2026-03-27 00:46:23
Please enjoy this transcript of another in-between-isode, with one of my favorite formats: the good old-fashioned Q&A.
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Tim Ferriss: All right. Hello, everybody. Thanks for making it. We’ve got lots of questions that were pre-submitted. There’s a lot to cover, and I will begin with saying there are many, many questions about AI. It is certainly the topic of the hour and I would like to provide a few caveats and I’ll do that by leading in with a question. How many of you invested in or even know of, Diamond Rio? Diamond Rio? Anyone? MPMan F10? Come on, now. You guys must remember MPMan F10. These are MP3 players that predated the iPod. And Jobs famously changed it from “speeds and feeds” into “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Also, had the industrial design engineering supply chain wizardry, along with his marketing genius, of course, all to bring to bear on this thing called the iPod, which then produced, you guessed it, some of you wizened, gray-haired folks, but youngsters not realizing iPod leads to podcasting.
Yes. That was the genesis of this podcasting term. And the reason I bring this up is that I do not consider myself a bleeding edge investor or even in a lot of instances, a bleeding edge user. I like to be on the dull edge. And I would say that the iPod is a great example of that because if you looked at some of the technological trend lines, you looked at a few different pieces of hardware that had somewhat de-risked solid-state MP3 players. The timing was right for something to be taken from very, very niche and unwieldy to mainstream. And certainly, we’ve seen that unfold. And I view AI very similarly. And in some respects, it is very amenable to that approach because things are changing so incredibly quickly. If you hated a model three weeks ago, it might do exactly what you need today.
And with all of that, I just want to say I do not view myself as an AI expert. I think if you’re looking for someone who seems to be the Nostradamus of AI, you should read up on Leopold Aschenbrenner. You can look up “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.” It was penned and published online June 2024. And the number of actual hits, predictive hits that Leopold had is staggering. It is just really about as close to clairvoyant as you could possibly be. So Leopold Aschenbrenner, and you check him out, if you’re looking for what’s coming. If you’re looking for what I have observed personally as a muggle, someone who is non-technical, I’m not writing white papers, but I get to watch a very large audience and I have a lot of friends I can lean on, many of whom are technical, I can fill you in. All right. That’s a whole lot of preamble. So let’s hop into it.
All right. First question is from Hugo. “In a world full of tools, systems, and AI, what human abilities or habits are becoming more valuable, not less?” So I’ll try to keep this pretty short. I would say the relational, the tactile, anything IRL, in real life, that can be extended also to, for instance, in my case, informational advantage, offline informational advantage. A lot of the LLMs are slicing and dicing the internet. One might argue all of them are doing that. And whether you are looking at longevity in professional terms, if you’re looking at longevity in creative terms, I think putting on the lens of looking at what you can do in IRL that currently, now that certainly robotics are on the edge of some type of Cambrian explosion, so who knows, maybe it’s iRobot three years from now, but for now, the kind of offline differentiator is a big deal.
And I would say the relational side, certainly the harnessing of awe, wonder, et cetera, nature immersion, which sounds like I’m suggesting everybody disappear off into a commune in the woods or become homesteaders or something. That’s not what I’m saying. But for instance, the fact that I have people I can text for very narrow types of expertise, even though they have the access of a generalist, allows me to have an informational advantage because none of that is online. Conversely, if you’re using ChatGPT or Claude to try to assess a given public company as a good or a bad investment or somewhere in between, you can rest assured that many, many people, perhaps even millions of people have already done this, and therefore you’re going to be reading more or less the same thing as many others. So that’s my stab at that first question. A lot of this is going to boomerang back in future notes. Let me take a sip of my sipping ketones. Excuse me.
This was sent to me by a scientist and he was like, “Mix 10 milliliters into 250 milliliters of water. DO NOT CHUG,” in all caps, written with a marker on this experimental container of ketones. So, we’ll see. If I start seizuring, it’ll make for a great short on social media.
All right. Next question I’m going to take a stab at is, this is from Jeff. “With a pre-throat clearing, not financial advice ‘disclaimer’ already granted to you by virtue of this question, where should a small investor be looking to invest in public markets as AI continues to eat our white collar jobs in the coming months and years?” All right. I know I indirectly already gave the caveat. I am not giving any investment advice because that is a terrible thing to do if you’re not a registered financial advisor and all that stuff. I’m none of those things.
So this is for informational purposes only. Number one, you shouldn’t gamble, and I do kind of view it as gambling, or invest anything you cannot afford to lose completely because AI is moving so incredibly quickly and there’s a lot of whipsaw reactivity in the markets. ChatGPT comes out with something that connects to some type of industry in an oblique way and suddenly six public stocks lose billions and tens of billions of dollars of market cap. There’s a lot of craziness. So as certainly has been said before me, the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So don’t play with anything you’re not willing to lose. There are people talking about what’s been termed halo trades, trying to look for things that are less likely to get disrupted or destroyed, kind of the Warren Buffett approach to non-tech investing by and large, seize candy, railways, et cetera.
But I would say that, initially sparked by conversations with Kevin Rose, and I hesitate to even mention this, but I do think Google is in a very interesting position, Alphabet, the artist formerly known as Google. Alphabet is in an interesting position to, in some respects, kind of own the full stack. Engineers aren’t going to like that I’m using that term, but they have distribution, they have hardware in terms of TPUs. They have incredible, unparalleled access to information. They’ve got Demis Hassabis and DeepMind internally. They’ve got the ability to spin things out like Waymo. There’s just so much going on within Alphabet that I find it very fun and terrifying to take a close look at. And I say that also because it is completely unclear, I would say, how exactly Google compensates for or plans for shifting to some type of ad revenue from AI generated responses or an AI-based, LLM-based platform versus what we use today in the browser, right?
And that’s inevitably going to happen. So the bull case is very exciting for Google and the bear case is also pretty compelling, I would say. But as I’m looking at stuff out there, I tend not to screw around in the public markets. I just don’t feel like I have any advantage whatsoever compared to everybody else who’s fine slicing things. But in conversations with friends and looking at it pretty closely, I do think Alphabet’s pretty interesting. So there you have it. I’m not saying invest in it. You could really lose money and it might be that they lose for a while until they win. It could be they lose completely. So there is that.
Next question’s from David. “What are the top three things you should never use AI for?” I would say any skill you want to preserve in your head, you should probably not use AI for. So I use AI for editing right now. You very quickly end up on a slippery slope. So if I create a rough draft as I did with the self-help trap, for instance, I would then take that, feed it into these models, and give them a personality. You are an editor from The New Yorker. This is your name, right? Maybe it’s a famous editor or the person who worked with Robert Caro, whatever it might be. I mean, that’s, again, not to compare myself to those people, but I want a good editor.
Give me feedback on this rough draft. What the model will do, because I want to keep you using the model, of course, is it will give you all the feedback and then it will say, “Would you like me to incorporate all of these changes and draft a version that uses all these things?” And that’s where I have deliberately hesitated. I’ve also played around with it, and frankly, it’s very good, but therein lies the danger because if you want to preserve your ability to synthesize, and this will tie into questions shortly about creativity, I do think that it makes some sense to exercise caution, and there are already scientists and researchers looking at the negative cognitive impacts of depending on AI, much like your ability to navigate has probably deteriorated since using Google Maps. And I would say net, each individual is more enhanced, augmented using these tools.
But if you do want to keep certain muscles strong and able, that’s where I would hesitate. And look, you can always change your mind later, but if you lose it, it’s a hell of a lot harder to reclaim it. So that’s where I am at the moment.
Oh, CJ. CJ’s question. “Do you, Tim, think AI is capable of creativity in the sense that humans are?” Well, I would argue here, and I’ve read all these books on creativity, I’ve looked at some research, which tends to be pretty soft, I would say. If I were being less generous, hand wavy about creativity or flow. I mean, I feel like a lot of these are poorly defined. So we could even go so far as to say, I don’t think we understand what creativity is in humans, right?
Could machines have the equivalent of the muse visit them? Is there a way to engineer that? When we create these metaphors for ourselves, are we really just using poetry or abstraction to try to verbalize something that’s actually pretty discreet and replicable if you just operate from a sort of bottoms up approach with reinforcement learning and this, that, and the other thing? Maybe. I just don’t know.
The second question that CJ had though is the one that I think is worth not necessarily spending more time on, but I would underline this because I underline it for myself. “As a writer and with the explosion of AI-generated content out there now, how do you rise above the noise?” All right. It’s pretty simple and I will answer that by way of a story. I was spending time, a little bit of time, drinking a Paloma with a very well-known photographer. He is one of the most commercially successful photographers in the world, and he was laughing and telling a story of how he gets approached by photographers.
They could be amateur, but very often they’re professionals who want to know how they can become better photographers and they’re asking all of these gear related questions. And his answer is, just put more interesting stuff in front of the camera, make what’s in front of the camera more interesting. And the equivalent of that, at least for me as a nonfiction writer, is doing interesting things. Go out in the world, do interesting things, or observe interesting things in real life and write about those things, do experiments, et cetera. I mean, there are many ways to skin this cat. It could be, let’s just say, Travels with Charley, amazing book by John Steinbeck, road trip in a makeshift RV with his dog, Charley.
All right. Incredible book. And as it stands right now, I think it’s a ways off that a humanoid robot is going to get into a car with a canine companion, robotic or flesh and bone, and do something like this. Anything that is analysis-based is relegated to the machines at this point. They’re so good. The AI, broadly speaking, LLMs being one manifestation of that, are just too good. They’re so good. And we’ll talk about how I use some of those tools a little bit later. So do interesting things and write about them. That’s the short answer. All right. There are certain questions where I don’t feel like I have good answers or informed answers. I could make up some bullshit and spin a yarn and make something that seems to hold water, but I’m not going to do that. So I’m going to — I apologize if I’m skipping some of your questions, but I don’t want to give you any type of false confidence in my answers.
All right. So this is a question from Maneal. “How are you keeping up with all the new AI tools? Where do you keep your focus? Have you set up OpenClaw, and if so, what’s your workflow?” Okay. So, I am not keeping up with AI developments. People who do this full-time as the C-suite executive teams of the best known companies in the world have trouble keeping up. So I am definitely not keeping up or trying to keep up. I feel like as soon as I’m doing that, I’ve already lost. So, it’s not how do I win the game, it’s choosing the right game, which might sound cliched, but does that mean I’m ignoring everything? No. With something like OpenClaw, due to security concerns, I let friends of mine be the first — elect to be some of the first monkeys shot into space. So I’m going to read from a friend of mine who I texted, right? This is about this question right before we started recording.
All right. So about OpenClaw, he played around with OpenClaw. His name is Chris Hutchins. He’s been on the podcast. He has a podcast called All the Hacks, which he has used to explore some really fascinating stuff. If you’re a points nerd or like travel, it’s a good one. He goes a lot further than that. But one of his episodes is “I Built an AI Assistant That Works While I Sleep,” and he explains what he did with OpenClaw. However, here’s what he texted to me. “In the last week, Claude’s desktop app has shipped a bunch of features that do a lot of what OpenClaw can do in a more user-friendly way, schedule tasks, remote access, et cetera. So that could be a good beginner way to start. But with all AI projects, I suggest going in with a use case.” This is, again, Chris texting, and then he documented his whole journey with building a basic app through OpenClaw, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and leveling up his knowledge each time. We’ll link to that episode in the show notes. You can find it pretty easily.
Here’s what he added to that. “For OpenClaw, I’d say you absolutely don’t need a fancy computer. I ran it on a 2012 Mac mini for the first few weeks, but if you have an old computer and you want to set it up and test it out at home, great, but until you feel confident, one, don’t give it access to things like email, credit cards, et cetera.” And there are some hilariously tragic stories of this gone awry that you can find on your own. Okay, that was my director’s commentary. “Two, don’t install random skills you find on the internet. Three, go to Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera, and get advice about how to set it up securely. Four, every time I’ve gotten stuck, I’ve been able to use Claude Code in the OpenClaw Directory to fix things.” So there you have it. That is by virtue of texting Chris Hutchins, an answer on OpenClaw.
And what I could also do is give some examples of, internally, how we’re using stuff. So I have an employee who is very interested in these tools and I have wanted to encourage that as long as we’re not completely demolishing our own security from the inside out. So he’s played a lot with Claude Code and other things. And I asked him for some use cases that I could share with you. So I will pull those up right now. All right. And this alludes to a term, defines a term that Chris used. All right. So one thing I did — this is my employee. “One thing I did earlier today was build a skill, quote, unquote, “skill,” fancy name for a text file. In this case, inside Claude that will generate the PDF and Word versions of an IO, that’s an insertion order for a podcast sponsor, if I only give it the missing items from the IO, for instance, company name, official company name,” da, da, da, da.
“It fills it out automatically and creates a PDF. It’s a small save in time,” but this is something he repeats a lot, “and there may be a better way to do it, like a template and HelloSign or something.” I also have been working on a project doing a 20-year, roughly 20-year retrospective deep dive and analysis of all my angel investing, right? Are the stories I tell myself about my report card accurate? Are they completely false? Are they somewhere in between, et cetera, et cetera. And for that project, coming back to his text here, it’s been really crazy to just tell it, quote, “Here’s an API key,” and it will figure out how to connect to a given service like Gmail. And if you have an API key for a product, you can easily start using it in Claude as it will simply write itself a script. And one of the wildest things, and this is — I’m paraphrasing here, but it can ingest an absurd amount of data and convert it into something useful, and it can also enrich data in some very interesting ways, right?
So if I’m trying to figure out, okay, via email introductions, who introduced the winners, who introduced the losers, who introduced the zombies that just can’t seem to die after years of struggling, or take off for that matter? And then is there a signal, say, looking at the education levels, the schools, the alma maters of founders? What about single founders versus two founders versus three founders? Things like this. Location, geography, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is there any signal to any of this?
Another example, which might apply to more of you, the Google Calendar integration has also been helpful. In other words, updating a calendar entry from Claude or creating multiple at a time, so using Claude to add calendar entries. Now, in my case, I have a bunch of different calendars and different people on my team add to different calendars. One thing that helps us a lot, and maybe someday I’ll share this. For right now, I’m probably not going to, but I have a document, a Google Doc that is the 10 commandments of my calendar basically, and it’s rules around formatting, what to include, et cetera. Secondary points of contact, cell phones, time zone always indicated in the headline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are lots of different rules, but he can use that or other people on my team can use that to then automatically check calendar entries through Claude Code and fix them as needed.
So some people have joked that The 4-Hour Workweek should be rewritten as The 4-Minute Workweek. I think there’s something to it, and there’s a temptation to do an entire section on use of AI in place of virtual assistants and so on. The problem with that is that as soon as the ink had metaphorically dried on that paper, it would already be out of date, so I’m not going to do that, I don’t think. So there you have it, and the API key is a really important component to all of this.
Also, and I’m sure some of you have figured this out, but with Claude Code, and Chris Hutchins alluded to this as well, for debugging, for instance, we did a website redesign and there was an issue with a form, no idea why, and we wanted to fix it very quickly and we weren’t sure how long it would take for support to get back to us. So he was able to dump all the code at the time into the model and just figured out how to fix it, and there are many, many, many other examples of that. Yeah. And many of these things are not quantum leaps, but they are, much like anything else, just automating little paper cuts so they don’t add up ultimately to a huge gash in your calendar.
Okay. Back to work, Tim Ferriss. All right, let’s look at other things. This is a question from Becky. “What would you say to someone who wants a career jump? Sometimes I feel I get caught in a loop of same pay range, same experiences, same mid-level opportunities. How can I start increasing my income opportunities and skills this year?”
Okay. So I reached out, as I often do, texted a couple of people about this, because this is going to be a huge, huge, mega, mega, meta problem for people moving forward, and it’s going to increasingly, I think, be pervasive. People are going to wonder what they should do next, which then informs upskilling. And there’s a later question so I might as well explore it here related to encodings in the Jim Collins episode, question around encodings. And I might come back to that, but suffice to say, some of these personality tests and things like Enneagram are actually very helpful, and things like StrengthsFinder and so on.
And there are two startups I’m involved with because I recognize just through questions like this from Becky, which are the canary in the coal mine. It’s not really a canary in a coal mine. It’s like there was one whisper, now there are 10, then there were 100, now there are a thousand. This question is coming up more and more, and a lot of folks are going to, in one way or another, need to zig and zag, even though they might not expect it right now, and a lot of that’s going to be due to AI job displacement.
So the two startups that — and again, I mentioned that I’m an investor in these so I’m biased, but the reason that I invested in these is to answer this question, or more specifically, to help people answer this question. So the first one is called Apt, A-P-T, and you can check that out at tryapt.ai. So Tryapt, T-R-Y-A-P-T.ai. I had the co-founder and CEO create a code, so if any of you guys want to try it, ultimately, it does cost money to get all the results and to get this AI-guided mentor around your strengths and so on, which you discover or uncover through the process of going through this. But you can get 50 percent off with TIM50. That’s the code to use. T-I-M-5-0. All right. So if you want to take a look at that, you can check it out.
The other is Oboe, so OBOE.com, and that is entirely focused on accelerating skill acquisition and learning. So I think these two actually go together really well. You could use Apt first and then Oboe, and I’ve played around with both. There’s a lot that’s going to be coming into both of these, but might be worth checking out. Honestly, if I were to tell you to go buy What Color Is My Parachute or something, you might glean something from that, but I feel like in very dynamic times, with so much shifting sand with respect to technology, you probably need something a bit more or benefit from something that is more dynamic and personalized from the get go, as opposed to you having to do lots and lots of heavy lifting with a fixed format. So that’s what I would say, Becky, and definitely let me know what you think, because if something’s broken or if you love something or you hate something, all that stuff can get fixed.
All right, next one. This is from Jeff, and we will do some live questions. These ketones are actually doing something, which is good because it’s 4:00 p.m. and I don’t want to have any caffeine. Yeah, fortunately, it doesn’t taste too much like jet fuel.
All right. Let me do one more. Jeff. Okay, this is the question.
“You’ve worked across books, podcasts, and experiments that each attracted their own communities. What have you learned about proactively shaping a community’s culture, not just growing an audience? And how has direct interaction with people changed the way you enter creative flow today?”
The last piece is probably the hardest answer, but I can tell you that I think that proactively shaping a community’s culture actually helps you to build an audience, but to what end? Not build an audience like, oh, I’m aiming for two million, three million, 10 million YouTube subscribers. I don’t like renting audience in a way that’s dependent on algorithms, and you can look at a lot of the biggest YouTube channels. Their average views per video have cratered, even though they have huge numbers of subscribers. You see that with engagement on X and other places.
However, one thing that never goes out of style is “1,000 True Fans” by Kevin Kelly. You can read it for free at kk.org, and therefore, I will focus on the proactively shaping a community’s culture. In my case, I think it’s pretty simple. I treat a closed community like I would a dinner party at my house. So somebody walks into my house, and this is a shoes free house, because who wants dog shit and bubble gum on your kitchen floor? I don’t, so the shoes come off at the door. So let’s say somebody comes in and they’re like, “No, I’m keeping my boots on.” They come in tracking mud all over the place. They sit down at the dinner table, they kick their feet up on the table and start calling people assholes or something. That person’s going to get dragged by their hair out and then they’re never coming back in.
So that’s a bit of maybe a melodramatic example, but zero tolerance policy for broken windows. Even Malcolm Gladwell and others have written about this, but when these minor infractions are permitted, I’m going to pull out a fancy term that tech people like, the Overton window, the broadness of what is now allowable behavior shift? Or I shouldn’t say shift. It’s a fucking window. It’s not supposed to get wider or shorter, but it moves in a more aggressive behavioral direction. So if you allow minor infractions, you’re going to get moderate infractions. You allow those, you’re going to get major infractions.
So from the very first days of, say, the blog, the comments section has guidelines and it’s like, Remember the Fonzie? We’re going to be cool, like that. If you’re an asshole, we’re going to boot you and blacklist you, and you can criticize me but don’t be a dick to other people, and if you are, you’re gone. It’s zero tolerance and you have to enforce that. If you don’t, people are crafty. They’ll learn how to manipulate you because you are asking to be at least abused by not enforcing your own rules. So that’s the first one. You have to excise the cancers and remove the poison. You just have to, because the default state of pretty much the entire internet now, because it’s been allowed and encouraged through various gamifications on social platforms, is just being loud, obnoxious, awful, so you have to set rules to counterveil that.
Also, and Jeff, I think you’ve experienced this, if you have a private community of a hundred people or 200 people or 50, it doesn’t really matter, and you charge $5 a quarter, $5 a year, it doesn’t really matter, but if you have some very nominal costs, people opt in who generally want to contribute and be in an environment of positivity. That’s my experience generally. So having some very, very nominal fee at the door I think is incredibly helpful, and you find that also with events.
