00:00:00
every mental health complication or diagnosis is increasing and I've worked with different scientists and done a lot
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of experimentation on myself having grown up with multiple depressive episodes every year to see if there are
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root causes that we can address and so I'll just throw out a few things that have been very very helpful first
00:00:17
there's brain stimulation when I did this I had months of no anxiety then there's something called Vegas nerve stimulation and one of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years has seen a wild collection of benefits
00:00:29
So, let's talk about that. Tim Ferris has become a performance hacking expert after speaking with over
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800 influential voices on his podcast. Now, he's taking the most valuable frameworks and techniques to help you
00:00:41
optimize productivity, health, and performance. Tim, the variety of things that you write about, talk about is so wide. So, what is the question that most people should ask you?
00:00:52
How do you break down complicated subjects and accelerate your ability to learn? because time is one of our most
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valuable non-renewable resources. And so I have a framework that you can apply to any subject matter which consists of the
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80/20 principle which is picking the 20% to focus on that will give you 80% of what you want. For instance, there's
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hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish. But with the most frequently used500, you can get to
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reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks. And if you figure that out, you're ahead
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of 99.9% of the world. And what do you think is the question most people want to ask you? So there's a lot of questions around
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mental health and I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people because I was uh sexually abused by a babysitter's son on a weekly basis. I
00:01:41
was this close to killing myself. And it can have a lot of effects, but these are
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things that you can slowly chip away at. and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can take
00:01:55
the pain and make it part of your medicine. So, I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:02:07
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:02:13
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:02:20
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history
00:02:26
and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you
00:02:33
Tim. You're a remarkably interesting individual in part because the variety of things that you write about, talk about clearly have deep curiosity in is so wide that you're you're hard to to
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put into any particular box. So I my first question to you is how do you think about the work you do and how do
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you sort of like self-define if you do at all who you are and what your mission is. I think of myself as a
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self-experimenttor student and teacher in that order. The purpose though ultimately is to try to
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find simplicity through complexity or topics that can be complicated and then provide some type of recipe or algorithm that people can test with low risk and
00:03:22
hopefully a decent amount of upside. We're going to talk about a lot of different things today. So it probably a good place to start which is learning
00:03:28
how to learn and especially in a world that's changing at such speed. There's a lot of people that are being forced into
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relearning of some sort whether it's professionally or in other domains. So metalarning, I've never heard this term
00:03:39
before. Mhm. How how do what is metalarning and how do I learn how to learn better? I would love to cuz I spend so long as you do
00:03:46
speaking to really interesting people and I sometimes worry that some of that information is being wasted.
00:03:51
Yeah. The basic idea is this that rather than treat different subjects or fields as these silos that need to be figured out independently, how can you develop just a broad
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framework that you can apply to any subject matter? And the acronym that I generally recommend folks, DSS,
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deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. There's deconstruction, which is taking a fairly ambiguous goal like learn to swim
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or learn Japanese. None of those are actually very descriptive, right? So deconstructing
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any one of those is taking let's just use the learn to swim as an example and breaking it down into constituent parts right and you can you can do that very effectively with the help of an expert
00:04:44
you can try to do it yourself but for instance I mean if you want to find a silver medalist from the Olympics two
00:04:50
Olympics ago you can probably get on a Zoom call with them for $100 an hour maybe $50 an hour like you do have access to world class talent.
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Then they would help you figure out all right there all these different possible components. When you get to the next
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part which is selection, you're picking the 20%. This is the 8020 principle, right? Prao's law. So you're picking the 20% that will give you 80% of what you want. Let's just use language learning
00:05:20
in that case. Well, you can very easily find word frequency lists. So for any given language like Spanish, sure, or in English, hundreds of thousands of words you could learn. But with the most
00:05:33
frequently used 1500, you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks without question if you approach it methodically. But you need
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the right material first. And then the next S is sequencing. Putting it in the right order. And I feel like this is the magic sauce that gets lost a lot, which is what is a logical sequence for
00:05:58
learning any given skill. What do you practice first? So in the case of swimming for instance, forget about
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breathing. Like you need to figure out like fuselage right, fuselage left, and gliding, kicking off a wall in the
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shallow end of a pool before you ever think about breathing and getting comfortable putting your head under water, etc., etc. So, so
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there's the deconstruction, selection, sequencing, and then the last S stands for stakes, which means incentives. So,
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how do you ensure that you will do actually what it is you say you're committing to doing? If more information
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were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six pack abs. So, information is clearly not sufficient.
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It's necessary, but not sufficient. Incentives drive behavior change. So, you need good intentions are not enough.
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Even a system is not enough. You need strong incentives. So, right, you could give uh 500 bucks to a friend or 100
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bucks, whatever. Does the amount doesn't really matter. And if you don't do what you say you're going to do, they donate it to like your most hated political
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candidate in your name, right? That's another one that I've seen work really well. That's it. That DSS,
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deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. And if you just check those boxes moving that order,
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uh, your ability to learn will hockey stick in a really meaningful way. And what's also important to realize when
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you're trying to tackle any new skill, doesn't matter what it is. There will, it will not be just a linear climb from, you know, bottom, left,
00:07:31
upper, right. But if you know in advance that those are coming, then you can have a plan for it and weather the storm. So
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that's also very important. If people expect some kind of like linear incremental progress, it just ain't
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going to happen. And so most people quit before they hit any real inflection points. And how does one know what to pursue?
