The Tim Ferriss Show - #453: The Random Show — Zen, Investing, Mike Tyson, Artificial Intelligence, and the World's Best Beers

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since

Starting point is 00:00:32 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch, and I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, all form arrives in just three to seven days, and you can assemble

Starting point is 00:01:14 it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional. So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am

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Starting point is 00:02:31 dot com slash Tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners at allform.com slash Tim. Make sure to use the code Tim at checkout. That's allforum.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. It's a whole new world out there and we're all facing new challenges. You may need legal help to overcome some of yours and that's where LegalZoom fits in. Maybe you've been wondering about the best way to protect your family, or maybe you're thinking about starting a business, but you don't know the best way to do it. Don't let legal questions hold you back. LegalZoom has been dedicated to helping you find the right solutions for nearly 20 years. If you're looking to protect your family with a will or a living trust or something else, or you're thinking about the right way to start a

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Starting point is 00:04:02 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 AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. 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. 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 subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your

Starting point is 00:04:50 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 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

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Starting point is 00:06:11 any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a special edition, The Random Show, with Kevin Rose, my good friend, a serial tech founder and entrepreneur and investor of all different types. He really spans the spectrum, does a lot of things. And in this episode, we talk about many things. It is called The Random Show for a reason, after all. Surfing the waves of COVID, deleting social media apps, Zen quickenings, strange beers. Kevin's been enjoying some of

Starting point is 00:06:54 the best in the world, it turns out, for not that much money. Grilling, investing. We talk about investing towards the end. And we cover a lot of ground, a few caveats. We are not registered investment advisors or professionals of any type. We are not medical doctors. We don't play either on the internet. And anything you find in this conversation is for informational purposes only. So before taking any action on anything in this, please consult your local qualified professional. And with all that said, please enjoy this wide-ranging and rambling conversation with Kevin Rose.

Starting point is 00:07:37 Here we are again. Here we are again. I love it. Good to see you. You're in the dark cavernous. Is that a man cave? Is that a bar? Where are you looking?

Starting point is 00:07:49 I'm in a very light colored alternate universe. Yeah, you look a lot more peaceful than my kind of dungeon. I'm down here in the, this is the bar actually. But now it's office. It was a bar. It was kind of a cool place to hang out and have people, friends over. But in COVID times, it's an office and I got a mic hooked up here and all my computer crap and mail and all the other stuff. I feel like all of your BDSM dungeon

Starting point is 00:08:17 equipment is hiding in the shadows behind you. That is you. Do you want to talk about that? No. No, look, look, I am actually in my acupuncture office. You may recognize the acupuncture shelves behind me. I am in fact in an acupuncture office, but it's not mine. Are you just renting one out or what are you doing? I'm borrowing fast Wi-Fi in an undisclosed rural location where my internet speed is otherwise 0.5 megabits per second, which doesn't allow us to do calls like this. I am on a farm, and in the middle of the woods, I have a bear living about, well, in fact, probably hundreds of feet from me at times.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Like a real full-on bear. Yes, a huge black bear, but it's a huge bear. It's a gigantic, healthy black bear. Like a friendly trained one kind of thing? Not trained, no tricycles, no tricks, no dancing on the sidewalk for pennies. This is a wild black bear. We haven't yet met. I've met fox, coyote, all sorts of other animals, but have not yet met the bear. Just seeing photographs that my friends have taken. Have you done bear training?

Starting point is 00:09:28 I have not done any bear training. So that's a real thing. No, I haven't. But our mutual friend, Mike Mazur, sent me photos last weekend. He went up and did some, he lives in Montana, and he did some bear training. Like they bring real loud bears up that tackle you. That's where he's like wrestling with big dudes with beards.

Starting point is 00:09:45 Is that pretty much? Most of the training. San Francisco style. Exactly. I think I did otter training when I was in San Francisco, but no real legitimate bear training. I've done raccoon and squirrel. Those are my two certifications.

Starting point is 00:09:59 If people have not actually seen Kevin's raccoon video, he's not lying. He didn't actually do any raccoon training, but you got thrown into the swimming pool and turned into an Olympic swimmer in moments to defend your little pup toaster. People can search Kevin Rose raccoon and get to that. I haven't done bear training. If you're in Montana, you need legit bear training because you have terrestrial great white sharks, a.k.a. grizzly bears, which are very, very different from the supposedly friendly and skittish. They seem like they avoid humans and tend not to prey upon humans. So that's a good thing.

Starting point is 00:10:42 You carry bear spray, though, I take it. I do not currently carry bear spray. I make a lot of noise when I'm hiking, but that's about it at this point. Probably should do more research. But one of the things I've been getting into is plant and I suppose this would be a subset of that, but tree identification. So that's been something I've been spending a lot of time on. I've been doing probably two to three hours of hiking in the woods per day. And that involves a whole bunch of gear aside from my lack of bear spray. So I wear a limit tick pants. They have permethrin in the fabric. So you avoid ticks, which is super important if you're anywhere, certainly on the East Coast and anywhere else. And then have you ever seen a Go-Ruck rucksack? I believe they're based in San Francisco. No, I don't believe so. There are backpacks designed by, well, the CEO and founder who's former Special Forces to carry customized weight plates.

Starting point is 00:11:44 So for a replacement to running, because I like to think that I like to want to run, but I don't actually enjoy running very much and it bothers my knees. You can do these weighted hikes where you'll have say 20 or 30 or more pounds on your back, but the backpacks are specifically designed to carry these square weight plates that sit high on your upper back so that you can have better ergonomics as you hike.

Starting point is 00:12:11 And it's been awesome. I'll just... I was like, I'm curious about that because I have a weighted vest that I have, you know, the standard one like you order on Amazon. And I was using it on the treadmill sometimes just for like a super low grade, but you know, adds an extra 15 or 20 pounds. How is this? I take it to position the weights position better so that you don't hurt your back. The way that it's pitched, and I've only used a weight vest once, just as a quick side note. So when I used a weight vest, I had no point of reference. This was probably 2008 or 2009 when I was working on the 4-Hour Body.

Starting point is 00:12:46 And I thought, I can work with a weight vest. And I think it was before they used weight vests in the CrossFit games and so on. And I had no idea how much weight to use. And I was like, I'll just get like 50 or 60 pounds. That seems like a good starting point. So I put on 60 pounds and I would usually go for like a three-mile walk in San Francisco. And I put on 60 pounds and I would usually go for a three-mile walk in San Francisco. And I got three miles out and I was like, I'm fucking done. I can't do this. And so I left the vest on the sidewalk and walked back. I couldn't hack it. It was also in the summer. But if you read the website, you would be led to believe that the vests have more of a suffocating effect because you also are carrying weight on the chest. These are intended to mimic more of long distance

Starting point is 00:13:33 piggybacking ergonomics. Yeah, right. It's actually piggybacking, but with the weight higher up on your back. So I've found it surprisingly comfortable. I have some spinal issues in my upper thoracic back. So I've found it surprisingly comfortable. I have some spinal issues in my upper thoracic back. So let's just call it lower cervical. And wearing backpacks for long periods really bothers my back. But these bags actually allow me to train, usually for no more than about an hour and a half without any subsequent back pain as long as I don't overdo it. So it's been really nice to build up the lower legs. I'm also jumping rope, using both in a way to prepare for possible trail running and feeling great, feeling just

Starting point is 00:14:20 fantastic. I'll listen to audio books or do phone calls typically while I'm doing that. Two questions. One, I had always heard, at least back in the day, when you're backpacking, they always tell you, get a backpack where all the weight is kind of pushed down to your hips. You're carrying it on your hips and it's not so much on your back. Why wouldn't you want something like that? And to your jump rope point, did you hear that Tyson's going to fight again? I did hear that Tyson's going to fight again. That's crazy. It is crazy.

Starting point is 00:14:45 We'll start with the hip stuff. All right. So the hip stuff, I would imagine if you are carrying a lot more weight or if you're just hiking for efficiency and not as a workout, that probably makes a lot of sense. What I have found personally is that if I have a backpack with a weight strap and shoulder straps, Maybe I'm just using them incorrectly, but it tends to pull me backwards and I jump my head forward quite a lot. There are training recommendations and guidelines on this site. I think it's just gorock.com. And I follow those. So they encourage you not to lean forward. They encourage you to stand up straight and very deliberately do not have a chest strap or a waist harness. I'm sure you could train with other approaches, but the fact of the matter is my, let's just call it upper middle back always hurt after a short period of time of carrying

Starting point is 00:15:36 backpacks wherever I would be walking around in the city, whether it was San Francisco years ago or in Austin or elsewhere. And doing this, I got a great workout, but without that subsequent, it's really spinal pain, basically the musculature around the spine, or maybe even the connective tissue. I've had some of that. When it seizes up too, I don't know how many times you've had your back seize on you where you just can't move. Oh my God. It's like worst. It is. Yeah. And it sucks. I have two little monkeys like hanging on me all day long with little girls, you know, and I'm just like, they just tweak you one way. Or now like I'm in my

Starting point is 00:16:12 forties. Like if I cough my, with my head pointed the wrong direction, my back is just like, he's like, seizes up on you. Well, I feel like that's a good segue to, uh, what lazy bastards we are compared to Tyson is in's in his 50s, isn't he? I know. He's almost 60. So let me ask you a question, like straight up. $10 million. No, no, no. That's not enough money for Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss, $200 million. No bullshitting. No falling to the ground. Would you step in the ring with Tyson today? Absolutely not. No. I wouldn't. There's no fucking way.

Starting point is 00:16:50 You don't think you could win? Well, number one, absolutely would not win. Dude, you have a black belt? I mean, yeah, in judo. I mean, it's sport judo. It's very different from like raised in, I think it was Brownsville with... How many rounds could

Starting point is 00:17:07 you go? Oh, absolutely. If we're talking boxing or anything, unless I jumped guard and just hung on for dear life, like a koala bear, I would not last one round. I probably wouldn't last one minute. I think you could last one round. I don't think so, man. If you covered up completely, like you just put your arms in full turtle position and just let him punch you in your arms, your fucking head would fly off. Yeah. Most people have not been hit by a trained fighter.

Starting point is 00:17:40 I've been hit by trained fighters and it's a lot worse than you think it is. It's a lot worse. And as someone who's had head trauma before and concussions, because I was never a very good striker. I was a better grappler and I wasn't a great grappler either, but I was decent with a lot of wrestling background and judo and so on. But I would just get whacked in the head. Have you ever seen Spaceballs? Yes, of course. Where Dark Helmet is held at bay with one arm and he's swinging and isn't hitting anything. I was basically Dark Helmet whenever I sparred because I was heavy for my height. And so I'd end up with these goddamn six foot two, like 150 pounders who would just

Starting point is 00:18:21 tee off on my head from a distance nonstop. And I ended up, I think, with some long-term damage and consequences from that. So traumatic brain injury, I have zero interest in these days. So I would not for any price. Not even if it was like grappling, like MMA style with Tyson? The problem is... I wouldn't risk it. I wouldn't risk it, man. He would definitely get in one good shot. That's right. That risk it. I wouldn't risk it, man. He would definitely get in one good shot. That's right. That's all it takes, right? You could try and then he just needs to get the right angle

Starting point is 00:18:52 and then you're out. It's just over. The other thing to remember, too, is that speed goes with age. Speed is one of the first things. If you watch say, Roy Jones Jr. or a lot of these fighters who had a winning style predicated on speed, once they lose half a step, they start getting knocked out. Tyson was very, very fast, but he's also ungodly strong.

Starting point is 00:19:16 And he's got old man strength that has not diminished. Have you watched some of his videos? I have watched some of his... Back in shape videos? Yeah, his pad and knit work videos. Oh, God. And we'll put some in the show notes for people to check out.

