The Peter Attia Drive - #01 - Tim Ferriss： depression, psychedelics, and emotional resilience

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.

00:00:10.140 The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,

00:00:15.600 along with a few other obsessions I've gathered along the way. I've spent the last several years

00:00:19.860 working with some of the most successful, top-performing individuals in the world,

00:00:23.440 and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you

00:00:27.840 live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more

00:00:32.100 information on today's episode and other topics at peteratiyahmd.com.

00:00:41.120 Welcome to episode one of the Peter Atiyah Drive. I can think of no better person to begin this 0.65

00:00:48.120 podcast with than my very dear friend, Tim Ferriss. Not only is Tim a really close friend, but he's

00:00:54.940 also almost single-handedly the reason this podcast is coming into existence. So in other

00:01:00.120 words, if you hate it, you can blame Tim. Tim has been kind of on my case for about two years to do

00:01:05.620 this, and more than anything else, he's just really helped me think about how I can sort of put

00:01:12.180 something together that allows me to create something that is sort of new and that isn't

00:01:17.240 already out there in terms of content, but also is something that I'll find enjoyable to do and that

00:01:21.860 hopefully we'll come across as this podcast gets underway. I'm guessing most people listening

00:01:26.460 to this know a lot about Tim, but on the off chance that there are some who don't, I think it's just

00:01:30.280 worth kind of giving a little bit of background on Tim. He's been described as a quote, a cross between

00:01:35.640 Jack Welsh and a Buddhist monk by the New York Times. He's one of Fast Company's most innovative

00:01:40.460 business people. He's an early stage tech investor and advisor, and that includes a number of companies

00:01:45.200 that most people have heard of, such as Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Alibaba, and at least 50

00:01:50.460 others. He's also the author of five number one New York Times bestsellers and Wall Street Journal

00:01:56.080 bestsellers, The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, also known as

00:02:03.100 Biggest Tools, that's an inside joke in reference to the podcast, and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and

00:02:09.620 other media outlets have described him as the Oprah of audio due to the influence of his podcast,

00:02:14.440 The Tim Ferriss Show, which has about 300 million downloads at the time of this recording. It's also been

00:02:20.080 selected as the best of iTunes for three years running. Now, I want to say something about this

00:02:25.300 episode that will become apparent, obviously, once we get started. One, we talk a lot about things that

00:02:30.300 are topics that Tim and I don't really spend a lot of time discussing publicly and certainly

00:02:34.080 personally. And so it's important to understand here that while Tim and I do talk quite openly about

00:02:39.600 psychedelic experiences we've shared in South America, it shouldn't be taken to mean that that's

00:02:44.360 what we're recommending that anybody go out and do. We're absolutely not doing that. There are physical,

00:02:48.980 there are psychological, and there are legal risks among these things. And it's important to remember

00:02:52.600 that in the United States, at the time of this recording, psychedelics like psilocybin, which we

00:02:57.000 speak about quite a bit, along with mescaline and things that we don't get into much detail around,

00:03:01.780 such as ayahuasca, these are currently Schedule 1, which means that they are illegal. And while we

00:03:07.300 believe, obviously, that that designation is completely unwarranted and will likely, you know,

00:03:12.600 eventually no longer be the case when the scientific community has a chance to catch up and understand

00:03:16.820 the great potential of these things. Really, the purpose of this podcast is informational only.

00:03:22.320 And while I do generally provide a disclaimer at the end of my podcast that explains that all of

00:03:27.860 this information is informational, I want to be really clear about this particular issue.

00:03:32.120 We talk a lot about these things. We talk about a few other things as well. And I think even for the

00:03:36.680 listener who doesn't find this topic to be particularly interesting, one thing that we talk about at the

00:03:42.180 very end of the podcast that I'd been meaning to ask Tim for a while, and certainly I get asked a lot

00:03:47.020 is, what are the things that you still incorporate in your daily routine? Tim has written so eloquently

00:03:55.080 about this stuff and has codified so many ways to find these minimum effective doses and to optimize

00:04:01.680 everything he's doing that I think people wonder, hey, which are the things that have really stood the

00:04:06.280 test of time. And so I actually found that last part of the podcast to be especially interesting,

00:04:13.140 even for me, though I knew these things and I can see all the things that Tim does day in and day out,

00:04:18.180 but to sort of have him say, look, if I had to pick five, these would be the five. Tim can be found

00:04:23.260 all over the place, but I think the best places to see him are on his blog, which is tim.blog.

00:04:28.020 You can follow him at T Ferris, that's F-E-R-R-I-S-S on Twitter, and you find him at Tim Ferris on Facebook

00:04:36.600 and Instagram. I hope you enjoy this first episode half as much as I enjoyed recording it, and there

00:04:46.220 will be lots more of these to follow. So with all of that said, please welcome Tim Ferris.

00:04:54.000 Hey, Tim. Peter. Thank you for having me out in Austin this weekend.

00:04:57.380 My pleasure. It's been a good weekend. Good view, too.

00:05:01.360 Yeah. What I can't believe is in the relatively short period of time you have lived here,

00:05:06.640 you've become essentially the unofficial mayor of Austin.

00:05:10.320 Well, I like to get involved and to explore all the various nooks and crannies of any city that I

00:05:18.020 live in. And after 17 years in the Bay Area, I felt like I'd left almost no stone unturned,

00:05:25.540 have many dear friends who are still there, but many of them have traveled outside. And one of the

00:05:30.360 places that was an annual migration was South by Southwest here in Austin and had wanted to move

00:05:36.180 here right after college. Gotten to know it year by year with increasingly longer stays in the city

00:05:43.760 before and after the festival itself. And now it's home. Couldn't be happier.

00:05:49.020 Feel like every place we went in the last three days, everybody knew you like the owner of the

00:05:54.480 restaurant would know you and the coffee shop. And it was, I don't think I've drank more coffee

00:06:01.060 and Topo Chico in as short a period of time as I have in the last three days.

00:06:06.900 Yes. Coffee, Topo Chico and so many things here. Yeah. Breakfast tacos is something I haven't yet

00:06:13.020 explored. That's another form of religion here right next to barbecue and a bunch of other things,

00:06:19.540 but it's a cozy feel. It has a neighborhood feel and I've come to value that type of

00:06:27.060 neighborhood feel and cohesion, which is something I probably wouldn't have paid much attention to 10

00:06:33.480 years ago. Yeah. I've sort of always assumed I would live forever in California and I got to say

00:06:39.500 all your hard work here to get your friends to move out here. It's, I think it's going to pay off. I,

00:06:43.940 I, uh, I think I can see Austin in my future. Yeah. I have a, I have a lot of friends who are moving

00:06:48.660 and I think in, in many respects it's defined by the fact that it's difficult to categorize.

00:06:58.620 There is no one mono conversation about tech or entertainment or finance. And some people might

00:07:06.360 view that as a weakness, meaning if you're looking to live in the epicenter of a certain industry and

00:07:12.100 you're in your early twenties and want to cut your teeth and live that hyperkinetic, super aggressive

00:07:18.120 lifestyle while you're building your foundation for the future, that's one thing. But in my case,

00:07:24.260 I'm much more so in placing value on the general friendliness, the cultural diversity, which is not

00:07:36.060 just skin deep. It covers so many different bases here. And I enjoy the fact that you can go from

00:07:44.700 a strict vegan restaurant to a deer processing plant to an electric scooter startup office to a cowboy 0.85

00:07:53.520 boot store all in the stretch of a few blocks. That's exciting to me. And though I've never

00:07:59.440 really bought the argument that people in New York and Southern California, which are the two places I

00:08:03.980 spend most of my time are, you know, I've never bought the argument that those are snotty, super

00:08:08.460 snotty places and nobody's nice. Cause I do think that people are actually pretty decent everywhere and

00:08:12.900 including in the middle of Manhattan. But that said, it's a different level of nice here that is

00:08:17.480 completely foreign to me. Yeah, it is. I remember when I first moved to Austin and I had a number of

00:08:25.440 neighbors drop off cards or come to the door to ring the bell to ask if I want to come over for

00:08:29.920 dinner. And I didn't even know how to respond, which, which really you're like, what are they

00:08:36.440 selling? It told me more about myself that I was so mistrusting perhaps. But in San Francisco, that

00:08:43.420 does not happen as far as I know. I've never heard of that happening. Certainly in New York,

00:08:48.560 it'd be, you know, time to check your security system and consider your, your avenues of getting

00:08:56.700 out of the house. But here that's just par for the course. And it's, it's really been nice

00:09:01.820 to embrace that. And even within Texas, Austin is, is known for being very, very friendly. And

00:09:10.300 I've, I've met many different people here who've moved from Houston and other parts, which are also

00:09:14.320 fantastic in their own way because of the general level of friendliness. So I'm a fan, I'm a fan.

00:09:21.120 You know, I always thought I would be felt the gravitational pull here when I graduated

00:09:25.420 and did not get the job here that I would so coveted at trilogy. And it turned out being a

00:09:33.140 blessing disguise that I didn't get the job. And I think also for trilogy, because I most likely would

00:09:38.920 have been a terrible employee, but that took me to NorCal had a great stint there, but that chapter

00:09:45.700 came to a close and it was just the right time. Well, as I said, it's been amazing to be here. Not my

00:09:50.300 first time here, but each time I come, I like it more and more. And I guess with that said,

00:09:55.820 we are kicking off effectively the first episode of a podcast that you more than any other friend,

00:10:03.400 although several friends have played an enormous role in the so-called cajoling, as I referred to

00:10:07.820 it earlier in making this happen. So if this ends up sucking, um, I'll take all the blame. I'm blaming

00:10:14.500 you. And if this ends up doing okay, I'm thanking you. But either way, I think this has been

00:10:20.300 this will be fun. I think my customary 30% is very reasonable. 30% of what, right?

00:10:29.440 Now, obviously this podcast is on some level and probably on a large level going to come down to

00:10:34.480 things that I think a lot about and hope to bring to people. You asked me the other day, you know,

00:10:39.320 what am I hoping to accomplish with this? And I don't have a great elevator pitch on it,

00:10:43.360 but one of the things is I find myself so often having conversations with people that I think,

00:10:48.860 God, this person is so much smarter than me and knows so much more than me. And they're letting

00:10:52.700 me be a sponge right now and absorb so much information from them. And so many times I find

00:10:56.720 myself at the end of those discussions thinking, I can't believe nobody else got to hear that. What

00:11:01.160 if I didn't extract everything from that correctly? What if there was more to be gathered? And so it's

00:11:07.260 really that desire to sort of have as many of these conversations as possible and be able to sort of

00:11:11.660 share them in their natural state that I think is a large part of this motivation.

00:11:15.200 And while most people sort of associate me, I suspect with thinking about longevity,

00:11:20.840 we probably don't spend enough time talking about what longevity means, but the way I talk about it

00:11:24.540 with my patients is it's both enhancing lifespan, but also healthspan and lifespan is the easier of

00:11:29.860 those two to understand because enhancing lifespan just means not dying, which is not to say that

00:11:34.560 that's easy, but it's conceptually easy. I think the healthspan stuff is harder to understand.

00:11:40.120 And as I have come to learn in the past three or four years, I believe for most people,

00:11:46.020 it actually matters more. Many people think, you know, if you helping me doesn't add one day

00:11:51.800 to the length of my life, but improves the quality of my life, especially at the end,

00:11:56.280 that would be sufficient. And so in many ways, what I want to talk about today

00:12:00.240 is one piece of healthspan that I, I know the least about by far, but also I think is the one that

00:12:06.640 we are least likely to talk about as a society, which is sort of mental health. Now you've spoken

00:12:12.900 really publicly about your interest in that. I knew a lot of this before you talked about it at TED,

00:12:17.580 but can you tell me a little bit about that? I can. And I'm thrilled you're doing a podcast

00:12:22.380 because I do think that just as, as a bit of overlay on what you said, there is so much focus

00:12:29.700 on extending lifespan, rightly so, but the equal obsession, equal level of obsession that you bring

00:12:38.660 to performance and healthspan, I think creates a compelling combination that I don't find in many

00:12:47.800 places. I find the combination of those interests very common, but the combination of competencies,

00:12:54.660 broadly speaking, in both of those domains is very uncommon. So I'm excited to listen to

00:12:58.920 other episodes of the podcast. And as it relates to mental health, I should, as maybe an introductory

00:13:07.840 preamble, say that this is not a topic I've always been comfortable talking about publicly. And

00:13:15.720 in fact, I would say for the vast majority of my adolescence and certainly throughout high school

00:13:24.600 in college, I somehow came to the conclusion that I was just not designed to be happy, that evolution

00:13:33.040 did not optimize for happiness. And I just did not have the code for happy. And that was okay,

00:13:40.040 that I would be an instrument of competition, I would learn to be good at various things that were valued

00:13:46.800 at colleges, and then by the business worlds, and so on. And that it was

00:13:54.820 it was not worth

00:13:59.400 trying to be happy or

00:14:03.900 to

00:14:06.200 not just love myself, but really have a high opinion of myself.

00:14:11.600 And in fact, that was self indulgent, and that I would just focus on being the best competitor

00:14:16.600 possible, and hopefully turning that into something that was

00:14:19.220 not only a value to me, or that I was rewarded for, but that would help other people, and that

00:14:24.800 perhaps I would find some joy in the joy of other people, but that was the extent of it.

00:14:29.520 And suffered from

00:14:31.640 many different bouts of extended depression,

00:14:35.300 depression, for as long as I can recall, really. And that is also

00:14:39.140 something that you can spot very easily, looking back at my family history,

00:14:43.520 on both sides.

00:14:45.860 And

00:14:46.300 if you look

00:14:48.020 back to

00:14:49.340 grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, a fair amount of alcohol consumption, certainly, a fair amount of alcoholism.

00:14:54.480 I

00:14:54.800 thankfully have not

00:14:56.760 soothed myself with excessive amounts of alcohol, but

00:15:00.040 you see a lot of patterns

00:15:01.840 that scared me, certainly, but the depression was one that I could just not seemingly navigate around.

00:15:09.600 And

00:15:10.060 the TED Talk

00:15:11.540 opened with a

00:15:14.340 particularly

00:15:15.220 close call, the closest call I've ever had.

00:15:18.300 This is not a common experience for me, but

00:15:20.260 in college, where I came very, very close to killing myself, and

00:15:22.800 we actually got to the planning stages. It wasn't just

00:15:25.360 rumination about

00:15:27.960 what if, I wonder

00:15:29.320 what it would be like to take my life. No, it would

00:15:32.120 it was a decision that had been made, and I was already in the planning stages. And to give people the short

00:15:37.580 punchline to that, which explains why I'm here today,

00:15:40.160 I had reserved

00:15:41.900 a book

00:15:42.860 which was going to be the last of many that I had read on this subject related to suicide.

00:15:49.160 It was

00:15:49.920 already checked out of the Firestone Library at Princeton, where I was, at the time, taking a year away from.

00:15:56.220 And

00:15:56.660 it was checked out to some other poor student.

00:15:59.780 So I put in a request to be notified when it came back into

00:16:04.920 the library.

00:16:06.920 But I forgot to update my address at the registrar's office.

00:16:11.300 And the address that I had on file after taking this leave of absence was my home address

00:16:15.640 in New York, where my parents lived.

00:16:17.920 And so my mom got this postcard, which was

00:16:20.480 Dear Tim Ferriss,

00:16:23.120 this is to notify you that

00:16:24.940 and then whatever it was, you know, the final solution,

00:16:27.760 whatever it might have been,

00:16:29.680 the how to kill yourself manual

00:16:31.100 has arrived.

00:16:32.200 Please come to claim your book within the next X number of weeks, or it'll be released to the

00:16:36.840 next person who has it on reservation, whatever the postcard said.

00:16:39.900 And I got this very

00:16:40.860 heartfelt,

00:16:42.920 understandably nervous

00:16:44.040 call from my mom with her voice cracking,

00:16:47.540 asking about it.

00:16:48.440 And I lied.

00:16:49.200 I said it was,

00:16:50.060 I was very fast on my feet.

00:16:51.380 And I said it was for a friend at Rutgers who wasn't

00:16:53.640 able to get the book for a dissertation

00:16:56.080 or a thesis he was working on.

00:16:58.700 So I reserved it for him.

00:16:59.760 No, everything's fine.

00:17:01.020 But in that moment, after that call,

00:17:03.000 I realized how

00:17:04.360 these, in retrospect,

00:17:07.580 little waves,

00:17:09.620 small events can be blown,

00:17:12.100 or even large events can be

00:17:13.800 blown so out of proportion or seen as permanent

00:17:16.980 in such a way that

00:17:19.720 regardless of socioeconomic status,

00:17:22.920 regardless of race,

00:17:23.820 regardless of gender,

00:17:24.700 where people can be so

00:17:26.760 knocked off course

00:17:28.300 that they end up taking their own lives.

00:17:30.380 And certainly,

00:17:31.140 recently, that's been

00:17:32.260 very dramatically

00:17:34.160 demonstrated and tragically demonstrated

00:17:36.560 with the deaths of

00:17:37.480 many people,

00:17:38.980 including Anthony Bourdain,

00:17:40.580 who comes to mind most recently.

00:17:41.820 And that's just on the

00:17:42.660 high profile side.

00:17:44.500 But in my case,

00:17:45.540 personally, I realized

00:17:46.680 how

00:17:47.920 my blinders

00:17:50.560 and

00:17:51.660 pessimism in this downward spiral

00:17:53.800 had led me to

00:17:54.880 really only focus on my pain.

00:17:56.960 I didn't realize how

00:17:58.020 until that phone call,

00:18:01.380 committing suicide would have been

00:18:02.720 like taking 10 times the pain

00:18:04.520 that I felt

00:18:05.220 and imposing it on

00:18:06.540 the people who loved me the most.

00:18:09.180 And that was a huge wake-up call.

00:18:11.620 So that is

00:18:12.740 why I'm here today,

00:18:14.140 is

00:18:14.660 the

00:18:15.940 lucky

00:18:17.340 accident

00:18:18.240 that I did not update

00:18:19.640 my address

00:18:20.540 at the registrar's office.

00:18:21.780 And if that had not happened,

00:18:24.400 I mean,

00:18:24.940 I was ready to

00:18:26.480 pull the trigger,

00:18:27.840 so to speak,

00:18:28.320 although that wasn't how

00:18:29.240 I was going to go.

00:18:30.140 But it was all specked out.

00:18:32.180 It's terrifying to think of.

00:18:33.660 Really, really terrifying to think of.

00:18:35.380 And

00:18:35.820 I have

00:18:37.540 some of my best friends

00:18:39.500 in high school

00:18:40.420 who you never would have suspected

00:18:42.300 from the outside looking in

00:18:43.500 killed themselves.

00:18:45.120 College,

00:18:45.640 same story.

00:18:46.520 I just know so many people

00:18:48.040 who have taken their own lives

00:18:49.440 and

00:18:50.140 it always came as a shock

00:18:53.100 to people

00:18:53.940 at least who knew them

00:18:56.040 in school,

00:18:56.600 for instance.

00:18:57.260 They seem to have it all together.

00:18:59.100 They seem to have

00:19:00.040 the good relationship

00:19:01.380 or the good job

00:19:02.380 or the good grades

00:19:03.120 or whatever it might be,

00:19:03.840 the good family.

00:19:05.420 And

00:19:05.780 that's led me

00:19:07.080 in the last few years

00:19:07.940 in particular

00:19:08.500 to at the very least

00:19:09.720 want to

00:19:11.360 focus on

00:19:12.960 discussing

00:19:14.100 mental health,

00:19:16.000 different facets

00:19:16.600 of mental health

00:19:17.360 from an experiential

00:19:18.700 first-hand basis

00:19:19.620 simply to tell people

00:19:21.240 if

00:19:21.820 assuming I don't have

00:19:23.760 any type of ready

00:19:24.600 answer for them

00:19:26.420 you are not alone.

00:19:28.060 This is

00:19:29.140 exceptionally

00:19:30.260 exceptionally common

00:19:31.520 but it's

00:19:33.360 the dirty little secret

00:19:34.300 that so many people

00:19:35.120 carry around

00:19:35.760 and are unwilling

00:19:37.140 to discuss

00:19:37.760 and so at the very least

00:19:38.620 I want to say

00:19:39.000 you are not alone.

00:19:40.660 There are

00:19:41.320 millions

00:19:42.780 upon millions

00:19:43.480 of people

00:19:43.980 fighting similar

00:19:45.200 battles

00:19:45.600 and everyone

00:19:46.500 you meet

00:19:46.960 is fighting

00:19:47.480 some inner battle

00:19:48.760 you know nothing about.