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Like how do you decide what's worth pursuing? Is there a framework for knowing what should be on the Sunday shelf and what should be today today's
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work? I do think about this a lot and I've used this for a very very long time and
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I don't see it changing anytime soon. I refined it here and there. Almost everything I do is a 6 to 12 month
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project. with lots of 2 to four week experiments within that 6 to 12 months. I do not
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have and I've never had a long-term career plan 5 years, 10 years. If you have a reliable 5 to 10 year plan,
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you're going to be playing so safely within the bounds of your capabilities that I feel like you're selling yourself short. So for me, it's projects and just
00:08:28
going 100% into those projects. But how do you pick the project? I pick the projects based on relationships and
00:08:36
skills. So new relationships or deepening important relationships and my learning curve skills I'm going to learn and there's a condition though those
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relationships and those skills have to be able to transcend that project. I'll give you an example. If I have a project
00:08:54
which is working on a startup as an adviser that startup was stumble upon. Okay so I'm working on Stumble Upon. Way
00:09:00
back in the day Stumble Upon was a huge deal. It delivered a lot of web traffic to various websites. It's kind of like a
00:09:07
Pandora for websites. A year or two into that didn't go anywhere. But who was it? I spent all my time with it. Stumbled
00:09:14
upon. It was the founder named Garrett Camp and I became really close friends. I learned a ton about web traffic. I was
00:09:20
also able to use my own website and blog as a experimental destination. Right? So
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there was upside even if it went to zero for me. And few years later I get a text
00:09:32
from Garrett. we meet up to talk about this new idea which is solving the taxi problem in San Francisco. And then
00:09:38
shortly thereafter it was called Uber Cab LLC and I became advised to that. And I could give you 12 more examples
00:09:44
like that where like the first project failed but I became friends with with person A or B learned C and D and those were applied two projects later to something that was a home run. And
00:09:55
should everybody at every stage in their journey have the same brainwork or you know because if you think about the
00:10:01
different things one could acquire from like resources, reputation, knowledge, skills,
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um network. If I'm 18 and broke, should I be aiming at the same things as if I'm Tim Ferrris? My instinct is to say yes.
00:10:17
And the reason I say that is that Lady Fortune has a lot to say about what happens. There are so many things outside of your control that whatever game you choose to play
00:10:31
requires a system that allows you to survive a a string of very bad luck. Everything snowballs over time and compounds and it's really hard to lose long term as long as you're not
00:10:45
overindexing and betting too much on any one project say financially. It's like you need to be able to withstand as a team or as an individual a period of
00:10:57
very bad luck in order for the law of big numbers and statistics to work in your favor with a
00:11:03
system that gives you a slight edge. Um so that's just my lens on the world in general at least professional choices and I would say you mentioned a couple of
00:11:14
other things right like reputation and so on. I feel like a lot of those are second order effects. They happen automatically if you are optimizing for the relationships and skills.
00:11:27
So, uh this comes back to the sequencing, right? So, it's like which which is the lead domino. So, if you
00:11:33
have 12 dominoes, you kind of have to decide in which order you're going to stack them so that you knock over the
00:11:38
small domino, knock over the bigger domino, then the bigger, then the bigger, then the bigger. And over time,
00:11:45
if you're thinking about doing two projects a year, let's just say if they're 6 months each,
00:11:50
that's going to add up. It's going to add up. So, you can afford to be long-term greedy
00:11:57
instead of short-term greedy. Is that what people call passion? Is are you using the same
00:12:03
I uh I like energy over passion for a couple of reasons? Because you could have passion between the bed sheets. You could have the passion of the Christ. You had a different type of passion. I
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don't like imprecise terms. Energy for me, very simple. It's like, are you more awake or are you sleepy? Right? Do you
00:12:20
feel like you can do this for another 5 hours? Do you feel like you want to stop in 15 minutes? These are almost
00:12:26
biological questions, like biological state questions. So, it's it's pretty intuitive for people to get to a yes or no. One of the subjects I've been thinking a
00:12:36
lot about recently, why have I been thinking about this more recently? Don't know, just a series of conversations
00:12:42
I've had on the show which make have kind of pushed me closer to trying to answer this question is about
00:12:48
about meaning and purpose and I guess religion because actually it's only in recent history that we've had so many answers to some of these bloody questions like the the solar eclipse. We now know what's going on there. It's not
00:13:00
God testing us. So the the Vikings are throwing like their spears at it. We know what it is now. So not believing
00:13:08
atheism, agnosticism, is that a fairly new construct? And are we not meant to know so much? Well, I I think that humans need certainty. They need something to
00:13:21
believe. And if your belief is that non-belief is the way, well, guess what? I mean, that's a belief, right? Okay. So I would say that my experience
00:13:31
is if you want to experience self transcendence which I think is critical for mental health you don't need religion per se.
00:13:42
What you you can have I think a very wonderful life without religion. I don't think it's possible to have a wonderful life without awe and wonder. And those
00:13:55
are things you can architect. Those are things you can very much architect and engineer and schedule in
00:14:02
your life. Why have veganism and CrossFit done so well? They're religions. I mean, effectively, they may not have a god, per se. Yeah.
00:14:14
But certainly they have thought leaders, they, you know, glassmen before his fall from grace
00:14:21
and so on. Uh various athletes and so on. But it's like clear rules, community, self-inforcing and describing life sports.
00:14:32
Yeah. I mean, it's like this is religion just goes by another name. It's a lot of
00:14:37
the behaviors, collective behaviors and tenants of religion just lacking the rword. What you worship? Yeah, I knew that was coming. Yeah, you uh I think the risk for me is that I
00:14:48
feel like I have a moral obligation to help people which can turn into a bit of a savior complex because of a lot of the pain that I've suffered in the past. Uh
00:15:00
I feel like I am not necessarily uniquely suited, but I have the the experience and the perspective that allows me to be credible when talking to people who are experiencing certain
00:15:12
types of pain. And that can become a huge unhelpful self-imposed burden where I feel a moral obligation to do things at the expense of my own mental health or physical health. So I would say
00:15:27
that's something that I have very clearly on my radar as of a few years ago. Uh when did the first domino fall in that regard? In terms of uh you mean just general
00:15:39
challenges personally? Uh well, I was uh might as well dig into it. So I I was uh
00:15:48
sexually abused by a babysitter's son from 2 to four on a weekly basis, I would say. Very clear memories of all of it. And that will shape you. I mean,
00:16:00
that will definitely shape you. And it can have a lot of effects. It can rob you of agency. it can certainly make you or contribute to me being hypervigilant.
