If you just get off of social media for 2 weeks, it will do the same amount of good for a lot of folks as 10 years of therapy.
What advice has made you the most money?
Don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to OnPurpose. Today's guest is someone that I've been waiting to re-interview for 9 years. I'm speaking about the one and only Tim Ferriss, one of the most influential thinkers in personal development and performance of all time. Tim's the bestselling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, host of The Tim Ferriss Show with over a billion downloads. If you're someone who wants to learn how to make better decisions, overcome fear, and design a life that actually works for you, you won't want to miss this. Please welcome to OnPurpose, Tim Ferriss. Let's dive in because there's so much to extrapolate today with you.
I wanted to start off by asking you, like, what's a thought that reappears in your mind often today, or what are you fascinated by today that kind of steals your attention and gets you excited? Because you've done so many things, you've accomplished so many things, you're so active in so many ways. I wonder what fascinates you now.
I can tell you, literally, I was getting some texts on the way here from a few people I've been interacting with a lot. One is Tommy Wood, Dr. Tommy Wood, who's a neuroscientist, also a phenomenal athlete. Interesting combination. Looking at, and we'll probably get into this more deeply, but different fuel sources for the brain and extending your cognitive runway. So in life, if you, as I for instance, have a lot of neurodegenerative disease in your family, whether that's Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or otherwise, what can you do now, assuming a lot of these conditions take decades to fully develop, how can you intervene early? So that's a question that's occupying my mind, and I have found, I think, some very, very compelling options that are not new to me, but if you go through the scientific literature and you talk to people on the front lines, you do find some interesting options. So, we can talk about those.
I would say bioelectric medicine, which ties into this. In other words, microchips and electricity over pills. A lot of medications have off-target effects. So, you have a problem or you want to prevent a problem, you take a drug, very often it is not as specific as we would like. There are side effects.
There's a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine that can be applied a million different ways. We probably should talk about it, but I'll give you an example. Here's a crazy example. There's a technology called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, that has existed for decades, and it's basically using a magnetic field to affect brain activity. So, they put a paddle close to your head. There are different ways to do it. Might be a cap with a few other things, and you can either excite or inhibit different parts of the brain. Slightly more complicated, but let's just assume that's the case.
And a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, along with others, developed something called the SAINT protocol, which is an accelerated version. So instead of taking, let's just say, TMS treatments that you would do once or twice or three times a week over 5 months, they compress it all into one week, 5 days, and you're getting zapped 10 times a day, on the hour, every hour, each of those five days. And what they end up seeing in many instances, and there's good published peer-reviewed studies people can look at, 70% remission of treatment-resistant depression that is durable. You start to see impacts on things like OCD, generalized anxiety disorder.
But one thing that I experimented with recently, this is maybe four months ago, because I have diagnosed pretty severe OCD, which I think can be a superpower but can also be a super handicap. Also, just look at my family. Who knows how much of it is nature versus nurture, but generalized anxiety disorder, pretty high. And that can be a helpful monkey on the back for getting a lot done, but there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage, right? So, I wanted to see if I could dial back both of those. Would I lose my edge or would I actually improve my edge? I just wouldn't be holding on to the blade of the knife, right?
And I went through this experimental protocol, which is one day. So instead of taking a week off of work, one day where you preload, and there's science behind this, with something called cycloserine, and it's an antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis among other things, put in a lozenge in your mouth, and then an hour later you start these stimulations. You do one day, three-minute stimulations on the hour, and I have gone from basically like an eight or nine out of 10 severity with generalized anxiety to like a zero or a one.
For four or five months now. You cannot...
It is incredible. Does it help? Does it hurt? The dose does matter, right? You can overdo it. But this is a combination of pharmaceuticals to help with neuroplasticity and then brain stimulation. So, I've been looking very closely at bioelectric medicine. I think this is, and if I try not to too much, but pat myself on the back a little bit. Say you look at The 4-Hour Body and then the subsequent 10, 15 years, a lot of that played out and ended up being very, very highly reinforced by science. I'm placing a lot of my bets intentionally.
