practical productivity, a talk with tim ferriss [video]

Because, wow, that guy's productive, this guy does it all okay, 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. He has set a Guinness world record. He speaks like a bunch of languages, he does. Acroyoga.

He does breakdancing. It's like, Okay, dude, slow down, you know, he's one of those. It's like, Oh, whoa, whoa, slow down. 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. It takes a level of mastery to figure out or distinguish what is a truly life-changing hack. So I'm very excited to dig in to that with him. Today, he's written five number-one New York Times best-selling books, including the 4-hour Workweek. 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. He has a podcast, the Tim Ferriss Show focuses on what we can learn from people who are at the top of their game.

Definitely go listen to that, definitely go read the books. 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. He is, I think, a really special person because I feel like he is able to discuss productivity in a way that feels human.

It's not hustle culture, it's not, oh, you got to do the most, and it needs to be the most shiny thing, and it needs to be instagrammable. He's all about finding the ways that you can optimize your performance, not only for success, but also for well-being and for fulfillment. I'm really excited to be talking to him today. We will link the SciSafe foundation down below if you want to check it out.

Also, a quick disclaimer We do discuss mental health struggles, depression, suicide. If that's a sensitive topic for you, maybe don't listen to this one. Tim Ferriss Let's bring him in.

Your whole thing is this is the most productive man in the world, which is, I mean, what a stressful title burden. I'm curious if this started in childhood for you, is this something that has followed you your whole life or did?

No longer exists on Long Island.

I figured out how to make the cleaning much more efficient, but that left me with a lot of extra time. On my shift. I just sat around reading magazines, which was not ideal for the boss, so I got fired. But that interest in finding elegant solutions, looking for fewer moving pieces, I think that started really early. It's just a fascination for me.

It's part of figuring out how things work. My mom was very good at fostering that creativity. So if I expressed any interest towards anything marine biology, drumming, whatever it might be, that she would try to point me in a more focused way in that direction. Then learning is just figuring out how things work. Fundamentally, I think that a lot of people have that interest. I might have a little more OCD on board, but it's not automatically stressful.

I think productivity can be stressful. I think practical productivity that allows you to have some endurance should reduce stress. But if you're trying to pack as much as you can into every.

But being productive was I want to do a straight line and get everything I need to get done done on the way.

You can find these other definitions, but really, it's just figuring out the straightest line from where you are to getting done what you want to get done. I don't know if this counts as a system. It seems like a very generous term for it. But I remember being very small, maybe three years old, and I've never talked about this, that's for sure. 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 skateboard, is the way I used it for better speed. And there was this one step in the house that dropped down into this living room. 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, but that's what I was going for. What I wanted at the time was just max speed, and for me, this was like the Olympic ski long jump, right?

But I'm on my vroom vroom, so probably if I had to strain to think of a first memory, that's the one.

To speed in a way, do you think it's all about speed?

You're not thinking for yourself, you end up getting really good at things that aren't actually that important. They're not going to move the needle as much as other things. 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 and that can be applied everywhere.

Is what's going to be used the most often, or what does that look like?

And there are different tools you can use for that. But definition is number one Where is your target? where is the center of that target? Can you quantify any of it?

It doesn't need to be quantified, but that is helpful. The second piece which is most neglected is elimination. How much can you stop doing? how much can you remove? how many steps can you put to the side, even temporarily, right?

So that you're majoring in the major things and not in the minor things, right? Because there are very few critical things and there are a lot of trivial things. And in the quest for quote unquote productivity, people tend to try to do a lot.

And or do more and more. I think that is often a fool's errand 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, and it's going to be different for different people, so you have definition, then elimination, getting rid of as much as possible, then automation.

And you can use tools for that, you can use systems for that, figuring out rules and kind of policies to defend yourself from your lesser self. And then you have liberation, which is taking advantage of different resources once you've liberated them. Like time, right? Because you have money which is renewable so you can afford to spend that.

And then you can regain it later. In some ways, time is a different thing, attention is a different thing, energy also somewhat of a different thing. So figuring out how to use these currencies best once you once you liberate more of them.