00:16:12
I'm very slow to trust and so on and so forth, right? like that is a formative experience at a formative time and then later
00:16:24
had I think number one a genetic predisposition if you just look at my family to major depressive disorder
00:16:32
and that showed up as let's call it on average starting in early adolescence like three to four
00:16:43
multi-week or multimonth depressive episodes per That is half of your lived time. And for people who may have experienced
00:16:56
something like this, I will say that there are tools at work. So now, never thought it would be
00:17:02
possible, but I would say now I have one depressive episode of a few weeks at most every 2 to 3 years. Now the juxtaposition between those two
00:17:16
people is hard to overstate, right? Those are those are two fundamentally different experiences of being a human. And um a lot of it ties back to some of
00:17:26
the levers I was talking about, right? Metabolic psychiatry, psychedelic assisted therapy,
00:17:32
bioelectric medicine, including accelerated TMS. Like these things for certain people really work and can be
00:17:38
durable. They're not one and done. Very few things are, but uh these are things that you can slowly chip away at and become familiar with and
00:17:51
instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can mold the experience into something that is at least not
00:18:04
disabling. Sometimes you can make it enabling. I remember a psy very good psychotherapist
00:18:10
said to me maybe five years ago, six years ago, take the pain and make it part of your medicine. And it was basically like all that stuff is horrible. Nothing can
00:18:21
excuse it. Take that pain and made it make it part of what you offer the world. And there was I would say the
00:18:28
combination of that statement and also COVID during which my girlfriend at the time because she knew about my history very few at that time there were maybe two people in the world who knew about
00:18:40
it. Wow. Two long-term ex-girlfriends I'd been with for like five to six years each and
00:18:46
parents didn't know parents didn't know. Really? Yeah. And I was sitting with her during COVID just as it was getting fully ramped.
00:18:59
And I had always planned on writing a book about it or like my healing journey after my parents passed away cuz I didn't want them to blame themselves. And my girlfriend at the time over a
00:19:13
meal said something that had a huge impact, which was, "Have you ever thought about how many people are going
00:19:18
to pass away from natural causes or from COVID or anything else before you ever have a chance to write this book?" Cuz you're probably not going to write that book for 10, 15 years.
00:19:29
Think of all the people you could have helped that you didn't help. And I was like, "Okay, maybe I should workshop it
00:19:36
on a podcast." But keep in mind, none of my family knew. And so I was very fortunate to have a
00:19:43
very close friend who's based here in New York City, Debbie Milman, Design Matters Podcast, one of the longest running podcasts in the world, wonderful
00:19:50
human. And she disclosed to me a number of years back for the first time in full
00:19:56
fidelity extended childhood sexual abuse. and we talked about it and I came clean with her after that conversation with my girlfriend and I
00:20:08
asked her if she would be open to having a conversation with me that we could record but as a conversation because I
00:20:14
knew I couldn't do it as a monologue. I just knew I couldn't do it and I told her in advance I said I have no idea if
00:20:20
I'm ever going to share this but I feel I feel compelled to at least record it. And so we did and ended up publishing that I want to say in September 2020,
00:20:32
something like that. And uh holy [ __ ] I would say the most shocking thing about that to me. I knew the statistics, right? But statistics are very
00:20:43
impersonal. Like these these these types of abuse, this type of sexual abuse is incredibly prevalent. not just uh involving young girls but also
00:20:56
involving a lot of young boys. I probably had a quarter to a third of my close close friends reach out to me for the first time to talk to anyone and
00:21:08
confess that they had had some type of similar experience. I I mean the percentages were staggering.
00:21:15
Um that was really hard. Um I was willing to absorb it. I have a lot of capacity for absorbing that type of thing, but it was hard because I would get these tearful voice memos from guys
00:21:26
who had never told anyone, giving me graphic details of everything that happened. It's just gut-wrenching. I
00:21:32
mean, I remember walking up and down my driveway just like tears running down my
00:21:38
face and like I don't cry much. that's not really a thing for me, but just the brutality of it
00:21:45
and uh then in retrospect seeing so many things coales where I'm like oh that explains all of these unanswered questions I had about that friend and also for me looking back
00:21:58
again hindsight being 2020 for a long time I had let's just call it to pick a number out of thin air it's like okay I
00:22:04
have seven mental health psycho emotional challenges I need to address and I was viewing them as independent
00:22:10
problems to address. But when I was willing to reopen the door and look at the childhood abuse, everything was tied to that. And
00:22:21
sometimes you just have to, you know, put on your gas mask and go into the cellar and contend with that. And
00:22:28
there's no one right way to do it. Psychiatry is still in the dark ages. It's where surgery was 300 years ago.
00:22:35
But still there are certain things that work often without knowing the mechanism
00:22:40
seem to help a lot of people. So there there are tools I think internal family systems created by Dick Schwarz is very interesting. The MDMA assisted
00:22:51
psychotherapy certainly for PTSD very interesting and generally well tolerated not right for everybody. And then a
00:22:58
number of the other things that I mentioned uh family constellation therapy also quite helpful for a lot of
00:23:04
people but uh it's not insurmountable. What I would not say is that some people and I think that I would love to be able
00:23:16
to do this but I just can't get there or who would say like I don't regret it. I'm glad it happened because here's the
00:23:22
silver lining. No. Like if I could control Z and remove that stuff 100% I would I mean it did a lot of damage but
00:23:30
it gives me a credible voice when I am talking to people who have had these experiences and that is valuable.
00:23:37
Can you explain to me what you've learned about how how you were 2 years old at the time. Yeah. Between the age of two and four you
00:23:44
said. What what is I'm I'm kind of asking about the mechanism here. what is happening in a 2 to four year old
00:23:51
child's brain that causes the damage cuz presumably at 2 years old you don't understand what's happening. You don't understand what this individual this person who's older
00:24:03
than you is doing and the context of it. Yeah. So I'm I'm I'm trying to understand how
00:24:08
what the mechanism of harm is to a to an innocent child who doesn't understand understand the context of what's going on here. Yeah. I I don't think anyone can really
00:24:20
answer that particularly well with high conviction. But what what I'll say is that
00:24:26
uh I am blessed and cursed with a near photographic memory for some things. Mhm. So you have the original injury, you have the original insult,
00:24:37
but if you have, as I do, which is weird, but like I can draw the floor plan of almost any building, any restaurant I've ever been in, that's crazy. Even once, I don't know why that is, but
00:24:49
I can do that. Now, there are upsides to that. There are a lot of downsides, too, in the case of abuse.
