#584: Bo Shao — His Path from Food Rations to Managing Billions, the Blessings and Burdens of Chasing Perfection, Building the eBay of China in 1999, Pillars of Parenting, and Pursuing the Unpopular

Brought to you by Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim mushroom coffee, and Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating. Bo Shao is a co-founder and the chairman of Evolve https://evolvevf.com/, a philanthropic investment firm composed of a foundation, Evolve Foundation, and an impact investment firm, Evolve Ventures. With an initial capital of $100 million from the Shao family, Evolve aims to support organizations that relieve inner suffering and facilitate inner transformation. He is also the co-founder of Parent Lab https://www.parentlab.com/, an app that helps parents meet common parenting challenges (a new version launches on April 10th). Prior to Evolve, Bo was a founding partner of Matrix China, a leading technology venture capital firm in China, which manages more than $7 billion and has funded more than 500 companies, 50+ of which have become unicorns. He is also a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded five companies that have either gone public or become leaders in their respective industries. Bo was born in China and was a winner of more than a dozen national mathematics competitions during high school. When he was 17, he left China for Harvard College on a full scholarship — one of the first such scholarships Harvard granted to a person from mainland China. After receiving his A. B. summa cum laude in physics and electrical engineering, he worked for Boston Consulting Group and Goldman Sachs and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim and their delicious mushroom coffee, featuring lion’s mane and chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but it has less than half the caffeine of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It’s organic and keto friendly, plus every single batch is third-party lab tested. You can try it right now by going to FourSigmatic.com/Tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code TIM. You will receive up to 39% off on the lion’s mane coffee bundle http://foursigmatic.com/tim. Simply visit FourSigmatic.com/Tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you’ll be disappointed. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. * Bo shares what it was like to grow up poor in Shanghai, how his uncanny math acumen was sharpened with poker cards and rewarded with ketchup and hugs, and the lifelong lessons he absorbed from his parents. [07:07] How did Bo wind up getting a full scholarship to Harvard? [16:30] What did Bo do to learn and refine his English language skills, and why does he consider the pattern of behavior that compels him to excel a “burden?” [18:26] How much of a culture shock did Bo experience when he moved to the United States in 1991? What were the most noticeable differences between China and the US? [26:47] Why is Bo committed to bringing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to China? What unique traumas have recent generations of Chinese experienced en masse that might be greatly alleviated by such treatments? [34:15] Bo walks us through what it took to build his first startup during the age of dial-up modems after returning to China from a lucrative job in the US, and how his parents reacted. [43:29] As someone so hardwired toward rationality, how did Bo weigh the pros and cons of beginning his own entrepreneurial venture in China instead of pursuing stable, high-paying employment for someone else in the US? Did he have a contingency plan in case things didn’t work out? [50:46] Western names don’t always translate easily into Chinese. Take mine, for example. [55:19] The ups and downs of startup life and the finite resources that even a math wizard can easily lose track of. [1:00:14] How did Bo roll with cash flow problems and a major source of funding potentially drying up during a time of dire market fluctuations? [1:03:31] It turns out Harvard is a great place to increase one’s vocabulary. [1:06:55] How Bo’s superpower-charging study regimen resembles meditation. [1:09:11] Whatever happened to Bo’s first startup? [1:11:34] How did meeting the woman who would become Bo’s wife enhance his emotional development? [1:13:20] How old was Bo when he “retired” after selling EachNet, what motivated him to rejoin the entrepreneurial world, and what have been some of his most noteworthy accomplishments since? [1:16:09] How did personal introspection become a priority for Bo after years of resistance to the idea, and how has his life improved — as a friend, husband, and father — as a result? [1:17:50] What tools, perspectives, realizations, and resources have helped Bo make progress on his journey of self-discovery? [1:26:38] What does Bo believe is missing right now from the discussion around psychedelics and related therapies? [1:35:55] Projects with which Evolve is involved, Bo’s thoughts on the importance of inner work (particularly for people who are, as he was, overly focused on the rational), and other parting thoughts. [1:40:21] * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing, and all you have to do is add hot water. I use travel packets. I've been to probably a dozen countries with various products from Four Sigmatic, and their mushroom coffee is top of the list. That's number one. I travel with it. I recommend

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  it. I give it to my employees. I give it to house guests. So if you're one of the 60% of Americans or more who drink coffee daily, consider switching it up. This stuff is amazing. That's part one. That is the cognitive enhancement side, easy on the system side, energizing side. The next is actually their chaga tea, which tastes delicious. It is decaf, completely decaf. And some may recognize chaga. It is nicknamed the king of the mushrooms. It is excellent for immune system support. So needless to say, I am focused on that right now myself, and so I will often have that in the afternoons. They make all sorts of different mushroom

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  blends. If you are doing exercises, I am on a daily basis to keep myself sane. Cordyceps, excellent for endurance. They have a whole slew of options that you can check out. Every single batch is third-party lab-tested for heavy metals, allergens, all the bad stuff, to make sure that what gets into your hands is what you want to put in your mouth. And they always offer a 100% money-back guarantee. So you can try it risk-free. Why not? I've worked out an exclusive offer with Four Sigmatic on their bestselling Lion's Mane coffee. I literally have a mug full of it in front of me right now. And this is just for you, my dear podcast listeners. Receive up to 39% off. I don't know how we arrived at 39%, but 39% off, it's a lot, their bestselling Lion's Mane coffee bundle.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  To claim this deal, you must go to foursigmatic.com/tim. This offer is only for you and is not available on their regular website. Go to foursigmatic, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim to get yourself some awesome and delicious mushroom coffee. Full discount is applied at checkout.

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle asleep and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 3:19Tim Ferriss?

  I polled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So I used it and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now for me and for many people, the result, Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster,

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250. Off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight all spelled out, E I G H T, sleep.com/tim or use coupon code TIM, T I M. eightsleep.com/tim for $250 off your Pod Pro cover.

• 4:44Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Now would have seemed appropriate time.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where each episode is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different areas to tease out the habits and routines, or maybe frameworks, decisions, approaches, who knows, that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Bo Shao, B O, last name S H A O. Bo Shao is a co-founder and the chairman of Evolve, a philanthropic investment firm composed of a foundation, Evolve Foundation, and an impact investment firm, Evolve Ventures. With initial capital of 100 million from the Shao family, Evolve aims to support organizations that relieve

• 5:51Tim Ferriss?

  inner suffering and facilitate inner transformation. Bo's story is pretty wild, so let's jump into a little backstory. And we're going to go in reverse chronological order. Prior to Evolve, Bo was a founding partner of Matrix China, a leading technology venture capital firm in China, which manages more than $7 billion and has funded more than 500 companies, 50 plus of which have become unicorns. That means valued at more than $1 billion USD. He is also a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded five companies that have either gone public or become leaders in their respective industries. Bo was born in China and was the winner of more than a dozen national mathematics competitions during high school. For those who don't know what that means, it is a huge, huge deal and a very significant feat.

• 6:35Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to leave the rest of his bio to our conversation and we will dig in very, very quickly. The website for Evolve is EvolveVF as in Venture Fund, Venture Foundation. So evolvevf.com. He has no social media. We will dig into why that is. And without further ado, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with none other than Bo Xiao.

• 7:08Tim Ferriss?

  Bo, it is nice to see you again, sir. And I wanted to perhaps set the stage by pulling from one of our very first conversations we ever had. And it involves ketchup. Might sound like a strange place to start for those people listening, but perhaps you could provide just a bit of context and that'll be a way we can jump in.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  I grew up in Shanghai, China. My father was a math teacher. I guess he's retired now. He had always been very strict with me. He had many, many good qualities as a father, which I won't go into here. But one of the things he did not do so well was he was angry all the time. And often for a certain period of years, he was angry. And also he would unpredictably get very, very angry and get very scary. So I think one day, maybe when I was maybe five, no, actually, no, I know exactly how old. I was around 10 years old. He brought ketchup home in a bottle of a beer bottle.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I remember it's a green beer bottle and we never had ketchup before. You know, we grew up poor like everybody else in China. And I think I stole a taste of it without his permission.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  And he flew into a rage. I do not remember whether he hit me or not, but it was very scary. And I I'm sure I cried and it was it was a terrible time. And then a couple of days later, I came home and I saw him in a good mood. And I think that somehow gave me courage to ask him again, like, can I try the ketchup? Which actually is surprising because after that episode, I don't usually I would not have worked up the courage to do something similar. But in that case, I did because he looked so happy. So he said to me, Bo, you can have, my my Chinese nickname is Xiaobo. It's like Xiaobo, you can have as much ketchup as you like.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  I was shocked. And not only I tried the ketchup and he actually bent down to to hug me. I remember exactly where that happened. It was in front of the kitchen. I have a mental picture of that location right now. And I don't recall too much. To be fair, I can't say he did not hug me ever. Yeah, he probably did. It left such a deep imprint in me of getting this kind of, I didn't ask for a hug and he gave me a hug, you know, in a very tricky situation. And that that left a very deep imprint on me. Then later on, I found out that I won my first mass competition.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  I think it was in fifth grade, is a mass competition involving all the students in Shanghai. Shanghai is like at that time, probably a city of twelve, thirteen million people. And I was like clear number one in that mass competition.

• 10:05Tim Ferriss?

