Radical Authenticity Over Marketing Tricks

`1:21:33`

"You're just one guy. How could you do this?" Or, "How could you do that?" Or, "You don't know what you're doing. You don't have a degree in this." That kind of fired me up for a while, but there's a point where you want... This is, again, to the point of, kind of like, you want to sort of launch, and then you want to find a place to settle, where you kind of just, I think, come into your own at a certain point. And I think I probably did that in my forties. I'm 51 now. So I think in my forties, I probably came into my own actually, settled into my own. Had some psychedelic experiences, which helped as well. — Did you? — Yeah. — John Mackey... I don't know if it was in the episode, I can't remember. — Yeah. — But this guy keeps trying to get me to do psychedelics. I think we talked about it at the end. — Yeah. — I was like, "I'm not doing psychedelics." What did you do? — Why not? — I... — Let's turn this interview around. — Let's go. It's a conversation.

`1:22:19`

You can do whatever you want. — Yeah. — I think me and you both bond over... Like, there are some positive things. Obviously, the tech industry and the Bay Area and San Francisco have created great companies and great products and stuff, but there's also a lot of just wacko shit, and a lot of them are... — Sure. — There's just too much drug use, in my opinion. I don't do drugs. — Yeah. — And I like the way my mind is, and I don't want it to change. — Yep. — And yeah, and I'm very resistant to doing drugs, because I've also had, like.. My cousin died of a heroin overdose. My dad did drugs his whole life. He went to jail for selling drugs. — Yeah. — I've never seen somebody high on cocaine make a great decision. — Yeah, yeah. — So it's like, we carry all the stuff that we experienced earlier,

`1:23:05`

and I'm like, "Well, what's the opposite of that?" — Yeah. — The opposite of that is not doing drugs. So, I'll just not do drugs. — Yeah. I'm not here to convince you to do drugs. — No, no, go for it. — For me, the experience was very... Okay, as I think I mentioned earlier, my favorite thing in life is to have an insight, and so psychedelics for me were an avalanche of insights, and that was fascinating to know, that my mind could see things and understand things in ways I didn't know were possible. I could see, like... This will not make any sense, but maybe people who've done this will understand. You think of an idea, and I never thought an idea was like a three-dimensional object that I could turn around and see from the other side. Not like a different perspective on an idea, but literally, I could

`1:23:52`

turn it around and see what was behind it. Things like that, like, that fascinated me. Having insights about the nature of existence and all this other stuff was fascinating, too, but just having... I remember... I've done this a few times, and the experiences are always like, "Wow!" Like, while I'm doing it, like, "Wow, I never thought about it that way," or, "I've never seen it..." So for me, it's candy, and this sounds like maybe candy and drugs, I don't want to mix them, but there's a sweetness to having an insight that you've never had before about something that you think you knew, that psychedelics have shown me.

`1:24:37`

But I don't do "drugs." — But it's an insight of... — I've done this three times. — How does it help you know yourself better? — Well, that's not why I did it. — Okay. — I don't think I know myself better, but I feel more expansive now that there's more than I thought I knew. Here's how I kind of thought about it afterwards. You have to picture an old car radio from maybe the '50s or something. An old pickup truck had a car radio with a needle, and you could move the dial, and the needle moves, right? Get the little glass window with all the channels, and you're in one of the channels. That's where you are all the time. You're in this channel, 95.7 is you. And psychedelics let me turn the knob a little bit and tune into something else