And that sounds super abstract, but you can apply that to any skill you want to learn, you could apply that to building a business. And what you define and then what you eliminate is going to be super personal. So, for instance, I get asked all the time about writing books, Should I write a book? How do I make my book a bestseller?

That's usually where people start. How do I make my book a bestseller? I think I want to write a book. I'm like, Do you now okay?

Oh God, why? Another one of my worst nightmares? No, like, Do you? Why do you want to write a book?

And asking five, why?'s basically? I mean, this is an exercise a lot of people use. But well, I really want to share this teaching with the world, this, that and the other thing. Okay, why? Because I'm sick of my job and I would love to do speaking engagements.

Okay, interesting. Why? Because I want to make an extra $250,000 a year and that would solve my problems, okay?

Why do you believe that? And then you start drilling down, and maybe at the end of the day, you realize, actually, when we do the math, you're fucking fine. You don't need to write a book. And even if you were to want to get to that dollar amount, this is not the most effective way to do it. Going through that type of process, which, again, it's just asking better questions.

You can then pick the target, 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. Because if you're not aware, like beyond shelter and food and whatever. We're all playing different games, we're opting into different games. Maybe I'm playing the podcast game, or the book game, or the Angel investing game, or fill in the blank. And step number one is to figure out what games you're playing now and then to be really deliberate about what you choose to play.

Picking the right game is more important than being good at whatever game you happen to land in. And you can figure it out pretty quickly. I do feel like a lot of people.

So it's like, what you do to get there doesn't need to be this sparkly thing. I guess, you know what I mean.

Maybe it's just because you flame out and burn out and you're like, I need to take a step back. Yeah, it could.

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.

Well, the first part isn't speculation, the first part is language is relatively new. Spreadsheets and pro and con lists on the scale of human evolution, pretty brand new, yeah. And then we have millions of years of evolution. And other 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?

We've come to overvalue the highly analytical, explicit numbers on a spreadsheet approach to thing, uh, to to things and problem solving. Whereas 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. And I have, since I was very young, Uh, had challenges with depressive episodes. I think I've become much smarter about how I approach those, and they've become less and less frequent. We can talk about why that's the case.

I mean, far less frequent in some cases, though, like depression. Can and I'll. 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. Yeah, that's not automatically the same as this constellation of symptoms that we would call psychiatric depression.

Yeah, right, and those signals are easy to mix up, but oftentimes it's like, no, this is. This is an energy out activity and your body is making you pay attention to that, as opposed to an energy inactivity. Which is how I choose a lot of what I do, which comes back to, like, Okay, well, how do you choose the target? I'll give people just a if it's helpful for folks, how I choose, say the few big yeses, yes.

I was about to ask this because in a. In a world of infinite distraction and a million shiny objects and phones that force feed you temptation at all times. And I remember I interviewed Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs at one point. he sadly passed away a few years ago. But, he said, one of the key skills is being able to distinguish between, let me get this right. An opportunity to be seized or a temptation to be resisted. And I think that skill is going to be increasingly important. It's going to become very obvious this year with AI. And many of the tools are going to be used to inflict a fire hose of temptation on everyone, including the two of us. So how do I try to sift through that?

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. So I'm like, Oh yeah, let me use this as an opportunity to pause and think about what next chapters might look like. And there are a few ways that I look at my list of possible candidates and start to filter. Number one is how do I succeed even if I fail? or can I succeed even if I fail? With these? 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, will I develop skills and relationships, or deepen relationships and develop skills that will transfer to other things? If so, that's not failure, like you can still have a very meaningful partial win, even if externally it's a total failure. If any of those candidates don't check that box, they're like, that has to be a prereq, because then you snowball your way into long-term success. It has never failed me.

I've never seen that fail, and it's done really methodically. Over time. You need endurance for that, which comes to the next point, which is like energy in, energy out. And by the way, if you're not really excited about something, it's not quite the right word. And I know you've talked about this, you know, passion, and these words are kind of clumsy labels that we try to apply to what I think fundamentally is like energy in, energy out. If language learning for me is energy in, and somebody else wants to compete in that, let's just say money was big in the language learning game, which it isn't.

