The Tim Ferriss Show - #224: The Random Show - Drinking Urine, Exploring Japan, and Figuring Out Life

Episode Date: February 26, 2017

Coming to you from a late night in rural Japan, this is a special edition of The Random Show. Per usual for The Random Show, I am joined by Kevin Rose (@KevinRose), serial entrepreneur, world...-class investor, and all around wild and crazy guy. We discuss Japan and how to do it cheaply, building apps, urine drinking, love and marriage, beauty and absurdity in 2017, why Kevin doesn't have New Year's resolutions, favorite books, and much more. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by iD Commerce + Logistics. I'm asked all the time about how to scale businesses quickly. Rule number one: remove unnecessary bottlenecks. Many businesses can do so by outsourcing inventory management and fulfillment to a company that makes this its primary focus. iD Commerce + Logistics is just such a company. It helps online retailers and entrepreneurs outgrow their competition by handling all types of details -- from inventory to packing and shipping. I depended on iD to handle these types of details when I launched The 4-Hour Chef so I could focus on promoting the book. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off your start-up fees and costs waived by visiting tim.blog/scale or idcomlog.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is the future of financial advice. It's become especially popular among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country because it provides the same high-end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra wealthy -- but for any account size, at a fraction of the cost. Wealthfront monitors your portfolio every day across more than a dozen asset classes to find opportunities for rebalancing and harvesting tax losses, and now manages more than $5 billion in assets. Unlike old-fashioned private wealth managers, Wealthfront is powered by innovative technology, making it the most tax-efficient, low-cost, hassle-free way to invest. Go to wealthfront.com/tim to take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and it'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio it would recommend. If you want to just take the advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get your first $15,000 managed for free if you decide to go with its services.***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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Starting point is 00:00:00 Three. Hello. My name is Kevin. No, Tim, I'm telling you, I think that if you really focused on masturbating, it would just really help you out. You need to start your own milk company. Milk. Milk duds. I've been telling you milk duds are the future. Milk duds are the future. Milk duds. are the future. Milt Duds dot co dot nz. Everybody check it out. Milt Duds. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.
Starting point is 00:00:57 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG-1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG-1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.
Starting point is 00:01:34 So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of
Starting point is 00:01:58 subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be
Starting point is 00:02:35 free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out,
Starting point is 00:03:15 tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and it is a late night edition of the Tim Ferriss show. And I'm recording this from rural Japan, trying not to wake the friendly neighbors. So I'm going to keep this short. This is a special edition random show. And for those of you who have not experienced the random show, it is, as the name would indicate, a random collection of exchanges between myself and Kevin Rose, entrepreneur, one of the best
Starting point is 00:04:03 stock pickers, both in public markets and in the startup game, early stage investors I've ever met. He's incredible and also hilarious, where we really just banter and talk about our favorite things, new discoveries, what we're up to. In this particular episode, we discuss Japan and how to do it cheaply, how to do it in a very, very fun way, different recommendations. We talk about building apps. Kevin is extremely good at this. And the exact process, we brainstorm out loud and discuss things we haven't gotten into before. Talk about urine drinking. Long story.
Starting point is 00:04:38 We'll get to that. Love and marriage difficulties therein and thereof. Beauty and absurdity in 2017. Why Kevin doesn't have New Year's resolutions this year. Favorite books and much, much more. We do talk about Japan a fair bit, but lest we bore some percentage of you guys who aren't really into Japan, I would also recommend you check out some of my collected thoughts on my favorite recommended bucket list items, as well as cheap or free diversions and incredible options in places like Tokyo. And you can find that in a two-part blog post. You can go to tim.blog forward slash Japan. This is all free and it shows you how to get the most out of Tokyo for less than say a trip to New York. So it is a, it is a fun post.
Starting point is 00:05:32 It's one that I put a lot of thought into and had friend, uh, friends help me with as well. Tim.blog forward slash Japan. If you've ever thought about Japan, fantasize about going to Japan, why don't we get that on the calendar for you? And this will help you plan a lot of it and to spend your money very, very wisely. Tim.blog forward slash Japan. So without further ado, please enjoy this episode of The Random Show with Kevin Rose at Kevin Rose on Twitter and all the sochers. Sochers. It is late and we've had a lot of sake.
Starting point is 00:06:06 Enjoy. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. And I'm Kevin Rose. Hello, friends. Long time no chat. Long time no chat. How do you do? It's been a while.
Starting point is 00:06:20 The last one is effectively long time no see in Japanese, which is appropriate because we are here for a special edition of The Random Show in Kanazawa, Japan. That's right. And why are we in Japan, Kevin? Well, that's a good question. It's been a while since we've been... Last time we were on this side of the world was China.
Starting point is 00:06:44 No. No. It was when you got engaged. That's right. You were out here. I got engaged in Tokyo for a cherry blossom festival and you were here and we ended up hanging out. Um, but this is my 40th birthday yesterday, which is kind of nuts. So we did a little trip, uh, invited trip, invited six or so really close friends. And yeah, it's been a ton of fun. And we're sitting here in a very traditional Japanese style inn, yokan. And we're sitting on tatami mats.
Starting point is 00:07:18 We have a low table in front of us. We're sitting cross-legged. And we have some booze. We've already had a fair amount of sake. So instead, we've switched gears. I have some booze. We've already had a fair amount of sake. So instead we've switched gears. I have some red wine. You have whatever that is. I have a Suntory premium malt beer,
Starting point is 00:07:31 which is brewed with pride is what it says on the outside there. So Japanese do everything with everything with pride. I love it. I love it. Cheers. Kampai. Kampai. So Kampai,
Starting point is 00:07:40 we'll do a couple of language things and then we'll get into our usual random odds and ends, bits and pieces. But kanpai is empty glass. That is cheers in Japanese and Chinese. Same characters. Kanbei, also empty glass. But the funny thing is, you told me this,
Starting point is 00:07:59 it doesn't mean chug. Doesn't mean chug. No, most people think when you say kanpai, you just put it straight back, you chug it, boom, done, slam the glass, that's it. Which is not true, yeah. But there's another word. There is. What is it again? Ikki. Ikki.
Starting point is 00:08:13 So if you go ikki, ikki. Ikki, ikki, ikki. Ikki, ikki is one breath, one breath, and that means chug. Okay. So different uses to be used sparingly or all the time in the case of K-Rose. And we are at Adaya as the name of the place. And if you hear any waterfall-like sounds in the background, that is because we have a natural onsen bringing water into the rooms
Starting point is 00:08:38 where there are wooden tubs that are effectively indoor-outdoor. There's an open wall, so you look out into a forest-slash-hillside, and the steam pours out into the great outdoors. It is winter, so there's tons of fog and mist and so on. It's just a magical place. Yeah, it's absolutely beautiful. And one of the reasons why I chose this place to stay is, one, I had never stayed in a Ryokan, like traditional Japanese house before. And I always wanted to do that. And number two, when you're talking about an onsen, like a natural spring, it's very difficult because in Japan, if you have any tattoos whatsoever, you are forbidden from doing the onsen. Like you can't go in. Public baths. Public baths because they say that you're a Yakuza.
Starting point is 00:09:26 Yeah, it's associated with organized crime. So if you have tattoos, as Kevin does. Yes. My little pony on both deltoids. They're beautiful. I got the long haired with the tassels. It's quite a breathtaking thing. It is breathtaking.
Starting point is 00:09:41 And you are not allowed to go to public baths or most of them. Also true in say hotels where they have beachfront. You're not allowed to go on the beach if you have exposed tattoos. Also hotels when you're going to just use their kind of spa. Because I went in there one time, I was staying at, I think it was a peninsula and went in to use a spa and she goes tattoos. And I said, yes. And she handed me flesh colored tape, like a, like a little square of tape. And, and I have a few, and I was like, I'm going to need the whole roll. And it ended up not being, I didn't actually happen. I didn't go in.
Starting point is 00:10:25 So I would have been kicked out. But this is nice. It's in our room. So every single room here has its own little private bath, hot water being piped in. And it's been very relaxing. And I should say also,
Starting point is 00:10:36 we're not going to talk about Japan the whole time, but I do think Japan is worth highlighting for a few reasons. I mean, I was an exchange student here at age 15, which was really my first time abroad. And that year completely changed my life. I lived with host families. I went to a Japanese school. I was the only American in my class photo, which was very easy. Where's Waldo? All in school uniforms. So like crew cut,head and then all japanese kids about 5 000 and uh it has proven to be such a subtle and nuanced culture simultaneously you can come here as someone who doesn't speak japanese
Starting point is 00:11:17 get completely lost be completely bewildered the english level is generally pretty low here so it can be a totally alien environment where you can't read any signs and it's not dangerous. Right. And the people will go above and beyond to try and kind of decipher what you're saying with your hands. Well, not only that. So why don't you tell the story of Tony and the earphones? Well, what are your phones? The earphones that he dropped on the side.
