The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

[podcast-player id=”5d439c6c-f8d9-4d70-9dc5-5cb108d8b515″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/5d439c6c-f8d9-4d70-9dc5-5cb108d8b515.mp3″ title=”#715: Chris Beresford-Hill — A Master Ad Man on Superbowl Confessions, How to Come Up with Great Ideas, Cold Emailing Mark Cuban, Doing Naughty Things, Poetic Mind Control, Creative Process and Insider Tips, How to Negotiate with Bosses and Clients, and The Power of a Stolen Snickers”]

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

Tim Ferriss: Chris, welcome to Austin. Nice to see you, man.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Nice to see you too. Thanks for having me.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. So we are going to bob and weave, and do some improv jazz in this conversation. We’re going to wind all over the place. Let’s start with a basic, which is how did you land your first job?

Chris Beresford-Hill: My first job was at a very cool, very trendy ad agency in Boston called Modernista. And I convinced them to let me be an unpaid intern, because they were so small they didn’t know how to say no to me coming in and offering to work for free. So I just graduated college and I got really lucky, because there was kind of no high-speed internet or anything. I just found them in the phone book literally, and I walked around and it was this cool office.

By virtue of that, I found my way there, and they let me be an unpaid intern and they let me write website copy, very Web 1.0 copy for General Motors for the Hummer truck, when that was brought back with the H1 and the H2. And I decided this was my dream. Maybe write a ton of web copy, and that was making me really excited. Maybe do a print ad back when there was magazines everywhere, maybe put an idea on the back cover of a magazine and that would really be massively fulfilling. So as soon as I got that internship, I had to figure out how to get hired, but they weren’t hiring. And it was very, at the time —

Tim Ferriss: To go from unpaid to paid.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Unpaid to paid, barely paid. But at that time, and we could touch on this, it was much more competitive to get into the ad biz, because there weren’t as many creative options for a career. So we had an assignment for the Dallas Mavericks 2002 NBA program, like the magazine that people would buy when they went to Mavericks games. And at the time, Mark Cuban was this very — besides just being Mr. Shark Tank, he was this very outspoken NBA owner. He was always criticizing the league and the officials and he was always getting fined, and that was a big theme. So I wrote an ad, and it wasn’t a particularly good one, it was okay, but I wrote “Even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about it,” with a picture of the truck, which I thought was clever. I don’t know if it really stands the test of time, but I knew that getting a billionaire to give you the rights to their name was probably something that had to be thought through, where there’s probably some people that would weigh in on that.

And I remember this urban legend, again, very like Web 1.0, which was that Mark Cuban had an email address that if you could find it and you emailed him, he wrote everybody back. So I kind of put together a very short, concise email pleading my case. “I’m an unpaid intern; this would mean so much if you would let me put this ad into the world.” And I made a little PDF and I attached it. And like true to magic, about an hour later, he just wrote back and he just said, “Go for it. -M.” And so —

Tim Ferriss: You summoned the genie.

Chris Beresford-Hill: He was there for it. Maybe it was because it was an ad about him.

Tim Ferriss: He was waiting.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah. Maybe there was other emails he didn’t want to write back to, but maybe this worked for him. And so I remember I printed out the ad and then I printed out the email from him, and I put it underneath and I showed my boss Lance, and he laughed at that ad and then said that the requisite, “We’re never going to be able to do it, but thanks, kid.” And then he turned the page and there was the email. And I think that, more than any creative idea I’d ever shown him, and I was doing my best to show him everything, I think I showed him that I was going to solve every problem with creativity, not just the assignment. And so we ran that underwhelming ad, but that was enough for him to give me a job offer for 22 1/2 thousand dollars a year, which was the best job offer I ever got.

Tim Ferriss: So many follow-up questions. So the first is, and you may not recall, but do you have any idea what the subject line was, or the gist of the subject line?

Chris Beresford-Hill: You know what, I don’t remember the subject line, but I’ll tell you this. I think it was good and considered, because to this day, I receive a lot of email that’s not from people I’m looking to hear from, and I know the power of a subject line. So I think very hard on these things. Everything is the communication. So, for example, when I worked at TBWA\Chiat\Day, I would sometimes cold email clients, we’d have an idea for Audible or an idea for Ikea, and I would find the client and I would reach out, and I figured out the perfect email subject which was “Hi, from Apple’s ad agency,” because TBWA is Apple’s ad agency. And my response —

Tim Ferriss: That’s strong.

Chris Beresford-Hill: — rate on that was killer. So I’ve definitely learned that your first impression is kind of your only impression. So maybe I appealed to his kindness. Maybe it was desperate, desperate, unpaid intern. I don’t know what, but it was something.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe you appealed to his level of get-shit-done, and he appreciated the chutzpah, and —

Chris Beresford-Hill: I hope so.

Tim Ferriss: — it would seem to be the case if he gave you permission.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So if I ever see him, I’ll say a very big thank you.

Tim Ferriss: He may end up hearing through the podcast. So coming back to the phone book, becoming an unpaid intern, why did you choose to focus — because the phone book has a lot of entries.

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of different types of businesses. Why did you choose to pursue this particular company? Or at least sector?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Everything’s luck. You can be prepared for it, you can have some gifts, but —

Tim Ferriss: You need some luck.

Chris Beresford-Hill: — you’re an idiot if you don’t think that chance and fate and all those things. Because there were a number of ad agencies in Boston, and I was sure I wanted to be an advertising creative person, but again, Googling wasn’t a thing to do. The computer with the internet was at the library, and I think it was like yellowpages.com. And I think Modernista was the name of the agency. So that’s kind of in the middle. That’s not the first one. I think I tried Arnold advertising in Boston, and they didn’t want to meet with me. I think I just worked my way down, and I think it was just the right place, right time, where they were like, “Yeah, we’ll take free labor.” So it was really, you couldn’t look up what the client lists were.

Tim Ferriss: Did you have a pitch, or was it “I will do anything if you let me in the door?” Or was it more specific?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It was “I will do anything,” because I had nothing to offer. And I think later, I would get my second job, and I would go to someone, and now I’m a copywriter, and I would say, “I will write on your accounts in my spare time, if you want.” You got to offer whatever you have, but I started out with nothing to offer. So I think I knew I was free labor, and I said I would get coffee, and I did, and I got a lot of coffee.

Tim Ferriss: We may come back to that. There’s a lot of power in being willing to do the small things, because a lot of folks feel like they’re too good for it or too qualified, but we may come back to that. I want to ask you for the program, and maybe you already said this and I missed it, coming up with the “Even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about this particular car.” Did they give that to you as an assignment or is that something you just did of your own volition?

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, I think I graduated from website copy to the smallest of creative tasks. And so I think there was, you could write the welcome signs for the GM convention and try to make that clever, and you could write — so there’s all kinds of little things that weren’t like the big-brand stuff, and they weren’t the big TV spot or any — and that’s kind of where all the focus was and you kind of had to work your way up to those things.

Tim Ferriss: Work your way up. So you said that you have to consider luck, I’m paraphrasing here, which is of course true. There’s certain things you can do to increase your surface area for luck to stick to them. Borrowing that concept from somebody else, I don’t know the attribution. And you didn’t get a yes from the first few spots or the first few companies you contacted. Did Modernista end up being a particularly good fit or particularly influential in a way you could not have predicted?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It gave me — so interestingly, when I kind of found my own, quote-unquote, “voice.” Modernista was one of these ad agencies that was very stylish, very European, everything was very cool, and they would put out work that was very avant-garde. I think I later became a little bit more mass, a little bit more comedic in the work that kind of came out of me. But what I got at Modernista is the owner was a guy named Lance Jensen, and he, for any ad nerds, you know exactly who that person is, because he had written one of the best advertising lines of all time, which is “On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted for VW.”

And so he had created that campaign while working in Boston at an agency called Arnold, and he’d done all these famous ads. I don’t know if you remember, there was an ad, I don’t know what the name was, but it’s that “Da Da Da” song, and a couple of guys just killing time driving around in their VW Golf, and I think they pick up a chair, and they drive around a little further, they realize the chair smells because they picked it up off the street and they let it back out and they drive around and the line said, “The VW Golf. Everything you need for your life, or your complete lack thereof.” Things like that.

So there’s all these amazing ads and there was years and years of them. And so he had struck out on his own and opened this ad agency, unbeknownst to me, Modernista. So when I walked in, they had accrued maybe 20, 25 people there. But I didn’t know that I was going to effectively be interning for one of the best, most poetic writers in the industry ever. So that was dumb luck. But what I got out of that is the one thing you cannot quite step back and get from the start is your taste level. At the end of the day, it is a skill, it is a muscle, it is an ability, but ultimately, you’re making choices on the ideas you’re coming up with and the ideas you’re approving and putting forward. And that’s all on taste.

And I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet that says they have bad taste. Everyone thinks they have good taste. And so I literally stumbled on the doorstep of just one of the most thoughtful emotional writers ever. So I learned my taste from him, and I learned the bar and the standard and I learned what was acceptable and making everything feel brand new and interesting. He could write a line about a car, and it would make a — we know what a car is, but he could make a car sound like this really exciting thing that you really needed to get one of. And that’s the art of it. So I learned that from him. And the best gift you can ever get is a first boss that has great taste or high standards.

Tim Ferriss: We will come back to taste, almost certainly, but I’m going to bookmark that. I’ll say a few things, and this is context that you did not have before we started recording, but as I began to explore entrepreneurship, all of the books, almost all of the books that I first read were on copywriting. So Caples and all of the classics. I also bought as many books as I could possibly find and afford on print advertising, because at the time, this is, let’s call it 2000, 2001, print was still a thing and it is still a thing to a lesser and lesser level, but I was going to be doing a lot of direct-response advertising in magazines. So I had swipe files; I had a three-ring binder where I collected various advertisements. I also bookmarked a lot of advertisements, one of which was the VW campaign that you just mentioned.

And I am endlessly fascinated by copy because it’s effectively, at its best, I think, sort of poetic mind control. The idea that I’m making these sounds that are coming out of my face that are instantaneously registering semi-instantaneously through your senses into your brain and then facilitating thought is pretty wild when you sit down and think about it. And no, I’m not on drugs, people, at the moment, just to be clear.

I suppose my next question is actually bridging the bookends of where we started, which is this cold email to Mark Cuban, and then an email that you sent to my team. The reason I think this is perhaps fun to unpack is that a friend of mine asked me earlier today, she said, “How many guests have you booked who have cold emailed you?” I thought, and I said, “I honestly can’t even think of three. But your email worked, which, one would hope, given your track record.” And I was like, “Okay, so this guy knows how to play the game, and he knows how to get my attention. He knows how to get it surfaced, at least, to my attention, and now we’re sitting here.” So when you thought about that email, how did you think about crafting that, or any email like it?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Honest answer. I think I have the muscle memory now, so I don’t think I had to really sit down. I think I made the connection. I thought, “Boy, I really want to talk about this with a broader audience, and I want to get more people thinking about advertising, and I want people to think about it as a career.” So I had that thought, and then I found my way to you via our mutual friend Zach, because that’s part of it.

The muscle memory for me is not only coming up with ideas. The other muscle memory is actioning and executing them. One thing to have all these great thoughts. I know people that are so much smarter and more interesting than me, but it’s also pairing that with this knowing how to do it. So I hope I had a good subject line, and I hope I was brief and didn’t oversell it, because no one likes that, and I think that’s probably what I would’ve stuck to. I think I was kind of doing what I do.

Tim Ferriss: I have your email in front of me, so let me share my perception of my read of the ingredients. First thing is you get to the point. It’s not six paragraphs of meandering life story. You sort of established that you know the podcast very quickly, within the first two sentences. And you mentioned, very quickly, your credibility. So 21 years chasing the dream, to much success and far more failure. Okay. What kind of failure? So you’re prompting sort of questions. Immediately, sizzle reel of some of my career highlights, short sizzle reel, which you can accomplish in different ways, by the way. It could just be a few bullets, but credibility up front, in other words. And then thanks for entertaining this. Here’s some macro topics we could talk about. So immediately getting into topics which prompt questions in my mind, including several that I would want answered, not just for my audience, but for myself.

So I would say establishing credibility, yes, you have the connection, but that actually is just table stakes. And particularly if I’m not extremely close to the person making the introduction. If it’s someone close, I know they’re putting their social capital at risk with me. So it gets, in some cases, elevated by someone on my team. But it’s very rare that something like this will convert. But I was interested in exploring, as you led to in the probably second paragraph of your email, not just the successes but also the failures. But first, we’re going to look at the nurturing and development of your ability to get things done on the execution side.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well before that, by the way, I think in that email, and maybe the big thing about it, because we also, when we pitch as an agency, we show up with 10 people and a hundred-page deck and our capabilities and the ideas we’re going to bring forward. But the thing you never can lose sight of is whomever makes their idea easier to buy, we’ll sell their idea. Whoever makes their product easier to buy. So I think anytime either I position the work or our company or myself, I try to give you a couple of reasons for a yes rather than relying on someone else to put together my Cinderella story for me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean you had different headings too. You had macro topics, and then later on, techniques, truths, et cetera. And these were very well thought through. So in effect, you made it easy to say yes, because they’re like, “Okay, you’ve done 50 percent of my research for me,” in a sense, which makes the yes easier.

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right. There we go.

Tim Ferriss: And by the way, folks, number one, this is not an invitation for thousands of people to cold email, because trust me, it’s not going to work. I’m giving you the exception to the rule. But what I would say, number two, is that, and then we’re going to go to father-son trips. That’s going to be next step. So I’m going to precede that by preparing this. And maybe you have discussed some of these bullets before in talks or in pieces you’ve written, but you’ve also, the work that you did, even if I had not said yes, would be useful in other places. Thinking about your career, your history, the techniques that you’ve used is not lost if the first person says no, or the second person, or the third person. So I’m just pointing out that it was well crafted, and a good investment.

All right. Father-son trip to California. I’m going to use that and let you run with it.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes, this is something, it is a formative experience that I only really put together a couple years ago on Father’s Day when I kind of felt like I wanted to tell my father how inspiring he is for me. Because your dad’s your dad, your mom’s your mom. I don’t often take a step back and let him know the things he showed me when I was young, how much I value them, and how much they helped shape me. So when I was 10 years old, we took a father-son trip to California, and it was the first time I’d ever been to the West Coast. And my father’s a teacher. It probably would’ve been a family vacation, but I think maybe it was like a “Let’s just send the two of you.” And on the docket was we were going to go to Universal Studios and then we were going to go to a waterpark and then we were going to go to the beach or what have you.

Obviously, Universal Studios was the big ticket item because those were really expensive, and that was the highlight. We go to Universal Studios and my mind was blown, because I had never — I grew up a little bit of a shy, reclusive kid. So I did kind of — if I wasn’t out playing with the other kids, I was watching TV, I was watching movies. So that world was extra important to me as a child, and I’d never been anywhere near where these actors were, where these things happened. And so we took the tram tour and I saw the actual house from Psycho, and the real Hill Valley Town Center from Back to the Future, which was my favorite movie ever. And even the empty water tank that was — I still remember this, that it was also at cross purposes a parking lot, but had a giant painting of an infinite ocean behind it, and that’s where they filmed the water scenes for Jaws and a dozen other movies and all this stuff.

So I was so excited, and I just never — in many ways, I’ve been kind of chasing that rush to production into sets and to where it’s happening ever since. But I mean, the guy walking past the tram with the paint bucket, I wanted to be him, because he was doing something. So anyway, it just blew my mind.

Tim Ferriss: How old were you at the time?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I was probably nine or 10. So it blew my mind. So we go home, we go to the hotel and call my mom and report on the day and I said, “Look, I know we can’t go back, but I would give anything to go back.” And that was that, and I appreciated it. And then the next morning, my father wakes me up maybe at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., which is really early to a nine-year-old.

Tim Ferriss: It’s pretty early for a lot of people.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Pretty early for a lot of people. And we get in the rental car, and I don’t really know where we’re going, and we drive 20, 30 minutes, and we wind up in some kind of a strip mall, and we go into a storefront, and I remember this, and there’s a row of chairs and an old-school projector, I guess at the time it wasn’t old school, it was just a projector. It was 1990.

Tim Ferriss: Like overhead transparencies or something like that.

Chris Beresford-Hill: All that stuff, like the sheets and — and it was a four-hour timeshare meeting for a new development in Anaheim. It was a hard sell. They were coming in, they were talking about these are going to go fast, and people would raise their hand and get up and buy into it. And then after they left the room, they would lower the price. I was worried. I didn’t know what was going on. I was worried my father was going to buy one of these things. And so after this whole four hours is over, we kind of go to the front to sign out, and we were rewarded with two super crisp day passes to Universal Studios. So my father figured out that that was another way to get access.

And so we burned rubber, got to the park, and we rode the back lot tour until they literally kicked us out of Universal Studios. And I think that was what we’re getting at with this story was this is — my father kind of taught me the definition of creativity, which is really just looking at any situation, finding another way, because he didn’t overextend himself and buy tickets he couldn’t afford. He didn’t get mad or upset that he couldn’t get them. He bypassed all of that and he was just always going to figure out another way, and that’s who he is and that’s how he lives his life. And my father is a guy who has never let his situation ever determine where he was going to go. And it rubbed off on me, and in a number of other ways, it kind of made me a little audacious or precocious.

And so I was this very shy kid. I was very little and we moved around a lot. So I was kind of, every couple of years I was the new kid.

Tim Ferriss: Why did you move around a lot?

Chris Beresford-Hill: My father is a very ambitious teacher and he became a headmaster and became a professor and he pursued a doctorate. So we kind of would move around every couple of years to wherever fit. I think I wasn’t a great athlete, I wasn’t a great student, I was small. So I felt like, “Okay, I’m not going to kill it in seventh grade, so I’m going to bide my time.” So I probably spent a lot of time observing people, which helped me as a creative person. But what would happen is I lived this double life where at school I was this quiet, nice, invisible kid, and then I would chase my passions and take these moonshots in my personal life.

So I loved the New York Knicks. They were great in the ’90s. I don’t know if you’re an old-school hoops fan.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I remember this.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay. Starks, Mason, Oakley, Ewing. That was an incredible team, and I’d never been to a Knicks game, but I loved them and I never missed watching one. So as I watched it, I absorbed everything. So when Marv Albert would reference that the Knicks had a big day of practice at SUNY Purchase before the game, I banked that, and I happened to have a friend that I would go see, and I noticed that the SUNY Purchase was on the way to his house, so I convinced him to hitchhike there. And then we’d — no internet. We walked around the campus until we found a giant beige building with eight Mercedes in front. So we’re like, “I think this is where the Knicks are.”

Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t look like student transport.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Doesn’t look like student transport. Giant Mercedes. And we staked it out, and when people started walking out like trainers, they had those “Exit only” gymnasium doors. I grabbed my friend and we ran for it and we slipped in, and practice was just ending. And you could see people were filtering everywhere, and a few Knicks were staying maybe to work on some stuff. And I don’t know what possessed me, but I grabbed a ball and I started dribbling it, and I kind of figured, “Okay, maybe they’re going to think I’m like a trainer’s kid or ” And so my friend, who I’m coaxing with me, because my friend Steven did not want to do this. So we start shooting, and then I swear on my life, Tim, maybe it wasn’t as pronounced or as dramatic as this, but in my memory, I heard a ball slap, and I turn around and it’s Anthony Mason and John Starks, who were the heart and soul of this Knicks team at center court.

They go, “Two on two.” And so we played a five-minute game the day before they were playing at the —

Tim Ferriss: Straight out of a Disney movie.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Straight out of a Disney movie. The day before they were going to be facing off against Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls, at Madison Square Garden. And so I go to school Monday, and I’m sitting at the lunch table and everyone’s talking about that game, and I can’t even tell them, because they wouldn’t even believe me that I played basketball with them the day before. So that was the — but my parents supported that. They thought it was great. I know you’ve had Todd McFarlane on before.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I’m a huge Image Comics fan. I grew up loving him. And my favorite was Rob Liefeld, who I don’t know if you know of.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: He had Youngblood, but he actually famously created Deadpool among many great characters. I would come home from school every day and I found out that the Image office, I will remember this, was in Venice, California. And so I called 411 and I got the number, and I came home from school every single day, and I called the number, and a woman would pick up and say Image Comics. And I said, “Hi, my name is Chris. I’d like to speak to Rob Liefeld.” And she said, “Okay, Chris, let me take your number and I’ll give him the message.”

And so I did that, and then the phone would ring and it’d be my mom’s friend. It was never him. But I did it every day, because I just wanted the off chance. Maybe that receptionist was going to be sick one day. Maybe she’d have some mercy. Maybe he’d pick up the phone himself. But I had to talk to him just, for the contact. “Hi.” I just needed that. So, later that year, we went to the Jacob Javits Center for the New York Comic Con, which was a very big deal, and this must’ve been like 1990 or 1991. And instead of just going in with our tickets, I had to enhance my surface area for something magical to happen. So, again, my poor friend Steven — I don’t talk to him that much anymore, but —

Tim Ferriss: The voice of reason who was shackled to this —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Steven, God bless you.

Tim Ferriss: — out of control.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I think we convinced, I think it was my parents at the time, to drive us in early. And we, with a few, maybe 10 or 20 people, we went to the service entrance of the Javits Center where there was some barricades. And at this time comics were big, but the limousines were showing up, and these guys were getting out with their teams. And so I was here for it. I wanted that chance to see them. Lo and behold, the Image crew roll up, and at this time they were really the — Marvel was the old school, and Image were these bad boys, and they’d all — exodus and it was Jim Lee and it was Todd McFarlane, it was Rob Liefeld or whatever. So they all walk out, and so I start yelling to get attention just like everyone else. And I swear to God, Tim, this woman walks up to me, because I’m yelling. And she goes, “Are you Chris?” And I was like, “Yes.” And she was the woman that had answered the phone there.

Tim Ferriss: With the patience of a saint.

Chris Beresford-Hill: With the patience of a saint. And this is — when I said I was little, she lifted me over the barricade, and they brought me in and I got to sit behind the table with those guys for the whole morning. And Stan Lee came by and I got to shake hands with him.

Tim Ferriss: Visit from the Godfather.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. So all that stuff. I found out where the Dave Matthews Band recorded their albums and I would send a letter and a self-addressed envelope to make it real easy for them to say yes and write back. And he became a pen pal for a couple years. But then I would go to school, and I’d have my too-big backpack and be a mediocre student. But I kind of was living this world where —

Tim Ferriss: So you’re your own superhero in your own way?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, yeah. It just felt like I was able to create the life of my dreams, even if the day-to-day reality didn’t totally match it. And that was fine by me.

Tim Ferriss: So then we flash forward, you’re getting coffee for people at Modernista, then you catch a break —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: — with this amazing email that you get back from Mark Cuban. What is the next quantum leap moment, which might’ve been at the time, seemingly small? But some moment, some experience, some small or big win where you’re like, “Okay, here we go. I think I can be really good at this,” or something that’s sort of marked as a milestone after that? Does anything come to mind? It doesn’t need to be sequentially immediately after that, but something that ended up being an inflection point, whether you recognized it as such at the time or not?

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s a good question. I play golf with my father-in-law, I just learned it so I’m terrible at it. I don’t know if you play?

Tim Ferriss: Terribly.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, but it’s fun. If you’re on a golf course in the morning, life’s not bad. But I was taught that when you putt, if the hole is 20 feet away, what you do is you measure 10 inches in front of the ball on the path to the hole. So you don’t aim for the hole, you aim for that spot 10 inches in front. And I think that advice landed well with me because I think I kind of had a sense of my dreams, but I was only really looking at the incremental of, “Okay, I made a Mark Cuban Dallas Mavericks ad, now what I really want is to write something that’s going to be on the back cover of GQ.” And that was everything.

Tim Ferriss: So you had a clear idea though?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, and it was incremental. I knew that I was not going to —

Tim Ferriss: That was the hole?

Chris Beresford-Hill: — do the Super Bowl in my first year, I accepted that. But every time it was, “Okay, now I’m regularly writing print ads and print headlines. Now, I really want to do a TV production. I really want to go learn that and do that.” And that’s bigger and that gave you more weight. And as I did that, I slowly accrued a body of work. And that’s the beauty of this industry is you can have a resume and you can say whatever you want about yourself, but you actually have a basket of your ideas and you can be appraised on those.

So I built up just enough to get a job in San Francisco at Goodby, Silverstein, which I think that was my big break because I was learning my craft in Boston, but I didn’t realize that when I went to Goodby, that was then and now is still one of the greatest creative ad agencies in the world that came up with “Got Milk?” for God’s sake. So it doesn’t get that much better than that. But when I got there, what I realized is I had learned how to write in the Modernista style, and that taught me a great lesson, which is that it’s not totally about you. As an advertising writer, you’ve got to be a chameleon, you’ve got to understand not everything can be your voice, it has to be the correct voice.

Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to San Francisco, so bookmark for a second. But I’ve made a promise earlier that I’ve not forgotten, which is coming back to taste. And I think this may tie into the Modernista style. So could you say a bit more about what characterized the Modernista style, and just a little bit more about being introduced to good taste? Because there seems to be, this is an overstatement, but a religious divide among creatives where on one side you have people who think that taste can be taught or cultivated, and on the other side it’s like that is nature and not nurture, and you either have good taste or you do not. Now, that might be two people with different definitions of God debating the existence of God, which is going to go nowhere because they’re talking about different things. So could you tell us a little bit more about Modernista style? What is that? And then good taste.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, the first thing I’ll say about it too is I don’t know the nature/nurture answer, but I have personal thoughts. But I think Lance, who’s still in my life now, by the way, he was a great first boss, but someone I still talk to regularly, he had a good way of saying it. He’s very self-effacing, like many really talented — the most talented person is usually the person that’s least boastful and least sure of anything. I’ve definitely learned that over time, and also radically open-minded versus fixed.

And Lance would say that the Modernista style was kind of you put an idea out there and the vibe of it is like, “That’s cool.” They really did know how to do one of the hardest things, which is cool is or isn’t, and it’s hard to convince of cool. But there was just a way of writing, there’s an ad for the big H2 Hummer truck at a three-quarter angle that made it look almost like a piece of jewelry. And then the line on it said, “Perfect for rugby moms.” But it was smart, but it was just kind of bad-ass, kind of sexy, kind of those things. And so that —

Tim Ferriss: It was succinct also, very, very succinct.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It was very hard to copy. It was very tight writing and it was beautiful art direction, and that was the hallmark and that was the box there. And if you came with something that was too wacky or too dry or too intellectual, too much maybe like Modernista or too much like a big broad Super Bowl ad, it just didn’t fit into the kind of clients that were attracted to Modernista and that Modernista sort of serves very well. So I really learned how to find that voice and write in it.

And then when I went to Goodby, the four ends of the box just fell down and I realized, okay, you could go to Jeff with something that makes someone laugh out loud or you could go to him with something profound and the color palette there because of who Jeff and Rich are because of the scale and size of the agency and the amount of talent they’d had through the halls over the years, the aperture was just wide. But at that point, I think some level of taste, some level of maybe standards came of it has to feel fresh, it has to feel interesting, it has to be succinct. Those kind of lessons were learned and then you could apply them to goofy things and profound things. But I think it’s the taste and the skills kind of were merged.

Tim Ferriss: So part of the reason that I wanted to have this conversation, and we were talking before we started recording or you asked me rather, “What would you be interested in or what do you think an audience be interested in hearing?” And we discussed a few past podcast guests who are very iconoclastic and have sort of painted a unique path for themselves with seemingly very few constraints, like Rick Rubin would come to mind, one of a kind. And part of my answer was creativity within constraints. Because the reality for most people, and the reality for me more than a lot of people would assume, is that I’m operating with a team or with contractors or with deadlines, I have constraints. I think a lot of good creativity flourishes with constraints. But when you have a team, when you have a boss, when you have clients, you have to navigate a whole host of different hurdles and challenges than if you’re a solo operator trying to be a creator on say, Instagram or TikTok, which has its own challenges, but they’re very different. And I thought that would be fun to explore.

So one of my questions, as someone who doesn’t know the business at all really or very, very little, as you’re building the portfolio, you could have a portfolio that doesn’t pull its weight after a few years, right? There’s the possibility you assemble a portfolio that doesn’t get you to the back cover of GQ, that doesn’t get you to the Super Bowl ads. How did you think about, and I’m not sure how much agency you have with this, I guess pun intended, building a portfolio that would get you closer to the hole? It’s like, okay, you can measure 20 inches out for that putt or whatever it might be, how did you think about portfolio construction and making progress towards bigger and more interesting things?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, I mean, I suppose it’s what you’re attracted to and what you love. And I’m not here to say that all of advertising, when you drive past a billboard or flick on Instagram or turn on a TV, it’s mostly not good. And in fact, most of it is not even ideas, I think oftentimes it’s just information. So there’s a lot of it.

And I think for whatever reason my interest in the industry latched on to somewhere in the top 20 percent of the — because I don’t think I wanted a job in advertising, I think I wanted to express myself in an interesting way and I wanted to put provocative or interesting ideas into the world. So I think I was obsessed with the best of the best. And so I would, in my early years, spend time with award show annuals and look at what the industry said were the best. And I’d form my own opinions and I would say, “Okay, I think that’s okay, but I love that.” So I started to shape where I wanted to go with it. And then of course you figure out, “Okay, well what are the places or who are the people that are doing that, and how the hell do I get near them?” And that became —

Tim Ferriss: And are those people who are on the creative side? Are those clients? Are those both? How much control do you have over what you do next, right? One thing you said that surprised me was you came up with an idea for a client and then sort of pitched it to a client who is not already signed with the agency. So I was like, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting,” because I would assume in a big agency it’s like, “We have these clients, and here’s your assignment.” So I don’t know how much control you have in sort of forging your own destiny with new clients, being around new people.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, like anything, I think it’s like if you are being challenged and if you have all the opportunities under the sun on your current roster or whatever your workload is, then you give your all to that. But if you’re feeling like maybe there’s a lower ceiling on some of the things in front of you, then naturally I think you’ve just got to get proactive. Because, again, at the end of the day when the clock runs out or when the year is over, whatever you made is what you have to show for it. So if things start to go south, I mean, sometimes there’ll be maybe a host of great clients, but maybe the CEO has very questionable taste, doesn’t like ideas that are too big or bold or creative. And you’ve got to account for that and you’ve got to kind of hedge on that, you’ve got to have a lot of irons in the fire. And when you’re feeling like things are stagnating or going south, you’ve got to almost invent your own opportunities. So it’s a mix.

Tim Ferriss: How did you get your first Super Bowl ad? How did that happen?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s a little bit of — it may be a nature/nurture thing as well. The nurture is my dad who kind of figured out how to remove obstacles to where he was going. To get a Super Bowl brief is and was a very big deal, but I think maybe 10, 15 years ago things were much more hierarchical. I think today it’s not uncommon to give big opportunities to all levels of creative people or any strategist or account people, anyone in the agency. But back then it was very hierarchical. And again, this is the most 1A thing, but I went and I asked for the assignment and I had a friend —

Tim Ferriss: Can you place us in time? Where are you?

Chris Beresford-Hill: So this would be 2005 in San Francisco at Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners. And the previous two years they’d done a Super Bowl ad for Emerald Nuts. And so I went to the creative director of it and I said, “I very much love this campaign. It’s one of the reasons why I was so excited to be here. If you would have me, it doesn’t even have to be formally assigned. I would just give anything to work on it.” And that was it.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a smart way to word it.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Make it an easy yes. If you make yourself.

Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t have to be formally assigned. I mean, that probably simplifies the political/approvals dynamic.

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right. And it gives that creative lead. I was scoped for two teams, I just found a third writer. So I did that and I was fortunate, it was a guy named Steve Simpson who worked there, it was him and Jeff Goodby together. And we got the brief, and the brief was, “Win the Super Bowl ad meter,” and that means win the popularity contest. So peanuts are parody, so just do our peanut ad and make it amazing. And I remember we were sitting in a conference room on the sixth floor and everyone kind of funneled out and I felt like I was so close to this chance to do a Super Bowl ad that I needed it, I had to give myself the best shot to win. So the strategist was one of the last people to leave the room. And the strategists are the ones that work with the client and they align on what needs to be communicated, what are the core elements and what do we know about our audience and that kind of stuff.

Tim Ferriss: So this is not to diminish the role, but it’s kind of like an account manager, they work with that specific client to translate their needs and preferences and so on to the in-house creative folks?

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right. To kind of translate the ask from the client into something that might be inspiring in a brief that would get the creatives thinking. And it was a guy named Matt Herman, and I remember I kind of grabbed him and he was a nice guy and I knew him socially. And I just said, “Hey, just tell me, is there anything that I could put in this that would make the client like it even more?” And he had said, “Well, we’re having these conversations about maybe thinking about peanuts as a source of energy, not just like a snack, but something that can give you a pick me up.”

And so I took that and then I ran and I wrote 20 scripts, but every single one of them had the peanuts as this source of energy that gave you something, that got you out of something, that protected you from something, made them feel like more of a utility. And as a result, I kind of gamed the system. And then all the ads I wrote were the ones that went forward because they did more. And table stakes are table stakes, in anything, in creativity or whatever your job is, if you can figure out one more thing that what you’re being asked to do could do and you cover everything and that, you’re more attractive, you’re more appealing always.

Tim Ferriss: And I want to highlight also that first you have to have the chops, you have to have the ability, the skillset to execute. But so much is left on the table by not asking targeted questions, right? You asked the question, which was the spell that provided you with the information you needed to use the hook that the client would respond to. All right, so then what happens? What does the approval process or production process and brief look like? All right, so you send off these 20 different scripts for, what is it, I don’t know how long the spot is?

Chris Beresford-Hill: 30 seconds.

Tim Ferriss: 30 seconds?

Chris Beresford-Hill: So it fits in a page. The average 30-second spot is like three-quarters of a page in a script.

Tim Ferriss: How much does a Super Bowl ad cost these days?

Chris Beresford-Hill: These days? Oh, boy, oh, boy. I want to say a 30 is like six or seven million.

Tim Ferriss: Six or seven million?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I think a 60 is somewhere in the 10 to 12. At this point, I think Super Bowl was the Super Bowl, but I think it was like $1 million in 2005, 2006.

Tim Ferriss: Non-trivial though. I mean, this is a big bet.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It was a big bet.

Tim Ferriss: Also reputationally a big deal for people within the client company. All right, so 30-second spot, obviously a huge investment for the company, if not in capital, certainly in reputation.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: What happens?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, so I wrote a lot of them, and we can chat a little bit later about the techniques, but I spilled my brains and I wrote — the trick when you’re coming up with creative ideas, I think everyone has slightly different techniques, but I think the one consistent thing is you have to cajole yourself to release every possible thought you can and get it all out of your head. And then when you think you’re empty, you have to trick yourself into coming up with more ideas. You’ve got to mine yourself. You’ve got to say, “What is the ad I think we should make? What is the absolute wrong ad to make? What is the worst ad to make? What is the ad my hero David Fincher would make? What is the ad Peter and Bobby Farrelly would make?” My friend Jason has one where he says, “What would I do if the laws of gravity and physics were not in place?” You have to fuck with yourself. And it’s almost like trying to make yourself vomit basically. I’ve never said it that way before, but you got to get it all out.

And then essentially when you’re a babe, when you’re young, you bring all that raw material and a creative director tells you what’s good, That’s how you learn some tastes. A good creative director says, “These three are the interesting ones.” As you get better, you start to be able to sift your own material, but you’ve got to get all the material out. Now, 20-plus years in, I think I can vomit in my head and extract the bits, but I think that’s the journey is get everything inside of you out and then in the beginning someone tells you what it is. In the middle, you get it out and then you work through it yourself. And then in the end you can have your private vomits.

But anyway, so I wrote all kinds of them, and the one that went through, I used it, I trapped myself to write it. And a few years ago I was reading something or I saw an interview with the artist Kaws, K-A-W-S, I’m sure you have seen his stuff. He does those big kind of vinyl Disney-looking characters with the Xs for eyes.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’d have to check it out. Yeah, all right, got it.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s really good pop art and he sometimes uses these crazy color combinations. And someone asked him how he put together such crazy combinations of colors. And what he would say is he kind of reverse-painted himself into a corner. He would start in a corner with a bunch of colors that didn’t make sense, and then he used the rest of the canvas to make sense of it. So he forced himself to make sense out of what he did here all the way here. And that I learned later but that was just something I would do to myself. So I started writing a sentence and I didn’t know what the end of the sentence would be. And I would do that to myself a lot just to force myself. I would start an answer without knowing what the answer was, and then I would —

Tim Ferriss: How would you pick the beginning?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I would start logically. So I thought about that, the brief I got to with my friend Matt was an afternoon energy slump and peanuts are a good pick me up. So I wrote around 3:00 p.m. when your blood sugar and energy are low, and then I sat there and then I wrote “Robert Goulet appears and messes with your things,” but I didn’t have that idea, I just started a sentence and I said, “Finish it, fucker.” And so that was, again, one of a bunch of ideas. But that was the idea was basically to turn Robert Goulet, the now passed, but the iconic crooner and singer of “The Impossible Dream,” to turn him into an afternoon poltergeist. And so basically, I think I had also seen that incredible Fatboy Slim Spike Jonze video with Chris Walken. I think many of us saw that and went, “Oh, my God, I want something like that.”So I had the sentence I wrote, and then I thought, “Let’s make this a weird kind of dance around an office where everyone’s asleep and Robert Goulet is pouring coffee on keyboards and taping people to chairs and just doing whatever.”

So anyway, so it’s written, and I think another thing obviously is I show my bosses, and it’s Steve and it’s Jeff Goodby, and Jeff Goodby is in the advertising world, one of the Mount Rushmore kind of figures. So I also learned if he’s 10 times better than me, don’t try to sell him on anything he knows. So that’s how I read it.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning let him judge for himself.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, okay, “This one’s crazy. Oh, you’re going to love this.” No, I just said, “Okay, here it is.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, pro tip, don’t ever say that to —

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, it’s true.

Tim Ferriss: “You’re going to love this.”

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, don’t do that.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t laugh too hard at your own jokes at the time either.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So they liked it. I think they liked it and they’re like, “Okay, that’s cool.” And then what ended up happening again is the craziest ad ideas are really highly, highly rational strategies brought to life in highly, highly surprising, memorable ways. Because when we went to the client with it, and it was a guy named Andrew Burke, who was the CMO of Emerald Nuts at the time, we had a very literal idea. We had an idea about a little Mick from Rocky kind of coach that would keep you awake in the afternoon and tell you to eat. We had stuff that was a little bit on the nose. But to his credit, he didn’t see this weird poltergeist thing. He’s like, “Oh, I get it. We’re going to show people that there’s actual danger in being sluggish in the afternoon and we’re going to make up what that is and we’ll position ourselves.” So he immediately saw past the kind of insanity of the execution to the strategy. And ultimately a great client does that and great work does that.

And I was talking to my friends Eric and Craig, who did the Old Spice, “The man your man could smell like,” and that is also a completely batshit idea. But the strategy was, “We make body wash for guys, but their lady friends buy it for them.” And they said, “Great, we’re just going to have a hot guy talk to ladies about it.” And again, and then they made it entertaining but it’s almost like —

Tim Ferriss: There’s a rationale behind it?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, and it’s simple and it’s bone simple. And then the creativity and the surprising connections you make and the surprising things you write, that’s the magic. But it’s always magic on top of something very simple and easy to understand, it has to be. So to go back to this, so we go through it. So this idea is sold, and I will say, to this client’s credit, it was not over-researched or heavily researched. So what they did is they put it into some quantitative research to show the storyboards. We made some storyboards and a moderator shared it with a panel of people, and it was not —

Tim Ferriss: Panel meaning almost like a focus group?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, they were like people roughly in the demographic. And they were kind of read the script. It wasn’t performed, it was read by a third party. And instead of saying the dreaded, “Do you like it?” Which is how many a great idea gets unraveled, they just said, “Okay, so what did you see? What do you understand from it? What did it make you understand about peanuts? And what do you think of Emerald Nuts now?” Again, it was asking customers the right questions. I think sometimes the Henry Ford, “Ask people what they want and they’ll say ‘A faster horse,'” I think sometimes when you ask your audience to tell you what it should be, you get a lot of mirroring. But when you make the conversation about what are you getting from it, then you can give them something unexpected and you can push yourself. So we did that kind of research, thank God.

Tim Ferriss: Those are good questions. It makes me think of something that is maybe only tangentially related, but something Kevin Kelly, who’s a friend of mine who’s been on the podcast who’s very wise in a lot of ways, and he has a book of advice, short, pithy lines that started as a list of lessons learned on his, I believe, 68th birthday to give to his kids.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: And one of them was, “If people tell you something is wrong, they’re almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.” But people have a gut sense, so these questions pair well with that insight, I think. Okay, so those questions are asked?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Those questions are asked, and it passes. People say what we wanted them to say. And of course, again, maybe the reason why this one sailed through it, I have many a horror story was, again, because they got a natural energy message when they had convinced their board they were just going to entertain. So it was already in the bonus round, so it was favored. And that gives you that lift so you can move through. So then we hired a director. It was a duo called The Perlorian Brothers out of Toronto, Canada.

Tim Ferriss: That’s an amazing name.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I don’t know where, Ian and Michael —

Tim Ferriss: Sounds like an acrobatic act from Cirque du Soleil.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, I know, I know. And they’re these two former ad creatives that became directors and they got into it and we did a call with Robert and his wife Vera. And I thought we can talk a little bit about celebrity advertising because this was my greatest experience because normally celebrities are very specific on what they will or won’t do, and there’s always some pushes from their team. But Robert just wanted to know if he could choose his own wardrobe. And we said, “Absolutely, sounds good.” So we filmed it in Toronto over two days, and it was very fun.

Again, and this is probably maybe inside baseball and the industry, but I think sometimes clients become so creative that they mirror the job, but sometimes the best clients are let the creatives be creative and you’re there to say, “I think this is okay,” “I’m not comfortable with this,” “Here’s a note on why making this change would actually be more effective, not less.” But our client, Andrew, was just there to supervise and make sure that we were getting the right stuff in the can, protecting his investment, but giving us liberal room to play. So it was a magical shoot, it was right before Christmas.

And then you hire an editor separately. And so there’s an editor named Ian McKenzie, who’s cut a ton of Super Bowl ads and he’s very good at it. And early January we go into his suite in the Flatiron in New York City, and I’m super excited, and he plays it and I’m super disappointed because it didn’t live up to all my dreams. I don’t know, it feels flat. Is it funny? I could see nothing but the problems with it. And what you end up doing with the editors, I think back in the day when you had to cut film with a razor blade and use tape, you would debate and edit. But because you’re doing things at the time final cut, you can try anything.

Tim Ferriss: You can ready, fire, aim.

Chris Beresford-Hill: You can make it backwards. In some ways, it allows you to explore anything, but maybe in other ways it takes some of the thinking out of it, which could be a shame. But anyway, we go through a couple of days where we try a whole bunch of different things, we try some different music, we change the order of this little afternoon maraud, we experiment. And then what I’ve learned with Ian, because I’ve now been working with him for 15 years, ultimately we start to feel really good about it, me and the art director I was working with.

Tim Ferriss: How much of that was the product changing versus your psychology adapting to the fact that perhaps nothing could live up to the swirling dream of perfection in your mind?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s the latter, it’s the latter. Yeah, you’re exactly right. And what I’ve learned with Ian, and I just, for a Super Bowl ad we made this year, I brought a young team for the first time to work with him, so I have fun, I’m seeing them get to do what I did 15 years ago. And the advice I gave them is I said, “Just know whatever Ian shows you first is going to be closest to where you end,” because that’s what I know about him. So we kind of walked around the moon with him, and of course it was like maybe some music tweaks, maybe a little bit of tightening up a few moments here, but ultimately he had it. But we had to get our brains to catch up with reality. And of course, at the end of the day when someone has never seen it, they’re going to kind of see the best version of it. But you torture it.

Tim Ferriss: Editors are magicians. I mean, the good editors in any medium are so important, yet so frequently semi-invisible, right? And I think I am getting this roughly right enough, but I believe if you look at Steven Spielberg’s films and his greatest hits, the greatest constant, I believe, is his film editor, yet how many people could name his name? I wish I could name his name. I’ve read the story, I’ve researched this guy, and he is one of the masters at work again and again.

Chris Beresford-Hill: More happens in the edit than people think because it’s not lining it up in order, it’s speeding up shots, it’s arts and crafts, it’s punching in. The amount of raw stuff we do in the edit where we’ll split the screen, take this, take from that, and the amount of experimentation that happens there. And that’s really, in many ways, that’s the most important moment.

And so we walked with this edit and I showed it to Jeff Goodby and Steve Simpson, and they liked it and it was good. And then a very interesting thing happened, I had the QuickTime on my computer and I showed a couple people in the office and I played it — why would I say their name? But I played it for a couple people and they went, “Huh.” And I distinctly remember this. I showed two or three people and everyone — and by the way, I think some people respond as professionals. They immediately think what they would’ve done with the opportunity maybe or I don’t know what. But for some reason, and I don’t know why, it didn’t bother me at all, and in many ways I started getting a little excited by the fact that people didn’t get it.

And I’ve not really unpacked this, I’m talking about this kind of long-form for the first time in a long time but I kind of felt like there was something more special happening if it wasn’t an easy get for people. And I started to think that it might be more original. And I think that was the case and I kind of learned a great lesson there, which is once you take feedback and definitely share your ideas, but once you’ve locked in and you’re sure you’re good with it, you really don’t have to look back. It didn’t rattle me, and I’m glad it didn’t. And I think to this day, if there’s something that I believe in, if I get lukewarm results, it just does not phase me at all. And usually you’ll find your audience, people will like it, people will respond differently than your inner circles.

Tim Ferriss: What happened when the ad came out?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It did well, it did really well. The Ad Age the next morning ranked it number one, they had an ad critiquer named Bob Garfield who —

Tim Ferriss: He was like the Siskel and Ebert of ads?

Chris Beresford-Hill: He was, and I feel like Jeff Goodby him had went head-to-head a few times. And Jeff wasn’t a big fan, but he liked it. And I think it was kind of early days of YouTube, and I think it was for a day or two, it was the number one comedy video on YouTube or something crazy like that. So it worked and the sales went up.

Tim Ferriss: I saw it back then, I remember seeing it. It was weird because it got sent to me and it was on YouTube, I recall this very specifically. So I want to unpack a couple of concepts/lessons from a few different people and I want you to explain them. And then we’re going to go to lying to the CMO of Adidas, if that’s the right way to put it. That’s what we call a cliffhanger. After this commercial break. No commercial break. But the first is from David Lubars, if I’m getting that right. And I’d love for you to share what advice or lessons you took from him. Now one that I have in front of me, which could be a starting point or maybe is the point, make as many decisions as possible. I’m not clear on what this means, but it does pique my curiosity. So who is David, and what does this mean, and any other lessons learned or principles?

Chris Beresford-Hill: David is the worldwide chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO. I worked for him for eight years, and I’m not shy of saying he was the best boss I ever had. He was the best boss I ever had because he was very clear, and he was very consistent, and that’s what you need in leadership. So you could show him a bunch of work, and he would tell you what he liked and what he chose right away, and that was that. He didn’t need to split hairs. He would come give you his response, and he knew that he would make a bigger impact in this giant company by going around and saying, “I think this is the most right thing, the most creative thing, the most interesting thing,” and just go and do that, and not be afraid to make decisions, create progress. By the way, if he picked something that was wrong, well whoop-de-do, we’d have to go back and do it again. Or maybe we had one that wasn’t as good as it could have been, but he never inhibited progress. He always facilitated progress by doing that.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning catalyzing some type of forward motion.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Exactly. He never would say, “Let me take this back, let me think about it, or let’s pull more people into it.” He would just give you these gut reads, and it always gave you permission to go forward, and it really taught that someone who’s really pushing everyone and keeping everyone in motion just happens to always be at the center of so much. That’s why for that eight years, I mean, the agency was one of the most awarded in the world. There was my little corner of the universe, but there was all these other corners, and he just amplified himself by empowering his people and saying a lot of yes, sometimes a no, but he was always game to move forward.

Tim Ferriss: Were you able to emulate that at the time in some small way or is that something that you were only able to implement later as you had more and more direct reports or bigger team?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I used it. I used it then because — well, because BBO at that time was David’s place, so David said to do it. David said, “Let’s go,” and whether or not — I don’t think we ever got a look at an org chart or reporting structure. I don’t think we ever knew that that carried muster, but a lot of us loved the decisions he was making, and so enough of us would constantly say, “That’s what David wants.” So whether or not that was be all, end all, it became be all, end all. So we were all emboldened to make moves, but I myself couldn’t. There wasn’t much I could do in terms of —

Tim Ferriss: In terms of making your own decisions?

Chris Beresford-Hill: No.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Chris Beresford-Hill: No. I was probably working through my own process, but it was invaluable later because you do see people that in a high creative role, you’ve really got to make things happen, and you will see some people in very senior roles that really gild the lily and that really obsess over —

Tim Ferriss: It’s such a great expression.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It is.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: By the way, the gilding the lily of someone who’s looking at a two-minute case study for an award show, and changing the mix on the music eight times, and you’re like, “Listen, it doesn’t really matter.” There’s times to craft the hell out of it, but there’s also this step back. I think in our industry and in creativity, fast decisions are really stepping back as opposed to getting in the weeds.

Tim Ferriss: Can you say more about that? What I’d like to hear you riff on a little bit is how you think about fast decisions. This is a source of constant fascination for me. It’s something I revisit a lot. To what extent do I prioritize speed and just catalyzing things happening versus honing, minimizing mistakes? I think that’s what it comes down to for a lot of people. It’s what error rate are you willing to accept? Is it 10 percent? I know it’s hard to track these things, but is it, you’re willing to accept a breakage of making the wrong call 10 percent of the time because the speed net over time is just a huge competitive advantage and good for what you’re doing? That’s a long question, but with a fair amount of lead up. How do you think about that?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I remember that at the end of the day, it’s subjective, that there is not —

Tim Ferriss: It’s not mathematics.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s not mathematical. So I’ve learned to trust myself, and I’ve learned that if you A/B something too long, you’re lost. So I think the more I get stuck in something, the more I realize I need to make a fast decision because I don’t think obsession when you’re really deciding go, no go, good idea, bad idea, excited about this, not excited about this, I don’t think time is your friend. I think time pulls everything. It slows everything down. It takes the energy out of it. So I think sometimes you’ve just got to let it fly, and then by the way, you can correct, and you can change as you go. I mean, I’ve approved ads that wound up being completely different ads that we’re really proud of. So that’s the other thing, is that nothing is totally fixed.

Tim Ferriss: It also strikes me that there are so many things, just pulling from my own experience, that get worse with time and more deliberation like deals and just deal structures, negotiating. Often in my experience, it’s the longer it takes, the more that is a harbinger of pain to come or just a bad wasteful outcome that ends up stalling out. There’s so many things like that where it’s like, okay, if there’s isn’t some speed to this, likely the outcome is going to be worse.

Chris Beresford-Hill: For sure. Time kills all deals for sure, and it kills momentum, and it kills energy, and it takes people. So if you’ve got people going, if you need to take something offline for yourself, just know that their muscles are going to cool. They’re going to take a break, and they’re going to restart. Many times, the wrong decision can become the right decision.

If it’s actually an okay time, I’d love to tell you a little bit about a Mountain Dew Super Bowl —

Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.

Chris Beresford-Hill: — ad we did because it started out as one thing and it became something totally different, and there’s a beauty in that sometimes the non-linear way, it really works. So this would be, I want to say it’s 2018. We are Mountain Dew’s agency of record. I’m working at TBWA\Chiat\Day at the time. I’m the chief creative officer, and I have these incredible executive creative directors named Amy and Julia that run the Mountain Dew business. We got the Super Bowl brief, and the idea we landed was something about how it was for Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, and this is the zero that they really got right. This one tastes so close to the original that we needed to do something that was going to cause a real reappraisal.

Before we started talking, I was like, “That’s right” because I couldn’t remember what it was. So our original idea was, it’s impossible taste. So that was the core thought we were executing against. Amy and Julia had this really gutsy idea, and the idea, and I’m caveating here, this idea never happened, was never purchased by PepsiCo. So this is behind the scenes in our house at the agency. We had the idea that for this impossible drink, we were going to do the impossible Super Bowl ad. So what we were going to do is we were going to announce mega press release billboards, front page of Variety that Daniel Day-Lewis had agreed to star in Mountain Dew Zero Sugar’s Super Bowl ad, and we were going to do it without telling him.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, continue. Yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: For sure, he would say “Go away” if he acknowledged it, and for sure he would probably cease and desist, if not sue. Our whole idea was going to be we were going to let this play, but we were going to say because this Mountain Dew Zero Sugar was so impossibly good, you deserve an impossibly hard-to-make Super Bowl ad, so we’re going to do it. We were going to even have a live cam of a limousine parked in front of his last known address on the day of the Super Bowl, and we were going to have the set ready, and we were going to basically film and live stream, is he going to come do it?

So as I’m working with Amy and Julia on this, we’re loving it. We’re having fun, and this is when — the best ideas are when you’re like, “We can never do this. We’re going to get in big trouble. This is so wrong.” When you feel that, you’ve got to stay there. You absolutely have to. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens. So then we started saying, “Okay, so what happens when he doesn’t show?” So we’re talking. We’re like, “Okay.”

So we made this up. The whole pre-campaign, all the buzz, Daniel Day-Lewis sues Mountain Dew because he doesn’t want to be part of this. He’s not going to participate, but we still had the TV ad. So a camera winds through a set from There Will Be Blood, and finds its way into this chapel, and finds the back of this cloaked character, and it’s Daniel Day-Lewis’ character. Turns around, and it’s Will Ferrell in a mustache and a hat, and he does the monologue, or the beautiful performance piece of, “I take my straw and I drink your milkshake,” and he does. He just goes nuts yelling about how “I take my straw, and I drink your Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, and I drink it up.” So then the rug pull becomes insane. So he’s not going to do it, and then Will Ferrell does an insane Daniel Day-Lewis screaming about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar.

So we know it’s probably a long shot, but we go to Pepsi. We go with a bunch of ideas, and we go — the client was a woman named Nicole, and there’s the CMO Pepsi guy named Greg Lyons, who’s been there a long time, and he’s great. He knows creative. Again, when you talk about the kind of clients you can work with that understand creative people but also understand their own business and can bridge that, that’s why Pepsi marketing has consistently been so strong. So we show Greg and Greg’s like, “I love it. I love it. There’s no way we can do this.” But he said, “But you know what? I’ll bring it to our legal because look, I love it. I just know we can’t do it. I love it.” Sure enough, and I won’t even get into the myriad of reasons, but basically there was a potential legal precedent that would’ve altered Pepsi stock’s price forever if we pissed off Daniel Day-Lewis or whatever.

Tim Ferriss: Hold on. That’s too tantalizing, if you can’t get into it, but just a little bit.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I’ll give it. Look, because nothing happened, nothing happened. So I think there was a case that perhaps if this went wrong, he may be entitled to a royalty on every Pepsi product sold forever.

Tim Ferriss: I can see why legal would push back.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I’m talking about a bag of Frito Lays in Bangkok is still Daniel Day-Lewis gets money. It would have been the best thing that ever happened to him, but anyway.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like that guy who had a phone thrown at him by Russell Crowe.

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Man won the lottery, Powerball.

Chris Beresford-Hill: And if he put that money into Apple stock, now how good is he doing?

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Chris Beresford-Hill: But [inaudible 01:21:53].

Tim Ferriss: So legal’s like, “I love it, we think not.”

Chris Beresford-Hill: So we think not, but this is how it really happens. So we go back to the office and we’re — there’s new ideas and stuff, and we’re sitting, the three of — Amy and Julia are great. They’re working with their teams, and then we would get together for an hour or two, and we’re saying, “You know what?” There’s just something about that weird ass scene with the wrong actor just screaming about Mountain Dew that we just loved. We just loved it. So then you just go, “Okay, I don’t know how you’d ever get to that without the Daniel Day-Lewis thing, but let’s cut off the Daniel Day-Lewis thing and make sense of this.”

So then we said, “Okay, well what if it’s about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar is almost as good as the original, or what if it’s as good as the original, if not better and then we — that’s our idea, and we put the wrong person in an iconic scene, and have them go nuts,” and make it just — because we knew that — when we saw the Will Ferrell idea, we were like, “I just want to see that.” So then we knew, okay, if you have something people want to see, don’t leave it. So then we said, “Okay, maybe it’s Cast Away. Maybe it’s There Will Be Blood. Maybe it’s The Shining,” and that’s how we landed The Shining where we recast with Bryan Cranston and Tracee Ellis Ross remaking The Shining. But again, he’s ranting and looning about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. So that’s how we got to that. But we would’ve never got to that if we didn’t just go on a weird journey and stay creative the whole way.

Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to something you said in passing that I’d love to hear more about, and maybe you have another example, and this ties into Jeff Goodby. Make sure you always feel like you’re doing something vaguely naughty. So that feeling of like, oh, we’re never going to get away with this, or ah, use slightly different wording. But could you tie these things together because that type of indicator, I want to understand what that feeling is, and how you actually use it. Because, for instance, this is not a hundred percent, but for me there is a certain physiological quickening that I experience, have experienced before almost all of my best investments. There’s an obvious signal that I’ve learned to tune into. It’s not right a hundred percent of the time, but the hit rate is very high. So what is this? Or how do you use it? Any way you want to tackle it.

Chris Beresford-Hill: The thing I love by the way about asking people advice is they give you advice, but people tell you who they are when they give you advice too, and that’s Jeff. Jeff is a super smart guy who went to Harvard and wrote for The Harvard Lampoon. He happened into advertising, but he’s just a vibey, really smart guy, and I think he behaves like he wants to fuck around, and he’s a serious businessman, and he can talk to the CMO and CEO of any brand he works with and totally explain why he’s doing what he’s doing. But he has this way about him where it’s going to be fun.

Some days you go to work, and your deadlines are tough, and the client pressure is tough, but he just always behaved like it was fun, like he was having fun whether he was or wasn’t, and that kind of vibe is great. That does embolden you to say, “Okay, we should be thinking about this as a form of play.” In the day-to-day, you don’t. It’s about engineering, and it’s about we have to get this just right, and we have to hit this timeline, and we have to make everything neat and tidy. But it’s really our responsibility to make it closer to art because that’s what people respond to. People don’t respond to tons of rational drivers. People don’t respond to things that have been focused group to death. It’s our job to find the line and find the edge, and stay there. That kind of attitude gives you that permission that if you’re feeling like this could be wrong, you’re probably onto something and if it feels dead right, you’re probably dead in the water.

Tim Ferriss: Are there indicators for that? So for instance, I’m making this up. But you’re going blue sky, you’re coming up with a lot of bad ideas, getting things out of your head, so you can hopefully sift the —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Sift the vomit.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sift the vomit. Exactly. It’s a good commercial visual for you, somebody vomiting into their own gold pan over a river. In any case, in terms of doing something wrong or that type of characteristic, it’s a scent trail for something promising, what are some indicators? Is it that people around you are like, “Oh, God,” or they break out laughing, or somebody above you is like, “Oh, I love it, but I don’t really want to say I love it.” I don’t know how to really express what I’m trying to ask, but I think you get what I’m grasping for.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, and there’s different feelings. I was a very good kid, but sometimes when you’re presenting an idea, and you think you might get it through, if you feel like maybe what you think you’d feel like if you were shoplifting a Snickers bar, that’s one tell is when you’re like, “Oh, boy, if I get out of this meeting…” So if you know you’re getting away with something, and if you feel that in your bones, that’s something. If people are nervous, and they start to scenario — “We all love the idea, but…” they scenario plan. The other is if you just can’t get it out of your head, if you become a dog with a bone, and us creatives, we are dying to get our best ideas into the world. We become insufferable when we attach to one, and that actually is a pretty good segue to the Adidas story if you want because that’s one where we got away with one.

Tim Ferriss: So we are going to get to the Adidas. I’m going to put one thing in between, which is — and you may have to help me with the pronunciation here. Tor Myhren.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Getting it?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yep. All right. Executive at Apple, Apple CMO specifically, has said what a world-class agency partner does is, “reduce things.”

Yes.

Tim Ferriss: What does this mean to you?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, it’s the case for creative agencies because if I’m a soap company, I could hire us, or I could just make our own ads. Well, I’d say, “Well, our soap’s the best soap, obviously, and we put love into it and our people…” you start to want to say everything, and you want to say your Pollyanna version of it, and I think an agency partner —

Tim Ferriss: I thought you said polyamorous version of it for a second.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, Pollyanna version of it. No comment on polyamour. That’s a whole other topic.

Tim Ferriss: We are in Austin, the land of plenty. Anyway, continue.

Chris Beresford-Hill: But I think what an agency does is the clients come and say, “We want to say this, and this, and this, and we say, ‘No, no one’s going to care.'” No one’s going to care that you think your soap makers are the best soap makers. No one’s going to care that you’re saying — everyone says the ingredient. Look, we show you. Everyone says ingredients. So what you get from us is your jumble of all the things you want to do, and we strip it down to the most compelling core truth about why your product, or service, or offering is compelling. Everyone adds, and really what you want from us is to subtract, and come to you with the one thing, and passionately and say, “We know, and we know communication, and this is what you have to do to make your point.” So it really is the art of editing, and just down, down, down, down.

Tim Ferriss: Any examples that come to mind? I mean, this is not exactly a statement, but “Got Milk?” is pretty good. I mean, it’s an attention-grabbing distillation for messaging purposes, but do any other examples come to mind of reducing?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, anything good. I mean, anything good?

Tim Ferriss: “A thousand songs in your pocket.”

Chris Beresford-Hill: A thousand songs. I mean, talk about a brilliant way to get at the benefit.

Tim Ferriss: Nobody gives a shit how many megabytes.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s not about speeds and feeds.

Tim Ferriss: Speeds and feeds.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s about, show me what about this is magical. It’s about finding the one magical bit. I think you can just look at any great execution or any great ad and say, “Okay, that was focused, that was reductive.” That’s the difference between the good ones and the bad ones.

Tim Ferriss: Inherently present.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: “Where’s the beef?” We could go on and on.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: “Drivers wanted,” on and on.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right, Adidas.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay. This is a good landing spot because it’s like the Mountain Dew one. It’s a bit of a tale.

Tim Ferriss: Love tales here.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay, good. I’ll say every bit of it, as much to not get in trouble, everything ended well for everybody. So start there. So we are given an Adidas assignment, not the big brand Adidas assignment. Adidas works with a number of agencies on a number of projects, but we were granted an awesome opportunity to do something for tennis for the US Open, what Adidas calls Heartbeat Sports, which is tennis, fencing, swimming. So we had this opportunity and we thought, “Okay, for our motley crew, for our squad to get to do something for a brand like Adidas, we’re going to show up at our very best.” So we invited the client, and I’ll refer to the client as the client. We invited the client to visit us.

Tim Ferriss: Capital T, capital C.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: The Client.

Chris Beresford-Hill: 18 point and a good client. We had the client in, and we brought our strategist. We brought a strategist from another region that had worked on Adidas. We brought a creative team. When a client is going to tell you about a project, you don’t normally bring the creative team. Normally, you understand the project, and decide what you want to do with it, and then bring in the creative team. But we did.

Tim Ferriss: Full-court press.

Chris Beresford-Hill: We went for the full-court press. By the way, another lesson — certainly in advertising, but anywhere — is the more ground you can cover in a room, the better because you start further ahead than if you constantly come together, and split off, and come together, and split off. So our intention was, let’s land a brief together.

Tim Ferriss: When you say land a brief, you’re basically getting the gig, right?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, getting the gig and also — and the strategy, and what we want to do, and what our objective is, and the challenge that we’re going to meet with creative ideas. So we’re having this day, and we’re talking a lot about how — I think the statistic is still valid, but something like 80 percent at the time of young girls would drop out of sports due to body confidence issues or not feeling like athletics were for them because obviously the kind of media biases towards male athletes. So an initiative not only with Adidas, but also with Nike, and all these companies, is about keeping young girls in sports because it obviously has great benefits, not only that they could go on to be professional athletes, but for confidence, and all kinds of teamwork, and all the great things that come with it.

So our client was excited about the idea of let’s do something about girls in sport. Okay, we’re talking and then our client says, “We have Billie Jean King, and she’s going to work with us.” We’re thinking, “Billie Jean King is awesome.” I mean, she’s a total rule-breaker, trailblazer. She played the battle of the sexes, so how exciting. So we had the very obvious idea, we’re like, okay, for the US Open, we’ve got to take her blue suede shoes, and we’ve got to bring them back. We’ve got to bring them back and sell them. So obvious, dumb, done. And then as it turns out, it’s a little more complicated than that. They’ve got to make that in a factory somewhere else in the world, and then ship that volume of shoes on a big slow ship, and so that wasn’t going to happen.