  And that's why he was in such a good mood?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  Could you paint a picture of what poor looks like, what it looked like for you? Because I remember you mentioned rations and things like that, just so people have a little more detail.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  First of all, I didn't know I was poor. Everybody was poor, so I didn't know I was poor, which is actually a good thing. But the way we grew up is, you know, we, when I was, you know, four, five years old, we didn't always have meat on the table. Everything was rationed, including milk.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Rice, oil, cooking oil, meat certainly, very rarely any kind of seafood. I think vegetable probably was not ration, I can't remember. And you get these little tickets you have to carry to a grocery store in addition to the money. And they were making, I think my father was making maybe certainly less than ten dollars a month. My mother was also making ten dollars a month as well.

• 11:01Tim Ferriss?

  So the tickets are like food stamps in a sense?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  But there's a ticket for meat, there's a ticket for cooking oil, etc.

• 11:09Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And you had mentioned your father was a good teacher. And I'd love for you to pick up there. And also, I'd love to hear how and when poker or cards may have entered the picture.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Because we were so poor, we didn't have ways of, you know, setting up maths. These days, if you're on a train, you have lots of tools to do it. But back then, we didn't even have an abacus. He initially started just writing down arithmetic problems like five plus seven or fifteen plus twenty eight on a piece of paper and asked me to add them. He has to write hundreds of these equations and then you solve them. But then he said, oh, he sort of had, one day had an inspiration. Actually, initially started with my sister, who was, who is three years older than me. And said, oh, why don't we use a deck of cards? And obviously ace is one, then two is two, and then jack is eleven, the king is thirteen, etc.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  And you add up the deck of cards. Initially, you actually add up only ten cards and then to twenty and then to forty, involving one to ten, and eventually to fifty two, involving one to thirteen times four. The total sum, I think, is three hundred sixty four. And then he would take one card of, from the fifty card, two cards away and ask me to add up the rest. And he would set a time limit, so have to get it right within a certain time limit. And I think I trained for several years under this method. And I actually became so fast that I think I was able to add up fifty two cards under twelve seconds or so. And actually, just to be able to, you know, show the cards so quickly.

• 12:49Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna say, I don't even think I could show the cards in thirty seconds.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  I developed a particular way of going through these cards. And I think I was doing basically more or less four or five calculations a second. And it turns out, actually, just later on, as I understood a bit more neurobiology, is that actually it takes about a hundred milliseconds for the brain to recognize an image. To be able to see the card clearly and take it in. And then process information takes one tenth of a second already, or sometimes depending, one tenth to maybe one sixth of a second. So to be able to add five cards in one second is probably at the close to the limit of of human biology, I guess.

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

  What else did you absorb from your parents? And maybe it's worth also backtracking for a second and asking the question. What lesson, subconsciously or otherwise, did you take away from that experience with your dad? With the rage over the ketchup and then the have all the ketchup you want hug from your dad that seemed to coincide with winning that math competition?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  I'm still actually discovering how these imprints have affected me. You know, my experience is that, you know, and my understanding is that I was so imprintable as a child. All children are very imprintable. That I carried away with certain things with me. And that's not his intention, I want to be clear about that, but it's nevertheless is what I carried away with. And one of the impressions that I received was that my value comes from my performance.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  In fact, specifically to be almost like number one, that's my value. And if I am not number one, then I'm a person with no value. And I feel heaviness as I talk about it because it's such a burden. And it was a creative solution in some ways because indeed I became number one in many things. And when I was growing up, particularly math, I end up winning first prize in dozens of national math competitions in China. And I felt safe. That performance enabled me to feel safe. I think my impression is that actually I was treated better after that. My father had less of a rage.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  He was so proud of me. I felt my life changed for the better, significantly better because of that performance. And then as I grew up, I needed to perform well in everything. It's not just math competitions anymore, not just college or the first job. But this kind of almost compulsion to perform start to dominate everything, including driving. Like I need to be always on the fastest lane. More importantly, perhaps I always need to plot the most efficient route to a place. I remember when I initially got my Tesla, I needed to look at the Tesla maps. I need to look at Google Maps.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  I need to look at Waze so that I can see which map provides the best route. Then I can look at postmortem and see, oh, which indeed, which one was was more accurate. The next time I will, I will use this map for this route, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, I gave a lot of pressure to my wife, enormous amount of pressure to my children. It's a very, one of my deepest patterns of behavior.

• 16:30Tim Ferriss?

  You ended up going to Harvard at seventeen. How does a poor kid? In China, end up with Harvard on the map. I understand you won these competitions, but how did it end up that you were able to go from where you were in Shanghai to Harvard at seventeen, if I'm getting the age correct?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  I think I came to the US on my eighteenth birthday, if I remember right. This is largely thanks to my father. He saw it early that going to America for higher education will open up entirely different world of opportunities. So he started working on that very early. And back then, going to America for PhDs were relatively known. Quite a lot of people go because you get, you know, research assistance or teaching assistance so that you actually get paid to to study. But for college, there were no such things, so you needed a full scholarship.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  The reason it needs to be full is nobody in China back then could remotely afford a college education in the US. Remember, you know, when in the nineteen eighties, when the China economy initially opened up, people who got rich first were called Wan Yuan Hu, which means people who have ten thousand RMB. That's considered to be very rich. You can get a special name, so like millionaires or billionaires that we use now. Ten thousand RMB is a big, big deal. So actually, even when when we started applying for colleges, we couldn't even afford the application fees, which is like thirty five or fifty dollars. We actually had to get waivers of application fees from these colleges.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Really thanks to him, I applied to twenty or so colleges in the US when I was in junior high school and got into a bunch of them. And a number of them gave me a full scholarship, including Harvard, and off I went.

• 18:26Tim Ferriss?

  When did you start studying English?

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Chinese middle school and high school education have always emphasized English as a part of core curriculum. So we did study English in middle school and high school. Now, the teaching quality wasn't very good because most of those English teachers never, no, actually not all of them, none of them have ever been overseas and their accents are, you know, atrocious. But you know, we would learn grammar and all those things. I I think I was able to probably read. Actually, no, I you know, I take it back. I don't think my English was that good. But then I get some cramming school outside of the regular school to learn English and that helped me.

• 19:11Tim Ferriss?

  So the cram school, just for people who who who might not know what that is, that's like a an additional night school that you would go to to strengthen your abilities in a certain subject?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yes, that is correct. And remember, my English was always, definitely, I was very unsure and not confident about my English until one summer, maybe in somewhere middle school, where I spent probably half the summer listening to a few tapes. It was a textbook called New Concept English, I think from the UK. And I listened to those tapes over and over again until I pretty much memorized it. I could even talk, not just the text of the the lessons, but also including the copyright, everything that the the the speaker was introducing the book and everything, you know, Oxford Cambridge Press, whatever, all of those things I listened to so many times. I remember it was a it was a little recorder. It was actually not a little, it was like probably the size of a laptop, kind of a, but several times sticker,

• 20:07Speaker 03

  a recorder with these plastic buttons and I'll I'll click rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play, probably thousands of times during the summer. And I basically was able to mimic the speaker on the tape, memorized without trying to most of the things that he was saying. And then after the summer, my English just ceased to be a problem, became something I became very comfortable with.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  What prompted you to listen to those tapes thousands of times? Was it the pending trip to the US for college or was it something else?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  No, I don't know why. If this is way before even going to the US appeared on the roadmap. There's a part of me that just really wanted to be excellent, I think. And this is actually a very important learning as I actually in the past few months, you know, and I'm starting to realize. Because, let me explain this is actually important. I have this sort of pattern of behavior that require me to be sort of want to be perfect in every situation, which is a burden. And one of the reasons that I was unwilling, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, to let that pattern behavior go.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Is that I'm afraid that if I don't follow this strict pattern, I will cease to be excellent. All the things that made me great or successful will disappear. And then I become lazy and all that. And I think subconscious, I was holding on to that pattern for fear of that happening. But as I connect, however, now with, I was just talking about is I actually, you know, nobody forced me to do this. And I did it because I, I, there's an innate drive in me, I think, to do a good job. Things I touch.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  And the more in some ways I get in touch with that innate drive, but it's not a pathological compulsion. Like in certain situations, it's appropriate. And certain situations not appropriate. It's a great tool in my toolbox. It's a great trait of mine. But if I actually have more confidence, this is within me. That's my inner quality. Then the more willing I'll be letting this other pattern go. Does it make sense?

• 22:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it does make sense. I think that if it is your default and you are not aware that you have a toolkit with other tools. And if you don't have that developed self-awareness, then you're sort of sleepwalking through parts of your life with a hammer looking for nails. But as you develop more awareness of your capacities and also the side effects of misapplying the tool, both for yourself and other people, then you develop different strategies, right? And you can also be easier on everyone, including yourself, in certain places.

• 23:14Tim Ferriss?

  And like you said, there are times when it makes sense to pull out the big guns and focus on something intensely. But it doesn't have to be, you know, figuring out how to shave 12 seconds off your trip to Starbucks by looking at 17 maps necessarily, right?

• 23:29Speaker 03

  You could even go one step further that if the reason I had developed this particular coping mechanism or pattern behavior or professionalism.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Is because I have an innate inclination because people react to trauma. I use the word trauma, not just referring not to just say one time, big event kind of a trauma like abuse. But trauma could happen over a long period of time of a repeat exposure to certain stimulus. That does not meet one's need. And I was exposed to a particular situation repeatedly. But however, my sister and I responded to that same situation differently because of our different innate inclinations. And so it's not a surprise that I developed this pattern of professionalism. That's always there that I couldn't control.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Because I had an innate inclination, that's good. But then it became almost bastardized or misused to cope with a situation that was very, very difficult.