I’ve done plenty of live events, don’t really do them anymore for a lot of reasons, but very, very rarely in the past, I would throw these live events for book launch parties, hundred people, 200. If people can RSVP to an event, your abandonment rate or no show rate is going to be sky-high. If you force them to pay $1 to hold their spot, suddenly the no show rate goes down to low single digits. So I don’t think there’s any rocket science here, but the tough part is being willing to enforce, and maybe you give someone a two strikes or out policy, but frankly, I find that that can metastasize.
For instance, I have a lovely dog. It was a stray two months ago, adopted her, and she’s really smart. She’s part Anatolian Shepherd, it would seem, and if she realizes, for instance, that she can pit me against my partner and that she doesn’t actually have to listen to sit until the third time, she’s not going to listen to the first two. She’ll just stare at you defiantly and then sit the third time. Humans are the same way. They’ll do that too. If they know they have two strikes, you’re going to get more bad behavior because they know they can get away with it once.
All right, so there you go, and let’s go to — we’ve got plenty more questions, but I am going to — let’s go live to some live questions, and I apologize that there’s so much in the chat, so I’m going to have to — oh, yeah, the crown means top fans. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you, top fan. All right, let’s throw out some live questions and I’ll give it a shot. If you already posted one, please post again because I can’t scroll up and go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.
Favorite color? Green, right there. Green, green, green. Specifically, it’s the color of late morning light, like 11:00 a.m. sunlight around August coming through maple leaves. That is the color, the sort of translucent green. All right.
Future of Varlata. Okay, for those who don’t know. Also Coyote. Coyote continues to do really well. I feel like I have done mostly what I can do with Coyote at this point, and it’s in steady state. The reviews on Amazon and elsewhere are great. It continues to sell well through the distribution channels. I wish in retrospect, earlier on, I had really focused on, even though there are plenty of adults who enjoy it, focusing on families that have at least one or two kids in that eight to 15 range, and that would have helped with escape velocity sooner, but hindsight 20/20. I’m really, really happy with how it’s turned out.
And then Varlata, honestly, now that the AI tools are getting good enough, about six months ago, I was planning on creating a movie trailer for effectively a script, I’ve got the whole thing in my head, focused on Tyrolean. If anyone — this is The Legend of Cockpunch. Now I think I will, for obvious reasons, lean towards Legends of Varlata, but focusing on the relationship between Ty and his father and all sorts of craziness that ensues. So I’ve got a whole movie script in my head and concept art that I haven’t really done anything with from some of the top Magic: The Gathering and D&D artists you can imagine, so we’ll see. We’ll see. I could see screwing around with that this summer.
Yes, shout out to Jeff for keeping the CP community humming. Happy to spend some time there as well. All right.
“If I could only pick from the books on the shelves behind you, what book would you want everyone in this group to deep dive into or dive deep into?”
Man, I have those books up there for a reason. I have thousands of books. I’ve donated most of them. These are the ones I keep up for me to look at. Give me a second. I’ll tell you. Okay, great. So I’m going to give answers that may not be satisfying to some folks, but that’s okay. I’ll give you one that I suppose you might expect from me. So one is going to be The Effective Executive from Peter Drucker, classic, old, short, incredible bang for the buck. However, the other books, I would say, again, talking about what you do in a world of AI, do more interesting things. There’s a book back there called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who won, I believe it was the Booker or Pulitzer Prize for another of his books called Arctic Dreams. Of Wolves and Men is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read, and it really shattered the mold. It redefined what, let’s just call it nonfiction nature writing could be. It’s just an incredible, incredible book. So there’s one, but again, this is choose your own adventure, pick and choose.
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, I mentioned it earlier, is hilarious. Also an incredibly accurate and enjoyable, warts and all, ride through the US. What a quirky, weird-ass country. So that’s another one, pretty fast read. And then there are entire shelves back there related to animal tracking and so on, because I’ve done a bunch of that. I don’t think most of you should probably spend a lot of time on that.
If you haven’t read, I’ll simplify the title here, Alice in Wonderland, you should go read Alice in Wonderland. Read the whole thing, not just quotes from it. I have a collector’s edition back there. And then there are a few actually that I was going to mention for one of the questions you guys submitted as an answer. The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch, that just never gets old. It just does not get old, and there’s another book of his up there called Living the 80/20 Principle. It might be Living the 80/20 Way, but he really walks the talk, and if you haven’t heard my podcast with Richard Koch, K-O-C-H, he’s also one of the best investors I’ve ever met. He’s had, I don’t know if he’s disclosed the actual amount, but he is — I know a lot of the world’s best investors and he is quietly way up there in the pantheon. So also a practitioner, he’s on the field, so worth paying attention to him.
All right, Of all the places I’ve traveled to, which have been the most breathtaking? There are so many. Queenstown, New Zealand at the right time of year I think is incredible, but you name it, you name it. I think Upstate New York honestly, The Gunks and that entire region where a lot of The Last of the Mohicans, the book certainly, I don’t know about the filming of the movie, but that takes place in that region. You can put me anywhere. I think so many places are beautiful. Take a couple of drawing classes. That makes things much more beautiful overall, like gesture drawing classes. Get some live nudes, keep it interesting. You may get an obese dude with his schwanz all over the place, so just so you know, it’s not automatically going to be a Victoria’s Secret model, but that’s okay. Can’t win them all.
All right. This is from Hilca. All right. I’ll abbreviate a bit because this was a long question. I’m only going to hit the first part here, but, “I’m a bootstrap founder in Replit’s Race to Revenue flying into San Francisco next week to pitch and network for a few days. If you were in my shoes and wanted to squeeze the maximum long-term leverage out of that short trip, what specific things would you do before, during, and after the event to, one, have the right conversations, and two, turn them into real opportunities rather than just great chats?” Okay. “Bonus, how has your bootstrapped versus VC changed lately for tech software?”
I think it’s just getting cheaper and cheaper to make software, so I think we’re going to see a lot of self-funded startups. Good news, barrier to entry technically, also economically is much lower. Bad news, the barrier to attention and actually getting people to use your stuff has never been higher. So there is that, but I do think that we’re going to see huge self-funded bootstrap companies, assuming that there aren’t just a few gods, AKA, super intelligence AI beasts that eat everything. All right.
But coming back to your question about network, this has also never been more true, I think, in real-life wins. Everything else is too crowded. So there is a talk I gave. I don’t think there’s any video. You don’t need video, frankly, but there was a talk I gave at South by Southwest, we’ll link to this in the show notes, but if you search my name and “How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time,” this will pop up. This is a talk I gave, who knows, seven years ago, 10 years ago at South by Southwest describing exactly what I did at South by Southwest 2007 when I launched The 4-Hour Workweek. And my entire budget for that book for launch and marketing and so on was spent on a few trips to, I think it was Web Summit, maybe something expo, Blog Expo, and then South by Southwest.
And there’s an approach described in that that I think is very, very effective, and it’s still surprising to me no matter how many times I talk about certain things, people just don’t follow it. If I’m like, “Hey…” If I wanted to shill some shitcoin and be like, “It’s going to the moon,” people would buy it immediately. But if I’m like, “Hey, here’s this thing. It actually takes some hard thinking and you need to plan for it, but it’s so much more effective long term than all of this hustle culture bullshit three-card monte that you want to do every day for 10 hours,” it’s like the upfront stuff really matters a lot.
In this case, I really recommend this talk, “How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time.” And that sounds like YouTube clickbait, but it’s actually true. A lot of friends, who are still friends of mine almost 20 years later, came from South by Southwest 2007, and a couple of those events I flew to. These were not just transactional interactions. And there is a way to approach this. You definitely need to study any sessions and attendees beforehand.
The good news is — good news, bad news — is that — have the right conversations? You don’t need to worry about. You have no idea how to have the right conversations. Your goal is to meet people who are hopefully world-class at what they do, simpatico with you, meaning you guys will actually get along. Could be extracurricular interests, side hobbies. It could just be the way the two of you are programmed. And there are other kind of general strategies, like talking to moderators of panels instead of the panelists. Everybody floods the panelists. The moderator gets orphaned. And in many cases, the moderator is just as impressive, and certainly the moderator knows everybody on the panel and lots of people on other panels and everywhere else. So there are a couple of tips in that that I would suggest checking out.
All right. Next question’s from Alex. “My company’s growing quickly. There are a lot of things that I need to be doing to hit escape velocity and be able to hire to manage at the top.” I think that’s manage. It says “mange,” but I assume you don’t want mange. “How do I choose what not to do?”
All right. Well, the good news is we already talked about a couple. So 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch, I would read that. The Effective Executive, absolutely read that, and it’s really going to give you frameworks for better discerning yourself what to do and not do. The other, depending on the scope, current scope and scale of the company and then the ambitions, especially if it’s venture-backed, is to read a book called The High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil, E-L-A-D G-I-L. Arguably, one of the best certainly, angel investors in the last few decades. I mean, his hit rate is absolutely insane. He’s invested in at least 40 unicorns, also a tremendous founder and operator in his own right. You can check him out. Has a pretty wicked biology background on top of everything else. So those are a few that come to mind.
And then maybe last but not least, it’s been a long time since I read it, but The Blue Ocean Strategy, probably worth checking out. Because if you choose to compete in a crowded category, you just have a harder road ahead of you. So creating a category of one in a sense, much like Cirque du Soleil back in the day. I’m expecting you’re not dealing with Eastern European acrobats, but you get the idea.
All right. This is from JC. “When exploring somatic or psychedelic healing spaces, what specific questions or observations do you use to quickly distinguish between a highly competent, grounded practitioner and a narcissistic guru?” Tough. A lot of good actors out there.
The first thing that comes to mind, and obviously with all the usual caveats, these things are powerful, you can definitely destabilize yourself, they’re illegal in most places, et cetera, so don’t break any laws, talk to your doctor, blah, blah, blah, but you could ask practitioners or you could ask someone who’s had two trips and they’re suddenly acting like a messiah proselytizing everybody. You could ask them the same question. But specific to clinicians or practitioners, ask them what types of adverse events they’ve seen. What are the most concerning adverse events that they’ve seen?
A simple way to put that is, how do you handle freakouts? What do you do when somebody really loses their shit? And if their answer is, “People don’t lose their shit. There aren’t any adverse events,” they’re either lying, delusional, or very inexperienced. Maybe all three. Those are not mutually exclusive. So I find that to be a pretty quick, necessary but not sufficient way to use a particular line of questioning to separate seasoned practitioners who are honest from those who are neither of those things.
Of course, do your own homework. I don’t think anyone who’s new to this, and by new, I mean, they have not been doing it more than a decade, ideally multiple decades, makes the fly list for me. It’s just become too goddamn trendy. So I would just say, probably unfairly, but I would be biased towards people who have been doing this since before Michael Pollan’s exceptional book, How to Change Your Mind. That might be the cutoff for before and after.
Let’s go back to live questions.
Yeah, Kumaré. Great documentary. Fred recommended. Everybody should watch Kumaré. K-U-M-A-R-E. I won’t ruin the surprise. Check that out. It’s a great film. I liked it so much that way back in the day, there was a startup called quarterly.co, which sent out boxes of goodies to people who subscribed, and I would hand-curate all these things that I really liked. It was kind of like a 5-Bullet Friday, but on a quarterly basis where you get all my favorite things shipped to you in a box. Very difficult business to make work. But at one point, this also dates me, it tells you how long ago it was, I reached out to the filmmaker who made Kumaré and we figured out a way to make it work that I would ship something like 3,000 USB drives, each of which contain this movie, to my subscribers. That was one of my items that I sent. All right.
All right. Lots of questions about conferences. I don’t have a particular take on conferences these days. I apologize. I’m not tracking it actively. There are always interesting meeting places in person, so I don’t believe that’s outdated. South by Southwest has gotten very large and quite corporate. Doesn’t mean you can’t have interesting interactions, but I would look for the events ideally that are fewer than a thousand people, fewer than 500 even better, if you can.
All right. It’s from Chris. If I “weren’t an author and podcaster, what other careers or industries would you have pursued?” I wanted to be a comic book penciller for ages, and still do. Some, actually, of my art pads right back over there where I love to do live gesture drawings, honestly. It helps me get out of my head. Somebody will be up there, they’ll hold a pose for like 60 seconds at a time and then change, or two minutes or five minutes at a time. You really can’t get in your head. There’s just not enough time for it. So I really, really enjoy that. But I wanted to be a comic book penciller and was an illustrator through a good part of college, helping to pay for expenses, things like that, illustrating books and so on. So the prospects then were not very attractive financially to do that, especially after my extended family paid a fortune on my education. So I shifted gears, but certainly felt a draw towards that.
“What kind of dog is Molly?” Molly is a rescue mutt. She is a Labrador, Bloodhound, and a Pit Bull mix. Then I’m sure there’s a Heinz 57 of other breeds in there.
In terms of training, honestly, I put up some basic training videos on YouTube if you just search my name and dog training, but the books that I have found most helpful are Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. I think everybody should read that. I think the back copy says something like, “Whether you want to stop your cat from jumping on the table, train your dog to do X, or convince your mother-in-law to stop nagging you, the instructions are all the same.” It’s something like that. It’s pretty funny. But Karen Pryor brought clicker training, audible cueing of that type, from marine mammal training, dolphins, orcas, et cetera, to dog training, or at least she’s one of the people responsible for that. Really fantastic book on behavioral change and shaping behavior overall.
And then listen to my podcast with Susan Garrett. Susan Garrett, G-A-R-R-E-T-T, is impressive because she has won, I want to say, I don’t know, five to 10 national dog agility championships, even though she herself is much older than most of the human competitors who have to kind of run alongside their dogs, and she really, really knows her stuff. So those would be, I would say, two places that you can start, two or three places. All right.
All right. Well, very kind comment here. “All of your works hold so many lessons on protection and nourishment, the root of being a father.” I feel that way. Thank you. My friends have been, my closest friends are like, “Yeah, you know what? You’re going to be a great dad.” So that’s part of the reason why I’m headed that way, even though word on the internet is that I’ve self-helped optimized myself into being single and miserable. That’s not true. So all those trolls can suck a dick. It makes me feel like I’m drinking tequila. Beware of those ketones, guys.
All right. More on my thoughts, this is from Cindy, on Enneagram, dating, and business peeps. I think Enneagram, look, it might be tech-friendly astrology, but I’ve seen it used at Shopify. I’ve seen it used at Dropbox. I’ve seen it used by more than one person to meet very good matches in intimate relationships, and I think there’s something to it. I mean, it is a tool. I would say that I try to be as tool-agnostic as possible, but I found the Enneagram, and there are other options, of course, as one good option for identifying your own blind spots for, say, your partner, and this could be someone you work with, a superior, subordinate, colleague, what your likely blind spots are, where you’re likely to be oversensitive, and therefore how you might want to handle things internally, like meetings, decision-making, conflict resolution. And that’s pretty interesting, and it has been tested on a pretty large scale within places like Shopify and Dropbox, unlike many other things.
So I find it interesting and the app that I mentioned earlier, tryapt.ai, code Tim50 for 50 percent off. I don’t get any affiliate kickback or anything. That’s just to save you guys some money. They incorporate the Enneagram, so, pretty interesting. I was telling them, I was like, “Hey, once you figure out this kind of business career mentoring side, you could very easily have a matchmaking capability built into it.” All right.
Quantum computing I find fascinating, amazing, and terrifying in equal measure. I have not done much in the quantum computing world. I have looked at maybe how certain cryptocurrencies are more prepared to be quantum-resistant than others. I’ve looked at stuff like that. I mean, not to mention all of our other fancy passwords that we currently use and security, but I have not really gone super deep. I feel like that’s an area, much like fusion, where you really want to be as technical as possible wading into those waters. I did a podcast with Steve Jurvetson ages ago, who was one of the first investors in D-Wave, but yeah, I mean, people are talking about AI, but man, when quantum actually hits —
And the joke has been with fusion, for instance, that fusion is always 30 years away. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Now, I could be proven wrong, but I also think that’s true with quantum where people are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that shit’s never going to work.” I’m like, “Ah, we’ll see.” Look at Google’s — excuse me. Look at Alphabet’s investments into quantum computing. It does raise some questions. Very interesting and also pretty scary to imagine what post-quantum looks like. All right.
Bear with. This is a good question. “How do you maintain so many friends despite your countercultural ideologies?” My friends and I, I think, have maybe implicitly, and this is maybe survivorship bias, but agreed that as long as you’re civil, you can disagree on all sorts of stuff, and I surround myself with friends who are going to push back. And this includes my oldest friends. This isn’t just like fancy friends that I’ve accumulated since the podcast or anything. This also applies to my oldest friends from high school and college.
So I would also say that most of my friends are pretty adaptable in light of new information, but if some — I don’t spend a lot of time around blowhards who are like, “I’m an X, I’m a Y. I’m a liberal and that person’s a neocon,” or, “I’m a conservative and that person’s a libtard,” or whatever. I don’t hang out with those folks because that, while I recognize that level of simplicity is appealing in a very chaotic, messy world, it’s not particularly an accurate reflection of reality and the gradations in between extremes and it’s certainly not very helpful unless you are playing the political game and that’s just a quiver, an arrow in the quiver that you have to use.
But otherwise, I just stay away from that stuff, which doesn’t mean I don’t — I certainly don’t steer away from controversy, but I ask myself, “Is this…” And this applies to watching news or social media.
And I know I’ve said this before, but I haven’t had any social media apps on my phone for probably three or four years. And the way I feel about the news in The 4-Hour Workweek is probably 10x more intense now in terms of my selective ignorance around mainlining “news.” Because if it’s not relevant to your life and if you are not going to make a decision differently or take action because of it, or maybe avoid action because of it, if there isn’t some kind of follow-up, you don’t need it is my general feeling.
And that’s going to become not just a, maybe, perceived luxury. I’ve been doing this for decades now, and I wouldn’t consider myself ineffective in the world, but it’s going to become a survival imperative. If you want to remain sane, you can’t doomscroll 24/7. There’s no way. You can’t doomscroll even a few hours a day. So I’ve seen some crazy, crazy physiological data from people on and off of social media, like blood tests and mental health assessments and so on, like HAM-D, CAPS-5, all this kind of stuff. It’s not good, guys.
So I’m getting up on my soapbox now, but yeah, and we were talking about that no-asshole rule. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they’re an asshole, but if someone is really throwing sharp elbows for no reason, it’s like they’re out. I very freely have an inflow and outflow of friends. There are certain friends who have remained in the inner sanctum, and I for them too because they reserve the same right, for years and decades and decades now, but it’s like — and people are allowed to have off days, but it’s like if someone has suddenly adopted being an asshole as part of their personality or identity in service of “keeping it real” or something, I don’t have time for that. All right.
Let’s see. Somebody asked about podcast interviewing a female screenwriter. Yeah, sure. Depends on the screenwriter, but was actually reaching out to two female screenwriters not too long ago. Don’t think I heard back. So what are you going to do? But let’s see.
Yes, this is a comment by Tim. “This sounds super simple, but my longest, latest relationships share a common sense of humor. Married for 33 years and that’s foundational. Same goes for oldest and longest-lasting friendships.” Yeah, 100 percent. Humor is just reflective of so many other qualities, and there’s a difference between humor and just like a kind of cynicism, quippy cynicism. I’m not so much into that, but if there’s a fast banter and people also are good at making fun of themselves, not all the time, but in the right dose, it generally bodes well.
What inspired my most recent blog post? @FugacityLabs. This is on “The Self-Help Trap: What I Learned from 20+ Years of ‘Optimizing’ Myself,” optimizing on quotation marks. Might’ve been improving. We split test a bunch of different headlines. But what prompted that is just seeing how, at worst, miserable, at best, constantly anxious or self-doubting so many people are in the self-help, self-development world, and I feel like we are all sitting on a slightly too-warm stovetop of baseline anxiety due to the technological tectonic plates that we’re dealing with, and certainly the kind of algo-driven personalized feeds that will just pour gasoline on your limbic system. And coming back to what we can control, it’s like, okay, sure, I can suggest people delete social media apps off of their phones. Realistically, most people are not going to do that. And there are some upsides. If you have the ability to moderate with these tools, you can stay connected with friends, et cetera, et cetera. Although I become more and more dubious of those defenses.
If people were able to, instead of just looking at screen time by app to see what actual usages, the use cases that they’re spending time on with a given app, I think that would be very illuminating. In any case, in lieu of that, what else can you do? What other levers can you pull? And I think the in-real-life relational component is the lever that makes all other levers easier in a way. So that’s what prompted writing that blog post. All right.
