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How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More

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Tim Ferriss: Kevin, thank you for making the time. So nice to see you.

Kevin Ryan: Happy to be here.

Tim Ferriss: So I wanted to just give people a scan at 30,000 feet of the landscape, meaning your chronology for a second. So this was prepared by the robots. So don’t believe everything you read, but let’s just go through some of the basics. I’m not going to spend too much time, but please indulge me for a second. So 1985, graduates from Yale, I think that was economics, begins his career at Prudential Investment Corp. All right, New York and London. 1990, earns his MBA at INSEAD, subsequently works at Euro Disney in France, then United Media. We’re going to come back to all of that. 1995 helps launch the blank website. I’m leaving that blank for a reason. We’ll come back to it. And then after that, DoubleClick, that’s where if people interview you, and I know you don’t do very much media, but in the few that I’ve seen, that’s where a lot of people start.

We will not start there. Then goes on, DoubleClick sells for 1.1 billion. Ryan steps down. 2007, founds AlleyCorp. We’re going to spend a lot of time on AlleyCorp. Co-founds Gilt Groupe, Business Insider, 10gen later renamed MongoDB. Then co-found Zola, a wedding registry company and Nomad Health in 2015, a marketplace connecting clinicians with temporary healthcare jobs. I’m trying to give people an idea of the breadth of fields. 2015, Axel Springer acquires control of Business Insider. I’ve got some numbers here, but who knows? 442 million, something like that. Hudson’s Bay buys Gilt Groupe for announced $250 million deal. MongoDB in 2017 goes public on NASDAQ 10 years after its founding. I know there’s a lot of stories behind that. 2021, we met, I guess, or had dinner next to each other two years prior to this roughly. Co-founds Transcend Therapeutics, developing new medicines for psychiatric conditions. And we will certainly talk about that.

2023, skis 101 kilometers to the South Pole. So that stands out as an outlier. Then, June 2026, Otsuka completes its acquisition of Transcend, 700 million up front plus up to 525 million contingent on future sales. July 2026, announces AlleyCorp’s 335 million second fund focused on backing companies at their earliest stages. I think you’re doing a lot more kind of deep tech investing also. This is a crazy bio, Kevin. And there’s so many reasons I wanted to chat and learn from you. And I wanted to start, we’re eventually going to get to things like recruiting and talent scouting, but I wanted to talk about trends and gazing into the crystal ball, looking into the future. So I’ve read that you sometimes do an exercise of listing trends on a whiteboard, throw 20 trends up. And I’m going to read a bit, this is from founders-journey.org.

“So one exercise I do is to list 20 ideas on the board of trends that I believe are going to exist for 10 years and then what are the implications that come out of that.” And you can look at societal trends, healthy eating, automation and restaurants, gig economy. And this is where I think I misstep. So first, I get the first part. You ask, “If I bet that’s going to continue for 20 years, the market’s going to grow by 5X.” He asks, “What will exist that doesn’t exist today?” So sometimes I miss that second step, but could you perhaps just walk me through how you think of trends and spotting opportunities in those trends? And it strikes me that I think that 10 years is important as opposed to one or two years, but could you speak to that?

Kevin Ryan: First of all, 10 years is important because to build an important company, unfortunately you can’t do it in two or three years. It does take 10 years. And so you’ve got to bet on a long-term trend. So if it’s something that is hype-y today and is going to be done in two years or started five years ago, you’re too late.

And it’s very hard. I’ve gotten it wrong many times, but sometimes you get it right. So DoubleClick was internet advertising was going to be very important and that trend we absolutely got right. Unstructured data in databases was Mongo and that was a 20-year trend. Psychedelics was a very important trend. I became a big believer that that would be significant for mental health and that we are five years into that 10-year trend. Nuclear energy is something that we made a bet on, a very significant bet on two and a half years ago and are an incredible company there. The creator economy is something that we made a bet on several years ago and have an extremely successful company there. That’s a trend that is continuing. There are other trends out there and more specifically value-based care is a trend.

Value based care is a way the government has structured it so that you can go to multiple hospitals or doctor’s practices and work out ways for them to reduce their costs by focusing on a specialty often. And if you reduce their costs, then you can share in the savings. And so we have multiple companies there. And sometimes there are trends and I’m not able to think of the right way to benefit from the right product. Longevity and this focus still haven’t come up with the right thing. I have a conference called Doc, which is in Napa Valley in October that is longevity and science. And so that’s to learn more, but I don’t have a product idea yet on that.

Tim Ferriss: Why do you do events? Are the events opportunity and talent scouting mostly or are—I understand that learning is sort of a bedrock beneath both of those two, but what was the impetus behind an event like that?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah, so I have four now and some of them are linked to my business. So Deep Tech New York, it’s 450 people talking about the most fundamental deep tech trends that are happening out there, material science, things like that. Then I have one in Digital Health New York, which is next week, Doc, and then I have one that’s called Odyssey, which is just ideas that’s less commercial and just getting a hundred very smart people together. I look at that as more intellectual nourishment. I don’t think of it as directly generating business. If I meet fascinating people in different areas, good things will happen. Some of them may be business oriented and some of them may not be.

Tim Ferriss: Could be dragging a hundred pounds sled behind you in Antarctica.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. I’m leading 20 people as part of Odyssey to China in a month. The theme is what does China do better? There are things they do worse, but there are things they do better.

Tim Ferriss: There are definitely things they do better.

Kevin Ryan: I haven’t been in a long time, I don’t do a lot of business in China, so I just felt like I need to see that. I’m bringing heads of VC firms, a bunch of interesting people on that trip. We did one, took 16 people skiing that are off-piste skiers to a place in Val d’Isère, fascinating conversations in the afternoons. I’m going to take 30 people to Switzerland on a hiking trip next May. Anytime I’m surrounding myself with great people and we structure it in a good way that these conversations are happening, then I’m going to get a lot out of it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I had planned, but plans change when the conversation gets flowing on hitting early chapters and I want to hit early chapters. But before we get there, I remember sitting next to you in Portugal, whenever it was, 2019, the first thing I thought was, good God, what does this guy do for exercise? I mean, you seem to take, unless your genetics are just like Usain Bolt or something, fitness, movement, exercise very seriously, and we’ll probably get into what that regimen looks like a bit later. But when you organize these trips, so I organize a few trips a year for friends, how long are the trips? In the case of say the hiking, off piste, you got to check some boxes before someone’s going to be avalanche ready and so on. In the case of the hiking trip, how do you think of composing the group? How long is the trip? What goes into creating that?

Kevin Ryan: The hiking trip is three or four days. It’ll be probably 30 people and my structure will be probably a four-hour hike, eight till 12, which is a good size hike. You can go longer, but four, maybe five. And then in the afternoon we’ll have sessions. So there’ll be someone talking about climate change. There’ll be someone who’s talking about nuclear or whatever is happening that we think is interesting—or consciousness. And so you should feel like you had great content, you got to know other people, you had great conversations, and then at dinner, a lot of that comes together and you get to hopefully come away knowing 20 of these people who’ve been selected because they come from different walks of life but are doing something very interesting.

Tim Ferriss: So with 30, does that mean that you would have something like 10 who end up getting up to speak?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: At dinner, is that structured in any way? The reason I ask is that there can be unstructured events. One of the characteristics of Dialog that I really enjoyed in the early days when it got bigger, it changed. Also didn’t realize I was in Peter Thiel’s secret society when it came out in the media. Who knew? In any case, in the early days, I remember they had very small tables, four to five people, and there would be a question at each table and someone would have to take the responsibility for effectively acting as moderator. There was frequently assigned seating to ensure that you would get exposed to a variety of folks. I thought that was really an astonishing way to squeeze a lot out of a few days. But in this case, if it’s unstructured, how do you think about seating and grouping people? Because if it’s just one long Red Wedding Game of Thrones thing, then if somebody’s at one end and someone’s at the opposite end, they’re not going to interact necessarily, right? Is it Jeffersonian or like—

Kevin Ryan: No, at 30, it’s too big to have one conversation. So what I would generally do actually is the first two nights have seating so that it forces people to mix it up and maybe on the last night not do it so then you can say the person I really want to catch up with is this and you should have that opportunity of someone you spent some time with. On my bike, I have an annual biking trip where we just classic four days, do a lot of mountains last year in the Douro Valley in Portugal, might be in Italy, things like that. There’s only eight of us and each person has a topic that one meal is going to be a 20-minute conversation that you’re going to lead. And it can range from very early on we were talking about crypto and it wasn’t so obvious. A good topic when you are relatively well off, how do you handle money with your children? Always a tricky issue when all of us had kids. So wide range of topics.

Tim Ferriss: On the trend side, personally I remember for instance, way back in 2008, 2009, I met Tobi, who is still CEO of Shopify, and they had 10 employees, something like that. Got very lucky, ended up becoming the first advisor to Shopify. But in part, the reason I committed to that is I thought, okay, one year, two years, who knows? But in 10 years, will there be more people online? Will there be more e-commerce? I feel like that is a no-brainer.

Kevin Ryan: No-brainer.

Tim Ferriss: All right. And Tobi and his team, Harley and everyone were also very focused on being basically first movers on mobile. I was like, okay, well, will there be more mobile phones, more broadband? I mean, that seems obvious, of course. And so ostensibly someone will probably win a decent part of that market. Sure, why not? Give it a shot. And there’s a lot of luck involved with these chance encounters, but I feel like you over time have probably developed a more sophisticated lens or kind of multidimensional lens of looking at trends. So if you’re, say, hosting a company offsite and they’re imagining where different industries are 10 years from now, can you walk through maybe common pitfalls or mistakes that people make when extrapolating trends or forecasting? Are there any follow-up questions or frameworks that you use to hone in on something that might be an opportunity or disqualify something that is shiny but is actually a suicide mission?

Kevin Ryan: Well, one of them—and again, if this were formulaic, we’d all be doing it and it would be easy. So there’s definitely some gut feel and some instincts, some guesswork in here. But I’m always thinking about, let’s imagine Shopify does very well. Who else works with them and supplies them? So that’s a second order. And so let’s think about that. The people who are providing the picks and shovels to data centers are doing very well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Ryan: And how does behavior change? What does that mean? Sometimes that has a result that people will stop doing this and be doing more of this.

Tim Ferriss: Can you give an example of that?

Kevin Ryan: Well, I’ll give you one example in second order that we sat down in 2003 and didn’t quite do it and thought about bandwidth price is going down and they were going down. The reason there was no video in 2003 is because it costs about $10 per thousand to serve content and you could get about a dollar in advertising. So that model doesn’t work. But we looked at the trend and thought by 2005, 2006, they’re going to cross and we should have started YouTube and we didn’t. It’s not a coincidence that YouTube started in 2005 and then crushed it. And that was the second order that led to a company that today is worth $300 billion.

Tim Ferriss: That was a good acquisition.

Kevin Ryan: Incredible.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible acquisition.

Tim Ferriss: I won’t belabor this, but I think it’s, well, number one, deeply fascinating to me. If we look at, for instance, Gilt Groupe, and maybe you could give just a brief description of what it was. Why don’t we start there, just very brief, what did Gilt do?

Kevin Ryan: It’s a good news and bad news story. So this was an unusual one where I spent a lot of time in France. I have a French passport, speak French, and everyone in France in 2006 knew vente-privée, which was basically Gilt of France. They were doing a billion dollars in revenue doing this concept of flash sales where during the day, at one moment, they would have a discount merchandise of high-end brands on sale. The equivalent, if you had time to go to a sample sale, which you don’t, and I remember walking by a sample sale in New York and there were 200 mostly women in line. I remember thinking the person who lives in Philadelphia or Austin, you don’t have sample sales. It’s really the New York brands. There’s a lot of people who’d like to be in that line, and these guys had figured that out.

I started it. It became a phenomenon. So in our second year, we did $175 million in revenue, which is crazy. It’s merchandise, you have to buy it and package it and sell it and return it and things like this. We did an incredible job of providing that. In year four, we were doing $500 million in revenue. This quite a while ago. Then the problem was, which does happen, is the market changed on us.

Tim Ferriss: This is the part I wanted to ask about.

Kevin Ryan: And so what happened was when we started it, let’s use Marc Jacobs, Marc Jacobs did not have a website in 2008, 2009, because they sold to Bloomingdale’s and people like that, they were a wholesaler. Why would they have a website? They got a website. They started discounting their own things.

Tim Ferriss: You had been filling that gap.

Kevin Ryan: I had been filling that gap completely. At the time, Macy’s had a terrible website. They at least got it to mediocre by 2011, 2012. So did other department stores, then Farfetch was there. So all of a sudden I’m competing with a lot of people for that merchandise. It got a little commoditized and we couldn’t figure out a way around that.

Tim Ferriss: So this leads to my question, because you have to take shots on goal and sometimes the competitive landscape or the evolution of the competitive landscape is difficult to glean, but did that experience with Gilt inform how you think of durable capitalization on trends? In other words, how you capitalize on that window, but avoid getting crowded out when you have 10 other people do effectively the same thing?

Kevin Ryan: And it gets back to, do you have a moat? We were trying to get to be big enough that we would have that moat and we got to be quite big, but not big enough. I mean, I was talking to Theory once and they had 20,000 items at the end of the season to sell. I could buy a thousand. Good, but doesn’t move the needle for them. I just didn’t quite get there to have an impact on the market. It’s hard to know exactly how big you’re going to get, how fast, how much success you’re going to have over your vendors. We almost got there, but didn’t. And one of the lessons there, I went to the board and said, “I think we should sell the company.” Everyone’s like, “Well, we were worth a billion dollars. We thought we could sell it for 400. It’s disappointing.” But I said, “We have a falling knife here.” We went out and we only got $250 million. Saks came in and paid for it, and three years later they said, “I’ll sell it back to you for five million.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Better late than never.

Kevin Ryan: Exactly. It wasn’t a great sale, but it was a lot better than it would have been because I just didn’t like where things were going. The conclusion has been that I haven’t touched really e-commerce since then.

It’s solved. I mean, startups have to solve a problem. Even if you don’t realize that problem is there, when you see it, you’re like, “Oh yeah, that is a problem I had.” Right now, I can get anything delivered to my house in 27 seconds. I can return it. It’s inexpensive. So I don’t know how to do better. I don’t have any ideas. Whereas in many other fields, cure for cancer, nuclear energy, psychedelics, there are things to be built that have not been built that will improve the world a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s wind back the clock, as I promised listeners earlier. We’re going to get to the helps launch the blank website. Before that, we have Yale, Economics, Prudential Investment Corp.

Kevin Ryan: Investment banking.

Tim Ferriss: Investment banking, INSEAD, Euro Disney. Was there anything that you learned or developed in those chapters that then helped you when you moved to United Media? Is there anything sort of crucial or critical?

Kevin Ryan: The key thing is I was quite financially oriented and very comfortable. I’ve always been very comfortable with numbers and understanding fundamental trends and the business, and that is a component of business and life. All of that was business. I went finance and then going into operations at Disney, we had to manage hotels and it was an exciting project. We launched Euro Disney, 15,000 hotel rooms, 50,000 people every day. Huge project launched one day. I learned a lot about that, but I decided I didn’t want to work for large companies anymore. I thought there’s a lot of training, wasn’t incredibly enjoyable. I then wanted to go back to New York. I got a job to be the CFO of 180-person division of United Media. For me, that was a big job. I was managing 50 people. I managed all the operations and the finance, and it was a turnaround, made a lot more money. For me, it was a huge step-up. I was now CFO and COO.

Tim Ferriss: And what is the blank that I’m leaving at here?

Kevin Ryan: I still remember, I read an article in Business Week that talked about a thing I did not know, which was called the internet. You may have heard of it. I remember reading that thinking, oh my God, that is incredibly cool. We could all be in touch with each other. We can send each other messages. We could buy things. Remember, there’s no browser at the time. By ’95, I launched, because we owned a lot of intellectual property, and one of the things was Dilbert. I launched the Dilbert website, which became extremely successful. The reason was there were a lot of tech people who could use the internet without a browser, and so we had enormous traffic. I started selling advertising, which was a hard coded ad just up there. IBM was the first person. They took it for two weeks. I made up a price on the spot. I mean, how do you price something that’s literally never existed?

We did our own merchandising, so we started selling t-shirts and ties and things like that. A year later, we had a very successful business. I went to the parent company and I said, “This internet thing’s going to be big and we have a head start, so why don’t you give me—” I was thinking as a loyal corporate citizen, “Give me a couple million dollars and I’ll build up an internet division. We can do it for other companies.” The disturbing thing is the guy I was talking to was very nice, smart, traditional media guy. And he said, “No, because we’re going to wait for the next internet.”

Tim Ferriss: What’s that even mean?

Kevin Ryan: First of all, I know you don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no next internet. The disturbing part is I remember thinking, you’re just really too old for this. He was exactly the age I am today, 61 or 62. A very successful executive and other things just wasn’t in touch with what was happening right at that moment. So I then concluded this is not my future, but I believe in my thesis. I thought this might be, and it turned out to be true.

Tim Ferriss: Was that a gut feeling or were you tracking numbers outside of traffic? What made you feel that conviction?

Kevin Ryan: No, I could see at that time, if you’re around in ’96, it was just early but starting to boom. Companies were starting, more and more people were online, no one was getting offline. They were starting to buy things. They were starting to use maps. You could just see it worked. The things we take for granted now that you can buy something from anywhere, see content from anywhere that never existed. And now I saw that. I’m like, this is a no-brainer. Everyone in the world is going to be doing this. So I think it was like your point on, is e-commerce going to grow? Yes, it is. It’s just better. It was a no-brainer. And so I said, I’m going to go out and start an internet company. I met, it was a very tiny world at that point. People in Silicon Valley wanted to bring me on to join existing companies like, I don’t know if you remember Excite.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Ryan: A bunch of companies like this.

Tim Ferriss: Drove by them on the 101.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. And at that point I had a year of internet experience, which made me one of the most experienced people at the time. So people were super excited to have me join and do something. And then I ran across two guys who had started DoubleClick six months before and who were very smart, very technical, and I still have great relationships with both of them. And so they said, why don’t you come join us? And I wanted to stay in New York. I thought that was going to be a successful company. And so I joined. I was the 10th or 12th person. And then I started for a couple months as CFO, became the president and then became the CEO.

Tim Ferriss: What do you think contributed to that ascension to CEO? What skillset or otherwise contributed to that?

Kevin Ryan: I felt like a founder. Technically I’m not, but I felt like I was. And so I just was a team player and wanted to make this company successful. And I adapted extremely quickly to making decisions very, very quickly. You have to make your decisions faster than other people because if I wait, so for example, we opened offices in 25 countries in those first three years and our competitors were only in six. And when I went to Microsoft or Procter & Gamble, they’re like, “We do business in a lot of countries. We need to work with you.” And then once you had all them, the smaller players were like, “Well, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft, everyone are working with you, so we’ll work with you.” So we just ended up almost dominating our space. And I think I did adapt to that of fast decision making, understanding the numbers, willing to take risks.

We were in 20 countries before our first country was profitable. If it never worked, you’d be like, “What were you doing?” And we made some mistakes along the way, but in general, we built the world leader. DoubleClick today as an independent company would be worth a hundred billion.

Tim Ferriss: So I want to talk about that, not exactly building the parachute on the way down, but the AlleyCorp model, let’s just say, especially in the first few years, because I hesitate to put it under the label of incubators because it’s different in a lot of ways. Unlike say a Y Combinator, it’s not a bunch of people coming in with their own ideas that you select, then you take a tiny percentage for a tiny amount of money and teach them how to pitch a demo day. It’s not what you do. My understanding is, in the early days, you and your partner were putting in maybe 500K each into each company, acting as co-founders, building each for about six months as a proof of concept and then going out to raise venture. Is that a fair description?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah, maybe a year.

Tim Ferriss: A year. Okay.

Kevin Ryan: But we really built the product, generally launched the product, and then went out to raise money. And so we were really focused on those companies and we did three and then we did another batch of three. So we did a total of six. Three of them were hugely, hugely successful, Gilt Business Insider and Mongo.

Tim Ferriss: After the formation of AlleyCorp, when were those founded?

Kevin Ryan: All between 2005 and 2008. And the last three were started in the same year.

Tim Ferriss: At that time, were you doing eight companies a year or did that end up later?

Kevin Ryan: No, that much later.

Tim Ferriss: Much later.

Kevin Ryan: Because there was really only two of us. At the time, my partner, he’s retired now, but Dwight Merriman is one of the most brilliant technical minds that we’ve seen. So he’s really the brains behind the DoubleClick technology and the Mongo technology along with one other person. And so we had this great partnership where everything technical, he really handled. I didn’t even worry about. And then everything on the business side, finding the CEO, building it, raising money, things like that, I focused on that.

Tim Ferriss: It seems like you have a number of incredible strengths and I’m sure there are more, but there’s the trend opportunity identification. There is recruitment of talent, capital formation, being able to raise money, in some cases a lot of money depending.

And as you mentioned with DoubleClick, getting to 25 countries before the first is profitable, because when a larger company wants to partner with you, they’re going to want that global footprint and you raise the capital necessary to reach that critical mass, escape velocity, choose your metaphor. And I’m wondering how you think about that when in the say first three to five years of AlleyCorp when you were founding companies. And some of them took longer, obviously. MongoDB I think stands out as an example of that. But let’s just say with Business Insider, for instance, I listened to an interview you did with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri, and you mentioned how in the beginning you had a handful of people covering everything. And we could talk about the problem and the gap that that addressed, but just for the time being, I think this is worth spending a moment on.

It’s like in the beginning you had a handful of journalists handling everything.

Kevin Ryan: No, they were only handling New York technology.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. They were handling New York technology.

Kevin Ryan: It’s important to start narrow.

Tim Ferriss: So they handled New York technology and then at a certain point though, I imagine they were spread thin, but then once you got the traffic that allowed you to hire more. And so you could stair step it in a way that I think a lot of people would be hesitant to, but ultimately that allowed you to dominate the space. And I’m not delivering that in a very eloquent way, so maybe you could explain it. I’m just wondering how that type of thinking manifests in other companies that you start.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. And Gilt and Business Insider, even though they’re very different businesses, we did the same way, which is that Gilt started with one sale a week of women’s clothing and then we went to two and then three and then five. And then maybe a year later added men’s and then kids and then travel and then home. And in Business Insider we start because it’s better to do one thing really well than a bad job on everything. And so we started with only three people, so we discovered New York Tech, which wasn’t that big, but we did a good job and then expanded and had a Wall Street vertical and then added another vertical. And then as we added more people, they would add a vertical, eventually defense, retail, things like that. And then got to 600 journalists at one point and did a great job.

Roughly when we sold there afterwards, we had six people covering defense. That’s great coverage.

Tim Ferriss: When you and Dwight were putting in the initial million dollars, split fifty fifty, presumably you’re taking, I don’t know, 30 plus percent of the company, something like that.

Kevin Ryan: Day one more and then it gets diluted down.

Tim Ferriss: Right, exactly. You’re planning for that dilution with the later raise. In the early, let’s just call it the 2005 to 2008 period, how did you get very, very smart, capable people to quit their jobs and come run these companies?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. And they have to believe that one, the idea is a great idea. They have to believe that we are adding value and that there’s something here and that we should do it together. And those are the things they have to believe and then we can help them. And so we had just sold the company in New York City that was the most valuable startup company ever created at that time. So we had credibility with—they thought, we’re going to get you in to raise money and help you do that. And we did and we’re able to do that. So that was the pitch. Henry Blodget is a perfect example. He was—

Tim Ferriss: Business Insider.

Kevin Ryan: Business Insider. He’s an incredibly talented person. At the time had a mixed reputation because what had happened on Wall Street years before, but a great writer.

Tim Ferriss: Just for clarity, he basically said he was uncomfortable with something that was standard practice. That was his sin.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. No, I stand by what he said and did actually, but he came on board and I knew him a little bit, but brought him in and after 30 minutes he’s like, “This is a great idea. We should do it.”

Tim Ferriss: What did the pitch look like?

Kevin Ryan: So the idea is so simple now you won’t believe it. There was no business news site that was online that was inherently online. And at the time, Wall Street Journal and Business Week did not update their sites during the day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Got to wait for the paper.

Kevin Ryan: And so all the things we did, we’re not maybe the only ones, but we were one of the very first ones, our standard today, meaning we posted multiple stories as it built, got more information, had punchy headlines, tested our headlines. So it’s just hard for people to switch mediums. So Business Week doesn’t worry about their headline in the magazine. Does a good headline give them more revenues?

Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t matter.

Kevin Ryan: Doesn’t matter.

Tim Ferriss: They care about their cover, but they don’t care about the headlines of the articles.

Kevin Ryan: And so we would try four headlines, which was incredibly innovative at the time for five minutes a piece and then see, oh, this one is pulling better. Let’s use that one. So all these things are absolutely standard today. And Henry was very good. He’s incredibly talented. And we got Peter Kafka, some people who are still very significant journalists today. We got them early on in their careers. But it took a long time. It took years, but luckily we had enormous growth. Also, it was hard to raise money for. Our strategy was, we’re never going to do marketing. So by the way, you’ve never seen an ad for Business Insider. We’re going to write stuff that’s so good that eventually we’ll have a hundred million uniques. And everyone’s like, “That’s not a strategy.”

Tim Ferriss: Hope is not a strategy.

Kevin Ryan: And that is exactly what happened.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right. Now you have, how many full-time employees do you have at AlleyCorp now?

Kevin Ryan: 23, 24.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So still not gigantic?

Kevin Ryan: No.

Tim Ferriss: All right. When you go back to yesteryear, back when you and Dwight, and maybe there were one or two other people, how did you do the opportunity analysis to decide on what you were going to launch? How did you stress test what seemed interesting?

Kevin Ryan: No, it was just the two of us.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, great. So how did you choose what to do?

Kevin Ryan: Literally just sitting there in the conference room, brainstorming ideas, talking about it, thinking about it. Sometimes we’d go months and had nothing. And then you have to just trust at a certain point that it’d be no different if you met someone who’s single and is out there dating and said, “How do I know this is the person?” You have to hope you know when you know.

Tim Ferriss: What does it feel like to know with some of these ideas or any others, but preferably earlier examples, what does it feel like?

Kevin Ryan: I recognize it because I start with a business crush, meaning there’s an idea and I can’t stop thinking about it. And then a week later I’m still thinking about it. And now I’m thinking, “Oh my God, this would be good and we could do that and we could have this person.” And it’s just building in my mind and I’m falling in love with my idea intellectually. And if that sticks with me for two weeks, I generally do it. I don’t actually spend more time. I know if I feel it and see it, because there’s no sense doing a business model. Who knows how many people are going to be looking at Business Insider? If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything. The question is, are people going to read their business views online? Can we do a better job than the established players? And can we do it differently? Do we have a vision for that? In the beginning, I want someone who is going to focus on product. I don’t need a finance person. I don’t need marketing. I need a great product. And Business Insider was a great product, which is why we got 100 million and Gilt was a great product.

Tim Ferriss: Also Business Insider was in a sense in your sandbox because presumably it’s dependent on advertising. So you knew that once you had the eyeballs, you could develop that as a business.

Kevin Ryan: It’s harder to get the eyeballs than it is to sell advertising.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Ryan: If I hand you 100 million uniques, you just go out there, hire a guy to sell advertising and he’ll sell it. Getting a hundred million uniques is 95% of the job.

Tim Ferriss: At what point in the process are you like, you know what? I know exactly the person at Union Square Ventures or fill in the blank friendly VC who would love this idea if we can show a proof of concept.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. No. I don’t think that way. I think, and I’m always wrong, sometimes I’ll think, I bet this person would like it. But the way to do it, once we go out to raise money, then at the time we would go out to 20 firms, 25 firms. And half the time, the person I thought wanted to do it didn’t want to do it for whatever reason, and someone else fell in love with the idea. So I don’t preset that. I’m always shocked.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. So it’s not really, the fundraising is a we’ll solve it later kind of situation.

Kevin Ryan: It’s also I never think about exits. We need to focus on the product. Do we have a product that everyone wants to use? If you solve that, everything else follows. You can raise money, you can hire people, you can do everything.

Tim Ferriss: When did you guys, and I’m going to mispronounce this, invest in Valar Atomics? Is it Valar?

Kevin Ryan: Valar.

Tim Ferriss: I had fifty fifty chance. That’s V-A-L-A-R.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: When did you guys invest?

Kevin Ryan: Nuclear company. Three years—

Tim Ferriss: Three years ago.

Kevin Ryan: Not even three years ago.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So this is right.

Kevin Ryan: Small modular and nuclear reactor.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. So the next gen nuclear reactor. How did you approach this? Because nuclear is, pun intended, hot, right?

Kevin Ryan: It wasn’t hot.

Tim Ferriss: It wasn’t.

Kevin Ryan: No.

Tim Ferriss: Because fusion was kind of on fire. You had the commonwealth fusion systems at MIT and you had Sam Altman raising his SPVs. I’m wondering how you decided on that investment.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. And so this came directly from my deep tech team, so it wasn’t my relationship, but we just thought, like always, that there’s an incredible team idea and that they’re going to execute well. It was at a $20 million valuation three years ago. They just raised, it was announced publicly from Sequoia at six billion and they have been crushing it. Where we got lucky is that the US government was not behind nuclear at that time. And I’m not always the biggest fan of the Trump administration, but on psychedelics and nuclear, I think they’re right on both and they have moved both of them forward in a very substantial way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I hope you talk to some nuclear folks when you’re in China because they are crushing energy production gap.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. By the way, most people know France must have 70% of its energy for 50 years from nuclear. Absolutely no problems. Great thing, stable. I am convinced that this should be an important part of our energy future.

Tim Ferriss: Do you guys, as you’re raising or as the companies, the portfolio companies are raising money, that’s a crazy markup, right? I mean just amazing markup. Does AlleyCorp take money off the table in these large rounds along the way strategically or do you guys just park it and wait until the end? How do you think about handling that?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. So we’ve done it once so far and in the past I would personally take some money off the table, especially the QSBS enabled money, which can make sense.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a small business exemption for tax purposes for people listening under whatever the asset cap is.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. You get 10 million tax free and so it’s worth doing that. But in general now, we think it’s a good idea for a smaller fund like us in rounds four or five years in to sell a third of our position. So over the next year we will be hedging in some ways and we’ll go out there even though we feel good about these companies. But I think that’s a sensible thing. It returns some money to everyone. It returns some money to the team. And some of these will do really well, some won’t. So I think that’s a good idea.

Tim Ferriss: What does your LP base look like?

Kevin Ryan: It’s very small. I’m the largest LP, and then we have mostly family offices and some institutions, some small endowments. So we have maybe 40 or 50 LPs.

Tim Ferriss: You have a spectacular track record and the second fund, correct me if I’m getting this number wrong or correct me if Astra’s getting this number wrong, July 2026, 335 million second fund, something like that?

Kevin Ryan: The first fund is at the end of this quarter will be roughly at 60% IRR. And my family office, the fund you were talking about before also is at 60% and the $335 million fund is in that ballpark. We haven’t had anything to date in our three sort of funds that’s been below 50% IRR. So we’ve been very lucky. We’ve had some great companies and things are going really well.

Tim Ferriss: You could raise a huge fund if you wanted to and maybe you could do more follow on investing. Maybe you could have a separate fund for growth rounds, et cetera, et cetera. Why not do that? What are the reasons for not doing?

Kevin Ryan: So one, what I like to do and what I think we are very good at and the team like to do are build companies. Whether we start them, most of them we’re investing in, and we think a lot of the true value add is in those first five years.

There are plenty of funds that are big. We’re not trying to collect assets. You know how VC funds are typically 2% and 20% on the upside, big funds focus on the 2%, we focus on the 20%. So I don’t want to be in that business of accumulating assets. Our funds will get bigger, but it’ll because we add verticals, we add some time, we might add a geography at some point, but I want to keep doing what we do well and what we find fun. I got to wake up every day and feel like I love what I’m doing. And I think we’re in our own small way helping to change the world. You mentioned Zola, there’ll be, I don’t know, 150, 200,000 couples this year who will use a wedding registry. That was an idea I had 12 years ago.

