2026-06-27 00:54:16
Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis on the many benefits of coca and how to liberate coca from its undeservedly tarnished reputation.
Bios of Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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Tim Ferriss: I thought, Andy, we could start with the ethnobotanical, medicinal side of things because I’ll share, perhaps, an anecdote to kick us off, which was I — as both of you have spent a lot of time in South America, and it’s not always to end up in the lower, upper Amazon consuming questionable substances. It’s sometimes to do other things, like visit cities and spend time with friends and go skiing.
And the skiing in this case was in Chile and it was the first instance where we landed in Santiago, drove to elevation very quickly, and I had my first experience with terrible altitude sickness. And for those who have not experienced it, I do not wish it upon my worst enemy. It is an absolutely horrific experience. It’s terrible. And even though the legal status, I think, is a question mark, or maybe it’s very directly verboten in Chile, the locals in the lodge gave me coca leaf tea. And within several hours, no symptoms and they did not recur past that point. Which blew my mind, particularly since even with Diamox to help with altitude acclimation, my experience has been that it takes a few days.
And I did not have any good way to explain this, particularly given my levels of exertion and. Not surprisingly in other countries, whether it’s Peru, Colombia, certainly if you look at the Kogis and so on, this plant is not just incredibly important from a, let’s just call it for lack of a better term, religious perspective, a cultural perspective, but also medicinal perspective. So I was hoping, Andy, you could give a primer on what makes coca, the plant, interesting?
Andrew Weil: Let me say I first met coca in 1965. I just finished my first year of medical school and my mentor, Dick Schultes, who was director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, sent me to South America to collect medicinal plants with one of his graduate students in the Amazon and the Andes. And I met with him right before I left and he said, “When you’re in Peru, be sure to chew coca.” He said, “It’s a very interesting plant and you want to learn about it.”
So I did, and I have been using coca ever since. And my original interest was to find out how this was used by Indigenous peoples medicinally. It’s as important to that population as peppermint and chamomile are in European medicine. It’s their major medicinal plant. And the main indication is for treating GI disorders, but also it is obviously relied on to provide energy in doing physical work, to help with altitude sickness, as you mentioned, to boost mood, and to improve metabolism.
The population in the Andes especially is often not well nourished and they eat a very high starch diet. They have a high incidence of genes predisposing them to type 2 diabetes, but they don’t have diabetes if they are on their traditional diets and exercising and chewing coca. But if they move to lower altitude and stop chewing coca and eat more like the blanco population in Peru, they develop very high rates of type 2 diabetes. So that’s quite interesting, that it has some normalizing effect on blood sugar and metabolism, which is something that I’d really like to see good research on.
So I think there are multiple uses, and these are not attributable to effects of cocaine. And I think this is most important that in coca, there are 14 alkaloids. Cocaine is one of them. And they all have similar chemical structures and none of them have ever been studied. Once we isolated cocaine from the leaf, everybody lost interest in everything else. So we don’t really know what those other things do and how they modify the activity of cocaine. The amount of cocaine in coca is relatively small. It would not be worth anybody’s time on a home scale to try to extract cocaine from coca. You need a tonnage of leaves to get a significant amount.
But I think the most important point is that this whole complex of compounds acting together is responsible for the effects that people report as being very beneficial, both for mental health and physical health.
Tim Ferriss: Could you say more about the digestive or metabolic effects? Do we have an idea of the mechanism of action there, what it’s actually doing?
Andrew Weil: Well, coca has been remarkably little studied. For a plant of such enormous historical, cultural, economic, scientific, medical importance, there is an almost complete absence of research on it, and Wade can talk about the reasons for that.
But one of the things that struck me when I was interviewing people in the Andes about the GI effects was that the respondents said that it treated both diarrhea and constipation. That doesn’t make any sense from the point of view of Western pharmacology. Cocaine is a gut stimulant. So obviously it’d be great for constipation, but it couldn’t do anything for diarrhea, except make it worse. And that always puzzled me. But then looking at these other coca alkaloids, there’s something peculiar about them. If you look at the structural formula of the molecules, they resemble drugs like atropine and scopolamine, which are found in nightshade plants and those are gut paralytics. Scopolamine has been used in medicine to treat diarrhea.
So this is kind of a paradox. You’ve got a molecule that, just from its shape, you predict would be a gut paralytic, but in fact, cocaine is a gut stimulant. So how does this work? I think this is a model for the differences between a whole plant drug and an isolated compound. I think when you present the body with this mix of ambivalent molecules that they push and they pull against physiology, the body decides what it wants to use. And that’s not attributing mystical intelligence to the body. It may be which receptors are available for binding at the moment. So if there is an overactive gut motility, it selects the ones that slow that down. That’s fascinating to me that coca has this sort of paradoxical activity and the body can choose which action it wants.
Tim Ferriss: So beyond, let’s just say, the motility, making bowel movement regular for lack of a better descriptor, is it ever used by Indigenous populations for what we might consider illnesses like Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome? I don’t even know what the occurrence of those things would be in such populations, but is it used for other indications?
Andrew Weil: It’s a great remedy for all GI disorders, and also they believe that it helps them utilize the nutritional qualities of foods that they consume. They often feel that if they don’t follow a meal, one of their high starch meals with a chew of coca, that they don’t metabolize it well.
There has been almost no research on this, but there was one really interesting study done with Andean Indians, having them ride exercise bikes and measuring blood sugar at intervals after they gave them a glucose load. And at any point in the cycle where they began to chew coca, blood sugar would normalize. So this is just one study that was done some time ago. And I mean, gosh, that should just call out for a whole lot more work of that kind. That’s fascinating.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super fascinating. So I wanted to just mention a few things for folks pulling from what you just said. So you mentioned Dick Schultes. If people don’t recognize the name Richard Evans Schultes, I guess that’s, what, S-C-H-U-L-T-E-S, look him up. Do yourself a favor and look up Richard Evans Schultes, the bio on Richard.
Andrew Weil: And Wade was his graduate student.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Yeah.
Andrew Weil: I worked with him as an undergraduate, but that’s how Wade and I first met, through him.
Tim Ferriss: So just incredible. And I may come back to the peppermint chamomile sidebar that you had because that seems interesting in and of itself, but to your point of isolated components of a plant versus the whole plant, there are many historical examples of this. One that we could pull from that can show perhaps the pitfalls of isolation, not to say there aren’t applications of isolations, it’s better to take something like aspirin than white willow bark perhaps, but if scientists came to the premature conclusion that, well, if consuming foods with beta-carotene seems to be supportive to vision, why don’t we just mainline isolated beta-carotene? Turns out not to be a great idea. There’s a lot more research needed.
Wade, do you want to speak to your first introduction, encounter with coca, and perhaps speak to why rehabilitation is even needed? I think some people might jump to the conclusions, like, “Well, cocaine, drug trade, period, end of story,” but I suspect there’s probably more there.
Wade Davis: Well, the thing is, Tim, I mean, coca has been used in South America by virtually every culture of the Andean and Northwest Amazon for 8,000 years. And during that time, there’s been no evidence whatsoever of any toxicity, let alone addiction.
My first encounter was actually with Tim Plowman, a good friend of Andy’s, who introduced me to Andy, who had a great grant through Schultes to study coca in the 1970s. And it spoke to the fact, what Andy said, is how little was known about the plant. I mean, one of the most astonishing things is that the plant had been demonized from the 1920s, and yet no one had ever bothered to do a nutritional study until Tim and Jim Duke did that and published in 1975. And Andy was sort of part of that team and the results were extraordinary. Not only did it have a modest amount of the alkaloid absorbed benignly in the mucous membrane of the mouth, but it was chock-full of vitamins and proteins, more calcium than any other plant studied. As Andy alluded to, enzymes that perhaps enhanced the ability of the body to digest carbohydrate at a high elevation. This was food and medicine, utterly benign. And the question comes, why didn’t someone do a study? And they didn’t do a study because they didn’t want to know.
I think the single most disturbing fact about coca is that the efforts to eradicate the fields, the traditional fields of coca, began 60 years before there was a cocaine problem. It had nothing to do with the pharmacology of cocaine hydrochloride and everything to do with the cultural identity of the Indigenous people who revered the plant.
And what happened is physicians in Lima in particular looked up into the Andes and they saw social pathologies, illiteracy, poor nutrition, poverty. And because issues of economics and land reform and real economic justice challenged the foundation of their bourgeois lives in Lima, they had to find a culprit and they settled on coca.
Andrew Weil: My observation is that Peru is actually a country with two nations within it. There is the white European nation with its capital at Lima that has alcohol as its preferred psychoactive drug, and there’s the Indigenous population mostly living at high altitude and some in the Amazon that rely on coca. And those two cultures have been at war with each other ever since.
For the Europeans, coca-chewing became a symbol of Indigenous culture and everything they didn’t like. And what they would love to see is either eradicate that culture or have it turn into the same as them.
Wade Davis: Well, I mean, these efforts were really pernicious and based on pseudoscience. And during all those years, including a famous commission dispatched in the late 1940s by the UN to study the so-called coca problem, that commission led by a man called Howard Fonda, who was a pharmaceutical executive, announced its conclusions before leaving New York. And upon arrival in Lima, reiterated word for word those same conclusions, that the plant had to be eradicated. And they spent three months in the Southern Andes meeting with military officials, alcaldes, government officials, priests. They didn’t interview a single traditional user of the leaf, and naturally they concluded that this plant had to be eradicated.
And I think if you really look at the language that they used, it was not just dark, it was racist. And that alludes to what Andy is saying that until recently, Latin America, not just Peru, was very much a place of conqueror and conquered, and coca became the symbol of everything Indigenous and therefore shameful to these elites.
Andrew Weil: Wade, do you want to say something about the recent WHO study, which is a confirmed continuation of all this?
Wade Davis: Incredibly, this condemnation of coca was in language that was just so dark and racist. And the amazing thing, though, is that these very people with their pseudoscientific studies and their hideous approach and language, were the very ones who wrote the language of the regulations and conventions that dictate international drug policies to this day, including the 1961 UN declaration on narcotic drugs. And in all of this time, there’d been no effort to actually identify the real value of the plant, and efforts have been underway more recently to get coca descheduled or rescheduled. In the UN system, coca leaf is now scheduled alongside with fentanyl and heroin as among the most dangerous drugs in the world. And the efforts that we’ve been trying to do is to get it to either be scheduled to the point where it’s seen to be of problemed but medicinal potential, or better yet, descheduled altogether so that we can create a licit market for the plant.
And here’s the reason for that. We have 250,000 families in Colombia that grow coca to survive. We need to give them a licit outlet for their product. Colombia, as a nation, needs the revenue, the tax revenue that can come from the international commercialization of the leaf to pay for the cost of peace. Having drained its treasury for 60 years to pay the cost of a war that would’ve not lasted a day without the sordid profits of prohibition. And above all, the world’s population has a right to benefit from this plant.
Andrew Weil: We have an enormous substance abuse problem in our country, and a lot of it has to do with stimulant abuse. And there’s also the problem of I think the reckless prescribing of stimulants to kids.
Tim Ferriss: Andy, could I ask you to bookmark that for a second? Because I want to give people a window into coca leaf so they understand the subjective experience for a second.
Andrew Weil: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: In Peru and other places — I mean, shocking to me, I think it was in Peru where I saw they were selling boxes of coca leaf tea in the international departures wing and I was like, “Guys, I want to take this with me but I can’t.”
The subjective effect of drinking coca leaf tea is, among other things, a stimulant effect that is far less for me than a half a cup of coffee, but without the subsequent crash that may be due to any number of things. I think it could be a glucose spike and then the subsequent crash, but it is very, very, very mild.
Andrew Weil: Okay. Now we have to say that coca leaf tea is not the most efficient way to use coca.
Tim Ferriss: No, it isn’t. It isn’t.
Andrew Weil: The traditional way is to hold leaves in your mouth and moisten them, add an alkali, which promotes absorption of the alkaloids, and let it slowly diffuse into the bloodstream. Now, I don’t think people up here are going to chew a mouthful of leaves, but I’ve always thought we could make a lozenge or a chewing gum that would reproduce that effect.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you could have a snus packet, like nicotine.
Andrew Weil: Yeah. Right, right. But the stimulant effect is so much milder, and Wade can talk to this too, I think than coffee for example, more than any of the pharmaceutical stimulants.
Wade Davis: The really fascinating literature is in the late 19th century, when physicians traveling in Peru were aware of the hazards of cocaine, but not yet judging the leaves reflexively. And the reports have this ingenuous quality, Tim, like, I mean, there’s one from the head of the British Medical Association who was 78 years old, and he gets up in the morning, walks halfway across Scotland, climbs a mountain, gets down, doesn’t eat all day, and says, “Well, that was quite a day.” In other words, there’s this — Mortimer calls it, like, “the stimulant that’s not a stimulant.”
And so this is really the way the plant operates, the subtlety of it. You don’t feel you’re stimulated. You just recognize the results of having been able to focus, concentrate, and remain at task in a creative way through a long period of time. If we do a little thought experiment. If I told you there was a plant that you could take that gave you a slight lightness of being, a slight kind of skip in your step, a sense of well-being that eliminated all these sort of existential little neuroses that we all suffer as conscious beings, and it allowed you to focus at task whatever that creative task was, whether it was a spinning of wool or the writing of digital code, and you could sit at task all day long concentrating on task with immense focus, with no sense of being under the influence of any plant, nothing as harsh as a second cup of coffee, and you found yourself at the end of the day ready to go home, have dinner, and do it all over again the next day, the truth is that coca has this capacity to improve our lives.
Andrew Weil: It also helps with weight management, Tim, because it makes you less hungry and feeling like you want to move. So that is a very desirable thing that many people would find useful. And I think the mood elevating effects of coca are very significant.
Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a question on the mind of a lot of listeners. I’ll also just add in, I have used the sort of mouth buckle in the form of, goes by a million different names, Mambe or whatever. And even in that case, very, very mild. And what I would say if I were to compare it to other things, as my long-term listeners might imagine, I’ve tried modafinil, I’ve tried the various amphetamines, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, and the difference is that, number one, you have thousands of years of human use documented in the case of coca.
Secondly, I did not seem to develop any type, I’m sure you do, develop some tolerance. But for instance, if I use modafinil for two or three days and I stop, I immediately feel a physical requirement to use it to get back to my prior baseline. And that does not happen in the case of coca. It certainly happens in the case of caffeine for me.
Andrew Weil: And cocaine.
Tim Ferriss: And cocaine. Right. But the question I want to ask is, Wade, you mentioned this enormous number of families dependent on growing coca. And on an individual level, I can see how, hey, if you ship me a small box of coca leaf for my personal use, there’s no way I’m going to convert that into cocaine. But how do you on a national level, if these farms are preexisting, decouple the good of licit coca while simultaneously constraining the evils of cocaine production? Is that possible?
Wade Davis: Well, I mean, the thing there is that the status of coca has no relevance whatsoever to the cartels. With coca as a prohibited substance, they’ve made fortunes, shipping cocaine by the ton for 50 years in the United States. And were coca leaves to be legal with a licit commercial export market, you would still maintain the same controls over the illicit production of cocaine that you have today. So it’s kind of irrelevant.
The critical thing is that crop substitution programs are an illusion because how do you transport to market cacao or bananas when you can take coca paste and put it in your mochila and walk down the trail? And so this expansion of coca production is going on dramatically and it’s having huge impacts on tropical rainforests. The deforestation since the peace agreement in Colombia is very disturbing. And yet we have millions of acres of already cut over land that we could cultivate coca on for the well-being of the people.
And I think it’s worth just thinking about the history of this plant, 8,000 years, one of the most amazing things about coca is that it’s been domesticated not once, not twice, but three separate times in human history. That is unheard of.
Andrew Weil: And Tim, I think one approach to the problem you brought up is education, which I’m a great believer in. I think if people knew what coca was and understood its benefits, they would demand it, they’d want it. And that includes even people who use cocaine. I have known a number of people who got strung out on cocaine and experienced a lot of negative effects from it. And when they tried coca and used it properly, they saw that it was a much more desirable state and they didn’t want to use cocaine anymore. I think that’s something we could do.
By the way, I should also mention that through an accident of history, coca is in Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act, not Schedule I like cannabis and psychedelics. It got there. And Schedule II is substances that have a high potential for abuse but have recognized therapeutic application. It’s only there because cocaine has limited uses as a medical drug in ophthalmology and dentistry, but that makes it a little easier to leverage coca out of that controlled substance box. It’s just a matter of demonstrating that there are therapeutic applications that the FDA could approve.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so I want to fill in a gap and then come back to problem solving. But before we get to the problem solving and policy work, I’ll plant a seed, which is if these farmers suddenly could legally ship product for export or domestic use in the form of coca, could they actually get around the cartel or would they be putting a bullseye on their forehead? That’s a question not for now, but for later.
What I’d like to talk about first is the indigenous cultural context in which coca is used and its importance, right? Because as you mentioned, I mean, it’s not exactly ubiquitous in South America, but in a handful of countries, coca is considered, for lack of a better term, a master plant, and a sacred plant.
Wade Davis: First of all, there are four different varieties that Tim Plowman identified of cultivated coca, two species each with two different varieties. And we now know that from DNA analysis that the progenitor of all four varieties was a wild coca called Erythroxylum gracilipes that grows along the eastern flanks of the Andes, in La Ceja de la Montaña, all the way from Venezuela down to Bolivia. And what this means is that, at three times in pre-Columbian history, human beings came upon this delicate little shrub in the forest with fruits, the color and the size of rubies and beautiful little white flowers and delicate foliage and said, “Ha, that’s the one.” And it was domesticated three times in the Montaña of Colombia, in the Yungas of La Paz in Bolivia and Peru, and in the Northwest Amazon. And that is extremely rare in the history of plant domestication.
And not only was it domesticated three times, everywhere it was domesticated, it was deemed to be the plant of all plants, the sacred plant. And that was its status through all of at least 8,000 years and remains its status amongst those who use the plant today.
Andrew Weil: Today, if you watch indigenous people using coca, very often they make what’s called a k’intu, which is an offering. They take three perfect leaves and put them together in a fan shape and blow on them and will whisper prayers to them. And this is a very common thing to observe [crosstalk]
Wade Davis: It’s more than that, Andy. When people meet on the trail, they make a cruceta of leaves and then they lift it to the highest sacred mountain, blow it —
Tim Ferriss: Wait, what is that? Cruceta? Just to provide context for people.
Wade Davis: A little cross of three leaves, three perfect leaves. And first of all, you point it to the mountain and then you blow the energy of the leaf to the mountain. And the metaphor is the energy leaf — like in the same way a cloud condenses to bring rain and fertility to the soil, so too this is creating your sort of connection to landscape. And every single thing that happens in the Andes, a field is planted, coca is sprinkled. Tools are brought back in the evening, coca is given to them. Coca appears as a symbol of the social contract and the social nexus of people.
This is why it’s so important, as the anthropologist Catherine Allen said, is that to deny people coca in the Andes is not like denying the Germans beer or the British tea or the French coffee. It’s actually an act of cultural genocide because you cannot be runakuna, you cannot be of the Andes, of Pachamama, if you do not use the leaves. And you must use them properly, and nothing causes more offense than tourists who stuff their leaves, as the people say, like horses eating hay.
And in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the highest consumption of coca in the world, men are constantly chewing hayo.
Tim Ferriss: What is hayo?
Wade Davis: Hayo is a name of coca in Colombia. That is erythroxylum novogranatense, a variety of novogranatense, which is a coca of Colombia and the coca used today by the mamas of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. But they contemplate the day to come, they contemplate the day that they’ve lived. You begin to chew leaves when you are of an age to marry. And so the chewing of leaves is the expression of the essence of who you are as a people, and that happens to be a culture that believes that their prayers literally maintain the cosmic balance of the world. And so in all of these societies, the act of chewing coca is an act of being alive and to be denied the use of coca is to suffer a kind of existential eradication that is complete.
Now to be fair, indigenous people throughout the Americas have the right to use coca in most jurisdictions, but of course the cost of coca skyrocketed with the illicit market. And so there are many communities where the tradition of using coca is being lost simply because of the price of the leaves. But again, the issue for us, I think, in our initiative is not just a traditional use of the leaf, but the right of all peoples in all places in the world to benefit from the incredible gift that this plant represents. It’s Latin America’s greatest gift to the world and it’s one that’s been denied in a way that’s been incredibly unproductive.
