Every mental health complication or diagnosis is increasing, and I've worked with different scientists and done a lot of experimentation on myself, having grown up with multiple depressive episodes every year, to see if there are root causes that we can address. And so I'll just throw out a few things that have been very, very helpful. First, there's brain stimulation. When I did this, I had months of no anxiety. Then there's something called vagus nerve stimulation, and one of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years has seen a wild collection of benefits.
So, let's talk about that. Tim Ferriss has become a performance hacking expert after speaking with over 800 influential voices on his podcast. Now, he's taking the most valuable frameworks and techniques to help you 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?
How do you break down complicated subjects and accelerate your ability to learn? Because time is one of our most valuable non-renewable resources. And so I have a framework that you can apply to any subject matter, which consists of the 80/20 principle, which is picking the 20% to focus on that will give you 80% of what you want. For instance, there's hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish, but with the most frequently used 500, you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks. And if you figure that out, you're ahead 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 mental health, and I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people because I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son on a weekly basis. I was this close to killing myself. And it can have a lot of effects, but these are things that you can slowly chip away at, and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can take 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 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 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 double check if you've subscribed and thank you so much because in a strange way you are, you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you.
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 put into any particular box. So my first question to you is, how do you think about the work you do and how do 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 self-experimenter, student, and teacher in that order. The purpose, though, ultimately, is to try to 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 hopefully a decent amount of upside.
We're going to talk about a lot of different things today. So it's probably a good place to start, which is learning 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 relearning of some sort, whether it's professionally or in other domains. So meta-learning, I've never heard this term before. How, how do, what is meta-learning and how do I learn how to learn better? I would love to, because I spend so long, as you do, speaking to really interesting people and I sometimes worry that some of that information is being wasted.
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 framework that you can apply to any subject matter? And the acronym that I generally recommend, folks, is DSS: deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. There's deconstruction, which is taking a fairly ambiguous goal like learn to swim or learn Japanese. None of those are actually very descriptive, right? So deconstructing 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. You can try to do it yourself, but for instance, I mean, if you want to find a silver medalist from the Olympics two 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.
Then they would help you figure out, all right, there are all these different possible components. When you get to the next part, which is selection, you're picking the 20%. This is the 80/20 principle, right? Pareto's law. So you're picking the 20% that will give you 80% of what you want. Let's just use language learning 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 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 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 learning any given skill? What do you practice first? So in the case of swimming, for instance, forget about breathing. Like, you need to figure out like fuselage right, fuselage left, and gliding, kicking off a wall in the shallow end of a pool before you ever think about breathing and getting comfortable putting your head under water, etc., etc. So, so there's the deconstruction, selection, sequencing, and then the last S stands for stakes, which means incentives. So, how do you ensure that you will do actually what it is you say you're committing to doing? If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs. So, information is clearly not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient. Incentives drive behavior change. So, you need, good intentions are not enough. Even a system is not enough. You need strong incentives. So, right, you could give 500 bucks to a friend or 100 bucks, whatever. 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 candidate in your name, right? That's another one that I've seen work really well. That's it. That DSS: deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. And if you just check those boxes moving in that order, your ability to learn will hockey stick in a really meaningful way.
And what's also important to realize when 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 to 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 that's also very important. If people expect some kind of like linear incremental progress, it just ain't going to happen. And so most people quit before they hit any real inflection points.
And how does one know what to pursue? 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 work?
I do think about this a lot and I've used this for a very, very long time and I don't see it changing anytime soon. I've refined it here and there. Almost everything I do is a 6 to 12 month project with lots of 2 to 4 week experiments within that 6 to 12 months. I do not 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, 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 going 100% into those projects.
But how do you pick the project?