Starting point is 00:11:46 Oh, yeah, yeah. So two days ago, well, there was two stories. Okay, so this is classic Tokyo for you. And it's part of the reason why I love Japan so much is like the people here are just so friendly and really concerned with your well-being. So Tony, one of the members that was traveling with us, that is traveling with us, he dropped his headphones and just, you know, we're talking
Starting point is 00:12:12 standard kind of Apple headphones, you know, white cord, whatever. And we walked into a coffee shop. And now just for context, this is on one of the busiest streets in a shopping district yes in tokyo yeah so there's people just you know fifth avenue in new york city yeah just like all over the place just you know probably stepping on the headphones and whatnot somebody on the second floor of a building across the street was looking out the window saw that these these small white headphones fell out of his pocket ran down the stairs grabbed the headphones figured out which his pocket, ran down the stairs, grabbed the headphones, figured out which coffee bar we had gone into, and then proceeded to enter in and hand back the headphones, which was just nuts. And then on top of that, the exact same coffee bar, I had gotten out of a taxi,
Starting point is 00:13:00 left my cell phone in the taxi. And of course know, of course, when you're in the States, you're like, shit, like my cell phone's gone. I'm never going to see it again. And so I used Find My Phone, you know, the Apple built-in feature so you can see where your phone is. I used it off of my wife's cell phone. And, you know, it's 20, 25 minutes away from where we're at in a taxi. And I'm like, oh, damn it. Like, how am I ever going to get this back? And I pressed the button to, which sends a signal to the cell phone. So it sends out an audible alert to the, you know, so anyone, whoever is, is nearby can hear that all of a sudden I'm watching on GPS. The phone starts getting closer and closer and closer. This driver drives all the way back 20 plus minutes,
Starting point is 00:13:46 comes up the stairs to the coffee shop where he dropped, where I had, I'd left him and then hands me my phone back. I try to tip him, you know, I'm thinking like in the States, you know, you give somebody 20, 40, 50 bucks. Like, thank you so much. He wouldn't accept my tip and was just so polite, bowed to me and left. He's just like, oh man, it just makes you, when you live in the States, you're just like, what happened? We have a few friends with us. And it also makes you feel like a, in many, many, many instances, an uncivilized, hairy savage. That's what I'm saying.
Starting point is 00:14:23 You wake up feeling, you know, you're going to be ashamed of at least 17 things that you do that day. That's right. But it's a wonderful environment. And one thing that I want to underscore before we move on, and I'm sure we'll come back to it, is that you don't have to have a lot of money or spend a lot of money to enjoy Tokyo. This is a common misconception. It can be extremely expensive, but it doesn't have to be extremely expensive. And certainly Japan as a whole doesn't need to be extremely expensive. When I was here at 15, I had no money whatsoever. And you can, for instance, find stores that you would recognize like 7-Eleven
Starting point is 00:15:02 that are completely different from the equivalent at home. And you can go into a 7-Eleven that are completely different from the equivalent at home. And you can go into a 7-Eleven, for instance, and you can grab one of my favorite on-the-go bites, which is onigiri. These are rice balls wrapped in dry seaweed and filled with various meats, vegetables, or fish, say tuna, whatever it might be. And those typically cost about 110 yen. So let's just call that a dollar. And you can find those at 7-Eleven, a store called Sunkus, S-U-N-K-U-S, or Lawson. And it's packaged in such a way that you pull apart the plastic, which keeps the seaweed separate. It automatically wraps this rice triangle. And you have effectively an entire meal right there for somewhere between $1 and $2.
Starting point is 00:15:45 Yeah, you know what's funny? I don't know if I told you this, but I was out here with David Chang, who is, I would say, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with him, but he's one of probably the top five chefs in the United States. Very famous, Momofuku.
Starting point is 00:15:59 Momofuku, yeah, just like- Milk Bar, right? Yeah, Milk Bar. And we happened to be here on the same trip with some friends, and he was ranting and raving about the 7-eleven uh egg salad sandwich and this is like you know a multi like you know it was i think he has three michelin stars at one of his restaurant i mean top of the world chef freaking out about a 7-eleven different 7-eleven the united states yeah i mean not high in food by any means mean, a couple bucks for this egg salad sandwich,
Starting point is 00:16:29 but prepared with, like my beer says, prepared with pride. Yeah, there's so much. A couple of other go-tos I'd suggest. In Tokyo, if you can get a ticket, go to the Ghibli Museum, G-H-I-B-L-I Museum, which is the museum. Think of it as the Disney Museum for the Walt Disney of Japan. And that's Miyazaki Hayao. He did Spirited Away, my favorite movie, My Neighbor Totoro, a whole long list of blockbuster and genre-defining anime films. And it is one of the most incredible museums I've ever been to. It's in the middle of what they call Mitaka Forest, which is right next to or is Inokashira Koen. And then a lot of things in Japan are also free. You can go to Harajuku, H-A-R-A-J-U-K-U, where you can find on the weekends Elvis impersonators doing their dancing.
Starting point is 00:17:22 This has been going on for decades now. And you can also go to Takeshita Dori, which is I guess Takeshita Street or alleyway where you find dozens or hundreds of teenagers and high schoolers doing cosplay. So they wear these crazy outfits and walk up and down the streets or showing off the weirdest outfits imaginable. Some people are into that. A lot of people are into it. Like do you, are you kind of like when you see a cosplay, are you, because it's like a sexual thing. Well, for some, you know, I think that for some people that might be part of it, but I think that it's just a form of, of hyper expression in a culture where a lot of people feel very repressed or overly polite most of the time. And so then they blow it out on the weekends
Starting point is 00:18:07 and they put in pink contacts and white hair and 12-inch platform shoes and wear the wackiest shit imaginable. Yeah, maybe it's more of a, in the States, cosplay is a bigger, because they dress up like video game characters and things like that when, you know, at Comic-Con and whatnot.
Starting point is 00:18:24 Oh, yeah. Well, there are a lot of things that are... That's not really Japanese cosplay, though. There are a lot of things that are regular in other countries that end up being adopted by weird niche groups in the U.S. and take on, in some cases, like creepier, weirder elements.
Starting point is 00:18:41 Right? Like tango in Argentina, normal. Tango in some places in the United States, super weird. Yeah. And I'm just saying that as someone who loves tango and dances, dances in many places, but primarily in Argentina, way back in the day, same thing with Japanese stuff. It's like, Oh, manga. Cool. And then you find like a little subculture in a given city in the U S and you're like, wait a second. It's all 40 year old guys like reading creepy half porno hentai manga.
Starting point is 00:19:06 Okay, I don't think I'm going to hang out here anymore. Segway. Yes. How do we segway from that? Let's segway from hentai. Hentai, you can look up if there's people interested. There are two books that have helped me review and prep for
Starting point is 00:19:22 this trip in terms of Japanese that I'd like to suggest people check out if you're interested in Japanese. Very short, and I was able to get through these really quickly. The first is probably for people who speak more intermediate Japanese, so you'd want some basics first, but it is 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese. And this is by, I think it's Giles, or Giles, G-I-L-E-S. Let's say Giles. Murray, M-U-R-R-A-Y. So 13 secrets for speaking fluent Japanese. Very, very helpful. And then the second is maybe a bit dry for some people, but I like very concise grammar summaries that are quick reference. This is Japanese
Starting point is 00:20:01 verbs and essentials of grammar. And that is by Rita Lampkin, L-A-M-P-K-I-N. You were mentioning, I want to say, or at least this came up before we started recording, app and app apps and app development. Yes. And you said you wanted to talk about it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we can kind of segue into
Starting point is 00:20:24 just what we've been up to lately. Sure. Because that's what we do at The Random Show. If you've tuned in to previous episodes where we just get hammered and talk about weird stuff. So yeah, so I want to get your take on this and kind of do a real time, you know, just hash something out
Starting point is 00:20:41 because I haven't told you anything about that. Oh, I've told you a little bit about it, but I think it would be fun to do on air and show people what it's like to brainstorm some of this stuff. Sure. So here's the deal. Lately, so in my career, for people that know me and don't know me, I built a bunch of different software applications,
Starting point is 00:21:04 both on the web and mobile, and worked at Google for a few years and done investing and things of that nature. Recently, I've got back into building apps. And so I built an app around fasting that helps people do intermittent fasting that I wanted to give away for free. And that's a completely free app.
Starting point is 00:21:21 It's called Zero. And then I wanted to do another app recently around meditation. So meditation has been a hobby of mine on and off, I will say, like most of our friends that meditate, for probably the last, I'd say, three or four years. And I took a course in Transcendental Meditation here probably six months ago. Really enjoyed it. Mantra-based meditation. So when I say mantra, I'm talking about you receive a word, you repeat that word over and over again. You've done this before, Tim, obviously. And you kind of go into more of a, what would you call that state? It's almost like a hypnosis
Starting point is 00:22:03 type state when you're doing the word over and over again, very relaxing. Anyway, a different form of meditation versus a general mindfulness meditation. So one of the things I was thinking about for this app is to actually go completely public on the soup to nuts creation of the application. So starting off by showing the wireframes, doing a kind of weekly video and showing off how you make certain decisions around app design, how you make usability trade-offs, like what gets included in the app,
Starting point is 00:22:40 what gets excluded, how you have to rerecord audio because you don't like certain pieces of the audio you're putting together. There's a thousand things that go into app creation, but it's also really scary because at the same time, when anyone, any new entrepreneur is developing anything new, you kind of want to keep it close to the vest a little bit because it's kind of like your own secret sauce. It's your own proprietary stuff. What do you think about going out, going very public? Cause you are a very guarded guy and like having known you, but having known you for many years now, like you tell when you're working on a new book and I've seen you now for through many
Starting point is 00:23:22 books, you, you won't even share chapters of the book. You, you keep that stuff very close and very tight. What are your thoughts either way on doing something like this? So the, the book books are a unique animal to me in that respect, where I feel like memes can, uh, inadvertently be released into the wild and gain traction in ways that are unforeseen. If you start talking about a book that is going to take potentially three years to do too early, and then that can create knockoffs and maybe push the way forward in such a way that you were paddling in the perfect place. And now you're going to be six, 12 months or more late to a party where you would have a superior product. But since you're not the first to market, you're not the first to mindshare. So with books, I think that crowd sourcing ideas and feedback is most valuable in my experience
Starting point is 00:24:28 when you have a clear idea first of what you would like to do, and then you use the wisdom of crowds to select from options that are of equal appeal to you. In other words, if you say, all right, we're going to include one of these three features, but we only have the manpower to focus on one. I like all three equally. Then let's let the crowd decide. I find that very actionable and helpful in many cases. But what should I write about? And let me just pick and choose and make a frankincense monster.
