Tim FerrissModify

Better Than Free: How To Differentiate In The Age Of AI

2026-07-18 02:27:28

Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and he is the author of one of my favorite essays on making a living as a creator: “1,000 True Fans.”

But if 1,000 True Fans tells you who your customers might be, how do you figure out what to sell them, especially in the age of AI?

I recently published “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?“, and reader Andy Vaughn recommended another Kevin Kelly essay in the comments: “Better Than Free.”

“Better Than Free” answers the what question, and I was shocked I hadn’t seen it before, as it first came out in 2008.

As luck would have it, I know Kevin, so I asked him if he’d like to update or revise the piece. He did so and kindly offered to let me post it here.

When perfect copies of your work cost nothing to make and distribute, what can you actually sell? In 2008, the copy machine was the internet. In 2026, it’s AI, which can produce not just copies but competent variations—of words, images, music, code, and advice—in seconds.

Fortunately, there is still terrain left for humans.

P.S. I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Which of these eight “generatives” are you betting on? What have you tried, and what has actually worked?

Enter Kevin… 

[At the request of Tim Ferriss, I’ve condensed this short essay, which I wrote back in 2008, updating it a bit now that Patreon and Kickstarter are almost clichés. I did not have to change much; the central theme still stands: You need to sell things which can’t be copied.]

In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy. That friction worked as a constraint to limit the propagation of copies. If you wrote a book or developed a photograph or carved a statue, it took trouble to reproduce it. We invented a legal system whereby we would reward the creator of the book or the photo or the art or the music or the device by preventing others from reproducing copies of it without the creator’s permission. Creators were granted a temporary monopoly to make the only copies available via a copyright—the right to make copies. Selling legal copies became the livelihood of most creators.

In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet as a superconductive fluid that transmits copies everywhere, all the time. Once a creation is brought into contact with the internet, it will be copied forever, and those copies never leave. With copies free and freely distributed, the traditional livelihood of creators selling copies is gone.

We now live in a digital age. If perfect reproductions of our best efforts as creators are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless, and stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.

Well, what can’t be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” You can’t purchase trust. You can’t duplicate it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, a stranger will always prefer to deal with someone they can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we purchase when we pay for something that could otherwise be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free in the eyes of the creator. Eight uncopyable values. I call these values “generatives” because they must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured in context of the exchange with the buyer. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, faked, replicated, counterfeited, banked, or reproduced. Instead the generative value must be generated uniquely, in place, in time. These generatives are what are sold, not the copies that carry them.

Eight Generatives Better Than Free

1. Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, the second it is produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via streaming or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. You might pay for a writer’s timely newsletter to get their insights that later appear for free on the web. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often devalued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.

2. Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound acoustically perfect in your particular living room — as if it were performed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, no ads). Aspirin is practically free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA would be very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time-consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset and will be reluctant to switch and start over.

3. Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free; the software manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. Consultants make their living doing exactly that. For instance, for 25 years the for-profit company Red Hat has been selling support, training, consultation for enterprises using Linux and other free open source software. The copy of the code, being mere bits, is free — and becomes valuable to a user only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting a copy of your DNA is not free, but soon it will be. In fact, I’d bet that pharmaceutical companies will eventually PAY you to get your genes sequenced because they can sell targeted drugs to you that don’t work for everyone. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.

4. Authenticity — You might be able to grab an app for free, but you might like to be sure it is bug-free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was, indeed, actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.

5. Accessibility — Free doesn’t mean it is easy to get. A clearinghouse that can offer otherwise free material in a format that we find easy to use will get our money (Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc.). We want our particular music (remember my tastes), at any time, anywhere in the world. Ditto for books and blogs and movies and apps. In fact, ownership is overrated. Even free stuff has to be stored, backed up, and tended to keep it accessible. An agency can do that for a fee. It works with us to keep everything in order, at our fingertips, with a uniform and dependable interface and therefore acts as a generative force for the copies.

6. Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a phone. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res 16K on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. That hardcover book is embodiment. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same physical room? Sure, the hi-res of today — which may draw ticket holders to a big theater — may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new, insanely great display technology that consumers won’t have and will have to move their bodies to. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. The book is free; the bodily talk by the author is expensive. The movie is free, but the toy merch is expensive. This formula is a common one for many creators.

7. Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if (1) it is very easy to do, (2) it entails a reasonable amount, and (3) they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. The advent of Patreon, a reliable platform that enables fans to easily, dependably, and satisfyingly pay for free stuff is a great boon to creators. I run two different Substack newsletters that are free. But many readers pay for it (via the easy subscription mode) just because they want to establish a connection with me — by directly supporting me. I thank them personally.

8. Findability — A price of zero does not help direct attention to a work. In fact “free” may sometimes make it easy to ignore. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen. Unfound masterpieces are worthless to the world. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of movies, millions of apps, millions of agents, millions of everything all demanding our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable. We pay the big aggregators like Netflix (and some users, like me, pay YouTube) in part to help us find good free stuff, which is why creators hook up with them. Right now the technologies of findability favor the economic interests of the big aggregators, rather than the creators, who only get a fraction of what the audience spends on their work. Alternatives like my 1,000 True Fans model can help, but are still constrained by the difficulty of findability. One of the promises of AI is that it could enable a more decentralized matchmaking function that would connect the creator who has a one-in-a-million interest with the thousand possible fans in the world with the same one-in-a-million interests.

***

In short, money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution to the demise of the copy because they are attention magnets. Ads have almost been the ONLY solution to the conundrum of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. Ads do work, but I think they are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.

Maintaining generatives is a lot harder than duplicating copies. These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not dependent upon the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse. These generatives are very human skills, by the way, which AIs are not very good at – yet.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and the bestselling author of books including What Technology Wants, The Inevitable, and Excellent Advice for Living. Explore his work at KK.org, subscribe to his KK Substack, or follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram and on YouTube. Kevin’s most recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show explored his life philosophy, optimism, advice for younger generations, and more. 

***

Back to me, Tim:

To make this concrete and provide a dose of inspiration, here are a few friends and past guests who each embody at least one principle brilliantly.

1. Brandon Sanderson. His “Four Secret Novels” Kickstarter raised $41.75 million, making it the most-funded campaign in Kickstarter history. Fans paid extra for backer-first releases, lavishly illustrated premium leather-bound hardcovers, swag boxes, and a yearlong experience. For a deep dive on Brandon’s business, check this out.
   
2. Ben Thompson (Stratechery). The tech news is free everywhere; subscribers pay $15 per month for his interpretation. Stratechery was an explicit inspiration for Substack and an early proof that a one-person publication could scale through paid subscriptions.
   
3. Maria Popova (The Marginalian). Since 2006, The Marginalian has remained free and advertising-free, supported by reader patronage. Its value is Maria’s trusted curation, synthesis, and ability to draw unexpected connections across literature, science, philosophy, and art.
   
4. Derek Sivers. He says he replies to every personal email and sells his books directly from his own site, including every digital format with a purchase and pricing additional paper copies close to cost. The words are easy to share; the direct relationship with Derek is scarce.
   
5. Ryan Holiday (Daily Stoic). The free Daily Stoic email reaches roughly one million subscribers. Its paid offerings include physical coins and medallions, challenges, courses, memberships, signed and leather-bound books, and an actual bookstore, The Painted Porch.
   
6. Seth Godin. More than 10,000 free blog posts built the trust. Books, talks, courses, and the cohort-based workshops he pioneered turned those freely available ideas into deeper, participatory experiences.
   
7. Boyd Varty. His books and free podcast distribute his ideas inexpensively; the scarce offering is a five-day Track Your Life retreat at Londolozi, including wildlife-tracking expeditions, personal coaching with Boyd, and work with master trackers. You cannot download that.
   
8. Matt Mullenweg. WordPress is free and open-source. Automattic—the company behind the hosted WordPress.com service, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other products—provides paid hosting, security, commerce, support, and other services around an open ecosystem. It is a modern version of “software, free; the software manual, $10,000.” 

The post Better Than Free: How To Differentiate In The Age Of AI appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday” (#875)

2026-07-17 09:13:56

Please enjoy this transcript of another rousing edition of The Random Show with my good friend Kevin Rose. We reunite over tequila to talk Zen retreats, learning to rock climb at (almost) 50, mortality and grief, why you should stop saying “one day,” AI predictions, and much more.

Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the episode

Legal conditions and copyright information

---

Additional podcast platforms

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.

---

Tim Ferriss: KevKev.

Kevin Rose: TimTim. Good to see you, man.

Tim Ferriss: Good to see you. And let’s figure out which one. There we go. Cheers.

Kevin Rose: Cheers.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I know the cool kids are down on alcohol, but every once in a while, I think there’s a place for it.    

Kevin Rose: There’s a time and place. And this is the time.

Tim Ferriss: I think this is the time and the place and I think paying a tax for it the next day is a feature and not a bug.

Kevin Rose: Are you getting taxed harder on alcohol?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, of course. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Is it getting worse?

Tim Ferriss: Every old bastard.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know.

Tim Ferriss: That’s gender neutral, gets taxed as you can process ethanol less and less well over time.

But I’m cool with it. I don’t have that much, but today has been hectic.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I feel like you had a hard day today.

Tim Ferriss: Take a little edge off and people may not like the sound of that. It’s a little antiquated maybe for all the cool ketamine kids. No offense.

Kevin Rose: Don’t put that shit on me. I try it one time and I get freaking ambassador.

Tim Ferriss: You fuck a goat once and then they call me the goat fucker. You can’t get around it.

Kevin Rose: I still stand by that experience. When you’re doing it in a supervised setting by a medical professional—

Tim Ferriss: Oh, here we go.

Kevin Rose: No, I’ve been telling you, you’ve done it.

Tim Ferriss: Of course I have.

Kevin Rose: Okay. So there we go.

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, because I wanted to be able to speak from—

Kevin Rose: I saw you at a party one time and you were just like, “Woo.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s not true. That’s not true.

Kevin Rose: I’m just kidding.

Tim Ferriss: Still have all my nostrils intact. No ketamine cramps.

Kevin Rose: I don’t even know what that is. Is that a thing?

Tim Ferriss: That’s when you use too much.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Way, way, way, way too much.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I heard it’s bad on the bladder.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, your bladder can get a little grumpy or a lot grumpy as the case might be.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’m good.

Tim Ferriss: I’m good. Kevin, random show number 3,479.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. You know what’s crazy, dude? Is I looked up a random show the other day and you had a bit of hair way back in the day.

Tim Ferriss: Way back. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: We were babies.

Tim Ferriss: I know.

Kevin Rose: So much shit has happened.

Tim Ferriss: I know.

Kevin Rose: The only constant I think is, like, maybe like Toaster, who’s barely alive.

Tim Ferriss: Toaster right now, seriously. Toaster was a tiny, tiny little pup who was chewing through the XLR cables.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: On your couch in San Francisco way, way, way back in the day. Toaster.

Kevin Rose: Toaster’s 15. And I’ll tell a quick little story. A week ago I get this call and Darya calls me and she’s like, “You’ve got to get over to the house. Toaster is shaking violently.” And he’s 15. He’s running into walls and shit. He’s getting up there and his legs are collapsing so he can’t stand up and he couldn’t stand up and he’s shaking violently and I’m just flying over there.

I throw him in my car. He’s on my lap, driving to get to this emergency vet as fast as possible and he just sprays shit all over me. Literally, I heard it, I felt his stomach be like, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.

Tim Ferriss: Here we go.

Kevin Rose: And then like 10 seconds later, I’m not even talking like, “Oh, he had a little shit.” No, no, no, no. Shotgun against the car door, the whole thing. And it’s all down my pants.

Tim Ferriss: Poor Toasty.

Kevin Rose: I know, but you know what’s funny, dude? It’s like I rushed him in and, long story short, he’s okay now.

Tim Ferriss: What was it?

Kevin Rose: He had gone into the vet the day prior and he was so nervous that he stood for, he had to be there for like a multi-hour blood draw because he was having some other issues and he stood for like six hours straight.

Tim Ferriss: That’s too long for an old dog.

Kevin Rose: And dude, he can only stand for like 10 minutes, max. And so he had just overtaxed himself and got like, there’s a syndrome that they can get when they’re, like, super stressed out and all that.

Tim Ferriss: Sure. Little Molly’s at it or big Molly. She’s on the floor right here. She’s sleeping. Molly’s 12. Hard to believe.

Kevin Rose: That’s crazy. But long story short, he’s okay. But I thought to myself, it’s so weird because when I walked in there and there was shit and literally I’m in tears because I think I’m about to have to put down my dog.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course.

Kevin Rose: And I just thought it’s okay. I’ll do this any day for this dude. When you care about your animals that much, none of that matters. You would do anything for them. You know?

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Kevin Rose: And it’s just, just that love. It’s so crazy how much you love these little beasts. It’s insane too. It’s like a kid. It’s like a kid.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s wild to think about if you really sit down and think about it. Some of these super common daily experiences like communing with a dog or pointing and having a dog recognize that you’re pointing, for instance, that’s really rare in the animal kingdom, that recognition of pointing, as just one example. But how unusual it is that we have this—and yes, we have cats. I grew up with four cats and two dogs. I get it.

But in particular, dogs as, like, companions, co-hunters, et cetera, the fact that we’ve co-evolved in a sense and sort of co-domesticated also. It’s not necessarily one way, read The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan for more on that, it is incredible. The fact that we’re totally calm having this 60-plus-pound beast with giant fangs on the floor is nuts.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve seen those Instagram posts where it’s like where I was and where I am now today? And they show the wild wolf out in the countryside eating a rabbit and then they show a poodle in a tutu outfit and shit, all dyed up.

Tim Ferriss: The meme is, “I’m going to go grab some scraps from those weird monkeys. What’s the worst that could happen?” And then it’s like, “10,000 years later, you’re a Chihuahua with a bonnet on.”

What else is going on, Kevin? I’ve got a couple things on my list, but we’ve got—

Kevin Rose: There’s a lot to talk about.

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot to talk about.

Kevin Rose: First I’ll say that lately, life has been lifing me. It’s been doing all the things. We lost a dear colleague, Om Malik.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, very sad.

Kevin Rose: Very notorious, just amazing early tech, just creative author.

Tim Ferriss: Brilliant writer. Brilliant thinker. Very sweet guy. The nicest.

Kevin Rose: The nicest.

Tim Ferriss: And now we lost him within the last week or so.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. He passed away so that was tough. That was really tough. I found out when I was at a retreat. I went to a five-day silent meditation retreat, which is great, but bummer to hear that. But this is the thing that I realized the other day I was thinking about Toaster and Om and other stuff I have going on and my mom getting older and falling and all these things. And in some sense, it’s unavoidable, number one. And number two, I kind of wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s what makes life interesting. When Om passed—

Tim Ferriss: You mean death?

Kevin Rose: Well, just everything, the chaos of it all. If you can just take a step back and be like, “Well, or I could just be sitting there living a really boring life and nothing could be happening.”

When Om passed, what I felt was a severe sense of loss and sorrow and sadness. But I realized that that gap is just love, at the end of the day, because I wouldn’t have it unless I loved this man so much. I cared for this person so much. How lucky am I to have crossed paths with this person, to get to know them.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And you were tied in through True Ventures obviously and prior to that.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. But like anyone in general that you lose that you love. When I lost my dad, that is just a gaping hole of love manifested through sorrow and sadness. And once you realize that, it’s like, wow, I had this great father that did all these amazing things with me. And that you can kind of convert that or just be okay with it. Not that you need to change that feeling.

Tim Ferriss: Recognize that it’s a consequence of the love that you have.

Kevin Rose: That’s a consequence of the love, the deep love.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I heard about his passing and I want to give credit where credit is due for a few things. Matt Mullenweg, a mutual friend. He was incredibly close to Om and I’m really grateful to Matt for a few things. One, I mean many things, I could give a long list, but there are a few.

One is he organized a trip to Antarctica. I’ve never been to Antarctica or hadn’t. And on that trip were just a handful of people, including Om. So I got to spend quality time. I mean, trust me, when you’re in Antarctica, you are indoors most of the time. What that means is you’re either trying to sleep in your tent, but it’s going to be during the summer so it’s like a spotlight in your face 24 hours a day. Or you’re in one of these other structures where you’re probably like having wine and junk food, let’s be honest.

And there’s a lot of talking. So we got to hang out and Om was also an avid photographer. And so we got to go to this nearby emperor penguin colony, which was a once in a lifetime experience and you just sit and talk. And if there were going to be any small talk, which there wasn’t going to be with Om or me really for that matter, it all falls away after the first half a day. And then everybody’s kind of psychologically naked.

So I really want to thank Matt for that opportunity to bond with him. I’d spent a lot of time with him, but it was always in these little bits and pieces, not for several days straight where you’re basically like locked in together.

And separately, Matt introduced me to this short blog post by someone who typically writes very long blog posts, Tim Urban, called “The Tail End.” I don’t know if I ever sent this to you.

Kevin Rose: People should know it by Wait But Why.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Wait But Why.

Kevin Rose: Fantastic blog.

Tim Ferriss: And “The Tail End” makes the point among many others that by the time you, I think it’s graduate from high school, let’s assume you’re headed off to college away from your parents. You’ve spent something like 90, 95 percent of the total hours you will ever spend with your parents by the time you graduate from high school. And when you start to visualize that, and Tim Urban’s really good at laying it out visually, it can provoke some really profound changes for me. I mean, just reading that short blog post sent to me by Matt ended up leading to taking my family on these family trips. As awkward and uncomfortable as that was at points, because my family doesn’t really emote much and so you stick us together in the way that I was together with Om and it can be super uncomfortable. But making the effort, at least feeling like, look, this runway is not infinite and it’s like, let me just make the effort. And I’m glad I did because we got to a point where it’s like with my dad’s mobility, he’s really compromised and needs a wheelchair now for a lot and—

Kevin Rose: I just saw him a few days ago and it was great to see him, dude. It was so great to see him. He’s so kind. He’s like, “Kevin,” so happy. And he had a little cane and it was just like so sweet to see him, man. I hadn’t seen him for years.

Tim Ferriss: Long time.

Kevin Rose: It had been like seven years or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, something like that. And I’m glad I took those trips because before you know it, you can’t do it anymore. And it makes me think of, you mentioned meditation, this really good short, I’ll call it a meditation for simplicity, but it’s like an audiobook chapter by Sam Harris called “The Last Time.” I think it’s called “The Last Time,” and he reflects on these various experiences that, at the time, you don’t recognize are the last time for something. So he went skiing, he went skiing, he went skiing, and there was a time when he stopped, but he didn’t realize that was going to be the last time.

Kevin Rose: You don’t know. Right.

Tim Ferriss: And you just fucking don’t know.

Kevin Rose: Do you ever try, I think about this dude and then I try and do it one more time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s how I always end up injured.

Kevin Rose: Dude, I went to the bouncy house with my kids and like I’m 49 and I was like, “I’m going to fucking do a flip right now.” And literally people were like, “Don’t do it. Don’t,” calling me off. And I did it and I stuck it, and it felt good.

Tim Ferriss: You’re good on a trampoline.

Kevin Rose: It might be my last time.

Tim Ferriss: It might be your last time. You are good on a trampoline. This is so weird, man. Dude, I kid you not. I had a dream last night of the two of us going to House of Air at Crissy Field in San Francisco and you were doing front flips off your knees.

Kevin Rose: I can do that.

Tim Ferriss: You dropped your hat and then you kicked the trampoline to bounce it back up to your head. And I was like, “What?”

Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait, wait. So you know I sent you that video of me dropping my hat and kicking it back on my head.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen you do it live, too.

Kevin Rose: So it just made its way into the dream.

Tim Ferriss: And I was just like, “What?” I literally had that in my dreams last night. That’s wild.

Kevin Rose: And I have the assless chaps on like I normally do in your —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you had the assless chaps on, which, depending on your angle, can be kind of awkward.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Because you like doing the straddle flip. You like doing the straddle flip. So it’s a little awkward, but —

Kevin Rose: I’ve heard about these dreams before. I know how they go.

Tim Ferriss: I always text them to Kevin. I’m like, “I was thinking of you last night.”

Kevin Rose: The chaps were back.

Tim Ferriss: So what do you got, man? My hands are too sweaty, because I’m thinking about death.

Kevin Rose: Chaps.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and the chaps. Wow, that was perfect audio.

Kevin Rose: Well, the retreat was fantastic. I spent five days going really deep on my koan doing a lot of work on it.

Tim Ferriss: Mu.

Kevin Rose: Mu. Which you can listen to Henry Shukman on your podcast if people are interested about what Zen is all about, like real true traditional Zen with koans. And you’ve probably heard the sound of one hand clapping that actually is one of 500-plus koans.

Yeah, it was fantastic. I had a couple little micro insights, which was good and I was kind of rushed through to the Zen master to explain them and try and get some clarity on them, which is great.

Tim Ferriss: How do you know that you’re having a micro insight? So it’s not like my balls are chafing in this position, it’s something else.

Kevin Rose: Yes, it’s not that, but close. No, I essentially was sitting and Henry, one of the Zen masters that you’ve had on the show, a dear friend of ours, was there and then his roshi from Japan was there. So it was very special. He only comes every two years.

Tim Ferriss: What’s his name? Yamada Roshi?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yamada Ryoun Roshi. Yeah. So basically I kind of pulled Henry aside, you’re not supposed to, he’s not talking, but he’s like, “How’s it going like this and that?” And I was like, “Well, I had this thing happen, what do you think about this?” And he’s like, “You’ve got to—”

Tim Ferriss: “Come with me right now.”

Kevin Rose: Well, not come with me, but he got me right in front because there’s a line to see the roshi to go have your private interview where you go and check your practice with them. So it’s behind closed doors, you go in, you sit down with the roshi, you typically get between two and 10 minutes to sit down and talk about your progress on your practice and you do that like once every day and a half when you’re out there.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Kevin Rose: And this was enough to where Henry was like, “You should go talk to him right away.”

Tim Ferriss: Skip the line. TSA pre-check.

Kevin Rose: Go to the pre-check. And it was beautiful and it was a micro little thing. I can share it if you’re curious.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course I’m curious.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So there was this sense, I’m sitting there—

Tim Ferriss: I get bored of hearing myself talking. That’s why I’m here, to talk to you.

Kevin Rose: I’m sitting here staring against the wall because in Zen you stare against the wall with your eyes open and you’re staring about three quarters down and kind of just glancing on. I’m working on my koan and for people that don’t know how you do that is essentially on the out breath, you just like slowly internally say your koan. It’s almost like a mantra in some sense but a little bit more involved.

Tim Ferriss: Confounding.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s like a question you’re kind of asking yourself slowly that doesn’t make sense and eventually it pops. But what happened is I had about two seconds of this sense that there was, and this is going to be hard to explain because it’s not from the world of thought, which is already hard to explain.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a sneeze in the perineum.

Kevin Rose: No. No.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Close.

Kevin Rose: I had a sense of nothing lacking.

Tim Ferriss: That sounds nice.

Kevin Rose: Nothing needed to be added and nothing even possibly could be added and nothing possibly could be taken away because everything at that moment was full in the way that it should be. But what was interesting about it is it wasn’t an emotion. It was just like a steady state of being. So it wasn’t like, “Oh, I feel free right now.” No, none of that. It was just like, “Oh, everything is here, perfectly present.” And it was just wild.

Tim Ferriss: Wild in what sense? In the felt sense of that experience or realization?

Kevin Rose: Wild in the sense that —

Tim Ferriss: Wild in the, I just drank too much tequila after not having much tequila sense?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I haven’t had any tequila, but —in the sense that we oftentimes so often go outside or inside, into our brain to try and find something, figure something out, an emotional state that’s either bothering you or feels good or feels bad or something else. And then just to know that everything and I don’t mean objects, everything was one unit of nothing lacking and it was just a micro sense of kind of like, “Oh, there’s actually nothing to do because everything’s already here.”

And they talk about this in Zen a bit where you’re actually not, you already have everything that you need. So it’s just they call it the removal of the veil. It’s an expansive awareness that you get from a deep continued practice over years and decades, but it was already there all along.

Tim Ferriss: Can I give a shameless plug?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So you and I are both involved with The Way, which is this guided single path meditation app, which is guided by Henry Shukman, who you mentioned. And it’s the progressive development of skills on a single path, which I really like as opposed to just what is the meditation du jour with no coherence.

And a few of my favorite meditations, I have a lot of different sessions bookmarked and I’ve done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And by the way, for people who are like, “Oh, these guys are just shilling their bags.” I do think it can be a good business, but this is sort of an ideologically philosophical investment of time and money.

Kevin Rose: It’s the reason we invested in the dog aging study with rapamycin.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. University of Washington, it’s like, “This needs to exist.”

Kevin Rose: These exist.

Tim Ferriss: It’s good for the world. Let’s try it. So sure, we’ve got some chips on the table, but this is mostly because we believe in it. And a few of my favorites, if people ever try it, “[The] Whole Earth is Medicine” is one.

Kevin Rose: That’s a good one.

Tim Ferriss: Another one is “This Too is Me,” which makes me think about what you’re saying.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: So “This Too is Me” is a meditation led by Henry, which this is going to sound maybe esoteric, but it’s not. When you recognize that all of the things you experience are mediated by your mind. And therefore when you hear something, when you feel something, when you’re interrupted by something, et cetera, et cetera, anything you can possibly imagine experiencing is also you, because ultimately it is entirely mediated by your mind. Let’s just use that instead of brain.

And it’s incredibly, at least for me, and I’m not comparing it to your experience because I think it’s probably characteristically different, is incredibly relaxing to let go even just for a moment because my brain is like the ultimate dog chasing a squirrel kind of brain. I’m always looking for something to fix, something to improve, what I need to do, what is happening next week and meditation is—

Kevin Rose: You are the squirrel.

Tim Ferriss: I am the squirrel. You’re right. It can be excruciatingly painful. Meditation can be super hard.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. 100 percent. That’s a very common thing.

Tim Ferriss: Super, super hard.

Kevin Rose: People are like, “I can’t do this.”

Tim Ferriss: But when Henry gives you permission to include all of that as you, I know this might sound very bizarre, it allows you to kind of drop this burden that you didn’t realize you were carrying. So in any case, you don’t have to do a week-long meditation retreat. If you’re just doing 10 minutes twice a day and I do think there’s some alchemy to twice a day. I don’t know why exactly. I have some theories around vagus nerve stimulation and stuff, but you get a lot out of it. In any case, I didn’t mean to interrupt your story.

Kevin Rose: No, I think there’s two things that I love that Henry says quite often when he starts some of these meditations, which is, “Take everything that you came in the door with, all of the thoughts, worries, emotions, things, and leave it at the door just for now. You can come back to it in 20 minutes, but just for now.”

The permission to set those things down for yourself just for now is such a beautiful thing. And then like the little instructions where he’s like, “Drop your jaw an eighth of an inch.”

And I’m like, “Whoa, I didn’t even realize I was clenching my jaw.”

Tim Ferriss: Can I tell you something crazy about that?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So I got fitted for a mandibular device, which is a fancy way of saying a double decker mouthpiece that is an easier approach to resolving sleep apnea or snoring. So I don’t snore a ton, but every once in a while I do, it drives my lady insane, understandably. And if you take the jaw and drop it down an eighth of an inch and forward an eighth of an inch, you open your airway.

And I was thinking about that because Henry will often say, as you’re alluding to, drop your jaw and leave it forward as if it’s resting on a small pillow ever so slightly and it increases your airflow. These ancients hit on some stuff by trial and error that really just works. It’s like, yeah, if you want to have better respiration while you’re meditating and better alignment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just do what Henry’s describing.

And I will say his dulcet British tones. If you just want a relaxing voice that will help you with chilling the fuck out when your monkey mind is ricocheting inside your skull, try Henry out. You can find free stuff everywhere. I’ve had him on the podcast a bunch as well as Meditation Mondays for a while, which were these very short episodes of guided meditations. In any case.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s great.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve been so—what’s the right word? I mean, overjoyed sounds too dramatic, but I’ll just say happy for you to watch your path with meditation because it seems like you get so much nourishment and grounding from it and no offense—

Kevin Rose: Here it comes.

Tim Ferriss: —you’re kind of a spaz. You’re kind of spaz. You get excited about shit and then you drop stuff that is very well exemplified and you’re like, “Tim, you got to buy this stock,” and then you never tell me when you sell. And I’m like, “Oh, fuck, I’m fucked.”

Kevin Rose: Oh, you want to talk about—

Tim Ferriss: Hold on, hold on. No, no, no.

Kevin Rose: Okay, because you gave me a real winner.

Tim Ferriss: You lost [REDACTED]. You lost [REDACTED].

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You should have held. It’s fine. But anyway, the—

Kevin Rose: Literally, Tim gives me this tip and I’m like, “All right, I’m in.” And then a day and a half later, I’m down like [REDACTED].

Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s why you’ve got to wait. But the point of the story is I thought, I was at a meditation thing, just like every nine months you’re like, “I’m moving to Android.” And then I’m like, “Let me start the timer for two weeks before you come back to iPhone.”

Kevin Rose: Week and a half maybe, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’m like, “Yeah, this meditation thing. Yeah, sure. We’ll see. I give it two weeks.” And you’ve stuck with it.

Kevin Rose: Coming up on five years now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s really made me happy as your friend to see something that gives you that consistency. That’s it. There’s nothing more to add. I’ve been really—what’s the right word? I’m not sure of the right way to put it. I’ve just been very reassured by you having that constant in your life.

Kevin Rose: One of the things I’m curious about, speaking of constants and kind of like how things changed since we’ve known each other and you had hair and all that other shit. My hair wasn’t great.

Tim Ferriss: Still got plenty of hair, just not on my head.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Those braids down there. The question I’m curious about is I’ve been thinking a lot lately as I kind of march towards 50, what are the things that I’ve always said that I want to do that I’m just like, I’ve got a thousand book marks on Instagram, like all these Japanese woodworking things, and like—

Tim Ferriss: It’s always woodworking. It’s always woodworking.

Kevin Rose: This is how bad my — Speaking of the monkey mind and bouncing around, I literally have, for some reason, the algorithm has now given me those motherfucking boats inside of bottles, like people making the boats in the bottles. I’m like, “Am I going to be a boat in the bottle guy?” I don’t know, maybe.

I realize now, I think these next couple decades, I want to stop bullshitting myself and stop saying like, “Hey, one day. One day I’ll get into Japanese woodworking. One day I’ll do this.” And really start doing some things.

And you’ve been really good because you archery, hunting, like the stuff that you’ve gotten into, you’ve gone deep on in the last few years.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super deep.

Kevin Rose: Are there any things that are on your kind of bucket list of things where you say, “One day.” You’re busy with your podcast and all the other shit you got going on?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, podcast, shoot me in the head. It’s fine and it’s fun most of the time, but it’s so crowded and it’s like, man, if 20 other people are trying to do the same job, I don’t want to do this job.

Kevin Rose: It is wild how many new podcasters there are out there. And they’re also optimizing every little freaking thing.

Tim Ferriss: All the thumbnails.

Kevin Rose: All the thumbnails.

Tim Ferriss: What you need to know before your crypto crashes next week, now. And I’m like, “Oh, God,” I just don’t want to play that game. And for me, I would say the most top of mind is rock climbing, actually.

Kevin Rose: Oh, really?

Tim Ferriss: I just did some outdoor rock climbing a couple of days ago and I love rock climbing. I was always, for at least the last 15 years, limited by my right elbow, which I had surgically repaired so it’s ready to go and I want to do some multi-pitch stuff in Yosemite.

Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s go.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: So I don’t know if I want to say this.

Tim Ferriss: All right, that’s a good start.

Kevin Rose: So you know who’s a big rock climber is [REDACTED].

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s very well-built for it.

Kevin Rose: He goes out to Yosemite, I’m sure. We should go.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: Because he’s invited me to go up there and do some climbing.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he’s good. He looks like someone who would be good.

Kevin Rose: Apparently he’s amazing. And I’m like, “Dude, I can’t go do multi-pitch with you at Yosemite.” And he’s like, “Ah, just come out, we’ll have fun, blah, blah, blah.”