That’s great. The nuclear company, I sat down and had drinks with the governor of New York three weeks ago. She’s doing a great job, but one of the things she wanted to talk about was nuclear and how we can bring that to New York state because we need to lock down and get more energy costs and bring down costs of energy and help data centers. And we’re a part of these things. And psychedelics, I hope there are, if we’re sitting here 10 years from now, I hope a hundred thousand people who have PTSD have been helped by methylone because we discovered that compound and are going to help bring it to market.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we can chat about methylone. That was a beautiful molecule and we will talk about it. Before we get there, I want to take a break from some of the investing stuff just for a moment. How did you end up pursuing a serious level of ping pong?

Kevin Ryan: It just started in high school. I played, I had a table in the basement, so I was one of the better people in my neighborhood. And then we had a high school tournament and then sophomore year I won that and I realized I was pretty good. Then they had a regional tournament. So I went to that and I won that. And then I finally found the state level tournament and I got ass my handed to me there. Then I started playing in New York because New York has great ping pong.

Tim Ferriss: Was that the defeat that you needed? You were just like, “Oh, okay.”

Kevin Ryan: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Kevin Ryan: Well, I just didn’t play enough. I didn’t have a coach. I was just playing in my neighborhood. So then I found a ping pong club that doesn’t exist anymore right near here on White and Walker, found a guy named Musa who was 14th in the Olympics in 1992. He’s from Nigeria, a freak of nature. And started playing with him. And so, then I played some tournaments. And then when I went on the board of Yale, I called up the ping pong team and said, “Hey, can I come play with you?” And they’re like, “Sure.” And then I went and played with them and realized that I could hold my own there with the varsity team. And so, I would go play with them. I still do when I can get up to New Haven. And so, I just like to play with—I’m not incredible, but I’m pretty good.

Tim Ferriss: Well, how often do you play and what kind of coach or coaching do you have?

Kevin Ryan: So, I actually weirdly still play with Musa and then with another guy as well. My son is pretty good. And so, he’s 28, he’s in New York and so we’ll be playing tomorrow actually. So, I probably play every two or three weeks. I just love it. It’s incredibly fun.

Tim Ferriss: Seems great for your brain also.

Kevin Ryan: The Chinese will all say, and I think they’re not wrong, that it’s unbelievably good because brain is hand-eye coordination reacting extremely quickly and subtly. And so, that’s got to be very good for you.

Tim Ferriss: Talking about the brain. We are going to get back to methylone, but I want to talk about vacation first. Got a quote here. Again, feel free to fact check. This is attributed to one Kevin Ryan. “I think everyone should take four to five weeks of vacation. I would rather have somebody who works 47 weeks of the year pretty intensely.” All right. And then it says, “Knowing that his CEOs will be influenced more by his behavior than by policy, he takes eight to 10 weeks off annually now.” But you’re not entirely off the grid when you take that time. So, can you tell me what your split looks like? And was it the same in the early years of AlleyCorp? How long has that been the case?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. So, I told all my CEOs that when I was building DoubleClick, obviously as you heard, pretty intense. And we went public 24 months after we started, just another project.

Tim Ferriss: Different world now, huh?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. Those are the good old days. And I knew I had to change my life and I could only do three things, that family. I took my kids to school.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. So, you were burning the midnight oil on that one and that led to the realization?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. I’ve never burned out at all because I pace myself. And so, I needed to be working hard, spending all the time I needed to with my family and staying in shape. Everything else I cut by 80% and that’s costly. That’s time with friends. I used to be guy who’d do the cool cultural things all over. Gone. I used to watch my twenties sports on Sunday afternoon. All gone. I prioritized those three things. And then eight years ago, my kids went off to college and things. And I could layer in new things and different things and have more time. And so, it’s always became more interesting. But I didn’t ever want to be in a situation where my kids are 18 and I thought, oh, my God, I didn’t spend time with them. And we did spend at least four to five weeks vacation doing great things together, great memories.

That’s extremely important. Today, I spend eight to 10 weeks out of the office. I do work every day, but sometimes it’ll be two to three hours, just keeping things moving, but I can do that. And sometimes it’s a full day. The week after next, I have a wedding in Ibiza, so I’ll be there for four days. And the first five days before that I’ll be in my house in France. And so, in the morning, I will be doing intensive sports. Incredible biking there. You need to come at some point.

Tim Ferriss: I’d love to.

Kevin Ryan: Great biking, tennis, swimming. And then I have already blocked out that I’ll do the three hours, 9:00 to 12:00 New York Time locked in for meetings. And then one of the days I’ll also do the night shift, so I’ll do eight hours the next day. But that’s an amazing day. Or if I ski in France, back by 3:00 and then work from 3:00 till 8:30 and then have a great dinner. It’s an incredible day.

Tim Ferriss: That is an amazing day. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, what did that do for you?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. So, I reached the age of 54, which was eight years ago, and had never thought about psychedelics at all. Certainly never tried anything and didn’t know very much. Read the Michael Pollan book. It was on The New York Times in 2017, 10 Best Books of the Year, which is something I always go over to see what I should be reading there. Read the book and it literally did change my mind. It was called How to Change Your Mind. And I realized later than most people that I was wrong, that these medicines could be very useful for people, and that there was a lot of academic results even at the time that showed that they could help PTSD and depression and anxiety. And at the time I was still on the board of Yale, so I went and I realized that Yale, I think you talked to John Krystal at one point.

Tim Ferriss: Interviewed John Krystal on his work on ketamine, foundational work with respect to depression and much more. Also, I’ve had conversations with Ben Kelmendi, who I’m so happy for.

Kevin Ryan: I just spent a week in the desert with Ben.

Tim Ferriss: Never met him in person. Only fun.

Kevin Ryan: Oh, you need to meet him. He’s fantastic. And so, anyway, John Krystal is great. I’m trying to get together with him in the next couple of weeks. Realized Yale had done amazing work. Got them all there. They have a Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. And I just became persuaded in terms of long-term trends. I wasn’t thinking about investing at all at the time. I was just thinking this is something I am persuaded that most people don’t realize is going to be very effective and very important. I’m probably one of the bigger donors to the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research, doing great work. Then in 2021, I decided in talking to Ben, Ben Kelmendi, who was a professor there—

Tim Ferriss: Superstar.

Kevin Ryan: —that the next phase was going to be a for-profit phase, and it was the right thing. And the reason is, whether we like it or not, it takes roughly 200, $250 million to get one compound through the FDA process. And I wish that were less, but it is what it is right now. And we’re not going to be able to raise that money from a nonprofit point of view, even though I think you contribute, I contribute, but it’s not going to be enough. And so, then I said, “We should look and see if we should start a company in this space.” Then worked with Ben and a guy in my team who was on the AlleyCorp team, Blake Mandell. And so, we worked on the idea, came up with this methylone, largely due to Ben. And then said, “Let’s start this. We think it has very promising—” Blake spun out of AlleyCorp, which sometimes happened to be the CEO of the company. And then we started the company.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Methylone, for people who don’t know, I want you to hold me in check here. But methylone, if I were describing it. I had my first methylone experience by 2015 early, but it had to basically fall off the back of a truck. It was very, very hard to find even on the underground. But an incredibly beautiful, gentle experience and maybe the soft-spoken, shorter staying cousin of MDMA.

Kevin Ryan: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: So, rather than coming in and you’re like, “When’s this guy going to leave in six hours?” It’s more like, “Wow, that was so pleasant. Came over, didn’t overstay his welcome.” So, I’d love to hear how you landed on methylone or just whatever you’d like to share about methylone specifically, because I think it was, I mean, just the bullseye. I mean, what a good choice. What a good choice in terms of the horse to bet on. And then let’s start there. Let’s start with methylone itself because it’s one that many people will not be familiar with.

Kevin Ryan: And even more so at the time. So, from a business point of view and impact to society point of view, we wanted to find something that people didn’t know about, but had some preliminary results that meant that we thought that it could be impactful. And so, what most people didn’t realize at the time that it has some advantages over MDMA. And by the way, I think MDMA is fantastic, both recreationally and therapeutically. The results in the trials were very good, but there are some advantages. And so, what you were referring to, put it another way, you can take methylone once a week in our trials. You actually can’t take MDMA once a week. It’s a little bit more toxic. It depletes your serotonin a little bit more.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sasha Shulgin would say if more than four times a year it loses its magic, a lot of people become resistant, non-responsive.

Kevin Ryan: And so, sometimes a slightly softer substance has advantages. Also, you tend not to have the downer that some people have in MDMA.

Tim Ferriss: And the duration of action is much more compatible with healthcare as we know it, right?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. So, it had those advantages. And we still don’t know until you do a full double-blind study. And so, then we started that process or raised the money and the results ended up to be incredible.

Tim Ferriss: And the results, this is within the indication of PTSD, right?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. We have a patent for PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which is very valuable. So, no one else can use it for 20 years in these three categories, but you can only start with one indication because it’s $200 million each time. And at the time, if you remember two years ago, we went through a period in psychedelics where it was the desert period. It was hard to raise money. It wasn’t easy. So, there was no way we were going to be able to do all three.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I think part of the reason it was hard to raise, there was stigma, but there were plenty of enthusiastic capitalists who wanted to make something happen. I think there were a few common mistakes. One was assuming it would be easier than it is to get something that lasts four to six hours, let’s just call it, you have to prove that it can be scalable as a treatment. You can deliver a certain quality of care, but what does that mean? You have extra nurses, you have extra people, and suddenly the cost is very out of reach. Separately, I would say the combining, we saw this with Lykos, the combining of psychotherapy, the bundling of psychotherapy. And then you put it in front of the FDA advisory committee and they’re like, “We don’t know how to evaluate or standardize psychotherapy. And since we don’t, no pass.” I mean, there’s a lot more to that story as you know. How did watching the ecosystem, maybe seeing some of the early unforced errors inform how you guys approached methylone?

Kevin Ryan: Oh, it definitely did. And there’s a saying the early worm gets the bird, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. So, sometimes it’s better to be the second mouse. First mouse—

Tim Ferriss: Meaning gets smashed.

Kevin Ryan: First mouse gets smashed. The cheese is still there, and then you have it.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like the iPod.

Kevin Ryan: So, we tried to learn from what we saw out there and change certain things. I think also the FDA has changed over time and the Trump administration has sent a signal—

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Kevin Ryan: —that they would like this to happen. And I think, as you know, I mean you were super early in 2015, but now I would imagine that huge percentage of your random friends have tried psychedelics.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Kevin Ryan: In 2015, that number must have been small.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it was small. And unless you happened to be like me living in the Bay Area, people were pretty mum’s the word about it. I think maybe the pendulum in some cases swung too far. It’s like if I have to listen to one more trip report about neon crocodiles, this is listening to somebody’s dreams every morning. It’s like, okay, I get it. At the same time, it was very different. And I mean, look, I don’t want to take us too far afield, but I mean, I did a podcast, even though I did a podcast on Ibogaine in 2015.

Kevin Ryan: Did you really? Wow.

Tim Ferriss: I did.

Kevin Ryan: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: With Martin Polanco and Dr. Dan Engle, looking at some of the work that was being done in Mexico. I mean, this is early days.

Kevin Ryan: Wow, you were early.

Tim Ferriss: First Hunter Monkey shot into space, right? I was not going to sign up for it. But I never would’ve guessed that Ibogaine would’ve been the one that gets mentioned in the Oval Office as an executive order is being signed. And in retrospect though, it makes a lot of sense. And I have to imagine the application of PTSD to this politically immune group. If you’re on the left or the right as a politician, you cannot say fuck the veterans.

Kevin Ryan: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: That the indication of PTSD also as sort of a tip of the spear has that benefit.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah, it does. And one thing I haven’t mentioned to you is that we set up Transcend as a public benefit corporation.

Tim Ferriss: I wanted to talk about this. Yeah.

Kevin Ryan: And that means that the initial shareholders had committed to give 10% of their gains to what is essentially a foundation. And that Blake and I will be giving out that money. And so, we will be giving $20 million in the next nine months to causes linked to psychedelics. We’re in that process right now. I’ve hired a part-time person to do that. But it has come up because we focus on veterans for PTSD for political reasons. We being the entire industry. The number one source is sexual assault.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely.

Kevin Ryan: And that’s why our trials were actually 60% women, because more women have PTSD than men. And I think it’s a little bit undercovered, and so we’re going to look into some causes and support that and try and see if we can give some of that money out into that area.

Tim Ferriss: I guess a few things. The first is kudos to you, because—and I want you to correct me if I’m wrong, but a public benefit corp has its charter, its state admission. I’ve interacted with a number of them. But ultimately, I remember one of the questions I had for somebody else running one of these. I was like, “Well, if you change your mind later, how are you held accountable?” And he was like, “Silence.” I was like, “You can kind of break the rules and get away with it.” So, the fact that you guys are following through means a lot.

Kevin Ryan: We’re doing it.

Tim Ferriss: How are you thinking about—I’m sure it’s not just an open casting call because you’d get a million wackadoodle things in the inbox that somebody would have to comb through. How are you thinking about how to allocate that 20 million?

Kevin Ryan: So, we’re still thinking about it. We already have 50 organizations that—I’m not meeting with companies, but—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you seem like a busy guy.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. But Nicolas Boillot, who’s the person who is in charge of this, has been meeting with people. We’re assembling it, looking at the world. There’s going to be a big PSFC meeting in October, and then we’re going to start—

Tim Ferriss: This is the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, although now they’ve expanded beyond just the science, but PSFC.

Kevin Ryan: But it’s the largest collection of donors in the psychedelic space.

Tim Ferriss: Psfc.co, I think.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. And they do great work. But the point is what we’re going to look to do is not make 500 grants, but make 20 and have real grants. Most of these organizations are small, so there’s a good chance we’ll be the largest donor to the psychedelic industry in the next 12 months, just for 12 months. And I don’t have the full answer to that yet. We’re starting to think of where can we have impact? What can be done that other people are not doing? We probably won’t give as much to pure academic research. Even in Oregon and Colorado, have legal psychedelics—

Tim Ferriss: Or at least decriminalized.

Kevin Ryan: Well, there’s a program in each state that is legal to give it out and for people to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Right. With the parallel structure. Yeah.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. But not even 0.5% of people with depression or PTSD have been able to access this yet. One of the biggest challenges we have, it’s too expensive. And one of these I am interested in is trying to show that group therapy works as well, which I think maybe even better in some cases.

Tim Ferriss: I think maybe even better. My bet would be better.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. Same here. There’s a reason that AA does it in a group setting, because you get support from other people. And you’ve probably been in some group ceremonies and they can be very powerful. FDA has been very nervous about that. That’s a whole new thing. How do you monitor that? So, we need to get to the point. We need to bring down the cost is the bottom line.

Tim Ferriss: What would your hope be for the for-profit ecosystem? Would your hope be that more people would follow in your footsteps? If so, how can they, as the better version of themselves or the best version of themselves, ensure that when incentives get really tempting later, they don’t change their mind?

Kevin Ryan: On the public benefit corporation?

Tim Ferriss: On the public benefit corp. Exactly. I have been incredibly disappointed with how many centimillionaires, billionaires have had their lives changed by these things, but have in no material way supported the ecosystem or the science upon which ultimately a lot of the work depends. It’s been personally very upsetting to me as someone who put 20% of his entire net worth in at one point. So, that is not to say that I think academia is the cure for all the reasons you said, like the market driven solutions for the very expensive FDA processes involved. Incredibly important. What do you think can be done to maybe gently encourage people? I mean, you’re doing a great job by doing it, just showcasing it. And I think a lot of good will radiate from that. Any thoughts on how to encourage more people to get involved?

Kevin Ryan: I don’t know how to force them, but one of these I know I’m doing is I’m actually having a series of conversations with people and talking through who have called me. And what I’m doing, I’m going to be speaking at the smaller PSFC group to give an example of why we did it this way, what we did. We did it for a couple of reasons. One, at the end we thought it was fair. Two, it reminded everyone in the company that this is a mission driven company. Yes, at the end it may be a good exit, but we are doing this. And everyone needs to join this company because they want to make the world a better place and we want to help these people who have PTSD. There are 10 million people. And it’s a real problem and then eventually depression as well. And so everyone joining knew that the original shareholders, board members, chairman had already committed to do this and were going to put their money where their mouth is. And I think we just have to push everyone on this to do it. I don’t know a better way to force them.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I’m so glad you’re doing it. I hope more people follow suit. A friend of mine who’s a VC, he was very successful as an angel, joined a venture capital firm, very well known, did incredibly well. And a while back he started kind of stepping back and I’ve had people suggesting I start a fund forever and for a host of reasons I’m not convinced I’d be good at it or particularly enjoy it. I don’t know.

But he said, “Oh, early stage venture’s dead.” And I was like, “What do you mean early stage venture’s dead?” And what he meant was if your bread and butter is a lot of consumer-facing tech, he’s like, “I just made a clone of Twitter in 12 hours as a non-technical person using vibe coding and X, Y, and Z.” Ultimately that’s not enough to just displace X, right? But is the deep tech focus because there are more defensible moats in deep tech or is there more to it?

Kevin Ryan: It’s partly that, but it’s also partly that world is changing. So in that consumer idea you’re talking about, there are 164 soft drinks. The odds of you coming up with one that stands out is pretty slim. Whereas the changes that are occurring or have occurred in solar or wind or geothermal or nuclear, there are going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars of contracts signed to produce energy. Robotics, same thing. We’re seeing extraordinary developments that we’re getting 10X and 100X improvements in robots, which will change the world. I just don’t see the same thing in e-commerce. Healthcare can be done better in this country. We spend a lot, we don’t have great results, complicated issue, but that’s why we really do what I call traditional software AI is one group, healthcare is one group, and deep tech is one group. And those are our three areas of focus. We have dedicated teams, but we do more deep tech than we did four or five years ago. Absolutely. That’s the one that’s grown the most for these various reasons. And it’s intellectually interesting.

Tim Ferriss: It’s fun. You learn a lot.

Kevin Ryan: You learn a lot. Space, we have an investment in space, company called Portal that can help move satellites from one area to another. And there’s just a whole ecosystem that’s sort of a second order implication of having 10 times more satellites, which we’ll have.

Tim Ferriss: On the robotics side, what are some second or third-order effects that might present opportunities? Because investing in someone who actually, like Boston Robotics, way beyond my pay grade. But I’m like, maybe if that’s where the focus is, I’m saying this in a very simple way, but if a lot of people are focused on that, maybe the second or third-order effects are more neglected. So let’s look at the movement and societal shifts and are there going to be more robots in 10 years? Yeah, I think so.

Kevin Ryan: A hundred times more. I mean, this is one where it’s literally going to be somewhere between 100 and 1,000 or 10,000 times more. And so I think the business opportunities are going to be in very vertical uses, a textile factory, things like that or a car factory or things like that. And those are happening right now and they’re going to continue to happen. Where it’s harder is in things like a restaurant because robots are best early on when they can do one thing and do it really well. When they have to chop vegetables, take the garbage up the stairs, and go to a nearby deli to buy a product that we need, humans can do that quite well. Robots, that’s tougher. So single use is the best way and factories are the best way for that. So that’s going to be colossal in every single factory.

Tim Ferriss: Are you still bullish on robot massage and to what extent are you looking at unfilled jobs as a maybe one criteria?

Kevin Ryan: I am bullish. And we were an investor in Aescape, which is doing that. That’s a product that’s still evolving, but it’s going to work. I remember as of two years ago, there were 17,000 unfilled jobs in massages in this country. And you must have gone to a hotel like I have and you arrive and you’re like, “Yeah, can I get a massage tomorrow afternoon?” Like, “Mm, totally booked up.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. How about three days from now at 9:00 a.m. and you’re like, “No.”

Kevin Ryan: I’m not going to be in the hotel. Or you say 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m., no way. No one works at that time. 7:00 p.m., no one works. If you had a machine and 25% of people prefer to have a robot, some people think it’d be much better to have a person. There are a lot of people that don’t like to take their clothes off, don’t feel comfortable with it, and feel better about a robot. So it’s just another example of something you wouldn’t think of. And it is a solvable problem and we’re probably 70% of the way there to solve it.

Tim Ferriss: Any other jobs with lots of unfilled positions that make for appealing terrain?

Kevin Ryan: Again, we haven’t solved the restaurant one and that’s a big one.

Tim Ferriss: I wonder, I mean, to what extent, man, I’d love to have a conversation with Travis Kalanick about that. I mean, he is more than anyone I know, certainly put a lot of thought.

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. And he is industrializing, so he has a better chance of doing it. The truth is most restaurants are big mom and pop shops, and so it’s harder to do that. But yeah, I mean, we’re watching customer support. We had an incredible call where one of our AI agents was on the phone with someone and after 15 seconds said, “I’m sorry, would you be more comfortable in another language?” And the person said, “Well, actually, yeah, could we speak Spanish?” And he goes, “Muy bien,” and then just handles the rest of the call in Spanish.

Tim Ferriss: What a cool example.

Kevin Ryan: And if you listen to it, it changed completely the call because she had trouble explaining. It was a medical thing. She had a lot of trouble explaining in English. And then right away, no issue and solved the problem.

Tim Ferriss: That is such a good example. Wow. It’s coming fast. It is coming so fast. If you think of an example of one of the companies, ideally one that you co-founded that was pushing a boulder downhill, it’s like, wow, this is really—things just fell into place in a sense, ideally not just through luck. And then one that was pushing a boulder uphill. I’m wondering what the biggest difference is. What comes to mind and what were the differences between the two?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. I mean, I’ll give you a good uphill one, which I’m still disappointed at. We realized there were going to be a lot, basically Shopify for healthcare companies because we were building these healthcare sites and we found we were building a lot of the same things, scheduling for time, and this was three, four years ago, scheduling information, all the stuff. Didn’t matter whether it was for your cancer care or your back problem.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of repeating features.

Kevin Ryan: And it has to be HIPAA-compliant, which most sites are not. So we set up a company to be Shopify for healthcare sites. And for whatever reason, we put $6 million in, eventually just didn’t get there. People were reluctant to sign up. They didn’t see someone else. Maybe it wasn’t good enough execution. Felt like that should exist and we never pulled it off and then had to make a decision to close it down.

Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t seem like you were too early. Are the reasons unknown?

Kevin Ryan: They are unknown for me. Did we not do a good enough job? Did we have to wait just another year to get the first 10 marquee clients and that was enough? Obviously, most companies at the time were reluctant to outsource to someone else. So I still don’t know. And sometimes you don’t know. It’s still not quite a playbook there.

Tim Ferriss: Now, DoubleClick was public 24? No, 48 months?

Kevin Ryan: No, no. It was public for seven years.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sorry. After it’s formed—

Kevin Ryan: Oh, yeah. 24 months after we start.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, there’s marketing conditions and all that stuff also, but then you have something like MongoDB, that was a decade before IPO. Why was that?

Kevin Ryan: Because first of all, we didn’t have any revenue for three and a half years. And if you’re taking notes, don’t do that because it made it hard to raise money. It’s a hard product. It’s also, if I said a database is like a pacemaker, if I said to you, “I’ve got this startup pacemaker idea, do you want to try it?” And you’re like, “No, no. Call me when a thousand people have used your pacemaker for two years.” But if everyone says that, I can’t get my pacemaker out there. So it took us a long time. We had to give away for free for a long time, used for inexpensive things, and then slowly got there. So even after eight years, we were doing 40 million in revenue, which is not that much, but the usage was growing dramatically. The product worked, the product was getting better, and today it’s worth, I don’t know, $30 billion and it’s an incredible company.

Tim Ferriss: What are your personal rules for what you do when a company goes public? What is your policy for holding, selling a portion, selling all? How do you think about that? Because I know some angels, they’re like, “Look, public market, not my game. As soon as it goes public, I’m going to sell 50% and then just let the rest ride and keep it really simple.”

Kevin Ryan: I definitely don’t have a policy. I hold it as long as I still feel this is a great investment and I think it’s going to grow for a long time. At Mongo, at some point you do need to get money if you have a firm to invest in other things. So I did not sell in the first year or two when it was public and then the price went up and I just slowly started selling, and I still have shares today, but I’ve sold a big percentage of it over time.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to land the plane now. So Kevin, if you could put anything, metaphorically speaking, on a billboard to get a message in front of millions, billions of people, we can just pretend that they all speak English, AI can figure it out. But what might you put on that billboard? Could be a motto, could be a quote, could be anything non-commercial. Does anything come to mind?

Kevin Ryan: So I’ll give you something different than you think. I would love the United States to be a more balanced society and a more open and a more caring society that we take care of other people. I’m not worried about our startups. Our startups doing great technology, funding, all that’s great. Lots of entrepreneurs. I do worry long term about the income inequality in this country. I don’t think we’re addressing that issue. I think the ability for people in this country to move up the ladder statistically has been diminished. And I think all of this is going to catch up to us and it’s not right. People have schools that are bad. They don’t have support. We’re going to have this transition. There’s no doubt we can debate the time we’re going to lose jobs to AI, and I don’t think we’re in a good position to help people have successful lives. So I would like the country to be thinking about that.

Tim Ferriss: So whether we’re at the highest levels of state government or you’re in the Oval Office and it’s like Kevin carte blanche, you get to pull two levers. What are the levers to try to make a bit of progress in addressing some of the issues you just mentioned?

Kevin Ryan: So one that’s going to lead to it, we’re going to have to address the budget deficit at some point. We don’t know where the point is, but it could be sneaking up on us right now. We’re going to have to end up having a more equitable tax system where the wealthy pay 30% taxes, which they don’t right now. We have to decrease that budget deficit because that decreases the interest rate, which impacts everyone to do that. And then we’re going to have to just agree that we’re going to do a better job of helping people go to the right colleges, get the right degrees.

I don’t mean necessarily college degrees, I mean professional training, retraining, things like that. We have to get to the point where a higher percentage of people are doing well and they feel like their kids are going to do well. When families don’t feel like their kids are going to do better, they get desperate and they go to the far right or they go to the far left and neither one of those solutions is going to be the right solution. We’re going to have to get more immigrants in this country.

Tim Ferriss: How do you think you do that? Because I agree with you and I’ve seen so much headache in say recruiting in Silicon Valley and this, that and the other thing. It’s wild. I mean, this is a country of immigrants. So how do you think you tackle that?

Kevin Ryan: The message has come down in the last several years from the president that immigrants are bad. And I just find it unfathomable because—and everyone in Silicon Valley that has been supporting this has made their money backing immigrants.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s pretty gross.

Kevin Ryan: Look, should we have unlimited people coming over the border? Absolutely not. No one’s saying that. Should my companies have trouble getting PhD people in AI to come from other countries to come to the United States? How is that a good idea to stop those people from coming in? We should be opening our doors and saying, “You have a master’s in AI and computer science, something like that. Of course you can come work here. Come work here.” You think they’re going to go on unemployment? I doubt it. They’re going to make $500,000 a year and they’re going to join some company and three years later they’re going to start their own company, employ 5,000 people. I mean, as you said, we’re all immigrants. This should be the country where the most talented people in the world are coming to right now.

And we shouldn’t take a hundred million of them, but we should take a million of them, two million of them. Population’s going to be going down. That has some negative impact on us. We should be supplementing that because our entire history, our immigrants do great. The data shows our immigrants from Haiti do great, from Nigeria do great, from Kosovo do great. They’re just scrappy people who want to work their ass off in whatever they do and I want more of them. And that’s a contrarian view today.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I agree 100%. I mean, I’ve seen the same thing where it’s like, okay, let me get this straight. You’re going to say you’re going to keep these PhDs in X, Y, and Z out of the country. And guess what? They are talented. They’re going to get used with great leverage and they’re going to create something incredible. The question is it going to be here or not?

Kevin Ryan: Yeah. At Yale, we’re seeing pressure on not getting academics in, on some academics feeling not comfortable. We had one who left for Oxford and Cambridge, people who left to go to Canada. That should not be happening. The Premier League in English soccer is the best league in the world, not because of English players, because they have Norwegian players, they have Egyptian players, they have people from Ghana. Basically, they don’t care. They want the best people. And that’s what we have always been and need to continue to be.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, hear hear. Kevin, before we wind this to a close, anything else you’d like to say? Anything else you’d like to point people to? People can find AlleyCorp online, of course, and it’s spelled as it sounds, alleycorp.com. I’ll include the LinkedIn and AlleyCorp X and all of these things in the show notes. Anything else that you’d like to—

Kevin Ryan: The only thing I’d say, and the fact that you’re in New York for a month or two, makes the point that New York is just booming.

Tim Ferriss:

Kevin Ryan: And we had an incredible summer with the Knicks and the World Cup and the US Open, but the restaurants, the startups, I could not feel better. We’re very focused on New York, but I see so many people moving from Europe, coming to New York, starting up companies. Mongo was run by someone who was an immigrant. Datadog was started by French entrepreneurs. Those are the two most valuable tech companies here. We are going to get more, despite what I said, we’re going to get more people coming here and New York’s going to be very, very successful.

Tim Ferriss: It’s on fire. Yeah, it’s really on fire. I mean, home base is Austin. Austin’s a boom town for—

Kevin Ryan: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: —a million different reasons. That’s not going to slow down anytime soon, but New York is New York. Having grown up as a New Yorker, it continually blows my mind. But this particular season, this season of New York has been just on fire. It’s really exciting.

Kevin Ryan: And the higher level thing is the more I go, I spend a lot of time outside the United States, but the United States from a business tech point of view is just crushing it. And we all see this, but the future industries, and we have to worry about China because China’s doing a lot of great things, but we’re doing a lot of great things. Everyone in Europe and Latin America looks to us and is both concerned and impressed.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, thanks for the time, Kevin. Lovely to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, the one and only Kevin Ryan, just type in his name and everything will pop up. And until next time, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself, and thanks for tuning in.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More (#884) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More (#884)

2026-09-25 10:20:31

Kevin Ryan is one of the leading entrepreneurs and investors in New York. Often called the “Godfather of NYC tech,” he is the founder and CEO of AlleyCorp, a New York based venture capital firm that incubates and invests across healthcare, AI and software, consumer tech, deep tech, and more. Kevin is also the co-founder of several notable companies including MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola, Gilt Groupe, and Transcend Therapeutics. Earlier in his career, Kevin was the CEO of DoubleClick, which he helped grow from a 20-person startup to a publicly-traded company with more than 1,500 employees.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

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Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

Show Notes

Connect with Kevin Ryan and AlleyCorp

AlleyCorp | AlleyCorp at X | AlleyCorp’s Newsletter at Substack | Kevin at AlleyCorp | Kevin at LinkedIn

Books

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

People

Organizations, Places, and Resources

DoubleClick
MongoDB Inc.
Business Insider
Prudential Investment Corp. (now PGIM)
INSEAD
Euro Disney (now Disneyland Paris)
United Media
AlleyCorp
Gilt Groupe
Zola
Nomad Health
Axel Springer
Hudson’s Bay Company
Transcend Therapeutics
Otsuka Pharmaceutical
Deep Tech New York
DOC
Digital Health New York
Odyssey
Val d’Isère
Dialog
Shopify
Vente-privee (now Veepee)
Marc Jacobs
Macy’s
Farfetch
Theory
Saks Fifth Avenue
Business Week (now Bloomberg Businessweek)
Dilbert
IBM
Excite
Microsoft
Procter & Gamble
Y Combinator
The Wall Street Journal
Union Square Ventures
Valar Atomics
Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Helion
Sequoia Capital
The New York Times
Yale Program for Psychedelic Science | Yale School of Medicine
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Lykos Therapeutics (now Resilient Pharmaceuticals)
Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative (PSFC)
Oregon Psilocybin Services | Oregon Health Authority
Natural Medicine Division | Colorado Department of Revenue
Portal Space Systems
Boston Dynamics
Aescape
Premier League Football
Datadog

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:01:25] The chronology, prepared by the robots.
[00:03:40] 20 trends on a whiteboard, 10 years out.
[00:06:33] Four conferences, a China trip, and how to seat 30 people.
[00:11:42] The YouTube Kevin didn’t start.
[00:17:47] Gilt: $500 million in year four, then a falling knife.
[00:22:06] “We’re going to wait for the next internet.”
[00:25:58] DoubleClick: 25 countries before one was profitable.
[00:27:52] The AlleyCorp model: $500K each, a year to build, then raise.
[00:32:26] Recruiting Henry Blodget in 30 minutes.
[00:38:28] The two-week business crush.
[00:41:44] Valar Atomics: $20 million to $6 billion in three years.
[00:45:25] Why the fund stays small: 2% vs. 20%.
[00:47:15] Ping pong, red wine, and Ibiza dance floors.
[00:49:05] Three things only; everything else cut 80%.
[00:51:52] The book that changed Kevin’s mind at 54.
[00:54:20] Methylone: MDMA’s gentler, shorter cousin.
[00:56:54] The second mouse gets the cheese.
[00:59:57] A public benefit corp that actually pays out.
[01:05:46] Is early-stage venture dead?
[01:08:04] Robot massage and the AI agent that switched to Spanish.
[01:11:35] The healthcare Shopify that failed; MongoDB’s revenue-free years.
[01:15:06] Kevin’s billboard.
[01:16:19] Pulling levers: taxes, training, and immigrants.
[01:20:04] New York is booming.
[01:21:41] Parting thoughts.

