← The Tim Ferriss Show
The Tim Ferriss Show
#838: The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello
01:51:56
Loading summary
Transcript382 lines
- [00:00]
A
Kevkev. Good to see you.
- [00:02]
B
Tim.
- [00:03]
A
Tim.
- [00:03]
B
Another episode of the Random Show.
- [00:05]
A
Glad to be back. Another episode of the Random Show. You look very dashing for people who can't see you. You have sort of hair, slicked back jacket with wide open lapels reminiscent of a leather jacket. You look like a leading man from the Outsiders, that movie back in the day. You just need a cigarette in your pocket and some other goodies. But you're looking good. Looking good. You also have, as you disclosed to me, your secret weapon nearby, an IKEA light that is providing very seductive shadows and contours on your face. So well done.
- [00:40]
B
I think we're both kind of hacking it together today.
- [00:43]
A
Yeah, today has been putting together the boxcar on the way down the hill, in a sense, from an equipment standpoint. But here we are.
- [00:50]
B
Here we are.
- [00:51]
A
Made it.
- [00:52]
B
Now.
- [00:52]
A
You asked me to grab a glass of wine, which I didn't. I ended up grabbing a glass of gin. Caledonia Spirits, Bar Hill gin for anybody who's curious. I do like my gin. B A R R Hill. But this might surprise people. And it surprised me because last time we spoke, I think you had hit, what was it, six months or however long it was, six months sober. So what is unfolding before our very eyes?
- [01:25]
B
Well, what's unfolding is a glass of.
- [01:26]
A
Champagne is what's unfolding.
- [01:28]
B
But I will say that I almost made it to seven months, but then I just decided my original goal was three months. Then I made it to six, and was I going to continue to go on like this? And I had hung out with some friends. We had a dinner in San Francisco, and I thought, you know, I'm going to have a glass of vino. I'm just going to have a glass of wine because I don't want to make this. There was a great book, you know, the book Awareness, which you've recommended to me.
- [01:54]
A
It's one of my favorites. I have one of my many copies downstairs right now.
- [01:59]
B
Yeah. So Anthony d', Mello, Jesuit priest. Correct. Is that right?
- [02:03]
A
Jesuit priest, who is also a psychotherapist, who has now since passed, but incredibly, incredibly compelling writing. I'm sure we'll get more into this because I listened to the audiobook you recommended. So we'll come back to that. Cool.
- [02:18]
B
Awesome.
- [02:18]
A
But. All right, so take us back to the story you were telling. So you're sitting there at dinner.
- [02:23]
B
Well, prior to that, I had re. Listened to that book and I got it on audio. And one of the things that hit me that he said in the book was.
- [02:31]
A
I know what it was. Can I guess?
- [02:33]
B
Yeah, you do? Yeah, go for it.
- [02:35]
A
That abstinence or asceticism, renunciation is as much a trap, or can be as much a trap as anything else, because it ties you. It binds you to the thing that you are abstaining from. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
- [02:49]
B
It makes it your lifelong enemy and it binds you to it.
- [02:54]
A
And so you're like, fuck it.
- [02:56]
B
Yolo.
- [02:56]
A
Let's have some wine.
- [02:58]
B
Well, I want to be bound to it. And I did that with a glass of wine.
- [03:02]
A
Break those chance.
- [03:03]
B
Yeah, exactly. The plan was never to be sober for life. It was to reevaluate my relationship with alcohol and get to a point where I could truly say to anyone that asks, like, the cravings have gone away. And my goal going forward is something I just call the two, two, two rule, which is maximum of two drinks in any given night, never two days in a row, and then two days a week. So just lightweight. That's kind of my new thing. And then also special occasions, like, I want it to be about a celebration of something or a gathering in some way that is meaningful to, not just because a football game's on or something.
- [03:45]
A
Well, first I have more to say, but cheers. I have my little Japanese mug full of Bar Hill gin. Cheers.
- [03:52]
B
Wait, wait. Straight up gin.
- [03:55]
A
That's just straight gin. I didn't have any ice. You've inspired me to cut way back on my drinking. So I haven't really had much. I don't want to open a bottle of wine that I'm not going to finish with friends or something.
- [04:05]
B
Yeah, I mean, you'll finish a bottle of gin.
- [04:07]
A
So I just grabbed what I had open with, which will stay good for a long while once open, which was this gin. So I'm not going to drink a full glass of gin, but I will have a sippers with you.
- [04:17]
B
I think we're both going to be cheap dates. Maybe then because we haven't drank in a while, we might get really sloppy, really fast.
- [04:23]
A
Yeah, very, very cheap dates. So let me follow up on this story and the two, two, two plan. How are you intending, if at all, to catch yourself if you start slipping? Do you have people who you want to hold you accountable? Do you have some type of calendar reminder in place? How do you keep an eye on that, recognizing that you may very well be totally fine, but given the history that you have, it seems like it would be a good idea to put some guardrails in there.
