The Tim Ferriss Show - #712: The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much More

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account; AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement; and Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business. Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose) rejoins me for another episode of The Random Show!Please enjoy!P.S. Links to everything discussed: https://tim.blog/2023/12/27/the-random-show-2024-new-years-resolutions/*This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required.Go to shopify.com/tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/tim.*This episode is also brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 5% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account. That’s more than ten times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.*This episode is also brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health.*[00:00] Start[04:57] Tequila disclosures and investment discourse.[10:42] Startup advisor considerations.[18:40] The hit rate of past New Year’s resolutions.[20:13] Henry Shukman’s new meditation app: The Way.[22:44] An overlooked advantage for the early investor.[24:15] Saucelessness and second brains.[27:41] Protecting your phone’s collage of schwanzes.[34:20] Privacy and liability concerns in an AI-guided world.[40:42] Minimalist delegation, foot faults, and surrender.[46:30] Quick, creative collaborations.[51:39] My post-holiday physical reboot.[59:02] Kevin’s physical reboot.[1:03:18] Taking a break from caffeine, alcohol, sex, and sweetness.[1:16:26] Cacao ceremonies and perilous tobacco cocktails.[1:22:18] Radical Acceptance and the origin of TimTim.[1:24:34] How NFTs drove Kevin to ketamine.[1:57:09] Kevin’s robot-enhanced Tyler Hobbs tattoo.[2:02:45] What kind of tattoo might I get, and why?[2:09:11] Advice for our former (and current) versions.[2:21:25] Ayahuasca agony alleviation and alternatives.[2:34:07] Gratitude and parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases.

I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune

support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional

athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform

that powers millions of businesses worldwide, including me, including mine. What business, you might ask? Well, this year, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cockpunch Coffee. It's a long story. All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, SciSafe Foundation, to fund research for mental health, et cetera. Anyway, Cockpunch Coffee, it's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out. We use Shopify for the online storefront, and my team raves about how simple and easy it is to use. It has everything we need and nothing we don't. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you

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I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Kev Kev, good to see you, man. Tim Tim. Look at this. In the flesh. In the flesh, like grown-ups. I know, cheers.

Sitting at a table in Austin. Cheers, man. This. We're together. I love it. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Happy early New Year's, I suppose.

Was I supposed to shoot that? No. Sip it. This is quite good. That's sipping. This is sipping. Yeah. So this is something that I've had on previous random shows, but I don't think I've talked

about it too much. This is Lalo Tequila. And Lalo Tequila, full disclosure, it's my first and only alcohol-related investment. I was first introduced to this at a fantastic restaurant here in Austin called Suerte. Excellent restaurant. I feel like you've talked about this place before.

It's great. Maybe I should go there tonight. An excellent restaurant. Was it hard to get in or no? Not too bad. And there is typically some walk-in available. They reserve some space for walk-ins. Sweet. And I went there for the first time

with Chase Jarvis. Love Chase. And I had not seen Chase in ages. He was coming in from out of town, wanted to do something Tex-Mex-y, ended up at Suerte, and we wanted to have tequila because we both like tequila. Asked what the server most recommended, and he recommended something I'd never heard of, this Lalo. And I ended up really liking it, both of us. Bought a bottle. Turns out

that the namesake, so Lalo, is the grandson of don julio oh crazy and this is additive free it is matured in the plant instead of in barrels so it's a blanco only blanco they don't sell anything non-blanco and they harvest from more mature plants so for a lot of the larger scale operations they harvest one could argue prematurely and then they try to add a little razzle-dazzle with additives and the way that they use the barrels. And instead of doing that, they're letting the plant do the work. So this particular tequila, for me at least, is a very clean drink. And I know this is a topic, du jour, of course, alcohol, no alcohol. I certainly find a place for it. And then about six months, nine months later, a year later,

out of the blue, a friend of mine reached out who does a lot of CPGs, so consumer packaged goods stuff. He's a genius when it comes to both operating and investing. He's one of the best I've ever seen. And he said, I'm not sure if you've ever heard of this particular brand, but would you have any interest in looking at Lalo? And I was like seen. And he said, I'm not sure if you've ever heard of this particular brand, but would you have any interest in looking at Lalo? And I was like, yes, I would, because I drink it all the time. And that's how it came together. That was going to be my question for you, because I feel like so many of us have had

something that we've used in life and said, gosh, I wish I was an investor here. Have you done that with multiple companies? Has there been something where you've said, this is so great, I have to invest? And then if so, what is your strategy to get to that point where you can become friends with the founder, talk about around? You are better at doing this than I am. You're one of the best I've seen. Back when Twitter was usable, sorry, but I remember Twitter, and you've used pretty much every channel available. You're very generous and sincere. When you find something you love, you share it. Add value first.

Yes. And you are able to get the attention of founders. Historically, I've seen you do this over and over again. And often I'll do that. So these days for me, if I find something, and i will sometimes look at either my credit card statement or the stuff i use the most and run down the list to see if there's anything i might want to invest in for instance and there are a few that got away there are a bunch that got away right like yeah one password i should have and i knew the guys and they ended up raising money maybe a year or

two ago. A gajillion dollars. They're great guys. And I'm like, oh, if I had just, and I didn't want to, cause it didn't feel right. But if I'd pushed just a little bit more, maybe could have done something. There are many stories like that, that I could tell. But these days I would say, I try to be helpful. So I will take something. And if it's good, I'm like, look, even if I don't end up being involved with the company, I want to help them out. The product's fantastic. So I might put it in the newsletter. I might mention it on the podcast, do something like that.

Yeah, one of the things that you hear these stories every once in a while, I remember when Facebook was getting off the ground, Zuck wanted a mural painted. Do you know this story? I do, but you should tell it anyway. The artist actually at that time said, don't pay me in cash, pay me in stock. And that's oftentimes a very good strategy

where you say, hey, I might not have the capital to go invest in this thing, but I have a skill. And that skill is somehow gonna be useful to this company. If I can make friends with them, then at some point it's like let's share the upside together totally you know and you can you don't have to ask for a big massive percentage but you can say hey can i is there some options available that i can have and that can work i mean for that guy i think it turned him into like a billionaire or something like that at least

several hundred million dollars david show who's fascinating he has done some incredible and hilarious things he's a very funny guy very very creative i don't know but i've heard that story so many times he had a podcast called uh i think it was dvda double vag double anal with wow asa akira who's a porn star and i it may have all been taken down but he is a polymath. He's an incredible artist, incredible actor also. That could have been the name of your show. No one would try to come up with names for your show.

Instead of Tim Tim Tok Tok. Exactly. You know, it's close runner up. We all have to make decisions. I saw a shirt, side note, well, I've had one sip of tequila and here we go already. I saw a shirt at a climbing gym yesterday, which said no solutions, only trade-offs. And I was like, that is actually pretty interesting to sit with. But on the advising front,

because that's really what we're talking about, right? Where can people learn more about that? Because I used to point people, and maybe this is still a good reference. It's a little dated, but Venture Hacks used to have a bunch on advisors and super advisors. This is worth unpacking a little bit for folks.

So if you look at, for instance, my track record, the vast majority of my lifetime earnings in startups have actually come from advising. And that's not to say that it's easy. That's not to say that times haven't changed, because certainly times have changed since 2008, 2009, 2010. But if you have a skill or you have a network or you have a platform, there are times when it will be appealing for both you and for a startup to have

some type of trade for equity. And Saka used to be fantastic at this before he became the Chris Saka and Marky Lights that we know and love today. And taught me a lot about this. But you might look for, let's just say, I don't know how the landscape has changed. You could probably speak to this, but say 0.25%. That's early. Yeah, like a quarter point early. It means you've seen the company pretty early. Super super early and the way that that's de-risked for the company or one way that that can be de-risked is that it vests over a course of say two years right so every quarter a percentage of that basically becomes yours yeah and the company can cancel at any time yeah and that allows them in a sense to kind of try before they fully buy.

Right. They get to see what results you can deliver. Any other thoughts on folks? Yeah, I mean, I think... Thoughts on folks, Jesus. No, one tip in. Well, this is related to caffeine, which we're going to come back to at some point.

I think it's important to remember that every company that's out there, private company, when they're forming and putting together their cap table, like their list of investors, employees, all of that, they put together something called an options pool, which is a percentage of the company that is used to incentivize those employees to work there. And so when you join a company, you get X number of options and you earn them over, say, typically three to four years. A part of that, most founders will set aside for advisors.

And so these are people that are not compensated with money, but rather just stock. And so in my mind, what I always do when I'm forming a new company is I say, okay, I'm going to take 1% and I'm going to carve that into 10 roles. And then I'm going to go out there and find the 10 most impactful people that I can possibly find to help me change the outcome of this company. And then I'm going to go out there and find the 10 most impactful people that I can possibly find to help me change the outcome of this company. And you offer them in a role and you say, hey, no fancy strings attached. So I never say, to be an advisor, you have to tweet X number of times, screw that. You want it to come from a place of authenticity.

And you're often doing this with people you know, presumably, right? Or you can find someone that you're just like, with people you know right presumably right or you can find someone that you're just like this is a really good match there's an ai company that i've been working with and they needed someone that had a very specific expertise in a very small subset of a type of ai and they found an advisor and they didn't know this person but they reached out it never starts with hey we want to offer you an advisory role. It's a coffee. It's a hangout. It's a dinner. It's let's get to know each other. And it's like, hey, you might be helpful. And sometimes they'll say, no, actually, you can hire me as a contractor or it's a mixture of both. They can say, hey,

we'll bring you on as a contractor for three months and we'll give you an advisory role. So there's no perfect science here, but just expect to get some fraction of 1% of a company as an advisor. And your hope is that this turns into $100, $200, $500 million company, and that becomes a very lucrative outcome for you. And I would imagine part of the reason that you're comfortable not having a laundry list of deliverables is because their advisor equity vests over a period of time. Yeah, it vests over a period of time. You can cancel it anytime. So if you're three months in, you're like, ah, this person's not doing anything.

You can just cancel it and no hard feelings. Everybody just, they get a little, a small percentage of that and that's fine. I would say that it's best in my mind not to overcomplicate things, especially with celebrities. Celebrities don't want to have some type of crazy 20-page document they have to run by their agent and they have to go through with their attorneys and have to figure out, oh, I'm going to have to show up at this event or screw all that.

If you work with a celebrity and you find someone, you happen to know someone and they want to be an advisor, say no strings attached. Oh, by the way, we're doing this party in two months. You can come or not. And oftentimes that actually frees them up to be like, I don't feel like I'm being used as a pawn here. Sure, I'll show up for a half hour or 45 minutes. And that's a win for you. You want them to speak from the heart when they're talking about a product. And I think you would agree that time kills deals. Deals do not get better with time. Especially if you're dealing with someone who has an entourage or like a phalanx of lawyers, managers, agents, et cetera.

You want it to be an easy yes, make it an easy yes. 100%. So I'll give you an example. Back in the day when I launched Moonbirds, that PFP project, the NFT project that I launched, I talked to a handful of people and some people that I knew quite well that were very famous celebrities. There's one NBA player that is Hall of Famer that I gifted a Moonbird to.

And I said, hey, listen, he's like, I'm Web3 curious. I want to learn more about Web3. And it's Gernoble. Yeah, huge. Yeah. So I gave him one and I said- Sweetheart of a guy too. Super nice guy. And I said to him, I said, listen, you don't have to tweet about it. Like that's, this isn't a pay for play thing. I would never want to do that. If for some reason down the road, you think it's really cool and you want to say something you can, and he never tweeted about it, but no, but that's fine. You know what I mean? Cause like he did just wasn't vibing with there. Didn't feel that it was going

in the right direction or whatever it may be. And same thing for Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy was super kind, super nice. And he created a little parody account for his moonbirds and was tweeting from it. And he was figuring it out because he wanted to learn Web3 wallets. He set up his own wallet. He nested his own moonbirds, meaning he interacted with smart contracts and dollars.

And it was because he was curious on the tech side and there was no money exchange. There was nothing about, it wasn't about that. That's the way I like to do these types of deals. And you tell me if this resonates with you. I would also think in terms of whether you're building a company or an advisor, who would I like to work with on multiple companies? Because I've seen, for instance, in many of the cases where I've been an advisor,

assuming you do a decent slash good job, a lot of these people, if they're good, are going to be serial entrepreneurs. And then you end up just advising, advising, advising, and they have their X-Men squad that they pull in to most startups. That seems to me to be pretty common. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's certain domain experts when you think about strategies around different parts of your business where you say, gosh, I would always want this person in my corner if I'm going to go launch a consumer internet product. And so you go back to those people.

Or if you don't know, like a great example is I'm relaunching my podcast in January. And one of the things that I just have been out of loop on is a TikTok strategy. And I just really found a great company that had been recommended and had worked with multiple top 20 kind of podcasts on their TikTok strategy because that's a hole that's missing, right? And so I'm going to go out, I ask like 10 friends, who's the best, the best at this, and then try and hone in on that person or people and then get them to work on your behalf. In this particular case, I'm paying them for it, but that's fine. I think twerking is the answer. Yes. I think coordinated dances and twerking,

you might have a little- That's what you do for your advisors. Yeah, a little case of werewolf buns. I don't know if that's a plus or a minus on TikTok. January. Yeah, January. Let's talk about January. We're coming up on the new year. How are you thinking about new year's resolutions, that type of thing? We do this every year. We do. I don't even want to go revisit our list because I'm sure they're horrible. What do you think your hit rate is on your previous list?

You had it written down. Do you have your last list? Can you look at it? I don't have it in front of me right now. I would say that over the years, I've become better. My hit rate is higher. 50%? Yeah, I would say it's the years I've become better. My hit rate is higher. 50%? Yeah, I would say it's 50%. I'd say it's probably 50%. Which, hey, if that were

startup investing, man, you'd be best of the best, right? Yeah. But you also don't want to set your resolutions like, brush my teeth three times a week. You don't want to set the bar so low just for checking the box. So I would say it's 50%, maybe a bit more than 50%. I think this year they're simple enough that I could actually get to 100%. Yes. That's exactly what I did. So this year for me, it's about less, but make sure I can try to get to 75 to 100% of them. So mine are really straightforward. Last year I went one month without drinking. This year, my therapist has told me she's awesome. And she's like,

she's like, oh, you made it a month. She's like, oh, cool, cool. Like, congrats. Everybody does that. And I'm like, she's like a little bit of like a hard ass. And I kind of liked that about her. And she's like, no, go three months. She's like, that's when the real benefits start to show up is at three months. And I'm like, could you, I mean, you could have said two, but so she's at three. I'm going to go three months without drinking. That's a big one for me. Daily meditation has obviously have been a big part of my life. I'm going to continue that trend. We can talk about Henry Shikman's new app too, which is going to be a big part of that. Zen master that I study under is finally launching a new meditation app coming in January called The Way.

And very excited to help him with that app in terms of like on the product side and just usability side. Obviously, he's doing all the content. I'm not involved in it. I'm just an investor in it. Not involved in the content. Not involved in content, right. Yeah, I'm not as an investor. But you know, you've studied very seriously with Henry.

