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I remember when I was little, I became obsessed with efficiency, okay?
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I became obsessed with taking the least amount of steps to get everything done.
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And that s why I m so excited to talk to Tim Ferriss.
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Tim Ferriss is a household name in the self-help world, and he has a long list of things that he does.
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Why?
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Because, wow, that guy s productive.
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This guy does it all, okay?
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He s an entrepreneur, he s an investor, he s an author, he s a podcaster, he s a lifestyle guru, and much, much more.
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He has set a Guinness World Record.
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He speaks, like, a bunch of languages.
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He does acro yoga.
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He does breakdancing.
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It s like, okay, dude, slow down.
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You know, he s one of those.
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It s like, oh, whoa, whoa, slow down.
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He s sort of the go-to guy for people looking for meaningful, practical, life-changing tips and hacks, because it s one thing to give a tip or a hack that s useful, but sort of impractical.
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It takes a level of mastery to figure out or distinguish what is
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a truly life changing hack.
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So I m very excited to dig in to that with him today.
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He s written five number one New York times bestselling books, including the four hour work week tools of Titans, the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers, tribe of mentors, short life advice from the best in the world and more.
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He has a podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, focuses on what we can learn from people who are at the top of their game.
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Definitely go listen to that.
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Definitely go read the books.
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I could go on for hours, but the last honorable mention is he founded the SciSAFE Foundation, which is a foundation that focuses on cutting edge technology and research.
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He is, I think, a really special person because I feel like he is able to discuss
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productivity in a way that feels human.
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It s not hustle culture.
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It s not, Oh, you got to do the most.
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And it needs to be the most shiny thing.
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And it needs to be Instagrammable.
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He s all about finding the ways that you can optimize your performance.
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Not only for
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success, but also for well-being and for fulfillment.
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And so I m really excited to be talking to him today.
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We will link the SciSAfe Foundation down below if you want to check it out.
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Also, a quick disclaimer, we do discuss mental health struggles
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depression, suicide.
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If that s a sensitive topic for you, maybe don t listen to this one, Tim Ferriss.
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Let s bring him in.
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Your whole thing is.
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This is the most productive man in the world.
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You know what I mean?
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Which is, I mean, what a, what a stressful title.
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Burden.
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But I have to, I m curious if this started in childhood for you.
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Like, is this something that has followed you your whole life or did that become a part of your life later?
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I think a lot of it started early in the sense that from a really early age, I ve always been a systems person.
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So I got fired from my first job.
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I was a cleaner at an ice cream parlor called Snowflake, no longer exists on Long Island.
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And I figured out how to make the cleaning much more efficient, but that left me with a lot of extra time on my shift.
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And I just sat around reading magazines, which was not ideal for the boss, I suppose.
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So I got fired, but that interest in finding.
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elegant solutions, looking for fewer moving pieces.
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I think that started really early.
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It s just a fascination for me.
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And that s part of figuring out how things work.
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And my mom was very good at
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fostering that creativity.
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So if I expressed any interest towards anything, marine biology, drumming, whatever it might be, then she would try to point me in a more focused way in that direction.
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And then learning is just figuring out how things work.
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So fundamentally, I think that a lot of people have that interest.
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I might have a little more OCD on board, but it s not automatically stressful.
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I think productivity can be stressful.
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I think
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practical productivity that allows you to have some endurance should reduce stress.
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But if you re trying to pack as much as you can into every minute, then of course you re going to be a complete headcase.
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Do you remember your very first, like even before the ice cream shop, your very first sort of system?
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I m actually trying to think of mine too, because I ve always had that sort of brain where I m always trying to do things in the least amount of time.
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Where it s like, how can I take the least amount of steps in my day?
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But that s sort of how my brain, that s how it started for me.
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But being productive was like, I want to do a straight line and get everything I need to get done, done on the way.
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And by the way, productivity is just getting done what you want to get done.
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It s all it is.
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And you can dress it up and put it in a tuxedo and say, well, it s about maximizing your per hour output or whatever.
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You can find these other definitions.
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But really, it s just figuring out the straightest line from where you are to getting done what you want to get done.
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And so I don t know if this counts as a system.
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It seems like a very generous term for it.
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But I remember being very small, maybe three years old.
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And I ve never talked about this, that s for sure.
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I don t lead with my vroom vroom, so there s this car, it was like a little kid s car that I would put my knee on and then push, kind of like a...
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It s kind of like a skateboard almost.
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Kind of like a skateboard is the way I used it for better speed.
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And there was this one step in the house that dropped down into this living room.
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And I would clear things out of the way so that I could get maximum speed to fly off this thing, which didn t always turn out super well.
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But that s what I was going for.
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What I wanted at the time was just max speed.
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And for me, this was like the Olympic ski long jump.
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Of course.
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Right?
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But I m on my vroom vroom.
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If I had to strain to think of a first memory, that s the one.
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That s so good.
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I mean, do you feel like productivity is boiled down?
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to speed in a way?
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Like, do you think it s all about speed?
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No, I actually think that that s where people screw up.
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And I should say also, I m not like the paragon of ultimate productivity in the sense that my trick, if anything, is really basic.
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And that is that effectiveness, meaning what you do, is more important than efficiency, how you do it.
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Another way to put it, whether you re trying to learn languages quickly or you re trying to build a business, like what you do is more important than how you do something.
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Because you can follow the herd, you can bend to the whim of the crowd, you can end up imitating even people who are close and good at what they do, who happen to be in your peer group or cohort.
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you re not thinking for yourself, you end up getting really good at things that aren t actually that important.
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They re not gonna move the needle as much as other things.
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So if you choose the right thing to do, then even if you do a B minus job, that will be ultimately more impactful than doing an A plus job with something that is two levels down in importance.
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And that can be applied everywhere, everywhere.
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Yeah, like I m curious,
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How do you make that choice?
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In someone s mind, how should they build the tier list of like, okay, what do I need to learn how to do?
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Is it like the most important is what s going to be used the most often?
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Or like, you know, what does that look like?
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Yeah, there are a number of different ways to approach it.