- [04:55]
B
I Agree with you wholeheartedly. If my issue with alcohol had been one of excess consumption, in that I was never a six or seven drink or even five drink person. For me, it was more consistency. So the one that is easier to catch is you wake up the next morning and you say, okay, I'm just not drinking tonight because you're catching it in a sober state, which is huge. The big foul that I had over the last few years, especially with COVID was just two drinks a night, maybe three, and just continuing that and taking a day or two off a week. That's not healthy, as my liver enzymes would report back. But I'm not as concerned about that. But also, I've talked to my therapist about this and she's amazing and she's like, hey, I'm going to check in with you and just make sure that you're truly sticking to this. But I think an accountability partner is absolutely a necessity, especially when it's been such a staple of your life for decades.
- [05:51]
A
Yeah, for sure. And I think for you, one thing that immediately hops to mind, which seems super mundane, but I know you have a lot of anxiety around flying and I don't think that flying counts as a special occasion. Right. So you'll need to.
- [06:03]
B
Oh, it absolutely does. It absolutely does.
- [06:05]
A
Like, that counts as a special.
- [06:07]
B
You fly so much, though, we are in the air. Like, we shouldn't be able to do that as humans. Like, it is an amazing feat of engineering. So, yes, it's special.
- [06:17]
A
Tim.
- [06:18]
B
Don't take this away from me. God damn it.
- [06:20]
A
All right, well, this is my one thing. I'm going to call that a yellow flag in the making, but I'm fine.
- [06:27]
B
With one yellow flag. I do fly a bit. But you know what's funny is when I came back from sfo, when I actually had that first drink, I didn't want a second drink on the plane. And it's honestly, it's kind of that just like anxiety of the whole process of it all, the security and the packed jets and the people coughing next to you and kind of once I get settled, I'm pretty good, unless it's international flight and I'm with friends. So, yeah, I think it's. The first drink actually goes a long way.
- [06:54]
A
Yeah. On that note, first drink goes a long way, especially if it's just straight up gin. So where else should we segue? Because we can come back to this, but we have a lot to catch up on.
- [07:04]
B
So much to catch up on. Why don't we just go back and forth and just have it be old school random show where everything's random. We have no idea what we're about to talk about.
- [07:11]
A
Yeah, let's go for it. So I'll share an update on my side which folks might find interesting. As you know and long term listeners know. I have been one way you could put it, as an early adopter, looking at bioelectric medicine of different types, whether that is legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. By the way, there aren't many options that would fall in that category. Interviewing people like Dr. Kevin Tracy, but also looking at most acutely, transcranial magnetic stimulation. So tms, which is a form of brain stimulation, I'll keep it simple. That has existed for decades. But there was an innovation by the very recently late Nolan Williams, sadly and others called accelerated TMS, where you basically take something like 50 stimulations, like 50 different sessions and you compress it into one week as opposed to doing it over the course of many months. And this type of dense dosing schedule produces some, in many people, incredible effects. And you saw me after my first experience of accelerated tms, which was with a device called Magventure device. It uses neurotargeting. So you need a resting state FMRI and so on to determine where they're actually going to place this stimulation, depending on your condition and your own individual neuroanatomy and activity. So if it's depression, they might point it in one direction or in one place. If it's anxiety or ocd, they might point it somewhere else. And I effectively had, let's just call it 8 or 9 out of 10 kind of resting state generalized anxiety.
- [08:53]
B
Was this self reported? Meaning, like when you went in there to get the resting state scan, were you like, hey, I'm coming in here with ED and general anxiety. I need you to treat this for me. Did you send them? Yeah, yeah, I know it's an issue, but I just keep. Oh, we can cut this if you want. We can cut this.
- [09:11]
A
Nice, nice. Very, very cute.
- [09:16]
B
No, but all joking aside, like how did you, how did you determine the areas? Did you have to tell them, like, this is what I'm coming in to treat?
- [09:24]
A
Oh, for sure. Well, they'd run you through. They do interviews and assessments that are qualitative, let's just say asking you what your symptoms are, why are you coming here in the first place? Then they would dig into the details and then they would run you through various standardized tests or assessments. So you might have the Madras, you might have the Hamd, you might have the Y box. There are different assessments that are accepted as standardized for diagnosing, say, OCD or any number of other psychiatric conditions. And then you get an fmri, so you get this scan of your brain, which I did at I think it was Mass General in Massachusetts, as you would guess. And based on that, they can do some precision targeting. And just to give people the upshot of that, I did five days of stimulations, and that gave me basically three to four months of effectively a zero on a scale of zero to ten of generalized anxiety. So from that point forward, effectively no anxiety, the rumination, the kind of anxious mental loops that I would get involved with late at night that would then in turn affect my sleep and cause onset insomnia, et cetera. That went to zero for a period of, say, three to four months, which blew my mind.