• 24:33Tim Ferriss?

  And the situation was the just overall household dynamic? Is that the situation you're referring to?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  It's difficult for me to talk about a bit here.

• 24:42Tim Ferriss?

  And we can always cut things out later.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Partly it's because it's memory, but also I want to make sure that if my parents ever hear this, they know that I love them dearly and they've done so much good for me. But there are certain things that simply one needs when not met. And one of the situations was my, my father was angry and very demanding and very controlling to the extreme. And also he was physically punishing as well. So I was scared, I was scared, I think to the end of my wits, I think. And some of this rage becomes at very unpredictable times. So I think I was constantly vigilant and constantly making sure I was performing. And also another thing in the family dynamics was that.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  There was very little attention paid to how I feel. So the feelings were, for the longest time, I treated feelings like an emotional evolutionary waste product, like an appendix.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Rationality and analytics is what I'm built for, and emotions just gets in the way. And it serves no purpose. So I think for a long time, until I was probably my, maybe the first time I met my wife, I don't think I had many feelings. I didn't know what they were, really.

• 26:03Tim Ferriss?

  Just to speak to that, because I think part of the reason we bonded and ended up speaking for as long a time as we did when we first met is that that's, I think, some shared experience that we have in the sense that when you think emotions are a liability, you compartmentalize or dissociate in such a way to focus on the things that you feel you can control and apply, like rationality, right? And becoming as Vulcan-like as possible. But over time, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this, things have a tendency to squeeze out the corners, even if you think you've put them in a nice tidy little box.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 26:47Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to come back to your chronology just a little bit, and we're going to dip in and out of a lot of these topics. When you first came to the United States, do you remember what things or any things that were very surprising to you? Whether about the US in general, about the students you ran into, anything at all? Did anything jump out at you as incredible, unbelievable, confusing?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  There was too many things to count, really. I came from a country back then in 1991 where people didn't even have phones in their homes, most people. And when I had to call home, I needed to make sure, arrange a time with my parents over a regular mail or over the previous phone call so that they can go to my neighbor who had a phone, and they will wait by the phone when I call. But when I got to the US... I remember, I was just, you know, some, I guess vignettes might be illustrative was that when I landed in Los Angeles on my way to Boston, I needed to call home to make sure that they know that I'm okay.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  And by the way, just to, it's hard for me imagine that my oldest daughter is off to college, to imagine a parent sending their kids off to college, knowing that they may never see him again. So then I'm going to America, it was, it's a, it's not just getting on a fight. Seriously, they may never see me again. The courage they displayed and the selflessness they displayed was breathtaking. When I called home from Los Angeles airport, I was using a public phone, which is the first time I've ever probably seen a public phone. I remember having putting maybe several dollars worth of quarters into the phone, but the phone refused to connect.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  And I put more money in, it would still refuse to connect. So eventually I became frustrated and I switched to the phone next to it. And that payphone worked, I put in a couple of dollars or something like that and connected and told them I was okay. And as I was on the phone, a cleaning lady came by, was cleaning all the phones, and she puts her finger into the coin return slot, which I didn't even know existed, by the way, until she, she put her finger in, into the phone that I was previously using. And she got out a whole handful of quarters, probably, you know, ten dollar worth of quarters. And she was so happy, she looked at me and smiled.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  And, you know, it took me several days, maybe weeks, after I arrived in Boston, to realize, actually, those quarters were mine.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  I think the, the, the phone must have been full or something, it's malfunctioning. So all the quarters I put into the previous phone, basically, went straight down into the return slot, but I didn't realize it. And it took me several days at least, probably longer, to say, oh, one day it hit me, oh, that's what happened, she was taking my money.

• 29:56Tim Ferriss?

  What did that feel like to you?

• 30:00Tim Ferriss?

  And if you could describe also, as you've continued on your journey, what that was like. I think this is important connective tissue for some of the rest of the avenues we'll be exploring.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  When I got to Harvard, my focus was on grades. I needed to be number one.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  So I remember taking as many classes I could. The normal course load was four courses.

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  How many non-Chinese had you met before you got to the US? Had you met many non-Chinese?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  I think I met, really spent time with, was one non-Chinese person. And his name was Nicholas Kristof, as New York Times columnist. And now I think he just announced he's running for the governor of Oregon. But back then, he was living in Beijing as a journalist, and he was interviewing for Harvard.

• 30:55Tim Ferriss?

  He was an alumnus who was interviewing folks?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:59Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And I think I took the first train ride alone to go from Shanghai to Beijing to meet him, to be interviewed. So I think he was the only non-Chinese person that I met. I might have met a cousin who was born in America, who came back to China. But as far as a white person who was concerned, I think he was the first one.

• 31:27Tim Ferriss?

  So then you get to Harvard and you're like, oh, my God, there are so many lao ai. And then you're like, wait a second, I'm lao ai.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I was so out of it. I was so unsophisticated that none of these thoughts much occurred to me. I was just so focused on studying. I just needed to study.

• 31:47Tim Ferriss?

  You just had blinders on. You're like, people from all over the world, whatever, distraction. We'll focus on grades.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  One of the first classes I needed to take was exposé, which is a writing class, which is supposed to be a hellish, difficult writing class for college entrance as a first freshman. And I did very well. I think my first essay was read to the class, which is pretty amazing because I'd never written an English essay before until that point, not counting the application essays. The first essay got an A, but eventually my whole grade for the course was A minus. And I was very unhappy about that.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  I remember calling the professor and complaining that how he could give me an A minus.

• 32:37Tim Ferriss?

  How dare, how dare that professor?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And, and he was very confused. He might just really good. It's amazing that you're writing so well. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I said, well, put it right. Well, why don't I getting A minus? I was so focused on grades at the time.

• 32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula,

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 34:15Tim Ferriss?

  I want to flash forward and I'll often bookend things like this because I want to in part flesh out the picture in the mind's eye for listeners of China because it's very easy to look at the other, whatever the other is and be like, well, all people in Afghanistan X, the Chinese Y, the Americans Z. And I'd like to sort of humanize a bit also.

• 34:48Tim Ferriss?

  Chinese people, because China is not, as much as people might think so in the Western world, it's not uniform, top to bottom, east to west. There's a lot that happens in China, many differences regionally and so on. But you're helping, so present day, in the last few years, you're helping bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to China. I would like to hear you describe why you're doing that and why you think it's important, why it applies. And this will just be a way of also edging into a couple of different topics. And then we're going to go back to your bio and begin to talk about BCG in 1999 and consulting

• 35:32Tim Ferriss?

  projects for the Singaporean government. We're going to go there. But first, I want to just ask, why MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in China or to China?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  We're trying to work on it, and I'm not sure how much progress we are making. But it's a very worthwhile effort for us because in some ways, people everywhere share most of the similar aspirations. And regardless of their color or socioeconomic status, go through very similar traumas in some ways. As I got to know many of my fellow countrymen over the years, particularly the successful ones, actually, as they share some of the stories about themselves that they never told other people, that we all have so much

• 36:21Speaker 03

  hurt inside of us and everywhere. And these hurts could be, some could be very easily felt, some of it is deeply buried and maybe even subconscious. So many people, and I will say so many of us, because I'm certainly one of them, develop certain views of oneself that we somehow think there were something wrong with us, that we are not worthwhile, that we have no value other than the things we do. And just breathtaking how much suffering there is. And I use the word suffering in a Buddhist sense, even though I'm not a Buddhist.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  And so MDMA and other psychedelic medicine that have huge healing potential that I feel really passionate about bringing that to the world, helping that. And certainly, I'm not the main person doing it. I can, I like to contribute where I can to bring that to the world, including China. And in China in particular, China went through some very tough periods after World War II. There's a period called the Cultural Revolution. And prior to that, there's a rightist movement, anti-rightist movement that lasted more or less for 15 years that really traumatized an entire generation of people.

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  Can you speak to what that trauma looked like? Cause I think a lot of folks listening will not have, they won't be able to conjure any sort of images of what happened during either of those.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  I could start with something personal. Was in my family, my grandparents' family were relatively well to do. So when the Cultural Revolution came, Red Guards will come from house to house to search for all the valuables. You have to give them up, every single thing you have. If the Red Guards want it, you have to give it. And there are stories of people, as I was growing up, heard that, you know, some people bury some treasures in the backyard because they didn't want to give it up. And then Red Guards will come and pour water on the backyard. And when the water sinks in a particular place, they will dig it up. You know, obviously they will confiscate that and probably either torture or kill

• 38:39Speaker 03

  the people who try to bury it, imprison the people who try to bury it. So it was this incredible terror that happened to people. And then there was also this race to show your purity, your ideological purity toward these sort of proletarian, what do you call it, proletarian? What's the right?

• 39:02Tim Ferriss?

  Proletariots?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, proletarian revolution.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  So you have to chant the right things and you have to in every turn.