So one of the creators we brought into the room, his name is Ricardo Franco, he says, “Why don’t we just change people’s shoes into Billie Jean King’s shoes?” It was just that, and we went, “Okay, that sounds interesting. That sounds like something I haven’t heard before,” and we didn’t know what it meant. We said, “Okay, so would we have felt applications that we could stick on?” So if you came in wearing a pair of New Balance, you could fix them. We kept talking and said, “What about spray paint? What if we get shoe artists? There’s these people like the Shoe Surgeon and all these people. What if we got some of those people?”

And so we started saying, “Okay, maybe this is possible. We should figure this out.” And even someone in the room said, “Oh, God, imagine if someone comes in a pair of Nikes,” and everyone was rubbing their hands together. This was great. So a great lesson is when you get what you want, get out of the room. Don’t let the vibe dip, and you start thinking about all the reasons why it might not work.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, don’t oversell it.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So I’ve learned this lesson, as many of us have, and seen it in practice.

So leaving the room, normally we’d say, “Okay, we’ll come back in two weeks, and let’s put it in a deck, and let’s draw out the comp.” But in this one, we just knew that the more we sat on it, time would kill this deal. Time would give people time to think about the pros and cons. So our team was just, “Go do it. Just go. We’ve got money.” Nancy, our president in New York, loved the idea. So we said, “Can we just get 10 grand to start paying people to test? Don’t get client money, let’s just do it.” So we started setting this whole thing up and we were —

Tim Ferriss: That’s an important point.

Chris Beresford-Hill: You’ve got to have —

Tim Ferriss: Let’s get a little internal money just to —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Start it.

Tim Ferriss: Sort of jump the gun.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, let’s make progress because we saw a green light. This is not the kind of idea that gets green-lit. I had a stolen Snickers in my pocket, and I wanted out of that store. So anyway, we start R&Ding it, and we find someone that blends a cool pearl blue paint, and we make these stencils and we start doing these tests, and we have — so we’re spray painting Converse and Air Jordans, and we’re doing them around the agency. They look awesome. I mean, anyone who sees them goes, “Holy shit, what is that? I want that. I’m so into that.”

So we get maybe about a week and a half away from the US Open, and this client didn’t live in the States. It was a global client. The phone call comes, and I knew the phone call was coming. We get on the phone and the client says, “I just want you to know though, that we can only have people wearing Adidas shoes, that we can spray any Adidas shoe you want, but we can only have people spray Adidas shoes.” So at this moment, this is a moment where, no, because then it takes all the coolness out of the idea.

But if I say no now, I mean, she’s got a week and a half to lock us out of everything, and this is the client. They hold the purse strings. And they have the ultimate say. They’re the brand. So I can’t argue it because if I lose the argument, it’s over. So I lied. And so I said, “Absolutely,” and I knew what I was doing. I knew that I was straddling a third rail where if you do something like this and it doesn’t work out for you, it could be very bad for my network’s relationship with that giant company.

Tim Ferriss: To say the least.

Chris Beresford-Hill: But there comes a moment where it’s not even, is it worth it? You say, “Okay, I understand lawyers are there to avert risk.” But in my gut, I know that when someone at Nike sees a shoe of theirs defaced to look like a Billie Jean King shoe, I know as a human being that that brand will not come after Billie Jean King’s legacy or empowering young girls in sport. I just knew it. Now the lawyer would not sign it, but I knew it. So that’s the moment where you say, “Fuck it.”

So our team is still going, and our client is not at the US Open. Our client is still in Europe. So I’m in Beverly Hills at the Hilton, at the Beverly Hilton with my partner Nancy, my president, and we are filming a big campaign for Hilton. The morning of the first day of the US Open, my phone buzzes and Amy and Julia are sending me these shots of, we stacked the line with a pair of Converse All Stars, and Air Force 1s, and Sauconys, and the first five are the things… They took pictures of them, and they sent them to Ad Age, and to Hypebeast, and to Sneaker Freaker, to everywhere. That’s the one where I didn’t have the Snickers bar. I felt like I was going to vomit, but it was so good, and I knew it was so good.

Tim Ferriss: Not vomiting ideas, this is actually —

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, actual vomit, bile. It was a bile one. So anyway, I go back, and I sit. I sit down at set, and I show Nancy, and I’m like, “Look at these,” and she goes, “Oh, that’s cool.” Actually, she always says the word “Babes.” She talks like a Hollywood producer. She goes, “That’s cool, Babes.” And I was like, “Thanks,” and then my phone rings. I see the number, and I say, “I think I’m about to really get unloaded on.” And she goes, “Good luck.” She was in on it. And I was like, “Okay. Okay, I’ve got my anchor here.”

So I walked outside, called the number back, and the client said, “Please hold. I’m patching in our global legal.” And I was like, “Fuck, here we go. This is it.” I got yelled at. I got screamed at. I got, “You said that this wasn’t going to happen, and this happened. How did this happen, and who would’ve done this,” and this and that. And I said, “I told you this wasn’t going to happen. It happened, so I accept responsibility.” I did not volunteer that I had endorsed it, but I accepted the responsibility. I said, “I will have our PR…” the toothpaste is out of the tube. Once it hits the internet, it’s done.

So I said, “I will have our PR reach out to all the publications and ask them to take it down because I know a thing or two about journalists, and journalists will say, ‘No, thanks. It happened, so I’m going to cover what I want.'” But I said, “Look, we’re going to do that.” I said, “I’m very sorry, and I understand you’re very angry with me.” So it happens, and then the little Hypebeast community love it, and then it all goes away, and there was no problem.

People thought it was really cool, and they got some tip-of-the-spear cred for doing something really innovative. All the hardcore sneaker nerds loved it, and they started going for thousands of dollars on eBay, and we made a great case study out of it. That client was included in juries to evaluate the biggest brand ideas of the year for notoriety for the highly disruptive Billie Jean King, your shoes idea.

So the lesson there, or not even the lesson, but the thing about it too is when you’re in a position where you can gatekeep or put yourself out there, it’s like driving a car or something where you’re going to change lanes and in between two, and you’ve got to say, “I think I can do this.” Sometimes you’ve got to pump the brakes, and then sometimes you’ve got to gun it. But really, it’s a lonely decision. But you’ve got to make it, and you’ve got to have confidence that you’re going to thread the needle. And that’s the getting away with it.

Tim Ferriss: So to use the racing metaphor, I mean, very few race car drivers who have consistency over long periods of time are routinely reckless. They do have to make those decisions, but they’re not routinely reckless, and you don’t strike me as someone who’s routinely reckless. So what I want to ask you about this particular decision, this calculus, in your mind, if you did, how did you rehearse the worst-case scenarios where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to make this decision.” You gave me a little bit where you were like, “I don’t think — it seems very unlikely that say Nike’s going to come after a campaign that is trying to foster youth women’s participation in sports. That’s going to be a bad look.”

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not a hundred percent.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Nope.

Tim Ferriss: But it would be a bad look. So how did you think about the calculus and just like, okay, worst, worst case, this is what happens, but I’m not going to get killed.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Here’s what I thought. The truth is, as you talk about what it feels like to get away with it, it’s like a dog with a bone. I just knew the idea was so good, and I just saw so much upside. And then the only question I asked myself was, “Could someone be hurt by this?” So could you do something that would marginalize a person or a community, or is there — and no, it would’ve been really pissing off a marketer and that, no one ever died from that. So that was that.

Tim Ferriss: So swinging big is a prerequisite for home runs, but it doesn’t always work out. Babe Ruth, a lot of home runs, a lot of strikeouts. So what would be a, for you, your personal Hall of Fame failure list, if you had to pick out one that was important in some way, whether it was just a very strong lashing that you got, that you learned from, or maybe you took something away from it, maybe it set the stage for something later. Any failures come to mind?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, obviously way more failures than successes, but I think by the way, you just have to have a short memory. So I don’t want to think about them very much. Actually, I was thinking about when I was coming to talk to you, I was like, probably that will come up. And I had to dig around, not because I haven’t had a million of them, but because I wash them out quickly.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t dwell on them.

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, no. You learn what you can. You take that nugget. But going all the way back to that agency in Boston, Modernista, we had Napster as a client. So for —

Tim Ferriss: Brings back the memories.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. So any of your listeners that are too young for this, so probably when Tim and I were in college, maybe you were just finishing college and I was just in college.

Tim Ferriss: It was in college at some point, yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: And it was a file-sharing app or thing. I don’t remember how the hell we got it. I guess it was like a plugin or —

Tim Ferriss: I can’t even recall. But it was, I would say to my mind at least, there may have been some predecessors or parallel tools like LimeWire, but Napster was the first time that suddenly, at least in the popular zeitgeist, that people could get music for free.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Including new music.

Chris Beresford-Hill: And we were. And I think the statute of limitations has run out, but we were stealing. But what Shawn Fanning, the founder, said is, “No, no, no, we’re sharing.” And that was the big soundbite, and we all remember that it was, he said, sharing. And that was like, it became a bit of a joke, but that way it was synonymous with that. So Napster, turns out it maybe wasn’t sharing and it goes away, and then I think someone buys the naming rights or something and it relaunches a few years later. So it relaunches in maybe 2002 as a way too ahead of its time streaming platform where the proposition was 10 bucks a month and unlimited plays, a million songs. And it was a streaming database that you could subscribe to. Again, way ahead of its time. So we had been given the assignment to work on it at Modernista, and of course, we were a tiny agency and it was way too busy.

So I got to take a big swing. And the idea we had that I had come up with as a 21-year-old or 22-year-old was what if our campaign was, instead of buying media, we share media and what if we took a million dollars and we just put bounties and had regular people crash live broadcasts of every sort wearing Napster shirts and holding signs. So it was called Crashster.com and the bosses at Modernista loved it because they were kind of cool and subversive. So we somehow, this is, I’m talking 2002, 2003, this would’ve been pretty ahead of its time. And we built a website with this cool design, Crashter.com. We made a bounty list and it was all the way from $250 for a local radio show. If you said 1.5 million songs, unlimited downloads, napster.com all the way to, if you crashed a presidential address, you got a million dollars.

And I think we had two and a half million dollars if you said that line during a live televised spacewalk. And there was everything in between of getting a sign on college game day or doing this that. So anyway, this was kind of crazy stuff. Lawyers were okay with it. I know we just said something about lawyers, but this thing was done. We had insurance, we built the site. Anyway, we even did an inaugural practice Crashster where two interns from the company crashed a morning interview in Boston and interrupted a live interview with a little-known comic named Bill Burr. So young Bill Burr was playing some crappy comedy club and was promoting it on Good Morning Boston. And these guys came up with the big sign and they’re like, “What the hell’s going on?” They get escorted out and then Bill Burr’s like, “What the hell’s going — the Napster sign? What do these guys do?”

It worked like a charm. So this thing was going to go, and it was like within a week of going, and I’m 22 years old and this thing would’ve been something real. This overshot the GQ magazine cover that I had dreamed of or whatever. So anyway, so the client has to go to the Napster board to give them a progress update. And the Napster client is under no responsibility to share launch ideas or activations. This fell under. So the client goes to the board and says, “Okay, here’s our strategy and we’re going to go to market and we have a new positioning,” and this and that and the other. And then he says, “Oh, one more thing. We’re going to do this next week.” And he brings it up, and I’m not in the room, but this is the report we got back that he shares, Crashter.com walks through it and the chairman of the board just interrupts him and just says, “I’m going to interrupt you before you finish. Just to let you know, we are not doing that.”

And that was it. And this thing could not have been more firmly dead, but that was for 21, I learned that if you get what you need, get the hell out of the room, which has served me well, has served many people well, to not get into lily gilding and see what happens when everyone starts thinking about —

Tim Ferriss: Don’t linger.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Don’t linger. But the other great thing is was the best thing for me, because this industry is full of a lot of heartbreak and rejection. You have a million ideas to sell one. And I think if that had happened for me, I would have a different — I would’ve been very successful at 21 or 22. And I liked my climb. I liked working my way up slowly and learning my craft and not doing something that might’ve made me very sought after and might’ve gotten me a bigger, better job faster. So it was a heartache, but it put me right on the path that I needed to have, which was the long path.

Tim Ferriss: So many what ifs in life, like what if it happened?

Chris Beresford-Hill: What if someone died during — I’m glad we didn’t do it because it could have been bad.

Tim Ferriss: Could have been messy, could have been very messy. Just out of curiosity, if the lawyers, if legal had given the okay, do you know what the substance of the objection was by the chairman?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It was so long ago. I don’t exactly remember, but I think he just did not want a problem. He did not want it to — he either, maybe it was because something bad could happen or maybe because he was on other boards and he didn’t want to wreck MBC’s —

Tim Ferriss: Jeopardize.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: Who knows?

Chris Beresford-Hill: But someone had to kill that thing. It was too scary.

Tim Ferriss: That was out there. Question for you, coming back to process and technique. You mentioned a whole bunch of questions. What if David Fincher made this, what if, I’m making this up, but what if, what’s the commercial my mom would respond to? Or whatever these questions might be. I think about questions a lot, not just in podcasting, but in certainly writing the non-fiction books that came before the podcast, interrogating myself. When I’m journaling, I think about questions a lot, and the power of questions seems to be a fundamental piece of creating, creativity. Looking at something that a million people have looked at and seeing something different or seeing a way to position it differently. Are there any books on the ad game, on creativity that come to mind if somebody were sitting in front of you like your much younger self, you’re like, “Okay, this kid’s got some balls, gender-neutral and is willing to step out of his or her comfort zone. Okay, I want to help this kid.” What might you recommend?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I have a prescription for that.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s go.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So there’s a book called Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This, that’s authored by Luke Sullivan. You know it?

Tim Ferriss: This is one of my books that I read.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So it is the most perfect orrne because it’s —

Tim Ferriss: I’ve got to go back and reread this now.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It tells you what an ad agency does.

Tim Ferriss: Does it have a photograph of a roll of toilet paper on it?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. So Whipple was a grocer in some 1970s campaign, and I think he was selling toilet paper to customers. And so the logo is written on a double roll of paper. So I think it’s a weird title, but one you don’t forget. And Luke just lays out what an agency does, what every job is at the agency, and then specifically as a creative, what are the types of things you’re being asked to do and what do those outputs look like? It’s an amazing book. It explains to you what a headline writing assignment is and what headlines look like and why some might be better than that. So it’s really, it’s a really smart trek, micro apprenticeship. So I read it and I said, “I will be damned if I don’t do this,” because I read it and I was like, “I’m in.” That’s it.

That told me what the job was. And I said, “That’s the only job I want to do.” So anyone who — now I think these days people do ask to hop on and do informational interviews, but people will sometimes, even these days, ask you to describe your job to them, which I always thought was a little crazy because you do want people to do some level of legwork where they might know what your job is and ask you a question about it. But I just feel that constantly with just please go read this book and if you can’t live without doing what’s in this book, then we’ll get time. But that book is perfect. But then for the creative journey or even to understand what it’s like, there’s three video bits of content. We were chatting about them earlier. Number one, South Park, 6 Days to Air, looking at the pressure these guys are under to come up with and do a show. I don’t know if it ages well. I think because the humor can be — so please don’t judge me if the subject matter is not PC.

Tim Ferriss: You can judge me. It’s pretty funny.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Judge Tim. So that one goes to Tim because he likes that show too.

Tim Ferriss: I will say that it’s an amazing doc/mini-doc. There are a couple of points where it drags a little bit, but there are so many payoffs. There’s so many payoffs.

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, but even just the thing of when — which one is the blonde one? Is that Trey?

Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember.

Chris Beresford-Hill: He’s like the writer, writer out of the two of them. And once they’ve got the story down and he has to write the script, he has his assistant go get him an extra value meal from McDonald’s because it’s just so hard after all that to sit down and then hammer it out. And you know as a writer, and I know as a writer sometimes you’re like, “I know I have to do it, but I don’t want to.” So even watching him bribe himself, watching one of the most dynamic, prolific, edgy writers, he has to fool himself into it. And by the way, sometimes when we make commercials, we have to make little animatics, like little boardomatics, like rips. That’s considered a chore. That whole show is a boardomatics when you watch how they make it. So it’s so inspiring to see those two power through. And there’s just a ton of stuff that you can relate to.

The two other ones I love are, I love the Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster because it gets into doing creative within a team and chemistry and how challenging that can be. And that documents Metallica almost breaking up and working out their shit as they come up with The Black Album. And it’s amazing. And you don’t have to like Metallica to love it, to see are you more of a Lars? Are you more of a James? Who do you side with here? So that’s an amazing study on high-performing creative team dynamics. And then the last one, and the most underrated is Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So he made — after that really painful departure from The Tonight Show, he had a non-compete. So he threw a comedy tour, and so he allowed it to be documented. And you see that this guy is a creative animal that coming out of what he just came out of, where you must be so damaged and wounded, but he throws himself right into another enterprise and they’re writing bits and skits and they’re staying up late at night the night before a show to rewrite it. And just seeing the obsession in the craft of it, you’re like, I watch the thing and I’m like, “I do not work hard enough.”

And you see the euphoria, the euphoria of, and slap happiness around all of it when you really push yourself to — that man really pushes himself to his limits. And you watch that and you’re like, I just want to go and write something after I see that. Those things, any one of those things, they inspire me so much that I’ve got a bank that someone else will get something out of them.

Tim Ferriss: I can’t wait to watch Some Kind of Monster and Can’t Stop. I’ve seen the South Park doc and can you guess my favorite part? Where did I laugh hardest?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, Tim, I don’t want to be bawdy, but would it be the Apple user agreement? Human Centipede?

Tim Ferriss: It was the voiceover session that was related to that.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of good stuff.

Chris Beresford-Hill: They were in a booth.

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of good stuff.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s crazy stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This. I haven’t thought about that in ages. I used to have that book when I was really cutting my teeth on copy and spending a lot of my own money doing very expensive testing because the lead time and the turnaround time for any type of quantitative feedback on magazine ads, I mean, oh, my God, how painful. I had that book deliberately cover-out on my shelf as a reminder of some of the contents. It’s been a very, very long time, but it’s wild that that has now resurfaced in my life. What fun.

When it comes to the prompts and the questions, are there any other questions that come to mind? If you’re stuck and you’re just like, man, we’ve been banging our head against the wall, we’re not there. And this is going to lead into some of the less glamorous maybe aspects of the job where it’s like, okay, you’ve got to come up with X number of ideas, this is important and you’re getting close to deadline and you don’t have it. What do you do to mix things up? And I suppose just broadly speaking, what do you do in a situation like that?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, writer’s block doesn’t really exist. You think it’s blocked, but clearly you can. It really is like a game of tricking yourself. So, say, Sally is trying to come up with ideas. “Sally, what are your five favorite movies or directors or writers? Okay, what would each one of them do?” It’s just coming up with a new challenge or a new way to approach it that fools you into coughing something up. And then again, I’ll go as far as then what’s the absolute right thing to do? What’s the absolute wrong thing to do? What would I do if I thought this whole thing was a big joke, if I wanted to make fun of it?

And again, and then even the cause technique of just start writing sentences and finish them. But it’s not even — I think it’s knowing yourself and knowing your interests and then using avenues. So what are the things you’re into? Put it through that lens. But it’s just, it’s a forcing exercise and it’s really uncomfortable. It’s really, really uncomfortable because the more you get out, you will find — one thing I have found, and I don’t think it’s just me, I’ve talked to friends about it, is that four-hour, five-hour, whatever your big dump is, later you will have new ideas and things. But the biggest treasure trove you’ll ever have is when the challenge is fresh, when your brain is first trying to put it together. And the more you get out of that moment, the more you’re paid back later.

Tim Ferriss: What do you do when you’re, say, overwhelmed or unfocused? Because this is a game of creativity and we’re all playing different games. So all of our careers on some level are games of different types of rules. Some you can bend, some you can break, but endurance is important. The ability to not just flame out burning the candle at both ends. Some people are superhuman and can bank all sorts of crazy work weeks and sleep four hours a night because they happen to have the right genetic profile for that. But what do you do when you’re overwhelmed or unfocused?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, interesting that you bring that up because I work with some of those people that are, I don’t know if they sleep and I am sensitive and I need sleep. And so I’m very aware that I’m not like a full beast. So there’s two actually, the question as you phrase it, there’s kind of two answers that are different, but I read a book, I know you know this book called Bird by Bird.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, so good. An amazing book. And some people will ignore it because it’s intended at face value for fiction writers. It does not matter. It does not matter.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So I had to read it at school, so talking about… I must’ve had a good teacher or whatever, so I had to read it.

Tim Ferriss: What a gift.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I don’t remember a single thing in the book except for the titular story. And that story was, and I think about it all the time. And so the author’s little brother had to write a report on the birds and he had books open and printed out essays everywhere. And he was in a full meltdown and panic.

Tim Ferriss: He pushed it off until the last minute.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Pushed it off until the last minute.

Tim Ferriss: He had all semester to do it, something like that.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Of course, that whole thing, everyone has a version of that and he’s there. And I think in my version of the story, he’s crying at the table with all that stuff, and then good old Dad comes in and goes, “Just take it bird by bird, bud, take it bird by bird.” And you’re like, “Wow.” So I have an imaginary father that comes in and says that to me every time because it’s permission, permission to stop thinking about the totality of it and permission to do the littlest bit. The other quotation that I love, I don’t have a ton of quotations, but the great Arthur Ashe said, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” And that’s so fantastically empowering because it’s saying that you’re in a good enough spot and you’re off the hook for anything more than that.

But then the other part of it about being a beast and the constant pressure is I’ve figured out that I can’t meditate.

I think I’m too, it’s something I’ll get to later in life, but I think I’m too — I can’t sit still. I can’t be alone in my thoughts. And so I discovered that instead of turning the dial down to zero, I found also that hard fitness is another meditative instead of going down to zero, it just puts me at a 10. And so every morning I go do a similar workout that gives me almost like an existential crisis so that by the time I show up at work, whatever this kind of fog of anxiety that I used to live in, it just burns it off and I just am so calm for the rest of the day because I’ve already been through something tough in the morning.

Tim Ferriss: What is the workout?

Chris Beresford-Hill: And that’s helping. There’s a gym in New York City called Tone House and there’s just one of them. And I used to exercise in college and I was in pretty good shape. And then I got to doing a lot of writing and drinking beer and doing writing, and I kind of let it slip. And I think around 2015, back when people would upload Facebook albums the night after you did anything, I went to a New Year’s party and there was a picture of me on New Year’s Day and I was leaned over a table of food and I swear in my head I looked like Alfred Hitchcock or something. It was like the way my jacket lapel was open came out on this huge thing and I got so upset that I looked up “Hardest workout in New York” and then, bing, there was this one-off gym called Tone House.

And I went that day, on New Year’s Day they were open and the class is like — the founder is a guy named Alonzo Wilson, and he played D1 football and played a little pro football. And when he stopped playing, he missed the practices. So it’s a lot of — the way I describe it to friends is it’s like a one-hour Under Armour commercial that you’re in where you’re just dropping the deck and jumping over stuff and banging ropes and the heart rate stays up the whole time. And so the first time I did it, I stepped out of class after 10 minutes, because the warm warm-up is really intense cardio, and I vomited in the locker room and I stayed up at night staring at the ceiling and being like, “I can’t let this thing get me.” And so I came back the week later and the week later and it kind of pulled me in.

And now me and a fairly regular group are there five days a week, six days a week, and then we do other stuff. But that has been such a gift for me because I’m just — I used to walk around in between meetings and I’d be like, “Should I run? Am I using my time well?” I would just ruminate on all the things I could be doing, wasn’t doing. And something about really beating myself up in the morning, I don’t expend the energy worrying about all those things. I just focus on what I’m focusing on. So it’s made me normal.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Do you relate?

Tim Ferriss: You’re inspiring me to double down. I’ve recently, knock on wood, largely addressed this kind of crippling lower back issue that has sidelined me for the better part of the last year. And I’m really excited to get back into serious exercise. And this might sound strange because I’m not built like a border collie, but it’s kind of like if you can’t have a working dog and put that dog in an apartment all day long, the dog’s going to go crazy. And I remember when I was training my dog Molly and taking it super seriously, going full deep dive on dog training. And one of the lines that stuck with me is “A tired dog is a happy dog.” I think that is true, not for every person, but for people who have a certain hard wiring and sounds like you’re one of them, I’m certainly one of them. If you’re not putting that creature to work physically, all sorts of strange things are going to creep out of the cracks, mentally.

Chris Beresford-Hill: And not the best things because you want to get a lot done and you need to be tired out a little bit to be a little bit normal about it because if you’re going full energy, you’re doing what’s in front of you and you’re freaking out about all the other things you could, should, might. And when you’re just a little taken back a little bit, you’re, I’m more present. It’s great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think a lot of kids end up getting into trouble in school because they have idle cycles. They don’t know what to, and they don’t know how to apply those idle cycles. I remember in school, for me, it’s like I needed to draw nonstop in grade school. I got very good grades, I did really well, but I would get so bored in class. I had to draw all the time, even though I was listening to exactly what the teacher was saying because I had to occupy myself. And I was fortunate that I’d somehow chanced upon drawing, but a lot of other kids who were very smart, got into all sorts of trouble, got kicked out, got suspended, ended up getting involved drugs because they didn’t know how to occupy or consume those cycles. And exercise is an amazing way to do it.

Any other books, favorite books that you have or put a different way, books that you have gifted or recommended a lot to other people outside of what we’ve discussed already?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes, and I love this question because I find those are the things I always jot down when I hear what people gift. Two of them. One of them is called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Allen Carr, have you heard of this?

Tim Ferriss: That’s so weird. All of these things are coming up in this conversation, I listened to a derivative of that, but it’s based on the same method, The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine. I listened to the audiobook, somebody had recommended it to me and I stopped. I went 30 or 40 days without any caffeine, which is the first time I’ve done that since I was like, God only knows, 16? So please keep going. But this is —

Chris Beresford-Hill: In my 20s, I smoked cigarettes and I was hopelessly addicted to them. And I don’t know how I found the book, but I read it and it told me bit by bit all the reasons why I thought I had to keep or why I would hang on to it. And it dispelled them one by one and it was kind of romantic. And then there’s a chapter and it says, “Go outside and have your last cigarette.” And I went outside and I did, and then I finished the book and I never smoked again. And I talk about it sparingly because the easy way is kind of usually a red flag of anything, but that’s what I love about it. If you look it up on Amazon, the reviews are in, it is like five-star for thousands, but I’ve given it to four or five friends and all four or five of them just read it and never smoked again.

Tim Ferriss: So wild.

Chris Beresford-Hill: So that book is probably a life-saving book. And then the other one that I love, and I know you know this book, but The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

Tim Ferriss: I know the book and I have not read it and it’s been on my to-read list forever.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I think you would not only love the book, but you would love talking to Daniel about that book because I don’t like business books and especially when things become dense and theoretical, I get lost. But he went and spent time in 10 incredible high-performing cultures that are all different from IDEO to the San Antonio Spurs to the Navy SEALs, and just identified what makes people feel like they belong in those and what gives people the psychological safety to do their best, do their best in those environments. And you read it and you’ll get confirmation bias. You’ll be like, I do that. That’s great. Or you’re reminded I need to do that. Or there’s things you never thought of.

Tim Ferriss: Now, do you recommend this book to people who are individual contributors, kind of operators on the front lines, or do you give that to people who are running companies? Who do you give that to?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Good question. I mean, I think for leadership for sure. So if anyone’s stepping into management, but I also find it’s good — I would imagine I would’ve loved the book if I wasn’t a manager just to understand the kind of culture that I want to be part of. Obviously, we’re all students all the time, so I think there wouldn’t be any harm in imagining if you were to lead something or if you were to have total control, what kind of culture you’d want. But definitely if you’re in leadership or you’re stepping into leadership or if you’re stepping into a new role, there’s just the simplest things you could do to show that everyone you meet, that there’s a long-term potential future there. And that’s a thing you would forget to do.

But if you reference something in the future, some minor things like that that you’re like, “Oh, that can make all the difference.” And I understand having been on the receiving end of those kind of culture, those kind of behaviors, it’s just, it’s great stuff. But that’s one of the few things that I reread every year for the last two, three years.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I need to read it. And I will. Side note, just because I made a mental bookmark to mention this to people listening, Conan O’Brien is so impressive to me. The more I learn about that guy, the more I see, the more impressed I am. So Conan, if you’re listening or a friend of yours is listening, would love to chat sometime publicly or privately. There’s a video that I found, actually it was sent to me because I went to Seoul for the first time recently, became deeply enamored of Korea and the Korean people, started learning Korean, studying the Korean language. And there’s a video called something like Conan O’Brien Learns Korean and Makes It Weird, which is like eight minutes long. Trust me, folks, find it on YouTube. It is beyond hilarious.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I’ve seen it.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you have?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s so good. It ends with him in the — he’s in classroom and he —

Tim Ferriss: He’s with the teacher.

Chris Beresford-Hill: And he’s — oh, yeah. And he’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So fast, so fast on his feet. Unbelievable. And another just quick side note, because this is what I do. Arthur Ashe, another legend, I mean iconic figure on so many different levels. And to take that word a step further, levels. There’s a book called Levels of the Game by John McPhee, which is about one tennis match, a single tennis match involving Arthur Ashe. But it becomes this study of the macro through the micro and the structure of the book, the narrative. It is not a long book, it’s something like 170 pages. And if you want to see why John McPhee is as famous as he is for being a master of nonfiction, being a staff writer for The New Yorker for a thousand years, this is an amazing way to get a taste test. It is so, so good.

You mentioned before we started recording that you had an answer for the under a hundred dollars best investment. I mean, best investment is one way to put it, but device, gadgets, service, anything that you’ve spent kind of less than a hundred dollars on, that has had a material impact on you. What is your answer for that?

Chris Beresford-Hill: My first Tone House class, $34.

Tim Ferriss: Ah, there we go.

Chris Beresford-Hill: That was the one. That was the $34 purchase that changed everything.

Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that comes to mind? Maybe it’s a second place, but just best investment that could be investment of time, investment of energy, investment of money.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, I think sometimes you ask about what’s something you bought for under a hundred dollars that had a big return. And you know how work is, you get caught up in things and you have your plan for the week, but then you wind up responding to real time and conditions and you just never know where it’s going to go. But I go to Balthazar restaurant in Manhattan on Spring Street, and I take one of my mentees, I go with one of my mentors, I go with a peer who I get a lot of energy from or an old friend that I haven’t caught up with. And the bill, no matter how you do it, is always under a hundred bucks with tip. And it’s always the best a hundred dollars I spend every week. It’s the best thing. And I’ll never change it. And even if I’m down to my last hundred dollars, I will go have breakfast with someone.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a great location. I haven’t been in a million years, but that is —

Chris Beresford-Hill: So the reason I went by the way too, was everyone, the pandemic really, really was challenging. And I used to like Balthazar, but I didn’t love Balthazar. And when New York reopened, a lot of restaurants popped out their al fresco, their outdoor cafes, and things like that. And I would always walk by Balthazar and it was boarded up, boarded up, boarded up, and the owner, Keith, waited until you could do full occupancy indoors before opening it. And when he opened it, he did a post. And I didn’t realize how much I missed it, but his post said, “Balthazar is open and it will never close again.” And coming out of that pandemic, when everyone’s like, “Everything’s going to be different,” it’ll never — just that statement, talk about communication, that kind of a subject line on an email. I’m like, “I will go there every week then. As long as you’re open, I’ll go.”

Tim Ferriss: This is going to sound like such a newbie question, but I’m curious, do you in any way keep track of the ads or the messaging or the copy that snag you? Right? Because that’s a hell of a line. It’s a good line. It worked.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It absolutely worked.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any, and these could be ideas that you come up with too, but do you have any way of capturing ideas, whether they’re yours or things you come across in the wild where you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s good.”

Chris Beresford-Hill: No, I’m an idiot. And I forget. No, and I, probably 10 times a week I see things where I’m like, “That’s good.” And then I remember one of them, and if I was a smart man, I would have a notebook with me at all times, or I would put it in my stickies and after this conversation, I’m going to collect them because now I’m conscious because I see things all the time, and then they come up at random times, but I can’t call on them. So I would like to collect better.

Tim Ferriss: What I used to do, because I suppose, to invoke Glengarry Glen Ross, “You must get them to sign on the line that is dotted.” You can ask people if they’re going to buy something, but people are nice a lot of the time, too nice. And they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Getting someone to actually buy something is a different level of commitment. It’s a different type of signal. So when I would find myself compelled to buy something, especially when I didn’t have very much money and I was just getting started, cutting my teeth, trying to build this direct response business in sports nutrition, if I bought something or if I got close to buying it, I would save the ad or I would —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: — I would take a video of the infomercial or the commercial or I would take notes on what it was that I thought got me to buy.

Chris Beresford-Hill: What closed you.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s really —

Tim Ferriss: Was it, “But wait, there’s more; there’s an installment?” Was it the timing, right? Do I think it was just pure fatigue on my part where my defenses were low at 3:00 a.m. because I’d been watching Animal Planet, and God knows some Ginsu knife thing came up and I would try to figure out, although this was a secondary thing, what had moved me to buy, especially as someone who is not stingy but had a really tight budget for most things. And I no longer do that, but —

Chris Beresford-Hill: What did you learn?

Tim Ferriss: I learned a lot about copy. At the time, I was reading a lot of magazines and also newsletters and mostly text, because text was easier to freeze and study. Just like for yourself, journaling is thoughts trapped on paper. If you’re trying to figure something out by sitting there and staring off into space and thinking, sometimes it works, often it doesn’t because it’s too ephemeral.

These bits and pieces, the floats and jets. It’s just like being thrown out of the boat in the Grand Canyon and getting kind of tossed. You don’t really — it’s hard to orient to up when you’re in that type of chaotic mental state, even if it’s just too much going on, if you have a high-energy state.

But for me, journaling for introspection, but for external studying, it’s not that text was the best medium; it was just the easiest for me to study as a fly locked in the amber.

So what I learned was what kind of headlines got me to look at anything, right? So if I’m reading a magazine and especially — I would read magazines I wasn’t even interested in just to see what got my attention.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Not to really beat the drum on Glengarry Glen Ross, which is actually a very depressing movie on a lot of levels when you get to the bottom of it, but the “Attention, do I have your attention? Interested, are you interested?”

The AIDA: the first thing is attention. So I would pick up, say, a fashion magazine. I’m like, “All right, this is going to be half ads,” and I would just riff through. And I would see what would get me to stop and I’d be like, “Okay, why did I just stop?” And I would tear it out of the magazine. It might even be at a dentist’s office or something.

If I had downtime, I would just try to see what would grab my attention and that was step one. So you learn a lot of things. I mean, I don’t want to go into a full monologue here, but I actually haven’t talked about this publicly, I don’t think —

First thing you realize is how important art direction is: composition. Do you have a dominant element, or is everything the same? If everything’s the same, your eye isn’t going to necessarily be drawn to any one component and you’re going to skip over it, generally.

There are some weird exceptions where the jumble is the branding. For instance, I have used unscented baby soap from Dr. Bronner’s forever because it’s just the least offensive to my system and I really like it. Their branding, if you look at the bottle, it’s like size-two font with a million words covering the label.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I think I know that. Very super old-timey? Is that the —

Tim Ferriss: There may be some old-timey aspect, but it’s a very small font. It’s like Unabomber, ransom-letter-y stuff. If you actually dig into it, it’s not very easy to follow all of it, but it’s full of text.

But it’s like a horseshoe or it’s — the horseshoe is not the best way to explain it, but it’s like you get to such a point of clutter that it becomes a clear signal again, almost, as like a gestalt form of branding. So there are some exceptions to that, but you realize, “Oh, okay.” If you look at the Volkswagen ads, if you look at some of the old classics.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Very reductive.

Tim Ferriss: Reductive.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Very —

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Okay.” Now, I’m not going to get the ratio totally right, but it’s like, all right, the top two-thirds or three-quarters of this ad is a bold visual, often black and white. There’s one tagline that’s like three to seven words, and then you’ve got some copy at the bottom and a clip-out coupon or something for a lot of these direct-response ads.

So I studied the visual element because I was actually buying, and in fact, at the time, I was designing a lot of my own print ads. So I was going into Photoshop and Illustrator and doing a lot of the art. I was doing everything myself. I couldn’t afford to hire anybody.

Chris Beresford-Hill: You were an advertising creative before I was.

Tim Ferriss: I learned a lot about clarity and also converting speeds and features into benefits.

Chris Beresford-Hill: But you said that the two things, and I mean these are the power of art direction. To pull you into a world, to show you something that’s interesting or attractive is incredible. And it still feels like art. People, great art directors do not do it scientifically. They have principles, but they’re expressing and exploring.

And then the other thing is with also the magical set of words that can sell you. Someone I used to work with, one of my mentors, Rob Schwartz, who used to be the chief creative officer at TBWA in Los Angeles back in the day. He has a saying that I repeat to everyone, which is: “Clients buy words.”

We can come to clients and assure them that we can deliver across every social channel and every asset and do all the strategy research, but ultimately we’re going to give them a set of words that tells them who they are, who they can be, and who they are to their consumer. And those magical words are kind of everything. And no matter what changes in the industry, clients buy words and consumers like me buy words too.

Tim Ferriss: Totally. And I feel like even if you aren’t planning on playing offense in the sense that you’re not a writer, you’re not crafting ads, I feel like everyone, certainly everyone who’s listening to this should make a deliberate study of words for defensive purposes.

Because if you are on social media or in any media, and of course, you are exposed to advertising all the time, you’re exposed to communications all the time, you can be manipulated very easily if you’re not aware of how your mind is being controlled or — it is being controlled. Informed.

If I say, and this is cliche, but “Don’t think of a pink elephant, pink elephant, pink elephant.” Your mind is very reactive in a lot of respects. So I feel like the study of words is the study of thoughts and the malleability of thoughts, which then leads to the malleability of behavior.

I mean, if you really want to see how crazy that can get, you can watch these Netflix specials like The Push from this illusionist who’s also an amazing graphic artist, or I should say visual artist, painter, Derren Brown.

And these are long features that are mostly about social engineering, but just what you can get someone to do if you profile them properly, have a delay, hire confederates. And in this particular case, the push is: can you get someone off the street and get them to the point where they push someone off a building, they commit murder just by scripting everything out from start to finish? It is horrifying. I have very mixed feelings about it from an ethical perspective. Nobody gets hurt. He has many more. Miracle, I think, is another one, which is very well done.

The point of all this is part of my fascination with the Whipple book — part of my fascination with ads is for playing offense. So building a business and so on. A lot of it is just wanting to understand how humans work.

And the practitioners are always going to be ahead of the scientists and the theoreticians. That’s true in exercise where it’s like the coaches, they’re going to get a lot wrong. They’re going to get a lot right, and they’re going to be able to see the state of the art before the academics ever get their hands on it.

So if you want to understand how humans work, one approach, and these are not mutually exclusive, one approach is to study psychology and so on. Another is to just look how people are affected and persuaded.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So there are many books that I’ve read, like — and I’m blanking on his first name, but Blunt is the last name, Words That Work, who is, I believe, a Republican political strategist.

And if I’m not mistaken, I read this a long time ago. It was recommended to me by a very famous entrepreneur, and neither of us would say we have much in common politically with this guy at all. But he came up with as, one example, the death tax instead of inheritance tax, like the death tax.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Unappealing.

Tim Ferriss: And just these, a handful of rebrands that became almost impossible to sort of overturn in the zeitgeist. You should study that, right? There’s a gold mine there if you study that kind of thing.

So you asked what I’d learned. I mean, I continue to learn, I continue to study these things. And maybe I’m a weirdo, but it’s so fundamental to the existence — the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month of existence of anyone listening to this. And by the way, you’re going to have to get a lot better at defense because —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Sure, because everything’s going to get sharper.

Tim Ferriss: Everything — about to get so much overwhelming, so much more overwhelming, so much more personalized. The number of pitches that I get and the number of pitches my friends get now just in the last few months where intro paragraphs are clearly crafted using AI, where it’s —

Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s going to take away my email writing gift. I better —

Tim Ferriss: I think it’ll take a while. It’ll take a while because you can still pretty easily discern, but you’re going to have to get better at defense if you want to preserve your sanity and your ability to function.

So let me ask a question that has been in the hopper for a little while. It’s been gestating and it comes back to blue-sky thinking and creative brainstorming and then constraints.

Because listening to some of your stories and I’m like, “Man, it’d be great to sit down for my own business and be like, ‘You know what? I want to get Bill Murray doing this in an ad. I want to have him in the cockpit of a space shuttle.'”

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. I already want to watch this ad. I like it.

Tim Ferriss: And then there are certain, eventually, real-world considerations like budget, like legal. And I’m wondering if there are examples of overriding these constraints where it’s worked out, or at what point you kind of bring things back to Earth, right? Because if you do it too early, it would seem like —

Chris Beresford-Hill: It stifles it.

Tim Ferriss: — it was it. Exactly.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah. There’s no hard and fast rules. I think there’s — the nice thing about working at big agencies with big brands is — my experience has always been: if the idea is good enough, there’s always more money. I think I can say that without getting in trouble, but it’s true.

And then I think creative people — we need the constraints to push off against — to have ideas that have tension and that are going to be effective. So I think we try to know as much about that going in as possible.

And sometimes you’ll have a $10 million idea for a $1 million budget, and it’s a tragedy because it would be amazing and they would probably get great ROI on it and it might make economic sense, but I think —

Sorry, I’m quoting everyone and their mother, but another one of my mentors, Rob Reilly, who’s the chief creative officer of the WPP Holding Company, always says, “No client ever fired you for bringing extra ideas.” And so I think —

Tim Ferriss: That’s a great line.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Some of the best things we’ve ever gotten away with have been a lucky strike extra or saying, “Okay, here’s the thing you asked for, but by the way, I know this would involve getting a few celebrities or opening the coffers, but what about this?”

And I think once you’ve taken the defenses down by showing what’s within possibility, you buy yourself good will and permission to bring a crazy idea, and you’re going to be sharing that crazy idea with someone who’s not nervous about what’s to come; they’re going to enjoy it. And so by and large, you can get there with that. But yeah, I think you’ve got to cover your bases first or else, yeah, they’ll be pissed at you.

Tim Ferriss: TBS’ Funniest Ad of the Year.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Could you give us some context on this prompt?

Chris Beresford-Hill: This is — it’s like you’re in my head, Tim, because you’ve just connected it and maybe you already know where it’s going, but my creative partner when I was at BBDO, there was a guy named Dan Lucey. And he and I, he’s my best friend. And for eight years, I spent more time with him than I spent with my wife sharing an office and finishing each other’s sentences and fighting all the time too.

And we had a new client in Foot Locker, and their aspiration was to not be this kind of a transactional house of brands, but for holding the Foot Locker bag to mean something.

And so we knew there was big ambition there that we had to — it wasn’t just about the shoes that were in stock; it was about trying to make the brand cultural. So we worked together on Foot Locker for about five or six years, and we created an ongoing campaign where we got celebrities and athletes to make fun of themselves and kind of play it close to the bone.

So part of this is we had a great client, a guy named Jed Berger, who — he didn’t come up from traditional marketing. He’d come from Modell’s, which is an East Coast sports store.

Tim Ferriss: I know Modell’s.

Chris Beresford-Hill: You know Modell’s. We all know Modell’s.

Tim Ferriss: I grew up on Long Island.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah. But he also founded a basketball magazine called Dime Magazine. And he had other interests besides just marketing. So he kind of came at things from a cultural place.

So sometimes we would show him ideas that got to the bone of sports issues or athlete issues, and he always championed it. So this was our first kind of big campaign, and we overswung the fences like crazy. There was maybe money for a cameo in an ad. And instead, we came up with this cockamamie idea that for this one week, Foot Locker was putting out the very best shoes. They were just going to stack it one day after another.

And the client had called it the Week of Greatness. And so we had written an ad that said basically what’s happening at Foot Locker, it almost feels like with all these shoes coming out, it feels like all is right in the world. And then we leave that scene and we go and we see a bunch of wrongs be righted and impossibilities happen.

And so we wrote the script and it had Mike Tyson answering the door, and Evander Holyfield is there with a box, and Mike Tyson returns the piece of the ear that he bit off Evander.

So already we’re showing that to the rest of the team at BBDO. And they’re like, “That’s never going to happen.” And then we’re like, “Don’t worry, it keeps going.” Dennis Rodman, this is —

Tim Ferriss: But wait, there’s more.

Chris Beresford-Hill: — 2012 kind of jokes. Dennis Rodman, what did we all want to see? He was at an airline counter and he buys a one-way ticket to North Korea. They’re like, “That’s never going to happen.” And they’re like, “But wait, there’s more.” Because Brett Favre would refuse to retire.

So Brett Favre is going to make a joke about retiring. He’s at a diner and he’s got a piece of pie, and he hands it back to the lady half-eaten and says, “It’s time to stop.”

So one or the other, everyone said that, “You can’t bring this to them because this is going to cost a bajillion dollars. They’re never going to do it. This is not — they asked us for something simple, and you’ve given something incredibly complicated.”

And this is, I would say, kind of halfway through my journey. And there’s probably a period usually around the halfway point where you’re maybe a little more arrogant than you are later, in the beginning. And so Dan and I just went, “Nah, we’re going to do it.”

And so we got in such a blow-up fight with our account lead that he said, “Well, you know what? You’re going to tank this whole thing and I’m not going to go to the meeting.” And so we went, “Sounds good.”

So we went down to the meeting by ourselves without our business partner who forsook us as a matter of pride and principle, and we presented it to this guy Jed, and he went, “I fucking love it. Let’s do it.”

So you’ve got to take your chances. There’s no shame in it. And we would’ve — and he knew, and Jed knew we would’ve had the back. We can write him a cheap ad, but if we have a great one…

And so he went to bat for… and he went and he negotiated, our client negotiated with all those athletes and people. And a little side story, which for any sports nerds will be really fun is we filmed the Brett Favre segment in Hattiesburg, Virginia.

And so Dan went down there with the camera crew to pick that up. He gave us half an hour because he was a high school football coach in his first season, retired. And he famously had hung on to things in Green Bay, and as the story goes, prevented a young Aaron Rodgers from ascending and taking the starting quarterback spot year after year. And so there was tension there. And that was famously, or in the press, a bad relationship.

And Dan calls me from set and he says, “I was just standing next to Brett Favre in between shots, and I saw him open his fantasy football on his phone, and Aaron Rodgers is his starting quarterback.”

And I was like, “God, that is such fun intel to get from the front line.” And I swear we were like, “Should we call Bleacher Report and tell them this because it’s so…” People, sports fans would’ve loved to know that.

Tim Ferriss: I really have two questions. There are 50 more. I’m just going to give some teasers that we won’t get to.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. Why that? Why? What if that’s something that someone really wants to know about and then we didn’t do it?

Tim Ferriss: Well then maybe we do a round two.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

Tim Ferriss: So the time Kanye tried to get you fired.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’re not going to do that, although I really do at some point want to talk about that because just the limited context that I have makes it seem really hilarious.

Chris Beresford-Hill: It was pretty good. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Actually, I’ll let you choose. This is going to be not dealer’s choice. This will be your choice.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay. Gambler’s choice.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s — gambler’s choice. This is one option.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Another option is: you on the cusp of taking your name off of the Guinness wheelchair basketball ad and what that was all about and just how that unfolded.

Chris Beresford-Hill: The Kanye is easy, but we’ll save that for another time. The wheelchair basketball one, because there was a good lesson in it, which is — so Dan, the partner I mentioned, and another guy named Tom Kramer and I pitched that ad. And again —

Tim Ferriss: What is the ad?

Chris Beresford-Hill: So in the ad, a group of — it’s almost like you start in a Nike ad or in a scene from the movie MegaBall$, which is a movie that features wheelchair basketball. You’re just in a really intense game, a wheelchair basketball, and you get seduced into it. You follow the team down one end of the court to the other, and you think it’s all about performance or drive or what these guys are doing.

And as the game resolves, the surprise is that nine out of the 10 guys get up out of their chairs to leave the gymnasium, and then one friend is still in the chair. And that you understand that this group of friends all participated in wheelchair basketball so that they could play with their friend who’s in a wheelchair.

And the way we got to that — so the line we had was, “Made of More,” for Guinness. And it’s simple. It’s one of those great lines where the beer itself is complicated, but also it’s maybe a drink that maybe someone who wants to feel like they’re of more substance or that there’s something more substantial in that moment would choose.

So the brief we gave ourselves was: what’s a story you would tell that you would wish you could do that for a friend? Or if your friends did that for you, that would mean everything?

So it was just kind of writing that way. So it was very simple, and that was what was pitched. And that’s probably what anyone who saw the ad saw. But what happened was, our experience making it was not great. We were pretty hard-headed at that.

So it was right around the Foot Locker time where we were maybe a little more rambunctious and a little fighty. And we had a client that also was a little rambunctious and fighty. And I think early on, for whatever reason, I think there was a sense of distrust that wasn’t solved when we were going to produce the ad. And for whatever reason, we didn’t quell it, we fought it.

So we brought forward the director we wanted, and the client didn’t like something about the director’s treatment. The director will write a synopsis of how they planned to tell the story. And instead of saying, “Okay, we hear you, let’s go back and rewrite it,” we tried to push back. We tried to win the fight. And as I think I mentioned from my Adidas experience, you can’t really win these fights. You’ve got to play it collaboratively and forward. But we ended up —

Basically, every single thing was a fight, and ultimately we lost every fight. And it got to the point where the director was challenged and the casting was challenged. And the wardrobe of one of the actors that wasn’t even the lead actor was, “Why would you choose green shoes?” And we like green shoes, but it didn’t matter, but we lost. And then they weren’t green shoes.

And there was a red stripe in the gym and, “Why is there a red stripe? That’s Budweiser’s color.” And we’re like, “It doesn’t matter.” And then instead of just saying, “We’ll change it,” we’ll paint it out.

So we fought everything. We lost everything, and we just felt like such losers. By the time we were done, the music wasn’t the track we liked, the set of words had to be rewritten because it wasn’t right.

And we were so down and we were so miserable and sad that when it got released, we both said, or the three of us said, “Listen, we’re going to take our names off it because this stank. It’s garbage,” because maybe of our egos, the 30 battles we lost along the way, that must’ve meant it was crap.

Maybe it was subconscious, but we never made that phone call, even though we intended to. I think we got busy, so we didn’t ask for our names to be taken off of it, but we intended to. And then it aired with no fanfare on a playoff baseball game in October that I wasn’t watching.

The ad was not on YouTube. Someone videoed it on their phone, maybe on their DVR, uploaded it to YouTube, and by the morning it had over a million views. But I don’t even know how anyone found it. I don’t even know how you could search it, but it just kind of went through the roof because it touched the thing that we wanted to touch where everyone felt, “God, I would do that for someone. I pray I have people around me that would do that for me.”

But we missed the whole point because we were so caught up in the 30 things that we lost, we missed — the story was still intact and it was still good, but we were obsessed about our own personal experience on it that made us lose faith in it.

And so it’s just that constant reminder to step back, ask yourself if you’re feeling a certain way — does it really matter? Is it really changing things or are you just caught in the weeds? So that was a big lesson for me to get outside of my own attitude about stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Were you able to change your behavior in future projects because of that?

Chris Beresford-Hill: I think so.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Chris Beresford-Hill: I think so. I think it was a clear lesson that a lot of things we thought matter, don’t matter. So maybe we need to be a little more amenable to feedback and suggestion. You know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally.

Chris Beresford-Hill: But it was good. There was a work lesson and a life lesson.

Tim Ferriss: So lessons, not that you have to impart a lesson, but the billboard question. So if you could put a message, a quote, an image, anything on a billboard, non-commercial, metaphorically speaking, just to get something in front of a lot of people, what would you put?

Chris Beresford-Hill: First thing is I would request the billboard location would be at my house because I want to see it every day because I’m — whatever matters to me is probably the thing that I need to be reminded of more than I need to broadcast. But I would just say, in the spirit of creativity and living an interesting life, “See what’s possible.”

Tim Ferriss: “See what’s possible.”

Chris Beresford-Hill: “See what’s possible.”

Tim Ferriss: What would that mean to you if it were in front of your house? How would that be helpful to you?

Chris Beresford-Hill: It would remind me every day that I’m not living a routine, but I’m here to see what I can do and what people around me can do. And how can we — I don’t like the word maximize because that sounds maybe a little functional, but how can you fully express in life by taking chances, by believing in yourself, by trying new things? And it can mean anything to anyone, but it’s just that reminder of, “I’m not here to do what the plan is today. I’m here to see what’s possible.”

Tim Ferriss: I love it. Chris —

Chris Beresford-Hill: Tim.

Tim Ferriss: — we are winding to a close. Is there anything else that you would like to — well, first of all, any websites, places to point people to that you’d like to mention? And then is there anything you’d like to say before we come to a close?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, first of all, thank you. The best place to find me is LinkedIn, because I tend to post a lot about creativity and work and work that we are doing and work that I find inspiring. So it’s a good place to engage.

And I hope anyone out there — we were talking before we started that when I was 21, a career in advertising was one of the few options for a creative person. Today, you can self-publish, you can become an influencer, you can write your own movie, you can publish your own novel.

It’s not as attractive, but I hope we continue to attract the best talent. And I hope people do pursue it because it’s a really fun job. You learn about all kinds of different businesses. They tell you all their secrets about why things aren’t working, how good their product really is, and you get to come up with ideas to solve it.

And if you hit it, you get to put them out into the world and get your ideas in front of, hopefully, millions of people. And I think it’s probably a career that doesn’t seem as illustrious as it used to be, but my hope is that we continue to bring great people in because that’s the only way it’s going to be vibrant and exciting.

And by the way, otherwise, you’re just going to have horrible ads on TV or whatever screen we look at. So it’s kind of like, “Let’s get good people in this industry so that we don’t have to look at horrible marketing in the future.”

Tim Ferriss: And you also get to collaborate, right?

Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a big one. I mean, a lot of people out there I think have lost sight of the possibility of collaborating in these types of environments and these types of companies because the shiny object for a lot of young people is running your own ship as an influencer.

But there are a lot of trade-offs, and one of them that I know from having spoken to a lot of people who are creators independently is you can end up being or feeling very isolated and very lonely.

Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And one of my top priorities, in fact, I just finished an offsite recently for my whole team, was fast creative collaborations with world-class people. Because you can do a lot as a solo operator, even with a team, but if you’re in isolation, you’re not going to be broadening, at least I don’t think, for me personally, your horizons.

You’re not going to be bending and testing your perception of the world in a way that you could in a collaborative environment. So we will link to your LinkedIn in the show notes for everyone, and we will link to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes everybody at tim.blog/podcast. That’ll be easy to find.

And until next time, please be a little bit kinder than is necessary, not just to others, but to yourself. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Chris Beresford-Hill: Awesome. Thanks.

Chris Beresford-Hill — A Master Ad Man on Superbowl Confessions, How to Come Up With Great Ideas, Cold Emailing Mark Cuban, Doing Naughty Things, Poetic Mind Control, Creative Process and Insider Tips, How to Negotiate with Bosses and Clients, and The Power of a Stolen Snickers (#715)

Artist's rendering of Chris Beresford-Hill.

“The best ideas are when you’re like, ‘We can never do this. We’re going to get in big trouble. This is so wrong.’ When you feel that, you’ve got to stay there. You absolutely have to. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.”
— Chris Beresford-Hill

Chris Beresford-Hill is one of the most sought-after creative leaders in advertising and has led brands with a combined market cap of over $1 trillion. He was recently named Chief Creative Officer of the Americas at BBDO Worldwide.

Please enjoy!

Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account, LMNT electrolyte supplement, and Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega fish oil.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Go to Nordic.com/Tim and discover why Nordic Naturals is the #1-selling omega-3 brand in the U.S. Use promo code TIM for 20% off your order of Ultimate Omega.

This episode is brought to you by LMNT! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness.

LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim.

This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is a financial services platform that offers services to help you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.00% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Accoount. That’s nearly 10x more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, with savings rates at 0.42%, according to FDIC.gov, as of 05/19/2025. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.00% APY from program banks on your uninvested cash. And when new clients open an account today, they’ll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. Terms and Conditions apply. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.

Cash Account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront is not a bank. The APY on cash deposits as of 04/30/2025, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to program banks, where they earn a variable APY. Tim receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage. Tim and Wealthfront Brokerage have no other affiliation. Tim reflects his own opinions and Wealthfront does not endorse, sponsor, or promote them. See full disclosures here.

This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the #1-selling fish-oil and algae-oil brand in the U.S.! Trusted by doctors and health-care professionals since 1995, Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega and Algae Omega provide foundational support for heart and brain health, immune-system function, and more. More than 80% of Americans don’t get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body can’t produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their Ultimate Omega fish-oil formula—made exclusively from 100% wild-caught fish—and their 100% vegan Algae Omega—made from microalgae, the original source of marine omega-3s.

Want to hear another episode with someone who sells for profit and fun? Listen to my conversation with domain broker Andrew Rosener, in which we discussed securing brand identity, negotiating equity, a potential digital real estate boom, avoiding attraction to unnecessary pain, domain investors vs. domain squatters, the impact of AI on the domain industry and SEO business, and much more.

[podcast-player id=”349069c8-8b35-450a-b9c3-6143c8eb6ff2″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/349069c8-8b35-450a-b9c3-6143c8eb6ff2.mp3″ title=”#711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More”]

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: A Glimpse of the Future: Electroceuticals for 70%–90% Remission of Depression, Brain Stimulation for Sports Performance, and De-risking Ibogaine for TBI/PTSD (#714)

Artist's rendering of Dr. Nolan Williams.

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Nolan Williams (@NolanRyWilliams). Nolan is an associate professor within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. He has a broad background in clinical neuroscience and is triple board certified in general neurology, general psychiatry, and behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry. Themes of his work include examining spaced learning theory and neurostimulation techniques, development and mechanistic understanding of rapid-acting antidepressants, and identifying objective biomarkers that predict neuromodulation responses in treatment-resistant neuropsychiatric conditions.

Nolan specializes in looking at cutting-edge treatments and new technologies that can be applied to treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders—so, treatment-resistant depression, disorders that are notoriously difficult to address, such as OCD, and many others.

Nolan’s work resulted in an FDA clearance for the world’s first noninvasive, rapid-acting neuromodulation approach for treatment-resistant depression. And I’ve tested this myself, and we get into this in the conversation. He has published papers in Brain, American Journal of Psychiatry, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Results from his studies have gained attention in Science and NEJM Journal Watch. He has received two NARSAD Young Investigator Awards, the Gerald L. Klerman Award, and the National Institute of Mental Health Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists.

This is a very special episode that might be an example of peeking around corners and catching a glimpse of the future of mental health treatments in the next five to ten years. We also discuss things like ibogaine that are seemingly unrelated to neuromodulation, as Nolan is very well-versed in multiple disciplines and in multiple toolkits, both pharmacological and non-invasive neuromodulatory. It’s this combination, actually, this rare Venn diagram, that makes him incredibly interesting to me.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it is very important, highly tactical, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

P.S. “Magnesium–Ibogaine Therapy in Veterans with Traumatic Brain Injuries” is now live in Nature Medicine.

[podcast-player id=”a06c8bb0-d0b1-4d22-a06e-b77c244417b0″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/a06c8bb0-d0b1-4d22-a06e-b77c244417b0.mp3″ title=”#714: A Glimpse of the Future: Electroceuticals for 70%–90% Remission of Depression, Brain Stimulation for Sports Performance, and De-risking Ibogaine for TBI/PTSD”]

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

Tim Ferriss: Dr. Williams. Good to see you, sir.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, thanks man. Thanks for having me.

Tim Ferriss: And I thought we would start with a personal story, not your personal story, but a story of Deirdre Lehman. Could you tell us who this person is, how it fits into your story? But let’s begin with just a description of Deirdre.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Absolutely. So Deirdre is, I think, maybe in her 50s, 60s, female, in Bay Area, who has suffered from bipolar disorder much of her life, and pretty successfully treated for the mania side of things over the years. Had a psychiatrist taking care of that part in Marin, and happened to slip into this pretty severe depressive episode a couple of years back. Guess it’s been, maybe like four or five years now. And her psychiatrist had actually gone to see a talk that I gave at this mood disorders day, the year before. And we were talking, it was really early on, when we were working on a rapid-acting neurostimulation approach. The psychiatrist had heard the talk and then her patient fell into this really bad suicidal depression.

And so she reached out to me to treat her, and I got on the phone, I’ll never forget, it was a Wednesday. And I got on the phone with her psychiatrist and she was telling me symptomatically how bad off she was. And I was like, “I don’t think we can treat her at outpatient. She’s way too ill. I think she needs to go in the inpatient hospital.” So essentially, gave her some information on how to do that.

So I see her the next morning and she’s in really bad shape.

Tim Ferriss: What does that mean? Does that mean like she’s —

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How did that show up?

Dr. Nolan Williams: When people are at the level where they definitively need to go into the hospital, they’re not really totally communicative anymore, and they’ve got some cognitive issues sometimes. So in her case, she couldn’t look you in the eyes. Look at the ground and she was doing this rocking thing, which you can see in pretty severe depression. It’s kind of this catatonia overlap symptoms. She’s at the very end of the spectrum, one of the highest severity patients we’ve ever treated. So she was like, a score of 50, on the moderate side of 60, very, very severe, and just rocking and not really talking. And the husband was counting everything. And she had bipolar one, so she was hypomanic, I think or manic two weeks before and then dropped into this very, very severe depression. So it was her daughter and the husband, and they’re sitting in the room with me and they want me to treat her, and I say, “Listen, it’s Friday, we go Monday to Friday. You have to find a way basically to keep her well from now until Monday. And that means…”

Tim Ferriss: And by well, you mean safe? Preventing self harm?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So keep her not having a suicide attempt basically from now until Monday. She’s very suicidal. And I said, “You’re going to have to take every knife. I don’t think any guns, but gun, chemical, scissors, everything out of the house, all of it has to go. And you guys have to be on a 24-hour watch until Monday.” And so Monday morning rolls around and we bring her in. And the craziest thing, we had an error, a repair on the motor threshold coil, which is the coil you use to get calibrated on the intensity, and it shorted out the device and blew the capacitor bank up on the first stimulator.

Tim Ferriss: Blew your flux capacitor.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Yeah. At 7 a.m. And you can’t imagine how stressful that was.

So we had a second machine, and I’ll tell you about this later. We were running this trait, hypnotizability modulation study, and it was over at the scanner, so it was pretty far away, and these things weigh like a hundred pounds. So I had to send my team over there, run over there and grab it, bring it over. And luckily we were able to get her going and treat her with a second machine. And she was in really, really bad shape that morning. And by five o’clock that afternoon, she was basically normal. And the next morning she was totally zeroed out and completely normal.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning no suicidality?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Meaning no depression, no nothing. She looked like any person walking the street. Totally normal. And that was in 24 hours. We’ve seen this with bipolar patients quicker. It’ll happen really quick for a bipolar one patient. You can get it done sometimes in a day.

Tim Ferriss: Just for clarity, by “Get it done,” and don’t worry people listening, we’re going to define terms and get into all this, but you’re talking about accelerated TMS?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, we’re talking about accelerated TMS. So our rapid-acting neurostimulation approach, we’re able to get people out of these states and into normal mood, and in short periods of time, generally 2.6 days on average for major depression patients, but it’s quicker with bipolar we’ve seen, especially with bipolar one patients. So she was totally out of it in 24 hours. And I remember it was right around July 4th or something. And so the whole team left. And I guess we’ll maybe talk about caffeine later too. So my wife and I were like big Philz Coffee fans, and so I’ll never forget this either. So we go down to the Philz Coffee in Palo Alto after I saw them. And I’ll never forget it. Clark Lehman, her husband, also went to Philz, didn’t know I was going to be there. And I look over and this guy’s just kind of staring at me, and I was like, “Hey, how are you? Good to see you again.” I just saw the guy 10 minutes ago, and he’s like, “I still don’t understand what happened.”

And it makes sense, to take somebody from the worst you’ve ever seen them mood-wise to normal in such a short period of time was remarkable for him. And it ended up being that after that period, they actually went out and really were helpful with a lot of the philanthropy that led to all the trials being funded and ultimately the clearance, and Clark and Deirdre really were advocates and have continued to be advocates for this to kind of get it out into the world. And it was totally based off of that experience of basically him feeling helpless and going from that to feeling like it was all solved. And I think she went maybe a year completely asymptomatic, ended up needing to get retreated again at some point, but gets these little touch-ups here and there and is able to stay well ongoing, and, as they tell me, depression’s not her problem anymore. And so that’s good. She’s a great illustrative case of what this can do and I think what the promise of it can be.

Tim Ferriss: What I’d love to talk about next is not necessarily direct mechanism of action, but I’d love to hear you just explain a snippet that I pulled from your conversation with Andrew Huberman, which was a very good conversation. Specifically it was about, and I’m not going to use the right terminology here, so bear with me as a lay person, but the sequencing or abnormal/pathological sequencing of activation or activity in different parts of the brain. So I don’t know if it’s the anterior cingulate.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: I think you know what I’m alluding to here. Would you mind just explaining that? Because it was something that I had never been exposed to and I found it deeply fascinating. And I’ll just also mention this context for people who are listening to this, that part of what is deeply interesting to me about a number of the different tools and modalities that you explore in depth, is not just the speed of action, but the durability of effect. Super, super potent combination and very unusual, from what I can tell, combination of things. All right. So as far as the sequence of activation goes, could you explain what I’m referring to?