Tim Ferriss: No, that’s how you end up fucked.

Kevin Rose: Exactly, exactly. I did multi-pitch when I was like 24 and it was like three pitches. I didn’t do Yosemite.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no, that’s a commitment. So the idea of having something like that, to strive for. Having some type of physical goal like that for me is very helpful because just not dying, like training to not die sooner than is necessary is not sufficient for me. I’m just like, that’s such a depressing, uninvigorating goal. I’d much rather have something that has a deadline. It’s like, all right, you need to be able to do x. In the case of the archery, it’s like Lancaster Classic, here’s the date. You need to do this type of training and this type of volume with this type of deliberate practice in order to be prepared to train and then compete. Okay.

Similarly, for something like a multi-pitch, it’s like, okay, you can break that down. And I just enjoy doing that stuff.

Kevin Rose: Dude, so let me ask you a question. The number two, I don’t know if you saw this on my story list. The number two story I had was this guy Michael Eckert. Do you know who he is?

Tim Ferriss: Tell me. No, no idea.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Okay. So Huberman and Rogan and all these guys, they’ve talked about him publicly, about this guy. He has won multiple pull-up world championships. And dude, when you watch him do a pull-up, he’s kind of one of those guys that can bring the bar all the way down and does the [crosstalk] style.

Tim Ferriss: The typewriter and all that stuff.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. You know where you can walk with your feet and shit.

Tim Ferriss: All the calisthenic stuff. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. But he has a series of videos that teach you how to do finger strength training. And I bought his course and I’m doing this right now. But you got me into that wooden device.

Tim Ferriss: The Nug.

Kevin Rose: The Nug. So dude, you got to watch his videos. They’re amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.

Kevin Rose: Seriously, Joe’s really into them. This guy, his name is Michael Eckert. You can find him on Instagram, and it’s all about grip strength, pull-ups. And he’s not big, but he’s shredded. And when I think about the next 10 years, I don’t need to be big, big.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s probably not what you want.

Kevin Rose: It’s probably not.

Tim Ferriss: Especially for rock climbing.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you need to be lean and strong. And that’s what I love about this. I’m doing these every single day. Well, I’m two days in. I’m getting into it. Tell us about The Nug, because that was something that you turned me onto.

Tim Ferriss: Well, The Nug, I mean, I have it in my suitcase at the hotel here. It’s just a simple little wooden device. It looks like a very large bar of soap with these different indentations carved into the sides.

Kevin Rose: Like little finger indentations.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So you can use a carabiner to connect it to, say, a cable machine of some type in any gym. Look, you could use a loading pin and all this, that, and the other thing on a daisy chain, but let’s put that aside. At a gym, you could use a cable and connect it through the loop with a carabiner, and work on your hand strength.

Kevin Rose: And you brought this to Santa Fe when we were out there doing the meditation thing.

Tim Ferriss: I did. Yeah. I mean, it’s literally—

Kevin Rose: It travels probably so easy.

Tim Ferriss: Something small enough to slip into my sweatshirt pocket. So it’s easy to travel with. I always travel with that and a band for multiple purposes, for something called DNS kind of core exercises.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I know DNS.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I use a band for that, and it’s incredibly easy to travel with. And then a handful of other things. There’s something called an Alpha Ball, which I use for different types of kind of mobility. It’s the size of a very large soft softball. And all this stuff fits into the corner of a suitcase. And then I’ll do also something that maybe we haven’t talked about, called Abrahangs, which so Abrahamsson, Emil Abrahamsson, very well known rock climber on YouTube and Abrahangs—

Kevin Rose: I’m writing this down right now. Abrahangs.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Abrahangs are pretty simple. I mean, it’s partial body weight hangs in different positions for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, for 10 minutes. And you do that twice a day, and it’s very, very moderate in intensity.

Kevin Rose: With like a wooden kind of rock climbing kind of like type thing?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you could use a hangboard.

Kevin Rose: Hangboard, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, you could also use a pull up bar depending on how you position your hands. And that’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, was that kind of stuff, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off. And the endurance and strength gains that you get in your hands are just insane. I should say your lower arms, and it really helps. So I’ve been doing indoor climbing, but ultimately I’m like, you know what? As a stretch goal, multi-pitch outdoor Yosemite, that just—

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I am deadly terrified of heights, deadly. Just talking. If you just look at my hands, I’m sweaty just talking about heights.

Kevin Rose: When I watch Free Solo, my hands are sweating the entire time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: For people who haven’t seen the documentary, even if you’re not into rock climbing, that is amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, watch Free Solo. It’ll freak you out. So that’s one that I’m thinking about going deep on. I’d say that’s very high up on the list, because—

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome dude. Let’s do that together. I’m totally down. I’m into it.

Tim Ferriss: I am totally into it. I mean, the rock climbing when approached in a reasonable way, like a systematic, reasonable way, not with crazy dyno movements on bouldering, necessarily. I mean, look, younger bodies can handle it, certain bodies can handle it. My body, not so much. I do not want to fall repeatedly from 10, 15 feet up. I’m just not into it. So in the case of doing it reasonably though, for instance, I spent a bunch of time, I’ve spent a lot of time in Utah, and climbing in some of the Salt Lake City indoor gyms, you have incredible athletes. And I’ll make that a little finer tuned. When I would go to the gym, it was generally like 11:00 a.m.? Who the hell goes to the rock climbing gym at 11:00 a.m. on a weekday? These are retirees and moms. So you would see, for instance, these like 60, 70, 75, almost 80-year-olds who were doing like 5.11 plus.

Kevin Rose: Oh, shit. This is when you were single, so that was like, prime hunting.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Cougarville. And you would just see these people in their 60s and 70s doing things that I could not even imagine doing, with complete inversion on overhangs.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this.

Tim Ferriss: 60, 70 feet up. You had the national speed climbing team, you had Olympians. But more than like the young guns, the 15 year olds who are doing all this crazy stuff because they’re impervious, it was the people in their 60s and 70s who were climbing every day that inspired me to want to take this more seriously. So I was like, “Okay, I want to play the long game here. What can I do that’s fun?” It’s a puzzle. There’s a lot of Tetris.

Kevin Rose: They’d literally call bouldering, they call them problems.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, problems. Yeah, exactly. And so there’s a lot of brain power involved, and also it’s just to give an idea of the technicality, I mean, there are, for example, women who cannot do five pull-ups, who can climb 5.13, 5.14. That’s very, very, very, very, very hard just for people who have no reference point, like world-class, like 5.14, 5.15, insane, insane. That’s when you’re in the magazines.

Kevin Rose: Oh, 100 percent.

Tim Ferriss: And it’s because of the technical depthness. Yeah, there’s like ape index and other physiological factors that play into it, but that is a very long answer to your question of what I’m thinking about now, which is rock climbing. 

Tim Ferriss: The archery was great and the competition was fantastic. I love competing. However, archery is, by definition, incredibly solitary. You’re just by yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again thousands of times, and I’ve had enough of that in my life. I’ve hit my quota. I want to hang out with other people. I want to have—

Kevin Rose: Climbing is super social, because you’ll sit there and if neither of you can do it, you’ll be like, “What if you put your foot in like that, and kind of lunged up that way and stretched?” You know what I mean?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then you can ask other people for tips, like beta. Like, “Hey, can you give me some beta on this?” It’s fun. It’s really fun. I just love it. I wanted to mention something, if people haven’t read it, The Blade Itself, which is a series, it’s not very long. I think it’s two or three volumes by Joe Abercrombie. It’s fantasy novels. They’re really good. The audiobooks are incredible. And the reason I thought of this, The Blade Itself, is because of our conversation around Om and Toaster, and a friend of mine just died in a plane crash—

Kevin Rose: Jesus.

Tim Ferriss: A couple weeks ago, not even two weeks, less than two weeks ago.

Kevin Rose: The NetJets one that went—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: You knew him?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Josh.

Kevin Rose: Oh, God, that was at latitude too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. I know. I know. So you just don’t know when your time is up. And in The Blade Itself, I mean there are a lot of various like—

Kevin Rose: Sorry, that sucks.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. And we weren’t super close friends, but certainly friendly acquaintances. It wouldn’t be strange to text and you just don’t know when your time is up and The Blade Itself explores this in a million different dimensions. It’s really, really outstanding. I say that as someone who’s read a lot of fantasy and it just talks about the randomness of life or death in war. It’s like you happen to squat down, take a, and the guy next to you gets an arrow through the head.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, totally.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just dumb luck, which is a way to, I suppose, reiterate the gratitude piece that you were mentioning earlier. I mean, that’s going to be a tough act to follow, but where do you want to go from that?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean a few things. Let’s change it up to, well, let’s just go straight into working out. Have you tried this?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have actually. It’s great.

Kevin Rose: Okay. I really like it. So for people that are on audio, I just got turned onto this new protein called Pioneer Pastures and it’s 30 grams in this little tiny shake. It’s A2. So it has lactose removed and it’s also from that special genetic cow. Do you know more about the A2? Can you speak to it?

Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard about the A2. I don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s like the Holstein and some other cow and da, da, da, da, da. Apparently, more people tolerate A2 better than not.

Kevin Rose: I don’t get any stomach issues or anything with this type of whey protein. Anyway, I’m not an investor or any shit like that. You can get it at Target or whatever. It’s tasty as hell and it’s 30 grams and I don’t know. If you’re trying to put a little muscle mass on—

Tim Ferriss: I love that this is next to the LALO tequila.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you could mix them if you want.

Tim Ferriss: Everything a growing boy needs.

Kevin Rose: Anyway, I just wanted to know if you had tried it because we always, this is The Random Show, we do random shit.

Tim Ferriss: I tried it. Yeah, I tried it.

Kevin Rose: You like it?

Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah. There’s a gym, I can’t remember exactly. I think it was Brooklyn Barbell Club where they sold this and I tried it then and I did. Yeah, tolerated it super well. Didn’t get the grumpy guts as one might when they—

Kevin Rose: What’s your favorite protein, out of curiosity?

Tim Ferriss: I mean, my protein, I mean, this is a softball pitch, but funny you should ask, Kevin. And look, I’m involved with this one, but you know what? I always disclose, have you noticed how few fucking people disclose what they’re involved with? They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of this great thing. Oh, my God.” And they never disclose they’re involved. The fact that I’m involved—

Kevin Rose: You can literally go to jail for that shit.

Tim Ferriss: No, I know. But the FTC doesn’t enforce that stuff. Anyway, I mean, right now I’m traveling with Maui Nui as usual. This one though is kind of interesting. I probably get 40 percent of my protein from Maui Nui venison. This is wild harvested axis deer from Hawaii. There’s a long story there, but incredibly nutrient dense.

Kevin Rose: I love this shit and this is not an ad, but I do have a hard question for you, like a real hard question. This is how you know that it’s not an ad, because you have no idea what I’m about to say.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s hear it.

Kevin Rose: Processed meat nitrates linked to a lot of cancer and bad shit. What are your thoughts on that?

Tim Ferriss: This is very, very, very minimally processed. So you can get summer sausage or the sticks. This is free of most of that bullshit.

Kevin Rose: What do you think that is? Because it is real. People that eat more like, nitrate processed, ultra processed meats—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If it’s ultra processed and the shelf life is like three years, I would raise an eyebrow and probably hit pause. So the fact of the matter is most of this stuff that is minimally processed almost definitionally is not going to last very long on the shelf.

Kevin Rose: What do they mean by minimally processed when you see a meat stick? What do you think about that versus— Is it the amount of salt content that creates the nitrates? What—

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s actually, nitrates are totally separate categories. So you’re looking to— I mean, I think an easy heuristic for this is just shelf life. How long will this last?

Kevin Rose: How long are those good for?

Tim Ferriss: Your eyes are going to be better than mine. If you can read this size two font on this, then you can tell me.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, let me look at that.

Tim Ferriss: Give it a go. And I’ll buy you some time. In the meantime—

Kevin Rose: 27 years. No, I’m just kidding.

Tim Ferriss: 25 years.

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t say on here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’ll stay somewhere on the box. There we go.

Kevin Rose: Oh, ’27.

Tim Ferriss: Best by. Yeah, ’27. So it’s like less than one year, I think, actually looking at it here.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so—

Kevin Rose: Less than one year. Wow.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And what makes this interesting is that this I give also, Molly looks really good for 12 years. I give her probably two or three of these a week. The way I think of this, this is Peppered 10, so there are a bunch of these different sticks. Every professional team you can imagine uses these things in their training, but this is made with wild harvested venison liver and heart. So it has some organ meat in it. You do not taste that. It just tastes like regular jerky stick, but I treat this like a multivitamin. So it’s like I take, let’s call it two or three of these a week and limit it to that and then the rest of the time I’m taking their other either peppered or regular sticks.

But this is when I’m on the go, I mean, literally this was in my bag when I got here. When I’m on the go, I’m traveling with this, probably some nuts of some type like pistachios or whatever. Walnuts are pretty good for a host of reasons and that’s about it. I mean, I might have a couple of servings of exogenous ketones, but I haven’t taken that stuff in a couple of months.

Kevin Rose: You told me, you freaked me out, it messes up your liver.

Tim Ferriss: This is a controversial topic. So yeah, there are certain exogenous ketones that contain something called 1,3-Butanediol. It’s very common and there’s a lot of debate around this. So the jury is still out, but some people believe that that can produce liver toxicity. So I consume anything with 1,3-Butanediol in moderation. Now, to play not devil’s advocate, but to do a counterpoint, a lot of the people who are putting forth that hypothesis or claiming that’s true are selling their own ketone salts. So they’re actually selling a competitive product.

Kevin Rose: I see. I see.

Tim Ferriss: So question mark, question mark. But I mean, look, you can look at the peer reviewed literature and decide for yourself. What I have decided personally is that you should use the exogenous ketones very intermittently. I have experimented a lot with every type of exogenous ketone you can imagine and—

Kevin Rose: I mean, you got me on that good. It’s expensive as hell, but like that stuff goes straight to your head. The one that you didn’t want to talk—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Delta G. We can talk about it.

Kevin Rose: You know what’s funny is when Tim, this is how you know it’s good, off camera, Tim’s like, “I don’t want to mention the brand because if I do, it’ll sell out and I won’t be able to get my own supply.” And that’s how I knew I was like, “That’s some good shit.” If Tim wants to guard his own supply of it, you know it’s good.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And it is good, but it’s BHB. I won’t get too much into the technicality here, but it’s beta-hydroxybutyrate bonded to 1,3-Butanediol. So you’re still getting that 1,3-Butanediol, which means you should take it. In moderation. But in a pinch, when you want it for a podcast or something like that, man, it really works.

Kevin Rose: It does work.

Tim Ferriss: It really works. And I mean, I’ve given it to relatives with dementia and within 20 minutes, their sentences have like 5Xed in length and they’re more acute verbally. It’s wild.

Kevin Rose: How do you give it? I wish they had it in pill form because in some sense it’s really hard to give that to someone that has dementia because it tastes like gasoline.

Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t taste great. It’s not the worst thing. I mean, I’ve had a lot of foul stuff in my life. I just did a shot with this person and I was like, “I’ll do it with you.” And then we went for a walk and that was it. There are some concerns around 1,3-Butanediol and balance. So particularly in older adults, you do not want to contribute to any risk of breaking a hip.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, 100 percent.

Tim Ferriss: That’s just the death knell for a lot of people. I know.

Kevin Rose: I just had to put my mom into a different home that has—it’s actually kind of cool. It’s sad, because she’s been falling and they have this like new AI orb that sits up there and it kind of does like a kind of radar type situation and it detects falls.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Kevin Rose: So the second she falls in the home, they can rush in and help her out and all that and they carpet the hell out of it now and stuff like that.

Tim Ferriss: How do you think about sort of pre-grieving that or contending with that yourself?

Kevin Rose: In terms of—

Tim Ferriss: With family, that’s rough. I mean, it doesn’t sound easy. Because if you play forward the tape, it’s like, I mean, I think about this with my own parents and it’s just like, nobody lasts forever.

Kevin Rose: It’s one of those things where it’s so funny because when you’re a teenager and I remember when my dad was having a hard time standing and this was like when I was much younger before he passed and I was like, “Oh, dad’s going to be in the thing that I might have to push him on it if he has to sit down.” Kind of those walkers that can also be something you can push somebody on. I was so embarrassed. I was like, “Oh, people are looking at us or whatever.” And now I push my mom with pride in the inner walker thing and I’m like, I don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s like, the only thing you can do is just make sure to show up and hang out. And I’m very lucky that my mom has dementia, but it is a type that it’s not Alzheimer’s so it’s probably vascular or something. I can walk in and she knows who I am. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but she knows who I am, which is like, I’ll take that all day long.

Tim Ferriss: For sure. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I know you have family members that are in the same boat, which is tough.

Tim Ferriss: I have a ton of family members with Alzheimer’s. I mean, I literally got a call from one of my relatives wanting to discuss interventions and it’s a tough conversation because there really isn’t much. You have to, as far as I can tell, act preemptively, which is why, actually this relates to another bullet of mine. I—

Kevin Rose: You have five?

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Kevin Rose: How many Bulleits did you have?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, how many Bulleits did I have?

Kevin Rose: I was just curious.

Tim Ferriss: Of all the rye whiskeys, it’s the only one that I can tolerate. I loathe stationary bikes. I really find stationary biking to be one of the most soul crushing things in the world.

Kevin Rose: It’s the worst.

Tim Ferriss: However, I mean, I’ve tried Peloton and didn’t like the ergonomics and so on for a bunch of reasons. And then I have tried very expensive, very, very expensive setups recommended to me by fancy doctors and so on, which are just too uncomfortable. I’m incredibly hunched over. My back is basically parallel with the floor.

Kevin Rose: What are you talking about?

Tim Ferriss: And I’m kneeling myself in the stomach. It’s so uncomfortable.

Kevin Rose: Like crunching machines? What are you talking about?

Tim Ferriss: No, no, I’m talking about getting on a stationary bike. But if you’re in a racing position, you have to adopt this hunchback and there are a million reasons why I find that uncomfortable. There is a bike, however, it’s very easy to find. It’s pretty common in public gyms called the Keiser M3i Studio Indoor Bike. I don’t know why they have to make it so difficult in its nomenclature, but the Kaiser M3i is unique in my experience in that you can elevate the handlebars enough to sit in a comfortable position with a decent saddle, meaning the seat, such that I can do the V2 and the V4 and all of that training for me in a comfortable position without compromising my low back, which has been a huge step forward.

So this is the only bike that I’ve used consistently for this kind of training. I was having a number of conversations with a neuroscientist named Dr. Tommy Wood over a period of weeks. And if for instance, you do something called the Norwegian 4×4, there’s data to suggest that if you do—it’s VO2 max training, so it’s very, very, very intense, but it’s like—

Kevin Rose: Four on, four off?

Tim Ferriss: Four minutes on, three to four minutes off, let’s just call it three minutes. Four minutes on, three minutes off. And you do that for four rounds. This is the only bike that I’ve been able to use to do this consistently. And if you do that for, I think it’s three times a week for five to six months, the volumetric changes, meaning the neuroanatomical changes in the hippocampus and other areas that are certainly indicated in things like Alzheimer’s lasts for up to five years.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: So if you do five to six months gutting it out three times a week, the results—

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: The dividends pay off for, it seems, up to or possibly beyond five years.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: Crazy.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of—

Kevin Rose: [crosstalk] sauna in there and you’re like—

Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s why I’m doing—yeah, I’m doing all the usual stuff, I’m doing the sauna. And don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You know what I mean? It’s like, okay, sure. You don’t have 30 minutes to do it, do 10 minutes. You can’t do a sauna, take a hot bath, figure it out.

Kevin Rose: You know what my good is that I like?

Tim Ferriss: What’s that?

Kevin Rose: It’s not perfect, but it’s good, which is I go on my treadmill, I set it to 4.75 or something incline. So it’s not crazy, but it’s not, I still do shit. And I set it to only like 2.5 on the walking and I’ll play Duolingo chess because they have chess on there now for Duolingo. They teach you chess, it’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Kevin Rose: And you can play friends and live people and all that stuff and they do game replays and they teach—and I’m learning a ton. And 30, 40 minutes go by and you’re drenched in sweat. I know it’s not high intensity and all the benefits on the cognitive side seem to be around a lot of high [crosstalk].

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but who knows?

Kevin Rose: But it’s good.

Tim Ferriss: It’s doing something.

Kevin Rose: It’s doing something. So I’ve really enjoyed that. If you just want something to both be learning and engaged and kind of like having fun so you forget about the time. Do you know what I’m talking about where it’s like you just like, “Oh, wait, what time is it? Oh, shit, I’ve been on for 37 minutes. I can get off now.” I love that type of cardio.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, for me, I mean, this is going to sound like maybe a step down, but it’s like the older I get, the more I realize a little goes a long way. Like yesterday, for instance, I had a bunch of stuff stacked up and I won’t bore people with the commitments, but I didn’t really have any time to go to the gym and it was my day to go to the gym to do X, Y, and Z exercise. And I went in and I did like, three sets. I was literally in there for five minutes and I left, but it’s better than nothing.

Kevin Rose: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: Something is better than nothing. I’m not going to go to the Olympics with that approach, but let’s fucking be real. I’m not going to the Olympics, period.

Kevin Rose: You’re not going to the Olympics. I mean, maybe it’s like a bystander. Like, in the—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, I’ll throw some new random stuff in there. There’s a study that got my attention, it’s been out since 2025, September 2025. This is in JAMA and this is the title, Single Treatment with MM120, and then in parentheses Lysergide, I think is how that’s pronounced, in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. So this is—

Kevin Rose: GAD.

Tim Ferriss: GAD. This is a randomized clinical trial looking at anxiety, which is often comorbid, meaning happening at the same time as depressive disorders. And I think this is sponsored by a company called Definium, which used to be MindMed. In any case—

Kevin Rose: I love where this is going. I just looked it up. Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So what’s interesting about this, and they’re not going to maybe love my comparison, but so MM120, Lysergide, I mean, it’s comparable to LSD. And this is a multi-arm clinical trial. They did five arms, which is rare to do because—

Kevin Rose: Arms?

Tim Ferriss: The risk is that they’ll blend together. So the arm means a group who is treated with a different intervention in this case. So they’ve got placebo, 25 micrograms, 50 micrograms, 100 micrograms, and 200 micrograms. 100 mics is—

Kevin Rose: That’s what they give standard for LSD.

Tim Ferriss: That’s what you can think of as a standard hit, 100 micrograms. And the results are wild, man. If you look at the HAM-A score, this is up to 12 weeks out. You can see, I’ll just show you, how it’s dose dependent. The more you take, basically the better it goes up to, and I’m not sure how long the follow-ups continued, but where you land is you see that the 100 micrograms and 200 are very, very close to each other.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, so might as well take 100.

Tim Ferriss: 25 and 50 are certainly a lot higher.

Kevin Rose: Now are you still getting the same psychedelic experience with this stuff?

Tim Ferriss: In the case of this particular compound, I don’t know. My guess would be yes. I could be totally wrong in that. So Definium, feel free to correct me. I am guessing the answer is yes with MM120, but what that says to me is, hey, 12 weeks of relief with GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, which I’ve been clinically diagnosed with, that and OCD, 12 weeks is pretty good. And it seems like at least according to the data in this study, the minimum effective dose would be 100 micrograms. Now, 100 micrograms at least for me and for a lot of people, you’ll be tripping your balls off, not to get too technical.

Kevin Rose: Wait a second. Dude, it says that this was done at Neuroscape at UCSF.

Tim Ferriss: Was it really?

Kevin Rose: This is Adam’s lab.

Tim Ferriss: No shit. Are you serious?

Kevin Rose: I’m dead serious. I just clicked through on it. It says phase three trial of MM120 for GAD.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s amazing.

Kevin Rose: This is our buddy doing this.

Tim Ferriss: This is our buddy, Adam. Okay. Well, I have a text that I need to send then.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome. I wonder if I indirectly funded this because I helped fund some of Neuroscape’s stuff. That’s funny. I did not—

Kevin Rose: Isn’t that hilarious?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did not look at that. That’s hilarious. Small world.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. There you go. So it’s interesting for GAD. We were talking about dementia. There’s a case report with high dose psilocybe mushrooms, I don’t think it was actually psilocybin synthesized, looking at this particular thing was a Japanese elderly woman with dementia, may have been Alzheimer’s who took, I can’t believe they did this to her—

Kevin Rose: Five grams, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then she took five grams. So Terence McKenna, heroic dose, somehow fell asleep for like 19 hours or something obscene, which would be very, very worrisome if you’re like the child of said parent. Wakes up and then starts having like full expositional conversations in contrast with her previous like monosyllabic or single word responses to things. And it was transient. It didn’t last forever, but it raises some very interesting questions. I’ve seen at least some case reports also with LSD producing similar effects. And I’ve been interested in this for probably a decade. I’ve hypothesized this could be the case. It’s just like, do you really want to give your parent—

Kevin Rose: Especially that age.

Tim Ferriss: Under what circumstances is it ethical to give someone hallucinogens?

Kevin Rose: See, I could never do that to my mom because she was always anti all this stuff. And then the second, God forbid they have a bad trip, like why would you want to put them through that?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So it’s curious. I was sent something by someone I won’t mention, but a very interesting case report on microdosing with LSD with someone with dementia.

Kevin Rose: Did it work?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Oh, really?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And in terms of similar to the ketones, not saying the mechanism is the same, but producing much more verbal fluidity. Going from like, “I’m good. It depends.” I have relatives who are limited to that now. They’re basically giving answers that are non-answers. “Sounds good.” These things that you could use as a reply to anything, they’re not necessarily grokking what’s happening, to full paragraphs. Which means to my interpretation, it’s offline to online. It’s a really stark difference because with the one word, two word answers, you don’t actually know if they’re understanding what’s happening.

Kevin Rose: Do you have some MM120 on you right now?

Tim Ferriss: No, I don’t. I don’t. If I did, I would probably not take it tonight necessarily.

Kevin Rose: If you see a weird cut in the video and then we get infinitely smarter, you’ll know why.

Tim Ferriss: Little glitch here or there.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s a flash and all of a sudden we’re just like Rain Man.

Tim Ferriss: For the smarter, I would keep it probably to 20 mics or below. We’ll see. But I found this pretty interesting—

Kevin Rose: That’s so cool.

Tim Ferriss: For GAD especially and then for the dementia piece, but it raises a lot of ethical questions. What is ethical to use as a treatment in someone who cannot give consent? That’s a tough, gnarly problem.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Especially if you’re dealing with stuff that is not exactly prescription medication.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, that’s the whole thing. If it goes sideways, you feel like an asshole.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, to put it mildly.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, to put it mildly. But it’s amazing and it gives you another half day with a parent or a loved one and you can full on have conversations and they see you and you see them in a way that you hadn’t in six months or a year, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Or if it potentially slows the decline. I think it’s too much to hope for a reversal frankly, but there are some strange phenomena out there, man. There’s this phenomenon called terminal lucidity where someone on their deathbed when they’ve been vegetative—

Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve heard about this.

Tim Ferriss: —and, like—

Kevin Rose: There’s that book that—

Tim Ferriss: —right—

Kevin Rose: —I told you to read. Did you read that?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure.

Kevin Rose: The afterlife book?

Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t read that.

Kevin Rose: Okay, because they—

Tim Ferriss: But this is—

Kevin Rose: —talk about that case.

Tim Ferriss: —well documented, where people—

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —suddenly, they’ve been basically vegetative or completely unable to respond to any stimulus.

Kevin Rose: In like the last two days they come—

Tim Ferriss: They—

Kevin Rose: —fully lucid, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —they become totally lucid, and they can have full-blown extensive conversations.

Kevin Rose: That’s why I know—

Tim Ferriss: What the fuck is going on there?

Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you, it is so weird to me that we think, like— Like a lot of the things that we do in physical form, like what we do in life mimics nature in many ways. And all of our data is backed up in the cloud, and we’re like, “Oh, we’re not backed up in the cloud in any way.”

And then there’s these people with full-blown entanglements in their brain, full on, you know, the Alzheimer’s—

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.

Kevin Rose: —for like a decade, and then they become completely lucid.

Tim Ferriss: Lucid. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: Where is that coming from?

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I see what you’re saying. I wasn’t tracking that fully for a second, but if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s like, if it’s all localized—

Kevin Rose: In the cloud. Right.

Tim Ferriss: No, I’m saying if all of that ability is localized within the confines of the skull, how do you explain this?

Kevin Rose: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Given all the structural deterioration.

Kevin Rose: Damage. Exactly. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t have good answers for that. I just don’t. It is a well-documented, as far as I know, a well-documented phenomenon. So it’s like, go figure that one out. I mean, I’m not qualified, way above my pay grade. Crazy, man. It’s wild.

Kevin Rose: It is wild.

Tim Ferriss: So I’ll give a shout-out to somebody. We’re not going to open this right now because we’ll start chewing on them and we’ll be up all night.

Kevin Rose: Is that the 120?

Tim Ferriss: No, this is Neutonic, N-E-U-T-O-N-I-C, Nootropics. See, that’s a pun. Nootropics, because these are toothpicks that I was given by a podcaster you may recognize named Chris Williamson. And they have—

Kevin Rose: Oh, nice.

Tim Ferriss: —they have, like, 20, I want to say 20, I might be getting that off, but like 20, 25 milligrams of caffeine in each toothpick.

Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: And there are a couple of other nootropics, AKA—

Kevin Rose: That’s a quarter-cup—

Tim Ferriss: —smart drug—

Kevin Rose: —of coffee, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —yeah, smart drugs in there. And they’re great. It’s just, like, suck on a toothpick.

Kevin Rose: Because if I have cups of coffee, I will chug a cup of coffee and then if it gets refilled, I’ll chug another cup of coffee, and it’s a problem. These actually is, in terms of pacing—

Tim Ferriss: Hm.

Kevin Rose: —have been fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. So that’s been my sort of, not exactly quite as interruptive for people to get that, but sort of ad libidum interruptus.

Yeah. Avoiding over-consumption of coffee and other stimulants, this helps me to kind of pace it. Because even if I chew on this thing until it’s fragments of wood, max I can squeeze out of it is 20, 25 milligrams.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What else do you got, Kevin?

Kevin Rose: Let’s take a little look-see. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I have that I think is interesting is what’s happening in the world of—I don’t want to talk a lot about AI because I’m just frankly AI’d out, but I will say that the idea that we can all now kind of take control of our productivity and pretty much anything that we want to control now, like device-wise, we can do with just a few simple prompts on AI.

And I had a buddy that came over to my house and he was like, “Hey, you got cameras in your house.” I have something called Ubiquiti, which is like, they have cameras and it’s a very common kind of household type situation when you want to have security system, front door thing, cameras, sensors, water detectors underneath the things in case things leak and you’re out of town, whatever.

And so I’ve got this whole setup and he’s like, “Hey, you know they have a full on API where you can just tell Claude or whatever to code against it.” And I was like, “Okay, well that’s interesting. Well, what can it do? ” And so, the cameras now have AI sensors where they can detect who it is that’s walking in.

So it’s like, “Oh, Tim’s coming up to your door.” “Oh, that’s your daughter,” or “That’s your dog.” It detects my dog, Toaster. It sees him and it puts a little dog emblem above his head when he’s walking around and it knows that it’s Toaster. But the crazy shit is I was like, “Okay, well what if I can go further and I can tell it to do actions,” because there’s a speaker hooked up to it as well, so that’s for security.

So basically if anyone loiters in my alleyway and it detects it, it’s like I play some really funky shit where it’s like “Detected,” like, “Loiterer in the alleyway” or whatever and just to scare people off in case they’re—

Tim Ferriss: I am the Batman.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, but you could draw little areas around where they shouldn’t be, which is like at your door fiddling with your door and say, “If they stand here for more than 30 seconds, place that audio out of speaker.” So I was like, okay, this is interesting. Well, what if when I walk in my house, if I’m wearing a hat of my favorite sports team and they’re playing, it reads me the scores like I walk in.