Yeah, for a few years now. You introduced us. He's been on this podcast twice. And they're very strong episodes. So I encourage people to check those out. What makes the way different? The one thing about, as an investor, so I'm a part-time VC because I had this other NFT and art thing that I'm working on as well. As a VC over at True, we are looking for novel ideas, things that haven't been done before.

And the meditation app market is just completely saturated. Saturated. Who would want to build an app in that space? I mean, comms dominating, you know, headspace dominating, like, you know, waking up fantastic app for more on the depth side. I would say Sam probably brings together the strongest group of teachers, I would say is as a portfolio of

meditation teachers. Like a university of meditation. Yeah, exactly. So Henry's approach is like, if you go into any of these other meditation apps, it's like a meditation for sleep, a meditation for anxiety, a meditation for this, three-minute meditation, two-minute meditation, 30-second meditation. It's all these different... Henry's like, okay, he's very humble, but he's one of only, I think, three fully accredited Zen masters in his lineage of Zen in the United States. And he is bringing Zen, a flavor of Zen, mixed in with some other types of meditation. And his goal is simple. It's the way, it's one path. There's no choose your own adventure. It's not the ways.

Yeah, it's not the ways, right? You can't branch off and do a body scan over here and then come back for a sleep meditation or a sleep story. It's none of that. It's a singular path and his goal is to lead you to some type of awakening moment sometime in the future. So it's for those that are like, okay, I've tried the other meditation apps. I want to go deep. I want to get really serious about this. So I can't tell you when it's going to launch. They're in beta right now. I can't tell you that thewayapp.com

is going to be the place where you can put in your email address and they'll let you know when. You know what we can do for your show notes? Let's put a beta link because I think you can have up to a thousand testers. Perfect. Let's put it in your show notes

and get a bunch of people testing it out. Lovely. Yeah, we'll put it, tim.blogs.podcast. And you put a little bit of cash in too, which is great. I did, which was going to be what I was going to say next, which is this is my first investment in a meditation app and my first investment in any type of consumer app in a while, in fact.

And that's based on my interactions. Since Evernote. You know, which wasn't, that wasn't a bad thing. That was certainly not, it didn't turn into the thousand X, you know, 10,000 extra turns that I would like. They turned it around. It's a good product again. It is a good product. I still use it, believe it or not. This is actually on my list. Anyway, we'll get into that, but yeah, finish your thoughts. Well, I was just going to say that I learned so much about product. I learned so much about startups.

I learned so much about scaling, what to do, what not to do, through my experience with that company, where I was an advisor, because I didn't have the capital early on to really build out a large portfolio with cash alone. And I was able to request, this is not a small thing for me, I was able to make requests of product changes directly. thing for me, I was able to make requests of product changes directly. That lifelined the CEO. And to the product team, for me, selfishly, if I'm using an app every day, that makes a difference to my quality of life. So I do not regret it. And part of your calculus, if you're going to be involved with early stage,

has to be, I think, the assumption that the vast majority are not going to return what you hope they're going to return. Nine out of 10 fail. That's just part of a power law distribution. Great book, by the way. Power law. So New Year's resolutions, what else do you have? And do you have a date?

I'm just going to hold your feet to the fire a little bit. For your three months, have you decided on a start date? Oh, so I've got, I'm going to invite you to this. My birthday's in February and you're invited. I got really lucky to get to know the artist Sohn, S-O-H-N. Do you know Sohn at all? I don't. Oh, so good.

So Sohn has become a nice friend and he agreed to come play my birthday party for like 30 people. Amazing. And so he's going to fly out. He's in Spain right now. He's going to fly out and play. And I got to have a couple of drinks there. We're going to have a little barter. Yeah, that would be, you'd be failing before you started. If your first day were the day before your birthday. Yeah. So I'm going to, after my birthday is when I'm going to kick this off. So that'll be good.

But so really quickly to hit on mine. So no drinks for three months, daily meditation, no brainer. I want to organize my brain in digital form. And so this is what's really interesting. In the last three months, multiple note-taking apps have enabled AI. And what they're doing now is they're saying, screw knowing where your notes are. Ask questions of your corpus of data. So it's changing into a world where you can just enter all the data, enter all of Tim's brain into some place and say, hey, what was that one note I had that one time when I was at that Mexican restaurant? And I think it was about cat beds. And it will literally serve you up that note based on the AI and its crawling abilities. And I think that's just fascinating. So Notion has added that.

There are three, they call them second brain note-taking apps, or really four that I'm considering. I'm still working through all of them to see which one I like the best. My candidates are Notion. Craft is amazing. Craft is a really beautiful note-taking app. It's a little bit more about here's the current day, start taking notes, and then you can interconnect the notes

and do all kinds of fun things there. Is it spelled like the dictionary word, spelled like Kraft cheese? Yes. C-R-A-F-T. Yeah, Kraft. Obsidian is another one. Have you heard of Obsidian?

I've heard of it, or maybe I just like the name. It's more like graph-based interconnected notes, like all these backlinks, tying together thoughts and ideas. You've seen these cloud mappings of interconnected nodes. Note-taking apps and services, also a very crowded market. Very crowded. And capacities is the last one I'm looking at.

I'm leaning towards craft. I think that's probably going to be my go-to. It won app of the year last year on iOS. Okay. And it's pretty fantastic. So, and I will say in that list and still actually, I think the largest market share, barely bidding out Notion is Evernote still.

And so I installed Evernote, the latest version. I'm like, damn, this is actually a lot better. I thought for a minute there, it was going to go under. I was like, because it traded hands a little bit. There was a little bit of drama there. Yeah. But it got overly diversified, overextended. Yeah. But it's quite good. They've revamped the app and it's nice. So that and launching my podcast. And so just keep it as simple, launching the Kevin Rose show. I'll give it a one second plug, which is kevinrose.com. If you want to sign up, I'll let you know when it launches,

but I've got some great guests lined up for that show and taking it seriously building out a real studio doing a professionally professional editors the whole thing so it's gonna be great it is gonna be great i can't wait to see i want to keep it simple what the roster looks like not 10 things but like just like three or four yeah what are yours mine are and then i'm gonna come back don't worry folks it's not gonna consume the whole show but I want to ask you a question about AI. So I'll preload that in your head, which is where do you think people compromise their privacy because of really compelling convenience where they might regret it? I'm just like where they might click yes in providing access where later

they'll be like, Oh, I really shouldn't have done that. I do quick answers for that. One I think is going to be photos. People believe that don't ever click yes to all photo access, especially if you've got dick pics. Wow.

No, listen, I went there because a buddy of mine just got compromised last week. I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I'm not going, no, listen, I went there because a buddy of mine just got compromised last week. I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I'm not going to say who. I swear to you, Tim, this is a true story.

My buddy got SIM swapped. Okay. Somebody took over his iCloud account. And he's got a very, my wife knows this, so I can say this freely. He's got a very beautiful wife. And he's a good looking dude. He's like yeah solid b you know like kind of like us you know like b minus whatever and he's got pictures of his wife like all in his iCloud he's traveling a lot and she's saying a little little little naughty naughty yeah and i'm like

i'm like dude are you are you sending a little back? Or, you know, because those are the ones, like no one's going to complain about your wife getting leaked online. It's like, are your pics going to get out there online? And it was a really stressful few days for him. I am sure. Honestly, not to judge anyone who's fond of shooting around dick pics, I don't understand how anyone ends up in that position. Yeah.

I'm just like, don't do it. No, don't do it. There are certain commandments. It's like, thou shalt not send dick pics. Yeah. It's just like, the downside is so much higher than any possible upside. Right. Plus, I mean, look, maybe I'm biased.

I'm just like, who has, like, I don't think I have, you know, the Shrek of penises, but it's like, I don't understand what the appeal is also. Well, that's because you don't like penises, but it's like, I don't, I don't understand what the peel is also. Well, that's because you don't like penises. I'm not, yeah. I don't have a, I don't have a, I guess a, like a collage of Schwanzes made into a piece of artwork on my wall. So maybe, maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just, that's based on the team. I mean, it's for, for some people that's kind of, they're like, you know, the way they flirt remotely and things like that. And that's, it's not me. I don't, I don't do that either, but I'm actually doing a full episode on my podcast on dick pics on the dick pics and on on

on on locking down specifically iCloud because i think it is the the scariest place for hackers to gain access to because they get your iMessage messages and they also get your your photos as well any quick tips for folks? Just a little teaser. Here's a quick teaser. Number one thing you can do. So you want to hear the crazy shit that happened to him? No, no.

This will blow your mind. Oh, God. Here. We can 10X my paranoia. Here we go. It actually wasn't a SIM swap. Okay. So what happened is, is that Apple, as you know, if you forget your password, they have

something called I Forgot, which is like, you can go there and say if you forget your password, they have something called I forgot, which is like, you can go there and say, I forgot my password. Right. And it says, okay, well, do you have another device that you can confirm? No, I don't have another device. Okay. Well, what's your backup phone number. Right. And so you can reset that password with the backup phone number that you put into the system. That all makes sense. Right. A SIM swap, somebody steals your phone number and they get access to it and then that's how you get compromised. SIM swaps are getting harder to do

because some of the big providers have caught on and they've tried to kind of like prevent that from happening, ask you more questions, all of that nature. Well, someone called in on his behalf to, let's just say, you might want to bleep that out if they're a sponsor at some point,

but they called in, they faked like it was him, and they didn't ask for a SIM swap. What they asked for, they said, hey, can you forward the phone number just for an hour to this other number because I need it forwarded. So normally this- So it was straight social engineering. No, but it was straight social engineering. But listen to this. Normally a forward wouldn't work because the text message doesn't get forwarded.

Only calls do. But you can go into Apple and you can say, I have auditory problems. I can't hear. Can you call me with the security code? So they did a quick forward. They called. It didn't go to his phone. It went to the hacker's phone.

Apple read the security code to them via audio and put it in, compromised, reset it, changed his phone number, compromised, download all of his data, and then tried to blackmail him to get his data back. Oh my God. Okay, so in terms of teasers for... Yes, teaser, number one thing to do is that you want a cell phone provider where there is not a phone number to call and it's really, truly securely locked down. Your best provider for that in the United States

is Google Fi. And what you do is you don't set it up with your Google account. You create a brand new Gmail account that no one knows, TimTimSecure8537 at gmail.com. You just doxed me so hard. Exactly.

And then you two-factor the off the crap out of that, turn on Google's advanced protection there. Then you sign up for a Google Fi account, which is a brand new phone number. Then you tell Apple that is your backup phone number because Apple can still service your main number, but only use that backup number to reset passwords. So there's no possible way anyone

would know that backup number. So it's a whole thing anyone would know that backup number. So it's a whole thing. There's more steps to it than that. You get hardware keys involved, like Google's Titan key, which is the most hardcore of the USB-C keys, hardware keys. Uses one of their Titan chips, which is legit. It's a whole thing, but it's scary. Wow. Terrifying. Yep. Time for me to double down. My phone has been been acting funny recently it's making me spooked a bit it dude it scares the crap out of me yeah it's like

my phone has been acting a little funny and i'm like weird you know what sucks too is i've been going to whatsapp more and doing that seven days like delete all my messages because honestly tell me if you feel this way i know you feel this way because we have these conversations on text. There are things that you say with your friends that you're just like, if anyone read this out of context, I would seem like the most insert whatever. Oh, every person who uses group threads, if you are remotely interesting at all and funny, you're all fucked. Like if anything were made public, everybody's screwed. The number of jokes i've made that are not something i would want the world to see but

are all in good fun and just amongst friends it's like in the thousands right and i thought she got online i would deny it all i didn't write that yeah i did the ai but yeah it's it's tough so this is actually really good tequila it's really smooth so on the ai front real brief and then we said photos was the one part you asked what were the two places where or what were the places where ai might compromise your data so that's the first one yeah so i think photos would be the main thing and the second one would be just this idea of these note-taking apps because if you're journ journaling, like for me, I have a fantastic therapist and I journal all of that.

And so things like Obsidian, the reason I'm drawn to that one in particular is it's local only. So it only doesn't sync to the cloud. And when it does, it uses a local encrypted key. So not even they can read your data. I trust Notion, I trust, but if someone were to compromise their key on their end,

in theory, even though the data is encrypted at rest, meaning when it's not being used, it's encrypted on their hard drives, is still a potential vulnerability there. But at the end of the day, if someone really wants to read my therapy notes, it's like, whatever. We live in a world where you can just be like, ah, someone made that up. There's a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI, and there's a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI and there's a whole new world of exploits. Yeah. Wild. 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 Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can. But I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. And right now you can earn 5% APY, that's the annual percentage yield, with the Wealthfront cash account. That's more than 10 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according

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AI on all of my transcripts. So if you want to ask questions of 700 or so transcripts of the Tim Ferriss show, you can do that. And the results in a lot of cases are surprisingly good. There's several startups working on this. I saw one that actually indexed your show. And if you ask a question of it, we'll return the clip in which you said the answer to it, which is amazing.

I was thinking the other day about a great startup that I don't have the time to build would be a podcast app that imagine this world and tell me that this is interesting to you. So it trains on all of your data. I'm listening to Tim Ferriss show. I'm halfway through an episode and you mentioned something that I don't understand or I'm just not familiar with. I'll just say ayahuasca for something random, okay? And I hit pause, and I hit the Tim AI button. Now, it's trained on your voice, so it can respond in your voice.

And I say, Tim, what is ayahuasca, actually, before we continue the show? And you respond. You say, well, ayahuasca is this, and I talked about it in episode number 12, blah, blah, blah, and also number 27. Here's a clip of me saying this. And then you can rejoin the stream of the podcast and continue.

So it's almost like you show up as a coach mid-podcast for any questions I have about that show so I can pick your brain and also as applied to your books. So I could go into your entire corpus of books that I have and ask questions of that data as well. That has to be the future, right? Yeah, that's interesting. How do you feel about it as a content creator? Does that make you a little uneasy? It doesn't make me uneasy on a content level because I operate from a place of

abundance with my stuff because my stuff is so dense. It's not dense necessarily in a bad way, but it's like I could talk about the content of, say, one of my books for hours on dozens of podcasts and not come close to exhausting even 20% of that book. So I'm very forthcoming with that. The one flag I would say that I have for that particular example is that if it's my voice and so on and this is going to come up a lot with ai what is the indemnity what does liability look like right right if someone uses an ad and they're like well this tim ai told me that i should do a b and c or that i

should right it's it's the point zero zero zero one you hope chance they get it wrong, and then as applied to something dangerous. Because that could be telling you from the four-hour chef how to make runny eggs the wrong way. Who cares? But it's like telling you to take the wrong supplement dosage is a whole other can of worms. There's dangerous, and then there's just opportunity for scammers. Right.

