I’m incredibly proud to share news that’s been two years in the making: my next book is coming in Fall 2026!

It’s called Life in Perspective, and it represents the culmination of a reflective practice I’ve been refining since 2008: the annual review.

If you’ve read Building a Second Brain or The PARA Method, you know I’m passionate about systems that help us manage information and act on it. But I’ve come to realize we’ve been solving only half the equation.

We’ve gotten incredibly good at capturing information as it arrives. But we’re terrible at revisiting and making sense of what we’ve accumulated after time has passed.

That’s what annual reviews are for. And the timing has never been more critical.

Why this matters now

We’ve spent the last few decades in what I call the Attention Era—a unique period in history in which human attention became the scarcest resource, and thus the most valuable. 

Every hour of every day has been transformed into a unit of consumption. Our attention is bought and sold by the second, fragmenting our mind into tiny pieces so that it can be monetized more efficiently.

But I believe we’re reaching the end of the Attention Era, because we’ve fully exploited that scarce resource. The average person now checks their phone 96 times per day—once every 10 minutes. There are simply no more pockets of attention left to harvest.

What’s scarce now isn’t what we notice, but how we make sense of it and put it in context. The new currency of our age is perspective, and we are entering what I call the Perspective Era.

Unlike attention, perspective cannot be harvested or extracted by outside forces. It can only be cultivated.

And the annual review is the most powerful tool I’ve ever found for doing so.

A life-and-death lesson on the power of perspective

Let me tell you how I discovered this practice, because it didn’t start with productivity optimization or goal-setting frameworks. It started with a gun pointed at my chest.

I was 23, studying abroad in Brazil and living in one of Rio’s favelas, where I taught English at a small nonprofit. I’d pulled out my camera to film my street when a man named Chucky – a local drug trafficker – pressed his assault rifle into my chest and accused me of being a police informant. He marched me up the hill to his headquarters while I tried to explain, in broken Portuguese, that I was just a volunteer teacher who’d been filming memories.

After what felt like an eternity, his leader let me go. But the encounter shattered something inside me. I couldn’t stop thinking: What am I doing with the time I have? Am I willing to continue following a path I haven’t chosen for myself, knowing it could all end at any moment?

A few weeks later, on New Year’s Day 2009, I sat on a Brazilian beach at dawn with a notebook. I had no idea what I was doing—I’d never read a self-help book or heard of SMART goals. I just knew I needed to see my life differently.

I started by listing everything I was grateful for from the past year. The first few items came slowly. Then the memories started flowing: teaching English to rowdy twelve-year-olds, dancing at Carnival until my feet ached, starting my first blog, the moment I realized I could make people laugh in Portuguese.

By the time I finished, I had pages full of specific, vivid memories. The picture they painted was of an unforgettable year I couldn’t help but feel proud of. As I set down my pen, I felt something shift physically inside me—the knot of existential terror that had been simmering there for weeks began to loosen.

When I turned to my goals for the new year, I suddenly saw them from a completely different perspective. I noticed something in what I’d written: I was happiest when traveling, teaching, and learning. That one insight – so small, yet so clear – made everything click into place for the next chapter of my life.

That was the moment the course of my life changed. Not because the obstacles had changed, but because I had.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just completed my first annual review.

The missing link in your knowledge system

Over the years, I’ve realized that the annual review (along with other reviews at other timescales such as quarterly, monthly, and weekly) is the fifth step in the CODE knowledge management cycle I’ve taught for years:

1. Capture: Getting information into your system
2. Organize: Structuring it for retrieval
3. Distill: Extracting the essence
4. Express: Creating value for ourselves and others
5. Review: Reactivating and reframing our accumulated knowledge

Without that final step, we’re like computers with infinite storage but no RAM. That is, we can remember everything, but can’t turn any of it into awareness or wisdom.

Think about how much happens in a single year of your life. Thousands of experiences. Hundreds of insights and lessons. Dozens of meaningful relationships and projects.

Without a systematic review process, 99% of that value is lost.

An annual review isn’t just reflection for reflection’s sake. It’s a memory technology—a way to compress a year’s worth of experiences into accessible insights, preserve important memories before they fade, reorient yourself in the arc of time, and build agency over your past so you can consciously shape your future.

And it compounds over time. Your third annual review is exponentially more valuable than your first because you’re pattern-matching across multiple years of consciously processed experience.

The ARC Method: A practical process that works

In Life in Perspective, I’ll guide you through the complete framework I’ve developed over 15+ years of practice and teaching this to over 1,000 students. I call it the ARC Method—three stages that correspond to past, present, and future:

Appreciate the Past: You’ll spend 1-2 hours gathering what was good about your year. Not in vague generalities (“I’m grateful for my family”), but in vivid, specific details that bring memories back to life. You’ll scroll through photos, review your calendar, collect artifacts—anything that helps you remember what actually happened versus what you think you remember.

Reflect on the Present: Next, you’ll spend 1-2 hours looking for patterns in what you’ve gathered. Which memories still move you? What themes keep appearing? This is when you notice the bodily sensations—the quickening breath, the tightness in your chest, the sense of expansion—that reveal what matters at a level deeper than the intellect. You’re not analyzing; you’re listening to your intuition.

Create the Future: Finally, you’ll spend 1-2 hours deciding what you want to create next. But unlike typical goal-setting that starts with what you should do, this emerges naturally from what you’ve discovered about who you truly are and what genuinely enlivens you. You’re not starting from scratch – you’re building on what already exists and what’s worked in the past.

This isn’t about perfectly following a rigid checklist. It’s a flexible toolkit you draw from based on your needs. Some years, you might spend most of your time on gratitude and excavating the past. In other years, you’ll focus on identifying patterns in the present. The process pulls you forward based on what captures your curiosity, rather than requiring you to force yourself through it.

What makes this different

If you’ve tried annual reviews before and found them draining or daunting, I understand why. Most approaches to structured reflection are built on assumptions that work against human nature.

The typical annual review asks you to analyze what went wrong, identify your failures, and rationally construct goals based on where you fell short. It’s an audit, not an exploration. A diagnosis of deficits, not a celebration of what has been and what’s possible.

The approach I’m taking in Life in Perspective contradicts that conventional approach in several fundamental ways:

It starts with what worked, not what didn’t. When you begin by looking for problems, you’ll find them…and miss the subtle patterns of what’s currently working well in your life. The most valuable insights don’t come from analyzing your failures; they come from noticing what makes you come alive and doubling down on that.

It trusts your body’s wisdom, not just your analytical mind. Your intellect can rationalize anything, but your body knows the truth. It is physical sensations that reveal what matters in the long term. Smart, achievement-oriented people especially need this, because we’re trained to override our intuition with analysis.

It treats annual reflection as a sacred ritual, not an optimization exercise. This should feel like hiking your favorite trail in deep conversation with your best friend, not suffering through a performance review with a tyrannical boss. When something is genuinely enjoyable, you don’t need willpower to sustain it. You can’t compete with someone who’s having fun, and there’s no reason this practice can’t be fun!

It anchors you in the natural rhythm of years, not the tyranny of daily habits. While productivity culture obsesses over morning routines and daily tracking, I’m more focused on how humans experience the long arc of time—through seasons, cycles, and the earth’s rotation around the sun. What happens annually guides and shapes what happens daily, and that reality has been underappreciated in most self-improvement literature.

My book will teach the specific principles and practices that make an annual review work, that make it feasible and sustainable, and that allow you to squeeze as much value as possible out of the practice.

Why I had to write this

I’ve been practicing annual reviews since 2008. Since 2019, I’ve published mine openly on my blog – among my most popular content. I’ve taught The Annual Review workshop every year since 2019 to over 1,000 students from around the world.

