E166 - Tim Ferriss: The Hard Truth About Self-Improvement (After 25 Years of Experimenting)

Tim Ferriss opens up about the inner evolution behind his outer success. He shares the practices and perspectives that have most transformed his life: from the art of asking better questions and setting meaningful goals, to the wisdom of subtraction — removing what no longer serves to make space for what truly matters. Tim reflects on how psychedelics, fasting, and deep self-inquiry have reshaped his understanding of sensitivity, healing, and purpose. He explores the balance between self-development and self-centeredness, revealing how real growth begins not in control, but in surrender. To get your free shilajit today: https://fractalforest.co/knowthyself 20% off Pique Life Tea: https://www.piquelife.com/knowthyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 0:00 Intro 2:40 Trusting in What Can't be Controlled 6:45 Reviewing Your Life & Setting Goals 8:54 Why He Devoted His Life to Strategic Self Development 13:13 Asking Great Questions Leads to Great Results 19:12 A Question to Shift Your Perspective on Life 28:04 The Key for Growth: Addition vs Subtraction 38:09 Making the Space for Social Connection 44:14 The Power of Subtraction & Fasting 49:55 Ad: Fractal Forest 51:32 Self Development Without Being Self Centered 59:48 His Journey with Psychedelics 1:14:15 Ad: Pique Life 1:16:47 How Psychedelics Changed How He Sees Life & the Mystical 1:20:22 The Misuse of Psychedelics and How it Used to be Used 1:27:07 Why He started Working with Them 1:31:32 Red Flags & What to Watch Out For 1:37:35 How His Relationship to Sensitivity has Changed 1:46:50 Healing from Childhood Trauma 1:58:28 Creating A Life Worth Living 2:05:28 The Projects He Pours His Time Into 2:10:43 Coyote, a Game of Connection 2:19:50 Diversifying Your Business & Self 2:23:18 Rapid Fire Questions 2:36:20 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss/ https://www.explodingkittens.com/products/coyote https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  People overestimate how much they need to do things that are incredible. I think one of the traps of self-improvement is that the solution tends to be framed through the lens of addition. So what's the pill I can take? What's the magical stretch I can do so that all my problems will go away? It's almost like maybe trying to grab something in water really quickly, and you're just pushing it away. I think that self-development is perhaps best approached indirectly.

• 1:24André Duqum?

  What's like the high-level overview of your journey with psychedelics?

• 1:27Speaker 02

  The more time you spend in psychedelic space, the stranger and more interesting it gets. Psychedelics makes me worry quite a bit. You know what? Let me do a little PSA real quick. First order of business, the subconscious choice to sort of cauterize my sensitivity wasn't on my own volition.

• 1:45André Duqum?

  If I may so, procure a prop.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, brutal. Poor kid. That sort of uncorking and then embracing of the sensitivity has been fundamental. Feeling intact as who I am, because I had disavowed that entire part of myself for so long.

• 2:11André Duqum?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today needs no introduction, but here's a small one anyways. Many of you know him from his bestselling books, notably The Four Hour Work Week, over 700 produced podcast episodes with hundreds of millions of downloads. He, beyond all the illustrious accomplishments that I could continue to name, he's really become a beacon of authenticity and explorer of what it means to truly squeeze the juice out of life by testing limits, questioning assumptions, and sharing the raw truth of his own human journey. Tim Ferriss, thanks for being here.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:52André Duqum?

  Pleasure is mine.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Beautiful space, pure air tea.

• 2:56André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Just the slightest waft of comfortable air. You guys have really dialed this in.

• 3:02André Duqum?

  It's a process of refinement.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, God.

• 3:05André Duqum?

  I'm glad you feel at home.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  I do.

• 3:07André Duqum?

  Yeah, I am so excited to dive into the many different avenues that we can. And somebody that is so well-versed in many different areas and has many different interests, notably, obviously, for so many incredible frameworks you have for optimizing different areas of life, where I want to start, as someone who has cultivated a relative degree of mastery in a lot of the external games, health, business, finances, what is your journey of trusting in what can't be controlled?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Well, in trusting in what can't be controlled, and think about the wording, because it's super interesting wording, I would say training yourself, in this case, training myself to trust in your ability to handle the uncertain has been a lifelong process. And we can dive into it at some point if you want, but had some very rough experiences in childhood and to compensate for that or as a reaction to that, I wasn't really conscious, I think a lot of people who experience early difficulties find a way if they make their way through it. Not everybody does.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  To control something and that can take the form of chasing a clear what you perceive as a finish line, make a million dollars, financial freedom, family and kids and the white picket fence, whatever it might be, right? So you have this dogged determination with a singular focus and then you control something. It could be your schedule. It could be your eating and all of these things in excess can become some type of handicap and disorder, right? In the case of eating, anorexia nervosa, right? There's a certain rigidity and compartmentalization. So for me, I think in the beginning, the way that I attempted to control the unknowns was by white knuckling anything I felt I could

• 5:00Speaker 02

  control and that's an illusion largely. Stoicism, different philosophical systems that really harp on this and just pound it into your head over and over and over again can be very helpful. And then a lot of it is revisiting the past for me. So I remember, maybe it was about 10 years ago, when I started doing past year reviews instead of new year's resolutions, looking back at the last year, every week of the calendar for peak sort of negative and positive experiences, positive and negative people, right? The slight battery drains that seemed consistent over time, activities and people. And in addition to that, and I joked with a friend of mine at one point, I said, you know what I should create as

• 5:45Speaker 02

  a journal? Because like people love journals. Everybody's putting out a journal. I was like, let me just add to the noise. But my journal will be something like worries that mostly didn't come true, where you just look back at the things that you were worried about. And so I do this when I look back at the calendar and just what a tiny fraction of the whole, the smallest percentage that actually become a problem. And that gives you, I would say, two insights for me. And I need to constantly remind myself of this because I'm hyper vigilant and actually tend to see the world as like full of danger,

• 6:25Speaker 02

  strangers you can't trust, et cetera. That's my baseline. But one is, a lot of the things you're really, really terrified about, worried about, just don't happen, right? So in that case, the cards fall in your favor. But real life has bumps along the way. So when the cards don't fall in your favor,

• 6:45Speaker 02

  You figure it out. And when you look backwards, you can see like if you're actually sitting here, you have a decent life, you have figured out thousands upon thousands and maybe millions upon millions of little micro decisions and adaptations along the way. So it's also doing a retrospective to convince myself, and this takes re convincing that you can figure it out. So I would say trusting in the ability, your own ability to figure most things out and recover, even if something ends up being really terrible.

• 7:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Which happens, you know, that's life.

• 7:22André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm reminded of paraphrasing Mark Twain, like the worst things in my life never happened.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:29André Duqum?

  You know?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are a great many worries in my life, most of which have never happened, or a great many terrible things that befallen me, most of which never happened. Just something along those lines.

• 7:37André Duqum?

  Yeah. No, it's interesting. And I'm curious, in your year in review process, like the more that you've done that, have you actually seen the needle moving forward of not worrying about those things that are outside of your control?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:51André Duqum?

  Like you made progress.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, much better. So that is a coachable skill, or a learnable skill, depending on how you do it. And I say coachable and learnable because I view those things as slightly different. Learnable is this self improvement game, right? And there's a lot to the self improvement game, but the social component, surrounding yourself with the right peer group, people who call you on your bullshit when you're blowing little things out of proportion, people who remind you of the silver lining when you're focused on the dark side of things, people who point to the past for evidence that you have figured something else out before, or to say, hey, you're about to make the same mistake. So I really try to, I don't try,

• 8:35Speaker 02

  I calendar and invest in time with those people. And that's arguably the most important thing that I do at the beginning of each year. But look, every day is the beginning of a new year. So you don't have to wait for January 1st.

• 8:48André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  It's kind of an artificial constraint. You don't need to do that. But is looking forward to my calendar and basically, once a quarter, let's just say, I have at least a long weekend going up to a week where I spend time with those people. And You can read, you can study, you can meditate, you can do all those things, or you can just surround yourselves by the people who embody or naturally do things, think things, believe things that you want to absorb.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  It tends to be, I think, a little bit easier.

• 9:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  If you just steep yourself in it.

• 9:26André Duqum?

  I'm really looking forward to exploring many of these guiding questions and frameworks that really like change your orientation towards life in a way that you become more available to so much more opportunity and grace and insight. But to set the stage a bit, because I am curious if there is like a natural proclivity, a period or moment in your life where you really decided to pursue this systematized way of self-improvement to such a degree? Because you've been known in the space for decades now of being kind of like

• 9:59Speaker 02

  But I'm not.

• 9:59André Duqum?

  The guy. You're the guy who's like dialed with it, you know?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I think I just ask a lot of questions. I'm not afraid to ask dumb questions. And I've been blessed and cursed, in parentheses, with some limitations that have forced me or encouraged me to approach things obliquely. So I'll give an example. In the beginning, it wasn't like I sat down and said, all right, here are these disciplines I want to master at like age eight, sat down with my crayons and like sped down the path forward.

• 10:29André Duqum?

  Honestly, wouldn't put it past you, though.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  That would have, I mean, that would make an amazing kind of like false genesis story. So there are a lot of those floating around, but let's put that aside for the minute. I would say in the beginning, born premature, lots of health problems that I still have some vestiges of today, like really impaired left lung function, thermal regulation, right? Hence the fan, thank you. And I run very hot in part because my thermal regulation is all screwy. And I was very, very small up until sixth grade. So the only sport that my mom could conceive of where I could do decently well and not get the crap kicked out of me by bigger kids in, say, a group sport was kiddie wrestling. So I was on Long Island.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  My mom put me into kiddie wrestling to drain my batteries so that I wouldn't be as much of a hassle at home. I would actually go to sleep. And I figured out pretty quickly, just as a kid, that endurance was not an option for me. Okay, well, if you can't outlast your opponent, what do you do?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  That type of question even to a kid is sensible, easy, kind of straightforward. It's like you can't do something, but you want to do that thing. What do you do? And worked with coaches, experimented, figured out ways just to be ultimately hyper-aggressive and kind of a brawler with, then over time, having quite a bit of power. So I was more of a power athlete. And then if it got dragged out by my opponent, if they're smart, then I was in the deep water and it was bad news for me. But it really started with, I think, sports. And then ultimately, the main laboratory for all of that was academics because didn't grow up with a lot of money.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  We weren't dirt poor, but I mean, we were, you know, we had, we had to scrape by for various things. And the story, the narrative, whether it's true or not, is kind of secondary. But the, the narrative that I was taught that was very helpful, and there are narratives that can be very, very critical and helpful, even if ultimately they're not true long term. So the story was if you get great grades, if you do super well academically, like you can write your ticket, right? So for some people, it's like using sports and a scholarship to get out of whatever situation they might be in. For me, the promise was if you do this and you're really good at it, like you can do whatever you want.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  So school was where I tried to figure out every possible, I wouldn't say shortcut, but just like a little efficiency here, a little question here, asking the teacher a lot of pointed questions, not just during class, but after class, like about tests and what was going to be on the test. It's shocking like how few people just ask that. It's like, half the time they'll just tell you effectively. And then, man, it makes things a lot easier. So I would say that a lot of it started as a necessity, not to be too cliched, but being the mother of invention, just based on limitations.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And I've realized that you can actually make these incredible leaps forward through having...

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Constraints and limitations imposed on you. So sometimes that feels like a weakness, but you can actually turn that around a lot. Or if you have a paradox of choice in your life, and most of us do, frankly, anyone watching this probably has some degree of that. It's imposing constraints on yourself. And so I think that's also a practice that is very, very, very coachable and learnable. Right? So you can surround yourself with people who do it well, and you can also work on it yourself. I think those are both important to do in tandem.

• 14:24André Duqum?

  It's fascinating because I'm sure as you've been able to interview hundreds of people, and I get the pleasure to sit down across a lot of amazing minds, you see, you pick up patterns. You see how in so many different cases, the challenges that we're faced with, for whatever reason, early in our adolescence, in many ways, become the way of us actualizing our gifts, our unique fingerprint of how we show up in the world. And it seems very much so like the, the way your mind works, which many people admire and the, how you're able to bear many fruits in the world, was really started in that origin of the difficulties that you were faced with and placed with early on.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then I should say that it wasn't like I, I figured out it worked in one area and then applied it all over the place. I just followed the script that I felt like society would reward. So whatever the dominant story happened to be about doing the job, getting promoted, da, da, da, da, retire, whatever, like I just followed that mindlessly. Right? So it, it wasn't as though I was questioning all assumptions from the very beginning. And I think this is true for a lot of people that almost everyone has some area. Right? Maybe it's making cookies. Who cares? Like, maybe it's playing soccer. Maybe it's watching, like crafting DIY videos online or tinkering with electronics. Doesn't really matter. But there's one area where they're really good at asking assumptions.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Then there are a bunch of other areas where they don't actually do the same thing. Right, they're sort of running on autopilot with other people's programming, right? The beliefs they have are not beliefs that they arrived at on their own. And that was true for me. So it took a long time and a lot of sort of mistakes and stumbling along the way. And then, in the case of the four hour work week, like a complete implosion in around 2003, 2004, to catalyze the asking of questions. And then at a point, I was like, well, wait a second. Every time I have one of these like breakdown slash implosions, then I have to ask all the questions.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Is it possible that I could just maybe preempt that and start doing it early? And then I started seeing how well that often worked for just finding option C. When you feel like the world is like, is offering you options A and B, it's like, yeah, maybe that's true. Sometimes it is. Like, if there were an option C or D, what would those be? Right? If you had to name them and not letting yourself or other people off the hook. I remember having a conversation with Adam Grant, well-known professor and researcher and author. And when we finished our conversations, this is for the podcast. And by the way, I mean, if you keep doing this, by the time you're my age, like you're

• 17:18Speaker 02

  two decades younger than I am. I mean, you'll have interviewed thousands of people. So you'll be well ahead of me in short order. But in the case of Adam, the point is, we stopped recording. And after that, he stayed on my ass for probably five minutes, asking for ways he could improve. And the first few times, I don't want to be rude, right? And nothing was super obvious. And I was like, you were great. And he was great. And he's like, I appreciate it, but I'm not going to let you go until you give me one thing. If you had to give me one piece of advice. And so I did. And I was like, yeah, I mean, and I'm not gonna, I don't necessarily need to share it here. But he would not, he was like a dog with a bone. He wouldn't let me go.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  And fundamentally, I think that is an easy way to get incredibly good results, to kind of put you in the top. I don't know what the number is, but like 10% of performers in X is just to stick with a question and ask follow-ups for like two minutes longer than everybody else. You're gonna get that last little piece, and sometimes that last little piece is the piece that makes the difference. And so when you look at someone like, say, Adam Grant, who even to my mind, I'm like, I don't understand how this guy is as productive as he is. I mean, he is prodigious in his output. It is shocking how much he can get done.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  But when you have that type of interaction, and I assume, and I would bet on it, that he's doing that every day in and out, it makes more, it starts to make more sense. It seems less miraculous, and it seems just like daily deliberate practice. But it's not like being yo-yo ma and putting the finishing touches on being the .00001% at the top. It's just asking the right questions and insisting on people giving you or attempting to give you some kind of answer. And people can learn to do that. Might be a little uncomfortable.