Starting point is 00:24:59 I find that very, very difficult. But in the case of an app, from where you are now to potential launch, what type of timeline are we looking at? Three months. I wouldn't be worried at all. Yeah. I'm not too concerned about it. I'm just curious to think about, it's a lot of work, obviously, to air it all out there because you don't want to be this one way communication where you just are pushing out content and you're not taking in feedback. Sure. Um, so, you know, I was going to do, um, a custom Slack group where I invited a few hundred people, have them listen
Starting point is 00:25:36 to the, the different various meditations as they're being developed because I'm going to do, um, both male and female voices, guided meditations. I'm going to be, I want to be the first app to actually teach mantra meditation. Nachos, nachos, nachos. Nachos, nachos over and over again. That is not going to be one of the mantras. So yeah, anyway, it's just, it's a new thing for me to actually, because, you know, in building so many different pieces of software over the years, when I had started Digg here back, gosh, like 10 years ago, and Reddit, and we had competitors around, we were very cautious about which features we launched because they were getting cloned so quickly. Almost like you said, whereas if you put out there this idea for a genre, all of a sudden you can have 10 or 15
Starting point is 00:26:25 other books spring up before yours is actually out there and they gain mindshare, right? Yeah. So I don't know. It's just that me, it's potentially me being just a little bit gun shy here. Yeah. Sorry to interject. I would just say that I do small, I would say test group development for a lot of the content that goes into my books. Well, this is what you did for your first actually book cover, right? Or the name of it, right? Weren't you doing... Did Google AdWords testing.
Starting point is 00:26:53 Well, didn't you also print out covers and put them on a book? Tell people that story. I did. Yeah, this is a story fewer people know. So a lot of people have heard about how I used Google AdWords to come up with... Not to come up with, but I had about a half a dozen titles and subtitles that were of equal appeal in effect for the four-hour work week and tested them on Google AdWords for $150 or $200 over the span of a week and figured out very quickly, or Google figured out for me, which combination worked best to maximize click-through. Then that just went to an under construction page. But the other way that I tested was I printed out sample covers, different covers, once the title had been decided, and wrapped them around books that were the same size and put them up on shelves at the borders that used to exist on university Ave and Palo Alto and sat there
Starting point is 00:27:46 keeping track of how many people picked up different covers based on the cover or based on the cover design. That's right. Okay. Yeah. So you'd already decided the time. Yeah. So I'd swap the covers every whatever it was, hour or so and just stand there. What were some of the covers? Do you remember what they look like? It was mostly color scheme. Okay, so it wasn't like... It was mostly color scheme. There were some design elements, but I test. I do test. But I would say a few things. Number one, you could capture the process and then release those after the app is launched. I think that would still be of equal value. I don't think you need to broadcast them while you are still in development.
Starting point is 00:28:31 I don't think that's a necessity. Quick question for you though, because I've wondered about this myself. I use Slack internally for a lot of my work with my team, but I've heard mixed reviews about Slack channels for communities. Some people seem to love it. I've had other people who will remain unnamed who say,
Starting point is 00:28:49 don't do it, it's a huge headache. Why use a Slack channel as opposed to, say, a private Facebook group? It's a great question. I actually thought about both. I might go Facebook. The problem with Slack is due to the nature that it is just a real-time chat, I think that the expectation is a more immediate response from you
Starting point is 00:29:12 versus it being just a general post in a Facebook group, which you can get back to in a day or two. And you and I are both really busy people. I have a feeling that I probably will go Facebook. Yeah. And Slack has a cap too. Slack also doesn't have nested comments. Right.
Starting point is 00:29:29 Well, they just added something like that. Did they? Because that drove me and drives me insane. No, it's not nested comments, but it's kind of like sub threads around a single comment. That's what I mean. Yeah. So it doesn't show up as a straight nest in the timeline though.
Starting point is 00:29:44 You kind of like click through into it. It's a little bit funkier than a standard nested comment, but yeah, they've added that. But honestly, Slack has been... Can I add a side note? Yeah. Just in case anyone from Facebook is listening to this, request, please, pretty please,
Starting point is 00:30:00 if I could sort my comments by most liked or upvoted, that would make my life so much easier. On my fan page, on facebook.com forward slash Tim Ferriss, when I poll people or ask my audience for feedback on things like, hey, for a thousand square feet or less, what type of yurt or small house should I build on such and such a plot, then I get all these incredible responses, but there seems to be no, and I've, I've asked some people at Facebook about this. There's no clear way that I have found to sort by most
Starting point is 00:30:34 likes. I feel like there's a, isn't that crazy? Don't they have a sort by most interesting? They said they have sort by most, uh, I think it's best or top or something like that. But it's an algorithm. It's not a straightforward, most liked indicator. So go figure. But why a meditation app? What is driving you to do it?
Starting point is 00:30:59 And what does success for you look like? Say you launch it in three months, three months after that, how will you know it has been successful or not? Yeah, so, well, a couple of things. Why? I've seen changes in my own body and my own feelings in terms of just reducing anxiety
Starting point is 00:31:18 and overall just happiness in general. And just giving me a little bit of space. You know, to be honest, there's a lot of great apps out there. I think that Calm and Headspace are two great ones. I've used both them for many, many sessions. One of the things that I, when I started taking TM, the Transcendental Meditation that teaches mantra-based meditation, it was a very expensive process. For most people, spending $1,500 on a three-day course
Starting point is 00:31:52 is just, that's a big chunk of their pay. Yeah, for sure. And so mantra meditation is, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of coaching there that I think is really valuable that TM provides, but I think that the concept is very, um, is pretty straightforward. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:32:10 And so honestly, I'm at the point in my career where I'm not trying to, you know, knock on wood. I've, I've done fairly well in terms of investing and other things that I've, I've done. And this isn't about creating a big multi-billion dollar business. It's about putting something out there that the world will enjoy, that is free, that people can get into. So I want to make an app that teaches both mindfulness and the more breathwork-based mindfulness meditation, as well as mantra meditation. And then also, I should have said breathwork-based mindfulness meditation, as well as mantra meditation. And then also, I should have said breathwork as being a separate category. So teaching more of the kind of yoga breathwork. And then a way to layer on some light social features. So one of
Starting point is 00:33:00 the things that none of these apps do is they don't allow you to engage really in a community and with your friends in a social way. And it's a very difficult thing because you want to make sure that this isn't an ego-driven thing. It's not about, oh, I meditated more than you, so I'm better. It's more about encouraging each other to have a regular practice. And so I've built a lot of social apps in the past. And I'm hoping that I can tread lightly there and get the right mixture of features that are both high-quality guided meditation along with unguided meditation, which I've got some really amazing and beautiful kind of like different chimes and gong sounds to bring you back to your awareness. What about duck sounds?
Starting point is 00:33:51 We can put ducks in there if you want. We can have a little Tim Tim shout out if you want, whatever you'd like. Oh my God. Yeah. But it's one of those things when you're an app developer and you start using apps, they never fit you because you didn't build it. And so I look at these apps and I'm like, I love them, they're great, but they're not what I would build.
Starting point is 00:34:12 So I just want to have my own little take on it. So for me, success doesn't mean 10 million people using it. It's if I can just attract some more people to get into meditation and find a little bit more space in our life and a little bit less stress, I'll be happy. What is the motivation behind
Starting point is 00:34:32 wanting to share the step-by-step? Like you said, it's a lot of work to do that well. I think that one of the things, if you've taken a look at the podcasts that I've done in the past on my own, you know, through the journal podcast or the foundation series, it has been this theme of interviewing entrepreneurs to encourage other people and let other people realize that entrepreneurs, they're just like anyone else. And so if they can see how we make mistakes along the way, because to get to a final product, to get to a 1.0 version that you launch, you change your mind 50, 75, 100 different times
Starting point is 00:35:17 before you actually launch something. And so there'll be so many times where I'll build something, I'll get it in my hands, meaning build it in wireframes, build it in design. Just for those people who don't know the term, what are wireframes? So wireframes are essentially what I use and what most people use as their very first layout, meaning that let's just say you're going to design the front page of Instagram as an app. You would draw a box and type in picture goes here. You would draw a circle and say, user profile photo goes here. It's like storyboarding. It's choose your own adventure for... Right. Yeah. It's a blueprint. It's a house blueprint. So you look at it...
Starting point is 00:36:00 Visual flowchart with different actions. exactly so if if click this goes to this page if click this goes to that if turn on push notifications does this you know so it's a very complex kind of series of um just well they call it wire frames because it is like wire boxes and then you get that on the phone so you can kind of tap around so you make these mock-ups you can actually tap on with your finger and walk through and And oftentimes you'll be like, oh, that doesn't feel right. Or gosh, I wish this icon was over here, or this doesn't make sense. So there's a lot of iteration that goes into that. And I just want people to, and I know so many people and entrepreneurs or potential entrepreneurs that have talked to me in the past have always said, I'm scared to make that leap and I don't think I have it in me.
Starting point is 00:36:47 And I think if I can expose to people how many mistakes that we all make in building these things, that maybe they'll think like, well, gosh, I could do this too. I just want to encourage more creativity amongst would-be entrepreneurs, if that makes sense. It does make sense. Let me ask you a question that I've already asked you, but we didn't really get into. Because I've been fascinated by and used apps for a really long time for all sorts of things.
Starting point is 00:37:15 And like many people out there have had some ideas for apps, I've had listeners and readers of mine request apps, say, from me for different things. Yeah, you could easily have an app, a very popular app, I'm sure. But my fear has been not the onus of designing a good app, which I think with the people that I know, with the people that you know, with the people that I have access to, and maybe even people listening to this podcast who want to help, that designing a good app is achievable. My fear has always been to do that and then be on the hook for updating indefinitely for the rest of my life, every week, every day,
Starting point is 00:38:00 whatever it might be, that you're just at that point caught in a very taxing and labor intensive maintenance mode and you said well no you just have to design it right the first time or something along those lines so could you elaborate on that because yeah the fear and i this comes from a place maybe that is no longer relevant but having used for instance v bulletin right as bulletin oh my god and it was just like every day was a fire drill, some type of vulnerability or botched something. Explain to people what that is for people that don't know. That's old school talk right there.
