#01 - Tim Ferriss: depression, psychedelics, and emotional resilience

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peteratea Drive. I'm your host, Peter Itia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions I've gathered along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of those successful top-performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you with a higher quality, more fulfilling life.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at PeterItiaMD.com. Welcome to episode one of the Peter Itia Drive. I can think of no better person to begin this podcast with than my very dear friend, Tim Ferriss. Not only is Tim a really close friend, but he's also almost single-handedly the reason this podcast is coming into existence.

In other words, if you hate it, you can blame Tim. Tim has been kind of on my case for about two years to do this, and more than anything else, he's just really helped me think about how I can sort of put something together that allows me to create something that is sort of new and isn't already out there in terms of content, but also something that I'll find enjoyable to do, and that hopefully will come across as this podcast gets underway. I'm guessing most people listening to this note a lot about Tim, but on the off chance that there are some who don't, I think it's just worth kind of giving a little bit of background on Tim. He's been described as a quote, a cross between Jack Welsh and a Buddhist monk by the New York Times.

He's one of Fast Company's most innovative business people. He's an early stage tech investor and advisor, and that includes a number of companies that most people have heard of such as Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Alibaba, and least 50 others. He's also the author of five number one New York Times bestsellers and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, The Four Hour Workweek, The Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, also known as Biggest Tools. That's an inside joke in reference to the podcast, and Tribe of Mentors.

The Observer and other media outlets have described him as the Oprah of audio due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has about 300 million downloads at the time of this recording. It's also been selected as the best of iTunes for three years running. Now, I want to say something about this episode that will become apparent, obviously, once we get started. One, we talk a lot about things that are topics that Tim and I don't really spend a lot of time discussing publicly and certainly personally.

And so it's important to understand here that while Tim and I do talk quite openly about psychedelic experiences we've shared in South America, it shouldn't be taken to mean that that's what we're recommending that anybody go out and do. We're absolutely not doing that. There are physical, there are psychological and there are legal risks among these things. And it's important to remember that in the United States at the time of this recording, psychedelics, like psilocybin, which we speak about quite a bit, along with masculine and things that we don't get into much detail around such as ayahuasca, these are currently Schedule 1, which means that they are illegal.

And while we believe that designation is completely unwarranted and will likely, you know, eventually no longer be the case when the scientific community has a chance to catch up and understand the great potential of these things, really the purpose of this podcast is informational only. I do generally provide a disclaimer at the end of my podcast that explains that all of this information is informational. I want to be really clear about this particular issue. We talk a lot about these things.

We talk about a few other things as well. And I think even for the listener who doesn't find this topic to be particularly interesting, one thing that we talk about at the very end of the podcast that I've been meaning to ask Tim for a while and certainly I get asked a lot is what are the things that you still incorporate in your daily routine. Tim has written so eloquently about this stuff and has codified so many ways to find these minimum effective doses and to optimize everything he's doing. But I think people wonder, hey, which are the things that have really stood the test of time?

And so I actually found that last part of the podcast to be especially interesting, even for me, though I knew these things and I can see all the things that Tim does day in and day out, but to sort of have him say, look, if I had to pick five, these would be the five. Tim can be found all over the place, but I think the best places to see him are on his blog, which is Tim.blog. You can follow him at T. Ferris.

That's F-E-R-I-S-S on Twitter. And you find him at Tim Ferris on Facebook and Instagram. I hope you enjoy this first episode half as much as I enjoyed recording it and there will be a lot more of these to follow. So with all of that said, please welcome Tim Ferris.

Tim, Peter, thank you for having me on Austin this weekend. My pleasure. It's been a good weekend. Good to you too.

Yeah, what I can't believe is in the relatively short period of time you have lived here, you've become essentially the unofficial mayor of Austin. Well, I like to get involved and to explore all the various nooks and crannies of any city that I live in. And after 17 years in the Bay Area, I felt like I'd left almost no stone. Unturned, many dear friends are still there, but many of them have traveled outside.

And one of the places that was an annual migration was stopped by South West here in Austin and had wanted to move here right after college. Got into know it year by year with increasingly longer stays in the city before and after the festival itself. And now it's home. Couldn't be happier.

I feel like every place we went in the last three days, everybody knew you like the owner of the restaurant, would know you and the coffee shop. I don't think I've drank more coffee and topo Chico in a short period of time. It's a lot of three days. Yes, coffee, topo Chico.

And so many things here. Breakfast, tacos, something I haven't yet explored. That's another form of religion here right next to barbecue and bunch of other things. But it's a cozy feel.

It has a neighborhood feel and I've come to value that type of neighborhood feel and cohesion, which is something I probably wouldn't have paid much attention to 10 years ago. Yeah, I've sort of always assumed I would live forever in California. And I kind of say all your hard work here to get your friends to move out here. I think it's going to pay off.

I think I can see Austin in my future. Yeah, I have a lot of friends are moving. And I think in many respects, it's defined by the fact that it's difficult to categorize. There is no one mono conversation about tech or entertainment or finance.

And some people might view that as a weakness, meaning if you're looking to live in the epic center of a certain industry and you're in your early 20s and want to cut your teeth and live that hyper kinetic super aggressive lifestyle while you're building your foundation for the future. That's one thing. But in my case, I'm much more so in placing value on the general friendliness, the cultural diversity, which is not just skin deep. It covers so many different bases here.

And I enjoy the fact that you can go from a strict vegan restaurant to a deer processing plant to an electric scooter startup office to a cowboy boot store all in the stretch of a few blocks. That's exciting to me. And though I've never really bought the argument that people in New York and Southern California, which are the two places I spend most of my time are, you know, I've never bought the argument that those are snotty, super snotty places and nobody's nice because I do think that people are actually pretty decent everywhere, including in the middle of Manhattan. But that said, it's a different level of nice here that is completely foreign to me.

Yeah, it is. I remember when I first moved to Austin and I had a number of neighbors drop off cards or come to the door to ring the bell to ask him. I want to come up for dinner and I didn't even know how to respond, which really told me more about myself than I was so mistrustful. But in San Francisco, that does not happen.

As far as I know, I've never heard of that happening. Certainly in New York, it would be time to check your security system and consider your avenues of getting out of the house. But here, that's just par for the course. And it's really been nice to embrace that.

And even within Texas, Austin is known for being very, very friendly. And I've met many different people here who've moved from Houston and other parts, which are also fantastic in their own way because of the general level of friendliness. I always thought I would be, felt the gravitational pull here when I graduated and did not get the job here that I was so coveted at Trilogy. And it turned out being a blessing to guys that I didn't get the job.

And I think also for Trilogy, because I most likely would have been a terrible employee. But that took me to NorCal. I had a great stint there. But that chapter came to a close and it was just the right time.

Well, as I said, it's been amazing to be here. Not my first time here, but each time I like it more and more. I guess with that said, we are kicking off effectively the first episode of a podcast that you, more than any other friend, although several friends have played an enormous role in the so-called Kajolan as I referred to it earlier in making this happen. So if this ends up sucking, I'm blaming you.

If this ends up doing okay, I'm thanking you. But either way, I think this will be fun. I think my customary 30% is very reasonable. 30% of what, right?

Now, obviously this podcast is on some level, and probably on a large level going to come down to things that I think a lot about and hope to bring to people. You asked me the other day, you know, what am I hoping to accomplish with this? And I don't have a great elevator pitch on it, but one of the things is I find myself so often having conversations with people that I think, God, this person is so much smarter than me and know so much more than me, and they're letting me be a sponge right now and absorb so much information from them. And so many times I find myself at the end of those discussions thinking, I can't believe nobody else got to hear that.

What if I didn't extract everything from that correctly? What if there was more to be gathered? And so it's really that desire to sort of have as many conversations as possible and be able to sort of share them in their natural state that I think is a large part of this motivation. And while most people sort of associate me, I suspect with thinking about longevity, we probably don't spend enough time talking about what longevity means, but the way I talk about it with my patients is it's both enhancing lifespan, but also health span.

And lifespan is the easier of those who understand because enhancing lifespan just means not dying, which is not to say that that's easy, but it's conceptually easy. I think the health span stuff is harder to understand, and as I have come to learn in the past three or four years, I believe for most people it actually matters more. Many people think, you know, if you helping me doesn't add one day to the length of my life but improves the quality of my life, especially at the end, that would be sufficient. And so in many ways, what I want to talk about today is one piece of health span that I know the least about by far, but also I think is the one that we are least likely to talk about as a society which is sort of mental health.