The results I’ve seen from doing so have been nothing short of remarkable, rivaling any other method or technique I’ve ever encountered. I’ve seen my students discover unprocessed grief they finally had the courage to face. They’ve committed to long-postponed dreams and signed their first clients within weeks. They’ve identified recurring patterns that needed deeper self-understanding, not just willpower.

But beyond the credentials, I know this works because completing an annual review remains the single most important project I undertake every year. The success of everything else hinges on the depth of honesty I’m able to reach in my reviews. They’ve become even more critical since becoming a father—my ability to be present and loving with my family depends on the overall balance I maintain across all areas of life.

Most importantly, even if there were no external benefits whatsoever, my reviews rank among the most fun and meaningful experiences of my life. They’re a priceless chance to appreciate what’s happened over the past year of my life, which is so easy to miss as the months blur together.

A technology for becoming

As AI handles more of our analytical and routine tasks, the value is shifting to what only we can do: make meaning from our unique experiences. 

Your annual review becomes a deep well of accumulated wisdom that no AI can replicate. It’s your personal system for sense-making, fueled by the raw material of your life.

I call this building “temporal agency”—the ability to consciously shape your relationship with time, memory, and your personal evolution.

If you’ve ever felt like:

• You’re moving fast, but not sure you’re going in the right direction
• You keep making the same mistakes despite having all the “right” information
• Your Second Brain is full, but somehow not helping you grow
• You want to be more intentional about your life choices and priorities

This book is for you.

Annual reviews aren’t just another productivity technique. They’re a technology for becoming who you’re capable of becoming, by finally learning from who you’ve been.

​​It took a brush with death to wake me up and give me a new perspective on my life nearly 20 years ago. I still have that notebook from the Brazilian beach, its pages yellowed and curling, reminding me of time’s relentless passage. 

But you don’t need a near-death experience to access that same transformation. You just need a few hours, a notebook, and the willingness to see yourself clearly.

I can’t wait to share this experience with you.

I recently set aside some time to do my mid-year review, a ritual I complete around July each year, and noticed that I felt some resistance to it.

In fact, I realized that I’ve always somewhat resisted it. Since I’m currently writing a book on the subject, I decided to explore why.

My first guess is that it comes down to the background soup of emotions I’m typically feeling around the halfway point of the year. It always feels like the first six months passed far too quickly, like I haven’t made nearly as much progress as I’d liked, and that I need to hurry and “catch up” to a timeline racing further and further beyond my grasp.

In short, I resist doing my mid-year review because it forces me to admit I’m behind my own expectations. I resist it because spending the hours of sitting, journaling, thinking, reflecting, and writing it typically requires puts me even further behind!

This year, I realized that AI has finally reached a point of sophistication that I can use it to kill three birds with one stone: 

1. To condense my mid-year ritual into a shorter amount of time
2. To do it while walking instead of sitting at a desk
3. And to shape it into a dynamic and free-flowing conversation instead of an extended writing exercise.

I’m talking, of course, about the new “voice modes” recently released by the leading AI companies, including ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and Claude’s Voice mode (the latter of which is currently in beta and only available on the mobile app).

The limits of voice interaction…until now

I have to admit I’ve always hated every form of voice interaction with computers. I always found it incredibly buggy, error-prone, and mechanical versus writing.

It takes so little to make a voice interaction fall apart. If it misunderstands even one word, it might miss the context of the whole rest of the conversation. If it interrupts me because it thinks I’m done talking, it completely breaks the flow of the conversation. If I talk for several minutes and then a network error causes it to glitch and lose what I’ve said, I’m gone. Absolute dealbreaker.

Which makes it all the more surprising how good I found ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode to be. I was shocked that it was not only perfectly accurate, but also fluid, natural, engaging, and even warm. These were qualities I didn’t even know I wanted from an AI conversation partner.

There were thoughtful pauses, subtle inflections and intonations, and I genuinely felt listened to and supported by its warm, understanding, even affectionate tone. I couldn’t help feeling the glow of approval as it affirmed my reflections.

And most importantly, across two hours of conversation in a very noisy environment – walking the streets of Long Beach – there was not a single “real” glitch. At most, it would pause because of loud background noise or a passing conversation, but then resume, just as a human would.

The response time, which was such a problem with earlier voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, was indistinguishable from talking to a human. It was around 2-3 seconds, as you’d expect from a person taking a moment to reflect on what you’ve just said. The only delay happened when it had to reference external sources, such as my blog post with the projects and goals I planned on taking on in 2025.

I said there were no glitches, but there was a limitation: at the one-hour mark, I hit the daily limit currently in place for Advanced Voice Mode, and only had the option of continuing with Standard Voice Mode. I don’t typically hit limits on AI usage, and this was the first time I can remember feeling genuinely disappointed that I couldn’t continue.

The setup: Testing Claude and ChatGPT

Claude recently released a beta version of its voice mode, available only in the mobile app for now. I started there because we use Claude primarily in the business, but found it quite disappointing. The interface is less intuitive and seamless, requiring me to tap a button, say my piece, and then hit “send,” a clunky experience that reminds me much more of earlier voice transcription apps.

The tone of the voice was colder, more mechanical, and more monotone, making me feel like I was talking to a robot. The sensitivity of the audio capture was also too high, and it kept interrupting me or sending my message mid-sentence, which is baffling considering it could simply wait for me to hit “send” once I was finished.

Here’s what the interface for Claude’s voice mode looks like:

I decided to switch to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode instead.

The crucial thing to understand is that ChatGPT’s voice mode isn’t simply speech-to-text transcription, like earlier technology. In other words, it’s not transcribing your words into written text and then sending that text as a message. That would save you a few seconds from not having to type it yourself, but otherwise not be any different.

ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode does something altogether different: it provides the audio directly to a multi-modal AI model that can take it directly as an input, rather than having to convert it to text first. What that means is the AI gains access to much richer information – the pauses, the tone of voice, the speed and cadence of your words – and can therefore output much richer information in return, including its own tone and style and cadence.

I used wired Apple Earbuds, which I’d recently noticed lead to much better audio quality on calls than wireless AirPods, to make sure it was getting the highest-quality audio from me. With the earbuds plugged into my iPhone 16, I put my phone in my pocket and went on an hour-long walk without needing to look at it once.

To start the conversation, I created a new project within ChatGPT, added a link to my annual goals from the start of the year as a source, as well as instructions for the purpose of this project:

“This project is for completing my mid-year review, in which I check in with goals and projects I planned at the start of the year, revisit any intentions or themes I’d committed to, and generally connect with my deeper self and the wants and needs that are arising midyear. I’d like to use a back-and-forth coaching format where you surface insightful questions and ask me anything you think will surface important realizations and perspectives as I envision the second half of my year.”

Here’s what the project looks like in the mobile interface:

Problems and limitations with the AI

Lack of thoroughness

The first issue I noticed, just minutes into our conversation, was the AI’s lack of thoroughness.

Thoroughness – dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s – is something I value highly in my work, because it allows me to trust the results of my past efforts and proceed confidently knowing I’ve left no stone unturned.

The reason I provided my goals from the beginning, including all the comprehensive and highly detailed context around each and every project I intended to take on this year, was so that it would help me review them one at a time!

Instead, I found that the AI repeatedly tried to gloss over certain projects, or skip certain goals entirely, or “jump to the end” of the past-facing part of my reflection and pivot to the future instead.

It was as if it had a system instruction to summarize or distill any source it was given. Even after numerous requests “to cover every project and goal in my review without skipping any,” that bias was too strong, and it was never really able to. Every time I asked, “Were there any elements that you missed?” it would apologize profusely and admit that yes, there were several more.

Reluctance to access the web

I also noticed it seemed to have an aversion to accessing external sources, such as the blog post I provided a link to at the start. Only when I explicitly directed it to reference my source did it grudgingly comply. I wonder if perhaps this is OpenAI’s attempt to limit the bandwidth, computing power, and time it takes to access the web. In the future, I’ll try adding the text of my source directly as an attachment to see if that helps.