• 39:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the proletariat, the workers of the working class people regarded collectively.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. You have to chant. You have to follow all the dictates on Chairman Mao. In the middle of the night, you might be forced to get up and you cannot complain. If you complain, you are disloyal to go on the streets at two o'clock in the morning to to march and to to shout slogans at the top of your lungs. There's a real story that my my father actually tried to help somebody, somebody who's a good teacher was denounced of being not being loyal to the party and he spoke up for this person. And then he got in trouble for it. And later on, much to his dismay and disappointment anger, this person made up stories about him.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Instead of being grateful and helping him, the other victim actually made up stories about my father to protect himself. Because the more you denounce other people and tell secrets about other people, the more protected you are, you show your loyalty. So during Cultural Revolution, many children were forced to tell on their parents. And that created, you can imagine the amount of distrust that creates amongst everybody.

• 40:27Tim Ferriss?

  Terrible.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  They were so scared. And my father was put on for a few times because he came from a rich family and also because I think he helped this other person. He was put on on a platform in front of hundreds of people denouncing him, spitting on him. He would wear tall hats that could be very heavy for hours while standing in front of hundreds of people denouncing, shouting things at him. He wasn't, you know, didn't get the worst deal. There are people who got more or less lynched. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. And millions, I think it was millions of people sent to the countryside to do manual labor to reform their thinking.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  It was really, this is all from secondhand because I was too young. I was only a few years. Some of it happened before I was born. But other times was I was maybe one or two years old. So this is all through. Secondhand, but but there's so many stories and this is a period of time that is not often discussed, but I would say this whole country has PTSD.

• 41:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  It's very hard to imagine going through that. I mean, war, of course, can be very traumatic in a physical form, of course, and very scary. But when a country goes through this kind of internal convulsion, where people are betraying each other left and right every single day, it's hard to imagine the impact onto the psyche of a generation of people.

• 41:59Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for sharing all that context. I think this is really important on a number of levels, I think, for people to gain an appreciation of. And I say people, probably referring to those who haven't had firsthand experience. One film that may be interesting to folks, and I don't know if you've seen it, I'd be curious to hear if you have, but there is a Chinese filmmaker named, I don't know the tones on his name, but Zhang Yimou, Y I M O U. And he made a film called To Live, which is, I guess, Huajia, that was initially

• 42:41Tim Ferriss?

  denied theatrical release in mainland China, but later, I believe, was made available. And it covers the working class experience through a number of very difficult periods of modern Chinese history, from the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s to the Cultural Revolution. And Zhang Yimou has a beautiful cinematography style. It's usually very color saturated and stars a number of folks who have appeared in many of his films, like Gong Li, who I had a crush on when I was in China in 96. Oh, my God. But that's also an option for people who might want to. This film, To Live, was made or released in 1994,

• 43:26Tim Ferriss?

  so people can can try to find it. I'd love to come back to your experience in the US. So we flash then to say, and you tell me if this is the right place to start. Maybe there are things that happened beforehand that are worth noting, but it seems like You have your first job, sort of real official job, BCG, where you're giving, your mandate is to give advice to these, these big companies and we're paying you guys a fortune. And at some point, I don't know if it was BCG, but you had a consulting project for the Singaporean government. Is it fair to say that was an important turning point and milestone for you?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was definitely a turning point. I think I made a, a few big decisions in my life that all worked out. And there's a general theme of getting closer to who I really am versus what I was made to be by the environment. But one decision was starting a company and that was inspired by a field study that I did with a couple of other students at the end of my business school, studying what internet models worked at the time and which of those can be successfully adapted to Asia. And this is in 1999, really at the height of the internet boom in the US.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  And what we discovered was that most business models didn't make a lot of sense. There was a lot of hype, a lot of bubble, but we thought the eBay business model really is incredible. So I looked into whether anybody was doing that in China and the answer was no in 1998. So I said, oh, okay, when I graduate, I will go back to start the online auction website in China. And that was a huge step for me because up to that point, I was this steady person. I was a mass geek and then even when I got a job, it was from one of the most established and prominent firms.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  It's all very understandable. It's like a very steady thing. And also, I also left my back door open, you know, my, there's a way to back because I actually got a deferral in a PhD program in physics when I initially took my job at BCG. So I had a, had a backup. It was always very safe and steady. But going back to China, not getting a green card from the US in nineteen ninety nine to start a company whose business model I couldn't even explain to my parents. I think I'm convinced to this day, they do not know what that business is. I don't even sell things. I didn't even sell things. I was building a platform for other people to sell things.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  I didn't have a store even. No, no departments like it's, it's, it's mind boggling what that platform really means. So that was a big, big step and I didn't know what the hell I was doing whatsoever, despite business school.

• 46:40Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanna, well, ask a couple of things. So how did your parents respond to this?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Well, to their credit, they didn't say a thing. I was living at home when I got back to China in nineteen ninety nine. I had an office, another, in another apartment, really. It's not an office, in an apartment building. I couldn't find anybody to work with me, really. I didn't know anybody, really, other than my high school classmates. Because I was out of the country for what, by then, eight years. So the only people I knew were my high school classmates. So the only, the first, my first recruit was a high school classmate of mine who was trading stock at home. So he didn't have much to lose, so he joined me. You know, I couldn't find even programmers. Back then, building an internet website is not a thing.

• 47:29Tim Ferriss?

  It was not a thing, yes.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Nineteen ninety nine, China. It was all dial-a-modems back then, by the way. There's some internet access, but it was all dial-a-modems. My kids don't even know what dial-a-modems are these days. And yeah, it's only got a fun, two part-time programmers were you to work for the Shanghai Electricity Bureau. They never built a website before ever. They were IT maintenance people. But they knew some Microsoft ASP like programming language. They didn't want to quit their jobs. And so they, they would go to their regular bureau jobs, government jobs, and work from six PM to like midnight every night to build the website. And then they'll go back to their regular jobs. Good thing the job is not very demanding, so they could sleep during the day in the office.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  And at night, uh, they work for us and work for me, I guess. So we have these, basically four employees, three employees and me. Then they built the website, uh, after, I think, two months, surprisingly, I just finished the website, of course. And as soon as they launched, it promptly crashed. So it was a long, but things my parents didn't say anything like they just said, oh, okay. Like really, to my father's credit, particularly,

• 48:40Speaker 03

  he knew that he didn't know what he didn't know. And he trusted me to make my own decisions.

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  Do you know, this is a leading question, of course, but is there any element of you already having sort of brought honor and reputation to the family through winning the competitions, going to Harvard, where effectively you had already passed any test that you might need to pass in your father's

• 49:09Tim Ferriss?

  from his perspective, or is that, do you think that's not a factor?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  I think he was incredibly proud of me for sure. Winning so many mass competitions in China was a big deal. When I initially was thinking of going overseas to study, we even got a call from the Shanghai government saying that, oh, we wish that I do not leave for my senior year because in senior year, I have the chance to participate potentially in the mass Olympics and win gold medals or whatnot for the country, and that will bring honor to the Shanghai government and all that. So he was very proud of me from that. And of course, going to Harvard is a big deal as one of the earliest. I think another student from Shanghai and myself got the whole foreign student thing. Directly coming from China started.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  That was the first year. I think after that, every year was two, three students getting for scholarships. So he was very, very proud, though putting myself in his shoes, like imagining my own kid giving all of that up. The even including a green card in the US, which is this incredible valuable, you know, inattainable thing most people view to go back to China to start something in the startup thing, entrepreneurship is unheard of in China, more or less in China back then. You know, if you're an entrepreneur, you're usually, I guess you start a food store. You don't start companies really back then. So for them not to say anything to me to question or not, I think it's still a big deal. I really

• 50:42Tim Ferriss?

  Still a big deal. Yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I really, really value them for it.

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  So let's take a look into your experience during that time, because it does, it does seem pretty wild. Given all of the factors, BCG.

• 50:56Tim Ferriss?

  Can pay well, consulting certainly can pay well. You're coming out of Harvard. Your parents previously making ten to twenty dollars a month. Suddenly, you're in a position to get a green card, to take any number of jobs that would pay you, who knows how much money, I have no idea, but fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, who knows, more maybe. What was going on internally in your mind or otherwise that gave you? You're certainly highly rational person, so I don't believe the decision to go to China to be an entrepreneur was an impulsive move that wasn't thought through. So how did you think through the pros and cons and risks of doing that?

• 51:40Tim Ferriss?

  Because from the outside looking in, without any explanation, it does kind of look crazy.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Well, I was very rational, for sure. Actually, for a while, I was deciding between going back to BCG versus going to work for Goldman Sachs. And we're in summer intern doing the middle of my business school.

• 52:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, both known for paying more than minimum wage generally.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  That's right. I think I definitely could have made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year at age twenty five. But I was preparing even a spreadsheet, sort of listing the pros and cons. And I think one person I met, who was a senior person at BCG in China, asked me a question, was like, what do you want to do? Putting aside all these pros and cons, what do you want to do? And that sort of stumped me, actually, because I didn't really know what I want, I wanted. And all my life, frankly, nobody really asked me that question, what I wanted, up until that point. I think one big decision I made for myself was to be with my now-wife, then-girlfriend.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  That was a huge thing for me, which we can go back to. But in terms of career. I was just going to through whatever's the most popular thing was. Now, BCG, when I graduated from college, was the most popular career choice. BCG McKinsey and got an offer from both. Then after BCG, going to business school was the most popular choice after two years. So I got an offer from both Stanford and Harvard Business School. That was this clear choice. Going to back to China, however, was not a popular choice. And I think not as I think about 12 Chinese students in the Harvard Business School graduating class of my year. I think I was the only person going back to China. Now, actually, a few years later, all I think 10 of the 12 eventually all went back to China.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  That's a different story. But I that was not popular back then. And starting companies certainly wasn't popular. I guess, well, take it back. I think starting internet companies in 1999, 1998, 999 might have been popular choice. But I don't think I was driven by that. I think it was driven because I really saw an opportunity. And I felt that it's such a good business and it will, it should be created. I think there was this kind of belief that this is a business worthwhile to be created. And since since nobody else is doing it, I should be doing it. Now, of course, I didn't know that back then several other companies were preparing to launch. So I definitely wasn't the only or even the first one to launch. But I felt like this is something that should happen.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  If we look at that decision, you had this conversation with a BCG partner in China who asked you what you really wanted. And you saw this opportunity. Did you also have a contingency plan in the case that it didn't work out?

