The Tim Ferriss Show - #493: The Random Show — Bitcoin Pros and Cons, 2021 Resolutions, Fave Books, Lucid Dreaming, Couples Therapy, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an edition, a special edition of The Random Show with my close friend, Kevin Rose, well-known investor, serial entrepreneur, and all-around good guy who's my friend. And we have an important preface, an important caveat, an important disclaimer before we get started. And here it is provided from my lovely lawyers. Here we go. I am not an investment advisor, nor is Kevin Rose. All opinions are mine alone or his.

Starting point is 00:00:31 There are risks involved in placing any investment in securities or in Bitcoin or in cryptocurrencies or in anything. None of the information presented today, or really anytime since you might be listening to this anytime, is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person. That includes you, my dear listener. So everything you're going to hear is for informational entertainment purposes only. And with that said, please enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a brand new cereal that I eat just about every day that is low carb, high protein, and zero sugar. I just ate a huge

Starting point is 00:01:15 bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. Magic Spoon cereal has received a lot of attention since launching last year. Time magazine included it in their list of best inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it the future of cereal. It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood. Remember that? But it's actually good for you. Each serving has 11 grams of protein, 3 grams of net carbs, 0 grams of sugar, and only 110 calories. It's also gluten-free, grain-free, keto-friendly, soy-free, and GMO-free. All the things. It's delicious. And I don't say that lightly because most of this healthy version of X stuff is not delicious, but these guys really nail it. Magic Spoon has nailed it.

Starting point is 00:01:57 It comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted, and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at magicspoon.com slash tim or you can just grab a box or a bunch of boxes i'm going to order some more today of the cocoa which is my personal favorite but there's a new contender for favorite flavor because they just launched two limited edition flavors honey nut and peanut butter which are delicious i am a sucker for peanut butter and it is outstanding so i think cocoa and peanut butter, which are delicious. I am a sucker for peanut butter and it is outstanding. So I think cocoa and peanut butter are my two new favorite flavors. And fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with Magic Spoon. One of the podcast's most popular guests, Dr. Peter Attia,

Starting point is 00:02:37 routinely crushes six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot. With no glycemic response. He's looked at this with a glucometer. He likes it so much, he invested. Other friends, two very fine gentlemen, and also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan Holiday, also invested. So check it out. See what the buzz is about. Go to magicspoon.com slash Tim and grab a variety pack or cocoa, which is my favorite, or anything else. But see what strikes your fancy. Why not? Try a variety pack and be sure to use code TIM at checkout. My listeners, that's you. Get free shipping and a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you're not a fan, if you don't love it, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. Again, check it out. Magicspoon.com forward slash TIM. That's Magicspoon.com forward slash TIM.

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Starting point is 00:04:46 slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss in the how did you hear about us section. That's freshbooks.com slash Tim and enter my name, Tim Ferriss, two R's, two S's in the how did you hear about us section. One more time. That is freshbooks.com slash Tim. At this altitude, I can run flat out Tim Ferr Random Show. This is episode number 7496. Kevin Rose. Correct. It is good to see you, my friend. You too, you too.

Starting point is 00:05:38 It's been too long. When was the last time we actually saw each other in person? You were in Portland. It would have been in Portland 100 years ago because it was simultaneous with a, I think it was acro love festival where you had hundreds of people just smothering each other with body contact, one another with body contact. So that is a pre COVID activity. Yes. It was probably a year and a half ago, huh? It's been about that long. It's crazy. It's sad. It is. It's wild. And what I'm reassured to see is you have your Japanese podcasting robe on,

Starting point is 00:06:13 and you seem to have new eyeshadow or mascara, which really brings out your eyes. It's called five hours of sleep, dude. It's called, it's called babies is what it is. Well, I like it. You're converging with the raccoon gods that you upset so long ago by tossing one of their brethren downstairs for people who want that security footage. You can search Kevin Rose raccoon and it'll pop. You're determined to make that like what's on my grave. Like what I'm best known for is the raccoon toss. Your Wikipedia legacy. I want it in the first paragraph. So we shared a Google spreadsheet that you created beforehand of things we might talk about. I'm sure we'll talk about all sorts of stuff. Where do you want to start, man?

Starting point is 00:07:00 Yeah. I mean, we can start with the Bitcoin stuff because you were super excited about that, which is odd because you're typically not like the biggest. I'd never seen you as like a hardcore crypto guy. I would definitely not self-describe as a hardcore crypto guy at all. I just happened to have this combination of ignorance and laziness, which led me to hold on to the Bitcoin that I had. Oh, so you're stoked. That's why. I'm like, why is Tim so excited about this? Because you have a boatload of money right now. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's a boatload, but I've held on to it. I mean, look, anyone who is holding, just to put a timestamp in this, it's January 8th, 2021. Bitcoin, I believe for the first time ever, just crossed $40,000 per Bitcoin. It was 41 this morning, yeah. Yeah. So anyone who has ever bought Bitcoin to the unexamined or unexamining eye looks like a complete genius, right? But it's not possible

Starting point is 00:07:58 that everyone bought Bitcoin for the right reasons or through the right process. But nonetheless, here we are. And it's exciting to watch, even if it may implode. And people are drawing comparisons and certainly pointing out the differences between 2017 and now, where we saw this huge spike several years ago and then a consequent crash. Now, I should point out... And that's happened several times now. It's happened several times. And I should also point out that I got into crypto in a meaningful way right before that crash in 2017. So if I had consequently sold all of it, I would have done so at a pretty massive loss. And I was like, well, look, I'm playing with house money in the sense

Starting point is 00:08:41 that I can afford to lose whatever I am putting into crypto. So I'll just hold on to it. And the premise that I used or the set of assumptions I used to get into crypto ended up being totally wrong in a lot of ways, at least in the sense that I was investing in crypto as a hedge, specifically against, say, a huge drop in the stock market since I had a few different pending IPOs and so on. This is like pre-Uber IPO, basically. Yeah, exactly. And so I made a bunch of very tenuous leaps of faith in my logic to look for different ways to hedge against the possibility that a market collapse could drag Uber down with it.

Starting point is 00:09:32 So nothing stock-specific, meaning nothing Uber-specific in that case. I mean, you literally could have just hedged the market, though, at the same time. Yeah, I mean, look, I could have hedged the market. I don't know much about shorting or hedging or anything like that. And when I looked at it, even in any cursory way, looking at the stuff with certain very smart people, yourself included, I mean, you've played a lot in the crypto sandbox, so I want to hear from you more than me. It's easy to get intoxicated, and it's easy to kind of walk into this reality distortion field where you're like, you know, the world is going to Mad Max in the next 48 hours and crypto will be all that survives. I'm not saying that's your argument. But the point I wanted to make is that if you look at the timeline, so 2017, boom, right, the sort of tulip bulb craze of crypto at the time, sort of tanks, or at least Bitcoin. And this time around with COVID, a lot of Bitcoin bulls and so on were expecting that Bitcoin would be inversely correlated with

Starting point is 00:10:54 these crashes and it would shoot through the roof. But that's not what happened. Not what happened with gold either. And I think what was underestimated was how many people would need cash, right? And when you need cash, you sell whatever you happen to have. And if you have, for instance, as a lot of people got themselves into trouble by borrowing against assets, so they took out, say, lines of credit based on the value of their stocks. And then when the stocks cratered, those all got called. And, you know, bankers and everyone else cratered, those all got called and, you know, bankers and everyone else calling up, you know, Joe Smith, like, Hey, Joe Smith, we want

Starting point is 00:11:30 all our money right now. And they had to sell anything they could sell that was liquid. And that would include a lot of crypto. So it took a few months for crypto to recover to pre COVID. Whereas gold kind of took off immediately after COVID. It did drop in the very short term, like the kind of early March to early April, and then kind of picked back up. It wasn't a big run-up, though. We never saw kind of massive, like, the crypto-like gains that we've seen with Bitcoin, right? Gold's picked up a bit, but not a ton. No, not that much. And I'm referring to GLD specifically for people interested. But what are your thoughts

Starting point is 00:12:05 right now on all this crypto mania? I mean, there are differences, huge differences between right now and 2017. Namely, the entry of at least one of them is the entry of institutional investors. And yes, just a few months ago, Paul Trudeau Jones, and some other legends kind of dipping their toe in the water and beginning to make some allocations in their portfolios, fun portfolios, which is a big difference, not just personal. I believe that's true. Somebody can fact check me. But what do you make of all this? This is a terrain that you're much more familiar with than I am. My take is that with any new, crazy, wild idea come just a ton of skeptics, as there should be. And when Bitcoin was first launched and we were all playing around with the very early wallets,

Starting point is 00:13:00 and I remember just buying coins and picking them up. And I wasn't really early, early, like I wasn't, you know, in the pennies, but I was buying them around 10, $12 a coin, something like that. And, you know, it was, it was the wild west. It was very difficult to do anything to, to buy crypto to, um, you know, we were all setting up mining rigs back then and trying to mine our own Bitcoin. And then eventually pools came out so you could join in with other people to do it more efficiently. But this is fresh new technology that hadn't been hammered and beaten on. And so, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:35 anytime there's something that is directly linked to your finances, it takes years or decades for people to get comfortable with a new emerging technology to where they'll commit any serious capital to that technology. So I think largely what we're seeing here is, well, one, it's, you know, there's a lot of stimulus money hitting the market. There's a lot of people buying on Square Cash app. There's, you know, it's much easier to purchase Bitcoin than it has ever been. You know, it used to be you have to go to some shady exchange somewhere, hold up a picture of your driver's license with like literally your like date written underneath it to make sure it was you like shady stuff that I've been on some of the exchanges.

Starting point is 00:14:18 My identification has since been hacked on many of these exchanges. Thankfully, I don't live at any of those addresses that I had those IDs I was holding up in front of the camera. But I do get text messages of people trying to phish me all the time, like trying to get me to like... That's so creepy. It's crazy. It happens at least twice a week. It's insane. Because my information is out there. So whatever. But the point being is that it was extremely difficult to purchase Bitcoin. And now, you know, PayPal came online just a couple months ago and is offering the ability to purchase Bitcoin and Ethereum directly inside of PayPal. Like, it's just insane how easy this is now. So you're unlocking massive

Starting point is 00:14:56 customer bases, like hundreds of millions of users with PayPal. You know, Square Cash is the, I think, the second or third largest buyer now of Bitcoin. This is on the retail side, right? This is just on the retail side. Yeah, so that's not even talking about the institutional money going in, right? So I work at True Ventures, venture capital firm, several billion dollars under management. We have positions in Bitcoin. We've been doing that for a while.

Starting point is 00:15:27 When you say you guys have positions in Bitcoin, that means you've invested in startups that focus on Bitcoin? No, that means we actually own Bitcoin. How does that work? As a venture capital fund, you're operating a private endowment? Yeah, every fund is a little bit different. In our specific case, we have allocated as part of our formation documents for the fund, a certain percentage of the fund can be in cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency-related companies. So we can say, I'm just throwing out a random number here. I'd have to go look at the docs, see what the actual number is. But let's just say 10%, 15% of the fund, overall fund size,

Starting point is 00:16:00 we have a $600 million plus fund that you can only invest that much from this specific fund into cryptocurrency. And so if we're going to go into and do a purchase, typically dollar cost average your way in over a couple months and buy in a place that has really strong security. We don't hold this ourselves. It's not at our office. There's big financial houses like fidelity and Coinbase custody and others that now provide these types of services. You don't just have a bunch of hardware wallets sitting in your jacket pocket. Yeah. It's a right here just at my house. Um, no, I don't, I actually, I don't, I don't mess with that stuff anymore. I used to have wallets and I actually had a laptop that I bought specifically for cryptocurrency.