Quotes from Kevin Ryan

“I went to the parent company and I said, ‘This internet thing’s going to be big and we have a head start, so why don’t you give me … a couple million dollars and I’ll build up an internet division. We can do it for other companies.’ The disturbing thing is the guy I was talking to … said, “No, because we’re going to wait for the next internet.” First of all, I know you don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no next internet.”

— Kevin Ryan

“It’s important to start narrow.”

— Kevin Ryan

“It’s better to do one thing really well than a bad job on everything.”

— Kevin Ryan

“I never think about exits. We need to focus on the product. Do we have a product that everyone wants to use? If you solve that, everything else follows.”

— Kevin Ryan

“There’s a saying that “The early [bird] gets the [worm]. But the second mouse gets the cheese.”

— Kevin Ryan

“There are 164 soft drinks. The odds of you coming up with one that stands out is pretty slim. Whereas the changes that are occurring or have occurred in solar or wind or geothermal or nuclear, there are going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars of contracts signed to produce energy. Robotics, same thing.

— Kevin Ryan

Want to hear another episode with someone who builds category-defining companies and bets on where technology is headed? Listen to my conversation with Netscape co-creator and Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen, in which we discussed his rules for investing, how he decides whether a company should stay the course or pivot, why his firm bets for change when others bet against it, the factors behind a big investment, the future of AI and drones, bitcoin, “strong opinions loosely held,” his debate with Peter Thiel, and much more.

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The post How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More (#884) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough (#883)

2026-09-19 14:48:09

Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Tania de Jong, a co-founder of Mind Medicine Australia. In 2023, Tania and her husband Peter helped lead the push that made Australia the first country in the world to allow MDMA and psilocybin to be prescribed for psychiatric conditions. I wanted to understand how the hell they helped make that happen and what the rest of the world can learn from it.

Legal conditions/copyright information

How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia's World-First Breakthrough

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tim Ferriss: Where do you think it makes sense to begin? I mean, we could just begin with “The Trip Treatment” and how that domino knocked over so many dominoes. And—

Tania de Jong: It did.

Tim Ferriss: —then what you did with all of the momentum of said dominoes. Do you want to just begin there and we’ll just chat through it?

Tania de Jong: In 2015, I came across your blog. Well, I’d been signing up to your blog for ages. I mean, I’ve been reading your books and admiring your biohacking courage to try all different things and experiment for yourself because that’s very much how I also like to operate. I just don’t believe anything until I try it myself. And so being that person that had never had any alcohol really, don’t drink coffee, never got high, never had any drugs in my whole life until I read your 5-Bullet blog back in December, I think it was 2015, when you said that you had donated 100,000 US dollars to the Imperial College with psilocybin for depression, I think it was, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: 2015 would’ve been Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths. So there was a depression study there.

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm. So that was like a light bulb went off for me. And I clicked on the link, and I read the article, and it was a fascinating article in The New Yorker magazine called “The Trip Treatment,” and—

Tim Ferriss: Michael Pollan.

Tania de Jong: —one—that’s right by—

Tim Ferriss: The one and only.

Tania de Jong: —Michael Pollan. And I said to my husband, “We have to do this. Please read this article.” And I think he thought I lost it. And he read the article, and then he said, “Why don’t you see if we can get into a trial?”

And so we then approached Robin Carhart-Harris, who has subsequently become a great friend of ours. But at that time it was like, “Well, can we get into one of the trials in Europe?” And he said, “Well, no, you don’t qualify. You don’t have a mental illness diagnosis.” And then he proceeded to see if he could introduce us to The Psychedelic Society, and finally, we were introduced to a guide in the Netherlands. And we flew over to Europe, and we had this extraordinary experience where we took a large dose of psilocybin. But for me, I had spent the previous six months when we’d planned this just getting more and more nervous. I was just petrified.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sounds normal.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. And I was like, “Am I going to lose my mind? What’s going to happen?” Meantime, my husband’s just not engaged in it at all. And so it got to the day before where we’re going to go and meet this guide, and I wrote an email to my accountant, and I said, “If anything’s to happen to me in the next 24 to 48 hours, these are my last wishes.” I was that scared, scared of losing control, scared of what this would all mean. I’d never had any drugs in my whole life before. And was I going to go crazy?

So anyway, we went, and my husband picked up the guide at the airport where we’re meeting him. He surrounded him in his white robe, sort of Ram Dass-style, hippie Indian white robes, gave him a huge bear hug. Then my husband asked him all the way back, “Well, what’s going to happen?”

Tim Ferriss: “How does this work?”

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Run a show for me. Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Right. And after 45 minutes, he was no wiser, and then literally, we, the next day, took the medicines with the guide, and we were blasted into multiple realms of consciousness, all different dimensions of consciousness. And it was an extraordinary experience, as you well know, a sense of being connected to self, to others, the planet, feeling like you’re part of everything, that everything’s part of you. I think I said to you last time we spoke that I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that day. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience, and I could see the energy in everything. And my husband was also completely blown away. It brought us much closer together, which was also something, well, we didn’t plan for, but it was a fantastic bonus. And we then just started going, “Well, what has just happened to us?”

And so it was such an extraordinary experience. It took us about a year to really integrate what had happened, and we kept talking about it, and it was a true mystical experience at the highest level.

Tim Ferriss: When you say it took a year to integrate, was it really just letting the snow globe settle and seeing what was discernible after things had settled, or were you using therapy to talk through the experience afterwards? What did integration look like for you guys?

Tania de Jong: No, it was sort of the snow globe. Everything had sort of been blowing like a huge fireworks display, and actually, it was like a fireworks display at times. And so for us, it was letting that settle. And then for me, I’d thought, “Well, there’s no way I’d ever do that again.” It was challenging. I mean, it was beautiful, but it was also challenging because a lot of material came up relating to my ancestors, probably relating to other ancestral lineages that I’d had before. And I thought there’s no way I’m going to do this again.

But then as the year went on and we were going to go back to Europe again and stuff, I thought, okay, well, maybe we’ll have another go and see if it’s the same or if that was just a fluke or what happened. And so we went back again and we worked with the same guide, Dutch guide, and we had an even higher dose, and it was even more profound. And so by that stage, we said to one another, wow, well, if this is having this impact on us—and it was really healing us personally. There was something going on. There was some kind of magic. I mean, magic mushrooms, but it was like there was some kind of golden thread that was trying to connect us back to ourselves, to integrate us into ourselves and then connect us to one another and to other people.

And we said to ourselves, we’d already founded five charities between us by that stage, and we just thought, wow, well, if this is happening to us, imagine if this could be applied to all the people who are suffering with homelessness or domestic violence or unemployment or disabilities, people suffering with depression that we come across through all of our charitable work, because underpinning all kinds of disadvantage is usually some kind of mental illness, some kind of trauma, depression, something that has happened to that person in their lives. And it’s usually that they’ve ended up being unemployed or committing domestic violence or whatever it happens to be, but it’s through the intergenerational trauma that they’ve experienced.

And so Peter and I just started looking and going, “Let’s meet all of the people around the world. Let’s go to all the conferences. Let’s start meeting all the researchers.” And we did that, and we started meeting researchers from all over the world, which was absolutely extraordinary. And we attended events, and we learned everything we could. We watched every video. We listened to every recording that we could. And then by that stage, Peter and I were like, “This is extraordinary.” And we spoke with Rick Doblin at about that stage, which was in 2018. And in 2018, he said to me, “Tania, I think you should set up a charity in Australia to do this.” And we were mad enough to do that. I mean—

Tim Ferriss: And for people who don’t have the context—

Tania de Jong: —we—

Tim Ferriss: —just to describe Rick briefly, Rick is really one of the primary drivers, probably the primary driver, I would say. And there are a lot of people, of course, who have played large roles behind the psychedelic movement through this organization called MAPS, and they have been predominantly focused on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. That’s been the main indication. So he has been a fixture. He’s very unorthodox. He is very well-educated in policy, incredibly colorful. He’s just one hell of a character. And I wanted people to have just a little bit of—but he’s been forging ahead since the ’70s or ’80s, well before there was any kind of tip of the hat from anywhere in the mainstream. So that’s Rick Doblin, and he’s very good at helping other people and encouraging other people.

Tania de Jong: No, I mean, absolute inspiration.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. I mean, he’s dedicated his whole life to this work, and it’s just extraordinary. And he was a total inspiration to us, as was Roland Griffiths and Robin and David Nutt, Professor David Nutt, the head of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Just amazing people, these legends.

And the thing was, in Australia, we really didn’t have a lot going on. There was one trial in the making. It was a trial for end-of-life stress and anxiety through a terminal diagnosis, which had been replicated in other parts of the world, like at New York University and Johns Hopkins University. And we just knew that if Australia could start to position itself in this space, that there might be a chance to heal a lot of people. So we did start a charity, Mind Medicine Australia. We launched it in February 2019, and we started working in this field starting to work out, well, how could we get these medicines to Australians as quickly, safely, accessibly as possible and cost effectively as well. We originally approached the Therapeutic Goods Administration, I think it was in late 2020, and we asked them if it would be possible if the medicines could be rescheduled. And they—

Tim Ferriss: So let me pause you and apologize, Tania, just for—

Tania de Jong: No, no, go for it.

Tim Ferriss: —the Yankees listening and others. The TGA is roughly analogous to the FDA in the US. So if you want a new drug approved, if you have something that is in a highly restricted drug class and you want to make it more readily available through prescription with fewer controls, et cetera, then you have to contend with, in our case, the FDA, but in your case, the TGA. Is that a fair way to put it?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And these bodies require a lot of data and evidence, and generally speaking, pharmaceutical companies make applications to them for the rescheduling of medicines. And in this case, we wanted to make an application to move these medicines from prohibited substances, which in Australia was called Schedule 9, but in the US, it’s called Schedule 1, to a Schedule 8 medicine, which is a controlled medicine, so that it could be used in clinical environments.

And so we started applying to the TGA and we put an application in at their encouragement. And then at the interim stage, it was knocked back. And then at the final stage, despite many public submissions, it was also knocked back. And so we thought, let’s put it in again. And one of the things that the TGA has to do is it has to provide its reasons for knocking it back. So my husband, who’s an extraordinary intellect and strategic, I guess, mind, started really working on these applications and really addressing their concerns.

And so then we put in another application to reschedule psilocybin MDMA for the treatment of depression and trauma in Australia. And again, at the interim stage, the application was knocked back, and they had to provide their reasons, and then we put in a final submission. And in that period, there was another public consultation period, and we did this huge campaign, and we were educating people all the time through this period. We were presenting webinars, and we were presenting talks to politicians and health professionals and anyone we could, business leaders. We were talking—we probably gave thousands of presentations about these medicines over that period. And then finally, we put in a submission, and over 13,000 Australians supported this submission through public submissions to our Therapeutic Goods Administration supporting the medicine. And over 98% of people supported the rescheduling of these medicines, and this was the largest amount of public submissions ever received by our regulators for rescheduling any medicines. So there was this huge pressure. And—

Tim Ferriss: Not every one of those recipients was super happy about the volume, I imagine.

Tania de Jong: Right, probably, because they had to publish—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The—

Tania de Jong: —them all as well on—

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Tania de Jong: —their platform.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a lot.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So a couple of questions. At that point, was it still just you and your husband who were working on this, or had you assembled volunteers to assist you guys in various ways? What did it look like at that point?

Tania de Jong: No, it was like this massive movement by then. I mean, we had started chapters in communities all around Australia. So we had over 30 chapters in place like Byron Bay or Brisbane, Darwin, Perth, even chapters in New Zealand.

Tim Ferriss: And that would be chapters of Mind Medicine Australia. So it’d be like MMA—

Tania de Jong: Yeah, people who were just—

Tim Ferriss: —put in place.

Tania de Jong: —behind this mission. Yeah, just chapters and chapters of people.

Tim Ferriss: When you have chapters, how did you—I’m just thinking of the challenges involved with retail and franchising or whatever, like quality control and giving people marching directions of some type. When people would reach out, how would you enable them or what materials would you send them? What would you encourage them to do if you’ve got people in Byron Bay and 29 other locations across Australia? What would you guys send to them?

Tania de Jong: Well, we had templates for everything. So we had precedence and templates, and we had how to actually do this. So we made it as easy as we could for the public to put submissions in. And we had volunteers in all those places who were leading these campaigns and getting a whole lot of people together in those places.

But in addition to that, we also had clinicians. So we had already started training clinicians through our world-leading Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy. So we started that training in 2021, and we’ve already trained now over 750 clinicians, so psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, oc therapists, social workers, counselors, you name it. We’ve trained a lot of clinicians in Australia. So we already had an enormous amount of clinicians who were starting to put pressure on their peak bodies and professional bodies, as well as the general public. So there was also an enormous amount of people, not necessarily in our chapters, but just people who—just families, had people who were suffering with mental illness in their families. There was workplaces. So there was a lot of people who had people in their workplaces suffering with depression or trauma or addictions. And people just started to really jump on the bandwagon to start to really learn about these medicines as sacred medicines.

Tim Ferriss: And the medicines at that point, just to define the molecules we’re talking about, that was MDMA and psilocybin?

Tania de Jong: Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Let me bring us back for a moment to David Nutt. And the reason I’m going to bring David Nutt, N-U-T-T, back into the picture is because in the process of doing homework for this conversation came across a number of allies that you had recruited over time, right? You really had a multi-pronged approach and I want to talk about some of those.

Tania de Jong: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. That’s a big approach.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So this is abc.net.au, and it mentions you engaging new lobbyists, “Hawker Britton, known for their cozy relationships with the labor government,” and that goes on da, da, da, “understand the dynamics of Canberra. The organization then flew out Imperial College of London Neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt for a roadshow up and down the East Coast.” And it goes on to mention him as one of the celebrities of sorts in psychedelic circles, certainly within scientific circles. And I’m going back to the piece here, “During a whirlwind tour sponsored by herbal tincture and organic chocolate brands,” perfect, “he addressed packed town halls in Byron Bay, Sydney and Canberra,” if I’m pronouncing that correctly, “and Melbourne. Then there were black-tie events with philanthropists and stakeholders at the Australian clubs in Sydney and Melbourne.” It goes on and on. Right?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: So if there’s any more color to that, I’d love to hear the purpose of doing that.

Tania de Jong: No, absolutely. I mean, that was a huge part of it. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the reason I’m bringing this up and part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation is because you did something very remarkable, and there were other parties involved and a lot going on, but I mean, MMA was a real driving force behind some incredible world firsts on the playing field of global pharmacology and mental health treatments. You’ve accomplished something really impressive. And there are pieces of the playbook that I think people could apply in other locations, and this would be, I think, potentially one example of that. So could you speak to what you did with the roadshow with David and maybe how you used lobbyists? And also, how did you pay for all that?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. Well, I mean, these are really important questions, and we are being asked by a lot of other countries and organizations how we did it. And it was very tough, but we tried everything. So we never gave up. That was one aspect of—and my husband and I are very persistent people. So every roadblock that we get, we think, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” And we would climb around or over or through that wall, whatever we could do to keep going. So what happened was in 2022, David, who’d become an incredibly good friend of ours and someone we deeply respected and we just adore his humor and his intellect—

Tim Ferriss: How did you first connect with David?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so that was—

Tim Ferriss: Cold email or—how did that happen?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. I mean, so as you would see, one of the other really strong prongs of our strategy was to put together this world-leading advisory panel. And so we’ve got about 75 or so leaders in this field or people who are really great advocates for these medicines, scientists, doctors, researchers, and others. And I just started reaching out to people, but also in 2018, I went to a conference run by Usona in Madison in Wisconsin, and I spoke at that conference.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s a trip. It’s a bit of a trip for you.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it was, but—

Tim Ferriss: So for people who don’t know, the organization, at least last I checked, predominantly focused on psilocybin.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm. Correct. And their medicine’s likely to be registered as just about as soon as Compass Pathways, another huge pharma company who’s an applicant for psilocybin. Over the next six months or so, we anticipate a number of these medicines becoming registered medicines. We can talk about that shortly.

But back to the time that we brought David Nutt out. So basically, I had approached a lot of people. I’d also met a lot of people at Usona, and so I then started inviting them to join our advisory panel. And so that was how I met Robin, Roland, David Nutt, all of these people. And as we’d meet one person, then they’d say, “Well, have you met this person and have you met that person?”

Tim Ferriss: Let me pause you, Tania, for a second. So I know you’re persistent, but these people get asked to do all sorts of stuff all the time, right?

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How did you make it easy or compelling for them to say yes? What’s the pitch? What was the pitch to someone like Robin? Because at that point, I’m trying to put a date to it, but Robin at that point had probably appeared, I’m just guessing on the timeline here, in How to Change Your Mind, he’s somewhat of a main scientific protagonist—

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: —certainly figure within How to Change Your Mind, a book by Michael Pollan that really shifted the tectonic plates of what was possible for psychedelics in the US and elsewhere in some ways, in a lot of ways. And many, if not most of the best known philanthropists and supporters of psychedelics, not all of them, but a very high percentage would reach back to that as the tipping point for their interest. So how do you get then Robin’s the hottest girl at the dance? And he’s very charismatic, he’s good on camera, he’s good on audio.

Tania de Jong: I met them. I met them, Tim. I met most of them actually at the Usona conference. And also, I happened to sing at the Usona conferences and speak. So I gave a speech. I spoke about what we were hoping to achieve in Australia, also sang. I serenaded Roland Griffith. It was beautiful. I mean, I miss that guy so much. And so I met these people and we just connected and they were inspired by the fact that we were trying to move the needle in Australia. I don’t think that they thought that we could do it. And to be honest, I didn’t know that we could do it either. It was just persisting and persisting. And so I think people just started joining us because maybe they believed that we could do it. I mean, we had set up five charities before that had already done some significant things.

Tim Ferriss: How did you end up speaking at the conference? Because that seems to me, have an important piece of the recipe—

Tania de Jong: It was.

Tim Ferriss: —for why suddenly you could talk to them afterwards. And they were already a warm audience at that point. So how did you end up speaking at that conference?

Tania de Jong: Well, that was through Bill Linton. And so Bill Linton is the founder of Usona and as I’m sure you know, and you know him, and he’s just a lovely guy. And again, we connected. I wrote to him.

Tim Ferriss: What did you say to Bill in the email?

Tania de Jong: I’d really like to speak at your conference. In fact, I think they even had heard what we were doing and that we were trying to do this in Australia. And then they actually, I said, “Look, I can also sing.” And maybe that was part of it. And then he just said, “Well, look, I’d like you to come over. I’d like you to sing.” I think we probably had a Zoom call or something like that. And they then invited me to speak and to sing. And it was a long trip. It was a very long trip and literally I had to get off the plane.

Tim Ferriss: It was a very long trip.

Tania de Jong: And I was in an altered state. I was in some time warp then.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I wanted to sidebar quickly that sometimes it is the weirdest, not that singing is weird. I have much stranger obsessions and interests, but it’s the most unexpected, maybe, talents or side interests or fill in the blank that you do on the weekends and evenings, that sometimes is the thing that opens the door because it is the thing that other people aren’t leading with. So when you’re like, “Oh, and I also sing.” And they’re like, “You know what? She’s scrappy. She’s willing to fly all the way from Australia. Oh my God. To Wisconsin? Okay, sure. Why not? Let’s give it a shot.”

Tania de Jong: Well also, I think by then I’d also had that connection with Ram Dass. Yes. So that was also a help. I haven’t mentioned that and that was very significant. So actually, and I want to come back to David with you, because that’s really important. But back in 2016, after you’d woken me up into this whole space, and then we did the medicine with this Dutch guy, and he played us some Ram Dass at the end of the medicine session. And I went, “Who’s this guy? This is amazing.” And my husband’s one of these guys who, when he hears someone really inspiring, he goes, “Well, is there a way we could meet them?” And so, okay, well, why not try and meet Ram Dass? So what we did was we wrote to him via, again, his people, and we found out that you could indeed spend a week living at Ram Dass’s house in Hawaii and get to spend time with him living there. So we were lucky enough that we got to fly to Maui.

Tim Ferriss: Hold on. How does that work? Because I’m sure a lot of people would love to hang out with Ram Dass.

Tania de Jong: Yeah no, really.

Tim Ferriss: What are the hurdles you have to climb to live at his house for a week? Or how does it work? Or is it just pay for a plane or how is it?

Tania de Jong: We made a donation. We made a donation and we got to live in the house that was on his land there and live right next to him. And then every day or two we’d get to hang out a little bit with Ram Dass. And so we’d come into the main house, we’d spend some time meditating with him. He’d invite us to some of the ceremonies that he’d be having at the house. We even went to the beach with him because he had this incredible wheelchair that had these amazing inflatable tires and he’d be wheeled out in his wheelchair out into the ocean. And one particular day there’d be two rainbows that appear when Ram Dass gets out into the ocean. I mean, it was like just pinching yourself, like, is this really happening? And a lot of it was sitting in silence with him because he had had that stroke and by this stage, it was about a year or so before he actually would pass.

And so he was still vibrant though. And when you looked in Ram Dass’s eyes, you could just see yourself reflected back in him. And I remember singing to him as well and there were tears rolling down his face when I sang to him. And it was a song called Coming Home. It was all about coming home to yourself. But the minute that we would mention psychedelics to Ram Dass, his eyes would light up and he’d start talking about his time that he gave his guru in India this huge dose of—

Tim Ferriss: Craziest story.

Tania de Jong: You’ve heard this story, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: And nothing happened.

Tim Ferriss: It’s in Be Here Now.

Tania de Jong: Right.

Tim Ferriss: His guru in India. So Ram Dass, again, just to provide a little context for people who are like, what are they talking about? All right. Ram Dass, which is I believe servant of—

Tania de Jong: God.

Tim Ferriss: —Ram. Yeah, Servant of the God, is the non-birth name of Richard, the man formerly known as Richard Alpert, who was at Harvard with Timothy Leary, who some people may recognize. And they were both kicked out of Harvard, little known fact, in part due to Andrew Weil, then an undergrad writing, I think it was in The Harvard Crimson, about their dosing of psilocybin. And there was some discussion, I don’t know if it was verified, of them giving it to undergrads and it became this huge scandal and they were booted out. And at one point Timothy Leary was designated by President Nixon as the most dangerous man in America, which is ridiculous in retrospect, but there you have it. And there’s a lot more we could say about that, but suffice to say, Richard Alpert decides to go to India. And at one point he somehow finds his way. This was pre-internet, pre-smartphone, somehow finds his way to this guru. Again, which was described in Be Here Now.

Tania de Jong: Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Maharaj-ji. And he’s, I think, trying to explain to him something about psychedelics. And he’s like, “Well, do you have any?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I do.” And he had—Ram Dass had LSD and he gave him, it was either 400 or 600 micrograms.

Tania de Jong: Huge dose.

Tim Ferriss: This guy had never taken any psychedelics. Took that and just sat there and clearly would’ve set in and an hour later as if nothing was happening, just looked at him with a smile and was like, “Interesting.” And I think he said something like, “Sure, you can peek in and say hello to Christ consciousness or whatever you want to call it, but you’re not actually going to get to know the depth.” But the fact that somebody could take 400 or 600 micrograms. To put that in perspective, 100 micrograms is considered a, let’s just call it standard hit. If I were to take 200 micrograms, I would be completely incapacitated for 8 to 12 hours. So if somebody could take four to 600—

Tania de Jong: I think that would even happen to me on 50, to be honest.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And could just carry on having a conversation as if they only had a glass of water is somewhat mind-boggling.

Tania de Jong: It’s bizarre.

Tim Ferriss: So yes, and Ram Dass went on to do a lot of writing and a lot of recording, and it’s just incredibly compelling—

Tania de Jong: Prolific.

Tim Ferriss: —to listen to. So you spent time with Ram Dass. So the Ram Dass part—

Tania de Jong: We spent time with Ram Dass.

Tim Ferriss: —ends up being helpful to get to Madison. And then Bill Linton—

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it definitely did.

Tim Ferriss: —and co invite you with open arms. You sing, you talk, you meet this whole cast of characters, including, I’m guessing, was David Nutt there in Madison or—

Tania de Jong: I’m not sure that David was there, but I mean Robin and Roland and everyone else was there.

Tim Ferriss: I think they’re all a stone’s throw from—

Tania de Jong: So then this was the year before we started Mind Medicine Australia. So then I wrote to David and I said, “We’re launching a charity. It’s on February the 13th.” That was the date of our launch. “Would you come to Australia and speak at the launch?” And so we flew David to Australia. He spoke at our launch, which was at the University of Melbourne, and we then became very friendly with David and his wife, who’s delightful. And we’ve brought him over a few times since then. And that launch was packed out. And then what happened was in—I mean, cut a long story short, I’m cutting through a whole lot of things here, but in 2022, we invited him to Australia to present at some town hall events in public, but then we also brought him to the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

And we asked the Therapeutic Goods Administration if we could present to them, and we asked the head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration how many people approximately would come to the meeting, that we would have David Nutt there. And we would also have a woman there whose husband had tragically lost his life because he got depression and had not been able to cope. I’ll talk about that very briefly in a second. So what happened was the head of the TGA said, “Oh, there’ll be probably 10 or 15 people that turn up to the meeting.” 140 people turned up to the meeting. Some of them were in the room, some of them were on Zoom.

Tim Ferriss: These are all people internal to the TGA. These are all employees.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, they were like Department of Health people, executives, all from all different parts of the Department of Health and the TGA. And so what happened was we had invited this woman called Vanessa to speak just before David Nutt, and Vanessa’s husband had got depression a few years prior, just out of the blue, all of a sudden got depression really badly. And he woke up one day and he said to her, “I need to go to a hospital.” And so she took him to a doctor and they started him on some SSRIs, antidepressants, and then they didn’t work. And then he got taken to an institution because he was really unwell. He was put in that institution. And they’ve got a young daughter, very successful man, by the way, no previous history of depression, just came on. And so he was put in this institution that didn’t help. They saw every professor and expert that they could. She’s kept a 20-page dossier of every treatment she tried.

During the middle of him trying many, many treatments, she rang me up and she said, “Tania, I’ve heard about psychedelic assisted therapies. Could Franco—” His name was Franco, “Could he get psychedelic assisted therapies?” And I said, “Look, no, not in Australia at the moment. We’re trying really hard to get these medicines rescheduled, but he would have to go overseas to do this legally, like in the Netherlands where psilocybin truffles are legal, for example, or somewhere else.” He was not well enough to be taken overseas and they didn’t want to break the law by going underground in Australia, and this applies to a lot of people. And so what happened was, they kept trying all the different other treatments, the professors, he was in the institutions. She said to me, she rang me about another year later, said, “He’s begging me to go every day. He wants to go. He wants to leave.” Hang in there. We are really working hard on this.

Anyway, he couldn’t wait. She had kept this 20-page dossier and she got up in front of the TGA and she said, “I believe that if my husband had have had access to these treatments, that he might still be alive today and that our young daughter would still have a father. And this is all the treatments we tried. It’s not like we didn’t try to get Franco well. We did.” And there wasn’t a dry eye in the room at this stage. And then Professor Nutt comes on and starts presenting about the science and all the research, the data, the evidence that you know of. By that stage, there’d been a lot of trials, as you know, that had taken place. So he presented and then we presented, and still everyone was going, “There’s no way this is going to happen. There’s no way the rescheduling’s going to happen.” There were scientists and clinicians and others that just said, “It’s not going to happen.”

But this was in about November of 2022, and we just kept pushing. And then in February, February the 3rd it was, 2023, we’re standing in the kitchen and my husband goes, “It’s been rescheduled.” And I just said, “No, you can’t be serious.” I said, “You’ve got to show me this.” I read the document and I kept thinking there must be an error in the document. Can’t have been rescheduled. And no, it’s been rescheduled. So we start dancing around the kitchen and this is unbelievable. This is really amazing. We were so thrilled. Then the headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled. Australia’s the first country to do this. Look at Australia. Now Australia’s leading the world in this field and this is surreal. This is so incredible that this actually happened in Australia because Australia tends to be more of a follower than a leader often, but to do this was incredible.

So then a few months later, the rules changed so that the psychiatrists could actually start to treat patients in clinics. And that was the whole purpose of this, was that there should be clinics around Australia with clinicians that we’d been training since 2021 and that patients should start to be treated with these incredible sacred medicines, with therapy obviously. And so there was these multidisciplinary teams and psychiatrists could start applying to the therapeutic goods administration for what’s called an authorized prescriber status. So you, psychiatrist, put an application into the TGA, and we help a lot of psychiatrists do these applications because they’re quite onerous. And they have to put in their protocols, how much medicine they’re going to use, where they’re going to practice from, all these different protocols. And then those are reviewed by the TGA and an independent ethics committee. And if they get the TGA stamp and the ethics committee stamp, they can start using psychedelic assisted therapy, psilocybin assisted therapy and MDMA assisted therapy in their clinics.

And so there’s now over 20 clinics around Australia, mostly led by clinicians that we have trained through our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies. And over 400 patients or so, roughly, have been treated. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot because there’s millions of Australians who are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and there’s millions of people globally suffering from these conditions who are not getting well, like Franco. And one of the arguments that was really important for the Therapeutic Goods Administration was there’s a risk to not doing anything. So if you don’t do anything, if you don’t reschedule these medicines, that’s actually a risk because patients who’ve tried everything, like Franco, might end up taking their own lives and that would be tragic. And we, through the period that we were making these applications, heard of other stories than Franco. We had a lot of people who write to us. They texted us, they emailed us, and they begged us.

We even had politicians writing to us saying they’ve got a son, or constituent saying, “Could we please provide the medicines to them?” And we said, “Well, no, we can’t until these medicines are rescheduled.” So we kept having people begging us for the medicines. We obviously couldn’t provide them. We’re not a medicine provider.

And important to say to everyone that these medicines, you don’t take them lightly, you take them in a very controlled setting. Personally, I love nature, but we have to do it in clinics in Australia under these circumstances. It’s really important for the patient to have the right preparation and mindset so that they can be open to whatever is coming through the altered state and then bring all of those insights for their life, their work, their health, whatever it happens to be back into their life. And usually that’s done through therapy. So a patient goes through a three or four month process, protocol, and we are seeing 60 to 80% remission rates in Australia, which is replicating what we’ve seen in trials around the world. So of those 400 patients that have been treated so far around Australia, 60 to 80% of those are going to remissions and there’s been no serious adverse events.

Tim Ferriss: What does the pie chart split look like for out of those 400, how many are psilocybin for depression versus MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for PTSD?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so more of them are MDMA, so more psychiatrists started out doing MDMA for trauma.

Tim Ferriss: It’s probably a good idea. I think it’s good to get comfortable skiing the blue squares before the black diamonds.

Tania de Jong: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Tends to be more manageable.

Tania de Jong: And many of the psychiatrists felt more comfortable administering MDMA first. There are some patients in Australia, I think, who’ve been administered both medicines, not at the same time, but subsequently, but it’s probably about a 70/30 split. But psilocybin is starting to creep up, and we’re also seeing psilocybin now being researched for a whole range of other conditions, as you know. So for addictions and obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think MDMA’s still very underestimated as a tool. It’s been in the zeitgeist long enough that a lot of the writing or videos or podcasts that get attention are focused on the latest and greatest, or what they might consider the new kid on the block, like a 5‐MeO‐DMT. Okay, everything’s about 5‐MeO‐DMT because it can be crammed into 15 minutes and it’s the businessman’s path to God and all this stuff.