So you can think about all these things where it’s doing stuff based on your activity, right?

So like if you’re out there gardening, it’ll be like, “Hey Kevin, I noticed that the plant over here wasn’t watered enough.” So it’s watching all of this stuff and so there’s a lot of, “If then, then that” kind of situation, like, “If I see you doing X—” So the latest I have is, like, I programmed it so when it sees the license plate on my car, it automatically knows to open the gate because it knows it’s me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool.

Kevin Rose: And the camera looks at the license plate on the freaking car, checks it against the database, and allows me in. How crazy is that? And for people that are listening, I’m not talking about, like, $10,000 systems. The camera’s like $200. Anyone can do this at home, you know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild.

Kevin Rose: It’s just wild to think about. Finally, we had all these kind of discrete systems that you had some Nest stuff, and I had some Google Home stuff, and now they’re all talking to each other. So you can just do kind of really crazy. I know you would like this because you’re the kind of person that you’ve told me before, like, you don’t like to answer your door because if the delivery person is like, “Tim!” then all of a sudden your address is, like—

Tim Ferriss: Then I need—

Kevin Rose: —all over the internet.

Tim Ferriss: Then I’m doxxed. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I know you’ve said you don’t—I’m also pretty AI’d out, but at the same time it’s like, I can’t resist going back to the opium den. It’s so fascinating.

Kevin Rose: What are you doing now with AI stuff?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, I’m more curious to hear your thoughts and predictions frankly, because I think you’re better at it. But, I mean, I’m using Claude Code with APIs to do tons of inbox analysis and stuff—

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —right? I’m doing a 20-year retrospective analysis of angel investing. It’s like, who made what introductions? Which companies did I not reply to that ended up being successes?

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Which did I turn down that ended up being really important?

Kevin Rose: Do you really want to do it to yourself?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I suspected it would be worse than it was. I actually have not—I haven’t missed that many explicit opportunities. I wanted to test my own stories against data, right? Because I have all sorts of stories—

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: —about why I did certain things—

Kevin Rose: Right, right, right.

Tim Ferriss: —and why certain things worked out. And I have certain stories about my batting average and I’m like, “But is it true?”

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: “Really?”

Kevin Rose: Of course.

Tim Ferriss: “Is it really true?”

Kevin Rose: Because—

Tim Ferriss: “Let’s look at some hard numbers.”

Kevin Rose: —the sad truth, and I have a buddy that wears up the bracelet, and you’ve seen me with the necklace around the way it categorizes your AI and it listens to you 24/7, it’s about 70-ish percent that we think we know, but it’s actually what we know. Out of the hundred percent of what we think we know, this is the truth. I said I wanted a dark chocolate bar at 7:00 p.m.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s like, “No, you said it at 5:00, and you said it this way.” You know, it’s like—

Tim Ferriss: And you said it was milk chocolate.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. So it’s always about 20 percent off from where you actually think—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: —your brain’s at.

Tim Ferriss: Sure. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Which is brutal.

Tim Ferriss: Well, plus, I mean, that’s like last week, right? If you’re talking about 15 years ago.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, if you listen to any genesis story of any startup, you’re like, “Eh—”

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: “—wait a minute now.” This is like a startup comic working on material, but he’s been working on this one five-minute bit so long that now he believes that’s actually truth. I mean, the sanitizing and the editing of these startup genesis stories is hilarious, and there’s no reason to think that I would be or you would be exempt from it—

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: —right? When you’re telling your—

Kevin Rose: Absolutely not.

Tim Ferriss: —own story, even if you’re just telling it to yourself.

Kevin Rose: So what’s the number one thing that you’ve learned by applying AI to your life in this fashion? What’s the thing where you walked away and said, like—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: —”Damn, that was insightful and I’m going to change my behavior,” or, “I learned something new about myself that I wouldn’t have if I had not used AI”?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I think from a holistic health perspective, by “holistic” I mean having enough data related to medications, supplements, predispositions, side effects, what happened to me two weeks ago, the LLMs have been incredibly helpful. I mean, the picture that they get and the speed with which they can deliver an answer that I can interrogate is just incredible. So I—

Kevin Rose: What did you learn? What was the thing that you, like—

Tim Ferriss: I mean, honestly, it’s mostly avoiding disaster, right?

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like, are any of these things contraindicated with one another? Could A, B, or C explain D? Right? And you have to keep in mind these things can still hallucinate, but you can, I don’t want to say, eliminate that, but minimize it by just fact-checking across LLMs. Right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And so there’s that. I would say that there’s a lot of insight on hopefully that that can translate to future decision-making related to investing, which is, investing for me is not just amassing more chips. What’s fun about investing to me is it’s a way to scorecard your thinking and decision making.

Kevin Rose: Mm.

Tim Ferriss: Right? It’s just a very objective way to decide if something was the right or the wrong decision. And you can fine slice that and there are ways that you could maybe question that. But if you’re asking yourself, “Was I thinking well last month?” that’s not a very helpful question. Where do you go from there.

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

If you’re logging maybe every decision you make every day, and then trying to cross reference outcomes with blah, blah, blah, like yeah, but you’re never going to do that. But when you’re making relatively frequent investments, you can do that. You can also run counterfactuals, right? “What if I did the opposite? What if I had not sold that? What if I had kept that? What if I had done this? What if I had done that?”

Kevin Rose: Is that worth your time though? At the end of the day—

Tim Ferriss: It’s worth—

Kevin Rose: —you can throw everything into S&P 500—

Tim Ferriss: Well—

Kevin Rose: —and just go to bed.

Tim Ferriss: —well, there’s that. I would say it’s worth it to me because I find it interesting. I actually enjoy the intellectual exercise of it, but otherwise I would say with in terms of like how AI has impacted me, I would say that the honest answer is not that much, because most shit isn’t worth doing in the first place.

People are finding very, very clever ways to expedite automating workflows of all different types, and doing something well does not make it important or worth doing in the first place. So there’s a lot, I think the level of bullshit that is being done just at a very fast efficient rate is skyrocketing, but simultaneously there are definitely cases where I look back at, say, this analysis of 20 years of stuff, to do that manually would be impossible.

Kevin Rose: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: All right? It would take me a year full time with multiple people to do that, and with a Claude code, like Gmail API and leaving my computer running for a handful of hours a few times, that’s like, what you get back is fucking incredible. It’s unbelievable. And I haven’t even scratched the surface.

I will say also another way that AI has maybe affected my life in a net negative way and I’m not, we have another mutual friend who maybe we shouldn’t name who feels very similarly. Is—

Kevin Rose: [REDACTED].

Tim Ferriss: We’ll bleep that out, but yeah, Jesus Christ. So is, if you train AIs on your writing, they’re really good.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And it’s, I think I feel—I mean, this is a stretch of a comparison obviously because I’m not an adept like a world class Go player, but when AlphaGo defeated one of the top Korean players, he was kind of like, “I’m done. I don’t find joy in this anymore, like, if we’re playing against machines.”

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And when I see these AIs very beautifully, I’m not going to lie, and we’re like in the top of the first inning, right? This stuff is going to get so much better, spit out stuff that is so much better—I mean, I can still write, but what they can do in 30 seconds is what would take me 30 hours. And I’m just like, “Fuck.” I don’t know. It really drains the motivation for me to put in those 30 hours.

Why wouldn’t it? Of course it would, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. But in some sense you can consider it a really good copilot, because for it to come up with novel ideas that would engage an audience, that’s still the holy grail where it’s not quite there yet. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s going to make you sound—It’s going to button up your copy, and it might expand upon it in ways that you wouldn’t, but it’s not going to come up with the original thesis for the whole thing, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s going to have trouble with the original thesis, but even there I think it does a pretty good job.

Kevin Rose: Really, it’s—

Tim Ferriss: Like, you just—

Kevin Rose: —getting better?

Tim Ferriss: —you just—

Kevin Rose: I haven’t tried with writing stuff, so.

Tim Ferriss: Well, if you just do a data dump and you’re like, “Create an amazing—”

Kevin Rose: Oh, you sent me that link.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if you just do a data dump, you’re like create—

Kevin Rose: Yeah, where you sent me that link you were like, “What should Tim do in the next five years?” Remember?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, that was good.

Kevin Rose: That was really interesting. Tell people what you did, because they might find this, I think it applies to their own life.

Tim Ferriss: Sure. So, you could do this in whichever model you’re using, whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. If it knows you, right, if it—

Kevin Rose: You can tie in your inbox too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can tie in your inbox. In my case, I didn’t do that, but if it has enough history on you, you can just ask, “What do you think I should do in the next five years? What might be some rewarding paths of exploration?” I think I put something like that, like, “What are three to five ideas that you think could be rewarding career exploration for me—”

Kevin Rose: I love this.

Tim Ferriss: “—in the next X period of time?”

Kevin Rose: So, if for people listening—

Tim Ferriss: And the answer’s—yeah.

Kevin Rose: —if they’ve used AI for, let’s call it, three to six months, and you’ve probably given it several hundred things to think about, it will span cross those conversations as long as you turn this on. I think it’s on by default now, but it used to be an opt-in thing where you’d say, “Allow the AI to look cross-conversation,” so it has a wholistic understanding of who you are.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the answers were fucking outstanding.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean really, really good.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I sent it to a few friends, sent it to you, I sent it to a few of my closest friends and they’re like, “That’s pretty good.”

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean—

Kevin Rose: It was really cool.

Tim Ferriss: —it’s—

Kevin Rose: Some of the ideas I was like, “Damn, you should do that dude.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s—

Kevin Rose: We had this one business idea for you to do, and it wasn’t a book, and I was like, “Dude, I texted you back.” I was like, “That’s awesome. Go build that.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, there were business ideas, there were certainly kind of non-revenue, but philosophically-aligned ideas. It was shocking to me. I mean, that’s actually a very good example of something that has deeply informed what I’m mulling over as I imagine the future. I was like, “Man, that actually is a really good—”

Because, keeping in mind, I’m asking questions about things of interest, things I like, things I don’t like. I am asking questions about different scientific interests related to Saisei Foundation, my nonprofit foundation. I’m asking questions about investing, I’m asking questions about writing, I’m asking questions about relationships, I’m asking questions about organizing trips for friends. I’m asking so many different questions.

Kevin Rose: Am I still on the board of your nonprofit?

Tim Ferriss: I think you’re like secretary or something.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, something like that. I haven’t heard anything about it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe you were honorably discharged—

Kevin Rose: No, I don’t—

Tim Ferriss: —I don’t know.

Kevin Rose: —think you did—I never got any paperwork around it. I haven’t heard anything in, like, three years.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, well I said it was going to be a light lift. It’s a light lift.

Kevin Rose: There’s a light lift.

Tim Ferriss: And I mean, that’s a very good example, right? I mean, that may be the best example because if that even 10 percent informs a major next chapter—

Kevin Rose: Yeah, 100 percent.

Tim Ferriss: —holy shit, that’s a big deal for me.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Certainly. And—it makes me think a little bit about podcast listeners especially, readers also, but to a greater extent, podcast listeners who come up to me and most listeners I run into are really great and I mean, there are always a couple of weirdos, but most are fantastic and they’ll say something often like, “I’m so sorry, you don’t know me at all, and I feel like I know you.”

And what I say a lot of the time is, “Actually, if you listen to my podcast every week or even every month, you do know me pretty well.” And then you think about a machine that never forgets. It’s going to know you pretty damn well.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

Tim Ferriss: And it’s spooky in a way, but I started getting more out of the LLMs when I started asking questions. Now you have to be, I think, a little careful with outsourcing this and absolving yourself of responsibility to think about these things.

But when you ask it open-ended personal questions in the way that you would ask a close friend, “What do you think are three to five creative ways I might explore things professionally in the next five years?” As opposed to something that you think is more suitable for a robot—

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —you get some really interesting responses.

Kevin Rose: It’s so cool. That’s a great use case.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: The one thing I’ve been playing around with lately that I haven’t told you about yet, but I think about all these AI startups and everyone that’s creating all these different apps and all that stuff and for me, it’s kind of fun to watch as a kind of bystander being like, “Oh, cool, you’re going to make this.”

But I really want to explore things that just no one has done before. It’s always been interesting to me more than just iterative kind of, like, sanding down with the rough edges. A lot of startups will go out there and be like, “Hey, you know what sucks is word processing doesn’t do this so I’m going to make a slightly better word processor.” I’m just making this up.

But I like the kind of like wilder, crazier, like, I’d rather have it fail and say, “I did something new,” than just do something boring, if that makes sense.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I get it. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so, lately what I’ve done is—

Tim Ferriss: Part of why I have so many fatalities.

Kevin Rose: So many fatalities. Yeah. Exactly. Same. What I’ve done lately is I’ve taken—I went and bought a bunch of these decks of cards on Amazon that are values cards.

Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?

Kevin Rose: Meaning they give you like a deck of a hundred things and they’re like, “What are your core values?”

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: And you’re like, “Empathy,” or, “Kindness,” or like you flip through them. And the way they typically work is that you have like a, this is a really high value, a medium, and a low value, and then you put them into different stacks and then you walk away and you say, “Oh, this is my high value stack of things that are my core values that mean a lot to me.”

Tim Ferriss: Hm.

Kevin Rose: And it might be 10 or 15 different cards, right? And what’s interesting is to do that with friends and partners and things like that and then compare them and say, “Hey, what do we align on what we don’t align?” And I can imagine for an intimate partner, this would be a pretty important thing to do, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so I started there and I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m going to scan these cards in, and then I’m going to pare it down and make these core values where you come in and say, “This matters to me.” It’s almost like a swiping dating app or something like, “Yes, I’m into—”

Tim Ferriss: “Yes, I’m into—”

Kevin Rose: “—into this—”

Tim Ferriss: “—empathy.” “No, I’m not.”

Kevin Rose: Right, exactly. But you swipe through them and then when you’re done with that, then you’ve got your list of these values, and they can change over time. And so I think the important thing is to log that and say, “These are my values today, but tomorrow one might shift a little bit.” Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose: And then I thought about contractual bonds, and so the working title I have for it is just called “bond” and where I can say like, with a partner, I’m going to create a contract with you where we both have to shake on it, meaning like a virtual shake. You think of it as almost like a SimCity-like situation. This is my city, this is her city, or a friend’s city, and we’re going to agree that I take the trash out every Tuesday night.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose: And there’s an emotional shake on both sides, and if I break this bond, it results in what? And so from the partner side, it will result in a one to 10 on how much damaging this is to me.

So not taking the trash out, probably be like, “Ah, that sucks because the trash is going to overflow.” That’s probably three—

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose: —to most people, right? And so, then I kind of get negative points in case I break that bond. But what’s interesting though is that that will link back to a core value of theirs and a core value of mine.

And I want to show up as a good partner, and there’ll be a core value associated with that. And then you could see those bonds between multiple people. And the reason I say this is because I’ve always been one of these people historically that have said yes to so many things, and then, like, be the last minute. I’m the worst at that, you know?

Where I’m like, “I’m in.” And then I’m like, “I’m an introvert. I’m out—”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: —at the last minute, right? And so I just think that there needs to be a system where, almost like a LinkedIn for like values and trust and bonds, there’s a great Wu Tang quote that’s like, “Word is bond.” And ultimately I really believe that. There’s something really cool about saying, “We have the Better Business Bureau, that’s like the best we’ve got.” Right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: Like, “Oh, this person, they did well by their customers 2,000 times.” What about individuals and saying, like, “Hey, this person was always empathetic towards me or this person was kind and helped me move on a Sunday.”

Tim Ferriss: What prompted all this?

Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it. Just, like, well I—the thing I think about is that there—

Tim Ferriss: That was such a dissatisfying—

Kevin Rose: Well, I call it—

Tim Ferriss: —answer.

Kevin Rose: No, hold on. Let me give you the real answer. I call this “dark information.”

Tim Ferriss: “Dark information—”

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —okay.

Kevin Rose: So “dark information” is information that exists in the real world, but we have yet to put in physical form.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay.

Kevin Rose: And so right now you and I have a trust thing. You know that you could, if the camera was turned off, there are certain things that you can tell me that you’re pretty certain I will not tell anyone else. Every once in a while I do, but you will know you know where that line is, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.

Kevin Rose: But that hasn’t been concretized in any type of, like, visual, real format. And so there’s something interesting, I’m just brainstorming with you in real time because we’ve had a couple of drinks, but like my point is if there was a system where I could say, “I’ve created these bonds, I’ve built up this reputation,” but it would also give me a way to reflect back and be like, “Oh, you know what? I can see now historically that I’ve often bailed on events that I’ve signed up for, let me improve that in myself.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: The whole point of what you brought up a minute ago was, if I use AI to go back historically and look across things, I can detect these trends and then make course corrections based on those trends, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so there’s something interesting about this idea of, there are these different facets, so there’s these like emotional facets that we have with every individual, how might we track those?

Tim Ferriss: Well, what jumps out at me about this is maybe a cool use case would be identifying, you could write it out or you could have cards, your values, but maybe to put a finer point on it, the type of person you believe yourself to be.

Kevin Rose: Right, because—

Tim Ferriss: Or the—

Kevin Rose: —it’s very different than what people perceive you to be.

Tim Ferriss: —or the type of person you want to be.

Kevin Rose: Right, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And then it’s like, “Let’s take a look at your calendar and your email and your iMessages to see how much your story of what—

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: —you think you are or what you want to be matches up with your behavior.”

Kevin Rose: So I built—

Tim Ferriss: And then you get a report card.

Kevin Rose: —I built a prototype for exactly this. So remember maybe seven years ago you did a 360 review for me?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: So—

Tim Ferriss: Those things are brutal.

Kevin Rose: —for people that don’t know what 360 reviews are, it’s like you give 10 of your friends to somebody, they interview them, they collect all the data anonymously—

Tim Ferriss: Could also be like coworkers, employees—

Kevin Rose: Coworkers, employees—

Tim Ferriss: —bosses, whatever.

Kevin Rose: —friends, whatever. And then you get a report back being like, “Here are the deficiencies and positives that this person brings.”

Tim Ferriss: Anonymized.

Kevin Rose: And anonymized.

Tim Ferriss: Brutal.

Kevin Rose: And they are very different than what you think—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: —how you show up.

Tim Ferriss: Totally.

Kevin Rose: And so that’s the idea.

Tim Ferriss: I literally was looking at mine from, like, 12 years ago—

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I think we did one around the same mind—

Tim Ferriss: —a couple weeks ago and I was just like—

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I know.

Tim Ferriss: —”So tough.”

Kevin Rose: I know.

Tim Ferriss: Because you get it back and you’re like, “Who said this?”

Kevin Rose: I know.

Tim Ferriss: Like—

Kevin Rose: Like some of this—

Tim Ferriss: —some of it’s brutal.

Kevin Rose: I think I know what you said, by the way. Do you ever use the word “child rearing”?

Tim Ferriss: “Child rearing”?

Kevin Rose: Did you ever say that?

Tim Ferriss: “Child rearing.” I mean—

Kevin Rose: To throw me off, would you ever say that?

Tim Ferriss: Throw you off the scent trail?

Kevin Rose: Because before I had kids, somebody in my anonymous 360 review said, like, “Oh, he’s going to have a hard time with child-rearing.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, no, that wasn’t me.

Kevin Rose: I’m like, “Who the fuck—”

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: “—would say ‘child-rearing’?”

Tim Ferriss: No, that’s not me, that’s not me.

Kevin Rose: I don’t have any friends that even have that in their vocabulary. And I’m like, “The only person that could do that would be Tim trying to throw me off with a fucking smart-ass word.”

Tim Ferriss: No, that wasn’t me.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: That wasn’t me. That wasn’t me.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: No, no. I think I’d be able to identify whatever responses I gave.

Kevin Rose: Okay, I got it I guess. That’s the one thing that stuck with me for like 15 years. I’m like, “Who’d said that?”

Tim Ferriss: Man, you’re lucky if you got off with that. Man, I’ve got so much more. Good Lord. Ah. You know what I’ve been doing that has been really helpful, because the blank page is something I struggle with with writing, which is part of the reason why the AI is so demoralizing in a sense, because the LLMs, within like 30 seconds, are just like, “Boom, how you like me now? Try to match that.”

But using, even though I certainly don’t know the future of this company because it might get replaced by features that are innate to X, Y, or Z, but Wispr Flow.

Kevin Rose: Oh, God, I love it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, using Wispr Flow as a data dump—

Kevin Rose: I wish I was an investor, it’s freaking awesome.

Tim Ferriss: —and you may have recommended this to me, I can’t recall, but—

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —basically doing a dump of a conversation as I’m walking with Wispr Flow into a note on my phone, then taking that, dropping it into Claude, asking it to clean it up and turn it into something readable has been so helpful, not necessarily for publication, but for emails, especially uncomfortable emails where like, “Oh, God, I’m putting it off. I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to do it.”

Just doing like a 10-minute brain dump, it’s shocking how quickly things come together, incredibly helpful. And I’ll just give a shout-out to my friend Elan Lee, co-founder of Exploding Kittens. He recommended this headset because I was on a call with him and I’m like, “Man, that audio is awesome. What are you using?”

Kevin Rose: Can you put it on just for the viewers—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I will. It’s—

Kevin Rose: — and let’s see if it’s going to look as good as I hope it does?

Tim Ferriss: It looks so good.

Kevin Rose: There, see? Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s pretty good, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So this is the Shokz, S-H-O-K-Z, OpenMeet UC, open ear bone conduction headset. So he was talking and I’m like, “What the hell are you wearing?” I was like, “Audio’s really good.” So it looks pretty dorky. This is like a—

Kevin Rose: Nah, it’s great.

Tim Ferriss: And the bone conduction is right here, effectively in my cheekbones. And when you first use them, you’re like, “Wait a second, I feel like this is playing out of speakers, like, this is nonsense,” right? “This is—”

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: —complete BS.” But then you totally plug your ears and you can still hear perfectly well, which is crazy.

Kevin Rose: Oh, crazy, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And what I like about these is, A, the audio quality is great, and the connectivity varies, but the audio quality is fantastic. You can hear. So if I’m walking my dog, walking Molly, and I want to be able to hear traffic and so on, I can use this because especially if I’m using Wispr Flow to data dump into a text file of some type, I don’t really need to be listening. It’s not like I’m on a phone call or a Zoom call or something.

So I find this very, very helpful so that I can actually pay attention to my surroundings. And that’s all I got. It’s basically this and AirPods. I mean, there are other headphones that I will use for professional recording and stuff, but thus far I’ll share one more tech thing real quick. These, this little baggie here, is the Sennheiser Pro Audio Condenser Microphone. It’s very simple.

I’ve just been very impressed With the audio, when I’m on the road recording stuff for the podcast like intros or sponsor reads or whatever, it’s just a simple live mic. It’s so simple, but the audio quality, even in a hotel room that is really bouncy, lots of glass, lots of metal where it should sound terrible, if I use a fancy, like this is a sure mic that we have right here, if I were to use this exact mic because I have it at home, in some of these bouncy rooms, it would sound worse, I’m not kidding, than what I get for my purposes—

Kevin Rose: Wow, crazy.

Tim Ferriss: —with this.

It’s pretty wild, and I love Shure. I use their mics on a lot of podcasts, but in terms of minimizing bounce, for whatever reason, this little baggie that I can stick in a pocket, right? It’s like, “This is my portable sort of recording studio.”

Kevin Rose: Have you recorded on the iPhone with it?

Tim Ferriss: I have.

Kevin Rose: It sounds good?

Tim Ferriss: It sounds great.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And I don’t have my phone with me. There is an app that you can use for really high fidelity recording. It’s called Ferrite or something like that.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s like lossless recording, right?

Tim Ferriss: Lossless recording. It’s like F-E-R-R-I-T-E, something like that. I’ll put the link in the show notes for this for people who are interested. The quality is absurd. And you can also use Descript or one of these programs to do AI cleanup and it’s crazy how smooth it is.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, you don’t need Descript anymore. You can just use all the models to do it. Gemini is actually quite good at multimodal audio video, all that stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, cool. Yeah. Gemini, honestly, I’ve been using Gemini more and more just because it’s such plug and play with—

Kevin Rose: It’s fast too.

Tim Ferriss: —with G Suite also.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, 35 Flash is a great model. Although the new Sonnet just came out and that’s from Anthropic that just came out. I haven’t played with it yet because it was literally launched today and it’s supposed to be fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: So what do you think the landscape looks like in a few years? You’ve got Anthropic and OpenAI racing to IPO. See where that goes. You’ve got Mythos/Fable taken off.

Kevin Rose: Mythos is out tomorrow.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Kevin Rose: Back out tomorrow.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Okay. Was a national security threat yesterday, but it isn’t today.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: What do you think? I mean, I think the—

Kevin Rose: It’s the big three. It’s three players. It’s Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. And X is trying and I would never ever count out Elon. Obviously he has the funds to make it happen.

Tim Ferriss: Well, also Anthropic and Google are buying excess capacity from Colossus, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. But that means that their product isn’t working because they bought that capacity for themselves.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Kevin Rose: So that means that no one’s using Grok. I mean, I actually like Grok. They have done—

Tim Ferriss: I use Grok more than people might realize.

Kevin Rose: Well, here’s what’s interesting about it.

Tim Ferriss: For current events and synthesizing.

Kevin Rose: Yes. So it has direct access to the X API and that it has actually X tools built into Grok. So if you want to get, like you said, current events, news, things like that. And they’ve also said that it is one of the most grounded models and doesn’t hallucinate so that it’s really good at. And so on Digg, when we relaunch it and we use a lot of AI to come up with the different stories and all of that, we use it a ton because we want that grounded information that is true. And so it’s really important to have that. I don’t know. I mean, I think I wouldn’t count them out. I should probably include them in that list but that’s it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So big three.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What do you think things look like in two years? You’re very good at this. I’m not saying, obviously this is just fucking bullshitting and speculating, but what’s your guess?

Kevin Rose: I mean—

Tim Ferriss: I went pretty heavy into Alphabet thanks to you, which—

Kevin Rose: You went heavy in Alphabet?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then they had a 40 percent pop on a $4 trillion company. What is going on?

Kevin Rose: I haven’t even watched. Is it up?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, well, I mean, look, this was a while back. A while back in AI time, which is like dog years. So by that I mean like five months ago.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Listen, exactly. Five months is like 10 years now. So here is why I like Google. They own the full stack. They have their own chips. And so one of the things that I did a deep dive on was the chips that they are building are, they—really confused the industry. It’s my understanding that they made an insanely high bandwidth and kind of memory throughput when everyone was like, “Hey, why are you opening up these channels and making them so high bandwidth for this kind of data flow?”

And I talked to a buddy and he was like, “Yeah, everyone was confused at first when they saw the architecture for their latest AI chips.” And then they realized that we will live in a world right now where a model drops. Fable goes live tomorrow on Wednesday, right? And the next OpenAI model goes live in two weeks or whatever because they have that rumored one. It’s like old software deployment where it was like model trained, released, out, model trained, released, out. That’s the cadence we’re on right now. What Google is betting, and I know I know they’re all thinking this, but what Google’s betting with this high throughput kind of wide memory architecture is the future is continuous learning. And so everyone is saying like we’re 12 to 18 months out, maybe a little bit longer—

Tim Ferriss: From what?

Kevin Rose: From self-improving models.

Tim Ferriss: I see. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: So 27/7, it’s no longer about like, “Oh, Mythos came out today. Woo, crazy.” It’s not about those new models dropping. It’s about—

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a child learning day by day.

Kevin Rose: Tomorrow, it’ll be better than today, forever. And when that happens and they own the full stack, Google’s got the chips, granted they’re going to be constrained by TSMC, which is the only player that’s producing —I mean, there’s a few others, Samsung and Micron and a few others, but TSMC is like the leader and I believe they’re producing Google’s chips as well. But they’ve got the chips architecture, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the engineers. They’re freaking—I mean, they lost a great one a week ago, but it’s crazy what they’re paying these engineers. Did you see some of this? It’s like a billion dollars situation. It’s insane what they’re paying some of these people to stay around.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s what Meta was doing to poach also.

Kevin Rose: Meta, I just don’t think they’re going to make it, man.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Listen, they have great businesses. Instagram is phenomenal. They’ve got these fantastic assets, but I just don’t think they have the talent to pull off what these other bigs are pulling off.

Tim Ferriss: What do the big three look like in two years, do you think? Because Google has a lot of advantages, like you mentioned, right? I mean, also vast data center expertise, right?

Kevin Rose: They have the data centers. They have Android, which is like 60 some percent of the population or something like that. So they have the install base. I have a hard time believing that if you believe that AI inference and all the costs associated with AI eventually kind of settles and it’s affordable, and yes, it’ll probably be like a Netflix type plan where we’re all like, “Oh, yeah, that’s our extra $30 a month to get all the AI shit, whatever.” If it’s coming on your device and also Google’s powering a lot of Apple shit, though Apple has some unique tech.

It’s interesting. Apple is kind of coming up. I wouldn’t write off Apple either. Apple’s another one, but they’re probably another couple years out. I don’t know. I mean, at the end of the day, for me, I’m old enough now to not want to be like, “Hey, this is the 10xer.” Actually, it’s interesting. I called on your podcast. I don’t know if you know this, but four years ago I was like, “Dude, NVIDIA’s going to crush it, blah, blah, blah.” There’s been some dumb predictions. We’ve definitely made some bad ones too. So I’m not going to say it’s been all good, but we’ve called out some stuff. In the world of AI, I don’t think it’s winner take all. Unless somebody hits some kind of crazy escape velocity that is like truly it’s like, aware.

Tim Ferriss: So what do you think, just I’m curious, because you’re so much better at this kind of stuff than I am. I’m like good at my dumb little corners here and there, but you’ve worked at Google, and you worked on their ill-fated social product at one point, right? What was it called? I can’t remember.

Kevin Rose: Google Plus.

Tim Ferriss: Google Plus, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it was horrible. I left right away.

Tim Ferriss: Right. And very wisely segued to Google Ventures. I guess my point is when people think consumer, not enterprise, when they think AI right now, they think ChatGPT, right? ChatGPT has raised a ton of fucking money. They’ve got to figure out ads almost certainly. That’s not easy. That is very, very, very hard to do. I’m pretty familiar with the ads business at Google. Very hard to do at a high level.

However, when average Joe or Jane on the street thinks AI, they think ChatGPT. And when I have tried to set up the Gmail API for Claude, the process on the Google side is such dog shit. The UX is terrible. It is so bad and I’d like to think myself reasonably decent with tech stuff, not as technical as you are, but pretty good, I would like to think. Nonetheless, I need someone on my staff to walk me through step by step to do it because it’s so counterintuitive and there are errors all over the place.

And then you’ve got Anthropic, which is, if we are to believe the headlines on ARR just like crushing on the enterprise side.

Kevin Rose: 100 percent.

Tim Ferriss: Like the fastest scaling business of all time on a lot of different measures. However, they’ve gotten a number of pretty strong bitch slaps from the administration. At the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these frontier labs are going to be left unconstrained by the government, so that’s like a huge question there.

Kevin Rose: I think China will push that.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Tell me.

Kevin Rose: Well, so China’s been launching new models and they just did one a week ago that was on par with Fable and they—

Tim Ferriss: Was that Alibaba or someone else?

Kevin Rose: No, it’s…

Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t matter, but yeah.

Kevin Rose: But these are open source models. So it’s actually really interesting because China is like, “Okay, listen, we’re going to open source this and people will use our tech.” They’re almost doing it the American way. They’re not closed sourcing anything. They’re like, “Okay, here’s the free model. Come use ours because we’re going to charge you—you can run it yourself if you want, locally.” And that is going to be increasingly, I think that will be increasingly common.

AMD came out, I don’t know if you saw what she, the CEO, she’s brilliant. She came out with this new box that is this little $4,000 box or somewhere around there and it can run like these massive multi-billion parameter models locally. So those charges that you were getting for like $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month or whatever in AI expenses is now just that one box that just runs the model locally.