Starting point is 00:16:55 And I wanted to keep it in cold storage, meaning that back in the day when I was doing the craziest coins you've never heard of on these weird exchanges, I went out. I bought a laptop. It was an Apple. Hooked it up to the internet. Did all the software updates. Just put the wallets on there, transferred the funds, and then immediately powered it down so that it wouldn't be online anywhere, hackable, and then put it in a safe. And like, that was the way I kept my cryptocurrency. It's crazy. It's crazy. But, but yeah, so there's been enough time has gone on. This current run-up though is just nuts. I mean, the thing you have to do with all these things is just don't look at the last three months because it looks like a

Starting point is 00:17:24 decent graph and you're like, oh, that looks reasonable. Maybe I should buy some. Zoom out to the five-year view, the 10-year view. That's when you see really what's happening here. And it's not even like a hockey stick. It's like, it's even more, it's like insane how the run-up has been. And so I get nervous when you see, you know, it's, it's always a good tell around, well, in this case, it was like the, the virtual Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner when uncle Harry is asking you if they should be buying Bitcoin. Like that's when I like my, my Spidey sense tingles a little bit and be like, huh, everybody wants this now, you know? And

Starting point is 00:18:02 there's, it's just, if, If I were going to enter the market now, I would do it in a way that is you pick the dollar amount, let's say it's $1,000, and this is not investment advice, I'm just telling you what I would do. Pick $1,000 and I'd say, okay, I want to own Bitcoin. I believe in the future of Bitcoin. I think this isn't going away, which all those things are true and they are things that I believe. It's a proven technology now. Let's a proven technology now. Let's take that $1,000 and invest it over six months. And so just divide it up by six and just do those, I'll say the first of every month and just go in. It doesn't matter what the price is. You don't care. You just buy that set amount. And that way, at least you're averaging your

Starting point is 00:18:38 way in over six months. How do you personally think about crypto for yourself as part of your portfolio or percentage of your total? I mean, you're kind of famous for telling, not famous. Well, you're famous to me for telling me when I should buy stuff and then not telling me when you've sold stuff, which I appreciate. I love that call, by the way. You're like, are you still holding this? I'm like, no, I sold it for like a 10x like 6 months ago and you're like I'm down or something bad will happen

Starting point is 00:19:09 you'll have been screwed by the fact that we didn't talk yep that happens with some fair frequency but what is what is your current thinking in terms of crypto are you steering clear do you still have a certain position is it an investment for

Starting point is 00:19:26 you? Is it an insurance policy for you? Some people have drawn that distinction just sort of philosophically as looking at cryptocurrency as an insurance policy or a hedge. I think that over time as, well, a few things. One, let's just talk about the ecosystem in general. I think that 99% still today of the coins that you see on the market out there are just garbage. I think a lot of them, and it's hard for them really to go away. Just the volumes of the volume in trades that happen just decrease over time, but they still have these somewhat impressive looking market caps just sitting out there, very stagnant, developers kind of drop off.

Starting point is 00:20:06 It's just kind of like they're left for dead, but they're still around. So there's a lot of that, a lot of interesting innovation happening in the kind of decentralized finance space. So they call it like DeFi. It's mostly happening on Ethereum. There's a handful of projects where I say that's really interesting. It's almost like an angel investment now. I want to hold some of that. But with the understanding that this could go to 10% of the value it is today. And so extremely high risk, but still has the ability to have a 50x upside, right? Or at least a 20 or 30x upside. If you just look at the market cap of Bitcoin today, there's not another 20 or 30x anytime soon coming to Bitcoin. It's just too big, right?

Starting point is 00:20:49 Like the market cap is just too large. Now, how do you come to that conclusion? Well, I mean, first of all, there's a few ways you can do it. I think that you just have to look at the market cap in general, which I don't have in front of me right now, but I can type it in. The other thing is just look at the proxies for this. So like, what is the market cap of gold, right? Of all gold out there. And it's in the trillions. Let me see here. I did this the other day. So Bitcoin right now, the market cap is 82.49 billion. So, you know, where would we be at if that's a 10 X from now?

Starting point is 00:21:30 Like, I mean, that's just insanity. That's, that's, I can't imagine that happening anytime soon. It would just be. Now that's insane because of the comparables that you might put next to it. Yeah. I mean, Apple is worth 2 trillion, right? And so, you know, you just kind of have to – and I know it's not the same in that we're not talking about corporations here with cash flows and PEs and things that we would typically use to value a company. That is not this.

Starting point is 00:21:58 The closest proxy that I think most people draw the comparison to is to just gold. How much gold has been mined? How much do we believe we believe is there in the, in the earth? What are people holding for an investment? How much of it is actually being worn? Like there's a lot of other ways. So there is a lot of potential upside in, in, in Bitcoin, but I don't think, you know, for me, I, it's not that I wouldn't hold it. I would definitely hold it. I think it's going to be a rocky bumpy ride given the run-up that's had recently, like it's been forever. Like this has always been the case of Bitcoin. It's been very bumpy, but the new low is higher than the last low. And it just continues to kind of like, it wouldn't surprise me to see this drop down to

Starting point is 00:22:40 25 or 30 again, but I don't think it's going to get back to 10. There's just too many institutional buyers coming in. So I like it because there are a lot of governments, the US included, are probably one of the biggest offenders, just printing money right now. It's really hard to understand what the value of a dollar is or what it will be in the future. This is a fixed number of coins forever that will never change it's universally accepted you know even more so every month all over the world so it's it's kind of a global reserve currency that

Starting point is 00:23:15 i i'm comfortable with so i i do like it for that um but i think there's a lot of new interesting projects that probably have more upside. That also require more due diligence and expertise, right? Or attention to detail. So let's, if we talk about Bitcoin, just to continue on this thread, it's currently at, let's just call it $40,000 of Bitcoin. And you were saying, well, it's hard to see a 20X upside. If we look at proxies or comparisons to gold, or certainly if we draw comparisons to Apple, that's a little bit categorically, I guess, a different comparison. But if we're looking at certain trends or growth trends that have been accelerated thanks to or due to COVID, right? If we look at, say, Amazon or Shopify or Peloton, companies that we're both quite familiar with and or investors in, a lot has

Starting point is 00:24:15 been accelerated and the growth trajectory of the graph has changed dramatically for a lot of companies, SaaS companies, adoption of remote work, et cetera. Could someone make an argument that that is why, in part at least, we are seeing this adoption of Bitcoin and that it is on some level reasonable? Or I guess in your mind when you're thinking of how much this price can be explained via factors, external happenings, storming the capital, etc., certainly MMT and all this kind of stuff, versus just pure mania, right? Because the Bitcoin bulls will sort of lay out often regurgitated, but sometimes cogent arguments for why this is explainable and reasonable. And then the bears will say,

Starting point is 00:25:15 here's the tulip bulb craze of such and such a year, and this is exactly what's happening. It's just pure mania. There's nothing to it besides greed and human psychology run amok. Where do you fall in thinking about explaining the price? Because if you look at institutional adoption, we're still super early in institutional adoption. And by institutional, I mean, there are wide ranges of institutions. And certainly, I think at the more conservative end, if we're talking about endowments and pension funds and so on, it's super early, not to mention sovereign wealth funds and so on, right?

Starting point is 00:25:56 The really gigantic nation-state players. So yeah, what do you think? From an institutional adoption perspective, it's super, super early. That does not mean, though, that the tiny amount of adoption up to this point, plus Square, plus PayPal, have organically produced $40,000 per Bitcoin prices, right? That's a lot of word salad I just threw at your face via Zoom. So maybe you can speak to that. Well, I think that it is really hard if you look at the people that are actually looking at the blockchain and watching where assets are moving, some promising and also some really scary things start to emerge. And so I think the promising side is just the average consumer now has access to purchases with just a couple clicks and Apple Pay and everything else.

Starting point is 00:26:53 The ease of purchase is gone, as we mentioned earlier. It's simple now. So that has unlocked certainly a lot of demand, especially around a hype cycle. We know about the institutional side. I agree with you that it's very early days there. And there's been several proposals and there are new ones out there for a Bitcoin ETF. I think that happens and we start seeing these appear in people's 401k accounts and things just go bonkers. The scary side of things is some of the price manipulation that's going on.

Starting point is 00:27:26 And so there are ways to manipulate the price. And this is, well, I'll bring it up with the caveat that it's being talked about on the internet, so I'm bringing it up here. It is not my view that this is happening, but it is being talked on the internet. So it's worth mentioning. So I say that from a news perspective, not from an accusatory perspective. And that is that there is a lot of preamble for Kevin. Well, I'm just trying to say that because I don't want them to come after me and like just sue the shit out of me basically.

Starting point is 00:27:59 So, so there's, there's a, there's a stable coin out there. And when I mean stable coin for those people that don't know, there are a bunch of coins out there that you can hold as cryptocurrency that are pegged to an asset, like a Fiat asset that we know,

Starting point is 00:28:13 which like say the U S dollar. So if you hold USDC is what it's called the coin and you hold one of those coins, it is worth $1 and that never changes. It's just pegged at that price. And so there are a bunch of these and one of the larger ones is called Tether. And so Tether is, we don't have, here's the thing. There's been some analysis of some of these transactions and Tether,

Starting point is 00:28:39 if you can imagine, if you control and it is centralized, if you control, the way that Tether is supposed to work is this. If you send Tether $1,000, they issue you $1,000 worth of Tether coins, right? That makes sense. If you go to redeem them, they give you back the $1,000, right? And so it kind of grew and, well, I shouldn't say kind of grew,

Starting point is 00:29:01 it's massive now. Let me ask a novice question. What is the use case for that? Why would someone do that? They want a mobile anonymized. They want stability. Yeah. So imagine you're sending your aunt in Costa Rica $100.

Starting point is 00:29:17 You want to make sure $100 gets there, not $92 because Bitcoin dropped, you know, or maybe she's like if it went up. But, you know, it's like it's you need the stability and also be used for a whole slew of other things. They do lending with it where you can earn interest on it. That's what a lot of the decentralized finance comes from. Anyway, so a tether coin, for example, is one of the first ones, one of the first stable coins. And it has a twenty three point nine three billion billion market cap. Now there are currently some ongoing investigations into what's going on behind the scenes at Tether because there are some allegations that they're just issuing new Tether and buying Bitcoin without there being the reserve USD to

Starting point is 00:30:00 actually back it up. So there's been a handful of articles. You can search tether, whatever you want to call it, like scandal or whatever you may be into Google news. And you'll see that people are looking at this and saying, huh? And there's several organizations like government organizations that are looking at this and they're saying, okay, we need to peer inside here and make sure everything is kosher because if it's not, they could be just propping up the bitcoin market and buying bitcoin with fake minted tether stable coins and if that's the case and that comes out that's going to be a shit show for a few days it's the best way i could describe it do you think yeah that's probably a description the shit show uh do you think not knowing anything about it that they have sufficient volume to prop up so to speak the bitcoin price or to inflate it well i mean just

Starting point is 00:31:00 give you a sense in the last 24 hours they've done 114.31 billion in volume. It's heavily used on, on some exchanges. Some exchanges won't touch it. There's some, there's some changes that you won't even, you can't even purchase to other if you wanted to. So it is the one piece that I look at and I just say,

Starting point is 00:31:21 ah, gosh, I don't like where this is trending. And some of the people that are looking into this, this could really put a big black eye on the market. It doesn't mean that Bitcoin is a fraud. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a legitimate technology that works well.

Starting point is 00:31:35 It's well secured. It's been hammered on. Like there's, right. It doesn't mean this doesn't mean Bitcoin goes away, but it does mean that it there's spook could spook the hell out of lots of people. It spooks the hell out of a lot of people, and it also shuts down ETF talks

Starting point is 00:31:50 and all those other things because a lot of the reasons why these ETFs for Bitcoin aren't being approved is because of these claims of this type of market manipulation. So it's, but to your earlier ask around, like, what do you, how do you think of this when it comes to portfolio construction? And again, I'm a venture capitalist, not a registered investment advisor. This is not a financial advice. But for me personally, I think... Informational purposes only. This is informational and entertainment purposes only.

Starting point is 00:32:17 If Tim says that... Oh, you bastard. That's not true. You're going to cut that out. You rat bastard. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best version of LinkedIn for sales professionals. Get ready to exceed your 2021 sales goal with the help of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That's what it's built for. The best salespeople know that closing deals is about

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Starting point is 00:33:35 So start your 60-day free trial. That's a two-month free trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator today by going to linkedin.com slash navigator. That's linkedin.com slash navigator, N-A-V-I-G-A-T-O-R, to start your 60-day free trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. One more time, linkedin.com slash navigator. So basically, I would say for me personally, I think, okay, maybe up to 5% of my overall portfolio and consider it super high risk. But I liked your strategy, Tim. It's like, it's kind of one you have to take with cryptocurrency. If this gets cut in half or cut in three quarters, you just have to say, oh, okay, bad day, bad week, bad month, and just ride it out for the next 10 years. Because you know,

Starting point is 00:34:22 in 10 years, it will bounce back and the returns were going to look better than ever. So, you know, that's kind of how you have to play it. Yeah. And it's a test of conviction and process also, right? In the sense that I've been talking to, you know, friends and like you, sort of the kind of Uncle Harry equivalents are like, I want to put money into Bitcoin and Ethereum. And I'm like, can you tell me what Bitcoin is? And they can't even hazard a guess. It's just something that's going up in value very quickly. And the sort of observation I've made, because usually... Is your uncle actually Harry? I don't want to throw this guy under the bus. Let's made up. Okay, good. Okay. So Uncle Harry usually will have a story that is something like this. My friend Bob has invested in crypto, and over the last seven months, he's made,

Starting point is 00:35:17 let's just make up a number, $500,000. And my question is always, did he sell all of his Bitcoin and pull out $500,000? And the answer is no. And my follow-up to that is, well, it all looks good on paper, but if it's not enough to just buy something that is going up in value, unless you believe it's going to go up in value indefinitely, you also have to have a plan for if and when you are going to sell that asset and redeem. Now, some pure believer or true believers would say you never sell Bitcoin. And that's one option. But unless you have deliberately, conscientiously decided that, and you have that as a bulletproof, emotion-proof strategy, you sure as hell better have a plan for if and when you are going to redeem to some type of fiat. And if you don't have a defined time horizon, the likelihood of you losing money because you sell in a panic

Starting point is 00:36:21 when it plummets is pretty goddamn high. That's why I like the lower percentage points of your overall portfolio, because it has to be money that doesn't matter. So you can hold it for the long term if you want to hold it for the next 20 years. But I guess what you're saying is it does get to meaningful money at some point, right? Because naturally, if it does 5x from here or 10x from here, then it's going to be no longer 5% of your portfolio, right? So in that case, I would force myself to every year or every other year, just rebalance. Do you actually do that though?

