Shawn Ryan Show: SRS #274 with Tim Ferriss (Transcript)

And who is your friend? Jason?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, he’s over at Sig.

TIM FERRISS: Got to learn how to use these professional mics. Thank you, Jason. Yeah, man, that’s beautiful. Thank you.

Patreon Question: New Habits and Beliefs

SHAWN RYAN: And then before we get too in the weeds with the interview, I have a Patreon account. It’s a subscription account, and we’ve turned it into one hell of a community. So one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question.

So this is from Scott J. Batagoli: In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? And how would you relate it to the struggles of young men just starting out in life?

TIM FERRISS: Good question. Behavior, belief. I’m going to throw out a few. I’ll give people a grab bag. So I would say I’ll start with the first thing that comes to mind, which is on the physical side. And I’ve really changed how I think about this after doing a lot of experimentation.

Intermittent fasting. This is going to seem like a strange place to start. Intermittent fasting—so time-restricted eating where you’re fasting. In my case, I’m fasting until 2 or 3 p.m. every day, more or less. And doing that for, say, even three months, did a few things. So your mileage may vary, but there’s a lot of good science around intermittent fasting. Mark Mattson is one scientist who comes to mind.

And there are certain issues that I’ve always had with my blood work, certain issues I’ve had with, for instance, fasting glucose, insulin. And you can measure these things if you’re just doing blood tests. I would also—not a doctor, don’t play one on the Internet—but consider asking your doctor about something called an oral glucose tolerance test.

And no matter what I did, I could be vegan, I could be carnivore, I could be something in between. There were certain numbers that always looked bad. They would just not change. Seemed to come from buggy code, DNA, genetics.

And a few months of intermittent fasting gave me the most immaculate corrections to those markers that I and my doctors have ever seen. And I’ve been tracking, no kidding, for a long time.

Furthermore, and here’s why it ties into more than just the physical, because the mind and the body, or at least let’s just call it the brain and the body, are really one interconnected superorganism, right? The mood swings, the dip in energy in the afternoon that often leads people to drink coffee, which then affects their sleep architecture, which then can create lack of sleep, depression—I mean, all these things cascade. All of those ups and downs just vanish completely.

And I think there’s some good reasons for it, and part of the reason people feel sharper on GLP-1 agonists like the Ozempics and Mounjaros of the world is they’re more ketotic, they’re producing more ketones. So the reason you want to fast for at least 16 hours is to deplete your liver of glycogen. And so you get that metabolic switching into using ketones.

And that’s relevant to mental health because most people will experience a lot more mood stability. All right, so that’s the first thing, intermittent fasting. If you want to talk about fasting, we can talk about it, because I’ve done much more extreme versions of that. But intermittent fasting, I think, is pretty easy in the sense that you don’t have to change what you eat. You’re just changing when you eat. That makes it—

SHAWN RYAN: I know everybody does this. I’ve not looked into it. Just—I don’t know why. Just because I just do it every day. Not because I’m trying to intermittent fast, just because I don’t have time. But so what—I mean, what are the benefits of it?

The Science and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. So I’ll say a few things. The first is what you’re discussing. Intermittent fasting by default seems to be super common in former Tier One military. A lot of my friends, almost all of my friends who are former SEALs or former Marine Force Recon, they’re just like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot to eat and I’m just going to eat at 5 p.m.”

And they’re not affected by it. Which leads me to wonder, how much of it is cultivated in the course of being in service versus part of what allowed you to make it through is that type of physiological resistance where you have a certain degree of stability. I don’t know.

So the benefits are—and we’re still so far from understanding these things well, in part because it’s very hard to get intermittent fasting—you can do it. But doing extended fasting studies in humans is incredibly difficult for getting ethical approvals from IRB and so on.

But I’d say the simplest way of describing it is—and we could certainly talk more about this—but if you look at, say, my family and very common neurodegenerative disease, it’s not just tangles and plaques and so on that cause problems. It’s metabolic dysfunction.

So if you have chronically elevated insulin, glucose, et cetera, it’s basically an amplifier for any possible problems and those compound over time as your body accumulates garbage. So a very simple way of putting it. But if you are developing the metabolic machinery for that switching I was talking about, your body gets better at things like autophagy, mitophagy, sort of cellular self-cleaning.

So your cleanup crew gets better, if that makes sense. It’s a very simplistic way to put it, but I think it’s a fair way to think about it. And that is part of the reason—if you look at, and I don’t want to oversell this—but fasting, in a sense, is the oldest cure.

If you look at animals, if they get sick, what do they do? At least mammals, most like ungulates, like deer and so on, they fast.

SHAWN RYAN: And if we get sick, we don’t want to eat.

Managing Relationships and Time

TIM FERRISS: Your appetite’s gone. Yeah, but then we’ll often force ourselves to eat, eating by the clock. And I would say that the details do matter. Like that depletion of liver glycogen from at least the reading and research I’ve done, seems to matter a lot.

So much like a ketogenic diet, if you do it halfway, you’re actually not getting a lot of the benefits that the protocol seems to offer. So I would say that’s one. I’ll switch gears for a second. I’m happy to come back to the intermittent fasting, but I would say in terms of beliefs and behaviors, I would say a focus on just to really zoom out, focus on investing in. And I have very specific ways that I do this.

Relationships and the way that looks is if I do a past year review, as I’m doing right now, looking back on the past year, and I look through my calendar week by week and identify the energy giving and energy draining activities. Where were the peak positive and where were the peak negative? But also what types of things in my calendar drained me versus energized me?

And then creating a “do more of” column and a “do less of” column. It’s very easy to do it on a single piece of paper. But the crux piece of that that I ignored for a long time was, all right, if you have a parking lot and that parking lot has five to ten slots for your most important relationships, family, closest friends. Last year, did you spend as much time as you would like to with those people?

If the answer is no, which it usually is, then I’m going to schedule time in advance, book and pay for things for the following year, calendar it before it gets crowded out immediately. And so that could be long weekends could be group dinners. It could be, as I’m going to be doing soon, hosting friends. It could be time in Montana wilderness, which was a couple of months ago.

But getting all that stuff on the calendar and creating some loss aversion by whenever possible paying it in advance doesn’t have to be expensive. But creating a situation where it’s very hard for you to cancel and get out of things that I think is the facet of self help in quotation marks that gets lost if you focus on the self.

The paradox of self help is if you excessively focus on the self, it is almost inevitable that you’re going to be miserable. Like humans are not the self sufficiency sort of mantra of self help. If you combine it with the rugged individualism of the US which has a lot of upside. But if you take both of those in excess, people end up feeling very isolated.

And so the investing in relationships, and I do mean investing like really blocking out that time in the last five years, that’s been the single domino that tipped over. Changes everything. Last thing, the third thing I’ll mention and then I’ll stop my TED talk.

SHAWN RYAN: How many relationships do you manage?

TIM FERRISS: Not many. I really prefer very deep relationships over a broad network.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m the same way.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. How do you determine who you’re going to spend your time with?

SHAWN RYAN: I’m asking now I’m learning. And so I am very curious. And you have a huge name. You’re a huge household name. You’ve been around for a long time. A lot of people want to get to you. They want to talk to you, they want to pick your brain. They want something from you. How do you determine who you’re going to give your time to?

The Beer Test and Choosing Relationships

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I’d say there are different tiers. So I do have, let’s just call it. Shallow is not the right word because that sounds very negative. I do have a wide network and I just set parameters around what is allowed and what isn’t allowed in those relationships that might have more of a purely business context.

But at the very top, I would say I am giving the most time to people who are more than happy to call me on my bullsh*t, tell me my baby’s ugly, whatever I might be precious about or really excited about, they’re happy to tell me that it’s a bad idea if it comes down to it. So that is non negotiable. Right.

Otherwise, if someone’s not willing to do that raises a lot of questions about what motivations might be like, if the emperor has no clothes, I want to know that I’m naked, even though in the moment I might find it very annoying. Right. If I’m really attached to something. But you need those people around you.

So what that means is they’re very often old friends. These are people I’ve known for fifteen, twenty years, first met in sports competition or in school or something like that. Then I would say it’s really simple. It’s energy in versus energy out.

Because you might have somebody at a dinner party who’s happy to tell you all your ideas are terrible, but that person’s also terrible. Or maybe there’s just something slightly off and your spider sense doesn’t know what it is. Can’t put a finger on it. But for whatever reason, whenever you come away from them, you feel just ten percent drained and you don’t really want to have a second dinner with that person.

I pay a lot of attention to that. I feel like language analysis, spreadsheets, all helpful, but relative to our entire evolutionary apparatus, that’s really new. So I pay a lot of attention to the millions of years of animal sensitivity. If that’s. And I used to be. I’m so. I used to view emotion and intuition as basically kind of horsesh*t, for lack of a better description.

Like things that would always lead you astray. Therefore, you need structured thinking and so on, which there’s a place for. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for it, but if I get a weird feeling around somebody, like, I pay a lot of attention to that. Even if on paper they should be.

SHAWN RYAN: You do pay attention to intuition. I thought you.

TIM FERRISS: Okay, no, no, I pay attention. I pay more and more and more attention to it. But for decades, I was just like, yeah, look, like emotions are a liability. They can lead you astray and in excess, again, in excess. That’s true.

But I would say in terms of determining who I’m going to spend time with, it’s like, if that person calls you, do you want to pick up the phone or not? And if you’re like, not now, maybe I’ll get back to them. That’s not a small thing.

Like, some of my friends are really good investors. Call it the “beer test.” And the beer test, it’s really simple. If you’re walking around, like if you’re walking outside at a mall and somebody, a founder you invested in is walking the other way, are you going to do this? Or are you going to walk over and be like, hey, man, so good to see you. We should grab a beer. Which one is it?

Because with say, startup investing and everybody should treat their relationship this way. But in startup investing, just to give a concrete example, it’s like the biggest successes for me take seven to twelve years. That is longer than most marriages. And smart isn’t good enough. Hard working isn’t good enough. You could have somebody with low integrity who is very smart and very hard working. That is a dangerous person.

So like the beer test. Okay. Do they pass the beer test or not? But it’s even easier than that. It’s like you go through your calendar and it’s like, do you have a whole body yes to this person or not? And if the answer is yes, then not just the question of who you spend time with, but the question of what you do gets a lot easier.

Because if one of those people invites me to do something, even if I think it’s the most harebrained, idiotic idea, I am default yes based on the who, not on the what. So that’s like the very, very top. Right. That’s the five to ten, maybe fifteen parking spots.

And then one level down, I would say broadly, I’m looking for as much learning as possible and combined with sort of honesty and EQ. So if I can find those three things, the EQ is not trivial, then I will invest time in those people.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. What do you think it’s easy to get squeezed out of your own life? Yeah, it is. So this has been fine tuning over decades because otherwise it’s just like email becomes everyone else’s agenda for your life and your calendar evaporates. Boom, you’re done.

Which is why at the beginning of the year, it’s like block out that time with those close relationships. Book it. Invite people. So you’re going to look like an a if you cancel. Like get things in motion so that ship’s out of the harbor. Yeah. And then you have defensible space in your calendar that you will defend.

The Nature of Intuition

SHAWN RYAN: You mentioned intuition. Where do you think intuition comes from?

TIM FERRISS: Oh, man, I’m going to buy myself a little time to tap dance. Where do you think intuition comes from?

SHAWN RYAN: I think it’s a combination of something you’re born with and the ability to self reflect on situations in your life.

Fear Setting vs. Goal Setting

TIM FERRISS: To gain the experience. So it depends on how into crazy town we want to go. But I’ll say that on at least one level, I’m 100% on the same page. And that’s it. It’s pattern matching born of experience. So that’s one piece of what we might call intuition. Very fast judgment based on pattern matching, pattern recognition.

Then there’s another piece of it that I think is along the lines of maybe “The Gift of Fear,” Gavin de Becker type stuff, where there’s an evolved sense, there’s a sensitivity that perhaps you can’t verbalize, maybe can’t even justify. Maybe it runs counter to the conclusion you’d come to analytically, but it’s just some gnawing feeling. I don’t know how to explain that. I just think it’s a byproduct, probably of evolution.

Then I think there are other ways we could think about intuition that I have a much harder time explaining.

SHAWN RYAN: Like what?

TIM FERRISS: Like remote viewing? Well, we could. Yeah, remote viewing. Or you could look at people who seem to have—and I recognize there are a hundred ways to put up a pretty good Steelman argument against these things—but people who seem to have experiences of precognition.

But we don’t even have to get out into that territory. We could look at animal behavior. There’s a great book I recommend to everyone. It’s a beautiful book called “Of Wolves and Men,” about, effectively, the history of wolves and man. But it dives into the biology of wolves, their mythological significance, how they’re viewed by various indigenous cultures. And it redefined what was possible within nonfiction writing. It’s by someone named Barry Lopez. Incredible writer. I recommend this book to everyone. It’s an older book. It’s a few decades old.

When that book came out, people in—let’s just call it that category of book—were like, “Oh, okay. There’s kind of a before this book and then after,” because he’s shown what is possible. And in that book, I think it’s the Nunavut people. Could be mispronouncing that, but he was talking about their observations of wolves and hunting patterns and how also with modern technology and radio collars and so on, you’ll see sort of, let’s just call it wolves traveling. And then to intersect a herd of caribou, they’ll turn perfectly from 100 miles away and then intersect.

And so you could try to explain that through scent. You could, but it starts to fall apart pretty quickly. Or you look at, let’s just say, kind of spontaneous coordination of starling or fish school behavior and sort of phenomena that are very difficult to explain mechanistically exists. They just do.

And so you don’t even need to necessarily step into things that some folks are going to get very hot and bothered about, like remote viewing, which I do actually think is very interesting. But if you just look at animal behavior, what we might call instinct becomes very hard to pin down.

So that’s a very fancy way of saying, I’m not really sure. But whatever the inputs might be, I have started—I have paid more and more and more attention to it. I pay attention to it with everything. People, girlfriends, investing.

Sometimes it’s the flip side. You’ve had Toby of Shopify on the show, and it’s like when I spent time with Toby and Harley, I got this sort of physiological quickening. I don’t get it much. It’s not like this happens all the time. You do have to be careful about not fooling yourself. It’s very easy to fool yourself and to look for evidence, confirmation bias, et cetera, to support what we already believe.

But in cases like that, I was like, “Ooh,” there was like a physiological quickening. And I had my analytical kind of hat on looking at Shopify as a business and stuff when they had like nine or 10 employees. But also just being around those guys, I was like, “Oh, yeah, these are good horses to bet on. Really good horses to bet on.”

So it’s not just a warning system. It can also be a go signal. But for people who may not find this to make any sense, I would say you can re-access these things that you had as a kid. You can cultivate those sensitivities. It just takes practice.

And you can start by doing a past year review, go through and be like, “All right, what gave me energy and what didn’t?” That’s usually pretty straightforward. And if you’re not sure, if you’re like, “I’m not sure,” that is your answer.

I don’t know if anybody’s seen the movie “Ronin,” some really great chase scenes and so on with Robert De Niro. There’s a quote in there that I’m paraphrasing, but I’m pretty close. Like, “When in doubt, there is no doubt.” So if you’re hemming and hawing, it’s like, yeah, there’s your answer. It’s not a yes. That’s not a whole body yes.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think we’ve lost intuition over time?

TIM FERRISS: The human species? I would say if you look at animals, they all—

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t.

The Atrophy of Human Intuition

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I think humans have, in some ways, understandably, like, obsolesced intuition or allowed it to atrophy in the same way that if you become dependent on Google Maps, you no longer need to develop that faculty.

If you look at, for instance, some of the literature that’s been published recently looking at cognitive performance pre and post AI, or looking at rather degrees of AI usage or LLM usage and cognitive performance, like, yeah, okay, if you’re relying on something, you’re using an exoskeleton for walking, what’s going to happen to your legs? You’re going to atrophy.

Of course your body’s really smart. It doesn’t want to put calories and building into anything that’s redundant. You take exogenous testosterone. If you’re getting injections, guess what? Your balls are going to turn into Raisinets. Body’s smart. It’s not going to say, “Yeah, let’s pump a bunch of hormones to the Leydig cells to produce testosterone.” It’s very, very, very smart.

So I’m very cautious of the technologies that I adopt. And actually there’s a great guy, if you’ve never talked to him, you should meet him. He’s fascinating. Has a big Amish looking beard named Kevin Kelly, older guy, but he’s a technologist who’s one of the most incredibly accurate futurists I’ve ever met. His ability to predict things is off the charts. He’s like the American technomist or something. Interesting.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s his name?

TIM FERRISS: Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly, yeah. He’s in the 70s now and he is, by the way, probably 10 to 20 times more popular in China than he is in the U.S., which is a whole separate conversation. But they pay a lot of attention to him nonetheless. He has literally spent time with the Amish to study how they accept or reject technology.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, he was a founding editor of Wired magazine. You think that he just would adopt everything and let trial and error sort itself out in his own life. But no, he studies how the Amish evaluate technology. Because despite what some people might think, it’s not like they don’t actually use technology. They’re very, very methodical about how they evaluate it.

So that is the way I would think of any of this augmentation. Whether it’s what people would consider nootropics and smart drugs or any type of enhancement which would include Google Maps, AI, et cetera.

Like right now, for instance, I write. AI is—LLMs are getting incredibly good at writing. And I saw a piece recently, I think it was in the New Yorker, but like a Pulitzer Prize winner, some incredible writer tested an LLM and provided very educated test readers with sample prose. And the vast majority couldn’t tell the difference.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

TIM FERRISS: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: Trained on his or her own writing. So the temptation to use it is there. And I’ll use it for editing suggestions. But as soon as I use that as my primary mode of writing, it’s just going to be too tempting. It’s like digital heroin. And ultimately I may travel down that path. But the point is I’m being very cautious with it because I know that certain faculties will atrophy.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

TIM FERRISS: And I don’t know what the consequences of that are because if those faculties start to atrophy and I’m not a Luddite, I use tons of technology. I invest in tons of technology on the cutting edge. But what are the secondary or tertiary effects of that? It’s probably not just writing essays. There’s probably a higher cost to be paid and I just want to have a better understanding what that cost is.

SHAWN RYAN: How will you find out what that—

TIM FERRISS: I mean, how will you find them? Probably hang out for a while at the periphery and see what people are finding. Talk to researchers. It is not hard to talk to researchers.

I’ll also use, you know, I’ll kind of use certain AI enabled tools to evaluate the AI itself. So there are like websites like consensus app or open evidence. There are tools you can use that make it a lot easier to interrogate published scientific literature with just basic queries that kind of anyone would come up with or could come up with.

