Tim Ferriss

which you see in pretty much every culture, right?

Whether it's like North American, Plains Indians, or Siberia, or wherever, right?

And there were chapters in there about the use of different plants.

So, mandrake, belladonna, henbane, et cetera.

by quote-unquote witches or werewolves, right?

Who would basically go on these incredible psychotropic journeys and then come back with stories of shape-shifting, which are still very common in the Amazon, by the way.

This belief and these types of stories.

I mean, they might call them skills or powers, right?

I mean, dieting certain plants is intended to help you with some of this stuff.

So...

That opened the door to me asking like, okay, let's just assume for the time being that people cannot turn into animals, but like... the idea that you could ingest a plant or put on a salve that would so fundamentally change your consciousness that you would come back with complete belief that you had done it was also interesting to me.

And so I then became this sort of intrepid, very amateur,

biochemist looking at how that might happen, right?

And so you combine that then with the fear of Alzheimer's in my family.

And it just led me to really want to focus on brain function.

And...

a few things happened around the same time.

Towards the end of high school, I read a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Steven LaBerge.

And still to this day, I think it is one of the most impressive books

I have found for teaching a skill in a systematic way.