Tim Ferriss: I guess potatoes are a pretty good gift too, right? So let me come back. I promised to do a call back to the question that I had bookmarked. I mean, doing homework for this in conversation with you guys, also lots of text messages and so on, I mean, it seems like there are many reasons that if one could wave a magic wand to create a licit trade of coca, it would be a good idea. You would have dramatic impact on indigenous land rights, you would curtail deforestation because things wouldn’t be pushed to the outer edges where they can be better hidden. Certainly the sustenance and viability of these communities who are already operating farms. Not to mention the potential global impact if this were to be more widely available, certainly pending or parallel with lots more research, right? There’s a lot of good that could come of it.
Could these farms be converted to legal trade without these farmers having a bullseye painted on their head by cartel who are dependent on them for producing their product?
Wade Davis: It’s not as if the cartels are going to roll over and say, “Oh, great. Sell your tea to Andy Weil, Inc.” On the other hand, the point is that the cartels are already out of control in Colombia and doing whatever they want anyway and they will continue to grow coca as they want to grow coca and continue to produce enormous quantities of illicit cocaine. Whether or not individuals will be free to grow coca with impunity, obviously there’s going to be conflict. But if the state has a national interest in the cultivation, a licit cultivation of coca, they’ll have an interest in protecting those who are growing the coca. It’s not going to be some kind of smooth transition.
But the point is that the situation in Colombia, for example, is already completely chaotic with the production having skyrocketed since the peace agreement and parts of the country now being inaccessible and that’s really a failure of leadership by the federal state. But I don’t think that’s a reason not to move forward with creating a licit product for the farm families who have been waiting for this.
Tim Ferriss: Andy, maybe you could speak to this next, just to rotate here. What is the wedge in the door, right? Because this would be a big long-term undertaking to rehabilitate coca. So what are sort of tangible next steps you think would move the needle in a positive direction? Is it funding research? Is it pilot programs of some type for legal products? What do you think?
Andrew Weil: I think it’s got to be multi-pronged. One is creating consumer demand for it, creating a market in North America for coca. If people want it, if consumers want it, that will move the needle quite a bit.
Secondly, there have to be FDA-recognized approved uses of it, which there now are not. And that has to be demonstrated, has to be supported by research. Some obvious ones are for the treatment of GI disorders, for treatment of substance abuse disorders. I think possibly for treatment of ADHD, for example, with a much safer stimulant. I think the metabolic indications, there’s great potential there that needs some research to demonstrate that. But if this shows potential for preventing or treating type 2 diabetes, that would be enormous. And I think we can make a list of these things.
So I think we’ve got to work on all these fronts, but to me, the first thing is making people aware of what coca is. Most people don’t know anything about it and if they do, they just think of it as the source of cocaine. So that’s where we’re starting.
Wade Davis: There was a big effort and a very hopeful effort to get the UN to reschedule coca. And this was done at the request of both the Bolivian and the Colombian governments. And the hope, as I mentioned, was that coca would be taken out of schedule. Andy mentioned its coke is in Schedule II in the United States, but by the international statutes of the UN, it’s still Schedule I. And the goal was to try to get it completely descheduled as a benign plant that it is.
The group that met in Vienna decided against that and to maintain the status quo to the disappointment of all advocates. And the rationale was a little strange. The reason that coca remained the equivalent of fentanyl is that cocaine could be extracted from coca. Well, everybody knows that. And the fact that nothing stopped the cartels extracting cocaine by the ton. So it made no sense that logic, but because of that, coca remains scheduled. And that was a big disappointment, but that effort continues.
Andrew Weil: But we are seeing movement in the US with, there’s been movement with cannabis, there’s been movement with psychedelics. A lot of this has been, I think, promoted by veterans demanding access to these treatments for mental health conditions, but things finally have loosened up. And maybe as part of that momentum, we can introduce discussions of coca and getting some movement there as well.
Tim Ferriss: I think it’s possible. My sort of pragmatic hat is always wondering, well, if we have many, many, many people listening to this podcast, there are probably policymakers. There are individuals, certainly, who say to themselves, “Hey, I would love to cut down on my coffee. Maybe give coca a spin. Sounds mild. Maybe doing a few days of that would be wonderful.” But I don’t know what, then, their next step is or how the demand or interest is harnessed in a way that leads to broader change. Do you have any thoughts on getting specific stakeholders to take any next steps?
Because chances are you have people from every possible walk listening to this. You likely have scientists who are perhaps psychedelic adjacent, maybe they are stimulant adjacent, who are interested. Of course, there’s a fundraising question, but that’s solvable, I think. I would be willing to help fund some research. What else can be done?
Andrew Weil: To the scientists I would say, this is an incredibly interesting plan with a fascinating history, cultural relevance, chemistry, pharmacological effects, and it hasn’t been studied. It’s just waiting there. This would be a rich subject for investigation. So I would think that scientists who are curious about things of this sort, medicinal plants, medical botany, natural products, would want to take a look at this.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just say because it’s Schedule II versus Schedule I, it makes, presumably, the process for researching it much easier and much less expensive.
Wade Davis: But I would say, Tim, to the entrepreneurs who might be listening, the person who manages to crack this nut has the potential to make enormous wealth, because I think that the qualities of coca are such that they could very easily compete on the level that coffee is presented to the world. It’s just a much, much better natural stimulant, a more effective one, a more benign one, a more useful one. So when the dam breaks, it will be enormous. And again, you have issues of intellectual property, but again, this is a plant that’s been used for 8,000 years by everybody. It’s very difficult for anyone to claim the intellectual rights to this plant. And as some good friends of mine say, in this case, the plant itself has agency and the plant wants to be known to people.
And the other element of this is storytelling. I mean, Andy and I are in the midst of raising funds to make a film that will celebrate, in a positive sense, coca and the whole tradition. And it’s a story of social justice. It’s a story of spiritual illumination. It’s a story of Andean pre-history, incredible story of cultural celebration, ethnographic richness. And I think if people embraced the story, they would be deeply moved.
And at the same time, it’s also a story of incredible violation of human rights and the egregious way by which this plant has been demonized speaks to larger issues that we face as we try to find a way to live on this planet. And so, I think the story is so rich.
Andrew Weil: And Wade and I have been involved in an effort to rehabilitate coca for some time. In the 1970s, I started a not-for-profit foundation called the Beneficial Plant Research Association whose aim was to conduct research, make people aware of lesser known medicinal plants. And the main one we focused on was coca. We were way ahead of our time, but we had wonderful people involved in this effort.
And the group lapsed, but I revived it a couple of years ago and it’s now very robust. We have some really great scientists behind it. And I would urge listeners to check our website, which is bpra.org and read about the Coca Project and what we are involved with.
Tim Ferriss: bpra.org. Is that right?
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If people were interested in potentially supporting the film, is that where they should go to contact folks?
Andrew Weil: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. So, that’s one that people can latch onto.
Now, Wade, you were delivering a summons, a call to action to entrepreneurs. As luck would have it, we may have an entrepreneur in our midst. Known for True Food Kitchen, not only Matcha Kari. So Andrew, if you were going to market and you’re like, “You know what? Let me pave the way.” I’m not saying that’s your plan, but if you decided I want to be the first to introduce coca, right? Coca Kari?
Wade Davis: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: You could come up with, I’m sure that you could do a line extension. Fantastic matcha for people who are interested.
Andrew Weil: By the way, matcha and coca are both green powders. So, I’m an advocate of green powders. And matcha, this is another one that I got interested in way before its time and I tried for a number of years to introduce it here unsuccessfully. And now, I mean, it is just unbelievable. The worldwide demand for it has completely stressed Japan’s capacity to produce it. So, that took maybe 15, 20 years for me to get that going. Coca is probably going to take a little longer, but I am determined.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I mean, what would be the levers or perhaps dominoes is a better metaphor that you would want to tip over on the path to introducing coca as a commercial product?
Andrew Weil: Even just one good study clearly demonstrating one of these effects that we’ve talked about, of helping people get off much more dangerous stimulants or regulating carbohydrate metabolism, helping to prevent type 2 diabetes — Wade, what do you think?
Wade Davis: Well, I mean, I think that focusing on what Andy and I know from our personal experiences is how fantastic coca is, how it works. I think all of us, Tim, as conscious human beings, suffer from these afflictions that the Buddhists talk about, the monkey mind, these little moments of neuroses or even depression.
Tim Ferriss: I’m lucky if it’s moments. My god, I would pay to have moments.
Wade Davis: And I know. I’ll say something very personal. I mean, I have two daughters and both of them for different reasons have been on some of these serotonin uptake inhibitors, Prozac. And never Ritalin, but I’ve watched that. And what I experienced in my life, which is a very productive life, is that I function perfectly well without coca. Just like old Schultes used to say, he chewed coca every day in the Amazon, he didn’t chew it in Boston. I find that if I run out of coca, my life goes on. It’s just not as nice a life and it’s not as productive a life.
But what I find is that I’m as susceptible as anybody to mood swings, to existential despair, whatever we call it. I think this is part of the human condition. In the same way that death is the price we pay for the glory of being alive, I think some of these little mental fuck-ups are what we pay for the price of being conscious.
Tim Ferriss: The ticket of entry, yeah.
Wade Davis: And that’s the whole thing about coca is that it takes care of that. Without having any sense that you’ve been drugged or even stimulated, you just find that stuff flitting your way. And it just makes for a more productive life.
I’ve written 24 books, Tim. And I’ve made 50 films and people, “Oh, he’s so productive.” And I just smile like the Cheshire Cat. Of course I am. And Andy knows exactly how and why.
I think probably Andy and I both share a certain frustration that you can’t talk people into this. It’s sort of show, don’t tell. And it’s so subtle. I remember the first time I ever really got behind coca. It was in the Putumayo above Sibundoy in Colombia, and Tim and I had gotten a bunch of leaves in Silvia and Tim was never one to rush a situation that was itself inherently pleasant. And so we just laid back in the sun. And I’d been with the Mamos, but I hadn’t really discovered the plant. I mean, Andy will tell you, you create a learned experience with these plants. And suddenly, I just felt like I was just where I wanted to be.
And that’s what Andy says. When Andy, and I’ve quoted him many times, first went to the Kubeo in ’73, wasn’t it, Andy?
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Wade Davis: And there’s a beautiful passage in one of Andy’s essays where he was exposed to mambe for the first time. Mambe, by the way, for the audience is just an Amazonian form of coca. It becomes a green powder like matcha and you don’t use it with an ad mix. The ad mixture as the ashes placed in the preparation so you end up swallowing the whole thing and you absorb the nutrients and so on.
But anyway, so Andy had been exposed to mambe and the next day with the men, they gather around this calabash and he walks away as I walked away in the Northwest Amazon with a spring to your feet, oblivious to the humidity. And as Andy said in that wonderful passage, “swinging my machete and feeling that I was just where I wanted to be.” And I think that’s a really great summation of the subjective effects of coca.
Andrew Weil: And can I say, I attribute at least some of my well-being to regular use of coca. By the way, today is my birthday.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, happy birthday.
Andrew Weil: And I am 84 and I feel pretty good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you look great.
Andrew Weil: Yeah, people always comment on how good I look and so forth. And I have to say coca has contributed to that.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I have many more questions, but I’ll try to contain, I could probably use some more coca to get this ADHD-OCD under control.
But for people who have heard and maybe latched onto something you said earlier, which is one good scientific study, right? I’m a firm believer in this because I’ve been very active on trying to establish firsts, pilots that might be a proof of concept that then catalyze more research, et cetera. Are there any particular researchers who people could look to fund?
Andrew Weil: Yes. So, let me mention one who was on our board of beneficial plants and that’s Chris McCurdy, who is a medicinal pharmacologist at the University of Florida.
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell the last name?
Andrew Weil: M-C-C-U-R-D-Y, Christopher McCurdy. He’s University of Florida. And he is the main person who’s researched kratom and had a lot of federal support for his studies of kratom. And I met with him and got him interested in coca. And he was determined to do a study of this. Now, I will just tell you, it has been a very torturous route for him to get leaves legally to study, but he finally just this week got his supply. I mean, you would not believe the red tape.
Tim Ferriss: Why is it so hard?
Andrew Weil: Because this is the problem with coca, that it’s just all these regulations and fear about it and confusion with cocaine. Anyway, he’s a very interesting person to talk to. But he has set up, he’s just about to get going. And he’s doing animal research first, but he’s using whole coca, trying to disentangle the effects of the different alkaloids. But one of his interests is looking at this possibility of regulating carbohydrate metabolism. So, he’s the main person at the moment that I know who is doing research in this area and he’s very good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I was wondering, I looked him up while we were talking, might not be a fit, might be a fit, but Dr. Peter Hendricks has done some interesting work mostly looking at — well, I shouldn’t say mostly, but perhaps best known for looking at the potential use of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy as a promising treatment for cocaine use disorder. So there might be room for looking at, as strange as it might sound to people, coca for cocaine use disorder. That might be too hard to sell.
Andrew Weil: I’ve proposed that in an article that I wrote long ago, saying that this would be one of the possible uses to wean people off of cocaine onto coca. That would be a big step up.
Tim Ferriss: I had not even thought about, and I feel foolish, realized that even if it’s Schedule II, if you are, say, using methylphenidate, aka ritalin or something else, you just synthesize the damn stuff. Whereas if you have to get actual organic coca leaves, that adds a whole different layer of headache in terms of procuring it, right? Because now you’re dealing with importation and this, that, and the other thing. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about that wrinkle. There’s always a wrinkle.
Okay, got it. And for someone like Christopher McCurdy, how much do research studies like this cost? Do you have any ballpark for folks? In my experience, it’s like, okay, the number of subjects determines a lot of the cost.
Andrew Weil: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: So, if you want to power the study, if you want to try to get a properly powered study, maybe you want to increase the scope for more people to participate, et cetera. But do you have any idea? And I know you’re not speaking for him, but do you have any idea what something like that might cost?
Andrew Weil: More than you would think. So that is a challenge. But Chris has found that the federal government and National Institute on Drug Abuse is willing to fund these studies. So that’s very promising.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I had Nora Volkow of NIDA on the podcast a couple of years ago and it was a really good conversation. And I don’t know if this is public, might have to scratch it, but she was in the Oval Office for the executive order related to psychedelics. And I was like, “Man, that’s awesome.”
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And she’s so brilliant. So I don’t know what her current status is within NIDA. She might still be running it, but there seems to be a seat change afoot. So, the timing could be very serendipitous to try to kick something off now, particularly on the research front.
For people who might be wondering, I’ll just throw out some numbers. I mean, early on, this is 2015, helping to fund some of the initial psilocybin studies looking at depression at Hopkins, for 50k, you could make a huge, huge, huge difference.
Andrew Weil: Really? That’s great.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not necessarily millions of people. It depends on, again, the size, the ambition. And you don’t want to be penny wise and pound foolish, right? If you can fund more and you want to drive the possibility for a statistically meaningful outcome that is suitable for publishing and defensible, then maybe you write a bigger check, right? Especially if you’re going to wait all that time, because science is pretty slow when it’s done properly.
Andrew Weil: Wade, can you tell us anything about what’s going on in Canada? Because the regulations in Canada are a little more favorable than they are in the US and there’s some research interests up there.
Wade Davis: There’s nothing really definitive. I mean, I think one opening in the States could be Bobby Kennedy. Bobby, few people know, but when his father was killed, was sent by the family to Colombia. And he fell in love with Colombia and I’ve been in Colombia with Bobby with the Mamos, chewing coca. He totally understands the plant and he certainly understands the distinction between coca and the alkaloid cocaine. So I think there’s an opening there which could be very promising.
Andrew Weil: And one area that I very much agree with him on is his initiative to change psychiatry and move it away from the biomedical model, which I think has been really failed us.
Wade Davis: I mean, I think this whole coca story, you slam up against the whole kind of failure of the War on Drugs and the ideology of the War on Drugs.
There’s a very funny account where in October, end of October 2020, there was this bust at the Philadelphia International Airport of 15 pounds of what was called green cocaine. And the customs agents sort of heralded this great sign of the vigilance of their colleagues and so on and anyone who knew anything about anything could see that that green cocaine was mambe and also in the bus was a brown paste, which everybody knew would’ve been a tobacco paste. Now, tobacco kills 400,000 people every year, but it’s legal. So this was not of concern to the agents, but the green cocaine was. And they analyzed it and discovered it had some cocaine in it, trivial amounts, so that if anyone had tried to just snort the mambe, they just would’ve plugged their nose most unpleasantly with a powder the consistency of talcum powder.
But the thing that was so disturbing about the bust is that after 60 years of War on Drugs, you had customs agents who still didn’t know the difference between coca and cocaine after expending a trillion dollars on this failed campaign. And that was really the equivalent, if you think about, of Eliot Ness busting a truckload of potatoes in violation of the Volstead Act. Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good comparison. I like that.
Wade Davis: Or a peach. We don’t deny us the right to enjoy the luscious fruit of a peach because of the cardioactive glycosides found within the pit of every peach, right? Not to kind of push the metaphor, but they’re truly apples and oranges.
And so, I think when you combine that in-the-moment idiocy, together with the really pernicious history by which this plant has been demonized, I mean, Andy said earlier that these countries remain countries of conquered and conqueror. And in this era where we’re so sensitive to language, if people were aware of the language, and I wrote a long piece for Rolling Stone called the “Secret History of Coca,” the language being used by those who crafted the very documents that we live by to this day is so hideous that it would cause anybody to be immediately dismissed from any position in our country today. And yet that language, accusing coca users of being pornog — because they make this stuff up and it was all driven by the same guy, Anslinger, who created us, gave us Reefer Madness. And so we’re still living by that mindset, which has been utterly exposed as a racist and colonial conceit that it was.
Andrew Weil: And also, I think that coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relations with the natural world, really failing to see that plant for what it is, confusing it with this one component of it, and then getting ourselves in enormous amounts of trouble.
And in my career as a physician, I have worked for years and years to help people understand the differences between whole plants, natural products, and isolated compounds. I mean, I think isolated compounds have their place in medicine, but very often I see that these complex natural mixtures work better, are much safer, often have effects that we don’t have pure compounds that work for. And coca is a perfect example of that.
Wade Davis: And Andy, when you say that relation to the natural world, in a social sense, it’s expressed in Peru, as well. I mean, one of the great rituals I’ve participated in is called the mojonamiento. It’s out of Cusco where, once each year the fastest young boy in every hamlet is given the gift of becoming a woman, and you have to lead all able-bodied men on this ritual run, but it’s not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet, run down to the base of the sacred mountain, Antakillqa, to 9,000 feet. Then you run to over 16,000 feet and you fall across two soaring Indian ridges over the course of this 24-hour race that’s less a race than a ritual of ordeal. And the idea is that, as you enter this race, through pure exhaustion, you make the sacrifice that makes it sacred. It’s from the Latin.
And I did that race at the age of 48, the oldest man ever to do it and the only outsider to do it. And I only got through that race by chewing more coca in one day than anyone in the 8,000-year history of the plant.
But the point is what Andy’s saying about our relation with the natural world, what that race is really about is expressing a sense of obligation and belonging. You’re running the perimeter of the lands. There’s sacred mounds of earth, jitos, mahones, where the Wayllakama spin to bring the energy of the woman to the mountaintop where coca is given to Pachamama. And so the race becomes a ritual of belonging. You’re demonstrating your ownership, also your obligation to preserve that land.
So, you see, coca in that sense is as powerful and adjunct to culture as ayahuasca might be amongst the peoples of the Anaconda. You can’t do that run without coca, Tim. Coca is the mediator. They often say that the first to taste the leaves was Santísima María in the kind of syncretic myth of origins when she lost the Christ child. And in her grief, she sampled a leaf and that gave her the spirit to continue. Well, obviously that’s a syncretic fusion of pre-Columbian and Catholic ideas, but that’s an indicator of its centrality in the stream of existence in the Andes.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask just a personal question of you guys, which I’m sure has occurred to a lot of listeners or viewers. And that is, why do you care so much about this? In the hierarchy of reasons, what’s at the top? What is it for you, Andy?
Andrew Weil: For me, it is the confusion of a plant with an element of it, which is I think a problem that I see in medicine greatly, that we just failed to understand those differences. And I would like to help educate more people about that. And as I said, I think coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relationship with a plant.
Tim Ferriss: And also just to, I suppose, underscore one thing, which is not what you’re saying. You were not saying that all plants are therefore safe, right?
Andrew Weil: No, obviously.
Tim Ferriss: That whole plants are therefore — you don’t want to go out and start chugging a bunch of hemlock tea, right? There’s plenty of stuff. However, piece versus whole, component versus entire plant are different.