• 19:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  You know, most, most important things are. But it's not complicated.

• 19:20André Duqum?

  I too am a lover of questions and how they have the unique capacity to kind of penetrate us into a deeper way of viewing life. And it's an art form in this medium, especially in this format.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  You're in the right job, it would seem.

• 19:36André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm honored to be able to do so and have that be such a strong part of it. I'm curious, though, if you have, because I know you're a fan of collecting questions. And as they do very much so shift our focus and what we can perceive as possible and where it takes our attention, what, is there a predominant question that is like alive for you most now, or maybe in this past year that has been providing that like new perspective for you?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  You know how some people, as a lazy tick, they're like, "Good question, good question." "I don't do that, but that is a good question." And certain, very simple questions are really present for me. Because, for instance, we met, and I gave you a fist bump, that's not really how I roll. But I just had elbow surgery, like, pretty involved elbow surgery. I just had a procedure on my low back yesterday, because when in LA, why not get injections? People in LA love injections, they seem pretty good at it. So I got PRP, like, along the spine, got a lot going on right now.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  And as you're trying to sort, and this is especially true in LA, my god, but it's true everywhere, to separate fact from fiction, say, credible science from pseudoscience. Where do you even begin? And there are some recommendations for doing that, that's not the focus of where I'm going, but I would suggest checking out Dr. Peter Attia's "Studying the Studies", just to get a basic literacy of looking at published research. There's a lot there, and it's incredibly valuable. But to give you an example, one question that I ask a lot is, "What else might explain that?"

• 21:23Speaker 02

  If I had to, you'll notice I've used this term a number of times already, just in the last few minutes. You could ask, like, "What else might explain this?" That's pretty good, but you can let yourself off the hook. So you'd say, "All right, maybe you think nothing else can explain this, but if you had to invent, if you had a gun against the head, other things that might explain this, you know, give me two or three." That is really valuable when you're trying to debug any type of challenge. So, for instance, it's like, my elbow is actually in quite a lot of pain right now. It wasn't three days ago, I'm trying to figure out if I did something strange, or if it's a natural progression, should I have some intervention? Should I do something, or should I leave it alone, right? These are like daily...

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Legitimate questions and you can ask that question. And right now, fortunately, one of the upsides of AI is there are tools like consensus.app for looking at published research and you can get better at being a spellcaster. Meaning if you get good at asking questions to a human, you're also getting better at asking questions to the Borg, whatever LLM or AI tool you might be using. And for instance, we're not going to spend a ton of time on this right now, but I mean, we could, but launched, you know, spent two years developing a card game, launched that. There were all of these strange things happening at retail. Yeah, there it is. Oh, look at that.

• 22:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, I played it with some friends last night.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Amazing. Yeah, so you got.

• 22:50André Duqum?

  Congrats, dude.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  This is, thanks. Yeah, this is the larger addition, which I like. And so with this, when you have it at 8,000 retail locations and there's a hiccup in the data, whether that's like sell-through over a week or some other metric, everyone will have a guess as to what is causing it. But there are a bunch of other questions that I'll ask. And I literally just did this yesterday. Number one is like, there's a bunch of variation. Before we do anything, and I think Americans are particularly prone to trying to like do more, like when in doubt, do more. But subtraction can be important, ignoring can be very important. So it's like, before we do anything, like, does anyone have a statistics background?

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Could I upload this graph to ChatGPT and ask it if these variations are statistically significant? Because if not, let's chill the fuck out and like wait a few weeks before we overinterpret this, right? That's like number one, like, is this meaningful broadly? As a, whatever we're looking at that we perceive as a problem, is it meaningful or is it just come some kind of like natural variation? That could be true if you have like two days of bad sleep, like before you've. You know, throw everything in the kitchen sink at it. It's like, well, like pause, like maybe this isn't actually meaningful enough to act on. And then look at it and it's like, well, some people might say, we think we should change the name. Uh, we should change the box. Uh, maybe it's like the hang tab.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  So on the smaller edition, it's intended to hang. Well, it turns out there was an issue with some of those hang tabs and they had fallen off of the metal prongs. And so ultimately had to send people into the stores to try to put them on the shelf properly, but it wasn't designed for the shelf. So anyway, the point is a problem well stated is a problem half solved. I think that's John Dewey, right? And a lot of these little questions are dominant for me when I'm considering medical interventions for myself, right? So you might look at, and then I'll give you another question that I apply to a million different things, like can you cap the downside?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  I'm like, what is the low downside or no downside, but seemingly promising upside option? Right? And that type of question is important for everything from deciding which supplements to take or not take, which diets to follow or not follow, which type of investments to pursue or not pursue. And historically, you look back at people who are famous for being these wild maverick risk takers like Richard Branson. If you read Losing My Virginity, I think the book was, you realize this guy is above all else, an expert at absolutely capping his downside. He is a risk mitigator. Genius.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  But that's not exciting. And at the time for to get on magazine covers, that's not a very sexy story. So you have the theatrics of kind of being a showman, but in reality, an expert risk mitigator. So those are a couple of questions that are really alive for me. And honestly,

• 26:02Speaker 02

  The follow-up questions, little follow-up questions are kind of, I think, the secret sauce for learning. So when someone tells you something, you just ask something like, you know, what were you saying to yourself when you did that? Right? Or if it was some big decision and they're like, did I made this big decision? And then all these amazing things happen, or so that these terrible things happen. I mean, like, well, what was the conversation like with your partner or spouse beforehand? Or afterwards?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  What did you make of that? How did you feel when that happened? Like, these little follow-up questions? The entry point is almost less important than the follow-up questions that then lead you somewhere potentially very, very interesting. Because you can come up with a script, let's just say someone's starting a podcast. I still don't think it's too late, although it's competitive.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  You can now use an LLM to copy me, or Lex Friedman, or Rogan, or you. Right? You have enough material out in the world. If I was like, give me 10 questions in the style for interviewing person X, the questions will actually be pretty good. Right? What the LLMs are less good at replicating is the flow of a conversation using follow-ups. And so I think that whether it's in podcasting, but also just in life and in learning, that those little follow-up questions, by the way, they don't need to be long. Why? Why is that? Why does that matter? Does that matter?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  You know, or if somebody gives me an opinion, I'll be like, who's the person you respect most who disagrees with that?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Just these little, short, little ditties. So I think the older I get, you know, I'm not Gandalf or anything, but it's like, the older I get, the more I strive for like, the fewest moving pieces. Kind of, I'm looking less for optimizing and productivity and more for a certain elegance to things.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admiral's Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 29:05André Duqum?

  I'm curious about in that elegance, as you've grown in your journey. There you go. Prop it up, dude. Let her rip. Let her coyote. Yeah, we're excited to circle back on that. Yeah, I'm not in a rush.

• 29:19André Duqum?

  In the elegance of like the journey of growing and maturing as a human being, what starts off as a sincere quest for self-improvement and the unending ways that one could try to fulfill that, you go to examine those deeper held core beliefs. Those assumptions on reality that we often don't question enough consciously, but subconsciously direct the fate of our life in so many ways. And so to kind of dig a little bit deeper here into the process of these like intrinsic motivating factors and the things that are running the show that we're not always consciously aware of, that we've alluded to throughout this conversation.

• 30:01André Duqum?

  What do you see at the stage of your life, growth being things that you're adding on in the pursuit of self-improvement versus things that you're removing, letting go of, and making space for? What's the balance there?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say for me, it's maybe a combination of the two. So it's not, in some cases, it's pure subtraction. Like, yeah, should I eat like fewer cookies? Yeah, probably. Yeah, I don't eat a ton of cookies. But typically, it's one cheat day a week. It's been that way for decades. But anyway, this week has been a bit of a slippery slope for reasons I won't bore people with. But it's like, okay. So that's a kind of a trivial example. I mean, like, over time, yeah, you don't want to become diabetic. But I'm not really at risk of that. The, and then there's adding, right? Where it's like, I'm doing these 10 things. Let me add 11, 12, 13, 14. I think a lot about substituting.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  So from a behavioral change perspective, this is true certainly for anyone with addiction. Like, yeah, you can just subtract it. But then you have a void. And the nature abhors a vacuum. And humans and schedules tend to abhor a vacuum. So the question is, what's going to fill it? So I find substitution. Like, what are you going to substitute in your life? To be a really good question. And in my case, just make a list of hypotheticals. And Seth Godin, author, has become a friend of mine. He's got a lot of wisdom. And he really walks the walk in a lot of interesting ways in crafting a unique life for himself and his family.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  But he will say, the best way to come up with great ideas is to come with a lot of bad ideas. And so I do this a lot. And I'll just say, all right, let me come up with 20 different ideas for substitutions. So replacing alone time with social time, right? Replacing digital time with analog time. Replacing fill in the blank with fill in the blank, right? Strength training with cardio. Zone two, which I think is boring. It's so boring, but it is important, right? So, and then you look at each one. You're like, all right, well, what would that look like? As a test for two weeks in my calendar? Okay. And so you've got maybe 20 of these options and you pick a couple to test out. And you see what the results are. It's not a forever decision.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  It's a two week decision. So I will often do that. To give you a real example, the first one is probably the biggest, which is alone time versus social time. We are evolved to be social creatures. And yes, some people are introverted or more introverted or extroverted. And I would self describe as an introvert. I get very drained in large group environments. Like my nature immersion and I've spent a lot of time alone. Right? Book writing, thousands of pages in these books. And so on, can be very solitary. And my predisposition has always been to suffer in silence. Right? It's like, figure it out.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Don't subject anybody else to your nonsense or self-generated inner turmoil or self-inflicted wounds. Like sort it out, go in a corner, lick your wounds, get it sorted. And I've just come to question any type of hyper independent mindset. I think it can be very enabling for quote unquote productivity. Yeah, you want to make a bunch of money? Okay, sure. You want to go fast? Like, sure. Like by yourself isn't a bad way to do it. And if you want to sort of climb over people like a crab in a bucket to get to the top. But yeah, that's one way to do it. And you can become very financially successful doing that.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  But as I have looked at, let's just say, and I can talk about what I view as one of the traps of self-improvement. And I say that because I've stepped into this particular bear trap many times. But let me just talk about that now. I think one of the traps of self-improvement and sort of the optimizer's curse is that as you get good at solving problems and you get rewarded for solving problems, whether that's people patting you on the back or people giving you money, you start to scan the world for problems. That becomes your lens. And that does not, in my experience, lead to a great reliable quality of life.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  So as someone who has prided himself on being a problem solver, like it's taken some rehab to reorient and not to beat a dead horse, but I have found the easiest way to do that is not by reading a book on positive psychology. It's not by watching a documentary on the happiest people in Denmark and Singapore. It is by surrounding yourself with people who embody what it is you're trying to develop. You cannot help but absorb that. So for me, it's social, social, social. Instead of it's the economy stupid, I would frame it as it's the relationship stupid. Right? So for me, the biggest quality

• 35:16Speaker 02

  of life upgrade in the last five to 10 years has been that booking of time, getting it in the calendar, creating the right sunk costs. So I will often, and not everybody can do this, but it doesn't have to be expensive stuff at all. I think people would be kind of shocked at how low burn my life is broadly speaking. Time with friends, time with family, and just getting it on the calendar, protecting it like the most important business conference or payday of your year. Easier said than done sometimes, but that I would say is the dominant add subtract combination, replace, replacing alone time with social time. And you do that, what, like a few weeks out of the year, schedule different adventures with friends?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for instance, a few weeks ago, and I recognize not everyone has this flexibility. However, and this goes way back to the four hour work week, people overestimate how much they need to do things that are incredible. They also underestimate how much flexibility and leverage they have all the time, all the time, all the time. I've seen so many employees take many retirements, thousands at this point, since the book came out. I have seen well before COVID, right? Like 10s of thousands of readers negotiate remote work agreements back when that was not common and get raises, et cetera, et cetera. Since

• 36:41Speaker 02

  I question the assumptions you have about what you can or cannot do. Also, like what's the downside of asking for something? They say no? Okay, boo hoo, move on, right? They might say yes, or they might say maybe. Or they might say, come back in six months. So the point is, what I'm about to describe might seem like a lot, but you can do this with relatively few resources. So a few weeks ago, four or five weeks ago, I took a week off the grid in Montana and Idaho to do wilderness survival training with this amazing guy who I won't name by name because I'm gonna, I'm gonna dox him appropriately in a couple of months.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  But along with a handful of my friends, and it was just a week, no computers, no phones, nothing, didn't have any devices on me whatsoever in the mountains. For how long? About a week. Okay. About a week, which will feel like to many people, like a three month vacation. And then in October, November, taking another group of people booked the housing in advance, Day of the Dead in Mexico, right? Completely different experience. And then in November, December, taking another trip to Japan. This is gonna be for about a week and it's all set.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  And I mentioned earlier, I've thought about writing up a log post on this, but writing's hard. So I'll just describe it here. Maybe I'll write about it at some point, but the finding the right sunk costs. So if people are familiar with cognitive biases, go on Wikipedia and just search cognitive biases. There's a great entry with like 30 or 40 of them. And this overlaps a lot with, say, I think it's Poor Charlie's Almanac, but Charlie Munger and various mental models and so on. There's a lot of overlap, but becoming aware of cognitive biases. And they're generally looked at as a very negative thing. So sunk cost fallacy would be something like, I've put so much money into XYZ shitcoin

• 38:48Speaker 02

  that I can't sell now and I should put more in. It's like putting good money after bad. Or you invest in some real estate project, it's going south, it's almost certainly like continue to go south, but you spent two years on it and a bunch of money. So you have this resistance to admitting that you were wrong and shifting course. So you continue to engage with that. That's sunk cost fallacy in the negative sense, right? It can be very expensive, do a lot of damage. But how can you use that to your advantage? You could prepay if you've Failed to get in shape and you're price sensitive, prepay for a personal trainer. You can't get the money back. Do something like that, right? Have a bet with a friend.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Or in my case, I am paying for trips and then basically burning the ships on like refund policies. I'm like, hey, go spend the money. Like, don't allow me to get a refund. And then for friends, I don't want them ditching out. So I'm fortunate at this point to be able to do this. You don't have to do this, but generally, let's say on the Japan trip, I'm like, hey, I'll cover all the housing once they're there and I will do X, Y, Z. I will cover it. I also used to live in Japan, so it's like I know my way around. It's your job to get yourself there, right? Because I don't want anyone ditching last minute because they don't have the right sunk costs. It's like, all right, everybody has to have some skin in the game.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  And it doesn't have to be some big thing like a trip to Japan, right? The thing to Montana, I'm not going to name the price, but like incredibly affordable, right? Especially if you're splitting the cost with friends. Yeah. Yeah, camping is pretty cheap, just making the space and the time to just camp. Yeah. And I mean, look, it could be having a long weekend where you're just like camping out in your living room with sleeping bags and like doing a little stoic exercise, which my friend Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, used to do. He would just like camp out in his living room with a sleeping bag, having like beans and instant coffee and rice for a couple of days. And he's like, this is pretty sweet, actually.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  It's very simple and you're able to let go of the burden of thinking that you need millions of dollars to live comfortably. So a lot of these trips also have an element of self deprivation that ends up being closer to self liberation in a sense. Yeah. But that stuff. Is great in theory, but it doesn't, at least for me or most of my friends, stick unless you practice it.