00:19:50.180 So do not assume

00:19:51.260 that you are alone

00:19:51.880 and I think in that

00:19:52.820 hopefully people

00:19:53.800 can find some solace

00:19:54.880 and then beyond that

00:19:55.940 I've spent the last

00:19:57.000 few years

00:19:57.740 really investigating

00:20:01.000 using the

00:20:02.140 contacts

00:20:03.260 and network

00:20:04.220 that I've developed

00:20:04.980 through the books

00:20:05.980 and the podcast

00:20:06.960 and the tech investing

00:20:08.400 to explore avenues

00:20:10.560 and

00:20:11.440 potential treatments

00:20:13.140 or interventions

00:20:13.720 that can

00:20:15.740 certainly help

00:20:16.920 people who are

00:20:17.500 on the brink

00:20:18.140 get back to

00:20:19.460 stability

00:20:20.460 potentially

00:20:21.020 but also

00:20:21.720 to take people

00:20:22.460 who are

00:20:22.900 who might view

00:20:24.420 themselves as stable

00:20:25.480 or normal

00:20:25.940 and

00:20:26.820 to

00:20:27.840 mitigate

00:20:29.080 against

00:20:29.860 the potential

00:20:30.580 of losing

00:20:32.140 their footing

00:20:32.540 and then there are

00:20:34.500 we can go beyond

00:20:35.560 that certainly

00:20:36.120 but

00:20:37.180 that is

00:20:38.840 my interest

00:20:39.700 in this

00:20:40.180 certainly

00:20:40.900 began

00:20:41.620 on a very

00:20:43.200 personal level

00:20:43.860 how do I

00:20:44.980 is it possible

00:20:46.060 I should say

00:20:46.540 forget about how

00:20:47.420 is it possible

00:20:48.240 for me

00:20:48.700 to manage this

00:20:49.600 and

00:20:51.020 the type of

00:20:52.200 thinking that

00:20:52.700 triggers the

00:20:53.260 most dangerous

00:20:53.940 downward spirals

00:20:56.380 is

00:20:56.740 what's the point

00:20:57.760 if I'm

00:20:58.400 if I'm

00:20:58.920 constantly

00:20:59.520 going to

00:21:00.260 default

00:21:00.720 to this

00:21:01.180 negative thinking

00:21:02.000 and I'm so

00:21:03.080 blessed for

00:21:03.980 A B and C

00:21:04.800 reasons

00:21:05.320 what's the

00:21:06.220 point

00:21:06.580 and

00:21:07.920 that is

00:21:08.760 a really

00:21:09.520 really

00:21:10.360 poisonous

00:21:11.420 sort of

00:21:12.440 toxic

00:21:13.060 mental

00:21:13.600 landscape

00:21:14.080 to immerse

00:21:15.260 yourself

00:21:15.540 into it

00:21:16.000 and

00:21:16.280 get caught

00:21:17.140 in

00:21:17.420 so

00:21:17.720 is it

00:21:18.100 possible

00:21:18.560 for me

00:21:19.140 to somehow

00:21:20.000 decrease

00:21:22.020 the frequency

00:21:22.660 of those

00:21:23.020 types of

00:21:23.380 episodes

00:21:23.760 is it

00:21:24.220 possible

00:21:24.680 somehow

00:21:25.100 to decrease

00:21:25.980 the severity

00:21:26.720 of those

00:21:27.200 episodes

00:21:27.680 is it

00:21:29.060 possible

00:21:29.440 to look

00:21:30.060 at

00:21:30.600 my

00:21:31.920 quirky

00:21:32.360 biochemistry

00:21:33.060 my

00:21:33.500 software

00:21:34.520 in a way

00:21:35.300 that I

00:21:35.660 see some

00:21:36.080 blessings

00:21:36.520 within

00:21:36.980 my

00:21:37.980 day-to-day

00:21:39.100 month-to-month

00:21:39.660 experience

00:21:40.320 that in

00:21:41.260 some way

00:21:41.560 counteract

00:21:42.400 the tendency

00:21:44.060 to view

00:21:44.580 myself so

00:21:45.380 harshly

00:21:46.020 when the

00:21:46.760 inevitable

00:21:47.100 dips

00:21:47.440 come

00:21:47.800 long

00:21:48.760 answer

00:21:49.020 to a

00:21:49.300 short

00:21:49.440 question

00:21:50.000 but

00:21:51.440 that's

00:21:52.400 that's

00:21:53.280 really

00:21:53.700 been

00:21:54.160 particularly

00:21:54.760 in the

00:21:55.260 last

00:21:55.540 I would

00:21:55.780 say

00:21:56.000 two

00:21:56.340 years

00:21:56.820 three

00:21:58.040 mostly

00:21:58.700 starting

00:21:59.080 about

00:21:59.260 five

00:21:59.540 years

00:21:59.740 ago

00:21:59.880 but

00:22:00.020 in

00:22:00.100 the

00:22:00.160 last

00:22:00.300 two

00:22:00.580 or

00:22:00.740 three

00:22:01.060 really

00:22:02.000 diverting

00:22:02.840 a lot

00:22:03.220 of my

00:22:03.460 attention

00:22:03.780 that was

00:22:04.280 going

00:22:04.600 to

00:22:04.980 start

00:22:05.820 up

00:22:05.960 investing

00:22:06.260 a lot

00:22:06.540 of my

00:22:06.720 resources

00:22:07.220 that were

00:22:07.540 going

00:22:07.800 to

00:22:07.940 start

00:22:08.200 up

00:22:08.320 investing

00:22:08.720 to

00:22:09.340 areas

00:22:09.660 that

00:22:09.800 are

00:22:09.900 related

00:22:10.180 to

00:22:10.360 this

00:22:10.600 and

00:22:10.920 there's

00:22:11.160 so much

00:22:11.700 of that

00:22:11.900 stuff

00:22:12.100 I can't

00:22:12.440 wait to

00:22:12.700 talk

00:22:12.980 about

00:22:13.180 today

00:22:13.480 because

00:22:14.020 you've

00:22:14.520 brought

00:22:14.700 a lot

00:22:15.020 of

00:22:15.160 people

00:22:15.420 along

00:22:15.860 on

00:22:16.160 this

00:22:16.340 ride

00:22:16.660 with

00:22:16.840 you

00:22:17.000 so

00:22:17.580 obviously

00:22:17.980 I

00:22:18.160 can

00:22:18.280 only

00:22:18.440 speak

00:22:18.680 from

00:22:18.880 my

00:22:19.140 own

00:22:19.320 personal

00:22:19.700 experience

00:22:20.220 but

00:22:20.480 we

00:22:20.700 have

00:22:20.860 so

00:22:21.000 many

00:22:21.120 mutual

00:22:21.440 friends

00:22:21.880 who

00:22:22.240 have

00:22:23.020 also

00:22:23.480 been

00:22:23.860 heavily

00:22:24.340 influenced

00:22:24.940 by

00:22:25.500 sort

00:22:33.780 realm

00:22:34.020 of

00:22:34.220 thinking

00:22:34.600 you

00:22:35.260 said

00:22:35.580 something

00:22:35.820 at

00:22:35.960 the

00:22:36.080 outset

00:22:36.380 which

00:22:36.720 was

00:22:37.140 you

00:22:37.880 just

00:22:38.040 thought

00:22:38.200 you

00:22:38.320 weren't

00:22:38.480 wired

00:22:38.820 to

00:22:39.000 be

00:22:39.140 happy

00:22:39.500 which

00:22:39.760 I

00:22:39.920 mean

00:22:40.200 I

00:22:40.300 can

00:22:40.400 resonate

00:22:40.660 with

00:22:40.800 that

00:22:40.900 completely

00:22:41.240 I

00:22:41.400 remember

00:22:41.720 as a

00:22:42.080 child

00:22:42.400 my

00:22:42.720 mom

00:22:43.200 would

00:22:43.380 always

00:22:43.640 say

00:22:43.820 to

00:22:43.920 me

00:22:44.060 you

00:22:44.180 know

00:22:44.280 Peter

00:22:44.540 do

00:22:45.260 you

00:22:45.360 just

00:22:45.540 not

00:22:45.780 want

00:22:46.060 to

00:22:46.140 be

00:22:46.260 happy

00:22:46.600 and

00:22:47.440 I

00:22:47.540 would

00:22:47.820 look

00:22:47.960 at

00:22:48.060 her

00:22:48.160 like

00:22:48.320 I

00:22:48.460 don't

00:22:48.540 know

00:22:48.620 what

00:22:48.720 kind

00:22:48.840 of 1.00

00:22:48.940 dumb 1.00

00:22:49.140 question 1.00

00:22:49.560 that

00:22:49.760 is

00:22:49.940 like

00:22:50.140 it's

00:22:50.360 not

00:22:50.480 an

00:22:50.620 option

00:22:51.020 like

00:22:51.340 you

00:22:51.860 might

00:22:51.980 as

00:22:52.020 be

00:22:52.180 asking

00:22:52.520 me

00:22:52.700 if

00:22:52.820 I

00:22:52.940 want

00:22:53.300 to

00:22:53.440 be

00:22:53.600 12

00:22:53.980 feet

00:22:54.240 tall

00:22:54.620 like

00:22:54.820 I

00:22:54.920 have

00:22:55.060 some

00:22:55.240 say

00:22:55.600 in

00:22:55.760 the

00:22:55.860 matter

00:22:56.120 it's

00:22:56.980 not

00:22:57.080 about

00:22:57.240 wanting

00:22:57.600 to

00:22:57.740 be

00:22:57.880 happy

00:22:58.100 it's

00:22:58.280 just

00:22:58.420 about

00:22:58.620 metaphysically

00:22:59.280 not

00:22:59.560 being

00:22:59.820 able

00:23:00.040 to

00:23:00.200 be

00:23:00.340 happy

00:23:00.640 and

00:23:01.300 then

00:23:01.460 furthermore

00:23:01.920 my

00:23:02.120 thought

00:23:02.440 which

00:23:02.620 was

00:23:02.780 even

00:23:02.960 a

00:23:03.100 bit

00:23:03.220 more

00:23:03.460 obscure

00:23:03.880 or

00:23:04.180 maybe

00:23:04.500 bizarre

00:23:05.000 was

00:23:05.380 happiness

00:23:06.180 was

00:23:06.380 a

00:23:06.520 bad

00:23:06.820 thing

00:23:07.160 because

00:23:07.420 you

00:23:07.760 would

00:23:07.900 stop

00:23:08.180 being

00:23:08.380 hungry

00:23:08.800 makes

00:23:09.100 you

00:23:09.240 complacent

00:23:09.780 yes

00:23:20.620 and

00:23:21.560 of

00:23:21.660 course

00:23:21.780 I

00:23:22.060 didn't

00:23:22.220 have

00:23:22.420 the 0.98

00:23:22.660 mental

00:23:24.460 framework

00:23:25.180 to

00:23:25.440 probe

00:23:25.800 that

00:23:26.100 idea

00:23:26.420 further

00:23:26.740 which

00:23:26.920 is

00:23:27.020 what

00:23:27.140 are

00:23:27.220 you

00:23:27.320 proving

00:23:27.700 who

00:23:27.900 are

00:23:28.020 you

00:23:28.140 proving

00:23:28.460 it

00:23:28.660 to

00:23:28.900 why

00:23:29.160 do

00:23:29.280 you

00:23:29.380 feel

00:23:29.520 the

00:23:29.660 need

00:23:29.780 to

00:23:29.900 do

00:23:30.040 all

00:23:30.200 of

00:23:30.300 these

00:23:30.480 things

00:23:30.820 but

00:23:31.140 it

00:23:31.780 wasn't

00:23:32.120 until

00:23:32.360 quite

00:23:32.700 recently

00:23:33.180 that

00:23:33.460 I

00:23:33.600 even

00:23:34.000 began

00:23:34.360 to

00:23:34.560 entertain

00:23:34.960 the

00:23:35.180 idea

00:23:35.520 that

00:23:35.880 being

00:23:36.520 happy

00:23:36.760 is

00:23:36.880 not

00:23:36.980 a

00:23:37.060 bad

00:23:37.180 thing

00:23:37.740 or

00:23:38.140 put

00:23:38.320 another

00:23:38.540 way

00:23:38.700 that

00:23:38.820 it's

00:23:38.940 a

00:23:39.020 good

00:23:39.140 thing

00:23:39.360 the

00:23:41.900 double

00:23:42.160 negative

00:23:42.560 right

00:23:50.620 talk

00:23:50.920 Jim

00:23:51.480 Lair

00:23:51.820 who

00:23:52.320 is

00:23:52.520 a

00:23:52.920 performance

00:23:53.480 coach

00:23:53.860 who

00:23:53.980 has

00:23:54.080 worked

00:23:54.320 with

00:23:54.520 many

00:23:55.000 many

00:23:55.360 of

00:23:55.560 the

00:23:55.660 most

00:23:55.840 famous

00:23:56.280 tennis

00:23:56.820 players

00:23:57.220 and

00:23:57.400 other

00:23:57.580 athletes

00:23:58.040 in

00:23:58.360 the

00:23:58.480 world

00:23:58.740 I

00:23:58.940 had

00:23:59.200 a

00:23:59.300 chance

00:23:59.460 to

00:23:59.600 spend

00:23:59.840 time

00:24:00.140 with

00:24:00.300 him

00:24:00.500 for

00:24:01.180 my

00:24:01.320 last

00:24:01.560 book

00:24:01.780 and

00:24:01.880 also

00:24:02.200 for

00:24:02.420 some

00:24:02.580 tennis

00:24:02.840 training

00:24:03.160 in

00:24:03.500 Florida

00:24:03.900 and

00:24:05.080 he

00:24:05.380 spent

00:24:05.840 time

00:24:06.100 with

00:24:06.220 one

00:24:06.360 of

00:24:06.440 my

00:24:06.620 very

00:24:06.960 close

00:24:07.200 friends

00:24:07.440 Josh

00:24:07.760 Waitzkin

00:24:08.180 as

00:24:09.360 well

00:24:09.580 who's

00:24:09.840 best

00:24:10.260 known

00:24:10.560 for

00:24:10.960 being

00:24:11.840 the

00:24:11.980 basis

00:24:12.280 for

00:24:12.600 searching

00:24:12.920 for

00:24:13.100 Bobby

00:24:13.320 Fisher

00:24:13.600 for

00:24:13.760 those

00:24:13.880 people

00:24:14.060 who

00:24:14.160 are

00:24:14.200 familiar

00:24:14.480 and

00:24:15.800 he

00:24:17.020 talks

00:24:17.420 a lot

00:24:18.280 about

00:24:18.820 the

00:24:19.280 inner

00:24:19.880 voice

00:24:20.260 the

00:24:20.460 most

00:24:20.720 important

00:24:21.360 coach

00:24:21.900 and

00:24:22.520 voice

00:24:23.280 you

00:24:23.480 ever

00:24:23.780 hear

00:24:24.040 is

00:24:24.200 your

00:24:24.320 inner

00:24:24.520 voice

00:24:24.880 so

00:24:25.700 I've

00:24:25.840 learned

00:24:26.060 to pay

00:24:26.620 increasing

00:24:27.300 attention

00:24:27.760 to the

00:24:28.420 words

00:24:28.940 I

00:24:29.400 use

00:24:29.820 particularly

00:24:30.940 when

00:24:32.060 I'm

00:24:32.240 ruminating

00:24:32.860 referring

00:24:34.020 to

00:24:34.220 myself

00:24:34.680 talking

00:24:35.140 to

00:24:35.300 myself

00:24:35.740 making

00:24:36.720 a note

00:24:37.020 to

00:24:37.200 self

00:24:37.580 that's

00:24:39.460 a long

00:24:39.720 story

00:24:39.980 inside

00:24:40.260 joke

00:24:40.520 guys

00:24:40.780 another

00:24:41.220 time

00:24:41.560 and

00:24:42.400 I

00:24:44.300 found

00:24:44.580 myself

00:24:45.020 using

00:24:45.520 perhaps

00:24:46.580 very

00:24:47.180 unsurprisingly

00:24:48.340 similar

00:24:48.940 language

00:24:49.440 to

00:24:49.660 yourself

00:24:50.020 if

00:24:50.880 I

00:24:51.040 were

00:24:51.200 happy

00:24:51.600 I

00:24:53.180 wouldn't

00:24:53.500 be

00:24:53.660 doing

00:24:53.920 the

00:24:54.120 things

00:24:54.380 that

00:24:54.520 are

00:24:54.640 very

00:24:54.920 clearly

00:24:55.340 contributing

00:24:55.800 to

00:24:56.020 my

00:24:56.240 success

00:24:56.920 whatever

00:24:58.920 that

00:24:59.240 means

00:24:59.560 and

00:25:00.840 not

00:25:01.300 only

00:25:01.460 that

00:25:01.900 but

00:25:02.780 on

00:25:03.780 every

00:25:04.160 possible

00:25:04.720 level

00:25:05.140 if

00:25:05.480 I

00:25:05.660 were

00:25:06.000 to

00:25:06.280 find

00:25:06.660 joy

00:25:07.200 in

00:25:07.560 too

00:25:07.780 many

00:25:07.980 moments

00:25:08.460 or

00:25:10.160 to

00:25:10.860 not

00:25:11.220 feel

00:25:11.540 deficient

00:25:12.240 or

00:25:12.480 inadequate

00:25:13.000 or

00:25:13.900 loath

00:25:14.460 loath

00:25:15.200 wordly

00:25:15.760 which

00:25:17.400 is

00:25:17.560 honestly

00:25:17.920 how

00:25:18.240 I

00:25:18.520 felt

00:25:19.000 for

00:25:19.180 the

00:25:19.300 majority

00:25:19.700 of

00:25:19.860 my

00:25:19.960 life

00:25:20.220 no

00:25:20.520 I

00:25:20.640 don't

00:25:20.840 just

00:25:21.120 not

00:25:21.620 love

00:25:21.880 myself

00:25:22.260 like

00:25:22.460 there's

00:25:22.640 a

00:25:22.800 deep

00:25:23.060 sense

00:25:23.520 of

00:25:23.900 well

00:25:24.980 I 0.53

00:25:25.080 hate

00:25:25.240 to

00:25:25.340 use

00:25:25.520 the

00:25:25.680 word

00:25:25.880 hate

00:25:26.100 but

00:25:26.300 it's

00:25:26.480 the

00:25:26.600 right

00:25:26.760 word

00:25:27.020 like

00:25:27.420 loathing

00:25:28.020 like

00:25:28.320 how

00:25:28.560 could

00:25:28.760 you

00:25:28.840 be

00:25:28.960 so 1.00

00:25:29.140 stupid 1.00

00:25:29.500 how 1.00

00:25:29.700 could

00:25:29.820 you

00:25:29.880 be

00:25:30.000 so

00:25:30.180 lazy 0.99

00:25:30.500 how 0.81

00:25:30.740 could

00:25:30.920 you

00:25:31.040 be

00:25:31.220 so

00:25:31.460 fill

00:25:31.680 in

00:25:31.780 the

00:25:31.860 blank

00:25:32.160 tough

00:25:33.220 up

00:25:33.720 and

00:25:34.900 you

00:25:36.020 may

00:25:36.200 not

00:25:36.340 have

00:25:36.500 control

00:25:36.880 over

00:25:37.080 all

00:25:37.260 things

00:25:37.580 but

00:25:37.800 you

00:25:37.960 know

00:25:38.040 what

00:25:38.160 you

00:25:38.240 can

00:25:38.480 get

00:25:38.640 really

00:25:39.100 good

00:25:39.900 at

00:25:40.040 doing

00:25:40.300 is

00:25:40.540 absorbing

00:25:41.040 pain

00:25:41.440 like

00:25:41.680 get

00:25:41.820 really

00:25:42.200 good

00:25:42.500 at

00:25:42.940 absorbing

00:25:43.400 pain

00:25:43.780 it's

00:25:44.660 like

00:25:44.760 okay

00:25:44.980 if

00:25:45.120 you

00:25:45.220 work

00:25:45.440 hard

00:25:45.720 and

00:25:45.840 have

00:25:45.940 a

00:25:46.020 high

00:25:46.160 pain

00:25:46.400 tolerance

00:25:46.740 maybe

00:25:48.440 you

00:25:48.740 can

00:25:49.140 win

00:25:49.660 maybe

00:25:50.020 you

00:25:50.200 can

00:25:50.360 be

00:25:50.520 successful

00:25:51.180 and

00:25:51.380 I

00:25:51.560 should

00:25:51.720 put

00:25:51.920 win

00:25:52.380 and

00:25:52.540 successful

00:25:52.940 in

00:25:53.280 quotation

00:25:54.440 marks

00:25:54.780 because

00:25:55.020 they're

00:25:55.180 so

00:25:55.400 seldom

00:25:55.800 well

00:25:56.280 defined

00:25:56.800 by

00:25:57.240 people

00:25:57.500 who

00:25:57.660 use

00:25:57.820 this

00:25:57.960 type

00:25:58.120 language

00:25:58.420 including

00:25:58.740 myself

00:25:59.140 for

00:25:59.420 decades

00:25:59.920 but

00:26:01.060 what

00:26:01.260 I've

00:26:01.420 come

00:26:01.620 to

00:26:01.760 realize

00:26:02.240 and

00:26:02.660 this

00:26:02.860 is

00:26:03.180 also

00:26:03.520 a

00:26:03.920 common

00:26:04.560 concern

00:26:05.100 among

00:26:05.600 type

00:26:05.960 A

00:26:06.240 personalities

00:26:06.860 who

00:26:07.240 consider

00:26:07.780 or

00:26:08.480 are

00:26:08.700 told

00:26:09.120 by

00:26:09.480 people

00:26:09.860 they

00:26:10.020 respect

00:26:10.440 that

00:26:10.760 they

00:26:10.940 should

00:26:11.400 take

00:26:12.480 a 0.98

00:26:12.680 stab

00:26:12.920 at

00:26:13.080 meditation

00:26:13.560 for

00:26:14.340 a

00:26:14.460 period

00:26:14.620 of

00:26:14.780 time

00:26:15.000 there

00:26:15.480 is

00:26:15.680 this

00:26:15.920 highly

00:26:16.620 prevalent

00:26:17.100 almost

00:26:17.600 universal

00:26:18.620 concern

00:26:19.220 among

00:26:20.100 type

00:26:20.520 A

00:26:20.680 personalities

00:26:21.220 by

00:26:21.720 which

00:26:21.920 I

00:26:22.040 just

00:26:22.180 mean

00:26:22.380 driven

00:26:22.760 like

00:26:23.140 hard

00:26:23.520 charging

00:26:24.080 head

00:26:24.500 through

00:26:25.300 walls

00:26:25.840 I

00:26:26.660 can

00:26:26.820 take

00:26:27.040 the

00:26:27.220 pain 1.00

00:26:27.680 fuck 1.00

00:26:28.620 it 1.00

00:26:28.760 I'm

00:26:28.880 just

00:26:29.020 going

00:26:29.140 to

00:26:29.220 grip

00:26:29.400 my

00:26:29.580 teeth

00:26:29.800 and

00:26:29.960 white

00:26:30.220 knuckle

00:26:30.480 through

00:26:30.720 anything

00:26:31.080 that

00:26:31.280 comes

00:26:31.460 my

00:26:31.640 way

00:26:31.920 which

00:26:32.740 hey

00:26:33.680 let's

00:26:33.980 let's

00:26:34.220 face

00:26:34.380 it

00:26:34.500 that

00:26:34.660 serves

00:26:35.100 people

00:26:35.380 very

00:26:35.660 well

00:26:35.960 up to

00:26:36.380 a

00:26:36.520 point

00:26:36.780 in

00:26:36.980 certain

00:26:37.240 ways

00:26:37.540 they

00:26:38.880 worry

00:26:39.160 about

00:26:39.400 losing

00:26:39.780 their

00:26:40.040 edge

00:26:40.400 this

00:26:41.340 is

00:26:41.480 the

00:26:41.640 exact

00:26:42.160 wording

00:26:42.520 that

00:26:42.740 I

00:26:42.880 hear

00:26:43.100 so

00:26:43.420 often

00:26:43.720 and

00:26:43.860 the

00:26:43.980 exact

00:26:44.260 wording

00:26:44.600 that

00:26:44.800 I

00:26:45.020 used

00:26:45.340 with

00:26:45.480 my

00:26:45.680 friends

00:26:45.980 when

00:26:46.140 they

00:26:46.240 first

00:26:46.500 recommended

00:26:46.960 a

00:26:47.300 few

00:26:47.440 of

00:26:47.600 them

00:26:47.800 Rick

00:26:48.120 Rubin

00:26:48.460 and

00:26:57.680 who

00:26:58.100 Rick

00:26:58.340 is

00:26:58.660 but

00:26:59.180 Rick

00:26:59.380 Rubin

00:26:59.660 and

00:26:59.760 Chase

00:27:00.220 very

00:27:00.800 famous

00:27:01.280 photographer

00:27:01.760 also

00:27:02.100 the

00:27:02.280 CEO

00:27:02.540 of

00:27:02.680 a

00:27:02.760 company

00:27:03.060 called

00:27:03.640 Creative

00:27:04.000 Live

00:27:04.280 which

00:27:04.460 is

00:27:04.600 an

00:27:04.760 incredible

00:27:05.180 company

00:27:05.920 in and

00:27:06.160 of

00:27:06.260 itself

00:27:06.600 both

00:27:07.440 of

00:27:07.580 them

00:27:07.760 recommended

00:27:08.340 meditation

00:27:08.960 to me

00:27:09.180 and I

00:27:09.700 resisted

00:27:11.140 for

00:27:11.440 more

00:27:12.660 than a

00:27:13.100 year

00:27:13.360 I want

00:27:13.660 to say

00:27:13.980 because

00:27:14.180 I was

00:27:14.340 afraid

00:27:14.700 of

00:27:14.900 losing

00:27:15.180 my

00:27:15.460 edge

00:27:15.800 even

00:27:17.460 though

00:27:17.840 what I

00:27:18.500 came to

00:27:18.860 realize

00:27:19.240 was

00:27:19.680 if

00:27:21.000 you

00:27:21.120 want

00:27:21.360 to

00:27:21.520 use

00:27:21.840 your

00:27:22.120 edge

00:27:22.520 indiscriminately

00:27:23.680 like

00:27:25.160 a

00:27:25.360 kitchen

00:27:25.680 knife

00:27:26.060 which is

00:27:26.480 only a

00:27:27.100 blade

00:27:27.460 like

00:27:28.240 the

00:27:28.420 handle

00:27:28.760 is

00:27:28.940 also

00:27:29.260 bladed

00:27:29.660 on

00:27:29.880 both

00:27:30.120 sides

00:27:30.500 you

00:27:31.360 can

00:27:31.540 continue

00:27:31.900 doing

00:27:32.160 what

00:27:32.300 you're

00:27:32.440 doing

00:27:32.680 if

00:27:33.140 on

00:27:33.260 the

00:27:33.360 other

00:27:33.500 hand

00:27:33.800 you

00:27:34.220 want

00:27:34.440 to

00:27:34.560 put

00:27:34.820 a

00:27:35.480 nice

00:27:35.920 ergonomic

00:27:36.500 handle

00:27:36.980 on

00:27:37.420 that

00:27:37.600 beautifully

00:27:38.020 honed

00:27:38.360 blade

00:27:38.580 so

00:27:38.740 that

00:27:38.840 you

00:27:38.900 can

00:27:39.040 use

00:27:39.280 it

00:27:39.400 as

00:27:39.540 an

00:27:39.720 instrument

00:27:40.240 for

00:27:41.220 its

00:27:41.440 highest

00:27:42.340 purposes

00:27:42.940 you

00:27:44.440 can

00:27:44.700 utilize

00:27:45.400 different

00:27:46.620 tools

00:27:47.080 meditation

00:27:47.620 being

00:27:48.400 one

00:27:48.640 of

00:27:48.740 them

00:27:48.860 and

00:27:48.980 we

00:27:49.080 could

00:27:49.180 talk

00:27:49.440 about

00:27:49.620 all

00:27:49.760 the

00:27:49.900 different

00:27:50.100 types

00:27:50.440 of

00:27:50.560 meditation

00:27:51.020 as

00:27:51.240 well

00:27:51.440 because

00:27:51.680 I

00:27:51.820 think

00:27:52.000 they

00:27:52.160 do

00:27:52.320 have

00:27:52.440 slightly

00:27:52.700 different

00:27:53.040 applications

00:27:53.600 is

00:27:55.300 a

00:27:55.520 tool

00:27:55.880 in

00:27:56.040 the

00:27:56.180 toolkit