Starting point is 00:36:58 100%. You do? I did it with Peloton. Okay. All right. So now you would do that regardless of the duration of holding that investment? Or do you wait for long-term cap gains? I would wait for long-term cap gains unless it is something just absolute bonkers.

Starting point is 00:37:21 So if it's absolute bonkers and you're just like, I mean, look at Tesla right now, just like, look at that chart, click on the five year and, and, and your Apple stocks app. It's, it's, it's just like the, you're like, how is it not bending over? If you like fall, it should fall backwards. It's going so high. Like it's, it's ridiculous. And so you, if you, I'm, if I'm holding short-term cap gains there, I'll take the tax hit. I just want to point out that you are also a lover of Tesla products, right? So you're not saying this as a Tesla hater. You love their stuff. Listen, I have two Teslas. They're fantastic vehicles. They're my favorite. I have a truck on order. I can't wait to get that thing. And yet, when it's a straight line.

Starting point is 00:38:05 Yeah. Yeah. So it's just one of those things where if it is getting an outsized percentage of your portfolio, then it's absolutely smart to... And I kind of have this thing where, I mean, we talked about, I think you and I traded some texts on this, but we talked about just like your overall mixture of assets and everything that you have kind of put together. Like what is your allocations for multiple things look like? And I'm, most of my stuff is just fully diversified, set it and forget it forever. Like wealth front style, just put it in there and have it be fully diversified and safe.

Starting point is 00:38:41 And then I have a category that is like, let's just call it 25% of my overall assets that I'll say, these are 5X capable stocks or greater. And those, I know they're super risky, well, somewhat risky, and they have real cashflow and all that, but I'm going to invest in those. And I would put like, you know, Pelotons in that kind of camp. Some of them are riskier stuff like the Nios, like the Chinese Tesla, you know, a few other things that I've bought over the last couple of years. So, you know, but then always going and pruning and readjusting and saying, oh, actually my 5X stocks are now 40% of my portfolio. Let's trim that back to 25. Yeah. I appreciated your strong buy recommendation on Pornhub. That was, that was genius. Well, you're co-owner now, which is odd,

Starting point is 00:39:27 but it's your thing. The acro yoga. I'm on the team. I'm on the team tab. Free premium for the next two months. Use code TimTim. TimTimKevKev. I really hope they make that code.

Starting point is 00:39:42 That would be fantastic. That is a joke, people. Joke, joke. Joke, joke, Kev, Kev. I really hope they make that code. That would be fantastic. That is a joke, people. Joke, joke. Joke, joke, Kev, Kev. Now, I had a follow-up to that. Oh, the follow-up was really more a commentary because I think some people will be very interested in this conversation and others will find it

Starting point is 00:39:59 inside baseball or just they'll think that it's kind of a rarefied air investment talk. And I would, on one level, agree with that, and on one level, disagree with it, because we're sitting here at the beginning of 2021. 2020 has been such a fascinating and punishing laboratory for looking at the consequences of good and bad decisions. And there are many places where it's difficult in many ways to quantify those upsides and downsides and risks, certainly with COVID, with certain information available,

Starting point is 00:40:48 other information unavailable or pending, it's been challenging. But one of the playing fields in which you can look at decision-making as sort of a microcosm of the macro, right? Like you get to see how decision-making that transcends investing shows itself with stocks, crypto, whatever it might be, right? In other words, if you are able to observe and hone your decision-making with even very small investments, I believe that that transfers into,

Starting point is 00:41:24 if you're self-aware, that can transfer into better decision-making in other areas, right? Because we're all investors of time, energy, capital, and you can choose to become better at those things or you can remain blissfully unaware. But one way or another, you are making decisions about investment every day. So that's another reason why I've paid attention to this a lot in the last year. I mean, I think there have been some incredible opportunities also in the last 12 months.

Starting point is 00:41:59 But more than that, it's just a lens through which you can look at how rational you are, how subject to emotional swings and corresponding bad decisions you are. And it tells you a lot about how you might make decisions or more concretely make rules for yourself in 2021. So can you give me an example of that? I'm really curious, outside of finance, how have you applied this to other areas of your life? Well, for instance, in 2020, one of the biggest lessons or takeaways that I had for myself in investing, and I'll talk about how I would apply that, is that this is going to sound so rudimentary, but I've been very

Starting point is 00:42:49 lucky and also, I think, very good at picking things to invest in over time. If you just look at the last 10 years, 12 years, net-net, things have worked out pretty well. And there are a lot of circumstances, there are certain trends that I accidentally took advantage of, some that I deliberately took advantage of, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm pretty good at placing bets. I am very weak, I would say, on exit strategy and knowing when to get out of positions. And this past year, I realized that three years, looking at a three-year time horizon for anything publicly traded seems to be incredibly comfortable for me. In the sense that I can't predict what things are going to do, what companies are going to do what in the next three months, six months.

Starting point is 00:43:41 I have no fucking idea. No idea. I mean, there are just so many curveballs that can be served to any company. Five years, I mean, geez, five years, now we're talking about Google starting to usurp Yahoo, right? I mean, that's a long enough period of time, especially with exponentially developing technologies, that five years is very hard to call. But like three years, if I'm looking at certain types of companies that I feel like I understand pretty well, Amazon, Shopify would be two examples. I think Spotify also. I'm investors in all of those.

Starting point is 00:44:21 And again, this is not investment advice. I don't know how many times we have to say this to cover our asses. But this is, you know, your mileage may vary. And I only invest in things that I feel like I really, really understand deeply. I'm the same way. Yeah. So three years, I'm looking at certain trends. I have an audience, fortunately, and a lot of friends who are kind of the tip of the spear with early adoption. Not all of those things work out. But when you see then it begin to kind of

Starting point is 00:44:54 hop the fence from, say, my friends or my audience to people one degree removed, I'm like, okay, that I think is worth paying a lot of attention to so that is that has been a a new rule that i have established for myself specifically for publicly traded equities and uh the way that that's applied to my life more broadly and we're gonna we're gonna don't worry folks we going to get to other points besides crypto and investing, is looking at, you know, doing a full review of 2020 and then looking forward to 2021, thinking out three years as opposed to just 2021 and thinking about what types of sort of regularly occurring practices I want to have, and I can give some examples when we get into it, over a three-year period is really calming for me. I think,

Starting point is 00:45:56 yeah, like 10 years, 10 years is kind of like, I don't know, man. I mean, there's just so much that could change. I mean, who knows if, you know, California, you know, like Texas is going to secede along, like maybe Texas and Montreal will become sister cities and, you know happen. Three years, I just find that to be a very calm place for me when it comes to planning now, but also thinking about personal development and building a family and so on and so forth. So it's kind of like if you were to paddle out in the ocean at like a surf break, right? When you first paddle out, let's just say it's a beach break for simplicity. Like you're going to have to get through these, these first sets of waves and then you're going to have some calm and then you're going to get to like the outer breakers and you're going to be in the impact zone again. And it's going to be exciting, but it's also can be really stressful. And I find like three years for me, it's just

Starting point is 00:46:58 kind of comfortably in between those two. Yeah. I like what you said about also doing these kind of thematic investing where you say, okay, I don't know. I like you, you just named off the exact same companies that I pay attention to around e-commerce because like, obviously we know e-commerce is, is, well, it's more so online these days than ever, but it's still a fraction of in-person commerce. So if we believe that trend is going to continue, which it will, who are the players in that space? And so rather than say,

Starting point is 00:47:33 well, actually, I think it's going to be Amazon and not Shopify or Square, it's like I just would rather own the entire bucket. So I go and get Amazon, Shopify, Square, PayPal, and I think that pretty much covers, you know, the future of payments. When I think about like mobile payments and just happening on your phone and eventually when Coinbase goes public, I'll probably pick some of that up as well. But just having that and sitting on those and then just watching and as leaders start to emerge, dollar cost averaging a little bit more

Starting point is 00:48:12 to get a little bit more upside in the clear winners, if there are going to be any, then that's what I've done historically that's proved to be pretty successful. Yeah. And we're talking about pickaxes and shovels, right? I mean, in the sense that a lot of these companies, not all of them, but a lot of these companies offer services that other companies capitalize on or other creators. And my choices also were based on different scenarios related to COVID.

Starting point is 00:48:46 So I was like, okay, let's say COVID, wave a magic wand, it gets solved tomorrow. But we were decimated, behaviors changed, growth trajectories changed for, let's just call it severely, for like six to 12 months. Okay, what does that look like for an Amazon? What does that look like for Shopify? Okay. And then let's say COVID continues. Let's say there's a new strain and A, B, and C happens. And rather than best case, it's certainly maybe not worst case, but a terrible case. What does that look like for these various companies? Okay. And just came to the conclusion personally that in most scenarios you could play out as an exercise, these companies still seem to do well. Right. But you also have to play out the other side too, right?

Starting point is 00:49:39 Like what happens once a vaccine happens and COVID subsides? This is why I'm not holding zoom right now. And zoom may be a great, it's a great company, great product. We're using it right now, but it's like, it's,

Starting point is 00:49:51 I just don't see, you know, when people start to return to work, what gets hit the hardest. And so that's, that's part of the reason why I, I mean, I missed out on a ton of upside with the climb of and rise of zoom,

Starting point is 00:50:02 but it doesn't pass that post vaccine test i want to i want to have to believe in my heart of hearts that i will close my eyes and hold this thing for five years and before doing an investment otherwise it's just it's gambling at that point yeah well i mean it depends on how you define your time horizon and if you have the skills and the emotional control or stoicism to be able to stick to your plan, right? So for me, one of the reasons I came to three years is again, five years, I just don't have confidence that I can look into the crystal ball and understand where technology is going to be in five years. There are companies I expect will still be around, certainly, but let's just take in the case of Spotify, for instance.

Starting point is 00:50:46 I looked at Spotify really closely, and I'm on Spotify. I understand the technology. I use the product. I saw them investing incredibly heavily in non-music audio content. And certainly at the top of that list in terms of their capital expenditures would be podcasts. And you have Rogan, you've got all these different folks. And for Spotify compared to, say, Amazon, there are people who would argue that podcasts are an existential priority, right? Like they have to really heavily invest and be the A player high bidder

Starting point is 00:51:31 for a lot of this core talent and these teams who can create content because their economic model is in some respect dependent on the improved margins through non-music audio, right? Amazon sells everything, right? Amazon sells a million things. And Amazon Music and the team who's on podcasts with Amazon is a fantastic team. But within Amazon itself, it's hard for me to imagine that that has the same level of urgency and priority that it would have for Spotify, just given the range of options. I agree with that, but what about Apple?

Starting point is 00:52:19 Yeah, Apple's huge. But Apple also is, I think, Apple's amazing. They have by far the most market share right now. And they're also, they have, I would expect, certain constraints. I don't think they're going to pursue anything incorporating advertising models, at least not in the short term. They just haven't had a lot of luck with that. They don't seem inclined to pursue it. Also, like, absolutely has to make this work. So for me, I'm like, all right, Apple, Amazon are going to be really deliberate. They're not going to rush. They have endless powder in the keg, right? Like they just have, once they find things that work, they can make them ubiquitous. I think that's going to take time. Is it going to happen in one year? Maybe, but I think pretty unlikely, which is why I think Spotify will continue, if I had to guess, to invest very heavily in trying to solidify their position as the go-to platform for sort of talent and content creation within the kind of predefined parameters of non-music audio. And so for that

Starting point is 00:53:58 reason, this is not the only reason, but for that reason, also looking at potential upside, right? I mean, in the sense that like, if you want Amazon to double what needs to happen for that reason, also looking at potential upside, right? I mean, in the sense that like, if you want Amazon to double, what needs to happen for that to happen, right? And then if you look at Spotify, for Spotify to double, what might need to happen in order for that to be the reward that the market and retail investors sort of bestow upon it? And the answer is, I mean, I feel like a lot less needs to happen for Spotify, right? I'm not saying Spotify would ever do this, but like if Spotify were just to redomicile and avoid all of these various problems that they have with their current situation, not that they would do that, but like certainly there are steps they could take if they needed to

Starting point is 00:54:44 that would dramatically change their financials. And again, what the hell do I know, right? Like, not that they would do that, but like certainly there are steps they could take if they needed to, that would dramatically change their financials. And again, what the hell do I know? Right. Like I'm not an analyst, but, uh, yeah, but this is your world though. I mean, podcasting is like, that's your DNA. So I feel like you would do a lot when it comes to that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just, I, and I also see, and you and I have texted about this, where people you wouldn't have expected to use Spotify are now using Spotify. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 00:55:12 And it's made that hop over the fence in the United States. In Europe, the behaviors are very different. In Spanish-speaking countries and regions, Spotify is extremely dominant, it would appear, based on polling my own audience. And there's just a lot of room to grow, I think. Yeah, I agree with that. I think Spotify is interesting from that standpoint. It is certainly, it's a really crappy, razor-th thin margin business on the music side. Anytime they can get you anywhere away from one of the major labels, they're making money, right? Cause you're paying that $15 a month or whatever it is, $12 a month. Um, I just found out they have a,

Starting point is 00:55:58 uh, I downgraded from the family plan to the duo plan, which is just for two people. So my wife and I just use the dual plan and save my bucks myself three bucks a month. Well done. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you. Anyway. Yeah. So it's a great product too. I love the technology. I think that they have invested heavily on the kind of AI machine learning side of things to get recommendations better than anyone has, which is so key for music discovery. I'm a fan on that front as well. Yeah. And one more thing.