Well, that's happening regardless, dude. Well, it is, but— Tim's going to be calling me well not just on the ai kind of social engineering side but for instance there are we don't spend a lot of time on this but there are people called career plaintiffs out there unfortunately i know what this is but for instance there will be a law firm what they do is they file class action lawsuits based on a couple and like Barbara and Bob Jones are the couple that they work with all the time. And they're like, hey, Barbara and Bob,

Subway Sandwiches is selling 11 and a half inch subs, but they're calling them footlong. Go buy two of them and then complain with us and we'll file this thing and we'll give you 10% of the upside. And I think that some of these AI models will provide a nice juicy bite of the apple. That was actually a

real lawsuit by the way that you're mentioning oh i know yeah oh i know but we won't get into the details of why i know that but god the us man some of these things it's just astonishing that they the rules provide for some of these creatures to exist and profit coming back to new year's resolutions yeah we had a nice big boomerang on that. Mine are, I would say, simple, not necessarily easy, as is true with a lot of things. The first is minimalist delegation. And what that means to me is delegating the why and the who, but not necessarily the how. So I think my predisposition is to be very detailed when I delegate various types of tasks or projects.

In other words, what I would like to do more of is, here is, at the simplest level, five words of what I want to do. Figure it out. And you can handle all the specifics. You should know that we should have at least three bids if we're putting something out that's expensive. But to really take my hands off the wheel in terms of over-prescribing the details, which I have a tendency to do because my mind is very detail-focused. I'm very meticulous. But I've found that more often than not, I can point to examples of where I'm providing too much. I'm very meticulous. But I've found that more often than not,

I can point to examples of where I'm providing too much step-by-step detail. And also people who receive that, in some cases feel like they're being micromanaged. Not only that, they're not building the muscle. Exactly. Because they need to understand, the only way they can kind of build that muscle

around who you are and what you want is by making mistakes and you saying, hey, I would have done it this way a little bit differently because of X, Y, and Z. And then they learn from that mistake versus you just prescribing and it saves you a shit ton of time. It saves a ton of time. So what I'm experimenting with, and I've already started doing this, and I think I've made a lot of progress is say less, say less and be available for questions, but otherwise make it clear that there's a certain degree of wiggle room and space for errors that is okay. So when your admin walks in, you say sandwich. If a meatball sandwich, you throw it against the wall and he says, wrong fucking sandwich. That would be one way to handle it. And I remember there was, I want to say a blog post a while ago

that was written by either Ben Kaznoka or Reid Hoffman. But Ben Kaznoka used to be the, let's just call it like aide-de-camp or chief of staff for Reid Hoffman. And what Reid had said to Ben was something along the lines, and I remember this because I had to look it up. This would be a chance for me to interrogate the Reed AI. What do you mean by blah, blah, blah? He said, in the service, I'm paraphrasing here, but in the service of speed, I'm willing to accept 10% foot faults. And I was like, foot faults? What the fuck does that mean? And I think it's a tennis reference, which is when you step over the line when you're serving and you get called for a fault. But in the service of speed, basically the way I interpret that is you can get 10% wrong. Ideally, it's not really expensive, catastrophic stuff, but I'm willing to accept a 10% error rate in the service of speed.

So I'm trying to think about it along those lines because there's so many things that are either reversible or inexpensive where it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. You're better off making sort of wrong decision and then right decision and doing both of those quickly because you course correct than taking a ton of time to deliberate in your mind when oftentimes you don't even have complete information. You don't know. But also imagine you get that down to 5%, the extra effort required. What is that doing to you as a burden versus just letting go a little bit and letting those faults happen? And it's got to be a little bit freeing. Yeah, totally. Question for you, because I thought you recommended at some point this book to me, and I have two or three friends who have recommended it since. The Surrender Experiment?

Yeah. Are you still a The Surrender Experiment? Yeah. Are you still a fan? Michael Singer? Yes. Yeah, I'm still a fan. Okay, could you say a little bit about it? Because I don't know if we've ever talked about it on the podcast. Yeah, I mean, I haven't read it for probably two and a half or so years now,

but Michael Singer is, I would say, just a general kind of, I don't know how to put it other than just like, I don't want to say spiritual guru, or more just kind of like a salt of the earth type guy that has figured out that surrender is kind of the ultimate freedom. Like this idea that you can just release and let go puts you more in the present moment than pretty much anything else. And the whole book is around how when stuff comes in, it doesn't hit you. It doesn't hit and stick. So to hit and stick and marinate and fester is not surrendering. It's letting the energy build and bring you down oftentimes. And the book is framed around this

idea that the more you can let go, the more freedom there is, the more happiness there is. And as Henry Shookman put it, the freedom comes from not the tight grip on reality, but the slow finger by finger letting go of that grip. And part of the appeal for me as it was described to me, I have not read the book, but a very close friend of mine is reading it right now. And he has a course, by the way, that's fantastic. It's on Sounds True. It's a video course and it's quite good. It's a video course. Is it necessary to watch the video? He's a quirky personality and he's great on video. He's just really funny. Yeah. And it seems like that book, at least, is his personal story, which automatically makes it

more engaging for me hypothetically all right so yes letting go so the minimalist delegation and the second point is actually related to that that is the in a sense letting go quick creative collaborations is the second one i only have three things it's minimalist delegation quick creative collaborations and then physical reboot which is pretty straightforward to me again it's simple but not always easy we got to get into my physical reboot here yeah yeah we're going to talk about it so quick creative collaborations this is an area where you have seen me actually kick the tires quite a bit in the last year with cock punch which by the way there's a ton coming with that which is going to be a big surprise to

a lot of people but i have done a num by cock punch i'm taking notes real quick here by nfts tim ferriss cock punch that's right hashtag to the moon no not financial advice jesus that was ai talking i didn't say that and in the, I mean, using this NFT project way back in the day, which is when a lot of this has been invisible but it will soon be visible i've done creative sprints in say upstate new york with some of the top dnd and magic the gathering artists people who have done amazing iconic work for those brands yeah doing character design and concept art to you it was so much fun it was so much fun and i have had this narrative that i'm a better i see individual contributor i'm better as a solo operator and that in some sense i think because i've heard from some publishers and so on that i'm a bit of a problem author because I'm very, very, very unwilling to

compromise quality. I am unwilling to compromise quality and I'm very meticulous. And so if somebody's not on that same page, I'm a problem. And so I developed this narrative that I was just prickly and difficult and didn't play well with others. How much of that do you think is true? Have you ever done a 360 review? I have done a 360 review. The feedback wouldn't support, I wouldn't say it supports that narrative. And in this particular case, gathered all these folks, had some writers as well, which I thought was going to be harder than the art side, because I can step back and say, you are all much better at art than I am, but I have an identity as a writer. And it was great. I had two writers, three artists, and had an absolute blast. The output was spectacular,

which I haven't made public yet. And that emboldened me to do more and more experiments. And so I can't talk too much about it right now, but I am actually working on my first book project in seven years, eight years. And I'm doing it with a collaborator, which I thought I would never do in a million years. Okay. Wait, you got to give us a little more fiction, nonfiction. Nonfiction. This is OG TF style. Five hour. No five hour. But very dense, hyperical. Not dense, like very rich.

In other words, it's not a bunch of fluff. I'm not turning a blog post into a 300-page book. You're going to want each. Can you tell us what it is? I can't. I can't. Can you give me like a genre? I can't really give you a genre.

What I will say- It's not a cooking book again, is it? It's not. I think everybody got their fill of cooking with that. I'm very proud of that book, but holy shit, that almost killed me. No, I'm not doing that again. Also not making the foolish decision to say to myself, you know what I should do? You know what would be fun is for me to do 30 to 50% of my own photography for a 700-page cookbook. Don't do that. Not archery.

If you're not a photographer, don't do that. It is so much work. Oh my God. I really respect to the photographers out there. I underestimated that one. But you dodged the archery question. It is an archery book. It's not an archery book. I'm planning on doing more archery.

That is part of the physical reboot. Okay. But the quick creative collaborations, this book is going to be about, I would say, how to find the essential and ignore the trivial. That's the very broad strokes. I am collaborating on writing, which I thought I would never do. It is going better than I ever possibly could have imagined. And it has opened the floodgates for me to think about what other collaborations I could pursue.

Screenplays, animation, television, who knows? But I've realized that if I am paired with someone who really gives a shit about quality and cares about being really proud of their work, I'm totally fine. I can collaborate really well with those people. They just have to have really high standards. And I'm excited to do more of that. So the screenplay side and the TV and animation is particularly interesting to me.

So becoming more adept with a format like a screenplay. And the format itself has intimidated me. And I feel like I just need to be locked in a room with someone really good for two weeks and be like, you cannot leave until you have something to ship. It can be a rough draft, but it has to be pretty much ready.

And I think that's doable. So the quick creative collaborations is something that I'll be doing more of. And then last on the physical reboot, it's I have been such a piglet in the last month. You're looking thick. That's T-H-I-C-C, folks. Looking thick.

And I'm not in terrible shape, but I am planning on continuing to be a little piggy for Christmas and the holidays because I'm going to be home with family. And I love butter cookies. I love gingerbread cookies. This is kind of like you not committing to your three months before your birthday. That'd be stupid. So I'm going to be spending January, February in really intense outdoor training and skiing and ski touring and so on. So I'm not worried about burning off what I'm accumulating because that's going to happen, especially at high altitude. I'm going to try and visit you by the way. Awesome. January. That would be fantastic. So the physical reboot is up there and I'm optimistic about that because on the internal level, meaning biomarkers and so on, almost every biomarker is the best that

it's been in like a decade. Wow. After the last year. That is not me. That sounds amazing. Yeah. And some of that has been certainly physical practice exercise. A lot of that has been dietary. How's your ApoB? The best it's ever been. How low?

I can't recall offhand. 20s or 30s? I mean, it's within the aggressive ATIA target range. AST, ALT, fine? Oh yeah. Those are always fine. Homocysteine,, fine? Oh yeah, those are always fine. Homocysteine, always good? Homocysteine's always fine.

Okay. Yeah, my liver enzymes... What have been your issues then? What was that? What are your issues? What did you correct in your blood work? There are a couple of things that I've corrected. So I have historically high uric acid levels. Oh, but you're on an L-apurinol then?

I'm not on an L-apurinol because I had a reaction to it, which can be very dangerous. Yes, it can. So I'm on something called Euloric, which is fine and it's actually a better a cleaner drug i think it is people can yeah there's a bunch of debate around it because there were some smaller studies that were arguably poorly designed that did some type of head-to-head and it got poo-pooed but uloric for me is a good option not medical advice talk to your fucking doctor please i don't play one on the internet in addition to that that's from your meat by the way you know that that's your meat intake no it's not

are you sure yes because typically uric acid you know they used to call it the king's disease right because it causes gout and it was from like wine it's considered a disease of apples okay so the wine is more interesting okay so yes people associate it with if i'm not mistaken purines and it gets associated therefore with with protein intake also but there's a blog post i it's easy to forget i have a thousand plus blog posts which actually bridged the books to the podcast it's easy to forget that connective tissue a thousand plus blog posts one of them is called something like the hidden chapter from good calories bad calories good calories bad calories book great book uh gary gary tops and one of the

chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor was about fructose and how it is anti. Right, which also ties into uric acid. Yes. So what I have seen in myself, at least, it doesn't matter if I am carnivore diet, vegan, fasting, whatever dietary lever I try to pull, uric acid is high. It just does not matter. And that's also hereditary.

This runs in my family. The other constellation of issues are all cardiac, like lipid profile related. Also hereditary. Dietary intervention, with the exception of one thing that I'll mention. Are you on a statin? I'm not on a statin. Okay, well, your EPOV is fine. Yeah, but just to be clear.

So there are different reasons that your lipid profile can be out of whack. In my particular case, and I might be able to put something in the show notes as a resource, there are sophisticated labs or companies that will run labs that sort of fine slice a lot of this. Boston Heart? I think it's Boston Heart.

Yeah. And then you need someone to interpret the tea leaves, obviously, in which case you need a very confident doctor. In my case, I'm a cholesterol hyperabsorber. More accurately, I'm a sterol hyperabsorber, which means I can also absorb a lot of sterols from, say, plant matter, which is why automatically if you reduce meat or eliminate meat, it doesn't mean that your cardiac and lipid profile will improve. And you actually see a lot of folks for which it goes the opposite direction because they end up consuming a lot more refined carbohydrates, their fasting glucose goes up, and they end up with a whole host of issues, in some cases associated with fructose,

right? Like, oh, agave nectar, brilliant. Well, maybe not so brilliant. And for that reason, in my case, I'm taking azetamib. Actually, I'm taking something called Nexlazet, which is absurdly expensive. Welcome to the United States in this case. But it's a combination of azetamib and something called bempadoic acid. Azetamib, very well researched, pretty well understood. Bempadoic acid, a newer player on the scene, but very interesting. And the combination of those two plus the Euloric are what got a number of biomarkers of concern.

Not crazy. And I've done not only the usual cardiac calcium scores, which are helpful but incomplete in a lot of ways. I've also done angiograms, which you do not want to do willy-nilly all the time, but I wanted to see if there were any precursors to any issues. So far, so good. In my particular case, those things plus reducing saturated fat intake makes a difference. Dude, saturated fat for me is the killer. It screws up all my numbers.

It makes a difference. So in my case, it would be a bad idea for me to hit the MCT smoothies, right? So Bulletproof Coffee, bad idea for me to hit the MCT smoothies, right? Right. So bulletproof coffee, bad idea for me. Also, MCT, I don't know if it does it to you, but it's... Disaster pants? Yeah. Risk goes up. Yeah, risk goes up by about 10x.

Yeah. If you're like... Running to the bathroom with the MCT oil. Yeah, yeah. If you are thinking to yourself, you know, in 2024, I want to shit my pants more often, I would recommend a... You're constipated.

Yeah, yeah. Creatine, double espresso, and MCT oil, problem solved. Don't ask me how I know that, but you can guess. Don't have that right before you're driving to the airport for your international flight also. Pro tip. So the minimalist delegation, fast delegation, embracing reversible or low cost possible mistakes, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot. And honestly, with the physical reboot, a lot of that is old news.

The stuff that works, works. It's like kettlebell swings. Zone two cardio. Yeah, zone two, which I'll get to very naturally with what I'm going to be doing in terms of hiking and ski touring and so on. Basic, basic, basics.

I shouldn't say basics. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. And just when in doubt, return to fundamentals. It's like weight training once a week. That is better than nothing. Once a week and then the zone two. But also for me, it's like one or two sessions of very, very hard technical Pilates

to hit everything that I'm going to miss anyway, like medial glute and transverse abdominis. And that's about it. Do less than you think you can do. If some of your goals are around physical reboot or recomposition, set the bar where you are sure you can clear it. Yeah. So I want to talk to you real quick about, you mentioned the physical body reboot. One of the things that all my physicians, and it sounds bougie to say all my physicians, my primary care physician- Tell us, President Obama. Has been concerned about is I have slightly elevated blood pressure. And it's not to the point where I should have it treated with medicine yeah but you know

there's breathing exercises you can do there's a device called respirate which peter tia recommends i don't know yeah it's fantastic it hooks around your chest it's like a strap okay and then you put in some ear pods that are connected to this device and it walks you through a series of breathing exercises and it's clinically proven to lower your blood pressure so tia recommends that as kind of first line defense for slightly elevated blood pressure. There is a device that is approved in the UK and the EU, and it's called Actia, and it's a horrible name. Actia, not ATIA.