And so you've spoken really publicly about your interest in that. I knew a lot of this before you talked about it head, but can you tell me a little bit about that? Again, and thrilled you're doing a podcast because I do think that just as a bit of over land what you said, there is so much focus on extending lifespan rightly so, but the equal obsession, equal level of obsession that you bring to performance and health span, I think creates a compelling combination that I don't find in many places. I find the combination of those interests are common, but the combination of competencies, broadly speaking in both of those domains is very uncommon.

So I'm excited to listen to other episodes of the podcast. And as it relates to mental health, I should as maybe a introductory preamble say that this is not a topic I've always been comfortable talking about publicly. And in fact, I would say for the vast majority of my adolescents and certainly throughout high school and college, I somehow came to the conclusion that I was just not designed to be happy. That evolution did not optimize for happiness, and I just did not have the code for happy, and that was okay.

That I would be an instrument of competition. I would learn to be good at various things that were valued at colleges and then by the business world and so on. And that it was not worth trying to be happy or to not just love myself, but really have a high opinion of myself. And in fact, that was self-indulgent and that I would just focus on being the best competitor possible and hopefully turning that into something that was not only of value to me or that I was rewarded for, but that would help other people and that perhaps I would find some joy in the joy of other people, but that was the extent of it.

And suffered from many different bouts of extended depression for as long as I can recall, really. And that is also something that you can spot very easily looking back at my family history on both sides. And if you look back to grandparents and great, great, great parents, fair amount of alcohol consumption, certainly fair amount of alcoholism, I thankfully have not soothed myself with excessive amounts of alcohol, but you see a lot of patterns that scared me certainly, but the depression was one that I could just not seemingly navigate around. And the TED Talk opened with a particularly close call, the closest call I've ever had.

This is not a common experience for me, but in college, I can very, very close to killing myself. It actually got to the planning stages. It wasn't just rumination about what if I wonder what it would be like to take my life. No, it was a decision that had been made and I was already in the planning stages and to give people the short punchline to that, which explains why I'm here today.

I had reserved a book, which was going to be the last of many that I had read on this subject related to suicide. It was already checked out on the Firestone Library Princeton where I was at the time taking a year away from. And it was checked out to some other poor student, so I put in a request to be notified when it came back into the library, but I forgot to update my address at the registrar's office. And the address that I had on file after taking this leave of absence was my home address in New York where my parents lived.

And so my mom got this postcard, which was, here Tim Ferriss. This is to notify you that, and then whenever it was, you know, the final solution, that it out, whatever it might have been, the how to kill yourself manual has arrived. Please come to claim your book within the next number of weeks or release to the next person who has it on reservation, whatever the postcard said, and I got this very heartfelt, understandably nervous call from my mom with her voice cracking, asking about it. And I lied.

I said it was, I was very fast on my feet and I said it was for a friend at Rutgers who wasn't able to get the book for a dissertation or a thesis that he was working on, so I reserved it for him, now everything's fine. But in that moment after that call, I realized how these, in retrospect, little waves, small events can be blown, or even large events can be blown so at proportion or seen as permanent in such a way that, regardless of socioeconomic status, regardless of race, regardless of gender, people can be so knocked off course that they end up taking their lives. And certainly, recently, that's been very dramatically demonstrated and tragically demonstrated with the deaths of many people, including Anthony Bourdain, who comes to mind most recently. And that's just on the high profile side.

But in my case, personally, I realized how my blinders and pessimism in this downward spiral had led me to really only focus on my pain. I didn't realize how until that phone call committing suicide would have been like taking 10 times the pain that I felt and imposing it on the people who loved me the most. And that was a huge wiggle call. So that is why I'm here today is the lucky accident that I did not update my address at the Registrar's Office.

If that had not happened, I mean, I was ready to pull the trigger so to speak, although that wasn't how I was going to go, but it was all specked out. It's terrifying to think of, really, really terrifying to think of. And I have some of my best friends in high school who you never were suspected from the outside looking in, killed themselves, college, same story. I just know so many people who have taken their own lives and it always came as a shock to people, at least who knew them in school, for instance.

They seem to have it all together. They seem to have the good relationship or the good job or the good grades or whatever might be the good family. And that's led me in the last few years, in particular to the very least want to focus on discussing mental health, different facets of mental health, from an experiential first-hand basis simply to tell people, if, assuming I don't have any type of ready answer for them, you are not alone. This is exceptionally exceptionally common, but it's the dirty little secret that so many people carry around and are unwilling to discuss.

So at the very least, I want to say you are not alone. There are millions upon millions of people fighting similar battles, and everyone you meet is fighting some inner battle you know nothing about. So do not assume that you are alone. And I think in that, hopefully people can find some solace.

And then beyond that, I've spent the last few years really investigating using the contacts and network that I've developed through the books and the podcast and the tech investing to explore avenues and potential treatments or interventions that can certainly help people who are on the brink get back to stability potentially, but also to take people who might view themselves as stable or normal and to mitigate against the potential of losing the footing. And then there are, we can go beyond that certainly. But that is, my interest in this certainly began on a very personal level. How do I, is it possible I should say, forget about how, is it possible for me to manage this?

And the type of thinking that triggers the most dangerous downward spirals is, what's the point? If I'm constantly going to default to this negative thinking, and I'm so blessed for A, B, and C reasons, what's the point? And that is a really, really poisonous, toxic mental landscape to immerse yourself into it and get caught in. So is it possible for me to somehow decrease the frequency of those types of episodes?

Is it possible somehow to decrease the severity of those episodes? Is it possible to look at my quirky biochemistry, my software in a way that I see some blessings within my day-to-day month-to-month experience, that in some way counteract the tendency to view myself so harshly when the inevitable dips come? Long answer to a short question. But that's really been, particularly in the last, I would say, two years, three, mostly starting about five years ago, but in the last two or three, really diverting a lot of my attention that was going to start up investing, a lot of my resources that were going to start up investing to areas that are related to this.

And there's so much of that stuff I can't wait to talk about today because you've brought a lot of people along on this ride with you. So obviously I can only speak from my own personal experience, but we have so many mutual friends who have also been heavily influenced by sort of a sense of awareness that you brought to us with respect to all of these things, but also potential solution spaces that are outside of our realm of thinking. You said something at the outset, which was, you just thought you weren't wired to be happy, which I can resonate with that completely. I remember as a child, my mom would always say to me, you know, Peter, do you just not want to be happy?

I would look at her like, I don't know what kind of dumb question that is. It's not an option. You might as well be asking me if I want to be 12 feet tall. I have some say in the matter.

It's not about wanting to be happy. It's just about metaphysically not being able to be happy. And then furthermore, my thought, which was even a bit more obscure or maybe bizarre, was happiness was a bad thing because you would stop being hungry. Yes, you can place it.

Yes. Right. Along with self-indulgence. There was that.

Yeah. It was like, mom, if I was happy, I wouldn't get up at 4.30 in the morning and run harder and faster than anybody else. And of course, I didn't have the, I don't think I had the mental framework to probe that idea further, which is why are you proving it too? Why do you feel they need to do all of these things?

But it wasn't until quite recently that I even began to entertain the idea that being happy is not a bad thing. We'll put it another way that it's a good thing. Yeah. The double negative.

Yeah, right. Just to touch on a few things you just mentioned, I think are really important. The self-talk, Jim Lair, who is a performance coach, who has worked with many, many of the most famous tennis players in the world, I had a chance to spend time with him for my last book and then also for some tennis training in Florida. And he spent time with one of my very close friends, Josh Wetsgan as well, who's best known for being a bassist, for searching for Bobby Fisher, for the people who are familiar.

And he talks a lot about the inner voice, the most important coach and voice you ever hear is your inner voice. So I've learned to pay increasing attention to the words I use, particularly when I'm ruminating, referring to myself, talking to myself, making a note to self. That's a long story inside you guys, another time. And I found myself using perhaps very unsurprisingly similar language to yourself.