So with certain things, I like to be on the cutting edge. With other things like what we’re talking about, I really like to be on the dull edge. I don’t want to be one of the first thousand monkeys shot into space with. I’m going to wait. You know, you want to colonize Mars? Great. Maybe I’ll be 2 billionth in life.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m right there with you.

TIM FERRISS: Go spend a month in Antarctica in the winter first and tell me how you like it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am with you on that. I want to talk about a piece of gear you probably use more than anything else, but never think about it.

TIM FERRISS: Your wallet.

SHAWN RYAN: For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off at Ridge by using code SRS at checkout. Just head to ridge.com and use code SRS and you’re all set. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Again, that’s 10% off your order when you go to ridge.com and use code SRS.

You know, I wanted to ask you. You know, it’s the—it’s new year.

TIM FERRISS: You know, we’re about a weekend to 2026. And so I wanted to ask you. I don’t know about fear setting versus goal setting.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

TIM FERRISS: So I’d love to chat with you about that. What is it?

SHAWN RYAN: Sure. Yeah. So fear setting is something that—

TIM FERRISS: I—

Fear Setting: A Stoic Practice

SHAWN RYAN: Effectively found through stoicism. So the philosophy of stoicism. And people can certainly find a lot of great books written contemporary, you know, in a contemporary sense, by Ryan Holiday. “The Obstacle Is the Way.” I actually produced the audiobook for that book, no good back in the day.

And one of his first early writings on stoicism was a blog post on my blog way back in the day. And at that point we resonated on stoicism because I had been traveling almost always with a copy of “Letters from a Stoic,” which are the moral letters to Lucilius by Seneca the Younger.

Now, Seneca the Younger, controversial character for a bunch of reasons, but very, very, very skilled writer and proponent of stoicism. And in effect, one of the practices that he would encourage is he had a number of them, but it was in effect, defining your fears, thinking about the worst case scenarios.

So there’s a mental component to it. There was also a practiced component which would be—and actually Kevin Kelly does this as well. So in effect, practicing the thing that you most fear, like poverty.

So like Kevin Kelly, this is a good example. Modern example, like he sometimes will go a week or two just as a practice, like sleeping in his living room and sleeping bag, eating like rice and beans and instant coffee. And Kevin isn’t really afraid of most things. But what you realize, you realize this too. If you go on a week long camping trip, you’re like, “This is actually pretty sweet. I don’t actually need that much.”

SHAWN RYAN: Simpler times, right? That’s what I’ve noticed.

Fear Setting: A Systematic Approach to Overcoming Paralysis

TIM FERRISS: And when you prove that to yourself, you recognize that the downside risk on a lot of what you might be considering—taking a new job, proposing or ending a relationship, whatever it might be that you’re nervous about, that you might be procrastinating or putting on pause—has very limited downside.

This, the systematic way of doing that. I needed something a little more concrete for myself. I have been hyper vigilant my whole life. There are good reasons for that that we can get into, but I’ve been very hyper vigilant my whole life. Also have diagnosed OCD, which did not surprise any of my friends when it came about a couple of years ago. They’re like, “Yeah, whatever, big surprise. Duh.” Yeah, duh. I had the same response.

But the point is that with generalized anxiety plus OCD, if you have that hyper vigilance plus OCD, you ruminate or I’ll keep it personal. Like I don’t have the hand washing thing, I’m not flipping light switches. They’re different manifestations of OCD, but I have these kind of endless ruminative loops and they tend to relate to imagining worst case scenarios. And that can be really paralyzing if I want to bias towards action, which I prefer to do. Right? Bias towards action instead of inaction.

So what do you do? Well, reading the stoicism and so on, started to develop this approach, fear setting. I’ll explain what it is. So what makes goal setting effective? What makes goal setting effective? There are different frameworks for this, but you know, like the SMART framework, specific, measurable, achievable. Right. With timelines and so on, there are better and worse ways of defining your goals to make them more likely to be achieved. Right. If you have accountability and you have timelines, you have a deadline, you have deliverables, et cetera, all that makes goal achieving easier.

All right, well, what’s fear setting? Fear setting, it’s really simple. So if you have the thing that you’re worried about, and this is what I still do to this day, I probably do it once a quarter. The thing you’re nervous about could be starting your own business, could be writing or finishing a book. Could be getting cancer.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it could be getting cancer.

TIM FERRISS: Right? It could be getting older, could be one of your parents dying, could be whatever it might be. And to be clear, fear setting doesn’t automatically solve all of these things, but here’s what it does, it defangs a lot of them so you can take action.

Let me explain what I mean. So fear setting is super simple. Let’s say the example is in my case, I’ll give a real, like one of the very first huge examples was I’d started my own company, I was completely burned out around 2003, 2004, had been working seven days a week and I wanted to take four weeks off. All right, running my own business, how do you do that? Right. I’ve created this monster, I’m running it, I have single point of failure, me. And so all of these disasters came to mind. Right.

So what did I do? I wrote them down. And there’s an alternative approach called morning pages which is slightly different, but I’ll explain it. That’s from Julia Cameron who wrote “The Artist’s Way.” Really, really incredible practice, but I’ll come back to that.

So in fear setting, like at the top I would put taking four weeks vacation. That’s the thing I’m considering. Then in the first column, just write down all of the things that are freaking you out that could go wrong in as much detail as possible.

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

TIM FERRISS: So I would write down I’m going to be overseas and I’m going to miss a letter from the IRS and then they’re going to shut, do this and this and I’m going to get audited and blah blah, blah. Okay, write it down. Boom, I miss IRS letter, blah blah, blah, blah. All right, what’s the next one?

Next one is there’s going to be some supply chain problem and like blah blah, blah, blah. Okay, write that down. All right, like the president at the fulfillment company is going to get sick and then boom, like orders aren’t going to ship and there’s going to be this huge disaster. Okay, write it down. And so you write down all these things, like aim for volume, like 10 to 20 things. All right, that’s column one.

Then column two is what could I do to decrease the likelihood of this happening? Like anything I could do to try to prevent this. All right, great. So for the letter at the time, this is back in the day, keep in mind early 2000s, but there still were services where you could have mail shipped, they would scan it and they would email you PDFs. Okay, well, let me test out one of those services. I could do that.

Okay, what about supply chain? All right, well, supply chain issues, there were few. There were a few components that I could basically stockpile in advance in case things were disrupted. And that would reduce like 80% of the risk. Okay, now I can do that. All right? And you go down the list, and there’s probably something you can do to decrease the risk of that happening.

All right, so now you have two columns. All the worst things that could happen, the things you could do to decrease the likelihood of them happening. All right, next column. Next column is if it happens, if that thing happens, what could you do for damage control? What could you do to possibly get back up on your feet? Right. It’s like if you start a company and it fails, what could you get a bartending job? Could you—

SHAWN RYAN: So you go through every contingency plan.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. So then it’s like, what can you do to repair the situation? Just to get back to like life support. Right. If needed, what can you do? There’s always something you could do. So you write that down.

Okay. Then you have to ask yourself two follow up questions. All right, so if I did this thing, I’m considering four weeks of vacation. What are the payoffs and how durable are they? Right. Like, what’s the upside? I’ve talked about, you know, I’ve written down all the downside. What’s the upside and what’s the durability?

Okay, well, if I went on a four week vacation and I figured out how to run my business and automate things, I would come back and all those systems would still exist. Like, I would have taken myself out of the machine. I would no longer be the wizard of Oz, having to control everything. Well, I mean, that could last years in terms of benefits. Right? Okay, boom, boom. You go down the list. What are all the benefits? How durable are they?

And then you look at all the downsides and you’re like, all right, how temporary or durable are these? What is the real downside risk? And I’ll be done with this in just a minute or two. But it’s important because people can do this. And I gave a TED Talk on this for people who want to really dig in.

But what you realize often is that the thing you’re considering if it works, is like a 7 to 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 in life changing impact with durability. Like, it lasts for a while and the things that you’re scared of are like, 2, 3, 4, and temporary pain. And they’re either reversible or completely survivable.

The Cost of Status Quo

The last piece, and this is new, in the last, I would say 15 years for me, is on a separate piece of paper, you write down status quo. If I just consider, if I can just continue doing what I’m doing, what are the costs financially, emotionally, relationally in one year from now, in three years from now, in ten years from now? And you write that stuff down because we’re very good at thinking about the risks of doing something, but we’re not as trained to think about the risks of just continuing doing what we’re doing.

So when I looked at that, I was like, I don’t think I can make it five years, ten years, forget it. My life’s a complete, utter disaster. It’s like, okay, so now it’s not a question of if, it’s just a question of when. Okay, now when I look at these two things, right? Is doing this thing risky compared to status quo 1, 3, 5 years from now, it’s like, oh, this thing that I thought was scary is much lower risk. And then you do it.

And like, that is what kicked off all these adventures that led to the first book. And like, here we are. If I had not taken that vacation, I would not be sitting here.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s interesting.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you find the balance, though? How do you find the balance? Because I could see, you know, people going, I’m going—

TIM FERRISS: I’m going for 16 weeks of vacation, you know.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

TIM FERRISS: Well, here’s what I would say is that fear setting, much like doing goal setting, doesn’t achieve your goal.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s almost daring yourself to do what you want to do.

TIM FERRISS: It’s daring yourself. Here’s what it is. It’s daring yourself. What it’s also saying is some of your fears will be well founded. Right. There’s certain things that could be catastrophic, but it’s like 1%. Like, do not let your fears put an emergency brake on your life without cross examining them.

That’s all it says is like, most of your fears are these phantasms in the fog that are scary because it’s like the boogeyman. The lights are out. You haven’t looked at it clearly. As soon as you write it down, you realize, flip the light switches on, Boogeyman’s not there, and then you can take action.

But sure, there’s certain things that are going to be scary no matter what. Right? Losing relative to Alzheimer’s. Right. Someone you love or suffering some horrible injury. These are all things that have real consequences. But your ability to survive and thrive, like your resilience, is a lot greater than I think you realize in most cases.

And you have a track record like anyone who’s made it this far, who’s watching this right now. You’ve survived a lot and you’ve figured out a lot, even when plans went sideways. So fear setting fundamentally is a tool that you can do in like an hour. Doesn’t even take an hour. That takes the emergency brake off. Doesn’t matter how good your goal setting is if you’ve got the emergency brake on. So that’s, I say the principal purpose.

Practicing Poverty and Minimalism

SHAWN RYAN: That’s very interesting. You know, you had mentioned earlier about your friend who practiced being in poverty.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And then found out this isn’t so bad. It’s a lot simpler. Sounds like you maybe have experienced that as well.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I do it every year.

SHAWN RYAN: You do it every year?

TIM FERRISS: Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I’ll do all—

TIM FERRISS: Part of the reason I do the fasting too. I might do like 7 to 10 day fasts. Certainly try to live a very minimalist existence for, you know, weeks at a time throughout the year to remove the hedonic treadmill that we’re all vulnerable to. Right.

It’s like if you, man, if you live where we’re sitting, right. In the United States, not for everyone, but broadly speaking, it’s like if you were born here, my God, did you win the lottery? Right. And you look at these comforts and amazing privileges and it’s easy to believe that whatever your kind of latest level of comfort is, that that is necessary for happiness, that is necessary for safety, that is necessary for fill in the blank. And by and large, it’s just not.

So I really try to, you know, get out in the woods, get filthy, do something hard, experience some physical pain. Not excessively so, but just like through training and so on, you’re like, okay, yeah, a little bit of pain, a little bit of fasting. Yeah. If I lost, you know, half, half what I have, 75, 80, 90% of what I have, I’m fine.

So doesn’t mean you just go to Vegas and put it all in black. Doesn’t mean that. It means that a lot of these things you’re considering, if they go totally wrong, and it’s actually surprisingly hard to fail completely if you’re pretty smart and have some ability to improvise. Completely survivable. Right.

And for a lot of what I do, you just, you, you don’t make it unless you have that. Unless you cultivate that view on things. And you can’t be stupid and reckless. But it’s like in startup investing, it’s like 70, 80% of those are going to go to zero even if you put seven to 10 years there.

Getting a Few Things Right

And so I like startup investing as a metaphor for life because you don’t need to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life, an incredible life. You don’t need to get a lot of things right. You just need to get a few high leverage things right. Those 10 relationships, health. All right, like if you get those two things right, guess what? Like I know a lot of billionaires, deca billionaires. You’re going to have more than 90% of those guys in terms of durable wealth, what I would consider wealth.

Oh yeah, just get those two things right. It’s like, sure, money is important to a point. Right. I don’t want to minimize that. But don’t underestimate what you can do by getting a few things right. You can be wrong a lot of the time. I mean, I’ve been wrong tons. Tons, Tons, tons.

SHAWN RYAN: D* good point.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I love that.

SHAWN RYAN: I love that fear setting.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I still, I mean I am, you know, I’m not just the president, I’m a client, you know, Hair club for men.

Morning Pages and Mental Clarity

SHAWN RYAN: You got a great haircut, I must say.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I use it. Yeah, we go the same stylist I said earlier. I still use this and because I promised it, I want to close one loop. Morning pages Julia Cameron. This is even simpler. People can try this. Maybe this is the appetizer before fear setting every morning. That monkey mind with all the worries and things ricocheting around that might be producing anxiety or whatever it might be, just vomit that onto a page longhand write for two to three pages. That’s it.

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to remember it, you don’t have to go back to it. You don’t have to solve anything. Just trap that monkey mind on paper so you can get on with your day. Do that for two, three pages a day.

Arguably the most one of the most productive writers creators in Hollywood even though he lives in New York. But Brian Koppelman co-created Billions, was behind Rounders along with his writing partner. I mean the guy’s super prolific and he does transcendental meditation and morning pages every day. We could talk about meditation separately but I recommended, I won’t mention him, but like the right hand of a pretty well-known politician who basically is like the COO of everything that politician does, which is incredible, right? In terms of just like track record, endurance, output.

And he did morning pages based on my recommendation, which I got from Brian for six months. And he wrote me back and he said, “This is the closest thing to a magical effect that I’ve ever found.”

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, no shit. So simple. So simple. And what does that have in common with fear setting? It’s taking these kind of nebulous problems inside your head and putting it on paper. That’s it. It’s very simple. But consistently right. It’s not going to the gym once and then you’re like, I guess I’m fit now. It’s like, no, this is kind of like flossing your teeth.

You don’t necessarily have to do it every day. Although if you do morning pages for a week or two, it’s shocking what effect it can have on your well-being and productivity. And then you could view that as the flossing. Why do you think it works?

SHAWN RYAN: I’m going to try this. I’m going to try.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. Yeah, you should. Why does it work? What would be the difference? I think the way it works, this is my perspective on it is that this is part of the reason why writing is so helpful also in general is that it’s incredibly difficult to cross examine your own thoughts while you’re thinking them. They’re too fleeting, moves too quickly. It’s very hard to look at them dispassionately almost as an observer. Right.

It’s like if you hang out with your friends and they’ve got problems, you’re like, man, you can sort out their problems like that, right? And just like, why don’t you just do this, this and this? You can see it so easily. But it’s very hard for us to look at ourselves in the same way, especially with the speed of thought.

So the simple act of freezing it on paper allows you to look at it for what it is. And nine times out of ten you look at it, you’re like, okay, that’s kind of ridiculous. Or it’s not ridiculous, but once you’ve put it on paper, I feel like subconsciously there’s part of you that’s like, I have that written down. I don’t need to remember or think about it.

And whatever that tendency is, and some people more than others, certainly I have a lot of it to kind of white knuckle grasp onto a thought so that it becomes this merry-go-round. Writing it down just allows you to relax your grip and let it go. And if you can do that for a few hours. I mean, in today’s world, if you can single task and focus on one thing for a few hours without notifications, without getting distracted, without looping on some future anxiety or past depression or whatever it might be, if you can do that for a few hours, my God, like in the next few years, especially post AI, you’re going to have such an enormous competitive advantage. Huge. Huge, like, attentional advantage.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s already a fascinating conversation. Love it.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Love it.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s get into your story a little bit.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, sure. Where did you grow up?

Growing Up on Long Island

TIM FERRISS: I grew up on Long Island, so eastern Long Island, rattail and all.

SHAWN RYAN: A rat tail. Nice.

TIM FERRISS: I had a rat tail. I had some terrible haircuts growing up. Didn’t realize it at the time, but grew up on eastern Long Island, way out by Montauk. So people associate that with, rightly so, you know, hedge fund managers and out by the Hamptons, you know, like tennis with Steven Spielberg kind of thing. Right? These $100 million mansions.

And that’s part of it, but a lot like any tourist town that has a lot of second or third or fourth or fifth homes, like Nantucket or wherever. They’re all over the place. You’ve got the people who come there on the weekends or for the summers, and then you got the locals.

So the local side is mostly people working in service industries, etc. Most of my friends’ fathers were fishermen, carpenters, landscapers, that kind of thing. So I grew up working in restaurants. Started bussing pretty early. Not even sure it was legal. Probably 14, 14 or so. I think everybody should work a service job. I think everybody should have to work a service job.

But that’s where I grew up, eastern Long Island. And school was not great. I mean, you don’t really realize you have no reference point, right? Like, whatever’s in front of you is kind of your reality. School was not good.

So eventually one of my, I got really lucky, man. You just think about all these things that have to line up for either of us to be where we are, and these sliding door moments. One friend, if I had been two years younger, two years older, this wouldn’t have happened. But one guy managed to escape Long Island and his parents sent him to a school in New Hampshire, which was a private school.

And he came back and he was like, “You have to leave this place.” I was like, what are you talking about? And then a math teacher was like, “He’s right. You need to f*ing get out of here.” I was like, what? And started looking into it, ultimately got some scholarships. My parents were very supportive. It was all my idea. Like, the whole extended family chipped in and I was able to transfer to a private school in New Hampshire.

And that was a huge life changer and inflection point. I mean, that’s where suddenly, instead of just being able to study Spanish, you could study anything. And that’s how I ended up studying Japanese. And class six days a week, right. Seated meal with coat and tie. I mean, wow. You had mandatory sports, and then in some cases you had six period, which is classes.

After sports, you’d finish school, like, whatever, 6:00 PM, go back to your room, like splash water on your face, get on a suit in time, then go to seated meal chapel in the morning. I mean, the workload, the intensity was unbelievable. I was accustomed to doing really well in school without having to try very hard, and suddenly I was like, barely keeping my head above water.

And it was great for me. It was great for me. It was really hard. But having a few male role models in particular who were like, “You can do it. Yeah, it’s hard. You can do it.” And just having to push through that initial sunburn, too much sun exposure in terms of stress.

Early Interests and Wrestling

SHAWN RYAN: What were you into as a kid?