Starting point is 00:56:30 Yeah, I was going to say one more thing on the finance side as well. Fire, fire, fire. We should close off finance and move on because I know we had a few more topics to hit. But I spent a crap ton of time researching and doing my due diligence on the various financial applications for tracking finances. So I just wanted to share this with people because I let my work

Starting point is 00:56:52 benefit you in some way. So, you know, I feel that what I've done is, you know, all of us or most of us, we dabble in a bunch of things, whether it be cryptocurrency or a little bit of E-Trade or whatever your brokerage is, or Wealthfront, or you have a little bit of stuff here. Maybe you have a home or not, or a car payment or not. And I want a universal dashboard to bring all of that stuff together. It's like one place where you can see holistically what's going on with all of your finances everywhere, credit cards, all that stuff. And I've tried all of the stuff out there real quick. Quicken sucks. It's horrible.

Starting point is 00:57:29 It doesn't work with like half the crap out there. It won't tie to wealth front. It won't tie to a bunch of stuff. It's just horrible. So avoid that at all costs, even though that's like the old school one that sounds like, oh, maybe, maybe Quicken's better now. It's not better.

Starting point is 00:57:40 It sucks. Now I have this theory that a bunch of the Quicken engineers got together and were like, yeah, this place kind of sucks, but let's go create a new product. So Quicken came out with a new product that is actually quite good. It's, it says it's called simplify. So it's simplify money.com S I M P L I F I. You can just Google it. Don't like try and spell that. Anyway, simplify from it's by the makers of Quicken. So I, it is actually a fantastic product and it's somehow competing against Quicken,

Starting point is 00:58:17 their own product, which is very weird. I think what happened is as with any old piece of software, you've got an old school audience that's been baked in for decades that if you change change any user interface element, they go apeshit and they freak out on you, right? Like that's the case with why all these software packages like Word and Excel and all these others, they just turn into bloatware. You know, you look at them and you're like, why so many icons? And it's because people will complain if you remove anything. It's always hard to take features out. So this is just a really streamlined, beautiful, it's like three bucks a month. It's always hard to take features out. Um, so this is just a really streamlined, beautiful, it's like three bucks a month. It's fantastic. Now, if you don't like this, one thing I do like about this, I'll just tell you one of the features I thought was really

Starting point is 00:58:53 cool. And I use this, uh, for over the holidays, you know, how like you, you go and you return something like you got a sweater, you return it, but you like never know if it really hits your account. Again, you don't pay attention. Like pay attention. There's a way to say I return this and notify me when I get the credit back or not if the credit doesn't come back. Just some really cool little features like that. So anyway, I was pretty impressed with it. It does link with a lot of the stuff.

Starting point is 00:59:14 Very confusing why it links with a lot of the places that Quicken doesn't, even though they're the same company. But anyway, that's that. I think personal capital, though, is the best one that's out there. Have you used personal capital before? No. I don't use them on the investing side.

Starting point is 00:59:28 I don't put my money with them because they also have an investing thing. I use Wealthfront for that. But personal capital, in terms of the interface, the holistic interface to bring together all the accounts, it's completely free. You don't have to spend any money on it. And it kind of brings everything into one dashboard for you. So anyway, I've looked at 10 others that I won't even bore you with, but those are my picks for the show. Sweet.

Starting point is 00:59:50 What, what now you are, how would I put it? You have a financial dashboard fetish. Like some people like tentacle porn, some people like shoes. Like Japanese coffee, which you also like. But you have a financial dashboard fetish. So what I'm curious about is, does it just tickle your balls and you get a little feeling in your butterfly? I wish we were having wine right now.

Starting point is 01:00:21 It makes you really happy to look at this? Is it just like a Zen garden for you? Or do you actually learn anything? Does it inform your decisions? Has it changed how you behave in any way? It has because what it does is it does a pretty good job at kind of categorizing everything that's going on in my life. And so it has a beautiful cashflow feature where I can see

Starting point is 01:00:47 I've spent this much, this was my budget, and this is how much income I have coming in. So I like to kind of track that and watch the trends over time. And overall net worth is cool because it like lets you tie in your house in there. Let's put your cars in there, like anything else that you may have, any jewelry, anything. And you can kind of like watch as certain things appreciate or they don't and they go down. It's just like, I like the idea of being able to pull all this stuff together into like one interface. Because if you think about, okay, now I got to go log into Coinbase and now I got to go log into Wealthfront and now I got to go log into my bank to see my checking account. Oh, and I have a credit card over at Chase and I have an Apple Pay card. And like, there's a bunch of stuff to check, you know, and, and that means in terms of

Starting point is 01:01:32 transaction transactions as well. I mean, I've caught some fraud on these and it alerted me to things where I was like, I didn't buy that. And I went and canceled a card. So just having a way that I can go and every couple of days just see that and just do a quick gut check. Like, is everything sane here? It's nice. And there's no, I don't have to log into multiple places and it's, it's free. So I don't know. It's cool. So you avoid logging into multiple places by giving all of your login information to one entity, or is there some type of auth that allows

Starting point is 01:02:02 you to circumvent that likecer-producing centralization, which would make me nervous. Yeah, so Plaid powers all of this on the back end. So Plaid is a company you may or may not have heard of. It was one that we invested in when I was at Google Ventures. They work with all the financial institutions to connect and provide data to apps like Personal Capital. to connect and provide data to apps like personal capital. So you're actually not sharing your login credentials with plaid or with a personal capital.

Starting point is 01:02:30 You're sharing them with plaid plaid secures them. They issue like a token to personal capital. So personal capital never actually has your credentials. Um, and then they can view your data that through, through that one one secured vault. So it is nice like that. Yeah, I was worried about that as well.

Starting point is 01:02:51 So to completely... So I'll add one more thing on the finance front, which is I am fucking tired of thinking about anything related to finance or investing. That's been you forever, dude. Yeah, I know. That's been you for five years. Yeah, that's true. That's been you forever, dude. It's been you for five years. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But especially in the last, I would say, six to 12 months. So one of my goals is to do as much possible in terms of batching activities or setting rules for

Starting point is 01:03:22 myself, like strict rules. You can't eat bag. Like you can't eat bagels. I don't eat bagels anyway, although they're delicious, but like making very binary rules for myself because I think it is very easy. And if we look at just human behavior, I think it's very natural, but often harmful to one's health. If you have something that is moving up or down,

Starting point is 01:03:48 or up and down, if you have something easily quantifiable that to your mind seems like points on the scoreboard, whether positive or negative, it's really easy to spend a lot of time being distracted by these things and looking at these things. I'm thinking a lot more about

Starting point is 01:04:06 energy management over the next year than time management. I feel like time management should be a downstream decision based on your energy management priorities and rules. And that is how I'm approaching it. So I am hoping to do effectively zero investing unless I have to make defensive moves or disaster befalls me, which I hope will not be the case. So that is all to say, I kind of crammed a lot of decisions. Because as you know, Kevin, I was sitting on the sidelines since, mostly sitting on the sidelines since, I don't know, 2015 with the exception of that crypto position. And I don't enjoy it in the same way that some of my friends do and maybe you do, just the tracking of all of it. I think it's more, I feel like it's kind of a leeching of energy for me, even though it is very addictive.

Starting point is 01:05:07 So I'm looking forward to doing things that have nothing to do with investing. And we were talking about in prep for this conversation, talking about, or I guess in the Google spreadsheet, talking about this year, meaning 2021, New Year's resolutions last year. And I do every year for the last handful of years, a past year review where I go through my calendar week by week from the previous year and look at the things that gave me the most energy, took the most energy. Some of them are

Starting point is 01:05:41 worth it. Most of them are not. And trying to identify the kind of peak emotional experiences, positive and negative, and who the people and activities are on both of those lists. So I'm sorry to say, Kevin, you ended up on my negatives. I'm kidding. And that's how I then go through and look at scheduling things and spending time or not spending time with activities and people for the next year. And the most consistent energy giver was time in nature and activities in nature. And it's just part of the reason I was so thrilled and we can kind of go in any direction, but to get as a gift this book,

Starting point is 01:06:31 which is Of Wolves and Men by Barry Holston Lopez. And it is probably the best nonfiction book I've read in the last five years. It is so unbelievably good. And I have highlights on almost certainly in every chapter. And it's just, I had to modify the way I highlighted because I highlighted so much. His writing is as crisp and clear as Michael Lewis, the structure of his writing is right up there with John McPhee. And the beauty of his prose and just the wordsmithing and use of metaphor is right up there, I would say, with Mary Oliver. I was blown away.

Starting point is 01:07:20 I kept stopping my friends and wanting to read them paragraphs and chapters, and they got pretty annoyed after a while. But it is a spectacular nonfiction book. Very cool. Yeah. It's funny, Tim. I don't know if you remember telling me this, but you told me, I don't know, maybe was it six months ago? You were like, I'm not reading any new books. What was it? You were saying something like that. What was the deal? Yeah. So, well, for 2020, I read no books that were printed in 20, that were published in 2020. So I was reading books, but I put up a blog post as a policy. And I think the title of the blog post was making the single decision that removes a thousand decisions. And that relates to the burden of getting hit up by hundreds of people a year who want me to read their books that are coming out a week later or two months later. And it's not that they're bad

Starting point is 01:08:22 people, but they very often have a book coming out, they want to be on the podcast, and it's not that they're bad people, but they, they very often have a book coming out. They want to be on the podcast. And I end up oftentimes, or I have ended up with just stacks of hundreds of books. And the fact of the matter is we don't have that much time on the planet, you know, unless we figure out how to, you know, recycle, you know, 20 year old blood, like vampires, like some people do who shall not be named, or whatever, using fancy drugs, rapamycin, metformin, et cetera. Maybe you eke out a few more years. Okay,

Starting point is 01:08:51 that's possible. But if I look at the average age of death of males in my family going back many generations, as far as I could easily do the math, it's about 85. It doesn't really matter what you do. As long as you don't get hit by a bus or fall off a cliff, like you're probably going to die around 85. So I'm 43. That means I've crossed the 50% mark. I think it's helpful to just assume that. And you can sit down and do the math. Like how many really good books do you read per year? And people do the math and maybe they end up at five, maybe they end up at 20. It's hard to read 20 amazing books unless you're really deliberate about it. You probably read a fair amount of garbage. So you figure out like, okay, this book took me a long time to find and it was gifted to me. Even though it had been recommended many times, I still didn't

Starting point is 01:09:43 read it. And you said a long time to find, meaning you just hadn't heard of it or it's out of print? No, no, no, it's not out of print. It's a long time to find. It took a long time for it to happen, I guess is what I'm saying. It had been recommended many times, but we get bombarded with reading assignments all day long, right? Maybe it's just something on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Although I deleted all of those from my phone. I deleted, yeah, all of those have been deleted from my phone for about six months now, which is great. Wait, I saw you post on Instagram the other day. I didn't see you post. Daria told me you did, because I don't go on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, I do know.

Starting point is 01:10:25 She told me because you posted our chocolate bar that we got you. I did, yeah. So I have a workaround. So the way that I post to Instagram without using Instagram is I use... Your sister does it. No, I use... Well, I mean, that sometimes happens too. But I use an app called OnlyPult.

Starting point is 01:10:44 And OnlyPult, like catapult, but only, pult, P-U-L-T, allows me to post to Instagram without having the application on my phone. So I'm sure there are other things that allow you to do this, maybe Hootsuite or others, but I've used OnlyPult, and it's really kind of a, it is not a Swiss army knife. It is for specifically posting. What is it? Is it just like Instagram and ASCII?

