The Tim Ferriss Show - #391: The Random Show — On Fasting, Forest Bathing, How to Say NO, Rebooting the Self, and Much More

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose), rejoins me for another episode of The Random Show. In this one we discuss Japanese whisky, domestic speakeasies, wooden saddles, the rebooting power of Anthony de Mello's Awareness, poetry, the art of surrender and letting go, mushroom cultivation in the Pacific Northwest, fasting, learning to say no, and much more!This podcast is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs.You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas, or hire the perfect designer for your project based based on their style and industry specialization. It's simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you'll end up with a design that you're happy with. Click this link and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade.This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Hiring can be hard, and it and be super expensive and painful if you get it wrong. Today, with more qualified candidates than ever — but also more noise than ever — employers need a hiring solution that helps them find the right people for their businesses. LinkedIn Jobs provides just that by screening candidates with the hard and soft skills you're looking for so you can quickly find and hire the right person.LinkedIn can make sure your job post gets in front of people you want to hire — people with the skills, qualifications, and other insights that help LinkedIn paint a better picture of potential candidates. It's no wonder great candidates are hired every eight seconds on LinkedIn. Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want, and the first $50 is on LinkedIn. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim to get $50 off your first job post! Terms and conditions apply.***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? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.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.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find an amazing designer

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Oh, he's cheating with a little sip. I'm just having a little sip of the whiskey that we poured. Another random show. This is a random show slash crossover Tim Ferriss of... Wow, I haven't even had any booze yet. Tim Ferriss show slash wherever this gets cross-posted. This is more like one of your episodes that you do when people... Or you drink and people call in. It's kind of like that. The drunk dial episodes. The drunk dial, yeah. Have you done one of your episodes that you do when people or you drink and people call in

it's kind of like a drunk dial episode yeah have you done one of those in a while i have not done a drunk dial in quite a long time so we can consider this a drunk dial among friends yeah and you're here in person like we're not doing this remote which you know i have to say that it's it's really good to see you man yeah and it's my first time getting to check out your pad in portland undisclosed location okay portland i wasn't sure how secret that was or not and it made me think as we were prepping to sit down and do a random show how long i've known you because you mentioned that toaster your dog just turned nine he's's getting old. And I remember when he ate the cables during one recording of the random show. I don't know if you remember that.

Yeah. When he was a little pup. Oh, dude, he was eating everything back then. He actually, the scariest thing that ever happened with a toaster, this shows you what a bad parent I am. He ate through an actual entire plugged in outlet. No, sorry. It was not plugged in. It was a heating pad that had, you know, but he ate through the entire thing and I didn't even notice. And I looked down and can you imagine if that was plugged in?

Like there would be no toaster. He would have turned into a toaster. Right. Exactly. He'd have been burnt. Big time. So we have a bunch of display items that are out on this table in front of us. But before we get to that, do you want to describe where we're sitting?

Yeah, we're sitting. So I have, gosh, I would say that one of the things that is awesome about living in Portland, Oregon versus living in the Bay Area is that I was actually able to afford a place that is bigger than the size of a little apartment in San Francisco. So I built a house out here in Portland. So it took us three years to build it. Finally got it done. And I think when you're like, you know, well, I'm not 12, because I guess I would have wanted alcohol. When you're like 18 years old, you always think like, how cool would it be to have like a secret passageway that leads into like a bar or something right and speakeasy yeah a little speakeasy and you know i always wanted

uh something like that and we were going to put in a little entertainment room that would be bar slash you know listening to vinyl like a place to go and just kind of hang out anyway and so i talked to the architect i was like can you put like a secret door to get in here? And so we built this like fake bookcase and it kind of swings open and then you have a bar. So we're in our little bar here. It's really minimalist, very Japanese in feel. Reminds me of some of the bars we've been to.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was definitely inspired. Yeah. And what was that one bar we went to? Gen or something or other. Bar, there's Bar Gen, which is- It might be Bar Gen. Yeah.

And the bartender has something like six or eight seats inside. And amazingly enough, I had met him many years before when we sat down. You might remember this a couple of years ago in Tokyo. And he's like, I think I know you. And I was like, I think I know you. And it turned out that for the food marathon that I did for the four-hour chef, which was 26.2 dishes in 24 hours. These are large portions generally. We went to a restaurant called Brushstroke, I think it was called. And at the time, he was their superstar master bartender who would chip these softball sized ice spheres by hand with a little ice pick. That's one of the best parts of Japan is when they make their ice by hand with a pick. Very high labor.

Yeah. And this has that feel. And in fact, if you look at the wall, I'll try to paint a picture for those of you listening. There is this beautiful black wood behind the bar where the floating shelves are, which have down lighting coming up onto these beautiful bottles of various types of alcohol and liqueur and so on what is the texture or the technique behind what i'm looking at it has i'm not going to say scalloped but if you could imagine if you had pure black slate in a shower on the wall and water rivulets were running down that wall? It kind of has that look. It's shiny. What is that?

Well, this is a wood that I first learned about in Japan where they take these planks of wood and they actually use it for the exterior of houses, and they burn it. And so they actually take a torch to it, set it on fire, let it burn for a certain amount of time, it gets all the oils out and kind of just really hardens the wood. They put it out, and then it has this really beautiful aged kind of burnt wood look to it. So we decided to use that rather than have like wallpaper or something in here, we decided to use that rather than have like wallpaper or something in here we decided to use that as um the backdrop so it's all this like uh japanese burnt wood um so it does when you shine light on it it looks like there's kind of like water coming down it or like a little scaly or but it's just really beautiful stuff it's gorgeous and we will put a link in the show

notes to the actual technique and you can see how it's done because it's also used obviously as you can see here outside of japan i mean it's a technique i actually had this brought these were brought in from japan all right i don't know if they do it here all right well so if you want to go super honmono honmono is like the real deal the real mokoi in japanese they would say honmono uh and so if you want to go real, real super honmono, then you can bring the wood from Japan. Well, the nice thing about doing it, bringing it in from Japan, honestly, is that... The cost. Well, no. We weren't doing an entire house, right? This is not our exterior. It's one little room,

right? So it really wasn't that expensive to bring it in. And what are we drinking? I haven't had a sip yet. Am I skipping ahead? No, no, no. Let's do it. Let's do it. So what is this? To kick things off, this is a very special Japanese whiskey. Which I've never tried. Yeah, it's called the Card Series. And so essentially, what you're looking at here is this is the Joker, and it's done by Ichiro's Malt. And so this has, basically what happened

is they had all these whiskeys, 52 different whiskeys that were put into barrels and then kind of forgotten about for a while. And then the distillery went under, they found the barrels and they decided to put it into 52 different bottles with different card faces. So this is the Joker right here. And essentially, every card has a different quantity. So this one here, this is the least rare with 3,690 bottles of the Joker that were produced. And the most rare, I think were like 50 bottles or something like that. Um, so if you want to collect them, you can get the entire, you know, 52 cards and they're really kind of hard to find because it became very culty and, um, sought after. And now you can find them up at auction

and things like this. So this was, um, a little gift that, uh, to me that I tend to consume, um, rarely when I have good friends in town because they are really expensive. But you always got to have a couple awesome ones in on the top shelf. Well, cheers, man. Yeah. Cheers. It's so nice to see you and your family. Yeah. And to see-

It's different, isn't it? The previously grievously irresponsible Kevin Rose as a doting father is, is quite a, it's different twilight zone experience. it's nice actually. Like honestly, the other night when you guys got in, um,

you know, we like had a dinner, like, you know, didn't go crazy on the wine, just had a little bit of wine, uh, jumped in the sauna,

uh, got in the hot tub and like called it a night at like 10, you know? Yeah. And so like, that's kind of what you have to do. We have to wake up for kids at 7am. So this is a spectacular, sauna, got in the hot tub, and called it a night at 10. And so that's kind of what you have to do when you have to wake up for kids at 7 a.m. This is spectacular. Isn't that amazing? Spectacular. Yeah, it's really good stuff.

This is single malt whiskey. This is really nice. And I'm not a whiskey guy. I hate to admit because that sort of demotes me 17 levels on the manliness scale for some people. But there are a few types of whiskey that I like. This is one, and then you happen to have. Oh, dude, I have the Six of Hearts up there. That one was another gift where I went to a tasting where they were doing the card series tasting. And they had, you can see how much is left in that bottle.