00:27:56.520 that

00:27:57.040 allows

00:27:57.460 you

00:27:57.780 to

00:27:58.160 build

00:27:58.460 this

00:27:58.680 beautiful

00:27:59.020 kitchen

00:27:59.400 knife

00:27:59.680 instead

00:28:00.120 of

00:28:00.420 holding

00:28:00.840 on

00:28:01.240 to

00:28:01.460 the

00:28:02.060 blade

00:28:02.320 itself

00:28:02.800 just

00:28:03.220 bleeding

00:28:03.820 over

00:28:04.920 and over

00:28:05.240 again

00:28:05.580 scabbing

00:28:06.420 bleeding

00:28:06.800 scabbing

00:28:07.400 bleeding

00:28:07.700 which

00:28:08.040 is

00:28:08.200 I

00:28:08.340 think

00:28:09.060 day

00:28:09.460 to

00:28:09.580 day

00:28:09.820 how

00:28:10.140 many

00:28:10.700 driven

00:28:11.260 people

00:28:11.660 experience

00:28:12.140 life

00:28:12.660 whether

00:28:13.300 they

00:28:13.580 are

00:28:14.080 financially

00:28:15.240 stable

00:28:15.600 or not

00:28:16.020 if

00:28:16.660 they

00:28:16.820 are

00:28:16.960 compulsively

00:28:17.700 active

00:28:18.220 if

00:28:18.820 they

00:28:19.020 are

00:28:19.220 using

00:28:19.940 the

00:28:21.620 distraction

00:28:23.080 of

00:28:23.420 constant

00:28:24.000 motion

00:28:24.580 and

00:28:25.320 absorbing

00:28:25.880 pain

00:28:26.360 and

00:28:26.580 seeking

00:28:26.900 pain

00:28:27.380 to

00:28:28.020 numb

00:28:28.360 themselves

00:28:28.840 so that

00:28:29.200 they

00:28:29.340 don't

00:28:29.560 have to

00:28:29.860 be

00:28:30.020 in

00:28:30.140 their

00:28:30.280 own

00:28:30.440 head

00:28:30.720 any

00:28:31.140 longer

00:28:31.420 than

00:28:31.600 possible

00:28:31.980 which

00:28:32.180 is

00:28:32.280 what

00:28:32.400 I

00:28:32.580 did

00:28:32.840 for

00:28:33.480 a 1.00

00:28:34.020 fucking 0.99

00:28:34.360 long 0.99

00:28:34.760 time

00:28:35.080 pardon

00:28:35.320 my

00:28:35.540 French

00:28:35.880 but

00:28:36.140 I

00:28:36.240 mean

00:28:36.340 decades

00:28:36.920 if

00:28:38.800 they're

00:28:39.040 able

00:28:39.380 to

00:28:40.040 develop

00:28:40.960 other

00:28:43.000 skills

00:28:43.540 that

00:28:44.600 allow

00:28:44.960 them

00:28:45.320 to

00:28:45.660 and

00:28:46.360 I've

00:28:46.880 certainly

00:28:47.200 less

00:28:47.840 less than

00:28:48.960 seeking

00:28:49.560 happiness

00:28:50.180 I

00:28:50.600 have

00:28:50.800 been

00:28:51.000 looking

00:28:51.300 for

00:28:51.580 ways

00:28:51.960 to

00:28:52.240 both

00:28:52.460 develop

00:28:52.860 in

00:28:53.060 myself

00:28:53.580 and

00:28:54.400 help

00:28:54.680 others

00:28:55.020 to

00:28:55.220 develop

00:28:55.640 a

00:28:55.940 sense

00:28:56.360 of

00:28:56.580 peace

00:28:57.080 even

00:28:57.620 if

00:28:57.800 it's

00:28:58.400 10

00:28:58.960 minutes

00:28:59.220 a

00:28:59.360 day

00:28:59.600 that

00:29:01.680 does

00:29:02.240 nothing

00:29:02.880 negative

00:29:04.080 in

00:29:04.560 my

00:29:04.840 book

00:29:05.160 other

00:29:05.580 than

00:29:05.840 magnify

00:29:06.360 your

00:29:06.620 strengths

00:29:07.080 and

00:29:07.500 allow

00:29:07.780 you

00:29:07.980 to

00:29:08.240 maybe

00:29:08.760 for

00:29:08.960 the

00:29:09.120 first

00:29:09.420 time

00:29:09.800 see

00:29:10.160 some

00:29:10.400 of

00:29:10.520 your

00:29:10.640 weaknesses

00:29:10.980 that

00:29:11.520 are

00:29:11.660 very

00:29:11.860 often

00:29:12.140 self

00:29:12.440 imposed

00:29:12.820 and

00:29:13.680 the

00:29:13.820 blind

00:29:14.180 spots

00:29:14.620 that

00:29:14.880 have

00:29:15.020 been

00:29:15.300 like

00:29:17.460 an

00:29:17.960 invisible

00:29:18.380 hand

00:29:18.940 guiding

00:29:19.480 your

00:29:19.760 life

00:29:20.180 for

00:29:20.660 in

00:29:21.020 some

00:29:21.260 cases

00:29:21.600 decades

00:29:22.200 I

00:29:23.280 see

00:29:23.500 no

00:29:23.820 I

00:29:24.440 really

00:29:24.860 see

00:29:25.120 no

00:29:25.280 downside

00:29:25.640 to

00:29:25.900 that

00:29:26.160 and

00:29:26.600 since

00:29:27.320 I've

00:29:27.480 had

00:29:27.600 two

00:29:27.800 cappuccinos

00:29:28.360 and

00:29:28.600 I guess

00:29:29.100 have

00:29:29.260 some

00:29:29.420 extra

00:29:29.600 personality

00:29:30.160 I'll

00:29:30.640 further

00:29:31.120 extend

00:29:31.480 my

00:29:31.680 long 1.00

00:29:32.040 ass 0.99

00:29:32.260 answer

00:29:32.640 by

00:29:33.380 saying

00:29:33.820 my

00:29:34.800 books

00:29:35.260 very

00:29:35.740 my

00:29:36.960 priorities

00:29:39.840 in

00:29:40.760 some

00:29:40.980 respects

00:29:41.460 you

00:29:42.180 have

00:29:42.460 the

00:29:42.720 four

00:29:42.920 hour

00:29:43.060 work

00:29:43.260 week

00:29:43.500 which

00:29:44.460 looked

00:29:45.700 at

00:29:46.000 different

00:29:46.280 types

00:29:46.580 of

00:29:46.740 currencies

00:29:47.180 time

00:29:47.740 being

00:29:48.080 the

00:29:48.320 most

00:29:48.560 valuable

00:29:48.860 non

00:29:49.220 renewable

00:29:49.560 of

00:29:50.640 those

00:29:51.040 and

00:29:51.800 how

00:29:52.140 to

00:29:52.340 address

00:29:52.860 a

00:29:53.280 few

00:29:53.640 rungs 0.99

00:29:54.140 on

00:29:54.780 Maslow's

00:29:55.900 hierarchy

00:29:56.220 of

00:29:56.420 needs

00:29:56.660 and

00:29:58.220 as

00:29:59.720 I've

00:29:59.980 moved

00:30:00.300 along

00:30:00.880 and

00:30:01.400 suffered

00:30:02.300 my

00:30:02.560 own

00:30:02.780 burnout

00:30:03.100 of

00:30:03.640 different

00:30:03.980 types

00:30:04.400 not

00:30:04.800 necessarily

00:30:05.200 financially

00:30:05.720 related

00:30:06.120 but

00:30:06.340 certainly

00:30:06.780 for

00:30:07.160 our

00:30:07.380 chef

00:30:07.740 took

00:30:09.080 me

00:30:09.280 out

00:30:09.500 for

00:30:09.660 the

00:30:09.780 count

00:30:10.020 I

00:30:10.220 bit

00:30:10.460 off

00:30:10.660 more

00:30:10.900 than

00:30:11.060 I

00:30:11.200 could

00:30:11.380 chew

00:30:11.660 in

00:30:11.980 part

00:30:12.280 because

00:30:12.640 I

00:30:12.860 was

00:30:13.000 having

00:30:13.280 some

00:30:13.640 personal

00:30:14.760 difficulties

00:30:15.400 and

00:30:15.660 some

00:30:15.820 relationships

00:30:16.340 and I

00:30:16.760 wanted

00:30:16.960 to

00:30:17.160 numb

00:30:17.320 myself

00:30:17.640 I

00:30:17.840 went

00:30:18.020 back

00:30:18.300 to

00:30:18.440 that

00:30:18.580 numbing

00:30:18.820 behavior

00:30:19.200 which

00:30:19.520 included

00:30:19.940 taking

00:30:20.460 stimulants

00:30:21.600 which

00:30:21.860 included

00:30:22.300 over

00:30:22.800 caffeinating

00:30:23.440 in

00:30:24.400 addition

00:30:24.720 to

00:30:24.960 the

00:30:25.220 pills

00:30:26.180 and

00:30:26.380 so

00:30:26.560 on

00:30:26.800 using

00:30:27.660 alcohol

00:30:28.080 at

00:30:28.280 night

00:30:28.440 to

00:30:28.620 wind

00:30:28.880 down

00:30:29.320 engaging

00:30:30.500 in

00:30:30.680 exercise

00:30:31.120 that

00:30:31.440 was

00:30:31.580 far

00:30:32.360 more

00:30:32.740 painful

00:30:33.200 and

00:30:33.840 ridiculously

00:30:35.180 punishing

00:30:35.680 than it

00:30:35.960 had to

00:30:36.260 be

00:30:36.440 for

00:30:36.720 any

00:30:37.020 type

00:30:37.320 of

00:30:37.500 health

00:30:37.900 or

00:30:38.020 performance

00:30:38.360 purpose

00:30:38.800 and

00:30:40.320 I

00:30:42.680 crashed

00:30:42.940 and burned

00:30:43.300 and that

00:30:44.320 led to

00:30:44.740 the podcast

00:30:45.460 as a way

00:30:46.780 to take

00:30:47.060 a break

00:30:47.380 from book

00:30:47.740 writing

00:30:48.060 which led

00:30:48.560 to the

00:30:48.860 explorations

00:30:49.740 and talking

00:30:50.260 to people

00:30:50.600 like

00:30:50.800 Brene

00:30:51.020 Brown 0.70

00:30:51.300 talking

00:30:51.580 to people

00:30:51.840 like

00:30:52.020 Tara

00:30:52.240 Brock

00:30:52.540 talking

00:30:52.820 to people

00:30:53.120 like

00:30:53.360 Jack

00:30:53.660 Kornfield

00:30:54.600 and

00:30:54.980 many

00:30:55.200 others

00:30:55.760 that

00:30:56.620 then

00:30:57.000 led

00:30:57.600 to

00:30:58.080 say

00:30:58.340 Tribe

00:30:58.660 of

00:30:58.780 Mentors

00:30:59.260 or

00:30:59.900 Tools

00:31:00.140 of

00:31:00.260 Titans

00:31:00.480 then

00:31:00.680 Tribe

00:31:00.880 of

00:31:01.000 Mentors

00:31:01.400 and

00:31:01.940 where

00:31:02.200 I

00:31:02.340 am

00:31:02.480 now

00:31:02.860 where

00:31:04.400 I

00:31:04.500 look at

00:31:04.760 this

00:31:04.940 Maslow's

00:31:05.360 hierarchy

00:31:05.660 of

00:31:05.860 needs

00:31:06.260 and

00:31:06.820 realize

00:31:07.520 at least

00:31:07.760 for

00:31:07.900 myself

00:31:08.300 let's

00:31:09.620 say

00:31:09.740 you cover

00:31:10.260 your food

00:31:11.280 you cover

00:31:11.740 your shelter

00:31:12.340 you cover

00:31:12.960 and you

00:31:14.160 get up

00:31:14.720 to these

00:31:16.300 rungs on

00:31:17.180 the ladder

00:31:17.600 where you've

00:31:18.560 checked

00:31:19.140 off

00:31:19.740 success

00:31:21.340 you are

00:31:21.880 blessed

00:31:22.320 you are

00:31:23.040 hopefully

00:31:24.060 healthy

00:31:24.600 your family

00:31:25.600 might be

00:31:26.040 healthy

00:31:26.440 and

00:31:27.520 you can

00:31:29.040 meet all

00:31:29.480 of your

00:31:29.680 basic needs

00:31:30.380 and probably

00:31:31.320 have some

00:31:31.780 disposable income

00:31:32.600 and yet

00:31:33.240 you have

00:31:33.580 trouble

00:31:34.040 living with

00:31:34.660 yourself

00:31:35.080 that's a 1.00

00:31:37.040 fucking 1.00

00:31:37.400 tragedy 0.99

00:31:37.960 I mean

00:31:38.480 it's

00:31:38.920 it's

00:31:40.360 to have

00:31:41.520 deciphered

00:31:43.960 how to

00:31:45.860 achieve

00:31:47.220 and yet

00:31:47.840 not be able

00:31:48.460 to appreciate

00:31:49.040 is

00:31:50.620 it's just

00:31:52.420 the tragedy

00:31:52.980 of tragedies

00:31:53.680 it's this

00:31:54.520 kind of 0.99

00:31:55.540 fool's errand 0.99

00:31:56.140 that could have 0.97

00:31:56.820 taken five years

00:31:57.560 could have

00:31:57.800 taken ten

00:31:58.180 could have

00:31:58.440 taken twenty

00:31:58.940 and then you

00:32:00.000 see people

00:32:00.340 like that

00:32:00.760 who do

00:32:01.520 not know

00:32:01.940 which way

00:32:02.360 to turn

00:32:02.760 and then

00:32:03.160 perhaps

00:32:04.240 just withdraw

00:32:05.260 into a shell

00:32:06.020 and

00:32:07.100 sit at a

00:32:08.660 table

00:32:08.900 with their

00:32:09.540 family

00:32:09.860 and look

00:32:10.480 at their

00:32:10.700 phone

00:32:10.920 for the

00:32:11.140 entire

00:32:11.380 dinner

00:32:11.680 over and

00:32:12.240 over and

00:32:12.480 over again

00:32:12.760 because they

00:32:13.040 don't know

00:32:13.440 how to

00:32:13.740 emotionally

00:32:14.080 engage

00:32:14.540 with

00:32:14.760 themselves

00:32:15.180 let alone

00:32:15.640 other

00:32:15.840 people

00:32:16.180 or you

00:32:17.220 see the

00:32:17.440 more

00:32:17.560 dramatic

00:32:17.820 cases

00:32:18.180 where

00:32:18.360 they're

00:32:18.460 like

00:32:18.620 alright

00:32:19.700 I

00:32:20.060 thought

00:32:20.400 these

00:32:20.720 things

00:32:21.000 would

00:32:21.140 make

00:32:21.300 me

00:32:21.440 happy

00:32:21.700 I

00:32:21.840 was

00:32:21.940 told

00:32:22.200 these

00:32:22.480 things

00:32:23.000 were

00:32:24.040 the

00:32:24.280 necessary

00:32:24.900 ingredients

00:32:25.540 for

00:32:25.920 eventually

00:32:26.640 solving

00:32:28.000 this

00:32:28.240 emotional

00:32:29.200 Rubik's 0.66

00:32:29.660 cube

00:32:29.920 that I've

00:32:30.320 been

00:32:30.420 struggling

00:32:30.640 with

00:32:30.860 my

00:32:31.000 whole

00:32:31.220 life

00:32:34.240 up

00:32:34.560 and

00:32:34.720 have

00:32:34.880 made

00:32:35.140 it

00:32:35.340 even

00:32:36.520 if

00:32:36.680 having

00:32:36.920 made

00:32:37.220 it

00:32:37.360 just

00:32:37.580 means

00:32:37.880 you're

00:32:38.360 not

00:32:38.760 struggling

00:32:40.160 with

00:32:40.420 alcoholism

00:32:41.220 and rent

00:32:42.240 like your

00:32:42.660 parents did

00:32:43.180 or something

00:32:43.480 like that

00:32:44.020 and I've

00:32:46.100 come to

00:32:46.400 realize you

00:32:46.880 don't need

00:32:47.700 to and

00:32:48.520 you should

00:32:49.040 not wait

00:32:50.020 until you

00:32:50.660 think you

00:32:51.060 have all

00:32:51.600 of the

00:32:51.860 other

00:32:52.080 pieces

00:32:52.540 non-emotional

00:32:53.700 non-psychological

00:32:54.500 pieces of the

00:32:55.000 puzzle together

00:32:55.780 to start

00:32:57.560 working on

00:32:58.340 self-acceptance

00:32:59.860 among other

00:33:00.740 things

00:33:01.040 and untying

00:33:02.600 some of those

00:33:02.980 Gordian knots

00:33:03.620 that you

00:33:03.880 have

00:33:04.360 that you

00:33:04.720 might have

00:33:05.020 carried

00:33:05.300 for

00:33:05.780 decades

00:33:08.100 since your

00:33:08.520 childhood

00:33:08.820 and

00:33:10.040 that it

00:33:11.520 is not

00:33:12.180 esoteric

00:33:12.900 it is not

00:33:13.760 intangible

00:33:14.580 when you

00:33:14.960 start to

00:33:16.000 address some

00:33:16.680 of those

00:33:17.040 things

00:33:17.380 it makes

00:33:18.560 everything

00:33:19.440 more effortless

00:33:20.840 it makes

00:33:21.340 everything

00:33:21.860 more rewarding

00:33:22.640 and

00:33:23.880 that I

00:33:26.660 think is a

00:33:27.240 project worth

00:33:28.320 tackling

00:33:29.100 it's a lot

00:33:30.380 but that's

00:33:31.840 yeah this

00:33:32.820 this depression

00:33:33.640 I think

00:33:33.980 particularly

00:33:34.540 among men

00:33:35.480 who are

00:33:35.900 very very

00:33:36.980 very bad

00:33:37.980 generally

00:33:38.560 and I'm

00:33:39.020 just going to

00:33:39.300 paint with a

00:33:39.700 broad brush

00:33:40.200 because that

00:33:40.720 makes this

00:33:41.180 type of

00:33:41.480 conversation a

00:33:42.040 little easier

00:33:42.480 but broadly

00:33:43.980 speaking

00:33:44.380 across cultures

00:33:46.020 it really

00:33:46.860 doesn't matter

00:33:47.260 where you go

00:33:47.920 women are 1.00

00:33:49.420 generally better

00:33:50.480 at social

00:33:51.160 cohesion

00:33:51.700 and building

00:33:53.600 groups of

00:33:55.760 friends

00:33:56.280 who are mutually

00:33:57.640 supportive

00:33:58.160 and we

00:33:59.700 look at it

00:34:00.120 through an

00:34:00.320 evolutionary

00:34:00.660 lens

00:34:01.060 but men

00:34:01.620 very often

00:34:02.580 are

00:34:03.440 biologically

00:34:04.800 culturally

00:34:05.380 who knows

00:34:06.200 fill in the

00:34:06.980 blank

00:34:07.300 trained

00:34:08.120 and maybe

00:34:08.920 born to

00:34:09.480 just bite

00:34:10.000 their lip 0.98

00:34:10.400 and suffer

00:34:10.820 in silence

00:34:11.260 and I do

00:34:11.700 think there

00:34:12.260 are certain

00:34:12.860 places for

00:34:13.340 that

00:34:13.500 look if

00:34:13.840 you're going

00:34:14.060 to be a

00:34:14.360 navy seal

00:34:14.740 commander

00:34:15.060 waking up

00:34:16.700 every morning

00:34:17.180 and like

00:34:17.500 telling your

00:34:18.700 direct reports

00:34:19.440 like about

00:34:20.480 your really

00:34:20.940 hard dream

00:34:21.500 you had

00:34:21.860 probably not

00:34:22.920 like strategically

00:34:23.560 tactically

00:34:24.240 professionally

00:34:24.780 or ethically

00:34:25.720 the right

00:34:26.400 thing to do

00:34:26.800 when you have

00:34:27.180 to go out

00:34:27.660 and then

00:34:28.060 risk your

00:34:28.740 lives

00:34:29.100 doing things

00:34:30.400 that are

00:34:30.600 mission critical

00:34:31.140 to fill in

00:34:31.540 the blank

00:34:31.780 right

00:34:32.000 so there

00:34:32.860 is a time

00:34:33.760 for that

00:34:34.160 but to

00:34:34.520 make that

00:34:35.260 your one

00:34:36.820 coping mechanism

00:34:37.700 for navigating

00:34:39.060 life

00:34:39.560 or like the

00:34:40.440 sort of the

00:34:41.900 mesh

00:34:42.380 that is imposed

00:34:44.220 on everything

00:34:44.900 else

00:34:45.280 that you

00:34:45.860 suffer in

00:34:46.400 silence

00:34:46.860 and that

00:34:47.840 the solution

00:34:48.760 to that

00:34:49.200 is just

00:34:49.760 to get

00:34:50.120 tougher

00:34:50.560 to get

00:34:50.880 better

00:34:51.300 at accepting

00:34:51.780 pain

00:34:52.180 to use

00:34:53.400 cheesy

00:34:54.300 tech

00:34:55.020 parlance

00:34:55.480 doesn't

00:34:55.800 scale

00:34:56.080 it just

00:34:57.560 doesn't

00:34:57.860 scale

00:34:58.120 you know

00:34:58.460 when I was

00:34:58.820 on your

00:34:59.120 podcast

00:34:59.760 the first

00:35:00.400 time

00:35:01.180 which I

00:35:01.600 don't know

00:35:01.780 how long

00:35:02.040 ago

00:35:02.120 that was

00:35:02.340 it feels

00:35:02.600 like it's

00:35:02.820 probably been

00:35:03.120 three or four

00:35:03.520 years ago

00:35:04.100 one of the

00:35:04.920 questions I

00:35:05.420 remember you

00:35:05.720 asked me

00:35:06.060 which of course

00:35:06.460 you ask

00:35:06.800 many of your

00:35:07.180 guests is

00:35:07.580 what book

00:35:08.240 have you

00:35:08.700 gifted

00:35:09.080 more than

00:35:09.580 any other

00:35:10.060 and I

00:35:10.440 remember

00:35:10.820 the book

00:35:11.160 I mentioned

00:35:11.680 at the time

00:35:12.040 it was and

00:35:12.540 remains a great

00:35:13.200 book but

00:35:13.700 I now have to

00:35:14.940 update that answer

00:35:15.840 what was it

00:35:16.500 just for people

00:35:17.040 who were curious

00:35:17.500 it was

00:35:17.980 mistakes were

00:35:18.620 made but not

00:35:19.280 by me

00:35:19.740 which is

00:35:20.460 just an

00:35:21.080 amazing book

00:35:21.960 on the

00:35:22.800 psychology of

00:35:23.540 cognitive

00:35:23.900 dissonance

00:35:24.480 but of course

00:35:25.440 that now has

00:35:25.920 been surpassed

00:35:26.820 there is now

00:35:27.420 a new book

00:35:28.080 that is my

00:35:28.600 most gifted

00:35:29.380 book and

00:35:30.320 amazingly I

00:35:31.240 can't believe I

00:35:31.840 didn't bring a

00:35:32.300 copy to Austin

00:35:33.060 to give you

00:35:33.540 because I

00:35:33.880 now I

00:35:34.880 probably I

00:35:35.260 think I

00:35:35.500 just buy

00:35:35.940 Amazon out

00:35:36.980 of this

00:35:37.240 book like I

00:35:37.720 just have

00:35:38.200 stacks of

00:35:38.900 it all over

00:35:39.420 like you

00:35:39.820 have stacks

00:35:40.300 of certain

00:35:41.040 books in

00:35:41.440 your place

00:35:41.900 and this

00:35:42.600 book is

00:35:42.840 called I

00:35:43.120 don't want

00:35:43.320 to talk

00:35:43.600 about it

00:35:43.960 by Terrence

00:35:44.900 real who

00:35:45.980 I've since

00:35:46.480 reading the

00:35:47.480 book and

00:35:47.780 becoming obsessed

00:35:48.460 with actually

00:35:49.300 it comes

00:35:49.600 back to

00:35:49.960 you you

00:35:50.460 introduced

00:35:50.800 me to

00:35:51.120 Esther

00:35:51.360 Perel

00:35:51.760 Esther

00:35:52.600 recommended

00:35:53.120 the book

00:35:53.700 the book

00:35:54.780 was one

00:35:56.140 of a

00:35:56.720 series of

00:35:57.540 little

00:35:57.980 nudges

00:35:59.140 that ultimately

00:36:00.140 led to me

00:36:00.860 meeting Terry

00:36:01.780 and of course

00:36:02.480 that book

00:36:02.860 has now been

00:36:03.280 the book

00:36:03.540 I have

00:36:03.760 given most

00:36:04.140 but what

00:36:04.880 you said

00:36:05.180 is spot

00:36:05.560 on which

00:36:05.980 is there

00:36:06.720 is just

00:36:07.120 this epidemic

00:36:08.880 of male

00:36:09.500 depression

00:36:10.020 and it's

00:36:10.940 not always

00:36:12.360 overt

00:36:12.800 that's the

00:36:13.300 thing right

00:36:13.660 people have

00:36:14.120 this image

00:36:15.360 of what

00:36:15.700 depression

00:36:16.220 is but

00:36:17.500 you know

00:36:18.660 like a

00:36:19.140 guy who's

00:36:19.540 constantly

00:36:20.020 angry or

00:36:20.680 emotionally

00:36:21.020 volatile

00:36:21.420 he can

00:36:21.940 be quite

00:36:22.300 depressed

00:36:22.860 so depression

00:36:23.800 isn't always

00:36:24.380 dysthymia

00:36:24.960 and I think

00:36:26.020 that's where

00:36:27.120 people miss

00:36:28.180 this idea

00:36:28.820 of how

00:36:29.560 much pain

00:36:31.020 people both

00:36:31.640 men and

00:36:31.980 women carry 1.00

00:36:32.520 around but

00:36:33.040 how men

00:36:33.640 have this

00:36:34.080 more orthogonal

00:36:36.160 way of

00:36:36.680 displaying it

00:36:37.400 that makes

00:36:37.920 it get

00:36:38.480 masked

00:36:39.020 longer and

00:36:39.840 longer and

00:36:40.620 I want to go

00:36:41.520 back to

00:36:41.680 something you

00:36:41.960 said earlier

00:36:42.320 because it

00:36:42.620 really hit

00:36:44.040 home about

00:36:45.300 a year ago

00:36:45.920 when a

00:36:46.480 mutual friend

00:36:46.940 of ours

00:36:47.200 Paul Conte

00:36:47.820 made this

00:36:48.940 point to

00:36:49.400 me which

00:36:50.300 was the

00:36:51.140 way you

00:36:51.780 treat yourself

00:36:52.960 is ultimately

00:36:53.740 how you

00:36:54.260 will treat

00:36:55.040 those you

00:36:55.660 love most

00:36:56.360 and you

00:36:58.300 know when

00:36:58.520 he really

00:36:59.180 pushed me

00:36:59.740 to think

00:37:00.140 about that

00:37:00.640 which is

00:37:01.120 do you

00:37:01.920 want to

00:37:02.760 be the

00:37:03.080 guy who

00:37:03.500 treats his

00:37:04.040 kids the

00:37:04.620 way you

00:37:04.940 treat yourself

00:37:05.720 and it

00:37:06.960 had to be

00:37:07.740 put that

00:37:08.280 way for

00:37:08.960 me to

00:37:09.280 think

