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Tim Ferriss
Optimal minimalism.
Kevin Rose
At this altitude, I can run flat
Tim Ferriss
out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Kevin Rose
Can I answer your personal question now? It is in a perfect time.
Tim Ferriss
I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Kevkev.
Kevin Rose
Tim. Tim.
Tim Ferriss
Good to see you, man.
Kevin Rose
Good to see you. And let's figure out which one. There we go. Cheers. Cheers.
Tim Ferriss
All right. You know, I know the cool kids are down on alcohol, but every once in a while, I think there's a place for it.
Kevin Rose
There's a time and place, and this is the time.
Tim Ferriss
I think this is the time and the place, and I think paying a tax for it the next day is a feature, not a bug.
Kevin Rose
Are you getting taxed harder?
Tim Ferriss
Oh, of course. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Is it getting worse?
Tim Ferriss
Every old bastard. Yeah, I know that's gender neutral. Gets taxed as you can process ethanol less and less well over time, but I'm cool with it. I don't have that much, but today has been hectic.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
You know, take a little hard day, take a little edge off. And people may not like the sound of that. It's a little antiquated, maybe for all the cool ketamine kids, no offense,
Kevin Rose
put that on me. I try it one time and I
Tim Ferriss
get freaking you goat once. And then they call me the goat. You can't get around it.
Kevin Rose
I still stand by that experience. When you're doing it in a supervised setting by a medical professional. Here we go. No, I've been telling you, it's. You've done it.
Tim Ferriss
Of course I have.
Kevin Rose
Okay, so there we go.
Tim Ferriss
Well, yeah, because I wanted to be able to speak.
Kevin Rose
I saw you at a party one time and you were just like, that's not true.
Tim Ferriss
That's not true. Still have all my nostrils intact. No ketamine cramps. You know, I don't know what that is.
Kevin Rose
Is that a thing?
Tim Ferriss
That's when you use too much.
Kevin Rose
Okay.
Tim Ferriss
Way, way, way, way too much.
Kevin Rose
Oh, yeah. I heard it's bad on the bladder.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, your bladder can get a little grumpy. Or a lot grumpy.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
As the case might be. Yeah, I'm good. You know, I'm good. Kevin random show number 3,000, 479.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. You know what's crazy, dude, is I looked up a random show the other day, and you had a bit of hair, like, way back in the day. Back.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. We were babies.
Kevin Rose
I know. So much shit has happened.
Tim Ferriss
I know.
Kevin Rose
The only constant, I think, is, like, maybe, like, Toaster, who's Barely alive.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. You know, I know. Seriously, Toaster was a tiny, tiny little pup.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Who was chewing through the XLR cables.
Kevin Rose
Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss
On your couch in San Francisco. Way, way, way back in the day.
Kevin Rose
Toaster's 15. And I'll tell a quick little story. A week ago, I get this call. Daria calls me and she's like, you got to get over the house. Like, Toaster is shaking violently. And he's 15. He's like running into walls and shit. Like, you know, he's getting up there and his legs are collapsing so he can't stand up. And he couldn't stand up and he's shaking violently. And I'm like, just flying over there. I throw him in my car. He's on my lap driving to get to this emergency vet as fast as possible. And he just sprays shit all over me. Like, literally, I heard it. Like, I felt his stomach be like, here we go. And then like 10 seconds later, I'm not even talking, like, oh, like, oh, he had a little shit. Like, no, no, no, no. Like shotgun against the car door. Like the whole thing. And it' on my pants or toasty. I know. But you know what's funny, dude? It's like I rushed him in. And long story short, he's okay now.
Tim Ferriss
What was it?
Kevin Rose
He had gone into the vet the day prior and he was so nervous that he stood for. He had to be there for like a multi hour blood draw because we were. He was having some other issues and he stood for like six hours straight.
Tim Ferriss
That's too long for an old dog.
Kevin Rose
He can only stand for like 10 minutes, like Max. And so he had just overtaxed himself and got like. There's a syndrome that they can get when they're like super stressed out. Sure.
Tim Ferriss
So little Molly's at it or big Molly, she's on the floor right here.
Kevin Rose
She's sleeping.
Tim Ferriss
Molly's 12.
Kevin Rose
It's crazy. But long story short, he's okay. But I thought to myself, it's so weird because I. When I walked in there and there was like, shit. And like, literally I'm in tears because I think I'm about to have to put down my dog.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, of course.
Kevin Rose
And I just thought, it's okay. I'll do this any day for this, dude.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
You. Like, when you care about your animals that much, none of that matters.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Like, you would do anything for them, you know? And it's just like, just that love. It's so crazy how much you love these little beasts. Like, it's insane.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
It's like a kid. It's like a kid.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. It's wild to think about, if you really sit down and think about it, some of these super common daily experiences like commuting with a dog or pointing and having a dog recognize that you're pointing, for instance. That's really rare in the animal kingdom, that recognition of pointing as just one example. But how unusual it is that we have this. And yes, we have cats. I grew up with four cats and two dogs. I get it. But in particular dogs as like companions, co. Hunters etc. The fact that we've evolved. Co. Evolved in a sense and sort of co. Domesticated. Yeah. Also, it's not necessarily one way. Read the Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan for more on that is incredible.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss
The fact that we have like, we're totally calm. Having this 60 plus pound beast with giant fangs on the floor is nuts.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that those Instagram posts where it's like where I was and where I am now today. And like they show like the wild like wolf, like out in the countryside, like eating a rabbit. And then they showed like a poodle in a tutu outfit and like all like died.
Tim Ferriss
The meme is, I'm gonna go grab some scraps from those weird monkeys. What's the worst that could happen? And then it's like 10,000 years later.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
You're at Chihuahua with a bonnet on. What else is going on? Kevin? I got a couple things on my list, but we got.
Kevin Rose
There's a lot to talk about.
Tim Ferriss
There's a lot to talk about.
Kevin Rose
First, I'll say that lately life has been lifing me. It's been doing all the things we lost. A dear colleague, O Malik.
Tim Ferriss
Oh man.
Kevin Rose
Very notorious, like amazing early tech. Just creative.
Tim Ferriss
Brilliant writer, brilliant thinker, very sweet guy.
Kevin Rose
The nicest.
Tim Ferriss
And yeah, we lost him within the last week.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, he passed away. So that was tough. That was really tough. I found out when I was at a retreat. I went to a five day silent meditation retreat, which is great, but bummer to hear that. But I mean, this is the thing that I realized the other day I was thinking about, you know, toaster and OM and other stuff I have going on and my mom getting older and following and all these things. And in some sense it's unavoidable, number one. And number two, I kind of wouldn't have it any other way. It's what makes life interesting. When OM passed.
Tim Ferriss
You mean death.
Kevin Rose
Well, just Everything. The chaos of it all. If you can just take a step back and be like, well, or I could just be sitting there living a really boring life and nothing could be happening. Like, when Own passed, what I felt was a severe sense of loss and sorrow and sadness. But I realized that that gap is just love at the end of the day. Because I wouldn't have it unless I loved this man so much. Like, I cared for this person so much. How lucky am I to have crossed paths with this person? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And you were to get to know them and you were tied in through true ventures, obviously. And prior to that.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. But like anyone in general that you lose that you love, you know, I mean, when I lost my dad, like that is just a gaping hole of love manifested through sorrow and sadness. And once you realize that, it's like, wow, I had this great father that did all these amazing things with me and you can kind of convert that or just be okay with it. Not that you need to change that feeling. Right.
Tim Ferriss
Recognize that it's a consequence of the love you have.
Kevin Rose
It's a consequence of the love. The deep love.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. You know, I heard about his passing and I want to give credit where credit is due for a few things. Matt Mullenweg, mutual friend. He was incredibly close to Om and I'm really grateful to Matt for a few things. One, I mean, many things. I could give a long list, but there are a few. One is he organized a trip to Antarctica. I've never been to Arctic or hadn't. And on that trip were just a handful of people, including Ohm. So I got to spend quality time. And trust me, when you're in Antarctica, you are indoors most of the time.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
What that means is you're trying to sleep in your tent, but it's going to be during the summer, so it's like a spotlight in your face 24 hours a day. Or you're in one of these other structures where you're probably like having wine and junk food, let's be honest. And there's a lot of talking. So we got to hang out. And Om was also an avid photographer. And so we got to like go to this nearby Empire penguin colony, which was a once in a lifetime experience. And you just sit and talk. And if there were going to be any small talk, which there wasn't going to be with Om or me really for that matter, it all falls away after the first half day.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
And then everybody's kind of like psychologically naked. So I really want to thank Matt for that opportunity to bond with Omen, I'd spent a lot of time with him, but it was always in these little bits and pieces, not for several days straight, where you're basically locked in together and separately. Matt introduced me to this short blog post by someone who typically writes very long blog posts, Tim Urban called the Tail End. I don't know if I ever sent this to you.
Kevin Rose
People should note by way. But why?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Wait, but why?
Kevin Rose
Yeah. Fantastic blog.
Tim Ferriss
And the Tail End makes the point, among many others, that by the time you. I think it's graduate from high school, let's assume you're headed off to college, away from your parents. You've spent something like 90, 95% of the total hours you will ever spend with your parents by the time you graduate from high school. And when you start to visualize that, and Tim Urban's really good at laying it out visually, it can provoke some really profound changes for me. I mean, just reading that short blog post sent to me by Matt ended up leading to taking my family on these family trips as, like, awkward and uncomfortable. That was at points, because my family doesn't really emote much. So you stick us together in the way that I was together with Om, and it's. It can be super uncomfortable. But making the effort, right. At least feeling like, look, this Runway is not infinite.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And it's like, let me just make the effort. And I'm glad I did, because we got to a point where it's like, with my dad's mobility, he's really compromised. He needs a wheelchair now for a lot.
Kevin Rose
And I just saw him a few days ago, and it was great to see him. Dude.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
It was so great to see him. He's so kind. He's a Kevin, like, so happy. And you. He was keen, and it was just, like, so sweet to see a man. I hadn't seen him for, like, years.
Tim Ferriss
Long time.
Kevin Rose
It had been like seven years.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, something like that. And I'm glad I took those trips because before you know it, you can't do it anymore. And it makes me think of. You mentioned meditation. This really good short. I'll call it a meditation for simplicity, but it's like an audiobook chapter by Sam Harris called the Last Time. I think it's called the Last Time. And he reflects on these various experiences that at the time, you don't recognize are the last time for something. Right. So he. He went skiing. He went skiing. He went skiing. And there was a time when he stopped, but he didn't realize that was going to be the last time, right? And you just fucking don't know.
Kevin Rose
Do you ever try and like, I think about this, dude, and then I try and do it one more time. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
That's how I always end up injured, dude.
Kevin Rose
I went to the bouncy house with my kids and like, I'm 49, you know, and I was like, fucking do
Tim Ferriss
a flip right now.
Kevin Rose
And like, literally people were like, don't do it. Don't like, call me off, you know? And I did it and I stuck it.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, good. You're good on a trampoline.
Kevin Rose
My last time.
Tim Ferriss
You might be your last time. You are good on a trampoline. This is so weird, man. Dude, I kid you not. I had a dream last night of the two of us going to House of Air at Chrissy Field in San Francisco and you were doing like front flips off your knees.
Kevin Rose
I can do that.
Tim Ferriss
You dropped your hat and then you like kicked the trampoline to bounce it back up to your head. And I was like, what?
Kevin Rose
Wait, wait, wait. So you know I sent you that video of me dropping my hat and kicking back.
Tim Ferriss
Do it live too. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose
And I said it just made its
Tim Ferriss
way into the dream. And I was just like, what? I literally had that in my dreams last night.
Kevin Rose
That's wild. And I have the asses chaps on. Like I normally do when you're.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah. The chaps on which like, depending on your angle can be kind of. Because you like doing the straddle flip. You like doing the straddle flip. So it's a little awkward.
Kevin Rose
I've heard about these dreams before.
Tim Ferriss
I always text them, Kevin. I'm like, I was thinking. I was thinking of you last night.
Kevin Rose
The chaps were back.
Tim Ferriss
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Kevin Rose
Well, the retreat was fantastic. I spent five days going really deep on my koan, doing a lot of work on it, which you can listen to Henry Schuchman on your podcast if people are interested about what Zen is all about. Like, real, true, traditional Zen with koans. And you've probably heard the sound of one hand clapping. That actually is a one of 500 plus Kohons. Yeah, it was fantastic. I had a couple little micro insights, which was good. And I was kind of rushed through to the Zen master to explain them and try and get some clarity on them, which is great.
Tim Ferriss
How do you know that you're having a micro insight? So it's not like my balls are chafing in this position. It's something else. Yes.
Kevin Rose
It's not that, but close. I essentially was sitting, and Henry, one of the Zen masters that you've had on the show, a dear friend of ours, was there, and then his Roshi from Japan was there. So it was very special. And then comes every two years.
Tim Ferriss
What's his name? Yamada. Yamada Roshi.
Kevin Rose
Roshi, yeah. So basically, I was kind of pulled Henry aside. You're not supposed to. He's not talking, but I was like. He's like, you know, how's it going? Like this and that. And I was like, well, I had this thing happen. Like, what do you think about this? And he's like, you got to come
Tim Ferriss
with me right now.