I mean, probably one finger worth, you know, in terms of height. There was probably two fingers in total when I got it. And the lady that was doing the tasting was like, you can just take the bottle with you, like take it home. And the bottles alone sell for like that one, I think is about a $15,000 bottle, which is crazy. And, um, just take the bottle. You're like, I will thank you. I'm like, that's like four grand right there. Like, absolutely. Like, thank you so much. So it was amazing. So those are the only two bottles.

I do not collect these. I think it's a... And the Pappy up there is also... That's good stuff as well. That is just incredible stuff. Yeah, I also started collecting the Japanese whiskeys, like the Hibiki, aged Hibiki, you can see up there as well. So what's interesting about Hibiki, and Tim, you probably remember this, but when we were going to

Japan back in the day, Japanese whiskeys, you could go in Tokyo and down in the train station, there's actually one of my favorite places to buy Japanese whiskey. And you go in there, and I was buying bottles of Hibiki 30-year for right around, you could get them for like $400 for an entire bottle. And it was, I mean, that's a lot of money for a bottle. It's crazy, right? And you buy it, and you let your friends try it, and it's a crazy 30-year Japanese whiskey.

And then probably about seven or eight years later, they started running out of it because it became very popular. And now they don't produce it at all. Did it become popular with Japanese people or was it foreigners? Foreigners, yeah. So foreigners got like, they started realizing that Japanese were doing whiskey at a really high level. And then they bought up all the 30.

And so they ran out. And so now what's crazy is a bottle that you know you know it's just a few hundred dollars that same goes for the um the 17 up there which they also discontinued which i heard they're bringing back for a short amount of time um but anyway the bottles went like 10x in price and so now i i think those are like four grand a bottle or something like that it's crazy but if you were buying it back in the day it was like nobody knew you know it was just like oh wow this is just a really crazy expensive i'll just get one bottle i'll try and you know it makes me wonder also if there's something to be said for

developing a taste for whatever is unpopular at the time or unrecognized right so if if japanese whiskey is really popular you could look at whiskey from a much lesser known location and get the best of that or you could look at something that maybe is lost at sex appeal temporarily like sake we did a a tasting trip through part of japan you must remember that of course and we had you took me out for my birthday yeah yeah and we had the sake sort of right out of the oh god that was so good i'm not gonna say barrels sort of right out of the, I'm not going to say barrels, but right out of the containers and with the ladle. And it was stellar and very, very, very reasonable in terms of price. You could really get something that was only found in Japan, beautifully done, something that you could share with friends on a special occasion

that would not break the bank. Right. I mean, the thing about, you know this, Tim, way better than I do, but like the thing about, I think I love most about Japan is that you can take any hobby or any profession, and they do it at the highest level, right? So it can be aged coffee. Remember when we had that aged coffee? Yes, I do.

It's, you know, 30-year-old aged coffee by a little guy in a shop and there's, you know, six or seven other people sitting around the table. Good news, delicious. Bad news, it's a 45-minute pour over. Right. It's a really long process. Like you have to sit there and wait. But there's something amazing about being able to relax and sit there and wait for it and appreciate that person for what their craft. And we don't do that in the States, man. We don't have that appreciation for people,

individual people doing something in a high level. And you know, what's awesome about that is that guy is recession proof, right? Like there's nothing's going to automate his job away. It's the commodity stuff that's getting completely destroyed by technology. You know, it's,

it makes me think of something that, as a general theme I bring up a lot when I'm talking to people who are starting businesses or thinking of starting businesses, and they have a high level of skill in anything. And almost every person has a superpower, something that is, at the very least, easier for them to do than for most other people.

They may recognize it, they may not recognize it. But when I am talking to friends or acquaintances who are thinking of, say, starting a business, it's part of the reason why I always like to start with the conversation of what if you charged more than everyone else? What would you have to create that is sort of based on the superpower related to it that would then be worth a price that is at the highest end? In part because it makes you recession-proof, right? You have to look at things through such a different lens and the market doesn't have to be large to have a successful coffee shop like that market isn't large right but this guy is such a specialist and has ritualized something into sort of the plug and play cult format for people like you or like me.

I mean, you like that shit. You got horse saddles and shit at your house that you collect. I do. I'm an unapologetic Japanophile. And I can see the good, the beautiful, the bad, and the ugly in Japan as I can say in the US, but the attention to detail, the beautiful and bordering on pathological obsession to detail just scratches every itch for me. Yeah. And for that reason, you mentioned the saddles. I don't think I've ever talked about this,

but when I don't spend, uh, a whole lot of money on toys, uh, and, and I do spend money on, uh, a handful of things,

uh, but it's been very slow in development just to growing up with, uh, a family that was very, very money, sort of scarcity-minded in a way. But for the four-hour body, when I was writing the four-hour body, I remember promising myself, if, not if, at that point it was when I finished writing this book, if it is number one, New York Times, not number two, but if it's number one, I'll reward myself with buying a Japanese antique

of some type, which I'd never, I'd never bought any antiques of any type and love Japan have this, have always had, I mean, for decades, this obsessive fascination with martial arts. And years before, around the same time, actually, I was exploring a television series that involved doing horseback archery in Japan, which people can find online, actually, if they search trial by fire. I think it was trial by fire. You can find this weird video of me in Japan doing horseback archery. And so I decided to get a saddle. That was what I would reward myself with. And so I ended up with one of these saddles. And in fact,

one was really cheap. Some of these auctions are so weird. I haven't participated in many of them, but you'll see the, the unpredictability of auction dynamics where you'll, you'll see one item that for whatever reason has like two, you know, big swinging dick,

muckety mucks who are just punching each other in the face to win with the ego reward of having this item. And so it goes for five times what was anticipated. And then there's another one because that happened, like knocks out a bunch of folks and it's just empty. Like no one's doing anything. So I ended up getting two saddles for the price of one, because who the hell wants Japanese saddles?

Turns out, not a large market. Wooden Japanese saddles. Yeah, wooden Japanese saddles. And I love them. They give me so much joy every day. And something I've been thinking about, I want to give someone credit. And I think I'm getting the pronunciation right here. But Adeo Rossi, who's been involved in the startup scene for a very long time. I think it's Founder Institute. Am I getting that right? Maybe not.

In any case, but Adeo was recently in Austin, where I live. And he was doing a panel with a number of folks who were all very, very good. And it was a discussion of mental health. And he said something that I wrote down because it makes sense to me. And I think I've bumped into this occasionally. And I'm like, oh, there is some truth to this. And that is to the benefits of looking at things in the world and decisions, things you create and so on, not just through the lens of, is this good or bad, which can often be an ethical choice, right? Like, is this good for me in the world? Is this bad for me in the world? But also through the lens of,

is this beautiful or not? And I think the Japanese pay a lot of attention to this, right? Like you can get a cup of coffee, perfectly great cup of coffee in many places in Japan, but can this guy we're talking about, for instance, just create a beautiful, unusual experience that you talk about 10 years later? Case in point, he can. And there's a value to that. It's hard to really smack a label on it, but there's

really, there's something in the essence of that that I've grown to appreciate more over time. I hope some of that starts to carry over more into the United States and our appreciation of that as a culture, because I feel like, as a technologist like I can just see it 10, 15 years from now, like automation in a serious way is coming to pretty much every industry and every job, right? And if it's something that can be taught in a very easy, predictable way, it will be automated, right? It's the stuff that is creative, the stuff that is unique, the stuff that is hard to do and produce at mass, at scale, that will stand out and you'll always be secure. Now, you're not going to make, you know, that guy that's doing the 30, 40-year-old aged coffee, he's pouring, you know,

15 of those a day or whatever. The guy's not in a mansion, like living it up in Tokyo, right? But, you know, he takes a lot of pride in that i think that if you can be content and and really believe in and enjoy what you're what you're producing and it fulfills you yeah then that's all you really need yeah and japan's a great in a way it's sort of like a an art exhibit or a zoo of pocket obsessions. Yeah. You know what I mean? Exactly. You can walk through every alleyway you can walk through.