Tania de Jong: Correct, correct.

Tim Ferriss: Which from a commercialization perspective, I understand. But at the same time, you have something that is already very well researched, that has actually been around a very, very long time. I want to say it’s the 1920s when MDMA was first patented, and then it was shelved, and then the patent expired, and then Sasha Shulgin, his little lab and his tasting parties conjured up hundreds of psychedelics. If anyone’s ever heard of 2C-B, 2C-E, you can thank Sasha Shulgin, but also resurrected MDMA, which basically replaced MDA as the underground therapists tool. And I think MDMA is very underestimated, given how—

Tania de Jong: So do I.

Tim Ferriss: —broadly speaking, how manageable it is relative to many of the other psychedelics that we could discuss. And I think partially because it doesn’t necessarily, I would say pretty typically, does not provide the 17th dimension shattered into stardust, technicolor, grand finale fireworks show, which make for good stories that it gets underestimated as a tool because it’s maybe not making the rounds at as many cocktail parties because it’s unlikely you’re going to be like, “Yeah, and then these dancing crocodiles with sapphire eyes came out and danced around me and so-and-so,” which you’ll certainly get if you’re hanging out with your ayahuasca friends. So MDMA is really, I think, a tremendous tool, given the risk profile, given the manageability of it relative to other things. Question, I suppose, related to the integration that you already mentioned. Is the therapy that acts as the lattice work of support for these experiences in Australia, is it standardized or is it really up to the clinician and the patients to select the therapeutic modality? Is it standardized perhaps in the way that MAPS was trying to standardize with IFS informed dyads and things of this type?

Tania de Jong: So it’s not standardized, and many of our clinicians, the ones who’ve done our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies, use a whole lot of different modalities. So yes, some of them may use parts and IFS therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy, or they may use other types of therapy. So there’s all sorts of different therapies that we encourage our clinicians to look at. And that might be, and I feel like one of the things that’s becoming most important is even just nutrition. So just coming out of this experience and having the right nutrition. Because if you go back into your life and just start eating all, say if you were eating a lot of sugar before or drinking a lot of alcohol and you go back to that, well, then you’re probably going to relapse. So there’s all sorts of things around nutrition and exercise that we’re hoping will be more and more included as integration therapy post-treatment for anyone doing psychedelic assisted therapies.

But we don’t believe that there should be a cookie cutter approach. Every therapist has different skills that they bring to the table, and many of them, most of the therapists that we’re training are trauma-informed, but not all of them. And they’re just learning and they’re learning to bring their own skills and work out what works for each patient. And I think that matters a lot because everyone that we’re treating through these clinics, they’re all individuals and not everything’s going to work identically for every patient, just the same way that the dose of the medicine’s not going to be identical for each patient.

Tim Ferriss: How many patients would you hope, not in a pie in the sky, best case green lights all the way scenario, but in a base case, not worst case, not best case, right down the middle case, how many patients do you think could be served with these medicines over the next three years in Australia? What do you think?

Tania de Jong: Well, it’s an exponential thing. So we’re seeing a huge exponential growth. So just even now as we speak, we just found out that now there’s 120 authorized prescribing psychiatrists in Australia for either MDMA or psilocybin or both medicines. So that is a huge jump. We started with one or two psychiatrists back at the start of 2024. We’re now at the middle, latter part of 2026, and that is an exponential increase in authorized prescribing psychiatrists. In the first year, we trained about 80 therapists. We’ve now trained 750. In the first year, only a handful of patients, maybe, I don’t know, 15, 20 patients were treated. Now there’s been nearly 400. So maybe it will get to 5,000 by then. This is me being conservative because well, it could be a lot more, but maybe 5,000 is a realistic number, but that’s a fraction of who needs it.

Tim Ferriss: Right, which I understand, but I don’t want to let the dream of boiling the ocean minimize the impact of even 400 people, because what people listening may not realize is that if you look back at the early studies, if you look at a lot of current studies, they are expensive, at least in the United States. I’ll speak for the United—well, speak for the United States, what a sentence. I will speak to some of the clinical trials in the US, many of which I’ve been involved with. And because these compounds are still schedule one, it is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to recruit subjects, to get approvals through ethics boards, IRBs, et cetera. And as a result, what you could get on the street very easily, in mushroom chocolates or otherwise, for $50 for a patient in a proper clinical trial run at a university could cost $15,000 per person, right?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Something like that. It is incredibly expensive. And what that means is you end up with these studies that are well-designed and hopefully properly powered. And people can dig into that if they want online, if they want to read up on what that means from a statistical perspective. But you end up with 10 people, you end up with eight people, maybe you end up with 15 people. And certainly if you’re a for-profit company, Compass and others have been able to, and have had to, have larger sample sizes and larger cohorts and so on and so forth as you move through the different phases. 400’s a lot. But—there’s a big but, and I’m hoping you can tell me the answer. I’m sure you can.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Is there some type of requirement for data reporting from people who are authorized? Because it’s most valuable as a way of building momentum and creating a virtuous cycle if there is mandatory data reporting that then provides a signal or many signals.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Tania de Jong: Well, no, and that’s a really important part of our strategy. So our strategy at Mind Medicine Australia was to build the ecosystem so that we could make sure everyone’s trained, that the public and clinicians were fully educated, and we keep doing that, that there is ongoing research for new conditions, that clinical rollouts and the medicine supply can happen very smoothly. And then there’s the whole payor part, which I’ll come to you. So there’s the whole cost of it all. But the data collection’s really, really important.

And one of the things David Nutt did with us was he was really like, “We have to make sure there’s real world evidence being collected.” So he worked with Professor Paul Fitzgerald at Australian National University and Mind Medicine Australia has funded a registry, which we have no influence on, we simply fund it at the Australian National University, which collates real world evidence, the data from the baseline of a patient when they go in for the treatment, then what they’re like when they come out of the treatment. And that’s being collected all the time.

It hasn’t published yet, but we hope that it will publish over the next few months, and then continue to publish periodically as they collate more and more data. And this data is critical because this is what can show the government. Well, firstly, they know there’s been no adverse events, serious ones because there’s been nothing reported to the TGA, but it’s also really important to show the government, “Wow, well these remission rates around 60 to 80%,” that’s compared against 10 to 15% for existing treatments for PTSD and psilocybin with MDMA and psilocybin treatment for depression and trauma in Australia at the moment.

So 10 to 15% versus 60 to 80% remission rates, that starts to become very important for a government because they go, “Wow, wow, there could be some serious cost savings here. We could save millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollar over the course of a patient’s lifetime.” And one of the other things we’ve done at MMA is we’ve helped really bring on the payors for these treatments.

So we now have the Department of Veterans Affairs who are supporting treatments for veterans. We have the National Disability Insurance Scheme also funding treatments. And we have Medibank, which is our largest health insurer, who have basically said that any eligible Gold members of Medibank can get pretty much the whole treatment cost paid apart from a couple of thousand dollars.

Tim Ferriss: What does it look like to recruit—

Tania de Jong: So everyone’s shifting to Medibank.

Tim Ferriss: —any of these payers? So how do you even bring the first of these payers online? What does the outreach look like?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so we went to them all from early on. So we were talking to the Department of Veterans Affairs from early on because we had seen what happened in the US with veterans and we knew that that was a core strategy that Rick Doblin and MAPS had also used. And it’s an important strategy, because veterans and first responders have served their nation and more veterans die through their own hands, through suicide, than die in the battlefield. And they experienced so much trauma in the work that they’ve done. And we knew that the Department of Veterans Affairs was really struggling with the amount of veteran suicides that were occurring.

So they were someone we started talking to and presenting to from very early on in our time as Mind Medicine Australia. The National Disability Insurance Scheme came on board because they obviously want to try and reduce the costs of treatments. And this is a really good way to reduce costs over time. Though the cost of the treatment is relatively expensive upfront, over the course of a patient’s lifetime, the potential cost savings are enormous. Rick Doblin and MAPS did some economic modeling and showed that the cost per patient, this was a few years ago already, could be well over $100,000 US of cost savings.

So we knew that cost would be a barrier, and so we also started a patient support fund at Mind Medicine Australia. And how we managed to do a lot of this was through our own philanthropy.

So we’re philanthropists and social entrepreneurs. And then we got other philanthropists that we know to come on board and start to support our patient support fund and to start to support Mind Medicine Australia’s work. And that’s really how we’ve enabled a lot of this to happen. We just went in, we didn’t let anything be our barrier. We just though, “Well, anything’s possible. We can do this. And if we get enough people behind us and we spend enough time, energy—”

In the end, yeah, we’ve also donated a lot of money to this. Peter and I have done this pro bono for the last eight years, completely pro bono, because we just want to help alleviate suffering and want to see people get their lives back.

We want people to have meaningful lives. We want them to feel healthy. We want them to be able to see the sacred in everything. And that’s one of the great gifts that these medicines give you, whether you’re washing the dishes or you are looking at the beautiful tree outside or a beautiful sunset, it’s starting to see the beauty in everything in this life. And if that’s a gift we can give people, wow, well, why won’t we do that?

Tim Ferriss: Couple of questions all over the map, is it true that you with your facilitator from the Netherlands were given psilocybin with Syrian rue or was there no Syrian rue?

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right, why—

Tania de Jong: No, it was Syrian Rue. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Why did he decide to include that? My understanding, and I haven’t looked this up in a very long time, is that Syrian rue contains—could be multiple beta-carbolines, like harmine, harmaline, which are—

Tania de Jong: Peganum harmala, mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So peganum harmala is the Syrian rue.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: But it imparts when combined with psilocybin kind of an ayahuasca twist of lemon on top.

Tania de Jong: Yes, it does.

Tim Ferriss: Because it’s adding the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Why did he choose your facilitator to approach it that way?

Tania de Jong: I think that was the protocol that he used. Anyway, it was his standard protocol. Now I think it’s a great protocol for the right clients. I think for us it was the right protocol. Firstly, it’s an MAOI inhibitor, as you’ve just mentioned. So he has this protocol which he calls Psilohuasca. So it’s a combination of psilocybin and ayahuasca. That’s how he sort of describes it. Now, when I went in, if I’d known that it was ayahuasca, I probably would’ve freaked out and gone, “Oh, there’s no way I’m doing ayahuasca.” But it was the way that it was done was actually it was like that.

And I think that because Peter and I had never had any drugs in our life at all, we were completely new to this, but we were also type A people.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t say.

Tania de Jong: Right. I was a bit of a control freak then. I’m still one, but I’m not as much one then now as I was then. I will say that. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this, was I wanted to let go of some of the control. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Tania de Jong: So I really wanted to see what that would be like. What would Tania be like without all of that holding on?

Tim Ferriss: Good for you. Good for you.

Tania de Jong: You know?

Tim Ferriss: A lot of type A people will not choose to release the white knuckling.

Tania de Jong: Right. So it was like this Syrian rue, it relaxed us, firstly. But then the goal, which I found out later, I didn’t know this at the time, but that it was expanded the visuals and the whole experience between two to 10 times. So it amplified our experience and what we would’ve seen, heard, everything, experienced by two to 10 times. And subsequently, I think that is accurate. I think it extended the experience. It created more visuals than what I had seen say without using peganum harmala subsequently.

But the first two experiences Peter and I had both were with Syrian rue. And I thought it was an extraordinary way of relaxing us and then helping us to just let go of our bodies and just to be able to travel. And at one stage the guide said, “Oh, you guys are really having a lot of trouble stepping out of your bodies.” I could hear him say that in the room.

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Thanks, bud.”

Tania de Jong: It was like your body’s there fighting you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh man. I’m curious, what dose, do you recall how many grams of, I’m assuming it’s dried Psilocybe mushroom of some type?

Tania de Jong: Yes. With a kick of lemon juice, yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The lemon, did he let it marinade in the lemon for a while? Did he grind it up and marinade it?

Tania de Jong: Not so long.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Tania de Jong: Well, I don’t know how long he’d marinated it for. I was too petrified to really watch that part.

Tim Ferriss: How quickly did you feel the onset? That’ll probably tell me how long it marinated.

Tania de Jong: It was probably within about—I started feeling tingling through some of my feet and hands probably within about 30 minutes. My husband kept saying, “There’s nothing happening.” And then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh my God.”

Tim Ferriss: Famous last words. Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. I mean, he was on the floor on a mattress. I was on the bed. We were not talking to one another. That was part of the protocol. And it probably took about half an hour and I could feel like there was so much tingling. I called the guide over and I said, “Hey, I’m really afraid. Can you hold my hand?” Because I though, “What’s happening?” I hadn’t felt my body do these sorts of strange things before. And it was like I could feel myself sort of—it was like I was filling up and I didn’t quite know what that meant. And then all of a sudden I started to see the colors and the shapes and it was like this kaleidoscope that I was looking through and it was incredible.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I’d be curious if this matches your experience because I do have some experience with psilocybin plus Syrian rue. Also, just a footnote for folks on the lemon.

Tania de Jong: The lemon, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So my understanding, I’m not a biochemist, but if you marinate the Psilocybe mushroom, especially if it’s ground up, say a coffee grinder, in lemon that it basically pre-metabolizes it, breaks it down or converts it into psilocin. And your body is converting psilocybin into psilocin as the active metabolite to begin with. And in doing so, for me, it would typically take, in some cases, it really depends on a lot of factors, when did I last eat, et cetera, et cetera, but 45 minutes to an hour maybe for effects to really set in with eating mushrooms.

If they’re ground and put in lemon, and it depends on the strain of mushrooms, some can be more obviously potent than others, but 10 to 15 minutes, I mean, I am off to the races, what normally would’ve taken 60 to 90 minutes. Which is actually quite nice, because the waiting game can be the most torturous part for a lot of people.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Similarly, with the Syrian rue, my experience is, let’s just say if my workspace functional dose is 4.5 grams, let’s just say, or 3.5 to four these days, let’s just say, although I’ve taken the foot off the gas a lot with this stuff. But if Syrian rue is involved, then all of a sudden 1.5 is plenty and you can use much less.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: Which I think one advantage of that is that you’re less likely to have a headache the next day. Some people at higher dose psilocybin can really get a crusher of a headache, depending on their individual pharmacology. So have you continued to work with the Syrian rue or have you moved to a different toolkit?

Tania de Jong: Sometimes, yeah. And I’m sort of curious again to actually—I have this hankering at the moment to perhaps go and have a session with Syrian rue again. I think that it’s more powerful for me still, but subsequent to the second dose, so when we had the second dose with the guide—and yeah, it was probably about probably 2.5–3 grams of dried mushroom that we were having to your earlier question. And I guess the next one we had after that was probably with a guide somewhere in the US who didn’t use the Syrian. And for me, that was not as powerful.

It was still good. I was still traveling quite a lot. And I think Aldous Huxley famously said, “Once the doors of perception are open, you can never shut them again.” And I really have found that to be the case. What I saw, I can never unsee what I experienced, I experienced, and it’s always going to be there with me. And I consider that the greatest gift that I had that, and it enables me to get into other transcendental states with meditation and singing and other things much more quickly and easily as well. I can access those states more easily.

Would I prefer to do Syrian rue from time to time? Yes, I think so. It is a good thing. Some people find it a bit nauseating. So there are some people who might find that it can make them a bit nauseating. So I don’t get a headache from psilocybin, generally speaking. In fact, a lot of people I know use psilocybin to microdose to remove their cluster headaches and their migraines. So it’s interesting that you said about the headache. So everyone’s different of course.

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, I think this is a Paracelsus, the dose makes the poison, situation in the sense that microdosing, certainly there’s research being done with LSD, or analogs of LSD, looking at cluster headaches very specifically.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, correct.

Tim Ferriss: And a lot of the data I think are compelling on the—when I’m talking about headaches, generally what I’m talking about is someone who is relatively naive to psilocybin, who is—and this is most people in the beginning innings, who are subconsciously or consciously trying to remain in control. And so they have three grams. They also don’t know what to expect. So when the facilitator shuffles over and puts a hand on the shoulder and says, “Tania, how are you feeling? Are you feeling anything?” You’re like, “I have no fucking idea.” That’s what 99% are going to be like.

Tania de Jong: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I’m feeling anything. I have no idea if this is the right thing or if I’m just making things up. Okay.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, I know.

Tim Ferriss: And then depending also on how seasoned the facilitator is, but they’ll say, “Well, if you’re going to boost, this is the time to boost.” And again, 99% of newbies are going to be like, “I have no idea if I should boost.” But if they’re not clearly feeling something and they imagine it’s supposed to be this explosive 17th dimension experience, they’re like, “Sure, I’ll have more.” So they have three, then they have six, and then I’ve seen people have nine, and then some people go 12. In a case like that, the likelihood of having headache is non-zero.

Tania de Jong: No, I know. I mean—

Tim Ferriss: When you start getting up into the brute force—

Tania de Jong: Oh no, definitely.

Tim Ferriss: —flood doses, which it happens a lot. I mean, moms also frequently need higher doses than some folks because they’re so used to taking care of everybody else. And also sometimes a good reason for people to do sessions separately as opposed to as a couple.

Tania de Jong: No, that’s true.

Tim Ferriss: If someone is a primary caretaker, sometimes they can be so preoccupied that they don’t respond to what is already a saturating dose.

Tania de Jong: That’s true. But there is also something very much to be said for doing this in groups.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I agree with that.

Tania de Jong: And we’ve seen that. Especially with just the experience, but also then the integration, just sitting in circle together, in sacred circles, and sharing these experiences with others, it’s just—you can’t bottle it. I mean, everyone’s experience is so different and it really helps you to understand just how different we really are. But then we’re getting the same sort of messages coming back.

So even though the material is so different that we’re seeing and hearing and feeling, but then our insights coming back can be very similar. And it’s amazing how many people, for example, that I’ve met who’ve literally stone-cold stopped alcohol after having psilocybin experiences and never had it again.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Remarkable.

Tim Ferriss: The group experience, I mean, the group dynamic I think is where a lot of gold is. And I think it was either 2014 or 15 where I funded a study at UCSF in Northern California looking at long-term demoralization, effectively a variant of depression, in AIDS survivors. And the reason that I funded that study, I mean, there are a number of reasons that I helped fund it, and I’m not sure if I funded the entire thing or part of it, that’s beside the point. The point is that the reason it most grabbed my interest is it was the first time I had seen group integration in the study design.

And I could foresee, or I would bet at least at that point, I still bet, that not only will it be much more cost-effective to deliver some of these medications in group environments—

Tania de Jong: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: —because you’re splitting the cost of one or two therapists/babysitters/nurses across multiple people, four, six, whatever the number might be. I actually think, and this is certainly borne out in the data from a number of the better Ibogaine clinics, the outcomes are better. It’s not just that the cost is lower, the outcomes are better. And certainly I think the experience is much more nuanced and deeper for the participants. So I do think there’s a lot there.

Let me come back to MMA, and every time I say it, I think of mixed martial arts, but I know it’s not mixed martial arts.

Tania de Jong: Oh, Magic Mushrooms Australia. That was sort of the secret name behind the real name.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, got it. Okay. Right. So Mind Medicine Australia, what are some of the mistakes that you made? Because if someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “We want to take a playbook. We want to try this in Croatia. We want to try this in Japan. We want to try this in—” fill in the blank, what are some of the cautionary notes or the things on the do not repeat list where you’re like, “You know what? If I were to do this all over again, I would probably not do X, or I would do Y a little differently.” What are things that come to mind for you?

Tania de Jong: There’s so many things really. It was really challenging. I mean, though my husband have set up so many charities, and very successfully, this was very difficult. Because it’s a very nuanced area, the whole area of mental health care. There’s a lot of people that have a lot of views and there’s a lot of vested interests in the space that we hadn’t fully appreciated. So there was vested interest from researchers that we were not aware of, where researchers were wanting to just keep researching for many, many more years.

We had people literally confront us and we had a lot of conflict with researchers saying, “Well, we need to research for another five or 10 or more years.” And we’re arguing, but there’s patients out there who are going to take their own lives if they don’t get other solutions for their mental health conditions. So there was that sort of thing.

Tim Ferriss: Can you say more about that?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: When you say vested interest, did they feel, because they are researchers and in the business of conducting science, did they simply feel that the burden of proof had not been addressed, therefore we need more data? Or was it, “Hey, we are receiving funding from,” I don’t know the equivalent of the NIH is in Australia, “but we want to continue to receive funding to research these things. Therefore, the longer the runway we have, the more my job security is assured and therefore—” I mean, when you say vested interest, what do you mean?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. That was the main reason. I mean, that was.

And look, we understand, we’ve supported a lot of—we’ve actually invested ourselves, as we know you have, in trials that are for innovative new uses for psilocybin, for example. So we’ve just, for example, part funded a trial that was for eating disorders and another one I think for obsessive compulsive disorder and other things like that. And we very much believe in supporting new research, novel research, but we were not fans of replicating trials that had already been undertaken at least five to 10 or more times in other markets overseas. For example, end of life anxiety and stress.

Or there was a particular researcher who did a trial with MDMA just for four patients and it took, I don’t know, more than five years to complete. Things like that. We just though, “Well, that’s statistically insignificant.” And one of those researchers was one of the people that really attacked us really strongly. It was very, very vicious and personal. And because Peter and I were not clinicians, that was another reason that people though, “Well, who are these people? How dare they come into our space as nonmedical people and start thinking that they could actually change the regulations and how dare they think that?”

There was a lot of that pushing back like, “Go back into your box, please. You don’t belong here.”

Tim Ferriss: So mistakes, though. Mistakes.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe that was a mistake.

But we had a lot of clinicians around us so that we were also constantly having clinicians presenting with us on webinars and things like that. And we did that deliberately because we didn’t want people to say, “Well, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” And so that we had clinicians always appearing with us when we’re presenting, especially if we’re presenting to clinicians, governments and things like that.

I think other mistakes we made was that we had a lot of people wanting to work for us who had lived experience of mental illness. And look, we all carry trauma and I’m no stranger to trauma. I’m the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. And we all are carrying some kind of trauma, whether it’s our own, our families, our lineage collective trauma, we’re carrying that. But we were attracting a lot of people to work with us who didn’t fully disclose all their conditions upfront. And so all of a sudden there might be somebody who was taking alcohol or would turn up to work in a completely drunk state. And this was something we’d never seen before in our other charities. And I think people were coming to us ’cause they wanted to heal their condition.

And to begin with, we wanted to be as inclusive as possible with the people we had working with us. And we still believe in that, but we did have some very difficult experiences early on where I guess we were attracting people who still needed to do more work on themselves rather than working in a high-powered, high stress environment. And this is a high-powered.

When you’re trying to change the law, you need people around you that are very strong and who are resilient because we got knocked down over and over. So I would say you just have to be so resilient and you can’t let it all affect you. And even the personal attacks, I found them very hurtful and I’m quite a sensitive person. And there were times where I was literally lying on the carpet crying because it was just too personal. It was just too much.

I thought I was tough and had a thick skin before this, enough of a thick skin, but I didn’t. So I had to bring in all the resilience of my forefathers, and my maternal grandmother who’d fled the Holocaust and all of that started to become very useful when this was all going on. You can sort of see that anyone who’s a pioneer who’s trying to drive change is going to be attacked. And I hadn’t really appreciated that fully before.

Tim Ferriss: Does anything else come to mind? So I will underscore what you just said. Very common in the, broadly speaking, psychedelic space, which is incredibly understandable, but it is the last or viewed as the last hope for a lot of people for whom every other intervention has failed. Right?

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And for that reason, a lot of people who want to help are in fact, and this is again understandable, interested in trying to mitigate some of their own suffering, but are not in a position where they can sustain the type of intensity or stress or volatility in some of the work that is being done. It’s just not the right timing for them, not the right circumstance.

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: I would also say that for those who haven’t been exposed to the science, it’s another reason why the effect sizes of these drugs on even a small cohort, say 12 people, 15, whatever it might be, when you see these dramatic reductions in HAM-D or whatever assessment might be used for depression or PTSD, what makes it all the more mind-boggling is when you consider how long people have had these diagnoses and how resistant they have been to, in some cases, dozens of interventions.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And when you look at some of this data, I think it was the phase II data from MAPS looking at complex PTSD, but the average, and again, I might be misspeaking, but I’m directionally right. The average length of diagnosis of severe complex PTSD was something like 16 years, 17 years.

Tania de Jong: Yes. Correct.

Tim Ferriss: And then you see for a subset of that group complete remission.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: After two or three sessions, it’s—

Tania de Jong: 68%.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Which also, and I’m pulling from memory, so this is a dangerous business. But when I did the MAPS. I kind of audited. I didn’t do it for any type of practice myself, but I sat in on the MAPS international therapist training in Israel, which was the first time actually that any, to my knowledge, any federal government had paid for or supported at least, financially supported this type of training. And my recollection is, this was quite a few years ago, that after the last administered medicine, the remission rate was something like 54 and then six months later it climbed to 68.

Tania de Jong: Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It went up, and again, we’re painting with kind of a rough brush here, maybe it was 65%, who knows? But the point is that people who no longer met the clinical diagnosis of PTSD, they went from blind shut can’t work a job to asymptomatic, grew over time. It did not go up.

Tania de Jong: Yes, that’s remarkable. That is a remarkable feature. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just crazy to think about. The durability is so wild. And also it’s not a panacea, to your point. It’s like if you go back into the same circumstances with the same temptations and the same problems and the same abuse or the same fill in the blank, it’s not a magic bullet. And I really agree, I’m taking us a little, sorry, off on a tangent, but with say Gul Dolen, who’s now at UC Berkeley, used to be at Hopkins, and I’m paraphrasing, she can certainly speak for herself. I’ve had her on my podcast, but—

Tania de Jong: We did too, yeah—

Tim Ferriss: —I believe these psychedelics open a critical—

Tania de Jong: Critical window—

Tim Ferriss: —period, a critical window within which you can change longstanding beliefs and behaviors. So I think—

Tania de Jong: That’s right—

Tim Ferriss: —the integration, and I’m working on a bunch of stuff related to this right now actually outside of psychedelics, but when you induce neuroplasticity, so suddenly you’ve warmed up the clay and you can shape it in a new way.

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: The question is how do you do that? And it becomes a lot of the questions relate to behavioral change. How do you set up—

Tania de Jong: They do—

Tim Ferriss: —the systems? How do you set up the nudges? How do you create the incentives? How do you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: Because it’s not a foregone conclusion that you take these things and you turn out better. It just isn’t.

Tania de Jong: No, no, it’s not. Though it is, to your point about the increased remissions, when I started presenting on this and I saw that was that New York, I think it was New York Uni or Johns Hopkins trial that showed these increasing remissions over time, that is not something that would ever happen with an antidepressant. Usually what happens with an antidepressant is you get an original improvement perhaps then it plateaus. Then the doctor says, “Well, we might have to try different antidepressant or increase the dose.”

Whereas in this case you have those two or three doses maximum, then you’re having the psychotherapy and your remission is increasing if you engage well with the integration sessions. And that means making those changes in your life that you’ve just talked about that are really important, whether that means exercise, nutrition, connecting with people who are important for you to connect with that are not going to bring you back into the old patterns that you were in before. All sorts of stuff about community and social connection I think is really important at that stage as well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

What do you think contributed to the TGA agreeing to the offer to have David Nutt speak to their employees? Why would they say us? ‘Cause sitting here in the US, if I were just to ring up the 800 number, the FDA and be like, “You know what? I got a pitch for you,” I don’t think it would go anywhere. Now, sure, I wouldn’t call the 800 number, but even still, it would not be easy for me to get a yes to create a webinar.

Tania de Jong: Look, I had the mobile number of the head of the TGA. I was lucky to have that. Somehow I got that.

Tim Ferriss: Sure he or she loved that.

Tania de Jong: I don’t think he loved me having his number. I didn’t bug him too much, but if things started to get roadblocked and we could see they were getting roadblocked, we might give him a call and say, “What’s going on here now?” Or there was all sorts of governance things that would happen. It was really important, for example, that they publish all the submissions, but it took them a while to do so.

At the moment, by the way, we have a new submission in. You can see our submission for end of life stress and anxiety with psilocybin. We’re trying to extend the psilocybin to end of life stress and anxiety because virtual assisted dying is legal in Australia. So if people can do that, then why can’t they find peace through psilocybin in Australia? So that’s part of our argument. You can see our argument on the TGA page. And in fact, on our website on Mind Medicine Australia, you can see all our submissions for these medicines to the TGA.

But I think really we were speaking to him, it was getting to the really pointy end of the final, really probably what would’ve been the final chance to get there. And we’d put in the opposing submission to the interim decision. So the interim decision said no. We’d put it in. We asked him if we could present that we were bringing David Nutt to Australia, so he said, “Yeah.” And then as I said, 10 to 15 people he thought would turn up and then it was 140.

Tim Ferriss: 140.

Tania de Jong: And not a dry eye in the room after Vanessa spoke. Literally everyone was in tears. I think it was really her. I mean, David was brilliant. Of course he was brilliant, but I think it was her. I think it was the fact that people could see a real life example. Well, this is what’s going to happen. If we keep denying people access to these treatments, then we could have many more Francos occur. And of course, there’s many people who are taking their own lives because they’ve given up hope. And we want to give people hope and we want to give them their lives back. That’s the most important thing in the world we could have ever achieved.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the biggest challenges still—

Tania de Jong: Now?

Tim Ferriss: In current day or that you foresee in the next year or two? I just don’t know what the picture currently looks like.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So it seems like there’s a grand kind of real world experiment afoot in Australia, which is like, okay, we’ve allowed these authorized psychiatrists and medical professionals to prescribe and supervise sessions with MDMA and psilocybin. Is the jury still out in the sense that the government’s like, “After X period of time, we’re going to review all this data and determine whether we want to continue this or not”? Or is that not the case? Is it open-ended?

Tania de Jong: I mean, I believe it’s open-ended. So we do still keep having an ongoing dialogue with the TGA. So we write periodically to the TGA about some of the bureaucratic roadblocks. So there are some bureaucratic roadblocks. For example, for quite a while until a few months ago, there was a rule in place that only clinical psychologists could be the lead therapist. So there’s two therapists that usually sit in the dosing with a patient. Well, there was this criteria that it could only be a clinical psychologist.

So we then put in a letter saying all the reasons why it shouldn’t just be a clinical psychologist, why it should be other psychologists, but also other practitioners. And so then that did get widened. And every time there’s a roadblock, we write letters to the TGA showing the evidence and research why that should not be the case. And if necessary, we’ll have a call and we’ll keep just trying to open the door, not to open it fully. That’s not our goal at all.

We believe that these treatments should be done in very careful ways because some of the patients going in for these treatments, in fact, the majority going in for these treatments above ground in clinical environments are very sick and they need to be very well cared for. And so they need to have proper screening. They need to have the top most well-trained clinicians sitting with them, and they need to have extremely good integration processes and tools to go back into their lives and to get real remissions.

But we don’t believe that there should be overly onerous constraints. So now we’ve also got a situation in Australia where all of the clinics are videoing the sessions. So there could be an argument in the future that says that one clinician with a patient, if there’s a video there as well, might be sufficient.

There’s also group therapy that we’re looking at and we’ve already started to look, and I think some authorized prescribers might have put in protocols that might have group integration in their protocol. So we are very supportive of that.

Other roadblocks, of course, is the cost. So there’s still a lot of patients who can’t afford the upfront costs, so we need to let them know about our patient support fund. We need to let them know that Medibank is providing their gold members who qualify for these treatments with pretty much the full cost of the treatment, which is really significant.

Tim Ferriss: How much is the cost off the rack at the moment?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so at our clinic, so we’ve started a clinic too with another listed company called Incannex, and our clinic is called Mind Medicine Australia.

Tim Ferriss: Listed publicly traded company?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. So we as a charity have a half share in this clinic with a publicly traded company and it’s called Mind Medicine Australia Clinic, and it’s in Abbotsford, a suburb of Melbourne. And we’re using that as a real test case to see how to build a best practice clinic. So what do we need to do? How much supervision needs to be supplied? We also use it as a wonderful resource where some of our clinicians that we’ve graduated through our training course can go and gain supervision and experience as well as in the other 20 clinics around Australia. So it’s like we’re developing this sort of clinic in a box protocol, I guess.

