Hi All,

Please find your weekly roundup email below. The 5-Bullet Friday newsletter is coming on Friday, as always.
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​🎧 New podcast episode:
​Eric Cressey, Cressey Sports Performance — Tactical Deep Dive on Back Pain, Movement Diagnosis, Training Principles, Developing Mobility, Building Power, Fascial Manipulation, and Rules for Athletes (Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, AeroPress 3-in-1 coffee press for delicious brews, and Athletic Greens’s AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.)
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​​✍️ New blog post:
​I Feel Love: MDMA for Autism and Social Anxiety​
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​​​​Short descriptions are below.
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Enjoy!
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🎧 New podcast episode:
​Eric Cressey, Cressey Sports Performance — Tactical Deep Dive on Back Pain, Movement Diagnosis, Training Principles, Developing Mobility, Building Power, Fascial Manipulation, and Rules for Athletes​

Eric Cressey (@EricCressey), MA, CSCS, is president and co-founder of Cressey Sports Performance, with facilities in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and Hudson, Massachusetts. He has worked with clients from youth sports to the professional and Olympic ranks but is best known for his extensive work with baseball players; more than 100 professional players train at CSP each offseason. He also serves as Director of Player Health and Performance for the New York Yankees.

Eric double-majored in exercise science and sports and fitness management at the University of New England and then received his master’s degree in kinesiology with a concentration in exercise science at the University of Connecticut. He has published books and video resources that have been sold in more than 60 countries. He regularly lectures both nationally and internationally, and his research has been published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. He serves as a consultant to New Balance, Proteus Motion, and Athletic Greens.

Eric’s free blog and newsletter can be found at EricCressey.com. You can also find Eric’s podcast at EliteBaseballPodcast.com.

Please enjoy!
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​Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, 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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​This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.
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​Go to EightSleep.com/Tim and save $300 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover through June 6th. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.
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​This episode is also brought to you by AeroPress! If you haven’t tried coffee made with an AeroPress, you’re in for a treat. With more than 45,000 five-star reviews and customers in more than 60 countries, it might be the highest-rated coffee maker on the planet. This press uses a patented 3-in-1 technology that combines the best of several brew methods into one, easy-to-use, very portable device. Because it combines the best of 3 methods, you get a cup that is full bodied, like a French press; smooth and complex, like when using the pour-over method; and rich in flavor like espresso.

As I wrote in The 4-Hour Chef: “This is now, bar none, my favorite brewing method.” And now, exclusively for you, get free shipping and 15% off the new Crystal Clear Aeropress at AeroPress.com/Tim.
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This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.

Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and 5 free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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​✍️ New blog post:
​I Feel Love: MDMA for Autism and Social Anxiety​

This is a guest post from Rachel Nuwer (@RachelNuwer), an award-winning science journalist who regularly contributes to the New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and many other publications. Her reporting for the New York Times broke the news globally about the MDMA Phase III clinical trial and was highlighted by me, Michael Pollan, and Ezra Klein, among others. In 2022, Nuwer was among the inaugural recipients of the Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. She holds masters degrees in applied ecology and in science journalism. Her first book, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, took her to a dozen countries to investigate the multibillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade.
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What follows is an excerpt from her new book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World.
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​Enter Rachel…​
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One group of people who are particularly at risk of missing out on social benefits—and who serve as a sort of canary in the coal mine for the insidious effects of increasing disconnection—are autistic individuals.
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Autistic adults are more likely to experience high levels of loneliness than their neurotypical peers. While 7 percent of the general adult U.S. population meets the diagnostic criteria for social anxiety disorder, one in four autistic adults do. Autistic people are also four times more likely to suffer from depression and eleven times more likely to have suicidal thoughts—problems that frequently both stem from and exacerbate social isolation—and they are 2.5 times as likely to die early.
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Despite the serious setbacks that many people on the spectrum face due to living in a society that discriminates against those who are different, social anxiety, loneliness, and lack of connection are not inevitable parts of being autistic. According to a 2022 meta-analysis of thirty-four scientific papers, autistic adults are less likely to be lonely if—somewhat obviously— they have relationships, experience fewer difficulties with social skills, and have positive views and acceptance of themselves. While there are many different ways to achieve these things, some autistics have gravitated toward a certain particularly potent molecular tool.

​Aaron Paul Orsini grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and as a teenager he remembers oscillating between being on the periphery of social gatherings and being “overly performative and needing to take over a situation.” At parties or at professional conferences as a young adult, he’d often feel overwhelmed by the bombardment of incoming sensory information.

When he was twenty-three, Aaron started seeing a psychologist for depression, anxiety, and what he described as “feeling that I would never ‘get it,’ and not really having any answers about how or why that might be.” During one session, the psychologist handed him a questionnaire to fill out without really explaining what it was for. After evaluating Aaron’s answers, the psychologist announced that Aaron was autistic.

In some ways, this news came as a relief. Knowing that he was autistic provided Aaron with a new way to conceive of his specific challenges and potential strengths. Yet even with this revelation—and to his distress—his lifelong habit of focusing on his deficits and limitations proved stubbornly resilient to change. “Even though I could tell myself, ‘Oh, I have superpowers,’ I was still feeling down and feeling a bit like, for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to do things,” he said.

When Aaron was twenty-seven, he experienced something of a quarter-life crisis and wound up on a train from Chicago to the West Coast with only a backpack in hand. He befriended a group of free-spirited fellow travelers who gave him a tab of LSD—a chance encounter that changed his life. Sitting on a tree stump in a forest, Aaron felt his mind go still; his awareness widened, and his sensory issues suddenly seemed manageable. The LSD also bestowed him with an ability to better read between the lines of social interactions and emotions in ways “I quite literally could never have imagined,” he writes in Autism on Acid, a book he published in 2019.

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