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, I did, actually. I told BCG, their senior partner in China, that I will start the business for a few months. After a few months, the business should be in good shape, then I'll go back to BCG.

• 54:50Tim Ferriss?

  We'll have it all figured out in a few months.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Everything out, it will be steady, it will be autopilot, and then I can go.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  I have no idea what he thought about my, I think his name is John Wong and what he thought about what I said at the time. But he was very generous and he said, okay, that's okay. And he agreed to it. I think he held my place for at least a year.

• 55:19Tim Ferriss?

  So this is really important. And I know I've said that about a number of points, but it's so common for, I think, I would usually, you were talking about dialogue modems. You know, I need to stop using the example of like people on magazine covers because now the only time you ever see magazines is in the airport. It's not really a thing anymore. But the profiles and so on that you read about entrepreneurs tend to be turned into these romanticized action movies. And there's certainly a lot of action, but when someone says Zuckerberg dropped out of college, right? And people hear that and they think, oh, my God, he threw it all away, burned the ships, bet it all. And it's like, actually, that's

• 56:01Tim Ferriss?

  not, that's not what happened. Because in many of these schools, you have the ability to defer graduation or come back over a certain period of time, or maybe at any point in time. And it's, I think, helpful for would be entrepreneurs to hear that oftentimes, the best entrepreneurs do take calculated risks, but they also mitigate risk, right? So you had had this conversation and you had, in a sense, a safety net of sorts so that you could do this experiment and see what would happen with the company. And I think that it's, it's really helpful to kind of peek behind the scenes.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  That's a good point.

• 56:40Tim Ferriss?

  So if we go back to the company, at the time when you were first getting started with the IT guys who were sleeping in the office during their day job and working at night, what was the name of the company?

• 56:51Speaker 03

  It's called each net, like each and everybody's net.

• 56:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  And yeah, in Chinese means interesting exchanges.

• 57:00Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting exchanges. How do you say that in Chinese? What was the name?

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Yi qu. Yi means exchange, qu means interesting, or fun.

• 57:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  The sound actually works, the translation works.

• 57:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool. So it's it's a transliteration, but you also have the meaning, which by the way, anyone listening, when you ask someone, when you, if you ever ask a Chinese person to write my name in Chinese, part of the reason it's so hard is you have to think very carefully about what the characters mean. You can't just grab the phonetics and

• 57:35Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 57:36Tim Ferriss?

  throw something on paper. You have to be very careful about what the actual meaning is. And, you know, I actually, I don't know if I ever told you, Bo, when I first went to China and was studying at the Beijing, what is it in English? I can't even remember. The Beijing Jingji Maoyi Daxue, the

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:54Tim Ferriss?

  Beijing Capital University of Business and Economics. And I had been given my name, my Chinese name, at Princeton, which was Fei Ting Cheng. And Fei Ting Cheng was Fei, which is like Xiaofei de Fei. So it's a sort of expense in a way is is the meaning Xiaofei would be like a tip, like it'd be in Spanish or whatever. But funny enough, you were saying that your parents would call you like little, little Bo, right?

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  If people use that with me, my name meant tip. But so that was problem number one with my Chinese name. So Fei was for my last name, Ferris, right? And then Ting Cheng. So the T sound was Tim. And they they use Cheng with Yan Zepan because I was always so blunt in class. It was

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Oh, I see.

• 58:46Tim Ferriss?

  Tim, very honest, because I was a pain in the ass. But the problem with that name, or one of the problems, I'll give two examples of problems. When I got to China and you're telling people your name and it's a strange, kind of transliterated foreign name, it's not always clear what the hell you're saying. And so some people thought my name was Feiji Chang, which is airport, right? So that was a problem. They're like, your name is airport. That's strange. Other people heard my name is Fei Ting Chang instead of Cheng. And so Tim, very long, also has problems. So ultimately, we changed my name to Fei Yucheng and Y is like a

• 59:27Tim Ferriss?

  图书馆的书, but without the R at the bottom. It's a pretty rare character. But anyway, so this is just a long way of saying you have to you have to think very carefully about how you name things in Chinese.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, by the way, for the readers, for the listeners who do not know Chinese, I would say your Chinese is actually really good. Your Chinese pronunciation is very good.

• 59:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, thanks, man. It's very rusty, but I hope to get back at some point, get back to China because the China I know is nineteen ninety six China. I mean, this is like People's Liberation

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:58Tim Ferriss?

  Green jackets, Silk Road with DVDs, burners inside jackets and bicycles. I mean, that's the Beijing I know.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  I've got to take you back to China. You will be just shocked. Your jaw will be on the floor.

• 1:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, visit the sci fi future. So coming back to each net. When did you actually feel like it was working or you thought to yourself? Oh, my God, this might actually work. Like, when was that moment? Or what were some of the signs, any signs where you're like, OK, maybe this is the thing?

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  It's a constant roller coaster. So there are many moments I would said, oh, this is working. But then the other moments, holy shit, this is not working. It goes up and down.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  You know, there'll be times when we raised, initially we raised, I think I'd raised a small angel round of like a few, three, four hundred K, but then we raised six point five million dollars, I think in October of nineteen ninety nine. And that was a lot of money back then.

• 1:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  These days, a series A of six point five million is really very small, but back then it's actually a fairly substantial amount of money. So definitely I thought, oh, things are going well. But then it turns out five months later, I spent it all. Five months.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  And the thing is, I didn't even know I spent it all. At one point, my financial controller came to say, do you know that we have no more money? That we're not gonna pay a salary next month? Is it really? I didn't even know. Like, that's how little I know about really running a business. It's actually really thinking back.

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's pretty, it's pretty embarrassing for a math champion.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  That's right. That's clearly, this will not work. And then we need to, to, I guess, what do you call it? In Chinese, we'll be 拉紧裤腰带, which means that you have to tighten your belts, I guess.

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  Tighten your belt, yeah. What did you spend all that money on?

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  Advertising.

• 1:01:58Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  We were the one, I think we might be the old, the first internet company in China to do TV advertising.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, TV, wow.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we had commercials made, it was very exciting and all that. And we got a lot of users and of course, our website crashed all the time. And at one point, I was afraid to go on to my own website. The thinking being that I might be the last straw that breaks the camel's back.

• 1:02:28Tim Ferriss?

  I don't wanna add any load to our servers. That's amazing, wow.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Just give that valuable opportunity to somebody actually who will find this site useful.

• 1:02:38Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, so a quick question. The TV commercial, I bet you still remember parts of that TV commercial. What did you say? Do you remember any of it in Chinese? And then you can explain what it is in English. Do you remember any of it?

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  I recall that our logo looked like two Es facing each other. Two Es with the other one being a mirror image of the other E facing each other. And I remember TV commercials around sort of like, I remember this logo of two Es. One is orange, one is green, sort of talking to each other or playing with each other or something like that. That I do recall. But other, what they actually said to each other, I do not recall anymore.

• 1:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  What was your tagline? Did you have a tagline for the company in, in Chinese or anything like that?

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. The fun in exchanges. 交易的乐趣，which in English means be the fun in exchanges.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's good. I like that. All right, so awesome TV commercial. You're not even on your own site because you don't want to crash the servers. And you run out of money and your controller is like, uh, Bo, we have a small problem. We're not going to be able to make payroll. What happens?

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Well, we were able to get everybody.

• 1:03:47Tim Ferriss?

  Tighten your belts.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  That's right. I think I actually got the team in play to get and say, oh, we have no more money. And we all need to take a pay cut. So I think we all took like a 50% pay cut. Existing investors holding it up a few million dollars to bridge us. They were ultimately willing to do that, which I'm very grateful for. And then we went on a fundraising tour. And of course, in, I think it was around February or March in 2000, the market crashed. The initial reception was very positive. People, without knowing the company, said, we're going to write you a $50 million check. But then the market crashed and all of it basically went away.

• 1:04:28Tim Ferriss?

  Just evaporates.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  I remember quite a first Boston was our banker to try to raise money for us. And we had a lead, which shall remain unnamed. Actually, no, was willing to write a, initially was 50 and then became 20. The one day I looked at in a red Wall Street Journal and on the front page, it says this firm is in trouble. When I read that, I said, oh, that's not good news. They're probably not going to honor their commitment. So I thought about what I'm going to say if the firm calls me to reneg on their verbal commitment or their term sheet. I decided to ask them for 5 million instead of 20. I said, if you give me 5 million,

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  I'll first guilt trip them, saying how much trouble they got me in, because I was counting on their money and all that. And then I was, I'll make a request. I need 5 million, not 20. If you give me 5, I will raise the rest of the 20.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  So lo and behold, the next day indeed, this person from the room called.