Tim Ferriss: How much does that cost per person depending on the compound maybe?

Tania de Jong: So it starts at about—so we actually at our clinic only start with people at one dose. So if a person decides after one dose that it’s really not for them, they can withdraw because in speaking with our authorized prescribers, they preferred that protocol and we don’t want to force people through it if they really don’t want to do it and money is an issue. So it starts at about 8,000 Australian dollars, which is about 5,000, let’s say US dollars for one treatment, including the screening. Then the next one, yeah, probably up to about 15,000 US dollars for three doses and integration.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s the same for either compound?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, I think MDMA might be slightly more because it may be up to three doses where psilocybin’s up to two, and that includes the three to four months of integration following the medicine treatments as well. So it’s about a three to four month course that is costing maybe up to about 25,000 Australian dollars, about say 15,000 US dollars, something like that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive, but it’s not insane. I know it’s out of reach of a lot of people, but if people view it, if they think of it as a pill, I’m taking one pill and it costs me $5,000 and it’s like, okay, their reference point is walking into a pharmacy, let’s just say here in the US, they have their insurance and the copay is 5 bucks or 10 bucks and they get their 30-day supply. So they’re like, “Wait a minute, how is it possible?” But when you realize, if it were to be framed, I’m not saying this is the way to frame it, but it’s like this is three to four months of very well-designed therapy. And by the way, you also happen to get a few powerful drugs along the way.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Yeah, okay, great.” But when they think of the drug first, they’re anchored to a reference they understand, which is probably some very low cost prescription that they get 90 days at a time.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. No. Well, I mean, it is really important to say that the majority of that cost is therapeutic time. The medicine, so we’ve enabled the medicines to come into Australia at the cheapest possible price. The medicine is a tiny little percentage of the cost that I’ve just mentioned. It’s all about therapeutic time. And because there’s two therapists involved for some periods of that time, that’s even more, which is why one of the reasons that we, and not only we, others around the world also say, “Well, if there’s a video in the room, does it always have to be two therapists? I mean, but it is a long treatment time as we know, so a dosing session can take five to six hours, so maybe there needs to be some overlap there.

Tim Ferriss: Is there anything in process or have you guys thought about methylone? Transcend Therapeutics was recently acquired. I don’t know what the parent company is now planning with methylone, but methylone is, for lack of a better descriptor, it’s like the softer, gentler cousin of MDMA who just comes in for a quick hello as opposed to sitting down for dinner, right? It’s like a—

Tania de Jong: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: 45 to 60 minute hello as opposed to four to six hours. And as you mentioned, it’s like the cost of—well, my opinion, the cost of synthesizing and purchasing these things should not be exorbitantly high.

Tania de Jong: It’s not.

Tim Ferriss: There are certain—

Tania de Jong: It’s not at all.

Tim Ferriss: And depending on where you are in the world, there are some companies that would like to make that as expensive as possible, but that’s a whole separate conversation.

Tania de Jong: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: But putting that aside, putting pharma shenanigans to the side, the pills shouldn’t be expensive, the materials.

Tania de Jong: Not at all.

Tim Ferriss: But the therapist time is expensive.

Tania de Jong: Very.

Tim Ferriss: So if you could look at comparing, say, methylone and its effects, which have been quite impressive looking at non-psychotherapy coupled dosing, because MAPS, Lykos at the time, got itself into all sorts of tangles because the FDA on our side does not know how to think about standardizing or regulating psychotherapy. So if the drug is inextricably tied to psychotherapy, the FDA is kind of on some level forced to respond with, “We don’t know how to deal with this, so we’re going to say no.”

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, there’s much more story—

Tania de Jong: Because that’s not their expertise. They’re a medicine scheduling bureau.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So then Transcend said, “Well, let’s just look at what happens with the dosing of the medication.” And even if you had though a therapist in the room, which is not a bad idea, then you have something that is possible within a 60 minute, or let’s just call it 60 to 120 minute window, which should ostensibly lower the cost really substantially. And I know this probably wouldn’t convince the TGA, but my perspective too is like, look, you’re not tripping your balls off when you’re on methylone or MDMA, frankly.

Tania de Jong: Not at all.

Tim Ferriss: Most people could have a conversation. They’re probably not going to want to work on a computer, but there’s not as much distortion as you would experience on something like psilocybin. So when you have, let’s just say, six people in a room plus one therapist or two therapists, you also, for each patient, have five other witnesses.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, they’re in an altered state, but it’s not like they’re seeing goblins doing jumping jacks all over the room. It’s not that kind of perceptual distortion.

Tania de Jong: Well, I’m all for that, Tim. So one of the things that I think I recently mentioned to you that I went to Dave Asprey’s BEYOND Event in Austin, Texas, and there happened to be a stand there for Kanna. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kanna—

Tim Ferriss: Kanna, African, I believe.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it’s an African medicine. It’s not cannabis, but it’s like an African leaf or something.

Tim Ferriss: With a K.

Tania de Jong: Anyway, and I came across through a friend of mine who was there, a substance called Kanna Lift, I think it’s called Lift, and it’s like MDMA, but it’s shorter lasting. It only lasts a couple of hours, maybe 90 minutes to two hours. And I just thought actually, and it’s natural as well, which I really like. I thought to myself, “Wow, this is really good.”

I agree with you. I mean, obviously ketamine is being used a lot and people go in and have a ketamine session, certainly in the US. It’s not as common in Australia, but a lot of therapists in the US are using ketamine for depression. But the problem about ketamine is that it needs to be used over and over in most cases.

Tim Ferriss: Even bigger problems. It has very, very high addiction potential.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen a lot of lives to unravel because of ketamine. It has its place. If there’s acute suicidality, I do think that IV or intramuscular ketamine has a place, but it is very easy to abuse. Very, very easy to abuse.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The Kanna I’ll check out. I took a look at it.

Tania de Jong: Check it out.

Tim Ferriss: Quite a few years ago.

Tania de Jong: I’ll send you a link.

Tim Ferriss: The synthetic all natural thing is an interesting conversation, just because I would say that I am interested in all natural to the extent that you might be throwing some of the baby out with the bath water when you move to say ibogaine from Iboga. And I certainly know a number of researchers and certainly plenty of practitioners who would take that side of things.

Simultaneously, part of the reason scientists and pharma like to isolate is because you have, in some instances, a less muddied picture of things. You have fewer variables. But in the US, for instance, I don’t know what the status is in Australia, Kratom or Kratom, depending on who you ask, was viewed as this savior of the people who want to get off of opioids and prescription drugs. But mitragynine or mitragynine, which is found in Kratom, lo and behold, if you use it chronically, can put you into a dependent state where you need rehab to get off of Kratom.

Tania de Jong: Crazy, right?

Tim Ferriss: Right. And I know people who run rehabilitation clinics and so on. And if there were, maybe there is a chart, I don’t know where you would find it, but anecdotally talking to people who run these type of clinics or people who run clinics offering different services, part of which is detoxing from various types of drug dependencies, Kratom is up and to the right. It’s like AI stocks. They’re matched.

I would tell people all natural can be very powerful and it also can be, in some cases, poorly understood because there aren’t as many financial incentives if there isn’t something that can be patented. We get into very slippery territory here.

But I would also say in the case of ketamine, I’m not a doctor, I’m not giving medical advice, but if you look at, say, Johnson & Johnson and Spravato, sure, it’s esketamine, but they’ve created a maintenance model with this drug. But I would say if you suffer from a serious diagnosed mental illness, then obviously follow the advice of your doctor. But if you are considering different options and you happen to be in the US and one of the few legal options available is ketamine, I would encourage with the input of your doctor to look at less chronic use as an option, right?

Tania de Jong: Definitely.

Tim Ferriss: And you’ve got Phil Wolfson and others who have certainly written a lot about this. You have John Krystal at Yale has looked also at IV and intramuscular use of ketamine where you may just need a few rounds. You may just need one round.

Tania de Jong: Or you might just need to have psilocybin therapy instead.

Tim Ferriss: Well, there’s that too. Yeah, we have some legal checks.

Tania de Jong: Oh no, I get that at the moment, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, at the moment, for sure. I mean, look, ketamine would not be in my top five list.

Tania de Jong: Nor mine.

Tim Ferriss: However, there are two huge caveats there. Look, it is one of, I believe it’s still on the World Health Organization’s most essential medicines list. This is a very useful drug as an anesthetic. I mean, it’s a dissociative anesthetic. So for instance, if you have any history of using alcohol, even to take the edge off, certainly if you have alcoholism or alcoholism in your family, ketamine is the dissociative turning off of feelings you don’t want that you get from alcohol times 100. Ketamine, that is part of the reason why it can be so addictive. However, if you have chronic pain, this is I know not within the sphere of mental health, but for certain types of chronic pain, ketamine is incredible in terms of very few rounds with very durable benefits.

And in fact, I really dislike the ketamine in general. Subjectively, personally, it’s not really my thing. But I was getting so many questions about ketamine, this is 10 years ago, and I decided, “Well, look, I’m going to follow basically the Yelp protocol and I’ll get the, whatever it is, 0.5 milligrams per kilogram,” or whatever the magic doses that everybody took as gospel, even though it’s an informed guess on the part of John Krystal’s colleagues, whatever became the dogma. I was like,” All right, I’ll do at least one, probably two, two week sequences of infusions, so at least I can speak firsthand to the subjective effects and the experience, the phenomenology of the experience. I’ll be able to answer some questions about it.” And went in and the clinicians were good, this was in Austin, and you have to be careful, there are a lot of fly-by-night operations, but I did my homework, I kind of know how to vet this stuff. And the clinicians were so baffled by me because I went in and I had no anxiety, no depression. And each time I went in, which was multiple times a week, they would ask me to fill out this assessment to determine my current state, how they would score me for anxiety and depression. And I just kept getting more anxious, not really depressed, but more and more anxious and maybe mildly more depressed. And the reason was, I had a really, really busy two weeks. So it’s like I’m preparing for a podcast with LeBron James, but then I have ketamine and then I forget my backpack and my short-term memory’s fucked and I’m misplacing all this shit and then have constipation, so it’s hard to sleep and I’m like, “This stuff is terrible.”

So every time I went in, I was getting more anxious and they were like, “This is very confusing for us. We really don’t know how to make any sense of this.” And I got to the end of it and I was like, “God, that stuff is weird and it is not for me.” I was just like, “Look, I can handle it.” I pushed it with a lot of clinical supervision. The IV allows you to do some very interesting things that you can’t do with—

Tim Ferriss: —with intramuscular. Intramuscular, you hit the golf ball and the golf ball’s hit and you’re gone. But with the IV, you can dial it up and down and experiment with things like interacting with a therapist at different dosages.

Tania de Jong: Have you heard about IVD 5-MeO?

Tim Ferriss: I know quite a bit about IV and NDMT where they extend it out to about one hour. There’s been some research at Imperial College London. Would I do it? I think I’d be open to it. I don’t think that’s automatically a free lunch. I mean, that’s going to be pretty intense.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But I’d be open to it.

On the ketamine side though, the reason I brought up this whole story, preparing for podcasts and getting anxious and being kind of annoyed that I had to go in and do this thing because I’d committed to this experiment is I finished my first series of infusions and I was like, “All right, never doing that again. That was a total waste of time.”

And then I noticed about a week later that I had this really horrible pain in the middle of my thoracic musculature in my mid-back. And this had been from a horrible injury 15 years ago, something like that, where I basically almost tore my lat off my back, really bad accident. And it had plagued me ever since. And I would sit there and I’d be like, “Oh, oh, oh.” And sometimes I couldn’t turn, sometimes I couldn’t cough, sometimes it would hurt to breathe deeply. I mean, it was really this chronic plaguing injury. And after I had that, whatever it was, week or two weeks of infusions, that went away, never came back.

Tania de Jong: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And that is one of the indications for ketamine is certain types of chronic pain. And I was like, “Holy shit, amazing.” I was like, “Okay, there’s a place for it. That was worth it.”

Tania de Jong: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: I really didn’t like that experience, but it was worth it. And I do know multiple people who were like, “I’m going to blow my head off tomorrow.” And they go in and they have an infusion or intramuscular injection, and at the end of the session they’re like, “I don’t know what I was so upset about.” I mean, they’re able to look at it in a dispassionate, more dissociated, obviously, capacity. They’re almost an observer of their own state and the stories they were telling themselves. So for that also, I think it’s useful. But, yeah, personally, it wouldn’t be on my top five.

Tania de Jong: No, no. Well, it’s not being used much in Australia, but I feel there’s going to be huge shifts globally over the next few months and that there’s going to be psilocybin probably through Compass Pathways and Usona will be registered. I think, is it Resilience? What’s the name of MAPS now? I can’t remember now.

Tim Ferriss: They keep changing names. I think it’s Resilient.

Tania de Jong: Resilient. I think that’s going to come through as well, especially given that the president’s given that executive order. I think that potentially by mid next year, who knows what’s going to be registered and the whole landscape’s probably going to change and a lot more countries hopefully are going to be following Australia and hopefully Australia there’ll be less bureaucracy and we can have way more people being treated.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. A lot of people may not realize that Australia is a very fascinating landscape when it comes to conducting certain types of science. And globally, a lot of clinical trials from companies around the world have gone to Australia and China. Those are the two places you want to do it. That’s fun for people to check out if they weren’t aware. There is a global market for conducting clinical trials and Australia is one of the best places.

I wanted to come back to advice for advocates in other countries and things you might do differently. And you were mentioning that you’re very persistent, which you are, you and your husband. And so here’s another quote from, this is abc.net.au, and I think you’ll get a good chuckle out of this. All right. Here’s the quote. “I actually had to on several occasions say to staff, ‘Look, I know they’re driving you crazy. Put their approaches in the way they work to one side. Think about the medical criteria and the scientific criteria and the regulatory issues only.’ And I also counseled Mind Medicine at some stages that they were perhaps working against their own case by frankly being so aggressive. I lost count of the number of emails that would’ve sent staff here.” I think this is Professor Skerritt—

Tania de Jong: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: —told Background Briefing that he did provide MMA with the names and public phone numbers of the chief health officers in each state.

Tania de Jong: He did.

Tim Ferriss: Hilarious. The committee of experts and state regulators that advised TGA were similarly displeased by MMA’s outreach according to a TGA, et cetera. So you’re a force of nature. You guys have accomplished some amazing things. Were there any cases of pushing too hard? Because there are cases when people push with me. If they hit me from 17 different directions, I’m like, “Don’t like it. Too brute force.”

Tania de Jong: No.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, “Blacklist. I won’t engage.” Right?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Which is not to say that you should have done anything differently, but I am curious, are there cases where you’re like, “I should have waited an extra week. I should have approached that slightly differently.”? How do you think about that?

Tania de Jong: I think in this case, I mean, certainly I know that me personally can be too pushy at times and I’ve had to really scale that back. And one of the things that the medicine has taught me is to just be more accepting, and I have become more accepting. So if a door or something doesn’t seem as open as I first thought it was, or if it really feels really shut, I just don’t go back and knock on the door as much anymore. And I just go, “Okay, there’s other opportunities. I’ll go to them instead and I’m going to go for the lower hanging fruit.” So that’s just me personally nowadays. I’m much less driven about that than I was, and I think it’s better.

But in terms of this particular campaign, I don’t really think that anything less would’ve been enough. And I feel that we had to keep pushing. And even my husband, who’s less pushy than me, he’s English, I’m Jewish, I’ve got a lot of chutzpah. I was brought up with a grandmother who invented the first foldable umbrella. She was a woman in the 1920s doing stuff that was way ahead of her time. But even he says that we had to do what we had to do. We had to just keep pushing and moving forwards. And we did have to knock on every door and we had to use every bit of the networks that we developed over decades to achieve what we achieved. But it was all done because of the data and science. It wasn’t done because we pulled some favor. That was not the case at all.

And we all have this in our lives. We all have people in our lives who are suffering immensely and we owe it to them to push for the most safe and effective options available. And a lot of safe and effective medical options are not available. They’re being withheld from the public. And this is only one example of that. And so we all have to push, as I say, we all have to become our own chief medical officers. We have to work out what’s going to work for us, what’s going to make us whole and healed so that we can live our best lives possible. And for me, that’s the reason why I’m here. I saw an article by you, I read it, I immediately felt inspired, and that has led to everything else that we’ve created. So we blame you entirely for all of this and all the flack that we coughed. But I can say this now because to see the—

Tim Ferriss: Part of the journey.

Tania de Jong: It’s just extraordinary. And we receive these letters now where people are just like, “You gave us our lives back.” We’ve given people their lives back, Tim. And that’s something that you should be so proud of because if it were not for you, I wouldn’t have even known about this. Certainly not at that time. I would’ve probably discovered it at some point, but there’s always a thing about timing and that was really important timing. And we all have to just, if we really believe that something has to be done, then we just have to go for it and we can’t let anything stop us. I’ve told you the story in my TED Talk, how singing together changes the brain. I was told as a 14-year-old girl never to bother having singing lessons by my best friend, I talk about in my TED Talk, and one of the great things I learned was to never let anyone snatch your dreams away. And you can’t.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: It’s too important.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thank you for saying that, everything you just said. And man, we are here for such a short time.

Tania de Jong: Right.

Tim Ferriss: You got to get after it or not, but you got to do your thing, I suppose. Tania, so nice to spend time with you. Thank you for making the time.

Tania de Jong: My pleasure.

Tim Ferriss: Where would you like people to find you and Mind Medicine Australia? And do you have any asks of the audience? Is there anything you’re trying to accomplish at the moment where maybe there’s someone listening who may actually be able help or hold the keys to something?

Tania de Jong: Well, I have a couple of asks. So one of them is that we have our patient support fund and we’re a registered charity. So all donations to us, depending on what tax vehicle you’re giving through, can be tax-deductible. So we have full deductible gift recipient status, certainly in Australia. We also have people from overseas who donate to us regularly. And our goal is to raise, at the moment, $2.5 million so that we can really enable a lot more patients to have access to these treatments who otherwise couldn’t afford the upfront costs. So we’re talking here about helping support veterans, first responders, single moms, people who demonstrably can’t afford the upfront costs of these treatments. That’s my first ask.

Tim Ferriss: Would people find, if they’re interested, in considering that—

Tania de Jong: Yep. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —is that Mindmedicineaustralia.org.au? Is that the place to go or—

Tania de Jong: Yes. Yeah. Mindmedicineaustralia.org.au. And then the second thing is if you’re a clinician or therapist out there and you really would like to work in this field and you want to learn from the world’s best, well, we have the most extraordinary global faculty that is teaching our Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy. So people like Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, who I know is a great friend of yours, Tim, and mine as well, people like Bill Richards and David Nutt and Rick Doblin and all those people are on our faculty and Jim Wolfson, lots of people that you know and Wade Davis. So these people you can study with through our world-leading Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies.

And our next intakes are in February and July of 2027. Our current intake’s full. All our intakes get booked out, but we really welcome you and we have people coming from all over the world to study with us. So we’ve got people from Switzerland, Europe, the US, Canada, even from the United Arab Emirates and Asia now. We feel these huge markets potentially opening up in Asia and the UAE. And so we’re seeing quite a few clinicians coming into our training from those regions. And just look us up. We’ve got an amazing website. It’s an amazing learn section. Everything you could ever want to learn about psychedelic-assisted therapies is on our website.

Tim, I’ve got an ask for you, but you don’t have to say, “Yes,” and that is we’d love you to join our advisory panel, but we can talk about that offline. And we also have an extraordinary webinar series and it’s free. And the next one’s on eating disorders. We just had Dr. Peter Levine, and before that we had Dr. Gabor Maté.

Tim Ferriss: Is that Peter Levine Waking the Tiger Peter Levine?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, that one. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. And later in the year we’ve got Bessel van der Kolk, and I think we’ve got a Dick Schwartz one coming up as well. So we have this extraordinary faculty. We have extraordinary people working with us and just reach out. We’re really friendly. We have a huge community and we’re building a movement that’s building this massive other movement that we just need a massive movement globally that is saying, “We all need to have access to treatments that can heal us.” But bigger than that, our bigger reason for being here was to make sure that the worried well, that people like you and I, Tim, could get access to these treatments to raise our consciousness and to expand our beings and for us to really learn and become curious. Because I think one of your questions is commonly, “What would you put on a billboard?” And I would put, “Be curious.”

And these medicines really help us to be curious. And if we can awaken people’s curiosity in a world that is so dominated by AI, we just need to go back and be curious and start to ask our own questions, not just to AI, but to ourselves and to what’s here. So I would say to everyone, “Let’s just keep asking questions and not outsourcing ourselves to all of the chatbots and all of the robots.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, sometimes it’s a good idea to take a break from going outside for entertainment and go inside for intratainment.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, intratainment, intratainment that’s a—

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot to be curious about.

Tania de Jong: There’s so much inside, so much inside. And that was probably the greatest gift of the medicines was it really taught me to explore my inner terrain. I’d always been such an extroverted—I was very introverted as a child, but then I was pretty extroverted as a performer and I still—I’m a pretty extroverted person. But for me to be able to go inside and to actually explore every single night, I lie in bed and I just explore what’s going on inside, I couldn’t have done that without these medicines. They gave me that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a category of catalysts that is very interesting, right?

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, many people who, I think, listeners would associate with meditation actually never took up meditation until they had their mind—

Tania de Jong: Changed.

Tim Ferriss: —cosmic egg cracked open by psychedelics, which is not to say you have to start with psychedelics, you don’t.

Tania de Jong: No.

Tim Ferriss: But many of them have been greatly informed by psychedelics. Ram Dass certainly being one primary example that you mentioned, and there are many, many others.

Tania de Jong: Well, one of the great things that he said to us when we were with him, was, “We’re all walking each other home.” And I think that’s one of the really most important things that these medicines teach you, that really we’re all here together. We’ve come from whatever that place is, we’re going back to whatever that place is, and we’re here for a really short time to your point. And so why can’t we all just reach out of hand, get out from behind our boxes and screens and start walking each other home? And so I write songs about that.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. Yeah. It’s too bad I never got to meet him. I did watch the documentary about the last chapters in his life. What an incredible human.

Tania de Jong: Amazing. Becoming Nobody. Have a look at that one. It’s beautiful.

Tim Ferriss: Becoming Nobody. Exactly. Tania, thank you so much for the time and thank you for doing what you do. Please say the same to your husband for me. And the website, I’d like you to add anything else that you’d like to, but mindmedicineaustralia.org.au that’s for the trainings, for the resources. If you want to consider donating and supporting this nonprofit, you can find everything, my understanding is, at that website. Tania—

Tania de Jong: Yep. I have a personal website too. So that’s Taniadejong, T-A-N-I-A-D-E-J-O-N-G.com. It’s my personal website. Please feel free to reach out on any platform. I like LinkedIn, but there’s lots of others. And I just want to just really say to you, Tim, that I just want to say a huge shout out to you for everything that you’ve done, not just in this field, but for your willingness to try to question, to be curious, and to really try to hack yourself and to find things that you can share with others that are going to work for everybody. And honestly, if it were not for you, and you can see this in multiple interviews that I’ve had, probably we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation. Australia probably would not be leading the world in this field. And I just want to thank you for all the resources that you give to people every single week. I love your 5-Bullet.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you.

Tania de Jong: It’s the first thing I open each week. And just a huge testament to you. And, as you said, when we first met, you never know where these things are going to end up, but I want you to know that your work helped change a whole nation, and not only a whole nation, but because our nation has changed, that has changed the whole world. And there’s a real possibility now, there’s a real hope for everyone that we can actually heal some of the immense suffering in our world, and that brings tears to my eyes just even saying it because we’ve seen the suffering and we have seen, as you would all the time, the most devastating letters and emails from people who’ve they just deserve a chance.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do.

Tania de Jong: And that was the reason we did this. And I think in spite of us being pushy, our hearts were always in it for the right reasons, and I think people realize that.

Tim Ferriss: Well, thank you, Tania. Thank you for saying that. And you’re right that oftentimes, the 5-Bullet Friday, I’ve been writing this newsletter for, God, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, however, and I do it every week. And sometimes I’m just like, “Is anybody reading this?” I’m not sure. It just gets fired off. And because of the format, I’m just kind of like, “I really have no idea what is resonating, what is landing.” So I have to just follow my own curiosity. And it’s like if I find it compelling, if for whatever reason, even if I can’t justify, it’s tugging on me in some way. I’m like, “All right, look, maybe there’s at least one other person out there who might resonate in the same way. Let me give it a shot. I’m in there eight, nine billion, whatever the number is, people on this planet. There has to be one other person who speaks English this might get to.”

And thank you for saying all of that. Really admire you and what you’ve done with your husband and everybody associated with MMA and the people who also said, “Yes,” at the TGA and everybody involved. It’s such a beautiful story. And the fact that you were an outsider, that you weren’t steeped in this from day one, and you were able to just experiment and test and cold email and offer to sing and fly to fricking Wisconsin, the land of cheese, most people are like, “Wisconsin, isn’t that where people eat a lot of cheese?”

And to move mountains bit by bit by picking the right place to stick that Archimedes lever. It’s a really inspiring story. And part of the reason I wanted to, and I’ve already said this in one way, but have you on this podcast was because I think there are many people out there who underestimate how much they can do if they just grease the elbows and get after it. And it’s like, yeah, you’re going to make tons of mistakes. Yeah, I’m sure you’ll piss somebody off. Yes, yes, yes and but you might also just make a huge thing happen.

Tania de Jong: Exactly. And do you know what? You never know until you ask, and most people never ask. And you know what? All you have to do is ask, and it’s amazing how many people say, “Yes.” Literally just about no one has said, “No,” to us to join our advisory panel. Literally just about no one we’ve ever asked to do a webinar has said, “No.” People want to support good causes and good pioneering efforts. We so need this. We are living in a world that is becoming more and more boxed in.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: So we need all of you out there to just grab your dreams, ask for help, and then set them on fire. Not in a bad way, sorry, set them on fire in a really good way.

Tim Ferriss: I think they get it. Yeah, yeah. No arson endorsement on this podcast.

Tania de Jong: I’m not very good. I always mix my metaphors like that, but—

Tim Ferriss: So TLDR, get after it, folks. We’re all going to be dead and dust in no time flat so it’s time to—

Tania de Jong: Exactly. What have you got to lose? Seriously, what have you got to lose?

Tim Ferriss: Ask for it. People can find you at Mindmedicineaustralian.org.au and your personal website, which you’ve mentioned, yourname.com. And to everybody listening, we will have show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Tania, I believe you are the only Tania that I’ve had on the podcast, T-A-N-I-A, and you’ll be able to find everything we talked about, all the people, all the documentaries, all the organizations, et cetera.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it’s all there.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll put it all in the show notes. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary. Just try to be a little bit kinder than is necessary to other—

Tania de Jong: Loving kindness.

Tim Ferriss: —but also to yourself.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: That voice that you put out should echo if you’re being compassionate, the voice that goes in, “Do your best. I know it’s hard.” Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough (#883) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough (#883)

2026-09-19 04:02:24

My guest today is Tania de Jong, co-founder of Mind Medicine Australia. Tania and her husband, Peter, helped lead the push that, in 2023, made Australia the first country in the world to allow MDMA and psilocybin to be prescribed for psychiatric conditions. I wanted to understand how the hell they helped make that happen and what the rest of the world can learn from it.

Please enjoy!

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Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia's World-First Breakthrough

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

Show Notes

Connect with Tania de Jong

Website | LinkedIn | Mind Medicine Australia

Timeline

February 2, 2015: Michael Pollan publishes “The Trip Treatment” in The New Yorker, which is the article Tania credits with setting her journey in motion.
March 21, 2015: Tim releases his James Fadiman interview, “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide” (#66). Its show notes link to “The Trip Treatment.”
January 15, 2016: In 5-Bullet Friday, Tim announces support for Johns Hopkins’ psilocybin research and a personal commitment of at least $100,000 toward psychedelic research that year.
2016: Tania and Peter travel to the Netherlands for their first guided psilocybin experience. (Source)
2017–2019: UCSF conducts the psilocybin-assisted group-therapy study involving long-term AIDS survivors that Tim helped support. (Source)
May 6, 2018: Michael Pollan joins Tim for “Exploring the New Science of Psychedelics” (#313), discussing his forthcoming book (How to Change Your Mind).
May 15, 2018: Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind is published.
February 13, 2019: Tania and Peter publicly launch Mind Medicine Australia. (Source)
2020–2022: MMA applies to reschedule MDMA and psilocybin, faces rejection, and submits new applications in March 2022. (Source)
November 21, 2022: David Nutt presents to Australia’s medicines regulator, the TGA, supporting the case for therapeutic access. (Source)
February 3, 2023: The TGA announces restricted prescribing access to MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, effective July 1, 2023. (Source)
January 2024: Patients begin receiving treatment under the new prescribing program. (Source)

Books

Be Here Now by Ram Dass
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine, with Ann Frederick

Organizations and Resources

Patient Support Fund | Mind Medicine Australia
Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies | Mind Medicine Australia
TGA Rescheduling Submissions and Resources | Mind Medicine Australia
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies | MAPS
Connecting Science and Human Well-Being | Usona Institute
Internal Family Systems Institute | IFS Institute
Australian Interventional Pharmacotherapy and Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Research Registry | Australian National University

People

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Intro from Tim.
[00:02:46] The article that changed Tania’s life.
[00:04:39] A first psychedelic experience—and the year it took to integrate it.
[00:10:17] Rick Doblin’s encouragement and the birth of Mind Medicine Australia.
[00:13:14] Turning regulatory rejection into a stronger application.
[00:20:48] Building a grassroots movement and training clinicians.
[00:23:23] Cold emails, scientific allies, and singing your way into the room.
[00:31:11] A week with Ram Dass: silence, singing, and an extraordinary LSD story.
[00:37:54] Bringing David Nutt—and a family’s devastating story—to the regulators.
[00:42:42] Dancing in the kitchen: Australia’s rescheduling breakthrough.
[00:43:40] From changing the rules to treating patients.
[00:48:18] Why Tim thinks MDMA is still underestimated.
[00:50:23] Integration beyond the session: therapy, nutrition, and exercise.
[00:52:29] Scaling access and collecting real-world evidence.
[00:58:13] Getting insurers, government agencies, and philanthropists on board.
[01:00:41] Syrian rue, psilocybin, and learning to let go of control.
[01:09:06] Dosing, expectations, and the pressure to take more.
[01:11:07] The promise of group therapy and shared integration.
[01:13:28] Hiring mistakes, personal attacks, and the resilience advocacy requires.
[01:22:43] Turning a window of change into lasting habits.
[01:24:56] Getting through to regulators and pushing for end-of-life access.
[01:27:32] The bureaucratic barriers that remain.
[01:30:43] What treatment costs—and why therapist time drives the bill.
[01:34:12] Could shorter-acting compounds make treatment more affordable?
[01:37:52] Ketamine, kratom, and the limits of “all natural.”
[01:42:19] The unexpected payoff from Tim’s ketamine experiment.
[01:46:52] What might come next for psychedelic access worldwide?
[01:48:10] Persistence versus pushiness—and knowing when to try another door.
[01:53:27] Supporting patients and training the next wave of clinicians.
[01:56:56] “Be curious”: exploring your inner world and walking each other home.
[02:00:40] The ripple effects of sharing your curiosity—and simply asking for help.
[02:05:10] Parting thoughts.

Quotations from This Episode

“Be curious.”

— Tania de Jong

“I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that [first high-dose psilocybin session]. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience, and I could see the energy in everything.”

— Tania de Jong

“We want people to have meaningful lives. We want them to feel healthy. We want them to be able to see the sacred in everything.”

— Tania de Jong

“When you’re trying to change the law, you need people around you that are very strong and who are resilient because we got knocked down over and over.”

— Tania de Jong

“You can sort of see that anyone who’s a pioneer who’s trying to drive change is going to be attacked.”

— Tania de Jong

“We all have to become our own chief medical officers. We have to work out what’s going to work for us, what’s going to make us whole and healed so that we can live our best lives possible.”

— Tania de Jong

“One of the great things I learned was to never let anyone snatch your dreams away.”