00:37:09.580 no I

00:37:12.040 mean if

00:37:12.460 I'm going to

00:37:12.720 be brutally

00:37:13.220 honest I

00:37:14.480 would not

00:37:15.120 want to

00:37:15.700 watch my

00:37:16.260 kids get

00:37:16.820 treated by

00:37:17.380 another human

00:37:18.080 the way I

00:37:18.420 treat myself

00:37:19.200 even though I

00:37:20.340 think it's

00:37:20.680 good for me

00:37:21.240 to treat

00:37:21.560 myself this

00:37:22.220 way so

00:37:23.420 again I

00:37:23.740 think the

00:37:24.040 challenge is

00:37:24.900 by far the

00:37:26.860 hardest part is

00:37:27.480 getting people to

00:37:28.100 accept that maybe

00:37:28.800 what they're doing

00:37:29.300 isn't the right

00:37:29.780 thing or isn't

00:37:30.500 maybe right's the

00:37:31.200 wrong word it's

00:37:32.500 not the best

00:37:32.960 thing it's not

00:37:33.340 the optimal

00:37:33.940 thing I

00:37:34.400 loved your

00:37:34.820 analogy of

00:37:35.500 taking the

00:37:36.540 best blade in

00:37:37.220 the world and

00:37:37.720 not having a

00:37:38.180 handle on it I

00:37:39.320 mean it's a

00:37:40.200 limited tool

00:37:40.860 yeah and

00:37:42.240 there are so

00:37:43.520 I would say

00:37:44.340 just to

00:37:46.820 maybe put a

00:37:48.360 fine point on

00:37:49.040 it going

00:37:50.620 through life

00:37:51.360 merely tolerating

00:37:52.600 yourself which

00:37:54.220 would have been a

00:37:54.920 dream for me I

00:37:55.820 mean I

00:37:56.060 actively loathed

00:37:58.880 myself and

00:38:00.200 any weakness

00:38:00.860 any mistake

00:38:01.900 any foible

00:38:02.980 any flaw I

00:38:04.000 was I

00:38:05.240 was and

00:38:05.740 and still at

00:38:06.660 times I'm

00:38:07.260 and so

00:38:08.220 incredibly

00:38:09.240 violently

00:38:10.640 critical in

00:38:11.600 my own head

00:38:12.280 that it is

00:38:13.220 not the

00:38:14.240 treatment I

00:38:14.680 would want

00:38:14.980 to that I

00:38:15.600 would wish on

00:38:16.060 anyone I

00:38:16.660 care about

00:38:17.040 that is not

00:38:20.840 a state you

00:38:21.600 have to accept

00:38:22.480 it is not

00:38:23.920 programming that

00:38:26.180 you have to

00:38:26.820 accept and

00:38:27.600 there are ways

00:38:28.640 to begin to

00:38:31.020 chip away at

00:38:32.080 that and to

00:38:32.900 rewire it and

00:38:34.980 to reformat in

00:38:37.480 a sense

00:38:37.920 certain behaviors

00:38:39.720 behaviors that

00:38:40.020 you've experienced

00:38:41.200 for so long

00:38:42.220 many of them

00:38:42.800 are thought

00:38:43.180 patterns self

00:38:44.360 talk that

00:38:45.540 you've come to

00:38:46.160 believe they are

00:38:46.640 completely unchangeable

00:38:47.920 and in my

00:38:49.040 experience and

00:38:50.340 more and more

00:38:52.060 the experience of

00:38:52.980 dozens and

00:38:53.520 hundreds of that

00:38:54.180 and thousands of

00:38:55.020 other people I've

00:38:56.260 observed in the

00:38:56.860 last five years

00:38:57.540 it is is patent

00:38:58.640 it is patently

00:38:59.680 untrue that you

00:39:00.900 have to accept

00:39:01.500 that and I

00:39:03.800 think what you

00:39:04.220 said is really

00:39:05.020 really important

00:39:05.880 to digest

00:39:08.300 and ponder

00:39:10.840 and that is

00:39:11.940 how you treat

00:39:13.040 yourself is how

00:39:13.880 you are going to

00:39:14.460 treat the people

00:39:14.940 you care most

00:39:15.520 about and I

00:39:16.020 think it was

00:39:16.380 actually Gloria

00:39:17.200 Steinem who had

00:39:18.000 a quote and I

00:39:18.560 don't know if

00:39:19.840 this is accurate

00:39:20.440 but somebody on

00:39:21.440 the internet I'm

00:39:21.920 sure will fact

00:39:22.440 check this who

00:39:24.360 said in effect

00:39:25.720 I'm paraphrasing

00:39:26.420 here but the

00:39:26.860 goal and you

00:39:27.400 have to remember

00:39:27.800 that the golden

00:39:28.320 rule goes both

00:39:29.180 ways so we all

00:39:30.880 know do unto

00:39:32.060 others as you

00:39:32.920 would have them

00:39:33.300 do unto you

00:39:33.880 if you flip

00:39:35.560 that around it

00:39:36.100 is do unto

00:39:36.860 yourself as

00:39:37.840 you would do

00:39:38.180 unto others

00:39:38.700 and that is

00:39:43.600 really has very

00:39:46.400 profound and

00:39:47.820 wide-ranging

00:39:48.480 implications when

00:39:51.160 you really sit

00:39:52.040 with it for a

00:39:52.660 minute and

00:39:54.440 suffice to say

00:39:55.280 though you do

00:39:55.880 not have to

00:39:56.480 accept the

00:39:58.060 inner voice or

00:39:59.520 the patterns that

00:40:00.400 have led you to

00:40:01.180 pursue success

00:40:02.220 with rare

00:40:03.620 glimpses of

00:40:04.260 any type of

00:40:04.740 inner peace

00:40:05.180 that is not

00:40:06.520 something you

00:40:06.940 have to accept

00:40:07.520 so one of the

00:40:09.600 most sort of

00:40:10.340 profound experiences

00:40:11.800 I've had and

00:40:13.260 sets of experiences

00:40:14.340 I've had in the

00:40:14.900 past few years

00:40:16.580 are experiences

00:40:17.320 we've shared

00:40:18.220 together around

00:40:19.000 certain plants

00:40:19.860 that honestly I

00:40:22.020 was completely

00:40:22.920 unaware of and

00:40:23.820 ignorant of for

00:40:24.980 most of my life 0.99

00:40:25.840 had never really

00:40:26.560 given them any

00:40:27.300 thought and

00:40:29.060 probably much of

00:40:30.800 the stuff that

00:40:32.160 you've talked

00:40:32.600 about written

00:40:33.060 about in the

00:40:33.460 past in

00:40:33.860 particular there

00:40:34.400 were two

00:40:34.640 podcasts that

00:40:35.540 you did one

00:40:36.920 was with

00:40:37.260 Martin and

00:40:38.140 I'm trying to

00:40:38.640 think who the

00:40:39.120 other team

00:40:39.620 Polanco and

00:40:40.500 Dan Engel

00:40:41.020 Dan Engel

00:40:41.620 that was the

00:40:42.000 other one yeah

00:40:42.380 and those were

00:40:42.780 two separate

00:40:43.300 podcasts but

00:40:43.820 they were very

00:40:44.140 close together

00:40:44.840 if I recall

00:40:45.420 there were a

00:40:45.760 couple of

00:40:45.980 months there

00:40:46.280 were a few

00:40:46.860 together and

00:40:47.860 then a few

00:40:48.320 apart so you

00:40:49.080 had James

00:40:50.080 Fadiman and

00:40:51.620 then Dan Engel

00:40:53.440 and Martin

00:40:53.920 together that's

00:40:54.840 right and then

00:40:56.600 later Michael

00:40:58.940 Pollan yeah but

00:41:01.080 that first wave

00:41:01.980 was probably

00:41:02.720 2015 ish yeah

00:41:04.540 it was a few

00:41:04.980 it was about

00:41:05.920 three years ago

00:41:06.540 that was the

00:41:07.660 thin end of the

00:41:08.160 wedge and

00:41:09.160 interestingly the

00:41:10.100 thin end of the

00:41:10.560 wedge for me was

00:41:12.240 around something that

00:41:13.060 wasn't a personal

00:41:13.860 issue but more of a

00:41:14.960 societal issue which

00:41:15.900 is I was blown away

00:41:17.140 by the discussion

00:41:19.000 and the clinical

00:41:19.960 results that they

00:41:21.260 were achieving in

00:41:21.840 Mexico using a

00:41:23.120 plant called

00:41:24.240 iboga and using

00:41:25.220 ibogaine as well to

00:41:26.820 treat patients who

00:41:28.060 were opiate

00:41:29.460 addicted and

00:41:30.000 that's something

00:41:30.500 that even back

00:41:31.860 when I was sort

00:41:33.080 of you know in

00:41:33.840 my residency and

00:41:35.300 you would see in a

00:41:36.540 city like Baltimore

00:41:37.320 what the effects of

00:41:38.880 heroin addiction

00:41:39.440 are and of course

00:41:40.700 today it's even a

00:41:42.180 much bigger issue

00:41:43.060 and it's spread far

00:41:44.000 beyond just heroin

00:41:44.860 so that just

00:41:46.140 interested me purely

00:41:47.300 from an intellectual

00:41:47.940 standpoint which is

00:41:49.280 wait a minute we

00:41:50.420 have a drug or set

00:41:51.480 of drugs that are

00:41:52.600 so categorically

00:41:54.100 addictive to so

00:41:54.960 many for which

00:41:56.280 our only treatments

00:41:57.180 are at best

00:41:58.340 useless and 0.99

00:42:00.620 there's this other 0.96

00:42:01.920 thing that admittedly

00:42:03.180 comes with plenty of

00:42:04.240 risk and plenty of

00:42:05.280 unknowns but it

00:42:07.320 seems to fundamentally

00:42:08.660 change the way a

00:42:09.580 person's brain is

00:42:10.840 wired which would

00:42:12.340 seem to address the

00:42:13.700 root issue as

00:42:15.120 opposed to the

00:42:16.140 band-aid that led

00:42:18.000 of course to me

00:42:18.940 wanting to understand

00:42:19.800 more about those

00:42:20.840 entire classes of

00:42:21.940 compounds and that

00:42:24.020 led to my very first

00:42:25.540 experience with them

00:42:26.440 which I shared with

00:42:27.480 you meaning which

00:42:28.780 you know you

00:42:29.600 helped me through

00:42:31.020 which to this day

00:42:32.340 remains one of the

00:42:32.880 most profound things

00:42:33.600 I've ever done and

00:42:35.100 if anybody's listening

00:42:35.680 to this who's

00:42:36.160 thinking what are

00:42:37.420 they talking about

00:42:38.100 what are these

00:42:38.460 psychedelic agents

00:42:39.400 aren't those drugs

00:42:40.480 you know all these

00:42:40.920 things one of the

00:42:42.320 most remarkable

00:42:43.400 things I remember

00:42:44.220 after the first time

00:42:45.200 I tried psilocybin

00:42:46.280 was I don't feel

00:42:48.120 like doing that again

00:42:48.940 anytime soon like

00:42:50.720 these are the most

00:42:51.580 anti-addictive

00:42:52.780 compounds on the

00:42:55.400 planet what

00:42:57.240 started your

00:42:58.020 interest into that

00:42:59.120 space the interest

00:43:00.020 began and for

00:43:01.800 those people

00:43:02.120 listening who are

00:43:02.900 wondering if if

00:43:03.820 we'll discuss any

00:43:04.380 other tools I think

00:43:05.020 we should also

00:43:05.580 discuss some other

00:43:06.760 options on the

00:43:07.620 table aside from

00:43:08.720 this although this

00:43:09.460 is very fertile

00:43:11.800 ground for

00:43:12.260 discussion so we

00:43:13.660 can talk about

00:43:14.220 meditation some

00:43:14.920 other tools and

00:43:15.900 books and so on

00:43:16.800 later but the my

00:43:19.160 interest in

00:43:19.700 psychedelics began

00:43:20.960 long ago with a

00:43:23.900 close friend who

00:43:25.520 introduced me to

00:43:27.860 psilocybin contained

00:43:30.220 in what is commonly

00:43:31.940 called magic mushrooms

00:43:33.500 must have been in

00:43:35.400 college midpoint

00:43:37.060 perhaps in college

00:43:37.900 and it became an

00:43:41.540 annual ritual and

00:43:43.920 once a year I

00:43:46.080 would meet up with

00:43:47.020 a few of my closest

00:43:47.740 friends and we

00:43:48.840 would consume

00:43:49.400 mushrooms in

00:43:50.120 retrospect it was

00:43:51.040 very haphazard we

00:43:52.080 were not measuring

00:43:52.880 any doses just have

00:43:54.660 a big bag of

00:43:55.280 mushrooms and split

00:43:56.460 it up and then

00:43:58.300 hope for the best

00:43:58.940 which is not

00:44:00.100 ideally how you go

00:44:01.380 about things and

00:44:03.020 nonetheless despite

00:44:05.460 the lack of

00:44:07.460 controls and I do

00:44:08.100 not recommend

00:44:08.640 anyone use these

00:44:10.180 compounds under

00:44:11.000 uncontrolled

00:44:11.740 circumstances I

00:44:14.460 experienced what I

00:44:16.240 began to refer to

00:44:17.420 as a reboot and I

00:44:20.300 would have this

00:44:21.540 anxiety and

00:44:22.380 depression plaguing

00:44:23.340 me I would go

00:44:25.500 very very deep

00:44:26.260 and looking back

00:44:28.120 now I was

00:44:29.280 almost certainly

00:44:30.140 consuming minimum

00:44:32.180 of five grams I'm

00:44:33.520 sure I was consuming

00:44:34.300 quite a high dose

00:44:36.020 of mushrooms which

00:44:37.860 is for those people

00:44:39.200 who might read

00:44:41.140 the writing or

00:44:42.980 listen to some of

00:44:43.500 the presentations of

00:44:44.260 someone named

00:44:44.720 Terrence McKenna

00:44:45.760 five grams is

00:44:46.740 referred to as a

00:44:47.440 heroic dose and

00:44:48.640 that is a dose

00:44:49.240 sufficient to

00:44:49.960 flatten even the

00:44:50.800 most resistant ego

00:44:52.000 I believe is the

00:44:53.300 wording that was

00:44:53.820 used in any case

00:44:55.460 I felt this

00:44:57.600 decrease or even

00:44:59.180 complete removal of

00:45:01.580 depression anxiety

00:45:02.500 that extended far

00:45:04.760 beyond the

00:45:06.240 supposed duration

00:45:07.840 of effect let's

00:45:09.160 just call it five

00:45:09.820 to eight hours and

00:45:11.260 there would be this

00:45:11.820 afterglow period that

00:45:12.920 certainly lasted most

00:45:14.040 acutely for a day

00:45:15.780 or two after the

00:45:17.260 experience and I

00:45:18.700 was going into this

00:45:19.380 also with none of

00:45:20.920 the best practices

00:45:21.600 that we know of

00:45:22.900 now in terms of

00:45:24.240 preparation intention

00:45:26.080 setting perhaps some

00:45:27.560 of the preparatory

00:45:28.500 steps you can take

00:45:29.280 and then integration

00:45:29.900 there's none of

00:45:30.660 that so this was

00:45:31.440 very bare bones

00:45:32.460 haphazard experimentation

00:45:34.600 with a few friends

00:45:35.580 nonetheless there

00:45:37.380 were these periods

00:45:38.580 of let's just call

00:45:40.920 it two weeks to

00:45:42.300 two months where I

00:45:43.400 was able to

00:45:44.400 finally see

00:45:46.960 things clearly

00:45:48.780 appreciate all

00:45:50.880 of the incredible

00:45:52.380 chance blessings

00:45:54.480 that I experienced

00:45:55.260 in my life and

00:45:57.120 make decisions

00:45:58.180 about things I

00:46:00.620 viewed as serious

00:46:01.520 problems or

00:46:02.260 challenges or

00:46:03.240 opportunities whether

00:46:04.140 it was making a

00:46:05.900 decision about

00:46:07.120 academics making a

00:46:08.240 decision about a

00:46:09.500 relationship to

00:46:11.100 either start a

00:46:12.040 relationship or end

00:46:13.020 a long-standing

00:46:13.560 relationship these

00:46:14.300 were things I was

00:46:14.940 able to look at

00:46:15.700 very calmly and

00:46:16.720 make decisions

00:46:17.320 about and

00:46:19.920 ultimately after I

00:46:22.400 want to say four

00:46:23.000 or five years of

00:46:23.780 this had a very

00:46:25.440 very very scary

00:46:26.640 and dangerous

00:46:27.080 experience which

00:46:27.860 was again with

00:46:29.100 no sitters in

00:46:30.380 other words no

00:46:31.160 sober person

00:46:32.360 supervising this

00:46:33.380 any number of

00:46:34.660 things can go

00:46:35.100 wrong and one

00:46:36.880 is people can

00:46:37.640 wander around and

00:46:38.400 get themselves into

00:46:39.240 dangerous situations

00:46:40.320 in my case I

00:46:41.620 ended up coming

00:46:42.580 out of my trip

00:46:44.680 very late at

00:46:46.160 night walking on

00:46:47.220 the side of a

00:46:47.800 street with cars

00:46:49.280 whizzing by me I

00:46:50.800 mean that could

00:46:51.200 have very easily

00:46:51.960 been the end and

00:46:53.940 that scared me

00:46:55.320 enough that I

00:46:55.980 stopped so never

00:46:57.460 again too dangerous

00:46:58.520 and I stopped I

00:47:00.400 didn't revisit

00:47:01.320 psychedelics until

00:47:02.540 let's just call it

00:47:04.660 let's think about

00:47:05.220 this 10 to 15

00:47:07.500 years later when

00:47:10.180 a girlfriend at

00:47:12.500 the time who

00:47:13.560 had some very

00:47:14.740 very very

00:47:15.720 difficult traumatic

00:47:17.760 experiences as a

00:47:19.080 child traveled to

00:47:21.560 Peru which has

00:47:22.860 its own set of

00:47:24.260 very real risks

00:47:25.780 that we can talk

00:47:26.360 about if we would

00:47:26.980 like if you were

00:47:28.720 going down explicitly

00:47:29.600 for the purpose of

00:47:30.780 using a psychedelic

00:47:31.880 most commonly in

00:47:32.800 this case ayahuasca

00:47:33.880 but her experience

00:47:36.520 was strong enough

00:47:37.540 and meaningful enough

00:47:38.440 that she came back

00:47:39.180 and said to me

00:47:40.740 that she wished it

00:47:42.240 for me because it

00:47:43.060 was like 15 years

00:47:44.040 of therapy in two

00:47:44.980 nights now if

00:47:49.140 anyone knows

00:47:50.240 anything about any

00:47:51.000 of the books I've

00:47:51.620 written or the way

00:47:52.360 that I tend to view

00:47:53.040 the world that is a

00:47:54.820 very very effective

00:47:55.820 sales pitch for

00:47:57.140 Tim 15 years of

00:47:59.380 therapy in two

00:48:00.060 nights interesting

00:48:01.880 and I put that

00:48:04.300 in the back of my

00:48:05.060 mind did not move

00:48:07.220 ahead with it

00:48:07.980 because of my fear

00:48:09.440 relate which I

00:48:10.540 think was very it

00:48:11.440 was well-founded I

00:48:12.840 had a what could

00:48:13.760 have been a very

00:48:14.400 very dangerous

00:48:14.960 experience or fatal

00:48:15.940 experience things had

00:48:18.000 to get much worse

00:48:19.000 for me to finally

00:48:21.620 decide to re-enter

00:48:24.640 that world which I

00:48:26.200 did first through a

00:48:27.920 guided psilocybin

00:48:29.300 experience I did not

00:48:31.200 want to go straight

00:48:31.700 to ayahuasca which

00:48:32.460 I to this day

00:48:33.700 believe is a very

00:48:34.540 very big gun and

00:48:35.740 can be very

00:48:36.320 destabilizing I

00:48:38.120 didn't want to go

00:48:38.640 I didn't want that

00:48:39.640 to be my

00:48:40.920 reintroduction so I

00:48:42.540 did I had one

00:48:43.660 guided psilocybin

00:48:44.540 experience which

00:48:45.580 also lacked much

00:48:48.760 in terms of any

00:48:50.020 type of prep

00:48:50.780 integration or post

00:48:52.080 so it was effective

00:48:54.000 in the sense that it

00:48:55.040 it was like a

00:48:56.160 returning home and

00:48:57.280 it was a familiar

00:48:58.260 feeling that I came

00:49:00.120 out of unscathed I

00:49:02.180 took an absurdly

00:49:03.080 high dose because I

00:49:03.900 didn't know what I

00:49:04.680 had taken before so

00:49:06.840 for those people who

00:49:07.420 know anything about

00:49:07.960 it I began at seven

00:49:08.900 and a half and then

00:49:09.560 did a booster in nine

00:49:10.440 which for me is it is

00:49:12.680 such an absurd

00:49:13.500 overkill as to almost

00:49:18.060 defy belief at this

00:49:19.260 point which by the way

00:49:21.160 is a counterproductive

00:49:24.440 taking too much is

00:49:25.800 counterproductive it is

00:49:27.020 not more is better by

00:49:28.120 any stretch of the

00:49:28.820 imagination being

00:49:30.640 strapped to the

00:49:31.320 icebreaker is not as

00:49:33.680 very rarely what

00:49:35.820 someone needs in any

00:49:36.900 case came out of it

00:49:38.620 realizing that you

00:49:40.840 could approach this in

00:49:42.300 a safer fashion with

00:49:43.900 a container physical

00:49:45.120 and otherwise that

00:49:46.700 allowed you to avoid

00:49:47.780 the risk I had that

00:49:49.800 it scared me off then

00:49:52.220 went into the ayahuasca

00:49:54.800 experience about six

00:49:56.800 months perhaps six

00:49:58.300 months later took it

00:49:59.780 very seriously had

00:50:01.720 people sign non

00:50:02.660 disclosure agreements

00:50:03.700 had someone act as my

00:50:04.920 proxy to try to vet

00:50:06.320 people in several

00:50:08.240 different countries and

00:50:10.380 ultimately honed in on

00:50:11.600 someone I spent two

00:50:13.260 nights with and it was

00:50:15.000 one of the most

00:50:15.700 disorienting awe-inspiring

00:50:19.180 experiences of my life

00:50:22.140 without question the

00:50:23.660 first night I was

00:50:25.540 prepared for all of

00:50:26.820 the sickness and

00:50:28.320 vomiting and terror

00:50:29.840 that I knew could be

00:50:31.860 part of the experience

00:50:32.680 and it was blissful it

00:50:33.900 was an incredible first

00:50:34.880 night second night

00:50:36.900 was without any

00:50:40.600 exaggeration the most

00:50:42.240 painful experience of

00:50:43.200 my life at one point I

00:50:46.040 experienced full-body

00:50:48.040 seizures so grand mal

00:50:50.440 uncontrolled uncontrollable

00:50:52.880 seizures for about I

00:50:54.660 would estimate two and

00:50:55.580 a half hours ended up

00:50:57.180 with rug burns all over

00:50:58.180 my face and hands and

00:50:59.120 feet and was

00:51:02.660 completely lost there

00:51:04.540 was no contact no

00:51:07.840 footing in this reality

00:51:09.900 whatsoever and my

00:51:12.460 subjective felt experience

00:51:14.060 was one of being torn

00:51:15.660 apart a thousand times a

00:51:17.020 second dying a thousand

00:51:19.580 times a second only to

00:51:20.880 re-manifest and have that

00:51:21.980 repeat infinitum it was

00:51:24.360 beyond horror and when I

00:51:29.800 came out of the experience

00:51:31.180 or the the main roller

00:51:35.080 coaster was was coasting to

00:51:36.980 an end after let's call it

00:51:38.540 six to eight hours I was I

00:51:41.240 was partially detached from

00:51:43.760 reality for probably 36 hours

00:51:45.860 and I had very fortunately

00:51:47.280 paid someone in advance to

00:51:49.680 babysit me and act as a

00:51:50.980 chaperone for that extended

