The Tim Ferriss Show - #171: The Random Show - New Favorite Books, Memory Training, and Bets On VR

Episode Date: July 2, 2016

This is not going to be a long-form interview where I dissect and deconstruct a world-class performer...at least not in the usual fashion. Instead, this is a special edition of The Random Show. I am joined by Kevin Rose (@KevinRose), serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, and all around wild and crazy guy. We discuss a wide range of topics, including new favorite books, memory training, meditation tactics, multiple wives, and bets for or against virtual reality. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are from the worlds of athletics, business, strategy of any type or fashion, entertainment or otherwise. This episode is a little bit different. It is not going to be a long-form interview where I dissect and deconstruct a world-class performer, or at least not in the usual fashion. going to be a long-form interview where I dissect and deconstruct a world-class performer,

or at least not in the usual fashion. Instead, this is a special edition of The Random Show. I am joined by my usual co-host in this capacity, Kevin Rose, at Kevin Rose on Twitter, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, and that is not an exaggeration. He's one of the best product guys for those in Silicon Valley or tech and investors I know. What makes him unique, perhaps, is an unusual combination, and that is he's very good at early-stage investing, very early-stage seed investing, and also very good at the public markets. And he's also an all-around wild and crazy guy, which makes for a fun conversation. So we go all over the place. We talk about new favorite books, memory training, multiple wives, or maybe I talk about that, bets for or against virtual reality, and much, much more. So please say hi to us on the socials

and enjoy. Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to another episode of The Random Show. I think it is episode 477. I'm Tim Ferriss. And I'm Kevin Rose. Thanks for joining us. It's been a while. It has been, to be precise. It has been a long while. Yes. And we are sitting in your new place.

Just moved in today. A lot of life changes. Speaking of, sorry, I swear I've only had two glasses of wine. Speaking of random show, um, you hit me up today or last night. I did. And we're like, Hey, let's do a random show. And it was like midnight. I'm like, you said on Tuesday and it was yesterday. It was Tuesday. I'm like, I'm not getting out of bed to do a random show. So that would have been very random, though. But you meant Wednesday.

I did mean Wednesday. You're in town for one night. That's right. And we're in a new spot. It's just a sniper shot in and out. And I'm excited to dig in because we have a bunch of new interests, but we also have new questions. Yes.

Because I realized when I was just developing my Bambi legs in the podcasting and interview game. Episode one. Episode one of the Tim Ferriss show, which we didn't even have a name for at that point, although you nominated Tim Tim Talk Talk. I still think that's the best name and I think you should rename your show. Go to hell. Kevin has stuck and people still refer to it as TimTimTalkTalk.

I see that on Twitter from time to time, and I always laugh my ass off every time I see it. Things have hopefully evolved and not devolved, but I remember you giving me so much shit when I asked you. I put together my list of questions, and I asked you if you could be a breakfast cereal, or if you had to be a breakfast cereal, which would you be? And you're like, Oh, it's going to be one of those interviews. And I was like, Oh, stop busting my balls. I'm nervous already. Even though you're my friend, it's my

first time recording audio. And so I want to, I'm going to, at some point, lob some questions at you that I've asked a lot of my other guests that I don't know your answers to. And it sounds like you have some top secret questions to volley. Yes. We decided to go before the show, you know, Tim and I spend probably five, 10 minutes putting together kind of a, just a bullet list of outline and stuff that we want to talk about. And you mentioned wanting to do those new kind of refreshed questions on me. And so of course I've got to come back to you and do some on you as well, because you know, you're always on the interviewing side of this equation. Why not throw some back to you and see what you come up with?

Because I feel like you grill your guests. Sometimes you're like, what would you put on a billboard? And they're like, Oh, you know, it's, it's really difficult to answer this stuff in real time.

Yeah. Some of them are really tough. I'm curious to see how you're going to do. We'll see. Yeah. We'll see how well I can tap dance. I've grown better at the asking, not necessarily the answering of questions, but do you have anything new on yours? And I should also say just for those people who are wondering at the prep. So we both bullet out a couple of ideas or items that are new for us, whether they're

books or gizmos or otherwise, but we don't share those notes with each other beforehand. Otherwise, it would be boring. That's right. So we tend to leave it to be just like fresh stuff that we just came up with. It's typically stuff that we've used and discovered since the last time we saw each other. That's right. And so I've got kind of three things.

You want me to kick it off with the first one? Yes, please. So this one is actually thanks to you. I called you on the phone and talked to you about this, the TM meditation. Yeah. So Transcendental Meditation is a form of meditation that I hadn't actually heard of until you first brought it up. I have another buddy, Anish, who's been doing it since he was a child.

You know Anish. He was at my bachelor party. And then also our mutual friend, Dr. Peter Atiyah. I was just talking to him. I'm like, hey, what are some great ways that you reduce stress in your life? And he's like, oh, I've looked at the literature. Like, TM, he's trained in it as well. And he's like, you should just go.

And he did an introduction to some of the folks over at the center, and I was like, okay, well, why don't I go give this a shot? And I called you up, and I was like, what do you think? And you were like, yeah, go do it. Well, I was introduced to bring it full circle. So, of course, Peter's been on the podcast. Yeah. And I was convinced to do my first proper training with TM

by two other guests. So it was Chase Jarvis and Rick Rubin. Oh, crazy. I effectively asked them the same question that you asked Peter, and it just took a while for me to get it through my thick skull that I should try it. Because of the costs involved and various things. It's not cheap. It's not cheap. And I may hopefully collaborate with some folks involved at the higher levels of TM to change that. We will see.

But there are some quirky aspects to it, right? You sent me a photograph of your flowers and fruit with the comment, I feel like I'm joining a cult. Some of it is for a secular person. It's a little, it's a little tough. I mean, here's the deal. Like I grew up religious and I drank the blood of Christ at communion and whatnot and like did all that stuff. So I'm used to, you know, certain formalities around certain things. And, and, you know,

I go to the introduction meeting, which is free and you sit down and you're like almost in like a church type setting. And, you know, they're like, Hey, like, welcome. They kind of start explaining some stuff. And I'm like, okay, this all sounds great. Everything you're saying sounds great. They're like, here's the cost. I'm like, eh, a little pricey, but if it's going to change my life, whatever. And then they're like, by the way, on your first day, I want you to bring three pieces of fruit and some flowers for the introduction to the dude and the offering that you must give him on the table when we burn incense. And I was like, what?

And by the dude, you mean there's a large mural of the dude from the Big Lebowski. That's right. No, but the founder. I never recall the founder's name. Maharishi? Maharishi, yes. So, you know, whatever. I'm not going to buy in if it's any kind of religious thing.

Dara's making faces. She's making faces. But essentially, are we allowed to talk about this, by the way? This is the other thing. They told us we couldn't talk about any of this stuff. Will this do us? I don't think so. I mean, ultimately, this is like a, I would say, a ringing endorsement of the benefits of TM, probably.

But there's some weird stuff. Let's call a spade a spade. And people have talked about it before. Yeah, So basically you go into a little room, you swing a dead cat over your head 13 times. No, you don't do that. I'm kidding. You do your little ritual sacrifice thing. It's fine. I gave fruit and the, that lasts like 30 seconds and then they give you a mantra. So a mantra for people that don't know, there's a few different types of meditation. The type that I'm used to is the headspace variety, which is the app, which is mindfulness, meaning you sit there, you follow your breath, you know, the attention is directed at the in and out flow of your breath, and that's kind of it. So mantra-based meditation is taking a

word that doesn't mean anything and you repeat it over and over and over in your head. And so you sit there for 20 minutes and you take this word and it's just like, let's say it's cheeseburger, and it's just like cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, like over and over. And then eventually you enter this somewhat hypnotic state. Did you find that that's kind of where it took you as well?

It does, or it can, I should say. And you can think of it at least, and I'm sure there are people who are experts in this who take issue with the analogy, but you can think of it almost as a white noise machine for a waking state. So if you use a white noise machine to help you get to sleep, let's say, then this would be the equivalent for helping you to achieve a sort of alpha brainwave level of relaxed

attentiveness that some people might associate with flow. So it does help you to get into a hypnotic state. And where I find it very helpful is if you feel compelled when you've practiced or attempted meditation in the past to kind of swat your thoughts away as if they were like flies buzzing in your face, it can get very, very frustrating. And by repeating a mantra, you are effectively overriding a lot of the internal dialogue or monologue. Right. Uh, but yes, you can get into a very, very altered state of sorts, enhanced state. Yeah. So, you know, what's funny is it's a four day

training course and I did the first day and it was literally the fruit sacrifice, then the introduction of the mantra. And by the way, the reason I said it's cheeseburger, cheeseburger is like, they give you this mantra and you're not allowed to tell it to anyone. It's, it's like private just to you. Later I looked them up online and there's like, you know, 15 of them. So you can just guess which one mine is. It starts with a M. No, I'm just kidding. Um, but essentially, um, you do that. And then I was a little upset. I finished day one and I was like, why did I, why did I really pay all this money for this? Why do I have to say poontang poontang?

I literally read it on the internet. I can just do this. And I was like, you know what? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to go back for day two. And I went back for day two and it all made sense after day two. And I stayed for the entire four days. And the reason being is it's not. To be clear, when you say four days, at least when I went through the process, you're really, it's like an hour to two hours a day. I'm talking an hour and

a half per day. Yeah. So, um, and day two, it's funny cause you learn it and it's really easy, but day two through four is all about helping you get over the little hurdles that appear throughout the entire process. And it's funny how they, they occur for everyone. Um, it sounds really simple, but as you're doing the mantra, certain things happen. Like all of a sudden for me, I was doing the mantra and I started sinking the mantra with my heartbeat and I'm like, Whoa, that's weird. And then of course that distracts me, takes me away from the mantra. And then I don't, I don't know what to do. I'm kind of frozen. And so imagine like that, but with, there's probably 15 different things that you'll run into that are distractions and they teach you how to kind of come back to the mantra,

how to embrace that stuff. And, and it's, it's really, that's where the value is. It's the practical tactical stuff where, where there, I think two chief benefits, at least for me one is you have someone holding you accountable to meditate for two sessions in between the in-person meetings yeah in other words there is a consequence i.e embarrassment to not performing the assigned work that's whereas when i tried meditation in the past i'd buy a book i'd be like 90 of this makes no sense i I don't understand.

But here's a little sidebar. Fine. I'll follow my breath. And then I do it and I'm like, am I doing this right? I don't know. I've got all these thoughts. I'm no good at this. I'm losing at meditation.

I quit. And after a few days, I would stop doing it. But when you have someone you're going to meet with each day who is going to want in that hour and a half to talk about your last two sessions, do post-game analysis, and help you with the issues that came up, you feel compelled given that social pressure of sorts. Yeah, it was great. And the sunk cost, quite frankly. I think that if I were to point to a benefit of the payment,

although I hesitate to do that, but one of the benefits is you, in a beneficial way, succumb to the sunk cost fallacy. You're like, well, I already paid for it, so I might as well do it. Yeah, and honestly, I asked a ton of questions, got a lot of value out of it. So that was great, and it's been about a month and a half now. I've been practicing and doing 40 minutes of meditation every day, seven days a week. Two sessions split into 20 minutes.