If I were happy, I wouldn't be doing the things that are very clearly contributing to my success. Whatever that means. And not only that, but on every possible level, if I were to find joy in too many moments, or to not feel deficient or inadequate, or loathewardly, which is honestly how I felt for the majority of my life. No, I don't just not love myself.

There's a deep sense of why I hate to use the word hate, but it's the right word. Like loathing. Like, how could you be so stupid? How could you be so lazy?

How could you be so film the blank? Puff in the fuck up. And you may not have control over all things, but you know what? You can get really, really good at doing is absorbing pain.

I get really good at absorbing pain. It's like, okay, if you work hard and have high pain tolerance, maybe you can win. Maybe you can be successful. And I should put win and successful in quotation marks because they're so seldom well defined by people who use this type of language, including myself for decades.

But what I've come to realize, and this is also a common concern among type A personalities who consider or are told by people they respect, that they should take a stab at meditation for a period of time. There is this highly prevalent, almost universal concern among type A personalities, by which I just mean driven. Like, hard charging, head through walls. I can take the pain.

Fuck it. I'm just going to grit my teeth and white knuckle through anything that comes my way. Which, hey, let's face it, that serves people very well up to a point in certain ways. They worry about losing their edge.

This is the exact wording that I hear so often. And the exact wording that I use with my friends when they first recommended a few of them, Rick Rubin and Chase Jarvis, very specifically Rick Rubin, legendary music producer. Although that doesn't, it's not even a drop in the ocean of what Rick does and who Rick is. Rick Rubin and Chase, very, very famous photographer also CEO of a company called Creative Live, which is an incredible company in and of itself.

Both of them recommended meditation. I mean, and I resisted for more than a year I want to say, because I was afraid of losing my edge. Even though what I came to realize was, if you want to use your edge indiscriminately, like a kitchen knife, which is only a blade, the handle is also bladed on both sides, you can continue doing what you're doing. If on the other hand, you want to put a nice ergonomic handle on that beautifully-honed blade so that you can use it as an instrument for its highest purposes, you can utilize different tools, meditation, being one of them, and we could talk about all the different types of meditation as well, because I think they do have slightly different applications.

Is a tool in the toolkit that allows you to build this beautiful kitchen knife instead of holding onto the blade itself, just bleeding over and over again, stabbing, bleeding, stabbing, bleeding, which is I think day to day how many driven people experience life, whether they are financially stable or not, if they are compulsively active, if they are using the distraction of constant motion and absorbing pain and seeking pain to numb themselves so that they don't have to be in their own head any longer than possible, which is what I did for a fucking long time, hard in my French, but I made decades. If they're able to develop other skills that allow them to, and I'm certainly less than seeking happiness, I have been looking for ways to both develop in myself and help others to develop a sense of peace, even if it's 10 minutes a day, that does nothing negative in my book other than magnify your strengths and allow you to maybe for the first time, see some of your weaknesses that are very often self-imposed, and the blind spots that have been like an invisible hand guiding your life for, in some cases, decades. I really see no downside to that, and since I've had two cappuccinos and I guess I have some extra personality, I'll further extend my long ass answer by saying my books very clearly track my priorities in some respects. You have the four hour work week, which looked at different types of currencies, time being the most valuable non-renewable of those, and how to address a few rungs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

As I've moved along and suffered my own burnout of different types, not necessarily financially related, but certainly four hour chef took me out for the count. I bit off more than I could chew in part because I was having some personal difficulties and some relationships, and I wanted to numb myself. I went back to that numbing behavior, which included taking stimulants, which included over-caffeinating, in addition to the pills and so on, using alcohol at night to wind down, engaging in exercise that was far more painful and ridiculously punishing than it had to be for any type of health or performance purpose. I crashed and burned, and that led to the podcast as a way to take a break from book writing, which led to the explorations and talking to people like Brene Brown, talking to people like Tar-Brock, talking to people like Jack Cornfield, and many, many others that then led to say tribal mentors or tools of guidance than tribal mentors, and where I am now, where I look at this Maslow's hierarchy of needs and realize, at least for myself, let's say you cover your food, you cover your shelter, you cover it and you get up to these rungs on the ladder where you've checked off success, you are blessed, you are blessed.

You are hopefully healthy, your family might be healthy, and you can meet all of your basic needs and probably have some disposable income, and yet you have trouble living with yourself. That's a fucking tragedy. I mean, it's to have deciphered how to achieve and yet not be able to appreciate is just the tragedy of tragedies. It's this kind of fool's errand that could have taken five years, could have taken ten, could have taken twenty, and then you see people like that who do not know which way to turn and then perhaps just withdraw into a shell, and sit at a table with their family and look at their phone for the entire dinner over and over and over, because they don't know how to emotionally engage with themselves, let alone other people, or you see the more dramatic cases where they're like, all right, I thought these things would make me happy.

I was told these things were the necessary ingredients for eventually solving this emotional Rubik's Cube that I'm struggling with my whole life, where I assumed that poof one day I would just wake up and have made it, even if having made it just means you're not struggling with alcoholism and rent like your parents did or something like that. And I've come to realize you don't need to and you should not wait until you think you have all of the other pieces, non-emotional, non-segalageal pieces of the puzzle together to start working on self-acceptance, among other things, and untying some of those gordian knots that you have that you might have carried for decades since your childhood, and that it is not esoteric, it is not intangible. When you start to address some of those things, it makes everything more effortless, it makes everything more rewarding. And that, I think, is a project worth tackling.

It's a lot, but that's this depression, particularly among men who are very, very bad generally, and I'm just going to paint with a broad brush because that makes this type of conversation a little easier. But broadly speaking, across cultures, it really doesn't matter where you go. Women are generally better at social cohesion and building groups of friends who are mutually supportive. And we look at it through an evolutionary lens, but men very often are biologically, culturally, who knows, fill in the blank, trained, and maybe born to just bite their lip and suffer in silence.

And I do think there are certain places for that. Look, if you're going to be a Navy SEAL Commander, waking up every morning and telling your direct reports about your really hard dream you had, probably not strategically, tactically, professionally, or ethically, the right thing to do when you have to go out and then risk your lives doing things that are mission-critical to fill in the blank. So there is a time for that. But to make that your one coping mechanism for navigating life, or the mesh that is imposed on everything else that you suffer in silence, and that the solution to that is just to get tougher, to get better at accepting pain, to use cheesy tech parlance, it doesn't scale.

It just doesn't scale. You know, when I was on your podcast the first time, which I don't know how long ago that was, it feels like it's probably been three or four years ago, one of the questions I remember you asking, of course, you asked me any of your desk, is what book have you gifted more than any other? And I remember the book I mentioned the time it was and remains a great book, but I now have to update that answer. What wasn't just for people who were curious?

It was mistakes were made, but not by me, which is just an amazing book on the psychology of cognitive dissonance. But of course, that now has been surpassed. There is now a new book that is my most gifted book, and amazing. I can't believe I didn't bring a copy to Austin to give you, because I now, I probably think I just buy Amazon out of this book.

I just have stacks of it all over, like you have stacks of certain books in your place. And this book is called, I Don't Want to Talk About It by Terence Reel, who I've since reading the book and becoming obsessed with. Actually, it comes back to you. You introduced me to Esther Perel.

Esther recommended the book. The book was one of a series of little nudges that ultimately led to me meeting Terry, and of course that book has now been the book I have given most. But what she said is spot on, which is there is just this epidemic of male depression, and it's not always overt. That's the thing, right?

People have this image of what depression is, but, you know, like a guy who's constantly angry or emotionally volatile, he can be quite depressed. So depression isn't always dysthemia. And I think that's where people miss this idea of how much pain people, both men and women, carry around, but how men have this more orthogonal way of displaying it that makes it get masked longer and longer. And I want to go back to something you said earlier, because it really hit home about a year ago when a mutual friend of ours, Paul Conti, made this point to me, which was the way you treat yourself is ultimately how you will treat those you love most.

And, you know, when he really pushed me to think about that, which is, do you want to be the guy who treats his kids the way you treat yourself? And it had to be put that way for me to think. No. I mean, if I'm going to be brutally honest, I would not want to watch my kids get treated by another human the way I treat myself, even though I think it's good for me to treat myself this way.

So again, I think the challenge is, by far the hardest part is getting people to accept it. Maybe what they're doing isn't the right thing. Or maybe it's the wrong word. It's not the best thing.