Dr. Nolan Williams: We published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, I guess it’s been about six months ago now. So one of the former research track resident postdocs in the psychiatry program at Stanford, Anish Mitra, who’s now junior faculty, was working with Karl Deisseroth and I during that training phase. And Anish had this interest in a specific way of looking at brain imaging, particularly this type of brain imaging called resting-state functional connectivity MRI. And so resting-state functional connectivity MRI has been around for a long time. The resting state part of it is basically tell the person sit in the MRI scanner and let their mind wander. So that’s kind of the resting state or the default mode, however you want to think about it. And functional connectivity, what that means is it’s the brain regions that have blood flow that is time-locked with each other. And so essentially these connected brain networks, the blood flow will go up or go down in those areas in a time-locked fashion and blood flow is —

Tim Ferriss: By time-locked, you just mean at the same time?

Dr. Nolan Williams: At the same time.

Tim Ferriss: Correlating.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so why blood flow? Blood flow is a surrogate of electrical activity. It’s hard to see electrical activity deep in the brain. People see it at the surface of the EEG, but with MRI, you use the blood flow as a surrogate of the electrical activity, and it makes sense, if you’re using glucose in a brain region using that network, then you need to have cerebral auto-regulation, so the blood vessels increase and they dilate more blood goes into that area. So it’s just like a response to increased activity. And so you have these increases in blood flow that are supposed to represent electrical activity that are in different separate nodes in the brain, and they come on roughly at the same time. And we’ve known that for a while. Anish got very interested in this idea that the timing of the blood flow is consistently temporally offset between these nodes.

So slightly, that people ignored it for a long time, but he was able through using various math, able to show that there’s a slight offset of the timing such that one brain region slightly comes on before the other. And that’s interesting because that infers some level of causality. And so instead of the whole network coming on at the same time, maybe it’s just one area and it’s signaling the whole network on, and it’s so quick that you see it as all like this, but really it’s more like this, if that makes sense. It’s coming on all at the same time. But from this network node kind of turning this one on, turning that one on or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: The lead domino matters.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s right. The lead domino. Exactly. And so in the case of mood, it looks like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the area that’s involved in control, precedes slightly the cingulate cortex. In our normal healthy control population, essentially nearly everybody had that directionality. In the depressed cohort, 70 percent of them had it flipped where the cingulate was temporally in front of the dorsolateral, but not everybody. And if you just had that information, then you wouldn’t know what to make of that. Why is it some people and not others? But what was interesting is when he looked at the folks that had it versus the ones that didn’t, the ones that had it were the ones that were responsive to our — when we’ll talk about what SAINT is and the rapid-acting neural stimulation approach in detail, I guess, later. But the folks that responded to SAINT responded to this rapid-acting TMS approach were the ones that had the biomarker and the ones that had no change, did not have the biomarker and looked like a normal healthy control. And the signal on the post scan flipped to look normal in the folks that responded had the biomarker, and then their brain changed after.

And so the post-scan looked just like the pre-scan on the folks that didn’t clinically change in the normal healthy controls. And so we see this sort of test all the time in medicine. 10 people come into the primary care doctor’s office with blurry vision, urinating a lot, drinking a lot, headache. A lot of those folks probably have diabetes, but not all of them. Some of them have migraine headache and need glasses and some other things, and it looks like the diabetes presentation. But when you go and do the blood sugar, the blood sugar is normal. And then the folks that have elevated blood sugar that look like they have diabetes, you go and you give them a diabetic medicine and then it normalizes. So the blood sugar after looks like the blood sugar of a normal healthy, and it looks like the blood sugar of somebody that symptomatically presented but didn’t have diabetes.

And so it was nice to see this and we’re replicating this now. We have money from the National Institutes of Health to do that, but this idea that we’re able to have a test that would change, and the same thing that signals that there’s an abnormality is the thing that changes later. And that’s more rare in psychiatry to be able to have all of that line up. So we’re pretty excited about that and hope to see it. It does replicate in the larger population of patients, but as a conceptual idea, it’s an important conceptual idea, this general idea of being able to use neuroimaging or whatever it is, EG, whatever it is, to type different people that are presenting with similar symptoms and be able to say, “Okay, you’re going to respond to this and not this, or vice versa.” And I think that’s part of what we need for psychiatry, right? Because people spend just so much time in their lives trying to find the answer, and we don’t really have any tests.

Tim Ferriss: Trial and error.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it’s a lot of trial and error.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like pharmaceutical ready, fire, aim, in a sense. And this raises, I guess just a meta observation/question. Perhaps you could just discuss this briefly, which is, it seems to me like there have been, and this is part of the impetus for us having this conversation, part of the impetus for me in the last, let’s call it half year, paying a lot of attention to accelerated TMS, which is there have been these dominant paradigms in certain types of, let’s call it psychiatric treatments, for things like depression — treatment-resistant depression. And it seems like a very dominant paradigm for a period of perhaps several decades has been these chemical imbalance theory of psychiatric disorders. So you have a serotonin issue, therefore we’re going to treat it in these following ways. You have such and such an issue, so we’re going to give you SNRIs. And then like you said, it’s a lot of trial and error to figure out what works. And even if something works, it may often only work for a period of time.

So it seems to me, and I want you to absolutely fact check and correct everything that I’m saying, but that part of the reason that the research you’re doing and that others are engaging in is so fascinating is that it presents an alternative paradigm through which you could look at certain disorders, right? Like, oh, wait a second. Well, maybe this person’s car, when you turn the ignition, is just tripping things in the wrong order. And if that’s causal, we could try to address that and then maybe that addresses what we might’ve otherwise perceived as a chemical disorder. I have a lot of follow-up questions, but is that a helpful way to think about this? Or what would you add to that?

Dr. Nolan Williams: I think there’s been, I would argue three eras in psychiatry, what friends of mine have called psychiatry 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and the first era was this era in and around Freud. And this idea that it was a content issue and a life experience issue, which is partially true. It’s not that that’s not true, it’s just not complete. And so then the solution is a content solution, a initially psychoanalysis all the way through to modern forms of psychotherapy. The limitations of that led us to psychiatry 2.0, right? This idea that we serendipitously found the first antipsychotics, first antidepressants, and we were able to deinstitutionalize primarily schizophrenia patients out of inpatient asylum stays with these drugs, which kind of flew in the face of this being a content issue.

Tim Ferriss: What was the first antipsychotic?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Thorazine.

Tim Ferriss: I was going to say Thorazine.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: How was that — I don’t want to take you off track. So keep track of where we are. We’re at 2.0. How was it serendipitously discovered?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I think, if I remember correctly, I think it was they were trying to — it was like an antibiotic or something like that, and they were trying to develop that drug out for something completely unrelated and happened to give it to some patients with schizophrenia. And they had a dramatic improvement.

Tim Ferriss: I would love to read a book that is just a collection of case studies like this, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like sildenafil, Viagra, it’s like for angina or whatever.

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And then the male patients are like, “Why aren’t the male patients sending their meds back? Oh, wait a second.”

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Here we go. Fascinating. All right, so right. So Thorazine and the serendipitous discovery of — oh, wait a fucking second. This seems to not necessarily negate, but certainly render incomplete this pre-existing paradigm.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And then where does it go from there?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. So then I think, to your point, there was this accumulate kind of accumulation of assumptions around, well, if we’re moving all of these chemicals around in the brain, then it must be that there’s a deficiency or an imbalance or whatever. And that I think led us to recent history where there’s quite a bit of prescribing of oral antidepressants and all that stuff. And the third era, this circuit era that I think we’re in now, and I’d argue we were entering in 10 years ago, but I think we’re pretty squarely at the beginning of now, flies in the face of that. If I can take a patient as severe as Deirdre Lehman, get her out of it in a very quick timeframe and looking normal and holding that for a long time, and there was no chemical exchange, there’s nothing that went into her system, then it gets you into this newer way of thinking about it.

It’s a circuit problem. The useful thing about this framing, one, it’s seemingly consistently true in the sense that through all the various modalities seeing these differences, but more importantly, it lets you integrate past ideas into that concept. Drugs act on circuits, therapy acts on circuits, but focal neuromodulation is a really direct way of acting on those same circuits. And so from a patient standpoint, I think it’s very empowering because we’re not saying to the patient there’s something inherently missing or too much for you in the sense that you’re constrained to having to take these exogenous chemicals to stay well, but rather there’s a circuit, there’s a miswiring, misfiring sort of problem. And if we can reroute that information, then you can feel well. And I think that there’s a level of empowerment that comes with that.

One of the things that patients always tell me after they get well with some of our stimulation approaches is that they kind of look at it and say, “Well, I may get depressed again, but I don’t think I’ll ever get suicidal at that same level again, because I know that I’ve got a way of getting out of it and it’s my own volition to choose to do that, and it’s something I can tolerate and I feel normal.”

Tim Ferriss: So I’d like to highlight that last part because, not that I’m the world’s foremost expert in suicidal ideation, but as someone who came very close to offing himself in college and really just by a series of lucky events ended up not fulfilling that, it’s the hopelessness. For me and for a lot of people, it’s the feeling that nothing can fix this. I am broken. I’m permanently broken. There is no option other than trying to silence this voice in my head. And the only way I can think of doing that is by ending my life. But once you see, once you experience, even more so, something that alleviates that, especially with any type of durability, doesn’t need to be forever, but some type of durability, and especially if it’s rapid-acting, then you feel like you have a plan B, and that is incredibly empowering. Let me ask you a few questions. The first is this type of neuromodulation, is that synonymous with a term that I came across, I don’t know who coined it, it’s a nice term, electroceuticals, or are those different?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I think it’s a broad — yeah, it’s part of that broader term of electroceuticals. Yeah. And so what we had done, I don’t know if this is a good time to get into it.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. What we had done with what we called SAINT, or Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, is that we came up with a way of reorganizing conventional TMS, which had been around for some time, reorganizing it in time and in space. And so with conventional RTMS, it had developed in the mid-’80s, first used as a therapeutic within clinical trials by my mentor Mark George when he was at NIH in the mid-’90s and approved by the FDA in the mid to late 2000s, it utilized average skull positions to find an average spot to stimulate, which at the time, given the technology that was available, that was the right call. Right.

Tim Ferriss: Can I pause for one second just to give some additional context?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What does TMS stand for?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, so transcranial magnetic stimulation. So it’s this —

Tim Ferriss: And it was originally developed for what?

Dr. Nolan Williams: As a motor probe by Tony Barker in the UK. And the idea is this idea of Faraday’s law. So Faraday’s law is this idea that you pulse a magnet, you pulse a magnet, you can generate current and electrically conducting substances. So if I take an electromagnet, if I take a TMS machine to the beach and I try to pulse the sand, nothing’s going to happen because sand is not, as you know, electrically conducting at all. It’s an insulator. And so if you put a TMS coil or any electromagnet next to a wire, a copper wire, or speaker wire or whatever, you can generate current in that wire. If you put the coil on the head, it will bypass the skin, scalp, skull, and induce current in the electrically conducting substance in the brain, the kind of brain tissue. And so you’re able to selectively turn on cortical neurons without really interacting with much of the rest of the head.

People do feel something because of the nerves in the scalp, but your brain can’t feel anything. So that’s like scalp nerves. And so if you, as they did in the ’80s, just kind of send a single pulse, it doesn’t really change the brain, but you can probe the brain. So I could take that coil from the mid-’80s and I could put it over my hand representation, make my thumb move, I can put it over my wrist representation in my brain, I can make my wrist move. And it’s organized in this stereotyped way such that essentially the head face area is closer to the ear and you can march up to the midline of the skulls, such that when you get to the midline, you’re able to actually move the foot and the leg. If you have a certain kind of coil, you can do that. And so you can actually probe the entire motor system and make all of it move without having any volition to it.

Tim Ferriss: Question: what is the value of this probe?

Dr. Nolan Williams: So the value of a probe itself is just as they thought —

Tim Ferriss: Figuring out the mapping.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it’s a mapping exercise initially. Where is everything? Is it the same in everybody, is it consistent? And they wanted to have a way of doing that non-invasively. Penrose and others had been doing this invasively as neurosurgeons for a hundred years, I guess 50 years at that point. And so they wanted to be able to emulate what the surgeons could do in epilepsy patients, they’re doing epilepsy surgery non-invasively. And then what folks realized over the next 10 years is we can send a signal into the brain that’s like Morse code and basically send this signal to change the excitability of the brain. And we can measure it if we do it in motor cortex by how much the thumb moves with a set amplitude out of the machine.

So if I get X movement where I can make from stimulating here, I can make the thumb move X amount, and then I send this Morse code signal onto the brain to tell it to tone down or to kind of be less excitable, and then I send that same intensity back in. The thumb will move half as much, right? And so you’ve toned down cortical excitability. If, instead, I get this measurement of X, and then instead of putting in what we call inhibitory or de-potentiating stimulation, we put in excitatory potentiating stimulation into the brain, and we do that and then we measure again, it’ll be 2X. So we knew by the mid-’90s that we could actually move around how excitable the brain was in these normal, healthy, control volunteer motor cortices, and so the aha moment for Mark and his team was this idea that depression at that time on PET scans, on spec scans, was this kind of hypoactivity, hypometabolism.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning lower?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Lower, yeah. Yeah, sorry, yeah. Lower activity, lower metabolism of the prefrontal cortex, right, where the prefrontal cortex just isn’t as active, isn’t as robust as it is in normal healthy controls. And so, he had this idea, “Well, could we use this excitatory stimulation to drive up activity?” And so that was the aha moment in the kind of first version of this. But they were super careful. There’d been some seizures in the early days from trying to figure out how all this works, and so they wanted to do a stimulation approach that wasn’t going to have much in the way of risk. And so, they had this once a day, very extended protocol, and because of the mid-’90s, it was very hard to get cheap brain scans on patients.

And so this idea that they were going to have to use average coordinates to target it, and so they get average skull measurements, and then they would do a low dose sort of approach once a day and do that out for weeks, and then it’d extended out to months. And so, the original TMS trials and the original approval was this less efficient version that basically utilized kind of a low efficiency signal into the brain, and used kind of average coordinates to place the coil.

Tim Ferriss: So, average coordinates meaning, just by clumsy analogy, “We can’t take an X-ray of you, but we do have a hundred other X-rays that seem to indicate roughly this is where you have your fracture. So we’re going to aim at those coordinates.”

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And the once-a-day protocol, I’ve heard the number 36 from somewhere, but is it somewhere in, generally, like the 30 to 40 session range?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: So we’re looking at, let’s just call it for a placeholder, 30 to 40 sessions, one per day. And to perhaps not necessarily conjure an image, but remove an image from the minds of some listeners. They may be thinking, “This is A Beautiful Mind. This is somebody chomping down on a wallet or a piece of wood, getting electroconvulsive therapy.”

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yep, yep.

Tim Ferriss: These are not the same thing.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it’s actually the opposite, right? So the goal of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, which has been around for 100 years, is to produce a therapeutic seizure. It’s effective, it’s associated with, and some people with autobiographical memory troubles, it’s pretty underutilized as a treatment in psychiatry because of these issues, because of particularly One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and that story, and that movie culturally has actually had an impact on ECT. And it’s one of these things that’s kind of, for a lot of patients, that last ditch resort because of the concerns around the side effects.

TMS is different, right? You’re not trying to induce a seizure. In fact, you’re not trying to have any sort of change in cognition. I always tell patients it’s really boring, and so we have Netflix running in the background and people have their Netflix movie that they keep watching every day. And it’s basically just, once folks get used to it, it’s just part of a routine where they’re sitting there and watching their show or whatever it is and the stimulators turning their brain on. And, yeah. Unlike ECT, there’s no anesthesia, there’s really no need for anything. You can do this in an outpatient setting.

But the old forms of TMS are extremely slow. You can’t use that in a psychiatric emergency. And so this is something that happens over a couple of months, and it’s tricky for some people. If you’re a working person and you have to do TMS during, conventional TMS during business hours, and you basically have to tell your boss or sneak out of the office or whatever it is and go do an hour and a half during the middle of the day, during standard bankers hours to be able to do this, and it’s hard to do that over a couple of months. And it doesn’t address these kind of high acuity emergencies.

And so we got very interested in this idea of can we, like I said earlier, reorganize the stimulation in time and space? Space being, can we personalize it to each person’s brain? I can talk about that in greater detail. And then, can we compress these six-week courses, in this case, into a single day? So that’s why Deirdre was able to get well in a day, is we gave her a whole six-week course in a day.

Tim Ferriss: You gave her how many sessions?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s 10 triple dose sessions. And so it’s like 30 total equivalent sessions in a day. And so the FDA cleared 600 pulses of ITBS once a day, five days a week, for six weeks in 2018. And so we give —

Tim Ferriss: That was for a major depressive disorder?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That was major depressive disorder. And so we give a triple dose every session, so 1,800 pulses. And so, after 10 sessions, you’ve got the equivalent of 30 sessions worth in that first day, and you do that for five days. And so, people are getting the dose equivalent of seven and a half months worth of TMS in five days. And what we found is, surprising to us that it was this linear, is that you just pick up remitters as you progress through the days.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by remitters?

Dr. Nolan Williams: People who completely lose all of their depressive symptoms to a level that is within the normal range. So, they’re rating at the same level as somebody who’s not depressed. And we can get people there on an average of 2.6 days, and we’re able to do that by personalizing the target and then being able to deliver treatment into that target, a lot of treatment over a short period of time. And so what’s useful about that is somebody can be in a really pretty bad state on Monday morning, they can take a week off a vacation and may end up being on the inpatient unit or whatever it is, but they can go out, get this done, and get back to work in a timeframe that’s actually reasonable.

And that was really our goal. How do we get people acutely out of these high acuity settings and into a state of wellness quick enough that it doesn’t make a major impact on their lives?

Tim Ferriss: May I add one thing to that?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Which is,

Tim Ferriss: I’ve had a number of friends, and I’ve certainly heard of many cases where people with certain professions, airline pilots, firefighters, police officers, there are many more, will not report any type of mental health issue because they will be suspended, in a lot of cases, or relieved of duty. They’ll be forced to take time off. And in a case like this where you have a compressed protocol, there’s the possibility of taking PTO or taking a week off and doing this treatment, whereas like you said, doing it during banker’s hours over months is going to be highly visible, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And until the entire system changes, which is going to take time if it happens at all, this would be an incredibly attractive alternative protocol —

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — if it were to work. So please continue.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that’s the way that we thought about it, right, is can we take folks who need to get well quickly. I mean, we had people in conventional TMS courses where they started, they’re in really bad shape, they lose their job halfway through. Maybe they get better at the end of it, but it took so long. And so it’s one of these things, if we can compress that up and get them well in a short period of time and get them out of it, it gets people back to their lives and it has a low impact on it.

Tim Ferriss: I know I’m interrupting a lot, but the threading of this I think is important. So we can sort of foreshadow something that is going to be on the minds of a lot of people, which is, what are the downsides, what are the risks? So my question is, was it easy to get the sort of ethics board approval to compress all of this into a much shorter timeframe?

Dr. Nolan Williams: I was able to make a compelling case to the IRB and then eventually to the FDA around safety.

We give 90 percent of the resting motor threshold that’s depth-corrected for atrophy. So if it’s an older patient, they have more prefrontal atrophy, then you can increase the intensity based off of that difference in depth with the motor cortex. But essentially, what their brain is getting is 90 percent of the resting motor threshold, which is kind of a calibrated number that’s based off of these motor, these TMS induced motor movements. It gives us a sense of how to dose the stimulation.

Tim Ferriss: May I translate that briefly?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sorry to interrupt. So I’ll show a bit of my hand here, which is I’ve undergone two separate weeks with different hardware, different protocols, because I’d never want to talk about things like this unless I’ve put myself in the spaceship and been the monkey shot into space. Which doesn’t mean at this point I am a proselytizer 100 percent for the treatment, but I find it very compelling, at least for investigation. So, to just explain since I recently went through this, each morning, or certainly on the first morning, but on multiple mornings in my case, they will test your motor threshold.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Right? And that could be a finger or a hand, it could be a foot, and they’ll watch movement really closely. And then based on that, determine the sort of dose that will be delivered throughout the day during these sessions. And in my case, it was once an hour for 10 hours a day.

Dr. Nolan Williams: So it’s just a way of getting the intensity that you need. And so we know that 90 percent, meaning sub motor threshold, there’s never been a TMS-related seizure for that kind of sub motor threshold intensity. Even giving multiple sessions a day or whatever it is, there’s never been an event like that. It’s always been at a higher kind of intensity of the stimulation in the moment, if that makes sense. So the amount of magnetic field that’s being put out in proximity to the brain. And so it seems to be much more related to that than it does the amount of pulses that you receive in a day. And so I was able to lay that out to the various regulatory bodies and show the evidence that that threshold is really the threshold where risk goes up.

Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s sort of the magnitude of the strength of the pulse, not the frequency or the density.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Exactly. It’s more about the intensity in this case, and less about the density or the amount. So, laying that out, it was acceptable, and various parties deemed it to be non-significant risk, and they let us proceed. Now this is FDA breakthrough status, FDA cleared, and all the way through all of the regulatory processes. And so it’s kind of an on-label approach these days. But back then, I had to make a lot of those arguments. And knock on wood, we still haven’t seen any seizure.

Tim Ferriss: How many people would you say at this point have gone through well-designed, accelerated TMS?

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s definitely, I’d say more than four or 500 between trials. We have trials where they’re ongoing and I don’t know what the clinical outcome of those trials are because I’m blinded to them, but I do know that AEs, right, we can know what, and we don’t have any serious adverse events in the sense we haven’t had anybody have a seizure yet. So that’s good. But what you do see is headache. People will have a headache. It’s usually from the, not everybody, but a fair percentage of people. And it’s mainly related to the coil-activating skull nerve, scalp nerves, and basically kind of turning the facial musculature on. And that actually goes away over time. So, in the long-term, you can actually see a reduction in migraine headaches and you can see a reduction in pain, all that sort of thing, And people actually have an antinociceptive effect.

Tim Ferriss: Anti, excuse me?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Anti-pain effect.

Tim Ferriss: Ah, pain.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What was the word you used?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Nociceptive?

Tim Ferriss: New one. All right.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so, you can actually have an anti-pain effect, and the reason why we think that happens is because you actually —

Tim Ferriss: Anti-pain, meaning it could help with chronic pain or something like this?

Dr. Nolan Williams: — at least acute experimental pain. There are some chronic pain studies. You can see that you release endogenous opioids from stimulation because you can actually use opioid blockers and block the anti-pain effects of TMS.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Dr. Nolan Williams: So, there’s this whole kind of pharmaco stimulation thing that people are looking into. A buddy of mine, Joe Taylor, who’s at Harvard now, did these studies when he was an MD/PhD and he was able to actually show that there is this release and that you can kind of block it with co-administration of opiate-blocking drugs. But yeah, that’s the idea is that there is some acute potential headache risk, and people can get a little fatigued from this. It’s like fatigue, more like you ran a marathon instead of depression related fatigue, just from kind of being there all week.

Tim Ferriss: Look, N-of-1 here, but seems, I spent a lot of time talking to folks as kind of my job. My experience was, headache for sure. I was hesitant to take any type of Tylenol or medication for that just because, and this is, again, as a naive lay person. But I was like, well, if you do take NSAIDs, if you’re doing, say, weight training that can inhibit some of the adaptive response. I’m not sure we fully understand what the hell’s going on here, so I’m just going to deal with the headache. It was tolerable. I mean, you could feel it. The fatigue was the fatigue that you might feel if you were cramming for your final exams every day. It was not the fatigue of apathy and anhedonia, the difficulty or impossibility of finding joy in the things you’d normally find joy with. That type of fatigue is, characteristically, it was very different.

It’s more like, yeah, you just crammed for 20 hours to try to nail your finals because you didn’t prepare, and you’re going to do that every day.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s the feeling.

Tim Ferriss: Question for you, then. We’re going to get to the results. I want you to discuss the results of SAINT, but I think before we do that, it’s important to maybe describe this patient population. Is it fair to say that you’re seeing, it’d be an exaggeration maybe to say the worst of the worst, but you’re dealing with patients who have had multiple failed interventions. So it seems like that’s important to kind of keep in mind if that is true.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. And so, in our randomized control trial, people had an average of nine failed, nine years of the current episode. So, they were depressed for nine years on average, straight before they came into our trial, at five plus or minus two med failures, and they had a lifetime load of depression of about 25 years. So, these were folks who’ve been depressed with multiple episodes or very long episodes, and they tried a lot of meds to get out of those episodes. These are not mild cases, right? These are folks who’ve kind of been through it for a long time. And interestingly, going back to the study that we talked about earlier with the flipping of the signal, that flipping of the signal was correlated with higher MADRS scores. And so, the more —

Tim Ferriss: MADRS is the assessment?

Dr. Nolan Williams: I’m sorry, yeah. Higher depression scores. And so, the higher your depression rating, the higher likelihood you are to have that signal from the data that we collected. And so, and that’s what we’ve seen, right?

Tim Ferriss: Got it. And this switching, just to tie it back to what we were talking about, is that sort of having the wrong lead domino, or if you have a car where you’re trying to start the diesel car without heating the coil first?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Type of situation. Yeah.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s that directionality. And so, that’s what we’ve seen. Folks that are at that kind of more in-stage sort of depression seemed to be more responsive to this. And I think that’s because, in those cases, you’re really correcting this pretty dense brain signaling problem if that PNAS work replicates. And what we’ve also seen is folks that do really well with dorsal later at least are folks who have a pretty impaired attention, and so they actually score up on the concentration item of the depression scales. And so that was something we observed earlier on, that if you’re saying you can’t read a book anymore, you can’t really follow a recipe book to cook your favorite meal or whatever because you just can’t attend to it, then your likelihood of getting better from this is higher.

Whereas folks that are more on the kind of obsessive/depressive side of things that don’t complain as much about cognitive problems and concentration problems, but more about they’re just ruminating and kind of obsessing on things, we’ve found that inhibiting the right frontal pole, orbital frontal cortex, so stimulating here, and we have OCD trials to do that, is pretty effective at shutting that down. So it’s more of a shutting down than a turning up sort of intervention. So, some of it’s actually where the illness intersects with the brain anatomy intersects with the symptomatic presentation to try to derive the best spot to stimulate for those folks. And we have some early studies now where we’re trying to use brain imaging to actually sort folks into buckets neurally, to figure out which target makes sense for their symptomatic presentation.

Tim Ferriss: Based on their personalized fMRI scans?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I think this would be a good point, and we’ll mention this again at the end, but maybe you could mention any open trials or if people would like to consider enrolling or they know someone who might want to become subject in the study. Is there anything you’d like to mention?

Dr. Nolan Williams: So we have a number of trials that are ongoing at the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab, so it’s bsl.stanford.edu/clinical-trials. And you can go on the website and then there’s a screening portal and people can go on and fill out their information. And essentially, we have trials for anhedonic depression, we have trials for standard severe treatment-resistant depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, patients who also have depression, bipolar depression, and other pilots, some addiction work that my collaborators are working on, and so folks have that range of symptomatology. Happy to have folks come through and screen. And it’s all free, which is nice. So it’s all basically funded through these trials. And yeah, we’re excited to bring people in and see if it makes sense for them to work with us on this, and it’s a couple of week commitment.

Tim Ferriss: What did the results, or what have the results looked like with SAINT or slight permutations of that, and how do they compare to, let’s just say more conventional treatments for these same conditions?

Dr. Nolan Williams: So in our original pilot study, 90 percent of people experienced remission at the post.

Tim Ferriss: 90 percent?

Dr. Nolan Williams: 90 percent, yep. In the randomized control trial, it was 79 percent of people transited through remission at some point in the four-week follow-up. What’s interesting is it’s not all at the same time point. So if you look at time point by time point, it’s in the 50 to 60 percent range. And the reason for that is because there’s this, colleagues of mine at Cornell, Conor Liston and others, have replicated this finding that there’s a subpopulation of patients that actually has a slower time to remission. And we’ve seen those too. Folks will lose their suicidal ideation, will actually peak their antidepressant effect at one month. It’s usually in older adults, and that’s what we’ve seen is basically it’s only in 50-year-olds and above. We haven’t seen that —

Tim Ferriss: That sort of delayed remission?

Dr. Nolan Williams: — that delayed remission, yeah. But if you’re putting together 22- to 80-year-olds, you’re going to have some of these folks. But what’s interesting is TMS is also a probe of the system. If you kind of ignore the kind of normal rules of how to define remission, and you just ask the question of who crosses through, 79 percent of our active group crossed through, 13 percent of our control group crossed through. And that tells you something, I think, about the neuroanatomy, that probably something in the 70 percent of folks have this dorsal lateral cingulate problem. And then that was a version of that thinking was seen in our PNAS signaling paper too, about 70 percent of those folks had the flip in the signal.

And so my suspicion is that there’s a subpopulation of people who don’t have that, who have some other diagnosis. It probably looks a lot like depression, but it’s probably a different neuroanatomy. And we’ve seen this sort of phenomenon happen in medicine before. We used to cluster all the Parkinsonism together. So, there’s lots of reasons that Parkinsonism, some of those reasons are idiopathic Parkinson’s disease in the kind of classic sense, the way —

Tim Ferriss: What does idiopathic mean?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Just that it’s kind of this spontaneous happening of Parkinson’s disease. That’s the core Parkinson’s syndrome that we think about in Michael J. Fox and others.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Dr. Nolan Williams: And then you’ve got other things that look like it, progressive supranuclear palsy, Lewy body dementia, drug-related Parkinsonism. And so, we used to kind of lump —

Tim Ferriss: Parallel to your diabetes presentation earlier?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, we forever lumped all these folks together, and it really took the UK Brain Bank and being able to link, in that case for Parkinson’s, link Parkinson’s pathology to symptomatic presentation.

Tim Ferriss: What is the UK Brain Bank? I’ve never heard of this.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. So, it’s like a brain — I mean, there’s lots of brain banks or brain donation entities.

Tim Ferriss: Physical brains, or are we talking about scans?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Physical brains after death, post-mortem donations. So, there’s a lot of ways you can donate. If you have a neuropsych disease, you can donate your brain to science. And so, a lot of Parkinson’s patients donated their brains to this brain bank to try to understand what it is. And what they found was, with a deep clinical phenotyping before death, right? And so then folks, you had this kind of deep phenotyping, and then after death, they were able to —

Tim Ferriss: Sorry, what do you mean by deep phenotyping?

Dr. Nolan Williams: — like a deep, kind understanding of the symptomatology, right? So basically, does this person’s tremor, did their tremor happen on one side or both sides at the same time?

Tim Ferriss: How do things present?

Dr. Nolan Williams: How do things present?

Tim Ferriss: In an observable way?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s right, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: In the same way, just folks, so you have genotype, phenotype, right? So, this would be a similar idea. Okay.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Yeah. So basically, what they found was, clinically, people that have the kind of standard Parkinson’s disease typically tend to have a presentation of unilateral onset illness, right? Where one side of the body or the other is much worse from a Parkinsonian standpoint than the other. And it’s actually very common for people with Parkinson’s to present where, if it’s a leg onset Parkinson’s or foot’s dragging, or tremor just in one hand, right? And that’s actually what you would expect from normal Parkinson’s. If it’s really symmetric, it’s less likely to be that and it’s more likely to be something else. And they figured that out from essentially the brain biology and forming that, being able to link up substantia nigra problems they found on autopsy with symptoms.

And so I think we’re at the beginning of an era in psychiatry to be able to do the same sort of thing, to take what’s lumped together as depression or anxiety or whatnot, and to be able to parse it into a lot of different, what we call biotypes, or people think about as endophenotypes or whatever these kind specific kind of flavors of that symptomatology. Some linked with a very specific brain physiology or brain functional neuroanatomy, such that you can say that this depression type one needs this treatment. Depression type two needs this treatment, and so on and so forth.

And so that’s really, from my vantage point, the future, right, is being able to really, at an N-of-1 level, at a single-patient level, be able to figure out something about their brain and then use that to help to prescribe what the next step is for them. And if we can do that, we can also cut time, right, because we can go straight to the effective treatment for people and cut all the time around diagnosis. I mean, there’s —

Tim Ferriss: And it’s not just time, it’s risk, right? In a lot of these cases.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Absolutely. It’s time, it’s risk from potentially the wrong treatment. It’s also risk from waiting.

Tim Ferriss: It’s cost, potentially, also, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s also cost. Yeah, So, as you know, right, there’s a period of time where the diagnosis is uncertain, and then there’s a period of time where the treatment is uncertain, right? So, for bipolar depression, the average length of time it takes to diagnose somebody with bipolar disorder from a depressive episode onset, so they come in with depression and depression’s their primary presentation, seven years until you get them.

Tim Ferriss: Geez.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Right?

Tim Ferriss: It’s wild.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Right? And then, that’s just to get to that point. Now you’re on the right realm of medications or whatever. Now you’re talking about, in year seven, you’re having to spend whatever it is, like three, five, seven more years trying to find a solution. So you could go from being 25 years old and having this be your first depressive episode, and you’re still trying to figure out what you’re going to do about it at 40, and you see these patients.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m just imagining you’re reaching into a dark closet and there’s what you think is a screw head, and you’re just trying different tools, but you’re not allowed to touch the screw head.

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s it.

Tim Ferriss: Versus let’s flip on the light, take a photograph, and then go find the appropriate tool for the job. Just a couple of follow-ups, the numbers that you’re mentioning, the remission rates, the people who pass through, so to speak, how does that compare to frontline conventional treatments right now?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah so I mean, oral antidepressants, so there’s a study called STAR*D, it’s been an interesting year for STAR*D in the sense that some people have reanalyzed that data and there’s open questions about what the percentages are as far as what percentage of people make it to a remitted state after going through this algorithm. But, essentially, STAR*D started with a pretty low side effect burden, oral antidepressants, citalopram, and then transited through higher risks like SNRIs and psychotherapy and lots of other.

Tim Ferriss: What’s the trade name for escitalopram? Do you know what people would know it as?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Lexapro.

Tim Ferriss: Lexapro. Got it.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. And citalopram, Celexa. So those drugs, and then you go to SNRIs, like Effexor, venlafaxine, and then into the tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. And so people would go through this algorithm and then they’d pop out on the other end after five or six or seven different treatments. And then they’d ask the question of, after people go through all of this, what’s their remission rate? So that number’s kind of been called into question, but essentially when you get into med four, which is roughly where insurance used to start to pay for TM, conventional TMS, conventional TMS would beat that pretty well, almost double, compared to you’re talking about lithium or thyroid hormone, things like that. When you start getting into that step, and conventional TMS would beat that.

When you get to those next even more severe steps, you start to lose efficacy with conventional TMS. So you go from a remission rate of around 30 percent with conventional TMS down to about 16 percent when you get into the higher treatment resistance levels. That’s the levels that we ran our trials on, which really that where people normally get about 16 percent remission with conventional TMS. That’s where we were seeing those numbers.

Tim Ferriss: Could you just repeat those numbers where you’re seeing what numbers?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. So in our open-label trial, 90 percent in our randomized control trial, depending upon how you look at it’s in the 50, 60 percent at each time point or 79 percent if you’re asking did people transit through remission at any point.

Tim Ferriss: Versus 16 percent.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Versus 16 percent.

Tim Ferriss: And this wasn’t a head-to-head.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s not a head-to-head thing.

Tim Ferriss: But just so people have some means of comparison. And in terms of pharmaceutical interventions at that point?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Very low. I mean, you’re talking about sub-ten percent efficacy. This is around where electroconvulsive therapy is thought about, this kind of therapeutic seizure thing we were talking about earlier. That’s got about a 48 percent remission rate, but it’s not fast either, and you definitely can’t work the day you get it. And there’s this autobiographical memory thing, so you’re talking about a conventional TMS, like a one- to two-month commitment, and then quite a bit of risk for side effects there.

You’ve got ketamine, which produces about a 30 percent spot remission rate with a single infusion, and that goes up as you administer more ketamine treatments with the IV ketamine forms. But as you go from a single infusion to what they did in this New England Journal paper that was published a couple of months ago, like six treatments over a couple of weeks, it starts to accumulate more time. And so we’re able to, from my standpoint, we’re able to get the most bang for your buck the quickest and with the least kind of interruption, and I think people’s ability to do stuff during that time. But there are other things, ketamine, psilocybin, and other psychedelic drugs that I think you’ve thought about and talked about on this show before that are also coming over the next couple of years.

Tim Ferriss: A few follow up comments and questions. You mentioned a number of things, borderline personality disorder, bipolar as two examples. Part of the reason that I’m so interested in neuromodulation right now, accelerated TMS in particular, although I’m also interested in other things that I know less about like focused ultrasound and so on, which we might get into if we have time, is that many of the conditions that would be screened out there would be exclusionary criteria in, say, a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy trial —

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — are eligible for this type of treatment.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Which is incredibly interesting. There are people also who might have something that is more common, extreme hypertension, some type of ocular issue where, physiologically, psilocybin shouldn’t technically pose a risk, but if they have a lot of panic, rapid heart rate, etc, there might be complications, right? Elderly patients, etc. So part of the reason this entire realm of treatment possibilities with neuromodulation is interesting is because these tools could be available to people who would not be good candidates for some of these other things that you’re mentioning.

What I’d love to ask you about, because this has been one of the questions that has just stuck in my head, is the topic of delayed remission.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Having these patients, I can’t remember the number, I was looking at some of the charts, maybe it was three or four people out of N-of-16, I can’t recall.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, there we go. Who had this remission at week four.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Or something like that. How do you explain this and why is it older patients or does it seem to be older patients, and how do you relate it to a few things? So, in the case of, say, SSRIs, some folks also have this, a lot of people, delayed onset of benefits.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then you have ketamine, this is going to be a bit of a sloppy question, but I’m sure you can clean it up for me. Then you have ketamine, which is very rapid-acting, and I have heard, I do not have the credibility or the means of parsing all of this. Okay, well, ketamine acts directly on NMDA receptors. Seems like maybe SSRIs do that, but in a very indirect way, and that explains the delayed benefits in some patients. Don’t know if that’s true or not. Don’t know if I’m even wording that correctly.

How do you tie this to or not the delayed remission? Because I’m just like, how does that even work, right? I’m like, okay, if you put a drug in someone’s head and it triggers a cascade or maybe it triggers some type of exceptional neuroplasticity that then shows the fruits of that at weeks, whatever, two, three, four. But I just cannot figure out, I can’t come up with, I haven’t been able to figure out a plausible mechanism for the accelerated TMS and that delayed remission. How do you think about that? Even if it’s speculation.

Dr. Nolan Williams: And it would be speculation, but I think, so we’ve only seen in older adults, we know that the brain plasticity in older adults goes down as a generality. And there are lots of metrics about why folks think that. As you talked about earlier, it’s cramming for a test, you’re actually sending a memory signal into the brain. So the stimulation pattern you’re sending into the brain, this kind of Morse code is really a “Turn on, stay on, remember to stay on” memory signal that’s going into the brain. You’re just basically taking the hippocampus, the part of the brain that’s involved in memory and that signaling that comes out of there, and you’re playing that back through the prefrontal cortex in a way to try to tell the prefrontal cortex to “Turn on, stay on, and remember to stay on.”

I think part of what’s going on is, because that older brain is a little less likely to have flexibility/plasticity, it takes some time for the signal to fully lay its tracks into the brain. We don’t have any sort of biology to back that up yet, but what we’re doing right now, we haven’t analyzed this data yet, is we’re actually scanning people every single day and we’re scanning people multiple times out to the month. NIH funded one —

Tim Ferriss: By scanning you mean fMRI?

Dr. Nolan Williams: fMRI scanning. Yeah, yeah. So we’re actually getting 10 scans spread out over —

Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot of coffin time.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s a lot. Yeah, yeah. People have been very cool about this. And so we’ve been able to with that, we think that we’re going to be able to potentially spell some of this out. Why are these delayed remitters happening? But my suspicion is that it’s probably a plasticity related issue. Interestingly, ketamine and TMS may have more in common with each other than one would initially think. A lot of the TMS effects are probably, in part, glutamate-related, as is ketamine. And then as we talked about earlier, there’s an endogenous opioid release from TMS. We’ve done some work with opioid-related mechanisms in ketamine.

There’s probably a confluence of not one neurotransmitter system, but an orchestra of neurotransmitter systems that are being affected across these interventions. It’s my suspicion that that’s probably what needs to happen in order for these treatments to be effective. And our old views on this kind of chemical imbalance sort of 1990s view of one neurotransmitter, one neurotransmitter receptor sort of problem in the brain is way too simplistic and that it’s probably a lot more complicated, as one would imagine, a lot more complicated than that.

Tim Ferriss: Outside of accelerated TMS, if you’re looking out, say, over the next five years for rapid-acting, potentially durable antidepressant effects, what other tools or molecules or treatments are most interesting to you?

Dr. Nolan Williams: We have a paper coming out soon in Nature Medicine on looking at at ibogaine as a potential treatment for, in this case for military traumatic brain injury, but a lot of these folks had depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and PTSD. It was an interesting, that was another interesting story, so I was approached back in 2018 by a professor, a senior professor at Stanford who was tapped by some folks to kind of find somebody who’d be willing to partner with a non-profit called VETS at the time who were sending, and I think you’ve interacted with Amber and Marcus Capone a little bit.

Tim Ferriss: I have, yeah, I interviewed Rick Perry and Rick Doblin two years ago at their Veterans Day fundraiser.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I was there, I remember. That was an interesting one, yeah.

We partnered up with them and I had to again, go to the Stanford IRB and ask them for another edgy — and you have to give the Stanford IRB credit.

Tim Ferriss: Could you just spell out IRB?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Oh, sorry. Institutional Review Board. It’s the entity that reviews all research protocols at institutions. This is the kind of governing body that’s in place that’s been around for about a hundred years that essentially is a non-conflicted, uninvolved group of senior professors that look at your proposed research and then determine if it’s ethical and safe and answering the questions that you think you’re going to answer. And so just going to them to talk through doing accelerated TMS and saying we were able to talk to them about doing a study where people would come to Stanford, knowing in the IRB, knowingly agree to them, then going down to Mexico to take an illegal-in-the-US root bark extract that’s been utilized for millennia in the country of Gabon and related areas in central West Africa. As you can imagine, this was not a quick turnaround, nor should it have been for the IRB in the sense that I had to convince them this was science worth doing.

Tim Ferriss: At that time though, is it fair to say you’re the TMS guy, or was it in the air that you also had an interest in exploring something like an iboga or an ibogaine?

Dr. Nolan Williams: People knew that I was very open-minded to things. I’m a pragmatist, right? I mean, for me, the patient’s the most important thing. I have this view of psychiatry that it’s going to look like in-patient cardiology in 20 years where we’re going to use drugs, we’re going to use devices, we’re going to be able to figure out what the best thing is for that patient. To your point, some of these things are good for different problems. I think that was known that I was open to that. We’d just been running this ketamine mechanism trial, so I was tapped to look at this and a couple other people too.

I found out later they’d gone to, like, a lot of people. Apparently, I was the only person that was willing to do this trial. I felt kind of special back then, and then later realized —

Tim Ferriss: “Oh, wait a second, I was on The Bachelorette and I didn’t even realize.”

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I was on The Bachelorette and I didn’t realize it. Essentially, yeah, and The Bachelorette was a tricky one. We ended up reluctantly agreeing to this. Admittedly I almost pulled out a couple of times because ibogaine has this street knowledge, and academic knowledge, that it has a death risk. Right, it has a one, roughly one-in-300 risk of death from Torsade de pointes. This arrhythmia, fatal arrhythmia that can happen with certain cardiac-acting drugs, and it works through this, what they call HRG potassium channel. Other things do this or like FDA cleared like cancer drugs and arrhythmia drugs, that’ll do it too, so it’s not —

In context, it’s like something that happens with lots of different drugs that we use. But I think there was somewhat of a stigma and a bias around particularly an addiction drug. Folks had been trying to get this through the FDA and NIH and whatnot in the ’90s, Howard Lotsof and others, and it was a very complicated drug. And I’d known about it since residency. I’d read about it. I thought that it was like, “Wow, this is the most promising anti-addiction drug on the planet.” But I’d thought it was completely unstudiable, and I kept doing my other stuff.

Tim Ferriss: At that point, how did you come across ibogaine? Where did you find it?

Dr. Nolan Williams: In 2012, 2010, you know, I think —

Tim Ferriss: Would this have been early Deborah Mash stuff or?

Dr. Nolan Williams: No, no. I come across this book Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck.

Tim Ferriss: Pinchbeck.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Yeah. He was a big, I think he wrote for The New Yorker or something, and I was stuck. I was going kite surfing in South America and I was stuck in the San Salvador airport and there was five English-speaking books or something. I picked this book up in the airport.

Tim Ferriss: What? That was in the San Salvador airport?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Randomly, right? I got a hold of this book and read it waiting on my flight, which was like eight hours delayed to get to Peru. And so essentially, yeah, he just lays the whole thing out. It was very interesting. He talks about his own personal experience of it, and then I read a lot about it. And there was some work that folks like Ken Alper and others had published on the case report level outcomes, but then also the cardiac problems. So then I figured it was kind of unstudiable.

And then, yeah, in 2018 I was approached and was asked to do this trial. And so we went to the IRB, spent a year back and forth, and right when they were about to, they approved it, COVID hit. So we were actually supposed to start when COVID happened, and it paused the whole thing. It took a while to get it back online, but it was actually the quickest recruiting study I’ve ever run. We got 30 people done in eight months.

Tim Ferriss: Now is that because of the category of potential death of despair? I mean, is it because of the patient population? Were you dealing with addicts?

Dr. Nolan Williams: So the patient population was, and that was the unique part about this, it was veterans with traumatic brain injury, some of which were alcohol use disorders, so we used to call alcoholism, but more than a third, I think 13 or 14 people out of the 30. But everybody had TBI, a lot of them, most of them had depression, most of them had PTSD. We were running this trial, I put my best neuropsychology postdoc on it and a couple other superstars, and it was running in the background and I was like, we’ll get this into a pretty good journal or whatever, thinking we’d see some people get better, some not, whatever.

I remember I was asked to give a talk about it at a very prestigious university and asked the postdocs, we just wrapped up the immediate post and asked the postdocs to put the data together and we have data to present for them. They showed me the clinical outcomes, and I was completely blown away. It was way better than I think we anticipated, very consistent improvements in basically everybody. Some people would lose it before the month, but most people held it and they’re holding it out to a year now. I was floored. I actually told them to delete all the code and start the analysis over. They had to have done something wrong in the math, which is always fun. The postdoc always, they kind of say yes, and look at you, “You just ruined my weekend.” And so we did it again and it was the same exact findings. So I was wrong, they were right, they had done it the first time, essentially really, really striking. And like I said, by the time this will come out, Nature Medicine will have published this.

Tim Ferriss: Somewhat prestigious.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Somewhat! Top five biomedical journals in the world.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like being nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, I mean, scientifically speaking, right? It’s up there.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s up there. It’s a nice deal. It was very surprising that, for me, that they were going to be open to publishing an open-label paper, which historically you’re going to publish in that kind of a journal, like a randomized trial.

Tim Ferriss: Just for clarity’s sake, for folks listening, so open-label means no placebo control, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And also to just rewind for a second, I want to mention to people that for accelerated TMS, how do you know it’s not placebo effect? You mentioned the control group, but that’s a sham treatment. You’re basically, people feel like they’re getting a treatment, but they’re not actually getting the proper treatment.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, in that case, you want to ask a blind guess. And that’s actually been a big — so I was going to get into here a big problem with a lot of the psychedelic trials and why there’s a lot of criticism for a lot of the psychedelic trials is that they kind of know that the blind guess is going to be highly skewed. So there was one trial where they did psilocybin for alcohol use disorder. I think it was like 99 percent correct blind guess rating, so the P value was highly significant. In our same studies, to my great surprise, our blind guess was chance.

Tim Ferriss: Could you explain what do you mean by blind guess?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Mr. Smith, who —

Tim Ferriss: These are the experimenters. Trying to guess who is in which group.

Dr. Nolan Williams: This is the patients trying to guess what they got.

Tim Ferriss: I see.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. “So, Mr. Smith, you just wrapped up your treatment, which treatment did you get: active or sham, what’s your confidence…”

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Dr. Nolan Williams: “…in what you got? And so what we found, which is really interesting for SAINT, was that I didn’t know what people got, but I talked to some of these people and I heard some of this. So it was really interesting. Patients who’d gotten totally better and they’d say things like, “Yeah, I just got lucky with placebo this time,” they ended up getting active. And then the folks that didn’t get any better, that they got sham, would say things like, “I’m not even good enough to respond to the active treatments.” So it was confusing enough for them where they were making the wrong guess 50 percent of the time, which is what you’re looking for, is about 50 percent error rate. And it’s a coin toss.

Tim Ferriss: Sidebar on that, I know this is very kind of staccato the way that I’m trying to hold this conversation, but having gone through two weeks, different hardware, different practitioners, etc., and having had a lot of conversations with technicians and so on, it also seems like for some people it takes a while for their narrative to catch up with the hardware upgrade. In the sense that they say, “Well, maybe I got lucky,” or “Maybe I don’t really feel that much,” and yet their assessments are improving and/or their significant others see dramatic changes, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s true. That’s not specifically a TMS effect, or a SAINT effect, or accelerated TMS effect. That’s true, I think, for a lot of treatments you see that, I mean, I’ve had calls in since our data’s been out on ibogaine where I’ve had people call me and say, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so, they look amazing.” And they’re not, they don’t think they’re any better. And so I think you can see it across the board, psychedelics, neuro mod. There’s a certain problem called alexithymia in about 25 percent of people with treatment-resistant depression.

Tim Ferriss: Alexythymia.

Dr. Nolan Williams: And so “A” meaning without, “Lex” meaning the ability to describe, “Thymia” mood. And so they can’t really describe their mood, and so they have an inability to accurately rate their mood. And the way you know that is —

Tim Ferriss: Alexithymia. I’m going to use that at a fancy cocktail party, so, “Tim, how are you doing?” “Sorry, got alexithymia” “Oh, sorry. You may better know that as ‘Difficulty to describe mood.'”

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s all right. Sorry, I’ll try to back off on the medical jargon.

Tim Ferriss: No, I like it. I’m learning all sorts of words.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it’s an interesting term and it’s an interesting phenomenon. You see this in psychiatric conditions. People just have a, if you ask them very specific questions, “Well, when’s the last time you’ve been sad or thought about anything negative?” “Oh, it’s been a week or two.” “Are you depressed?” “Yes.” “Well, why do you know that?” “I don’t know.” They just don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: It’s also like a self-reporting problem too, I think in some cases, right? It’s like if you ask someone, “How many calories did you eat yesterday?” Most people would be off by 30 to 60 percent or something, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s right. I think what, the remedy for that is that you have a clinician rater, and the clinician rater asks these really, really pointed, very detailed questions, and then the patient’s able to answer, and then it’s a formula to calculate what that mood rating is, in that case. Sometimes it’s just off from what their perception is, but when their kind of meta perception of the whole thing. But when you get down to the brass tacks, they’re answering right, and so we’ve seen that and that’s been true across these problems and there’s ways of constructing trials to deal with that. But yeah, we’ve seen that with psychedelics as well.

So we went after military TBI and yeah, we were just really surprised. And one of the biggest —

Tim Ferriss: And these were all special operations?

Dr. Nolan Williams: They were basically all Army Rangers, Navy SEAL, former Army Rangers, former Navy SEALs. There’s been a big cohort of these folks that have gone down, I mean, some people in Congress have gone down and done this and have spoken about it publicly. I mean, it’s this National Defense Authorization Act, the NDA, I think has just went through the Senate and the House both approved it yesterday and it’s going to Biden. So to earmark money for ibogaine for trials, which is pretty cool.

The military community and some of the government is pretty aware that this is a possibility. There’s been a lot of advocacy that Amber and Marcus have been involved in. My hope is that coming out of a journal like Nature Medicine that really kind of validates what we were seeing and puts some context to what we observed and what we found in our study, will help to spur more funding and more focus. I think the veteran psychedelic angle is an important one for a lot of ethical moral reasons and a lot of —

Tim Ferriss: Stuff like a political immunity bracelet, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s right. That one.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a very important subpopulation and it’s very fortunate that it aligns with driving forward the research around these therapeutic tools.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it was super cool to work with those guys.

Tim Ferriss: And this was a monotherapy in the sense that it was just ibogaine. I know that at least in many places in Mexico, they sometimes combine it. Well, they don’t combine it, but they sequence it with 5-MeO-DMT at the tail end. Was this ibogaine alone?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it was ibogaine alone, and then we had folks come back later to do the 5-MeO outside of this month follow-up period. But the data that we’re publishing in Nature Medicine is just the ibogaine effect. It was tricky to divorce those two together because that’s what’s been going on, as you know, in Mexico quite a bit. All the acute out to the one-month effects are all ibogaine, direct ibogaine effects, and it’s super cool.

And the thing that I found really interesting about this drug is that it produces what I think is probably the most stereotyped trip, if you want to call it, or the psychological phenomenon that happens alongside the drug effects. People will describe this earlier life, autobiographical replaying of emotionally salient memories that are kind of epoched in time.

Tim Ferriss: Some people call it life review, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Life review or slideshow. Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting, everybody’s kind of got a different version of what the slideshow ends up playing out to be like for them. Some people would say, I found myself in this room and it was on my TV from childhood, and all of a sudden it was playing all these things, or I found myself in a hall of mirrors and it was playing all these things. So kind of like the context can be very different, the mind seems to shape that, but the actual replay seems to be pretty stereotyped.

Tim Ferriss: Stereotyped, meaning like it’s a pattern that repeats or it is just like a common characteristic.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s a common characteristic, and it’s closed-eye only. It’s not open eyes, it’s not for a lot of people. The ibogaine experience is kind of really around this part, this kind of replay part that happens. And from what I have heard, there’s kind of a cathartic re-evaluation of these memories, and interestingly, an ability to not only have insights into your own reasons, which may have been good or bad for feeling or behaving or doing whatever it was, but also reasons for they have some insight and the reasons for the other, which, to me, is the hardest thing to explain. It’s almost like you knew it the whole time.

Tim Ferriss: Can you say it one more time? Say the last part again?

Dr. Nolan Williams: When people have this slideshow or life review, they seem to have it as a third-party person in the experience. What is this Christmas Carol, Scrooge, or whatever, when they go back, they go back in life and you see —

Tim Ferriss: You become the observer of your own past experience.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Right? It’s kind of like that. Scrooge goes back and sees himself as a kid. He sees himself as when he broke up with his significant, all that stuff. It’s almost like that, like you’re having a similar sort of thing where I’ve used the analogy of Tom Cruise in Minority Report, where you’re able to go back and see these events. And what’s so fascinating, and why I’ve said, and I continue to say I think this is the most sophisticated drug on the planet, is that I think that there’s nothing else that can seem to do this, right, where you have these experiences where you’re able to hold this neutral place, and you’re able to have this sense of where you were and why you did what you did. And you have this sense of the other, and you’re able to, I don’t know, intuit, empathize, I don’t know what that is, you somehow stored it at the time and you weren’t able to fully access it and you’re able to access it, whatever that is. Being able to forgive or to forget or to understand this person’s position as well as your own, and then seemingly unlock the lock on both sides and then kind of dissolve the problem. And people will say, they kind of would work through all of this. And there’s one veteran would say, “Well, I went through all this military stuff, and at the back of the room it was my early childhood trauma.” And so this idea that, at the core of it, for a lot of this ends up being a childhood trauma thing that’s kind of buried below all of it.

And really being able to actually both access that in a way that you can understand that, in many cases, the traumatizer was themselves traumatized and that it’s a pattern of trauma and the ability to kind of resolve it by understanding and this kind of more meta empathic viewpoint. And so that’s where I think the tool’s really going to be important is this ability to have what seems to be a pretty profound or atrophic effect. We were able to see disability improvements from traumatic brain injury, but also this pretty pronounced cathartic reevaluation of past life problematic memories.

Tim Ferriss: All right. As I’m wont to do, let me hop in with just a few comments that we can bounce around if we want and then a whole bunch of questions. So the first comment is with the special operations vets who are friends of mine, what I’ve observed, maybe similar to what you’re describing, that is, part of what has contributed to them being extremely high performers in these high-stress environments is their ability to tightly compartmentalize, which they developed when they were traumatized as kids.

Super high overlap, incredibly high overlap. Of course, there are many other factors that contribute to them being the one person out of 10,000 who doesn’t get washed out of training, being that unbreakable in a sense. But with those friends, and look, it’s a tiny sample size, but of those friends, I wouldn’t say any of them would claim to have PTSD or moral injury, like a feeling of having done the wrong thing. But the TBI, and this is where I want to lead into a question, which is not to negate the fact that a lot of people could have, of course, meet the diagnoses for complex PTSD and so on with the TBI. What makes ibogaine different from some of these other psychedelics? And I want to say one maybe place to explore would be glial cells. Am I making this up?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Glial-derived neurotrophic factor, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Glial-derived neurotrophic factor. There we go. What makes it different in terms of mechanisms of action, therapeutic effect, compared to some molecules people might be more familiar with — psilocybin or otherwise?

Dr. Nolan Williams: The classic psychedelics, like psilocybin, as you know, primarily affect the 5-HT2A receptors. So there are 5-HT2A agonist, they produce these kind of classic psychedelic experiences from largely from that receptor you can selectively knock out 5-HT2A receptors, you can knock out the psychedelic effect. So we’ve largely thought about this class of psychedelics in that way. Ibogaine is a known neurogen, so it produces a dreamlike state. Some people call it an atypical psychedelic. We’ve elected to use this neurogen term because I think it more accurately reflects what’s going on in the trip and in the way of perceiving what it is. It does have some 5-HT2A action, but that’s probably the minority of the effect. It affects a broad range of other receptor systems. So salvia for instance, is a kappa agonist, right?

And so there’s kappa mu effects, there’s NMDA effects with ibogaine, there’s SERT effects, so serotonin effects. And then there’s this upregulation of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and GDNF, glial-derived neurotrophic factor, and both of those are profound neurotrophic factors for plasticity in the brain. The problem is this has been, psychedelics were thought of as relatively obscure 15, 20 years ago to study. Obviously that’s changed now, but ibogaine is extremely obscure. So there were a handful of studies that were performed and published in good journals over time, but it’s very limited in the data that we have so far. So it’s hard to give you some sort of definitive answer of what’s going on in the brain. And so what I can tell you is that it was a paper published, I think 15 or 20 years ago, where they took mice and they got them to self-administer alcohol. So that’s kind of a way of an addiction model or whatever, an alcohol self-administration or sucrose self-administration, sugar self-administration, it’s like a way of getting, you can put cocaine in the water and get mice to —

Tim Ferriss: Modeling addiction.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, exactly. And so if you give a mouse ibogaine, you can get them to stop self-administering alcohol. It’s interesting, we saw that in humans that stopped drinking as well in our study, or in this case, you could actually drill a small hole in the mouse’s brain, you can inject GDNF directly into the ventral tegmental area, the area that produces dopamine for more of the pleasure-seeking part of the brain. And it emulated the same effect as the ibogaine, so this GDNF effect in the dopamine system at least, and GDNF is thought to regulate dopamine neurons. And so I think that that’s probably at least a pretty strong part of it and what makes it so unique. But we don’t, I always tell people when I’m talking about this ibogaine stuff, if we gave one of the big pharma companies a hundred billion dollars and said, “Don’t just re-synthesize ibogaine, but make a drug that works like ibogaine,” or, I think even some of the classic psychedelics, but really specifically ibogaine, I think they’d have a hard time doing it because we don’t have the neuroscience to understand what’s going on there. And I think it’s because it’s not a one receptor.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not super clean in that way. It’s like promiscuous. It’s like —

Dr. Nolan Williams: People use that term “dirty drug,” I think it’s —

Tim Ferriss: It has the wrong connotation, but yeah.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: LSD is pretty kind of promiscuous.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I think promiscuous, I like to think about —

Tim Ferriss: Complex? Sophisticated?

Dr. Nolan Williams: I like to think about it like a symphony.

Tim Ferriss: There we go.

Dr. Nolan Williams: You’re interacting with these neurotransmitter systems in proportions in such a way that it produces this effect. My suspicion is that it’s probably more sophisticated than we want to attribute to, I mean maybe not you, but the scientific community wants to attribute to nature being able to pull off. But it’s this idea that maybe somehow we have this drug that just happens to work the way it works because it’s able to interact with these systems in pretty important ratios or pretty important kind of simultaneous effects. And that’s really what’s driving it. And that’s the part I’m saying it’s going to be hard to reproduce. I mean obviously Sasha Shulgin and others were able to take/emulate similar sort of 5-HT2A effects, but I don’t even think he was able to produce an ibogaine-like multi-receptor sort of symphony like this. There hasn’t really been another drug like it in this way. And so trying to think about what that is and really how to study it’s going to take a new wave of neuroscience tools to be able to capture all the effects in real time.

Tim Ferriss: I have a symphony of follow-up questions. And so I’ll give, you can choose, this is dealer’s choice, you’re the dealer. So we could go with and we will get to all these, but improving the safety profile of ibogaine, which I should also say I’ve had people reach out to me, which is always — can be very uncomfortable for me, but a friend of a very close friend, and in this particular case, someone’s sister was a heroin addict who is now homeless, acting as a prostitute, living under an overpass. And the reason I bring up all that level of detail is that for a lot of interventions in this case, ibogaine at that point, the cardiac risk or some of the risks were known. And there’s a question of is this risky? And the follow-up is compared to what? And in this particular conversation it was, well, she could die tomorrow from an OD or this and the other thing.

So I’m just kind of setting the table with that. But improving the safety profile is one question. Another, because you mentioned the cessation of, or the minimizing of the AUD, so people stopping drinking. We were also talking before recording people stopping drinking caffeine I guess, or coffee.

Dr. Nolan Williams: We saw that.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Unexpected presumably. And so my question there, which I sort of seeded because I mentioned I would want to talk about this, it’s like any overlap in terms of mechanism around how does this compare to something like Semaglutide or an Ozempic or some of the newer gen, I think Mounjaro, maybe I’m getting that wrong. And then the last one, and I’ve been wanting to ask somebody about this. So you mentioned 5-HT2A, it seems like some psychedelics exert effects also on 5-HT2B receptors. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s some data to suggest that that can — continued stimulation, agonism of that B can lead to some type of cardiac complication as well, some type of ventricular hypertrophy —

Dr. Nolan Williams: Heart valves.

Tim Ferriss: Valves. Exactly. So the question there is do you think that microdosing, for instance, which has become all the rage, could that potentially have long-term negative cardiac effects?

Dr. Nolan Williams: And not to derail too much, yeah, exactly. The FDA clearance, the FDA guidance document for psychedelics that they released actually on the last day of the psychedelic science meeting, which is really interesting, specifically has a section about this issue of cardiac valvular problems, particularly from these more classic psychedelics. The problem with ibogaine is different. The problem with ibogaine is that it interacts with hERG potassium channel. There are a number of groups, folks at Columbia, folks at UC Davis who have looked at this and their solution is to modify the molecule and to affect it in such a way that it no longer interacts with hERG.

Tim Ferriss: Do you mean noribogaine or something like that? Or is it more of a —

Dr. Nolan Williams: Noribogaine, the primary metabolite of ibogaine that goes after 2D6 is a normal part of the ibogaine process, has a similar cardiac risk profile.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, it does.

Dr. Nolan Williams: So it’s drugs that are, I think they call them like tabernanthe logs or something, but, iboga logs or something, I think is what was coined at Davis, but essentially these are drugs where they try to engineer off that interaction, which may or may not have an effect on its brain effects. I mean generally, and so I want to answer the question I’m trying to ask, and the question I’m trying to ask is, does ibogaine help with certain human illness by modifying the molecule? It’s not ibogaine anymore, it’s something else. And then you’re asking the question, is this something else help — the view is maybe it’s close enough to ibogaine to do something similar. And I’ve taken a different stance on this where I’ve basically taken the frame of how do you preserve the molecule and really lean in on the cardiac risk?

Tim Ferriss: How do you put an airbag in the car instead of redesigning the whole car?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Instead of making it 3an airborne shuttle or something, I don’t know, whatever. So it’s putting an airbag in with a high likelihood of saving the person. And so we talk about this in the article, but essentially all the patients that were treated received torsades, like IV magnesium at the start.

Tim Ferriss: What type of magnesium?

Dr. Nolan Williams: So it’s like magnesium sulfate. So it’s basically just like IV bag magnesium. And so what’s really interesting about this arrhythmia torsades that everybody’s worried about is that the treatment for it per the American Heart Association guidelines is to give IV magnesium, which is incredibly safe. And I’ve given many times for various things in the ER and you can just give it to people and you’ll eventually urinate it out or whatever. And so you can give it, get people through this risk period, and then they may be slightly hyper magnesiumic or a little high on their magnesium in their blood and they’ll go out and everything’s all good.