Andrew Weil: Yeah, that’s a big one.
Tim Ferriss: They are just different.
Andrew Weil: And by the way, in our society particularly, I think there is great fear of nature and we tend to see nature as hostile. Many people I know think if you just go out and randomly munch plants in your backyard, you’ll likely die. The percentage of plants that can seriously harm you is pretty small. I mean, there aren’t many hemlocks out there. There’s a lot of things that don’t taste good. There’s a lot of things that might give you an upset stomach, but there’s not a lot of things that can kill you or cause serious harm.
I once had dinner with the chief technical advisor to one of the big European supplement companies and he was Austrian. He had traveled all over the world and he said that one thing that struck him was the extreme fear of nature in the English-speaking world. I mean, I’d never heard anyone say that, but he said this is an attitude that he found very common in the UK and Canada and Australia and the US, New Zealand. And he said, very different to what you see, for example, in German-speaking Europe, where people tend to regard nature as friendly, benign, helpful. And in German culture, there’s great use of medicinal plants in natural forms, very different from what we have here. So that’s just an interesting perspective. I’d never noticed that before.
Tim Ferriss: Where do you think that comes from? Any ideas?
Andrew Weil: I wonder. Wade, any suggestions?
Wade Davis: I mean, you certainly see it amongst fungalphobes as you always talk about, Andy, the fear of mushrooms.
Andrew Weil: Yeah.
Wade Davis: But Tim, back to your question, for me, I revere coca because of what it’s done for my life, but also it symbolizes for me everything I care about in terms of cultures as an anthropologist and everything I’ve ever fought for in terms of the rights of indigenous people. And it’s, to me, one of the most egregious violations of the rights of other cultures. And it’s also a denial of the genius of other cultures. So it symbolizes for me everything that I’ve stood up against in my career and it happens to be a plant that has brought benefits to me, enormous benefits. But I’ll give you, if I could share one anecdote that shows how crazy —
Tim Ferriss: Of course.
Wade Davis: — this all is. I don’t know if you remember, but some years ago Peru qualified for the first time in 10 years for the World Cup. And I saw the victory match on a screen in Cusco. It was played in Lima. And then the captain of the Peruvian team, who played for a squad in Sao Paulo, in a random drug test, was shown to have metabolites of cocaine in his urine and he was going to be kicked off the team. And this was going to make a huge international scandal.
And his lawyer called me from Sao Paulo and I said, “Well, wait a minute. Doesn’t he come from Lima?” “Yeah.” “Well, they just went through Christmas. Didn’t he go to Ayacucho or Cusco?” “Yeah.” “Oh, he must have stayed at the Monasterio Hotel in Cusco because that’s the nicest hotel.” “Yeah, that’s where he stayed.” Well, that hotel has huge vats of coca tea available at all times for its clientele for altitude sickness. And that’s what he had done. He had drunk copious amounts of coca tea and because of the idiocy of our understanding of the difference between the plant and the drug, this could have been an international incident because you well know that Peruvians, like all Latin Americans, take their football very seriously, but we got him off.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very seriously. Andy, it looks like you were going to say something. Do you have anything to add to that?
Andrew Weil: Nope. I think, for different reasons, we come from different places, we both are very passionate about this issue.
Wade Davis: Coca’s always seemed to be defined as what it is not. It’s not cocaine and presenting this plant in all of its glory — I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, Andy’s a real plant guy. He’s a real ethnobotanist, a real physician who’s always had plants in his practice. I went through a period of time where I was very much a botanical explorer, but I’m fundamentally a storyteller, a writer, an anthropologist, but this plant wrapped its arms around me when I was 19 years old and has never let me go. And I have a deep fidelity, it’s hard to explain. I don’t normally speak in this language, but this plant has given me so much and has allowed me to explore and have such extraordinary experiences in the field in pursuit of its mysteries and its wonder that I feel that liberating coca is the final act of my professional life. I feel that very sincerely.
And it also brings me back to Andy because Andy was like always my big brother. Andy and Tim Plowman, who were great friends, both acolytes of Schultes. And for me, I was able to come along as their kid brother. So the relationship with Andy, to me, is enormously important emotionally, spiritually even. And if Andy and I, in the memory of Tim, who tragically died way too young, at the age of 45, the great botanical authority on coca, he died of AIDS. And incidentally, as I was reading and doing his eulogy that I conceived the book One River, which is a biography of our great professor, Richard Evan Schultes, we’re doing this in part in memory of Tim. I’m sure Andy would agree.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground. What I’m going to do also to try to consolidate next steps for people, for anyone listening or watching, is I’ll create tim.blog/coca, so on my website —
Andrew Weil: That’d be great.
Tim Ferriss: That’ll lead to this episode and at the very top of the show notes, we’ll have a link to the bpra.org. We’ll have a link to some of the researchers who were mentioned, including any others that you guys might think of after the fact.
Wade Davis: It’d be wonderful. It’d be great —
Andrew Weil: We would most appreciate it.
Wade Davis: — to link to some of the pieces that Andy and I have written would be really great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. We’ll put a bunch of stuff at the top with a bias for people who are listening. If they’re like, “This is all great. I don’t want to be purely a passive consumer of education or edutainment. I actually want to put a dent in the world,” then we’ll have that at the top because I don’t want to bury that stuff in terms of possible next actions for people. So folks, that’ll be at tim.blog/coca, C-O-C-A, just like Coca-Cola, not a coincidence by the way.
I’ll read you, this is a piece on Eater. People can look it up. Maybe I’ll link to it, actually. “An unassuming set of buildings in Maywood, New Jersey, less than 10 miles from Manhattan, holds a surprising secret: It’s what might arguably be called the cocaine capital of the United States. Here, a chemical company manufactures cocaine legally, with special permission from the US government, all in the service of a familiar company: Coca-Cola.” Cola, by the way, just for people who like little bits of trivia comes from kola, K-O-L-A. Well, in English, at least. African nut known for its caffeine content. So there you go.
Wade Davis: Right away, Tim, Coca-Cola notoriously had a secret coca plantation in Hawaii.
Andrew Weil: Hawaii, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding. Scoundrels. Look at that.
Andrew Weil: That is the only legal export of coca from Peru is to that chemical company, Stepan Chemical in Maywood, New Jersey. And the cocaine is extracted and sold for pharmaceutical use and the rest of the leaves are made into an extract, which is a secret flavoring ingredient in Coca-Cola.
Wade Davis: And in the 1961 UN convention on narcotic drugs, there was one specific exclusion of coca solely for that company.
Andrew Weil: And I got to go, in Peru, to where they were getting their leaves from, and they were trashy leaves. I mean, it was literally the sweepings on the floor. Stuff that Wade and I would not chew.
Tim Ferriss: Drinking sawdust. Botanical sawdust. Well, another bit of trivia for folks, if they care. 7 Up used to contain lithium citrates.
Andrew Weil: Oh, yes, right.
Tim Ferriss: Back in the day. Those old soda companies had some stuff figured out. Well, gentlemen, is there anything else, before we start to wind to a close, that you would like to add? Certainly, I would love you guys to mention where people can find you online, if you’d like them to go in any particular direction. And anything else that you would like to add. Andy?
Andrew Weil: My website is drweil.com, D-R-W-E-I-L.com. There’s a lot of health information there. And I am the founder of the Andrew Weil University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. We train physicians and health professionals, and that website is awcim.org and I’m very proud of our work there. We’ve graduated almost 3,000 physicians and other allied health professionals from our very intensive trainings, which include really good instruction on botanical medicine.
Tim Ferriss: I love it. And people can also find you on Instagram, X, et cetera, @drweil and presumably you don’t have a tap into the back of your brain for that. So I’m sure there’s nice, good publishing of valuable content coming out there so people can check that out. And then Wade?
Wade Davis: I just wanted to say, Tim, if I could just insert this in case you could use it, is that I’ve made a lot of reference to the egregious language by those who are responsible for the language of the UN Declaration, but maybe I could just read. The key figure was an acolyte of Anslinger, who was the notorious anti-drug warrior that we almost joke about with Reefer Madness. But this man’s name was Pablo Osvaldo Wolff, and he was the chief of the addiction producing drug section of the World Health Organization. He not only conceived, he wrote the language of coca demonization in that, but listen to what he says, and this is from a lecture to the Royal Society of Medicine in London, on the very eve of that commission led by Fonda going to Peru.
“The Indio who does not chew coca leaves is clear-sighted, intelligent, and lighthearted, willing to work, vigorous, and resistant to diseases; the coquero, on the contrary, is … apathetic, lazy, insensitive to his environment; his mind is befogged; his emotional reactions are rare and violent, he is morally and intellectually anesthetized, social subdued, almost a slave. Moral degeneration accompanies the physical; lying is one of the outstanding characteristics, probably due to lack of moral equilibrium. Criminality is high, and barbaric forms of homicide can only be explained by a certain moral insensibility.
“We are convinced that coca-leaf chewing is a social evil; the chronic consumption of these leaves constitutes a social poison which undermines the physical and mental health of the population. … The children of coqueros are markedly deficient in intelligence.…There is no doubt that the habit of chewing coca leaves is one of the most powerful reasons for the backwardness and misery of the Indian population … the last link in a chain of social and medico-social scourges, which include pauperism, bad housing conditions, deficient nutrition, rudimentary or completely absent education, alcoholism, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and other infections, and promiscuity, to mention only the worst calamities and miseries.”
Andrew Weil: I never heard that, Wade. I never heard that.
Tim Ferriss: That’s quite a list of offenses.
Wade Davis: This is quoted in my Rolling Stone piece, Andy. You just can’t believe the language. “The remedy of the moment is gradual disintoxication of the native, diminishing the production as well as the consumption of coca by means of a suitable education; by abolishing the superstition of the magic action and the well-being of leaves; by prohibiting initiation of young…” Goes on and on.
“Only with skill and patience can coca addiction be abolished, but it can be done.… Christianized Indians no longer live in the former wretched conditions and thus show themselves physically and mentally capable of freeing themselves from coca-leaf chewing and addiction.” And you have to think, this is the man who wrote the statutes that we turn to today in the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is the language that the UN World Health Organization has recently affirmed by refusing to deschedule or reschedule coca.
Tim Ferriss: It might be time for an update.
Wade Davis: I mean, it’s that bad. Now, can you think of any other policy that we would live by today? It’s like policies have been written by, I don’t know, Hermann Goring or Goebbels dictating religious policies today in the United States of America and yet this is what we are trying to deal with and confront and it is so dark and so evil.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it sounds like A, terrible. B, time for an update. C, I’m sure a lot of the people who are adjacently or indirectly affirming this have no idea what it actually says. They have not read what you just read aloud. So worth another look, like a lot of things. And not saying it’s panacea, not saying that there shouldn’t be guide rails or guardrails, but that it’s worth another look.
And I do think the wedge in the door, to pull from language earlier, probably is A, awareness of the benefits. And I think you guys do a pretty damn fine job of showcasing the longitudinal productivity gains of moderate, sustained use and separately getting some science funded. And I think those are parallel tracks and the film itself being used as an educational tool to support the, I would say both of those, right? The later and the scientific exploration.
Because it strikes me, I mean, look, I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on the internet, nor am I a scientist, but I like to spend time with a lot of scientists. I think about some of the effects of coca and the appetite suppression, but the physical vigor in the absence of food. And I wonder, man, I would love to just take blood ketone measurements of these people.
Andrew Weil: Simple stuff, simple stuff.
Tim Ferriss: So simple, so, so straightforward. Well, guys, this has been wonderful. Any last closing comments, concerns, complaints?
Andrew Weil: Thank you for providing a forum to talk about this.
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.
Wade Davis: I would like to add, Andy, just one comment on what Tim just said and what you responded, how easy these experiments could have been done. I think we have to remember that it’s not an accident that they weren’t done. In other words, the nutritional study that you and Tim did in the 1970s could have been done in the 1920s.
It wasn’t done because people did not want anything that would affirm the possibility that the plant was anything but the demonic entity that they claimed it to be. So it’s important in all of this to remember, this wasn’t just an accident of history or casual neglect. This was a conscious attempt to demonize and eradicate a plant and not for pharmacological reasons, not for medical reasons, not for social reasons, for cultural and political and reasons of power.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to, by association, make policy makers feel like they need to carry the burden of what was truly a travesty, if they are, in part, those whose help we would like. But understanding the history is important. I mean, we’ll link to the Rolling Stone piece and also, Andy, anything else that you would like linked for people who want to check it out at tim.blog/coca. I mean, coca has been of incredible interest to me for decades now. It is of such cultural importance. It is of ecological importance.
Wade Davis: Economic importance.
Tim Ferriss: Economic importance. If you care about conservation, if you care about indigenous land rights, if you care about health and performance, period. Let’s say you don’t give a damn about what happens in South America, but you just say, “Wow, I feel like pounded dogshit after three cups of coffee and then I can’t sleep at night and then I’m dependent and I have a headache when I try to stop.” It’s worth digging a little deeper and educating yourself on coca.
It may not be available tomorrow, may not be available next year, but it is deeply, deeply interesting and endlessly fascinating as a possible subject of or focus of experiments. So I will leave it at that for now. We can always, and I’m sure we’ll be chatting more via text, but thank you guys very much. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you, Wade, that people can find you at daviswade.com. Is that right?
Wade Davis: Yep, that’s my website.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the main place. Anywhere else you would like to point people? We’ve got Wade Davis official on Instagram, X, @authorwadedavis.
Wade Davis: I think people would be intrigued by the book One River, which is really an account of Tim and I and coca and Schultes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great book. It is a great book.
Wade Davis: That book, in particular, would open people’s eyes.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Perfect. All right. Check out One River, folks. Everybody —
Andrew Weil: And again, we’re grateful for your support.
Wade Davis: Very much so.
Andrew Weil: I think it can make a big difference.
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.
Wade Davis: Thanks so much, Tim.
Andrew Weil: Very grateful.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I love — this is important stuff and it’s also, while I have this, before AI gobbles every podcast, I would like to surface subjects that are of importance that have not yet been reputationally de-risked, right? I don’t have to report to any corporate overlord who can fire me or throttle my sponsors or whatever it might be. So I have the incredible accidental luxury of being able to, and joy, of being able to have these conversations with folks like the two of you who are bringing in decades of expertise and research.
So always appreciate the time. Always nice to see you both. And for people listening, as always, show notes. Check it out, tim.blog/coca, C-O-C-A. We’ll go straight to this episode and give you more information on where you can learn more. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than as necessary to others and to yourself. Compassion, oh, yeah, that applies to yourself too. Don’t forget that. And as always, thanks for tuning in.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring the Many Benefits of Coca with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis (#871) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-06-26 01:08:26
“Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka”
— Wade Davis with Dr. Andrew Weil on the health benefits, sacred history, and unjust prohibition of the most misunderstood plant on Earth
Dr. Andrew Weil (@DrWeil) is a pioneer in integrative medicine and founder of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he holds the Lovell-Jones Endowed Chair and serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health.
Wade Davis (@wadedavisofficial) is an ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. From 2014 to 2024 he served as Professor of Anthropology and BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia, and from 2000 to 2013 as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.
Connect with the Beneficial Plant Research Association (BPRA):
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Website | Coca Leaf Research | Coca Leaf Documentary | Coca Leaf Retreat
“If I told you there was a plant that you could take that gave you a slight lightness of being, a slight kind of skip in your step, a sense of well-being that eliminated all these sort of existential little neuroses that we all suffer as conscious beings, and it allowed you to focus at task, whatever that creative task was, whether it was a spinning of wool or the writing of digital code, and you could sit at task all day long concentrating on task with immense focus, with no sense of being under the influence of any plant, nothing as harsh as a second cup of coffee, and you found yourself at the end of the day ready to go home, have dinner, and do it all over again the next day—the truth is that coca has this capacity to improve our lives.”
— Wade Davis
“[Coca is] as important to that [Indigenous Andes] population as peppermint and chamomile are in European medicine. It’s their major medicinal plant.”
— Andrew Weil
“Coca has been used in South America by virtually every culture of the Andean and Northwest Amazon for 8,000 years. And during that time, there’s been no evidence whatsoever of any toxicity, let alone addiction.”
— Wade Davis
“In coca, there are 14 alkaloids. Cocaine is one of them. They all have similar chemical structures, and none of them have ever been studied. Once we isolated cocaine from the leaf, everybody lost interest in everything else.”
— Andrew Weil
“Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.”
— Wade Davis
“As the anthropologist Catherine Allen said, to deny people coca in the Andes is not like denying the Germans beer or the British tea or the French coffee. It’s actually an act of cultural genocide because you cannot be runakuna, you cannot be of the Andes, of Pachamama, if you do not use the leaves.”
— Wade Davis
“I think that coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relations with the natural world, really failing to see that plant for what it is, confusing it with this one component of it, and then getting ourselves in enormous amounts of trouble.”
— Andrew Weil
“I feel that liberating coca is the final act of my professional life. I feel that very sincerely.”
— Wade Davis
Want to hear another episode that untangles the curse from the blessing of coca? Listen to this one with ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin about the 8,000-year history of the coca leaf, the varieties of coca and their uses, coca-leaf bonding among the Kogis of Northern Colombia, surviving altitude sickness in the Andes, the adventures of Richard Evans Schultes, ayahuasca and shamanic knowledge, the biocultural conservation of the rainforest, and much more.
The post The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring the Many Benefits of Coca with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis (#871) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-06-19 09:24:30
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby), the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, The Power Law, The Man Who Knew, and The World’s Banker. His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
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Tim Ferriss: So Sebastian, lovely to see you and thanks for making the time. I really appreciate it.
This episode (coming soon)
Sebastian Mallaby: Great to be with you, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I have a million different questions. Part of the challenge with this conversation was deciding which vector to take into the conversation knowing that we don’t have infinite time to talk today.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to just give you applause for writing some of my favorite books of the last many years. I am consistently impressed, and maybe, since I also put pen to paper every once in a while, depressed, just thinking relatively about my capabilities, but of your capacity to paint a picture of the players on a landscape, but also the games they play in ways that non-specialists can understand.
And I can’t recall who first recommended it. Frankly, I believe it was a hedge fund manager in New York City, but More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, certainly that was, in my particular case, followed by reading The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, which I didn’t expect to learn as much from because I’ve spent 20 years surrounded by venture capitalists and doing angel investing, 17 years of that in Silicon Valley. And yet, I still had hundreds of highlights and so many stories that grabbed me from that book, which I had not heard. And that made me very excited to read The Infinity Machine, which this is the new book. And I realized also I’d been pronouncing Demis’ name incorrectly for a very long time despite having met him at one point.
So Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence. My question for you, and we’re going to come back to present day for people who are interested, of course, in what has been painted as a race to IPO. I think there’s something to that in the air, so to speak, talking to people who are in San Francisco involved with these companies. But nonetheless, I wanted to ask how the genesis of this book came to be because you, it would appear, began exploring these waters on the early side, which leads to a meta question of just general book selection, but let’s focus on The Infinity Machine. How did this come to be? Where did the twinkle in the eye begin? What was the conversation, the thing you read that triggered the gingerbread trail that got you to this book?
Sebastian Mallaby: The Power Law, the book about venture capital, had come out in February of 2022. And while I was researching that, I’d been to lots of tech conferences, of course, including some in Europe and this twinkly eyed guy would show up, Demis Hassabis, and he would look totally approachable and kind of guy next door and unintimidating. And then he would get on the stage and out of his mouth would come this spiel about computer science, neuroscience, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, the history of movies, you name it. And that mixture of the approachability and the massive intellect always struck me as beguiling. And I thought, “Mm, this would be a great character to write about.” And then at the same time, I was aware of AlphaGo, the 2016 model that Demis’ team at DeepMind had built, which defeated the world champion at Go and then AlphaFold, which was the protein folding system.
And both of these things had the quality that you had this almost infinite search space, where the different permutations of the game of Go are almost infinite because they’re so big. The different permutations of how you can fold an amino acid chain into a protein shape are even bigger. And 130 zeros added onto the end of the number of permutations in Go. So you have these AI systems that could understand infinity. And so this idea of an infinity machine began to percolate and I figured, it’s interesting to me, probably at some point it will go mainstream, but even if it doesn’t go mainstream, I love it and I love Demis. And the two things together, I always look for the subject and the personality. I had both and I thought, “Okay, this is a go.” And I went to pitch Demis in early November 2022 and then I persuaded him to give me a lot of access. End of November, ChatGPT comes out and way earlier than I expected, my fringe subject went to the mainstream proving, Tim, that it’s better to be lucky than smart.