00:51:52.680 period in the off chance that

00:51:54.140 it happened which ends up

00:51:56.440 being the case and the

00:51:58.740 entire time as soon as I was

00:52:01.040 coherent enough to even

00:52:02.760 think in English which took a

00:52:04.520 while I thought never again

00:52:09.580 never again will I touch

00:52:12.320 anything like this and it was

00:52:14.720 only six to eight weeks later

00:52:16.400 and I should mention that my

00:52:19.020 intention I did have an

00:52:20.200 intention this time going in

00:52:21.580 to the second night

00:52:22.620 specifically which was to let

00:52:23.880 go of anger towards myself

00:52:26.280 towards other people very a

00:52:28.920 handful of very specific

00:52:29.840 people and I swore I would

00:52:33.040 never touch this stuff again

00:52:34.080 it was just too scary too

00:52:36.300 potentially dangerous I thought

00:52:37.880 there was a real chance that I

00:52:39.200 could lose my mooring from a

00:52:42.020 sanity perspective and never come

00:52:43.380 back and I realized six to eight

00:52:46.860 weeks later after spending a lot

00:52:49.920 of time with someone I've known

00:52:51.900 forever who have I've had a very

00:52:54.640 contentious emotionally volatile

00:52:57.020 relationship with lots of

00:52:58.580 triggers things I thought were 0.58

00:53:01.060 beyond repair meaning couldn't spend

00:53:04.640 more than an hour with this person

00:53:06.180 without feeling extreme agitation and

00:53:09.660 anger well up in some fashion and I

00:53:12.260 had I had given up on that changing

00:53:14.700 that long ago I realized let's just

00:53:19.080 call it six weeks after my two nights

00:53:21.460 that 90% of that was gone with this

00:53:25.120 person and completely gone and to this

00:53:32.520 day it has not come back and that has

00:53:35.880 repeated itself or I've seen that in a

00:53:39.200 number of my closest relationships

00:53:41.000 the value of that is hard to

00:53:45.240 overemphasize it's hard to even put

00:53:48.020 into words and it's so far outside

00:53:51.400 any conceptual schema in medicine or

00:53:56.420 therapy that I've run into it's it's

00:53:58.500 hard to convey in a way that makes any

00:54:03.000 sense because I've had so many people

00:54:05.340 ask me well how did that happen I do

00:54:07.680 not have a good explanation for that all

00:54:09.940 I do know is since then having

00:54:13.080 explored this both on an experiential

00:54:16.060 level having spent time in several

00:54:18.420 countries working with people who are

00:54:20.540 some of the best at what they do and I

00:54:22.780 do think I'm very very good at vetting

00:54:24.760 that hopefully people believe that

00:54:25.980 after looking at the books and the

00:54:27.180 podcast and so on I'm really good at

00:54:28.760 getting a hold of people who are

00:54:30.200 really really good and I'm very good at

00:54:32.640 vetting and having explored the space

00:54:35.540 also from a scientific standpoint it

00:54:38.820 just gets more interesting it just

00:54:41.560 gets more unbelievable yet at the same

00:54:46.640 time compelling and some some of the

00:54:50.220 changes I have seen in people are they

00:54:53.860 defy explanation by any conventional

00:54:57.240 means and I'll throw out a few

00:55:00.240 examples but before I throw out the

00:55:01.800 examples I want to make it really

00:55:03.620 clear that these compounds are not for

00:55:06.200 everyone there are contraindications

00:55:08.620 things can go wrong and they're not a

00:55:13.180 panacea they do not fix everything by

00:55:16.060 any stretch of the imagination but for

00:55:17.760 certain types of debilitating conditions

00:55:22.740 thought patterns and fear they are

00:55:27.020 remarkable really really impressive to

00:55:31.700 the point that it is outside of the

00:55:34.660 care and feeding and love of my family

00:55:38.080 and myself my closest friends it is what

00:55:40.200 I'm I am most focused on furthering from

00:55:43.460 a scientific standpoint certainly so you

00:55:45.560 and another friend who's a mutual friend

00:55:47.480 of ours so it's all this big circle of

00:55:49.360 people we know but shared an equally

00:55:52.400 remarkable story with me about a single

00:55:56.220 experience he had had in this case it

00:55:58.000 was psilocybin as opposed to ayahuasca

00:56:00.080 that also took him to this place of you

00:56:03.820 know incredible emotional pain that led

00:56:07.580 to a change in a belief in this case it

00:56:09.520 was for this individual it was it was a

00:56:11.580 belief system around a person who was no

00:56:12.920 longer alive so someone they had lost I

00:56:15.400 will never probably forget my first

00:56:20.740 experience with psilocybin for the same

00:56:22.360 reason it's interesting I I didn't know

00:56:24.160 that that experience you described came

00:56:25.660 from your very second time with ayahuasca

00:56:27.740 I was familiar with that story because

00:56:29.720 you'd shared it with me before but hadn't

00:56:31.880 pegged it to such an early time but my

00:56:34.680 first experience with psilocybin if not

00:56:37.740 for the fact that I had that experience I 0.85

00:56:39.400 wouldn't know what the hell you were 0.59

00:56:40.420 talking about right now because it seems

00:56:42.560 so improbable implausible and impossible

00:56:46.480 that something that occurs over a span of

00:56:49.980 six or eight hours that is nothing more

00:56:53.800 than these compounds that come from these

00:56:55.280 plants could so fundamentally alter the

00:56:58.340 way we interact with other people in my

00:57:01.040 case it was very similar it was a very

00:57:03.600 important person in my life for whom I'd

00:57:06.320 not had a great relationship in a very

00:57:08.020 long time because I simply had no empathy

00:57:11.020 now Michael Pollan has written about this

00:57:13.220 so eloquently and I wish I could even half

00:57:16.080 reiterate what he said because I remember

00:57:18.760 him writing about it going that's exactly

00:57:21.100 it which is for the first time in your

00:57:23.720 life or at least for me I'm not seeing the

00:57:26.700 world through my eyes anymore and David

00:57:29.080 Foster Wallace has talked about this so

00:57:31.140 eloquently in his talk which is one of my

00:57:33.120 favorite talks this is water every

00:57:35.120 experience we have is through our own eyes

00:57:36.860 and these plants give you that ability to

00:57:40.880 be out of that and I remember I still

00:57:44.140 remember watching myself as a 13 year old

00:57:47.200 boy in this situation and for the first

00:57:50.900 time ever not seeing that situation from my

00:57:53.900 vantage point instead seeing it from the

00:57:56.540 vantage point of others and that led to the

00:57:59.860 most profound emotional breakdown which

00:58:03.000 again these are very durable changes I mean I'm a

00:58:08.440 couple of years out of this but I truly

00:58:10.440 believe that 40 years from now I will still

00:58:12.220 have this exact set of feelings about this

00:58:14.760 particular individual and this particular

00:58:17.140 experience and you're right there is how do

00:58:21.780 you explain that it's very difficult and

00:58:23.620 these compounds many of the classic

00:58:25.460 psychedelics let's just for the sake of 0.69

00:58:27.660 argument will leave LSD out of the running

00:58:30.000 for a number of reasons including just the

00:58:32.060 the political PR baggage that that acronym

00:58:35.300 carries if we're looking at say mescaline

00:58:37.460 which is found in peyote it's found in the San

00:58:41.560 Pedro or Huachuma cactus in South America

00:58:44.960 among other places and we're looking at

00:58:47.020 psilocybin found in quite a few different

00:58:49.700 mushrooms these are compounds that have been

00:58:52.780 used for hundreds of years probably

00:58:56.160 millennia by different civilizations and you

00:59:00.700 have Amanita muscaria which was used in

00:59:03.400 Europe you have psychedelics that have been

00:59:05.620 used all over the world psychedelics

00:59:07.780 referring to and there's there are

00:59:11.440 different ways to try to define this term

00:59:13.800 but mind manifesting is what the word

00:59:16.220 refers to if you look at the etymology

00:59:18.320 but I would say experientially one of the

00:59:21.480 defining characteristics of psychedelics and

00:59:24.780 we probably will talk about we might have a

00:59:27.320 chance to talk about MDMA later which is in

00:59:30.700 some way can be used for us for many of the

00:59:33.720 same conditions but I wouldn't consider a

00:59:37.060 psychedelic simply because psychedelics

00:59:40.520 provide what is often referred to at high

00:59:44.020 enough dosages ego dissolution or a controlled

00:59:47.660 death experience where you cease to exist as

00:59:52.080 this subject who is viewing your experience of

00:59:56.420 reality but that is so powerful that I again

00:59:58.960 we talk about it with these sort of in this

01:00:01.620 sort of banal way but until you experience

01:00:05.160 that that statement is so difficult to

01:00:07.680 comprehend imagine imagine if you will and

01:00:11.500 there are different analogies or metaphors

01:00:13.680 you can use but imagine if your whole life

01:00:18.420 you have been the protagonist at least in

01:00:20.980 your own mind you are the primary actor in

01:00:24.000 the play of your life and you've always been the

01:00:27.600 primary actor in the play of your life there

01:00:30.000 are other actors of course all these people

01:00:31.940 you've ever met and for the first time you

01:00:35.920 realize that it's a play and you're sitting in

01:00:38.340 the audience and you're the playwright you're

01:00:41.720 the person who has the ability to look at it

01:00:44.720 from every perspective and you can change the

01:00:48.940 lines of the primary actor that person known as

01:00:52.620 Tim in my case that person known as Peter if you

01:00:55.880 want to change their lines you want to change

01:00:57.660 their backstory you want to change the stories

01:00:59.660 they tell themselves you have the ability to

01:01:01.760 do that because you're sitting in the audience

01:01:03.580 as an observer of this person who is known as

01:01:06.340 Peter or Tim and this is similar to the type of

01:01:13.760 experience that people can have through

01:01:16.260 meditation and they might describe it as

01:01:19.660 instead of being outside standing in the storm

01:01:22.180 you're standing inside looking through the window

01:01:24.240 at the storm or you are instead of being inside

01:01:28.120 the washing machine you're zooming out 18

01:01:30.100 inches so that you're looking into the washing

01:01:33.580 machine and you're observing what is happening

01:01:35.400 as opposed to being tumbled by it and in fact the

01:01:39.100 the states achieved through psychedelics and in

01:01:42.480 very experienced meditators although I'm convinced

01:01:44.500 that you can achieve this state pretty quickly

01:01:46.280 through meditation it doesn't have to take 20

01:01:47.960 years is remarkably similar as best we know or

01:01:52.400 there are some similarities I should say

01:01:54.040 neurophysiologically in the sense that both

01:01:57.700 seem to not necessarily deactivate but decrease

01:02:01.820 activity in something referred to as the default

01:02:04.000 mode network and this default mode network and

01:02:07.520 Peter you may do a better job of explaining this

01:02:09.980 Michael Pollan does a fantastic job of describing

01:02:11.940 this in his book how to change your mind which I

01:02:13.780 recommend to everyone yeah we'll link to the

01:02:15.820 book we'll also link to your interview with Michael

01:02:17.880 recently which was excellent as well even if people

01:02:20.400 say they're not quite ready to read the book at

01:02:23.200 the very least they should invest the time and

01:02:24.920 listen to the podcast and by the way I would not

01:02:27.380 suggest that anyone jump out and tomorrow go on

01:02:32.220 Craigslist to try to find a shaman to take you

01:02:34.980 through some experience even if you felt like that

01:02:37.860 was an inevitable step you ultimately want to take

01:02:40.460 there are some things that I would recommend first that

01:02:42.920 can by themselves be exceptionally exceptionally useful so

01:02:49.160 to come back to it though the ability to for the first

01:02:53.860 time view this ego that refers to itself in my case

01:02:59.380 as Tim who is a combination of many different things the

01:03:05.100 identity that we have had foisted upon us or conditioned

01:03:08.640 into us but also that we've created for ourselves by the

01:03:13.340 stories we tell ourselves that we've always told

01:03:15.820 ourselves oh my you know my wife always does this my dad

01:03:20.520 always does that I always do this I never do that these

01:03:23.740 stories that we've told ourselves for so long that we've

01:03:26.740 come to accept it as just a fiber in our being to look at

01:03:31.100 it and realize that you can reformat almost every part of

01:03:35.460 that or you can take trauma that you experienced as a child and

01:03:38.960 for the first time ever recontextualize it as an adult

01:03:42.160 without emotion to look at it with a level of emotional calmness

01:03:48.700 so that you can finally close that that that circle

01:03:52.180 is difficult to describe so I don't want to try too hard to put

01:03:58.380 words to something which by definition if we're talking about

01:04:03.080 mystical experiences which is a corollary to the durability of

01:04:07.860 these effects let me restate that in English that is a little easier to

01:04:11.620 understand when you look at for instance studies that have been done

01:04:16.940 research that has been done at whether it's Johns Hopkins NYU or other places

01:04:20.740 and I've gotten to know the team at Johns Hopkins quite well and I've

01:04:24.440 huge amount of respect and admiration for what they've they've done and

01:04:28.660 continue to do in many of the studies whether they're

01:04:33.400 looking at terminal cancer patients and end-of-life anxiety or they're

01:04:39.180 looking at lifelong smokers who came into a study specifically to look at how

01:04:46.820 psilocybin could be used for the cessation of smoking the duration of

01:04:51.620 effect the durability of effect is very closely linked to something that you that

01:04:58.900 you could refer to as a mystical experience and it turns out as you would hope

01:05:04.180 there are different types of scales and measurements one can use to determine if

01:05:12.540 something is a mystical experience or not and there's some debate about this but

01:05:17.180 there there are ways that you can assess whether something qualifies as a mystical

01:05:21.660 experience based on looking at the historical accounts and writings of people we would consider

01:05:27.000 mystics and one of them is ineffability the inability for someone to verbalize their experience

01:05:34.380 that the words somehow do violence to the experience or don't do it justice

01:05:40.200 pollen gives a great example of that in his book I believe it was Michael pollen in his book how to

01:05:45.700 change your mind about it you take somebody from you know whatever a thousand years ago put him in a

01:05:50.560 time machine bring him to time square let him hang out for five hours shoot him back can they describe

01:05:57.020 what they saw not really they could say that it was big loud and bright but other than that they

01:06:04.020 couldn't explain what a car is they couldn't explain what a building is or a skyscraper because the

01:06:09.720 vocabulary hadn't even been developed and that to me is like the greatest example albeit somewhat glib of

01:06:17.100 this idea of being ineffable which is you and I can sit here and talk about it in shorthand but it's

01:06:23.240 very difficult to explain to one of our friends maybe who hasn't experienced this we and and when

01:06:28.380 you you know again it's these things sound so so goofy when you say them like these experiences

01:06:35.280 seeing yourself from outside of yourself you know if someone hasn't experienced that I can understand

01:06:40.540 why they would look at you a little funny and say okay intellectually I understand what you mean by

01:06:44.840 that but why would that matter why would that be profound how would that disrupt your ego it's

01:06:49.620 very difficult to convey and I would say that what I've experienced and what I've certainly seen

01:06:56.740 and heard other people experience in their reports to me and in writing in various books that I've read

01:07:05.380 is the importance of the felt experience and that in some senses it's not that you have a

01:07:13.700 psychedelic experience you have three realizations you bring those realizations back to this ordinary

01:07:22.040 reality you take certain actions based on those realizations and based on that intellectual legwork

01:07:30.840 your life changes it is not something strictly in the domain of words and thinking and just thinking

01:07:38.900 harder and working harder in other words you're not taking the things that got you here if you've

01:07:43.540 achieved anything professional or personally the pro and con list the spreadsheets the logical

01:07:49.580 arguments it's not that you just get a better set of those things that you bring back it's that you

01:07:55.120 are finally able to see and experience and feel something like empathy deeply for the first time for

01:08:02.240 someone you've never felt it for or you feel love for yourself truly for the first time and you think

01:08:08.500 holy shit like that's what's been missing I've never even felt that and if someone had asked me

01:08:13.760 what does self-love feel like I wouldn't have had an answer for it these are the things that really 0.98

01:08:19.260 stick and I think given the plasticity of the mind or plasticity of the brain that allow as one

01:08:25.480 researcher put it to me you to instead of going to the top of the ski slope and then taking the tracks

01:08:32.120 that have been worn and of course the deeper the tracks get the harder it is to kind of hop out of them

01:08:36.460 as you're skiing but to get to the top and to have four fresh feet of powder fall on the entire

01:08:44.740 mountain so that you you you have the ability to choose an entirely new path an entirely new

01:08:50.860 record to play it's hard to verbalize but one way to think about it for me has has allowed me to come

01:08:56.460 to grips with this because there's a part of me that has sometimes thought like this is too good to be

01:09:01.140 true it's going to go away this new found empathy I have for person X or this reduction in this horrible

01:09:08.980 negative emotion I've had that's going to go away in six months and and I and I've thought of something

01:09:13.900 which is when you look at the opposite of that which is how often is a person's life changed for the worse 0.91

01:09:22.120 based on one event and the answer is all the goddamn time a child could be abused once and 0.62

01:09:30.400 that can change their life forever and again we're not going to go into that now because that is its own 0.94

01:09:35.500 topic but so many of the horrible habits that we carry into adulthood are really because we never became

01:09:43.400 adults we are basically adaptive children who are taking on a set of behaviors to protect wounded

01:09:50.060 children and sometimes those wounds occurred very acutely and so in many ways these experiences

01:09:56.060 with psychedelics if administered correctly in the correct setting with the correct integration can act

01:10:02.260 as the exact opposite of a wounding event in other words with something that is so acute and so poignant

01:10:07.740 you can just change the direction of this trajectory this vehicle doesn't necessarily mean it's orthogonal

01:10:13.920 and of course there's so much more to it than that many people go through similar types of abuse

01:10:19.580 and they don't all have the same impact and similarly many people can experience a psychedelic

01:10:24.220 and not have the same impact but I think when I started to think of it in that way it started it

01:10:28.980 started to become much more understandable why this could happen just as something horrible could

01:10:34.320 alter the course of your life and you know I'm gonna one of the podcasts I've already recorded that

01:10:39.440 will be coming out later this summer will be with Corey who you and I spent a couple of days with

01:10:43.680 up at Kern it's a maximum security prison yeah when we did this we spent this this time up there with

01:10:49.420 the five ventures the story of Corey's life is unbelievable and it's just a again at no point in

01:10:55.820 there I think is Corey using any of these things that happened to him when he was young as excuses for

01:10:59.840 the road he went down but it's impossible to argue that those experiences many of them very acute

01:11:05.600 in this moment on this day in this place at this time completely set him on a different path than he

01:11:12.380 could have been otherwise so as you said I love the idea of the stage analogy because to me that's

01:11:19.100 actually one of the best analogies I've ever heard about how mindfulness meditation works is it's the