00:24:56
And as you have greater and greater ability to navigate the world and realize what has happened, what is happening, what might happen, and you
00:25:10
can recontextualize highfidelity memories. Well, then you realize that that thing that was very weird at the time was a lot more than just weird,
00:25:23
right? It was just straight exploitation and abuse. So that's the best answer I think I can give to that question. It's similar to what Lisa, Dr. Lisa Feldman told me. She's a neuroscientist
00:25:40
who said she told me this story. It's obviously an anecdote, so it's an N of one. Um, so obviously taken with
00:25:46
caution, but she she told me the story of a young woman who was abused by her uncle and um lived a normal life. Everything was fine, slept well,
00:25:57
then watched Oprah and Oprah had on there an array of women that were abused when they were younger and she recontextualized what happened to her and from that day onwards she had
00:26:07
all the symptoms of someone who was abused. She was had sleep disruption, health disruption, all these things.
00:26:12
Yeah. Because she had suddenly, as you used that term, reconceptualized actually what had happened there. Yeah.
00:26:17
It's made, you know, Yeah. I mean, look, I think people who have been abused are
00:26:26
those who survive and do well afterwards in some way are become very good by force, by necessity at compartmentalizing. And uh if you look at some of the very
00:26:42
very top tier military um special forces units and so on, the percentages of those guys who have been abused very high. Now, why why would
00:26:56
that be an asset? Well, if you're in battle, if you're in a chaotic environment where
00:27:03
people are dying or at risk of dying and you need to act effectively and calmly in the most
00:27:15
disruptive, unpredictable environment imaginable. Compartmentalizing is a superpower, right? where you can
00:27:21
basically detach and take this observer status almost as if you're watching yourself
00:27:28
doing, you know, kill and capture raids or whatever it might be. Uh but when some of those folks come back to civilian life, the
00:27:39
compartmentalization is a severe handicap and disruptor in family life, right? So that superpower becomes a
00:27:46
super weakness. And I think that that is true outside of the military for people who survive abuse. They may bury it completely, put
00:27:56
it under lock and key subconsciously. So they don't even have explicit recall of the event until perhaps there's some
00:28:04
trig triggering catalyst that brings it back up. They might just say, "Hey, look, that happened. It's terrible. Like
00:28:11
no need to dwell on the past. I want to move forward." which I think frankly is a viable
00:28:16
strategy. I don't think everyone needs to go, you know, put on their hazmat suit and unearth everything bad that has
00:28:23
ever happened to them. I don't think that is automatically productive or helpful. Uh can make people really
00:28:30
despondent because you can't fix the past, right? Mhm. Uh so I would say that in in my case that compartmentalization
00:28:41
was uh on some levels very enabling, right? Like I could outlast out endure a lot of people in sports, in work. My pain tolerance was incredibly high. Uh
00:28:57
but there's a there is a price to be paid when you cauterize certain aspects of yourself and disallow
00:29:05
certain types of emotions. Like there are prices to be paid. And um I will say that I think the potential and promises of psychedelics by and large are overstated.
00:29:18
But in terms of bringing emotions back online, that was almost entirely due to psychedelic experiences for me. Bringing emotions back online. Yeah. So, I hadn't cried in like 20
00:29:31
years. Couldn't remember the last time I cried. And then I'd be like on a plane watching a really compelling kind of
00:29:37
heart-wrenching documentary and just start crying on the plane. What the [ __ ] is going on here? The [ __ ] And uh
00:29:44
certain emotions just came back online. And I think that once those were online,
00:29:51
that is in part what then pulled along with it, this revisiting of these highfidelity memories. And then um
00:30:02
I had a very rough period because of that and ultimately decided, you know what, like this is the lead domino that
00:30:09
has already been tipped over that has affected so many things. I can continue to do patchwork
00:30:16
like remediation with band-aid solutions for various things, but I'm just I'm plugging holes in the side of the boat,
00:30:23
not asking why it's filling with water in the first place. And I just decided, you know what? I'm just going to take 6
00:30:28
months. And I know psychiatry is pretty messy, but priority number one is to try
00:30:35
to find some resolution with this. And that's what I did. I I canceled everything because I was having
00:30:41
basically like a nervous breakdown and wasn't sure I would be able to sort of function in a business capacity anyway.
00:30:49
Um so yeah, quite the adventure, quite the misadventure, but you know, you play your hand the best you can. Uh so having
00:31:01
a podcast, having the books, having a blog has actually been incredibly therapeutic for me in finding some way to extract value from those experiences.
00:31:14
And let me just mention this because I don't make anything from it. If people are going through any experience like
00:31:22
this or if they've had a history of trauma, uh you can just go to tim.blog/trauma blog/trauma and it's got
00:31:29
the conversation with Debbie. It's a hard conversation, but it also has a list of resources because what I used as a toolkit and what Debbie used are
00:31:40
completely different. So, you get two very different perspectives on things. And uh I would say if I had to pick one other blog post in this case that I am
00:31:51
was the hardest to put out and also that I think I'm proudest of it would be some
00:31:57
practical thoughts on suicide. There's a post called some practical thoughts on suicide and um I know that has I know directly
00:32:05
that has saved a few hundred lives and it it details my personal experience of almost killing myself in college coming very close like I had a date on the calendar and the only reason it didn't
00:32:17
happen is because I lucked out this is luck so at the time I was taking a year off of uh college to
00:32:29
work in a few different jobs and ended up being very isolated because my whole class was graduating. My roommates at the time had full-time jobs. So, I was just kind of stuck at home working on my
00:32:40
senior thesis. Not a good recipe for mental health. And I reserved a book from the Princeton University Library about assisted
00:32:51
suicide. And the book was out, popular book it would seem. And back in the day, the way the system worked is they would mail you a physical postcard to your address that was at the registars's
00:33:04
office. I had not updated my address to my off-campus apartment. So, the card that said, "Good news, your book on assist suicide has arrived at Firestone Library got mailed to my parents."