TIM FERRISS: I mean, at that point, I mean, I was very interested. Even at that point, I was very interested in neuroscience. I wanted to be a neuroscientist because I’d seen my grandmother disintegrate with Alzheimer’s. And I was also very interested just in learning in general and how you could accelerate learning from a very young age, because it just seemed like there was a wide open field of possibility there that folks weren’t exploring. And we can dive into that.

I was also a wrestler. That was the only sport I was ever any good at.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, really?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. I was born premature. I was tiny, super hyperactive. And one of my mom’s friends was like, “You got to put that boy in kid wrestling to tire him out.” And because I was so puny, I just got the crap kicked out of me all the time. Until about 6th grade and team sports were out, I would just get massacred.

I mean, I wouldn’t even go out to recess until probably like, fourth or fifth grade because it was just like being out in the prison yard, get the crap kicked out of me. So I would just stay inside safely, near the teacher and read books, mostly in marine biology, because my parents, actually, this is something my parents did. I want to give them credit. We didn’t have a lot of money.

But my mom said, “If you want books, we always have budget for books.” And so we would go to the bookstore, and there were remainder tables, you know, these books that the bookstore’s trying to get rid of. And I’m like, that was the permissible real estate. It’s like, all right, you get to choose from these books, which are like 40, 60, 80% off.

And got a big hardcover book called Fishes of the World. And out on eastern Long Island. Maybe people don’t know this, but lots of sharks and great whites. And the crazy shark fisherman from Jaws is actually based on a guy named Frank Mundus, who is a no kid rod and reel shark hunter off of Montauk. And so my mom took me to meet him. I was fascinated by sharks.

And that is just a roundabout way of saying for a long time, it was not safe for me to go into kind of like group sports. So my mom threw me into kid wrestling. Weight class. Right. It’s like puny kid versus puny kid. Perfect. And that stuck all the way up until the beginning of college. And so wrestling. Wrestling was the center of my athletic life.

If you want to get good at Sufferfest, wrestling is a good way to do it.

SHAWN RYAN: I was a wrestler, too.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Very familiar. Also puny.

TIM FERRISS: So I would say those are a few things that I was into. I was very interested in drawing. I think, just genetically, there’s, my grandfather was a sculptor. Seems to be something just in the bloodline for that. So I was always drawing. So I kind of had, I guess, three in tandem. Right. The neuroscience and cognitive performance and stuff. That was an interest. And I thought, oh, man, it could be really interesting to be a scientist.

And then there was the marine biology also. Right. The intersection of science. But then there was comic book penciler. I wanted to be a comic.

SHAWN RYAN: Comic book pencil.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. Yeah. I still have all my comic books from when I was a kid. So I wanted to be a comic book penciler. But this was pre-Marvel studios, like before. I mean, you were basically signing up for poverty if you were a comic book penciler back in the day. Nonetheless, still a lot of icons and idols to this day, I have so much respect for. Jim Lee was one of my favorites.

So I still, I still draw. Like, I still, I still get into it, but for a long time, I wanted to take that path.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. So that’s, those are some of the early stages. I mean, I have that.

Confronting Mental Health and Childhood Trauma

SHAWN RYAN: I think it was in childhood. Bipolar disorder, OCD, depression. How did you overcome those things, how did, how did they, how did they pop up on your radar?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, you know, it was sort of the water that I swam in.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

TIM FERRISS: In the sense that I didn’t know life was any different for most people. So a lot of bipolar, major depressive disorder, a lot of addiction in my family. So you got alcohol-induced cardiomyopathy in one uncle, so he drank himself to death. Had early onset dementia. My aunt died of alcohol plus Percocet. Pretty messy.

So a lot of addiction and, which I think is really, and Gabor Maté, I think is the right framing on this. It’s, before we ask why the addiction, we should ask why the pain. Right. And so I think a lot of that is undiagnosed psychiatric disorders. Right.

And so that was always part of my experience. Right. This anxiety, this kind of OCD, like dysregulation and rumination, worrying, hyper-vigilance. I was also very badly abused as a kid. Not by my parents, but that’s, we can get into that if you want, but that turned everything up.

SHAWN RYAN: How were you abused?

TIM FERRISS: I was sexually abused by a babysitter’s son, like, weekly for a couple years.

SHAWN RYAN: By a babysitter’s son?

Early Trauma and Anger as Fuel

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. How old were you?

Two to four. Two to four years old? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So do you remember it?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, sadly, yeah. Be better, maybe better if I didn’t, but. So you take out of the box hardware that’s already predisposed, and then you add some type of traumatic event like that. It’s not a great combo.

And I would say that I was driven. I wanted to get out of Long Island, et cetera, et cetera. Money issues were always kind of a problem in the household. Like, that was always a conversation. So I was like, all right, I need to make money. So there was like, get out of Long Island. Be good at school. That’s your ticket. That was kind of the narrative in the household, which I think was actually a helpful narrative. It’s like, you got it. If you’re good at school, you can write your tickets.

All right, So I took all the rage. I was a very angry kid, Very angry human, I would say, up until probably 2013, 2015, after the book. After her first book. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. I didn’t start to deal with any of the trauma until probably 2015 in any meaningful way. But the anger and the rage.

SHAWN RYAN: Even though.

TIM FERRISS: It’s not a clean fuel, I don’t think it’s a clean fuel. Like, you do a lot of damage to the vessel but it’s a fuel, right? Like, it’s a propellant that I used to. So I was just f*ing intense, super intense and took that experience and everything, compartmentalized it and I was just like, okay, like no rear view mirror forward. That’s it.

And I think for that can work for a while. You know, it can work for decades in some cases. Ultimately, I think if you want a semblance of peace and well being, you kind of have to pay the piper and deal with it.

And I have been surprised. I mean, look how many of the friends I have who are veterans, who operate at a very high level, came out, ended up for any host of reasons doing, say, ibogaine or other psychedelic therapy. Who in the process of doing that realized that it wasn’t principally, say PTSD, often some component of TBI, but there was some type of trauma they didn’t deal with. Super common, super common. I would say 80% of the guys I know.

And so it’s really like the numbers are staggering. And the people who kind of survive, as opposed to like self destructing, at least in the beginning, I think get really good at compartmentalizing. Right? But compartmentalizing, while it can help you with performance for relationships, for friends, for family, it doesn’t work very well. You end up being emotionally cauterized.

And, you know, the armor that you develop to keep things out keeps a lot of things in and it keeps a lot of people out.

Psychedelic Therapy and Bioelectric Medicine

So to answer your question, though, things that ended up really having a positive impact would include psychedelic assisted therapies. So we can talk about that because they’re not a panacea, they’re not for everyone. And there are real risks depending on the compound that is in question.

Brain stimulation, like accelerated TMS. I literally just did another round of accelerated TMS two days ago, so we could talk about that. Very fresh. But different types of non-invasive brain stimulation. Incredibly interesting. So microchips over medicine, in a sense, I think bioelectric medicine is one field where I’m paying a lot of attention.

SHAWN RYAN: Bioelectric medicine.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, yeah. So where can you use stimulation doesn’t automatically have to be stimulation. It could be something more like ultrasound. But how can you use non-invasive technologies or even an implant to, say, change how your brain is firing or to inhibit or excite a certain part of the brain or to stimulate the, say, vagus nerve in some cases related to autoimmune dysfunction or rheumatoid arthritis, for instance.

There was a piece on the cover of the New York Times not too long ago about this. How can you use electricity, in effect, to treat issues with fewer side effects than pills or injectables or IV or whatever it might be.

So the accelerated TMS specifically, I think is very interesting. There’s a protocol called the SAINT Protocol. It’s been modified in a couple of different ways, but the primary or one of the best known researchers behind that unfortunately committed suicide a few months ago. A friend of mine, Nolan Williams, developed a lot of these approaches along with his team. But you see in some cases, after a week, 70, 80% remission of treatment resistant depression. Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

TIM FERRISS: With just as much, if not more durability than psychedelic experiences. Wow.

I have a lot of time on the research side also on the experiential side with psychedelic assisted therapies. And I’ve taken copious notes for well over a decade on everything and know a lot of the people who are at the top of that field. And I would say that bioelectric medicine is just as interesting. That has had a huge impact on my life. Very early days, very early, but that is certainly of interest.

Simple Tools: Morning Pages and Fear Setting

And then I would say the therapies and tools like morning pages, it’s so simple. Morning pages and fear setting, these are not small things, guys. At least not for me. Like, if your life is ruled by fear. Because what I realized is, for me personally, I miss, in a sense, I was mistreating myself by focusing on the depression.

And what I only realized in the last five years is that the depression was downstream of other things. I had anxiety, which was maybe out of the box. Like, I have family members who make my OCD look like amateur hour. Like they’re so over the top. When you combine that with hyper vigilance, like your life is ruled by fear and worry.

And when you have that as one of your defaults, something like fear setting something like morning pages is not a small thing. Like, it is actually a very big deal.

And when you start to look at psychedelic assisted therapies, or frankly, honestly, off the rack regular antidepressants like SSRIs or selective like SNRIs, there are many different types. For some people, those are a godsend, right? But when you start to combine some of these things with medical supervision, with therapies, right? Whether that’s CBT, there’s one called DBT, which I think is very interesting. Peter Attia, M.D. is a big proponent of DBT.

It’s the combination of things, plus investing in relationships. I think Tony Robbins said once I heard at one of his events. I’ve only been to two of his events. They’re a bit too much stimulation for someone who’s pretty introverted. A lot of stimulation. But he was on stage and he said, “Yeah, I, I, I, me, me me gets to be a really f*ing boring song after a while.” And I was like, that’s the way to put it.

And I think the best way to help the self is to escape the self sometimes. Not by doing coke, not by getting plastered every night, but by doing what we’re evolved to do, which is spend time with other people, doing things. Not just like sitting there in a circle like AA, talking about all your worries and pains. Even though AA is actually spectacular organization and formats incredibly impressive.

But you don’t necessarily have to do that. You can just be a bunch of dudes sitting around a fire, not making eye contact, making fart jokes and talking about hunting. That’s fine. That’s actually incredibly therapeutic. It’s like people process things in different ways. It doesn’t have to be like, not everyone has to do it the same way. Yeah.

Near-Suicide in College

So those are a few thoughts. But yeah, I mean the almost killed myself in college. Had a date in the calendar. Had a plan. Knew exactly how I was going to do it to make it look like an accident. I mean, I won’t mention it because it’s too good and other people will copy it.

I’ve never wanted to discuss it because there are people who are probably watching this who are in pain. And until I give them maybe a glimpse of how I got out, I wouldn’t want to give them any blueprint. It’s just too risky. I wouldn’t want to feel the responsibility for that.

SHAWN RYAN: But.

Childhood Trauma and the Decision to Share

TIM FERRISS: I got really lucky once again. One of those sliding door moments. If it had been two or three years later, I wouldn’t be here. The reason is I went to Firestone Library at Princeton where I went undergrad. Funny story, but my guidance counselor in high school was like, you should definitely not apply to Princeton or any Ivy League schools for that matter. Talk about that if you want. But misaligned incentives.

Anyway, got in and was reserving a book on assisted suicide from Firestone Library, but someone else had already taken it out. Some other student was reading it and I put in a request. So you put in a request with the library. What do they do at that point in time? They would mail you a postcard.

But I was taking a year away from school at that point. Took a break from undergrad, which is what the school and what a lot of schools will encourage you to do if they think you’re having, if you claim any mental duress. They don’t want a suicide on their watch, on their campus. Might not help you, but they don’t want that as a blemish on their record, so to speak.

So the actual postcard got mailed to my parents at home. I’d forgotten to change my mailing address at the registrar’s office. So postcard goes to my parents’ house and it’s like, “Congratulations, your book is now in on assisted suicide.” Whatever. Mom called me freaking out and I tapped dance and I lied. I was like, “Oh, it’s a friend at Rutgers who couldn’t get the book and I was just trying to help him out.”

But it snapped me. It broke the spell, snapped me out of it. Because when you’re in that much pain, you think nothing can fix it. You think you’re fundamentally broken, that you’re uniquely flawed. You become so I, I, I, me, me, me that all you want is the pain to stop. Anything must be better than this. So let me just close the curtain and turn the show off.

And when my mom called, I realized, oh, if I do this, number one, now I can’t make it look like an accident. Number two, even if I tried to make it look like an accident, doing what I had planned to do would have been like putting on a suicide bomber vest, walking into a room of all the people I care most about and detonating, like psychologically, emotionally. That would have been the impact.

And so I didn’t do it and quadrupled down on physical training, which is how I ended up going to the nationals for Chinese kickboxing in the U.S. I was like, you know what? The only thing I know how to do that gets me out of my head is train under imminent threat of being kicked or punched in the face. Like, I am not allowed to daydream under those circumstances. So I’m just going to train hours a day. And that’s what I ended up doing. And ultimately everything was fine.

There were some reasons for me getting as deep into that hole as I did. Not all my fault. And much later, this is probably only 10 years ago, I wrote a post called “Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide.” And like, if anyone’s feeling really dark, go read that post. It has saved hundreds of lives. And it doesn’t sugarcoat anything.

The Catalyst for Writing About Suicide

The reason I wrote that is I was at an event in San Francisco at the time, being interviewed on stage. I got off and a couple people came over and there’s a small circle around me. They wanted books signed and things like that. And this really nice guy dressed up in a suit and everything for the event, gave me this book. And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I just wanted you to sign this for my brother.”

And I was like, “Sure, no problem. What would you like me to say to your brother?” And he just kind of froze. And it was like a weird interaction. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I was like, you know what, I’ll tell you what, let’s chat afterwards. You can think about it for a bit. I’ll sign it afterwards.

And then I went on and interacted with everybody else. And then as I was walking back to the elevator to leave, he joined me and he was like, “Yeah, I’m really sorry I froze, but my brother killed himself. And my mom has kept his room exactly as it was. And he was such a huge fan of yours. And I just wasn’t sure what to put in the book.”

And I ended up signing the book. I gave it to him and he’s like, “Have you ever thought about talking about anything related to mental health?” He’s like, “Because my brother listened to you.” And I was like, f*, okay.

And it took me months. I was not committed to publishing it, but I spent months working on this piece, “Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide.” And then like, my parents didn’t really know, right? Because I’d lied. Family didn’t know, best friends didn’t know.

Publishing the Most Vulnerable Work

And I certainly, like the two things that I would say I’m proudest of in terms of publishing, probably, if I had to pick two, would be the blog post on suicide, right? “Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide.” And then the podcast during COVID on the childhood abuse, which also, like, parents didn’t know about, nobody knew about. Only parents didn’t know about that. Nobody knew.

So I didn’t want them to blame themselves. I had intended to write a book after they passed away so they wouldn’t blame themselves. And then during COVID, right? This is early COVID. People don’t know what’s coming. Like, it’s scary, right?

And I was, I remember I had flown to Costa Rica to have some optionality in terms of travel. I was like, all right, let me figure out what’s going on here. Like, a friend of mine who works with a lot of hedge fund managers had given me a very early heads up on COVID and I was like, oh, this is bad. This could be really bad. Let’s try to preserve as much optionality as possible. We’re leaving now. So I ended up in Costa Rica.

And we’re sitting there having a meal. And somehow this came up because she knew about it. There were two girlfriends, like long term, long, long term girlfriends. As I was mentioning earlier, when you’re like cauterized and compartmentalized, there are a lot of relationship costs. So it works up to a point. And then you hit a wall and suddenly it doesn’t work.

And so with these girlfriends who were three, four, five, six years, right, there was a point where I shared with these two women, specifically, I guess it was three long term girlfriends about the abuse. And this one girlfriend, I was talking about writing the book, and she’s like, you know, we’re sitting in the middle of COVID. She’s like, “Have you ever thought about how many people are going to die of natural or unnatural causes before you ever write that book? Like, it’s going to be 10 years, 15 years.”

She was like, “Why don’t you do a podcast?” And I was like, “Because I don’t want to talk to my parents. I don’t want to talk to my friends. Like, it’s too vulnerable. It’s too vulnerable.”

Debbie Millman and Shared Trauma

But ultimately, I had had a friend, Debbie Millman, amazing human being, incredible graphic artist, teacher. “Design Matters” is her podcast. Been running even longer than mine. And when she came on my show, I had noticed in all my research she never really talked about her family. And so I asked her before we started recording, I was like, “Would you be open to talking about your family at all? I noticed a huge, glaring omission.”

And she was like, “Maybe.” She’s like, “You can try it. And then if I’m open to it, we’ll talk about it. But if not, then not.” And we were friends and we got into it and she opened up for the first time really publicly about horrifying sexual abuse, like throughout her entire childhood.

SHAWN RYAN: And it’s crazy how many kids go through this.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, it’s awful. And I mean, the numbers are staggering. Like, it’s really high.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, I know. 50% of the people that have been on here have talked about it.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And then there’s another percentage that won’t, that will talk about it, but not on camera.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. So it’s pervasive. And so I asked Debbie if she’d be open to having a conversation with me about how we’ve both tried to overcome or address this, because she and I took very, very, very different paths and used very different tools.

And so we recorded the conversation and I told her in advance. I was like, “Look, Debbie, I don’t know if I’m ever going to publish this.” She was like, “That’s totally fine.” And we recorded it. Eventually I was like, all right, here goes nothing. And published that.

Stayed off of all social media. I told my team, I was like, “I don’t want to see any feedback unless it’s from people I care about and it’s positive feedback.” I was like, “I’m too, it’s too raw. Like I don’t want to.” Internet’s a nasty place, right? It’s a full contact sport where every f*ing village idiot has been given like a halberd and a mace, right? It’s not pretty. So I was like, “I’m staying off of everything.”

SHAWN RYAN: But the opposite happened, didn’t it?

The Unexpected Response

TIM FERRISS: Well, I ignored everything except the only people who could reach me were my close friends. So what happened? I would say somewhere between 25 and 35% of some of my oldest, closest friends reached out and left me the most heart wrenching voice memos and voicemails you can imagine about their own abuse that they’d never told anyone about.

F*ing horrible. I had anticipated bad behavior on the Internet, so I stayed away. I did not expect such a high percentage of my really close friends to confide in me. That was really hard. But I have a lot of, for whatever reason, capacity for like that with friends, with people I care about. I have a lot of capacity for handling that.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

TIM FERRISS: F*, man. How did it feel? It felt, it felt. And I had to decide in advance what would, what the, what feeling would make it worth it because no outcome’s guaranteed. You have no idea what’s going to happen when this thing gets released into the wild.

So it was like it was an unburdening for myself, right? Wasn’t expecting apologies from anybody. I wasn’t expecting a make good. I wasn’t expecting any Harry Potter magic spell to do Control Z undo on these experiences. I just, I was exhausted by carrying the weight of that secret around.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

Turning Pain Into Medicine

TIM FERRISS: Furthermore, I had had this very skilled therapist tell me at one point, and maybe she just didn’t realize that this would stick. I guess we very seldom realize these little things we might say that actually can make a big difference to people. She said, “Take the pain and make it part of your medicine.”