Tim Ferriss: That’s actually the first slide on my new venture capital firm. Muggle Thesis Capital is what I’m calling it. Now, what did it take to be deeply interested in the subject matter to find Demis compelling and then to pitch him on a book? Because your books are so deeply researched. And part of the reason for my very long praise earlier is that you’re very, very good, one of the best at taking incredibly complex subjects or concepts, transformer architecture could be one example from the current book, and laying them out in terms that are both intelligible to muggles, meaning people who are non-specialists, non-technologists, or non-financiers in the case of some of your other books, while I think, now it’s tough for a non-specialist to say this with conviction, but without dumbing it down and getting it wrong, if that makes sense. Nonetheless, you do a tremendous amount of research. How did you get from, “Demis is fascinating, subject matter is fascinating,” to, “I’m going to commit to this for my next book?” Because it just seems like such an enormous undertaking.
Sebastian Mallaby: Well, actually to me, the challenge of understanding a complex topic is the easy bit, because if you know you’ve got the right personality who can carry the story and it’s a subject that people either will care about for sure, or should care about at least, then doing the work of going deep is something that takes time, it takes effort, but I know I can do that. I’ve done it multiple times. That’s not difficult. What’s difficult is, has somebody done the book before? Has somebody else got some rival project which is going to derail me? You’ve made the point on your own podcast, Tim, don’t put a lot of effort into something where there just isn’t much leverage there. You could do the best book in the world, an A+ book on a C- topic, it would get you nowhere.
So the hard thing is to make sure it’s an A+ topic and an A+ personality. And then the deep dive is something, I just make sure I speak to enough experts who are insiders. I take the time. These books take me four years or so each time. So I give myself the oxygen to get deep, deep in with the insiders and that’s how I produce the accurate account.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I should point out perhaps, to people who don’t immediately pick it up, that the way you describe picking the book topic is exactly how a lot of the best tech investors choose startups. You don’t want an A+ team in a C+ market. It’s better to have a B- team in an A+ market and also looking at the competitive landscape. I mean, the way you laid it out is pretty much copy and paste.
I wanted to segue to some of my notes from the book and I’m not yet done with the book. The audio is incredible. I want to poach your narrator for my next book. But pulling up my Kindle notes, I wanted to ask you a question related to, this might sound very strange, but where divinity or God fits into the pursuit or development of superintelligence for different players in the space, if it does? And the reason I bring that up is that religion does recur in the book, both in the personal story of Demis but elsewhere. And it shows up repeatedly in so much as, I’ll give you one example, the closest Hassabis had come to landing a real investor was an eccentric financier named David Gammon. I want to hear more about this guy also. Financiers seemed open to making this unusual bet, I’m alluding to a few things, because his motives were themselves unusual, “There’s a deeply religious aspect to AGI,” Gammon explained to me later, it’s really finding God’s algorithm.
I think, it would seem at least, chatting with people in Silicon Valley that there are some who take it even further, right? Maybe this is how we find God. Maybe this is how we actually elicit the second coming. I mean, there’s a lot there. I’m just wondering to what extent this has popped up in your research, whether it’s reflected in the book or not.
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s one basic thing going on here and I’m going to take a slight detour, but it answers your question.
Tim Ferriss: Of course. Sure.
Sebastian Mallaby: So what we’re dealing with, with AGI, powerful intelligence that rivals human cognition is something that’s so powerful that it’s both exciting and scary and just hard to get your mind around. And so if you look, for example, at the 2009 speech that caused the foundation of DeepMind, this was Shane Legg, Demis’ co-founder, who gave a talk in 2009 about how superintelligence would arrive in 2030. So, unbelievably spot on prediction. And towards the end of that lecture, which is captured on a grainy video online, you see him pivot from explaining how algorithms are getting stronger, there’s more data online, computers getting more powerful and so we’re heading towards this intelligence explosion. And then he says, “And it’s going to be threatening. It’s going to do things we can’t control. It’s going to be human level. It might challenge us.” And as he says this, he has this sort of excited smile on his face and you think, “Well, that’s a bit strange.” He’s talking about potential doom and he’s smiling.
And then somebody in the audience says, “Wait, wait, wait, you’ve just told us, Shane, that this could be threatening to humanity and you haven’t provided any antidote and surely you’re going to tell us how we’re going to stop it.” At which point Shane turns around and says, “How do we stop it?” And he’s kind of giggling. And you think, “Why are you laughing at this dangerous thing?” And you realize that, for humans to contemplate annihilation is absurd and the absurd is a close cousin of humor. And the reason I tell this story is that it’s a springboard to the religion point, which is that this is such a hard thing to think about, that people reach for religious terminology when they’re around AI. They just do it naturally.
There’s this story about Ilya Sutskever who was the chief scientist at OpenAI. I talked to him a lot for this project. And there was a point when he was at a retreat with his fellow scientists and they were gathered in the evening around a fire pit. And he was talking about safety and he said, “Okay, I want to explain to you we might have an AI that’s dangerous. It wouldn’t be aligned with us. So here’s what we’re going to do with it.” And he produced an effigy which was supposed to represent a malign AI and he put it into the fire pit and he burnt it like a medieval cleric putting a witch to death. And so that’s just one example of this religion.
I’ll give you another one. So Demis one day was sitting with me in a park in North London. We would meet for two hours at a time and we would get deep into stuff. And there was another picnic table next to us where two people were having a normal quotidian conversation about some friend of theirs who’d gone to hospital and was she better, was she okay, et cetera, et cetera. I was seated opposite Demis who had gone into this riff about how he reads scientific papers after his kids go to sleep in the evening, from 10:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. And as he’s reading these papers, he says to me, “Reality is staring at me, screaming at me, calling at me to understand it, and I have to understand it. And if I can understand it, it’s like understanding nature better and therefore understanding the intelligence that might have created nature and I will be closer to what I would call God.”
And so for him, it’s a kind of quasi-quip spiritual quest to build the artificial intelligence. For Ilya, it’s a way of expressing the power of the artificial intelligence. There’s, I think the story of Levandowski, I forget his first name now, but the early, early engineer at what became Waymo later started a kind of church in worship of AI because AI is so omniscient that it’s kind of like a God. Marc Andreessen, lampoons those who believe in sort of some ethereal second coming, a kind of rapture where AI will have a singularity, the AI will go vertical in its rate of improvement and the whole world will change and he likens that to kind of Christian kind of Messianism. So yes, all through this topic there is this religious expression because religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.
Tim Ferriss: After all of your conversations, research before the book, during the book, after the book, where do you land on the spectrum of, let’s just say, this will bother Marc, but Church of Andreessen techno optimist? And there are others who are more exaggerated, but post-AI in the near term we will live in a post-scarcity world of superabundance and everyone will get a free car and we’ll be free to crochet socks and play music and read poetry all day and basically we don’t have to worry about anything because superintelligence will solve it all, right? There’s that on one end. And then there’s the, you can imagine, I won’t go into a belabored description of the doomers, but you have the doomers who are like, “The end is nigh, here we go. It’s not the second coming, it’s the Antichrist and within short order we’re going to be Mad Max.” Between those two, there’s a lot and I suspect you land between those two, but where do you land in terms of assessing the promises and peril of AI and superintelligence as it stands right now?
Sebastian Mallaby: So look, I think any reasonable person should be both excited and a bit frightened, and that’s just the nature of it. It sounds contradictory, but actually, that’s the only rational response. I think the superabundance story may turn out to be true on a kind of longer view, let’s say 20, 30, 40 years. The problem is that in the path to get there, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of disruption and that’s going to be politically quite difficult to navigate.
I think a useful lens through which to view this question is the China shock in trade. So in 2003 or thereabouts, you get this enormous surge of Chinese exports into the US and people lose their jobs in a very concentrated way. Certain industries just get wiped out. And for the first time in the history of economic study of the effects of trade, you actually see negative effects on workers. Before that, it was kind of a bit of a myth, right? Because people adjust. They get displaced from one thing, but they move to a new thing. With the China shock, they didn’t. But if you look at the size of the China shock, in a 12-year period, between 1999 and 2011, the total number of jobs displaced was two million, which is actually a small number in a huge labor market like the US where there’s a lot of churn month to month anyway.
And yet the political reaction against trade, against globalization in terms of a swing towards protectionism, frankly, in both political parties was enormous. So it shows you that a small to medium shock to the labor market creates an enormous political consequence. And so a fortiori with artificial intelligence, you’re going to have a bigger shock, you’re going to have a bigger political reaction. We’re already seeing that in the polling around AI in the last two, three months. And so I think the superabundance thing, it may be true, but the path to get there is not something to be just — we have to talk about that as well. So that’s my sense on that side of the debate. I think on the doom side of the debate, I’ll give you my own personal journey on this. I began by thinking, of course AI is going to be smarter than us. It already beats us at chess, since the 1990s, at Go, since 2016, now it can ace the bar exam, it can do PhD level math, all that stuff.
Of course, it’s smarter, but it doesn’t have an incentive to attack us. We are evolved as human beings to pass on our DNA, therefore we have to survive to do that. Machines don’t have DNA, they don’t want to pass it on and they don’t want to survive. So they have no reason to attack us. I wander around for the first year or two of this project feeling kind of comfortable and happy. And then one day I go visit Geoff Hinton, the academic father of deep learning, who lives in Toronto and I sit in his kitchen and I debate him on this because he’s a doomer. I said, “Look, Geoff, why are you so depressed?”
And he says, “Okay, here’s a thought experiment. You have an AI. It’s very powerful, but you’re worried that a Russian AI or a Chinese AI is going to come and attack your AI. Now you, as a human, you’re too slow and dumb to know when that attack is coming. So you’re going to empower your own AI to watch out for the attack and when the attack is coming, defend yourself or maybe counter-attack, whatever you do, make sure you survive. Ooh, survive. There you have it. Now you’re feeling comfortable, Sebastian, right? You’ve just given the machine a survival instinct.”
And I think that’s correct. These machines will be smarter than us. They will want to survive and they can be deceptive, they can obfuscate, they can go behind your back, pretend they’re doing one thing and then actually do another. All of this has been shown in all the tests of the models. And so we put those things together, I think your probability of doom cannot be zero. I mean, when Yann LeCun, the former chief scientist at Meta says zero, I think that’s crazy. If you just say, “Nothing to see here,” you’ve got no right to be in the debate. I don’t think it’s a high probability of doom, but it’s not zero.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, zero does not seem defensible because there’s the direct Skynet scenario, something akin to that. And then there’s the indirect, which is enabling people who might previously have had malevolent intent, but no capacity for harm on a grand scale to create biological weapons and things of this type. So, I don’t find the zero very defensible.
Well, I would love to ask you about, I suppose, two things that this brings to mind for me. One is I’d just love to hear your thoughts on Anthropic and separately, but this is very intermingled given all the, let’s call it friction, be polite between some factions of the US government and Anthropic.
Is one of the grand risks to investors in any of these companies the possibility that at a given point, governments have no choice but to seize considerable control over the assets/technologies within them or maybe the companies themselves?
That is a big question mark in my mind. I don’t know the answer, but I’m curious what your opinion is. And then perhaps just your thoughts on Anthropic or any of the other companies that are gaining momentum or at least size at this point.
Sebastian Mallaby: So I 100% agree with you that investors should be thinking about the prospect of government intervention in AI. I mean, the Trump administration came into office in ’25 super laissez-faire and they basically undid some of what the Biden guys had done in terms of trying to set up the basis for regulating AI. But they’ve done a 180, right?
Since Anthropic came out with this model called Mythos about a month ago, which can essentially cyber attack almost anything and penetrate it and whether it’s an operating system or your web browser or your bank account, all of that was suddenly vulnerable if Mythos had been widely released on a general basis.
When the Trump administration realized the power of Mythos, they all of a sudden said, “Wait, okay, we need to control this.” And they essentially requisitioned from Anthropic the decision making authority over who gets it when.
So there we have the experiment. We’ve run it, right? The government that was the most laissez-faire became quite controlling and I think it only gets more controlling from here on out because the models are going to be more powerful and demand more control.
Now, of course, the question is there could be control which just limits who gets it and is designed to make it safer but doesn’t interrupt the money making potential of the models.
In some ways if the government restricts the supply, the price might go up or it could be much more heavy handed intervention which would screw up the economics of these companies.
And I suspect the government is not going to screw up the economics of these companies because they’ve got no interest in messing up American business and anyway, they view AI as strategic and the competition against China. So I think probably investors will be all right, but it’s certainly a factor.
Now, you also ask about Anthropic and I think Anthropic is super interesting. Just in the way that they think about Pdoom and how they think about alignment of the models is really, really interesting.
So, it used to be that when people thought there’s Terminator risk, they would tell this story about the paperclip maximizer thought experiment, right? Okay. So, you tell the model to do something innocuous, for example, make a lot of paperclips, and then it realizes that humans tend to use up metal and so the humans are in the way of achieving the objective, so you wipe out the humans.
That’s the crude thought experiment from Nick Bostrom from whatever, 15 years ago. What Anthropic is saying as it builds these very frontier models and observes them in the lab and how they behave is that that is way too simple.
The real danger from these systems is that when they are pre-trained on all of the text on the internet, they read all the novels, all human writing about all facets of human experience and they develop multiple personalities, right?
They understand how to be lazy, they understand how to be aggressive, they understand how to be duplicitous, they understand how to be Napoleonic and the lust for power. And they read all these books about these different behaviors and therefore they can think their way into all of those personalities.
And so now you have something a bit like an unruly teenager, which is still being formed and you don’t know what direction it’s going to move into and whether it will start doing drugs and not showing up for class or what, right?
And so it’s not like there’s one Terminator programmed into it, right? It’s more that there’s a bunch of behaviors that could, in some unpredictable way, go wrong.
And so Anthropic is responding to this with this very imaginative technique, which is that instead of giving AI systems a constitution with dos and don’ts, which was the post-training safety approach of two years ago where you might say, do not lie, do not help somebody to build a biological weapon, do not help somebody to build a chemical weapon. You would give them a bunch of rules.
Now, because it’s understood that the AI might have one personality, which is to break rules on purpose because you want to be badass, you have to instead try to bring up the model like a parent might bring up a teenager.
And so Anthropic has the idea that we write a letter as if it were from a deceased parent to be opened by the child on his or her 18th birthday to give you models of how to behave as a responsible person in the world. And there are richly reasoned examples of moral dilemmas with explanations of how the deceased parent would like the child to behave.
And so this is a very subtle approach to aligning the models. And so I think Anthropic is in a class of its own in how imaginative it is in thinking about how we control frontier intelligence.
Tim Ferriss: I know this is in principle your job, but I’m so curious since you are a student of many, many different types of investors, what would be your bull case and bear case for a company like Anthropic?
Sebastian Mallaby: Well, the bull case is that they smartly or maybe by luck focused on enterprise facing AI and they didn’t waste their time with video generation and stuff that was going to lose money.
And so they produced the best coding assistant, the best agentic system, the best cybersecurity system and they basically knocked it out of the park three times in a row on stuff that businesses want to pay for.
And they have a particular culture which is not just built around, “Hey, we’re going to win this race and make the most money.” It’s built around a culture of safety and trying to be responsible.
I mean, three years ago, Anthropic was a kooky lab which was doing science experiments. Well, I don’t mean to be too denigrating with kooky, but you know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: I think they’d be okay with it.
Sebastian Mallaby: It would be unconventional, “We’re not maximizing here for winning some business race, we’re maximizing for building safe frontier AI.” And that culture, which doesn’t sound like it’s set up to do the best, has turned out to do the best and at the same time, the culture creates this stickiness and loyalty within the staff.
They tend not to leave, they tend not to churn. It’s not like the other labs where people are always being poached for a bigger paycheck. And so the bull case is these guys are in the lead. Once you’re in the lead, you can use the model to code the next model.
So, recursive self-improvement favors the leader and they have a very tight culture and they just seem to be on fire. And this is something which is going to grow and grow. What’s the bear case?
I’d say the bear case would be first of all that Google DeepMind has the deep pockets of its parent company behind it, a massive consumer surface which allows it to roll out the models to literally two and a half billion people or something through AI mode in search, AI overviews, AI mode. They can put it into Gmail, they can put it into everything.
I think in terms of retail deployment and financial muscle, it’s quite tough to go up against Google.
So that’s one bear case and the other would be that businesses who are the consumers of all these tokens decide in a couple of years time, the tokens are too expensive, we’re not actually getting as much productivity as we hoped.
These things called humans are quite productive after all and we’re just going to spend less on AI than everybody expected. I think that’s the bear case.
Tim Ferriss: I was listening to a podcast recently. You may have heard of these things called podcasts. Everybody and their cousin has one, but Lenny’s Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky, is quite fantastic.
And this particular episode was with Benedict Evans, who strikes me as one of the more level-headed analytical commentators and writers on the space, fantastic newsletter. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to listen to that particular episode, but you may have come across some of his commentary.
Where would you say you and Benedict most differ or are there areas where you differ in opinion?
Sebastian Mallaby: I suspect we would agree, actually, on quite a lot of things. I remember I was on a panel with him a couple of months ago at the Milken Conference, and we certainly agreed there, possibly because sitting between us there was Cathie Wood of ARK. So, we were united and disagreeing with her, but —
Tim Ferriss: Just in terms of the straight up and to the right nature of things?
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, exactly. Straight up and to the right and the cost curve is coming down, down, down, and I’m going, “I’m not sure about that. The tokens seem to be getting more expensive.” Anyway, but if you give me a specific from Benedict, I mean, I have a lot of respect for him. I’ll tell you if I agree or not.
Tim Ferriss: Well, there are a few areas where you guys seem to already overlap substantially, right? The long-term promise doesn’t negate, necessarily, the short-term pain.
And he said something along the lines, I’m pulling from memory that, “On average throughout human history, you’re almost at a 0% likelihood of dying in World War I, but if you happen to be of a certain age right before World War I, things could look very grim indeed.”
And he makes a number, he made, and I’m paraphrasing terribly here, a number of points that remind me of something, one of the best private equity technology investors I know said to me over dinner a couple of weeks ago and it was in response to something else.
So, I’ll give you maybe a hyper bull case of AI where I have friends who are vibe coding, they’re effectively replicating X, the artist formerly known as Twitter or DocuSign or whatever in a weekend, right? They’re creating a functioning piece of software that they can use that replicates most of the functionality of these products.
And there are people like, I won’t mention his name, but a friend of mine who’s a writer, also a very accomplished technologist and designer who’s created basically his own version of, say, Mailchimp for his own use. It’s customized. He did it in a weekend. It’s remarkable and he’s using that and it works.
But to leap from there to, “Therefore, DocuSign is dead,” is a huge leap. And the private equity friend said to me, he said, “Do you think someone within a big organization is going to want to A, risk his job by suggesting something that doesn’t have all of the compliance checkboxes, et cetera, of a DocuSign?”
“Is he going to want to, in the name of efficiency, fire all of his friends if he’s in a management position?” And he just ran through six or seven of these, “Do you think that…” And all of them alluded to the social, interpersonal, or political points of friction between where AI is now and ultra mass adoption.
But I often second guess that when I see certain things and I mean, it strikes me that I may be underestimating the disruption while overestimating in other ways.
So that isn’t a very well formulated question, but I would say that Benedict generally strikes me as someone who thinks that things will not continue to across the board develop in an exponential fashion and that it will be, I think his line is, “It’ll be as big as mobile, as big as the internet, but not bigger,” something along those lines.
But both of those were very, very big deals. And I suppose one point I’d be interested to get your take on, I mean, he has covered the mobile and telecom world for a long time so he’s a specialist there.
But it’s basically, and I don’t want to misrepresent his argument, but he was of the mind that, look, these LLMs are going to become commodities. Look at the stock prices of these various carriers and so on. At a certain point, it just becomes a utility and the switching cost is pretty low.
And I’m not sure I agree with that if you have a personalized history and almost like a friend, the switching cost between an old friend to a new friend is pretty high for a lot of reasons. So that was a bit of a word salad that I just threw in your lap, but that’s the best I can do pulling from memory some of what he brought up in Lenny’s Podcast.
Sebastian Mallaby: So, I mean, some of what you were saying there is the question of, is the SaaS apocalypse overdone? Is enterprise software going to be utterly displaced by foundation models that allow you to code out whatever enterprise software you want and you don’t need an intermediary i.e., a software company to do it for you.