01:11:24.340 awareness that there is a stage that's simply what it comes down to and to be able to leave your vantage

01:11:31.420 point as one actor to step back and see that you are an actor on a stage is I think one of the most

01:11:37.640 empowering things and that's why I sort of love this interplay between you know

01:11:41.980 meditation and these psychedelic agents there's an interplay there's an interrelatedness there is a

01:11:48.660 reinforcement a mutual reinforcement also which is why I'd love to mention a few things just to give

01:11:56.340 people a chance to crack their knuckles and stretch for a second in non-psychedelic territory there are a

01:12:03.220 few things that I'd love to suggest to people which help you to develop the same types of meta awareness

01:12:11.100 that you can be thrust into through psychedelics that serve a purpose whether or not you ever choose

01:12:20.460 to take one of these compounds one would be certainly mindfulness meditation and I think by the time

01:12:27.580 this podcast we're recording right now is live Sam Harris's waking up app I think it's just tremendous

01:12:35.980 I think it does an exceptionally exceptionally good job of this and there's certainly guided meditations

01:12:41.680 if you search say mindfulness meditation Jack Kornfield Tara Brock both outstanding Sam Harris also

01:12:49.700 has some some guided meditations that he's recorded awareness meditation and Peter you feel free to jump in

01:12:56.020 if I if I don't do this justice but awareness meditation being different from say other forms of

01:13:01.740 meditation many of which I have used and still use on occasion perhaps one of the more popular of which

01:13:07.540 being say transcendental meditation mantra based it is a concentration practice where you are repeating

01:13:13.800 a mantra to yourself over and over and over and over again as a way to hone concentration and although not

01:13:22.560 everyone's going to love this description to give your psyche and self a break from the incessant monkey

01:13:28.020 mind and you really can reach a transcendent space where you feel like you are a point of consciousness

01:13:35.140 floating if you do the 20 minutes twice a day very consistently that is a concentration practice if you were

01:13:41.940 thinking of a candle flame and that were a a focal point for a period of meditation whenever you found

01:13:48.300 yourself swept up in thought you returned to a candle flame that would also be a concentration practice

01:13:53.340 if you're doing there are many also within awareness meditation there are different types but if you're

01:13:59.480 doing say something referred to as I think it's sometimes called open monitoring where you're paying

01:14:05.180 attention to anything that comes up as it comes up and there are different ways to approach this but

01:14:09.900 very often begins with the breath so it is in some sense a concentration practice but you're focusing on the

01:14:15.600 breath you're not chasing it you're simply observing it then you focus on sounds then you focus on

01:14:22.540 any discomfort or weight that you feel in your body then you perhaps later after 10 sessions 10 daily

01:14:30.600 sessions begin to practice with your eyes open which I had never really done before sam's app which I

01:14:36.680 found tremendously helpful as a bridge into then waking reality these are all practices

01:14:45.500 that help you to spot the gap between sensory input and cognitive response right so that

01:14:58.300 you become more response able in so much as you you have a tiny gap within which you can choose your

01:15:06.580 response as opposed to simply reflexively going through life like some type of slug that's been

01:15:12.780 shocked in a skinner box or something and you you have more optionality you suddenly realize there are

01:15:20.460 just more options on the menu then oh whenever so-and-so does this I always get pissed off there are more

01:15:26.780 options on the menu and that by the way having that basic ability having the just the abcs of that

01:15:35.520 awareness and control will give you a tremendous advantage and allow you to get very often much more

01:15:43.760 value out of any psychedelic experience because you will have had let's just call it 50 sessions

01:15:49.940 on a boogie board before they're like oh cool here's a surfboard it's hurricane season have fun good luck

01:15:55.520 like maybe you catch a wave chances are your first experience is going to be getting tumbled a lot and you

01:16:02.320 can accelerate the you can steepen the learning curve really dramatically for later getting more out of

01:16:09.760 psychedelics very often if you develop some of this basic awareness beforehand i'm kind of amazed at how

01:16:17.280 difficult it is for me to convince some of my patients at the importance of meditation and i find

01:16:23.820 sometimes by just telling them about my own struggles and my own journey to accept first of all that this

01:16:29.660 was something that was beneficial even when it didn't feel beneficial and two to realize that

01:16:34.260 you have to sort of figure out what's going to work for you but it's worth making that effort i agree

01:16:41.320 with you i think that just even putting the apps aside it's different people have different ways of

01:16:46.360 explaining things and i remember a math professor i had in in college and this was early this might have

01:16:53.220 been like i must have been i was either a freshman or a sophomore but he said something that always

01:16:58.120 resonated with me because now you were sort of getting outside of like you know rudimentary

01:17:01.880 calculus and stuff and mathematics was starting to get very abstract and he said look if you're

01:17:05.780 reading a proof and you don't understand it assume that the person who is presenting it doesn't know

01:17:11.880 how to present it to you find somebody else and so i think that that really holds also for meditation

01:17:17.640 which is there are just going to be some people who guide in a way that you're willing to be guided

01:17:23.000 and so you shouldn't be put off if someone's listening to this thinking oh you know every

01:17:27.300 time i try meditation it doesn't work for me or something like that and and so i don't want to

01:17:31.420 sort of name the apps i went through but there were many apps that i went through that just didn't

01:17:35.560 resonate for me you know just the way that they talked about this didn't make sense to me but then

01:17:40.640 when you find the ones that do and there are several that do for me including sam's waking up which

01:17:46.200 you and i have been lucky enough along with a number of other folks to get the beta version of that

01:17:50.400 which god it's been six months it's been a while yeah i think i remember sam giving it to me in

01:17:54.540 january the way sam explains it really resonates with me and there are others that do so the same

01:18:00.840 jeff warren is also one of the guides on dan harris is no relation to sam harris 10 percent happier

01:18:06.460 i just love the way he explains stuff and so you know i would say to anybody who's listening to this

01:18:13.520 who's feeling sort of bearish on meditation try a different app try a different guide try a different

01:18:21.200 book try another way keep going till you find someone who can walk you through how to do this

01:18:27.600 in a way that resonates and the i'll just mention two others uh since they're very easy to test

01:18:33.060 another is headspace the 10 in 10 program i think is a very very well done format for beginning this

01:18:41.260 10 minutes a day for 10 days and it is quite well done calm for some people who like the background

01:18:47.020 nature sounds for instance i've used that app and many of my friends really find that to be with a

01:18:53.340 female guide to be their preferred mode of meditation and then you can meditate in silence you can consider

01:18:59.340 taking a tm course as i did which actually really served to kickstart a lot of my meditation because

01:19:06.280 it cost money so i had that sunk cost working in my favor and it's effectively four lunch breaks

01:19:15.320 over four days i want to say if i'm remembering correctly and you have to meditate in between

01:19:21.240 those sessions so you have homework and you are going to feel like a doofus and a disappointment

01:19:26.020 and be embarrassed if you don't do those sessions so you have someone holding you accountable i.e. the

01:19:32.120 teacher to actually put this into practice for at least a four-day period and that in and of itself

01:19:40.020 i pushed off for so long for so so long and i remember chase jarvis i'll give him credit again

01:19:47.020 at one point said tim you can afford it it worked for me what is the downside if it doesn't work for you

01:19:55.540 you still get to meditate with someone else for four days might that be worth it and i didn't have a

01:20:02.000 good counter argument so eventually i acquiesced and took that step which was uh which was very it

01:20:09.160 was one of the first times i finally felt what i had the first hand experience of what meditation

01:20:21.680 could deliver which is in some ways equally difficult to describe as the psychedelic experience

01:20:26.680 when you have your first session where you've completely lost any rumination or

01:20:33.600 compulsive thinking about your to-do list and it might just be the last five minutes of a 20-minute

01:20:39.140 session and you come out of it and you just feel this serene peace that perhaps you haven't even

01:20:43.840 touched on for 10 years you go oh okay now i get it if this is something that i could actually call

01:20:52.380 upon reliably that is a superpower and for that reason i would say for that if you're going to

01:21:00.380 commit to this commit to it like you would a workout program or a diet you don't go to the gym once and

01:21:06.740 come back and wake up with uh in a six-pack abs the next morning for me at least if i take a break and

01:21:12.360 there are periods when i last especially by the way if you eat like we've eaten in austin yeah we have

01:21:16.420 eaten there's so much good food here you have to be very careful about portion control but if you

01:21:22.600 want to get a taste for what meditation can do i would say commit to 10 days and for me at least

01:21:29.180 if for whatever reason i lapse and there are certainly periods when i lapse this happens to me

01:21:33.180 with diet absence happens to me with exercise and occasionally it's like you know what i haven't

01:21:36.620 meditated for two weeks for whatever number of reasons it will take me i would say five to seven days

01:21:43.040 to finally stop grinding gears and shift into a calmer state there there's a certain loading phase

01:21:51.260 almost like creatine or something there it takes me five to seven days to click into that different

01:21:57.960 gear at which point i go oh yes this is why it's so important now i remember yeah there's a great book

01:22:04.220 out there called altered states which i read this year that i think does a great job of parsing that

01:22:10.180 concept out which is is it altered states or altered traits oh it's altered traits and it makes

01:22:16.300 the point that it's not about the state thank you for that correction we'd have had a whole bunch of

01:22:20.600 people potentially going to amazon going i can't find this book or maybe they read that book does exist and

01:22:25.740 it's completely the wrong book but that's exactly the point right which is that we don't meditate for

01:22:30.760 the state the state can be pleasurable i ought to be honest i don't find it that pleasurable i don't

01:22:37.160 actually enjoy meditating that much sometimes i do but but as many times as i do i it's difficult for

01:22:43.660 me it's work it's sometimes truthfully it feels like i suck like i'm boy it's really amazing the

01:22:49.980 frequency with which thoughts keep entering my mind i think i forget who and again i can't remember if it

01:22:55.220 was sam harris or a different guide who made this point which was actually i think i think it was

01:23:00.140 actually jeff warren which was he described it as the bicep curl of the brain is not the cessation of

01:23:07.840 thought it's the recognition of the thought that then allows you to go back to the breath or whatever

01:23:15.080 the focus is and boy that really again that's just an example of like that's not a particularly like

01:23:20.960 profound difficult to understand concept but it's exactly what i needed to hear which is don't be

01:23:26.220 discouraged that you keep having thoughts that's the exercise the exercise is acknowledging it

01:23:31.300 recognizing it going back to the focus which in this case could be the breath or a sound or something

01:23:36.240 like that and so it's not about that state that you may or may not achieve just as some people who

01:23:43.160 like you and i we love exercising so we actually get a pretty good state out of it i i actually if

01:23:47.820 exercise provided no benefit i would still do it just because of how i feel when i do it but for many

01:23:54.040 people that's not the case but exercise is still valuable if you spend an hour a day exercising

01:23:58.220 it's really what it's what's what it's doing for you that other 23 hours so that's i guess that would

01:24:02.560 be the next thing i would say to anybody listening to this who's tried meditation who has found it

01:24:06.180 to be unpleasurable or uninteresting or whatever it's like that's okay you're not doing it for what

01:24:11.360 you experience in that 20 minutes i would also add and this just just occurred to me because i think

01:24:17.620 you're you're in some ways alluding to this that in my experience having observed hundreds of thousands

01:24:25.320 of listeners and readers attempt or not attempt succeed or not succeed with different forms of

01:24:33.680 meditation it's very important and this applies to many many different things including physical

01:24:39.740 exercise as far as as i'm concerned but the good program that you follow i let's let's lower it even

01:24:46.860 further the consistent program that you follow is better than the perfect program that you quit

01:24:52.180 so if you're having trouble following a meditation program and you've committed to doing it daily which

01:24:58.880 is a very important commitment in the beginning keep lowering the bar if you think 20 minutes is too much

01:25:07.820 do 10 minutes 10 minutes is too much do five minutes if concentration meditation is too difficult

01:25:14.740 use a guided meditation and i recall at one point there were two things that i recall having been

01:25:22.540 said to me i think tara brock mentioned the first i could be misattributing but i think it was tara brock

01:25:31.300 who first said this to me her book radical acceptance by the way ties into everything that we're talking

01:25:35.540 about beautifully it had a huge impact on me and has had a huge impact on many people it's the type of

01:25:41.100 title that's going to scare off a lot of people because i think it's going to be a bunch of woo hand

01:25:44.540 wavy stuff there's a little bit of woo in there but it is a incredibly good book radical acceptance

01:25:50.820 if you have any type of emotional patterns or thought patterns that seem to control you as opposed to the

01:25:56.800 other way around this is a worthwhile book and her guided meditation is very good but we were chatting

01:26:02.520 i had her on the podcast on my own podcast and i believe it was tara who said the repetition

01:26:07.820 if we're doing the bicep curl isn't the 20 minute session where you sit perfectly without having a

01:26:14.060 single extraneous thought occur the repetition is when you get distracted and something comes up and

01:26:21.080 then bringing it back to the breath so you should be happy when that happens because that is the work

01:26:27.080 the work isn't doing it perfectly every time it took me three years to understand that yeah three years

01:26:34.360 of frustration and am i doing this right and you know why can't i stop thinking and and just all of

01:26:42.260 this misunderstanding but boy once you get what the bicep curl is it's freeing and it makes the pass

01:26:50.280 fail bar lower which for many of the people who most need meditation which i think has a brand

01:26:56.940 like a branding problem like it should be called you know emotional non-reactivity training or something

01:27:02.460 that sounds very appealing to you know type a driven people emotional non-reactivity conditioning

01:27:11.800 program there you go or just warm bath for the mind might be appealing to other people but meditation

01:27:18.000 as such as it's a word that's becomes it's so overused and unfortunately could use a rebrand but

01:27:24.900 for the time being meditation and a successful meditation session should in the be in the beginning

01:27:32.580 be as easy as possible to fit into your life you need to stack the deck particularly in the beginning

01:27:38.400 and tm transcendental meditation was very good at instilling this in the training for me at least

01:27:43.920 they said if you say the mantra once in a session that is a successful session you have 20 minutes to say a

01:27:51.220 two-syllable mantra once that's a successful session and you might even drop it further and say you know what

01:27:56.560 this is the goal this would be miraculous but if i just sit for 20 minutes with my eyes closed

01:28:02.740 that's a successful meditation session and sometimes i've honestly wondered how much of the benefit comes

01:28:09.620 from some of the mental practices versus just sitting still and breathing with my eyes closed

01:28:16.040 well that's actually really interesting that that gets to something where i want to talk a little bit

01:28:20.480 about which is the study of psychedelics but while we're on that topic it's it's hard to sometimes

01:28:26.200 study these things because of these performance biases right it's hard to disaggregate the effect of

01:28:32.060 just sitting there for 20 minutes and luckily some of those experiments have been done which is you

01:28:37.820 know you take a group and instead of saying the control group just doesn't do anything maybe you have

01:28:42.620 the control group sit in silence for 20 minutes and then you can sort of disaggregate those things

01:28:47.320 so tim you've spoken with me quite a bit about your interest in funding science and that goes back

01:28:54.360 to even before the discussion of psychedelics but very recently you've made a pretty large commitment

01:28:59.000 are you comfortable talking about that publicly i am i am very very comfortable talking about publicly

01:29:03.260 i have almost entirely redirected not just what i would have invested in startups but a multiple

01:29:11.460 of that into scientific research so i've made the commitment for me which is by far the largest

01:29:19.680 commitment to not just science but even any given startup that i've ever made financially and that's

01:29:26.740 a million dollars a minimum of a million dollars over the next several years several meaning three or

01:29:32.900 four and i expect i'll exceed that one million dollar amount with primarily a focus on psilocybin and

01:29:41.160 mdma but that could extend to other compounds which which i also find to be understudied and that have

01:29:50.480 been in some ways shelved for decades for primarily political and not scientifically justifiable reasons

01:30:00.300 when we started talking about this when you were thinking about it i remember one of the stories that

01:30:05.180 you really liked was a relatively unknown story in the world of philanthropy unless you dig deep in

01:30:11.360 the annals about a woman by the name of katherine mccormick that story really resonated with you what was it

01:30:17.020 about that story well you should you should tell this story because i think it's it's so noteworthy on

01:30:24.480 a number of different levels but what struck me was how if timed right and if thought about

01:30:32.920 intelligently where you're focusing on points of leverage how even a single person with relatively

01:30:40.240 moderate amounts of investment and moderate is relative right but let me rephrase that how how

01:30:48.780 someone or a small group of people if concentrating on points of leverage in furthering in this case

01:30:56.000 scientific studies can really bend the arc of history in a way that most people would find

01:31:04.200 unbelievable because when folks think of say pharma or bringing a new drug to market in the

01:31:13.800 largest scale senses it's billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars but that story

01:31:20.920 was appealing to me because on many levels but i'd what i'd love to do is have you tell it and then i

01:31:28.200 will i will point out the the the parts if this were a kindle chapter which parts i would highlight to go

01:31:36.460 back to to remind myself of certain things but why don't you tell the story because it's such a great

01:31:41.480 example of what one person or a small group of committed people can do i'll leave it at that well it can be

01:31:49.740 probably be read about more eloquently than i can restate it but the gist of it was katherine mccormick

01:31:54.300 in i believe the early 60s or late 50s met a gentleman i believe his name was gregory pincus if i'm not

01:32:01.320 mistaken and i think that's right at a dinner party or a cocktail party yeah and and basically he

01:32:06.500 explained to her that he was pretty convinced he could chemically synthesize hormones that could be

01:32:13.360 served as a birth control pill or serve as a birth control pill for women and she was no dummy herself 0.99

01:32:18.000 she went to it was mit yeah i believe so been involved with also funding housing for additional

01:32:24.260 female students so they could attend yeah and her hypothesis was if we could create a birth control 1.00

01:32:31.200 pill we could completely change the interaction that women can have with education with work with 1.00

01:32:40.060 the family balance etc now we take this we listen to the story today and we think well what's the big

01:32:44.920 deal like so what she funded the research for the birth control pill but the reality of it is at the

01:32:48.760 time again i can't remember i must have the dates wrong but certainly it was long enough ago that this

01:32:56.980 was viewed as an absolute no-go i mean there was simply you know birth control was such a taboo

01:33:02.160 and what's really interesting is she decided to fund something that was incredibly risky that

01:33:07.160 no pharma company was willing to touch with a 10-foot pole because it was viewed as just a way to sink

01:33:12.260 money into a bottomless pit that could never achieve the regulatory approval and using again a relatively

01:33:20.040 small sum of money and i believe in today's dollars it's to the tune of about 25 million dollars she

01:33:26.480 sunk into the work of this guy pinkis and i and one other gentleman whose name is escaping me over the

01:33:32.200 span of something something like about a decade about a decade yeah maybe eight years and when you my

01:33:38.020 favorite graph that i ever saw which was kind of the holy shit moment was the graph of the number

01:33:44.320 of women in graduate schools professional school law school business school whatever pre and post the

01:33:49.740 introduction of the birth control pill and it's you don't get to see a lot of hockey sticks you know

01:33:53.720 as one of my friends once put it um it's really cool when the data don't need statistics to be

01:33:59.820 analyzed it's not like well there was a statistically significant increase in the rate at which women

01:34:06.200 entered the workforce no no like you didn't even have to say the word statistically significant it

01:34:10.300 was a step function change and i don't know i just i i thought that was such an interesting story and i

01:34:15.800 remember when you and i were talking about this a while ago i i don't even know why i told you the

01:34:20.880 story but you you seem to really grip to it there were many reasons for it i think partially being at 0.91

01:34:25.420 the time in silicon valley and surrounded by venture capital i saw some of the stupidest i don't know 0.99

01:34:33.840 how else to put it just stupidest non-viable ideas raise tens of millions or hundreds of millions of 0.99

01:34:42.520 dollars uh let's just stick with philanthropic dollars no i mean for profit okay startups repeatedly 0.98

01:34:48.920 i mean you just saw dozens and hundreds of examples uh over time of this and it struck me that

01:34:57.240 we find ourselves in a unique time which i suppose is something that goes without saying every time is

01:35:05.600 a unique time but in the sense that long ago this is worth discussing for a quick second

01:35:11.660 psychedelics specifically lsd were through the controlled i think it's the controlled substances act

01:35:18.340 scheduled put into the the schedule one class of drug classification which means high potential for

01:35:26.540 addiction no no known medical or no medical application no demonstrated medical application

01:35:32.300 putting them in the same class as heroin and to be clear for the listener who might not appreciate that

01:35:38.080 even cocaine is scheduled too right which means it still has potential for addiction that everybody

01:35:43.100 acknowledges but it does have at least one viable medical application which is it turns out to be a

01:35:48.440 pretty good local anesthetic in the nose which is ironic of course um but it therefore does have a

01:35:56.240 medical use and it's used routinely in ent surgery so if these compounds are so useful if they can have

01:36:03.020 some of the effects without guarantee of course it's not batting a thousand every time if you have a hundred

01:36:08.900 people at random who are using these some with directions some without you're not going to have a

01:36:14.760 perfect record but if if even some of the time the effects can be achieved the outcomes can be seen that

01:36:21.000 we're discussing how did these compounds including lsd end up in this category and there it's a it's a

01:36:28.880 multifactorial problem and it's hard to say there's one causal agent but there are few things that

01:36:36.040 happened at the time number one many people don't realize pollen gets into this it's really fascinating

01:36:40.400 but lsd25 which was first isolated or synthesized by albert hoffman was developed on the part or on behalf of

01:36:49.740 a pharma company it was later used it was roche correct i want to say it was sandoz oh you're right

01:36:55.840 you're right it was sandoz and then it was later used in a program that if i'm remembering correctly

01:37:01.860 was cia-led called mk ultra where it might be used as a truth serum for interrogations and things of this

01:37:09.820 type or to confuse and sabotage enemies of the state and it got out into the wild and then the

01:37:22.800 adventure began so to speak and lsd was widely distributed and at the time you had parents who

01:37:32.560 had never experienced psychedelics we were going into the vietnam era and we had a number of characters

01:37:39.060 come on to the scene in a very high profile ways one of them being and he cannot be even though he

01:37:46.320 is often given the blame i don't think it's it's fair to do this unilaterally but tim leary came onto

01:37:52.320 the scene he was at harvard as was richard albert who later became ram das and the things exploded at

01:38:01.480 harvard and they they were both i believe fired i don't think they resigned preemptively because

01:38:07.380 psilocybin was given to an undergraduate when it was only supposed to be administered to graduate

01:38:12.680 students and at some point leary decided that science was too slow and that the way to affect

01:38:21.160 cultural change was to have tens of millions of people he had a specific number in mind and that that

01:38:26.220 would effectively lead to a tipping point where all these positive effects on society would be

01:38:33.420 inevitable and if you think about the cultural setting you have a lot of young people being told

01:38:42.120 to to drop out of school to resist war efforts and all of that made a number of figures including

01:38:51.000 leary very high profile targets that could not in some ways be ignored by the administration

01:38:56.740 and so nixon famously said timothy leary is the most dangerous man in america and you had parents who

01:39:03.340 could not in any way conceive of the experiences that their children were having on these compounds

01:39:08.000 and that along with dozens of other things was a recipe for political crackdown which is exactly what

01:39:14.820 happened what you have now is you have parents who are well in many cases certainly products of the

01:39:23.480 60s who have had psychedelics experiences you have people who are in positions of power or in

01:39:28.980 regulatory organizations who have in in some cases experienced psychedelics you also have studies now being

01:39:37.720 conducted even though it's it's with great difficulty because of all of the approvals and DEA oversight and so

01:39:44.260 one that's required that are going back to the dozens and hundreds of studies that were performed

01:39:50.820 before the the crackdown and rescheduling and applying more rigorous scientific standards and that is

01:40:00.660 combined with a number of as you mentioned earlier epidemic level problems that we're experiencing

01:40:08.620 that are costing i would have to imagine billions upon billions of dollars namely

01:40:13.440 opiate addiction depression ptsd right if you add up the costs associated with those three if we want