Starting point is 00:19:34 I mean, if they just search, you know, Mike Tyson new videos, I'm sure they'll pop right up. They're terrifying. They're really, really terrifying because I've been hit by some decent strikers. And I mean, you feel afterwards the bruising of your brain. I mean, your brain is ricocheted off the sides of your skull like a big ice cube being shaken in a fucking shaker. And that's not good for you. It can contribute to depression. It can contribute to dementia, early onset Alzheimer's. I am so uninterested. I'll take my chances with the bear

Starting point is 00:20:13 over Tyson anytime. I don't know. Four-hour body Tim might have been interested a few years ago. Four-hour body Tim is like Evel Knievel, right? I'm going to jump Grand Canyon and just wipe out into the wall, break every bone in my body. And at the time, I think I just assumed that I could automagically repair all of that. And the fact is, not to imply that there's a lot of that in the book, I don't think there is, but there's a certain sense of immortality or invincibility that you have when you're younger, which you learn is very misplaced when you get a little bit older. And that's not to play the crotchety old, like, oh my God, once it's 30, it's all downhill. Once it's 35, it's all downhill. You always meet lazy people who say that shit because they just don't want to put in the work because it takes a

Starting point is 00:21:02 little more work when you're not in hormonal nirvana to keep that little python that swallowed a goat physique in a dad bod at bay. But the fact of the matter is, without higher testosterone levels and so on, your recovery time and everything else is extended. So I am so uninterested in injuries these days, especially during COVID. The last thing I want to do is put up some home-based parkour course and break a wrist trying to scale the garage and then have to go to the emergency room. No way. No, thank you. Roy Jones Jr. on exhibition fight with Mike Tyson. You don't know what Mike might do. Is it Roy Jones Jr. on exhibition fight with Mike Tyson. You don't know what Mike might do. Is it Roy Jones Jr.? That would be a huge weight class mismatch.

Starting point is 00:21:49 Let me just fact check this real fast. But Roy Jones Jr. was boxing not that long ago, right? It's been a while. It is Roy Jones Jr. Oh, it is Roy Jones Jr. Eight round exhibition fight. This should be super, super interesting. Roy Jones Jr. I watched a lot.

Starting point is 00:22:07 And these are both fighters who capitalized on incredible speed. And now they're older. They're both strong. Tyson absolutely has a strength advantage. Oh, Jesus. Tyson is 5'10", 240.

Starting point is 00:22:22 Roy Jones Jr. is 193. I don't know what his height is. It doesn't say here. But 193 to 240, that's a big weight difference. Yeah, you really don't want to get hit by either of these guys. So to make that exhibition, looks like an exhibition fight on September 12th,

Starting point is 00:22:43 that's really soon, that Roy Jones Jr. is going to have to dance. exhibition, looks like an exhibition fight on September 12th, that's really soon, that Roy Jones Jr. is going to have to dance. He's really going to have to dance. And I don't know the last time that he had a dance card with stakes quite this high. And he might be laughing all the way to the bank, but honestly

Starting point is 00:22:58 it's like, if Mike Tyson hits you hard enough, you're going to have trouble finding the bank. Yeah. Exactly. Oh my God. I'll definitely watch that fight though. Are you kidding? It's crazy. It's good to see him back though, man.

Starting point is 00:23:13 You know the cool thing about it is I saw Tyson being interviewed and he pledged 100% of the proceeds to charity. He doesn't care about making any money off of this. He said that's not where his happiness comes from anymore. It just seemed like really a different version of

Starting point is 00:23:30 Tyson that was refreshing to see. It seems like he's done a lot of work on himself. Yeah, it seems that way. It's not biting off ears anymore, I don't think. Not biting off ears. That's a good start in self-development. Stop biting off ears. And it seems like he's done a lot of work. That's a good start in self-development. Stop biting off ears.

Starting point is 00:23:47 And it seems like he's done a lot of work. I saw a video on, which was an interview of Tyson describing his 5-MeO, 5-Methoxy DMT experience. Oh, crazy. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know who the sitters were for that but you either have to be really really really good with lots of safeguards or you have to be incredibly fucking stupid to be in a room where you volunteered to hold down mike tyson when he's on five mbo dmt fuck

Starting point is 00:24:21 that i know thanks yeah you get a big padded room and you kind of have to do it via like speakerphone alright Mikey here's the tube through the window you're gonna do great

Starting point is 00:24:39 it's like the Hulk when he erupts and you can't contain him you don't contain him. Yeah, you don't want to be anywhere close to that. So what have you been up to, man? It's been actually quite a while since we've caught up. It's been at least a few weeks since we had a proper conversation.

Starting point is 00:24:56 Yeah, I know. And then our last podcast that we did, we were just in a horrible place. Our last podcast was when COVID was really starting to hit and we're both like, well, we'll see. I hope to see you sometime. We thought the end was near. You still kind of feel that way though, huh? Well, not the end, but lots of changes for sure. I'm less concerned about the virus wiping out everyone, which I didn't think was going to happen to begin with, but I didn't like the, at the time, what we understood to be the secondary and third-order effects of economic destruction and high rates of unemployment, very understandable anger and frustration and strong emotions coming from not having work, not having a sense of purpose for millions of people, and also just having a very, very polarized political machines who are

Starting point is 00:26:19 capitalizing on that heightened emotion to try to further their aims on all sides. This is a defining, I would say, characteristic of a sort of opportunistic political maneuvering. So I'm very concerned about the country. So I'm not, the game is far from over. If we had a working vaccine tomorrow and were prepared to distribute, what percentage of the US do you think would volunteer,

Starting point is 00:26:52 even if they were told that it were mandatory, who would comply? What percentage of the population do you think would comply and actually get a vaccine? And since we don't have any state-to-state restrictions in terms of travel, I mean, there are recommended 14-day self-quarantines and so on, but there's no real enforcement. There's no real follow-up. That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, what percentage of the country do you think would actually take a vaccine? Fully distributed, thought to be effective. Yeah. I mean, I think, I guess it also depends on the window of time that you're talking about, right? I mean, I think that a lot more people will take it a month three versus month one. So, I

Starting point is 00:27:36 would say that, well, I guess the question though is, does it really matter? You and I are going to take it, right? There will be a certain subset of people that won't and it's like you're kind of rolling the dice with your own life. And at that point, you've done all you can do. I mean, it sounds horrible to say that, but you can't force someone to stick a needle in their arm. So you have to do the best you can at education, at demonstrating safety and efficacy, and then hope for the best. I would say, though, it's probably going to be more than you would think.

Starting point is 00:28:13 What percentage of folks get the flu shot every year? I guess that would be a good proxy. Yeah, I don't know. That's the answer. And then I would say it will be higher than that, because flu is very optional for a lot of people, not as deadly. So yeah, it's hard to back into a number like that. But I would imagine it would be somewhere around 70% or greater.

Starting point is 00:28:35 You're probably thinking like 20%. I'm thinking 20% to 30% by month three. That would be my guess. Are you doing it month one? This is where we're going to get ourselves into trouble I'm not a medical professional not giving medical advice I would not want to be the first monkey

Starting point is 00:28:54 shot into space but we might edit this out later because I also don't want to discourage people from getting a vaccine but if we're breaking every land speed record in developing a vaccine. But if we're breaking every land speed record in developing a vaccine for a virus that we understand very incompletely, I have my own misgivings. I do think vaccines are incredibly valuable to the individual and to community and humanity overall. And we, we simply don't have a lot of data on, on this virus. So.

Starting point is 00:29:29 Well, to your point about the economy though, that I think that's going to be the difficult piece of this and getting folks back to work and getting the average consumer to trust restaurants again, to trust bars again, to trust all of concert venues, all of the things that we used to do to, to drive up the economy. And, and, you know I just can't see it bouncing back as fast as people have said it's going to. I think, I think we're in minimum, you know, year and a half, two year.

Starting point is 00:30:00 Yeah. Tough, tough, tough trench. Yeah. So as you put it, as you poetically put it to me some time ago, I think we're in for a slow donkey. I think we are looking at a slow donkey here. Yeah. Sometimes people quote you and you're like, there's no way I said that. I definitely said that. That sounds like something I would say. Well, here's the crazy thing, man. Like I've been thinking more about universal basic income. And the one thing, the biggest, at first I was like, no, there's no way. Why do we need it? It seems like a waste of money. You know, it's like just giving out money doesn't seem to be a solution for anything. And then two weeks ago, a new API came out from a group called OpenAI,

Starting point is 00:30:48 which is this artificial intelligence group. Have you seen anything created by this GPT-3? Have you seen this at all? I've seen Chris Saka's experiments with it. I haven't played with it yet. He seems incredibly impressed. I don't know what his involvement is, if any. It's nuts. It seems nuts. I don't know what his involvement is, if any, but you tell me.

Starting point is 00:31:05 So what I saw, some of the demos that I've seen lately are you give the AI a couple websites. So you go like, here's a website I like, and here's another website I like. Now design me a website that looks like those websites, but is about a text-based messaging app. about a text-based messaging app and it literally created a beautiful ready to go fully designed website and like minutes that it came up with and it's and you're like well there goes all the graphic design jobs like you know like maybe not in the next six months or next year but that is where it's going and like if that's going to be on a whole, like AI is going to kill so many technical jobs and it's just crazy. I don't see any way out of this.

Starting point is 00:31:52 Like you have to become like a basket weaver or a potter or a cult leader. Those are... That's the first thing Daria said. I was talking to my wife about it. She was like, you know, it's going to be down to like artisan craft, like the AI can't do, like touched by human hands. And I'm like, well, yeah, but like how many people need baskets? Like how many, you know what I mean? Like how many artisan, like artists do we need to be doing this? Like, I just don't know that there's that many jobs there.

Starting point is 00:32:21 So maybe something like universal basic income does make sense when eventually that hits. And I worry the talk now on the street is that a lot of these jobs just aren't going to come back. The talk on the street. That's a phrase I haven't heard you use. Sorry, you mean like the street, like Wall Street. Oh, okay. Yes. Got it.

Starting point is 00:32:43 The word on the street around the corner, the neighbors are saying. I got it but word on the street around the neighbors are saying i got it all right yeah the jobs aren't going to come back yeah i mean if if this is like v0 right if this is rough draft it's hugely i mean it's awesome in the like 18th century sense of the word right i mean it's awe-inspiringth century sense of the word, right? I mean, it's awe-inspiring and kind of staggering in its implications and also really terrifying. It is. It's like writing books now.

Starting point is 00:33:14 You're going to be soon out of work. Did you see some of the stuff it's writing? Like you can say, write me a bedtime story, and then it just goes and creates these beautiful, like you could take that, tweak a couple words, and put your name on it. And people will do that. And it's not going to show up again in any plagiarism dictionaries or anything like that. But it'll be like 90% AI written. I mean, that would be a way to rough draft stuff, right? Although I have to imagine it's pulling from other sources that might end up then having claims of plagiarism,

Starting point is 00:33:49 but maybe not. Yeah, but it's pulling from other sources in terms of creating its mental model and understanding model of the data. But so are we all, right? The only reason you can write your books is because you're pulling from all your childhood experiences and all the other crap.

Starting point is 00:34:02 So it's the same. All the crappy childhood experiences also. Sokka, for those people who don't know, very, very successful investor, previous operator, first fund delivered something like 250X, I guess, and has done very well. He drafted a number of tweets and then let OpenAI, but that's not the phrase he used.