Starting point is 01:11:10 Like you're like scrolling. I like to think that your assistant's calling you up and being like, Kevin is wearing a red shirt today and Daria seems to be holding their dog, like describing you post by post. Yeah, I'm like, take out the semicolon. Who uses semicolons? No, I use OnlyPult. Think of it as a buffer for Instagram specifically. So you can schedule social media posts or post immediately using this application and it posts to your Instagram account for you. So what that allows

Starting point is 01:11:43 me to do is I can take a photo of something I think is beautiful or useful, put it on Instagram, and do so without ever being exposed to my feed in any way. So it is, in other words, it is write-only instead of read-only. I mean, you could just unfollow everyone too. And then when you go, well, there's like a blank feed. Yeah. I mean, you could just unfollow everyone too. And then when you go bolt, there's like a blank feed. Yeah, I mean, I could do that. But then you don't get the DMs and stuff, I guess.

Starting point is 01:12:12 But how do you look at your DMs? I don't really use DMs. Yeah, I don't either. Yeah, it's just over the volume isn't manageable. So the point being with these books is like, look at your track record of reading books. And I remember Tim Urban wrote about this, the creator of Wait But Why, in an amazing piece called The Tail End, which everyone should read. And it talks about how precious time actually is. Everybody

Starting point is 01:12:42 listening to this, if you haven't read The Tail End by Tim Urban, read it, reread it. I reread it regularly. And the fact of the matter is, I don't know, maybe I have a few hundred books left to read, good ones. So I don't want to be reading stuff, generally speaking, that hasn't stood some test of time, right? Like this guy, Barry Lopez, won the National Book Award. He was nominated for the National Book Award for this book of Wolves and Men. I mean, this is a very high bar, right? They just published the 25th anniversary edition. It changed how people wrote about nature or how people thought about constructing nature writing in nonfiction, period. The guy completely reshaped an entire genre of writing. It's incredible.

Starting point is 01:13:33 And if you have that high a bar, there are still too many books. So I'm trying to be much more purposeful about my reading. And that was why in 2020, I'm not reading any books published this year, which I am going to extend for 2021. So I'm not going to read any books published in 2021 either. That's awesome. I love that. Yeah, it feels good. And once you make the rule, it depersonalizes it. This is really important because it's hard to say no when you're making one-off decisions, right? If somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, can you contribute to my GoFundMe because I lost my shoes and I want to buy a nice pair of shoes or whatever, you just get hit up with so much stuff. And if it is a

Starting point is 01:14:18 personal no, it's hard for people to receive. If it is a policy and you can point them somewhere, even if you say it's a policy, it often takes the sting out. But I could just point to, if you go to tim.blog forward slash new books, I think it is, it's a short URL that takes people directly to that post on finding single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of decisions. And yeah, there it is. Yeah. So if you just go to TimDuckBlog.com forward slash new books, then it takes you to finding the one decision that removes a hundred decisions. And so if I get hit up via email, via text, via fill in the blank by someone I actually know

Starting point is 01:15:01 who wants me to read a book, I'm just like, you know, I wish I could, but I can't. I've set this public policy so I don't have to choose among friends. Boom. And I send a link and that's, that's it. That's the template response. Can I ask you how you, um, well, let me, I'll, I'll tell you why I'm asking this question. I'm asking this question because one of the, as part of the training that I'm doing with, with Henry, who we talked about on a previous podcast, who's a Zen training that I'm doing with Henry, who we talked about on a previous podcast, who's the Zen master that I study with,

Starting point is 01:15:32 one of the things that I do is when I go for walks in nature, and you mentioned enjoying nature as one of the big highlights, the easy thing to do is to put on a podcast or an audio book, right? And on top of that is to set it at two and a half speed so you can get through as fast as possible. My instructions have been to take out my headphones and just treat it as a way to listen, just listen to nature. Just like let it all come in and put your focus and attention on the sounds that are happening around you. I found that to be a much more, it's like a amplifier on top of the already awesome walk, just this idea of really being there

Starting point is 01:16:14 rather than try and do extra things while you're on that walk, right? And so my question is, when I've been listening to audiobooks, I've actually said, okay, 1x speed. Because I really, if I'm going to do a book, I'm going to give it my full attention. Are you doing anything like that? Or do you jam through books?

Starting point is 01:16:33 Do you read them at night? Like, how do you consume? Well, so there are a few things I'd love to reflect on that you just said. The first, as far as nature goes, I would say that, and I try to think about much like the energy management leading then to time management, I think a lot, as you know, about the sequencing of things. Like what is the natural kind of waterfall cascade order in which these things belong? And for me, spending time in nature is about cultivating a very detailed awareness of nature or acute awareness of nature first and foremost. If I do that, the enjoyment or the contentment

Starting point is 01:17:21 that I feel in nature automatically goes up dramatically. So I spent, and part of the reason I'm thinking about this so much is I've had a very hard time reacclimating to Austin. And it's not because of just all the swarms of locusts, aka Californians, descending upon this fair city, although I'm hypocritical to say that, obviously. It's because it's a city. It's a city. And I spent a lot of time in the wilderness on a farm. I don't want to mention locations, but for the entire summer. So I spent several months walking through the woods every day where there were black bear and coyotes and so on. And seeing the changes, I would walk for hours and I got to recognize these very minor, or I should say minute, changes on my walks. I would see which trees changed color first as we got closer to autumn. I would see how tracks presented themselves in certain places at certain times of the day, dependent on weather.

Starting point is 01:18:27 And when I came back to Austin, I want to say one thing also. One of the ways that I increased my appreciation for what was around me, because I think if the walk isn't interesting enough for you, you're probably just not interested enough. So I asked, and I'm going to be finding someone to pay to help me with this in Austin, found wildlife biologists and specialists, or even people who work at, say, garden shops and things like that, to walk with me through the woods to identify things, to point things out to me. And the recommendation they gave me at one point was start with trees because flowers and wild flowers are very complex. There are going to be dozens, if not hundreds of different varieties.

Starting point is 01:19:20 Start with the trees because in any given location, you might have at least where I was, let's just call it 8 to 12 trees. And if you learn the classifications and how to tell them apart and how to describe the different characteristics that separate them or distinguish them, you're going to be able to identify 90% of the trees that you see. How cool is that? Before that point in time, they're just trees. You might identify a maple, let's say, because the leaf looks like something you'd see in Canada. But by and large, it's just trees. It's green stuff that's really high. And after that, you suddenly kind of click the dial a few notches towards high def and your experience of the walk changes tremendously. So I would occasionally take phone calls when I was walking, but I spent,

Starting point is 01:20:12 I would say at least 70, 80% of my time listening to bird calls, learning to identify birds. You're a birder now. Are you a birder? I'm not a birder. I'm not a birder. It's okay if you are. No, no, I'm not a birder. Someone'm not a birder. It's okay if you are. No, no, I'm not a birder. Someone will be able to find this. There is actually an app on Android, sadly not. Last I checked, it wasn't on iOS

Starting point is 01:20:33 that is like Shazam for bird calls. It's amazing. In other words, you can hold your phone up, click a button and it will identify which bird is calling, which is awesome. Are you doing this? Are you doing Shazam for birds out in the forest? No, because I use iOS. I use iOS. So I had to do it the old fashioned way and

Starting point is 01:20:50 like go online and listen to different bird calls and try to compare them. The, the, uh, the other thing that I, that I found really fun to do because not everyone's going to have access to someone who can point out different plants, is to use the Google app to do image searches on different plants. And it is incredibly accurate most of the time. I was stunned. It's so cool. Just walk around your house. How many people, and I'm going to plead guilty here, know the names or the types of all the plants they might have in or around their houses? Very, very few, I would guess, right? And using the Google app and image search, which is very easy, you can pretty quickly identify the vast majority of plants, trees, and so on.

Starting point is 01:21:43 It's awesome. I've used it on walks here in Austin to identify trees. I love that. Yeah. So those are a few of the ways that I think about nature, of which we are a part, right? It's very easy to feel separate from nature. And I think that feeling of separateness is intensified if you have earbuds in and you're listening to something at rapid speed. Nature doesn't really rush, right? So to meet it at its own cadence without listening to anything but what is around you, I find really therapeutic. As far as reading, these days, I definitely don't rush. If I'm rushing through a book,

Starting point is 01:22:25 I should generally just drop the book. It's not good enough. This book, like you should be, you should only be choosing books that you are sad to see end. Right? Like if you're not like, oh man, what am I going to do now that I feel, oh no, I have to find another book. If you don't have that feeling, then you're not reading the right books. I'll give you another example. So this book is one that I was given by my girlfriend for Christmas, and it's an awesome book. I hadn't read it in probably 20 years. And it's this. It's called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge, L-A-B-E-R-G-E, and Howard Reingold. This is an incredibly detailed tactical how-to book about lucid dreaming and developing the different skills related to lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming, I was really, really dedicated to a lot

Starting point is 01:23:27 of these practices towards the very end of high school or certainly the first few years of college. And I actually reached out to Stephen LeBerge or his team when I was in college. I couldn't get a hold of him, but I did get the attention of his team because I said, you may want to look at, if you haven't already, Hooperzine A. Hooperzine A is a supplement. You can get it anywhere, but certainly online, which acts as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. And this is just a very long-winded way of saying- It sounds bad. It inhibits choline in the brain? Well, it's not turning off acetylcholine production, but it has anecdotally the ability to help one induce lucidity. How and why that happens, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:24:16 At the time, I had a very well-developed pet theory for why this sort of mechanistically and plausibly why it worked. But the point being that Stephen LaBerge came out of Stanford, lucid dreaming to define that is the phenomenon of realizing that you are dreaming when you are dreaming. You effectively wake up in your dream and you're like, holy shit, I'm dreaming. And normally you get excited and then you wake up. Yeah. They call that, they call that in Zen, they call that enlightenment,

Starting point is 01:24:46 but it's not when you're dreaming. It's when you're awake and you wake up and you realize that this is a dream. Yeah. So you can start with, you could start with the lucid dreaming. See how you do with that. This is actually a phenomenon that can be demonstrated in laboratory settings because your eye movements during REM sleep correspond to your eye movements in dreams. So you could hook someone up to, I suppose it would be an EEG, in a sleep lab. You will know when they are sleeping and in REM states and so on based on brainwave activity. And then if they have agreed with the experimenter on a predefined set of eye movements, let's just say like right, right, left, right, right, left,

Starting point is 01:25:32 or something like that, when they become lucid in their dream, they could look following that pattern and indicate to someone who is in the lab that they are in fact aware of their dreaming. It's pretty cool. Or they could just be closing their eyes and doing that. Well, they wouldn't be able to pull that off because... Because the EEG wouldn't show it, right? That's right. The EEG would just show that they're being dickheads and trying to fool people. But the lucid dreaming is...

Starting point is 01:26:01 It makes you more aware in your normal waking life because you develop the habit of doing what some people might call reality checks. And that is asking yourself the question, am I dreaming or am I awake while you're awake? And then you would test it. And the way you would test that, for instance, if you had a book cover like the way you would test that, for instance, if you had a book cover like this with text on it, in a dream, you looked at the cover, at the text, you look away, you look back, the text is generally going to change because your brain is producing the entire experience moment by moment. So that would be one test. We like looking at text, looking away, looking back. Another would be looking at patterns. Like I'm looking at the wall in front of me in my kitchen and the tiles are laid a certain way. If I looked away and looked back at those tiles, they might be running the

Starting point is 01:26:54 opposite direction or at a diagonal. Are your dreams that vivid? Like my, my REM dreams are just kind of like, I never really believe that they're real. Do you actually like, well, if you never believed they were real, you would always be lucid. Right. So, right. But I don't, I don't think like, I don't ever remember like picking up a book and being like, Oh, it has texts on it. Like that doesn't, I don't get to that high fidelity. Like do you, you, you work on dream recall first. So you would cultivate dream recall. And your grasp on the sort of coattails of details of these dreams is so tenuous that there's definitely a protocol and an etiquette to maximizing dream recall. If you don't do it immediately upon

Starting point is 01:27:45 waking, if you move around, if you brush your teeth, if you go take a piss, it's gone. All of your dreams are gone. You have to be really methodical and strict about it. But it is incredible how quickly your dream recall ramps up and you get to the point where you're remembering oftentimes three, four, five dreams a night and taking them down. There are ways to improve that. You can wake up in the middle of the night, stay up for two, three hours, go back to bed. I mean, there are all these different techniques that are outlined in this book that really, really work. So in high school, when I first became reasonably good at this, I'm not going to say great, but I could usually induce lucidity in dreams at least every other night. And I was in my final wrestling season,

Starting point is 01:28:29 and I would manifest this guy, John Smith, who was a famous gold medalist and had a particular type of wrestling with low leg attacks. I think he was out of Oklahoma. And I would train with him. I'd never met him, and I never have met him. But I would train with him. I'd never met him, and I never have met him. But I would train with him. I'd seen a lot of his video footage, and I would train with him in my dreams in wrestling and found that to carry over into my normal practices. So there are all sorts of things. Let's say you have stage fright. There are all sorts of anecdotes slash case studies of people who will then create Inception style. They'll create the environment of performing in front of a crowd. They practice this in their dreams, and it gives them an opportunity

Starting point is 01:29:18 to rehearse facing their fears. So I'm really interested in lucid dreaming. And, you know, there are some commonalities between the neurological or biochemical responses to REM sleep as compared to the effects produced by like LSD-25, right? There are some really spooky similarities. And so this came back to me. This is a book I read many times in late high school, certainly early college. My own copy, which is covered in highlights, is somewhere. And then it was just gifted to me again. So I have many books in my house now that I would willingly read a second time. I think that should be the bar for reading anything once.

