Safi Bahcall — On Hypnosis, Conquering Insomnia, Incentives, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

[Music] Safi welcome back tanks really glad to be back and I thought we could start with a chapter of your life and a capability that I know nothing about and that is hypnosis oh man where does hypnosis enter the stage and why hypnosis oh man so this is I don't think I've talked about that anywhere in fact I think a lot of people don't know that I studied that and I'm glad this is just between you and me so this is also get out there like oh he's the hypnotizing CEO or something like that so nobody will ever use that phrase on me ever so that's good no I think about well it started with a it started with a Thai food truck okay it's about when I was in grad school maybe 20 years ago I was in at Stanford in the physics but they did really didn't have any good food like anything that was sort of edible around and kind of across a campus there was this Thai food truck which was awesome it did like my mouth is watering still thinking I was just like great Thai food trucks are used to trek across and it was parked right outside the psychology building and so on my you know three or four times a week I would trigger that one day I saw a sign outside a door that said hypnosis class I was like what's that like hypnosis is just like freaky thing with like you wave something and people go you know bark like dogs or something right so what you know is Stanford and cyclists so I went in at some point I just got curious I peeked in and they're all these like really tall big super athletic looking people not what I expected peering into like a door that said if notices it turns out it was like half the Stanford football team so I'm like now I'm getting curious like why is half the Stanford football team studying hypnosis so eventually after probably three or four more walks you know on Thai food lunches I go and I sit down and it's being taught by a physician from the Stanford Medical School who had written one of the classic books on hypnosis and he starts by kind of debunking some of the myths around it that oh is this kind of freaky thing and it's actually a very natural state and there's a very important evolutionary reason we have developed this state to allow ourselves to be hypnotized what what hypnosis is as he explained is in ordinary life there's something called the magic number seven as you sit there or as I sit here or as anybody sits down in your audience and imagines the world around them they can kind of be aware of seven roughly seven different things around them plus or minus two the famous article is the magic number seven plus or minus two hypnosis is really the state of bringing that down to one you just focused on one thing and it turns out everybody practically everybody has the ability to go into a hypnotic trance why why does that exist it was very interesting reason evolutionarily why it makes sense if you are being chased by a tiger and the tiger is you know clawed a little bit of your leg and it's incredibly painful you really only want to be focused on one thing getting away from that damn tiger you don't want to be focused I know look there's a nice bird or what did I have for lunch yesterday or what might be dinner tomorrow or all my leg hurts you just want to be focused for your survival on that one thing and that's what hypnosis is it's just learning how to focus on one thing and in the case of I got interested in it because I had trouble falling asleep I would just have racing thoughts in my brain all the time and I've liked thinking about them for a couple and I wonder of maybe I can work a couple hours well I don't it felt like a couple hours you know so I could say the same thing so ya know if I don't know if it was actually a couple hours or you would feel like a couple hours I would just have these racing thoughts I was like well maybe this is a tool the self hypnosis tool so I started getting curious about it and reading about it and taking this class from this physician I actually forgot his name now but um and why were all these athletes there that state of incredibly heightened focus is the same thing great athletes do so if you are a baseball player and you're are on the you've got your bat in your hand and you're looking at the pitcher everything is disappearing except that one baseball and that baseball will seem as large as a big pumpkin to you that's a state of complete focus or if you're listening to music and I mean this is why hypnosis and trance and action is so familiar because we all go into this state of very heightened focus if you're listening to music or you're deep in a book and when someone has to call your name a couple times and then you just sort of shake your head and snap out of it you were in a trance you were completely focused on just that one thing and that magic number seven plus or minus two in the world around you had just narrowed down to one so what's hypnosis hypnosis is helping someone get into that one and that's what a good if no therapist does is he induces that trance and it's not with like a met so I learned how to do it and then started practicing over you know a year or two with friends and eventually for myself and discovered it's amazing firstly it's completely real it's amazing what you can do with hypnosis oh it probably changed my life it firstly developed some tricks that you know allow me to get to sleep in 30 seconds some fast tricks well okay let's let's let's talk about the sleep and then then I'd love to talk about just induction more broadly but sure so the you can do trance and out there are many different forms of trance induction and the Masters of this are very good at identifying what forms of trance induction work with what with different types of people because there's the ideas oh let's just do X but that's actually not true they're different personality types and different so in and of itself it's kind of a fascinating exercise and then you do it with your set that I was most interested in self hypnosis to actually really just to help me get to sleep so over the years I practiced it with friends on hypnotizing others and I mean really just for curiosity to see what it could do and how real it was and was just it was clearly very real and then on myself was kind of like experimenting on myself on my own mind and guiding your own thought patterns and identifying what little tricks work with your own mind and eventually found a couple tricks that are incredibly effective for the the question that I started with which is how do you go to sleep quickly so there is the the short and easy which works maybe 60 70 percent of the time and there's a sort of guaranteed home run sort of the the big guns takes a little bit longer but it works essentially a hundred percent of the time so the short and easy is I've actually shown it told a couple of people this trick and it's helped them a lot and it's kind of like a for those people who have a lot of racing thoughts it's almost like a jiu-jitsu mover I studied a lot of Aikido so it's like Kido as you use your opponent's energy to achieve what you want so what you do is you close your eyes and whatever comes whatever visuals you see you start to really get curious about them you might it doesn't matter what pattern you see you might see some you might see it the vague images of a chair and you say well what does that chair look like what's its texture is it moving is it floating is it spinning around is there something on it and because your mind is racing that object whatever that object is it might be ashamed of layer it might be just weird images they'll start to change in your mind and you just get curious what's it going to change into next and the reason that sort of like a jujitsu are I couldn't move is all those racing thoughts all those firing neurons get redirected to that object because it gets curious like really what's it gonna change that's so wacky like what is it going to change into and then the object starts to take go from this like Amorphis thing that's very far away to coming clear and clear and closer to your mind him sharpen sharp and the sharper and sharper becomes in focus the more you're getting deep in trance the more you're letting the waking world go by and you just keep asking well what's it gonna change into next I have no idea let's follow it so that works a good fraction of the time and it just calms you it just takes all those racing thoughts and redirects them to that one object and if you find yourself strain your mind straight just redirect it well where's that object or what's it gonna do next let's get really curious and there's so many things to add what colors are it is it sparkling what's its texture is it gonna morph into something oh my god there's my father or there's you know and just watch it and the more you watch it the more it crystallizes the more you're going deep into trance and you leave the waking world behind if you are I'm a little more visual if you have you're more auditory and you tend to hear kind of a dialogue in the back of your head there's trick number two this is a little bit of a weird I actually haven't told anybody this play a game I'm so glad it's just between you and me I asked the audio generator in my brain which is you know whatever audio engineer is popping forth that little audio in our dialogue to focus on generating a random double digit number between one and a hundred so why double digit well single digit is not a really difficult enough task one three four it doesn't really engage your auditory engineer very interrogatory engineer very much double digit is just comp you know just enough of an effort that your audio engineer can't play some irritate and keep you awake dialogue and do that other task it has to pick one or the other and why random well if you just do 23 24 25 sequence it's kind of boring and then your audio engineer can go back to that really irritating voice that was keeping you awake so by asking your audio engineer to do this task of generate a random double digit number and then to keep the audio in the video engineers in your head that generating this noise busy you assign them the task of seeing those numbers so I kind of imagine like a cannon launching these numbers in the sky and watching in 22 76 57 feel like people listen here I don't think I'm crazy but this X it really works it's like all those sort of inner racing thoughts you just take them away from their tasks that they were doing which was keeping you up and you focus I'm on tasks that you would rather have them doing tasks that are actually helping you get to sleep faster Wow I love that I have you found anything else actually before we get to anything else that has helped your sleep besides hypnosis what are some of the more common or more effective induction techniques so if it's not swinging a pendant in front of someone which it could be I'm not saying that isn't an option but what are some of the different induction techniques that apply to different people there's so many different induction techniques there's a relaxation technique let us start by focusing on a part of the body and saying notice this how it's relaxing and then going up the body slowly and notice how that's slowly relaxing as we're talking about it and then I want you to imagine a color it's sort of green maybe and as that color is spreading up your body it's just getting more and more relaxed each part of a button I want you to and then you go and walk up their body and especially around the nape neck muscles or the face muscles and you need to acknowledge if there's anything going on around them you acknowledge that and then bring them back to the relaxation technique then there's the counting down from ten to one as you're walking down you know a set of stairs or as you're floating into a cloud and then there's the I want you to imagine you know pick some place you're very comfortable and as I count from ten to one I want you to notice you know let's say you're on the beach I want you to notice the sand between your toes I want you to notice what's around you and you just get them to that place all of these are different induction techniques and there pretty standard deduction techniques if you look at anything good hypnosis folks what I actually found amazing as some people can do it with just shaking your hand it's actually incredibly really great master therapists at this you interrupt a standard pattern like you go to reach across the shake somebody's hand they're expecting to reach it you pull aside at the last second and you interrupt them and you say drop and they just like something that you shock you do some unexpected shock to an interrupting natural pattern and you just sort of drop them into a trance state I can't do that but I've seen that it's just it's incredibly it's kind of mind-boggling to see and it it really works when you've practiced it a lot and you get good at it you can help people go into the zone where they're totally focused on the ones like a great athlete is tough and I mean like I said that's why I flirt studied because it helps them get into that zone and when they are there they're focused on your voice so the hypnosis part is because at that point you can make suggestions and they and those suggestions become realized in their body what are some of the best applications of hypnosis because there's there are it could be nearly everything there could be a smaller subset it just makes me think of for instance you have platelet-rich plasma injections for instance for various types of soft tissue pathologies and turns out doesn't appear to work uniformly well in different joints even though in the lay person's mind in my mind it's like okay joint is kind of a joints composed of the same stuff turns out in as it relates to outcomes just not to be the case right there there are there are certain types of pathologies that are really well suited to PRP what are some of the better applications or more effective applications of hypnosis now that's a great question I think there is that common view out there that you can use it to solve problems or address pathologies and that is the case I'll talk about them I actually found the the far more interesting use of it and I'll I'll give some examples actually a bigger gun technique I give you the sort of this short cute quick trick techniques for going to sleep quickly if you have a racing mind but I'll give you the bigger gun one which has far broader implications it's essentially about guiding your own thought patterns being in charge of what's going on and your mind taking control of what's happening in your mind and these sort of tools give you the techniques to essentially create the way I think about it is meditation is like a meditations like a volume control on a radio you can Det dial down stuff learning to guide the thought patterns in your mind is a creating a new station your own inner playlist for your mind for whatever you think is it's like creating your inner Pandora so one thing is you just i think meditation is a is a very useful tool but it's just a dialogue dialed up dialed down kind of thing the other one is about creating a playlist so you can use it either to optimize or become more effective or i think the most effective tool is in some ways to create inner peace or inner calm and I'll come back to that you asked about a more something I hear about often which is how to treat certain pathologies and I think what people have found and this is where hypnosis or hypnotherapy kind of morphs with CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy for certain things like fear of heights or fear of or certainly for quitting smoking a really good mastery of no therapist can be incredibly effective for that or in some cases over in eating or basically bad habits it just gives you a new set of tools and techniques for going in and quickly reversing a bad hand for example creating an association you always finish a plate of food why and so I actually did this a few times to the back then why well it turns out the really good hypnotherapist can go in there find out what Association do when you see a plate what's the trigger what happens well it turns out when I was a kid my mom always told me to finish the plate so I always you know finish a plate well let's go reap just lets twist that trigger around now when you see a plate I want you to imagine it half-full and that's the end and let's just replay that video all the time so you you can in bout you know a 30-minute session take control of your brain and just change a trigger so for those kinds of relatively quick fixes hypnotherapy is very effective it's not effective for serious biochemical disorders like depression or schizophrenia that it won't work but for sort of more common sort of ingrained habits or bad habits or things that are very difficult to change and can be very effective the other one which I found even more fascinating is for achieving some level of inner peace and I'll give you an exact weight is fascinating the first few years it's been a long time since I thought about it well let's start with it going to sleep example if those quick tricks don't work for you this kind of approach gives you this sort of bigger gun approach it will give you a sense of what I mean by taking control of your brain so if those tricks don't work here's what you do you personify each of the thought patterns that are racing through your head and here's what I mean do you have something about family that you are stewing about so that's mister family do you have something about finances Oh should I made this investment or should I have not made this investment or I'm running low on this in my bank account or what am I going