• 41:26André Duqum?

  Yeah. It's fascinating how often we overlook the sometimes most powerful levers we have for well-being and feeling like we're living a meaningful life in search of all the different biohacks and all the little things that we can do.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:40André Duqum?

  Community, obviously, being a huge aspect of that. Having a purposeful aim in life.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:47André Duqum?

  I'm curious about what you think those most low-hanging fruits are that we often overlook and search for the all the other.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Magic bullet.

• 41:54André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Well, let me give you, because you mentioned the social time, an example of using that question I mentioned earlier, which is what else might explain this? Remember that?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  All right. So there's this sometimes delicious, quite enjoyable beverage that humans have been consuming for millennia. Ethanol. Alcohol, booze.

• 42:18André Duqum?

  Delicious is an interesting adjective.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on your association, right? Like, if you give, yeah, if you give tequila to a baby, they're not gonna be like, mm, love this. That's generally not gonna be the first response. That's true with probably pu erh tea and coffee as well. They're required tastes. But the point I'm gonna make is that alcohol is objectively not great for you biologically speaking, right? There are all sorts of effects that you want to avoid. And so alcohol writ large has sort of been thrown under the bus in the past handful of years. And I would say for a lot of good reasons. But, but, but, if humans have been doing anything for thousands of years, usually

• 43:04Speaker 02

  I feel like there's a baby in the bathwater somewhere.

• 43:07André Duqum?

  They're getting something right somewhere.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Possibly, possibly, possibly, right? And so when I look at alcohol, and I don't drink a lot of alcohol, but occasionally, especially after medical procedures, I'm not drinking really any booze, but. I will drink occasionally. And like when I go to Day of the Dead, am I gonna have mezcal? 100 fucking percent, I'm gonna have mezcal. And if that subtracts 3.2 hours off my life, like, so be it. But I don't think that's gonna be the case. Because when you look at these blue zones, and there's a lot of conversation around blue zones and so on, and they're trying to figure out like how the Italians in such and such a place in Naples, or whatever, live to be incredibly old. I think first of all, we understate the importance of genetics.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Like, I do think you gotta pay attention to that. But my what if, what else might explain this? Because people were trying to make the alcohol fit for a long time. They're like, well, there's like resveratrol. And pump bets must be the polyphenols in the olive oil. And I think there's partial truth to a lot of this. But my bet, or my pet theory, and very hard to prove such a thing in any kind of randomized controlled trial, is that as a social lubricant, if alcohol means that you spend substantially more time with your closest connections, using all of the hardwiring that we have evolved

• 44:37Speaker 02

  over millions of years to use to suss out nuance in social interactions, that that will, up to a point, right, more than offset any of the negative effects of alcohol. So, does that mean I drink all the time? No. But if I take a trip to Italy, am I gonna have pasta and drink some wine with my friends? Yes, absolutely, I will. So I think that question of what else might explain this, also with any type of trend of the people's spot, is really, really important. Plus, the psychedelics, big time, also. We could talk about that at some point if you want. So, in any case, I know it took us down a bit of a side alley.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  But we can use that as a jumping off point.

• 45:24André Duqum?

  Sure.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Or wherever you wanna go.

• 45:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, all those intangibles, the medicinal quality of laughter, of time spent with people you love, like, all those things, you don't need a clinical study to feel the felt benefits of in real time, you know? It's tough to quantify, but, but yeah, it's important.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  I, uh... I can go back to the magic bullets question, though.

• 45:45André Duqum?

  Sure.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  So typically, I would say...

• 45:50Speaker 02

  I feel like I'm kind of slapping Americans a lot in this, but like, America became in part, there are a lot of reasons for this. It's not, I don't want to oversimplify it, but this economic powerhouse that is legitimately the land of opportunity, right? People move here, not because it's the land of the free. I hate to tell people. Objectively, that's probably not true on a bunch of different levels, but it is an amazing land of opportunity economically. That is why we attract so many people, I think, in part, and at least up to very recently, largely a rule of law and so on. We'll see what happens. But the reason I bring that up is that when you then kind of infuse

• 46:33Speaker 02

  the culture with this Protestant work ethic and that has had incredible outcomes for us as a country and individually, the solution tends to be framed through the lines of addition, right? So what's the pill I can take? What's the magical stretch I can do? What's the new muscle de jour that I need to strengthen so that all my problems will go away? Right. Combination of the peptides and all the supplements. Like, what can I snort a couple of lines of peptides and then have my chaga suppository and like walk on water through the rest of my week? Maybe. Let me know if that happens.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been trying for months. It hasn't panned out yet. Been watching slow-mo videos of the Jesus lizard. Can't figure it out. Jesus lizard. But the reason I mention all that, and I've been, I have been guilty of this for sure, because I think that it is, if you're, if you're very curious and you like learning, oftentimes you want to do that through addition, trying something new. But

• 47:41Speaker 02

  I will frequently, as a forced question, and it may not have a great answer in any given context, but like, what might subtraction look like? Have humans approached this with subtraction in the past at any point? And for instance, fasting, removing certain foods instead of adding foods, seemingly can address conditions that even the most advanced frontline treatments fail routinely. So psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, very ill-treated with psychedelics at this point, by the way. People who are trying to join, say, a clinical trial for psilocybin or something like that

• 48:25Speaker 02

  would be excluded if they have family histories typically of schizophrenia. It's very challenging to treat. But then you look at another leg of the stool that I think is very interesting, on the cutting edge, but it's old technology being revisited, metabolic psychiatry. You put somebody on a ketogenic diet, and people can check out Chris Palmer of Harvard and others. Dominic D'Agostino is another scientist who's really interesting. And you put someone on a ketogenic diet for a few weeks, and they get off 15 medications they've been on. And they have near or complete remission of symptoms. It's, and it doesn't work for everybody. I'm not saying this is a panacea, but it is very interesting that these are demonstrated

• 49:08Speaker 02

  effects in certain case studies and in clinical trials, epilepsy, et cetera. There are also profit motives, and you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to just follow the puck or follow the money and realize that if you want to sell someone something, generally it's going to be a thing they add, right? Whether it's a pill, a program, a training, a class, whatever it might be. Very hard to monetize fasting. Very hard to monetize a proper ketogenic diet, which does not include tons of keto candy bars. I hate to tell people. There's no biological free lunch. So if it sounds too good to be true, generally there's going to be a catch with that stuff.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  But the reason I'm bringing it all up is that it should be hopefully reassuring to people that you don't need a bunch of money to fly to Honduras to have some questionable, cutting-edge stem cell therapy to reverse your receding hairline. Maybe you just need to only eat within a window of eight hours each day for two weeks and see what that does. Try intermittent fasting, which I've been doing for a few months continuously now. I take a few days off here and there.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  I have access to very, very good doctors. And I'm fortunate that I have the financial means. I can try whatever treatment I want to try. And I have spent my life trying all sorts of crazy things or dull edge technologies. And some of them have stuck and been very interesting. My blood markers now at 48, after a few months of intermittent fasting, but truthfully, even after four weeks, are the best they've been in 20 years.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  And I've reduced everything else. Might there be something to that? Maybe, maybe. And there are many, many, many documented cases of reversing type 2 diabetes with something as simple as time restricted feeding, intermittent fasting. And it's a lot easier to do than people might think. Sure, you'll have a week when you're kind of pissy and whiny and irritable and might send a few emails that you'll regret. But once you adapt over the span of a week, it's pretty remarkable what happens to your entire physiology. So those would be some examples of subtraction. You can apply that to business. You could apply to investing. You could apply to a million different domains. But the dietary example is sort of a simple one to explain.

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• 53:58André Duqum?

  Try it out, see how you feel. Back to the show.

• 54:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, and I'm someone like you who also loves all the different ways we can affect and pull levers in our environment that affect our physiology. And you know, nature is unbeaten in that context. And it's refreshing to just come back to the simplicity of how we've evolved, what like, what really works well for this human meat soup, which is turns out not eating every day, all day. And but it's an interesting paradox, which you definitely see in the biohacking space, you also see in spiritual spaces and the search for quote unquote, freedom in some contexts. And it's this paradox of putting your a state of freedom

• 54:42André Duqum?

  or perceived ideal state of being some place in the future reinforces your own belief of insecurity and inadequacy in that moment. And it's an interesting paradox, because meditation as a practice has amazing benefits. And yet to seek it from which often can come from this place of something's missing is to reinforce a state that is anything but meditative, you know?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 55:05André Duqum?

  So it's

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're perpetuating the problem that you're seeking to solve in the first place.

• 55:10André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  No, it's it's super common. I think it's very human.

• 55:13André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Honestly. And it does speak to real pain that people are feeling, right? It's like, suffering is real. And I would say that here's a question, right? Just something people can think about. But if you could not focus on self actualization at all, you had to focus on group actualization. Pick some of your most important relationships, and it's about actualizing the group. What does that look like? How how is that different from your pursuit of self actualization? I think people would make a lot of progress with the self actualization by not focusing on

• 55:56Speaker 02

  it directly. Right? And I can't remember the quote. I'm sure I'm going to misattribute it. But it's either Emerson, I think it was Emerson, might be throw, who knows? Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Marx.

• 56:08André Duqum?

  One of those guys.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Who said, and I think it was actually misattributed, and it was somebody else, like, 100 years ago, in some newspaper in the US. But you know, happiness is like a butterfly. Tell you, we try to grab it directly, it will elude you. But if you sit quietly and focus on something else, it might just a light on your shoulder. I think that self development is perhaps best approached indirectly.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  That shouldn't be the objective. And in fact, if it's the objective, it's almost like maybe trying to grab something in water really quickly, and you're just pushing it away every time you try to grab it. That might be the metaphor I would use. So as I've looked at my own goals, often I've begun to ask the question like, what if this had to be a downstream effect of doing something else? Like, what's a different target? That's sort of a bigger domino. And if I hit that, I'll naturally get these other things that I want. It can work pretty well,

• 57:16Speaker 02

  particularly when it's group actualization. Or what if the ultimate route to feeling the feelings you want? Because freedom, what is that? It's kind of abstract. That's not a feeling. Like, what are the feelings you hope to have from that freedom? Is it finally being able to go to sleep without your heart racing? Is it waking up without the first thoughts in your head being what you have to do? Is it lessening the chronic anxiety that you feel? Right? I think that it's a mistaken target, freedom, right? It sounds very good. No one's gonna be like, freedom's terrible. No one's gonna say that, so it gets socially reinforced. But what are the feelings you want from that? This applies to possessions, too. Ah, somebody wants a big boat.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  All right, well, fine. Like, hey, if you can have it, you enjoy it, great. Like, what do you hope to get from that? And this goes way back to the four-hour work week. Like, what are the alternate routes to those feelings? And I think that in the case of the self-development and personal improvement spaces, often it's like, if you're trying to do it alone, you're not doing it right. Like, see if you can focus on the group. And it's like, man, I'm gonna blatantly steal from 20 Robins on this one. But I remember going to one of his events. I've only been to two, I suppose. And like, what a machine that guy is. But he said, you know, I, I, I, me, me, me. Starts to become a really fucking boring song. And it's like, as soon as you take the focus off of this,

• 58:46Speaker 02

  and I don't want to get too esoteric, but kind of illusion of a permanent, persisting self. Like, just leave all that alone. It's too messy, anyway. Like, sure, like, if you're Sam Harris, you can figure it out and like, free well on this. But I like, I just get confused and like, neurotic. It's like, just focus on like, helping your friends out and helping your family out and doing things together and blocking that out in your calendar and just see what happens. My suspicion is that a lot of that stuff you're trying to shake off will just naturally kind of come off like a snake shedding its skin, as long as you're not fixated on yourself. And I've spent most of my life, I mean, I have diagnosed moderate severe OCD.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  And like, there's some upsides and there are definitely some downsides, a lot of downsides in terms of like, hyper rumination and anxiety and insomnia and stuff. And at least in my experience, tends to be very I, I, I, me, me, me focused. And looking at mental health and therapeutics over the last 15 years, but certainly investing in early-stage science for the last 10 very heavily, you see this sort of internal self-focus rigidity in a lot of psychiatric conditions that are hockey-sticking right now. And yeah, we could talk about social media and Instagram and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows the story. I don't think we need to beat it over the head.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  But as soon as you, that's part of the reason, for instance, that I think...