- [10:53]
B
Just out of curiosity, were you tracking aura data and whatnot so you could see kind of the impact of this as measured by different devices?
- [10:59]
A
I wasn't looking at aura at that point in time. I have been tracking with aura at least for the last three to four weeks. And so I'm going to be taking a closer look at things like HRV and so on in terms of trending. But the upshot of it is, and I'll try to compress this a little bit, but that first time I did accelerated tms, I had this incredible effect, much more durable in terms of its intensity of effect and relief than even any psychedelic therapy or psychedelic assisted therapy that I've looked into. And those were effectively ended up being the two modalities with the greatest, biggest effect size on the psychiatric conditions that I was most personally interested in and where I funded a lot of early stage science. Unfortunately, when I then went to do boosters to do shorter duration, two or three days, nothing happened. My symptoms started creeping back in, which seemed to be hereditary. Just to put that out there, I recognize objectively, I'm like, there isn't really anything I should be so anxious about. I recognize that very clearly. Nonetheless, I get caught in these sort of OCD gad, generalized anxiety disorder loops, and I see that in family members. So it seems to be somewhat genetic. In any case, none of these boosters worked. And then I was like, fuck, this is terrible. Okay, well, let me go back and do the full five days. Full five days, didn't do anything. And then I was looking back at the calendar and trying to identify anything that might have correlated or preceded the first treatment that helped make it work. Did see that I'd spent a few weeks in the Amazon, ending about two weeks prior to that treatment. So since I was ingesting plants of various types that are known to induce some degree of neuroplasticity, I thought, well, it could be that it was a plasticity issue, sort of a preconditioning that helped that first session. So I tried to replicate that using psilocybin and did another five days null effect. Didn't have any effect and was starting to feel really hopeless about this, but then came across some research that this is going to sound pretty wild. And this is definitely early, early, early stages. So to my knowledge, I am maybe one out of fewer than 100 people who have been one of the first monkeys shot into space doing this specifically for anxiety. It has been applied to more people with depression, but decided to try.
- [13:35]
Simultaneous dosing with something called D cycloserine in parentheses, dcs. So, D cycloserine, D C, Y C L O S E R I N E is very, very interesting. So it is an antibiotic that historically has been used to treat tuberculosis and urinary tract inf. But it is also now being studied. And for the last several years, people have been looking at this as a cognitive enhancer for treating various neuropsychiatric conditions.
- [14:12]
B
Wow.
- [14:12]
A
Now, how they figured this out, I'm not sure. I mean, it could have been working backwards through the purported mechanism of action. So D cycloserine has been looked at in conjunction with, say, cbt, like cognitive behavioral therapy and all sorts of different things. And part of what people believe makes it effective as an amplifier of effects, although there can be side effects and sometimes the pendulum swings. The other direction is that it is a partial agonist at the glycine binding site of the NMDA glutamate receptor. Now, ketamine also works on NMDA receptors, but it's an antagonist, so it's very different in that respect. But I will again try to cut to the punchline. So instead of doing five days, I did one day, just one day of basically a stimulation every hour, on the hour for 10 hours, and preloaded with a lozenge that you just let it melt in your mouth with this D cycloserine. And it worked. One day it had some side effects. I had insomnia for about two weeks, which seems to happen in some patients who have undergone this. Some people have really bad insomnia for a month and then it goes away. And I was willing to take that risk. There's some other things that can crop up, like temporary loss of some fine Motor control and some other weird stuff.
- [15:36]
B
Jesus.
- [15:37]
A
Tinnitus in some people. Wow.
- [15:39]
B
With just the treatment in general, the papers that you're signing and say this may happen.
- [15:44]
A
Yeah. I mean, with any of this stuff, you're writing your life away with some signatures.
- [15:49]
B
Frontier stuff.