Starting point is 00:38:33 VBulletin is or was very popular bulletin board software. So if you wanted to build- Message board. If you wanted to build a forum or something along those lines, you could use VBulletin. And the amount of headache and spam infiltration and moderation and nonsense that I and my team had to deal with on a probably weekly basis was just unbelievable, primarily because of updates that either were completed improperly or sometimes completed or additional bug fixes needed. It was really a big headache.
Starting point is 00:39:07 And of course, when I pick up my iPhone almost every day, it's like 37 notifications on App Store. New updates, yeah. New updates for every app. That's right. How can you minimize the amount of maintenance that goes into something? So let me put it this way.
Starting point is 00:39:23 Some things have gotten a hell of a lot better. Some things still require a little bit of work. So let me start with what's gotten better. So back in the day, when you built an application for the web or anything else, you had to host your own software. So roll your own servers. I mean, there were times when Dig was really taking off
Starting point is 00:39:44 and gosh, we had 38 million people using our site every month. And I had, oh gosh, I want to say 75 to a hundred servers that we physically would move into a location and rack mount, like screw them in and hook them up. And, you know, it was, you had to touch the actual metal right so amazon was probably the they were the first ones to really take over them in rack space and a couple others decided okay we know that's a headache let let's let's get rid of that problem and actually allow sysadmins to interact with these servers but they don't actually have to touch the metal. We'll do all the rack mounting for them. Okay, so now, fast forward to today,
Starting point is 00:40:31 a lot of this stuff is magic. And when I say magic, meaning that Google and Amazon and a few others have really created these automatically scaling databases and services that you can essentially, if you pay them enough money, will automatically scale. Meaning, I'll give an example. Let's say you create an application and you're like, okay, this looks like a fun little social photo sharing application.
Starting point is 00:41:04 Back in the day, you'd have one little rented server that you paid $99 a month for. And if you become popular, your server falls over, it stops working, you're screwed, you're running all over the place, you're paying people to rack and mount more servers for you. Google has figured out, and many others, Microsoft and all the big players these days, have figured out that they will handle all of that and automatically scale things for you. And they've created certain types of databases and other services that more or less automatically scale. So if you become Snapchat overnight, it's just a matter of dollars going in. It's just a matter of your credit limit on the MX you have on file.
Starting point is 00:41:48 Exactly. So there's none of that concern anymore. So that's the nice piece that's been taken care of. So we're talking about, say, Amazon Web Services. That's right. What are some of the other... I mean, Microsoft, Heroku to some extent, even though it's a little bit more managed and sits on top of Amazon. Oracle has some stuff that plays in this space.
Starting point is 00:42:07 All the big players have... All the usual suspects. So the thing that is difficult, the one thing that is tough, is that you still manage the application. So if you're building an app, let's just say Snapchat, for example, and you want to make a change to a feature in your app. So if you have
Starting point is 00:42:26 the Tim Ferriss app and you're like, okay, I want to feature podcast, but guess what? You know what? I want to add blog posts now too. You have to write that additional change. Or if there's a bug in your app, you have to fix that bug and push out a new release. Or if there's a new iOS version that comes out that deprecates some of the old features that were in your old iOS version, you have to then upgrade your version of that software, rewrite some code, and then re-release it. So long story short, and trying to get less technical, but you maintain the app, the back end, what scales and allows people to use it is a lot easier to scale, but you still have to make sure to support your app
Starting point is 00:43:06 and keep it current. So what should the expectation be then? Let's just say, or let's not make it abstract. If I did a long weekend jam session, came up with some wireframes with a couple of competent folks, just grounded out with a lot of caffeine, and then went into development. You said three months. Let's say I gave myself and the team, whatever, three to six months to ship
Starting point is 00:43:35 and got it out there. Okay, boom. It goes out. What should my expectations be in terms of maintenance for the next year? Your expectation should be that within... If it has moderate popularity. Yeah. It's not Snapchat, but it also just doesn't die on the vine.
Starting point is 00:43:51 Okay, so within the first 48 hours, there's going to be a bunch of bugs that show up just because you have a mass of people using it for the first time. That's to be expected. Sure. Different OS versions. Happens with books too, by the way.
Starting point is 00:44:03 Yeah, exactly. Oh shit, I misspelled my own name on the cover page. A little bit easier to fix in the app world. Yeah, so that's going to happen. So you've got to push a pretty quick release out after that. But again, it's a few little code fixes and you
Starting point is 00:44:18 submit it to the app store and it goes right out and everybody gets the update, at least those that choose to update. And then, you know, it's just a matter of usage in terms of dollars. So with an audience of your size, let's say you have a few hundred thousand people using it, if it's pretty image intense,
Starting point is 00:44:35 that's going to cost you some money. You know, you could be thousands of dollars per month. Okay. That's not out of the question. You know, I have an app called the little fasting app zero. It doesn't require any backend, which is awesome because it's all localized on the phone. So I don't have to pay anything for that. It just runs. Um, it's like a software program that runs on the phone. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Stores all the data locally,
Starting point is 00:44:59 all that good stuff. So, so that's really easy. If yours is just pulling an RSS feed and making a really easy way for people to have a conversation and enjoy your podcasts, that's really easy. If yours is just pulling an RSS feed and making a really easy way for people to have a conversation and enjoy your podcast, that's a pretty straightforward thing. That's not going to cost you a lot of money. I mean, that's going to be next to nothing. You probably wouldn't even need a backend to do all that. So it's just the cost
Starting point is 00:45:17 of actually developing the app. And so that can range from anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $10,000 or $15,000. In terms of cost. So I'm not concerned so much with the cost of bandwidth. Maintenance is not a ton, by the way. It's more managing developers to,
Starting point is 00:45:35 it's like, oh shit, Apple rewrote the book and came out with an OS that makes half of the app obsolete. It's never that drastic, though. They always give you a lot of time. Anytime Apple makes a major change and they say, hey, this is going to be deprecated over, it's always a year. And then you're not going to be rewriting stuff
Starting point is 00:45:54 from the ground up. I mean, there was a point where that happens every few years. Apple will move from Objective-C to, say, Swift, which is their new programming language, which they did a few years ago. But still, they support the old stuff. So it's not the end of the world. But the upside is huge. I mean, you have the ability to push notifications. Anytime someone that's listening to this, when you receive one of those push notifications, that is such a very powerful way
Starting point is 00:46:21 to pull people back into your brand and back into your product to get them to be your top of mind then, right? Like how else right now can Tim Ferriss tell you about something new in his life? Via Twitter? Sure. But how many people are actually going to be on Twitter? Twitter's like throwing a golf ball into the Niagara Falls and hoping that somebody sees it. You hope somebody sees it on Facebook Facebook, you could boost the post and get a little more people to see it and you pay a little bit of dollars there. But when you own your own app
Starting point is 00:46:51 and you get people to opt in for those push notifications, those are real actionable things that people swipe into and then they're back into your experience. So the engagement is really high and worthwhile. What I've fantasized about is for instance, having the ability to centralize all the various bits and pieces of the
Starting point is 00:47:13 experiments I'm doing and so on in one place, right? So you would have the social feeds and all that stuff within the app, but then you'd have the podcast. Then you'd have the ability, for instance, when I'm traveling, as I do a lot if i'm in
Starting point is 00:47:27 nashville or i'm in tokyo or i'm in detroit or wherever it might be i can actually send push notifications based on location oh absolutely to people within a hundred mile radius yeah it's called geofencing yeah geofencing so it's like in two days, I'm going to buy drinks for anyone who wants to swing by Joe's bar at this time and this night and just push it out to people who are in that zone. I've told you, you should build your own app. Yeah. and you can slowly expand it over time. That's the one thing that I always try and encourage people to do is this doesn't have to be everything on day one. That's the beauty of software updates.
Starting point is 00:48:13 Start with what you think are the, take your laundry list of 15 features that you would like to see in the next two years, narrow it down to three to five that you must have for a version 1.0 and go launch with that. Yeah. Well, who is it? Reid Hoffman has said, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you ship too late. That's right. That's right. That's great advice.
Starting point is 00:48:34 Which doesn't apply necessarily to books, by the way, but software that you can update quickly, for sure. So what else is new, man? Gosh, that's kind of my focus right now. I've been bouncing around doing different kind of board advisory stuff, doing a little bit of angel investing, helping out Hodinkee where I spent a bunch of time there and building apps. So this is going to be my new thing. I will say before I want to get into your stuff, but the last thing I will say is if people do want to join all this stuff, I have an email newsletter called The Journal. And just head on over to thejournal.email and you can sign up there and I will send you a way to take part in this meditation app. I'd love to have you try it out and tell me what you think. But I want to know, dude, I want to know what you've been up to because you've been busy as hell. I feel like when I first invited you to the of people don't realize is that I've never done
Starting point is 00:49:45 a technical book tour. I've always done, at least for the last three books, my rhythm. And I'm actually going to have a mini documentary coming out soon about this because I hired for the first time ever, hired a videographer to follow me around during week one of the Tools of Titans book launch, which ended up putting it at number one New York Times. And first time I've had a book in consecutive weeks from the get-go at New York Times, number one, and he tracked the whole thing. So you get to see behind the scenes. But the point I was going to make is that I do two weeks in New York, typically in late November, early December. Then I take a breather over the
Starting point is 00:50:27 holidays, and then I hit the ground running again on the West Coast this time for two weeks. And that's it. That's effectively the book launch, because keeping in mind that a lot has been set up and put in motion months before the actual publication date. So there are things that are locked and loaded and ready to go on day one or day zero, I guess. But the book launch is a 24-7 engagement. At least I treat it that way because I would rather overdo it or overcommit by 20% and feel like I've left everything on the playing field, then to dial it back, go 80%, hit number two or number three. Very competitive. So I don't respond well to that. Congrats on that, man. Thank you. You hit it. But it's like, I would rather overdo it for a short period of time and leave no doubt that I did everything that could have been effective rather than going 70% or 80% not hitting the goal and then ask myself
Starting point is 00:51:34 every point thereafter, what if? What if I'd done that extra 20%? And it was a spectacular experience. So that is now wrapping up. It's effectively wrapped up. I mean, really the last event for the... Well, there are two sort of last events. There was the Jimmy Fallon, being on Jimmy Fallon, which was fantastic. Did some acro yoga with Jimmy.