Two sessions split into 20 minutes. And my wife, like Dariaia says she notices a big difference i don't know i mean i feel a little bit more relaxed and i certainly like for me my pressure points are if too much is going on in my life meaning if i have a lot of travel combined with work combined with board meetings combined with fundraising or whatever's going on, when I hit a certain critical mass, I kind of break down a little bit. And that's where it's just too much going on. Why are you laughing?

No, I'm laughing because this doesn't happen to anyone else. I don't know why you have this particular defect. I mean, I know what happens to you too. This is seriously, but that hasn't happened as much, and I've been able to weather the storm a lot better. I'm not experiencing any type of effect other than just like I will do the meditation and I will come out of it in a kind of slight daze. In fact, they tell you when you finish the session, the 20-minute session,

to spend three minutes just kind of slowly reintroducing yourself to the world. It's like coming up from scuba diving. They're like, okay, hold on. You got to equalize. Exactly. And it's funny because I said, well, one time I didn't have that three minutes. I just got up and went and I felt a little weird afterwards. And, and the, the, the lady at the, that was instructing me said, actually, if that's going to happen and you know, you have to run, you have to go out to someplace, cut back the meditation time and still spend that three minutes because it's really important. You go pretty deep inside yourself and you're kind of a little dazed and people can get headaches or all kinds of

things if they come out too fast. Daria, if they come out too fast, Daria's pointing to a shirt that she had printed for herself, which says that's what she said. And that's why I married my wife. She makes those kinds of jokes. But let's make it more concrete. We were just at dinner. We had a really nice dinner together. And Daria said, you have been a rock in the best way possible, meaning very stable and a dramatic difference. And I think that for, for someone who is doing that type of work, it can be in some, not

all cases, difficult to discern the progress because it's like, if you're, you know, gaining a, say a half pound of fat a month and then like, you know, a decade later, you're going to be pretty fat, but, uh, you won't notice it. I mean like, you know, a decade later you're going to be pretty fat, but, uh, you won't notice it. A year later you'd be pretty fat too. Yeah.

That also. But the, the, the point being is terrible comparison, but it's like the boiling frog, but like you don't notice the improvement because you're exposed to it every day. Right.

And I noticed a big change in my sleep in particular, the onset to sleep has changed dramatically. I will be the first to admit I am not as consistent at all with afternoon sessions. So it's mostly for me first thing in the morning. And this particular type of meditation, I would say is probably not for everyone, but it can be very useful for some people. I think the social accountability, the camaraderie, and also teacher-student relationship was what was most important for me. Yeah. I really do like the foundation that they put in place in that once you pay for the session, it is, do you remember how much it was? I think it was like $1,200, something like that. Something like that.

The cost has decreased over time from like $1,500 to $1,200. Yeah, but you get to go back whatever you want. So the teacher was like, yeah, come back anytime. You don't have to pay anything. Hang out, and I'll help you if you run into any more roadblocks. They were really friendly people. So let me give a couple of suggestions. The first is, and the TM folks probably gonna hate me for this,

but you can experiment with this, right? Using some type of mantra. And I hate that term. I think it's very loaded, but you could use a word that is say like a two syllable word, like nature, right?

Like nature, nature. It's not supposed to mean anything. It's not supposed to mean anything, but let's, let's not let perfect be the enemy You could use om also For some people who are allergic to yoga

Like I was for a long time They'll have negative associations So you could use that Even though I do have a mantra I've used nature What does your mantra start with? You can say the letter it starts with I'm going to lie to you. It starts with Z.

I'm such a hyper-analytical person. I enjoy having a few superstitions. You drank the Kool-Aid. I also don't like using red pens. Are you serious? I don't like cheersing with water. I don't like cheersing with water either. That's just weird.

I'm not doing it for a superstition reason. It's just strange. So a couple of alternatives for people. You're doing it for superstition. No, I'm not. She's saying I'm doing it for superstition. I just don't like the idea of everyone drinking alcohol and I don't have a glass of alcohol. No, it's not superstition.

It's pure heart science. It's like I like alcohol. I want a glass of alcohol. Okay. We won't belabor that but for people interested in experimenting with this kind of thing you can sort of bootleg an imperfect variation of it and experiment i do think that people would derive benefit from it but like you said having someone who can answer very specific questions like okay you travel a lot what are you going to do if room service knocks on the door comes in when you're in the middle of meditation? Like, what are the options? What is optimal? Et cetera, et cetera. And going through all those contingencies is very

valuable. But you pointed out one, Headspace has worked tremendously well for a lot of my friends and a lot of people listening to this, for that matter. Calm is another one that's worked well. There are others who have enjoyed, and I've enjoyed quite frankly, I'm not a purist about it. I've used guided meditations from Tara Brock, who was introduced to me by Maria of brain pickings,

Popova, Popova, Maria, I need to, I need to do a refresher on your name pronunciation. I apologize. What was it? Popova.

There we go. I'm being, we need Daria here is like a consistent fact checker. And, uh, the guided meditations by Tara Brock, B-R-A-C-H, are fantastic. She's also been on the podcast. Sam Harris has some great guided meditations. I think it's samharris.org. There are many options out there for starting your day off

in a relaxed, non-reactive, calmly effective state. And those are some of the options, I would say. Yeah. I mean, one thing I will add on to that, and I agree with you. I would say if you're going to try mantra-based meditation, try to pair up with a friend or someone that you know that's done it before. They can help you get over those hurdles if you don't want to pay for the class. The nice thing about paying for the class, the only nice thing about paying that much money is it truly is a forcing function to make you take it seriously.

I mean, I went to day two because I was kind of pissed and I was like, why did I pay this much for it? I'm going to get something out of it, you know? And then I went, I was like, okay, actually I get it. You know what I mean? This is the way with all courses. Well, it's true with a lot of skills also that are very frustrating in the beginning. Let's take slacklining as an example. Oh God, I tried that at your house.

So slacklining is difficult and most people completely lose interest and quit after the first or second sessions because neurologically they're not capable of the neurological and muscular control and coordination. You need a certain, this is my, at least, my me. Yeah, your legs just go berserk. So you require a certain number of sleep cycles as far as I can tell, to consolidate this procedural knowledge. Meditation, in this particular case,

I think is very, very similar. It's like going out and snowboarding. I don't know of anyone, first day snowboarding, who's like, that was so much fun. You just eat shit and catch edges and smash your head on the slopes or your ass and tailbone for the entire time. And in the world of meditation, that's where 95 plus percent of people quit. Yeah. But

if they were forced to do five days, they would, they would see the potential, right? They would have one good run or one good stretch and they'd be like, okay, now I'm hooked. That's right. That's why I like to take 10 from headspace where they give you 10 days, 10 minutes a day. That was the first time where I got through all 10 days and I was like, ah, it was about day eight where I was like, oh, I get it. I'm coming out of this more relaxed. I'm feeling stronger as an individual after I do this. So anyway, we don't have to keep talking about meditation the entire time. Yeah. Last thing I would say is it's, it's very similar to physical training for non-reactivity. So if you're interested and have been interested in the Stoic philosophical

episodes that have been on this podcast before related to Seneca and so on, a number of episodes by Ryan Holiday, if that interests you as an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments, that meditation is sort of the, one of the found or mindfulness, which both terms bother me, but that type of non-reactivity training that mentally as you would train yourself physically is a foundational skill, a meta skill that allows, uh, all the other pieces of the puzzle to function. Well, yeah. Uh, all right.

And if what's, uh, what's next? Yeah, that was mine. What's yours? Uh, what's mine? Well,

I'll give a couple of specifics. Uh, one is a fiction book that I just finished. And I, and I said fiction with that particular emphasis, because I've almost always been a nonfiction snob in the sense that I've taken a very hoity-toity position with fiction, which is, well, if I just want to make stuff up, I can do that myself. I want to get something concrete out of this. If I'm going to invest

the time into reading a goddamn book, it needs to be valuable, actionable, takeaways this and the other. I've realized a few errors in that thinking. The first is that just like, as is the case with movies, there are movies for entertainment, there are movies or TV shows just for complete stress relief, like a Dumb and Dumber or something like that, which are brilliant in their own way. And then there are documentaries that you might watch, like Fog of War, to learn something or two. And I think that's very true with reading.

Not only that, but that you can better remember and incorporate some of the lessons from fiction because there are stories well told and we're programmed to be story remembering machines. The truth and the truths that are embedded in fiction often are more utilitarian than the dense non-fiction that is just going to fall through your brain or out of your brain like sand through the fingertips. That's been my experience.

I've actually realized that fiction can have not only a rejuvenating, relaxing effect by turning off your problem-solving apparatus, but you can actually incept yourself or embed truths that are helpful. And one book that was actually recommended by our mutual friend, Chris Saka, who's been on this podcast, on track to be, or if not already,

the most successful venture capitalist of all time based on his first fund. The novel is How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I think I'm getting the title right. And I'm blanking on the author's name. Pakistani author. That's as I remember it. And it is a fascinating novel. It's beautifully written.

And I've never seen such incredibly glowing reviews of any book. I mean, it's just woven together in such a powerful way. And what makes it very, very unique is the voice that is used and the perspective. So the entire book is written from first person. What I mean by that is it's like you awake to pain in your left eye. You're laying down under your mother's cot with your head on the dirt. Oh, I like this.

This sounds cool. And I, I was told about this by Chris. It sounds like a video game almost. It does. And Chris, uh, told me about this and I thought to myself afterwards,

I should really think I should really read that. And the second thought was that conceit, like that way of, of, of writing the book, will be really fascinating and cute for like 10 pages, and then it's going to drive me insane. And it didn't at all.

You just seamlessly become this character. And I don't want to spoil it, but it's written as a parody of a self-help book, which is awesome and hilarious, And it's written as a parody of a self-help book, which is awesome and hilarious. And there's a lot of truth and a lot of sort of timeless wisdom embedded in this book. Is it on Audible or just? Oh, I'm sure it is.

Thank you. Yeah, there we go. Thank you, Daria. How to Get Filthy, Rich, and Rising. The Asia novel Mohsin Hamid. M-O-H-S-I-N, last name H--a-m-i-d the reason we're not getting our facts right is I have no internet at the house right now so he's like so looking things up on our phone here is the quote and there are many like this from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times

audacious Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers it's a beautifully written book so if people people are looking for a, a shift in the gears, perhaps a break from the relentless pursuit of dry facts, then I think this is a fantastic way to spend a few days. I got so into this. I read this book in maybe three days, tops, I think two days probably. Read it in a weekend. It's fantastic. So that would be the most recent read that I'm into. I'll bring up one other one that's really weird, or maybe an odd choice and an impulsive purchase,

which is a book of poetry. I'm not a poetry reader. an odd choice and an impulsive purchase, which is a book of poetry. I'm not a poetry reader. And I was in a Barnes and Noble at union square in New York city. And there was a, there was a, a very, really thin collection of poetry sitting there called, uh,

I might need Dari again. I think it's night with exit wounds. And, uh, I might need Dari again. I think it's Night with Exit Wounds. And I think the author is Ocean Vuong. That's a great title, by the way. Oh, it's fantastic. That's what caught me. And the last name, I'm pretty sure is Vietnamese, V-U-O-N-G. And so I got it right.