And by taking my own experience and turning it into something hopefully that would help people, it gave it some redemption. It gave it some meaning. Am I glad it happened? No, right? When people say it’s like, “Well, it made me who I am.” F* that. Like, if I could remove that, I would remove it. For sure.

The amount of damage that’s done is unbelievable. And it certainly contributed to the near suicide in retrospect. Right. I thought I had 17 different problems, but when you look back, hindsight 20/20, it’s like, oh, yeah, all that stuff makes sense. There’s one like, it was like hardware, like genetics plus trauma. Like, is that.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you learn that through psychedelics?

Psychedelics: Power, Risks, and Responsibility

TIM FERRISS: That’s part. I would say it’s one of the tools that made it very clear where I was able to see how these seemingly disconnected pieces of puzzle fit together perfectly quickly.

Psychedelics are fascinating for a lot of reasons. I’ve stepped outside of the public discussion of psychedelics largely in the last few years because I’ve just been disgusted by all the infighting and humans being humans. Humans just cannot resist soiling the nest, peeing in the pool. Choose your metaphor.

It’s like all of the infighting and nonsense and politics and power grabbing that you see in any group of humans, you also see within the psychedelic ecosystem, right? So anyone who thinks you just need to put LSD in the water supply and we’re going to have world peace, like, I’m like, you should go to a psychedelic conference and see all the assholery and f*ery. And trust me, I can assure you that that will not work.

And at the same time, I mean, some of the most beautiful, wonderful, inexplicable, and also painful experiences I’ve ever had have involved psychedelics. And you do need to be very, very careful with them.

I really feel like, as one of my good friends who passed away due to cancer, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, he said, in effect, “You’re using psychological nuclear power.” It’s like it doesn’t just bend one way. It’s inducing a level of plasticity and suggestibility and malleability. But how you shape that Play-Doh once it’s heated up matters a lot. So you can’t just dose and run. The experience does matter. Experience itself does matter.

Treating Psychedelics Like Brain Surgery

But the way I encourage people to think about it is, number one, treat it as if you were going in to have brain surgery. You’re not going to find a shaman on Facebook for your brain surgery. So if your friend’s like, “Bro, yeah, I got an awesome shaman who’s coming in and come sit this weekend,” and it’s like three days till the weekend, you would never do that if you were having your skull opened up. Don’t do it, in my opinion, without a lot of prep and consideration.

So you have a very healthy respect. I have a very healthy respect because, and this isn’t scaremongering, it’s just a fact of the matter, there’s a lot of survivorship bias in the sense that you tend to, especially up until a few years ago, hear about all the amazing transformations.

The people who get their psyche shattered and who have some type of persistent perceptual disorder, they’re not necessarily showcasing that, they’re not sharing it. They might be ashamed, they might get criticized by friends who are proselytizers for psychedelics who take their difficult experience as a risk to the “movement.”

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

TIM FERRISS: There are a lot of forces at work and dynamics at play that make it challenging for people who have hard experiences to get the help they need. But as someone who had a podcast in 2015 about Ibogaine and ibogaine in Mexico specifically, and I’ve been around these things, certainly not as long as many, like there are facilitators with tens of thousands of sessions under their belts over 40, 50 years. I mean, these people know infinitely more than I do.

And certainly indigenous practitioners are coming through practices handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of thousands of years. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface there. But I’ve had enough time, I would say, as someone who’s taken it very seriously and effectively had researching and experiencing and experimenting around psychedelics as my unpaid full-time job for 10 years, to say that once I had a platform, the number of emails that come over the transom from people who have been destabilized is not trivial, right?

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, it’s not trivial. And you can mitigate some of the risks. There are better, or I should say safer and less safe ways of approaching different psychedelics. And it depends on the compound, right? Like psychedelic is not a psychedelic, is not a psychedelic. These are as different as completely separate classes of drugs in some cases in my opinion, and even at different doses they behave very differently.

So it’s like 10 micrograms of LSD is very different than 200 micrograms of LSD as an example. But I would just say that take it seriously, right? And if you’re going to consider these tools, the way I put it with folks, because a lot of friends come to me to discuss this, is I say you should look at this as like you’re having, the neurosurgery example is a good one, but let’s use perhaps a better comparison in some respects, which is you’re about to have both knees or both hips replaced.

The Importance of Integration and Rehab

Okay, so you’re going to do a lot of homework on who’s going to do that surgery. And you’re going to understand all the risks involved. You’re going to understand the durability, right? You might need to get those hips replaced later again. And what are you going to do? You’re going to do a lot of rehab.

The surgery is the catalyst. But it’s like if you have both knees replaced and you don’t do any rehab, that could have a worse outcome than not having surgery in the first place. So what you do afterwards really matters.

And there’s a lot of, I think, compelling research and a number of theories around this that I think are very credible from, say, Gül Dölen, who is a researcher who I believe now is at UC Berkeley, used to be at Hopkins, who looked at MDMA extensively among octopuses. And how octopuses, which are very asocial or antisocial most of the time, but how even with a completely different nervous system, how they would display pro-social behavior, just like humans on MDMA.

SHAWN RYAN: Serious?

TIM FERRISS: Really fascinating stuff. But what she is also looking at now is how you might use psychedelics to, and I might be getting some of the details wrong, but I’m not that far off, to say, help stroke patients to redevelop motor control. Is there an application there?

And the reason that she’s looking at potential applications like that is that she believes certain psychedelics open or reopen a critical period or a critical window. Much like if kids don’t learn to, say, speak a language within a certain age range, it’s much harder to do later. There’s a critical developmental window for certain things. Can you reopen those windows using psychedelics? And it seems like the answer is yes.

In which case all of the advice that the old timers have been giving about integration, for people who might be familiar with ayahuasca in a traditional context, the diets afterwards, abstaining from certain things for a few weeks. What does that sound a lot like? It sounds a lot like what science is only beginning to scratch the surface of, which is the reopening of these critical periods, critical windows within which you can start to rewrite behaviors, like before the concrete sets.

A Conservative Approach to Powerful Tools

So I’m very, I would say, mind blown and impressed with what these compounds can do as part of a larger context of some type of therapy. There are a lot of different approaches to this. And the westernized version of neo-shamanic practices is very different from what they actually do, whether it be the Amazon or Africa or fill in the blank, right? Like the practice is very different, or the Mazatecs in Mexico, etc.

So I would say I’m very impressed. And I’m also very conservative. And the vast majority of people who come to me and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I really want to do psychedelics,” I talk them out of it, not into it.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, the vast majority I talk out of it. Which is not to say I think the risks outweigh the benefits. But there are certain people, if you have family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, I do not recommend using these things.

Which is another reason why I’m so excited about the different types of brain stimulation or vagus nerve stimulation because, or this is another one actually that I’ll throw out there, metabolic psychiatry using diet, the ketogenic diet specifically.

There’s an associate professor, I think he’s still an associate professor at Harvard named Chris Palmer, who has looked at this very extensively for certain, let’s call it, people aren’t going to like this, some folks, but chaotic psychiatric disorders.

Two Sides of the River: Rigidity vs. Chaos

So let’s just say there’s a river and you can swim in the middle. That’s like complete normalcy. That’s pretty much no one. And then on one side you have hyper-rigidity, just say, which is like OCD, depression, chronic anxiety, anorexia nervosa, which are all characterized in a sense by a certain looping and rigidity. Which is part of the reason why I think psychedelics are mysteriously effective for this constellation of seemingly different diagnoses, right? They’re on this rigidity side. I think classical psychedelics can be very, very helpful for that side of things.

Then on the other side of the river you’ve got, let’s just call it a more chaotic constellation of disorders which would include schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder. On that side of the river, it would seem that something like metabolic psychiatry is very, very interesting. You see people who have been on dozens of medications and they’re on the ketogenic diet for four weeks and then they get off of all of their medications.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, it is shocking, shocking. So like the three, let’s just call it current, it could get replaced, but pillars of the mental health technology stool for me that are most interesting: ketones and metabolic psychiatry, brain stimulation or bioelectric medicine more broadly, and then psychedelic-assisted therapies.

But I’m tool agnostic. Psychedelics at the time were most interesting, most compelling because of some of the effects that you were seeing and the durability, right? With PTSD, with major depressive disorder, with alcoholism, through like NYU addiction, which by the way, is not new. We were doing this research with LSD in like the 1950s.

SHAWN RYAN: Were we really?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, 1950s and 1960s. And then once Nixon signed it off into prohibition era, that all went away. And there were a lot of political motivations behind that. There was not a scientific reason for that. It was more politically motivated.

But the point being that I’m very excited about what the future holds for psychedelic-assisted therapies. But I’ve been most interested in the science. Once it turns into policy and politicking and grandstanding and befriending the right special interest groups, yeah, it’s not, I have zero patience for that stuff. I just can’t. I have a lot of trouble with it.

So I prefer to just deal with the scientists and the practitioners. Like I’ve been very heavily involved with groups like the Amazon Conservation Team and looking at indigenous land rights and really trying to the extent possible to support and reciprocate these groups who effectively gave the world these things that are now being medicalized, right? I do think that’s important.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that’s really important?

TIM FERRISS: Especially since some of these folks operate in such hostile territories. I mean, you’ve got like illegal mining interests, you’ve got logging, agriculture, narcos. Like, you know, these folks are routinely assassinated. Indigenous leaders all over the place. Look at Brazil, Colombia, Mexico. It’s a very, very tough world that they inhabit in a lot of ways.

SHAWN RYAN: What got you interested in psychedelics to begin with?

Early Fascination with Altered States of Consciousness

TIM FERRISS: I’ve always been interested in altered states of consciousness ever since I was a little kid. And I don’t know exactly where that comes from. I think it was just suspecting that there was, on some level—I think researchers like Donald Hoffman, he’s a bucking bronco, he could have one—but there’s always part of me that kind of suspected that this was what we’re looking at here and experiencing is like a user interface. It’s like a desktop on a computer where it’s like, okay, we have these icons and so on that represent something, but that this is just one interface.

If we were a mantis shrimp or a different animal, it wouldn’t look or feel like this. Right. So this is a reality, but it’s not the end all, be all objective reality. I always just had that feeling and you can explore that through a purely scientific, physicalist lens. You don’t have to get out there. You don’t have to be running around the full moon swinging the dead cat over your head with a hawk wing. Like, you don’t have to get into pure Wu territory to ask some questions about things.

And then I would say later, I was always interested in mythology. My mom got me this crazy book, I think it was on the remainder table called “A Lycanthropy Reader.” And “A Lycanthropy Reader” was a historical collection of essays on the mythology and belief of shape shifting, which you see in pretty much every culture, whether it’s like North American Plains Indians or Siberia or wherever.

There were chapters in there about the use of different plants—so mandrake, belladonna, henbane, etc.—by “witches” or “werewolves,” who would basically go on these incredible psychotropic journeys and then come back with stories of shape shifting, which are still very common in the Amazon, by the way. This belief and these types of stories, I mean, they might call them skills or powers. Dieting certain plants is intended to help you with some of this stuff.

So that opened the door to me asking, like, okay, let’s just assume for the time being that people cannot turn into animals. But the idea that you could ingest a plant or put on a salve that would so fundamentally change your consciousness that you would come back with a complete belief that you had done it was also interesting to me. So I then became this sort of intrepid, very amateur biochemist looking at how that might happen.

The Fear of Alzheimer’s and Focus on Brain Function

You combine that then with the fear of Alzheimer’s in my family, and it just led me to really want to focus on brain function. And a few things happened around the same time. Towards the end of high school, I read a book called “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen LaBerge. And still to this day, I think it is one of the most impressive books I have found for teaching a skill in a systematic way. And it teaches you how to induce lucidity in your dreams.

And it’s nothing mysterious. I shouldn’t say that—it is provable within the confines of a laboratory that you can cultivate the ability to control your dreams and become conscious in your dreams. And the way they demonstrate, the way they demonstrated this is they got an EEG or other means of confirming that someone is in a sleep state. And you devise in advance, for instance, eye movement. When you’re asleep, what happens? Rapid eye movement. Your eye movement still correlates to what you’re doing in a dream.

So you determine in advance a sequence between experimenter and subject where it’s like Morse code, basically. It’s like, right, right, left, right, right, left, right, right, left. And then when the person’s in the dream, they just perform that eye sequence.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you kidding me?

Mastering Lucid Dreaming

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. So as I started, really, once I got accepted to college, I was like, I can do whatever I want now. It was just basically wrestling. All I wanted to do was compete and go to nationals and do well, and lucid dreaming—that was it. And within pretty short order, I’d say within a month or so, some people come to it very naturally, within a month or so I could get to the point where I was inducing lucidity like once or twice a night.

And that is a bizarre experience when you get to the point where you can actually modify your dream at will or extend your dream in certain ways. And at first, I’m going to tell everybody in advance what you’re going to do. You might protest, but what everyone’s going to do is they’re going to do two things. They’re going to fly as much as possible and they’re going to f* as many people as possible. Those are the two things everyone’s going to do.

So then you’ll fly around and f* everybody for a while. And then you can start messing around in some really peculiar ways. So what I was doing at the time, one of my favorite wrestlers, just a phenom, John Smith from Oklahoma, famous for low leg attacks—never met the guy, but I watched tons of video. So at night in my dreams, I would have wrestling practice with John Smith. And it improved my wrestling in real life.

So there are some really unexpected levers that you can pull and corners you can explore just through lucid dreaming. And it does take work. You have to train up to it. You have to have a very scheduled way to record dream content. It is a practice. But that also kind of raised a lot of questions, like, huh, okay, well, if I learned something 10 years ago, could I use lucid dreaming to go back and pull those books off the shelf? Is that possible? Maybe.

First Experiences with Psychedelics

And then I would say very early college—so this would have been, actually, no, it was still in high school. At the very end of high school, I had my first experiences with psychedelics with mushrooms first and LSD. And after that, I was like, oh, okay. I don’t understand how my experience of time can be cut up into slices and rearranged in the way that I just experienced it last night. That is, it doesn’t really fit with my consensus experience of this reality. So what does that mean? I have no idea. But I’m interested in exploring what that might mean.

So when I went to Princeton, I went to Princeton for a couple of reasons, or I applied to Princeton Early Action, which is like an exploding offer. In retrospect, I think I would have been much happier somewhere else. Princeton was a very difficult, stiff environment for me, but I went there because they had one of the best East Asian Studies departments in the world. Really phenomenal. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. They had a very, very strong psychology and neuroscience program. So, like, Danny Kahneman was there.

There was a guy named Barry Jacobs who had done a bunch of research with LSD and did a lot of research also on the serotonergic system involving cats and stuff, because the cat’s going to sleep all the time. I really wanted to work in his lab.

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory

And then thirdly, there was something—at the time, I was very sad that it ended up getting wound down maybe a year after I got there—but there was something at Princeton called the PEAR Lab, P-E-A-R, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, where I think I could be getting some of the details wrong. But I’m pretty sure at one point they had military funding or, you know, three letter acronym funding. They also had money, I want to say from like SRI International to use sort of computational and quantitative measures to study things like telekinesis, remote viewing, etc.

And literally that had been started by, I want to say, Professor John, J-A-H-N, I believe it was. And somebody should fact check this, but I’m getting pretty close. I think he was the former dean of the Engineering Department or Engineering Quadrangle, and one of his grad students had looked at human influence on random number generators. And he was like, “Really?” He was like, “Look, if you want to waste your time on this, it’s not going to help you with anything. It looks like a terrible idea to me.”

And then when all the data came back, he was like, “Hmm, okay.” And ultimately became so interested that he spearheaded this Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. And I wanted to know what the hell they had figured out. I wanted to get a read on what they felt like they had figured out. And this is a, I mean, this is a high end, incredibly credible engineer. This isn’t some rando. This is someone who was on the far side, extreme skeptic end of things, who ended up then spearheading this.

You can still end up with beliefs that you want confirmation for. So again, the purpose of the scientific method, which is really a framework for thinking, is to prevent you from fooling yourself. But all of those things came together to answer your question. And I was like, you know what? I think all of these things, if for the moment we provisionally say that maybe some of those phenomena have something to them—even if you exclude that psychedelics, lucid dreaming, certain types of religious experience that I’d read about—I was like, I feel like there’s a possibility these are all touching like the hem of the same garment.

And perhaps that’s all internally generated. Maybe it’s like a temporal lobe epilepsy kind of seizure. Like when you look back at a lot of scripture, it’s like, that sounds a lot like seizure. But does that invalidate it? I don’t know. Like some of the most creative people we’ve ever known have also had something very similar. So it’s like, all right, all of it meant like, I want to know what the hell is going on in here, if that is even possible. How do you even study it? It’s like three pounds of fat sitting in this skull. What do you even do to study that?

So, I mean, all of those things, I would say catalyzed it, then went pretty hard in the paint with all of that for a while.

A Terrifying Experience and Stepping Back

And then since I had no, certainly no training, my friends and I had no training in how to structure psychedelic experiences. And I had a terrifying experience of coming out of a mushroom psychedelic experience in the middle of the night because my ahole friends—so three of us had wandered off on some hike and I was left alone in a house and I started looping because I was on a, I’m sure we weren’t even measuring doses at the time, but I’m sure it was, in retrospect, I would say it’s probably like 6 to 8 grams of dried sliced mushrooms, which is a lot for people who don’t know.

So I was looping, looping, looping, wandered over to my parents’ house and my friends were like, “You definitely didn’t go over there?” And then the next day, my mom’s like, “Big night, huh?” And I was like, “What do you mean?” So that was already a problem. I’m tripping my balls off sitting on like the kitchen floor with my parents. Like, that’s bad enough.

But when I was walking back to this other house where I was staying with my friends, I came out of my trip in pitch blackness, walking in the middle of the road, and almost got hit by an oncoming car. Like, the headlights coming at me is what woke me up. And then I jumped out of the way. And I was like, “Okay, we’re done.” And I stopped.

And the only reason I got back into it, the interest always persisted. And the other things, the lucid dreaming, the neuroscience, the interest, all of that continued. But I was like, psychedelics, that’s off limits.

Re-Entry into Psychedelics in 2012

And then in 2012, probably 2012, my girlfriend at the time went on retreat to Peru and did three nights of ayahuasca and came back and was just a different person. And I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” And she said, “You really need to do this.” And I was like, “I don’t think so.” And she said, “It’s 20 years of therapy in two or three nights.” And I was like, “Damn, you know me too well. That’s a pretty good pitch.” And I was like, “Okay.”