And they're like, Okay, I want to do that because five other people I respect are doing it. And it seems like this exploding opportunity like AI or Web Three a couple of years ago. Okay, fine, we're going to chase that, yeah.

If it's energy out for you and it's energy in for me, I'm going to win. Yep, there's just no way around it, assuming I have, like, the basic skills, so choose a game you can win, right?

So there's the will this help me snowball into success long-term, like will the skills and relationships transfer potentially to other things or persist after this? Even if it fails or succeeds. And then beyond that, it's kind of doing an 80 20 analysis of what you're trying to do in your life, right?

With whether it's finance, personal stuff, it's like, all right, let's rank, order your life and break it down in some way where it's. You could do this a million different ways, but it's like, all right, finances, physical health, mental health, that, that, that, like. Which levers are you trying to pull? 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 got to, you probably should deal with. Okay, then you choose the overlap and that's what you go for, and you can fuck. Sorry. Am I allowed to curse?

Oh my God, yes, so you can fuck that up every which way from Sunday. I'm from Long Island, so I curse a lot. 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? I don't think anything.

I was looking at my computer a lot, but I don't think I actually did anything. But as long as you have right target and you get a little bit done week by week, I mean, you really can produce some, some miracles from the outside. Looking in. But it's that front loading, that thought process in the beginning that really makes a difference. 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 terrible, like I'm going to look so, quote unquote, unproductive. Because there's a lot of empty space, there's a lot of kind of feeling lost or being unsure of next steps.

And there are ways to improve that. I'm not totally terrible, 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.

Do you agree with that to an extent?

And then, guess what, then you end up with five kind of cool things that you're not particularly good at, that drain you. And that is your schedule. And that target that you chose so carefully in the beginning just disappears, although usually if you go through the trouble of choosing it, it's it's, it doesn't disappear quite as easily.

Yeah, and those those empty spaces are important. 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. And that is important for positive reinforcement. But if you look at the best scientists, I've ever interacted with a lot of the best creatives.

There's a lot of negative space and they actually deliberately create that for themselves. Yep, and my feeling is, and this isn't across the board, there are always exceptions. But like, if you feel like you are rushing, you are rushing almost certainly in the wrong direction. If you feel like you're rushing, you're going the wrong direction. 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. Yeah, right, because the window of opportunity isn't going to close really quickly. 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, you're going to have to rush, or you're going to feel like you have to rush. 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.

That is a bad game 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.

Mine was 170 pages or something, I mean, by far and away longest thing I'd ever written, and it just absolutely crushed me. I didn't know how to handle something of that scope, it was very complicated.

And after I was done with it, which took way longer than I expected, I made this vow to myself that I would never write anything longer than an email. Ever again. I was like, I'm done, I get it, I'm done.

I'm done, 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, so I had this professor at Princeton. I've been really part lucky, part by design, but a lot of luck in terms of having some teachers who've had huge impact on me.

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, what should they do? Here are all the facts. Pause.

And then the students have to figure out what they would do, and then the second half is. Here's what the company did. And then he would bring in the CEOs or the former CEOs of these companies to explore their decisions. It's a great class, so I started giving these lectures, and I think I guess lectured in this class from 2003 to 2013 or something.

And every class asked for feedback from students like, What do you like? favorite piece? how could it improve? because I always ask for that kind of feedback.

I do this all the time, by the way, with everything.

And sometimes Princeton kids can be snobby pricks, and this is one guy put in. I don't understand why you're teaching this class to, like, 30 students. Why don't you just write a book and be done with it? And it was not intended to be a serious recommendation, it was just a dickish response.

But that stuck in my head and I was like, I don't want to write a book. And then I reached out to a friend, this is years later, in 2004, who was an author. And I basically showed him my notes from the class and I was like, you know, I've been thinking about what I'm going to do next. I don't think I want to write a book.