to do about this check that's coming up or is it something about work all my boss said this to me today let's do about that for 49 minutes you know or you know my significant other said that is he or she really thinking this or to really think let's do about that for another 57 minutes and replay that video day for 57 minutes or my parents this or my kids that let's worry about that problem then cycle back to the finances and cycle back and you give each of them a character give each of them a character whatever you want to name them now you put them around a table and you are the chairman of that board and you say you start by assuming positive intent the character that's tearing about the work you thank them for their thoughts and you say thank you for raising those things because that may be helping me and you may be playing that videotape because you want me to learn a lesson so let's talk about and Ben before I start how many minutes do you think you need I hear you but the reason you're replaying this video in my head is that something happened today and you're replaying that video and over there's a very good reason that you're doing that and I appreciate that because you're watching out for me you want me to learn the lesson from that video so let's do this this is the inner conversation you have with that one character and then you're gonna repeat how many minutes do you need to explain the lesson it is do you think you need 30 minutes well not really thirty about one well one is not enough so then you end up with like let's take two minutes and we're just gonna listen to it you analyze the video so here's what you're trying to tell me it's this lesson I said this stupid thing to my boss I really shouldn't do that in this situation here's what I should do and then you ask that engineer or that character who's playing that video work video over and over and over where you said some dumb thing did I get the lesson right yes is that good yes do you want to keep going or was that enough for tonight do you think we should get some rest now we're done boom sits down then you go to the next the one that's doing about what you happen with your significant other or spouse or whatever lets you and you're playing some stupid video of some stupid thing that you did and shouldn't have done let's go through that how many minutes do you need you converge and agree and you go how many minutes you give that character your full attention you think and you start by thanking it for watching out for you assume positive intent instead of making enemies with your thoughts and trying to suppress them you become partners with them friends with them and now you walk through one by one each of the three or four or five characters that were playing videos or or sounds or audio about stuff that happened that day that you are stewing about and you just walk around the table and as soon as you're done as soon as the last person says okay I'm done you feel this like incredible calm and then you just go to sleep because these guys are done these are the guys who were playing video or audio in your head and they are done and then at the end of that when you've gone around the table you say is there anybody else that feels like they have something they want and you actually strangely like when you oh well you know what there was the email that I got and there's mr. email guy about [ __ ] that I need to do tomorrow that's like replaying oh don't forget this don't forget this and then you negotiate okay let's hear you you let's hear you out how many minutes do you want well two and actually I'd really like you to write this freaking thing down so you don't forget it like okay here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna take my little notepad here and get it open I'm gonna write these things down does that address your concern yes it does do you need to raise it again no I'm done you can go to sleep now and that's it then everybody in your head all those little and of course we're creating these character but it's incredibly empowering to create those character because then you can address them and instead of being in battle with your thoughts you become in partnership with them because they are there for a reason they are doing you good they're trying to watch it the only reason they're replaying those videos in your head or those audios and they're trying to improve you they're trying to say hey idiot learn the freakin lesson from this damn thing that happened today and the reason they were playing it you haven't heard them and then they're just going to repeat until they get acknowledged once they get acknowledged pushed you watch them sit down shut up they're done and it's amazing the first few times you do that it's like magic it's like wait a minute that videos not appearing in my head anymore oh that's why he was doing it he just wanted me to get the freakin lesson and be acknowledged now that I got the lesson it just like completely dissipates anyway that's just that I call that the chairman of the board or the chairman of the mind routine that takes a little bit longer it works 100% of the time so this I love and I want to ask you to dig in a little bit because this I didn't take it enough there you did dig in okay but I want to get your opinion as we experience the background melody of fire sirens and so on in Austin Texas nonetheless the power of making friends with your thoughts and bifurcating or trifer cating or identifying different characters or creating different characters that represent this this psyche that you're contending with whether it's during insomnia or because you are suffering with some type of debilitating conflict within your own mental experience of life and this and I and I'm bringing this up because versions of this have been one of the most valuable things I have incorporated into my own life in the last few years I have not worked with this particular format but whether it's jack Kornfield who's been very very instrumental in helping me to recontextualize anger for instance which was a default of mine for a very long time there are exercises that that he prescribed or visualizations that are kind of close cousins of this but the the common ingredient is viewing these different characters validating them thanking them and that very often ends or at least temporarily interrupts the pattern right and I'm curious what you as a as a very well trained scientist what you the answer doesn't need to be scientific but what does that say about the mind like what does that say about the ego and the mind that sort of splitting it up into these different characters has such tremendous power like why is it so effective well I think our mind is a tool too for survival and all of those that stuff that's going on in your head is about survival it's about enhancing the propagation of the the collection of genes it's your body and so the thoughts that are going on in your mind are about learning lessons from stuff that's happened so that you can improve in the future and improve your probability of surviving what's happened that's different in the last hundred years is the world has gotten more complex there was an email and work job and spouse difficulties and you know Oprah and you know Letterman and Leno and Tim Ferriss you know all these things to let what's happened in the last hundred years that we have not evolved to is just the flood of inputs so our brain is fine if all you have to think about is like running along the Sahara and finding you know a gazelle or whatever to eat let's learn the lesson from yesterday's hunt and apply to tomorrow's hunt and so you have the videos of yesterday's hunt in your brain and you're like okay I got that I'm gonna apply that to tomorrow's hunt fast forward to now and we've got you know 10,000 different inputs during the day and our brain just hasn't evolved and so this is sort of a technique to keep pace with how to keep calm and how to keep centered and how to keep sane when you have such a flood of inputs it's like all right you the brain is trying to improve survival which is a great thank you for that but we're flooded with inputs so you're just flooding with outputs because there's just so many and that creates confusion and the reason it's suboptimal is just because their brain has not kept pace with the the evolution of our body and evolution of our brain has not kept pace with the rapid evolution of technology so it's the technologies outstrip us we have far more input that we are capable of handling and so this is just a technique for trying to keep it under control anger is a great example so here's what I do with Angra I think of Michael Jordan I think of anger as a gift why I reframe it as a gift why I think of a Michael Jordan example every time I get angry Michael Jordan in the later stages of his career I remember reading an interview or quote with him someone said you know how do you think about being kind of an older player he was in his I don't know if he was in it he was in his mid-30s I think and you know surrounded by all these younger players how do you like get up the energy and he says when I'm sitting on the bench before the game I just think they say you are too old they say you are too old they say you are too old they say you are too old and he has that son he created that soundtrack see he's doing the same thing he's dying he's tuning his brain he's creating anger and then by the time the bell rings and he leaps off the bench he is so [ __ ] pissed off he goes any crushes the opponents at age 35 and they're all 10 years younger than him anger is a gift you use it as fuel so when publishers told me this is you know when you know some agents or whatever likely wouldn't even bother returning my phone call and I talked to them at all this makes physics and business in history and I listen and you know they kept doing this really irritating thing of like scheduling something and then like an hour before yeah can we do that two weeks from now and then an hour before can we do that a week from now [ __ ] you I really pissed me off like if you're not interested just say you're not interested and keep like Reese I'm still angry but you know what I use it anger as fuel and I sit down in the morning I think about that [ __ ] you I'm gonna make this the best goddamn book ever because are you [ __ ] you this getting a little gay that's how anger is a gift if I think in the Michael Jordan example whether it's real or not and I'm not really like infinitely upset about that maybe just but you use it as fuel and then it's a gift and you know what I thank all the people who rejected me because they fueled me to make a better story and data and work harder so when I was training every Eve essentially training it's like shooting you know three-point shots endlessly or shooting you know free-throws endlessly it's feel like you imagine like they say you are too old [ __ ] you I'm gonna do a hundred goddamn free-throws alright so I'm going to read you know every sentence of Nabokov and deconstruct everything what he what are those little tick tricks or tips whether it's him or the because [ __ ] you and so anger when someone screws you over it's a gift and your job your trick is to figure out how is it a gift what are they helping you become better at how are they providing you with fuel they've just given you fuel how are you going to use that fuel that's your job it reminds me of also Alexis Ohanian is one of the co-founders have read it and in the early days of reddit they had some meeting with executive at Yahoo and I think it was I'm speculating here but probably a fishing expedition on the part of Yahoo to figure out like how can we clone these guys if they're doing something interesting but it was couched in some type of strategic kind of highfalutin language of import and so they meet with this guy and I assume it was a guy and at some point he says after looking at their numbers he goes oh wow you guys are a rounding her and so Alexis and his team made a huge sign in the office that said you are a rounding error and put it on the wall so they would see it every day yeah but my question to you then I I do want to ask you about depression in a minute because it seemed like hypnosis might not be the best tool for that so we'll come to that later that's why I'm just planting the seed but I have used anger as fuel so I have done that but became my default right so I looked for reasons to get angry to create the fuel to do things how do you not slip into you know becoming the the vessel full of acid that hurts itself more than anything it's very fun so I don't so I use that whenever I feel a little incipient bud of anger and then it just dials down the anger so I there there are two ways to get fuel one is that anger as you say but that in some ways I think that's only useful when you're already angry or you're feeling the incipient really it's a trick for not being consumed by the anger it's for whenever you feel an incipient bud you turn it into an opportunity my real motivation is I have a phrase that I keep in mind when I started I got connected to a guy an author named Richard Preston who wrote if you brought the hot zone which was this huge bestseller and then a number of other great books as a New Yorker writer and we were talking I was really beginning and he just said you know Safi just make something beautiful don't worry about anything else really simple it's great advice and I just like whenever random stuff comes up okay could you do this thing or could you write write that by lining could you do this interviewer could you do blah blah blah or all these distracting things or is this marketing thing going well or is that like you know what just my job is just to make something beautiful don't worry about anything else and really the whole time I was writing I was I kind of had that phrase just make something beautiful don't worry about trying to please anybody don't worry about how this might go and I didn't I just was like let's make something beautiful that I could be proud of at the end and so what motivated me was this kind of kind of that phrase just makes something beautiful and that that's what kept me going yet these search for thus the search for or the recognition of beauty for a lot of reasons in the last handful of years has become a much higher priority it seems to not necessarily be a solve all but it covers a lot of bases and it's it's difficult for me to put into words why that's the case but you're talking about plausible evolutionary explanations for why the ability to fall into a trance state seems to be nearly universal and similarly it's like why why why is the recognition of beauty or even the concept of beauty something that seems to be universal we'd have to get into that that's getting pretty pretty highfalutin but that's that desire to create or recognize beauty has become much more of a driver for me in the last five years I'd say in particular and it's it seems to check off a lot of other boxes so rather than trying to check off 20 different things that I need or solve 20 different problems if I have a compass that is pointing towards creating something of beauty but however you end up recognizing that yourself it seems to really solve a lot for me let's talk about an experience of not being able to see Beauty mentioned depression earlier how do you think about depression what do people get right or wrong about it I don't know if you've suffered from it yourself and in all of your exposure to various types of treatments and methodologies and pharmaceuticals what's out there that actually seems promising you know that that's a great question I learned a lot about depression in the last few years that I knew nothing about you know I'm very fortunate to not have had either depression in the family or experienced clinical depression myself but what happened last few years is I got to know somebody you know closely with depression and realized a lot of wrong things to do that in fact no matter how much I thought I knew you know either was self-aware or they're just so many traps and that one big trap that's incredibly common to people like let's say you and me who really looking to improve how we go about our life in the world let's find the things that you can do that will improve let's look on the bright side let's you know do this little cognitive change and that as it turns out is exactly the wrong thing to do with depression and I remember I think I heard I think it might have been Tony Robbins on your show talk about well here are these you know techniques that I use to help motivate people and do these great that which work phenomenal in that situation you know with these people who are depressed those we should just do the same stuff it's you know some variant have learned to look at the glass as half-full look on the Brightside cetera etc and just turn you know change your mind to focus on the good stuff and that's what I thought you know maybe a couple years ago that is a disaster when you're dealing with someone with depression why it has depression is a biochemical it's essentially a diseased or broken organ it's stuck it's no different than you know you sprained your ankle or you or you have a trouble with your liver you're having trouble with your brain it's a biochemical trouble with your brain and little quick fixes not only don't help they are make it worse why when you suggest to somebody with serious clinical depression hey there's a glass why don't we let's talk about the where it's full let's talk about the water why do you just keep looking and talking about where it's empty everywhere around because I look and I I can take the exact same glass and talk about the water rather than the air so when you say that to