Starting point is 00:51:59 Listen to the podcast, hey, Jimmy. And had a fantastic time. Jimmy's awesome. you've spent time with me he's just he is he is for people who wonder jimmy is everyone you would hope him to be like he is the sweetest most encouraging most positive guy you could imagine and i it's so noticeable and i'm not going to name names but i've've been on a lot of media and TV jobs are really hard jobs. I'm not talking about Jimmy, although his job is very hard. I'm talking about everybody. It is a really tough business. And the staff on that show are happy people. They were joking
Starting point is 00:52:39 around, having a good time. It was a really, really exciting and affirming culture to observe when I went on the show. So there was Jimmy Fallon and then there was the Castro Theater event that I did in San Francisco. And that was effectively the tail end of it. So right now I'm in a period of slack, a bit of a... How does that make you feel? You know, I'm practicing getting more comfortable with that. I like to have a big thing in the works and to have... I like to have around
Starting point is 00:53:13 in the chamber ready to go. And I'm very good and I think you and I are both good at setting goals and then backing into that goal and setting a timeline, just like you're working on your apps, right? I mean, you think about it very methodically and that is fantastic for achievement, but it makes you very future focused. And I think that you can leave appreciation
Starting point is 00:53:39 and happiness on the table a lot of the time if you're always future focused. So I'm trying to deliberately not have an immediate huge project to jump into next. And how does that make me feel? I'll be honest, at times very uneasy because I feel like things are red hot. I feel like there's a lot of encouragement from other people to strike while the iron is hot. And I think that selectively that's not bad advice, but I remember BJ Novak said to me once on this podcast, in fact, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he's like, if,
Starting point is 00:54:13 if Will Smith doesn't do a movie for three years, people aren't like, where's Will Smith? That guy hasn't done anything. Like he, if he can all, if you're, if you have some degree of talent or ability, you can get other people's
Starting point is 00:54:27 attention again, if you have to. And so I think that sense of urgency where it's like, no, I have to do another big thing or else, or else what? Yeah. No, it's, I don't think that there's that. Uh, I don't think that pressure is, is intrinsically healthy or helpful necessarily. So right now, you now, I just finished reading this book. I think it's Cal Newport who wrote a book called Deep Work, just about really mitigating the reactivity that a lot of people experience on a daily or weekly basis to focus on different types of deep work, whether that's blocking out three hours in the morning, whether that's blocking out a day a week, whether that's blocking out a few weeks a year,
Starting point is 00:55:11 as Bill Gates does, to effectively go off the grid and do a lot of deep reading, deep thinking. Having some type of commitment and scheduling in advance that allows you to do that is something I've been thinking about a lot. So this year I've been proactively looking through 2017 and blocking out extended periods of time for unknown purposes. Yeah, I was curious about those unknown purposes because I would say that, you know, I first met you when you launched your first book
Starting point is 00:55:41 at the launch party. Yeah, on the boat. For our work week, yeah, on the boat. On the SS Jeremiah Working Homeland Security Warship, if people want to. It's for rent in San Francisco. Right, you can rent out a boat for a party. It's actually pretty badass, the old warship.
Starting point is 00:55:57 But the one thing that I've seen you do is you've found your next thing every few months or every six months or so something like that sure what do you want what do you want your tombstone to read uh you know like what's what's it what's it gonna be when you sum it all up and you you you pass away we're all gonna die sure what what's what is it what is tim Ferriss at the end of the day? I don't think it'd be something grandiose. I think it would be
Starting point is 00:56:28 a teacher who always wanted his students to be better than he was. I think that's it. Something along those lines. You consider yourself a teacher then? More than a writer, for sure. Writing is just a vehicle for trying to impart things that I've learned.
Starting point is 00:56:45 Yeah, but your writings are teachings. I think everything that you've done has been about teaching, right? In some capacity, absolutely. It's a vehicle. It's a tool that I use to teach. And I always thought I was going to be a ninth or 10th grade teacher, actually. But I think it's a very critical window for a lot of kids. I know it was for me. And it just so happened that the book and now the podcast even more so provides, because it can be a secondary activity versus a book, an opportunity to reach more than, say, a classroom of 30 to 50 kids or fewer and takes it to the millions instead, which is a huge opportunity. And I think
Starting point is 00:57:36 about it a lot. It's a huge opportunity. It's a huge responsibility not to squander it. What do you want to teach people? I want to teach people how to think bigger question the limitations that they've set for themselves that have been absorbed from people around them whether that's family friends critics otherwise and to test to test intelligently, to experiment intelligently. I think if you do those three things, you're set for most things, at least in terms of goal achievement. I think if you train yourself, and by train, I mean practice in some systematic way, thinking big, questioning limitations that you've accumulated or that you've assimilated from other people, and then experimenting intelligently and knowing how to limit your losses and how to think about downside in a non-fearful way, if that makes sense. Yeah. if that makes sense. In effect, learning to be able to ask, what's the worst that could happen?
Starting point is 00:58:46 And then planning experiments within the boundaries. I think you're kind of set for most things. Whether that's learning a language, building a huge business, helping a group of people overcome drug addiction, whatever it is. I think that those three are very, very critical. When people look at what you've done over the last few years, connection, whatever it is. I think that those three are very, very, very critical.
Starting point is 00:59:13 So when people look at what you've done over the last few years, you've launched a series of successful books. You just made the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine, which is awesome. Yeah. I think from the outside, I'm looking in and I know I've had, uh, been fortunate as well to have people ask me a very similar question, which I want to ask you is, you know, they tend to think that people that have a little bit of success, they have it all figured out. Yeah. They, you know, and I think in reality, at least for me, that's never been the case. Yeah. What, what, what don't you have figured out? I mean, I think you could ask me, what do you have figured out? And I'd have trouble coming up with answers.
Starting point is 00:59:53 And that list is a lot easier. Because the more that I... Oh, yeah, I could give you, I think that... What are the things that you struggle with? I'm thinking about marriage and kids. I want to get a little deep here tonight. Thinking about marriage and kids, for sure. Okay, marriage and kids. Relationships is tough.
Starting point is 01:00:09 It's tough because if I'm looking at it empirically as, say, an investor in certain social constructs, as it's typically... Why is that tough for you to do? Hold on, though. As it's typically formed or organized, marriage does not have a good success rate. It just doesn't. I mean, empirically data-driven in the United States just does not.
Starting point is 01:00:37 But this is the data-driven side that you can't... I feel like you can't... How can you apply data to love? I feel like you can't, how can you apply data to love? Like, I feel like those things. Well, I think marriage is, I think love, well, I was going to say is necessary, but not sufficient. But even love is not necessarily necessary for successful marriage. I know that sounds weird,
Starting point is 01:00:58 but I know people who've had arranged marriages, learn to love each other over say 20 years and have wonderful families. I know also a higher percentage of people who were passionately in love, didn't think about long-term compatibility or value orientation and ended up imploding into a supernova of psychological destruction and financial destruction. So I haven't ruled out marriage, although I think it's largely unnecessary and an unhelpful legal construct in a lot of respects. Kids is more interesting to me. But those are a few areas in my life with a lot of variables involved, changing variables, both known and unknown, that is tricky. It's tricky. And I like to be really good at whatever I do. I know you do.
Starting point is 01:02:01 So diving into something and be like, well, if it works out, it's going to be awesome. If it doesn't, it could be like a complete disaster for myself and those I care about most. That's not an easy leap of faith for me to make. So those are two examples, right? There are plenty of things I don't have figured out. Let me ask you
Starting point is 01:02:20 a question about love. Oh, boy. Come on. Yeah, I'll do it. Let me go a little bit deeper here. Have a little sip of wine. Um, I've been drinking so much sake. This I know we've had no, our tastes like sake, which is a really weird. We've had a lot of sake tonight. Um, so the thing that, that, you know, is that you are a weird dude. And that's, that's one of the reasons why we're friends. And I think it's so awesome is because we both like to get into really weird shit and kind of experiment on weird stuff. I got to say this story.
Starting point is 01:02:54 I'm sorry, Tim. Oh, God. Don't cut this out of the episode. I know you have the final file, but don't cut it out. You told me in the car today. Can I say it? Sure. I don't know what's coming.
Starting point is 01:03:06 That you drank your own urine. Just because you were curious to what it tasted like. Well, no, let me back up. Let me give some context here. So I have a friend. Ladies aren't running. Yeah, no. Knocking on your door.
Starting point is 01:03:20 It's not. Yeah, no. Maybe a few, but I don few, but those are marriage material. Yeah. Not in my Bumble profile. It's not usually what I lead with, but the avid urine drinker, uric acid forward. No, I've met a few different folks over a relatively short period of time. One guy who said his aunt, I think it was, and he was Indian. He said his aunt drank her urine or something like once a month or something like that for medicinal purposes, which didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I'd read various accounts of people drinking urine, whether they're on a lifeboat or fill in the blank. Right. And of all of the weird things
Starting point is 01:04:03 I've done, I mean, I have taken out whole blood samples, have them spun in centrifuges, re-injected locally into injuries. I've had things like BMP compounds that I've imported to inject into connective tissue. I've done some very odd stuff. I mean, really, really odd stuff. And I realized I'd never had a sip of my own urine. You also never ate a shit sandwich. No, well, I know. We were talking about this earlier because one of our friends was like,
Starting point is 01:04:36 well, it's a slippery slope. I'm like, yeah, before you know it, you're eating shit sandwiches for lunch. He's like, no, not quite. I mean, and yeah, so yes, I'm a weird guy and I did over-sink because I thought I might puke after a day of fantastic hydration. I had a sip or two of my own urine and it wasn't that bad. I got to tell you, like the Tim Ferriss 2016 vintage was quite tolerable. You got to have a few fans. It was quite tolerable. Where were you going with a few fans. It was quite tolerable. Where were you going with that? I had a little bit too much caffeine
Starting point is 01:05:11 earlier today and I was volunteering all sorts of information. The only place that I was going with that is that as being weird... And by the way, just so people out there don't start drinking their piss every day, I'm not recommending it, guys. I was just curious.