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An easy way to remember at least how I tend to approach it is with this framework which was in the first book, the 4-Hour Workweek, DEAL, which is Define, Eliminate, Automate, and then Liberate.
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We can run through this real quick.
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So define or definition is the most important.
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That s just really clearly defining what you are trying to accomplish.
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And there are different tools you can use for that, but definition is number one.
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Where is your target?
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Where is the center of that target?
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Can you quantify any of it?
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It doesn t need to be quantified, but that is helpful.
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The second piece, which is most neglected, is elimination.
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How much can you stop doing?
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How much can you remove?
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How many steps can you put to the side, even temporarily?
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Right, so that you re majoring in the major things and not in the minor things.
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There are very few critical things and there are a lot of trivial things.
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And in the quest for quote-unquote productivity, people tend to try to do a lot.
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and or do more and more.
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I think that is often a fool s errand.
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When you re young, I should say, and when I was young, you have to throw a lot against the wall in the beginning to just figure out what you re good at and what you like and what gives you energy instead of drains energy.
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And it s going to be different for different people.
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So you have definition than elimination, getting rid of as much as possible.
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Then automation, and you can use tools for that, you can use systems for that, figuring out rules and policies to defend yourself from your lesser self.
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And then you have liberation, which is taking advantage of different resources once you ve liberated them, like time.
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Because you have money, which is renewable, so you can afford to spend that.
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And then you can regain it later in some ways.
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Time is a different thing.
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Attention is a different thing.
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Energy also somewhat of a different thing.
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So figuring out how to use these currencies best once you liberate more of them.
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And that sounds super abstract, but you can apply that to
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Any skill you want to learn, you could apply that to building a business.
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And what you define and then what you eliminate, it s going to be super personal.
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So for instance, I get asked all the time about writing books.
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Should I write a book?
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How do I make my book a bestseller?
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That s usually where people start.
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How do I make my book a bestseller?
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I think I want to write a book.
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I m like, do you now?
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OK.
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Oh, God.
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Another one of my worst nightmares.
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No, like, why do you want to write a book?
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And asking five whys, basically, this is an exercise a lot of people use.
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Well, I really want to share this teaching with the world, this, that, and the other thing.
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Okay, why?
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Because I m sick of my job and I would love to do speaking engagements.
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Okay, interesting.
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Why?
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Because I want to make an extra $250,000 a year and that would solve my problems.
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Okay, why do you believe that?
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And then you start drilling down and maybe at the end of the day you realize, actually when we do the math,
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fucking fine.
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You don t need to write a book.
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And even if you were to want to get to that dollar amount, this is not the most effective way to do it.
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Going through that type of process, which again, is just asking better questions.
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you can then pick the target.
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And the point I want to make here is like picking the target or picking the game you want to play is more important than winning the game, whatever game.
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Because if you re not aware, like beyond shelter and food and whatever, we re all playing different games.
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We re opting into different games.
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Maybe I m playing the podcast game or the book game or the angel investing game or fill in the blank.
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And step number one is to figure out what games you re playing now.
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And then to be really deliberate about what you choose to play.
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Picking the right game is more important than being good at whatever game you happen to land in.
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And you can figure it out pretty quickly.
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I do feel like a lot of people
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choose the game for the wrong reason.
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It s so easy to see a sparkly game and be like, I m going to go do that one instead of going and doing what you re maybe naturally good at, naturally going to succeed at maybe.
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It s a new way of thinking for me to be like,
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What is the end goal?
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And if it s like a financial end goal, you just need to get there.
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So it s like what you do to get there doesn t need to be this sparkly thing, I guess.
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You know what I mean?
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Yeah, it doesn t need to be sparkly.
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And part of what strikes me as very interesting about you is I think you ve been very good at taking steps back to look at what game you re playing in a way that is very,
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beyond your years.
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And that s been impressive to me.
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So I think you re, you re very good at this.
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I don t know why, but you seem to be good at like pausing and stepping back.
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Maybe it s just because you flame out and burn out and you re like, I need to take a step back.
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It could be part of it.
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Well, I think it actually is because I almost feel like I m a very intuitive person so everything I do is very intuitive and I can feel immediately when I m playing the wrong game that it s not working and it s not even like I can
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do it anymore, like my brain shuts off and I go full depression immediately if I m playing the wrong game.
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It s sort of like my body telling me, it s miraculous in a way, like it s something I m sort of perplexed by even though it happens to me.
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Yeah, well if I could, and this is just speculation on my part, but I would say that
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Well, the first part isn t speculation.
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The first part is language is relatively new.
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Spreadsheets and pro and con lists on the scale of human evolution, pretty brand new.
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And then we have millions of years of evolution and other
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means of knowing or evaluating our environment and things happening in our environment that we have trained ourselves, I think, by and large, to mute or ignore, right?
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We ve come to overvalue the highly analytical, explicit numbers on a spreadsheet approach to things and problem solving, whereas
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It seems like part of what you re doing is just using all these other means of sensing that are harder to put words into.
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Totally.
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And I have, since I was very young, had challenges with depressive episodes.
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I think I ve become much smarter about how I approach those, and they become less and less frequent.
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We could talk about why that s the case.
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Me too.
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Far less frequent.
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In some cases, though, like depression can, and I ll make this personal because I don t want to project all over you, but I just say sometimes when I ve been like, oh, I m feeling depressed, it s like, no, you re getting a signal and your energy has dropped.
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That s not automatically the same as this constellation of symptoms that we would call psychiatric depression.
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Yep, completely.
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And those signals are easy to mix up.
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But oftentimes it s like, no, this is an energy out activity and your body is making you pay attention to that as opposed to an energy in activity, which is how I choose a lot of what I do, which comes back to like, okay, well, how do you choose the target?
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I ll give people just a, if it s helpful for folks, how I choose, say, the few big yeses.
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Yes, I was about to ask this.
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Because in a world of infinite distraction and a million shiny objects and phones that force feed you temptation at all times.
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And I remember I interviewed Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs at one point.
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He sadly passed away a few years ago, but he said one of the key skills is being able to distinguish between
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let me get this right, an opportunity to be seized or a temptation to be resisted.
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And I think that skill is going to be increasingly important.