Very nice question. How can we help you, whether here or in the Discord book forum? Just try to be — go first with people, to quote Gabby Reece. I interviewed Gabby with Laird Hamilton, one of the kings of big-wave surfing, and I think her billboard answer was, “Go first. Just smile and say ‘hi’ first. Just do that.” I’d say helping the world to be just one percent brighter in some tiny way. Tip the breeze, like leave a $20 as a tip once a month somewhere. I know that’s not necessarily trivial money for folks, but it’s, like, give somebody an absurd tip. If they’re really good, really kind. Or it doesn’t even — like have a nice tea tip of a $10, right? Something like that. It doesn’t need to be money. You get the idea. All right.
Do I have any news to share about The No Book? Yeah. I’m going to put on my diving goggles and get back into it in the next probably month or two, pretty soon. I have a couple of other things, and I’ll have — I foresee at least one big announcement related to other projects coming up in the next few months, but going back in. Wish me luck.
Let’s see. Okay. Let me think about — this is a question from John. “Still love the 17 questions.” People can find those 17 questions. I think they’re in Tools of Titans, maybe Tribe of Mentors, but also on tim.blog. There’s a PDF with the 17 questions I most often ask myself.
“I’ve got one. A question that I would probably add is some version of ‘What is the most generous interpretation of this?'” I have been trained since a wee little lad to be pretty anger forward, let’s just say, if I were a wine. Very anger-forward. And the way that shows up, there are, to get fancy, myriad ways this shows up. One is that some days I can just feel like the entire world is conspiring to make me annoyed. And obviously that’s not true, right? But if it seems like someone is ripping you off, right? Which does happen. Most of the time, it’s probably just a misunderstanding.
So what’s the most generous interpretation? If you feel like your significant other did something to annoy you, or they always do X, they never do Y, like, okay, well, what’s the most generous interpretation of this? And I’m borrowing this from other people, but I feel like that is a very helpful question. And you could pair that with a bunch of other ones. I think Krista Tippett, great podcaster by the way, but Krista Tippett, one of the OGs, On Being, I believe, is her podcast. And I believe it’s Krista. I might be misattributing, but at least I’m not saying Oscar Wilde or Abe Lincoln that she said, “Anger is pain shown in public,” something like that. So you can apply that to yourself too if you’re a little anger-forward. And that doesn’t mean naval gaze, and you have to do 12 years of therapy to figure it out, but what is the most generous interpretation of this, whatever this might be? I would add that to my questions.
Let’s see. Okay. “If you go to a city and you have two days, what are your go-to activities?” Bicycle tour. Bike tour, for sure. One of the best ways to meet locals, figure out what’s fun that isn’t just a glossy photo posted on Instagram or a super expensive three Michelin star restaurant. Bicycle tour. Also hang out with — you don’t have to actually stay at a hostel, but go talk to the manager of a hostel or somebody who works the front desk and has been there for a couple of years. They’ll have lots of great recommendations.
Okay. Where does accumulating wealth fall on my scale of overall success? Zero. It’s like, look — I mean, a lot of wealthy people make a lot of excuses as to why they need to keep making money like, “Well, I could give money now, but if I compound at such and such, compound on an annual growth rate and da da da, and then I’ll give it away when I’m dead basically, or yada, yada, yada.” I just don’t buy it. Working dogs who have been chasing a rabbit around a track their whole lives in sixth gear get very good at chasing something at sixth gear, so they want to continue doing that.
I’m not holding myself up as some enlightened being. I’ve just had the benefit of seeing so many people crash and burn or just end up with this existential malaise because when they actually pause for a second, if they do pause, and sometimes life forces you to pause with a divorce or medical emergency. They have this maybe sense of hollowness or certainly not a sense of fulfillment. I’ve just seen that so many times. It’s like, “Accumulating wealth, who cares?” It’s just like, how many people can give you the full name of Alexander the Great? It’s like nobody’s going to remember you. Nobody’s going to remember me. Nobody’s going to remember us. It’s okay. It’s totally fine. It’s actually very freeing. It’s like everybody should read, I think it’s Percy Shelley, Ozymandias. I’ll let you guys — yeah, Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias.” Everybody should find this. O-Z-Y-M-A-N-D-I-A-S. So good. Everybody should read “Ozymandias.” All right.
All right, what do I prioritize instead of wealth? Relationships. And this sounds so trite, but it’s like there are people who say that and then you go visit them, and you’re like, “Holy shit, their kids hate them, and they never see their best friends.” Or their “best friends” are constantly a different roster because, as Arthur Brooks would put it, “They’re deal friends, not real friends,” right?
But I mean, the past year review really helps to make this point for me over and over again. And if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, just search my name and “past year review.” But thinking about it’s like, okay, who are the 10 most important people in your life? Did you spend as much time as you would like to spend with them last year? If the answer’s no, invest in those 10 before you invest in anyone else, right? And track the results. Then you look back, and look at the number of peak positive experiences, energetically, emotionally, whatever it is, over that quarter, that year. It’s not something you have to do all the time. And you’re like, “Oh, yeah, doubling down on those 10 really made my year so much better. Blocking out time with those people in advance made it so much better. Okay, let’s do more of that.” So yeah, that’s about it. Yeah. It might have been Tara Brach who talked about the angers, fear on the outside. Who knows? Some smart person who’s a lot chiller than I am said that.
All right, David, here we go. “As a soon-to-be father, I’m thinking a lot about parenthood. If you started a family, what would be the top three values or lessons you’d hope to instill in your children?”
I have thought about this a lot and I’ve been able to watch what has worked and what has not worked. I think optimism, resourcefulness, and lots of physical activity. Lots of physical activity. You got to run that dog. A tired dog is a happy dog. So yeah, optimism. I think Mike Maples Jr. was the first person who really underscored this. He has a bunch of kids who have turned out well. Optimism’s kind of number one. It’s like the mother quality that enables all else.
Resourcefulness, I would say, I think Maya Angelou actually said courage is sort of the mother quality because everything else at its breaking point depends on it. So I had something which is like no failure only feedback. Just encouraging them to try stuff. Positive reinforcement. Try stuff, try stuff. I mean, this applies to dog training too, but some of my friends who have never had dogs get all pissed off and get their knickers in a twist when I compare kids to dogs. I know they’re not the same, but you know what? Shaping behavior is pretty similar across mammals. Anyway, optimism, courage/try a bunch of shit, it’s fine. It’s just feedback. And then resourcefulness. And I think if you have optimism and you’re willing to try a bunch of stuff, AKA, use courage in certain ways, then I think resourcefulness is a byproduct of that. So those would be the things I would focus on, and lots and lots and lots and lots of physical activity, together as a family, right?
Okay. Let’s see. Rachel, “Thought I’d throw out an odd question this time. Have you ever been on a treasure hunt or geocache? What’s the weirdest, coolest, most unexpected thing you’ve found out in the wilderness? Could be something natural or unnatural.”
Well, a black bear stole a leg from my elk last year. That was pretty annoying. And we found it chewed into all sorts of mangled contortions. That was a bummer. I don’t want to have sloppy seconds after a bear has gotten into your elk leg, just pro-tip. I’ve been on treasure hunts and geo cashes.
I would say the thing that comes to mind, which is somewhat unrelated to your question, is that if people are like, “What’s the most interesting way you’ve lost money?” Because I do get my face ripped off then and again, part of the early stage investing game. I invested in treasure hunters, very famous treasure hunters who were searching for sunken Spanish galleons full of gold bars and all sorts of stuff. And ultimately, one of the people involved just absconded with all of the investor money, and it turned into this like, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? fucking debacle, but makes for a story. So once again, don’t bet money you cannot afford to lose, especially when it involves Spanish galleons.
Oh, good lordy, lordy, lordy. Let’s see. This is coming back to encoding. Cindy. “You and Jim Collins talked about encoding.” This is a term that Jim uses, which is somewhat comparable to strengths, like what are your innate strengths, right? So we spoke about that. “I’d love if you’d go deeper on the topic, share more about how it resonated with you personally and give additional practical advice on how people currently locked into work or career situations can progress with a plan towards living fully within their encoded selves.”
I find that asking your best friends, could be family members, could also be employees. 360 reviews can be very brutal. You can listen to my conversation with Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb about how brutal that can be. It doesn’t have to be brutal, though. I would say that a couple of questions come up that I have asked close friends, some of my best friends, people who know me really well. When have you seen me at my best, or when do you see me at my best? But it’s good to have practical examples or concrete examples from the past, not just like, “When you tend to do this, you tend to do that.” It’s like, “No, give me an example. When have you seen me at my best? When have you seen me at my worst? What stories or memories come to mind?” Then, “What is easier for me than for other people? What do you see in me that I find easier than most people?”
Jim didn’t like that question, because he wanted it all to be internally, individually referenced, but this is how I do it. I actually do find that aspect helpful, because then you’re not only finding strengths, you’re finding strengths that allow you to potentially compete. And I just like having both, if I can. And then you could ask you to what — this is very closely related to the last one, but, “What strength or ability do I discount in myself?”
There’s certain things. A friend of mine was making a point about something related to startups recently. And I was like, “Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t strike me as particularly special because A, B, and C.” And he’s like, “That’s the problem.” He’s like, “You can’t see it because you’re the fish swimming in the water.” And I was like, “Huh, okay.” And then I bounced it off a few other people, and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s like a fucking weird superpower of yours, and I don’t understand it.” And I was like, “Oh, never really realized.” So, “What strengths or ability do I discount on myself?” This is you using that question for somebody else, or not harness, right? It could be discounting, could just be like, “What strength or ability am I not using that I have?”
And one question that can infer a lot of the answers to these others also is if I weren’t doing X, whatever your current gig is, like, “What could you see me doing?” Right? And I feel like if you ask enough people who know you well enough and who aren’t going to bullshit you, who will also be willing to answer questions about your weaknesses, right? In other words, example given, “When have you seen me at my worst?” If they can’t answer that, they’re not going to give you fully candid advice. So I would say those are a few of the approaches that I’ve used, and I’ve found them very helpful.
Geocaching. A lot of people here into geocaching. Yeah, I mean, sure, it’d be fun. I’ve also dreamed about doing orienteering courses, which I think could be super, super fascinating.
This is the last question. I think it’s a good one to end on. “Is courage external or internal? How do you teach it to kids?”
I think courage is learned. You have to practice it. And if you’re not afraid, it’s not courage, right? If someone’s fearless, they’re, by definition, not using courage. You have to be afraid of something. So you can edge yourself, and you can edge kids into that, right? It’s not like, “Hey, you’ve never been in the water before. Let’s take you up to do cliff diving.” It’s like, no, no. Yeah. I mean, that’s unhelpful fear with severe consequences. It’s like you can stare-step into it.
But I don’t think courage is a decision. I don’t think courage is something you get from reading a book. I don’t think courage is something that you can develop abstractly. I think you have to prove to yourself that you have it, and the only way your subconscious will believe it is if you are actually doing things that are uncomfortable. That’s it, which means it is learnable.
And there may be some set point that contributes to it in one way or another, right? If you’re Alex Honnold, and your amygdala is basically asleep, it’s like, “Okay, well, right, that explains a few things.” But it’s also something that you can very sequentially sort of expose yourself to, just like you would to build a tan or to get stronger in the gym. I think it’s through action, right? It’s like progressive resistance that you develop courage, and it’s very — I’ve seen my friends do this with their kids and this is also why the physical activity is very, very helpful to prove to kids, or help them prove to themselves that they can do hard things, right? Like, okay, sure. You could wait until they can sit down with calculus and try to figure that out. Or you could be like, “Yeah, that thing that you’re nervous about doing,” like hitting a baseball, climbing a whatever, 5’9″ in an indoor climbing gym. “Yeah, okay. Well, let’s get after it.”
All right. I will stop there guys. I appreciate, somebody asked, “When is Alex Honnold coming on the podcast?” I had him on about six months before he free soloed El Cap. So if you want to listen to Alex Honnold before he got media-polished, my podcast is a good way to start. Great guy, but it was before he got polished for prime time. And that’s about it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, appreciate you taking the time, and thanks for all the great questions. And be safe out there. Be just a bit kinder than is necessary. To others, yes, but to yourself also. Go first. Smile. Say, “Hi.” Thanks, everybody.
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2026-03-26 21:20:07
Welcome back to another in-between-isode, with one of my favorite formats: the good old-fashioned Q&A.
Please enjoy!
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Want to hear my case for being a world-class learner over a specialist? In the last Q&A, I shared my AI workflow for research, my current supplement protocol, lessons learned recovering from surgery, why I’ve changed my mind about intermittent fasting, Austin vs. San Francisco for startups, philanthropy insights, the origin story of this podcast, and much more.
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2026-03-19 13:51:30
Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging Random Show episode, recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose! We cover our recent Zen meditation retreat with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, the fascinating science of vagus nerve stimulation, my recent back pain breakthrough, balance-training tools, tendon-strengthening protocols from Swedish rock climber Emil Abrahamsson, the emerging research on photobiomodulation, urolithin A supplementation, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol for cognitive longevity, podcast recommendations, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird feeder obsession, and much more.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
Legal conditions/copyright information
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Kevin Rose: Okay, ready?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wait, wait. So we’re rolling?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, we’re rolling.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Three, two, one.
[CHIME]
It feels, actually, really good.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like my bowl is a little smaller than yours.
Kevin Rose: That’s always been the case.
Tim Ferriss: You want to kick it off?
Kevin Rose: Hello, friends and family, colleagues. That was amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Very prominent ejaculation projection show.
Kevin Rose: Welcome to The Random Show.
Tim Ferriss: Welcome, folks, to another episode of The Random Show.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Couch audition edition.
Kevin Rose: That’s right. ADU back-of-my-place edition.
Tim Ferriss: Why do we have these fancy bowls?
Kevin Rose: So this is —
Tim Ferriss: For people not looking, these are meditation bowls.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Got a bunch of script. Presumably that’s Tibetan or Sanskrit or something.
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: And you have a little corner, but that’s not the bad corner. That’s the Zen corner.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is Zen corner. Would you say bad corner?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you don’t need to put kids in the bad corner.
Kevin Rose: Did you used to have to do that as a kid?
Tim Ferriss: In school, I got sent to the bad table all the time.
Kevin Rose: Oh, there was a table.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. And then the teacher in kindergarten sent me to the bad table with a bunch of other kids who were really bad, and then forgot that she had decided it was the bad table and just left us at the bad table for the entire year.
Kevin Rose: And so she —
Tim Ferriss: It might explain a lot of psychological issues —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: — that I’ve carried with me.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So this is not the bad table. This is the meditation area. And I have bowls over here that I just use. I just like the sound of a good — I mean, you heard that. Hopefully, it came through and didn’t distort the mic, but a well-rung bowl — it sets the tone for the beginning of the meditation and then also at the very end.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also just perfect for a podcast in Southern California.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Nice to be in person.
Kevin Rose: It plays well in the whole, yes, SoCal environment. There’s bowls per capita out here and crystal shops are very high.
Tim Ferriss: High density. High density, man.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Another beautiful day in SoCal.
Kevin Rose: Beautiful day.
Tim Ferriss: Been doing a lot of walking. Where should we start off with? We’ve got tons.
Kevin Rose: We just came back from our retreat.
Tim Ferriss: We did. We did. You want to describe the format?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we’ve done a couple of these retreats. This is the second one where it’s just a small group of people that are interested in meditation and that want to go a little bit deeper in the world of Zen. You and I both talked about The Way and Henry Shukman a ton. The Way being his app. And Henry’s just a great leader, great Zen master. And it was accompanied by Valerie, another Zen master.
Tim Ferriss: This is in Mountain Cloud.
Kevin Rose: Mountain Cloud Zen Center.
Tim Ferriss: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we flew out there, small group, got together. And it’s kind of like if a proper Zen retreat is like 5:30 cushion in the morning and then you’re off at 7:00 p.m. and it’s hardcore, like no talking, shitty food. This was not that. We had a good chef that was there and we were allowed to ask questions in between sits. The sits were purposely time bound to call it maximum of 25 minutes and then a walking meditation, then another 25 minutes that was like the max.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me interject just so we don’t get into hyper bougie territory too fast. So the chef was not our chef. He’s actually, as I remember, this is a former, I think, James Beard award winner who decided to forego the accolades and the attention.
Kevin Rose: How is that less bougie than what I was going to say?
Tim Ferriss: Well, you said we had a nice chef and people might assume that we’re bringing in a chef. This is a chef who actually —
Kevin Rose: He lives there locally.
Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s the point I’m making. He lives at the Zen Center and has chosen a life of simplicity working with local ingredients and so on. And he is also normally there. It’s not like we had our own dedicated —
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — chef.
Kevin Rose: That’s right. That’s one of the things.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not in my house. I ate venison jerky sticks most of the time. Lentils out of a can still stick.
Kevin Rose: And you chugged my freaking ketones about five minutes ago. Tim just goes to my fridge and he’s like, “Okay, what are you up to?”
Tim Ferriss: I want to see what Kevin’s up to. I want to see the evidence.
Kevin Rose: Okay, we’ve got a little something gluten here. We got some Repatha.
Tim Ferriss: A little Repatha, what else do you have?
Kevin Rose: He’s like, “Oh, ketones.” And he starts chucking my ketone esters.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I unwrapped it and I was like, “I probably should ask if I can drink this, but I’m guessing this has been in there for weeks.”
Kevin Rose: Dude, that stuff that you drank is like — so they make several versions of that. That’s like the full on — F16 isn’t the latest fighter jet. Whatever the Gen 5 fighter jet is, F22.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the highest intensity. This is the deltaG brand ketone monoester, which is BHB, which is kind of what you want, bound with something called 1,3-butanediol, which I will say if you see that on the ingredient list of your supplement for exogenous ketones, treat it like a shot of tequila. You really want to use it in moderation. There’s mounting evidence that it’s pretty unhealthy for your liver. So just use in moderation in terms of ketone supplementation. But hey, right before a podcast —
Kevin Rose: By the way, I’m —
Tim Ferriss: — it’s a great time for me to take like 15 grams. I will not do 30 because, and I talked to you, she’ll probably come up again, our mutual friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick about this. I don’t think I’m talking out of school here, but when you take, when I take, and this is true for her as well, and I suspect other people, the full 30, the entire shot, rather than decreasing anxiety, it actually, for me, spikes it. And I think that could be related to a very rapid rise and then trough afterwards. But who knows? The point is, keep it moderate.
Kevin Rose: You’re the first person to tell me that it impacts liver function. And I have more often than not had elevated liver enzymes, surprise surprise on the whole drinking front typically, but it’s something I watch. And when did you hear about that? Because I’d never heard that could be the case with ketones.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I, fortunately, by virtue of doing the podcast and also being incredibly interested in science, interact with a lot of researchers, so I get to have chats with them once I get to know them better about pre-publication data. Studies that are underway, and they never want to talk about them publicly because you have to check all the boxes, and science is also very much about not fooling yourself when you make a certain hypothesis. But the first whispers of this were from, and still are, from animal models, where you can basically dose mice with 1,3-butanediol and give them the equivalent of fatty liver disease.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not good. And I’m sure I’m oversimplifying that.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: The point is treat it like ethanol. Treat it like not even tequila, moonshine, like you’re drinking moonshine and you wouldn’t want to do that every day.
Kevin Rose: It tastes like moonshine.
Tim Ferriss: Or cough syrup. Cough syrup moonshine.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that is just to say, I think they still think there’s a time and a place for it. I’ve been experimenting with other versions like ketone salts, Dominic D’Agostino. He’s also the co-author in some of the papers that are describing this.
Kevin Rose: He tried bath salts for a while too. That was a very odd version of Tim that came out.
Tim Ferriss: If it’s good for McAfee.
Kevin Rose: Just eating the flesh off of us.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Eating people and eating —
Kevin Rose: Wasn’t that a thing that happens?
Tim Ferriss: — in the median in Florida. It’s always a Florida man.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So Florida man, duh-duh-duh. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Eats another person. Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Shooting someone’s face off after bath salts. Stay away from bath salts, kids. So yeah, I came in nice and fully loaded today.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Awesome. Well, I am glad that you’re feeling better because you also might not have made today.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a sidebar. I may have had a glancing blow of eggplant to which I’m deathly allergic and woke up in the middle of the night, incredibly sick last night. So I’m glad I’m here.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I brought my EpiPen for dinner later.
Kevin Rose: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Learned my lesson. Bring your backup.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the retreat, let’s finish that off real quick.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So we got together. What did you learn this time around? Because we’ve done this twice. You’ve dabbled in the world of Zen. You’ve always said, correct me if I’m wrong, but meditation’s been a hard thing for you typically. Where are you now with your practice?
Tim Ferriss: Well, what I would say is, first thing, speaking as a very much still a novice on any level, I would say that meditation is like sports or exercise. “Do you like exercise?” Well, what kind of exercise? Meditation, there’s so many different ways to meditate or explore mindfulness. There’s the Vipassana approach. There’s Transcendental Meditation. There’s Zen, which is very much its own thing, and you know more about that than I do.