Starting point is 01:30:15 It has to be that good. That's awesome. Yeah, I have many books that I've never touched. You must have. Yeah, me too. But I want to get to. I tend to clean out all the... Because I know what you mean. If anyone that has a podcast that has more than 10 viewers,

Starting point is 01:30:33 you just get books sent to you. You get on some publisher's list, and all of a sudden, a new book. It's the worst. Yeah, it's crazy. So I tend to gift those mostly away to friends and whatnot. Cool. So what else are we going to cover today? There was a couple of things I wanted to hit.

Starting point is 01:30:49 Yeah, I mean, I'd be curious to know how you're thinking about 2021 and what kind of resolutions you have, if any, or how you think about planning for the new year. Yeah, I mean, I think there was two things looking similar to you in that I spent a good chunk of time looking back on the year. And I didn't go through a calendar, but I did look at my news resolutions from last year, which I failed at all of them. And so I look at what I want to do differently this year. And so I've set up some procedures in place. And then there were some things, some wins that I did have mid year,

Starting point is 01:31:28 but they weren't resolutions because I didn't want to know we were going to be in COVID. And so, you know, I think that COVID, what it did for me is immediately caused me to start drinking more. You know, it was like very easy to finish a bottle of wine with my wife.

Starting point is 01:31:43 Like, you know, and where you typically back, Oh, we have some leftover from last night. Should we pour a little? It's like, no, we cleared a bottle out. No problem. And then went for a beer or something, you know, it was just like, cause we were like, we're going to die. And it's like, if you're going to die, might as well drink. So I was, I was basically just freaking out there for the first couple of months. And you know, that, that kicked off a point to where I got to and I said, I'm fat, I feel like I've drank too much, and I need to course correct. And so if I'm honest with myself, I felt really

Starting point is 01:32:14 depressed, not in a clinical way, but in a just, this has really beat me down. I miss my friends. I miss traveling. I miss like, you know, there's things that, and then part of me is like, well, you know, we have clean drinking water, we have food, we have jobs, like life is good. So, but, but I think it, it's, it's impacted everyone a little bit differently. And what I immediately went to is said, well, how can I stop and cut back on drinking? And then given that I only have so much free time with two little girls, what can I introduce that is new that gives me some relief and brings my spirits back to into a positive place? And so I tried a bunch of stuff. I know, I tried, you know, walking through the forest because I live in Oregon and I've got a forest in my backyard. Tried sauna, tried cold plunge, meditation, Pilates, working out, lifting weights, like all those things. And I would do a couple weeks of them and say, okay, which one of these, if you had to like stack rank them, which ones are having the biggest impact on me? Because I can't do them all. Which ones can I do that are having the biggest impact? And without a doubt, I would say the two things are, are walking and,

Starting point is 01:33:32 and, and sauna. Those are the two things that, that are just so key. And, um, I walk every single day now and it is a no phone, no ear pods, like AirPods, like kind of walk. And it is, um, it's crazy what 45 minutes in the forest will, will, will get you. And in terms of just like a mood boost, you know, like swinging the arms, moving the legs, like it's, it's fantastic. So, so that's been huge. Also in being totally transparent, I did some couples therapy, which I thought was fantastic. Like, and it's not because I thought I was going to end my marriage. Like I'd never got that crazy, but it's just something, you know, you're cooped up with somebody else with a couple of like little toddlers and it gets chaotic sometimes, you know? And it's like, you're, there's no work escape work is in the home.

Starting point is 01:34:24 Like, you know, there's no, there's no way to have that natural kind of break that you get, whether it be grabbing a beer with another friend and then coming back to your spouse. There's none of that. You're just on top of each other. And so we had done couples therapy back before and after we got married to give us a toolkit to deal with issues. And it's fantastic.

Starting point is 01:34:52 I highly recommend it. It's every single time I've done it, I've never been pissed that I did it. And you know, and I've always learned- What recommendations would you give to people who are listening to this and considering it as an option? What's, any best practices or recommendations for people? Well, I would say at first I was curious, like, are there any new tech plays that I can get into here? Like these talk spaces and some of these other things that are out there. And I find that those are really kind of like lightweight, not really meant for couples. It was just like, you know, text your therapist. And I was like, I don't, I don't need this. So I found someone that I could actually meet with over like a secure zoom type connection. That is a real licensed therapist. Not that they aren't on, on that, but a dedicated person to you. That's going to give you a full hour, you know, um, is not, not texting back and forth. And I would say, you know, I have

Starting point is 01:35:40 another buddy that did the same thing and he had to get to a second therapist to find the right one. So it's not like just because you find one that you're you go to and you're like, oh, this this isn't what I expected. It doesn't mean the idea of why am I feeling this way and just opening up the lines of communication to let us and remind us that we're both on the same team. We both want what's best for each other and to support each other and help each other because we're coming from a loving place. But sometimes we get caught up in other things and other loops and cycles and scorekeeping. I'm a big scorekeeper because I've always avoided confrontation. Like my dad was a very verbally aggressive, abusive guy to my mom and had many, many, many good traits. I always like to say that about my dad because he did, but definitely not teaching me on the relationship side. Fantastic father, horrible husband,

Starting point is 01:36:46 confusing for me as all hell, right, as a kid. You know, I think that I tend to avoid confrontation and then just kind of keep track of things. And then I get upset and I have something that's like, I've been all these things, ah, you know, just come out. And so just like trying to address things in more real time has been a big help for me. And yeah, there's been a ton of little things that I picked up, but anyway, I just wanted to tell people out there, if you're going through rough

Starting point is 01:37:13 times, cause I hear divorce rates are like through the roof right now. It was like the courts are backlogged. It's, it doesn't mean necessarily that you found the wrong person. You might just need a little help and that's okay. Yeah, I think the real-time versus dropping the mother load of 17 complaints and freeze-framed infractions is really important. Would you share that line that you told me that you used that I think is really helpful? Which one? The one that you said me that you use that I think is really helpful? Which one?

Starting point is 01:37:45 The one that you said. Oh, I think, yeah. I mean, I owe my girlfriend for all of these, because certainly I didn't come up with these on my own. And I think she's been, she is very conscientious about how she uses wording and language. And you would expect that I would have that as a writer or supposedly. But when I get upset, I think I tend to throw haymakers, right? Not literally, but I'm less careful with my wording when I'm upset. And it usually escalates or damages things more than it helps. And I'm not a yeller. I never yell. But I can be very blunt. And the wording that she used, and I noted it, and I have also used, is really simple.

Starting point is 01:38:39 It's just the story I am making up in my head is right. And then you have that the dishes are left in the sink because you expect me to clean them up. And when I, when I believe that thought, I feel X, right? So you're not saying disarms it quite a bit, doesn't it? Yeah. It's really, and it's not just being nice. I mean, it's being more effective because as soon as someone is put on the defense, it's game over. Like you're just not going to, you're not going to get where you want it to go. And by saying, and this is, this is also something if people wanted to study nonviolent communication, I think Marshall something or other, you can find it. If

Starting point is 01:39:26 you just search Marshall nonviolent communication, I can't remember the last name, but there is an audio course that is quite good. And that's one structure. And you would think, as I did, I was like, well, if we're constantly both saying the story I'm making up in my head is that it's going to be so formulaic that we're going to be like, come on, what the fuck, you know, and it's just, it's not going to work. And I have not found that to be the case. It just continues to be really helpful. Even if it is true though, that's why. Cause it is a story you're making up in your head, right? I mean, it's always what it is. Yeah. And having, I don't know a lot about couples therapy. My girlfriend and I have worked with people before. We're going to likely work with someone again, just because I have phone calls on a

Starting point is 01:40:12 weekly basis with someone who kind of looks after me. My girlfriend has phone calls at least once or twice a week with people who look after her, but there is no one currently whose sole priority is to be a sort of midwife, even if male, for the relationship, right? Like the cultivator of the coaches, just having someone who can create a neutral, safe space where each person can get whatever they need to get off their chest, off their chest, is a huge service so that it doesn't bottle up, bottle up, bottle up, and then explode into this 20-exhibit assault on someone, which they just can't easily recover from. They can't easily defend themselves against. And it's really jarring ultimately for everyone involved.

Starting point is 01:41:14 And it can force people to just kind of throw their hands up and be like, well, fuck, I don't feel like I can win here. Like I just can't win. Right. And I think this has happened a lot during COVID. And I know that my girlfriend and I have both felt that way at different points. It's like, well, shit, man. This is set up in a way,

Starting point is 01:41:29 I don't feel like there's any way I can win here. There's nothing I can do that is going to lead to me feeling like I'm being successful. And I think that is much more likely to happen when it's bottled up and given out as a massive dosage of 10 or 20 things. Instead of like on a weekly basis, having someone else say, well, Tim, like, is there anything else on your mind or anything on your heart that is that you're withholding right now? And then I'm responding to a question as opposed to like snapping over something stupid and then letting all this stuff fly out of my face. That's great. Yeah. I think that the, the thing that she's helped me

Starting point is 01:42:12 with that I forgot to mention is that really just identify who the cast of characters are in your head and how they react to certain situations, because we all have triggers. We all have these little rough patches that if, if you just poke the right way, it's going to put you in an angry or upset or frightened or scared state. And, you know, I certainly have those as well. And so I can come at something defensively or offensively from a place that is one of these cast of characters that is taken over my, my brain at that moment. And when you can name them,

Starting point is 01:42:52 define them, their wants, their needs, their fears, their hopes, you can say, Oh, that's so-and-so appearing that has a fear of this.

Starting point is 01:43:01 And she is triggering that right now. And so just, just that bringing awareness to that, just like if you can catch yourself a little bit, it just, not that it makes it go away, but you're like, Oh,

Starting point is 01:43:13 okay, here's, who's making an appearance. I know how to deescalate this person, this, this type of my personality a little bit better than before. Yeah. So have a rational conversation

Starting point is 01:43:25 where you actually have an outcome that is one that puts that person away for good, right? Or at least for that time. Yeah, definitely. There's something, it's not helpful for everyone and there are different formats for it. Some of it I've found very clunky. Some of it I've found,

Starting point is 01:43:43 depending on the facilitator, quite helpful for couples, and that is Imago therapy, I-M-A-G-O. People can look it up and very quickly decide whether it's helpful or not, but it does help you to convey in a non-violent, non-aggressive way some of the parts work that you're referring to that certainly for my girlfriend and I were, was very impactful. Kevin, if you had to choose a word for 2021 for you, like a theme. Patience. Patience. Yes. Okay. It's something I'm really trying to cultivate. I feel like you're a pretty patient guy. Are you an impatient guy? Well, I mean, I just think about what we have ahead of us

Starting point is 01:44:26 in terms of vaccines that who knows when we're going to get them. Um, you know, the crazy scariness of potential mutations of a virus, uh, new incoming administration, the, all the anxiety and unrest out in the streets. Like there's a lot of things where I just like, I'm very anxious. And so I want things to be resolved and I want my problem solver. And it's like, I just need to have a little bit more patience, just like slow down and just let things unfold the way they're going to unfold and stop trying to, to, to project my mind into the future, into some crazy scenario, you know? Yeah. That's a, that's a big one for me. And the other thing for 2021 is, is just really asking myself like the, for the drinking thing that I've, I've been really, really good lately. This is COVID drinking. So it's like, you know,

Starting point is 01:45:17 I'm not going crazy, but like more than I'd like to drink. So our new kind of, well, my new kind of framework that I've put together for myself. Blackouts only on Tuesdays. Tuesdays, no less than 10. No, no. No. So what I'm doing is no more than two. I have found that anything above and beyond two drinks just does not serve me well. I'm too old. I'd wake up like hot in the middle of the night for no reason. I'm sweating like hot red wine sweats, you know? And then the other thing is never, never two nights in a row. So I may say to myself, I may be on night number two and I say, you know, like, or want to drink the second night. And I just tell myself like, can you go one day? Oh, of course I can. And then you go one day and it turns out the next day you don't want to drink. So then it's two

Starting point is 01:46:07 nights in a row. So it's funny how just separating drinks by a night will help a ton. And then the, the last thing, and I think this is the most important thing and the one I don't have a good answer for, but I'm working on, this is part of my Zen friend who's coaching me on some of this stuff is really asking yourself when you're having a drink, like really who is getting nourished right now? Like that's a good one. It's a really good one because what's happening, what part of me is, is there something that, cause there's, there's something inside that's getting nourished and just trying to like, and I don't have an answer for that yet, but it's, it's a deep one to sit with, you know? Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. So question for you, when you look at your graph of drink consumption, as it goes down,

Starting point is 01:46:56 is your consumption of edible gummies going through the roof? No. You know, although I will tell you, I did try something new called CBN. Have you heard of this? CBN, I have heard of actually from a grower, but I've never consumed. So there's a... You should describe it for folks. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a gummy manufacturer out here. And by the way, Tim is saying this, but you know I'm not a big user of gummies. Like I'm not, I'm just fucking with you, but I do fight. I can, when, when you have had gummies, it is exceptionally clear in our text messages. That's probably accurate. It was probably pictures of me eating pizza, fucking typing with your elbows. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So basically, uh, on the gummy

Starting point is 01:47:48 side, there's one other company called wild W Y L D. Um, I, they make fantastic. Wait, like W Y L Y L D. Yeah. And so, uh, they, I think they have them all on the West coast and they're starting to spread all over the place, but they do a CBN. It's not really psychoactive, but it really makes you sleep. Like it is, I'm telling you, it's the closest thing I've had to like, I don't know. It just feels like you're, you took like a sleeping pill or something. Like I take it and it does have a little bit of THC in there. Like they do put some with it, but wild makes a sleeping gummy. So, you know, for me drinks, it's like, especially when, I mean, God, man, the news over the last few weeks and months,

Starting point is 01:48:31 it's just been insane. So when you're stressed out, um, and that's the nice thing about a glass of wine that, but a gummy with, with either CBD or CBN, but CBN more so these days, fantastic sleep with it. And I wear the aura ring and I just got the Fitbit to try out the new sleep data on here. And so I'm tracking all this stuff to see how it's doing. If you have more than two drinks, you see it so clearly in your aura data. It is irrefutable. It's just, it turns your sleep into such garbage. It's unreal. Well, resting heart rate goes up by 10 points and it's elevated all throughout the night. HRV goes down.