But what do you think of this? And he replied with, you should definitely do it. And I had some conversations, I got turned down by a bunch of folks. Ended up finding a guy who was a superstar editor who had just become an agent, so he was new to that game, the agenting game.

I was new to the writing game. We ended up really hitting it off and we signed. The book got turned down by 27 29, somewhere in that range, publishers got turned down by everybody.

And then somebody bought it and then I had to write it, so that's how it happened. But it was not as though I had this burning desire to write a book. It was one of these things, and I think things that I have done that have been most.

Successful, per se, have been the things that I just cannot get out of my head. I have to do them, which is what I say to people. When they're like, maybe I'll write a book, I'm like, you should only write a book if you have to write a book, yes.

It's almost like it has to haunt you.

Leave me alone. I don't want to do that. It's almost like it starts like that, sometimes, not always.

But I've noticed with me too, even with YouTube. It was like, I had to do it. It's the same thing, but I was like, Oh, it's not going to do well, I don't eat.

Why are you investing? People say, Well, I'm investing to grow my money. Okay, you're investing to grow your money. Why are you? Why do you want to grow your money?

Well, because then I'll have this money and I'll have retirement, and then, okay, why do you want retirement? Well, because I want security, okay.

What is security? What is that feeling that you're going for? Well, ultimately, for a lot of people, feeling more peace of mind on a day-to-day basis. But what do they do? They decide to put it in the latest shit coin, crypto, whatever that is bouncing all over the place.

And they're stressed out of their minds. And I'm like, if if you get distracted by the secondary metric of like compounded annual growth rate, you're going to make bad decisions. You have to keep the fundamental underlying driver in mind, right? So I would say that for people who are miserable in the quest for productivity, often it's because they forget about 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, that are vanity metrics, or they're just distracting metrics, right? And not to beat this drum too hard. But it's like modern tech platforms are not designed to maximize your wellbeing. Oh, just to be very clear.

And we can come back to that, 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, or they have not taken the time to define a target, which is even worse.

And secondly, it's the belief that productivity means more is more, right. 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, right? One of the commonalities is searching for something that is called the minimum effective dose. Okay?

You want to get a suntan? 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. Yeah, right, like you want the minimum effective dose if you're using medication, right?

Especially with things that are a little dicey, like tylenol acetaminophen, which can have incredible liver toxicity. If you take too much, and it's not that much at all, you're looking for the least you can take to produce the desired effect. Yep, that's how I think about productivity.

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. And he said the goal is to do the least necessary, not the most possible.

And that is a fun puzzle for me to try to solve. And I use the word elegance very deliberately. I mentioned it earlier, like the fewest pieces in the least dose to get what I want. Because when you aim for that, you get fewer side effects, just like with drugs.

And 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. Yeah, a brutally competitive, fast changing game, totally.

Aim to be a category of one, choose an uncrowded game, or create a new game for yourself where you can be the one and the only ideally. 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. So there was a proof of concept. But it was not mainstream in any capacity, and it was very uncrowded.

There was a lot of room to be differentiated. It is very hard now, I feel that super hard.

It's so hard, it's very challenging, yeah, and it's not just because it's crowded, it's because within that crowd there are a lot of really good people.

Yes, incredibly good, totally. And for me, that's like to use the casino analogy. I've been playing single deck blackjack and then they're like, Well, we're actually going to play with three decks. It's like, ooh, that makes counting cards a lot harder.

And then they're like, you stay exactly where you are, and they move the tables. And now the roulette is in front of me and I'm like, I don't want to play this game. Not from a purely competitive perspective, because you have to be careful about competition.

I think it can make you very unhappy. But for me to feel energy in, I want to feel like I am doing something that I am uniquely suited to do. Yes, so I'd say that if I were going to be a productivity doctor and diagnose the most likely causes of that misery, it'd be the few things I just mentioned. We're in a real hustle culture of it all, to use the lifestyle hustle.

I know I used that in the beginning, bringing it back to.

It's like, if I didn't post on social media, I would delete the apps to not.

The platforms and the algorithms dictate what you will be rewarded for as an obedient little.

