Okay, let's unpack this. Welcome back to the
Deep Dive. Today, we are opening a file that,
honestly, it creates a bit of a paradox. It really
does. We're looking at a man who built his entire
reputation, his entire brand, really, on shortcuts,
on hacking the system, right? The four -hour
work week, the minimum effective dose, all that.
Right, the life hacks. But the file we have on
him is, well, it's thick. It spans decades of
meticulous, grinding, sometimes painful self
-experimentation. It is ironic, isn't it? We're
talking about Tim Ferriss, and the central tension
of his life is exactly that. The guy who sold
the world on efficiency has himself taken the
long, hard road to find out what actually matters.
And it's a journey that I think a lot of you
listening right now might find familiar, maybe
uncomfortably so. You start out wanting to be
faster and richer, and you end up just wanting
to be sane, just functional. That's the arc.
One hundred percent. We are going to trace Ferris
from this this human guinea pig persona selling
brain supplements in the early 2000s through
his reign as like the Oracle of Silicon Valley.
And then finally to his current very unexpected
role as a philanthropic heavyweight in psychedelic
research. It's a massive pivot. Yeah. A huge
one. So. Let's get into it. We've got the biography.
We've got the four -hour bibliography, the investment
portfolio, the medical research data. It's all
here. But let's start where, you know, every
superhero origin story really starts. Where is
that? Not with the superpower. Yeah. With the
weakness. Right. Because if you look at Tim Ferriss
today. You know, muscular, successful, seems
stoic, interviewing the world's best performers.
You assume he was born that way. Of course. He's
assumed he just like came out of the womb optimized.
But the records from his childhood in East Hampton,
New York, tell a completely different story.
Born in 1977. He was not an athlete. He was small.
He was frequently ill. And bullied, right? And
he was bullied. Yeah. Which is a classic motivator.
We see that all the time. But I think for him,
it wasn't just, I want to get big to beat up
the bullies. It was something more. Analytical.
It was survival. He explicitly credits that poor
health as a child for sparking this obsession
with self -improvement. He viewed his body not
as a vessel he was stuck with, but as a machine
that was malfunctioning. Oh, okay. A machine.
And if it's a machine, it has an operating manual.
If it's a system, it can be engineered. He wasn't
optimizing for vanity, at least not at first.
He was building himself up out of sheer necessity.
That engineering mindset. is absolutely crucial
here. He doesn't just work out. He deconstructs.
He reverse engineers. And we see that mindset
really start to solidify when he leaves the bubble
of Long Island. Yeah. He goes to Japan as an
exchange student at age 15. 15. Now, just imagine
a kid from East Hampton dropped into a culture
that is entirely based on rigid systems, hierarchy
and extreme efficiency. Japan is a culture of
refinement, of stripping away everything unnecessary
to perfect the form. That had to be a massive,
massive. culture shock huge but it likely influenced
his later academic path he ends up at st paul's
school which is a very prestigious prep school
and then princeton university graduating in 2000
with a ba in east asian studies so he's not just
a casual observer he's like academically studying
these systems. He's grounded in this rigorous
academic environment, studying systems and cultures
that are very different from the standard American
model. But, you know, the key detail from his
school years isn't actually the classroom. It's
the wrestling mat. It's the wrestling mat. OK,
so why wrestling specifically? I mean, plenty
of people play sports in high school. Why does
wrestling matter so much to the Tim Ferriss mythology?
Because wrestling is the sport of leverage. It's
pure physics. In football, if you're bigger and
faster, you usually win. Simple as that. But
in wrestling, there are weight classes. You are
fighting someone who is almost exactly your size.
So how do you win? You win by understanding physics.
You win by understanding where their center of
gravity is and applying force at just the right
fulcrum. So you can be technically weaker than
your opponent. But if you have better leverage,
if your technique is better, you win. Exactly.
Ferris learned that you don't have to be the
strongest if you are the smartest about mechanics.