Kevin Rose
That will not come with me. But he, like, got me right in front. There's a line to see the Roshi, to go have your private interview where you go and, like, check your practice with them. So it's behind closed doors. You go in, you sit down. With the Roshi, you typically get between 2 and 10 minutes to sit down and talk about your progress on your practice. And you do that, like, once every day and a half when you're out there. And this was. That's cool enough to where Henry was, like, you should go talk to him right away.
Tim Ferriss
Skip the line. TSA, PreCheck.
Kevin Rose
Like, go through the pre check. And it was beautiful. It was a micro little thing. I can share it if you're curious.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, of course I'm curious.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So there was this sense, I'm sitting there.
Tim Ferriss
I get bored of hearing myself talk. That's why I'm here talk to you.
Kevin Rose
So I'm sitting here staring against the wall, because in Zen, you stare against the wall with your eyes open. You're standing about three quarters down, kind of just glancing out. I'm working on my koan. And for people that don't know how you do that is essentially on the out breath. You just like, slowly internally say your koan. It's almost like a mantra in some sense, but a little bit more. Yeah, it's like a question you're kind of asking yourself slowly. That doesn't make sense. And eventually it pops. But what happened is I had about 2 seconds of this sense that there was. And this is going to be hard to explain because it's not from the world of thought, which is already hard to explain.
Tim Ferriss
It's like a sneeze in the perennium.
Kevin Rose
No, no. All right. I had a close. I had a sense of nothing lacking.
Tim Ferriss
That sounds nice.
Kevin Rose
Nothing needed to be added, and nothing even possibly could be added. And nothing possibly could be taken away because everything at that moment was full in the way that it should be. But what was interesting about it is it wasn't an emotion. It was just like a steady state of being. So it wasn't like, oh, I feel free right now. No, none of that. It was just like, oh, everything is here, perfectly present. And it was just wild.
Tim Ferriss
Wild in what sense? In the felt sense of that experience or realization.
Kevin Rose
In the sense that wild in the.
Tim Ferriss
I just drank too much tequila after not having much tequila.
Kevin Rose
I haven't had any tequila. But in the sense that we oftentimes so often, like, go outside or inside into our brain to try and find something, figure something out, an emotional state that's either bothering you or feels good or feels bad or something else. And then just to know that everything, and I don't mean like objects, like everything, was one unit of nothing lacking. And it was just a micro sense of kind of like, oh, there's actually nothing to do because everything's already here. They talk about this in Zen a bit where you already have everything that you need. So it's just. They call it the removal of the veil. It's an expansive awareness that you get from a deep continued practice over years and decades. But it was already there all along.
Tim Ferriss
Can I give a shameless plug?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, let's hear it.
Tim Ferriss
All right. So you and I are both involved with the way, which is this guided single path meditation app, which is guided by Henry Shukman you mentioned. And it's the progressive development of skills on a single path, which I really like, as opposed to just what is the meditation du jour with no coherence. And a few of my favorite meditations. I have a lot of different sessions bookmarked, and I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And by the way, for people who are like, oh, these guys are just shelling their bags, I do think it can be a good business. But this is sort of a ideologically philosophical investment of time and money. Right.
Kevin Rose
It's like the reason we invested in the dog aging study with rapamycin.
Tim Ferriss
Exactly. University of Washington. It's like, this needs to exist.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. These exist.
Tim Ferriss
It's good for the world.
Kevin Rose
Yes.
Tim Ferriss
Let's try it. So, sure, we've got some chips on the table, but this is mostly because we believe in it. And a few of my favorites, if people ever try it, Whole Earth is medicine is one. Another one is this too is me, which makes me think about what you're saying. Yes. So this too is me is a meditation led by Henry. Which this is going to sound maybe esoteric, but it's not. When you recognize that all of the things you experience are mediated by your mind. Right. And therefore, when you hear something, when you feel something, when you're interrupted by something, et cetera, et cetera, anything you can possibly imagine experiencing is also you, because ultimately it is entirely mediated by your mind. Let's just use that instead of brain. And it's incredibly, at least for me, and I'm not comparing it to your experience because I think it's probably characteristically different. Is incredibly relaxing to let go even just for a moment, because my brain is like the ultimate dog chasing a squirrel kind of brain. Right. Like, I'm always looking for something to fix, something to improve what I need to do, what is happening next week. And meditation is, you are the squirrel. I am the squirrel.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
It can be excruciatingly painful.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Like, meditation can be super hard.
Kevin Rose
That's a very common thing People are like, I can't do this.
Tim Ferriss
But when Henry gives you permission to include all of that as you. I know this might sound very bizarre. It allows you to kind of drop this burden that you didn't realize you were carrying. So in any case, you don't have to do a week long meditation retreat if you're just doing 10 minutes twice a day. And I do think there's some alchemy to twice a day. I don't know why exactly. I have some theories around vagus nerve stimulation and stuff, but you get a lot out of it. In any case, I didn't mean to interrupt your story.
Kevin Rose
No, I think there's two things that I love that Henry says quite often when he starts some of these meditations, which is take everything that you came in the door with, like all the thoughts, worries, emotions, things, and leave it at the door just for now. You can come back to it in 20 minutes. But just for now. The permission to set those things down for yourself just for now is such a beautiful thing. And then like the little instructions where he's like, drop your jaw an eighth of an inch. And I'm like, whoa, I didn't even realize I was like, I was clenching.
Tim Ferriss
Can I tell you something crazy about that?
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
All right, so I got fitted for a mandibular device, which is a fancy way of saying a double decker mouthpiece.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
That is an easier approach to resolving sleep apnea or snoring. So I don't snore a ton, but every once in a while I do. Drives my lady insane, understandably. And if you take the jaw and drop it down an eighth of an inch and forward an eighth of an inch, you open your airway. And I was thinking about that because Henry will often say, as you're alluding to, like, drop your jaw and leave it forward as if it's resting on a small pillow ever so slightly and it increases your airflow. I mean, these ancients hit on some stuff by trial and error that really just works. It's like, yeah, if you want to have better respiration while you're meditating and better alignment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just do it. Henry's describing, and I will say, his dulcet British tones.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
If you just want a relaxing voice.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
That will help you with chilling the fuck out when your monkey mind is ricocheting inside your skull. Try Henry out. Like, you can find free stuff everywhere. I've had him on the podcast a bunch, as well as Meditation Mondays for a while, which were These very short episodes of guided meditations. In any case, you know, I've been so. It's the right word. I mean, overjoyed is. Sounds too dramatic, but I'll just say happy for you to watch your path with meditation, because it seems like you get so much nourishment and grounding from it. And no offense, you're kind of a spaz. You're kind of a spaz. Like, you get excited about, and then you drop stuff. That is very well exemplified. And like, Tim, you gotta buy this stock. And then you never tell me when you sell. And I'm like, oh, I'm. Oh, hold on, hold on. Okay.
Kevin Rose
Because you lost me a real.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, you should have held. It's fine.
Kevin Rose
No, but anyway, literally, Tim gives me this tip, and I'm like, all right, I'm in. And then, like, a day and a half later, I'm down. Like, I know.
Tim Ferriss
That's why you got to wait. The point of the story is, I thought this meditation thing, just like every nine months, you're like, I'm moving to Android. And then I'm like, yeah, let me start the timer for two weeks before you come back to iPhone. I'm like, yes, meditation thing. Yeah, sure, we'll see. I give it two weeks, and you've stuck with it five years now. Yeah. It's really made me happy as your friend to see something that gives you that consistency. That's it. There's nothing more to add. I've been really not sure of the right way to put it. I've just been very reassured by you having that constant in your life.
Kevin Rose
One of the things I'm curious about, speaking of constants and kind of, like, how things change since we've known each other and you had hair and all that other shit. My hair wasn't great.
Tim Ferriss
Still got plenty of hair. It's not on my head.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The braids down there. The question I'm curious about is I've been thinking a lot lately as I kind of March towards 50, what are the things that I've always said that I want to do that I'm just like, you know, I've got a thousand bookmarks on Instagram. Like, all these Japanese woodworking things, and always woodworking.
Tim Ferriss
It's always woodworking.
Kevin Rose
This is how bad of my speaking the monkey mind and bouncing around. I literally have. For some reason, the algorithm is now giving me, like, those motherfucking boats inside of bottles. Like, people making the boats of the bottles. And I'm like, am I going to be a boat in the bottle guy. Like, I don't know, maybe, like, I realize now, I think these next couple decades, like, I want to stop bullshitting myself and stop saying, like, hey, one day, one day I'll get in the Japanese woodworking. One day I'll do this and really start doing some things. Yeah, you've been really good because you, like you archery hunting, like the stuff that you've gotten into, you've gone deep on in the last few years. Are any things that are on your kind of bucket list of things where you say one day, you know, you're busy with your podcast and all the
Tim Ferriss
other you got going on podcast, Shoot
Kevin Rose
me in the head.
Tim Ferriss
It's. It's fine and it's fun most of the time, but it's so crowded and it's like, man, if 20 other people are trying to do the same job, I don't want to do this job.
Kevin Rose
It is wild how many new podcasters there are out there. Well, also, they're also optimizing every little freaking thing.
Tim Ferriss
All the thumbnails. What you need to know before your crypto crashes next week now. And I'm like, oh, God, yeah, I just don't want to play that game. And for me, I would say the most top of mind is rock climbing. Actually, I just did some outdoor rock climbing a couple days ago and I love rock climbing. I was always, for at least the last 15 years, limited by my right elbow, which I had surgically repaired. So it's ready to go and I want to do some multi pitch stuff in Yosemite.
Kevin Rose
Let's go.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So I don't know if I want to say this.
Tim Ferriss
All right, that's a good start.
Kevin Rose
So you know who's a big rock climber?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah, he's per.
Kevin Rose
He's very well built for it to Yosemite. I'm sure we should go because he's like invited me to do some.
Tim Ferriss
He looks like someone who would be good.
Kevin Rose
Apparently. He's amazing. So. And I'm like, dude, I can't go do multi pitch with Yosemite. He's like, ah, just come out, we'll have fun. Blah, blah.
Tim Ferriss
No, that's how you end up fucked.
Kevin Rose
Yes, exactly. I did multi pitch when I was like 24 and it was like three pitches. Like, I did not do Yosemite.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, no, that's a commitment. Yeah. So the idea of having something like that, to strive for having some type of physical goal like that for me is very helpful because just not dying, like training to not die sooner than is necessary is not sufficient for me. I'm just like, that's such a depressing, uninvigorating goal. I'd much rather have something that has a deadline, right? It's like, all right, you need to be able to do X. In the case of the archery, it's like Lancaster Classic. Here's the date. You need to do this type of training and this type of volume with this type of deliberate practice in order to be prepared to train and then compete. Right? Okay. Similarly, for something like a multi pitch, it's like, okay, you can break that down. And I just enjoy doing that stuff, dude.
Kevin Rose
So let me ask you a question. The number two. I don't know if you saw this on my. The number two story I had was this guy, Michael Eckhart. Do you know who? Tommy?
Tim Ferriss
No. No idea.
Kevin Rose
Oh, my God. Okay, so Huberman and Rogan, all these guys, they've talked about him publicly about this guy. He has won multiple pull up world championships.
Tim Ferriss
Okay?
Kevin Rose
And dude, when you watch him do a pull up, he's kind of one of those guys that can bring the bar all the way down
Tim Ferriss
the typewriter and all that stuff.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, like, you know that, like the, like, we're like, yeah, you can walk
Tim Ferriss
with your feet, all the calisthenics.
Kevin Rose
But he has a series of videos that teach you how to do finger strength training. And I bought his course and I'm doing this right now. All this could be. You got me into that wooden device.
Tim Ferriss
The nug.
Kevin Rose
The nug. So, dude, you gotta watch his videos. They're amazing. Seriously, like, Joe's really into them. Like this guy, his name is Michael Eckhart. You can find him on Instagram. And it's all about grip strength, pull ups. He's not big, but he's shredded. When I think about, like in the next 10 years, like, I don't need to be big. Big.
Tim Ferriss
It's probably not. It's probably what you want, right? Especially for rock climbing.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you need to be lean, right? Like, and strong. And that's what I love about this. So I'm getting into. I'm doing these every single day. I've not one, two days in, I'm getting into it, you know, Tell us about the nug. Because that was something that you turned
Tim Ferriss
me on to, the nug. I mean, I have it in my suitcase at the hotel here. It's just a simple little wooden device. Looks like a very large bar of soap with these indentations carved into the
Kevin Rose
Sides like little finger indentations.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, exactly. So you can use a carabiner to connect it to say a cable machine of some type in any gym. And look, you could use a loading pin and all this and the other thing, a daisy chain. But let's put that aside. At a gym, you could use a cable and connect it through the loop with carabiner and work on your hand strength.
Kevin Rose
And you brought this to Santa Fe when we were out there doing that
Tim Ferriss
meditation thing I did, yeah. It's literally something small enough to slip into my sweatshirt pocket. So it's easy to travel with. I always travel with that. And a band for multiple purposes for something called DNS kind of core exercises.