Puppy begging at the heels of whatever platform you happen to be on, that sounds a little harsh, but you get the idea. The rules of the games How confident can you feel in your choice of game when the rules of the game constantly change? No wonder you're stressed out, of course.

What I would say, though, is, I'm making up this example. But some of the top contemporary artists in the world, individual artists, are they posting every day? I'd guess probably not a lot of them. I would say, you might be right, you can't stop. But that seems like a hypothesis worth testing where you could say, Okay, I'm going to do two weeks. No social.

Now, to do that, though, you have to decide how you're going to evaluate, whether you need to or don't need to. For that, you would need other metrics. 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, then yes, you are captive to the platform, but if you have other products, if you have coffee. 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.

This is just a long way of saying, you can test it, you can test all of these things. They are not permanent decisions.

I'll add one thing to that, which is sometimes the pain isn't acute enough.

I listened to your episode from 2021, Rock Bottom, you said something which I've thought a lot myself. If something is 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, devastating pain. Because the latter forces you often to do something. Sometimes you need to manufacture that, though, for instance, right now, you're like, I'd love to, but I can't.

I can't, I'm not sure. It's like, okay, let's say you continue doing exactly what you're doing. What does your life look like? mental health, physical health, friendships, finances? This, this, this?

If you look out three years, all right, five years, okay, 10 years. Sometimes it's fine, but usually if someone is like, I don't know, I'm not sure.

It's like pebble in the shoe. That right now is a little irritating, but on a hundred mile march, you're going to tear your feet to pieces. I do that type of telescoping out a lot. I'm like, okay, if I continue to do this as I am? What are the costs of inaction? Because I think often folks will look at, and this is a lot of for our work week. Honestly, it's like breaking down risk and thinking about risk differently.

Yes, right, so like, let's just say the risk of taking two weeks without doing any social posts yourself. And we think about the risks of that action. That's a new thing, but we don't compare it to something, because when something is is it, we say, oh, that's risky.

The followup we should always ask is compared to what? yeah, compared to what, and in this case, the compared to what. Is doing the same thing for the next two, three, five years? And when you sit down, you evaluate that and you telescope out.

Sometimes you're like, Oh shit, like, doing no social for two weeks is extremely low risk because the potential payoff.

And and I feel terrible, like I do, I feel bad, I'm anxious. I'm like, dissociated a little bit, weirdly for some reason, when I'm on social media too much, I have like.

Negative existential crises, like over and over, like, it makes me weirdly existential in a bad way.

It's a group.

And by and large, people seemed really happy in the rural areas. And then we we came across this one village where people seem pretty surly. And I was like, That's weird, yeah, why is that? and he goes, Oh, it's because they got satellite TV.

I was like, What, what do you mean? And he goes well. Now they can watch the Kardashians, and they can watch all these people with fancy cars and fancy lives. Wow, and now they've concluded their lives suck.

I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist. Wow, and if you take that and you basically put 5 million horsepower into it, you have social media.

Yeah, and I don't think social media is all bad, but there's enough. It's very you, you. In my experience, it's increasingly difficult, especially with the kind of tick tock vacation and competition that we've seen across platforms. To selectively engage with social media and just peel out the positive. It is very hard because you're no longer limited to accounts that you follow. You get served anything that will captivate your attention, which can then?

And it's not that I was like, Oh, I miss watching it, but it was like, I want to be present there. And I had this like feeling that I hadn't had, you know, I hadn't had in a long time, and I was like, why am I feeling that? So that's something I'm analyzing right now.

Why am I feeling that? That's where something like The Five Wise doesn't?

So, like the Five Wise or Morning Pages, I'm a huge fan of Morning Pages by a Julia Cameron who wrote the artist's way. It's just like you wake up, three pages of writing out whatever's in your monkey mind, bitch and moan, complain, it's not writing. You're not going to show anybody, just like, get it out of your head so you can move on with your day, trap it on paper.

And it's the simplest thing ever. What do you think about going cold turkey?

You're so outgunned, you're so outfunded, you're so out-researched. These platforms are not going to lose like you're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

It's not going to work, it's going to be very challenging to make work, at the very least. It's like, do the easy thing first, and the easy thing is is cold turkey, in my opinion.