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It s going to become very obvious this year with AI and many of the tools that are going to be used to inflict a fire hose of temptation on everyone, including the two of us sitting here.
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So how do I try to sift through that?
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Part of it is if you have a list of, let s just say, five things you might want to do, and I m in a transition period for myself right now where I m thinking about new things, 10th anniversary of my podcast is coming up in April.
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So I m like, oh yeah, let me use this as an opportunity to pause and think about what next chapters might look like.
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There are a few ways that I look at my list of possible candidates and start to filter.
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Number one is how do I succeed even if I fail or can I succeed even if I fail with these?
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What I mean by that is if I try this project and by any external measurement it fails, whether that s books sold, views, subscribers, revenue, whatever, if it fails.
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Will I develop skills and relationships or deepen relationships and develop skills that will transfer to other things?
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If so, that s not a failure.
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Like you can still have a very meaningful partial win, even if externally it s a total failure.
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If any of those candidates don t check that box, they re out.
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That has to be a prereq, because then you snowball your way into long-term success.
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It has never failed me.
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I ve never seen that fail, and it s done really methodically over time.
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You need endurance for that, which comes to the next point, which is energy in, energy out.
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And by the way, if you re not really excited about something, it s not quite the right word.
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And I know you ve talked about this, you know, passion.
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And these words are kind of clumsy labels that we try to apply to what I think fundamentally is like energy in, energy out.
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If language learning for me is energy in, and somebody else wants to compete in that, let s just say money, money was big in the language learning game, which it isn t.
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And they re like, okay, I want to do that because five other people I respect are doing it.
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And it seems like this exploding opportunity like AI or web three a couple of years ago.
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Okay, fine.
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We re going to chase that.
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Yeah.
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If it s energy out for you and it s energy in for me, I m going to win.
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Yep.
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There s just no way around it.
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Assuming I have like the basic skills.
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So choose a game you can win, right?
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Will this help me snowball into success long term?
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Will the skills and relationships transfer potentially to other things or persist after this, even if it fails or succeeds?
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And then beyond that, it s kind of doing an 80-20 analysis of what you re trying to do in your life, whether it s finance, personal stuff.
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It s like, all right, let s rank order your life and break it down in some way.
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You could do this a million different ways, but it s like, all right, finances,
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physical health, mental health, like which lever are you trying to pull?
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Okay, if you ve checked the first two boxes, then you check on the third, like is this addressing, say if you rank each of those on one to five, anything that s a three or less, you probably should deal with.
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Okay, then you choose the overlap and that s what you go for.
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And you can fuck, sorry, am I allowed to curse?
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Oh my God, yes.
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So you can fuck that up every which way from Sunday.
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I m from Long Island, so I curse a lot.
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If you go through that process and you choose the right target, you can have off days, you can have off weeks, you can have multiple days in a row where you think to yourself, what in the hell did I get done today?
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I don t think anything.
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I was looking at my computer a lot, but I don t think I actually did anything.
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But as long as you have the right target and you get a little bit done,
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week by week, I mean, you really can produce some miracles from the outside looking in, but it s that front loading, that thought process in the beginning that really makes the difference.
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Because if people looked at me from day to day, week to week basis, and if I had some journalists or various folks pitch me on like shadowing me for a day or a week, and I m like, no way, because it s going to look
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terrible.
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Like I m going to look so, quote unquote, unproductive because there s a lot of empty space.
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There s a lot of kind of feeling lost or being unsure of next steps.
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And there are ways to improve that.
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I m not totally terrible.
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But as long as I ve taken my time in the beginning to do that type of deconstruction of things and assessment of things, if I have the right target, those off days don t matter.
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Every time I m having like an off day or even an off week, well, actually in the beginning when I first started working and when I d have these off periods, I would feel horrific.
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I d be like, this is, I m wasting my time.
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I m not getting anything done.
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And now I lean into it because I ve realized that those periods are very productive because you re doing work in your subconscious.
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I feel like sometimes the,
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the off day, the off week can be productive.
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Do you agree with that to an extent?
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Oh, yeah, yeah.
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I mean, busyness is often laziness in disguise in the sense that you re not willing to sit with those spaces.
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So you choose something that s easy.
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You choose something that s sexy.
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You choose something that s shiny because it s right in front of you and it s easy to do.
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And then guess what?
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Then you end up with
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five kind of cool things that you re not particularly good at that drain you.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that is your schedule.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that target that you chose so carefully in the beginning just disappears.
2
SPEAKER_00
Although usually if you go through the trouble of choosing it, it doesn t disappear quite as easily.
2
SPEAKER_00
And those empty spaces are
2
SPEAKER_00
I like to accomplish and have some end product to show for myself at the end of the day or the week as much as the next person.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that is important for positive reinforcement.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if you look at the best scientists I ve ever interacted with, a lot of the best creatives,
2
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of negative space.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they actually deliberately create that for themselves.
2
SPEAKER_00
And my feeling is, and this isn t across the board, there are always exceptions, but like, if you feel like you are rushing,
2
SPEAKER_00
you are rushing almost certainly in the wrong direction.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you feel like you re rushing, you re going the wrong direction.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because if you ve chosen something that you re somehow uniquely or close to uniquely well positioned to do, right, because it s energy and you re building these skills and relationships, since it s energy and you re going to have some endurance, et cetera, et cetera, you don t need to rush.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right?
2
SPEAKER_00
the window of opportunity isn t going to close really quickly.
2
SPEAKER_00
If however, and I ve seen this with a lot of folks, you re chasing some specter of a fast disappearing opportunity because whatever the latest thing is, is what you re sprinting towards.
2
SPEAKER_00
you re going to have to rush or you re going to feel like you have to rush.
2
SPEAKER_00
And chances are 10 people can do it just as well, if not better, or maybe there are a hundred people or a thousand people and you ve chosen the wrong game.
2
SPEAKER_00
That is a bad game.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so for me, an indicator that I m probably running in the wrong direction with my hair on fire is if I feel rushed, I probably should take some time to think about what target I m aiming for.
2
SPEAKER_01
When did writing a book become a target for you, and why?
2
SPEAKER_00
After college, my senior thesis almost killed me.