someone who is suffering real clinical depression a it invalidates their depression it says what you're telling me is not valid because it's a real quick fix and I should have known this quick fix which takes 15 seconds and I've been [ __ ] around for however long whether it's years or months or weeks so it invalidates them it tells them that they're weakened character it's not a biochemical problem it's not like you know you you sprained your elbow or you have a liver problem you have it you just have a weak personality that's your problem see I have a strong personality because I know how to look at the glasses that full and your problem is you have a weak personality you're kind of inferior it's just the worst possible thing you could say and third they're unable to do that they do have it's like telling someone who is an example I was told reason like telling someone who is infertile you know what just think positive and you'll have a baby how frustrating and irritating is that to hear just think positive you have a physical biochemical problem that has nothing to do with how you're thinking about the world and is not a quick fix it's incredibly irritating for all of those reasons and it just makes you feel worse like not only can you not do these things you've just been invalidated and told you have this inferior weak personality the person that you're talking to totally doesn't understand you they are in a different planet they think it's a simple quick fix and they just don't get that you are stuck in a deep brown soup and cannot there's nothing you can do to get out it's like a disease that takes over your brain and it it just takes over it's the department when you see this stuff or you say this stuff it's the depression talking it's not you and it is really no different than having any other damaged organ it's just it's like with PTSD I did get to spend some time with people with PTSD and much it's a damaged organ and that's okay everybody gets wounds that's totally fine it's totally normal and what you could do for someone with depression is listen and accept and recognize but don't say hey let's look on the bright side that's literally the worst thing you so that's among the things that I've learned is there so what can you do in that case I mean I I certainly as someone who has suffered from very severe depression I mean almost off myself in college so I have some first-hand thoughts as well but what what have you seen to help in those cases have for my professional help you know the last thing you want is your buddies or your friends saying you know here's some quick fix stuff it's just professional help because I mean they're people who spend their entire lives researching whether they're therapists or psychiatrists and for many it is amazing how effective pharmaceuticals are I you know I mean the drug discovery drug development industry I don't take a lot of drugs because you know they may have I just don't there are a lot of things like oh you know what's something aches I'll get over it no big deal I didn't really want to put stuff in my body but I've just seen firsthand like and I know for many people with depression even small doses of the right med literally will Tran because you really do have a bio it's it's a biochemical imbalance it's like you know your show what happened what do you call it when the shoulder falls out of the socket the shoulder dislocation or subluxation right that's what happens with your brain and depressed it's just no amount of talking about you hey just think positive and it'll go back in the socket no you just need somebody to go and you need somebody to put it back in the socket and that's kind of what the med it's a little bit busted and in some cases the right med and the right time and the right dose and the right combination we'll just put that pop that shoulder right back and people be like holy cow all of a sudden the brown is dissipated and I see light everywhere so there are many techniques and many men and they're more in develop men and there's more coming but meds fortunately there's as you probably know there's a handful of different therapeutic categories and so really experienced and very good medical doctor we specializes in this we'll figure out and different ones will work for different people and we don't know why yeah we don't know why clase works for this person but not for that person but Class B works great for so there the different drug categories so you really have to have someone who knows what they're doing and is willing to and there's just very it's not even very little there's no way to know which one is going to work for you but the odds that one of them will work is pretty good or maybe even a combination and then yeah there is some cognitive behavioral stuff that you can do often in combination with the meds and I think the clinical studies have shown that in combination with the meds that can really improve the response rate compared to just baseline meds alone yeah I would I would also reinforce a few things you've said and then add some some color as someone who's spent a lot of time boots on the ground with this both in the undesirable sense of having suffered from it and people in my family have been sort of paralyzed by depression but also having looked at different tools that are available I would say the it is true that you have genetic markers and you can have different software but different output and that there are certainly seem to be sort of genetic factors that predispose you to say bipolar depression and when I when I sequenced my whole genome that was one of two things it was highlighted for me there like we don't have much to say there are only a few things yeah and one is you seem to be from 1 to 10 scale and 11 and predisposition to depression and then Alzheimer's same same I was like okay well looks like I have some research to do and that having been said you know the to draw an analogy if you have flat feet as I do for instance the flat flat feet lack of archers can cause a lot of pain I've had pains in I was a kid much like I've had bouts of depression since I was kid but there are without necessarily changing the flatfoot directly you could use orthotics and an essay I think that there are there are certainly pharmacological interventions that that work for a lot of people I know people have had their lives changed using SSRIs for instance as one class the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors no other people for whom SSRIs have had no effect whatsoever and as an adjunct just for people who are wondering what you might add to it and I do think it's it's in a sense more helpful to have this self directed than someone who is well lecturing you like you said but stoic philosophy for instance and sounds very dry and was thousands of years old but there are some very practical tools within that that have helped me much like you trained yourself to become a better writer to train myself to view the world differently and that's true of say art classes or suddenly you realize that you perceive concepts and when you try to draw a tree you're drawing what you think a tree is rather than what you actually see and I think that stoicism can teach you to look at things differently not saying it's sufficient in and of itself and there are other tools CBT also which is in effect heavily influenced by stoic philosophy and then there are and feel free to call biasa me at any point but they're they're also tools out there more recently explored say like ketamine as as an example and you know one of the theories out there currently is that possibly the reason why ketamine can be so immediately effective with say intravenous administration for someone suffering from acute suicidal ideation very often done in a sequence of five or six infusions sometimes intramuscular I would discourage anyone who looks into Academy and I'm not a doctor I don't play one on the internet but nonetheless it does have an interesting capture profile from an indictable can get hooked on ketamine which is why I wouldn't say take lozenges home but the you know one of the theories is that part of the reason necessaries take a few weeks to produce an effect for some people is that the they're ultimately having an effect on say NMDA or ketamine acts on it more directly ketamine is is also interesting to me along with some other therapies like psilocybin for instance which is being studied at Hopkins for treatment depression and elsewhere which might go through phase 3 trials for that or prospectively alcoholism what I find fascinating about these compounds and for anybody listening don't try to DIY this I mean psilocybin found and say selasa tea mushrooms is Schedule one so it's in the same class as cocaine and heroin so the legal side effects can be substantial and those are beyond debate but the the prospect that you could have say a five or six infusion sequence of ketamine or two to three sessions with psilocybin and have a duration of effect that is months long is really interesting because the half-life of these compounds is let's call it on some cases it's going to be thirty minutes depending on the route of administration let's say ketamine and then let's just call it a four to six hours or less with psilocybin but nonetheless the durability of effect can be on the range of months so I don't want people to the reason I'm saying all this understanding that I'm not a clinical psychologist MD or researcher is that having struggled with depression for so long there can be a hopelessness beyond the depression and so I I think it's at least what I want to do is impart some hope people who are listening as someone who has struggled with very severe depression for decades but not experienced any major depressive episodes in the last four or five years that there are tools available that can help you to sort of put orthotics on your flat feet and it doesn't have to be a self-reinforcing pattern where you're depressed and then you're depressed you're depressed and assume you're a broken toy that can never be fixed and therefore what's the point there's this slippery sort of logically compelling with faulty assumptions process that is really scary that people can end up in so for those people listening I just say that there are tools out there you should see a professional if you're suffering from major depression which I have done in a somewhat unorthodox way but I have and also to explore the tools that will supplement any type of pharmacological intervention or prescription that you would use because there are resources that can help and people yeah I'm talking a lot but now I just want to make two recommendations the one is to take a look at a William Irvine book which is on stoic joy which for many people seems like an oxymoron so William Irvine and his book on stoic joy I think is worth taking a look at there's also a book with a very clear but somewhat cheesy sounding title which is how to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie which I've also found to be very helpful and it's it's not going to change necessarily olace was it could then in some fashion sort of the the composition of your it's not going to change the genetics but it might change how you respond to your predispositions so that it's not genetic determinism you're not doomed to the same response you're just starting with say different attachment points on your like hamstrings and Achilles tendon so you're not going to be Usain Bolt but you can get faster and you can train with subpar attributes to develop capabilities that no one would expect given where you started with your raw materials so the Nagus I I think is very hopeful that you and thank you for sharing all that you know I think it's incredibly hopeful that you suffered from severe depression but have been free of a major episode I mean just that fact alone so I'm curious to what would you if you had to point to one or two things that made a big dip that may have been responsible for turning the corner there what would you point to yep I would point to a few things and not all of which are things you can go get it righted or prescribed by your physician the short the short answer is well I'll give you a few probably these aren't necessarily rank-ordered once we get past pole position but pole position is sufficient supervised administration in my case rent receipt of psychedelics to and this is one theory sort of down regulate activity in the default mode network which is related to rumination and self-reference so III mimimi also seems to be - activity than in the DM n appears to correspond to let's call it time travel so what happens in the future anxiety what happened in the past depression and when that's subdued in some fashion what many people experience and this is one theory for why say psilocybin can have the effect it does on depression or end-of-life anxiety is that it acts as a pattern interrupt where people can gain an observer perspective on their behavior without being stuck like on the edge of the vinyl record that's spinning around at high velocity when you have that perspective it's difficult as you said when someone's like just look at the glass half-full and when you're in the middle of like I'm broken I'm never gonna be better I'm depressed no matter what happens I see I see the glass as half-full and I still think life is shitty what's the point right people can see it they can see the same thing exactly and they can say look I know you are right and yet I can't [ __ ] see it and that's the problem right when that audio engineer as you put it is it just has that one track of self-loathing on repeat or that one track of acute anxiety related to the what if you're not going to hear anything else but when you can zoom out to 30,000 feet see the bigger picture it is very common that people come out somewhat reformat it it's not guaranteed and I know I'm talking about things that are not readily available which is part of the reason why I'm spending so much time and money supporting research related to this because the underground doesn't scale that would be one tool another would be trying to identify coping mechanisms that actually exacerbate the condition you're trying to avoid in other words like what are the if you can't fix depression which is a big mountain to try to climb at once and I don't think it's very productive to say I want to defeat my depression you can you can look at the antecedents of depression or the ingredients right and potential triggers so like when do you tend to get depressed is it when you're tired is it when you go to bed too late and wake up too late and feel behind the 8-ball from the moment you get out of bed and these are personal examples does it correlate to consuming too many stimulants too much caffeine which leads to asleep and so on and then try to compensate for that by consuming more emmalin's does it correlate to social isolation is it inversely correlated to exercise and this is another thing where people who are depressed gonna say yeah no [ __ ] [ __ ] Sherlock like I know these things I just can't deal with them the time to deal with them is in practice when you don't need the safety net right so for me I began to put in place and this is in combination I should say with meditation and the most effective specific meditation tool that I would recommend to people and I have no stake in this even though I gave him a nice quote because I think he deserves it as Sam Harris's app waking up and the reason I recommend that specifically is there is a progression and there is a skill acquisition it isn't just the guided meditation did you or that someone pulls out of a hat at the last minute because I think it might be popular and get shared on social media it's a progression of skill development and the reason I say this that that people should use that app or something like it concurrently with trying to interrupt these antecedents or facilitate the inversely correlated the things that help in other words I'm being fancy is that if you don't have the awareness of your state in the moment it's very hard to catch yourself whereas if you train yourself to think of consciousness as the light that shines upon everything else that you are aware of and this is getting a little abstract in the training this becomes very very understandable as a matter of direct experience and you you begin to separate yourself from the emotion right if I am conscious and I can observe that I am hot well it's it's in fact the observer is separate from the condition so like I am experiencing heat as a way you can reframe that I am angry well let's reframe that and rephrase it since I mean so the our words are the limitations of our world I mean like Vidkun Stein paraphrase the words are the phrasing is very important so you would then get to the part you can say I am experiencing anger rather than I am angry or I am an angry person and if if you feel then the lethargy and so on you can recognize that that's leading you to a place that in the past would be a double espresso a triple espresso at 6:00 p.m. which is going to end up keeping you up okay I'm getting a little all over the place but I inject a thought about a trick that I found that is super useful for that yeah I had this weird thing I do i sometime haven't experienced like those that I know the the the severe clinical depression but especially late at night I will find myself wallowing in a deep brown stew of thoughts and it's I recognize that once one friend of mine said that's what our life is like in there 24/7 it may exist in a few moments for you but that's what what I do is I have a weird trick which I think it was like the mental hashtag where a thought bubbles up and let's say it's self-criticism I just cashed I do