- [15:50]
A
Yeah. Yeah. But the point that I'm trying to make here in a pretty long winded way is, number one, it worked. So that leads me to believe that the original hypothesis that it was around neuroplasticity, so I needed to, like, warm up the play doh. Before it could be molded properly. Could be accurate. That could be true. Secondly, and this is incredibly important, most people I know who are really busy, or most people who can't afford it can't take five days off of work. They can't take a week off of work to do this treatment, no matter how bad their symptoms might be. And the fact that this decycloserine, like DCS enhanced treatment, was able to be compressed into a single day, I feel like it opens up the multitude of people who can potentially use this tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousand fold, who knows? And it should also, at the same time, really decrease the cost. So it's made me even more bullish around accelerated tms. And it's been. I'd have to go back and look maybe a month, six weeks, but it's still sticking, which is remarkable. So, in any case, for people who want to hear more, they can listen to my podcast with Nolan Williams that goes into a lot of detail around this, but very exciting stuff. It turns out a lot of these things might be interrelated and that certain types of tms, when implemented properly, actually seem to also stimulate the vagus nerve in some interesting ways. So this is kind of the next frontier that I'm most interested in exploring right now is bioelectric medicine. Sort of computer chips over pills and so on. I think it allows you, in some respects, to get much more targeted. So that's good news for me. But I think it's also obviously at the edges of medicine right now. But I think that in the next two to three years, I could see this becoming a much more accessible therapeutic for millions of people. And there's some companies you can watch. I mentioned one, Magventure or Magventures. The other is called Brainsway, and they're actually a very small company, but publicly traded. And I'm sure there are going to be more entrants. So super exciting stuff. But now I feel like I have a recipe worth trying to replicate where maybe once a quarter, maybe twice a year depending on when. I think it's a when, not if I see symptoms start to creep back in. I don't think this is a one and done nor is any psychedelic assisted therapy that I'm aware of. So I expect it'll be some type of ongoing treatment that I do one to four times per year.
- [18:39]
Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. You know that move when you hold your phone at an arm's length just to try to read a message? You squint, you try to get even further away. Does that sound familiar? If so, you may have presbyopia or age related blurry near vision. Luckily we now have an option beyond reading glasses. I suffer from presbyopia. It is not fun. So I'm excited to introduce you to this episode's sponsor, Closei Qlosi, an FDA approved prescription eye drop designed to improve your near vision and help you see things up close more clearly with once or twice daily dosing packaged in single dose vials. Closely fits into your routine and is ready to when you need it. In clinical studies, people could read letters in the eye chart equivalent to reading menus, recipes and phone screens with fast acting near vision improvement often starting in just 20 minutes. Most side effects and studies were mild and short lived, including eye discomfort and headaches in 5 to 8% of users. So give those readers a break and ask your eye doctor if Closei is right for you. Visit Closei.com Tim to find an eye doctor along with full prescribing information. That's Q L o S I.
- [19:56]
One more time Q L-O-S-I.com Tim Sleep is the key to it all. It is the foundation. Many of you heard me talk about how today's sponsor, Eight Sleep has improved my sleep with its Pod Cover. The Pod 5 introduces Eight Sleep's latest product, the Blanket, which uses the same technology as the pod's cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body. On average, members report the pod has helped them fall asleep 44% faster, 34% deeper sleep, and given them up to one added hour of sleep each night. Also, the pod snoring detection and automatic elevating platform have reduced user snoring by 45%. You'll also get a personalized report each morning, allowing you to track your sleep stages, heart rate, variability, respiratory rate and more, all without having any devices strapped onto you. And from now until December 31, listeners get $400 off the Pod5 Ultra you can try it at home for 30 days and return it if you don't like it, just go to eightsleep.com.
- [20:58]
For $400 off shipping is available to many countries worldwide. 8 sleep.com Tim.
- [21:08]
B
When you think of the potential N of 1 inability to replicate this again in others. I know you put a lot of cash personally into philanthropic things around research and studies. Are you curious to push on these buttons and see can you put together a trial with, with 50 people and what's your thoughts there?
- [21:28]
A
Yeah, I would definitely be interested in funding more research. The brain Stimulation lab at Stanford. I've already funded some research within. Very sadly Nolan Williams, who helped develop a lot of these technologies died. I mean, I want to say it was a month or two ago by suicide. Very sadly.
- [21:46]
B
Oh geez.
- [21:48]
A
And he was a friend and.
- [21:53]
Really heartbreaking to see. And I mean it's hard to put that aside for the moment, but putting it aside for the moment I did fund research within that lab. I suspect that's going to take time to implement, particularly given the leadership vacuum that was created by his very, very tragic death. But I am interested in funding more research and this is an ongoing thing. As you know, my foundation, the Saisei foundation has funded all sorts of on the edge research since 2015 or so I would say. So this is for sure where I would like to fund more research, particularly looking at these combinations. And that could be something like D cycloserine plus stimulation. And at certain clinics they have cohorts of say 60. I think it's at the time that I did it, there were 60 patients who had been treated for some form of anxiety disorder with this combination. I think that at least at that particular clinic on the depression side, the numbers are larger, probably 200 or so. But it's exciting, it's exciting and that's enough to get a signal. And sure you need to check all the boxes and do the randomized placebo controlled studies with multiple arms and all that, but it is enough to start to see a signal, especially when you have treatment resistant cases that haven't responded to other things. And that's enough to inform at least the design of a study that would take much longer. So we'll see. I will say that much like some people experience with GLP1 agonists like tirzepatide, mounjaro or Ozempic or whatever after these treatments and maybe it's just from really putting the brakes on a lot of the OCD like circuitry that I had much less Desire to over consume caffeine, to over consume alcohol. It made dialing all of those things back a lot easier.