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  Good thing you saw that newspaper.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. And he said he they needed to just withdraw together. And I gave him my prepared spiel. And he said that he will go back internally to see what he can do. Now, if I had said that, thank you, I understand, or this is so good. If I didn't make a specific request and didn't prepare, this would have been over.

• 1:05:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Instead, I made a specific quest that has a chance of being honored. And then I had a very good friend who went to the boss and tried to reason and tried to cajole. So eventually we did get five million. And then I begged many people to put in half a million or a million or whatnot. And eventually we were able to raise twenty million dollars.

• 1:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  And that's how the company survived and thrived.

• 1:06:24Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have a backup plan in case the immediate answer was no? Did you have, say, if they say no to five million, I'm going to come back with this other request?

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  That was plan B.

• 1:06:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  No, there was no backup. I think we'd have to dissolve, I think. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know what the existing investor would have done. But I think it would be hard pressed for them to put a lot more money without profitability insight.

• 1:06:56Tim Ferriss?

  I have to ask you, Bo, because I've noticed this in many of our conversations. You have an incredibly broad English vocabulary, like cajole, right? I mean, you you have a very nuanced English vocabulary, which is not always the case. It's actually rarely the case, I find, with a lot of non-native speakers. How did you accumulate such a vocabulary?

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  I guess I have Harvard to thank.

• 1:07:22Tim Ferriss?

  Was it Harvard? Because I know a lot of native speakers I went to Princeton with who do not have your vocabulary.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  So what happened was when I was applying for college in the US in, you know, nineteen ninety when I was in China in my junior year of high school, I couldn't provide standardized testing results because SAT was not offered in China at the time. Now I think it is. So I can take the TOEFL, which is the English test for foreigners, which I passed and did very well in. But the school still wanted some kind of standardized test results, just like the SATs. And in fact, I couldn't apply to MIT because of it, because MIT was not willing to give a waiver of SAT. If I got into MIT, I probably would have gone to MIT, given my orientation at the time.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  But I was able to convince Harvard and other schools to take the GRE. And GRE being the Graduate Record Examination, which is for PhD programs. And that was offered in China. So I took the GRE test and aced it. I think I got twenty-two sixty, I think was like the third highest in the country at that time or something like that. And that helped the application process. But one of the GRE, I don't know if it still does or not, but it has had a verbal section, which is basically testing your vocabulary.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  And I remember it was much harder than the SAT verbal sections.

• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's much harder. Yeah, much harder.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  So I remember getting this huge book of words that I needed to remember. And I just spent several, probably one or two months just studying that book, remembering every word.

• 1:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  What happens internally or what do you do when you need to focus for an extended period of time? Because you have that as a superpower. When you need to say, sit down. If you had a new test coming up and needed to sit down and study something, what does both studying? Look like and that could be things that you do or how you prepare. But it could also be your internal state shift or internal monologue or self talk, anything.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  I think it turns out that I learned how to meditate without knowing that it was meditation. I have a very good ability to focus because of that. And I think the meditation I did was when I tried to add the poker cards together when I was very young. And to add fifty cards, fifty two cards together in twelve, that twelve seconds. I needed to get rid of all thought. If I start worrying, if I start trying to consciously add it, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be that fast. So I need to get myself out of the way.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  I remember looking up into the sky or into the ceiling and just, there's a particular way I blanked my mind. Mind can still see, of course, but there is a particular process of suppressing thought, I guess, or getting out of the egoic kind of self. And with no attachment also, another key thing was no attachment to the result. Because the more attached I became, the more agitated and I was thinking that wouldn't work and then I fail. And it actually to be times when I was basically cried because I could do twenty, thirty times in a row and either they were wrong. Or it took too much time so that it doesn't count. I need to get ten times right under the right limit every day.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  And the limit kept decreasing as I became more successful. And my father said it that way. So was sometimes at the end of my rope and I needed to blank my mind. And also not to feel any kind of attachment to how I do. And that's when I did my best work. And to me, that's in some ways just meditation.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  And I think I was able to develop that muscle without knowing that it's actually really a form of meditation.

• 1:11:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it certainly strikes me as meditation, and I think a lot of athletes also enter meditative states without calling it meditation. Thank you for answering that question. I've actually always wondered that about you. So if we come back to Echene, how'd that turn out? Just so people kind of know how the movie ends, in a sense.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  We can't do a whole session on this, but I want to be very short about it. But, you know, it's basically, it became successful, became the largest e-commerce company in China. We sold it to eBay for a price I couldn't say no to in 2003. And I retired after that. And unfortunately, I was actually, I was planning to run it, but a family tragedy prevented me from doing it. I needed to be with my wife to support her. So I end up not running the firm a couple of months after I sold it. And then eBay did not do well. I still feel sad about it because it was my baby. And for many reasons, a multinational company like eBay couldn't do well in China.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  So we went from eighty-plus percent market share in e-commerce down to five percent in a matter of a few, few years. Jack Ma at the time was in the B two B business, e-commerce, but he launched the e-commerce, B two C, C two C e-commerce business right around the time when I sold my company. And the company's called Taobao. The new company started as Taobao, which became the biggest e-commerce player in China after about ten years or so. While eBay really struggled, despite having a huge head start. People say this, the rest is history.

• 1:13:20Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned your wife and you mentioned also earlier in the conversation, how important it sounded like meeting her and committing to that relationship was. Could you expand on that? Especially because you also confessed earlier that you viewed emotions as distractions. So I'd love for you to say a bit more about all of that.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  I think I met her and I just simply fell in love with her head over heels. A truck hit me and I didn't even know what happened.

• 1:13:56Tim Ferriss?

  Where did you meet?

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  I was in business school and she was in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So she was the last year, a last few months of her time there. And I was doing my first year of business school. And I fell in love, became very irrational. I started just basic things. I believed that she is meant to be with me and I'm meant to be with her. I had no fear, no worry. I went all out. And the biggest mystery in some ways is that she loves me back. She loved me and loves me back, even though I was very flawed at the time. But I guess in front of her, I was emotional.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  I was extremely passionate. I was considerate. I let all the things I suppressed, I think, show up in a way that was not conscious. It was out of my control. And without her, I don't think I would be the person that I am today. So it's not only I have a live companion and my best friend, but also that, you know, being with her enabled me to blossom. Whatever that was hidden deep and buried blossomed. Now, to be clear, I only was that way with her for the longest time.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  I was still the same cold, unemotional analytical judgmental me with everybody else for many years after that. So there will be, you know, very incongruent, Jackal and Hyde kind of scenarios where I will be just lecturing my employees in a very kind of analytical and judgmental way. Then my phone would ring, I'll pick up. I became like a little kitten talking to her in small voices. I love you and I miss you, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  And I went back straight to the old, straight-faced robot that I was. Many people have commented that I was not gonna talk.

• 1:16:10Tim Ferriss?

  So you retire. Well, how old were you when you retired? And I'm going to put that in quotation marks.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  I was 29 years old. I was surprised, actually, because after the first few months of, first really, first week of ecstasy, I was famous, I was TV all the time and everything. Life was the same as before.

• 1:16:35Tim Ferriss?

  Funny how that happens, yeah.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  And it was disorienting because I think I built a picture, like the most people probably do, that somehow you sort of, when you reach that level, your life will become different. In some ways, we are, I wasn't even sure what I was searching for. But whatever I was searching for, I felt like, oh, if you get that kind of success, whatever you searched for, you would have found it. But actually, it didn't happen. I was still the same old me and very little changed.

• 1:17:07Tim Ferriss?

  We may just have to have a round two at some point. And obviously, we talk a lot separately, so maybe we can figure that out. But I know that we have, let's just call it, how much more time do you have, Beau? Like 20 minutes?

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  I have another 30 minutes or so.

• 1:17:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay. So we have another 30 minutes and we may dig into this separately. You did, you ended up doing many things after that. You were a founding partner of Matrix China. Which manages more than $7 billion and has funded more than 500 companies, 50 plus of which become unicorns. There's more to the resume, obviously, and you continue to be hard-charging in a lot of ways.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the resume is not the most important part about me, which I want to.

• 1:17:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so this is the segue, which is the way we met was in part around the discussion of inner journey and turning the eye and attention inward. Right, we didn't meet at a business networking event. We weren't doing a joint venture together. We met in a very personal context. How did that start for you? How did that process? And I know process is a broad term, but when did that become a priority? And how did it become a priority for you?

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  First, I would say that I had no interest in any kind of inner work for a long, long time. In fact, I would look down on people who go to retreats or meditations or not and say, what the hell are these people doing? They have better things to do in life. I was sort of, I found it almost disgusting, despicable back then, actually.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  So I had no interest, but life, I think, has a way of, if one pays attention, I guess, to send little reminders. So the first reminder I got was, hey, you know, I was still the same me with some of the same kind of patterns of behavior, the same level of happiness and joy that I had before this big success. And looking back, I realized that compared to the life I have today, the life back then was more of a black, white television and today is more colorful television. It's hard to describe the difference if I only watched black and white television all my life.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  The reason I use this example was, you know, because I grew up with a nine inch black and white television, which felt totally fine for all my life. And without having seen a eighty inch, you know, color television, the nine inch black and white looked completely adequate and comfortable. And I think that's where I was back then. My life didn't have a lot of color, didn't have joy, I never cried really, I never laughed, never smiled really. I never even felt lonely, interestingly, I felt alone, but not lonely. But I think some of these things showed up a little bit, like, oh, I sort of started wondering, what am I missing? There's a little, little, little things, I think, but very small.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  On that alone, I don't think I would have embarked on a journey. Another reminder was how different my life was with Jenny, my wife, versus with other people. And also I see how she behaves with other people in a way that's sort of beyond my comprehension. I remember like one time she was, we were having dinner with a friend, and the friend start talking about how he lost his father, and then my wife just stood up and went to hug him.