And there’ve been about a thousand operators that have gone down to Mexico so far. And to my knowledge, and we looked into this pretty significantly, there hasn’t been a single case of torsades. Conversely, the New Zealand study that was published a couple of years ago, they had a death out of 10 people. And so we are not doing head-to-head, I can’t tell you for sure what the deal is there, but my suspicion is that if you give, what is the treatment for the problem you’re worried about before you give the thing that can cause that problem, then it’s much more likely that you can knock out the risk or significantly reduce the risk. It’s also about doing it in a monitored bed setting. So Tikosyn, T-I-K-O-S-Y-N, is a drug that is approved for atrial fibrillation and it’s an antiarrhythmic that can be pro-arrhythmic in the same way as ibogaine and actually has more risk than ibogaine.

The rates of torsades are higher with Tikosyn, it’s approved, and it’s totally safe if you do it in a monitored cardiac bed. And so I think that we have to, if we’re, and my suspicion is if we’re going to do a study in the US with ibogaine, we’re just going to need to do it in a monitored cardiac bed with cardiologists involved. And I think if you do that, you’re good. I think the trick is between now and when in theory one could see an approval eventually from the FDA for this, you’re going to have to think about, well, not just can this place in wherever Mexico, wherever it is, provide a good pure form of ibogaine, but what’s the wraparound risk reduction there? And I think that’s what people have to think about as they think about that, taking on that level of risk. It’s not trivial risk, though. It’s a real risk. I think the reason why the veterans that we studied were so interested in going is because, as you point out, there’s a lot of risks from not doing things too.

Tim Ferriss: There’s also a lot of social proof in that community now.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And a friend will go down with their friend to sit in the same room and it’s a tight group, I mean.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s a super tight group and it’s pretty cool. And I think it’s, the reason why I did the trial ultimately was because my view was there’s no way that all these very high performing special operators are all going down to Mexico and taking this thing, which is not recreational at all, and spending a week down there dealing with this and then they’re not really getting benefit, they’re getting some sort of pure placebo effect. It just seemed unlikely to me given how treatment-resistant and how many things that these folks had done, how much time they’d spent in the VA hospital and all that good stuff. And so that’s why we did it. And what we found was enough of a consistent finding and this reversal of disability such that the, well, I can’t tell you this works because I don’t have that level of evidence on it, that the signal that this could work is really high. It’s the highest of any kind of brain-acting drug I’ve been involved in looking at.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Let’s talk about the alcohol and the caffeine. So mechanism of action, I mean, you sort of mentioned the GDNF in the animal models, the direct kind of injection. How do you think about this and does it in any way tie into what we’re seeing with some of these drugs that are, I guess designed for type two diabetics, the semaglutide and Ozempic-like drugs, but they’re having such an effect on various types of cravings that large box retailers are having to revise, sort of in a panic, their sales projections and inventory planning around snack foods and stuff. I mean, it’s wild to see the societal ripple effects.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Walmart apparently has sold less food.

Tim Ferriss: And I have friends who have been obese effectively their entire lives, never had an exercise habit, and now they’re doing pull-ups for the first time, which is again, not an endorsement because I don’t understand, and maybe nobody really quite understands exactly how these things work, but I certainly don’t, so I’m not yet there. But how do you think about this, I mean, are there any overlaps with these? Are they completely different mechanisms just presenting similarly?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s no evidence that there’s a direct overlap in mechanism just because I think the kind of CNS kind of psych addictions side of things, people are still in the like, “Is this doing something yet?” It looks like it’s doing something there, but not in any deeper than that. I think we’ll learn about that on the Ozempic drug side of things. And then ibogaine has been relatively underexplored from basic science, science and technology. And my suspicion is, is that is probably similar enough and maybe some of the same mechanisms are being enacted because what you’re finding is a similar phenomenon across both instances. We thought these were diabetes drugs and then there was a significant weight loss observed, and then we thought these were weight loss drugs and then everybody’s quitting all their other habits.

And placebo works by a phenomenon called expectancy. And as you can expect from the term, it’s expecting something. So you’re primed to think that this thing’s going to help for this reason. I’m always really clued in when you have really obscure off target, off non-expectancy phenomenon happening. So in our ibogaine trial, as you mentioned a minute ago, we had basically everybody quit drinking coffee for a period of time and none of them really went into it as most of us don’t, our coffee habit is maybe a concern.

It looks like coffee is protective against Parkinson’s and some other things, so it’s kind of a mixed bag about that, but it’s generally the thing we’re the least worried about trying to deal with, as a generality people are much more focused on dealing with being overweight or focused on their alcohol use problem, or in this case, PTSD and depression and TBI and all these other things that folks were worried about. And so when we started seeing consistent reports of people stopping their caffeine intake, it was really a signal for me. I was like, you know what? That’s really interesting.

I mean, there’s probably a bigger systemic change that’s happening. And what people will tell you, phenomenologically about this, is it puts a pause in between stimulus and response. A phenomenal, and I can’t prove this, this is just what everybody seems to come back and say it puts a period of time between when you normally have a trigger to do something and go do it and it was a habitual action and really kind of gets into this question of free will and all this stuff that people think about, where there’s a moment where instead of making the habitual action, the person finds themselves in a purely unbiased choice phenomenon.

And what people who have opiate-use disorder would say in those scenarios when they would relapse after ibogaine is they’d say, “You know what? I had something about it. I didn’t crave it. I just wanted to do it or something wanted to remember,” or whatever, but it wasn’t this habitual action. And they’d go back and they do ibogaine again after they’d gone back into the addiction and then they had all the negative consequences and they say, “You know what?”

And they got back to that choice again and they’re like, “No, it’s not worth it anymore. I’m going to go this way.” But they were able to pause and make those decisions. And it sounds like from talking to the various veterans that have gone through our study is that they’d approach things like coffee and they’d be like, “I do this, but do I need to do it?” Which is really striking actually, it’s not something that people typically tend to do. You get into all these habitual actions and your life is just made up of a lot of habitual actions and they were able to reevaluate all those habitual actions and then establish new patterns. The drug eventually is going to wear off, as all drugs eventually do, and you probably do lay down a level of habituating again. But if you could, during the period of time when your brain seems to be pretty plastic, shift and lay down new patterns that when the drug wears off assumably, you kind of lock into that new set of patterns.

And I think that’s really interesting and probably a little bit different than the Ozempics in the sense that the Ozempics seem to kind of take away from what folks will say a lot of the seeking or rewarding aspects of things with food or whatever. It’s just —

Tim Ferriss: Like cravings.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, cravings. Whereas this seems to introduce a level of choice. What would be very interesting, so you alluded to this earlier, is you take somebody who has a pretty significant addiction like this and you give them an ibogaine sort of drug and then you think about how do you use something like an Ozempic to kind of follow on with that, right? Where you’re able to gate some of it and it’s way out there. And probably not anything anybody’s going to do anytime soon, but it’s an interesting idea of these are essentially habit-affecting drugs that we haven’t had tools to really use before, which I think is pretty cool.

Tim Ferriss: And folks who want to dive deeper into this sort of reopening of, let’s call it critical windows, I mean I’m borrowing that terminology from Professor Gül Dölen, but pretty fun stuff to dig into as well, if you want to scientifically, at least for the time being, reinforce what a lot of experienced facilitators have been saying for a long time, which is the post-period matters a lot. If you’re going to have knee surgery, make sure you do your rehab. All right, let’s hop to a few other questions. One is coming back to ibogaine specifically. The two things that have been of greatest interest to me with respect to ibogaine are TBI, right, so if someone has no addiction, no PTSD, the only issue they have is some form of TBI, do you think there is a role for ibogaine so we can place hold that, there’s part two to this question, which is I’ve heard reports and I haven’t gone into the literature on this site.

I don’t know, maybe this has been explained somewhere, but I’ve certainly heard reports of opiate addicts who have seemed to indicate that ibogaine or iboga opens a window after treatment during which they do not seem to experience much in terms of withdrawal symptoms. And I want to know what the hell is going on there if that seems to be observed. So those are the two questions. Somebody who just has TBI, do you think there might be a role for an ibogaine or something like it, compared to other options, and then the seeming diminishing or disappearance of for a period of time, physical withdrawal symptoms?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it’s a little tough with the cohort that we studied because were, it was military TBI. While I understand that the PTSD diagnosis is pretty ubiquitous in the system, it’s probably true in a fair amount of folks, especially folks who’ve been exposed to a lot of combat related trauma and earlier life trauma that in our group, it seemed to be there in most of the participants, so was depression and anxiety. And so we haven’t studied a pure TBI group. And so the confound is without studying a pure TBI group that somehow had, maybe was a competitor in martial arts or something like that, right?

Tim Ferriss: Multiple concussions or whatever,

Dr. Nolan Williams: Something like that where they intended to potentially get hit in the head.

Tim Ferriss: Probably intended to hit other people in the head.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Well for sure, but intended to go into the ring knowing —

Tim Ferriss: You’re going to get hit.

Dr. Nolan Williams: That you were probably going to get hit and that it wasn’t, because the problem is in a lot of these cases, motor vehicle accidents, there’s really high rates of PTSD in those because there’s not an expectation that you’re about to get hit in the head, but there’s probably a population you could study that’s pure traumatic brain injury where —

Tim Ferriss: Like football players, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, could be football.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of reported depression, who knows? There could be a lot of other factors involved, but —

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, football players is another great example.

Tim Ferriss: Highly correlated, yeah.

Dr. Nolan Williams: And those guys know they’re going to hit their head in the game probably at some point. And so that population where it’s more of a pure TBI population, you could ask that same question that we asked in this more mixed population, which is does TBI disability improve? We saw a dramatic improvement in TBI disability at the one month mark, less actually right after it really took a while for it to work, which is —

Tim Ferriss: If you had to guess, we’re two drinks in, and I’m like, no, just give me your wild-ass guess mechanistically, what’s going on here?

Dr. Nolan Williams: I mean, it’s this symphony, right? Which is sounds kind of like maybe even hokey or a little less direct, but I just think that there’s something about interacting somehow with multiple different neurotransmitter systems at the same time that must produce this. I mean, maybe the GDNF, BDNF alone could do this. I’m not saying it can’t, but I suspect that it’s some more complex process. And the problem is we don’t have great tools to evaluate that, but sometimes nature trumps our human scientific abilities. And I think that ibogaine certainly is there in 2023, it’s like the story of scurvy. We associated eventually after a bunch of weird stuff, we eventually associated eating oranges with improvement in scurvy, but it took us another a hundred years to synthesize vitamin C. And so I think what’s so hard about this scientifically, and to get the scientific community fully on board with these ideas, is that we’re likely going to figure out this works before we have any idea on how it works.

Your second question, which is, I’m going to answer it the same way, is that we don’t, but it’s very unique to ibogaine, and you can take somebody who’s going through florid opioid withdrawals and you can have them not only have a cessation or stopping of a desire to go take more heroin or prescription opiates or whatever it is, but you can have them basically blunt or completely attenuate the physical withdrawal symptoms of withdrawing from opiate use from opiates, right? Which is diarrhea, like, headache, sweating, all this stuff that people will go through when they’re going into opiate withdrawals. And this seems to really knock that out.

It’s likely, again, that because it’s interacting with the opioid receptors, it’s interacting with the glutamate system, but it is, to my knowledge, none of the other psychedelics can do that, ketamine can’t really do that, so this is a pretty unique thing to ibogaine that it can pull this off and why I think it’s such an important drug to understand. I mean, I would argue that because of how broad ibogaine seems to work across now most of the major psychiatric diagnoses with the absence of something like schizophrenia, but anxiety, depression. There’s traumatic brain injury, multiple different addiction types. It’s going to behoove the scientific community to really break down why it does what it does over the next couple of decades, I think, and try to really back engineer what it is, but, yeah, we have no idea.

Tim Ferriss: Outside of the lab and more in the wild, what are some of the more interesting things happening related to ibogaine and iboga? I believe there’s something happening in Kentucky?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Yeah, so I’ve been down to Kentucky to testify in front of the Opiate Abatement Commission of Kentucky. It was myself along with Srini Rao from Atai, Deborah Mash, who’s the CEO of DemeRx, was at the University of Miami for a while, and Ken Alper, who was at NYU and is an academic private practice psychiatrist. And so there’s a guy by the name of Bryan Hubbard, which, he’s a very interesting guy. He’s an attorney by training who has worked in a bunch of different domains within Kentucky State government and whatnot. And he, for one reason or another, has become completely convinced that the money that ended up being some of the lawsuit money for some of the opiate overprescription that happened, particularly in Kentucky and West Virginia, but all over the country, should be utilized for novel therapeutics and not just for more of the same sort of treatments that we have available.

The conventional treatments that are available for opiate-use disorder fall under the realm of what we think about as replacement therapy. You’re replacing a higher-risk opiate with a lower-risk opiate, so that’s Suboxone, which contains buprenorphine and methadone, or opiate-blocking drugs like Naltrexone. There’s a fairly high fail rate on those drugs. Part of it is psychosocial. We put people in the right environment. You could probably drive up the rates of that. There’s also a prescription issue. You used to have to have a special FDA license to prescribe it. I used to have this thing and then recently that was knocked out. So everybody with a medical license can prescribe Suboxone. And so there’s kind of a group of drugs that can do some work on this, but there’s certainly folks that we would think about as treatment-resistant opiate-use disorder patients. And the numbers I’m not going to get into because debated or whatever, but whatever those numbers are, it’s a good chunk of folks and they don’t really have much to offer.

And so people have thought about lots of different options for them. And one of the options is brain surgery. So in West Virginia, a group of neurosurgeons are actually doing full on, so there’s a surgical form of neuromodulation called deep brain stimulation where you can actually put an implanted device into the reward system. And also kind of similar to some of these Wegovy kind of drugs, you can drive down some of the pleasure around, and this is more theoretical at this point, but opiate-use, opiates as well as there’s some data out of a couple of different studies with even weight loss for stimulating in the reward circuitry. What’s interesting is that there’s a one-in-100 risk of a head bleed from that treatment, and about a third of them end up, it ends up being a pretty significant head bleed, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Dr. Nolan Williams: And so what’s really interesting is you have no one in West Virginia organizing all these hearings about it. It’s just happening. They’re letting people do the science and all that stuff. And I don’t disagree with doing that, by the way. I think it’s a useful thing to explore, and it may be a solution for this, and this is, as we described earlier, such a high-risk phenomenon that a one-in-300 risk is not as bad.

Tim Ferriss: Is it one-in-300 or one-in-100?

Dr. Nolan Williams: One-in-100 risk of a DBS.

Tim Ferriss: Of a head bleed.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It can be a trivial, just blood on the tip of the electrode, which is asymptomatic. About a third of those people are going to be in a more, they’ll have a complication, have a real complication, and then you’ve got about a one-in-300 risk of a torsades risk with ibogaine. And so next door in Kentucky —

Tim Ferriss: Similar odds. Yeah.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. You’ve got a similar odd concern, both of which can be kind of dealt with in the hospital. I’d argue that the ibogaine risk is probably a little less actually than the DBS risk if you just kind of look at everything. And when they’re having these significant hearings, there’s a lot of opinions about this and a lot of

Tim Ferriss: Shocker!

Dr. Nolan Williams: Right? And I’m one of the few people that does all this stuff, so I can kind of, and you juxtapose this —

Tim Ferriss: That’s part of the reason why we’re having this conversation, because you bridge a bunch of interesting, often separate worlds. So anyway.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah. Yeah. So I went down there and there were a million questions about the cardiac risk and about whether or not this should be done and particularly should state funds be funding this, and there are various opinions about that. My opinion and the reason why I was willing to go down there and support the effort is there are a subpopulation of people in which Suboxone, naltrexone, and methadone don’t work, and we need to spend some money on trying to help those people.

Tim Ferriss: Also working is quote-unquote “working,” has different outcomes if you’re talking about sction therapies as well, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Anyway.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, no, I think you’re totally right. I think there’s, yeah, it’s totally, yeah, is living —

Tim Ferriss: Replacement.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, replacement. On opiates, if you’re having to do this your whole life, I mean, it’s tricky. You lose your prescription in a flight to wherever and then now you’re in a really bad place. And so this idea of instead of replacement or substitution or whatever, interruption, which is what ibogaine is going to do, and I think at some level what DBS is going to do too, it’s going to interrupt that system, that circuit that’s driving the seeking behavior and be able to reorganize the brain, such the person approaches the problem in a different way is a promise that I think everybody wants to see. I think the interesting part about this whole phenomenon down there is from the folks that are opposed to this is this view that one, the current treatments are fine or whatever, and then two, that how could it be that this extract from a root in an African country somehow be something that can do what modern humans and pharma can’t do? And it goes back to what I think is a pretty hubristic part of the human psyche, which is that I need to start the fire, I need to hammer the wheel, I need to, and I think at some level —

Tim Ferriss: The sort of “not invented here” kind of thing.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. Yeah, right? And I think the idea that somehow this just exists, it goes around the psyche in a way that doesn’t really work. And we saw this with scurvy too, right? I’ve spent a lot of time studying scurvy because I am very interested in this human phenomenon. There were people called anti-fruiters. I’m not kidding you, it’s a real term. And they were in the royal societies in the 1750s. And so we knew from 1498 that folks that were going around the Horn of Africa and going to Asia that way, they’d plant citrus trees all the way there. So we were doing this and at some point, scurvy got worse and all that. And people said, “There’s literally no way that these fruits could be the solution for this. Humans have to solve this. And actually the fruits are probably what’s making it worse.”

So James Lind ran the first clinical trial in the history of humans on scurvy and citrus fruit where he gave all these various weird concoctions like poisons, and they were trying to give people cyanide. They were trying to give people alcohol mixed with acid. This is what they, and so he randomized people on a ship with scurvy to these various things in citrus fruit. And what happened was the citrus fruit receiving people at the end of the week were taking care of everybody else, but it took another a hundred years. And I think this is meta phenomenon of people need to feel like they made it in that culture within that context that this is the latest and greatest thing. It needs to be kind of very proximal in time. It needs to be new, it’s got to be the new thing to be the solution.

And I think that’s part of what’s going on in Kentucky from my view of it. If you look at West Virginia and you just look at the actual information of what’s going on, you’d probably be more likely to cause, and I don’t think that people should, but question the brain surgery thing, if you really get down to it over the ibogaine thing, just on the risk portfolio and having to have an implanted device for the rest of your life. But nobody, there’s nothing there. And it’s because we’re making this. Western society is making this really innovative new treatment that requires a brain surgery and dah, dah, dah. And that’s totally cool from their perspective. And I think that we’ve got to, as a culture and as a scientific community, really change the way that we think about evaluating tests and particularly therapies and look at the inherent scientific complexity and not the temporal proximity and the fact that we made it or whatever, and those sorts of things that I think drive people to have these misconceptions. So yeah, Kentucky’s really interesting, and it’s really an argument about whether or not some of this money should be earmarked and whether or not it should be studied. I think both of those things are a, “Yes, we should be.” It’s the best candidate that we know about and the risks are mitigatable and similar to DBS.

Tim Ferriss: So many facets to this, like insurance reimbursement, scaling, therapists availability, or I should say more medical availability for the duration of stay that would be required with ibogaine versus, there’s so many facets to all of this in terms of, say, getting to patient 10,000, whether it’s this DBS implant surgery or ibogaine, there’s so many levels of nuance, but at the basic science level and the further research that if, I mean, who am I to say? But it seems like the cost and severity and prevalence of the problem is such that the answer is of course, yes.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Of course it’s yes. I do want to ask you about synthesis specifically, really diving in because I’m always fascinated by rate-limiting steps and also unintended consequences of using different compounds that occur in nature. But before we get there, I want to very selfishly throw a wild card question around IRBs and funding studies and getting ethical approvals because I would love to see more studies on extended fasts in humans, but to my knowledge, those basically got taken off of the table if I wanted to try to make the case and fund some science related to extended fasts in humans. Any suggestions?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I mean I think everything’s studiable if the risk benefit ratio is on the right side of things. I don’t think there’s any, I mean at least at Stanford, I think that’s the evaluation is extended fasts in normal healthy controls. That would be, but I think if you can make an argument for some sort of medical psychiatric, whatever it is, condition that you think that the benefit of doing that significantly outweighs the risk.

Tim Ferriss: I think I can make that case.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Then I think you can do it. And so it really is just that, right? It’s this ethical, and I agree with it, right? It’s this ethical justification that we’re going to be able to do more good by trying to do something like this than to do harm. I mean, if people, a study that would never go through any IRB is we’re going to randomize people to no motorcycle helmet or motorcycle helmet and have them do laps around the university. We pretty much know the answer to that question and the benefit of knowing in a randomized control trial way, the benefit of the answer to that question does not outweigh the risk at the individual patient or participant level of participating in a trial like that. So that trial would never get done. And so I think that’s the way that we have to look at it. So if you’ve got a reason, your reason is you think that there’s going to be some effect on coronary artery disease or something like that, or —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think there are a couple of different approaches I could take just in case there’s anyone listening who wants to do this. And there are extended people study fasting in animals all the time, but it’s for whatever set of reasons at some point it seems to have been taken off the table for human subjects. I mean there is research done, I want to say up until maybe the ’40s and ’50s, but then it kind of vanished. And I’m very interested in if I had to make the case, I would probably make some type of case around what Chris Palmer at Harvard and other people have called metabolic psychiatry. So to look at this almost like the accelerated TMS equivalent of a ketogenic diet for certain psychiatric conditions, because you see some incredible results, and Chris has been on the podcast with, say, ketogenic diet as applied to conditions like schizophrenia, for instance.

I mean remarkable transformations where people get off of half a dozen or dozen medications. And you, I am interested in practical solutions and especially things that are uncrowded from the perspective of scientific support, which for a while has been psychedelics, but certainly accelerated TMS. I’m agnostic when it comes to the tools and I think I’d probably make the metabolic psychiatry argument, but the fact of the matter is I also feel like it’s been so long since we applied modern tools and tracking of biomarkers and so on, everything that we have at hand now to human fasting, that may not be the argument that I would use, but certainly there is that. Okay.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: So synthesis, there’s a great piece that came out in National Geographic not too long ago by journalist named Rachel Nuwer, I think I’m getting the last name right? N-U-W-E-R. She also has a great book on MDMA and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, the history and implications that recently came out and she traveled to, I think it was Gabon, although I think there is also, I think you can also find iboga in Cameroon if I’m not mistaken.

And she went on the ground to look at all the implications of global demand for ibogaine and iboga and it’s very, very nuanced, but it seems clear, and I wrote a piece a long time ago on my blog, which was a letter to users of psychedelics, like a plea for a more ethical menu of options, something like that to just point out some of the diminishing natural supplies for say, peyote, right? Almost certainly going to go extinct, use something else, use San Pedro cactus, look at the growth cycles. Just don’t touch it unless you’re part of a culture that has this as an integral part of tradition and healing as would be the case for say, people who are in the Native American Church and so on. But iboga, ibogaine can be had in, I guess, a number of different ways. Maybe you could speak to the known options and then looking forward what some of the most interesting options are for whether it’s extraction or synthesis.

Dr. Nolan Williams: And so there’s kind of the straight extract out of the iboga tree as you’re pointing out, and that one’s probably a pretty big ethical issue because what’s happening, and I think that that National Geographic article really reflect this is that there’s such a global demand that it drives the prices up in the peoples that take ibogaine, iboga and in Gabon in surrounding countries no longer can access it because of the high cost, which is the last thing that you want to have happen. That’s the thing that everybody I think should be trying to avoid first. And so what else can you do? So another way to do this is that there’s another tree in Ghana and other places in Africa that has voacangine, the Voacanga africana tree, and it has voacangine, which is a very similar but not identical alkaloid to ibogaine. It’s actually not even a controlled substance. So voacangine is not on the controlled substances list, and it’s not as much of an issue. There’s not really a current medicinal usage of voacangine or utilization of that within those cultures that have these trees.

Tim Ferriss: It’s also more commercially cultivated, if I’m not mistaken, for maybe fragrances or something. I can’t recall the commercial use.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, and it’s pretty ubiquitous too. I mean, I’ve heard that it’s not just in Africa, it’s in some of Central and South America, and so you can extract the voacangine and then you can do this simple chemical step to get it to ibogaine. So to do a synthesis pathway of ibogaine from de novo, it’s like 26 plus steps or something like that. But this is the last step before it’s ibogaine from voacangine, and so it’s really pretty straightforward to do that, but you’re still talking about a botanical, right? You’re still talking about essentially growing a plant to derive a chemical out of the plant. So the other way to think about it is you do a full chemical synthesis and people have looked at that and tried to do it. It’s very hard to though, because ibogaine has two chiral centers, so it has the potential for four stereoisomers, and that chemistry is complicated. And so full synthesis is a tricky process.

My suspicion is that whether it be biosynthesis or straight full synthesis, but there’s got to be a way to make this that avoids trees eventually. I think it’s better for the environment. It’s going to be more scalable, is going to be something that standard pharma is going to want to see happen, to really be able to use it. But there’s still some time to get from A to B as far as that goes. So I think it’s not a done deal. It’s not completely figured out yet.

Tim Ferriss: So bridging from that, I mean, this is actually a completely separate question, but also raises some sustainability, ethical questions, 5-MeO-DMT. So five methoxy DMT. So first of all, I would really implore people, I’ll link to this in the show notes as well, read the blog post that I put together. So the 5-MeO-DMT, I mean it’s present in quite a few different plants, different nuts. Most people who have heard it in the zeitgeist to know it within the context of Bufo alvarius, there are other scientific names for this toad, the Sonoran Desert Toad. And that has turned into a huge mess in terms of cartel harvesting and over harvesting from these poor toads. It can be synthesized. There are ways to synthesize that. Hamilton Morris has beat the drum about this. To his credit, there is no, people are not going to like this, but there is no documented indigenous use of the Sonoran Desert Toad, Ken Nelson, look it up, in the ’80s, produced a pamphlet after testing God knows how many things.

Brilliant amateur biochemist. But nonetheless, it is very, very, it is interesting and appealing on a whole number of levels. A lot of people are trying to commercialize it because at least in Earth time, it is a short experience. So that’s going to 10 to 20 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes. So from a business model perspective, I understand the appeal much like I understand the appeal of the newly branded psychoplastogens, right? Psychedelics with the content/mind-altering aspects as removed as possible. We might come back to that, but my question related to this is not so much on the production side because people can read about that separately. And I think it’s important for people to read about. It’s more of practical use following IGA administration, I believe I’ve heard people describe its use on what some people call the gray day following administration. Could you speak to this, because I’m trying to discern for myself how important or critical it is from a therapeutic outcomes perspective versus being a business differentiator? Does that make sense? This is something we put a nice set of icing on top of the cake and that includes this what can often be a sublime experience, not always for people, it can be destabilizing for some folks, but in the form of 5-MeO-DMT. So what’s your take on this?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, I mean, so we specifically made sure that folks weren’t getting a second kind of confounding drug on top of the ibogaine to figure out what the ibogaine effects were in isolation. And as I described earlier, we had extremely remarkable effects in the absence of doing the 5-MeO. I think what people say about this, the 5-MeO, is that it just takes the edge, at minimum it just seems to take the edge off the gray day, which is a day that happens for not everybody that takes ibogaine, but a fair percentage of people such that there’s a name for it, where people for some reason end up having kind of a bad day in and around like day two, three, where they really have a hard time and then it goes away the next day.

Tim Ferriss: Hard time meaning depressive symptoms —

Dr. Nolan Williams: For some people.

Tim Ferriss: What is hard? Okay, what makes it hard?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Anxiety.

Tim Ferriss: Anxiety.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, like anhedonia, low motivation, sadness. I think probably what’s going on is there was a serious kind of flooding of your CNS with a whole host of effects from this drug, and then the brain’s then kind of reacting to that, and then it seems to rebound out on its own without the 5-MeO. But it sounds like, from what I’ve heard, the 5-MeO bridges people out of that, so they don’t have to really have to experience that feeling. Now the question would be, does it do something else beyond that that’s useful? And we have no idea. I suppose what we could have done, or maybe what we could do in a subsequent study is to just randomize people to getting no 5-MeO after or 5-MeO. And we could actually answer that question. Does it have an effect on the long-term? It’s hard because there’s a floor effect of just the profound improvements that we saw just from ibogaine. So you’d have to, my guess is that the statistics would tell you that you have to do a pretty large sample to be able to see something if it’s there with 5-MeO just because everybody’s flooring out just with ibogaine.

Tim Ferriss: When you say flooring out, does that mean that the amplitude of the effect is so great that, just in terms of seeing a large percentage improvement over the ibogaine, you’d need to see something great?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by flooring out?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah. So essentially we’re seeing people drop down within that normal range.

Tim Ferriss: On the assessments.

Dr. Nolan Williams: On the assessments. So you’d need to see — and people are going into the range of a score of five, six, something like that on various scales. The PTSD scales, the depression scales between the normal range, and so you’d have to zero people out with a 5-MeO, essentially. Or the other thing that it may do, which nobody knows probably, is whether or not it makes some of these folks who were, and you’ll see in the paper, there are a couple of people that relapsed at the month mark. Maybe it helps the durability on some people. It could do those things.

So I’m not saying that it doesn’t have a benefit. It would be a hard study to deal with, and I think from a purist, I want to see this go through the FDA and kind do the FDA things and see if we can get the first drug through the process. I don’t want to say it’s a distraction from a US scientific regulatory strategy standpoint, but it’s definitely something that would add complexity. So I think at the level of clinics, they’re doing this in Mexico and they have free-range to use these substances. I don’t think it’s, on the face of it, like a terrible thing to do. I think it makes sense why they’re doing it.

Tim Ferriss: Do you really think that? I guess just to push on that a little bit, I’m like, okay, so people have a hard day, but it’s known that this is a phenomenon so they could prep people for the possibility that they would experience this hard day if they’re not somehow edging into dangerous territory where they’re likely to self-harm. 5-MeO-DMT, I have some experience with it. I understand the appeal, it’s like satcitananda, et cetera, but it’s not risk-free.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Well, you’re strapping yourself to a rocket.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That is a big, big gun, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Which is not to malign anyone who is using this in a clinical setting, but it’s not risk free. I have friends who are very, very experienced psychonauts. We’re talking like a hundred plus reps with things like ayahuasca who have been pretty much even keel with their various experiments and been knocked pretty sideways for non-trivial periods of time by 5-MeO-DMT. Maybe that’s just the sample set that I’m dealing with.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, it’s an interesting — and I totally agree with you. Medicine is a discipline and a profession of risk mitigation and risk benefit ratios and everything. Anybody that would proclaim themselves to be a physician scientist that doesn’t believe that isn’t seeing it as it is. Everything that I do is some sort of risk mitigation exercise where I’m looking at this thing has these risks, but this person has these inherent risks, and how do you square all that? I think to your point, it would totally make sense if the person was in such a bad place in the grade A that you were worried about them. I think there’s a justification there.

It seems that they do have some general experience that this was helpful to getting folks out. The reality is that we’re really not going to know much of anything, and a lot of this is going to be in the realm of anecdote until we do the trials in the US and really thoroughly document everything that happens with this draw, with ibogaine, with fibromyalgia, which as you know, people are trying to put through trials and commercialize that.

So I think there’s a moment where we’ll be able to rectify all of this and figure it out. I agree with you too that I think that where MDMA may be a substance that certainly not everybody could use, but a decently broad population-based drug that a fair amount of the population that had PTSD could go after. I think that these substances are more constrained to a smaller population where the risk benefit is right for them. So absolutely, it’s a tricky moment. I think we know just enough to be dangerous in some places, and we got to get through this just enough to be dangerous moment to the we know how to not be dangerous moment as a culture and do that with the scientific process.

Tim Ferriss: Much earlier you were laying out psychiatry 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. I’d love for you to feel free to speculate, right? It’s going to be speculation, but putting aside the — I know it’s hard to do, but shepherding stuff in its simplest form, cleanest form through the FDS, etc. But what might psychiatry 4.0 look like in the sense that — for instance, something that’s on my mind, and I’ll keep it short, is as I understand it at a very primitive level, the way that some of the accelerated TMS protocols work from a hardware perspective is you’re kind hitting nodes at the exterior of the hub and triangulating in a way to hit what you’re trying to hit.

But perhaps you could use, for instance, in my conversation with Nora Volkow of NIDA, she’s talking about focused ultrasound. So maybe you use that to hit the deeper structures directly. You hit the nucleus accumbens or whatever it might be. Then related to that, if we’re talking about Freud and so on, focusing on content, and then you’ve got this sort of neurotransmitter focus, oh, it’s a serotonin issue, and then now you have the electroceutical kind of structural nuance and experimentation. But it seems like these things aren’t necessarily wrong. They’re just, at least if we’re looking at the content, the molecules incomplete.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It’s incomplete. That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: But if you talk to a lot of these guys who go through, and gals, but a lot of these operators of men who go through the ibogaine experience, they will — and maybe there’s a visibility bias because they can’t see what the hell’s going on in their head from a chemical perspective, but they can remember the content, but a lot of people attribute the therapeutic effects to much of the content. There’s reconciliation and so on. So what might psychiatry 4.0 look like?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, that’s a great question. We have a paper coming out soon where we’re actually trying to use neurostimulation to change trait hypnotizability to make people more suggestible transiently, and it’s probably an ability to zero in on specific content and manipulate that content through circuit based intervention. That’s a pure speculation, but I’ll give you an anecdotal kind of case report example. So there was a patient who got similar sort of deep brain stimulation approach that I was describing earlier that they’re looking at in West Virginia for addiction. That individual received deep brain stimulation, I think in Europe, I think for OCD. He had a normal musical taste. He listened to whatever the range of standard artists, and then he got his deep brain stimulation and he became obsessed with Johnny Cash. Totally sold all of his —

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t see that coming. All right.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, totally sold all of his other albums and listened to Johnny Cash. The batteries for the brain stimulators will wear out after time and you need a new one. It’s decently common that if the person’s doing pretty well, then they will forget to come in and then all of a sudden their battery’s dead and then they’ll have a re-emergence of symptoms. So this gentleman did. So I think it was his OCD and his OCD got worse again, and he fell out of favor with Johnny Cash and threw away all of his Johnny Cash albums and started listening to whatever he was listening to before, went in and got a battery changed. The battery was put back in.

Tim Ferriss: He’s like, “For fuck’s sake. I’ve got to go back to the shop and buy my Johnny Cash!”

Dr. Nolan Williams: That’s what he did. So just like we don’t really understand how ibogaine works, we really don’t understand what happened there. It was a very illustrative case, and I love talking about that case because it gets into this area that I think people are really worried about right now, about specific content manipulation. I don’t think we can do that. We don’t have the tools to do that. We have these broad tools that basically change the lens of the world that you look through. I can change your brain in such a way that, for some people, they’re going to see rose color glasses where they saw blue before or whatever.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like, I can give you a different set of glasses to watch the movie, but I can’t change the movie directly.

Dr. Nolan Williams: You can’t change the movie directly. My suspicion is that we’re going to edge into a world where maybe we can change the movie. That’s where it starts to get both very interesting and very ethically complicated. That story about Johnny Cash, that doctor had no intention of doing that because nobody knows how to do that. Maybe they played Johnny Cash in the OR, maybe not. They didn’t report that in the case report, but there’s no clear sense of why that happened either. Is this the first song that was playing in the hospital and he woke up and his brain, the reward system just kind of attached to it or whatever? But it’s one of these things where we’re going to get to a place of sophistication. I think we’re going to be able to do that.

What happens in medicine is, I see it is we are always redefining what’s illness. So it used to be that high blood pressure was 150 over 100 or something, and then it was 140 over 90 and then it’s 130 over 80, and now it’s 125 over 75 or whatever it is. It’s not that the illness has changed. It’s our definition of illness changed. So my suspicion is that as we have enough tools to be able to knock out these major mental illnesses, which were effectively end states, at the end of the day. We let the system go all the way to this kind of completely semi-functional end state where people have semi volition and they’re kind of stuck in these mindsets and these behaviors.

If we can figure out what that is and we have ways of intervening sooner in that process, and we have emerging tools that can help you with this sort of content targeting manipulation sort of thing, then I think you’re going to be talking about much more specific sort of interventions. That’s very sci-fi though. It’s not something that I think there’s even a hint of. I wouldn’t even know how to tell you how to do that now. Our one shot on goal is just to move around this brain trait. We do have a study with Raag Airan where we’re actually packaging ketamine into nano particles, infusing them into through an IV into the bloodstream, and then using ultrasound to open the nano particle ketamine and drop ketamine just in the cingulate, in the area that we were talking about earlier in this case, in pain patients, because it’s easy to measure pain scales and reactivity.

But what I think will be really interesting with that is if you could take that same technology and start to drop various psychedelics into specific brain regions and you can do a behavior mapping exercise, what’s necessary and sufficient to produce the clinical improvement, what’s necessary and sufficient to produce the trip. I think that’s going to be way more important than modifying the molecules, because it’s like a confound. We’re not really answering the question of does tripless ibogaine work? Because it’s not ibogaine. It’s just some other thing.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Dr. Nolan Williams: But what we really want to know is does tripless ibogaine work because we just put it in the amygdala or just into the cingulate or something like that? That in isolation isn’t sufficient to produce the trip, but it’s sufficient to produce a therapeutic effect. I think if we can pull that off, we’re going to start next year on that, that’s going to be super cool because it’s going to give us the ability to have more of these questions. You could even think about it if you had a long-acting anesthetic where you had somebody with pretty pronounced psychosis, schizophrenia symptoms coming in, and you’re able to shut down their amygdala for a couple of days with an anesthetic just in the amygdala and nowhere else.

They’re totally awake, they’re still with you, but their fear response or into the cingulate, their kind of salience of the environment response, goes down because you’re able to kind of temporarily shut it off, but you’re not having to give a whole body whole brain anesthetic where you’re putting somebody into a medical coma or something. You’re just shutting down this one area. So it’s an interesting —

Tim Ferriss: Which you could potentially do through neuromodulation and not pharmaceutical, right?

Dr. Nolan Williams: You can, but even with — so people have tried to do that with deep brain stimulation. You can actually do a jamming signal in certain areas and shut it down too. But it ends up being — and that may be the long-term solution, you’re using drugs like focal drugs to test it. It’s a commitment. It’s not something you do in an emergency, but you could in theory do this in the ER. You could take somebody that was acutely psychotic, you could put an anesthetic that could shut down that system for transiently for a couple of days, and you could get them more on board with thinking about what the long-term solution is when the fear system isn’t in place as much. All total speculation. It’s not something I have any direct data to support, but it’s definitely interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s push it into a little bit more sci-fi because it’s fun. Also a lot of things that start in sci-fi end up in sci.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Right, true.

Tim Ferriss: So to speak. You look at Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and he’s very good. There are many, many examples, but do you think you could change handedness, hand dominance?

Dr. Nolan Williams: That one would be hard. I think it’s possible to do that at childhood. We do do this in stroke. We do this constraint therapy sort of stuff where you actually constrain — if you have a big stroke where you have on one side of the brain, you have a pretty devastating stroke where people can’t move their arm and all that good stuff, or they have minimal movement of their arm and then they have an intact side, that’s totally fine. You actually constrain the intact side and force the person to use the affected side to drink water or to write or whatever. What you’re trying to do is to reorganize the neural system in such a way to where there’s more cross-functional attribution of that side. So we have some evidence there’s ways to do that.

There’s kids who need corpus callosotomies in various different, pretty significant, like, say, epilepsy surgeries when they’re really, really young, like one year old, two years old, three years old, whatever. When you look at those cases, it can lose a pretty substantial part of their brain from whatever surgery they needed to deal with their problem or if they had a trauma or whatever. They can reorganize the system to be able to reallocate resources to be able to do bilateral sort of functions. So it’s mostly that the brain gets fixed. The interesting thing about this idea of critical periods and whether or not, and maybe what ibogaine is doing and whether or not you can make a more plastic brain is this idea that if you could bring the brain to a more juvenile state, then you could probably neuro-rehab it better. That’s going to be, I think one of the questions that’ll come out of the data that we’re going to present is how far can this go?

We saw people go from mild to moderate TBI disability to not on average, which is awesome and never heard of. But if you keep pushing on that, how far could you go with something like that? That’s going to be a question that I don’t have an answer for, but at least there’s a signal there to look. That’s kind of part of what I like about the general work that I try to do is I like to be relatively disrupting and I like to be in spaces where nobody else is working. I start to not like it when everybody’s doing it. So I’m like always now, “Where am I going?” I’m always looking for the thing where nobody’s really in that space studying it. I always like it when people think — if people think it’s really weird, it’s a positive signal that I need to do it kind of thing. So I think certainly this area of using psychedelic drugs to try to treat neuro deficits is not something that a whole lot of people are really looking into right now. So it’s pretty curious and hopefully we can ask some of those questions.

Tim Ferriss: One aspect of the accelerated TMS in terms of — case reports may be too strong word — anecdotal reports that I found interesting, is it seems like some folks report increased visual acuity or color contrast. I found that very interesting for a few reasons. Number one is that it’s very commonly reported, say if you’re on lower doses or higher doses, but let’s just say low to moderate doses of certain psychedelics. It’s sort of like the dial on your HD visual perception is set forward a few clicks.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: The flowers sparkle just a little bit more. You notice details you would otherwise not notice. The reason I’m bringing this up, that raises a lot of questions, but I’m bringing that up specifically because there are athletes who have talked about the performance enhancing benefits of some types of psychedelic use. I think Aaron Rodgers would be one example of this, although I don’t want to say it’s sort of in session use. It’s I think more longer term implications. However, there are people, certainly I know athletes who have used these things to enhance their perceptual faculties, which then leads me to wonder and almost assume that neuromodulation will be used as a very hard to detect means of performance enhancement in sports.

It’s hard for me to see how that would not be the case with people who are willing to. I think there was some type of poll done at one point. It’s like, would you be willing to take a drug that would guarantee you to get a gold medal, but it would reduce your lifespan by five or 10 years? The answer for this thing could be all made up, who knows? But I remember the report supposedly indicating that the yes answer was very, very high percentage of respondents. So if they’re looking at something that has a lower risk profile and is basically going to be impossible for the world anti-doping association to track, why wouldn’t they try it?

Dr. Nolan Williams: Absolutely. I’ll tell you, we’ve had a number of patients who’ve gone through and they remitted really early, so they lost all their symptoms really early in the week. So day one or two. Then by day three, they’ve zeroed out. Then Thursday, day four or five, they’re coming in and they’re saying, “You know what?” I remember this one guy, he was like, “I was driving by the beach and I saw the sun setting or whatever it was, and I wanted to stop and, for whatever reason, just sit on the beach, and I don’t normally do that.” Then he described how he was completely present in the present moment and able to just be there and present and was watching the water for an hour. He said, “I’ve never been able to do that before, but I used to do these mindfulness courses that I couldn’t understand, and it fell a lot like that. I went and found my book and it sounded like I was having this kind of totally present mindful moment.”

I’ve had a ton of folks come back and tell me this. So if they remit really early and we keep treating them, we treat them through and they get to this kind of more — now that we’ve had folks come through for this and folks come through for psychedelic treatments, it looks like day three, four, five out of a psilocybin experiment where the person’s no longer having any trip, but they’re just calm and peaceful and pretty relaxed and present, and it’s very similar to that. So I think that you’re probably getting a similar or the same state there. I would assume a state where a lot of good performance can happen from you really are truly in this moment not thinking about the present or the future.

I’ve had a lot of folks actually offer, and at some point we need to do this, but offer various philanthropic gifts for me to run trials on athlete performance.

Tim Ferriss: I knew it. I knew it. Of course.

Dr. Nolan Williams: One of our donors said to me, “I will give you the money if you will take me and all of my group of friends.”

Tim Ferriss: All my post-finance guy triathlete friends.

Dr. Nolan Williams: It is basically that. We cycle every morning and randomize us to sham our active stimulation before we get on the bikes and look at it. He’s like, “The reason why this is good is because we make the same exact times and everybody knows their times, and can you change this?” There’s a little bit of evidence for this. It was a paper that was published a couple of years ago where they took people and taught them to do complex motor tasks like hand tasks where it’s like tap digit 1, 3, 5, 1, 3, 5, 1, 3, 5, and then interspersed it with 2, 4, 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, like that. It’s like a complex kind of multi-step finger task.

If you prime the motor learning area before you do that, you can cut the speed of acquisition in half compared to the people that had sham.

Tim Ferriss: That’s non-trivial. Seems non-trivial.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah. So it’s interesting. There’s some really early preliminary data to suggest that you could potentially improve performance with neurostim. The thing about it is that if you could pull something — if you really could have something that people have been thinking about TMS as a treatment for insomnia, others for acute anxiety. If you could come up with something that you could kind of put the brakes on a couple of different symptomatologies and you could make — maybe it’s a TMS device, maybe it’s another technology. You can make it something you could bring home, then you’d have the ability to have this kind of full service sort of process for dealing with things.

I think trying to treat depression and isolation or something like that, you’re never going to be able to scale, I think one treatment alone. But if we get to a place where we can use this for a lot of different functions and actually the hypnotizability stuff, drive people up to be able to receive information better or study better or whatever, do motor tasks better and then turn it off and flip it on to sleep mode. You had a level of more control over your brain than just your own volition. It’s your volition plus your volition to do these things, then I think it’s very interesting. It’s also very sci-fi though. We are not anywhere close to knowing we can do that yet.

Tim Ferriss: Not anywhere close. Yeah, not anywhere close yet. But fun food for thought at the very least. Nolan, one more time. Where can people find your lab online?

Dr. Nolan Williams: So it’s bsl.stanford.edu. It’s the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab.

Tim Ferriss: Great. Any other websites you’d like to point people to?

Dr. Nolan Williams: No, I think that one’s the place to go.

Tim Ferriss: That’s home base. Anything else you’d like to say before we wind to a close? Any comments? Public complaints?

Dr. Nolan Williams: No, it’s been super fun. I think you’ve definitely gotten yourself quite up to speed and kind of right in the center of a lot of the pulse of this and both on the neurostim side and the —

Tim Ferriss: Psychedelic pulse.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, yeah. So appreciate the knowledge coming in and your interests, and I appreciate the ability to have a conversation around these topics.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you for saying that. I really have enjoyed delving into this field. You’ve been incredibly helpful as a resource and a sanity check since I get all excited about things and sometimes can fly off the rails, but it’s been so much fun to engage with this burgeoning, I think hopefully soon to be dramatically expanded, field of experimentation, especially given the remission rates and the durability. The reason I first began exploring this was I saw a friend’s family completely transformed, and the before and after was just truly unbelievable. One of the most unbelievable transformations I’ve ever seen in my life. It happened quickly. I think it was about day three. Many, many failed interventions, really critical situation, lots of self — harm, and it was just like Ctrl Z undo and back to the person they used to be. It’s been durable with, I want to say, let’s call them single day boosters, maybe once a quarter or once every six months.

I think it’s now been durable, I want to say probably a year and a half, which is just phenomenal.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: So I appreciate the work you do. I appreciate you being the last man standing on the scientific bachelorette, and I suspect that’ll happen again.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, probably.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for taking the time for the conversation, man.

Dr. Nolan Williams: Yeah, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Look forward to watching what you do in the future. And for everybody listening, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes, including Nolan’s lab at tim.blog/podcast. Until next time, be a little bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself, and thanks for tuning in.

A Glimpse of the Future: Electroceuticals for 70%–90% Remission of Depression, Brain Stimulation for Sports Performance, and De-risking Ibogaine for TBI/PTSD (#714)

“What’s so hard about this scientifically, and to get the scientific community fully on board with these ideas, is that we’re likely going to figure out this works before we have any idea on how it works.”
— Dr. Nolan Williams

Welcome to a very special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, an episode that might be an example of peeking around corners and catching a glimpse of the future of mental health treatments in the next five to ten years.

My guest is Nolan Williams, MD (@NolanRyWilliams). Nolan is an associate professor within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. He has a broad background in clinical neuroscience and is triple board certified in general neurology, general psychiatry, and behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry. Themes of his work include examining spaced learning theory and neurostimulation techniques, development and mechanistic understanding of rapid-acting antidepressants, and identifying objective biomarkers that predict neuromodulation responses in treatment-resistant neuropsychiatric conditions.

We also discuss things like ibogaine that are seemingly unrelated to neuromodulation, as Nolan is very well-versed in multiple disciplines and in multiple toolkits, both pharmacological and non-invasive neuromodulatory. It’s this combination, actually, this rare Venn diagram, that makes him incredibly interesting to me.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it is very important, highly tactical, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

P.S. “Magnesium–Ibogaine Therapy in Veterans with Traumatic Brain Injuries” is now live in Nature Medicine.

Brought to you by Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega fish oil, Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Go to Nordic.com/Tim and discover why Nordic Naturals is the #1-selling omega-3 brand in the U.S. Use promo code TIM for 20% off your order of Ultimate Omega.

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I’ve suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 5 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, Pod 5 Ultra ensures you and your partner stay cool in the heat and cozy warm in the cold. Plus, it automatically tracks your sleep time, snoring, sleep stages, and HRV, all with high precision. For example, their heart rate tracking is at an incredible 99% accuracy.

Pod 5 Ultra also introduces an adjustable Base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame to add custom positions for the best sleeping experience. It also automatically reduces your snoring when detected. Add it easily to any bed. And for full coverage, you can include the Blanket, which uses the same technology as the Pod’s Cover to extend temperature regulation over your entire body.

And now, listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can get $350 off of the Pod 5 Ultra for a limited time! Click here to claim this deal and unlock your full potential through optimal sleep.

This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.

I have always admired AG1’s commitment to improving one product over many years, which is why I am excited about their latest upgrade: AG1 Next Gen. It’s the same—but improved—single-scoop, once-a-day product to support your mental clarity, immune health, and energy. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health.

Want to hear another episode that explores the frontier of ibogaine therapy? Listen to my conversation with Hamilton Morris in which we discussed Alexander Shulgin’s psychedelic research at the height of the War on Drugs, concerns about psychedelic research in the for-profit sector, how ibogaine’s usefulness for treating opioid addiction was discovered, sustainable alternatives to popularly used compounds, required reading, and much more.

[podcast-player id=”28968eba-fd27-4dcb-8edc-8485d871e9ba” src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/28968eba-fd27-4dcb-8edc-8485d871e9ba.mp3″ title=”#511: Hamilton Morris on Iboga, 5-MeO-DMT, the Power of Ritual, New Frontiers in Psychedelics, Excellent Problems to Solve, and More”]

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

24 Highlights from The Tim Ferriss Show to Make You Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise in 2024

Happy New Year!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to The Tim Ferriss Show, which will hit its 10th anniversary soon.

Below are some of my favorite TFS moments from 2023. I’m using them, and I believe you can use them, as launching points to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in 2024. I’ve thrown in a few laughs, too, as those are perhaps most important of all.

The clips below cover a wide range of topics—the very tactical and practical (exercise routines, optimizing to-do lists, building habits, goal setting), life-transforming decisions and big-picture moves (rites of passage, personal reinvention), and much more.

2024 is going to be very big! Secret plans are already in the works…

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio morsels.

Sending all the best to you and yours, and please enjoy (click on the guest’s name for the full episode):

1. Arthur Brooks explains how to create lasting satisfaction:

2. Dr. Peter Attia on his personal rules for alcohol consumption:

3. Derek Sivers goes into when and why you should stop playing “the game“ you’re playing:

4. Dr. Andrew Huberman addresses the importance of neck strength training:

5. Dr. Shirley Sahrmann recorded her exercise routine after discussing it on the podcast:

6. Sam Corcos explains his approach to getting things done (and ditching the standard to-do list approach):

7. Kevin Kelly on cultivating a strong rest ethic:

8. Atomic Habits author James Clear on how to build good habits in 2024:

9. Professor John Vervaeke on reading for personal transformation:

10. My thoughts on AI companions, and how they will reshape society (from a recent Q&A):

The Tim Ferriss Show Trancripts: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours (#713)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers over 40 percent of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, Texts, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair.

Matt is from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. He currently splits his time between Houston and San Francisco.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

[podcast-player id=”cf508207-ae64-4b92-8910-4fc641932e45″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/cf508207-ae64-4b92-8910-4fc641932e45.mp3″ title=”#713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours”]

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

Tim Ferriss: Matthew. Matty.

Matt Mullenweg: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Dr. Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg: Not a doctor. At all.

Tim Ferriss: In my heart of hearts, you’re always a doctor.

Matt Mullenweg: I think in Argentina I got an honorary degree, actually.

Tim Ferriss: Really?

Matt Mullenweg: In that country.

Tim Ferriss: I’m so jelly. Argentina. I haven’t been back in a hundred years, but we’re not here to talk about my aspirations and dreams, although, maybe.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I hope to hear some.

Tim Ferriss: Well, we’ll dive in and out. Bob and weave. For people who don’t have context on the Argentine Dr. Mullenweg, could you give people just a snapshot?

Matt Mullenweg: Sure. Matt Mullenweg, domain ma.tt, which is pretty fun.

Tim Ferriss: Excellent domain.

Matt Mullenweg: I got my domain at .TT sometimes. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, a few hours from here, in Austin. At the age of 19, I co-founded open source software called WordPress, which is a blogging content management system. Fast-forward 20 years, it’s been 20 years now, and runs over a third of all websites in the world. A few years after that, I co-founded or founded a company called Automattic, which is kind of like the for-profit side of commercializing things around WordPress.

Tim Ferriss: Auto-Matt-ic, M-A-T-T?

Matt Mullenweg: Yes. It’s like any egotistical founder, I snuck my name into the company and we started with just sort of Akismet anti-spam and wordpress.com kind of easy ways to get going with WordPress, but since have expanded to e-commerce with WooCommerce, one I’ll talk about with messaging, we’ve done a number, over 25 acquisitions, so we’re trying to be a digital Berkshire Hathaway, like a buyer of first resort for amazing things on the internet. Pretty much everything we do is open source or open web. Oh, we bought Tumblr, so we’re running Tumblr for the last few years, basically trying to — I would like future generations to grow up with a web that is more open, more free, gives more liberty, and so open source is really my life’s work, even above WordPress and anything else. I hope to work on it the rest of my life.

Tim Ferriss: You are one of the rare examples, and I’m so envious of this particular sort of mental state of focus that you have, which is this clarity on what you want to do, something you could do for the rest of your life with that degree of certainty. It’s something that’s always struck me as rare and maybe not as a consequence of being rare but precious in a sense. Anyway, I’m happy for you. I don’t run across that much from a professional perspective, when someone’s like, “I want to do this for the rest of my life.”

Matt Mullenweg: I think it’s because the open source freedom and liberty’s somewhat abstract, so there could be lots of things under that. In fact I just mentioned probably too many things. Some people will call me very unfocused, but you have that too. We talked about it on the last podcast around teaching, learning, education, lifelong — that’s the rest of your life. I think if you can find those principles, you can keep them and then the job might change, other things might change. I’m lucky to work at the same job because I’m probably unemployable anywhere else at this point, but it’s been a lot of fun. Oh, Automattic’s now over 1,900 people in 97 countries. We were fully remote and distributed since 2005, so we’ve been kind of early on a few of those trends, open source, distributed, et cetera.

Tim Ferriss: I know we’ve talked about this before and you’ve certainly talked about it in other places, but we’re going to get into a lot of new territory, before we do that though, open source, just for people who may not have familiarity with that term, what does that mean?

Matt Mullenweg: Normally when you sign up for software, you click through that license that no one ever reads. Ours actually has Easter eggs in it just to see if anyone will find them. Most of those licenses are about all the rights you don’t have. Sometimes you’re not even allowed to look at the thing and see how it works. There’s a whole right to repair movement right now where you can buy things that you’re not even allowed to repair yourself. Open source is the opposite. It’s all about almost like a bill of rights for you as the user. WordPress belongs just as much to Tim Ferriss as it does to me, which is kind of amazing. There’s rights and freedoms you have to use it for any purpose, to modify it, to see how it works, all these sorts of things that no one can take away from you.

Even myself as a co-founder, or even if all the other developers got together, and we all agreed to become evil, we couldn’t take it away from you. It’s that bill of rights, those inalienable rights is the core of open source and there’s lots of examples. Wikipedia is open source applied to an encyclopedia. It used to be really bad and Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica were way better, but then over time lots of people working together made it better and better. Why did they work on it? For free, for fun, and also because it belongs to them. WordPress has many thousands, probably tens of thousands of contributors at this point. Why do they do that? Is it Tom Sawyer painting the fence or is it the other guy?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I need more caffeine to be on my literary references.

Matt Mullenweg: We should both know that. Wow, I’m embarrassed for both of us. Tom Sawyer, and — it’ll be the first thing in the comments.

Tim Ferriss: Huckleberry Finn.

Matt Mullenweg: Huckleberry Finn, yeah. It’s because it actually belongs to people. Sometimes people come in and just fix one bug that’s annoying them. Or sometimes you have the pride of knowing that code you wrote is running on a third of all websites in the world, which is actually a real thrill as an engineer developer, and that’s just a lot of fun.

Tim Ferriss: It’s openly collaborative in that way. Not to state the obvious, but it’s a contrast to actually this news item I saw in — “news” is probably giving it a little bit too much gravitas — but I read this story which seemed credible based on the source, I’m not going to give it too much, but this engineer joins a startup and fixes one or two bugs or develops a feature that he wanted in the product and then put in notice and that was it.

Matt Mullenweg: Two weeks later, yeah. I love that story because I know so many on the spectrum of engineers that would totally do that. It’s a beautiful hack, right, where, “Oh, I’ve just got to get this fixed.” There’s actually companies I would do that. One thing I have considered is secret shopping, seeing if I could get hired by my own company under a fake identity or just something like that. It would be kind of fun.

Tim Ferriss: Why would you do that?

Matt Mullenweg: One, to experience the hiring process, which is difficult for me to debug. It’s set by secondhand accounts. Two, to see how my code still is.

Tim Ferriss: Do companies provide mystery shopper-like services for hiring processes or no, because mystery shoppers, this would be the equivalent of, say, retail where there are companies you can hire, they send people into stores to experience the touch points and the flow or lack of flow and then to report back so you can improve your operations, and you have that for security, right? You can hire people to red team and try to exploit or defeat your security and then you get a report back and you can improve things. Does that exist for something like a hiring process?

Matt Mullenweg: It probably does, but I’m a big believer in, especially executives, going and doing the work themselves. Engaging with the customers, doing customer support, trying out the product, building a website, whatever it is that your thing is. I think that’s so key.

Tim Ferriss: I might be making this up, but something along the lines of two weeks of frontline service. Even if it’s a CFO or someone who’s —

Matt Mullenweg: No matter the job you’re hired for at Automattic, you start with two weeks of support, and then every single person rotates back in one week per year, and I’m running out of year, so I’m actually squeezing mine in at the very end here.

If you go to wordpress.com support in the next two weeks, you might get me. I talked to executives at Salesforce, I was really impressed. They were saying they spend 50 percent of their time with customers. This was a top executive running an organization of thousands of people. I was like, wow, that’s inspiring to me. I’m probably 25 or 30 percent right now. So it really made me think, am I spending enough time with customers? Also, we might have some executives that are spending closer to zero percent time. How do we make this a cultural thing throughout the company?

Tim Ferriss: You’re an enthusiastic fellow. Part of why I like spending time with you. Good vibes, lots of smiles, lots of laughs. You also find a lot of things that are interesting out at the edges and you’re an immaculate packer of bags also. For those who do not know “What’s in My Bag” every year gives the latest and greatest of Matt’s tech gadgetry and assorted doodads and doohickeys that he’s traveling with as a road warrior who travels, fair to say, most of the time. Your schedule, we’re going to get to my first planned question in a second. I recall maybe it was five months ago, six months ago, who knows, you sent me something along the lines of just in case we can overlap, here’s where I’ll be in the next year, and it was one of the most absurd, it was like a Rolling Stones tour. Are you continuing to do that in terms of travel for the next year?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, currently. Why do I go into it? Well, it’s a global community, so one, I have a global company and a global community. Our hack for Automattic, because we’re apart most of the year, is the teams get together a couple times a year. If you’re an individual contributor, you might travel two, three times a year. But as CEO, this means that every week there’s a couple of meetups happening and I try to hit the bigger ones and sometimes the small ones too, but mostly the really big ones where there’s a couple hundred people there, but that’s happening at least once a month. Then for WordPress, there’s three major work camps per year that have thousands of people. There’s all these different — I just did State of the Word in Madrid. You just take those, you’re traveling a week out of the month already, and then you got to add in some fun.

Tim Ferriss: You’re not going to die of a fun deficiency, you know how to have fun.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it really adds up. But, it does take more of a toll than it used to, I’ve got to be totally honest. There were years I did well over 400,000 miles and looking back I was like, I don’t know if I still have some of the energy or I’m getting more radiation in the plane. I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting older.

Tim Ferriss: That does happen to people.

Matt Mullenweg: 40 in a few weeks.

Tim Ferriss: I know. Thank God. No more of this 30 under 30, 40 under 40 nonsense. You’ve accumulated 700 lifetimes worth of those. You mentioned gatherings and the first, I suppose, cone that we’re going to weave around on this slalom of a conversation is things that are exciting you, things you’re excited about, five or more. I enjoy this format. It’s very simple. I haven’t done it much and it’s a shame because I always have a good time doing it. Where would you like to start?

Matt Mullenweg: Well, I mentioned messaging. If you look at Automattic’s history, it was like 2005. Blogging CMS, 2016 Commerce, Blue Commerce, it’s grown to over 30 billion of sales or GMV. We entered our third major area this year, which was messaging. We acquired this company called Texts. You might remember these sorts of programs, but we all have 20 different messaging apps. Texts currently takes 10 of them. It’ll take more in the future. Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, Twitter DMs, all these sorts of things, some of which have terrible interfaces. It brings them into one power user app right now, desktop only because it’s all ultra secure so it doesn’t break any encryption or run anything in the cloud. It’s all on your device, which is I think very, very important.

Engineers, you have a code of ethics. I think we need to build things extra secure now. It brings them all together. It’s really nice. I often acquire apps or invest in things to make up for my own deficiencies. Like investing in Calm in 2012 or whatever it was, I felt like I needed to meditate. I was so behind on messages. I’m like, “Okay, we’ve got to buy this company and make it available.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a much more expensive version of the guy who gets hired and fixes the bugs and then leaves. Buying companies.

Matt Mullenweg: A small team, really, really exciting. I’d love for you to try it, actually.

Tim Ferriss: My team is using it and they love it.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s right. [BLEEP] actually told me about this even before I had heard about it myself. Some credit there.

Tim Ferriss: The team’s loving it. I have used it and it is a great product. Where can people find it or learn more about it?

Matt Mullenweg: Texts.com. T-E-X-T-S dot com.

Tim Ferriss: Texts.com. All right. Texts.com.

Matt Mullenweg: If you go on desktop and it’s a paid product right now, so 15 bucks a month, five bucks a month if you’re a student or pretend to be a student, but we’re also going to explore some different things. Mobile app is coming out next year in the early part and we’re going to explore some different pricing as well. Maybe making it free for one or two networks paid for more. That’s some very exciting stuff there.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so I want to ask you a strategy question to the extent that you can discuss it. You were kind enough to spend a lot of time with me just as a friend overall, which I really appreciate, love spending time with you, and also just because disclosures are important. I am available at your beck and call, advisor with Automattic from the early days. I am fascinated by not just how you operate in the world, but how you think about the world because that’s a prerequisite for making a lot of, not necessarily contrarian because you can be a different form of sheep as a contrarian too by just doing the opposite of what everyone else does. That’s easy. But picking and choosing where you’re going to be unorthodox or approach things obliquely is more challenging.

The question, and I’m going to set the table with some other examples, but the question is how you choose what you’re going to get into in terms of areas, products, et cetera, because there’s diversification, there’s lack of focus, there’s synergy, these words we can throw around. I would love to know how you think about, for instance, or thought about getting into commerce, which I think is a more obvious leap in my mind than say messaging. What I’ve observed is say in the media landscape, well the media landscape and the social media platform landscapes have collided in such a major way in the last five to 10 years where you have Amazon Studios, you’ve got Netflix, you’ve got messaging, and then video and so on that are seemingly all being pursued on some level by a lot of these large platforms. In the forms of, say WhatsApp or whatever it might be.

How do you choose what to engage in next? You said some people might say, “I’m unfocused,” I don’t consider you unfocused, but there are sometimes hidden or unspoken rationales or logics behind. How do you think about what you’re going to do next?

Matt Mullenweg: I do think about it for a long time. We’ve been thinking about messaging and actually making investments in this space for four or five years. I think a lot about environment and incentives. The reason there used to be these multi-messaging apps 15 years ago and they all stopped working was the networks all blocked them. There is a political environment now which I think is more conducive to being more customer and user-centric. This is our data, this is our messages, it’s all secure, it’s not breaking security or anything, so why shouldn’t we be able to run this.