Starting point is 00:34:29 What was the other term that you used? Oh, GPT-3. GPT-3. What does that refer to? That's just their most recent iteration of this type of technology. It was two, and now it's three. I don't know what the GPT stands for exactly. I can find out, though. Catchy, catchy. First, I thought he was talking about Grand Theft Auto, and he'd smoked too much weed. I wasn't know what the GPT stands for exactly. I can find out though. Catchy. First I thought he was talking

Starting point is 00:34:46 about Grand Theft Auto and he'd smoked too much weed. I wasn't sure what he was texting me about. He wrote a string of tweets and then he let GPT-3 write the next two or three. Effectively impossible to tell apart.

Starting point is 00:35:01 They did seem like tweets that he would write. It was spooky. It's really cool. For those of you that are listening, I have no idea what these guys are talking about. Definitely go on Twitter, type that in, and just look for it. They have so many examples being tweeted out.

Starting point is 00:35:16 They're just fun. They're crazy and fun and wacky. It's one of those things where you realize a major shift has happened. This is truly a big AI shift in that I talked to Siri today, and it doesn't understand half the shit I'm trying to tell it. And you watch what this thing can do, and you're like, wow, this is an order of magnitude better than what we had

Starting point is 00:35:40 just a couple months ago. Hey, Siri, tell me, predict what this slow donkey is going to do. Slow donkey. I found these results for slow donkey. Oh my God. That's so fucking creepy, man. Why does Siri... Oh, it's because I said, hey Siri, auto-activated on my phone and then had slow donkey. I didn't get that. Could you try again? All right, Siri, that's enough out of you. Oh boy. So you were asking what we've been up to. I mean, for me, it's been more of the same in Portland though. Just kind of like enjoying the protests out here. Like not enjoying them. That was a joke. It's been really brutal downtown in Portland. The weather has been fantastic, but it's like you got to look on the

Starting point is 00:36:27 bright side with all this stuff going on and try and find ways to, I don't know, just return to some resemblance of some kind of normal. And I don't know how you do that. For us, it's like Daria and I, on Friday nights, even though we don't leave the house, we actually get dressed up like we're going to go out to dinner. And I know that sounds cheesy, but it's like breaking that pajama routine is a big deal. And eating outside now is nice. We have a backyard in Portland, so we can go and eat outside, which is a huge change. But yeah, how about you guys? What have you been up to

Starting point is 00:37:05 well it's made a big difference at least from my mental well-being to move from a more urban environment to a very rural environment to have access to wilderness got some muck boots for people who are looking for some bushwhacking boots. Muck boots are amazing. Knee-high boots that you can wear through mud and anything you might want

Starting point is 00:37:33 to walk through. They're not actually that suffocatingly hot for your feet. So I'll throw those on. I'll throw on the tick pants and just hike for hours. And there's so much land in so much of the US that if you're able to move yourself from point A to point B, and there are a lot of areas outside of Austin, outside of a lot of major cities, LA outside of New York City, where you can find space. That has been incredibly clearing for me. I also deleted all social apps from my phone four weeks ago. That's crazy. I did that a couple months ago. I did the same experiment and it's been fantastic. Yeah, I have missed exactly nothing of great importance that I'm aware of. Meaning, I talk to friends.

Starting point is 00:38:36 I will occasionally on laptop look at, say, things that are trending on Twitter that might be relevant to anything that I can affect positively, or areas where I can mitigate risks or something like that. But the vast majority of news is going to make you either anxious or really pissed off. And if you're not prepared or able to take action on something that is within your sphere of control, it's really just creating energy leaks that will drain you. that I was extremely fatigued. I was very tired. And it was, I think, because I had so many stimuli in the form of different notifications or apps on my phone, social, etc., which were creating these powerful emotions without any ability to direct them towards something positive and actionable. Does that make sense? And so I deleted them from my phone and talked to a lot of friends and

Starting point is 00:39:56 also will talk to members of my team, employees. We do team calls of various types and feel like the signal to noise ratio has improved so much since I did that. And I will occasionally, probably twice a week, look at replies on Twitter because my listeners and readers are extremely helpful in helping me to find high signal articles or research studies that are really relevant to things they know I care about and focus on. But outside of that, it has been such a freeing experience. And I really feel like social by and large has been a huge net negative. Dude, it's so crazy that we came to the same realization. Like a couple months ago, I posted on Instagram,

Starting point is 00:40:52 my final post saying I'm not going to be on here for a while. And the same thing with Twitter. And I removed all of them from my phone, all the apps from my phone. And I stopped looking at them all together. I have not been on Instagram since. It's been at least a couple months. And I have gone back on Twitter because, like you, well, two reasons.

Starting point is 00:41:14 One, some people communicate with me there over DMs that I don't actually have their phone number. And so sometimes there's important things that come through. And then also, there is important stuff in terms of the research I do for my job and investing in tech companies and all that. Like it is a good source of that type of data. So, but I still kept it off my phone. So it is a desktop only experience for me now.

Starting point is 00:41:37 And I will tell you, you're right. Like the anxiety goes down a ton. The notifications to your device goes down and you don't realize, you know, it's funny, I don't know if you got this feeling, but the first week I was opening my phone, I'd be like, oh I wonder what's oh wait, I don't have that app anymore. Did you get that like a few times

Starting point is 00:41:54 you're like, oh wait a second, I don't have that app. The other thing I did, which you might want to try this is kind of this is just dumb stuff, people are listening I'm not trying to be holier than thou when I do this type of stuff. It's just like, it's fun to do these little micro experiments. The other thing I did is I said, okay,

Starting point is 00:42:10 how can I reduce the stress on my phone even more? And that would be uninstalling even more garbage that I don't use that may or may not send me notifications. But with every app, there's like a micro mental burden somewhere buried in there of having just like one more thing to check or one more thing that is a potential distraction. So I said, if I can't fit the apps on the homepage,

Starting point is 00:42:31 I'm not going to have them on my phone. So no swiping sideways for more apps. So basically, I have one screen of apps now. Does that mean you just have folders with like 75 apps inside them? I do have folders, but here's the rule with the folders. The folders cannot swipe sideways. So that means a total of nine apps and folders. So basically, this is my home screen right here. And so you can see, I just have the apps in there. I like that. Now the bottom, people are looking at the bottom.

Starting point is 00:43:01 The bottom, I do have a screen that goes sideways that I put all the Apple utilities and crap that you kind of can't uninstall, like the Compass app and the Measure app and the calculator and all that stuff in its own little side folder thing. What are the categories in those buckets? Okay, so here's what I have.

Starting point is 00:43:17 My categories are audio, which means for me, that's Pocket Cast, Music App and Spotify, Audible, Sonos for Home Stuff, and Pandora me, that's Pocket Cast, Music App and Spotify, Audible, Sonos for Home Stuff, and Pandora. So that's good. Health, I have Waking Up, I have the strong app, Dexcom, Aura, Less, Zero. For learning, all the language learning apps that I want to go back to, and Lumosity and Masterclass. And then finance stuff, I have one screen of that,

Starting point is 00:43:46 which is personal capital, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Wealthfront. I like playing around with Clarity Money and Barron's and Simplify. And then I have home apps like Home Control. Now, home means I got a Traeger barbecue, which has been a fantastic addition this summer, by the way. So I also got a Tra trigger. That's really funny. Are you serious? Which one did you get? Looks like we're on parallel tracks here. The one that...

Starting point is 00:44:14 Timberline 870? I got the... I actually did get the Timberline 870. That's fucking crazy. That's the one I got. I did get that. So I have that in Austin and at the undisclosed rural location, I have, I think it's a 650. So I got a slightly smaller one because I looked at the 870 and I was like, okay, maybe it is the 650 that I have. It's like, you can cook

Starting point is 00:44:36 20 chickens at one time. And I'm like, I don't need to cook 20 chickens at one time. So I got a smaller unit. No, maybe I did get a smaller unit as well. Now you have me curious to see which one I got. It doesn't say on the app right away. I think it is the smaller of the Timberline version. But anyway, that's a great one. So last one. So the home stuff has things like that where it's like Ring and Lutron and that stuff. And to be clear, you have an app.

Starting point is 00:45:03 You have a Traeger app which helps you to control the grill so you can check the temperature and so on and so forth. Yeah. So I just, by the way, wild salmon is running and it's on sale right now. But I've been smoking salmon like crazy. I've gone through six or seven different recipes. I finally found the perfect smoked salmon that I'll send you which one on the Traeger app. It's fantastic. But you got to let it cure 24 hours. That's the key. You can't do any of these little rubs where you do two or four hours. You got to do a full 24-hour cure on it. Cool. Amazing. Yeah. I've been dialing in the Traeger like crazy. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

Starting point is 00:45:46 This episode is brought to you by Dry Farm Wines. I'm a wine drinker. I love it. Love a few glasses over meals with friends. That said, I hate hangovers. It kills me often for multiple days. Right now, all of the wine in my house is from Dry Farm Wines. Also, for my last two book launch parties, all the wine has been from Dry Farm Wines. Why is that? Because in my personal experience, their wine means more fun with fewer headaches. Dry Farm Wines only ships wine that meet very stringent criteria. Close to sugar-free, so less than 0.15 grams per glass. Lower alcohol, less than 12.5% alcohol. Additive-free, there are more than 70 FDA-approved winemaking additives. The fewer, the better. In your wine, lower sulfites, organic, and produced

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Starting point is 00:47:10 Dry Farm Wines is offering you an extra bottle in your first box for a penny because it's alcoholic. It can't be free. Find all the details and collect your wine at dryfarmwines.com. Check it out, dryfarmwines.com. And one more time, I love this stuff. Dryfarmwines.com slash Tim. And one more time. I love this stuff. Dryfarmwines.com slash Tim. Yeah, I've been cooking a lot, period, right? We've been cooking a lot at home and cooking a lot of venison also. I don't know if you even know this, Kevin, but I ended up... You know, you definitely know. You can confirm this. I invest in very, very few things these days. And about a year ago, I invested in a venison harvesting operation in Hawaii called Maui Nui Venison. For those people who are not watching the video, Kevin is laughing. And really thought to myself, there's no way this

Starting point is 00:48:14 is ever going to make any money, but I like the ethos and the principles behind it because axis deer are an invasive species in hawaii they've destroyed a lot of ecosystem uh they've damaged or compromised coral reefs because of runoff after removing vegetation and this operation harvests axis deer and they they just approach it in such a thoughtful, such a surgical way. And the meat is so incredibly good. Peter T is obsessed with this also, by the way. And he's the one, in a way, who convinced me to combine the Traeger

Starting point is 00:49:00 with this Maui Nui venison. So the leg medallions are better for cooking indoors, but rib racks, steaks, all of that are just incredible. And you've probably realized this on the Traeger that one of the benefits of having, and for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about, this is a wood pellet fueled grill. You can also think of it as a smoker. And in a lot of ways, I tend to think of it more as a smoker than a grill because you're not going to get... It's more difficult to get, say, the searing on a burger in a trigger. Yeah, there's no direct flame.

Starting point is 00:49:35 That's right. But if you cook ribs at super low temperature, like 165 or 185, you just get the most incredible flavor. Oh, yeah. I did ribs last night. I did some heritage pork ribs. By the way, speaking of trading places to buy meat, have you used Crowd Cow at all? I've not used Crowd Cow. There are a couple of these companies. I have used ButcherBox, which might be similar. I'm not sure. I don't even know how to set up their own online site. And so let's go to them and put them on our site. And it's only the best, small, little, amazingly run farms. And also, they work with Japanese farmers as well. So they get in some of the best Wagyu that I've ever had. A5 certified with all the holograms and everything on there.

Starting point is 00:50:47 And they work with a couple of really small farms out there. And that's fun stuff. So do you then choose the farms you want to buy the meat from? You pick individually? Yeah, so you can do it. I think how they started was you had to put together a portion of a cow, like X number of pieces, and then you would save. You're going in on a cow.