- [23:59]
B
You know, that's a massive benefit of GLP1s for a lot of people, which is huge. Well, dude, I'm pumped for you, man. It's like I'd love to see you getting some relief here. That's even if just for a few months. And that's fantastic. It's repeatable.
- [24:12]
A
Yeah, yeah. So fingers crossed. We'll see. And for people who want to learn more, I would suggest they start with. As eerie as it might be, my conversation on the podcast with Nolan Williams. All right, man, you're up. All right.
- [24:25]
B
Speaking of brain related things, I was at a dinner with a friend and I was kind of lamenting and talking about just my inability to remember faces, names and then how that extended into childhood for me, which was doing poorly on tests. And just I couldn't quite retain the information the way that my friends could.
- [24:48]
A
I just could never explain it.
- [24:50]
B
And somebody at dinner, my buddy Mal said to me, do you have aphantasia? And I said, I have no idea what that is. And then he said, okay, I want you to close your eyes right now. And this is going to blow some people's minds right now. I know. Close your eyes and picture an apple in your mind's eye. You know, picture an apple.
- [25:11]
A
What do you see?
- [25:12]
B
Do you see a red apple? Do you see water droplets on it? Does it look fresh? Does it look like an HD image? And that's what he said to me. I go, what are you talking about? And he goes, well, what does it look like to you? And I go, there's no apple. He goes, what do you mean there's no apple? And I said, well, there's kind of like an outline, kind of ghosty, foggy thing, maybe ish. And he goes, oh, you have aphantasia. And I was immediately jumped, like, you know, whatever. ChatGPT. And I had no idea that people suffer from this condition. And it's in the low single digit percentage of people and they have no idea that this is a thing where you cannot picture something in your mind's eye. Had you heard of this before or no?
- [25:54]
A
No, I hadn't. Until you dropped it in one of our group kind of friend text threads. This was, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, but Fantasia is spelled like the Disney movie. But actually no, that would with an F. It's Aphantasia. A P H A N T A S, I, A. Yeah. Is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images first described in 1880.
- [26:19]
B
So you knew this was like, when you close your eyes, what do you see? Because they give you a scale there, and a 5 is like an HD full on beautiful apple. What do you see? Do you see perfect quality apple?
- [26:31]
A
So Aphantasia can be considered the opposite of hyper fantasia. I am the exact opposite. I have hyper visual recall and the ability to visualize. I can probably draw the vast majority of restaurants or the floor plans that I've ever visited. I can absolutely spec it out and have very, very vivid visualization. So I would be on the far other end of the spectrum.
- [27:02]
B
So when you think of a new idea, do you see it? In some ways, because I feel it.
- [27:08]
A
You are very similar to my friend Mike, because I remember Mike and I have a lot of shared flight time with psychedelic experiences. And he was describing how he has almost no visual imagery and it's almost purely kinesthetic for him. And that is as hard for me to imagine as it is for him to imagine my experience, which is overwhelmingly, explosively visual.
- [27:34]
B
What's crazy, dude, is how many things.
- [27:36]
A
I thought were jokes.
- [27:37]
B
Like when people said they counted sheep before they went to bed, I was like, oh, that's funny. What do you count numbers in your head? But I didn't know they see sheep.
- [27:48]
I didn't know. And if you're younger, mute the podcast for 10 seconds. I didn't know the spank bank was a real bank you could visit.
- [27:58]
I didn't even know that was a thing.
- [28:02]
I seriously.
- [28:02]
A
Well, to be clear, it's not a bank with, like, tellers and.
- [28:05]
B
No, but it is in your head.
- [28:06]
A
Boxes in your head.
- [28:08]
B
You can open up the box and go back and, like, see that. I can't see any of that.
- [28:17]
My buddy from dignation podcast was like, after we stopped recording, he's like, you got to be kidding me. So you can't go back and, like, look at, like, you know, people you've dated in the past during intimate moments and see revisualize that? I'm like, no, I have no idea.
- [28:28]
A
What you're talking about.
- [28:29]
B
He's like, oh, he felt so bad for me. He almost, like, was almost starting to cry for me. It's horrible.
- [28:36]
A
It's horrible. Well, what do you think you have, if anything, kind of developed in compensation of that?