I pick the projects based on relationships and 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 relationships and those skills have to be able to transcend that project. I'll give you an example. If I have a project which is working on a startup as an advisor, that startup was StumbleUpon. Okay, so I'm working on StumbleUpon. Way back in the day, StumbleUpon was a huge deal. It delivered a lot of web traffic to various websites. It's kind of like a Pandora for websites. A year or two into that, didn't go anywhere. But who was it? I spent all my time with it. StumbleUpon. It was the founder named Garrett Camp and I became really close friends. I learned a ton about web traffic. I was also able to use my own website and blog as an experimental destination. Right? So there was upside even if it went to zero for me. And a few years later I get a text from Garrett. We meet up to talk about this new idea, which is solving the taxi problem in San Francisco. And then shortly thereafter it was called Uber Cab LLC and I became an advisor to that. And I could give you 12 more examples like that where like the first project failed but I became friends with person A or B, learned C and D, and those were applied two projects later to something that was a home run.
And should everybody at every stage in their journey have the same framework? Or, you know, because if you think about the different things one could acquire from like resources, reputation, knowledge, skills, network. If I'm 18 and broke, should I be aiming at the same things as if I'm Tim Ferriss?
My instinct is to say yes. 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 requires a system that allows you to survive 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 over-indexing 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 very bad luck in order for the law of big numbers and statistics to work in your favor with a system that gives you a slight edge. So that's just my lens on the world in general, at least professional choices. And I would say you mentioned a couple of 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.
So this comes back to the sequencing, right? So it's like, which is the lead domino? So if you have 12 dominoes, you kind of have to decide in which order you're going to stack them so that you knock over the small domino, knock over the bigger domino, then the bigger, then the bigger, then the bigger. And over time, if you're thinking about doing two projects a year, let's just say if they're 6 months each, that's going to add up. It's going to add up. So you can afford to be long-term greedy instead of short-term greedy.
Is that what people call passion? Are you using the same...
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 don't like imprecise terms. Energy for me, very simple. It's like, are you more awake or are you sleepy? Right? Do you feel like you can do this for another 5 hours? Do you feel like you want to stop in 15 minutes? These are almost biological questions, like biological state questions. So it's pretty intuitive for people to get to a yes or no.
One of the subjects I've been thinking a lot about recently, why have I been thinking about this more recently? Don't know, just a series of conversations I've had on the show which have kind of pushed me closer to trying to answer this question, is 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 solar eclipse, we now know what's going on there. It's not God testing us. So the Vikings are throwing like their spears at it. We know what it is now. So not believing, atheism, agnosticism, is that a fairly new construct? And are we not meant to know so much?
Well, I think that humans need certainty. They need something to 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 is if you want to experience self-transcendence, which I think is critical for mental health, you don't need religion per se. 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 are things you can architect. Those are things you can very much architect and engineer and schedule in your life.
Why have veganism and CrossFit done so well? They're religions. I mean, effectively, they may not have a god, per se. But certainly they have thought leaders, they, you know, Glassman before his fall from grace and so on. Various athletes and so on. But it's like clear rules, community, self-enforcing and describing life.
Sports. Yeah. I mean, it's like this is religion just goes by another name. It's a lot of the behaviors, collective behaviors and tenets of religion just lacking the R-word.
Yeah, I knew that was coming. Yeah, I think the risk for me is that I 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. I feel like I am not necessarily uniquely suited, but I have the experience and the perspective that allows me to be credible when talking to people who are experiencing certain 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 that's something that I have very clearly on my radar as of a few years ago.
When did the first domino fall in that regard?
In terms of, you mean just general challenges personally? Well, I was, might as well dig into it. So I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son from 2 to 4 on a weekly basis, I would say. Very clear memories of all of it. And that will shape you. I mean, 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. 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 had, I think, number one, a genetic predisposition, if you just look at my family, to major depressive disorder. And that showed up as, let's call it on average, starting in early adolescence, like three to four multi-week or multi-month depressive episodes per year. That is half of your lived time. And for people who may have experienced something like this, I will say that there are tools at work. So now, never thought it would be 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 people is hard to overstate, right? Those are, those are two fundamentally different experiences of being a human. And a lot of it ties back to some of the levers I was talking about, right? Metabolic psychiatry, psychedelic-assisted therapy, bioelectric medicine, including accelerated TMS. Like these things for certain people really work and can be durable. They're not one and done. Very few things are, but these are things that you can slowly chip away at and become familiar with and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can mold the experience into something that is at least not disabling. Sometimes you can make it enabling.