Starting point is 01:05:25 I'm curious. I'm not recommending it, guys. I was just curious. So I'm not- I'm curious. I can guarantee you, I cannot think of a single legitimate doctor that I know who would recommend you drink your own urine. That's right. So kids, don't try that at home. Yeah, don't try that at home.
Starting point is 01:05:37 I guess where I was going with that is just that, being such odd ducks as you and I both are, it's got to make dating and finding that right person difficult in terms of like, you probably have a different standard. They probably have a different, like, is that a hard match to find? Oh, well, you know the answer. It is. Of course it is. And I think also the, I am not convinced at all. I'm actually quite convinced probably of the opposite that I need to or want to
Starting point is 01:06:10 date a long-haired version of Tim Ferriss. I think that would be possibly a complete nightmare. Probably would be a complete nightmare. So I'm looking more for a compliment than an overlap if that makes sense.
Starting point is 01:06:25 That's fair. There's certain things that... That's smart. Yeah. I think it'd be too hard for us. In my defense, I've had some great relationships in the last, say, decade. I've had a lot of long-term, very healthy relationships.
Starting point is 01:06:41 So what about the work stuff? What don't you have figured out? Thanks for the life raft. The work stuff, I will tell you, I think that I'm not preoccupied by work. Like I just don't. There are a lot of micro details that I haven't figured out, like Slack versus Facebook group, right? Like, all right, maybe I don't know exactly which of those, but that's such window dressing. It's not material. It's a trivial, mundane thing that I'll think about because I find the technical aspects
Starting point is 01:07:11 of it interesting or something. But on a macro level, there are no looming, troublesome work questions that I'm grappling with at the moment. You seem to have found your life's work then. You know, I didn't, in a sense, I feel like the podcast, it started off as a break from writing and a creative outlet, a way to minimize verbal tics and improve my thinking and learn to ask better questions. And I recognized from the beginning that it was effectively my favorite part of the book writing process without the writing.
Starting point is 01:07:45 Being able to interview experts and develop, hear their thinking, get a better understanding of their routines and what makes them tick and non-obvious solutions and all of that. But also to develop and improve my own thinking. And I thought about it as my favorite part of book writing without the writing. But now it's its own thing. And the podcast itself is something I enjoy so much and was never expected. It was never expected to go as long as it's gone. I mean, I'm at 225, 250 episodes now.
Starting point is 01:08:21 It's nuts, man. We did the first one. Yeah, I know we did. That was a drunken episode. That was a very drunken episode. I remember when you came to me and you were like, I'm thinking about doing a podcast. I was like, all right, well, you know, because I did podcasts. I'd done over 500 episodes of Dignation, you know? And so I was like, okay, whatever. And let's practice. Let's have some wine. And it turned out to be a shit show, but it was such a shit show. It was fun. But I was there. I feel very out to be a shit show, but it was such a shit show.
Starting point is 01:08:45 It was fun. I thought I was there. I feel very honored to have kicked it off with you. So that's awesome. Yeah, it was fun. So the work stuff, I would say the question I'm asking myself this year, 2017 for me is, I've resolved to think a lot about absurdity and beauty
Starting point is 01:09:02 as criteria for projects that I take on because neither of them lend themselves very well. And we could debate this, but neither of them immediately lend themselves very cleanly to analytical sort of quantification that I rely on so heavily. Does that make sense? Like I'm good at that. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:09:28 So let's give me an example, absurdity and beauty. Well, absurdity, I would say in simple terms would be doing things just for the fuck of it. Right. That from the outside looking in, or maybe to anyone don't seem to make any sense whatsoever.
Starting point is 01:09:45 Urine. No, even that has a story don't seem to make any sense whatsoever. Urine. No, even that has a story. That doesn't make any sense to anyone. But the narrative behind it kind of makes sense. Like if you were to tell that story to anyone who really knows me, they'd be like, of course, Tim Drake is fucking urine.
Starting point is 01:09:57 Like big surprise. That guy's a lunatic. But I really want to have more fun playing with the rules, the so-called rules out there, and whether that takes the form of large-scale pranks or misdirection or just general weirdness. To what end? What are you hoping to achieve from the absurdity?
Starting point is 01:10:22 There is no hoping to achieve. I would just say that... But I would imagine if you're going achieve from the absurdity? So there is no hoping to achieve. I would just say that- But I would imagine if you're going to do something absurd, you're hoping, you have to have some hypothesis around what you want to achieve out of that. I think it will stretch my mind in ways that I haven't stretched my mind before. By, in every, almost every culture,
Starting point is 01:10:40 if you look at mythology and say traditional ceremonies, there is a person designated almost like a court jester to speak truth to power, to play in the realm of the absurd, to be the prankster. And in some cases, they will do exactly the opposite of what social convention is. So if you're there in a very strict society, for instance, where people never eat with their mouths open, I'm just making this up, but they might run around and say, eating rice and dropping it all over the place out of their mouths for this, this temporary period, like carnival back in the day where they're doing everything they're not allowed to do the rest of the year. And they act as a boundary tester and a,
Starting point is 01:11:31 a walker between worlds in a sense. I, I think there's a, I just, this is going to sound odd, but I'm already admitted to drinking my own urine. So I, I think there's a lot of power.
Starting point is 01:11:44 I, I, urine. So I think there's a lot of power. I just sense there is a lot of latent potential and power in that space. And we don't play enough in that space. I certainly don't. Hyperlogical. And I think there's certain limitations to that. And that in lieu of thinking, trying to think bigger, think bigger, think bigger, which has a place that thinking stranger and stranger and stranger will actually get me more of what I want or need. Some of which I might not even realize I need. So there's that. And I think at my heart also, I mean, you saw me earlier today in the car i was on fire i'm a joker and i haven't done a lot of that yeah like really i haven't really embraced that and uh i don't so
Starting point is 01:12:33 there's that's that's a component of the absurdity piece and then beauty because and this this is maybe tied into the absurdity i recall recall very closely my podcast with BJ Miller, one of my favorite podcasts I've done, hospice care physician or palliative care physician who's helped more than a thousand people die. I listened to his TED Talk. It was wonderful. Oh, it's incredible.
Starting point is 01:12:58 So we spoke for whatever it was, two hours. And I asked him if he were bringing a patient in who was going to die in weeks or months and they weren't very social, if they weren't going to interact with other patients and say bake cookies, for instance, which is one of the most therapeutic activities that he mentioned for a host of reasons that you're, and I should say also at the same time that when someone is in hospice, the expectation of people who come into visit is sometimes that they will be having these Tuesdays with Maury type wide ranging philosophical existential conversations that are pregnant with meaning
Starting point is 01:13:43 at every turn of phrase. And that's just not what happens. Like a lot of dying is just going through your day-to-day routine, like brushing your teeth and like taking a shit and like watching TV and just waiting for the end to come. It's not all huge philosophical breakthroughs. And that's where the bacon cookies comes in, in part because it's on behalf of nothing but the tasting and the smell and the communal interplay of these different patients. It is present state and present moment. But I asked him, if someone's not going to do that, not engage, what would you give them if you could give them three things? And he mentioned a comedy. He said plenty of space. I think he said plenty of time and space for just staring off and thinking. And then a book of Mark Rothko paintings.
Starting point is 01:14:27 And I asked him about the Mark Rothko paintings specifically. And he explained Mark Rothko paintings are, in effect, extremely expensive painted squares. Like $80 million for a huge painting, two orange squares on a canvas. And I asked him why. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing, but in effect, he wanted people to consider and ponder how beautiful something potentially meaningless or pointless could be. The beauty in the meaninglessness. And that conversely, when people are getting closer to death, they grapple with some of these very big questions that might not have very good answers. So what happens after I die? Why me? Why now? These questions that are
Starting point is 01:15:20 very stress-inducing and can lead to a very difficult time and a very unpleasant time right up until death. So instead, pondering the fact that maybe there is no answer to this, and maybe that's not a bad thing, and that you don't need all the answers. You can experience beauty. You can observe beauty in the mundane and in these fucking painted squares that sell for $80 million. And you can look at this and you can try to make sense out of it. And chances are you won't be able to make sense out of it. But yet, at the same time, you can behold some sense of aesthetic beauty and absorb that.
Starting point is 01:16:01 And I've thought about that a lot because I'm a pattern. I think humans are pattern recognition machines and we look for answers and meaning and sense and logic in everything around us. And sometimes, sometimes that produces more pain than joy, I think. Certainly that's true for me. So those would be, I think, a few of the reasons why I want to do more art projects in a sense. And that maybe this year isn't the year of big things for me. It's the year of little things. Yeah. I'm with you. I just recently took a woodworking class that I, you know, it was just one night a week for several weeks. And woodworking was something that my father was really into before he passed away.
Starting point is 01:16:49 And I never really got a good chance to... Honestly, I just was too busy to really pay attention. And just as dad is just always in your mind is always going to be around forever. And turns out that's not the case. And the smell of sawdust to this day reminds me of my father. And I got back into that and it's been pretty awesome.
Starting point is 01:17:13 Actually, when we get back, when I get back to New York, a couple of days after we take off, I'm going to be taking a traditional Japanese woodworking class as well. No, I'm kidding. Yeah. Do you want to tell people
Starting point is 01:17:23 about where we went this afternoon? Oh, man. We went and saw one of Japan's living treasures. Is it true? Dari told me you were like, Hey, yeah, I'm into woodworking too.