But what I do find helpful about the retreats is you can describe what is going on when you’re sitting still with your eyes closed, trying to focus on something, in the case of, say, the breath, or trying to just observe whatever that comes up. And the feedback that you get from someone like Henry or Valerie, where you can do a 25-minute sit and then take a short break, talk about it, and they can say, “Well, given that you experienced this, this, maybe you had restlessness. Maybe you had, in my case, this sort of planning compulsion.” So rather than memories or fantasies about who knows what, not necessarily people can run wild with that, but I default to plans, like things I need to do.
And it’s like, okay, well, if that’s coming up, then Henry might say, “Why don’t you try in the next sit, which we’re going to do in 10 minutes or five minutes, A, B, or C?” And then you do it and you provide feedback. And so you’re able to really polish the stone moving forward. And similar, I suppose, to a lot of what we might call transcendental experiences, which sounds fancy, but it’s really just perhaps not fixating on the self or interrogating what this thing is that we call the self, which you can do through meditation. You can also do it with, or maybe you’re forced to do it in some cases with psychedelic experiences or other things, breath work.
When I was there at the retreat, you might remember this, I was getting very frustrated and I was like, “Where’s all this frustration coming from?” And while I was there, I was like, “I don’t know how much I’m getting out of this right now.” But when I got back to “real life” in Austin, I had like three to five days of this just kind of blissful, calm attention where I was able to get everything done. I need to get it done. There was no rushing, there was no looping in any kind of future tripping. And I was like, “Well, that’s very interesting.”
And it also holds true for, say, breath work, psychedelics. There are many different things that you could look at. And interestingly, maybe this is one way to think of it. I mean, in a sense, there are a lot of parallels between different methods for entering what people might consider a trance state. And I don’t think meditation is exempt from that, depending on what it is. But if it’s a concentration practice, it’s like for sure, you’re using a mantra or you’re using something you’re repeating in the case of TM in the same way that you might use rhythmic drumming and you can go some pretty weird places and then you come out of it, you’re like, “I don’t know what to make of that. “
And sometimes the payoff is what you notice in the next unfolding week or two or three or whatever the duration might be.
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: So that was very invigorating for me. And also Henry at one point used a prompt in response to, I’ll give a great — this is a real world example of something that happened to me, something I experienced in a sit and then Henry’s response, right? So I use The Way all the time, full disclosure, we’re both involved with it. I mean, it’s really because —
Kevin Rose: Henry’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: — more than anything else, it’s just I think it’s good for humanity and people to learn from somebody who is really deliberate about layering on progressive skills that you can take outside of the meditation. But one of the practices is labeling. So if, and there are a million different ways to do this, but let’s just say talk comes up in the mind and you label it radio or talking. And then if some kind of video comes up in the mind, images, you’re imagining something or planning something or remembering something, “okay, that’s video” and so on and so forth.
But for me, as someone with very well-established OCD, I can just end up being like, radio, radio, radio, video, radio, radio, radio. And it turns into, instead of a helpful thing, a very interruptive, stressful thing. And at that point in the retreat, clear — it was three to four days, something like that. It was very short. Henry said, “Okay,” well, he moved into the next sit and he said, “Just be still. Just be still. That’s it. That is the focus. Just sit still.” Did that for two consecutive sits. I just focused on that and it was remarkable how much everything calmed down. I was like, “Okay.”
Well, just like exercise, some people, sure, can go to the gym and do full sprinting workouts on an incline treadmill. Not everybody can do that. And other folks are well-suited to yoga. Some people are well-suited to different types of lifting, et cetera. And everybody should probably spend a little bit of time in each of those compartments if they can, but it’s not like everyone is equally suited, for instance, in my case, to the open monitoring stuff, like, well, just sit there and notice all the things that come up.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I came out of the retreat thinking, you know what? Something along the lines of Transcendental Meditation, not necessarily with that branding, but using a koan, using “Just be still” as a concentration practice that I repeat really gives me a lot of payoff. If I just sit still for 10 to 20 minutes, twice a day — did I tell you my theory on this?
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: So one of my theories, because I’ve been going super deep on bioelectric medicine and different ways of using electricity in place of pills, basically, and medications, which I think is really the next frontier in a million different ways. People check out Michael Levin at Tufts and some of the crazy stuff he’s able to do. But related to meditation, I did this deep dive with someone named Kevin Tracey, who’s a very credible scientist, very widely cited, helped discover and explore a lot related to TNF alpha and all sorts of things.
And he is incredibly knowledgeable of vagus nerve stimulation, not the bogus bullshit kind, which is 99.9 percent of what you see on the internet, but using, say, implants the size of an omega-3 capsule in the neck, which is where the vagus nerves run. It’s really like two transcontinental cables running down either side of the neck. Each one has about 100,000 fibers. And if you put an implant in that’s giving continuous stimulation on and off, on and off, it’s not 24/7, it’s incredibly effective for things like rheumatoid arthritis. And actually it was FDA approved. It was on the cover of The New York Times —
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: — the day that I interviewed him. And that raises the question, how? Why? What’s going on? And it just so happens when you stimulate the vagus nerve, you activate something called the inflammatory reflex and you can in effect prevent damaging cytokine storms, decrease systemic inflammation of all different types. That word inflammation is kind of an umbrella term for a million different things.
And I remember chatting with one of my friends who’s a professor, he was using the 10% Happier app by Dan Harris, and he was meditating twice a day. And then after like one or two weeks, he’s like all of his aches, which were debilitating. He had a lot of musculoskeletal issues. They just went away. And one way people might try to explain that as like, “Well, you’re becoming more present to your feelings and maybe it was psychosomatic.” But I think it might actually be when you sit still and you inherently end up breathing rhythmically, because you can also stimulate your vagus nerve with say box breathing and other things, that you do that twice a day. If you were to use an implant or let’s just say either ear-based or neck-based stimulation of the vagus nerve, guess how long it lasts? Roughly 12 hours. So you do it twice a day, you’re getting full coverage.
Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.
Tim Ferriss: And so if you’re getting full coverage, and there’s a lot more to it, I won’t dig too deep right now. If you’re getting twice a day, vagus nerve stimulation from sitting and focusing on breathing, even if you don’t realize that you’re entraining your breathing, I think that might have explanatory power for some of the benefits people see from meditation.
Kevin Rose: That’s fascinating. So I bought one of the vagus nerve stimulators that hooks onto my ear. Have you seen that one? And you feel that this little tiny pulse of current that’s happening.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So people who are not watching this may have trouble envisioning this, but I’m actually in communication with a couple of scientists in Scandinavia. I don’t want to dox this guy because I don’t think he’s public with it yet, but there are two ways currently, non-invasively, to stimulate the vagus nerve that are commonly known. One is the neck where you really press some type of device. There are a number of them out there, mostly used for migraines or cluster headaches, and it’s pretty unpleasant. You stimulate the neck and it actuates superficial muscles in your face and it pulls your face down. And I used one of those for probably four to six weeks. Didn’t see any systemic benefits.
A friend of mine doubled his HRV using one of those devices. He had some, I’m not going to call it PTSD, but he had some overactive sympathetic drive and the vagus nerve stimulation is associated with the rest and digest parasympathetic.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Which is also why right now I stimulate it before bed, five minutes twice a day.
Kevin Rose: I know you do.
Tim Ferriss: For the ear — Jesus Christ.
Kevin Rose: No, I’m talking about the device.
Tim Ferriss: For the ear, there’s something called the cymba concha. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And people can see most of the research —
Kevin Rose: This little bit right here?
Tim Ferriss: Most right here.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And you can look this up online. You kind of want the portion of the cymba concha that is closer to your sideburns, let’s say.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And then you need another piece that is grounding and/or completing the circuit, and that’s got to be touching your skin. The contact point is incredibly important.
Kevin Rose: Are there any of these that you like that are consumer available? Because a lot of this stuff you mentioned —
Tim Ferriss: You can DIY it with components off of Amazon and maybe I’ll make that available to folks. The reason I hesitate to do that is that it’s easy to get wrong and you can — I just don’t want to be responsible for people trying to put current through their heads. There are a lot of people who DIY trying to do TMS and stuff.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is the one I —
Tim Ferriss: Or TDCS and they reverse polarity. And you can fry your brain, not with the vagus nerve stuff necessarily, but you got to be really careful with stimulation.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of this one, Nuropod?
Tim Ferriss: Uh-uh. I haven’t seen it.
Kevin Rose: I mean, it’s basically, if you look at who’s involved on the scientist level, it’s crazy. The number of —
Tim Ferriss: N-U-R-O-P-O-D. Let me see the world’s-most studied wearable vagus nerve stimulation.
Kevin Rose: A hundred plus international, UCLA did a study there, Penn —
Tim Ferriss: Okay. That’s interesting. I’d have to check it out.
Kevin Rose: It’s interesting, but I will say, just to be honest with people —
Tim Ferriss: Have you noticed anything?
Kevin Rose: I’ve owned this thing for about a year and a half. I did it for about two weeks for 30 minutes a day and I didn’t notice anything.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m looking at — it’s hard for me to see the placement on the earpiece. The placement is very, very, very specific.
Kevin Rose: It clips right here to this lobe right here.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I don’t think that’s in the right place.
Kevin Rose: But you feel a little ticky, ticky, tick, like shock, almost.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t think you’re — look, this is my first time seeing it, but I don’t think you’re going to be necessarily hitting as many fibers as you would want if that’s the placement.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But who knows? Look, a lot of fancy names on the website, maybe I’ll take a look at it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s worth it. You can borrow mine, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Because I want something I can recommend to people.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I can’t recommend this because it’s not done anything for me. But when I was doing the research for the most — this one, they’ve clearly paid for studies to be done. Obviously, that’s a huge grain of salt because who’s doing the studies and what are their biases and whatnot. But I’ll let you borrow mine and see if it does anything for you. It is a $900 device, which is like, “Shit. That’s a lot of money to spend.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m using a prototype of one from Scandinavia right now. On Amazon, look, I’m sure people can find some instructions for this. You can DIY something for like 20 to $25 worth of components on Amazon. It is not hard.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just a small tense unit.
Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s do that.
Tim Ferriss: Cables, the placement is very challenging to get right. And I did not see much in terms of results from me, even with a lot of professional guidance using that.
Kevin Rose: I want to tell you about something related.
Tim Ferriss: But can I stop for a second?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, please.
Tim Ferriss: Try breathing.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Do box breathing.
Kevin Rose: So that’s what this is?
Tim Ferriss: Or something like that. Do that twice a day.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: This is why also in The Great Nerve, which is a book written by Kevin Tracey, it’s a great book. There’s an extended chapter about Wim Hof. And Wim Hof is a very controversial figure, but well-known for breath work. And you see some of the same effects in terms of controlling immune response so that it is not excessive with respect to various types of cytokines and so on. You can do it with breath work. So what are we looking at?
Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of HeartMath?
Tim Ferriss: I have heard of HeartMath. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I went to a little mini retreat where they were doing a bunch of different modalities in terms of different therapies and things to just really let you be the best version of yourself. And one of the things that they did was they gave you a HeartMath device and they had a whole class on it. And I was like, “Yeah, I heard of that thing before. I never tried it.”
And so I hooked it up to my ear and it measures your HRV, but what blew my mind was that the app, once you launch it, it’s like, “Follow this box breathing and we’re going to watch…” You get to watch your HRV in real time. And dude, when I followed it, just as it was telling me what to do, the HRV just shut up. And then I would try and trick it and I’d be like, I’d follow up, but I’d think of something really stressful and my HRV would go down.
So I’m telling you, this is the coolest device I have owned in a while and you lock into this coherence mode as you do this breathing and it’s pretty awesome. It’s 250 bucks. I’m not an investor or anything, but heartmath.com.
Tim Ferriss: Heartmath.com. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And 60-day money back guarantee. Well, I want to say that because I hate recommending stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Affiliate code Kevin 40 percent.
Kevin Rose: Exactly. TimTim, 20 percent off. I hate recommending stuff when people spend their money, but I will say this with the one thing that I was really-
Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard good things about HeartMath. I don’t know who’s involved. I did, maybe you didn’t know this, for a period of time, maybe it was about three months I did training for this specifically, I think it was before any retail options were available, with a doctor named Leah Lagos, who has a book about this. And we actually in real time would do a video call and identify what type of breathing specifically would have, in real time, the biggest impact on HRV.
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: And there is something to this. There’s definitely something to this. I can’t speak to HeartMath, but I’ve heard of it before. So don’t worry about the device for stimulation, the point being try meditating twice a day for 10 to 20 minutes. And if you’re like, “Ugh, meditating, God, I’m allergic to that word because it gets used so much,” Try breathing. Use HeartMath or something else. There’s not a whole lot you need to worry about. Andy Weil has some very good breathing exercises.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 4-7-8. Yeah. So I have box breathing and 4-7-8 on my app Oak that’s still in the App Store and it’s 100 percent free. There’s no way you have to pay for anything on the app. So if you just Google Oak, you can find it. And it has like six different breathing techniques on there you can do.
Tim Ferriss: I think here’s a hypothesis-slash-bet. I think that if it hasn’t been demonstrated already, I haven’t done a full lit search for this, I think there are breathing patterns, if you repeat them in the morning and at night, twice a day, roughly 12 hours apart for like 10 to 20 minutes, that you will see a lot of benefits for things like chronic pain.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I think it is — I really feel very confidently. So it’s exciting.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Sweet.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what else you’ve got.
Kevin Rose I’ve got crazy things. I mean, I just had my birthday a few weeks ago, which is crazy because I’m marching towards 50 really quick.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Kevin Rose: And so are you.
Tim Ferriss: Getting dragged through the —
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: — doorway. With your fingernails leaving lines on the linoleum.
Kevin Rose: It’s really scary. Well, what’s crazy is, dude — okay, so when Tim and I first started hanging out, whatever, 15 years ago, 17 years ago, maybe 20, I don’t even know how long it’s been.
Tim Ferriss: It must be close to 20 years ago.
Kevin Rose: Close to 20 years ago, every time you walk into Tim’s house, he tackles you with some kind of new jiu-jitsu move to take you down. And in the last three years, he’s been carrying a ball for his lower back where he’s like, “I can’t move.” And it’s like old man Tim has appeared and that old Tim that would tackle you with the jiu-jitsu move is gone.
Tim Ferriss: The gentle art, not so gentle it turns out.
Kevin Rose: But I know one of the things that I want to really focus on for this next decade is balance. Balance obviously is such a key thing and it’s the number one way that people as they get older in their 60s, 70s, and beyond are actually permanently injured is by falling and breaking a hip and things like that. So two things to show off.
Tim Ferriss: Incredible increase in risk, all-cause mortality if you’re older and you break a hip.
Kevin Rose: Yes. It turns out breaking hips are not good. So check this out. This one right here I’ve had for a while.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t fall on your ringing bowl.
Kevin Rose: So can you imagine? I smashed my face on the ringing bowl. So I’m going to show you how this works.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, geez.
Kevin Rose: Have you used this before?
Tim Ferriss: I have. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so are you good at these or no?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, I feel like a parent watching after you.
Kevin Rose: Move this. All right, how well can you do the balance boards?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t done it in a long time. There’s one called the Indo Board, which I have and I’ve fucked around with it. I don’t think today is the day.
Kevin Rose: Well, so let’s check this out. So five minutes a day, there was some research that was done around people with ADHD and it dramatically improved their symptoms, which I have a ton of.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can’t really —
Kevin Rose: But I want to know if you can do this. I want to see if you can do these squats.
Tim Ferriss: You have to pay attention if you’re on this thing.
Kevin Rose: Could you do these?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. Never tried it.
Kevin Rose: And then the tippy-toes. So I do 50 squats like this.
Tim Ferriss: I should also point out he has some history as a skateboarder.
Kevin Rose: I do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which helps.
Kevin Rose: Let’s see, let’s see, Tim —
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I’m going to —
Kevin Rose: You’ll be okay. I’ll hold your hand when you go up. Come on, just give it a shot for a second.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you some Depends. I’ll give you some Depends and give you a walker so you can get up there.
Fuck, man.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So one foot there.
Tim Ferriss: Yep. I got it.
Kevin Rose: Jesus. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, fuck. Hold on.
Kevin Rose: There you go. It’s got blockers, so you won’t slide off the end.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Lean hard right, harder on the right foot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like —
Kevin Rose: It’s hard, isn’t it?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m nervous about falling over.
Kevin Rose: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: There we go.
Kevin Rose: Now the squats.
Tim Ferriss: This is kind of like slackboarding where you need a couple of days to get your nervous system in order.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing how your nervous system adapts to it?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s really —
Tim Ferriss: There’s a crazy video people should check out. I think maybe it’s not online. There’s a guy named Jerzy Gregorek, had on the podcast, he’s got to be 70 something right now, but he was 67. He could stand on one of these at 67 with a fully loaded barbell with like 150, 200 pounds. He weighs probably 130 and he could do a perfect form Olympic snatch —
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: — landing with ass to heels and then stand back up and do repetitions.
Kevin Rose: So dude, when I was just in Japan last week —
Tim Ferriss: All right, there we go. That’s enough.
Kevin Rose: When I was just in Japan last week, I was out there and I was at this event. Whoops. I was at this friend’s birthday party that Tony Hawk’s also friends with. So I was hanging with Tony and he’s like — last time I saw Tony, I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” Because —
Tim Ferriss: Tony Hawk, one of the most legendary skateboarders of all time, for people who don’t know.
Kevin Rose: People definitely know who Tony Hawk is, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You might be surprised.
Kevin Rose: I mean, a lot of people definitely know.
Tim Ferriss: A lot of people know who Tony Hawk is.
Kevin Rose: So Tony —
Tim Ferriss: For the youngsters.
Kevin Rose: Last time I saw him, he had a cane and I was like, this was probably like eight months ago or whatever. And I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” And he’s like, “I just got a couple screws put into my hip.” And he had this injury and I was like, “Holy shit, man.” In my head, I’m like, “Oh, the fucking legend.” Pushing himself in his 50s to do — he’s still doing whatever, 720s on the half pipe in his mid 50s. Fucking crazy.
And I saw him up at Hokkaido and we’re going snowboarding, he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going boarding today.” He has no cane, no nothing. And I’m like, “Do you have pain? Do you have pain? Do you feel pain? What are you doing in your mid 50s doing vert snowboarding?” You know what I mean? And he’s just like, “Yeah, my wife jokes that I should have a shirt that says ‘Always in pain’ or something like that.” And I was just like, that is a — some people are built like that though. Have you ever seen his shins?
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he looks like a Thai kickboxer.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. He has been hit so many times by the board, it’s insane.
You and your birthday, when I was at your birthday in New York probably about, I don’t know, maybe seven, 10 years ago, you had a slackline in your backyard.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And I couldn’t do it at all at not even one step because it is very much a nervous system practice.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a nervous system practice.
Kevin Rose: So I found this online. It’s like a little home one. Do you have one like this?
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. I have played around with these. These are pretty sweet. So I have not used the smaller ones. I had one between trees, same company, Gibbon. And just for people who’ve never played with this, if you’re going to try it, don’t do an hour thinking that you’re going to figure it out in one day. Actually, my belief is you need sleep cycles for your nervous system to try to integrate it. So you’re better off doing a few minutes every day and gradually you’ll figure it out. But that’s cool. Very portable. So obviously a lot easier to set up and take down a gigantic thing between two trees with ratchets and everything.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to get one because again, on the balance front, they’ll have a little QR code there at the end that you scan and they give you about 20 or 30 different exercises that you can do with it. Like the toe taps where one foot is on and you need to tap of toe on each side of the bar.
And you’re right. And there’s this weird thing and I noticed this in my kids where they got those little hoverboards for Christmas so they can just kind of zoom around and they’re seven and eight. And day one, like eating shit, helmets, full gear. And day two, my youngest is just like whoosh-shoom, just flying over the place.
Tim Ferriss: Totally figured it out.
Kevin Rose: But it took a couple of days of that kind of adaption and that muscle memory to kind of kick in, which I think all these things do. But yeah, this has been awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for people who might want to try slacklining, don’t get on a slackline really far off the ground, number one, but a lot of rock climbing gyms have slacklines set up. So you can potentially get someone to show you the basic ropes, pun intended, of walking on a slackline over there. And it’s called Gibbon. Pretty sure this is why it’s called Gibbon because if you see really good slackliners, they do this with their arms as they’re walking across. And what does that look like? It looks like a gibbon, this monkey.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And you can see footage of Gibbons walking across rope on small suspension bridges. Pretty fascinating stuff. So try it out.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw something out there.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: Because it’s related to rock climbing. Well, a couple of things, since you brought it up. So for the last two days, we’ve been hanging out a little bit and you have not seen my little blow up Pilates ball that I usually put behind my low back.