Kevin Rose
Oh yeah, I know DNS.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. So I use a band for that. And it's incredibly easy to travel with. And then a handful of other things, something called an alpha ball, which I use for different types of kind of mobility. It's the size of like a very large soft softball. And all this stuff fits into the corner of a suitcase. And then I'll do also something that maybe we haven't talked about called Abrahangs Abrahamson, Emil Abrahamson, very well known rock climber on YouTube and Abra hangs.
Kevin Rose
I'm writing this down right now.
Tim Ferriss
Abrahams are pretty simple. I mean, it's partial body weight. Hangs in different positions for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off for 10 minutes. And you do that twice a day. And it's very, very moderate in intensity
Kevin Rose
with like a wooden kind of rock climbing. Kind of like.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, you could use a hang board. Yeah, you could use, I mean, you could also use a pull up bar depending on how you position your hands. And that's what I was doing in Santa Fe was that kind of stuff. 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off. And the endurance and strength gains that you get in your hands are just insane. Or I should say your lower arms. And it really helps. I've been doing indoor climbing, but ultimately I'm like, you know what this is? Stretch goal, multi pitch, outdoor Yosemite that just.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And I am deadly terrified of heights. Just talking like, look, I don't even just look at my hands. Like I'm sweaty.
Kevin Rose
Just talking about when I watch Free Solo, my hands are sweating the entire time.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
For people who haven't seen the documentary, even if you're not into rock climbing, like, that is amazing.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Watch Free Solo, it'll freak you out. So that's one that I'm thinking about going deep on. I'd say that's very high up on the list because awesome, dude.
Kevin Rose
We're gonna be. Let's do it together.
Tim Ferriss
I'm into it.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I'm into it.
Tim Ferriss
I am totally into it. I mean, the rock climbing, when approached in a reasonable way, like a systematic, reasonable way, not with like crazy dyno movements. On bouldering, younger bodies can handle it. Certain bodies can handle it. My body, not, not so much. Like I do not want to fall repeatedly from 10, 15ft up. I'm just not into it. So in the case of doing it reasonably though, for instance, I spent a bunch of time. I've spent a lot of time in Utah and climbing in some of the Salt Lake City indoor gyms. You have incredible athletes and I'll make that a little finer tuned. When I would go to the gym, it was generally like 11am who the hell goes to the rock climbing gym at 11am on a weekday? These are retirees and moms. So you would see for instance, these like 60, 70, 75, almost 80 year olds were doing like 5, 11 plus.
Kevin Rose
This is when you were single. So that was like prime hunting.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, exactly, Cougarville. And you would just see these people in their 60s and 70s doing things that I could not even imagine doing. With complete inversion on overhangs. Oh yeah, I've seen this 60, 70ft up. You had the national speed climbing team, you had Olympians. But more than like the young guns, right, the 15 year olds who are doing all this crazy stuff because they're impervious. It was the people in their 60s and 70s who were climbing every day that inspired me to want to take this more seriously. So I was like, okay, I want to play the long game here. What can I do that's fun? It's a puzzle.
Kevin Rose
There's a lot of Tetris they literally call bouldering. They come problems.
Tim Ferriss
Problems. Yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot of brain power involved. And also it's just to give an idea of the technicality. I mean, there are, for example, women who cannot do five pull ups, who can climb 5:13, 5:14. That's very, very, very, very, very hard. Just for people who have no reference point, like world class, like 5 14, 5 15, like insane insane. Like that's when you're in the magazines. Oh, 100. And it's because of the technical depthness. And yeah, there's like ape index and other physiological factors that play into it. But that is a very long answer to your question of what I'm thinking about now, which is rock climbing. Lately, navigating the financial landscape can feel like a full time job and it's not a very fun full time job. It's stressful, but it does not have to be that way. You can simplify. Wealthfront helps you tune out the noise and earn more on every dollar with sophisticated easy to use products like their Cash account. You get fee free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts and when you're ready to invest, transferring to their expert built investing accounts is simple. For a limited time, my listeners can earn up to 4.3% variable APY on cash. What that means is on top of the 3.3 base APY from program banks, new cash account clients get an exclusive 3 month 0.75% APY boost on up to $150,000. Then they get another 0.25% APY increase by direct depositing $1,000 a month and maintaining a funded investing account. Terms and conditions apply. More than a million people trust Wealthfront. Check them out. Go to wealthfront.comtim to claim your boost. That's wealthfront.com Tim this is a paid endorsement of Wealthfront Client experiences vary. Wealthfront Brokerage isn't a Bank Base APY as of January 30, 2026 and subject to change Details in the episode Description the archery was great and the competition was fantastic. I love competing. However, archery is by definition incredibly solitary. Like you're just by yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again thousands of times and I've had enough of that in my life. I've hit my quota. I want to hang out with other people.
Kevin Rose
Climbing is super social because you sit there and if neither of you can do it, you'll be like ah. Like what if you put your like foot in like that and like kind of lunged up that way and stretched? You know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss
Like yeah. And then you can ask other people for tips, like beta, right? Hey, can you give me some beta on this? It's fun.
Kevin Rose
It's really fun.
Tim Ferriss
I just love it. I wanted to mention something. If people haven't read it, the Blade itself, which is a series, it's not very long. I think it's two or three volumes by Joe Abercrombie. It's fantasy novels. They're really good. The audiobooks are incredible. And the reason I thought of this, the Blade itself is because of our conversation around Ogham and Toaster. And a friend of mine just died in a plane crash.
Kevin Rose
Jesus.
Tim Ferriss
Less than two weeks.
Kevin Rose
One that the nuts one that went. You knew him?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Josh.
Kevin Rose
Oh God, that was A latitude too.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I know, I know, I know. So you just don't know when your time is up. And in the Blade itself, and there are a lot of various. Yeah, thanks. And we weren't like super close friends, but certainly like friendly, you know, acquaintances. Like we've. It wouldn't be strange to text and you just don't know when your time is up. And the Blade itself explores this in a million different dimensions. It's really, really outstanding. I've read. I say that as someone who's read a lot of fantasy and it just talks about the randomness of life or death in war. Right. It's like you happen to like squat down, take a. And the guy next to you gets an arrow through the head. It's like. It's just dumb luck. Yeah. Which is a way to, I suppose reiterate the gratitude piece that you were mentioning earlier. So, I mean, that's going to be a tough act to follow. But where do you want to go from that?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I mean, a few things. Let's change it up into. Well, let's just go straight into like working out. Have you tried this?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I have, actually.
Kevin Rose
Okay. I really like it.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So for people that are on audio, I just got turned onto this new protein called Pioneer pastures and it's 30 grams in this little tiny shake. It's a two. So it has lactose removed. And it's also from that special genetic cow. Do you know more about the A2? Can you speak to it?
Tim Ferriss
I've heard about the A2. I don't know a whole lot about it. It's like the Holstein and some other cow. And apparently more people tolerate a 2 better than not.
Kevin Rose
I don't get any stomach issues or anything with this type of whey protein. Anyway, this is not. I'm not an investor or any like that.
Tim Ferriss
This is.
Kevin Rose
You can get it at Target or whatever. It's tasty as hell and it's 30 grams. And I don't know if you're trying to put a little muscle mass. I love.
Tim Ferriss
This is next to the LA Tequila.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can mix them if you want.
Tim Ferriss
Everything you're growing by needs anyway.
Kevin Rose
I just. I just wanted to know if you had tried it because, like, we always. Just the random show.
Tim Ferriss
I've tried. Yeah, I tried it.
Kevin Rose
You like it?
Tim Ferriss
I do, yeah. There's a gym. I can't remember exactly. Brooklyn Barbell Club, where they sold this. And I tried it then and I did, yeah. Tolerate it super well. Didn't get the Grumpy guts. Y as one might.
Kevin Rose
What's your favorite protein? Out of curiosity.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, my protein. I mean, this is a softball pitch, but funny you should ask Kevin. And look, I'm involved with this one, but you know, you know what? It's like. I always disclose. Have you noticed how few people disclose what they're involved with? They're like, yeah, I've heard of this great thing. Oh, my God. And they never disclose they're involved. The fact that you could literally go
Kevin Rose
to jail for that.
Tim Ferriss
No, I know, but the FTC doesn't enforce that stuff anyway. I mean, right now, like, I'm traveling with Maui Nui as usual. This one, though, is kind of interesting. I probably get 40% of my protein from Maui Nui Venison. This is wild harvested axis deer from Hawaii. There's a long story there. But incredibly nutrient dense.
Kevin Rose
I love this. And this is not an ad, but I do have a hard question for you. Like a real hard question. This is how you know that it's not an ad, because. Yeah, we're about to say, let's hear it. Processed meat, nitrates. Yep. Linked to a lot of cancer and bad.
Tim Ferriss
Yep.
Kevin Rose
What are your thoughts on that?
Tim Ferriss
This is very, very, very minimally processed. So you can get summer sausage or the sticks. This is free of most of that bullshit.
Kevin Rose
What do you think that is? Because it is real. Like people that eat more nitrate. Processed. Processed meats.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. If it's ultra processed and the shelf life is like three years, I would raise an eyebrow and probably hit pause. So the fact of the matter is, most of this stuff that is minimally processed, almost definitionally is not going to last very long on the shelf.
Kevin Rose
What do they mean by minimally processed? When you see like a meat stick, like, what do you think about that versus. Is it the amount of salt content that creates the nitrates? Like, what? What?
Tim Ferriss
No, no. It's actually nitrates are totally separate categories. So you're. You're looking to. I think an easy heuristic for this is just shelf life.
Kevin Rose
Right?
Tim Ferriss
Like, how long?
Kevin Rose
How long?
Tim Ferriss
Your eye. Your. Your eyes are going to be better than mine. If you can read this size 2 font on this, then you can tell me. Give it a go and I'll buy you some time in the meantime.
Kevin Rose
27 years. No, I'm just kidding.
Tim Ferriss
25 years.
Kevin Rose
It doesn't say on here.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it'll say somewhere on the box. There we go. Best buy. Yeah, 27. So it's like less than one year, I think, actually looking at it here. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So, yeah, less than one year.
Tim Ferriss
Wow. Yeah. And what makes this interesting is that this I give also Molly looks really good for 12 years. I give her probably two or three of these a week. The way I think of this, this is peppered 10. So there are a bunch of these different sticks. Like every professional team you can imagine uses these things in their training. But this is made with wild harvested venison, liver and heart. So it has some organ meat in it. You do not taste that. It just tastes like regular jerky stick. But I treat this like a multivitamin. It's like I take, let's call it two or three of these a week and limit it to that. And then the rest of the time I'm taking their other either peppered or regular sticks. But this is when I'm on the go. I mean, literally, this was in my bag when I got here. Right. When I'm on the go, I'm traveling with this. Probably some nuts of some type, like pistachios or whatever, walnuts, Pretty good for a host of reasons. And that's about it. I mean, I might have a couple of servings of exogenous ketones, but I haven't taken that stuff in a couple of months. You told me.
Kevin Rose
You freaked me out. It messed up your liver.
Tim Ferriss
This is a controversial topic. So, yeah, there are certain exogenous ketones that contain something called 1, 3 butane diol. It's very common and there's a lot of debate around this, so the jury is still out. But some people believe that that can produce liver toxicity. So I consume anything with one three butane dial in moderation. Now, to play not devil's advocate, but to do a counterpoint, a lot of the people who are putting forth that hypothesis or claiming that's true are selling their own ketone salts. So they're actually selling a competitive product. So. Question mark, Question mark. You can look at the peer reviewed literature and decide for yourself. What I have decided personally is that you should use the exogenous ketones very intermittently. I have experimented a lot with every type of exotic ketone you can imagine.
Kevin Rose
And I mean, you got me on that good shit. It's expensive as hell, but like, that stuff goes straight to your head. The one that you do.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, Delta G, we can talk about it.
Kevin Rose
You know, it's funny is like when Tim. This is how you know it's good. Off camera, Tim's like, I don't want to mention the brand because if I do, it'll Sell out. I won't be able to get my own supply. And that's how I knew. I was like, that's some good shit. Tim wants to guard his own supply of it. Like, you know, it's good.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And.
Tim Ferriss
And it is good, but it's bhb. I won't get too much into the technicality here, but it's beta hydroxybutyrate bonded to 1:3 butane dial. So you're still getting that 1:3 butane dial, which means you should take it in moderation. But in a pinch, when you want it for a podcast or something like that, man, it really works.
Kevin Rose
It does work.
Tim Ferriss
It really works. And I mean, I've given it to relatives with dementia and within 20 minutes, their sentences have like 5x'd in length and they're more acute verbally. It's wild.
Kevin Rose
How do you give it? I wish they had it in pill form because in some sense it's really hard to give that to someone that has dementia because it's like, it tastes like gasoline.
Tim Ferriss
It doesn't taste great. It's not the worst thing. I mean, I've had a lot of foul stuff in my life. I just did a shot with this person and I was like, I'll do it with you. And then we went for a walk and that was it. There are some concerns around 13 butane diol and balance. So particularly in older adults, you do not want to contribute to any risk of breaking a hip. That's just the death knell for a lot of people.