00:33:19
And that's what snapped me out of it was realizing, "Oh, this isn't just about me." right now. I don't have the
00:33:25
plausible deniability. I was going to make it look like an accident. It's like now I don't have it. That's been taken away. Retrospect, thank God. And so, it
00:33:32
didn't happen. But the reason I wrote that post is because I was at an event. It's actually being interviewed by Jason
00:33:39
Calcanis on stage at this live this weekend startups event. Few hundred people in the audience and stuck around afterwards and a bunch of people came up and wanted books signed
00:33:51
and things like that. And there was one really nice guy, well-dressed, had had himself put together, who asked me to
00:33:57
sign two books, one for himself, and then he asked me to sign a book for his brother. And I said, "What would you
00:34:03
like me to say to your brother?" And he just kind of froze. And I was like, "Huh? Okay. Well, I don't want this guy
00:34:08
to feel stressed out." I was like, "I'll tell you what, we can figure it out or you can just leave it to me. There's no rush. Like, we can do this after the
00:34:15
event." All right. Took care of everybody else. And then the guy walked me to the elevator and he explained, he
00:34:22
said, "Yeah, sorry about that. I froze because my brother committed suicide and we kept his room exactly how it
00:34:29
was." And he was a huge fan of your writing. And so I wanted to get a book signed by you and put it in his room. And
00:34:39
he said, "Have you ever thought about talking about mental health because you could really help a lot of people? A lot
00:34:45
of people listen to you." And unbeknownst to him, I had all the history with coming this close to
00:34:52
killing myself. And uh I sat with that and I was like, "Yeah, he's right. He's really right. I have a responsibility to write about it." And that blog post took me at least
00:35:05
a month to write and rewrite and rewrite and have proof read consider deleting. And uh because that was also something that my family didn't know about. I mean they they knew about the book but they
00:35:19
didn't they didn't realize how close it was. So um that was also another wonderful call with family to be like so there's this thing about to come out.
00:35:31
Should probably give you a heads up so you don't hear about it from everybody in the extended family. But uh
00:35:36
when your parents received that that thing in the post y that slip the library slip. Yep.
00:35:42
Did they call you? My mom called me with this very shaky voice being like, "What is what is what is this? Why did you
00:35:48
reserve this book?" And I lied, you know. I said, "Oh, well, I have a friend at Ruters and he was trying to get this book for a research project and they
00:35:55
didn't have it at their library, so he asked me to get one from through Firestone." But I was just lying. But I
00:36:01
knew the the jig was up, right? And uh that was that was the turnaround point. And that was also because this was in 1999 where I just decided to go 100%
00:36:12
into physical training. U and there's a lot of backstory behind it. People can read about it if they
00:36:19
want on that post. Some practical thoughts about suicide. But this is not it is so [ __ ] common. It's very disturbing like when you
00:36:30
realize it's disturbing and reassuring. It's disturbing because you realize how prevalent it is and how close so many
00:36:36
people have come. It's reassuring because you realize also very quickly that you are not alone. You're not uniquely flawed. This doesn't
00:36:49
need to be personal and permanent. People have solved for this. Looking at my audience over the last 10 years,
00:37:00
every mental health complication or diagnosis that I can think of is up and to the right. Just hockey stick. So, chronic anxiety, treatment resistant depression,
00:37:12
you name it, right? Obesity, loneliness, which can take many different forms, usually self-imposed. And when I see a constellation of issues
00:37:24
like that, I try to identify if I can, not just the symptoms because then you end up putting band-aids on things that are interrelated but treating them as silos, but looking underneath it to see
00:37:38
if there are root causes that we can address. So let me speak to that first. So on the mental health side, I'll just throw out a few things that have been very very
00:37:50
helpful. There are the behavioral questions and I would agree that at its simplest level, you can just look at what we're evolved for, right? Just
00:38:01
take a close look at evolutionary biology. Independence lone wolf is not in our programming. It just is not. So I would say when in doubt
00:38:12
revert on some level to what people were doing a few hundred years ago at the most recent right and that would be sort of assumption number
00:38:24
one. Then I would say to people who are suffering right now, the social interaction, analog human interaction, I would just say is the is
00:38:38
the the one target when hit that solves a multitude of other problems that otherwise you'll be playing whack-a-ole with. But if there are then remaining
00:38:50
problems with say chronic anxiety, OCD when we get into some slightly trickier terrain, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, etc. There are a
00:39:02
few things that I have found in the course of doing a lot of work with different scientists and also a lot of experimentation on myself having grown
00:39:14
up with multiple long duration depressive episodes every year and those are a short list of different types of brain stimulation specifically something called accelerated TMS. The
00:39:28
before and afters that I've seen with that are beyond incredible and equal or surpass in some cases the amplitude of effect and the durability of effect of
00:39:39
psychedelic assisted therapies. Accelerated TMS, so transcranial magnetic stimulation. And Nolan
00:39:46
Williams, Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford is is a good person to look up for more on that.
00:39:51
What exactly is that? Is that putting something on your head? M there are different ways to do it depending on the hardware that you're
00:39:57
using but in effect accelerated TMS refers to a new protocol with better hardware and software of a technology TMS that has existed probably for 40
00:40:09
years if not more on some level and you will instead of doing two or three sessions a week for many months you do 10 sessions a day for 5 days straight.
00:40:25
So you are getting stimulated on the hour every hour for about 8 minutes and you do that for 10 hours straight and then you compound that over 5 days
00:40:39
and you see for instance uh to give one example a friend's child very terrifying
00:40:47
story uh but uh he was a cutter this this 14-year-old self harming. Yeah. And the parents were just waiting for the call that their child had
00:41:01
committed suicide. And this went on for two or three years, I want to say. And then within 3 days of accelerated TMS treatment, it was like reversion back to
00:41:11
old self. And then with boosters every say 3 to 6 months, that has been durable. It's the before and after is impossible to overstate. It's pretty
00:41:23
wild. What are they doing to the brain? Is it electrodes or is it music or it's magnet? It's magnets.