Now granted, it’s probably eight months behind in terms of like the model it can run versus the frontier models.

Tim Ferriss: For a lot of people, who cares?

Kevin Rose: For a lot of people, who cares?

Tim Ferriss: So from a business perspective, and I know that’s tightly related to all sorts of technical considerations, but where do you think Google, I still hate saying Alphabet. Let’s just say Google—

Kevin Rose: The word on the street is that they have models that are more advanced than Fable. They have not launched them because one, the government’s going to step in and stop them and two, they are very expensive to run and it would cost them a lot of money. They would lose money doing so. And so I think in a year we’re really—12 months, we won’t really know where Google’s at because I’m telling you—

Tim Ferriss: They’re holding on. 

Kevin Rose: They’re holding shit back.

Tim Ferriss: Of course they are.

Kevin Rose: They’re holding shit back.

Tim Ferriss: Because they have the bank roll to do that.

Kevin Rose: And it’s fucking Google. You don’t understand. My time there, I walked—Sergei took me, and I’m not saying this as a flex. I’m just like, this is just what happened.

Tim Ferriss: Such a flex. Such a flex.

Kevin Rose: Sergei took me and Bill Maris, who ran Google Ventures—

Tim Ferriss: Smart dude.

Kevin Rose: Bill’s amazing. Through Google X, and this was years ago.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, cool, fun.

Kevin Rose: We got the tour and he was like—

Tim Ferriss: That’s the moonshot factory.

Kevin Rose: It’s like, dude, you already worked there and they make you sign when you walk in, like, “Don’t fucking say anything or we’ll kill you.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Google X is like the Willy Wonka.

Kevin Rose: So I’m like seeing the Waymos before they even talked about them freaking 10 plus years ago, before it was even a thing. And so I saw all the crazy balloon projects and a couple others that they shuttered that I can’t even talk about. But I’m telling you, they’re sitting on tech that’s like five years out that don’t underestimate how many freaking PhDs they have working on this shit. You just can’t imagine what’s under the hood there.

Tim Ferriss: Sure, yeah.

Kevin Rose: So for me, I’m not a fan of like at this point when I think about investing into the future, and this is not investment advice, but when the Anthropics and the OpenAIs and the Googles, you name the top five, it’s kind of almost like what they said back in the day when they had the, what was the acronym they used for like Netflix, Google, what was the —

Tim Ferriss: It changes all the time.

Kevin Rose: But you know what I’m talking about.

Tim Ferriss: FANG?

Kevin Rose: FANG. Yeah. FANG was a thing and then there’s another one and there’s another one. You’re going to want to own like those five and you’ll sit back and you’ll be like, “Damn, if I’d only just owned Google, I’d be up 70 percent.” But you’re like, “Oh, you know what? In combination, I’m up 30 percent and the market’s doing 10 percent.” You’ll be stoked, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you sent me a graph. We can delete this if we need to.

Kevin Rose: Oh, the NASDAQ 100?

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, for you looking forward, because you bust my balls about some of the swings that I take, which is good. No, you should bust my balls.

Kevin Rose: I bust it because I’m like, “Tim, what are you optimizing for, dude? Another zero? You don’t need another zero on the bank accounts.”

Tim Ferriss: I get it, I get it, I get it. But I’m asking you, right? I mean, look, we’re all looking for the feeling of being alive. Part of the way I feel alive is by taking swings, right?

Kevin Rose: Fair. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: My question for you is, you’re not just going to do S&P 500. I find that hard to believe.

Kevin Rose: I dabble.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So if you were—

Kevin Rose: I’m like you. I bought Waymo stock and you got pissed at me because I didn’t offer you any.

Tim Ferriss: Such a prick. Keeps all the shiny stuff for himself. He’s a greedy little piglet.

Kevin Rose: I didn’t know you wanted it.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you 100 percent know that I want it because I sent—this actually turned out pretty well. It’s part of the reason why I pulled the trigger on Google was it’s such a simple approach. I took five names, was it? It was like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Waymo, handful of other companies. And there was Vercel, Crusoe, a couple of others.

Kevin Rose: God damn it.

Tim Ferriss: And I sent this list out and I sent it to, I don’t know, five smart people I know who are very, very good investors and have good track records, across asset classes, and a few of them sent that to their technical analysts who specialize in different fields. And I was like—

Kevin Rose: That’s maybe when I gave you bad advice.

Tim Ferriss: But I was like—maybe, maybe not. And I was like, “You have 10 chips. Where do you put those 10 chips as a bet?” That’s it. No further guidance, no caveats, no explanation. And look, I’m not saying this is the most sophisticated investment thesis in the world, but you know that I wanted Waymo because it was on that list and it was one of the winners that came back in terms of if we are to believe the consensus of this small cohort.

Kevin Rose: And to be a fair, I offered you some of my own purchase and you turned me down.

Tim Ferriss: I may still take you up on it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, you’re gonna just wait till the six-months evaluation—

Tim Ferriss: Exactly.

Kevin Rose: “Hey, remember, brother? I think [inaudible] cost.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s on the news. I would love to revisit our conversation from earlier.

Kevin Rose: But I think for the average person listening, the good news is that these companies are going out soon, meaning they’re going to be publicly traded companies. They may seem very expensive and very pricey and you’d be right to say that. And so did Amazon when it went out in 2000.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, what was the market cap on Amazon IPO though?

Kevin Rose: It was like—

Tim Ferriss: It’s got to be tiny.

Kevin Rose: No, no, no. It’s not about market cap. It’s about price to earnings, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.

Kevin Rose: So I looked at the price—

Tim Ferriss: Well, now price to earnings will depend a lot — I mean, it’s going to be very different for OpenAI and Anthropic, right?

Kevin Rose: Well, what’s crazy is SpaceX is like 30 percent bump on price to earnings on the peak of Amazon. So SpaceX is like—did you invest in SpaceX or no?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I started investing in SpaceX like 10, 12 years ago.

Kevin Rose: Oh, you’re stoked.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, yeah, I’m fine. But the point, I would say here also, it’s like if you’re like, “Oh, I missed it because only the fancy people get to invest beforehand.” It’s like, no, I mean, SpaceX right now, I’m looking at the chart launched at 160, had this huge bump obviously, but then dropped down and you could have bought it for 156, 154, 153, and now it’s climbing back up. I mean, there’s a lot going on here. And honestly, I still find public equity investing terrifying because there’s so many sharks and there’s short sellers and derivatives and all this craziness going on. And what happens when it’s listed and put into these indexes and blah, blah, blah? All those dynamics are way beyond my capability.

Kevin Rose: That’s why I don’t do the day trading thing.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t do day trading.

Kevin Rose: No, I’m just saying, for example, SpaceX, I don’t have a position in SpaceX, but if I did, it would be to hold it for the next 10 years.

Tim Ferriss: Here’s a good takeaway. You’re asking what’s the takeaway from my 20-year analysis of the angel investing? It’s still incomplete. There’s a lot left to do and—

Kevin Rose: Shopify.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Well, that’s a good example, right? It’s like this is going to sound so dumb and, “Yeah, duh,” to so many people who are more just better investors than I am, but yeah, I mean, I’ve done pretty well. I think the decisions I made at the time to sell certain things were very logical given the information and my financial status at the time.

Kevin Rose: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Totally reasonable, right? So I don’t want to judge a good poker play based on where I am 20 years hence, that’s not reasonable. But the takeaway is like, you’ve got to let your winners run as long as possible.

Kevin Rose: 100 percent. I’ve lost more money by selling stocks early than I’ve ever probably made buying the original stock.

Tim Ferriss: And the other thing I would say also, for people listening who are like, “Oh, my God, if these one percenters are jerking each other off any longer, I’m going to vomit.” If you had just, and some very famous firm did this, maybe it was Sequoia or Benchmark, I can’t recall, but they looked at their gains from initial investment all the way through follow on rounds to IPO and then six months post. So after lockup for, let’s just keep it simple for all intents and purposes. And then they looked at what you would have gained if you bought at IPO and just held for like 10 years and you would have made as much or more if you would just bought as a retail investor.

Kevin Rose: Yep. I mean, that is the silver lining here, which is, I for some reason get fed all a lot of these Instagram videos and two of them that—

Tim Ferriss: You’re on Instagram so much. You send me so many fucking Instagram pics.

Kevin Rose: They’re funny though, right? I send some funny shit.

Tim Ferriss: You do.

Kevin Rose: But the interesting thing about it is so many times as individuals, and I’ve fallen into this trap as well, which is you find something that you love and you buy said object when you should actually buy the company. So let’s just pretend you’re going to spend $500 on an iPhone every year since it came out, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And there was this great woman that came in and she was like, “Okay, how do you just for the first four years of the iPhone coming out, rather than buy an iPhone—

Tim Ferriss: Put it into Apple.

Kevin Rose: —just put it into Apple.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.

Kevin Rose: And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And my buddy, sadly, I love you, Prager. David Prager, the second the Tesla came out, not the first one, but the one that was consumer friendly, he went out and he had made a little money and he’s like, “You know what? I’m going to do it. I’m going to splurge. I’m going to deck it out, spend a hundred grand on this thing.” And he got the freaking top of the line Tesla. We did the math for him because we’re bastards and it was like $15 million or something like that had he just invested in Tesla the second he loved the product.

But the moral of the story is like if you love something and this is going to happen over and over again for decades to come, if you’re like, “Hey, Claude is my shit. I use it every single day. I think it’s great because of X, Y, and Z.” And they go public, set it and forget it. Come in, whatever you can afford, I don’t care if it’s $100 or $1,000 or $100,000, it’s meaningful at the end of the day. I don’t know. That’s my reaction.

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s great advice. I mean, look, that’s part of the reason and I have gotten so much shit from this by some VCs, I won’t mention their names, who are just like, “What?” Because they’ve got their 30 slide, our proprietary investment thesis shit that they show pension funds and stuff, right? And I’m like, I just try to invest in stuff that I will use every day and it’s not true for everything, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, I’m not using them every day, SpaceX, outside of Starlink, but it’s like there are exceptions. But it’s like with something like this, where it’s like I am eating close to half of my protein calories every day of this stuff and I’m like, “I should just invest in the company.” It’s just like that is what makes sense. You know the first stock I ever bought? This was when I was like —

Kevin Rose: Dildonics. I mean, something you use every day.

Tim Ferriss: Teledildonics. Yeah. Can’t go wrong.

Kevin Rose: For people that don’t know what Dildonics is—

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’ll be another random show.

Kevin Rose: Show notes.

Tim Ferriss: Show notes. It was Pixar.

Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. My dad bought me some book on stock investing. Honestly, I couldn’t make any sense of it because it was getting into like price to earning and this and that, earning per share. And I was like, “Ah, I don’t really understand this.” 

Kevin Rose: That’s so cool your dad bought you that book.

Tim Ferriss: It was cool.

Kevin Rose: That’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: It’s cool. It’s cool. It was his way of showing love. We can’t all do it the way necessarily people want to receive it. But in any case, the point of that was I loved comics. I tracked comics and animation and I saw Toy Story, number one, I even saw shorts and I was like, “That is the future.”

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: I know that’s the future.

Kevin Rose: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And when I was whatever, 15 or something, first stock, Pixar.

Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: I have the original shareholder poster they mailed out.

Kevin Rose: No way. Oh, shit.

Tim Ferriss: Like Lasseter and Jobs and stuff.

Kevin Rose: Oh, dude, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for me it’s like, look at your credit card statement. Do you know what I mean? I mean, this is not investment advice. I’m just saying this is the way I personally approach it so informational purposes only, but it’s like, yeah, if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on like Amazon and Amazon Prime, it’s like, well, maybe, who knows?

Kevin Rose: Totally. I mean that’s—

Tim Ferriss: Are you going to be spending more or less on that in five years? Just forget about the market, forget about analysts, like you personally. Will you be spending more or less on this in three or five years time?

Kevin Rose: That’s exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’ll put something in the intro on, this is not investment advice, but it’s like this stuff, you don’t need to be a quant hedge fund manager.

Kevin Rose: And to be fair, when you look at Buffett’s portfolio and the things that he’s bought over the years, it’s the consumer staples and the things that we’re just like, he’s like, “Yes, more people will want and drink Coca-Cola in the future. It’s a fantastic brand. The margins are impeccable. It’s a well-run business. I know the CEO.”

Tim Ferriss: Not prone to disruption.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. In downturns, guess what? People still drink Coke.

Tim Ferriss: He’s also a clever bastard though. He’s been very good with his like, “Aw, shucks, aw, shucks, grandpa,” branding. He’s very good at that, but that dude is a stone-cold killer in terms of Geico is a cash machine and being the lender of first resort.

Kevin Rose: Smart as shit.

Tim Ferriss: When shit’s going sideways, people call Uncle Buffett and he’s like, “Sure, here’s my offer, take or leave.”

Kevin Rose: He’s so smart.

Tim Ferriss: But yes, very bright guy. What have we missed?

Kevin Rose: The only thing I would say is that—

Tim Ferriss: Teledildonics.

Kevin Rose: Yes, that. I relaunched if you want to learn about the latest tech and AI news, I relaunched Digg.

Tim Ferriss: You were showing me some numbers. That’s crazy.

Kevin Rose: It’s crazy. We went from 20,000 people a week using it to now we have close to 500,000 so it’s been growing quite a bit and it’s pulling across the entire zeitgeist of the web. So we’re like, we don’t want to start another social network. So we pulled from X and we’ve pulled from a few other feeds and we’ve been putting in like videos from YouTube and TikTok and others and it’s just been a fun little hobby. It’s a fun hobby and it’s like doing millions of pages a month and I’m proud of that. It’s awesome to see it working again. So it’s good.

Tim Ferriss: D-I-G-G.com.

Kevin Rose: D-I-G-G.com, @KevinRose on Instagram, and, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Sweet. What should I say? I guess tim.blog, you can find 1,000 plus blog plus. If you want to read about my cadaver on the table, my book sales as a result of AI, that is a crazy blog post. I don’t even know if you were aware of this.

Kevin Rose: No, I’ve not seen this.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. All format book sales—

Kevin Rose: Oh, I saw that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, isn’t it crazy?

Kevin Rose: Went down.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you look at the graph and it’s like stable annuity, stable annuity, stable annuity, very predictable. And then in 2013, because what happened in November 2022, ChatGPT 3.5, and you see a slip by negative 5 percent, then you see a slip by like, I’m making up these numbers, but they’re close, negative 28 percent, then it’s like negative 49 percent.

Kevin Rose: But it turns out you’re going to be okay.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll be fine. But no, no, but the implications are pretty interesting and now if we continue the pace in 2026 down like 67 percent.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: These are sort of compounding in the wrong direction, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not quite the right terminology to use, but you get it. So stuff to think about. People can check that out. If you search AI nonfiction, Tim Ferriss, that’s a blog post that’s actually a pretty interesting read, but on the less dystopian view, ultimately the message isn’t dystopian. Tim.blog, @TimFerriss on Instagram @Tferriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, on Twitter. But honestly, I’m not so active on the socials because I’ve deleted those from my phone for a couple of years. You’re listening to the podcast so I don’t have to sell the podcast. Oh, Five Bullet Friday, my diary.

Kevin Rose: Can you add one?

Tim Ferriss: Can I add one what?

Kevin Rose: I don’t know. It’s like six bullets.

Tim Ferriss: Well, every once in a while, if I’m lazy, there are, I’d say—

Kevin Rose: Four bullets?

Tim Ferriss: No, if I’m lazy and I’m like, “I don’t want to do it.” Because I still do this thing myself.

Kevin Rose: I gotta pee. I really gotta go.

Tim Ferriss: Hold on one sec. We’re almost done. Relax, you and your prostate.

Kevin Rose: No, it’s not the prostate. It’s the fact that you gave me tequila.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I gave you tequila. You were over served? Hold on a second. Just give me two fucking seconds, you old man. You old bastard. Now I’m going to make this really long.

Kevin Rose: No, don’t. Come on.

Tim Ferriss: So yeah, Five Bullet Friday. Every once in a while—you did this to yourself—turns into Six Bullet Saturday if I’m just not feeling it. But yeah, two million subscribers, it’s free, easy to unsubscribe. Tim.blog/Friday and that’s all I got.

Kevin Rose: All right.

Tim Ferriss: You want to go pee, old man?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I will.

Tim Ferriss: All right, good to see you, bud.

Kevin Rose: Good to see you. Love you brother.

Tim Ferriss: Love you too.

---

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday” (#875) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday” (#875)

2026-07-17 00:33:56

In this edition of The Random Show, Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose reunite over tequila to talk Zen retreats, learning to rock climb at (almost) 50, mortality and grief, why you should stop saying “one day,” AI predictions, and much more.

This episode is brought to you by:

• Incogni, which removes your personal data from the web, helping shield you from fraud, scams, and identity theft
• Wealthfront high-yield cash account

Please enjoy!

---

Additional podcast platforms

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

• This episode
• All episodes

Show Notes

Connect with Kevin Rose:

Website | Digg | Diggnation Podcast | Instagram | X | Threads | Bluesky

Connect with Tim Ferriss:

Website | 5-Bullet Friday | Saisei Foundation | Instagram | X

Relevant Tim Ferriss Show Episodes

• Assessing Risk and Living Without a Rope – Lessons from Alex Honnold | The Tim Ferriss Show #160
• Dr. Adam Gazzaley, UCSF — Brain Optimization and the Future of Psychedelic Medicine | The Tim Ferriss Show #507
• Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia | The Tim Ferriss Show #851
• Elan Lee, Co-Creator of Exploding Kittens — How to Raise Millions on Kickstarter, Deconstructing Mega-Successes, Secrets of Game Design, The Power of Positive Constraints, The Delights of Craftsmanship, and The Art of Turning Fans into Superfans | The Tim Ferriss Show #653
• Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway | The Tim Ferriss Show #531
• Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies | The Tim Ferriss Show #61
• Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours | The Tim Ferriss Show #713
• The Maverick of Brain Optimization | The Tim Ferriss Show #83
• Michael Pollan — Exploring The New Science of Psychedelics | The Tim Ferriss Show #313
• Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants | The Tim Ferriss Show #520
• My Two-Year Secret Project, COYOTE — The Strategies and Tactics for Building a Bestseller from Nothing with Elan Lee of Exploding Kittens | The Tim Ferriss Show #821
• The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #858
• The Random Show, Rare Drinking Edition — Affordable Luxuries, Brain Stimulation, Sampling the Future (and Some Previews), Recharging with Creative Experiments, Tokenizing Humans with a Bonding Curve, Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry, and Much More | The Tim Ferriss Show #690
• Sam Harris, Ph.D. — How to Master Your Mind | The Tim Ferriss Show #342
• Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg in Antarctica — Exploring Personal Fears, Bucket Lists, Facing Grief, Crafting Life Missions, and Tim’s Best Penguin Impressions | The Tim Ferriss Show #578
• Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans | The Tim Ferriss Show #560

Books & Recommended Reading

• 10,000 Years of Dog Domestication | CBC Radio’s Ideas
• 360 Feedback Questions: Samples for Managers [With Downloadable Templates] | Indeed
• The Blade Itself (The First Law Trilogy, Book One) by Joe Abercrombie | Amazon
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan | Amazon
• FANG Stocks Explained | Investopedia
• Has AI Already Killed Nonfiction? by Tim Ferriss | Tim’s Blog
• The Tail End by Tim Urban | Wait But Why
• Internet?Enabled Orgasms: How Teledildonics Are Changing the Way We Have Sex | The Conversation

Films & TV

• Free Solo | Prime Video
• Rain Man | Prime Video
• Toy Story | Prime Video
• Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory | Prime Video

People

• Joe Abercrombie
• Emil Abrahamsson
• Joshua Baer
• Sergey Brin
• Warren Buffett
• Michael Eckert
• Molly Ferriss
• Adam Gazzaley
• Sam Harris
• Alex Honnold
• Andrew Huberman
• Steve Jobs
• John Lasseter
• Elan Lee
• Om Malik
• Bill Maris
• Terence McKenna
• Matt Mullenweg
• Elon Musk
• Michael Pollan
• David Prager
• Joe Rogan
• Darya Rose
• Toaster Rose
• Henry Shukman
• Lisa Su
• Tim Urban
• Chris Williamson
• Tommy Wood
• Yamada Ryoun Roshi

Meditation & Introspection

• Four Myths About Zen Buddhism’s Mu Koan by Steven Heine | OUPblog
• The Live Your Values Deck | Amazon
• Waking Up (Sam Harris’ Mindfulness Meditation App)
• The Way (Henry Shukman’s Guided Meditation App)
• The Last Time by Sam Harris | Waking Up
• The Whole Earth is Medicine by Harry Shukman | Instagram

Supplements, Food, Drinks, & Performance

• Bulleit Rye Whiskey
• deltaG Ketones
• LALO Tequila
• Maui Nui Venison
• Neutonic Nootropic Toothpicks
• Pioneer Pastures A2 Protein (Chocolate / Vanilla | Amazon)

Training

• Abrahangs Protocol (10s on / 50s off, 10 min, 2×/day)
• Ape Index Calculator | 99Boulders
• Learn Chess the Duolingo Way | Duolingo
• M3i Studio Indoor Bike | Keiser
• Norwegian 4×4 High-Intensity Interval Training | On
• The Nug | Frictitious Climbing

Science & Research

• A Phase 3 Trial of MM120 for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (Voyage) | UCSF Neuroscape
• Definium Therapeutics (formerly MindMed)
• Research | Dog Aging Project
• Single Treatment With MM120 (Lysergide) in Generalized Anxiety Disorder | JAMA

Tech & AI

• AI Halo | AMD Ryzen
• ChatGPT | OpenAI
• Claude / Claude Code | Anthropic
• Descript
• Ferrite Recording Studio App | Wooji Juice
• Gemini | Google
• Google X
• NVIDIA
• Pixar Animation Studios
• Sennheiser XS Lav USB-C Pro Audio Condenser Microphone | Amazon
• Shokz OpenMeet UC Bone-Conduction Headset | Amazon
• SimCity Games | EA
• SpaceX
• Tesla
• Ubiquiti UniFi G5 Ultra Network Camera | Amazon
• Waymo
• Wispr Flow (Voice-to-Text)

Timestamps

• [00:00:00] Start.
• [00:00:24] A tequila toast, and getting “taxed” by alcohol as you age.
• [00:02:18] Toaster at 15: a late-night health scare.
• [00:06:01] Losing Om Malik, and finding out on retreat.
• [00:08:03] Matt Mullenweg, Antarctica, and gratitude.
• [00:09:34] Coming to terms with our limited time on Earth.
• [00:14:37] Five days of silence and the koan “Mu.”
• [00:15:20] Kevin’s micro-insight and a plug for The Way.
• [00:27:25] Rock climbing after 40, and a Yosemite goal.
• [00:29:18] Michael Eckert and finger-strength training.
• [00:30:40] The Nug, Abrahangs, and a travel training kit.
• [00:32:57] Free Solo and climbing with a fear of heights.
• [00:37:53] The Blade Itself, and a friend lost in a plane crash.
• [00:39:19] A2 protein and Pioneer Pastures.
• [00:40:34] Maui Nui venison and the nitrate question.
• [00:43:48] deltaG ketones: what they are and the catch.
• [00:45:42] Ketones, dementia, and verbal fluidity.
• [00:46:29] Pre-grieving a parent’s decline.
• [00:48:33] Training not to die: the one bike I can stand and the Norwegian 4×4.
• [00:51:10] Something beats nothing: saunas, treadmills, and Duolingo chess.
• [00:53:04] The MM120 anxiety study — and a small-world surprise.
• [00:56:17] Psilocybin, LSD, and dementia case reports.
• [01:01:28] Neutonic toothpicks and Kevin’s AI-powered home.
• [01:06:12] Spooky AI personalization and investment autopsies.
• [01:17:38] Values cards, contractual bonds, and dark information.
• [01:23:25] 360 reviews and child-rearing.
• [01:24:54] Wispr Flow, Shokz, and my recording rig.
• [01:29:32] The “big three” and where AI goes next.
• [01:44:40] Let your winners run; buy the company, not the product.
• [01:51:08] Digg’s relaunch, 5-Bullet Friday, and parting thoughts.

Want to hear the last time Kevin and I got together for a Random Show? Listen to our Couch Edition, in which Kevin and I discussed our Zen retreat with Henry Shukman, DIY vagus nerve stimulation, my Bertolotti’s Syndrome back-pain breakthrough, balance boards and slacklining, Emil Abrahamsson’s tendon-strengthening protocol, photobiomodulation and urolithin A for mitochondria, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird-feeder obsession, and much more.

---

This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is a financial services platform that offers services to help you save and invest your money. Right now, your cash can earn 3.30% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account from its network of program banks. That’s 8 times more interest than a typical savings account at a bank, according to FDIC.gov as of 1/22/2026 (Wealthfront’s 3.30% APY vs. 0.39% average savings rate). Right now, for a limited time, Wealthfront is offering new clients that use my sign-up link an additional 0.75% boost over the base rate for three months, meaning you can get up to 4.05% APY, limited to $150,000 in deposits. Terms & Conditions apply. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started. 

The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC (“WFB”), member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The 3.30% Base APY on cash deposits is as of January 30, 2026, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum balance. The overall boosted rate is subject to change if the base rate decreases during the three-month promotional period. Tim Ferriss, who’s not a client, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage LLC for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, which creates an incentive that results in a conflict of interest. Tim expresses his own opinions and Wealthfront does not endorse, sponsor, or promote them. This ad may not reflect the experience of other Cash Account clients, and similar outcomes are not guaranteed. Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Securities investments: not bank deposits, not bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. See full disclosures here. 

---

This episode is brought to you by Incogni: erase your personal data from the web and prevent scams, fraud, and identity theft! Incogni automatically removes your information across 420+ data brokers (1,000+ additional sites covered in their Unlimited plan), and they keep it scrubbed automatically. Deloitte has independently verified the headline numbers (245M+ removal requests), and the company adheres to AICPA SOC security standards, with an A+ rating from the BBB. And with their Unlimited plan, if you find your info on a site they don’t automatically monitor, just send them the link, and their privacy team will handle it. ​Protect yourself now with Incogni. Go to Incogni.com/Tim to get 60% off their annual plan.

---

DISCLAIMER FROM TIM FERRISS: I am not an investment adviser. Nor is Kevin Rose. All opinions are mine alone. Or his. There are risks involved in placing any investment in securities or in Bitcoin or in cryptocurrencies or in anything. None of the information presented herein is intended to form the basis of any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person, and that includes you, my dear listener or reader. Everything you’re going to hear is for informational entertainment purposes only.

The post The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday” (#875) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Guy Oseary — The Legendary Hollywood Power Broker on 5-Minute Decisions, 36 Years of Managing Madonna, 26 IPOs, and Spotting Magic First (#874)

2026-07-09 13:54:06

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Guy Oseary (@guyoseary). Guy has managed some of the biggest names in music, including Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and U2, and was named Variety‘s Music Mogul of the Year in 2022. He co-founded A-Grade Investments and then Sound Ventures, now with nearly $2 billion under management.

Guy’s full bio

Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

Legal conditions/copyright information

Additional podcast platforms

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!

---

Tim Ferriss: So, here we are sitting in this beautiful home and I wanted you to explain this beautiful calligraphy behind you that I was admiring, some of the most impeccable handwriting I’ve ever seen. What is it that’s sitting behind you?

Guy Oseary: That’s “Purple Rain” lyrics by Prince.

Tim Ferriss: Just incredible.

Guy Oseary: I’m a huge fan of Prince. When I was a kid, I had Prince posters up on my wall and I met him when I was 12.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Guy Oseary: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How did that happen?

Guy Oseary: The place where I was living with my dad, an apartment building in West Hollywood, was directly across the street from a hotel called Le Parc Hotel. And that’s when I started meeting artists. I started becoming a fan. I loved music, but I became a fan, someone that would actually wait to get their album signed. And Prince actually signed something for me. He wrote “Love God” for me. I told him that years, years, years later. We became friends and became close.

Tim Ferriss: Was it “Love God.” Or Love, God?

Guy Oseary: It was “Love God” and it was signed “Prince.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Guy Oseary: That was a long time ago because later on he became a Jehovah Witness. But yeah, you could see the posters. I had Billy Idol and Prince on my walls and you could see it from the street if you looked up. So, you can come out, if you’re waiting for your car or whatever, and you look and you’d see, okay, someone up there likes music a lot. And I was on the first floor and there’s a little balcony there.

And then I’d come out a lot. I met INXS. And I met some people I became friends with, like Billy Idol, I became friends with years later and Michael Hutchence, I became friends with. And Morrissey, I became friends with later. But I met them all when I was a kid.

Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome.

Guy Oseary: And a really cool thing is other kids were around then so I could hang. They were older than me, but they were kids and so I could hang with them and really get a little camaraderie with some of the fans out there that were waiting for the bands.

Tim Ferriss: I want to talk about addresses and Beverly Hills High School. How did you end up at Beverly Hills High School? And why?

Guy Oseary: Before Beverly Hills High School, I went to a school in downtown L.A. It was on Pico and Arlington, so it’s almost on the way if you’re going to go see a Laker game. It’s on the way to that. And I went to that school and it was incredible. So many great people.

Music was a big piece of my journey there. I took a school bus there and the kids would go between two radio stations on the bus. So, the bus driver would play either KDAY, which was the first hip hop station in L.A., or they would go to KROQ, which is the alternative radio station in L.A. And I loved them both. And so, I met a lot of really cool kids there who were in these groups of people. They were like the punk rockers, the hip hoppers, the break-dancers, gang members, graffiti artists, just a great eclectic group of people during that time period where I’m just a sponge. I’m just picking up all the energies and really falling in love with music.

And one night, I was outside the school dance. There was the L.A. Dream Team. That’s what they were called, this group that was performing that night. And I was waiting outside the school. I was very tall. I looked a little older than I was and it was late. My dad was late to pick me up.

And while I was out there, I saw a guy running past me for his life. And then I see a car turn the corner and I guess chasing the guy down and a guy jumped out of the passenger seat and pulled a knife out on me and asked me if I was with that guy. And he asked me if I was in a gang and I said, “I’m just a kid waiting for my dad. I was at a school dance and this is my school and da, da, da.” And so he got back in the car to chase the guy.

And so there are no such thing as coincidences. But when my dad showed up, I got in the car and I was like, “I almost died and someone pulled out a knife on me. And you were late. And I want to go to Beverly Hills High School next.” And again, there’s no coincidences. That just came to me right then and there that I want to go from downtown L.A. to Beverly Hills High.

And there was a TV show, 90210, back then.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Guy Oseary: I thought, “I want to check that out. That’s a different world from the world I’m in now. I want to just see it.” And I didn’t know at the time, but you have to live in Beverly Hills to go to Beverly Hills High School.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that makes sense.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. I don’t know why I didn’t put that together. I just said that to my dad and we didn’t live in Beverly Hills. And he knew that’s what I wanted and he heard me. He came back to me and said, “There’s someone who I know who lives in Beverly Hills and they will give you their address to basically pretend that you live there so you can go to that school that you want to go to.” And the combination of going to school in downtown L.A. and also going to Beverly Hills High right after, I think that’s a big part of who I am today.

Tim Ferriss: Blending the two worlds.

Guy Oseary: Blending the two worlds. One or the other without the other would not have given me the perspective that I needed.

Tim Ferriss: What was the perspective that you got once you were transported to this second chapter at Beverly Hills High?

Guy Oseary: Well, once you walk through those doors, it might as well be a TV show from where I just came from. People have a lot. There’s cars and there’s homes with pools and just the optionality and the potential of what they all had was pretty wild.

And that actually inspired me to, “Oh, I didn’t know you can aim this high. I don’t have what these people have. I don’t have the means. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the connections. So I’d better start working.” And I think at like, 14, it really started to kick in where I go, “Ooh, because these people are going on trips and ski trips and I don’t know anything about skiing. I don’t know anything about…”

I just didn’t live that world. So I knew that I needed to do something about it and I looked like, “What am I good at? What could I be good at?” And music was my love. It was my passion. It’s what I was obsessed over. And so, I thought something in music. And that’s when I started to really pay attention to, what could I do around music, would I do music? And then around 15, I really started to pick that up and at 16, I was already really running with it.