Yeah, do the simple thing first. Yeah, there's another exercise. So I had a TED talk a handful of years ago on this topic, called Fear setting, right?

Where you're just as you would with goals, right? To have a goal that you have some chance of accomplishing. You can do the same thing with your fears. So if you're like, I can't do this, no, but but no, if I do that, then I'll become irrelevant.

If I do this and people will forget about me if I do this, then if I don't do that, et cetera, et cetera. You need to take those cloudy, nebulous fears and put them on paper in some structured way, and I'll just tell people how to do it. Go old school piece of paper pen. And you're going to have three or four columns, and the first column is like all the things that could go wrong at the very top.

It's like what you're considering doing or not doing, stopping social media for two weeks, all right? Write down all the things that go wrong and get as specific as possible, and the second column, you write down what you could do to minimize, like to reduce the likelihood of each of those things happening.

Okay, and then in the last column, you just write down what you could do to recover, even temporarily. If that thing happens, like, how could you reverse the damage or minimize the damage? Yep, that's page one.

Page two is the cost of inaction. You're like, Okay, if if I don't do this thing and I telescope out like one, three, five years, what does my life look like? You're making explicit something that is implicit, that if you choose not to do this thing, you are making a choice in another direction. What is what are the costs associated and the risks associated with that? And I would say, one time out of 10, you're like, you know what?

That is risky, I shouldn't do that. Nine times out of 10, you're like, this is fine. I am risking like a three out of 10 temporary setback that I could reverse for, like a nine out of 10. Durable.

You know, like, what is this? Yeah, how does one balance their intuition with being sort of analytical and rational in a way? Can you give any examples of where?

Because on paper, it looks good, but to me, it feels bad.

And this is, this is sort of just a meta comment, and then I'll come into the specifics. 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? Like you're used to constantly thinking in terms of frameworks and pro and con, this and the other thing. How do you feel right like with this company, with this person? When you're on the phone, are you constricted? when you get off, are you drained?

Are you checking the time because you want to get off the call? Like, pay attention to that stuff, not not as much the content, because content doesn't matter. If you feel like your system is giving you a yellow or a red. And then I would say, intuition, to me, is most interesting when it contradicts what you've arrived at in your head.

That's when, that's when I pay attention, right? 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, and there's part of it. It's just like, Uh, yep, I would wait, that doesn't feel good.

That should be, and I've become, I think, very good at this. That's an automatic. No, yeah.

It's like there's something in this pre-language evolved sensing that is telling me, fuck, no. And when I have over written that it's never worked out, there's always some problem. Later, I'm like, damn it.

I knew it. It's the worst, you know, he did this deal and you can't do a good deal with a bad person or an untrustworthy, worthy person. So I find intuition most valuable when it is actually subverting what you think you want. Absolutely.

But it's always.

I can't do it right now. 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? I hadn't asked myself why, that's for sure, um, and then my body rejected it, yeah.

I went into full depressive episode and then I knew like, this is just wrong. Speaking of that, we, we are both depressive people. Okay, um, how has that impacted?

I don't know, everyone's different, I like I. You mentioned earlier that the the more wise that you get, the easier it is to sort of get through those moments.

Four to six extended depressive episodes a year on average since I was adolescent per year. Okay, yeah, oh yeah. And they could last anywhere from, let's say, two weeks to, like, two months, right?

And there've been years when it's basically been mostly depressive episodes, since 2012 2013.

That frequency is probably down to, like, one every two years. Wow, and they're typically pretty short, they're typically one to two weeks.

And I would attribute that to a few things, and to really provide, I guess, a harrowing example of how bad that can be. 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. Cause my mom called me because I had reserved this book at the library, I was taking a year off school. It was related to suicide.

The reminder on a postcard got sent home to my parents house. I forgot to change the mailing address and she got it. Freaked out, called me, and that sort of snapped me out of my own self-imposed delusion. In a way, because you put on these very dark glasses. When you're in those states where it seems very personal, you're the only person, you're uniquely flawed. Nobody else has this problem.