Kevin Rose: Well, I just mentioned it a few minutes ago. I do see it. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but you haven’t seen it.
Kevin Rose: I know. So what’s going on?
Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems like, and this is not going to apply to most people, and this is a work in progress, so it’s not definitive, but I ended up meeting with a neurologist and surgeon in Austin.
Kevin Rose: And you’ve injected baby seal stem cells into your spine.
Tim Ferriss: No, no.
Kevin Rose: It’s going to be some shit like that.
Tim Ferriss: No. It might apply to a very, very small fraction of the people who are actually listening to this. He did imaging. He used to be in a clinic where they ran trials and studies related to something called Bertolotti’s Syndrome. And Bertolloti’s Syndrome is incredibly uncommon, most specialists in his profession might see one or two cases in their entire careers, but he’s seen hundreds. And he looked at my imaging and he said, “You may actually have Bertolotti’s Syndrome.” And he pointed out, they had very advanced imaging, the first time it came up, it corresponds perfectly to where I point to when people ask me where I have pain.
And it’s, in effect, where you have a transitional segment. So it’s like a lumbar vertebra that’s behaving like a sacral vertebra or vice versa. And let’s just say it’s L5 and the transverse processes, I think it’s transverse processes on both, try to form a pseudo joint. So they basically lay on bone and other material to try to create what is then called a pseudo joint. And if you look at textbook cases of Bertolotti’s, you’re like, “Yeah, of course that’s going to hurt your lower back.”
And as a way of testing the hypothesis, he said, “Well, before we even consider any interventions, let’s try to hone in on whether that is accurate or not as a diagnosis. The way we’ll do that is there are some nerves that affect that area specifically, there’s no radiating effect or anything down the leg, let’s put in effectively a nerve block and then see what happens. We’ll put in a nerve block…”
Kevin Rose: What is a nerve block?
Tim Ferriss: Basically stops the area from transmitting pain signals.
Kevin Rose: But what does it mean though when you put in a nerve block?
Tim Ferriss: Well, you lay down, in my case, on your face. I hate when anyone is messing with my spine, man. I’ve had so many things done to me and I’m usually cool as a cucumber, but when needles are in or around my spine, I really get the fear sweats. I don’t like it at all. But in this case, that was required. So you get a — in this case, it was, I think it was lidocaine, small amount of lidocaine to numb the surface.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: Then they’re going through quite a bit of deep musculature. So they go in and then they’re putting, in this case, and obviously you need specialists for this —
Kevin Rose: It was a baby seal.
Tim Ferriss: Prilocaine, baby seal semen. No, it was Prilocaine and something called Kenalog. But none of those specifics are the punchline. The punchline is, after he did the injection, he said, “Okay, this particular portion of the cocktail is going to last 18 hours, and then you’re going to get probably two weeks of effect from the Kenalog, something like that, which is a cortisone shot basically.”
And he said, “I want you to do all of the things that you think will most piss off your back. All the things you’ve been avoiding,” which for me are sitting on hard surfaces, sitting with a slightly flexed back, like if you’re sitting on a bar stool and you’re kind of like this, any of those, stretching in that position, sitting on the floor with the dogs, certainly things like heavy deadlifts, squats. So I did all of that stuff for three days straight, zero pain.
And I’m like, “Holy shit.” After having so many specialists from different disciplines say like, “Yeah, I know you point to that, but that’s not the spot. It’s actually because there’s referral pain from this, this, or this.” And just having so many people dismiss how precisely I could point to where I felt the most pain, which was consistent over years. And for the first time, he’s like, “If we look at the imaging right here, it is exactly where you are pointing with your finger.”
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m cautiously optimistic.
Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: This is the first time in six years. Also, there are different tools that work for different people. Sometimes it requires multiple tools. A lot of people have benefited from the work of John Sarno, but that school, for instance, in effect, says none of the imaging really maps to symptoms well, it’s all in your head. So do cognitive training and reconditioning to solve it because —
Kevin Rose: That’s the guy that Howard Stern got his back problems fixed through, right?
Tim Ferriss: It might be. A lot of people benefit from that stuff, but it’s also infuriating to be told every type of back pain is in your head. I’m like, “Really? If I took a ball peen hammer and smashed one of your vertebrae, that would be in your head?” I guess technically since the brain is governing pain, fine, but this is the first time with a relatively simple but precise intervention, I guess it’s been about five days, it’s like I can do everything with no pain.
Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So what does that mean?
Kevin Rose: Well it could be the cortisol shot. That’s the one thing that’s like, hmm?
Tim Ferriss: Well, that is —
Kevin Rose: You probably had that before, right? Or no?
Tim Ferriss: No, I haven’t, but here’s the thing. So that’s going to have —
Kevin Rose: Anti-inflammatory.
Tim Ferriss: — yeah, anti-inflammatory, it’s also going to basically kind of, for lack of a better term, like puff up the pseudo joint in a way that sort of reverses the chronological age or development of that in some ways from a symptom perspective. But this is where I’ll offer people something they can potentially look into, obviously with the help of really, really, really good doctors. If that shot continues to deliver benefits, and I can do all these things pain-free, which is the case right now, then there’s something called radiofrequency ablation, RFA, which is used to, in this case, temporarily, completely incapacitate those nerves.
So they go in, they apply radiofrequency ablation, and that should last for like a year to a year and a half, hopefully. And the hope in that case is, okay, with a year, year and a half, and I’ve spoken to multiple people and they’re like, “Even if you resume a lot of your activities and stare step into it that previously caused pain, you shouldn’t structurally make that worse.” Because that was a concern.
And I think that’s enough of a period of time where you could effectively reprogram your pain patterning, right? Because for years now, it’s like if I sit on a hard surface, my brain is like code red, DEFCON 5, you are about to not be able to sleep for six to seven days.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re going to have trouble walking and sitting and standing. So super exciting.
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you mind if I continue my TED Talk for a second?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So I also had long overdue surgery, I think I might have talked about this last time, but on my extensors, right? So the forearm extensors. So this would be considered like tennis elbow, like 20 plus years overdue, from a sports injury. And I’m back to rock climbing. I’m not great at rock climbing, but I love it. I just love rock climbing, feeling really good.
And if people have never seen something called Abrahangs, so like Abraham, but Abrahangs, go on YouTube, find this Swedish rock climber named Emil Abrahamsson, so Abrahamsson, S-S-O-N, he is a monster, very competent rock climber, does like V13 problems and probably much more, incredible explainer of things and dives into a lot of training. And he, along with the help of this scientist named Keith Barr, B-A-A-R, who I’ve actually had on the podcast, developed or tested this protocol for improving tendon strength.
And it is the simplest, lowest impact thing you can imagine. It’s basically 10 minutes, twice a day, and he does a bunch on a hangboard, but let’s keep it simple. Let’s say you’re hanging on, could be a pull-up bar, could be a door jamb, could be the underside of some stairs, whatever, and he’s hanging with like 30 to 85 percent of his weight, so his feet are still on the floor, does that for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, and you do it 10 times, that’s 10 minutes, and then you do it again later in the day, and his before and after strength in endurance tests are mind-blowing.
This is already a guy who we could say is a high level climber, and to see the before and after is crazy. So you don’t always have to kill yourself to adapt in really, really interesting ways. And that’s something I’ve really, really benefited from. But the low back has been a limiter for the last few months, because hanging from a bar, if I don’t engage the abs, it could cause some issues with the low back and spasming.
So I bought this thing recommended by a friend of mine, Nick Norris, who’s also been on the podcast, former Navy SEAL, called the NUG. And the NUG is, it’s about the size of a gigantic bar of soap, it’s a piece of wood, and it has different depths of grips on it, like 25 millimeters, 20 millimeters, and you can move it around really easily. And basically you could keep it in a jacket pocket. And as long as you have a carabiner, like one of those things that kind of clicks on, you can do all sorts of exercises while you’re traveling. And at home I have basically a plate loading pin that you can load plates on.
Kevin Rose: Like this?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So that you can basically do like a single-handed deadlift with different weights.
Kevin Rose: And so this is the same as essentially doing the hanging board?
Tim Ferriss: It’s similar, right? You’re going to be, I’m looking for the same kind of loading, but what you can also do is take this thing that you can fit in your pocket and attach it to like a low cable machine. That’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, actually.
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: And just like get the weight off the ground, the stack off of the resting position and then I was doing 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off.
Kevin Rose: And you only have one of these?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because I’ll do one hand and then I’ll do the other.
Kevin Rose: Oh, amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ll be like, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 second rest, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds rest.
Kevin Rose: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And I think a lot — yeah, the website is Frictitious Climbing, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but like friction, Frictitious Climbing. They have the NUG, they have a bunch of other items that you can use while traveling for this, which are really, really interesting. So that’s another one that I’ve been traveling with. I’ll let you go and then —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just a fun little tool to play with. Do not overdo finger training. You do not want to tear a pulley or something in your fingers. So less is more, less is more, less is more. This is, I guess, something like 30 to 85 percent of body weight. And obviously, or maybe it’s not obvious, that’s with two hands, so if you’re doing it with one hand, it’s going to be 15 to 40 percent.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing. Oh, this is cool. Thanks. I already just ordered it by the time you’re done talking about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s fun to play with.
Kevin Rose: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: What you got?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of things. One, I was hanging with Craig Mod in Japan and you’ve had Craig on the show before.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Craig.
Kevin Rose: Craig is —
Tim Ferriss: Amazing, amazing guy.
Kevin Rose: I don’t think there’s anybody that understands Japan the way that Craig does, in terms of the back country and just like the little artisans and all the stuff that he’s into.
Tim Ferriss: Craig has walked probably fair to say like thousands of miles of different trails and pilgrimage paths in Japan. It’s very likely he has walked more of Japan on foot than any other person.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So he was out here visiting, he actually stayed in this house for a week when he was out here in L.A. And I walked in and he’s got all his little toiletries sitting out. It’s sitting out, he puts it all in Japanese order where it’s got a little nice little cloth and it’s got all this shit —
Tim Ferriss: He even dresses like a Japanese person now.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know. So I mean he’s lived there for 25 years, so that makes sense. But I saw his toothbrush and I was like, “That is a dope looking toothbrush.” And I got you one.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow, look at this.
Kevin Rose: So you can get these on Amazon. It’s got a really wide head. He said it’s his favorite Japanese toothbrush.
Tim Ferriss: So for people who can’t see it’s like the toothbrush bristles are almost in a square. I mean, it’s very square-like as opposed to being more elongated.
Kevin Rose: And so you get three of these for $11.50 on Amazon. And what does it say in Japanese?
Tim Ferriss: Premium care. Premium care.
Kevin Rose: Premium care. Oh, Toaster’s here.
Tim Ferriss: Premium care.
Kevin Rose: Hey, buddy.
Tim Ferriss: Hi, buddy.
Kevin Rose: Look at old man Toast.
Tim Ferriss: I was just saying hi to him earlier. Toaster is now 15. I was just saying to Darya that the last time we did a podcast sitting on a couch was at your place in San Francisco back when Toaster was a puppy and he chewed through the XLR cables on the Zoom.
Kevin Rose: Yes, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Hey, buddy.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, he can’t hear anything anymore. And sadly, his back legs are falling out from underneath them now. But look at that. He’s still a good dude. Look at that.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like he recognized me because I’ve seen him so many times.
Kevin Rose: Oh, for sure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What a sweetheart.
Kevin Rose: He’s such a good boy.
Tim Ferriss: So yes, premium care.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I got you one of those and there’s a three pack for $11.50. I think it’s great. It’s a fantastic toothbrush.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. [Tim says something in Japanese]. Yeah, okay. Cool. I dig it. Thank you.
Kevin Rose: Speaking of all things Japanese, so I am hesitant to give this up. So if you want to get a —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, low in stock, only one left.
Kevin Rose: Well, hold on, let me tell you why. So first of all, check this out. Check out this jacket.
Tim Ferriss: Cool. All right. Oh, nice.
Kevin Rose: You feel how heavy that is?
Tim Ferriss: Feels almost like a — I know what this is. I know what this is.
Kevin Rose: So this is a fireman’s jacket in Japan.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And this is a heavy, dope fireman’s jacket. It’s vintage from like —
Tim Ferriss: This would be hard to rip. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: — the 1970s.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose: And so I found a store on Etsy.
Tim Ferriss: How did you even think to look for this?
Kevin Rose: Because I love this style of jacket.
Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese fire jacket.
Kevin Rose: I didn’t type in, fireman jacket. I typed in, Japanese jacket on Etsy. And so this importer, they import the coolest vintage Japanese.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just wear this.
Kevin Rose: Everything from jackets to — you know how they used to do that patch mill work where they take stuff? They would patch quilts out of old material?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So everything from little tiny shrines to wicker baskets. Dude, check out the store. Let me just show you this store real quick. And the only reason I’m plugging it is —
Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese Indigo dyed Kendo jacket.
Kevin Rose: So they’ve got all the little dolls. Look at these different types of indigo dyed blankets.
Tim Ferriss: So what’s the seller?
Kevin Rose: The seller is just an importer from Japan. Or exporter.
Tim Ferriss: You don’t want to give the name?
Kevin Rose: No, I will. Well, here’s the deal. It’s so inexpensive. In the States, if you were to buy this jacket from a designer called Visvim, which is like a well-known Japanese designer, this style of jacket would be — oh, gosh, it’d probably be $2,500 for that jacket.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. It’s more expensive than my car.
Kevin Rose: No, it’s not. They sell these jackets on there for — here’s one for $92. Look at this. Vintage 1960s jacket, $92.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s cool. Watch out, buddy.
Kevin Rose: You okay, bud? He needs a little help.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think you’re ready for the slackboard, my friend.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There you go. Okay. I know, I know.
Kevin Rose: That jacket’s dope. But I just wanted to get this out there because I think if you’re looking to buy vintage fun things in, you can’t scroll.
Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. I know. I’m being an idiot.
Kevin Rose: If you’re looking for just various objects around your house that are vintage from Japan, this place is insanely inexpensive for all different types of things.
Tim Ferriss: Blue Heritage Japan?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Etsy name is Blue Heritage Japan.
Tim Ferriss: 4.9 stars, thousands of reviews.
Kevin Rose: But look at some of this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s cool. These hanging tapestries for stores and stuff, those are fun.
Kevin Rose: So anyway, I just thought it was a fun shop that — and you know it’s legit because when you get the package, it’s actually shipped directly from Japan. Oftentimes you’ll find some of these places that make a Japanese style jacket and then you find a little tag that says made in China on the inside of it or something. So anyway, look at this farmer’s washy paper basket. But wouldn’t that be cool to have in your house sitting around somewhere? That’s just awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I guess these guys are based in Canada, looks like. CA.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no, that’s just because I’m logged in the Canadian store. They’re based in Japan.
Tim Ferriss: Why the hell are you logged into the Canadian store?
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I was on VPN.
Tim Ferriss: You better close those porn browsers.
Kevin Rose: No, I was in Japan and they were firewalling me off of some stuff, and so I had to use a VPN.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: I’m being dead serious, I’m being dead serious. It wasn’t porn, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Thou doth protest too much. All right. Should I hop in?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, go ahead.
Tim Ferriss: All right, cool. So I want to recommend some podcasts for people. And these are two that I continue to revisit. One is a miniseries by 99% Invisible, one of the OGs, Roman Mars, and he’s got some co-hosts. It is a series on The Power Broker. So The Power Broker by Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It’s a biography of Robert Moses, who basically shaped modern New York. And this book is considered the quintessential book to read if you want to understand state and local politics, especially power wielding in New York.
And it’s a legendary book. It’s 1200 pages. I’ve never made it through. I’ve never even really put a dent in it. And then what 99% Invisible does, they walk you through the whole book and give you their highlights. They interview Robert Caro himself who got to meet Robert Moses multiple times and they have guest appearances by people like Conan O’Brien, who’s a huge Robert Caro and Power Broker fan. It’s a wonderful series.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: And I think there are 12 parts. I had listened to it ages ago, but they only had three episodes out and then I just petered out because I didn’t want to wait months for the next one to come out. Now they have the full 12. So that’s one. And then the other one is a podcast called STEM-Talk. And if I want to find interesting scientists doing things that I think I might be able to apply to my life or the lives of loved ones, and certainly there’s a lot of stuff that’s out on the edges that is not yet ready for any clinical applications. STEM-Talk is just incredible. And my latest discovery there is a really fascinating scientist named Dr. Francisco Gonzalez-Lima, who’s at UT Austin.
One of the many reasons I’m interested in his research is that he has a very different view on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and thinks, as I do, that people underweight and researchers underweight, how you might think of Alzheimer’s as a vascular disease and including mitochondrial dysfunction. And the more I dig into this, the less compelling I find amyloid beta plaque, amyloid beta plaque for a whole host of reasons.
Kevin Rose: It’s pretty widely accepted now that that is a byproduct of something gone wrong and not the cause of it, right?
Tim Ferriss: But still, I do think a lot of doctors and scientists would view it as a byproduct. Nonetheless, a lot of the treatment options like Donanemab infusions or otherwise are focused on removing plaque. But you can remove a lot of plaque —
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t do shit.
Tim Ferriss: — assuming it doesn’t kill people because there are —
Kevin Rose: The side effects are huge.
Tim Ferriss: — risks of RA and stuff. And you may not see any change in cognition whatsoever.
Kevin Rose: What do you think of the Bredesen protocol?
Tim Ferriss: Look, Dale Bredesen, I don’t know much about Dale, so you should illuminate me. Let’s get to that in a second.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Tim Ferriss: But what I have seen, let’s just say in the case of some of my relatives, I’ve got three relatives with Alzheimer’s right now, one who’s disintegrating very quickly, one who’s in hospice, and another who’s in the early but rapidly advancing stages. I gave one of them actually the exact same ketone that I had before we sat down, only 10 grams because I didn’t want to risk them getting dizzy, which can be a byproduct and falling, but I gave them 10 or 15 grams and within 20 minutes, longer sentences, faster speech, this is someone who’s giving like one word, two word responses, and that lasted for about an hour, hour and a half. So if plaques, even if we’re talking about tau and so on, if those were solely responsible, that shouldn’t work. But I don’t want to be dosing my family with ketones constantly for a lot of reasons. It’s like, “Okay, well, what else can we do?”
And this Dr. Gonzalez-Lima has looked at low dose methylene blue and also photobiomodulation using lasers or LEDs right on, in most cases, the right prefrontal cortex.
Kevin Rose: By the way, do you know that they’re selling methylene blue on freaking Amazon now?
Tim Ferriss: That’s scary.
Kevin Rose: I know. They didn’t used to because they were scared to do it. Now there are supplement companies that are selling straight up methylene blue on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss: That’s scary. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Although the safety profile, it’s been used for a very long time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s got like 120 years of research, but if you overshoot the therapeutic window, you can fuck yourself up.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. 100 percent. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So in this case, it’s low dose, ideally plus photobiomodulation, and you’re hitting two aspects of the electron transport chain that should be synergistic for mitochondrial function and also glucose metabolism. And so that’s really got my attention right now.
Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this on Amazon. Look at this guy drinking a big pitcher of it.
Tim Ferriss: Guy’s drinking a shaker bottle full of methylene blue.
Kevin Rose: With the goldfish.
Tim Ferriss: Dude.
Kevin Rose: Methylene blue is what they use for fish tanks, right? To color the water blue.
Tim Ferriss: Is it?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, they were using it in fish tanks.
Tim Ferriss: Well, if it’s good enough for the fish tanks, I guess. Be careful.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, look at it. Here it is. General disease prevention for fish.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, disease prevention. Oh, you know, hey.
Kevin Rose: If it works for fish.
Tim Ferriss: Those pet stores figured it out.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Be very careful, folks.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: If you overdo, this is true for a lot of things. You basically have a response curve where a hormetic dose, like a very small amount is good for you, like iocaine powder in the Princess Bride, or it helps with immune function and so on.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: If you take too much, it has the opposite effect. So you could, I believe, I don’t think I’m getting this wrong, handicap your mitochondrial function by taking too much.
Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this. 15 milligrams of methylene blue with 75 milligrams of vitamin C NeuroPro. I’m not recommending this. This is just one on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss: It’s All over Amazon. God, that’s terrifying.
Kevin Rose: What would be considered a microdose in your opinion?
Tim Ferriss: I’d have to go back and look at his actual research. People should listen to the STEM-Talk episode with Francisco Gonzalez-Lima.
Kevin Rose: There’s a picture of someone putting it in her purse.
Tim Ferriss: Like an EpiPen.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’ll just take this to go.
Tim Ferriss: Take this to the spa.