And then on the more philosophical side, but intensely practical. I don't think philosophy can be inert and kind of flaccid if you choose the wrong approach. But ultimately, if you're trying to decide on values, you're not going to do a randomized control trial on that, right?
You have to find your way. And fortunately, people have been attempting to do this for millennia. And I would say that in the last few years especially, there's a great book called Already Free, I think it is, by Bruce Tiff, that discusses the kind of two complementary approaches, which are the, let's just say, developmental achievement approaches that Western psychotherapy might take or self-help broadly. How do I improve myself? How do I change my circumstances? But then on the opposite side, a perhaps, let's call it, more Buddhist approach, although it's not unique to Buddhism alone, the acceptance piece, right? Recognizing what is, allowing what is.
And it's a balancing act to do both. But I've been, so I would say for decades, most of my life, focused on the achievement piece. And there's a lot to be said for it, a lot of upside, but paying also attention to the approaches, the practices that cultivate the other side, because guess what? None of us have as much control as we might like to think.
So, especially once you add in other humans. Sorry guys, that's an illusion. So, I would say those are a few of the things that are very, very present for me.
I love it. You've just given us the contents page of our conversation. It's brilliant. This is what I enjoy the most. That's fascinating. Do you mind if we dive into some of those a bit?
Yeah, for sure. And I, you know, my hope, and I also said this before we hit record, it's like I don't have anything to pitch or sell. I really am excited about some of these things that I'm exploring though. So if I can give people very specific, concrete recommendations that in some way expand their thinking or help them, then I'm thrilled.
Yeah. No, I'm really grateful for you coming on. Let's dive into cognitive fuel then to go first. What do we currently do or what do we currently know that we use for cognitive fuel, and then the new approaches that you're looking at? How are they so different? As you said, they have less side effects. We're talking about potentially...
In terms of fuel. First, a caveat: not a doctor, don't play one on the internet. So, talk to your physicians. However, what I will say is it's helpful to think of the brain like you would think of musculature, right? The mind-body separation duality is a complete falsehood. So everything is really, really tightly interrelated.
What I will say is that if we look at the extremes to inform the mean, this is something I like to use as a heuristic, right? You can learn a lot by studying the extremes in athletics, in business, the best and the worst outcomes. And that tells you a lot about the middle, but not the other way around. Like if you study the average, the ideal customer, the A, B, or C in the middle, it doesn't actually help you solve the edge cases. All right?
So, if we look at, let's just say, Alzheimer's, right? Some people, some scientists, some doctors refer to Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. Why? Because the brain, and there are many factors that go into this, can end up in a state where it's very bad at utilizing glucose, insulin insensitivity. You're basically diabetic in your brain. And I'm simplifying here, but for instance, and I have done this with relatives of mine with Alzheimer's, you give them an exogenous ketone supplement of the right kind. Give them a little shot, and I'll do it with them so they're not freaked out. Within 20 minutes, their sentences are longer. Their rate of speech is faster.
In some instances, there's something called the clock test, for instance, where you can look at the severity of Alzheimer's or other conditions by having someone attempt to draw a clock, and they just can't do it. And boom, like some type of stage magic, 30 minutes later, they can draw a clock.
So, what's going on? Ketones are an alternate fuel source. And if you ever fast, if you ever experiment with intermittent fasting, which we can also come back to, another thing that has my attention, if you cultivate your ability to use ketones, suddenly you have this very compelling alternate fuel source.
I'll give you a third one though that is new to me, even though if I look back at my experience in life through sports, I'm like, ah, okay, that helps connect some dots. Lactate. If you ever have done a bunch of cycling or you go in the gym and you get that burn. All right. Well, a big part of that is lactic acid or lactate.
Turns out the brain can really use that not only as a fuel, but it's also a signaling. It's almost a signal or messenger that can produce all of these changes in the brain. And there is, for instance, Tommy Wood introduced me to this, the Norwegian 4x4. People can look this up. Norwegian 4x4 is in effect doing VO2 max training, and we can explain what that is, but it's not really important right now. Basically 4 minutes of incredibly hard, let's say, stationary biking. You're getting up to 85, 90% of your max heart rate.
Like in the last minute of those four, you don't think you're going to make it.
Right. Basically you're running away from wolves. Okay?