Exactly. You can walk through certain neighborhoods down alleyways and each shop is, I mean the size of a broom closet, right. But specializes in, there's one that specializes in like, I'm making this up, but like succulent display containers that you put on the

wall in a small room, like a bathroom. And that's the entire shop. That's all they do. Yeah. I love that. They go really deep down one particular little avenue that is their own, that they can own, you know? Yeah, totally. What else appeals to you most about Japan? Because I think there are many things I could talk about that appeal to me about Japan. I've lived there. I have a total love affair, long-standing love affair with the language.

What appeals to you about Japan? Well, I think the cleanliness is a huge piece of it. You could eat off the ground pretty much everywhere in Tokyo, right? And it's a massive city. It is unbelievably clean, which, not to interrupt, but which reflects not just a priority on the state or government level, but a collective behavior. That doesn't happen top down. It's a collective behavior. Right. I don't know how they kind of cultivate that. Like, how does that, you know, at a young age, how do you kind of like make sure that carries on to the next generation, right?

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not, I don't have a ready answer for that, but I would say that very often, I mentioned personal superpowers earlier, they're very often right next to our greatest defects. They're somehow also very close to our greatest weaknesses. It's very frequent.

I think in Japan, there is this light and dark side to shame. Exactly. I was going to bring up shame. So embarrassment, losing face, shame, bringing shame upon your family. Very big deal. Right. Remember, I don't know, like they're embarrassed for you,

which is crazy. Like sometimes like when you do something that's like awkward, they'll like rush out to give you something so that you're not embarrassed because they're embarrassed for you. Oh yeah. There are multiple levels of like recursive humiliation in Japan. It's just like the language and the culture has so many complex etiquette rules around hierarchy. And there's honoring language. There is what you would call in English, I guess, humbling language for yourself, which is self-deprecating. There are all these different layers of grammar and words that change based on how you relate to someone else. And it's the same with embarrassment. I think that's something that they've teased out

into a very complex set of rules and awkward interactions. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think the thing that sealed it for me is one time I was waiting for an Uber out there in Tokyo, and I was looking around, and I saw this old man coming outside of his house,

and he had a rag in his hand, and he was polishing his mailbox. Like, seriously, like putting, and I was there waiting like 20 minutes for the Uber, and the guy's like polishing it nonstop, and I'm like, wow. Yeah. I don't polish my mailbox.

You know, it's just like, that's like next level kind of like commitment to cleanliness and just respect for your items. Like how often do we just like throw shit out and just like don't recycle? And I wish we had more of that in our culture. But you know, you're right. it's a double-edged sword. There's a shame component as well. Yeah, but it's worth exposing yourself to if you have the opportunity or the means to do so.

I get asked a lot, what is your favorite place to travel? And it's an impossible question for me to answer because it really depends on... China? For what? Yeah, China china i love parts of china i've had great trips to china i've spent time in taiwan but there there are also some really rough i mean having lived in beijing where i decided it was healthier not to run outside

because my i would just blow soot out my nose afterwards we had the worst trip well we had awesome but we had a tricky trip yeah where you got completely scammed with artwork. Yeah, well, not only that, but think about, Tim and I went out to the middle of nowhere. There is a random show. If you search probably random show China edition, you can flash back a couple of years. A couple of years. That was like- A long time ago.

Eight years ago or something. Anyway, there was maggots that we were having to shit into and it was really disgusting it was a rough trip it was rough it was a rough trip yeah uh and there are many answers that i could give right i mean i i have really enjoyed some trips in china i've really enjoyed but it depends on what you want to get out of the trip right right if you want to feel totally lost like an alien in on a new planet but at the same time be in almost no danger whatsoever japan's perfect 100 tokyo yes if you want to visit an alien landscape yes and really feel like an alien you will get off the plane and everything will be alien and in all the right ways

like people the cool thing about japan is no one's a dick to you if you don't know japanese which is amazing which is amazing if you think about it everybody's super friendly and you know obviously if you're going to be a good tourist as you should you should pick up like you know a half dozen little phrases you can say to people outside of that, you really don't need to know the language. And they have the most, from a linguistic perspective, the most layup, friendly, overreactive encouragement you can imagine, right? Let's contrast this. I love Paris. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. Oh, yeah. But there are certain people, actually, this is more common in Montreal, not to throw them under the bus.

But if you don't speak really good French, that you'll kind of get scoffed at. And it's very hard. Dude, I've gotten it like, taxi drivers in Paris are dicks, like straight up. Like, you know that. Right. So in other words, even if you speak, if you're 80% of the way there, if you're a B plus student,

you're still going to have a tough time impressing anyone or getting a pat on the back. Right. Whereas in Japan, if you can, and when we were there with a couple of friends including our mutual friend tony conrad tony thought this was hilarious i'm like imagine for a second what you sound like to them if you can imagine somebody in the most broken english possible being like right can you where is hunger bathroom please know, that's basically what you sound like in Japanese to them. Right. But you say that, and you sound like sloth from the Goonies,

and they're like, oh, oh, good job. Oh, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. And they do give you this hand clap for performing like a seal at SeaWorld. And it feels really good. Yeah, it does. But yeah, all you need to know is good morning and where's the bathroom. And you're like the Michael Jordan of Japanese to the most folks you're going to encounter.

What else do we have here? We got some other random items laid out. Well, the thing is, people have listened to it before. We've done these random shows where we talk about books that we're reading we talk about products that we're liking like things like that so i mean i just grabbed a couple things that are actually there i might as well continue down the japanese theme so i moving to portland have been into forest bathing which is started in japan and the idea is that there are so many people because of the work culture out there that they are so many people because of the work

culture out there that they actually prescribe, doctors prescribe going into the forest and using it as a way to walk and relax and unwind. And there's been a bunch of research that's been done in these forests, trying to figure out what is it that's dropping people's cortisol levels, that's dropping, like increasing their dropping, increasing their killer cell count. They did all these studies where they drew blood and they checked on people that were walking in the forest and all these different biomarkers improved. And so there were a few things that they were able to conclude. One, there's a certain bacteria in the soil that's supposed to be really good for you that's in Japan. And the second is, I'm sure just

disconnecting and being in the forest is a big part of it, but also the scents and the aromas that the trees were putting off. And so there is a few trees in particular that they pulled out and distilled down into essential oils. And then in the hospitals, they would diffuse them out. And they saw a dramatic decrease in people getting sick at the hospitals in terms of like people getting flus and colds and things like that. And so I basically read this entire book on forest bathing and decided to buy a few of these essential oils and use them. You know, you can either diffuse them in your room or you can pour them over, you know, hot coals and a sauna. Hinoki is obviously a very popular

tree out there. So I got some Hinoki oil and there's, I think there's four or five different ones. Another one is a Hiba wood. This is another one here that you can smell And they smell fantastic I don't I'm not here to sell you essential oils I don't have any brands to recommend But they're I mean smell that It smells like a Japanese spa

Which one is that? That's the Hiba wood Hiba wood That does smell fantastic Yeah It's really cool stuff But Anyway So there's a couple

different books out there on forest bathing. You can just search Amazon for that. Um, if you're really into just trying to figure out how to slow down a little bit and learn more about the kind of Japanese way of disappearing into the forest and walking in the forest for longevity and health, um, you can learn a lot about it in this book, and they outline all of the different essential oils there. Do you remember which one you read? I do. If you were to, I can, you know what? I can pull it up and.

I just searched forest bathing on Google, and the third result, well, let's go in order. Four. These are the suggested results. Forest bathing. Forest bathing book. Forest bathing Portland is number three. Well, that's because

it knows you're here. It's using GPS. Oh, fuckers. So creepy. Wow. We did some forest bathing today, which was nice. We did.

I have to say, Portland is one of the, certainly from a mycological, from a fungi, mushroom perspective, one of the most incredible forest bathing opportunities

out there. Yeah, this is the most incredible forest bathing opportunities out there. Yeah. This is the book that I read right here. Forest bathing, how trees can help you find health and happiness by Dr. Queen Lee. And so that was one of the researchers that was doing all of this out in, out in Tokyo.