00:41:29
Magnets. Yep. And the what it feels like is is someone kind of like flicking the side
00:41:34
of your head. It's sort of the sensation. It is from a safety profile perspective really compelling. Like the
00:41:41
downside risk is very very minimal. And me with the most recent sessions that I've done myself, I had probably four to five months of no anxiety. Like all of that
00:41:55
stuff vanished as if by magic wand and I felt like I'd been meditating twice a day for a year. I mean it was it was
00:42:04
incomprehensible. Uh it was it was really really really uh remarkable. And there's there's good clinical evidence
00:42:10
for this. It's not just end of one anecdote. So, so that's one is the kind of neurostim piece and there's a lot more that's going to happen in that space. But bioelectric medicine, that
00:42:21
would be one big lever that I think is worth investigating if people are suffering with any number of different
00:42:28
conditions. Then you have metabolic psychiatry. Primarily that would be dietary intervention. Chris Palmer at Harvard is is someone who's popularized this in the
00:42:38
last handful of years. metabolic psychiatry specifically putting people on a ketogenic diet. You have folks who
00:42:44
have been treated with 15 different medications for schizophrenia for a decade who get off all of their
00:42:50
medications within 3 to 6 months and stay off simply by stabilizing a handful of things in the brain including adding a very beautiful
00:43:04
clean energy source which is ketones. There are also a lot of possible applications of the ketogenic diet or modified ketogenic diets, exogenous
00:43:14
ketones meaning supplemental ketones for neurodeenerative disease. So I have three relatives right now who have
00:43:21
Alzheimer's and genetically I'm very predisposed. So I'm thinking a lot about this also from a preventative perspective. So can I potentially
00:43:31
bolster mitochondrial health, cellular cleanup, reduction of plaque buildup, etc. by doing strict ketosis for a month a year, fasting for
00:43:45
a week, perhaps once a year, water only. I think there's actually pretty compelling evidence that those are all
00:43:52
worthwhile interventions to consider if you're very highly predisposed as I am. And then I would say the last one I'll
00:43:58
mention now the psychedelic assisted therapies for various conditions. I do think that psychedelics and this is to
00:44:04
quote a very famous psychotherapist named Stannisl Grath Stan Grath what the telescope did for astronomy what the microscope did for biology psychedelics will do for the mind. I don't think
00:44:16
that's an overstatement because a lot of the the clinical outcomes that we're seeing with treatment resistant PTSD,
00:44:23
people who've had an average diagnosis duration of like 14 to 17 years, nothing succeeded. They do two to three sessions
00:44:30
and then you see like a 50 plus% complete remission of PTSD. I mean, what is going on there? I think in a very productive way leading us to question some of the very fundamental assumptions
00:44:41
that are made in the world of psychiatry particularly with pharmaceutical interactions or pharmaceutical
00:44:47
prescriptions and that's really exciting to me because I think there is an argument to be made that you can address certain root causes
00:44:58
and there are different explanations for this ghoul Dolan who's now at UC Berkeley she was at Johns Hopkins talks
00:45:04
about the reopening of critical periods for development. So you could potentially use psychedelics for
00:45:12
stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor control. So I would say that those are are broadly kind of the
00:45:18
the three pillars. There's one other that I'm digging into that I think could end up
00:45:24
being very very interesting overall. This is one that is sort of TBD. Personally I am experimenting with it
00:45:31
but Vegas nerve stimulation. There is a sea of [ __ ] floating around related to Vegas nerve stimulation. The vast
00:45:37
majority of what you'll bump into is pseudoscientific nonsense. So, if I'd never heard about Vegas nerve
00:45:43
stimulation before, how would you Yeah, I can explain it. Yeah. All right. So, the Vegas nerve is a bit of a misnomer because they're actually
00:45:50
two bundles of nerves that travel down from around your brain stem down either side of the neck, kind of where you would feel your pulse. It's right alongside the corateed artery.
00:46:00
Mh. And you can think of them as almost transatlantic cables. So you don't have you have two primary vag nerves, but there are about a 100,000 fibers in
00:46:12
each of them. And we only know what a tiny fraction of those do. They then travel down and they intervate and touch
00:46:19
pretty much everything you can imagine, including your gut. And there's some very interesting communication between the gut microbiome and the brain. visa v
00:46:30
the Vegas nerve. It's wild. And the most credible voice that I found in the world of Vegas nerve stimulation or VNS for short science is a guy named
00:46:44
Dr. Brian Tracy, T R A C Y. He wrote a book called The Great Nerve, which is a very good introductory read on all of
00:46:51
this. One of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years. He's incredibly credible. and
00:46:59
he co-founded a company I want to say at least 10 years ago or 11 years ago was involved at least as a as a primary
00:47:06
scientific adviser for an implant. The implant is about the size of a omega-3 fish oil capsule gets implanted right in the neck. So surgical procedure but pretty minor and that has just been
00:47:19
approved. It was the cover of the New York Times a few weeks ago for rheumatoid arthritis. And the before and
00:47:25
after that you see in some of these conditions again is something straight out of science fiction. You see someone
00:47:30
who's been mostly bedridden, chronic fatigue, can't hold a job, struggling to interact with their kids, has this procedure, and then like two weeks later they're running up a flight of stairs to
00:47:42
catch a train on a trip to Europe and have the problem of too much energy. It seems to have broad potential application to autoimmune conditions. So
00:47:53
you might think of say a Crohn's disease or IBS. It seems to have applications to significantly enhancing HRV heart rate variability. So I have a
00:48:07
friend who for the longest time he's former tier one operator military. He's got a lot of sympathetic overdrive. So he had trouble sleeping and he tried
00:48:17
all sorts of sophisticated breathing programs which can help. He tried cold exposure which can help but those were
00:48:23
all incremental gains on his HRV maybe improved 10 to 15% lots of meditation twice a day 10 to 15%. Used vag nerve stimulation for
00:48:35
somewhere between two and four weeks tripled his HRV. What? Yeah, tripled. How did he stimulate his vag nerve? Was
00:48:42
it like this? This is where we get into some controversial territory. All right. So, the device he used is
00:48:52
it is a device. It's called Gamma Core. It's by prescription. It is applied to the neck. It provides
00:49:01
electrical stimulation for 2 minutes at a time. I believe it's very very minimal. It's 2 minutes twice a day. I want to say maybe it's 5 minutes twice a day. And that seems to have just
00:49:14
a a downstream collection of benefits or potential benefits. Most of the research
00:49:21
for gamore is for I believe migraines andor cluster headaches in terms of published literature or option B which has a lot more in terms of published
00:49:33
studies would be uh oricuricular so ear stimulation uh and that's stimulating something called the simba conscia right here this very particular location and so you
00:49:45
apply stimulation to the ear I'm experimenting with both the ear and also the neck. I would say Vegas nerve stimulation has top of mind
00:49:57
access right now for me in terms of interest. I bought this Bond Charge face mask,
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simplysafe.com/doac. That's simplysafe.com/doac. To save 60% on a simplysafe home security system, there's no safe like Simplysafe. Before the Diary of SEO was
00:52:07
what it is today, it was just an idea. And it started with me, a cheap plug-in microphone, and my Mac right here. And I
00:52:15
have to say, when I first had the idea for the Diary of a CEO, my thinking was that the world might want to see into the diaries of some of the most
00:52:21
interesting, successful people really in high places that were doing interesting things. So, after recording that first
00:52:27
episode under my duvet, I sat on my Mac, which is from our sponsor Apple, and spent hours editing and eventually
00:52:33
uploaded it. And honestly, I thought that would probably be it. But a couple of my friends said they enjoyed it. So,
00:52:38
I kept on recording. And over time, the microphone has changed and we now have this incredible setup here. But the
00:52:44
thing that has stayed the same is I'm still using the Mac. Even today, my entire team across our studio still uses the Mac. Our first few episodes maybe had tens of people listening, but now
00:52:56
tens of millions of people tune in all over the world, which is still absolutely crazy to me. So, if there is
00:53:01
an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, this is your sign to start. Your great ideas start on Mac. And you
00:53:07
can find out more at apple.com/mack. Because of what you do and because of the way that you are in terms of your broad curiosity and the way that you think and the way that you learn, I have
00:53:18
to ask you the question, what is it that you see coming down the pipe? Like coming down the line in terms of macro
00:53:24
trends in it's probably makes sense for us to just stick with health for a second, but you've talked about Vegas enough. Is there anything else that you
00:53:30
think 10 years from now everybody's going to be doing but they're not currently doing
00:53:36
or thinking about? One of them I'll throw out there is something I've been thinking about is air quality. I think I see a rise in people's concern about CO2
00:53:43
levels and also outside air quality. So I imagine I'll be wearing some kind of device or my iPhone will be telling me
00:53:49
about the air quality in the room or outside. Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. I think bioelectric medicine is a big category.