hashtag self-criticism like oh and as soon as I put the mental hash I do the little hash tag I'm like oh yeah that's what it is and then like the power of it dissipates yeah or hashtag anxiety like I'm anxious about something coming up I just do have stagnant oh that's what it is and then the power of it dissipates and when I'm stuck maybe in that kind of rumination loop where I'm being critical either of myself or something going around me and I realize why am i doing I'm just like filling mental I do hashtag FTF f filling time by finding fault I don't remember anything unless there's an acronym and Sergey and I just I guess like some critical thought and like I'm getting angry like this thing didn't work out of that person did this and and then I why am I even and then I do hashtag FG FF oh that's what I'm doing I'm just filling empty time because I haven't taken charge of my inner audio engineer or my any other video and they're just playing this loop over and over and then I and the way I visualize it and this comes from a book that probably influenced me more than any other on many of these aspects and I'll tell you what that it's called joyful wisdom and I've probably given that book to more people than I can count and it essentially captures the idea of making friends with your thoughts rather than trying to suppress them making understanding and out the example that's used there the way I think about it is I am on a boat going down a river and the thoughts are like the little trees that I'm watching now oh there's an interesting thought let's hashtag it boom hashtag this thing and then there's another one oh let's hashtag that one and it just I find that personally very calming because it does what you're saying in a very because I'm pretty visual and so it just does that in a very visual way that the thoughts are separate from what you're feeling so one of the ways that helps me just stay calm as the world is going nuts is I'm on that boat and like oh there's that thought going let me see what lesson I can tell you there's something useful I need to act on if not it just disappears behind my head as I move along the river the wonderful example that's used in the beginning of that book it's by a Buddhist monk I think of it I can't pronounce the name because I you know the last it's something broche being poke you a little like yeah I mean a little bit no chef X rush yeah and it's a Buddhist monk who I think got labeled like the happiest man and the planet or something but he opens with a story there's also a very helpful lesson on death that I found which we can utilize from one but he opens with this story of villagers who are going between their village needs to do an annual trip between their village and some distant neighbouring village and they have to go through a forest each time and every time they've been doing they've been doing it for years they get attacked by these bandits and it's like this some horrible thing and they get robbed and so forth and they go to the visible and then coming back they get it by you know a different group of bandits and and you know they're fighting and the bandits loot you know get you know injured or lose some lives and then they get and then one day one of the villagers says as the bandits come and approach the villager walks out and he says you know I hang on I got a suggestion for you instead of us fighting each time why don't we make it come to an arrangement we'll give you 10% of everything we have or whatever the number is and you protect us as we make this journey and all of a sudden they achieve the journey and peace it's better for the bandits it's better for the villagers the bandits don't have to lose any lives they don't have to take any risk they get a steady income and so that's the metaphor for your thoughts instead of fighting them and trying to suppress them how can you just turn that perspective around and say oh thank you for being here let's see how what you're doing is really helpful and let's work together you're trying to have a bet if it's something that said don't do this thank you for being there you're trying to protect me let's say you have two thoughts race you know one side is the you know mr. red and the other side is the mr. green rest register don't do that it's very risky very mr. greens like go for no risk no no pain no gain and they're kind of at war sit them down around the table let's hear you out let's hear can you guys let's come to an agreement you're absolutely right you're trying to protect me you right and you are trying to say listen if you don't stretch a little bit you'll never grow both their great points let's talk this through and let's come to an agreement and you know what by doing that I mean that kind of inner dialogue validating starting pursuing positive again thanking them for what they're trying to do for you you may come up with some brilliant let's say it's a mr. Redd and mr. green about making some let's say it's personal life going ahead with this significant other mr. Redd says no no no I don't want to open up and be vulnerable mr. green is like absolutely that's the only way forward and then you just don't know what to do you're being pulled the two sides let's sit down is there you might come up with some staged approach listen we're both sides agree and then guess what happens inner peace yeah you're calm so that's the benefit of this kind of joyful wisdom approach through this inner dialogue or personifying these characters why it helps you achieve an inner peace I can often see that on people's faces so when I see somebody you know where their face is sort of at very tense and they're saying one thing but their facial expression is indicating something else you know what I'm talking about yo and there's clearly an anxiety there that's not resolved they have a mr. ed and a mr. green or a mrs. read and mr. green inside and they haven't sat them down and talked about it so while they're talking to you mr. red is saying one thing and that's coming out the mouth and mr. green is saying something else and that's on the face or the other way around and you're just getting two different messages and that's why they have all this inner anxiety and stress and so people who look calm who project calm tend to be the ones that have already made peace between the two they tend to go inside and look at what are their motivating forces what are those characters of personally what are their positive intents they're both trying to get to the same goal which is a better life for you better more safe secure help your life for you ultimately it's the same goal the same positive intent two different paths yeah and once you sit down you just have a simple negotiation your valid your valid let's see if we can find a great compromise and what happens when it's done inner peace yeah this this also reminds me of a few tools people can look into the joyful wisdom seems to be or at least have a component of this that's very similar there's something called ifs I was introduced to by Michael and any MIT Hoffer who are involved with many different things experienced therapists and Michael's also an MD used to work in the ER among other places but is involved with phase three studies involving MDMA for PTSD and it is mdma-assisted psychotherapy and the the two are important to keep in mind together right because you might find a magic bullet out there but very often it's the context that is wrapped around that that is is critical to the outcomes that you see which can be really remarkable and one of the tools i fsj believer is internal family systems it's a bit of a confusing name but the gist of it which people can look into is that you are examining and interacting with and making peace with through validating and thinking and many other things the different components of your psyche and viewing many of them as protectors right so the label is protectors and it is it is incredible what you can see when someone and I'll personalize it when I took that approach with say anger because I would get angry and then I would get angry at the fact that I was angry or I would be depressed and I think for a lot of people who are depressed and I could speak for myself it's it's not the feeling shitty and seeing darkness everywhere or highlighting the negative that is the scary part like you know ER was ER but you're kind of made it through it's the fear that it will never change that no matter how good things get no matter which partner you're with no matter how much money you have you're always going to simply look at the negative and that this is something that you cannot escape and I would just say that to reiterate something I mentioned earlier for people wondering is that I had that belief I was no psycho this is how it works I'm not hardwired to be happy but maybe I can be really good at competition and like feel worthy by creating some type of value and achieving a lot of things that's just the hand I've been dealt so I'll play the hand to the best of my abilities but I'm not hardwired for this thing that other people refer to as like happiness contentedness sadly just didn't get it if you look at my family you see other examples of the same that proved to be incorrect you can change and you mentioned a few things ifs I want to mention two more and I know we're giving people a lot of books and what I would recommend is just download them all on Kindle read the first two chapters of each one and then whichever one grabs you just kind of roll with that but to others I want to mention one is radical acceptance by Tara brach which as the title might indicate is cut from the same cloth as a lot of what we're talking about it's very well written and Tara has been on the podcast and we've spoken about some of the content of the book radical acceptance was recommended to me again it might come off as a really cheesy title fantastic book recommended to me by a PhD in neuroscience who is one of the most skeptical women and I say that as a compliment I've ever met Randi she is allergic to anything a remotely hand wavy or squishy and this book had a huge impact on her and that is how it found its way to me the other is a book called awareness which came to me not too long ago because he had another guest on the podcast Peter Mallick who's involved in finance mentioned it in passing and said this book you generally gives me at least two weeks of deep-felt in her piece something along those lines and then we moved on to other topics and I made a note of it and because it seems so odd as a passing comment and awareness is written by Anthony de Mello de mal ello and and the the subtitle differs whether it's paperback or Kindle it's very confusing but the one I like is something along the lines of the perils and opportunities of reality Jai love is this as a as a subtitle and that book also helps you to separate your responses and emotions which are often the same thing two external factors from your identity and it's it's been truly stunning to see the before and after on something people who are highly anxious or prone to depression after reading this book awareness does that include you that does include me yeah I read this book this is one of the few books it goes so far beyond pathologies like if you want if you think you're a high functioning normal ie probably neurotic like a high-functioning neurotic or normal and you want to get to super high functioning I would also recommend this book awareness I think it's it's a it's a huge competitive slash unfair slash worthwhile advantage even if the only person you're competing against is the lesser version of yourself do you feel like you experience joy now yes and that wasn't the case a few years ago I did not have access at there were moments of joy I don't to make it seem like I was just this dull gray you know pain of like muddy glass at all times that's not that's not the case and also I should say now I still have hard days but everyone has hard days I feel like my hard days are closer to normal hard days then like you know what I wonder what it would be like to like jump off this balcony right now like would that be easier I'm not kidding like people have these thoughts and it's like you know what like Here I am it's a beautiful day I don't know like and nonetheless I'm seeing the negative what's the point right like these are the types of questions I asked myself for decades just didn't act on any of them came very close in college like I mentioned but didn't actually get to the finish line with that now my default calibration is much higher like the baseline of contentedness is much higher I do think the ware of happiness is another ingredient that I didn't mention but like the people think of the how and the why what should I do who should I spend time with the wear of peace or contentedness is is an important way do you mean by where the where meaning the environmental factors right so we're sitting here right now in Austin and it is a beautiful sunny day turns out it's sunny here most of the time I was in the Bay Area for 18 years prior to that the East Coast New England where you get a lot of gray and a lot of rain and a lot of darkness that was not helpful for me and there are many ways that I could try to contort myself or go through months of mental gymnastics which I did and can to increase my baseline or I can just spend more time somewhere it's sunny and exercises another thing that has has become much more consistent I always did my exercise at night typically or in the evening I have since completely inverted that and I tend to do my exercise first thing in the morning and I want more people with the the many many different effects and the cascade of effects that exercise can have on the brain which is not limited to aerobic exercise although there's a book called spark that looks at brain derived neurotrophic factor and all sorts of things that are related to exercise weightlifting resistance exercise can provoke very similar beneficial responses and actually adaptations over time but yes so my default is much higher now if people want to see ifs in action although it's it's in Hebrew and not in English there is a movie that I just helped put out just is a documentary I don't make a cent I'm doing it for free because I think it needs to be seen it's just sitting on a shelf after being broadcast once on television overseas which is called trip of compassion so if people want to take a look at how therapists work with someone in this case under the influence of MDMA but it can still be powerful by itself at interacting with the various pieces of themselves maybe the emotions they haven't had access to as well then trip of compassion if you just go to Tim da blog for slash trip you can take a look take a look at that or at least watch the trailer I will warn you in advance it's very intense I mean you're seeing actual session footage of people who have suffered extreme trauma but I think the payoff is worth it but yeah I I never in a million years Safi thought I would be where I am now that's I mean that in self is incredibly helpful yeah yeah in and of itself it's just I think anyone suffering from severe depression just just knowing that is incredibly helpful and also realizing and I know we're doing what we do best which is digressing all over the place but it's also realizing that just as genetics are inherited so are patterns of thought and behavior I think this is really important and it means like you run into people who say like oh yeah my whole family is big-boned and fats like why are your pets fat them right it's like there are behaviors and there are thought patterns and it's not to in any way invalidate the software predisposition that you can come out of the box with that exists but for many of us certainly I'll speak for myself you know the the thoughts that I have in my head are not necessarily my thoughts right like the scripts that I'm running the audio engineers playlist that has been in I'll speak to the listener too in your head for years or decades maybe the playlist that your mom gave you your dad gave you your uncle gave you your teachers gave you your friends gave you and you have the ability to edit that script I think that's the most important thing you thought is who's in charge of your mind yeah you know what your if it's you know as you say if that inner audio engineer playing that tape or the or the any a video engineer showing that movie is sharing the movie because they're doing it for one of two reasons if you're not in charge they're doing it of one of two reasons one as you say you got it from your mom or your dad or your friend or whatever and you just didn't realize that that's a wake up call it's like oh that inner and engineer is just following my mom's orders well let's see who actually in charge of my brain I am how about I switch to a different station or I create my own pinned or a playlist how about that sure no problem yeah you know why they're playing that video or that tape because you didn't give them anything better to do it's really easy to give them something better to do you know a simple trick to start with that is let's say you're you know we were playing some video just close your eyes and watch that video and switch it to black and white yeah like whoa I didn't know I could do that but guess what the emotional power is much less and then take that video if it's right here in front of your face and zoom it back like it's on a TV set that's getting farther and farther away play the same video guess what much less emotional impact look I didn't know I could do that but guess what you can't you know why who's in charge of your brain you those audio engineers those video engineers they all report to you you know why they're showing that movie