You might reasonably suspect that Tim Ferriss is having the most productive quarantine of all time. After all, his first book—The 4-Hour Work Week—was, in his words, “a toolkit for maximizing per-hour output.” Released 13 years ago, it turned him into one of America’s most popular productivity gurus. Four other best sellers and a hit podcast, not to mention 1.6 million Twitter followers, have come in its wake. But when we speak, via phone, toward the end of May, before historic protests rolled across the country, Ferriss assures me that productivity is not on his mind.
“I am not focused on maximizing productivity because that begs the question: to what aim?” he says. “I'm revisiting those questions and my answers to those questions during this time. That does not mean that I wake up every morning sitting on a Lotus flower, meditating for six hours and then producing masterworks as Isaac Newton and Shakespeare and others supposedly did during quarantine. That is decidedly not what is happening in my life day-to-day.”
In fact, the very morning we speak, he’s just lost his shit. He says there were a handful of issues in his “home slash oasis slash prison”—a broken fridge, for starters (not ideal during a time of isolation), a handful of small professional fires, and a general lack of sleep. “I just became a pouty three-year-old, who felt the need to throw a tantrum,” he says. “There’s nothing glamorous or justifiable about it—I just hit my threshold.”
Ferriss is forthcoming about his tantrum as a penance of sorts. He knows that much of the noise in the self-improvement or self-optimization space—plenty of which he has been responsible for—presents a rosy picture of people always functioning at their highest capacity, leaving little room for the messy fuck-ups and tantrums that characterize most everyday lives. Particularly in the time of Covid-19.
“There’s a lot of struggle right now, whether that’s lowercase ‘s’ struggle or capital ‘S’ Struggle,” he says.
It’s that struggle that Ferriss has turned his attention to in recent years, both with his last two books—Tribe of Mentors and Tools of Titans, tomes of crowd-sourced wisdom and advice from the type of world-class talents he has on his podcast—and with his recent venture as an ardent backer (both vocally and financially) of research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Whereas Ferriss was once in search of answers to questions about how to do more (and do it more efficiently), he says he’s now focused on going inside and helping you get comfortable being with yourself.
That professional pivot is, of course, tethered to Ferriss’s own personal trajectory. After spending much of his career chasing after external markers of success—money, time, skills—he says he still knew something was missing. (He’s also been vocal about a lifelong struggle with his own mental health, specifically bipolar depression.) “Certainly I found myself, after checking a lot of those boxes, still suffering,” he says.
In a rare interview while promoting the Audible exclusive version of Tribe of Mentors and Tools of Titans, Ferriss reflects on what he’s learned throughout his career, and how the success he set out to find 13 years ago looks very different from the success he’s after now.
You said you lost your shit this morning. When that happens to me, I wonder if any of the therapeutic work I’m doing is actually helping me become a calmer, saner person. Have you been able to be more self-forgiving over the years?
I’d say that’s the biggest change that I have focused on, and seen in myself over the last five to six years—that change in the inner voice. And there are many things that have contributed to that, including interactions with people like Tara Brach, who wrote an outstanding book called Radical Acceptance, which was recommended to me by a neuroscience PhD who is as anti-woo-woo as possible. That's a great starting place for learning to accept and be friends with the emotions and thoughts that you would otherwise label as bad.
Another is Awareness, by Anthony de Mello. I've gifted at least a hundred copies of this book to people, and it makes the point very early on that most of us say we want to be healed or we want to change, but that, in fact, is not true. What we want is a reprieve. What we want is a salve to remove pain. But there's a big difference between looking for a reprieve and looking for a solution. The solution involves focusing on things that can be very uncomfortable.
[I’ve also used] tools like “turnarounds,” from [author] Byron Katie. It’s where you take a phrase that is a belief of yours—I don’t have a sister but let’s just say, My sister is selfish and always asks me to do A, B, and C—and you turn it around by saying, I am selfish and I always ask her to do X, Y, and Z. Or, My sister is not selfish, and she thought that X, Y, Z. In each case of rephrasing, you are required to produce two or three points of evidence to support this restructuring of a statement. I've seen some incredible transformations just with that alone.