Tim Ferriss: Can you give an example of a network blocking these multi-message tools in the past?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it happened last week. There was another one called Beeper that supported iMessage and Apple decided to just shut it down. They broke it all and Beeper actually charged its users. They had to refund everyone. It’s also more subtle things they could do. They could just subtly degrade if they make it so your messages don’t go through five percent of the time, it’s not blocking you, but you’re going to stop using it.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like throttling your hotel speed on Wi-Fi. So you upgrade to the premium, you’re like, “Okay, all right.”

Matt Mullenweg: They don’t need to block you, which might draw attention. They can just make you a little wobbly.

Tim Ferriss: More painful.

Matt Mullenweg: It doesn’t take a lot of friction for people to move away, especially in messaging. The regulatory framework, both with the EU doing a lot of sometimes misguided, but also sometimes really smart, they have an act coming in called the DMA that requires some interop between messaging services. We will talk about USB-C, which I’m very excited about. Thank you EU, for forcing Apple to finally drop lightning and give us USB-C. Then in the US I think there is bipartisan, this I actually don’t agree with, but it is a reality, some extra scrutiny on big tech. I think it’s actually good for them. Again, what are their incentives? I think it’s actually really good for them to show that they’re open right now. I don’t want to fight these folks. They’ve got more money than most countries. They could squash us like a bug if they really, really wanted to, but we’re always doing things open source, user-centric, and so it’s —

Tim Ferriss: It’d be a bad look for them to try to squash.

Matt Mullenweg: If you have the people on your side, I feel like that’s what truly matters in long-term. People are what, short-term, lobbying, et cetera, but long-term in the US, functioning democracy, politics is accountable to its people.

Tim Ferriss: If we come back to what you said and the whole point of this format is scaffolding, and then we can deviate. We’re deviating right now. People may have noticed. Talking about a, let’s just say next, next gen or digital Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway could have, well, originally textiles, but they could have insurance, then they could have something that is —

Matt Mullenweg: Chocolates.

Tim Ferriss: Chocolates, right? See’s Candies, things that are completely unrelated on a face-value business level. They’re not integrated in the way that a CMS or having a gajillion blogs and websites running on your platform would combine very easily with WooCommerce, right? Those two pair very nicely. Are you thinking about, say in the case of texts.com that is a standalone in the same way that some of these Berkshire Hathaway might be a standalone?

How do you think about building and acquiring in that way? Are they standalones? How much do they need to help each other or not? In the case of Berkshire, right, the insurance premiums and so on, as I understand it, provide a huge bolus of cash for all sorts of other purposes. The capital can be utilized across the family, in a sense. How do you think about, because there’s so many different ways you could rank order the priorities when looking at potential acquisitions, is it just like customer pain point, converging trend lines in terms of regulation and public sentiment and —

Matt Mullenweg: Which Berkshire navigates beautifully in highly regulated industries, including insurance, railways. How I think about it, I like to study these people. I know you love doing that too. Study high performers, that’s your thing, right?

Tim Ferriss: I do that sometimes. Yeah, occasionally do that.

Matt Mullenweg: I mean, Charlie Munger, rest in peace, 99 years old. Warren Buffett, I don’t know exactly. I think up there as well. I try to think if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were hackers in their 30s or 40s today, what would they build versus what they built in their time with the opportunities in technology afforded? I like to think they do some open source because it’s, obviously, the future. I like the Berkshire for atoms companies versus — atoms versus bits — and in the industries, they’re in —

Tim Ferriss: A-T-O-M-S.

Matt Mullenweg: I think there would be a lot of coordination costs and they try to optimize for giving the companies under them as much autonomy as possible. They find great leaders and they also try to find great businesses. I think Warren Buffett said something like, “We try to find a business a monkey could run, because someday they will,” something like that. What business is so good, it would survive even bad leadership. What we do with a digital version of that is we lower coordination costs between the different products by open source. They don’t need, like For WooCommerce, to build on top of WordPress. It doesn’t need a meeting, doesn’t need to talk, doesn’t even to know the people developing WordPress. There’s open APIs, open source, there’s a plugin framework, et cetera. That removes a lot of the coordination costs that you normally get in a multi division company.

Tim Ferriss: Now when you say coordination costs, are you talking about people internally, say, full-time employees? Or are you talking about the communities that surround some of these things?

Matt Mullenweg: In proprietary software, if you want to integrate with something, like if I wanted to add a new feature to Mac OS or something like that, I can’t do that. Now, they have APIs, they have operating systems. Smart companies like Slack or Shopify will create marketplaces that you can extend them. However, you’re subject to their terms so they can change their mind. Remember Twitter used to have all those clients, or Facebook did too. They were like, “Oh, we don’t want this anymore. You’re all kicked off.”

Tim Ferriss: Rough Tuesday.

Matt Mullenweg: Don’t build on proprietary platforms. They can pull the rug and will pull the rug at any point. In open source, one, the rug can’t be pulled. Two, typically they’re ultra pluggable. You can really change every line of WordPress.

Tim Ferriss: Not to interrupt, but would you mind giving a real world example of what this lowered integration cost looks like in practice?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. Let’s talk about a company like Salesforce, which has done a ton of acquisitions. One criticism of a Salesforce or Cisco or even Google: sometimes their own products don’t integrate with each other as well. Sometimes even external things do. So even with the best acquisitions, and most acquisitions fail by the way, even when you do a really good one, maybe say YouTube, sometimes the integrations aren’t as strong. Remember when YouTube tried to do the Google+ thing?

Tim Ferriss: I do.

Matt Mullenweg: Every single division in Google was incentivized by how much adoption Google+ got. They really tried to push it into everything. A lot of coordination costs, maybe not as responsive to users. That was ultimately an unsuccessful push. Google’s another example. All the messaging platforms they have, you need text just to work with the five messaging platforms at Google. There’s examples like that where you get duplication, you get different incentives of executives, maybe they’re more rewarded for launching new things versus integrating things. Those are coordination costs. This comes up in economics terms where why shouldn’t everyone just be a freelancer?

Well, there’s some coordination costs there. It’s nice to have people employed full-time by a company. Then you don’t need to rehire them every time. They’re not going to be poached by someone else. Maybe you have a gap in the gig and they just take another gig, that sort of thing. I feel like for us, the common platform of open source, particularly WordPress, allows us to plug things in and do acquisitions in a way that is more set up for success. We have a set of products that run directly on WordPress or get distribution from WordPress and Tumblr. That’s, I would say, our core area. There are some which are, I would call, philosophically adjacent. It’s the same philosophy. Day One is a great example. Day One doesn’t share any technology with Tumblr or WordPress, but it’s a fully encrypted local journaling app. Journaling is another word for blogging. You can use it like I do as a local blog. I posted every day for the past 200 or 300 days.

Tim Ferriss: What does “local blog” mean? To the untrained ear, they’d be like, “Wait, so I have a blog that I’m publishing on my own computer? How do people see it?”

Matt Mullenweg: Well, this is why people usually call it a journal. But when you think about it, like a “notes” app, like the Notes app, I don’t know, typically things are undated, right? The metadata associated with them is somewhat loose. Often the list is ordered by most recently modified. That’s kind of a UI. In a blog, it’s reverse chronological. We have a lot of metadata associated. Day One attaches a date, location, we can store the weather when you post it. All these different things that kind of make it a bit richer. When it’s local, we usually call it a journal, just because that’s the concept. Apple just launched a built-in journaling app.

I call it a blog because fundamentally if you kind of look at those principles, it’s got all the same ingredients as you post a blog reverse chronological. Now why do I really like it? I prefer dated entries because I’m usually taking notes each day. Kind of like Benjamin Franklin. He would log everything he does every day. I do that as well. I love the search, I love tagging, I love all those metadata things. Help me find stuff. You can also interlink the notes, which is actually pretty cool. Not unlike a Roam Research or some of these other — Obsidian. You can interlink things.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so we took a little side alley if we come back to things that you’re excited about.

Matt Mullenweg: I didn’t actually answer your question on messaging.

Tim Ferriss: You did not, yes.

Matt Mullenweg: So why messaging? It is not built on top of WordPress and it’s not part of our publishing kind of thing, but I do believe it is fundamental human right to have private and hopefully in the future, open source messaging. Again, I only want to work on things I feel like I can work on potentially the rest of my life. So publishing commerce and messaging, that covers a lot of human activity.

Tim Ferriss: It does.

Matt Mullenweg: And if you have those things truly free, I think you have a free society. And that’s also exciting to me because how do we help bend the long arc towards more freedom, more liberty across the world? And technology does that better than, I think, any sort of diplomacy or anything else that at least I could work on.

Tim Ferriss: Are there any other people or companies that stand out as being aligned or philosophically adjacent with the ethos you’re describing?

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, yeah. Well, one, there’s a lot more open source companies now. GitLab is a really great one led by Sid. They’re actually even more open than we are. They publish like everything and they’re a public company now, like nine or $10 billion. So that’s pretty cool to have those examples. I think Element, which is built on the Matrix ecosystem, so open source messaging, actually the competitor to text Beeper, really awesome company, I think philosophically very aligned.

So what’s cool is more and more of this is happening. Also, there’s a fun trend where sometimes people who did proprietary companies and then made a ton of money off them, what they do next is often open source. So Jack Dorsey made him a ton of money off Twitter, Square. One, he’s taken Square to more of a crypto direction. He wants to enable that. And two, what’s he funding? Something called Nostr and Bluesky, which are two competing open source Twitters, which is really cool. Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp. What’s he doing today? He’s running Signal, which is an open source nonprofit messaging app, which is amazing. Signal, very philosophically aligned. So Wikipedia, Mozilla, there’s a lot out there both for-profit and nonprofit.

Tim Ferriss: Based on the very little I know, and you track this type of thing much more than I do, but in terms of number of users per full-time employee pre acquisition, how would you place WhatsApp? I mean, it’s —

Matt Mullenweg: The messaging apps are tops.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: I think Instagram was a pretty good size with 13 or 14 when they sold. Telegram’s actually pretty amazing today. Signal is pretty small team. I’m not sure the size of the WhatsApp team now, but they were very, very small when they were acquired. It’s actually pretty incredible because messaging — there’s not really any user support. It’s all self-serve. And so those businesses can scale quite a bit with very few people and it also attracts really amazing engineer. The Texts team is incredible. And so their aspiration is to remain a sub-20, sub-30 team, even as they grow to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users.

Tim Ferriss: So how do you, as the buyer first resort, hopefully the aspiring buyer, first resort, Berkshire Hathaway, known as Automattic, how do you find these various companies or threads to pull on or how do those people find you?

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, people do reach out sometimes, which is always nice. But yeah, I guess fundamentally it’s usually just driven by me as a user. I’m always trying out new products, friends recommend it. My colleagues actually, of the people we employ, they tend to be very early adopters and very digitally savvy. So I mean, that’s why we launched Bitcoin in 2012 when it was $12. I wish I could say that that was me being brilliant. No, it was one of my colleagues who was like, “Oh, this thing’s so cool, we can add support.” And I think he hacked it over a weekend, and so, all right, cool.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. I’ll tell you just a quick anecdote that I haven’t mentioned really. I don’t know, I haven’t mentioned it anywhere because why would I? But you mentioned Charlie Munger, rest in peace. I was, if I’m remembering correctly, I mean I was definitely tentatively scheduled, I think it was to interview him the next Tuesday.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, my goodness.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: He had just started doing podcasts for the first time.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Matt Mullenweg: He did the one with the Collisons, right? John Patrick — or Invest Like the Best, I think.

Tim Ferriss: He did, I think it was Acquired. I can’t recall exactly.

Matt Mullenweg: But we’ll link it up. It was a really great episode.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So for people who didn’t get a chance, we’ll link to that in the show notes.

Matt Mullenweg: I appreciated that when he passed, for someone who I’ve been so obsessed with for many years, when he passed, I actually had a feeling of wow, what a life well lived and so appreciative how much he’s published over the years. So even though he hadn’t done a lot of these podcasts or modern stuff, he has been doing the meetings and speeches and other things for decades now. So you don’t always have to meet your mentors. I think you talk about that as well. Sometimes it’s really great to just have the book or the speech or something like that and it can really live with you. You can grow up with it, you can reread it over the years, like rereading Siddhartha. I know you have some things that you read. Is it Zorba the Greek?

Tim Ferriss: Zorba the Greek is spectacular. I think we might’ve been together.

Matt Mullenweg: When you found that book.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in Greece, when I found that book of all places, in Greece, in Santorini. And absolutely loved that book, yes. So that is one I go back to revisit. There are a lot of books I go back to revisit, Awareness by Anthony de Mello would be another one, very short, very fast. I’m increasingly a fan of rereading, that includes some fiction too, as you mentioned, Zorba the Greek. Any books you reread?

Matt Mullenweg: Siddhartha.

Tim Ferriss: Why? Great cover.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, just an interesting story of enlightenment and journey and it’s actually my Twitter bio is, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s a great line. Something like that, yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: I probably have it out of order, but I do them out of order too, so it works. What else do I like to reread? Essays for sure, Paul Graham.

Tim Ferriss: Which essays?

Matt Mullenweg: “Acceleration of Addictiveness” is a really good one.

Tim Ferriss: I haven’t read that one.

Matt Mullenweg: He has one on speed. He just published what I consider his magnum opus, apparently worked on it for a year. I think it’s called “How to Do Great Work” or something like that. Man, that one’s really good. That could be a book. Yeah, it’s interesting that there is authors now blogging essentially, publishing these essays like Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander, Shane Parrish, Knowledge Project. There’s these writers now that really drive a lot of folks. I mean, your WordPress blog started that genre in a lot of ways, like the longer form, like super essays.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, a thousand plus blog posts, a lot of blog posts. And it’s sometimes easy for me to forget that that was essential for the entire, I don’t know if I would call it trajectory, meandering, developing “career” that I’ve had. Without the blog, it doesn’t happen. I mean the blog was started before the first book. It continued — I mean it still continues,

But I have a question for you related to blogging actually. And then ultimately led to the podcast, but without the blog, very hard to drive people to the podcast and show notes.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So the blog was both jet fuel and bridge and connective tissue and still continues to be. I have thought a lot about next chapters for myself recently. I love doing the podcast. I plan on continuing doing the podcast. The 10th anniversary is coming up next April.

Matt Mullenweg: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: 10 years of, on average, 1.4 episodes per week every week. It’s been going for a long time.

Matt Mullenweg: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And I wasn’t the first podcaster, nor will I be the last, but 10 years is a good stretch and it’s an opportunity to pause and reflect, think about things. And when I was doing that recently, it’s the end of the year, I noticed that often I enter a game that is new. I’m not the first participant, so I’m not at the absolute cutting edge, but I’m on the sharp edge.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, yeah. Pretty early.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, pretty early. And then I stick around for a while and I focus on it with incredible enthusiasm and OCD.

Matt Mullenweg: Ridiculous intensity.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, intensity. And then it often gets a bit crowded or saturated, and then I do something else.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So that was true a bit with the blog, but it wasn’t so much that blogging got crowded, but other opportunities surfaced. And then there was the startup investing and then that was a focus from, say, 2008 to 2015. Then I took a hiatus for a while. I took a startup vacation, took a complete break from that. That was in tandem with books, took a break from the books after The 4-Hour Chef, that’s when the podcast was started, 2014. Have done that for a while. And now I’m looking at various trends, various types of collective and individual behavior. I’m like, “Okay, there’s a lot more zero-sum behavior. Things are getting very saturated, things are much more algorithmically driven now.” So you can effectively have an attention rug pull where you’re pursuing format X and all of a sudden format X becomes invisible.

That could be long-form audio. Then you get pushed to video and then you get pushed to short video, then you get pushed to clips and now you’re in reels, but you’re not appearing where you used to appear, etc, etc. And I’ve been thinking about what to do next and have posed the question to some folks, I’d be curious to get your two cents, maybe we’ll talk about it over dinner tonight is what you would find interesting for me to do next. And part of what’s baked into that is as was true with these early chapters in each of these new arenas, where do I have a particular differentiator, an ability or access or combination in some weird Venn diagram that gives me an advantage? That was true with the startups because I had the blog actually. I had the platform and the visibility through the first book, which allowed me to become an advisor with various companies and that was what enabled that as well as geographically being located in —

Matt Mullenweg: Bay Area.

Tim Ferriss: Bay Area.

Matt Mullenweg: Although some cool companies like Shopify or us, which were not really Bay Area companies.

Tim Ferriss: That’s true, that’s true. And actually a lot of my greatest hits are from, they are from outside of the Bay Area. Being in the Bay Area created a certain high level of resonance with discussion in those communities, which then extended to places like Ottawa. What I’ve been also thinking, this is getting a little long, but I really respect your opinion on all this stuff and I know you pay close attention is that the new thing isn’t always a new thing. So for instance, I was chatting, I’m not going to name him because he probably doesn’t want to be named, but I was chatting with a friend of mine and he came back to writing.

He was like, “You can write.” And he’s like, “Everyone has a TV show now, effectively.” If you want to have a podcast, you are building out a studio. And the truth of the matter is people are really good, really good. I mean there are some spectacularly well-produced, well-organized, well-researched, well-executed shows out there and it’s going to get more crowded. I mean you can use, for instance right now, you can go to ChatGPT and say, “Provide me with 10 questions in the flavor of Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll, pick your favorite podcaster, if he or she were interviewing so-and-so,” and it will spit out questions. And they are quite good. They’re not bad.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s hilarious actually.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. So if you have notes in front of you and you’re presentable on camera or via audio, now you’re a formidable competitor. The hurdles used to be a little higher, it used to be a little harder. So I’ve thought about going back to writing, it is very high labor. There’s a reason there’s so many podcasters in the sense when COVID hit, people could have all become writers. When the writer’s strike happened, people could have all become writers. Writing is really, really difficult, I think, so —

Matt Mullenweg: I’ll interject here if I can.

Tim Ferriss: Interject.

Matt Mullenweg: Also, I felt like your writing process had a lot of solitary.

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Matt Mullenweg: And what I observed as you got more into podcasting, other things is you really loved the —

Tim Ferriss: The social piece.

Matt Mullenweg: — social piece of it, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: The interpersonal, like the direct you and I sitting across from a table in a personal piece.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s more of a team doing it. Also, there’s this with the guest and —

Tim Ferriss: 100 percent.

Matt Mullenweg: — that’s actually a pretty cool element of the format.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. That’s a huge piece. You’re totally right. And I think there’s part of me that has recognized how nourishing that is for me. And I’m hesitant to go back into monk mode in the cave staring at a blank page. I don’t know, do you have any thoughts that percolate? We can certainly continue this, I’m just wondering. I mean, at the very least this is just like a confessional, which is nice.

Matt Mullenweg: No, I love that. I love psychoanalyzing Tim. It’s one of my pastimes. That is a good question. And I think how you laid out how the market changes and becomes crowded is very, very true. So the thoughts that come to mind is first, also just as your friend, I would love to see you focus on things where it’s not just outcome based. Because as you talked about this, you’re like, “What about the traffic?” Those are my outcomes. So where are there things? And I think actually podcasting is true for this, where the journey itself is very rewarding for you.

Tim Ferriss: Totally.

Matt Mullenweg: If no one listened to this, this was still a fun afternoon.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely.

Matt Mullenweg: And we’re just recording what we might do anyway, which is neat.

Tim Ferriss: Best job ever.

Matt Mullenweg: So I think that’s nice. So I would say, I think actually I find writing, although it can be unfun at the time, so rewarding afterwards.

Tim Ferriss: Type two fun.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, type two fun. And so I wonder as well if that’s — I’m not sure how much you’re writing right now. I know you did some fiction stuff and some comic stuff and so that’s interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Those questions of creativity.

Tim Ferriss: And those also, when I bleed out of nonfiction is when it gets easier for me to collaborate, which maybe is the way I go, not necessarily fiction per se, but just different formats. That would be an ability to experiment. I mean the other thing is, and I’m not going to have the right attribution, maybe it’s Neil Strauss, maybe it’s Seth Godin, but anyone who’s really been consistently productive in the sense of words on pages, the vast majority, at some point I’ve heard say, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. It’s when your standards are too high. You just need to lower your standards until you can get out of rough draft.” And I’m of course grossly generalizing, but it’s along those lines.

And so I’ve also thought, I think part of the reason that writing is so intimidating to me is I look at some of my blog posts and they’re not quite Tim Urban, God bless his soul, they’re not 50,000-word posts, but they’re long. I mean these are significant investments of time and energy. And maybe the answer is, “You know what? Just you can’t write more than four paragraphs. That’s it.”

Matt Mullenweg: Some constraints.

Tim Ferriss: Closer to, say, some of Seth’s shorter pieces. Even shorter, much shorter than Paul Graham. I’ll give a nod to Paul also. I have, I think, it’s “The Top Idea in Your Mind” that is one of his essays that I have bookmarked so it’s visible in my browser. There are others of course, I mean the “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” or “Manager’s Schedule, Maker’s Schedule,” which I think is a perennial reminder worth paying attention to. So I’ve thought about the constraints, maybe making it shorter, but I do think to underscore what you said, the social piece is a big one.

Matt Mullenweg: How do you make it social? So if I were to brainstorm about your blog, some things I’d recommend trying are like what would a really amazing comment section look like? If that were really jazzed up, maybe more like forums, maybe more like building community. You’ve experimented with events before and I think that’s actually pretty exciting. I found a lot of value because I’ve been blogging now for 20 years, and some gardening, so meaning returning to some older pieces, some of which still get traffic. And do the links work? What’s the update to it? At the top, do I link to a new thing? Does this inspire me to write a new version of this?

Tim Ferriss: That’s interesting.

Matt Mullenweg: Really lovely, actually. It feels like you’re creating a corpus, you’re creating a body of work that even the old stuff reflects some of your best today thinking and being able to return to the old Tim or when I return to the old Matt, it’s often sometimes surprising. I’m like, “Wow, I said this?” Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. Sometimes I’m like, “Ah, I was young.” But then maybe that’s a cool grist for something new.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Like, “Hey, I said this 15 years ago.” I’m like, “Wow, I’ve learned so much since then,” and maybe you’re at my 15 ago version. And here’s what changed my mind.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: I guess we have a list of things to change your mind on, community and also I think multimodal formats. It’s like you’re going to take this podcast and slice it up for TikTok, Shorts, Reels, whatever you’re putting it on. I think people don’t do that enough into blog posts.

Tim Ferriss: Tell me more. What does that mean? You mean converting things into blog posts or taking blog posts and turning them into other derivative –

Matt Mullenweg: No, I think every podcast you do has 10 to 15 blog posts worth of stuff in it.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I agree.

Matt Mullenweg: Easily.

Tim Ferriss: Easily.

Matt Mullenweg: And so —

Tim Ferriss: I just don’t want to — I mean, you’ve known me for a long time, so I’m going to start with my fears. Not all the amazing ways this could go, let me talk about all the terrible things that could happen. I guess what I want to be very cautious of is the siren song of high volume content farming.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Because I have seen people who are very good, they’re very smart, but they’re really video first, just churning out just an assembly line of hot dogs of content in every form, including text. So how would you think about quality assurance on that?

Matt Mullenweg: We’ve actually talked about this. We brainstormed a bit on your site around if you imagined Tim.blog, almost like a Wikipedia where each guest was like a topic and that could be referred to in many episodes. And so I think that might be the antidote to this, to where the content, the transcripts, everything. How this works on blogs, it’s kind of clunky right now. I think you have a post for the show and then a post for the —

Tim Ferriss: Transcript.

Matt Mullenweg: — notes script or transcript. And that should honestly be one URL, like it should be —

Tim Ferriss: It’s clunky. It’s clunky in part because it’s a lot of stuff. The show notes are very extensive.

Matt Mullenweg: They’re long.

Tim Ferriss: And then the transcripts are very extensive. So it turns into an enormous — it’s basically a book. It turns into a book length.

Matt Mullenweg: I would love if the transcript tied to a player, video and/or audio, so you can click on it and listen. You could listen and read at the same time, sort of like a karaoke scrolling through.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I use YouTube that way with transcripts.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, they have some cool features there. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Surprisingly good, surprisingly good.

Matt Mullenweg: I would love for everything to be linked, auto linked. So any time a book is mentioned, anytime an essay is mentioned, that goes to a page which pivots. I want to see every time Paul Graham’s been mentioned across all of your — how many episodes now?

Tim Ferriss: It’s close to 700.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. That’s interesting.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve been invoking Paul Graham like Candyman, Candyman, Candyman for years now. But as of yet, we have not had a podcast conversation. Maybe someday.

Matt Mullenweg: I don’t think he does that many.

Tim Ferriss: He does very few. He had a conversation with Tyler Cowen.

Matt Mullenweg: I love that one, it was hilarious.

Tim Ferriss: Which was hilarious. Which was hilarious. And I have the utmost respect for both of those guys. Tyler is also a one of a kind. He has stylistically produced a very novel and helpful show. There is no one like Tyler, he has an inimitable style.

Matt Mullenweg: The rapid-fire question.

Tim Ferriss: The rapid fire, no follow-ups.

Matt Mullenweg: Of different things, yeah, I’m kind of terrified about going on a show. He’s the reason I started blogging. He was a big influence.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, tell me, I’m not sure I knew this, tell me more.

Matt Mullenweg: Because he’s been doing Marginal Revolutions for, I think, over 20 years.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: And when I was in high school, one of the super cool things I did, you did wrestling, I did this economics competition run by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Tim Ferriss: Sexy.

Matt Mullenweg: I know. Let me tell you.

Tim Ferriss: You must have been beating the girls off with a stick.

Matt Mullenweg: Somewhat. My macroeconomic insights were not quite driving the interest I hoped for since beginning the computers and jazz and stuff. So —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: But we did this economics competition and it provided, it really opened a lot of opportunities for me. I got to go to Washington DC, meet Alan Greenspan.

Tim Ferriss: What does it mean to have an economics competition? I mean is this econometrics mathematics competition? What are we talking about?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it was an interesting format. So have you heard of the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Matt Mullenweg: So that is the committee of bank presidents and Federal Reserve leaders that come together to determine what’s called the Fed Funds Rate, which basically trickles down to be the interest rates.

Tim Ferriss: Man, I bet a lot of people would like to be in that room, wouldn’t they? Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s a pretty cool meeting.

Tim Ferriss: It must be.

Matt Mullenweg: And they’re basically —

Tim Ferriss: That’s like the Illuminati.

Matt Mullenweg: And they’ve been doing an amazing job too. Think of all the recessions we’ve avoided and all the problems they don’t have. So it was, I think Volker who said their job is to take the punch bowl away as the party starts going and by turning up the interest rates slows down the economy. So they have a lot of levers and some new ones as well. So the first 15 minutes is we would do a mock meeting. So you would be Greenspan, I’d be Ben Bernanke, like we pretend role play the different presidents and we’d read their essays and speeches and things to try to have their style or their point of view and based on data up to when the competition started. So if new economic data was released that morning, we might incorporate it into the presentation. So do 15 minutes of that. And then the second 15 minutes is they can ask you any question about economics they want.

Tim Ferriss: And do you have to still be in character or is this —

Matt Mullenweg: No, this is more that they’re quizzing you as like the five high school students. And that part was really fun because it’s a little more improvisational. I love Q and A. And Houston just weirdly ended up being one of the most competitive districts in the country. So the first year we just got creamed. By the way, I went to arts high school. So we had never won an academic competition, ever. Like, Beyoncé went there, Robert Glasper. We weren’t known for academics. But had this awesome teacher, Scott Roman, who was an economics teacher. He was like, “Hey, let’s do this.” So first year we got creamed. Second year we won Houston, won the region.

Tim Ferriss: Hold on.

Matt Mullenweg: And then —

Tim Ferriss: So second year they’re just like, “All right, we’re giving you guys all the roids. We’re giving you guys all the specialist top secret Chinese training programs.” How did you just go from getting creamed to winning in the second year?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I credit the teacher a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: It was first period, so it was the same class every morning. We all picked different newspapers like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal. We’d read them every morning. We discussed things.

Tim Ferriss: How old were you then at the time?

Matt Mullenweg: It was high school, so it’s —

Tim Ferriss: Okay, 15, 16, 17.

Matt Mullenweg: — 17, 18 probably.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Or 16, 17. He had us teach each other a lot of things and you really learn something when you have to teach it. So he’d be like, “Scott or Iram, teach about some macroeconomics concept,” and we’d rotate through that. And then a lot of practicing. We’d get together on weekends. Over the summer we went to DC as a summer program.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: But anyway, got to meet Alan Greenspan, which is pretty cool.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: The follow-up to that is the year after there was a conference hosted by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank honoring Milton Friedman. And because one of my teammates had gone to intern for the Federal Reserve — and actually maybe Mr. Roman might’ve started consulting for them or something like that. I got an invite as a kid. At this point I haven’t done WordPress, I’m just going to University of Houston, barely passing my political science major. So I got to go to this and Tyler Cowen was there, and his blog actually was one of the big — I mentioned the newspapers, I probably learned more from Marginal Revolutions than I did from Financial Times textbooks, etc. And he has textbooks and stuff. So he was there, and this is actually, I blogged about this and so it’s on my blog, a post about meeting him. And I asked him for advice and he said, “Write every day.” And I’ve basically been doing that ever since.

Tim Ferriss: That seems to have worked out.

Matt Mullenweg: And it’s kind of cool also now that I can look up this history.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m going to do a bit of follow up on this.

Matt Mullenweg: I have 14 more things I’m excited about.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know. I know, I know. We’re going to get to —

Matt Mullenweg: This format —

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to get to the other things. Maybe I have an idea for how we’re going to do that. But with the economics competitions, you said barely passing in political science. And I know you credited the teacher and said he was an excellent teacher. But what was it about the economics, the competition, the teacher or the combination that made you give so much to that versus other classes?

Matt Mullenweg: Well, at one point I got kicked off the team, which —

Tim Ferriss: You got kicked off?

Matt Mullenweg: Which was, it really worked. I get it now, the psychology of it. So I think by a lot of ways you would rank things or look at strengths I definitely should have been on this five-person team. However, as actually you experienced today, I’m not always the most timely person. This was the first class of the day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: So I was late a lot to school. And at one point this teacher kicked me off the team and I was like, “This is ridiculous. What do you mean? We’ve got to win. What’s happening?” And then he made the challenge to me. So his other thing, which was actually true, I didn’t really appreciate this until my 20s, but he was like, “You have no physical tone,” or, “You don’t…” I just thought I was a brain in a vat. It didn’t work out. And by the way, the school had no gym, we had no sports. So he was like, “To get back on the team, you need to run two miles with me,” because he was a jogger. And I think he got me a book called Body for Life or something, one of these really —

Tim Ferriss: Oh. Yeah, Bill Phillips, I think, back in the day.

Matt Mullenweg: And so that was what I had to do to get back on the team. I had two months to run these two miles or whatever and I had to show up on time. So I started showing up on time. And then we did the run. By the way, I really had not trained, but I just made it through sheer force of will because when you’re 17 you could just destroy your body anyway. And so I did that and I was back on the team. We went on to win all these competitions and everything. But that was motivating to me, the harsh consequences, getting kicked off.

Tim Ferriss: Getting kicked off.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. And also my day thing at the school was jazz saxophone. And I think music, all performances can be very rigorous. You get first, second, third, fourth chair. You get ranked, you compete. I feel like that feedback loop and also the performing, so being on stage, breath control.

Tim Ferriss: True with the competition as well, like the economics.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, you have to perform.

Tim Ferriss: You’re performing.

Matt Mullenweg: When I look back at what set me up for business later, especially at a young age, I think it was musical theater, jazz, performance, that sort of stuff was really huge.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. So the way we got here, because I’ve learned to rewind, you were saying things should all be automatically linked. Every mention of Paul Graham in the podcast and then I mentioned Candyman, Tyler Cowen, and then we ended up where we ended up. So anything else? I want to continue to brainstorm this with you just in terms and we can continue at dinner just in terms of what experiments might look like to do things differently where I am somehow well positioned doing something that cannot be replicated the next day by a thousand people. I’m interested in trying to answer that question more kind of blue ocean versus red ocean kind of stuff. But let’s come back to your list of exciting things.

Matt Mullenweg: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: And why don’t we do this?

Matt Mullenweg: We can go through some quickly too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, mention a couple, this is the process I was thinking of and then we can dig in. We can sort of swoop in.

Matt Mullenweg: This is a quick one, and I mentioned already USB-C. If you know me, you know how much I love cables.

Tim Ferriss: You love cables.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s hard for me to convey verbally how much Matt likes different kind of cables and containing the cables and organizing the cables.

Matt Mullenweg: And gifting the cables.

Tim Ferriss: And gifting.

Matt Mullenweg: I like to give someone a good cable. They think of you every time they charge up.

Tim Ferriss: It’s true. I was just using your external battery pack that you gave me for my birthday the other day and I was like, “Oh, Matt.” Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: What do you get the guy who does that has everything the coolest battery pack, because I’ve tested 20 of them. So it’s those things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know you’ve put in the mileage. All right, so USB-C,

Matt Mullenweg: Everything’s growing USB-C now. iPhone is USB-C, I’m down to, I think, one or two things in my life that are not USB-C and it’s glorious. So I’m very excited about that. I’m really excited about AI, honestly, it’s the programming of AI, like the prompt engineering, you can’t really call it programming.

Tim Ferriss: Spellcasting. Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s like casting spells. It’s ridiculous. And when you hear a good prompt like you just said, it’s like, oh, that’s so cool. And it’s kind of open source-ish in that it’s not really, I guess you could have prepared your prompts. People do, but there’s actually sites now where people buy and sell prompts.

Tim Ferriss: Which is so cool. Yeah, it’s wild.

Matt Mullenweg: So it’s kind of like a new form of programming coming online that, for me, is as exciting as when I first learned to program. It unlocks these superpowers and it’s also just fascinating the things you think would be easy like driving the cars turns out to be really hard. Stuff you thought would be really hard, like writing poetry like Shakespeare, it just kind of spits off in seconds.

Tim Ferriss: Not hard at all.

Matt Mullenweg: Turn this podcast, make it all rhyme. It could do that and that’s kind of ridiculous.

Tim Ferriss: Kind of nuts. Okay, so on the AI side, this has, of course, been a topic in the zeitgeist for a bit now a lot of people are talking about AI. You, unlike me, have some technical chops and you know how to code. I would love to know if you have any controversial, there’s no emotional valence to this, right? Or maybe uncommon thoughts around AI or questions that you’re asking, things you’re looking for that maybe are not what I would get in response from a hundred people. I wouldn’t get 50 of them telling me the same thing.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s hard. I don’t know what 50 people would tell you, but I’ll tell you one thing —

Tim Ferriss: You get the idea. I mean they would tell me probably what’s in the news cycle or in the media cycle. Even if it’s within the niche community of FinTech on Twitter, they would have those inputs.

Matt Mullenweg: I’ll tell you what I kind of hate about it, which is that it’s gotten me addicted to Twitter again, which I’d broken.

Tim Ferriss: AI?

Matt Mullenweg: AI, because there’s the folks you hear of the Sam Altmans, the Greg Brockmans, etc. And there’s just as interesting and good stuff on random anonymous Twitter accounts with an anime avatar. And so it’s a little ridiculous. A lot of the top researchers have these alts, they call them, or other accounts where they’ll share more stuff and it’s redirected a lot of my reading. I follow a lot of these. Find out stuff within hours of it happening and they link to a lot of scientific papers. So this is the area I don’t understand as well. So I’ve been reading a lot of papers and learning a lot about it.

Tim Ferriss: Is there a place where people can find a group or a list of these people or that’s a taboo, right?

Matt Mullenweg: No, no, there probably are. I don’t publish any list. I don’t use the Twitter list function or X-list function. I think Cyan Banister might. She was very early. She was a first hundred user of ChatGPT, Midjourney.

Tim Ferriss: Wow, good for her.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh she’s definitely one of these people to follow. Okay, so I’ll say Cyan Banister as someone great to follow.

Tim Ferriss: Cyan Banister, we’ll link to Cyan in the show notes.

Matt Mullenweg: And you find one of these people that are often a portal. Roon is another one. R-O-O-N.

He’s kind of famous, he also does a lot of jokes or posting. It’s also kind of funny whole community.

Tim Ferriss: What do you think will be surprising looking back three years from now? What will lead most people to think, “Holy shit! Really didn’t see that coming?”

Matt Mullenweg: Next year. So next year I think we’re having at least the 10x in the models in a way that is hard to anticipate. There’s also these new chip architectures coming out.

Tim Ferriss: Hard to predict too, not just anticipate.

Matt Mullenweg: Well I think this next turn we’re going to be able to predict a bit. I think we’re going to plateau a little bit after that. So maybe these are some controversial thoughts.

Tim Ferriss: So I think that the 10x of the models, I mean it depends on how do you define 10x? Are we talking about capabilities, are we talking about, what are they called, parameter?

Matt Mullenweg: Tokens, parameters. Yeah. Some of that’s going up a lot. How we’re learning from things is improving a lot. Some non-GPU chip architectures, which could be very, very interesting or coming online or non-transformer ways of learning that could be vastly more efficient. What I think it’ll affect every day is we’ll get small versions of this on our phones, so some really cool local and open source AI stuff. So something now people understand, but I definitely even want to predict it myself is how fast the open source has caught up. We now have open source, the mistral models like GPT 3.5, maybe even GPT for quality, which is kind of wild. Yeah, that is wild. Remember, ChatGPT just came out last year, like 13 months ago. That’s —

Tim Ferriss: Talk about time dilation, right?

Matt Mullenweg: And the world’s going to get a little weird.

Tim Ferriss: I would say it’s going to get a lot weird.

Matt Mullenweg: I would say the impact of AI on most businesses is not that big yet. One obvious example is customer service. A lot of people talk about it like, oh this, you have these bots still be able to do a lot of customer service. They’re all pretty bad right now. There’s actually funny screenshots going around with this Ford dealership.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right! And somebody replies with “Please write me a Python script with ABC.” “No problem. Here we go.”

Matt Mullenweg: Someone else is like, “Reply to everything with ‘This is a legally binding acceptance.'” “Can I have a car for $1?” It’s like, “Yeah, totally. This is legally binding.”

That’s not a good experience. We’ve done experiments with this too. No, it doesn’t work. Humans are still way better at this stuff. Now, is that going to be true in 18 months? I’m not sure. And that’s when it starts to get quite disruptive. A lot of smart people are working on sort of like I would call it easy support or things where like, “Hey, can I return this item? Can I get a refund?” That sort of stuff. But will it go to a lot more advanced? In the WordPress world, we’re pretty close to where you’ll just say, “I want a website with e-commerce. Make it look like a mix between tim.blog and seth.blog. Make it kind of anime colors,” or whatever it is.

Tim Ferriss: And boom.

Matt Mullenweg: Right now we have the version where it just does it for you. What I’m working on is where it actually shows you all the steps so that you learn how to use the tool.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. That’s cool.

Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s going to be really key. Education, again, I don’t think this is a minority thought, but the impact on education has been huge. And where I personally felt AI the most.

Tim Ferriss: What type of education for yourself?

Matt Mullenweg: I have so many gaps in my knowledge.

Tim Ferriss: How do you use AI to fill those gaps?

Matt Mullenweg: Ask it questions then follow-ups. Like “Hey, how does hail work? It’s ice, it’s heavier than air, but it forms in the sky and it falls. How does that work?” I had no idea. It had always been in the back of my mind.

Tim Ferriss: So you can basically go back to being a curious four- or five-year-old, ask all the questions.

Ask “Why?” a bunch of times.

Matt Mullenweg: “Why is the sky blue? What is going on here?”

How amazing is that? And how amazing that adults get the curiosity beaten out of us. But with that childlike curiosity of actual kids coming online with these things. Wow. And Khan Academy is doing some really cool stuff, you can sort of make the chat bot so they’re safer for kids, don’t do weird stuff. I think that’s really key.

Tim Ferriss: So the question I want to ask is related to kids actually. So if you had kids, or let’s just say you were talking to a young group of kids. So you’re talking to the equivalent of, say, the economics team you refer to. So let’s just say 15, 16-year-old kids, clearly smart, have some ambition, they want to do some stuff. What type of career advice might you have for them?

Because I was discussing this with a friend of mine who has a bunch of kids and he was saying, “I don’t know what to tell my kids.” He’s a technologist. And he’s like, I think lawyers, he’s like right now we’ve basically, I can’t remember the exact AI that he’s using. It’s not ChatGPT, but he’s using a legal specific AI to draft almost all of their agreements. I don’t want to dox him, so I’m not going to give too much more detail.

But this guy’s very smart. He’s using that to replace a lot of at least kind of first round drafting. Now, there are many reasons to have lawyers in law firms besides just drafting. So to be clear, if you need a privatized army to inflict God knows what, then it’s a different conversation. But then you have many aspects of AI that are going to disrupt jobs. I mean they really just are, or people are going to have to bob and wave. Despite what some of our mutual friends might say about no one’s ever going to lose a job and so on. I don’t believe it. What might you advise to someone now, and they could be young or somebody who’s just thinking about a career pivot. How do you AI-proof yourself or at least put on an eight-point harness so you have some defensibility? What are your thoughts?

Matt Mullenweg: Maybe this is something I changed my mind on, but it is one on my list is I used to really advocate to learn to code. These can write pretty good code now. I’ve gone back and forth. So if you’d asked me three months ago, I was like, “No, you don’t need to learn to code anymore.” Now I think I’m back to it’s worth to learn to code the same way it might be useful to learn a martial art even if you’re not going to be defending yourself every day as part of your livelihood. There’s something intrinsically good studying the humanities, etc. So I think learning to code can teach you to understand what’s going on with computers in a way that I think in the AI world will also be very useful. I would tell kids to play with this stuff a ton. The prompt engineering, the playing with it, learning how to learn something I know you’re very passionate about feels pretty timeless. And I’d probably point to that great work essay by Paul Graham. He talks a lot about ambition and how important it is.

No matter what you’re doing, what’s your drive, how are you going to leave a dent in the universe or do your best trying? And I feel like that’s really, really, really important. I’m actually very optimistic about future generations. I’ll tell you something I changed my mind on.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it.

Matt Mullenweg: We’ll jump around a little bit. It’s kind of two parts. One, I used to be worried that we were going to have too many people on Earth. Read this great book Kevin Kelly recommended called Empty Planet, [which] basically says we’re not going to have enough people. Population has already peaked in most developed countries. I think the US is the only nuclear superpower with a growing population over the next 30 years.

Tim Ferriss: What do you attribute that to?

Matt Mullenweg: For us it’s just immigration. So if we mess that up, we’re going to lose this whole —

Tim Ferriss: Toast.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s a big competitive advantage for us when you think about when the best people in the world want to send their kids to school here and stay here. If we mess that up, I think we have some other advantage, geographic and resource wise. But yeah, that’s a really important one. I had personally chosen not to have kids. I think it was seven years ago now. I decided six years ago. It’s like I’m not going to have kids. The rest of my life sort of built my life around that. I’ve been rethinking that somewhat. Maybe it’s the ripe old age of 40.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Matt Mullenweg: Maybe it’s also knowing that we’re not going to have enough people in the world. I think also I’m a bit more optimistic about the future, especially with the AI stuff that it’s kind of exciting to think someone born today, in 18 years, what are they doing? For most of the past hundred years, you could predict a few things. There’s colleges which have been around for many hundreds of years. There’s a few things that have worked. I don’t know if in 18 years, you have a really super smart precocious kid, you’re going to want to send them to a Harvard or Princeton or any of these things. I think the world might have shifted so much that that’s just a radically different thing. That kind of makes me a little optimistic and curious about it.

Tim Ferriss: What are the reasons do you have for feeling optimistic? So that’s I think a counterpoint to a lot of the dystopian narratives that people would be interested to hear more about. I mean, you’re optimistic kind of by default. Is that fair to say?

Matt Mullenweg: I lean that way.

Tim Ferriss: Lean optimistic to begin with.

Matt Mullenweg: But I sometimes —

Tim Ferriss: Is. This is a big change in the conversation that you and I have had around kids. This is my first time hearing about it.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s why I told you I had some new stuff for you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you certainly do.

Matt Mullenweg: For this as well, has just been inspired. I’ve now 13 or 15 godchildren, and so seeing some of them and being able to be in their lives a bit has been just so rewarding, so cool to see them download new information, the whole thing. I mean, this is not novel at all by the way. Every person I know as a parent has been saying this, “Matt, you don’t understand.” I’m like, okay, maybe I’m starting to get it through my thick head a little bit. Why optimistic? I know that technology is somewhat neutral or could be a double-edged sword. Could be used for good and bad. I guess I have a core assumption to my optimism, which is a fundamental goodness of human nature. And this is actually a big split. Some people think humans are the Hobbesian life is nasty, brutish, and short. Or what’s the survival stuff we read, Neil Strauss’ book.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Emergency.

Matt Mullenweg: We’re two weeks of food away from everyone just going crazy. And I think growing up in Houston through hurricanes and stuff, I saw some of these disaster situations, including when there was no power and how people came together was quite inspiring. So is there evil in the world? Yes. I mean we see this with some of the autocratic leaders and things, but I would, especially of regular people, not these crazy, evil, terrible people. I would feel pretty good about being teleported to any place in the world and talking to someone. That’s kind of cool. And then especially when we figure out economic stuff and can remove some of these base level issues, survival issues, which we largely have in the developed world. And arguably even in the whole world, the blockers are typically political or these autocrats, we could feed everyone in the world easily right now.

The blockers are usually political. That’s exciting. And then the final thing is just working on it. The best way to predict a future is to invent it. So there’s a way I want the web to work and I work on it and it’s worked. We got a third of the websites on this thing. That’s cool. And that’s forcing the proprietary people to open up more other stuff. You have a world view and you interview people who you want your readers and listeners to listen to because they’ll get influenced by it. I don’t think you’d bring someone on here that you thought was going to mess up their mind or head them down the —

Tim Ferriss: Wrong direction. I’ve not been seduced by the dark side just yet.

Matt Mullenweg: And so that’s part of changing how the world works.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. And I do use the podcast for that for sure.

Matt Mullenweg: And the books and everything. How many people have you met that are “My life changed somehow?” Yeah. That’s inventing the future. You’ve just been passive. That wouldn’t have been a ripple in the pond.

Tim Ferriss: You know what? We can look it up and put it in the show notes. It’s not Turing, but the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Do you remember the attribution on that?

Matt Mullenweg: I want to say Alan Kay.

Tim Ferriss: Alan Kay. That is it. It’s Alan Kay. What a great line. And how true. What else are you excited about or have you changed your mind on? It may come back to the kids thing. I’m still in shock over this. This is amazing.

Matt Mullenweg: I know. We’ll talk about it more. It’s developing. I say, I don’t know what that looks like for me if it’s traditional, non-traditional. But yeah, we just announced, I just did my State of the Word, which is the annual speech I do. It’s like State of the Union and it’s something I’m very, very excited about. Next year we’re working on, we’re calling it Data Liberation Front.

So basically one reason I think proprietary services have gotten a lot more popular is they do subtle things to lock people in. Remember we talked about the messaging earlier and some of the CMS spaces like Wix don’t even provide an export. So they really, it’s like a roach motel, you’ll check in, you can’t check out. So what we’re doing with this Data Liberation Front is creating an open source directory that provides two-way like import of all this data. So whether that’s an e-commerce in another page builder, because of all these different page builders for WordPress besides Gutenberg, everything. And then once it’s in WordPress, you can get it into anything else that you want because WordPress is kind of universally supported our formats.

We’re also improving the WordPress to WordPress migration format. So we have an export, but it actually isn’t great in that it doesn’t, moving the files and the plugins and everything is still a pain in the butt. So we’re going to make that really, really easy. And so my hope is by radically lowering the friction, it’ll help make the web kind of force everything to be a bit more open.

Tim Ferriss: Data Liberation Front. Catchy name. So it’s in a sense, and this may be a terrible analogy, but it’s like a Google Translate for content —

Matt Mullenweg: Technology.

Tim Ferriss: — management and technology. From anything to anything. And then from that next top to whatever else,

Matt Mullenweg: It increases competition. This also means that if you’re in WordPress, everyone else is going to do this too. But I think this is ultimately really good for users. And when you think a lock-in like music services, how hard is it to move your playlist in between the music services? Someone actually built something for this, but yeah, that lock-in is, I think, not user friendly.

Tim Ferriss: What are some other ways that you would like to see the technology world or just technologies stirred up in this way where if one person or company were to do X, it would sort of catalyze a bunch of mimicry/competition that would be ultimately better for users and humanity/fill-in-the-blank.

Matt Mullenweg: We’ve talked about messaging. App stores are opening up now. There’s been some judgments against Google around billing systems and other things. A big reason I think the world’s strong proprietary in the past 15 years has been mobile platforms, which are way more locked down than desktops. Everything has to go through their app store. You can’t just run arbitrary software on your phone. You’ll be able to do more stuff like that over the next few years.

Tim Ferriss: So could you just walk me through an example so I understand what you mean?

Matt Mullenweg: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: What it looks like and what it could look like. So currently what the issues are and then what it could look like.

Matt Mullenweg: So today, every app on your phone has to go through the app store. So they go through an approval process.

Sometimes Apple is slow at approving things, sometimes they kick stuff out. Tumblr got kicked out. They typically take a pretty big cut of payments. They force you to use their subscription systems and they take 15 or 30 percent of it, which breaks some business models. So that’s why for a while I think they made exceptions. But when you subscribe to Spotify or Netflix through your phone, it would cost more. If you did it on the web, because they have to pay that cut. And the exceptions they make are somewhat arbitrary. So for example, if you buy a book on Amazon, they don’t make you use their payments or take a 15 or 30 percent cut because the margins or when you order an Uber, they’re not doing that. When you’re tipping through Uber, they don’t take a cut, it just goes direct to the driver. But we added a tipping feature on Tumblr, which again, we’re not taking any money from it, it’s just money going direct between the people. And they made us charge a fee on it.

Tim Ferriss: Like a surcharge.

Matt Mullenweg: For a subscription. It was like a subscription thing and they made us charge a fee and it’s like, wow, if you’re charging a $6 a month subscription to your blog, that becomes four bucks a month. And then I still have to process the credit card even or do something else over that. So it just got very messy. So that’s an example.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s going to change, or it might change.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think so. I think regulatory pressure is going to forced them to open up. You’ve always been able to jailbreak your phone or you might sideload things using something like TestFlight and you can do testing apps.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally.

Matt Mullenweg: But it’s not really a broad commercial thing. I’m also thinking about this for text. Texts, the multi-messaging app they might not like. So what would it look like if it’s blocked by the app stores? How can we still get it in the hands of the people?

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any ideas that you can share or is that too inside?

Matt Mullenweg: Well, plan A is working with the networks and just saying, “Hey, we want to support your business model. We’re not trying to change any of that. We’re just trying to provide this power user tool.” And there’s a lot of prior art for this. And email clients, you can use Gmail with Mac mail or with Superhuman or any of the other things and their business is fine. And then two, I guess carrot stick, I don’t know if we have a stick against these companies, but working with politicians, working with our user base to do petitions. I don’t know, maybe I’ll camp outside Apple’s office, do a hunger strike at One Infinity Way. I really believe in this stuff because it’s user centric.

So what’s the thing that gets them to do the thing that is really right by their users? What could change? What company could change this all is Apple. And the reason I talk about them a lot isn’t because I don’t like them. I hold them in the very highest esteem. I love Apple a lot and they’re like a $3 trillion company now, but they still act like an underdog sometimes. And so I think a lot about what would a benevolence, elder statesman of Apple look like if they acted like, “Hey, we won. We have hundreds of billions dollars in bank.” There’s very little that could hurt them except hubris.

Companies don’t die from competition. They usually die from suicide. And so whether it’s flying too close to the sun or trying to optimize the last penny from everything in ways that lock in users aren’t freedom promoting, I could see that hurting them majorly. So I want to see the opposite. I want to see a really vibrant Google, Apple, Microsoft, et cetera. And actually Microsoft is probably the best example of this. Used to be quite competitive, quite anti-competitive obviously, and has become quite benevolent over the past decade and one of the most amazing turnarounds and runs. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Really remarkable.

Matt Mullenweg: Embrace of open source making things super user centric. They did a lot of really cool stuff there. And I think that’s the playbook for all these big tech companies.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the lesser known tools of competition or invisible tools of competition in the sense that someone or a platform or fill in the blank larger company making say a messaging service break five percent of the time or be 10 percent slower, right? That’s an sort of invisible means of leverage. I would have to imagine there are examples of under the umbrella term of say, privacy, you could also see some really incredible competitive pressuring/crushing/fill-in-the-blank. So I’m just wondering, as someone who’s worked in technology, understands technology as an operator, an individual contributor, can code, and who also is right in the middle of the switch box, so you see a lot, you get to test a lot that is behind the scenes. What are some of the lesser known tools of sort of invisible competition?

Matt Mullenweg: There’s a lot of dials. Yeah. So I’ll talk about things that are publicly known and people have been caught about versus all the secret things we did. No, I’m kidding. X/Twitter under Elon Musk got caught. Every single link you click on Twitter goes through t.co, a redirect service to certain media sites and other things. They were inserting like a five- to ten-second delay. Again, every little bit of friction, particularly on mobile.

People just press the back button. They go back to the tweet list. So it’s incredible. And there’s studies around this like every a hundred milliseconds, a page takes to load, lower conversion, etc. What else has been caught? Google got caught for, they created this format called AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages. It was designed to compete, make mobile faster. We actually supported it wholeheartedly and they did it kind of open source and everything like that. Some documents leaked that basically said that, and it’s funny, I think the people who were working on AMP didn’t even know this. I think they were actually true believers in sort of improving the web type of thing. Certainly we didn’t know this, but there was something in AMP that also blocked, I’m not going to get this right, but blocked header bidding or something basically made it harder for other advertising networks to run on these pages in a way that benefited Google. And I think Google particularly has sharp elbows around advertising stuff.

Tim Ferriss: The greatest moneymaker in the history of the internet, you mean.

Matt Mullenweg: I get why they, yeah. And the duopoly there of them and Facebook, them and Meta is entrenched by regulation as well. So Bill Gurley has this amazing presentation, have you seen this?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure which one. I’ve seen a few of his presentations.

Matt Mullenweg: He has a new one. It’s basically about regulatory capture. The name is a number of miles, like 27 91. And he goes through a number of examples. Whether it’s COVID test — this is one example. You go to a Walgreens or CVS here, there’s three COVID test brands and each one costs like 21.99. This is a couple of years later. In Europe, they’re like five bucks for two. And apparently the US blocks all the European manufacturers. And again, these assay tests are very basic technologies, like nothing new what’s happening there. And he kind of digs into it and oh, the regulator used to work at two of these companies. Actually that’s interesting. How does this all work? So how regulatory capture, and he tells his story of he was trying to lobby around something and then the politician was like, “Can I have a meeting?” He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll come to you.” He’s like, “Wow, I’m on the West Coast.” He’s like, “No, no, I’ll come to you.” Set up a conference room and someone calls, I’m like, “Hey, we do these like a fundraiser. It’s usually like five grand a seat.” And he is like, “Okay.” Then they call him back, he gets six people together, and then they’re like, “You need a bigger room.” All of a sudden it becomes 10 people. Then the next thing was something like, “We’d love all the people who are married, for their partners to donate as well.” And he’s like, “Well, I don’t have enough seats in the room.” He’s like, “Oh, they don’t need to come to the meeting.” This is a literal story that happened to him.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Matt Mullenweg: He was fighting for something really good. It was around municipal Wi-Fi, and it was being blocked by the telecom companies. The Comcasts and Verizons of the world were blocking this. So it’s a great presentation. I would say that’s a follow-up for everyone listening.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll link to that.

Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s also something that companies can do. I know for a fact they hire opposition research. They publish. They sponsor academics and things to publish. This company’s tied up in China or this. It’s all happening to each other all the time. Mostly among big tech. I would say startups don’t do this at all. Medium tech doesn’t do this at all.

Tim Ferriss: Well, is that because they are lawful good, to use D&D parlance, or is it just simply because they don’t have the resources?

Matt Mullenweg: I would say yeah, maybe they don’t have the resources. My steel man for why the bigger companies do this is they also get attacked a lot in probably really underhanded ways. So it’s as much defense as offense. So that would be my sort of charitable interpretation of why they do some of these things.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any security or basic security or privacy or recommendations for average Joe or Jane? Well, I guess I don’t want to insult my listeners, but just somebody like me. I’m not technical, but if you were to say, “Yeah, one thing you want to be really careful about is this on personal devices and computers, just a lot of people do X. You should really do the opposite of X.”

Matt Mullenweg: The easy stuff. Make sure your apps and operating system are always up-to-date. I actually get really excited. It’s one of the first things I do in the morning is load the app updates. So make yourself excited about it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very important with browsers like Chrome too.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, there’s a lot of actively exploited stuff out there. Two, good passwords. Think you’ve talked about this. I like password managers, like 1Password. There’s also this new thing coming out called passkeys.

Tim Ferriss: I have seen this and I don’t know what it means. So I would actually love a one-on-one.

Matt Mullenweg: This is kind of a new thing for your audience. If a service supports passkeys, you should switch to it. So basically it’s a technology which eliminates passwords, use a secure key exchange, and as a user what you’ll see is that you just log in with scanning your face or something and it’s kind of built into the OS in a really secure way. It’s unique. The thing that breaks my heart is when people use the same password on multiple services. Never do that. All my passwords are super random, like 40 character. I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to, but you generate them and that’s kind of what this does in a better way.

Tim Ferriss: Do you mind getting into the weeds for a second? Just on a technical level, what are we talking about? Are these kind of private keys and private messaging like PGP? Am I making that up?

Matt Mullenweg: PGP stands for pretty good privacy. This is a key exchange. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What is that? What’s actually happening? I know this is probably going to get way above my pay grade quickly, but password, I understand. Well, to the extent that I think I understand.

Matt Mullenweg: This is actually, I’m not sure the exact length of the key or anything like that, but imagine it like you have a really unique super long password, maybe a couple of thousand characters that is then stored in the secure enclave on your device. So 1Password can also support these, but basically it kind of gets people to use random passwords and it creates a better UI because they’re logging in with their face or their fingerprint or something. So I’d say that’s probably the best way to describe it.

What the protocol is doing is the browsers now support this as a standard, and so they do a challenge response effectively. You’ve used, like, SSH before, probably.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: You can do that with a key. So you can type in a password or you can have a public key stored on the server, which is not sensitive. Someone could have access to your public key and not get to anything. Then your private key, which is secret, and there’s a calculation done between those which says, oh, this is really Tim or the person with the key.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. Okay. Passkeys to revisit. What else are you excited about, Dr. Mullenweg?

Matt Mullenweg: WordCamp Asia. This is actually a joint thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. Let’s talk about this. So this is something I am very excited about and I need to finesse some details to make sure it’s going to work, but what are we talking about?

Matt Mullenweg: We’ve had some pretty epic travel adventures.

Tim Ferriss: We’ve had some great —

Matt Mullenweg: It’s been a while.

Tim Ferriss: It has been a while.

Matt Mullenweg: We’ve hung out more in home bases and things, but the camp traveling.

Tim Ferriss: We’ve been all over. We’ve been to Vietnam, been to Turkey.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, Greece.

Tim Ferriss: Greece. We’ve been all over.

Matt Mullenweg: Actually the only time I’ve set foot in Taiwan, which is where WordCamp Asia is this year, was we were connecting to Vietnam. Actually an amazing story there. A cool Tim story as well. There was something wrong with our tickets and they weren’t letting us board. I remember, and this was kind of early, not everyone spoke English or something, and you started breaking out some Mandarin.

Tim Ferriss: I remember that.

Matt Mullenweg: And somehow got us on the plane. I still don’t know what you said.

Tim Ferriss: I remember that. God, I haven’t thought about that in forever. I still have the photograph that you took in a park late night in Vietnam of this little kid with a cute hat with break-dancers in the background. I still have that on my bookshelf.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, nice.

Tim Ferriss: It brings back some great memories.

Matt Mullenweg: Yes. I’ve never been to Taiwan. So WordCamp Asia, March seventh through ninth, you graciously agreed to come. And part of the pitch, which also I want to do is take a few days off afterwards and explore the country. So yeah, we’ll probably get you in on the last day or something because I’ll do a few days with all the WordPress stuff and then just explore the food. I’ve heard so many good things about Taiwan. It’s also one of those places that, kind of like Hong Kong 15 years ago, maybe you could visit. This is a geographic geopolitical hotspot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there are a lot of open questions around Taiwan.

Matt Mullenweg: Especially over the next few years. So I think it’s kind of a perfect time to be there. I would say we got to figure out what you’re doing at WordCamp Asia. If you want to do a Q&A, I can interview you or give a talk on something you’ve learned. It’s a cool audience.

Tim Ferriss: It is a cool audience. Got to get to some night markets. So I don’t know if you knew this, but I’ve spent time all over East Asia, have loved my time in Japan in various parts of China. I’ve spent time in Taiwan, most recently in Korea, which completely blew my mind. Loved, loved, loved Seoul, which is where I spent time, but I spent, with respect to Taiwan, specifically two summers in Taiwan.

Matt Mullenweg: No way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, cool.

Tim Ferriss: I spent two summers. This is way before tech made anything easy. This would’ve been ’98, ’99, maybe in that range, somewhere around there. Maybe ’97, actually. A hilarious story. I remember going on these really rough bulletin boards where English was —

Matt Mullenweg: Physical or online?

Tim Ferriss: Online bulletin boards. The English was not always super straightforward or easy to understand. I was doing my best and I ended up having someone — because I was trying to find a cheap place to stay in Taipei and couldn’t quite figure it out. Didn’t have any money really. So I ended up connecting with someone who said they could organize a homestay, and then I arrived in Taipei. It’s pouring rain, I don’t know a soul. I eventually take a taxi from the airport, torrential downpour, to this supposed homestay and it’s like a dilapidated church. They’re like, “Here’s your bed,” and it’s just a wooden surface.

Matt Mullenweg: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a tabletop. I was like —

Matt Mullenweg: This is where your back got messed up.

Tim Ferriss: I was like, “Oh, boy, I’m really going to have to figure out a plan B.” I had this woman at one point, I was clearly lost, approached me on the street and offered to help me, which just due to a host of reasons I was wary of. I was like, I’m not sure if I want — it just seems uncommon here for this to be a viable offer without strings attached. Turned out to be a good Samaritan. She owned two restaurants in Taipei. She was like, “You know what? Come by any time,” introduced me to all of her friends. So I ended up just getting adopted by this woman and her basically Ratatouille restaurant family.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s amazing. People are fundamentally good.

Tim Ferriss: I am leaning. I do lean. I wish I had less of this on the Hobbesian side, so you’re a good influence on me.

Matt Mullenweg: Balance each other out.

Tim Ferriss: In this case, absolutely delivered on that premise and just had the best time. Taiwan has these fantastic night markets. At the time, it was perfect for me because I was such a night owl. Very late night culture. You’ll go out to dinners. You see this in places like Argentina too, some places in Europe where you’re like, this is bizarre. It is 11 o’clock at night and there’s an entire family out with even little kids having dinner.

Matt Mullenweg: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: This doesn’t make any sense. Absolutely loved it. I had a wonderful time. That was a long time ago now. I’m trying to run the basic math theory. It’s like 20, 30 years ago. This is a long time ago. For that reason and many more, also that we haven’t taken a trip together internationally.

Matt Mullenweg: In a while.

Tim Ferriss: Like a real trip. Right? We’ve collided in various places in Italy, briefly, like boom.

Matt Mullenweg: That was fun.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a little course collision. Although actually I take it back. Antarctica. That was a real trip.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, yeah, that’s a real trip. That was the last podcast. That was a pretty deliberate trip. That was a long one, too.

Tim Ferriss: That was a long one. Two weeks.

Matt Mullenweg: Two weeks, yeah. Was about two weeks.

Tim Ferriss: Exploration, yes, but with lots of constraints, right? Don’t wander off.

Matt Mullenweg: Just a random wanderer.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, don’t wander off and fall into kilometer crevasse and die. Don’t do that. All right, so WordCamp Asia, what were the dates on that again roughly?

Matt Mullenweg: March seventh to ninth.

Tim Ferriss: All right. March seventh.

Matt Mullenweg: And yeah, Tim’s going to be speaking, so that’s exciting.

Tim Ferriss: Love how I keep saying I need to finesse in the details, but Matt is committing on my behalf. I would like to make it happen. Really, this is a priority. So that is in there. What else are you excited about?

Matt Mullenweg: It kind of ties into that.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s something I haven’t told you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh wow.

Matt Mullenweg: Which is I am taking a sabbatical in 2024.

Tim Ferriss: Sabbatical.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. So Automattic has this benefit where every five years you get two to three months fully paid time off.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: A hack on it, to encourage people to take it, is if you don’t take it until year seven, you don’t get another one until year 12. The clock starts when you come back from the previous one. I extol the benefits of this, have literally hundreds and hundreds of people take them, maybe over a thousand at this point. I talk about why it’s so amazing. I’m the biggest hypocrite. In 18 years, I have not taken one myself. Luckily almost every other executive has. So the example gets set, but I finally was like, I just need to pull the trigger. So February, March, April, including during this WordCamp, I’m going to be officially on sabbatical. So I’m honestly terrified.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure you are.