Kevin Rose
I just had to put my mom into a different home that has. It's actually kind of cool. It's sad, but she's been falling. They have this new AI orb that sits up there and it kind of does like a kind of radar type situation and it detects falls.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose
So the second she falls in the home, like, they can rush in and, like help her out and all that. They carpet the hell out of it now and stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss
How do you think about pre grieving that or contending with that yourself in terms of family? That's rough. I mean. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't sound easy, you know, so if you're like, play forward the tape, right? It's like. I mean, I think about this, my own parents, and it's just like, nobody lasts forever, you know, it's.
Kevin Rose
It's one of those things where it's so funny because when you're a teenager, and I remember when my dad was having a hard time standing and this was like when I was much younger, before he passed, and I was like, oh, dad's gonna be in, like, the thing that I might have to, like, push him on it if he has to sit down, kind of those walkers, that can also be something you can push somebody on. I was so embarrassed, you know, I was like, oh, people are looking at us or whatever. And now I push my mom with pride, like, in the inner, like, walker thing. And I'm like, I don't know. You don't know when it's gonna. What's gonna happen, but it's like the only thing you can do is just make sure to show up, you know, and hang out. And I'm very lucky that I. My mom has dementia, but it's. It is a type that is not Alzheimer's. So it's like, it's probably vascular or something. So I can walk in and she knows who I am. She can't tell you what she had for breakfast, but she knows who I am. But she's like, I'll take that all day long. I know you have family members that are in the same boat.
Tim Ferriss
I have a ton of family members with Alzheimer's. I mean, literally got a call from one of my relatives wanting to discuss interventions. And it's a tough conversation because there really isn't much, like you have to, as far as I can tell, act preemptively. Which is why, actually, this relates to another bullet of mine.
Kevin Rose
I. Yeah, five.
Tim Ferriss
What was that?
Kevin Rose
I was. How many. How many bullets did you have?
Tim Ferriss
Oh, how many bullets? Yeah, that was good. Of all. Of all the rye whiskeys, it's the only one that I can tolerate. I loathe stationary bikes. I just, I. I really find stationary biking to be one of the most soul crushing things in the world.
Kevin Rose
It's the worst, however.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I mean, I've tried peloton and didn't like the ergonomics and so on for a bunch of reasons. And then I have tried very expensive, very, very expensive setups recommended to me by fancy doctors and so on, which are just like, too uncomfortable. Like, I'm incredibly hunched over. Like, my back is basically parallel with the FL for.
Kevin Rose
What are you talking about?
Tim Ferriss
And I'm like, kneeing myself in the stomach. It's so, like, crunching machines. No, no, I'm talking about getting on, like, a stationary bike. But if you're in, like, a racing position, you have to adopt this hunchback. And, like, there are a million reasons why I find that uncomfortable. There is a bike, however, it's very easy to find. It's pretty common in public gyms called the Kaiser M3i Studio Indoor Bike. I don't know why they have to make it so difficult in its nomenclature, but the Kaiser M3i is unique in my experience in that you can elevate the handlebars enough to sit in a comfortable position with a decent saddle, meaning the seat, such that I can do the V2 and the V4 and all of that training for me in a comfortable position without compromising my low back, which has been a huge step forward. So this is the only bike that I've used consistently for this kind training. And I was having a number of conversations with a neuroscientist named Dr. Tommy Wood over a period of weeks. And if, for instance, you do something called the Norwegian 4x4, there's data to suggest that it's VO2 max training. So it's very, very, very intense. But it's like. Like four minutes on, three to four minutes off. Let's just call it three minutes, four minutes on, three minutes off, and you do that for four rounds. This is the only bike that I've been able to use to do this consistently. And if you do that for, I think it's three times a week for five to six months, the volumetric changes, meaning the neuroanatomical changes in the hippocampus and other areas that are certainly indicated in things like Alzheimer's, lasts for up to five years.
Kevin Rose
Wow.
Tim Ferriss
So if you do five to six months of gutting it out three times a week, the results, the dividends pay off for it seems up to or possibly beyond five years. Holy crazy.
Kevin Rose
So that's probably sauna in there.
Tim Ferriss
And you're like, well, that's why I'm doing. Yeah, I'm doing. You know, I'm doing all the usual stuff. Right. I'm doing the sauna. And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like, okay, sure. You don't have 30 minutes to do, like, do 10 minutes. Like, you can't do a sauna, take a hot bath. Like. Yeah. Figure it out.
Kevin Rose
You know what my good is that? I like, it's not perfect, but it's good. Which is. I go on my treadmill, I set it to 4.75 or something. Incline.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So it's like, not crazy, but it's not, you know, I can still do.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And I set it to only, like, 2.5 on the walking.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And I'll play Duolingo chess. Because they have chess on there now for duolingo. They teach you chess. It's amazing. And you can play friends and live people and all that stuff. And they do game replays and, like, teach. And I'm learning a ton of. And 30, 40 minutes go by and you're drenched in sweat. I know it's not high intensity. And all the benefits on the cognitive side seem to be around, like, a lot of high. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
But who knows?
Kevin Rose
But it's good.
Tim Ferriss
It's doing something.
Kevin Rose
It's doing something right. So I've really enjoyed that. Like, if you just want something to both be learning and engaged and kind of like having fun.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So you forget about the time. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where it's like, you just like, oh, wait, what time is it? Oh, I've been on for 37 minutes. I can get off now, you know?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
I love that type of cardio. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, for me, I mean, this is gonna sound like maybe a step down, but it's like the older I get, the more I realize, like, a little goes a long way. Yesterday, for instance, like, I had a bunch of stuff stacked up, and I won't bore people with the commitments, but I didn't really have any time to go to the gym. And it was my day to go to the gym to do X, Y and Z exercises. And I went in and I did, like, three sets. I was literally in there for five minutes, and I left. But it's better than nothing, right? Totally right. Something is better than nothing. And, like, I'm not going to go to the Olympics with that approach.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
But let's fucking be real. I'm not going to the Olympics, period.
Kevin Rose
I mean, maybe it's like a bystander.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. You know, I'll throw some new random stuff in there. There's a study that got my attention. It's been out since 2025. September 2020. This is in JAMA. And this is the title. Single treatment with MM120. And then in parentheses, lysergide, I think, is how that's pronounced in generalized anxiety disorder. So this is. This is gad. This is a randomized clinical trial looking at anxiety, which is often comorbid, meaning happening at the same time as depressive disorders. And I think this is sponsored by a company called Definium, which used to be mindmed. In any case, I know where this is going.
Kevin Rose
I just looked it up.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this. So what's interesting about this? And they're not going to maybe love my comparison, but so MM120 lysergide, I mean it's comparable to LSD. Right. And this is a multi arm clinical trial. They did five arms, which is rare to do because the risk is that they'll blend together. So the arm means a group who is treated with a different intervention in this case, so they've got placebo 25 micrograms, 50 micrograms, 100 micrograms and 200 micrograms. 100 mics.
Kevin Rose
Is this, is this give standard for LSD?
Tim Ferriss
That's what you can think of as a standard hit. 100 micrograms. And the results are wild, man. If you look at the ham a score, this is up to 12 weeks out. You can see. I'll just show you how it's dose dependent. The more you take, basically the better it goes over up to. And I'm not sure how long the follow up's continued, but where you land is you see that like the 100 micrograms and 200 are very, very close together.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Like 25 and 50 are certainly a lot higher now.
Kevin Rose
Are you still getting the same psychedelic experience with this stuff? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
In the case of this particular compound, I don't know. My guess would be yes. I could be totally wrong in that. So definium. Feel free to correct me. I am guessing the answer is yes with MM120. But what that says to me is, hey, 12 weeks of relief with GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, which I've been clinically diagnosed with that no CD. Like 12 weeks is pretty good. And it seems like, at least according to the data in this study, the minimum effective dose would be 100 micrograms. Now, 100 micrograms at least for me and for a lot of people, you will be tripping your balls off. Not to get too technical.
Kevin Rose
Wait a second, dude. It says that this was done at neuroscape@ucsf.
Tim Ferriss
Was it really Adam's lab? No. Are you serious?
Kevin Rose
I'm dead serious. I just clicked through on it. It says ph trial of mm120 for gad.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that's amazing.
Kevin Rose
This is our buddy.
Tim Ferriss
This is our buddy Adam. Okay, well, I have a text that I need to send them.
Kevin Rose
Oh my God, that's awesome.
Tim Ferriss
I wonder if I indirectly funded this because I helped fund some of Neuroscape stuff. That's funny. I. Isn't that hilarious? Yeah. I did not look at that. That's hilarious. Small world.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Okay. There you go. So, you know, it's interesting for Gad, we were talking about dementia. There's a case report with high dose psilocybin mushrooms. I don't think it was actually psilocybin synthesized. Looking at this particular thing, it was a Japanese elderly woman with dementia, may have been Alzheimer's, who took. I can't believe they did this.
Kevin Rose
Five grams, right?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. And then she took five grams. So Terence McKenna, heroic dose, somehow fell asleep for like 19 hours or something obscene. Which would be very, very worrisome if you're said parent wakes up and then starts having full expositional conversations in contrast with her previous monosyllabic or single word responses to things. And it was transient, it didn't last forever. But it raises some very interesting questions. I've seen at least some case reports also with LSD producing similar effects and I've been interested in this for probably a decade. Right. Hypothesized this could be the case. It's just like, do you really want to give your parent, like under what circumstances is it ethical, right. To give someone hallucination?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I could never do that to my mom because she was always anti all this stuff.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And then the second like God forbid they have a bad trip, like why would you want to put them through that? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
You know, so. So it's curious. I was, I was sent something by. Well, someone I won't mention, but a very interesting case report on microdosing with LSD with someone with dementia. Did it work? Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. And in terms of similar to the ketones, not saying the mechanism is the same, but producing much more verbal fluidity. Right. Going from like I'm good, it depends.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
I have relatives who are limited to that now. Like they're basically giving answers that are non answers. Sounds good. Right. Like these things that you can could use as a reply to anything.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
They're not necessarily grokking what's happening to full paragraphs. Right. Which means to my interpretation it's like offline to online. Right. It's a really stark difference. Like because with the one word, two word answers, like you don't actually know if they're understanding what's happening. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose
So do you have some mm120 on you right now?
Tim Ferriss
I don't, I don't. If I did, I would probably not take the podcast.
Kevin Rose
If you see a weird cut in the video and then we get infinitely smarter.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
You'll know.
Tim Ferriss
A little glitch here there.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. It's a flash and all of a sudden we're just like.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, for the smarter I would keep it probably to 20 mics or below.
Kevin Rose
We'll see.
Tim Ferriss
But I found this pretty interesting for GAD especially and then for the dementia piece. But it raises a lot of ethical questions. What is ethical to use as a treatment and someone who cannot give consent.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
Brain, that's a tough, gnarly problem, right?
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Especially if you're dealing with stuff that is not exactly prescription medication.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I mean, that's the whole thing. If it goes sideways, you feel like an.
Tim Ferriss
Well, yeah, to put it mildly.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, to put it mildly. But if it's amazing and it gives you another, you know, half day with a parent or a loved one and you can full and have conversations and they see you and you see them in a way that you hadn't in six months, like, or a year. That's amazing, right? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Or if it potentially slows the decline. Yeah, I think it's too much to hope for a reversal, frankly.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
But there are some strange phenomena out there, man. Like there's this phenomenon called terminal lucidity where someone like on their deathbed when they've been vegetated.
Kevin Rose
And like that book that. Did you read, did you read that?
Tim Ferriss
I'm not sure. No, I didn't read that.
Kevin Rose
Okay. Because they talk about.
Tim Ferriss
But this is, well, this is well documented where people suddenly, they've been basically vegetative.
Kevin Rose
Right, Right.
Tim Ferriss
Or completely unable to respond.
Kevin Rose
Days they come fully lucid. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
They become totally lucid and they can have full blown extensive conversations.
Kevin Rose
That's why.
Tim Ferriss
What the is going on there?
Kevin Rose
I'm telling you. It is so weird to me that we think like, like a lot of the things that we do in physical form, like what we do in life, like mimics nature in many ways. And all of our data is like backed up in the cloud. And we're like, oh, we're not backed up in the cloud in any way. And then there's these people with like full blown entanglements in their brain and full on, you know, the Alzheimer's for like a decade, and then they become completely lucid. Where is that coming from?
Tim Ferriss
Okay, I see what you're saying. I was, I wasn't tracking that fully for a second. If it's, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's like if it's all localized. No, I'm saying like if all of that ability is localized within the confines of the skull, how do you explain this, given all the structural deterioration?
Kevin Rose
Exactly, exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I don't have good answers for that. I just don't it is a well documented, as far as I know, a well documented phenomenon. So it's like, go figure that one out. I mean, I'm not qualified. Way above my pay grade. Crazy, man. It's wild. So I'll give a shout out to somebody. We're not going to open this right now because we'll start chewing on them and it'll be the. The. We'll be up all night.
Kevin Rose
Is that the 120?