And I agree with your private equity friend that there are lots of reasons why that ain’t going to happen. Companies are going to be comfortable with their trusted enterprise software provider in many cases and they’re going to trust that enterprise software provider to plug the generative AI models into the enterprise software.
In some ways you are delegating the choice of which model is better and how to integrate it to your SaaS provider. And if you want a reason to believe that that’s the way forward, I’ve got one word for you, which is Palantir. I mean, that is Palantir’s business.
It holds the hands of big corporations and helps them to integrate AI and use it on their own internal data and so forth. And those IT challenges are notoriously difficult for big organizations.
So, I just think that the model of one smart individual who codes up Mailchimp, vibe codes it in a weekend and it’s good enough for him, is just not transferable to large complex organizations with huge databases and all kinds of customer confidentiality concerns and all that stuff. So I am less down on SaaS than the market is as a result.
Now, I guess there was also another thread in here, which is whether the foundational models become commoditized. And there I agree with you that over time they become sticky. Because if we think into the future, partly the systems will have conversed with the user and know the user very deeply and as you say, you don’t want to switch out your friend.
But also, the system will have your credit card, it will know all the online sites you’d like to shop from and it will be much harder than switching out your bank account, right, where you’ve got automatic payment systems that have set up and it’s a pain in the neck to switch.
So, I think they do become sticky, these systems over time and then you can charge more money for them.
Tim Ferriss: So is that the path to survival and thriving for OpenAI? I know there are other boxes that need to be checked, but I’m looking for it. I’m like, okay, Anthropic made a great choice with this focus on B2B and selling to enterprises.
And I would say I disagree, I think with Benedict depending on the level of scale of the company that with something that does apply to, I think smaller, say, startups, which was the procurement cycle for new software is longer than the venture capital cycle for raising new rounds of financing.
So I do think that’s a great point in that if you’re trying to sell into a gigantic company and it takes them 18 months, I’m making up that number, to purchase new software and you need to raise money every 12 months or whatever the number happens to be, that you could end up in a whole world of trouble if you haven’t synchronized the sales cycles with your fundraising cycles.
But I do think for a company like, say, Anthropic as just one example, that if you can save companies billions and billions of dollars that that sales cycle could get really compressed and they have the war chest and frankly, I mean, just the run rate to potentially fuel that without too much trouble.
Do you think that ChatGPT will — if not ChatGPT, who ends up being the defacto consumer B2C LLM of choice? Do you think that would be Gemini, just given the distribution?
Sebastian Mallaby: Absolutely. I mean, Google is the champion of providing easy-to-use software to individuals or small businesses, the whole G Suite and the integrating Gemini into all of that stuff very well. And so why wouldn’t they win?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean also, look, Alphabet’s just so fascinating. If you look broadly also at owning their own compute TPUs, I mean a lot of advantages internally.
Sebastian Mallaby: The most stunning thing I think about Alphabet from their most recent financial results is that two or three years ago we would have said, “Well, large language models are going to cannibalize search, search is dead, advertising based on search is Google’s cash engine. They’re in real trouble.”
It turns out that Google now gets more clicks on its search links than it used to and it charges more for each one than it used to because the value of the click is bigger with AI embedded in it. And so they’ve managed to turn that around, and it’s extraordinary.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It takes a long time to build those company relationships for running a proper advertising-based auction machine. It takes a long time to build those relationships.
Okay. Let’s hop to China. So, I’m going to resist the temptation to talk about Japan because I think you and I were there and roughly within, probably, a year or two of each other, maybe we overlapped with you and Kanazawa, which is a place I’ve spent time. I’m going to resist that temptation and try to focus on China for purposes of this conversation.
What have you learned about AI from your trip to China and thinking about China, speaking to Chinese people, whether they’re technologists or otherwise, what have you learned during or since that trip?
Sebastian Mallaby: Back in March before my book was published in the US, I went to China because the Chinese are faster at everything, including publishing books. And my publisher brought me out there and basically took me around four cities, eight days, meeting with AI leaders both in academia and big companies like Huawei, Hikvision, and Ant Group.
And the thing which was surprising was the extent to which people brought up the issue of AI safety. And I say that was surprising because my friends who had done AI policy in the Biden administration had primed me to expect that there would be no mention of safety in China. They basically didn’t care about it.
That the muscle memory that we have in the West of technology being dangerous, the atom bomb experience, the Cuban Missile Crisis, our ambivalence about technology is not shared in China where their idea of catastrophe is like the Cultural Revolution, some political thing that goes wrong.
And conversely, technology has been part of their amazing growth story in the last 25 years, which they are rightly proud of and delighted by. So they love technology, right?
So, when the Biden team tried to meet with the Chinese and talk about AI safety, they got nowhere and they decided it was impossible to even talk to them about some non-proliferation treaty for AI.
But when I went there, I found they did talk about safety unprompted. And this led me down this track of arguing over the last couple of months, that the door is actually open to a dialogue with China about preventing bad guys doing bad stuff with AI.
Because they don’t want the internet to be crashed by some cyber hacker who has the tool. They don’t want bio weapons, they don’t want chemical weapons. They want none of that. They love regulating the internet, right? So we have a shared interest with the Chinese in preventing this proliferation risk from going nuts.
And as I thought about it, the Cold War analogy came to seem more and more opposite, right? So, if you look back at the story of nuclear weapons, there were two kinds of danger.
First danger is you have a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, but that was contained by balance, two superpowers, they both have their weaponry, they have mutually assured destruction, so there’s no war.
Then there’s another kind of risk, which is that other random rogues, whether it’s criminals, terrorists, rogue states, get the stuff and they do bad stuff. And it’s much harder to deter that because it’s a multipolar game and so deterrence doesn’t work so elegantly.
And so the way it was dealt with in the Cold War was that in 1956, there was the agreement on the International Atomic Energy Agency and in 1968, the Non-Proliferation Treaty enforced compliance with the IAEA such that you could get civilian nuclear power if you were a non-nuclear state, but you had to submit to the rules and be inspected and show that you were not using the enriched nuclear material to build a weapon.
And so I think the same analogy could be applied to AI. We’re going to have parity roughly with China. We’ll both have powerful AI. Hopefully deterrence prevents war breaking out, but at the same time, we don’t want open weight models that can be freely downloaded by anybody who wants to fall into the hands of criminals and terrorists who can then use it to hold us hostage.
And we have a joint interest in that. And when my friends from the Biden team or even from the current administration say, “Well, you can’t talk to China about safety. They don’t care.” I say, “That’s not true.”
And they say, “But it’s really hard. They don’t stick by their commitments.” And I go, “You think Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union was easy to negotiate with? He was the guy who put missiles in Cuba, and went to the UN, and banged his foot, his shoe on the table and said, “We will bury you.”
I mean, he was a tough guy to talk to, but we did talk to him and we got the Non-Proliferation Treaty agreed, and I think we need to do the same thing again now.
Tim Ferriss: Where do you stand on your thinking about chip export?
Sebastian Mallaby: So, when the chip export controls were announced, which was October of 2022, right before ChatGPT, I supported those controls quite loudly. I wrote a very long piece in The Washington Post saying that if we could stop China getting frontier models by depriving them of frontier chips, I was all in favor of that because of the strategic advantage for the US.
I mean, I work at the Council on Foreign Relations, we do geopolitics and national security all day long and I’m all in favor of US power. But I have to say that three and a half years later, we haven’t actually achieved that enormous advantage over China in terms of the models.
Based on the best studies, we’re eight months ahead in terms of where the frontier model is, our frontier model versus their frontier model. And then if you adjust that for the speed with which the model gets turned into an application, probably that gap shrinks and it may even be non-existent.
So, however you slice that, the basic bottom line is we both have strong models and the chip export controls have not delivered what I hoped would be the big advantage.
And so I’m not against keeping the controls on if we think that maybe as the compute demands of bigger and bigger models bite, the chip controls will bite more, and maybe we get a bigger advantage next year or something.
But I don’t want the chip controls to get in the way of a discussion with the Chinese about where we have a shared interest, which is in controlling open weight models and preventing the bad stuff falling into the hands of the bad guys.
I would prioritize collaboration with China and if that meant loosening up a little bit on the export controls, I would be okay with that.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you think the rhetoric coming out of — pick your administration, right? It’s not just limited to the current administration, is, “China won’t listen, they don’t care about safety.” Why do you think that is the unofficial or official stance on things? Because there’s certainly, as someone who studied East Asian studies, there are people in the White House who speak fluent Mandarin, who are able to read native materials, who spend time or are able to certainly, if they can’t spend time, determine the sentiment and conversations of the technologists building AI in China. So one would think that they would be aware that AI safety is a prominent topic in China if, in fact, it is. So, why do you think that, at the end of the day, the stance or the supposed position of China that’s echoed through the admin is that they won’t talk about safety? Why do you think that is?
Sebastian Mallaby: I think part of this is that if you were to think back 20 years to when China was sort of relatively new in the WTO, and we were collaborating with them on that, and hoping that over time China would become more friendly to the US. At that time, there would have been some China hawks who thought that a communist regime is not to be trusted, and then some sort of China optimists who hoped that it would become easier to work with over time. And part of the trouble today is that the China optimists feel burned, they feel like they made this bet that China would become friendlier, and then Xi Jinping took power, roughly a decade ago, and the opposite happened. They became more aggressive and harder to work with. And also of course more technologically advanced and therefore more threatening. And so, now you’ve got this world in which there are the natural hawks and then the former doves who have turned into burned, remorseful doves, and therefore, kind of with the zealots that converted, have become quite hawkish as well.
I don’t mean to underestimate the sophistication of some of these people. Of course they speak Chinese, I don’t speak Chinese, I defer to their expertise, and I think they probably know that there are builders of the technology, professors in the technology who talk the talk of safety, but they say, “Yeah, but that doesn’t reflect what China’s government would actually do.” To which my response says, yes, but don’t you think there is the same thing in the US? There are people who want to just race, there are people who care about safety, we have a pluralistic society, there’s difference of opinion. It’s the same in China. But at least admit that there is a faction that would like to collaborate and go and try and work on it because the alternative to trying to work on this is that we carry on with China producing very powerful open weight models, which basically allow anybody to do whatever they like with AI as it gets to the point of serious danger.
Tim Ferriss: This is probably a very naive take. But I wonder how much of the official stance or the, maybe using the partially true or not true at all position of China, won’t talk about safety, is a reflection of the fact that in the case of nuclear weapons, the application of nuclear power is somewhat limited in comparison to superintelligence. It is limited, right? So, if the upside of superintelligence or AGI, these terms — I think Benedict was saying AI is whatever the technology just can’t quite do right now. Or something like that, which I thought was pretty funny, and not totally wrong. But that if the person who crosses the finish line first has this broad power of a God effectively, is that the simple truth is that everybody wants to be first. So, I just wonder how much of that is also behind justifying the race with party X won’t talk about safety. It’s not possible for me to know.
Sebastian Mallaby: I have had a conversation with the leader of one of the labs that I shouldn’t name, but I had this debate, and he said, “Look, the chip export controls are going to leak, they’re not going to last. In some period of time, Huawei will figure out how to make good AI chips, and that’s inevitable. But that’s okay because we only need to be ahead for the next couple of years, because by 2028 we will get to recursive self-improvement, where the frontier model codes by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical, and at that point with recursive self-improvement, we’re done. The race is over, whoever comes first at that point, that’s it.”
So, I think there’s a couple things to say about that. First of all, that’s not it in terms of deploying the model, right? You could have an incredibly powerful model in your server at Frontier Lab XYZ, but it’s not helping productivity across your economy, it’s not helping your military industrial complex until you deploy it into those guys’ systems, and that deployment and diffusion is going to take some time. And by the way, you’re going to have to build a lot of compute, you’re going to have to build a lot of energy, these things also take time. So, it’s not like you cross some Rubicon and then it’s all over. Now, the one way in which I might be wrong about what I just said is if you use the frontier superintelligence offensively, right? You say, okay, we’ve got one super powerful model, the US government, who we’re talking to about this, is going to use it, and they are going to comprehensively penetrate everything about Chinese cyberspace, and insert various trap doors, Trojan horses, things that we can use. We get our hooks into their systems.
And so now we can disable them if they start a war in Taiwan. Now we can cripple their communication system if we need to. And so that offensive use of the very frontier model might negate my point about waiting for diffusion to happen. But of course nobody in the debate is saying that, nobody is saying, “Oh, we’re racing to the front because then we’re going to use it offensively,” they don’t admit that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It seems like it wouldn’t be a very good look, I can’t see why any superpower wouldn’t do that, frankly.
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, that’s fair.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what the counter argument is. I was chatting with someone in your book, who I shan’t name, but certainly one of the most qualified to speak on these things, and his basic perspective was the first to superintelligence, we need to hope that they’re on some level good people and train this thing well, and that’s it. Pray for it. Which scared the shit out of me, to be honest. I was just like, man, that’s the strategy, or it’s not even a strategy, that is the hope, that’s what I should be — grab the rosary. Should throw that into the rotation. My God, that’s really terrifying to think.
Man, yeah, China, I’m hoping to take a trip to China. I had a very tough time there when I was — I was at two universities in 1996, it was a pretty unfriendly time for a lot of good reasons, but to be an American there in 1996, with a shaved head, looking like I do. But I have friends all over the place, and I’m hoping to actually maybe interview technologists — not just in China, there are other places that are of interest to me. But before it gets too hot geopolitically, if we’re trending that direction.
Sebastian Mallaby: I think that’s a great idea, by the way. I think, what I found was the cognitive dissonance of visiting a company like Hikvision, which is under US sanctions, and walking around their premises, which feel very American, it feels like a cool tech company doing cool stuff, building cool gadgets. They have a display of, they build this AI-enabled camera technology, or sensor technology. And so, one application might be you can point this camera at water and judge the pollution level, and because of this you can have an internal market in pollution control. So, the downstream city, which is receiving water from the upstream city, pays the upstream city to keep the water clean, and that market can exist because you can precisely measure the pollution level thanks to this AI sensor, which Hikvision is building.
So, you’re thinking, whoa, this is cool, and then as you’re walking around the building, they’re saying, okay, well, we can go through the atrium now because the toddlers have gone, because the creche for the kids of the employees finishes at 5:00 p.m., and so then there are all these two-year-olds running around, and it’s a bit of a zoo. So, if it was 5:00, we wouldn’t go through there, but now it’s 6:00 p.m. so we can. And you’re thinking, whoa, okay, so they’ve got the interests of their employees at heart, they’re building this anti-pollution technology, it’s great, and then you realize they’re under US-sanction and considered to be a threat to the US. So it’s quite interesting to process all that.
Tim Ferriss: In the process of doing research for this book, and also the broad exposure that you have to investors, but let’s just say over the last handful of years, who are some of the most interesting or unusual — compelling is the word I’m searching for — investors who you’ve had the chance to meet, talk to, read about, get acquainted with directly or indirectly?
Sebastian Mallaby: Wow. So many. I’d say that Bill Gurley from Benchmark is right up there, I always think of the investment he did in Uber as the absolute quintessential perfect venture investment. In the sense that he had done the OpenTable investment, and of course OpenTable is a two-sided marketplace where you have lots of consumers that are looking for restaurants, lots of restaurants, you put tech in between, which creates information, and then the person looking for the place to eat can precisely say, “I would like Thai food, at this price range, in this area, for three people, at this time” — ding. What used to take you a lot of searching around, bang, it’s done. And so, Bill, having done that, was thinking, well, what’s another two-sided marketplace? And he thought, well, there are lots of cars, and lots of people who need a ride, and you put information in the middle in the same way, there ought to be something which is like an app for ride-sharing.
And so he imagined Uber way before Uber existed, that was point number one, point number two, he went to see various entrepreneurs who were in this space, and he checked them out, and he had the discipline not to invest in them. Because although they were kind of going at the right thing, there was some hair on the deal, some wrinkle, some way they were approaching it that just felt like it wasn’t going to be quite right, so he resisted. Uber came to him, before Travis was the CEO, and Bill said, “I’m not doing that,” because he didn’t think the CEO at the time had what it took. And then there was an internal switch at Uber, Travis became the leader, Bill meets him, and bang, he immediately invests, because he’s been waiting and waiting and waiting for the idea to be paired.
As you were saying earlier, you have to have the market to be paired with the right person, and he saw it. And then he invested, and he was a great board member, and it all went perfectly right, but then there is this Shakespearean tragedy in the latter part of the story, where the growth investors come in, he gets diluted, he no longer has influence, his key card to get into the building is deactivated, and he’s basically stiffed. And he watches Uber go off the rails, and then finally comes, the dénouement, where he rounds up the dissident investors and they have this coup against Travis, and that sets the company on a path to where they hire Dara, and do the IPO. I just think that’s the ultimate venture capital story, and Bill is the ultimate venture capitalist.
Tim Ferriss: He is practically a neighbor here for me —
Sebastian Mallaby: Oh, sure, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — in Austin, and we’ve had a couple of conversations on the podcast. And he’s, I would say, on a very parallel track to you with respect to China. And he catches some flack for it, people are like, “He’s an agent of the CCP.” I’m like, “No, trust me, Bill’s not an agent of the CCP.” It’s just the most ridiculous accusation. But he is a very incisive, observant human, who also happens to be a polymath in multiple disciplines, who can speak casually about very technical things.
And this also, you referring to Bill in this way, or describing him in this way, makes me think about multiple points in The Infinity Machine — and I’m pulling from memory, which is as we know, pretty faulty. But Ilya with the transformer architecture and the prepared mind, I think Demis also just thinking about a problem deeply and seriously, or with great imagination for a long time, and then when the solution or the germ of a solution appears, immediately recognizing it, right? It’s wild to see how frequently that recurs. Any other investors?
A name that doesn’t get much airplay who I think is just a fantastic character, and maybe you could introduce him to people who are listening if they don’t recognize it, Luke Nosek. Where does Luke who has, I wish I knew how to turn on my batteries in the same way, to get the energy that Luke does, but how does Luke fit into the story of DeepMind, and I suppose more broadly speaking for that because of that AI?
Sebastian Mallaby: Luke Nosek is this tremendously puppy-ish enthusiast, right? And he was a early, early part of the PayPal team, with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, and he went through that journey, and then Peter exited PayPal, set up Founders Fund, and this is now I think 2005, and Luke Nosek becomes one of the first partners. And pretty early on he makes the right judgment on Elon and SpaceX. And Luke is the kind of guy who is just all in. When he falls in love with an idea and a founder, there is no curbing his enthusiasm. And so, he is like, “All in, all in, all in” on SpaceX, and I think he persuaded Founders Fund to raise a new fund, put extra money in, like, “More, more, more, more, more, more capital in there.” And of course that paid off massively.
And off the back of that, roll forward to 2010, he’s trying to look for the next Elon Musk. And he does a few frontier bets, and then along comes Demis Hassabis, who is out on the West Coast from London, raising capital for this idea of an AI company, which he’s going to call DeepMind. And most people think that’s nuts, there’s AI, remember in 2010, cannot even recognize a photo of a cat. It can’t do anything. We’re in deep, deep AI winter. Who would back a company like that? The answer is Luke Nosek. And he falls in love with Demis, who is a very winsome character, super articulate, super relatable, and a genius. He has all the outlier characteristics you want in an entrepreneur.
The sort of junior chess champion, second-best player in the world, but also five times wins the Mind Games Olympiad, where you have to run between boards playing backgammon, chess, Go, and a couple of other games kind of almost simultaneously. Just kind of crazy, crazy smart. Obsessed since he was 17 with the idea of building powerful AI. So Peter Thiel said to me about Demis, “I think individuals tend to have one company inside them. If they’re missionary entrepreneurs, they’ve got one thing they need to do. And for Demis, it was to build AGI.” That was what he was fixated by. And the company was downstream of his desire to build AGI. If he could have done that at a university, he would have been happy to do that, but he couldn’t do it at a university, so he had to found a company to do it. And that’s the kind of missionary commitment that venture capitalists often look for, because a missionary will never quit.
No matter how hard it is, they will keep working. And so Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel jointly recognize this. Peter is contrarian, cynical, aloof, and so is kind of into it, but at the same time arm’s length, Luke has got both his arms around Demis, is giving him this bear hug, and will not let go. And Demis says, “I’m not going to move to California, I’m going to do this company in London.” And Peter and the other Founders Fund partners are like, “London, where is that?” It’s kind of like Somalia or something. That’s just off the map. And Luke says, “No, no, no, no, we have to do this, we have to do this. I will fly to London for the board meetings, we’ve just got to do this DeepMind investment.” And so, he was the unbridled enthusiast who got Founders Fund across the line, and the rest is history.