It's a night with exit wounds. And I was like, whoa. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Thank you. And I was like, Whoa, night sky with exit wounds. Thank you. And I opened up this book. It's very small. And I started reading one poem in the morning when I wake up and one at night, or if I feel stressed, I use it just like I use fiction to short circuit the pro con hyper analytical. Whatanalytical, what-if brain that can drive me completely bonkers. And it works.

It works really well. Now, I will warn people what I didn't know about this. And I don't think it would have affected my purchase, but this author is very gay and very explicit. So there's some pretty hardcore action in this, in this, in this book. So if you're reading along, if you're reading along and, uh, and you're like, Whoa, Hey now, like that will some crazy shit that will probably happen a few times, but, uh, the language and some of the poems I don't like at all. And that's okay. But like every third or fourth I read, and this is a first for me, the wording is so evocative of

unusual imagery, like the night sky with exit wounds, that it twists my brain. It's almost like mental yoga. It's because my brain struggles to piece together an image that makes sense. And a lot of these poems don't seem to make a lot of sense, but there are four or five turns of phrase that stretch my ability to visualize in such a way that I find it just opens doors to perception or gives me other lenses through which I can view the rest of my day. Oh, sweet.

Sounds odd. I know, but, and I've never really read or pursued poetry in this way. But very impulsive chancing, very impulsive purchase based on chancing across this book. And I've really enjoyed it. So I think it's going to reignite my interest in certain types of poetry, like those that were introduced to me by Rolf Potts,

the writer and author of Vagabonding, one of my favorite books. So that's to be continued. I don't think I will become a poet. I don't have sort of the hubris to think that I have the capacity for that. But also the way this book is formatted is so odd as someone who's accustomed to narrative fiction or nonfiction. Because the words will be scattered around the page for one poem. Then the next will be an unbroken paragraph of text with no punctuation. And it's just so jolting that I find it serves as a pattern interrupt for me. Just kind of like...

It's almost like an art in a way. Yeah, it totally is. that I find it serves as a pattern interrupt for me. It's almost like an art in a way. Yeah, it totally is. You're getting a little piece of art on every page. It absolutely is. So that's been an interesting experiment, unintended experiment of mine recently. That's awesome. The last I would say is, maybe not the last,

but probably we'll jump into some questions after this, is that I am going to be, as promised, donating at least $100,000 to psychedelic research at top universities this year, 2016. And I've already raised, I think it was 90 something thousand dollars for Johns Hopkins in looking at the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. It's depression that has not been addressable by any conventional means. And I'm going to be doing more work and funding research. So thank you, first and foremost, to everybody who contributed to that campaign.

It was a huge success. Things are already underway. I'm very excited about what will be discovered that can be used in that trial. What is that? Give me the quick 30 seconds for people that aren't familiar with this. Like what is the trial? What are you testing? I get that it's depression that can't be treated with anything else,

but what does the actual trial look like? What do they receive? So the structure of the trial, so if people want to read all the details, they can go to crowdrise.com forward slash Tim Ferriss. The trial has actually been upgraded. So what happened, it will be relatively small sample size. So I'm pulling this from memory, but I think it's six to twelve people. Can I be one of the... Unfortunately not, unless you want to move to Baltimore and fill out a very long questionnaire and qualify for it.

But the purpose is to determine whether, as I, again, I'm pulling this from memory, so I encourage people to check out the website, a single or several administrations of standardized psilocybin. And if I had, this is again, totally guessing, but if I'm guessing probably 0.25 to 0.35 mg per kg, milligrams per kilogram, which would translate to what would generally be considered a heroic dose.

And if I'm getting this wrong, then you can go to my blog and leave a comment and let me know. But to see the effects, measurable effects, and persistence of effects of psilocybin in patients who have not responded, chronic depression that has not been addressable or treatable with other pharmaceutical or therapeutic means. And they will be also using, again, pulling from memory, this was a few months ago, fMRI and other imaging tools to look at,

to try to determine how, if there is a demonstrable and statistically significant effect, how psilocybin has this particular effect. And there is good science and more science on the way to indicate that there are some incredibly powerful applications of psilocybin for instance in the treatment of different types of addiction. And it's not a panacea, it can't be used for everything, but in terms of

nicotine addiction or alcoholism, tremendously effective, at least based on the preliminary data that we have thus far. So when you're administering the psilocybin to someone, can I finish one thing? Yeah, go for it. So the purpose of me bringing it up was not to say, hey guys, I'm donating a bunch of money to psilocybin,

please give me a gold star. It was to say that I'm doing a second campaign. Oh, sweet. And I'm going to be, instead of using crowdfunding, because I want, as everyone listening who's a long-term listener knows, to run an experiment. I want to figure out not only what works in the scientific arena with these compounds, or not, but what are the most effective non-traditional ways of fundraising for scientific studies? So I'm going to be, and I've already designed and will be selling a number of themed t-shirts that should be available by the time you hear this. And you can check those out

by going to fourhourworkweek.com forward slash mushroom, which is traditionally where one finds psilocybin. Not all mushrooms, so don't go out foraging yourself. That's a good way to get dead. But yeah, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash mushroom. If merchandising is a more efficient way to raise, say, $100,000 for scientific research, then crowdfunding. fill-in-the-blank university or fill-in-the-blank nonprofit has a dinner at someone's house where they invite a bunch of muckety-mucks and then they have one-on-one conversations infused with a lot of wine to convince people to donate X amount of dollars. 15 to 25 grand, and that's what you hope for. Or you try to land a whale, right?

Right. And I want to see if there are more elegant ways of doing that. Yeah, the t-shirt looks pretty cool. You're wearing it right now. Yeah, I'm elegant ways of doing that. Yeah. The t-shirt looks pretty cool. You're wearing it right now. Yeah. I'm wearing, I'm wearing one of the shirts right now.

It's very comfortable. I, uh, I am, I, I, I spent a disturbing amount of time picking out the materials for these shirts,

which is a real stickler. It's always bugged me when, uh, I'll, let me give two examples. So I've seen some shirts I would have been totally down to wear that are, now these are from say South by Southwest where like every startup has given away free shirts,

just generally a waste of money by the way, startups. But some of them are so comfortable that I've worn ridiculous shirts just because they're a good material. The problem is they always give you extra large, but they give you like extra large Moo Moo shirts with like a 20 by 20 inch logo that makes the front all stiff and plastic. It shirts with like a 20 by 20 inch logo that makes the front all stiff and plastic.

It's just like, who is going to wear that? Yeah. You tried to cut corners to make a, like a, a minimally expensive shirt. And as a result, you wasted all of it. Right. So it's like you spent whatever, I'm making these numbers up, but like you spent $5 or like $2 a shirt. It's more like 10. Right. spent $5 or $2 a shirt. It's more like $10.

Right, so you spent $10 a shirt. You did 1,000 shirts because you didn't want to spend $15,000. And now that $10,000 is going to be entirely wasted because no one's going to wear it. Whereas you could have just spent 50% more and actually have some measurable ROI of some type. Anyway, sorry, it's a pet peeve. I fucking hate... I have no fashion sense. I wear a lot of t-shirts. I think a lot aboutve i fucking hate i am i have no fashion sense i wear a lot of t-shirts i happen to i think a lot about t-shirt comfort i have a question about mushrooms

yes so you know the typical college kevin like you know that has experience with mushrooms is you know you get a chocolate you get a bag something like that when you do these trials how do they how do they measure this are they grinding up mushrooms and weighing them out like how do they actually administer it's um my understanding is that it's synthesized okay it could be extracted but this is actually one of the largest constraints i mean with a compound that is effectively as tracked and regulated as like plutonium it's scheduled in the same class as cocaine and regulated as plutonium. It's scheduled in the same class as cocaine and heroin. So it is extremely difficult to get the approvals

on many different levels, including IRB for human trials, to initiate this type of research. But let's just say you get all the approvals. And I'm making these numbers up. I wish I had a few people here to help me with accuracy, but let's just say, for the sake of argument, say that you get the approvals, and then you want to get, say, five grams of psilocybin. It's something crazy, like $15,000 a gram to get a hold of it because there are no economies of scale. Who's growing it?

It's not being grown. It's all synthesized. I don't know specifically. I should. There's a non-profit, I'm pretty sure it's a 501c3, called USONA, U-S-O-N-A, or maybe USANA, which has, I believe they're behind this, has purchased a very large quantity in bulk so that they can then distribute at cost to researchers. It's actually a really brilliant approach. Doing this all through legitimate legal means, so they have all the necessary clearances,

but what this does is it removes one of the largest constraints currently, which is a capital constraint. Universities have fundraising. Fundraising has to be allocated. If you have a six-person study and it's going to cost whatever it is, an additional $50,000 to $100,000, even if all your research is well-planned, even if you get all of the proper boxes checked, if you don't have the money, you don't have the money.

This will, in part, remove that limitation. It should greatly improve the number of researchers who are performing studies using psilocybin, which is very exciting. That's great. Yeah, the first time I had read about it being used in research was probably about six months to eight months ago. There was a study that was done, I don't know if you heard about this in New York actually.

This kid that was actually studying to become a doctor came down with cancer. And he was having absolutely horrible anxiety. And he knew how to check himself because he was pre-med and so he was rubbing his lymph nodes all the time and really freaking how to check himself because he was pre-med and so he was like rubbing his lymph nodes

all the time and like really freaking out to the point where the doctors were like you need to stop rubbing your lymph nodes he was causing rashes where he was rubbing them to check for cancer like just went off the deep end and they they had this study he took part he swallowed these these capsules or whatever they had this psilocybin and knocked out his anxiety 100 even though he still had at the time like stage four cancer he was just okay with dying at that point well this is where i this is one of the areas that is uh very active i mean very, being relative to such a controlled substance, is end-of-life anxiety or depression for, in one instance, terminal cancer patients. And so there's actually a very good article written some time ago by Michael Pollan called The Trip Treatment, which was in The New Yorker,

very much worth reading, and talks a good deal about this. So that is one type of study that I'm looking to and will be funding more of. And there are actually two on deck. And I think it's very important to fund studies that are easily defended at this point, at this nascent stage of research with a very unfairly scheduled compound. You have to really be on the up and up and be on best behavior and have as many sort of insurance, assurances and insurances as possible to ensure that you can defend a study, not just scientifically, but politically.