He learned to use an opponent's momentum against
them. That concept leverage is, I mean, it's
the skeleton key for his entire career. He applies
wrestling logic to business, to learning languages,
to everything. It's the original hack. It's the
original hack. So, OK, let's jump to the year
2000. He graduates from Princeton. This is right
at the peak of the dot com. bubble or maybe just
as it's bursting the job market is chaotic where
does our future guru land he goes into sales
at a data storage company it's a total grind
he's dialing for dollars trying to sell storage
area networks i mean it is soul crushing work
by his own account he's miserable but while he's
there in 2001 he starts tinkering on the side
he needs a way out he needs leverage he needs
leverage and this is the birth of the first real
business brain quicken brain quicken Okay. Even
the name screams efficiency. It sounds like something
you'd buy at a gas station at 2 a .m. to stay
awake for a road trip. It does sound a bit snake
oil, doesn't it? It was an internet -based nutritional
supplement business. He was selling products
designed to ostensibly speed up neural processing
or physical reaction times. Who was he selling
to? Mostly students and athletes. He eventually
rebranded it as Body QQ Week A later on, but
the product itself, you know, it matters less
than the situation it created for him. This is
the crucible. He's working the sales job during
the day, and he's trying to build this company
on the side. And he's absolutely drowning. This
is the part of the story people forget. He didn't
start with the four -hour work week. He started
with the 14 -hour work day. Maybe more. Oh, yeah.
He's the customer service rep. He's the shipping
coordinator. He's the CEO. He's the janitor.
He's everything. And he hits a breaking point.
He realizes that working harder has a ceiling.
He physically cannot work more hours in the day.
So he has to apply that wrestling leverage to
his own life. Precisely. He has stated explicitly
that the four -hour work week was based on this
specific miserable period of his life. He wasn't
writing about theory. He was writing a survival
manual based on his desperate attempt to automate
his income so he could just step away. He started
asking these, like, dangerous questions. Like
what? Like, what if I just... didn't answer these
emails. Or what if I hired someone in a different
time zone to answer them for me while they sleep?
Exactly. He started automating everything. He
hired virtual assistants from India and the Philippines.
He set up fulfillment centers to ship the pills
so he never had to touch a box. He even fired
his high -maintenance customers. That's a famous
Ferris tactic from that era, firing your customers.
It's a terrifying thing for a new business owner
to do. He calculated which customers took up
you know, 80 % of his time, but only provided
20 % of the profit. The Pareto Principle. The
Pareto Principles in action. And he literally
banned them from buying from him. Sent them an
email saying, we can no longer serve you. Turning
away money. It's so counterintuitive. But it
worked. He liberated his time. He proved you
could decouple time from income, which is the
core thesis of the book. He eventually sold the
company, Brain Quicken, or Body Quick as it was
then, to a London -based private equity firm
in 2010. 2010. He held onto it for a while, even
after the book came out. He did. But the lifestyle
design concepts, the philosophy, all of that
was being forged in the fire of those early 2000s
years. That sale in 2010 was the financial exit.
But the intellectual exit, the escape, happened
much earlier. Okay, so that leads us directly
into the four -hour era. This is part two of
our dive, the book phenomenon. Because when the
four -hour workweek hit the shelves in 2007,
I mean. It didn't just sell copies. It broke
the brain of the American workforce. It was the
right book at the exact right moment. Think about
2007. You had BlackBerry's tethering people to
their desks, 234 .7. The always -on culture was
just starting to really suffocate people. Crackberry.
The Crackberry, exactly. And here comes this
guy saying, the goal isn't to be a millionaire
when you're 60 and retired. The goal is to live
like a millionaire now, using time and mobility
as your currency. The new rich. That phrase was
everywhere. I remember that. It redefined wealth.
Ferris argued that if you have a million dollars
in the bank, but you work 80 hours a week in
an office you hate and you can't leave your desk,
you aren't rich. You're a well -paid prisoner.
Right. But if you make, say, $50 ,000 a year
and you work four hours a week from a laptop
in Argentina, you are wealthy. In terms of lifestyle,
you are rich. And people just ate it up. I mean,
who doesn't want to hear that the nine to five
is a scam and there's a secret back door? It
tapped into this massive, massive vein of dissatisfaction.
But Ferris didn't stop at work. He applied that
same hack the system mentality to biology with
the four hour body in 2010. The spidal hair is
even more aggressive. An uncommon guide to rapid
fat loss, incredible sex and becoming superhuman.
Becoming superhuman. I mean, come on. He wasn't
promising get fit. He was promising a literal
upgrade to your human operating system. And again,
it was all about leverage. What is the minimum
effective dose of exercise? What are the specific
chemical reactions of food? He was treating the
body like a machine that could be debugged and
optimized. Tracking everything. The data. All
the data. Blood sugar, sleep cycles, you name
it. And then came The 4 -Hour Chef in 2012, which...