2
SPEAKER_00
It really was a brutal experience.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I went to Princeton, where a senior thesis is a requirement, and it s a huge part of
2
SPEAKER_00
departmental or I should say your departmental average is a huge piece of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s very high pressure.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know how long mine was, 170 pages or something.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, by far and away the longest thing I d ever written.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it just absolutely crushed me.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know how to handle something of that scope.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was very complicated.
2
SPEAKER_00
And after I was done with it,
2
SPEAKER_00
which took way longer than I expected.
2
SPEAKER_00
I made this vow to myself that I would never write anything longer than an email ever again.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like, I m done.
2
SPEAKER_01
I get it.
2
SPEAKER_00
I get that.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m done.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m done.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the way the first book came about is actually how I m thinking about exploring my next chapters a bit is teaching a class.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I had this professor at Princeton.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve been really
2
SPEAKER_00
Part lucky, part by design, but a lot of luck in terms of having some teachers who ve had huge impact on me.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Ed Schau, Z-S-C-H-A-U, was teaching this class called High Tech Entrepreneurship, and it was based on the Harvard case study method where they would use these real case studies of, say, business X has this problem or this goal.
2
SPEAKER_00
What should they do?
2
SPEAKER_00
Here are all the facts.
2
SPEAKER_00
Pause.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then students have to figure out what they would do.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the second half is, here s what the company did.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then he would bring in the CEOs or the former CEOs of these companies to explore their decisions.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a great class.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a great class.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s great.
2
SPEAKER_00
I started giving these lectures, and I think I guest lectured in this class from 2003 to 2013 or something.
2
SPEAKER_00
And every class asked for feedback from students.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, what did you like?
2
SPEAKER_00
Favorite piece?
2
SPEAKER_00
How could it improve?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because I always ask for that kind of feedback.
2
SPEAKER_00
I do this all the time, by the way, with everything.
2
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes Princeton kids can be snobby pricks.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this one guy put in, I don t understand why you re teaching this class to like 30 students.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why don t you just write a book and be done with it?
2
SPEAKER_00
And it was not intended to be a serious recommendation.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was just a dickish response.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that stuck in my head, and I was like, eh, I don t want to write a book.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I reached out to a friend, this is years later, around 2004, who was an author, and I basically showed him my notes from the class, and I was like,
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, I ve been thinking about what I m going to do next.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t think I want to write a book, but what do you think of this?
2
SPEAKER_00
And he replied with, you should definitely do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I had some conversations.
2
SPEAKER_00
I got turned down by a bunch of folks, uh, ended up finding a guy who was a superstar editor who had just become an agent.
2
SPEAKER_00
So he was new to that game, the agenting game.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was new to the writing game.
2
SPEAKER_00
We ended up really hitting it off and.
2
SPEAKER_00
We signed, the book got turned down by 27, 29, somewhere in that range.
2
SPEAKER_00
Publishers got turned down by everybody.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then somebody bought it and then I had to write it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s how it happened.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it was not as though I had this burning desire to write a book.
2
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was one of these things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think things that I have done that have been most
2
SPEAKER_00
Successful per se have been the things that I just cannot get out of my head.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like I have to I have to do them which is what I say to people when they re like, uh, maybe I ll write a book I m like you should only write a book if like you have to write a book Yes It s almost like it has to like haunt you it has to haunt you and you almost have to like resent it in not like in a weird way where you re like
2
SPEAKER_01
Leave me alone.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s almost like it starts like that sometimes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not always, but I ve noticed with me too, like even with YouTube, it was like I had to do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I was like, oh, it s not going to do well.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like I don t eat whatever.
3
SPEAKER_00
you feel, you know, the muse keeps like tapping you on the forehead long enough and you re like, ah, for fuck s sake, I ll be fine.
3
SPEAKER_01
What would be your advice, I guess, to somebody who is so obsessed with productivity and like, you know, and success and this, this, and that, but they re miserable?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a big question.
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of things are fundamentally driven by a desire to improve our lives.
3
SPEAKER_00
But we can get distracted by these secondary metrics.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I ll give you a very simple example.
3
SPEAKER_00
Investing.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you re saving a certain amount of money, and you have that money to invest.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why are you investing?
3
SPEAKER_00
People say, well, I m investing to grow my money.
3
SPEAKER_00
OK, you re investing to grow your money.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why do you want to grow your money?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, because then I ll have this money, and I ll have retirement.
3
SPEAKER_00
OK.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why do you want retirement?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, because I want security.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, what is security?
3
SPEAKER_00
What is that feeling that you re going for?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s ultimately, for a lot of people, feeling more peace of mind on a day-to-day basis.
3
SPEAKER_00
But what do they do?
3
SPEAKER_00
They decide to put it in the latest shitcoin, crypto, whatever, that is bouncing all over the place, and they re stressed out of their minds.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, if you get distracted by the secondary metric of, like,
3
SPEAKER_00
compounded annual growth rate, you re going to make bad decisions.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to keep the fundamental
3
SPEAKER_00
underlying driver in mind, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So I would say that for people who are miserable in the quest for productivity, often it s because they forget about like the layer one, now I m using crypto terms, but meaning the fundamental layer, they forget about the fundamental layer driver, like the primary driver they should pay attention to, and they re getting distracted by metrics that are higher up.
3
SPEAKER_00
that are vanity metrics or they re just distracting metrics, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And not to beat this drum too hard, but it s like modern tech platforms are not
3
SPEAKER_00
designed to maximize your well-being.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just to be very clear.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, they re not.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we can come back to that.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I will say that for people who are miserable with productivity, I would say generally it s because they probably have a target that is energy out instead of energy in.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yep.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or they have not taken the time to define a target, which is even worse.
3
SPEAKER_00
And secondly, it s the belief that productivity means more is more.
3
SPEAKER_00
And for me, I ll add one more thing to that, but for me, I m always looking for, if you look at any of my books, one of the commonalities is searching for something that
3
SPEAKER_00
is called the minimum effective dose.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, you want to get a suntan?
3
SPEAKER_00
Going out in Australia, laying on the beach as pale as someone like me for like three hours straight, probably not the right way to start, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like you want the minimum effective dose if you re using medication.