— Tania de Jong

“Let’s just keep asking questions and not outsourcing ourselves to all of the chatbots and all of the robots.”

— Tania de Jong

Want to hear another episode with someone who spent decades turning a stigmatized medicine into approved treatment? Listen to my conversation with MAPS founder Rick Doblin, in which we discussed the founding of MAPS, MDMA’s unlikely path from the lab into the therapy room, Sasha Shulgin, the difference between MDMA and MDA, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, treating veterans and first responders, what it cost to champion psychedelics long before the mainstream caught on, the fight to reschedule MDMA, a surprise $10M challenge, and much more.

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The post How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough (#883) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Teach a 3-Year-Old to Read and Rethinking Education — Tim Coaches Niels Hoven of Mentava (#882)

2026-09-11 13:31:21

Please enjoy this transcript of a live, unscripted working session with a founder, one of only two I’ve done this year. Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners.

Niel’s full bio

Legal conditions/copyright information

How to Teach a 3-Year-Old to Read and Rethinking Education — Tim Coaches Niels Hoven of Mentava

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tim Ferriss: Niels, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Looking forward to this.

Niels Hoven: Thanks so much. I appreciate the chance to be here.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And it was fun for me to take a trip down memory lane in a sense, because I remember exactly where I was when we first had our very initial long conversation about Mentava and I got super amped. I was in British Columbia walking around a friend’s cabin. I remember exactly right next to a river, freezing cold outside, snow on the ground. And digging back into the website, looking at the testimonials, watching some of the videos of kids, I was like, “Yes, I remember very clearly why I invested so long ago.” It feels like ages ago. It was quite a while back. And we will get to the bio. I actually want to use part of this working session to go through the bio as I have it here intended for me to read, because I think the wordsmithing may apply to other places, including the website, including potentially paid acquisition.

But before we get to that, why don’t you—let’s hear it from your mouth. What is Mentava? What is the latest draft of your quick explanation of what Mentava is?

Niels Hoven: All right. The latest draft is that Mentava is software that is designed to let kids learn as fast as they’re capable of learning instead of just at the pace assigned to their age. And the first product we have is our early literacy software, which is designed for kids, preschoolers, as young as generally three to get to a second-grade reading level.

Tim Ferriss: And what is a second-grade reading level? Let’s just say I’m a first-time parent. I don’t know what it means. What is an eager to learn, reasonably smart second-grader doing with their reading by the end of second grade?

Niels Hoven: Our finish line is basically able to read easy reader books on your own. So think Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, the Elephant & Piggie series, the conscious competence level of being able to read.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. And what are some stories? And I recognize these are not RCTs, right? So for the people out there who are going to try to needle everything, a lot of these are anecdotal of course, but you also have data in terms of performance on the app, right? It’s not just a subjective measurement, but could you just give some stories related to kids learning to read faster than one might expect?

Niels Hoven: Right. We had a set of two-year-old twins who were reading Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, these early reader books before their third birthday. We have a three-year-old who—

Tim Ferriss: That I saw, where they were standing…

Niels Hoven: Oh yeah, you just retweeted that video.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The parents were projecting the game onto some large screen and the two twins were basically just playing and competing with each other to read. Wild. They were so excited to read.

Niels Hoven: It is really adorable. It’s funny, there’s so much fear around, but if I give my kid these academic opportunities when they’re so young, are they going to stress out? Are they going to freak out? But no, it’s actually fun. Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.

Tim Ferriss: And just as background, well, why don’t you tell one or two more stories and then I want to hear how Mentava came to be, not the Iliad version, like the abbreviated version, but maybe you can give a few more examples because people might say, “Okay, fine. You got the Wonder Twins, but we need more than the Wonder Twins.” So what else have you seen?

Niels Hoven: We had a three-year-old who learned to read in about three months. We had a kindergartner who was behind and his mom asked us, “Can we use this software to help him catch up?” And she came back to me a little later and said, “Yeah, he’s reading now. The teacher says she’s never seen a kid catch up so fast.” What was the phrasing? She was like, “The teacher didn’t actually say this, but I could read between the lines. I could tell that the teacher really wanted to say your kid was just a terrible reader.” The teacher didn’t say that. The parent was like, “But I could read between the lines. I knew what she wanted to say.” And the teacher said she’d never seen anyone catch up that fast.

And the thing that actually really stuck with me from that one was the mom was saying the kid used to come to her and tell her, “Hey mom, there’s this kid in my class who’s so smart. He’s able to read and do all these things.” And then she said, “He came back to me the other day and said, ‘Mom, I can read like he can read now.'”

Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.

Niels Hoven: That was just really neat.

Tim Ferriss: I was watching the two-minute, maybe three-minute demo. I’m not sure. It’s pretty short. I don’t think you guys publicize or use it much, but the demo video that you sent over.

Niels Hoven: It’s a terrible demo, but yeah, it’s out there.

Tim Ferriss: It’s terrible except there is one slide, let’s call it, it’s text that is a testimonial that is kind of below the fold on laptop on your love letters section with all these parents sharing their experiences, which is roughly more progress in one week with my daughter than in roughly six months of kindergarten. And that’s bananas, but it’s not so bananas as to be outside of the realm of possibility. And you become somewhat of an adept in the sport of sparring with critics on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. And we may chat about that, to what extent it’s helpful to engage in or even provoke the culture wars. But I have seen a few. I think there’s one notable. You’re good at responding to the critics in a way that gets people to sign up for Mentava. And there was someone who said like, “The learning process, I have a four-year degree that was earned because learning is complex and you cannot simplify it and we’re not focused on outcomes. We’re focused on all this hand wavy stuff.” And certainly—

Niels Hoven: This was an educator who said something like, “You will never convince me that results are the driver of education. You’ll never convince me that efficacy is supposed to be one of our goals.”

Tim Ferriss: People can watch the documentary Waiting for “Superman” if they want to see the part of the sorry state of things. But I was introduced to you. How was I introduced to you? It was Eric Ries, I believe, of The Lean Startup.

Niels Hoven: Also one of our investors.

Tim Ferriss: Also one of your investors because I think he knew or intuited that I’m very much on the same page. You can learn things much, you meaning adults, but also humans, broadly speaking, can learn things much, much, much more quickly than conventional wisdom would suggest. And I could go off on this long list of things, but how do you do it? How do you do it? How did Mentava come to be, short version, and why does it work? How and why does it work?

Niels Hoven: Short version of how it came to be. Mentava started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids, so we both have full-time jobs. We’re locked down in this 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn. They’re young kids. They’re these little sponges. They want to learn to read. They want to do math, but I have a full-time job. I don’t have time to teach them and be their teacher every step of the way. What I really want is I want them to be able to teach themselves, which aside from just being practical in that situation is just this life skill that I feel is really, really important. And so, I started looking around for software or apps that could support my kids as they’re learning, and there just wasn’t very much out there. I found a couple of things that were okay and we made it work, and it was honestly surprising how well they were able to learn despite using software that really wasn’t designed for having kids teach themselves.

And so, other parents noticed what I was doing. They asked me questions about it. I pointed them to the same software, and some of them had some success and some of them didn’t. And really what I realized as all of this was going on was that the problem was in the design of the software. No one is designing software for three and four-year-olds to be learning on their own. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it’s really, really hard. But my background is in games. I spent a long time designing games and designing tutorials, and it’s just design problems all the way down. I felt like this is a problem that I could solve, that I wanted to solve for myself, that I wanted to solve for other people, and that’s where Mentava came from.

Tim Ferriss: And what’s the magic sauce? Why does it work? Why is it better than the 12 other things that I’ve seen you rate from a scale of, I think, 1 to 10 in different ways and giving your reasons?

Niels Hoven: Right. I think the key things that Mentava brings to the table is an extremely optimized curriculum and a lot of really good motivation design. I think the curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems. We know how to teach reading. You teach kids letter sounds and then you teach them to blend them together. And honestly, for $15, you can get a book off of Amazon that will let you do that. You have to be the teacher. It’s a lot of heavy lifting from the parents’ side, but it will get the job done. So it’s kind of unconscionable that this has been a debate in education for a generation, but this is very much a solved problem. So we take phonics, we optimize it, we teach it really nicely. We make really good UX. We make it really easy for two, three, and four-year-olds to use.

Tim Ferriss: And this is on, typically, a tablet?

Niels Hoven: Yeah, on an iPad, just as an anecdote is where the bar is hanging in terms of low hang design. In one of the apps that I was using before we built Mentava to have my kids learn, if you have a two-year-old, if you have a three-year-old and they’re using an iPad, they kind of brace it on their belly and they hold it there while they’re tapping away at it. And a very common situation that happens is their little tubby toddler belly hangs over the edge of the iPad and you get all these extraneous touches at the bottom of the iPad. And in one of the apps that we were using, every time that happened, the app would crash. It was just a tap. So you have this—

Tim Ferriss: Belly crash.

Niels Hoven: —two-year-old toddler belly constantly crashing the app. And so we take into account all these little things where you have a kid who doesn’t know how to read trying to use these educational apps. The other piece that we really bring to the table is motivation. I think there’s a lot of people really don’t understand how sophisticated motivation design is. But if you look at video games, if you walk into a casino and you walk through the slot machine aisles, human motivation is kind of a solved problem. We know how to get people to do the things that we want them to do over and over and kind of, I don’t know exactly how to say that.

Tim Ferriss: You mean like variable reward or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design?

Niels Hoven: Right. The slot machine example is probably the crudest example. It’s the easiest way to motivate someone because the metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it’s like trying to get someone to jump through a hoop. And so, you can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop. And so, slot machines are kind of the purest example of this where they dangle the biggest reward you could possibly imagine, which is like a million dollar jackpot, and they’ve moved the hoop as low as you possibly can, which is just press this button over and over again. And so for that specific use case, it has been solved. And so our goal with Mentava is, okay, the hoop we want kids to jump through is learning all of these phonic sounds and learning to blend them together.

So how, through really good user experience design, can we lower that hoop as low as we possibly can? And then what can we dangle on the other side of that hoop to make kids want to come back and do this every single day? And for that, we use a lot of insights and design principles from game design about helping kids feel motivation, about visualizing the progress that they’ve made, about twiddling the right reward centers in the brain in just the right way that we celebrate their intrinsic motivation rather than trying to replace it extrinsically.

Tim Ferriss: So Niels, let’s move next to your bio. And if you could indulge me, which might end up seeming like a very pedantic exercise, I’m just going to go through and tell you how I would change certain words because I think we’re going to talk a lot about these magical things that allow us to produce images in brains at a distance. All words. All right. How do you pronounce your last name correctly? Remind me.

Niels Hoven: Hoven.

Tim Ferriss: Hoven. All right.

Niels Hoven: Hoven.

Tim Ferriss: Niels Hoven. On X, if you want to see front lines of the culture wars, @NielsHoven. He’s the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support unusually fast learners. This phrasing, unusually fast learners, I would actually just scrap unusually and go straight to fast learners. Part of the reason for that is that when I saw this on the website, I was like, “Well, what is unusually fast?” Even if I consider my kid fast, maybe unusually fast is what, 1 out of 100? 1 out of 1,000? And I stumbled. So I made note of things that I read twice or that I stumbled over. And this is a subjective take, but since I’m in the midst of having just recently cut an 870-page book to 350 and now I’m doing all of the fine tuning, this is how my brain is calibrated at the moment.

Okay. So software to support unusually fast learners or support fast learners. High achieving kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. I would also, I think high achieving for me at least, I think about pegging to letter grades in high school or college. I might just replace that or you could scrap high achieving. When in doubt, take it out is another writing dictum. So it’s like kids, high achieving kids, eager kids maybe, right?

Niels Hoven: Oh yeah. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. And again, I recognize this might be a little laborious for a second, but it’s going to tie into things that come up later. Okay. Niels created Mentava to allow top performing students to achieve their potential. I think we can scrap top performing also, students to achieve their potential. Great. Now I would actually scrap this entire second paragraph, which I’ll explain in a moment, but while most education companies focus on raising the floor, Mentava’s mission is to remove the ceiling. I have very strong opinions about this. I know it’s on the website. I get the turn of phrase and I understand why there’s a degree of clever wordsmithing here. I don’t like this as a positioning for you because what I ended up stumbling over here, I was like, raising the floor, remove the ceiling, remove the ceiling. I guess that’s as high as the best performing students.

So raising the floor, does that mean accommodating and helping the lowest performing students? I ended up dissecting it and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. So I’ve read that line a lot, but let’s move on. Is my understanding of that correct? Am I actually understanding that sense as it’s intended?

Niels Hoven: Yeah, basically you are. I think one of the challenges we are struggling with is how we kind of target what we see as more of a niche audience that deeply values education, is willing to pay for it and has kids that are being unsupported academically. And so we’ve been playing with different turns of phrases to try and speak to these people, but I agree. I don’t think we’ve found the right one yet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would also say, I think it’s a big niche, frankly, which you may have already concluded, but their early literacy software, meaning Mentava’s early literacy software for preschoolers is used and trusted by some of the most influential people in the world. Don’t love that. We can come back to that just because it’s something that anyone could claim unless you have things to point to, right? And maybe you do. We can come back to that. Mentava blends careful curriculum design with best in class motivation design. I think, for instance, we are not that far from the beginning of the new year. I think doubling down on motivation design if you’re going to do more X posts around January would actually be very interesting and do some very interesting things there that would drive conversions, but developed through years of experience building mobile and I’m guessing the way you pronounce this is AAA games.

I don’t actually know what AAA games are, but that sounds like a good thing and I have heard it before. This is, I think, the money shot in some respects. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. That says you know what you’re doing very, very clearly. So I would be inclined to scrap that whole second paragraph and then move up the third. And then it goes to mentava.com and it has all the links and everything else. So M-E-N-T-A-V-A, if people are wondering. But I don’t want to belabor the intro, but we are going to spend a lot of time on messaging.

And you very kindly sent a skeleton framework that we could use for going into the conversation. I think we already checked off kids can learn much faster than people think. Problem two, I think, is maybe not immediately obvious to folks, but the problem, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just read it. We waste the low pressure elementary school years and then pour on pressure in high school. And it’s like, okay, maybe I agree with that. Okay, waste low pressure. How should we capitalize on low pressure and are we accidentally turning it into high pressure if we add something like this? I mean, looking at the kids playing it, at least the video I’ve seen, it wouldn’t seem that way. I do like, I know I’m kind of spoiling the delivery by offering the punchline, but if you don’t mind.

Niels Hoven: Yeah, go for it.

Tim Ferriss: So you had two, right? You had two sub-bullets under that. Schools actively slow down fast learners. Yes, 100% agree. They wouldn’t let my son learn algebra, et cetera. Is that your son, your actual son?

Niels Hoven: My son, yep.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. Early acceleration means less pressure later. That I think is super, super, super interesting as a point that could be really used, maybe not in exactly that form. And then number three solution. Mentava lets kids accelerate without requiring parents to become teachers or taskmasters. And that’s through, as you pointed out, the very finely tuned curriculum and motivation design. And I would agree that schools are surprisingly bad at both.

Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the current challenges? How would you lay out the hierarchy of problems to solve, opportunities to capitalize on, however you would like to phrase it or list it out? Where should we go next?

Niels Hoven: Zooming way out. We’ve built a product that we are really proud of that when our customers use it, they rave about it and they tell their friends about it. I think we have not figured out. We are really good at product design and we are not so good at marketing. We are trying to explain a problem that a lot of parents don’t realize that they have, that their kids could be doing so much more, that their kids are going to be held back when they get to elementary school. By the time parents realize that they had this problem, that their kids are bored and not achieving their potential. It’s kind of too late to—or the biggest opportunities to do something about it are now behind them. And then for even the parents who are looking for a product in this space that can help support their kids’ learning, they’re not experts.

And what differentiates our software from a lot of the other stuff out there is really nuanced. And so, how do we differentiate what we feel is a premium product when the differentiates is really nuanced and in thousands of small decisions that customers can’t look at themselves? It’s kind of like trying to explain what makes this video game better than this other video game. It’s a very hard thing to explain or has been for us.

Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s a thousand decisions that add up to a very distinct feeling maybe on some level. Okay.

Niels Hoven: We found a lot of the parents who came to us immediately sort of already feel this problem intensely because sometimes it’s immigrants who come to the US and then are just shocked at how much worse the education system is here than what they experienced. So they just see this immediately and they’re like, “I am not going to have any part of this. I need to start addressing this right away.” Or it’s people who already care about motivation and just recognize that their kid is capable of doing more than they’re doing. We have a lot of parents who are in Montessori who send their kids to Montessori school because they love the values there, but they’re like, “But Montessori school doesn’t focus on academics. My kids could be learning to read and they refuse to give them any phonics, so I want to do it at home.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So let me just say what’s top of mind and then we can go in a lot of different directions because I think that the fixes in a way are going to be a lot like your product design. I don’t think there’s one thing. I think there are probably myriad things that when moved five degrees in the right direction might reach this breakthrough or step function distinction where suddenly you have better retention, more referrals, et cetera. That’s just my intuition looking at everything in front of me and the website and so on.

Niels Hoven: That sounds right to me.

Tim Ferriss: But let’s start with what came to mind for me, which is related to something that you have, I think is kind of like one of your pain points, which is how do we solve a problem before the customer knows it exists? And a way to rephrase that would be like, how do we educate people about the problem? And there’s a framework, you may have heard it. It was actually introduced to me. I met a doula the other day, someone who’s somewhat like a midwife who helps the birthing process and she was talking about this acronym BRAIN, and it was benefits, risks, alternatives, what does your intuition say, and then N is nothing. What if we did nothing? What if we didn’t do anything about this?

And so, I’ve been applying that to more things and I’m like, “Well, what if you didn’t do any education in—” Rephrasing that, what if that were not the problem? And the reason that comes up for me is when I imagine I want to have kids at some point, it’s like, okay, I would hope my kids are eager learners and curious and maybe have a little embedded software that gives them an advantage. It’s like, okay. I don’t know if you’ve run into this, but my hesitancy, if I had any, I don’t think I would have a ton. I think I would just pay the price and use Mentava, but is I want my kids to be socially intelligent. I want them to be in school with other kids. I’m not going to have child neuro taught by private tutors or whatever. I mean, hopefully not child neuro, but that’s a whole separate conversation.

The point of that being, I want them to be kids and to have time socially. But if I push them three, four years ahead, is school going to be even worse for them because now they’re just sitting there staring at the clock waiting for school to be over? And if so, how do I check the box of maximizing intellectual development while also allowing for kids to be kids plus the social development?

Has that come up at all or is that—

Niels Hoven: This has come up.

Tim Ferriss: Because for me, I’m like, fuck yeah. Let’s pour gasoline on this eagerness to learn. And these kids want to go, go, go and they’re being held back. They’re these thoroughbred racehorses locked in the gate. They’re just not being let out to run. It’s like, “Sure, I want that kid to run, but then what? What form does school take if I give them such a head start?” How do you think about that?

Niels Hoven: So a big part of the reason we’ve designed Mentava the way we did is because of exactly this. So when I was in third grade, I was ahead of my class in math and my school only went up to third grade. So before third grade, in second grade, I would go to the third grade class for math and then I would come back to my classroom. But in third grade, there was no classroom for me to go to. So I started doing independent study in third grade. During math class, I would go to the back of the room, I would study out of a math book for the hour of math class, and then I would come back and join my class for the rest of the day. And I did that for the next four years all the way up until I rejoined classes in seventh grade for pre-calculus. And then I took calculus in eighth grade.

And so, those four years of being able to learn on my own at my own pace allowed me—I didn’t have any homework. I got to go as fast as I wanted. It was really incredible. It also built this skill of teaching myself that I depend on today. And that’s why I think you look at a lot of the other alternative schooling startups that are happening where they’re trying to develop an entire schooling ecosystem that would run parallel with public schools. And I actually really believe in the institution of public schools. I went to public schools. My children go to public schools. I just want them to be supported and allowed to learn at their own pace there.

So to me, really, the ideal case is let’s let our kids go to public school with their peers from their neighborhood. And then for an hour a day during math class, they study Mentava. They do math Mentava for an hour. They get to go at their own pace, and then they rejoin their same age peers for the rest of the day and have a good time.

Tim Ferriss: Am I wrong? As an Austinite, I feel like it may not be exactly this, but Alpha School uses sort of adaptive software on tablets for a portion of the day.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I think I’m getting that right. But you would also want something that scales that people can use now as opposed to moving to a city that has Alpha School, which is going to be great, but also very expensive and limited capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Niels Hoven: So Alpha School’s big insight is essentially the same as ours, that if you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very small amount of time. When my own son was in third grade, after a lot of back and forth, we finally got permission from one amazing teacher for him to do independent study during math class from an app during the school day. And he finished eighth grade math while he was in third grade. And that’s just the pace of what kids are allowed to do, capable of doing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So let’s hop into it because I love what you’re doing. I have since the beginning. It works. I’ve seen plenty of videos and enough testimonials and the design. This is going to sound maybe arrogant because I’m certainly not an educator, I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not a UX designer, but I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah. From a micro progression logical sequencing perspective, it just makes sense.”

It’s very hard to make and when you see it, you’re like, “Oh yeah. That makes sense like many things.” So I want to be as maximally helpful as possible here. Let’s hop into a real customer. And I’m going to give you an example of a real prospective customer because as chance would have it, it’s such a small world. It’s crazy.

So we’re doing this kind of live workshop on this podcast episode. I’ve only done two of these. You are number two. Number one, I don’t think you’d mind me mentioning is Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics. He’s developing mRNA as a programmable layer in medicine and doing all this crazy stuff that’s amazing with cancer.

And Jake is very, very smart, so not shockingly. His kid is also pretty smart. And he reached out to me because he saw me as an investor on the website, and he’s like, “Of course you’re an investor in Mentava.” He’s like, “All right. Well now, I want to ask you about it.” And I encouraged him to try it and then never heard back.

And so I reached out to him, and I was like, “Whatever happened? Did you try Mentava?” And then I just want to read his feedback, and we’re going to just take a bite of the apple from a bunch of different directions because again, I don’t think there’s one—as much as I wish this were the case, like, “Okay. We’re going to change unusually fast learners to fast learners,” and boom, automatically conversion and everything like quadruples. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

But here’s what he said, “Yes, I did.” So they have a 14-day trial period and also try to see if your kid is ready. He put that in quotation marks. A few thoughts. Number one, I won’t give his kid’s name, but let’s call his kid Rob. Rob was super young, two years and two months, but he taught himself the whole alphabet at 17 months so he figured why not try?

Two, there’s a “sequencing milestone” that they explain is important. Rob was likely not fully there. Three, let’s see. Their curriculum sort of made the sequencing tests more difficult than I think they need to be, and then pushed him to easier curriculum, which I couldn’t figure out how to override. That was one sort of annoying part, but it makes sense to make sure people fail fast and don’t pay before the kid is ready.

Four, we ended up pausing at the end of the trial with the plan to restart in three months, which will be soon. Five, he still points to the iPad. This is the most important part of the whole thing by the way. Well, I think there’s a lot in all these bullets, but here’s the last one. He still, this is his son, Rob, still points to the iPad and says he wants to play the letter game.

So clearly, Mentava had some pull for him. So the kid wants to use it. But one question I had, I guess there are two things that pop to mind. Well, before we get to the suggestions, can you explain the 14-day trial period and the sequencing just for folks so they have an idea of what this looks like? People go to the website. They’re like, “Oh my God, totally want to try this.” And so they click on the 14-day trial period. What happens, and what is the sequencing?

Niels Hoven: I think there’s not a question about the user flow, which we know is bad and more about a question of the experience that they’re having as they engage with the software. Is that what you’re asking?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yep.

Niels Hoven: Okay. So the point of the 14-day free trial is that we know we are not good at explaining what differentiates our software. We think what works best is just get it in the hands of the customer and let them try. So I think within 14 days, we think that’s enough time that a customer can figure out if this is going to be a good fit for their family or not.

A very common problem is exactly what happened with Jake where he has a kid who is probably not developmentally ready to learn to read. And so we want the parents to recognize that during the free trial. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the developmental milestones, kids are able to learn letters and letter sounds quite a bit earlier than actually being able to blend those sounds together and be able to read.

So very common that you could have a kid who’s a year and a half, two years old, knows all of their letter sounds, but they are not actually capable of learning to read because they can’t blend those into words. We’ve figured out that there’s a test that we can give the kids to see if they can understand the concept of left to right reading order, basically the idea that directionality is important.

So what do we do is we show them a couple emojis. We show them dog fish, and we show them fish dog and we say, “This one is dog fish. This one is fish dog.” And then we ask them, “Now, we just told you, which one of these is dog fish, and which one of these is fish dog?” And what we found is that for older kids, this is an obvious question.

Of course, you just go this way, “This one is dog fish, and this one is fish dog.” But for younger kids whose brains haven’t connected those neurons or whatever, this is a nearly impossible question. And so in the Mentava experience, fairly early on, you purposely hit this wall where we’re asking your kid, “Do you understand dog fish, fish dog?” And if they can’t, we boot them over to, “We’ll just teach you letter sounds,” and we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness.

I think we send the parents an email. We might not. I hope we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness issue and ask them to try again in three to six months.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So that was going to be one of the questions I wanted to hit on. And I’ve got plenty. So don’t worry folks who are listening. We’re getting into the weeds quickly, but the weeds are where we have to play this game. What share of failed trials come back like a Jake? And are they prompted three months later or are they just told when the kid doesn’t pass the hurdle, try coming back in three months? I guess how proactive is the outreach and what percentage?

Niels Hoven: There’s zero proactive outreach.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to hit something that is going to be related to all of this, which ultimately is going to fold into mock-ups and redesigns of the website as well. But let me give you just a brain dump of some things that I think might be helpful, and I’ll prompt some of them with questions. All right. Is Mentava free for schools or in some capacity free for teachers? Is there any free option? Is there anyone who can use Mentava for free?

Niels Hoven: We have pilot programs running with schools right now. We’re not charging the schools who are in the pilot program. I would like to give Mentava to schools for free. Our philosophy is that if you want to use us as essentially a private tutor to accelerate your kid, that’s going to be expensive. But if you’re a school just using us as a tool to support your teacher, we’d like that to be cheap or free.

We are in the process of getting—may actually have just gone live of having self-serve signups for teachers so that they can get it for their classroom. The main issue we have there unfortunately is just fraud. What prevents just a random parent from saying, “I’m a teacher. Let me sign up and get this for free.” And so that’s why we haven’t really scaled that or pushed it aggressively.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I would say a few things. The first is that if, in fact, you end up offering it at very low cost or for free to schools, even if it’s in some limited fashion and people need to check a bunch of boxes, that could be a useful flak jacket for offsetting the premium cost of the product, which is what right now? What is the cost?

Niels Hoven: I don’t think we’ve mentioned this. So this is a $500 a month product, which I think many people are shocked when they first hear, but also, we have a lot of customers who are like, “Oh, we let go of our tutor. We don’t need our private tutor anymore because we’ve replaced it with your software. You guys should be charging more. This is great.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I don’t think the cost is a problem personally, and we can come back to that. But I do think the free for schools and teachers is interesting. The other thing I would say is that—I probably shouldn’t mention them specifically, but I know someone who has created a spectacularly successful app, and it’s pretty expensive.

On an annual basis for an adult, it’s going to be in the hundreds of dollars, and it’s very, very successful. And he set a policy very early on, which was if you can’t afford it, send an email to this email address, explain why. And chances are, you’ll get it for free. And the fraud has been unbelievably low.

People do email, and I’m sure some of them are fraudulent. But on the margin, it is so unimportant. It’s so trivial and the cost of delivering the product to a handful of fraudulent customers who are unethically kind of abusing things is so low that maybe it doesn’t matter.

At the very least, I think it could be worth the test. I don’t want to belabor this particular point because I don’t think it’s the most important of those we have to talk about. But it might not matter.

Niels Hoven: I think I know exactly the app you’re talking about and I do know that it’s a great program.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a great app. Yeah. I’ll just give another example. Long ago, when I started my first, let’s call it, real business, I offered a 110% money back guarantee if the product didn’t work and never questioned it. Just did it unflinchingly because frankly, the time that it would take me to police it would be so much more expensive than a certain degree of fraud.

Even if it’s like 10%, 20% even of the people who requested it were fraudulent. Also, I should say in this case, this is a hard product being shipped via regular mail, and they would be able to just keep the product because having them ship it back and paying for shipping, it just wasn’t worth it given the cost of goods. People were much better behaved than I expected.

It really didn’t cause a problem. Assuming the product is good, this isn’t a returns situation. So you could offer something like that, frankly. I think that the 110% back is really underutilized, but I feel like you were going to say something else. Yeah.

Niels Hoven: We have something along those lines, but not exactly. When people write, so sometimes, people do the free trial. And then they write into us and say “Essentially, we love the free trial, but we just can’t afford it. Do you have any scholarship programs or anything like that?”

And what we’ve been going to right now is Mentava costs $500 a month, but if you tried the free trial and you loved it and you really want to keep using it and you’re motivated enough to write us, we’ll tell you that you can have Mentava for $100 a month, but we would like you to send us a video of your kid every week using Mentava, enjoying Mentava that we can use in social media, in marketing, because we want to run those ads, but we want to make sure that we have signed releases for any kids that we put into advertising or social media.

And we don’t police that aggressively. I would say not everybody participating in that program has been sending us all the videos we would like them to send us. But like you said, mostly people are pretty good about it.

Tim Ferriss: Where would you like to go next? I can pull up lots of things. We can look at the website. I want to come back to the readiness check. Is there any reason to have people sign up and then do the readiness check as opposed to do an abbreviated readiness check, a two-minute, “Is your kid ready?” type of quiz?

Niels Hoven: I like that idea a lot. We’ve been talking about that for a long time, just put the readiness check directly on the website.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because if you had, is your kid ready, take the two-minute quiz, you could still accomplish the data capture of email address and so on and verification so that you can communicate with those people.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I think that’s reflected in some of the mock-ups that I sent over. On the price, I don’t know if you guys have approached this. I really think that selling the parents relief, not just the kid’s speed is a big deal, that you don’t have to be the teacher because the 500 can be anchored in a few different ways. $500 a month. Is it the same or is it less than a tutor? Well, let’s just say it’s the same.

And let’s say they’re equally effective, but there’s one difference. And one is you’re giving a kid a fish, meaning the teacher is motivating the kid versus you’re teaching the kid to fish, meaning the kid is becoming a self-motivated, self-directed learner, then Mentava still wins, even if they’re equally effective.

And then furthermore, it’s like if you have all these other tools and let’s just say they’re—as you mentioned, you can get books, I don’t know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, who knows? And then you’re going to put in that time. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be an absent parent. There are plenty of ways you can spend time with your kids. But if you want to create a self-directed learner and you also put a value on your time, if you can afford $500 a month, it’s also kind of a no-brainer, right? But we can look—

Niels Hoven: I think that’s very true. I think we need to lean into that more because we’ve had people I know personally who could absolutely afford Mentava. Usually, they are parents of only one child. This is their first child, and they say, “I tried Mentava. It works, but I really want to be the one to teach my kid to read.” And so they opt in with another product where they get to be the teacher. They actually want to be the teacher. But for a lot of parents who are busier, who have multiple kids see that value immediately. They cannot be the teacher for every single one of their kids. They want their kids to learn on their own, and we’re the product for that.

Tim Ferriss: I love teaching. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I absolutely love teaching. But the selling point for me, if I were the stand-in parent, would be extrinsic reward/pressure, teacher making the kid study versus kid becoming self-directed and excited about learning.

I’m like, “Well, that’s a very easy choice for me.” They’re going to have plenty of time with teachers. They’re going to have plenty of time with me coaching them or teaching them or going out and being curious about things in the real world. But it’s like if that. How many minutes a day or per week? How much time do you suggest?

Niels Hoven: Fifteen to 30 minutes a day, depending on age.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So okay, look. You got all day with your kids from when they wake up to when they go to bed, depending on the day and schooling and so on. But it’s like 15 to 30 minutes is just getting them closer to being stoked about learning and able to actually take that stoke and put it into practice. It’s like, okay.

Niels Hoven: Okay,

Tim Ferriss: Is that worth $500 a month? Yeah. For a lot of people, I think the answer is yes.

Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I just brain dump and then—

Niels Hoven: Yeah, I love it.

Tim Ferriss: Then I want you to steer the ship a little bit.

Niels Hoven: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: So the two minute, is your kid-ready quiz right up front, I think, would be an amazing email capture tool, but it would also be in service of the parents who are running at light speed with a million different things, exactly the kind of people who are probably considering something like this.

I think it’s the type of thing that might also get shared, right? So in a sense you have user generated marketing, lead gen and a filter all at once. The selling the parents relief, not just the kids speed, as I mentioned, like the you don’t have to be a teacher, how much is your time worth? Maybe there’s something there. One of your lines that—I think this is from the website, tell me, but we don’t push kids, we stop making them wait. I think that’s an amazing line.

Other words I’d be a little more careful with, right? So the unusually fast learner, the gifted, any IQ elite top 1% kind of stuff, I think artificially constrains your market in a way that is unhelpful to Mentava and unhelpful to parents. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. Because the kid doesn’t need to be a super genius to use Mentava and benefit from it. So I really like the idea of paying attention to that language so you aren’t accidentally excluding a lot of parents whose kids would benefit from the product.

The free to school story, if that ends up being tenable, I think is—it’s a decent adjunct to other things you’re doing, but it’s also an example of playing defense instead of offense in a way. Does that make sense, right?

Niels Hoven: It does make sense.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like if people say this is just for rich kids, it’s like, “Okay. Fine.” This is not what you’re doing, but if you just focused on people who make 500K a year or more, that’s a huge market. You’re fine at $500 a month. It’s like you don’t. And it isn’t just for rich kids, but I think that given the fact, and if I say anything, I’m not supposed to say publicly, stop me, but you guys have four full-time employees. I’m sure you have other contractors. You guys are going to be spinning a lot of plates, wearing a lot of hats. If you have a lot of unqualified leads emailing you, asking questions, requesting special treatment, that time is incredibly expensive for you guys internally, right?

Niels Hoven: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I would just be inclined. If I were talking to someone, I had two glasses of wine, so I’m playing a little loose, and someone’s like, $500 a month, I’d be like, “Well, do you want something that really works and makes your kid not just stoked, but capable of learning faster, or do you want a video game that is disguised as education that’s going to do nothing for them?” If you want that, sure. There are a thousand other options.

If you actually want something that works with people who understand product, then suck it up. How much did you spend on your kid’s pants last month? How much does your stroller cost? Really? You’re not going to spend. Come on. So that’s how I would sort of hopefully productively bust their balls.

That’s how I would do it. I’d be like, “Yeah, if you want something that works and you want something that the kid is going to request, as opposed to something that kind of works, that requires you to be a nag and police that the kid might push back on” it’s like, “How much is removing all that brain damage worth to you?” And I understand that’s probably not the text you put on the homepage, but let’s see.

So on the online, you have done a good job of using X specifically, I would say. And the two examples you sent me of social media that had converted was basically a response, if I’m remembering correctly, two examples of responding to people, right? Someone called basically what you’re doing, snake oil and you’re like, “Well, here’s a video of snake oil.” And it was the twins, the two-year olds or two and a half year olds reading.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then there was the other one with the educator. Those are good examples. I wouldn’t have any critique around those. I would say that jumping into the culture war, even if it gets a lot of views, in a sense, forces readers to pick a side instead of picturing their own child, which is why I think the video of the two twins works so well.

So that’s just a side note. And I know you have math coming so that you can move from the perception of reading app to learning for kids who are ready to move faster or something like that. I think we can leave that alone for a moment. We can come back to that, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it because I think you get it, and you’re branching out, and it makes sense. The pricing against tutors, I have hired—look, I had two different coaches this week for rock climbing.

I am a connoisseur of teachers and coaches and tutors. I’ve used probably a hundred plus coaches of various types. And getting a tutor, managing a tutor, scheduling with the tutor, none of that is free. Even if the hourly cost of that tutor is commensurate with the cost of Mentava. However, there are other ways to make the price case, but this is one of those examples of what if you did nothing, coming back to that brain acronym that I love so much.

It was the first acronym. I’ve heard all these SWOT acronyms, like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, all this stuff. But this was the first one where one of the prompts was, “What if you did nothing?” And I was like, “That is such a good question. What if you didn’t justify the price and you were just like,” Let’s just find—” And look, this is going to be very unappetizing, maybe a turnoff for some people listening, but this is how Uber started. This is how a lot of companies start, is go after the easy customers, the people who have plenty of budget.

Later, you can use the initial cohort of wealthy people to subsidize product development, then you get economies of scale, you have more employees, blah, blah, blah, dot, dot, dot, and then you have more offerings at lower cost. But rather than trying to convince the edge cases, it’s like maybe you just talk about the efficacy and take a different tack, I think it’s tack as in the sailing, to get that done.

Look, I could give you six different examples of how you could make the price, could justify the price, but let me keep going. This is coming back to the parent’s role because the parent’s buying it, not the kid, right? Not to overly state the obvious, but you don’t have to teach, you don’t have to nag.

Now, you don’t have to teach, might accidentally elicit a sense of guilt in parents because they’re like, “Oh, I’m just trying to foist the responsibility of education onto an app. I’m a terrible parent. What’s wrong with me?” But if it’s you don’t have to nag, you don’t have to police, you don’t have to reward, you don’t have to give cookies because the kid’s just going to want to play this game, period, full stop, that’s what we spend our time on, right?

That’s a huge one, right? Because some parents—I love teaching. I want to teach a lot. So if the selling point to me where you don’t have to teach, I’d be like, “Oh, does that make me a bad parent? I actually do like teaching. Does that mean I’m not engaged with my kid?” But nagging and policing, nobody wants to do that.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So choosing things that are an easy hell yes for parents, I think, makes a difference, and that’s where the words matter. And that you don’t have to teach. You don’t have to nag. Beats the book. That beats the live tutor. It beats all that stuff. It’s not like, “I don’t want to take the piano lesson with teacher X.” It’s like when you have Jake’s kid being like, “I want to play the letter game. I want to play the letter game.” And he’s like, “Man, we just have to wait a few more months and then, okay, then you can play the letter game.”

Niels Hoven: I kind of want to hop in on this because maybe this is my pathological honesty because I do believe we built a really delightful product that kids will want to use most of the time. But absolutely, sometimes, you do have to push a nag, I think, way less than anything else. But I’m reluctant to say you won’t have to push a nag.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I think that that is where you finesse, right? I’m coming in as—I’m not blind because I’m familiar with the product, and I’ve looked at the website and everything else, but I’m not a parent with a kid who has used the product.

So instead of saying that, you can say parents don’t want to nag. They don’t want to police. They want a kid who can learn as fast. They want a kid who can learn at their own speed, even if that means fast. You can say that.

Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a truthful statement, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you a bit of trivia that not many people know. So my name in Chinese is—well, it was Fei Ting Chung. Now, it’s Fe Yu Chung. And the reason I have that name is because Fei is for Ferriss, right? So there’s some alliteration, but Ting Chung is Very Honest because I would just blurt things out that were clear or honest to me. And so my teacher was like, “Good God, you are a pain in my ass.” Okay. Your name is like Ferriss Too Honest, basically.” I was talking to you, I can’t mention which, but talking to another startup I’m involved with, and they’re about to have a huge launch, and I was like, “Exaggeration is death. Do not exaggerate.” I was like, “Because if one statement can be falsified and it’s a casual statement, it’s going to call into question every other claim you make, and your competitors are going to fuck you.” And they should.

If you’re exaggerating and inflating your claims, like, “Hey, you’re going to reap what you sow.” So I am on the same page. I think there are ways to word it where it is a completely truthful statement. And it may not be nag and please. It may be something else.

No one wants to force their kid to learn. What would it be like if your kid wanted to learn and use it? You get the idea. And you could come up with 10 of these and just split test it with an Optimizely or whatever. You’d probably have something homegrown that does a better job, but you get the idea. All right. Feel free to stop me.

Is there a way to get an indication of how many sessions are initiated? Coming back to, yeah, sometimes, you have to push a little bit or prod or prompt. Maybe that’s a nice delicate word to use, your kids. But do you have any idea of what percentage of sessions are initiated by a child versus a parent? I don’t know how you would have that.

Niels Hoven: I think they’re probably 100% parent initiated. We’re talking mostly three and four year olds here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Right, right. Running around like chickens with their head cut off. Yeah.

Niels Hoven: I think it’s the sort of thing where it’s just like the parent is responsible for saying, “Oh, it’s that time. Let’s do our Mentava again.” And rather than it being a battle, then your kid is like, “Oh, okay. I guess I’ll put down my Legos and do Mentava.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So I’ve noticed in the investor update emails, and I’ll add my personal preference here, but I will, I think, speak for a lot of investors. So I have a lot of portfolio companies and I don’t invest all the time, but they add up. If a company’s going to be successful, mega successful, it usually takes 10 to 12 years, in my experience. So that means if you’re investing every year, you start to gather portfolio companies. The reason I mentioned that is that I get probably 10 to 20 investor updates, a month. And some of them are super long, yours are not super long. But if you have investor asks, I would put them at the very top. I would skip all the updates. I would skip all of the numbers. I would skip the runway. I would skip the new hires. I shouldn’t say skip. I would defer. I would put it lower down.

But if the intent, because most of the people who are getting that, outside of your major investors, if you’ve got board members, sure, give them the nitty-gritty. But the vast majority, I don’t have voting rights. So the only way that I can really impart influence is by trying to be helpful, but I also am in an inbox with a million other things. So having the asks at the very top will get more help. I know that seems self-evident, but almost no founders do it. So that’s just a quick suggestion.

But the reason I brought up the investor updates also is that I feel like I’ve seen in a number of the investor updates, something along the lines of, we just need to figure out how to drive more conversions through, I want to say paid advertising. And maybe I’m misremembering, but that leads me to a question which is what channels actually convert and retain? TikTok, X, referrals, search, paid advertising. What is actually working best for you guys? Which might not be working well, but what is of the available options, what is working best for you guys? At not just conversion, because you could get garbage leads that sign up for trials and then don’t convert. But for actual paying customers who are retained, what seems to be working best so far?

Niels Hoven: I think our best customers are X, and word of mouth. And I think the reason for both of those is that our message gets in front of people who are receptive to hearing it. I would say that a big part of our struggle is top of funnel. How do we raise awareness with the right people? And I think what tends to happen on X is that, I get in an argument with someone who is basically arguing that kids should not be learning, or kids are learning too fast, or something like that. And then the entire internet piles on and I am kind of like the loud voice saying that kids should be learning as fast as they can learn. This is our thinking. I think people hear that and believe in the mission and because it’s hard to make sophisticated product decisions about these nuanced products, they hear the mission and they’re like, okay, this is a company that believes in a mission of very accelerated learning, which is something that I believe in too, that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about.

I’m at least willing to go out and try their software. And I think that’s why we get people from X. And we have not been able to replicate that on, say, Meta ads. I think Meta’s algorithm, basically, you give them your ads, you give them your videos and they put them in front of the people who engage with those videos the most. And so we absolutely have content that goes viral, that people engage with, that gets a lot of interaction and even gets very, very cheap leads, but they’re not qualified leads. So they’re not getting in front of the right people who care deeply about accelerated learning, and are willing to pay for it.

Tim Ferriss: Here’s a tagline that came to mind. Less nagging for parents, faster learning for kids.

Niels Hoven: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: You’re not saying no nagging. Faster learning for kids. You probably put the kids first, right? Faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, or something like that.

Niels Hoven: I like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Faster learning for kids, less brain damage for parents, whatever. You could test a bunch of them.

Niels Hoven: I think one of the things that really sets us apart is our motivation design and our way to keep kids motivated and engaged. And we really have not found a way to talk about that in a way that gets any sort of traction. I’ve tried, but a lot of the arguments that I get into are around topics like accelerated learning or phonics. Phonics is a big cultural touchpoint right now. But nobody really seems—

Tim Ferriss: Really? There’s a war going on about phonics I didn’t know about?

Niels Hoven: There is a huge war about phonics. For the past 30 years, schools have been debating over whether or not phonics is the right way to teach kids.

Tim Ferriss: It seems like something you could test.

Niels Hoven: Yeah. And they have tested it. Basically everybody outside of education, everybody in cognitive science, everybody in the rest of academia, completely understands that phonics is the only way to teach reading. Academia and teachers and schools have been the one holdout refusing to teach phonics, saying that all we have to do is teach kids to love reading, that if you show them a picture of a puppy and they say dog, then they got that right. They’re reading because they understood the gist, they have comprehension.

Tim Ferriss: Slippery slope of that one.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Understand. Wow.

Niels Hoven: So we have not found a way to, we think that motivation is one of our biggest differentiators and just have not found a way to talk about that that engages people. But maybe this less nagging for parents is that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I will say that, this may not matter, there may not be much collateral damage, but when I have seen some exchanges, I think that some percentage of the observers of those arguments might feel like it’s Mentava versus teachers. And I don’t think that’s a great fight.

Niels Hoven: Agreed.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Because there are plenty of teachers too who are just as frustrated as the parents, in a lot of ways. They’re hamstrung. But, you know, so it goes.

Niels Hoven: We try very hard not to position ourselves as Mentava versus teachers, although I know it doesn’t always come off that way. But to a big part, I think teachers are the victims here too. They were told in teacher’s college that phonics will turn kids off of reading, and they believed what they were told, and they went out and taught to the best of their abilities, the best they knew how.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s come back to the word of mouth. This is something that everybody wants, but sometimes it’s difficult to get high resolution on the mechanisms of word of mouth.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any insight on what that actually looks like? At what point, this is I think perhaps a helpful question, at what point do people suggest that someone else checks out Mentava? Is it after they’ve been on the app for three months, six months? Is it as soon as they sign up and they are on 48 hours? At what point throughout their experience of Mentava do people share with others? Do you have any idea?

Niels Hoven: We get that wow moment within the first week where parents, sometimes it’s the first day, sometimes it’s the first week, but very quickly the parents realize, if it’s good for the family and the kid, parents realize very quickly, “Oh my God, this software actually works.” Going from there to word of mouth, we have a lot of parents say to us that they tell their friends about it. There’s some reluctance to tell their friends about it, because there’s a certain amount of shame around using a $500 a month app. There’s this sort of cultural shame around using your resources to allow your kids to get ahead. I have friends who can afford private school, who know that their kid is not getting a good education in their local public school, but they insist on sending them there because they feel they have a responsibility to not give their child an advantage. And I don’t know, there’s some deep-seated self-hatred there, but.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. God, I wish they would take the money they’re not spending on their kid and put it into therapy first. But I mean, that maybe come off a little callous.

Niels Hoven: We have tried incentivized referrals.

Tim Ferriss: That’s what I was going to ask about. What is the incentive that you’ve tried?

Niels Hoven: I believe we did as big as, if your friend signs up, we will give them a free month and we will give you a free month. So that’s basically, that’s $1,000 user acquisition cost. And we sent out coupon codes to our entire customer base, and we got zero referrals. Even though we know that customers are actively referring friends, we have a lot of people who sign up. I do an intro call with almost every customer who comes on board. And so we know that a lot of people came because they saw their friend use it through word of mouth, but the incentives didn’t drive, they drove zero.

Tim Ferriss: What do you attribute that to?

Niels Hoven: My guess is that our customer base at $500 a month is fairly wealthy. And so that $500 bonus that they get is not as valuable to them as the social currency that they either gain by referring this, or sort of lose by telling someone about this product that they feel guilty about using. And so I think that, yeah, it is an incentive, but they already had very strong incentives to tell their friends about it if they would love it or were reluctant to tell their friends about it.

Tim Ferriss: What makes the people who do refer through word of mouth different from the archetype that you just described? The people who have some shame around it, and they don’t want to burn social capital because what if their friend’s like, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize you’re such a rich asshole.” Or whatever. What makes the other people different, the ones who talk about it?

Niels Hoven: I don’t know if they’re different. What I’ve heard from the people who do refer their friends is that they’re very selective about who they mention it to. They have specific ideas about which of their friends would be receptive, and they tell those friends about it. And my theory is that they tell those friends about it anyway to help their friends out, and the $500 is not a driver of behavior.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay. Have you done multiple tests? Did you just do one incentive test?

Niels Hoven: Yeah, we just did one.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I do think the devil’s in the details with a lot of these—

Niels Hoven: That could be a two.

Tim Ferriss: Right, I mean, for instance, one free month versus $500 credit, which sounds better? $500 credit sounds better, but it’s the same thing. Also, and this may be unappetizing, but if the cost of delivering the product is zero, which makes a bunch of assumptions, around the associated costs of various things and customer support and duh duh duh duh. But if the cost of development is high, but the cost of delivery is low, you can afford to do very limited, first 100 people to get it, use a little scarcity, free year, if you refer three people. $6,000 value, if you get three people to sign up, whatever. I’m pulling that out of my ass.

Niels Hoven: Yeah, we can be more generous.

Tim Ferriss: But it’s like, if you tried that and you limited it to the first hundred people, you know your maximum downside cost. It’s not this open-ended fog of scary expense because you’ve already set a cap. I am a big fan, I mean, sometimes you have critical weaknesses, some Achilles heel that needs to be fixed. And I think that there are, I think the website hops to mind for me as an example of that, which I don’t fault you for because you’re doing so many things at once, but we will get to that. But also for me, I’m like, look, if something isn’t working, and it’s just continually not working, which is not the case with the incentives because you only tried it once, I think that’s worth testing. And also, it’s because that is related to one of the two means that has proven most effective for acquiring customers who are retained, X and word of mouth.

But X is time-consuming. You got to write, you got to engage, you got to respond. Maybe you get lucky and there’s an easy one that really pulls some weight, but you got to keep feeding the monster. Whereas if you figure out some type of flywheel that involves—and incentives are just one tool in the toolbox, but really focusing on how you can facilitate word of mouth, and particularly if there’s a prompting at that first peak of magic, the wow experience, if that’s within 48 hours, boom, they get an email, or a notification of some type. If it’s one week, it’s within one week.

And I think that could obviate the need for paid advertising. There are plenty of huge brands with monstrous ARR that never spend a dime on advertising, because they figure out the small levers to pull that in concert create a flywheel of some type for this type of referral generation. We will put these up for people watching the video. If you’re on audio, I’m afraid you’re going to have to really use your imagination. Would you like to talk about the website or would you like to talk about any other challenges, goals? We’ll probably touch on a lot of it as we look at the before and after on the website, but is there anything else that you would like to cover before we get to the website?

Niels Hoven: I guess, do you have any thoughts about very, very top of funnel? Just as parents are first exposed to Mentava, how we might want to think about positioning ourselves or messages that you think might reach out broadly?

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Top of the funnel, it’s like, get as many parents who see this sentence to be interested in Mentava, is that the question?

Niels Hoven: I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: Or is it a question of marketing channels? Because a big top of the funnel is not always a good thing, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: If it creates a bunch of noise and garbage applications that are going to—

Niels Hoven: Yeah. I’m not saying go broad. I’m saying what sort of messages might get the attention of the specific kind of customers we want, if they’ve never heard of Mentava before?

Tim Ferriss: Well, this is going to seem like a lazy response, but it’s usually where I like to start because you’ve thought a lot more about this than I have. What is on your short list at the moment, for how to do that?

Niels Hoven: I think the two that we’ve been playing with are teach a kid to read, teach a preschooler to read, which we don’t love because we feel like it doesn’t differentiate us well. The other one that I think does differentiate us is talking about the mission, talking about acceleration, talking about schools not supporting fast learners, but then there’s kind of a deeper—

Tim Ferriss: How are people seeing this?

Niels Hoven: What’s that?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In terms of top of the funnel, the phrasing that you were just mentioning, or the taglines, how would people see these across all marketing? Facebook, X, website, everywhere, or somewhere else?

Niels Hoven: Say TikTok, X, and Meta, Facebook, Instagram ads are where we get the most volume.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, look, my beginner’s eyes, uninformed, knee-jerk response would be, “My daughter made more progress in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten.” You start with the testimonial. And not to be too Glengarry Glen Ross, but for those who haven’t seen the Alec Baldwin sequence, it’s very short, you should watch it. But AIDA, A-I-D-A, “Do I have your attention? Are you interested? Have you made your decision for Christ?” Got to watch the clip, folks. I’ll link to it in the show notes. And then action is the last piece, right? But that type of testimonial is what I would use.

Niels Hoven: That makes sense.

Tim Ferriss: That’s what I would test.

Niels Hoven: We haven’t tried that. That makes a lot of sense. We’ll go for it.

Tim Ferriss: Because you hit a few things at once with that. If a company says, “We are the best,” you’re like, “Of course you’re going to say that. What do you give me next to prove that you’re the best?” Testimonial gets around that. And fortunately, you’re not dealing with a medical product or something where you have structure function claim restrictions, which are very important to have. And thank God we have the FDA and FTC and all that stuff. But in this particular case, I don’t think you have too many restrictions about how you can use testimonials, assuming you have written permission from the people who provided those testimonials. And man, the mock-ups that were created for the website, for a revision of the website, are one thing. But if you were like, “You know what? We can’t make. I’m afraid the internet is broken. We cannot create any new pages.” I’m like, “Bummer.” I’m like, “Okay, then make your main page the testimonial page.” That’s what I would do.

Niels Hoven: We’ve talked about that.

Tim Ferriss: I would make the main page the testimonial page. And then you have a persistent popup in the middle of the screen that’s like, “Is your kid ready? Take the two-minute quiz.” If I’m playing with applying constraints, if we cannot create a new website, is the current homepage the one that should be the homepage? Maybe, maybe not.

Niels Hoven: I feel like I’m getting too into the weeds, but I feel like this is exactly where your expertise is coming through that yeah, of course, starting with the testimonial. If I did a short video, like a, I don’t know, a 60-second-long TikTok video, where would you go after the testimonial? What would the beats of that video be for you?

Tim Ferriss: Well, here’s my hot take, and it could be totally wrong. I mean, everything I’m saying could be wrong. But my hot take is that the people who can spend 500 a month, and are busy and value their time and their kid, this is not going to be a fair assumption for everyone on TikTok, but I don’t think that is where the people making the buying decisions are spending most of their time. I could be wrong. I mean, there are younger men and women I know who spend plenty of time on TikTok. Do you have any idea of who is making the purchase decision? How many males versus females are actually putting in their credit card information to buy this right now? Which, look, that’s a very heteronormative question, but you guys get the idea.

Niels Hoven: I think it’s roughly fifty fifty judging from the customer calls that I do. In the beginning, it was very heavily male, but I think that was just my audience at the time, and now it feels a lot more balanced.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you probably don’t have this information. Any idea on the age, the sweet spot age range using past customer data of your current customer avatar? If I said to you, okay, guess what? You only have one opportunity to ever sell Mentava, that’s the bad news. The good news is I’m going to put you on stage in front of an audience of 5,000 people, but they all have to be of one particular demographic/personality/—

Niels Hoven: Yes. Give me—

Tim Ferriss: —makeup. Give me the census data, right?

Niels Hoven: Give me age 35 to 45, first generation immigrants who work at tech companies, who value education, who see it as a ladder to a better life, and are willing to pay money to make their kids successful.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m guessing those people are not on TikTok. So the beats of the video, honestly, it’s a tough one for me to answer off the cuff, but I think in part because, it may not be the right medium. Where I think video matters is showing actual kids using Mentava and learning with Mentava. Here’s a crazy question, and I think I failed my computer IQ test for the day, because maybe it’s something obvious. Is it possible to turn on audio for the current video that is right in the middle of your homepage when I open it?

Niels Hoven: That’s a good question. I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: In Chrome, I kept trying to figure out how to turn on the audio because I’m like, it’s not really—

Niels Hoven: Oh, is it possible for you to turn on the audio?

Tim Ferriss: I wanted to hear what the kids were saying while they were using the software, but I could not figure it out, which could be user error.

Niels Hoven: That was a request that we were planning to do. I don’t know if it may not have gotten done. Yeah, that was an oversight. Good catch.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that does nothing for you. And it is, at least on a 13-inch MacBook, that is the entire screen on Chrome.

Niels Hoven: Brutal.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, okay. So if we come back to the website, and I’ll just give people a visual description, and I’m sure we’ll throw it up. It’s got a very familiar layout, which I think is, there’s nothing wrong with this familiar layout, but you got Mentava company name top left. You have a menu bar at the top, parents, teachers, about reviews, case studies, sign up, login, and then you have get started at the top right. Then you’ve got the giant video playing with no audio, and a cute little character, presumably from the Mentava app itself. And then under the video that is auto playing, it says, “Most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling. Mentava was built for unusually fast learners. Try it for free.” And the try it for free is a button. Okay.

If we were to look at a heat map of what I just described, meaning what is clicked on the most, do you have any read on which elements I just mentioned get clicked the most? Yeah. Which doesn’t, at least my experience was didn’t do anything. Yeah. Okay. I think, and I’m sure they’re called something else now, but way back in the day, you could get a heat map and it would be so called because, things would get redder and redder and redder the more they were clicked. And so you could, at a view, look at a website and with these tiny little circles indicating clicks that were colored in the way I just described, you could get a pretty good idea of what people were clicking on or trying to click on, right?

Well, if it works for you, let me pop open some mock-ups that were created using Claude in an incredibly short period of time. It is just insane what you can do these days. Shout out to Lenny Rachitsky, who had some really good tips on how to use these LLMs for design, turning your LLM into a, or maybe your AI into a world-class designer. All right, so I’m looking at the website right now, and if I go right now, a 13 inch, I did not look on mobile, which I probably should have. But on the MacBook, which is kind of my workhorse daily driver, the try it for free is where the screen ends, right? So my world of Mentava on first contact is what I just described. And then if we scroll down, you got best reading app for kids, and you got all these amazing testimonials, which I think do a hundred times more for you than what I just described.

Now, if we go to the mock-ups that I sent over, and we can play around with these because they’re not perfect, but you’ll notice a couple of differences. So I’ll point out some of those differences. So instead of get started in the top right, which is that button, and I still, well, it’s replicated in another place on the homepage, but it’s, “Is my child ready?” Instead of get started, maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. Something that’s very easy to split test. Then the actual tagline on this mock-up, I don’t love, I’ll be honest. I like it more than the, “Most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling.” I do prefer what is in the mock-ups to that, but it’s not where I would put it. I think maybe—what was it? Less nagging for parent, faster learning for kids.

Niels Hoven: Faster learning, less nagging for parents.

Tim Ferriss: Less nagging for parents is maybe what you test, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Okay. I don’t like that because ready and read throw me off. Frankly, they’re just. I know that sounds ridiculous given we’re talking about learning to read, but they’re too similar. So I would not use that phrasing. But then below that, we get an idea of what we’re actually talking about. Because when you say most education companies try to lift the floor, we want to remove the ceiling, it’s like, well, who are you selling to? What is it? Education company? Is it a clinic? Is it a company that sells consoles to nursery schools or daycare centers? It’s not as clear, whereas Mentava’s expert reading instruction for your child. Oh no, no, no, no. It’s just too wordy. Mentava is expert reading instruction, that’s terrible, but your child will actually want to do, right?

So you could say Mentava teaches reading that your child will actually want to do, or something like that. 15 to 30 minutes a day, a coach on call, and nobody in your house has to be the teacher. It’s not quite right, but below that you have two buttons, take the two-minute readiness check, and then how it works. And then a video that could auto play or not, but I would definitely have audio on there. So that’s one option. And then right below that, and I’m not convinced this is the way to do it, but it makes it very explicit below the readiness check, $500 a month per child. Most families finish in 6 to 12 months, free 14 day trial, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s one approach. You could also, rather than make the $500 fine print, you could just lead with it. Mentava is, you could have what we had before, faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, if you want something that works and not something that’s cheap, right?

Niels Hoven: Right. We have absolutely had luck leading with the price. We’ve had customers tell us we use you because you cost $500 a month, because we knew there’s no way you could be a scam if you managed to charge that much money.

Tim Ferriss: You can’t survive. You can’t survive for years if it’s not working.

Niels Hoven: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. Some of these other mock-ups I sent you, I do like the tagline on the second one better than the first one, for children who are ready before school is. A bunch of the other copy would be replaced, and I think that one is too sassy looking. It looks like it’s trying to sell a tablet, which is not what you guys are doing. Watch the 60-second demo or whatever. The “Not a score” mock-up I don’t particularly like, but I do like in the third option, leading with the testimonials.

Niels Hoven: I like that too.

Tim Ferriss: Right? So for instance, let’s imagine maybe the first mock-up, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Man, that’s a mouthful. It’s a tongue twister for me. If it were faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, make your child love learning, right? Whatever, something like that. And then on the top right, much like the third mock-up, there was this big testimonial which was like, my daughter learned more in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten. And then there was another one maybe for—you pick it, you’ve got a million of these testimonials. You’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the testimonials. Maybe if I were going to pick from the ether one other type of testimonial, I saw a number of testimonials that were like, we got rid of our tutor and did this.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe that’s the other one. Right? Just so you address that, what about this? What about the comparable, the cost of it? You just have a testimonial do some of that heavy lifting for you. I mean, you have so many good testimonials. These are real testimonials.

“Tim Ferriss: “Last fall he didn’t know how to read his letters. Now he can read his baby brother a book before bed.” Like what? WTF? Are you serious? “You guys changed our lives. There’s not a world where I could teach a child to read without your app.” I mean, these testimonials are crazy. So aesthetically you have some choices to make. Some of these are a little too sterile. The last page of mock-ups I think are a little more friendly, like the second to last one would be a little too busy and a little too like, did our web designer take LSD? But you get the idea. I’m just going to note what I like about these things. So the testimonials, I would 100% test having the testimonials very prominent. And just looking at your homepage as a print advertisement effectively, you want to have a clean visual progression through the piece.

Generally people are going to be pulled through a graphic and then to the largest headline, then to the second largest. So making sure that the visual tracking isn’t too pinball machine. So frankly, it’s like if I were going to be really nitpicky and try to pull something from Ogilvy, I would say the—look, you could have the video on the left instead of the right and then the headline on the right if we’re talking about people who track from left to right with reading. But what I do like about this third one is that it’s got a couple of bubbles on top of the kid learning, 15 minutes a day. These would have to be fact checked obviously and audited to make sure. But 15 to 30 minutes a day, a real coach for you on the couch in pajamas, whatever some of the main features are, and then take the two-minute readiness check. Can you speak to the real coach or the coaching aspect? Is that a thing or is that just a hallucination?

Niels Hoven: Yeah. So when you sign up, we have the Mentava parent app and even during the free trial, we prompt you to book a call with me and chat about where do you think your child is stuck on? What have you been having issues with? How is the free trial going? And then you have the parent app where you can chat with us 24/7 and we will get back to you as fast as we can. We use that a lot for customer support, but also parents are confused about whether their kids are engaging the right way and we can let them know and get them back on the right path.

Tim Ferriss: How much do you sacrifice, and you can tell me what the exact bracket is, but on this third mock-up, something that was put right above the headline, not saying that’s the right place for it, but a reading program for curious three to seven year olds. Is that an accurate description of the product? Would you say that’s the sweet spot in terms of ages or what is the ideal age range?

Niels Hoven: I’d say three to five.

Tim Ferriss: Three to five. Okay, great. So reading program for three to five year olds. How much do you lose by saying three to five? That’s maybe not the right way to phrase the question. But for instance, Jake came in. What I’m trying to figure out is how much noise and time-consuming activities are introduced by having people try this too early versus just saying, you know what? It’s not for two year olds. That’s going to be like 90% failure rate so let’s just say three to five. Do you feel like that would help or hinder results?

Niels Hoven: I’m very comfortable saying it’s probably not for two year olds. I think the two-year olds that this works for, although we’ve had a couple, are very rare.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So if you were to give an age range right up front as a way of discouraging people who are ultimately maybe going to be frustrated, would three to five be the bracket? Would it be two and a half to five?

Niels Hoven: I would actually say three and a half.

Tim Ferriss: Three and a half. Okay, great. And none of these design ideas are permanent decisions, right? It’s a living, breathing website, you can change it. But what I’ve found with the startups I’ve worked with and also just with all the stuff that I’ve launched myself is being very clear about who you are for and who you are not for makes everything else easier, particularly when you are explicit about it.