Tim Ferriss
No, this is new tonic. N E, U T O N I C. No tropics. See, that's a pun. No tropics. Because these are toothpick that I was given by a podcaster you may recognize named Chris Williamson. And they, they have like 20. I want to say 20, I might be getting that off, but like 20, 25 milligrams of caffeine in each toothpick.
Kevin Rose
Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss
And there are a couple of other nootropics, AKA Yeah, yeah, smart drugs in there. And they're great because if I have cups of coffee, I will chug a cup of coffee. Coffee. And then if it gets refilled, I'll chug another cup of coffee. And it's a problem. These actually is, in terms of pacing have been fantastic. So that's been my sort of not exactly coitus interruptus for people to get that, but ad libitum, interrupt us avoiding overconsumption of coffee and other stimulants. This helps me to kind of pace it because even if I chew on this thing until it's fragments of wood, max I can squeeze out of it is 20, 25 milligrams.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
What else do you got, Gavin?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I have that I think is interesting is, is what's happening in the world of. I don't want to talk a lot about AI because I'm just frankly AI'd out. But I will say that the idea that we can all now kind of take control of our productivity and pretty much anything that we want to control now, like device wise, we can do with just a simple. A few simple prompts on AI. And I had a buddy that came over to my house and he was like, hey, you got cameras in your house? I have something called ubiquity, which is like, they have cameras and they're. It's a very common kind of household type situation when you want to have security system, front door thing, cameras, sensors, water detectors underneath your things in case things leak and you're out of town, whatever. And so I've got this Whole setup. And he's like, hey, you know they have a full on API where you can just tell clot or whatever to code against it. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. What can it do? And so the cameras now have AI sensors where they can detect who it is that's walking in. So it's like, oh, Tim's coming up to your door. Oh, that's your daughter, that's your dog. Text. My dog Toaster, like, sees him and it puts like a little dog emblem above his head when he's walking around. And it knows that it's Toaster. But the crazy shit is I was
Tim Ferriss
like, okay, well what if I can
Kevin Rose
go further and I can tell it to do actions? There's a speaker hooked up to as well. So that's for security. So basically, if anyone loiters in my alleyway and it detects it, it's like I have, I play some like really funky where it's like detected like loiter in the alleyway, like, whatever. And just to scare people off in case they.
Tim Ferriss
I am the Batman.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, but you could draw little areas around like the word they like they shouldn't be, which is like at your door, fiddling with your door and say if they stand here for more than 30 seconds, Play said audio out of speaker.
Tim Ferriss
So I was like, okay, this is interesting.
Kevin Rose
Well, what if when I walk in my house, if I'm wearing like a hat of like my favorite sports team and they're playing it like reads me
Tim Ferriss
the scores like I walk in.
Kevin Rose
So like you can think about all these things where it's like, it's doing stuff based on your activity. So like if you're out there gardening, it's be like, it'll be like, hey, Kevin, I noticed that the plant over here wasn't watered enough. So it's watching all of this stuff. And so there's a lot of if then, then that kind of situation, like if I see you doing X. So like the latest I have is like, I programmed it so when it sees the license plate on my car, it automatically knows to open the gate because it knows it's me.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Yeah, that's cool.
Kevin Rose
And the camera looks at the license plate on the freaking car, checks it against the database and allows me in. How crazy is that? And this is like, for people that are listening. I'm not talking about like $10,000 systems. The camera's like $200. Anyone can do this at home, you know, and it's just wild to think about. Finally we had all these kind of discrete systems that I had some NEST stuff and I had some Google home stuff and I had. Now they're all talking to each other. So you can just do kind of really crazy. I know you would like this because you're the kind of person that you've told me before, like you don't like to answer your door because if the delivery person is like Tim, then all of a sudden your address is like all over the Internet.
Tim Ferriss
Docs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know you said you don't. I'm also pretty AI'd out, but at the same time it's like I can't resist going back to the opium den. It's so fascinating.
Kevin Rose
What are you doing now with the, with the eye stuff?
Tim Ferriss
Well, I mean, I'm more curious to hear your thoughts and predictions, frankly, because I think you're better at it. But I mean, I'm using Claude code with various APIs to do tons of like inbox analysis and stuff. Right. I'm doing a 20 year retrospective analysis of angel investing. It's like, who made what introductions, which companies did I not reply to that ended up being successes, which did I turn down that ended up being really important?
Kevin Rose
Do you really want to do that to yourself?
Tim Ferriss
I suspected it'd be worse than it was. I actually have not. I haven't missed that many explicit opportunities. I wanted to test my own stories against data. Right. Because I have all sorts of stories about why I did certain things, why certain things worked out. And I have certain stories about my batting average. And I'm like, but is it true? Right?
Kevin Rose
Really?
Tim Ferriss
Is it really true? Like, let's look at some hard numbers.
Kevin Rose
The sad truth. And I have a buddy that wears the bracelet and you see me with the necklace around the. It categorizes your AI and listens to you 24. 7. Yeah, it's about 70ish percent that we think we know, but is actually actually what we know, like out of the 100% of like what we think we know. Like, this is the truth. Like I said I wanted a dark chocolate bar at 7pm it's like. No, you set it at 5. And you said it this way, you
Tim Ferriss
know, and you said it was milk chocolate.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's always about 20% off from where you actually think your brain's at.
Tim Ferriss
Sure.
Kevin Rose
Which is, is brutal.
Tim Ferriss
Well, plus, I mean, that's like last week, right?
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
If you're talking about like 15 years ago.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, if you listen to any Genesis story of any startup. You're like, wait a minute now, like this is like a startup comic working on material. But he's been working on this 15 minute bit so long that now he believes that's actually truth. Yeah, the sanitizing and the editing of these startup Genesis stories is hilarious. And there's no reason to think that I would be. Or you would be exempt from it.
Kevin Rose
Right?
Tim Ferriss
Right. When you're telling your own story, even if you're just telling it to yourself,
Kevin Rose
what's the number one thing that you've learned by applying AI to your life in this fashion? Like, what's the thing where you walked away and said like, damn, that was like insightful and I'm going to change my behavior or I learned something new about myself that I wouldn't if I had not used AI?
Tim Ferriss
Well, I think from a holistic health perspective. By holistic, I mean having enough data related to medications, supplements, predispositions, side effects, what happened to me two weeks ago, the LLMs have been incredibly helpful. The picture that they get and the speed with which they can deliver an answer that I can interrogate is just incredible.
Kevin Rose
So what did you learn? Like, what was the thing that you.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, honestly, it's, it's mostly avoiding disaster. Right. It's like, what can I. Are any of these things contraindicated with one another? Could A, B or C explain D? And you have to keep in mind these things can still hallucinate, but you can, I don't want to say, say eliminate that, but minimize it by just fact checking across LLMs. There's that, I would say that there's a lot of insight on, hopefully that can translate to future decision making related to investing, which is investing for me is not just amassing more chips. What's fun about investing to me is it's a way to scorecard your thinking and decision making. Thinking it's just a very objective way to decide if something was the right or the wrong decision. And you can fine slice that. And there are ways that you could maybe question that. But if you're asking yourself, was I thinking well last month, that's not a very helpful question. Where do you go from there?
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
If you're logging maybe every decision you make every day and then trying to cross reference outcomes with blah, blah, blah, like, yeah, but you're never going to do this, do that. But when you're making relatively frequent investments, you can do that. You can also run counterfactuals. What if I did the opposite? What if I had not Sold that. What if I had kept that? What if I had done this? What if I had done that?
Kevin Rose
Is that worth your time though? At the end of the day, you could throw everything into S&P 500 and just go to bed.
Tim Ferriss
Well, there's that. I would say it's worth it to me because I find it interesting. I actually enjoy the intellectual exercise of it. But otherwise I would say with. In terms of how AI has impacted me, I would say that the honest answer is not that much because most shit isn't worth doing in the first place. People are finding very, very clever ways to expedite automating workflows of all different types. And doing something well does not make it important or worth doing in the first place. So there's a lot. I think the level of bullshit that is being done just at a very fast, efficient rate is skyrocketing learning. But simultaneously, there are definitely cases where I look back at say this analysis of 20 years of stuff. To do that manually would be impossible. It would take me a year full time with multiple people to do that and with the Claude code Gmail API and leaving my computer running for a handful of hours a few times. It's like what you get back is fucking incredible.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Like it's unbelievable and I haven't even scratched the surface.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I will say also another way that AI has maybe affected my life in a net negative way. And I'm not. We have another mutual friend who maybe we shouldn't name who feels very similarly is we'll bleep that out. But yeah. Jesus Christ. So if you train AIs on your writing, they're really good. Yeah. And I think, I feel this is a stretch of a comparison, obviously because I'm not an adept, like a world class GO player. But when AlphaGo defeated one of the top Korean players, he was kind of like, I'm done. Like, I don't find joy in this anymore. Yeah. Like if we're playing against machines. Yeah. And when I see these AIs very beautifully, I'm not gonna lie, we're like in the top of the first inning. This stuff is gonna get so much better. Spit out stuff that is so much better.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, I can still write, but what they can do in 30 seconds is what would take me 30 hours. And I'm just like, it really drains the motivation for me to put in those 30 hours.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Why wouldn't it? Of course it would. Right.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. But in some sense you can consider it a really good co pilot because for it to come up with novel ideas that would engage an audience. That's still the Holy Grail where it's not quite there yet. Right. Like it's going to make you sound, it's going to button up your copy and it might expand upon it in ways that you wouldn't. But it's not going to come up with the original thesis for the whole thing, right?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's going to have trouble with the original thesis, but even there I think it does a pretty good job. It's getting better.
Kevin Rose
I haven't tried with writing stuff.
Tim Ferriss
Well, if you just do a data dump and you're like, create amazing.
Kevin Rose
Oh, you sent me that link.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. If you just do a data dump,
Kevin Rose
you're like, you sent me that link. You were like, what should Tim do in the next five years?
Tim Ferriss
Oh, yeah, that was good.
Kevin Rose
That was really interesting. Tell people what you did because they might find this their own life.
Tim Ferriss
Sure. So you could do this in whichever model you're using, whether it's, you know, Claude or Chat GPT or whatever. If it knows you, you can tie
Kevin Rose
in your inbox too.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, you can tie in your inbox. In my case, I didn't do that. But if it has enough history on you, you can just ask, what do you think I should do in the next five years? What might be some rewarding paths of exploration? I think I put something like that. What are three to five ideas that you think could be rewarding career exploration for you in the next X period of time?
Kevin Rose
So if we're looking, if they've used AI for let's go, call it three to six months and you've probably given it several hundred things to think about. It will span cross those conversations as long as you turn this on. I think it's on by default now, but it used to be an opt in thing where you say, allow the AI to look cross conversation. So it has a holistic understanding of who you are. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And the answers were fucking outstanding.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, really, really good.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I sent it to a few friends. Sent to you. I sent it to a few of my closest friends and they're like, that's pretty good.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, it was really cool. Some of the ideas I was like, damn, you should do that.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
It had this one business idea for you to do. It wasn't a book.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And I was like, dude, I texted you back. I was like, that's awesome. Like, go, go build that.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, there's. I mean, there were, there were business ideas. There were certainly kind of non revenue but philosophically aligned ideas. It was shocking to me. So that's actually a very good example of something that has deeply informed what I'm mulling over as I imagine the future. I was like man, that actually is a really good. Because keeping in mind I'm asking questions about things of interest, things I like, things I don't like. I am asking questions about different scientific interests related to scise A foundation, my non profit foundation. I'm asking questions about investing, I'm asking questions about writing, I'm asking questions about relationships. I'm asking questions about organizing trips for friends. I'm asking so many different questions.
Kevin Rose
Am I still on the board your non profit it.
Tim Ferriss
I think you're like secretary or something.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, some like that.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
I don't know.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Maybe you were honorably discharged. I don't know.
Kevin Rose
I never got any work around it. I've heard anything like three years. I'm like, okay, yeah, well I said
Tim Ferriss
it was going to be a light lift. It's a light lift. And I mean that, that's a very good example. Right. I mean that may be the best example because if that even 10% informs like, like a major next chapter.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Holy. Like that's a big deal for me certainly. And it makes me think a little bit about podcast listeners, especially readers also, but to a greater extent podcast listeners to come up to me. And most listeners I run into are really great and there are always a couple of weirdos, but most are fantastic and they'll say something often. Often like I'm so sorry you don't know me at all. And I feel like I know you. And what I say a lot of the time is actually if you listen to my podcast every week or even every month, you do know me pretty well.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And then you think about a machine that never forgets. Yeah, it's gonna know you pretty damn well.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, of course.
Tim Ferriss
And it's spooky in a way. Yeah. But I started getting more out of the LLMs when I started asking questions. Now you have to be, I think, a little careful with outsourcing this and absolving yourself of responsibility to think about these things. But when you ask it open ended personal questions in the way that you would ask a close friend, what do you think are three to five creative ways I might explore things professionally in the next five years as opposed to something that you think is more suitable for a robot?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss
You get some really interesting responses.