And objectively, you realize, at least in my case, like, your life is pretty good. So I'm fucked because this is never going to get better. And it's permanent. Therefore, X, which is often some type of final exit. And if that had happened now, all digital notifications, I wouldn't be here.

I got it all planned out, I had the whole thing figured out, and that didn't happen, thankfully. And then I would say some of the contributing elements that have helped are different therapeutic modalities, like, for instance, IFS internal family systems created by a guy named Richard Schwartz.

Provoking certain behaviors or beliefs, and they have names for these different parts of yourself. And if people want to hear an example, I interviewed Dick Schwartz on the Tim Ferriss Show and I was a little hesitant to do this. So we agreed that I might not publish it. But it's a live session, like he takes me through it. And it's a structured way of having you interact with these parts, have conversations with them, identify when they came up, like, how old are they?

What age are you when this kind of player entered the stage? And I've seen tremendous effects from IFS by itself, then you can layer in other tools that are sometimes very advantageous in the case of IFS. IFS has been adapted in part to a protocol used with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. So post-traumatic stress disorder, in this case, treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. Where, at least with the phase two trials, I think. The average was something like 16.8 years, or 17 years of diagnosis, which meant these patients had not found a solution to address their PTSD symptoms for an average of, let's call it, 17 years.

And they do two or three sessions with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. The IFS. Parts work, parts work is another term you'll sometimes hear.

And I think I'm going to 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. And at the I want to say six or 12 month follow-up point, that number had gone up to something like 68, which is very rare in psychiatry. So for me personally, also, psychedelic assisted therapies have been a critical component.

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 not just saved my life, but allow me to.

Re-envision and re-author the beliefs that govern my life, and that's a big deal, certainly a big deal for me. I think people are too cavalier with these compounds now, right?

Like, you can't walk down the street in L.A. without, like, somebody offering you a matcha latte with magic mushrooms in it or something. And they're like, Oh, I'm really healthy now, I no longer drink, I just use ketamine five nights a week.

And you're like, well, timeout, timeout.

Recontextualize experiences 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, and recontextualize it as an adult. So that it, in a way, kind of overwrites the disabling stories, and that's hard to measure. So a lot of scientists are looking for mechanistic ways to explain these changes, but it's very difficult to do. The content, from my perspective, matters a lot because you look at the durability 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. And if you get off of them, you have to be very careful. Because there are withdrawal symptoms. And there are lots of contraindications and these, I should say, these conventional frontline drugs are really critical and very effective for a lot of people, they also don't work for a lot of people. 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. You can't explain that by the presence of the drug, because the drug, the half-life of psilocybin, is so short.

Psilocybin being what is considered the active constituent element in magic mushrooms psilocybin mushrooms of different types. 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. In terms of, I think, probably overturning, or at least augmenting, very longstanding beliefs about the brain and mind. Many of the effects we're seeing are just so far outside of the normal purview of psychiatry that it's hard for me to offhand pick something I find more interesting. And because our conception, our beliefs and conception of reality are. If we're talking about base layers, right, it's like, that's layer one and everything else is built on that. So if you start to, if you can learn more about that. And 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, let's not make any mistake, like we are constantly creating reality as we go. There's a book called The Case Against Reality by a scientist named Donald Hoffman, which I think makes this very compelling. But like, if I were a mantis shrimp or a sparrow, this room would not look the same clearly.

So, as we learn more about sort of 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.

And he also was the victim of a terrible accident when he was in college. He was electrocuted, lost three of his limbs. I want to say. And nonetheless has incredible sense of humor, very smart guy. And I asked him what he would put on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, and his answer was, Don't believe everything that you think.

And I asked him where he got that, and he said, I think it was a bumper sticker in Berkeley.

So that's okay, that's so real, that's okay, but don't believe everything that you think, yeah.

A lot of what we think has not been stress tested, a lot of what we think. The things we take to be. Our beliefs are not our beliefs, 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. And they're just, it's a goldmine waiting for you.