Honestly, I think it's the most misunderstood
book in that whole series. I completely agree.
On the surface, it looks like a cookbook. The
cover says, The Simple Path to Cooking Like a
Pro, but the subtitle gives the whole game away.
And learning anything. It's a book about meta
-learning. It's a book about meta -learning,
yeah. He used cooking as the vehicle to teach
people how to deconstruct any skill. any skill
at all, and learn it in record time. He introduced
concepts like decess deconstruction, selection,
sequencing, stakes. It was a framework for rapid
skill acquisition. So the philosophy of this
whole era was just pure, unadulterated optimization.
If you could measure it, you could hack it. But
here's the thing. Anyone can write a book full
of shortcuts. Ferris needed to prove it. He needed
receipts. He had to be the living embodiment
of his philosophy. He had to be the guinea pig.
And there is one story in the file that I think
just perfectly encapsulates this hacker mentality
from that period. It's the story of the Chinese
kickboxing championship. Oh, the Sanshu incident.
This is classic Ferris. So in 1999, before the
books, he decides to enter the National Chinese
Kickboxing Championship. Now, you have to keep
in mind, Tim Ferris is not a professional striker.
He's a wrestler. He doesn't have years of conditioning.
He isn't spending six hours a day kicking a heavy
bag. So on paper, he has no business being there.
How does he expect to survive, let alone win?
He reads the rulebook. He approaches the sport
like a lawyer, not like a fighter. He finds two
critical loopholes. First, the weigh -in. The
weigh -in happened the day before the fight.
Which is common in combat sports, right? To give
fighters time to rehydrate. Right. But he took
it to an extreme. He used severe dehydration
techniques. Yeah. Saunas, spitting, diuretics,
wearing sweatsuits. He basically sucked all the
water out of his body to weigh in at 165 pounds.
So he makes weight. He makes weight. But then,
over the next 24 hours, he hyperhydrated. By
the time he stepped into the ring, he weighed
something like 193 pounds. Oh, wow. So he's fighting
guys who are effectively three weight classes
below his actual functional size. That's the
first lever. It's just physics again. Mass times
acceleration. But the second lever was even smarter.
It was in the scoring. He noticed a specific
rule. If you push your opponent off the raised
platform, it's called a light tie, three times
in a single round, you win by technical knockout.
He didn't need to punch them out. He didn't need
to kick them. He just needed to push them off
a platform. Precisely. So while the other guys,
the actual trained kickboxers, were trying to
land these flashy spinning kicks to his head,
Ferris would just like cover up, eat the shot,
clinch them. Use his wrestling base. Use his
wrestling base and his 30 -pound weight advantage
and just shove them off the platform. And he
won. He won the national title by technical knockout.
Now, there are two ways to look at that story.
You can say it's brilliant or you can say it's...
Well, kind of cheap. Not that it's against the
spirit of the competition. And that is the polarizing
nature of Tim Ferriss in a nutshell. To a purist,
he ruined the sport. He bypassed the artistry
and the years of dedication required for kickboxing.
But to a hacker, he optimized the game theory.
He achieved the stated goal winning the gold
medal with the absolute minimum effective dose
of combat. He did the same thing with the Tango
World Record, right? A similar kind of deconstruction.
Yes. He became the first American to hold a Guinness
World Record for tango spins. And again, he didn't
practice for 20 years. He analyzed the biomechanics.
He broke down video frame by frame. He realized
the female role in tango spins allowed for certain
pivots. And he analyzed the male role, found
the friction points, adjusted the technique,
and broke the record in a matter of months. It
was all performance art. It was all performance
art to demonstrate his thesis. You don't need
10 ,000 hours if you have the right strategy.
He even had a TV show about this whole concept,
right? The Tim Ferriss Experiment. Debut on HLN
in 2013, the whole premise was life hacking and
speed learning. Each episode, he'd try to learn
some incredibly complex skill in a week. Like
what? Like learning to play drums well enough
to perform with a major rock band. Or rally car
racing. Or learning Tagalog in a few days. I
remember that show had a really weird distribution
history. It kind of came and went. It did. HLN,
the network, they basically buried it. They produced
13 episodes but barely aired them. They didn't
know how to market it. So in true Ferris fashion,
he didn't let the content die. In 2015, he acquired
the full rights to the episodes himself and distributed
them on iTunes. And of course, they shot to number
one. They topped the charts. He bypassed the
gatekeepers. perfectly encapsulated his philosophy.