that's because you didn't tell them anything to do they're like well it's you know it's like 11:30 I got a you know 40 minutes to kill until lunch let me just replay the same movie for 40 minutes where I barked on my boss I'm just gonna replay that over and over and over why because you didn't give that video engineer any other task yeah you're in charge of your brain take control the audio the video yeah and then maybe as we said they're different characters and they're each you know thank them they're just idling you know until you start to take control and realize that you're in charge and you can play some movie any way you want you can turn it upside down you can make it black away you can make it color I personally found very powerful is to take something and just move it behind my head mmm then I'm like oh okay it's gone yeah like that I haven't I haven't tried that and it's very you know here's a NASA nor any things to do this exercise all the time is you interview ask people who are on time just just a punch punch punctual we're on time punctual don't you close your eyes and imagine your calendar closer the rain and just take your hands and kind of move in empty space like where do you roughly see your calendar for today and the people who are really punctual tends to be their calendars like happens to be like right in front of their head do to do to do to do now you ask the same question for your friends or people who tend to be late where's your calendar for the day oh it's over here for on the left what's over here in front of your face well oh you know what I need to do you know you might grocery list or this other thing or my cat or whatever but my calendar is farther on the left and they're just not really the people who are putting the calendar is right there in front of that and in a weird way optimistic people well tell me how you see the next day well it's on a slope going up and the a week from now well it's up over there depressed people more like oh it's down it's going to the ground it's very fascinating how where you put things visually especially if you're a visual person in effect people who live on the past just some what's in front of their face oh well what I did last year we're always talking about their past what's in front of their face this is good to like last year last month whatever people were very I remember asking my dad one time when I got into this he never grew up in Shreveport Louisiana right and nothing none of us would ever hear a peep about growing up the south soon we grew up in Princeton New Jersey and I was educated a very kind of elite scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Shreveport like never came up and I asked him Oh dad where do you think about when I close your eyes it was down at his feet very often people like for me past the sort of to the left center and what I need to do today and tomorrow and over the next year kind of in the middle and future is sort of off there up to the right but for him and so it's who's putting it there as you say it's the default thought pattern do you have to do the default I don't know and you're in charge if you're always late you know just try experimenting with putting the calendar right directly in front of your eyes when you close and just that's training like riding a bike you have to do it a bunch of times until it becomes engrained and cemented and automatic but those are the kinds of things that happen when you realize that nobody else is in control of your brain with the caveat that there are certain biochemical things you know that that doesn't help but the things that you can control those are the things whether you're in you audio engineer etcetera yeah the biochemical stuff and I feel free to slap me down actually I'll come to the biochemical in a second I have a theory that I'd love to allow you the opportunity to shoot down related to that but but first I wanted to say the note another tool that really helped me that has made a very significant difference and actually it does come from Tony Robbins which is related to how you how you change your thinking so you recognize you're in charge of your thing how do you change your thinking and one of the approaches that I and many of my friends found really really effective is from Tony and it's identifying it your default question like your primary question that you ask yourself and for depressed people anxious people it is often something very disabling and it's a leading question like what's wrong with you right exactly that assumes something is wrong with you exactly and if that's your search function for your brain your brain is going to come up with answers exactly what's wrong with me what's wrong with me that was my primary question for decades how could you not end up depressed if that's your default question I mean on some level not saying there isn't a biochemical component but it is certainly going to grease the wheels for negative thought patterns that's what your inner audio engineer is playing over know if that's right if that's if that's your you yell across the room to your audio engineer you're like hey what's wrong with maybe like I coming right up and then like there goes the playlist and becoming aware and thinking about your primary question your default question that you ask and then deciding on a replacement Rhines and you you do this I think naturally maybe you came to use it more through these various books and resources but the when you're angry right like what can I use this as fuel for and so a replacement default question that you could use something like what can I learn from this as a witch also deep personalizes the situation wait doesn't doesn't assume that you are the primary actor creating all of the problems which is not at odds with recognizing that you're in charge of your thoughts yeah I was give you that's a great great example that I would say they're two different kinds of anger like when you get rejected whether it's you losing a sport or someone's telling you you're too old and you can't play or you that's you know an interesting fuel you can use if you choose to use that I actually for a long long time I think since I was a teenager because of one specific anecdote have used I have never thought about in this language but anger to trigger a question that immediately diffused the anger and I'll give you the example so I was with a friend of mine who we grew up playing competitive tennis and in the juniors and my friend we were a few years older then probably you know decade older and we were sitting around and she was talking about and she had been a star she'd been right we were both ranked and she but she was you know she'd done really really well and had really stopped and it just you know not done any exercise and it clearly you know you could sort of see that and I remember we were sitting around catching up and she was telling me with growing anger about her cousins who would get in a car to drive two blocks to mail a letter they were so lazy and it just really drove her angry and she was like beside herself of course she was like lying sprawled out on the couch and like was getting help to just like reach over for a box of chocolates or whatever it took for it and I thought okay now if I had cousins that would get in their car too two blocks to me a little letter rather than walk the two blocks would it make me would it be curious sure but would it make me angry no and ice its kind of started to realize that a different cut triggered anger is what is this anger say about me how does this anger identify maybe something in me that's kind of an unresolved issue mm-hmm and so probably since then since I was a teenager every time I research I get angry in this way in an something that didn't seem rational piss me off somebody always I would say immediately what is it in them that's triggering something about me that I'm not comfortable with and it doesn't mean to be something that you're doing now I'll give you an example when a friend of mine we were sitting in a bar and we saw somebody going who a mutual friend of ours who had said he was going to quit smoking go outside to have a cigarette I said that you know and this was my friend had tried and had actually given up smoking and he said yet so pisses me off that this guy said he quit and he broke it and he went back and it just I can't what did you know what a [ __ ] really what you just pisses and I'm I had the exact same reaction okay he he tried to quit and he failed and now he's breaking his commitment but I'm not angry about that why is why are you angry I didn't ask him that's more inner like yeah why is he angry and what I started to realize is not only an interesting trigger question that completely diffused the anger instantly for me but it's also really interesting mirror whoever you're talking to if they seem to be getting almost irrationally angry about something in somebody else I set that completely aside and say when is that tell me about this person that they're getting what is it about their own inner struggles so I saw that in myself I remember when I was a grad student and there was some guy who was a you know being accused or you know another grad student of like sucking up to the professors too much and whenever I would see him it just would really piss me off and then I had that same figure why is that bothering me is that wouldn't bother Joe Schmoe but why is it so bothering me and I'm like Oh am I worried that I'm speaking because I was very friendly with a couple of really senior professors who you're a generation or two older than me am I worried that I'm like acting different to them than I am to my friends because I wouldn't like that and immediately all of my anger towards that other fellow grad student just completely dissipated and people often ask me like you don't seem to get angry about anything but firstly that's not your like when the Xerox machine breaks I get frickin angry some customer so aside from the Xerox machine of the printer breaking at the last minute I really don't get angry and that's entirely attributed to this trigger question I feel the bud of anger I'm like oh there's something about me here hmm that it's a mirror and I may have solved the problem or not solved the problem or I solved it years ago like the quitting smoking thing the guy who did a vs2 but let me and then all of my anger dissipates mm-hmm you should I'm gonna pick up joyful wisdom I would love to hear your thoughts on this book awareness oh yeah because this is same writing these down yeah it's great the awareness really helped me with exactly the type of reframing that you're talking about it's slightly different though a little more conceptual I think the trigger question is more actionable but as a as a background sort of conceptual framework that is really helpful it's probably very fancy way to put it but in brief in awareness one of the discussions is it centers on and there it's really a transcription edited transcription of a number of short lectures very easy to read very fun actually the guy's really hilarious and focuses a lot on cognitive bias is and confirmation bias although it's not called anything super fancy and a lot of looking at acute responses like anger to situations come to entitlement like what do you feel this is another angle right it's not exactly the same but it's like what do you feel entitled to receive right now or like what do you expect like how should the other person behave and is that completely unreasonable right because you can't control other people's responses and it's it's a way to kind of pick apart the like the weaknesses and the scaffolding that is holding up whatever emotion is about to drive you crazy that comes straight to the simp the happiness equation the ultimate Avenue is very simple mathematical happiness equals reality - expectations yeah so if you're very frustrated with somebody is it because of the reality or is it because of the expectations yeah and if you lower your expectations you can turn that into a positive so I'm gonna I'm gonna give us a 90-degree turn here before can I yes just before you because it was so cool and so interesting the MDMA stuff in many ways the MDMA is a loon shot it's something that people have dismissed as naughty or crazy that it could actually help therapy but actually may turn out to be incredibly important so can I tell you another loon shot for depression yes please I'm kind of interested in that I've seen some remark now it's it might be in a similar stage where there's a lot of very good very interesting patient data actually in this particular case it has been through phase 3 trials in a certain form so this is something called our TMS which is transcranial magnetic stimulation and what it has in common is that it has this kind of vibe to it that sounds kooky or sounds nutty or Jack Nicholson and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest right yeah but so it's kind of a loon shot as well especially one flew over the cuckoo's not salute chat but it is actually based on a very very interesting observation as it turns out it has been through phase three trials and it is approved and I spent exit quite a while learning about it for no reason other than I just found it a fascinating story of a loon shot and a completely neglected idea and in this case I actually ended up talking a bunch of my psychiatrist friends and there's a Center in Boston where I live that's actually one of the world centers for it and so I end up talking creating some collaborations there with a group that I had met that was doing a really novel twist on in California but the bottom line is this in psychiatry today there's this focus on what you might call if you're a physicist you would call it position space so I'll explain what I mean and I'll explain why this different approach is what something in physics we call duality which is two very different ways of looking at the same problem one way helps you solve it one way doesn't and so in psychiatry and TMS I'll well first I'll start with what people do today people do today MRIs to diagnose brain problems and MRIs are you know trying to find magnetic resonance really where in the brain certain activities seem to be concentrated so that is what you might call position space where in the position inside your brain or certain activities concentrated but that's not what we did that's a relative relatively new in the sense of you know a couple decades but if you fast if you go back even more to let's say the nineteen late 1930s 1940s there was a field of study with EEG s looking at the frequency the frequencies that are issued by the brain so in physics you have position space and you have frequency space and they're two different ways of looking at the same problem they're equivalent one lets you solve problems easier certain problems easier the other doesn't and then for different problems it reverses so aegs it turns out it was discovered lieblick the brain has a blinking rate it's roughly the average in the population in the u.s. is roughly ten Hertz so ten times a second that became a very interesting field of study for about ten or twenty years and then it kind of dropped off it was it's a very inexpensive tool MRI was a fancy or more expensive tool and because if you want a big grant and want to be a big professor at a big Ivy League school you want to use the latest most expensive one that generates these fancy color images that other people can't do unless they have big grants like you Iggy's everybody can do that's why I find it sort of sort of it's a little bit like MDMA because it's got this sort of reputation and I know so as it turns out with depression if you measure people's brains they're blinking rate may be a little bit off and what TMS does there's really interesting physics about it which actually one of the reasons I got interested of how it works essentially it creates it's an oscillating magnetic field there's no surgery there's no nothing it's just it's like a shower what do you call it the showerhead that they put next to your skull and it just has an oscillating magnetic field that kind of locks in the rate and sort of nudges as if your default blinking rate is ten Hertz it's supposed to be ten Hertz and you're blinking at nine point five Hertz in some parts it just sort of nudges you back closer to ten Hertz so as it turns out that was approved that was through phase three trials and got approved by the FDA about five or ten years ago I don't remember in a certain format and technique and actually turns out to work roughly about the same as meds not a much better response rate on a much worse response rate depending on the study in the population roughly thirty percent response rate in both different side effects you know you don't have the side effects of taking a drug systemically but the side-effects of TMS you're not doing any surgery you're not taking a drug you're essentially it's like a refrigerator that's a little broke and you're sort of kicking the refrigerator and getting it kicking it back into gear and the side effects are well you can read about them but they're much much less and it was approved and it's kind of fascinating but the younger psychiatrists who are trying to do this recognize that this is a very effective tool what's nice is that when you treat any therapy you you want a tool belt so you want a lot of different tools because you never know what will work with a different person so this one has shown some efficacy and drug resistant depression so that makes it a very useful tool to have on the tool belt younger psychiatrists are really understand the data and understand that its effects safe and effective and approved by the FDA and this technique that was approved