So forest bathing in Japanese is Shinrin Yoku. Shinrin Yoku. S H I N R I N. Yoku. force bathing in japanese is shinrin yoku shinrin yoku s-h-i-n-r-i-n yoku yoku is the bath portion of that what uh what is is that one of your items right yeah i don't really want to talk about that all right we're gonna we have so many oils this is another oil it's like a beard oil i use it's great we can wait till the show so you know one know, one of the books that I am rereading, and I don't reread a lot of books, but this is one that I've read probably five or six times in the last 18 months, is one that came through a recommendation from someone you also know, Peter Malouk. And he was a podcast guest, mostly involved in finance and wealth management and things along those lines, investing.

But the book he recommended was Awareness by a Jesuit priest also, as I call, a psychotherapist named Anthony DeMello. Have you ever read this book? No, I haven't. And he mentioned it somewhat briefly in our conversation and he but the the sales pitch which wasn't intended to be a pitch that got me was every time i read this book for for a few weeks afterwards i feel an incredible sense of peace and i'm paraphrasing but he said something like that i was like that's an odd statement coming out coming from the rest of the conversation. Yeah.

It was a sharp contrast to a lot of the subject matter. And I thought, interesting. All right. Well, awareness. And I looked it up and I think the subtitle, there are two different subtitles for some reason,

but one of the subtitles is the, the promises and perils of reality or something like that. And I was like, interesting subtitle and read this book pairs very well with Sam Harris's Waking Up app, actually, but has a lot of sort of, oh, fuck, caliber, aha moments in this book. From the perspective of self-awareness and distinguishing between, say,

the labels and stories you use from yourself and the self. It's also a very funny book. It's effectively a transcript of lessons or weekend courses that were given by Anthony DeMello. And as I am always, I was very skeptical going into this book because I thought it might just be another collection of woo-woo, hand-wavy bullshit, because a lot of these books are.

And it really had an impact on my life immediately and has become this sort of reboot in the sense that occasionally, I'm sure everyone has had the experience that your phone is just kind of slow, things aren't working, maybe your bars are dropping. Shit's just going kind of wonky. And you're like, you know what? I need to restart my phone. Yeah. You have real phone issues. Like I'm in outside of that. Like I can't text you. It turns into like those green texts. Oh yeah. My phone needs an update. This is very old phone. I tend to, I'm very dull edge when it comes to phones. I wait until, I want as many bugs to be fixed,

found and fixed with new versions of iOS, new phones. Such an old man thing to say. It is. Give me the old. I have an iPhone 6S or whatever this is. It's ancient. Yeah.

Eventually I'll get a new phone. But the point that I'm making is when your phone isn't working, when you're having trouble with your computer, when you're in trouble with iCal, But the point that I'm making is when your phone isn't working, when you're having trouble with your computer, when you're having trouble with iCal, one of the first things that someone is going to ask you if you go to a genius bar or deal with a tech, sort of tech-savvy person is,

when's the last time you rebooted this? When's the last time you quit and restarted? And for me, this book, Awareness by Anthony DeMello, has that effect psychologically and emotionally. You're going to sell 100,000 copies of this by saying this. It sounds awesome. And I'm happy to. This is one of a handful of books that I now buy by the dozen in paperback.

It's a short book. It's a very fast read that I buy by the dozen to have in my house so I can give them to friends. I literally have an entire shelf in my guest bedroom that I can tell you what the other books are. Well, I appreciate you. This is the first time I'm hearing that. Where's my copy, dude?

I give them to all my friends. You don't understand. My friends visit them. My friends who visit Austin. I know you have an entire brood, sort of pending soccer team that you need to cart around the world but the uh awesome awareness dude it's not on audible you don't you don't see uh if it's not on audible i probably tried to get the rights at some point did you know that i must not have but awareness by anthony de mello

you can get on kindle that much i know I have the new Kindle right there that's one of the things I was going to talk about this book has a probably 90% hit rate with people I recommend it to that's awesome it's really good

the other books that I have are How to Change Your Mind Michael Pollan of course I have a whole rack of that book and then also The Gift which is a collection of poems

by Hafez H-A-F-I-Z, which is just a wonderful and very funny collection of poems. And I'm not the person historically who has read poetry by any stretch. That's so crazy. Are you starting to get into poetry? In the last few years, I've been reading a few poets, not many, and also become very open to, it seems like maybe unrefined poetry in the sense that I've been turned off of poetry many times in the past. I think because there's a breed of poet or a breed of poetry many times in the past yeah i think because there's a there's a breed of poet or a breed of poetry fan who seems to be similar to the hoity-toity fan of say abstract art where it's

like if if it if you need an explanation then you don't get it right kind of thing there's a lot of poetry i read it i'm like i don't fucking get it. And I'm not into that kind of poetry. But Hafez makes perfect sense to me. Maybe spending a little bit of time in psychedelic space helps with that. And then poetry like Mary Oliver. Mary Oliver's amazing. I've really become a huge fan of her work.

A handful of folks. I don't have a lot of exposure, but have you been reading poetry? Well, I just got a book on how to read poetry, actually, that I thought was pretty interesting. I went down to Powell's probably just a month or so ago. And I was, Powell's is a, for people that don't know. Powell's is amazing. It's like one of the best, well, I would say it's the best bookstore in the United States for sure. It's actually still a bookstore that's independent bookstore

that's thriving and doing really well here in Portland. It's massive. It's like the size of like a Costco or something. It is truly enormous. Yeah, and they have a whole poetry section. And you know, for me, I've always been a fan of, I invested in a company called

JOR that does guided journaling on iOS and iPad. How do you spell it? J-O-U-R. It's like short for journaling. So they do these like encrypted guided journals that you can do. And the reason I wanted to get into that is I've just read about the benefits of actually kind of just opening up your heart and pouring out a little bit of what's going on inside as a way to be very therapeutic and just kind of release certain things that you may be holding on to. And there's a lot of, obviously that's a big part of poetry as well.

And so I was like, well, I'd like to read what other people are, how they're releasing their emotions and also maybe eventually get into this myself, not in a way that I would ever share publicly, but just something like, I think that you and I are the same in that we're both like,

wanna experiment with different things, like all the time, right? Trying new things. And so this is just one of those things where I was walking down the aisle and I was like, sure, I'm gonna pick up a book on poetry. Why not? Grab the gift.

It's really good. Cool. And it's funny. The guy is a really funny fucker. He's very funny and very irreverent. Actually got into a fair amount of trouble back in the day from present-day Iran. And you read 50 pages and you're like,

if this guy were alive today, he would be in my top 10 people I would want to have drinks with. That's awesome. Yeah, he's very, very funny and profound. And it requires a very high level of sensitivity and artistry and wordsmithing. Of course, these are translated by Daniel Ladinsky, in this case

to achieve that it's a very hard effect to produce in such a short format well i think yeah what else are you reading uh well i will say or have read the thing in the last three months that probably well it just consumed me this summer, was a course by Michael Singer, who wrote The Untethered Soul. So he has a course over that was on Sounds True. You know that they're like a publisher? Yeah. So he has a course that's a video course. And it's a five session, like hour and a half, two hours per video. No, sorry, eight session,

eight or nine session, hour and a half, two hours per video on surrender and just really how to embrace surrender and incorporate it in your everyday life and how that is one of the most powerful things that you can do and how it just really, really simplified letting things unfold for me. How do you, how do you, or could you give an example of how you might use this concept of surrender without becoming driftwood in the flow of life. Sure. Because it's sort of, for some people, myself included, has a connotation, which is from my own experience, I suppose,

or just perception of passivity. Sure. Yeah, I get that. That you've lost your free will and you're just sort of an impassive creature taking whatever life throws at you. Yeah. Well,

I think it's, well, there's a couple of things. One of the things that I appreciated about the course and when I'm still continuing to learn, cause I'm going back and listen to it, you know, it's good when you're going back and listen to it like two or three times.