Starting point is 00:51:07 Now it's all... That's a feature in there somewhere, but now it's all a la carte now. So you can just go, I just want some amazing ribeyes, or I want a rack, and they're just right there, ready to buy. Cool.

Starting point is 00:51:18 Yeah, ButcherBox mixes and matches, and you get a membership. So I have pork and beef from them as well. Another one that is close to our long ago home in NorCal is Belcampo. I don't know if you've tried any of their stuff. No. Belcampo has incredible ribeyes. So those are the two non-venison sources that I've been trying these days. But that's about it as far as meat goes. I've tried to really take out not less is more, but if you're going to eat meat, really do it in as thoughtful a way as possible, which I recognize is in a sense a luxury, right? I mean, it is because we have the means to sort of explore some of these options and some of them aren't cheap. Certainly Traeger's

Starting point is 00:52:13 aren't cheap. Traeger's aren't that expensive, man. They make ones that are further down the line that aren't the fancy, fancy ones that actually do a great job smoking. My buddy has one of the ones that you can buy at Costco and it's phenomenal. And they're not crazy. I mean, they're not cheap, but they're not crazy, crazy. We're not talking thousands of dollars or anything. Yeah. So I've been enjoying really paying attention to the fundamentals for me, just hearkening back to what you said about us being in a pretty bad place, stressed out place. I mean, I was in a very anxious, stressed out place for a really long time once I kind of saw the comet of COVID headed towards planet Earth slash United States

Starting point is 00:52:59 since early February, right? So I've had this low-grade or high-grade anxiety for months. And eventually, you just get fucking tired of the anxiety. So you want to figure out approaches to lessen it. And for me, it's really been keep it simple, stupid, right? Eat good food, cook food, take time to prep. It's super meditative. If you're using a sharp knife, you got to pay attention or you're going to chop your little pretty fingers off. And I've been doing HRV training. So heart rate variability training with breath work. And the jury's still out. I've been doing that for five weeks, twice a day for 20 minutes.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Can I ask what that practice looks like? Yeah, it looks like using an app. I'm using one called Breath, or actually it has a very generic name, but this is not to imply that it's the best app out there, but it's the one breathing. It's just called breathing. And it's a circle that opens and contracts to help you time the duration of your inhale and exhale.

Starting point is 00:53:59 What is it? What is the, you know, sometimes there's a four, seven, eight breath. There's five and a half seconds in, five, six, seven out. This one is, I think I'm doing 3.7 second inhale and 6.3 second exhale. And I arrived at that, or I didn't. I'm working with a doctor. I don't want to mention her name just yet, but I'm working with a PhD who sent me a kit, which includes a pulse oximeter, which you put on your thumb to track your pulse and heart rate. And then- Blood ox as well, right?

Starting point is 00:54:35 And blood ox, although I think we're looking less at that. And then a respiration strap. So it looks like basically a bra that you put on under your nip nips and what would be just above your navel. And as you breathe and it expands, there are sensors that track that. And so you can correlate and superimpose your breathing on your heart rate. And she would then take me through, we would use Zoom, share screen, and she would take me through different exercises to identify which duration of inhale and exhale seemed optimal for me in terms of activating my sympathetic, I'm sorry, my parasympathetic nervous system. So more of a autonomous relaxation response. And if people

Starting point is 00:55:26 have trouble separating the two, so sympathetic, you can think of stimulating, S equals stimulating, sympathetic, like fight or flight, fight, flight, freeze. It's not quite that simple, but it's a useful shorthand. And then parasympathetic would be more of the letting go calming. And I have incredible hypervigilance. I mean, I don't think we're going to get into it today, but it's a lot of gnarly stuff happened to me as a kid and my system, well, as she would put it, I am cardiac hyperreactive. So little things will send my heart rate shooting to the ceiling, and then my heart rate will stay elevated for hours. And that's part of the reason. To the tune of what?

Starting point is 00:56:10 Like what? 90 beats a minute? Like, isn't that crazy? Yeah, 80 to 90. But that's, I mean, if we're talking like six, seven hours, that's a long time. No, I was worried you were going to tell me something worse. But yeah, that is, that's like, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:23 you probably should be walking the dog at that rate. You know what I mean? That's not just sitting there. That is elevated. Yeah. And fatigue has been this lifelong battle of mine since I would say age 16, 17, especially with Lyme disease on Long Island and all of these undiagnosed Lyme and then later diagnosed, which is how now the people are familiar with serologic testing. I was tested when I was suffering acute symptoms and they said, well, you're positive for the short-term antibodies, but you realize you've already had Lyme disease because you're testing positive for the long-term as well. And so I've really tried in the last, my dog's pacing all over the place. You can see, where is she? Where are you, Molly? Hiding behind me? There she is. You can kind of see her, but I think she has to pee. I might have to take a little break to let her out. But

Starting point is 00:57:20 long story short, this fatigue is like my battle, right? It's like without sufficient energy, you really can't execute well on anything else. And by execute well, I would include like relaxing and enjoying yourself, right? Like if the tank is empty, the tank is empty. So the fundamentals, the food, the HRV slash meditation, all these things have been focused on identifying cracks in the vessel where I'm leaking energy. And so a lot of those I've found to be really helpful, right? Like the jumping rope, I'm not talking about like 10 rounds of jumping rope. I'm not Mike Tyson getting back into shape to try to lop Roy Jones Jr.'s head off. I'm talking about like three to five minutes jumping rope, first thing in the morning,

Starting point is 00:58:16 just to get outside, to make sure I get outside into some sun ideally and move my body. That's it. And if people are interested in the intersection and the interplay between exercise and the brain and brain health and brain-derived neurotrophic factor and all these various things, BDNF, there's a book called Spark that gets into this. But if you want to get out of your monkey mind, at least for me, one of the fastest ways is through the body. And it doesn't take a lot. It really doesn't take a lot.

Starting point is 00:58:49 Get outside, walk for a few minutes, jump rope for three to five minutes, and then go back inside. So those are a few of the things I've been doing. I don't know if you found any routines or other practices helpful. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've just now recently started getting back into meditation, but in a different way. Before I had done Sam's course, which I think that you've done as well, Sam Harris, his Waking Up app. Fantastic. Are you still doing the tantric self-pleasuring

Starting point is 00:59:21 meditation that you told me about? The one that you Zoom with me on? Yeah, we're still doing that. Wednesdays? Wednesdays, yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, no, this is, it's interesting. I was on Sam's app, and this was several weeks ago, and I saw that there was a new course on there by Henry Shookman, who practices a certain lineage of Zen. And he's based out of New Mexico. And he just had these beautiful 10-minute meditations on these Zen koans. Do you know much about Zen koans? Yeah. Paradoxical statements or parables that are intended to, as I understand it, intended to derail the rational mind, to sideline the rational mind. So what is the sound of one

Starting point is 01:00:19 hand clapping type of stuff? Right. And they're these beautiful little unsolvable riddles that are part of the practice and that they will meditate with them and on them and then take back their kind of insights that are gathered from these over time back to their teachers. And it's kind of like you talk them through with your teacher. There is no real answer to them, but they're used as – they're very difficult to describe, but they're used as a part of the Zen training. And so I was very fortunate to reach out to Sam, and Sam introduced me to Henry. since come on my podcast. And he had a book that he recently published called One Blade of Grass by Henry Shookman. I'm just pulling it up right now. It's on Amazon. Fantastic book that talks about, it's basically a biography of his life. And he talks about all the struggles that he faced. He had severe eczema all over his body where he was hospitalized, bleeding knuckles, really bad for decades.

Starting point is 01:01:34 How do you spell his last name? His last name is spelled S-H-U-K-M-A-N. Got it. Thanks. And so, yeah, he's this fantastic Zen master. And I read his book and he talks about his path to these stages happened to him because he wasn't training at the time. And then later went into Zen and had other experiences. And then all the way through to today, where he describes the falling away of basically of everything, just everything falls away at some point during this training. And it's a beautiful story on Zen and really just reemphasized to me that

Starting point is 01:02:27 he's had a career as a writer and he was an award-winning poet and Oxford-trained, very busy, productive human, wife, two children, and has still been able to go off and obtain these very deep life. Well, he's now kind of flipped onto the side of they're lasting now. The changes are lasting versus going back to reality after a couple of weeks. Fascinating story, but also just one where by the end of the book, I was like, I need to get back into Zen. Like, cause I, I don't, I told you at some point, you knew I,

Starting point is 01:03:07 you used to come over to my house when I live right next to the Zen center. But my, my first training in San Francisco was at that Zen center. And then I, I fell away from it cause I didn't really take it seriously. But yeah, so Henry's going to help me really get back into Zen and he's,

Starting point is 01:03:22 I'm, I'm excited to, to go to, he has the mountain cloud Zen center back into Zen. And I'm excited to go to... He has the Mountain Cloud Zen Center that he runs. And I'm going to be taking some courses there. And I really want to take this seriously. I figure I'm in my 40s now. It's time to devote a decent percentage of my life to this type of training. I feel like it's time. I'd love to hear you elaborate on that because I know you've tried all sorts of different types of meditation. Still interested to know if you recommend the surrender course by... I do. Michael Singer. Michael Singer.

Starting point is 01:04:00 But you've explored these various tools and modalities. What is it about Zen that differentiates it for you or that you find attractive, right? Because you could reach out to or get a hold of, one of your magic powers is getting a hold of anybody basically you want to get a hold of. Why Zen? What is it? I would say that when I first took the introductory course to Zen,

Starting point is 01:04:29 I appreciated the mystery behind it in some sense. So I was attracted to how it could be a strict discipline in some ways. Like, you know, like kind of one of these things where you show up for Zazen and if you're not there, the second you're supposed to be there, they'll keep you out from coming in and you're rejected. Or if you want to train and actually set up a residence there, like you have to prove it by sleeping outside

Starting point is 01:05:01 for like two months. Like all these stories that you hear that Henry actually talks about in his book. Can be super hardcore or like you let you go to the Zazen room and you're separated by these like cubicle walls, right? And so you're sitting in Zazen, this like seated meditation with your face about a foot and a half away from a wooden wall. And then if you start to nod off, they might hit you with a little wooden switch. Right. Things like that. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, I kind of, I was initially attracted to that. Now Henry's discipline that he's into, that he's teaching is a little bit more laid back,

Starting point is 01:05:36 which I can appreciate. Because this was like, you know, when you're going to, you had to enter with your right foot when you're entering into to sit like you have to enter into the room the correct correct way you can't cross over the mat in the wrong way like there's all these rules right too many rules but it's also very japanese but but i it is very japanese which i you know we all both of us really love um but the one thing i will say about zen and is that in a especially with the way that Henry has been teaching, at least that I gather through his book and through our conversation, is that they make enlightenment less mysterious and less about being a perfect person and making it actually

Starting point is 01:06:19 seem like it's something that is attainable by everyone. And it doesn't have to mean that you're this ultimate spiritual guru the second you snap into these different states of consciousness. And that there are these really beautiful moments when people have this flip, like this flip in their brain, this switch that goes,

Starting point is 01:06:39 and then they're jolted, almost shocked into this state of consciousness. Like sometimes, like there's these stories of these Zen masters where they'll look at a student the right way and the student won't grasp it. And the student can't, they've been teaching and sitting and they just can't, and they'll just shake them in a certain way. And it'll spontaneously jolt them in the right way into enlightenment. And there's these funky little things like that that that are just like beautiful stories. And like, you know, you always take a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt,

Starting point is 01:07:10 but coupled with this Coen training, which I highly recommend listening to on the Waking Up app, they're fantastic by Henry. It just, it checks all the boxes that I'm curious about. And I think for me, the curiosity at this point is the most important thing because it's encouraging me and it gives me the drive to go and sit for a half hour every morning consistently. And that's what it's going to take. It's going to take a real dedication. And I think that if I can get the proper training coupled with these koans and I don't know,

Starting point is 01:07:42 I've done the Transcendental Meditation. I've done a few other disciplines. And this one, for some reason, maybe it's because I'm a Japanophile. I don't know all the reasons, but I'm attracted to it. Cool. Do you know what the training is going to look like and what the meditation sessions are going to look like? Yeah. I mean, they're very simple. just sit so it's like I'm more interested in what happens inside the head so you sit maybe you shave your head I would love to see you with a shaved head

Starting point is 01:08:13 that would be hilarious like Bict kind of thing we can be cue balls together get you some black robes with some white inner linings good look for you you kind of already have that look you see me black robes with some white inner linings. It'd be a good look for you. You kind of already have that look. You got a bunch of panties.