I remember a very good psychotherapist 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 excuse it. Take that pain and make it part of what you offer the world. And there was, I would say, the 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 it. Wow. Two long-term ex-girlfriends I'd been with for like five to six years each and 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. And I had always planned on writing a book about it or like my healing journey after my parents passed away because I didn't want them to blame themselves. And my girlfriend at the time over a meal said something that had a huge impact, which was, have you ever thought about how many people are going to pass away from natural causes or from COVID or anything else before you ever have a chance to write this book? Because you're probably not going to write that book for 10, 15 years. Think of all the people you could have helped that you didn't help. And I was like, okay, maybe I should workshop it on a podcast. But keep in mind, none of my family knew.
And so I was very fortunate to have a very close friend who's based here in New York City, Debbie Millman, Design Matters Podcast, one of the longest-running podcasts in the world, wonderful human. And she disclosed to me a number of years back for the first time in full fidelity extended childhood sexual abuse. And we talked about it and I came clean with her after that conversation with my girlfriend and I asked her if she would be open to having a conversation with me that we could record, but as a conversation, because I 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 I'm ever going to share this, but I feel compelled to at least record it. And so we did and ended up publishing that, I want to say in September 2020, something like that.
And holy [__], I would say the most shocking thing about that to me, I knew the statistics, right? But statistics are very impersonal. Like these types of abuse, this type of sexual abuse is incredibly prevalent, not just involving young girls, but also 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 confess that they had had some type of similar experience. I mean, the percentages were staggering. That was really hard. 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 who had never told anyone, giving me graphic details of everything that happened. It's just gut-wrenching. I mean, I remember walking up and down my driveway just like tears running down my face and like I don't cry much. That's not really a thing for me, but just the brutality of it and then in retrospect seeing so many things coalesce where I'm like, oh, that explains all of these unanswered questions I had about that friend.
And also for me, looking back again, hindsight being 20/20, for a long time I had, let's just call it, to pick a number out of thin air, it's like, okay, I have seven mental health, psycho-emotional challenges I need to address. And I was viewing them as independent problems to address. But when I was willing to reopen the door and look at the childhood abuse, everything was tied to that. And sometimes you just have to, you know, put on your gas mask and go into the cellar and contend with that. And there's no one right way to do it. Psychiatry is still in the dark ages. It's where surgery was 300 years ago. But still there are certain things that work, often without knowing the mechanism, seem to help a lot of people. So there are tools. I think internal family systems created by Dick Schwartz is very interesting. The MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, certainly for PTSD, very interesting and generally well tolerated, not right for everybody. And then a number of the other things that I mentioned, family constellation therapy, also quite helpful for a lot of people, but it's not insurmountable.
What I would not say is that some people, and I think that I would love to be able 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 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 it gives me a credible voice when I am talking to people who have had these experiences and that is valuable.
Can you explain to me what you've learned about how, you were 2 years old at the time. Between the age of two and four, you said. What is, I'm kind of asking about the mechanism here. What is happening in a 2 to 4 year old child's brain that causes the damage? Because presumably at 2 years old you don't understand what's happening. You don't understand what this individual, this person who's older than you is doing and the context of it. Yeah. So I'm trying to understand what the mechanism of harm is to an innocent child who doesn't understand the context of what's going on here.
Yeah. I don't think anyone can really answer that particularly well with high conviction. But what I'll say is that I am blessed and cursed with a near photographic memory for some things. So you have the original injury, you have the original insult, 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 I can do that. Now, there are upsides to that. There are a lot of downsides too in the case of abuse. 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 can recontextualize high-fidelity memories, well, then you realize that that thing that was very weird at the time was a lot more than just weird, 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 who said, she told me this story. It's obviously an anecdote, so it's an N of one. So obviously taken with caution, but she told me the story of a young woman who was abused by her uncle and lived a normal life. Everything was fine, slept well, 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 all the symptoms of someone who was abused. She had sleep disruption, health disruption, all these things.