And one of the things that he talks about is just this idea that I think we can all agree on that. We have these little programs that are essentially in us that have been either handed down to us by teachers or parents or whatever it may be that are how we interpret the world as it hits us. So, for example, if you were cheated on by a girl in the past and something kind of comes close to that by a new person that you're dating, maybe they're stayed out too late and didn't call you or something like just like happens that, that activates that little scar that you have, you can then go and really work

yourself up, right. And that applies to so many different things. I mean, it's like, you know, we're talking about coffee earlier, I can enjoy an amazing single origin coffee from a Japanese up, right? And that applies to so many different things. I mean, it's like, you know, we were talking about coffee earlier. I can enjoy an amazing single origin coffee from a Japanese artisan, but you hand that same cup of coffee to someone that's Mormon that has been told that coffee is a sin and it's against your religion, you're going to have a completely different experience when trying to consume that beverage, right? So there are all these little things, these little programs that have been installed, whether we know it or not, you know, and a lot of them we don't know. So it can just be a reaction to something that has previously happened to us in our childhood,

or even, you know, through our parents yelling at us, like, I'm, thankfully, I'm the opposite of my father, my father was a very verbally aggressive thing, per human. And so when I hear certain types of aggression like that, I tend to kind of back away from it because it's hitting that stuff inside of me. Yeah. So his whole thing is this, this idea of surrender is really being able to identify when that is happening and seeing when that's happening and understanding which programs

aren't really serving you any longer and being able just's happening and understanding which programs aren't really serving you any longer and being able just to release and let them go. And when you can release and let go of those little scars that we've been accumulating over decades, we can just become free. And it's so amazing when you can finally just rest and let the world kind of unfold and not get pissed off about the person that cuts you off in traffic or any number of little events that happen throughout the day. And he has really some amazing, really compelling examples throughout this entire course. But it's helped me really examine my reactions. And it goes hand in hand with meditation in that way.

You're going to love awareness. Awesome. Yeah. I sounded like these, these sound like birds of a feather, very complimentary, very complimentary ways of feeding your mind and emotions. And you've been talking about this,

this surrender course for a while now in our conversations. So I'm definitely intending to check it out. And The Untethered Soul, his book, has been recommended to me on a number of occasions. So I'm going to give it a taste. I think you'd really enjoy this course, because you're going to sit back and it's video, and I would just let it play when I had some downtime. And there's just, it's funny what people think of, your reaction was the exact same one that I had initially, where surrender is this kind of passive thing. And it's like, gosh, it seems like, it feels like a weak thing, actually, if you think

about it. Like you're surrendering. Oh, that's the weakest thing. But think about it this way. It is the hardest thing to do. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you're like, that mother, right? Like, what's harder harder to get angry at them or to surrender and just let that pass through you rather than hit you yeah it's hitting

you in some way right and so it's not this course is not about like having people step all over you because obviously that would be a horrible thing and no one wants that but it's it's really about understanding and being able to choose and let go of probably 98% of it, right? Like there's still things that I get amped up about. Certain things aren't going well in our country or there's certain things that, you know, people are getting mistreated or, you know, there's things that will really still charge me to do things.

But I realize now after taking this course and kind of revisiting it, that most things you realize really don't have a whole lot to do with you. If someone's really pissed off at you, they're dealing with something. Why should it then come out and affect you and your being? You should have compassion for that person because they're going through a rough time. There's a way to flip this stuff that gets really interesting. Yeah.

And even if you don't have compassion, just taking the second to pause and recognize that it's not serving you. Like, it's not going to translate into any action that is productive. Like, what are you going to do? Chase the guy down to cut you off and get out of your car at his office that he's running into

because he got into a fight with his wife and punch him in the throat? I mean, what do you want? People do that. People do. But it's not like that. That's especially bad energy allocation. And something that's predictable.

Like that's going to always happen to you. It's like, that's like getting cut off is going to happen to you for the rest of your life. You know, hundreds of times, like, why are you going to get so charged up about it every single time?

It's ridiculous. You know? Yeah, for sure. I'm excited to hear what you think of awareness. It'll pair very well with that. Yeah, I love stuff like that. It's just like, you know, any way that we can just kind of get a little better understanding. And to your point earlier about Sam Harris's course, I think that Sam has the best meditation course for people that want to take it seriously. I made a meditation app with the thinking of just doing a free unguided timer

and some very basic instructions. But that's great if you want something that's free. Sam's is a paid course, and I think that he goes deeper. And I love it. It's not just window dressing. It's really taking meditation seriously. I know you completed the 50 days as well. Yeah.

Yeah, I just finished up the 50 days and I thought it was phenomenal. Yeah, it's super strong. And there are different strokes for different folks in terms of meditation styles. Oh, for sure. And his style is not for everybody, but for the right person it it's

it's really helpful as a skill progression as a as a sort of logical progression of skill development what am what am i holding up here this is something might as well oh yes can we talk about this yeah let's talk about it might as well talk about it. This is something that I've been downing a lot of since I got to your house. And on the can it says DRAM, D-R-A-M, and then the particulars, that's the brand. And then cardamom and black tea. No sugar, zero calories. What is this thing that I'm holding? Yeah, so this is interesting. And this is a company that actually someone that I know here in Portland

was like, you've got to try this sparkling. A chef. She knows, yeah, she's a chef. And she knows that I drink sparkling water. And she's like, you've got to try this sparkling beverage. It'll change your world. And I was like, well, why? There's so many of them out there.

Like every Whole Foods aisle or whatever has, you know, a hundred of these. Right. And she goes, no, this is different. They're actually bitters makers. So remember like bitters and cocktails and they create these concentrates from real herbs and spices and like very bitters focused and then put them in sparkling water so it's not like you're never going to see on the side of like one of these cans like natural flavorings like that's not what they do like they're they're hand pressing their ginger they're doing all they make these zero calorie beverages i would say i don't know if you agree with me but it's like an order of magnitude better than anything you find in the store they're really really good

they're really good. The Black Tank cardamom is my favorite, by the way. I think that's... Yeah, this one, I tried a bunch. This is the current fave. You have an entire refrigerator full of these. And you and Tony, who I mentioned earlier, brought this to my attention. I'd never tried it before that.

And we should say, just in full disclosure, we're looking at it, and I've talked to the founders, and we're considering investing. Neither you or I have invested in this company. No, we haven't. But whether I invest or not, it's really good stuff.

Yeah, it's really good stuff. And they do a CBD one. Can I say that you tried it? You're okay with that? Sure, yeah, I'm fine with that. You do psychedelics and shit. What was that? I said you do psychedelics and shit.

You're fine with saying you did a little CBD at my house. They make a CBD one that has 25 milligrams of CBD, which is what Michael Singer. Michael Singer loves CBD cardamom. Oh, wait, no, I take that back. Don't sue us. Yeah, exactly. Matthew Walker from Why We Sleep,

the Berkeley scientist that has a sleep lab in Berkeley, he recommends 25 milligrams of CBD for sleep. And they do some of the best. There's one called Beauty Bubbles that is the best CBD. You wouldn't even know there's CBD in it. That's how you know it's good. You have no idea. You have no idea. There's from a taste perspective. It doesn't taste like weed. No. That'd be terrible. Yeah, that'd be terrible. And it has a bunch of different adaptogens in there as well.

But these things are awesome. You can buy them on their website. You can just search like DRAM, D-R-A-M, Sparkling Beverage. DRAMapothecary.com from Colorado. Anyway, it's my favorite sparkling beverage. And they do direct-to-consumer. They're not in all the stores yet. Yeah, it's, it's my favorite sparkling beverage and they do direct to consumer. They're not in all the stores yet. Yeah. It's really good.

I mean, I, I've had, sorry, Kevin, probably like nine of these in the last 24 hours. Fantastic. What else is on your mind,

man? Ah, gosh. Um, just trying to kind of like, uh, do less work stuff. Um, not in terms of like taking on less startups, like do less work stuff, not in terms of like taking on less startups,

like not actually building stuff, more just investing. And so I've been doing that through True Ventures. And then also just exploring rather than do, you know, 20 things at once that I want to explore and get excited about, picking two or three and then just really following through on them and doing them really deep. So, you know, this summer for me was all about, um, cause I live in the Pacific Northwest and I was all about mushrooms. And so, you know, I went out and bought a couple thousand mushroom plugs, um, cut down some, uh, oak trees, not, not big oak trees,

but branches, and then inoculated those branches with lion's mane and a couple other specimens. So that means, just to paint a picture, you're drilling holes into these logs that kind of simulate branches that would have fallen in the forest. And then you're injecting mushroom spores into this wood. Right. So you drill about an inch into the wood,

and then you get these little wooden dowels that are inoculated. So they look like little pieces of round peg wood, and they are all frosty with fungi growing on them, or mycelium, I guess. And then you pound it into the log with just a rubber mallet, and then you put a thin layer of wax like just a rubber mallet. And then you put a thin layer of wax on the outside of that to prevent anything else from getting in there. And then you cover them mostly in the summer with like, cause it does get a little hot here. And so

we cover them with some like some shade cloth. And I went out there and watered them kind of once a day, just kind of keep the logs a little moist. And then in the fall, either this year or next year in the fall, the lion's mane will really start to just come out of them. And then in the fall, either this year or next year in the fall, the lion's mane will really start to just come out of them. And I'll have these massive lion's mane that I'll turn into, chop them up, saute it with a little bit of garlic and butter, and you'll have just an amazing mushroom that is also really good for the brain. There's been a lot of studies done on lion's mane in the brain and brain health and helping you with memories and recall. And it's, yeah, it's good stuff. You are also doing a lot of fasting.