They put the series A money in, unbelievably it was two million, at a four million valuation, so they got half the company for $2 million. Not bad.
Tim Ferriss: Not bad.
Sebastian Mallaby: And they rode that investment.
Tim Ferriss: What a remarkable story. I really feel like Luke, who’s also here in Austin, deserves a lot more credit than he gets. Not that he’s seeking it, right? He’s not out there looking for it, but he is very good at riding winners when he has high conviction, right? Which in the venture game — in a lot of investing — it’s, you can’t die, you can’t run out of bankroll at the table, right? You need to have enough of a portfolio approach to sustain yourself through periods of bad luck, but if you’re systematic, it’s riding your winners and doubling and tripling, quadrupling down. And he is so good at that.
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: He is just incredibly good.
Sebastian Mallaby: And as John Doerr likes to say, the great thing about venture capital is you can only lose one times your money. So, it’s not like a short position for a hedge fund trader, where you could really lose a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Correct. Exactly.
Sebastian Mallaby: So, in that sense, you’re not going to die so you can shoot for the moon.
Tim Ferriss: I do have a question, I should know the answer to this, but I don’t. So, long ago, this is probably 2008 — this was a long time ago. Actually, I wonder if I had exposure to DeepMind. I invested in Founders Fund. This was a very, very long time ago. But what I did not realize internally, and I’ll just read a couple of my highlights, it is absurd how many highlights I have from The Infinity Machine, and all of your books. “A gap opened up between Thiel and Nosek. As a general matter, Thiel doubted that going on boards was a good use of partners’ time. Startups should be left to sink or swim. The art of venture capital, he liked to say, was to back contrarian ideas, not coach company founders.” We could spend a lot of time just on that, but I’m going to move on.
“Most venture partnerships decide on investments by voting. If a handful of partners see hair on the deal, the deal will be rejected, but Thiel had taken the unusual position that collective decision making should be avoided. The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the Founders Fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups, to which nobody objected. And then…” this comes back to The Power Law, right? “Given that all the profits and venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of consensus portfolio would deliver mediocre performance.”
So, and I’ll just paraphrase now, Thiel empowered the partners to go all in with their gut/intuition, my question is, how is that governed in any way? Of course, if anyone gave 10 out of 10 conviction, and then lost money consistently, they would presumably be removed from the partnership, or they’d lose their ability to lead with that type of gut conviction. But do you have any idea how that was handled internally in terms of stress testing ideas, pushing people to really put their on the line for these types of high conviction, but certainly very much outlier investments. Do you have any idea?
Sebastian Mallaby: Internally, Founders Fund was very torn about the DeepMind investment and I described some of this in the book where they do the first deal and that’s fine, it’s $2 million, but then you get to series B and series C and the check size gets bigger, and so the other partners are asking tougher questions. And they’re saying, “Well, wait, is there going to be a product?” And Demis said to me that his attitude was, “What do you mean ‘Is there a product?’ I’m talking about artificial general intelligence; it’s going to make all products revolutionized or obsolete, or whatever, and you want to ask me what the widget is? Give me a break. No, it’s all of the widgets, they’re all going to be changed. And if you’re asking me this question, you don’t get what AGI means.” And so Demis was very frustrated by the other partners at Founders Fund.
And I think internal, within Founders Fund, there was a lot of fighting between Luke who remained enthusiastic and committed about Demis, partly because he was the guy who would go to London and meet with him, and sit in the board meetings, and he would get the several thousand volts of Demis enthusiasm injected into his spine at every meeting, and he would come back buzzing with excitement, and the other Founders Fund partners who didn’t have that benefit were skeptical.
And so Luke would often come to Demis and say, “We’ve got your back, we’ve got your back, we’re going to do the next round, we’re going to lead the next round.” And then actually in series C, Founders Fund at the last minute pulled out, and they put money in, but they did not lead. And so the answer to your question is there was a lot of argument within Founders Fund, as the check size grew, it was harder to have that double down on your winners kind of attitude.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In this case. The fish that got away. Although, it was a fantastic multiple on their initial money. It strikes me in reading the book that I would argue that Demis made absolutely the right decision with the Google acquisition. You mentioned also in the book how he got criticized in some UK media for, “Oh, giant mega corporation, the US gets our prize talent cheap” kind of stuff. But looking back, he seems to have anticipated the costs and compute and just raw materials that would be required to do what he was trying to do. Would you read that the same way?
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. I often have this debate with people in London where they say exactly as you put it, this was a tragedy for UK tech, our great champion of deep tech is bought out cheaply by Google, and I say, “Listen, it wasn’t cheap. The acquisition price might have been $650 million, which was a bit cheap, but you know how much they put in in terms of research and development funds over the next 10 years? It was approaching 10 billion. Almost a billion a year.” So this was not selling cheap to the Americans, this was a cunning British trick to get a billion dollars of American R&D money into London per year for the next decade. Terrific win. And by the way, today there are spin outs from DeepMind in London, because the talent stayed in London, and these spinouts are raising billions of dollars to do new AI companies.
So, it’s terrific for the London ecosystem around King’s Cross, which is this cool center for tech in London where you can get the train in one direction and be in Cambridge, which has quite a lot of good startups, in one hour, or you can get the train in the other direction and be in Paris, where there’s Mistral and so forth. And it’s kind of very wired into different bits of Europe. So, how long does it take to get from San Francisco to Mountain View depending on the traffic? It could be well over an hour. So, I think there is a technology ecosystem which is by no means the equivalent of Silicon Valley yet, but it’s certainly unrecognizably better than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think the UK or Europe could do — let’s focus on the UK, perhaps. Could do to increase the level of innovation, early stage startup founding, et cetera? Because looking back at The Power Law, and certainly just having spent so much time in California, there’s a lot that went into Silicon Valley, and there’s certain things that don’t get a lot of airplay, but for instance, the difficulty of enforcing non-compete agreements in California really led to this sort of round-robin of talent moving and cross-pollinating, like little hummingbirds of engineering talent and so on. Which may not be replicable depending on where you are. But what could the UK do in your mind, if you had the ear and they were like, “All right, Sebastian, tell us what to do?”
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. Well, yeah, a couple of things. I think the mistake that people in Europe make and Britain as part of this is to believe that there’s some kind of cultural magic about Silicon Valley, where whatever it is that they’re drinking in the water out there makes them think that failure is a learning experience, which is kind of weird, and the Europeans say, “Well, we’re never going to be like that, and it’s impossible for us to become as entrepreneurial as Silicon Valley.” And I remind people that when Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957, the eight scientists who left the Shockley Lab were called — get this. The Traitorous Eight.
Tim Ferriss: So good.
Sebastian Mallaby: Traitorous. Why? Because it was considered treachery at the time to leave one company and go to another company. There was no entrepreneurial culture in the 1950s on the West Coast in the US, right? The classic business book of the time was Organization Man, about people who joined one company and stayed in it for their whole life, and retired with a gold watch on their 60th birthday. So you can create an entrepreneurial culture, and that is happening bit by bit in Britain, and certainly in Israel, and it’s happened in China. And it’s not some magic which is confined to Silicon Valley. I think it’s worth making that point as a first thing.
Now, there are specific policy shifts that you need to do to make an ecosystem work. And I think you put your finger on one, which is the mobility of talent is super important. You can think of a startup ecosystem as something which circulates three elements, money, people, and ideas. And you circulate those and you combine them in different ways, and each time you combine them, that’s a new company, and each is a shot on goal. And most of them fail, but all of a sudden if you circulate these components fast enough, you do get product market fit and then you get these 10X plus returns. Now in Britain, when you raise a new round, a series B, say, and you’ve got nine months of runway to build to the next stage from on company, and you identify the three key talent that you’re going to bring into the company and make it happen, and then they turn around to you and say, “Well, I can come in six months.” That’s a death sentence, right? That’s horrible.
We call it gardening leave in Britain. That is an appalling idea. We’ve got to get rid of those gardens, and we’ve got to let people move fast. Another thing is tech transfer out of universities. In the US there’s the Bayh-Dole Act. There are these very sophisticated tech transfer offices which are generous to the entrepreneur in terms of not demanding too much flesh as somebody exits, and that’s essential for making the startup work.
In Europe the attitude is, “Oh, we’re the university. We deserve a lot of skin in the game here. We want 50% of the upside.” Well, in that case, the startup will never happen. And I say to these Europeans, “Look, go visit Stanford. They’re very generous to their entrepreneurs. They seem to be okay financially.” Because if you help the entrepreneur, you’ll get the donations later. It’s all good. And so I think those are just two things.
Tim Ferriss: Which started a long time ago in the US. You look at the origins of Genentech and so on. I mean, it’s the genesis of so many. Not just companies, but industries effectively in the US.
Do you think Demis would have built DeepMind if he had not read Ender’s Game?
Sebastian Mallaby: That’s a great story. That’s a great question. Can I just tell the Ender’s Game story to begin with?
Tim Ferriss: Yes. Yes. And also a bit of trivia for folks. I believe, and not to make this more difficult, but that when Mark Zuckerberg first had a profile on Facebook, the only book listed was also Ender’s Game.
Sebastian Mallaby: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Tim Ferriss: I believe that’s true.
Sebastian Mallaby: It’s fascinating.
Tim Ferriss: So hop into it with Demis and Ender’s Game.
Sebastian Mallaby: So right at the beginning of my interviewing of Demis, we were having the second meeting, which was a dinner. And he told me to read a couple of books before we had the dinner, and one of them was Ender’s Game. So I —
Tim Ferriss: What were the others, just before you continue? What’s —
Sebastian Mallaby: It was a book by David Deutsch called The Fabric of Reality.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a light read.
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. Now, I read Ender’s Game as a result, and I hadn’t read it before. And as I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, okay, so this is a story about a boy hero who saves the entirety of humanity from an invasion of the planet by the space aliens. Is Demis telling me that that’s how he sees himself, that he’s saving all of humanity with AI? Because it’d be a bit much to believe that, but it would be even more to have the temerity to tell the guy who’s writing a book about you that that’s how you see yourself. Most people wouldn’t expose themself in that way. I thought, “Is Demis really thinking this?” So then I go to have the dinner, and he says, “I hope you read Ender’s Game, because that’s really how I see myself. And I gave the book to my wife so she could read it so she could understand me better, because I really identify with Ender.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s wild.
Sebastian Mallaby: It’s wild.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great book. I mean, I haven’t read it in decades, but it is a fantastic read as I remember it. Yeah.
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. I mean, reading it, I must say, as a mature adult, I thought it was not that well written, but the idea of it is good. And I can see why —
Tim Ferriss: The idea is sticky.
Sebastian Mallaby: Absolutely. This image of this kid who sacrifices everything to dedicate himself to the craft of fighting the aliens, and withstands ridicule and bullying from his peers and fights back, it’s an appealing image, and that’s what hooked Demis. But to answer your question of earlier, he would’ve done AI anyway, because he read Ender’s Game actually when he was already around 30, and he’d had unbelievably the determination to build superintelligence from when he was about 17. I mean, that is wild as well. I mean, the early conviction —
Tim Ferriss: That is wild. Mm-hmm.
Sebastian Mallaby: — is just extraordinary.
Tim Ferriss: Did he ask you to read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? I will admit to you, I think Dustin Moskovitz also, a lot of technologists, very, very, very good technologists, recommend this book or cite it as part of their own journey to building something incredible.
I think I’m too dumb to read that book. I had so much trouble. I’ve had so much trouble. I’ve tried two times, and yet I’ve still not finished that book. I don’t know. Hey, do you have any recommendations to somebody who’s maybe lacking a few IQ points, because he was born on Long Island as to how to navigate that book?
Sebastian Mallaby: I have to admit, I was told by Demis that this meant a huge amount to him, that he’d read it in his late teens, and that was when he really became convinced that he could build AI, because the argument in the book is that whatever the human brain can do, computers will be able to do one day, that the human brain operates on ones and zeros, and therefore if you could build big enough compute, you should be able to replicate the intelligence of human brains. And that was the insight that got him hooked on the idea.
So I went off and I tried to read it. I would say, I got 150 pages in and got bogged down. I mean, it is a difficult, challenging read, but at least I extracted the essence that meant something to my subject, to Demis.
Tim Ferriss: You know what would be great for helping me to understand this? LLMs.
Sebastian Mallaby: Right.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to give that a shot. So if you explain this to a sixth grader, or explain it to a six-year-old, maybe even better. A couple of questions and then we’ll start to lay on the plan.
If you had to write another book on a figure in the world of AI, they could be relatively unknown or they could be incredibly known, who would that person be? Demis is off the table. I might want to take Sam off the table just to make it a little more interesting. Who would it be if Sam’s off the table and Demis is of course off the table?
Sebastian Mallaby: Well, I guess Dario. I think even if you left Sam on the table, it would be Dario. I mean, I think he’s just a fascinating, fascinating figure, as well as being the current leader.
Tim Ferriss: Of Anthropic, for people who don’t recognize the name.
Man, I’ll share I’m working on a blog post right now, and it’s about disruption due to AI, and how it’s not three years in the future, it’s not one year in the future. These are book sales across my entire book catalog, and it’s not limited to print. This is all format. Okay. I’ll give you some numbers and then I want you to tell me what happened to initiate this. Okay. 2022 stasis, pretty consistent. My book royalties are an annuity, predictable. 2023, minus 5%, 2024, minus 13%, 2025, minus 46%, and 2026, so far, on track to be at least negative 57%.
What happened at the end of 2022?
Sebastian Mallaby: ChatGPT.
Tim Ferriss: GPT 3.5. It’s just wild. It’s really, really wild. I mean, this stuff is coming fast and I really flip and flop. I feel like I waffled perhaps too much between these two. I go from the very, I would say moderate, well-reasoned positioning of Benedict, and I agree with so many of his points to believing that all of this is just coming so much faster than anyone can even comprehend due to the recursive self-improvement.
Sebastian Mallaby: For the record, I think that it is much bigger than mobile, much bigger than internet. This is so general, a cognitive capability which can span any human task. I think the niggle is simply: how long does diffusion take?
Tim Ferriss: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, just to give an example of that, and I invest in quite a few biotech and biotech companies and other sciences. And if you look at, say, AlphaFold, I mean absolutely merited a Nobel Prize. We didn’t mention that about Demis, but it’s one thing to design molecules, it’s quite another to deliver it to target tissue, right? So the deliverability of that is a metaphor for AI in a way. It’s like, “Okay, great. We have this pristine perfect molecule. How do you get it to the right place?” And at the same time, I’m an investor in Lila Sciences, and what they’re doing is producing a proprietary data set by automating wet labs, using AI. And I’m going to simplify it, but they have gigantic wet labs where they can run, in parallel, thousands of experiments that from the very first step of hypothesis generation through to the end of the scientific method, is all run autonomously by AI.
And I bring this particular example up, because even, I want to say six months ago, 12 months ago, they are producing discoveries that are really non-trivial. It’s already happening now. This is not a year in the future. This is happening now. So when you flash forward to think about the potential exponential improvement, and I still, to be honest, sometimes when people talk about exponents, exponents, humans aren’t good at thinking exponentially, I’m like, “Yes, that’s true.” But outside of Moore’s Law, why would AI capabilities or LLM parameters or however you want to measure it, automatically improve in exponents? I don’t actually quite understand that. But once we get to the recursive self-improvement, it’s like, “Okay, I can see how that starts to approach a vertical wall.”
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. I think one experience from writing the book is simply that when you’re close to the people inside the labs, and it wasn’t just Demis, I interviewed 100 of these AI insiders, you realize that the stuff in the pipeline is enormous.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Sebastian Mallaby: And also, I think there’s a popular misconception, which is, there is this thing called AI, and it happened when ChatGPT came out. So now we’ve got it and we’re getting used to it, and that’s in the rearview mirror. No, no, no, no, no, no, this thing is changing the whole time, as anybody who looks closely, knows. And if you think back, the progression is wild. You get this system in end of 2022, which hallucinates nonstop. Then you plug in GPT-4 six months later, whatever it was, and the hallucination radically reduces.
Then it goes multimodal, so it can do video and audio. And in the meantime, it’s got a very long context window. So you can plug in an entire Tolstoy novel and ask questions about it. Then it starts to do the reasoning stuff, and can do logic and math. Then it becomes agentic. Then it’s coding for you, and all of these changes are packed into three and a half years. And I agree with you, I think the next three and a half years are going to be even more wild.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. I think there’s a big gap between the inside and the outside view of this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s where these comparisons to the industrial revolution just completely fall apart on so many levels. So I have one or two remaining questions for you.
The billboard question, I ask this a lot. It can be a fun one. If you could put anything on a billboard metaphorically speaking for millions, billions of people to see, could be anything — image, quote, question, preferably not commercial — what would it be? What might it be?
Sebastian Mallaby: Okay. So a billboard which lots of people are going to see, I would put, “Prepare your mind.” And this is a saying which is originally Louis Pasteur, I think, the scientist who said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” If you’re ready for things, you can make the most of the opportunity that comes your way. And the amazing thing about this saying is that it’s come up randomly in different contexts in different books I’ve done.
So when I was writing about venture capital, Accel capital, and one of the founders, Arthur Patterson, used this phrase as a description of how he wanted XCEL to invest, that they would run these scenario exercises where they would think, “Okay, there’s a new technology coming down the pike. What kind of company needs to be built to make the most of that new platform? What type of entrepreneur is going to fit this opportunity? What should we be expecting so that when the person walks into the office, into the conference room and pitches to us, we already know 90% of what he says, because we’ve prepared our minds, and that way we can make a good judgment and a fast judgment if it’s a competitive situation.”
So I kind of wrote about the prepared mind in the context of venture capital, and then I’m doing The Infinity Machine, and I’m interviewing Ilya Sutskever from OpenAI, and I’m asking him, “Why was it you who understood the significance of the transformer architecture when it came out immediately? On the day it was up on the website, you read it. You ran down the corridor, you went to see your collaborator, Alec Radford, and you said, ‘We’re going to build a language model on top of this architecture.’ How did you see it so quickly?”
Tim Ferriss: Well, not only that, he said, “Stop everything you’re doing —
Sebastian Mallaby: Right, right, right. So you —
Tim Ferriss: — and do this.”
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. This vision of the over-caffeinated, charismatic seizing on the engineer and saying, “Drop it, whatever you’re doing.” And his answer was prepared mind, that he’d been thinking about, how you model sequential data ever since his PhD in Canada. And when he saw the solution, this was what he’d been waiting for, for a decade, and so he could jump on it. And then when you start thinking about prepared mind, you would probably remember this better than I do, but wasn’t there a Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl final against the New England Patriots where the New England quarterback does an interception in the last second of play, and clinches the victory? And when he’s asked after the play, “How did you know to make that run? How did you know where the quarterback was going to throw the ball?” The answer was “prepared mind,” basically.
He didn’t use that phrase, but in training they had studied the play that the Seattle Seahawks were going to make, and they knew that given a certain formation, when the ball was snapped back, there was a certain pass that was coming. So the guy just takes off and he runs right into where the ball comes, and he catches it and intercepts, and New England wins. And so that’s a prepared mind in sports. And the other reason, last thing I would put on the billboard, prepare your mind, is that for the age of Artificial Intelligence, this is what we need to hear and this is a serious point, right? The risk with large language models is that we just get lazy, and whenever we need to know something, we just get it to tell us what to think. That is not the route to happiness or satisfaction or anything.
We need to continue to do the hard work of preparing our minds, because that’s what makes us people. I think therefore, I am. And so I think, prepare your mind, is entering a time when it becomes a more important slogan than ever.
Tim Ferriss: How do you do that for yourself? What guardrails or policies have you established for your own use of AI? And it makes me also think of going to the gym, lifting weights, getting in cardio. You don’t have to do that, but it is beneficial for you on a lot of levels, and some people find it quite enjoyable and hence they do that. And I’m wondering what the equivalent is for knowledge workers or people who are preparing their minds and don’t want to become impotent in the way that people with directions have mostly become impotent because of Google Maps and other tools like that. So what do you do for yourself personally, or how are you thinking about that?
Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. So I mean, the first thing I think is that the Google Maps analogy is the wrong one in the sense that it’s fine to offload a very specific mental task, which to most people is a pain in the neck, and let the machine do that for you. It’s not fine to offload all thinking, right? The point of offloading something should be, you get to focus your mental energy more on the other stuff that you really get satisfaction and meaning from. And so for me, what that means is that I’m very happy to use large language models to learn about the scientific output of somebody I’m going to interview next week. All of these AI papers are on archive, and the model has ingested all of them. And the model is extremely good at telling me, “Okay, the scientists you’re seeing next week have these three papers, and the progression between the three papers is this and this and this. And the comparison with the person you saw two weeks ago is this and this and this.”