And then you take 3 to 4 minutes off and you repeat that again and you do four cycles. So you're doing four minutes on, let's just call it four minutes off, four minutes on, da da, for four rounds. If you do that, there's a study conducted three times a week, and I think it was for 6 months, the effects on your brain, which includes some plausible volumetric changes, like certain structures in your brain, like the hippocampus actually grow, right? One of the primary areas affected by Alzheimer's. Those effects extend out for 5 years from 6 months of training three times a week. What is going on?
The VO2 max is just an indicator of the work that you're putting in. Okay. Well, why does that kind of work matter? Because steady-state aerobics, walking for long distances, doesn't do it. And there are people, credible people who focus on this, who think that lactate is the main driver.
So, for instance, this morning before I came here, I was like, well, I'd like to have a little bit of extra energy. So, I did a weight training workout where each of my sets with leg press or leg extension or whatever large muscle groups, I just turned on a music track that lasts 4 to 5 minutes. And I was like, all right, I can't stop for 4 to 5 minutes and it's going to be really painful. And that's it. Because I think that the cycling itself doesn't necessarily have any magic to it. Like you could use rowing.
It's the lactic acid. It's the actual concentration in the blood.
Those I would say are three interesting fuels to consider. And I'm sure we'll come back to this, but like sometimes you don't have a problem-solving issue. Sometimes you don't have a quandary in your life that you can think your way out of. You have a fuel issue.
Yeah. Riddle yourself with journaling out of all of your issues. Maybe you're just starving.
And that could mean you need food. Could mean you need to improve your insulin sensitivity. Maybe look at intermittent fasting, which completely blew my mind with how it changed my insulin sensitivity and biomarkers over the course of four weeks. It really shocked me. And these are actually compatible, looking at building up your ketogenic machinery, which you can do in a whole bunch of ways.
I love the point you're making about fuel. And I was definitely someone, I always felt like when I came to this work I had a really strong mind because of my previous work, but I hadn't really worked on my body. And it was when I married my wife, who's a nutritionist and a dietician.
Yeah. Yeah. Very useful. Extremely useful for many reasons. But the body became a part of the conversation because she was so much about physical health as well as mental and emotional health. And I think I was so in the mental, emotional sphere that I kind of disregarded the body to some degree, only to realize how much I was limiting myself based on this fuel point.
And even to speak to a very recent occurrence, probably a few years back, I was experiencing fatigue and low energy, although I was positive and living my purpose and felt meaning in my life and had beautiful relationships, but I was just tired. And I remember getting my biomarkers done and everything, and it turned out to be something really basic, but they were just like, your vitamin D is at a 10, right? It should be at a 60 to 100 for the optimal, but you're at a 10.
Like, how did I not understand that something as small as this could be affecting my energy? It wasn't just about meaning. And I think you're so right. People are journaling really hard. They're trying to find their purpose. They're trying to do this thing mentally, and half the time it's like you're not giving yourself enough fuel to even be able to have that breakthrough.
Yeah. It doesn't matter how good you are at driving the race car if no one's done an oil change, no one's checked the tires.
No one's put proper fuel in the tank, etc., etc. So I think that those levels are important to check, right? Like you mentioned the vitamin D. In a lot of my friends who have complained about anxiety or depression or fatigue, they might do a micronutrient test and realize that they're deficient in trace minerals. Very common, whether it's copper, selenium, or other. And it's like, okay, here, try, like, eat a handful of Brazil nuts once a day for a week and let me know how it goes. And they're like, I have energy. I'm like, well, yeah, okay, great. Well, then you can check off the selenium.
Which I think can be very reassuring for folks, right? Because if they've been banging their head against the wall trying to quote-unquote figure out X and they're just not making progress, it's not necessarily because your brain isn't working, you're not smart enough. Well, maybe it is because your brain isn't working. But you can fix it holistically through looking at your mind and body as one thing.
Right. Like certainly through, say, meditation, right, you can exert all sorts of interesting effects on your body, right, through the breath as this sort of interface of the autonomic nervous system. So it stands to reason you can do the other.