3
SPEAKER_00
Especially with things that are a little dicey, like Tylenol, acetaminophen, which can have incredible liver toxicity if you take too much.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s not that much at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re looking for the least you can take to produce the desired effect.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s how I think about productivity.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to do, and there was a very famous, I m blanking on his name, track athlete who had many athletes with world records.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he said, the goal is to do the least necessary, not the most possible.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that is a fun puzzle for me to try to solve.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I use the word elegance very deliberately.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mentioned it earlier.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like the fewest pieces in the least dose to get what I want.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because when you aim for that, you get fewer side effects, just like with drugs.
3
SPEAKER_00
The last thing I would say is a lot of folks who are striving to be hyper-productive and they re really stressed out, it s because they have chosen a really crowded, what you might call red ocean.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
A brutally competitive, fast-changing game.
3
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
3
SPEAKER_00
Aim to be a category of one.
3
SPEAKER_00
Choose an uncrowded game or create a new game for yourself where you can be the one and the only.
3
SPEAKER_00
And part of the reason I m looking for what my new experiments might be is that when I started, for instance, the podcast in 2014, there were already podcasts.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there was a proof of concept, but it was not mainstream in any capacity.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it was very uncrowded.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was a lot of room to be differentiated.
3
SPEAKER_00
It is very hard now.
3
SPEAKER_01
I feel that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Super hard.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s so hard.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s very challenging.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s not just because it s crowded.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s because within that crowd, there are a lot of really good people.
3
SPEAKER_00
Incredibly good.
3
SPEAKER_00
And for me, that s like, to use the casino analogy, I ve been playing single deck blackjack.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then they re like, well, we re actually going to play with three decks.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, ooh, that makes counting cards a lot harder.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then they re like, you know what, Mr. Ferris, stay exactly where you are.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they move the tables.
3
SPEAKER_00
And now the roulette is in front of me.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m like,
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t want to play this game.
3
SPEAKER_00
Not from a purely competitive perspective, because you have to be careful about competition, I think.
3
SPEAKER_00
It can make you very unhappy.
3
SPEAKER_00
But for me to feel energy in, I want to feel like I am doing something that I am uniquely suited to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I d say that if I were going to
3
SPEAKER_00
be a productivity doctor and diagnose the most likely causes of that misery, would be the few things I just mentioned.
3
SPEAKER_01
we re in a real, like, hustle culture of it all, to use the lifestyle hustle.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know, I used that in the beginning.
3
SPEAKER_01
Bring it back to that.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, but, I mean, people, like, the hustle culture of it all, where it s, like, all about, like, looking productive, like, you know, that s what it s all about.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it can get very dangerous, very unhealthy.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m also curious, sort of speaking of social media, like,
3
SPEAKER_01
I feel like one of my greatest challenges when it comes to focus is social media addiction because a lot of us now have to use social media in one way or another for our job.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like whether you have a bakery or you are, you know, you re the bakery and you re like, whatever it is.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, if I didn t post on social media, I would delete the apps to not be addicted anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I can t.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let me push back on that.
3
SPEAKER_00
This might be helpful.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I m so addicted to my phone.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s push back.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t have any social media apps on my phone.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying that is optimal if your goal is to grow your following because the platforms and the algorithms dictate what you will be rewarded for as an obedient little
3
SPEAKER_00
little puppy begging at the heels of whatever platform you happen to be on.
3
SPEAKER_00
That sounds a little harsh, but you get the idea.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like the rules of the games, how confident can you feel in your choice of game when the rules of the game constantly change?
3
SPEAKER_00
No wonder you re stressed out, of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what I would say though is
3
SPEAKER_00
I m making up this example, but like some of the top contemporary artists in the world, individual artists, they posting every day, I guess probably not a lot of them.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I would say you might be right.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can t stop.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that seems like a hypothesis worth testing where you could say, OK, I m going to do two weeks, no social.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, to do that, though, you have to decide how you re going to evaluate whether
3
SPEAKER_00
you need to or don t need to.
3
SPEAKER_00
For that, you would need other metrics.
3
SPEAKER_00
So this is where I think it gets challenging for folks if they, for instance, have sponsored posts on social and that is their metric, as an example, or in stories or whatever it might be.
3
SPEAKER_00
Then, yes, you are captive to the platform.
3
SPEAKER_00
But if you have other products, if you have coffee,
3
SPEAKER_00
You can assess your progress, what you need to do or don t need to do, by something other than the metrics the platform gives you.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is just a long way of saying, you can test it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can test all of these things.
3
SPEAKER_00
They are not permanent decisions.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I ll add one thing to that, which is sometimes the pain isn t acute enough.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, I listened to your episode from 2021.
3
SPEAKER_00
Rock bottom.
3
SPEAKER_00
And but you said something which I ve thought a lot myself.
3
SPEAKER_00
If something is just if something s mediocre or a little bit painful and you can tolerate it for a long time, that is oftentimes a more precarious situation than really acute
3
SPEAKER_00
devastating pain because the latter forces you often to do something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes you need to manufacture that though.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
So for instance, right now you re like, I d love to, but I can t, I can t, I m not sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like, okay, let s say you continue doing exactly what you re doing.
3
SPEAKER_00
What does your life look like?
3
SPEAKER_00
Mental health, physical health, friendships, finances, this, this, this.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you look out three years, all right,
4
SPEAKER_00
five years.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
10 years.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes it s fine.
4
SPEAKER_00
But usually if someone is like, I don t know, I m not sure.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like pebble in the shoe that right now is a little irritating, but on a hundred mile march, like you re going to tear your feet to pieces.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yep.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I do that type of telescoping out a lot where I m like, okay, if I continue to do this as I am,
4
SPEAKER_00
What are the costs of inaction?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because I think often folks will look at, and this is a lot for our work week, honestly.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like breaking down risk and thinking about risk differently.
4
SPEAKER_00
So like, let s just say the risk of taking two weeks without doing any social posts yourself.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we think about the risks of that action.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a new thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
But we don t compare it to something.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because when something is, we say, ah, it s risky.