Tim Ferriss: So, I think this might be a good bridge. If I’m missing something in between these points, let me know. I’m sure there’s a lot that we could talk about. But Bernie Brillstein, who is that?

Guy Oseary: So, Bernie Brillstein is iconic. In Hollywood, he’s one of the greats. He was exceptional. He was one of the original managers and he managed all of these amazing talents. A lot of the talents from SNL, he managed all of them.

Tim Ferriss: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Garry Shandling.

Guy Oseary: All of them.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Guy Oseary: And he was beloved. He looked a little like Santa Claus. He was a really big guy with a white beard. 

And so, when I was 15, I started to compile artists that I liked that had demos. So I would go out there and try to find artists and try to find new artists. I had the yearbook person come and take photos of these.

Tim Ferriss: And this was on your own or were you working?

Guy Oseary: On my own.

Tim Ferriss: On your own.

Guy Oseary: On my own. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought, let me put together a portfolio, let me have someone take photos of these artists, let me get the demos. One day, I’ll get a meeting with somebody. And that’s what I started.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll have something to show when I get the meeting.

Guy Oseary: Yeah, I’ll have something to show. I think I called it Wise Guy Records. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I had my little logo. I did everything I could possibly do without knowing anything or anyone.

And then, the week I turned 16 — I remember it was the week I turned 16 because I didn’t pass my driver test so I needed to be dropped off. So the week I turned 16, I went to meet with Bernie. And what happened was, I approached a lot of the kids at school at Beverly Hills High and I said, “Can I meet your dad? Can I meet your dad? Can I meet your dad?” And just anyone that was in entertainment.

And out of all the people that I approached, I got two meetings that would end up both being really the most impactful meetings I could ever have. And one of them, the first one I got, was Bernie Brillstein and his two boys, Nick and Dave, both told their dad, “You should meet with Guy.”

So I go meet with Bernie. He was at the 9200 building on Sunset and I played him a song. I don’t even remember what group or what it was at this stage, but I played him a song and he just looks at me. He goes, “Well, hey, kid, how much is it going to cost to put this out?”

And I knew not to pause because then he’d know I’m a phony. So I said, “$25,000.”

And he said, “I’ll tell you what, kid, I’ll give you the $25,000. If you make it back, pay me back. That’s all I ask.”

And at the time, I’d never seen $2,500. So, I just said, “Bernie, I’d rather you make three phone calls for me to music people and I don’t want your money.”

And he ended up putting that in his first book, that story. He’s passed away, unfortunately. But he always felt that I said no because I just couldn’t take the money from him. I said no because I didn’t know what to do with $25,000 and I was a phony. But until his last days, in his book, he’s like, “The one guy that didn’t want to take my money was Guy Oseary.” It’s not true. I just didn’t know what to do with it. So he made those three phone calls for me.

Tim Ferriss: Did he pick the people to make the phone calls to?

Guy Oseary: Yeah, I had no idea. I said three music business people. He did. And I got meetings with a few of them. But they never ended up — 

Tim Ferriss: Going anywhere.

Guy Oseary: — going anywhere at all. But what ended up happening was, I came back home and I thought to myself, “Wow, I’m 16 years old and this guy offered me as much money as people make a year in one meeting.”

If people feel they have talent, they don’t know, really. There’s no confirmation on that talent. People think, “Oh, my mom says I’m a good singer or so and so says I’m great at this.” But you don’t know until someone confirms it, until someone buys your book or goes to your show or whatever.

Tim Ferriss: Offers you 25k.

Guy Oseary: On that day, that was the confirmation I needed that I’m on the right path and I went, “That’s it. From this point on, I’m going to turn it up. I’m not looking back. This guy offered me 25k in one meeting. I just turned 16. I’m going to stick to this. I can do this.” And many years later when I got my first gold record, I sent it to Bernie because that was so impactful on my life.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned two meetings.

Guy Oseary: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Was the other Freddy?

Guy Oseary: The other was Freddy DeMann.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Who is Freddy DeMann?

Guy Oseary: So, Freddy DeMann, his daughters Neysa and Pilar connected me with their dad, Freddy. And Freddy was iconic as well. I mean, he worked on, I think, “Thriller” with Michael Jackson. He managed Madonna. He managed some of the greatest artists of all time. And he was just a really great human, great guy. And he heard me out. It took a few meetings to get Freddy to really go for it with me. Not that long.

Tim Ferriss: And this meeting was after Bernie.

Guy Oseary: Meeting was after Bernie and he just learned about me. He heard my pitch and, “I’m trying to do this, I’m trying to do that.” And he knew I didn’t really have any money.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. At that point, what was your pitch?

Guy Oseary: Gosh, I think I’m just showing him that I’m in the flow of music. I’m around music. I’m around artists.

Tim Ferriss: The portfolio.

Guy Oseary: Yeah, one of the crews that I was working with was Ice-T. And I got very lucky, got introduced to my friend Chris Boyd. I met when I was working when I was 15 at this Fred Segal and Chris Boyd, another guy, was working there and he’s like, “Oh, I know Ice-T and his producer, Johnny Rivers. And would you want to come to the studio and check it out?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I want to go.” So, he brought me to the studio and actually my first day in the studio, Ice-T goes, “Come into the booth and do a few words.” And I’m actually on the album.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. And so, he had me say a few words on the album, but I started hanging around and I’m like, “What could I do? Could I clean up? Could I carry someone’s bag? How do I be helpful or of service?” I’m just so happy to be around this energy, the music and artists coming in and out. And he had a thing called Rhyme Syndicate. So, a lot of the artists came through there. And I was able to be around them and help.

And then I ended up becoming the manager of Ice-T’s DJ and his brother, who’s Hen Gee and Evil E. Evil E is Ice-T’s DJ. So, I managed them. It was my first group I ever managed. And I was 17. We got them a record deal. So I had that and I always checked in. I checked back with Freddy and said, “Freddy, I just got my first group signed to record label.” So, he knew.

There’s a guy named Steve Rifkind who I met who knew the record label. He helped me get that first record deal. So, when I went to see Steve and I played some of the music, I played him Ice-T’s DJ, Evil E and his brother Hen Gee. And I said, “Here’s the music.”

He said, “I know a label for you.”

So, he helped me get my first record deal.

So, I always write Freddy and go, “Hey Freddy, I just got my first group signed, a manager.” And he knew, how was he pulling these things off on his own without any help or any money?

And so I met with him and he said, “Madonna and I are going to start a record label one day.”

And so I said to him, “I’d love to work there.” I said, “I don’t need any money.” I did need money, but I wanted to make it really easy for him. I said, “I don’t need money. Just give me an office and a desk.” That’s all I asked.

And he was like, “Okay.” 

Guy Oseary: So he brought me in as a scout because one day they’re going to start a label. They didn’t even have a name. They just knew they were going to do it.

So I’m scouting and then one day I find Hole, which is Courtney Love. I find their first song, “Teenage Whore” and I go, “Oh, my God, this sounds incredible.” I’m just blown away by the sounds and the lyrics and all of it. So, I reached out to the lawyer, Rosemary Carroll, and next thing I know it’s in the paper the next day. “Madonna’s trying to sign Hole.”

Tim Ferriss: How did that happen?

Guy Oseary: I made a phone call. I was very naive back then, but it was like, “Madonna’s trying to sign Hole.” So, the next day there was a show that Hole was doing at the Whiskey. Actually, I think Kurt was there. But then Madonna was like, “Who is this?” Wanted to talk to me about, “Who is this Hole thing?”

Tim Ferriss: “Hey, kid, come here for a second.”

Guy Oseary: Yeah, so I go in a room and I play this song for Madonna and for Freddy and it’s pretty wild. I mean, the lyrics are like, “When I was a teenage whore, my mother said, she said, ‘Baby, what for?'” I was like, whoa. And you’ve got to go back to that time period.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Guy Oseary: And they were like, “Okay, all right, so go after it.” And so, I went after it. I didn’t get it. It was between us and Geffen Records and we didn’t get it. It went to Geffen Records. But my first artist I ever attempted to sign was Hole.

Tim Ferriss: So, let me pause you for one second.

Guy Oseary: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So, the meetings that you got with Bernie and Freddy, you got two introductions. How many kids at school do you think you asked in total to end up with those two?

Guy Oseary: I think I probably asked five.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Guy Oseary: I mean, I already wasn’t a social guy. I’m not on the football team. I was just sort of my own music guy running around and I didn’t have much. So, I did as much asking as I can from who I could figure out to ask. So, I probably asked around five. And I remember one person specifically saying, “My dad doesn’t do that.” Whatever. Because it was rap I was trying to play, “Oh, my dad doesn’t do that.”

But I didn’t have any shame. I needed to figure this out. I knew that my time was limited before going to college and I’d better figure this out soon. So I was on a hustle.

Tim Ferriss: This is from an L.A. Times piece way back in the day, 1997, but it says something along the lines of, “I gave myself a year, which is why I kept pushing people for a chance.” Maybe that’s accurate, maybe it isn’t. But did you apply pressure to yourself in that way, like instead of going to college?

Guy Oseary: Oh, yeah. No, I went to college.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Guy Oseary: I went for half a semester and I got my first group signed, which was just Hen Gee and Evil E. And then I remember going to my English teacher. I don’t know her name. She was amazing because I said, “Hey, I’m thinking of dropping out and focusing on this thing.”

And she just looked at me and said, “You could always come back.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow. It’s wild to think about these just chance moments.

Guy Oseary: That was it. And I go, “Oh, I could always come back.” Okay. So, that was it. And by the way, I couldn’t even afford the $700 per semester and all the things that came with that. So, I had no choice. Sometimes having no options and no choice is really the best option.

Tim Ferriss: Where did the chutzpah come from? I mean, just that drive, was that absorbed from the parents? Were you just out of the box very different?

Guy Oseary: I don’t know. Look, I fell in love with music in a big way. But I think I realized how lucky I was to be at Beverly Hills High and see the potential of — 

Tim Ferriss: What was possible.

Guy Oseary: Yeah, of what’s possible. And I thought, “Wow, not everyone is this lucky. Not everyone gets this opportunity.” And by the way, I was scared that they would kick me out because if they found out I didn’t live there, they’d kick you out. So, I had to watch how I went to school. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. And so I just thought, “For every day I’m here, I’m really lucky and I need to pay attention to that.” And I just realized that, if I wanted to change my destiny, I needed to get going.

Tim Ferriss: And at what moment did you realize, “Oh, I think this might just work out”? I mean, was there a particular person or band you signed? Was there any flashpoint or was it really gradual?

Guy Oseary: I think the Bernie Brillstein moment where he offered me 25 grand the week I turned 16 was a big game changer for me.

And then there was a personal moment for me when I got a car when I finally passed my driving test. Took a few times. But when I finally got my car, I remember going to see my old friends from my old school. Because it was a Honda Civic. When I drove it to Beverly Hills High, not one person commented or said congratulations or nothing, no mention of it at all. And then I went to my old friends from my old school and then they couldn’t believe that I had a brand new Honda Civic. And they got in the car and they were rolling down the windows and sticking their arms and heads out and I was like, “Oh, wow, okay.”

I got a little perspective there to go, “Oh, no, these people at Beverly, they’re not really my friends. I’m here for a reason. I was put around this community for a reason, which is to work and which is to build my name or to build the things I want to do.” And it wasn’t until years later, actually, I told that story in that thing you’re talking about when I was 24. And my dad mentioned it was really hard to even come up with the money for that car back then. It was a really big deal for us. It was expensive back then.

And so, I think I needed perspective a lot of the opportunities that were in front of me and to really appreciate them. So, it’s a combination of those things.

Tim Ferriss: And from the chapters we’ve discussed so far, I mean, was then the next phase building your relationship with Madonna primarily, or where did you hop off past the things that we’ve already discussed?

Guy Oseary: Well, Madonna and I, the first real connection was that Hole connection where it’s like, “Well, play me this thing that you like.”

And then the second one, second artist I brought was Rage Against the Machine. And I really wanted to sign Rage Against the Machine. And so, I took her to the concert in New York at the Limelight, I think it was called. And I didn’t get them either. I didn’t get Rage. They ended up going with Michael Goldstone at Epic Records.

So, God, the first two things I competed for, I didn’t get.

Tim Ferriss: Well, not only did you not get them, but they went on to be successes, right?

Guy Oseary: Yeah, it was painful. It was painful. The third one that I competed for, I did get, it was called Candlebox. And at that time, actually, I think it outsold both Hole and Rage at that time. They ended up doing really, really well. But regardless, Hole and Rage, even to today, I still listen to them. I love them. But I was very lucky to get Candlebox. The fact that they bet on me, we didn’t have anything.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Guy Oseary: We just had this idea.

They ended up selling four million albums on that album. But I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget that they gave me that shot. That was my first success story with Candlebox.

Tim Ferriss: So, they give you a shot, but just to repeat what you just said, you didn’t have much, right? They were placing a bet on you.

Guy Oseary: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: What then goes into helping make a hit album that sells four million?

Guy Oseary: Well, going back to that time period, first is the music. I saw them. I was so lucky. Almost everything that I’ve been lucky on happens within minutes, not within days or weeks or months to think about it. It’s all intuitive and it’s very fast. And I was supposed to be somewhere else that night, but I went to this party and it was so bad that I thought, “Oh, I have time to go see that showcase of that band from Seattle.”

So, I go to the Lingerie on Sunset. And I walk in and these guys start performing. Now, there was a screen, like a video screen, on the side of the stage and then there’s a stage. I was looking at the video screen. There were maybe like, 30 people in the audience. It’s a showcase. I’m looking at that screen and I saw thousands of people singing along to that band.

Tim Ferriss: In your mind?

Guy Oseary: In my mind, yeah. But I went to the payphone from that performance, called Freddy, and said, “Freddy, I have our band. This is the band. I just saw them. This is the one.” And so it starts with that.

It always starts with the magic. I don’t care if you’re a tech company or whatever it is, a film, a product, a book, magic. You’ve got to have magic. Something has to pull you in. And that night I saw it, I visualized it, and the songs were there. The songs were so there that, when we made the album, their first two singles, we could not beat the demo. They went in to rerecord them for the album. So whatever they made for a few hundred bucks that I had with a lot more money and a lot more time we couldn’t beat. And so those songs, those first two songs on the album are from the demo. So the music was there. They were talented. The band was talented. The singer Kevin is so great. And they really did it the hard way. They chipped away. They did show after show after show. Took a few years for every week, every week, little by little, little by little. Keyword is artist development and people don’t artist develop that much. It’s something that we all want. Every artist wants to have the time to build, have the time to develop. And we really took that time week after week after week developing that one. That’s how we got there.

Tim Ferriss: This may be jumping ahead too far, but what would be an example of that in your investing later? Could be tech, could be outside of tech where you saw something or you talked to someone and it was within a matter of minutes or one conversation where you’re like, “Okay, that is a horse to bet on.”

Guy Oseary: Honestly, I would say that 90 percent of the things I do happen in the first five minutes. 90 percent. It drives me crazy when we get in a room and talk about it for three months. And I respect process. I know there is a process to these things, but I think I know what I want to do very quickly. It started out, I think that the muscle that got built for fast sort of response thinking or intuition was really in the music business. We have such a small label, so boutique and we’re competing with these big companies that have been around forever and have all these other artists and we didn’t have any artists. So when I met an artist and I liked them, most of the artists — Alanis Morissette I signed off of one song. Muse, I saw them perform one song and I’d stopped them after — they flew all the way from London to L.A. to showcase for me.

And after the first song, I stopped them. I said, “You do not have to play another song.” And they’re like, “We flew out all the way from London. We’d like to play more music.” I go, “But I just want you to know I do not need to hear another song.” Just to be clear. So it shows the artist the passion, which is very important. This person believes in me that much.

Tim Ferriss: High conviction. Yeah.

Guy Oseary: High conviction. And also if I left it available, maybe someone will offer them way more money or make them other promises and I couldn’t afford to not make fast decisions or else we would never have gotten to where we got to.

Tim Ferriss: So in any of those examples, and I know this is possibly very hard to verbalize someone said to me recently and I thought it was pretty funny, they were like, “Yeah, in Silicon Valley, if you say you’re using your intuition, nobody listens, but if you say pattern matching, then they pay attention.” But if you were trying to explain what you intuited or noticed in that one song, understanding the music is good, but what else are you picking up from those five minutes? Because you can’t bet on everything, especially as a small label.

Guy Oseary: No.

Tim Ferriss: So what were you picking up on that allowed you to make a fast decision in that way?

Guy Oseary: Well, I have to fall in love and you can’t fall in love every five seconds, but you have to just have — I didn’t know I was going to fall in love with Alanis when she walked in my office with Glen Ballard. They came in to play for me. I didn’t know what was going on here. I thought they were a band. He was the producer, co-writer, but I don’t know until I’m — you just have a feeling and there is a lot of pattern recognition later.

Tim Ferriss: Later, sure.

Guy Oseary: Now, with experience, now I bring other elements into the mix, other things I’m looking for that are different than back then. It was just gut. It was just like, “I love it. I’m ready to go. I feel it,” and you have to fall in love. And later today, I would say, on my tech investing and what I do there, it’s a combination of gut, a combination of pattern recognition. And then there’s a few other things. One of the things I look for is, can I help it? I visualize what I can do for the company and that gets me excited too. So I go, “Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, I know exactly what I — I have a feeling I can help in a big way.” The puzzle starts to come together for me very quickly and so that’s important.

And then of course there’s the other aspect of, well, you’ve got to make sure they do what they say. Let’s try this thing out. Let’s make sure the car actually shows up when you press the app and it picks you up. Well, make sure that things work, make sure that you can stay at the apartment and it’s actually, “Oh, I pressed the thing and I can get an apartment.” These things have to work, but for me it all starts with that initial pitch.

Tim Ferriss: So how does Alanis Morissette fit into your life? Seems like an important piece of the puzzle.

Guy Oseary: She played a big role in my life. She was the rocket ship. It just took me to the next level. I mentioned earlier, she appeared in my office with Glen Ballard and they played me one song. They played a few songs, but the first song they played was a song called Perfect. I didn’t understand how powerful those lyrics were until later, when I really listened to it. It’s really about earning your parents’ — do they believe in you? Do they love you? I don’t know if you know lyrics, but:

Sometimes is never quite enough.

When you’re flawless, then you’ll win my love.

Don’t forget to win first place.

Don’t forget to keep that smile on your face.

So I didn’t even understand. To me, it was just, how is she putting these words together and the — I just had never heard anything like it. Again, later I understood how powerful those lyrics were, but at that time I was just in love with what I was hearing. I hadn’t heard anything like it and I went, “I’m ready to sign you. I love this. I’m all in.” And I didn’t know anything. I remember I didn’t know that the comparisons where people were like, “Oh, I thought it was Joni Mitchell.” People were like, “Oh, I didn’t know Joni Mitchell.” So to me, she was my Joni Mitchell. I didn’t — never listened to Joni Mitchell before. I listened to it later because of her. I wanted to know what people were talking about, but to me, she was my Joni Mitchell and I didn’t know any of the background. A lot of people prejudged her because she had, as a teen, did a pop album in Canada. And so people had all this background. I had no background. I literally was asked to meet with her and Glen and I knew nothing.

Tim Ferriss: All you had was that meeting.

Guy Oseary: I knew nothing. They walked in and I thought, oh, wow. It felt like a hippie group, actually. I was like, oh, maybe there’s some hippie vibe what is this going to be like, kind of thing. But there was, again, another life-changing moment where — so when the story is told, it’s that everyone passed, but I just felt it in the first minute and then we ended up working together and working on that album and that album ended up selling 30 million albums and I think it’s a top five debut album of all time. That really just took me to the — because not only did I sign it, but everyone else didn’t want to sign it. So it’s not like I even competed. So it really cemented that, oh, okay, I’m in a good place right now that I can do these things and this probably is going to give me more opportunity to do more of these things.

So she’s such a big part of my life and she’s so talented. How lucky that years later, right now she’s still winning awards. She’s still out there crushing. She’s actually doing incredibly well right now, and it makes me so proud to have played any part of that. It would be so sad to have missed that one. I’m so happy to have been fortunate to have gotten that meeting and to have figured it out. A lot of people, when they initially heard it, I remember Freddy once asking me, “What do you think this record could sell?” Before it ever came out, and I go, “Millions of albums.” I just had a feeling that I had not heard anything like this and that this was a monumental record. And that’s it.

Tim Ferriss: The rest is history.

Guy Oseary: Rest is history.

Tim Ferriss: I’d love to spend a little bit of time on what you’ve learned from Madonna. This is an older Variety piece, but the quote here that’s attributed to you is, “She mentored me and by working so hard, pushed me to work so hard. I didn’t know until she grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘Let me show it to you.'” And it goes on and it goes on. But what did you pick up from Madonna? What are the key sort of learnings?

Guy Oseary: I mean, there’s some clear learnings and there’s stuff that with, I’m 36 years next to this woman and there’s things that when you look back, you go, “Okay, I got that…” Like people who think about things that, “I got that from my brother or my mother or my…” There are things that I didn’t realize I was getting the whole time. So there’s both and the front part is pretty, I think obvious. Her work ethic is not to be believed. Her commitment to her craft not to be believed, her passion for just the greatest gifts, whether it’s through the books that she’s reading or through the art that she’s finding or the people that inspire her or the designers, she’s so surrounded herself with a collection of some of the most incredible people in the world and she identified them by the way. She is the greatest identifier. She found these amazing talents early and was able to, whether either they’d be painters or Frida Kahlo or they could be designers or musical people.

She’s an incredible finder of talent.I think that the thing that has really affected me the most is that she doesn’t see any kind of — there’s no walls around her thoughts. There’s no, “Oh, I can’t do that.”

Tim Ferriss: Right. In terms of constraints, right?

Guy Oseary: Yeah. And I think that even going back to my first experience at Maverick Records, if you went to any record label, they would’ve put me in a compartment. There’s the R&B department, there’s the jazz department, the rock department, reggae department, pop department, hip-hop department, “Oh, what department are you in?” And they sort of bucket you into these things. I think that when I look back and I go, “How did I not really bucket myself? I went from this to this to that to that to that.” And I think it’s really just being around her has allowed me to never think in a limited way and they all work together. A lot of the stuff I do on technology has allowed me to bring that into my musical world and to understand how these things work together or the relationships. They’re so hand in hand.

And of course, a few decades later now people understand that, but at the time it was very much like, “Well, what are you doing?” This tech thing is crazy and you’re not doing…” No, they’re very — innovation is innovation and how we can distribute music or how we market and vice versa. All this stuff for music is — when you’re launching a new company, these founders are rock stars. In my mind, every founder I invest in, I look at them like they are the rock star. I go, “That person has music they want to share with the world.”

They have their album and my job is to identify that artist, that founder before everyone else maybe identifies them. And my job is to help you reach that audience. How do we tell the story? How do we reach the base of your audience? How do we grow your audience? What’s your first single? What’s your second single? And those are the things I still work in that kind of process, which is very musical in my mind.

Tim Ferriss: And we’re going to spend a good amount of real estate on the tech, but before we get to it, I want to take a moment to explore the terrain of film and how you ended up executive producing Twilight and all of the rest. Because as you mentioned, in a different environment with a different label, you would have been tightly siloed and you wouldn’t have had that ability, right?

Guy Oseary: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How did you end up with the foray into film?

Guy Oseary: I’d been signing bands for a long time and running the record label and I thought, “Well, why don’t we do a film company as well?” And Madonna and I were really in a good groove together and thought, “Let’s just start this film company.”

Tim Ferriss: Why did that come to mind?

Guy Oseary: I don’t really recall that. I just recall thinking about how people do it differently. And so again, I didn’t have context. The best thing sometimes is to have zero context. Sometimes fresh is okay, sometimes having a blank canvas. And with films, I had a blank canvas. I didn’t know how it worked, but I knew I wanted to make some films. And so I had this idea of bringing in a bunch of producers under one roof and they were all independent producers and the idea was I’ll bring them in and house them and give them support and pay for a lot of the legal. Things that cost money. When you’re independent, it’s a lot on you. I go, “I’ll take that.”

Tim Ferriss: All the back office, all of that — 

Guy Oseary: “We’ll take all that on, we’ll help you and then we’ll work on these projects together.” And we had like a lot of producers that I, if I was to pay for them, I couldn’t have afforded it, but we did it that way and out of that came a lot of films and a lot of different — Twilight and Percy Jackson, a few others that I was very lucky to be part of. The guy who ran it, Mark Morgan, was really good at it, but there were a lot of complications and I was at that same moment that it started to take off, I picked up Madonna as manager with my partner at the time, Angela, and I took on Confessions, which was the pretty massive tour that year and I think the biggest selling record of that year. I don’t know how old I was back then, but that was a major responsibility for me.

Tim Ferriss: Hard to ride both of those horses at the same time.

Guy Oseary: Just that alone, just Madonna at that moment in time for someone — I had not been a music manager for anything near that level, and so to take that on and to work on all things, the tour and the album and all that-

Tim Ferriss: And for people who have no context on music at all, what does a music manager do in that type of situation?

Guy Oseary: It’s a tricky question because no one manager is the same. Everyone’s different.

Tim Ferriss: I guess what was your umbrella of responsibilities?

Guy Oseary: My umbrella, when Madonna started working on “Ray of Light,” I found the producer, William Orbit, but I was not managing her. I was her partner at the record label, Maverick Records and not her own, not Warner Brothers, which is where she was — she was on Warner Brothers, but we were just friends and working together, but I fed ideas. I found the director, Jonas Åkerlund. And so I was creatively really working on this project called Ray of Light. So we’re already building a creative rapport and on music, Stéphane Sednaoui, the director introduced me to a producer named Mirwais. He gave me a demo. I loved it and I gave it to Madonna and it ended up becoming Music. So I found on those two albums, I really, even though I wasn’t managing her, I was creatively helping here and there bring in some ideas. So we already had a rhythm on the creative side.

Now there are some managers that don’t do any creative and there are some that are very creative, but I was coming from the creative point of view on ideas, ideating, here’s things we could do, here’s things we could build. So I think for me, that’s the management that I am. I’m more creative. When I’m working with someone, I’m sort of in it. And there are other managers I’ve worked with who they really just — they don’t do the creative, but they do an incredible job managing everything, putting together the tour, but they’re not in there going, “What if we did this?” There’s different kinds of managers. I’m creative.

Guy Oseary: For example, when I showed her, Jonas Åkerlund did a video for Prodigy, which was a band I signed, and it was really provocative. And I just showed it to her, “This guy, this is crazy.” And she goes, “He’s doing my first video or he’s doing that.” I showed her, there’s a guy named Chris Cunningham and he made a song called “Come to Daddy” by Aphex Twin, which is really insane. It’s a $30,000 video. I just showed it to her just to show her, “Look at this crazy thing,” and she’s like, “That guy’s doing that video.” So she had Chris Cunningham do “Frozen,” which is an incredible video and she had Jonas Åkerlund do “Ray of Light”. So it was just a really great back and forth. We had really great energy together that she was open to my craziness and then she would take it to the next level.

Tim Ferriss: Even when I was very, very young and everybody knew Madonna, I was constantly impressed by her longevity and ability to seemingly reinvent herself and I’m just wondering why you think she has been so consistently good at that over decades. I mean, it was the first example that I remember even as a pretty young kid marveling over. And I’m just wondering if you could add any color to that.

Guy Oseary: She doesn’t sit well on her past. She’s not high-fiving herself. She’s not really a, “Oh, my God, I’ve done all these…” She just keeps it moving forward. Yeah, I think that is part of the inspiration for continually trying to move forward myself is I have a front row seat or shotgun to this incredible journey of this woman who just continually defies all the odds and fights the fight. It is not easy. It’s not that she’s maintained or stayed around. It’s actually that she’s had to fight her way through it a lot. She’s breaking ground for a lot of other people who are coming behind her who can say, “Well, Madonna’s done it. I can do it.” But it is no easy feat. There is a lot of bullshit to deal with. And I think it comes from she just doesn’t celebrate her accomplishments. She just starts like it’s a brand new day.

Tim Ferriss: How did you end up, and I don’t know if this is a good starting point, but I’ll throw it out there as an example, your first consumer investment, Vita Coco.

Guy Oseary: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Well done.

Guy Oseary: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if that was your 10th investment overall or your first, but how did you end up edging into the world of investing, whether it was CPG and consumer stuff or tech? How did that even come to be?

Guy Oseary: Wow. Well, the original, original was I was on a plane to Milan for the MTV Awards and I don’t remember how old I was. It was in my 20s and I was reading in a magazine about Sky Dayton and it said he started EarthLink and he was worth a hundred million dollars and he was really — I’m like, “Wait, what? Wait, what is he doing and how old is he?” And so I go, “When I get back home, I want to meet this guy.” So I came back and took me a while, but I finally tracked him down and we went to have lunch at Four Seasons Hotel and he was like, “Wow, if you’re impressed by me, have you ever heard of Bill Gross?”

Tim Ferriss: Idealab.

Guy Oseary: And I go, “No, who’s that?” He goes, “Well, he started an incubator and he’s launched three billion companies in one year.” I go, “Sky, I like you, but can you get out of the way I want to…”

Tim Ferriss: This time has been great.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. “It’s time to move on. I need to talk to this Bill Gross guy.” So he sets me up with Bill Gross. Bill Gross ran an incubator called Idealab in Pasadena and I just loved it. I love the idea of a lot of ideas, reminded me of the record label where you had all these artists and you had all these project managers and everyone, and you’re — 

Tim Ferriss: Or the independent producers, right?

Guy Oseary: A version of that. And you can walk in and out of different rooms and you can say, “Oh, okay, what are we doing here? What are we doing here?” And so he was building all these different companies and I would go in and out of ones that I could be helpful to and I would learn about it. So that was like a, “Oh, okay, an incubator.” I really fell in love with that idea and there’s bad news to this story, but it’s like all things it worked out in the end.

Tim Ferriss: Wait a second. My listeners are going to kill me if I don’t follow. What’s the bad news?

Guy Oseary: Well, I mean the bad news is that I worked there for a year helping and then one day someone I really trust that — they don’t know it to this day, but they’re an incredible human and I was lucky to sit with them at dinner one night and they were telling me how Bill Gross is one of the greatest investments they’ve ever made. So I called up Bill and I go, “Bill, I want to put money into Idealab.” And he goes, “Well, I was going to surprise you and I was going to put X dollars in for you from bottom of my heart for all the work you’ve done here.” And I go, “Oh, what is that worth?” He told me what he thinks it’s going to be worth when it comes out and by the way, it was worth a lot and I go, “That’s not enough.”

I’m thinking to myself, “That’s not enough.” So I go, “Bill, I want to put more in, a lot more in.” And he’s like, “Hey, for you, I’ll let you do whatever you want.” And he did. He’s a really, really sweet guy and that’s the bad news. He let me do whatever I wanted.

Tim Ferriss: What year was this?

Guy Oseary: It was before the crash. By the way, it wasn’t a year before the crash. I think it was like an hour before the crash. I put every dollar I have plus dollars I didn’t have. I picked out three investments at that time, Idealab because of Bill Gross, Bill was the first guy in I think in L.A. to have the BlackBerries. So I was the first guy from Hollywood to even know what the hell BlackBerries were. So I ended up buying 400 of them and I gave them to all the people in Hollywood so I could connect when I needed to and talk to them. And so I made a deal with Jim Balsillie to be an advisor because I was the guy that put it in everyone’s hands. This is smartphones before anyone else was doing it. And then I also, my friend Seth Rodsky brought me Vitamin Water.

Those were going to be my first three investments. What happened was the Idealab thing, once I put that money in and I don’t know the timeline because I tried — it’s almost like something you want to wash away from your mind. It collapsed — 

Tim Ferriss: Fever dream you’re trying to forget.

