“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” — L. P. Jacks
Blake Mycoskie (@BlakeMycoskie) is a serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, and best-selling author, most known for founding TOMS Shoes. He is also the person behind the idea of One for One®, a business model that helps a person in need with every product purchased. Since its inception, TOMS Shoes has provided almost 96 million pairs of shoes to children around the globe.
In 2014, after selling half of the company to Bain Capital, Blake stepped down as CEO of TOMS. Utilizing half of his proceeds, he started The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund to help early startups with core social missions get off the ground with much-needed funding. Since then, he has invested in more than 25 social enterprises.
In the spring of 2020, Blake co-founded his newest company, Madefor, which offers a 10-month program that applies the principles of modern neuroscience, psychology, and physiology to make your brain and body better. Created alongside scientists from Stanford, Harvard, and other top universities, Madefor helps people learn and sustain positive habits and practices that have the greatest impact on their lives. Listeners of this podcast can use code TIM to get 20% off the all-in and monthly plans.
As the New York Times best-selling author of the 2011 book Start Something That Matters, Blake offered his own story of inspiration and the power of incorporating giving in business. Blake also recently expanded his philanthropic efforts to include the funding of The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins, making it the first such research center in the US and the largest of its kind in the world.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform. The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…
Want to hear Blake’s last time on the show? Lend your ear to our conversation in which we discuss early entrepreneurial endeavors, advice for aspiring manufacturers, the importance of journaling, growing organically versus raising venture capital, and much more.
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Connect with Blake Mycoskie:
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
- Madefor
- How to Make a Difference and Find Your Purpose — Blake Mycoskie | The Tim Ferriss Show #249
- Start Something That Matters by Blake Mycoskie
- TOMS Shoes
- The Social Entrepreneurship Fund
- The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research
- John Newcombe Tennis Ranch
- Things to Do in Austin, TX | Visit Austin
- What is the Hoffman Process? | Hoffman Institute Foundation
- Esalen Institute | Big Sur, California
- Cortisol | You and Your Hormones from the Society for Endocrinology
- Phosphatidylserine | Amazon
- Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello
- Rediscovering Life: Awaken to Reality by Anthony de Mello
- You Can Change Your Life: With the Hoffman Process by Tim Laurence
- Kathleen Harrison: Comparing Ayahuasca to Psilocybin | DMT: The Spirit Molecule
- COVID-19 Map | Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
- 5-MeO-DMT: The New Psychedelic with Promising Mental Health Benefits | Big Think
- Waking Up with Sam Harris | Waking Up
- Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers | Prime Video
- About Holotropic Breathwork | Grof Transpersonal Training
- MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy | MAPS
- Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After by Katherine Woodward Thomas
- The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire by David Deida
- Avoiding Dehydration, Proper Hydration | Cleveland Clinic
- MoMA
- Tools and Tips for Better Sleep | The Tim Ferriss Show #267
SHOW NOTES
- What compelled Blake to begin his life as a serial entrepreneur from an early age? [06:39]
- With dreams of becoming a professional tennis player, what made Blake good enough to be a contender? [09:27]
- After years of running full throttle on multiple projects, why did Blake decide to take a sabbatical in 2012 — and what did that entail? Does he feel like he came away with value from the experience? [11:47]
- What is The Hoffman Process, and why did Blake choose to participate in it? [15:34]
- How I blunt the cortisol response at bedtime so I can actually go to sleep. [21:00]
- What disruptive patterns from his own life did The Hoffman Process allow Blake to identify and process? [22:12]
- Books and resources Blake recommends that might help people achieve some of what they might undergoing The Hoffman Process. [26:22]
- Blake shares the difficult stage he experienced while going through The Hoffman Process. [29:28]
- Aside from The Hoffman Process, what are some of the other processes Blake has tried that have had a lasting impact? [32:55]
- As a substantial supporter of psychedelic-related scientific research, what does Blake feel he’d gained from his own experiences with plant medicine? [36:08]
- Has Blake had any difficult or negative plant medicine experiences? [40:59]
- A public service announcement for anyone considering the use of psychedelics for whatever reason. [46:52]
- What is conscious uncoupling, how did Blake become familiar with it, and how has it helped him personally — especially during the age of COVID-19? [50:45]
- What else has conscious uncoupling brought into focus for Blake and allowed him to see — perhaps for the first time? [56:27]
- When during a relationship does Blake feel is the right time for someone to read Conscious Uncoupling by Katherine Woodward Thomas? Is there something they can do before that relationship is clearly headed into dangerous territory? What other books might be appropriate reading at this time? [1:00:31]
- What does Blake hope to accomplish with Madefor, his new business that helps people learn and sustain positive habits and practices that have the greatest impact on their lives? How did it begin? [1:03:25]
- What does Madefor look like from the consumer side of things? What are the habits and practices presented? [1:07:32]
- Parting thoughts. [1:19:27]
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)
This episode was extremely moving, and brought tears to my eyes because it made me realize how much work my marriage needs. I'm excited to read Conscious Uncoupling and Awareness, and to encourage my husband to read it too. Thank you to Blake for sharing his story and thank you to Tim for this episode.
Your interview with Blake reminds me of the song “Who wrote the book of love?”- “Chapter One says to love her, You love her with all your heart, Chapter Two you tell her you're, Never, never, gonna part…” Or that quote from author, J.Jaye Gold “Everything we do appears so mundane to us that it’s impossible to see how focusing on the ordinary could possibly yield an extraordinary experience.” From “Justin Time: Autobiography of an American Spiritual Master.” Quomodo autem fieri?
Really helpful for me as I was eagerly searching for this type of article.