They're going to get a cease and desist from Actia. Yeah, so it's A-K-T-I-I-A. I'm wearing it on my wrist right now. So if you're watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest Fitbit. Yeah, so it's A-K-T-I-I-A. I'm wearing it on my wrist right now. So if you're watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest Fitbit. It's super tiny. The battery life is five days.

It does every hour blood pressure monitoring. It's clinically proven accurate. And Atiyah's testing it right now in his lab with his folks there. It is not approved in the US. So what I had to do is I bought it online. First, I got a VPN. I proxied into their website to make it look like I was in the UK. And then I bought online, shipped it to a friend in the UK who sent it to me in the States. I then created a fake iCloud account in the UK with a fake email address and VPN to act like I was in the UK on a separate phone that I had not sent in, like one of my

older iPhones. And then I was able to get the app installed through the UK app store because it's not available in the US app store and got it to work. So technically, this is not legal in the United States. Yeah, contraband. But it's, you know, I'm actually monitoring it and the breathing exercises are helping. High salt intake combined with water is huge. If you have a salty steak or anything, I can notice, just like when we, remember when we first got into CGMs,

you were way before I was, but into continuous glucose monitors, you got me into them and you would be surprised because you would sit there and you'd be like, oh, banana doesn't do anything. And some people, banana shoots you through the roof, right? Or rice for me, oh my God, through the roof. I don't know about you, but rice for me is a huge offender. Rice affects me less than it affects you, but it affects a lot of folks. Yeah.

Footnote, in a previous episode, we talked about- The rice cooker. Which drains out the water, which dramatically reduces the glycemic response. But back to our scheduled program. Yeah, we can link that in the show notes as well. But this for me has been like, okay, I just had a salty meal. Now let me chug a bunch of water along with that meal. And actually, I will notice a difference.

I do not get into those, what they call like the high orange levels of blood pressure just by my water consumption. Meaning you help or hurt. Meaning if I drink water. By drinking more water. Yes, drinking water. And there's evidence to back this up. We just had people on the podcast have talked about this.

But anyway, it's another device that I hope, knock on wood, they've submitted to the FDA. Hope is that we'll have this device approved in the States here, I don't know, next six months to the FDA. The hope is that we'll have this device approved in the States here, I don't know, next six months to a year. So we'll see. Very cool.

Anything else on the physical reboot side? I mean, the three months with no booze, I think is going to be, if you can do it, no offense, it'll be a revelation, I think. It's going to be amazing. Speaking of it, looks like you're not a big fan of your own tequila. I just noticed you're not really drinking any. Well, first of all. No, I mean,

if you don't like it, you're just selling it. That's fine. It's also, we started recording at 3 p.m. So usually I'm not a 3 p.m. drinker.

But you know what? I want to be in bed by 7. So it'll be okay. Oh, jeez. Okay. So since we're checking back into the home anyway, where they're going to

put our socks on and put us to bed, no problem. Yeah, yeah. All right. Dude, let's retire at the same retirement home. That'd be so fun. That'd be so much fun.

Yeah. I don't know what I'm going to say today. This is really bad. Cheers, man. Cheers. And so let's talk about taking breaks from stuff, because I have kind of a wild story, which I don't think we've talked about at all.

I have a number of wild stories. Oh, yeah. I got one big one for today. You have a big one too, and I think these are going to be interrelated in a sense. So I'll piggyback half of it after what I believe you're going to share. But I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated, which was the first- Cold turkey, which was the first time I've done that probably,

I would have to imagine, since I was, what, 16? I mean, it's been forever. Let me ask you a question here. Why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like, oh, a half a cup of coffee today, and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later? Why go, this is like the extreme tim well did you get headaches it's extreme yeah i got headaches but but it was during a period where

i could you had vicodin no i didn't use vicodin i i knew that i could accept the headaches and i had a period of time where there really was a low cost where like professionally i was taking three to four weeks off the grid and i knew that i had a grace period where i could sustain it so i did effectively no caffeine no alcohol and i suppose the most important other item sex no sex no ejaculation which is we can talk about that but that's pretty easy the harder one is i did nothing sweet so not just containing sugar but nothing sweet so anything that has an artificial sweetener was out would you consider this tequila sweet i would not consider this tequila sweet there is a there is a bit of

subjectivity for a lot of it there's sweet notes to it like it's yeah it's got some floral notes to it but by the kind of letter of the law i wouldn't consider this subjectively to be sweet but for instance any kind of juice out any type of sweetener of course out let's just say different types of plantains if they are sweet to the taste they're out sweet potatoes out and was that hard for you that's not hard for me it doesn't seem hard but let's just extend this. Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol or some kind of crap in it that is a sweetener. So no brushing your teeth for two weeks. I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb, just baking soda. Straight up.

I brushed my teeth with that for a handful of weeks. And what you also realize is in the US, or in this case, when I went to Korea, if you ask people if A, B, or C has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost everything that you come across. And that was interesting. It was challenging because it's severely limited what I could eat. But the caffeine was an amazing experience. Now, I alluded to this a little bit earlier. I'm back on the sauce over the last week, week and a half, which I regret, number one. And I'm paying a lot for. There are costs.

In terms of sleep? Let me back up and I'll just give you the punchline. Tell us why you did this to begin with, because you didn't mention that. It wasn't a New Year's resolution. Why? It started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff and there were restrictions. And then I just extended everything.

But weird stuff, psychedelics stuff. Yeah, psychedelics. Okay. Which will tie into a part of my strange story later. But I hadn't done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years. So I took the restrictions very seriously. I think that is important in my opinion.

And then I extended them all. And I wanted to see in part because I met someone who said they had stopped drinking anything caffeinated, cold turkey, because they felt like a loser because they'd become dependent on it. And they missed a really important ski day, like one of the first days of the season. And they're a really good skier.

And they were with a group of people and they were the only, I believe they were the only person who skipped. And that day they were just like, no more. And to this day, you know, like two years later, caffeine free. And- Wait, wait, wait. I lost something there.

When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing? Because they couldn't have coffee. Because they didn't have coffee that morning and they were so tired. Oh, I see.

That they felt like they couldn't do it. So they stayed on the ski lift. Instead of getting off, they just went around and went straight back down. That's amazing. And called it a day. And to their credit, they got to be under the weather or something that happened but

to their credit they were just like this is fucking loser behavior enough and they they went to zero and uh that caught my attention because when you talk to someone no no offense to anyone who fits in this category but let's just say if someone is a Mormon and they've never had caffeine, that's not my life. They've never had a hit of the sauce. I mean, although technically their workaround is like Diet Coke instead of coffee, but we're not going to get into the weeds here. But if somebody hasn't had a taste of the delicious poison, there's so many things right there's so many things like this where it's like okay if you've had one significant other and you've never been out and about and like sampled the buffet of the world like we can't really have it's very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships like it's just it's a different situation right same with caffeine

but this person had been hitting the sauce for decades, and then they got off. And that was inspiring to me. Then I had this restriction, and I just extended it. And just to give the punchline, my sleeping issues that I've had for decades, every single one, just vanished. Best sleep of the last 20 years. Woke up wide awake every morning after the first, let's just call it like a week and a half. Had tons of energy and got super high volume of stuff done. And what I realized, and part of the reason to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things? I was curious what my real baseline was like what does real baseline look like what is tim untouched unaffected by all these various supplements that's another thing i took a month off of all supplements i only took my prescription meds like the uloric and so on yeah i got rid of all supplements. No Deca or Tesopra or anything? No Deca. No nothing. Okay.

And I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what the sort of pure baseline Tim is. And it turns out baseline Tim does really well. Why go back then? You got hungover. No, I didn't get hungover. I didn't get hungover. Because it's good after a hangover, a little bit of a little juice. So I also, before I went

to South America, I listened to an audio book, which was called or is called the easy way to quit caffeine. That is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it's the easy way to quit smoking. And I know people who have literally multiple people who've listened to this, they have their last cigarette and they're done and they stop. So it's a little hokey, but that made an impact on me as well. I'll do that for January and write that down on my list. January, no caffeine. And now that I know I can do it, I'm definitely going to do it again. The reason that I got back on it, and this is, I'll actually add just a little bit of color. The first is that there were days without caffeine where i would say to myself i'm tired i really want a cappuccino

but i realized because i interrogated i was like well i'm not allowed to have a cappuccino am i really tired right and i came to the conclusion that no i wasn't actually tired i just wasn't fucking wired you see what i mean like my normal had become multiple coffees in the morning and god knows what else so i had taken as my baseline a default i mean wired sounds too negative but like stimulated state And when that was removed, the story that I conjured was I'm tired. But when I was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast, podcast turns out great. I'm like, okay, let me revisit this. I wasn't tired. I was just calm. Interesting. Crazy. Interesting. And why did I get back on coffee coffee for me i've realized

is probably like alcohol for a lot of folks and there's sometimes i'm not gonna lie look let's be honest here like there are times i was like i want to take the edge off sure have a drink yeah but more often because i don't drink that much i use coffee as like a security blanket. When my life gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted and things seem a little out of control or I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through something, walking to the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee, it's a life raft of consistency. We saw this during COVID, right? Where people would line up at Starbucks for three hours to get a coffee because it was like the one semblance of normal. It's like a ritual, you know? And there's also a high to it.

So it's like- There's also a high. So even though I realize intellectually that it's kind of productive, like when I am feeling as I have been for a host of reasons that I won't bore people with, but just gone through a pretty challenging week or two. My response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee, even though it increases anxiety physiologically. This is one thing actually we've known each other for a long time. I don't know the answer to this. I don't know that I have seen you do this. Are you an afternoon coffee guy at all? I don't know that I've seen you do mate maybe a little bit later. I typically do not have coffee in the afternoons. And I really try not to

have caffeine in the afternoons, which I violated this week. So in the last like two days, or I should say in the last, let's just say in the past seven days, I have violated that. And what I've realized because I've run the N of one now, and there are a bunch of different variables, so I realize this is imprecise, it's not a perfect science, is that I can drink coffee and fall asleep. That's not the problem. But it disrupts my sleep architecture. I wake up after three days, days very little time three days of drinking caffeine i wake up and i have circles under my eyes like dark circles are you quantifying this in the sense of like are you wearing an aura ring do you have any other data where you're looking at it i'm not

currently capturing the data with an aura ring but i have in the past yeah i've seen what it looks like so i know that's the case. I'm falling asleep. My time in bed, if we're just looking at a clock, is fine. But I'm waking up tired. I hate that. And then what do you want? You want another hit? Of course. You want more of the sauce? First thing, a little juice. And there's a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. I don't think for the rest of my life I'm going to be caffeine free. But now I have a better awareness of what my baseline looks like so I can return to that. So let me tell you something crazy. This was before I met Dario. So I'm trying to go back

in years now. So probably let's just call it 15 years ago. I gave up coffee for about six months. Six months? Yeah. That's legit. But I wasn't really that addicted to it i was having like a cup every other day or whatever i went back i remember i was living in san francisco at the time and i went to ritual coffee which is fantastic coffee place great place and i ordered a tall like single origin coffee and i drank the whole thing and i will tell you when you go six

months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee you feel high as a kite yes i was like 10x what i feel today with a cup of coffee yeah because your body just i mean it is a powerful drug when you've gone without it for a while super powerful do you have any sense of how long it takes to like get that back have you done any research like to get what back that over an That initial childhood high of that first cup of coffee. How long do you go without before you get back to that? I don't know. I don't know. I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking, how long does it

take to develop a tolerance and experience with withdrawal symptoms? It is so fast. Oh, so fast. One day, if you go without coffee for serious coffee drinkers will be headaches yeah well i would say furthermore if you stop drinking coffee and i'm using coffee as a bit of a scapegoat here like i love coffee but if you go without caffeine and then you get back on caffeine and you're on it for two or three days and then you stop again my personal experience is you are going to feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is unlike most

other drugs. It is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug, right? Like I'm not recommending this, but hypothetically, if you were to like smoke cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you're fine. No problem. You're not going to have a headache the next day. But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that's in part because it is often disrupting sleep architecture. That's my vote, at least. One question for you. One of the things that I have yet to try that I've been really curious about is I know that there are cultures, I can't remember. I'm going to screw it up. I don't know if it's like an Inca or... I can't remember exactly

which culture it is from Mexico that did high-dose chocolate, almost like a cacao ceremony where they drink this super purified cacao, insane amounts of caffeine, and they reach these kind of spiritual states. Have you ever heard anything about that? I haven't read reports, but I know that, for instance, I want to say in some places in Mexico, certainly in Guatemala, you have cacao ceremonies. I don't know. I was invited to one one time, a cacao ceremony. So I don't know the historical record. I don't know how much of these things were used

a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. There are many new practices that have created the narrative of age-old use for a veneer of credibility when, in fact, things were very different 1,000 years ago. You have to imagine cacao was a staple. Cacao's been around for a while. So in the case of cacao, my understanding is it contains theobromine, which in and of itself is a fascinating word.

So theobroma, theo like theology, broma, food, food of the gods, theobromine theo like theology broma food food of the gods theobromine which is pharmacokinetically is very meaning just if you were to look at the graph of peak and half-life and so on it's quite different from caffeine is it is my understanding vasodilator of the plant what causes because i know likeia, for example. Are you familiar with that supplement? Cocovia? Yeah, it's a cacao supplement from a large company, I believe. Yeah, from Mars, actually. From Mars, yeah.

But the crazy thing is, I was talking to Rhonda Patrick about this, and she has had one of her, I think it was her mother-in-law or something like that, high blood pressure takes Cocovia, drops it down because it's a vasodilator, and is a big fan of it as well. And it's been showing cognitive improvements as well. Yeah, I'm not sure. It very well could

be the case. I mean, when you get, the dose makes the poison, the dose also makes the transcendence for a lot of different plants. And so in the case of cacao, I have experienced higher, let's call it higher dose cacao, and you can reach an alter state for sure. I'm going to caveat what I'm about to say with the do not ever do this warning. But for instance, there are plants that at high enough doses are absolutely psychedelic, which I would never recommend because you can die. Let me repeat that. Fatal risk. So do not try this at home. But tobacco, as an example, has a very rich history in South America and elsewhere, but especially in South America, where high doses of juice have been consumed. Every mode of administration you can imagine has been done and is very common down there. There's a book by Johannes Wilbert, which is titled Along the Lines of Tobacco in

South American Shamanism. It is very dense. It reads like a PhD dissertation. But when you consume pretty much through any route imaginable enough tobacco, you can experience a psychedelic experience. Oh my God. Can I tell you a story about this? I've had this. So I was in San Francisco at the time, and they have, this was called a decade ago, they have a bunch of chefs that are very experimental. I won't name the chef, but it was a one Michelin star chef that infused tobacco leaves into an alcohol. And you have to be insanely careful. If you look up online, like you said, if you put too many leaves in the infusion, you will have a lethal overdose of nicotine that will kill you.