Right. It's bidirectional. Like if you want to, you can improve the mind by working on the body and you can improve the body by working on the mind. They go together.
So that's a lot of what has my attention. I mean, there's a lot of nonsense floating around out there about vagus nerve stimulation, but if you talk to certain scientists like Dr. Kevin Tracey, who wrote a great book, I think it's a great book called The Great Nerve, all about the vagus nerve, which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side of the neck with roughly 90 to 100,000 fibers on either side.
He's got a great story in the book where he's discussing all of this research related to, in effect, activating something called the inflammatory reflex and preventing overwhelming cytokine storms for COVID, for you name it. And you can stimulate the vagus nerve a bunch of different ways. You could have an implant. There's actually something called famotidine over the counter. Talk to your doctor. Don't just start taking this. But it's an antacid, I believe, and that actually has some incredible effects related to that.
But he was on stage talking about this at one point, and the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama's contingent happened to be at the same event. And the Dalai Lama got up afterwards, because Kevin was talking about the vagus nerve, right? Just for simplicity, singular. And the Dalai Lama asked a question after the presentation. The translator translated and said, you know, His Holiness would like to know, are there two of these that run down the neck? And he said, yes, actually, there are two. And the Dalai Lama kind of chuckled. And there's a practice that they have that involves meditating on these two channels that run down the neck and then basically innervate the rest of the body, including the abdomen. And it's like, hm, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah. I find that East-West connection so fascinating, and how the scientists are being able to prove these ancient techniques. I remember when I was talking to someone else on the show, it was that idea of them talking about circadian rhythms and looking at the sun first thing in the morning, etc., which of course you've talked about as well.
And I was talking about how in the monastery in India it was always about sun salutation. So Surya Namaskar is the Sanskrit version of sun salutations, and that was the practice. You woke up in the morning and you paid respects to the sun, which meant making, you know, eye contact with the sun and allowing the sun rays to enter. And I'm like, all of these techniques, they didn't have the language that we have, but the technique existed far back then. Talk to me about the, did you call it the bioelectric...
Medicine. Yeah. Because you're talking about chips versus pills.
Yeah, chips or electricity versus pills.
So explain to me what you mean by chips.
Well, just microchips. So actually using a device, which could be in the case of, I think it's SetPoint Medical, for instance, has an implant which is the size of an omega-3 capsule. I think it's called SetPoint Medical. They were on the cover of The New York Times for this, and it just got approved. Goes in the neck. It's actually a very fast procedure, and it applies stimulation to the vagus nerve, which runs right along the carotid arteries, basically, and it is used for, say, rheumatoid arthritis.
It gives some people incredible relief where they might have been incapacitated, laying on a couch, can't get up, have to elevate their legs, can't walk more than a few steps. They get this implant, and then boom, like 2 months later, they're running upstairs on a tour through Europe with their husband. I mean, that's a real example.
It doesn't solve it. It doesn't reverse it. It just provides...
That's a very good question. I shouldn't speak to that because I don't know enough about rheumatoid arthritis and what it looks like in terms of development over long periods of time. What I will say is that broadly speaking, this is controversial, but it's not that controversial with a few scientists I interact with who look at this very closely. I think a lot of our psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety, etc., etc., etc., some of them you may be predisposed to those things genetically, but I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start with acute infection, much like long COVID or long Lyme disease.
There's some acute immune system insult, often an infection, that leads to then chronic neuroinflammation. And when you address that neuroinflammation, a lot of the symptoms can abate, which is why there have been studies looking at just giving people who are depressed anti-inflammatories. And I'm not saying, by the way, anyone listening or watching, that you should gobble anti-inflammatories. There are side effects. Don't do that. But maybe there are other ways to address excessive inflammation, and it turns out vagus nerve stimulation could be one of those.
There are other approaches. I can't recommend any current device out there. I'm interacting with this Scandinavian researcher who's amazing. I'm hoping that at least in the US, maybe in the next 6 months, something will be available that people can grab. I'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight being corroborated by science, because there's a really cool tie-in.