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  That group administration and pre and post sort of prep and integration with psychedelics will not only be cost-saving, which will allow potentially greater access and scaling, although there are questions around whether we should or should not scale these things. It will actually, I think, in many instances, depends on the indication, but improve outcomes substantially. And we've already seen some early indications of that. And I funded at UCSF some of the very first studies, this is probably close to 10 years ago, looking at long-term demoralization in AIDS survivors, and it was done in a group context. And the reason that I put money into that early on was specifically because the group dynamic,

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  I think, is so important. You don't need drugs for that, but that happens to be the sort of sandbox in which I have been involved for a decade, right? But yeah, if you're playing the I, I, I, me, me, me, self-improvement game, like, try the group actualization thing for two weeks. Try it. Just see what happens. Might be surprised. I've been surprised.

• 1:01:24André Duqum?

  Yeah. I think many people can verify that in their own experience. The more navel gazy, the more focused on self, there is a direct inverse relationship between experience of joy in life. And it's interesting that you, all of the ways in which you described access to that feeling or state that we, qualities we would attribute to freedom, were actually, in the way that you described it, removing things. They were, as Jung has quoted, pleasure is tension reduction. So that there is an available, bountiful chemical factory in us that produces this experience of bliss, of joy, of a sense of

• 1:02:03André Duqum?

  freedom, that becomes available when we remove what's often in the way of it. And I know psychedelics has been a big, you know, avenue that you've explored, which I'm sure has garnered you bountiful insights in that regard of letting go, of making space for those things. And what's like the high-level overview of your journey with psychedelics? Because I know you've recently been stewarding many rounds in deeper clinical research and studies, and it's been a big part of your life, yeah?

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been a big part of my life. I had my first exposure in high school, and I continued into college. I actually chose Princeton University in part because I wanted to Study under Barry Jacobs, who was a professor at the time, who was very experienced with LSD, which was a rarity because I was certainly in the middle of prohibition. And that was from decades prior and led me to be initially a neuroscience major within the psychology department and so on. So these early experiences raised a lot of questions about the nature of,

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  if not reality, certainly perception and time as a... Is it a constant or is it a construct? Is it something in between? How much of reality is us perceiving it unadulterated versus creating it? I mean, I think people can guess probably where I lean on that. But those were early questions. And then because I was experiencing these things in very uncontrolled environments, had a couple of 10 out of 10 terrifying experiences. And I was just like, yeah, that's enough. Couple of bad trips. That's enough. Yeah, well, I mean, I had one where I was in the countryside coming out of a trip

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  because I was standing, like, walking between two houses on this country road in complete darkness and almost got hit by a car like coming at me with headlights. And I was like, not worth it. So I stopped and then didn't revisit it until 2012, 2013, because my long-term girlfriend at the time was really transformed by this trip she took to Peru. And she did two or three nights of Iowa, Wisconsin Sacred Valley and had this very transformative experience. And then we talked about it at length and I was like, okay, if I'm going to look at this again, I'm going to do it through the lens of first, like precaution, safety measures, and I'm going to absolutely take a deep dive on the scientific literature.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  And do as much reading as humanly possible. So that's where I started. And as fate would have it, I was in Northern California. So didn't have to look too far for options for doing things safely. And that was the, that was the first person experiential reentry into things. And, you know, I would say over the years that I still believe psychedelics, and we should kind of define that term or constrain it because it gets applied to a lot of different things. But let's just for the time being, limit psychedelics to the classical psychedelics, which might also include some of Sasha Shulgin's inventions.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  But let's, let's just say the ones that your parents might know. My parents never did any of that stuff, but mushrooms, LSD, mescaline, or like peyote slash San Pedro cactus, they're not the same, but you know, similar composition in some respects. I would include the, you might throw in like a 2CB or some of the 2Cs, but compounds that at sufficient doses, I would say, produce reliable experiences of ego dissolution and loss of self. Those would be somewhat synonymous, but that particular experience, and yes, you can do it through other things.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  There are thousands of psychedelics. I would generally encourage people not to weigh it into the edges of the alphabet soup. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble. We can talk about that. But the experience of having that ego dissolution and a perception, whether it's real or not, of touching something timeless, I think is one of the greatest adventures a human can experience. I think it's one of the richest experiences a human can have. I became very close friends with Roland Griffiths, who may rest in peace, died of cancer not too long ago. But he was certainly one of the pioneers who, through prohibition,

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  helped to reopen the doors to scientific study of, in his particular case, psilocybin. And there were certainly others. Rick Strassman and his experiments with DMT, not to be confused with 5-MeodMT. These are different things. NNDMT and 5-MeodMT. In any case, there were a handful of people who really helped reopen the doors to scientifically examining some of these compounds. And when Roland and others at Hopkins did their very early first studies with psilocybin and providing doses that were pure psilocybin, so synthesized, not mushrooms, but the equivalent of, let's say,

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  five to seven grams of dried mushrooms.

• 1:07:44André Duqum?

  Hero dose?

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a Terence McKenna heroic dose. The subjects, who were all psychedelic naive, ranked, by and large, they ranked the significance of that experience alongside and as equal to the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. That's pretty nuts to think about, right? You take this molecule and put it in your system and you have this seemingly pretty reliable experience. Can that cut in other directions? Yes, it can. And I do worry, after funding the space for 10 years, about scaling the use of psychedelics, which excludes MDMA in this case, because it doesn't really produce the type of effect that I'm describing.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Maybe it's some astronomical dose that would put you at risk of hyperthermia and melting your organs, maybe. But typically, it's more of an intactogen and very useful for conditions like complex PTSD, but it doesn't produce the typically ego dissolution that I'm describing. It's sort of fundamental to this classical psychedelic experience.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  So MDMA is relatively easy to manage as far as this broad class of things go. And so I'm not that concerned about MDMA being applied to, say, millions of people. But if we're talking about psilocybin, we're talking about potentially LSD, which I think is very much underrated in a lot of respects, but it has unfortunately a lot of baggage from sort of Nixon era issues at the time and culture wars and various things. But I don't know what that looks like when you have millions of people taking it. And the psychedelic ecosystem suffers from some of the weaknesses that you see in any

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  other group of diehards, at least when you're talking about true believers. And the true believers can include, even though they would deny it, people in the scientific world or business people who are very vested in the success of these things. There is a survivorship bias in terms of reporting. So you tend to hear about the good stuff, right? If somebody goes to a party and they're telling you about how they saw thousands of crocodiles with diamonds on their faces and they were spinning and put you in the 17th dimension, that's a hell of a story, right? It's not as fun and less likely to be heard that you had this harrowing psyche-splitting

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  experience where your soul was shuffled by a Mesoamerican demon and then you were suicidal for six months. Generally not going to have somebody volunteer that at a party or at a dinner, but that stuff does happen. I mean, look, I'm kind of joking about the Mesoamerican demon part, but people, they're very, you're playing, as Roland would say himself, you're playing with, not playing with, but you're using sort of psychological psychiatric nuclear power. And you're, these are my words now, but inducing such a potent level of neuroplasticity, you're really softening the playdough of what makes you you.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  And it's not a foregone conclusion that it's going to come out as a beautiful sculpture. At all. So I do have, and this is just my nature with everything. So I want to recognize my own bias and I tend to look for risks and downsides and dangers everywhere. Not, not always to my benefit, but not in the history of the world have we ever had an experiment of that scale with psychedelics. And in fact, when you look at almost any indigenous group that has a long history of using these compounds, it's a very small fraction of the community that ever touches this stuff. It's not like everybody's doing ayahuasca

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  circles twice a month. That's, that is, I have never seen that, never is a big word. So it might very well exist, but when I've spent time with indigenous groups and I've done a lot of work, I think more work should be done, but with credible groups like Amazon Conservation Team and so on, to really try to protect some of these groups and to reciprocate, that's also a politically charged word, but to provide some recompense and also some protection against biopiracy and things like this. It's a very, very tiny fraction of the population that ever touches this stuff. And there's a reason for that. So

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  there are a lot of open questions, I guess, but these compounds, certainly I can't imagine my life without them. I have barely touched them in two years, but they held a very important role and continue in my exploration of self and connection. And I suppose we want to get a really woo woo, which is like reality and to what extent what we're looking at is quote unquote, real versus like a user interface, like icons on a desktop. Donald Hoffman, who's a Yeah. He's coming out in three days. Oh, great. Yeah. He will, he's going to take you, he's going to be a buck and bronco. It's going to be No, I love him.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  He's, he's going to take you all over the place. Say aye for me. And just to kind of land the plan, I'll say that psychedelics showed me the potential of questioning some very fundamental and basic assumptions around

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  Psychology, for psychological interventions, psychiatric treatments, and even how we conceive of disorders, the possibility for dramatic and durable change in people who have seen no success with any conventional treatment over 15 to 20 years or more. You see durable sobriety after one or two experiences that last decades in some people. You see complex PTSD, meaning it's failed multiple interventions. Diagnoses that have lasted 15 years plus go to total remission after two or three sessions with the appropriate therapeutic container and everything, which is critically important, especially the post-period.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  I encourage people to check out Gould Dolan, who's now at UC Berkeley, and her theories around critical periods. But, once I kind of saw the possibility of these really high effect sizes, which raise a lot of questions around why and how we're doing things currently. And I'll give credit to Stan Grof, Stanislav Grof, who said something along the lines of, you know, what the telescope did for astronomy and the microscope did for biology, psychedelics were due for the mind. I think he is dead on with that. However, I am tool agnostic. So if you look at what my foundation has done over the last 10 years, yes, we did a ton with psychedelics.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  Right, so helping fund the first dedicated center in the world at Imperial College London, then at Hopkins, and tons and tons and tons of stuff. But right now, my attention is actually focused on non-psychedelic interventions because looking at brain stimulation, different types of brain stimulation, like non-invasive accelerated TMS, or the results of metabolic psychiatry, which are, in some respects, far, far, far lower risk than psychedelics. I have seen some of the same changes. I have seen changes that psychedelics, as far as I know, cannot produce. And a lot of them are durable. So for me, thinking about, what does this look like if you apply it to 10 million people?

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Psychedelics makes me worry. Quite a bit. And there are a lot of charlatans and there are a lot of, I think, amoral at best investors and CEOs in the space as well. I have a lot of trepidation around it. When you look at something like accelerated TMS when done properly, or metabolic psychiatry when done properly, the risk profile is pretty incredible. So I would say tool agnostic psychedelics are incredible. I kind of like cover my eyes and point towards psychedelics because I don't want to be responsible for what happens to people. But I'm sure, look, given where you live and given the waters that you wait in, that you've met people,

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  you tell me who have been, I certainly have met many of these and a lot of them sent me emails, but like destabilized by psychedelics. Like, these are incredibly powerful compounds. So would I do it again? Yes. Have I not touched practically anything in two years? Yes, that's also true. And like, there are reasons for that. I feel like I owe it to myself and I owe it to people who might listen to me to explore other technologies and other options.

• 1:16:51André Duqum?

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• 1:17:33André Duqum?

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• 1:18:18André Duqum?

  Check that out. Knowleselfpodcast.com/ partners. All the discounts are there. I hope you enjoy. Drink some tea.

• 1:18:27André Duqum?

  A gain in awareness through some of these experiences doesn't always, really does sadly, come with the necessary integration to, uh, to make it a, like a, yeah, an integrated way of being in your life. And, and so I've met plenty like you have of individuals who continue the hunt for experiences and hope that there's going to be just the next transformation and the next insight. And often, if we're honest with ourselves, I find at least in myself, there is, there's enough awareness, if you ask the right questions of what you need to focus on right now. And it's usually not another experience.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04André Duqum?

  To, to go after. There's a couple of things that you brought up, both the slightly woo woo or mystical encounters and contemplations of time and space, which is fascinating for me.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  I can talk about crazy town if you want. I can go there.

• 1:19:18André Duqum?

  And then another avenue as well, but why don't we start there just because it's, it's up here. I'm curious, what, what fundamental, if it has, what fundamental reorientation towards how you perceive what life is and the purpose of life for how these experiences, you know, really brought for you?

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. The, the purpose of life, I can't, I can't speak to. I mean, the sort of cliched example that comes up repeatedly for everyone, including myself. It's like, you know, some little love comes up again and again and again on these experiences. I don't know how culturally dependent that is, to be honest.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  I will say that, um, at the risk of hurting any shred of credibility I might have, uh, I will say I'm not convinced that the, the totality of what people experience and see is totally internally generated in the sense that.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  There tend to be some recurring features. And for instance, and there are lots of ways you could debunk this. I could take a counter position and tell you 20 different ways or 20 different explanations that might cover what I'm about to describe. But for instance, in ayahuasca particularly, and I think it's due to format in part, but shared visions are incredibly common. People seeing the same thing, hearing the same thing. There are some very bizarre things that seemingly happen on a fairly routine basis. All right. So I've become much less attached to, I'd say, a few things.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  One is the idea that the fidelity of my senses is an accurate representation of more or less all there is to like a reductionist materialist explanation of things. I would say, secondly, one of the, and this is not answering the purpose of life question, but I would say part of the reason people are looking for a purpose of life is that they're trying to avoid nihilism or address some type of latent fear of death, which most people have. I don't really have much fear of death.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  And so I do feel that fear extinguishing of death to be not just anecdotal, but pretty well documented in studies involving terminal cancer patients and things like that. That's worth examining more closely, I think. That's quite remarkable, even if it is pure internally generated sort of abnormal firing of neurons. It's still pretty interesting. I would say psychedelics for me raise a lot more questions than they answer. And I think that's going to be true for a while. And there's a lot of good science being done in the space.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  I mean, my intention from the beginning was to try to de-risk it and de-stigmatize or contribute to de-stigmatizing with a very small foundation. I mean, I contributed at one point like double digits of my net worth to all this stuff. Right? I mean, it was a huge commitment at certain points in time.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  But I never planned on doing it forever. That's another reason that I'm moving on. It was like, look, I want to bring more people into the space so that larger foundations and hopefully federal money and state governments and so on will actually fund it. Yeah. But like, if I can help get the flywheel started in some way, fantastic.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  A lot of open questions. I mean, the more time you spend in the psychedelic space, the stranger and more interesting it gets. And I think at any given point in time, and this also comes back to like, when you're trying to solve something, should you add something or should you subtract? Not saying you should subtract psychedelics. There's been human consumption of a lot of these compounds for millennia, although some of them are incredibly dangerous, so you gotta watch out. Don't chew on any datura seeds anytime soon or anything like that. But yeah, be careful of what you read on Reddit. And in any case, what I would say is I most certainly do not have a Newtonian orientation