Kevin Rose: By the way, the comments — it’s so funny you’re on this because literally two days ago, I was in here reading the comments and they’re like, “I’m peeing blue now.” You pee blue.
Tim Ferriss: You do pee blue. And that’s actually a way individually that you can begin to identify your customized dose.
Kevin Rose: Oh, you shouldn’t be peeing blue.
Tim Ferriss: No, at what point you go from blue to clear. You can figure out basically what the half — I’m probably using not exactly the correct terms, but figure out what the half life is in your body so that you’re dosing at the right interval.
Kevin Rose: They call this bro science, by the way, when two guys that don’t have —
Tim Ferriss: Well, I am pretty closely echoing. Yes, it is broscience, but it’s bro science with citations, meaning don’t trust exactly what I’m saying, but go listen to the episode and read his research.
Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this.
Tim Ferriss: Methylene blue gummies. Fuck.
Kevin Rose: They’re selling gummies now of methane blue.
Tim Ferriss: Terrifying.
Kevin Rose: Anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Just because it’s a supplement doesn’t make it safe, folks.
Kevin Rose: Amen. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Hemlock, all natural. Turns out, shouldn’t have too much of it.
Kevin Rose: Hemlock?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, killed Socrates.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just like arsenic, all natural. Don’t go take a shaker bottle full of arsenic. So yeah, be careful out there, kids. But that definitely has my attention right now because I think about say parental risk, my mom’s cognition is slipping, but she’s APOE e3/e3. Her APOE allele profile is 3/3. I’m 3/4, my brother’s 3/4, which means we got the four from my dad. He’s sharp as a tack. He’s incredibly sharp and he’s older than my mom. So it’s like, all right, they both have metabolic dysfunction. So that’s equalized. The fasting glucose and all that’s terrible. It’s like, what’s going on? Well, you do inherit mitochondria from your mom and mitochondria are a very big deal. So looking at different levers that I might experiment with in my mom that could also potentially be applied preventatively in me and my brother.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Dale Bredesen protocol is pretty awesome. He wrote a book about six or seven years ago, maybe it’s closer to 10 now.
Tim Ferriss: Nicotine enemas, am I right?
Kevin Rose: Exactly. That’s all it is. Which you tried for the first time today.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t exactly that, but yeah.
Kevin Rose: So the one thing I like about, it’s called The End of Alzheimer’s, is the name of his book, is that he’s —
Tim Ferriss: Understated.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Won’t sell any copies with that title. But what he came up with is he said, “Okay, listen, what we’re seeing in the brain is the byproduct of something going haywire. It’s either blood-brain barrier breaking down, allowing bad shit in. It could be bacteria. It could be a whole slew of different things.” It could be, like you said, an issue with blood flow and it could be, what did you call it? A vascular type issue.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And he thinks it’s like three or four. He thinks it’s either vascular, which sauna, other things like that help with. CocoaVia, like other ways to make sure that you have vascular health. Obviously the mitochondria thing is another one that he’s huge on. And then he also thinks it could be toxin-related as well.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: And talking about how to get those toxins out of your body, but his protocol is very common sense.
Tim Ferriss: What is it?
Kevin Rose: It is essentially a handful of supplements, which are all the ones that you’ve basically talked about along with, it’s like a lightweight keto. So just making sure you go into lightweight ketosis like five days a week. And then obviously no sugar, no refined carbohydrate, it’s eliminating all that shit. Turns out exercise, like intense exercise, is very important. And he’s shown now over the course of a decade that he’s taken people. Actually, you know Kelly Boys who we were on the —
Tim Ferriss: Retreat with.
Kevin Rose: — retreat with. She’s an awesome meditation — she teaches something, this form of relaxing yoga.
Tim Ferriss: Yoga Nidra.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. As an aside, her father, I think she’d be okay for me to share this, we’ll double check, but her father had mild cognitive impairment 10 years ago and they were, of course, really worried. They put them on the Dale Bredesen protocol and he’s scoring better now than he was when he first took the test. 10 years later.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And she’s like, “Yeah, he still has issues here and there.” But he’s I guess in his 80s now or something, but that’s what you want.
Tim Ferriss: Makes a difference. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Even if we can say, okay, mild cognitive impairment, it’s progressing. My mom is in this situation. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but thankfully she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She has some form of dementia. She remembers me, kids’ names, stuff like that, the important things. She would have a hard time telling you what the name of my dog is. There’s little things that slide through the cracks. She’s sadly really overweight, didn’t really want to do that. But the point is, if we could see this stuff early enough where you still have enough of your wits about you to take action, because compliance is huge, as you know. How hard is it to get your family members to go do high intensity exercise?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Can I pause for a second?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of the reason why the methylene blue and the photobiomodulation are so interesting because for instance, there’s a device that is actually worth investigating on some levels called the Cognito device. It’s a headset and it was developed by scientists out of MIT and it’s 40 hertz, I believe, both visual and auditory stimulation, and in Rhesus monkeys, pretty recently in the last year, they showed a lot of plaque clearance enhanced by this, right? But that’s still, if I’m understanding correctly, people fact check this, but that’s still predicated on the theory of disease for Alzheimer’s that by removing plaque, you get clinical outcomes, right?
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: The photobiomodulation — well, before I get to that, as I understand it, this is an hour a day of wearing this device on your head. My mom’s not going to do that. There’s no fucking way, right? Nor any of my relatives. However, the photobiomodulation, it’s like eight to 10 minutes, right? Laser or LED. LED is a little harder to make —
Kevin Rose: And do you have to go in to do that or can you get a device that does it at all?
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to buy a device and I’m not recommending people do that. You can really damage your eyes with lasers and so on, but right now, it’s not like you can go to a clinic and be like, “Hey, I’d like to have this treatment.” Just doesn’t exist. So let me be the guinea pig before anybody does anything, but you get this device and I’m sure it’s going to be very expensive. Some of these lasers, they’re like $30,000. But eight to 10 minutes, and you can see, even after a single session, you can see multiple weeks of effect. It’s crazy.
Kevin Rose: And so it just sits right on top of — into the eye or on top of the —
Tim Ferriss: No. Well, there are devices that go through the eyes, but this one, what makes it so mystifying in a way for me is that it’s actually pointed at the forehead as an infrared laser. It’s so fascinating. And there are peer reviewed published studies on this, which you can find. Anybody who looks up Gonzalez-Lima will find it. So it’s exciting. It’s super exciting because there’s certain things. I know that my mitochondria are funky. And I know that through different types of endurance testing, different types of, obviously all sorts of stuff done through doctors and tests and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s something funky with the mitochondria. And I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s try to get ahead of that.”
And actually related to that, to invoke, I said she would come back. Rhonda Patrick, also, I was texting with her at one point because I was listening to STEM-Talk, that podcast I mentioned, and I came across a scientist discussing something called urolithin A.
Kevin Rose: Of course, Mitopure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Mitopure. And two years ago, maybe it was two years ago, she was pretty bearish on it, but there’s a lot of new research, or I shouldn’t say a lot. There’s new research that’s come out and also met with a couple of biotech people in Boston who are very respected. I’m not going to dox them because I don’t want to, but they basically did this comprehensive analysis and landed on three or four things and one of them was urolithin A.
Kevin Rose: Right. I take 300 milligrams a day.
Tim Ferriss: 300. How did you choose 300 milligrams?
Kevin Rose: Because that’s what all the studies are done on — or no, sorry, so 500 to 1,000. I take 500 milligrams a day.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Clear then you’ve been taking a higher dose.
Tim Ferriss: I was like 300?
Kevin Rose: I’ve only been doing these things for three months to see some results. So bear with me people, I was close. it was 200 milligrams off.
Tim Ferriss: What’s a little strange is that if you buy the bag, you can get this on Amazon. I’m not recommending you do that. Jury’s still out, but I’m like, “Hey, I want to hit mitochondria from as many reasonably plausible mechanisms or angles as possible.” You can get Mitopure. It’s expensive AF. It is very expensive.
Kevin Rose: I was going to tell people that the one that people talk about the most in this world that has done a lot of clinical studies around it, your Urolithin A is this company called Timeline, who doesn’t say — they trademarked the name of it, which is Mitopure. The problem is it’s freaking expensive.
Tim Ferriss: It’s very, very expensive.
Kevin Rose: And I don’t know, is there another company that’s out there that has high quality? Because I’m not going to put shit into my body, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: But I would like to know, is there any company that has —
Tim Ferriss: When you say expensive, it’s like 60 count is $125, right?
Kevin Rose: Right. And you’re taking two a day.
Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So that’s 30 days.
Tim Ferriss: And most of the studies actually have people taking a thousand a day. So if you’re taking a thousand a day, the prices are going to add up. But again —
Kevin Rose: I would trust Pure Encapsulations if they offered some of it. I haven’t seen anybody — there’s no other brands that I’ve seen that — you know the household names like the Thorns, the Pures, the ones that —
Tim Ferriss: And this is a single SKU, well, not a single SKU, but a single compound company. They have a lot vested in IP protection and so on.
Kevin Rose: But it can’t be synthesized. They don’t own urolithin A. Obviously that’s something that anyone can produce.
Tim Ferriss: Well, urolithin A is also —
Kevin Rose: urolithin A, I mean.
Tim Ferriss: — what’s called a postbiotic. If you were eating tons of pomegranates and walnuts and so on, there’s certain things that in your gut, biomicrobes will be converted into, in part, urolithin A. The problem is that there’s a high degree of variability. So if Kevin eats two handfuls of walnuts and I ate two handfuls of walnuts, we’re not going to get the same amount of urolithin A out. Fortunately, urolithin A is very orally bioavailable, which is why the supplementation potentially makes sense.
Kevin Rose: What’s interesting is actually Pure Encapsulations does make one, and when you go and look at the label, they actually buy Mitopure for theirs.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, There you go.
Kevin Rose: So they use Mitopure in theirs.
Tim Ferriss: Well, Mitopure in this case is almost like an industrial grade supplier in so much as Creapure. If you’re buying Creatine, I use Momentus Creatine, they’re a sponsor of the podcast, but I like their stuff and everything is NSF certified and third party analyzed. Creapure is this supplier, just like maybe Mitopure is, that’s providing something that is very pure and properly assayed and so on and so forth. Okay. So Pure Encapsulations, it’s not cheap either. That one’s 80 bucks.
Kevin Rose: 80 bucks, but so that’ll get you — hold on. Let’s just do the math here. So $80 of 60 pills. And, again, it is 250 mgs per two pills, so that’s half the dose.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so if you wanted — well, per two pills, so if you wanted a thousand a day, that’s eight per day.
Kevin Rose: It’s 160. Oh, thousand a day, yeah, eight a day.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s eight a day, 60 capsules.
Kevin Rose: But it has other shit in there, too. I don’t want all this other stuff, the resveratrol and whatever.
Tim Ferriss: So, yeah, it’s expensive. That 80 bucks is going to last you like 12 days, something like that. In any case, guys, the jury is out.
Kevin Rose: The jury is out.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s interesting enough that I added it into the rotation. And I routinely take things out of the rotation also.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.
Tim Ferriss: This one I’ve been taking for probably six to eight weeks.
Kevin Rose: What’s the number one thing that you’ve kept in rotation for the longest time? I have two, vitamin D, obviously, because my levels are chronically low without it. And I think, at this point, it’s a no-brainer to get your levels where they should be. And then I would say curl-ups is another one that I have had in for a long time —
Tim Ferriss: CocoaVia is interesting, yeah.
Kevin Rose: — just because it looks really interesting in terms of vascular health, and then I think, well, obviously, your high-quality omega-3. Outside of that, I don’t know what else I’ve had. What’s been in your rotation forever?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, a lot of them are dictated by genetic analysis and blood biomarkers in some way. Right? So, outside of prescription stuff, because I am taking things to not die of cardiovascular disease, because everybody in my family gets smoked by some kind of cardiovascular disease, and I’m, like, “Yeah. I’m no spring chicken.”
Kevin Rose: Are you taking Repatha, too?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m taking Repatha.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Where do you inject it?
Tim Ferriss: In the thigh. I hate it. It’s so painful.
Kevin Rose: Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss: I find it so painful.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God, dude, I can tell you a secret.
Tim Ferriss: What’s the secret?
Kevin Rose: How often are you — how long do you let the alcohol dry for?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it’s the alcohol.
Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve done thousands of injections in myself.
Kevin Rose: You got to let it because, if you would just like swipe, swipe, swipe and then go pop, it hurts because it’s pushing the alcohol down into the cuts.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe I’m not waiting long enough because I’m impatient. It’s possible because —
Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, oh, are you letting it come to room temperature, too?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did let it come to room temperature. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Okay, because you know it takes five times as long to inject it if you don’t.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, there’s the prescription stuff. It’s not going to apply to too broad a number of people, and I don’t want anyone aping it and getting themselves into trouble, but there are like a few prescription meds for lipid profile specifically, in my case, cholesterol absorption, hyperabsorption. But I would say supplement-wise, omega-3, I honestly try to get that from fish when I can. I eat a lot of canned sardines and mackerel and stuff, which ties into the keto and Fasting Mimicking Diet diet stuff. Vitamin D, yes, although I’m pretty skeptical of like the entire planet having vitamin D deficiency frankly. I do take it though. And then there’s some B vitamin complex stuff.
Kevin Rose: I do that, too.
Tim Ferriss: I’m a shitty methylator, so that’s a good idea.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.
Tim Ferriss: And creatine, although I end up looking kind of like a puffy fat baby if I eat too much of that stuff.
Kevin Rose: Wait. Are you doing five grams?
Tim Ferriss: It depends on the day, right? So like I took five grams today. If I’m training, I’m going to use at least 10. I’m doing weight training. And then, if I have a crazy travel schedule ahead of me where I’m going to be in like London for one day and Sweden for one day, I’ll be taking probably 20 to 30 grams a day —
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: — because my sleep’s going to be so screwed —
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — just to compensate for the sleep deprivation.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit. Good luck.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Kevin Rose: Good luck making it to the toilet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Don’t —
Kevin Rose: Creatine jacks your stomach up, right?
Tim Ferriss: Don’t combine. Actually, I’m fine with creatine. If I get —
Kevin Rose: You told me at one point it was messing you up though.
Tim Ferriss: Well, there was the story of me — what did I have? I was in San Francisco. This is probably TMI, but whatever. We’re all friends here, right? So I was in San Francisco. I had my Volkswagen Golf. It got broken into like three times for change. I was so annoyed. San Francisco for the win. And, in any case, I had to run to an international flight, and I was stressed out because I was running behind. And I was, like, well, just before I go, I’m going to have double espresso, 10 grams of creatine, and then I had MCT oil.
Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, my God, dude.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m driving on my way to the airport like in a massive rush. I don’t have time for anything. And I leaned to do a little squeaker, and just —
Kevin Rose: Oh, no.
Tim Ferriss: — full disaster pants.
Kevin Rose: In an Uber?
Tim Ferriss: No. In my own car.
Kevin Rose: Oh.
Tim Ferriss: I park in long-term parking and —
Kevin Rose: Did you grab a new pair out of your thing, just wipe and go?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, all right, I can’t believe I’m talking about this to millions of people. But I basically took the underwear and like some rags that I had, like did what I had to do for like emergency field triage —
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: — tossed it under my car, put on my pants —
Kevin Rose: Throw it in the trash.
Tim Ferriss: — put on my pants. No, I literally was about to miss my flight. I put my pants on commando style and then ran on and got on the flight.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: And I was just, like, “I’m sorry, everybody.” I know this can’t be too much of a wonderful cologne for anyone near me.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God.
Tim Ferriss: We might need to edit some of that. So, yeah, don’t do those three at once. If you’re getting Creapure creatine, I don’t find it to mess up my stomach at all. Totally fine. If you combine it with caffeine and MCT oil —
Kevin Rose: MCT oil is the devil, dude.
Tim Ferriss: All bets are off. All bets are off.
Kevin Rose: That stuff just goes straight through you. I don’t know a single person that can do high-dose MCT and has been, like, “Oh, my stomach’s fine.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. You’re going to — high risk. You should just pre-order the subscription of Depends.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Let me mention one other thing. So, related to all the mental health stuff, it sounds like we’re doing like tons of stuff, millions of things. It’s actually not that complicated for me. Right? There are a few supplements that I’m taking consistently, the creatine, the Urolithin A, et cetera. There are a few things I’m considering like methylene blue. If photobiomodulation with the lasers or LEDs is something that you can experiment with once a week or once every few weeks and track changes over time, let’s do that, and before and after cognitive testing. Intermittent ketosis, which I find easiest to do through intermittent fasting, frankly, which I’ll be doing when I travel also. I find it to help with jet lag.
And then there’s the exercise, right? And so what kind of exercise? I did a podcast with Dr. Tommy Wood recently. Fascinating guy. People should listen to that episode. But 4×4 Norwegian, high-intensity training, which is like you’re basically doing — I guess it would be considered zone four. You’re really maxing out your heart rate. And you’re doing four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on. You’re repeating that four times. And it is very much puke inducing. It’s a lot of lactic acid.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: The problem has always been, or one of the problems has always been that, if I’m traveling, stationary bikes in hotels are just terrible.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: They will destroy my knees. They’re just too inconsistent in terms of settings and stuff. So I was texting with Tommy. I don’t think he’d mind me saying. I’ll have to double check with him. But I asked him, I said if — in the conversation we had, I was, like, “Well, what are the drivers here? Is it VO2 max, because talk about VO2 max, VO2 max, VO2 max?” And he said, “Well, lactate actually seems to be a big driver, like lactic acid, right?”
Kevin Rose: Driver of what?
Tim Ferriss: Driver of the cognitive changes, like the neuroanatomical and vascular changes. And he’s, like, “Okay.” “Well, hold on a second.” I was, like, “If that’s the case, there are certain ways of weight training. Like if you do 20 rep squats in slow cadence or any number of different things, like you are going to be brimming with lactic acid. Could that possibly achieve the same effect?”
Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?
Tim Ferriss: What’s that?
Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?
Tim Ferriss: Klotho is another part of it.
Kevin Rose: Because klotho has been shown — like HIIT is what creates klotho in humans.
Tim Ferriss: Well, klotho is another piece. I don’t think it’s the only piece. I mean, look, I can’t wait for us to have proper injectable klotho or that lever to pull. But, in the meantime, I guess, right now, today, what I’m saying is like high intensity interval training when you’re traveling is not always the easiest thing to do.
Kevin Rose: Right. Right. Right.
Tim Ferriss: But, like for instance, when I go back to my hotel tonight, can I do like a couple of sets of very high repetition leg presses and just basically have lactic acid pouring out my eyeballs? Yeah, I can do that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I can do it in like five minutes. Right? And there are many open questions about it, but that’s the approach I’m taking. And what’s really cool about the Norwegian 4×4 that Tommy describes, and I think I’m remembering this correctly, is that, if you do it, I think it’s three times a week for six months, you can observe the effects, the beneficial effects for like five years afterwards.
Kevin Rose: Wow. Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: Isn’t that fucking crazy?
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: The durability of the effects are just nuts.
Kevin Rose: Okay, this is what I get to — I’ll start by like 1×1 or something. And you could go in 4×4?
Tim Ferriss: There ain’t no way in hell I’m doing 4×4.
Kevin Rose: 4×4, if you’re doing it properly. I use a Morpheus chest strap. But you’re assuming a certain level of like baseline cardiovascular fitness to do 4×4.
Tim Ferriss: Not really because, I mean, look, you don’t —
Kevin Rose: It’s subjective.
Tim Ferriss: You don’t blow yourself apart, but it’s heart-rate based, right?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So, if you get winded and your heart gets gone walking up a flight of stairs, like you’re not going to need very much to get into the proper zone. I will say, for me, and this comes back to the mitochondrial discussion, and I’ve had doctors who are, like, “That’s nonsense. It’s all mediated by the lungs.” It’s actually not mediated by the lungs. It’s all like heart stroke volume. I’m, like, “My legs crap out first before my heart rate gets to where it needs to be.” My legs are the weak link.
Kevin Rose: Oh, dude.
Tim Ferriss: I feel that fatigue in my legs.
Kevin Rose: I’ve got boots for you tonight. Can I put the boots on while you have dinner?
Tim Ferriss: Are these the —
Kevin Rose: The ones that go all the way up the leg.
Tim Ferriss: — Normatec?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, Normatec.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll try them. Yeah, I’ll try them.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever tried them?
Tim Ferriss: I have. I love those.
Kevin Rose: Oh, they’re so good, man. For people who don’t know, real quick, just a quick aside, they just squeeze and then move the blood around in your legs. They’re great for recovery.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like if you want to feel like a Kobe cow —
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: — just throw on some Normatec boots, have a cold beer while you’re doing it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. And we could do both of those things tonight.