Starting point is 01:17:36 Did you? No, I didn't say that. How would I even communicate that to him? I'd have no way to even say that. We visited, uh, let's see. It see it was uh let me think kawagita mr kawagita who's a national living treasure in japan in in terms of woodworking and i think
Starting point is 01:17:59 there's one of seven total yeah he was the youngest to ever receive the national treasure at 59. And now he's 82, 82. Yeah. Beautiful stuff. Yeah. Amazing. We both got suckered in and bought a few of his pieces. I'm so happy about it. Yeah. So much. And these pieces in some cases take five, 10 years to make because they have to slowly whittle down a huge piece of wood to smaller and smaller forms. And at each step, they have to effectively let the wood rest to dry among other things so they can work with it effectively. And I didn't know that about the sawdust. So I mean, when you walked into that workshop, sawdust shavings everywhere. Oh, absolutely. Just reminds me of my dad. Yeah. A hundred percent. It's cool. I love
Starting point is 01:18:45 doing stuff like that though. In the same sense that of kind of pushing yourself into uncomfortable situations. Um, Daria, my wife thinks I'm crazy because I, I try to find at least, uh, I would say three to five things per year that push me in new directions. For example, it was snowing in New York recently, and I like to walk around in Birkenstocks in the snow and my feet freeze. I don't know why I do it, but I like how it brings me to the present moment. It sounds crazy, but one of the things I really enjoy about meditation is I can calm the mind. This is also one of those, don't try this at home kids. Yeah, I know, but don't lose your toes.
Starting point is 01:19:32 But it's, it's, I'm, it's not like I'm out there for like four hours, but you know, I go out and take my dog out for a walk and, and I think people look at you a little strange, but it's just like, you feel life. You feel that moment. You feel, I can feel it right there, you know? And I love, I think that's why I did Wim Hof's ice training. It's also why I've done extended fasting, like things like that just really force you into kind of just this, this, this, this very, very, very present moment, which is awesome. And it's hard to get there. I'm not going to act like I'm some Zen doubt Buddhist master. Cause of just this very, very, very present moment, which is awesome.
Starting point is 01:20:06 And it's hard to get there. I'm not gonna act like I'm some zenned out Buddhist master because 99.9% of the time I am not. But you know what I'm talking about. I do. You go into a meditation and most times, to be frank, meditation is just your mind jumping all over the place being monkey mind. Nachos, nachos, nachos.
Starting point is 01:20:21 Every once in a while, nachos, nachos. I've never done the duck. No. But every once in a while, nachos, nachos. I've never done the duck. No, but every once in a while, it just turns into something beautiful. And that's what I want more of. So anyway. So how are you thinking about producing that more for yourself this year? Gosh, you know, this is the first year that I actually did away with New Year's resolutions because I don't want to force myself into having to prove something. I'm actually just going to take it month by month. I just turned 40. I feel pretty confident where I am in life.
Starting point is 01:20:58 And I want to be more vulnerable and just kind of... Vulnerable to whom? I want to be more vulnerable and just kind of... You know, I feel like... Vulnerable to whom? To everyone. To everyone. I feel like my entire life I spent trying to build up to be something and constantly try and find the next level. To level up.
Starting point is 01:21:21 To look for, oh, if I could only make X number of dollars more per year, oh, if only I could achieve this, if only if my startup could do this. It was always this trying to push to level up. And it's just, man, one, I can't do it anymore because it's physically pulling me down. And two, there's no happiness to be found there. I think you and I have been very fortunate in that we've done some amazing things in terms of things that money can buy. And I can tell you that there's just,
Starting point is 01:21:58 that's not where it comes from. Like just because you are sleeping on a slightly better mattress or have better walls or a better front yard or whatever it may be, that's not going to make you happiness starts in the brain. You know, it's like, and until you can settle that and, and,
Starting point is 01:22:14 and come to peace and come to terms with your brain, nothing physical is going to fill that void. Yeah. It's something that people always say. I mean, I'm not saying anything new here, but I realized that. And so, you know, I watched that documentary, uh, the minimalist, you know, you've heard about those guys. I like their general message. I think that the idea of just like scaling back and I've sold a bunch of stuff on eBay. I hadn't used eBay in
Starting point is 01:22:41 like years and I just got rid of a bunch of shit and I'm happier. I have less things to maintain, less things, less garbage. I have a new rule. Oh gosh. Well, this, I don't know if this is going to sound, this is my rule. I get, I'm, I'm one of those people that get very wrapped up in the hot new thing. Meaning that if someone's like, oh, you should try this supplement. I know you're like this, Tim, because you told me you have like 20 bottles of unopened supplements. Well, we were talking about the 2AM Amazon Prime Delirium. We're like, that's a fantastic idea.
Starting point is 01:23:14 And then you're like, wait, why do I have three different like Chinese foot massagers? How did I get these? And you're like, oh, I see what happened. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to just want more things. And so my new rule is that if it's going to cost, you know, probably I'd say more than $50, $75, I wait 30 days.
Starting point is 01:23:35 And if in 30 days, I still really, really want it and it makes sense in terms of like, you know, your budget or whatever it may be, and my wife's not going to be pissed at me, then, you know, you can decide to buy it or not. So how do you keep track? You put it on Amazon wishlist? Yes. I save it as a wishlist. Yeah. If it's on Amazon, I do. Otherwise I put it in a reminders doc and I got to tell you, I've done this for reminders doc where I just, there's a reminders app built into Apple. And I will tell you that I've done this now for about
Starting point is 01:24:02 three months and I would say 80 to 90% of the shit I would have normally bought. I just don't buy anymore. It's awesome. It is awesome. And I'm less stressed. I have less crap. Yeah. I've done this with clothes.
Starting point is 01:24:13 I just donated a ton of my clothes that I don't wear. And I probably have a quarter of the clothes that I used to. You were telling me about weeds. We've always sat down. You said I have 300 t-shirts. No, I didn't say 300. I said, I have too t-shirts. No, I didn't say 300. I said, I have too much shit.
Starting point is 01:24:27 And I pulled out this shirt that I'm wearing right now, which I got for free, which I love. It's very comfortable. But I was like, I probably have 50 t-shirts. That's fucking ridiculous. A, and B, I guarantee you, anyone who's spent time around me could be like, oh yeah, those are the eight t-shirts that you wear.
Starting point is 01:24:44 You don't even wear those other 40. Oh yeah. I wear black t-shirts most night. I've been fantasizing about going a little jobsy and then just getting a uniform being like, okay, I'm going to wear Mizunin Manchinos with a black t-shirt and like van slip-ons and that's it. Yeah. That's, that's hard on the dating life though. Like my wife would be like, change it up a little bit, you know? Yeah, I'm okay. I wouldn't have anyone to veto my monotony. I mean, there's no one who would care enough
Starting point is 01:25:11 about that kind of thing to veto the monotony of my wardrobe, which let's be honest is not exactly, you know, Gucci catwalk wear. I gotta say that's one of the things that I've, you know, we, you know, Gucci, uh, catwalk wear. I gotta say, that's one of the things that I've, you know, we, we did this little,
Starting point is 01:25:29 well, I don't know about what we did, the dinner thing about going, we did this little thing at dinner where when I turned 40, I went around the table and talked about things that I really admire about everyone that was at the dinner. And one of the things that I, I don't know if I'd mentioned this about you, but that like,
Starting point is 01:25:43 as you've increased your popularity and wealth and everything else over the years, you still keep it the same, man. You got t-shirts and flip-flops and cheap shoes and all kinds of shit. I love that though. That's like, you just keep it real, which is kind of awesome.
Starting point is 01:25:58 Yeah, well, I worry about, and we talked about this. Experience stretching. So you call it experience stretching. I don't know why it's called experience stretching, but hedonic adaptation same thing which is the unfortunate phenomenon of adapting to new levels of comfort or quality in the things that you own oh i can explain so that your your new baseline your new baseline for below which
Starting point is 01:26:28 you become dissatisfied and unhappy goes higher and higher and higher. I've got the best explanation ever. So here you go. You start off, you have a wonderful trip planned to Maui and you're like, gosh, I'm going to the beach.
Starting point is 01:26:38 This is going to be awesome, right? That's amazing. Then you see a sunset. You're like, oh, beautiful sunset. That was great. I really enjoyed that. You go to bed. Next day, you wake up, another sunset, beautiful sunset. Oh, guess what? I'm going to have a glass of scotch with this. It's 12-year scotch. This is great. Next day, you wake up. Oh, you know what would be great? That glass of scotch again. But if I
Starting point is 01:26:59 added a cigar to this and they got these Cuban cigars my buddy got me, I'm going to have one of these, right? And you keep adding on and layering and experience stretching this entire time. And all of a sudden, guess what? That sunset, the original, beautiful, amazing gift that you had that first night is not so special anymore because you don't have your scotch, you don't have your cigar, and you've experienced stretch this whole thing, and it's very difficult to go back from there. Where did you hear this? Where did you get the term? I'd never heard it before you brought it up. Some book. I'd have to go figure. This was a few years ago, some book. Yeah. So this hedonic adaptation thing is something I think about a lot. And part of why, I was just in, mentioned Maui. I was just in Kauai a few weeks ago with Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reese.
Starting point is 01:27:49 So Laird Hamilton famed big wave surfer. Everybody should see riding giants documentary. It'll blow your mind. And Gabby Reese, his wife was equally impressive in a million ways. And a bunch of other folks like Brian McKenzie and so on for XPT training, which was ice exposure, heat exposure. I love that. Underwater weight training.