Killer show! One of my 10 ideas this am wass to take a SPAC public for a psilocybin acquisition. Have you explored this idea?
Tim, this was one of the best yet! I am a 55 year old retired police inspector from Canada now College Professor and I needed to hear this one. What a beautiful gift from you and Blake to anyone listening. P.S. You have to stop making hair loss references. You look great. No one cares and if they do it doesn't matter. I have learned to love my bald head. Keep doing what you are doing. Your work matters!!!
Hi Tim, Excellent podcast with some very interesting discussion content! I can totally resonate with the “spiritual bypass” concept. Psychedelics and plant medicines can be powerful catalysts for change, but they often don’t result in a real, lasting change if the integration phase isn't optimized. Part of this, I think, is the ability to consolidate and maintain the new neural connections in the brain that these drugs facilitate. I’m a researcher on the faculty at the Department of Psychiatry, Dell Medical School at your local UT Austin. We are investigating a whole new paradigm for how to boost and maintain the psychological health-promoting effects of psychedelics by combining them with brain modulation technologies. I’d love to tell your more about it. Hit me up if you’re interested. [Moderator: contact information removed here but preserved in WordPress.] Best, Greg
Hi Tim, I left you a retweet, but I will also leave this here. I think this is an important (but tough) conversation we need to have around all this wonderful psychedelic research/renaissance. I've love to hear your thoughts! The idea of a psychedelic industry poses greater existential questions, too. “How should you be allowed to profit from something that has so much potential to heal the planet and a human being?” asks Katherine MacLean, psychedelic integration therapist and psychedelic scientist, formerly on the research faculty at Johns Hopkins. “On the one hand, you could say it has a lot of value, it has such amazing potential to make people’s lives better. On the other hand, we should charge nothing: If it is this saving grace, then everyone would have access.” She draws a comparison to bottled water: Like wellness—and the plants that support it—water is a natural resource and a human right. “We have extremely expensive bottled water from companies packaging something that should be free and accessible,” says MacLean. “This is the end of humanity’s chance for a peaceful, happy life. Do you really want to be the person selling bottled water at the end of the world?” I’ve listened to a lot of your episodes on the upcoming psychedelic “renaissance” and wanted to ask you a few important questions from a different (maybe more controversial) angle. I urge us all to pause and think about the way we are guiding this movement. As we have seen, Compass, MAPS, and JH aim to figure out a way to deliver these medicines in a perfect, medically-controlled environment. However, have we collectively stopped to think that leaving these powerful substances in the hands of a few white, older men can be the ultimate demise of such a wonderful drug? How are we going to prevent insurance companies from controlling distribution, price gauging and overall monopolizing what should be freely accessible to the public? If all of these organizations truly believe that these drugs have such incredible healing power, and I think many of the employees working for them do, why isn’t decriminalizing a main priority for them? I have read Michael Pollan’s book and while I think it is great for novice people who do not understand psychedelics and their powerful healing effects, the article he wrote for the NYtimes was abhorrent. Why are we so quick to put this man on a pedestal when he is in support of a company trying to obtain patents to be the only company allowed to distribute a synthetic form of psilocybin? What is going to happen when they are finally approved by the FDA for medical use? They will be controlled by the very few companies who are approved to manufacture them medically. Psilocybin sessions will become a very expensive luxury that many cannot afford. And we will find ourselves in the exact same situation that we are in now during this mental health crisis. Unaffordable therapy, lack of insurance coverage, insurance companies monopolizing drugs. Maybe we should shift our focus to harm reduction and psychedelic education. For example, educating the public on how to safely ingest these entheogens so that this medicine may be widely available and truly contribute to healing on a global scale. We could create public sanctuary spaces where communities can get together and explore their experiences. I’ll leave you with a video of someone I look up to, Katherine Maclean – former scientist at JH Psychedelic Research Center: [Moderator: YouTube link removed.] Consider inviting her onto your show to gather another look into this psychedelic renaissance. I think we owe it to ourselves to consider every possibility because we, as humanity, are at a crossroads and we are running out of time. It’s time to change the way things are done. Here are some organizations centered around decriminalization, harm reduction and education: [Moderator: links to zendoproject dot org, decriminalizedenver dot org, decriminalizenature dot org, and afterthemedicine dot com removed.] Here is a panel discussion on “Male Supremacy and the Psychedelic Patriarchy: Oppression, Repression and Abuse in Ritual and Research”: [Moderator: YouTube link removed.]
You recommend certain activities in preperation for a psychedelic experience (e.g. meditation, Holotropic Breathwork, Power of Myth). Are there any resources where you go into why you recommend each of them?
I heard someone slightly stutter the word "elucidation" today, and at first I thought they were saying "hallucinate". So the word "halluci-dation" came to mind as a descriptor for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. Just posting it here in case you see this comment and like the idea, Tim. Be well.
Wait a minute! Blake mentioned that a mutual friend of his and Tim's moved to Austin before Austin was cool. Wait a minute! Austin isn't cool anymore! It's wealthy and fancy but it hasn't been cool since the seventies. I lived in Austin in the seventies. Hippies were everywhere and we were having a blast. Swimming naked at Hippie Hollow, swimming topless at Barton Springs, going to concerts at the Armadillo World headquarters, going to the very first Whole Foods (a small little hippie store with uneven floors), dancing at Liberty Lunch, and hippie vendors on the drag.
Tim – the Bill Moyers and the Power of Myth was unexpectedly the most powerful and timely video for the specific moment I'm currently in in life. Thank you so much for recommending it.
Haha, I agree with your comment about the hair loss. Maybe I just have a thing for bald guys, but I think Tim looks so much better with a shaved head than when he had a full head of hair.