And keep in mind, this is before I unpacked all the trauma stuff. But she was aware of it, and I was just white knuckling with my compartmentalization. I was like, “No, I’m fine. I’m fine.” And then just basically around 2012, just like, you know, the re-entry from outer space, like, the front of the hull is getting red hot. And I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m at risk of blowing apart here.”

And two things simultaneously happened. One, a friend of mine, one of the most successful extreme photographers in the world, said, “You need to try some type of meditation.” He’s like, “Go pay someone and do transcendental meditation.” And I was like, “Eh, really? I’m going to pay, like, whatever it is, $500, $1,500 to have some guy give me a mantra and I have to give him flowers? Are you f*ing kidding me?” And he’s like, “You can afford it.” I was like—and he’s like, “Really?” He’s like, “Look at yourself.” And I was like, “All right, fine.”

So I started doing TM, which was actually an incredibly good investment. And the money matters. Why? Because you don’t want to lose that money, and you have the accountability, so you’re actually going to do it.

A Methodical Approach to Psychedelics

Secondly, I started thinking about a re-entry into the playing field of psychedelics. And I was like, all right, if I’m going to do it now that I know how to read research properly and I have access—I was living in the Bay Area, I’m like, I am in the epicenter in North America for exploring this type of thing—I’m going to do it in a really conservative, step by step build up leading to, but not committed to, potentially ayahuasca.

And so just thought about how to structure it safely, you know, interviewed, for lack of a better term, like hiring for a job, different facilitators, had people help me with the vetting, got reference checks. I really went over the top because that experience in the middle of the street had rightfully scared the hell out of me. Like I could have very easily been hit by a car. And it’s like bad things do happen. Like people jump out of windows. I hate to say it, but those things do happen.

So I wanted as many safeguards as possible. And so that was sort of starting in, let’s call it 2011, 2012, was the re-entry onto the playing field.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh man.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. But being much more, much more methodical about the whole thing.

Religion and Spirituality

SHAWN RYAN: Are you a Christian?

TIM FERRISS: I wouldn’t identify as anything from an organized religion.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

TIM FERRISS: He’s asking.

SHAWN RYAN: You brought up scripture a couple times.

TIM FERRISS: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I think scripture, I think it doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not. I think you should read scripture. I think there are different ways to approach it. But I mean, if something is sort of one of the foundations of Western civilization, it’s like, yeah, maybe you should get familiar with it, right?

Like if you haven’t read the Constitution, maybe you should read the Constitution too. It’s like Constitution’s a much shorter read, so maybe start there.

SHAWN RYAN: But what do you think when, what do you think happens when we die?

TIM FERRISS: What do I think happens when we die? I find it increasingly difficult to believe that we simply have a machine that gets turned off. So I think that’s informed by some of the experiences on psychedelics.

And I recognize I could take, and I think it’s important if you have a strong belief. I think it’s really important that you try to attack that belief with the strongest possible version of a critic’s arguments.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

TIM FERRISS: I really think that’s important if you want to become a better thinker and a better human. I think that’s important. So I recognize that I could also make a bunch of arguments for why it should just be lights out.

But if I’m looking at some of the documentation around near death experiences, if I’m looking at like sort of CCTV like view from above, where people are able to confirm things that happened, where objects were placed, what people said while they were clinically dead. It’s hard to explain that with like hypoxia and death rattle spasms in the brain and erratic neuronal firing. Seems pretty hard to explain.

And there’s enough of there. There’s enough in terms of documented cases where at the very least it raises some interesting questions. So what do I think happens when you die? I mean, the best placeholder that I have is that consciousness is fundamental, just like matter. I’m not even convinced time is fundamental.

But yeah, Carlo Rovelli, I think his name is. There’s some really interesting writing from physicists. Like it’s not as static uniform constant as one might like to think. But if consciousness on some level is fundamental, kind of Max Planck style, then I think when you die, it’s like a drop return to the ocean.

SHAWN RYAN: You think what?

TIM FERRISS: I think that your consciousness is like what we experience as sort of a skin encapsulated ego that we associate with ourself and all of that can dissolve and go away on psychedelics. Right. And you become, you have the experience of something you might call consciousness without any consciousness.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that what you’re saying?

TIM FERRISS: What was that?

SHAWN RYAN: Some type of a collective consciousness?

TIM FERRISS: Sure, something like that, yeah. Where it’s like, yeah, okay, you’re a drop of water and you just get returned to the ocean. What does that subjectively mean? No idea. Right. I mean, what’s it like? What’s it like a few months before you’re born? I don’t know. I don’t know. Right. What is that like? Not the slightest clue.

But you know, I’ve had conversations with people like the incredible biologist, also computer scientists, and you should talk to this guy Michael Levin out of Tufts, who is on the cutting edge of more things than I can even list off at this point. But if you’re looking at the development of a human from embryo, and I’m getting seemingly a little off track, but I don’t think so.

Like the development of consciousness, which we kind of need to define, but let’s just think of it as having an identity in me, an I, that is separate from the outside. And maybe you’re aware that you’re aware. Right. Which might distinguish humans from other species in some way.

Okay, well when does that happen? Is there just a point in the process where it’s like Frankenstein galvanizing? It’s like lights on and suddenly. Or is it does it actually exist at a cellular or subcellular level? And it just scales up to what we experience, kind of like a beehive. I tend to lean towards the latter. Right.

And I think Michael Levin would lean towards the latter. Like very good scientists. These aren’t people running around at Esalen with tinfoil hats on. I love Esalen, by the way. No smack to Esalen. I’ve been there before. But it’s like these are people who have some of the most analytical, critically minded brains in the scientific field. And these are open questions.

So what do you think happens when you die?

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, I’m a Christian, so I think you die and you either go up or down.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, but.

SHAWN RYAN: But I don’t know. I mean, when I did psychedelics, I mean, I was. I don’t know if I would say.

TIM FERRISS: Dude.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I wasn’t an atheist.

TIM FERRISS: I wasn’t an atheist.

SHAWN RYAN: I believed in something. I just wasn’t sure.

TIM FERRISS: I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t even know how to explain.

TIM FERRISS: I didn’t think about it. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, and I didn’t think about it until I did ibogaine and 5-DMT. I climbed the Mount Everest of psychedelics.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. And then go skiing. Okay, I’ll do without oxygen down Everest. Let’s go.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And then we did, you know, the 5-MeO after that, which is a death experience.

TIM FERRISS: And it did.

SHAWN RYAN: They made me realize, oh, there’s definitely something after all of this.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. And so.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s where I landed.

The Journey from Militant Atheism

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, it’s. So I would say I was, for a period of time, like a, for lack of a better descriptor, like a militant atheist. One of my friends, I was not raised religious. The school I went to, the private school, was Episcopal, so nominally Christian. Had chapel every morning outside of one or two days, but that was really for like roll call and announcements and you could go to religious service. And I would occasionally actually go to religious service.

But a friend of mine a few years out of college was getting divorced and he joined a church that was very, very, very extreme. And I would say a weaponized version of religion, very extreme. And I was incredibly worried for him, but he was very, very, very smart. And so he had done all this reading. He had kind of prepared himself for every possible counter argument.

And I was like, well, I got to stock up on some materials here. So I bought all these books and like Bertrand Russell and this, this and this. And we would have these long debates and I’m trying to kind of prevent him from being weaponized in this church because he was, like, the heir apparent. Like, he’s a really smart guy, very intense, super aggressive in everything he did.

And I was very concerned, but ultimately realized that at that point in time, he had no safety net. He was going through this horrible divorce, his life was falling apart, family was having all these problems, meaning his family of origin. And I was like, I think if this gets taken away, I’m not even convinced I can take it away. But if I were to be able to take it away, then what?

And I was like, I’m not willing to. I would rather him roll the dice with this particular church than have on my conscience that he killed himself or something horrible happened. But from that point forward, I had this really bad taste in my mouth.

And so I had really strong conviction around not necessarily atheism, but, like, hyper skepticism, which I think I still have, and it served me well. But after some of these psychedelic experiences and also just, frankly, after spending time with some of these indigenous groups, with the recognition that, like, some of these groups also use what we might consider, like, stage magic. Right?

Like, there are performances that a mentalist or someone could potentially try to replicate. Right. Just like someone can mimic remote viewing. Right? Like, there are people who have done this. There’s a great documentary called “Honest Liar” that people should watch.

But I’ve just seen too many things now and experienced too many things, not entirely on drugs, dead sober. A lot of them were like, there’s just more to the story, and we’ve never known the whole story. We are very, very, very early in neuroscience and psychiatry. It’s like surgery 500 years ago. Yeah. So.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, the reason I was, the reason I had asked you that is I was going to follow that up with, you know, what do you think? Are you solely into the science of psychedelics, or is there potentially some type of spiritual component?

The Spiritual Component of Psychedelics

TIM FERRISS: Oh, there’s a huge spiritual component. I just don’t usually talk about it because I’ve got so much I want to do on the scientific and policy side that if I sort of show my full hand, then people are going to be like, oh, that guy’s a wackadoodle. So I haven’t. I don’t usually talk about the stuff that I can’t really defend with, like, randomized control trials. I don’t talk too much about typically, but there’s a huge spiritual component.

I don’t love that word spiritual, but I don’t know a better replacement. I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know a better replacement. But I think that if what you’re looking for is relief from something like depression, OCD, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, I think the brain stimulation is incredibly compelling and that the effects with a successful treatment.

And there are some really, there are some new approaches to that which make it really interesting, like single day stimulations, a few minutes per hour for 10 hours straight. Pre-dosing with a drug called D-Cyclocerine. That’s it. That’s the treatment. One day and you might have durability for three to 12 months. Like anxiety from 10 to one. Wow. Wow.

They’re not. I can’t say that for. I can’t say that reliably for any psychedelic. So if you’re looking for relief from those symptoms functioning in this world, I think there are a lot of tools in the toolkit, which is good news. Metabolic psychiatry would be another example.

If you’re looking to tangibly touch something that feels timeless, whatever that is, even if it’s just a hallucination, but if you’re looking to touch something timeless and lose your fear of death, I think a lot of human suffering is wrapped around being, as far as we know, the only species that is aware of its own pending death. Right.

I don’t think you get there through brain stimulation. I do think you can get there through psychedelics. But we start getting into.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re saying, take away fear of death.

Fear of Death and Making the Most of Time

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. Do you fear death? No, I fear certain declines to death. But actual death? No, I do not. Do I fear something like neurodegenerative disease? Yes, I do. But death, like, nah.

I mean, I think that you can get more out of life if you assume that you are going to die around the age of your grandparents, great grandparents, great, great grandparents. And if I look back at my family, 85 for men, more or less, right. It’s like, okay, great, we have antibiotics, cool. Infant mortality, way down. Great.

But there’s not a whole lot we’ve found that really extends life a lot. We could talk about some things I find interesting, like. Sure. Rapamycin might be interesting for people who have metabolic dysfunction and don’t exercise much. Metformin may be interesting. Intermittent fasting and so on. Sure. Okay. I think there might be benefits, but they’re all question marks in humans.

And if you just assume you’re going to die at 85, I think you make more, potentially make better use of your time. Then if you’re pleasantly surprised, great scientists come up with some like injectable Clotho or gene therapy related to Clotho, which is a really interesting protein. Fantastic. All right, great. You can avail yourself of that when it comes out.

But until then, read “On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca and it’s like, make every minute count because I think you can do a lot to extend your health span, like how long you can function at a high level. And I think certainly you have a copy of “Outlive” by Peter Attia on your shelf. I would recommend people check that out.

I think Peter is, he is a credible former scientist and physician who really pays attention to the details, does not sell hype. If anything, he undersells certain things, which I appreciate. So I do think there are ways and Peter’s a better resource for that. But he’s also my doctor, so we have known him since 2008.

So, yeah, make the most of your time, but when your clock is up, your clock just might be up.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Tim, let’s take a quick break. When we come back, I’d like to dive into conception of time. Let’s do it.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

Perception of Time and Happiness

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Tim, we’re back from the break, getting ready to move into perception of time. We’re having a mini conversation about. I think I cut you off at breakfast because I was like, oh, we got to talk about this on the show. So, I mean, it is, it’s a fast. It’s a. I mean, I think about it all the time. A lot of the things that we’ve discussed already today, thinking about a lot, especially the slowing down thing. Or not the slowing down thing. The simplification.

Pretending that you’re in poverty and then realizing, oh, shit, this is nice.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s nice not having shit to do. It’s nice not having an agenda. It’s nice not being in the f*ing grind all the time. And, but it’s interesting, as nice as it is, we for some reason refused to pull ourselves out of it.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. I think that most of us, if we’re attempting to have healthy social fabric, live within the context of a society or a culture, and there are certain norms, there are certain expectations, there are certain rewards, and it’s very difficult and also probably undesirable to operate completely monastically outside of all of that. But what that means is at every turn, every moment, you will have temptation to do something that is probably not serving your long term interests.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I mean, you’re, you are 100% agree with that. You’re a well traveled guy. I’m a well traveled guy. I am very curious. Let’s say there’s a happiness scale.

TIM FERRISS: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Where does the US lie compared to a lot of the other places that you’ve been? And then I’ll share mine.

Global Perspectives on Happiness

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. So I would say in the last, I’ll back up and just say in the last 10 years in particular, I’ve been exploring a lot of the US. It is a huge country with so much diversity. And I don’t mean diversity in the DEI sense, I mean diversity in the cultural sense, where if we take culture to be a shared set of beliefs and behavior, it’s like going to Louisiana versus going to Upper Peninsula, Michigan versus going to Maine. They might as well be different countries. Sure we ostensibly have the same language, but they’re really, really different.

So I think the default baseline of happiness that I observe throughout the US varies quite a lot. But I would say if we’re looking at countries, I don’t know if I’m going to get myself into hot water with some folks, but this is just what I’ve observed. I would say that where you have rich social fabric and human interactions combined with some sense of safety, there are different types of safety you could have, that could be physical safety, that could be a social net of some type with health care, as would be the case say in a Denmark, for instance, those things combined which offer a certain level of predictability, not predictability across the board.

But I’m not sure how heavily to weight various polls and happiness reports. But you might have, say for instance a few years ago you had Singapore, which is fascinating little country, a little postage stamp, but like from swamp to what it’s become is fascinating. So Lee Kuan Yew and so on nonetheless, like highly structured, quite strict, predictable, but purportedly a high level of self reported happiness.

Okay, then you take that and you compare it to say Denmark and you could point out a lot of differences. But if you talk to Danes about why they might rank highly on these happiness report cards, you’ll get some serious responses mostly around like the social safety net, frankly, specifically as it relates to healthcare, I would say, and physical safety so they don’t have to worry about their kids running around outside, et cetera.

I did have one friend because you might guess from the size of my head, I’ve got some Scandinavian genes. So one of my Danish friends, he was like said why are you guys so happy on these reports? And he goes, “low expectations.” Now I think there’s actually some, something deeply profound about that in a way, expectations. Well, if happiness is, and I’m not the first person to come up with this, but reality minus expectations, it’s like, well, you can work on both of those, right? What do you expect? What do you feel entitled to versus your reality? And you can work on either side if that is in fact.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think entitlement is the same as high expectations?

TIM FERRISS: I mean they’re not the same. They’re not the same.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

TIM FERRISS: I would say that entitlement is a perverted type of high expectations in excess. So there’s, they’re kind of different windows through which you can look at high expectations. I have high expectations. Look if like someone’s working on my team, if I’m working with someone, if I’m in a relationship, like I have high expectations of myself and I have high expectations of pretty much everyone around me in terms of, let’s just call it in the professional context, like certain core tenets, commitment to excellence, shipping and meeting deadlines. Right. Certain things that are non negotiable.

When you feel like you should have A, B and C, I deserve D, E and F, I think that’s where you get into murkier waters. But then if you look at like a Costa Rica, right, which was also in the report that I looked at, top three, one of the, have very rich social environments. Right. Whether it’s extended family or walkable neighborhoods, et cetera, you can find a lot of these things in the US. Maybe minus the healthcare, but you can find a lot of those elements in the U.S.

So the way you might interact with people in say Indiana or Boulder is very different from how you’re going to interact with people on like the Upper East Side. I wouldn’t say the happiness seems very high on the Upper East Side. Would not say that. So what’s been your experience with happiness and traveling the world? Happiness in other places?

I mean, some of the happiest people I’ve ever met have been two come to mind. Ethiopians in the, in the Tigray area, which is like, I don’t think you can even travel there right now. Dirt poor in villages. And Shangan people in South Africa also. I mean, not quite as destitute, but very rough situation. Displaced people.

SHAWN RYAN: I would say, and this is just my perception, you know what I mean? So, minus the war torn countries that I’ve been to, I’ve been to a lot of third world, you know, countries in extreme poverty. And I really, I have to say that I, I think that the countries in poverty seem to be more happy.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Than we are here at the US who have literally every f*ing thing we can think of at our fingertips.

The Paradox of Abundance

TIM FERRISS: All right, so if I’m going to armchair quarterback this, which why not, since I’m sitting in an armchair, I would say, I think that having everything is part of the recipe for dissatisfaction. Right. You start fearing having those things taken away. I do think your level of entitlement goes up.

And there’s a great book by Sebastian Junger called “Tribe.” I really recommend everyone read this. Sebastian has been through some shit.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s about, that’s about, that’s about PTSD and he wrote a book on PTSD. I don’t know if it’s called “Tribe.” I know, I know who this is.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, “Tribe.” Sebastian Junger. It’s about veterans. I believe it includes a lot of discussion of veterans. “Tribe” really talks about social cohesion. But if you look at for instance, I think the example, there are a number of examples he gave, but looking at World War II bombing in the UK and how admittances to hospitals. Now there are a number of different ways you could explain this, but effectively the incidence of mental illness, suicide, et cetera, all seem to plummet while the city’s being bombed.

What’s going on there? And you see a similar pattern in other places? Well, I think that when you have seemingly everything, you by default almost necessarily can easily end up majoring in minor things. Right. Because you don’t have any major problem to deal with. But humans love having problems and solving problems. In order to solve problems, you have to have problems.

So I think humans are problem solving machines. But the dark side of that is you can become a problem seeking machine, problem creating machine. So these small things take on the proportion of something big. Right. It’s kind of like, I’m sure a lot of people had the experience where it’s just like there’s some old cat lady in the neighborhood who’s part of the HOA and man, is she just a pain in the balls. Like, she’s just like every, okay, so and so didn’t put out the recycling bin. So and so didn’t, whatever. It’s because she doesn’t have anything else to do that is bigger. Right. That is kind of forcing her hand.

So if you’re really way up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I think it’s easy to become more sensitive to slight turbulence in life, which is also part of the reason for practicing not just minimalism, not just necessarily poverty, but like subjecting yourself to shared privation. The things I do with friends are definitely type two fun. Maybe type three fun.