4
SPEAKER_00
The follow-up we should always ask is, compared to what?
4
SPEAKER_00
Compared to what?
4
SPEAKER_00
And in this case, the compared to what is doing the same thing for the next two, three, five years.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when you sit down and you evaluate that and you telescope out, sometimes you re like, oh shit, like doing no social for two weeks is extremely low risk.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because the potential payoff is so high.
4
SPEAKER_02
Totally.
4
SPEAKER_00
So why not?
4
SPEAKER_02
The past two weeks for some reason I ve been
4
SPEAKER_02
horrific with it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Oh, it s been terrible.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I feel terrible.
4
SPEAKER_02
Like, I do.
4
SPEAKER_02
I feel bad.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m anxious.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m, like, dissociated a little bit.
4
SPEAKER_02
Weirdly, for some reason, when I m on social media too much, I have, like, negative existential crises, like, over and over.
4
SPEAKER_02
Like, it makes me weirdly existential in a bad way.
4
SPEAKER_00
We are in no way evolved to
4
SPEAKER_00
thrive in these secondary digital environments?
4
SPEAKER_00
How long has it taken even a small percentage of the population to get accustomed to lactose?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, these tools are brand new.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I ll tell you a quick anecdote, which is
4
SPEAKER_00
I travel a lot.
4
SPEAKER_00
I really enjoy traveling.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I spent some time in Ethiopia in the north, in the Tigray area.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was going from spot to spot, and I had this driver.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was a group.
4
SPEAKER_00
And
4
SPEAKER_00
By and large, people seemed really happy in the rural areas.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then we came across this one village where people seemed pretty surly.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, that s weird.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Why is that?
4
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, oh, it s because they got satellite TV.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was like, what?
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you mean?
4
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, well, now they can watch the Kardashians and they can watch all these people with fancy cars and fancy lives.
4
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
And now they ve concluded their lives suck.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m paraphrasing, but that was the gist.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you take that and you basically put 5 million horsepower into it, you have social media.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t think social media is all bad, but there s enough, it s very, in my experience, it s increasingly difficult, especially with the kind of TikTokification and competition that we ve seen across platforms.
4
SPEAKER_00
to selectively engage with social media and just peel out the positive.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is very hard because you re no longer limited to accounts that you follow.
4
SPEAKER_00
You get served anything that will captivate your attention, which can then be monetized.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I feel like that switch is when it got harder to have boundaries with it.
4
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I don t have TikTok, which is nice.
4
SPEAKER_02
But I do kinda sometimes have a little FOMO.
4
SPEAKER_02
Actually, I didn t for a long time, and then recently, I was like, this is such a, this is the platform, and I m not there.
4
SPEAKER_02
And it s not that I was like, oh, I miss watching it, but it was like,
4
SPEAKER_02
I want to be present there.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I had this feeling that I hadn t had in a long time.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, why am I feeling that?
4
SPEAKER_02
So that s something I m analyzing right now.
4
SPEAKER_02
Why am I feeling that?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s where something like the five whys, it doesn t have to be exactly five, but it s just like sit down with a cup of coffee and journal and just...
4
SPEAKER_02
No, I m actually going to do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
It takes 10 minutes.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m curious.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s amazing how much you can get out of like 10 to 15 minutes of structured journaling.
4
SPEAKER_00
It can be so fast.
4
SPEAKER_00
So like the five whys or morning pages.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m a huge fan of morning pages by Julia Cameron who wrote The Artist s Way.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s just like, you wake up, three pages of writing out whatever s in your monkey mind.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yep.
4
SPEAKER_00
Bitch and moan, complain.
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It s not writing.
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You re not going to show anybody.
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Just like, get it out of your head so you can move on with your day.
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Yep.
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Trap it on paper.
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And it s the simplest thing ever.
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What do you think about going cold turkey on something?
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Like, for example, social media.
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How do you decide whether cold turkey makes sense?
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I do cold turkey with stuff all the time.
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I know, and you kind of have to.
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I don t do moderation well.
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And I don t think, I shouldn t say that, it s not like I m abusing everything that I use or do, but keep it simple.
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Simple usually means, instead of titrating off of social media or saying, well, instead of using it for 30 minutes in the morning, I m going to use it for 10 minutes in the morning.
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God s name makes you think that you could possibly do that.
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You re so outgunned.
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You re so outfunded.
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You re so out-researched.
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These platforms are not going to lose.
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Like, you re bringing a knife to a gunfight.
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It s not going to work.
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It s going to be very challenging to make work, at the very least.
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It s like, do the easy thing first.
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And the easy thing is cold turkey, in my opinion.
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Yeah.
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Do the simple thing first.
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Yeah.
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There s another exercise.
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So I had a TED Talk a handful of years ago on this topic called fear setting.
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where you re just as you would with goals, to have a goal that you have some chance of accomplishing, you can do the same thing with your fears.
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So if you re like, I can t do this.
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No, but no, if I do that, then I ll become irrelevant.
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If I do this, then people will forget about me.
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If I do this, then if I don t do that, et cetera, et cetera.
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You need to take those cloudy, nebulous fears and put them on paper in some structured way.
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and i ll just tell people how to do it go old school piece of paper pen and you re gonna have
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three or four columns.
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And the first column is like all the things that could go wrong.
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Yep.
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At the very top, it s like what you re considering doing or not doing.
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Yep.
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Stopping social media for two weeks.
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All right.
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Write down all the things that could go wrong and get as specific as possible.
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In the second column, you write down what you could do to minimize, like to reduce the likelihood of each of those things happening.
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OK.
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And then in the last column, you just write down what you could do to recover, even temporarily, if that thing happens.
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Like how could you reverse the damage or
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minimize the damage.
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That s page one.
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Page two is the cost of inaction.
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If I don t do this thing and I telescope out one, three, five years, what does my life look like?
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you re making explicit something that is implicit.
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That if you choose not to do this thing, you are making a choice in another direction.
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What are the costs associated and the risks associated with that?
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And I would say one time out of 10, you re like, you know what?
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That is risky.
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I shouldn t do that.
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Nine times out of 10, you re like, this is fine.