If the traditional system like cable TV doesn't
work for you, find the hack, find the back door.
In this case, it was digital distribution. So
up to this point, we have Tim Ferriss, the hacker.
He's conquered the bestseller list. He's conquered
his body. He's conquered the weigh -in scales.
But while all this is happening, while he's writing
these books, he's also doing something else in
the background that turns out to be incredibly,
incredibly lucrative. Oh, yeah. He's becoming
the Oracle of Silicon Valley. This is part three
of the story, and honestly, this is probably
where the real new rich money came from. While
everyone was reading his books and trying to
start dropshipping businesses, the tech insider
saw him as a golden goose. He became a super
angel investor. He wasn't just writing about
the new rich. He was literally investing in the
companies that would build the infrastructure
for that new rich economy. Precisely. And his
investment portfolio from this era is staggering.
I mean, we are talking about getting in on the
absolute ground floor of companies that became
verbs. Okay, let's name drop a few. Give us the
highlights. Uber. Right? He was a pre -seed money
advisor. Wait, pre -seed? That means before it
was even a real company with a product. That
means when it was basically a PowerPoint deck
and an idea about black cars you could summon
with your phone. That is the earliest, riskiest
stage of investing you can possibly get in on.
But because he got in there, his equity stake.
Well, the return on that investment would be
astronomical. Life changing. Who else is in that
portfolio? He was an early investor in Twitter.
an early investor in Duolingo. He was an investor
and an advisor for TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit makes
so much sense for him. It's literally outsourcing
for the masses. It's the philosophy of the book.
It is the four hour work week operationalized
as an app. I don't want to build my Ikea furniture.
I'll pay someone else to do it. That is the Ferris
ethos. He was also heavily involved with Shopify.
I remember that. He did more than just write
a check there, didn't he? He was an advisor who
helped them launch their build a business competition
back in 2010. And this was just a brilliant piece
of synergy. Ferris had millions of readers who
all wanted to start a muse, his term for a low
maintenance automated business. Right. Shopify
had a platform to build online stores. So Ferris
went to his audience and said, use Shopify to
build your business. And the winner gets $100
,000 and direct mentorship from me. So he used
his massive audience to drive a tidal wave of
traffic and new users directly to his investment.
It's the value add that venture capitalists dream
of. He didn't just bring money to the table.
He brought an army of motivated users. It just
seems like he couldn't miss, like he had the
Midas touch. But surely... In the world of angel
investing, you have to miss sometimes. It's a
hits -driven business. You absolutely do. It's
a power law game. Most of your investments fail.
They go to zero. And there is a specific case
study in the file that really highlights the
risks involved. A company called SHYP. S -H -Y
-P. SHYP. Okay, tell us about SHYP. In 2013,
Ferris formed a syndicate on AngelList to invest
in this company. He raised $250 ,000 personally
from his followers and helped the company raise
over $500 ,000 through his network. Ship eventually
raised a total of $2 .1 million in that round.
And what was the pitch? What did they do? The
pitch was Uber for shipping. It was a fantastic
idea on paper. You take a picture of an item
you want to send, a toaster, a pair of shoes,
anything. And a ship courier comes to your house,
picks it up. boxes it for you and ships it via
the cheapest carrier. So no going to the post
office, no finding tape, no printing labels.
None of it. It sounds like a dream. So why did
it fail? It sounds brilliant. Because atoms are
much, much harder than bits. It's easy to scale
software. It costs almost nothing to add another
user to Twitter or Facebook. But for ship, every
single transaction required a van, a driver,
gas, cardboard, packaging materials, warehouse
space. The logistics were a nightmare. The unit
economics must have been brutal. They ate them
alive, they grew too fast, the margins weren't
there, and they could never make the model profitable.
In 2018, ships shut down completely, they laid
off all their employees. So all that investment
money was just gone. Gone. Poof. And for Ferris,
I think this hit differently. It wasn't just
his money that was lost. It was his fans' money,
the people from his syndicate. It provided a
very realistic, very public counterbalance to
the Uber success stories. It showed everyone
that high reward investing comes with total loss
risk. And it seems like this volatility, or maybe
just the sheer intensity of that world, it started
to wear on him. Because around 2015, we see a
really significant pivot. We do. In 2015, Ferris
declared what he called a long vacation from
new investing. He just stopped. Cold turkey.