Yes. You want to talk about that? Yeah. I mean, I talked to you, you know, when we checked in, when I first got here and we were chatting about fasting and you're like, yeah, I've been fasting for 18 hours now. And I was like, oh, really? Like how often are you doing that? And then we had a whole discussion about it. But how often? Yeah, what are you using? Well, you know, I started Zero, the fasting app, about two years ago.

And that really has taken off. We've had, gosh, close to, I think, over 40 million fasts now or something like that. That's really wild. Yeah. And we've got a million people fasting on it a month. And it's growing like crazy. Zero. Yeah. And it's growing like crazy. Zero. Yeah.

And it's completely free. Peter Attia just joined as the chief medical officer to really help put some medical rigor around what you should be doing, especially with extended fasting. You know, there's like magnesium and some other supplements and things you want to be considering when you're doing longer, especially water only fasts. So, um, you know, for me, I do a quarterly, uh, five day fast. Um, and then I will try and do, uh, at least five days a week of 18 hours. Um, and that for me, I can find, you know, I, I gotta tell you, I still do love this. These Portland beers out here are really good. And I know I, well, this is, this is the hell that I have to face

because I love meditation and all these things but I also like to have a couple beers so on the other side Kevin is fasting 18 hours a day all of his other calories he consumes are from beer I have a window of two hours where I just get hammered

seriously though in the summer time the beers are so amazing that I will just become a little piggy and I'll just get super fat because I'm just having these amazing beers and they go right to my gut. I find that at 18 hours, I can pretty much throw anything at me. Not that I want to,

because I want to try and eat healthy and pretty well-rounded, but I can slim up quite well and not have issues with weight, which my dad's side of the family was all obese and had heart disease and all that stuff. So it's something I take pretty seriously and try and maintain a pretty lean physique. So 18 hours is kind of my sweet spot there. When you do your five-day fasts once a quarter, are those water fasts? Are they fast-mimicking diet fasts?

I did only one five-day water fast, and it was so brutal. It was brutal not because of the hunger, but because of the sleep. I had a really hard time sleeping, and I got really cold. Rapid heart rate. Yeah, exactly.

Rapid heart rate, all that good stuff. And magnesium will help with a little bit of that stuff. But yeah, you really want to, if you ever do anything like that, you want to talk to a doctor, be under supervision. You want supervision. You really want supervision. So I'm doing something called a fasting mimetic, which is like you do limited calories, about 500 calories a day.

This is like the Walter Longo FMD, fast mimicking diet. Exactly. So this is, Walter Longo is a scientist out of USC and he basically developed this protocol for cancer patients. It really helps reduce the effects of chemotherapy.

So you're not getting a lot of the nausea and things of that nature. Makes it more effective too, as I understand it and we know friends i mean i'm gonna mention names but oh he's come out the ceo zero oh great right now mike mazer has come out and talked about this he had stage four cancer and used uh this this fasting as part of his regimen with in conjunction with chemotherapy pre-treatment yeah he would do a three-day fast or something along those lines. Yeah, I think it was two days prior to chemo

and then during chemo and then two days after. So that was his five days. And he was in a lot better shape. I remember one time he called me up and he's like, I didn't fast for my last round of chemo and I'm just obliterated. Like he could really tell the difference.

And they have, Walter has done some amazing work, and you can go and search his work on YouTube, and you'll see the videos of the rats and mice that he's inoculated with chemotherapy, and he does the fasting ones with the non-fasting ones. And the ones that have fasted are running around the cages,

same dose of chemotherapy, and the ones that have eaten food are just like on their sides. Well, I want to say that that was also from remembering correctly mike's experience where he did the fasting and uh other folks he got to know who were undergoing treatment at the same time or like laid out on the couch yeah having a tough time moving and he was doing like 10 mile runs yeah he was running which is crazy um so, you know, there's the one piece of actually the one study that I really love was this one that they had these women that had had breast cancer, but were in remission. And it was something like 2500 women, it was a decent sized pool. They have them do just a very simple circadian rhythm kind of fast, which is, you know, you don't have any food after sunset and then you fast for 13 hours. So it's mostly just kind of like, you know, sleeping.

Sun up, you're allowed to eat. Yeah. Basically. Basically. And of those women that followed the protocol, they had a 36 or 38% reduction in reoccurrence of breast cancer just by fasting 13 hours, which is nothing. That is the easiest fast you could do. So there's a lot of benefits to it in terms of inflammation markers, in terms of your obviously better glucose levels

if you're not nighttime snacking. You don't have elevated glucose when you go to bed, which is huge. I think we blew the nighttime snacking yesterday. Well, you went whole hog on that tub of ice cream. Oh, I went whole hog on that tub of ice cream. Oh, I went whole hog. I would say we split it. Yes, engaged in some behaviors that make one... Eat ice cream.

Indulge in things like ice cream. That ice cream was amazing. Yeah, it was. I don't know what that is, it has this layer of like ganache yes the chocolate it's got like it's got about a quarter inch of ganache on the top with sea salt on top of that and then it's a caramel ice cream underneath what is that stuff do you know the name jewel dude it's a local place called ruby jewel it is unbelievable if you don't want to eat an entire pint of ice cream do not buy it because

it will not last yeah that's the problem i have i i because it's local here and they always come out with these summer flavors with like strawberries and stuff and so you can see why i do the 18 hour fast i really am good most of the time i but i do go off the rails i'm like you dude you used to do those cheat days and yeah i remember going with you in the morning to the bakery and you'd get these massive bear claws. Oh yeah, they're delicious. And just put those, those were like huge. Those were like nine inch bear claws.

Oh, I miss those. They're so good. Yeah. Man. Time for dinner? Yeah, I think we've got to go to dinner soon. Anything else to, to plug or talk about?

Ah, well, I would say. Someone posted this on my podcast too. You have any, like, could you talk about the fact that you're doing anything with the new book or anything or no? We had to cut this out. Well, no, I can talk about it. And actually I'm surprised I haven't told you this. So I was working on a new book. I'm not going to. Oh my God. You pulled the plug on it? I pulled the plug. Oh my God. So this is a book about... This is an exclusive. So I was working on a book

entirely about saying no. And gathering... I know you knew that. People listening didn't know that. Oh yeah, there's other people listening. A book on saying no and gathering tactics and systems and rules and language and so on from many, many people who are good at this. And one of the challenges of writing a book on no, at least for me, is that I kept on coming up with all these reasons why I shouldn't write the book. And so, I said no to the book. I returned the advance. I canceled the contract. Holy shit.

But I have, and I could go into that. Well, let me go into it. I think this is maybe worth talking about for a minute. What I realized was it was putting a real strain on my relationship with my girlfriend who I love dearly. She's awesome, by the way. This is the first time I've met her, which is crazy. She's great and really, really wonderful. And I was putting a strain on the relationship. And particularly, I'd misjudged how long the book would take to do. I thought I could sprint over the summer and do it in three to four months. Turned out it was going to be much more complex, would require a lot more writing on my part, and would have to be extended at least six months. And that would require canceling the vast majority of things in

my calendar and disappointing my girlfriend on a number of levels that were important to me and her that, uh, that I not bend on. And I was like, for what, for what to write a book for, uh, the world, broadly speaking to jeopardize this relationship. No, like that's,

that's, that's a decision that young Tim would have been like, fuck that. I was just going to say that. Yeah. Young Tim, younger Tim. I mean,

I'm embarrassed to say probably not that much younger Tim, but younger Tim would have viewed returning in advance and canceling a book as a gigantic sign of weakness and quitting. And I've spent a lot of my life developing a very high pain tolerance and being able to just out endure. And I would spent a lot of my life developing a very high pain tolerance and being able to just out endure. And I would have forced it. But I was able to zoom out. I mean, it sounds like this is right along the lines of the surrender course, right along the lines of the awareness.