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

TIM FERRISS: Sure. Okay. We might do like a ski touring trip that’s mostly suffering. It’s like, yeah, you’re going to spend an hour and a half going up the hill for six turns down. Like if you just want to ski, that’s a terrible way to do it. But you get through that experience. You’re stuck in a snowstorm, it’s white out on the, not, by the way, suggesting that everyone do this. They’re scaled down versions of it.

SHAWN RYAN: It creates a bond.

TIM FERRISS: Creates a bond.

SHAWN RYAN: It creates a bond because you have overcome some type of adversity.

Engineering Stress and Building Resilience

TIM FERRISS: Exactly. So in a world or in an environment that doesn’t offer you those things. And by the way, there are lots of reasons why you would want a more comfortable experience, not saying, go move to Sierra Leone. Right? So I’m incredibly grateful for just the number of miracles effectively that ended up with me being born here, having opportunities, et cetera, hugely beyond grateful. I do not take it for granted.

And I do think that in the absence of real environmental stressors, we are built to overcome and adapt to stress. And there’s a book called “The Comfort Crisis,” I believe that really delves into this. But it’s like there is a great argument to be made for engineering certain stress into your life, including physical stress. And I think veterans are amazing at that.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, I’m amazing at that.

Engineering Adversity and Finding Peace

TIM FERRISS: So, yeah, I should say also, I mean, you know, obviously you know multitudes more veterans than I do, but a couple of my best friends are vets. And I think that if you don’t very explicitly consciously engineer suffering—sounds strange to put it that way, but it really is like adversity, suffering, stress—into your life, there is, I think, an inevitable innate push to manifest it subconsciously while it seeps through the edges.

And that might take the form of slow burn workaholism, right? It might take the form of certain types of self-sabotage. It might take the form of blow-ups and arguments with your wife. Might take the form of fill in the blank. And I have just found it so incredibly—and I’ve seen this too, in a lot of my listeners and readers over decades—it’s like when you engineer in periods of stress, some of those other things just resolve themselves in an unexpected way.

It’s not always the case. I mean, you still need to be able to talk to your wife, but it’s like if you’re a working dog, like, you need a job, right? Can’t be a border collie stuck behind a laptop all day. You’re going to go crazy, start chewing on the couch.

Are you happy? I feel like I am the happiest. We could definitely pull apart that term and what it means, but I would say I am the most at peace. That’s more my goal than happiness.

I would say you’re reluctant to say that you’re happy. Well, I feel like I’m reluctant to say happy because I’m such a stickler—this could be the OCD kicking in—but for terms, right? When people are like, “I just want to be successful,” I’m like, let’s talk about that very carefully, right? When people get into fights about God, I’m like, “Are you guys talking about the same thing?” Like, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

I am very happy right now. I have great relationships. I have, you know, taking care of people I care about, doing meaningful work. Very happy. But I think happiness comes and goes. So looking for a steady state of smiles I think is a fool’s errand because you are going to be disappointed.

And if we come back to the sort of, let’s say long-term durable happiness is reality minus expectations. If my expectation is I’m never going to have hard days, I’m never going to have moments of self-loathing, then in the long term, I think I’m handicapping my peace of mind. Does that make any sense, for instance?

The Reality of Progress and Setbacks

Right. I can give a lot of examples of this. If you’re trying to learn a language, which I think—I think people can become, let’s say native English speakers, conversationally fluent in a bunch of languages in like 8 to 12 weeks if they really dedicated themselves. No magic trick involved. Like there’s a very methodical way to do it. I mean, look at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey. Like the stuff they can do is incredible with language instruction. They’re very interested in bioelectric medicine too, by the way, potentially as an augment.

But if you’re going to learn a language, if you expect your progress to look like this, weight training, same thing doesn’t—skill acquisition, it’s going to be lumpy, right? You’re going to have predictable setbacks. It’s like, okay, you memorized 100 phrases. Fantastic or 100 words, man, you’re going to be making rocket-like progress.

But as soon as you start introducing a little more complicated grammar, which you need to do to make it for the long game, you’re going to feel like you’re getting worse. Your ability to juggle those balls is going to take time for adaptation and you’re going to get worse. Boom, boom, boom, and then up and then down and then maybe there’s more of a plateau.

And if you know these in advance, you can kind of plan for them, right? In the service of the long-term goal of being fluent in the language. But if you have a teacher who’s trying to do the right thing and they tell you everything’s going to be great, you know, just one step in front of the other, you know, slow and steady wins the race. And you expect it to be this linear progression. You’re going to get crushed as soon as you suffer a setback.

And I feel like psychologically this is where stoicism is such an incredible arrow in the quiver. It’s just expecting people to be like Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations,” effectively. When you go out, expect people to be insolent and rude. Expect people to disappoint you. Expect A, B and C. And there’s a thin line between that and just being pessimistic or nihilistic.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

TIM FERRISS: But I think you’re just talking about drive, personal drive.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s—yeah. I mean, if it was easy and the incline was like this—

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Said it a thousand times. Everybody would do it.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Then you hit a setback and 75% of the people quit.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: But the drive keeps the 25% going.

Rally Racing and Knowing the Course

TIM FERRISS: Totally. And I think that there’s—there’s just like baseline drive. It’s like, okay, what kind of engine do you have? And then there’s how do you drive the car? And it’s almost like rally racing. Like, I did a little bit of training in rally racing, which is incredibly dangerous, but also—

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: The whole team here is going to the—where’d you go to rally racing school?

TIM FERRISS: I went to New Hampshire, dude. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You went to O’Neill?

TIM FERRISS: I went to O’Neill.

SHAWN RYAN: F*ing awesome. I went to O’Neill.

TIM FERRISS: He’s great. Amazing. I love that school. Hilarious. So, yeah, so I went to O’Neill, as, you know, pretty risky endeavor. What do you do? Okay, what does that look like? Well, you have a navigator. In the case of your own life, like you are both the driver and the navigator.

And are you going to take a rally course, race at high speed without studying the course? F* no. You need to know if it’s like right three or right one, right? Or you’re going to hit a tree. Because you need to plan for all of these subtleties of the course in advance.

So all I’m saying is if you have this drive, which is like the base engine, right? Some people, I think, are just born with a huge engine. They’re born in a Ferrari. Other people might be born in like a Miata, but guess what? It’s like, I’ve seen pro drivers in a Miata smoke people in McLarens on a driving course. Why? They know the course. They’ve trained, they know fundamentals. Yeah.

And similarly, like, I don’t think, in some ways, I think I have certain advantages, but I do not have like a huge psychological buffer. Some people have incredible inbuilt—I really think psychological resilience. Like they have a lot of margin of safety. I don’t have that.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

TIM FERRISS: I do not have the batteries and infinite endurance of some serial entrepreneurs I’ve seen or professional athletes, right? It’s just like they have different, like Kobe Bryant or I mean, you could look Travis Kalanick of Uber or whatever, like just like different batteries. These guys are coming to the table with a different engine.

But you can give yourself a competitive advantage if you know the track. So for me, with anything, it’s like, know the track. What does that look like? What does that mean? Well, kind of apply. It knows like it’s identifying in advance. If you’re learning anything, doing anything, like, where am I going to be most likely to quit? What are the failure points? Why do other people quit? When do they quit?

And then if you know in advance, like, okay, it’s very likely three months into this that I’m going to hit like a crisis of meaning and I’m going to plateau and I’m going to be tempted to quit. If you know that in advance when you hit it, your little engine is enough to get you past that plateau.

So I just, I think about that a lot, right? It’s like, if people aren’t following, why do some people quit diets? Why did so many people make New Year’s resolutions and then by February 1st they’re long gone? Smoke, exhaust in the rearview mirror.

Like part of it is they have these very optimistic, well-intentioned visions of what they’re going to do. Where they go to the gym three times a week, it never gets interrupted. They don’t reverse engineer it, they never need to make a phone call, they never get into an argument about who’s going to watch the kids. And as a result they don’t have any type of safety net on that plan.

So I would say, you know, these are some of the ways that I think about it. I know there’s a lot there, but—

High Expectations and Happiness

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, one thing you said about happiness is, I think you said this, I know this. High expectations can be a roadblock.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, it’s a double—

SHAWN RYAN: You said you have exceedingly high expectations. So I’m curious.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you overcome those high expectations to find happiness? I struggle with this.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. I mean I struggle with—

SHAWN RYAN: I have extremely high expectations. Yeah.

TIM FERRISS: I’ve struggled with my whole life. I think I have found certain approaches and tools that have helped me to use the double-edged sword without holding the blade as a handle, right? And I expect, here’s the other thing. I expect this will always be a challenge.

So I’m not going to beat the shit out of myself if I don’t eradicate it like polio once and forever, right? It’s like—right. It’s like this is—this is part, I think, of my hardwiring. I really do. It’s not to belabor the dog—

SHAWN RYAN: You wouldn’t be where you are without high expectations though, either.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, right. And you know, I think that I’m at a point also where it’s like the incremental dollar or whatever the incremental media mention is not worth as much as the incremental hour or even 15 minutes with someone I deeply care about. And those are very—mastering, sounds strange to say this, but becoming good at those two sides of the track are very different things. They require different skill sets.

So for me, I would say, first of all, I think high expectations can be great. I think it can be amazing. And you know, while I guess Archilochus way back in the day, right. “We do not rise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training.” Like I think that’s a real thing. So hope alone is not enough. Expectations alone is not enough.

But I would say that for me, realizing that what you do matters a lot more than how you do any one thing is critical. What do I mean by that? So what you do versus how you do seems kind of strange. In other words, you can get really, really good at having high expectations for things that don’t matter very much and being perfectionist about little things. But that doesn’t really move the needle for you or other people.

You can spend your whole life focusing on little things. I think that’s going to become the default for most of humankind in the next few years with AI. Like the idea that we’re all going to have this incredible leisure class with tons of free time. Complete nonsense. It never happens with any technology.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s going to get worse. The Karens are coming out.

The 80/20 Principle and Letting Go of Over-Optimization

TIM FERRISS: So I would say that there’s a book called the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, K-O-C-H. Read that. And this comes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is you really don’t have to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life.

So I used to over-optimize. I would attempt to optimize almost everything because I felt like I had the bandwidth to do it. Maybe I did. But that can make you an insufferable son of a b not just to other people, but to yourself. Right? Because if you have unreasonable, unhelpful expectations in environments that you cannot control—interpersonal relationships, your girlfriend or wife or husband or whatever, your kids—you’re going to drive not only yourself but the people around you completely insane.

So when I sat down here, you might remember this, there was a little piece of paper stuck in here from a prior guest, Serenity Prayer. And I folded it up and I was like, oh, I like the Serenity Prayer. And I put it in my pocket. Serenity Prayer is stoicism, right? Being able to separate things you can control versus things you can’t control. And then the wisdom, hopefully and experience to be able to tell the difference.

And I’ve realized that being incredibly forgiving while knowing your non-negotiables up front with interpersonal relationships is for me at least so far, like the path to intimacy and longevity and happiness, peace. And then with other types of compartmental—I shouldn’t say compartmentalized—silos in my life, let’s just say maybe it’s writing a book, having like unforgivably high standards, but with a deadline so that I’m not allowed to procrastinate forever. Because if I don’t have a boss, and I don’t, that perfectionism can turn into permanent, meaning you’re not shipping anything.

So I still apply super high standards for myself with certain non-negotiables related to physical training or to building, cultivating and developing, conditioning a mental reserve, right? To hopefully stave off things like neurodegenerative disease. Those are all non-negotiable.

Learning to Navigate Intimate Relationships

But with human interactions, I think I have really learned through fing it up over and over and over again. I mean, really just like, God, I look back at some of my past girlfriends, I’m like, God bless you, you saints. Like God, I was such a pain in the a. And I was so convinced I was right. So convinced I was right about so much. And guess what? It doesn’t matter. Maybe I was right.

But I really encourage people to check out—there’s an amazing therapist who is brutal but decades of experience and I don’t agree with him on everything—but Terry Real is his name. He’s got to be one of the highest paid couples therapist in the world. He has to be. But he has a number of books. There’s an audiobook, doesn’t even have a print version called “Fierce Intimacy” that I really recommend people listen to so they have a toolkit for communicating in intimate relationships.

Because I don’t think men and women were ever meant to spend as much time together as they do now. That’s a very unnatural situation, I think. And as a result, we need tools that we did not historically. And I think Terry is very good at providing a toolkit for modern relationships.

But one of his tenets is like, there’s no place for objective reality in most relationship disputes. And he gives this example of like, husband and wife go out to dinner, waiter comes over to take the order, waiter leaves, and the husband’s like, “Honey, you don’t have to yell.” And she’s like, “What? I wasn’t yelling.” And he’s like, “No, you were yelling.” And so it turns into one of these things, right? Starts to spiral out. And now their date has turned into a heated debate where people are getting ramped up.

And the point Terry makes, he’s like, the husband could say, like, “Honey, I knew you were going to say that. So actually I hired a team of professional audiologists and recording artists. They have mic’d our table and everything around us. And based on this decibel level, you were in fact yelling.” You think that’s going to help things? Probably not. I don’t think so.

Understanding Over Being Right

So once you, I think even as a test, an experiment, ask yourself, all right, well, if objective reality doesn’t exist in most conflicts and your only job, especially as a male, is to try to understand your partner’s position—I think men are particularly pigheaded about this. Women can be pretty bad too, but I think men are much worse—and to really understand why they feel the way they do, what, if done differently, would have changed anything, it’s like, man, so many of the problems just go away.

It’s kind of like meditating where it’s like, don’t fix anything. Just like, actually don’t try to fix anything. Just sit there and develop more awareness. And they’re like, oh, all these problems go away. Oh, my friend’s chronic pain went away. What’s going on? Who cares about the mechanism?

It’s like going from problem solving, right? Which is closely related to problem seeking, to understanding someone’s inner experience as opposed to trying to validate your objective reality. May sound a little squishy, but like, listen to Terry Real. He gives you a lot of practical tools and language you can use.

That is a huge, huge part of life. As I’ve already talked about, I’ve revamped my entire way I think about my calendar, the entire way I commit time, defend time, say no to things around these most important life-giving, energy-giving relationships. And that means how you navigate those, how you interact with people, how you cultivate your EQ, how you feel what someone is saying, not just listen to what they’re saying.

Preparing to offer them some words of condolence—maybe that’s not what they need. Like bearing witness to that person in a true felt sense is like, if my 20-year-old self could hear me saying this, would have vomited in his mouth. But it’s like at that time I was a bull in a china shop. I was leaving just a wake of collateral damage in my relationships. Not because I was abusive—I saw enough of that, didn’t want to, no thanks—but I wasn’t available. I was very, very concerned with being right.

And I think if you’re instead, even in the case of work, dedicated to what you put out in the world but someone else’s idea, or if you just want—if they need to believe it’s their idea, fine, sure, why not? Could just be getting older and softening around the edges. I don’t know. Not as much piss and vinegar.

SHAWN RYAN: Talk about saying no to certain things. But I want to go there too. But first, about 45 minutes ago we were going to talk about the perception of time and how fast it goes.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, these are all tied together also.

SHAWN RYAN: Sounds like you’ve done a lot of thinking about that.

The Nature of Time and Quantum Physics

TIM FERRISS: Done a lot of thinking. Did a lot of what I call flight time in different states too, which can stress test a lot of the subjective experiences we have around time. I would encourage—it can be hard—you can watch his YouTube videos and so on before digesting. But Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. I believe he’s most focused on quantum gravity. And he has some really thought-provoking writing on time. I think one of his books is called The Order of Things.

But you realize pretty quickly that even within the halls of quantum physics and mathematics, time is not this straightforward thing. A clock at your head runs at a different speed than a clock at your foot. And when you start to look at these fundamental equations, especially quantum gravity, time becomes this very slippery thing.

It’s kind of like money. Money is real in practice, but it’s actually an abstraction. You can use it, but it’s really an abstraction. There’s a book called The Biography of a Dollar about the history of money, which is worth reading. It’s a very useful abstraction, but it’s an abstraction.

And so you can certainly, just from a secular scientific perspective, from credible sources like Carlo, read enough where you start to scratch your head and you’re like, “Okay, wait a second. Does that mean that in certain experiments, A comes before B, but B also comes before A until they’re observed?” That’s strange. And is it possible that time is actually more like a book? And sure, we’re on page 237, but all the pages are already there. We just happen to be in the middle. Is that actually something that could be defensible?

In which case, let’s just say—and again, I’m very careful with this stuff—but if that were the case, then is something like precognition that crazy? I don’t know. Is it even precognition, or is it just cognition?

And look, I’ve spent a lot of time around magicians and illusionists and people who are incredible at mentalism, because I don’t want to fool myself. I want to know, if you wanted to fake this, how would you do it? If you wanted to try to replicate these phenomena and fool an audience, how would you do it? But there’s still a flickering of a sliver of some examples that are pretty interesting that raise more questions than they answer. Same with UAPs and stuff, right?

Experiential Lifespan vs. Biological Lifespan

So you can really bring this down to Earth, though. It’s like, all right, sure, I could read about quantum gravity, but what does that mean for me? Well, we’ve all had the experience of a day that seems to last forever. Or you go on a trip and you’re like, “Wow, did we really only get here two or three days ago? Man, it feels like it’s been two weeks.”

We’ve also had the experience of saying, “Holy s*, where did 2025 go? My God, did the frame rate change? What happened? It seems like that was just a commercial break. It was 2024. There was a commercial break, and now it’s 2026. What happened?”

And I was just in Silicon Valley for a few weeks, hadn’t been back in eight years, and just wanted to kick around, check it out. It’s having a real renaissance at the moment because of AI. Very exciting. And have a lot of old friends there and folks surprised seeing this in the news. But a lot of billionaires are preoccupied with living forever.

Now, rich people have always been obsessed with living forever, and some of them are funding very interesting research, but the goal is extending biological lifespan so far. And I think there are some things that are interesting but certainly not definitive. Nothing is conclusive yet in humans. People have been trying to find the fountain of youth for a long time. And every generation, somebody seems to have the answer. And so far, they’ve all been wrong.

But what if that example that I mentioned where you experience two or three days and it feels like two or three weeks, what if you could increase the number of experiences like that? So the way I’ve been thinking about it is you have biological lifespan. I’m very skeptical that we’re going to be able to extend that meaningfully, at least before you and I kick the bucket. Very, very skeptical.

So, all right, well, if I make it to 85, sure, there’s certain things I can do. I’m not going to eat Ho Hos all day. Fine. But could I increase instead of my biological age, what about increasing my experiential age?

So if someone’s preoccupied, they’re anxious, they’re depressed—when they’re having dinner, they’re thinking about what they’re doing after dinner. After dinner, they’re thinking about the work they’re doing the next morning. That’s how your weeks feel like days. But what if you can make your days feel more like weeks?