These particular populations in the early stages are important to choose wisely. It's very hard to say, fuck the cancer patient who's going to die. Let that guy have incredible anxiety and depression. Very, very hard to attack that. And similarly, I find it very compelling to look at the treatment-resistant depression, something that has not responded to other medical options to date, or veterans with PTSD. Don't you feel like you can use kind of marijuana as a template here? Like they're, they've been very successful at creating cannabis related compounds to treat and

help cancer patients with pain and other things. That was kind of like the foot in the door strategy to kind of open the door to further research. Potentially, potentially, definitely. And I've, and I've spoken with all the, I've spoken with some people who have had very deep involvement on the political and legislative side with cannabis. But yes, I do think there are lessons to be learned. Both things to do and things not to do. So that's something that I continue to be very passionate

about. So if you want some super comfy they'll make your nipples hard, but in a good way. T-shirts go to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash mushroom and one is very subtle, one is not so subtle and you can decide if you want to support some team colors and all of the proceeds, I'm not keeping any of it, all of my proceeds 100% are going directly to research. Uh, so that, uh, is something I'm very much looking forward to. Awesome. All right. So I have one quick little book and then we can

move into the Q and a, does it sound good? Let's do it. All right. So the book that I'm halfway through right now, and I hate to, to recommend something when I'm only halfway through it, but I'm really enjoying it so far is called a moonwalking with Einstein. Have you read it? I haven't, but I know a good, I know a good deal about it. Joshua for him.

Yeah. So it's essentially, he was a writer that eventually went on to, well, he was, he was covering, um, national,

uh, memory champions. And so he was assigned this beat. He thought he was just going to write a single article about these memory champions. And then he got pulled into actually performing and learning the tricks of the trade to become a memory champion now memory champion includes things like memorizing the order of the cards in a shuffled deck that's right or a unpublished poem handed to you um names and faces of like 50 some people.

They hand you like these cards with names and faces and you get like a minute to memorize all the digit strings. Maybe he did. Yeah. Random strings of digits. Just it's, it's insane stuff that for someone like me that has a really horrible memory was like attracted to this book.

Yeah. And so, you know, kind of where I'm at right now, they talk about this idea. I'm sure you've heard this before of a memory palace. Do you know much about this? I know all about it.

Okay. So what did you, the loci technique? Yeah. Give your, your take on it. I'm curious. A memory palace.

I used to be really, really into this stuff. And also, I don't know if he's popped yet up yet in the book, but Ed cook, who's the coach in Moonwalking with Einstein, or at least one of the coaches, is a very close friend of mine. No way. Yeah.

That's amazing. And he has been on the podcast talking about memory stuff. Are you serious? Yeah, absolutely. How did I miss that episode? That's awesome. Oh, yeah, he's great. And we did it when I was on the West Coast and he was in London.

So he had plenty of booze it was great he's hilarious he's a hilarious brit to start talk about them drinking in the episode and going out no joke like using it to hit on girls and stuff by memorizing it is hilarious so you should definitely check out the episode but he uh to the the memory palace memory palace So the Memory Palace. Memory Palace has been used for ages in one form or another in many different cultures. And unless I'm getting this wrong, it's also called the loci technique, which means location. And the way it's used is very simple.

You have a predetermined location or route that you are familiar with. That's right. And you can then, in the process of giving yourself a tour of this location in a predetermined, say, clockwise fashion around the perimeter of the inside of a concert hall or walking from your front door to your favorite coffee shop where you pass 16 different buildings and a bunch of different landmarks and so on, you can place items that you want to remember along that route in a particular order. Right. And that allows you to do some very interesting things. Not only can you remember things by using imagery, which we're, we're definitely visual

creatures. You can also recall them out of order. So somebody could give you, and let me get, let me take one step further. So if you want it to remember, I used to do this as a party trick in college. I was really into this stuff for, for a very brief flash in time. I was a neuroscience major. I was very interested in how to stretch the capacity of cognition. And what you can do is take the abstract and convert it into the concrete, ideally into the form of images. And you can do that with numbers. For instance, you could take the numbers from 1 to 100. So 1, 2, 3, da, da to a hundred, right? So one, two, three, dah, dah, dah. Then you have like 21, 73, whatever it might be. Convert the numbers zero to nine. So zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine into specific letters. All right.

So let's just say zero is S or Z. One is T or D, which both have one downstroke, right? Three is M, three downstrokes. Four is R, let's just say, like four, last letter R. Okay, and so on. And then let's just say you decide well in advance that 12, as an example, is 10, right? So T and then N, two downstrokes. So tin. And so anytime you have a 12, it's automatically tin.

And maybe that's the tin man. All right, and so let me show you where this goes. So let's just say you have, you are, this is what I used to do. You have a route from your front door to your coffee shop, and somebody gives you a $1 bill, $5 bill, $10, and a $20. And you say, okay, I'm going to memorize the serial code numbers on all these and give them back to you.

The way you would do that is, the way I did it at least, is I would take pairs of numbers and go in fours. So let's say my first stop, I walk out the door and there's a, there's a yellow fire hydrant. That's the first kind of landmark that I pass. So if, if the first four numbers are like one,

two, it's making this up like, um, K's, uh, I'm sorry, seven, zero,

right? I'm making that up. So the reason I said K is it's seven is a K and then zero is S or Z. Like I said, so one, two, seven, zero. All right. So 10, I have 10 men, seven, zero. I'm just making this up. Let's say it's okay. Kaz would be one, right? So Kaz in my mind, I associate with this guy named Bill Kazmaier, who was the world's strongest man champion for ages, just a complete beast. I know what he looks like. So now I have the Tin Man and Kazmaier, Bill Kazmaier, Kaz, fighting

around this yellow fire hydrant. Now I have four numbers. Boom. I can move on to the next one. And by doing that, you can get to the point very, very quickly where you're memorizing 100 plus random numbers at a time. It's really incredible. So I'll give you my very first exercise in the book that I came up upon is that it's the same idea. This time you picture your childhood house. And everyone tends to know their childhood house pretty well, um, or a

location that you know quite well. You lived there for a long time and they start you off at the sidewalk. So you're standing on the sidewalk right by your mailbox. And so you think you're going to put an item down right there. And so in this case, he wants you to memorize like 15 different items on a grocery shopping list. And the first thing is pickled garlic. And so you put a glass of pickled garlic right there when you're walking in, right on the corner. You visualize the glass, you visualize how it tastes in your mouth, the logo on the outside, the type of screw-down cap that it has, and the more connections you can make to how it feels, how it tastes, the size of it, what it looks like,

the stronger a reinforcement is in your brain. And so that is one location. So just like you, you pick the next one up is by your garage door or either the front door, or the next one is inside the house in your kitchen or whatever comes next. And so you pick like, you know, these 10 different locations, you place one object down at each location. And sure enough, like I can go back days later and tell you exactly where the pickled garlic was. Right. And anyone, I mean, I shouldn't say anyone, but almost anyone can do this. And what I used to do, I was lazy. I didn't want to use. So if you use the same location over and over and over and over again, I found at least that there was a fair

amount of interference and I would get confused because I recall something that I already put in a specific place. So what I would do if I was sitting in a, you know, the equivalent of like a bar on Princeton campus, hanging out with somebody and they're like, I heard you do some weird memory shit. Like, hey, dance for me, monkey. And I'd be like, OK. And so I would actually look around the room that I was sitting in. And I would place, within the direction

I happened to be facing, and I would place the images around the room. And what was so wild about that is that it was so unique a signature, it was so unique a frame, that I could see the person two, three days later, and I'd be like, hey, do you still have that five in your wallet? I'd be like, go out the serial code backwards, and they'd be like, what?

And people can get to that level of proficiency within a week or two of practice. It's not complicated. Yeah, so anyway, this is a great book. I'm enjoying it so far. If you're looking to improve your memory, there's a bunch of little tricks that they're starting to unveil about halfway through the book.

It's been a fun read, and it's also on Audible too. That's how I got it. I've heard great things about it. Uh, there's another book for those of you who want a compliment that I found extremely helpful. Uh, and I believe the author,

I haven't seen the book in probably 20 years, but I think it's Higby is the last name. H I G B E E your memory and how to improve it. Uh, fairly sure I'm getting that right. Or partially right. Cool. And that is a tremendous resource.

Because in my, I'd say, sophomore year, all of the recreational reading I did was related to mnemonic devices and studying this type of, some people would call it artificial enhancement of memory. That's so funny. I, we didn't even know this when I sat down, like you didn't even know I was going to bring this book up.

I had no idea. I had no idea. I mean, there's another one, there's another book that's just a description of us, basically a super mind called mind of a mnemonist, like mnemonic M N EN-E-M-A, Nemanist, you can figure it out.

Mind of a Nemanist by A.J. Luria, and talks about synesthesia and all this kind of crazy, crazy stuff, just Rain Man-like abilities and beyond, which I thought was very inspiring, but it also highlighted that when you have those types of gifts, it's often a very mixed bag. You have a lot of issues. They bring that up a lot in this book.

They walk through a couple profiles of individuals that have had more or less perfect memories, and it's very daunting not to be able to forget certain things. It actually has really bad... You want to be able to forget certain things. We're built to forget certain things. And it shows the consequences there and they're not pretty. No, they're not, which is why when I look at technology and living in Silicon Valley as I do and the perspective

of memory enhancement using technological means, and I think that there's a lot of promise in developing some of these technologies, which are well in development at this point. I mean, well in development. I mean, these are, this is not science fiction. Are you talking about the low voltage to the brain stuff? No, I'm not talking about

TDCS, which would be the transcranial direct current stimulation. Sounds right. Am I getting that right? No, I've experimented with that. Have you? I have. Gosh, we could just keep going on.

We could just keep going. We could just do the Q&A. Yeah, we'll do Q&A. And if you guys want to talk more about cognitive enhancement and memory, we can certainly do that. We should do it at a random show. There's a great, actually, I have another recommendation for people, which is, have you guys seen Black Mirror?

No. Oh, my God. You haven't seen Black Mirror? Wait, I did see that. You mean the little miniseries? The min Black Mirror? No. Oh my God. You haven't seen Black Mirror? Wait, I did see that. You mean the little mini series? The mini series that's like the Twilight Zone based on technology? Oh. The first one was just kind of like.

The first one, look, the first one is creepy and gross. It is creepy and gross. But there are, I really enjoyed it. There's some very good episodes. I watched the one where the president's daughter gets kidnapped or whatever. Yeah, that's the first one. It's a mind trip, but there's one episode about a not-too-distant future

where you can replay memories because your waking reality is being recorded through your eye and you can replay them or project them for people, rewind, search for certain things. I don't think that we're that far away. But it definitely highlights some of the risks involved. That could be amazing, but it also could be really horrible.

I think it could be both. It will be both. Q&A. Q&A, let's do it. You want to take a stab first? I'm going to start first. This is kind of fun. I get to interview you and your podcast. I guess the random shows are a shared show,

but this is more or less your channel. So here we go. What is one illegal substance that you've tried that has changed you for the better? Got Tim Tim on this one. Yeah. Okay. Psilocybin. Psilocybin.

