don't have the option of not thinking if we're awake. Well, even if you're asleep your brain is still active so you don't have an option of thinking nothing. And if your problem is that there are too many negative thoughts, that is something you can control. So you can't control whether you have thoughts but you can definitely control, 100%, you can control the percentage of them that are negative.

Now I call that shelf space because that's the idea that it's limited. There's not unlimited shelf space, it's just the shelf. So if your shelf has 50% negative and 50% positive, well you have room for improvement. You can just force yourself to think of some more positives and that automatically reduces the number of negatives because you only have so much shelf space. If you just jam it with good thoughts, which is what I do by the way, you can just squeeze them out. It's one of the most important mental hacks you could come up with. If I could give you only one thing to do differently in your whole life, just one thing, it would be this: to make sure you squeeze out the opportunity for negative thoughts by just forcing in the positive ones until your shelf space is all taken. That'll fix just about everything. It'll give you energy, optimism, people want to be around you, you'll take on bigger challenges which is good for you. Basically it fixes everything. And that's not too far from what your best self-help gurus would tell you. You've got to get that mental conversation right. That's the Tony Robbins big, probably the most basic thing he says that's the most important. You've got to get the conversation that's always happening. You can't stop it but you can change it. Change it to positive.

Sam Altman, who as you know is the big AI boss I guess you'd say, so he's the ChatGPT head, and he was asked according to a post I saw by Zarat on X, he was asked if he'd had any psychedelic experiences. And he did. He said that earlier in his life, so not nothing recently, but at least the life-changing part wasn't recently, he did psychedelics. And he said it changed him from being an anxious unhappy person into a very calm person who can work on hard and important things. I'm going to add to that and say this: you can tell he's done psychedelics by looking at his eyes. Now I know you don't believe that if you've never been around people who have done psychedelics. You can tell. You look at him talking for a minute and a half and you know that he's experienced a different reality than you have, came back and incorporated it into his worldview. You could just tell by looking at him and by listening to him. And it's important for you to know how transformational some of these experiences are.

But I'd like to tie this to a comment I saw from Marc Andreessen, big Silicon Valley investor, famous investor. And he said, I'm paraphrasing but something like, the dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that high agency people, I think that's the phrase he used, can use illegal drugs to great advantage. Now again that's just a paraphrase to which I say, oh my God, which I did say. I've wanted to say that in public my whole life but you can't because it's irresponsible. If you say to somebody, you know, the most successful people I know did illegal drugs but they were really smart about it so they didn't do the wrong illegal drugs, they did the ones that helped them. Now if you do ones that help you, can they also kill you? Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah it'll kill you. But if you're one of these high agency, high willpower, high intelligence, you know you've really got it going on, there are rare cases, and I'm going to say it's rare, where people just use the drugs to great success.

So for example, and again I