He stopped the intake of new deals. He cited
the incredible stress of the work, the constant
pressure. But he also said something very telling.
He said he felt his impact was minimal in the
long run. Minimal in the long run. That is a
haunting phrase for a guy who is completely obsessed
with impact and efficiency. Here's a guy who
has invested in some of the biggest tech companies
in history. And he's saying, is this actually
mattering? It marks the first major crack in
that optimization armor. He realized that financial
success and efficiency were not enough for personal
fulfillment. He even moved out of Silicon Valley.
In 2017, he stated that one of the main reasons
he left the Bay Area was that after retiring
from angel investing, he had no professional
need to be there anymore. He was unplugging from
the very machine he helped build. He was. And
this, this disillusionment, it leads us directly
to part four, the voice of reason. Because as
he stepped back from investing, he leaned hard
into a new medium, podcasting. The Tim Ferriss
Show. It launched in 2014. And it became a juggernaut.
I mean, the numbers are just insane. We are talking
over one billion downloads. It's consistently
ranked as one of the top podcasts in the world.
But what's really interesting is the format shift.
How so? In his books, Ferriss was the teacher.
He was the guru. Here is how you lose fat. Here
is how you learn French. He had the answers.
But on the podcast. On the podcast, he's the
student. The format is almost entirely interview
centered. He isn't teaching. He is asking. He's
deconstructing other people's success, not just
his own. And the list of guests is just absurd.
It's not just tech CEOs and venture capitalists
anymore. No, not at all. It's a who's who of
high performance across every possible domain.
You have Jamie Foxx giving these incredible insights
on entertainment and mimicry. You have Arnold
Schwarzenegger on discipline and psychology.
LeBron James on physical recovery. Maria Sharapova.
Matthew McConaughey was a great one. Exactly.
But then you also have someone like Brene Brown
discussing vulnerability. That's a key shift.
He's not just talking to tech bros about conversion
rates anymore. He's talking to researchers about
shame and courage. He's looking for the source
code of these people, the underlying principles.
He is, and he asks these very specific, almost
tactical questions. What is the book you've gifted
the most? How do you handle a failure? What do
the first 60 minutes of your day look like? He's
still looking for the hack, but the target has
changed. He's not hacking the body anymore. He's
trying to hack the mind and the soul. And he
also started his own publishing imprint around
this time, too, right? Yeah, Tim Ferriss Publishing,
which he launched in November 2013. And again,
look at the mission, bringing books he loves
to the world, not just writing his own. He's
becoming a curator. What were some of the titles
he put out? Well, the first one was a perfect
fit, Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which is kind
of the Bible of long term travel. But then he
published Ego is the Enemy and the Obstacle is
the Way by Ryan Holiday. Those are huge books.
I mean, those are the books that basically brought
stoicism back into the mainstream for a whole
new generation. They are foundational. Before
Ferris and Holliday, stoicism was something you
studied in a dusty philosophy class. They made
it a practical, actionable toolkit for modern
life. He also published a book called What I
Learned, Losing a Million Dollars. A book about
failure. From the guy who everyone thought was
the king of success. A book about failure. You
see the pattern, right? He's moving away from
how to win and he's moving towards how to endure
and how to think. And his own later books reflect
this too. Tools of Titans in 2016 and Tribe of
Mentors in 2017. These aren't really narratives.
They're compilations. They're collections. They
are basically encyclopedias of other people's
wisdom. It's Ferris explicitly saying, look,
I don't have all the answers, but I have access
to the people who might. It reinforces that shift
from guru to guide. So we have the hacker, the
investor, and now the podcaster and publisher,
the curator. But beneath the surface of all this
public success, there was a very serious struggle
going on. And this brings us to part five, the
philosophy shift. This is where things get really
personal. This is the most human part of the
story. For years, Ferris was the image of the
optimized male, the guy who had everything figured
out. But as the podcast went on, he started to
pull back the curtain on his own mental health.
