PJ Vogt’s decades-long quest to understand his own brain

Podcaster PJ Vogt has talked about his ADHD for years. Casually. Almost cheerfully. Then things changed. He decided to go off his ADHD medication, and he found the neuropsych report from when he was 13. It didn’t say what he thought.

On this episode of Hyperfocus, PJ, who’s spent his entire career making some of the most popular podcasts around – like Reply All and Search Engine — talks about his journey to understand his own brain. And how when he reread that old assessment, he found something messier than the story he’d been telling himself. 

Host Rae Jacobson follows him through that reckoning and the big question: What happens when the label that shaped your identity turns out to be blurrier than you imagined?

They talk through the trade-offs he’s still sorting out now that he’s stopped taking medication, and the advice he’d give younger people with a brain like his.

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PJ Vogt: The family crest of my brain is I am either a very, very, very smart dumb person or a very, very, very dumb smart person.

Rae Jacobson: If you have ADHD or any mental health condition, you probably spend at least some, maybe even a lot of time thinking about your own brain — what it will do, what it seemingly won't do, where it shines, where it sucks. Would it be on today, off today? Can you rely on it or will it let you down?

How to manage, treat, live with, make peace with, or even love our brains is this strange, essential, constant part of being a person with any mental health difference. And I guess of being a person in general. And today's guest, PJ Vogt, has spent a lot of time thinking about his brain.

PJ: I think if I described how much time I spend trying to understand my brain, many people would reasonably just be like, "You should just think about yourself less. There's a lot of other people and other things to think about other than your own mind." And I'm sure they're right. But I have just found that my mind is a very confusing tool. And I'm constantly surprised at the things it can do well and the things it can't.

Rae: I think it's fair to say that PJ, who hosts the popular podcast "Search Engine", is basically someone who thinks about things for a living. He makes shows where he tries to answer questions big and small. And if you're a podcast fan, you've probably heard his voice before. I've been listening to him for a long time, and it was on his previous show "Reply All" that I first heard him talk about having ADHD.

Now, like today, hearing someone talk about having ADHD on a podcast is not remarkable. But back then, nearly a decade ago, hearing anyone talk about ADHD anywhere was pretty unusual. And the way PJ talked about it — casually, relatably, like it was just part of his life — felt like a weird relief.

Here was this other person talking about having a brain like mine in a way that felt extremely familiar and sort of pleasantly un-special. It wasn't the subject of the week, it was just part of who he was. But then a few years ago, PJ's current show "Search Engine" did a two-part series on stimulant medication called "Why Did I Take Speed for 20 Years?".

In it, PJ talked about going off his ADHD medication and mentioned that in the course of his reporting he'd found his original ADHD assessment — the one done when he was a kid. Turns out, the doctor had found that he didn't quite meet the criteria for ADHD at all. I found myself wondering what this was like for him to go from someone who had heard talk so easily and so comfortably about his ADHD to someone who seemed to be questioning whether the diagnosis was right for him — and what that meant for who he is now. So, I asked.

PJ: There's a time in my life where I was much more bought in on the idea of this is a disability and it's part of my identity. I saw it as a wound. And then there's been years where I've felt like, no, it just describes the shape of my brain.

Rae: So, today on "Hyperfocus", PJ Vogt talks about his 20-plus-year journey to understand his own brain. How it's helped him rise to the top of his field while often sabotaging him along the way. And how this evolution in how he understands his diagnosis has made him rethink his relationship to work, to the people he cares about, and to his own — I hate this word, I'm sorry, but — potential.

Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. I'm very excited to talk about this.

PJ: I'm excited to talk about it. I think about it a lot. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, actually.

Rae: Why?

PJ: You know that feeling that your brain is like an instrument that you might have less control over than other people?

Rae: Yes, that feeling. I feel like it is the governing feeling of my life.

PJ: Yes. Or I feel like I have so much control that I am driving a Ferrari and everyone else is in some kind of sad sedan. That's always the metaphor. I'm like, it's a sports car. When it works, it's so fast. And also, it spends a lot of the time in the shop.

Rae: It's interesting that you say that, because everything that you're saying sounds to me like the ADHD world that I also inhabit. Which is part of the reason that I locked in on the idea that you saw this piece of paper, your old neuropsych testing, that said that this label that had become such a huge part of your life might not really be the one. What did it feel like when you read that?