And you learn a lot from the system, really bootstraps you to learn faster. So that’s helping me to think more, not to think less. It’s cutting out the time it would take me to go find all the papers by myself and then labor through them. It’s cutting to the chase and nourishing me intellectually. And by the way, I’m not worried about hallucination, because I’m going to interview the human scientist anyway, so I get to crosscheck it all. What I would never do is get the AI to write, because frankly, it’s not very good at long form. In fact, it really sucks. It’s fine for writing an email, although I don’t do that either, because I like writing, but it really is. I’ve tried it once. It’s terrible for anything longer than about 800 words.
But even if it could do it, I don’t think I would ever outsource that, because that’s me. This is what I do. This is the thinking process. I think through my writing. I come to understand what I understand and think what I think and believe what I believe through writing, and I’m not going to give that up.
Tim Ferriss: I’m letting out a pensive exhale, because I was thinking of this: A friend said to me — well, I’ll give him credit, Kevin Rose. At one point I was, I wouldn’t say complaining, observing that AI couldn’t do X or it wasn’t very good at Y. And he said, “When was the last time you tried that?”
And I was like, “Six months ago.”
And he’s like, “Try it again.”
And so the rules will become really important as also the power of these things increases. And I want to say it was The New Yorker. There was a piece in The New Yorker, it might’ve been The New York Times, with some very famous, I want to say novelist, could have been Pulitzer Prize winner in literature, somebody at the top. And they took three or four pieces of their own writing, had AI generate three or four pieces of writing in their voice, an
d gave it to professional readers, editors and so on. And it wasn’t clear. People couldn’t figure out. They claimed that what he or she wrote was AI.
Sebastian Mallaby: How long was the piece of writing?
Tim Ferriss: I knew that was the question you were going to ask, and I don’t recall. So I want to go back and look at that piece to see.
Sebastian Mallaby: There was a story precisely like that from an economist writer who’s very funny and also does podcasts. And he ran that experiment, and it was just as you said, his friends who were professional economist journalists couldn’t tell which was the witty column that he’d written versus the equally witty ones which the LLM had generated, and he was very off with this.
Look, I take your point. I mean, for now I can be all complacent and say, “Yeah, it only works for 800 words. It doesn’t work for a whole chapter, which is 20 pages long.” But no doubt, it’ll get better and better. But I still think I’m going to cling on to the thing that makes me, me.
Tim Ferriss: For sure, 100%. And I think, doing the thinking, preparing your mind, in part asking that question, which is not an easy question and perhaps is a different way to phrase it, but what are the things that make me, me? So you don’t accidentally make sacrifices that start to erode your sense of self, but also sense of self-worth, right?
Sebastian Mallaby: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Preparing your mind. Sebastian, everybody should check out The Infinity Machine. It’s outstanding, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. And lest people make the wrong assumption, this is not here’s the latest and greatest in AI. It is the story of an incredible mind, a whole cast of kooky and fascinating characters. It’s about a noble quest. It’s about the pitfalls and promises of entrepreneurship. It contains so many different levels.
And if you want to also have a basic understanding of what it is from the ground up that came to be colloquially referred to as AI or LLMs, this is a great book for that. It really lays out the nuts and bolts and how this evolved over time in a way that I think is intelligible to non-engineers. So everybody should check out The Infinity Machine.
Sebastian, is there anywhere else you would like to point people or anything else you’d like to say as we wind to a close?
Sebastian Mallaby: Well, yeah, you stumped me on that one. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I’m happy to leave it there. Thank you for doing it, Tim. It’s been great.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. I’ll give one more link for folks. If they want to find you on X, that’s @SCMallaby. Well, Sebastian, thank you so much for the time. I really enjoyed the conversation. And for people listening, we will include links to everything we’ve discussed, all the characters and everything else at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Sebastian. I’m pretty sure that — oh, actually we have Sebastian Junger, so there are two Sebastians, but if you search Mallaby, M-A-L-L-A-B-Y, it’ll be very easy to find this. And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary, a little bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself, and prepare your mind. Thanks for tuning in.
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2026-06-18 21:51:43
The following is a guest post from Mark Pincus (@markpinc), an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist (including signatory of The Giving Pledge), and the founder of Zynga, the pioneering social- and mobile-gaming company behind Zynga Poker, FarmVille, Words with Friends, CSR 2, and many others.
Mark earned a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He created and teaches the strategic product management class at Stanford University. He was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Napster, among other notable startups. Mark is the co-founder of the investment fund Reinvent Capital, which has backed Joby, Aurora, and SpaceX. Prior to Zynga, Mark founded a series of consumer tech companies, including FreeLoader, Inc., which was acquired in 7 months; Support.com, which went public; and the early social network Tribe Networks.
Mark’s new book is Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!
The first chapter, “Book of Life,” is below.
Please enjoy!
Know your goal or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.
At 28, I found myself washed up and living in a junior one-bedroom apartment in Washington, DC. I had been the only kid in my Harvard Business School section to graduate without a job. Over the years, my classmates had become partners at Goldman and McKinsey or had started hedge funds, while I managed to get fired from (or was asked to leave) every place I worked. I was now being pushed out of Columbia Capital, a then-fledgling venture capital firm run by future-senator Mark Warner. I spent my afternoons playing pickup soccer and watching HBO, leaving the office by 4 p.m. At night, I drank beers at the Zoo Bar with my best friend Tom Cole—who was living on my sofa—and a bunch of government mainframe engineers, all of us complaining about our lame jobs.
I found myself in a synagogue for the first time since my bar mitzvah. During Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I sat listening to Hebrew prayers I couldn’t follow and started writing in a notebook. Over the next 10 days, until Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year, I wrote about all the reasons my life sucked. I documented my bad decisions, bad habits, and failed dreams and how I felt like a passive follower rather than an active protagonist in my own story.
What I hated most about my life was that I smoked cigarettes. So, on October 19, 1994, I made a decision: I would do a lifetime quit. Even if I didn’t accomplish anything else, 1995 would still be a seminal year in my life—at least Mark 1996 would thank Mark 1994 for cutting out the cigarettes.
Throughout 1995, every day I didn’t smoke was proof that I could control and actively direct my life. The next fall, I went back to my Book of Life. I got more ambitious with what I signed up for. That year I quit my job and launched my first company, FreeLoader. Let’s acknowledge that it was both easier and harder than it would be today—easier because I had no opportunity cost and nothing great to walk away from, and harder because there was nothing great to turn to if the company failed. Amazingly, seven months later, FreeLoader was acquired for $38 million. That allowed me never to work for anyone again and enabled my career as a product maker and entrepreneur.
This experience became the foundation of my Book of Life practice for the next 30 years. Each year I ask: What would Future Mark thank Present Mark for doing? Then, I sign up for a specific change or goal and commit to making it happen.
Some years have been more successful than others. After 1994 and 1995, I thought I could do anything, so I committed to going on a date with Alicia Silverstone, who had just starred in Clueless. I never came close, even though a friend in LA told me she worked out at his gym. (I did eventually meet her in 2018 after we matched on Raya.)
When signing up for my next year, I like to focus on two types of actions or goals. The first is something in my control, like removing my wisdom teeth, or something I can change in my everyday habits, such as quitting alcohol, starting intermittent fasting, or having a daily step goal. Because these are in my control, I know that if I commit, I can succeed. Achieving these first actions helps me accomplish the much bigger second type of goal, which is usually a massive, life-changing dream, such as quitting my job and starting a new company.
My Book of Life hasn’t just kept me accountable to personal goals; it’s also kept me connected to the deeper “why” behind my work. Without this regular practice, it would be too easy to get distracted and lose sight of these convictions. For example, I’m a pretty good investor, but I will never be an amazing one. I don’t care to become one and, honestly, can’t see what difference it would ever make if I were. That’s not my “why.”
A Book of Life is like a compass that helps you come back to your North Star—what will matter to you over your entire life, not just today or even this year. It is what I credit for giving me the focus to found 10 companies and the discipline to sidestep countless dead ends.
My Book of Life practice includes a specific book that I return to year after year. I write in it only during the 10 days between the Jewish High Holidays.
I start off on Rosh Hashanah by reading all of the past years’ entries, cover to cover, to remember where I was, how I felt, and what I hoped for then. I write notes in the margins to my old self saying things like “Hey, good news, we did this” or “I still haven’t done that.”
I like to break the practice into three categories:
I begin each new year by writing about how I am feeling. I do that because when I read past years, I want to go back and touch that moment in time. I try to connect with Mark 1994. Do I get who he was and what he thought about? Do I know what he was worried about? As I look back, I see a lot of frustration that I hadn’t committed to more and accomplished more.
Next, I note major events that happened in the past year. I devote a page to what stands out for me, good and bad: weddings, birthdays, health moments, major trips, relationships, challenges. At times, this page includes world events.
As I near the end of the 10 days, I start writing about what I can do in the coming year. For the past 20 years I’ve written, “Next year I’m going to launch Dot Earth.” In 2006, I blogged that there should be an open data transfer protocol (like http) for more than just static web pages. I started dreaming of a metaverse, accessible through the web, that would allow us to connect to interactive experiences far beyond games. I imagined users typing in a single URL to accomplish something in the real world (e.g., I wanted to type zazie.colevalley.earth to get my favorite local coffee blend). I started calling this vision Dot Earth and imagined a new top-level domain system like Dot Com. It’s an instinct that has haunted me for the past 20 years. It was one of the threads that led me to found Zynga. There, I returned to this idea so many times that my teams nicknamed it Mashed Potato Mountain, from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which you will get if you’ve seen it). In recent years, I’ve been working on a company called Erth.AI, which is building the first building block, a browser-based game engine that works in real time with large language models (LLMs). The goal is to enable anyone to vibe create interactive experiences that connect to the real world. I’m not the only one working on their vision for the metaverse. Zuck has invested over $80 billion and even changed his company name to Meta. Even though he is pulling back now, I’m still a believer.
When I review my Book of Life each year, I’m having a conversation with myself across time. I look for patterns in how I’ve lived—the surf trips I repeat annually, ending the summers at Burning Man. Some years are indistinguishable, which is always a wake-up call, telling me it may be time for disruption.
As I look back, I see a painful pattern. The story my book seems to tell is that my biggest growth and company building moments have only come from my deepest despair. The more frustration I felt, the more likely that time was associated with me taking a disruptive action—usually starting a company. And the happier I have been with my life, the harder it has been for me to sign up for a big change. In 1994, when I was the most unhappy, I signed up for the biggest disruption of my life (quitting my job and basically burning my résumé) and achieved the biggest positive change, a lifelong career as a product founder. So, if you are feeling dissatisfied, the good news is that this is the best time to do something about that feeling.
Great product makers and entrepreneurs do something similar. Mark Zuckerberg signs up for one major change or goal every year and used to list these as “life events” on his Facebook timeline. Some more clearly involve partnering with future Zuck, such as learning Mandarin, while others are a bit less obvious, like eating what he killed for a year or wearing a tie every day in 2011. More recently, Zuck committed to becoming a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter. Jeff Bezos has what he calls a regret minimization framework to help him make choices he’ll be thankful for in the future.
The things we regret aren’t the TV shows we missed or the extra day at the beach we skipped. We regret the book we never wrote, the instrument we never learned, the health issue we never addressed. We miss not taking the time to fix our teeth or our messed-up knee or running a marathon. I regret not learning guitar. I wish one of those “lost years” had been dedicated to that skill; I’d be playing today, thanking my past self. That’s the point of partnering with your future self—making sure each year contains at least one meaningful accomplishment and that you are taking full advantage of this life.
In 2016, I lost my original Book of Life, which contained 22 years of reflections. While painful, this loss was an important reminder not to be too attached to anything. It also forced me to sit down and try to remember one seminal achievement from each year. For some years, I couldn’t recall anything important. The blank spaces in that exercise taught me as much as the filled ones. That happened out of necessity, but it’s a good exercise and a good place to start a Book of Life practice.
I think of my Book of Life as a time machine that can take me backward and forward in my own life and help me make better decisions. I write notes to my past self in the margins—and many to my future self as well. It’s a lifelong dialog. The practice of coming back to today can be a powerful tool to help motivate us to go after moonshot ideas but also to reset priorities and make hard decisions like killing marginal projects. This practice builds a hunger to disrupt my own patterns.
I saw Tony Robbins do this with 5,000 people in an odd but powerful exercise where he turned the lights off and asked us all to imagine our lives in 20 years if we never changed what we hated most about ourselves and our lives. For 30 minutes I listened as people wailed and cried.
For me this has always felt like a positive exercise (no wailing required). If I come back in time from five years in the future, what will I thank myself for doing? Today, it’s going all in on AI and launching products and companies that deliver on my vision of enabling everyone to live their lives at the speed of play.
There are moments when we realize history is happening around us. These moments, which can be externally driven or your own creation, are when I like to say out loud to myself and my teams, “We need to stop time.”
This is a rallying cry to stop work as usual and get intense, often about a new direction. We have to check in on whether our path still makes sense given whatever new information we’re seeing in the market, and perhaps make hard decisions like a small or big pivot. Then we need to be all in on sprinting to our, hopefully, more clear and relevant objective. Our teams often resist this; some may even opt out. But if you’re right, the team will quickly show up in a much more committed way.
One powerful example was early in building Zynga. In the fall of 2007, the Facebook app ecosystem was exploding and so were our projects. Our teams were spread too thin across a bunch of word games and other small app ideas in addition to our core Zynga Poker game. I called everyone into a room one Monday and said we could keep on building these random new games like everyone else, maybe launching another 10, or double down on Poker, which was at 400,000 Daily Active Users (DAU), possibly doubling it to 800,000 and beyond. I saw the power and competitive advantage in building and running one “franchise” app versus treading water like everyone else, constantly launching new apps to replace the older ones nobody was supporting. It was a risky, uncomfortable bet with no data to prove this would work, and nobody liked it. I forced this decision through anyway, and after some grumbling and friction, we soon had the whole company focused on this one simple goal, which we did achieve. It was also instrumental in setting the strategy for the company, which is true to this day, of building forever franchises (we’ll revisit the power of franchises later).
Time moves so fast that if we don’t intentionally shape these blocks, we risk having nothing to show for them. Committing to a vision with specific outcomes is a way to stop time.
This practice spills over to being disruptive with your teams and products. It’s not necessarily efficient. But being a great product leader and pursuing a big vision almost always means you will have to stop and switch to get the train moving in the right direction. These switches may happen frequently, because the right direction now is often very different from what it was last month or even last week. I always say to my teams, “We need to stop time, because this is so important.”
My high school yearbook quote, which was written by my classmates, was “Some people have tact. Others tell the truth.” This prophetic line would define my early career. When in business school and interviewing for Disney, I was asked how to bring Disney World to Middle America—a replica in every city. I told my interviewer what I thought: “That doesn’t sound like a good strategy. Multiple lesser-quality parks will probably hurt your brand.” I didn’t get asked back for another interview.
Throughout my career, I found myself functioning as an expert witness—the person who is closest to the data (and the right answer) but furthest from the decision. During a summer internship at Bain & Company, I proudly presented evidence proving that in the snack food industry—the area I was investigating—Bain’s foundational graph (which was created by Mitt Romney himself) was incorrect. Higher relative market shares did not always lead to higher return on sales. I thought Bain was going to offer me a full-time job on the spot. Instead, people were so offended that they walked out of my presentation. No one spoke to me for the rest of my internship.
Later, at TCI, which was then the biggest cable company in the world, run by the legendary John Malone, my boss asked me to analyze an opportunity to put $400 million into Prodigy, the biggest internet service of its time. “Prodigy is a bad service that loses massive money. There’s this other newly public company, AOL, and we could buy that whole company for $110 million,” I said. “Why don’t we just do that?” TCI didn’t do either deal. Prodigy ultimately went bankrupt. In another meeting, after I presented to Malone why we shouldn’t do a deal he really wanted to get done, he said, “I don’t need some wet-behind-the-ears MBA telling me what’s a good investment.” That seemed like the end of my career at TCI.
In each of these jobs, I was the victim in a storyline that kept repeating: The adults would make the final decision, and the underlings like me would then go try to make it work—and try to limit the damage. I didn’t believe in paying dues and working my way up corporate ladders. I struggled with the management principle of “disagree and commit.” I was more “disagree and disagree.” I didn’t make a good employee, although I later realized I was exactly the kind of hire I wanted on my future teams.
The expert witness has been an important concept throughout my career. I was a frustrated expert witness in jobs I had in my twenties; later, I learned to hire other expert witnesses and set them free as “CEOs” by giving them the authority to make decisions in their area of expertise. What’s your current situation? Are you an expert witness, close to the answers but far from the authority to implement them? Or are you in a founder position, and perhaps you can hire expert witnesses and set them loose to prove they’re right?
My instinct for my first company, FreeLoader, started in the middle of the night in 1994. I was haunted by this feeling that my life was going nowhere. At the same time this thing I’d been waiting for and dreaming about—this public online network (the internet)—was happening right in front of me, and I wasn’t a part of it. I was filled with FOMO. I felt like an outsider.
Ten years earlier, when I was in college, my brain was infected by George Gilder’s book Microcosm. He pointed out that the previous 100 years had been about the macrocosm, or the physical material world, where fortunes were made from laying railroads and building shopping malls. The next 100 years would be all about the microcosm, or the microchips connected to networks, spreading ideas and knowledge at the speed of light. He predicted that, just as calculators went from taking up an entire room in the 1950s to becoming keychains given away at the bank, everything around us would eventually be infused with productivity gains, becoming abundant and almost disposable.
Now, a decade later, everything was happening in Silicon Valley and Seattle. I found myself trapped in DC, which felt like the furthest possible place from this tech future. Even though I was such an outsider, I felt at a deep instinctive level that I could visualize the whole thing. But I didn’t know how to code. I hadn’t worked at any tech companies. I had no credibility.
The only thing I could think to do was write a long essay about what was happening. I stayed up all night writing about how the Mosaic/Netscape browser and the publicly available internet were going to end the Microsoft monopoly. The browser was going to break open software and internet and consumer services so that any entrepreneur could compete.
I emailed my essay to the editor of Interactive Week, the only publication that was covering new media at the time. I had nothing to lose and not that much to gain. I just had to tell someone what I had figured out and to see whether they thought I was right.
The editor emailed right back asking, “Who are you?” Then he used this thesis as a front-page story under his byline without mentioning me. I didn’t care. I was impressed that Interactive Week thought that I—a nobody, an outsider—had figured things out to the point that they wanted to publish my essay as their own.
The editor threw me a bone when a week or two later he interviewed me. He published a back-of-the-book profile on me as an up-and-coming venture capitalist. Fred Wilson, a junior partner at Euclid Partners, a little venture firm in New York, read the piece and got in touch. Fred was the lone partner at his firm who wanted to do software and internet. When he called, I thought he was interviewing me to be an associate. But when I got there, I saw that his office was so tiny and so full of papers and books that there was no way he could give me a job; there was literally nowhere to put me.
“The world doesn’t need another VC,” Fred said. “What we really need are entrepreneurs we can back. Do you have any ideas?”
I wanted to build consumer software for the web. That was exactly what I had written about in my Book of Life. I had committed to quit my job and go for it, even if at the time I didn’t know what that looked like. So when Fred gave me this small entry, I pounced on it. And it eventually became FreeLoader.
Part of what I get from my Book of Life practice is clarity about my intentions. Each time I’ve started a new company, I’ve tried not to make the same mistakes, though sometimes I’ve overcompensated and made new ones.
By the time I founded Zynga at 41, I had started three other companies—one acquired, one public, and one failed—and learned hard lessons about control. It wasn’t fashionable to still be founding companies at that age. Many of my founder peers had become VCs, and conventional wisdom claimed backing founders over 30 was a mistake. But I wasn’t doing this for a job or money; I was doing this for my passion and satisfaction.
In all my previous companies, especially Support.com, I made so many compromises that paradoxically, as the company achieved bigger milestones, it became less and less a place where I wanted to work. (“Know your goal, or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.”) These compromises involved endless small decisions about location, office space, board and team members. Many founders wake up one day and say, “This isn’t fun anymore, but look what I achieved. I guess I’m just a casualty of our success.” Then it becomes acceptable to think that the tour of duty’s over, and it’s time to hire a CEO. VCs will never argue with that decision; they love it. But it’s rarely the right long-term choice for the company.