protocol that was approved older psychiatrists much more resistant but both of them are not using it as much as it could be because of the Jack Nicholson effect you just say oh I'm is a pin your brain and they think of like a tongue is going to be hanging out you're gonna be drooling and and your eyeball is going to be rolling right and so it's a little hard to get over but they recognize that it's as effective or more and then recently what's so fascinating is there is a group or a few groups that have recognized although the response rate is pretty good in some cases it works phenomenally well he's at the but you do the TMS session you sort of kick the refrigerator in oh the refrigerator Sona starts working oh I was blinking a 9.5 should have been a 10 you nudge him a little bit and boom now he's at 10 and he's walking off happy in some cases you get that in some cases you get nothing kind of like the drugs but then one group realizes it put measured probes in different part of the brain and realized what's fascinating is you can tease out that there's an average blinking rate in the brain but it's not the same for everybody so you're blinking rate my average default blinking rate that you were born where that might be eleven point two Hertz and mine might be eight point seven Hertz and the next guy might be nine point three Hertz it is true when you take the population mean it is roughly ten here's the weird thing the FDA protocol that was approved in phase three is treat everybody at ten that's weird if your thing is if you're at eleven point two and I meant blinking at eight point seven I'm a little why should i zap you at ten why should I be nudging you to ten wouldn't that be the case it would probably have no effect on you and it would only really have effect on the small people who so there's a group that's realized that and is now doing what's called individualized all for frequency TMS and is seeing some really pretty spectacular results and even more than that they start to look at different regions of the brain and they see oh wait a minute it's not like your whole brain is brain just your front left hmm so if I take put 11 you know let's say 15 probes around your head you know 12 of them are right at let's see you know Tim your default blinking rate is 11 point 2 then 12 out of the 15 are at 11 point 2 and these three here just they're blinking at eight point seven so what we do is we take the shower head and we stick it only there and we nudges back up to 11 now they're all in alignment the interesting thing is when you take a patient and some of these groups have been able to do that and just do the probe in different regions of the brain without even talking the patient's some of these physicians have been able to say well I think this person is depressed because it's a little too low and the frontal cortex or I think this person's problem is mania because it's actually then turns out to be a little too high or manic-depressive because it's high here and low there so let's zap here and zap there and some of those groups have seen remarkable results for example with PTSD these PTSD is a lot like manic depression and when PTSD patients come in it's like all over the map they've suffered some brain trauma and you know this region's low this regions high yeah they're out of control you know somebody drops as one guy no describe that somebody drops a milk how he's shopping for groceries someone drops a milk carton and he's like ready to fight and like pulling out a gun because he's like still mentally on the battlefield and he's like that's the main and then other times can't get out of bed he's so depressed sometimes don't sleep and I remember talking to one guy who hadn't been able to sleep for more than three hours at a stretch for maybe seven years his family had left them and he would written a suicide date on a calendar and he went and this was being a clinical trial in Sandy a one of the VA s and thus in San Diego area a naval base in the bay sir and he was like a last resort case and went in and got the this treatment this investor individualized TMS treatment family moved back in suit-and-tie literally when he got back from the first it sounds like one of these magic bullet things but you know it's really when you talked to these it is in clinical trials the the one protocol is already being polluted we're really talking about a variant protocol Gate is kind of amazing when you talk to these people and their lives for like literally I had a date on the calendar marked for suicide and now I have it and my family had left me a long time ago I hadn't slept more than three hours and seven years since I returned from Iraq and I got back home from the first session I slept 11 hours yeah it's it's just amazing wild so what we're talking about is loon shots yeah moon shots of the future are they proven not quite yet are they in clinical trials absolutely should we wait until the clinical trials out that'll be defend I'm sorry again I'm talking for a variant of an established protocol for an established therapy so if you're interested in TMS you speak with a psychiatrist preferably the younger ones are all over what I've actually there was a meta-study surveying acceptance or interest in TMS as a therapy among psychiatrist and that study identified an age difference that the older ones were less into it and the younger ones were all over it so if you are intrigued by this there are these as treatment centers kind of major cities all over identify a psychiatrist speak with your psychiatrist about it talking learn about the pros and cons see if it's something for you it's just another tool in the toolkit maybe it works maybe it doesn't you could also add what maybe I'm trying to think if if the protocol for the individualized studies are published yeah there they are in clinical trials you know kind of phase I think there and I don't think that you had in Phase three I think there's a bunch of faith and it's interesting who's sponsoring them firstly the army there are no statements by a number of sort of medical that I've seen by medical leaders in the army that it's an incredibly important potential therapy for them so they're sponsoring clinical trials but also in I have heard about insurance companies because for example the one I talked to a couple of vets who had done this therapy and they were on so many meds they went completely after the therapy you do maybe a couple sessions a week for four or six weeks eight weeks and maybe there's follow-up they went completely off meds completed off opiates and it's very tough to get off those oh for sure and that's why the insurance companies are sponsoring because it's relatively low-cost and can get you off meds and off hospitalization yeah this so more to come on this I'm kind of excited about that more to come clinical studies in the next couple of years I'm super excited about TMS CCS also pretty interesting for other applications but the do you know which team is doing the research on the individualized we could put it in the show notes and figure it out also I'll send you an email after an off get it we'll put it in the show notes for people so there are tools there are these our tools being researched there it's another reason to be in addition to you know Tim Ferriss sitting here living proof they experience joy and turn your life around and that's one cause for hope and the second one is there's a growing toolkit of things that can help and if the first one the the great thing about that is it's different tools in that toolkit that will work for different people and the bigger that toolkit the more likely it is that something will work for you and it's just that toolkit is just being added to and added to and added to and as we sit here and the since I did to it earlier and I'm gonna do the the right hand turn after I mentioned this but I said I was going to give you the shot to shoot something down but this is this is not based on any type of literature review whatsoever but my theory that I have and I'm sure there are other people with with a similar view but is that there may be bi-directional causality with biochemical imbalance associated or yeah let's call it biochemical imbalance associated or pathological to the neuro Tomica activity and the thinking that is assumed to be a byproduct of that and to put it may be more cleanly and again this is not open shut case but almost everyone knows at least a handful of people who are on antidepressants and still depressed that could be because they developed tolerance it could be for many many different reasons but if if I were to be tasked as a sadistic experimenter to create some type of biochemical change in the brain let's just say high levels of cortisol that would then affect sleep that would then affect maybe other hormones that would create a a measurable pathology and biomarkers I think that could be done like you could you could you could you could impose stresses on people that might simulate some of the environments and say warfare like whistling of bombs and mortars and that would potentially create a state of depression or anxiety or feeling tired and wired which is when people try to go to sleep but instead of getting a spike of cortisol in the morning which would sort of liberate glycogen and increase blood glucose they get it at night and you can measure that with all sorts of devices if you're interested so the reason I'm bringing this up is that I when I've observed myself and also family members who have used pharmaceuticals different types of drugs to address the manifestations of the depression that I tend to think that not only can the imbalances help produce the thoughts and just make it easier but that the thoughts can also in some way affect the the biochemistry itself and so I just I curiously if you if you have any thoughts on sort of the plausibility of it being bi-directional cuz it just it seems I feel like if I if I were to like Tim we're gonna give you ten million dollars if you can manufacture measurable imbalances but do it by like forcing someone to visualize a past traumatic event or what could happen to their kids or fill in the blank I feel like I feel like that I would take that offer alright I think has been demonstrated so the idea is that biochemistry can influence thought patterns but also the other way around thought patterns can influence biochemistry and I think that's been proven you read about for example these now monk I actually forgot the guy's name I think he actually started as a physicist who suffered from some depression and had medical problems and psychological issues psychological disorders but eventually trained his mind through a bunch of the meditation and some of the techniques that are used and they actually did a whole series of studies there's actually a whole literature now of studying the properties the mental properties of these Buddhist monks who have practiced deep meditation and you see clear biochemical changes so it clearly goes both ways and we know that from so many system in the body it's almost never one way it very often almost every system in the body there's a feedback loop so thought patterns influence biochemistry influence thought patterns and so absolutely I agree that there is something there and there something very similar we were talking about how they're sort of nudges or you get stuck and the way I think the reason it makes so much sense from a physics perspective and the way I actually mentioned duality looking at the world from two different so in physics it's very common to look at the simplest duality is position space and frequency space there are a lot of problems you can solve by looking at position hey where's some you know a electrochemical potential in space and how do you find the minimum of that and that's where you'll find your particle is located you know I think that this is sort of simplifying a lot you solve that problem in position space but you can look at it in frequency space and it's exactly the same problem there's a simple mathematical transformation you don't even need to know what those details are all you need to know is that it's just looking through a blue lens or a red lens at the same world the world is exactly the same but you can just see different things there's no way to understand the properties of a metal why metals conduct electricity in position space and I'll get to exactly what this means about the brain no way to understand a metal it turns out when you'd make the transformation frequency so it's almost easy to solve the brain fMRI is position space where is something broken in the brain EE G's are frequency space what are the frequencies that my brain are firing at and I think one of the things that's being missed or often not talked about enough in even academic psychiatry is why are we so focused on fMRI and position space let's go but I know EEG is an old technology but maybe let's see if we can at least look at the problem and may there's something there maybe these frequencies are a little bit off and maybe there's something to looking at the same problem in both ways and when you look in position in frequency space in physics it is very common that when you have something that's called a complex system which means there's just a lot of interactions especially as you just said they go both ways where people end up there's something called an egg crate model and if you imagine where you end up it as you're like a little ball that's where you are you're you might be stuck in one well of that egg crate but you really want to be in this so this is a kind of the healthy well and you're just stuck there and that's what you see in frequency spec on Plex oscillator complex frequencies that are connected you get these sort of egg crate models and if you are in an unwell state you may just be stuck in a local minimum but which is not the global minimum you really want to be in this other well of the egg crate and that's what something like TMS does I gave sort of jokingly the analogy of like bumping a refrigerator that's stuck but that really is kind of what happens with the complex system you're trapped in this local minimum and you need to get to the global minimum but you have a little hill or a barrier and the TMS just sort of shocks you a little bit and whoosh you go over the barrier so when I think of it the mental model I have is let's say some of these patients with severe PTSD they're stuck in this local minimum and they're getting help because they just by themselves or even therapeutics can't get them over that little barrier - they're kind of somewhat more well state so to answer your question yes I think it makes a lot of sense that it goes both ways the brain is what's called a complex system where there are many interactions back and forth I think would be an incredibly rare exception if it didn't go both ways thank you for answering that and you also brought up something I'm going to use as a segue because it did promise people that we were going to talk about in episode 1 I promised towards the end that we would talk about bringing a gun to a knife fight and incentives and possibly what a chief incentive officer might be and we are going to talk about that and what I'm going to use as my my Segway is something you pointed out which is that the EEG is an older tool and that fMRI is a fancy expensive tool and there may be incentives in the scientific world whether it's related to grants whether it's related to publication bias with newer tools who knows that affect the science and aside from the validity of the tools I just have so pause and say that's like a brilliant segue I had no idea how you would possibly says a depression and brain science to like let's talk about teams and companies in incentives like there is no how the hell is this is this guy going to get from A to B and you this Segway like on the fly like good job that's a really good say totally not forced yeah totally natural yeah this is this is my job yes but it actually works because you're absolutely right yeah this there are all sorts of incentives and I'd love for you to just riff and you start wherever you like because I think of incentives all the time all the time and when we were talking earlier I'll use another tie-in about depression and what helped okay so let's see you identify the things that you should be doing or shouldn't be doing that act as precursors to well States or precursors to depression okay knowing is one thing how do you stop drinking so much coffee and in my case what I ended up doing was not just deciding and making a resolution but creating incentives whether those are rewards or punishments so maybe that is a betting pool with a friend not who can go the longest without drinking caffeine or it could be some type of reward if I do X for Y period of time then I receive you know reward Z whatever that might be and there are all sorts of different ways to set up incentives and there are things you have to be cognizant of like I think that Andy Grove used to do this but for every incentive they created to hopefully shape of behavior they wanted they looked for the inadvertent kind of perverse incentive that was paired with it so I'm fascinated by incentives and would love to hear you riff on any aspect of incentives all right yeah you can kind of come into it any direction I just it's something I think about all the time because I view my job in part through the podcast or other things as examining what works for behavioral change that that's really the crux of all of it so let's talk about it all right so this is a great example of how you come across an idea in science because we're in another segue which is we're talking about these little things that you see that don't seem to