PJ: I think it made me kind of sad. I just felt like, oh, you got an answer that was close enough to real that you stopped thinking about it. You're like, "I have ADHD and I take this medication. This is what it's going to be like." And I think whatever the answer was was a little bit more complicated and weird.

It was funny because my memory of that had been, I did the neuropsych thing, I got diagnosed with ADHD, they started giving me stimulants. Reading the old document, essentially what they had actually said is, "This person's mind has some traits that are very ADHD-like, but strictly speaking, in the view of this practitioner at this point, I cannot conclusively say that he has this thing."

All of this obviously is on a spectrum. You can describe your problems with attention and almost any human you've ever met will nod their heads and relate to part of it. But we've also decided that there's people who are outside the bounds of what seems to be normal social functioning and some of those people benefit from medication.

Basically what I was reading in this report from when I was 13 is like, this person was saying, if here's the line, you might not actually be outside of it. You might be just narrowly inside of it. It was just strange to know that given ADHD had been such a huge part of how I thought about myself for years. I was at a point as I was working on that specific piece where I was like, "Oh, the relationship I'd had to that medication was wrong for me." It was certainly wrong for me at the point of my life where I was, but also I thought it had been wrong for me much earlier than I'd understood.

Rae: When you say it was wrong for you, were you being medicated for something that wasn't the brain that you had and thus the medication was not functioning for you?

PJ: I don't think that. It's super tricky. Here's the expanse of truth. Right now, if you were to walk into the office where I work, what you would see if you hung out for a little bit is a person — me — clearly something is unusual about my brain's ability to focus. And not unusual in a good way.

Good things can come out of my brain, but it requires a support system around it. And I have that. I work with brilliant, capable, highly organized people, and they help make everything work. But you don't get to start your career there. I had to start my career being a support to other people. And I don't think I would have survived that part of my career necessarily without medication.

"PJ, where'd you save the file? PJ, why's the file name so weird?" I was on the verge of losing a job without medication and I went on it and stayed at the edge of death. So, that's just real, that's a part of that experience.

But then I was running a show for many years, and the show was run in a disorganized way because I ran it. Often a very dysfunctional way because I ran it. And the story I was telling myself was, "This medication is the reason I can do my job. It's the reason I can do this much deadline work, it's the reason I can do this much writing."

I look back at that period of my life and there's just mistakes I made — errors of carelessness and thoughtfulness. Maybe I would have made them anyway. People make mistakes. I certainly still make mistakes, many of them humiliating. But the thing I've noticed for me personally is when I removed Vyvanse from my life, for me, I had a greater capacity for thoughtfulness.

The trade is I might leave my car keys in the car. And the upside is my ability to reflect and to notice things about other people or my own thinking has gone up some measurable amount. I just know that's real. And so, that's what I sit with. That's what the piece was trying to say. Not to say that that's true for everybody, but to say that it was true for me.

Rae: One of the things that I struggle with with the medication conversation as somebody who does this stuff for a living is that you very rarely hear ADHD talked about without meds as part of the conversation. The type of conversation that you and I are having right now about just what it is like to live with a brain like ours is much quieter than the one about the way that the disorder is treated.

PJ: I think once you have a medication treatment that kind of sort of works, there's less work on the other things that might kind of sort of work. I find myself wishing that the med stuff could be a part of the conversation but not the entire conversation.

Rae: Yeah, the idea that it's this thing that is just one of many. My aunt lives in Alaska and she often says there's no bad weather, only bad gear. That's kind of how I feel about this.

PJ: That's really good. But it's weird because I think part of the problem with the medication — whether it's ADHD or depression or anything — if people are like, "You can take this pill or you can do these other things," I'm the kind of person that's like, "I'll take the pill." And if the pill doesn't work, I might not do the other things. I'll take the pill, it'll be interesting.

Rae: I think you're right about that though, because with ADHD, if you just take the pill, then maybe for that five-hour period, you at least feel like you're better at things or your reward pathways are like, "We're doing great here." Every piece of research that we have on this says that therapy and medication together is the best possible thing you can do for most brain differences. But it's so rare that you get to do the other piece — the skill building, thinking about things, finding the right gear.