Sycophancy and lack of good questioning

Another tendency I noticed was the sycophancy that’s been so widely reported this year among many AI tools. It would always strongly agree with, affirm, and encourage any thought, idea, conclusion, or insight I came up with, even if it wasn’t a good one. 

Relatedly, it didn’t ask follow-up questions, point out dysfunctional patterns or inconsistencies in my thinking, or offer new perspectives or frames on anything I said, which is the main thing I’d expect from a good human coach.

At one point, I realized that its failure to act as a good coach meant I was missing out on the main value of conducting a mid-year review, which is to rethink, challenge, and reevaluate my goals. So I had to course correct…

When we turned to my most important project of the year, the launch of our new AI educational program called Second Brain Enterprise, I asked it to “Ask me 3 provocative questions to provoke insights about this project.” It complied, but they were quite generic, like “What expectations did you have about the project that weren’t met?”

I noticed that the AI’s sycophancy had another, much more insidious effect: I really didn’t trust or place much value in any of its advice or recommendations. Even if it made its strongest case for an idea, I knew that if I simply asked it to change its mind and give me the opposite advice, it would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

In other words, my AI interlocutor had zero skin in the game. It had nothing at stake, nothing to lose, and no true commitment to any particular point of view or opinion. This made me realize that a crucial factor in how much stock we put in someone’s opinion isn’t due to the correctness of their logical arguments – it has more to do with their personal level of exposure to the risks of their advice. 

We essentially treat a person’s advice as a “bet” that they’re placing on a future outcome, and the larger the bet, the more we believe them. That certainly makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: people who keep making large bets on false positions will soon find themselves broke and unable to make any more.

Daily 1-hour time limit

I typically review my year (and mid-year) in three steps, corresponding to the Past, the Present, and the Future. After about an hour, we had covered the first two, but just as I was turning my attention to the future, I hit the 1-hour limit. This is actually a major issue, as in some ways I felt the conversation was just building momentum and reaching some interesting takeaways.

Here’s what it looks like when you reach the daily limit:

This limitation meant I had to save the last part of my review for another day. By the time I was able to return to it, a week had passed, and I’d forgotten much of the context, especially since I hadn’t written anything down! It’s clear that the technology itself is ready for prime time, but not until the limits are raised can it become an integral daily tool.

Length limit on each chat

When I picked up the conversation a week later, I found that I couldn’t continue in the same chat because I had reached another limit: the total length limit for any individual chat.

I had to restart a new chat within the same project, and even though OpenAI claims that context is shared between chats in a project (i.e., the contents of one chat should carry over and inform other chats in that project), my experience makes me doubt this is the case.

In our second conversation, the AI didn’t reference anything from our previous one. It retained the same project source file containing my goals, but the meandering context we’d built up over an hour of conversation was lost, which was disappointing.

Lack of documentation

By the end of our conversation, we’d hit upon a number of valuable takeaways, despite the limitations mentioned above. This was where yet another limitation arose: there wasn’t really a record of the conversation.

When you communicate via text, the conversation is “self-documenting.” You or anyone can simply scroll back through the entire conversation and review any part of it, with the same level of detail available to the people who engaged in it in the first place.

But audio is very different. What makes it so natural and fluid – that it’s effortless and ephemeral – also means that there’s no record that’s easy to review. Even if you make a full audio recording, it isn’t easy to search for specific segments within it.

I addressed this problem by asking the AI to create a summary of our entire conversation, including all the conclusions, insights, takeaways, and action steps we’d identified, which I’ll unpack in more detail in the final section below.

Problems and limitations with me

Not having my Master Prompt

My team and I use Claude as our AI daily driver, which means we have the full context of our business uploaded as project knowledge across all our chats. I call that upfront context the Master Prompt, and it’s quickly become an essential, non-negotiable component of my AI usage.

Right away, I noticed that my interactions with ChatGPT were much less rich, less context-aware, and less specific because it lacked my Master Prompt. I soon realized this is a much bigger problem when interacting in voice mode, because it required me to explain the most basic details of my business on the spot. With text input, you could give it a link to your website to bring it up to speed, or copy and paste a long document with context about your business right into the chat box, but with voice, you’re limited to one word at a time.

This isn’t a limitation of ChatGPT, to be clear. I can easily move my Master Prompt from Claude into ChatGPT and add it to the project as a project file, but I hadn’t thought of that in advance.

Not trusting it

I noticed that I didn’t fully trust the AI at first, and spent some time tentatively testing its abilities. I would overexplain things initially to make sure it really understood what I was talking about, but soon realized that wasn’t necessary and I could provide only minimal explanation.

I was wary of the limits of how much input it could take in at once, and found myself speaking in unnaturally short segments and waiting to see if it would understand. As my trust grew, I found I could speak for many minutes at a time without any problem. The AI seemed to have a highly accurate short-term memory, though again it would usually gloss over some of the small but important details, or fail to dig into unclear or contradictory statements.

Retaining human conversational courtesies

I found that one of my limitations in fully utilizing the tool was, paradoxically, treating it too much like a human, with all the social conventions and courtesies that entails.

For example, I hate being interrupted and strive to never interrupt others. That makes sense in human relationships, but at one point, I realized that I could interrupt the AI at any time, and it would never take offense.

In fact, I found that my patience quickly dwindled to nothing, and I started correcting the AI immediately and sharply changing direction, since there was no value for either of us in it continuing to ramble on in the wrong direction.

Another example is that I kept trying to answer immediately, as you would in a human conversation. But then I realized I could just say “Let me think” and it would wait for as long as needed, while I thought about my answer. Though I suspect even these silent periods count against your daily usage limit.

Was it valuable to do a mid-year review as a conversation?

I would say the “voice-only” approach to my mid-year review was an interesting experience, and I accomplished my goal of conducting it in a casual, conversational format while getting some exercise.

Where this method falls short is in terms of its thoroughness, depth, and ability to surface contradictions, blindspots, and unexamined assumptions in my thinking and behavior. 

ChatGPT is designed to “solve the problem” as efficiently as possible, not lead you on a meandering, introspective journey. OpenAI thus doesn’t optimize for engagement or time spent – since they make the same amount of money regardless of how much you use their service, their incentive is actually to keep interactions short and to the point.

But the purpose of any kind of review or reflection isn’t to get to the end as quickly as possible. It’s to ponder, to contemplate, to reconsider, to reframe. The value comes from the time you spend noticing your own thinking, and thinking about your own thinking. And the value in a coaching interaction comes from your conversation partner having the skill and willingness to challenge, question, notice, and reflect back.

In the future, I plan on using AI’s voice mode as an occasional complement to my review processes. I think with some more involved prompting to slow it down and have it act more as a coach, this will turn into a powerful new mode of self-reflection as time passes.

Below you can find the full summary ChatGPT created at the end of our conversation, which I consider excellent, including a concise to-do list of action items at the end.

Here’s a complete written summary of all insights, decisions, takeaways, and action items from your mid-year review conversation, organized into key domains. I’ll also place this into a separate canvas in this chat for easy access.

Strategic Focus & Role Definition

Decisions:

• Your presence in the next three cohorts of Second Brain Enterprise will be structured as follows:
  
  • Present for the first and last session of each cohort.
    
  • Deliver one or two special “Tiago-only” sessions per cohort.
    
  • Focus the rest of your time on creating reusable content and scalable assets.
    

Insights:

• This balance allows you to maintain influence and connection without overextending.
  
• You’ve moved into a strategic role in the business with a focus on vision, storytelling, and growth through YouTube and thought leadership.
  

Takeaways:

• Delegation is key: continue handing off direct delivery and execution.
  
• Preserve your “spark” by focusing on high-leverage contributions.
  