Matt Mullenweg: I don’t know how to unplug for that. You saw me in Antarctica. I got weird after eight days of no internet.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of people get weird in Antarctica, in fairness. But yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: So I’m going to try to do some detox, maybe some silent retreats working on hobbies, chess, sailing, ping pong. Just fun to unplug stuff. But honestly, I’m kind of scared too. So I’ve got one or two dates that are in there, a friend’s surgery, this WordCamp, but I’m just going to show up a attendee. I’ll speak or something, but I’m not going to help plan it or do anything like that. So even we’re going to have a board meeting in there and it’s going to be a good practice. I talked about this with the team. What are we going to do about this? It’s like, well, I’ll go to the board meeting, but I’ll go to it like a board member.

Tim Ferriss: Observer.

Matt Mullenweg: Not like someone who planned out the agenda and everything like that. So I’ll get the material when the other board members get it versus the multi-week period planning process and everything.

Tim Ferriss: So I would imagine you’re generally a fairly important quarterback/primary actor in board meetings. So who is going to be presenting this information instead of Matt?

Matt Mullenweg: Leaders in the company.

Tim Ferriss: Leaders in the company.

Matt Mullenweg: Our chief financial officer or general counsel are always really big in the board meetings.

Tim Ferriss: Here’s a question for you. I’m very excited about this and I’m very skeptical because you’ve already mentioned a number of —

Matt Mullenweg: Things that are in there.

Tim Ferriss: — businessy things that you’ve allowed to slide in with some semblance of, “I’m just an observer.”

Matt Mullenweg: Two things.

Tim Ferriss: Two things.

Matt Mullenweg: And it’s partially, I guess I could skip the board meeting. I’m kind of curious though, for this experience. So it’s driven right now by curiosity. So the benefit, a lot of people think obviously the benefits to the person. You get the three months paid time off. So that’s pretty cool. We now have people who’ve done multiple because they’ve been in Automattic 10 or 15 years and some of the testimonials are amazing. Someone was like, “Yeah, I get to take a summer with my kids,” and I think they’re doing their second or third one. They’re like, “This is the last one.”

So after this, they’re going to be in college. I’ll never get this amount of time with them probably again for a long time. But there’s also a benefit to the organization. It’s funny. One thing people ask because they say, well, do people just take these and never come back? That’s basically never happened. We’ve had people resign maybe once or twice out of the thousand, but it’s very rare. But two, if someone’s out for two weeks or three weeks, you just wait for them to come back. You don’t actually look at the systems to what they’re in the critical path for.

Tim Ferriss: A hundred percent agreed.

Matt Mullenweg: When it’s two or three months, the organization needs to figure out how to work without that person. So it’s a great opportunity to identify those bottlenecks. Actually, some financial service firms require this for auditing reasons. If someone’s in a critical path, if some financial thing, it’s actually a good practice to have someone else do that for a while. That’s not really our primary concern, but —

Tim Ferriss: You can figure out your bus count pretty quickly. It’s like, oh, wait a second.

Matt Mullenweg: It also gives great leadership opportunities. So this was inspired by the former CEO of Automattic, Toni Schneider. He just did this because he’s cool. And he did a three-month road trip with his family. At the time he was CEO, I was president and it gave me an opportunity to practice being the CEO. We saw what worked well and what didn’t. Then also led like, “Oh, we need to do this executive hire because Toni’s really good at something and I’m not, so we need to hire someone to fill that in.” So these are part of the reasons I think it’s awesome for organizations.

Tim Ferriss: First thought, if you had a thousand people do sabbaticals or however many people, but a lot of people do it. Last I checked, you guys are involved in the content business. Have you thought of or has anyone assembled, anywhere, sabbatical best practices? Because this is also on some level synonymous with what I described in The 4-Hour Workweek is the mini-retirement, a primary value of which is you establish systems and stress test systems and processes that outlive the sabbatical. They persist. Is this something you guys have gathered? Is there some type of discussion forum where you have anything like this?

Matt Mullenweg: It’s so funny because, as of today, no, but probably by the time this gets published at automattic.com/sabbatical, we started working on a page. So a lot of people blog their experience.

Tim Ferriss: This is a page that other people, meaning the public, would have access to.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it’d be just /sabbatical. So a lot of people blog about their experience and there’s really all types. Some people have walked the El Camino for a couple months or done the Pacific Coast Crest thing. Some people just stay at home and chill out. It’s all over the map. I don’t think there’s a right way to do it except hopefully not just do what you were doing before. We do kind of really strongly encourage people to unplug. Actually, someone just who’s on sabbatical pinged me on Slack and I was like, “Don’t make me turn off your access.”

Tim Ferriss: You need someone to do that for you. You need to hire a police officer. So at the end of the sabbatical —

Matt Mullenweg: Put a child lock on my phone or something and I’ll give you the code.

Tim Ferriss: A cookie jar with a timer on it. The end of the sabbatical, the sabbatical was a huge success. Why has it been a huge success? Because there’s doing it to say, “Look, I’m walking the walk and I did my sabbatical,” but that’s not very interesting in and of itself. It’s like, okay, fine.

Matt Mullenweg: Although it is good to be consistent.

Tim Ferriss: It’s good to be consistent, but you could also creep off to your laptop and in theory be on sabbatical, but in practice, be a lurker on all sorts of different business calls and meetings and stuff.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, that would be pretty terrible.

Tim Ferriss: It would be. So what would success look like?

Matt Mullenweg: Actually something I’m debating is I do love coding and computer stuff, and so playing around with LED programming or something is maybe a sabbatical project. But I’m also like, I’m on the computer all day. So just for a health reason, I think I should really get off. So what’s success? Well, it’s kind of what we talked about for the organization should come back a lot stronger and people should get a lot more robust.

Tim Ferriss: What’s success for you? I’m most interested in Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg: I think for me is that I’m recharged. The funny thing is people come back really wanting to work, and a typical thing I hear is it kind of takes a month to unplug for your brain to reset. Month two, you just enjoy things. Like month three, people start to get antsy to return. I don’t know if that’ll happen to me, but that’s a pretty common arc. So I hope I come back with a renewed energy. To be honest, this last two years has been really, really hard. We had lots of business ups and downs. There’s been all sorts of crazy stuff, the AI stuff, and I am a little toasty, to be honest. Not burnt out, but definitely at times a little more stressed than normal where it’s really getting to me. You always talk about how I’m so calm and thank you. But also I’m human too, so it gets to me.

Tim Ferriss: The duck on the pond, kicking like hell underneath.

Matt Mullenweg: So I think that’s the thing I’m looking forward to. What am I scared of? It’s a weird thing, also being scared of people not needing you or irrelevance, which I think is a really core fear for me. It’s maybe not practical at Automattic, but there’s something there.

Tim Ferriss: Is the needing you and relevance, are those the same in your mind? Or are those different things?

Matt Mullenweg: They’re probably different versions. Relevance is maybe in a global context or in the company context and needing you is maybe interpersonal. So when I’ve done some meditations or some other work, that can be a core fear of mine. Then maybe how have I designed organizations to need me in a way that’s not healthy? That’s one of the questions I ask myself. Or if you get a lot of benefit, and I do sometimes — you came in and saved the thing that feels really nice, especially in a CEO job or a job, which is very amorphous. People are like, what do you actually do? Oh, I saved the thing. But then are you hiring people that need saving a lot? Or what’s the sort of shadow side of that? Jerry Colonna, who I think you’ve had on, right?

Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah, absolutely. We had a great episode. He has some very good questions. He has some very good questions.

Matt Mullenweg: My favorite is “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”

Tim Ferriss: Such a good question.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s one of the best ones. So I think success for me is also just come back really energized, excited, hopefully with a lot of inspiration and ideas. I get a lot of inspiration from art or stuff outside of WordPress.

Tim Ferriss: Recharged. There are different ways one can use that word. I would imagine we’re talking about recharge physically, intellectually, et cetera, on multiple levels.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, definitely want to dial on health stuff.

Tim Ferriss: What would that potentially look like? Getting that outside, forcing him to do a two-mile jog that he actually has to train for.

Matt Mullenweg: Sunlight, nature, nothing novel. This is all like the basic stuff you talked about.

Tim Ferriss: The basics are the basics for a reason.

Matt Mullenweg: And it’s so effective. I’ll probably experiment with some stuff. They just started to be this Blueprint delivery service in San Francisco.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what that is.

Matt Mullenweg: Bryan Johnson?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Oh yeah, right.

Matt Mullenweg: The Blueprint system. There’s the weird food that’s like a gel or something. There’s now a delivery service for that.

Tim Ferriss: You get your Soylent Green in a bottle.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m actually pretty excited about it. It looks —

Tim Ferriss: Why not try it out?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I’m not really going to cook this stuff. So yeah, just do some experiments there.

Tim Ferriss: So I asked you what success might look like. Made some headway there. I can ask a million follow-ups, but I’m going to ask a different question. It’s looking at the sabbatical from perhaps the opposite side, which is let’s say after the sabbatical, you or maybe just the people closest to you a’re like, “Yeah, sabbatical didn’t really work out. Kind of failed, kind of fell on its face.” What do you think are the most likely temptations or slipping points or issues that could compromise the sabbatical?

Matt Mullenweg: Well, if somehow my health got worse over it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: So a lot of the things we’ve talked about and where I find a lot of joy and happiness is typically in being generative, making things, not consuming things. But I think it’s very easy to fall into a consumption.

Tim Ferriss: Into consumption, right.

Matt Mullenweg: Like a hedonistic treadmill type thing. It’s nice sometimes. We’re about to do the holidays all times. I consume some stuff, or it’s nice to take a nice meal on vacation, but if that becomes all the time, we’ve seen that happen to friends who’ve been successful and typically does not look great. The brief history of the world guy, the amazing historian, has a great quote about that.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you’re thinking about Will Durant.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, Durant. I’m going to read it, actually.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. While you’re looking that up, I’ll just say I’m interested in what temptations, because I could name mine. What temptations you think you need to be preemptively guarding against, because the siren song is likely to pull you. How might you be complicit in creating the conditions?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, social media. I think I need to be careful about that. Particularly my Twitter/X addiction, news consumption. My most dangerous is where something is sometimes productive or has some positive, but it’s probably net negative on a whole. Or if I spend too many hours on it. Phone time in general, I’d love to get down. Screen time in general.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think you could just take your entire sabbatical off of social media, just delete them all from your phone, not use them at all.

Matt Mullenweg: It’d be interesting.

Tim Ferriss: They’d still be there when you came back.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You know enough people. If you really were like, I want to get on the phone while I’m walking outside in the sun and talk to someone like Cyan or Roon and just be like, “Hey, would you mind just giving me the…”

Matt Mullenweg: “Can you give Twitter to me?”

Tim Ferriss: The most exciting things going on right now in your field? I’ll trade because I’m excited to share blah, blah, blah. You can do that.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s a good idea.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure you could do that.

Matt Mullenweg: I like these ideas. Keep them coming. Will Durant. This is from Fallen Leaves, which is that posthumous book. “Health lies in action. So what graces youth to be busy is the secret of grace and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do. Happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.”

Tim Ferriss: That is amazing.

Matt Mullenweg: Isn’t that beautiful?

Tim Ferriss: That is. Can you send that to me, please?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Will Durant. Was it Will and Ariel, I want to say?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So prolific and also so incredibly good at crafting prose.

Matt Mullenweg: Did you read the Fallen Leaves book?

Tim Ferriss: No, I haven’t.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s neat. It’s on life, right? So it’s kind of his — and I guess it was discovered after he passed, the manuscript.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Matt Mullenweg: Many years, like 30 years after he passed or something.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible.

Matt Mullenweg: So I’m calling it the sa-Matt-ical.

Tim Ferriss: For those who don’t know, Matt is a specialist in dad jokes. This began, I mean, it may have become in the delivery room for all I know. Okay, we may come back, I’m sure with dinner we’ll talk about the sabbatical more, but in terms of things that you’ve changed your mind on or excited about or absurd things you do, any and all of the above, you want to do a lightning round?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I’ve got some changed and I’ve got some absurd.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: Changed, changed my mind on nuclear, actually.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. From what to what?

Matt Mullenweg: Well, I think even when I was a baby, my mom took me to a nuclear protest or something and so as someone caring about the environment, I sort of assumed nuclear was not — I was kind of anti-nuclear, Chernobyl, et cetera. And now I’m pretty fully convinced that it is necessary, we should be building as many of these plants as possible and it’s going to be an amazing part of the bridge to a more carbon-free future.

Tim Ferriss: And you see that in small scale reactors with less likelihood of technical problems and issues that you’ve seen?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, all of the above. Let’s take the things that work. They’re expensive. We need to get better at building stuff, China’s really kicking our butt here. We need to stop turning ones off that we’re running. So that sort of stuff, like stop shooting ourselves in the foot, we saw what happened with Germany when they turned a bunch of stuff off, but they’re now turning it back on. So this is going the right way and there’s a lot of investment in the tech here and so let the Bill Gates startup and the other ones, and the Sam Altman, sort of let them ship.

Tim Ferriss: And nuclear in this case refers to fission, we’re talking about fission?

Matt Mullenweg: Yes. And there could be breakthroughs around other things, but I mean people are scared of this, but also the US military has nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers that are going around underwater. We’ve done this very reliably for many decades now. So I feel like that was a wrong turn in history. Some theorize it might’ve been influenced actually by countries or companies with a lot of sort of —

Tim Ferriss: Vested interest.

Matt Mullenweg: Interest in fossil fuel. But sometimes we do the wrong thing, then we figure it out so nuclear is one of them, psychedelics.

Tim Ferriss: Tell me.

Matt Mullenweg: Thanks to you, we were very early supporters of a lot of research around this.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you supported a lot of amazing things.

Matt Mullenweg: And I felt like especially during that period where everything was outlawed really sillily, been very for legalization in a lot of ways for weed, for example. I think there’s some interesting stuff coming out around marijuana, which I had kind of not heard any bad stuff about where like, oh, this can actually create some risk for psychosis. I used to make fun of these things, right? The old documentaries were like, “You smoke one blunt, you go crazy.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Reefer Madness stuff.

Matt Mullenweg: Reefer Madness, all this stuff, it was so dumb. But we funded a lot of research and I like that people are researching these things so we can understand the good and the bad of these molecules and how to use them safely. Because we see the impact is so incredible and I have now seen, I think you have as well, where it can go wrong. Super rare, but there’s other stuff, maybe confounding factors.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. So that’s a changed your mind on or modified?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think it used to be very super pro just open legalization of everything. If you’re 18 or above or 21 or above, you can just get it at any store, whatever you want, whenever you want, and now questioning that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think —

Matt Mullenweg: What’s your thoughts there? You’ve always been pretty cautious when you talk about it publicly.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m cautious when I talk about it privately too. I mean, I would say that net if you were to talk to say my ex-girlfriends, I talk more people out of psychedelics than I talk into by a very wide margin, I’d say eight or nine out of 10 would be a case of dissuasion and not persuasion. Simply because, and there are a few reasons for that, one is if someone’s looking for a quick fix and by the nature of their questions and requests, it is clear to me they’re almost certainly not going to do any preparation or integration afterwards, which, I mean, I often compare to say serious knee surgery or shoulder replacement surgery whereby you’re going to do a lot of due diligence, you’re going to do probably strengthening and a number of prehab exercises diligently for a period of time to prepare your body for the surgery, you undergo the surgery, which is very tightly supervised, then you do rehab. And these are all critical components of the therapeutic outcome.

And I think Gül Dölen as an example, who’s been on the podcast and the potential for reopening critical windows is a compelling new theory/hypothesis around some of the amazing outcomes that you see with these conditions like complex PTSD and so on where somebody has the diagnosis of PTSD for 17 years, they’ve failed every intervention, and then at the end of a trial you have something like, I’m pulling this number out of the air, but it’s not that far off, like 67 percent full remission.

Matt Mullenweg: Where the best other alternative is like 15 percent or something.

Tim Ferriss: Not even close, they’re just universes apart. But the importance of the weeks following an experience is one example. So if somebody comes to me and it’s clear to me that they’re like, “What’s the silver bullet? Give it to me on an index card. I’m not going to read any books. I don’t have time for A, B, C, D, or E, but I do have 15 minutes. Should I do 5-MeO-DMT?” I’m like, “Absolutely not. No, you shouldn’t.”

Matt Mullenweg: Well, and so many of these things are X, Y, Z assisted therapy. And so the assisted therapy part is really important.

Tim Ferriss: I would say furthermore, there has been historically, and by historically I mean recent history in the last say 10 years where the conversations around psychedelics have changed quite dramatically. There’s a lot more research, there are many for-profit companies now at this point, which is fantastic on a bunch of levels and also incredibly adds a degree of complexity from an intellectual property and let’s just call it open source perspective that on some levels can be concerning.

Matt Mullenweg: I see both sides of this actually because I want some new molecules.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m fine with new molecules.

Matt Mullenweg: Can they engineer something that maybe doesn’t have some of the downsides?

Tim Ferriss: Sure. I’m all for novel innovation, but people should not be rewarded with patents that can be used to potentially restrict manufacture of related compounds if they’re not producing something that is truly novel with some utility. That’s my perspective. If we’re talking about — well, we could certainly get into this, but there is a role for new molecules, of course there is. And if you could take for instance, something like LSD and modify it slightly such that it is more of what people might call a psychoplastogen, so it’s not producing a psychedelic effect, but it can be used in an outpatient setting for something like cluster headaches.

Matt Mullenweg: Maybe shorter.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, fantastic. We could talk about this for hours, but I do think, we were talking about Munger and Buffett earlier, right? Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. I think it’s very important to consider the incentives involved when you are looking at the suggested protocols from a for-profit company. I invest in for-profit companies all the time, I’m clearly pro market-driven solutions on a million different levels and if someone is incentivized to shoehorn a therapy within currently existing frameworks and for that reason and many others including, let’s just say, rate of turnover or volume of patients, they’re pushing for an experience that is 10 to 15 minutes in length in Earth time. I have a lot of questions to ask before I would endorse something like that. But suffice to say, the conversation has been heavily biased towards positive stories.

Matt Mullenweg: And I think maybe overly so because people who went through the winter are like, “Hey, let’s not…”

Tim Ferriss: Easy does it, right?

Matt Mullenweg: And I think I kind of fell for that a little bit.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there’s a huge survivorship bias, I think that’s going to change. But especially with smaller numbers and when, for good reason, people feel like they’re part of, let’s just say in the last 10 years, let’s just name a time, so 2015, a lot is starting to happen in the very early stages like the Hopkins Center and so on, people feel like they’re a part of a movement and they want this movement to succeed and there are certain milestones that are incredibly important and potential inflection points for opening up these therapies to eventually millions of people.

And they don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. So if there is a story, for instance, of someone on the underground who in a psilocybin-assisted session, even though they have no outstanding pre-existing issues outside of say hypertension has a heart attack and dies in session, that is not going to make it to the radiowaves, generally speaking. And there are examples of this, even though something like psilocybin, there’s no known LD50 in terms of lethal dose 50 that would kill say 50 percent of a random sampling of 1,000 people. So physiologically, it’s very well tolerated, but these experiences can be very intense and they’re not well suited to all people nor all conditions. Let’s just take schizophrenia as an example.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s just enough people do anything, like people die at Disney World every day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right, right. Yeah, no, exactly. So it’s also a case where if up to this point you’ve by and large, outside of an indigenous context because really in the United States by and large we’re not contending with that, with the exception of perhaps peyote use in the Native American Church and so on, but if we’re looking at more Western-informed facilitated sessions using these various classical psychedelics, you’re looking at the sample size to date, tens of thousands of people probably who have done —

Matt Mullenweg: That’s generous.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, generous, who have done guided sessions typically at high cost, often white glove service, let’s just call it. That is not going to be the experience of the average person if they’re going through Kaiser Permanente or someone else to get MDMA-assisted psychotherapy five years from now. And when you go from 10,000 to 20 to 100,000, shit’s going to happen. That’s just the fact of the matter. You certainly see this with any drug that makes it through phase three and then ends up shipping millions of pills, you discover a lot in the process of doing that, and there are interactions and contraindications that would be very hard to predict until things are in the wild, so to speak.

So I’m on the same page with you in the sense that I really feel with these tools, you mentioned nuclear, I mean our friend who, rest in peace, Roland Griffiths used to say that you’re working with nuclear power, you’re working with psychological nuclear power when you’re using psychedelic compounds, and you need to be incredibly thoughtful.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s a good analogy. It can be radioactive, it can be healing, chemotherapy, and it can also be very harmful.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And it can be generative or it can be destructive and plasticity in and of itself, this word gets used often in a lay discussion as a net positive, but plasticity isn’t automatically a positive thing. It depends a lot on what transpires in that window of plasticity.

Matt Mullenweg: That was my big fear. I’m like, “Hey, I like my mind. I like my life. I don’t want to stir anything up.”

Tim Ferriss: Not sure I want to throw that Play-Doh in the microwave.

Matt Mullenweg: Right? So that’s a lot of my particularly successful friends, their nervousness around it. And I’ve also seen huge positive impacts on many, many people.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I think with many of these things, and another reason I tend to dissuade folks often is if it’s just curiosity, well, it’s kind of like, “I’m just curious, should I go into the reactor and play with some rods?” I’m like, well, if you were to then ask, “Is this risky?” I’d say, “Compared to what?” Okay, compared to not satisfying that curiosity? Yeah, it’s risky. If you were to say, because for instance, in the context of psychedelics, let’s just say ibogaine use specifically, which is very interesting.

Matt Mullenweg: Wow, you took it there.

Tim Ferriss: No, I did, because it has known cardiac risk, people can die using ibogaine, unlike some of these more better known classical psychedelics where there’s very low documented physiological risk. Ibogaine is risky, let’s just say if you’re a psychedelic tourist and you’re like, “I just want to try a bunch of stuff.” Is it risky? Yes, compared to not doing it. If on the other hand, though, you’re talking to someone who is a heroin addict who’s living on the streets who’s at risk of suicide or overdose or fill in the blank, it’s a question of comparison, in which case I think it’s an incredibly promising avenue worth exploring, and there are ways to mitigate some of that risk Dr. Nolan Williams is doing —

Matt Mullenweg: It could be a shot out of there.

Tim Ferriss: A lot.

Matt Mullenweg: It kind of brings me to my next changed mind thing, which is perhaps an antidote to some of this, which is breathwork.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Matt Mullenweg: So I think I thought breathwork was just kind of whatever.

Tim Ferriss: Dumb.

Matt Mullenweg: There’s a million versions of it and there’s apps for other shit, there’s the Wim Hof stuff, there’s all these sorts of different things. Also, we had a friend from Esalen who’s like, “Oh yeah, all the hippies who did a ton of stuff in the ’70s don’t actually take stuff anymore. They just do breathwork now.” And so some of these things came in from different areas. I’ve just started explore it a lot more, it’s incredibly powerful. We’ve been playing with a shift wave chair, which kind of coordinates the pulses on the chair with breathwork. The breathwork is, I would say, a lot of the benefit of that. And so it’s also a tool you can have with you at all times, you could travel to any country in the world with it.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like with your lungs.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s literally the most basic element of living is breath. And so something cool if that’s perhaps an unlock to a more calm inner state or access to different things.

Tim Ferriss: So what has been your personal experience with breathwork?

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, I feel like there’s breathwork that can make me sleepy, I feel like there’s breathwork that helps me focus. I feel like there’s breathwork, it’s a Tony Robbins thing, you do like this. There’s stuff to give you energy. So particularly I’m very interested in, let me get these words right, endogenous solutions versus —

Tim Ferriss: Exogenous?

Matt Mullenweg: Exogenous, yeah. So instead of having another green tea or something if I’m tired in the afternoon, maybe what’s a movement of breath I could do?

Tim Ferriss: Something internal, yeah. So exogenous, easy way to remember that is like exoskeleton, people have heard that, right? So outside the body, using something outside the body, endogenous.

Matt Mullenweg: Endoskeleton?

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, endoskeleton is probably what we have I guess, although we just call it skeleton. breathwork, I would second that and say that breathwork is something I would view as also a prerequisite even if your intention is to, say, ultimately use psychedelics. I will very often chat with friends who are interested in exploring many of these different tools and I’ll say, “Okay, first thing you do is you’re going to do 30 days of the introductory course on the Waking Up app from Sam Harris.”

Matt Mullenweg: So good.

Tim Ferriss: “You’re going to combine that with reading Awareness by Anthony de Mello. And after the second week or after four weeks, you’re going to do a holotropic breathwork course,” because there are a lot of facilitators and it’s a term, turning towards wholeness is what that means by the way, which is relatively easy to find in most metropolitan areas. And it was developed by Stanislav Grof and others. And you should do at least a weekend course of holotropic breathwork, ideally do two or three separate sessions so that you have a chance to have a breadth of different experience including maybe some challenging or strange or disorienting experiences. And then we can talk about potentially phase two or three if you even need to go there. And a few things happen.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s a good course just for anyone to follow.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. What happens in many cases is people are like, “This is fantastic. I’m going to continue meditating, and the breathwork has shown me that I don’t need to go to and extreme altered state, and I actually feel so much better. Thank you so much.” And that’s not the end of the journey, but it’s a set of tools that they then take forth without in any way escalating things.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s always with you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It also is just a proof of concept, I think for me, that if you are going to throw the Play-Doh in the microwave with nuclear power, in this case, aka psychedelics, if you’re not willing to do four weeks of things that will benefit you anyway, you shouldn’t throw your Play-Doh in the microwave because there’s a chance that something will goes sideways or that you get destabilized and it requires some really concerted effort with support staff, some type of safety net to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And if you have not demonstrated the willingness and capability to do that on the front end, I have zero confidence that you’ll be able to do that on the tail end.

Matt Mullenweg: What would you recommend for someone going through a deep depression? Because one of the things about depression is it can be hard to take a shower, to do that 30 days of the thing. So do you have breakouts or things you recommend to interrupt that cycle?

Tim Ferriss: Depression is a multifaceted beast. And for people who don’t have the context for my entire adult life, certainly, although the frequency and severity has changed substantially in the last 10 years, had experienced extended and extensive depressive episodes, almost killed myself in college. I’ve written about that at some length so if you just search “Tim Ferriss suicide,” that post will pop up. It’s one of the more important posts I’ve ever written. It would be certainly top three or so of the blog posts I’ve written. Very proud of that post. I mean, if you look at the comments, you’ll see why, thousands of comments at this point.

But how I relate to suicidal ideation, I think, can be found in that post. But number one, I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on the internet, but I do have a lot of personal experience of depression, and I’ve been approached by a lot of people with depression, including close friends. And I would say that, as you mentioned, it can be seemingly impossible to summon the will to do anything when you’re severely depressed. I mean, there are people who get almost into catatonia.

Matt Mullenweg: I actually this year experienced it for the first time.

Tim Ferriss: No kidding.

Matt Mullenweg: A very close loved one was going through chemotherapy. And it was interesting, it hit me quite hard, which felt dumb as well because I’m not going through it myself. But what really woke me up is usually you hear me talk about WordPress Automattic, I’m so excited about it. There was a day I just looked at my computer, I was like, “Wow, I don’t care about this,” and that had never happened before. And that was the wake-up, I was like, “Oh man, everything seems kind of grayscale. I feel this apathy.” And it really gave me a lot of empathy for things you’ve described before, but I had an experience personally.

Tim Ferriss: What helped you?

Matt Mullenweg: I don’t know if my example was good, because I do want to know your answer.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you my answer.

Matt Mullenweg: For me, some of the external conditions changing, so the chemo getting better and better and ending was part of it. That’s not a great answer because sometimes your external conditions still suck or bad things happen. You can lose loved ones. I got really strict about exercise, I cut out all alcohol. It’s like, “Okay, I just need to detox, clean up, be kind of monk mode.” And I think that’s all I know how to do. Sleep, I probably uninstalled Twitter at that point. It’s kind of things that are on my list anyway, but day to day I would say I try to hit a lot of these things and I’m casual about some of them.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so I’ll make a couple of recommendations. I am very cautious about making broad prescriptions because there’s so many different varieties, right? There is everything ranging from, “I’m having a couple of tough weeks and I’m not sure why, but I can still function really well, I’m high functioning,” all the way to, “I want to hang myself tomorrow.” And those are entirely different species.

Matt Mullenweg: Closer to that first one for me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that experience, yeah. So I’d say a few things, a couple of resources I want to recommend. First of all, if you’re suicidal, certainly please call a hotline. And I’ve been through this, you’re not alone. A lot of people face this and even though it feels like it’s permanent, it’s personal, there’s nothing you can do to change it, there are tools and I’m living proof of that. So I mean, I am incredibly happy and fulfilled right now, and I’ve found tools that help to stabilize and facilitate that — not 100 percent of the time because I’m still part of the human experience. So I would just say, you’re not alone. And if it’s an acute experience, please call suicide hotline, and I’ll put that in the show notes.

But if you search my name, “Tim Ferriss suicide,” that post has helped a lot of people. There’s also a post I wrote called something along the lines of “‘Productivity’ Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me),” which has been helpful for a lot of folks. And that also I think just allows people to remove some of the judgment, the self-judgment from the experience, because the experience that is difficult and then there’s the harsh self-judgment that sometimes accompanies it.

Matt Mullenweg: That was tough for me.

Tim Ferriss: Right? Where you might be in a really challenging state, you’re suffering and then you have this voice that says, “Who the fuck are you kidding? Are you joking right now? Your life is great. There’s so many people who have of so many more challenges than you. You don’t even have the right to feel this way. Suck it up buttercup, get it together,” and variations of that, and it makes it a lot worse. So that post I just mentioned, which I’ll link to in the show notes, has helped some people with that.

Lastly, I would say if it’s really acute, there are a few tools that I’m hesitant to recommend because there are, especially in the first, some risks associated. I did a podcast with Dr. John Krystal, who’s the chair of psychiatry at Yale, which was effectively an everything you would ever want to know about ketamine episode. And I think for acute suicidal ideation and risk of self-harm intravenous or IM ketamine is very interesting as a pattern interrupt. And that episode is available for folks. There are risks associated with ketamine, there is addiction potential, it is something to keep an eye on. But again, risky compared to what? If someone’s at risk of acute self-harm, then it’s generally well-tolerated, meaning it doesn’t suppress respiration, it is very well researched. And that is one tool.

Another, that is a newer tool that I’ve been exploring myself also, which we might talk about at dinner because we haven’t talked about, is something called accelerated TMS. And this is transcranial magnetic stimulation. So various types of brain stimulation for addressing treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. There are some newer protocols like the SAINT protocol, which was developed at Stanford, that are incredibly interesting.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s way faster too, because the old treatments take like 30 days, an hour a day or something like that. The new ones are way faster.

Tim Ferriss: Way faster. So you’re taking treatments that would otherwise take a month or two and compressing it into five days. And fascinating, fascinating, cutting-edge stuff that I’m paying a lot of attention to because some of the results are equal to or even greater than with durability. So it’s as fast acting and as durable or to a greater extent fast acting and durable than some of the psychedelic-assisted therapies.

Matt Mullenweg: I think about it as well because we have friends that won’t ever take a psychedelic or some of these things, or actually there’s whole religions, there’s Mormons of this LDS, et cetera. So some of this stuff I think is a really cool accessibility, kind of like the same way breathwork can be.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And for people who might be older, a little frail or with different conditions, higher blood pressure, et cetera, a lot of these folks should not touch psychedelics. They just should not. The risk profile doesn’t make sense. And that would also be true for certain types of disorders. I mean, later research may overturn this, but for the time being, say, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, a lot of folks who maybe lean more towards the, and this is not a medical term, but chaotic or entropic disorders versus hyper-rigidity disorders like OCD, I would consider chronic anxiety and depression to be also rigidity issues on some level because they are often thought loops, things that repeat, there is a stuckness. Whereas something like schizophrenia, which I have seen up close and personal, has a different feeling to it. It’s an opposite end of the spectrum in some respects. So I’m very interested in those conditions.

Matt Mullenweg: I’ll check out those posts.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for someone who’s having a hard couple of weeks, you mentioned Tony Robbins earlier, I will mention something that I learned from him. I don’t know if he’s the original source of this, but I used to put this at the top of my journals, I would write it out at the top of my journal so that I would see it every morning. And it was basically, let’s call it a flow chart, that’s an overstatement. And it said, “STATE” in all caps with an arrow that went to story and then that went to strategy. So state, story, strategy. And what that’s meant to say is what happens to many people who are depressed or anxious or whatever is they sit down and they try to figure out how to fix the thing, they go straight to strategy. What should I do?

The challenge there is that if you’re looking at the world through gray glasses, the story that you’re going to come up with is going to be most likely a disabling story and then you’re going to come up with strategies that are by and large pretty ineffective. If on the other hand, you start with state. So if you’re in a low energy state, you hop in a cold shower for five minutes, or you do 50 jumping jacks, or you do 20 pushups, anything to change your state from a low energy state to a higher energy state, and that’s governed by all sorts of things — well, let’s keep it simple, so low to higher energy state, then you sit down and because of changes in neurotransmitters or any number of things, you have a more enabling story, right? So you’ve turned the gray maybe a tint or two brighter. Then the strategies you come up with are going to be more effective. So just reminding myself constantly before you jump to the strategy, like the what to do, the how to fix, have you addressed the state? Because this thing in between the story really matters, because if your narrative is like, “Oh, I’m always pessimistic, I’ve never been able to fix this,” you’re starting at a deficit. You have a severe handicap in coming up with approaches that are going to help you. That might be helpful to people as well. Like state, story, strategy, that is the order.

Matt Mullenweg: I’ve got to give credit to my mom, too. She gave me a list of three things that I found really helpful. She was like, “Did you sleep? Are you drinking water?” So sleep, water, and then “Have you been in nature?”

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good checklist.

Matt Mullenweg: I like that because it’s three. Sometimes I just do a check. I’m be like, “Ah, man, this morning is so tough. I felt like I wasn’t grading that meeting.” Then I’ll just like can run that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Sometimes the body scan, I also ask myself, “Am I hangry?”

Tim Ferriss: The basics, right?

Matt Mullenweg: Because our body emotions come from our system and sometimes it’s saying, “I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” and it’s coming through as something else. Our brain interprets it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally and to invoke our mutual friend Kevin Kelly in his book of Excellent Advice, which came out not too long ago, great book. Very pithy and one of them is, “If you don’t know what you need, chances are it’s sleep.” Or, “If you don’t know what to do, chances are you need more sleep. If you’re in a depressed state,” and this is something I have to remind myself of, I would be inclined even subconsciously to consume stimulants because that does change your state. But if you consume stimulants and then that disrupts your sleep architecture and then maybe you drink a little booze to take the edge off because you’re trying to get to sleep. This is a vicious cycle.

I had Richard Branson on the podcast years ago and his advice was stop drinking as far as depression goes. He was just like, “In nine out of 10 cases, alcohol is somehow in that picture,” in his lived experience, in his social circles. Those are a few things that come to mind. There are other things certainly, I mean I could go on and on.

I think The Work by Byron Katie and doing turnarounds and interrogating your beliefs is very valuable. If you have a belief that — I’m making this up, but my sister is selfish and always does what she wants, there are many work pages and exercises that are available for free on Byron Katie’s websites. If you just search Byron Katie, B-Y-R-O-N, Katie, K-A-T-I-E, The Work, you’ll find the website. All sorts of PDFs you can take down.

But let’s just say, “My sister is selfish. She only does what she wants.” Okay. You would then create alternative sentences and find supporting evidence for each one. “My sister isn’t selfish, she never does what she wants,” and you have to come up with some examples.

Matt Mullenweg: With some examples.

Tim Ferriss: You might also replace it with like, “I’m selfish, I always do what I want,” and then you come up with some examples. I and others have found these exercises to be incredibly powerful. There are 1,000,001 different varieties of this. For me, the turnarounds are, you have to come up with confirming evidence for statements that were not your starting statement. I find defangs your beliefs, which are thoughts we take to be true.

Matt Mullenweg: I like that a lot. Thing about Charlie Munger, he says you should be able to argue the opposite just as well as you can argue your case.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. When you get thrown on stage, you’ve got to be Bernanke. Useful exercise. Really useful exercise.

Matt Mullenweg: Got a couple more.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.

Matt Mullenweg: I saw the most incredible horrifying stat, which made me change my mind on TikTok.

Tim Ferriss: Oh.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m just going to read this. It was ridiculous. “20 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds,” did you hear this?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Matt Mullenweg: Said, “Do you agree with the statement the Holocaust was a myth?”

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Matt Mullenweg: Agreed with it and they had the chart of the different eras and like 65 plus it was like zero percent or 0.1 or something, and then it goes up to this 18 to 29, 20 percent. That’s horrifying. Like, oh, my goodness, whatever has led to that sort of misinformation and there’s some indicators that it could be sort of TikTok related.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: Makes me really question is this an adversarial thing? Is this another country goofing the algorithm a little bit in a way that is very scary misinformation.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s terrifying.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, you imagine what a geopolitical advantage it would be to be able to just very ever so slightly nudge sentiment about X or person Y in a certain direction.

Matt Mullenweg: Our social networks are not allowed in China.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: There’s no Facebook, there’s no Twitter/X. There’s no Instagram. I think there’s a reason for that. I think if you’d asked me earlier this year or something, I would’ve been like, “Whatever, we’re a free society, we should have everything, that’s dumb. Trump tried to get rid of it.” I was like, “All right, all right,” you know.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Now I’m like, “Huh,” and it was that stat that kind of blew my mind. Got some absurd things.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: Blogging. I think it’s absurd and it’s beautiful.

Tim Ferriss: Absurd meaning it’s like the horse and buggy in the modern world of clips and video and AI? What do you mean?

Matt Mullenweg: It feels that way sometimes.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Matt Mullenweg: Everyone’s on to something else. I guess newsletters are kind of like blogging, but you know what, there’s something so beautiful about doing it. I’ve been doing a lot more this year and it’s one of the most rewarding things of my year.

Tim Ferriss: What do you find rewarding about it?

Matt Mullenweg: The comments, the interaction, the follow-up. It’s all that. The writing. Well, the act of writing forces you to clarify your thinking. It activates something different in your brain. I mean you know this, I’m preaching to a writer, a real writer. That’s incredible. The act of publishing is incredibly vulnerable, scary. Then all the stuff that happens afterwards, you learn so much from.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we need to chat about how to not resurrect, because there’s still good commenters, but how one could create the best comment section on the internet. Because what I’ve noticed, and I’m sure you’ve noticed this, is that with blog posts, a lot of that conversation has sort of left the room to social media.

Matt Mullenweg: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: The volume of comments and so on is less, but there are exceptions. If I go to, say, the Derek Sivers blog and I look at his comment section.

Matt Mullenweg: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing comments section. If I look at Tyler Cowen’s comments.

Matt Mullenweg: Pretty good. Although mixed, there’s a lot of —

Tim Ferriss: Mixed, but he’s — I mean, I remember.

Matt Mullenweg: He moderates it and he participates himself.

Tim Ferriss: He moderates it. He moderates it.

Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s the secret. You have to participate yourself.

Tim Ferriss: He posed a question, it was like the most underrated geniuses of all time and he nominated Beethoven or I’m screwing it up, but it was some classical music composer and there was an amazing discussion in the comments, which of course may have been, as I think you’re implying, tightly curated.

Matt Mullenweg: I don’t know. I think he’s pretty open. But you set an example.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: By the behavior that you do in the comments and that what you allow, that sets the standard and people follow that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Also, SEO kind of screws it up, because you get people just trying to get links.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: You really have to be careful about that.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so blogging.

Matt Mullenweg: I changed my mind. Oh, this is my last change mind. It’s a little happier than the last one. Vienna sausages.

Tim Ferriss: Vienna sausages?

Matt Mullenweg: You know the sausages in the can?

Tim Ferriss: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, wow. There’s this thing called Vienna sausages.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: I have no idea if they’re from Vienna, but it’s kind of like — how many? Six or seven sausages and a little can this.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: Pops open. It’s one of those — I used to do it, have it as a kid.

Tim Ferriss: Uh-huh. It makes me think they’re not from Vienna.

Matt Mullenweg: I usually am not allowed to shop for myself because I am basically like a kid with a credit card, my parent’s credit card.

Tim Ferriss: Gummi bears and —

Matt Mullenweg: I bought a bunch of Vienna sausages, because I was like, “Oh, this is going to be healthy.” I brought it home.

Tim Ferriss: As an adult, you’re saying?

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, this was like last month.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. Got it.

Matt Mullenweg: Because I was like, “I’ll put it in my desk drawer.” I like to keep healthy snacks by my desk and where I work and I just assumed it’s sausage must be like — you know the punchline that’s coming. It’s terrible for you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: You read the ingredients, the sodium, the everything. It’s like the meat is mystery meat.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: I really thought I had changed my mind on that. I was saying, “Oh yeah, I had a healthy lunch in Vienna sausage,” and someone was a very close loved one, was like, “Oh, that’s not healthy.” I was like, “Yeah, it is,” and we Googled it and I was so wrong.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so Vienna sausage. Sorry, guys. You’re on the suspended list.

Matt Mullenweg: Absurd stuff. Oh, this is a fun food one as well.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.

Matt Mullenweg: There’s so much good fancy pizza in San Francisco, like Flour + Water, et cetera. One that I really like is called Delfina.

Tim Ferriss: Uh-huh.

Matt Mullenweg: Another thing perhaps with my Texas upbringing that I’m obsessed with is the sauce known as ranch.

Tim Ferriss: Ranch?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. Ranch sauce.

Tim Ferriss: Ranch sauce. Like ranch dressing?

Matt Mullenweg: Ranch dressing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Uh-huh.

Matt Mullenweg: Sauce/dressing. You see, this is why you’re the chef.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Ranch sauce. Got it. Okay. Ranch.

Matt Mullenweg: I asked for a ranch in Delfina and they just scoffed.

Tim Ferriss: Uh-huh.

Matt Mullenweg: I have not been scoffed to like that in a while. Then I tried this overseas where there was something, I asked for some ranch and it did not go well. Now contrast at a restaurant called Connessa in San Francisco, a new one.

Tim Ferriss: Condessa? Or Conessa?

Matt Mullenweg: La Conessa.

Tim Ferriss: Conessa, okay.

Matt Mullenweg: They have a lot of ex-Saison people. It’s a casual restaurant, but it’s really good service. They served an amazing pizza. I had the crust, I like to dip the crust in the ranch. I was like, “Do you have any ranch?” I was ready to be disappointed or scoffed at, and he said, “Hold on,” and they actually ran to another restaurant next door to get me some.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: That was amazing. But then I realized, because how do you take more agency in your life? I keep asking for ranch and being shut down. How am I creating the conditions I say I don’t want? I was like, “Oh, you just get those packets.” I went on Amazon and I got like 200 ranch packets for $16 or something.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Nice.

Matt Mullenweg: These have now arrived to my place in San Francisco. It’s going to be in my next “What’s In My Bag,” is some pocket ranch.

Tim Ferriss: Pocket ranch. Yeah, you just keep one or two in every inside pocket on your fancy jackets. I’ve seen you.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m so curious what I’m going to put ranch on in the future, having it available at all times.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Pocket ranch.

Matt Mullenweg: The absurd — I still insist on looking at every tab and email and I’m tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands behind at this point. I think I have 500 tabs open right now.

Tim Ferriss: Wait, what?

Matt Mullenweg: This is an absurd thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have 500 tabs open in your browsers?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: The email thing is like — I’ll even reply to emails from seven or eight years ago. I have that folder and I go through it almost masochistically. The sad thing is on a third of them, it just bounces, because people don’t have the email address anymore.

Tim Ferriss: Why on Earth are you replying to emails from seven or eight years ago? Is this just your Opus day penance?

Matt Mullenweg: There’s probably some of that.

Tim Ferriss: Just cat o’ nine tales on the back for —

Matt Mullenweg: Wow. I also, like —

Tim Ferriss: I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.

Matt Mullenweg: I fully appreciated people who have replied to me when I was nobody or anything like that.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Matt Mullenweg: I kind of want to pay that forward a little bit. I also just am really impressed. I feel like there’s folks who —

Tim Ferriss: There maybe a point when you’ve repaid that debt.

Matt Mullenweg: What’s that?

Tim Ferriss: I said, I feel like there may be a point where you’ve sufficiently repaid that debt that you don’t need to continue to crawl on your knees on broken glass with your tab of 10-year-old email.

Matt Mullenweg: I didn’t say this was a good idea. You asked for absurd things.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know. This is absurd.

Matt Mullenweg: This is absurd.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m still doing that and yeah, maybe I’ll work on that on my sabbatical.

Tim Ferriss: There you go.

Matt Mullenweg: I’ll just answer emails the whole time.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I think you might have some of this as well. I have a very ultra-critical eye.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: I’ve been constantly remodeling things instead of just enjoying.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: They’re pretty decent and fine already.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Matt Mullenweg: This is one of those things that there’s a superpower as well. I can open a web app or a design and immediately spot things down to the pixel.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: But the downside is sometimes I go in an apartment that’s beautiful and I’m like, “Oh, next to that speaker, there’s a little divot in your ceiling.”

Tim Ferriss: I have the same thing.

Matt Mullenweg: That now you’re going to see every time. No, I’m kidding.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: I just cursed your apartment.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: That is a curse as well. I’d like to be able to turn it off to just enjoy things as they are. The wabi-sabi.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. How do you think you’ll make any progress with that?

Matt Mullenweg: No idea. Maybe someone can leave a comment.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve become a bit better at this. There are cases where I succumb to this fine eye for detail, but I think that — this comes back to the depression question a little bit. I would push back on the idea that some of the interventions I mentioned, like 30 days of meditation are out of reach for people who are having a hard couple of weeks.

I would say that the returns on something, and this is very simple. Number one, the social return on, say, going to a weekend transcendental meditation training, interacting with someone is net positive to begin with. So I’m assuming you can get out of bed. If you’re crippled psychologically and can’t get out of bed, then it’s a different conversation. But if you can get up and you’re just like, “I really just don’t know what to do to get out of this funk,” meditating twice a day for a week, I would say in the vast majority of cases, 20 minutes a session twice a day will make a difference.

It creates a bit of space in the system and a little bit more space. It’s like taking your thought speed down to 0.5 X, so that there’s a little bit more space for you to become aware of the stories and the voice and so on. But honestly, just slowing down, which for me, meditating twice a day does, more than half of the time, I wonder if the benefits that I get from it are just not doing anything for 20 minutes.

I could just lay down on the floor for 20 minutes, but proving to myself that I do not need to rush. I have enough time. I have the luxury of being able to take two 20 minute breaks and then seeing over the course of the week that, “Oh, I actually get better results with less stress when I do this.” Sometimes I think it’s just sitting up straight with good posture for 20 minutes.

Matt Mullenweg: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what the causal factors are, but I do think there’s a benefit there. I’m bringing it up because I do think that a regular meditation practice has helped me to accept some of the wabi-sabi stuff and where there’s a point of diminishing returns where there’s improvement up to 90 percent right.

Then if you want to improve it from 90 percent right to close to a hundred percent right, first of all, you’re almost never going to get to 100 percent, because things change and things deteriorate. I’m making up a number here, but let’s just say it takes you five hours or 50 hours to get to 90 percent right, it’ll take another 50 hours to do the last 10 percent.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s actually, that’s very different from my experience of meditation.

Tim Ferriss: All right, tell me. You become —

Matt Mullenweg: This is actually — it’s something I’ve changed my mind on. We’re going to have to talk at dinner, because I —

Tim Ferriss: You’ve become more monkish?

Matt Mullenweg: Well, no. I think meditation can actually be dangerous at certain levels. That’s something we have to explore.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: But for me, and maybe it’s how I’m meditating as well, my system gets very sensitive and very observant.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah?

Matt Mullenweg: I also probably try to use meditation a little bit as a mental exercise, improve my cognition, my focus, other things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: That focus as well, can sometimes or just the sensitivity to the system, talking about downsides of meditation, I know someone who loved blueberries and they got so sensitive to their system they can’t eat blueberries anymore.

Tim Ferriss: From meditation?

Matt Mullenweg: That’s what they claim.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Matt Mullenweg: There’s the pursuit of the Jhanas, which is really big in San Francisco now. I’ve got to catch you up on a bunch of weird San Francisco stuff.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so we’ll get caught up on the weird San Francisco stuff. I did just do an episode, which didn’t get as much attention as I would like it to get, but I did an extended episode with Dr. Willoughby Britton I’ll put it in the show notes on the hidden risks of meditation, actually.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, cool. I’ll check that out.

Tim Ferriss: How they’re addressed and how they overlap with a lot of the risks of psychedelics.

Matt Mullenweg: I believe that, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Which is not to say like —

Matt Mullenweg: Don’t do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a boogeyman in the closet, like you’re going to do TM for 20 minutes and have your brain implode. I’m not saying that.

Matt Mullenweg: Not so that — the dose of that is, I think extremely low risk.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m thinking more like, yeah, many hundreds of hours.

Tim Ferriss: Then you get into trickier territory. I mean, historically, it’s not like everybody in the world was on meditation apps. Meditation was reserved for a pretty select group of folks, who had a lot of supervision. 20 minutes though, twice a day I find helpful. For example, a mutual friend of ours was at my house recently and for whatever reason, I’m in an older house and there are 87 light switches. There’s so many light switches, it’s so unnecessary. There’s one panel with the switches that is like 10 percent turned. He doesn’t have the fixation on details that I do. But he said to me, he’s like, “I’m astonished that you have not fixed that because that must drive you insane.” He’s known me for a very long time. I was like, “Yeah, this is my daily practice is to look at that.”

Matt Mullenweg: That’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: And be like, “You know what, it’s fine. It’s fucking fine.” There are many other bigger fish to fry. That in a way kind of becomes my practice. It’s in the kitchen. I see it every day and it’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t bother me.

Matt Mullenweg: Well, and if or when we have kids, I think kids also break it up.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, they’re going to break everything.

Matt Mullenweg: Any obsession you have with keeping your house perfect I think goes out the window.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s going to be game over.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m almost done.

Tim Ferriss: All right, what you got?

Matt Mullenweg: This last one is really weird and then I have a funny one.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Matt Mullenweg: The weirdest thing I’ve been exposed to recently, Scott Alexander actually wrote about it, but have you heard about this bacteria you put in your mouth and it eliminates cavities?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Matt Mullenweg: Okay, so we have bacteria in our mouth. It’s a whole microbiome, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Matt Mullenweg: I guess there’s a mutation on one of the bacteria that they have essentially GMOed a replacement.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: The bacteria, I guess, normally produces lactate acid.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: The lactic acid is what breaks down your teeth, creates cavities.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: In the ’80s, I guess the scientists discovered this in one of his student’s mouth. It had two mutations and they genetically modified it to add a few more. Basically one, instead of lactic acid, it’ll produce alcohol.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: Really trace amount.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: This is not even one drop, but it’s —

Tim Ferriss: It’s not like a whiskey distillery in your mouth.

Matt Mullenweg: You’re not getting drunk from having this bacteria. I forget the second one. The third one was basically something where it won’t share this mutation with other bacteria. It takes out the thing that usually allows bacteria to trade stuff. There was a fourth one. I don’t know, we’re going to have to look it up now, because I’ve forgot two of the four things.

But you get a one-time treatment of this. You basically scrub your teeth a lot. You put in this new thing, it takes over. Oh, it takes over from the old version of this bacteria, and that becomes the dominant bacteria in your mouth. It doesn’t, if you kiss the friend or something, doesn’t spread because they would need to have their mouth existing stuff removed first before the new thing could take hold.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Their parking spots are full.

Matt Mullenweg: The parking spots are full. I guess the story is this guy tried to get it FDA approved, a scientist, and he created a company around it. The FDA was like, “You need to test this on 100 children or 100 people who live more than — 100 people under 30 who have dentures, who live more than five miles from a school or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: What?

Matt Mullenweg: They created this really messed up thing.

Tim Ferriss: Weird.

Matt Mullenweg: It was basically impossible.

Tim Ferriss: Weird.

Matt Mullenweg: Some hackers heard about this story. First they tried to clone it, then they partnered with the guy to get the formulation, and they’re doing it down in Central America someplace.

Tim Ferriss: What?

Matt Mullenweg: There’s this libertarian. What’s the name of that city that they created?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s —

Matt Mullenweg: The crypto libertarian one.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a crypto libertarian thing in El Salvador or something. I’m blanking on the name.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s called Lantern Bioworks.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: I have no association, not an investor or anything.

Tim Ferriss: No. Okay.

Matt Mullenweg: I’m thinking about trying this. It’s a little absurd.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Lantern Bioworks.

Matt Mullenweg: You go down, you get the treatment, a one-time thing. I guess when they’re bootstrapping, the company will be expensive, like $20 grand.

Tim Ferriss: How are they in Central America?

Matt Mullenweg: The goal is to make this a couple of hundred dollars. Oh, because this libertarian city has anything a consenting adult wants to do for a biotreatment, you do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: As long as you’re informed of the risk. The other thing, they’re going to hopefully commercialize it so they can make it $200.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Then finally they’ll try to bring it back to the US. I guess it’s different regulations around probiotics. Have you tried ZBiotic?

Tim Ferriss: I have, yeah. I tried it this past, I guess maybe six months ago.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I did not find it. This is to prevent hangovers? This is what we’re talking about?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It helps metabolize the alcohol in your stomach.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I did not see a huge difference personally, but maybe I wasn’t consuming enough. But yes, I know what the product is.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, so same idea. That’s A GMO biotic.

Tim Ferriss: I know people who swear by it, but for me it —

Matt Mullenweg: I brought some just in case this was going to be one of those podcasts.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, good. Good. Well, look, I’m always up for a second ride at the rodeo.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, there’s a different regulation around these probiotics.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: If they can kind of get it reclassified as a probiotic, I think they can maybe bring it to the US. But how cool that may be in the future, we won’t have cavities anymore? Because this will just be something we give to kids as soon as they start to develop teeth.

Tim Ferriss: Wild.

Matt Mullenweg: Then how cool would that be?

Tim Ferriss: Uh-huh. Yeah, wild.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s my weird thing. Then my funny thing is, this is also my “What’s In My Bag” post, but it’s a little device, USB-C of course. You never know when you’re going to need a party, so it plugs in.

Tim Ferriss: This is like a disco ball that plugs into the bottom of your iPhone.

Matt Mullenweg: USB-C.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, USB-C. That’s amazing.

Matt Mullenweg: You can get adapters for lightning and different stuff. But yeah, especially with the holidays coming up, New Year’s.

Tim Ferriss: That’s fun.

Matt Mullenweg: Just a little pocket party.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: This is so fun.

Tim Ferriss: That is super fun. Amazing. That’s awesome.

Matt Mullenweg: This is $3 or something.

Tim Ferriss: What would someone search to find that?

Matt Mullenweg: It’s on my post. The “What’s In My Bag” post.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’ll link to that.

Matt Mullenweg: And I think this was like USB disco light that I saw.

Tim Ferriss: Literally you could hold it, you could cover the whole thing in your hand. It’s very small, but it does look pretty much exactly like a disco light, with USB-C that you plug —

Matt Mullenweg: That one’s now for you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, thank you.

Matt Mullenweg: Merry Christmas.

Tim Ferriss: Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So great to hang, man.

Matt Mullenweg: Likewise. This has been a lot of fun.

Tim Ferriss: Always, always a great time. We’re going to head out, grab a bite to eat. We’ll continue the conversation. Anything else you’d like to add before we wind to a close?

Matt Mullenweg: No. Photomatt, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Mullenweg: All the socials. But really check out my blog, ma.tt.

Tim Ferriss: Ma.tt We will add everything we talked about to the show notes, so folks can peruse all of these things. There’s going to be a lot at tim.blog/podcast and search Mullenweg. I should probably come up with a more elegant way of directing people to specific episodes.

But if they search you, you’ve been on a bunch. Just look for the most recent episode, assuming that you’re not listening to this a few years hence. As always, till next time, be just a little bit kinder than is necessary. Not just to other people, but to yourself. Remember that, Jack Kornfield. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. As always, thanks for tuning in.

Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours (#713)

“Companies don’t die from competition. They usually die from suicide.”
— Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) is co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers over 40 percent of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, Texts, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair.

Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. He currently splits his time between Houston and San Francisco.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here. The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements, Helix Sleep premium mattresses, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

This episode is brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate, apigenin, and L-theanine daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.).

Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. Use code TIM at checkout and enjoy 35% off your first subscription order or 14% off your first one-time purchase! And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered.

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2024 by Forbes, Fortune, and Wired magazines and many others. With Helix, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering 20% off all mattress orders at HelixSleep.com/Tim.

Want to hear the episode Matt Mullenweg and I did from Antarctica? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed whisky, perpetual daylight, living with zero internet access, the “patient” landscape of Antarctica, witnessing a total solar eclipse, the grieving process, podcast tech specs, existential revelations, bucket list items, and much more.

[podcast-player id=”8534ff05-ce97-4c8a-9b99-456275c27d50″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/8534ff05-ce97-4c8a-9b99-456275c27d50.mp3″ title=”#578: Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg in Antarctica: Exploring Personal Fears, Bucket Lists, Facing Grief, Crafting Life Missions, and Tim’s Best Penguin Impressions”]

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much More (#712)

Artist's rendering of Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose framed in a festive border with abstract gold and pink swishes on sides and bottom and holly leaves and berries above.

Please enjoy this transcript of another episode of “The Random Show” with technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose).

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

[podcast-player id=”93df9e2a-261f-4247-81c3-a301f2a458d9″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/93df9e2a-261f-4247-81c3-a301f2a458d9.mp3″ title=”#712: The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much More”]

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

Tim Ferriss: KevKev, good to see you, man.

Kevin Rose: TimTim.

Tim Ferriss: Look at this.

Kevin Rose: In the flesh.

Tim Ferriss: In the flesh like grownups.

Kevin Rose: I know. Cheers.

Tim Ferriss: Sitting at a table in Austin.

Kevin Rose: Cheers, man.

Tim Ferriss: Look at this.

Kevin Rose: We’re together. Love it. Happy holidays.

Tim Ferriss: Happy Holidays. Happy early New Year’s, I suppose.

Kevin Rose: Was I supposed to shoot that?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: Sip it. This is quite good, that’s sipping.

Tim Ferriss: This is sipping?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so this is something that I’ve had on previous Random Shows, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it too much.

This is Lalo Tequila and Lalo Tequila, full disclosure, it’s my first and only alcohol-related investment. I was first introduced to this at a fantastic restaurant here in Austin called Suerte. Excellent restaurant and —

Kevin Rose: I feel like you’ve talked about this place before.

Tim Ferriss: It’s great.

Kevin Rose: Maybe I should go there tonight.

Tim Ferriss: An excellent restaurant.

Kevin Rose: Is it hard to get in or no?

Tim Ferriss: Not too bad and there is typically some walk-in available, they reserve some space for walk-ins.

Kevin Rose: Sweet.

Tim Ferriss: And I went there for the first time with Chase Jarvis.

Kevin Rose: Love Chase.

Tim Ferriss: You know Chase.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I had not seen Chase in ages. He was coming in from out of town wanted to do something Tex-Mexy, ended up at Suerte and we wanted to have tequila because we both both liked tequila, asked “what the server most recommended” and he recommended something I’d never heard of this Lalo and I ended up really liking it, both of us.

Bought a bottle turns out that the namesake, so Lalo is the grandson of Don Julio.

Kevin Rose: Oh, crazy.

Tim Ferriss: And this is additive-free. It is matured in the plant instead of in barrels. So it’s a blanco, only blanco, they don’t sell anything non-blanco, and they harvest from more mature plants.

So for a lot of the larger scale operations, they harvest, one could argue prematurely, and then they try to add a little razzle dazzle with additives and the way that they use the barrels and instead of doing that, they’re letting the plant do the work.

So this particular tequila for me at least, is a very clean drink and I know this is a topic du jour, of course, alcohol, no alcohol. I certainly find a place for it and then about six months, nine months later, a year later, out of the blue a friend of mine reached out who does a lot of CPGs. So consumer packaged goods stuff. He’s a genius when it comes to both operating and investing, he’s one of the best I’ve ever seen and he said, “I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of this particular brand, but would you have any interest in looking at Lalo?” I was like, “Yes, I would, because I drink it all the time.” And that’s how it came together.

Kevin Rose: That was going to be my question for you, because I feel like so many of us have had something that we’ve used in life and said, “Gosh, I wish I was an investor here.”

Have you done that with multiple companies? Has there been something where you’ve said, “This is so great, I have to invest?” And then if so, what is your strategy to get to that point where you can become friends with a founder, talk about a round.

Tim Ferriss: You are better at doing this than I am. You’re one of the best I’ve seen back when Twitter was usable, sorry, but I remember Twitter and you’ve used pretty much every channel available.

You’re very generous and sincere. When you find something you love, you share it.

Kevin Rose: Add value first.

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You are able to get the attention of founders, historically.

I’ve seen you do this over and over again, and often I’ll do that. So these days for me, if I find something, and I will sometimes look at either my credit card statement or the stuff I use the most and run down the list to see if there’s anything I might want to invest in, for instance, and there are a few that got away. There are a bunch that got away.

Like 1Password, I should have —

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: And I knew the guys and they ended up raising money maybe a year or two ago.

Kevin Rose: Like gajillion dollars. It was massive.

Tim Ferriss: They’re great guys and I’m like, “Oh, if I had just…” And I didn’t want to because it didn’t feel right, but if I had pushed just a little bit more, maybe could have done something.

There were many stories like that that I could tell but these days I would say I try to be helpful. So I will take something and if it’s good, I’m like, “Look, even if I don’t end up being involved with the company, I want to help them out. The product’s fantastic.” So I might put it in the newsletter. I might mention it on the podcast. Do something like that.

Kevin Rose: Yeah you hear these stories every once in a while. I remember when Facebook was getting off the ground, Zuck wanted a mural painted, do you know this story?

Tim Ferriss: I do, but you should tell it anyway.

Kevin Rose: The artist actually at that time said, “Don’t pay me in cash, pay me in stock,” and that’s oftentimes a very good strategy where you say, “Hey, I might not have the capital to go invest in this thing, but I have a skill and that skill is somehow going to be useful to this company. If I can make friends with them, then at some point it’s like, let’s share the upside together.”

Tim Ferriss: Totally.

Kevin Rose: And you don’t have to ask for a big massive percentage, but you can say, “Hey, is there some options available that I can have?” And that can work. I mean for that guy, I think it turned him into a billionaire or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: It turned into so much money.

Kevin Rose: At least several hundred million dollars.

Tim Ferriss: David Choe, who’s fascinating. .

He has done some incredible and hilarious things. He’s a very funny guy, very, very creative.

Kevin Rose: I don’t know him but I’ve heard that story so many times.

Tim Ferriss: He had a podcast called, I think it was DVDA, Double Vag Double Anal with Asa Akira, who’s a porn star and it may have all been taken down, but he is a polymath. He’s an incredible artist, incredible actor, also.

Kevin Rose: That could have been the name of your show. No one tried to come up with names for your show?

Tim Ferriss: Instead of TimTim TalkTalk?

Kevin Rose: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: You know, it was a close runner up. We all have to make decisions. I saw a shirt side note, well, I’ve had one sip of tequila and here we go already.

I saw a shirt at a climbing gym yesterday, which said “No solutions, only trade-offs,” and I was like, that is actually pretty interesting to sit with.

But on the advising front, because that’s really what we’re talking about, right? Where can people learn more about that? Because I used to point people, and maybe this is still a good reference, it’s a little dated, but Venture Hacks used to have a bunch on advisors and super advisors. This is worth unpacking a little bit for folks.

So if you look at, for instance, my track record, the vast majority of my lifetime earnings and startups have actually come from advising, and that’s not to say that it’s easy, that’s not to say that times haven’t changed, because certainly times have changed since 2008, 2009, 2010, but if you have a skill or you have a network or you have a platform, there are times when it will be appealing for both you and for a startup to have some type of trade for equity.

Sacca used to be fantastic at this before he became the Chris Sacca and in marquee lights that we know and love today and taught me a lot about this, but you might look for, let’s just say I don’t know how the landscape has changed, you could probably speak to this, but say 0.25 percent, right?

Kevin Rose: So it’s early.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, like a quarter point.

Kevin Rose: It means you’ve seen the company pretty early.

Tim Ferriss: Super early. And the way that that’s de-risked for the company, or one way that can be de-risked, is that it vests over a course of, say, two years.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So every quarter, a percentage of that basically becomes yours and the company can cancel at any time and that allows them in a sense to kind of try before they fully buy, they get to see what results you can deliver.

Any other thoughts on folks, or?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean I think —

Tim Ferriss: Thoughts on folks? Jesus.

Kevin Rose: No. We’re one sip in.

Tim Ferriss: Well, this is related to caffeine, which we’re going to come back to at some point.