PJ: Yeah, and again I really want to be careful. I know there's going to be people watching this who take the medication and they are just going to hear — because of how they're primed to hear it or maybe because I'm describing it — me judging that choice. I really don't judge that choice. I do think for a lot of people it is life-changing.

In the episode we did, the second part was just interviewing somebody who it has been life-changing for them, it has been totally good for them. I'm not just being respectful. I think it's right for them. But it's funny. It's both because when I was on the medication, I let the medication do it. I didn't learn habits that when I went off of it I could transport at all. Everything I've had to learn about living with my own stupid brain, which has been scratched out in piecemeal, was in the wake of that. It wasn't during it.

(10:24) PJ describes how his perspective on his ADHD diagnosis has evolved over the years.

Rae: Well, so this label, this ADHD label, is that still part of how you look at yourself? Is that still on the lens or is that something that you've moved away from?

PJ: No, I look at how late I pay my taxes every year. No, definitely no. I just carry it more lightly. I carry it the way some people talk about their horoscopes where they're like, "I know this is a little embarrassing, but I'm a Pisces and I kind of believe in it, but also I know it's kind of fake." That's actually how I carry the diagnosis.

I'm like, yeah, there's this thing, it's socially constructed, it's on a range, my testing's been all over the place. I don't want it to be in the second line of the biography of myself in my own mind, but it's obviously a salient fact that everyone who depends on me as a person has priced into their relationship with me.

I was joking with my colleagues this morning. I was like, "I've got to do an interview. I'm going to get to talk about ADHD, you know, this disease I have that you all suffer from." That's basically how I see it.

Rae: It's "This is me, so if you interact with me, you're also in it."

PJ: I'm so sorry. I will just try to thank you a lot. Honestly, if you asked the people that have had the fortune or misfortune of working with me — like my main collaborator, Shruti, who edits "Search Engine", Shruti Pinamaneni. I think if you asked her about my evolution of this, because she's had to deal with it for a very long time.

She would probably say that in the first five years of working with me, there was a lot more like, "I have ADHD, I can't do that. I'm not going to do that." I was just annoying about it, frankly. This is who I am. And now it's much more like, I recognize that I'm less great at this and if you need me to do it, I'll do it anyway, but could we box it around expectations that I think I can meet?

Rae: When you look back over your experience in your more doctrinaire way of thinking about it — like, "This is me, this is how I am, so you get with it or not" — do you see those experiences differently? Does that past look different to you with this new lens?

PJ: Yeah, I just think I was a little bit incurious about it. I saw the diagnosis as an answer. This is who I am, this is what it's going to be like, these are the drugs I'm going to take, this is how I'm going to work, this is what I won't do. And now I see it as a question. What does it mean to have a mind like this? What are we sure about? What aren't we sure about? What are my responsibilities to other people?

Rae: On this show, we always ask this one question, which is, if you could get rid of your ADHD, would you do it?

PJ: No. You'd have to lose other things.

Rae: This is everybody's response because you're like, where would I know where I stop and it begins? How do you take that out of your system?

PJ: Yeah, and also I couldn't sleep last night because I was thinking about a piece I shouldn't be writing because I should be doing the work I'm supposed to do this week. But the piece is really beautiful, I think, and it works because you have a mind that doesn't approach things head-on all the time and explains things by drawing connections that are not totally typical. I think of it as just a difficult gift.

I could have had a different brain and some things would go more easily for me, but I also know the benefits of it. And in a society, you want a bunch of different people with different shaped brains. You want a me, but you also want a not-me, and we should work together to try to make something good. I wouldn't get rid of it. There's so many things about myself that I would change, that I would delete without a second thought, and this one I just know I never would.

Rae: I do know what you mean. And I feel like this is the reason that it is a really hard thing to quantify for yourself, because sometimes it's the thing that is ruining your life and sometimes it's the thing that makes you the guy. The person where you're like, "Oh no, I can figure this out. I see it. I know how to do this. Let's go."

(17:31) The professional challenges and personal strengths associated with having an ADHD brain.