Starting point is 01:49:08 Like there's just so many bad things that happen. Yeah. Speaking of which, in terms of like awesome little finds that have been helping us get through these times, this right here, I'm going to send you some of this, Tim. You got to try this.

Starting point is 01:49:21 What is it? So this is Hinoki wood in here. Okay. And so Hinoki wood in here. Okay. And so Hinoki wood is one of the seven sacred trees of Japan. And when they talk about all the health benefits that come from forest bathing in Japan, because you know, walking in the forest can be prescribed out there from a physician. It's typically attributed to a lot of the fragrance from Hinoki. And this is Hinoki oil right here.

Starting point is 01:49:46 I found a fantastic manufacturer in Japan of high quality, like cold pressed Hanoki oil. And I will tell you what it is. I have zero. I don't know any of these people. They're all in Japan. It is Hanoki lab.com. So H I N Ookilab.com. So H-I-N-O-K-I lab.com. These oils, they smell so, I mean,

Starting point is 01:50:10 you've been to like a Japanese, like proper bath house where they have like the essential oils and all this is the stuff's gold. Oh, and I put it in the sauna too. So you can put it in some water and then like poured over the coals in the sauna. Awesome. Yeah. It's a type of Cypress. It's a beautiful, beautiful tree. Really dense foliage. Cool. I planted a few of them here in my yard actually. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So I got some, I, I, I had some, uh, brought in. Jesus Christ. Oh, I love it. It's good to be Kevin Rose. Not from Japan. Okay, well, you have to qualify. So you brought him in. Like I flew them via freight from Japan.

Starting point is 01:50:51 Hey, man, you know, all that crypto gold, I don't know where it goes. I can almost 100% guarantee you that you have more crypto than I do. So if you're looking to ransack. Oh, Jesus Christ. to you that you have more crypto than i do so if you're looking to ransack oh jesus christ it's it's uh yeah well that's not saying much because you kind of divested yourself of everything yeah or a lot of things for sure i'm definitely more i'm scared the markets are just like super overvalued right now so i i tend to go safer yeah yeah i think that I think that's, I think there's, there's a good, a good argument to be made for that. If I were to pick a word for 2021, what is it right this

Starting point is 01:51:31 moment? It would be mischievous. I think that I've taken a lot of things in myself way too seriously in 2020. And I think I want to bring more coyote energy and kind of prankster mischievousness into 2021. Interesting. So what does that look like in you? Like, like, like no mask wearing kind of thing or? No, no, that's just being a dick face. I don't want to do that. No. Coyote, it's more, I think, a playfulness and a reverence, not taking things too seriously. I'll give you an example. I just the other day threw up, I love the original Willy Wonka movie with Gene Wilder. And so I threw up this animated GIF that is Gene Wilder sort of eating candy, saying, the suspense is terrible. I hope it'll last. so kind of oblique and vague that it acts as a rorschach test for wait a second did you throw this up like during the trump like capital takeover today i no no i threw i threw it up right afterwards oh geez and fuel in the fire, dude. Well, you say, yes. I mean, you say terrible timing. I think that I want to cultivate a

Starting point is 01:53:10 insensitivity to personality by consensus. What I mean by that is, if you look at a lot of people, I'm not going to name names, but if you look... Yeah. No, no, I'm not going to name names. Manicured. No, manicured like feeds and stuff well you just look at personalities online over time who spend a lot of time on social and they become caricatures of themselves because they have certain behaviors rewarded certain behaviors punished certain behaviors left unapplauded and they start to warp and bend their behavior to fit the most applause.

Starting point is 01:53:49 And they turn into these kind of creepy caricatures. I think that that ends up inevitably bleeding over into their real lives, right? I mean, their off-screen lives. And I think that's really something I want to be hyper aware of, which is why I don't have the social on the phone. I'm using these workarounds like OnlyPult to post stuff. And I want to kind of hold up a mirror that allows people to look at their own reactions also, right? So I think that a lot of what I'll put up in 2021 will be Rorschach tests. And for people who don't know that, those are the ink blot tests where they would put lots of ink, fold a piece of paper, show it to someone and say, what do you see? And they might see a murderer, they might see a butterfly, there might be something else. And then that is used as kind of a jumping off point for

Starting point is 01:54:48 psychoanalysis. And that's not going to be everything I put up, but I just think that life is too short to take yourself too seriously. And so first and foremost, it's for me. But doing things that don't seem to have a point, doing things that are beautiful just because I think they're beautiful, they don't need to have some targeted outcome ROI or fill in the blank, right? And just to kind of loosen my grip on whatever I think my identity is that's been constructed over such a long period of time. And let's not kid ourselves. Identity can be revealed, but it's largely constructed, right? And I think we get so attached to our labels of what we are and what we aren't, what we do and what we don't do, that it's just a, I think it's a very socially

Starting point is 01:55:47 reinforced trap that kind of constrains your awareness and sensitivity and openness to the world. So yeah, more coyote. That's good. I mean, the world needs, I think the problem that we've fallen into is social media. And part of the reason why I don't like having an account there is it just becomes, it makes me sad in some sense in that I see it's always the best version of someone's self. Like there's never any, if he feels very manufactured oftentimes, and it's, it's like, it doesn't feel authentic in the way that it's always about good times. There's never any, like any, I guess there has been more lately with some of the protests and some of the

Starting point is 01:56:29 stuff that's come out on there. But I mean, people, myself included tend to put just the best version of yourself on there versus just letting it all hang out, which I guess is what kind of what you're saying in a sense that you're, you're just going to have more fun with it than just trying to create the Tim Ferriss image up on, on social media. Yeah. And you know, I don't feel like I've done too much of that. I mean, I do, I've,

Starting point is 01:56:55 I very deliberately put out stuff that is true to me that I think could irritate some percentage of my followers just because I want to have some countervailing force against becoming this like dancing sock puppet on the internet. I do that to not become too attached to social feedback, but not to turn this into a discussion of the social dilemma, but if you are constantly exposed to these technologies, you are completely outgunned. Who have, for all intents and purposes, infinite resources to turn you into a little rat in a Skinner box. Well, yeah, I want to keep... I love that the AI is going to look at your feed and be like, I think Tim would like this. And they're like, oh shit, he posted a yellow pony. What the hell does he like now?

Starting point is 01:58:01 Oh, damn it. You're really keeping them on their toes. Well, I want to keep myself guessing too right like i yeah i don't i love that dude yeah follow less of a script and you've always been good at that though you've always been like every like one in every 10 of your instagram posts everyone's like what the hell is he why is there a picture of that like it's it's not it's clearly not that manufactured feed, which I've always appreciated. Yeah. Well, what was it?

Starting point is 01:58:26 I can't remember. Maybe I don't even remember what it was. But back when we were both on the apps, I remember one of yours was like, and deleting in three, two, one. Exactly. To your credit, sometimes when I get a little far afield you're like i think you should probably delete that and i'll get a text from you which i appreciate well i can just tell well speaking of like you said about my gummies i can tell when you're a little ham too every once in a

Starting point is 01:58:56 while someone will sneak out there yeah it's true yeah it's true it's dangerous dangerous to drink and uh to drink and post that's a dangerous habit uh well it's good to see you man it's true. It's dangerous. Dangerous to drink and to drink and post. That's a dangerous habit. Well, it's good to see you, man. It's been too long. Good to see you too. Last little thing. I know we always like to throw a bunch of nuggets out there for people to, to check out. I want to recommend a documentary since we have still so much time and months ahead of us at home. My octopus teacher, I thought was great. Yes. Second that.

Starting point is 01:59:28 Yeah. Cool. Fantastic. Beautifully shot. Netflix. What else you got? I liked, uh,

Starting point is 01:59:34 the last dance, the Michael Jordan series. I know it's a little bit old now, but it was fantastic. Timeless though. Oh my God. If you're like, yeah,

Starting point is 01:59:42 I'm a competitor. Like, okay, watch that. Watch that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah you're like, yeah, I'm a competitor. Like, okay, watch that. Watch that series. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's one of the best miniseries I've seen in years. If you want another documentary, which is actually very uplifting, doesn't sound uplifting based on the name, but it's called Crip Camp. And it begins with the story of a summer camp for crippled, I guess, young adults.

Starting point is 02:00:07 And it won, I want to say, the Grand Jury Award at Sundance a year or two ago, and it's really outstanding. So that's one I would recommend, Crip Camp. Also, it just puts a lot in perspective also. So I really enjoyed that. Hamilton's Pharmacopeia just has a season three coming out now. For those who don't know, Hamilton Morris, he's been on my podcast. Exceptional biochemist, really good at synthesizing all sorts of things. Also a very good storyteller and a

Starting point is 02:00:39 hilarious, hilarious character, unlike any other. Also happens to be the son of Errol Morris of Fog of War fame. And he's a really, really good narrator and editor of the series called Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia, which you can find on Amazon Prime. You can find it on, I want to say, Vice. And season three just came out. And in each episode, he describes the history of the culture and the biochemistry of a psychoactive drug. So it could be meth, it could be angel dust, it could be LSD, it could be 5-MeO-DMT, ketamine, ibogaine. And in each episode, he also then consumes or administers each of these drugs to himself or has them administered and records the entire experience and describes the entire experience. So it's a really well-done series. That is crazy

Starting point is 02:01:45 will certainly also put some fear of God and healthy respect into the conversations around these compounds too not everything turns out well and although he's usually fine

Starting point is 02:02:00 he's very seasoned but there are also other people who agree to have their experiences filmed and they don't always turn out fantastically well. That Ibogaine stuff, man, that scares me. Yeah. Yeah. I think you should be very, very, very, very, very exceptionally cautious with Ibogaine and Iboga. It's one of the few psychedelics that can kill you with cardiac complications.

Starting point is 02:02:28 So that is definitely, as far as I'm concerned, personally off-menu, although it does have some incredible possible applications to opioid dependence and addiction. Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, there's a documentary called Dosed, D-O-S-E-D. I saw heard that. Yeah, that's exactly it. and possible intervention with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, things along those lines. And Ibogaine or Iboga, I'm not sure which they used. Iboga would be the root, I want to say the root bark itself. Ibogaine would be the isolated alkaloid or synthesized,

Starting point is 02:03:21 depending on how they approach it. So Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia is worth a gander if you're interested in such things. Cool. Anything else? I think that's it. That's all that I have. Oh, no, I have one more. Have you seen the new jazz movie, the cartoon?

Starting point is 02:03:38 Ah, what am I drawing by? Jazz movie? No, you know what I'm talking about, the cartoon that everyone's talking about. Jazz movie. I have no idea what you're talking about. Hold on. You have to cut out the extra space on the audio side. Oh, no. I want it to be as awkward as possible.

Starting point is 02:03:53 No. Jazz, cartoon, Pixar. Soul. Soul, yes. Excellent. Yes. I wholeheartedly recommend people check that out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a must. It's fantastic.

Starting point is 02:04:08 I twisted my friend's arm into signing up for Disney Plus to watch Soul because it's the only place that I believe you can watch it. That's right. And we watched it. And then I ended up watching The Mandalorian. And I was like, you know, if I had had the forethought to just use Disney Plus, I absolutely would have invested in Disney when it got smashed post-COVID.