Marketing & Customer Success

Decisions:

• You’ll focus your energy on top-of-funnel (YouTube, brand, awareness) and bottom-of-funnel (customer success, testimonials) — the two bookends of the customer journey.
  

Insights:

• This “first and last mile” strategy amplifies impact without requiring you to manage the middle of the pipeline.
  
• Strong customer results will reinforce word-of-mouth and lead gen organically.
  

Takeaways:

• Invest in systems and team to manage operations, onboarding, and program delivery.
  
• Prioritize quality and resonance in content over scale for now.
  

Second Brain Enterprise & Forte Labs

Decisions:

• Maintain Forte Labs as a stable base while using most new energy for Second Brain Enterprise.
  
• Define a clear time allocation model (e.g. 70/30 or 80/20) to avoid unintentional drift.
  

Insights:

• Your identity is expanding beyond Forte Labs — and that’s a healthy sign of growth.
  
• As the new business matures, roles and responsibilities will likely shift again.
  

Takeaways:

• Continue building “execution muscle” on the team.
  
• Systematize Forte Labs so it requires minimal creative overhead.
  

Home Life & Support

Decisions:

• Move forward with hiring a nanny and driver to increase time flexibility and reduce logistical friction.
  
• Explore acquiring a second car for household and travel needs in Valle.
  

Insights:

• Increased household support = more energy and presence for work, family, and health.
  
• Clarifying expectations and scheduling will be key for smooth household operations.
  

Takeaways:

• Formalize schedules and responsibilities for new hires.
  
• Use this extra capacity to invest in family connection and personal renewal.
  

Health, Fitness, and Hobbies

Decisions:

• Schedule resistance training 2x per week as a non-negotiable calendar item.
  
• Supplement with hiking, yoga, and other light aerobic activities.
  

Insights:

• Structure and convenience (e.g., a nearby gym) are critical for consistency.
  
• Fitness is an investment in long-term energy and emotional stability.
  

Takeaways:

• Try adding a multivitamin (Thorne Men’s Multi 50+) as part of your daily routine.
  
• Stick to time-boxed workouts to preserve mental and physical bandwidth.
  

Family Activities & Hobbies

Decisions:

• Explore biking as a shared father-son hobby — purchase a bike for you and Caio in Valle.
  
• Look into a local biking route or destination you could make a weekly ritual.
  

Insights:

• Outdoor, physical, hands-on activities are the sweet spot for recharging and connecting with kids.
  
• You don’t need a perfect hobby — just one that’s good enough to enjoy and repeat.
  

Takeaways:

• Pick one small, recurring family activity to turn into a weekly rhythm.
  
• Track how it feels over a few weeks to iterate and improve.
  

Action Items Summary

Business:

• Schedule and confirm your cohort presence for the next 3 rounds.
  
• Outline 1–2 “Tiago-special” sessions per cohort.
  
• Begin scriptwriting or delegation for scalable cohort content.
  
• Define and document time allocation between Forte Labs and SBE.
  
• Finalize marketing funnel strategy (YouTube + testimonials).
  

Home:

• Hire nanny and driver with clear scope and availability.
  
• Price and acquire second vehicle in Valle.
  
• Add Thorne multivitamin to daily supplement regimen.
  

Health:

• Schedule resistance training on calendar 2x/week.
  
• Plan 1 outdoor activity (e.g., hike or run) per week.
  

Family:

• Buy bikes for you and Caio.
  
• Choose an accessible route and try it out together.

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I lifted my eyes from the journal I was writing in on the balcony of my hotel room, just in time to witness a towering block of ice split in half, splintering along its length with a thundering crack.

The iceberg it was part of shuddered, throwing off a shimmering coat of frost from its finely etched surface. For a moment, the block hovered in midair, seemingly unaware of its newfound independence. There was a moment of silence as it slowly began to pick up momentum.

After a few dramatic seconds, the wall of ice began to topple to the side, breaking up into several pieces that tumbled end over end as they crashed into the icy water with an immense splash.

My hotel room happened to be on a cruise ship crossing the most dangerous ocean passage in the world – the Drake Passage – on our way from the southern tip of South America to Antarctica on a 10-day voyage in December 2024.

Thirty-foot waves and seventy knot winds pummeled our ship from all sides as we plowed forward. The ship pitched from side to side, throwing our belongings off the table in our suite and making us seasick. The sea was a minefield of icebergs increasing in size and frequency with each passing hour.

The external environment of the cruise was accompanied by something equally special on the inside – a curated educational program on modern space exploration, organized by the advocacy nonprofit Future of Space.

The purpose of this voyage was to educate and inspire a group of 260 leaders from around the world on two of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change and space exploration – including how they might intersect and inform each other.

Ocean exploration pioneer Jacques-Yves Cousteau once said: “We only protect what we love, we only love what we understand, and we only understand what we are taught.”

We traveled to the edge of the world to discover how we could protect the planet, as well as potentially leave it.

Leaving the human world

We departed Los Angeles on December 17, flying to Buenos Aires via Miami. We stayed the night in the Argentine capital, before departing early the next morning on a charter flight to Ushuaia, a pioneer town perched at the very tip of the South American continent.

There we boarded the expedition vessel Seabourn Venture, along with 260 other guests who shared our dual fascination for Antarctica and outer space.

The program was made up of various luminaries, experts, scientists, and astronauts, including William Shatner, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, journalist Ann Curry, former NASA astronauts Scott Kelly, Charlie Duke, and José Hernández, Céline Cousteau (daughter of the famed explorer and a prominent environmentalist in her own right), UK artist Stephen Wiltshire, and physicist and author Brian Greene.

These speakers filled our days with a constant stream of educational talks, interviews, documentary film screenings, panels, and presentations, encompassing both the deep past and the far future. Those talks were also livestreamed on the Future of Space YouTube channel, where you can watch the recordings.

Why run a space exploration conference on an Antarctic voyage?

Because Antarctica is the closest analogue on Earth to the harsh conditions we face in space. It is the last uncolonized continent, thus serving as a laboratory and testing ground for how we’ll go about exploring and colonizing new worlds.

At the same time, Antarctica is the ultimate bellwether for how climate change will shape the Earth. It is ground zero for the warming that is driving all other kinds of environmental change. The deteriorating condition of its glaciers directly impacts the lives of millions of people along all the world’s coastlines.

I wanted to visit Antarctica to experience one of Earth’s rarest and most quickly disappearing environments. I had recently learned that since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable period in recorded history, and I wasn’t sure how long the continent would last.

I also wanted to see if immersing myself in such an utterly different and alien environment could give me a new sense of perspective for my annual review, at the tail end of a difficult year.

I was there to explore a triple frontier: humanity’s relationship to its home planet, our exploration of outer space, and my own inner world of goals and dreams for the future.

The itinerary

Each day, we’d arrive at a new destination, board a series of small, nimble Zodiac-style inflatables in small groups, and spend a couple of hours cruising (and sometimes landing) along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from the continent in the direction of South America like an inviting bridge.

We had many close encounters with vast colonies of charismatic penguins, and watched them comically run, jump, dive, and play like children at a water park.

We visited historical sites, such as the barren beach on Elephant Island where Ernest Shackleton’s men famously sheltered for 4 harrowing months in 1916, after their ship Endurance was crushed by encroaching sea ice on the way to the continent.

I was amazed to learn that, until the first landings by seal-hunting parties and explorers in the 19th century, it’s unlikely that any human had ever set foot on Antarctica. The Drake Passage was simply too forbidding, and the technology to endure it didn’t exist.

Antarctica is thus halfway to being a foreign planet, like a way station physically located on the same surface as all the other continents, but psychologically, a world apart.

As we traversed the peninsula, I could feel a version of the Overview Effect kicking in – the famed perspective shift reported by many astronauts upon first seeing the Earth from space. 