- [28:44]
B
Well, the one thing that I have never been able to explain is that the feeling side of it, everything is a feeling. So I have a friend of mine, and I'm not this way, but she composes music and she said that she sees in her head music is represented as colors. So when I come up with ideas for projects, I'm not seeing something. I'm traversing kind of a feeling of a path rather than a visual thing. And so it's a lot more on. It's funny you mentioned the fear of flying. I think part of the reason why I have such a vivid fear of flying is the feeling comes so strong of the plane crashing. Not that I see the plane crashing, so it's just a different thing. But I wouldn't trade that for the world. That has served me quite well in investing and seeing around corners early and things of that nature. But when I explain that to people, you feel a new idea. There's been a bunch of people that have no idea what I'm talking about and some that can't. I think you can probably have both. But new ideas come from a rising of feeling, not visual, if that makes sense.
- [29:45]
A
Wild. I mean, it doesn't really make sense to me, but it would make sense to my friend Mike. And thinking about all this and hearing about your friend, who I think you said sees musical notes as colors, that's often referred to as synesthesia. And there's a really amazing little book that I read ages ago. It's been around for a long time. I'm looking at it right now. It was published in 1987, but it's 192 pages. Anyone who's interested in memory and mind and the vast differences between people might be interested in this. It's called the mind of a mnemonist. I think is how it's pronounced. Like mnemonic device. M N E M O N I S T. A little book about a vast memory. The. The author's name is A.R. those are initials, A R Luria L U R I A. And the description is very short, so I'll just read it. This study explores the inner world of a rare human phenomenon. A man who is endowed with virtually limitless powers of memory. From his intimate knowledge of S the Neimanus gained from conversations and testing over a period of almost 30 years, Ar Luria is able to reveal in rich detail not only the obvious strengths of S's astonishing memory, but also his surprising weaknesses. His crippling inability to forget, his pattern of reacting passively to life, and his uniquely handicapped personality. Fascinating, fascinating book that I really recommend to people. But Aphantasia, who knew?
- [31:11]
B
You know who I should talk to is Josh Waitzkin, because didn't he say that he feels chess. And for people that don't know, he was the guy that was based on the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.
- [31:21]
A
Yeah. Searching for Bobby Fischer was originally a book and then a movie which was based on the childhood chess prodigy chapters of Josh Waitzkin's life. And Josh hates that term, prodigy. He has some unusual hardware, to be sure, but he also has a really incredible framework that he's applied to now four or five different fields to become world class in all of them. But he does have a feeling about certain things. So he was playing. One of the stories that he has told me is he was playing a simulator, which means he was playing, I don't know what the number was, 20 to 40 people simultaneously, where he's walking around a room. Oh, yeah.
- [32:03]
B
You do it really fast, right? You just look at it.
- [32:05]
A
Yeah, he's just moving from table to table really quickly. And I think it was with some very high level high school players, something like that. Maybe they were younger, I can't recall. But he was going around, he's playing 20 or 30 simultaneous games in his head. And then at one point he explained it as, it feels like you're juggling 20 or 30 balls in the air. And then he got to one table and he felt all the balls come crashing to the ground. My God. And he said, it felt as though I just missed a ball and they'd all fallen on the ground. And he couldn't quite figure out why that was the case. And then he was able to deduce that one of the kids had cheated. One of the kids had.
- [32:45]
B
No way.
- [32:47]
A
And it was just a gut feeling and then that visual that allowed him to figure out which of the kids had cheated. It's just insane. Holy crap. People can't even do that. Josh. Yeah. If you want to listen to Josh Waitzkin's first ever podcast, you were podcast episode number one and he was podcast episode number two, if I remember. That's amazing. Yeah. Wild character. Oh, man. Let's see.
- [33:12]
B
All right, you're up.
- [33:15]
A
Well, I'll give another sort of medical one that I think is interesting. And I've been texting and interacting with Matt Walker a lot on this. Matt is a scientist. He wrote a book, why We Sleep, and is about as credible as you can be within the world of sleep science.
- [33:35]
B
He's the best. And he's a great human. Fantastic.
- [33:37]
A
He's a great guy. Great guy. Has the most pleasing dulcet tones with that British accent and kind lilt in the voice.
- [33:46]
B
Plus 10 IQ. Accent, basically, yeah.
- [33:49]
A
Plus 10 or 20 IQ points with the accent. But his podcast is also excellent and we can link to it in the show notes. But he did an episode on a class of sleep medication called Doras. And D O R A stands for dual orexin receptor antagonists. And the reason that Dora's became very interesting to me is that I have Alzheimer's in my family.
- [34:14]
And it's left, right and center for me right now because I have three relatives currently diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
- [34:20]
B
Holy shit. And these are APOE4 negative folks.
- [34:24]
A
It includes APOE4 negative folks. So we won't get too far into the genetics, but people who should not be based on that particular.
