Jason Fried · 2026-02-15 · source ↗ · whole document (45)
Radical Authenticity Over Marketing Tricks
`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.
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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
`1:25:26`
that's always been there, but I couldn't hear that frequency. Like, it's amazing. And then if you look at a radio and you turn the knob, you're picking up things that are there that you can't hear until you turn the knob. That's what it was like for me. And how does it make me a better whatever or know myself better? I think all experiences help you know yourself better. So it's just a mirror and a reflection and a detail and a crumb that creates the pile of you. I don't really know. It's not like that was a huge breakthrough for me, but it was fascinating enough to do it a few more times and learn a few more things that were just fascinating. One thing I'll just share, it's a little bit of an aside, but again, it comes back to this object thing, and maybe this is me seeing how my mind works that way, because
`1:26:14`
we talked about objects before. But I remember having this experience where I was just puzzling through this three-dimensional puzzle and being stumped by it, but enjoying the problem-solving. And then I finally, just... Again, this is conceptual and metaphorical and not so literal, but I turned it around and saw it from the back, and it was dead simple. And what it basically told me was, turn everything around. This is inverted. Everything's a lot simpler from behind. Everything's real. The back of things are real. The front of things are fronts. The back of things are real. So, what does that mean? How do I apply that?