Niels Hoven: Can you give some examples of what that means? Because we want to do that, but I think we’re not sure how.

Tim Ferriss: Well, what that means is if someone says, like in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, which I think crossed your path many, many years ago, in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, it’s like I would get these questions when I did media around or even from my editor early on. It’s like, well, how can employees in big companies use this? And I’d be like, frankly, it’s not ideal for them. There are things they can use and let’s just say 20% of it I think is going to be very, very valuable to them, but it’s really designed for people who are in a job but want to experiment with designing their own lifestyle vis-a-vis starting a company of some type, ideally product and not service. And that happens to be a huge market. You don’t have to please everyone. And even if you tried, it’s not going to be possible. So that would be one example.

In the case of, for instance, there’s a company that I’m involved with, it’s probably 30% of my protein calories called Maui Nui. Maui Nui Venison, wild harvested venison from Hawaii. And it’s the most nutrient dense red meat you can buy, period, full stop. And it’s expensive. It is. If you think Mentava is expensive, no way. Maui Nui Venison is much more expensive. But in my case, I’m like the one place—when I have kids, it’ll change. But healthcare and nutrition and exercise, I’m not going to try to get the Goldilocks perfect amount. I’m happy to overspend to ensure that I am getting the best. And it turns out there are plenty of people who fit that bill. Even if you just had professional sports teams, collegiate sports teams at the high end and military, that can still be a really sizable business. So that’d be another example. They don’t hide it. You very quickly determine that this is going to be expensive.

Niels Hoven: So it’s not so much like a framing of the messaging. It’s just like price tag is there, they’re unapologetic about it. It’s just not something they pay attention to.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I would say that there is one facet, which is price. I’d say price, it’s just a very clear delineator. So rather than use four paragraphs to describe something that is probably accidentally going to insult a bunch of people one way or the other, it’s just like—I think there are ways that you could skin the cat. Oh, that’s a terrible expression. I wonder where it came from. I think about a lot of these things, like you can have your cake and eat it too? I’m like, where does that come from? If you have your cake, of course you’re going to eat your cake. Why is that double dipping? It doesn’t make any sense. In any case, the point is you could say something—I mean, maybe there’s something about, I’m sure there is, I would just have to spend more time on it, but the teaching your kid to fish as opposed to giving them a fish, right?

Traditional education gives your kid a fish and forces them to eat it. What if they loved learning how to fish and all it took was 15 minutes on a tablet and you did not have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m shooting from the hip here, But I do think that there are—I mean, I’ll take another stab at it. Another stab would be for parents who realize that the education system in the US is broken in one fundamental way: eager, fast learners cannot learn at their own pace. It’s not perfect, but it’s edging directionally, I think, towards something useful.

Tim Ferriss: There are tons of examples, right? And you could look at punk rock bands, you could look at fashion brands. How do they position? Very often, they’re very good at making a stark contrast between our people and not our people, which this is coming back to the do nothing. That may not be a task worth spending a lot of time on, but there are a lot of ways that you can distinguish. I think who you’re for is a lot more important than who you’re not for, stating who you’re for.

I’ll give you an example. This is something I’m working on right now myself because the book that I was alluding to, it’s primarily a book on saying no. Which I’m working on the positioning of this right now, because the first third of the book is how to identify or create the few things to say yes to that actually make all the difference. So it’s not exclusively a book on saying no, it’s a book on making really high leverage decisions. However, the crux of the book, because there’s so many, it’s very easy to say yes. I mean, just everyone’s got promiscuous over commitment in their lives and a lot of tech is designed to push us into the realm of distraction, infinite distraction. But with saying no, I’m going to get a bunch of pushback and I address this pushback in the book, but I’m going to get lots of things right off the cuff on social. I would bet my entire net worth on it, which is must be nice, you’re already successful so you can just say no.

I’m too kind for that. You’re just saying this after the fact. I bet in the beginning you had to say yes to everything. There are a couple of pieces that I feel very confident are going to come up and I have somewhat of a binary choice. I can try to respond to all those and I can try to convince them otherwise, which I could. I could do it, but it’ll be very time-consuming and it’s not going to make me particularly happy. I’m not going to enjoy it, let me put it that way, because I’ll have to do it repeatedly over and over and over again because I’m like, did you read my blog post? No, of course 99 out of 100 people did not. Well, 999 out of 1,000, probably, even worse ratio, didn’t see it. Or I can just say, you know what? You’re right. This is for people who’ve had just the bare modicum of success where they have figured out maybe one thing they’re good at where they have too much inbound and too many requests of their time. That’s who this book is for.

That, by the way, is still well over a hundred million people. I do not need to worry about an audience for the book, but if I try to boil the ocean and somehow homogenize it into appealing to everybody, the game is lost. I’m dead. So these are the types of things I’m thinking about where it’s like, okay, well, if I’m stating who it’s for, how precise do I get? How much do I reduce the aperture of the description? And it might make sense to really, really reduce it. I mean, when I launched The 4-Hour Workweek, I was like—in the background, in my mind, I was like, I am pitching this to 20 to 35 year old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. Phase one. Phase two, same kind of psychographics, female, same city. Next, same thing, New York. And then the sort of sphere of available readers was expanded to a handful of other major cities. And then before you know it, okay, fine. Then 16 year olds in Oklahoma are reading it and 60 year olds in Sri Lanka and so on. But if you try to start there, you’re fucked.

Niels Hoven: So when you have this very specific idea of who you’re trying to reach, what are the specific behavioral changes does that drive for you? Is it specific messages that you’re hammering on or—

Tim Ferriss: Marketing in that case, right?

Niels Hoven: Where you’re running ads or the messages that you’re running?

Tim Ferriss: All of it. I always like to look for the uncrowded channel. So in my case, I don’t think this would be appropriate for Mentava, but when I’m launching something, I often look for, always look for, don’t always find, but I always look for the fast-growing undervalued channel. And if I can’t find that, or even if I can, I then ask—and that could be channel or format. Then I ask what is the most uncrowded path to communicating with the taste makers in that sphere? So I’ll give you a concrete example.

In the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, which was published April 2007, 20-year anniversary coming up next year, which is insane, but there was this relatively new thing that had hit a critical mass and it was called a blog, which is short for web log. When I reached out to bestselling authors to ask them about their recent launches and I asked them what was a waste of time, what under delivered, what over delivered, what surprised you, what came back was TV is becoming less important for prescriptive nonfiction or nonfiction in general, NPR marketplace, there are a handful of NPR shows, and there’s this new thing, it’s really weird. They’re called blogs and I did this thing I never expected. I put this excerpt up, I did a little interview, sold more books than some gigantic morning show in New York City that gets all the fanfare.

And I was like, okay, well, I think I’m going to push all my chips in on this thing called blogs after I heard that six or seven times. And then the question was, well, how do I communicate with bloggers? And the answer was not email because that was the most crowded channel. So I spent my marketing budget basically for The 4-Hour Workweek flying to conferences to meet these people in person. WebExpo, can’t recall where that was held, but I spent all my time in the lounges, didn’t really do anything in the panels. And at the time, I’m not going to give the whole Dr. Evil life story, but met Robert Scoble. I have a lot of rules and thoughts around this type of approach, but flash forward, I’ll give a different example, 4-Hour Chef.

4-Hour Chef was launching in 2012. I asked the same questions, reached out to people, asked them the questions I already mentioned, and they said, you know, radio’s getting less important. It’s not having quite the same effect on sales as my last few book launches, but I went on this one thing called a podcast, and I was like, huh, okay. Well, I’d heard of podcasting, but I thought it came to the fore for a brief moment and then kind of flickered out and died. But that wasn’t true. It was just very, very early innings in podcasting in 2012. And when I launched The 4-Hour Chef, I was on Joe Rogan before Joe Rogan was Joe Rogan. Back in 2012, it was like, Joe Rogan, you mean the guy who used to be on Fear Factor? Like that was the reference. It wasn’t like, oh, the guy who was in the Oval Office and pushed through the executive order and is on every major news outlet every day where they’re quoting his podcast?

Man, this is incredible. I mean, that whole story is amazing. So Nerdist, Marc Maron, Adam Carolla, these OGs in the game, I was able to see the effects of that firsthand. Now later I took that experience and used it to inform starting my own in 2014. But for each book with Tools of Titans—no, was it Tools of Titans? I also did a bunch of experiments with BitTorrent with 4-Hour Chef and gave away the audiobook for free and all these experiments. They don’t all work out. I don’t think the BitTorrent experiment really panned out as I would’ve hoped, but that’s how I workshop. I do think, and look, you’re the CEO of the company, you don’t necessarily have the time to do this, but I imagine that you have the opportunity on these calls that you get on with the live coaching. I think in-person workshopping is just the fastest way to get feedback, real feedback.

Because sure, you can get feedback that is measurable in the forms of clicks and so on, and you can use user testing and see how people are reacting to a website, which I think is interesting. If you have a webcam on, you can look at their face and where they pause, which is not going to be transmitted if you’re only getting click-through data or click data in the case of a heat map, let’s say. But when you’re talking to people in person and trying to explain what you do, it’s like, do they lean in or do they lean back? Do they follow up with a question or they’re like, oh, interesting. If I’m at a party and someone’s like, what do you do? I’m like, I write books. 99% of the time, even if they don’t want to talk to me, they’re going to ask, what kind of books?

On the other hand, if I’m like, I’m an accountant, and I have some accountants I love, but if I’m like, I don’t really want to be at this party, and they’re like, what do you do? I’m like, an accountant, they’re like, oh yeah, that must be a job. There’s no follow-up and you can get a feel for which messaging is working. Or if you give them a paragraph and then two or three people at a bar, you’re just having casual conversations with at an event, they all ask about the same little thing that you’ve been discounting that has been a minor cameo in your messaging as opposed to the leading headline. And you’re like, you know what? Maybe I should test that.

Niels Hoven: Yeah. Actually, that’s brilliant. And it makes me think of comics, like trying out at open mic nights. I’m leaving so much on the table. I’m doing all these intro calls with our new customers. I should be asking them, if I said this, how would you have reacted to it? What were the pain points that got you to sign up? I should be at networking events, trying more taglines and seeing what gets people interested in having longer conversations with me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re going to be having these conversations anyway. And just like it’s more signal if you ask someone to buy and they actually pay as opposed to do you prefer A or B? Similarly, it’s not bad to ask, do you prefer A or B, but the fidelity of that signal isn’t as strong in my opinion. It’s not as reliable as if you mention a few lines and then just wait. And if they don’t follow up and two or three people don’t ask follow-up questions, that’s a problem. But if they latch onto something, you’re like, okay, that wasn’t organic. That was a proactive move on their part. It wasn’t in response to a question. They’re not trying to appease me necessarily. Maybe they are, maybe there’s a component of people pleasing or just being social, but that’s why you have to talk to more than one person.

And I’m like, The 4-Hour Workweek was workshopped. I mean, I didn’t intend on writing a book, but it was notes from a class that I taught twice a year. It was a guest lecture. It wasn’t an ongoing class, but I got to see what didn’t work. It was very much like a standup comic. If I tried a joke and it fell flat twice, I was like, kill it. Yank it. That’s got to go. It’s not working. So I’m not sure if that’s helpful, but there are other things you can use. I mean, for instance, with some of these mock-ups or if you’re testing copy options, I think it’s most valuable if it’s on your own website because you control it and you can try to discern intent to purchase.

However, there are many services that do this. I don’t know how I ended up finding this one. There’s one called PickFu, P-I-C-K-F-U. We’ll put the branding aside, but instant consumer feedback, split testing and market research. And so they’ve got their fancy social cred with these logos, HBO Max, L’Oreal, Wayfair, et cetera, have supposedly used it. But you can, I believe—I think it’s PickFu that’s allowed me to do this. It might have been another similar platform, but basically picking Amazon Prime members and then serving up— You can spec out your demographics, and then it just surfaces three options. And the reason this can be helpful—well, there are a few reasons. I use this for split testing different aspects of the design and packaging around the Coyote card game, which I created with Exploding Kittens, which came out, I don’t know, a year or two ago, which was a really fun experiment.

I’ve never had anything in thousands of Walmart and Target stores, which is super fun, but you’re not going to get much data from Amazon, and you don’t really want Amazon to be your debutante ball where you show up in your new dress for the first time and see if people like it. I do not like taking that type of risk. And there was internal debate. I mean, there were diverging opinions. And in the case of Mentava, it’s like, I don’t know what your traffic looks like. So if you are going to get a statistically significant signal with which you’re going to make an important decision about something, you might just not have the volume necessary.

Maybe you do, but maybe you don’t. And in this case, it’s like, look, if I want 5,000 people to vote on something in 72 hours, I can do that. It’s a function of cost, and maybe it’s like 500 bucks, 600 bucks. It’s very affordable. And you could very easily—I can’t recall what the competitors are, but you could use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to ask, what are the three most compelling competitors to PickFu with similar pricing? Because some of them are going to be very, very, very expensive intended for large enterprise. They do the same thing, frankly. It’s gussied up a little bit in a tuxedo and you have to do a sales call or they demo and then quote you a price. If you see that and you’re just looking for fast, quick and dirty, then I wouldn’t proceed. But these are all different tentacles that are all out probing that bring information back to the central brain that then determines which I want to split test in a place with higher stakes, but better signaling for purchase intention, which would be your website, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you can do it really fast. I’m famously impatient. I do not want to wait weeks and weeks and weeks. So I’m like, okay, cool. 72 hours over the weekend? Great. I’ll just let this run and then on Monday we can look at it because if we got—and if it’s an edge case where we’ve got something that’s like, okay, well, it’s like 49% or 51%. Don’t be too cheap on this because you can get a false positive on something. I mean, you did more math by eighth grade than I did throughout all of high school, so I don’t need to tell you about statistics. But the point is, don’t do the bare minimum because very often the results will flip when you get just a larger sample size.

Niels Hoven: These tips are so helpful because I think it makes me realize how many opportunities we’re leaving on the table to iterate with our messaging and get it dialed in. So I’m pretty excited about this.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s throw out a prompt for people who are still listening or watching this. Let Niels know. Look at the website, mentava.com, check it out. Of the things we’ve talked about, what has resonated? What should the tagline be? What language or features or anything have resonated most? Just let them know on X, right? Tag him @NielsHoven. That’s @N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. And trust me, Niels will be paying attention.

Niels Hoven: I will be.

Tim Ferriss: So check it out. Is there anything else that we should cover? I mean, I feel like we have hit a lot. I don’t feel like we need to spend a ton of time on competition. I mean, I did a competitive analysis, but I do feel like you’re heavily differentiated. But if there is a particular competitive snag that you run into and you’re like, oh God, Newman, they brought up whatever again, then we could talk about it. But if not, then we probably don’t need to spend too much time there, right? I mean, you got the cheap reading apps. I don’t think we need to spend time on that. Teach yourself books and kits. We got live online tutors. Then, we’ve got kind of like the super mega, super comprehensive localized options like Alpha School which are just a different category altogether.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m not sure we need to spend time on that. Big fan of Alpha School, by the way. It’s just a different thing.

Niels Hoven: They use us—my kid is using their homeschool program right now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Cool.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Niels Hoven: They’re investors also.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, nice. I didn’t realize that. That’s—

Niels Hoven: Yeah. Joe Liemandt was like, “I will take your entire round right now if you let me.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. Yeah. Joe is very smart.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Funny story, he may not realize this. Probably doesn’t. Why would he? But I almost ended up working for Trilogy Software out of college. The reason I fell in love with Austin is because I made it to the finals round of interviews and they flew out the finalist to Austin and gave us a whole whirlwind tour and kind of—I don’t think it was wining and dining, mostly just dining, but they made it really fun.

I didn’t make the cut. In retrospect, I guess, thank God, right? Blessing in disguise. Kind of forced me to really scrap for a while which was good for me. I’ve been in Austin for more than a decade, still haven’t connected with Joe. So that’ll happen eventually.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Anything come to mind that we should cover? I’m not sure if there’s anything outstanding. Just while we’re here, if there’s anything else that you’d like to chat about.

Niels Hoven: Is there—do you have any insights on getting in front of people who aren’t actively looking for your product or who aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, like don’t know they have the problem yet?

Tim Ferriss: Tell me more about that.

Niels Hoven: The issue about parents not realizing how much school is going to hold back their kids until they’re—like, it’s too late or that your best opportunities for acceleration are even before your kid gets to school.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So the question is any thoughts on how to get in front of those people?

Niels Hoven: Yeah. They say you want to be the painkiller. You want to solve the problem that your customer knows they have. I think for a lot of our customers, they don’t realize that this is a problem yet. They don’t realize how far their kid is from their potential or one of the strongest reasons I have for teaching your kids to read early is because when they hit school, your school is going to try and hold them back. And being able to say, “My kid can already read. You need to give them more opportunity,” is one of your strongest negotiating levers.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s a great point. I really like that. Let me do a Rashomon multi-directional thing on this question. The first is coming back to like, “What if I did nothing?” One position I could try to take, it might not be justifiable, is the people who are using your product understand the problem. So just spend a bunch of focused time on the referral engine for those people.

Then, you don’t have to explain anything because chances are they’re not going to have to explain anything either because their cohort of friends, i.e., parents with kids, will be cut from the same cloth. Then, it’s a question of, “How do you congregate the converted versus how do you convert the non-believers?” which I think is—I think that may be a better question but—

Niels Hoven: I think there is a lot there about, like, giving our customers the tools to let their friends know about this problem that maybe their friends don’t know about yet. They are going to have that opportunity to explain it if we can give them the words for it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I—I would also say that the—if you had a two-minute readiness test, make it interesting, make it—if the parents never end up using Mentava, how can you make that as illuminating and useful as possible so that people—that would be a worthwhile thought exercise. Namely, how can I make this two-minute readiness test or, like, “Is your kid ready?” or—there’s probably a better question to ask, better wording for that, but is there a—I cannot tell you. There was this thing a couple of years ago, I don’t remember what it was selling. It was definitely selling something to be clear. This was not just some questionnaire online for fun, but it was like—this is a bit risque. Hope those three-year-olds aren’t listening to this but—

Niels Hoven: I cannot wait.

Tim Ferriss: It was like a sex compatibility test and you would take this thing and then your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse would fill it out or whatever. And then—

Niels Hoven: Oh, Mojo Upgrade. I remember it.

Tim Ferriss: And then, it would tell you like, “Oh, you’re a Switch,” and, “This person is a that,” and, “This person is a this,” and, like, “You might be into all these things,” and it was—people got very excited about it and they shared the test. The point of that business was not to provide tests. It was selling something else. I can’t even remember what it was. I didn’t buy it. But in one of the more awkward transitions of my podcast career—let’s now come back to children.

If you made—I think it would be very—it could be fun to try to create a readiness test which is not sexy enough. It would have to be called something else. But a test that people could take in two minutes that would give them information that they would find valuable or interesting or fascinating, to the extent that they would want to share the free readiness test with their friends.

Because then, they’re not saying, “Hey, I’m not automatically one of those rich assholes who is just going to spend, who can burn $500 a month,” which is not what I think. I think it’s a fantastic investment, right? But they’re not risking that social judgment by recommending someone take a free two-minute test. So I think that’s another opportunity potentially. And then, where are you based, Niels?

Niels Hoven: I’m outside Seattle.

Tim Ferriss: Outside Seattle. All right. So in Seattle, you probably have some organization like this. If you were in the Bay Area, just because I’m familiar with the Bay Area and I’ve been there for so long, you mentioned first generation, immigrant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I would go speak at the Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE, in Silicon Valley. I would be—

Niels Hoven: Sorry. What did you say? The what entrepreneur?

Tim Ferriss: Indus, I-N-D-U-S. Let’s see if it still exists. The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE, nonprofit organization. There it is. So tie.org, T-I-E, .org. Wow. Well, let’s see here. The world’s largest community of entrepreneurs. I’m interested. Now, about the genesis of TiE. Yeah. So let’s see. Board of trustees. Who’s on the board of trustees? I’m expecting—I have high expectations, TiE. Let’s see who we got. Yeah. Founder of Infosys. Yeah. Baller. Okay. Oh, this website—they could use a website upgrade. Here we go. Jensen Huang. I believe TiE is one of the most extraordinary communities known to any industry.

I mean, they’ve got some good testimonials. But the point of this is that back in the day when I lived in Mountain View and I would go volunteer for TiE because it was the only way for me to punch above my weight class and meet people who would otherwise be completely unreachable, it was basically all Indians, right? Fine. Great. But if you want to talk about first or second generation immigrants who are all in on learning, like this about as—it’s about as warm an audience as I can imagine.

Niels Hoven: That’s great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you can check it out. But the point being, if you were like, “Hmm. All right. Well, look, I’m going to take a trip anyway to the Bay Area,” or maybe they have a chapter. Let’s see. Chapters. I mean, it’s freaking Seattle. Come on. I would think it’d be—well, they got Nairobi. They’re going to make me scroll through all the countries. Man. All right. Come on now. There is—I’m boring the hell out of people. Yeah. There’s a Seattle chapter.

Niels Hoven: All right.

Tim Ferriss: But the—and all over the US, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, et cetera. So I would just say pitch to your dream customer or get up and talk and do—see if you can get on the main stage at one of TiE’s large events and give a presentation. This is another way that you can test things. Give a presentation. If it’s good enough, if it’s not, then too bad. Try again.

But if it’s good enough, which does not have to be great, but if it’s—I suspect you’d have a very warm audience. And then, you see what people ask you. You see what people mention and you see what people ask you afterwards, right? And then, you’re hearing from the converted exactly what they want to know to join your church and I’m just like, “Man.”

Niels Hoven: I feel like this is the bread and butter question to ask you. How do you get on the main stage at these events when you don’t have a track record?

Tim Ferriss: I think you do have a track record. I think you’re underselling yourself. I think you point to some of these—I think you point to your pedigree, right? So in other words, that third paragraph where I was like, “Use that sentence: Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011.” If—well, first of all, it seems like TiE has branched out way beyond Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley which is great. But depending on who you’re pitching, you have to customize to who you’re pitching, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But I would say it may be easier than you expect, right?

Niels Hoven: So I didn’t even know that this is a thing. So people reach out to organizations and say, “I know you have a conference coming up. I would like to be a speaker there and here’s what I do.”

Tim Ferriss: People definitely do that.

Niels Hoven: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, I have not done this type of legwork in a very long time. But yeah, just cold email and pitch them.

Niels Hoven: Okay. Cool.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, it’s—you want to make sure it’s thematically related to what they’re doing, right? But they have the TiE Global Summit, TiEcon Silicon Valley. Maybe TiEcon Silicon Valley is more interesting because you could use it as a recruiting tool simultaneously, right? Depending on what your priorities are at the time. Definitely going to be a high density of venture capitalists, although perhaps you don’t need that at this point. Yeah. Let’s see, tieglobalsummit.org. What I would say is don’t be too attached to getting on stage and spending an hour talking about how Mentava was born and this and this and this, right? Maybe it’s the behavioral optimization or—what did you call it? Motivation engineering? There’s a term you used that I’m blanking on.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe it’s that, right? Maybe it’s commentary on disrupting and innovating education in the United States and, “Oh, by the way, I’m the founder of this startup,” and you spend two minutes on that. But like, “How did we get here?” Okay. Now, I’m giving a broader talk about my thoughts on education and where it’s possible to stick in door wedges, so that we can gain a foothold in something interesting. I am really just shooting from the hip here, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah. You—

Tim Ferriss: But there are lots of things because you—I mean, look, you could have some side hobby—I’m making this up, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s just say you bump into the chairman of the board of trustees of TiE and—I don’t know. He is about to go on a trip and you’re like, “Huh. Seems like he’s got an Olympic archery recurve bow that he’s taking with him. Isn’t that interesting?” You get into this whole archery and you’re like, “You know what? I’m into archery,” and he’s like, “Would you come speak on archery?” and the answer should be, “Absolutely. I’ll get on stage and talk about how to learn, how I approach the task of learning archery. And oh, by the way, I work at this company and here’s a minute on Mentava.” It’s like, “Yes, the answer to that one’s yes.”

As long as you have a very clear idea of what constitutes a success, getting on stage to talk in front of an interesting audience is not enough, right? What constitutes success? Is it recruiting? Is it feedback from people when you get offstage? If that’s the case, guess what? You probably want an earlier speaking slot as opposed to a closing speaking slot. You probably don’t want to be speaking on the last morning when a lot of people have already left, if they’re coming in from out of town, this type of thing.

I’m not, by the way, saying that you should focus on TiE, even though I do think it’s, at least when I was exposed to it, a very interesting organization. Again, an uncrowded channel. It’s like, “I might have been the only white person volunteering there.” I was like, “That’s ridiculous. This is an absolute goldmine of brilliant people and world-class entrepreneurs,” and it’s like, “Why isn’t everybody here?” So it’s cool to see that they’ve grown so much but—

Niels Hoven: I think what’s coming through so much out of these conversations with you is that it’s like an exercise in thinking out of the box. It’s like, “Okay. I know what the goals are.” It’s like, “Where are the open channels? Where are the—where were the opportunities that nobody else is looking for? Where are the shortcuts?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s like—I mean, it might not even be going to TiE, but you look at their team and you’re like, “Oh, look at that.” I’m looking at the board of trustees and you might realize like, “Oh, wow. Kamal Agarwala follows me on X. Maybe he’d be open to hopping on a phone call or a Zoom,” and then—or maybe you look at the bios and Anita is mother of three and you’re like, “Where do the Indian moms in the US congregate? Are there WhatsApp groups? Are there message boards? Are there whatever?” And I’m not saying this is a good idea, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But I do think there is value and I did this—you might recall. Very early on, I mentioned The 4-Hour Workweek and the whatever the range was I gave, like 20- to 35-year-old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. That’s very specific and—but the target isn’t the market, right? So the initial target is lead domino that you tip over that makes the rest easier to tip. The eventual market can be infinitely large, but the reason for being so specific—there are many reasons. I gave a few already.

Another is that I can achieve a surround sound effect for a very small number of people where they feel like I am ubiquitous and that there is a perceived momentum that is very helpful, right? Because at that point in time, going back 2007, if I was on Gizmodo, TechCrunch, I think it was 42 or 43 Folders, Merlin Mann and a few other places at the same time, as far as Silicon Valley technorati were concerned, I was everywhere, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: There are other ways to approach that, right? It’s like, “Okay.” Like Jdate for Jewish dating, okay? That’s like they’re very, very clear on who it’s for and you could— I mean, look, it’s like India is a subcontinent, right? It’s a gigantic place. So I’m not trying to paint with a broad brush. But it’s like, “Okay. Maybe I try to create a surround sound effect in a critical mass within the Indian communities in the United States.”

I’m not saying that’s a good idea, but that is—I would say that’s a very achievable—or at least it’s very concrete, right? It’s more precise than parents who want their kids to learn faster from a marketing perspective. Because then, you can figure out, “Well, maybe I sponsor a TiE event. Okay. Maybe there’s some app that they’re particularly fond of for cohesion.” I don’t know what that would be. Again, making this up as I go.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe there is—who knows, right? This is going to sound antiquated, but Facebook groups or something. Who knows? And you’re like, “Okay. Well, maybe I or my wife can become active or somebody on the team and offer free trials in exchange for feedback and—” Nothing sneaky, nothing underhanded. It’s just like I—people underestimate, I think, the power of a surround sound effect for a very focused group. This just happens to be the thing that popped into my head, but there could have been a dozen other examples.

Niels Hoven: Yeah. I think this resonates a lot because if that surround sound effect is going on, then at some point you’re like, “I keep hearing this name. I keep hearing this product. Let me go see what this is all about. I’m curious. I want to look into it.” That’s all we need, that first hook.

Tim Ferriss: Well, also, again, I’m stereotyping here but this is my lived experience. It’s like I would be very—I would put a lot of money on black that the management organizers of TiE care a hell of a lot about education and education for their kids. I would put a lot of chips on that and maybe that’s the way to make the ball roll downhill as opposed to pushing it uphill, right? You don’t need to convince them. They are convinced. They just don’t know that you exist.

Niels Hoven: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: You know? And then, you can focus on the stuff that’s really fun to focus on. I mean, a lot of this is really fascinating and, at some level, fun to focus on. But it’s like then you can focus on making it as good as possible for them. I think that’s more—I think that’s quite a fun piece of this whole puzzle, right?

Niels Hoven: Cool. I like this a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s an approach and it’s a very human scale approach, right? I’m not suggesting something that requires hiring McKinsey. I’m not suggesting something that requires outsourcing analytics to some board, which I’m certainly not averse to, but it’s the amount of intelligence that you can absorb both explicitly. But also, kind of implicitly and intuitively by spending time in some of these concentrated environments. You’re like, “Oh, okay. For at least this subset of Indus diaspora entrepreneurs, these are the questions and comments that come up when I use this two minute spiel that I ever find on Mentava.” That’s valuable. That’s really valuable.

And then, there are ways online that you can also convert that into very targeted paid advertising, right? This has turned into an infomercial for TiE, but it’s like maybe they have a newsletter, maybe they have—these are relatively low cost things and it’s—I mean, look, I—I’m going to get in so much trouble for this, but it’s like, look, I’ve gone to—went to two universities in China. Also, probably, you could find an equivalent for first generation in the US, Chinese parents who are all in on education, right?

Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah. We had—

Tim Ferriss: Chances are, if they made their way here, which is hard AF, they’re going to care a hell of a lot about giving their kids as many advantages as possible and there’s no convincing. They just don’t need—

Niels Hoven: Yeah. We had one customer who was, I think, Chinese, possibly Vietnamese, and she was saying she loved Mentava because she does not speak English very well. So she’s like, “I probably wouldn’t be able to teach my kid to read. So I give them this app, I sit next to them, I do my work, and I just—just to make sure that they kind of stay on task.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s super cool. So those are some of the things that I would be thinking about. I mean, I only know my toolkit, right? So I have lots of blind spots, tons of blind spots. But I will say that this is—I think this type of product, even though I don’t yet have kids, hope to remedy that soon, but this is the type of business I like a lot, right?

Because you have premium pricing, you have to build a product that allows you to charge premium pricing, so there is upward pressure on product quality. And you can find very discrete populations that are already converted, right? It’s like this is not—Education is not a nice to have. By hook or crook, one way or the other, sure, you might get lucky and your kid is like the Ramanujan of self-study. But in most cases, kids are going to need nudges in the right direction. They’re going to need tools, they’re going to need guidance, and it’s like people are willing to pay for that if they have the means, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So in any case. Niels, people can find Mentava, obviously, at mentava, M-E-N-T-A-V-A, .com. Check it out. Who knows? Maybe the website will be revised by the time you see it, but they can find you on X at @nielshoven, N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. I was dying to ask you about Beauty and the Geek, honestly, but I’ll save that for our round two.

Niels Hoven: All right.

Tim Ferriss: That’s round two. Anything else that you’d like to say or point people to? Any requests you’d like to make of people listening or watching before we wind to a close and land the plane, at least for now?

Niels Hoven: I think my one request to people, whether or not they try Mentava, is you will have to advocate for your child throughout their lives, especially when it comes to education, and never ever let anybody make you feel guilty for advocating for your kid.

Tim Ferriss: Love that. That is a great place to close. Niels, thanks for taking the time, man. Great to see you.

Niels Hoven: Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Love Mentava, the mission behind it, the purpose behind it, the ethos. Not to mention the product. I mean, go look at these testimonies on the website. It’s bananas. To everybody listening, we’ll include links to everything. Probably not the sex compatibility tests, but we’ll include links to just about everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. If you search Niels, N-I-E-L-S, or Mentava, it will be the only result, so you’ll find it there. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than it’s necessary to others. But also, to yourself. Make sure that your compassion includes yourself and thanks for tuning in.

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How to Teach a 3-Year-Old to Read and Rethinking Education — Tim Coaches Niels Hoven of Mentava (#882)

2026-09-11 04:36:47

This episode is a bit different. It’s a live, unscripted working session with a founder, and I’ve only done one other earlier this year.

Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners. Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system, and Niels created Mentava to allow students to achieve their potential. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems, where he ran the highest-grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. He has a graduate degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

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