Breathing, do breathwork. There are different types of breathwork that absolutely seem to have an effect on the inflammatory reflex. And that's actually part of the reason why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice, especially if they do it twice a day, like 10 to 20 minutes per session. After about 2 weeks, it's so consistent, right? It's like for the first week, they're like, I don't know if this is doing anything. And then after like 7 to 10 days, there seems to be something that happens. And people are like, I'm so much calmer. I'm so much this.
All right, there are a million different ways you could explain it, but let's throw one out there that doesn't really, I haven't really heard discussed, that the rhythmic breathing that you entrain when you're doing that kind of sitting activates the vagus nerve. If you use a stimulator, guess what? You use it 5 minutes in the morning. Say for the year, 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at night, because the effects last about 12 hours. Okay? And it takes about 2 weeks for most people to notice everything settle.
Well, that's a strange coincidence. And if you do box breathing or something like that, like for people who are maybe tuning in who are like, oh, meditation, oh god, like if I have to sit and focus on my breath one more time or, you know, imagine a candle or whatever it might be. It's not necessarily for everybody. I get it. I mean, my monkey mind is on like high-octane fuel. I get it. But you could use an app that just helps you breathe, right? Or something, box breathing or whatever it might be. Try that 10 minutes twice a day for 2 weeks. See what happens. I think most folks will be very pleasantly surprised.
On the ancient wisdom side, I've always been interested but skeptical. Interested in but skeptical of acupuncture.
Skeptical because, as with many modalities, practitioners sometimes oversell it as a panacea for everything. It's true of psychedelics. It's true with massage. It's true for PT. It's true for surgery. It's like, I can fix all your problems. All right. Probably not.
However, there are a few aspects, and I went to two universities in China. I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin in this case. I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture on animals. How does that work? Right? There's, as far as we know, maybe there's not a whole lot of placebo effect with dogs, let's just say. So, being able to use acupuncture in place of, say, anesthesia with animals, that's pretty weird. That's interesting.
The other one that seems pretty compelling, there are several, but the other one is pregnancy, using acupuncture for fertility. So, what on earth is going on if that is actually a thing? Yeah. Yeah. For the time being, let's say maybe it is. And I know a few traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, and they have walls of photos of babies. And I'm like, that's interesting.
Now, you can't underestimate the power of the mind and the placebo effect, which by the way, people are like, oh, it's just placebo effect. Placebo effect is the craziest thing in the world. But let's leave that alone for the moment.
One of the ways that you can stimulate some of the fibers in the vagus nerve is with placement on the ear. And you're applying electric current on something called the tragus right here. The placement really matters. It's very, very specific. And then you need another probe to, you know, ground or complete the circuit effectively. That would be the 5 minutes of stimulation. You can also do it the neck, but the neck's quite uncomfortable. The placement of those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners put the needles.
No way. And electricity is not the only way you can do it, right?
And it's not the only way. I mean, there was a physician in France who experimented with taking ballpoint pens and pressing on different parts of the ear, right?
That was in the 1900s, ended up getting retrofitted and adopted by a lot of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China.
But the overlap's interesting, right? Like that's very interesting. And it's also, you have to wonder. It's like, man, how many thousands of years of trial and error did that take to figure it out?
Yeah. The wrong place over here. Yeah.
And how did they figure it out, too?
And I should say, yeah, as one voice of sanity, there's also a lot of stuff that has existed for a very long time that is probably nonsense, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.
But suffice to say, to answer your question, bioelectric medicine is using electricity or electronics in place of drugs to avoid the side effects. That being the primary...
To avoid the side effects.
To avoid the side effects, to help establish homeostasis perhaps, as opposed to overall blocking something or overall stimulating something, you know, smashing some receptor, but then oh by the way, it also has an affinity for all these other receptors that we don't really want to mess with but we can't avoid.
And there is a place for drugs. Look, I take prescription medication, right? It's like, there is a place for it. But in at least the US, where it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through, you can advertise on television directly to patients selling drugs. It's outrageous.
The pharmaceutical, you know, industrial complex is a very real thing and the incentives are very perverse in a lot of cases. So, we are overprescribed, overmedicated without question.