Kevin Rose
That's a great use case.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
The one thing I've been playing around with lately that I haven't told you about yet. But, you know, I think about all these AI startups and everyone that's creating all these different apps and all that stuff. And for me, it's kind of fun to watch as a kind of bystander being like, oh, cool, you're going to make this. But I really want to explore things that just no one has done before. It's always been interesting to me more than just like, iterative, kind of like standing down on the rough edges. A lot of startups will go out there and be like, hey, you know what sucks is, you know, word processing doesn't do this, so I'm going to like, make a slightly better word processor. I'm just making this up. But I like the kind of, like, wilder, crazier. Like, I'd rather have it fail and say I did something new than just do something boring.
Tim Ferriss
That makes sense. Oh, I get it.
Kevin Rose
And so lately what I've done, part
Tim Ferriss
of why I have so many fatalities.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. Same what I've done lately is I've. I went and bought a bunch of these decks of cards on Amazon that are values cards, meaning, like, they give you like a deck of a hundred things and like, what are your core values? And you're like, empathy or kindness, or like, you'd like, flip through them. And the way they typically work is that. That you have like a really high value, a medium and a low value. And then you put them into different stacks and then you walk away and you say, oh, this is my high value stack of things that are my core values that mean a lot to me. And it might be 10 or 15 different cards. And what's interesting is to do that with, like, friends and partners and things like that. And then compare them and say, hey, what do we align on what we don't? And I can imagine for like an intimate partner, this would be a pretty important thing to do. And so I started there and I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna scan these cards in and then I'm gonna pare it down and make these core values where you come in and say, this matters to me. And almost like a, like a swiping, like, you know, dating app or something. Like, yes, I'm into.
Tim Ferriss
Yes, I'm into empathy. No, I'm not.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. And so you, you. But you swipe through them and then when you're done with that, then you've got your list of, like, these values, and they can change over time. And so I think the important thing is to log that and say, these are my values today, but tomorrow one might shift a little bit. And then I thought about contractual bonds. And so, like, the working title I have for it is just called bond, where I can say, like, with a partner, I'm going to create a contract with you where we both have to shake on it, Meaning like a virtual shake. Like, you think of it as almost like a sim City, like, situation. This is my city, this is her city, or a friend's city. And we're going to agree that I take the trash out every Tuesday night and there's an emotional shake on both sides. And if I break this bond, it results in what? And so from the partner side, it will result in a 1 to 10 on how much damaging this is to me. So not taking this ratio, I'd probably be like, ah, that sucks because the trash is gonna overflow. That's probably a three to most people, right? Then I kind of get negative points in case I break that bond. But what's interesting, though, that will link back to a core value of theirs and a core value of mine. And I want to show up as a good partner and there'll be a core value associated with that. And then you could see those bonds between multiple people. And the reason I say this is because I've always been one of these people historically, that have said yes to so many things and then I bail last minute. I'm the worst at that, you know, where I'm like, I'm in, and then I'm like, I'm an introvert. I'm out, you know, at the last minute.
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Kevin Rose
And so I just think that there needs to be a system where almost like a LinkedIn for like, like, values and trust and bonds. There's a great Wu Tang quote that's like, word is bond. And ultimately, like, I really believe that, like, there's something really cool about saying, you know, we have the Better Business Bureau. That's like the best we got. Oh, this person, like, they did well by their customers 2000 times. What about individuals and saying, like, hey, this person was always empathetic towards me, or this person was kind and helped me move on a Sunday.
Tim Ferriss
What prompted all this?
Kevin Rose
I don't know. I'm just thinking about it. Just like, the thing I think about is that there. No, hold on. Let me give you the real answer. I call this dark information.
Tim Ferriss
Dark information.
Kevin Rose
So dark information is information that exists in the real world, but we have yet to put in physical form. And so Right now you and I
Tim Ferriss
have a trust thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
You know that if the camera was turned off, there are certain things that you can tell me that you're pretty certain I will not tell anyone else. Every once in a while I do. But you will know. You know where that line is. Right. But that hasn't been concretized in any type of like visual real format. And so there's something interesting. I'm just brainstorming with you in real time because we've had a couple of drinks. But like, my point is, if there was a system where I could say I've created these bonds, I've built up this reputation, but it would also give me a way to reflect back and be like, oh, you know what? What I can see now historically that I've often bailed on events that I've signed up for. Let me improve that in myself. The whole point of what you brought up a minute ago was if I use AI to go back historically and look across things, I can detect these trends and then make course corrections based on those trends.
Tim Ferriss
Right? Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And so there's something interesting about this idea of there are these different facets. So there's these emotional facets we have with every individual. How might we track those?
Tim Ferriss
What jumps out at me about this is maybe a cool use case would be identifying. You could write it out or you could have cards your values. But maybe to put a finer point on it, the type of person you believe yourself to be.
Kevin Rose
Right. It's very different than what people perceive
Tim Ferriss
you or the type of person you want to be.
Kevin Rose
Right, exactly.
Tim Ferriss
And then it's like, let's take a look at your calendar and your email. Email and your imessage to see how much your story of what you think you are or what you want to be matches up with your behavior.
Kevin Rose
So I, I built.
Tim Ferriss
And then you get a report card.
Kevin Rose
I built a prototype for exactly this. So remember maybe seven years ago you did a 360 review for me? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Those things are brutal.
Kevin Rose
For people that don't know what 360 reviews are, is like you give 10 of your friends to somebody, they interview them, they collect all the data.
Tim Ferriss
Anonymous could also be like coworkers, employees, coworkers, employees, whatever.
Kevin Rose
And then you get a report back being like, here are the deficiencies and positives that this person brings.
Tim Ferriss
Anonymized.
Kevin Rose
Anonymized, brutal. And they are very different than what you think you're how you show up.
Tim Ferriss
Totally.
Kevin Rose
And so like that's the idea.
Tim Ferriss
I literally was watch looking at mine from like 12 years ago. Yeah, a couple weeks ago. And I was just like, yeah, I know. So tough.
Kevin Rose
I know.
Tim Ferriss
Can you get it back? And you're like, who said this?
Kevin Rose
I know. Like, some of it's brutal. I think, I think I know what you said. By the way, do you ever use the word, word child rearing?
Tim Ferriss
Child rearing?
Kevin Rose
Did you ever say that?
Tim Ferriss
Child rearing? I mean, to throw me off.
Kevin Rose
Would you ever say that?
Tim Ferriss
To throw you off the sun trail?
Kevin Rose
Because before I had kids, somebody in my anonymous 360review said like, oh, he's gonna have a hard time with child rearing.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, no, that wasn't.
Kevin Rose
I'm like, who the.
Tim Ferriss
No, that's not me.
Kevin Rose
I don't have any friends that even have that in their vocabulary. And I was like, the only person that could do that would be Tim trying to throw me off. Off with a fucking smart ass word.
Tim Ferriss
No, that wasn't me.
Kevin Rose
That wasn't me.
Tim Ferriss
That wasn't me. No, no. I think I'd be able to identify whatever responses I gave.
Kevin Rose
That's the one thing that stuck with me after like 15 years.
Tim Ferriss
I'm like, said that, man, you're lucky if you got off with that. I've got so much more. Good lord. You know what I've been doing that has been really helpful because the blank page is something I struggle with, with writing, which is part of the reason why the AI is so demoralizing in a sense, because the LLMs within like 30 seconds are just like, like, boom. How you like me now? Try to match that. But using. Even though I certainly don't know the future of this company because it might get replaced by features that are innate to X, Y or Z. But whisper flow, oh God, I love it. Yeah. So using Whisperflow as a data dump,
Kevin Rose
I wish I was a user.
Tim Ferriss
You may have recommended this to me, I can't recall, but basically doing a dump of a conversation as I'm walking with Whisper flow.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Into a note on my phone, then taking that, dropping into Claude, asking it to like clean it up and turn it into something readable has been so helpful. Not necessarily for publication, but for emails, especially uncomfortable emails. You're like, oh God. Like, I just, like I'm putting it off. I'm procrastinating because I don't want to do it. Just doing like a ten minute brain dump. It's shocking how quickly things come together. Like, incredibly helpful. And I'll just give a shout out to my friend Lon Lee, co founder of Exploding Kittens. He recommended this headset because I was on a call with him. I'm like, man, that audio is awesome. What are you using?
Kevin Rose
Can you put it on just for the viewers?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I will.
Kevin Rose
Since it's going to look as good as I hope it does. It looks so good.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's pretty good, right? So this is the SHOKZ S H O K Z Open meet UC Open ear bone conduction headset. So he was talking and I'm like, what the hell are you wearing? I was like, the audio is really good. So it looks pretty dorky. This is like a.
Kevin Rose
No, it's great.
Tim Ferriss
And the bone conduction is right here, effectively on my cheekbones. When you first use them, you're like, wait a second. I feel like this is playing out of speakers. Like, this is nonsense. This is complete bs but then you totally plug your ears and you can still hear perfectly well, which is crazy. And what I like about these a, the audio quality is great. You know, the connectivity varies, but the audio quality is fantastic. You can hear. So if I'm like walking my dog, walking Molly, and I want to be able to hear traffic and so on, I can use this because especially if I'm using Whisper flow to data dump into a text file of some type, I don't really need to be listening. It's not like I'm on a phone call or a zoom call or something. So I find this very, very helpful so that I can actually pay attention to my surroundings. And that's all I got. It's Basically this and AirPods. I mean, there are other headphones that I will use for professional recording and stuff, but thus far, I'll share one more tech thing real quick. This little baggie here is the Sennheiser Pro audio condenser microphone. It's very simple. I've just been very impressed with the audio. When I'm on the road recording stuff for the podcast, like intros or sponsor reads or whatever. It's just a simple lav mic. It's so simple. But the audio quality, even in a hotel room, that is really bouncy. Lots of glass, lots of metal, where it should sound terrible. If I use a fancy. Like, this is a shure mic that we have right here. If I were to use this exact mic, because I have it at home in some of these bouncy rooms, it would sound worse. I'm not kidding. Than what I get for my purposes with this. It's pretty wild. And I love shure. I use their mics on a lot of podcasts. But in terms of minimizing bounce for whatever reason, this little baggie that I can stick in a pocket. Right. It's like this is my portable.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Sort of recording studio.
Kevin Rose
Have you recorded on the iPhone with it?
Tim Ferriss
I have.
Kevin Rose
It sounds good.
Tim Ferriss
It sounds great.
Kevin Rose
That's amazing.
Tim Ferriss
And I don't have my phone with me. There is an app that you can use for really high fidelity recording. It's called like Ferrite or something like that. Lossless recording.
Kevin Rose
Right?
Tim Ferriss
Lossless recording. It's like F E R R I T E. Something like that. I'll put the link in the show notes for this. For people who are interested in. The quality is absurd. And you can also use Descript or one of these programs to do AI cleanup. And it's crazy.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. You didn't need House script anymore. Like you can just use all the models. Do it. Gemini is actually quite good at multimodal, audio, video, all that stuff.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, cool. Yeah. Gemini. Honestly, I've been using Gemini more and more just because it's such plug and play with fast with G Suite also.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I mean, 35 flash is a great model. Although the new Sonnet just came out. That's from Anthropic. That just came out. And that's. I haven't played with it yet because it was newly launched today and it's supposed to be fantastic.
Tim Ferriss
So what do you think the landscape looks like in a few years? You've got Anthropic and OpenAI racing to ipo. See where that goes. You've got Mythos fable taking off.
Kevin Rose
This is out tomorrow.
Tim Ferriss
Right. Back out. Right. Okay. Was a national security threat yesterday, but it isn't today.
Kevin Rose
Exactly.
Tim Ferriss
What do you think? I think the.
Kevin Rose
It's the big three. It's three players.
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
Kevin Rose
Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. And X is trying. And I wouldn't. I would never, ever count out Elon. Like, obviously, like, he has the funds to make it happen.
Tim Ferriss
Well, also Anthropic and Google are buying excess capacity from Colossus. Right?
Kevin Rose
Yeah. But that means that their product isn't working.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Because they bought that capacity for themselves.
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Kevin Rose
So that means that no one's using Grok. You know, I mean, I actually like Grok. They have done.
Tim Ferriss
I use Grok more than people might realize.
Kevin Rose
Well, here's what's interesting about it.
Tim Ferriss
For current events and synthesizers.
Kevin Rose
Yes. So it has direct access to the X API and it has actually X tools built into Groq. So if you want to like get, like you said, current Events, news, things like that. And they've also said that it is one of the most grounded models and doesn't hallucinate so that it's really good at and so on. Digg, when we relaunch it and we use a lot of AI to kind of like come up with the different stories and all that. We use it a ton because we want that grounded information that is true. And so it's really important to have that. And I, I don't know, I mean, I think I wouldn't count them out. I should probably include them in that list.
Tim Ferriss
All right, so Big three.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
What do you think things look like in two years? You're very good at this. I'm not saying, obviously this is just fucking bullshitting and speculating. But what's your guess? I mean I'm pretty heavy into alpha thanks to you.
Kevin Rose
Which Alphabet? Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss
I mean like, but. And then they had a 40 pop on a 4 trillion dollar company. What is going on? I mean I haven't even watched.
Kevin Rose
Is it up?