Tim Ferriss: I mean that’s —
Kevin Rose: That’s it from my side.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot —
Kevin Rose: I can do the doom-and-gloom AI shit, but I don’t want to talk about that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. Let’s save the doom-and-gloom for next time. I think you’re getting contagions from one of our other friends. I left out something that’s kind of important.
Kevin Rose: I’ve just got to make sure what you’re talking about. We have a buddy that just like we text with. And we love you if you’re listening. But he’s, like, “The world is ending.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot of — I lean dystopian anyway. It’s like I don’t need any feeding that hypervigilant. Like I need to become John Connor. Like I don’t. Plus, it’s like, can I do anything? What am I going to do? What’s Tim going to do?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly. Meditating.
Tim Ferriss: The fuck, the genie is out of the bottle, folks, so we’ll save the doom-and-gloom for next time. But, in terms of an actionable thing, like something I just did before coming here, let’s say you want to experiment with this lactate as lever for cognitive longevity, right? That’s interesting. Okay, and let’s just say, furthermore, to your point, right, everybody’s getting older. And, believe me, maybe you’re like a 20-year-old dude and feeling immortal. Those like popped-up joints and broken bones will add up, and they will come back to haunt you like the ghost of Christmas past. So, if you’re trying to minimize injury risk, right, there are a couple of different ways you can do it. One that I’ve been a proponent of for a long time is slow down, right? Five seconds up, five seconds down, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down.
Kevin Rose: Time under 10 is just huge, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so it’s like, look, if you’re not a competitive powerlifter, consider moving slowly. What that requires you to do is lower the weight. You’re also not going to be using momentum. The second thing you can —
Kevin Rose: Testosterone?
Tim Ferriss: Not for lactate, but, yeah, I mean, sure, when in doubt, yeah, testosterone.
Kevin Rose: When in doubt.
Tim Ferriss: When in doubt.
Kevin Rose: 200 milligrams once a week.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a joke, people.
Kevin Rose: Well, first of all, if you have it — well, anyway, don’t do that.
Tim Ferriss: So the second thing you can do, which I’ve been experimenting with, which Tommy would use this all the time, especially when traveling, is blood flow restriction cuffs.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And so —
Kevin Rose: I used to have some of those before my fire happened.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so —
Kevin Rose: I would blood flow. I got the automatic ones that would automatically keep the pressure, too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to use, like, a hand pump. I’m using the KAATSU —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, mine are digital KAATSU. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — K-A-A-T-S-U, C4. I’m using the C4 because I’m, like, I don’t want another app on my phone.
Kevin Rose: Did you get the app? Oh, I got the app.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t want —
Kevin Rose: That’s nice.
Tim Ferriss: No. Like, look, if people want apps, they can. I’m kind of along the Bill Burr lines of, like, “I need to install a fucking app to use my toaster now? Like, please, shoot me.”
Kevin Rose: What about having a hummingbird feeder?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, we’ll talk about that.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Let me finish the blood flow restriction. We’re all over the place. All right. So the blood flow restriction, all it is is a cuff. It inflates and it causes a partial occlusion. Right? It’s cutting off circulation to your arms or your legs. And there’s a lot of really good science on this. You can check it out. But what you can do when traveling — and I’m trying this right now. Tommy Wood, by the way, is a phenomenal athlete, endurance and strongman in addition to being an incredible researcher. I don’t know where they breed these people like Dominic D’Agostino, same thing, like 500-pound deadlift for 10 reps after a seven-day fast. Like who are these people? Anyway, Tommy is a beast. When he’s traveling, and he doesn’t lose muscle when he’s doing this, he’ll use blood flow restriction. And he’ll bring bands.
Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.
Tim Ferriss: He’ll just bring a bunch of bands. And I got to tell you.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t take much. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I like to think of myself as reasonably strong. I’m not a world-class powerlifter, but I think, like generally, pretty strong guy. I put on those cuffs today. And I was, like, “I think I’ll just bump it from light up to medium.”
Kevin Rose: Like 20 pounds?
Tim Ferriss: Ah, well, it has a different metric. It has a different —
Kevin Rose: The band strength?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in terms of like there’s —
Kevin Rose: Extra large or extra strong or whatever?
Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember. Yeah, I mean, if you use the KAATSU bands. There are many other brands. Tommy uses a different brand. You can find it in the podcast. We can put it in the show notes. But, suffice it to say, it’s like you’re using very, very light weights. And it’s like I can probably do hammer curls with like 40-pound dumbbells, let’s just say.
Kevin Rose: With those on?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: That’s what I was going to say. That’s way too much weight.
Tim Ferriss: I’m saying, normally, with reasonable cadence, not swinging around, I can probably do hammer curls with 40 pounds without too much trouble with the blood flow restriction bands on.
Kevin Rose: Like, literally, 20 pounds is all you need.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, 10 pounds.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I was doing like 30 reps and then take a 15-second rest, then 20 reps, 15-second rest, like 10 to 50 reps.
Kevin Rose: So you have the C4s, these bad boys?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got the C4s, yeah. And, look, KAATSU is expensive. These are, what, yeah, $1,259. Like that is expensive. There are other options that are not that expensive. But then the one that really was humbling is I was, like, “Okay, I’ll just do pushups for like triceps,” just because I only brought the armbands. I didn’t bring the leg bands and everything this time around. I can just do like walking and lunges. Trust me, you can smoke yourself doing those. But I was doing pushups, and I was, like, “Well, let me start moderate. I’ll just start on like a bench that’s about 18 inches off the ground. I’ll do some pushups.” And I did like 25, and I’m, like, “Wow, that’s a lot harder than I would expect,” right, because like, on the ground, I could probably do, I don’t know, 40, good form, 50 pushups. And I did 25. I was, like, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable.”
And then I went to do the next set, got like five, and I was, like, “Oh, I can’t do it.” And so then I increased my — basically elevated myself to make it easier. Right? And I’m doing it on, like, the seat of a hamstring curl machine. Did like 12. Couldn’t do any more. And then I got to the point where I was literally doing pushups. It’s so humbling on like the railing of the stairs. I was basically standing up straight, and I did 30 reps, and I was, like, “This really…”
Kevin Rose: Okay, real quick —
Tim Ferriss: “…keeps your ego in check.”
Kevin Rose: 20-second version, why is it working? Why is restricting blood flow working? Why is it building more muscle?
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s doing a few different things. It’s also increasing capillary density and vasculature. It’s having a whole host of effects. I, to be honest, don’t —
Kevin Rose: But doesn’t it increase HGH as well, localized?
Tim Ferriss: It might. It makes you sweat your balls off, too.
Kevin Rose: And then had another question.
Tim Ferriss: Not to get too technical, but
Kevin Rose: Could it work? Could that work?
Tim Ferriss: Kevin’s asking me if you could use blood flow restriction on your —
Kevin Rose: I didn’t want to bring it up unless it was with —
Tim Ferriss: — on your Schwantz.
Kevin Rose: So, listen, I think —
Tim Ferriss: I think it sounds like a terrible idea.
Kevin Rose: No. Listen, they have rings that you can put around your schwonks and — but, listen, hear me out.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I know those exist.
Kevin Rose: I just literally Googled that there is smooth muscle tissue in there. If you’re telling me that you’re putting bands on your arms doing lifts, if you —
Tim Ferriss: How are you going to do lifts with your Schwanz?
Kevin Rose: You have to have a schlonks erection.
Tim Ferriss: And then you do some shaolin monk — like —
Kevin Rose: Well, if you have the band —
Tim Ferriss: — like curl-ups?
Kevin Rose: I’m just saying this is a theory.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I guess you could like do manual resistance. You could push it down and then bring it back up.
Keving Rose: Push it down, five seconds up. Do you know what’s crazy? Obviously, everyone knows this is a joke, but it might not be, you know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Do not —
Kevin Rose: Like this could be real.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, do not wrap duct tape or anything —
Kevin Rose: Well, they have rings that they sell at stores.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think you can try that and then report back in the next show.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever used one of the rings?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think so.
Kevin Rose: You have to.
Tim Ferriss: No. I mean, I would. Why not? Yeah, I mean, why not? As long as you’re not going to completely — I mean, it’s not going to just fall off.
Kevin Rose: Apparently, it locks the blood in.
Tim Ferriss: Well, obviously, yeah. What else would it be for?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously, for people that don’t know, pre-Viagra era.
Tim Ferriss: We’re talking about cock rings. We’re speaking in fucking riddles here. It’s like that’s what they’re called.
Kevin Rose: We’re speaking in Zen koans here. What is the sound of one —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. This really fucking went in the gutter, yeah, quickly.
Kevin Rose: Well, we’re almost at the end of the episode, so —
Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds.
Kevin Rose: Hummingbirds. Okay. So, before we started the show, Tim was, like, “You’ve got to mention the hummingbirds,” and I’m like —
Tim Ferriss: Well, I looked at your draft, and I was, like, “You’ve got to talk about your hummingbird thing.” You’ve sent me a bunch of these videos.
Kevin Rose: Dude, they’re so cool. Okay. So, essentially, for Christmas, I got my kids a hummingbird feeder with a digital camera built in. And the cool thing about it is it charges from the sunlight and then also — so the camera just always stays on. And then also it detects what — in this case, it’s the hummingbird, but they have for normal birds as well. But it’ll tell you the variety of hummingbird that landed and then uses AI. And then you could name them. And so we have one named —
Tim Ferriss: Tony is back.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly, and we have one named Sunset. Our girl’s named it Sunset because it has this beautiful red neck, and we’re like — I’ll get a text notification. “Sunset is drinking…”
Tim Ferriss: Is this the one?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s the one, Birdbuddy. It’s the Birdbuddy Smart Solar Pro Hummingbird Feeder. And it’s fun, people, because these things are so beautiful and —
Tim Ferriss: The videos are amazing.
Kevin Rose: The videos are amazing. And then they play with each other. And you watch them hovering. And you get full audio. You see the little — their tiny tongues like sticking out. It’s just amazing. It’s really cool.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the videos were quite cool.
Kevin Rose: And then I got the one that is for just standard birds which has bird feed that comes down, and the motherfucking squirrels are taking it over.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, they’re just mercenaries.
Kevin Rose: They are ruthless. Dude, they jump. Like there’s nothing you could do to keep them out of it. They will spring onto it. And then you see they’re like — sadly, they look out because they don’t want to get attacked, and so all I have is squirrel ass on my freaking camera. I’m, like, “Goddammit, how do I get rid of the squirrels?”
Tim Ferriss: Have you heard of Mark Rober? Does his name mean anything to you?
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: He created like the ultimate squirrel ninja warrior course in his backyard.
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: He put it on YouTube. Let me — yeah, there we go. All right. Mark Rober, squirrels, I think he had the same problem. Here we go. Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 Ninja Warriors.
Kevin Rose: It’s supposed to keep them out?
Tim Ferriss: People have to check this out. Oh, hold up, no ads, no free ads.
Kevin Rose: I got to pay for my pro.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re not paying the $5 a month.
Kevin Rose: I’m not logged in. I’m not logged in to the pro.
Tim Ferriss: You’re buying $7,000 Japanese vintage jackets but you won’t pay $5 to get rid of these goddam ads.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, just click “skip.”
Tim Ferriss: All right. So, here, hold on a sec.
Kevin Rose: Whoa.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, look at this setup.
Kevin Rose: This is like MrBeast for squirrels.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, look, these guys just get —
Kevin Rose: My God, it’s totally MrBeast for squirrels. Like he’s having them go through all these obstacle courses.
Tim Ferriss: They stick their heads through and then they get a photo taken. All right, we’ll link to that.
Kevin Rose: People, you have to watch this video.
Tim Ferriss: Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 by Mark Rober.
Kevin Rose: Dude, this is —
Tim Ferriss: R-O-B-E-R.
Kevin Rose: — 144 million views.
Tim Ferriss: See, this is the kind of shit where I’m, like, “I should have come up with this idea.” Like this is too good. All right. Solid.
Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds and cock rings.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. We covered it all this time, people.
Tim Ferriss: Brought to you courtesy the Random Show.
Kevin Rose: Brother, good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good to see you, too, man.
Kevin Rose: Glad you’re —
Tim Ferriss: Good to see you, too.
Kevin Rose: Glad you’re feeling better. And, yeah —
Tim Ferriss: To be continued.
Kevin Rose: To be continued.
Tim Ferriss: All right, folks, we’ll put everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Random Show. It’s going to be one of those. Search for cock rings. It’ll be the only result on tim.blog. And, until next time, take care of —
Kevin Rose: For now.
Tim Ferriss: — yourselves. Be nice. Be a little kinder than is necessary to yourselves and to others.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-03-19 03:44:03
Welcome to another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose!
We cover our recent Zen meditation retreat with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, the fascinating science of vagus nerve stimulation, my recent back pain breakthrough, balance training tools, tendon-strengthening protocols from Swedish rock climber Emil Abrahamsson, the emerging research on photobiomodulation, urolithin A supplementation, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol for cognitive longevity, podcast recommendations, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird-feeder obsession, and much more.
Please enjoy!
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This episode is brought to you by Cresset Family Office! Cresset offers family office services for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs. They handle the complex financial planning, uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay and wires, and all the other parts of wealth management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most: making things, mastering skills, and spending time with the people I care about. Schedule a call today at cressetcapital.com/Tim to see how Cresset can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth.
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Want to hear a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from AI to Alzheimer’s prevention? Listen to our last Random Show, in which Kevin and I discussed the 2-2-2 rule for alcohol, bioelectric medicine and accelerated TMS, the promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s prevention, Kevin’s AI stack and investment thesis, aphantasia vs. hyperphantasia, surviving modern dating, wisdom from Anthony de Mello, and much more.
The post The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-03-12 05:07:22
Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, for which I invited five long-time listener favorites to answer a simple question: What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? You’ll hear from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman. You can find their full bios here.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Maria Popova: My name is Maria Popova and I am a writer. Here are two things I have done to anneal my life. Simple, practical, behavioral changes that have had profound existential benefits.
The first is that at some point I realized I was giving my time to people I perfectly like, respect, can spend a passable hour with conversing about things of some interest, but it was always leaving me malnourished, wishing I had spent that hour writing or down a rabbit hole about the anatomy of the eye of the scallop or talking with one of my closest friends about her work on exoplanets. And so I adopted a kind of, I guess you could call it the cherish quotient. I decided to stop giving my time to people whose company and conversation I don’t absolutely cherish, not just like or appreciate or admire or feel kinship with, but cherish.
Because as Annie Dillard so memorably wrote, how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. And so every middling hour is a step toward a middling life. Life is wasted on the lukewarm. Anything you give your time and attention to should roil with the magma of yes.
And the second thing is very kindred to the first. Some years ago, I emailed a poet I know who’s also an ordained Buddhist and got an auto response detailing her over commitment. And as I was reading it, I got a text from a physicist friend with an elaborate breakdown of his travels and his relationship troubles to explain why it had taken him three days to get back to me.
And I thought, holy stardust, here are people of extraordinary intelligence, creativity, accomplishment, and work ethic who think they are accountable to others for how they spend their time, which is the fulcrum of their life. And I thought how sad, how necessary that we train each other in a kind of basic faith, that everyone is doing the best with the equation between the resources they have, which we tend to overestimate, and that demands their life places upon them, which we tend to underestimate because most of them are invisible to us. And so I stopped using auto responders or apologizing for how long it takes me to return a text because the moment you begin apologizing for how you manage your time, you are essentially apologizing for your priorities, which means apologizing for your life.
Morgan Housel: Hey, Tim Ferriss listeners, thanks for having me. My name is Morgan Housel. I’m the author of three books, The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever, and The Art of Spending Money.
And I want to share with you a couple of things that I’ve done in the last 10 or 20 years that I think had a big, positive impact on my life that were both just around the philosophy of making everything as simple as I possibly could. And the first is how I invest and manage my own money.
My entire net worth is a house, cash, Vanguard index funds, and shares of Markel where I’m on the board of directors. It is hard to imagine a more simple investing asset allocation philosophy, and I’ve done it for a few reasons.
I think there are smart investors out there who have and will continue to outperform the market, and I know some of them and could invest with them. I’ll tell you why I don’t do it though. I think there is so much evidence throughout history that the fewer decisions you have to make as an investor, the better you’re going to do over the course of your life. And so there may be given years, maybe even given decades, when smart people ride a trend, spot an opportunity. Of course that exists. But the fewer chances and opportunities and decisions that I have to make of what are the trends are going to be? Who are the investors that I need to go with? When have they lost their touch and get out? The fewer of those decisions I have to make, the better.
So much of the decisions that we make and the forecasts that we make in the economy and with investments are less about truly objective views of trends and where we think the world is going, and more to do with what we want to happen in the future. When you make a prediction about where the US economy’s going, where AI is going, whatever it might be, it’s less about what you truly think is going to happen given the evidence and more about what you want to happen, given the biases and the lens of your own history and your own life and your own incentives, that kind of thing. And nobody is immune to that. Everybody has that. The fewer decisions that I have to make and anyone can make, the better we’re going to do as investors. I think that is true for 99.9 percent of people.
The other reason I do it, and I think this gets lost, is there’s a lot of evidence that how well you do over your lifetime as an investor has less to do with the returns that you earn in any given year or any given decade, and more just how long can you do it for? If your goal is to not outperform your peers this quarter or this year, if your goal is to maximize wealth over the course of your life, pretty much the variable that matters more than anything is just how long you do it for. And I know that if I can be an average investor for an above average period of time, I’m going to outperform the huge, huge majority of investors. If I can be a passive investor for 50 years, you will probably, after taxes and fees, end up in the top, I don’t know, two or three percent of investors, maybe the top one percent of investors, just by doing nothing.
And maybe that last point is the most important. You’re getting all this for doing nothing, for just sitting back and passively owning a slice of capitalism. How do you factor in that ease? And so let’s take an active investor who is working 40, 50, 80 hours a week tracking markets, and maybe they love it and they enjoy it and it’s their hobby, but let’s say they do that and they outperform me by 50 basis points per year, whatever it might be. How do you factor in the fact that I got my return for doing nothing and somebody else got it for lots and lots of work and stress and whatever it might be? And so I think when you put all that together, I want to minimize the biases that I and everybody has in the world. I think if I can do that, I’ll actually end up in the top one percent of investors over the course of my life, and I’ll do it for virtually no effort.
There’s a psychological cost of putting up with the volatility, but I can spend the time that I would have spent trying to track the global economy and trends and use that time in my career, if that’s outside of investing, my family, my health, my hobbies, those kinds of things.
The second thing I’ve done has to do with my relationship with the news. And I would sum it up like this. I think a really good heuristic for your relationship with information is read more history and fewer forecasts. As simple as it gets. Now, if you were to scroll most people’s social media timeline, if they’re interested in the news, whether that is business news, economic news, political news, science news, whatever it might be, the vast majority of it is forward-looking predictions. It’s maybe “Here’s what happened today and here’s what that means is going to happen tomorrow.”
It’s very predictive. And of course, if you’re even a loose amateur student of history, you know how difficult the history of predictions are. It’s just a very difficult thing to do. The world is so much more complex than we want to make it out to be. And so when we’re trying to predict what’s going to happen next, it’s very, very difficult.
A little side note because I just watched it and just finished it this week. If you watch or read the book, it’s called 11/22/63. It’s a book written by Stephen King, unbelievable book about a guy who basically finds a time machine and goes back in time to prevent JFK from being assassinated. And he does this, he goes back in time, he prevents it. He thinks he saved the world and there’s going to be no Vietnam war and whatever. And then he comes back to the present day and realizes that because he screwed with a little bit of history in 1963, the present world completely fell to pieces.
And so when he comes back in time, it’s like a Mad Max scenario. And I think that general idea that trends are very, very difficult to extrapolate and to figure out what’s going to happen in the future, particularly if we’re talking about long periods of time, is very difficult. And so I don’t spend a lot of time doing it or reading it. What I do want to spend a lot of time doing in my life is reading history. And I think if you immerse yourself in history, any kind of history, business history, political history, military history, whatever it might be, even if you’re looking at just the last hundred years, just in your own country, you become familiar with a lot of the psychological trends that repeat and you see over and over and over again.
And so if you spend time doing that, you understand how people are influenced by incentives, how whole cultures fall into traps of greed and fear and blindness to the problems that they’re causing themselves and the problems they’re causing in the world. You become very familiar with big, broad trends. And once you become familiar with those and spend most of your time studying that stuff, your ability to filter the news, the current news, is much stronger and you can read the news in a much more simplified manner.
You can run through the headlines and very quickly tell, “That headline’s not important. I’m not going to care about that six months from now or a year from now. It’s not important in the slightest. This thing about this new technology or whatever this might be or this example in the news of people falling for the traps of greed and fear, that’s pretty interesting. Let me read that and wrap my head around it.”