It's not the optimal thing. I loved your analogy of taking the best blade in the world and not having a handle on it. I mean, it's a limited tool. Yeah.

And there are, so I would say, just to maybe put a fine point on it, going through life merely tolerating yourself, which would have been a dream for me. I mean, I actively loathed myself at any weakness, any mistake, any foible, any flaws. I was, and still at times, I'm so incredibly violently critical in my own head that it is not the treatment I would want to wish on anyway, I care about. That is not a state you have to accept.

It is not programming that you have to accept. And there are ways to begin to chip away at that and to rewire it and to reformat in a sense. Certain behaviors that you've experienced for so long, many of them are thought patterns, self-hoc, that you've come to believe they're completely unchangeable. And in my experience and more and more the experience of dozens and hundreds of thousands of other people I've observed in the last five years, it is patently untrue that you have to accept that.

And I think what you said is really, really important to digest and ponder. And that is how you treat yourself as how you were going to treat the people you care most about. And I think it was actually glorious sign of a quote. I don't know if this is accurate, but somebody on the Internet, I'm sure will fact check this, who said, in effect, I'm paraphrasing here, but the goal, you have to remember that the golden rule goes both ways.

So we all know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you flip that around, it is do unto yourself as you would do unto others. And that is really has very profound and wide-reaching implications when you really sit with it for a minute. And, suffice to say, though, you do not have to accept the inner voice or the patterns that have led you to pursue success with rare glimpses of any type of inner peace.

That is not something you have to accept. One of the most profound experiences I've had, sets of experiences I've had in the past few years, are experiences we've shared together around certain plants. That honestly, I was completely unaware of and ignorant of for most of my life, had never really given them any thought. And probably much of the stuff that you've talked about written about in the past, in particular, there were two podcasts that you did.

One was with Marten and I'm trying to think of the other one. Marten, Polanco, and Dan Engel. Dan Engel, that was the other one. And those were two separate podcasts, but they were very close together, if I recall a couple months ago.

They were a few together and then a few apart. So you had James Fateman and then Dan Engel and Marten together. That's right. And then later, Michael Pollan.

Yeah. But that first wave was probably 2015-ish? Yeah. It was a few...

That was the thin end of the wedge. And interestingly, the thin end of the wedge, for me, was around something that wasn't a personal issue, but more of a societal issue, which was blown away by the discussion and the clinical results that they were achieving in Mexico using a plant called Iboga and using Iboga in as well to treat patients who were opioid addicted. And that's something that even back when I was in my residency and you would see in a city like Baltimore what the effects of heroin addiction are. And of course today, it's even a much bigger issue and it's spread far beyond just heroin.

So that just interested me purely from an intellectual standpoint, which is, wait a minute, we have a drug or set of drugs that are so categorically addictive to so many, for which our only treatments are at best useless. And there's this other thing that admittedly comes with plenty of risk and plenty of unknowns, but it seems to fundamentally change the way a person's brain is wired, which would seem to address the root issue. As opposed to the band aid. That led, of course, to me wanting to understand more about those entire classes of compounds.

And that led to my very first experience with them, which I shared with you, meaning which you helped me through, which to this day remains one of the most profound things I've ever done. And if anybody's listening to this who's thinking, what are they talking about? What are these psychedelic agents? Aren't those drugs and all these things?

One of the most remarkable things I remember after the first time I tried psilocybin was, I don't feel like doing that again anytime soon. These are the most anti-addictive compounds on the planet. What started your interest into that space? The interest began, and for those people listening who are wondering if we'll discuss any other tools, I think we should also discuss some other options on the table aside from this, although this is very fertile ground for discussion.

So we can talk about meditation, some other tools and books and so on later. But my interest in psychedelics began long ago with a close friend who introduced me to psilocybin, contained in what is commonly called magic mushrooms. It must have been in college, midpoint, perhaps in college. And it became an annual ritual.

And once a year, I would meet up with a few of my closest friends and we would consume mushrooms. In retrospect, it was a very haphazard. We were not measuring any doses. We just have a big bag of mushrooms and split it up and then hope for the best, which is not ideally how you go about things.

Nonetheless, despite the lack of controls, and I do not recommend anyone use these compounds under uncontrolled circumstances, I experienced what I began to refer to as a reboot. And I would have this anxiety and depression plaguing me. I would go very, very deep. And looking back now, I was almost certainly consuming minimum of five grams.

I'm sure I was consuming quite a high dose of mushrooms, which is for those people who might read the writing or listen to some of the presentations of someone named Terrence McKenna of five grams is referred to as a heroic dose. And that was a dose sufficient to flatten even the most resistant ego. I believe it was the wording that was used. In any case, I felt this decrease or even complete removal of depression and anxiety that extended far beyond the supposed duration of effect.

Let's just call it five to eight hours. And there would be this afterglow period that certainly lasted most acutely for a day or two after the experience. And I was going into this also with none of the best practices that we know of now in terms of preparation, intention setting, perhaps some of the preparatory steps you can take and then integration. There's none of that.

So this was very bare bones haphazard experimentation with friends. Nonetheless, there were these periods of, let's just call it two weeks to two months where I was able to finally see things clearly appreciate all of the incredible. Chance blessings that I experienced in my life and make decisions about things I've viewed as serious problems or challenges or opportunities, whether it was making a decision about academics, making a decision about a relationship to either start a relationship or end a long standing relationship. These were things I was able to look at very calmly and make decisions about.

And ultimately, after I want to say four or five years of this, had a very, very, very scary and dangerous experience, which was again with no sitters. In other words, no sober person supervising this. Any number of things can go wrong. And one is people can wander around and get themselves into dangerous situations.

In my case, I ended up coming out of my trip very late at night walking on the side of a street with cars whizzing by me. I mean, that could very easily been the end. And that scared me enough that I stopped. So never again, too dangerous and I stopped.

I didn't revisit psychedelics until, let's just call it, let's think about this, 10 to 15 years later. When a girlfriend at the time who had some very, very, very difficult traumatic experiences as a child traveled to Peru, which has its own set of very real risks that we talk about. If you were going down explicitly for the purpose of using a psychedelic, most commonly in this case, Ayahuasca, but her experience was strong enough and meaningful enough that she came back and said to me that she wished it for me because it was like 15 years of therapy and two nights. Now, if anyone knows anything about any of the books I've written or the way that I tend to view the world, that is a very, very effective sales pitch for Tim.

15 years of therapy and two nights, interesting. And I put that in the back of my mind, did not move ahead with it because of my fear, which I think was very, it was well found. I had a, what could have been a very, very dangerous experience or fatal experience. Things had to get much worse for me to finally decide to re-enter that world, which I did first through a guided cell-side experience.

I did not want to go straight to Ayahuasca, which I, to this day, believe is a very, very big gun and can be very destabilizing. I didn't want to go, I didn't want that to be my reintroduction. So I did, I had one guided cell-side experience, which also lacked much in terms of any type of prep integration or post. So it was effective in the sense that it was like a returning home and it was a familiar feeling that I came out of on the skaeth.

I took an absurdly high dose because I didn't know what I'd taken before. So for those people who know anything about it, I began at seven and a half and then did a booster in nine, which for me is, it is such an absurd overkill. It is to almost defy belief at this point, which by the way, is a counter-productive. Taking too much is counter-productive.

It is not more as better by any stretch of the imagination. Being strapped to the icebreaker is not as very rarely what someone needs. In any case, came out of it realizing that you could approach this in a safer fashion with a container physical and otherwise that allowed you to avoid the risk I had that it scared me off. Then went into the IOSC experience about six months, perhaps six months later, took it very seriously, had people sign nondisclosure agreements, had someone act as my proxy to try to vet people in several different countries, and ultimately honed in on someone I spent two nights with.

And it was one of the most disorienting, awe-inspiring experiences of my life without question. The first night, I was prepared for all of the sickness and vomiting and terror that I knew could be part of the experience and it was blissful. It was an incredible first night. Second night was without any exaggeration, the most painful experience of my life.

At one point, I experienced full body seizures. It was a grand mal uncontrolled, uncontrollable seizures for about, I would estimate, two and a half hours, end up with rug burns all over my face and hands and feet, and was completely lost. There was no contact, no footing in this reality whatsoever. And my subjective felt experience was one of being torn apart a thousand times a second, dying a thousand times a second, only to re-manifest and have that repeat, infinite of it.