- [34:34]
Parameter should not be particularly inclined to Alzheimer's, nonetheless have Alzheimer's. And then there are of course, people who have 3, 4. I don't think any of them are APOE 3.3i vapo e3 for. So compare it to a 3, 3 that, at least as I understand it, would Predispose me, say 2.5 times you.
- [34:54]
B
And my wife and Rhonda, Patrick and Atia. Two actually is a 3 4.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah, there you go.
- [34:59]
B
All of you guys. I'm the only one that's not crazy.
- [35:02]
A
So, in effect, to our current understanding, you want to mitigate the accumulation of two things. One is beta amyloid plaque. Another is tangles that are created by tau proteins. And sleep is really imperative for this. And if you have sleep issues, as I have for decades, the onset insomnia, low percentage of deep sleep, et cetera, you're effectively unable to have your garbage service within the brain clear out these at a rate that offsets the accumulation.
- [35:38]
B
And by the way, we don't know if these are causal. Right? There's never been any conclusion whether these are causal. They're most likely the protective effects of some. Something else gone awry. Do you agree with that?
- [35:47]
A
I would say that based on our best understanding, if you can mitigate the accumulation of these things, there seems to be, at the very least, delaying of the progression of these diseases. And there are different drugs, infusions like Donanemab and so on, that are kind of predicated on that understanding of the mechanism. This is still early days in the world of Alzheimer's, but it seems very defensible with our understanding currently that the less of this stuff you accumulate, the better off you are.
- [36:18]
B
Do you follow Dale Bredesen's work, by the way?
- [36:21]
A
I don't. Let's come back to that. Okay, let me just quickly tie this up and say that an Example of Adora would be Belsomra. There are many others. Or I should say a handful of others. But I have taken, as I believe you have. Well, actually, no, it was too strong. I gave you some, dude. Yeah, that's right. You gave me the Bell Sorrow.
- [36:40]
B
I gave you a bunch of Bellsomera, and you were going to give me some other shit back, and you never gave me anything good.
- [36:44]
A
Well, hold on, hold on. That's still pending, but let me. Let me come back. So you gave me the Balsamra, but I started using it. I was going to get it on a prescription. It's expensive as fuck.
- [36:53]
B
Yeah. I paid a ton for it, and then I didn't use it.
- [36:56]
A
Yeah. And I was like, all right, I'll take your Balsam. But the Trazodone, I got off of Trazodone and switched as a sleep medication to, in this case, Belsoma, because it was literally down the street in an Uber at your house. Not recommending you use your friend's bootleg drugs, by the way. Talk to your doctor.
- [37:14]
B
But we also have physicians that are looking at all our shit, so it's not.
- [37:17]
A
Yeah, yeah. I have been now on Belsomer for a few months as hopefully a. It's too strong to say it's a preventative strategy, but at least a delay strategy for potentially Alzheimer's and other associated neurodegenerative conditions. So I would encourage people, and I'll link to this in the show notes, to check out Matt Walker's podcast on this.
- [37:39]
B
Specifically, you know, what they did with Belsommer, where they tapped the spines of people that took it and they noticed there was less tau in the proteins in the spinal fluid.
- [37:47]
A
Yeah, they cleared a lot more. I mean, I think it was. They looked at animal models and then they looked at humans. And in that podcast episode, also, Matt discusses data related to comparing, say, Belsomera, or I should say Dora's to Ambien. And not all sleep medications are created equal. A lot of sleep medications effectively sedate you. But in the case of Dora's Orexin, as I understand it, is a wakefulness. I think it's a hormone. But this is effectively inhibiting wakefulness as opposed to sedating.
- [38:24]
B
And.
- [38:25]
A
And by using that particular approach, you're able to create more naturalistic sleep. So it's preserving sleep architecture, increasing certain things like REM sleep. In any case, it's very interesting because as it stands, look, sure, exercise for natural release of Clotho, watch your diet, blah, blah, blah. There are a handful of things Here sleep super critically important.
- [38:52]
If we're talking about again, staving off, hopefully neurodegenerative disease. But there really just aren't that many tools in the toolkit. So to come across some of this data via Matt Walker was very eye opening to me.
- [39:05]
B
That's awesome.
- [39:06]
A
That's also something that I'm looking at really closely.
- [39:08]
B
I will say the scariest test I have done in my life was about three months ago. I went and had my blood work done and had the towel, the full on. You can check your blood now to see if you are producing. We're always producing it. But if you are out of bounds, meaning you're above the norm in your production of these types of proteins. And if you are, it's like, you know, 99 chance you're on the path to some form of dementia. Right. And did you do that test?
- [39:36]
A
I have just done a whole battery of different tests.
- [39:41]
B
Did you do the P tau one though?
- [39:43]
A
Yeah, I'm gonna have all that stuff. So I will.
- [39:45]
B
Scary dude. When you. Yeah, come hang with me. We'll have a drink or something.