01:40:21.760 to be a little crass about it and just look at the profit loss it makes a lot of sense based on the

01:40:28.580 data thus far to explore some of these compounds and that's part of the reason why for instance in the

01:40:33.460 case of mdma and ptsd the fda has granted mdma breakthrough therapy designation which means that not only

01:40:43.400 is the process expedited for ultimately phase three trials that the fda is in a sense a collaborator so

01:40:51.460 instead of saying all right your methodology is approved and i'm going to apologize in advance this

01:40:56.260 is not phase three trials are not my area of expertise so if i make any if i misspeak i apologize and

01:41:01.800 certainly feel free to correct me in comments somewhere but the fda is effectively a partner who helps

01:41:07.500 them to navigate the entire process instead of saying your methodology is approved see in three

01:41:12.800 years and you're going to get a pass fail which is a precarious position for any compound let alone

01:41:18.780 something that is currently scheduled the way that mdma is and we don't have to get into right now but

01:41:23.660 there's also something called the special protocol assessment spa which should hopefully if the stars

01:41:30.640 align in some ways which i think they they very well might give mdma a very high probability of

01:41:37.040 ultimately being prescribable and with and used in supervised settings it would not be a take-home drug

01:41:43.800 in other words but ptsd and specifically with respect to let's say returning war veterans or victims of sexual

01:41:54.520 sexual abuse is a it is a highly bipartisan issue or i should better say it's a non-partisan issue 0.94

01:42:01.200 it's very hard for someone to say fuck the vets so the risk of of that getting shot down politically 0.97

01:42:08.340 i'm not going to say zero because it's never zero but it's there are more attractive targets if you're 0.98

01:42:13.780 looking for re-election or looking for press time there are safer targets to go after to achieve that than

01:42:19.740 this and then within the scientific community looking at psilocybin which there are at least

01:42:26.460 two entities right now that are presenting phase two data to the fda and i'm optimistic that within

01:42:33.840 the next year at least one of them will proceed into phase three trials psilocybin has has shown

01:42:38.320 remarkable efficacy at least based on preliminary data for end-of-life or i should say event-based

01:42:46.020 depression and people with terminal diagnoses terminal cancer diagnoses and that may end up

01:42:54.960 getting extended to major depressive disorder which is to be continued to be determined but i've i've

01:43:01.580 already helped to raise funding and also applied funding myself to a study that will be looking at

01:43:07.740 treatment resistant depression at johns hopkins utilizing psilocybin and that means i believe

01:43:14.140 by the book chronic depression that has failed at least two interventions or two other treatments

01:43:21.340 are there other agents tim i mean loosely speaking and this is a gross oversimplification and we will

01:43:25.940 probably get into a few of these time permitting certainly as you said mdma has really shown pretty

01:43:31.440 remarkable efficacy in ptsd it's it's wild it's one of those similar to the graph you mentioned

01:43:37.900 related to mccormick yeah it's just not subtle it's not subtle you don't need the p value to see the

01:43:43.200 difference no no no it's i think i'm getting this right anyone interested can certainly look up maps

01:43:48.500 you can find them at maps.org who have spearheaded a lot of this but i believe that psychotherapy alone

01:43:55.180 something like 27 percent effective at reducing the scale measurement and i'm ad-libbing a little bit

01:44:03.480 here but let's just say that there is a rating of zero to ten for determining the severity of ptsd

01:44:08.840 anything above a three is ptsd something along those lines this is a bit of ad-lib but i think

01:44:14.760 it's something between 20 and 27 percent decreased to below a three so they were no longer they would

01:44:21.400 no longer be diagnosed as having ptsd with psychotherapy alone i don't remember the time frame

01:44:25.460 when psychotherapy was combined with mdma was something like 70 percent i mean it's just not subtle

01:44:31.220 at all so which again we could spend just two hours just talking about the role the relationship of

01:44:37.520 trauma and psychological damage and and how mdma can help with that the other thing of course which

01:44:43.280 we talked about very briefly earlier was iboga and ibogaine in the treatment of opiate addiction which

01:44:49.040 probably has the worst success rate amongst societal epidemics that are being treated by conventional

01:44:55.240 means i mean there really aren't great options for for the individuals with with opiate addiction

01:45:00.400 and then of course psilocybin as you said on end-of-life depression

01:45:04.460 major depressive along with smoking cessation i heard it's even being looked at now for alcoholism

01:45:10.760 it is and there are a few predominant classes people can look at when it comes to psychedelics i believe

01:45:18.080 you have the they're the tryptamines and then the phenethylamines i believe it is but we don't have to

01:45:23.540 get into all that partially because i'll just embarrass myself but coming back to the default node network

01:45:28.400 which i think is worth returning to for a second which listeners might recall is this collection of

01:45:35.460 different parts of the brain that appear to be active when you are doing nothing what is doing nothing

01:45:43.540 mean and this was discovered i believe in part when scientists were doing calibrations within fmri machines

01:45:49.620 they said all right just do nothing we want to get a baseline so this is the part of the brain that keeps

01:45:53.400 lighting up what the hell is going on and it appears to be highly activated when people are

01:45:59.120 engaging in any type of self-referential thinking i how does it affect so not only like think about fear

01:46:05.440 but what makes you fear what makes you fearful okay boom and then default mode network seems to light up

01:46:12.560 any type of temporal projection in other words thinking about the past thinking about the future

01:46:18.240 seems to also light this up and pollen does a great job of digging into this in the book and a number

01:46:25.820 of people have written about this in very eloquent terms robin carhart harris out of the uk is one of

01:46:32.220 them but to to just pose a question that i think is something that's being explored currently if say

01:46:39.280 anxiety is being stuck in the future and being depressed is being stuck in the past what happens if you're

01:46:44.600 able to temporarily suspend or deactivate that system to some extent and to give yourself that witness

01:46:52.480 perspective so you can look at yourself without being yourself and the implication if many of these

01:47:01.780 psychedelic compounds are able to achieve that is and even tom insul who i think is the former head of

01:47:08.340 the national institute on or of mental health and imh if you look at ocd you look at different types of

01:47:15.380 depression different types of anxiety and so on these are nice these are very cleanly separated out in

01:47:20.320 some type of uh what is the the term for this desk reference that people use for the dsm dsm in the dsm

01:47:27.260 but they may all be slightly different species of the same thing which is why uh something like

01:47:35.680 psilocybin appears to be lsd very similar story mescaline probably very similar story at high

01:47:42.840 enough doses can be used for anything that appears to involve obsessive thought patterns or behaviors

01:47:51.820 that includes alcoholism it includes smoking it includes opiate addiction and there are uh studies

01:47:58.560 that are seeking funding right now i know at johns hopkins related to opiate addiction through the

01:48:05.320 lens of psilocybin treatment which i'm very very interested in eating disorders like anorexia

01:48:11.220 these may in fact be very interrelated phenomena and conditions so you mentioned a few that are lsd i think

01:48:23.580 is off the table not for scientific reasons but for political reasons it's just too loaded there's

01:48:30.220 too much baggage and let us not forget that the media plays a very large role in how politics respond

01:48:37.040 to things and in today's day and age i i do not have a high level of confidence that lsd since it was once

01:48:44.360 painted as the villain is not it's too seductive i think in a clickbait world to not fall into the same

01:48:53.140 bear trap in a way so psilocybin then you have mdma which is thought by referred to as some people as an

01:49:01.480 enactogen or an pathogen this is not probably not scientifically too granularly accurate but it

01:49:10.120 appears to tone down that's not a scientific term but tone down the amygdala and fear response that we

01:49:18.940 have to say recalling or reliving traumatic events and it allows us to people say with ptsd who have seen

01:49:28.840 their friends heads blown off or had to blow other people's heads off whatever it might be people have been

01:49:34.020 raped etc to in some sense clean up a very messy experience that did a lot of damage and to help people

01:49:47.020 heal themselves in non-verbal ways this is really key right we it's it's very it's very hard for many

01:49:54.620 people to talk their way out of something they didn't talk their way into that's so well said i

01:49:59.840 mean you said in one sentence what what i tried to say in like 20 sentences a while ago about the

01:50:05.000 experiences that can cause pain can be so jarring that it should be at least acknowledged or considered

01:50:13.760 that equally jarring chemical experiences might be necessary to put that new powder on the slope

01:50:20.060 definitely uh so you have mdma mdma i'll be honest i was i i was biased in some ways against mdma

01:50:29.380 for a long time because a i didn't have much personal experience with anything chemically related to mdma

01:50:38.600 i had a fear associated with it because of research which i think has since been largely

01:50:45.300 debunked in terms of risks for people who are predisposed to depression for instance

01:50:49.820 it was also at one point viewed as and is still used recreational as a party drug

01:50:56.080 and i've i've i've really been swayed to the other side i'm very bullish on mdma as a therapy i think

01:51:02.760 that it is extremely it's an extremely powerful and flexible tool that does not entail the type of

01:51:12.680 perceptual distortion that some of these psychedelics do which is not to say i am not bullish on

01:51:19.180 psychedelics i am but it requires much more sophisticated training to administer so mdma

01:51:25.400 iboga and ibogaine going back to mdma i do think it is important to point out if anybody's listening to

01:51:31.140 this thinking well of all of these compounds mdma is pretty easy to get and you know you can get it

01:51:36.560 packaged in other things and it's ecstasy etc but this goes back to intent setting and integration i

01:51:43.640 really do not i am not convinced that just taking mdma going to a party is somehow going to unwind any

01:51:51.500 of these problems i mean it's really i would go further than that and i would bet against it yeah if

01:51:56.060 someone gave me a hundred grand and they said all right this person is going to take mdma and go to

01:52:00.520 a party 10 times what is the likelihood that it's going to fix x long-standing problem i'd go a hundred

01:52:08.160 thousand dollars every single dollar against yeah i would short it and i know people in fact who have

01:52:13.400 used mdma recreationally and then used it in supervised settings and it is as if they are taking

01:52:23.100 a different drug yeah that that just can't be overstated and i'm not just saying that because

01:52:27.360 i'm a doctor and i'm supposed to say something responsible but i i mean that regardless it's uh

01:52:33.100 and that for me is the urgency around this stuff it's i i think about i think about myself frankly

01:52:38.940 but i think about my patients and i think about a lot of my patients that would benefit from these

01:52:42.680 things that i've experienced or even things that i haven't experienced that i've seen people

01:52:45.920 experience and i i just i've never had such a sense of urgency around this i mean prior to this

01:52:51.540 the most urgency i ever had was waiting for pcsk9 inhibitors to come on the market when i read that

01:52:56.700 first paper in the new england journal of medicine about 12 years ago on the discovery of this type of

01:53:02.480 you know these these individuals who had missense mutations in that enzyme that lowered their ldl

01:53:07.680 significantly but boy the the anxiety the anxiety might be the wrong word but the anticipation i had

01:53:14.300 for that class of drugs which anybody listening to this is probably falling asleep thinking that's

01:53:19.380 you're an interesting guy if that's what was keeping you up at night waiting for that drug

01:53:22.760 but but this takes it to another level which is almost nobody i know has not been traumatized

01:53:28.500 on some level and it doesn't always have to be something that is so obvious so so you know we've

01:53:34.360 all been traumatized we've all sort of been hurt we're all dealing with these things and yet i feel

01:53:38.420 how quickly can these things go through this regulatory pathway to get into the hands of people who

01:53:44.920 would know how to administer them i certainly wouldn't right even if these things were legal

01:53:48.660 today that's only half the battle it's can you create enough practitioners that know you know how

01:53:55.580 to select the right patients and how to apply the treatment because this is in many ways harder than

01:54:01.080 any other treatments we have today you know people talk today about the importance of combining

01:54:04.940 psychotherapy with antidepressants but that's really the tip of the iceberg compared to this stuff

01:54:10.200 and it's it's also tricky from a commercial standpoint in so much as part of the reason

01:54:16.100 these compounds haven't been picked up like a football and run to the the end zone by big pharma

01:54:23.420 is that many of these studies only involve two or three sessions with psilocybin

01:54:30.100 yeah a naturally occurring molecule in these cases it's synthesized but there is a lot more money to be

01:54:38.280 made in something that you can charge an arm and a leg for that you have to take on a daily basis or

01:54:42.840 an every other day basis indefinitely as opposed to two or three times with some pre-work and post-work

01:54:50.500 with durable effects in many cases that that's financially an unattractive model to many people

01:54:56.740 and i think it's a mistake there are some for-profit companies out there i should say startups who are going

01:55:01.400 after this and i'll be very disappointed if they try to make their money on the molecule by blocking

01:55:06.720 other people from doing research or manufacturing and good manufacturing in gmp facilities and so on

01:55:13.160 rather i think they should make their money on the services on the therapy uh so that's that's maybe a

01:55:19.680 separate discussion now why has ibogaine taken the longest track and why is that still the one that

01:55:26.660 seems to have gained the least traction for testing in the united states i've spoken to a number of people

01:55:33.020 philanthropists who are really interested in this opiate addiction problem and yet they are

01:55:38.300 understandably not interested in funding research outside of the united states and basically their

01:55:43.480 view is until the da and the fda allow for a similar pathway we're not interested in funding this and i

01:55:50.980 worry that there's a bit of a stalemate there is that is this is this thawing i don't think it is yet

01:55:56.520 to thaw there are some researchers and i'm blanking on names i apologize but there are a number

01:56:00.360 of researchers who are doing very good work looking at ibogaine and have been studying it iboga and

01:56:06.060 ibogaine in the united states part of what makes ibogaine tricky if on one end of the spectrum you

01:56:13.680 have mdma which again i don't consider a classical psychedelic but as a tool that can be applied to

01:56:21.360 some of the same conditions what makes mdma attractive is general low toxicity relative ease of

01:56:29.740 administration short duration if we're looking at i want to say four to six hours let's say maybe a

01:56:36.320 little bit longer four to eight hours ibogaine falls on the opposite end of the spectrum now i before we

01:56:43.040 get to what puts it on the opposite end of the spectrum i should say i know people very directly

01:56:48.220 who had family members who were heroin addicts and say prostituting themselves i mean on death's door

01:56:56.400 if they weren't going to die from an overdose they might die from getting shot in the street

01:57:00.260 and in a case like that where nothing else has worked including some say alternatives like methadone

01:57:08.600 i've seen cases where ibogaine has worked i mean don't the practitioners of this

01:57:12.460 offer that at one year the recidivism is only 20 percent i don't know the exact numbers but that's

01:57:20.140 given what else i've seen with these compounds it wouldn't i don't find that unbelievable yeah if

01:57:29.840 i'm recalling that's only with two weeks of of intervention now these are people that are put

01:57:33.980 into a you know a very heavily supervised detox environment where the the iboga and the ibogaine

01:57:42.720 itself are administered over a one week period outside of the you know pre and post integration so i think

01:57:48.760 the entire therapy if i recall was about six weeks there are there are many different formats

01:57:53.020 and i know people who have been involved with running some of these clinics

01:57:56.720 and certainly there are people like gabor mate who have looked at opiate addiction very closely

01:58:04.040 but ended up as i understand it at least looking at ayahuasca and others for helping people

01:58:13.100 who are addicted to opiates ibogaine is very it's it's unlike some of the others such as psilocybin

01:58:22.840 in that it acts on a whole slew of different receptors and let's discuss what puts it on the

01:58:29.100 opposite end so it yes it can have these seemingly miraculous effects on opiate addiction and part of

01:58:36.740 the reason for that experientially is i understand it and i've never gone for a full ride ibogaine or iboga

01:58:42.440 psychedelic experience and i have no desire to it is very unpleasant it is very long so it can last

01:58:49.540 as i understand it and people feel free to correct me but 24 to 36 hours that is a long time

01:58:55.160 and many people experience a full review of their lives and a controlled death experience whereby they

01:59:02.060 get to see from the beginning of life almost like a slideshow the decisions they've made how they've hurt

01:59:07.100 themselves the other people they've hurt how their addiction has affected things and what gabber mate

01:59:12.660 would how he might frame it is instead of asking why the addiction ask why the pain and the addiction

01:59:20.160 is often a response almost inevitably but often a response i'll say often to some type of trauma or pain

01:59:26.220 and if you don't address that in some fashion allow people to reintegrate that somehow the likelihood

01:59:34.200 of recidivism is very very high so just from a phenomenal phenomenological perspective which is

01:59:39.720 fancy of saying some subjective experiential standpoint many people report that biochemically

01:59:45.700 and there are people who are looking at for instance using a metabolite of ibogaine nor ibogaine

01:59:52.480 which may mitigate some of the risks and this is this is part of the reason why ibogaine hasn't taken

01:59:58.240 and the risk i think we've stated explicitly cardiac arrhythmias people have and can die of cardiac

02:00:05.960 events in using ibogaine i don't know the specifics but i believe you can screen for this in a number of

02:00:13.080 different ways to minimize the risk and then certainly you can monitor in ways having other types of more

02:00:19.380 conventional pharmaceuticals on hand in the case there is some indicator of of a pending cardiac

02:00:25.860 event or cardiac event itself that's one of the major risks it is one of the more potentially dangerous

02:00:33.220 psychedelics it almost certainly is because compared at least to say lsd or psilocybin for which

02:00:39.180 i don't believe there is a known ld50 meaning well you could explain this better than i can yeah the ld50

02:00:46.760 being the dose at which 50 percent of a population would receive a lethal dose exactly biochemically

02:00:52.500 what i was going to say this putting putting all that stuff aside for it for a moment what's so odd

02:00:58.040 about this and i'm not an opiate specialist but i i've had family members die from opiate overdoses i

02:01:05.320 don't even know if i told you about this relatively recently and my best friend growing up on long

02:01:10.520 island also died of a fentanyl overdose so i have first-hand experience with the pain of losing loved

02:01:17.280 ones to this epidemic it it appears that many people can come out of these ibogaine treatments

02:01:26.300 with close to no physical withdrawal symptoms and i don't know how that works i really don't but it does

02:01:34.200 seem to be certainly one of the constituent pieces of this experience that lead to the success rate

02:01:41.820 that many people are reporting which is really interesting because it's true that opiate addiction

02:01:47.400 opiate withdrawal is not physiologically harmful the way alcohol withdrawal is so delirium tremens so

02:01:54.140 these dts that people get when they withdraw from alcohol will be fatal so you actually have to

02:01:59.340 manage these people with benzodiazepines and other medications as you taper someone off you don't

02:02:04.520 have to do that with opiates but the withdrawal is nevertheless psychologically devastating so that's

02:02:11.160 interesting that you could mitigate that i've read accounts where people talk very similarly about

02:02:16.660 ibogaine the way you described or the way i don't know if it was you or if it was michael paullen on

02:02:23.560 the podcast talking about the smoker i think it was michael paullen talking about the smoker who says

02:02:28.100 you know my lungs are just too beautiful to be insulted with this stuff and like i realized that

02:02:33.580 and i'm not and it's like as silly as that might sound to someone listening to it that experience

02:02:37.720 if profound enough can have a have a life-changing event that that is durable and that's the key is

02:02:42.700 the durability and similarly i've heard these i've read these accounts of people who you know have

02:02:47.040 been completely addicted to narcotics you know the account i'm thinking of in particular was was

02:02:51.660 someone using heroin and they came away from this thinking i could never stick that needle

02:02:58.000 in my arm again like i could never do that to myself again because i now saw this connection i

02:03:04.400 have to a plant and or another person and or another organism and again i know that i realize that when

02:03:12.260 i say that it sounds really silly it takes us or brings us full circle in a sense also back to the

02:03:17.820 beginning when i said that you shouldn't and you don't have to go through life simply tolerating

02:03:24.100 yourself at best because there are a thousand things that could follow because but in part

02:03:30.660 if you don't have any regard for yourself if you think you're worthless or if you think you're fatally 0.95

02:03:35.740 flawed if you think you're a fuck-up if you think you can't get anything right or you just 0.95

02:03:39.120 don't you don't have some intrinsic love for yourself you don't see any beauty in yourself 1.00

02:03:44.700 why wouldn't you be addicted why wouldn't you stick that needle in your arm why wouldn't you smoke pot

02:03:49.440 five times a day and tune out why wouldn't not to say there aren't applications of cannabis don't

02:03:54.920 freak out people out there it's an interesting space we don't have time to get into it right now

02:03:59.980 but there are so many ways you can numb or damage yourself which is a in some ways a logical coping

02:04:08.200 mechanism if you have a low regard for yourself but when you sense an interconnectedness

02:04:13.800 and you suddenly have empathy not just for other people like we've felt through our experiences but

02:04:19.800 an empathy for yourself you look back at like the 10 year old peter or the 10 year old tim and i'm just 0.90

02:04:24.860 like jesus christ fucking poor kid i mean and i can sit with that feeling and actually 0.85

02:04:31.220 identify with that kid and forgive that kid and assure that kid everything's going to be all right 0.99

02:04:37.120 it's right now in words through this microphone probably not going to have the impact

02:04:43.420 that i would hope it to have but for people to feel that as if you are in the same room with

02:04:49.820 that younger version of yourself can be transformative beyond anything that i could convey

02:04:55.240 right now and when you have an experience like that as ludicrous as it might sound the idea of

02:05:03.960 injecting some type of numbing agent into your body just becomes inconceivable in the in the same way

02:05:09.900 that it would be inconceivable as you mentioned earlier how you treat yourself is ultimately how

02:05:13.860 you would treat others like well would you like inject your son with that you're like

02:05:17.720 to numb his experience of life of course not yeah that was uh just one of the most powerful

02:05:25.640 experiences i ever had when i really finally accepted all of the issues i needed to accept and

02:05:31.480 go into therapy was something they made me do which was carry around a picture of me at a certain age

02:05:37.360 before certain things had happened that were pivotal in sort of shaping both the positive and

02:05:43.760 negative aspects of my personality and the idea was and again it just works out that way it worked

02:05:49.200 out that way for me that my oldest son is at about that age and just for what it's worth looks like

02:05:55.340 me so it became a very easy way to look at him and say well that was me and it turns out that that was

02:06:01.580 the that was the bridge to understanding it's very it's actually if you're a parent what parent can't

02:06:08.500 find empathy for their child and that's like this stepping stone and so to think that these agents can

02:06:15.520 do that because maybe not everybody has that luxury of having a child or having a child that looks like

02:06:19.420 them at the same age when they were traumatized or something like that i mean it's it's very powerful

02:06:24.720 and um you know it just i guess it's uh there are many problems to which i really honestly have no

02:06:34.940 not even the foggiest clue how to go about solving them from a practical standpoint like like talk about

02:06:39.500 climate change like we could talk about climate change all day long and we could certainly wax

02:06:43.760 philosophically on the lots of regulatory things that could be done to mitigate it but you start to

02:06:50.120 realize very quickly that politically these things become challenging and you have all sorts of

02:06:54.620 different economies around the world and they'd all have to be in lockstep and and and you sort of

02:06:59.220 not to be dismissive of these things or say we shouldn't work very hard at solving these but

02:07:03.620 the solution space isn't that clear to me and yet when you see a problem that in my mind is

02:07:08.720 the single most important problem that's plaguing our civilization and i know that's a big statement that's a super

02:07:14.780 big statement and i realize it's also probably naive when you consider that there are many other

02:07:21.140 problems going on but unhappiness is at the root of more pain i would suspect than any ailment that falls in

02:07:30.820 the quote-unquote physical body and to think that we have compounds that could play such an important role

02:07:37.840 that are really facing you know challenges and getting approved i just find that really frustrating

02:07:44.760 it's frustrating and it has been frustrating for people like for instance rick doblin who heads up

02:07:51.100 maps who've been he's been at it since 1986 1986 that's which is just to me and probably beforehand

02:07:57.340 if you take into account i believe that's when maps was officially formed if i'm not getting my facts

02:08:02.640 wrong and we're at a very exciting time now where mdma is being expedited psilocybin is certainly on its