Yeah. Because she had suddenly, as you used that term, reconceptualized actually what had happened there. Yeah. I mean, look, I think people who have been abused are, those who survive and do well afterwards in some way, become very good by force, by necessity at compartmentalizing. And if you look at some of the very, very top tier military special forces units and so on, the percentages of those guys who have been abused, very high. Now, why would that be an asset? Well, if you're in battle, if you're in a chaotic environment where people are dying or at risk of dying and you need to act effectively and calmly in the most disruptive, unpredictable environment imaginable, compartmentalizing is a superpower, right? Where you can basically detach and take this observer status almost as if you're watching yourself doing, you know, kill and capture raids or whatever it might be.
But when some of those folks come back to civilian life, the compartmentalization is a severe handicap and disruptor in family life, right? So that superpower becomes a super weakness. And I think that that is true outside of the military for people who survive abuse. They may bury it completely, put it under lock and key subconsciously. So they don't even have explicit recall of the event until perhaps there's some triggering catalyst that brings it back up. They might just say, hey, look, that happened. It's terrible. Like, no need to dwell on the past. I want to move forward, which I think frankly is a viable strategy. I don't think everyone needs to go, you know, put on their hazmat suit and unearth everything bad that has ever happened to them. I don't think that is automatically productive or helpful. Can make people really despondent because you can't fix the past, right? So I would say that in my case, that compartmentalization was 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.
But there is a price to be paid when you cauterize certain aspects of yourself and disallow certain types of emotions. Like there are prices to be paid. And I will say that I think the potential and promises of psychedelics by and large are overstated. 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 years. Couldn't remember the last time I cried. And then I'd be like on a plane watching a really compelling kind of heart-wrenching documentary and just start crying on the plane. What the [__] is going on here? The [__]. And certain emotions just came back online. And I think that once those were online, that is in part what then pulled along with it, this revisiting of these high-fidelity memories.
And then I had a very rough period because of that and ultimately decided, you know what, like this is the lead domino that has already been tipped over that has affected so many things. I can continue to do patchwork like remediation with band-aid solutions for various things, but I'm just, I'm plugging holes in the side of the boat, 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 months. And I know psychiatry is pretty messy, but priority number one is to try to find some resolution with this. And that's what I did. I canceled everything because I was having basically like a nervous breakdown and wasn't sure I would be able to sort of function in a business capacity anyway. So yeah, quite the adventure, quite the misadventure, but you know, you play your hand the best you can. So having 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.
And let me just mention this because I don't make anything from it. If people are going through any experience like this or if they've had a history of trauma, you can just go to tim.blog/trauma and it's got 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 completely different. So you get two very different perspectives on things. And I would say if I had to pick one other blog post in this case that was the hardest to put out and also that I think I'm proudest of, it would be Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide. There's a post called Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide and I know that has, I know directly that has saved a few hundred lives and 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 happen is because I lucked out. This is luck. So at the time I was taking a year off of college to 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 senior thesis. Not a good recipe for mental health.
And I reserved a book from the Princeton University Library about assisted 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 registrar's office. I had not updated my address to my off-campus apartment. So the card that said, good news, your book on assisted suicide has arrived at Firestone Library, got mailed to my parents. 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 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. In retrospect, thank God. And so it didn't happen.
But the reason I wrote that post is because I was at an event. It's actually being interviewed by Jason Calacanis on stage at this live This Week in Startups event. Few hundred people in the audience and stuck around afterwards and a bunch of people came up and wanted books signed and things like that. And there was one really nice guy, well-dressed, had himself put together, who asked me to sign two books, one for himself, and then he asked me to sign a book for his brother. And I said, what would you 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 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 event. All right. Took care of everybody else. And then the guy walked me to the elevator and he explained, he said, yeah, sorry about that. I froze because my brother committed suicide and we kept his room exactly how it 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 he said, have you ever thought about talking about mental health because you could really help a lot of people? A lot of people listen to you. And unbeknownst to him, I had all the history with coming this close to killing myself. And 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 a month to write and rewrite and rewrite and have proofread, consider deleting. And because that was also something that my family didn't know about. I mean, they knew about the book, but they didn't realize how close it was. So that was also another wonderful call with family to be like, so there's this thing about to come out. Should probably give you a heads up so you don't hear about it from everybody in the extended family.
But when your parents received that thing in the post, that slip, the library slip, did they call you?