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  towards the explanation of our some experiences. It's just, there's too much bizarreness in the whole thing, particularly when you spend time in the psychedelic world. And it's not to say that you need psychedelics. People can have spontaneous mystical experiences. There are other ways that traditions use, dance and chant and drumming and so on to Breathwork. Breathwork to enter altered states. And their explanations will differ for why and how, for what purpose they do this. But you see some really weird stuff. And I would like to see, I would like to think that I'm a reasonably credible witness

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  because I come into it very, very, very skeptical. I'm still skeptical of a lot of psychedelic stuff in terms of claims around how it can be applied to curing things because the promises are often overstated, as is true with any hype cycle. I'll just, I'll just throw one more thing in there. So, which, which leads into the, or I'd say doubles down on the weirdness side of things. If you go to say, and despite what people might think, it's not like every culture has a history of psychedelic use.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  There happened to be certain areas where there's a lot of concentration, like South America, but it's not true everywhere. But if you were to spend time, let's just say in South America, and there's a lot of diversity, right? Like, South American is not really a thing. It's like, these cultures are vastly different. But the modern Western use of psychedelics for treating individual psychiatric disorders that are viewed as medical problems is really new, very, very new. And for instance, I mean, ayahuasca was was used, still is used, but particularly before contact with, say, missionaries

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  in Christianity. And I can explain why that's the case. But it was used for hunting and warfare a lot of the time. And then if there was a problem, or hunting was going very poorly, or something else, it might be used for addressing spirits, improving hunting luck, etc. But the, when, when you look at a lot of the use cases, hunting, warfare, and then a handful of other things. But it's not because, like, Juan is really sad, right? That just wasn't an application. And why would they use, say, ayahuasca for these things? And also, ayahuasca is like a, it's

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  not always the end all be all. It's sort of a conduit for other types of plants in a lot of these cultures. Not always, but in a lot of them. Putting that aside for the moment, the reason that they would use these, also how mushrooms, certain, certain strains of mushrooms were used by, say, probably still are, but especially historically by the Mazatex in Mexico, was for divination of some type. What the hell does that mean? Well, that sounds like a bunch of hocus pocus, like... You know, I'm sure there's a psychic reader somewhere with a neon sign, you know, 20 minute drive from here for like 10 bucks a reading. I'm not talking about that.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  I'm talking about specifically in this case, and all the examples I just gave, finding things that are lost or in an unknown location. So someone's donkey gets stolen in a village in Mexico and they're like, who fucking stole my donkey? All right, let's go figure it out. We're going to go to this, you know, this cuandero who's going to eat mushrooms and like try to figure it out. It was very like kind of brass tacks, practical shit. It wasn't. And then in terms of hunting and warfare, it's like, all right, where's where the peccary's going to be tomorrow so that we can choose our hunting location or like a topi or whatever it might be. And then in the case of warfare, I mean, it's the same idea, right? It's like, all right, if we're going to defend against a raiding party or we are going to

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  be a raiding party, and intrad tribal warfare was intense, intense in South America as it was in North America, then how do we gain a tactical or strategic, or strategic advantage by knowing where things are going to be at certain times? That's very different from how these things are positioned in, say, North American culture. And frankly, a lot of the capable, I don't, I don't like to call them shamans because it's not really a word that they would use, but healers, let's just say, in South America don't know what on earth to do with a bunch of gringos who have self-loathing.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  It's just like not a, it's not really a thing that you see as prevalently down there. And the idea of like weeks of integration or whatever, like that's just not how it worked back in the day. I mean, so in a, in an odd sense, depending on how far you want to go into like, let's call it, and this is the dangerous territory, but like the spiritual side of things, which, which we didn't really even talk about, but down there, that's certainly a big part of the conversation. If you want someone who's, let's just say of lineage where They're coming from 100 to 200 years of practice with these plants. So just think, you could think of them as high level wilderness pharmacist,

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  among other things.

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  In some respects, the more experienced those people are, the less capable or familiar they will be with trying to treat Westerners with a format that makes sense to them. So it's tricky. It was really tricky. Yeah. Anyway.

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• 1:30:31André Duqum?

  There's innumerable reasons as to why people might seek out these different experiences. I'm curious, is there a consistent, most reoccurring theme for you of why you've sought those out and with consistency in the past? Is there an area of life or psyche that you kept coming?

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say. And it also explains why I stopped, in a sense. And I haven't stopped. This is not like a forever stopping thing. I can't imagine my life without psychedelics.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Might pick and choose a little more carefully or like constrain the options a bit. So in the beginning,

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  and I think this is very typical and to be expected and admirable, maybe is the word to use, but you're looking for a solution or a path forward based on some issue that you have here. Right? So.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  Deep down, you really want to try something new, but it's scary. Or you want to start a relationship or a family or end a relationship or a marriage. Or who knows what it is, right?

• 1:31:36André Duqum?

  Is this third person speak for Tim Ferriss?

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  No, it's not their, this is, this is not third person.

• 1:31:41André Duqum?

  Okay, just generally saying.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Generally speaking, for me, it was like major depressive disorder or chronic anxiety or any number of things. But you have some issue here that everyone in this room would recognize. And you want some type of resolution or help with that. So, you know, you strap yourself to a rocket, you get shot into the 17th dimension. Turned into like, you know, a fractal of rainbow coming out of like a mastodon's piss or whatever happens.

• 1:32:13André Duqum?

  Quit the video.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  And then you come back and you're like, what was that? And then you journal and hopefully you have someone to hold you accountable to actually implement some behavioral change and do the things you say are important to you. And some fantastic things can happen as an outgrowth of that. Now, at some point, at least for me, the indigenous perspective and lens on this became more interesting than the therapeutic, I'm going to travel to this clinic called the 17th dimension and bring something back. In other words, it would be as an analogy as if there's a place called Japan.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  I love Japan, as we've established. And people are like, you know what? Japan's so different. It's so weird. I don't really understand a lot of what's going on, but when I go there and I think deeply on my problems, I come back and I have answers. Okay, great. But then you spend more time in Japan and you're like, well, there's a lot of stuff going on here. I'd like to understand it more. There seem to be certain constants. And certainly the people who spend all their time in Japan are not thinking about these types of problems all the time. What would it look like to actually? I experience things or try to develop capacities that would reflect what someone

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  might do if they were living in Japan, AKA, in this particular example, operating through the Cosma vision of someone in one of these groups, right? And like putting aside, if we can just chill the fuck out for a minute, like, yeah, I'm a white male and I don't have a savior complex and I'm not appropriating. By the way, America's just a whole big melting pot of different cultures. So make of that what you will. But the point is, I was actually deeply curious about their lived experience and how they perceive these things. Like, what do you use these for? And when you start then spending time, not just with the whiz-bang, head-exploiting psychedelics,

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  but kind of diving into the vegetalism and way that some of these groups relate to nature in general, and think about humans as a component of that, then you started going into these spaces for different reasons. So the vast majority of my experiences over the last 10 years have not been to try to fix some problem here. It's been in the hopes of seeing or experiencing or learning something that is valued or that I've been told or taught by someone who has been raised in a culture where this is just

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  the water that they swim in. That can be risky. There are a lot of, you know, Coyote, right? Coyote, so named because of the trickster mythology associations. Like, a lot of, let's just for simplicity, call them shamans, are kind of rascals, right? Like, and sometimes they will tell you exactly, like, whatever lie they think is going to be most entertaining for them to watch you pursue. Like, this is a real thing, for sure. Like, you're not dealing with a bunch of bodhisattvas walking around. That's not the way to view it. The way that I would think about it, I'm sure this is going to piss off a bunch of people, but... I think down there, they have technologies, they have tools, they've become very adept

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  at using them. But if you've ever seen like Doctor Strange, or let me, and I use that example because most people don't know a lot of surgeons, but like if you had a bunch of really good, like orthopedic surgeons or neurosurgeons, whatever, a lot of them have really big egos, some of them are assholes. But if you have a real problem and it requires a high level of expertise, you're like, okay, so be it. But like, do you want to take life advice from that guy? Maybe not, you know? And, or gal, although like matriarchal societies are less common. You know, the people couldn't even have some element of that, the Mashtaks also. So I would just say be careful of, this goes for anyone in the US, anywhere,

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  not just South America. Be careful of any shaman who sort of positions themselves as enlightened in any way. That is a huge red flag. There's a documentary called Kumare, which I recommend everybody watch. K U M A R E. I won't spoil the fun, but basically this documentary filmmaker in New York is looking at gurus in the United States and he's like, wow, these people are all full of shit. He's like, maybe I'll have better luck. He's Indian American. It goes to India and he's like, wow, most of these guys are also completely full of shit. And he decides as an experiment to go back to the US after he's in seclusion, grown his hair out, grown this huge beard, gotten really good at yoga,

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  puts on some robes and decides to basically start a cult. And the story of what happens is remarkably well told. So I'd encourage people to check that out. But anyway, I would, I would just be, you gotta be really cautious and know kind of what you're getting yourself into. And I would view people who are really adept at these things, and by adept, I mean like minimum 20 years experience for me. Like thousands of patients, right?

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  You know, let me do a little PSA real quick. If you're considering any of this stuff, and I can't recommend it because it is the legal risks, even though people think they have some kind of weird immunity bracelet online, they're advertising like ayahuasca circles on Facebook or whatever. There are legal side effects, so I can't recommend you do any of this stuff, but look, it's like telling kids not to have sex. Like, they're gonna have sex, like, give them some condoms. All right. So, first order of business, if someone calls themselves a shaman, that's like flag number one, for me. Okay. Number two, if they don't do a medical intake that is really extensive, that is a disqualifying mistake.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  Number three, if you ask them how they handle adverse events, and the worst adverse events they have seen, if their answer is, "We've never had any adverse event, we've never had anyone freak out," they are either inexperienced, delusional, or they're lying to you. And all of those are really, really bad. It would be like asking someone who's a surgeon, like, if you're ever, ever in your 20 years had a complication, of course, right? And you want someone who can handle the red line cases when something goes wrong. You want to know they have experience with that. So, those are just a few recommendations.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  If they don't ask you about psychiatric family history, another disqualifier, right? But I should say at the same time, you go to South America, typically, no one's gonna ask you that. If they're, if they've just been doing it their whole life within a community, like, none of that's gonna be standard operating procedure. So, you kind of have to do a lot of due diligence on your own. Yeah. All right. TED Talk complete. Sorry. It's just, I worry for people, because I've seen so many lives transformed for the better, and I've also seen people get way over their skis. And if somebody comes to you and they're pros, I just said I was done, I'm not done. If somebody comes to you and they're like proselytizing, they're like the new Messiah for convincing

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  everyone that should do psychedelics, if they have had fewer than 50 experiences, don't pay any attention to them. Do not pay any attention, because that's like someone who's gone skiing once on the bunny slopes and they're like, "It's amazing, you never get hurt, it's just all fun, and it was blue skies, and it's always blue skies when you ski," is my conclusion. It's like, hmm, there are a lot of different conditions, and there's a lot of really hard terrain, different skis, avalanches, like shit happens. And so, don't take advice from someone, it's very common that someone who does psychedelics for the first, second, or third time just becomes a diehard true believer, and they

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  like take the show on the road to convince the world to follow them as the Pied Piper into the promised land.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Like, there's a lot of promise, but there's a lot of peril as well.

• 1:40:57André Duqum?

  Yeah. Yeah. Important PSA.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't fire a shaman on Craigslist.

• 1:41:04André Duqum?

  Okay, so, since we're here and exploring the many different aspects of psychedelics, but also the internal drivers for your own healing journey, for like why you decided to explore these things, I know that the sensitivity that you felt innately you had as a kid has been a big aspect of self that is the reason why you are so sharp, hyper vigilant at times, pay attention to the nuances and subtleties, and like you said earlier on, could be probably perceived as both a gift and a curse in different moments of your life.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Most things are.

• 1:41:45André Duqum?

  Yeah. I'm curious how you relate to that sense of sensitivity in your life now. How, do you feel of it, it's more of a gift or a curse now in these days? And, yeah, I'm just curious.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  So I would say the conclusion, which makes it sound more formal than it was, because I was very, very young, but the subconscious choice to sort of cauterize my sensitivity was not...

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  It wasn't on my unvolition. So around COVID, I put out the most difficult podcast I've ever put out, and I could talk about the reasons for the timing, about childhood sexual abuse that I endured from age two to four. Sounds like weekly basis or so by this son of a babysitter. Not great. So, very common. That doesn't lessen the impact. Incredibly common for both girls and boys. And just a quick sidebar on that, when I put out the episode, which was a conversation between my friend and Debbie Millman, amazing graphic

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  designer, has this fantastic podcast that started way before mine, so she's an OG in Design Matters. She was terribly abused as a kid. And her approach to healing herself was very different from mine. And I asked her if she'd be open to a conversation. And I said, look upfront, I'm not sure I'm ever going to publish this. My parents don't know. Family doesn't know. None of my friends know. I mean, it was, it was very difficult for me to decide to publish it. I'm glad I did. But when it came out, I got texts or voice

• 1:43:35Speaker 02

  memos or voicemails from, I would say, a quarter to a third of my closest male friends, who were either on the verge of crying or crying, telling me the story they'd never told before to anyone, which was them having had a very similar experience. It is so common. And in any case, the reason I bring that up is that I think in response to that, being sensitive was just a liability, right? I don't know if, there's this, there's this guiding phrase that I think is helpful, whether it's true or not is another question. But

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  when you're, say, prepping or at a university and they're prepping people for a psychedelic experience, they say,

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Nothing inside you wants to hurt you. So like trusting in that as a basic maxim. And then depending on the school of thought and the facilitator about this sort of inner healer guidance, right? The idea that you don't need to reach out to external experts all the time, that you actually have this innate intelligence that knows exactly what you need. There's something to that. But the reason I bring it up is that my two-year-old self knew that hypersensitivity, given what was happening, was just effectively like psyche suicide on some level. So that got cauterized. And the sensitivity, any type of emotional engagement with the world was just viewed as weakness.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  I later justified that as it being this irrational distraction from like the hyper-efficient human mind that is the pinnacle of all evolution. And we can just run things based on this sort of hyper rationalist framework. And there's something to be said for that. You can do a lot with that tool. But if it's your only tool, there's collateral damage. And a lot of that collateral damage is in relationships. Because human relationships are not rational, which is why I find like efficient market theory and the idea that like all the stock, you know, people in the stock market behave rationally according to self-interest. I'm like, have you seen humans anywhere? What gives you any basis for that?