Kevin Rose: So —

Kevin Rose: I think it’s important to remember that every company that’s out there, a private company, when they’re forming and putting together their cap table, like their list of investors, employees, all of that, they put together something called an options pool, which is a percentage of the company that is used to incentivize those employees to work there. So when you join a company, you get X number of options and you earn them over, say, typically three to four years.

A part of that, most founders will set aside for advisors, and so these are people that are not compensated with money, but rather just stock.

So in my mind, what I always do when I’m forming a new company is I say “Okay, I’m going to take one percent and I’m going to carve that into 10 roles and then I’m going to go out there and find the 10 most impactful people that I can possibly find to help me change the outcome of this company.” And you offer them in a role and you say “Hey, no fancy strings attached.” So I never say “To be an advisor, you have to tweet X number of times.” Like, screw that. You want it to come from a place of authenticity and so —

Tim Ferriss: And you’re often doing this with people you know —

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Presumably, right?

Kevin Rose: Or you could find someone that you’re just like, this is a really good match.

There’s an AI company that I’ve been working with and they needed someone that had a very specific expertise in a very small subset of a type of AI and they found an advisor and they didn’t know this person, but they reached out.

It never starts with, “Hey, we want to offer you an advisory role.” It’s a coffee, it’s a hangout, it’s a dinner, it’s let’s get to know each other. And it’s like, “Hey, you might be helpful” and sometimes they’ll say, “No, actually, you can hire me as a contractor.” Or it’s a mixture of both. They can say, “Hey, we’ll bring you on as a contractor for three months and we’ll give you an advisory role.”

So there’s no perfect science here, but just expect to get some fraction of one percent of a company as an advisor and your hope is that this turns into a 100, 200, 500 million dollar company and that becomes a very lucrative outcome for you.

Tim Ferriss: I would imagine part of the reason that you’re comfortable not having a laundry list of deliverables is because their advisor equity vests over a period of time.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, if that’s over a period of time, you can cancel it any time, so if you’re three months in and you’re like “Ah, this person’s not doing anything,” you can just cancel it and no hard feelings, they get a little small percentage of that and that’s fine.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I would say that it’s best in my mind not to overcomplicate things, especially with celebrities. Celebrities don’t want to have some type of crazy, 20-page document they have to run by their agent and they have to go through with their attorneys and they have to figure out “Oh, I’m going to have to show up at this event.” Like, screw all that.

If you work with a celebrity and you find someone, you happen to know someone and they want to be an advisor, say, “No strings attached. Oh, by the way, we’re doing this party in two months, you can come or not.”

Oftentimes that actually frees them up to be like, “I don’t feel like I’m being used as a pawn here. Sure, I’ll show up for a half hour or 45 minutes” and that’s a win for you.

You want them to speak from the heart when they’re talking about a product.

Tim Ferriss: And I think you would agree that time kills deals, right? Some deals do not get better with time.

Kevin Rose: Yes, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Especially if you’re dealing with someone who has an entourage or a phalanx of lawyers, managers, agents, et cetera, you want it to be an easy yes. Make it an easy yes,

Kevin Rose: A hundred percent. So I’ll give you an example.

Back in the day when I launched Moonbirds, that PFP project, the NFT project that I launched, I talked to a handful of people and some people that I knew quite well that were very famous celebrities. There’s one NBA player that is a Hall of Famer that I gifted a Moonbird to and I said “Hey, listen…” He’s like, “I’m Web3 curious. I want to learn more about Web3” and it’s Ginóbili, like, you know him?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, huge.

Kevin Rose: So I gave him one and I said —

Tim Ferriss: Sweetheart of a guy, too.

Kevin Rose: He’s a super nice guy, and I said to him, I said, “Listen, you don’t have to tweet about it. This isn’t a pay for play thing. I would never want to do that. If for some reason down the road you think it’s really cool and you want to say something, you can.”

And he never tweeted about it, but that’s fine, you know what I mean? He just wasn’t vibing with it, didn’t feel that it was going in the right direction or whatever it may be and same thing for Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy was super kind, super nice, and he created a little parody account for his Moonbirds and was tweeting from it and he was figuring it out because he wanted to learn Web3 wallets, he set up his own wallet, he nested his own Moonbirds, meaning he interacted with smart contracts and dolls and it was because he was curious on the tech side and there was no money exchanged.

It wasn’t about that. So that’s the way I like to do these types of deals.

Tim Ferriss: And you tell me if this resonates with you. I would also think in terms of whether you’re building a company or an advisor, who would I like to work with on multiple companies?

Because I’ve seen, for instance, in many of the cases where I’ve been an advisor, assuming you do a decent slash good job, a lot of these people, if they’re good, are going to be serial entrepreneurs and then you end up just advising, advising, advising and they have their X-Men squad that they pull in to most startups.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That seems to me to be pretty common.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think there’s certain domain experts when you think about just strategies around different parts of your business where you say “Gosh, I would always want this person in my corner if I’m going to go launch a consumer internet product.”

And so you go back to those people or if you don’t know, a great example is I’m relaunching my podcast in January and one of the things that I just have been out of loop on is a TikTok strategy and I just really found a great company that had been recommended and had worked with multiple top 20 kind of podcasts on their TikTok strategy because that’s a hole that’s missing, right?

So I’m going to go out, I ask 10 friends, “Who’s the best of the best at this?” And then try and hone in on that person or people and then get them to work on your behalf.

In this particular case, I’m paying them for it, but that’s fine.

Tim Ferriss: I think twerking is the answer.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Like coordinated dances —

Kevin Rose: Twerking.

Tim Ferriss: And twerking, you might have a little —

Kevin Rose: That’s what you do for your advisory service?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a little case of werewolf buns. I don’t know if that’s a plus or minus on TikTok.

January.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, January.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about January. We’re coming up on the new year.

How are you thinking about New Year’s resolutions, that type of thing?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so we do this every year.

Tim Ferriss: We do.

Kevin Rose: I don’t even want to go revisit our list because I’m sure they’re horrible.

Tim Ferriss: What do you think your hit rate is on your previous list?

You had it written down. Do you have your last list? Can you look at it?

I don’t have it in front of me right now. I would say that over the years I’ve become better. My hit rate is higher.

Kevin Rose: 50 percent?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would say it’s 50 percent.

Kevin Rose: That’s about me too.

Tim Ferriss: I’d say it’s probably 50 percent, which hey, if that were start-up investing man, you’d be best of the best, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But you also don’t want to set your resolutions like “Brush my teeth three times a week.”

You don’t want to set the bar so low just for checking the box.

Kevin Rose: Right?

Tim Ferriss: So I would say it’s 50 percent, maybe a bit more than 50 percent. I think this year they’re simple enough that I could actually get to a hundred percent.

Kevin Rose: Yes, that’s exactly what I did. So this year for me, it’s about less, but make sure I can try to get to 75 to a hundred percent of them.

So mine are really straightforward. Last year I went one month without drinking. This year my therapist has told me, she’s awesome, and she’s like “Oh, you made it a month?” She’s like, “Oh, cool, cool. Congrats. Everybody does that.” And she’s like a little bit of a hard ass and I kind of like that about her and she’s like “No, go three months.” She’s like “That’s when the real benefits start to show up is at three months.”

And I’m like, “I mean, you could have said two,” but she’s at three. I’m going to go three months without drinking. That’s a big one for me. Daily meditations, obviously, have been a big part of my life. I’m going to continue that trend.

We can talk about Henry Shukman’s new app too, which is going to be a big part of that. The Zen Master that I study under is finally launching a new meditation app coming in January called The Way and very excited to help him with that app in terms of on the product side and just usability side, obviously he’s doing all the content. I’m not involved in it. I’m just an investor in it, but —

Tim Ferriss: Not involved in the content?

Kevin Rose: Not involved in content, right.

Yeah, I’m not a Zen Master.

Tim Ferriss: But you’ve studied very seriously with Henry —

Kevin Rose: Yeah for a few years now.

Tim Ferriss: You introduced us. He’s been on this podcast —

Kevin Rose: Twice now.

Tim Ferriss: Twice, and they’re very strong episodes. So I encourage people to check those out.

What makes The Way different?

Kevin Rose: So the one thing about as an investor, so I’m a part-time VC, I had this other NFT and art thing that I’m working on as well as a VC over at True, we are looking for novel ideas, things that haven’t been done before and the meditation app market is just completely saturated.

Tim Ferriss: Saturated?

Kevin Rose: Who would want to build an app in that space? I mean, Calm’s dominating, Headspace is dominating, you know Waking Up, fantastic app for more on the depth side, I would say Sam probably brings together the strongest group of teachers, I would say is a portfolio of meditation teachers.

Tim Ferriss: Like a university of meditation?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

So Henry, his approach is, you know, If you go into any of these other meditation apps, it’s like a meditation for sleep, a meditation for anxiety, and meditation for this three-minute meditation, two-minute meditation, 30-second meditation, you know it’s all these different — Henry’s very humble, but he’s one of only, I think, three fully accredited Zen masters in his lineage of Zen in the United States and he is bringing Zen, a flavor of Zen mixed in with some other types of meditation and his goal is simple. It’s The Way, it’s one path.

There’s no choose your own adventure, it’s like —

Tim Ferriss: It’s not The Ways.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s not The Ways, right. You can’t branch off and do a body scan over here and then come back for a sleep meditation or a sleep story, it’s none of that. It is a singular path and his goal is to lead you to some type of awakening moment sometime in the future.

So it’s for those that are like “Okay, I’ve tried the other meditation apps. I want to go deep. I want to get really serious about this.” So I can’t tell you when it’s going to launch. They’re in beta right now. I can tell you that thewayapp.com is going to be the place where you can put in your email address and I’ll let you know when.

You know what we can do for your show notes, let’s put a beta link, I think you can have up to a thousand testers. Let’s put it in your show notes and get a bunch of people testing it out.

Tim Ferriss: Lovely. Yeah, we’ll put it at tim.blog/podcast real quick.

Kevin Rose: And you put a little bit of cash in too, which is great.

Tim Ferriss: I did, which was going to be what I was going to say next, this is my first investment in a meditation app and my first investment in any type of consumer app in a while, in fact, and that’s based on my interactions —

Kevin Rose: Since Evernote.

Tim Ferriss: Y’know, which wasn’t, that wasn’t a bad thing, It didn’t turn into the thousand x, 10,000 x return, that I would like —

Kevin Rose: I’ve got to tell you they turned it around. It’s a good product again.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is a good product. I still use it, believe it or not —

Kevin Rose: Dude, this is actually on my list anyway, we’ll get into that but yeah, finish your thought. Sorry.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I was just going to say that I learned so much about product. I learned so much about startups. I learned so much about scaling, what to do, what not to do, through my experience with that company where I was an advisor because I didn’t have the capital early on to really build out a large portfolio with cash alone, and I was able to request, this is not a small thing for me. I was able to make requests of product changes directly.

Kevin Rose: It’s amazing, that lifeline to the CEO.

Tim Ferriss: Lifeline to the CEO and to the product team for me selfishly, if I’m using an app every day that makes a difference to my quality of life.

So I do not regret it. And part of your calculus, if you’re going to be involved with early stage has to be, I think, the assumption that the vast majority are not going to return what you hope they’re going to return.

Kevin Rose: Nine out of 10 fail.

Tim Ferriss: That’s just part of a power law distribution. Great book, by the way. Power Law.

So New Year’s resolutions. What else do you have and do you have a date? I’m just going to hold your feet to the fire a little bit for your three months. Have you decided on a start date?

Kevin Rose: Oh, so I’m going to invite you to this, my birthday’s in February and you’re invited. I got really lucky to get to know the artist Sohn, S-O-H-N.

Do you know Sohn at all?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: Have you listened to his stuff?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t.

Kevin Rose: Oh, so good. So Sohn has become a nice friend and he agreed to come play my birthday party for 30 people.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing.

Kevin Rose: And so he’s going to fly out, he’s in Spain right now, he’s going to fly out and play, and I’ve got to have a couple drinks there. We’re going to have a little bartender.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that would be, you’d be failing before you started.

Kevin Rose: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: If your first day were the day before your birthday.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so I’m — after my birthday is when I’m going to kick this off, so that’ll be good. But yeah, so really quickly to hit on mine.

So no drinks for three months, daily meditation, no-brainer, I want to organize my brain in digital form and so this is what’s really interesting in the last three months, multiple notetaking apps have enabled AI and what they’re doing now is they’re saying, “Screw knowing where your notes are, ask questions of your corpus of data.”

So it’s changing into a world where you can just enter all the data, enter all of Tim’s brain into someplace and say “Hey, what was that one note I had that one time when I was at that Mexican restaurant and I think it was about cat beds?” And it will literally serve you up that note based on the AI and its crawling abilities.

And I think that’s just fascinating. So Notion has added that, there are three, they call them second brain notetaking apps that are really for that I’m considering. I’m still working through all of them to see which one I like the best.

My candidates are Notion, Craft is amazing. Craft is a really beautiful notetaking app. It’s a little bit more about here’s the current day, start taking notes, and then you can interconnect the notes and do all kinds of fun things there.

Tim Ferriss: Is it spelled like the dictionary word, or spelled like Kraft cheese?

Kevin Rose: Yes. C-R-A-F-T. Yeah, Craft. Obsidian is another one. Have you heard of Obsidian?

Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard of it or maybe I just like the name.

Kevin Rose: It’s more like graph-based, interconnected notes, all these backlinks tying together thoughts and ideas. My Brain, you’ve seen these cloud mappings of interconnected notes.

Tim Ferriss: Notetaking apps and services also are a very crowded market.

Kevin Rose: Very crowded and Capacities is the last one I’m looking at. I’m leaning towards Craft. I think that’s probably going to be my go-to. It won app of the year last year on iOS, and it’s pretty fantastic and I will say in that list, and still actually I think the largest market share, barely bidding out Notion, is Evernote, still.

And so I installed Evernote, the latest version. I’m like, “This is actually a lot better.” I thought for a minute there it was going to go under because it traded hands a little bit, there was a little bit of drama there.

Tim Ferriss: It got overly diversified, overextended.

Kevin Rose: Yeah but it is quite good. They’ve revamped the app and it is nice.

So that and launching my podcast. And so just keeping it simple, launching The Kevin Rose Show. Yeah, I’ll give it a one-second plug, which is kevinrose.com. If you want to sign up, I’ll let you know when it launches, but I’ve got some great guests lined up for that show and taking it seriously, building out a real studio, doing it professionally, professional editors, the whole thing.

So it’s going to be great.

Tim Ferriss: It is going to be great. I can’t wait to see —

Kevin Rose: I want to keep it simple though this year.

Tim Ferriss: — what the roster looks like.

Kevin Rose: Not 10 things, but just like three or four. What are yours?

Tim Ferriss: Mine are, and then I’m going to come back. Don’t worry, folks. It’s not going to consume the whole show. But I want to ask you a question about AI, so I’ll preload that into your head, which is where do you think people will compromise their privacy because of really compelling convenience where they might regret it, where they might click in providing access, where later they’ll be like, “Oh, I really shouldn’t have done that?” So that’s —

Kevin Rose: I have two quick answers for that.

Tim Ferriss: Go for it.

Kevin Rose: One I think is going to be photos. Don’t ever click “Yes” to all-photo access, especially if you’ve got dick pics.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Kevin Rose: No, listen, I went there because a buddy of mine just got compromised last week. I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I’m not going to say who. I swear to you, Tim, this is a true story.

My buddy got SIM-swapped. Somebody took over his iCloud account and he’s got a very, and my wife knows this so I can say this freely, he’s got a very beautiful wife and he’s a good-looking dude.

He’s a solid B, you know, kind of like us, B minus, whatever, and he’s got pictures of his wife on his iCloud and she’s like, he’s traveling a lot and she’s sending little, little hoo hoo, you know?

Tim Ferriss: Little naughty, naughty.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, and I’m like, I’m like, “Dude, are you sending a little [whistle] back?” Because those are the ones, no one’s going to complain about your wife getting leaked online. It’s like, “Are your pics going to get out there online?” And it was a really stressful few days for him.

Tim Ferriss: I am sure, honestly, not to judge anyone who’s fond of shooting around dick pics. I don’t understand how anyone ends up in that position. I’m just like, don’t do it.

Kevin Rose: No, don’t do it.

Tim Ferriss: There are certain commandments, “Thou shalt not send dick pics.” The downside is so much higher than any possible upside.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Plus, I mean, look, maybe I’m biased. I’m just like I don’t think I have the Shrek of penises, but it’s like I don’t understand what the appeal is also.

Kevin Rose: Well, that’s because you don’t like penises.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not, yeah, I don’t have a, I guess, a collage of schwanzes made into a piece of artwork on my wall. So maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m just, that’s based on the team.

Kevin Rose: I mean for some people that’s the way they flirt remotely and things like that and it’s not me.

I don’t do that either, but I think I am actually doing a full episode on my podcast —

Tim Ferriss: On the dick pics?

Kevin Rose: On the dick pics, no on locking down specifically iCloud. I think it is the scariest place for hackers to gain access to because they get your iMessage messages and they also get your photos as well.

Tim Ferriss: Any quick tips for folks, just a sort of teaser?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Here’s a quick teaser. Number one thing you can do is that, so you want to hear the crazy that happened to him.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.

Kevin Rose: This’ll blow your mind.

Tim Ferriss: God, here we can 10 X my paranoia. Here we go.

Kevin Rose: It actually wasn’t a SIM-swap.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: So what happened is that Apple, as you know, if you forget your password, they have something called iForgot, which is like you can go there and say, “I forgot my password,” and it says “Okay, well do you have another device that you can confirm?” “No, I don’t have another device.” “Okay, well, what’s your backup phone number?”

So you can reset that password with the backup phone number that you put into the system. That all makes sense, right? A SIM-swap, somebody steals your phone number and they get access to it, and then that’s how you get compromised.

Their SIM-swaps are getting harder to do because some of the big providers have caught on and they’ve just tried to prevent that from happening, ask you more questions, all of that nature.

Well, someone called in on his behalf to, let’s just say —, because it was —. You might want to bleep that out if they’re you’re sponsor at some point. But they called in, they faked like it was him, and they didn’t ask for a SIM-swap.What they asked for, they said, “Hey, can you forward the phone number just for an hour to this other number? Because I need it forwarded.” So normally this would —

Tim Ferriss: So it was straight social engineering?

Kevin Rose: No, but — straight social engineering — but listen to this. Normally a forward wouldn’t work because a text message doesn’t get forwarded, only calls do. But you can go into Apple and you can say “I have auditory problems, I can’t hear, can you call me with the security code?”

So they did a quick forward, they called, it didn’t go to his phone, it went to the hacker’s phone. Apple read the security code to them via audio. They put it in, compromised reset, it changed his phone number, compromise, download all of his data, and then tried to blackmail him to get his data back.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. Okay. So in terms of teasers for?

Kevin Rose: Yes, teaser number one thing to do is that you want a cell phone provider where there is not a phone number to call and it’s really, truly, securely locked down.

Your best provider for that in the United States is Google Fi and what you do is you don’t set it up with your Google account. You create a brand new Gmail account that no one knows, TimTimsecure8537@gmail.com —

Tim Ferriss: Dammit, you just doxxed me so hard.

Kevin Rose: Exactly, and then you two-factor the auth the crap out of that, turn on Google’s advanced protection there. Then you sign up for a Google Fi account, which is a brand new phone number. Then you tell Apple that is your backup phone number, because Apple can still service your main number, but only use that backup number to reset passwords.

So there’s no possible way anyone would know that backup number. So it’s a whole thing. There’s more steps to it than that. You get hardware keys involved. Like Google’s Titan Key, which is the most hardcore of the USBC keys hardware keys, uses one of their Titan chips, which is legit. It’s a whole thing, but it’s scary.

Tim Ferriss: It’s terrifying.

Kevin Rose: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Time for me to double down. My phone has been acting funny recently. It’s making me spooked a bit.

Kevin Rose: It scares the crap out of me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like my phone has been acting a little funny and I’m like, weird.

Kevin Rose: Well, you know what sucks too is I’ve been going to WhatsApp more and doing that in seven days, delete all my messages because honestly, there are, tell me if you feel this way, I know you feel this way because we have these conversations on text.

There are things that you say with your friends that you’re just like, “If anyone read this out of context, I would seem like the most insert whatever.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, every person who uses group threads, if you are remotely interesting —

Kevin Rose: Or if you’re funny.

Tim Ferriss: At all.

Kevin Rose: If you’re funny.

Tim Ferriss: And funny, you’re all fucked. If anything were made public everybody’s screwed.

Kevin Rose: Exactly. The number of jokes I’ve made that are not something I would not want the world to see, but are all in good fun and just amongst friends, it’s like in the thousands, right? And if that shit got online, I would deny it all. I didn’t write that AI did.

Tim Ferriss: The AI did.

Kevin Rose: But yeah, it’s tough, so anyway, this is actually really good tequila.

Tim Ferriss: It’s really smooth. So on the AI front, real brief and then —

Kevin Rose: Oh, we said photos was the one part. You asked “What were the places where AI might compromise your data?”

Tim Ferriss: Yes. So that’s the first one.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so I think photos would be the main thing and then the second one would be just this idea of these notetaking apps. Because if you’re journaling, for me, I have a fantastic therapist, I journal all of that, right? So things like Obsidian, the reason I’m drawn to that one in particular is its local only. So it doesn’t sync to the cloud and when it does, it uses a local encrypted key so not even they can read your data.

I trust Notion, but if someone were to compromise their key on their end in theory, even though the data is encrypted at rest, meaning when it’s not being used, it’s encrypted on their hard drives, it is still a potential vulnerability there.

But at the end of the day, if someone really wants to read my therapy note, it’s like whatever. We live in a world where you can just be like, “Ah, someone made that up.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there’s a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI and there’s a whole new world of exploits, wild.

On the AI side. For people who might be curious, I’ve actually, not on my personal notes, but we have trained, or I should say rather Automattic, which runs wordpress.com and I rely on their enterprise side of things for all of my websites.

They have an AI feature and they’ve trained this AI on all of my transcripts. So if you want to ask questions of 700 or so transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can do that and the results, in a lot of cases, are surprisingly good.

Kevin Rose: There’s several startups working on this. I saw one that actually indexed your show and if you ask a question of it, will return the clip in which you said the answer to it, which is amazing.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen this.

Kevin Rose: I was thinking the other day about a great startup that I don’t have the time to build would be a podcast app that, imagine this world, and tell me if this is interesting to you, so it trains on all of your data. I’m listening to The Tim Ferriss Show. I’m halfway through an episode and you mentioned something that I don’t understand or I’m just not familiar with, right? I will just say “ayahuasca” for something random, and I hit pause and I hit the Tim AI button.

Now it’s trained on your voice so it can respond in your voice.

I say “Tim, what is ayahuasca, actually, before we continue the show?”

And you respond. You say “Well, ayahuasca is this, and I talked about it in episode number 12, blah blah, blah and also number 27, here’s a clip of me saying this,” and then you can rejoin the stream of the podcast and continue.

So it’s almost like you show up as a coach mid-podcast for any questions I have about that show so I can pick your brain and also as applied to your books so I could go into your entire corpus of books that I have and ask questions of that data as well.

That has to be the future, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Kevin Rose: How do you feel about that as a content creator, does that make you a little uneasy?

Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t make me uneasy on a content level because I operate from a place of abundance with my stuff because my stuff is so dense, right? It’s not dense necessarily in a bad way, but it’s like I could talk about the content of, say, one of my books for hours on dozens of podcasts and not come close to exhausting even 20 percent of that book. So I’m very forthcoming with that. The one flag I would say that I have for that particular example is that if it’s my voice and so on, and this is going to come up a lot with AI, what is the indemnity? What does liability look like?

Kevin Rose: Right, right.

Tim Ferriss: If someone uses an AI and they’re like, “Well, this Tim AI told me that I should do A, B, and C, or that I should or could X, Y, and Z.”

Kevin Rose: Right. It’s the 0.0001, you hope, percent chance they get it wrong. And then as applied to something dangerous, right? Because that could be —

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Kevin Rose: Telling you from The 4-Hour Chef how to make runny eggs the wrong way, who cares? But telling you to take the wrong supplement dosage is a whole another can of worms.

Tim Ferriss: There’s dangerous, and then there’s just opportunity for scammers.

Kevin Rose: Right. Well, that’s happening regardless, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it is.

Kevin Rose: Tim’s going to be calling me all the time, pitching me a new book.

Tim Ferriss: Well, but not just on the AI social engineering side, but for instance, we don’t have to spend a lot of time on this, but there are people called career plaintiffs out there. Unfortunately, I know what this is. But for instance, there will be a law firm. What they do is they file class action lawsuits based on a couple. Barbara and Bob Jones are the couple that they work with all the time. And they’re like, “Hey, Barbara and Bob, Subway sandwiches is selling 11 and a half inch subs, but they’re calling them foot-long. Go buy two of them and then complain with us and we’ll file this thing and we’ll give you 10 percent of the upside.”

And I think that some of these AI models will provide a nice, juicy bite of the apple.

Kevin Rose: That was actually a real lawsuit by the way that you’re mentioning.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know. But we won’t get into the details of why I know that. But God, the US, man, some of these things, it’s just astonishing that the rules provide for some of these creatures to exist and profit.

Coming back to New Year’s resolutions, we had a nice big boomerang on that. Mine are, I would say simple, not necessarily easy, as is true with a lot of things. The first is minimalist delegation. And what that means to me is delegating the why and the who, but not necessarily the how. So I think my predisposition is to be very detailed when I delegate various types of tasks or projects. In other words, what I would like to do more of is, “Here is, at the simplest level, five words of what I want to do, figure it out. And you can handle all the specifics. You should know that we should have at least three bids if we’re putting something out that’s expensive, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.” But to really take my hands off the wheel in terms of over-prescribing the details, which I have a tendency to do because my mind is very detail-focused. I’m very meticulous, but I have found that, more often than not, I can point to examples of where I’m providing too much step-by-step detail. And also people who receive that in some cases feel like they’re being micromanaged.

Kevin Rose: Not only that, they’re not building the muscle.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly, the confidence.

Kevin Rose: Because they need to understand, the only way they can build that muscle around who you are and what you want is by making mistakes and you saying, “Hey, I would’ve done it this way a little bit differently because of X, Y, and Z,” and then they learn from that mistake versus you just prescribing. And it saves you a shit-ton of time.

Tim Ferriss: It saves a ton of time. So what I’m experimenting with, and I’ve already started doing this, and I think I’ve made a lot of progress, is say less. Say less and be available for questions, but otherwise make it clear that there’s a certain degree of wiggle room and space for errors that is okay.

Kevin Rose: So when your admin walks in, you say, “Sandwich.” If a meatball sandwich shows up, you throw it against the wall and say, “Wrong fucking sandwich.”

Tim Ferriss: That would be one way to handle it. And I remember there was, I want to say, a blog post a while ago that was written by either Ben Casnocha or Reid Hoffman, but Ben Casnocha used to be the, let’s just call it aide-de-camp or chief of staff for Reid Hoffman. And what Reid had said to Ben was something along the lines, and I remember this because I had to look it up — this would be a chance for me to interrogate the Reid AI — “What do you mean by blah, blah, blah?” He said, “In the service,” I’m paraphrasing here, but, “In the service of speed, I’m willing to accept 10 percent foot faults.” And I was like, “Foot faults? What does that mean?”

And I think it’s a tennis reference, which is like when you step over the line when you’re serving and you get called for a fault, but in the service of speed, basically, the way I interpret that is you can get 10 percent wrong. Ideally, it’s not really expensive, catastrophic stuff, but I’m willing to accept a 10 percent error rate in the service of speed. So I’m trying to think about it along those lines. Because there are so many things that are either reversible or inexpensive where it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter. You’re better off making the wrong decision, and then right decision and doing both of those quickly because you course correct. Then taking a ton of time to deliberate in your mind when oftentimes you don’t even have complete information, you don’t know.

Kevin Rose: But also, imagine you get that down to five percent, the extra effort required. What is that doing to you as a burden versus just letting go a little bit and letting those faults happen? And it’s got to be a little bit freeing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. Question for you, because I thought you recommended at some point this book to me, and I have two or three friends who have recommended it since, The Surrender Experiment.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Are you still a fan?

Kevin Rose: Michael Singer?

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’m still a fan, I think.

Tim Ferriss: Could you say a little bit about it? I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it on the podcast.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I haven’t read it for probably two and a half or so years now. But Michael Singer is, I would say just a general kind of, I don’t know how to put it other than just like, I don’t want to say spiritual guru or more just kind of like a salt-of-the-earth type guy that has figured out that surrender is kind of the ultimate freedom. This idea that you can just release and let go, puts you more in the present moment than pretty much anything else. And the whole book is around how when stuff comes in, it doesn’t hit you. It doesn’t hit and stick. So to hit and stick and marinate and fester is not surrendering. It’s letting the energy build and bring you down oftentimes. And the book is framed around this idea that the more you can let go, the more freedom there is, the more happiness there is. And as Henry Shukman put it, the freedom comes from, not the tight grip on reality, but the slow, finger-by-finger letting go of that grip.

Tim Ferriss: And part of the appeal for me, as it was described to me, I have not read the book, but a very close friend of mine is reading it right now.

Kevin Rose: He has a course, by the way, that’s fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: It’s on Sounds True. It is a video course, and it is quite good.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a video course?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Is it necessary to watch the video or is it —

Kevin Rose: He’s a quirky personality and he’s great on video. He’s just really funny.

Tim Ferriss: And it seems like that book at least is his personal story, which automatically makes it more engaging for me.

Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So yes, letting go. So the minimalist delegation, and the second point is actually related to that. That is the, in a sense, letting go. Quick creative collaborations is the second one. I only have three things. It’s minimalist delegation, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot, which is pretty straightforward to me. Again, it’s simple, but not always easy.

Kevin Rose: We’ve got to get into my physical reboot here in a minute.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we’re going to talk about it. So quick, creative collaborations. This is an area where you have seen me actually kick the tires quite a bit in the last year with COCKPUNCH, which by the way, there’s a ton coming with that, which is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people. But I have done enough.

Kevin Rose: Buy COCKPUNCH, I’m taking notes real quick here. Buy NFTs, Tim Ferriss, COCKPUNCH.

Tim Ferriss: That’s right.

Kevin Rose: Hashtag financial advice to the moon.

Tim Ferriss: No, not financial advice. Jesus, that was AI talking. I didn’t say that. And in the process — using this NFT project way back in the day, which is, when it launched in December of 2022, I guess, as a vehicle through which to do creative experiments, emergent long fiction, that was kind of the whole point. And I have walked that. I’ve walked the talk in the sense that since then, and a lot of this has been invisible, but it will soon be visible. I’ve done creative sprints in say, upstate New York with some of the top D&D and Magic the Gathering artists, I should say. People who have done amazing iconic work for those brands doing character design and concept art.

Kevin Rose: How’s that felt to you?

Tim Ferriss: It was so much fun. It was so much fun. And I have had this narrative that I’m a better IC, individual contributor. I’m better as a solo operator. And that in some sense, I think because I’ve heard from some publishers and so on that I’m a bit of a problem author because I’m very, very, very unwilling to compromise quality. I am unwilling to compromise quality, and I’m very meticulous. And so if somebody’s not on that same page, I’m a problem. And so I developed this narrative that I was just prickly and difficult and didn’t —

Kevin Rose: How much of that do you think is true? Have you ever done a 360 review?

Tim Ferriss: I have done a 360 review. The feedback doesn’t usually fit, I wouldn’t say it supports that narrative. And in this particular case, gather all these folks, had some writers as well, which I thought was going to be harder than the art side because I can step back and say, “You are all much better at art than I am. But I have an identity as a writer.” And it was great. I had two writers, three artists, and had an absolute blast. The output was spectacular, which I haven’t made public yet, and that emboldened me to do more and more experiments. And so I can’t talk too much about it right now, but I am actually working on my first book project in seven years, eight years. And I’m doing it with a collaborator, which I thought I would never do in a million years.

Kevin Rose: Okay. Wait, you’ve got to give us a little more, fiction, nonfiction, fantasy.

Tim Ferriss: Nonfiction. This is OG TF style.

Kevin Rose: Five-hour.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, five-hour, but very dense, hyper tactical, not dense, very rich. In other words, it’s not a bunch of fluff. I’m not turning a blog post into a 300-page book. You’re going to want —

Kevin Rose: Can you tell us what it is?

Tim Ferriss: I can’t. I can’t.

Kevin Rose: Can you give me a genre?

Tim Ferriss: I can’t really give you a genre of what I would —

Kevin Rose: It’s not a cooking book again?

Tim Ferriss: It’s not. I think everybody got their fill of cooking with that. I’m very proud of that book, but holy shit, that almost killed me. No, I’m not doing that again. Also, not making the foolish decision to say to myself, “You know what I should do? What would be fun is for me to do 30 to 50 percent of my own photography for a 700-page cookbook.” Don’t do that.

Kevin Rose: Not archery.

Tim Ferriss: If you’re not a photographer, don’t do that. It is so much work. Oh, my God, I really respect the photographers out there. I underestimated that one.

Kevin Rose: But you dodged the archery question. It is an archery book.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not an archery book. I’m planning on doing more archery that is part of the physical reboot. But the quick, creative collaborations this book is going to be about, I would say, how to find the essential and ignore the trivial. That’s the very broad strokes. But I am collaborating on writing, which I thought I would never do. It is going better than I ever possibly could have imagined. And it has opened the floodgates for me to think about what other collaborations I could pursue. Screenplays, animation, television, who knows? But I’ve realized that if I am paired with someone who really gives a shit about quality and cares about being really proud of their work, I’m totally fine.

I can collaborate really well with those people. They just have to have really high standards. And I’m excited to do more of that. So the screenplay side and the TV and animation is particularly interesting to me. So I’m becoming more adept with a format like a screenplay and the format itself has intimidated me. And I feel like I just need to be locked in a room with someone really good for two weeks and be like, “You cannot leave until you have something to ship.” It can be a rough draft, but it has to be pretty much ready. And I think that’s doable.

So the quick creative collaborations is something that I’ll be doing more of. And then last on the physical reboot, I have been such a piglet in the last month.

Kevin Rose: You’re looking thicc.

Tim Ferriss: That’s T-H-I-C-C, folks.

Kevin Rose: Looking thicc.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m not in terrible shape, but I am planning on continuing to be a little piggy for Christmas and the holidays because I’m going to be home with family. And I love butter cookies. I love gingerbread cookies. This is kind of like you not committing to your three months before your birthday. That would be stupid. So I’m going to be spending January, February in really intense outdoor training and skiing and ski touring and so on. So I’m not worried about burning off what I’m accumulating because that’s going to happen, especially at high altitude.

Kevin Rose: I’m going to try and visit you, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Awesome.

Kevin Rose: January.

Tim Ferriss: That would be fantastic. So the physical reboot is up there, and I’m optimistic about that because on the internal level, meaning biomarkers and so on, almost every biomarker is the best that it’s been in like a decade.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: After the last year.

Kevin Rose: That is not me. That sounds amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And some of that has been certainly physical practice exercise. A lot of that has been dietary

Kevin Rose: How’s your Apo B?

Tim Ferriss: The best it’s ever been?

Kevin Rose: How low?

Tim Ferriss: I can’t recall offhand.

Kevin Rose: Okay. 20s to 30s?

Tim Ferriss: It’s within the aggressive Attia target range.

Kevin Rose: AST, ALT, fine?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Those are always fine.

Kevin Rose: Homocysteine always good?

Tim Ferriss: Homocysteine is always fine.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. My liver enzymes and —

Kevin Rose: What have been your issues then?

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Kevin Rose: What are your issues? What did you correct in your blood work?

Tim Ferriss: There are a couple of things that I’ve corrected. So I have historically high uric acid levels.

Kevin Rose: But you’re on an allopurinol then?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not on an allopurinol because I had a reaction to it.

Kevin Rose: Oh, dang.

Tim Ferriss: It can be very dangerous.

Kevin Rose: Yes, it can.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m on something called Uloric, which is fine.

Kevin Rose: It’s actually better, a cleaner drug, I think, Attia says.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There’s a bunch of debate around it because there were some smaller studies that were arguably poorly designed that did some type of head-to-head, and it got poo-pooed. But Uloric for me is a good option. Not medical advice. Talk to your fucking doctor, please. I don’t play one on the internet. In addition to that —

Kevin Rose: That’s from your meat, by the way. You know that? That’s your meat intake.

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s not.

Kevin Rose: Are you sure?

Tim Ferriss: Yes, I’m sure.

Kevin Rose: Because typically uric acid, they used to call it the king’s disease, right? It causes gout and it was from wine and meat and fats.

Tim Ferriss: It’s considered a disease of [inaudible]. So the wine is more interesting.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: So yes, people associate it with, if I’m not mistaken, purines, and it gets associated, therefore with protein intake also. But there’s a blog post. It’s easy to forget. I have a thousand plus blog posts, which actually bridged the books to the podcast. It’s easy to forget that connective tissue with a thousand plus blog posts. One of them is called something like “The [Missing] Chapter from Good Calories, Bad Calories.” Good Calories, Bad Calories book, great book.

Kevin Rose: Daniel Taubes.

Tim Ferriss: Gary Taubes.

Kevin Rose: Gary Taubes

Tim Ferriss: And one of the chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor was about fructose and how —

Kevin Rose: Which Attia is anti.

Tim Ferriss: Right, which also ties into uric acid.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: So what I have seen in myself, at least, it doesn’t matter if I am carnivore diet, vegan, fasting, whatever dietary liver I try to pull, uric acid is high. It just does not matter. And that’s also hereditary. This runs in my family. The other constellation of issues are all cardiac, like, lipid profile related. Also hereditary. Dietary intervention, with the exception of one thing that I’ll mention.

Kevin Rose: Are you on a statin?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not on a statin.

Kevin Rose: Okay. Well, your Apo B is fine.

Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear. So there are different reasons that your lipid profile can be out of whack. In my particular case, and I might be able to put something in the show notes as a resource, there are sophisticated labs or companies that will run labs that fine slice a lot of this.

Kevin Rose: Boston Heart?

Tim Ferriss: I think it’s Boston Heart. And then you need someone to interpret the tea leaves, obviously, in which case you need a very competent doctor.

In my case, I’m a cholesterol hyper absorber. More accurately, I’m a sterile hyper absorber, which means I can also absorb a lot of steriles from, say, plant matter, which is why automatically if you reduce meat or eliminate meat, it doesn’t mean that your cardiac and lipid profile will improve. And you actually see a lot of folks for which it goes the opposite direction because they end up consuming a lot more refined carbohydrates. Their fasting glucose goes up and they end up with a whole host of issues, in some cases associated with fructose. Like, “Oh, agave nectar, brilliant. Well, maybe not so brilliant.” And for that reason, in my case, I’m taking ezetimibe, actually, I’m taking something called NEXLIZET, which is absurdly expensive. Welcome to the United States in this case. But it’s a combination of ezetimibe and something called bempedoic acid. Ezetimibe, very well researched, pretty well understood. Bempedoic acid, a newer player on the scene, but very interesting.

And the combination of those two, plus the Uloric, are what got a number of biomarkers of concern, not crazy. And I’ve done not only the usual cardiac calcium scores, which are helpful, but incomplete in a lot of ways. I’ve also done angiograms, which you do not want to do willy-nilly all the time, but I wanted to see if there were any precursor to any issues. So far so good. In my particular case, those things, plus reducing saturated fat intake.

Kevin Rose: Dude, saturated fat makes a difference. It’s the killer.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it makes a difference.

Kevin Rose: It screws up all my numbers.

Tim Ferriss: It makes a difference. So in my case, it would be a bad idea for me to hit the MCT smoothies. Right?

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So Bulletproof coffee, bad idea for me.

Kevin Rose: Also, the MCT, I don’t know if it does it to you, but it —

Tim Ferriss: Disaster pants.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Risk goes up.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Risk goes up by about 10x.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you’re —

Kevin Rose: You run to the bathroom with the MCT oil.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. If you are thinking to yourself, “In 2024, I want to shit my pants more often,” I would recommend a coffee —

Kevin Rose: If you’re constipated.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Creatine, double espresso, and MCT oil, problem solved.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my god.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t ask me how I know that. But you can guess. Don’t have that right before you’re driving to the airport for your international flight, also, pro-tip. So the minimalist delegation, fast delegation, embracing reversible or low cost possible mistakes, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot. And honestly, with the physical reboot, a lot of that is old news. The stuff that works works. It’s like kettlebell swings.

Kevin Rose: Zone two cardio.

Tim Ferriss: Ski touring, zone two, which I’ll get to very naturally with what I’m going to be doing in terms of hiking and ski touring and so on. Basic, basic basics, I shouldn’t say basics. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. And just when in doubt, return to fundamentals, it’s like weight training once a week, that is better than nothing. Once a week. And then the zone two. But also for me, it’s like one or two sessions of very, very hard technical Pilates to hit everything that I’m going to miss anyway, like medial glute.

Kevin Rose: I’m getting back Pilates in the new year, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s about it. Do less than you think you can do. If some of your goals are around physical reboot or recomposition, set the bar where you are sure you can clear it.

Kevin Rose: So I wanted to talk to you real quick about, you mentioned the physical body reboot. One of the things that all of my physicians, not all, it sounds bougie to say, all my physicians, my primary care physician —

Tim Ferriss: Tell us, President Obama.

Kevin Rose: — has been concerned about is, I have slightly elevated blood pressure. And it’s not to the point where I should have it treated with medicine, but there’s breathing exercises you can do. There’s a device called RESPeRATE, which Peter Attia recommends.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s fantastic. It hooks around your chest. It’s like a strap. And then you put in some EarPods that are connected to this device and it walks you through a series of breathing exercises, and it’s clinically proven to lower your blood pressure. So Attia recommends that as kind of first line defense for slightly elevated blood pressure. There is a device that is approved in the UK and the EU, and it’s called Aktiia. And it’s a horrible name.

Tim Ferriss: What?

Kevin Rose: Aktiia, not Attia. They’re going to get a cease and desist from Attia. Yeah. So it’s A-K-T-I-I-A. I’m wearing it on my wrist right now. So if you’re watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest Fitbit. It’s super tiny. The battery life is five days. It does every hour blood pressure monitoring. It’s clinically proven accurate. And Attia is testing it right now in his lab with his folks there.

It is not approved in the US. So what I had to do is, I bought it online — at first, I got a VPN, I proxied into their website to make it look like I was in the UK. And then I bought online, shipped it to a friend in the UK, who sent it to me in the States. I then created a fake iCloud account in the UK with a fake email address and VPN to act like I was in the UK on a separate phone that I had not sent in, like one of my older iPhones. And then I was able to get the app installed through the UK app store because it’s not available in the US App store and got it to work.

So technically this is not legal in the United States.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, contraband.

Kevin Rose: But I’m actually monitoring it and the breathing exercises are helping. A high salt intake combined with water is huge. If you have a salty steak or anything, I can notice, just remember when we first got into CGMs, you were way before I was, but in the continuous glucose monitors, you got me into them. And you would be surprised because you would sit there and you’d be like, “Oh, banana doesn’t do anything.” And some people, banana shoots you through the roof, right? Or rice for me, oh, my God. Through the roof. I don’t know about you, but rice for me is a huge offender.

Tim Ferriss: Rice affects me less than it affects you, but it affects a lot of folks. And footnote, in a previous episode, we talked about —

Kevin Rose: The rice cooker.

Tim Ferriss: Which drains out the water.

Kevin Rose: Carbs.

Tim Ferriss: Which dramatically reduces the glycemic response. But back to our scheduled program.

Kevin Rose: We can link that in the show notes as well. But yeah, so this for me has been like, “Okay, I just had a salty meal. Now let me chug a bunch of water along with that meal.” And actually I will notice a difference. I do not get into those, what they call the high orange levels of blood pressure just by my water consumption.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning you help or hurt by drinking more water?

Kevin Rose: Yes, drinking water. And there’s evidence to back this up, but he’s had people on the podcast who have talked about this. But anyway, it’s another device that, I hope, knock on wood, they’ve submitted to the FDA, the hope is that we’ll have this device approved in the States here, I don’t know, next six months to a year. So we’ll see.

Tim Ferriss: Very cool. Anything else on the physical reboot side? The three months with no booze I think is going to be, if you can do it, no offense, it’ll be a revelation, I think.

Kevin Rose: It’s going to be amazing. Speaking of it looks like you’re not a big fan of your own tequila. No. I just noticed you’re not really drinking any.

Tim Ferriss: Well, first of all, no.

Kevin Rose: If you don’t like it — you’re just selling it, that’s fine.

Tim Ferriss: It’s also, we started recording a 3:00 p.m. so usually I’m not a 3:00 p.m. drinker, but you know what?

Kevin Rose: I want to be in bed by seven, so, okay.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, geez. Okay. Since we’re just checking back into the home anyway, where they’re going to put our socks on and put us to bed. No problem. Yeah, yeah. All right.

Kevin Rose: Dude. Let’s retire at the same retirement home.

Tim Ferriss: That’d be so fun.

Kevin Rose: That’d be so much fun.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I was about to say something bad.

Tim Ferriss: Cheers, man. It’s nice to see you.

Kevin Rose: Cheers.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk about —

Kevin Rose: Sorry. I was enjoying that.

Tim Ferriss: — taking breaks from stuff because I have kind of a wild story, which I don’t think we’ve talked about at all. I have a number of wild stories.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I’ve got one big one for today.

Tim Ferriss: You have a big one too. And I think these are going to be interrelated in a sense. So I’ll piggyback half of it after what I believe you’re going to share. But I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: Which was the first —

Kevin Rose: Cold turkey?

Tim Ferriss: Cold turkey, which was the first time I’ve done that, probably I would have to imagine since I was what? 16. It’s been forever.

Kevin Rose: Let me ask you a question here. Why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like, “Oh, I have a cup of coffee today, and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later.” Why go — this is like the extreme Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s —

Kevin Rose: Did you get headaches? You must have gotten something.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I got headaches, but it was during a period where I could —

Kevin Rose: But you had Vicodin before.

Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t use Vicodin. I knew that I could accept the headaches, and I had a period of time where there really was a low cost, where professionally I was taking three to four weeks off the grid and I knew that I had a grace period where I could sustain it. So I did effectively, no caffeine, no alcohol, and I suppose the most important other item —

Kevin Rose: No sex.

Tim Ferriss: No sex and ejaculation, which we can talk about that, but that’s pretty easy. The harder one is I did nothing sweet. So not just containing sugar, but nothing sweet. So anything that has an artificial sweetener was out.

Kevin Rose: Would you consider this tequila sweet?

Tim Ferriss: I would not consider this tequila sweet. And there is a bit of subjectivity for a lot of it.

Kevin Rose: It says sweet notes to it. It’s not —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s got some floral notes to it. But by the kind of letter of the law, I wouldn’t consider this subjectively to be sweet. But for instance, any kind of juice, out, any type of sweetener, of course, out, let’s just say different types of plantains, if they are sweet to the taste, they’re out. Sweet potatoes out.

Kevin Rose: Is that hard for you? That’s not hard for me.

Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t seem hard. But let’s just extend this. Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol or some kind of crap in it that is a sweetener.

Kevin Rose: So no brushing your teeth for two weeks.

Tim Ferriss: I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb, just baking soda.

Kevin Rose: Just straight up.

Tim Ferriss: I brush my teeth with that for a handful of weeks. And what you also realize is in the US or in this case, when I went to Korea, if you ask people if A, B, or C has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost everything that you come across. That was interesting. It was challenging because it severely limited what I could eat. But the caffeine was an amazing experience. Now, I alluded to this a little bit earlier. I’m back on the sauce over the last week, week and a half, which I regret, number one. And I’m paying a lot for, there are costs.

Kevin Rose: In terms of sleep?

Tim Ferriss: Let me explain. So let me back up and I’ll just give you the punchline.

Kevin Rose: Well, tell us why you did this to begin with, because you didn’t mention that, it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. Why?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So the reason that I did — it started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff and there were restrictions, and then I just extended everything.

Kevin Rose: By weird stuff, psychedelic stuff?

Tim Ferriss: Yes, psychedelics, which will tie into a part of my strange story later. But I hadn’t done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years. And so I took restrictions very seriously. I think that is important in my opinion. And then I extended them all. And I wanted to see in part because I met someone who said they had stopped drinking anything caffeinated, cold turkey, because they felt like a loser because they’d become dependent on it. And they’d missed a really important ski day, one of the first days of the season. And they’re a really good skier. And they were with a group of people and I believe they were the only person who skipped. And that day they were just like, “No more.” And to this day, two years later, caffeine free.

Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait. I lost something there. When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing because they couldn’t have coffee?

Tim Ferriss: Because they didn’t have coffee that morning and they were so tired.

Kevin Rose: Oh, I see.

Tim Ferriss: That they felt like they couldn’t do it. So they stayed on the ski lift, instead of getting off, they just went around and went straight back down.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And called it a day. And to their credit —

Kevin Rose: They’ve got to be under the weather or something if they had to miss a day of skiing, there.

Tim Ferriss: But to their credit, they were just like, “This is fucking loser behavior. Enough.” And they went to zero. And that caught my attention because when you talk to someone, no offense to anyone who fits in this category, but let’s just say if someone is a Mormon and they’ve never had caffeine, that’s not my life, right? They’ve never had a hit of the sauce. Although technically their workaround is Diet Coke —

Kevin Rose: You are the furthest from a Mormon I know.

Tim Ferriss: — instead of coffee, but we’re not going to get into the weeds there. But if somebody hasn’t had a taste of the delicious poison.

Kevin Rose: Sweet, sweet nectar.

Tim Ferriss: There’s so many things, right? There’s so many things like this where it’s like, okay, if you’ve had one significant other and you’ve never been out and about and sampled the buffet of the world, we can’t really have — it’s very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships. It’s a different situation. Same with caffeine.

But this person had been hitting the sauce for decades, and then they got off. And that was inspiring to me. Then I had this restriction and I just extended it. And just to give the punchline, my sleeping issues that I’ve had for decades, every single one just vanished. Best sleep of the last 20 years.

Woke up wide awake every morning after the first, let’s just call it week and a half, had tons of energy and got a super high volume of stuff done. And what I realized, and the part of the reason to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things? I was curious what my real baseline was. What does real baseline look like? What is Tim, untouched, unaffected by all these various supplements? That’s another thing. I took a month off of all supplements. I only took my prescription meds like the Uloric and so on. I got rid of all supplements.

Kevin Rose: No Deca or testosterone or anything.

Tim Ferriss: No Deca, no nothing.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what the sort of pure baseline Tim is. And turns out baseline Tim does really well.

Kevin Rose: Why go back then? Why?

Tim Ferriss: Well —

Kevin Rose: You got hung over.

Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t get hung over. I didn’t get hung over coffee.

Kevin Rose: Because it’s good after a hangover, a little bit of Le juice.

Tim Ferriss: Also, before I went to South America, I listened to an audiobook, which was called or is called The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine. And that is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it’s The Easy Way to Quit Smoking. And I know literally multiple people who’ve listened to this, had their last cigarette, and they’re done and they stop. So it’s a little hokey, but that made an impact on me as well.

Kevin Rose: I’ll do that for January. I’m write that down on my list. January. No caffeine.

Tim Ferriss: Now that I know I can do it, I’m definitely going to do it again. The reason that I got back on it, and I’ll actually add just a little bit of color. The first is that there were days without caffeine where I would say to myself, “I’m tired. I really want a cappuccino.” But I realized, because I interrogated it, I was like, “Well, I’m not allowed to have a cappuccino. Am I really tired?” And I came to the conclusion that, no, I wasn’t actually tired, I just wasn’t fucking wired. You see what I mean?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: My normal had become multiple coffees in the morning and God knows what else.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So I had taken as my baseline a default, wired sounds too negative, but stimulated state. And when that was removed, the story that I conjured was, “I’m tired.” But when I was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast, podcast turns out great. I’m like, “Okay, let me revisit this.” I wasn’t tired, I was just calm. Interesting.

Kevin Rose: Crazy.

Tim Ferriss: Interesting. And why did I get back on coffee? Coffee for me, I’ve realized, is probably alcohol for a lot of folks. And there’s sometimes, I’m not going to lie. Look, let’s be honest here. There are times when it’s like I want to take the edge off, “Sure, have a drink.” But more often, because I don’t drink that much, I use coffee as a security blanket when my life gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted and things seem a little out of control or I’m not sure how I’m going to make it through something, walk into the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee is, it’s a life raft of consistency. We saw this during COVID, right? Where people would line up at Starbucks for three hours to get a coffee because it was like the one semblance of normality.

Kevin Rose: It’s like a ritual and there’s also a high to it, so it’s like —

Tim Ferriss: There’s also a high.

Kevin Rose: — yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So even though I realize intellectually that it’s counterproductive. When I am feeling as I have been for a host of reasons that I won’t bore people with, but just gone through a pretty challenging week or two, my response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee, even though it increases anxiety physiologically.

Kevin Rose: This is one thing actually, we’ve known each other for a long time, I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t know that I’ve seen you do this. Are you an afternoon coffee guy at all? I don’t know that, I’ve seen you do matte maybe a little bit later.

Tim Ferriss: I typically do not have coffee in the afternoons. And I really try not to have caffeine in the afternoons, which I violated this week. So in the last two days, or I should say in the last, let’s just say in the past seven days I have violated that. And what I’ve realized, because I’ve run the N of one now, and there are a bunch of different variables, so I realize this is imprecise, it’s not a perfect science. Is that I can drink coffee and fall asleep, that’s not the problem. But it disrupts my sleep architecture.

Kevin Rose: Quality of sleep, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I wake up after three days, very little time. Three days of drinking caffeine, I wake up and I have circles under my eyes, dark circles.

Kevin Rose: Are you quantifying this in the sense of, are you wearing an Oura Ring? Do you have any other data where you’re looking at it?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not currently capturing the data with an Oura Ring, but I have in the past, I’ve seen what it looks like. So I know that’s the case. I’m falling asleep. My time in bed, if we’re just looking at a clock is fine, but I’m waking up tired.

Kevin Rose: I hate that.

Tim Ferriss: And then what do you want? You want another hit?

Kevin Rose: Of course.

Tim Ferriss: You want more of the sauce.

Kevin Rose: First thing, a little juice.

Tim Ferriss: And there’s a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. I don’t think, for the rest of my life, I’m going to be caffeine free. But now I have a better awareness of what my baseline looks like, so I can return to that.

Kevin Rose: So let me tell you something crazy. This was before I met Darya, so I’m trying to go back in years now. So probably, let’s just call it 15 years ago, I gave up coffee for about six months.

Tim Ferriss: Six months?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That’s legit.

Kevin Rose: But I wasn’t really that addicted to it, I was having a cup every other day or whatever. And I went back, I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time and I went to Ritual Coffee, which is a fantastic coffee place.

Tim Ferriss: Great place.

Kevin Rose: And I ordered a tall single origin coffee and I drank the whole thing. And I will tell you, when you go six months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee, you feel high as a kite.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super.

Kevin Rose: I was like 10x what I feel today with a cup of coffee. Because your body just, I mean it is a powerful drug when you’ve gone without it for a while.

Tim Ferriss: Super powerful.

Kevin Rose: Do you have any sense of how long it takes to get that back? Have you done any research to —

Tim Ferriss: To get what back?

Kevin Rose: — an initial childhood high of that first cup of coffee?

Tim Ferriss: I see. How long do you go without before you get back to that?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, we can tell you like —

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. I don’t know. I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking. How long does it take to develop a tolerance and experience withdrawal symptoms? It is so fast.

Kevin Rose: Oh, so fast. One day if you go without coffee —

Tim Ferriss: It’s so fast.

Kevin Rose: — for serious coffee drinkers will be headaches.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I would say furthermore, if you stop drinking coffee, and I’m using coffee as a bit of scapegoat here, I love coffee. But if you go without caffeine and then you get back on caffeine and you’re on it for two or three days and then you stop again, my personal experiences, you are going to feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is unlike most other drugs. It is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug. I’m not recommending this, but hypothetically, if you were to smoke cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you’re fine. No problem. You’re not going to have a headache the next day. But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that’s in part because it is often disrupting sleep architecture. That’s my vote, at least.

Kevin Rose: One question for you. One of the things that I have yet to try that I’ve been really curious about, is I know that there are cultures, I can’t remember, I’m going to screw it up. I don’t don’t know if it’s an Inca or I can’t remember exactly which culture it is from Mexico that did high dose chocolate, almost like —

Tim Ferriss: Cacao?

Kevin Rose: — a cacao ceremony where they drink this super purified cacao, insane amounts of caffeine, and they reach these kinds of spiritual states. Have you ever heard anything about that?

Tim Ferriss: I haven’t read reports, but I know that for instance, I want to say in some places in Mexico, certainly in Guatemala, you have cacao ceremonies.

Kevin Rose: I was invited to one, one time, a cacao ceremony.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t know the historical record. I don’t know how much of these things were used a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. There are many new practices that have created the narrative of age-old use for a veneer of credibility when in fact things were very different a thousand years ago.

Kevin Rose: You have to imagine cacao was a staple.

Tim Ferriss: Cacao has been around for a while.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So in the case of cacao, my understanding is it contains theobromine, which in and of itself is a fascinating word. So theobroma, theo like theology, broma, food, food of the gods. Theobromine, which is pharmacokinetically very — meaning, just if you were look at the graph of peak and half-life and so on, it’s quite different from caffeine, is my understanding.

Kevin Rose: There’s actually the vasodilator of the plant. What causes — because I know CocoaVia, for example, are you familiar with that supplement, CocoaVia?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a cacao supplement from a large company, I believe.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, from Mars, actually.

Tim Ferriss: From Mars, yeah.

Kevin Rose: But the crazy thing is, I was talking to Rhonda Patrick about this and she has had one of her, I think it was her mother-in-law or something like that, high blood pressure, takes CocoaVia, drops it down because it’s a vasodilator and is a big fan of it as well. And it’s been shown cognitive improvements as well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not sure, it very well could be the case. I mean, when you get — the dose makes the poison, the dose also makes the transcendence for a lot of different plants. So in the case of cacao, I have experienced higher, let’s call it higher-dose cacao and you can reach an altered state for sure. I’m going to caveat what I’m about to say with the “Do not ever do this” warning. But for instance, there are plants that, at high enough doses, are absolutely psychedelic, which I would never recommend because you can die. Let me repeat that. Fatal risks, so do not try this at home.

But tobacco as an instance, as an example, has a very rich history in South America and elsewhere, but especially in South America where high doses of juice have been consumed. Every mode of administration you can imagine has been done and is very common down there. There’s a book by Johannes Wilbert, which is titled along the lines of [Tobacco and Shamanism in South America], it is very dense, it reads like a PhD dissertation. But when you consume pretty much through any route imaginable enough tobacco, you can experience a psychedelic experience.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Can I tell you a story about this?

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Rose: I’ve had this. So, I was in San Francisco at the time, and they have, this was, I call it a decade ago, they have a bunch of chefs that are very experimental. I won’t name the chef, but it was a one Michelin star chef that infused tobacco leaves into an alcohol.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.

Kevin Rose: And you have to be insanely careful. If you look up online, like you said, if you put too many leaves in the infusion, you will have a lethal overdose of nicotine that will kill you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so this chef knew what they were doing. I would never try this at home. They made me a bourbon-infused tobacco cocktail. And I was like, “This sounds interesting, I’ll give it a shot.”

Tim Ferriss: Hope you don’t need to sleep anytime soon.

Kevin Rose: Dude. No, listen, I drank this one drink and I’m having a good time getting a little chatty and like, “Ooh, this is fun.” And then, dude, I get up to use the bathroom.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.

Kevin Rose: And I swear to God, it felt like my feet were sinking into the ground as I was walking, or I was walking down to the stumps of my knees, like my legs were collapsing as I was walking.

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Wait a minute.”

Kevin Rose: And I was like — because I don’t smoke tobacco at all or anything like that. And it hit me a ton of bricks and I’m like, “I am high as shit.” It is a very potent substance, especially for non-smokers, you’ve got to be really careful.

Tim Ferriss: So coming full circle. So cacao, powerful, fascinating plant, sacred in a number of different cultures. Tobacco, be very careful, folks. It is powerful and potentially lethal. And then coming back to caffeine, it is the, as I understand it, the world’s most commonly consumed psychoactive plant.

Kevin Rose: Via tea. Tea is the number one.

Tim Ferriss: Tea and coffee. And it has this place, I love my cup of coffee. Trust me, I had one this morning. And I think the exercise, if you can do it, not everyone can, but of rediscovering what your baseline is. What you actually felt like when you were 12 or 15.

Kevin Rose: I’m actually writing this down, because —

Tim Ferriss: It’s so valuable. It is so valuable because I now know what that feels like and I know that I can return to it as an adult.

Kevin Rose: Yes. And that holds true to anything that you’re doing that, call it alcohol, any substance that you’ve become dependent upon.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t have to be just caffeine. It can be anything that you’ve, that you almost feel like you can’t live without. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sugar, carbs, some activity, traveling.

Kevin Rose: Late night pizza.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, late night pizza. If you’re a road warrior and you just travel all the time because you say yes to everything, okay, what does it feel like to sit at home, if such a thing exists for you? For one month, what does that feel like? And if a bunch of weird stuff comes up, maybe as Tara Brach would say, “To one sage, only one question matters. What are you unwilling to feel?”

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God, I have to have her on the podcast. That is one of my top guests I need to get.

Tim Ferriss: She’s great. If you haven’t read it, folks, Radical Acceptance, which DarDar, I owe DarDar thanks for. So if you don’t get the reference —

Kevin Rose: DarDar is my wife, Darya. We call him TimTim, so we — the family.

Tim Ferriss: Which came about, actually, let’s give people a real look into the archives. So TimTim came about because we were on a trip to China to drink Pu-erh tea all over the place.

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Which was one of the weirder trips I’ve ever been on for a lot of reasons.

Kevin Rose: We were in the Yunnan province together in the middle of nowhere.

Tim Ferriss: We had some very strange experiences on that trip, drank a lot of tea, had a motley crew of people with us along for that ride. And there was another Tim on the trip. So there was a question of, “How do we keep the two of you separate?” And you came up with, I believe, TimTim.

Kevin Rose: I mean, it was a —

Tim Ferriss: Collaborative decision.

Kevin Rose: Kind of real-time.

Tim Ferriss: That’s how TimTim came about.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So Darya, who is a neuroscientist by training, which is why I actually took the book Radical Acceptance seriously, because all due respect, I love Tara, loved this book, and a huge impact on me. But the title gave me an allergic reaction. I was like, “Oh, God, another one of these.” Sounds hand-wavy. Kumbaya. Didgeridoo. Like, “Okay, I just can’t do it.”

But the fact that Darya, who has one of the lowest tolerances for bullshit, hand-wavy stuff that I know of, the fact that she said she gained from it, gave me permission to dive into it, which then had a really big impact on me. So, coming back though, if you feel like you can’t live without X, that is often a great signal or at least a prompt to ask yourself, what might an experiment look like for two to four weeks to go without X? Been super valuable for me.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome. I wrote it down. No caffeine in January, I’m going, I’m serious.

Tim Ferriss: I might double down and do it with you.

Kevin Rose: Let’s do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. No caf.

Kevin Rose: All right, let’s talk about my experiments, shall we?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it. I’m excited. I’m excited about this, because I also don’t know the details. I know that —

Kevin Rose: You saw the text messages.

Tim Ferriss: — I saw some of the text messages and I was very curious.

Kevin Rose: Okay. So, I don’t know how to frame this. Let me start off at the best I can. So, this is a big one.

Tim Ferriss: You’re pregnant.

Kevin Rose: I’m pregnant. What was the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger got pregnant, what was that? I can’t remember the name.

Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember the name. But yes, I know the movie.

Kevin Rose: But basically, I have the same physique too. So basically, for people that know me or don’t quite know me, I’ve done a bunch of stuff in terms of being like an entrepreneur and an investor and these different things. And one of the hats that I put on a couple of years ago was dabbling in the world of Web3. And Web3, for those untrained, it’s cryptocurrency, it is decentralized internet, it is NFTs, it’s art of the blockchain.

Tim Ferriss: It’s ownership, right? If 1.0 is read-only internet. 2.0 is read, write. Three is actually owning a piece of what’s on the plane.

Kevin Rose: So it’s a very exciting frontier and it’s filled with a bunch of explorers that I would say it’s a small number of people, call it probably, in terms of people that are excited about digital art, call it 250,000 people or less. But it is a serious group of people that are enabling a new canvas to take form in front of us. And I believe in my heart of hearts that for all of the bad press that we see about NFTs and all the scams, and don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of that shit, there is something true about, if you had to close your eyes and wake up in 20 years, will collectible digital art be a thing? Of course it will. And the blockchain is a perfect place to prove provenance, to prove scarcity, there’s a lot of advantages there. Long story short, I launched something called Moonbirds, which was a PFP project.

Tim Ferriss: I remember the text I got on the day of that launch.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. So, we launched this collectible NFT and it skyrocketed way beyond what we had ever thought. So to give you all a sense, from launch to one year in, over a billion dollars has been traded in Moonbirds NFTs.