So it's a toolkit, and certainly there are other tools that are difficult to recommend given current legal status. But psychedelic compounds also provide a vehicle for stepping outside of your normal egoic self so that you can see the stories that govern your life more accurately. When otherwise trying to examine how these made-up narratives control your life, it’s a bit like trying to look at the lens of your eye by looking out through your eye: It's not quite possible.
With a true psychedelic experience, when you experience ego dissolution or you become an observer of what you consider your “Self,” you're able to really see the bugs in the software that have governed so many of your decisions and so much of your life. That can be incredibly powerful.
And if it's done in an unsupervised fashion or in an irresponsible way—putting aside the legal risks—it can be profoundly painful and difficult and even dangerous. Having said that, there are very good reasons why my largest contributions to anything really, are funds for scientific research of psychedelic compounds.
You’ve spoken about your struggles with mental illness, and about addiction in your family. On Recode Decode, you told Kara Swisher how you haven't had a depressive episode in five years because of psychedelics. Have you had a profound experience with them?
I have. It’s important to underscore a few things. It was not a one-and-done process. Secondly, the value of psychedelics comes both in session, and then pre- and post-session. There are many people who find tremendous insights about what they could and should do, who then proceed to do nothing with those insights. They're back to their normal behaviors 48 hours later, trapped again in the ruts and loops of old behaviors. It takes effort and concentration and commitment to piece it all together.
The way I recommend people think about it is much like a shoulder reconstructive surgery. Surgery is really only part one. You want an incredible surgeon. You want the right tools for the job. You want it to be, in some sense, personalized to you. You want all of the right care. You want prep, and then you need to do the rehab. It doesn't matter if you have the best PT in the world, if you don't actually go to the office to do the rehab. Those are all very important for solidifying the structural changes that have taken place.
If you don't do that, not only will the outcome be suboptimal, but you can end up worse off afterwards. If you have a window of plasticity and in that window you solidify the negative, it’s a bit like concrete drying. I do think it's possible to come out worse for wear. Therefore, when friends ask me about psychedelic experiences, if they're unprepared or unwilling to commit to, say, a month of prep and at least a few weeks of concentrated follow up, I advise against them pursuing the experience.
But to come back to your comment, yes, it's true that my family and close friends have a number of sad stories related to addiction. And then major depressive episodes at least once or twice a year for me, going back as far as I can remember—at least beginning in adolescence. Once I started making a concerted effort to study and deepen my understanding of psychedelics, and incorporating all of these various tools that I've mentioned—like the work and awareness—I have not had a single extended major depressive episode in the last five or six years. To me, that is nothing short of miraculous.
It defies our current mechanistic explanations for how drugs and psychiatry can work. That’s in part why I'm putting funding into the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, and Imperial College London. It’s not simply to determine the potential value of psychedelics curing, in some cases, what are thought to be intractable or incurable psychiatric conditions, like OCD, PTSD, chronic anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, eating disorders, and so on. But if they are all close cousins and reflective of certain underlying issues that can be addressed with psychedelics, that changes the entire scope of our understanding of how the mind and psyche functions.
There’s a famous Czech psychotherapist, Dr. Stanislav Grof. Going back decades to when this was legal, he supervised somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions. His quote, which I'm going to paraphrase, was that what the telescope was for astronomy and what the microscope was for biology, psychedelics will be for the mind.
A few times here you’ve mentioned this concept of a toolkit. I’d be interested to know what the toolkit you started assembling 13 years ago, when you wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, was for, what the toolkit you’re assembling now is for, and how that’s changed over time.
The 4-Hour Work Week is—based on the title, understandably—often misunderstood. The objective was to provide a toolkit for maximizing per-hour output. It's not necessarily about working four hours a week. You could choose two hours a week, one hour a week, or 80 hours a week.
But the reason that book found such a toehold in Silicon Valley is because it was focused on evaluating different currencies—money, time, mobility—and how you can pull levers to change these variables to maximize per-hour output. That toolkit was very much time- and income-focused.
4-Hour Body was providing a toolkit for physical optimization and body recomposition. 4-Hour Chef was a toolkit for accelerated learning. Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors combine all of those, plus the toolkit of psycho-emotional health or psychological fitness.
Because it doesn't matter how much money you have, doesn't matter how effective or efficient you are. It doesn't matter what types of fancy toys you collect. It doesn't matter how hot your significant other is, if your inner world—your internal monologue or dialogue—is that of anger or despair or frustration or sadness the majority of the time.