I was able to zoom out and say, wait a second. I'm viewing this as a very binary thing. Maybe this isn't a binary thing. What I realized was at this point in my career, I'm very fortunate that I don't have to publish anything on any given timeline. And by returning the advance and canceling the book, I still have 200 pages of material. That's a lot of material. I was just going to ask you about that.

And I'll give a teaser for folks. I'm going to completely redesign and relaunch the, the website, the Tim.blog website, which hasn't been done in forever. Do you have a designer? It's all, it's basically done.

Yes. Wow. Yeah. It's basically done. You did it yourself. I got back into the HTML. Looks great. It looks like GeoCities.

And a great, great help, great help from Matt Mullenweg and the folks at Automatic. And I am actually going to get back to writing on a regular schedule. Oh, that's awesome. I'm going to start putting stuff out. That's the plan, at least, in a way that mimics how this all started. Before the book, before the four-hour work week even, the blog was what helped launch things.

I was just going to ask you if you were going to, like, why not use this content? I mean, it's going to be great content. I'm going to use a bunch of it. And there's some fantastic stuff. And I can say there's some fantastic stuff because it's not dependent on me. I really found some people who are just fucking incredible at this and give me a little hint on the book that i want to know like

since we're doing a little exclusive exclusive here um what is one thing that you learned okay let me put let me phrase it put it to you this way what was the aha moment for you where you realize like wow i have something that is new and unique enough that I need to go write a book about this. Like, what did you, what was that moment? Yeah. So, I'll answer it maybe in a way that is a bit lateral, but I decided to write the book, not because I said, I know the magic sauce for giving the answer that people need is because I wanted to gather more tools and resources for myself to become better at it myself. Turns out that I think I'm pretty good at it. In other words, I would go to a lot of friends asking them for advice and they're like, dude, you're the best person I know at doing this.

You should be writing that. And in some cases that was true in other cases they're folks like our friend josh who's incredible at it but he doesn't view himself that way right oh cook yeah oh he's really good he's really good but yeah but his his his in his position in his work relative to maybe some other Michael Jordans of saying, no, he didn't consider himself to be very good, even though he is. Looking at any normal sort of group of people, he's excellent. So it started out, as almost all my books do, as a very personal journey to learn how other people do this so that I could borrow their principles and techniques and so on. The aha moment I would say that I had, and this also coincided with realizing, oh shit, this is going to take at least another six to nine months.

This is not a sprint for three months. And I can do a lot in three months. I mean, I did 200 pages in three months, but I was like, to get it right, to make it, because I have no interest in writing good books. And I'm not saying my books are the best thing since sliced bread. I'm not saying they're good literature compared to Tolstoy or anyone you might pull out of a hat. But my goal at least is not to write a good book. Because if you're going to put in that much effort, that's like running 20 miles of a marathon. It's like, no, do the last 6.2, which is really like the second half of the marathon, which is the hardest,

because you want to put out a great book. And I was like, all right, to do a good book, I could do a good book, and my fans would would buy it and it would be helpful, but it wouldn't be enough. And I'll tell you what that means. You can get the best language in the world, template emails, auto responses, and so on to give people. And that's part of what I thought I needed. And it's necessary, but not sufficient. If you don't do a pretty major psychological overhaul and develop this awareness that we've been talking about, like the observer status of your own patterns and stories and codependence also,

where you feel like you're responsible for managing the emotional states and responses of other people, the templates and so on are going to seem really attractive and then a week later, you're going to be back in your email the templates and so on are, are going to seem really attractive. And then a week later, you're going to be back in your email doing all the same shit.

It's not going to work. And crazy. You should write this book. This sounds awesome. I wrote a lot of it. I wrote a lot of it. And, uh,

it, there were, there were some really important pieces to touch upon. Uh, and what I realized is that you have topics that are sort of independently treated well in like five different genres. And to write a book on saying no, that actually works,

that provides a systematic approach that really, really, really works, you kind of have to take those five genres and put them all into a book. I'm curious, was this, did you plan on having this be something that you could apply to things outside of, say, a work scenario?

Because I know a lot of people would say, Tim, like, dude, that's nice that you have 100,000 people wanting things from you. I don't have those demands on me. But I think there's even more power in saying no to things like Netflix or saying no to something else and just sitting. It's not that you have to fill the time with something.

I feel like that's what we're always trying to do. Like, how can I fill the time with something better? But it really is. All right. So you're also touching on something that made this book very difficult, which is when you start to really investigate no, and a book on saying no is also, has to be a book on why people have trouble saying no, which is also a book on why people say yes

to too many things. And before you know it, the book is about everything in the fucking universe. Like it just, it bloats. Sure. And very quickly, and I put in a quote and actually the first chapter from john muir i think it was which was in effect like whenever you try to separate out one thing in the world you real you find it hitched to the rest of the universe and uh

constraining this book was very very challenging i bet uh because as you pointed out there are many different types. Because as you pointed out, there are many different types. So many rabbit holes to go down. There are many different types of temptations to which you should say no. Broadly speaking, they could be put into two categories, internally generated distractions, and then sort of externally imposed invitations, distractions, requests, et cetera.

And they both depend on certain types of psychological reformatting. And I decided to focus on some of the commonalities. But the book, it's not going to be a book. But when I say it's not going to be a book, here's the thing. I could put a bunch of stuff on the blog, fine tune it, make it better,

and then publish it as a book a year from now. Why don't you just do a series of blog posts to start? Well, that's the plan. Yeah, that'll be great. And then if I decide to do a book, it's going to be a better book if I do it later. It'll be more refined. And the saying no is really not limited or specific to work or personal.

Some of the scripts are specific to work or personal. But it's like, because say declining going to a work meeting where someone of a similar level in the hierarchy as yourself or below is requesting your attendance is very different from say declining the baby shower invitation from someone who thinks that you're their best friend or one of their best friends and you don't feel and you don't feel the same right about them that's different right and the language you're going to use is probably

very different the consequences could be very different the way you might have to do damage control on those consequences which is also a chapter that i started working on is like if shit really goes sideways and you feel like you need to fix it what do you do what's the cleanup procedure how do you become like the the haritel character in Pulp Fiction, like the cleaner? What do you need to do? And a lot of those skill sets apply not only to work situations. I think that work is actually the easiest, even though many people may not view it that way. Even in the beginning stages of your career, or when you feel

like you don't have many options, the fact of the matter is you always, now I'm like getting into it, but you always have options. You always have options. They might just not be very attractive to you, right? You always have options, always. And so the book is also was intended to explore that like why do we artificially constrain our options and if you are seeing a binary choice of a versus b and both are unattractive what are you missing and can you zoom out what are the tools for zooming out so you can see the other paths you could take. So there were aspects of it that were really fun to work on that were really, really useful to me immediately, right? And that was part of the litmus test for each chapter. It was like, all right, is this something that I can literally

use in the next 12 hours? Yeah. I want these templates, dude. I really need no templates. I've got a bunch of them. I've got tons. That's awesome. Just screw the book to sell a template pack. Tim Tim's template pack of like saying no. Tim Tim's template pack upsell when all that fails and you come back and you have all of your old behavior still intact. Here's the psychological makeover. So yeah, that's something I'm really excited about. And I'll just give a shout out also and a congratulations to the entire team at Johns Hopkins for the successful launch of the world's largest psychedelic research center.

That's awesome. And the first psychedelic research and consciousness research center in the United States ever, which just launched at Johns Hopkins. And we should definitely mention, you probably won't, but dude, you've helped fund a lot of this, which is a big deal. Thank you for doing that.