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  And I was dumbfounded. It never would occur to me to do it. She's telling a story, I'm listening, but I was not in touch with the emotional content of the story. And my wife clearly was, and she is one of the most empathetic person alive that I know. So some part of me started wondering, what's going on? What am I missing? And also I noticed that I could work with people for a decade and not become friends with them, but she would then go to dinner with their significant other, the four of us would go to dinner or lunch, and then she becomes friends with them, but not me.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  Even though I've known them for ten years and she knows them for like one day. So that sort of started something like, you know, am I missing something? Is friendship something I value? Cause up until a few years ago, I didn't consider myself as having friends. But I always told myself I don't need friends.

• 1:21:48Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask, actually just a follow up there. Why did you not consider yourself to have friends? Is it because you viewed getting close to people as having little upside and a lot of potential downside? Why did you see things that way?

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  It was not a rational decision. I think deep down, if I were to answer honestly, is because I think I don't deserve a friend. And um.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  I think, I thought, and it's still a part of me, it probably still thinks that there's something wrong with me, that I don't deserve any friends. That nobody would really take an interest in my feelings and in what I have to say, unless what I have to say is useful. So when I'm in a position, I'm a board member, investor, or somebody who could educate or whatever, or help, then I feel comfortable, like this relationship has substance. But if it's simply a friendship, a part of me doesn't understand it. Like, it doesn't feel that, why would you or other people

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  take an interest in the inside of me? And I didn't have that trust.

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  Uh, of course, has to do, this has a lot to do with how I was brought up. And I'm still in the process of understanding and feeling it fully. But I've told myself for the longest time, I don't need any friends. At least that's the conscious thought. The deeper down, you know, realization happen much more slowly. And I think it's still happening as we speak. It's a continuous journey of discovery and being free from those patterns I developed. So that's the second thing that, you know, in terms of friendship and relationship with other people, I see myself with Jenny in a different way. I see Jenny with other people in a different way. That's all got me thinking a little bit. Is okay for continue on this right?

• 1:23:53Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely, of course.

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  Right, and then, and the third, which I think is probably the biggest one that I couldn't avoid looking at, was being a father. I was a terrible father, you know, for a while on, on the Chinese Twitter, Weibo, I was a, I was a very reasonably popular and a lot of people followed me. And my model, I guess, whatever I wrote right under my name was a perfect husband, but a so-so father. And I think I was giving myself too much credit. I don't think I was a so-so father. I think I was a terrible father, looking back. I didn't know how to be one. I knew how to be a teacher. I knew how to be a disciplinary. But I didn't know how to be a father the way I understand it now.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  And I didn't know how to spend time with them. I did not know how to give them love and attention. I didn't know how to give them support when they need it, emotional support in particular, when they need it. And I also just did not enjoy being a father. I remember, and my wife will remind me to go spend time with my kids when it's eight o'clock at night or something like that before they go to bed, before they went to bed. And my thought at the time was, why should I? And I felt some kind of resentment being called to do my job.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  It was really funny thinking back, but back then I really didn't enjoy it. And that got me thinking a little bit, hey, there's something missing here that, you know, people talk about being a father being enjoyable, but I really didn't enjoy it. And also I know that I knew that I was doing something wrong because I was repeating some of the mistakes that my father made. That was sort of shocking because you would imagine that you would never do what was done to you that you didn't like. But I was repeating the same thing. And if my wife didn't stop me,

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  I would have been worse, far worse. So one of the things that my father, for example, did to me is if he got really angry, he would threaten to throw me out of the home. And I did that to my son.

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  And that was very traumatic for him. He still remembers it today. Even for like two seconds, closing the door on him. It was so bad, but I didn't know what else to do. That was all I knew. When I got desperate as a father, when something happens outside of my control, I got desperate. So I guess I resorted to what worked because from a short term perspective, what my father did to me worked. I became obedient.

• 1:26:39Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for sharing, Beau. I'm really glad that we're having this conversation. I think it's going to be meaningful to a lot of people and

• 1:26:49Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to hear as you began observing these behaviors as perhaps Jenny called things to your attention and you decided to try to change or at least become more aware. What are some of the things that you found helpful? What are some of the tools or modalities that end up being helpful? Because I would imagine in the beginning, certainly I had this experience myself.

• 1:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to know where to begin, right?

• 1:27:23Tim Ferriss?

  And it's kind of like a chimpanzee with a mirror or something like you're looking behind the mirror. You're like, am I supposed to see something over here? Am I supposed to see something over there? And I would just love to hear because I know that you have tested many, many, many different things. What are some of, say, the tools, modalities or otherwise that you have found to be personally helpful?

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  I definitely tried many different things. In some ways, I'm like you, Tim, that I, when I get on something that really is that's important, then I would want to get to the bottom of it. I want to learn the best or form the best. First of all, I would say that there are three components to being a good parent that I've learned. And these are not necessarily, they might be orthogonal each other, meaning they're, you know, being good at one component doesn't mean necessarily going to be good at the second component. So the three components in my view is one is understanding what's going on inside of our children's heads.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  And what's going on in their biology, in their psychology? And the main thing is, we are, children are so different from us. We assume that they should have executive control of their body or of their mind or their actions. But the reality is, for example, for a boy, their prefrontal cortex doesn't fully develop until they're in their twenties.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  So when they are twelve, expecting them to behave in a disciplined way is simply not right. So understanding what's going on inside of them is hugely, hugely important.

• 1:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  From a developmental perspective, you mean?

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Right, from a developmental perspective, both from a physical neurobiology as well from a psychological development perspective. And there's a huge amount of science out there that unfortunately hasn't been made available and accessible to parents, which is one of the things one of our companies is working on. And a second is, as parents, why do we get triggered? Why did I get triggered in certain ways? My reactive patterns, which were usually formed very early on in my own childhood, maybe my own insecurity gets reflected in certain things, and then that's why we get triggered. So, for example, if a parent always wished they went to the best schools and they were feeding down on themselves for not having gone to the best schools,

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  they're probably going to be more demanding of the child. And if the child has bad grades, they probably tend to be more triggered. So there's all sorts of things we need to understand about our own self and our own childhood that would enable us to be a better parent. And so in some ways, I went into a lot of these workshops thinking that I just need to learn a tool or a trick or some kind of way like positive discipline or whatever it is to be a better parent. And to a certain extent, those tools and modalities help. But foundational wise, I needed to be, become a better person, quote unquote, in some ways, to be a better parent. And that has to do, everything to do with our inner journey as an independent person and has nothing to do with us being a parent, actually.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  This is just something that's really, really foundational. And then the third is what's in the relational field between a parent and a child? And becoming aware of that relational field any moment in time is really critical. Because when that relational field is not right, no amount of teaching on the rational side and analytical side will help. Because the kid's brain is underdeveloped. So when they don't feel safe and connected, they can't listen. When a typical parent sees a child, children not listening, maybe their reaction is try to say things more clearly. You know, repeat things. It doesn't really help.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  And what's needed is for the children to feel safe and connected. And then they will listen a hundred times better. So these three components, understanding the children inside of them, understanding ourselves, understanding the relational field. For me, that's the foundation. Then on top of that foundation, there are lots of tools that's actually very useful. I find it that to be so important, it's shocking to me that now looking back that

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  being a parent is probably the most important job in one's life. There's nothing more important. It's probably the most difficult job and we are least prepared for in our lives. We go to school for teaching math. We go to get driving lessons to get a driver's license so we can drive. But to be a parent, there's practically no preparation.

• 1:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  So if we look at those three foundational pillars, and I think it is really, it's a really good reminder to sort of look at the first principles, at least as you've arrived at them as these pillars. So that you don't get lost in a sea of tactics without any. Elemental discipline about how you approach them, right? Because you can just end up with this Frankenstein's monster of approaches that doesn't really have any focus to it. I know that, for instance, you've explored nonviolent communication. I know you've explored the work, so testing beliefs that you have in certain ways. People can find more on that if they look up the work and Byron Katie.

• 1:32:53Tim Ferriss?

  What are other books or resources or tools that you have found particularly effective for you in in helping any of the pillars that you described, any of those three?

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we're working on it.

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  And we, when I say we, that means we are starting. I've started a company three, four years ago that will have done now really three years of research and development, trying to collect the best parenting tools, the best research around child psychology and development into something that's accessible and easy and customized for parents to understand. Now, that's ongoing and we have a product, but I think it'll get better in the next couple of months when we launch the the full version. But one of the things I find, and the reason it taking so long is I feel that there are so many different kinds of kids and the parenting challenges can be very different.