Starting point is 01:28:11 Don't love that. Yeah, which is intense. And a number of other things. Kelly Starrett was also there. All of these people have been on the podcast. And the safe dosing of pain and or discomfort maybe in those circumstances and the practice of, this is part of what appeals to me of the idea of a uniform also, is getting, say, not fancy t-shirts, but like Hanes, just wearing something super basic, right? Few dollar t-shirt for a period of few weeks would help me to remember, or it would help to reinforce the
Starting point is 01:28:54 fact that A, nobody really gives a shit. Like most people are like, maybe one out of a hundred people will even notice. And then second, that it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't materially impact in any other way my life. And in fact, it simplifies a lot. And by doing that, I will be less likely to feel compelled. I don't buy a lot of clothing now. You're already like that, dude. It doesn't have to be the same thing over and over again. And you want a little variety for your spouse though, you know? Yeah. No, I hear you. But I mean, I'm not quite there yet, A. But B, I do think that the fasting and these various practices, and this comes straight, if you really want to get nerdy people listening, you could check out, this is available on public domain. If you search for Seneca on festivals and fasting, that is letter 13 in a
Starting point is 01:29:50 collection of letters called the letters to Lucilius. And it talks about setting aside a certain number of days each month or a week each quarter to subsist on the cheapest of food, the coarsest of dress, et cetera, so that you offset this hedonic adaptation, which leads to some pretty miserable outcomes. Taken to an extreme, you and I both know, and have spent time with people who have hundreds of millions of dollars, who are miserable cunts.
Starting point is 01:30:23 Oh, for sure. I mean, they're really unhappy people. And they're like, oh, my day was ruined because my friend only brought me a $500 bottle of wine instead of a $1,000 bottle of wine. I can't even drink this. Yeah, it's too bad. Ugh, that's disgusting. It's a terrible place to end up.
Starting point is 01:30:40 And not that I'm afraid of that, because I drink $4 wine from Trader Joe's and I'm perfectly happy most of the time but I worry about that something I worry about a lot I don't think you need to worry as much as most people man yeah that's true you're pretty I don't have very expensive tastes except when it comes to Japanese lacquerware
Starting point is 01:30:59 apparently and horse saddles and horse saddles yeah I have some Tim's house and he's got like crazy as gold plated horse saddles and shit I saddles, yeah. You go to Tim's house and he's got like crazy-ass gold-plated horse saddles and shit. I do have some weird stuff that I collect. Also from Japan. Oh, man. Well. This is fun.
Starting point is 01:31:15 Another wide-ranging random show. Anything else that you would like to mention before we... Yeah, you know, I've got two things I'll mention. A little plug at the very end. My once a month newsletter, which I... Oh, two times. Two times in one show. Well, listen, it's a podcast too.
Starting point is 01:31:35 Did I tell you I started my podcast back up again? Are you? Yeah. Really? Well, it's under the journal now. But yeah. So I have a newsletter called The Journal. You can subscribe at thejournal.email. It's a great newsletter. I got about 70,000 people on there that check it out, so I hope you join for that.
Starting point is 01:31:53 It's also a podcast. I just had some great guests on. I've had Elon Musk and a bunch of other folks on there. I hope you'll give it a listen. You can just type in The Journal Kevin Rose into iTunes and find it there. Thank hope you'll give it a listen. You can just type in the journal Kevin Rose into iTunes and find it there. So thank you guys.
Starting point is 01:32:08 Appreciate it. I'll give a couple more recommendations for people who want to explore. One is a sake recommendation that we all had. We went to the factory and just gulped it down.
Starting point is 01:32:23 We had the most hilarious, I have to just mention this tour. So Sake Factory Tour is on the itinerary. So we show up and this guy ended up being great, but he's like, oh, hey, you guys. All right, great. Take off your shoes.
Starting point is 01:32:40 Come on in. This is all in Japanese. And so we come in and he kind of walks us quickly past a bunch of these tanks campaigning sake. It's like, all right, you got it? All right, good. Look at the tank. It's bubbling.
Starting point is 01:32:52 Look at the tank bubbling. All right, great. That's the tour. And then walks us into his tasting room. No, no, no. Wait, before that, the one thing he did do is at the end of the tank. This was the clincher. This is the clincher.
Starting point is 01:33:04 Go ahead. So he had a sipping ladle, in effect, is the best way I'll describe it. And he gave us some extremely fresh, unpasteurized sake, which I'll be honest, folks, I'm a Japanophile. I've spent a lot of time here. I've had a lot of sake. Most of it kind of tastes the same. I mean, I know that's going to offend a lot of people, but generally most of it, you're kind of like, eh, okay. Good sake is good sake.
Starting point is 01:33:29 It's sake. I mean, if it's terrible, it's terrible, right? Yeah. But this stuff was fucking unbelievable. Oh, God. Everybody. I wanted to drink the whole ladle, and it was a big ladle.
Starting point is 01:33:41 And everyone on this trip can consume a fair amount of alcohol. These are experienced drinkers. And everybody was astonished. So we go in, then we go into the tasting room, and we're expecting he's going to sit down. He'll be like, here, well, first we're going to have this. Let me tell you about the notes and blah, blah, blah. But no, he sets out these glasses next to...
Starting point is 01:34:04 We each get one cup. Yeah, yeah. One no, he sets out these glasses next to each get one cup about, yeah, yeah. One glass, 10 bottles in a row. And he's like, yeah, no, just get in the line, like buffet style and go down and have a glass of each one. And he puts the, uh, the alcohol, like pours into the bottle at the top. Did you notice that? Oh yeah. Like a bartender, like a bartender. Yes. And so we just went down the line and just got hammed. Yeah, basically every person was ham-boned by the time they were done with like a 45-second tasting of 10 glasses of sake.
Starting point is 01:34:32 So we were in and out like 45 minutes hammered and then bought all the sake. The most efficient sales job ever. However, the sake is amazing. So this one has the hilarious name of Kiss of Legend, Japanese sake. And this is Junmai Daiginjo. Junmai is pure sake or unadulterated, literally means pure rice. Junmai, which I believe just means they haven't added separate alcohol into it, which you can taste for sure. And then Daiginjo,
Starting point is 01:35:06 which means about, I think I want to say 60% or so of the rice husk. I think it's a little grain husk, maybe higher has been removed. And this should be reasonably easy to find. I'm blanking on the producer name and my kanji are a little bit difficult to discern at this point in the evening. I would also say for those people looking for a book to read, I'm reading right now and I'm going to blank on the author name,
Starting point is 01:35:33 but it is so far fantastic called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. And spectacularly well-researched and well-written and complements my favorite podcast series of episodes I've ever listened to, which is Hardcore History. That's Dan Carlin, Hardcore History, Wrath of the Khans. So I think they're very, very complimentary. If you're more of an audio person, you could either listen to Wrath of the Khans on Hardcore History or get an audio version of this book that I'm reading right now. And I'm only about 5% into it,
Starting point is 01:36:07 but it's incredibly intelligently written and just a compelling and well-researched account of this figure and the legacy they left behind. Awesome. And last thing I'll plug is a documentary called The Birth of Saki. I know we've talked about this before, but all shot on really beautiful HD cameras. I guess everything's shot on HD these days, but... Shot on beautiful standard depth.
Starting point is 01:36:35 Standard VHS. No, but it really does cover the entire creation, kind of soup to nuts on creating Saki and how much labor actually goes into the process. It's a really touching story. So check it out on Netflix. Okay. You know what? Since you mentioned your newsletter, I think I'll mention mine as well. I'm pretty sure you can get to this Five Bullet Friday. It's very popular. It got lots and lots of folks, probably close to a million now, who get this every Friday. It's very popular. It got lots and lots of folks, probably close to a million now, who get this every Friday. It's just a couple of recommendations, cool things that I found, like the sake or the book or other things that I've come across. And you should be able to find it if you go to Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. It's free.
Starting point is 01:37:20 And you can check that out. Bertha Sake, fantastic. Kevin Rose. Hi. Tanjoubi omedetou gozaimasu. Happy birthday. Happy birthday gozaimasu. And we will talk to you guys soon. And signing off,
Starting point is 01:37:36 you'll be able to find links to all of the things that we mentioned, all the goodies, at the usual show notes page. That's tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you guys for page. That's Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you guys for listening. See you guys. 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
Starting point is 01:38:04 of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very 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 4hourworkweek.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.
Starting point is 01:38:50 This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is the future of financial advice. They've become incredibly popular among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country because they provide the same high-end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra wealthy, but for any account size and at a fraction of the cost. For instance, they monitor your portfolio every day across more than a dozen asset classes to look for opportunities to rebalance or harvest tax losses. Now, would you do the same? Are you doing the same? Probably not. And the power is in the software. Wealthfront now manages more than $4 billion in assets, which is up from around $2.5 billion when they started advertising on this podcast. They're growing incredibly quickly. Unlike old-fashioned private wealth
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Starting point is 01:40:12 making good decisions. They use investment theory to automate good financial behavior and decisions that people typically don't make, but should. So go to wealthfront.com forward slash Tim to get your first 15K managed for free, or just to get more details. Check it out to wealthfront.com forward slash Tim to get your first 15k managed for free, or just to get more details. Check it out wealthfront.com forward slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by ID Commerce and Logistics. I'm asked all the time about how to scale businesses quickly. Rule number one is removing unnecessary bottlenecks that are a headache and also an emergency break on growth. For many companies, one of the first things they should outsource is inventory management and fulfillment. There are companies that do this all day long perfectly for fast-growing companies. ID Commerce
Starting point is 01:40:54 and Logistics is one such company. They focus on helping online retailers and entrepreneurs outgrow the competition by handling all types of logistics for you. They manage your inventory, pick, pack, and ship, and handle everything you could imagine so that you can focus on the things you are best at instead of all of these details under the hood. I partnered with them myself during the launch of The 4-Hour Chef so that I could focus on promoting the book, which is what I'm good at. And they ensured that things I'm not good at got done perfectly. In other words, that readers were happy with dozens of different products we needed shipped out during holiday crunch season.
Starting point is 01:41:29 ID Commerce and Logistics works with many different types of businesses, including e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, subscription boxes, and dozens more. They're also integrated with top e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, my personal favorite, Magento, BigCommerce, and others, which makes the startup integration and partnership seamless. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 of your startup fees and costs waived. That is a big discount. Just visit tim.blog forward slash scale. That's tim.blog forward slash scale. Or you can go to idcomlog. That's idcomlog.com forward slash Tim.blog forward slash scale. Or you can go to IDComlog. That's IDComlog.com forward slash Tim.
Starting point is 01:42:09 You can go to either one. The easier one to remember is probably Tim.blog forward slash scale.

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