We had a half dozen former astronauts aboard, and they described in vivid detail how that shift had affected them. They had realized firsthand how fragile and alone humanity is, clinging to its ball of dirt hanging in space. They’d been overcome with a sense of gratitude, awe, and humility at the miracle that is life on our planet. 

Antarctica is so bare, so starkly devoid of any sign of human life, that I could easily perceive that we were skirting the edges of a polar ice cap, stuck to the side of a planet, hurtling through space with nothing but a thin band of atmosphere protecting us. The sun never quite set, demonstrating that its rise and fall each day is just a side effect of our particular location on the planet.

An imaging satellite from Planet Labs circling overhead took this photo of our ship as it was moored:

I was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation, of aloneness, despite being surrounded by my fellow travelers. I’d never realized how much comfort and security I’d derived from human structures, human affordances, and human-made environments my entire life. I hadn’t grown up on Earth – I’d grown up in a series of insulated bubbles that humans had created to shield themselves from the Earth.

We made a dozen stops on our journey, including Half Moon Island, Whaler’s Bay and Deception Island, Trinity Island, Brown Bluff, Neko Bay, Lemaire Channel, and Palmer Station, one of three US-operated year-round research stations on the Antarctic Peninsula.

At Neko Harbour, I went ashore and officially fulfilled a lifelong dream: setting foot on all 7 continents. In one sense, it was fulfilling, while in another, I realized how foolish such a goal was. As if setting foot on a continent taught you anything about such a vast, diverse place.

A council of teachers

I learned so much from the invited experts on the ship; it was like an intensive course and conference unto itself.

Céline Costeau shared fascinating stories about her work creating documentary films, trying to preserve both nature and the human cultures that existed in close communion with it. She is multi-hyphenate – a documentary film director, producer, explorer, artist, public speaker, brand ambassador, designer, author, and workshop facilitator – and I saw that my career could be similarly multi-faceted and pluralistic.

We watched A Million Miles Away, the documentary about the life of astronaut José Hernández, who was present and answered questions about what it had taken to become one of the first Latinos, and the first migrant worker, to go to space. I saw how meaningful it was to break through a glass ceiling for one’s people and create new possibilities for them through your personal example.

Former astronaut Scott Kelly told us about his record-breaking year in space, and how it had been inspired by the intrepid adventures of Ernest Shackleton a century earlier. I was deeply moved by the model of perseverance even through heartbreak and failure, of personal sacrifice in service of humanity.

Neil deGrasse Tyson regaled us with tales of black holes, the potential of time travel, pulsars, and updates on the recent mission to explore the environs of the sun.

The last astronaut to walk on the moon, Charlie Duke, told us what it was like to plant his feet on another planetary body.

Tom Mueller, employee #1 at SpaceX, told us some incredible stories about what the early days of the company were like – a bunch of nerds firing toy rockets in the deserts of California – in pursuit of a far larger dream that today is finally being realized.

I was inspired by the crew, who were made up of experienced scientists, researchers, explorers, guides, and naturalists who worked so hard to provide us with life-changing experiences while also keeping us completely safe.

Gaining a new perspective

As I sat down to complete my annual review, I had real trouble with it. All my projects and goals seemed so trivial, so pointless, in the face of the immensity surrounding me on all sides. My awareness had expanded to a timeline so vast, it made even the most ambitious accomplishments I could imagine seem totally insignificant.

I found that all my problems and worries were put into perspective. Our margins in the business were lower than I’d hoped for last year – who cares? The vast, unfeeling vistas of ice that stretched as far as I could see didn’t know or care about that. All of humanity, with all its achievements, was almost a non-event from the perspective of the glaciers inching forward across the millennia.

I couldn’t shake the idea that about 70% of the Earth’s water is frozen here in ice sheets nearly three miles thick, and that if all that ice melted, the world’s oceans would rise by 200 feet, completely inundating my hometown. My mind could scarcely grasp the tenuous but direct connection between the integrity of these glaciers I was seeing and my life in sunny Southern California.

It was disorienting to vacillate between the inhuman harshness of the ice in one moment, to the sumptuous luxury of our cruise as soon as I entered back through a doorway. All-you-can-eat buffets and round-the-clock room service on one hand co-existed in bizarre juxtaposition with windswept ice fields on the other. Outside, a world devoid of any trace of humanity; inside, a rich agenda of in-depth knowledge about humanity’s most advanced scientific fields.

There were extreme contrasts everywhere, and I almost felt whiplash as my perspective hurtled from one point of view to another.

The landscape outside was in constant change. Everything made of ice is temporary, as winds, heat, rain, and undersea currents continuously reshape it. But at the same time, the landscape is ancient, like a time capsule from across the eons.

The majesty and seriousness of ice cliffs looming above us contrasted with the hilarious silliness and jovial banter of the penguins.

There was one moment I’ll never forget, at Melchior. It was bitterly cold, with wisps of snow drifting slowly from the sky. A small group of us boarded an inflatable boat and set out among the ice floes.

We entered a narrow inlet between massive ice structures, and found ourselves in a pool of water with walls of ice shooting straight upward on all sides. It felt like a natural cathedral – sacred, majestic, peaceful. I hadn’t felt such a presence of the divine since the church of my youth. 

I felt distinctly that Antarctica, and all the other continents, belong to all of us. They belong to humanity. I could foresee a future in which the whole world, and even other planets, might be governed the same way Antarctica is: collaboratively, through consensus, according to the long-term interests of all humans, even ones not born yet. 

I could sense my allegiance shifting, that I wasn’t and couldn’t be loyal to one country above the others. We are citizens of the world, and for a brief moment perched atop an Antarctic glacier, I experienced what that was like.

Here’s a video depicting some of the key moments of the experience, which I recommend to anyone:

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I’ve noticed that psychedelic medicine has been on the rise in California and other parts of the U.S. over the last few years, and have heard reports from a handful of friends and acquaintances about the incredible results they’ve had from ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin. 

In our new home of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, I’ve also been surprised how psychedelics are just a normal part of everyday life. They’re something you talk about at kids’ birthday parties or with other parents in the pickup line at school. 

I don’t know if it’s the ancient heritage these plants have in Mexico (with evidence of their use dating back to 14,000 B.C.) or the hippie vibe of this particular town (it was the site of the Festival de Avándaro in 1971, the Mexican equivalent of Woodstock), or a combination of both.

Besides San Francisco, I’ve never encountered any other environment where psychedelics and other healing modalities are not only spoken of so freely, but are really “no big deal.”

That created the perfect setting for me to explore it for myself.

Micro-dosing

I decided to start my exploration of “magic mushrooms” with micro-dosing, which is typically defined as 5-10% of a standard psychoactive dose. For psilocybin, this means between 0.1 and 0.3 grams (100 to 300 mg) of dried Psilocybe cubensis.

According to this comprehensive guide:

“The intention [of micro-dosing] is to achieve subtle enhancements in mood, creativity, focus, and emotional resilience while maintaining the ability to engage in normal daily activities like work and socializing.”

I found a local cafe in Valle that openly sells branded psilocybin-infused chocolate bars, and I picked one up for my experiments.

I trusted the product because it’s made in-house by a local business owner known to the community, is nicely branded and packaged (suggesting there was at least a little quality control), and multiple people I trust have taken it and vouched for it.

It was a standard-sized, 100-gram bar containing 5% “functional mushrooms.” With 20 squares, that comes out to about 0.25 grams of mushrooms per square. Standard psilocybin content averages 1%, so there was probably around 0.0025 grams (or 2.5 milligrams) of psychoactive compounds per square.

I had never tried mushrooms before, nor micro-dosed anything, and therefore decided to start small: I took 1 square at 10 am on a weekday, about an hour before a Zoom workshop I was scheduled to teach for our Second Brain Membership.