Factors That Expand Time Perception

All right, well, let’s look at some of those experiences. Whether it’s a trip where things have a lot of novelty. Okay, novelty, maybe. Interesting. What else could be duress, stress. If I put somebody on a stationary bike and I’m like, “All right, you’re going to do a Norwegian 4×4.” What does that mean? It’s four minutes of sprinting. Minute one, hard. Minute two, “Oh, wow, this sucks.” Minute three, “I don’t think I can make it.” Minute four, “I’m being chased by wolves and I’m going to die.” And you’re going to do four rounds of that. Those four sets of four-minute sprints, effectively, are going to feel a lot longer. Okay, so I do think there’s a certain element of stressor.

Okay, what else? Well, it’s like I don’t hunt often, but I hunt maybe once or twice a year. Okay, what’s happening? You’re waking up in the dark, right? Probably depending on what you’re doing if you’re at high altitude. I mean, for me, high altitude, if you’re whatever, 11,000 feet and it’s the middle of the day, haven’t had any luck. What are you going to do? You’re probably going to eat some junk food, which is—hunting is largely an excuse just to eat a bunch of energy gels and garbage that you have. Okay, sure. So you eat your granola bars that you shouldn’t have. That’s fine. And then you’re going to take a nap. All right. And then you wake up.

So these breaks that are basically separate chapters of daylight, I think, also make a big difference. And if you’re going to Italy for a few days, what are you doing? You’re generally going to be making the most of that day, and you’re going to have these kind of breaks, but you’re also on vacation, might take a nap. What else is happening? Lots of location switching. Also true in something like hunting or hiking or ski touring.

There seems to be something related to context switching that increases the frame rate so that your experience is more—it’s closer to slow motion than the reverse, like fast forward. So I do think there are ways that you can begin to do your past year review, look at experiences that felt like a lot more than they were.

A Japanese Experience in Time Dilation

I had an experience like this in Japan recently. So a number of my friends—it’s been a dream of theirs since I was 15. I went there as an exchange student. They’ve always wanted to go to Japan with me, but some of them have tighter financial situations than others. All right, so how do I spend money? It’s like, I’m going to take those guys to Japan, cover everything. They have to have a little skin in the game. So it’s like, all right, we’re all going to get there. You have to get there. But then once we get there, I’m going to pay for everything.

And there was one day on that trip where all of us were like, “Today felt like seven days,” and our minds were blown. The amount of time dilation versus time constriction—time dilation was so extreme. It was like we sat at dinner, had a couple beers. We were just like, “What just happened?”

So do a little dissection of those experiences. And I really feel like if you’re able to turn days into the feeling of weeks enough in a given year, it’s like your experiential lifespan could go from—if you’re a preoccupied person who dies at 85, maybe you live 40, 50 of those years. Maybe you get to 120 experientially.

And I challenge anyone. It’s like, if I put an eye shade on you and give you some psychedelics, tell me that feels the same as the four to six hours you spent the day before. It’s not. Never does. It’s going to feel like a lifetime. Okay, but I certainly don’t want to do psychedelics every day.

SHAWN RYAN: And then you don’t want it—

TIM FERRISS: Well, I don’t—

SHAWN RYAN: I never want it to end.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, well, this is—

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

Psychedelic Experiences and the Nature of Death

TIM FERRISS: I mean, that’s a whole separate conversation, right? When navigating or putting yourself into these spaces, what safeguards and intentions do you have around it? Because there are times when it’s like, “Wow.” I think for me at least that feeling—and this might sound strange, but I’m just like, “Oh, yeah. This is probably what it feels like to be dead on some level,” when there’s no—there is an observer, there is an experiencer, but there’s no space, there’s no time, there’s no Tim.

I’m like, “Yeah, it wouldn’t totally shock me if it’s something like this.” And in some of those experiences, you experienced 5-MeO-DMT depending on the experience. But it’s like if you think back, could you recall, play by play, what happened? No. No way. Okay. Can you recall what happened a month before you were born? Nope. Maybe something like that. Who knows?

And then there are lots of—I would say, I mean, have you heard about—

SHAWN RYAN: We just talked about this with—

TIM FERRISS: This, with Chase Hughes.

SHAWN RYAN: I think I was talking about this.

TIM FERRISS: Have you heard about this guy?

SHAWN RYAN: It wasn’t 5-MeO.

TIM FERRISS: What’s another—what’s in that? What’s another site?

SHAWN RYAN: Psychedelic.

TIM FERRISS: Oh, there are lots. DMT. And it’s—I can’t remember the name of it. TCB? LSD?

SHAWN RYAN: No, it’s—

TIM FERRISS: It’s—

SHAWN RYAN: It’s something like the 5-MeO experience. I can’t remember the name of it, but it may have been five.

TIM FERRISS: But this, but he did it.

SHAWN RYAN: And he had experienced an entire life. Wife, kids, child, all of it.

TIM FERRISS: Like 70 years maybe. I don’t—

SHAWN RYAN: You know, had to hit a 70-year experience. From child to getting married, having kids, probably—

TIM FERRISS: I don’t—

SHAWN RYAN: You know what I mean?

TIM FERRISS: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: An entire lifespan and then comes out of it and misses—

TIM FERRISS: It was like 15 minutes and then misses where he just came from. He thinks he experienced 70 years. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been talking about lucid dreaming and time dilation and all this. It’s part of the reason why, Inception—love that movie, by the way. Christopher Nolan, when he was a student, way back in the day—take a quick sidebar here—would wake up early in the morning, he’d work all through the night. He’d wake up early in the morning to get free food. There was a free breakfast at school or whatever. So he would work all night, wake up, have breakfast and then go back to—

SHAWN RYAN: To sleep.

The Mechanics of Lucid Dreaming and Psychedelic Experiences

TIM FERRISS: And what did he start getting good at? Lucid dreaming. Because that is, unbeknownst to him, it’s one of the techniques where you basically take a break at like four and a half hours of sleep, stay up for like 20 minutes, go back to bed. And that’s what he was doing accidentally. So, yeah, Christopher Nolan, if you’re listening, I want to talk to you about a lot of things.

There are some very, very, very, very strange reports of things on psychedelics. There are also some very strange reports. If you want to look at what has been done at UVA, Professor, I think his last name is Grayson, has one of the best databases in terms of documented near-death experiences. And he’s very clinical.

If you look at that, and also at UVA they’ve looked at—and I recognize how easy it is to poke holes in things—but there are again, out of maybe a hundred quote-unquote documented examples there, there might be like one or two where you’re like, “That is incredibly hard to explain.” Some of the others you’re like, “Okay, sure, if you had a team of David Blaine’s.” David Blaine has an illusionist team. Like they could, yeah, okay, cool, they could maybe come up with 99 of these. Okay, sure. But that one I’m not so sure.

And you have stories of reincarnation that are specific to children in India and other places where they’ll like recount this whole life. This is like a little kid. And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s such and such village. And I was this old and my wife is this name and this and this.” And then they go over and like, lo and behold, like, this is not actually infrequent. Okay?

Now people could also be making this sh up, right? I recognize this. A lot of people send me the telepathy tapes and all this stuff and I’m like, people also want to believe there’s more than this because guess what? The real world is a suffer factory. And it’s very comforting to believe that there’s wonder and awe and some type of salve for that that’s just beyond our reach, even though we can feel it’s there. I recognize that parents might lie, they might train their kid to lie, blah, blah, blah. Okay?

The Importance of Experience with Psychedelics

But on psychedelics, man, you see some—if you get enough reps, right? And I say enough reps because I really like, not to get on like a high horse, but it’s like when people do psychedelics once or twice and then they become proselytizers. I’m like stop. You have gone skiing twice, you didn’t have a catastrophic accident and now you’re teaching the world how to ski. I was like, don’t do that.

And it’s like skiing on ice in New England is different from skiing in forgiving champagne powder in Utah, by the way. It’s like if you’re on a groomer that’s different from the moguls, if you’re backcountry with avalanche risk, that’s a different thing. And it’s like if you start to get more reps, you’re going to have accidents, then you’re going to realize the different species of accidents and so on and so on and so on, right?

So when you have enough repetition, when you have enough flight time, to put it another way, in enough environments, you just start to see really, really strange things. I mean, I don’t want to dox him but like this is a friend of a friend. Like this is not a game of telephone. This is a direct friend of one of my best friends.

Had an experience with NN DMT. So if it lasted 15 minutes, chances are it was 5-MeO-DMT or DMT. It’s a bit confusing because the phenomenological experiences, the subjective experiences are very different with NN DMT which is also what people experience through ayahuasca or 5-MeO-DMT. They’re very different in terms of their effects. But if it’s 15 minutes, probably one of the two.

But this particular guy had this experience with NN DMT. Feels like he gets this huge download related to physics and production of—I’m trying to protect this guy—something related to physics at like the very outer bounds of physics. This guy has no, no history in physics whatsoever. Seems really destabilized after the event, disappears, won’t talk to his friends. It’s just like online trying to watch YouTube videos about physics, write down what he supposedly downloaded, blah blah, blah blah.

Fast forward like two or three years. The guy’s co-author on a peer-reviewed public paper at like the cutting edge of physics, all based on what he saw. How wild is that on an experience? And what do you chalk that up as? I have no idea, I have no idea.

But when you see that or you see someone spontaneously singing in a language they don’t speak, you know like okay. And there are also non-drug related examples of like, I think it’s called something like immediate savant syndrome. Like someone jumps into a pool, hits their head, they wake up and they can play the piano. Like, what is going on here? That is not out on the fringe conspiracy theory. There are multiple documented cases of this. What is going on? I don’t know.

The Brain as Receiver Theory

I mean, it would certainly seem to imply that not all of our perception, access or experience to reality is mediated by something local. I mean, maybe it is, although maybe it is. I mean there are people within the exploration of psychedelics who think of the mind more like a receiver, right?

So it’s like, yeah, you can damage the brain and cause tremendous dysfunction. You can do that for sure. But maybe that’s not because the brain itself is generating something much like a television screen. Like the television screen isn’t generating the images you’re watching. It’s a receiver of some type, at least back in the day for those people who are old enough.

And at the same time, you have documented cases of people with minimal brain volume, right? Like their brains should not function and yet they have average IQ and we don’t really have, as far as I know, a good explanatory framework for allowing that to be possible.

So I don’t know. I mean, this is part of the reason why my position is always kind of impossible until proven otherwise. But I’m open-minded about it and that’s why I’ve poured so, I mean, millions of dollars into science, right? Because I’m like, I want to better understand this.

I recognize, as Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist said, like, it is important not to fool yourself and you are the most, you’re the easiest person to fool, right? Like when you want something to be true, even if it’s 1% experimenter bias and everything, it’s a real—

SHAWN RYAN: Convince yourself that it’s—

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, yeah, you can just, or just look for evidence that something is real. Which is why I do value the scientific method. And have you seen Karl Popper and all falsification? All that stuff is so, so critical for us to have arrived where we are, right?

Like Western medicine is the greatest healing system that has ever been devised, period. Full stop. But is it the full picture? No. Like 50%. You know any MD? I think this is an ongoing joke, but it’s kind of like 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don’t know which 50%. Like that’s like an accepted sort of joke within medicine and science. Yeah, that’s always been true.

So as much research as you’ve done into psychedelics—

SHAWN RYAN: You’re talking about downloading machine code.

TIM FERRISS: Have you—

SHAWN RYAN: If you read about the laser, the ones and zeros inside the laser.

The Laser Code Phenomenon

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I did. I looked at that. So I haven’t experienced it, but there was a—I want to say he was like a laser crystallography expert or someone who explained it just purely through optics and, like, how that could be the case even if you’re not on drugs. So I think there might be a purely mechanical explanation for this for people who don’t know.

I did watch this because it got sent to me. You would imagine, right? You can imagine. All my friends were like, “Bro,” same here. And so I got this video.

SHAWN RYAN: I was one of those guys.

TIM FERRISS: And so there’s this guy who looks shockingly similar to Lionel Messi. I don’t know if I’m the only person. I was just like, “What? It’s Lionel Messi in the psychedelic game now,” anyway.

And he would use DMT, probably still, and then direct this laser on a wall and get in a certain position and basically had this—and he had people who could replicate this, right? They would see the same thing or claim to see the same thing, which looked like some type of matrix-like code. And he had drawn them out and everything.

There was—I went down the rabbit hole on this because I was getting asked about it so much, and I found a very long, what appeared to be defensible engineering explanation for how that’s how, that’s how that is an explainable phenomenon without needing access to matrix code. So who knows? Maybe.

But I would say even without that, it’s just stuff is weird. Stuff is really weird. And I mean, you don’t have to go very far trying to remember his name. Fabrizio Benedetti, maybe. I think that Ashley—no, it’s not Ashley Vance. There’s another author. But read any book written by a credible scientist or science journalist about the placebo effect.

SHAWN RYAN: All right?

The Mystery of the Placebo Effect

TIM FERRISS: And if that is not one of the weirdest collections of verifiable data you’ve ever seen, I mean, you look at any given study with an intervention, like a drug or whatever, you look at the supplemental materials like there’s almost always going to be someone in the control arm of the placebo who showed just as much effect with nothing. With nothing. Whether it’s a surgery, whether it’s a powerful drug, psychedelic even.

And so there are a few questions that come to mind. Right? Well, these are just normal people. They’re not biochemists. They couldn’t tell you how psychedelics act on the brain. So it’s not like they’re rolling their eyes back and going in and trying to affect certain enzymes or whatever. They have no idea. And yet they are reporting the same not just effect, but magnitude of effect as matches the other people. What the hell’s going on? I don’t know. I have no idea.

But like, that you don’t have to go very far to get into really terra incognita, like unknown, there be dragons on water. So it’s actually very easy. You don’t have to get out into remote viewing or whatever, even though, again, I’m very interested in that stuff. But it’s like just look at the placebo effect, which gets understandably right because people are trying to assess something and that is the intervention in some of the RCTs that I fund, let’s just say.

But the fact that there are commonly people who produce the same effect, same magnitude of effect with a sugar pill or placebo or a sham surgery is incredibly strange. It is super, super strange.

So I will say not to be the broken record citing Richard Feynman and the it’s easy to fool yourself, but it is easy to fool yourself. So it is a challenge to be, to attempt to be radically open-minded while also being suitably skeptical. Right. Because there are a lot of con artists out there. There are a lot of delusional people out there. There’s a lot of bad science out there. There’s a lot of pseudoscience. God save you if you’re getting all your health advice from Instagram.

Developing Scientific Literacy

And so it’s a challenge to navigate. There’s something for Peter T. Actually, he did a series of blog posts called “Studying the Studies.” And I also put out a blog post related to Peter about scientific literacy. And I would say one of the best investments you can make for your life and for the people you love or care about is to just invest like a week. And now you can use AI to make it easy.

There’s a company I actually invested in called Oboe, O-B-O-E dot com. They’ll create a course for you and it’s just like, “Teach me how to read science.” Boom. And like spend a week, hour to a night doing that. And that will pay dividends for decades. It will help you sift the signal from the noise. Anyway.

But yeah, the weird stuff is interesting. Probably the understatement of the year.

SHAWN RYAN: You had brought up, you were going with the power of no.

The Art of Saying No

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like, so I started at the behest of my friends and some of my audience, started working on a book about saying no. That’s it, like six years ago. And I started doing that because people just kept asking me for help. A lot of my friends, even very successful ones, and over, I’d say probably a decade, I was using Evernote, which I was the first advisor for. Didn’t quite pan out as I had hoped, but still pretty interesting tool anyway.

Every time I got a rejection from somebody that I thought was really artful that left me feeling neutral or better about the person than worse, I’d be like, “Ooh, that’s good, I’m going to steal that.” So I’d copy and paste it. So I had this swipe file, which is just a term that some people use. I used to do it for advertising. Whenever I bought something, I would save the advertisement, put it into a three ring binder so that I would think about how this convinced me to buy something, and then I’d use that for designing my own ads.

So similar, I had a swipe file. I had hundreds of these examples of polite declines, I called them. And they’re really useful, really incredibly useful. Copy and paste to make your own. So I was printing out this book and then it just became too hard because I thought a lot of my friends were going to help and they were like, “Me? I’m terrible at this. You need to write the whole book yourself.” And I was like, “Oh.”

SHAWN RYAN: So I stopped.

TIM FERRISS: I shelved it. I gave up, returned the advance. The biggest advance I ever got in my life, returned it. It’s like real money, returned it. I was like, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it,” and shelved it.

And then over the last handful of years, as I’ve watched people start to fray at the edges. Because back in the day, it was one inbox, then it was two or three inboxes, then it was like, “Oh, man, all right, well, I’m just going to tell the people I really care about to text me.” Uh oh. All right. So then it’s text and then it’s text plus Google voice. And then it’s text plus Google voice plus Signal plus Telegram. And you see where this is going, right?

And then it’s social media DMs, and all of a sudden you’re f*ed. And it’s not just the interruption or the burden of those messages, it’s the temptation to triage, right? It’s like you’re spending all your time triaging injuries as opposed to actually getting up and marching where you’re supposed to march.

So I want to write a book about how to say no, because there are tons of books on how to say yes, and I just don’t feel like writing another book about how to say yes is very helpful. Although when you start to look at how to say no, it very quickly becomes an exploration of how to say yes to a few things and how to say no to everything else.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

TIM FERRISS: Still working on the book. It’s long AF. It’s like 750 to 800 pages now, but if people might want to check it out, I mean, they can get a bunch of free chapters. I don’t know when the full thing’s going to be published, but if they go to Tim.blog/nobook, N-O-B-O-O-K. Okay. Tim.blog, it’s not a typo, nobook. Bunch of free chapters people can get, which will help them, because I’ve had proofreaders read this thing, and I kind of put it on a shelf.

SHAWN RYAN: So it’s done.

TIM FERRISS: It’s close to done. But here’s the thing. A book is like a marathon where it’s like, you get to mile 20, you’re like, “Congratulations.” Or 20 mile, you know, 22. And you’re like, “Wow, you’re almost done. Congratulations. You only have 50% left.” That last, getting back to the high expectations. Oh, okay. Right. That last polish. It’s like, yeah. To make the sculpture out of clay as a rough model. Yeah, sure. I’ll do that in the afternoon. Create the finished piece in full scale to put in a museum. Yeah, okay, gotcha.