Tim Ferriss
Well, I mean this is, this was a while back that, A while back in AI time, which is like dog years. So by that I mean like five months ago.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, listen, exactly, exactly. Five months is like 10 years now. So here is why I like Google. They own the full stack. They have their own chips. And so one of the things that I did a deep dive on was the chips that they are building, they really confuse the industry. It's my understanding that they made them insanely high bandwidth and kind of memory throughput when everyone was like, hey, why are you opening up these channels and making them so high bandwidth for this kind of like data flow. And I talked to a buddy and he was like, yeah, everyone was confused at first when they saw the architecture for their, their latest AI chips. And then they realized that we live in a world right now where a model drops like fable, goes live tomorrow on Wednesday, right. And the next OpenAI model goes live in two weeks or whatever because they have that rumored one. It's like old software deployment where it was like, like model trained, released out, model train released out. That's the cadence we're on right now. What Google is betting. And I know, I know they're all thinking this, but what Google's betting with this high throughput kind of wide memory architecture is the future is continuous learning. And so everyone is saying like we're 12 to 18 months out, maybe a little bit longer from self improving models.
Tim Ferriss
I see. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So 24, 7 it's not no longer about, like, like oh, Mythos came out today. Woo. Crazy. It's not about those new models dropping,
Tim Ferriss
it's about, it's like a child learning
Kevin Rose
day by day it'll be better than today forever. And when that happens and they own the full stack, so Google's got the chips. Granted they're going to be constrained by TSMC which is the only player that's producing. I mean there's a few others, Samsung and Micron and a few others but like TSMC is like the leader and they're producing, I believe they're producing Google's chips as well. But they've got the chips architecture, they've got the models, they've got the engineers. They're freaking. I mean they lost a great one like a week ago but it's crazy
Tim Ferriss
what they're paying these engineers.
Kevin Rose
Did you see some of this? It's like a billion dollars like situation. Like it's insane what they're paying some of these people to.
Tim Ferriss
That's what, that's what you know, Meta was doing to poach also.
Kevin Rose
Meta. I just don't think they're going to make it, man. Yeah, listen, they have great businesses. Instagram is phenomenal. They've got these fantastic assets, but I just don't think they have the talent to pull off what these other bigs are pulling off, you know.
Tim Ferriss
So what do you think the, what do the big three look like in two years do you think? Because Google has a lot of advantages like you mentioned.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss
I mean also like vast data center expertise.
Kevin Rose
They have the data centers, they have Android which is like 60 some percent of the population or something like that. So they have the install base. I have a hard time believing that. If you believe that AI inference and all the costs associated with AI eventually kind of settles and it's affordable. And yes, it'll probably be like a Netflix type plan where we're all like, oh yeah, that's our extra $30 a month to get all the AI whatever if it's coming on your device. And also Google's powering a lot of Apple. Although Apple has some unique tech. It's interesting, Apple is kind of coming up. I wouldn't write off Apple either. Apple's another one, but they're probably another couple years out. I don't know, I mean at the end of the day for me, I'm old enough now to want, not want to be like hey, this is the 10x. Er, like actually this was interesting. I called on your podcast. I don't know if you Know this but like, like four years ago I was like, dude, Nvidia is going to crush it.
Tim Ferriss
Blah, blah.
Kevin Rose
There's been some dumb predictions. We've definitely made some bad ones too. So I'm not going to say it's been all good, but we've called out some stuff. In the world of AI, I don't think it's winner take all unless somebody hits some kind of crazy escape velocity that is like truly, it's like aware.
Tim Ferriss
What do you think? Just I'm curious because you're so much better at this kind of stuff than I am. I'm like good at my dumb little corners here and there. But you've worked at Google and you worked on their ill fated social product at one point, right? What was it called?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, Google plus.
Tim Ferriss
Google plus.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it was horrible.
Kevin Rose
I left right away.
Tim Ferriss
Right. And very wisely segue to Google ventures. I guess my point is like when people think consumer, not enterprise, when they think AI, right now they think chat GPT.
Kevin Rose
Right?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Chad, GPT has raised a ton of money.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
They've got to figure out ads almost certainly.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
That's not easy as very, very, very hard to do is like I'm pretty familiar with the ads business at Google. Very hard to do at a high level. However, when average Joe or Jane on the street thinks AI, they think ChatGPT. And when I have tried to set up the Gmail API for Claude, the process on the Google side is such dog shit. Like the UX is terrible. Like it is so bad.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And I like to think myself reasonably decent with tech stuff. Technical as you are, but pretty good. I would like to think nonetheless, I need someone like on my staff to walk me through step by step to do it because it's so counterintuitive and there are errors all over the place and then you've got, you know, anthropic, which is if we are to believe the headlines on ARR, just like crushing right on the enterprise side like the fastest scaling business of all time on a lot of different measures. However, they've gotten a number of of pretty strong bitch slaps from the administration. At the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these frontier labs are going to be left unconstrained by the government. Right. So that's like a huge question.
Kevin Rose
I think China will push that.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, tell me.
Kevin Rose
Well, so China's been launching new models and they just did one like a week ago that is on par with Fable and they.
Tim Ferriss
Was that Alibaba or someone else?
Kevin Rose
No, it's oh God. But these are open source models. So it's actually really interesting because China is like, okay, listen, we're going to open source this and people will use our tech. They're almost doing it the American way. Yeah. Like they're not closed sourcing anything. They're like, okay, here's the free model. Come use ours because we're going to charge you. You can run it yourself if you want locally. And that is going to be increasingly. I think, I think that will be increasingly common. Like AMD came out, I don't know if you saw what she of the CEO. She's brilliant. She came out with this new box that is this like little $4000 box or somewhere around there. And it can run like these massive multi billion parameter models locally. And so those charges that you were Getting for like $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month or whatever in AI expenses is now just that one box that just runs the model locally. Now granted, it's probably eight months behind in terms of like the model it
Tim Ferriss
can run versus for a lot of people who cares.
Kevin Rose
For a lot of people who cares. You know. And so I, so what do you.
Tim Ferriss
From a business perspective, and I know that's tightly related to all sorts of technical considerations, but where do you think Google. I still hate, hate saying Alphabet. Let's just say Google, the word on
Kevin Rose
the street is that they have models that are more advanced than fable. They have not launched them because one, the government's gonna step in and stop them. Yep. And two, they are very expensive to run.
Tim Ferriss
Yep.
Kevin Rose
And it would cost them a lot of money. They would lose money doing so. And so I think in a year we're really like 12 months will be, we won't really know where Google's at. I'm telling you, they're holding on Mac and it's Google. Like you don't understand my time there, I walked. It's like Sergey took me. And I'm not saying this as a flex, I'm just like Sergey took me and Bill Maris, who ran Google Ventures, smart dude. Through Bill's amazing Google X. And this was years ago.
Tim Ferriss
And he was like, that's the moonshot factory.
Kevin Rose
It's like, dude, you already work there. And like they make you sign when you walk in. Like, don't say anything.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Google X is like the Willy Wonka.
Kevin Rose
So I'm like seeing the waymos before they even talked about them, like freaking 10 plus years ago, you know, like before it was even a thing. And so I saw all the crazy balloon projects and a couple others they shuttered that I can't even talk about. But I'm telling you, there's sitting on deck that's like five years out that, like, don't underestimate how many freaking PhDs they have working on this shit.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Like, you just can't imagine what's under the hood there.
Tim Ferriss
Sure.
Kevin Rose
Like, it's just so for me, I'm not a fan of, like, at this point, when I think about investing into the future and this is not investment advice. When the anthropics and the open AIs and the Googles, like, you name the top five, it's kind of almost like what they said back in the day when they had the acronym they used for, like, Netflix, Google.
Tim Ferriss
What was the changes? All the time.
Kevin Rose
But you know what I'm talking about.
Tim Ferriss
Fang.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. Like, Fang was the thing. And there's another one.
Tim Ferriss
And there's another one.
Kevin Rose
You're going to want to own, like, those five, and you'll sit back and you'll be like, damn, if I'd only just owned Google, I'd be up like 70%. But you're like, oh, you know what? In combination, I'm up like 30%.
Tim Ferriss
The market's doing 10.
Kevin Rose
You'll be stoked. Right? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
You sent me a graph. We can delete this.
Kevin Rose
We need to NASDAQ 100.
Tim Ferriss
Yes.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
So, I mean, for you, looking forward, Right. Because you bust my balls about some of the swings that I take, which is. Is good. You should. No, no, you should bust my balls.
Kevin Rose
I busted. Because. Because I'm like, tim, what are you optimizing for, dude? Another zero. You don't need another zero on the bank account.
Tim Ferriss
I get it, I get it, I get it. But I'm asking you.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, look, we're all looking for the feeling of being alive. Part of the way I feel alive is by taking swings.
Kevin Rose
Right.
Tim Ferriss
My question for you is you're not just going to D.O. s and P500. I find that hard to believe.
Kevin Rose
I dabble.
Tim Ferriss
Okay. So if you were you.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I bought way more stock and you got pissed at me because I didn't offer you any.
Tim Ferriss
Such a prick keeps all the. The shiny stuff for him. So a greedy little piglet. I didn't know you wanted it. Oh, you 100% know that I want it because I sent this. Was actually turned out pretty well. It's part of the reason why I pulled the trigger on Google was such a simple approach. I took five names. Was it it was like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Waymo, handful of other companies and there's Vercel, Crusoe, a couple of others.
Kevin Rose
Damn it.
Tim Ferriss
And I sent this list out, out, and I sent it to like, I don't know, five smart people I know who are very, very good investors, have good track records, cross asset classes. And a few of them sent that to like their technical analyst who specialize in different fields. And I was like, yeah, but I was like, ah, maybe, maybe not. And I was like, you have 10 chips. Where do you put those 10 chips as a bet? That's it? Yeah, no further guidance, no caveats, no explanation. And, and look, I'm not saying this is the most sophisticated investment thesis in the world, but you know that I want a Waymo because it was on that list and it was one of the winners that came back in terms of if we are to believe the consensus of this small cohort.
Kevin Rose
To be fair, I offered you some of my own purchase.
Tim Ferriss
I may still take you up on it,
Kevin Rose
Brother. Get that a cost Southern News.
Tim Ferriss
I would love to revisit our conversation from earlier, but I think for the
Kevin Rose
average person listening, like, the good news is that these companies are going out soon.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Like, meaning they're going to be publicly traded companies. They may seem very expensive and very pricey. And you'd be right to say that. And so did Amazon when it went out in 2000.
Tim Ferriss
You know, I mean, what was the market cap on Amazon ipo?
Kevin Rose
It was like, it's got to be tiny. No, but no, no, no, here, no, it's not about market cap, it's about price to earnings. Right? Yeah. Okay, so I, I look, looked at the price.
Tim Ferriss
Well now price to earnings will depend a lot. I mean, it's going to be very different for open AI and anthropic. Right.
Kevin Rose
Well, what's crazy is like SpaceX is like 30% bump on price earnings on the peak of Amazon. So like SpaceX is like, did you invest in SpaceX or no?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I started investing in SpaceX like 10, 12 years ago.
Kevin Rose
You're stoked.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, look, yeah, I'm fine. But you know, I would say here also, it's like if you're like, oh, I missed it because only the fancy people get to invest beforehand. It's like, no, I mean SpaceX right now I'm looking at the chart, launched at 60, 160. Excuse me, like had this huge bump obviously, but then dropped down and like you could have bought it for 156, 154, 153. And now it's climbing back up. I mean there's a lot going on here and honestly I still find public equity investing terrifying because there's so many sharks and there's short sellers and like derivatives and all this craziness going on. Like what happens when it's gets listed and put into these indexes and blah blah, blah. Like all those dynamics are way beyond
Kevin Rose
my I don't do the day trading thing.
Tim Ferriss
Well, I don't do day trading.
Kevin Rose
No, I'm just saying like for example, SpaceX. I don't have a position in SpaceX, but if I did, it would be to hold it for the next 10 years.
Tim Ferriss
Here's a good takeaway. You're asking what's the takeaway from my 20 year analysis of the angel investing? It's still incomplete. There's a lot left to do in Shopify. Oh God. Well, that's a good example, right? It's like this is going to sound so dumb and yet duh to so many people who are more just better investors than I am. But yeah, I mean I've done pretty well. I think the decisions I made at the time to sell certain things were very logical given the information and my financial status at the time, totally reasonable. So I don't want to judge a good poker play based on like where I am 20 years hence. That's not reasonable reasonable. But the takeaway is like you gotta let your winners run as long as possible.
Kevin Rose
And I've lost more money not by selling stocks early than I've ever probably made buying the original stock.
Tim Ferriss
And the other thing I would say also for people listening are like, oh my God, if these 1 percenters are jerking each other off any longer, I'm gonna vomit. If you adjust and some very famous firm did this, maybe it was Sequoia or Benchmark, I can't recall. But they looked at their gains from initial investment all the way through, follow on rounds to IPO and then six months post. So after lockup for let's just keep it simple for all intents and purposes. And then they looked at what you would have gained if you bought it IPO and just held for like 10 years. And you would have made as much or more if you had just bought as a retail investor.