Yeah. That's your number one. That would be, I would say the, that was the, I had a number of very transformative and formative experiences with psilocybin that were, I think the tipping point for certain decisions and reprogramming. What did it do for you? What, what's the thing that we,

I mean, clearly as mentioned just a few minutes ago with the research that you want to do, something happened, something happened and that it changed you. Yeah. What was the change that happened there? The change, I would say I've always been a worrier.

I've always had a fair degree of anxiety, which is not uncommon among A-type personalities. Dude, this is me to the T. Well, I heard at one point, and I want to know the attribution on this, so somebody please let us know. Just hit us up on the Twitters. At T. Ferris, at Kevin Rose. At Kevin Rose.

Let us know. But this expression that I heard, which rang so true to me, was anxiety is being trapped in the future, and depression is being trapped in the past. So if you're a planner, if you're a control freak, what are you doing? You're constantly planning. What if this, what if that contingency, a contingency B makes you a fucking stress case, dude, that's me. Yeah. So, and it manifests in different ways, right? Some people get angry.

Some people start losing their temper. Other people develop physical symptoms. Some type of, you know, whether it's any GI discomfort, acid reflux, whatever it might be, right? Acid reflux, I've had it all. Yeah, so what my experience was is that at sufficient dose, and this is something you really need to do with proper supervision,

and I'm not just saying that as ass covering sort of liability lip service. There are many cases of people using psychedelics in the wrong circumstances and dying. You can make very bad decisions, step out in front of traffic, you can jump out of a window. Like there are many different ways that you can horribly injure or kill yourself if this is not used in a responsible way. But not from like overdosing from the psilocybin, right? No, it's from making very poor decisions because you think you can fly or something like that.

Or drive your car or something stupid. Right, all terrible ideas. So you need proper supervision. But with all those caveats, let's use a comparison. I think we've all had the experience of opening up a computer. Let's say you're using Chrome.

It doesn't really matter you have 30 30 tabs open and you're running out of storage yeah okay i'm looking at kevin's computer right now it looks just like mine so you have like 30 tabs open at least 30 you have 30 tabs open uh warning startup disk almost full oh shit what do i do and Dropbox is sinking. Why is my computer running so slow? Oh, Slack's also on. Not necessarily the Mac, but something else. It's like, why is my system so goddamn slow? Oh, the antivirus is on. Do you have antivirus on a Mac? I don't. I sit on a non-Mac. Okay.

For me, what a moderate to high-dose psilocybin experience does is it serves as a hard reboot. It basically just cleans that entire system, flushes the cache, and allows me to regain a 30,000-foot view sanity in view of larger pictures and my most important priorities and remove all of that noise and the, the anxiolytics or the, the anxiety decreasing and sort of depression, which I've also battled with suppressing effect for me. The first time I used it last lasted, I want to say, three to six months. It was unbelievable. It was just unbelievable how persistent it was. And so I would say that is my answer. That's fascinating. That's awesome. Good answer.

Thanks. So I'm going to ask a few questions that I don't think I got around to asking the first time. When you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? Oh, you know, I would probably say Philip Rosedale. Okay. Who's Philip and why? So he created Second Life way back in the day, the virtual world Second Life. And I have interviewed him on my show Foundation back in the day. I had a podcast called Foundation.

You can still find it. I think it's foundation.bz, where I interviewed a bunch of entrepreneurs several years ago. And the reason that I like him is, is a couple fronts. One, I feel that he is a very creative person that doesn't, um, it fully accepts risk and just goes in headfirst and is willing to try really

wild and crazy ideas and really doesn't care if they fail and always has, um, done that throughout his entire career and had been very successful at it. And he continues to do that today. And I just, you know, I really admire people that, um, aren't afraid of failure and willing to try big, big, bold things.

And I think like Elon Musk would be an easy answer on this front because he's trying so many really cool, big, bold ideas. Um, but founders of Google, another, uh, I mean the,

another example. Yeah. The founders of Google, but I, Larry Page has said, you know, the, the,

one of the things that people miss is that if you're, and I'm paraphrasing here, but if you aim big enough, it's very hard to fail completely. Like you take something from it or you learn lessons that then you can parlay into the next thing that is successful. I think that the problem I have with the founders of Google, and I've had the pleasure of meeting these guys, and I'm not knocking them at all. They're really brilliant guys. Clearly, they've created an amazing organization that continues to do great work. The issue I have is that, and the reason I like Philip,

and I picked him over like the founders of Google. You're mad about your AdSense account. They banned my AdSense account. No, seriously. It's because that Philip has these ideas that are just so crazy. You'll have to go back and listen to my other podcast about how to manage people and how to manage projects and how to get groupthink to come together

and create beautiful things. They're kind of out-of-this-world ideas, and I'm attracted to that. For some reason, I like the really crazy thinkers. I just had Jason Fried on my podcast that I do for the journal podcast that I do. And he has created an amazing startup. But he was like, we were talking about the culture that he creates in his company. One of the things that he said is that I want to pay people for getting eight hours of sleep. And he wants to track that.

You come in with your Fitbit, you auth in your account, and it shows that you slept a full eight hours, and you get paid a bonus. That's amazing. He really cares about how can I take care of the entire life cycle of an individual in ways that I've never heard about before. So those are the types of ideas that aren't just, how can we create a better browser?

How can we create a self-driving car? They're just really, I don't know. can we create a self-driving car? They're just really... I don't know. I'm just thinking with a Fitbit, you could try to pay people for having an hour of sex a day. That's an accelerometer. You should be able to figure it out.

That's true. You'd have to wear a belt while you're boning, I guess. Sorry, this question was where would you attach it? that's true you'd have to wear a belt while you're boning i guess there's there's um sorry this question is where would you attach it no there could be like a fitbit cock ring or something so no no seriously let me say one last thing on this topic then we can move on but the butterfly yeah my head all messed up now the last the thing, though, is that I think that in being a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley for so many years, we see the same pitches over and over. And you see modifications of, hey, I'm the Uber for this.

Hey, I'm the Twitter for that. It's just the incremental. Hey, I'm the MySpace for this. Me too. Also ran stuff. It's the Peter Thiel true zero-to-one jump. Those big ideas that are new and beautiful and ugly and scary and all those things, you find them so rarely in founders. I like those types of founders, and so that's why he came to mind.

Philip also has a tremendous amount of stamina. He's been in the game for a long time. He knows how to kind of modulate. And I'm not going to say, I don't think pacing is the right word, but he's been very consistent. Big time meditator too. Invented his own form of meditation. I'm not joking.

What characterizes it? He counts to like, what was it? It's more than 3,000? He counts To like It's more than 3,000 He counts to like 10,000 a day So he does mantra based But based on counting Single digits? Yeah we were sitting there and he's like

Yeah I'm at 587 right now Wait he does it Every day? But as he's doing other activities? Oh my god that sounds difficult. He doesn't stop down to do it. He'll have like three minutes. So he'll be on a conference call, and he's at like 6,737.

Right, and then he stops, and then he goes, if he has a minute, he does an extra hundred. Oh, I see. He picks up. Yeah, picks up. That sounds so stressful. It totally does to me, but it works for him. Yeah, hey, whatever works. Yeah, so anyway.

All right, next question. Let's bang through these. It's after midnight now. All right. All right. If you could, that one I kind of already asked. Well, let me ask it again. If you could change any law, what would it be?

And you can't say drugs. If I could change any law, what would it be? And I can't talk about mind-altering substances. You asked me what my favorite breakfast cereal was on Podcast One, so this is... That's true. No, I asked you an even worse question. I asked you if you could be a breakfast cereal, what would you be?

What a fucking terrible question. God. You know what? You were just getting started. You know, we all start off a little wobbly. Oh, Lord. Changing law. Let me think about this for a second.

Is there anything that just drives you nuts where you're just like, why is that a law? You got to have some political somewhere. I do. I do. I mean, well, just because I've gone through this recently, I guess I've been told that I am a libertarian i don't know if that's true or not but i think that let me give kind of a larger picture answer to that i think that there are laws and perhaps all laws should be revisited and reassessed on occasion because there are certain laws that

are put in place to in the best best cases, create the greatest good for the greatest number of people in circumstances that then change. So for instance, you know, I, I, I'm building a barrel sauna and it's, it's relatively small. It looks like a gigantic wine barrel effectively, uh, based on plans that were given to me by Rick Rubin, who got them from Laird Hamilton. It's an incredible setup. Surprisingly inexpensive. And to put that on my own property, out of view of any neighbors, was just like trying to broker a fucking peace treaty between North and South Korea.

Why did you tell your neighbors? What's north and south korea your neighbors what's that why did you tell your neighbors no no no it has nothing to do with my neighbors has everything to do with just getting city and town permits and all that kind of stuff do that just do it yourself just don't do it no no you have to do that it's uh there are in any case this this is uh this is just one example but i really i'm generally a small government guy. I really feel like if you look at, for instance, crises or natural disasters, and this is a conversation I had with Sebastian Junger not too long ago,

who wrote a great book called Tribe that talks about this, in earthquakes, in the Blitz, when London was being bombed during World War II. People develop social structures and rules that keep the peace and assign roles to different types of people and create order amongst themselves. Now, I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying the government shouldn't exist, but I do think that we've edged too far into a nanny state type of dependency, which is it's not a healthy dependency whatsoever. I think that it's created a stifling environment for certain things, whether it is this barrel sauna or hiring really good non-US citizens to work at your startup.

And I know a lot of icons in Silicon Valley have been working on it, but it's just like, why is this so hard? It's ludicrous. It is completely ludicrous. So those are, you know, especially based in a country where the blend of cultures and innovation that we have is directly a consequence of massive immigration. It's just outrageous. So in any case, that's my rant. But if I could change any law, yeah, nothing super specific.

The sauna laws. The sauna laws. I really need to provide more money to the sauna lobby, I think is what this comes down to. Just do a fundraiser for the sauna. I'm sure I could come up with a better answer if I thought more about it. That's great. Oh, here's one.

I think that it should that's great. Oh, here's one. I think that, uh, it should be easier to, uh, for people to, and this is, I'm sure state by state and not just federal. Uh, I think it should be easier for,

uh, a loved one to take their loved one off of life support or provide ethical euthanasia in cases where that has been sort of prearranged. I don't think that the state should have a say in that. I think that if, if, if that is something that has been documented and agreed upon beforehand, I think that that should be an option in more circumstances. Yeah. Sex to see people suffer. Yeah. All right.

What's my question? Your question. These are, these are pretty, pretty short ones. What is, what is the book or books that you've gifted most to other people? Number one would be miracle for a miracle of mindfulness.

Have you, that's a tick not hunt. That's right. Yeah. Have you ever read that book? Great book. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it was, it was the one that really got me into mindfulness and, um, really applying it to kind of everyday life. There's a story, um, in there where he talks about washing the dishes, uh, to wash the dishes. Yeah. Instead of thinking about, I think it's the, the, the plum that you're going to eat after the dishes. Right, exactly. It's such a good anecdote, though. I know.