Starting point is 01:08:26 I was going to say, you see me with robes on. We've been in robes together in Japan. You already got that one aced. But okay, you sit. And then what? What happens on the inside? So I think there's a few things. One, the question initially is,

Starting point is 01:08:43 there's kind of table stakes to play in the arena. And I would say to even get to that point, at least for me, what I've been told and what I can gather, and I'm saying this as someone that is a pretty new novice to this new sect of Zen, it's just sitting and trying to quiet the mind. And that means counting meditations, counting to 10 and repeating yourself, following the breath. It's that classic Zen posture of looking at the wall, not closing your eyes, glancing somewhat downward towards the ground with a fuzzy awareness of everything going on in the room,

Starting point is 01:09:25 but no strict focus on any one object. It's saying to yourself, a thought, a distraction, it's okay. It is the weights in a gym is what I need to get to the next level of this. And so not getting upset and getting the mind to where it's a little bit malleable and kind of getting to that place where the sits are becoming longer in duration, but also the mind is calming down a bit. I think Henry said it best in his book. Actually, I'm going to butcher it, but I'll tell you the gist of it. He said that Zen is like pulling the plug, being a boat in a bathtub and pulling the plug of the drain. And initially, you kind of just notice a little bit of swirling, a little bit of like movement of the boat. And then you look around and you see the walls of the bathtub are a

Starting point is 01:10:20 little bit higher. And you're like, oh, that's odd. And then you notice a little bit more movement and all of a sudden you start to twist. And then all of a sudden you notice that there's a swirl going down the drain and then there is the total annihilation of all things. And that's where you're headed. But you have to sit at the surface for a while and just kind of like, you know, slowly realize that even though you're not feeling it, the daily practice is unplugging the drain and you will eventually get there. So I'm at the point where- That's a terrifying description.

Starting point is 01:10:54 Oh, dude, wait till you read his book. His description of his last tranche of this passing into this, I think you would actually really like it because it reminds me of a lot of our conversations that you have had around ayahuasca and some of the ego just disintegrating. Controlled death. Controlled death. And he's getting that without any drugs, man.

Starting point is 01:11:17 Just intense multi-day meditation kind of things that happen. For, I guess, a lot of reasons. I think that scares me more because with the tea, you're like, all right, I'm going to go to crazy town for four to six hours earth time. And then I'll be back to some semblance of normal computation and absorption of what we call reality. But with the Zen practice, with that description, it's almost like a slow motion psychotic break that you've engineered for yourself. And that scares the living fuck out of me. I don't know how to back out of that. I don't know how to... You can't. You can't. That's the thing that's crazy, dude. When you

Starting point is 01:12:04 read this book and you get to that point, I'm freaked out by this because when you go there, all of a sudden you're viewing the world as an illusion, as a completely different thing than you ever had before. And there's no going back. What does Daria think about this? Is she supportive? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:24 She listened to my interview with him when I did the podcast and she was like, yeah, he sounds amazing and this is the path you want to go. I support it. I mean, I don't think... She's not worried about you like, I don't know, wearing your shirt backwards and picking a navel lint and staring blankly at the wall.

Starting point is 01:12:42 You have to listen to his post-analysis of what happened because he wrote the book after all this happened. I'd be curious to know if you would enjoy this world. I think you would. It sounds beautiful. Every moment is anew and just glistening.

Starting point is 01:12:59 There's so much. It's fascinating. I'm going to butcher it all. I think much like you with me and my various psychedelic experiments, of which there are now many, many, many, many. Thousands now, I think, for you. It's a lot. And you've kind of let me be the guinea pig. I think I'll let you be the first monkey shot into space on this slow motion engineered psychotic break. Tell me how that goes. Yeah. I mean, that's here to support. I think, well, it's not like you're going to see me in six months and like, I'm just going to be levitating. Like this is going to be like a, if I, if I do it correctly,

Starting point is 01:13:37 this is going to be like a 30 year kind of journey, you know, to get to these, these places or, you know, who knows there's no, There's no pinning a date on it. Unless he grabs you by your ears and shakes your head and gives you the Highlander quickening like you were describing. I'd love that, actually. Grab you by your eyebrows

Starting point is 01:13:55 and bite your fucking upper lip and throw you off your chair. Sounds great. That's exciting. Yeah, you should check out his book One Blade of Grass I highly recommend it to anyone listening he has a fantastic British voice

Starting point is 01:14:14 he's from the UK so his audio book is a fun listen you know yeah the British accent gives you an automatic plus 20 points of IQ. Oh, 100%. At least for any Yanks listening to it.

Starting point is 01:14:29 My God. Such an upgrade. You know, I wanted to thank you for something you introduced me to, actually, because I've been consuming a ton of it. You remember when you gave me some Peak Tea? Yes. The P-I-Q-U-E for anyone wondering. Not inexpensive, but they're powdered pu-erh. I've actually been having almost every morning for the last while. And it's fantastic. I've been having that usually before I do... So the sequence

Starting point is 01:15:07 for me would be wake up, immediately do the breathwork HRV meditation for 20 minutes, then heat the water to 170, pretty low temperature, just because I don't like continually burning the fuck out of my mouth when I forget how hot something is in an insulated mug. And then putting in the Peak Puerh with, I don't know if you've ever tried Laird Superfood Creamer, the unsweetened stuff. It's basically powdered MCT oil is one way to think about it. And I've been fasting. Well, if people consider it fasting, I've been semi-fasting until late lunch a lot recently. And so I'll have that and then go into the, say, jump rope and so on. But the peak is really good.

Starting point is 01:16:02 It took me a while to get into, but I appreciate you introducing me to that. It's funny because I never know. Sometimes I'll reach out to you. Anytime you plug me as someone that can get you stuff on podcasts and stuff like that, all of a sudden...

Starting point is 01:16:18 Wait, when do I plug you? No, I'm just saying, every once in a while, we'll do a podcast together and you'll be like, oh, dude, thanks for that recommendation. And then a week later, a hundred random emails.

Starting point is 01:16:29 Hey, I have this ball massager. Can you get it to Tim? He would love it. And I'm just like, everybody comes out and is like, give it to... Basically, I try all the shit and then the good stuff I pass on to you. I appreciate you trying the tea. The Peak is a cool company. I try all the shit and then the good stuff I pass on to you. I appreciate you trying the tea.

Starting point is 01:16:46 The Peak is a cool company. I met with the founder and we were chatting about how he creates some of this stuff. The thing that's unique about it is that so many times tea, as you know, you steep it and you discard the leaves when you're done. They steep it, crystallize it through this crazy process, and then they make it instant. So it's like you can just pour it in. You don't have to think about oversteeping it.

Starting point is 01:17:15 It's like if you took every tea and made it into matcha, right? Right, exactly. Yeah. And so it's really easy to consume and you can't screw it up, which is a lot of people oversteep their tea and they're like, a tea is so bitter. And it's like, no, it's not weird and stringent. It's just that you've oversteeped it. That's the main complaint. But anyway, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. They do quality stuff. I'm glad you're enjoying it. Yeah. What else is new in your world, man?

Starting point is 01:17:54 Oh, gosh. I would say new stuff that I'm into. Well, I've got boring stuff. I'm getting into salmon fishing. That's going to be next year. Oh, I've got one. I've got one. Let's hear it. You're the app guy. I'm the idiot who's like, in 2022, I'm like, I found this app called WhatsApp. It's really great. And you're like, oh boy, here we go. So I am pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to apps. But I did find one because I was, as I mentioned, doing a lot of hiking, have been doing a lot of hiking. And I'm in a very rural area. I don't want to wander onto somebody's property and have somebody come outside with a shotgun and be like, what the hell are you doing on my property? And I also just want to be respectful. I don't want

Starting point is 01:18:35 people showing up at my house. But I really wasn't sure how to identify property boundaries. And I met someone who hunts locally and introduced me to something called the OnX Hunting app. And it's just O-N-X. And OnX Hunt is the app. And I'm not going to necessarily use this for hunting, but what it allows you to do and they give you the premium features for free for seven days, which is super, super smart. If they're actually listening to this, I think they would get such better conversion and probably increase their revenue 40, 50%, at least from this particular app. If they had an onboarding process, which they don't. There's no automatic tutorial that I saw, which meant I had to kind of fumble and go find online

Starting point is 01:19:31 FAQs and figure it out. But the OnX Hunt app allows you to see property boundaries. It allows you to hit track and track yourself as you hike. So maybe similar to a Strava in that sense. But in this particular case, it's for wilderness. You can save maps offline so you can use them when you don't have reception. You can look at topographical view, satellite view, or combinations. You can take photographs. So for instance, if I find something of interest and I want to share that with someone,

Starting point is 01:20:10 I can take a photograph, geotag it, and then just share it with someone else who's on the app. This is cool. I'm looking at it right now. It actually also covers phishing as well, which is great. Yeah, it's an extremely, extremely cool app. So I've been using that on a pretty much daily basis and really, really enjoying it. And who knows, maybe I will use it for hunting.

Starting point is 01:20:35 I don't hunt much. I do it pretty infrequently. But if I were to travel to say Hawaii to hunt axis deer, which maybe at some point I will, it's not particularly easy to do. I don't even know if I could get permission to do it, but I would use something like this so that I could see how much mileage I'm covering, where I was, where I went. Perhaps we go on a scouting trip during non-hunt hours or on a non-hunt day. And I could take photographs of particular locations that I think might be ideal and save those.

Starting point is 01:21:10 And then I can go back and review that. So I've been loving it. That's an app that might not otherwise come across your radar that you might get a kick out of playing with. It's cool. Yeah, it looks awesome. I'll definitely give that a shot given how many hiking trails are here in Portland. There's just so many hundreds of miles of hiking trails just right in the city,

Starting point is 01:21:31 which is crazy. So you asked me what I'm into lately. Actually, I do have one thing I haven't told you about. I think that lately I've put on some weight and I've been able to shed it back off through intermittent fasting. Um, and then also, you know, doing a lot of cardio and things like that, but how do you typically, what's, what's your intermittent fasting look like just real quick? Uh, 18 hours a day. If I'm in, if I'm in lean mode, like if I want to get lean 18 hours a day, if not at a minimum 14, I think that's when a lot of the data... I have a friend out of UC San Diego. She works with Longo out there.

Starting point is 01:22:11 And she said that the... I was just talking to her like a week ago, and she said 14 hours is what she does. And that's where a lot of the data looks really promising in terms of just like some of the longevity benefits. I think if you're going to do it every single day... You're eating from what? Like between what hour and what hour?

Starting point is 01:22:25 Well, I just basically, when I use Xero, obviously, that's the app. And when I'm done eating dinner, so it's with the kids and putting them down and all that stuff, you never know when you're going to actually finish your last bite. So whenever I'm done, I just hit start.