It was beyond horror. And when I came out of the experience, or the main roller coaster was coasting to an end after, let's call it, six to eight hours. I was partially detached from reality for probably 36 hours, and I had very fortunately paid someone in advance to babysit me and act as a chaperone for that extended period. In the off chance that it happened, which has to be in the case.

And the entire time, as soon as I was coherent enough to even think in English, which took a while, I thought, never again, never again will I touch anything like this. And it was only six to eight weeks later, and I should mention that my intention, I did have an intention this time going in, to the second night specifically, which was to let go of anger towards myself, towards other people. I have a lot of very specific people. And I swore I would never touch this stuff again.

It was just too scary, too potentially dangerous. I thought there was a real chance that I could lose my mooring from a sanity perspective and never come back. And I realized six to eight weeks later, after spending a lot of time with someone I've known forever, who I've had a very contentious, emotionally volatile relationship with, lots of triggers. Things I thought were beyond repair, meaning couldn't spend more than an hour with this person without feeling extreme agitation and anger well up in some fashion.

And I had given up on that, changing that long ago. I realized, let's just call it six weeks after my two nights, that 90% of that was gone with this person and completely gone. And to this day it has not come back. And that has repeated itself, or I've seen that in a number of my closest relationships.

The value of that is hard to overemphasize. It's hard to even put it towards. It's so far outside any conceptual schema in medicine or therapy that I've run into. It's hard to convey in a way that makes any sense.

Because I've had so many people ask me, well, how did that happen? I do not have a good explanation for that. All I do know is since then, having explored this both on an experiential level, having spent time in several countries, working with people who are some of the best at what they do. And I do think I'm very, very good at vetting that.

Hopefully people believe that after looking at the books and the podcasts and so on. I'm really good at getting ahold of people who are really, really, really good. I'm very good at vetting. And having explored the space also from a scientific standpoint, it just gets more interesting.

It just gets more unbelievable yet at the same time compelling. And some of the changes I have seen in people are, they defy explanation by any conventional means. And I'll throw out a few examples. But before I throw out the examples, I want to make it really clear that these compounds are not for everyone.

There are contraindications. Things can go wrong. And they're not a panacea. They do not fix everything.

They do not fix everything by any stretch of the imagination. But for certain types of debilitating conditions, thought patterns, and fear, they are remarkable. Really, really impressive to the point that it is outside of the care and feeding and love of my family and myself and my closest friends. It is what I am most focused on.

Furthering from a scientific standpoint, certainly. So you and another friend who's a mutual friend of ours, so it's all this big circle of people we know, but shared an equally remarkable story with me about a single experience he had had had. It was still a Simon, as opposed to Iowaska, that also took him to this place of incredible emotional pain that led to a change in belief. In this case, it was for this individual.

It was a belief system around a person who was no longer alive. So someone that had lost. I will never probably forget my first experience with psilocybin. For the same reason.

It's interesting. I didn't know that that experience you described came from your very second time with Iowaska. I was familiar with that story because you shared it with me before, but hadn't pegged it to such an early time. But my first experience with psilocybin, if not for the fact that I had that experience, I wouldn't know what the hell you were talking about right now.

Because it seems so improbable, implausible, and impossible that something that occurs over a span of six or eight hours, that is nothing more than these compounds that come from these plants could so fundamentally alter the way we interact with other people. In my case, it was very similar. It was a very important person in my life for whom I'd not had a great relationship in a very long time because I simply had no empathy. Now, Michael Pollan has written about this so eloquently, and I wish I could even half reiterate what he said because I remember him writing about it going, that's exactly it, which is for the first time in your life, or at least for me, I'm not seeing the world through my eyes anymore.

And David Foster Wallace has talked about this so eloquently in his talk, which is one of my favorite talks, this is water. Every experience we have is through our own eyes. And these plants give you that ability to be out of that. And I still remember watching myself as a 13-year-old boy in this situation, and for the first time ever not seeing that situation from my vantage point, instead seeing it from the vantage point of others.

And that led to the most profound emotional breakdown, which, again, these are very durable. I mean, I'm a couple of years out of this, but I truly believe that 40 years from now, I will still have this exact set of feelings about this particular individual and this particular experience. And you're right, there is. How do you explain that?

It's very difficult. And these compounds, many of the classics I get, Alex, let's just, for the sake of argument, will leave LSD out of the running for a number of reasons, including just the political PR baggage that acronym carries. If we're looking at, say, Messlelin, which is found in Peyodia, it's found in the San Peyodro, or Watjumacactus in South America, among other places, and we're looking at psilocybin found in quite a few different mushrooms. These are compounds that have been used for hundreds of years, probably millennia, by different civilizations.

And you have Amadida Muscario, which was used in Europe. You have psychedelics that have been used all over the world, psychedelics referring to, and there are different ways to try to define this term, but mind manifesting is what the word refers to, if you look at the etymology. But I would say, experientially, one of the defining characteristics of psychedelics, and we probably will talk about, we might have the chest talk about MDMA later, which is, in some way, it can be used for many of the same conditions, but I wouldn't consider a psychedelic simply because psychedelics provide what is often referred to at high enough dosages, ego dissolution or a controlled death experience, where you cease to exist as the subject who is viewing your experience of reality. That is so powerful that, again, we talk about it with these sort of, in this sort of banal way, but until you experience that, that statement is so difficult to comprehend.

Imagine if you will, and there are different analogies or metaphors you can use, but imagine if your whole life, you have been the protagonist, at least in your own mind, you are the primary actor in the play of your life. And you've always been the primary actor in the play of your life, and there are other actors, of course, all these people you've ever met. And for the first time, you realize that it's a play, and you're sitting in the audience, and you're the playwright. You're the person who has the ability to look at it from every perspective, and you can change the lines of the primary actor, or the person known as Tim, in my case, that person known as Peter.

If you want to change their lines, you want to change their backs, or you want to change the stories they tell themselves, you have the ability to do that because you're sitting in the audience as an observer of this person who is known as Peter or Tim. And this is similar to the type of experience that people can have through meditation, and they might describe it as instead of being outside standing in the storm, you're standing inside looking through the window at the storm, or you are instead of being inside the washing machine, you're zooming out 18 inches, so that you're looking into the washing machine, and you're observing what is happening as opposed to being tumbled by it. And in fact, the states achieved through psychedelics and in very experienced meditators, although I'm convinced that you can achieve this state pretty quickly through meditation. It doesn't have to take 20 years, is remarkably similar, as best we know, or there are some similarities, I should say, neurophysiologically, in the sense that both seem to not necessarily deactivate, but decrease activity in something referred to as the default mode network.

And this default mode network, and Peter, you may do a better job of explaining this. Michael Pollen does a fantastic job describing this in his book, How to Change Your Mind, which I recommend to everyone. Yeah, we'll link to the book. We'll also link to your interview with Michael recently, which is excellent as well, even if people say they're not quite ready to read the book at the very least, they should invest the time and listen to the podcast.

And by the way, I would not suggest that anyone jump out and tomorrow, go on Craigslist to try to find a shaman to take you through some experience, even if you felt like that was inevitable, so that you ultimately want to take, there are some things that I would recommend first that can be, by themselves be exceptionally, exceptionally useful. So to come back to it though, the ability to, for the first time, view this ego that refers to itself, in my case as Tim, who is a combination of many different things, the identity that we have had to voice it upon us or condition into us, but also that we've created for ourselves, by the stories we tell ourselves, that we've always told ourselves. My wife always does this, my dad always does that, I always do this, I never do that. These stories that we've told ourselves for so long, that we've come to accept it as just a fiber in our being, to look at it and realize that you can reformat almost every part of that, or you can take trauma that you experienced as a child, and for the first time ever, recontextualize as an adult, without a motion to look at it with a level of emotional calmness, so that you can finally close that circle is difficult to describe.