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  And there's certain ways of parenting works for certain kids in certain situations. And there's no one size fits all. So it's really important to collect all the tools out there and develop a framework, a knowledge graph, so that the right tools and modalities and tricks can be recommended to the right children, the right parents, the right situation. For myself, as we work on this, one particular thing that has worked for me is a something called hand in hand parenting, started by this lady, Patty Whiffler, and there's a website called Hand in Hand Parenting. I find their tools to be very useful for me.

• 1:34:42Speaker 03

  They has a particular emphasis on the relationship between children and parents, so that's a particular emphasis. But I'm not sure they would necessarily help everybody, but I think they can help a lot of people. So.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  I think there are other more that I don't want to mention them because I don't know them as well. But I think in the next couple of months, our app should be ready for prime time. And then, then I think I'm hoping that will help a lot of people.

• 1:35:09Tim Ferriss?

  So hand in hand parenting, I believe you have also, correct me if I'm wrong, spent some time

• 1:35:18Tim Ferriss?

  with the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, but a lot of those commitments, you know, I've had Jim Detmer and Diana Chapman on the podcast, apply to personal relationships, not just leadership. And this is actually something my girlfriend and I are spending a good amount of time on right now is trying to make implicit agreements, which really aren't agreements, they're assumptions, implicit assumptions, explicit commitments, so that there's cleaner understanding, less misunderstanding, et cetera. We could go in a number of different directions and I know that you're doing certainly a lot with Evolve,

• 1:36:00Tim Ferriss?

  both on the foundation side and on the Evolve Ventures Impact Investing side. People can find both at evolvevf, that's V as in Victor, F as in Frank, so evolvevf.com. I would like to ask you, because I know that you have supported research and have developed quite a bit of familiarity with the field. What do you think is missing right now from the discussion around psychedelics or therapeutics related to psychedelics at the moment?

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  I think psychedelics is a, one of the most powerful tools that we are given, both for healing of trauma as well as opening ourselves up to a certain aspect of reality that has profound love and unity and safety that's inherent to us and to reality that we normally do not see. And those experiences simply just can be profound.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  For me, these experiences are the starting point, rather than the end points of one's personal journey. I think they play an incredible role to motivate people. It's almost like, hey, let me take you on a helicopter tour of the terrain, so you can see what the big picture is, you can see what the destination looks like. But then the helicopter will land you back more or less where you started, but then you need to do the personal work so that you could experience that one-time insight more regularly in life. And also to, that's what, and then also to apply it in one's life is really difficult.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  I think spiritual experiences tend to be overvalued. Oh, I had this incredible breakthrough. I saw whatever God, Buddha, or Guanyin, or this incredible vista of reality. But those, these are so clear, and our culture values these kind of milestones or things you can talk about so strongly, so highly, that the hard work almost, you know, there's this kind of myth of medicine doing us, doing the work for us, which is almost this model of the Western medicine, is it takes medicine, cures you. And psychedelics sort of can fit into that kind of conversation or framework.

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  But for me, it's incredibly, maybe the most important tool we have for healing and for opening up. But then one needs to do the hard work to integrate those experiences into our daily lives. As a father, as a wife, as a spouse, as a friend, as a CEO, as an investor, as an executive, you know, as an employee, all of those things. And we have so many patterns of behavior that's deeply ingrained in us over our childhood and growing up, that one or two or 10 one-time experiences do not erase them.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  So a teacher might talk about waking up and waking down. And waking up is actually not not easy, but it's easier than waking down. And when I say waking down means integrating the waking up experience, what you see into then back into our body, back into our daily lives and work and practice it and then overcome the patterns. And that's the hard work that maybe do not get much attention, I think.

• 1:39:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's easier to spin a colorful story about the waking up. And it's very understandable and it's compelling. And it's often fleeting if we sort of return back to all the invisible scripts that on some level run each and every one of us, like you said, right? It's very easy to step off of the helicopter and just turn around away from the train you just surveyed and walk back to where you were.

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  If anything, sometimes can even add to your ego. Oh, I had this experience, I'm enlightened now, right? For certain personalities, having some of these experiences actually could be negative.

• 1:40:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is true. It's perhaps surprisingly common how Messiah complex is. And it's good to be cognizant of. Now, if if people go to the evolve v f.com website, they can see on the for profit side, they can see your investments, which I think is actually, it's a fascinating read. People can look at the investments on the for profit side. They can look at the grants on the foundation side, certainly learn more about what evolve does and what evolve doesn't do, the leadership team. Is there anything else that you would like to?

• 1:41:05Tim Ferriss?

  Say or share about evolve or any requests you'd like to make of the audience or suggestions or anything really that you'd like to like to add to the conversation.

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  I guess I will say one thing, which is I think I'm coming from a rational point of view, going back to rational, okay. And what I find is we spend a lot of time optimizing our lives, particularly our work, finding the right job, negotiating packages, you know, we think about doing, you know, if we assign a task and work, we prepare a lot for it. We spend hours and days and weeks on working on particular things. If we need to learn a skill, Excel or whatever it is, we spend a lot of time learning it. However, when it comes to internal work, whether it's to understand ourselves or understanding ourself as a parent's parenting skills, finding a meditation

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  teacher, all these things, what I find is most people don't spend nearly as much time finding the right teacher, finding the right material. It's almost like this kind of latch on to the first one. If it works great, if not, I give up on it or whatnot. It's not the approach one normally takes in other work. But for some reason, when it comes to inner work, there's a bit of a almost casualness, maybe because they don't know there are better resources out there. Like, so one thing that I would encourage everybody to do is when it comes to inner work, whether it's meditation or trying to become a better parent or whatnot,

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  really spend the time, at least as much time as what you spend on doing external work.

• 1:42:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's very good advice. It's really, really good advice. It's so easy to become attached to the first teacher you find in a given discipline with respect to inner work, which is very understandable, right? Because you you are sort of On some level, shown a side of yourself or a side of reality with or without any type of pharmacological intervention that is so unusual, perhaps so compelling, so beneficial, that you can attribute that experience and the value of that experience to the person who helped facilitate it. And sometimes it's well founded, but sometimes it's misplaced

• 1:43:33Tim Ferriss?

  and you can become attached to an external agent who is acting upon you, which can be disabling in a way.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, cool. One more thing, Tim, if I can say.

• 1:43:45Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  Is that we started this conversation, I think, talking about, I find people who are dedicated in a work like despicable or disgust or whatnot, right? And it's so funny that my views are so different now. And for a long time, I didn't want to commit myself. And for me, inner work has always been kind of afterthought. It can fit into my schedule, my calendar. I would do it maybe once a quarter, once a month or something like that. It was never my priority. And at one point, I think maybe three, four years ago, I said to myself, you know what? For the next quarter, three months, I'm going to place as a priority my inner work, whether it's therapy work or different experiences or not.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  I said, that's finding the right teacher. We're not going to retreats. That's my priority, but only for three months because I wasn't ready and willing to commit too much. And once I made, however, even that temporary commitment, my progress changed. So if there's one thing I can say, one more thing I can say is just it's around that is giving yourself the space to make a commitment, at least a temporary commitment. See what happens. Can you say, well, this is only four months. I'm going to do this regularly or whatnot and place as a priority on top of everything else I do and see what happens.

• 1:45:10Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent advice.

• 1:45:13Tim Ferriss?

  Bo, it is so nice to see you and hear your voice, my friend. It's nice to reconnect. You know, I want to say

• 1:45:30Tim Ferriss?

  which, by the way, folks, if you've ever wondered where "long time no see" comes from, it comes from Chinese.

• 1:45:37Tim Ferriss?

  And people can learn more about Evolve. I recommend people check it out, evolvevf.com. And I love that in your bio, there is no social media. And that's a rarity. You're one of, I guess, two guests. Are you active at all on social media? Or is that something you have deliberately removed?

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  I deliberately removed myself on Weibo like 10 years ago or something like that. When I noticed that I was posting to please other people. It became something that added to my ego and then started to grab me. And I started tracking how many people replied, how many people forwarded, how many people applauded. And it was not source of happiness.

• 1:46:24Tim Ferriss?

  Good for you. Good for you, man. So good. That is inspiring. I may need to pursue that myself. And Bo, is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this conversation?

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  One company I didn't mention, this parenting thing, which I thought wasn't quite ready yet. It's called Parent Lab. Lab is a laboratory. I hope that company will help a lot of people. And in the next month or two, depending on when this podcast gets out there, hopefully, people will find it useful.

• 1:46:57Tim Ferriss?

  Wonderful. And I will also, for everyone listening, provide show notes for this episode. So we'll have links to everything we've discussed. And if that is live, we'll have a link to that. And you can go to tim.blog/podcast to find all episodes. But you can go to tim.blog/bo. We'll create a short link and that will forward directly to the links and resources and so on from this particular episode. Well, Bo, thank you so much for carving out the time today.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  It's my pleasure. That was fun. Thank you.

• 1:47:30Tim Ferriss?

  Super fun. And to everybody listening, Be safe, experiment often, be easier on yourself than you think you should be. At least at times. Give exception and be merciful with yourself and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered

• 1:48:15Tim Ferriss?

  or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:48:58Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49:43Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:51:08Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So, there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing, and all you have to do is add hot water. I use travel packets. I've been to probably a dozen countries with various products from Four Sigmatic, and their mushroom coffee is top of the list. That's number one. I travel with it. I recommend

• 1:51:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:52:36Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:53:18Tim Ferriss?

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