Starting point is 01:22:41 And whenever it tells me to eat again, then I eat. But it's 14 hours after I finished my last bite, basically. Yeah. Cool. And so when I'm doing 18 hours, sometimes I'm eating a late dinner and I'm not eating until 1.30, 2 o'clock the next day, which is a little brutal, but it's okay. I just have black coffee and I'm totally fine. But actually, the point I was going to, or what I was going to chat about is that in choosing my alcohol and alcohol consumption, especially during COVID, there was like this period there where like March, April, I was like, we're all going to die. I'm just going to get drunk the entire time. You know, I'm just going to, I remember that every time I talked

Starting point is 01:23:18 to you, you're like, Hey, whatever. I'm five glasses in. How the fuck are you? I'm like, I didn't say, I didn't say five glasses, but I was definitely three. But we didn't know what was going to happen and it was kind of freaky and it's like, might as well open the good stuff. So in my cutting back and focusing more on health, what I've decided to do, and this is kind of a crazy thing,

Starting point is 01:23:43 is like, okay, wine can get nutso. Like a really nice bottle of wine can be thousands of dollars for like crazy wines, right? Like nobody wants to do that. I mean, some people I guess want to do that, but not on a regular basis. So what I was thinking is, why not go? I went to Beer Advocate and I went to their top 100 beers and I've been slowly finding and buying the top 10 rated beers in the world and then trying them just to consume. Have you ever had the number one rated beer in the world? I hadn't. What is it? It's right here. It's called the Kentucky Breakfast Stout and it is from Toppling Goliath. Here, let me show you what it looks like.

Starting point is 01:24:27 One sec, since we have video. All right. So out of the top beers of the world, I would say out of the top 10, probably seven or eight of them are stouts. So it's like the thick, dark, rich, funky, slow sip type stuff. So look at the wax melt on the top of that. That's cool.

Starting point is 01:24:57 And they're hand numbered. 233. So you said beer advocate. I know nothing about beer. So beer advocate has their top... Just like some guy named Tony in Newark, New Jersey who's raised these? I think it's community-based and they have a lot of the pros and stuff go on there that are really into this. But this Kentucky Brunch Stout by Topling Goliath, so the vintage is 2016 so they age these like wine because they are so dense you can just

Starting point is 01:25:27 basically put them uh in you know the wine cellar and let them sit for a decade or longer and then they really mellow out over time um so i just i picked this up i found it i found a great site actually by the way i'm giving away all my best links but people need to know about this because it's a fantastic site um my favorite place to buy aftermarket beer, and I've done a lot of research on this, is mybeercollectibles.com. So you say aftermarket, it makes it sound like you're buying a spoiler

Starting point is 01:25:56 for your Miata or something. What does that mean? So what that means is, this is bottle number 233. Maybe they made 500 bottles in this year. So it's impossible to find. You can't buy it new. You just can't buy it.

Starting point is 01:26:09 I got it. So the site you mentioned is like the eBay of beer. Exactly. It's the eBay of beer. And so you can get Pliny the Elder on there. This one I got on there too. This is called the SR-71 by the same manufacturer. This one's ranked, I think, number 12 or something like that.

Starting point is 01:26:23 You can't see, but there's a little Blackbird stealth bomber on on there. Or not Stealth, but it's SR-71, actually. And then all the ingredients and everything are written in binary on the side. These are so cool. They're like culty little fun beers. So you gave a price anchor on the wines, right? Thousands of dollars. You can go, I mean, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of wines, right? Thousands of dollars. You can go, I mean, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, right? I mean, wine can get super, super crazy. So what does one of these very well-ranked beers go?

Starting point is 01:26:56 Okay, so let me give you, it's wide ranging. So for example, I got some of them that can't be aged. You have to drink them fresh. So like there's a, the number one ranked IPA, or I think it's the number two ranked IPA in the world is called the Julius by a brand called Treehouse. Okay. So the Julius, King Julius by Treehouse right now, a four pack on this site is going for $39.99. And that's the number one or number two ranked IPA in the world. That's so cool.

Starting point is 01:27:27 How fun. What was the name of the site again that you mentioned? Mybeercollectibles.com. That's such a great URL. Yeah, it's like a janky site, but they've got a lot of great beers on here. It's on GeoCities. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:42 That's cool. That's super cool. Yeah, the affordable vices right there are certain things where you can get the best in the country or the best in the world for less than 50 bucks right i mean there are certain categories of thing where you can go very high end i mean i think really good chocolate would be an example of that, right? If you really wanted to have a treat, I mean, you don't necessarily have to break the bank to do that. But if you're like, oh, I want to get the fanciest car, the fanciest

Starting point is 01:28:17 boat, the fanciest wine, I mean, you better have inexhaustible funds or you're screwed. And at the end of the day, if you think about it too, it's like that stuff ages really poorly, right? Those types of... And neither of us collect that kind of stuff. But if you think of, we know people who do. And it's like four weeks after they've bought something, it loses its luster for most.

Starting point is 01:28:49 And instead, if you have this, in the cases we're talking about, the beer or the chocolate, there's something really special about the perishable nature of it. And it's an experience. Right. Well, that's the key, right? It's an experience. Right. Well, that's the key, right? It's an experience. That's what's been linked to happiness is actually having experiences with friends

Starting point is 01:29:11 and this is sharing something like that, right? Yeah. It's great. Love it. I love it. I don't have anything. I don't have any big ones on my list or anything that's come into mind.

Starting point is 01:29:25 One thing I want to ask you before we wrap, I don't know if you'll share this, actually. You may not. We might have to cut it. So the stock market is so freaking crazy right now. Yeah, it is. Gold is going up and individual stocks are going up. And I'm like, well, that doesn't make sense.

Starting point is 01:29:44 What are you doing? Like, what's the Tim Ferriss four-hour finance version of this? Oh boy. Yeah. Be careful, everybody. Earmuffs, earmuffs, cover your ears. I'll tell you what I've, I can tell you what I've done. Yeah. What are you doing? And it's not so much doing, it's more what I've done. And I'm glad you asked this because I recently turned 43. And a while back, I spoke to my parents, looked at the genealogy, asked a lot of questions and determined that the average age of death of males on both sides of my family, if you adjust for some outliers, is 85. So 43 puts me past the half mile mark. And hopefully I live until 120, but I've also lived aggressively. So my

Starting point is 01:30:41 system's taken a beating and I don't assume I'm going to live that long. So I've been doing a lot of introspection and this birthday hit me kind of hard. Usually age, I'm just like, ah, whatever, it doesn't matter. But crossing past that 50% mark hit me unusually. And I've been doing a lot of journaling, a lot of thinking. And I realized that, number one, and you've seen this over the years, I don't have a high burn lifestyle. I don't buy lots of stuff. And if I have the ability to hike with my dog, my dog and my girlfriend are happy and healthy. And occasionally I'll splurge on nice food or something, but I don't really... You're not a flashy guy. I've never seen you with a sports car.

Starting point is 01:31:31 I've never seen you with a fancy watch. I've seen you with fancy horse saddles. That's the only thing I've seen you splurge on. That's true. That was probably the first time I ever splurged. People think that he's joking. He's not actually joking. So for the four-hour body, because I killed myself on that book in more ways than one, and I was super proud of it. And I made a promise to myself because I very

Starting point is 01:31:55 rarely celebrated. And that's been a weakness of mine is I don't celebrate. I'm very hard on myself and I feel like you become... Well, the story i've told myself for a long time is you become complacent if you over congratulate yourself so i tend to really not pause and smell the roses so to speak not you guys the other roses and smell you guys too though and and uh so celebrate has been this this kind of word of the year for many years for me. And when I finished writing The 4-Hour Body, I promised myself if it hit number one New York Times that I would... Horse saddles. Well, I didn't think about the horse saddles specifically, but I said, I'll get something special for myself that relates to Japan because I used to live in Japan.

Starting point is 01:32:43 I have this deep love for Japan and the Japanese people. And I had around the same time, maybe a little bit afterwards, you might remember this. I did a TV show pilot where I went to Japan and attempted to learn horseback archery in one week. And I'm pretty sure you can find it online. If you go on YouTube and search trial by fire, you might be able to find it. It's wild and it's fucking dangerous as hell. So I did that and I had been thinking, maybe I'll get a sword, maybe I'll get some type of armor. And then I thought to myself, actually, because I had this experience, I'd really like to get either a saddle or stirrups of some type. Initially, I was just looking for stirrups because I thought they'd be cheaper and just easier to

Starting point is 01:33:30 deal with and ended up finding a beautiful wooden carved saddle. So I do have a Japanese saddle, which at the end of the day, wasn't that expensive. But for me, it was one of the first times I've ever treated myself to anything. So yes, aside from all that. And so to zoom out back to the question about investing, I realized when I was journaling around my birthday that thinking about money generally does not make me happy. It makes me more anxious. And at the same time, I feel like I'm pretty good at, because I'm hyper-analytical and over-analytical, you might say, I'm pretty good at futzing around and optimizing. But the optimizing, at this point in my life, I figured out a lot of things that make me happy. I figured out a lot of things that don't make me happy.

Starting point is 01:34:30 And most of the things that make me happy don't require a lot of capital. So this is just a long way of saying, I decided that I wanted to make all of my investing decisions or like money decisions by my birthday. It didn't quite work out. So I gave myself a grace period to the 1st of August and then to take a 6-12 month break on all of that stuff. Meaning I'm not allowed to consider new deals.

Starting point is 01:34:59 I'm not allowed to look at stocks. I'm not allowed to do any of that stuff. And so I'm glad I'm saying it publicly because I want to make myself accountable. So I'll tell you what I did. It's pretty simple. I've thought about... And it's been made more complex, as you said, because it's Alice in Wonderland in the markets right now. Stuff is happening that just by any kind of rational prediction pre-COVID just should not be happening. There's all sorts of weird stuff. And then I'm not sure what's happening right now, but certainly previously you had the Fed buying high yield bonds, all this stuff that was off the playbook. And there's such a dislocation between the market and the economic reality of millions of people in the United States,

Starting point is 01:35:54 I mean, tens of millions, the entire country for that matter, that I only wanted to put money in places where I felt I had some informational advantage or not just in my head, but in my heart and gut, just had some conviction that I couldn't quite explain. Does that make sense? Where I'm just like, this feels like it makes all the sense in the world. And I don't have that very much. So just to be clear to people, I'm not one of those people who uses the word intuition as justification for lots of haphazard shit. That's just not me. But you and I, I think as a way, honestly, to distract us from the stress and uncertainty, at least in my case, talked about quite a bit of investing stuff over the last few months, but we haven't talked in maybe the last,

Starting point is 01:36:50 I don't know, two months about this stuff. And you had some predictions that I think turned out really well. I don't know if you're open to talking about them, but like Peloton, where I thought maybe that was already baked in. So I was like, ah, I'm not going to buy a bunch of different things from Peloton. I don't have enough room. I do have one bike and I love the bike, but I'm not going to buy a bunch. They've ended up doing really well, at least last I saw. So the question I asked myself was, which companies, if we're talking about the stock market, right? Because I don't think it helps people if we talk about more esoteric stuff like distressed debt or SPACs or weird stuff that most people aren't going to have access to. But when I looked at the stock market, because my biggest, I would say my highest conviction bets have been in the stock market, which you know is crazy for me.

Starting point is 01:37:47 I don't play in that sandbox. You do that all the time. But I just asked myself, this was around mid-March. And I listened to an interview with Chamath. I can never say his last name. But an interview on investing and his framework for looking at different investments. And it catalyzed a bunch of questions for me. Some were the same questions he had listed out. I put this interview in Five Bullet Friday, the newsletter that I put out. So I think the interviewer was Pomp, is his nickname, or Pompiano? I think we both talked about this podcast together. Maybe I sent it to you.