Guy Oseary: The bubble burst so fast on all of that that I didn’t have the heart to invest into — I never signed my deal with Jim Balsillie in Research in Motion and I never did my deal with Vitamin Water, which both ended up — almost like the Hole and the Rage analogy. They both ended up being massive and then I lost all my money with the first one. So I learned about a lot. I learned about diversification. I didn’t diversify. I put the — 

Tim Ferriss: Everything in one.

Guy Oseary: — majority of my money in one thing and I paid the price for it really. For the next two years, I only thought about that about 15 times a day. It didn’t matter. If I was sitting here with you right now, back then, I’d be thinking about it. I’d have a conversation with you, but I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about how did I lose all my money on that one investment? Everything I saved my whole life. And I was mad that Sky Dayton introduced me. I was mad at all the wrong reasons. Everyone was just trying to help me, but now I’m like, “Why did I even read that magazine? I should have just stayed in my music lane.”

But what happened was years later after my first Madonna tour, I started to think about it again and I go, “I wasn’t so off really.” I was off — the timing was wrong on the Idealab part. The other two worked. Had I diversified, I would have done — 

Tim Ferriss: You would have been fine.

Guy Oseary: — incredibly well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you would have been great.

Guy Oseary: And so I got two out of the three and the truth is it’s not fair to Bill because he really built an incredible company and some of the stuff that he had built ended up becoming search for Google and a bunch of amazing things, but it just didn’t work out and that’s life. Sometimes they don’t work out these deals.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of the time.

Guy Oseary: But I came back from, I think I had done three Madonna tours in a row. So I came back, all the money I’d lost, I made that back to survive. And then I had a window where I knew we were three tours in a row, we’re going to take some time off and I thought to myself, I didn’t get it so wrong, so I’m going to try this one more time. I’m good at identifying the ideas. I’m good at identifying the talent. I’m going to do one more time. And that’s when I — so I started and the same guy that brought me Vitamin Water, Seth Rodsky —

Tim Ferriss: Did he later work with Reese Witherspoon?

Guy Oseary: Yes, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Huge.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. Yeah. He’s done well for himself. And then he called me one day and goes, “Hey, have you heard of this coconut water thing?” So of course I’d heard about coconut water. One, my wife is Brazilian and my first son, his first words were like, “Agua de coco.” So we drink coconut water at the house, but the whole coconut water sector in America, if you added all the companies together was maybe a five or seven million dollar business. It was nothing.

Tim Ferriss: Tiny.

Guy Oseary: Nothing. But Madonna on tour, on the previous tour, she would have — the trainer would go in different markets to find fresh coconut for her for the coconut water. And I’m like, “Wow, every location went to, we had to find fresh coconuts.” And so I started to hear that other people were doing that as well. Other people who cared about their health were drinking coconut water. I started to see, again, back to pattern recognition, I started to see this thing and then one day the New York Post ran an article about coconut water. There was a photo of Giselle drinking from a coconut and they’re talking about coconut water and I had cut that out and I put that article on my desk and when Seth called me and said, “Have you heard about coconut water?” I go, “You have to be kidding me.” I have — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s sitting on my desk.

Guy Oseary: The only thing that I’ve tore out that’s sitting on my desk is an article about coconut water. It’s on my desk and it’s like my to-do, like, I need to figure this thing out. And here you are calling me. He goes, “Well, there’s a company called Vita Coco out of New York.” And I go, “Count me in.” I got on a plane. I went to meet with the founder, Mike Kirban. The company was, I think it was a $35 million valuation at the time and I literally just, here we go. I’m jumping back in and I went in really big and I brought Madonna into that. I brought Demi Moore. I brought Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Kiedis. I brought a bunch of people into this thing because they were all healthy people who drank coconut water. I’m like, “Let’s blow this thing up.” And that was the first time back after the crazy run.

Tim Ferriss: For people who don’t know, how did that turn out?

Guy Oseary: It’s a public company today. I think it’s $4 billion market cap.

Tim Ferriss: So you were back in the game?

Guy Oseary: Yes. It takes time.

Tim Ferriss: It takes time. Yeah, there’s a gestational period.

Guy Oseary: It takes time. Yeah, it didn’t happen overnight.

Tim Ferriss: What were you looking for? How would you replay that meeting with the founder in your mind? You fly out, you meet with the founder. How did you approach that meeting?

Guy Oseary: I think I approached it the way I approached everything. It wasn’t, let’s think about it. It was like, “I’m all in. Let’s go. I want to do this. Here’s what I can do.” And I think they were probably overwhelmed by, “Whoa, okay.” And we just ran. Yeah, he’s awesome. What he’s done with the company, we went public I think at like two billion and now it’s at five. He’s done an incredible job.

Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to hop to some more recent examples, which may or may not include this chair in a moment, but I want to focus on a term or phrase that I’ve seen applied to you a lot, which is great curator of people. Chris Rock has said this. Matthew, you just mentioned, said this. Woody Harrelson — have all described you in this way and you seem very intentional with the people you surround yourself with. Not only that, but you have these very long-term relationships with a lot of people. And I’m wondering how you think about building relationships. I’m not saying you have to come up with Guy’s 10 commandments of long-term relationships, but how would you think about that? If you’re in front of a class of students and you’re like, “Look, a lot of people get this wrong, or at least let me tell you how I approach relationships.”

Any particular rules that you use for yourself or just approaches, things you keep in mind? Because that’s certainly not true for everybody. You just have this long-term cohesion of these people around you. And I’m wondering if you can perhaps just speak to that in any way.

Guy Oseary: Well, I think it started early. In my teens, there was a group of us that were running around and we found each other. So you find the other people who are also on the hustle, who are also creative. And I wasn’t a comedian or a musician or an actor or a director. I was like an executive. So there’s a little responsibility. “He’s the responsible one.” I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. So I found my position was to really be a safe zone for people and to really — and they knew I worked with Madonna, which pretty much gave a lot of credibility to, “Okay, this guy — she trusts him. Maybe we should trust him,” maybe, back in the day.

But I think over a period of time, my house became the place that people would come to or people would congregate and feel safe. Even when I do events here or anything, there’s not a lot of photos, there’s no cameras. I think safety and support has always been in my DNA from an early age, of just making sure that people are protected.

And again, I think identifying really incredible people to be around. Same way I identify the greatest companies to invest in, I think I identified really amazing, incredibly talented friends who inspire me, and who, early days, you may not have known them 30 years ago, but you identify them and they identify you. And so there’s this camaraderie and there’s this trust, and I do try to bring them all together a lot. I think it’s important.

Tim Ferriss: That was going to be actually my next question, which is along those lines, which is, how often do you gather people? Whether it’s at this house or at events that you put together, just to facilitate that long-term cohesion. How often do you organize or host things like that?

Guy Oseary: A lot. If I’m landing in New York this week, I’ll probably do a dinner and I’ll invite the 15 or 20 friends and we sit down and we talk. So I’m always staying connected and in touch. It’s not like, “Oh, I haven’t talked to you in a year.” No, I’m checking in on my friends a lot. I’m finding out how they are always. I’m always checking in on everybody.

I grew up just with my dad. My two sisters were older. They weren’t around. So my friends are really — they’re everything I had. Before I had a family, my friends were everything to me.

I’m lucky I get to work with some of my family. Madonna’s — I’ve been beside her for 36 years. The Chili Peppers are my best friends in the world. The godfather of my first son is Anthony. The whole band, all of them, Flea, Chad, John, they’re family. So it’s a dynamic that I’ve chosen for myself is to really support and be around my friends a lot. It’s a big part of my life, which is to keep that close. And again, if someone’s in need, this is the number, call me.

Tim Ferriss: I want to hop back to the investing. I mean, you’ve had a lot of hits. Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, it goes on and on and on. I mean, I don’t know how many IPOs and someone that you’ve had, I mean, gazillion.

Let’s talk about one. 

So you put in, tell me if I’m getting this right, 35 million at a five billion valuation into Anthropic. This is a company that’s been in the news a lot. I think the last round was what? 965 billion, something like that. Are those numbers roughly accurate?

Guy Oseary: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So it’s a pretty nice multiple so far. We’ll see how things go. How did that Anthropic deal happen?

Guy Oseary: Well, it starts a little before. The day that OpenAI came out, which was on my dad’s birthday, ChatGPT, it was life-changing. You remember those moments. And again, I go back to music. I remember when I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, I pulled over the car and I went, “What is this?” And when ChatGPT came out, that was a “What is this?” moment for me. And if you saw me anytime after ChatGPT came out, I would’ve harassed you to show you ChatGPT. There’s no one — every artist, every actor, everyone I walked around and met, I’m like, “Check this out, check this out, check this out.”

And I was obsessed, and I called Ashton and I said, “Ashton, this is it. This is OpenAI. We’re doing OpenAI. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. We have to do it, have to do it, have to do it.” And so that was our first, “This is the one we’re going to go after.”

But then we visualized that — when we first started investing, Ashton and I, it was when the iPhone and the App Store were happening. And so for the first time ever, you can scale companies like never before. And I think anyone would have done well at that time. We were lucky people that came in at the right time and were looking at the right time and started our fund at that very moment, which is crazy. And so we had this incredible success because of that.

I saw it again, back to pattern recognition. If you fast-forward, we’re still using Uber and Airbnb and Spotify. We’re still using those things from that time period. And we felt that, “This is it. These foundational AI models in 10 or 15 years will be how we plug into all these things.” So we really felt like we had a three-month window. We told people we have a three-month window.

Now, it came out November 30th, 2022. So there’s not much you can do. People are going away. Christmastime break, blah, blah. But as soon as January came, we went out there and told people, “This is the vision. We’re going to do a foundational AI model fund.”

Tim Ferriss: I got it. LPs.

Guy Oseary: Raise money.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Guy Oseary: Raise money and create this fund, which was a crazy idea at the time.

Tim Ferriss: Now, had you already confirmed that you’d be able to get allocations, or you just had complete confidence?

Guy Oseary: Ashton spoke to Sam and we were able to get OpenAI. And then what happened was is I’m very close to Marc Benioff and Salesforce Ventures, people don’t really understand how smart they are.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they’re really smart.

Guy Oseary: They don’t get all the press on — they are one of the best investors in the world. There’s two guys there, John Somorjai and Paul Drews, who were — when I was doing my research, because now I’m on the lookout, “What should I know about an AI?” Once I find out about something, I just lock in and I want to know everything about it. As I was doing my research, I was finding out that they were going to do Anthropic and they were very bullish about it. I found out from a friend that works with a job hunter kind of — people who helped find jobs for people.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, like headhunters.

Guy Oseary: Headhunters, that everyone’s going to this company called Anthropic. People are really going to this Anthropic place and they’re not going anywhere else. I’m like, “Whoa, okay. I need to pay attention to this.” So I asked Paul and John, “Connect me with this founder,” Dario.

So they connect me with Dario and Neerav, and they come here. They’re here right in this room and that’s where we made the deal to invest in Anthropic. So we did a bunch of other companies in that foundational AI fund. It was a three-month window.

So it was before a bunch of other things that have come out since, but we set ourselves up for exactly what we did. “This is going to be within three months. We’re going to deploy 80 percent of the money within the next three months.” And that’s what we did and that’s over three years ago.

Tim Ferriss: And how did you know the window was going to be so narrow? Did you get any pushback from LPs when you said, “We’re going to deploy 80 percent of this in three months”?

Guy Oseary: Well, we didn’t have — there was no LPs, meaning that was the pitch. So it wasn’t like we raised money — 

Tim Ferriss: I see, I see. They either bought in or they didn’t.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. It wasn’t like we raised money and then told them the pitch. It was like, “Here’s the pitch.”

Tim Ferriss: “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Guy Oseary: “There’s a window of opportunity here. We think this is the future.” And that was it.

Tim Ferriss: They had opted in.

Guy Oseary: Yeah, opt in or opt out. We didn’t know what we were going to raise. Whatever came up is what it was going to be.

Tim Ferriss: So I was trying to pull from memory, but it looks like Sound at this point is at 86 exits and 26 IPOs. That’s insane. I mean, that is — 

Guy Oseary: It’s been fun.

Tim Ferriss: You have seemingly different batteries, certainly. I mean, you’ve got good batteries. What is the next five years, do you think, look like for you? I mean, is it more of this type of investing? What do you see? Is it switching gears entirely and looking at the prism through a totally different way? I mean, what is next for Guy?

Guy Oseary: I feel like going back to the core, really honing in that antenna for the greatest talent in the world, the greatest ideas in the world. This is an incredible time where people can scale up a company in the quickest ways. I’m excited about the potential of what’s to come. I’ve already identified three things I want to do today. So I can only imagine what’s to come, but it’s just — I’m okay doing a version of what I’ve been doing, which is identify great talent and help them, help this talent, help them in every which way that I can, and pick the teams that you want to back. So I’m feeling pretty good about that, just continuing on this best-in-class talent idea.

The hard part is for a lot of people is the access. So we’re very lucky we have access and we also do the job. We have more than enough proof of people that come through when you work with them. And we’re a different kind of investor on the cap table. We’re not in the valley. We’re here in Hollywood and we bring a different dynamic, a different — obviously, narrative is something that I’m very focused on.

Marketing is something I’ve been doing since I was a teen. And so marketing, strategy, media, partnerships, narrative, storytelling. Hey, if you want someone like that on your cap table, I might be interesting to you and hopefully I can be helpful. And that’s what I — I need to find that dynamic of a company that I’m in love with and, hopefully, the founder believes that having me would be a great advantage to them.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of founders listen to this podcast. Are there any particular things that have your interest right now or types of companies, types of founders, anything that you’d like to make clear to people who are listening or otherwise? Also, where can people learn more about what you’re up to? Is there anywhere that you would point them in particular?

Guy Oseary: I’m a generalist. I don’t care. That particular AI fund was very specific and we may have thematic funds from time to time. If an idea comes and you go, “You know what? I’ve got an idea,” it’s going to be built around this one idea. But usually I’m a generalist. I just like talented people.

And in regards to sharing, where can they find out what I’m up to? I’m not really — this is it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is it.

Guy Oseary: As you know, this is my first podcast and, depending how this goes, could be my last. And if it goes well, maybe one more, but I’m not out there — everything has been fine without doing that. People either find us word of mouth through friends or I find them. It’s okay. It all works out. I’m not out there yelling, “Hey, find me 1-800 whatever.” It’ll work itself out. The right people will find each other.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Guy, I mean, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to say before we start landing the plane?

Guy Oseary: I’d say that AI and music content, it’s on one level exciting that so many people are experimenting writing songs for the first time, writing beats, creating sounds for the first time. That’s pretty exciting. At the same time, the idea that there’s companies out there valued at billions of dollars that are built on the top of other people’s music, where not one artist has ever gotten paid a dollar, is not okay. So I don’t want to bundle it all up where people get — it all becomes one thing. It’s not all one thing.

Mikey, he runs Suno. He’s a great guy. He’s really, really — I mean, great guy. I really like him as a person, but every time I read about the company and it’s now at a $5 billion valuation, and next thing you know, it’s at a $10 billion valuation, and it’s all built off of the world’s music, but yet not one music artist has gotten a dollar. So that’s not okay. That has to be fixed. I’m hoping Mikey does the right thing and fixes that, comes up with a system that allows artists, if they want to opt in, either let them opt out: “Do not use my music to build your business.” Okay? “I’m opting out, but if I opt in, find a way to pay us.”

And I’m really concerned for that because the other part, which is right now, currently, every two weeks, more music is made on AI than all of the music that’s on Spotify today. That’s every two weeks, and all of that is going somewhere and people are inspired and they’re creating songs. Awesome, but don’t build a business using our music without getting those rights. And that’s something that I’ve been trying to work on for a long time. I’ve met with Mikey many times. I’ve met with lots of people many times. I hope that this gets solved.

When Napster first started, I met with Shawn and Sean when they started, because it was so exciting to see people were all downloading music, but it was illegal. So you were hoping they’d crack the code on, “Okay, how do you turn this into how artists get paid?” I don’t know if they were going to or not going to, but before that could even happen, it got shut down.

And out of nowhere, Daniel Ek in Stockholm built Spotify and figured out that people would pay for music. If you give it to them in this way where they had all the music in the world without having to try to piece it together, or try to illegally download songs that were not even clean or clear and it could be corrupt, to get it clean, to hold onto it, they’ll pay for it. And he was right. They have paid for it. Now, are all the payment plans there picture perfect? No, but it is the core of where money is coming in today to music artists; it’s through streaming. And I’m hoping that people figure out how, if you’re going to be using people’s music, how you pay for it. Fair use is not fair.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m curious to see where it goes because if you say, “Create a song that sounds like Metallica,” it’ll say, “We cannot serve up any copyrighted music.” If you say, “Serve me up some music that sounds like Morallica,” and you just misspell it, then lo and behold, it looks like it was trained — 

Guy Oseary: Yeah, that’s the problem.

Tim Ferriss: — on this corpus.

Guy Oseary: There’s a lot of workarounds and they’ll look you in the eye and tell you, “No, no, you can’t. You cannot type in Madonna.” But you can sort of describe Madonna. The problem is, is when — in discovery, we’re going to find out a lot, and discovery’s going to say, “All of this music is in there,” and they know that and that’s not okay. It’s just literally not okay. I don’t understand it.

And by the way, what’s wrong with paying artists? Why not figure out a way to do it, sit down with a team, figure out how to pay music artists if you’re going to train on their music?

Tim Ferriss: Where do you think it goes? Because I could see one future, for instance, even if legally they aren’t required, or for whatever reason, that’s not compatible with the vision they’ve pitched to investors, and I’m not singling out Suno. I mean, there are lots of different options here.

Guy Oseary: They’re the main one.

Tim Ferriss: They’re the 800-pound gorilla.

Guy Oseary: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But I could see a point at which possibly Claude, ChatGPT become the interfaces to everything. It’s almost like the App Store, but somewhat like WeChat in China: if you want to do anything, if you want to book a restaurant, you want to make a song, there are a few interfaces to everything, at which point then those companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, can gatekeep in some way and maybe they end up being the entities that incentivize these other companies, like the Sunos of the world, to reimburse artists. I guess I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how it gets there.

Guy Oseary: It starts with Suno. Because if Claude or Chat is the distribution, they probably won’t carry it because it’s got so many lawsuits involved and it’s just not worth taking on that responsibility.

And again, the guy who runs Suno, I find, would be a really good guy and I’m hoping that he does the right thing, but it’s really their responsibility. They’re sitting at the top of this opportunity.

Take off the artists that don’t want to be on there and find a way to pay the ones that are okay being on there. It’s that simple. It’s not complicated. Go in a room, lock yourself in a room for three days and come out and figure out how to pay people and take people off that don’t want to be on there.

Madonna does not want her music trained on. Don’t care what you want to pay her. She’s very clear: “I do not want my music to be trained on. I want my music to be its own thing.” So take her off. It’s okay. You’ll still do fine. Take her off. You don’t have to have her music.

So we’ll see where this goes, but this is — the last few years I’ve really tried to figure this out, and even with Sam at one point, he’s really wanted to figure this out too. A lot of people give him a hard time on this stuff, but he really did dedicate time to trying to figure out if there was a music thing to do, how to do it in a way that supported artists.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, there may be someone who comes along also if it’s not Suno, someone who comes from behind, like a next generation Spotify, and figures out how to do it.

Guy Oseary: Well, Spotify could do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, or Spotify could do it. You mentioned there were three things that you’d like to do today. I’m not going to ask you to name those things, but how did you find those things or how did those things find you?

Guy Oseary: One of them, well, I’m working on this platform that I’m going to announce in a few months that you’re part of is how we connected, you and I. So I’m able to ask investors what companies that they’re looking at. And so two of those came from that conversation.

Tim Ferriss: That’s good. Good information for that.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. They’re like, “What are you looking at? What are you liking?” And then they tell me and then I go, “Oh, let me look into it.” And some things I just read about, I read every single day. I’m checking things out every single day and I’m making sure I’m not missing an idea or I’m hearing about things.

Tim Ferriss: What do you read?

Guy Oseary: Well, I’m on X a lot. I see a lot of the stuff, a lot of information on X that’s flying by. It’s sort of my start of information.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned missing BlackBerry and Vitamin Water. Do you have, and this could go way back in the catalog, could go back to being 10 years old, there’s no limitation here, any favorite failures or apparent failures, meaning failures that taught you a lot or that set you up somehow for later success?

Guy Oseary: Well, I mean there’s so many. It’s endless, endless. One of the things that Ashton was really good about not looking back like that, he sort of just keeps it moving forward and I’m always like, “I can’t believe we’re not in that. I had it and we had it.” And he’s like, “Come on, let’s move — let’s go. Let’s go.” He always gives me like, “Oh, gosh, he’s going to complain about not being in it again.”

Tim Ferriss: Here we go again.

Guy Oseary: But what motivates him is he just keeps it moving forward and it’s awesome. And what motivates me is like, I’m not going to let that happen again.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, looking back, it seems like, in some ways, missing Hole, missing fill-in-the-blank, was almost a prerequisite source of fuel for the things.

Guy Oseary: Yeah. It’s scary, though.

Tim Ferriss: It drove you towards those things.

Guy Oseary: It’s scary, though. When you miss it, Ash and I invested in Bitcoin on our own when it was at $22. And then when it hit $250, I thought I just made 10 times my money. I’m a genius. So I sold then and clearly not a genius. So that hurts. And I remember Anthony, gentlemen on that wall, Elon invited Anthony from the Chili Peppers to see SpaceX early days, very early days. And I went with Anthony, I tagged along. It’s the first time I met Elon and we went to SpaceX. I was so wowed by the concept that I didn’t even pay attention to the business model or what could be the business model.

I was just like, “Wow, this guy’s building rockets.” If we just had had the wherewithal to go, “What business model?” I didn’t even ask those words. Sometimes I go to shows. I’ve seen shows where people are so wowed that they’re just like, they’re like this from a show and they didn’t even take in all the songs. They were just like, “Oh, my God.” If you ever look back at the Sex Pistols shows, people are just like, “What?” And they’re like, “Was I actually there?” I think I was more blown away by the concept of what Elon was building that I did not understand that there was a business model and I really wish I just would’ve asked one more question, like, “Hey, how do you monetize this?”

Tim Ferriss: “Oh, by the way…”

Guy Oseary: “How does this work? Can we invest?” So I have hundreds of those stories, but those are two that stand out today.

Tim Ferriss: I want to talk about the longevity for a second. You mentioned, and fact check me if I’m getting this wrong, but the three, was it back to back tours with Madonna?

Guy Oseary: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, that sounds impossible just from the demands of the physicality of that. And she’s legendary, of course, for her training and endurance and everything else. But for you, personally, what were the keys to enduring that and being able to function at a high level for that period of time?

Guy Oseary: I think it’s different as the years go by, there was a point around 10 years ago, 11, 12 years ago where it was a lot for me because I was also changing and growing and having kids and I was just losing myself because you’re going to a different city every other day and the amount of things you’re missing back home, you forget you have a family, you forget that you can go do other things or you forget to call back Stripe or you forget to — all the things, you just forget everything. And then one day your dad calls you and goes, “Oh, hey, I’m at your house with your kids.” And I’m going, “Oh, I have kids. I’ve got a house.”

So if you look at the first three tours that Madonna, those three tours that I did, those are 240 shows, 80 average. I missed three of those shows, three out of the 240. One, I was sick and then I missed two because it was my 40th birthday and I really didn’t feel like being in Seattle that day. I wanted to be home with my friends. So my 40th birthday, I spent here in this house. So I missed three shows out of 240, but we’re talking about a different city, a different hotel, a different — and in order to move along, you have to block everything else out. You have to forget and it’s a very selfish, very — for me. Otherwise, if, every day, you’re thinking about back home or your family or other things, it hurts. So I just go, “Okay, I’m off and I’ll see you.” I bet that’s what actors do when they go away and make a movie for three months and then they come back.

Tim Ferriss: Some military do.

Guy Oseary: They probably just compartmentalize a little bit. But in the last few years, I’ve stopped doing as much. I still go, but not as much. I’ve worn it down. There’s a moment there where I managed the Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, and Madonna, and they’re all going on tour, and it was a lot to process.

Tim Ferriss: How do you even make decisions about where to be in a case like that? You can’t be in three places at once.

Guy Oseary: It’s hard, but it tells its own story. You’re not going to miss New York, you’re not going to miss London, you’re not going to miss some of the major moments. And then you look at the calendar and go, “Oh, we have this time off. Let’s go to this place with — let’s go to New Zealand with Madonna or let’s go to so-and-so with U2 or let’s go to so-and-so with the Peppers.” And you find your way around it. You just make it work.

Tim Ferriss: So if you look at, let’s just say the last 10 years and presumably a lot of your focus is on the investing. How do you mind the different responsibilities, if that makes sense?

Guy Oseary: I think when I think of responsibilities, I always think of management. That’s a really big responsibility and I don’t take it lightly. There’s no way around it. Something’s going on there that’s a focus. It is cyclical. So the Peppers are not touring this year, they don’t have an album this year. They aren’t touring next year, they don’t have an album next year. There’s a lot of time in between, where they’re coming up with the creative. They’re going to make an album, they’re going to do all the things, they’re going to write songs, right? So that takes time. So you get these windows of opportunity where you go all in and you get windows of opportunity where you have a moment to breathe, just like they do. They all need it too. Madonna, after this cycle, will probably need a minute to just catch her breath and figure out what she does next.

So these are cyclical things. What I don’t do is I’m not out there trying to sign 10 more bands or 10 more artists. And so that’s where the balance comes in and which is the creative, but continually be creative through other ways. And so when the cycle starts, my creativity has never stopped so that I still have those things. I’m not starting from scratch. I’m always looking and meeting with people and understanding what’s going on in technology. And so when Madonna comes back into cycle, I can bring some of those ideas or some of those new relationships I met while she was off. And so I found a way to make it work.

Tim Ferriss: Now maybe I’m sure misquoting, but roughly paraphrasing much earlier in the conversation, I feel like you said part of Madonna’s ability to reinvent was not resting on her laurels, obviously, but not patting herself on the back for what she’s done and marching forward. I’m wondering how you’ve thought about for yourself the drive and velocity of forward-looking achievement versus appreciating what has been done or savoring the time that you have. I mean, I imagine you get a lot of that with congregating friends and so on, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

Guy Oseary: You know, my friends and I don’t spend a lot of time talking about what I do a little bit. I share with them so they’re in the know, but we don’t spend a lot of time on it. We don’t work together on these deals. My wife and I don’t talk about work much. I think I just keep it moving too. And again, when you look back 36 years, it’s probably Madonna that is responsible for how I also think of just keep it moving forward, keep it moving forward. And maybe one day, sometimes when I’m telling my kids a story about the past or someone asks me a question and I tell them about the past, I go, “Oh, my God, I forgot I even did all those things.” Or I see something pop up and I go, “Oh, I was there for that.”

But I really don’t think about it that — I don’t think about it that much. Things pop up every now and then, but I wake up and like tomorrow is — when I wake up tomorrow, I’m like, I haven’t done anything today. I better figure it out. I need to step my game up. That’s how I feel. I don’t feel accomplished. I don’t feel at all. I feel like I still have so much to prove and so much to do, but at the same time, I do know if I really took a minute and I go, oh, wow, okay. I should probably take a moment and take that in, but I really don’t.

Tim Ferriss: Is that okay? Is that a problem? Is it fine?

Guy Oseary: I just keep it moving. I don’t know. At some point, I can visualize being on the beach and high-fiving with my friends and having fun, but again, they don’t do it either. Yeah. A lot of my friends — 

Tim Ferriss: [crosstalk]

Guy Oseary: They don’t talk about it like that either. I mean, I think we just — 

Tim Ferriss: Working dogs.

Guy Oseary: How cool that we’re survived this period of time. How cool is it that we’re even able to do what we love? Waking up and being able to do what you love, there’s a Josh Kushner quote that I love that he says about success. And he says, “Tim, success is being excited to go to work and also being excited to go home.” And I got that. I’m excited to go to work and I’m excited to go home. That’s pretty cool. Not a lot of people get to do that and I don’t take that for granted. I work hard because of that, because I go, “This is not a given.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s not a given.

Guy Oseary: The potential and the opportunities. And I’m trying to bring in other friends and other people into my world to say, “Plug into this. Let’s help you figure this out.” I’m not just doing it for myself, you should use what I have. You should meet some of these people. You should come to this event. You should go to this. So I like sharing that. 

Tim Ferriss: So after 20 years, you and Ashton are going to be doing different things, it sounds like. And I was wondering if you could just share a bit of the background and what that looks like.

Guy Oseary: Well, we’ve had an incredible run and this AI fund is — I don’t know what to compare it to other than winning the Super Bowl for what we do. And between the investments in OpenAI and Anthropic. And we also did SPVs the whole way up, a lot. So we’re really fortunate and blessed and after 20 years, Ashton and I asked the question of now that we’ve done that and we’ve hit it out of the park, what do we want to do for the next 10 years? What makes us happy? What are we going to get enjoyment out of doing? And so it’s a really strong question and we all gave it some thought. This is a few months ago. We looked at each other’s visions of what he wanted to do that would make him happy and what he wanted to build and what I wanted to do. And then we have a third partner, her name’s Effie and what she wanted to do and it turned out that we had different visions.

And when you look at his vision, which he will share at some point, so I’m not going to share any of it, it’s a pretty awesome vision. It’s an incredible vision and the guy is mind blowingly smart and talented and I support that vision for him. It isn’t my vision. And I will support it financially and I will support it with energy. I want him to win and then I have mine, which is the things that we’re talking about today and the things that I want to build. I have a version of the things I want to do that I haven’t shared with everyone in full, but it turned out that we just have, it’s a new chapter. And I’ve had many new chapters my whole life, with the record label first amount of time and then I moved on. I went to music management, I went to crypto and I went to film.

I mean, I have so many different chapters in my life that this is a beautiful chapter that we’re in a celebratory mode. So we’re hoping to be on the beach, high-fiving each other at some point on the work that we’ve done and have worked hard to get here and taken a lot of risks and a lot of chances and put in our own money. And so this decision was made out of joy and to support each other’s visions. There are going to be times where we’ll cross over and we’ll work on things together because we do have some crossover of things that are part of things we both like, but he’s very specific on what he wants to do, I’m very specific on I want to do. Effie and I are going to continue on with Sound and what we’ve built the last 10 years with Sound. So we’ll continue to build that and then we’ve got some surprises of how we want to build that out too. It’s all really good. It’s all very supportive and it’s just another chapter.

Tim Ferriss: Cool. Guy, this has been a wide-ranging conversation. What a life. What a journey and it’s not over. Obviously, you’ve got lots of battery left for what’s ahead. Thank you for the time.

Guy Oseary: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for inviting me here.

Guy Oseary: My first podcast.

Tim Ferriss: I know. I know. Mine too.

Guy Oseary: Your first podcast with me, yes.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. And people can find you on Instagram, X @GuyOseary, no apostrophe. Guy, O-S-E-A-R-Y. And we will link to everything in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, everybody, thanks for tuning in. Be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Compassion is not complete if it doesn’t include you. Thank you, Jack Kornfield. And as always, thanks for tuning in. Thanks, Guy.

Guy Oseary: Thank you.

---

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Guy Oseary — The Legendary Hollywood Power Broker on 5-Minute Decisions, 36 Years of Managing Madonna, 26 IPOs, and Spotting Magic First (#874) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Guy Oseary — The Legendary Hollywood Power Broker on 5-Minute Decisions, 36 Years of Managing Madonna, 26 IPOs, and Spotting Magic First (#874)

2026-07-08 09:40:44

Guy Oseary (@guyoseary) has been spotting talent before anyone else could see it for nearly four decades. Under his leadership at Maverick Records, Maverick sold more than 100 million albums. Guy has managed some of the biggest names in music, including Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and U2, and was named Variety‘s Music Mogul of the Year in 2022. He executive produced Twilight, which became one of the most successful franchises in movie history, generating more than $3.5B.  