quite fit or that other people may be overlooking and you really want to focus on those teasing out a bigger idea so let me mention a couple what seems like odd paradoxes individually ten people all love some crazy new idea you bring them together they reject it why that seems kind of odd number two odd paradox we have this sort of myth of the big corporate guys are kind of a risk-averse if you're an entrepreneur this is what you often get to when I was a early entrepreneur starting first time CEO for a couple years you got with your friends for drinks you're all you know young entrepreneurs emerging new company and you pat yourself on the back and you say oh all the great ideas come from folks like us because we're the risk takers we love you know where the really entrepreneurial types and none of the good ideas come out of big companies because they're risk-averse corporate types and then as you grow up or as you mature as an entrepreneur you realize you have to start working with them you do partnerships with them or whatever and you start getting to know them as people and then you go out for drinks for them or have a meal with them and you realize hey they're actually exactly the same as me they're really not they want the next new gadget or the next the next new drug or than exact they want to go home and tell their spouse or their kids or their loved ones or their families or friends that they worked on something big and in fact you hai eventually sometimes you hire them and then all of a sudden the tie comes off the jacket comes off and they're pounding the table just like you they are you so why this myth so that's weird paradox number two and we are sort of seeming paradox number three is all this emphasis and articles and books and management stuff that you and I have in almost everyone is read about culture and you see these interviews and these glossy magazines and these cover stories of these great you know legendary CEOs and they interview ask you know what - what attribute do you attribute your success well it was you know it was to our culture we built a great meaning I built up a great culture usually as what they're trying to say and and then two weeks later the same companies in the toilet well what what happened like culture couldn't change overnight so what you know what happened why does why does the same company with the same people suddenly transform weird puzzle number three and that's usually the clue when you're doing science she sort of unexplained things that don't quite fit conventional stories and so underlying all of those is incentives and a new way to think about incentives and teams and companies and groups they can help explain all three of those and that's ultimately what actually loon shots is about and so let me explain what I mean whenever you put people together into a group you create two forms of incentives one is what we often think of oh the stake in the outcome so let's take a biotech company might be a 10-person company your stake and outcome is well 10% let's see if everything's divided or you just for sake for simplicity and now you double that well now your 20% now it's 5% it's kind of getting smaller as it grows your stake and outcome is getting smaller and smaller so your incentives for staking out coming like you know rolling up your sleeves and fighting hard to you know help that loon shot or crazy ideas succeed it's very high when you're a small company but it's getting smaller and smaller as you get larger what's changing there's a second incentive that you create whenever no matter what happens whenever you organize people into a group with a mission and a reward system tied to that mission you create a second incentive and that is perks of rank two forms of incent staking out a simple way to think of it as equity and cash equity and base salary but let's think about it even more broadly stake and outcome and perks of rank what does that mean well are you the team captain or a team member you the CEO or a VP when you're a 10-person company perks of rank is irrelevant compared to those stick because if you're the team captain or the team member it might be a few thousand dollars difference but if your project works or not it's a few billion dollars or as a few million dollars or whatever but of course as it grows it flips all of a sudden perks of rank become more important so when I am talking about bringing a gun to a knife fight or a chief incentives officer what I'm talking about is people spend so much time focused on culture and psychology and empowering and group dynamics there are literally thousands or tens of thousands of books and articles about it we spend so much less time on structure what are the incentives how are we motivating the behavior that we want to see and so for example here's how it can help us think about that last one why'd a group suddenly change well as they grow big all of a sudden the balance between those those two incentives the balance between them shifts and as you grow a bigger and bigger and bigger stake and outcome gets smaller and smaller and perks of rank matter more and more and more and at some point they cross boom and that's when people start caring more about politics and promotion and less about the success of their crazy idea and when you care about politics and promotion what do you do you try to shoot down other people's ideas and that's when good ideas die that's when the wisdom of crowd turns into the tyranny of crowds underlying that is what you asked incentives so understanding that is very important to understanding for example that weird paradox of why companies suddenly turn when you really understand that and you start to tease that out you can actually work out what are the control parameters of that transition so in science in physics you talk about a phase transition that's exactly whenever you have two competing forces boom you will trigger a transition but more interesting than just knowing that is what are the parameters okay so you can work that out mathematically what are the parameters there's temperature and water but if you add salt you lower the freezing temperature so there's a degree of salt and water although it's the binding energy between them all if you lower that you can also lower the freezing temperature so you can keep something liquid much longer if you understand those forces so the reason that it's important to understand incentives better for example have a chief incentives officer is that it can help you control the transition between innovation and rigidity when you embrace wild new ideas and you reject them it sounds like I'm speaking in a metaphorical sense but actually you can sort of translate that in the way a scientist or physicist whether into a sort of a straightforward mathematical model with two terms of you know cash and equity and then calculate where is that transition at what size company does it happen and you get a number it happens at this number and that number is a function of four parameters and here those four parameters so as I dial those parameters I can dial that number up oh that's cool I just created four things I can adjust to create more innovative teams the larger teams that still embrace new ideas rather than reject them that answer is kind of helps us understand one of those paradoxes but also helps us understand the one that I mentioned about the the myth of the big corporate risk-averse guy what happens when I take a drop of when I take a molecule of water and I drop it into a glass of water well it's lushes around with all the other molecules what happens when I take a molecule of water and I drop it onto a block of ice well it freezes but it's the same molecule and that's sort of the same thing with the group dynamics it's if you take you take the same guy but you give him the incentives I'm gonna start up I think pretty innovative the same guy and give him the incentives where it's all about politics and promotion he's gonna be shooting down new ideas so underlying that paradox as well is incentives so it helps us understand these sort of strange or mysterious puzzles the first one that I talked about is you take ten people who are loved wild no ideas you bring them together well if their incentives are more about who's going to be the team captain they're probably going to spend their time shooting down you know what gets me promoted for example in a large company you have and the same new idea let's say a new idea a new drug for new promising new cancer drug gets rule small biotech company is super excited about it and they're all united about and it stumbles and everybody rolls up their sleeve and save it then it stumbles again they roll up their sleeves again imagine your advisor you had a committee meeting same drug use same person well you could pound the table after its first stumble and say no no I think it's good so there's something good here let's all fight or yeah it's a successful oh and the staking outcome is not very high because how much is it going to help your career if it works ten years down the road not very much or you can make sort of smart aleck comments that are maybe funny about I think the science says this and the latest meta-analysis we see this and you know I went to this a keynote speaker Nobel laureate and he's thinking there and I really think the industry is headed here and by coincidence that's what your boss thinks and that's what your boss is box who also happens to be sitting at the table things and they're nodding along and you know what they're saying that young fellows got a smart head on his shoulders and if you keep doing that and it's putting politics and sounding smart at meetings and kind of shooting down by pointing out all the warts and playing it safe like the next thing the next incremental idea let's say you had the statin drug let's make the xlix statin drug yeah that sounds like a good idea I think that's a good idea everybody think that's a good idea we all think that's a good idea good job young man you might get promoted what happens if you get promoted you get a bump up of 30% in salary so which you want to do you know wait seven years and maybe move the needle of your company by one percent or you want us make smart aleck comments and get promoted and maybe next year for 30 percent incentives so that is how it helps you think about all three paradoxes why people individually who might like an idea when you put them in a group you create the second incentive of perks of rank and it can outweigh so what do I mean by a chief incentives officer companies today have a for example chief technology officer what's the job of the chief technology to make sure that everybody's got the latest gadgets and systems well that's pretty good but how important is it to have motivated employees is that is maybe at least as important as everybody has the latest apps and and you know smartphones or in software I would argue that it is as important or more important how aligned are your incentives with individual goals the job of a chief technology officer is to take a strategic you get very highly paid experts they're given a certain budget your budget is X with that budget I want you to optimize the quality of our tools same thing with the chief revenue officer you're going to get a fix of marketing budget your marketing budget your sales budget is X with that I want you to maximize our revenue why not have a chief incentives officer I'm going to give you a certain compensation budget your compensation budget equity in cash is X I want you to take that compensation budget and maximize the motivation of our employees some motivation is financial and some is not financial that's part of your job what non-financial things that are motivating people they're very different some people are in fact you know financial considerations are very important some people intrinsic stuff like am i growing am i developing am i contributing to a bigger cause am i getting recognized by my peer individual managers who are putting out fires and trying to do strategy and trying to get things done on time on budget on spec don't really have the bandwidth to sit around and say of the eleven people reporting to me what are the different incentives how can I design something to maximize the return on investment we're giving for those incentives it's much better handled if there is someone who that it's their first priority than if it's someone who is their 97th priority what happens today at the vast majority of companies colluding big corporate companies for incentives it's a good year everybody gets 10% bad year everybody gets zero how motivating is that if you're a you know even a thousand person company and we'll come back to small companies but if you're a thousand person company and you're like four or ten thousand person company and you're five levels down from CEO you're working on your project your design how much do you influence if it's a company's good you're a bad year not much so how motivating is it for you to work harder on your design to know that if it was a good year not very that's called a wasteful resource in economics that's called a free-rider problem you might as well it's the same thing with stock options the vast you know the many come as you said well I see everybody stock options okay you know maybe that's great if you're a five person company or a ten person company or a fifty person company and your project is the one project and if you help it then the value of but suppose you're a 10,000 person company or even if that you've there 50 different projects and your project might move the needle by one percent yeah even in a smaller company the hundred person startup and you're not deciding the strategic direction of the company if you're a higher number one hundred exact most likely so what are your incentives it's it's a free rider problem because you actually do better off if you can spend your time convincing your boss that you're incredibly valuable meanwhile just twiddle your thumbs and if the company has a good year bang your options go up and if a bad year or whatever you know you spend your time looking for another job I'd love to get into maybe some specific examples of or any examples of common incentives or incentives that you see that are problematic and I'll just riff on on a few problems I've observed I don't know exactly how to fix them but just as a reflection of how much I think about this which is not indicative of having all the solutions by any stretch but for instance first-hand experience of working on say books or television projects when there is a regime change new leader comes in says if this goes well I'll get none of the credit with this catalog of stuff that my predecessor approved and if any of it goes wrong I'll get all the blame therefore it's all going in the vault or whatever or getting deep prioritized are super super common because well for the for the reason I just incentives for the incentive and then having more recently spent time and science and looking at where there might be weaknesses there might be funding deficits correlated to weaknesses or funding pressure to perform science in certain ways you see a positive publication bias right so you could have a really well-designed experiment intervention let's just say in in in one case shows no effect that's still potentially a valuable study but there's a appears to be sort of a publication bias for positive effects with intervention stress it's like okay well how does that factor into a whole slew of different decisions that scientists make or the funders make but whether it's in science whether it's in for-profit companies what are some common sort of default and/or default sation structures or offers that you think are problematic all right I'll give you I'll give you one example it might be close to home uber yep and we'll talk about it really interesting cuz they'll be an interesting discussion and I just so we don't lose the thread what does it mean bring a gun to a knight what do I mean by that that is if everybody is doing one thing in kind of a 20th century like a 50 like hey you just reward bonuses they're creating a free rider problem they are not optimizing the use of incentives they are weak if you want to get a competitive advantage as a company why don't you bring a gun to a knife I appointed chief incentives officer whose job is to be more strategic where those companies are taking X amount of dollars cap you translate the equity into dollars they're taking X amount of cash and equity and wasting it why don't you be strategic why don't you take that X get rid of the free-rider problem figure out what will better motivate and better incentivize and essentially better align incentives and value created for the company individual managers don't have the time or expertise or training you don't ask every individual manager to say I'd like you to come up with the best identify the best software tools and the best smartphone apps and the best hardware and the best middleware for your team and could you get that done by a week from now in addition to all your others no you're appointed chief technology officer that's his job same thing with incentives so bring a gun to a knife fight if all your competitors are doing this week thing why don't you just turn that into a competitive advantage do it better use your resources more strategically to align incentives with value created better than your competitors and you know what you'll create a more motivated force that doesn't mean that the cultural stuff doesn't matter mm-hmm it's as a compliment yeah culture and structure so let's talk about uber for a second this will be kind of interesting since you are such an early investor and so one good friend of mine their