Starting point is 01:38:34 I don't know. You might have sent it to me. There's a very good chance that you sent it to me. I mean, this is the kind of thing that you would send to me. So everybody listening, send your interviews to Kevin. And I began to wonder which companies, technology companies, would do extremely well if COVID were protracted or if COVID were somehow magically resolved in three months. Which companies would benefit from a short period of dramatic online acceleration,

Starting point is 01:39:14 even if it ended in three months, and especially if it continued for a year, year and a half? And at the same time, I was looking closely at other countries like China, where I might be getting the numbers wrong, but there's something like 79% all e-commerce and we're 17, something like that. And there's a lot of room to grow. A lot of room to grow. And I wasn't trying to do any fancy spreadsheet analysis. And I know people are going to say, well, then you're speculating. And there might be some truth to that, but I only really considered a handful of companies. And I ended up deciding, this is when, and I can tell you what the prices were too. So Amazon at about 2000 and Shopify at about 380 per share. And this would have been in very, I want to say early

Starting point is 01:40:09 April, but at some point in April. And I decided to... Initially, I was looking at a bunch of different companies. And what I decided for myself was that if I was dividing my bets because I had low conviction, I shouldn't put money into any of those bets. And I'm not saying that's the right approach, but that logic made sense to me. And I said, all right, I have high conviction around Amazon and Shopify. And if one dominates the other, then perhaps I still break even. But what I noticed was when I went... I use Amazon all the time. And certainly my spending has increased dramatically after COVID. And I remember when Amazon was limited to essential goods and I couldn't get anything else. I would go to order coffee filters and it was like four-week delivery. And I thought to myself, these companies are fucked. If these people are largely dependent on Amazon and they don't have

Starting point is 01:41:12 an elegant or effective e-commerce plan B, they're going to need to do that immediately. And who's that going to be? And as somebody who isn't one of the first advisors to Shopify, and then one could argue stupidly, but it made sense to me at the time, I ended up selling shortly after lockup period when they IPO'd. So I became an advisor when they had eight to 12 employees. Now they have whatever, 2000. I always kicked myself, right? Because I love those guys and they know what they're doing. They're good guys. They're very strategically intelligent. They're great at executing. So I was always kicking myself. And when they suspended their guidance for 2020 and they got pummeled, I just thought to myself, all right, if you really believe that and you're seeing this kind of trend, then this would be the time to push some serious chips in. And it's like either put in enough where if it grows... And I kind of, in my mind, thought, okay, 2 to 3x in share price over the next three years. I did not expect it to

Starting point is 01:42:26 happen in three months. I mean, that's just bonkers, right? But those are the only... I don't think I'm omitting anything, but I think those are the two stocks that I put a lot into. But it was really thinking about what would do well no matter what. And of course, there are lots of unknowns. There's key person risk in both of these companies, but they've both been really, really smart. And I don't know about you. I think you do this too. I mean, I base a lot of my investment decisions. This is true for early stage and it's also true for later stage, just based on my personal day-to-day experiences and how I'm spending money and how my behaviors are changing. And if I see those same behaviors changing in a dozen of my friends, I'm like, I think this is the thing.

Starting point is 01:43:16 Well, I mean, that's the beauty of being an early adopter, which you are and which I am. You're early, right? And if that's true, and all of our friends are early adopters and we're all early on something, we should be buying that stock, right? Because we're early. And if that's true, and all of our friends are early adopters, and we're all early on something, we should be buying that stock, right? Because we're early. So I follow the same kind of strategy in that I have two buckets. One, we should both say neither of us are registered investment advisors and this is not investment advice.

Starting point is 01:43:41 This is just what we do personally. Two things. My sister, what will I tell her? I'll tell her, don't buy any individual stocks. Buy Wealthfront. Go into Wealthfront. Get a bunch of index funds. Play it safe. Do your thing. Set yourself up for retirement. You're done. So one bucket of my portfolio is like that. It's just like ultra safe, like slow growth, nothing fancy, lots of index funds, blah, blah, blah. Then there's the, okay, let's take this, and this is different for everyone in terms of what their allocation would be,

Starting point is 01:44:16 but some percentage of your overall net worth and say, I'm going to take that and invest it in something that I hope will have a blended 3X over the next five years, right? Or 4x, whatever you're kind of aiming for. And for me, it's the same bucket. So I was thinking, okay, heading into COVID, what are the things that are going to do better, which would be a Peloton? Because gyms are closed. It's a fantastic product. The churn is effectively zero because when someone else buys a bike

Starting point is 01:44:50 that is being sold used, a new subscriber is then activated, which is crazy. It's one of the very few products that has zero churn. And you have to imagine they're working on, and they've hinted at this publicly, they're working on other types of equipment.

Starting point is 01:45:05 It's not just a one-trick pony. They already had a treadmill. They pulled it back. They said they're revamping it. Right now, even today, it's a $19 billion company. If you think of this more as a technology subscription play and the

Starting point is 01:45:22 future of fitness, I think there's a much larger business to be built here. And we were talking about this when it was under $10 billion in market cap. So that's interesting. Amazon, obviously to your point about e-commerce penetration being relatively low

Starting point is 01:45:37 in the United States, there is no bigger Goliath. There is no bigger giant than this beast of a company. And it's like they're just going to continue to crush everything. And so for me, that's not a 3X because it's already a $1.8 trillion

Starting point is 01:45:54 company or whatever it is now. But there's still some growth to be had there. And I'm not betting against e-commerce ever. And especially in a COVID world, people are going to be shopping and do more shopping online. So I like that.

Starting point is 01:46:10 Square, I love how they diversified their product offering. Square Cash is a fantastic app. So it's not about brick and mortar. It's now about they're doing stock trading, they're doing Bitcoin purchases, which they made a ton of money off this last quarter. It's about building out that suite of personal finance tools for the unbanked directly in that cash app.

Starting point is 01:46:36 To my point earlier about the 3 to 5x, you have to look at lower market cap companies. You can't be looking at an Apple or an Amazon for those types of returns over time. So Square is a $67 billion company. I believe there's more room for them to grow there. Like you on Shopify for everything you've said. Tesla, same thing.

Starting point is 01:46:58 I think it's expensive right now, but they're continuing to build up these massive gigafactories. There's a reason why every other week they're announcing a new gigafactory. The demand is there, and they have a fantastic product. Yeah, I just love... It's hard to bet against them. Here's one that's interesting that I haven't

Starting point is 01:47:15 told you about. So, I don't know if you know this, but Intel is kind of screwed right now. They've had a really hard time with their chip manufacturing and getting this new process down, these smaller die chips. AMD has been crushing them. But here's what's interesting.

Starting point is 01:47:32 So Apple also moved away from Intel chips and is now doing their own chips, right? So Apple and AMD, but Apple is not using AMD. Apple is using their own silicon and doing everything. So who makes all these chips? It's a company called TSM out of Taiwan that makes all these next generation.

Starting point is 01:47:50 They're like the better version of Intel. So TSM, I think, is going to be, I mean, they're already a $375 billion company, so they're not tiny. But TSM is massive. And now also consider this. We're going into the fall. Two things are happening.

Starting point is 01:48:05 PlayStation, the new PlayStation, the new Xbox are coming out. Both of them, AMD architecture, both of them being manufactured by TSM in terms of the chips themselves. So, I'm excited about TSM. And then, you know, I buy some gold to hedge all of that.

Starting point is 01:48:23 And then, that's pretty much about it. Oh, you know, Spotify, dude. I think Spotify is going to be seen as the Netflix of audio, and eventually we'll get into video as well. And I think it's going to be... There's a reason they haven't launched

Starting point is 01:48:38 Joe Rogan in the app yet, and I think it's because they're revamping... My gut tells me they're revamping the player and they're going to announce video at the same time. And it's going to be like Spotify is going to be like the next Netflix. I think that was, so I agree with you.

Starting point is 01:48:54 And one of the discussed, publicly discussed, but under-discussed aspects of that deal was the inclusion of video. That his show would be coming off of YouTube and going into Spotify, right? This is, that's the thing that people were like, oh yeah. And they're doing the video thing, but okay. But look at the audio and look at the price of the deal. And I'm like, no, no, no. Right. That video is super fucking important. Right. Pay attention to that. That's a big, big, big deal. It's huge. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys are smart.

Starting point is 01:49:25 They're really smart. Do they have the Michelle Obama podcast now that's exclusive to Spotify? And like, it's funny, I was talking to, talking about like, speaking of early adopter stuff, I was talking to my wife, Daria,

Starting point is 01:49:35 and she's like, you know, we just had this conversation last night. She's like, Google Podcasts is crashing for me. She goes, you know what? I'm just going to use Spotify

Starting point is 01:49:42 because everything's there and they got some exclusive content now. And I was like, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like, that She goes, you know what? I'm just going to use Spotify because everything's there and they got some exclusive content now. And I was like, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like that's just, you know, it's going to be the default. Yeah, they're smart. And they're being very, very aggressive in ways that some of their competition really can't. I mean, they technically could,

Starting point is 01:50:01 but they're just not designed to be aggressive in the way that Spotify is being aggressive. And I'll be super curious to watch this space, obviously, because I play so much of the podcast world. Do you think you'll ever join them? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it would have to be an incredibly good offer. I do.

Starting point is 01:50:22 I've thought about this quite a bit. I mean, as it relates to different options, right? Because there have to be some responses or reactions from the big players, right? Like Apple, Amazon, Google are all going to put a lot of capital and energy into this space because there's money to be had. And if anyone's playing with music, they recognize that the margins and advertising dollars are much more interesting. The economics are much more attractive for podcasts and spoken word, right? I mean, look at Audible, right? What a monster. So dominant. Another reason that I'm bullish. Actually, one of the reasons I was really bullish on Amazon is I said, and this

Starting point is 01:51:03 actually came from a friend of mine, Mike, who pointed it out. And he said, what is going to happen with live sports? How are they going to broadcast sports to millions of people? Who is equipped to handle this right now? And he's like, Amazon with Twitch is equipped to handle this in some fashion. There's infrastructure within Amazon that can be adapted for all sorts of gaps in the market.

Starting point is 01:51:33 The beautiful thing is that Amazon gets paid no matter what. Guess what happens when Google taps out their data centers, what they light up next? They're lighting up Amazon. Yeah, exactly. Everybody's lighting up AWS when this stuff goes big. Exactly. So let me ask you a question about... So a couple of things real quick. So yes, confirmed that we are not registered investment advisors. And I think it's

Starting point is 01:51:57 really important for me to provide a little more context around my comments where I said I put in enough chips where it would be meaningful with, say, Amazon and Shopify. Man, you said Spotify. I always confuse the shit out of those two. When I put money into both of those companies, I had roughly 14 times more in cash reserves. So this is really important to keep in mind. In other words, at the time, if I put 2% of my liquid net worth into those stocks, I had something like 30% in cash or cash-like reserves. So I'm playing it, from my perspective, as kind of safe in that respect. And I do not recommend people stock pick in general. I just think it's a terrible idea.