• 1:45:54Speaker 02

  But let me come back from the stock market and using that example and say that I was not able to bring those emotions back online. And it was not even a, an agenda item. That's not what I was after, right? But after a number of deep psychedelic experiences in 2012, 2013, I remember I was on a flight and I was watching a documentary called Pressure Cooker, which is an outstanding documentary. Quite emotional, but I just started bawling on the plane. And I don't, I don't think at that point I had cried in 20 years. And I was just like, what the fuck is happening here?

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  I had a shaved head, as I do now. I probably looked even more like a skinhead, except that my neck was a lot bigger. And I'm like, are people gonna freak out? It's like, oh, my God, what's happening? And I just noticed all of these sensitivities coming back online. And I had mixed feelings about it at the time. I was just like, oh, what is this? This is very uncomfortable. And I don't, I don't know what's happening underneath all this. Is this good? Is this bad? Am I about to have a fucking mental breakdown? I don't know. Ultimately, that sensitivity, like, superpowers are always, I'm not saying it's a superpower, but I, I do notice things and feel things that other people don't. And I think that's part of what makes me pretty good at language learning.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  So there are upsides to it, but the, the reason I ultimately decided to double and triple down on that is to learn how to work with that hypersensitivity. And also recognizing, and this is true with any type of really intensive therapy, it doesn't have to involve psychedelics, doesn't have to involve any drugs. But a lot of folks are worried they're gonna lose their edge. It's true of people considering meditation, too. Right? Am I gonna lose my edge? Am I gonna have no motivation? These, these things that I'm good at, that form a lot of my identity. Am I just suddenly gonna lose my grasp on these and be lost at sea?

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  Typically, that's not the case, like 99 times out of 100, pulling a rabbit out of a hat for a number. That's not the case. And the, the way that I look at it is as having a wardrobe. You've worn this jacket. It's a great jacket, but it's like, you know, cigar smoking leisure jacket. It's like, well, do you really need to wear that to the beach? Do you really need to wear that to Christmas? Like, there's a time and a place for it. It's just not all the time. So you take that off, you put it in your wardrobe, right? Psychologically speaking, it's always there. So what I've learned is that I can work with the, the sensitivities. And they've been invaluable in trying to become more socially intelligent with

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  just conflict resolution and de-escalation and intimate relationships, becoming a better friend. I mean, I feel like I've always been a very good friend, very loyal, but being a more empathic friend. Because if you're, if you have armor up, you're keeping a lot out, but you're keeping a lot in as well.

• 1:49:11André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  There's a barrier. So for me, learning how to work with it, if I need to put blinders on and just be

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  a racehorse, I can do that. I go into the wardrobe, I take that jacket down and like throw it on and I'm good. Like I can go into that mode. So I think the fear of losing that often prevents people from exploring a richer terrain that they can explore and expanded capacities that they can use for a richer life. And look, I don't have all the answers. I don't want to make it sound like I'm preaching off the mount. It's not that at all. I mean, I'm fumbling around. Everybody's making it up as they go. But that is, I would say, that embracing, that that sort of uncorking and then embracing of the sensitivity

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  has been fundamental, not just to me, feeling better in the world, but feeling intact as

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  who I am, right? Because I had disavowed that entire part of myself for so long.

• 1:50:20André Duqum?

  It's fascinating to think about the intelligence of us as little ones and what it does keep in and what it keeps out, right?

• 1:50:30André Duqum?

  If I may so procure a prop, which I never really do, but I was just thinking, and I've also been in my own relationship.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  I really hope it's a magic wand like Hogwarts.

• 1:50:42André Duqum?

  Something close. It's actually an image from that episode, which I was really impacted by, which is you.

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50:49André Duqum?

  Which, if I may.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:50:51André Duqum?

  Pass along.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, brutal.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Poor kid. So.

• 1:51:02Speaker 02

  Go for it. Lead me along.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:06André Duqum?

  Well, you were describing a bit what it's like to be inside his world. And I'm just curious, how connected do you feel to that little one that lives inside of you like it does all of us?

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel very connected. I've spent a lot of time on that and.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  I have spent time with certain modalities, again, not looking for a silver bullet, but like things that help more than hurt. And I do find, I have found, things like Internal Family Systems, IFS, helpful. I've done live sessions where Dick has worked on me, the founder, that people can listen to if they want. But I feel, I do feel connected. And I think there's also a fine line between feeling resolved enough and intact enough to move forward and dwelling and wallowing in a very traumatic past, or just an unpleasant

• 1:52:03Speaker 02

  past. And I think the pendulum may have swung a little far towards like performative trauma reenactment, in a sense. I think there have been many decades and many generations where people just didn't talk about any of this stuff, at least on any scale. There was a lot of unnecessary suffering as a result. I don't think everyone should just dive headlong into their deepest capital T trauma without professional help. I think that can be risky, right? So it comes back to kind of the social cohesion and working with professionals who

• 1:52:46Speaker 02

  can help you along the way. But I think there's a time for looking in the rearview mirror. And it's become, I think, somewhat trendy to spend a little too long looking in the rearview mirror. And depending on, for instance, the therapist you work with, a lot of modern psychotherapy is only focused on the rearview mirror. That's it. And it's not their fault. And there's an application, but the training they have received, say psychoanalysis or whatever, it's like, oh yeah, let's talk about your parents forever. Let's talk about

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  your trauma forever. And therapists are also human, and humans are driven by incentives. And if they're trying to make a living and they feel, they're not necessarily trying to fool anyone, but they feel good about what they're doing and you have made progress, they're probably incentivized to keep the sessions.

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  Continuing. And this doesn't mean, you know, have a breakup talk with your therapist. It just means that for me, there came a point where I was like, all right. I've had this, I've disclosed this experience. I've already traveled this road for quite a long time. And I feel like the path forward for me for healing. But I think we need to be careful with overusing that word also. Because just like, just as if with problem solving, if you've been rewarded for fixing problems, you start to scan for problems. If you're constantly using the framing of, I need to heal, I want to heal.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

  Here's my path for healing. It implies that you are damaged or injured in some way. And I think the dose makes the poison, but there is a tipping point at which that is not helpful.

• 1:54:46Speaker 02

  And I think keeps you actually very attached to your trauma as part of your identity. And therefore, in my case, you know, I had this experience. Keep in mind, I'd already been traveling this road and then got this tidal wave of friends reaching out and so on, which I made time for. I have a lot of capacity for that. But there's also a point where I was like, you know what?

• 1:55:12Speaker 02

  A lot of this, a lot of life is about establishing boundaries. And for me, it's like, I will, I created the podcast and I created the blog post associated with it, which had that photo. And I'll just mention it to people, tim.blog/trauma, there's nothing for sale. But it gives all the resources that I, or a lot of the resources that I mentioned, as well as those that Debbie mentioned. She used no psychedelics, no nothing, very different approach.

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  I was like, I've said my piece and I don't want to be engaged with this forever. So I've, I've had to draw some hard lines also, right? Because I find it very gratifying to help. I find it very gratifying to help people, but you can become very easily enmeshed. And by constantly wading into the waters of that type of thing, you can sort of repeatedly rip the scab off of this healed wound that is inside yourself. I think you need to be careful with that. Yeah, I'm not a professional psychiatrist, don't play one on the internet, but that's been my experience. Now, on the flip side, there are people who are just like, past is the past.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  Never want to touch it. I'm just marching forward. And that can work, but there, there are side effects there, right? So I feel like trying to find the Goldilocks, which by the way, sometimes means you're not traveling that perfect middle path. You're like, oh, too far that way. Nope, too far that way. And it's more like you're in a swim lane where you have these guide rails and you're just trying your best to stay in the middle, but you're never exactly in the middle. So that's how I think about it at this point.

• 1:56:56André Duqum?

  Yeah. I, I mean, I just, when I listened to the episode, I just, I could feel both in your voice and how you explained it, the immense courage that it would take to share that, such a vulnerable aspect of your life and can only imagine the amount of individuals and outside of the friends that have outreach to you, like the, the wider community that, like you said, is so undershared, especially from the male side of things, with additional shame that maybe is coupled there with. But it is, it is an interesting gift to what, what was once a shadow and trauma and pain, like that, the sharing of that and how it allows us to connect with people and be a sense of resonance and yeah, shared humanity. So just thank you for the courage of sharing all that.

• 1:57:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I appreciate that. I had a facilitator at one point say to me, very, very experienced, probably 34 years of experience and.

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

  Very dry sense of humor, which I kind of appreciate, right? Because sometimes you don't want to be coddled. You don't want to be pitied. And she just has a very funny manner about her. Sometimes she'll say shit and you're like, is a therapist supposed to say that? But it's actually very refreshing. You know, it's more like having some very unrefined old friend who says some shit at a group dinner. And you're just like, oh, God, like, it's true, but oh, my God. Anyway, but she said to me at one point, you know, take the, take your, take the pain and make it part of your medicine. Like, that's how you give it meaning. Take your pain, make it part of your medicine. So that's what I've tried to do. And I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I did it.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  And I would say to people who maybe are listening or watching, who've had some of these experiences, could be a different shape, right? But something significant that left a lasting mark. It can take a million different forms, right? It could be like somebody passing away when you're young, somebody getting divorced when you're young. I mean, it could take a million different forms. And by the way, don't, don't eat, I wouldn't trivialize, but I also wouldn't deliberately exaggerate your trauma, right? Because you can have many documented cases of this. Two people in the same foxhole in a war. One person's incredibly traumatized with PTSD and all manner of issues afterwards. The other person's fine.

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  They're literally standing right next to each other inside a hole or squatting down. So depending on your sensitivity, like littler things can have a big impact, but just make sure it's not performative. Make sure you're not using it in any kind of theatrical performative way to make an impact on other people. It's very seductive because that does get rewarded in today's landscape. But the most important message I would say is if you've had any of that stuff, number one, you're clearly not alone, which I also felt was important just to drive home with the podcast and everything else that I did around it. Secondly, like you can, there are tools out there. There are frameworks out there.

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  There are forms of support that can make a huge difference. So if we look at, say, my life 20

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  2013 and prior, I was probably having, I don't know what the number is, but it's like three to five, let's say, major depressive episodes a year. And each one would last anywhere from a few weeks to like two months. Sounds like a lot of the year was spent grappling with these incredibly debilitating depressive episodes, but I would compartmentalize and I could, I could still kind of drive through very high pain tolerance and do stuff. But then look at me now and I have, I don't know, maybe let's call it

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  one or two depressive episodes on the order of two or three weeks every two years, maybe. Those are two completely different human experiences, right? And that's as a result of doing these various things. It's like there are tools and no one tool works for everybody. But if you look at the portfolio of, let's just say, you know, half a dozen or a dozen different options, it's like some combination or maybe one in isolation might work and can have a tremendous impact. So like, it's not hopeless. In other words, I could say it's very far from hopeless.

• 2:01:33André Duqum?

  Yeah, that I just appreciate the, uh, how important and the reflecting and like the balance is because it is both like a, an addressing of what's in the rearview mirror, but then also the rebuilding of things and what's, what's to come that like living a life that is meaningful and, and going after things that like light us up so much. I, which hopefully isn't too, too much of a, of a right turn in the conversation, but I am curious as somebody who's spent so much time thinking about what to think about, thinking about what to spend time on, you know, like what is going to be meaningful, what to choose your spend and your, spend your life and time and energy going after.

• 2:02:15André Duqum?

  As individuals, myself included, everybody that's listening, want to live a life and so to speak squeeze the juice out of life in the most meaningful way we can and be able to look back in the rearview mirror when we're 80, 90, 100 and say that was a life worth living. What are, if there is a predominant question or two that allows us to like reflect on and has allowed you to really choose what's worth spending your time on in life? I'd be really curious to hear.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, my answer to that would certainly have changed over the years. But if I look back at the best decisions, right, let's say I look at like the last decade of past year reviews. Cause I have those, which is pretty sweet when you think about it.

• 2:03:04André Duqum?

  That's cool.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  And then I look at some of the patterns that I spot that I can then turn into rules I can test. Right? A few things come to mind. So one is for each project. So I don't have any long-term career plan, never have. Don't have a five-year plan, don't have a 10-year plan. What I do have is generally, let's call it six to 12-month projects, where I'm optimizing for two things. One is learning as much as possible. The second is developing or deepening relationships. So either relationships with new, interesting people,

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  often these are tied together, or deepening relationships with people I already know. And what that has is the natural consequences. When you, when you have a project, let's just say it's six to 12-month project, that could be anything, right? It could be a book, it could be a freelancing gig, could be experimenting with a new way of doing speaking engagements, which I don't do a whole lot of, but you get the idea. Could be anything. And this is also something you can do. If you have a full-time job, this could be like a moonlighting thing you do evenings, weekends, whatever, right? It doesn't, doesn't require that you have complete freedom, as we talked about.

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  If that project fails by external metrics, right? It doesn't sell, people don't like it. For whatever reason, it ends up not coming to fruition, whatever. If you're investing in learning as much as possible and new and deepened relationships, that transcends that project. Like, those things persist after that project, and then you have another project. And these snowball, they start to accumulate, and it's very, very, very hard to fail long term. So if you select projects that way, which I've done for, I would say, at least since 2008, man, it's really hard to fail.