And the point being, if you're thinking about the plum when you're washing the dishes, when you're eating the plum, you're going to be thinking about your fucking email or whatever it is. Right, so his whole thing is, I mean, we should be in the moment and focusing on the task at hand, putting our full attention on that and really living that moment. And this is just a great, really short read. You can pick it up on Amazon for like 12 bucks. It's not an expensive book.

And it's, it's one of my favorite when it comes to mindfulness. Uh, what's second place. Oh gosh. Um, you know, just because of,

of doing the whole social internet thing in the early days, um, I would say that, uh, of Crowds was a big one for me. That meant a lot to me, and there's still some great little tidbits in there. Gosh. I'd have to think outside of that. Green Eggs and Ham. Green Eggs and Ham. I think those are probably my top two.

Fantastic. Since I gave a long-winded answer, I'm going to give you some air time. I'll ask another question. Recent purchase, doesn't have to be recent, of $100 or less that has positively impacted your life? Or any purchase of $100 or less that had a significant positive effect on your life or any purchase of a hundred dollars or less that had a significant positive effect in your life.

You know, I, I hate to plug my, my other podcast, but, um, on episode number two, um,

I went out and, uh, of the journal, I went out and interviewed this guy that is a master of pens. Like he just knows more about pens than we do about anything else on earth. He recommended three pens that have the absolute

best rollerball pen, the best fountain pen, and these are all $4 pens. Some of them are really hard to find. Some of them you can only find in Japan. That's convenient. No, but you can find them online, but they're just harder to find. And I swapped out my entire stock of pens at the office at my desk

with these cheap little $3 or $4 pens, and they're amazing. Do you recall the names of any of them? Yes, I can put them in your show notes. I will get his top three, and they'll be there in the show notes. All right, we'll put these in the show notes, guys. 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And you can find show notes for this and in the show notes. All right. We'll put these in the show notes guys for our work week.com forward slash podcast. And you can find show notes for this and all the other episodes. But that's just like,

I think that for me represents kind of who I am as a person in that I like to, and you know this about me, I like to geek out on something and go really, really, really deep. And you think you're like this too. I'm like this too. Definitely.

Like you find something that you're into and I'm like, really, there's a better pen. Tell me more, you know? And he's like, end up having a 30, 40 minute podcast about notebooks and pens. And I'm like, well, that was super geeky. And I don't know if anyone will like it, but I have some awesome notebooks now, you know? So that's, that's kind of what I like to do. I like, I dig pens. I have a bit of a pen fetish myself, so this is right up my alley. The next question for you.

All right. What is one body experiment you wish you didn't do? One physical experiment that I wish I didn't, that I did not partake in. Not that you can't mention the double circumcision. I can't mention the double circumcision. I'm sorry I did that partake in. You can't mention the double circumcision. I can't mention the double circumcision. I'm sorry I did that to Toaster. I do regret that. Sorry, Toasty. He's sleeping.

Yeah, all right. He's still in pain. Good boy. The one that comes to mind is... All right. is... Alright, so I was in Cape Town, South Africa doing research related to a number of chapters in the 4-Hour Body. I was getting muscle biopsies which involves having something the size of a large pen stabbed into the side of your leg to cut muscle tissue out. Not super comfy.

That one I don't regret. That got me a lot of really interesting enzymatic information related to endurance and so on. And also muscle fiber analysis, which was really fascinating. I was at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa and Dr. Timothy Noakes is there. Brilliant guy, incredibly well versed in the worlds of ultra endurance and hydration or lack thereof and how the body responds to different states of hydration and performance implications. I wanted to do a very, I should say, well-known, well-established running test. It's going to be an endurance test, which I'm not known for to start with. And I decided that I could use every advantage possible.

And I had read in a number of places that resveratrol, which most people associate with longevity, which is the excuse, the excuse they use to drink red wine, whereas in reality you'd have to have like 72 cases a day to get sort of the therapeutic dose used in clinicals, something absurd like that. Resveratrol also has apparently some incredible implications for endurance. And I remember seeing this video.

I believe it was super rat. So there was like normal rat and then super rat running on a treadmill i want to say this is david david sinclair perhaps who did and they gave super rat resveratrol and it just it's it's endurance like doubled it was just it's run time to exhaustion doubled or something just obscene like that and i said okay well let me look at the research figure out the dosing they used on the rats oh my god the runtime to exhaustion doubled or something just obscene like that. And I said, okay, well, let me look at the research, figure out the dosing they used on the rats,

the milligrams per kilogram. And then I, Oh my God, you ratted yourself. And then I ordered like, I ordered like five months worth of resveratrol, like multiple bottles and, uh,

consume. Don't do this at home. Kids consumed all of the bottles because I had to consume something like 120 capsules to get the proper milligrams per kilogram. Why would you do this? There are a couple of issues here, folks, for those of you who haven't realized this is dumb yet. I couldn't figure out a way to

expediently, if that's the right word, expeditiously perhaps, have this administered through injection, which is almost certainly how it was given to these rats, because they didn't feed the rats like resveratrol chow, I'm pretty sure. So they most likely injected it intramuscularly or intravenously. I didn't have that as an option. So I did it orally. Well, there are a bunch of issues that come up here. Now I'll just flash forward and give you guys a snapshot. Then I'll explain what happened. So I'm sitting there in this meeting and I wish I could remember this guy's name. He was such a serious, brilliant, hilarious guy. I want to say it was Tertius. Just a fantastic name. And he's sitting there and he's like i'm not going to try to do south african accent i wish i could but he's like what you have to understand here you know and he's

like explaining this very very seriously to me and it's like a 10 minute kind of intro to what i'm about to do and out of nowhere i just start sweating fucking bullets like cold sweat pills that you take at this point oh i had all of them like a half hour beforehand yeah i had like 90 or 120 drinking like 10 at a time like just kind of gulping them down oh yeah yeah yeah i'm really good at swelling pills so i just start i get this profuse cold sweat like out of nowhere click it's just like pouring down my face and he's giving me this very serious speech and i'm trying to pay attention i'm like blinking because the sweat's coming into my eyes and he's like, are you okay? And I was like, uh, do you have a bathroom nearby? And he's like, uh, sure. And he points me down the hallway and I kind of do like the butt squeeze waddle down the

hallway and do like a reverse broad jump through the stall and just stay there for the next 45 minutes. So what I didn't realize, what was not listed in the ingredient list on these pills is, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting this right. There's something called, there was something used as a filler called Imodin and Imodin acts as a laxative. Yeah, no, I think it was Imodin and I was just a disaster. So needless to say, completely killed my endurance. I did the running test. It was 10 times worse than it would have been if I had not swallowed 120 pills. You probably lost a ton of water.

Oh, it was a complete disaster. So that was... You're lucky you didn't have some crazy, horrible side effect. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't recommend mimicking that behavior, but to the extent possible, I did do my homework. I read a lot on PubMed. I knew that there was a risk that I would have GI distress. I just didn't know that it would be like that severe.

Yeah, exorcist-style, but out the other end type of issue. So live and learn. I saw saw a t-shirt i was walking around here we're in new york city right now and uh there's this other shirt that said bad decisions make good stories so i guess this is one of those examples uh what advice would you give to your 20 or 25 year old self you can choose choose which and place us where you are and what you're doing. I don't know whether I should go 20 or 25. Let's go 25. Right around that time was, let's just place it right around when I was

creating Dig for the first time and created that site. And that kind of exploded and got a bunch of users. And we grew that company to a pretty decent size. The issue, though, was at that age, I had just really, I was still really immature. I just, and my biggest issue and what I would sit down with my younger self, I would say to that person would be to seek out mentors and to stop acting like, you know, at all in that, um, when I didn't know something, I refused to learn it because I wanted to focus on what I already knew I was good at. And so I was really good at the kind of creative side and coming up with new feature ideas and product ideas and things like that. hiring a staff or interviewing folks or, you know, just all the other pieces of a business

that you have to learn in order to succeed. I just didn't have any of that. And rather than admit that I didn't know it, I kind of just turned a blind eye to it. And that caused a lot of problems later. For me, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to focus on this small little domain and hire other people to take over my kind of weak spots. And I just, first of all, didn't even know how to hire the right folks. And we hired some great people, don't get me wrong, but I kind of gave the keys of the castle to folks rather than taking on the hard work which was was admitting that i didn't know these things and and putting in the time and effort to to become proficient in them so that was uh that's probably what i'd

go back to that 25 year old self is say you know it's a lot of the stuff that I'm, I'm still learning today. It's like now as like, you know, probably a fourth time, fourth or fifth time entrepreneur having a startup, it's like, I'm putting a lot of time and effort. I feel like I'm mature enough now and then granted I'm almost 40, but you know, it's, it's finally, it's, um, you know, if I don't know something, I go and say okay who's the smartest person in the room or who can point me in the right direction so that i can go and get schooled up on this um because it's important you can't just you know uh shuffle that stuff to the side and and kind of let let an ego get in the way when it shouldn't be. Does that make sense? Makes perfect sense. Yeah. I mean, the sort of short term ego pain prevents the longterm sort of catastrophic pain. Right. Uh, exactly. And it

only happens once, right? You have that small little bash to your ego for 10 minutes, but you get introduced to the right folks and you, you know, you admit that you don't know something. And then guess what? That, that never comes up again because you can go and get schooled up on But you get introduced to the right folks and you admit that you don't know something. And then guess what? That never comes up again because you can go and get schooled up on that. So that's good advice. What is the worst advice that you hear being thrown around for startup founders or to startup founders? What is some bad advice that's given frequently do you think some bad advice that is given frequently to startup founders uh just bad advice in general something you think is bad advice that you hear a lot well certainly i know that i've seen many

startups that they believe that when they have a little bit of traction, now is the time to go raise a bunch of capital and just spend into that and hope for the best. And oftentimes you see a lot of bloat created and a lot of extra pressure to hit certain milestones that don't make sense and then cause you to make really bad short-term decisions for the business to bring in revenue when it's really not going to help you out in the long term. I think there's a bunch of examples I could give here, and I don't want to pick on any one individual company. That said, let me pick on one company.

People are like, I don't want to be an asshole, but that usually means they're immediately going to be an asshole. Yeah, I know. There's that great Onion article that says devil's advocate turns out to be just big asshole. I love that article. So true. I heard this comedian say, when someone says, I'm a taxpayer,

it means they're about to be an asshole. Totally. say when someone says i'm a taxpayer it means they're about to be an asshole totally so um you know i think a great example of this is like you know a company like and i've seen this happen to a dozen different companies but a company like fab.com i was an angel investor there brilliant great founder great seed of an idea actually a great pivot from the site they were before into kind of very design oriented e-commerce play. Had a great following, was doing, you know, their conversions on these little flash sales that we're doing were working quite well. Went out and raised several monster rounds, hired up a bunch of employees and just like really spent into this business and blew through a bunch of capital. And then when that novelty kind of wore off,

um, the business went away. That said, you know, there's, I think that growing thoughtfully and in line and in, in track and in parallel with your revenue and being a little bit more responsible around that,

um, and not going crazy on the kind of over-raising capital and, and you know, spending too much cash up front is makes a lot of sense. And, and I think that we're getting better at that as an industry. I think there's been enough fires now that people can see that's not the wisest way to go.