Contextualize within the big models that you’ve learned from history. I think it’s made my relationship with the news simpler and healthier. And I think if you don’t have those big trends of human behavior in your head that you learn from history, it’s very easy to get stuck in these wormholes of reading the news of every headline seems like it’s a disaster and every headline seems like it’s something you need to pay attention to that’s going to change the rest of your life. And there’s a great quote that I love from an author named Kelly Hayes, and she says, “When you haven’t engaged with history, everything feels unprecedented.” I think that’s a great way to summarize that.
That’s what I’ve got for you. Thanks so much for listening and thank you for Tim and the rest of his team for doing this.
Cal Newport: Hi, I’m Cal Newport. I’m a computer science professor and a technology theorist. I write and podcast about seeking depth in an increasingly distracted world. What I want to talk about here is simplifying.
Now, I want to establish something right off the bat. The entire reason why I’m a professor and a writer for my job and not, say, like a technology executive or a startup founder who’s made a bunch of money is that my body cannot handle busyness. When I have too many things to do and my calendar is filled with appointment after appointment, this does not energize me, this does not excite me. I get anxious. I get stressed out. What I need in my life is autonomy and space to work on my own terms, to produce cool things over a long amount of time, not to do a lot of stuff in the short term.
This has caused me to have to continually readjust what’s going on in my life to make sure that this busyness does not get out of control. I have to continually simplify to keep my lifestyle something that I can actually tolerate. So I want to give you two examples about this from my actual life. The first has to do with the opportunities that I get offered. Because as a writer and a podcaster, I’m relatively successful at what I do. As the years have gone on and I’ve gotten better, so have the opportunities and offers that come my way. I’m talking about, like, traveling to really cool places, chances to hang out with famous, really interesting people, stupid amounts of money being thrown my way. I mean, I’m talking about, like, a two-day trip that they’re offering you healthily more than my annual professor salary. What I’ve learned over the years is that I basically have to make no my default answer, because here’s the problem.
If you try to put in a triage rule, “Here’s how I evaluate if something is good enough for me to actually spend time doing it,” I found that whatever rule I came up with, too many things actually satisfied that rule. There were too many good enough offers coming my way that I would end up becoming busy anyways. And I would go into a cycle where I’d be completely overloaded, I’d get anxious and resentful, and then in reaction, I’d angrily say no to everything else. And I would tell people, they don’t care, but I would tell them, I am so busy, I can’t possibly do this like they care, like they need to know why you can’t do something. And then I would cycle down to doing nothing. And then I would cycle up to being too busy, getting anxious and upset. And this was not healthy. So I realized no just has to be more or less my default answer to keep my life at the level of simplicity that I personally need to thrive.
So now I basically, when it comes to these type of offers, I’m really only agreeing if it’s something I can bring my family to and it’s basically funding a vacation that we want to do otherwise, or if it’s something that’s cool and super convenient.
Now here’s the thing, in addition to missing out on money and contacts and book sales or whatever, I’m also clearly missing out on cool experiences by doing this. I’ll give you an example.
For over a year, MasterClass was asking me like, “Hey, will you do a MasterClass? We think your topic is well-matched to our audience.” And my default answer was “No, that sounds like a hassle. I know it’d be cool, but I don’t want hassle.” I said, no, no, no, no. But eventually, we found a way to make it work. I mean, they were really accommodating like, “Look, we could just do this in DC. It’s not going to be a big deal.” I talked to some other people that had done MasterClasses. I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll do this. This is convenient enough.” And I did.
And you know what? It was really cool. They rented a house, they had a crew of 20 people. It was like a movie set where the only “talent,” and I’m putting ferocious air quotes around this, was me. So you got to meet interesting people. The director had worked on a bunch of television shows I know. The makeup artist had just been working on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and the class, which actually just came out, is like, really good. I was like, I probably should have just done this originally. And who knows how many other things like this that are pretty cool that I’m missing out on? But here’s the thing, I realized over time that’s okay.
The goal with me simplifying the things I say yes to is not to try to avoid bad things, not like I need to get rid of these bad things out of my life so I can focus more on the things I really like. It’s instead trying to hit an ideal lifestyle.
And for me, my ideal lifestyle isn’t too busy.
All right, let me give you another example.
This has to do with my academic life. This was a complicated one for me. I’m a computer scientist by training. I got my doctorate at MIT. I worked under Nancy Lynch in the Theory of Distributed Systems Group. I specialize in distributed algorithm theory with a focus on shared channels. And really my subspecialty, because you all care about this, is lower bounds for randomized algorithms.
And that’s what I do. And I was pretty good at that. And I became a professor at Georgetown to work on doing distributed algorithm theory, supervising grad students, getting grants, writing papers, trying to win awards, et cetera. So this is what I did.
I also was always a writer. I wrote my first book when I was an undergraduate, and so I sort of had writing going on, but it was on the side and these weren’t at the time major books and it was just something I started as an undergraduate and as a grad student to make some extra money and I kept going.
These two worlds collided in 2016. This is right around the time I was about to go for 10 years as a professor and I published my book Deep Work, which was actually my fifth book because I started early. So I published this book, Deep Work, and it did really well. And it wasn’t meant to be some major launch or whatever. It wasn’t meant to be the big book of the year, but something about it hit a chord and that book started to do really well, like two million copies, 45 languages type of well. That began to change things for me, especially as I kept writing books and I started podcasting. That part of my life shifted from being almost like a hobby to something that I was really well known for. And now I had two major lives going on at the same time, wrangling my career as a writer while also wrangling my career as a professor and a theoretician.
And it was a lot to try to do both of these things because there’s a lot of logistics and overhead involved with both of those worlds. There’s a lot of work involved with both of those worlds. A lot of thinking goes into proving theorems and a lot of thinking goes into trying to write a book and you have to do these things at the same time. It also created like really sort of schizophrenic experiences, where you would go from a small computer science conference, where you’re essentially taking the super shuttle over to present the paper and there’s like 20 people there, and then you would fly to Malibu and a driver is taking you to your oceanside suite where a handler brings you to stage to give this one hour talk. It really became this weird mixed world and it was too complicated, but I didn’t know what to do.
I love being a professor. I’ve been in academia my entire life and I love writing. I just love thinking. What was I going to do here? And the key was simplify what’s going on with unification. So the discovery I had is like, “Well, wait a second. This book I wrote, Deep Work, which is at its 10th year anniversary, that book was about technology disrupting our ability to work well and what you should do about it. My next book was called Digital Minimalism. That was about technology. My next book after that was called A World Without Email. That book was about technology. A lot of what I was doing on my podcast was technology. I started writing for The New Yorker. A lot of what I was covering for The New Yorker was technology. And then around this time, as if the point wasn’t being made clear enough to me, the university where I work started a focus on digital ethics and they created the Center for Digital Ethics and asked me to be involved.
And I realized, wait a second, these aren’t two different worlds. I’m a computer scientist and I’m writing about the impacts of the type of technologies that computer scientists create and what we should do about it. Oh, this is the same world. I could be an academic that focuses on technology and its impacts, the ethics of technology. And this is a more recent change I’ve made and it’s brand new and I’m still trying to adjust to it, but at least for now, I have put a pause on doing distributed algorithm theory and supervising doctoral students, working on distributed algorithm theory and going to distributed algorithm conferences and getting grants to fund students to work on distributed algorithm theory.
I put a pause on that to say all of my effort is aimed at the same thing. Thinking and writing about technology and its impacts on humans flourishing and depth and what we can do about it. And that simplified everything.
That’s a completely reasonable thing. I’m now a full professor, so I’m at a stage of my career where I have flexibility and I should be exploring other intellectual avenues. Now my writing, my podcasting, my article writing, all of this is now unified towards a common topic. I simplified what was going on in my career. Now, again, this involves cutting off options. It involves cutting off opportunities. It also means I could be doing one thing maybe even better.
To me, the right way to think about simplifying is lifestyle design. I’m going to use Tim’s word here, lifestyle design. You know what conditions of your day-to-day existence are best for you, the conditions in which you as an individual are going to thrive.
And the whole game is designing a lifestyle that matches that. And for me, that required a high level of simplicity. I needed autonomy and I needed a lack of busyness. And so I don’t think about any of this in terms of what’s being left on the table. I think about it in terms of like how much I get to enjoy my day-to-day life when I’m successful with these efforts. So I still struggle with this. I constantly have to cycle and resimplify. Sometimes I go too far, but it’s something I think about a lot. It’s probably something you should think about a lot as well.
Craig Mod: Hi, I’m Craig Mod, writer, photographer, and long haul walker who has lived most of his adult life in Japan, actually pretty much all of it. My most recent book is called Things Become Other Things. It was published by Random House last year. I did a book before that called Kisa by Kisa. These are both books about huge walks across Japan. I’ve walked from Tokyo to Kyoto three times. I’ve walked the Kii Peninsula a bunch, the Hagiokan, the Rokujurigoe Kaidō, all sorts of different routes all over Japan and actually all over the world at large. But in Japan, I’m mostly looking at how the country is changing and just trying to understand things.
So three decisions I’ve made to simplify my life. Number one, cutting out alcohol. Easily the lowest energy in, biggest impact out simplification of my life has been to drop alcohol by the side of the road like a sack of dead cats, stinky dead cats.
I struggled mightily with alcohol abuse in my 20s. And looking back, nothing made things more complicated than this very stupid, very destructive relationship between me and drinking. Everything I perceived as complex in my life, trying to figure out who I was, believing in that person that that person could even exist, wanting to find a strong, meaningful partnership was made exponentially more complex by the presence of alcohol. If I could just go back and whisper in my 19-year-old ears, “Hey, dude, just don’t drink.” And if I could have followed that, a lot of things would’ve been simpler. Almost nothing in my 20s was made better by alcohol. And now the big question is, of course, if you’re struggling with alcohol is how do you cut the cord? That’s the big conundrum with a habit, an addiction like that. And for me, it was finding deep meaning in my work.
It was also sort of about hitting rock bottom. That was definitely a catalyst waking up one night and just really feeling like I was at the bottom of a terrible well. But just being at the bottom of that well I don’t think is enough to motivate you to really kick the habit. You need some kind of almost spiritual, “higher power” experience, I think, to really get over an abusive relationship, alcohol or otherwise. For me, that was my work. I was really lucky in the sense that I had this internal compass that I’ve felt for my entire life that was drawing me towards a certain kind of work, the writing, the walking I started doing. And I could see, once I acknowledged that kind of higher power in the work, every drink I took, I saw and I felt in my bones as taking away from that work.
And that alone was enough for me to be able to say no easily, consistently. And ultimately over the long haul, that was about 18 years ago that I really decided to, okay, let’s cut this out. But I think if you don’t have that purpose, it’s almost impossible to cut the habit.
The second big decision I made or tiny decision or whatever to simplify my life is therapy, at the risk of sounding like a cliche, starting therapy in earnest almost nine years ago now, which is funny. It was about nine years after I quit drinking. It was one of the simplest decisions I’ve made that’s probably had one of the biggest impacts on my life and in simplifying my life through clarification. I believe that it’s very difficult to achieve simplicity in life and to feel purpose strongly and clearly with a muddled mind, kind of makes sense.
And the man who doesn’t know who they are can’t be expected to perform at the best or to simplify their life or to make the right decisions if purpose itself feels mystical and forever off on some impossibly elusive horizon. I find that therapy when it’s done really well, it cuts to the bone in a really clarifying, interesting way. It just calls out all the bullshit-addled voices that you carry around in your head that you’ve probably been carrying around your whole life and it just kind of calls bullshit on this. Hey, okay, let’s really figure out what this voice is saying. And most of the time you realize that voice is responding to something that either hasn’t been a part of your life ever or hasn’t been a part of your life in, say, 30 years, and demystifying yourself and then thereby clarifying who it is you really are and why you are the way you are, you are paradoxically, I find, more freer, less limited than ever.
To use a [inaudible] metaphor, we’re all swimming. Some of us are swimming in clearer waters than others. Fundamentally, you’re not going to change the creature that you are in the water, but I do find that therapy cleans the waters quite a bit. And in those muddy waters, you just find yourself swimming in circles like an idiot. And I certainly found that to be the catalyst for reaching out nine years ago and wanting to begin therapy in earnest was even though I had achieved a certain amount of clarity and I felt a certain kind of purpose, I was still doing some dumb things in my life that felt just irreconcilable based on the purpose that I also felt. And so these sort of circles that I found myself moving in for certain aspects of my life, in order to demystify, to clarify them, I thought, okay, third party help is probably required. I don’t think we can carry this weight on our own.
And I did. And actually immediately I found within the first couple of weeks of therapy, this incredible sense of clarity and also this vision of a better version of myself, an even better version of myself that I felt like I could become. And every week in therapy, I find myself stepping up and becoming that person. And over time, it’s not just been an hour of therapy a week, becoming that person leaks out onto the sides of it and I find that I’m more able to readily inhabit that version of myself that I want to be. So therapy just cleans the waters, clarifies things, simplifies all of that, the act of living, and it allows you to move forward in ways that I think would be impossible on your own. And those paths that you can move forward on are much simpler than the ones I found I was moving on without therapy.
And then the third decision I’ve made to simplify my life has been to commit to craft. Almost nothing in my life has paid bigger dividends than stopping my waffling around, trying to figure out if I was an artist or a musician or a technologist or a writer or programmer or publisher or a photographer. No, I’m a writer. The end. And the more I’ve doubled down on that choice, that commitment to the craft of writing, the simpler my life has become, and the more vast my connections to beautiful, inspiring people. Everyone that I have in my life that I love and respect can be traced back almost one-to-one to the commitment to the craft of writing and the act of writing itself and publishing, getting things out there in the world. The more I write and the more people I reach, I find the bigger the impact of not only my present writing, but also stuff I’ve written in the past.
It sort of pays compounding dividends. And the more all of that is happening, the more inspiring people enter my orbit.
And when I say craft, committing to that craft of writing is not just dashing things off here and there. It is a full sort of almost maniacal pathological commitment where you’ll spend weeks and months and years working on certain texts. And it involves a lot of reading, editing, conversations, engagement with the world of literature as a whole. That’s what it means in my mind to commit to craft is you’re not just committing to hiding in a cave, typing. You’re engaging in the case of writing, in the case of writing that I like to do, case of writing that moves me, that I feel most drawn to, it’s literary nonfiction, literary fiction, universe of writing.
In my mind, look, I’m still a photographer and I love technology and following how it’s changing the world and thinking about its impact on society, but these interests and identities that I’ve carried all throughout my life to a certain degree or another are all mediated now through writing. And instead of trying to be a jack of 50 trades, especially as I was in my teens and 20s, which I kind of had to be to a certain degree, I chose one trade to commit to, which is the craft of writing.
That’s it. I mean, of course, friends and family are omnipresent, big part of things, but the foundations that allow me to be present for them and to be the best version of myself for them and for everyone else out there lies in the three decisions that I’ve outlined here. They’ve made things simpler and goddamn, they’ve made things better.
Debbie Millman: The Four Month Decision by Debbie Millman. In 2016, I turned down a job offer to become the CEO of the company where I had been working for over 20 years. At the time, I was president of the firm. My partners and I had sold the company to Omnicom in 2008. I had a five-year earnout, which meant I was obligated to stay there through 2012. After that, I was free to leave. And that is exactly what I was planning to do. For years, I’d been fantasizing about a different life, a life with more writing and creativity, more teaching, more experiments, a life that felt simpler and less operational, less quarterly. But when the earnout ended, I didn’t leave. I told myself at the time there were many reasons, money, security, status, fear, power, identity. I acknowledged it was hard for me to walk away from something I had helped build.
It was scary to leave a place where I could see the evidence of the biggest successes of my life all around me, and it was difficult to disentangle what I was running day-to-day from what I wanted to run towards. So I stayed.
Three years went by, but by 2015, I finally mustered up the courage to make my move. It wasn’t particularly dramatic. It really was just time. And then I was offered an even bigger job. My existing CEO, a man I worked with for the entirety of my 20 years at the firm, was looking to transition to chairman. And then he offered me his job, CEO, the chief executive officer.
On paper, it was extraordinary. I would be one of a small number of female CEOs within Omnicom. I would be one of the few openly LGBTQ leaders helming a branding consultancy. I would have full authority to shape the future of the agency I loved.
It felt like an honor. It felt historic and powerful, but it also felt heavy. I told myself I should want it. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I told myself that declining it might mean I lacked the ambition or courage or vision. As I considered what to do, I wondered if I turned it down, I would regret it forever, if I would disappoint people, if I would disappoint myself, and then I couldn’t decide. For four months, I vacillated. I made spreadsheets and pro con lists. I sought advice. I talked to friends. I consulted with my mentors, and every time I tried to land on a yes, something in me resisted, and I continued to vacillate.
One afternoon, after yet another conversation about my indecision, my very patient CEO said something to me that changed everything. He said, “Debbie, anything that takes you four months to decide might mean you really don’t want to do it.”
And suddenly, it was as if someone had opened a window in a sealed room. I had been framing my decision as bravery versus fear, as ambition versus retreat, and as success versus surrender. What if the four months weren’t indecision, but rather clarity trying to surface? His sentence gave me the permission to admit what I didn’t want and permission to prioritize alignment over advancement. And so I turned the CEO job down.
I remember the moment distinctly, but it wasn’t cinematic. There was no swelling music. There was no dramatic speech. But there was immediate, unmistakable relief. And yes, it was also bittersweet as I went through the realization that when you close one door, you’re closing a version of yourself, but I have never once regretted it. Not once in the 10 years since I made the decision to step into the life I now lead.
Turning down that job simplified my life in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Instead of scaling an organization, I began expanding my ideas. I continued my writing and my podcast, taught more intentionally, and began taking my illustration work more seriously. And I invested in doing projects that felt like extensions of my values rather than my title or my portfolio. Something else happened too. My ambition changed shape. For much of my career, ambition looked like ascent, more responsibility, more authority, more achievement, more recognition. Becoming CEO would have been impressive to who I was, but it would not have been aligned with who I wanted to be. There’s a particular kind of simplicity that comes not from doing less, but from doing what feels really true. Simplicity isn’t only about minimalism. I think it’s also about coherence. I often think about how seductive power can be, especially for women, especially for queer people, especially for anyone who has had to fight for legitimacy.
When an institution offers you the top seat at the table, it’s heady, feels like validation, but validation is not the same thing as fulfillment and power is not the same thing as purpose. Simplifying my life didn’t mean shrinking it. What I wanted, though I didn’t fully have the language for it at the time, was not more control. I wanted more freedom. That freedom has allowed me to build a very different kind of life. This meant removing the parts that no longer fit so that the parts that did could expand. And to me, that has been the greatest simplification of all.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman (#857) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-03-11 04:13:53
Many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question: What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? To explore that, I invited five long-time listener favorites: Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman.
More about today’s guests:
Maria Popova (@mariapopova) thinks and writes about our search for meaning, lensed sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include Traversal, The Universe in Verse, Figuring, The Coziest Place on the Moon, and An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than three million copies and has been translated into 53 languages. Morgan is also the author of Same As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes and The Art of Spending Money.
Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His latest book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.
Craig Mod (@craigmod) is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more.
Debbie Millman (@debbiemillman) has been named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and one of the most influential designers working today by Graphic Design USA. She is the host of Design Matters—a great show and one of the world’s longest-running podcasts. She is also chair of the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, editorial director of Print magazine, a Harvard Business School case study, and a member of the board of directors at the Joyful Heart Foundation.
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“The moment you begin apologizing for how you manage your time, you are essentially apologizing for your priorities, which means apologizing for your life.”
— Maria Popova
“The fewer decisions [we] have to make, the better we’re going to do.”
— Morgan Housel
“What I need in my life is autonomy and space to work on my own terms, to produce cool things over a long amount of time, not to do a lot of stuff in the short term.”
— Cal Newport
“Easily the lowest energy in/biggest impact out simplification of my life has been to drop alcohol by the side of the road like a sack of stinky, dead cats.”
— Craig Mod
“There’s a particular kind of simplicity that comes not from doing less, but from doing what feels really true. Simplicity isn’t only about minimalism. I think it’s also about coherence.”
— Debbie Millman
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Want to hear even more strategies for cutting the noise? Check out the last “How to Simplify Your Life” episode, featuring Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck, in which they discussed radical first-principles for living, why simplifying is hard work, making “no” your default answer, building a life around deep peace rather than dopamine, and much more.
Want to hear another episode with someone committed to the disciplined pursuit of less? Listen to my conversation with Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism and Effortless, in which we discussed how Gandhi would sum up Essentialism, the joys of simplicity, the difference between effortless action and effortless results, questions to cope with pet peeves, actionable gratitude, and much more.
The post How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman (#857) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