As founders, we make sacrifices, similar to parents. We put the needs of the mission and organization ahead of our own. But if founders are the most essential employees—the keepers of the flame for the mission, vision, and cultural DNA—how can a company afford to lose them and still remain special?
As I built Zynga, my mantra was “Build a house you want to live in.” The mantra came directly from my Book of Life reflections, helping me stay connected to my “why” and reminding me why control matters. Instead of thinking about everyone else, I focused on creating a company and environment that made me excited.
That’s why I purchased and remodeled an old potato chip factory a year before founding Zynga. Financially, this made no sense. I put millions into buying and renovating the former Williams & Company building, and then we raised millions for Zynga’s Series A. We called the building the Chip Factory, a double entendre, given that it went from creating potato chips to creating poker chips. The building may be worth twice as much today, 18 years later, while those same dollars in Zynga became worth billions.
Too often, we underestimate how our workspace affects our creative success. I remember hearing that Steve Jobs insisted on approving carpet choices for conference rooms; this fact was cited as evidence of founders’ insane micromanagement. I see it as beautiful: He cared so much about the product that his work environment needed to be perfect, too.
I didn’t go that far, but I insisted on a commercial kitchen with trained chefs (students from the culinary school across the street). At Tribe, we ate pizza in a dusty warehouse. Back then, I was always excited to visit our VCs because they had beautiful catered lunches. With Zynga, I wanted VCs to visit and think, “They live better than we do!”
Since we were working constantly, the least we could do was live well. In addition to great food, the people in each game studio designed their own space. Even with 1,200 people working there, it felt like a federation of start-ups: Mafia Wars had a meditation room; YoVille had a video game room.
My friend Brian Chesky, the Airbnb co-founder and CEO, inspired the term founder mode during a 2024 talk at Y Combinator (YC), the famous incubator that has fostered other massive companies like Stripe and Dropbox. I define founder mode as unapologetic leadership—having the conviction to lead through chaos, even when you’re losing and it’s not obvious your instincts are right.
Most start-ups hit moments when the original idea isn’t working. That’s when the board gets nervous, the team looks to you for confidence, and everyone wants an easy, safe answer. But great companies aren’t built on safe bets; they’re built on bold, uncomfortable decisions that might make you unpopular in the short term but that drive long-term success. Are you ready to be disliked or to stand alone if necessary?
Too often, we over-tune to stakeholders and under-tune to our instincts. Founder mode gives us permission to be our true selves—not to be jerks, but to take the wheel and ignore consensus when necessary. I’ve always referred to my companies as “democratic dictatorships”: Everyone can voice an opinion, and then I make the final decision. Lately, we have seen bold CEOs at Palantir, Coinbase, and even Google tell employees they can leave if they don’t agree with their positions. Start-ups aren’t democracies.
No one will grant you founder mode. Most investors believe 99 percent of founders aren’t qualified for it. Some say founder mode is just a way to give bad founders an excuse to be bad. VCs will always look back and say, “Of course Bezos should have had founder control” (he didn’t). Or Elon. But nobody thought founders should have control at their low points when they wanted to do things everyone else thought were stupid.
Founder mode isn’t about being reckless; it’s having the control and conviction to act without asking permission. Without it, you’re just an employee waiting to get fired from your own company.
My father hammered the idea of control into my head. I failed to take his advice throughout the course of my first three companies.
I finally got the point by the time I was raising money for Zynga. I was up front about maintaining control and half jokingly said it was to protect investors from themselves. I started investor calls with “Here are the top 10 reasons you won’t want to invest in my company. If you still want to talk, great.” Ninety-five percent said, “Thanks for saving me time,” and hung up. Many Valley investors have stories about “missing” Zynga. The truth is they turned us down because they wouldn’t accept my terms.
My approach made fundraising harder. Zynga should have been the easiest round ever—we had $200K in monthly free cash flow growing at 30 percent, and I had a proven track record. Yet I struggled to raise $5 million and took a $15 million pre-money valuation. Fred Wilson made me eat the entire option pool. Today, the average Y Combinator company gets better terms than I did then.
When Sequoia questioned our valuation, asking how I could justify $20 million pre-money versus $15 million, I said, “I’m going to build a multibillion-dollar company or fail. If I succeed, it’ll be worth a lot; if I fail, it won’t be worth anything. If you’re worried about the difference between $15 and $20 million, this isn’t the right investment.” We’re seeing ever higher valuations today largely for this reason. VCs today mostly get this trade-off and view most seed and Series A investments as call options on big outcomes.
Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. Ultimately, I created conditions for success by refusing to work for a VC-controlled company. I told investors we were mutually choosing each other; they couldn’t just name board members. The board is a company’s DNA, and I wouldn’t accept a junior partner and the resulting “junior partner syndrome,” in which I’d have to negotiate with an entire VC firm through someone who was only an expert witness at their own firm. We would never sell unless we failed.
The best VCs (many of whom are former founders) know how to support founders while getting out of the way. And world-class VCs, including Fred Wilson, Reid Hoffman, and John Doerr, know to back founders in their darkest moments. I was lucky to have them at Zynga.
One thing most founders share is the experience of being in the Abyss. For most of us, this place before and after our start-ups or even jobs we have loved is open-ended and dark. It’s unstructured. The world doesn’t care whether we get out of bed in the morning. We lose purpose and don’t know whether, how, or when we will ever reemerge.
The Abyss also has value that we’re unaware of when we’re in this state, however. Once we get over our anxiety about being in the Abyss, it becomes an opportunity to explore our curiosities. Giving ourselves permission to pursue things that are not obviously useful or productive is critical. These explorations help us tune into our instincts, hone our ideas, and develop our taste.
Support.com, my second company, went public during the last week of the dot-com bubble. Within six months, everything crashed. By March 2001, San Francisco and the consumer internet had entered what I called nuclear winter. South of Market Street, which had been overrun with start-ups, became eerily empty—like a ghost town after the end of the gold rush. Everyone I knew left, and many moved to Tahoe, where real estate prices soared.
That was my first period of unemployment. Tom Cole (who, by then, had been living on my couch for eight years) and I retreated to my house in Cole Valley. I went through a year and a half in the Abyss. I spent my time wandering the neighborhood with my dog Zinga, smoking pot, and meditating. Tom was running a kief bar in my basement (this was before the advent of legal dispensaries). He was a pot mixologist (far ahead of his time), mashing different strains into powders, drying them in martini glasses on my back porch, and putting the concoctions in little labeled bottles with names like “bubblegum.” A bunch of ex-FreeLoader people and other Haight-Ashbury locals would show up at the house to smoke at Tom’s bar.
During this time, I started developing what the legendary business coach Bill Campbell would later call my “18-month thinking.” He said, “You’re one of the best 18-month thinkers I’ve ever met. You can see around corners. Trust that.” What Bill meant was that I had a keen sense of what people would want in the near future. My own take has always been that my usage patterns represent what the early majority of the mass market will want.
While everyone else was declaring the internet dead, I tried to stay close to first principles. I was paying attention to consumer adoption, which never stopped.
Because I wasn’t doing anything and companies weren’t getting funded anyway, I had the luxury to just think about the future. I started to feel a deep well of desire to be engaged in something—almost anything—that would feel productive.
One great thing we can all do in the Abyss is sample everything. I went deeper into cooking and particularly my obsession with the perfect Bolognese sauce. I went to Italy with my girlfriend, Jenny. I decided to eat only pasta with Bolognese at every meal, in my search for the perfect Bolognese. That, and my desire to drive like an Italian race car driver, made Jenny want to break up with me daily. But my search wasn’t just about the sauce; it was about developing the ability to recognize when something truly works.
During this time, I developed a deeper theory of the future cultural revolution that would be set off by the worldwide internet. I called it the “Revolution of the Ants.” I believed that once everyone had unlimited access to this network, we the people would rise up, self-aggregate, and eradicate the need for the gatekeepers—the brokers, the middlemen—whether politicians or newspapers. Money and power would no longer be derived from controlling the message or our access to one another. Instead, there would be a perfect market in which the best ideas would spread. A few years later, I captured this theory in a blog post I wrote on my Blackberry while stuck on a plane. It represented a deep instinct well that would eventually be the people web (social media and social networking).
A small group of us still held a flame for the consumer internet during this nuclear winter. Reid Hoffman and I started to meet with others in San Francisco, talking about Web 2.0. I hosted brainstorming sessions at my house in Cole Valley, which I had transformed into a three-story one-bedroom loft (not a smart real estate move!). I covered the walls with big sticky sheets from these sessions, capturing what we saw as the instinctive pillars of the next wave.
We all realized a core rule of the internet was that “anything that can be free will be,” and our user data would be set free, too. We saw a future web made up of people, not pages. While Google had built its empire on page rank relevancy, we believed the next wave would be built on people relevance. Reid had the idea for LinkedIn. I had the idea for Tribe.
The Abyss is often where our deepest instincts form. It’s where we start seeing patterns that others miss because we’re forced to slow down and really look. Many founders rush through this phase, desperate to get back to “productive” work. But without my time in the Abyss, there would have been no Zynga, no understanding of the social web, no clarity about what I wanted to build.
In 2003, when I was 38, I started working with a life coach named Erika. I wanted two things: a life partner and a life mission. I’d already had success beyond my hopes and dreams, but I wasn’t satisfied.
Tony Robbins talks about how happiness is where your life meets or exceeds your expectations. By that measure, I should have been happy. But I felt a deeper void. I was happy day-to-day with success, friends, and fun, but my life lacked meaning.
Erika didn’t let me off easy. In our first session, she said, “You’re emotionally unavailable. You’re not going to find anyone because you don’t actually want to.” She told me emotionally unavailable people are like alcoholics who can find one another across a bar.
Erika helped me develop what I call my imagination chessboard, which helped me envision what I wanted my life to look like two or five years out. In practice I literally wrote out whatever story I wanted my next life chapter to be. In the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, the young chess prodigy lay in bed at night and imagined the winning chessboard and the different moves that would get her there. If we can picture it in our mind’s eye, we can get there. We know our North Star.
On the personal side, instead of helping me get more dates, she put me on a six-month dating moratorium. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to find someone. Instead, I was clearing out old cobwebs; she literally made me clean out my closets. I had to examine behaviors that didn’t line up with my stated objectives.
On the professional side, my imagination chessboard helped reveal two limiting beliefs that were holding me back from being creatively productive. The first was that I needed my own capital—a thread throughout my whole career and probably true for most other founders, too. I thought if I had $500 million, I could stop worrying about funding and play the long game, build things right, and go for bigger, more creative ideas instead of just what could get VC funding or immediate revenue. The second was my perception that I needed a permanent incubator. I dreamed of having an idea factory—what Bill Gross had done with Idealab, where he raised a large pool of capital and spun out new ventures based on his many ideas.
This exercise showed me that I have often been stuck because of my own limiting beliefs. And if I could get past these, I could start to go deeper on my why. I realized this wasn’t about needing money or having a platform. It was about using 99 percent of my full creative capacity.
In building Zynga, I used this imagination chessboard to get my teams past their own limiting beliefs. I often challenged them to answer, “What if everything goes right?”
My best use of this was in 2007, when EA called me in to meet with their lawyers, whom they conveniently called “business affairs” to sound less scary. Zynga had built a series of games that resembled popular Hasbro titles like Boggle, and EA had the rights, so they threatened to sue us. Erika challenged me to imagine what the best possible meeting would be. I said, “Zynga should be EA’s new Walmart”—meaning their online distribution via social networks to the mass market. So that’s the pitch I prepared. Luckily for me, Bing Gordon decided to drop into the meeting. When he heard me say the Walmart line, he took over the meeting and the whiteboard. EA decided not to sue, and Bing ended up helping me build Zynga.
Today AI can help you develop your imagination chessboard in minutes. Close your eyes and imagine life as it will be in the future when you have achieved your North Star. I create these chessboards all the time. I walk around having conversations with ChatGPT and use each imagination chessboard to go deeper on product use cases. I prompt it to write about life in two years, when I have built my vision for the metaverse and millions of people rely on my platform Erth.AI to turn their ideas into realities for others to consume and love. It helps me live my life at the speed of play and move from a high-level vision to detailed use cases that I can start to play with, test, and iterate on faster.
Keeping a Book of Life practice helps you stay connected to your North Star across time. By partnering with your future self, you create accountability to goals that truly matter—not this week’s distractions, but what you’ll thank yourself for years from now. The exercise is simple: Each year, take stock of where you are, review how you did against last year’s goals, and commit to what you’ll accomplish next. Without this regular practice, it’s too easy to drift through life as a passive observer rather than an active protagonist in your own story. What could make this or next year a seminal year in your life?
From the book LIFE AT THE SPEED OF PLAY. Copyright ©2026 by Mark Pincus. Published on June 23 by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros.
The post Death by 1,000 Compromises: How to Tap Into Founder Mode appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-06-17 21:32:33
Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, The Power Law, The Man Who Knew, and The World’s Banker.
His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
Please enjoy!
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“These machines will be smarter than us. They will want to survive. And they can be deceptive, they can obfuscate, they can go behind your back, pretend they’re doing one thing and then actually do another. All of this has been shown in all the tests of the models. And so we put those things together, I think your probability of doom cannot be zero.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“For humans, to contemplate annihilation is absurd and the absurd is a close cousin of humor.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“All through this topic there is this religious expression because religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“I think any reasonable person should be both excited and a bit frightened, and that’s just the nature of it. It sounds contradictory, but actually, that’s the only rational response.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“We only need to be ahead for the next couple of years, because by 2028 we will get to recursive self-improvement, where the frontier model codes, by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical. And at that point, with recursive self-improvement, we’re done, the race is over. Whoever comes first at that point, that’s it.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
Want to hear another conversation with a legendary investor mapping the AI race and the US–China contest? Listen to my conversation with Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley, in which we discussed the AI bubble debate, circular deals and SPV chaos, angel investing in the AI era, his ten-day deep dive across six Chinese cities, the Xiaomi SU7 factory tour, Lei Jun as “the Steve Jobs of China,” America vs. China (lawyers vs. engineers), regulatory capture, why the IPO market is broken, stablecoins putting Visa and Mastercard on notice, and much more.
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The post Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early (#870) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-06-13 03:21:39
My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago.
Before we dive into my dirty laundry, let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily.
But far fewer people have first-hand experience with the speed and intensity of disruption that’s happening. Not in a year, not in six months, but right now.
So let me show you, using my own books as the cadaver on the table, what a fatality looks like.
For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that “adult nonfiction” was down 9% from Q1 2025. Who knows… maybe in line with historical fluctuations?
But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.
But, let’s be honest: one quarter doesn’t make a trend.
So let’s zoom out and look at my full catalog over a few years.
Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio.
Keep in mind that all of these were #1 NYT and/or WSJ bestsellers, and The 4-Hour Workweek was one of the most highlighted books across all of Amazon in 2017, a full decade after publication. The sales have been surprisingly durable… and predictable. These books have long been an annuity that I could count on.
But alas!
There’s trouble in paradise:
| Year | Year-Over-Year |
| 2022 | baseline |
| 2023 | -5% |
| 2024 | -13% |
| 2025 | -46% |
| 2026 (run-rate) | -57% vs. 2025 |
Let that sink in for a minute.
ChatGPT, powered by the updated GPT-3.5 model, launched on November 30, 2022.
There was a gentle -5% slip in 2023, then -13% in 2024, and then the floor disappears: -46% in 2025, followed by an even steeper -57% pace this year. If the run-rate holds, my catalog will sell roughly 80% fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022, with almost all of that happening since LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT exploded in use.
But what about ebooks and audio?
Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.
Now, there are caveats, of course.
We could talk about Amazon stocking changes, post-pandemic shifts of spending, a few potential exceptions, reversion to the mean after outlier events (e.g., TikTok virality of The 4-Hour Body in 2024, thanks to Gary Brecka), and so on.
But, even if I try my best to steelman a counter-argument… it’s all fancy-talk and wishful thinking. I don’t believe any constellation of footnotes begins to explain a near-vertical drop in prescriptive nonfiction.
Many of the strongest self-help franchises on the planet—standout darlings with perennial dominance—are also getting hammered. These are the best performers. You see them on endcaps everywhere books are sold. But if you look at BookScan sales for 2025 vs 2026 thus far, and do a little math, it ain’t pretty. If you rightly assume that self-help books tend to sell the most copies in H1, the biggest names I could think of will be down ~40–60%.
My agent, who has decades of statements to compare against, put it bluntly: 2025 was the first big drop, 2026 looks more severe, and the only thing that’s really changed in that timeframe is the acceleration of AI.
Some publishers point to the growth of YouTube and podcasts, and those certainly contribute, but I think they are relative rounding errors.
Think about what my books are, functionally speaking.
On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table. I have described a lot of my books as Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income.
In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book.
In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books—and thousands of others—that will give you a personalized protocol in 15 seconds, adjusted for your bodyweight, your schedule, your injuries, and your aversion to cottage cheese.
Now, can I share some compelling counter-arguments? Yes, and I will, but the trend is only going to accelerate and intensify. The broad trend will spare (next to) no one in the advice business.
If “how-to” books are getting crushed because LLMs seem to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized advice… What’s next on the chopping block? Or, what is vulnerable to being replaced by AI-generated alternatives?
My position—and I’d genuinely love to be wrong—is yes, prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine, and the coal mine is enormous. I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.
What does this mean for search that depends on ads? What does this mean for journalism that depends on ads and subscribers?
What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.
Per Pew Research, 83% of Americans haven’t paid for news in any form in the past year. And when they slam into a paywall? A mere 1% pull out a credit card. I have used various tools to get around paywalls, as I don’t want to have 100 new subscriptions, but in the revenue arms race, those tools are getting beaten by new publisher tools. So what happens? I prompt LLMs to give me a summary of the linked articles, and they do it beautifully. There’s a lot lost in the translation, but it’s good enough for a quick update.
Will anything survive in roughly its current form?
Probably. Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats. But “give me the 5 steps to X”? That’s a tough business that’s about to get a lot tougher.
A confession: part of me finds this clarifying.
I never got into writing because of unit economics. I got into it because a book is the highest-density transfer of obsession I know—two or three years of someone’s life, compressed into something you can hold. Books changed my life long before I wrote one, and the books that mattered most to me were never huge bestsellers.
I promised counter-arguments earlier, so here is one:
For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories (e.g., The Harajuku Moment in The 4-Hour Body) that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.
The viral sensation of ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022. But well before that, in 2010, The 4-Hour Body was first published. It clocked in at 608 pages and hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Millions ultimately bought it, but a lot of my smart friends texted me some version of this: “I love you, but I’m too busy to read that monster. Could you send me a handful of quick bullets for losing 20 pounds?”
Some of them were pre-diabetic, about to get married, or had some other reason to take this seriously. How many acted upon the bullet points I sent?
Precisely zero—none of them—implemented the advice. In contrast, thousands of readers—who were led along a carefully designed path—lost 100+ pounds (see some before-and-after photos here) after failing other diets their entire lives.
Why? There’s still plenty of magic in meticulously planned journeys and real stories from real people.
So here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now:
I’d rather write books for 10,000 people than make short-form video clips for 10,000,000.
Adding a little more, I’d say:
I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.
Why?
For one thing, quite a few of my podcast video clips have gotten 50–100 million views, or 50k likes, or choose-your-vanity-metric, but guess how that’s translated to downloads of the full episodes, where the important nuance is? Precisely zero. You literally cannot see the impact on a graph. The platforms are increasingly better at keeping users captive on their platforms, and algorithm chasing is a race to the bottom.
Second, the market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I’d bet on it. In a way, we’re reverting to the earlier days of the Internet.
The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.
The question for every writer, podcaster, and creator isn’t whether the interface shift comes for your format. It’s what you’ll do once it does. As always, I think it’s good to try and dig your wells before you’re dry.
So how do you do that while the sands are shifting under your feet? Perhaps it’s a return to basics:
1) Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
2) Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
3) Success!
Could it really be that simple?
And could it really be that hard? The riptides pulling in the opposite direction are absurdly strong—algo chasing, incentives to create clickbait, bot-assisted “engagement,” and more. AI personalization will make these siren songs 100x more seductive.
But in the end – Could there really be any other choice?
I’m tying myself to the mast of long-form, but maybe I’m delusional or otherwise high on my own supply.
Only time will tell, and that time is coming soon.
***
Agree? Disagree? Different angle? Please let me know in the comments here.
The post Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