I don't want to try too hard to put words to something which, by definition, if we're talking about mystical experiences, which is a corollary to the durability of these effects, let me restate that in English, and it's a little easier to understand. When you look at, for instance, studies that have been done, research has been done at, whether it's Johns Hopkins, NYU, or other places, and I've gotten to know the team at Johns Hopkins quite well, and a huge amount of respect and admiration for what they've done and continue to do. In many of the studies, whether they're looking at terminal cancer patients and end of life anxiety, or they're looking at lifelong smokers who came into a study specifically look at how psilocybin could be used for the cessation of smoking, the duration of effect, the durability of effect, is very closely linked to something that you could refer to as a mystical experience, and it turns out, as you would hope, there are different types of scales and measurements one can use to determine if something is a mystical experience or not. There are ways that you can assess whether something qualifies as a mystical experience based on looking at the historical accounts and writings of people who consider mistakes.

One of them is the inability for someone to verbalize their experience, that the words somehow do violence to the experience or don't do it justice. Pollen gives a great example of that in his book. I believe it was Michael Pollen in his book, How to Change Your Mind, about that you take somebody from, you know, whatever, a thousand years ago, but I'm in a time machine bringing the Times Square. I'm hanging out for five hours, shoot them back.

Can they describe what they saw? Not really. They could say that it was big, loud, and bright, but other than that, they couldn't explain what a car is. They couldn't explain what a building is or a skyscraper because the vocabulary hadn't even been developed.

And that to me is like the greatest example, albeit somewhat glib of this idea of being in F-O-L, which is you and I can sit here and talk about it in shorthand, but it's very difficult to explain to one of our friends who hasn't experienced this. And again, these things sound so goofy when you say them, like these experiences, seeing yourself from outside of yourself, you know, if someone hasn't experienced that, I can understand why they would look at you a little funny and say, okay, intellectually, I understand what you mean by that, but why would that matter? Why would that be profound? How would that disrupt your ego?

It's very difficult to convey. And I would say that what I've experienced and what I've certainly seen and heard other people experience in their reports to me and in writing in book various books that I've read is the importance of the felt experience and that in some senses, it's not that you have a psychedelic experience, you have three realizations, you bring those realizations back to this ordinary reality, you take certain actions based on those realizations, and based on that intellectual legwork, your life changes. It is not something strictly in the domain of words and thinking and just thinking harder and working harder. In other words, you're not taking the things that got you here.

If you've achieved anything professionally, personally, the pro and con list, the spreadsheets, the logical arguments, it's not that you just get a better set of those things that you bring back. It's that you are finally able to see and experience and feel something like empathy deeply for the first time for someone you've never felt it for, or you feel love for yourself truly for the first time and you think, holy shit, like that's what's missing. I've never even felt that. If someone had asked me what does self love feel like, I wouldn't have had an answer for it.

These are the things that really stick. And I think given the plasticity of the mind or plasticity of the brain that allows one researcher to put it to me, you to instead of going to the top of the ski slope and then taking the tracks that have been worn, and of course the deeper the tracks get harder it is to kind of hop out of the other skiing. But to get to the top and to have four fresh feet of powder fall on the entire mountains that you have the ability to choose an entirely new path, an entirely new record to play, it's hard to replace. But one way to think about it for me has allowed me to come to grips with this because there's a part of me that has sometimes thought like, this is too good to be true, it's going to go away.

This new found empathy I have for a person X or this reduction in this horrible negative emotion I've had, that's going to go away in six months. And I thought of something which is, when you look at the opposite of that, which is how often is a person's life changed for the worse based on one event? And the answer is all the goddamn time. The child could be abused once and that can change their life forever.

And again, we're not going to go into that now because that is its own topic. But so many of the horrible habits that we carry into adulthood are really because we never became adults. We are basically adaptive children who are taking on a set of behaviors to protect wounded children. And sometimes those wounds occur very acutely.

And so in many ways, these experiences with psychedelics, if administered correctly in the correct setting with the correct integration, can act as the exact opposite of a wounding event. In other words, with something that is so acute and so poignant, you can just change the direction of this trajectory, this vehicle. It doesn't necessarily mean it's orthogonal. And of course, there's so much more to it than that.

Many people go through similar types of abuse and they don't all have the same impact and similarly many people can experience a psychedelic and not have the same impact. But I think when I started to think of it in that way, it started to become much more understandable why this could happen. Just as something horrible could alter the course of your life. And I'm going to, one of the podcasts I've already recorded that will be coming out later this summer will be with Corey, who you and I spent a couple of days with up at Kern.

It's an excellent security person. Yeah, when we did this, we spent this time up there with the five inches. The story of Corey's life is unbelievable. And it's just a, again, at no point in there, I think it's Corey using any of these things that happened to him when he was young, as excuses for the road he went down.

But it's impossible to argue that those experiences, many of them very acute in this moment, on this day, in this place at this time, completely set him on a different path than he could have been otherwise. So as you said, I love the idea of the stage analogy, because to me, that's actually one of the best analogies I've ever heard about how mindfulness meditation works is it's the awareness that there is a stage. That's simply what it comes down to. And to be able to leave your vantage point as one actor, two step back and see that you are an actor on a stage is, I think, one of the most empowering things.

And that's why I sort of love this interplay between meditation and the psychedelic agents. There's an interplay. There's an interrelatedness. There is a reinforcement, a mutual reinforcement also, which is why I'd love to mention a few things just to give people a chance to crack a stage.

Give people a chance to crack their knuckles and stretch for a second in non-psychodelic territory. There are a few things that I'd love to suggest people, which help you to develop the same types of meta awareness that you can be thrust into through psychedelics that serve a purpose, whether or not you ever choose to take one of these compounds. One would be certainly mindfulness meditation. And I think by the time this podcast we're recording right now is live, Sam Harris is waking up app.

I think it's just tremendous. I think it does an exceptionally, exceptionally good job of this. And there's certainly guided meditations. If you search, say, mindfulness meditation, Jack Cornfield, Tara Brock, both outstanding.

Sam Harris also has some guided meditations that he's recorded. Awareness meditation and Peter, you've jumped in if I don't do this justice, but awareness meditation being different from, say, other forms of meditation, many of which I have used and still use on occasion, perhaps one of the more popular of which being, say, transcendental meditation, mantra based. You're thinking of a concentration practice where you are repeating a mantra to yourself over and over and over and over again as a way to hone concentration and, although not everyone's going to love this description, to give your psyche and self a break from the incessant monkey mind. And you really can reach a transcendent space where you feel like you are a point of consciousness flowing.

If you do the 20 minutes twice a day very consistently, that is a concentration practice. You were thinking of a candle flame and that were a focal point for a period of meditation. Whenever you found yourself swept up in thought, you returned to a candle flame. That would also be a concentration practice.

If you're doing, there are many also within awareness meditation, there are different types, but if you're doing something referred to as, I think it's sometimes called open monitoring, where you're paying attention to anything that comes up as it comes up and there are different ways to approach this, but very often begins with the breath. So it is in some sense a concentration practice, but you're focusing on the breath. You're not chasing it. You're simply observing it.

Then you focus on sounds. Then you focus on any discomfort or weight that you feel in your body. Then you perhaps later after 10 sessions, 10 daily sessions begin to practice with your eyes open, which I've never really done before. Sam's app, which I found tremendously helpful as a bridge into then waking reality.

These are all practices that help you to spot the gap between sensory input and cognitive response, so that you become more response able in so much as you have a tiny gap within which you can choose your response as opposed to simply reflexively going through life, like some type of slug that's been shocked in a Skinner box or something. You have more optionality. You suddenly realize there are just more options on the menu than, oh, whenever someone so does this, I always get pissed off. There are more options on the menu.

And that, by the way, having that basic ability, having the ABCs of that awareness and control will give you a tremendous advantage and allow you to get very often much more value out of any psychedelic experience. Because you will have had, let's just call it, 50 sessions on a boogie board before they're like, oh, cool, here's a surfboard. It's hurricane season. Have fun.

Good luck. Maybe you catch a wave. Chances are your first experience is going to be getting tumbled a lot. And you can accelerate the, you can sleep in the learning curve really dramatically for later getting more out of psychedelics very often if you develop some of this basic awareness beforehand.

I'm kind of amazed at how difficult it is for me to convince some of my patients at the importance of meditation. And I find sometimes by just telling them about my own struggles and my own journey to accept first of all that this was something that was beneficial even when it didn't feel beneficial and to realize that you have to sort of figure out what's going to work for you. But it's worth making that effort. I agree with you.