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  You just can't be short-term greedy. Or you can't be excessively short-term greedy. You can be a long-term, really ambitious, but that would be the cliff notes. Now, the newer addition in the last handful of years, and I think as you get older, this becomes more obvious, is choosing, in a sense, I'll paraphrase a friend of mine, Derek Sivers. So Derek Sivers, people can look him up, he's amazing. Sort of like philosopher king programmer, used to be the ringleader of a traveling circus, I'm not making this up, incredible musician, bizarre, awesome guy.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  A really incredible author, and a unique life for himself and for enabling that in his family. And these sort of pithy one-liners do not apply all the time. But one of his is like, choose the option that gives you the most options. Right? Okay. Like, as an exercise, you could say, all right, well, what if I tried to live that for two weeks or something like that? What I have realized is, the way you might think of that initially is, well, say, from a business perspective, how do I choose the thing that allows me to do the most eclectic mix of different things afterwards? But I don't think that's the right question, at least not for me. The right question is, which thing can I do?

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  And it doesn't necessarily have to be isolated, right? I could do, I have multiple projects running all the time. And that's how I like to do things, not the only way. But we could talk about, like, what do I have running in parallel right now? We could talk about, I don't think I've ever really talked about that kind of thing, but...

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  What is the thing that you can do that will give you the most energy? And this isn't like a hand wavy thing. Energy is just, you feel charged by it and it gives you a greater ability to fill your battery so that you can apply it to everything else. That's it. And that has become a really critical component of me choosing things. Or saying yes or no to breakfasts or dinners, or frankly, like this conversation, right? You asked me before we started recording, like, how do you choose what to do? I'm like, do I feel like this is going to be energy in or energy out? And then if this is energy in, it's like, all right, I'm going to a dinner after this. I'll be fully tapped up for that dinner.

• 2:07:39Speaker 02

  And then maybe that'll drag into tomorrow and I'll still have extra battery. That's pretty sweet. And that is the fundamental currency and fuel that you need to execute on anything else. So it's learning as much as possible. Relationships on a project by project basis, those snowball over time. And then to keep that snowball moving, you need energy. And as someone who's had Lyme disease twice, I grew up on Long Island. It is a motherfucker of an issue. And people in my family have, you know, the alpha gal syndrome where they can't eat mammalian meat. Like ticks are a real problem. But the point is I had undiagnosed Lyme and I only realized that when I got it the second time.

• 2:08:24Speaker 02

  I'm like, you have the long-term antibodies. So I have battled fatigue. And not to be confused with the, anyway, I'll just call it chronic fatigue for simplicity, for most of my life, for one reason or another. Depression also certainly can lead to a kind of lethargy. So this question of energy has always been top of mind. And there are things you can do from a lifestyle perspective. Diet, intermittent fasting, stabilizing your glucose metabolism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can do all the cold plunges in the world that you want, but if you're choosing the wrong projects, you're just going to have battery leak all day long. So those would be a few ways that I pick projects.

• 2:08:58André Duqum?

  What is, if you can just give the quick, high level overview of all those parallels that you're simultaneously running in your life? And then why coyote is in addition? Why was that?

• 2:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, why coyote?

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, why coyote? All right, so the things I have running in parallel, I mean, just to give you a sample, right? I have, because like the four hour work week, just to be clear, right? Because I can see where people are going to jump on this, is about maximizing your per hour output. It's up to you how many hours you work. It's not about like, working on drop shipping for four hours a week and then just watching paint dry for the rest of your life. That's not what it's about. So in my case, right now, the things that I enjoy doing and that I spend time on are a lot of startup investing and early stage investing. A lot of it goes into science right now. It was like on the car ride here for this, I was looking at a video recorded by a scientist

• 2:09:51Speaker 02

  overseas explaining a graph for software that might be possible or might be effective. And I think it is actually, based on the clinical data and my own experience, for improving eyesight or vision, I should say specifically, because it's not fixing anything in the eye. All right, so I was looking at that on the way here. I find that really interesting. Like, I'm seeing what's coming five, 10 years from now, in a lot of cases. So there's the startup stuff. There's an 800-page draft of a book that I have, which I've tabled for now to focus on coyote, which we'll come back to. But that is in a serviceable, rough draft condition. It needs to be substantially shortened, but that's an entire book on saying no, and the power of saying no, how to do it, real templates, actual exchanges where you show how it gets messy, because it does.

• 2:10:36Speaker 02

  So there's the book draft, and I have a private community established that's been helping me with proofreading. Then I have, there's a bunch of personal stuff, right? So I'm like organizing, helping to organize the events that are planned for the Day of the Dead, week with friends, Japan trip, that's going to be two weeks, and I happen to know a lot about it. So, you know, we're trying to decide on, on the way here also, I was trying to decide on the seating arrangement at the sumo.

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  Event that we want to attend in Japan and it's like for certain rows, I've never been to one live. It's like, are you allowed to have more than eight fingers? That's a Yakuza joke if anybody gets it, but it's like, what's the protocol? How do we get these tickets? So it's like figuring that kind of stuff. I was just, you know, a lot of that type of thing right now because why? Because that's fun. And part of the reason of doing these events, by the way, it's not the week that you spend. It's creating a WhatsApp group for the people going and you have two months of payoff leading up to it. And then like two months afterwards. It's like a five month, you know, four to five month payoff for a week long trip. It's incredible. Anyway, so spend a bunch of time on that.

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  I and then have three relatives right now with advancing Alzheimer's or different forms of dementia. I'm taking care of two of them and there's a lot of medical and I'm very, very happy that I took the time over decades to develop a certain degree of literacy with medicine and science. So that has been an incredible and also very sad, but rewarding journey to take care of two of these relatives. And it's, it's very intensive. And I have access to some incredible people. So figuring out what to do there, that was probably an hour and a half of my day today.

• 2:12:30Speaker 02

  And it'll be another hour after this as I'm driving to dinner. Then we've got future creative projects. So brainstorming what that might look like. Possible, I've always wanted to make a feature film. I have a script that's like 70% done that I did like 15 years ago. Then I'm thinking of dusting off now that the AI tools are good enough that I could actually screw around just using AI with prompts, because I do feel like questions and prompts or something I'm pretty good at. So this would be a few. I mean, if I looked at my calendar, I could probably give you four or five more. And then the, then the question is like, how do you actually work with all that without having your head explode?

• 2:13:15Speaker 02

  And sometimes your head just explodes. There's no way around it, but I break up my week as a weekly architecture. So Tuesday, for instance, is all team calls, admin, lawyers, accountants, et cetera.

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  It's all the stuff that I find somewhat draining. I batch it into one day, so I'm able to rip off the mandated recordings on, oh yeah, totally forgot about this thing called the podcast that has whatever 1. something billion downloads now. Yeah, so I do, I record the podcast on Monday and Fridays typically, 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. my time. So everything is very tightly bracketed in that way. And then in this particular week, you know, things are all specked down. And then I've got, you know, my elbow surgery in my low back and like physical components and so on. But that gives you an idea. You can do that. You can do all that stuff without being

• 2:14:08Speaker 02

  excessively stressed out. It is imminently possible. And then Coyote, this- How is that giving you energy? Well, Coyote, this is the first thing I've ever done where the implicit goal of this is social fun, right? It's a card game. Yeah, so Coyote is a card game. And I spent two years developing this with a company called Exploding Kittens, which made Exploding Kittens. They've made dozens of amazing games. And I got to meet someone named Alan Lee. He was a genius. He worked on the original Xbox, helped to develop Halo as lead game designer, created effectively

• 2:14:48Speaker 02

  augmented reality. And yeah, so simple deck of cards. And before I get to, well, I'll explain now what the game is, and then I'll explain like the genesis story. So the game, there are a lot of Easter eggs on the card box. I will let people dig into that if they want. You can find it everywhere. Amazon, Target, Walmarts, and 8,000 retail locations right now. And has like, close to 400 million social views of gameplay, which is insane. I saw some of those viral. Yeah, so we've, we've tested the hell out of this. The reason I wanted to make this, I grew up with Dungeons and Dragons, and that was a huge part of my life. It taught me teamwork. It was my escape from bullying.

• 2:15:32Speaker 02

  I was very, very small, so it was just me and a handful of nerds. Storytelling, like things that ultimately really helped me in life, not just professionally, but personally. And when I look at what I'm observing in my friends, in couples who have kids, in their kids, in my audience, this will not be a surprise to anyone, but the trend lines for chronic anxiety, depression, addiction, everything appears to be hockey sticking up and to the right. And the answer to that is not more productivity. The answer to that is not more physical training, although that is helpful, exercise and so on, of course.

• 2:16:16Speaker 02

  I think the missing component, as far as I can tell, it's my best guess, is social interaction. And if, if an overdose of digital is the, the disease, then some degree of analog, I think, is sort of the, the antidote, right? The offset. But how do I get people to do that? Right, so for the 10th anniversary of the podcast, I used River, which is this amazing platform for in-person gatherings. And we had this huge celebration, 150 plus cities around the world with people gathering. And those people have stayed in touch. That was the point. The point was not to celebrate the podcast. That's fun. And I popped into a bunch of Zoom rooms and stuff, but it was to get like-minded people together

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  so they would actually spend time off of screens. And D and D is an amazing game, but it, it is a full commit. Like it is very, very involved. And so I started to ask myself, like, what could I do to possibly help offset some of these really disturbing trend lines? And I was like, I love games. I want to play more games in my life. I want to spend more time with my friends. Sure, I have like a week blocked off once a quarter. That's like a macro dose. Like, how do you microdose? Playing with your friends. Well, there are a lot of different ways to do it. I saw some musical instruments here. That's a great way to do it. And this is an easy way to do it. It's a light lift. So I wanted to create a casual, fast game.

• 2:17:44Speaker 02

  You can learn in a few minutes. Each game is about 10 minutes long. That is highly, highly, highly social. Trojan horses, I think it's also very good for your brain. I don't want to make too many claims about that, but I think it's pretty interesting. So Coyote is, after trying dozens of different games and prototyping and everything, it's, I would describe it as rock, paper, scissors, with like 20 different gestures on steroids, where you can sabotage other players. And you have to keep a beat and do these various gestures and say certain things. As you go around in a circle, each player has three lives. Last person standing wins. That's it. Shocking how hard and involved it is to make a game that is simple to play.

• 2:18:30Speaker 02

  Like it's 66 cards. Exactly. Why is that? Why is it not 57 or 72? Like, there's a reason. But we don't have to get into the process. We can. But fundamentally, Exploding Kittens, their thesis, and they make a lot of great games, like Poetry for Neanderthals and many, many, many others that are bestsellers. The premise is, we don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the players entertaining. This is a really, it's fun to sit with that because you could actually apply that to what you do on a podcast, right? You could apply it to what I do in a book, where you're actually looking at the actions that the people might take as opposed to the content in and of itself, right?

• 2:19:15Speaker 02

  But, but long story short, that is, that's Coyote. And Coyote is so named because of the trickster mythology in many different cultures. And you play these gestures and each person gets to pull off three cards and then play a card. And that could be a coyote card. It could be an attack card, where you're sabotaging people. And then you have blank cards. So every family, every group of friends gets to make their own. Set of different house rules, so to speak. So it's been a huge hit. It's it's actually gone super, super well.

• 2:19:53Speaker 02

  And it is a it is a wedge in the door for people to just have an easy way after dinner, when everybody's going to split in an hour, to do something fun that bonds people. There's it's I mean, it's hilarious. There's there's a lot of laughter. I mean, I could give some examples of some funny cards that people have made.

• 2:20:18Speaker 02

  Well, I'll give you one. So I was hanging out with a bunch of my friends, a couple of like Aker yogis and a couple of folks in Austin, which is like high density, just like LA for that kind of thing. And they may or may not have been a little high, which does not make you better at the game, but it makes it a lot of fun for me to watch. I'm sure. And this one woman got a blank card. And she's like, all right, I'm gonna make a blank card. And so her blank card is whoever landed on that card had to go, I like, and give everyone the finger and say, I like, like Borat. And I don't think it was just the weed.

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  Fucking hilarious. It's a good one. It's really good. And I've seen other families, like kids slay this game because their reaction speed's really fast, which is awesome, because it's a game that adults can play with kids where the adults don't have to try to lose. Like, the kids are very likely to beat you.

• 2:21:14Speaker 02

  So it's been a blast. It's been a blast. And this is an example of a project where you choose the project of getting to learn a ton about game design, mass retail, distribution, all these things I know nothing about, games and TikTok. I do not really use TikTok. So this is a whole new education on a lot of subtleties around that platform. And I'm getting time to I'm getting a lot of time with this incredible team, like one of the the absolute best independent game developers for tabletop stuff. Alan Lee, who's incredible, you should have him on the show. He's just such a polymath. This is the CEO who worked on like the Xbox and has done all this stuff, also a very

• 2:21:56Speaker 02

  intimidating hacker on a couple of different levels, fascinating guy. So I get to hang out with him. I was hanging out with him yesterday. And if this game never even got published, it's a win, huge win. Absolutely a huge win. It did get published and we tested it with at least 100 plus families beforehand where they videotaped gameplay and we tweaked all this stuff. So, so we know it works. I play with my friends, you know, I brought a pack and a rubber band on the trip to Montana. Like you can play it on the ground, you can just like smack your legs. So that's Coyote in a nutshell.

• 2:22:32André Duqum?

  Definitely gonna clip you speaking like Borat flipping everyone off.

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  I like.

• 2:22:38André Duqum?

  Clip it.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  And it's been a blast. It's been a blast and it also is, it's an example of something I would call, so Coyote is an example of identity diversification. This is something I think about a lot.

• 2:22:54André Duqum?

  I've heard you speak to this a bunch.

• 2:22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's for me, it's important because if you have a single startup, a single project, a single relationship where you expect too much of your partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, right? And you expect them to be all things in all ways. That type of concentration is really risky and it is true with what you commit to yourself to professionally also, where there's so many elements outside of your control with anything, right? Like China tariffs on a game like that, or any physical game in the United States, for instance, where the outcome is not guaranteed, right? Like YouTube and every social platform suddenly decide to throttle organic reach and make you pay for boosts.

• 2:23:40Speaker 02

  I mean, that could change your business model, right? But if you have a couple of irons in the fire, which is part of the reason I do things in parallel, right? So I have, or let's just say you've got your nine to five job, you've got maybe like intramural sports or some kind of competition with friends, doesn't need to be super intense, but it's a thing where there's, there are score points, you know, where there are points on the scoreboard. Maybe you have like a gym or rock climbing where you have more metrics. You don't always need metrics, but it's helpful. And then you've got a few other things that you're playing around with. If one is doing really poorly.