And so this chef knew what they were doing. I would never try this at home. They made me a bourbon-infused tobacco cocktail. And I was like, it sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot. Hope you don't need to sleep anytime soon no listen i know i drank this one drink and i'm like having a good time getting a little chatty you know like oh this is fun and then dude i get up to use the bathroom oh boy and i swear to god it felt like my feet were sinking into the ground as i was walking or like i was

walking down like to the stumps of my knees like i was like my legs were like collapsing as i was walking you're like wait a minute i was like because i don't smoke tobacco at all or anything like that and it like hit me like a ton of bricks and i'm like i am high as shit yeah like it is a very potent substance like especially for non-smokers you gotta be really careful so come in full circle, right? So cacao, powerful, fascinating plant, sacred in a number of different cultures. Tobacco, be very careful, folks. It is powerful and potentially lethal. And then coming back to caffeine,

it is the, as I understand it, the world's most commonly consumed psychoactive plant is tea and coffee. Yeah. And it has this place. I love my cup of coffee. Trust me. I had one this morning. And I think the exercise, if you can do it, not everyone can, but of rediscovering what your baseline is,

what you actually felt like when you were 12 or 15. I'm actually writing this down. It's so valuable. It is so valuable because I now know what that feels like, and I know that I can return to it as an adult. Yes. That holds true to anything that you're doing. Call it alcohol, any substance that you've become dependent upon.

Yeah. Right? It doesn't have to be just caffeine. It can be anything that you've like, that you almost feel like you can't live without. Yeah. Right? Sugar, carbs. Yeah.

Some activity, traveling. Late night pizza. Yeah. Late night pizza. I mean, if you're a road warrior and you just travel all the time because you say yes to everything, like, okay it feel like to sit at home yeah if such a thing exists for you for one month what does that feel like yeah and if a bunch of weird stuff comes up like maybe as tara brock would say like to one sage only one question matters what are you unwilling to feel oh my god i have to have her on the podcast that is one of my top guests yeah so if you haven't read it folks radical acceptance

which dar dar i owe dar dar thanks for so if you don't get it, folks, Radical Acceptance, which, Dar Dar, I owe Dar Dar thanks for. So if you don't get the reference. Dar Dar is my wife Daria. We call him Tim Tim. Which came about, actually, let's give people a real look into the archives. So Tim Tim came about because we were on a trip to China to drink Pu-erh tea all over the place, which was one of the weirder trips I've ever been on for a lot of reasons.

We were in the Yunnan province together in the middle of nowhere we had some very strange experiences on that trip drank a lot of tea had a motley crew of people with us along for that ride and there was another tim on the trip so there was a question of how do we keep the two of you separate and you came up with i believe tim tim i Tim. I mean, it was a collaborative decision. Kind of real time. That's how Tim Tim came about. So Daria, who is a neuroscientist by training, which is why I actually took the book Radical Acceptance seriously,

because all due respect, I love Tara, love this book, it had a huge impact on me, but the title gave me an allergic reaction. I was like, oh, God, another one of these? Like, I just, I just, sounds hand wavy. Okay, kumbaya, didgeridoo. Like, okay, I just can't do it. But the fact that Daria,

who has one of the lowest tolerances for bullshit hand wavy stuff that I know of, the fact that she said she gained from it gave me permission to dive into it, which then had a really big impact on me. So coming back though, if you feel like you can't live without X, that is often a great signal or at least a prompt to ask yourself, what might an experiment look like for two to four weeks to go without X? Been super valuable for me. That's awesome.

I wrote it down. No caffeine in January. I'm going. I'm serious. You know, I might double down and do it with you. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah. No caffeine.

All right. Let's talk about my experiments, shall we? Yeah, let's do it. I'm excited. I'm excited about this because I also don't know the details. I know that- You saw the text messages. I saw some of the text messages and I was very curious. Okay.

So I don't know how to frame this. Let me start off at the best I can. So this is a big one. You're pregnant. I'm pregnant. What was the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger got pregnant? What was it? I can't remember the name.

But yes, I know the movie. I have the same physique too. So basically, for people that know me or don't quite know me, I've done a bunch of stuff in terms of being an entrepreneur and an investor and these different things. And one of the hats that I put on a couple of years ago was dabbling in the world of Web3. And Web3, for those untrained, it's cryptocurrency.

It is decentralized internet it is nfts it's art on the blockchain ownership right if 1.0 is read only internet 2.0 is read right 3 is actually owning a piece of right what's on the plane so it's a very exciting frontier and it's filled with a bunch of explorers that i would say it's a small number of people call it probably you know in terms of people that are excited about digital art, call it 250,000 people or less. But it is a serious group of people that are enabling a new canvas to take form in front of us.

And I believe in my heart of hearts that for all the bad press that we see about NFTs and all the scams, and don't get me wrong, there's tons of that shit. There is something true about if you had to close your eyes and wake up in 20 years, will collectible digital art be a thing? Of course it will. And the blockchain is a perfect place to prove provenance, to prove scarcity. There's a lot of advantages there. Long story short, I launched something called Moonbirds, which was

a PFP project. I remember the text I got on the day of that launch. Oh my God. So we launched this collectible NFT and it skyrocketed way beyond what we had ever thought. So to give you all a sense, from launch to one year in, over a billion dollars has been traded in moonbirds nfts that's so wild and i did not expect that you know i really didn't but with that comes trading and i have never lived the world of trading i've grown companies to quite some size but never publicly i've never taken a company public. And when you take a company public, i.e. NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange, you deal with the ups and downs and feedback

from people that are now stakeholders of that particular company. It's different. This is an equity. Holding an NFT does not make you a shareholder. It's very different. But they still pay attention to what is the price of this NFT. So when the NFT

goes up, times are good. People are happy. And when it goes down, people are not happy. I've had people truly hug me and say they've paid off their house because they sold one of my NFTs for $200,000 and they were stoked. And it was like tears kind of hugging i've had people basically tear me apart saying i am the other person on the other side of that equation that bought that nft for let's call it whatever 50 000 not 75 000 10 000 doesn't really matter it's all relative to how much that person has as an individual and how are you going to fix this? Because NFTs are down and they need to go up, right? And some of it is on what we build to try and build bigger and better things for the ecosystem and try and hopefully prove that we are a company here for the long term.

It has taken a serious emotional toll on me as an individual. I have had many, many sleepless nights. I've had anxiety like I've never had before. I've had to work with therapists and I've had to reach out to my primary care physician and get anti-anxiety medicine, which I've never had to do before. I have had some dark moments, not dark like in suicide, but dark as in it's destroyed me because I've always considered myself an honest person. I've never been here to screw anyone over. You're also a very,

I consider you to be like an empathic feeler. Maybe the right word is like you're a deep feeler. I am a feeler, for sure. So if something like that is sitting with you, you take it very personally. And I remember when you had like stomach issues for so long. Oh my God, IBS related issues. So this year I've been treated multiple times for these types of issues with physicians, all kinds of things. I had, they discovered, you know, the high blood pressure thing was discovered because I have a brain aneurysm

right now. It's on the smaller side and they're watching it and I'm fine. But those grow the more stress you're under because the more blood pressure that builds up, the larger the aneurysm can grow. And so, you know, as you can imagine, all these things hit you at once. Yeah. And so I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn't go to work. I felt like I kind of just needed to reset, you know? And Huberman, who I love, who's been on my podcast, Andrew Huberman, his top 10 podcast

now. Oh my God. He's killing it. Killing it. Love that guy. He's doing such an amazing job of executing. I don't think I've seen anyone better at doing monologues the way that he can do them about scientific topics. I mean, just if you haven't subscribed to Huberman's

podcast, I mean, it's along with Atiyah's top five medical podcasts to subscribe to, along with Rhonda Patrick. I mean, they're all heroes. Huberman did a couple hour episode on ketamine therapy. And ketamine therapy, it's used for PTSD, it's used for severe depression, and it's used for anxiety. And it sounded really interesting. It rewires neuropathways, and Huberman's episode, highly recommend. I'm not a scientist, but he is.

And he goes in depth about what it actually is doing on the brain. And I always thought of ketamine clinics as being these shady places, these places where, you know, there are real people with real addictions that they treat. If you're hooked on everything from amphetamines to any type of serious addiction problems, they see these types of people, and also people that are about to kill themselves, like really suicidal. Like if you go to an emergency room right now

and you say, I'm going to end my life in the next 10 minutes, they will most likely treat you with some type of ketamine to just like get you out of that state. It's a very common emergency room, like a Hail Mary to like get you back into a state of like just being,

okay, I don't want to end my life right now, and now we can work this out or take you to an institution where you can get help. So I was never there, but I got to the point where I was like, I need to do something dramatic and different, and I need to reboot because I can't take the comments I'm getting on Twitter. Now, did you see the Hubert episode organically?

Did someone send it to you organically? You just came across it? I just came across it. I was like, oh, I've always been interested in ketamine. I'd heard about ketamine in a recreational setting. And sadly, who was the friend? Matthew Perry. Yeah, Matthew Perry. The toxicology report came back and said that he was on ketamine when he drowned. We can get into why that is in a minute. But in a- Let's focus on your personal experience. And I'll just say also, ketamine and jacuzzis or pools or water do not mix. Exactly. There are multiple fatalities.

Don't mix those two things. Well, when you go under ketamine, you are literally sedating yourself to where they can give you surgery. To dissociative anesthesia. Yeah. So what my doctor has told me, the ketamine doctor, she's an emergency room doctor

that did my treatments, is she said to me that she was a 10-year, I think 10 or 15 years emergency room doctor. And she goes, if you came in and you had dislocated your hip, she goes, I would give you what they call a bolus dose. Is that what they call it? A bolus is right. I mean, they're giving you a lot at once. A lot at once. They just like push it all in, right? Yeah. And she's like, I would give you that to about like, can't remember the exact X,

but it was a multiple on what they give you for therapy to put you under so I can get that hip back into place. And then you wake up feeling fine. Unfortunately with Matthew Perry, he took a dose that was equivalent of subconscious, fainting, falling asleep, drowning type dose. And they said, the Toxology Report, I read it,

he had that level in him that would have put him in that state of kind of like passing out, right? Yeah, drugs and water don't mix, folks. Don't mix. Anyway, so it wasn't the fault of the ketamine. He was using it recreationally versus under supervision of a professional, which is what is needed. So I found this clinic in LA that they literally have the set and setting right.

So they're all about, like, you come in, it's just beautiful, comfortable, peaceful music, really relaxing, reclining chairs, eye mask, because it's important to go inward. It's not about just getting this therapy and looking around the room. Music with like drums and beautiful, like sometimes I pick my own playlist. I did a little bit more chanting. You don't want like lyrics or anything to distract you. And they have you hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that measures throughout the time, a heart rate monitor,

like really professional setting. It's called Golden Afternoon is the name of the clinic in LA. It's an amazing name. It's an amazing name. And the doctor there, gosh, I'm gonna draw a blank for where she, I think she was, was she Penn?

I can't remember where she got her MD, but like top tier school emergency room doctor is legit as they come. So I felt really comfortable because you know, a lot of this is about setting and comfort and safety and safety. Yeah. So I went in there and I was like, I'm going to give this a shot because, you know, Huberman convinced me that this can help me with anxiety. And so I laid down in this comfortable chair, turned on the heating, like they have a heating element in the chair, tilt you back a little bit, put on my noise canceling headphones. They gave me an IV and IVs does sound hardcore, but for people like you and me that do like blood draws like every other week, who cares? Like I don't

care about this shit, but it does sound hardcore to most people. They gave me an IV and I closed my eyes and I went to a place, man. I went to a place and it's a beautiful place. And it made me over multiple treatments and I did eight in total. And they normally do six for depression, which is really interesting because she said that it's typically anxiety is harder to treat than depression in her experience. And they gave me eight in total and you need two per week. And about halfway through, the best way I can describe it is imagine that life is a series of crunches. And I say crunches like the ab workout. Okay. Whereas like nobody likes to work out their abs, right? Like, cause abs are like, ah, fucking ab day. Like, you know,

nobody wants to do that. And I didn't realize it, but I had had a 35 pound weight on my chest the entire time I was doing ab workouts and it took that weight off. And I had, and I still have, and it's been weeks later, a bit of grace and lightness to the way I'm carrying myself throughout life that is just a peace that I haven't felt since I was probably 10 or 12 years old. Were you interacting with anyone in those sessions or was it all internal? No, it's all internal. So it's headphones on, music, eye mask, entire session lasts for about an hour and a half. They have a camera that's watching you. If anything comes up, one time I had my music accidentally stop and I raised my hand, they're in there within 30 seconds.

They bring you hot tea when you're done. They let you take your time to slowly kind of like come to, and then you can literally walk out of there and carry on with your day. And, you know, the first session I was like, okay, that's beautiful. Second session was a little difficult. They say, imagine it's kind of loosening up the plaque in your brain and like rewiring circuits. And like, it's not always going to be easy. But by, I remember the sixth session, I just walked there and she dr jen came in and she goes how are you and i said i could run a marathon right now i feel amazing i feel like a weight

has been lifted off my chest and i just this is such important work that you do such important work because it's not about there's not an addiction to the substance i don't need to go back some people go back. Some people go back for boosters, depending on what they have. She told me that some people that have depression, they'll come back in every three months, every six months. She says some people, she never sees again. And it kind of takes the anxiety and pulls it apart from your body so that you can see it for what it is, which is silliness because life is play. And when you realize life is play and we're all here just trying to figure out our shit.

Yeah. Why are we taking it so seriously? Yeah. There's a lot that just does not matter. It doesn't matter. We can just chill, man. It doesn't really matter.

So that, we have clean drinking water. Like what the fuck are we complaining about? So the weight on the chest, was that something that you can't put words to, that you just felt release or, and you don't need to get into details, but I'm just curious, or was there a content to it where you're like, oh, interesting. Wasn't content. Content was beautiful. I don't know if you've ever experienced this tim with i've never done ayahuasca although at some point i would love to try it but like

i opened my eyes and it was when the mask is on and i was seeing things that were as high of fidelity as what we see today like right now yep where you're like i am in a room right now and i felt very present my dad now. And I felt very present. My dad's passed away. I felt very present with a father source there. At times, at one point, I saw the entire world and I saw how small I was. And I was just like, it immediately gave me this sense

of just like gratitude for that, being that little speck, but also at the same time, not having to take and carry the burdens of the world on me for being that little speck. And so there's bits and pieces of that, but I would say at the end of the day, when you come out of it, it's not like you had this epiphany. It's more like Dr. Jen calls it time on brain. How can we make this sit and do the rewiring on your brain and give you time on brain with the drug and the compound and let it do its work and so it was a lot of surrendering there's a lot of saying

you do what you want to do i don't care where you take me emotionally mentally whatever it doesn't really matter it's time on brain with the compound and after a certain number of sessions you just feel this natural lift and lightness. And it felt like, I'm not a ballerina, big surprise, but it felt like a little bit of a walking through life is a little bit of a dance now than it is such a struggle. It makes me super happy, man, to hear that. It feels amazing. And I remember getting some of the texts from you and I was excited to have this conversation, which we haven't had. This is the first time we're talking about it. And I'll say a few things. The first is that I have seen a number of cases where ketamine therapy has changed or saved lives. So a friend of mine,

for instance, who suffered from depression his entire adult life, had a similar experience to yours. And he went to a clinic, I believe it was in New York City, very well run, and he goes back once every six months for a single tune-up, let's just say, session. And I actually know, also not going to mention their name, but someone we know as a mutual friend, who you probably don't know, also does this once every three to six months. And separately, I know someone who's in law enforcement who is heavily disincentivized from talking about mental health with his superiors because you will be put on leave generally if you even hinted that and you're in certain professions a line pilot for instance you're going to be put on leave and it's on leave

is a nice way to say you probably fire it it's it's a it's a career risk to bring these things up yeah which puts many more people at risk there should be better processes for this but nonetheless he was suicidal at one point. We're talking about somebody who was carrying around a firearm all day. And ketamine was an intervention that was incredibly effective for him for pattern interrupting.