I think that just even putting the apps aside, it's different people have different ways of explaining things. And I remember a math professor I had in college, and this was early. This might have been like, I must have been, I was either a freshman or sophomore. But he said something that always resonated with me.

Because now you're sort of getting outside of like rudimentary calculus and mathematics and starting to get very abstract. And he said, look, if you're reading a proof and you don't understand it, assume that the person who is presenting it doesn't know how to present it to you find somebody else. And so I think that that really holds also for meditation, which is there are just going to be some people who guide in a way that you're willing to be guided. And so you shouldn't be put off if someone's listening to this thinking, oh, you know, every time I try meditation, it doesn't work for me or something like that.

And so I don't want to sort of name the app site went through. But there were many apps that I went through that just didn't resonate for me. You know, just the way that they talked about this didn't make sense to me. But then when you find the ones that do, and there are several that do for me, including Sam's waking up, which you and I have been lucky enough along with a number of other folks to get the beta version of that, which, kind of, it's been six months.

I remember Sam giving me a January. The way Sam explains it really resonates with me. And there are others that do so the same. Jeff Warren is also one of the guides on Dan Harris is no relation to Sam Harris, 10% happier.

I just love the way he explains stuff. And so, you know, I would say to anybody who's listening to this, who's feeling sort of bearish on meditation, try a different app, try a different guide, try a different book, try another way, keep going until you find someone who can walk you through how to do this in a way that resonates. And the others mentioned to others since they're very easy to test. Another is Headspace, the 10 and 10 program, I think is a very, very well done format for getting us 10 minutes a day for 10 days.

And it is quite well done. Calm for some people who like the background nature sounds, for instance, I've used that app and many of my friends really find that to be with a female guide to be their preferred mode of meditation. And then you can meditate in silence. You can consider taking a TM course as I did, which actually really served to kickstart a lot of my meditation because it cost money.

So I had that sunk cost working in my favor. And it's effectively four lunch breaks over four days. I want to say I'm remembering correctly and you have to meditate in between those sessions. So you have homework and you are going to feel like a doofus and a disappointment and be embarrassed.

If you don't do those sessions, so you have someone holding you accountable, i.e. the teacher, to actually put this into practice for at least a four day period. And that in and of itself, I pushed off for so long. I for so, so long.

And I remember Chase Jarvis, I'll give him credit again at one point said, Tim, you can afford it. It worked for me. What is the downside if it doesn't work for you? You still get to meditate with someone else for four days.

Might that be worth it? And I didn't have a good counter. So eventually I acquiesced and took that step, which was very, it was one of the first times that I was going to be able to do that. And the first times I finally felt what I had the first hand experience of what meditation could deliver, which is in some ways equally difficult to describe as the psychedelic experience.

When you have your first session where you've completely lost any rumination or compulsive thinking about your to-do list, and it might just be the last five minutes of a 20 minute session and you come out of it and you just feel this serene piece that perhaps you haven't even touched on for 10 years, you go, oh, okay, now I get it. And I'm going to say that if you're going to commit to this, commit to it like you would a workout program or a diet, you don't go to the gym once and come back and wake up with six pack abs and next morning. For me, at least, if I take a break and there are periods when I last- Especially by the way, if you eat like we've eaten in Austin, we have- There's so much good food here. You have to be very careful about portion control.

But if you want to get a taste for what meditation can do, I would say commit the 10 days. And for me, at least, if for whatever reason I lapse, and there are certainly periods when I lapse, this happens to be a diet, it happens to be an exercise, and occasionally it's like, you know what, I have a meditator for two weeks, for whatever number of reasons. It will take me, I would say, five to seven days to finally stop grinding gears and shift into a calmer state. There's a certain loading phase almost, like creatine or something.

It takes me five to seven days to click into that different gear at which point I go, oh, yes, this is why it's so important. Now I remember. There's a great book out there called Altered States, which I read this year that I think does a great job of parsing that concept out, which is- Is it Altered States or Altered Trades? Oh, it's Altered Trades, and it makes the point that it's not about the state.

Thank you for that direction. I've had a whole bunch of people potentially go in Amazon, going, I can't find this book, or maybe they read that book does exist, but that's exactly the point, right? Which is that we don't meditate for the state. The state can be pleasurable.

I don't find it that pleasurable. I don't actually enjoy meditating that much. Sometimes I do, but as many times as I do, it's difficult for me. It's work.

It's sometimes truthfully feels like I suck. Like, I'm boy, it's really amazing the frequency with which thoughts keep entering my mind. I forget who- I can't remember if it was Sam Harris or a different guy who made this point, which was actually, I think it was actually Jeff Warren, which was- he described it as the bicep curl of the brain is not the cessation of thought. It's the recognition of the thought that then allows you to go back to the breath or whatever the focus is.

And boy, that really- again, that's just an example of like a particularly profound, difficult to understand concept, but it's exactly what I needed to hear, which is don't be discouraged that you keep having thoughts. That's the exercise. The exercise is acknowledging it, recognizing it, going back to the focus, which in this case could be the breath or a sound or something like that. And so it's not about that state that you may or may not achieve.

Just as some people who like you and I love exercising, so we actually get a pretty good state out of it. I actually- if exercise provided no benefit, I would still do it, just because of how I feel when I do it. But for many people, that's not the case, but exercise is still valuable. If you spend an hour a day exercising, it's really what's doing for you that other 23 hours.

So that's- I guess that would be the next thing I would say to anybody listening to this who's tried meditation, who has found it to be unpleasurable or uninteresting or whatever. It's like, that's okay. You're not doing it for what you experienced in that 20 minutes. I would also add, and this just occurred to me, because I think you're in some ways alluding to this, that in my experience having observed hundreds of thousands of listeners and readers attempt or not attempt to succeed or not succeed with different forms of meditation.

It's very important, and this applies to many, many different things, including physical exercises as far as I'm concerned, but the good program that you follow, let's lower it even further. The consistent program that you follow is better than the perfect program that you quit. So, if you're having trouble following a meditation program, and you've committed to doing it daily, which is a very important commitment in the beginning, keep lowering the bar. If you think 20 minutes is too much, do 10 minutes.

10 minutes is too much, do 5 minutes. If concentration meditation is too difficult, use a guided meditation. And I recall at one point there were two things that I recall having been said to me. I think Tara Brock mentioned the first.

I could be mis-attributing, but I think it was Tara Brock had first said this to me. Her book, Radical Acceptance, by the way, ties into everything we're talking about beautifully. It had a huge impact on me and has had a huge impact on many people. It's the type of title that's going to scare off a lot of people, because I think it's going to be a bunch of woo-woo hand-wavy stuff.

There's a little bit of woo in there, but it is an incredibly good book, Radical Acceptance. If you have any type of emotional patterns or thought patterns that seem to control you as opposed to the other way around, this is a worthwhile book. And her guided meditation is very good, but we were chatting about her on the podcast on my own podcast, and I believe it was Tara said, the repetition for doing the bicep curl isn't the 20 minute session. You sit perfectly without having a single extraneous thought occur.

The repetition is when you get distracted and something comes up and then bringing it back to the breath. So you should be happy when that happens, because that is the work. The work isn't doing it perfectly every time. It took me three years to understand that.

Three years of frustration. Am I doing this right? Why can't I stop thinking? All of this misunderstanding, but once you get what the bicep curl is.

It's freeing. It makes the pass-fail bar lower, which for many of the people who most know the bicep curl is, it's freeing. Many of the people who most need meditation, which I think has a branding problem, it should be called emotional non-reactivity training, or something that sounds very appealing to type A driven people. Emotional non-reactivity conditioning program, there you go, or just warm bath for the mind.

It might be appealing to other people. But meditation is such a word that becomes so overused and unfortunately could use a rebrand. For the time being, meditation and a successful meditation session should in the beginning be as easy as possible to fit into your life. You need to stack the deck, particularly in the beginning.

TM, Transcendo and meditation was very good at instilling this in the training, for me at least. They said, if you say the mantra once in a session, that is a successful session. You have 20 minutes to say a two-sellable mantra once. That's a successful session.