• 2:24:19Speaker 02

  It doesn't mean that your entire self-identity and self-worth crater, which is a big risk. I've been in that position. A lot of people are because there are payoffs for being focused. But if it's 100% all of your eggs in one basket from an identity perspective, I've just seen too many people implode. And again, there's a survivorship bias. You hear about the people who made it work. But man, is there just

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  just a battlefield full of bodies that didn't quite make it psychologically. So that's why also I wanted to try something completely out of left field because if this even partially works, well, then I could, I could potentially close the doors on the podcast tomorrow. I don't plan on it. And like, okay, I'm going to be a full-time game designer for a year or two. See what that looks like because this is enough, you know, hopefully if it does super well to like cover the bare minimum of expenses or whatever. Although frankly, I mean, we priced it so that it would be really kind of a no-brainer at like 9.99. I wouldn't make your retirement plan making really inexpensive card games.

• 2:25:23Speaker 02

  But you get the idea.

• 2:25:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  And that's been important for me psychologically to feel like I have kind of multiple doors out of the room. And that's another reason.

• 2:25:34André Duqum?

  But much like a financial portfolio, you put all your, all your eggs in one basket, get into one stock and Dogecoin.

• 2:25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta be careful. Like it could work out.

• 2:25:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:44Speaker 02

  And if it works, that person's gonna be on the message boards and social media telling you how well it worked.

• 2:25:49André Duqum?

  I mean, we're here to taste the rainbow. We gotta diversify and experience the different aspects.

• 2:25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it takes, yeah, it takes very little to diversify. I mean, honestly, it's like if you're just doing zone two and tracking your heart rate and your heart rate goes slightly down over the course of two weeks at the same wattage or something. And so you feel really good about that. But holy shit, something terrible happens in your business for reasons outside of your control, or maybe you just made a really bad mistake. It's, it like that tiny difference is often enough safety net to prevent you from spiraling into someplace really dark.

• 2:26:27André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:30André Duqum?

  Amazing, man. I feel like we could continue talking for three hours about so many avenues we've yet to touch, but I thought it might be nice to just have a bit of a rapid fire and we'll see if we can titrate these to

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is the guy who has an 800-page draft. I'll try to keep my answers short.

• 2:26:47André Duqum?

  Yeah, sure, fire away. All right, let's go for it. Given that a lot of these questions, we could probably dive in so much further on. As somebody who's like, this podcasting gig job is so unique, where you get to craft your own bespoke university degree about the areas and topics of life you're most uniquely passionate about. So anytime I get to talk to somebody who's been doing it for so long, I, there's, there's a lot of questions that come up. I'm just curious how your definition of what it means to be an extraordinary human has evolved? Because you've met people that are high performers, world-class performers, athletes in so many different arenas. But what is it about the quality of somebody, and maybe how well-balanced they are, or whatever, whatever you feel most called, that, that

• 2:27:31André Duqum?

  you've like, come to admire most now in this day and age?

• 2:27:36Speaker 02

  I think there are two things that come to mind. One is, they feel pretty good about what they're doing. That sounds so simplistic, but even people who are sometimes the very best at what they do, have all sorts of misgivings and insecurities and second guesses about what they're up to. Not always, not always. But they may have also made certain interpersonal sacrifices that make it a parry victory, right? Which is why you have to be very careful with modeling successful people, which usually means there's some component of financial reward. But if they're on their third or fourth divorce, not on speaking terms with

• 2:28:17Speaker 02

  their kids, I would be very careful about copying and pasting that blueprint.

• 2:28:22André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:23Speaker 02

  Right? And that then leads to the second thing, which is just the quality of their relationships. That's it. Like, if I meet somebody, and I have a lot of friends, I feel very fortunate in this category, who

• 2:28:36Speaker 02

  Have great relationships with their kids and like, yeah, okay, their teenage girls bust their balls a bunch and that's part of their job. So it's fine, but fundamentally it's like they, they spend a lot of quality time with family and friends. That rarely happens by accident. And I've come to admire the art and craft of doing that as much as sometimes the science and engineering of creating a billion dollar startup. Because that money will, that startup can do a lot of good in some cases and that money will solve your money problems. It's not going to solve all your problems. So the interpersonal relationships, the quality of relationships, people are

• 2:29:19Speaker 02

  really adept at that. I've come to admire just how conscious they are about making sure that's the case for sure.

• 2:29:33André Duqum?

  What's, what's one recent most significant change of mind you've had recently?

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• 2:30:40Speaker 02

  Most significant change of mind.

• 2:30:46Speaker 02

  I really revised my thinking on intermittent fasting. I was very skeptical of intermittent fasting as compared to more extended fasting. I have done a lot of more extended fasting, three to 10 days, water only, possibly adding some electrolytes or supplemental fats, which would be called dirty fasting by some people. But the benefits seem pretty undeniable on a number of levels. Intermittent fasting, I was always skeptical of because I knew a few people who owned DEXA scanning clinics. And they told me based on thousands of scans that most people they saw who were trying intermittent fasting lost a lot of muscle mass.

• 2:31:31Speaker 02

  But sadly felt good about it because they were simply watching the scale most of the time and their weight was dropping and their goal was weight loss. But I have since revised that after a few months of experimenting with it and really ensuring that I'm doing proper weight training and consuming enough protein and doing basics. But even within an eight hour window, I've been shocked at what you can accomplish in terms of physical recomposition and in terms of producing biomarker changes that are frankly pretty hard to believe. I mean, my doctor's just like, what are you doing? And these are very, very good doctors.

• 2:32:15Speaker 02

  That's one place where I'm happy to overspend is doctors. And they're like, huh, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, it's been life changing for me for sure. So that's, that's, that's, I'd say one. Another would be, and I've always leaned towards the adult's ability to adapt in ways that might be perceived by a lot of people as fixed. But since I'm in my late 40s and a lot of people start to experience presbyopia, so stiffening of the lens of the eye and they have trouble reading, so they're holding their iPhone out like this. And that is just kind of viewed as inevitable.

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  Get glasses, you get greater magnification and then so it goes. And sometimes you can use eye drops and things like that. But looking at this new software that I was mentioning earlier from this startup that's commercializing some clinical research, it's shocking how you can train your brain to compensate for this lack of accommodation of the lens. And I went from not being able to read a menu in a dim restaurant to being totally fine.

• 2:33:28André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 2:33:28Speaker 02

  To the extent that friends were like, what are you doing? Because they all have readers. Like, once they did. Might be 40, might be 45. Like, everybody's got reading glasses.

• 2:33:38André Duqum?

  Is there a quick resource for people if they want to explore them more?

• 2:33:41Speaker 02

  I can't do it yet. To come. It'll be coming soon.

• 2:33:44André Duqum?

  Excited for that. Can't wait to see that.

• 2:33:46Speaker 02

  It's very exciting. It's just another example of where science is always a placeholder. And I do think the scientific method is the best framework we have for not fooling ourselves currently. But it's always a placeholder. So whenever someone says, well, this is fixed. You have a fixed number of X and then they degenerate and you're done. Or there's this inevitable structural change. There's nothing you can do about it. I always have questions about that. It was wild to see that in an example where you're literally viewing the world through a degenerated lens and you can train things upstream to compensate for that. It's, it's, it's pretty mind blowing.

• 2:34:29Speaker 02

  So that's, that's another one.

• 2:34:34André Duqum?

  Strange one, but I'm just curious. If you had to have dinner with three fictional characters, would they be?

• 2:34:40Speaker 02

  Fictional characters. Zorba the Greek, from the book Zorba the Greek. Everyone should read that book. It is outstanding. Zorba the Greek, just for comedic effect. Probably be pretty disruptive. So Zorba the Greek, then fictional character.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  One of the women who is a master of the tarot deck from a book called Little Big by John Crowley, which is one of the most confusing fever dream books anyone could ever read. I hesitate to recommend it.

• 2:35:14André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:15Speaker 02

  Like, 2 out of 10 people will read it and be like, "That absolutely blew my mind and made me feel like I was in a psychedelic experience for two weeks." And 8 out of 10 will be like, "Tim, that was the worst book you could have read."

• 2:35:25André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 2:35:25Speaker 02

  But the family in this book and the web of women in this book is really fascinating to me. So maybe one of those. I'm trying to think also of the group dynamics.

• 2:35:40André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at you go.

• 2:35:41Speaker 02

  And then probably one of these archetypal

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  sort of young men who become an amazing leader, like a Paul Atreides, but he would be such a sourpuss at a dinner. So I don't think I'd take Paul Atreides. I think I would probably choose someone along those lines, though. But I would need someone playful. If you've got a tarot card slash sort of Sixth Sense person, and then you have Zorba the Greek, you're gonna need someone who can kind of roll with that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna break the rules. I'm gonna actually pull in a real person. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist. I think those three would get along.

• 2:36:23André Duqum?

  That would be a fun conversation.

• 2:36:24Speaker 02

  That would be a fun dinner. And there would definitely be plenty of booze.

• 2:36:29André Duqum?

  All right. If you had a message on a billboard, what would it be?

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  I'd have two. I'd have, I'd have one on either side. So one would be, and I'm borrowing from a podcast guest, hospice care physician named BJ Miller, who helped thousands of people to die. "Don't believe everything you think."

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  Then on the other side, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting the attribution right, but I would have a quote from Rumi, and who knows if it's translated properly, but

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  "Be suspicious of what you want." Be suspicious of what you want. Those would be the two.

• 2:37:06André Duqum?

  It's a fire duo. It's a good one-two punch.

• 2:37:08Speaker 02

  You can solve a lot of problems by starting with one of those.

• 2:37:12André Duqum?

  All right, I'm just gonna throw some Tim Ferriss questions at you as kind of like glass rapid fire.

• 2:37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:19André Duqum?

  Purchase of $100 or less that's most impactful, been impactful for you the past year or two?

• 2:37:23Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 2:37:28Speaker 02

  Different types of exogenous ketones. There are some, there's, there's new technology on the horizon, new molecules.

• 2:37:36André Duqum?

  I feel like you're always bubbling with all these like to come innovative.

• 2:37:40Speaker 02

  Well, they're coming soon. I'd say within the next few months, but there are examples out there. There's some very clever concoctions. One is ketone, Q I T O N E. There's a mono ester and others that folks have made like Delta G is one company. Those would be two that I experiment with. I mean, I took one 10 minutes before this conversation. And plus MCT oil, the combination of those two gives you a

• 2:38:08Speaker 02

  more extended release and can help in a number of different ways. I think that there are more interesting molecules coming, but

• 2:38:18Speaker 02

  they can be a little pricey. But for a hundred bucks, you could get probably five to 20 doses. And for verbal acuity and just general speed of cognitive turnover, pretty interesting. So I would, I would, I would give that answer because you can apply that to so many things.

• 2:38:39Speaker 02

  If you're going to use them, be close to a bathroom. The first few times, high risk of disaster pants. So consider yourself warned, especially if you're taking caffeine at the same time.

• 2:38:52André Duqum?

  Most high leverage advice you'd give to your younger self?

• 2:38:56Speaker 02

  Probably sign up for a transcendental meditation course. And I would give that advice versus the broader advice of start meditating. Because I would have needed the specifics and the accountability. And ultimately I did. That is the

• 2:39:15Speaker 02

  key catalyzing moment that led me into more regular meditation. And there's a million different ways to do it, but I would say, and there are things that I find kind of silly about TM. But man, is it simple. You're just, you're given a sound, you repeat that sound. You do it twice a day, the twice a day is important. 20 minutes a day. And the reason I say sign up for a course is because you will have an instructor who holds you accountable. You meditate with them, not every day, but then they will be holding you accountable, like a sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, to do your meditating. And you don't want to look like an asshole, so you will actually do it. And you're paying for it on top of that, the right sun cost.

• 2:39:59Speaker 02

  So I would probably say, sign up for a TM course. And then, once you have some degree of momentum and you've done it consistently for a few months, yeah, sure, feel free to use the apps, like right now, and I'm involved with it, so full disclosure, but I use the Way app by Henry Schuchman. I think it's absolutely top class for like logical sequence of developing skills that you can then apply in other places. But I would start with someone holding you accountable.

• 2:40:29André Duqum?

  Tim, there are many more questions to come, and we'll have more conversations, I'm sure, in the future, but I just wanted to say, as you know, getting to do this podcast thing, as you grow and you gain access to more individuals to sit down with and have conversations who...

• 2:40:46André Duqum?

  Can't believe you just did that. I see.

• 2:40:49Speaker 02

  The ghost in the shell. I knew it was coming.

• 2:40:53André Duqum?

  Right, as I was about to share.

• 2:40:57Speaker 02

  That was so good.

• 2:40:58André Duqum?

  That was good. Good timing.

• 2:40:59Speaker 02

  You gotta keep that in.

• 2:41:02André Duqum?

  So I'm gonna just hit a high C now on a piano across the room. But as you know, it's like, and I'm sure you experienced this countless times, where you get to see you have a parasocial relationship with somebody online, and they've been impactful for your journey, a point of inspiration for what's possible in the podcast space, nonetheless, of like, all the other, you know, areas that you share. And so it's just, it's really cool for me to be able to do this, to meet you, to connect, have this conversation, and hopefully create a space that is conducive and gives you energy and, and all the things. So it's just, I live for this kind of stuff, so thank you.

• 2:41:37Speaker 02

  Thanks, man. Yeah. That's very kind of you to say. And I'm excited to see what you do. You got a lot of, you know, obviously, fingers crossed, who knows with the world out there, but runway to do very interesting things, and you've got a lot of momentum early. So I'm excited to see where you go and experiment with the identity diversification. And make sure you have, I would say, just a couple of irons in the fire because the landscape can change really quickly. But, man, you're doing a great job.

• 2:42:06André Duqum?

  Thank you.

• 2:42:07Speaker 02

  So, thanks for having me.

• 2:42:08André Duqum?

  Thank you, man. Appreciate you. We'll leave links down where everyone can stay connected with you. Your work, Coyote, which is available on Amazon, Walmart, Target, all over.

• 2:42:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Coyote game, just look for, look for the, uh, the orange and green.

• 2:42:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:21Speaker 02

  Or put my name in there.

• 2:42:22André Duqum?

  Congrats, man. That's exciting. I appreciate you. We did it. Until next time, be well, guys. Boom.

• 2:42:27Speaker 02

  Thanks, everybody.