Almost none of these other things matter very much. You can't wield money or time effectively. You can’t deepen relationships, repair relationships, deescalate instead of escalate conflict, unless you have a certain degree of self-awareness, emotional resilience, and emotional acceptance. That only comes, in my experience, through transcendental, transformative blocks of time touching the timeless, in a sense. Where the ego is dissolved. Or—because I don't think those are necessary or recommended for all people—using a toolkit to cultivate that. Without a baseline of psycho-emotional health, all of that is for naught.
I know centi-millionaires and billionaires who are utterly miserable. As Derek Sivers, one of my friends and podcast guests, once said, “If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs.” Information is not necessarily the answer. And if that isn't the answer or it's not the whole answer, what is missing? The inescapable fact that if, at best, you tolerate yourself, and more often berate, hate, or criticize yourself, how can you possibly fully engage with others, accept and love them, and find peace of mind and life? I think the answer is you can't.
Fair to say that the trajectory of the toolkit you’ve written about parallels your own personal evolution?
Yeah, it's one hundred percent personal. All of my books, all of my podcast episodes are personal. I'm trying to figure something out, or I'm trying to learn more about something, or I'm trying to achieve a goal or remove a pain. Everything I do is scratching my own itch, because if I do that, at least I know I have a guaranteed audience of one.
Certainly in the beginning you might think that money is the answer. After that, you might think that more time is the answer. After that, you might think, I simply need to care more for the physical vehicle, or I want to learn more. Then it's really just about acquiring skills, maybe they're productive skills, or maybe they're just for fun.
And then, at some point, you have to sit in a room and be able to live with yourself. And with COVID, I want to say that suicide hotline volume is up 600 percent right now. I think I read that on Forbes. At the end of the day, you would want to be able to sit with yourself and not suffer.
If you've checked some of those boxes I just described and you're still suffering, that says to me that something has been missed. Certainly I found myself, after checking a lot of those boxes, still suffering.
It doesn't mean you have to go through that process in that order. In fact, it's much more helpful to dedicate part of your practice and your energies to viewing the psycho-emotional health as a foundation for everything else. And paying more attention to that from the very beginning.
Assuming that I didn't have to love myself—that I was really by nature not a happy person and that was okay as long as I was good at competition—was a way to plaster over cracks that needed to be dealt with sooner or later. Compartmentalizing pain and rationalizing it sometimes works. But as I’ve said to a lot of my friends who will sometimes say, “I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to open up that Pandora’s Box,” I try to emphasize that, at least from my experience, no matter what, you are dealing with it. But you get to choose if you want to deal with it head-on in a proactive way. Or if you want to have these odd side effects leak out the edges, unbeknownst to you, subconsciously sabotaging you day to day.
What now is your metric for success on a day-to-day basis? How do you know it's been a good or successful day?
How do you feel when you wake up and before bed and how easily do you fall asleep? [laughs] The time in bed in the morning and at night tells you all you need to know. It's not a purely intellectual reasoning. It's not a pro and con list. It's not a spreadsheet. It’s not a Venn diagram. It's like, how do you feel? And are you even aware of how you're feeling? How much energy have you spent blocking out feeling, because you don't want to feel certain things?
To borrow from Tarah Brach, she said to me once, “There was a wise old sage who said, ‘There's really only one question worth considering and that is: What are you unwilling to feel?’” So I really check in, in the morning and at night. Do you wake up with a sense of foreboding and anxiety and a desire to stay in bed? When you go to bed, is it full of anxiety and worries and preoccupation about what happened, or what's going to happen the next day? If so, that's an issue.
I would find it difficult to call myself successful if I'm experiencing anxiety, fear, regret when I'm in bed in the morning or before I go to bed. So that's simple—and it's not so much a metric because not everything that is meaningful can be measured easily. And you can force fit it, sure. You could give yourself a 1 to 10 scale and blah, blah, blah—you could do all of that. But this is an exercise in really truthfully feeling whatever is present. And deep down, you know if it's good or bad, you know if it's hurtful or helpful, you know if it's healthy or unhealthy, and not a lot of analysis is required. There are plenty of things to measure, there are plenty of things to track. There are lots of things in my life that I do track with my businesses and elsewhere. But this is one place where simplicity pays off.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