And I use that very literally because the pattern was a thought loop. This is personal. This is permanent this is never going to change and when you're able to at least interrupt that for a short period of time you provide people with hope or at least a window within which they can consider other options so for acute suicidal ideation also for chronic pain very interestingly ketamine is super yes it's interesting you say that because she dr jen

over this clinic has told me she treated quite a few people for chronic pain as well and it works quite well so i unexpectedly because have you done it so before i talk to anyone about anything like this generally i am volunteering to be the monkey shot in the space so several years ago i did six sessions over three weeks. Ketamine? Yeah. Oh, shit. Dude, why did you never tell me this?

I didn't realize I didn't tell you. So I did six sessions. This would have been- With a mask on and like in the music? In this particular case, it was music, but it was not mask on. The way that this particular clinic ran things was with video, which was very strange to me. But nonetheless, it was sort of naturescapes. And I was like, okay, well, this is new to me.

I'll try it. And it ended up being supremely interesting. I was not going in with an acute condition. So it was hard for me to evaluate, ultimately, a lot of the efficacy. They found it very strange. And I found it kind of hilarious because they would do an intake each day of active sessions and they would ask me to do various assessments for anxiety and my anxiety levels were going up over time, which they found very confusing because you may

have experienced a little bit of this. Ketamine can compromise your short-term memory in the short-term after session. So you might like forget where your wallet is or forget where your backpack is. I didn't have any of that. Okay. So that can happen. And that happened to me. And it happened to be the case that while I was doing these sessions, because I shoehorned it into my schedule, I also had a number of huge podcasts coming up like LeBron James and so on. And it was freaking me out that I kept forgetting shit. And so my anxiety was going up over the course of treatment, which was not typically what they say. So I did the same thing. They gave me a whole breakdown. It was one to five on a bunch of

different scales. I think it's a pretty standardized thing that they give you. I can't remember what the anxiety scales are. But mine went down to literally a one on all of them, or zero on all of them, which is amazing. It is amazing. And went down to literally a one on all of them, or zero on all of them, which is amazing. It is amazing. And I want to mention a few other things. So I'm sure Huberman's episode is excellent for people who want to have a comprehensive overview of ketamine. I'm sure Huberman's is great. So listen to that first. It's fantastic. I also did an episode with John Crystal, Dr. John Crystal, who is the chairman of psychiatry at Yale, who did a lot of the seminal research

with respect to ketamine as an antidepressant in humans. So the protocols that get used, which I think are generally like 0.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, et cetera, over X period of time with Y number of infusions. Those are the protocols that he developed with his other investigators. X period of time with Y number of infusions. Those are the protocols that he developed with his other investigators. And I want to mention a number of things just to make sure that I'm doing

my safety first Ferris duty. So the first is that part of the reason, and this is pure speculation, but I think that it was risky for Matthew Perry to use ketamine, is that he had a history of abuse. Ketamine can be very addictive for people who are unwilling or uneager to feel certain things. It's a dissociative anesthetic. So if you have, for instance, a history of alcohol abuse, it is, I would say, increasingly likely that you might abuse ketamine, which is why if someone were to consider

ketamine therapy i feel very strongly that it should be iv or yes intramuscular injection and not at home treatment where you have access to say lozenges or nasal spray because there are companies that do lozenges at home. Yeah, I completely agree. But I will say one thing, Tim, real quick, and I'll let you continue. I noticed my desire for alcohol go down. Yeah, I think that that can happen. And I'm just saying for folks who, for instance,

may be coming out of or part of AA and they have issues with depression, my personal take after everything I've seen is that prior abuse of alcohol highly correlated to potential abuse of ketamine. And I would say furthermore, there are some urological risks if you use ketamine chronically.

And alongside that, if you use ketamine chronically, and this is true for a lot of drugs, actually that's for snorting though right no it's not for i mean you wouldn't get your logical track otherwise because it metabolizes in the liver well most people who consume ketamine recreationally oh the would you be their mouth or it'll be a lot of it'll be snorting of one way of one sort or another so they'll either have it in it'll be in suspension and a liquid or it will be a powder they snort in the same way they would snort cocaine a lot of people carry little lockets around their necks with ketamine i've seen this a lot and by the way that's not what i'm talking about no no no i'm not those are but those are two very different things they are so just to be very clear, ketamine therapy with IV or IM has a track record of being incredibly promising for a number of other things.

But where some folks get lost is they go from, instead of clinical setting, higher dose supervised, they bleed into more casual recreational use. In which case, it's very important for me to say that ketamine can be very helpful for people with, say, tumor-resistant depression or chronic depression. If you use it chronically, though, it flips the other way, and it actually makes you predisposed to more depression so it's just something for people to be aware of yeah and as is true with so many things oh my god more is not better do you know what what was the drug that michael jackson died of do you remember the name of that sure i think it was a synthetic opioid or no no it was basically some type of anesthetic yeah so it was funny i went and you know because i'm old now in my 40s

i wouldn't have my first colonoscopy because like you're supposed to do that shit you know party time have you done that yet or no i have yes yes i went and did mine and um and by the way this is this is very sad but do not skip your fucking colonoscopies no a very good friend of mine since we last spoke roland griffiths who's an amazing scientist from johns hopkins he died of terminal cancer and uh i had a long conversation with him a few days before he died before i went to south america he was completely razor sharp up until the end and my recollection is that part of the reason that was caught too late is that he was a few years late in having his exam. Yeah, so I had mine done, and they caught a couple precancerous, as they do with most people these days.

Yeah, do your fucking screens. And you gotta do your screens. But anyway, long story short, when I was going in, the anesthesiologist came in the room, and he was kind of a funny guy. It was cool i like those guys you know yeah and i and i asked him i said can i have a slow ramp and he's like what's the slow ramp i'm like where you just kind of get to me a little bit of time just like it's like feel like going into that like that zone you know and he's like it's funny you say that he's like i'm giving you the same drug they gave michael jackson when he died and i was like oh that's

crazy i'm like why and he's like he was addicted to it. And so he gave me the slow ramp and I remember this feeling about probably, let's call it 30 seconds into it, where I felt like I was okay with dying. It was just like this moment of like, this is beautiful. And I was like, oh my God, this is what Michael Jackson was feeling right now. Propofol.

Propofol, yeah, exactly. Propofol. That was it. And so I get it. But this is like to the point of Matthew Perry dying in the pool, like this stuff puts you under. It puts you under so that you can have surgery. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that is what ketamine does as well. And ketamine, broadly speaking, is an incredibly well-tolerated safe drug. Part of the reason that ketamine is, I believe, listed in the World Health Organization's top 100 most essential medicines is because it is generally very well-tolerated, and it does not suppress respiration. Yes, exactly.

Right? Which is a huge one. Right. Gigantic. Yes, exactly. Right. Which is a huge one. Right, gigantic. And it's an incredible compound, and you just need to know the risk profile. And there are risk profiles for everything. Of course. We have tequila, and we have water in front of us. Water has a risk profile, too.

It does. People die every year of hyponatremia because they drink too much water when they're training for or running in a marathon, and that causes disruption of sort of electrochemical signaling and then boom they drop and people die every year you probably didn't hear about this but there was a radio host dj do you remember this do you know i'm talking about where they have these water drinking competitions yeah somebody died of overdosing on water this has happened many times right so as parasolsus would say the dose makes the poison, but sometimes the frequency and the use pattern makes the poison.

Yeah. And I think ketamine's incredibly interesting. Yeah. Especially when you get into the actual science behind it, we're not just using this as an escape. It's actually rewiring the brain. Yeah. And Huberman will get into the neurology behind it

and what's happening and why these are more lasting changes and why some people, not everyone, but some people can go and do this and they don't ever have to go back for a booster or anything else. And it changes them forever. So I don't know if I should get into this.

We can always cut it. Someone very close to me, she was close to suicide. And she's a dear friend. She's a sweetheart of a person. And she was the first time I'd ever heard of ketamine therapy. This was probably four years ago. And she said, I was about to take the closest take in her life. And she had heard about ketamine therapy. It was kind of new at the time. And she paid for the six pack, the six sessions, you know, the full six. And she hated every single session. And it was funny when I talked to Dr. Jen at the clinic that I went

to, she said, it's very common people that have depression, they don't enjoy the experience. And I thought it was fantastic. Loved the whole thing. But like when my friend said that at session six she heard a pop in her brain like a physical pop it's like a psychic chiropractic adjustment literally the depression lifted and she has been amazing ever since so wild and this has been like five years ago and it's like i believe her she's like doing insanely well now yeah so Tim, I just want to, one, thank you for how much money and effort you've put into psychedelic research. Because after experiencing this, I realized that there is something here. And we don't have it figured out.

Obviously, we don't. We're in the baby stages. But 10, 20, 30 30 years with ai maybe 10 years like this will get figured out and it will be largely because people like you help fund this type of research so i just want to say thank you for that thank you for saying that brother yeah i really appreciate that and i was so happy to see those texts yeah i was so happy i gotta tell you if you're in the la area and obviously you'll talk to her as a doctor, this is her advice, not ours, and you'll go through the whole screening process. But goldenafternoon.clinic, I think, is the website.

And she is an amazing human, very caring, comes in pre and post, checks in on you, a really well-run facility, depression, anxiety, PTSD, war veterans. All these people are going in to see her and it's great. It's God's work, wherever you believe in God or not. Yeah, there are some great clinics out there. I will say there are also a lot of fly-by-night clinics. So do your homework. One of the main advantages, or it is a main advantage, of ketamine as compared to other psychedelics is that in the united states it is currently legal yes and that is a non-trivial advantage and i will say that one question you may want to ask in doing your due diligence if you consider this as an option and i do feel after canvassing many different compounds many different treatments that for acute suicidal ideation,

that ketamine is at the very top of the list. It is on a very short list of interventions that have incredible promise for at least creating the space for someone to consider treatment options. And the question, the due diligence question that I recommend, and this is true for any type of drug-assisted therapy. It's actually true for surgeons too. It's true for doctors in general. Ask them what types of adverse events they've observed, what type of abuse potential they've observed. If their answer is everything is always fine,

we've never had an adverse event, that is a huge red flag. Anyone who has enough mileage, if they are a ketamine clinic physician, if they are an ER physician, they will be able to tell you what things look like when things go sideways and how they handle those situations. And if they don't volunteer any of that, it means either they're inexperienced or they're delusional generally. And I'm giving people a bit of a break or it means they're lying. And in all three cases, you do not want to have anything to do with that particular practitioner. By the way, I let her up. She's a Princeton. Princeton. Go Tigers. Look at that.

That's where my doctor went with Princeton. Phil Wolfson, for instance, has done a lot of writing on this. Do your homework. You are signing up for, let's just call it psychoactive brain surgery. To the extent that you would do your due diligence related to a surgeon who is going to be physically opening your head, carving a hole in your skull, and performing manual brain surgery, do a commensurate amount of homework on the person who is going to be providing you with compounds that have a

significant impact on cognitive functioning, not necessarily only in the short term, but in the longer term. You want to hear another crazy drug story? Let's hear it. That's why we're here. Yeah. All right. I'll give you a refill. Speaking of drugs, Andrew Huberman would not be pleased. Would disapprove. Neither would Atiyah. Disapprove. Although Atiyah likes straight tequila. Yeah, occasionally Atiyah will have a drink or two. He just knows what he's signing up for.

Anyway, we can come back to this. Part of the reason that, you know, I had a wild experience in Portugal recently. No matter how much wine I have there, I do not have a headache the next day. And I think it's additive related. I can feel tired. It'll fuck up my sleep. I mean, at the end of the day, it is alcohol. But fascinating how different my physiological response can be. In any case, that's true with this stuff too, for me personally with Lala. That's great to hear, considering I'm consuming a good portion of it. Yeah, a good portion. All right, so let's-

Well, I got to talk to you about my tattoo at some point. Okay, should we? All right, you know what? I'm going to leave that as a cliffhanger. We're going to come back to wild drug story. Because that's why I'm here in town. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh yeah, you're going to hear about the crazy machine.

What? Okay, let's about the crazy machine. What? Okay. Let's tattoo and crazy machine. What's going on? What's the bracelet with the skull on it? Oh, that's just a... Bracelet with skulls. Yeah, bracelet with skulls.

Okay. So one of the premier generative artists, when I say generative, what I mean by that, for those that don't know, is there's a whole genre of art that is code-based. You know, you write actually computer science code, like, and you create art. And one of the premier artists in the space that's been sold at Christie's and Sotheby's and all over the place is Tyler Hobbs. He's based here in Austin. Such an awesome guy, too. Another sweetheart.

By the way, he told me he's always enjoyed hanging out with you. He's hanging out with you a couple of times. What a nice guy. He and his wife are just lovely beyond words. Such great people, yeah. And so Tyler lives here in Austin. And his NFTs, you can say what you want about NFTs, but his NFTs are just absolutely gorgeous pieces of artwork.

And it can sell for, at times, millions of dollars. They're really sought after. Also a legit visual artist outside of cook. Oh my God. Like I went to the studio today and he pulled open binders that he's been doing for like decades of his visual art. And it's just like, he's not in this for the quote unquote NFTs. Like he's an artist like to his core. And so one of the things that he strikes me as the person that's always saying, what's next? How can I push things in a different direction, right? And there's a company based out here called Black Dot that has a machine.

It's a robot that uses not tattoo needles, but you know when people get their eyebrows cosmetically tattooed on? I can imagine. It's a common thing. I don't want to be gender-based here, but it's mostly women that get it tattooed on. I can imagine. It's a common thing. Like some, I don't want to be gender based here, but it's mostly women that get it like tattooed on as their eyebrows. But like they use a much finer needle than they would say a tattoo gun. Okay.

And so this robot, this machine uses these really fine needles. And what they do is they take, and we can put this in the video as well. They take and they put this kind of template on your arm that is more or less just like, almost like a QR, a massive QR code kind of grid on your arm. So that's my forearm. Oh, I was wondering about that.

You sent me a text and I was like, what the hell? Is that another, is that your tattoo? Okay. No, it's just like a giant QR code. Yeah, like a giant QR code. Yeah. Like a giant QR code across my forearm. And that allows the optical lenses and the lasers and everything to align the tattoo. It is doing 17,000 small micro pushes into my skin with this needle.