Kevin Rose
That is the silver lining here, which is, is I for some reason get fed all a lot of these Instagram videos and two of them that you're
Tim Ferriss
on Instagram so much. You sent me so many Instagram you do.
Kevin Rose
So the interesting Thing about it is, so many times as individuals and I've fallen into this trap as well, which is you find something that you love and you buy said object when you should actually buy the company.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
So let's just pretend you're going to spend 500 on an iPhone every year since it came out, right?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And there was this great woman that came in and she was like, okay, how do you just. For the first four years of the iPhone coming out, rather than buy an
Tim Ferriss
iPhone, put it in Apple.
Kevin Rose
Just put it in Apple.
Tim Ferriss
That's so cool.
Kevin Rose
And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And my buddy is sadly like, I love you, Prager. David Prager. The second the Tesla came out, not the first one, but the one that was consumer friendly, you know, he went out, he's like, he had me a little money and he's like, you know what? I'm going to do it. I'm a sport surge. I'm gonna deck it out. Spent a hundred grand on this thing and he got the freaking top of the line Tesla. We did the math for him.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, God.
Kevin Rose
Because we're bastards. It was like $15 million or something like that. Had he just invested in Tesla? The second he loved the product. The moral of the story is if you love something and this is going to happen over and over again for decades to come, if you're like, hey, Claude is my shit, I use it every single day. I think it's great because of X, Y and Z. And they go public, like, set it and forget it. Come in, whatever you can afford. I don't care if it's a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, it's meaningful at the end of the day.
Tim Ferriss
No, it's great advice. I mean, look, that's part of the reason. And I have gotten so much shit from this by some VCs. I won't mention their names, who are just like, what? Because they've got their like 30 slide, our proprietary investment thesis shit that they show pension funds and stuff.
Kevin Rose
Right?
Tim Ferriss
And I'm like, I just try to invest in stuff that I will use every day.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss
And it's not true for everything, like Commonwealth Fusion systems. All right? I'm not using them every day. But SpaceX, you know, I mean, outside of Starlink. But it's like there are exceptions, but it's like with something like this, right? Where it's like I am eating close to half of my protein calories every day of this stuff and I'm like, I should Just invest in the company. Right. It's just like that is what makes sense. You know? The first stock I ever bought bought when I was like DX something.
Kevin Rose
Use every day.
Tim Ferriss
Tell itx.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Can't go wrong for people that don't
Kevin Rose
know what DX is.
Tim Ferriss
No. Jesus. Yeah, yeah. Well that'll be another random show. Show notes. It was Pixar. Oh yeah. My dad bought me some book on stock investing. Honestly, I couldn't make any sense of it because it was getting into like price to earning and this and that. Earning per share. And I was like, ah, I don't really understand on this.
Kevin Rose
But that's so cool your dad bought you that.
Tim Ferriss
It was cool. It was.
Kevin Rose
Do you like that's cool.
Tim Ferriss
It's cool. It's cool. It was his way of showing love. We can't all do it the way necessarily people want to receive it. But in any case, the point of that was I loved comics. I tracked comics and animation and I saw Toy Story number one. I even saw shorts and I was like, that is the future.
Kevin Rose
That's amazing.
Tim Ferriss
I know. That's the future.
Kevin Rose
Exactly.
Tim Ferriss
And when I was whatever, 15 or something, first stock Pixar. I have the original shareholder poster they mailed out like last year and jobs and stuff.
Kevin Rose
Oh, dude, that's amazing.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. And for me it's like, look at your credit card statement. Do you know what I mean? I mean this is not investment advice. I'm just saying this is the way I personally approach it. So informational purposes only. But it's like, yeah, if you're spending hundreds of dollars on like, like Amazon and Amazon prime, it's like, well maybe, who knows?
Kevin Rose
Totally.
Tim Ferriss
You know, are you going to be spending more or less on that in five years? Like just forget about the market, forget about analysts like you personally. Will you be spending more or less on this in three or five years time?
Kevin Rose
That's exactly right.
Tim Ferriss
Okay, and we'll pop to put something in the intro on this is not investment advice. But it's like it does this stuff. You don't need to be a quant. Hedge fund manager. Manager.
Kevin Rose
And to be fair, like when you look at Buffett's portfolio and the things that he's bought over years, like it's the consumer staples and the things that were just like. He's like, yes, more people will want and drink Coca Cola in the future. It's a fantastic brand. The margins are impeccable. Like it's a well run business. I know the CEO, it's like prone
Tim Ferriss
to disruption yeah, exactly.
Kevin Rose
In downturns, guess what? People still drink Coke.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
You know, it's like.
Tim Ferriss
He's also a clever bastard though. He's been very good. Good with his shucks, grandpa branding. He's very good at that. But that dude is a stone cold killer in terms of. Yeah, Geico is cash machine and yeah, I know. Being like the lender of first resort, when shit's going sideways, people call Uncle Buffett and he's like, sure, here's my offer, take or leave. But yes, very bright guy. All right, what have we missed?
Kevin Rose
The only thing I would say is that.
Tim Ferriss
Tell Dodonic.
Kevin Rose
Yes. That if you want to learn about the latest tech and AI news, I relaunched Digg.
Tim Ferriss
You're showing me some numbers. That's crazy.
Kevin Rose
It's crazy. We've got like we went from 20,000 people a week using it to now we've close to 500,000. So it's been growing quite a bit and it's pulling across the entire zeitgeist of the web. We don't want to start another social network. So we pull from X and we pull from a few other feeds when we're putting in like videos from YouTube and TikTok and others. And. And it's just been a fun little hobby. It's a fun hobby and it's like doing millions of page views a month. And I'm proud of that. It's like, it's awesome to see it working again. So it's good. Digg.com digg.com EvanRose on Instagram and yeah, sweet.
Tim Ferriss
What should I say? I guess Tim blog. You can find thousand plus blog posts if you want to read about my cadaver on the table. My book sales as a result of AI. That is a crazy blog post. I don't even know if you were aware of this. Oh yeah, my all format book sales.
Kevin Rose
Oh, I saw that. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Isn't it crazy down? Well, you look at the graph and it's like stable annuity. Stable annuity, stable annuity. Very predictable. And then in 2013, because what happened in November 2022, chat GPT 3.5 and you see a slip by negative 5%. Then you see a slip by, like I'm making up these numbers, but they're close. Negative 28%. Then it's like negative 49%.
Kevin Rose
But it turns out you're going to be okay.
Tim Ferriss
I'll be fine. The implications are pretty interesting. And now how if we continue the pace in 2026 down like 67%.
Kevin Rose
Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss
These are sort of compounding in the wrong direction. Right. It's not quite the right terminology to use, but you get it. So. Stuff to think about. People can check that out if you search AI Nonfiction Tim Ferriss. That's a blog post that's actually a pretty interesting read, but on less dystopian view. Ultimately, the message isn't dystopian. Tim Blog imferriss on Instagram. Ferriss T F E R R I S s on Twitter. But honestly, I'm not so activ socials because I've deleted those from my phone for a couple of years. You're listening to the podcast. I don't have to sell the podcast. Oh, Five below. Friday, My diary.
Kevin Rose
Can you add one?
Tim Ferriss
Can I add one? What?
Kevin Rose
I don't know. It's like six bullets.
Tim Ferriss
Well, every once in a while, if I'm lazy, there are. I say no. If I'm lazy, and I'm like, I don't want to do it because I still. I still do this thing myself. Hold on one sec. We're almost done. Relax. And you and your prostate.
Kevin Rose
No, no, it's not the prostate. It's the fact that we. We had. You gave me tequila.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, I gave you tequila. You were overserved. Hold on a second. Just give me two seconds, you old man. Old bastard. So now I'm going to make this really long. So, yeah, 5 bu Friday, every once in a while. You did this yourself. Turns into Six Bullet Saturday if I'm just not feeling it. But yeah. 2 million subscribers. It's free, easy to unsubscribe. Tim Blog Friday. And that's. That's all I got.
Kevin Rose
All right.
Tim Ferriss
You want to go po man?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I will. All right.
Tim Ferriss
Good to see you.
Kevin Rose
Good to see you.
Tim Ferriss
Let's go. 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 1 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 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading books, I'm reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Lately, navigating the financial landscape can feel like a full time job and it's not a very fun full time job. It's stressful, but it does not have to be that way. You can simplify. Wealthfront helps you tune out the noise and earn more on every dollar with sophisticated easy to use products like their Cash account. You get fee free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts and when you're ready to invest, transferring to their expert built investing accounts is simple. For a limited time, my listeners can earn up to 4.30% variable APY on cash. What that means is on top of the 3.3 base APY from Program bank banks, new cash account clients get an exclusive 3 month 0.75 APY boost on up to $150,000. Then they get another 0.25% APY increase by direct depositing $1,000 a month and maintaining a funded investing account. Terms and conditions apply. More than a million people trust Wealthfront. Check them out. Go to wealthfront.comtim to claim your boost. That's wealthfront.com Tim this is a paid paid endorsement of Wealthfront Client experiences vary. Wealthfront Brokerage isn't a Bank Base APY as of January 30, 2026 and subject to change details in the episode Description Longtime listeners know how important privacy is to me. In fact, my friends would call me paranoid. Or they used to call me paranoid and now they think I was just depression in a sense. These days you may have noticed it is a lot harder to protect privacy. Anyone can find your information with a quick search. It's shockingly easy and I've had friends and paid people to red team me to try to find my info. And what you'll notice is that shadowy data brokers quietly collect and trade your home address, phone, family members and more. It's a mess. You have to have a plan for defense and you can fight back with Incogni. That's Incogni. Incogni automatically removes your information across 420 plus data brokers with 1000 plus additional sites covered in their unlimited plan. And they keep it scrubbed automatically. Deloitte has independently verified the headline numbers, in other words, 245 million plus removal requests, and the company adheres to strict security standards with an A plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and with their unlimited plan. If you find your info on a site they don't monitor, send them the link and their privacy team will handle it. Go to incogni.comtimi n c-o g n I.comtim and use code TIM at checkout to get 60% off of an annual plan. One more time incog.comtim.
The Random Show: Tim & Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday”
Date: July 16, 2026
Guests: Tim Ferriss & Kevin Rose
In this lively, deeply personal, and wide-ranging “Random Show,” Tim Ferriss reunites with his longtime friend Kevin Rose to riff on everything from meditating on mortality and the unpredictability of life, to practical AI uses, new health and fitness obsessions (from supplements to rock climbing), and the importance of not putting your dreams on hold. With candid storytelling, humor, and actionable insights, the duo explores what it means to age intentionally, evolve, and use both ancient and cutting-edge tools to get the most out of life.
Facing Your “Someday” List ([25:48]-[27:46])
Rock Climbing & Aging Athletically ([27:47]-[34:23])
Protein, Processed Meats, & Longevity ([39:31]-[43:56])
Supplements and Exogenous Ketones ([43:56]-[45:41])
Cardio, VO2 Max, and Cognitive Longevity ([48:42]-[52:56])
AI Productivity and Everyday Automation ([63:14]-[67:13])
Personal AI: Self-Reflection & Decision Analysis ([66:13]-[77:32])
AI & Creativity: Blessing and Curse ([71:36]-[73:20])
AI Tools and Tech Stack ([85:10]-[89:32])
AI Competitive Landscape & Investing ([89:32]-[100:16])
| Timestamp | Segment | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00-06:15 | Opening banter, aging, Toaster the dog, stories of loss | | 06:15-12:12 | Grieving Om Malik, mortality, cherishing time with family, "The Last Time" | | 14:47-19:12 | Meditation retreat, koans, micro-insight of “nothing lacking,” Zen practice | | 19:12-22:44 | “The Way” meditation app, surrendering thoughts, physical cues in meditation | | 25:48-28:25 | “Someday” lists, Japanese woodworking, stops waiting, pursuing hobbies as you age | | 27:46-34:23 | Rock climbing ambitions, “The Nug”, Abrahangs, old-age athleticism | | 39:31-43:56 | Supplements, processed meats, protein hacks, liver toxicity concerns | | 48:42-52:56 | VO2 max, “Norwegian 4x4”, long-term brain health, minimum effective exercise doses | | 53:01-59:59 | Psychedelic clinical updates (MM120 for anxiety), dementia, “terminal lucidity” | | 63:14-67:13 | AI integration at home, real-world automation examples | | 66:13-77:32 | LLMs for investment analysis, cognitive reflection, the pain & power of AI self-knowledge | | 89:32-100:16| AI industry future, Google’s full-stack advantage, open-source in China, “winner-take-all” debate | | 109:00+ | Tim’s investing philosophy—invest in what you actually use; first stock bought as a teen—PIXAR |
Tim and Kevin’s “Random Show” is equal parts comedy, practical wisdom, and existential reflection. The central message: Don’t wait for “someday” to connect, to create, or to experience new things—embrace the randomness, reflect, and take action, because the runway isn’t infinite.
“If you love something and use it every single day... when they go public, just set it and forget it. It’s meaningful at the end of the day.”
— Kevin Rose ([107:48])
For more on the topics discussed, see the full transcript or check out Tim’s blog.