Starting point is 02:04:28 Yeah. I mean, talk about the franchises they own. It's just insanity. Marvel, Nat Geo, Pixar. I mean, Star Wars. The lineup is just absurd. Yeah, it's crazy. Also a lot of fun.

Starting point is 02:04:42 Yeah. Mandalorian, Jon Favreau. Congratulations. Everybody involved. Congratulations. Fantastic show. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:49 It's a great show. And let's see. I'll also mention, if you're looking for a healthy snack, I'll mention a company that I'm involved with just because I love their stuff and have had a chance to spend time with the co-founders who are husband and wife, Jake and Koolani Muse in Hawaii who run Maui Nui Venison. Thank you for the box, by the way. Yeah, you're welcome.

Starting point is 02:05:16 You're welcome. Tim Tim sent me a box and I highly recommend the jerky. It's fantastic. Not the dog jerky. Toaster likes the dog jerky toaster likes the dog i almost almost broke into that because it came with everything else and i just saw jerky and i almost went for it and it looks good enough to eat but the dog the dog treats are molly's favorite the human jerky the bars and everything are fantastic and the leg medallions are just incredible so it's-

Starting point is 02:05:45 I haven't eaten that yet, but I'm going to. How's the bone broth, by the way? Because I haven't tried it yet. Bone broth is exceptional. It's extremely high protein and it's all outstanding. I mean, this is the, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I can tell, the most nutrient dense meat you could possibly imagine. It is all wild harvested, although it's for those people who might be worried about game harvesting on public lands, it's all done on private lands on these large ranches because axis deer in Hawaii are massively damaging as an invasive species. And they actually not just destroy the vegetation where it looks so bad that people think it's caused by wildfires. I mean, that amount of destruction, but that leads to erosion and runoff that also damages the coral

Starting point is 02:06:33 reef and the marine life on the Hawaiian islands. And this is specifically Maui. So the ecological cost is huge. And so they work with USDA inspectors. They hunt at night at long range with rifles. They only take headshots to make the kill as stress-free as possible for the animals. The entire operation is like something out of special operations. It's unbelievable. It sounds like it.

Starting point is 02:07:02 They're like night vision snipers with headshots yeah they use infrared cameras and have you hunted them i have i didn't see one out there i did yeah i hunted with bow also with rifle but i feel and i don't i don't hunt often but i i think it is a profoundly profoundly impactful way to reconnect with food. Oh, dude, if you kill an animal and you, or sorry, if you eat an animal, but you won't kill it, you're way disconnected from nature. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I've, I've always told myself I've never killed a cow, but like I do eat cow. So if I, if there was a way that I could do it in a humane fashion at a place that like, I would, I would probably have to do it just because I'd be, I feel like a hypocrite otherwise.

Starting point is 02:07:53 Oh, you shouldn't have said that. I'm going to find you a cow. I don't want to do it. I don't really want to do it at all, but I'm just saying that like, I just, I don't know. Do you know what I'm talking about? I just, I would feel awkward saying I'm willing to eat you at someone else's hand, but not be willing to do it myself. Yeah. And it's, it's, uh, you know, hunting's not for everybody. I was, I was strongly, strongly militantly anti-hunter and hunting up until I worked on The 4-Hour Chef. And I decided for a portion of it that I wanted to do my best to learn to hunt and forage,

Starting point is 02:08:35 to consume only those things that I procured myself, and had the opportunity while doing that deep dive to spend time with really hyper-intelligent, responsible hunters like Steven Rinella, who's written books on the American bison. He's written all sorts of incredible books on multiple topics to see that it, as far as I'm concerned, can be approached in an extremely responsible, extremely eco-aware and thoughtful, conscientious manner. It really can. So the meat that I have here and the meat that I ate when I was hunting in Hawaii was from what we got that day. And I feel very good about that. I feel very good about it.

Starting point is 02:09:27 That's the, that's the, the evil side of hunting obviously is both on the species that, that are in low numbers, which obviously is just a massive no, no. And then also for the trophy of it, you know, like, like I, I really respect the people that have learned how to do the full, you know, nose-to-tail processing of an animal and to make use of everything they possibly can. It's really quite cool. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:53 So people interested, check out the video on mauinuivenison.com. The video is incredibly well done. It's done with an award-winning cinematographer, and it shows the kind of ethos and mission and how they approach all this stuff. It's incredible. So mauivenison.com, and people can check it out. And you know, Kevin, I've made basically no direct startup investments in the last handful of years. And I've been helping these guys. It's a very tough business. It's the best product in the world as far as I'm concerned.

Starting point is 02:10:33 And I am so enamored of this company and the family and the people behind it and the ethos. It's just like it checks all the boxes for me. That's awesome. Hope people check it out. Your food investing is hilarious to me, by the way. Because I would say on tech, fantastic track record. Then the cricket protein, remember you did those bars? But the funny thing about that is then they went and started a new company.

Starting point is 02:10:58 Yeah, that's killing it. Magic Spoon. That is killing it. Magic Spoon is killing it. And you unfortunately missed out on that one. I did. I did miss. But you know, I'm doing okay with food, man.

Starting point is 02:11:10 I'm doing actually really, really well. That's the only two investments I know you have. So maybe you have a handful more than that. Well, Blue Bottle did fine for both of us. That's right. Blue Bottle did fantastically well. And Hugh, the chocolate makers, were just acquired, I think the announcement was last week, by Mondelēz. And I was an advisor to, well, I suppose I still am an advisor to Hugh.

Starting point is 02:11:32 So that was also a really fantastic exit. I'm just giving you shit. I mean, literally 90% of the deals that we do go to zero. Then that's totally fine. That's the name of the game on on the early stage investing yeah if i could choose one that i really want to not just survive but thrive like maui nui would be at the very top of the list just because the the sort of benefits to community and ecology and like the way that they're walking the talk in a beautiful philosophical sense is just, it's rare. It's super, super rare. So that's awesome. I will say that, um, in with the product

Starting point is 02:12:12 that I have tried so far, I haven't tried it all. If you're scared of the idea of venison, you shouldn't be, cause it's very damn tasty jerky. Like you would, you would be, it's not gaming at all. It's not gaming at all.. And then I will say Magic Spoon for people that are like old school cereal, like Fruity Loops, but want a keto-friendly snack. Do you say Fruity Loops, you 90-year-old? No, they have like Fruity Loops flavor type cereal. Fruit Loops.

Starting point is 02:12:37 Is it Fruity? Oh, sorry. You know what? Fruity Loops was the DJ software. Do you remember that? It was how you could make, it was how how you made loops. It was something like that. I got it. Yeah. So Magic Spoon, I mean, I have an entire pantry full of their stuff, and I'm really thrilled for the founders. They've done an extremely good job of making a great

Starting point is 02:12:59 product. So yeah, if you liked Cocoa Puffs, Fruit Loops, these types of cereals as a kid, you can have cereal that tastes very much the same, that is basically zero carb, super low net carb with high protein and enjoy it with your real milk or fake milk of choice. And it's fantastic. My favorite is the chocolate i really like the chocolate flavor the cocoa yes they had one too that was like a cinnamon one that was quite good um anyway yeah good stuff cool magic spin coolio coolio man well uh do you want to tell people where they can find you yeah i mean eventually this year i'm going to start up on the instagram again that's probably the best place. I'm just at Kevin Rose. You can find me there.

Starting point is 02:13:47 And I also have a podcast that I put out one episode about every three months. It's not that regular, but I do have really good guests. I just had some great ones. I had Andy Ratcliffe on most recently, who's founder of Benchmark and also Wealthfront. Benchmark Capital being one of the most successful venture capital firms of all time. And fantastic interview about the importance of diversification. And yeah, he's a brilliant, brilliant man. Have you ever had Andy on your show? You know, I have, but I had it via Mike Maple's show. And he did an episode where Andy was featured. And so we published that audio on my podcast.

Starting point is 02:14:29 Yeah. Smart guy. Extremely smart guy. I wish he would write a book, man. He's one of those guys you could just sit down and talk to. And everything that you throw at him, he has a different take on.

Starting point is 02:14:38 And most of the time he's right. And he was like, this needs to be some like, you know how Ray Dalio put out his principles book. Like Andy needs his version of that. You know, it's like, this needs to be some, like, you know how Ray Dalio put out his principles book? Like Andy needs his version of that. You know, it's like, well, I tried to talk him into it. He wouldn't do it. He doesn't want to do it.

Starting point is 02:14:52 Books are a pain in the ass, but he could get a ghostwriter slash collaborator. And that person would just interview him like a few hours a day for a week straight. And then they would have all they needed. So there we go. Andy, if you're listening, make it happen. All right, Kev, Kev.

Starting point is 02:15:05 Well, it's lovely to see you. Yeah, good to see you as well. Let's hang in person this year, man. Let's make it happen. Let's make it work. Long road trip. I'll get in my armored marauder vehicle and make my way across country to visit you in the forest.

Starting point is 02:15:20 Maybe that's the next move. Do some forest bathing together. It just means walking in the forest. Sounds exotic and erotic. I can't wait. I mean, we've done some of that in Japan. That's true. We need to get back to Japan.

Starting point is 02:15:34 That would be fine. Oh, man. Well, step by step. Let's figure out domestic travel first, and then we can figure out Japan. Fair enough. Yeah. All right.

Starting point is 02:15:42 Natsukashina. Okay, man. Well, to be continued and much love to you and the family my man same to you and everyone out there please stay safe and healthy and take care of yourselves bye bye

Starting point is 02:15:56 hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from me would want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've

Starting point is 02:16:22 discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. When you're running your own business, it's easy to get weighed down by work that doesn't get you paid. That's why I love FreshBooks and have been recommending them for years on this

Starting point is 02:17:09 podcast. It's an all-in-one accounting and invoicing solution built for small business owners like you. I've pulled tons and tons of my listeners and readers who've brought up FreshBooks over and over again, and you guys have better things to do, so do I, than get caught up in admin work. Whether you're a podcaster or a creative agency, you can choose a plan that's right for you. FreshBooks has been used by more than 24 million people, and it can save you more than 11 hours a week by automating invoices, expense tracking, online payments, and so much more. Easy to understand reports and intuitive dashboard let you know at a glance where your business stands. You can create, customize, and send branded and professional-looking invoices in about 30 seconds.

Starting point is 02:17:49 You can also avoid that awkward exchange with your clients about overdue payments. FreshBooks automates sending late payment email reminders and allows you to send a customized message on your behalf. FreshBooks is a simple and intuitive tool for small business owners. But if you ever need a bit of help wrapping your head around something, they have an award-winning Toronto-based support team who are always happy to help. So try FreshBooks free for 30 days, no credit card required. Go to freshbooks.com slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss in the How Did You Hear About Us section. That's freshbooks.com slash Tim and enter my name, Tim Ferriss, two R's, two S's in the How Did You Hear About Us section. One more time, that is freshbooks.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon

Starting point is 02:18:36 is a brand new cereal that I eat just about every day that is low carb, high protein and zero sugar. I just ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. Magic Spoon cereal has received a lot of attention since launching last year. Time Magazine included it in their list of best inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it the future of cereal. It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood, remember that? But it's actually good for you. Each serving has 11 grams of protein, three grams of net carbs, zero grams of sugar, and only 110 calories. It's also gluten-free, grain-free, keto-friendly, soy-free, and GMO-free. All the things. It's delicious. And I don't say that lightly because most of this healthy version of X stuff is not delicious,

Starting point is 02:19:22 but these guys really nail it. Magic Spoon has nailed it. It comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted, and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at magicspoon.com slash Tim, or you can just grab a box or a bunch of boxes. I'm going to order some more today of the cocoa, which is my personal favorite, but there's a new contender for favorite flavor because they just launched two limited edition flavors, Honey Nut and Peanut Butter, which are delicious. I am a sucker for peanut butter and it is outstanding. So I think Coco and Peanut Butter are my two new favorite flavors. And fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with Magic Spoon, one of the podcast's

Starting point is 02:20:02 most popular guests. Dr. Peter Attia, routinely crushes six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot. With no glycemic response. He's looked at this with a glucometer. He likes it so much, he invested. Other friends, two very fine gentlemen, and also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan Holiday, also invested. So check it out. See what the buzz is about. Go to magicspoon.com slash tim and grab a variety pack or cocoa it's my favorite or anything else but see what strikes your fancy why not try a variety pack and be sure to use code tim at checkout my listeners that's you get free shipping and a 100 happiness guarantee so if you're not a fan if you don't love it they'll give you a full

Starting point is 02:20:42 refund no questions asked again check it out magicspoon. Again, check it out. Magicspoon.com forward slash Tim. That's Magicspoon.com forward slash Tim. Take a look.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #493: The Random Show — Bitcoin Pros and Cons, 2021 Resolutions, Fave Books, Lucid Dreaming, Couples Therapy, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #493: The Random Show — Bitcoin Pros and Cons, 2021 Resolutions, Fave Books, Lucid Dreaming, Couples Therapy, and More

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.