PJ: There's a teenager in my life that I'm helping to raise — I'm like a stepdad. He doesn't have ADHD, but he's just scatterbrained in a way that I identify with, where if he doesn't want to do something, he has a hard time getting himself to do it. It's been funny trying to think about how to love him and how to support him.

One of the things that I was thinking about was how do you teach a kid that maybe for some kids more than other kids, it's going to be really, really important for you to be incredibly alert to what are the things that when your brain finds them, time ceases to exist? What is the thing that when you do it, you have a hard time remembering to stop doing it?

Rae: There's a reason this show is called what it is.

PJ: I had the feeling. Part of the gift for me has been I do work that I mostly do not have to discipline my brain into doing. For the most part, when I'm in an interview, time goes away. When I'm writing, time goes away. I think the people with our kinds of minds who end up pretty happy, they find a way to get society to reward them for the parts of their brain that they're not having to beat into shape.

Rae: But it's just hard to teach someone to look for that. I don't know if you can. I think you just hopefully notice it when you find it.

PJ: I feel like it's something I think about all the time because it was a defining feature for so many people I know with ADHD and myself. It's this sort of strange, conflicting half-trauma of being either very smart or incredibly not smart about things and not being able to reconcile those two parts.

Whenever you are smart, you kind of feel like, "Am I just getting over? Is this a con?" That was how I experienced it. It was like the ultimate of imposter syndrome — I'm really good at this. So, because I'm good at it, does that mean it's not as valuable as the things that I am very, very bad at that seem very, very easy for everyone else?

Rae: The family crest of my brain is I am either a very, very, very smart dumb person or a very, very, very dumb smart person. And I'm just like, yes, the truth is both of those things are true depending on the context.

That's the thing I wish somebody had explained to me — that both of those things could be true and that it wasn't some secret thing that you had to hide that you were bad at things, otherwise the other veneer of smartness would crack and everyone would just know what you're really like. For scatterbrained kids, having somebody like you who's like, "I've been here, I can see down this path very far," to be like, okay, these two things can be true at the same time and figuring that out is kind of how you surf this brain.

PJ: But it's also hard. I was talking to another friend who is really, really accomplished. He does creative work that totally fits the shape of his brain and he's a leader in his field. And he was saying he sometimes struggles when he's talking to young people because he can tell them the story of what a lousy student he was. But he also knows that not everybody who struggles with this stuff finds the thing they love or society lets them professionally do the thing they love.

I just think people with these brains are a little vulnerable. The versions of their lives that work out for them are really beautiful and fulfilling because they get the sort of high of their brain being allowed to do the thing it wants to. And I think the versions of their life where they don't end up in jobs that suit them are incredibly punishing. The bad jobs I had — everyone finds bad jobs hard — I found them really hard. The amount of times I could look at my hands...

Rae: The hardest jobs I've ever had were ones where I had to be a cashier, run a cash register, do any form of thing where I had to do any kind of math or remembering of multi-step directions, like bartending. I have a vivid memory of weeping in the walk-in cooler and being like, "I am going to get fired right now." And it was because I couldn't remember where I put the money.

PJ: I'm so sorry. I so relate. I'm sure you have 50 of them. But you know, it's like you have to kind of go through those things, but you have to find a way to not let those experiences make you think you don't have any abilities at all. You have to get through to this part.

Rae: And I think it's like you're going to have to use your mind's unusual strength to find ways to compensate for your mind's unusual weakness. I remember I was a pizza delivery driver at Domino's and I have no sense of direction. I don't know if that's an ADHD thing or just "I have no sense of direction" thing. But the people got some pretty cold pizzas.

I was fighting for my life to stay employed at Domino's. I finally figured it out — because this was before the days of GPS — the boxes had a coupon thing on it and I would pull the coupon thing up and on the back I would just draw myself a map from the last place I knew how to get to to the person's house. I remember and I would hide the maps. I was really embarrassed that my brain couldn't just remember the basic directions of the town where I lived. It wasn't a big town.

I remember walking out of work one day and my boss caught me. He was like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, "Oh," and I pull up the coupon and I show it to him and he was like, "Oh, that's really smart. It's really smart that you figured out a way to do this." It was a real gift from Steve, who managed the Domino's Pizza in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, many, many years ago. Thanks, Steve. He was a leader of me. Just to say, it is good to find a way to get through. I weirdly learned a lot from that pizza map about how I was going to have to navigate professional life.