So it’s going to last. To polish the book is going to take at least two or three. So what’s going to be in it other…

SHAWN RYAN: Than nice ways to tell people to…

Beyond Templates: Changing Beliefs and Behavior

TIM FERRISS: Oh, there’s a lot more to it. Because that doesn’t do the job. That doesn’t do the job. Right. Because I could tell you, okay, and Martha Beck, who’s one of the amazing women, was Oprah’s life coach and all this stuff. Incredible lady in her own right for a lot of different reasons. And, you know, she turned me down for something, and she was like, “Sorry, can’t make it due to life Tetris.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s very short. You don’t, you’re not giving them something that they can negotiate against.” I’m like, “Great. Life Tetris. I’m definitely going to use that.” Simple, to the point.

But when you give people templates and I realized this with The Four Hour Body, because I was writing The Four Hour Body. Everything in there works. It’s been tested with hundreds of people now. Thousands, tens of thousands of people. And I had very busy CEOs of companies I was working with who’d be like, “Hey, I don’t have time to read a long book. Give me the index card, tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” And I did. Success rate: 0%.

Why? Because if you give people the prescription, but you don’t help them change their behavior, which also goes down to changing their beliefs, it’s just not going to stick. It won’t be durable.

So, for instance, if you don’t say no because the story is, “I’m too nice for that. I’m a kind person, I’m generous, I like helping people,” okay, that can be true. But that can also be a justification for saying yes to way too many things and being a martyr. If your answer is, “Well, must be nice for you. I’m not successful enough yet.” Okay, we can start to tease that apart. But I know people who have hundreds of millions of dollars who still say that.

So part of the reason this book has taken so long, and it comes down to when we were talking about the drive and predicting the bumps in the road and using the engine to vet your capacity, just having an index card, which is kind of what the Internet largely does. Not everyone, but they’re like, “Here are the three tricks to mastering crypto tomorrow before the crash,” you know, whatever. And I mean, look, I’m interested in a lot of things, not to malign crypto. I’ve been interested in it a long time.

But the point is, if your goal is durable behavioral change, which also comes back to the psychedelics, right? You need frameworks and you need to be able to put your beliefs, which are your underpinning philosophical guide rails, under some degree of scrutiny. And if you don’t update those, right?

Like if your story, for instance, in the realm of physical fitness is, “Well, I’m good at my job, I’m a good father, but, you know, my whole family has big bones and I’m just, it’s just the way it is,” right? You accept that partial completeness, right? And you’re really Type A and problem fixing oriented in a positive way in other areas of your life. But there’s this one that you don’t touch because that’s just the way things are. If you don’t fix that, no number of books on strength training, no number of gym memberships is going to fix it.

So a lot of it is unpacking. And this also, everything kind of ties together, the fear setting. It’s like, okay, you don’t want to say no. Why? Okay, you’re worried that person’s going to shit talk you to somebody you care about. Okay, you’re worried they won’t send you opportunities anymore, right? They sent you one, but it’s really a bad fit. Doesn’t align with your priorities. You’re worried they’re not going to send you an opportunity in the future. Okay, you’re worried that you will become irrelevant. That’s another dangerous catchphrase, “staying relevant.” That’s a very pitfall laden path.

Okay, so then it’s like, so what? And then what? And what’s the worst thing that happens? Right? So it’s kind of an unstructured approach to fear setting. But when you start to really unpack it and instead of saying, “All right, you’re going to go to the gym five days a week for the rest of your life,” it’s like, “Okay, you’re going to go twice a week, you’re going to do less than you think you can do, but for two weeks you’re going to go on a no diet and you’re just going to copy paste one of these three templates and you have an assignment which is you’re going to do it three times in the next week or your buddy gives $100 to your most hated politician.” And you’re in it. Okay, now we have structure, right? Now we have structure.

And I ended up in the last, I guess, year or so, collaborating with a friend of mine, Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, Emergency, written like 10 New York Times bestsellers. Terrible at saying no. He was pressuring me to write this book and I was like, we were both kind of drunk at the time. And I was like, “Neil,” he was busting my balls at a table. I was single at the time and he’s kind of embarrassing me in front of these women. And I’m just like, “Neil, if you’re such a hotshot, I see what you’re doing. You’re doing this lame power play in front of these girls, trying to impress them.” I was like, which is not totally true, but I was just like, “All right, you want to spar, let’s go.”

And I was like, “If you want to write this book, if you want to read this book so badly, why don’t you help me finish it? Get off the bench.” And he was like… And then the next day when we both sobered up, he was like, “Hey, if you’re serious, let’s talk.”

And so he became kind of the student. And I would have him test these things, and then 50% of the time, he’d f* it up. He’d fumble it, he’d create some messages, but what ended up happening? Or he wouldn’t do the homework. He would not do the homework. And I was like, “Oh, this book doesn’t work. Okay, well, I need to make this book work. So how do I make it work for this guy? If I can make it work for this guy, it’ll work for other people.”

And then started testing it with a private community of about 100 people also. And ultimately got to the point where it’s like, that guy is different now. After a year working together, his life, how he interacts, he still sends me texts to this day. He’s like, “You would not believe what just happened.” It is a different life. Before you have the shield of no and after you have the shield of no wielded artfully, they are two different experiences of life.

And this also, if you want more time dilation, if you want more experiential lifespan, you want more intimacy, you cannot do that if you have a porous mesh through which everyone else’s agenda filters to you, that you feel morally obligated for reasons that are unclear to say yes to.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you say no more than you say yes?

The Economics of No

TIM FERRISS: Oh, yeah, yeah, I have to. I have to on a lot of levels. And if I give you sort of a sterile example, it’d be like, in the world of startup investing, if I don’t say no to 80, 90% or more of what comes my way, I run out of money. Right? I have to play it like a smart blackjack player. It’s like, okay, yeah, I can try to learn how to count cards. And I know you’re not supposed to do that, but bringing down the house or the movie 21, it’s like, okay, you can try to get better at it. And then you need to know when you have a hot hand. You need to know when the deck is in the right place. You need to know your statistics, but you’re not going to bet on it. You’re not going to bet heavy on every hand. You’ll run out of bankroll.

So in the startup investing, it’s just an existential imperative. You have to say no to the most things. So you have to have rules. And what are those rules grounded in? They’re grounded in certain principles. And then what are those grounded in? They’re grounded in certain beliefs.

And I’ll give you an example of a belief. And the one belief would be there are plenty of opportunities. You can wait for a fat pitch along the lines of Warren Buffett, but if you’ve been taught and conditioned yourself to have this fear of missing out, the game is lost. It’s lost at the belief level before you ever get to the principles, before you get to the strategy, before you get to the tactics. So a lot of it is solved with fear setting.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you pick your investments? I mean, you were early on what?

TIM FERRISS: Facebook.

SHAWN RYAN: Shopify, a whole bunch of companies.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah. Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Clear, the biometric security company in all the airports. Alibaba. A whole bunch. Wow. Yeah. So how am I early?

SHAWN RYAN: Were you seeking them out or they sought you?

Building Networks and Strategic Positioning

TIM FERRISS: Both. Both. So there are a few things that I think are maybe copy and pasteable, and then some things that are probably not as copy and pasteable. The things that I think are copy and pasteable. And there’s a book coming out soon by a legendary venture capitalist named Bill Gurley called “Running Down a Dream,” I believe is the title of the book, which really makes this point well.

But going to the epicenter of the action matters. It really matters in real life. So me packing up after college with my piece of shit hand-me-down Plymouth Voyager minivan, I get so beaten up like hundreds of thousands of miles, like the back seat got stolen out of a parking lot. When I first got to the Bay Area, I mean, you know, got ruthlessly made fun of by my co-workers. But it’s like I picked up and I was like, I am going west to Silicon Valley to make my riches.

And that didn’t happen quickly. But what it did do is it put me in the very center of the pinball machine where I could bump into things. And I could bump into things by volunteering. Like, you don’t have any network. Get creative. What do you have? You have time, you’ve got endurance, right?

SHAWN RYAN: You’re young.

TIM FERRISS: In that case, right? What are your advantages? You always have advantages. All right, well, design something around your advantages. So in my case, I volunteered for a number of startup nonprofits like the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, the Indus Entrepreneur, which Sriram would know, past guest. Really nice, brilliant guy. The Indus Entrepreneur, almost wholly focused on the Indian diaspora and entrepreneurship around that. Right.

And the numbers of amazing entrepreneurs who come out of India who have chosen to come to the US is just unbelievable, right? I’m not India, as you might have guessed, but I would go there and be like, hey, I’ll do anything. I’ll fill water, I’ll punch tickets, I’ll rearrange chairs. I just want to be in the room with these speakers.

And as a volunteer, if you do more than someone asks you to do, you are going to get noticed by the people running the event. You don’t have to do very much, but I would just do a lot more than they asked me to do. And eventually they’re like, hey, do you want to help organize one of these events? We’re not getting paid, we have a day job. Do you want to help? I would love to, but really what I like to do is at least organize the speakers. They’re like, sure.

So now I get to reach out to people way above my pay grade who ended up in some cases being long-term relationships. I mean, Jack Canfield, the co-creator of “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” who I met through a nonprofit by volunteering and doing a little bit extra, he later, years later, introduced me to my book agent who after whatever 30-plus projections sold “The 4-Hour Workweek.” And I just had Jack Canfield on my podcast like a few weeks ago, whatever it is, like 24 years later, all from volunteering and doing a little bit more than anybody asked. So the network matters.

SHAWN RYAN: Exceed the expectations.

The Power of Strategic Location and Targeted Marketing

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, exceed the expectations and be in the center of the action. So it’s like if you’re really serious, there are other people who have said this. Scott Galloway, I think puts it really well. It’s like it’s better to be average at something in the center, like fashion in New York, comedy in LA or New York, whatever. We can give a lot of examples than to be great in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

And so putting myself in the middle is important. I could give very concrete examples of that. That’s something people can model. Not everyone, but some people can. You can also do it in virtual space and places like subreddits and so on. But so that’s one.

The second is, and this is harder to model, of course, but “The 4-Hour Workweek,” when it had its explosion in 2007, I very deliberately targeted very tech-savvy, initially males, say between the age of like 25 and 35 in Silicon Valley and then New York and then that bled out to both genders, no problem. That was an easy hop. And then it began hopping to other cities like LA and Chicago.

But I wanted to focus on people who could broadcast the message most effectively. And that’s relevant because the success of the book, especially targeted at startups, is what led to for instance, being in the Switchbox in Silicon Valley. I started going to events like RailsConf related to Ruby on Rails. I’m not a programmer but there who did I meet? I met Toby of Shopify when they had like eight to 10 employees and he had read the book and that was a context for a conversation and then ended up becoming their first, I believe, advisor.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

The Tim Ferriss Fund: An Alternative to Business School

TIM FERRISS: So that’s an example. I do think that you can engineer that type of thing just by cultivating a network which by the way, just like my friendships is like a few people, very deep, not a scattershot collection of business cards. I don’t think that works very well at all. And it comes off as what it is, which is transactional and superficial because here’s the secret.

The secret is if you are friend, if you develop true friendship with someone you love like a brother or sister or could who could become one of your true long-term friends and they happen to be an A-player at something. A-players in one domain tend to know A-players in a lot of domains. You don’t need to know everybody. Right? You really don’t.

Okay, so there’s that. I’m trying to answer this question in the least long-winded way I can but it’s nuanced. So in terms of selection. So then I start seeing startups but I don’t have very much money at the time. Got a little bit and I had fantasized about going to Stanford Business School for a lot of reasons. I was like, I would have been so much happier at Stanford than Princeton, which I think is probably true. And it’s gorgeous. It’s got like Palm Drive, it’s an amazing campus and it’s completely integrated with venture capital and startups. They have real operators to teach at that school.

So I went through the application process twice and then for one reason or another I was like, I just can’t do it. I just don’t want to be back in school. And then I was helping a friend of mine, Mike Maples Jr. who was a super angel. He was a very good angel investor. I had met him through one of my professors at school just by asking. A lot of people don’t get what they want because they don’t ask for it.

And he wanted to lose some weight. So I was well before “The 4-Hour Body.” So I was helping him get in shape and I was like, hey, do you mind if we just like after the workouts or whatever, like we can trade information on that. He also wanted to know about PR and launch for “The 4-Hour Workweek.” So I would share all that and I’d say, can you just explain the deals you’re doing? Like how are you choosing them? Why? Yes, why? No, why?

And eventually at one point I was like, hey, I’m willing to put skin in the game and I can be really cheap laborer. Like is there any chance I could invest small amounts along with you into some of these startups and help them with go-to-market strategy, whatever. And he’s like, well I can ask.

And what I decided to do was rather than go to graduate school, I would take the cost that I would have paid out of pocket, sunk cost. So I think Stanford Business School is like 60k for two years. 60k? 60k, 120. I was like, all right, I’m going to make the Tim Ferriss fund. I put in air quotes because it’s not a real fund, but I’m going to spend, I’m going to plan on spending $120,000 over two years, small checks. I assume the money is all going to zero, but what I’m optimizing for is skills and relationships, just like business school. And that’s how it started.

Investment Criteria and Timing

Then there’s the question of what do you say yes to? What do you say no to? I only said yes to things where the ones that worked out, I made a lot of mistakes, but the ones that worked out, which then became rules for me were: can I be a power user of this product myself? Does it solve a problem or help me achieve a goal? Personally, even if I weren’t involved, would I use this?

And by extension then that means through the books. I built the blog back when blogs were huge. Some blogs are still huge, but like my blog is one of the most popular in the world. I was like, okay, can I help them through the blog? Now that would be podcast, social media, but can I actually help them directly to increase the value of the company and therefore the value of my equity?

Okay, and ideally, ideally this doesn’t always work, but is it a premium product so that there is more room for error, more margin of safety? I do not want to be in a race to the bottom situation where the company is suddenly commoditized and they’re competing on price and just get pressed down and that’s about it. And then the price has to be right also.

And just to address this also, 2008 when I really started, that was a great time. That was a great time to be investing. That was a great time to be investing. And it was not a crowded playing field because it was in the middle of what people might consider a dot-com depression. So the fair-weather entrepreneurs, the fair-weather venture capitalists and angels, they had all run for the hills. They were like, screw this, I’m going back to investment banking or consulting or whatever. This is too risky. Right? IPO market’s dead. Like.

But it’s harder now. It is harder now. Especially right now with the froth around AI which has contagion into other things making them even great companies. If they’re too expensive, it’s a bad investment. Depending the specifics matter.

Investment Philosophy and Personal Behavior

But I do think people can use a lot of what I’m talking about, investing in what, you know, something you would use. It applies to, I hesitate to say people should do any stock picking because that’s a dangerous game. I think most people, including myself, I do a lot of passive low-cost index investing. I think that’s the right move for a lot of people.

But if you just look at how you spend money, what you’re spending more money on now than three years ago, where you’re trying to cobble together solutions for something that doesn’t exist, like just looking at your own personal behavior can inform how you think about investing. And I’m not a registered investment advisor or anything, I’m not giving investment advice. But it’s like if you stray outside of what you know, you will probably get your face ripped off.

Yeah, good advice. Rule number one, don’t lose your money. Don’t run out of bankroll.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn good point.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, damn good point. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Tim, it’s a fascinating interview. I got one question left.

TIM FERRISS: Sure.

SHAWN RYAN: If you have three people you’d like to see on the show, who would they be?

TIM FERRISS: On your show or my show?

SHAWN RYAN: On my show.

Ideal Podcast Guests

TIM FERRISS: Three people who I would like to see. I should start asking that question. I’m tucking that away in my swipe file.

I would say someone who is genuinely part of some mystic tradition, who has never been on a podcast, but who is a good communicator. And you know, we talked very early on about scripture and you were like, scripture, if you look at the Christian mystics, you look at say Sufism within Islam, you look at Kabbalah and so on within Judaism. It’s like when you start to read even the poetry produced by all three, they seem very, very similar.

And having someone on who could speak intelligently—and they need to be good with words to do this—but to describe their firsthand experience of the divine, I think would be a service to listeners. So that would be one.

SHAWN RYAN: Love that idea.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I’d say second, I’m trying to really go off menu here. So you’ve covered a lot of ground I enjoy already with a lot of your interviews. I would say probably dealer’s choice, meaning you’re the dealer. But old traditions, like really old traditions who have not been exposed or picked over by a lot of other podcasts. And that could be just about anything.

Because my approach to whether it’s investing, exploration, it’s kind of a barbell approach, like Nassim Taleb’s investing. Right. Like super, super safe or super, super speculative is how I do things. I’m not saying everybody should do that. But also with respect to my own intellectual exploration and scientific exploration, I’m like, I’m typically cutting edge or I’m looking at things that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years that are durable.

And I think exploring the really old stuff is interesting. So the mystics are kind of one example of that. Right. This has just been a consistent feature of humanity for millennia. Might be something there, I don’t know. I think there is.

So I would say this is getting very close to the same territory. But you could interview—and you have to pick them very carefully—but give you an example, like a Greek Orthodox church singer who knows a lot about droning, or a musicologist who can speak to… I could recommend one. He’s a wild card. I’ll say it off camera just so you can do your due diligence.

But someone who, for instance, has knowledge of historic use cross-culturally of harmonics or overtones for religious experience and altered states, that would be interesting. Who could speak not just to the cultural context, but also to what we actually know from a musicology perspective, from potentially neuroscientific perspective. Very interesting.

There’s some like, you do not need drugs to have some shockingly alarming altered states of consciousness. Music has been one major tool in toolkit for a long time. So that could be interesting.

The Nature of Time and Consciousness

And then number three, who’s lucky? Number three, I would say a physicist focused on time, not just a science communicator. There are physicists who have certain credentials who are primarily science communicators. But like a working physicist, somebody who’s still an operator, who’s kind of at the forefront of work that involves consideration of time fundamentally, I think would be squirrely enough to be fun for you and mind bending for listeners. Because it’s weird. It’s very strange.

SHAWN RYAN: Fascinating topics.

TIM FERRISS: Yeah, I think all three. And because at the very end of the day, it’s like, what can we be certain of? Right? Like, how do we know we’re not a brain in a jar in a simulation? Right? What can we actually know is true?

And I think one of the few things we can know is true is that we’re aware of the fact that we are aware. And therefore maybe it makes sense to really put that under a microscope, try to understand it, which mindfulness and meditation practice has done for millennia as well.

So that would be if I had to pick a fourth, just to round out the dinner table, someone who has a lot of experience. I’ve known one guy in particular, Henry Shookman, who I’ve ended up doing some collaborations with because he just blew me away, but who’s specifically a Zen practitioner, which is like layering weird on top of weird, but in ways that are oddly productive, like koans and so on. What a strange thing.

So I’ll leave it at that. But those would be four I’d put around the table.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Thank you. You have a fascinating way of thinking about things. I really enjoyed this, so thank you for coming.

TIM FERRISS: Thanks for having me, man. I really, really had a great time. Thanks for the gifts also.

SHAWN RYAN: My pleasure.

TIM FERRISS: Let’s go break that thing in. Let’s do it.

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