He's been very, very public about his struggles
with bipolar disorder. Yes. He has discussed
his bipolar disorder openly on his show. He has
talked about periods of deep. crippling depression
where he literally couldn't get out of bed for
days. He credits stoicism and meditation not
just with, you know, optimizing his mind, but
with actually helping him manage that disorder
and stay alive. It's less about crushing it and
more about surviving it. Exactly. There is a
famous TED talk he gave in 2017 called Why You
Should Define Your Fears Instead of Your Goals.
That title alone is a complete rejection of the
self -help industry standard. The whole industry
is built on set goals, crush your goals. He says,
no, define your fears. He calls it fear setting.
It's an old stoic exercise. You visualize the
absolute worst case scenario in agonizing detail.
If I quit my job, what exactly happened? OK,
I lose my income. Then what? I miss my rent payment.
Then what? I have to move in with my parents.
And usually when you follow that thread all the
way to the bottom, you realize. OK, it's not
great, but I'm not going to die. Exactly. You
realize the worst case scenario is survivable.
It strips the fear of its paralyzing power. He
pushes letters from a stoic by Seneca constantly.
He calls it his favorite writing of all time.
It's so interesting that a guy who made his name
on modern tech and biohacking finds his solace
in a Roman philosopher from 2000 years ago. While
stoicism is the ultimate operating system for
high stress environments, it teaches you to focus
only on what you can control and accept what
you can't. For a guy who spent years trying to
control everything, his blood sugar, his sleep
cycles, his business, his investments, realizing
what you can't control must have been a profound
revelation. There was a 2020 interview he did
with GQ where he really laid this all out. Right.
Yes. It's a pivotal interview, a real turning
point. He reevaluated a lot of his earlier ideas,
and he gave this quote that I think defines his
current era. He said, not everything that is
meaningful can be measured. Not everything that
is meaningful can be measured. I mean, that is
coming from the guy who tracked his. blood glucose
and sleep cycles on spreadsheets for years. The
ultimate quantifier. It's a massive admission.
It's the data guy admitting that the data has
limits, that there are things like love and meaning
and peace of mind that don't fit into a cell
on a spreadsheet. He started recommending books
like Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock and Awareness
by Anthony DeMello. These are spiritual books,
not business books. So he's moved from the body
to the mind and then to the spirit. And that
trajectory leads us to the current frontier,
part six, psychedelics and philanthropy. This
is where he is putting his money, where his mouth
is. And it's not a small amount of money. We're
talking millions and millions of dollars. When
we say psychedelics, just to be clear, we are
not talking about Burning Man recreational use.
This isn't about that. No, not at all. We are
talking about rigorous clinical university -backed
science. The motivation here is deeply personal
and, frankly, quite dark. Ferris became interested
in psychedelics because of his own experiences
with depression and bipolar disorder, as we mentioned.
But he also specifically cites addiction in his
family and losing a close friend to a fentanyl
overdose. So he sees this as a crisis intervention,
a tool for healing trauma. He sees it as a potential
cure for trauma in intractable mental illness,
things like treatment -resistant depression and
PTSD. The current tools, SSRIs, talk therapy,
they don't work for everyone. He believes compounds
like psilocybin and MDMA might be the key. And
he's treating it like a venture capital investment,
but for science. OK, so let's follow the money.
Where is it actually going? It started around
2015 when he met Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins.
Roland is a legend in this field, one of the
first to get FDA approval for this kind of research.
In 2019, Ferris donated over $2 million of his
own money to help fund the Johns Hopkins Center
for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. $2
million. It's a very serious commitment. But
he didn't stop there. He used his leverage. He
organized an additional $8 million in commitments
from other donors. He basically called up his
wealthy friends from the tech world and said,
this is important. This is the future. Put your
money here. That's huge. Johns Hopkins is a premier
medical institution. Having a center there, it
legitimizes the entire field. That's the whole
goal. He knows that to change the laws and change
public perception, you need the hard science
from unimpeachable institutions. He also contributed
to Imperial College London's Center for Psychedelic
Research. And then there is MAPS, the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies. They're
the ones working on MDMA for PTSD in veterans,
right? Correct. Their research is in late -stage
FDA trials. In 2020, Ferris donated $1 million
to them. But again, he used leverage. He issued
a challenge grant. He went on his podcast and
said, I'll put up this money, but only if my
audience matches it. Wow. He helped them raise
a total of $30 million for that research by publicizing
the challenge. $30 million. That is a game -changing
amount of money for what was once a very fringe
field of research. It accelerates the clinical
trials by years. It literally buys time and could
save lives. He also donated to the Neuroscape
Psychedelics Division at UCSF. He's spreading
the bets. And he set up his own foundation to
manage all this, too. The SASE Foundation, founded
in 2018. And through that, he's attacking the
problem from different angles. It's not just
the medical research. In 2021, the foundation
committed $800 ,000 to UC Berkeley. For what?