PJ: It makes a lot of sense, because when you look back and you'd never had that ADHD diagnosis — if you had never adopted that into your thinking — do you think those experiences would have been different to you? Do you think you would have been as able to make yourself the pizza map or would you have just been like, "I guess I just can't do this"?

Rae: I don't know. I think that what was helpful about the diagnosis is it said you're unusual and you need to have a relationship to that unusualness. And the relationship might be you think harder about getting through some problems that other people don't think harder about. It might be that you decide that you're really special. It might be that your self-esteem has a wound and you have to figure out what to do with the wound. But it just said there's something to pay attention to here and that was probably helpful. And without it, I think I would just be more confused.

I have one final question. It's something I wrestle with all the time: potential. The word potential.

PJ: Oh, like an epithet. What about it?

Rae: Well, I think perhaps you've already answered this question by that reaction. But to me, yeah, it always felt like an epithet. As soon as I could see it, someone's mouth forming the possibility of saying the word potential, I was like, "Oh god." Like you're already miserable.

But now, as somebody who's really successful in your field, right? You have a job that you've just told me works amazingly well for the brain that you have after navigating a lot of things that could have knocked you off course at any given point and probably did intermittently over the years. I think it would be fair to say, especially for people who are looking to have a career like yours, that you have achieved your potential. I'm sure there's more to achieve, but you're pretty far along in the journey of what I'm sure insert-teacher-here meant when they said potential. But how do you react to that word now? Is it how you just did react to it or is it something different?

PJ: No. I think for people that are at the beginning of the journey of figuring this stuff out — and I'm certainly not at the end of it, but for people who are like, "Dude, I would really like to be in your spot" — I think when you're a kid it does feel like an epithet because what I think they're saying is there's a gap between who you are when you're high-performing and when you're low-performing. And I believe that you should always be who you are when you're high-performing and that the delta between those two performances is effort or caring.

And it's just that wasn't the experience I had of it. The experience I had was I was as confused by the mismatches as everybody else. Potential to me was a word that was loaded with shame and judgment. That's how it felt then. I've been really fortunate, and a lot of the fortune I've had has been about this support of finding the right people to work with, understanding that a person with a scatterbrain probably actually needs to work with people without scatterbrains, not people with scatterbrains. That took a long time.

I think that if I were talking to somebody who was in the beginning of this, I would say your brain is really powerful at the things that it finds interesting. You need to be really alive to what you find interesting. But you also have to find the problem of using your brain to be an interesting problem. It's almost non-negotiable.

And if you try to bully yourself into doing better, you'll probably suffer a lot. But if you're like, "I'm going to use the sideways, out-of-the-box, associational kind of thinking that my brain wants to do to figure out unusual ways to solve problems that are simple for other people but aren't simple for me," that is the way that I have found to make the not-always-rewarding, not-always-pleasurable work of this mind doable, you know?

Rae: I really, really do. PJ, thank you so much for talking to us and doing this and being sleepless and willing to put headphones on anyway.

PJ: I was looking forward to this conversation. It's great to talk to you about this stuff.

Rae: Thank you so much to PJ for chatting with us. We'll have a link to PJ's podcast "Search Engine" and to the episodes we talked about in the show notes. And a listener question — or a request, really. This thing PJ and I were talking about, the kind of ever-changing relationship we have to our own brains, the labels we carry or let go of, the way all of this affects how we see ourselves is something I've been wondering about a lot lately.

And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that. So, I'm curious. How has your understanding of your brain affected how you understand yourself? It's a big question, I know, but we'd love to hear from you. Tell us in the comments or write us an email at hyperfocus@understood.org. Thanks. See you in two weeks.

"Hyperfocus" is hosted by me, Rae Jacobson. Our producer is Cody Nelson, and Anna Rothschild is our senior podcast producer. Julie Subrin helps with booking. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. Our research correspondent is Dr. KJ Wynne. Our associate director of content development is Calvin Knie. Briana Berry is our production director and Neal Drumming is our editorial director.

If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org. This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with neurodivergence like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.