senior who has been around a lot of tech companies we don't need to mention any names in this conversation talked about the culture in the engineering group they are pre CEO transition before the transition with Travis as everyone wanted to be captain of their own speed boat and it was problematic in the sense that whenever you grow very fast you accumulate a technology debit their liabilities and assets and when you grow this is actually Bob Sutton at Stanford was did a great study on this on uber and you know I've been talking about and this is the way he described it which I thought was very interesting when you grow really rapidly you accumulate a debit which is all the little technology stuff that you sort of fast-forward it past and really needs to go back and get cleaned up if you want a scale at uber what appeared to be the culture on the surface was that everyone wanted to be captain of their own speed but they wanted to work on the next due birth think Boober eats or uber delivery from hospitals of meds or uber this uber flower or whatever rather than go back and fix the technology debit all this stuff from growing hyper fast I needed to go back in and that led to a lot of problems and so that sounds like a cultural problem when this doesn't it everyone wants to be their own speedboat but let's go one level beneath that yeah what was the incentive system so the incentive system at uber at the time and I you know you can correct me if you have first-aid knowledge I just happened to everybody has a base salary let's just for sake of argument call it a hundred and let's say you have a bonus target 30 just for sake of argument could be very different but let's say that's the multiple and there is a multiple of bonus that you get based on how your year wet and at most tech companies in Silicon Valley that you know anything less than 0.5 you know your 5 50 percent you might be fired that's actually pretty nominal 70 percent was not a great year or 80% better 100 percent is you hit most of yourself under maybe 150 like at a great year at uber was 800 percent it was it was a huge multiple so what did that structure encourage it encourage everybody to go find their one project push everybody else away because that's what they were being compensated on because if you could demonstrate that you found some little niche and you grew it you could get you know to some huge multiple so that led to the captain of the speedboat problem CEO transition it sounds like all it was just a culture actually they changed underlying incentives as well the captain of the speedboat problem faded and people started playing together better they started going back and fixing the technology debits that they'd accumulated from the hyper growth phase so lesson sometimes things that look like culture you know may actually be structure sometimes only structure drives culture and that's why having a chief incentives officer is bringing a gun to a knife fight it can give you a competitive advantage if you're really busy hyper growing a company do you have time to think about the perverse incentives of your stuff you know you've got it's been for your CEO or you've got a board of directors you're gonna you know you've got all these fires to put out you got strategy you got execution you didn't have time to think about but if you appointed a chief incentives officer and that's his or her job they can catch some of these traps they can optimize the use of that resources more effectively so that's what I mean by chief incentives officer now uber what are you you know what is your I think well I do not have the ground-level firsthand exposure to their compensation structure so I can't speak to that I think I think it's it's a very valid example in this as well as a it's a micro example of a macro phenomenon in the sense that at the very least incentives are a large part of culture right in so much is if we think of culture just to separate it from the for-profit work world or business world for a moment if you think of culture whether it's Japanese culture or American culture or fill-in-the-blank culture what does that really meet like the word gets used a lot what does that mean that culture and in my mind it is it's a it's a shared set of beliefs and behavior I mean to a large extent like okay well putting the beliefs to one side like what dictates behavior certainly to a large extent its incentives what are you rewarded for and what are you punished for and what you're saying is in many just a structure can drive I think of cultures patterns of behavior and I think structure they're not mutually exclusive circles they overlap and in some and they interact a structure can drive culture certain incentives can drive patterns of behavior and by saying that structure can matter it doesn't mean that you're saying culture isn't important right so for example having regular employee beatings is probably a bad idea I'm just putting that out there not that kind of culture where you flog people in 11:00 a.m. and the Town Hall that's probably not gonna do great for you empowering your employees celebrating victories that's probably good those are patterns of behavior so alright here's a wacky analogy but we talked about nature versus nurture genetic predispositions versus thing.you this is a great segue genetic versus nature versus nurture netic predispositions versus things that you pick up from the environment and I think that's a good example there genetic predispositions to diabetes on the other hand if you drink two gallons of coke every day you're probably going to accelerate diabetes their genetic predispositions to lung cancer on the other hand if you smoke two packs a day you're probably going to accelerate both genes and lifestyle matter and same with structure and culture in a company both structure and culture matter and I think one issue is that there's been so much focus on number two and not enough focus on 100% agree so much focus on culture culture culture gods or gods because across our culture when I first started as a CEO and you're probably the same thing you know I consume those books as I wanted to learn how to be a better leader and after like the one hundredth book you know that said more or less the same thing like okay get it already but you know is there any more yes and then there were all these kind of funny little paradoxes that that couldn't really explain so it's not that those ideas and principles that there isn't stuff there that's useful evidence they get repeated over and over but people have not paid enough attention to structure yeah and that's why if you do it well the chief incentives officer it's bringing gun to a knife that you create a competitive advantage well I think it's it's also an example of bringing a scientific mindset to something that has a lot of fuzzy logic and is full of paradoxes as you noted because it's like okay well if the culture is the variable that is determining the success or failure of this company that's being put on magazine covers and then a month later it's it's a complete u-turn how does one explain that and on the incentive side also you have very discrete pieces that allow you to run experiments very effectively whereas I think the culture discussion can get very nebulous very quickly I was like okay you want to improve culture first let's define culture what are you talking about exactly hard to get anyone to not anyone but it's it's often talked about for 200 pages in a book without ever defining it properly problem number one problem number two okay you want to impact culture how are you going to measure improving culture is it in top-line revenue growth is it any number of other key performance indicators it's it's it's not as cleanly examinable or testable as incentives in a lot of respects and that's why for me I'll give you an anecdote and this this for people listening or like I don't run a big company this applies to you this applies to for me the culture would be like just think more positive right culture is like go lose weight because you'll be happier it's like okay well the fact of the matter is I haven't been losing weight for the last five years I've had that as many years resolution maybe it's time to shift and look at the structure and I remember talking to somebody that's at one point they were watching phobias being cured on stage and there's some type of Mentalist or someone who's doing work and at one point the this woman gets on stage and she's afraid of heights and there's a ladder that's put up and you know she she she talked to the Mentalist who's cures her of her phobia doing a B and C and then she walks all the way up to the top of the ladder and comes down and he goes how do you feel she goes I feel great my husband said he would give me $100 if I climb to the top of the ladder it's like structure drives right incentives people it's like it's the incentive stupid like sometimes it's like follow the money it's the economy stupid yeah well with human behavior it's like it's the incentive stupid like really really pay attention to that and you can rig the game so that it is more likely you will get the outcomes you want if you think about that structure right if you think about the incentives yeah you know you touched an interesting it's a more scientific approach so it gives you actionable ideas that are sort of surprising or starting points for discussion or different ways I'll give you two examples so you can work out the mathematics of you know when you get this transition and you get these control parameters that are parameters of organizational design and so here's one thing it tells you that you can do if you want to build more innovative teams and companies which is get managers out of the decision of bonuses or promotion just take them out of the decision loop that sounds kind of weird your manager should you be deciding I'll give you company a and Company B that do it the different ways and they'll be pretty clear why so imagine you know there is a let's call it some kind of client service consulting company agree a design company architecture company consult any kind of consulting here in Austin and there is the local office it's a global company and there's a local office here and there are three vice presidents and there are thirty associates in the Austin office and a spot opens up for a fourth VP now that in most companies the local office is going to decide on which of those thirty candidates is going to make that you know get that promotion and become the fourth VP and so what's going to happen those thirty associates are going to be sucking up to those three VPS and politicking and stabbing each other in the back all year long because they all want to get that promotion now imagine a different company and this is actually done in many ways at Google and was done at McKinsey and maybe at some other companies but not very many local office three VPS thirty associates spot opens up for a promotion three VPS don't decide they fly in somebody from you know Denmark specifically chosen because he or she doesn't know let's make it a she let's call her Eleanor from Denmark flies in because she doesn't know the three B fees doesn't know any of the associates maybe from a totally different industry or field but same group and her job is to spend a week two weeks three weeks interviewing broadly might interview ten fifteen twenty people will certainly interview the three VPS will interview many of the peers of the candidates of xxx will interview their customers and you view their internal customers their external customers up down and see make a decision on or make a recommendation to an independent committee that will make the decision now what happens in this second situation what are those thirty associates going to do are they going to be sucking up to the VP's all year round no because the VP's aren't making that decision are they gonna be stabbing each other in the back not really because they're the other associates are going to be interviewed on this decision so what do you have everyone's kind of going to focus on their job and doing good client work because they're going to be interviewing the clients and going to be interviewing the internal people so everyone is kind of cooperating what do we just do we took the manager out of the decision so where does this come from well if you work out in kind of an the mathematical economic model you can calculate something called return on politics what's the incremental value incremental probability that you increase your promotion likelihood versus the incremental hour you spend on politics when that variable or parameter return on politics as high as it was with the first company you really hurt innovation when that variable is low as it was with the second company you really improve innovation so that just falls out so you mentioned scientific they just actually falls out of the service straightforward model of the incentives and these two variables return on politics and so it gives you a way of quantifying something that's sort of fuzzy so if I tell you or we're sitting around we're talking in a friend of ours says you know this company I just joined this new company it's very political it sounds like cultural thing but actually there's a way to quantify it just means my return on my expected value of return on politics is higher here than in my old company and that sucks everybody every managers different everyone is less susceptible or less susceptible to politics but there's some average and that's what you mean so right and everyone's susceptible to incentives and everyone's susceptible in it so that's just kind of one example of how you can think a little bit more scientific quickly of incentive what our minds are my incentives around politics and promotion in which case it's not going to be a great place for innovation or my incentives pretty well aligned around the success of my idea or my project or my team's project not just innovation but am I going to be in an environment where I feel supported by my team by my peers or is it going to be like The Hunger Games right right I mean which certainly innovation is one thing that suffers there are a lot of things that suffer right and so designing incentives it's a complicated problem it's not like I'm saying oh there's an easy time just I'm saying that the return on investment of spending more time and more energy making it at least as equal a function as your chief technology officer your chief revenue officer is worth it chief revenues officers to motivate customers to buy your product as best as you can with a fixed budget well don't you want to motivate your employees to work as hard as you can on the the best projects for you yeah that's what this chief incentives officer should do isn't that just as important as motivating your customers motivating your people yeah so why don't we do that why don't we make it at least as good and this is the same this I should say I think certainly also applies to very small companies even one person shops because whether or not you've designed them you are responding to incentives absolutely so it makes a lot of sense to sit down and to figure out like what you're responding to what you're most motivated by positively and negatively Safi book call loon Transcom that's right at Safi sa fi but call bah CA ll on twitter if anybody wants to wave hello the book is loon shots it's it's a really fun read and for someone like me who really learns best by example and story to deduce the principle or the lesson it is just shocked full of stories that I would have expected to have heard at some point in all of my reading and all of my adventuring in the business and scientific worlds and yet I the the vast majority had never come across which made it not just a an actionable read but a very fun read so thank you for that thanks for saying that it means a lot of really appreciate and do you have any any parting comments before we wrap up yeah because I don't think we've spent enough time together and talked about enough ideas you know I think we got another 72 hours worth of material because we just we've been so superficial that's true you know skip more than you know a few seconds on each stuff no no it's super fun to be here of course and I hope you know my hope with this book is that it the thing that's been most it's made me feel the most satisfied and you probably experienced this with stuff you do as well is that a lot of people especially younger people have come to me and said they just find it in inspiring and uplifting and my hope with this is said it's an especially exciting thing for me that if it can inspire people who have a crazy idea or people who are being told that their idea is crazy to just keep going a little while because there is some gold out there if you just persist through the stumbles and that's not just the exceptional idea it's almost every single important idea so if you hit a bunch of rough patches it may be because you're onto something really really important they get Southie thank you again for all the time it is time for us to go grab some food and for everybody listening you can find links to everything we have talked about in show notes as per usual at tim blog a forward slash podcast and you can search moonshots Safi Saffy's probably the best bet si fi if you just search his name all of the links will pop up in the show notes and until next time thank you for listening you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 40,744

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, tim ferriss blog, Tim Ferriss Podcast, Safi Bahcall, Loonshots, depression, hypnosis, Tim Ferriss Show

Id: VtGNX5d4D0A

Length: 160min 6sec (9606 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2019