That said, we still see things like Uber and others that are just raising monster amounts of cash. But the good news is that they have real revenue to back it up. I think this was very much a thing when you don't have the revenue and you're going and doing this, it's a bad decision. Yeah, there's also, I mean, if we're looking at, say, Fab versus Uber, right? The Fab example is very different in the respect also that it's not necessarily a winner take all market where they have to dominate say a city or a country or a continent to become the de facto choice for say ride sharing where there are certain network effects or marketplace dynamics

at least where if they have the most drivers, then they'll have the most riders, because the riders want to have the fastest pickup time. If they have the most riders, then they will be able to recruit the most drivers, etc. So that it's a virtuous cycle for the person who owns the most market share on both sides of that equation. But in a fab case, or many cases like it, people just want to, and I think, I mean, I don't want to take us necessarily down this rabbit hole, but there are a lot of perverse incentives at play. And there are always perverse incentives, but particularly perverse incentives

at play in an environment like we are either just coming out of or still in, wherein, and there are many people who disagree with this, and I don't have issues with smaller examples, but there are startups that are on their way to failure. The founders know, and they take a ton of money off the table. The employees see nothing, and then it just craters. And that is a byproduct of being able to raise these monster rounds in part. Riding momentum of eyeballs and so on as opposed to revenue.

Right. And, well, I think that's, yeah. I mean, one of the reasons that I just kind of got dismayed and disillusioned with a lot of the exchanges, I wouldn't even call them, because it's certainly not long-term relationship building, but a lot of these sort of transactional exchanges that happen in that startup ecosystem. Yeah, there's a lot of positives to taking venture capital. One of the negatives is that

the founders are pushed to build a bigger and bigger business. And so, you know, I think that if you go out and you, so for example, when I first launched Digg, I launched it as just a tech-only news site. And it quickly became the largest tech news site in the world. There was no doubt. We had more traffic than every... At the time, it was like CNET's site. CNET was big and a couple other blogs.

But when a certain amount of dollars came to the table, it was like, Hey, we love what you're doing with, with dig as a tech site. Why don't you go into world news and politics and, you know, science and all these other categories. And so we did that. And then it was like, well, you know what? That's great.

And you're, you have 38 million people a month coming to your site, but wouldn't it be great if you could get to 50 or a hundred million people come to your site per month. So why don't you expand into something that, that you know my mom would like to use and embrace some of the uh traditional news sites and help them promote their content and things that just weren't naturally organic in our dna and i think that that is the danger there and that's where if a fab had stayed small if a dig had stayed small, if a dig had stayed small, if some of these other sites had just really focused on their core and stayed true to their DNA, they wouldn't be forced to make these unnatural decisions

that eventually lead to them not really servicing their audience, their core audience. Now, in fairness, though, I'll play devil's advocate slash asshole here, which is if you sign up for taking venture capital, you have to understand the economics of venture capital, which means they need you to grow. Because they, in turn, have their bosses, who are the LPs, and they have a fiduciary responsibility to try to generate whatever it is,

a 10x, 100x return for a few startups, because the rest are going to be dogs or dead or zombies. Right. And I think that's where as a founder, as Kevin, the 25 year old founder versus where I am today, the difference is that, um,

the 25 year old Kevin would have taken that as gospel in that they're like, Hey, you should go do X, Y, and Z. Okay. I'm going to go do that. That sounds great.

You guys have been down this road before the Kevin today would say, thank you very much, trusted advisor, as you are if they have a seat at the board or something like that. And take that into consideration, because oftentimes it is great advice. And eight times out of ten, you're going to agree with them. But there's that couple times where you're going to say, that doesn't make sense for my business, and say, I respect you and your idea, but where you're going to say that doesn't make sense for my business and say, you know, I respect you and your idea, but we're not going to do that. That's just not, you know, and they can't force your hand at that unless they have control of the board,

in which case you get yourself in a really whole separate conversation, separate conversation there. Uh, all right. I have two more questions for you. Let's do it. Uh, first one, rapid, two rapid fires, biggest two more questions for you. Let's do it. First one, two rapid fires. Biggest misconception people have about you? That I have an issue with hard work. I don't have an issue with hard work. I have an issue with hard work applied to stupid things.

So you should focus on being effective, picking the right things to do before you focus on being efficient, which is doing things well. Do you really only work four hours a week? Oh God. Here's the reality. I didn't know that.

You're just like, I know you're like verbally just fucking tickling my balls to make me uncomfortable. The, the, uh, the fact of the matter is, and you know this,

I don't have to work at all if I don't want to work. It's like the, that is not the driver for me at this point in my life. The, I was just joking. You don't have to answer this question. Not allowed to have booze right now. I could use some booze, but I'm not going to do it for reasons I can't discuss top secret. Continue. Okay. Next question. Um, this is a very serious question. And I don't know if you'll like this question actually.

It was very serious and I dislike it. My favorite type of question already. But I think that other people out there, if I didn't know you as well as I know you, I'd be curious about this, okay? The rumors about my 21-inch cock are all true. There you go. I can't even blame it on the booze. I haven't had any.

I guess I'm just... You're 39. 39. Dirty old man. 39, is that right? No, I'm 38. 38, sorry. Jesus. That's right. You're one'm just 39, 39, dirty old man. 39. Is that right? No, 38,

38. Sorry. Jesus. One year behind me. Early, all set. All Alzheimer's the man age too. So you're not married yet.

I'm not. You, I've known you for quite a while now and I've seen you through a handful of relationships, but for those that don't know you, what do you look for in a, a woman? And what's like your take on, on dating? I'm curious, like who dates Tim Ferriss? Like what do you, what do you look for in a woman and what's like your take on on dating i'm curious like

who dates tim ferris like what do you what do you look for masochistic uh advised women i know that's not true i'm joking what do i look for well i'll tell you what i'm looking for is a half japanese half italian bisexual architect super athlete part-time swimsuit model. You're not joking either. That's the funny part. I know you all know that like you're joking for the podcast, but you're really not joking. Who does, who does, who knows how to squat with at least body weight? This is actually what you're looking for. I, well, I'll put it this way. I wouldn't mind that. That sounds,

that sounds like very enjoyable conversation. Uh, I, uh, what do I look for in a woman? I look for, uh, I think, I think it's what I've, it's generally what I look for in a human being. Do you want someone that can kick your ass though? Like do you have to meet someone like you're a hardcore person? Yeah. I was saying to all my friends, like you are like, even though you can relax and you meditate and all that stuff,

but you're like, you're very into shit and take stuff very seriously. Yeah. I'm, I'm a, I'm hardcore about a lot of things and I can be hard around the edges. So, uh, these are characteristics that I, I don't know if I could fix and I'm not sure I want to fix them because I've seen so many benefits from them. I mean, they've been useful tools.

Uh, so I will tell you, I've, I've dated women who are very, very feminine and yin in emotional range and very nurturing. And I've also dated women who are extremely tough and make me want to be more resilient, less reactive, hyper-driven. And both of those can work for me. I think what is important is that you can have someone who is driven and tough like that, who doesn't feel the need to constantly butt heads to assert being an alpha. That is something I can't have in a relationship because I'm already

that way. You can't have two of those in one room. It's like, what are they called? They're like Chinese fighting fish. You put them in a bowl and they just fucking kill each other. Like you can't that, that, that in a dynamic doesn't work,

right? Whether it's a, you know, heterosexual, homosexual, whatever sexual relationship there, there has to be a compliment of personality traits and strengths and weaknesses. Uh, I mean, I could go down a long list. Uh, what do you want me to focus on? I can,

I'm just curious, like what it is that you're looking for now. And like, like you, you know, we don't have to go, what's that? Yeah. I think that was a good answer. Yeah. I mean, and I'll be honest, there's a big part of me. Uh, I not too, too long ago, got out of a very long, very serious, fantastic relationship, uh, that I reflect on a lot, but ultimately I wasn't sure what I was looking for in my life as it relates to family and or marriage. And that led to an indecision that was unfair, a level of indecision that was unfair to my partner at the time. And so when you ask me, what are you looking for? Part of me wants to say, I don't know.

Like, I know what I can't stand. I can tell you that. But what I might look for in person that I'm envisioning as the mother of several kids of mine is very different from what I envision, if i if i'm considering that my life might be a combination of different women or a lack of marriage entirely but having say maybe i have a wife and then a mistress maybe i have who's like they and they both know each other maybe i have two wives maybe i have a raise the red lantern situation with like six wives sounds like a huge headache on a lot of levels to me personally, but, uh, or maybe it's a, a series of very intimate lovers that I stay in touch with. I don't know. Honestly, I just, it's a big question mark to me. And, uh, for the time being I'm, I'm spending time with people, and this includes women,

and I think these are very important, who I respect a lot. So whether they are super hardcore and driven or just very good at what they do, but extremely soft and able to counterbalance some of my like hard edged steely attributes, which can be really damaging in excess. Like I need someone to help temper that. Uh, I respect them because they're good at what they do. I enjoy spending time with them because I learned from them. They don't take themselves too seriously, so they can laugh at themselves. They take care of themselves physically. I mean, for most of my friends, that's a criteria. That's one of the criteria as well.

I want to be averaged up in all ways possible by the people I surround myself with. So even if I have friends, some friends friends who might not take care of themselves physically, I need at least a few close friends who do because if I'm the average of the five people I associate with most, well shit, I need to be very careful about how I kind of allocate those interactions.

And what else? I like really nice hamstrings. I like big brown eyes, little brown ankles, as one friend would put it. Little brown ankles. Big brown eyes, little brown ankles. That's how he describes the type of woman he likes. I like generally long hair.

But I can think of an exception to all these things. That's the thing. People are like, oh, what's your type? And I'm like, I don't. Like super hot and smart and funny. I don't know. Like, like color doesn't matter to me. Um, but I, in terms of like short hair, long hair, I don't like tattoos, no tattoos, piercing, no piercings. Like I've dated every possible permutation of those. So I don't have to tell you, I just, I love women, period. I'm not sure what to do about that. That's,

I think that's part of the challenge that I'm having. Yeah. That was a great answer. I think that's all we got. I think that's all we got. Uh, well, all we got. Well, how should we close out? Do you have any parting thoughts, recommendations, reflections? Yes, I do. In fact, sign up for my newsletter, thejournal.email on the internet. And I send out once a month newsletter of all my kind of crazy chaotic stuff and gear and tech stuff that I'm checking out.