Tim Ferriss: That’s so wild.

Kevin Rose: And I did not expect that. I really didn’t. But with that comes trading and I have never lived the world of trading. I’ve grown companies to quite some size, but never publicly, I’ve never taken a company public. And when you take a company public i.e, NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, you deal with the ups and downs and feedback from people that are now stakeholders of that particular company. It’s different. This is an equity. Holding an NFT does not make you a shareholder. It’s very different. But they still pay attention to what is the price of this NFT.

So, when the NFT goes up, times are good, people are happy. And when it goes down, people are not happy. I’ve had people truly hug me and say they’ve paid off their house because they sold one of my NFTs for $200,000 and they were stoked. And it was like tears kind of hugging. I’ve had people basically tear me apart saying, “I am the other person on the other side of that equation that bought that NFT for,” let’s call it whatever, 50,000, 75,000, 10,000, doesn’t really matter, it’s all relative to how much that person has as an individual, “and how are you going to fix this because NFTs are down and they need to go up.” Right? And some of it is on what we build to try and build bigger and better things for the ecosystem and try and hopefully prove that we are a company here for the long term.

It has taken a serious emotional toll on me as an individual. I’ve had many, many sleepless nights. I’ve had anxiety like I’ve never had before. I’ve had to work with therapists and I’ve had to reach out to my primary care physician and get anti-anxiety medicine, which I’ve never had to do before. I have had some dark moments with some, not dark like in suicide, but dark as in, it’s destroyed me because I’ve always considered myself an honest person. I’ve never been here to screw anyone over.

Tim Ferriss: You’re also a very, I consider you to be an empathic feeler. Maybe the right word is you’re a deep feeler.

Kevin Rose: I am a feeler. For sure. For sure.

Tim Ferriss: If something like that is sitting with you, you take it very personally. And I remember you had stomach issues for so long.

Kevin Rose: Yes. Oh, my God. IBS-related issues. And so this year I’ve been treated multiple times for these types of issues with physicians, all kinds of things. They discovered, the high blood pressure thing was discovered because I have a brain aneurysm right now. It’s on the smaller side and they’re watching it and I’m fine. But those grow the more stress you’re under because the more blood pressure that builds up, the larger the aneurysm can grow. And so, as you can imagine, all these things hit you at once. And so I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t go to work. I felt like I kind of just needed to reset. And Huberman, who I love, who’s been on my podcast, Andrew Huberman is a top 10 podcast now. Oh, my God —

Tim Ferriss: He’s killing it.

Kevin Rose: Killing it. Love that guy.

Tim Ferriss: He’s doing such an amazing job of executing.

Kevin Rose: I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better at doing monologues and the way that he can do them about scientific topics. I mean just, if you haven’t subscribed to Huberman’s podcast, I mean it’s along with Attia’s, top five medical podcasts to subscribe to, along with Rhonda Patrick, they’re all heroes. Huberman did a couple-hour episode on ketamine therapy. And ketamine therapy, it’s used for PTSD, it’s used for severe depression and it’s used for anxiety. And it sounded really interesting. It rewires neuropathways and Huberman’s episode, highly recommend, I’m not a scientist, but he is. And he goes in-depth about what it actually is doing on the brain.

And I always thought of ketamine clinics as being these shady places. These places where there are real people with real addictions that they treat. If you’re hooked on, say, everything from amphetamines to any type of serious addiction problems, they see these types of people and also people that are about to kill themselves, really suicidal. If you go to an emergency room right now and you say, “I’m going to end my life in the next 10 minutes,” they will most likely treat you with some type of ketamine to just get you out of that state. It’s a very common emergency room like, a Hail Mary to get you back into a state of just being, “Okay, I don’t want to end my life right now.” And now we can work this out or take you to an institution where you can get help. So I was never there, but I got to the point where I was like, “I need to do something dramatic and different and I need to reboot because I can’t take the comments I’m getting on Twitter.”

Tim Ferriss: Now, did you see the Huberman episode organically, did someone send it to you?

Kevin Rose: Organically.

Tim Ferriss: Organically. You just came across it?

Kevin Rose: It just came across and I was like, “Oh, I’ve always been interested in ketamine.” I’d heard about ketamine in a recreational setting. And sadly, who was the Friends star?

Tim Ferriss: Matthew Perry.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, Matthew Perry had just, the toxicology report came back and said that he was on ketamine when he drowned. But we can get into why that is in a minute. But in a —

Tim Ferriss: Let’s focus on your personal experience.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just say also, ketamine and jacuzzis or pools or water do not mix.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And there are multiple fatalities. Don’t mix those two things.

Kevin Rose: Well, when you go under ketamine, you are literally sedating yourself to where they can give you surgery.

Tim Ferriss: It’s dissociative anesthesia.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So what my doctor has told me that, the ketamine doctor, she’s an emergency room doctor that did my treatments, is she said to me that, “If you came…” She was a 10-year, I think 10- or 15-years emergency room doctor. And she goes, “If you came in and you had dislocated your hip,” she goes, “I would inject, I would give you,” What do they call a bolus dose, is that what they call it?

Tim Ferriss: A bolus is — right. I mean, they’re giving you a lot at once.

Kevin Rose: A lot at once. They just push it all in, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And she’s like, “I would give you that to about…” I can’t remember the exact X, but it was a multiple on which they give you for therapy, “to put you under so I can get that hip back into place, and then you wake up feeling fine.” Unfortunately, with Matthew Perry, he took a dose that was equivalent of subconscious fainting, falling asleep, drowning type dose. And they said the toxicology report, I read it, he had that level in him that would’ve put him in that state of passing out.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Drugs and water don’t mix, folks.

Kevin Rose: Don’t mix.

Tim Ferriss: Just don’t mix those two.

Kevin Rose: Anyway, my point it wasn’t the fault of the ketamine, he was using it recreationally versus under supervision of a professional, which is what is needed. So, I found this clinic in L.A. that they literally have the set and setting right. So they’re all about you come in, it’s just beautiful, comfortable, peaceful music, really relaxing, reclining chairs. Eye mask, because it’s important to go inward. It’s not about just getting this therapy and looking around the room. Music with drums and beautiful — sometimes I pick my own playlist, I did a little bit more chanting. You don’t want lyrics or anything to distract you. And they have you hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that measures throughout the time, a heart rate monitor, really professional setting. It’s called Golden Afternoon, is the name of the clinic in L.A.

Tim Ferriss: It’s an amazing name.

Kevin Rose: It’s an amazing name. And the doctor there she’s a — gosh, I’m going to draw a blank for where she — I think she was. Was she Penn? I can’t remember where she got her MD. But top-tier school, emergency room doctor, as legit as they come. So I felt really comfortable. Because you know a lot of this is about set and setting and comfort.

Tim Ferriss: And safety.

Kevin Rose: And safety, yeah. So I went in there and I was like, “I’m going to give this a shot, because Huberman convinced me that this can help me with anxiety.” And so I laid down on this comfortable chair, turned on the heating, they have a heating element in the chair, tilt you back a little bit, put on my noise-canceling headphones. They gave me an IV. An IV does sound hardcore, but for people like you and me that do IVs or do blood draws every other week, who cares? I don’t care about this shit, but it does sound hardcore to most people. They gave me an IV and I closed my eyes and I went to a place, man, I went to a place. And it’s a beautiful place. And it made me, over multiple treatments, and I did eight in total. And they normally do six for depression, which is really interesting. Because she said that, it’s typically anxiety is harder to treat than depression in her experience. And they gave me eight in total and you do two per week.

And about halfway through, the best way I can describe it is, imagine that life is a series of crunches. And I say crunches like the ab workout. Whereas nobody likes to work out their abs, right? Because abs are like, “Ah, fucking ab day.” Nobody wants to do that. And I didn’t realize it, but I had had a 35-pound weight on my chest the entire time I was doing ab workouts. And it took that weight off and I had, and I still have, and it’s been weeks later, a bit of grace and lightness to the way I’m carrying myself throughout life that is just a peace that I haven’t felt since I was probably 10 or 12 years old.

Tim Ferriss: Were you interacting with anyone in those sessions, or it was all internal?

Kevin Rose: No, it’s all internal. So it’s headphones on, music, eye mask. The entire session lasts for about an hour and a half. They have a camera that’s watching you. If anything comes up, one time I had my music accidentally stop and I raise my hand. They’re in there within 30 seconds. They bring you hot tea when you’re done. They let you take your time to slowly kind of come to. And then you can literally walk out there and carry on with your day.

And the first session I was like, “Okay, that’s beautiful.” Second session was a little difficult. Because they caused it — they say it kind of like, imagine it’s loosening up the plaque in your brain and rewiring circuits and it’s not always going to be easy. But by, I remember the sixth session, I just walked out there and Dr. Jenn came in and she goes, “How are you?” And I said, “I could run a marathon right now. I feel amazing. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest. And I just — this is such important work that you do, such important work.” Because it’s not about being — there’s not an addiction to the substance, I don’t need to go back. Some people go back for boosters depending on what they have. She told me that some people that have depression, they’ll come back in every three months, every six months. She said some people, she never sees again.

But it kind of takes the anxiety and pulls it apart from your body so that you can see it for what it is, which is silliness because life is play. And when you realize life is play and we’re all here just trying to figure out our shit, why are we taking it so seriously?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there’s a lot that just does not matter.

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t matter. We can just chill, man, it doesn’t really matter. We have clean drinking water. What the fuck are we complaining about?

Tim Ferriss: So the weight on the chest, was that something that you can’t put words too that you just felt release or — and you don’t need to get into details, I’m just curious. Or was there a content to it where you’re like, “Oh, interesting.”

Kevin Rose: No, it wasn’t content. Content was beautiful. And I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, Tim with, I’ve never done ayahuasca, although at some point I would love to try it. But I opened my eyes and it was when the mask is on and I was seeing things that were as high of fidelity as what we see today, like right now. Where you’re like, “I am in a room right now.” And I felt very present, my dad’s passed away, I felt very present with a father source there at times. I felt very connected. At one point I saw the entire world and I saw how small I was. And I was just like, it immediately gave me this sense of just gratitude for that being that little speck, but also at the same time, not having to take and carry the burdens of the world on me for being that little speck.

And so, there’s bits and pieces of that, but I would say at the end of the day, when you come out of it’s not like you had this epiphany. It’s more like, Dr. Jenn calls it the ketamine’s time, she calls it time-on brain. How can we make this sit and do the rewiring on your brain and give you time-on brain with the drug and the compound and let it do its work? And so it was a lot of surrendering. It was a lot of saying, “You do what you want to do. I don’t care where you take me emotionally, mentally, whatever. It doesn’t really matter.” It’s time-on brain with a compound. And after a certain number of sessions, you just feel this natural lift and lightness. And it felt like, I’m not a ballerina, big surprise, but it felt like a little bit of walking through life is a little bit of a dance now than it is such a struggle.

Tim Ferriss: It makes me super happy, man, to hear that.

Kevin Rose: It feels amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And I remember getting the texts, some of the texts from you, and I was excited to have this conversation. Which we haven’t had, this is the first time we’re talking about it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it is.

Tim Ferriss: And I’ll say a few things. The first is that, I have seen a number of cases where ketamine therapy has changed or saved lives. So, a friend of mine, for instance, who suffered from depression his entire adult life had a similar experience to yours. And he went to a clinic, I believe it was in New York City, very well run. And he goes back once every six months for a single tune-up, let’s say just say —

Kevin Rose: Call it a booster, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — session. And I actually know, I’m also not going to mention their name, but someone we know as a mutual friend who you probably don’t know also does this once every three to six months. And separately, I know someone who’s in law enforcement who is heavily dis-incentivized from talking about mental health with his superiors because you’ll be put on leave generally, if you even hinted that and you’re in certain professions, airline pilot for instance, you’re going to be put on leave and it’s —

Kevin Rose: “On leave” is a nice way to say you’re probably fired.

Tim Ferriss: — it’s a nice way. It’s a career risk to bring these things up, which puts many more people at risk, right? There should be a bit of processes for this. But nonetheless, he was suicidal at one point. We’re talking about somebody who was carrying around a firearm all day. And ketamine was an intervention that was incredibly effective for him for pattern interrupting. And I use that very literally, because the pattern was a thought loop. This is personal, this is permanent, this is never going to change. And when you’re able to at least interrupt that for a short period of time, you provide people with hope or at least a window within which they can consider other options. So for acute suicide, suicidal ideation, also for chronic pain, very interestingly, ketamine is super interesting.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yes. It’s interesting you say that because Dr. Jenn over at this clinic has told me she’s treated quite a few people for chronic pain as well, and it works quite well.

Tim Ferriss: So I unexpectedly, because —

Kevin Rose: Have you done it?

Tim Ferriss: So before I talked to anyone about anything like this, generally I am volunteering to be the monkey shot into space. So several years ago I did six sessions over three weeks.

Kevin Rose: Ketamine?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Oh, shit. Dude, why did you never tell me this?

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t realize I didn’t tell you. So I did six sessions, this would’ve been —

Kevin Rose: With a mask on and in the music.

Tim Ferriss: In this particular case it was music, but it was not mask on. The way that this particular clinic ran things was with video, which was very strange to me. But nonetheless, it was sort of nature-scapes. And I was like, “okay, well this is new to me, I’ll try it.” And it ended up being supremely interesting. I was not going in with an acute condition, so it was hard for me to evaluate ultimately a lot of the efficacy. They found it very strange and I found it hilarious because they would do an intake each day of active sessions.

Kevin Rose: That’s what —

Tim Ferriss: And they would ask me to do various assessments for anxiety, and my anxiety levels were going up over time, which they found very confusing, because, you may have experienced a little bit of this, ketamine can compromise your short-term memory, in the short term, after a session, so you might forget where your wallet is or forget where your backpack is.

Kevin Rose: I didn’t have any of that.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So that can happen, and that happened to me. And it happened to be the case that while I was doing these sessions, because I shoehorned it into my schedule, I also had a number of huge podcasts coming up like LeBron James and so on, and it was freaking me out that I kept forgetting shit, and so my anxiety was going up —

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Over the course of treatment, which was not typical of me.

Kevin Rose: So I did the same thing. They gave me a whole breakdown. It was one to five on a bunch of different scales.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I think it’s a pretty standardized thing that they give you. I can’t remember what the anxiety scales are, but mine went down to literally a one on all of them, or a zero on all of them, which is amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It is amazing. And I want to mention a few other things. I’m sure Huberman’s episode is excellent. For people who want to have a comprehensive overview of ketamine, I’m sure Huberman’s is great, so listen to that first.

Kevin Rose: It’s fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: I also did an episode with John Krystal, Dr. John Krystal, who is the chairman of psychiatry at Yale, who did a lot of the seminal research with respect to ketamine as an antidepressant in humans. So the protocols that get used, which I think are generally 0.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, et cetera, over X period of time with Y number of infusions, those are the protocols that he developed with his other investigators.

And I want to mention a number of things just to make sure that I’m doing my safety-first Ferriss duty. So the first is that part of the reason, and this is pure speculation, but I think that it was risky for Matthew Perry to use ketamine, is that he had a history of abuse.

Ketamine can be very addictive for people who are unwilling or uneager to feel certain things. It’s a dissociative anesthetic. So if you have, for instance, a history of alcohol abuse, it is, I would say, increasingly likely that you might abuse ketamine, which is why, if someone were to consider ketamine therapy, I feel very strongly that it should be IV or —

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Intramuscular injection and not at-home treatment —

Kevin Rose: Oh, a hundred percent.

Tim Ferriss: Where you have access to, say, lozenges or a nasal spray.

Kevin Rose: A hundred percent, because there are companies that do lozenges at home.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I completely agree.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: But I will say one thing, Tim, real quick and I’ll let you continue. I noticed my desire for alcohol go down.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think that that can happen. And I’m just saying for folks who, for instance, may be coming out of or are part of AA —

Kevin Rose: Oh, yes.

Tim Ferriss: And they have issues with depression —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: My personal take, after everything I’ve seen, is that prior abuse of alcohol highly correlated to potential abuse of ketamine. And I would say, furthermore, there are some urological risks if you use ketamine chronically, and alongside that, if you use ketamine chronically, and this is true for a lot of drugs, actually, not all of them.

Kevin Rose: That’s for snorting though, right?

Tim Ferriss: Do a self-check. I mean, snorting —

Kevin Rose: Because it wouldn’t get in your urological tract, otherwise because it would metabolize in the liver.

Tim Ferriss: Well, most people who consume ketamine recreationally —

Kevin Rose: Oh, it would be their mouth, or —

Tim Ferriss: It will be a lot of, it will be snorting of one way —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Of one sort or another. So they’ll either have it in — it will be in suspension in a liquid, or it will be a powder they snort in the same way they would snort cocaine. A lot of people carry little lockets around their necks with ketamine. I’ve seen this a lot and —

Kevin Rose: And by the way, that’s not what I’m talking about here today.

Tim Ferriss: No. No, no, no. I’m not —

Kevin Rose: But those are two very different things.

Tim Ferriss: No, no. They are, they are. So just to be very clear, ketamine therapy with IV or IM has a track record of being incredibly promising for a —

Kevin Rose: Trained physician —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for a number of other things.

Kevin Rose: Like proper — yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But where some folks get lost is they go from, instead of clinical setting, higher-dose supervised, they bleed into more casual recreational use.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: In which case, it’s very important for me to say that ketamine can be very helpful for people with, say, treatment-resistant depression or chronic depression. If you use it chronically though, it flips the other way and it actually makes you predisposed to more depression. So it’s just something for people to be aware of.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And as is true with so many things —

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: More is not better.

Kevin Rose: Do you know what — what was the drug that Michael Jackson died of? Do you remember the name of that?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure. I think it was a synthetic opioid or —

Kevin Rose: No, no, no. It was basically —

Tim Ferriss: Some type of anesthetic?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure.

Kevin Rose: So it was funny. I went and — because I’m old now, in my 40s, I went to have my first colonoscopy because you’re supposed to do that shit, you know?

Tim Ferriss: Party time.

Kevin Rose: Have you done that yet or no?

Tim Ferriss: I have, yes.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so I went and did mine. And —

Tim Ferriss: And by the way, this is very sad, but do not skip your fucking colonoscopies.

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: A very good friend of mine since we last spoke, Roland Griffiths, who’s an amazing scientist from Johns Hopkins, he died of terminal cancer.

Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus. Sorry, man.

Tim Ferriss: And I had a long conversation with him a few days before he died, before I went to South America. He was completely razor sharp up until the end. And my recollection is that part of the reason that was caught too late is that he was a few years late in having his exam.

Kevin Rose: And so I had mine done and they caught a couple pre-cancerous, as they do with most people these days.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Do your fucking screens.

Kevin Rose: And you’ve got to do your screens. But anyway, long story short, when I was going in, the anesthesiologist came in the room and he was kind of a funny guy. It was cool. I like those guys.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And I asked him, I said, “Can I have this slow ramp?” And he is like, “What’s a slow ramp?” And I’m like, “Where you just kind of give it to me a little bit of time, just because I feel like going into that zone.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And he’s like, “It’s funny you say that.” He’s like, “I’m giving you the same drug they gave Michael Jackson when he died.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s crazy.” I’m like, “Why?” And he’s like, “He was just addicted to it.” And so he gave me the slow ramp, and I remember this feeling about probably, let’s call it 30 seconds into it, where I felt like I was okay with dying. It was just this moment of like, “This is beautiful.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And I was like, “Oh, my God. This is what Michael Jackson was feeling right now.”

Tim Ferriss: Propofol.

Kevin Rose: Propofol.

Tim Ferriss: Propofol.

Kevin Rose: Propofol. Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Propofol.

Kevin Rose: That was it.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Kevin Rose: And so I get it, but this is to the point of Matthew Perry dying in the pool. This stuff puts you under.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It puts you under so that you can have surgery.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: And that is what ketamine does as well, so it’s like —

Tim Ferriss: And ketamine, broadly speaking, is an incredibly well-tolerated safe drug. Part of the reason that ketamine is, I believe, listed in the World Health Organization’s Top 100 most essential medicines —

Kevin Rose: 100 most — yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Is because it is generally very well-tolerated —

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And it does not suppress respiration.

Kevin Rose: Yes, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Kevin Rose: Which is a huge one.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Gigantic. And it’s an incredible compound. And you just need to know the risk profile. And there are risk profiles for everything.

Kevin Rose: Of course.

Tim Ferriss: We have tequila and we have water in front of us. Water has a risk profile, too.

Kevin Rose: It does.

Tim Ferriss: People die every year of hyponatremia —

Kevin Rose: Did you hear about that —

Tim Ferriss: Because they drink too much water when they’re training for or running in a marathon, and that causes disruption of sort of electrochemical signaling. And then boom, they drop. People die every year.

Kevin Rose: You probably didn’t hear about this, but there was a radio host DJ —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, he’s fucking —

Kevin Rose: Do you remember this? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Tim Ferriss: Where they have these water-drinking competitions?

Kevin Rose: The water-drinking competitions.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. People died.

Kevin Rose: And somebody died of overdosing on water.

Tim Ferriss: This has happened many times, right?

Kevin Rose: It’s so crazy.

Tim Ferriss: As Paracelsus would say, “The dose makes the poison,” but sometimes the frequency and the use pattern makes the poison.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I think ketamine is incredibly interesting and for —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, especially — because when you get into the actual science behind it, we’re not just using this as an escape. It’s actually rewiring the brain.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And Huberman will get into the kind of neurology behind it and what’s happening and why these are more lasting changes and why some people, not everyone, but some people can go and do this and they don’t ever have to go back for a booster or anything else, and it changes them forever. So I don’t know if I should get into this.

Tim Ferriss: We can always cut it.

Kevin Rose: Well, someone very close to me, she was closest to suicide and she’s a dear friend. She’s a sweetheart of a person. And she was the first time I had ever heard of ketamine therapy. This was probably four years ago. And she said, “I was about to take…” The closest to taking in her life. And she had heard about ketamine therapy. It was kind of new at the time. And she paid for the six pack, the six sessions, the full six. And she hated every single session. And it was funny, when I talked to Dr. Jenn at the clinic that I went to, she said, “It’s very common, people that have depression, they don’t enjoy the experience.” And I thought it was fantastic. I loved the whole thing. But when my friend said that at session six, she heard a pop in her brain, like a physical pop.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a psychic —

Kevin Rose: Chiropractic.

Tim Ferriss: Adjustment.

Kevin Rose: Literally, the depression lifted and she has been amazing ever since.

Tim Ferriss: So wild.

Kevin Rose: And this has been like five years ago.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And it’s like, I believe her. She’s doing insanely well now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And it’s like, “Oh, my God. Dude.” So Tim, I just want to one, thank you for how much money and effort you’ve put into psychedelic research because —

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man.

Kevin Rose: After experiencing this, I realized that there is something here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And we don’t have it figured out.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Obviously, we don’t. We’re in the baby stages.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: But 10, 20, 30 years with AI, maybe 10 years, this will get figured out and it will be largely because people like you help fund this type of research.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks, man.

Kevin Rose: So I just want to say thank you for that.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you for saying that, brother.

Kevin Rose: It means a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I really appreciate that.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I was so happy to see those texts.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I was so happy.

Kevin Rose: Well, I’ve got to tell you, if you’re in the L.A. area, and obviously you’ll talk to her as a doctor, this is her advice, not ours, and you’ll go through the whole screening process. But goldenafternoon.clinic, I think, is the website, and she is an amazing human, very caring, comes in pre and post checks in on you like a really well run facility. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, war veterans, all these people are going in to see her and it’s great. It’s God’s work, whoever you believe in God or not. I get it.

Tim Ferriss: There are some great clinics out there. I will say there are also a lot of fly-by-night clinics.

Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.

Tim Ferriss: So do your homework.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: One of the main advantages, or it is a main advantage, of ketamine as compared to other psychedelics, is that in the United States, it is currently legal.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And that is a non-trivial advantage. And I will say that one question you may want to ask in doing your due diligence, if you consider this as an option, and I do feel after canvassing many different compounds, many different treatments that for acute suicidal ideation, that ketamine is at the very top of the list. It is on a very short list of interventions that having credible promise for at least creating the space for someone to consider treatment options. And the question, the due diligence question that I recommend, and this is true for any type of drug-assisted therapy, it’s actually true for surgeons too. It’s true for doctors in general. Ask them what types of adverse events they have observed, what type of abuse potential they have observed. If their answer is, “Everything is always fine. We’ve never had an adverse event,” that is a huge red flag.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Anyone who has enough mileage, if they are ketamine clinic physician, if they are an ER physician, they will be able to tell you what things look like when things go sideways —

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And how they handle those situations. And if they don’t volunteer any of that, it means either they’re inexperienced or they’re delusional, generally.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. A hundred percent.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m giving people a bit of a break or it means they’re lying.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And in all three cases, you do not want to have anything to do with that particular practitioner.

Kevin Rose: By the way, I looked her up, she’s at Princeton.

Tim Ferriss: Princeton?

Kevin Rose: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Go, Tigers. Look at that.

Kevin Rose: That’s where my doctor went in Princeton.

Tim Ferriss: And Phil Wolfson, for instance, has done a lot of writing on this. Do your homework. You are signing up for, let’s just call it psychoactive brain surgery. So to the extent that you would do your due diligence related to a surgeon who is going to be physically opening your head, carving a hole in your skull and performing manual brain surgery, do a commensurate amount of homework on the person who is going to be providing you with compounds that have a significant impact on cognitive functioning. Not necessarily only in the short term, but in the longer term.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You want to hear another crazy drug story?

Kevin Rose: Let’s hear it. That’s why we’re here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right. I’ll give you a refill. Speaking of drugs, Andrew Huberman would —

Kevin Rose: Not be pleased.

Tim Ferriss: He would disapprove.

Kevin Rose: Neither would Attia —

Tim Ferriss: Disapprove —

Kevin Rose: Although Attia likes straight tequila.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, occasionally Attia will have a drink or two. He just knows what he’s signing up for. And anyway, we can come back to this. Part of the reason that I had a wild experience in Portugal recently, no matter how much wine I have there, I do not have a headache the next day. And I think it’s additive-related. I can feel tired, it will fuck up my sleep. At the end of the day, it is alcohol. But fascinating how different my physiological response can be. In any case, that’s true with this stuff too for me personally with long.

Kevin Rose: That’s great to hear, considering I’m consuming a good portion of it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a good portion. All right, so let’s —

Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve got to talk to you about my tattoo at some point.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Should we? All right. You know what, I’m going to leave that as a cliffhanger. We’re going to come back to —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, we’ve got to come back to that.

Tim Ferriss: Wild drug story —

Kevin Rose: Because that’s why I’m here in town.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Kevin Rose: You’re going to hear about the crazy machine.

Tim Ferriss: What? Okay, let’s tattoo and crazy machine. What’s going on?

Kevin Rose: So —

Tim Ferriss: What’s the bracelet with the skull on it?

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s just a —

Tim Ferriss: Bracelet and skulls.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, bracelet and skulls.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: So one of the premier generative artists, and by when I say generative, what I mean by that, for those that don’t know, is there’s a whole genre of art that is code-based that you write actually computer science code and you create art. And one of the premier artists in this space that’s been sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and all over the place is Tyler Hobbs. He is based here in Austin.

Tim Ferriss: He’s such an awesome guy, too. Another sweetheart guy.

Kevin Rose: By the way, he told me he has always enjoyed hanging out with you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh.

Kevin Rose: So he’s hanging out with you a couple of times.

Tim Ferriss: He’s a nice guy.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: He and his wife are just lovely beyond words.

Kevin Rose: Such great people, yeah. And so Tyler lives here and in Austin and his NFTs, you can say what you want of NFTs, but his NFTs are just absolutely gorgeous pieces of artwork. And he can sell for, at times, millions of dollars.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: They’re really sought after. So —

Tim Ferriss: Also a legit visual artist outside of code.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I went to his studio today and he pulled open binders that he’s been doing for decades of his visual art.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, so fun. So fun.

Kevin Rose: And it’s just like he’s not in this for the quote, unquote NFTs.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: He is an artist to his core. And so one of the things that — he always likes to — he strikes me as the person who is always saying, “What’s next? How can I push things in a different direction, right?” And there’s a company based out here called Blackdot that has a machine. It’s a robot that uses not tattoo needles, but you know when people get their eyebrows cosmetically tattooed on?

Tim Ferriss: I can imagine it.

Kevin Rose: Well, it’s a common thing. Some, I don’t want to be gender-based here, but it’s mostly women that get it tattooed on as their eyebrows.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: But they use a much finer needle than they would, say, a tattoo gun.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: And so this robot, this machine, uses these really fine needles and what they do is they take, and we can put this in the video as well, they take and they put this kind of template on your arm that is more or less just almost like a QR of massive QR code kind of grid on your arm.

Tim Ferriss: Wow, okay.

Kevin Rose: So that’s my forearm.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I was wondering about that. You sent me a text and I was like, “What the hell? Is that your tattoo?” Okay.

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s just like a giant QR code.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, like a giant QR code across my forearm. And that allows the optical lenses and the lasers and everything to align the tattoo. It is doing 17,000 small micro pushes into my skin with this needle.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: And it does it. They can gauge with these depth sensors, the correct depth of the dermis to go in so that the ink doesn’t spread out and fade over time so they can do insanely high-fidelity tattoos. Like stuff you’ve never — it’s like picture perfect. Even when you see those pictures of like, “Oh, that person got that baby tattooed on their chest. How cute.” Imagine 10 x the fidelity of that where you’d be like somebody took a picture and pasted it on their chest.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: They have a machine that can do that.

Tim Ferriss: So you’re never getting those off until you change your mind.

Kevin Rose: What this is Tyler started with, he drew me a sparrow, and the reason I like a sparrow is because to me a sparrow is the most common low ego bird to me that’s out there. I’m just getting a little sensitive, but it reminds me that we’re all just sparrows.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: We don’t need to take each other — no one’s better than anyone else.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: We’re all a common bird. We’re all humans, right? And then what he did is he applied an algorithm to it that degrades the bird into a pixelated form over three images.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so the last one is his last algorithm of the more pixelated version. And so you can imagine I’m getting this tattooed on my arm tomorrow. And —

Tim Ferriss: So wait, you’re getting it tattooed tomorrow, what is that?

Kevin Rose: This is just stencil.

Tim Ferriss: Ah. Okay.

Kevin Rose: So I wanted to show you this today of what the stencil will look like.

Tim Ferriss: Cool.

Kevin Rose: So you can imagine a world where literally in the future —

Tim Ferriss: How long does that stencil last?

Kevin Rose: You could wipe it off with some alcohol and stuff, but it’s just there for the show of the show. But you can imagine a world where he can give you an algorithm like he does with his artwork, and you can walk in, put your arm underneath this machine and get a unique generative piece by an artist that is one of one unique to you as defined by an insanely famous artist. Imagine if, let’s backtrack here, but Picasso had the tools in his day to say, “I’m going to create an algorithm that is a bunch of crazy swirls and chaos that is my brain.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, or a Banksy or whoever.

Kevin Rose: Based on whoever. And you stick your arm in and you get a one-on-one Picasso. They’re only doing three of them. This is a brand new machine, brand new technology.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Kevin Rose: And so that’s why I’m out here to do a one-on-one, Tyler Hobbs on my arm with a sparrow.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Kevin Rose: So that’s tomorrow.

Tim Ferriss: Blackdot?

Kevin Rose: Blackdot, yeah. It’s a new kind of startup out here.

Tim Ferriss: And here in Austin. Man, there’s a lot happening in here.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot happening. That’s cool.

Kevin Rose: It’s so cool. Yeah, I want to show you the one they did of the Mona Lisa. It’s amazing stuff. You don’t have — do you have any tattoos at all? You don’t, do you?

Tim Ferriss: No. I’ve been thinking about getting my first, which is why I asked about the stencil.

Kevin Rose: So look at that.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s like just the eyes of the Mona Lisa right there. But look how high fidelity that is in the forearm.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s wild.

Kevin Rose: It’s insane.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s fast pretty wild.

Kevin Rose: So you’ve been thinking about getting one?

Tim Ferriss: I’ve been thinking about getting one for years, which would be —

Kevin Rose: What would you do? Molly.

Tim Ferriss: Molly’s paw prints on my forearm.

Kevin Rose: You would not.

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Kevin Rose: You would not. Are you serious?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: That’d be kind of awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: How old is Molly now?

Tim Ferriss: Molly is eight.

Kevin Rose: Oh, is it —

Tim Ferriss: Between eight and nine.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, Toaster is slowing down, man.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s tough.

Tim Ferriss: It’s so sad.

Kevin Rose: There’s nothing more heartbreaking than starting to see your dog start to go.

Tim Ferriss: On the decline.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: He is falling now. His legs are falling out from underneath him.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.

Kevin Rose: I know. It’s the worst. We don’t have to take the podcast there, but yeah, it’s bad.

Tim Ferriss: But hey, Toaster has been with the podcast since day one.

Kevin Rose: Remember when he’d chew on the cables? He’s like he was going to —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I do. I was just going to bring it up, man. Back in the day, this was still Digg era, I guess, and we were at your apartment in San Francisco and he was just a little pup chewing on the cables.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I remember that.

Kevin Rose: He was Toast.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: He’s still kicking it though. Mentally, he’s sharp as shit, which is great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Which is nice.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s nice to see him. We were playing with him. Friendly Toast.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. What a great dog.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So for me, it’s hard for me to imagine a world or any circumstances in which I would regret having the paw prints on my arm.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And there are many others —

Kevin Rose: How much has that dog meant for you personally? Because I’ve seen you through multiple relationships.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Dogs are like this thing that is just like this steadfast love.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Has it been a good — I mean, obviously, it must been an insane emotional lift for you to have an animal like that in your life.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It has changed me fundamentally on so many different ways, I think. And it’s not just the receipt of that love, which is — it’s like a task in and of itself, right? I mean, like to — and I actually saw this at one point. Somebody had sketched it onto this piece of wood and I came across it and it was like your task in life is to learn how to love and be loved. That’s it. And being loved is actually not straightforward for everyone, right?

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Learning to receive that in a way. So that has been a gift, but it’s also been a practice of giving and thinking about someone else’s welfare. And having, say, a dog as a mirror also for yourself, where let’s just say early on when I was training Molly and I took the training super seriously.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. I was there for that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: You were so serious.

Tim Ferriss: And I ended up being pretty good at it. And Molly is very well-trained. But if she fucked up or made a mistake, I would get upset.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And —

Kevin Rose: Or you would hit her.

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Tim Ferriss: Jesus Christ.

Kevin Rose: I’m exaggerating.

Tim Ferriss: I did not hit my dog.

Kevin Rose: Sorry.

Tim Ferriss: And beat her with a rod. So no, I wouldn’t hit Molly. But I would get very frustrated.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then that would scare her. And not because I was lashing out, but I would just get so frustrated because I’d be like, “God, this is the 37th time we’ve done this.” It was a mirror because Molly is not doing anything deliberately to piss me off.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: That’s ridiculous.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: And so it was an incredible reflection in the pond for me to see what was going on and to see what’s going on with me, right? I’m short-tempered.

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: If you’re with other people, you can weave a story to justify it.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Well, they should know like, “God, I didn’t get sleep, and they know that, and dah, dah, dah, dah.”

Kevin Rose: Yeah. They’ve done this.

Tim Ferriss: “Why does it always have to be in the morning that they blah, blah, blah?” You can really spin a yarn to rationalize why you’re upset with someone else, but a really loving, well-behaved dog, are you kidding? That’s a you problem, pal.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That is not a dog problem.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And so on all of those levels, she has just been such a wonderful companion and teacher. And I was away from her for a few weeks recently for the first time because I was in South America and absolutely not the right place for a dog where I was in the middle of the jungle. And I really, really missed her. So I mean, God, I’m really like, “Take us there.” But when I think about, which I do pretty often, when she has her decline and then passes, it’s heartbreaking for me to imagine. And I’m going to get a second dog almost certainly in the next year. That would be on my New Year’s resolutions too. And I’ve thought about this for a few years, but I’ve pushed it off because there’s part of me that doesn’t want to accept that Molly is mortal. So I push it off and push it off but it’s time —

Kevin Rose: It’s good to do it on the sooner side because when they’re older, I could never introduce another dog to Toaster right now because he’s too old to handle that puppy energy versus if you did it now, then they can chill with each other.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And Molly is really good with puppies and she loves puppies.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to do that very soon in the next year. And I at one point was volunteering, it’s a long story, but I was volunteering around wolves and I was preparing the food and so on for these wolves, which were —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, those are the ones that licked you in the teeth and stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Which were being sort of rehabilitated and raised in captivity because they’d either been bred and raised in captivity, in which case they can’t be released, or there are any number of conditions that led to them being non-viable as wild releases. And I saw one of the volunteers had — I think it was on his rib cage, he had a print from this wolf that he had known for years until that wolf passed away. And I thought to myself, “You know what? I’ve never felt pulled to have a tattoo.” And the fact that I have no tattoos is kind of novel now, which is funny, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Tattoos are pretty common.

Kevin Rose: Oh, you’ve got to go to Jess, my lady. She’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So I might, I might. And I thought, “I really have a hard time imagining regretting doing that, and I can also see it being a really valuable reminder of a lot.”

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Tim, I’ve got something for you.

Tim Ferriss: Yup.

Kevin Rose: Listen to this.

Tim Ferriss: Tell me.

Kevin Rose: You know how I said someone was going to play at my birthday?

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Kevin Rose: Jess is going to be out there at the same time.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: Why don’t you sign up to get the tattoo?

Tim Ferriss: At the party?

Kevin Rose: I mean, not at the party, but the day before, the day after or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Oh. All right, all right.

Kevin Rose: And she has booked out by a year.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: She did Bruce Willis’ tattoos. No, she’s legit as they come.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, she’s legit.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.

Kevin Rose: Jessmachete on Instagram. Insane.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Now she’s booked out for five years.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I just —

Kevin Rose: We’ll book her up.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll pull up the strings.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: This has been on my list for a while. It’s been on my list for a couple of years, and I think partially because I’m nervous.

Kevin Rose: You would love her.

So can I ask you a question?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I want to ask you a question that is a little bit more intimate just because we’ve had some tequila and we’re talking about dogs and just kind of the companionship and whatnot. Speaking of kind of New Year’s resolutions and looking back on life, in the last 10 years, when it comes to both personal, either intimate relationships or private, if there’s any one thing, what would you change about your interactions with either someone that you’ve been with on an intimate level or someone that maybe it’s on a more kind of friendship level. Is there anything that you can look back on and say, “I would’ve done more of this?”

Tim Ferriss: That is an exceptional question. And you know when I was driving over here, I was thinking about another question. We have the ultimate cliffhanger and the crazy drug story, so maybe we’ll get to that, maybe we won’t. We will do that the next episode. But I was thinking also, I was like, “What would Kevin tell his…” I’m going to ask your question, but I was thinking, “What would Kevin tell his 30-year-old self, my current Kevin, do this, maybe not do so much of that, blah, blah, blah.” I thought that could be a fun exploration. With the interpersonal stuff, I think that I would say just because someone needs other things, needs things that are different from your needs does not make them high maintenance. And by the way, Tim, if they looked at you through the same lens you were looking at them through, they would decide that you are high maintenance.

So gather some tools, right? I would say read The Five Love Languages, as cheesy and schlocky as it might seem. That shit is so helpful as a framework for discussion, for identifying and easily labeling the different categories of needs that people might have and putting them in some type of order. Oh, interesting. You’re a quality time person. Good to know. Number two would be this. Oh, you’re a physical touch and then acts of service person as I am, right? These are shared vocabulary that you can use to really avoid and repair a lot of things, right?

So I would say a handful of things, right? So Gay and Katie Hendricks, also Conscious Loving. There are a few books, a few resources that would say, “Look, if you really care about someone, commit together to develop a shorthand, which allows you to not necessarily prevent, I don’t think prevention is the key. I think repair is the key, right?” If you’re in a startup and you’re like, “Well, let’s just prevent all the bad things from happening.”

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: That’s never going to work.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Shit is going to happen and people are going to have bad days, and you’re going to say things you regret and there are going to be disagreements. And by the way, if there are no disagreements, something’s wrong.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.

Tim Ferriss: And therefore, having a shorthand and a set of agreements, these are the rules that we agree to play by and we’re not going to be perfect. I would say that would be very high on the list. And I would say for really close relationships, potentially, maybe we’ll edit this out, but who knows? MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, let’s just say anywhere from once a quarter to once a year, no more than once a quarter for a whole host of reasons. But I think that while MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is incredibly impressive, and I’ve been very involved with that from, I don’t want to say day one because that’s not true, but certainly for the last 10 years or so, I’ve been very involved up through phase three and now onward. The results with treatment-resistant PTSD or a complex PTSD, where you see people who’ve had this diagnosis for 17 years, suddenly after two or three sessions end up asymptomatic, right? They would not meet the criteria for PTSD with durability out to six, nine, 12 months.

I mean, it’s something that almost defies belief, right? It is causing a complete reexamination of psychiatry as we know it. I still think that is second place to couples work when it comes to MDMA. I think that that is an incredibly fruitful arena for seeing the full potential of MDMA psychotherapy. That would be another one. Because sometimes, oftentimes couples end up, and I know multiple people now who have had this experience with professional guidance, which by the way, folks, currently is illegal. So be forewarned, there are legal consequences or at least risks entailed with this. Not to mention the fact that at least I would say 60 to 70 percent of MDMA that you might purchase is adulterated or mixed with something else at this point, so you need to be very careful. Dancesafe.org is a resource I would recommend for testing kits and so on if you’re going to go that route. I’m not recommending you do anything illegal, however, people are going to do it anyway.

Kevin Rose: You have international listeners.

Tim Ferriss: People are going to do it anyway. I just recognize it’s like you can’t just say to every teenager, “Don’t have sex.”

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Kids are going to have sex. So let’s be realistic about it.

Kevin Rose: I did that shit one time. It was fun as shit.

Tim Ferriss: Had sex?

Kevin Rose: No. When I was 23, I did, well, they were called ecstasy back then, but holy shit, that is a good compound.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and that can also go sideways, just for the record.

Kevin Rose: Oh, no doubt.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, there are films out there now, How to Change Your Mind, the miniseries on Netflix. Watch the MDMA episode. It is excellent.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And it’s pretty heavy because it gets into some PTSD, but you’ll be able to see live session footage if you want another alternative.

Kevin Rose: Man, Pollan’s a hero.

Tim Ferriss: He’s great. And there is also a doc called Trip of Compassion, which is worth seeing, which has a lot of session footage as well. But those are a few of the things that would come to mind.

Let’s say on a friendship level, I might suggest to my earlier self, let’s just say 30-year-old self, right? Something that I have really embraced and put into action in the last handful of years, which is going to sound a little anti-social, but I don’t view it that way.

Humans have a finite capacity for building and sustaining really deep relationships. You just can’t do that with everyone. And when I’ve looked back, say — and I do this every year at a past year review, and I look back in my calendar every week of my last year, and on a piece of paper with positive and negative, two columns, I write down the peak negative and positive experiences.

If I look at the commonalities for the peak positive experiences, it’s usually the same 10 people, or fewer, right? It’s the same cast of characters. These are my close friends who are nourishing, supportive, good influence. And before — what I would say to my younger self is, “Before you seek to develop a bunch of new relationships, ask yourself, are you spending enough time, as much time as you would like, with the people on that shortlist who you know are guaranteed to be nourishing for you?”

And if the answer is no, maybe you should double down on those relationships. Maybe you should reach out to those people to get something on the calendar before shit crowds it out, before you look for shiny objects in new relationships. Which doesn’t mean I don’t develop new relationships, I occasionally do, but I’m at a point where I think recognizing the ephemeral nature of life, the finite limits, the constraints that we have, is actually very enabling.

It helps you to make cleaner, faster decisions. So for me, I would just say, before seeking to develop new deep relationships, ask yourself the question: “For my closest five friends, let’s just say, in the last year, did I spend as much time as I would like with those people?” If the answer is no, reach out to those five first.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What about you?

Kevin Rose: Oh, man. I would say, honestly, I think that we’re at the age now where every day just brings a new unknown in terms of how long are we going to last. I’ve had multiple friends with cancer now. I had one friend that I almost lost this year that was in the emergency room for weeks that we thought had stage four cancer and it ended up being a horrible bacterial infection from some foreign country.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I remember this.

Kevin Rose: I just realized there’s so many times when we hang out and we just give a hug and say, “Oh, good to see you, blah, blah, blah.” But we don’t say, “I love you.” We don’t say, “You are so essential to me in so many ways.” And maybe this is the ketamine talking, but like — no, but when I went through this whole thing with the ketamine therapy, I realized when I came out of it, I just realized that at the end of the day, love is the, this is going to sound cheesy, but it is the most important thing that we tell each other and that we feel for each other. And when you can really feel that and you say, “This person is so important to me,” and you let them know that and you feel it back, I don’t know what’s better than that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, what’s more human than that too, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: In a way. I mean, love, you can observe affection and love in many other species, but the ability to verbalize it and express it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Do you feel that psychedelics brings that out of you? Because when I did the therapy, I had more love in me than I’ve had in so long. Do you feel that’s a commonality amongst psychedelics to have a sense of just gratitude for existence?

Tim Ferriss: For sure. I think it’s very common. It’s not always across the board. I mean, I would say that this might be a controversial statement, but the psychedelics, to me, are similar to — there’s a lot more to it, which we’ll probably dive into, but kind of like alcohol, or power, or money in the sense that they magnify what’s already there and a term you sometimes hear is a non-specific amplifier. So I don’t think that at all. There’s no compelling evidence to me that psychedelics, if put in the drinking water, produce world peace, there’s no evidence for that. Right? I mean, you have plenty of civilizations —

Kevin Rose: Maybe lithium though. No, no, no, remember there was a study.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I remember. I remember. Yeah, a little bit of lithium goes a long way.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, people can look this up. We’ll try to find, there’s some —

Kevin Rose: There’s a study that people in populations where there is more lithium naturally found in the drinking water have lower rates of suicide than anywhere else in the world.

Tim Ferriss: All sorts of stuff. Yeah, so we’ll see what we can find. Put in the show notes. I do think low-dose lithium is pretty interesting. Very low dose. But psychedelics are a non-specific amplifier. There are many cases of civilizations where they had human sacrifice, played soccer with human heads, and they consumed psychedelics.

Kevin Rose: I still sacrifice people.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: You know. As we all do.

Tim Ferriss: Every once in a while in the solstice, I mean, I think it’s all fair game. The feeling of gratitude and love, I think, for a lot of people who wish to enable that, to experience it more, who have the conscious, or subconscious, desire to rekindle those things, that the experience you’re describing is very common.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. For sure.

Tim Ferriss: I think part of that is the dissolution, this isn’t true of all experiences, but the dissolution of self and, consequently, the felt sense of unity with many or all things. Which leads you to feel, for most people, less alone.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Which leads you to feel quite grateful because, to state the obvious, I suppose, despite the fact that we’re more connected than ever with loose ties, I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression —

Kevin Rose: Oh, for sure.

Tim Ferriss: — that is highly correlated to feeling of isolation. So, when you can remedy that by feeling the exact polar opposite in some of these states, not necessary, but helpful, that the end result of that is a feeling of gratitude for sure.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: What was the — before we wrap things up, because I know we’re coming to the end and you still have some tequila to finish. What was the cliffhanger you said you wanted to tell us?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so I’ll try to keep it short. I’ll let you — I’ll tell you what, I’ll keep it short and then you can excavate —

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: — as you like.

Kevin Rose: I love to excavate.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So as you know, for the last year, I’ve basically been crippled by lower back issues.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I’ve had trouble — there are days when I’ve had trouble getting up and walking. I mean, it’s been that bad.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, Tim, you first told me about this eight years ago or something. Remember when you got those injections or something?

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Rose: You were like, “I think I have degenerative disc…”

Tim Ferriss: “…disc disease.”

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I’ve had lower back issues for a long time. This is also a congenital issue. So I have what’s called a transitional segment. In other words, there’s a segment in my lumbar, there are vertebrae in my lumbar area that really mimic a sacral vertebral segment and that’s problematic for a host of reasons. Creates an abnormal angle. And if you can imagine just bending the paper clip over and over again in ways that it shouldn’t be bent.

That’s sort of the feeling in the low back. My brother has this. There are other people in my family who have this issue. So standing extended, slow walking, like a museum walk, cocktail party type of experience, can be very painful, like the low back locks up. But in the last year, specifically, had all sorts of issues and all sorts of MRIs and specialists, and PT, and adjustments, and traction and this, that, and the other thing. And it was a disaster and it caused a — well, let me give myself a little more agency. I created a lot of anxiety around this ’cause I was like, “Fuck, is this the new normal?”

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Is this really the new normal where —

Kevin Rose: Well, because you project forward, what does five years from now look like?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m like, I’m not that old.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m pretty active.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, and your skincare is amazing.

Tim Ferriss: My skincare is amazing.

Kevin Rose: I saw your Instagram —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.

Kevin Rose: — video.

Tim Ferriss: You know what’s funny, sidebar, is how much time you can spend on a blog post. Takes six months to put together and it’s like, you get crickets and a fart in the wind and then nobody ever reads it again. And then someone on your team is like, “You know what, people ask about your skincare. Let’s grab a couple clips and throw it up,” and it goes bananas.

Kevin Rose: I’m on Instagram and the first thing that pops up to me is like, “Hi, I’m Tim Ferriss. People ask me about my skincare regimen.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God.

Kevin Rose: “Let me tell you, I use Bronner’s Natural Soap,” or whatever. It’s like, “What the fuck has Tim become into?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so here we are, folks. Here we are, folks.

Kevin Rose: Your skin looks amazing though.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you. Thank you.

Kevin Rose: Breathtaking.

Tim Ferriss: It’s —

Kevin Rose: All natural.

Tim Ferriss: — it’s working from the inside out. So, coming back to the main throughline here, terrifying experience, the back. And I had more or less given up. I was in the stage of grief where I was trying to get past denial and accept that this might be the new normal because no one could figure it out. And a lot of the advice I received, many of the diagnoses were conflicting, and then I decided, in part because of this, to do a few things. And part of that was going to South America, which I’m not recommending, there are a lot of risks down in South America. It’s generally like safety fifth, it’s not safety first, so people getting into a lot of trouble. But I went down and did this training, which involved consuming a bunch of plants, also involved fasting for a week, also involved —

Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait, wait, water fast?

Tim Ferriss: Water fast.

Kevin Rose: Jesus. Seven days?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Also involved during that week, really not sitting, and standing very little. So it was either hammock or cot, basically. And I’m mentioning these things because they’re confounders. Translating that into basic English, that means that I can’t really point back to one thing and say, “This is what caused what I’m going to describe.” But during the first experience, which happened to be with ayahuasca, which is a huge gun, it’s, I think, treated very casually by people who do not realize what they’re signing up for. I do not recommend it to most people. As my ex, who’s going to become relevant in the second, would tell you, I talk many, many, many more people. Nine out of 10 —

Kevin Rose: Which ex?

Tim Ferriss: — out of — I’m not going to mention her name, but out my most recent ex, out of using ayahuasca than I talk into using ayahuasca. Nine times out of 10, I say, “You should not proceed. Do not pass go.” For a lot of reasons. But in this particular case, had a very, very, very difficult experience.

And I can kind of rank order my hardest experiences over the last decade plus, and this would be the third most difficult, maybe the second for different characteristics, which is saying a lot. And there was a point at which, in that experience, all I could imagine was having my head in the lap of my ex. That’s all I wanted. It was the only thing I could even visualize because I was in the impact zone. I was just getting hit by hundred foot waves from every angle. And there was no respite. It was 10 out of 10. There was no wave. Meaning, it didn’t ebb and flow. It was just 10 out of 10 volume from peak until end of the night, effectively. It was unusual and incredibly difficult. And that was true for everyone in the session. Yeah, well, we’ll leave it at that.

Kevin Rose: Your shaman mixed the wrong —

Tim Ferriss: This guy is famous for having a brew that just cripples people.

Kevin Rose: The crippler.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of other full-time clinicians from indigenous traditions who will not drink his brew, I’ll put it that way.

Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus.

Tim Ferriss: And coming back to the point of the story, I’m imagining the only thing I can envision is this woman holding my head and consoling me. That’s the only thing I can imagine. And then I realized that for a year, because we separated a bit over a year ago, and this was totally subconscious, it wasn’t a decision on my part, but I realized I had not allowed myself to feel the complete obliterating heartbreak that was in fact the core response to that separation. I’d not allowed myself to feel —

Kevin Rose: From her or from previous?

Tim Ferriss: From that separation. In other words, my psyche had seemingly protected me because of my history of depression. Which I’ve come to manage better than ever before. Each year I’m better able to manage it. And it’s less and less frequent. It’s less and less intense. But nonetheless, let’s face the facts, in college I almost killed myself. So there was a fear, at least subconsciously, that because of this separation, because of starting over at square one, that I could spiral into a deep depression and that could be dangerous. So my psyche protected me from that by not letting me feel the sadness, the pain, to the extent that ended up being important, which I realized in this moment. So I allowed myself to soak in it, in that moment.

Trip reports are so fucking boring most of the time. And I apologize to people who might be listening and thinking, “God, here we go again,” because I get it, trust me. But in this particular case, I experienced something I’ve never experienced. As soon as I soaked in that, and I really soaked in it, it was awful. It was so dark and so heavy. And then I felt my back release. And literally I’ve been 90 plus percent pain-free since that fucking moment.

And it blows my mind because at that point, I couldn’t explain it with the fast, because the fast and ketones are highly anti-inflammatory. And I think that they actually played a role —

Kevin Rose: Yeah but —

Tim Ferriss: Hold on. In the durability of things. But the fact that there was an immediate release —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I was going to say the snap —

Tim Ferriss: — is interesting —

Kevin Rose: — doesn’t make sense —

Tim Ferriss: — is interesting. I can’t explain that through fasting. I can’t explain that through the just being recumbent, laying down for seven days because that was yet to come. And I would say that I made a tactical error in the last few weeks, which is I was like, “Fuck, man, I’m all good.”

And so I’ve neglected some of the basic self-care and strengthening and PT, which I think is important because my low back and QL and so on, which are some of the surrounding muscles have atrophied over the last year of avoiding working with the back.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But there was that experience. And for people who may be interested in delving into this a little bit more, there is a book, I don’t agree with everything in the book, but it is interesting in the sense that it was written by a Western-trained MD who ended up then opening a healing clinic in South America, focused on ayahuasca and diets, which you will read about if you get into the book, called The Fellowship of the River. So I found that book quite interesting on a number of levels. But the reason I bring this all up, number one, people had recommended this book, I think it was called [Healing Back Pain].

I may be getting the title slightly wrong, could be Fixing Low Back Pain, but it’s by Dr. Sarno, John Sarno. And this book was recommended to me. I’ve read it before. And the general gist is, it’s all in your head. Now, I took great offense at parts of this book, and a lot of it is scientifically indefensible. So unfortunately, I threw the baby out with the bathwater a bit because he says a bunch of things that are ridiculous. And he cites these success statistics for his method while simultaneously saying, “If I interview someone and they say they’re not open to A, B, or C, I omit them from my treatment.”

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, okay, well wait a fucking second. Your selection —

Kevin Rose: Hundred percent —

Tim Ferriss: — is out of control. But I wanted to bring this up because that book has helped a lot of people, despite its flaws. And not everyone will, at any point, want to consume ayahuasca, which I would advise against for 90-plus percent of the population, because it can be very destabilizing for a lot of people and very risky.

I would say there are a lot of things you should do beforehand. Try the talk therapy, try holotropic breathwork, consider, after speaking with doctors, ketamine. After that, you can consider other tools, but ayahuasca should be like —

Kevin Rose: Let’s do a —

Tim Ferriss: — fifth on your —

Kevin Rose: Let’s do a random show on ayahuasca.

Tim Ferriss: We could.

Kevin Rose: Is that possible?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, possibly. Yeah. ayahuasca would be like fifth or sixth on the list of progressions. It would not be first. But I would say the Sarno books are interesting. I know they’ve helped people like Brian Koppelman, who’s been on the podcast, amazing writer who was the co-creator of Billions, among others, Rounders, etc.

And it’s something that I’ve always, in theory, agreed with. Yes, we store stress that can have a physiological effect. There are autoimmune disorders that I think are intimately linked with different types of psychological disturbances. So you can address the problem kind of from the physiological side first. Of course, the brain isn’t entirely separate. There’s no kind of Cartesian separation of mind and body. So yes, the brain is physiological, but you can attack it through content, in a way, or you can attack it through pharmaceuticals and physiology first. I think you can go both ways, but the Sarno book, I think, is worth a lot of people reading. The second thing I’ll mention, which is very, very simple and tactical.

If you have lower back pain, I’m shocked it took me this long to figure it out and say, sitting on hard chairs bothers you, or lumbar support helps you — for a year, I’ve been going to restaurants and asking if they have a cushion. Do you have a cushion or pillow or something I can use to fix fucked-up seating situations? This is the solution right here. This is it. This is a Pilates ball, this is a pro-body Pilates. It doesn’t really matter. But honestly, this thing folds up, sticks in your pocket, and I’ve been traveling with it. I’ve had it behind my back the whole time. And —

Kevin Rose: Great for first dates.

Tim Ferriss: Great for first dates. Ladies love Pilates balls. But I will say, for instance, the last time I did a podcast in this seat, I did not use this and my back was fucking killing me afterwards. But the killing me afterwards is not just an issue for today. That’s an issue that causes inflammation, that fucks up my sleep for three or four days. Use this ball, no problem. I can put it behind my back or I can put it under my ass and it folds up and fits in your pocket. So, anyways, folks, there you have it from the sublime to the ridiculous Pilates ball.

Kevin Rose: Amazing. All right, how are we doing? Any other topics?

Tim Ferriss: I feel pretty good. Next time we’ll get to what you would tell your 30-year-old self. Anything you’d like to add in that category?

Kevin Rose: No, I think if we’re — are we wrapping up now? Because I’d like to say some wrapping up comments.

Tim Ferriss: Wrapping up comments, please.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so my wrapping up comments would be this, I recently went out to dinner with five close friends of mine, who of which you know most of them. Just like the crew.

Tim Ferriss: The Wu-Tang Clan.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Just good friends, and one of the things I did is I went around the circle and I said a few words of gratitude. And I think to my earlier point, one of the things that’s really important to me, after coming out of this therapy, is just this vulnerability that allows us to speak from the heart because we don’t know what tomorrow brings. And I just want to say that, Tim, you have been a friend of mine for so long now, and I have appreciated the fact that my career has been a series of ups and downs and all over the place.

And you have been a steadfast friend, someone that sends me some of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen in my life, always keeps it lighthearted and fun, but I know that you care deeply about me. And I just want to let you know that I love you and I care deeply about you, and I’ll always be here to have your back. And I’m wishing you a fantastic new year. I hope that you hit all these milestones and more that you want to hit. Because I know that you are someone that I’ve always looked up to, and someone that is just so inspirational to us all that listen to your show and your podcast because you inspire us to do more, and to be better humans. And I just want to let you know that that means a lot to me, and I love you.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, Kevin. That’s amazing. That makes my night and —

Kevin Rose: Happy to say it. It’s the truth.

Tim Ferriss: I love you too, man. Our friendship has been such a constant for me, such a lifeline, in a way, with all the ups and downs and holy shit, I mean, both of us have had some pretty wily ups and downs.

Kevin Rose: I mean, you’ve had a lot of hot chicks you’ve dated. I will say —

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t see that coming.

Kevin Rose: When you talked about the ups and downs, I was like, you’ve got a lot of ups, my friend.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, look, that’s one category — that’s the one category —

Kevin Rose: I had to lighten up the mood a little bit.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m grateful for that. And life is like a box of chocolates, right? You just never know what’s around the corner.

Kevin Rose: It’s true, it’s true and that’s why it’s important to say these things.

Tim Ferriss: It is. It is. And I have, I have — I’ll tell you something you don’t know, I have your Christmas/New Year’s card from two years ago. So, obviously at a date, it’s like you and Darya and the kids, and it’s up in my kitchen.

Kevin Rose: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And I kept it there because I love seeing you guys every day, and I think about you guys all the time and just have such love for your family. And I’m so grateful for our friendship. So I love you too, man, as you said, it’s important to say. Things are so uncertain.

Kevin Rose: Uncertain.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve never experienced — I’ve had friends pass from cancer before —

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — but I’ve never been with them through — I’ve never been there every step of the way, from diagnosis to last conversation a few days before they passed, that was new for me. And it really deeply affected me on a bunch of levels. And I want to be deeply affected by that. I don’t want to push that aside. In part, because Roland was so joyful and curious and optimistic until the end. In a very genuine way. It wasn’t an act. It wasn’t theater. That raised a bunch of aspirations in me because he was, first and foremost, a very dedicated, seasoned meditator. Psychedelics were a piece of the puzzle. But, first and foremost, he was a dedicated meditator for decades.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And attributed a lot of his equanimity and preparation for death, which I got to see firsthand. A lot of people talk about it, but let’s be honest, or I’ll be honest, I’ve read all the Stoics or a lot of the Stoics, and I’ve read all sorts of Buddhism and rehearsed death and memento mori and this, that and the other thing. But when I’m actually on, as Roland said, the final glide path, I don’t know how I’m going to respond. I don’t know. I have no idea. So to see someone who really walked the walk in such a life-affirming way that lit everyone up around him was tremendous. And he said what he was able to, and he was willing to say what he meant to those people around him who meant things to him. And you don’t have to wait until you have a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Kevin Rose: No, you don’t.

Tim Ferriss: You shouldn’t wait.

Kevin Rose: Just because it may not be that, right. It may be a car crash. It may be something where you don’t get the chance to say these things. And so it’s important to do it now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’ve got to do it. Great to see you, man.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, good to see you. Happy New Year. Excited for — this is going to be, oh, don’t you — top me off a little bit at cheers —

Tim Ferriss: Cheers buddy.

Kevin Rose: — to the New Year and to all the listeners out there, wishing you a happy and healthy new year. And yeah, I’m excited to continue this new — I mean, it’s always a new year of change, a new year of change and exploration. I think one thing that you and I, let’s take a sip. The one thing that you and I have in common is just this lifelong pursuit of evolution.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Of figuring out — because the secret, that no one will tell you, is no matter how much money you make, no matter how much success you have, we’re all still figuring out and in Ram Dass’ words, we’re all just walking each other home.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well said, man. I’m going to leave it there.

Kevin Rose: Here we go.

Tim Ferriss: Cheers, buddy.

Kevin Rose: Happy New Year.

Tim Ferriss: Happy early New Year, and happy New Year to everybody listening. And as always, be just a little kinder than is necessary until the next episode that applies to other people, but also applies to yourself. Take it easy. Take it easy. Life is short, but life is long, and we’re all just figuring it out. And by the way, as far as I can tell, you never really figure it out.

Kevin Rose: No, you don’t.

Tim Ferriss: So true. So true. CTFO, chill the fuck out a little bit. Be a little easier on yourself. And we’ll put everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for all the stuff we talked about.

Tim Ferriss: Kevinrose.com is a better website. You can head over there.

Tim Ferriss: Kevinrose.com! Be sure to check out this amazing new podcast I’ve heard of.

Kevin Rose: New podcast. Kevinrose.com is the best place to go. Forget tim.blog.

Tim Ferriss: And KevKev KevKev TalkTalk coming at you soon. Make sure to listen to everybody.

Kevin Rose: See you.

The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much More (#712)

Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose) rejoins me for another episode of The Random Show!

Please enjoy!

Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account; AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement; and Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required.

Go to shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim.

Want to hear the last time Kevin and I put on a Random Show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed brain stimulation, twenty-first-century dating, phone data strategies for international travelers, carrot-free martinis, synchronous book clubs, creative CØCKPUNCH collaboration, overcoming delegation consternation, and much more.

[podcast-player id=”2164b221-6b01-4959-b237-b770f75242c3″ src=”https://rss.art19.com/episodes/2164b221-6b01-4959-b237-b770f75242c3.mp3″ title=”#690: The Random Show, Rare Drinking Edition — Affordable Luxuries, Brain Stimulation, Sampling the Future (and Some Previews), Recharging with Creative Experiments, Tokenizing Humans with a Bonding Curve, Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry, and Much More”]

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More (#711)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Andrew Rosener (@andrewrosener), the founder and CEO of MediaOptions, which has been the #1 domain broker in the world for the last six consecutive years. Since 2008, Andrew has been involved in more than $600 million dollars in domain sales and has played a pivotal role in numerous high-profile domain-name transactions, including X.com to Elon Musk, Zoom.com to Zoom, and Prime.com and Podcast.com to Amazon, as well as thousands of others.

Andrew is an inductee of the Domain Name Hall of Fame; he was named Domain Investor of the Year by TRAFFIC; and he is the creator of the Rosener Equation, a formula for objectively valuing domain names, widely adopted by the industry. Andrew is also the owner of DomainSherpa.com, the industry’s leading educational podcast.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!