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I am risking like a three out of 10 temporary setback that I could reverse for like a nine out of 10 durable benefit.
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Obvious, like the choice is obvious.
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What happens, though, when your intuition, or so you think, see, that s the thing about intuition is that you don t know what it is.
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It s so hard to know when you get a feeling, is this intuition, is this anxiety, is this delusion?
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You know, like, what is this?
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How does one balance their intuition with being sort of
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Analytical and rational in a way.
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Can you give any examples of where intuition has really served you point you in the right direction and maybe an example of where It didn t serve you right where maybe intuition because sometimes intuition is used as a guise Yeah for like justifying doing what you want to do or what is comfortable.
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See that s the truth, right?
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That s the truth because when I think about it anytime I ve used intuition and it s steered me in the wrong direction and
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friends, boyfriends, that s most of the time.
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I knew deep down it wasn t my intuition, but I convinced myself that it was.
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Whereas like, I d say intuition serving me right has been
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more career wise, you know, like being like, okay, you know what?
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Working with this, with this company doesn t feel right.
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And I don t know why because on paper it looks good, but to me it looks, it feels bad.
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Okay.
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So that s a great example.
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Yeah.
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And so here are my thoughts because the intuition, especially we re sitting here in LA, right?
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Intuition comes up a lot.
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Yes, at every bar.
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It s Friday tonight, we re all going to hear it.
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Yeah, there s going to be a lot of intuition chat tonight.
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So a few things.
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I would say first, if you rely on what you would call
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intuition a lot, practice using some frameworks, right?
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And this is sort of just a meta comment, and then I ll come into the specifics.
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If, on the other hand, you re very head-centric, as I have been for most of my life, I would say, then practice tuning into what you might call your intuition, like your body feel, right?
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Like if you re used to constantly thinking in terms of,
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Frameworks, and pro and con, and this and that, and the other thing.
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How do you feel, right, like with this company, with this person?
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When you re on the phone, are you constricted?
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When you get off, are you drained?
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Are you checking the time because you want to get off the call?
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Like, pay attention to that stuff.
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Not as much the content.
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Because content doesn t matter if you feel like your system is giving you a yellow or a red.
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And then I would say intuition to me is most interesting.
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when it contradicts what you ve arrived at in your head.
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That s when I pay attention, right?
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When I m like, God, like all my, you know, these friends or these advisors that tell me to do this thing on paper, like, oh, this looks great.
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And there s part of me that s just like, uh.
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I would wait.
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Mmm, that doesn t feel good.
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That should be, and I ve become, I think, very good at this.
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That s an automatic no.
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It s like there s something in this pre-language evolved sensing that is telling me, fuck no.
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And when I have overridden that,
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It s never worked out.
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There s always some problem later.
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I m like, damn it, I knew it.
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It s the worst.
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You know, we did this deal and you can t do a good deal with a bad person or an untrustworthy person.
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So I find intuition most valuable when it is actually subverting what you think you want.
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Absolutely.
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But it s always such an unsettling feeling.
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Like, I had that about college for me.
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I was like, this is just not right.
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Like, this is not right.
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I can t do it right now.
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And I got so depressed because I was like, this is my dream is to go to a good college for, you know, what reason?
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I hadn t asked myself why, that s for sure.
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And then my body rejected it.
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Yeah, I went into full depressive episode, and then I knew, like, this is just wrong.
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Speaking of that, we are both depressive people, okay?
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How has that impacted... I don t know, everyone s different.
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I, like, you mentioned earlier that the more wise that you get, the easier it is to sort of...
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get through those moments and not fully crumble under them, but... Well, there s a bit more to that story.
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So, depression runs in my family, manic depression as well.
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I don t have the manic episodes.
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And I d say, historically, I ve had... It s really hard to pin down a number, but I would say... four to six extended depressive episodes a year, on average, since I was an adolescent.
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Per year?
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Okay, yeah.
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Oh, yeah.
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And they could last
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anywhere from let s say two weeks to like two months, right?
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There have been years when it s basically been mostly depressive episodes.
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Since 2012, 2013, that frequency is probably down to like one every two years.
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Wow.
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And they re typically pretty short.
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They re typically one to two weeks.
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And I would attribute that to a few things.
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And to really provide, I guess, a harrowing
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example of how bad that can be.
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I mean, in college, I had a date on the calendar to kill myself and came very, very close and through a host of very lucky coincidences, ended up getting snapped out of it because my mom called me because I had reserved this book at the library.
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I was taking a year off of school.
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It was related to suicide.
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The reminder on a postcard got sent home to my parents  house.
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I forgot to change the mailing address.
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And she got it, freaked out, called me.
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And that sort of snapped me out of my own self-imposed delusion in a way.
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Because you put on these very dark glasses when you re in those states.
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You can t...
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where it seems very personal, you re the only person, you re uniquely flawed, nobody else has this problem.
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And objectively, you realize, at least in my case, your life is pretty good, so I m fucked, because this is never going to get better.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s permanent, therefore, X, which is often some type of final exit.
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SPEAKER_00
And if that had happened now, all digital notifications, I wouldn t be here.
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I had it all planned out.
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I had the whole thing figured out.
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And that didn t happen, thankfully.
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And then I would say some of the contributing elements that have helped are
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different therapeutic modalities like for instance IFS, Internal Family Systems, created by a guy named Richard Schwartz.
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What is that?
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So Internal Family Systems is a therapy technique that as its basis uses a type of role-playing that allows you to interact with different parts of yourself.
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Interesting.
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So you might have defenders who are trying to protect you in certain ways by
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provoking certain behaviors or beliefs.
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And they have names for these different parts of yourself.
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And if people want to hear an example, I interviewed Dick Schwartz on the Tim Ferriss Show.
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And I was a little hesitant to do this, so we agreed that I might not publish it.
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But it s a live session.
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He takes me through it.
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And it s a structured way of having you interact with these parts, have conversations with them.
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identify when they came up, like how old are they?
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What age are you when this kind of player entered the stage?
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And I ve seen tremendous effects from IFS by itself.
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Then you can layer in other tools that are sometimes
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very advantageous.
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In the case of IFS, IFS has been adapted in part to a protocol used with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.