00:53:55
So whether it's accelerated TMS or focused ultrasound uh where you might take something that looks like a hockey puck and put it over your your liver for instance or
00:54:08
spleen uh to affect various things. uh using microchips over pills I think is is is a is going to be a huge growth area and that we'll realize more and
00:54:24
more how much is dependent on the immune reflex and different types of communication mediated by electricity uh that can be affected by external or
00:54:35
internal devices like an implant. So for instance, I'll give you a wild factoid which is people may have heard the story
00:54:43
which is based on real science where you transplant the microbiome from say obese
00:54:49
mice into lean mice and those lean mice then become obese just by transplanting m the gut microbiome. If you sever the vagus nerve before you
00:55:01
do the transplant that doesn't happen. They don't become obese. So what's happening there? It would seem that the
00:55:09
microbiome is communicating with the brain viv the vagus nerve. And when you sever something experimentally in that way or bladed or whatever, often times this might seem paradoxical,
00:55:25
but you can achieve similar effects with stimulation that you can with severing.
00:55:31
And I think many of the assumptions that we have currently which form the bedrock of
00:55:37
our quote unquote understanding of mental illness and so on are just going to be completely false. They're going to
00:55:43
be completely untenable within 10 years. A lot of that I think is going to be driven by a better understanding of the body electric. It will be driven by better understanding of
00:55:58
how fuel utilization in the brain drives many different psychiatric conditions that can be mitigated or completely
00:56:09
addressed by say providing an alternate fuel source instead of glucose ketones, right? That would be just kind of a
00:56:14
simple example. But there's a huge huge compliance issue with the ketogenic diet, right? People don't want to do it
00:56:20
for a lot of good reasons. So, how do you get people to stick with it? Well, maybe there are other options
00:56:26
for achieving ketogenic like effects such as systemic anti-inflammation with the use of electricity instead of diet. Right? I think that's possible and I've
00:56:39
invested in a few companies that are aiming to do that. uh which is very exciting because it means that you might
00:56:46
have options for affecting brain function that do not require you to take molecules that get into your brain directly. Mhm. That's really exciting. So bioelectric
00:56:56
medicine I think is going to be a very exciting space to watch and there are a lot of researchers doing some wild stuff with bioelectric medicine. So we'll see
00:57:08
where it goes. Where are you today in terms of your what's guiding you at the moment in this season of your life? Do
00:57:15
you what are your big goals? Are you are you aspiring towards anything in particular? It's relationships. It's uh looking
00:57:21
forward to the next big chapter for me which would almost certainly it not almost certainly be partner, family, all of that. I mean another startup's not
00:57:33
going to make any difference to my life. You know, another podcast. I love all those things. I love startups. I love
00:57:40
the podcast. I love the books. But we're at the squeezing out of marginal gains at this point. Are you married or I'm not married. Don't have any kids
00:57:51
that I'm aware of. You're aware of But uh dating a lovely woman right now. Very excited about it. Do you think it's quite strange that a lot of podcasters don't seem to be like I'm not married. Yeah. And I don't have any kids yet.
00:58:03
Yeah. Um I've just turned 33. But so many of the big podcasters don't seem to have kids or be married other than really
00:58:10
Rogan. Yeah. Yeah. Someone tweeted about the other day. I was like, "Oh, fuck." Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that I'm not I'm not pointing fingers at you, but I but I know quite a few of these
00:58:22
guys. If we're talking about guys, u I I mean, I know a bunch of female podcasters as well. Um quite a few of
00:58:29
which are married. Uh, but on the male side, I will say, you know, if you're a good-looking guy and you're putting videos on YouTube, your DM inbound and your plethora of
00:58:44
temptation that you need to resist is going to make remaining single very attractive. And
00:58:52
that's true for a lot of these guys. So, I don't think there's a mystery to be solved. In other words, it's like if
00:58:58
they go on the dating apps, it's just like shooting fish in a barrel. And I I don't think ultimately that the dating apps, despite what they might say, are designed to be deleted. I do
00:59:09
not believe that. They are casinos intended to keep you in the casino. Yeah. It's just follow the money. Follow the subscription plans. Well, you talk about the paradox of
00:59:19
choice. Yeah. And so there are times and I think this is probably misplaced envy where I'm like, you know, maybe there was something to arranged marriages, you know, and this
00:59:31
whole idea of like soulmate romantic love driving everything is a relatively new invention.
00:59:36
Mhm. On the scale of human history. Uh now would I want someone deciding who I marry and have kids with? Not particularly. But there is a certain simplicity to it that I find enviable
00:59:52
when you end up in the modern digital casinos of dating apps where yes, that person was an eight out of 10, but man, that nine or 10 is just right around the corner. I know it's just a
01:00:04
few thousand swipes away. Yeah. And and you get the variable reward at least if you're like a a healthy, sexually vigorous male.