Yeah, it blew my mind when I moved to this country and saw those ads. I couldn't believe they were real. I was like, this has to be an SNL skit. Like, it has to be something comedic. I couldn't believe it because you don't have that in the UK. You just, you never see that. And so when I moved here, I was like, wow, it's literally telling me that this might kill me. Like, might kill you is a legitimate, you know, very, very fast word-per-minute fine print.
Yeah, it's unbelievable. No, I appreciate that.
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A lot of what you spoke about, you talked about, you know, doing the lactate. It was like 6 months to unlock. You talked about the four-four-four, like four on, four off, four on, four off, three times a week, 6 months. And then you spoke about the idea of, you know, two weeks of meditation twice a day to feel the benefits.
What I find more and more fascinating, even in myself, and what to speak of our community and the audience that tunes into shows like this, is we know that everyone struggles with that initial discomfort. Like you said, you have to do it for 2 weeks to start feeling the benefits and noticing that calm or letting things settle, or you have to do something for 6 months. What have you found to be the best startup strategy to a new habit to unlock its potential when it may take two weeks to unlock its benefit?
This might sound like a simplistic answer, but it's telling people that.
Yeah.
Do you know what I mean? Because in many cases, it's like, hey, study a language and you'll learn the language.
But there you're setting someone up for failure in that example. And I use that just because most people are like, oh god, so much PTSD about learning languages, right? But if you tell them like, hey, here's what the graph looks like. You're going to have this type of experience, and then once you add this new grammatical construction, like you're going to have a bit of a trough of sorrow, don't worry about it, right? You're going to plateau, but you're not actually plateauing. Your mind is adjusting to involve this additional complexity.
And then, and you kind of explain what the stock chart of your brain is going to look like, then people don't freak out and the abandonment rate is going to be less. And so I think with something like meditation, saying you may see benefits sooner, but experience seems to indicate that a switch is flipped around 2 weeks.
So commit to 2 and a half weeks and do less than you think is necessary. Do less than you think you can do. This applies to any new habit as far as I'm concerned. If you think you can do 20 minutes, but that's pushing it into redline territory, do 10.
Do less than you think you can do because that is going to contribute to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm.
Don't bleed the stone. Right? There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic and yada yada yada rugged individual stuff that we find in many parts of the world. This is not a place to like show how much you can do if you're trying to adopt a new behavior.
So with the meditation, I would just, I think it is undervalued how setting expectations can be the missing ingredient.
It's just like, hey, if I were trying to sell one of my friends, which I do often, I would just say, look, much like ketosis or ketogenic diet, it's pass-fail. It's binary. You can't do it 50%. The good news is you're going to know after two and a half weeks in the case of meditation whether this works for you at all or not.
And if it works, it could be pretty dramatic. But if you give up after a week, the whole thing is wasted. So just commit to two and a half.
And you know, if you need to do a bet with a friend or something to set stakes and incentivize yourself so you'll be embarrassed if you stop, like guess what? That's useful, too.
Yeah.
And you talked a lot about that in The 4-Hour Body. Like how do you actually set up incentives so that it's harder to quit? These are very, you know, have your friend take some photos of you in your tighty-whities in unflattering light and that'll get released into the wild if you don't do it for two and a half weeks, or it's like a $100 bet and your buddy, your friend is going to donate that to your most hated political candidate in your name if you don't do it for two and a half weeks. Okay, great.
You're more likely to do it.
Yeah. So good.
I think that's the biggest one, honestly, is just setting expectations. And in the case of the Norwegian 4x4, this is a quirk of science and interpretation of science. So they did do the 6 months and the effects seem to extend out to 5 years.
But that doesn't mean that you need 6 months.
That was just the study design.
So who knows? I would imagine that it's not all or nothing, that it's cumulative, and that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood about today. I said, well, like what do we know and what do we not know, because that was the study design and that's I'm sure since been replicated and people are modeling that, but is it possible that instead of say 4x4, so you know, 16 minutes of this VO2 max training, is it possible that less time would work as long as you hit certain peak levels of lactate?
Mm-hmm. Could a 10-minute, could a five-minute...
Session of weight training work if you hit a certain minimum threshold?