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So post-traumatic stress disorder, in this case, treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder, where at least with the phase 2 trials, I think the average was something like 16.8 years or 17 years of diagnosis, which meant
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these patients had not found a solution to address their PTSD symptoms for an average of let s call it 17 years.
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And they do two or three sessions with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
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the IFS parts work, parts work is another term you ll sometimes hear and I think I m gonna get the numbers slightly wrong but they re not that much off it s something like 58% or 60% were asymptomatic or they no longer met the criteria for PTSD after two or three sessions plus integration work and prep
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And at the, I wanna say six or 12 month follow-up point, that number had gone up to something like 68%, which is very rare in psychiatry.
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So for me personally also, psychedelic assisted therapies have been a critical component.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re not a panacea, there are risks, but I can honestly say that in combination with good therapists and supervision, that I think these things have,
5
SPEAKER_00
not just saved my life, but allow me to...
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re-envision and re-author the beliefs that govern my life.
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And that s a big deal.
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SPEAKER_00
Certainly a big deal for me.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think people are too cavalier with these compounds now, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
You can t walk down the street in LA without somebody offering you a matcha latte with magic mushrooms in it or something.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, seriously.
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SPEAKER_00
And they re like, oh, I m really healthy now.
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SPEAKER_00
I no longer drink.
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SPEAKER_00
I just use ketamine five nights a week.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re like, well, time out, time out.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh my god, that s everyone I m gonna see in like eight hours tonight.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah, it s Friday Yeah, so I I do think that people are taking these things in ways that are going to be very problematic later.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah But in the right circumstances with the right supervision, I Think these tools are are incredibly powerful for
5
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If you look at, say, the research of someone like Ghoul Dolan, this incredible researcher who I think is currently at Hopkins.
5
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And her belief is, and she s testing this as a hypothesis, of course, is that psychedelics, some psychedelics reopen critical windows where you can effectively, and these are my words, not hers.
5
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recontextualize experiences.
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This is certainly how a lot of subjects would explain the PTSD and MDMA, where they can revisit this traumatic experience, whether it s war, sexual abuse, whatever it might be.
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and recontextualize it as an adult so that it in a way kind of overwrites the disabling stories.
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And that s hard to measure, so a lot of scientists are looking for mechanistic ways to explain these changes.
6
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it s very difficult to do.
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The content, from my perspective, matters a lot, because you look at the durability.
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For most psychiatric medications that may be used for, say, maintenance, suppression of symptoms, or addressing any number of things like depression, you take these drugs, and they re three to five times a week or every day.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you get off of them, you have to be very careful, because there are withdrawal symptoms, and there are lots of contraindications.
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And I should say these conventional frontline drugs are really critical and very effective
6
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a lot of people, but they also don t work for a lot of people.
6
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And when you, say, take someone through a trial where they have one or two high-dose psilocybin experiences for, say, treatment-resistant depression or major depressive disorder, and they report 12 months later that they have not had any return of symptoms,
6
SPEAKER_00
You can t explain that by the presence of the drug because the drug, the half-life of psilocybin is so short.
6
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Psilocybin being what is considered the active sort of constituent element in magic mushrooms, psilocybe mushrooms of different types.
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What I find so deeply interesting about psychedelics is that, and I m going to borrow from a very famous psychotherapist named Stanislav Grof, and I m paraphrasing here, but it s close enough, that what the telescope did for astronomy and what the microscope did for biology, psychedelics will do for the mind.
6
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In terms of, I think, probably overturning or at least augmenting very long-standing beliefs about the brain and mind, many of the effects we re seeing are just so far outside of the normal purview of psychiatry
6
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that it s hard for me to offhand pick something I find more interesting.
6
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And because our conception, our beliefs and conception of reality are, if we re talking about base layers, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
That s layer one.
6
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And everything else is built on that.
6
SPEAKER_00
So if you start to, if you can learn more about that, and if you can use these, not just to help individual people in clinical trials, but also to get a better understanding of how we create reality, because let s not be,
6
SPEAKER_00
Let s not make any mistake, we are constantly creating reality as we go.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a book called The Case Against Reality by a scientist named Donald Hoffman, which I think makes this very compelling.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if I were a mantis shrimp or a sparrow, this room would not look the same.
6
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
6
SPEAKER_00
Clearly.
6
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So as we learn more about the user interface as we experience it, I think we ll have some very, very compelling breakthroughs in terms of not just treating psychiatric conditions or what we might consider dysfunctions, but also to help with broader mental flourishing.
6
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I think that s what we re seeing with psychedelics right now.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that s the long story long, I suppose.
6
SPEAKER_01
To end it off, what s your piece of advice for the listener?
6
SPEAKER_01
It could be something broad, it could be something niche, in random, you could go full indie with this piece of advice.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like, hit it however you want.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the piece that comes to mind is not from me.
6
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It s actually something I heard first from someone named B.J.
6
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Miller.
6
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So Dr. B.J.
6
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Miller is a
6
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He s a physician who has done a lot of work in hospice care.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s helped thousands of people to die, where he s shepherded them through that experience.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he also was the victim of a terrible accident when he was in college.
6
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He was electrocuted, lost three of his limbs, I want to say, and nonetheless has incredible sense of humor, very smart guy.
6
SPEAKER_00
I asked him what he would put on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, and his answer was, don t believe everything that you think.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s where he got that, and he said, I think it was a bumper sticker in Berkeley.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that s okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s so real.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s okay, but don t believe everything that you think.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
A lot of what we think has not been stress tested.
6
SPEAKER_00
A lot of what we think, the things we take to be our beliefs are not our beliefs.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re our parents  beliefs or expectations or the product of difficult experiences or maybe fantastic experiences that have distorted things and those things have not been reexamined.
6
SPEAKER_00
And they re just, it s a gold mine waiting for you.
6
SPEAKER_01
I love that.
6
SPEAKER_00
So don t believe everything that you think.
6
SPEAKER_01
Amen.
6
SPEAKER_01
Thank you so much.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, thank you.
6
SPEAKER_01
Such a pleasure.
6
SPEAKER_00
Likewise.