01:00:17
I'm sure for women as well. I just think that men tend to think with their smaller head a lot more often. Uh you're
01:00:23
going to get these incredible dopamine hits of variable reward. It's just like dog training, but you're training yourself with the dating app to continue using the dating app by getting these Scooby snacks in terms
01:00:36
of, you know, fill in the blank with your imagination. Uh, I don't meet all I have not met a single person who is like, I love dating apps. No one. I have not met a single person. And yet,
01:00:49
right, what does the crack addict want? More crack. And they might say, I just need one more hit. That's not how it
01:00:55
works. Yeah. So, there is, I think, a lot to be said for applying positive constraints,
01:01:02
right? Scared to be single again. I just the way I look out at the the current mechanism of finding someone these
01:01:07
dating apps and I just think and also I do understand it would be a significant distraction from whatever I'm doing here. Oh, for sure. Can you imagine me being in New York City tonight single and like uh and
01:01:20
having the evening off and what what would go through my head and and then you'd have to go on a date with someone.
01:01:25
You've got to do all the small talk stuff. I got out the game before the game like began. Yeah. Like seven years ago I the game. I saw
01:01:32
this this tweet from this I think it was a Vietnamese woman who said, you know, I
01:01:37
wonder if it wasn't Gen X, it was like, I wonder if X, Y, and Z people of this generation are looking at dating apps and thinking, wow, we got the last chopper out of N. Literally, literally.
01:01:50
And oh my god, that's not far from the truth. Uh, paradox of choice is a real problem.
01:01:57
People think it's a quality problem of abundance. I'm not convinced that that's true. No way. It's not poss I have so
01:02:03
many clo My friends that struggle with dating the most, date the most. Yeah, sure.
01:02:09
I've got two or three friends that I can think of. I won't name them, but two of them are women and one of them is a guy.
01:02:14
They do 50 between 50 and 100 dates a year. Yeah. And they're just convinced that it's
01:02:19
through lack of lack of option. And I just it's impossible. But, you know, yeah, I'm uh very happy to be off the
01:02:27
dating apps. I was on the dating apps for 2 or 3 years and it was just it is a part-time slash full-time job.
01:02:34
We have a a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And your you
01:02:40
know the person who wrote your question sat there I kid you not for 30 minutes in total silence thinking about these two three four five six seven eight
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words. Oh wow. They sat there for I've never seen anything like it. All right. and the eight words that they
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wrote. Oh man, I know, right? That's nine words. What is your favorite color today?
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Can you imagine? Yeah. What's your favorite sandwich? No, I'm joking. Um, how would you spend your
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final day on Earth? With my closest friends and family? No doubt. It wouldn't be pizza. It wouldn't be I mean maybe it involves pizza, but it
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would be telling the people I love that I love them and spending time with them.
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Doesn't need to be anything fancy. Could be sitting on a porch on a rocking chair. And that might seem like a trit
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answer, but I am putting that into practice every year with periods of time that are blocked out for this. So, I'm
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not waiting until my last day, but last day certainly wouldn't be dating apps. wouldn't be an opium bender. Uh it would be it would be time with my
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my absolute closest friends and family. And I'll add uh elaboration on the past year review when I'm looking at relationships before investing in new relationships. I
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look at my top say five to 10 relationships and ask myself did I spend the amount of time I would want to spend
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with these people last year? And if the answer is no, I always reinvest in those
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people and only the overflow gets allocated to new relationships. I really focus on the tried andrue proven relationships with deep levels of trust
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over long periods of time. In terms of systems, you've put have you put a system in place to make sure that life doesn't get in the way of those
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people coming together? Yeah. I mean, for 25 plus years, I've had a annual reunion around my birthday every year in the summer where all of my or
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those who can make it, but incredibly old friends show up. They know it's on the calendar. It's roughly the same date
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every year. And they fly in from all over the country, all over the world. And it has nothing to do with my
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birthday. It's just a reunion of friends. Tim, thank you. Thank you for several reasons. I think the first reason is
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you're one of the I said to you before one of the founding fathers of what we do here and if it wasn't for people like yourself and Joe there is a 0% chance I
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think that people like me would be doing what we do now and that's given us so much there's really really like a very
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extremely low chance that if people like you hadn't taken the risk and created a blueprint and shown that it was like an
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effective medium and the long form was interesting and everything that you you guys proved there's no chance that
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people like with me would exist and So I whenever I meet people like you that I I consider to have to be standing on the
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shoulders of on or have stolen a blueprint on I feel like I am obliged to say thank you because you've created but
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it's true. It's true. Yeah. And I was inspired also by people who preceded me right when I did the
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launch for the 4-Hour chef in 2012 with going on Joe Rogan and Mark Marin and Nerdist and so on. Like those guys also showed me that something interesting was a foot. So uh you're 33 you said
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33. Yeah. You got a lot of runway, man. You're in a good position. We'll see. We'll see what happens. I'll
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add one last thing that I neglected to mention earlier, but in terms of productivity, and we're talking about weekly architecture, I think everyone should put as a challenge for
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themselves, particularly if they're an entrepreneur, a 4-week mini retirement once a year
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where you are unavailable. you are off the grid. No laptop, no phone outside of maybe Uber and Google Maps and Open Table where you are literally completely
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unavailable. And the reason I recommend that there are a few. Number one, it's going to allow you to play the long game
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at high intensity having that de loing phase. The second is it will force you to improve all of your policies, rules, guidelines for autonomous decision-m by
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employees, etc., etc. It'll force you to clarify all of that on a regular basis. So, when
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you come back, all of those systems improvements will endure beyond the mini retirement, but it's a forcing function.
01:07:14
Mhm. Uh it also forces you to take a very close look at the non-b businessiness interests that you have either maintained or cultivated or let atrophy
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in complete disuse. And if you end up having a slight panic attack because you don't know what to do with your time, that's a great wakeup call. You need some other things to offset the type A
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maniacal focus on chasing that rabbit around the greyhound drag. Amen. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, man. Thank you so much.
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If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in today. And that is
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exactly why we created these conversation cards. Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and
01:08:01
have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to
01:08:08
each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we've
01:08:14
turned them into these conversation cards, and we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more
01:08:19
interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand
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new edition and for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card which is an exclusive question from me.
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But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the description below.