02:08:14.480 way for people who are interested in learning more about this i think maps.org is a fantastic

02:08:19.840 place to to look uh in fact one of the areas where maps could use support as i understand it is in

02:08:31.120 taking their approach to legitimizing mdma use therapeutically in the u.s to europe so there will

02:08:42.260 be steps they'll take with the ema i think it is which is the fda equivalent in the eu for hopefully

02:08:49.080 facilitating mdma use in europe so that that certainly if you're looking to become involved with

02:08:55.600 exploring and potentially supporting this as i am that is one clear and present need and it's it's

02:09:03.160 we're also a very exciting point because psilocybin is one example which has a lot of good research to

02:09:09.360 support it there's a lot more being done at places like hopkins and nyu and many other places now

02:09:14.120 may have and this remains to be studied but it's plausible that it could have profound applications

02:09:23.260 to opiate addiction for instance and uh it this comes back also to the mccormick story with birth

02:09:30.940 control because the i don't i don't recall what the first compound was that was fda approved but it

02:09:37.660 wasn't approved for birth control i think it was approved for menstrual disorders that's right

02:09:42.300 that was the thin end of the wedge was women whose menstrual cycles were unusually heavy or uncomfortable 0.99

02:09:48.680 were the first approval exactly so and that's the most important step is it's much easier to use

02:09:55.040 something off label once it's been approved than to get something approved right so you pick the right

02:10:00.260 indication that's what's also impressed me about these organizations is just the strategic thought

02:10:05.700 they've put into this which is understanding a roadmap that is interested in the least resistance

02:10:14.060 right because to what does it take to reschedule something if you want to take it from the same

02:10:19.840 class as a heroin and put it into a class where it can be prescribed with proper supervision medical

02:10:24.940 supervision you need to well you you you one of the approaches like cocaine and the the uh nasal

02:10:35.040 anesthetic demonstrate one clear medical application and if that is depression in terminal cancer

02:10:44.140 patients that is a legitimate medical application and then that entire train can get in motion that's

02:10:51.520 one nice thing about where the dea and the fda fall out is for the most part there's a sense that

02:10:55.840 look once we've as these agencies done our job in scheduling something we're going to put faith in

02:11:01.740 the practitioner to use his or her judgment as to how much latitude to grant around the application

02:11:08.200 and and i'll also mention one thing just in case we have regulators or lawmakers policymakers people

02:11:16.040 within the fda or dea who are listening and that is read pollen's book check out pollen's book and

02:11:22.840 immerse yourself in this fascinating area of research and and i'll give if like a lot of people you just

02:11:31.180 don't have the bandwidth to dedicate a lot of time to this a something that pollen has referred to on

02:11:37.560 a number of different occasions and that is the addictive potential so what is the addictive potential

02:11:42.980 of these compounds if we're looking at say psilocybin specifically we could use other examples but if you

02:11:50.480 take a rat put it in a cage and you give it one dispenser a little little lever that they can push to

02:11:58.300 dispense food and another dispenser with cocaine that it can use to dispense cocaine it will consume

02:12:04.080 cocaine to the exclusion of food until it dies in many cases if you do that with food and say

02:12:11.860 psilocybin and it gets delivered a whopping dose of psilocybin it will press that lever once

02:12:16.300 and the rat's like okay that was enough and it goes to the food and that rather than having high

02:12:24.660 addictive potential many of these compounds have anti as we've already discussed anti-addictive

02:12:30.760 potential and my god it's it is terrifying when i look at where i grew up on say long island and you

02:12:38.900 look at the obvious put putting aside the all the stuff that i don't see or hear about but the obvious

02:12:47.140 among people i grew up with among my friends who have died of overdoses family members who have died of

02:12:52.720 overdoses these are in some cases educated people in some cases not they're using prescription

02:12:57.900 medications these are widely distributed easily prescribed medications that have demonstrated

02:13:06.460 incredible abusive potential and to think that we have these molecules that can be produced at

02:13:15.040 relatively low cost at scale that are not just non-addictive but anti-addictive

02:13:20.580 really provide some hope that we can counteract some of these incredible epidemics i mean i you

02:13:29.220 might have been the person who told me this could have been someone else but was it last year that

02:13:32.520 opiate deaths exceeded automotive accidents yeah for it used to be that automotive accident was the

02:13:39.660 leading cause of death for people up to a certain age and i believe the age is 40 and now opiate overdose

02:13:45.160 has offset that so you know this isn't an isolated issue anymore you know for me i think i i think the

02:13:51.800 rate limiting step is actually going to be training the clinicians to administer these things i think

02:13:56.120 that's going to become the bottleneck and that's why i hope that you know you know and we we have

02:14:02.060 friends who are psychiatrists psychologists who have become very interested in this and that to me is

02:14:06.640 really heartwarming because they're actually going to be among the people who need to lead the charge on

02:14:11.480 this yeah there are groups thinking about this certainly both maps and other organizations that

02:14:17.720 are involved with psilocybin are thinking about this people who have come to the table to provide some

02:14:24.060 funding like myself and for instance the braunner family of braunner soap and others certainly their

02:14:31.780 technologists who have who have come to the table many of many of them have done so anonymously

02:14:35.880 are very well aware that having these compounds legalized for supervised use is step one and

02:14:45.120 that there will be a very very real need for training clinicians and the wheels are already in motion

02:14:50.200 with prototyping some of this there's a there's a group called ciis out of california which is

02:14:56.740 prototyping some some training protocols for therapists who are licensed in various ways already

02:15:03.060 so that when these compounds are available through prescription that there are trained clinicians

02:15:08.900 who could administer so we'll see we'll see i'm very optimistic but this is where i will be applying

02:15:15.060 a lot of my focus and these problems do not they do not discriminate these problems these addictions

02:15:23.820 depression anxiety that people experience on a daily basis don't care what color you are don't care

02:15:30.140 what gender you are don't care how much or how little money you have i mean given how publicly

02:15:36.980 i've talked about for instance the content of the ted talk that i that i put out there on the depression

02:15:42.640 i've had people come out of the woodwork from my listenership my readership some of the wealthiest

02:15:48.080 people in the world who suffer from debilitating depression whose kids are addicted to heroin

02:15:54.280 and then on the opposite end of the spectrum people who listen to the podcast who are just scraping by

02:16:01.120 the same set of issues debilitating and

02:16:04.820 you know for the in the last few years i've i've developed a real sense of optimism

02:16:15.040 about myself and my life quite frankly number one is a starting point which i think is a starting

02:16:21.580 point like before you try to save the world is a good idea to try to save yourself and i have come

02:16:27.020 away completely convinced that many of these stories i told myself which were crippling

02:16:33.020 were unnecessary and that they can be wiped and you can write new stories new narratives for yourself

02:16:41.060 and we talked about meditation there's a book you introduced me to that i think we should we

02:16:47.540 should certainly mention also is this solve for happy solve for happy can you talk about this yeah

02:16:52.960 so rick gerson who is a mutual friend and you actually introduced me to rick probably about

02:16:58.320 five years ago he gave me a copy of this book and uh it was one of those things that just sort of sat

02:17:05.900 there for i don't know six months and it was just in the queue but didn't you know i didn't really

02:17:11.780 appreciate why i ought to read it as soon as it was given to me you know something in the midst of

02:17:18.140 a crisis sort of brought it to my uh to my attention a little more quickly and i just devoured it and so

02:17:24.740 if if the terence real book i don't want to talk about it has now jumped into the number one spot of

02:17:31.060 books i've gifted most solve for happy is probably in the number two spot and no gaudat yeah i'm not sure

02:17:39.460 if i'm pronouncing that right but m-o last name g-a-w-d-a-t yeah and and that's sort of pushed

02:17:45.580 mistakes were made but not by me into the the now number three spot just ahead probably of surely

02:17:50.940 you're joking mr feinman it's weird it's interesting it says something about us the books we like to give

02:17:55.540 people doesn't it you thanked michael paulin at the end of your interview or maybe it was somewhere

02:18:01.000 in the midst of it but i thought it was at the end of the interview for writing the book

02:18:03.720 that he did because you said it was the book you wanted to read and that you wish you could

02:18:09.280 have written but you're no slouch yourself when it comes to writing books is there is there anything

02:18:13.740 that if you if michael hadn't have done that and you would have been writing that book in addition

02:18:17.560 to all the stuff we've talked about today is there anything else that you would have included in that

02:18:20.500 book that that wasn't included and that's hard that's a hard he's a tough act to follow a very tough

02:18:25.600 act to follow and i'm so pleased that he wrote the book because i have been very clearly

02:18:31.640 biased in the sense that i am a i've seen the power of these compounds firsthand and i'm not shy

02:18:42.060 about as as we've seen in this conversation putting myself clearly on the side of support i don't think

02:18:50.660 they should be available at every 7-eleven some people think it should be every every drug should

02:18:54.080 just be available for anyone who wants to pick them up at any time i disagree with that position

02:18:58.140 completely but i am nonetheless exceptionally bullish on the scientific research and ultimately

02:19:05.700 the rescheduling and widening of making these compounds available to people through qualified

02:19:14.060 professionals and supervision michael has such a pedigree and is so widely respected as a and i don't

02:19:21.960 think he would mind me saying this a skeptical highly skeptical investigative journalist that i'm i'm i

02:19:27.160 couldn't couldn't be happier that that he published his book before anything that i might write on the

02:19:32.540 subject if i were to write a book about or including i should say a discussion of psychedelics it would

02:19:42.420 differ in along the lines of pollen's and my writing styles meaning pollen is is so brilliant at taking

02:19:56.440 the history and science and characters in a given field and weaving it into a first-person narrative

02:20:04.500 of his exploration of all of those things much like john mcphee i don't want to digress he's also

02:20:09.760 just a hero of mine but they're both so good at that i would never try to out pollen pollen i'll get i'll

02:20:16.920 get my face ripped off i could my book would just be a poor poor poor imitation of of something that he 0.76

02:20:22.220 would do master masterfully you know as i'm writing a book now sorry to interrupt it makes it that much 0.84

02:20:27.600 more apparent to me when i read good books how much i suck and i'm not saying that in a that's not a 0.55

02:20:33.980 negative self-talk although it sounds like it it's just the reality of it's like look i mean these people

02:20:37.780 are great for a reason and it's it's exactly what you said it's like the best books are not lecturing you

02:20:44.040 they're bringing you on a journey and when when they can do that in really complicated topics and

02:20:49.620 bring you along and also interweave history non-linearly that's yeah oh it's it's it's amazing

02:20:56.860 but i would say just to give you a smooch on the forehead that much like the best meditation

02:21:05.040 approach or app or teacher in the world for me may very likely drive you nuts and is not the right

02:21:13.240 person for you that stylistically some writers some books will speak to you or grab your attention

02:21:19.460 in an otherwise overflowing workload and someone and that differs person to person so rather than

02:21:27.280 trying to out pollen pollen or out mcphee mcphee for god's sake that would be a losing attempt

02:21:31.620 i've realized that i'm not what i enjoy doing is providing first-hand accounts of my self-experimentation

02:21:40.860 followed by prescriptive recommendations that aren't intended to work for everybody but that serve as more

02:21:46.740 of a choose your own adventure buffet of options that i have vetted to at least work on myself and a

02:21:54.320 number of close friends who span some uh you know different genders different age groups and so on

02:22:00.160 and that's what i did with for our body that's what i've done with all these different books so if i were

02:22:04.220 to write a book including psychedelics it would likely include experiments with other modalities

02:22:09.680 other vehicles other tools that also produce not minutely noticeable but profound changes in consciousness

02:22:22.980 which is really the stage upon which everything happens right and in doing so provide you with an

02:22:31.680 opportunity to rewrite the story of your life or to gain perspectives that are otherwise inaccessible

02:22:39.020 and that might include sensory deprivation tanks it might include neurofeedback it might include

02:22:45.880 other types of non-psychedelic pharmaceuticals it might include ketamine for example ketamine we

02:22:53.100 didn't get to that today that would have taken a while but yeah ketamine is a whole separate kettle of

02:22:57.100 fish and i think my book would be more diffuse in that sense thematically connected but with independent

02:23:06.400 modular chapters that include some likely extreme experiment that i conduct on myself

02:23:14.100 and then report back and say guess what i pushed the envelope and went way too far so you don't have

02:23:20.140 to let's dial that let's dial that back 80 and here's something you can try that i think has an

02:23:25.900 acceptable risk benefit profile that's probably the book that that i would write speaking of your books i

02:23:32.560 don't know if i told you this story i think i did but if if if not it's it's worth retelling

02:23:36.780 totally unrelated to this but it just made me think of it so it's like i don't know maybe a year ago or

02:23:41.840 so i'm in the airport and i just remember like my flight was delayed and i was sort of like a friend

02:23:46.840 who i don't talk to that often like maybe once a year he called me and he's like dude i just read

02:23:52.560 about you in a book today i think i know where you're going and i was like i was like uh really i what

02:23:59.240 what do you mean he's like yeah yeah you're in this book it's called uh biggest tools

02:24:04.280 and i was like what he goes yeah yeah like there's a chapter on you in this book and i mean oh do you

02:24:11.600 mean tools of titans he's like yeah yeah yeah yeah that's it that's it and just kept like he just

02:24:17.300 didn't even and it's it was just and he's israeli and he has like an accent so it's like you could

02:24:22.960 tell that like the expression biggest tools didn't mean to him what it meant to me and i just thought

02:24:27.960 that was the funniest thing so to this day i feel like proud to be one of the biggest tools

02:24:32.880 well you know that would be maybe the alternate title of the the podcast that you and i have joked

02:24:38.740 about which is you know dumb things that smart people do and uh that that's a separate conversation 0.96

02:24:43.940 but there are so many ridiculous habits and obsessions that anyone who could be considered 0.94

02:24:50.560 smart has if you have not seen it already just where where should people find egg boxing i

02:24:56.380 will link to it but there's it's got its own facebook page at this point it's hilarious

02:25:01.280 that'll be a teaser i do have one final question that's not on the topic at all of what we've

02:25:06.160 discussed but given that we have now between the two of us in the past two and a half hours drank

02:25:11.360 i want to say 20 topo chicos um my bladder right now is probably at its maximum capacity i think pretty

02:25:22.260 soon i'm going to develop hydronephrosis so we're going to have to bring this thing to a close

02:25:26.960 one of the questions i get asked all the time is you know people say oh you're such good friends

02:25:32.800 with tim like does he still do x does he still do y he wrote about this he talked about this i

02:25:38.460 wonder does he still do it and so i was thinking for the person out there who's sort of wondering

02:25:43.620 like what how has tim evolved when you think of all the things you have written about when you

02:25:48.100 think about all the lessons you have codified for people what are the three four maybe five

02:25:54.620 things that you have written about in some of your books that still consistently shape how you

02:26:03.220 have continued to optimize your trajectory so the three to five things that i would say i return to

02:26:11.200 most reliably are perhaps unsexy to some people but one would be some type of hinging exercise

02:26:20.300 movement i notice that problems crop up when these are omitted for any extended period of time

02:26:26.440 by hinging movement or hip hinging movement i mean some type of deadlift or kettlebell swing

02:26:33.000 two-handed kettlebell swing very very simple to incorporate that into an exercise program i do not

02:26:39.760 believe unless you have some type of competitive agenda that you need to do these more than once

02:26:43.360 a week you can certainly do them twice a week for extra credit but kettlebell swings or deadlifts once a

02:26:49.320 week prevent a whole host of issues and improve a whole host of performance factors so that'd be one

02:26:55.980 number two would be fasting and entering a state of ketosis for at least one week at least once a

02:27:07.380 quarter in conversations with peter in conversations with dom de agostino who's a mutual friend very

02:27:13.660 impressive not just published researcher and scientist but also athlete himself the intermittent

02:27:20.380 use of autophagy and entering this state of fasting and ketosis seems to me to deliver a host of potential

02:27:31.540 benefits with very minimal downside i also like the just the pure asceticism of the practice so we have

02:27:38.460 the hinging movement like a deadlifter kettlebell we have fasting plus ketosis for an extended period at

02:27:45.600 least once a quarter i just actually finished my latest segment about a month ago number three would be

02:27:54.280 some type of meditative practice first thing in the morning i'm also asked constantly one of the

02:28:00.540 questions that i ask sometimes which is what advice would you give your 20 year old self what advice would

02:28:05.000 you give your 30 year old self and it would be meditate 10 to 20 minutes first thing in the morning

02:28:11.840 don't do it after you check your email and do a b and c because you are going to fail 50% of the time you

02:28:18.120 just will not go back to it wake up right now for instance i have a foldable chair that goes on the floor

02:28:26.400 i believe it's called a back jack or a jack back something along those lines used quite often in

02:28:32.940 meditation centers right on the floor in front of my bed that faces out a window looking at a bunch of

02:28:39.000 beautiful trees and i get out of bed throw some water on my face sit down and meditate i would say

02:28:46.080 that's number three absolutely is some type of non-reactivity training for 10 to 20 minutes or

02:28:55.000 put another way non-reactivity rehearsal which is another reason why meditation sessions where you're

02:29:01.880 you feel entirely scattered and you only return to the breath a few times feel like a waste of time but

02:29:06.960 they are absolutely not a waste of time is that there are going to be periods throughout your day

02:29:11.380 on many days when life is going to just roundhouse kick you in the face over and over again and you

02:29:18.000 are going to be in that scattered state so it is good to rehearse mindfulness in that scattered state

02:29:24.260 which is exactly what you're doing all right so we have the hip hinging movement at least once a week

02:29:28.580 exercise wise ketosis less fasting meditation would be three number four would be the importance of

02:29:37.660 group ritual and this is something that very often falls by the wayside that i forget because

02:29:43.540 i've so often retreated into myself whenever i felt pain or depression or anxiety i i don't want to

02:29:50.960 impose that on anyone else and i feel like i should be able to figure it out on my own and just climb back

02:29:57.660 into the cave that is my brain and uh this very often results in isolation i'm just by myself even if

02:30:04.680 i'm surrounded by other people by myself sitting in a coffee shop by myself in my own head group

02:30:10.060 dinners at least once or twice a week cooking i have found and this was not always the case

02:30:16.160 for people interested you can check out the four-hour chef for all the reasons why i find this so

02:30:19.860 incredibly therapeutic but you don't have to cook i just happen to find it adds a new another level of

02:30:25.940 decompression but group meals at least once or twice a week would be number four and then if i had to

02:30:34.260 pick a number five i would say i'm not going to use the psychedelics because we've been talking

02:30:40.040 about this entire conversation if you feel like you're having trouble making yourself happy

02:30:45.400 try to make someone else happy and i think that that is the workaround that very often then

02:30:52.780 improves your own state so it's like if you're feeling just awful or depressed or in a funk it's like

02:31:00.180 go get a coffee and pay for the person behind you i mean just exercise some of those random acts of

02:31:05.520 kindness think about someone who has helped you and call them and leave them a voicemail or get them on

02:31:10.680 the phone and thank them for how they've helped you and closely related to that that ties back into the

02:31:17.320 meditative practice is if the me me me practice focusing on your breath focusing on your thoughts

02:31:25.320 focusing on your your your your me me me me is maybe exacerbating some of your problems and you

02:31:30.980 feel like you're you're having trouble escaping your own head take a look at meta meditation m-e-t-t-a

02:31:38.220 also known as loving kindness meditation and i have found that to just be powerful beyond belief i

02:31:45.780 didn't think it would do anything i found it kind of cheesy i thought it was kind of cliched

02:31:49.180 i wrote about this a bit uh borrowing from the teaching of someone named chade mang tan who

02:31:56.220 was an early engineer at google and created a class called search inside yourself which was hugely

02:32:02.840 oversubscribed by employees at google i think it had some insane waiting list and this was one of the

02:32:08.840 techniques he recommended so loving kindness it's hyphenated loving kindness meditation which jack

02:32:14.080 cornfield has some some fantastic examples of so jack cornfield k-o-r-n field and loving kindness

02:32:20.820 meditation also known as meta m-e-t-t-a meditation and there have been multiple reports i've certainly

02:32:27.780 experienced this myself but by doing meta meditation say at night before going to bed do that for a few

02:32:33.900 days and you might have the most at peace week you have experienced in years it's it's really something

02:32:41.680 else it's worth experimenting with so i would say those are my five at least the the five that come

02:32:46.760 to mind right now that i would feel very comfortable defending and backing well tim that's super helpful

02:32:52.200 because i we managed to somehow figure out a way to spend so much time together that i when you say

02:32:57.500 those things i'm like yeah i of course like we that's just what you're always doing so um but i think

02:33:02.760 it's great for people who are listening to this who who don't you know get to interact with you

02:33:06.020 frequently who who to get that little update on stuff so you've been incredibly generous with your

02:33:11.580 time but what people probably don't realize is how generous you've been with your time off this

02:33:15.200 podcast including sending me the links to like which pieces of equipment to buy for the recordings

02:33:20.980 and sitting down with me and giving me the not just the 101 but the you know the full course on look

02:33:27.180 do this don't do that waste time and energy on this don't waste time and energy on that so i really want

02:33:33.280 to thank you i can't imagine having anybody else be the number one episode of this podcast and i i do

02:33:39.040 hope that this podcast continues beyond the the initial 12 or 13 but even if it doesn't this will

02:33:43.840 have been incredibly worthwhile and thank you again for your hospitality this weekend in particular i

02:33:48.660 remember i put out something on instagram the other day about what was the over under on how many

02:33:52.160 topo chicos i could drink in a weekend and i think i said it at 15 or 16 we have blown through that

02:33:58.480 so much i can't imagine i know i still don't to this anyone who's listening to this who doesn't

02:34:03.800 know what we're talking about we're talking about is sort of bottled water it's in a glass bottle and

02:34:07.500 it's a it's a carbonated water but anybody who's tried it will agree it's not like a perrier it's

02:34:13.560 not there's something different little touch of magic sodium to keep you coming back for more

02:34:17.780 among other things anyway tim i can't thank you enough for for taking the time to be on a

02:34:24.100 a little rinky dink podcast at this point but anyway it's been it's been wonderful oh my pleasure

02:34:29.300 man i expect to see you right up there with with our mutual friend jocko uh who you introduced me to

02:34:36.180 so thank you for helping to unleash jocko on the internet and ever since our episodes on my podcast

02:34:44.980 where i had you on as a guest i've been beating the drum uh wanting you to start your own because

02:34:52.360 i i think that you're just going to do a fantastic job and then it's going to become

02:34:56.240 one of the regular listens in in my own rotation of podcasts that i listen to so keep it up man

02:35:03.080 thanks brother you can find all of this information and more at peter at tmd.com forward slash podcast

02:35:11.280 there you'll find the show notes readings and links related to this episode you can also find my blog

02:35:17.100 and the nerd safari at peter at tmd.com what's a nerd safari you ask just click on the link at the

02:35:22.880 top of the site to learn more maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively

02:35:27.140 non-lame once a week email where i'll update you on what i've been up to the most interesting papers

02:35:32.000 i've read and all things related to longevity science performance sleep etc on social you can

02:35:38.140 find me on twitter instagram and facebook all with the id peter at tmd but usually twitter is the

02:35:43.800 best way to reach me to share your questions and comments now for the obligatory disclaimer this

02:35:48.120 podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine

02:35:52.720 nursing or other professional health care services including the giving of medical advice and note no

02:35:59.140 doctor patient relationship is formed the use of this information and the materials linked to the

02:36:04.240 podcast is at the user's own risk the content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for

02:36:09.200 professional medical advice diagnoses or treatment users should not disregard or delay in obtaining

02:36:14.760 medical advice for any medical condition they have and should seek the assistance of their health care

02:36:19.360 professionals for any such conditions lastly and perhaps most importantly i take conflicts of interest

02:36:25.360 very seriously for all of my disclosures the companies i invest in and or advise please visit

02:36:31.080 peter atia md.com forward slash about

The Peter Attia Drive - July 02, 2018

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

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