Tim Ferriss

In retrospect, I think I would have been much happier somewhere else.

Princeton was a very difficult, stiff environment for me.

But I went there because they had one of the best East Asian studies departments in the world.

Really phenomenal.

Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.

They had a very, very strong psychology and neuroscience program.

Danny Kahneman was there.

There was a guy named Barry Jacobs who had done a bunch of research with LSD and did a lot of research also on the serotonergic system involving cats and stuff because cats kind of sleep all the time.

I really wanted to work in his lab.

And then thirdly, there was something at the time, I was very sad that it ended up getting wound down maybe a year after I got there, but there was something at Princeton called the PEAR Lab, P-E-A-R, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, where I think, I could be getting some of the details wrong, but I'm pretty sure, at one point they had military funding,

or, you know, three-letter acronym funding.

They also had money, I want to say, from, like, SRI International to use sort of computational and quantitative measures to study things like telekinesis, remote viewing, et cetera.

And literally, that had been started by, I want to say, Professor John, J-A-H-N, I believe it was.

And somebody should fact-check this, but I'm getting pretty close.

I think he was the former dean of the...

engineering department or engineering quadrangle.

And one of his post, not postdocs, but one of his grad students had looked at human influence on random number generators.

And he was like, really?

He was like, he's like, look, if you want to waste your time on this, it's not going to help you with anything.

Like, it looks like a terrible idea to me.