Okay. And it does it. They can gauge with like these depth sensors the correct depth of the dermis to go in so that the ink doesn't spread out and fade over time yeah so they can do insanely high fidelity tattoos like picture perfect even when you see those pictures like oh that person got that baby tattooed on their like chest how cute imagine 10x the fidelity of that where you'd be like somebody took a picture and like pasted it on their chest yeah they have a machine that can do that so you're never getting those off so you change your mind what this is is tyler started

with he drew me a sparrow and the reason i like a sparrow is because to me a sparrow is the most common low ego bird to me that's out there. It just reminds me that in like, I'm just getting a little sensitive, but like reminds me that we're all just sparrows. We don't need to take each other, like no one's better than anyone else. We're all a common bird.

We're all humans, right? And then what he did is he applied an algorithm to it that degrades the bird into a pixelated form over three images. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And so the last one is his last algorithm of the more pixelated version. And so you can imagine I'm getting this tattooed on my arm tomorrow. So wait, you're getting a tattoo tomorrow.

What is that? This is just stencil. So I wanted to show you this today. Okay. Cool. So you can imagine a world where literally in the future- How long does that stencil last? You could wipe it off with some alcohol and stuff, but it's just there for the show. But

you can imagine a world where he can give you an algorithm like he does with his artwork, and you can walk in, put your arm underneath this machine, and get a unique generative piece by an artist that is one of one unique to you as defined by an insanely famous artist. Imagine if, you know, let's backtrack here, but Picasso had the tools in his day to say, I'm going to create an algorithm that is a bunch of crazy swirls and chaos that is my brain.

You know, or a Banksy or whoever. Banksy or whoever. And you stick your arm in and you get a one-of-one Picasso. They're only doing three of them. This is a brand new machine, brand new technology. And so that's why I'm out here to do a one-of-one Tyler Hobbs on my arm with a Sparrow. So that's cool. Black Dot?

Black Dot, yeah. Okay. It's a new kind of startup out here. Awesome, man. There's a lot happening here. There's a lot happening. That's cool. It's so cool. I want to show you the one they did of the mona lisa it's amazing stuff do you have any tattoos at all you don't know i've been thinking about getting my first which is why i asked about the stencil so look at that oh yeah it's like just the eyes

of the mona lisa right there like but look out look how high fidelity that is yeah that's wild yeah that's wild yeah that's that's pretty wild so you've been thinking about getting one i've been thinking about getting one for years which would be molly molly's paw prints on my forearm but what was that you would not are you serious yeah that'd be kind of awesome yeah how old is molly now well it's eight uh between eight and nine the toaster is slowing down man yeah it's tough it's so sad there's nothing more heartbreaking than starting to see your dog start to go on the decline yeah like he's he's falling now like it's like they're falling out from anything i know we don't have to take

the podcast there but yeah no but it's like hey toaster's been with the podcast since day one you remember you're chewing the cable oh i do i You remember he was chewing the cables back in the day? I was just going to bring it up, man. Back in the day, this was still dig era, I guess. And we were at your apartment in San Francisco, and he was just a little pup chewing on the cables. I remember that. Yeah.

He's still kicking it out. Mentally, he's sharp as shit, which is great, which is nice. Yeah, it was nice to see him. I remember playing with him. Friendly Toast. Yeah, it was nice to see him. I remember playing with him. Friendly toast. Yeah. What a great dog. Yeah, so for me, it's hard for me to imagine a world

or any circumstances in which I would regret having the paw prints on the arm. And there are many other reasons. How much has that dog meant for you personally? Because I've seen you through multiple relationships. Dogs are like this thing that is just like this steadfast love. Has it been a good, I mean, obviously it's been, it must have been an insane emotional lift for you to have an animal like that in your life. Yeah, it's changed me fundamentally on so many different ways, I think.

And it's not just the receipt of that love, which is, it's like a task in and of itself, right? I mean, I actually saw this at one point. Somebody had sketched it onto this piece of wood and I came across it and it was, your task in life is to learn how to love and be loved. That's it. And being loved is actually not straightforward for everyone. Learning to receive that in a way so that has been a gift but it's also been a practice of giving and thinking about someone else's welfare and having say a dog as a mirror also for yourself where let's just say early on when i was training molly and i took training super seriously i was there for that yeah and i was i ended up being pretty good at it and molly's very well trained but if she

fucked up or made a mistake i would get upset yeah and you'd hit her no jesus christ i did not hit my dog and beat her with a rod. So no, I wouldn't hit Molly. But I would get very frustrated. And then that would scare her. And not because I was lashing out, but I would just get so frustrated because I'd be like, God, this is the 37th time we've done this. And it was a mirror because Molly's not doing anything deliberately to piss me off.

That's ridiculous. Right. So it just was a, it was an incredible reflection in the pond for me to see what was going on and to see what's going on with me. Like if I'm short-tempered, if you're with other people, you can weave a story to justify it. Right. Well, like they should know, like, God, I didn't get any sleep, and they know that, and da-da-da-da-da.

Why does it always have to be in the morning that they blah-blah-blah? You can really spin a yarn to rationalize why you're upset with someone else. But a really loving, well-behaved dog? Are you kidding? Like, that's a you problem, pal. Like, that is not a dog problem. Yeah. So on all of those levels, she's just been such a wonderful companion and teacher.

And I was away from her for a few weeks recently for the first time because I was in South America. Yeah. Absolutely not the right place for a dog where I was in the middle of the jungle. And I really, really missed her. So, I mean, I'm not'm going to really take us there. But when I think about, which I do pretty often, when she has her decline and then passes, it's heartbreaking for me to imagine.

And I'm going to get a second dog almost certainly in the next year. That would be on my New Year's resolutions too. And I've thought about this for a few years, but I've pushed it off because there's part of me that doesn't want to accept that Molly is is mortal so i've pushed it off and push it off but it's it's time it's good to do it on the sooner side because when they're older like i could never introduce another dog to toaster right now yeah because he's just too old to handle that puppy energy yeah versus if you did it now then they can kind of like and molly's

really good with puppies and she loves puppies yeah so I'm going to do that very soon in the next year. And I, at one point was volunteering. It's a long story, but I was volunteering around wolves and I was preparing the food and so on for these wolves, which were the ones that licked you in the teeth and stuff. Yeah. Which were being sort of rehabilitated and raised in captivity because they'd either been bred and raised in captivity, in which case they can't be released, or there are any number of conditions that led to them being non-viable as wild releases. And I saw one

of the volunteers had, I think it was on his ribcage, he had a print from this wolf that he had known for years until that wolf passed away. And I thought to myself, you know what? I've never felt pulled to have a tattoo. And the fact that I have no tattoos is kind of novel now, which is funny, right? Tattoos are pretty common. Oh, you got to go to Jess, my lady. She's amazing. So I might, I might. And I thought, you know, I really have a hard time imagining regretting doing that. And I can also see it being a really valuable reminder of a lot. Tim, I've got something for you. Listen to this. Tell me. You know how I said someone was going to play at my birthday? Yes. Jess is going to be out there at the same time. Okay. Why don't you

sign up to get the tattoo? At the party? I mean, not at the party, but like the day before, the day after, something like that. Oh, all right. All right. And she is like booked out by like a year. She did Bruce Willis' tattoos. No, she's like legit as they come.

Yeah, she's legit. Okay. All right. Jess Machete on Instagram, insane. All right. Now she's booked out for five years. Yeah, exactly. I just took it up strings this has

been on my list for a while it's been on my list for a couple years i think partially because i'm nervous you would love her can i ask you a question yeah i want to ask you a question that is a little bit more intimate just because we've had some tequila and um we're talking about dogs and just kind of the companionship and whatnot speaking of kind of like new year's resolutions and looking back on life, in the last 10 years, when it comes to both personal, either intimate relationships or private,

what would you, if there's any one thing, what would you change about your interactions with either someone that you've been with on an intimate level or someone that maybe it's like on a more friendship level? Is there anything that you've been with on an intimate level or someone that maybe it's like on a more friendship level? Is there anything that you can look back on and say, I would have done more of this? That is an exceptional question. And you know, when I was driving over here, I was thinking about another question. We have the ultimate cliffhanger in the crazy drug story. So

maybe we'll get to that. Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll do that in the next episode. But I was thinking also, I was like, what would Kevin tell his... I'm going to answer your question. What would Kevin tell his 30-year-old self? My current Kevin. Like, do this, maybe not do so much of that, blah, blah, blah.

I thought that could be a fun exploration. With the interpersonal stuff, I think that I would say, just because someone needs other things, needs things that are different from your needs, does not make them high maintenance. And by the way, Tim, if they looked at you through the same lens you were looking at them through, they would decide that you were high maintenance. So gather some tools. I would say read the five love languages. As cheesy and schlocky as it might seem,

that shit is so helpful as a framework for discussion, for identifying and easily labeling the different categories of needs that people might have and putting them in some type of order. Oh, interesting, you're a quality time person good to know number two would be this oh you're a physical touch and then acts of service person as i am right like these are shared vocabulary that you can use to really avoid and repair a lot of things so i would say handful a handful of things. Gain Katie Hendricks,

also like conscious, loving. There are a few books, a few resources I would say, look, if you really care about someone, commit together to develop a shorthand which allows you to not necessarily prevent. I don't think prevention is the key. I think repair is the key. If you're in a startup and you're like, well, let's just prevent all the bad things from happening. That's never going to work. Shit's going to happen. And people are going to have bad days. And you're going to say things you regret. And there are going to be disagreements. And by the way, if there are no disagreements, something's wrong. Right. 100%. And therefore having a shorthand and a set of agreements, these are the rules that we agree

to play by. And we're not going to be perfect. I would say that would be very high on the list. And I would say for really close relationships, potentially, maybe we'll edit this out, but who knows, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, let's just say anywhere from once a quarter to once a year, no more than once a quarter for a whole host of reasons. But I think that while MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is incredibly impressive, and I've been very involved with that from, I don't want to say day one, because that's not true, but certainly for the last 10 years or so, I've been very involved up through phase three and now onward. The results with treatment-resistant PTSD is a complex PTSD, where you see people who've

had this diagnosis for 17 years, suddenly after two or three sessions, end up asymptomatic, right? They would not meet the criteria for PTSD with durability out to six, nine, 12 months. I mean, it's something that almost defies belief. It is causing a complete re-examination of psychiatry as we know it. I still think that is second place to couples' work when it comes to MDMA. I think that that is an incredibly fruitful arena for seeing the full potential of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. So that would be another one because sometimes, oftentimes, couples end up, and I know multiple people now who have had this experience with professional guidance, which by the way, folks, currently is legal. So be forewarned there are legal consequences or at least risks entailed with this.

Not to mention the fact that at least, I would say, 60 to 70% of MDMA that you might purchase is adulterated or mixed with something else at this point. So you need to be very careful. DanceSafe.org is a resource I would recommend for testing kits and so on. If you're going to go that route, I'm not recommending you do anything illegal. However, people are going to do it anyway. Yeah, the international listeners. People are going to do it anyway.

I just recognize, it's like you can't just say to every teenager, like, don't have sex. Like, kids are going to have sex. So let's be realistic about it. I did that shit one time. It's fun as shit. Had sex?

No. No, I didn't. When I was 23, I did, I did, well, they were calling it ecstasy back then, but like,

holy shit. Yeah. That is a compound. Yeah. And that can go, that can also go sideways just for, for the record. Yeah.

So like there are films out there now, how to change your mind, the mini series on Netflix, watch the MBMA episode. It is excellent. And it's pretty heavy because it gets into some PTSD. But you'll be able to see live session footage if you want another alternative or compliment. He's great.

And there is also a doc called Trip of Compassion, which is worth seeing, which has a lot of session footage as well. But those are a few of the things that would come to mind. I would say on a friendship level, I might suggest to my earlier self, let's just say 30-year old self, something that I have really embraced and put into action in the last handful of years, which is going to sound a little antisocial, but I don't view it that way. Humans have a finite capacity for building and sustaining really deep relationships. You just can't do that with everyone.

And when I've looked back, say, and I do this every year at a past year review, and I look back at my calendar every week of my last year, and on a piece of paper with positive and negative, two columns, I write down the peak negative and positive experiences. If I look at the commonalities for the peak positive experiences, it's usually the same 10 people or fewer. It's the same cast of characters. These are my close friends who are nourishing, supportive, good influence. And before, what I would say to my younger self is, before you seek to develop a bunch of new relationships, ask yourself, are you spending

enough time, as much time as you would like, with the people on that shortlist who you know are guaranteed to be nourishing for you? And if the answer is no, maybe you should double down on those relationships. Maybe you should double down on those relationships. Maybe you should reach out to those people to get something on the calendar before shit crowds it out, before you look for shiny objects in new relationships, which doesn't mean I don't develop new relationships. I occasionally do. But I'm at a point where I think recognizing the ephemeral nature of life, the finite limits, the constraints that we have is actually very enabling. It helps you to make cleaner, faster decisions. So for me, I would just say before seeking to develop new deep relationships,

ask yourself the question, for my closest five friends, let's just say, in the last year, did I spend as much time as I would like with those people? And if the answer is no, reach out to those five first. Yeah. Yeah. What about you? Oh man, I would say, honestly, I think that we're at the age now where every day just brings a new unknown in terms of like, how long are we going to last? I've had multiple friends with cancer. Now I had one friend that I almost lost this year that was in the, you know,

emergency room for weeks that we thought had stage four cancer and ended up being a horrible bacterial infection from some foreign country. And it's just like, I just, I just realized like, you know, there's so many times when we hang out and we just give a hug and say, oh, good to see you. And like, blah, blah, blah. But we don't say, I love you. You know? We don't say, you are so essential to me in so many ways.

Maybe this is the ketamine talking, but like, no, but when I went through this whole thing with the ketamine therapy, I realized at the end of the day, love is the, it doesn't sound cheesy, but it is the most important thing that we tell each other and that we feel for each other.

And like, when you can really feel that and you say, this person is so important. I mean, you let them know that and you feel it back. I don't know what,

what's better than that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What's let them know that and you feel it back. I don't know what's better than that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What's more human than that too, right? Yeah. In a way. I mean, like love, you know, you can observe affection and love in many other species, but the ability to verbalize it and express it. Yeah. Do you feel that psychedelics brings that out of you? Because when I did the therapy, I had more love in me than I've had in so long. Do you feel that's a common but the psychedelics to me are similar to, there's a lot more to it, which we'll probably dive into, but kind of like alcohol or power or money in the sense that they magnify what's already there. And their term you sometimes hear is a non-specific amplifier so i don't think at all there's no compelling evidence to me that psychedelics if put in the drinking water produce world peace

there's no evidence for that yeah i mean you have plenty of civilizations maybe lithium though no no no remember there was i remember i remember yeah a little bit of lithium goes a long way yeah people can look this up we'll try to find to find. There's a study that people in populations where there is more lithium naturally found in the drinking water have lower rates of suicide than anywhere else. All sorts of stuff, yeah. So we'll see what we can find to put in the show notes. I do think low-dose lithium is pretty interesting, very low-dose. But psychedelics are a nonspecific amplifier.