Yeah, my pleasure. I know so many people that had reached out to me being like, I can't believe Tim did this, blah, blah, blah. Because they don't know you directly, but they know that I know you. And it's like, people are freaking out about it, dude. It's a big deal. It is a big deal, symbolically and practically for the field.

A lot of conditions that are poorly treated or viewed as untreatable currently, whether that is, say, end-of-life anxiety after terminal cancer diagnoses treatment resistant depression eating disorders like anorexia nervosa which has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder i don't realize that nicotine addiction opioid dependence etc ptsd from ptsd from war sexual trauma uh. These conditions seem to be treatable through paradigm-shifting frameworks utilizing psychedelic compounds.

And the results thus far are pretty staggering. I mean, they're very unlike anything that's been seen in the world of psychiatry up to this point. And the center at Hopkins, for me, was about a year and a half in the making. So it was a very involved process, and there were a couple of folks who, along with my contribution, were able to get this funded. The foundation who provided the most money was the Stephen and Alexandra Cohen Foundation. They've done a lot of incredible work with veterans. And they put in a large slug, about half, maybe a little bit more than half of the total required, which is 17 million for this center, which is a five-year commitment. It's very important because it allows Hopkins to not only attract, but also retain some of the best people in the country

for doing this type of research. And then you have yours truly, Matt Mullenweg, just a beautiful human being, CEO of Automatic, which I mentioned earlier, Auto, M-A-T-T, I see, if you see what he did there. There's about a thousand distributed employees. They run wordpress.com among other things. Blake Mycoskie, founder of Tom's. Oh, awesome. I didn't know Blake was involved.

That's great. Yeah, Blake's involved. And then Craig Nirenberg, who's an investor, who's done some incredible things. He's very shy, so I won't get into much, but it was important that everybody be willing to allow their names to be used for this. I did not want any anonymous donors because it just reinforces undeserved stigma for these compounds that have so much therapeutic potential and very, very demonstrated low toxicity at this point and anti-addictive properties.

So that was a year and a half, and you've had this feeling i'm sure but it's kind of like after so much work and so much looking forward to this moment off in the distant future after shipping it there's this kind of uh it's an odd feeling there's this kind of like postpartum what now yeah oh shit like we kind of kind of shipped it and of course the scientists now get to do the fun stuff and the exciting stuff on their side but my job is mostly done and uh let me ask you a question before we before we wrap up um this is uh i know they had been doing some research there um was it just a very small scale like what did this funding enable

them to do yeah that's different than what they were doing before? So Hopkins has done a lot of research when you consider how many sessions, say they've administered of psilocybin, which is in the hundreds, probably somewhere between, I'm guessing here, but between 500 and 700 sessions, that has really reinvigorated the entire space.

Some of their early studies helped to galvanize the resurgence of scientific research. What the center allows them to do is dedicate their full attention to this field. Up to this point, and this is true at other places like NYU, UCLA, UCSF, Yale, people who've wanted to do psychedelic research have generally needed to spend anywhere from, let's just call it 30 to 75% of their time writing grants.

We have a scientist in the room. My wife. Your wife, Daria. So, she's seen this firsthand, I'm sure, that people need to write grants to ensure they have salaries. Right. And in the case of psychedelics, because there is effectively zero federal funding from agencies like the NIH or NIMH, there's a relative lack of funding. And therefore, these people who truly in their heart of hearts would like to spend 100% of their time unlocking the full potential of psychedelics and understanding the mechanisms need to write grants for other studies that don't involve psychedelics just to pay the bills.

And so, you have the most productive teams in the world, including Hopkins, who are spending only a fraction of their time on psychedelic research. Yeah, because writing grants is a whole job by itself. It's a whole job by itself. So when you create a center that has, say, five years of salary support, you just open the floodgates.

And I think the quote was from perhaps the chair of the psychiatry department but one of the higher-ups at hopkins who said this should allow a quantum leap forward in the in the productivity of of scientific researchers in the world and in the realm of psychedelics what it also allows and this is this is why I hope that the centers catalyzes multiple centers around the country and more ambitious thinking around building big things in this space, is that it also allows huge cost savings per study. So let's just say this opioid-dependent study, by itself done piecemeal, because there's no sharing of resources, you have to recruit and staff each study independently. Otherwise, let's say that might cost, and I am kind of pulling these numbers out of my ass, but something like 3.2.

And then within the structure of the center, it's like 1.7, 1.8. The cost savings are enormous. So you just get a lot more done much more quickly. And if you look at the opioid crisis, you look at depression, you look at the costs associated with some of these conditions. These are problems that are compounding. And I think it pays to be ambitious and aggressive with funding tools that could identify completely new pathways and mechanisms of action by which we can treat these things that up until this point have been largely untreatable.

Yeah. I mean, I think that this is a very noble cause and something that I've been tracking for the last few years and watching these kind of studies come out. And as someone that has benefited from a high dose psilocybin guided session, I can tell you that all of the or a large chunk of the kind of uh trauma that i was dealing with with my father being so verbally aggressive over the years and causing like that impression upon me i was able just to release in six hours which was amazing and the lightness you feel from that afterwards um sticks with you yeah and so i I mean, and I have it easy. Like think about the people that are addicted to opioids or, you know, all these other people that came back from fighting wars and have PTSD. And yeah, I mean, there's so many applications for it.

Yeah. It's really exciting. Yeah. And there's some organizations if you're not interested in engaging directly with universities, although if you happen to have a close directly with universities, although if, if, if you happen to have a close relationship with one and are saying alumni or trustee providing funding, then consider this as an avenue of exploration.

It's, it's remarkable. And how can people help out? Like, is it, I mean, obviously the funding is done for this next five years, but can people actually still donate and get involved and extend that runway

somewhere? They can, and they can do it at other universities. What I'm going to do, hearkening back to what I said earlier about relaunching the blog, one of my top priorities when I relaunch the entire site is to put out a post which is effectively the top 10 options for supporting the psychedelic scientific renaissance. And I will point out the targets that I think are extremely high leverage

in different places. And just keep that up to date, right? So it'll be a resource for people, basically? It'll be a resource. And an easy place to learn more is maps.org. And I would also recommend that people check out a documentary. If you want to see what these sessions actually look like, actual session footage, go to tim.blog forward slash trip. And that will take you to a documentary called Trip of Compassion.

It's very intense, but worth checking out. And you can learn more. Sweet. Dude, well, thank you for doing that. I know that you got a massive New York Times article out of behind the scenes. Michael Pollan also for his great work and ongoing work. Oh, man, the credibility that he added to the space by launching that book is so massive.

How to Change Your Mind, which has really, really just added so much momentum to uh to the scientific research and uh increased the interest level of potential funders and allies and so on who recognize that we have we have a lot of problems that are not being well addressed and in in oncology and neurology and immunology all these other fields have been these massive breakthroughs over the last few decades. And in psychiatry, there have been relatively few discoveries that would be considered breakthroughs, very few. And if we look at the costs of mental illness, the prevalence of mental illness, the number of people that I'm sure people listening know who take antidepressants and nonetheless are still depressed,

those affected by opioid dependence and addiction. The scale of these problems is so gigantic that if there are tools that have demonstrated low toxicity and anti-addictive properties, they're worth investigating. So I'm as gung-ho as ever. And they're not panaceas. There are risks involved. But I think the risk benefit ratio is, is, is incredibly compelling.

So to be continued. Awesome. Well, that is it for this episode of the random show. Yes, it is. Slash Tim show slash Kevin show, depending on what feed you're listening to this.

exactly. Where can people find you? Yeah. So people can find me at Kevin Rose on Instagram, kevinrose.com. Also links to my podcast there that I do every few weeks. And I think that's it. Yeah.

Cool. People can find me at Tim.blog, the podcast, Tim Ferriss Show. And the newsletter, I have a free newsletter that goes out every Friday to about one

somewhere between 1.6 and 2 million people now and 5 Bullet Fridays the five coolest things or most interesting

things I've found that week a lot of them get recommended to me by you are you serious well no I mean like every once in a while

some of them make in yeah so 5 Bullet Friday you can just find it tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's free. It'll always be free. And that's one of the things I enjoy doing each week. Sweet. Awesome. All right. Let's get some food. Off to food. Later, guys. See ya. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for 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

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