Guy was also an early investor in Vita Coco and co-founded A-Grade Investments and then Sound Ventures, now with nearly $2 billion under management. At A-Grade, his hits included Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify. Sound Ventures launched with less than $100M and has since had 86 exits and 26 IPOs.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

• Momentous high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular support
• AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement

---

Additional podcast platforms

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

• This episode
• All episodes

Show Notes

• Connect with Guy Oseary:

Instagram | Facebook | X

Books & Recommended Reading

• Chris Rock, Matthew McConaughey, and Woody Harrelson Direct and Star in This Exclusive Guy Oseary Tribute by Zack Sharf | Variety
• Not Bad for a Kid by Robert Hilburn | Los Angeles Times
• From Maverick to Mogul, Madonna’s Manager Guy Oseary Transcends the Music World to Take on NFTs by Shirley Halperin | Variety
• Where Did I Go Right?: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead by Bernie Brillstein

Music

• Candlebox by Candlebox
• Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin
• Confessions on a Dance Floor by Madonna
• Fat of the Land by Prodigy
• Frozen by Madonna
• Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette
• Music by Madonna
• Perfect by Alanis Morissette
• Purple Rain by Prince
• Ray of Light by Madonna
• Thriller by Michael Jackson
• Teenage Whore by Hole
• You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette

Films & TV

• Beverly Hills, 90210
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
• SNL
• Twilight

People & Bands

• Michelle Alves
• Dan Aykroyd
• Jonas Åkerlund
• Sam Altman
• Dario Amodei
• Aphex Twin
• Glen Ballard
• Jim Balsillie
• John Belushi
• Marc Benioff
• Bernie Brillstein
• Candlebox
• Rosemary Carroll
• Santa Claus
• Kurt Cobain
• Chris Cunningham
• Sky Dayton
• Freddy DeMann
• Neysa DeMann
• Pilar DeMann
• Paul Drews
• Daniel Ek
• Effie Epstein
• Evil E
• Shawn Fanning
• Flea
• John Frusciante
• Michael Goldstone
• Bill Gross
• Woody Harrelson
• Hen Gee
• Hole
• Michael Hutchence
• Ice-T
• Billy Idol
• INXS
• Anthony Kiedis
• Neerav Kingsland
• Mike Kirban
• Jack Kornfield
• Dave Koskoff
• Nick Koskoff
• Josh Kushner
• Ashton Kutcher
• L.A. Dream Team
• Courtney Love
• Madonna
• Kevin Martin
• Matthew McConaughey
• Mirwais
• Joni Mitchell
• Demi Moore
• Mark Morgan
• Alanis Morissette
• Morrissey
• Muse
• Elon Musk
• Nirvana
• William Orbit
• Sean Parker
• Prince
• The Prodigy
• Rage Against the Machine
• Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Sex Pistols
• Steve Rifkind
• Johnny Rivers
• Chris Rock
• Seth Rodsky
• Stéphane Sednaoui
• Garry Shandling
• Mikey Shulman
• Chad Smith
• John Somorjai
• U2
• Reese Witherspoon

Companies & Organizations

• Airbnb
• Anthropic
• Beverly Hills High School
• Brillstein Entertainment Partners
• Club Lingerie
• EarthLink
• Epic Records
• Fred Segal
• Geffen Records (DGC)
• Idealab
• KDAY
• KROQ
• Le Parc at Melrose
• Maverick Entertainment Group
• Maverick Management
• MTV
• Napster
• OpenAI
• Research In Motion / BlackBerry
• Rhyme Syndicate
• Salesforce Ventures
• Sound Ventures
• SpaceX
• Spotify
• Suno
• Thrive Capital
• Uber
• The Vita Coco Company
• Vitaminwater (Glacéau)
• Wise Guy Prods

Tools & Apps

• ChatGPT (OpenAI)
• Claude (Anthropic)
• Grok (xAI)
• X (Twitter)

Timestamps

• [00:00:00] Start.
• [00:02:01] How a West Hollywood balcony became a backstage pass.
• [00:03:51] A knife on Pico Boulevard and the snap decision to switch schools.
• [00:05:54] Faking a Beverly Hills address to get inside another world.
• [00:08:10] Wise Guy Records: a 15-year-old builds a portfolio out of nothing.
• [00:10:09] Guy’s alternative terms when Bernie Brillstein offered $25,000.
• [00:11:34] The one moment that confirmed Guy was on the right path.
• [00:12:29] Freddy DeMann enters the picture and Guy proves himself with Ice-T’s crew.
• [00:15:07] A desk at Maverick Records in exchange for no salary.
• [00:17:08] Chasing Hole and Rage Against the Machine — and losing both.
• [00:23:34] Candlebox in five minutes: seeing thousands in a room of 30.
• [00:24:11] Why “magic” beats everything else.
• [00:26:37] Signing Alanis off a single song, and stopping Muse mid-audition.
• [00:31:59] The real Alanis story: “Perfect,” Joni Mitchell, and a 30-million-selling debut.
• [00:35:24] What Madonna taught Guy about thinking without walls.
• [00:38:50] From bands to Twilight: the power of a blank canvas.
• [00:45:30] How Guy got into investing, and the IdeaLab bet that wiped him out before the crash.
• [00:54:31] Why Guy is known as a great curator of people.
• [00:58:32] The three-month window that caught OpenAI and Anthropic.
• [01:06:07] AI music and the battle to ensure human musicians get paid.
• [01:09:30] How Spotify solved the problems Napster couldn’t overcome.
• [01:14:50] SpaceX and Bitcoin: the ones that got away.
• [01:17:32] The rewards, rigors, and responsibilities of back-to-back touring.
• [01:21:44] Why Guy never stops to celebrate.
• [01:24:45] Splitting with Ashton Kutcher after 20 years.
• [01:27:30] Final thoughts on Guy’s first podcast.

Guy Oseary Quotes from the Interview

“Sometimes having no options and no choice is really the best option.”

— Guy Oseary

“It always starts with the magic. I don’t care if you’re a tech company or whatever it is—a film, a product, a book—magic. You’ve got to have magic. Something has to pull you in.”

— Guy Oseary

“In my mind, every founder I invest in, I look at them like they are the rock star. I go, ‘That person has music they want to share with the world.'”

— Guy Oseary

“Fair use is not fair.”

— Guy Oseary

“I don’t feel accomplished. I don’t feel at all. I feel like I still have so much to prove and so much to do.”

— Guy Oseary

Want to hear another episode with someone who has a preternatural gift for spotting world-class talent? Listen to my most recent conversation with legendary music producer Rick Rubin, in which we discussed timeless methods for unlocking creativity, secrets hidden in plain sight, the future with AI, working with strong personalities, breaking out of “the sameness,” reinvention versus going narrow, and much more.

---

This episode is brought to you by AG1. I’ve taken AG1 for more than a decade. Longtime listeners have heard me call it my nutritional insurance. Here’s the news: they’ve just launched AG1 Pro, designed for people focused on performance and longevity. I’ll be traveling soon, and I’m throwing this in my bag to cover my bases while I travel. Past a certain age, maintaining lean muscle becomes priority number one, and AG1 Pro is formulated to support exactly that. It includes HMB, a clinically studied compound that supports protein synthesis and helps reduce protein breakdown, plus zinc carnosine to support the gut lining. Remember: training is only half the equation. Recovery is where the work compounds, and AG1 Pro is built to support it. It’s NSF Certified for Sport, so what’s on the label is what’s in the pouch. Get your free AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in the Welcome Kit at Drinkag1.com/Tim.

---

This episode is brought to you by Momentous Creatine! I’ve used Momentous Creatine for a long time, as it’s been one of the highest-quality creatine options available. Now, Momentous has taken that quality even further with Signature Spec Creatine, their most advanced version yet. Signature Spec is manufactured in a pharmaceutical facility using reverse-osmosis water purification.  It’s verified through a six-stage testing process with four independent agencies—delivering 10x fewer impurities, 2–5x tighter heavy-metal limits, and added PFAS and microplastics screening. 

The ultrafine powder also mixes cleanly, with no grit. Creatine supports strength, power, lean muscle, and recovery, with growing research on enhanced memory and cognitive performance. Head to LiveMomentous.com/Tim and use code TIM for 14% off your first one-time order or a total of 35% off your first subscription order.

The post Guy Oseary — The Legendary Hollywood Power Broker on 5-Minute Decisions, 36 Years of Managing Madonna, 26 IPOs, and Spotting Magic First (#874) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring the Many Benefits of Coca with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis (#871)

2026-06-27 00:54:16

Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis on the many benefits of coca and how to liberate coca from its undeservedly tarnished reputation.

Bios of Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis

Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

Additional podcast platforms

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!

---

Tim Ferriss: I thought, Andy, we could start with the ethnobotanical, medicinal side of things because I’ll share, perhaps, an anecdote to kick us off, which was I — as both of you have spent a lot of time in South America, and it’s not always to end up in the lower, upper Amazon consuming questionable substances. It’s sometimes to do other things, like visit cities and spend time with friends and go skiing.

And the skiing in this case was in Chile and it was the first instance where we landed in Santiago, drove to elevation very quickly, and I had my first experience with terrible altitude sickness. And for those who have not experienced it, I do not wish it upon my worst enemy. It is an absolutely horrific experience. It’s terrible. And even though the legal status, I think, is a question mark, or maybe it’s very directly verboten in Chile, the locals in the lodge gave me coca leaf tea. And within several hours, no symptoms and they did not recur past that point. Which blew my mind, particularly since even with Diamox to help with altitude acclimation, my experience has been that it takes a few days.

And I did not have any good way to explain this, particularly given my levels of exertion and. Not surprisingly in other countries, whether it’s Peru, Colombia, certainly if you look at the Kogis and so on, this plant is not just incredibly important from a, let’s just call it for lack of a better term, religious perspective, a cultural perspective, but also medicinal perspective. So I was hoping, Andy, you could give a primer on what makes coca, the plant, interesting?

Andrew Weil: Let me say I first met coca in 1965. I just finished my first year of medical school and my mentor, Dick Schultes, who was director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, sent me to South America to collect medicinal plants with one of his graduate students in the Amazon and the Andes. And I met with him right before I left and he said, “When you’re in Peru, be sure to chew coca.” He said, “It’s a very interesting plant and you want to learn about it.”

So I did, and I have been using coca ever since. And my original interest was to find out how this was used by Indigenous peoples medicinally. It’s as important to that population as peppermint and chamomile are in European medicine. It’s their major medicinal plant. And the main indication is for treating GI disorders, but also it is obviously relied on to provide energy in doing physical work, to help with altitude sickness, as you mentioned, to boost mood, and to improve metabolism.

The population in the Andes especially is often not well nourished and they eat a very high starch diet. They have a high incidence of genes predisposing them to type 2 diabetes, but they don’t have diabetes if they are on their traditional diets and exercising and chewing coca. But if they move to lower altitude and stop chewing coca and eat more like the blanco population in Peru, they develop very high rates of type 2 diabetes. So that’s quite interesting, that it has some normalizing effect on blood sugar and metabolism, which is something that I’d really like to see good research on.

So I think there are multiple uses, and these are not attributable to effects of cocaine. And I think this is most important that in coca, there are 14 alkaloids. Cocaine is one of them. And they all have similar chemical structures and none of them have ever been studied. Once we isolated cocaine from the leaf, everybody lost interest in everything else. So we don’t really know what those other things do and how they modify the activity of cocaine. The amount of cocaine in coca is relatively small. It would not be worth anybody’s time on a home scale to try to extract cocaine from coca. You need a tonnage of leaves to get a significant amount.

But I think the most important point is that this whole complex of compounds acting together is responsible for the effects that people report as being very beneficial, both for mental health and physical health.

Tim Ferriss: Could you say more about the digestive or metabolic effects? Do we have an idea of the mechanism of action there, what it’s actually doing?

Andrew Weil: Well, coca has been remarkably little studied. For a plant of such enormous historical, cultural, economic, scientific, medical importance, there is an almost complete absence of research on it, and Wade can talk about the reasons for that.

But one of the things that struck me when I was interviewing people in the Andes about the GI effects was that the respondents said that it treated both diarrhea and constipation. That doesn’t make any sense from the point of view of Western pharmacology. Cocaine is a gut stimulant. So obviously it’d be great for constipation, but it couldn’t do anything for diarrhea, except make it worse. And that always puzzled me. But then looking at these other coca alkaloids, there’s something peculiar about them. If you look at the structural formula of the molecules, they resemble drugs like atropine and scopolamine, which are found in nightshade plants and those are gut paralytics. Scopolamine has been used in medicine to treat diarrhea.

So this is kind of a paradox. You’ve got a molecule that, just from its shape, you predict would be a gut paralytic, but in fact, cocaine is a gut stimulant. So how does this work? I think this is a model for the differences between a whole plant drug and an isolated compound. I think when you present the body with this mix of ambivalent molecules that they push and they pull against physiology, the body decides what it wants to use. And that’s not attributing mystical intelligence to the body. It may be which receptors are available for binding at the moment. So if there is an overactive gut motility, it selects the ones that slow that down. That’s fascinating to me that coca has this sort of paradoxical activity and the body can choose which action it wants.

Tim Ferriss: So beyond, let’s just say, the motility, making bowel movement regular for lack of a better descriptor, is it ever used by Indigenous populations for what we might consider illnesses like Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome? I don’t even know what the occurrence of those things would be in such populations, but is it used for other indications?

Andrew Weil: It’s a great remedy for all GI disorders, and also they believe that it helps them utilize the nutritional qualities of foods that they consume. They often feel that if they don’t follow a meal, one of their high starch meals with a chew of coca, that they don’t metabolize it well.

There has been almost no research on this, but there was one really interesting study done with Andean Indians, having them ride exercise bikes and measuring blood sugar at intervals after they gave them a glucose load. And at any point in the cycle where they began to chew coca, blood sugar would normalize. So this is just one study that was done some time ago. And I mean, gosh, that should just call out for a whole lot more work of that kind. That’s fascinating.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super fascinating. So I wanted to just mention a few things for folks pulling from what you just said. So you mentioned Dick Schultes. If people don’t recognize the name Richard Evans Schultes, I guess that’s, what, S-C-H-U-L-T-E-S, look him up. Do yourself a favor and look up Richard Evans Schultes, the bio on Richard.

Andrew Weil: And Wade was his graduate student.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew Weil: I worked with him as an undergraduate, but that’s how Wade and I first met, through him.

Tim Ferriss: So just incredible. And I may come back to the peppermint chamomile sidebar that you had because that seems interesting in and of itself, but to your point of isolated components of a plant versus the whole plant, there are many historical examples of this. One that we could pull from that can show perhaps the pitfalls of isolation, not to say there aren’t applications of isolations, it’s better to take something like aspirin than white willow bark perhaps, but if scientists came to the premature conclusion that, well, if consuming foods with beta-carotene seems to be supportive to vision, why don’t we just mainline isolated beta-carotene? Turns out not to be a great idea. There’s a lot more research needed.

Wade, do you want to speak to your first introduction, encounter with coca, and perhaps speak to why rehabilitation is even needed? I think some people might jump to the conclusions, like, “Well, cocaine, drug trade, period, end of story,” but I suspect there’s probably more there.

Wade Davis: Well, the thing is, Tim, I mean, coca has been used in South America by virtually every culture of the Andean and Northwest Amazon for 8,000 years. And during that time, there’s been no evidence whatsoever of any toxicity, let alone addiction.

My first encounter was actually with Tim Plowman, a good friend of Andy’s, who introduced me to Andy, who had a great grant through Schultes to study coca in the 1970s. And it spoke to the fact, what Andy said, is how little was known about the plant. I mean, one of the most astonishing things is that the plant had been demonized from the 1920s, and yet no one had ever bothered to do a nutritional study until Tim and Jim Duke did that and published in 1975. And Andy was sort of part of that team and the results were extraordinary. Not only did it have a modest amount of the alkaloid absorbed benignly in the mucous membrane of the mouth, but it was chock-full of vitamins and proteins, more calcium than any other plant studied. As Andy alluded to, enzymes that perhaps enhanced the ability of the body to digest carbohydrate at a high elevation. This was food and medicine, utterly benign. And the question comes, why didn’t someone do a study? And they didn’t do a study because they didn’t want to know. 

I think the single most disturbing fact about coca is that the efforts to eradicate the fields, the traditional fields of coca, began 60 years before there was a cocaine problem. It had nothing to do with the pharmacology of cocaine hydrochloride and everything to do with the cultural identity of the Indigenous people who revered the plant.

And what happened is physicians in Lima in particular looked up into the Andes and they saw social pathologies, illiteracy, poor nutrition, poverty. And because issues of economics and land reform and real economic justice challenged the foundation of their bourgeois lives in Lima, they had to find a culprit and they settled on coca. 

Andrew Weil: My observation is that Peru is actually a country with two nations within it. There is the white European nation with its capital at Lima that has alcohol as its preferred psychoactive drug, and there’s the Indigenous population mostly living at high altitude and some in the Amazon that rely on coca. And those two cultures have been at war with each other ever since.

For the Europeans, coca-chewing became a symbol of Indigenous culture and everything they didn’t like. And what they would love to see is either eradicate that culture or have it turn into the same as them.

Wade Davis: Well, I mean, these efforts were really pernicious and based on pseudoscience. And during all those years, including a famous commission dispatched in the late 1940s by the UN to study the so-called coca problem, that commission led by a man called Howard Fonda, who was a pharmaceutical executive, announced its conclusions before leaving New York. And upon arrival in Lima, reiterated word for word those same conclusions, that the plant had to be eradicated. And they spent three months in the Southern Andes meeting with military officials, alcaldes, government officials, priests. They didn’t interview a single traditional user of the leaf, and naturally they concluded that this plant had to be eradicated.

And I think if you really look at the language that they used, it was not just dark, it was racist. And that alludes to what Andy is saying that until recently, Latin America, not just Peru, was very much a place of conqueror and conquered, and coca became the symbol of everything Indigenous and therefore shameful to these elites.

Andrew Weil: Wade, do you want to say something about the recent WHO study, which is a confirmed continuation of all this?

Wade Davis: Incredibly, this condemnation of coca was in language that was just so dark and racist. And the amazing thing, though, is that these very people with their pseudoscientific studies and their hideous approach and language, were the very ones who wrote the language of the regulations and conventions that dictate international drug policies to this day, including the 1961 UN declaration on narcotic drugs. And in all of this time, there’d been no effort to actually identify the real value of the plant, and efforts have been underway more recently to get coca descheduled or rescheduled. In the UN system, coca leaf is now scheduled alongside with fentanyl and heroin as among the most dangerous drugs in the world. And the efforts that we’ve been trying to do is to get it to either be scheduled to the point where it’s seen to be of problemed but medicinal potential, or better yet, descheduled altogether so that we can create a licit market for the plant.

And here’s the reason for that. We have 250,000 families in Colombia that grow coca to survive. We need to give them a licit outlet for their product. Colombia, as a nation, needs the revenue, the tax revenue that can come from the international commercialization of the leaf to pay for the cost of peace. Having drained its treasury for 60 years to pay the cost of a war that would’ve not lasted a day without the sordid profits of prohibition. And above all, the world’s population has a right to benefit from this plant.

Andrew Weil: We have an enormous substance abuse problem in our country, and a lot of it has to do with stimulant abuse. And there’s also the problem of I think the reckless prescribing of stimulants to kids.

Tim Ferriss: Andy, could I ask you to bookmark that for a second? Because I want to give people a window into coca leaf so they understand the subjective experience for a second.

Andrew Weil: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: In Peru and other places — I mean, shocking to me, I think it was in Peru where I saw they were selling boxes of coca leaf tea in the international departures wing and I was like, “Guys, I want to take this with me but I can’t.”

The subjective effect of drinking coca leaf tea is, among other things, a stimulant effect that is far less for me than a half a cup of coffee, but without the subsequent crash that may be due to any number of things. I think it could be a glucose spike and then the subsequent crash, but it is very, very, very mild.

Andrew Weil: Okay. Now we have to say that coca leaf tea is not the most efficient way to use coca.

Tim Ferriss: No, it isn’t. It isn’t.

Andrew Weil: The traditional way is to hold leaves in your mouth and moisten them, add an alkali, which promotes absorption of the alkaloids, and let it slowly diffuse into the bloodstream. Now, I don’t think people up here are going to chew a mouthful of leaves, but I’ve always thought we could make a lozenge or a chewing gum that would reproduce that effect.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you could have a snus packet, like nicotine.

Andrew Weil: Yeah. Right, right. But the stimulant effect is so much milder, and Wade can talk to this too, I think than coffee for example, more than any of the pharmaceutical stimulants.

Wade Davis: The really fascinating literature is in the late 19th century, when physicians traveling in Peru were aware of the hazards of cocaine, but not yet judging the leaves reflexively. And the reports have this ingenuous quality, Tim, like, I mean, there’s one from the head of the British Medical Association who was 78 years old, and he gets up in the morning, walks halfway across Scotland, climbs a mountain, gets down, doesn’t eat all day, and says, “Well, that was quite a day.” In other words, there’s this —  Mortimer calls it, like, “the stimulant that’s not a stimulant.”

And so this is really the way the plant operates, the subtlety of it. You don’t feel you’re stimulated. You just recognize the results of having been able to focus, concentrate, and remain at task in a creative way through a long period of time. If we do a little thought experiment. If I told you there was a plant that you could take that gave you a slight lightness of being, a slight kind of skip in your step, a sense of well-being that eliminated all these sort of existential little neuroses that we all suffer as conscious beings, and it allowed you to focus at task whatever that creative task was, whether it was a spinning of wool or the writing of digital code, and you could sit at task all day long concentrating on task with immense focus, with no sense of being under the influence of any plant, nothing as harsh as a second cup of coffee, and you found yourself at the end of the day ready to go home, have dinner, and do it all over again the next day, the truth is that coca has this capacity to improve our lives.

Andrew Weil: It also helps with weight management, Tim, because it makes you less hungry and feeling like you want to move. So that is a very desirable thing that many people would find useful. And I think the mood elevating effects of coca are very significant.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a question on the mind of a lot of listeners. I’ll also just add in, I have used the sort of mouth buckle in the form of, goes by a million different names, Mambe or whatever. And even in that case, very, very mild. And what I would say if I were to compare it to other things, as my long-term listeners might imagine, I’ve tried modafinil, I’ve tried the various amphetamines, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, and the difference is that, number one, you have thousands of years of human use documented in the case of coca.

Secondly, I did not seem to develop any type, I’m sure you do, develop some tolerance. But for instance, if I use modafinil for two or three days and I stop, I immediately feel a physical requirement to use it to get back to my prior baseline. And that does not happen in the case of coca. It certainly happens in the case of caffeine for me.

Andrew Weil: And cocaine.

Tim Ferriss: And cocaine. Right. But the question I want to ask is, Wade, you mentioned this enormous number of families dependent on growing coca. And on an individual level, I can see how, hey, if you ship me a small box of coca leaf for my personal use, there’s no way I’m going to convert that into cocaine. But how do you on a national level, if these farms are preexisting, decouple the good of licit coca while simultaneously constraining the evils of cocaine production? Is that possible?

Wade Davis: Well, I mean, the thing there is that the status of coca has no relevance whatsoever to the cartels. With coca as a prohibited substance, they’ve made fortunes, shipping cocaine by the ton for 50 years in the United States. And were coca leaves to be legal with a licit commercial export market, you would still maintain the same controls over the illicit production of cocaine that you have today. So it’s kind of irrelevant.

The critical thing is that crop substitution programs are an illusion because how do you transport to market cacao or bananas when you can take coca paste and put it in your mochila and walk down the trail? And so this expansion of coca production is going on dramatically and it’s having huge impacts on tropical rainforests. The deforestation since the peace agreement in Colombia is very disturbing. And yet we have millions of acres of already cut over land that we could cultivate coca on for the well-being of the people.

And I think it’s worth just thinking about the history of this plant, 8,000 years, one of the most amazing things about coca is that it’s been domesticated not once, not twice, but three separate times in human history. That is unheard of.

Andrew Weil: And Tim, I think one approach to the problem you brought up is education, which I’m a great believer in. I think if people knew what coca was and understood its benefits, they would demand it, they’d want it. And that includes even people who use cocaine. I have known a number of people who got strung out on cocaine and experienced a lot of negative effects from it. And when they tried coca and used it properly, they saw that it was a much more desirable state and they didn’t want to use cocaine anymore. I think that’s something we could do.

By the way, I should also mention that through an accident of history, coca is in Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act, not Schedule I like cannabis and psychedelics. It got there. And Schedule II is substances that have a high potential for abuse but have recognized therapeutic application. It’s only there because cocaine has limited uses as a medical drug in ophthalmology and dentistry, but that makes it a little easier to leverage coca out of that controlled substance box. It’s just a matter of demonstrating that there are therapeutic applications that the FDA could approve.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so I want to fill in a gap and then come back to problem solving. But before we get to the problem solving and policy work, I’ll plant a seed, which is if these farmers suddenly could legally ship product for export or domestic use in the form of coca, could they actually get around the cartel or would they be putting a bullseye on their forehead? That’s a question not for now, but for later.

What I’d like to talk about first is the indigenous cultural context in which coca is used and its importance, right? Because as you mentioned, I mean, it’s not exactly ubiquitous in South America, but in a handful of countries, coca is considered, for lack of a better term, a master plant, and a sacred plant. 

Wade Davis: First of all, there are four different varieties that Tim Plowman identified of cultivated coca, two species each with two different varieties. And we now know that from DNA analysis that the progenitor of all four varieties was a wild coca called Erythroxylum gracilipes that grows along the eastern flanks of the Andes, in La Ceja de la Montaña, all the way from Venezuela down to Bolivia. And what this means is that, at three times in pre-Columbian history, human beings came upon this delicate little shrub in the forest with fruits, the color and the size of rubies and beautiful little white flowers and delicate foliage and said, “Ha, that’s the one.” And it was domesticated three times in the Montaña of Colombia, in the Yungas of La Paz in Bolivia and Peru, and in the Northwest Amazon. And that is extremely rare in the history of plant domestication.

And not only was it domesticated three times, everywhere it was domesticated, it was deemed to be the plant of all plants, the sacred plant. And that was its status through all of at least 8,000 years and remains its status amongst those who use the plant today.

Andrew Weil: Today, if you watch indigenous people using coca, very often they make what’s called a k’intu, which is an offering. They take three perfect leaves and put them together in a fan shape and blow on them and will whisper prayers to them. And this is a very common thing to observe [crosstalk]

Wade Davis: It’s more than that, Andy. When people meet on the trail, they make a cruceta of leaves and then they lift it to the highest sacred mountain, blow it — 

Tim Ferriss: Wait, what is that? Cruceta? Just to provide context for people.

Wade Davis: A little cross of three leaves, three perfect leaves. And first of all, you point it to the mountain and then you blow the energy of the leaf to the mountain. And the metaphor is the energy leaf —  like in the same way a cloud condenses to bring rain and fertility to the soil, so too this is creating your sort of connection to landscape. And every single thing that happens in the Andes, a field is planted, coca is sprinkled. Tools are brought back in the evening, coca is given to them. Coca appears as a symbol of the social contract and the social nexus of people.

This is why it’s so important, as the anthropologist Catherine Allen said, is that to deny people coca in the Andes is not like denying the Germans beer or the British tea or the French coffee. It’s actually an act of cultural genocide because you cannot be runakuna, you cannot be of the Andes, of Pachamama, if you do not use the leaves. And you must use them properly, and nothing causes more offense than tourists who stuff their leaves, as the people say, like horses eating hay.

And in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the highest consumption of coca in the world, men are constantly chewing hayo. 

Tim Ferriss: What is hayo?

Wade Davis: Hayo is a name of coca in Colombia. That is erythroxylum novogranatense, a variety of novogranatense, which is a coca of Colombia and the coca used today by the mamas of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. But they contemplate the day to come, they contemplate the day that they’ve lived. You begin to chew leaves when you are of an age to marry. And so the chewing of leaves is the expression of the essence of who you are as a people, and that happens to be a culture that believes that their prayers literally maintain the cosmic balance of the world. And so in all of these societies, the act of chewing coca is an act of being alive and to be denied the use of coca is to suffer a kind of existential eradication that is complete.

Now to be fair, indigenous people throughout the Americas have the right to use coca in most jurisdictions, but of course the cost of coca skyrocketed with the illicit market. And so there are many communities where the tradition of using coca is being lost simply because of the price of the leaves. But again, the issue for us, I think, in our initiative is not just a traditional use of the leaf, but the right of all peoples in all places in the world to benefit from the incredible gift that this plant represents. It’s Latin America’s greatest gift to the world and it’s one that’s been denied in a way that’s been incredibly unproductive.

Tim Ferriss: I guess potatoes are a pretty good gift too, right? So let me come back. I promised to do a call back to the question that I had bookmarked. I mean, doing homework for this in conversation with you guys, also lots of text messages and so on, I mean, it seems like there are many reasons that if one could wave a magic wand to create a licit trade of coca, it would be a good idea. You would have dramatic impact on indigenous land rights, you would curtail deforestation because things wouldn’t be pushed to the outer edges where they can be better hidden. Certainly the sustenance and viability of these communities who are already operating farms. Not to mention the potential global impact if this were to be more widely available, certainly pending or parallel with lots more research, right? There’s a lot of good that could come of it.

Could these farms be converted to legal trade without these farmers having a bullseye painted on their head by cartel who are dependent on them for producing their product?

Wade Davis: It’s not as if the cartels are going to roll over and say, “Oh, great. Sell your tea to Andy Weil, Inc.” On the other hand, the point is that the cartels are already out of control in Colombia and doing whatever they want anyway and they will continue to grow coca as they want to grow coca and continue to produce enormous quantities of illicit cocaine. Whether or not individuals will be free to grow coca with impunity, obviously there’s going to be conflict. But if the state has a national interest in the cultivation, a licit cultivation of coca, they’ll have an interest in protecting those who are growing the coca. It’s not going to be some kind of smooth transition.

But the point is that the situation in Colombia, for example, is already completely chaotic with the production having skyrocketed since the peace agreement and parts of the country now being inaccessible and that’s really a failure of leadership by the federal state. But I don’t think that’s a reason not to move forward with creating a licit product for the farm families who have been waiting for this.

Tim Ferriss: Andy, maybe you could speak to this next, just to rotate here. What is the wedge in the door, right? Because this would be a big long-term undertaking to rehabilitate coca. So what are sort of tangible next steps you think would move the needle in a positive direction? Is it funding research? Is it pilot programs of some type for legal products? What do you think?

Andrew Weil: I think it’s got to be multi-pronged. One is creating consumer demand for it, creating a market in North America for coca. If people want it, if consumers want it, that will move the needle quite a bit.

Secondly, there have to be FDA-recognized approved uses of it, which there now are not. And that has to be demonstrated, has to be supported by research. Some obvious ones are for the treatment of GI disorders, for treatment of substance abuse disorders. I think possibly for treatment of ADHD, for example, with a much safer stimulant. I think the metabolic indications, there’s great potential there that needs some research to demonstrate that. But if this shows potential for preventing or treating type 2 diabetes, that would be enormous. And I think we can make a list of these things.

So I think we’ve got to work on all these fronts, but to me, the first thing is making people aware of what coca is. Most people don’t know anything about it and if they do, they just think of it as the source of cocaine. So that’s where we’re starting.

Wade Davis: There was a big effort and a very hopeful effort to get the UN to reschedule coca. And this was done at the request of both the Bolivian and the Colombian governments. And the hope, as I mentioned, was that coca would be taken out of schedule. Andy mentioned its coke is in Schedule II in the United States, but by the international statutes of the UN, it’s still Schedule I. And the goal was to try to get it completely descheduled as a benign plant that it is.

The group that met in Vienna decided against that and to maintain the status quo to the disappointment of all advocates. And the rationale was a little strange. The reason that coca remained the equivalent of fentanyl is that cocaine could be extracted from coca. Well, everybody knows that. And the fact that nothing stopped the cartels extracting cocaine by the ton. So it made no sense that logic, but because of that, coca remains scheduled. And that was a big disappointment, but that effort continues.