Right. Has anyone done 3 months of the protocol and looked at the effects? Yes or no? Maybe, maybe not. This is the kind of stuff that I also fund through my foundation. Right. These are, I get so tired of kind of chewing on my fingernails wondering about these things that I just fund a lot of science. But there may be a smaller minimum effective dose for that stuff.
That's the business of science, right? Absolutely. Try not to fool yourself. Setting things up so it's very hard for you to fool yourself or the bias.
Yeah. So, I like that. Yeah. Under-set expectations. And do less than you think. That's a great one.
Do less than you think. Absolutely.
Do less than you think is a brilliant, brilliant method. And I think we're so scared of saying that to our friends or people we love because we know everyone wants instant change.
And so because people want instant change, we want to say do this today and it will calm you down. And we know that isn't true because it's going to take a practice and a discipline and it might, but...
Yeah, I mean there are some very fast returns and then other things seem to take more time. I interviewed years ago someone named John Krystal, who I believe is the chair of psychiatry at Yale, or he was at the time, and he did a lot of, along with his colleagues, a lot of the seminal work on ketamine as an antidepressant in humans.
And I think it was 0.5 milligrams per kilogram over X period of time and it showed these amazing effects. But now the 0.5 milligrams per kilogram has become this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners including some scientists who are like, this is the protocol. It's like, well, is it? It's one protocol.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was tested in that way.
But it doesn't mean that is the...
I would say also just on the ketamine front, very risky compound, high likelihood of addiction. Listen to that episode or just do some real deep dive before you ever consider having certainly any ketamine at home, whether that's through Johnson & Johnson esketamine, Spravato, or through a clinic. My recommendation is do not have lozenges or anything like that at home if you're going to pursue that for different applications.
I think it's very interesting for suicidality. It's one of the few things that I've seen if someone is acute, absolutely at risk of hurting themselves, in some cases with an infusion or an injection, a few hours later they go from I'm going to kill myself today to I don't know what I was so upset about.
Yeah. I've seen that multiple times and so have other clinicians. That's one of the few interventions I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario. That's pretty interesting.
So, in any case, I'll stop there for the moment.
So, I love it, man. This is what I wanted. And I was like, you're one of the few guests, you're one of the few people you can truly do this with where I'm just like, Tim, I just want to know what you're fascinated by.
That's what I love about talking to you or like learning from you over the years is that you're just so deeply curious about so many things happening at the same time and they're all just interesting and new and they help you be more curious and ask questions. And I appreciate that because I'm like, otherwise what's the point? Like why are we doing this, you know?
Yeah. People can see why I need to deal with the double-edged sword of OCD.
Yeah. Yeah. No, but I mean...
It's great when you're looking at science, but if you're looking at some mistake you made yesterday and you're thinking about that for 4 days straight, maybe not so helpful, you know.
How did you make that? Was there ever a turn you needed to make?
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's why I did the, you know, antibiotic plus accelerated TMS. Oh, yeah.
What helped you make that turn?
A few things, right? I think there's a degree of pain that especially over long periods of time you want relief from, and for some of us that is just the looping, ruminative mind that is turning on itself. So whether that's... could be any number of things, right?
And in terms of OCD, like my mom's makes me look like a cakewalk with her OCD, but I'm not flipping light switches. I'm not washing my hands, which is not to denigrate any of that stuff. It's like people have different ways of it manifesting. For me, it's all internal.
It's all internal. What if this? I should have said that. Loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, imagining outcomes, etc. Procrastinating on some conversation that I wish had gone a different way.
And it's exhausting. It's really exhausting. And you know, rest in peace, Nolan Williams unfortunately passed away. But I was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because he pioneered at Stanford also, he was a real polymath, a lot of very compelling research related to ibogaine.
So ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from iboga tabernanthe, which is a psychedelic plant. In this case, the Bwiti tribe and others are using the root bark for these very long, super intense Mount Everest of psychedelic-like experiences. It is not to be trifled with. There are some very significant cardiac risks for certain people. You can die taking this, unlike most psychedelics.
And he was the first to really put under a fine scientific lens some of the neuroanatomical changes, specifically in veterans. And so yeah, ibogaine is a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans, and specifically in cases of traumatic brain injury. That's strange. This is not really something you see.