That also has a podcast on iTunes and then also I think virtual reality sucks. I tried the HTC and it's stupid. So I think you're going to lose this bet. You sent out a tweet saying

virtual reality has blown my mind i now see the light i saw that tweet from you like three months ago yeah i don't take it back i stand by it so dumb virtual reality is so dumb all right did you try the htc one we put on your head i tried the uh the veve with the veve yeah that's uh i think it was at alab with what was that? At Adam's Lab? No, a different lab. Okay. With

with Valve software running on it. And you were really that blown away? I was very impressed. Maybe maybe I can just have

I have better long-term vision than you do. Maybe I can see the potential. No, no. This is one of those things where it's a hype cycle in Silicon Valley

and sadly the benefit to the consumer has to be an order of magnitude better than what they're already experiencing for it to ever get adopted. And that comes on both a couple fronts. One, on the application front in that they have to enjoy it at least 10x or greater and then it also comes on the comfort and wearability and maintenance and setup and everything else that goes with owning a virtual reality system and sadly we're all going to realize that it's much like the wii and it was fun for the first five games of wii bowling that i played but then guess what it ends up in a drawer just like 3d tv well here's here's what i think you're gonna miss though here's what i think you're going to miss, though. Here's what I think you're missing.

And Dario is giving the hands up. I don't know what you're talking about. Twilight Princess was so good. What was? Twilight Princess. Yeah, Zelda on Wii was great. So here's the difference if we're looking at purely the entertainment applications, types of games to be created, which basically were reminiscent of early Nintendo sports games. I mean, they're very different from the games that are currently blockbusters.

But what if you take virtual reality and simply use that to enhance the most popular first-person shooter games and Call of Duty and so forth, which I don't think is that much of a stretch, I don't think that's a hard sell. I think that is substantially better than what is currently available. We'll see. We'll see.

I think it's a pretty... Well, I would say there's a couple different camps in the virtual reality space. There's one that thinks it's going to be accessory for gaming, and there's the other one that says it's like, we're going to be watching movies like that. We're going to sit and sit around watching the Superbowl.

You know, everyone will have one. We're at a Superbowl party. We're just like wearing headsets and trying to cram freaking nachos underneath the mask. Like that's, that's a real thing. People are saying that kind of stuff.

And I, I, I believe that the maintenance and setup, it's just really difficult. I don't see the Super Bowl soon. I don't see that type of interaction happening because you're sacrificing an element. I mean, look, we could all watch the freaking Super Bowl at home by ourselves, but we go to a Super Bowl party.

Why do we go to a Super Bowl party? Why do we go to a movie theater? There's a communal aspect to it, and there are elements of that experience that are not fully accounted for when I think someone brings up the example of the

Super Bowl party and using it so that you can stand in the middle of the field and have a fucking crazy 300 pound guy charge at you. Like, oh yeah, that sounds like fun. Maybe there are permutations on that that i think could work but with something like call of duty where you're like sitting in a basement in your underwear playing it anyway yeah i don't think the setup costs i think that that is an

example where do you think in that case let's say it is a hype cycle what is the landscape of vr look like in three years five five years? Has it just been abandoned? Well, I think there's obviously a lot of money is going into game development and app development right now in VR, like tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the top companies. But it's one of those things where if consumers don't demand this hardware and it doesn't sell through, then those funds are going to quickly dry up. It's a very much chicken and egg thing because you need original content, original experiences, like more so than just, you know, a flying whale coming by your head that's in a 30 second demo. Like you need real content that was developed for vr which

is expensive to create and so you know it's a chicken and egg thing but you need a hell of a lot of eggs like you need a lot of great games because if you get in there and you have a mediocre experience or just like uh my buddy doesn't i don't have two headsets we can't play co-op you know there's a there's a thousand different use cases where I could describe it where it ends up frustrating the gamer, and they just set it in the corner, and they go back to the way things were. And this has been tried time and time again. I mean, this isn't the first type of...

I mean, I had a Nintendo Power Glove back in the day where I put my hand in the glove, and I tried to do different things with it. Do you remember that thing? I do. A little keyboard on the side of it. We've tried these devices to kind of augment our gaming experiences, and yet we all still come back to the standard controller because it's easy, because I can toss you one,

because we can sit there, we can drink a beer while we're doing it. There's a thousand different little things that you can do that you can't do with these big-ass headsets on. And you need a dedicated room if you're going to walk around with them. Like if you bump into a Frencher and shit. There's so many hurdles to get over here. I just think that those hurdles are going to be a little too high. I do.

We'll say one thing. One little caveat here. Augmented reality is very much different than virtual reality. And that, I still think the jury's out. I'm talking about where you put on a pair of glasses that allow you to project, at least back into your eye, the idea of there being little living creatures and different things crawling around your furniture. And have you seen some of this? I have.

They scare the shit out of me. They scare the shit out of me. That is cool enough. I mean, it's not just that. It's like overlaying things onto reality as you visually experience it today. That's right. So that I haven't written off yet. But this idea of virtual reality...

And granted, I'll be the first to admit I'm wrong if two years from now this is not the case. But I just have this gut feeling. And sometimes I like to be a little bit different than everybody else. Stir the pot. You have a bet writing on this, do you not? On virtual reality failing? Yeah.

I haven't shorted Facebook or anything. No, don't you have a... Adam, yeah. I'm betting a neuroscience friend of ours. He's very well known. He's on your podcast. Yeah, Adam'm betting a neuroscience friend of ours. He's very well known. He is the dude. He's on your podcast. Yeah.

Adam Ghazali. He's drank the Kool-Aid. He's like he's the poured the Kool-Aid in the water, mixed it and drank it. Now, he's just as context. This is one of the well, Daria used to work with Adam. It's fair to say like one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world, MD, PhD, studies gaming, has developed game, has a lab at UCSF, one of the best regarded in the country, certainly.

What does that say? 50 people? 50 people? No. Something like that. So, I mean, this isn't like a homeless guy on the corner of the sandwich board saying VR is coming. I mean, you have a qualified opponent here. I mean, I think that he is a good opponent.

He's not a technologist. I mean, he's a neuroscientist. And he has a dedicated big ass room for virtual reality so when he goes and plays in virtual reality and i've been in his lab and i've played with his equipment it is quite fun but he has a big ass room that he gets to not everyone has that room i don't have that room here in new york uh you know it's it's a different environment when you know not yet yeah but how specific is your are your criteria for success or failure right so for me it's very loose it's like if there are fucking rooms all over a given city and then in every city where people can go experience virtual reality that seems like virtual

reality at least is gaining a foothold i mean mean, that would be some measure of success. I think that virtual reality as a form of laser tag could be really interesting, because I actually saw that a week ago, and it looked pretty fascinating, where it had 10 people in a room. They're all wearing headsets. They could see each other in the virtual world. Monsters would appear.

They could run around corners. They could shoot them, things like that. But that's just Scandia fun. That's like mini golf like that's that's gonna be a scandia scandia is the thing on the west coast it's like a mini golf course oh are you going like ride go-karts and play mini golf like that's that's the kind of fun that that is i think that what adam's talking about is is really this in you know almost every home and it being kind of a fixture of your household. See, I think you're over-weighting

the entire room experience, which is definitely an enhancement and an improvement over the stationary experience. But I could see people with headsets, with immersive sound systems in the headsets themselves, so you have surround sound, using the headset in conjunction with the controller and have an incredible virtual reality experience.

We'll see, dude. So I'll tell you a story that I probably shouldn't tell, and I think I've mentioned it at one point somewhere, but I was at Google, and I went to Google X, which is very kind of limited access. Google X is where they do all the crazy top secret experiments, all that. I went in there and they had Google Glass, and this was before they announced it.

This was this prototype. Everyone's seen this. It's in your head. It has a little thing. And I somehow talked the Glass team into giving me one of the first prototypes outside of the team. So I got probably one of the first 10 units and they gave it to me i had the beta software on it i had it hooked up to my android phone i could see all my

text notifications i could see you know it was like the coolest thing if you're in silicon valley to have back then because no one had one you know i worked a party one time it was oh i remember i mean a friend of ours showed up at south by Southwest with Google Glass on and it was just like nerd magnet. Nerd magnet. Throngs of people surrounding her everywhere she went. And so as my wife will tell you, I had mine for like what, two weeks?

Something like that? Less than that. And I gave it back to the Glass team and they were like, what the fuck? Like everybody wants one of these. Why are you turning this in they expected me to have it for the next three months and like install the beta software and i'm just like no one's gonna use this it's like too dorky it doesn't it's yet another thing i have to charge which we don't need more of those in our life and it's heavy it's bulky the screen

display like i just didn't understand it. And, you know, that was kind of like my gut consumer product person's take on it. And I ended up just abandoning it. And I feel the same way about virtual reality. Yeah. Only time will tell. I don't think, I don't think it'll take that much time either.

I mean, I think there's so many big announcements and launches coming up soon that within the next year to 18 months, I feel like we should have a pretty good idea of what's going to fly or not fly. Oh, what's at stake? What's at stake in the bet? Is a bottle of Hibiki, was it 30 a year? Yeah, it requires a trip to Japan to buy a bottle of Hibiki 30 year aged whiskey, which is you can't find in the united

states they don't import to the united states that's the bet between the two of us it's it's a good bet it's it's a win-win because i'm gonna help him drink some of it but it should be fun it's it's gonna be uh you know i i think that even if i lose the bet i'll be pleasantly i'll be actually pretty impressed and happy because if they come out with a few titles where I'm just blown away, I'll be the first to say, you know what? This is going to take off, but I don't know. My gut doesn't tell me so. The jury's out.

We'll see. All right. Well, another random show on the books. And you already mentioned the journal. I will tell people, check out the t-shirts. I've never done t-shirts before, and 100% of the proceeds are going to psychedelic research, most likely psilocybin at top universities. I'm not making anything from it whatsoever.

Everything is going to most likely senior scientists who are working on very, very fascinating applications of compounds that have been neglected that can address potentially some extremely debilitating conditions that have very few options otherwise that have panned out, medically speaking. So check out the shirts. Who likes the shirts? American Apparel? What's that?

American Apparel shirts? I'd have to look. I went through... Is it cotton or blend? Most likely a blend. 10% psilocybin? I went through all of my own t-shirts and picked out the most comfortable

and the designs that I liked and sat down with a sourcing team and looked at how to make the most comfortable shirts possible. So I'm test driving the prototypes. They're not made from mushrooms. Like, you know,

they're not made from mushrooms. They don't disintegrate. You don't take a shower with them and sprout anything, grind them up and ground, grind them up and eat them. That would be pretty amazing. But no, sadly,

uh, for our work week, dot com forward slash mushroom. Check them out. And, uh, find us on the Twitters. If you have anything to correct or say or to add.

And I feel like that's about it. That's it. Thanks for listening. All right. Thanks for listening guys. And you can find show notes, links to various things that we have mentioned at four hour workweek.com forward slash podcast,

as well as notes for every other episode and the episodes themselves. And, uh, until next time. See you. Thanks for sticking around. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.

That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.