There are many cases of civilizations where they had human sacrifice, played soccer with human heads, and they consumed psychedelics. I still sacrifice people. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, as we all do. You know, every once in a while on a solstice. I mean, I think it's all fair game. But the feeling of gratitude and love, I think for a lot of people who wish to enable that to experience it more who have the conscious or subconscious desire to rekindle those things that the experience you're describing is very common yeah for sure and i think part of that is the dissolution this isn't true of all experiences consequently the felt sense of unity with many or all things which leads you

to feel for most people less alone yeah which leads you to feel quite grateful because to state the obvious i suppose despite the fact that we're more connected than ever with loose ties, I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression that is highly correlated to a feeling of isolation. So when you can remedy that by feeling the exact polar opposite in some of these states, not necessary, but helpful,

that the end result of that is a feeling of gratitude, for sure. Awesome. Yeah. Before we wrap things up, because I know we're coming to the end and you that is a feeling of gratitude for sure. Awesome. Yeah. Before we wrap things up, because I know we're coming to the end and you still have some particular defense. What was the cliffhanger you said you wanted to tell us?

Yeah. So I'll tell you what, I'll keep it short and then you can excavate as you like. I love to excavate. All right. So as you know, for the last year, I've basically been crippled by lower back issues

i mean i've had trouble there are days when i've had trouble getting up and walking i mean it's been that bad i mean to be honest tim you first told me about this eight years ago or something remember when you got those injections or something you were like i think i have this disease yeah yeah so i've had lower back issues for a long time. This is also a congenital issue. So I have what's called a transitional segment. In other words, there's a segment in my lumbar, there are vertebrae in my lumbar area that really mimic a sacral vertebral segment.

And that's problematic for a host of reasons. It creates an abnormal angle. If you can imagine just bending the paper clip over and over again in ways that it shouldn't be bent, that's sort of the feeling in the low back. And my brother has this. There are other people in my family who have this issue. So standing, extended, slow walking,

like a museum walk, cocktail party type of experience can be very painful. Like the low back locks up but in the last year specifically had all sorts of issues and all sorts of mris and specialists and pt and adjustments and traction and this that and the other thing and it was a disaster and it caused it well let me give myself a little more agency. I created a lot of anxiety around this because I was like, fuck, is this the new normal? Is this really the new normal?

Well, because you project forward. Like what is five years from now? Yeah. I'm like, I'm not that old, you know, and I'm pretty active. And your skincare is amazing. My skincare is amazing. I saw your instagram video you know what's funny sidebar is how much time you can spend on like a blog post takes six months to put together yeah and

it's like you get like crickets and a fart in the wind and then nobody ever reads it again and then someone on your team is like you know what people ask about your skincare let's grab a couple clips and throw it up and it goes bananas i'm on i'm on instagram and the first thing that pops up to me is like hi i'm tim ferris people ask me about my skincare regimen let me tell you i use bronner's natural soap like it's like what the fuck is to come into yeah so here we are here we are folks your skin looks amazing thank you thank you breathtaking you know it's it's we's working from the inside out. Coming back to the main through line here, terrifying experience with the back.

And I had more or less given up. I was in the stage of grief where I was trying to get past denial and accept that this might be the new normal because no one could figure it out. And a lot of the advice I received, many of the diagnoses were conflicting. And then decided in part because of this to do a few things. And part of that was going to South America, which I'm not recommending. There are a lot of risks down in South America. It's generally like safety fifth. It's not safety first. So people get into a lot of trouble but i went down and did this training which involved consuming a bunch of plants also involved fasting for a week

also involved wait wait water fast water fast jesus also days yeah also involved during that week really not sitting and standing very little so it was either hammock or cot, basically. And I'm mentioning these things because they're confounders. Translating that into basic English, that means that I can't really point back to one thing and say, this is what caused what I'm going to describe. But during the first experience, which happened to be with ayahuasca, which is a huge gun, it's, I think, treated very casually by people who do not realize what they're signing up for. I do not recommend it to most people. As my ex, who's going to become relevant in a second, would tell you, I talk many, many, many more people, nine out of 10.

Which ex? Out of, I'm not going to mention her name, but my most recent ex. Out of using ayahuasca, then I talk into using ayahuasca. Like nine times out of 10, I say, you should not proceed. Do not pass go for a lot of reasons. But in this particular case, I had a very, very, very difficult experience. And I can kind of rank order my hardest experiences

over the last decade plus. And this would be the third most difficult, maybe the second for different characteristics, which is saying a lot. And there was a point at which in that experience, all I could imagine was having my head in the lap of my ex. That's all I wanted. It was the only thing I could even visualize because I was in the impact zone. I was just getting hit by 100 foot waves from every angle and there was no respite. It was 10 out of 10. There was no wave, meaning it didn't ebb and flow. It was just 10 out of 10 volume from peak until end of the night, effectively. It was unusual and incredibly difficult. And that was true for everyone in the session. We'll leave

it at that. Your shaman makes the wrong i this guy's famous for having a brew that just cripples people and the crippler like yeah i mean there are a lot of other full-time clinicians from indigenous traditions who will not drink his brew i'll put it that way oh jesus and uh coming back to the point of the story i'm imagining you know the only thing i can envision is this woman holding my head and consoling me that That's the only thing I can imagine. And then I realized that for a year, because we separated a bit over a year ago, and this was totally subconscious, right? It wasn't a decision on my part, but I realized I had not allowed myself to feel the complete obliterating heartbreak that was in fact the core response to that separation right

like i'd not allowed myself from her from previous from that separation right like in other words my psyche had seemingly protected me because of my history of depression which i've come to manage better than ever before. Like each year I'm better able to manage it and it's less and less frequent. It's less and less intense, but nonetheless, let's face the facts in college, I almost killed myself. So there's a fear, at least subconsciously that because of this separation, because of starting over at square one, that I could spiral into a deep depression and that could be dangerous. So my psyche protected me from that by not letting me

feel the sadness, the pain, to the extent that ended up being important, which I realized in this moment. So I allowed myself to soak in it. In that moment, trip reports are so fucking boring most of the time. And I apologize to people who might be listening and thinking, go, here we go again, because I get it. Trust me. But in this particular case, I experienced something I've never experienced. As soon as I soaked in that, and I really soaked in it, and it was awful. It was so dark and so heavy. And then I felt my back release. And literally I've been 90 plus percent pain-free

since that fucking moment. And it blows my mind because at that point, I couldn't explain it with the fast because the fast and ketones are highly anti-inflammatory. And I think that they actually played a role, hold on, in the durability of things. But the fact that there was an immediate release is interesting.

It is interesting. I can't explain that through fasting. I can't explain that through the just being recumbent, laying down for seven days because that was yet to come. And I would say that I made a tactical error in the last few weeks, which is I was like, fuck man, like I'm all good. And so I've neglected some of the basic self-care and strengthening and PT, which I think is important because my low back and QL and so on, which are some of the surrounding muscles have atrophied over the last year of avoiding

working with the back. There was that experience. And for people who may be interested in delving into this a little bit more, there is a book. I don't agree with everything in the book, but it is interesting in the sense that it was written by a Western-trained MD who ended up then opening a healing clinic in South America focused on ayahuasca and diets, which you will read about if you get into the book, called The Fellowship of the River. So I found that book quite interesting on a number of levels. But the reason I bring this all up, number one, people had recommended this book. I think it's called Healing Low Back Pain. I may be getting the title slightly wrong. It could be Fixing Low Back Pain, but it's by Dr. Sarno, John Sarno. And this book was recommended to me. I've read it before. And the general gist is it's

all in your head. Now, I took great offense at parts of this book, and a lot of it is scientifically indefensible. So unfortunately, I threw the baby out with the bathwater a bit because he says a bunch of things that are ridiculous. And he cites these success statistics for his method while simultaneously saying, if I interview someone and they say they're not open to a b or c i omit them from my treatment and i'm like okay well wait a fucking second your selection bias is out of control yeah but i wanted to bring this up because that book has helped a lot of people despite its flaws and not everyone will at any point want to consume ayahuasca which i would advise against for 90 plus percent of the population. It can be very destabilizing for a lot of people and very risky.

You know, I would say there are a lot of things you should do beforehand, right? Like try the talk therapy, try holotropic breath work, consider after speaking with doctors, ketamine. After that, you can consider other tools, but ayahuasca should be like fifth on your list. Let's do a random show on ayahuasca. Is that possible? Yeah, possibly. Ayahuasca would be like fifth or sixth on the list of progressions. It would not be first.

But I would say the Sarno books are interesting. I know they've helped people like Brian Koppelman, who's been on the podcast, amazing writer who was the co-creator of Billions, among others, Rounders, etc. they've helped people like Brian Koppelman, who's been on the podcast, amazing writer who was the co-creator of Billions, among others, Rounders, etc. And it's something that I've always, in theory, agreed with. Yes, we store stress that can have a physiological effect. There are autoimmune disorders that I think are intimately linked with different types of psychological disturbances. So you can address the problem kind of from the physiological side first. Of course, the brain isn't entirely separate. There's no kind of Cartesian separation of mind and body.

So yes, the brain is physiological, but you can attack it through content in a way, or you can attack it through pharmaceuticals and physiology first. I think you can go both ways. But the Sarno book, I think, is worth a lot of people reading. The second thing I'll mention, which is very, very simple and tactical, if you have lower back pain, I'm shocked it took me this long to figure it out, and say sitting on hard chairs bothers you or lumbar support helps you for a year i've been going to restaurants and asking if they have a cushion do you have a cushion or a pillow or something i can use to fix fucked up seating situations this is the solution right here this is it this is a pilates

ball this is a pro body pilates doesn't really matter yeah but honestly this thing folds up six in your pocket yeah and I've been traveling with it. I've had it behind my back the whole time. Great for first dates. Great for first dates. Ladies love Pilates balls. But I will say, for instance, the last time I did a podcast in this seat,

I did not use this. And my back was fucking killing me afterwards. But the killing me afterwards is not just an issue for today. That's an issue that causes inflammation that fucks up my sleep for three or four days. Use this ball, no problem. I can put it behind my back or I can put it under my ass and it folds up and fits in your pocket. So anyway, folks, there you have it from the sublime to the ridiculous Pilates ball. Amazing. All right. How are we doing? Any other topics? I feel pretty good. Next

time we'll get to what you would tell your 30-year-old self. Anything you'd like to add in that category? No, I just, you know, I think if we're, are we wrapping up now? Because I'd like to say some wrapping up comments. Wrapping up comments, please. Yeah. So my wrapping up comments would be this. I recently went out to dinner with five close friends of mine who, of which, you know, most of them, you know,

just like the crew, the Wu Tang clan. Yeah. Just good friends. And one of the things I did is I went around the circle and I said a few words of gratitude. And I think to my earlier point, one of the things that's really important to me

after coming out of this therapy is just this vulnerability that allows us to speak from the heart because we don't know what tomorrow brings. And I just want to say that, Tim, you have been a friend of mine for so long now. And I have appreciated the fact that my career has been a series of ups and downs and all over the place. And you have been a steadfast friend, someone that sends me some of the funniest videos I've ever seen in my life, always keeps it lighthearted and fun. But I know that you care deeply about me and I just want to let you know that I love you and I care deeply about you. And I will always be here to have your back and I'm wishing you a fantastic new year. I hope that you hit all these milestones and more that you want to

hit because I know that you are someone that I've always looked up to and someone that is just so inspirational to us all that listen to your show and your podcast. Because you inspire us to do more and to be better humans. And I just want to let you know that that means a lot to me. And I love you. Oh, thanks, Kevin. That's amazing. That makes my night. Happy to say it.

Yeah. It's the truth. I love you too, man. Our friendship has been such a constant for me, such a lifeline in a way with all the ups and downs and holy shit. I mean, both of us have had some pretty wily ups and downs. You've had a lot of hot chicks.

You've done. I will say, I didn't see that coming. Yeah. Well, you talked about the ups and downs i was like you've got a lot of ups my friend yeah i mean yeah i look that's one category that's a one category and i had to light up the mood a little bit and i'm and i'm and i'm grateful for that

and life is like a box of chocolates right you just never know what's around the corner it's true and that's why it's important to say these things it is I'll tell you something you don't know I have your Christmas slash New Year's card from like two years ago so obviously out of date it's like you and Daria and the kids and it's up in my kitchen

and I kept it there because I love seeing you guys every day and I think about you guys all the time and just have such love for your family Love seeing you guys every day. And I think about you guys all the time. And just have such love for your family. And I'm so grateful for our friendship. So I love you too, man. As you said, it's important to say things are so uncertain.

And I've never experienced, I've had friends pass from cancer before. Yeah. But I've never been there every step of the way from diagnosis to last conversation a few days before they passed. That was new for me. Yeah. And it affected, really deeply affected me on a bunch of levels. And I want to be deeply affected by that. I don't want to push that aside. In part because Roland was so joyful and curious and optimistic until the end in a very genuine way. It wasn't an act. It wasn't theater.

That raised a bunch of aspirations in me. Because he was first and foremost a very dedicated seasoned meditator psychedelics were a piece of the puzzle but first and foremost he was a dedicated meditator for decades that's amazing and attributed a lot of his equanimity and preparation for death which i got to see firsthand a lot of people talk about it right but let's let's be honest, or I'll be honest. I've read all the Stoics or a lot of the Stoics, and I've read all sorts of Buddhism and rehearsed death and memento mori and this, that, and the other thing. But when I'm actually on, as Roland said, the final glide path, I don't know how I'm going to respond. I don't know. I have no idea. So to see someone who really walked the walk in such a life-affirming way that lit everyone up around him was tremendous.

And he said what he was able to, and he was willing to say what he meant to those people around him who meant things to him. And you don't have to wait until you have terminal cancer diagnosis. You shouldn't wait. Just because it may not be that, right? It may be a car crash. It may be something where you don't get the chance to say these things. And so I just, yeah, it's important to do it now.

Yeah, you gotta do it. Great to see you, man. Yeah, good to see you. All right, man. Happy New Year. Excited for, this is gonna be a, oh, don't chop me off a little bit. Cheers. Cheers, buddy. To the new to me off a little bit. Cheers.

Cheers, buddy. To the new year. To the new year. And to all the listeners out there, wishing you a happy and healthy new year. And yeah, I'm excited to, I mean, it's always a new year of change, a new year of change and exploration. I think the one thing that you and I, let's take a sip. The one thing that you and I have in common is just this lifelong pursuit of evolution, of figuring out.

Because the secret that no one will tell you is no matter how much money you make, no matter how much success you have, we're all still figuring it out. And in Ram Dass' words, we're all just walking each other home. Yeah. Well said, man. I'm going to leave it there. There we go. Cheers, buddy.

Happy New Year. Happy early New Year. And happy New Year to everybody listening. And as always, be just a little kinder than is necessary until the next episode. That applies to other people, but also applies to yourself. Take it easy. Take it easy. Take it easy. You know, life is short, but life is long.

And we're all just figuring it out. And by the way, as far as I can tell, you never really figure it out. No, you don't. So true. So true. CTFO. Chill the fuck out a little bit. Be a little easier on yourself.

And we'll put everything in the show notes, Tim.blog slash podcast for all the stuff we talked about. Kevinrose.com is a better website. Kevinrose.com. Be sure to check out this amazing new podcast I've heard of. New podcast at Kevinrose.com is the best place to go. Forget Tim.blog. And Kev, Kev, Kev, Kev, talk, talk coming at you soon.

Thanks for listening, everybody. Bye. See you. Hey, guys. this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool

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