These virtual workshops, which I do monthly, are typically quite challenging for me, since I have to keep a lot of material in mind and communicate it compellingly, while also taking into account the time left, people’s needs and questions, activity in the chat, the broader goals of the membership, etc.

It requires a lot of parallel processing and mixing different kinds of thinking, as well as keeping the objective in mind while remaining highly adaptable, which I often find difficult. I wanted to see if this chocolate could help me handle it with more ease.

Within about 15 minutes, I started noticing the effects, which were similar in magnitude to about 1-2 alcoholic drinks for me, i.e., a feel-good warmth without the negative side effects of heavy drinking.

The recurring pain in the right side of my throat that has plagued me for almost 20 years was already feeling relieved at this point. A line of tension down the right side of my neck (probably corresponding to my vagus nerve) felt soothed and even kind of buzzing with energy.

I started feeling a tingling, “glowing” sensation throughout my shoulders, neck, throat, and lower part of my head, as well as relief from a daily headache I’d had for weeks since recovering from a bad flu, which makes me think there were some pain-relieving effects.

As the workshop started, I felt noticeably more emotionally fluid, open, joyous, playful, and expressive, in place of the usual low-level anxiety I feel on group calls.

My wife Lauren, overhearing me from the other room, later said I sounded “really into myself,” which is a great description! I felt like the hot girl at a crowded bar, if that makes sense, open to and inviting attention from others, which is unusual for me.

During the call, I noticed I had a much easier time navigating the tension between sticking to a pre-formulated plan and adapting to changing circumstances. This was mostly because I more or less abandoned the plan – we only covered 1/3 of the agenda – which was a good thing because it was more important to discuss and integrate the material than plow ahead with all my slides, which is my usual tendency.

I felt much more attuned to the people on the call, warmer, more aware of their signals and body language, more curious about them, more interested in and welcoming of their questions and comments (which I can sometimes interpret defensively as veiled criticism, I’ve noticed).

We ended the last 15 minutes of the call with a very deep and personal discussion of what it means to be responsible adults and to conform to external expectations in the real world, without abandoning our interests, passions, aliveness, and sense of self.

That question was only loosely related to the technique I had introduced, but took a turn toward a more meaningful discussion than it would have otherwise.

Right after the Zoom call, I turned my attention to assembling a wooden playground structure for my kids, which I’d been doing the last few days in the afternoons after work. 

Surprisingly, this was extremely challenging! It was comically difficult for me to hold in mind obscure part numbers, search for them, count the numbers of screws and washers we needed for the next step, etc., a kind of task I normally find very easy.

I could tell my working memory was hampered – I repeatedly failed to hold in mind a 4-digit part number for more than a minute and had to keep starting over! I also handed my friend the wrong parts or the wrong number of parts. I don’t recommend doing construction on psilocybin, as studies have shown that it can hamper complex working memory.

I also found, both during my Zoom call and the subsequent construction task, that I cared much less and had much less fluency with anything numerical, abstract, technical, or conceptual, which normally feels like my “home territory.”

Instead, I felt drawn to nature, things physical and concrete, and thinking about my friends, family, and people I love. 

About 4.5 to 5 hours later, the effects had mostly subsided, and I was left with a pleasant afterglow like the morning after a fun party with friends (though my headache returned). I then left home to pick up the kids from school, and when my son got into the car, I felt a strong sense of spontaneous joy and almost broke into tears. I felt very connected to him and his innocence in that moment and throughout the afternoon.

For the rest of the day, I felt much more patient with the kids than usual. Normally, afternoons feel like they’re passing too slowly. I can find myself bored in comparison to the exciting pace of my workday. 

Next, I took the kids grocery shopping. I expected this task to be challenging, since it involves finding all the items on a list, but by this point, the cognitive effects had worn off and my working memory had returned. 

I felt more spontaneous, with my inner critic dormant and not filtering my words as much. This could also be described as “impulsive,” though, and my wife said I was “on one” all afternoon, and more blunt with her than usual.

In the evening, we went back to school for an all-school meeting, which took place in a forest next to the school. These all-school meetings are usually a bit stressful for me, with a flurry of faces and names I can’t quite remember, and all in Spanish. I felt noticeably calmer and more at ease this time, and about 50% warmer toward others (which made me about average for Mexicans!)

I had vivid dreams all night, one after the other, all warm and fuzzy and related to people I cared about. Besides the potential rudeness to my wife, the only downside I noticed was feeling thirsty. I had little appetite and didn’t eat much all day.

My conclusion from this first experiment was that this was a wonderful, enlightening, moving experience overall, and I definitely wanted to try it again. Micro-dosing felt very promising as an ongoing practice, as I seemed to be able to gain many mindset-altering benefits while still going about my day.

Overall, it strongly biased my mind and emotions away from abstract concepts and toward people, nature, my body, feelings, intuition, and my physical surroundings. Those are ways of being that I normally find hard to access, so this is extremely useful!

I did around half a dozen micro-doses, spaced out around once per week, as an initial foray into the world of magic mushrooms, and deeply appreciated their ability to shift me into a more grounded, calm, joyful, and connective state of being.

Macro-dosing

For the second phase of my experiment, I decided to go deeper with mushrooms and take a “macro-dose” (typically defined as approximately 2–3 grams, equal to roughly 25 mg purified psilocybin) under the supervision of an experienced professional. 

I recently met another father at our kids’ school who is a psychotherapist and administered psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapy sessions on the outskirts of our town. We had a lot of mutual friends, and after getting to know him at a local sauna, I decided to work with him.

The process was surprisingly pedestrian: a Calendly booking link to schedule my session, plus a preparation call a few days beforehand, and a post-integration call a few days after. On our prep call, he asked me about my childhood history, my past experience with psychedelics and other mind-altering substances, my work and family situation, and any risk factors like mental disorders or addictive tendencies. He gave me guidelines such as not eating meat or drinking alcohol in the week leading up to our session, and asked me to water fast on the day of.

Most of all, we talked about my intentions for the sessions – what I wanted to see, hear, learn, and discover about myself. 

The intention I settled on was to explore my relationship with my father and how that affected my relationship with my son. My son and I had been going through what felt like a period of conflict and friction lately, as he explored his willfulness and the limits of parental boundaries. I’d felt distant from him, like an authority figure enforcing the rules rather than a friend going on a journey, and wanted to get to the root of the anger and frustration I’d felt toward him as he provoked his sister or made messes at the dinner table.

In previous psychedelic experiences, my father and my son had been at the forefront of my mind the entire time, and in retrospect, I can see that I just sort of assumed that would be the case again. Much of my personal growth journey has been about healing my past with my father, and I realize I had almost resigned myself to continuing to do so indefinitely. But plant medicine has intentions of its own, and I would find that not to be the case.

Set and setting

On the day of my scheduled session, I had a slow morning and, around 9 am, hailed a taxi to the therapist’s house, about 20 minutes away. His home was in a heavily forested area outside town, surrounded by nature, with a small office on the corner of his property seemingly purpose-built for these sessions.

It was a single room with an attached bathroom, decorated with all kinds of spiritual paraphernalia – incense, altars, totems, crystals, and images of Eastern spirituality. A large pullout sofa bed with a thick comforter occupied the center of the room, with a desk in one corner and two chairs facing each other in the other.

I took off my shoes and silenced my phone, and had a seat in one of the chairs. We spoke for about 15 minutes, revisiting my intention for the day and covering what I should expect over the coming hours. There was relatively little orientation needed: I would drink a small cup of dried mushrooms dissolved in water, with some lemon added to counter the bitterness, put on an eye covering, and lie in the bed under the covers for about 3-4 hours, to see what the mushrooms had to teach me.