Andrew Weil: But we are seeing movement in the US with, there’s been movement with cannabis, there’s been movement with psychedelics. A lot of this has been, I think, promoted by veterans demanding access to these treatments for mental health conditions, but things finally have loosened up. And maybe as part of that momentum, we can introduce discussions of coca and getting some movement there as well.

Tim Ferriss: I think it’s possible. My sort of pragmatic hat is always wondering, well, if we have many, many, many people listening to this podcast, there are probably policymakers. There are individuals, certainly, who say to themselves, “Hey, I would love to cut down on my coffee. Maybe give coca a spin. Sounds mild. Maybe doing a few days of that would be wonderful.” But I don’t know what, then, their next step is or how the demand or interest is harnessed in a way that leads to broader change. Do you have any thoughts on getting specific stakeholders to take any next steps?

Because chances are you have people from every possible walk listening to this. You likely have scientists who are perhaps psychedelic adjacent, maybe they are stimulant adjacent, who are interested. Of course, there’s a fundraising question, but that’s solvable, I think. I would be willing to help fund some research. What else can be done?

Andrew Weil: To the scientists I would say, this is an incredibly interesting plan with a fascinating history, cultural relevance, chemistry, pharmacological effects, and it hasn’t been studied. It’s just waiting there. This would be a rich subject for investigation. So I would think that scientists who are curious about things of this sort, medicinal plants, medical botany, natural products, would want to take a look at this.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll just say because it’s Schedule II versus Schedule I, it makes, presumably, the process for researching it much easier and much less expensive.

Wade Davis: But I would say, Tim, to the entrepreneurs who might be listening, the person who manages to crack this nut has the potential to make enormous wealth, because I think that the qualities of coca are such that they could very easily compete on the level that coffee is presented to the world. It’s just a much, much better natural stimulant, a more effective one, a more benign one, a more useful one. So when the dam breaks, it will be enormous. And again, you have issues of intellectual property, but again, this is a plant that’s been used for 8,000 years by everybody. It’s very difficult for anyone to claim the intellectual rights to this plant. And as some good friends of mine say, in this case, the plant itself has agency and the plant wants to be known to people.

And the other element of this is storytelling. I mean, Andy and I are in the midst of raising funds to make a film that will celebrate, in a positive sense, coca and the whole tradition. And it’s a story of social justice. It’s a story of spiritual illumination. It’s a story of Andean pre-history, incredible story of cultural celebration, ethnographic richness. And I think if people embraced the story, they would be deeply moved.

And at the same time, it’s also a story of incredible violation of human rights and the egregious way by which this plant has been demonized speaks to larger issues that we face as we try to find a way to live on this planet. And so, I think the story is so rich.

Andrew Weil: And Wade and I have been involved in an effort to rehabilitate coca for some time. In the 1970s, I started a not-for-profit foundation called the Beneficial Plant Research Association whose aim was to conduct research, make people aware of lesser known medicinal plants. And the main one we focused on was coca. We were way ahead of our time, but we had wonderful people involved in this effort.

And the group lapsed, but I revived it a couple of years ago and it’s now very robust. We have some really great scientists behind it. And I would urge listeners to check our website, which is bpra.org and read about the Coca Project and what we are involved with.

Tim Ferriss: bpra.org. Is that right?

Andrew Weil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: If people were interested in potentially supporting the film, is that where they should go to contact folks?

Andrew Weil: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. So, that’s one that people can latch onto.

Now, Wade, you were delivering a summons, a call to action to entrepreneurs. As luck would have it, we may have an entrepreneur in our midst. Known for True Food Kitchen, not only Matcha Kari. So Andrew, if you were going to market and you’re like, “You know what? Let me pave the way.” I’m not saying that’s your plan, but if you decided I want to be the first to introduce coca, right? Coca Kari?

Wade Davis: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: You could come up with, I’m sure that you could do a line extension. Fantastic matcha for people who are interested.

Andrew Weil: By the way, matcha and coca are both green powders. So, I’m an advocate of green powders. And matcha, this is another one that I got interested in way before its time and I tried for a number of years to introduce it here unsuccessfully. And now, I mean, it is just unbelievable. The worldwide demand for it has completely stressed Japan’s capacity to produce it. So, that took maybe 15, 20 years for me to get that going. Coca is probably going to take a little longer, but I am determined.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I mean, what would be the levers or perhaps dominoes is a better metaphor that you would want to tip over on the path to introducing coca as a commercial product?

Andrew Weil: Even just one good study clearly demonstrating one of these effects that we’ve talked about, of helping people get off much more dangerous stimulants or regulating carbohydrate metabolism, helping to prevent type 2 diabetes — Wade, what do you think?

Wade Davis: Well, I mean, I think that focusing on what Andy and I know from our personal experiences is how fantastic coca is, how it works. I think all of us, Tim, as conscious human beings, suffer from these afflictions that the Buddhists talk about, the monkey mind, these little moments of neuroses or even depression.

Tim Ferriss: I’m lucky if it’s moments. My god, I would pay to have moments.

Wade Davis: And I know. I’ll say something very personal. I mean, I have two daughters and both of them for different reasons have been on some of these serotonin uptake inhibitors, Prozac. And never Ritalin, but I’ve watched that. And what I experienced in my life, which is a very productive life, is that I function perfectly well without coca. Just like old Schultes used to say, he chewed coca every day in the Amazon, he didn’t chew it in Boston. I find that if I run out of coca, my life goes on. It’s just not as nice a life and it’s not as productive a life.

But what I find is that I’m as susceptible as anybody to mood swings, to existential despair, whatever we call it. I think this is part of the human condition. In the same way that death is the price we pay for the glory of being alive, I think some of these little mental fuck-ups are what we pay for the price of being conscious.

Tim Ferriss: The ticket of entry, yeah.

Wade Davis: And that’s the whole thing about coca is that it takes care of that. Without having any sense that you’ve been drugged or even stimulated, you just find that stuff flitting your way. And it just makes for a more productive life.

I’ve written 24 books, Tim. And I’ve made 50 films and people, “Oh, he’s so productive.” And I just smile like the Cheshire Cat. Of course I am. And Andy knows exactly how and why. 

I think probably Andy and I both share a certain frustration that you can’t talk people into this. It’s sort of show, don’t tell. And it’s so subtle. I remember the first time I ever really got behind coca. It was in the Putumayo above Sibundoy in Colombia, and Tim and I had gotten a bunch of leaves in Silvia and Tim was never one to rush a situation that was itself inherently pleasant. And so we just laid back in the sun. And I’d been with the Mamos, but I hadn’t really discovered the plant. I mean, Andy will tell you, you create a learned experience with these plants. And suddenly, I just felt like I was just where I wanted to be.

And that’s what Andy says. When Andy, and I’ve quoted him many times, first went to the Kubeo in ’73, wasn’t it, Andy?

Andrew Weil: Yeah.

Wade Davis: And there’s a beautiful passage in one of Andy’s essays where he was exposed to mambe for the first time. Mambe, by the way, for the audience is just an Amazonian form of coca. It becomes a green powder like matcha and you don’t use it with an ad mix. The ad mixture as the ashes placed in the preparation so you end up swallowing the whole thing and you absorb the nutrients and so on.

But anyway, so Andy had been exposed to mambe and the next day with the men, they gather around this calabash and he walks away as I walked away in the Northwest Amazon with a spring to your feet, oblivious to the humidity. And as Andy said in that wonderful passage, “swinging my machete and feeling that I was just where I wanted to be.” And I think that’s a really great summation of the subjective effects of coca.

Andrew Weil: And can I say, I attribute at least some of my well-being to regular use of coca. By the way, today is my birthday.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, happy birthday.

Andrew Weil: And I am 84 and I feel pretty good.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you look great.

Andrew Weil: Yeah, people always comment on how good I look and so forth. And I have to say coca has contributed to that.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I have many more questions, but I’ll try to contain, I could probably use some more coca to get this ADHD-OCD under control.

But for people who have heard and maybe latched onto something you said earlier, which is one good scientific study, right? I’m a firm believer in this because I’ve been very active on trying to establish firsts, pilots that might be a proof of concept that then catalyze more research, et cetera. Are there any particular researchers who people could look to fund?

Andrew Weil: Yes. So, let me mention one who was on our board of beneficial plants and that’s Chris McCurdy, who is a medicinal pharmacologist at the University of Florida.

Tim Ferriss: How do you spell the last name?

Andrew Weil: M-C-C-U-R-D-Y, Christopher McCurdy. He’s University of Florida. And he is the main person who’s researched kratom and had a lot of federal support for his studies of kratom. And I met with him and got him interested in coca. And he was determined to do a study of this. Now, I will just tell you, it has been a very torturous route for him to get leaves legally to study, but he finally just this week got his supply. I mean, you would not believe the red tape.

Tim Ferriss: Why is it so hard?

Andrew Weil: Because this is the problem with coca, that it’s just all these regulations and fear about it and confusion with cocaine. Anyway, he’s a very interesting person to talk to. But he has set up, he’s just about to get going. And he’s doing animal research first, but he’s using whole coca, trying to disentangle the effects of the different alkaloids. But one of his interests is looking at this possibility of regulating carbohydrate metabolism. So, he’s the main person at the moment that I know who is doing research in this area and he’s very good.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I was wondering, I looked him up while we were talking, might not be a fit, might be a fit, but Dr. Peter Hendricks has done some interesting work mostly looking at — well, I shouldn’t say mostly, but perhaps best known for looking at the potential use of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy as a promising treatment for cocaine use disorder. So there might be room for looking at, as strange as it might sound to people, coca for cocaine use disorder. That might be too hard to sell.

Andrew Weil: I’ve proposed that in an article that I wrote long ago, saying that this would be one of the possible uses to wean people off of cocaine onto coca. That would be a big step up.

Tim Ferriss: I had not even thought about, and I feel foolish, realized that even if it’s Schedule II, if you are, say, using methylphenidate, aka ritalin or something else, you just synthesize the damn stuff. Whereas if you have to get actual organic coca leaves, that adds a whole different layer of headache in terms of procuring it, right? Because now you’re dealing with importation and this, that, and the other thing. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about that wrinkle. There’s always a wrinkle.

Okay, got it. And for someone like Christopher McCurdy, how much do research studies like this cost? Do you have any ballpark for folks? In my experience, it’s like, okay, the number of subjects determines a lot of the cost.

Andrew Weil: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: So, if you want to power the study, if you want to try to get a properly powered study, maybe you want to increase the scope for more people to participate, et cetera. But do you have any idea? And I know you’re not speaking for him, but do you have any idea what something like that might cost?

Andrew Weil: More than you would think. So that is a challenge. But Chris has found that the federal government and National Institute on Drug Abuse is willing to fund these studies. So that’s very promising.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I had Nora Volkow of NIDA on the podcast a couple of years ago and it was a really good conversation. And I don’t know if this is public, might have to scratch it, but she was in the Oval Office for the executive order related to psychedelics. And I was like, “Man, that’s awesome.”

Andrew Weil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And she’s so brilliant. So I don’t know what her current status is within NIDA. She might still be running it, but there seems to be a seat change afoot. So, the timing could be very serendipitous to try to kick something off now, particularly on the research front.

For people who might be wondering, I’ll just throw out some numbers. I mean, early on, this is 2015, helping to fund some of the initial psilocybin studies looking at depression at Hopkins, for 50k, you could make a huge, huge, huge difference.

Andrew Weil: Really? That’s great.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not necessarily millions of people. It depends on, again, the size, the ambition. And you don’t want to be penny wise and pound foolish, right? If you can fund more and you want to drive the possibility for a statistically meaningful outcome that is suitable for publishing and defensible, then maybe you write a bigger check, right? Especially if you’re going to wait all that time, because science is pretty slow when it’s done properly.

Andrew Weil: Wade, can you tell us anything about what’s going on in Canada? Because the regulations in Canada are a little more favorable than they are in the US and there’s some research interests up there.

Wade Davis: There’s nothing really definitive. I mean, I think one opening in the States could be Bobby Kennedy. Bobby, few people know, but when his father was killed, was sent by the family to Colombia. And he fell in love with Colombia and I’ve been in Colombia with Bobby with the Mamos, chewing coca. He totally understands the plant and he certainly understands the distinction between coca and the alkaloid cocaine. So I think there’s an opening there which could be very promising.

Andrew Weil: And one area that I very much agree with him on is his initiative to change psychiatry and move it away from the biomedical model, which I think has been really failed us.

Wade Davis: I mean, I think this whole coca story, you slam up against the whole kind of failure of the War on Drugs and the ideology of the War on Drugs.

There’s a very funny account where in October, end of October 2020, there was this bust at the Philadelphia International Airport of 15 pounds of what was called green cocaine. And the customs agents sort of heralded this great sign of the vigilance of their colleagues and so on and anyone who knew anything about anything could see that that green cocaine was mambe and also in the bus was a brown paste, which everybody knew would’ve been a tobacco paste. Now, tobacco kills 400,000 people every year, but it’s legal. So this was not of concern to the agents, but the green cocaine was. And they analyzed it and discovered it had some cocaine in it, trivial amounts, so that if anyone had tried to just snort the mambe, they just would’ve plugged their nose most unpleasantly with a powder the consistency of talcum powder.

But the thing that was so disturbing about the bust is that after 60 years of War on Drugs, you had customs agents who still didn’t know the difference between coca and cocaine after expending a trillion dollars on this failed campaign. And that was really the equivalent, if you think about, of Eliot Ness busting a truckload of potatoes in violation of the Volstead Act. Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good comparison. I like that.

Wade Davis: Or a peach. We don’t deny us the right to enjoy the luscious fruit of a peach because of the cardioactive glycosides found within the pit of every peach, right? Not to kind of push the metaphor, but they’re truly apples and oranges.

And so, I think when you combine that in-the-moment idiocy, together with the really pernicious history by which this plant has been demonized, I mean, Andy said earlier that these countries remain countries of conquered and conqueror. And in this era where we’re so sensitive to language, if people were aware of the language, and I wrote a long piece for Rolling Stone called the “Secret History of Coca,” the language being used by those who crafted the very documents that we live by to this day is so hideous that it would cause anybody to be immediately dismissed from any position in our country today. And yet that language, accusing coca users of being pornog — because they make this stuff up and it was all driven by the same guy, Anslinger, who created us, gave us Reefer Madness. And so we’re still living by that mindset, which has been utterly exposed as a racist and colonial conceit that it was.

Andrew Weil: And also, I think that coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relations with the natural world, really failing to see that plant for what it is, confusing it with this one component of it, and then getting ourselves in enormous amounts of trouble.

And in my career as a physician, I have worked for years and years to help people understand the differences between whole plants, natural products, and isolated compounds. I mean, I think isolated compounds have their place in medicine, but very often I see that these complex natural mixtures work better, are much safer, often have effects that we don’t have pure compounds that work for. And coca is a perfect example of that.

Wade Davis: And Andy, when you say that relation to the natural world, in a social sense, it’s expressed in Peru, as well. I mean, one of the great rituals I’ve participated in is called the mojonamiento. It’s out of Cusco where, once each year the fastest young boy in every hamlet is given the gift of becoming a woman, and you have to lead all able-bodied men on this ritual run, but it’s not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet, run down to the base of the sacred mountain, Antakillqa, to 9,000 feet. Then you run to over 16,000 feet and you fall across two soaring Indian ridges over the course of this 24-hour race that’s less a race than a ritual of ordeal. And the idea is that, as you enter this race, through pure exhaustion, you make the sacrifice that makes it sacred. It’s from the Latin.

And I did that race at the age of 48, the oldest man ever to do it and the only outsider to do it. And I only got through that race by chewing more coca in one day than anyone in the 8,000-year history of the plant.

But the point is what Andy’s saying about our relation with the natural world, what that race is really about is expressing a sense of obligation and belonging. You’re running the perimeter of the lands. There’s sacred mounds of earth, jitos, mahones, where the Wayllakama spin to bring the energy of the woman to the mountaintop where coca is given to Pachamama. And so the race becomes a ritual of belonging. You’re demonstrating your ownership, also your obligation to preserve that land.

So, you see, coca in that sense is as powerful and adjunct to culture as ayahuasca might be amongst the peoples of the Anaconda. You can’t do that run without coca, Tim. Coca is the mediator. They often say that the first to taste the leaves was Santísima María in the kind of syncretic myth of origins when she lost the Christ child. And in her grief, she sampled a leaf and that gave her the spirit to continue. Well, obviously that’s a syncretic fusion of pre-Columbian and Catholic ideas, but that’s an indicator of its centrality in the stream of existence in the Andes.

Tim Ferriss: So let me ask just a personal question of you guys, which I’m sure has occurred to a lot of listeners or viewers. And that is, why do you care so much about this? In the hierarchy of reasons, what’s at the top? What is it for you, Andy?

Andrew Weil: For me, it is the confusion of a plant with an element of it, which is I think a problem that I see in medicine greatly, that we just failed to understand those differences. And I would like to help educate more people about that. And as I said, I think coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relationship with a plant.

Tim Ferriss: And also just to, I suppose, underscore one thing, which is not what you’re saying. You were not saying that all plants are therefore safe, right?

Andrew Weil: No, obviously.

Tim Ferriss: That whole plants are therefore — you don’t want to go out and start chugging a bunch of hemlock tea, right? There’s plenty of stuff. However, piece versus whole, component versus entire plant are different.

Andrew Weil: Yeah, that’s a big one.

Tim Ferriss: They are just different.

Andrew Weil: And by the way, in our society particularly, I think there is great fear of nature and we tend to see nature as hostile. Many people I know think if you just go out and randomly munch plants in your backyard, you’ll likely die. The percentage of plants that can seriously harm you is pretty small. I mean, there aren’t many hemlocks out there. There’s a lot of things that don’t taste good. There’s a lot of things that might give you an upset stomach, but there’s not a lot of things that can kill you or cause serious harm.

I once had dinner with the chief technical advisor to one of the big European supplement companies and he was Austrian. He had traveled all over the world and he said that one thing that struck him was the extreme fear of nature in the English-speaking world. I mean, I’d never heard anyone say that, but he said this is an attitude that he found very common in the UK and Canada and Australia and the US, New Zealand. And he said, very different to what you see, for example, in German-speaking Europe, where people tend to regard nature as friendly, benign, helpful. And in German culture, there’s great use of medicinal plants in natural forms, very different from what we have here. So that’s just an interesting perspective. I’d never noticed that before.

Tim Ferriss: Where do you think that comes from? Any ideas?

Andrew Weil: I wonder. Wade, any suggestions?

Wade Davis: I mean, you certainly see it amongst fungalphobes as you always talk about, Andy, the fear of mushrooms.

Andrew Weil: Yeah.

Wade Davis: But Tim, back to your question, for me, I revere coca because of what it’s done for my life, but also it symbolizes for me everything I care about in terms of cultures as an anthropologist and everything I’ve ever fought for in terms of the rights of indigenous people. And it’s, to me, one of the most egregious violations of the rights of other cultures. And it’s also a denial of the genius of other cultures. So it symbolizes for me everything that I’ve stood up against in my career and it happens to be a plant that has brought benefits to me, enormous benefits. But I’ll give you, if I could share one anecdote that shows how crazy — 

Tim Ferriss: Of course.

Wade Davis: — this all is. I don’t know if you remember, but some years ago Peru qualified for the first time in 10 years for the World Cup. And I saw the victory match on a screen in Cusco. It was played in Lima. And then the captain of the Peruvian team, who played for a squad in Sao Paulo, in a random drug test, was shown to have metabolites of cocaine in his urine and he was going to be kicked off the team. And this was going to make a huge international scandal.

And his lawyer called me from Sao Paulo and I said, “Well, wait a minute. Doesn’t he come from Lima?” “Yeah.” “Well, they just went through Christmas. Didn’t he go to Ayacucho or Cusco?” “Yeah.” “Oh, he must have stayed at the Monasterio Hotel in Cusco because that’s the nicest hotel.” “Yeah, that’s where he stayed.” Well, that hotel has huge vats of coca tea available at all times for its clientele for altitude sickness. And that’s what he had done. He had drunk copious amounts of coca tea and because of the idiocy of our understanding of the difference between the plant and the drug, this could have been an international incident because you well know that Peruvians, like all Latin Americans, take their football very seriously, but we got him off.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very seriously. Andy, it looks like you were going to say something. Do you have anything to add to that?

Andrew Weil: Nope. I think, for different reasons, we come from different places, we both are very passionate about this issue.

Wade Davis: Coca’s always seemed to be defined as what it is not. It’s not cocaine and presenting this plant in all of its glory — I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, Andy’s a real plant guy. He’s a real ethnobotanist, a real physician who’s always had plants in his practice. I went through a period of time where I was very much a botanical explorer, but I’m fundamentally a storyteller, a writer, an anthropologist, but this plant wrapped its arms around me when I was 19 years old and has never let me go. And I have a deep fidelity, it’s hard to explain. I don’t normally speak in this language, but this plant has given me so much and has allowed me to explore and have such extraordinary experiences in the field in pursuit of its mysteries and its wonder that I feel that liberating coca is the final act of my professional life. I feel that very sincerely.

And it also brings me back to Andy because Andy was like always my big brother. Andy and Tim Plowman, who were great friends, both acolytes of Schultes. And for me, I was able to come along as their kid brother. So the relationship with Andy, to me, is enormously important emotionally, spiritually even. And if Andy and I, in the memory of Tim, who tragically died way too young, at the age of 45, the great botanical authority on coca, he died of AIDS. And incidentally, as I was reading and doing his eulogy that I conceived the book One River, which is a biography of our great professor, Richard Evan Schultes, we’re doing this in part in memory of Tim. I’m sure Andy would agree.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground. What I’m going to do also to try to consolidate next steps for people, for anyone listening or watching, is I’ll create tim.blog/coca, so on my website — 

Andrew Weil: That’d be great.

Tim Ferriss: That’ll lead to this episode and at the very top of the show notes, we’ll have a link to the bpra.org. We’ll have a link to some of the researchers who were mentioned, including any others that you guys might think of after the fact.

Wade Davis: It’d be wonderful. It’d be great —

Andrew Weil: We would most appreciate it.

Wade Davis: — to link to some of the pieces that Andy and I have written would be really great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. We’ll put a bunch of stuff at the top with a bias for people who are listening. If they’re like, “This is all great. I don’t want to be purely a passive consumer of education or edutainment. I actually want to put a dent in the world,” then we’ll have that at the top because I don’t want to bury that stuff in terms of possible next actions for people. So folks, that’ll be at tim.blog/coca, C-O-C-A, just like Coca-Cola, not a coincidence by the way.

I’ll read you, this is a piece on Eater. People can look it up. Maybe I’ll link to it, actually. “An unassuming set of buildings in Maywood, New Jersey, less than 10 miles from Manhattan, holds a surprising secret: It’s what might arguably be called the cocaine capital of the United States. Here, a chemical company manufactures cocaine legally, with special permission from the US government, all in the service of a familiar company: Coca-Cola.” Cola, by the way, just for people who like little bits of trivia comes from kola, K-O-L-A. Well, in English, at least. African nut known for its caffeine content. So there you go.

Wade Davis: Right away, Tim, Coca-Cola notoriously had a secret coca plantation in Hawaii.

Andrew Weil: Hawaii, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: No kidding. Scoundrels. Look at that.

Andrew Weil: That is the only legal export of coca from Peru is to that chemical company, Stepan Chemical in Maywood, New Jersey. And the cocaine is extracted and sold for pharmaceutical use and the rest of the leaves are made into an extract, which is a secret flavoring ingredient in Coca-Cola.

Wade Davis: And in the 1961 UN convention on narcotic drugs, there was one specific exclusion of coca solely for that company.

Andrew Weil: And I got to go, in Peru, to where they were getting their leaves from, and they were trashy leaves. I mean, it was literally the sweepings on the floor. Stuff that Wade and I would not chew.

Tim Ferriss: Drinking sawdust. Botanical sawdust. Well, another bit of trivia for folks, if they care. 7 Up used to contain lithium citrates.

Andrew Weil: Oh, yes, right.

Tim Ferriss: Back in the day. Those old soda companies had some stuff figured out. Well, gentlemen, is there anything else, before we start to wind to a close, that you would like to add? Certainly, I would love you guys to mention where people can find you online, if you’d like them to go in any particular direction. And anything else that you would like to add. Andy?

Andrew Weil: My website is drweil.com, D-R-W-E-I-L.com. There’s a lot of health information there. And I am the founder of the Andrew Weil University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. We train physicians and health professionals, and that website is awcim.org and I’m very proud of our work there. We’ve graduated almost 3,000 physicians and other allied health professionals from our very intensive trainings, which include really good instruction on botanical medicine.

Tim Ferriss: I love it. And people can also find you on Instagram, X, et cetera, @drweil and presumably you don’t have a tap into the back of your brain for that. So I’m sure there’s nice, good publishing of valuable content coming out there so people can check that out. And then Wade?

Wade Davis: I just wanted to say, Tim, if I could just insert this in case you could use it, is that I’ve made a lot of reference to the egregious language by those who are responsible for the language of the UN Declaration, but maybe I could just read. The key figure was an acolyte of Anslinger, who was the notorious anti-drug warrior that we almost joke about with Reefer Madness. But this man’s name was Pablo Osvaldo Wolff, and he was the chief of the addiction producing drug section of the World Health Organization. He not only conceived, he wrote the language of coca demonization in that, but listen to what he says, and this is from a lecture to the Royal Society of Medicine in London, on the very eve of that commission led by Fonda going to Peru.

“The Indio who does not chew coca leaves is clear-sighted, intelligent, and lighthearted, willing to work, vigorous, and resistant to diseases; the coquero, on the contrary, is … apathetic, lazy, insensitive to his environment; his mind is befogged; his emotional reactions are rare and violent, he is morally and intellectually anesthetized, social subdued, almost a slave. Moral degeneration accompanies the physical; lying is one of the outstanding characteristics, probably due to lack of moral equilibrium. Criminality is high, and barbaric forms of homicide can only be explained by a certain moral insensibility.

“We are convinced that coca-leaf chewing is a social evil; the chronic consumption of these leaves constitutes a social poison which undermines the physical and mental health of the population. … The children of coqueros are markedly deficient in intelligence.…There is no doubt that the habit of chewing coca leaves is one of the most powerful reasons for the backwardness and misery of the Indian population … the last link in a chain of social and medico-social scourges, which include pauperism, bad housing conditions, deficient nutrition, rudimentary or completely absent education, alcoholism, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and other infections, and promiscuity, to mention only the worst calamities and miseries.”

Andrew Weil: I never heard that, Wade. I never heard that.

Tim Ferriss: That’s quite a list of offenses.

Wade Davis: This is quoted in my Rolling Stone piece, Andy. You just can’t believe the language. “The remedy of the moment is gradual disintoxication of the native, diminishing the production as well as the consumption of coca by means of a suitable education; by abolishing the superstition of the magic action and the well-being of leaves; by prohibiting initiation of young…” Goes on and on.

“Only with skill and patience can coca addiction be abolished, but it can be done.… Christianized Indians no longer live in the former wretched conditions and thus show themselves physically and mentally capable of freeing themselves from coca-leaf chewing and addiction.” And you have to think, this is the man who wrote the statutes that we turn to today in the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is the language that the UN World Health Organization has recently affirmed by refusing to deschedule or reschedule coca.

Tim Ferriss: It might be time for an update.

Wade Davis: I mean, it’s that bad. Now, can you think of any other policy that we would live by today? It’s like policies have been written by, I don’t know, Hermann Goring or Goebbels dictating religious policies today in the United States of America and yet this is what we are trying to deal with and confront and it is so dark and so evil.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it sounds like A, terrible. B, time for an update. C, I’m sure a lot of the people who are adjacently or indirectly affirming this have no idea what it actually says. They have not read what you just read aloud. So worth another look, like a lot of things. And not saying it’s panacea, not saying that there shouldn’t be guide rails or guardrails, but that it’s worth another look.

And I do think the wedge in the door, to pull from language earlier, probably is A, awareness of the benefits. And I think you guys do a pretty damn fine job of showcasing the longitudinal productivity gains of moderate, sustained use and separately getting some science funded. And I think those are parallel tracks and the film itself being used as an educational tool to support the, I would say both of those, right? The later and the scientific exploration.

Because it strikes me, I mean, look, I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on the internet, nor am I a scientist, but I like to spend time with a lot of scientists. I think about some of the effects of coca and the appetite suppression, but the physical vigor in the absence of food. And I wonder, man, I would love to just take blood ketone measurements of these people.

Andrew Weil: Simple stuff, simple stuff.

Tim Ferriss: So simple, so, so straightforward. Well, guys, this has been wonderful. Any last closing comments, concerns, complaints?

Andrew Weil: Thank you for providing a forum to talk about this. 

Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.

Wade Davis: I would like to add, Andy, just one comment on what Tim just said and what you responded, how easy these experiments could have been done. I think we have to remember that it’s not an accident that they weren’t done. In other words, the nutritional study that you and Tim did in the 1970s could have been done in the 1920s.

It wasn’t done because people did not want anything that would affirm the possibility that the plant was anything but the demonic entity that they claimed it to be. So it’s important in all of this to remember, this wasn’t just an accident of history or casual neglect. This was a conscious attempt to demonize and eradicate a plant and not for pharmacological reasons, not for medical reasons, not for social reasons, for cultural and political and reasons of power.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to, by association, make policy makers feel like they need to carry the burden of what was truly a travesty, if they are, in part, those whose help we would like. But understanding the history is important. I mean, we’ll link to the Rolling Stone piece and also, Andy, anything else that you would like linked for people who want to check it out at tim.blog/coca. I mean, coca has been of incredible interest to me for decades now. It is of such cultural importance. It is of ecological importance.

Wade Davis: Economic importance.

Tim Ferriss: Economic importance. If you care about conservation, if you care about indigenous land rights, if you care about health and performance, period. Let’s say you don’t give a damn about what happens in South America, but you just say, “Wow, I feel like pounded dogshit after three cups of coffee and then I can’t sleep at night and then I’m dependent and I have a headache when I try to stop.” It’s worth digging a little deeper and educating yourself on coca.

It may not be available tomorrow, may not be available next year, but it is deeply, deeply interesting and endlessly fascinating as a possible subject of or focus of experiments. So I will leave it at that for now. We can always, and I’m sure we’ll be chatting more via text, but thank you guys very much. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you, Wade, that people can find you at daviswade.com. Is that right?

Wade Davis: Yep, that’s my website.

Tim Ferriss: That’s the main place. Anywhere else you would like to point people? We’ve got Wade Davis official on Instagram, X, @authorwadedavis.

Wade Davis: I think people would be intrigued by the book One River, which is really an account of Tim and I and coca and Schultes.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a great book. It is a great book.

Wade Davis: That book, in particular, would open people’s eyes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Perfect. All right. Check out One River, folks. Everybody — 

Andrew Weil: And again, we’re grateful for your support.

Wade Davis: Very much so.

Andrew Weil: I think it can make a big difference.

Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.

Wade Davis: Thanks so much, Tim.

Andrew Weil: Very grateful.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I love — this is important stuff and it’s also, while I have this, before AI gobbles every podcast, I would like to surface subjects that are of importance that have not yet been reputationally de-risked, right? I don’t have to report to any corporate overlord who can fire me or throttle my sponsors or whatever it might be. So I have the incredible accidental luxury of being able to, and joy, of being able to have these conversations with folks like the two of you who are bringing in decades of expertise and research.

So always appreciate the time. Always nice to see you both. And for people listening, as always, show notes. Check it out, tim.blog/coca, C-O-C-A. We’ll go straight to this episode and give you more information on where you can learn more. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than as necessary to others and to yourself. Compassion, oh, yeah, that applies to yourself too. Don’t forget that. And as always, thanks for tuning in.

---

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring the Many Benefits of Coca with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis (#871) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.