You might even drop it further and say, this is the goal. This would be miraculous. If I just sit for 20 minutes with my eyes closed, that's a successful meditation session. Sometimes I've honestly wondered how much of the benefit comes from some of the mental practices versus just sitting still and breathing with my eyes closed.

That's actually really interesting. That gets to something I want to talk a little bit about, which is the study of psychedelics. But while we're on that topic, it's hard to sometimes study these things because of these performance biases. It's hard to disaggregate the effect of just sitting there for 20 minutes.

Luckily, some of those experiments have been done, which is you take a group and instead of saying the control group just doesn't do anything, maybe you have the control group sit in silence for 20 minutes. Then you can sort of disaggregate those things. Tim, you've spoken with me quite a bit about your interest in funding science. That goes back to even before the discussion of psychedelics.

Very recently, you've made a pretty large commitment. Are you comfortable talking about that publicly? I am. I am very comfortable talking about that publicly.

I have almost entirely redirected not just what I would have invested in startups, but a multiple of that into scientific research. I've made the commitment for me, which is by far the largest commitment to not just science, but even any given startup that I've ever made financially. That's a minimum of a million dollars over the next several years, several, meaning three or four. I expect I'll exceed that $1 million amount with primarily a focus on psilocybin and MDMA, but that could extend to other compounds, which I also find to be understudied and that have been in some ways shelved for decades for primarily political and not scientifically justifiable reasons.

When we started talking about this, when you were thinking about it, I remember one of the stories that you really liked was a relatively unknown story in the world of philanthropy, unless you dig deep in the annals about the woman by the name of Catherine McCormick. That story really resonated with you. What was it about that story? You should tell this story because I think it's so noteworthy on a number of different levels, but what struck me was how if timed right and if thought about intelligently, where you're focusing on points of leverage, how even a single person with relatively moderate amounts of investment.

Moderate is relative, but let me rephrase that. How someone or a small group of people, if concentrating on points of leverage in furthering, in this case, scientific studies can really bend the arc of history in a way that most people would find unbelievable. Because when folks think of say, farm out or bring a new drug to market in the largest scale, it's billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. But that story was appealing to me because on many levels, what I'd love to do is have you tell it and then I will point out the parts, if this were a kindled chapter, which parts I would highlight to go back to to remind myself of certain things.

But why don't you tell this story? Because it's such a great example of what one person or small group of committed people can do. I'll leave it at that. Well, it can be read about more eloquently than I can restate it, but just if it was Catherine McCormick in, I believe the early 60s or late 50s met a gentleman.

I believe his name was Gregory Pankiss, if I'm not mistaken. I think that's right. At a dinner party or a top date. Yeah.

And basically he explained to her that he was pretty convinced he could chemically synthesize hormones that could be served as a birth control pill or serve as a birth control pill for women. And she was no dummy herself. She went to MIT and had been involved with also funding housing for additional female students so they could attend. Yeah.

And her hypothesis was if we could create a birth control pill, we could completely change the interaction that women can have with education, with work, with the family balance, etc. Now we take this, listen to the story, we think, well, what's the big deal? Like, so what she funded the research for the birth control pill. But the reality of it is at the time, again, I can't remember, I must have the dates wrong, but certainly it was long enough ago that this was viewed as an absolute no-go.

I mean, there was simply, you know, birth control was such a taboo. And what's really interesting is she decided to fund something that was incredibly risky that no pharma company was willing to touch with a 10 foot pole because it was viewed as just a way to sink money into a bottomless pit that could never achieve the regulatory approval. And using, again, a relatively small sum of money, and I believe in today's dollars, it's to the tune of about $25 million. She sunk into the work of this guy, Pinkis, and one other gentleman whose name is escaping me.

Over the span of something like about a decade, maybe eight years. And when you, my favorite graph that I ever saw, which was kind of the holy shit moment, was the graph of the number of women in graduate schools, professional school, law school, whatever, pre and post the introduction of the birth control pill. And it's, you don't get to see a lot of hockey sticks, you know, as one of my friends once put it. It's really cool when the data don't need statistics to be analyzed.

It's not like, well, there was a statistically significant increase in the rate at which women entered the workforce. No, no, like, you didn't have to say the word statistically significant. It was a step function change. And I don't know, I just, I thought that was such an interesting story.

And I remember when you and I were talking about this a while ago, I don't know why I told you the story, but you seem to really grip to it. There were many reasons for it. I think partially being at the time in Silicon Valley and surrounded by venture capital, I saw some of the stupidest, I don't know how else to put it, just stupidest non viable ideas raise tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Let's just be stupid.

No, I mean, for profit startups repeatedly. I mean, you just saw dozens and hundreds of examples over time of this. And it struck me that we find ourselves in a unique time, which supposes something that goes without saying every time is a unique time, but in the sense that long ago, this is worth discussing for a quick second. Silicon Valley specifically LSD were through the control, I think it's the control substances act scheduled, put into the the schedule one class of drug classification, which means high potential for addiction, no, no known medical or no medical application, no demonstrating medical application, putting them in the same class as heroin.

And to be clear for the listener who might not appreciate that, even cocaine is scheduled to, which means it still has potential for addiction. They're very acknowledged, but it does have at least one viable medical application, which is it turns out to be a pretty good local anesthetic in the nose, which is ironic, of course. But it therefore does have a medical use and it's used routinely in ENT surgery. So if these compounds are so useful, if they can have some of the effects without guarantee, of course, it's not batting a thousand every time.

If you have a hundred people at random or using these some direction, some without you're not going to have a perfect record. But if even some of the time the effects can be achieved, the outcomes can be seen that we're discussing, how did these compounds, including LSD, end up in this category? And there it's a multi factorial problem, and it's hard to say there's one causal agent, but there are few things that happen at the time. One, many people don't realize Paul gets into this really fascinating, but LSD 25, which was first isolated or synthesized by Albert Hoffman, was developed on the part on behalf of a pharma company.

It was later used. But rose, correct. I want to say it was sandals. Oh, you're right, correct.

It was sandals. And then it was later used in a program that if I'm remembering correctly was CIA led called MKUltra, where it might be used as a truth serum for interrogations and things of this type, or to confuse and sabotage enemies of the state. And it got out into the wild. And then the adventure began, so to speak.

And LSD was widely distributed. And at the time you had parents who had never experienced psychedelics. We were going into the Vietnam era, and we had a number of characters come on to the scene in a very high profile way as one of them being. And he cannot be, even though he is often given the blame.

I don't think it's fair to do this. You know, Larry, but Tim Leary came onto the scene. He was at Harvard as was Richard Albert, who later became Ram Das. And the things exploded at Harvard.

They were both fired. I don't think they resigned preemptively because SoulSightman was given to an undergraduate when it was only supposed to be administered to graduate students. And at some point, Leary decided that science was too slow and that the way to affect cultural change was to have tens of millions of people. He had a specific number in mind and that that would effectively lead to a tipping point where all these positive effects on society would be inevitable.

And if you think about the cultural setting, you have a lot of young people being told to drop out of school to resist war efforts. And all of that made a number of figures, including very high profile targets that could not in some ways be ignored by the administration. And so Nixon famously said, Tim was the most dangerous man in America and you had parents who could not in any way conceive of the experiences that their children were having on these compounds. And that along with dozens of other things was a recipe for political crackdown, which is exactly what happened.

What you have now is you have parents who are, in many cases, certainly products of the 60s who have had psychedelic experiences. You have people who are in positions of power or in regulatory organizations who have, in some cases, experienced psychedelics. You also have studies now being conducted even though it's with great difficulty because of all of the approvals and DEA oversight and so on. It's required that are going back to the dozens and hundreds of studies that were performed before the crackdown and rescheduling and applying more rigorous scientific standards.

And that is combined with a number of, as you mentioned earlier, epidemic level problems that we're experiencing that are costing, I would have to imagine billions on billions of dollars, namely, opiate addiction, depression, PTSD. If you add up the costs associated with those three, if you want to be a little crass about it and just look at the profit loss, it makes a lot of sense based on the data thus far to explore some of these compounds. That's part of the reason why, for instance, in the case of MDMA and PTSD, the FDA has granted MDMA breakthrough therapy designation, which means that not only is the process expedited for ultimately phase three trials, that the FDA is in a sense a collaborator. So instead of saying, all right, your methodology is approved and I'm going to apologize in advance.