I drank the liquid, which amounted to 4.3 grams of dried mushrooms (which at a 1.5% concentration meant about 40 milligrams of the active ingredient), and we talked for another 10 minutes, waiting for the medicine to start taking its effect. I started to feel its effects after about 15 minutes, and at that point went to the bathroom and then took my place under the covers. The therapist would stay with me throughout the entire 4-hour experience, making sure I was okay and supplying tissues and water as needed.

The first effects were visual – colorful tendrils of light swirling in the air above me. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was how mushrooms saw the world. After about 20 minutes of this, I went to the bathroom again, as the mushrooms had an effect on my bowels similar to coffee. 

Wrestling with an inner force

As I settled back into the bed, the experience shifted abruptly as a rising tide of discomfort quickly overtook me. It was a mix of nausea, muscle aches, and a kind of mental discomfort as thoughts and feelings I typically avoid rushed to the surface.

The next hour was physically intense for me – I writhed in the bed, flailing side to side, clutching my shirt and the bedspread, as the nausea got stronger and stronger. I broke out into a sweat, moaned and groaned and whimpered and snarled and breathed loudly in and out. It felt like I was wrestling with a powerful adversary, but that adversary was inside me, struggling to get out as I struggled to keep it in.

Throughout this part, many images flashed vividly through my mind, but I was surprised to find that they were mostly related to my daughter Delia. I saw her anguished face as she cried over a fight with her brother, and felt her kicking legs and pushing arms as she fought being put to bed. Suddenly, I was in her place, lying in her crib, crying and thrashing against the insurmountable force of my parent. I saw and felt it all viscerally from her perspective.

Eventually, I could sense the nausea was rising to a crescendo, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I felt the irresistible urge to yell, and gripping the sheets with my fists, I let out a couple blood-curdling roars at the top of my lungs, and could feel something moving through me and leaving me, like an exorcism. 

I could tell it was something related to my daughter, but I can’t say exactly what. As I lay on the bed, my legs propped up in exactly the birthing position, it was almost like I needed to “give birth” to her at a metaphorical or consciousness level, in the same way my wife had given birth to her physically. At 2 years old, her personality and will have emerged in full force, and it was as if I had to change my attitude and relationship to her from that of a helpless baby, requiring mostly feeding and changing, to a full-fledged person whose voice and opinions deserve an equal place in our family.

I told the therapist that I needed to throw up, and he brought a small bucket to the bedside so I could do so. Later, he told me that vomiting was uncommon, but not unheard of, during these sessions – happening with maybe one in every 30 people. As with ayahuasca, fighting the nausea and trying to keep the medicine down, I believe, was therapeutic. It provided a physical metaphor for the internal struggle, and the physical act of vomiting functioned as a symbolic act of expunging or releasing a force, entity, or energy that had been repressed inside.

The experience from that point onward was much calmer and more sublime. With my stomach empty but the psychoactive compounds fully absorbed into my bloodstream, I was free to go on an inner voyage. The music being played took center stage, a mix of soft contemplative instrumental tracks and adventurous, rousing anthems that sounded like a Hollywood epic.

Witnessing the women in my life

I found that, in contrast to my stated intention, my voyage was mostly about the women in my family. I thought of my mother, her intense love for me piercing my heart like it hadn’t in years. I felt the grief of her recent breast cancer recurrence, the helplessness I felt toward it, and how sorry I was to not be able to help her during this time, after all the years she dropped everything to care for me.

I thought of my wife Lauren and witnessed her essence as a divine, transcendent being that I was privileged to be with. The most clear message I received the whole time was that she was “the universe’s gift to me.” That she represents the universe’s most sincere act of pure generosity, I could never deserve nor repay. I felt the grief and sadness of all the times I didn’t treat her that way, neglecting to give her the attention, care, and respect her divine nature deserved.

I felt the deep sadness of not always treating my kids as the gifts they are. Of the times I’ve treated them as obligations, as hurdles to get past on the way to what I want. All of their emotions I hadn’t fully allowed – their rage, frustration, complaints, pride, annoyance, neediness, jealousy – came rushing up toward me from the pit where they’d been festering, unseen and unloved. It was hard to bear, the full weight of all that emotion. Like a white hot flash flood rushing past and through me on all sides. 

And again I thought of and felt my daughter – her emerging emotions of anger and sadness, her strong will and stubbornness, her vibrant personality, and the unique role she was starting to play in our family as peacemaker, caretaker, and comedian. It’s hard to explain, but each of these memories, realizations, ideas, and stories weren’t so much “thought” as “felt,” as if they were striking deep into the soft places of my heart. I cried more or less continuously, the tears completely soaking my eye mask and pillow. 

What was interesting about this part of the experience is that it was relatively free of “stories.” My daughter is so young, and our relationship so simple and pure, that I didn’t really have strong narratives about her that I had to let go of. The process was mostly somatic, like my body just needed to let go and process something I couldn’t fully explain, and both the logical explanations and the accompanying emotions took a backseat.

Holding this lineage of women in my mind, I was overwhelmed with the awareness of how much love they had poured into me my entire life. All the care, the thoughtfulness, the sacrifice. I felt the full weight of that care and how it had shaped me into the person I am now, capable of caring for so many others in turn. I saw how crucial, how all-important that warmth and love were to who I was; so much more important than the intellect with which I normally identify.

Tangentially, I also saw how important that direct, human caregiving is going to be in the new AI-driven era we’re entering. How important it’s going to be that we see each other, know each other, look out for each other, and help each other through the torrent of change we’re all facing as AI reshapes society. 

I saw that I could play a role not only in the intellectual, analytical, process-driven implementation of AI, but just as much in the education, the personal growth, and the human compassion that will need to accompany it. I had such a clear vision of the community we could create to help people grapple with the immensity of what AI would mean for them, and provide that human care and warmth that we all need to welcome the future with openness and curiosity.

The neuroscience of psychedelics

My psychedelic experience proceeded in stages or waves. They were almost like mini-trances, or a succession of dreams, as my mind flowed from one scene or sequence to the next. 

I found that I could choose when I wanted to “switch” from one line of thinking and feeling to another, almost like switching the channel on the TV. All I had to do was turn my head from one direction to another, and all of a sudden, my focus shifted. This was the first time I felt I had some control over the direction of my experience – I could choose where I wanted to go, what I wanted to focus on. And any person, relationship, memory, or part of life I focused on would yield insights.

I was reminded of this pair of images I came across in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind, showing the connectivity of the human brain in a normal state, compared to the hyperconnectivity of a psilocybin-induced state (based on this study):

The researchers found that: “This supports our idea that psilocybin disrupts the normal organization of the brain with the emergence of strong, topologically long-range functional connections that are not present in a normal state.” In other words, psilocybin temporarily allows distant parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate to talk to each other.

Psilocybin effectively “shakes up” the brain’s modular structure, temporarily breaking down entrenched communication patterns (i.e., the Default Mode Network) and thereby promoting mental flexibility and new associations.

I also know that psychedelics have the effect of “turning down” the activity in the pre-frontal cortex – the site of our high-order reasoning, as well as our inner critic and self-manager. I conceived of the experience as the authoritarian father figure (the pre-frontal cortex) stepping out of the room for a while, and the rest of the family coming together for a meeting in which they could talk to each other freely, share their experiences, and remember their love for each other.

The value in seeing through others’ eyes

One of my favorite aspects of the experience was the ability to see the world from anyone’s perspective. I saw the world from my wife’s perspective, and instantly all her words, actions, and decisions made perfect sense. I saw it from each of my children’s perspectives, and their pure innocence was so clear and palpable, even in the midst of their worst tantrums and “misbehavior.”

I think as a parent, one of the most important things to keep in mind is your children’s essential innocence. They, like you, are just a sweet, innocent being who was dropped into this chaotic, painful world without their knowledge or consent. They, like you, are just trying every day to survive, to get their needs met, to make sense of the information flooding their senses, and to find their agency and power in an unforgiving environment. 