Starting point is 01:52:54 And the other thing too is, if you're going to play in this world, there's no such thing as timing the market and you just never know what's going to happen. Always dollar cost average your way into any position. So that means if you have $500 to invest, rather than say, tomorrow I'm going to go buy some Spotify for 500 bucks

Starting point is 01:53:14 and just call it a day. Maybe divide that into five $100 investments over the course of five months or three months. You're not buying at the bottom, you're not buying at the high, but you're getting that blended dollar cost average. And a lot of people do that as a little mini way to hedge. Because who knows what's going to happen given how insane this market is. The second piece that I think is important to mention is, and I think,

Starting point is 01:53:37 Tim, you're in this boat too, but I wouldn't be buying anything that I wouldn't want to hold for the next five plus years. So it doesn't really matter. That's super important. I should have said that. I was planning on not touching these for three to five years. Yeah. So I mean, if something drops by 40%, will I be crushed by looking at the price? Of course. But I think long-term, I'm going to be in just a fine position. And that's the way you alluded to this too, it has to be something that you're comfortable losing at the same time, right? So it shouldn't be the life savings, right? Yeah, and we

Starting point is 01:54:12 should also say, it's like we're talking about companies that we actually really fucking know at some level, right? I mean, this doesn't mean that it's a different type of knowing than reading every analyst report. And it's just a deep product knowledge.

Starting point is 01:54:33 And the fact that we both... I know dozens and hundreds of companies that use Shopify as their e-commerce solution. I use Amazon every day for one thing or another. use Shopify as their e-commerce solution. I use Amazon every day for one thing or another. And I think that's important to keep in mind. And question about... I think my dog really has to pee, so I'm going to take her out in a minute.

Starting point is 01:54:59 She's being very good. We can wrap things up. We can wrap things up. This would be a good way to expedite the answer to my question, which is, you said you're buying gold. How do you think about gold versus crypto? Because you've been very involved or knowledgeable of and tracking crypto for quite a long time. And are you buying ETF?

Starting point is 01:55:22 Are you buying bars in some vault in a foreign country? What are you doing? And why gold versus crypto? How do you think about them differently? Well, on the gold side, I like to look at the ETFs that do warehouse their own gold and actually have full transparency reports about actually owning the bars. And, you know, so I actually buy the iShares Gold Trust, which is IAU. And I like that a couple that won there. The biggest one out there is GLD, but their expense ratios are higher. IAU, I believe there was a couple of things I looked into. And it's also like Providence, like where are they keeping their gold as well?

Starting point is 01:56:06 And the IU was keeping it in Switzerland. And I think one, I think the UK as well. And it just, I want to make sure where they're storing it is also safe and secure and not in a crazy war zone or something else that could, you know, potentially go really bad on that front.

Starting point is 01:56:22 Bank of Sierra Leone. Yeah. It's like, you know, so, you know, I just, I went with that one. I'm sure the big ones are all probably pretty decent. But in terms of crypto, I have a bunch of cryptocurrency that is not yet tradable that I've invested in over the last few years and so that hasn't hit the market yet. So I already see my crypto bucket as being pretty full.

Starting point is 01:56:49 I don't think holding Bitcoin or Ethereum is a bad idea. I just wouldn't make it any substantial portion of my overall portfolio. Like it wouldn't be 10% or something crazy. Why do you have less confidence in crypto than gold? That's a leading question, but I'm just making an assumption here. And that does not to imply that I am a super bull with crypto, but it seems like in some respects, you are more confident in gold as a disaster hedge versus crypto. Why would that be the case if it's true?

Starting point is 01:57:25 Well, it is true. And I believe that you have to look at what are the safe asset choices that institutional investors have direct access to. And there is no easy way, you know, ETF to buy cryptocurrency. It's just not there yet. And I just, it's not to say that people won't turn to crypto and the prices won't, you know, 5x by the time this video is released. Like, who knows? But I just, I know that gold is so time tested that I just, I feel it's a proper hedge and I'm okay with having some portion of my portfolio being gold. Now, do you view that as a hedge against hyperinflation, a hedge against general equity collapse? What are you hedging with gold? I would say a little bit of both, but mostly general equity collapse. I'm hedging in that I believe if all... Let's just say we have a vaccine that doesn't work and this turns into a three or four-year process instead of a one-year and change process, jobs don't come back. That's going to be a pretty brutal place to play. The markets, I think at that point might start to sour.

Starting point is 01:58:46 It's very confusing why they haven't today. But like, you know, in that case, I would like a little more something, a little more something that's a little bit more concrete, like having gold as part of a portfolio. But that's just me. Everybody's different. I have some friends that won't touch the stuff.

Starting point is 01:59:01 And then I have some friends that actually have bars and they're like actual physical gold bars, which i'm sure you know some of those people as well i do yeah you probably have some no i don't i don't actually but i'm just like i'm like if it gets that bad right where it's like mad max and marauders are you gonna drive your fucking dune buggy with machine guns down to the 7-eleven and like take a razor blade and shave off a sliver of gold to get your tampon. He's like, no, you're not. Right. Tim's on the corner with a little hatchet, just etching off some gold and trading it for some lentils.

Starting point is 01:59:33 If it gets that bad, you're going to have to use your gold as a weapon because it's not going to have any functional value. But I mean, who knows? God mean, it's, God, it just feeds every like, not paranoid, but sort of apocalyptic scenario planning compulsion that I have. So I try to not get wrapped up in it because it's so seductive. It's so seductive. Cool. Well, thanks for answering that.

Starting point is 02:00:01 Yeah, I think people should be prepared for a long haul, right? Like I think it's very dangerous to try to do any short-term trading. And I actually heard an anecdote. I'm not going to mention any names, but one of the best known hedge fund investors in the world who has an incredible, incredible track record. I mean, the guys, his compounded annual returns over decades are just ludicrous. And he came in, this was a couple of weeks ago, and basically said to his team, he's like, guys, it's too fucking hard. Just take a vacation. We're not going to try to deal with this right now. So if that is happening in one of the top shops in the world, I don't think it's a good idea for 99.999% of people to do any short-term trading. You're going to get eaten alive either by other traders who do this 24-7 or high-frequency folks,

Starting point is 02:01:03 or you're just going to get murdered by the market. As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. It's crazy when you read these subreddits about these Robinhood traders that are using that app to leverage their positions. And these kids are going in there

Starting point is 02:01:23 and just getting these crazy leverage positions on certain things. I mean, they're driving up bankrupt companies like Hertz and all these to new record highs. And you're just like, this is not... We shouldn't be playing. Don't play with this stuff. Well, that one kid, that poor kid, I don't know. Did you hear about what happened? I don't know. There are a lot of poor kids these days. Which one are you talking about? This one got... Robinhood, the app, it's a fantastic trading app. It's a great piece of software, but it allows people to opt

Starting point is 02:01:51 into options trading and leverage trading with three clicks. It's super simple. That's terrifying to me. I know. These kids go in and this one kid put in... I don't know what the dollar amount was, but he got on the wrong

Starting point is 02:02:06 side of being leveraged. He didn't know these things were going to expire and he saw a negative, I don't make a number, but it was something like $100,000 negative account and he killed himself. Oh my God. All over Robinhood and just a misunderstanding of what was going to happen in the end and just got so wrapped up doing it and it's it's yeah it is honestly for me you know another reason why i'm just hitting pause on all this stuff is that you know for me these days like the function of investing and that can be applied to time and energy, but certainly

Starting point is 02:02:45 capital is to increase your quality of life. So if one agrees that that is, let's just take that as the primary objective. If you're making investments that cause you to lose sleep and chew your fingernails and have cortisol pour out your eyeballs. It's a bad investment. It doesn't matter if it's two Xs, 10 Xs, 100 Xs. If for a protracted period of time, it's going to have that psychological, psycho-emotional effect on you. It's not a good investment. And I've learned that the hard way too. I've chased returns, certainly in the startup world and all this stuff. And I was like, this fucking sucks. This is not fun. And even if you're good at it, it doesn't mean you should do it. Watch after this podcast comes out, like venison futures are going to shoot up.

Starting point is 02:03:32 Tim mentions venison is the future. Venison is the future. Maui Nui, get after it. Cool, man. Well, it's awesome to see you, brother. Yeah, good to see you too. Miss hanging out. And it's a bummer to not be able to spend time in person. So hopefully we'll be able to do that before too long. Yeah, agreed, dude. It's been too long.

Starting point is 02:03:52 I'm actually really glad that you got to visit us just before this whole COVID thing happened. It wasn't that many months before. So it was good to see you then. But it's tough. It's tough. Stuck in the house. It's hard with significant others too. It's like you really realize what your relationship's

Starting point is 02:04:08 made of. You get to see all the stuff. Yeah, exactly. And all your stuff. I've got no shortage of my stuff. It's a daily project. Anything else you want to say before we wrap up?

Starting point is 02:04:23 Where people can find you, anything like that? Yeah, I mean, I'm not on social really these days. I do tweet every once in a while at Kevin Rose. But yeah, I would say one thing I would like to mention is if people want to check out that Zen interview I did on my podcast with Henry, I thought it was quite good. It was like, you know, and I'm sure you,

Starting point is 02:04:42 Tim, you get like this too. You probably obviously don't say it publicly, but you record episodes and you're like, oh, it was just okay. You know, it's like, you know, and I'm sure Tim, you get like this too. You probably obviously don't say it publicly, but you record episodes and you're like, oh, this was just okay. You know, sometimes you're like, every once in a while you get one of those. Yeah. So this one I was like, wow, actually, I think I did a pretty decent job

Starting point is 02:04:56 with this one. So I was pretty proud of it. So I think people will enjoy this one with Henry Schuchman. And you can find that at podcast.kevinrose.com. Sweet. And you can find that at podcast.kevinrose.com. Sweet. For me, I really love doing the Hugh Jackman

Starting point is 02:05:12 interview. That must have been huge for you, dude. It was amazing. It was just a dream come true. He's been on the wish list forever and he just was so game. So if you want to check that out, I think it's just Tim.com. I haven't listened to it. I gotta listen to it.

Starting point is 02:05:27 I got to listen to it because Dario was like, did you hear that Tim interviewed Hugh Jackman? I'm like, the first thing out of my mouth was I was like, he must have been shitting himself. That's like your dream episode. I was super nervous. It was great. It was great. Did you ask him about his training and stuff? I did, yeah.

Starting point is 02:05:43 Oh, I knew you would have. It was awesome. I was like, if you could only choose one exercise, him about his training and stuff? I did, yeah. Oh, I knew you would have. Yeah. It was awesome. I was like, if you could only choose one exercise, what would it be and why? And what would the protocol be? He really gave the details and got it. Oh, that's exciting.

Starting point is 02:05:56 That's awesome. So that one, I'd recommend people check out. If you just search my name and Hugh Jackman or go to your podcast app of choice. And then also I'd say one thing that I am still doing that I'm still really enjoying is Five Bullet Friday, which is the newsletter that goes out to between one and two million people every Friday. It's free. It's just five bullets of the five coolest things that I've come across that week or that I'm thinking about using, experimenting with, pondering. And you can find that at tim.blog forward slash Friday. Sweet.

Starting point is 02:06:25 That's it for me, man. But give a hug to the fam for me. I miss you guys. Yeah, miss you guys too. And yeah, let your dog go pee. Yeah. All right. Molly, thanks for getting off.

Starting point is 02:06:37 All right. All right, brother. All right, see you. See you. 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?

Starting point is 02:06:57 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 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

Starting point is 02:07:32 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. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. It's a whole new world out there and we're all facing new challenges. You may need legal help to overcome some of yours and that's where LegalZoom fits in. Maybe you've been wondering about the best way to protect your family, or maybe you're thinking about starting a business, but you don't know the best way to do it. Don't let legal questions hold you back. LegalZoom has been

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Starting point is 02:08:49 2017 i have two of them upstairs from where i'm sitting at this moment and now helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas they just launched a new company called all form a-l-l-f-o-r-m and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home.

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Starting point is 02:09:48 on it which is actually in a way what I did because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds it's pretty rad so I mentioned I have all these different things in this room I use the natural leg finish which is their lightest color and I dig it I mean I've all of these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color. And I dig it. I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #453: The Random Show — Zen, Investing, Mike Tyson, Artificial Intelligence, and the World's Best Beers

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