What are they doing at Berkeley? For journalism.
It's for the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism
Fellowship. And guess who chairs it? Michael
Pollan. Michael Pollan, who wrote the book How
to Change Your Mind, the book that brought this
whole topic to the mainstream. Exactly. The goal
of the fellowship is to provide grants to serious
journalists to cover psychedelics properly, to
move away from all the old trippy hippie stereotypes
and report on the science, the policy and the
business of this new field. So he's funding the
research and he's funding the storytelling around
the research. He's trying to change the whole
narrative. And the law. His foundation co -funded
a program called POPLAR at Harvard Law School.
That stands for the Project on Psychedelics Law
and Regulation. So look at the board. He's funding
the science at Johns Hopkins, the storytelling
at Berkeley, and the legal framework at Harvard.
It is a full -spectrum ecosystem play. Just like
he optimized his book launches with a multi -pronged
strategy, he is optimizing the mainstreaming
of psychedelic medicine. He's building the entire
infrastructure for a revolution in mental health.
And it's not just psychedelics. He's done some
other interesting philanthropy and education
too, right? This isn't his only focus. No, that's
right. He's been a member of the National Advisory
Council of DonorsChoose for a while, and there
was this incredible moment in 2016 called the
Flash Fund. What happened there? He just decided
to clear the board. One day, out of the blue,
he funded all 145 classroom projects on Long
Island. Every single teacher who had a request
on the site for pencils, books, computers, he
just paid for it. All of it. That's his hometown
area. Right. But then he also did it for all
the projects in the entire state of New Hampshire
and all the projects in Sacramento. It shows
that while he's thinking about these high level
complex issues like brain chemistry, he's also
thinking about, you know, a second grade teacher
who just needs a new set of notebooks. It's a
long way from selling brain supplements online
to optimize reaction time. It is. It's a maturation
of the soul, really. So we're coming to the end
of the file here. Just to show that he hasn't
completely lost his sense of fun in games, I
saw that in 2025 he released a card game. Yes,
a game called Coyote. He partnered with the company
Exploding Kittens to release it. It's a social
bluffing game. It shows he still likes to play.
He hasn't become some, you know, monk living
in a cave. He still enjoys a bit of strategy
and healthy deception. So let's synthesize this
entire journey. We started with a 20 -something
wrestler in a data storage sales job, completely...
obsessed with efficiency who creates the four
-hour empire. And we ended up with a 40 -something
philanthropist who has largely stepped back from
the relentless pursuit of money and fame to fund
clinical research into the human mind and to
study ancient philosophy. It feels like the ultimate
optimization was realizing that optimization
itself has a ceiling. Or that the metric was
wrong all along. He spent the first half of his
career optimizing for speed and for output. He
is spending the second half of his career optimizing
for meaning and for well -being. The takeaway
for you, for the listener, seems to be that the
tools of efficiency, the hacks, the leverage,
the systems, they work. Ferris proved they work,
but they are just tools. Exactly. A hammer is
a great tool for building a house, but it's a
terrible tool for understanding why you need
shelter in the first place. Ferris represents
this idea that eventually you have to apply those
powerful tools to the really hard problems of
the human condition, to fear, to trauma, to connection,
to meaning. You can't four -hour your way out
of being human. No. You can't efficiency hack
grief. You can't outsource your own peace of
mind. I want to leave the listener with a final
thought here. Ferris started his career effectively
asking the question, how can I do this faster?
And he seems to have ended up asking a very different
question. Why am I doing this at all? It's the
difference between velocity and direction. Velocity
is just speed. But if you're moving very fast
in the wrong direction, you're just getting lost
quicker. So here's the question for you listening
right now. If the king of productivity. The man
who literally wrote the book on the four -hour
life stopped focusing on speed to focus on his
state of mind. What does that suggest about the
goals you are currently chasing? Are you sprinting
toward a finish line that doesn't actually exist?
Something to mull over. Definitely. That's it
for this deep dive into the life of Tim Ferriss.
We'll see you on the next one. Stay curious.