That remembrance of their innocence is the key to everything – to treating them with compassion no matter how flagrant their behavior seems, to seeing every moment as an opportunity for love and connection, to teaching them with patience how to navigate life, to not taking their actions personally or making it about you. Yet it’s hard to see the innocence of your children when you’re not connected to your own innocence and inherent goodness. That awareness is what I was overwhelmed by once I could see life from their point of view.

I thought of other people as well. My uncle Gary, who passed away a few months ago, and I hadn’t been able to grieve. Somehow, the Spanish language we’d been using throughout the session helped me to feel it. I wept with the phrase “Mi tío, mi tio” echoing through my head, as all the memories of his generosity and humor filled my memory.

Finally, my attention turned to my father, and what I encountered there was so surprising: nothing but an overwhelming, profoundly deep sense of gratitude. I could see the world from his perspective, too, and what I instantly grasped was how hard it had been for him. How much he had had to endure as a father of four, what it had taken to maintain a marriage and a household and a career and a life all at the same time, and still maintain his integrity and sense of self.

I saw how important it was that he’d been a strong father, modeling principles and boundaries and an unshakeable commitment to order and stability in our home. I’d often resented him for that, wishing he’d been more flexible or forgiving or gentle. But from my own perspective at 40 years old now, I could suddenly see how that strength had protected us, shielded us, given us a stable foundation from which we could strike out into the world with confidence.

I sensed that I’d reached a resolution with my father, that I had made peace with him and healed the essential rift between us. That realization triggered a new flood of gratitude and joy, because that same healing and connection is what I want for my relationship with my own kids. The doubt that I’d ever find it with my father meant I could never be sure I’d find it with my children.

And that made me realize that this was the first intensive healing experience that I had undertaken from the perspective of an adult. I had always felt like a child, like a boy, healing some foundational wound in the hope of finally “growing up.” But not this time. This time I could allow my vulnerability, tenderness, and heartbreak to come to the surface without abandoning my identity as a father, husband, and leader. 

The aftermath

I wrapped up the session around 2 pm, and took a taxi to a nearby nature spa for my integration and recovery. I felt like a newborn, raw and incredibly sensitive to every sensation, internal and external.

I had little appetite, but ate a mushroom soup in honor of the plant. I then spent a couple of hours rotating between a sauna, cold plunge, and jacuzzi at a local hotel we visit frequently, nestled in the green forest amidst the soft rainfall of the wet season.

Returning home that evening, I was overcome with joy and happiness seeing my kids. Their beauty and perfection were just so vivid, so palpable. The same with my wife – there almost seemed to be a halo over her head, her beauty radiating outward like the sun.

Over the next week, my interactions with my kids felt so different. Suddenly, they seemed more patient, caring, thoughtful, curious, and cooperative, in stark contrast to how I’d perceived them in recent weeks. I knew that the change had to have been in me, not them, and all the same, I couldn’t believe how much more easeful, meaningful, and fun our time together was. I think they sensed my openness and safety, and expressed so many new thoughts, feelings, and questions to me. It was as if I was getting to know them for the first time.

Long-term effects

As expected, I found the effects of my mushroom journey slowly wore off over the following days.

During the next week, I had a highly elevated mood, and found so much joy in the most mundane everyday routines. I was far more patient and present with the kids. An all-day travel day back to California, 4 days later, was not only much more tolerable, I actually found it fun! Normally, my wife and I take turns managing the kids for the 4-hour flight, but this time I happily played with them the whole time.

Visiting my parents a couple of days after that, we had a series of lovely conversations, talking about what I had seen and experienced. I was moved to tears again at the privilege of being able to share my insights with them and how much I appreciated their role in my life.

Surprisingly, I found my desire to drink alcohol dropped to zero. I’d never really enjoyed the taste or the experience, and used it mostly to help me slow down at the end of a stressful workday. It’s been more than a month since my session and the desire hasn’t returned.

At work, I felt much greater emotional fluidity and warmth toward my team and customers, emphasizing our shared values and the bigger picture of our work, which is increasingly about helping businesses adopt AI. I can already see that I’m going to emphasize community and the human-to-human connection much more as a result of this experience.

Takeaways

It’s now been over a month since my magic mushroom experience, and I’m left with several takeaways.

Healing can progress and reaches resolution

Looking back on this experience, I realize that I had long operated under an assumption: that healing was never-ending. I had expected to never really reach resolution. I assumed I would just keep uncovering new forms of psychological damage for the rest of my life, like an infinitely deep well.

But this experience taught me a different perspective: that while the overarching journey of personal growth may be infinite, there is a possibility of reaching true resolution along the way. I was surprised to find such resolution with my father, who had been the focal point of my healing thus far. I was so happy to find I could undertake this journey from the perspective of an adult, feeling in control and empowered even in the most vulnerable moments.

Most of all, I loved being able to walk away from this experience without feeling like I had to fundamentally reshape my life. I quite like my life. This was more like a firmware reset, putting me back in touch with my values and sense of self, without demanding that I make dramatic changes as a result.

Healing does progress, and it does reach resolution even as it extends to the distant horizon.

The role of psychedelics in an age of AI-driven change

We are pivoting the business strongly toward AI, especially its implementation in small and medium businesses. And the more I think about it, the more I believe that psychedelics and other forms of healing are going to play a crucial part in the AI era. 

The defining feature of this new era we’re entering is going to be ever-accelerating change. The condition of “future shock” first described by Alvin Toffler in 1970 is only now truly coming to fruition, as we enter a literally inhuman pace of change.

Humans are going to need new ways of adapting to change at every level of society and the economy. They’re going to have to “unlearn” old patterns, old ways of thinking, old paradigms, and old assumptions at breathtaking speed. That unlearning may be an even greater challenge than learning the new.

One definition of “grief” is “the sudden realization that a form of value is ending.” That’s the case when someone dies, and the realization of the love you feel for them hits you in full force. It’s the case when you miss out on a hoped-for opportunity, or a season of life abruptly ends, or a tragedy strikes in your family or in the world. As humans, we tend to quickly get used to the status quo, including what is good, valuable, beautiful, and true. Often, we realize its full worth only once it disappears.

It isn’t easy to grieve on command. As humans, we tend to do everything we can to avoid it. But perhaps these substances could be a medium for releasing our grief more reliably as the world shifts under our feet. Maybe psychedelics are emerging into the light at this moment in history because now is the time we need them to evolve our human consciousness at the speed that AI, a new form of consciousness, is demanding. 

The gift of a safe, accessible tool for healing

This wasn’t my first encounter with psychedelics. I’d previously experimented with LSD at Burning Man and completed a 3-day ayahuasca retreat in the mountains.

I count those as some of the most meaningful, impactful experiences of my life. And yet in retrospect, I realize that I’ve always operated under the assumption that in order to have the most valuable experience, I had to go to the furthest extremes.

But why should that be the case? Why should someone have to travel to the furthest reaches of the Peruvian jungle, or skirt the law, or risk their reputation, or spend a lot of money, or take multiple days off work, or take the most powerful dose, to receive love and truth?

If healing is a universal phenomenon and a universal human need, which is what I believe, then we need to find more affordable, accessible, risk-free, and scalable means of accessing it. For so long, tools for healing have been illegal, socially sanctioned, or at least labeled weird and taboo. Modern society has long considered it too dangerous to venture into the unconscious, the repressed, and the traumatic.

How fortunate that that taboo is now passing, and that we’re starting to open up avenues for healing in a format that is so incredibly accessible. Almost anyone can take a day off work, consume some plants, and lie on a bed for a few hours. What a time to be alive, when we can pursue deep forms of healing without disrupting our normal routines.

I’ve become a believer and advocate for psychedelic-assisted therapy, and intend to use my influence to make it more accessible in the world.

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