- [39:50]
A
I'm looking at all my results in probably or three weeks because I have a few online batteries that I'm going to do assessments.
- [39:56]
B
It is absolutely terrifying because the doctor was like, hey, do you want to do this? I have this available. And I was like, sure, go ahead. And then three days afterwards I'm like, I should look up what that test is all about. And there's three of them now that can detect these various proteins that are essentially, if you have elevated levels, you're marching orders or you're heading towards some type of dementia. And I realized that and I was like, wow, if this comes back positive, this is an emergency situation where high intensity interval training every single morning for an hour. There's a lot of things you have to get into and it's a very frightening thing. It's a very frightening thing.
- [40:31]
A
Yeah, it can be super frightening. And there's certain other things that I think are just holistically good for my particular goals. Cognitive, psychological, physical. Like the ketogenic diet. Right. I recently did a podcast with David Baszucki, the co founder and CEO of Roblox. And he and his wife have a foundation that is one of the large. It is the largest funder of science related to metabolic therapies with a particular focus on ketogenic therapy. So I will be doing all of December in ketosis as an example.
- [41:10]
B
Oh, that's amazing.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah. Just to keep that metabolic machinery humming because I do think it's plausible that it could help long term with a lot of the stuff we're talking about.
- [41:21]
B
So, Tim, real quick, just to put a bow on this. Dale. Yes. So the reason I like Dale, Dale's a scientist that studies all forms of dementia. And he has a book called the End of Alzheimer's. You've probably heard of that book.
- [41:31]
A
It's pretty popular. I've come across his name. Yeah.
- [41:34]
B
Yeah. So he's a little bit different than most of the scientists out there where he believes that Alzheimer's and these other dimensions, they're not just a kind of one size fits all, one thing went wrong. But it can be a suite of different things that go wrong that lead you down this path. And so it's metabolic disorder, it's potential toxins, it's like, I think he's like the four major contributors to different various forms of dementia. And he's developed this protocol that can stabilize and even reverse a lot of this early cognitive decline if you catch it early enough. And it's a little bit of throwing the whole kitchen sink at it because it's everything. And he's not quite sure exactly what is doing the fix here, but it's fascinating the research that he's done. I highly recommend two things that stood out to me that he recommends is one, getting this P Tau test done on the blood front and also recommends the ketogenic diet. These ketogenic diet is huge for people and he's seen that alone stabilize people from mental decline. And not that they're not eventually going to get it, but the point is like, do you want to go into full decline within five years or do you want it to be 15 years? Right. And so that's kind of what his lab's focused on.
- [42:44]
A
Cool. Yeah, I'll check them out. I mean, I've seen, not that this is a necessarily sustainable or scalable approach, but with some of my relatives with Alzheimer's, where it's pretty progressed, and they tend to give one word answers or get confused and give the wrong answer to questions, giving them, say, 35 milliliters of exogenous ketones. So they're not in ketosis, they're following the terrible diet they've always followed, but give them 35 milliliters of kind of high octane exogenous ketones before going for a walk. And within 30 minutes, they're speaking in full sentences.
- [43:24]
B
It's wild.
- [43:25]
A
You see some really wild, temporary, but nonetheless very interesting transformations. Which comes back to what you said about metabolic syndrome and their There are good reasons why some folks refer to Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes 100% and.
- [43:39]
B
That'S what he says in his book. He's like that is definitely a contributor like excess glucose levels and all the downstream inflammation effects that come from that. It's Bad News Bears as you like to say. That's Tim Bears Bad News Bears.
- [43:56]
A
Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I am always on the hunt for protein sources that don't require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. And that's why I love the protein bars from today's sponsor David. They are my go to protein source on the run. I throw them in my bag whenever I am in doubt that I might be able to get a good source of protein. David has 28 grams of protein, 150 calories and 0 grams of sugar. And on top of that, David tastes great. Their bars come in six delicious flavors. They are all worth trying. Protein is also the most satiating macronutrient. What does that mean? It means that protein out of carbohydrates, fat and protein inhibits your appetite while also feeding all the things you want to feed, which helps you consume fewer calories throughout the day. You're less inclined to eat garbage. All of that contributes to fat loss and reducing the risk of various diseases. And now you guys. Listeners of the Tim Ferriss show who buy four boxes, get a fifth box for free. You can check it out. You can also buy one box at a time. Try them for yourself at davidprotein.com Tim Learn all about it. That's davidprotein.com Tim to get a free box with a four box purchase or simply learn more, check it out. Davidprotein.com Tim hey folks, Tim here. My best selling card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing team at Exploding Kittens, just won the Pop Insider Best geeky game of 2025 and also best stocking filler in the Made for Moms Toy Awards 2025. It is on sale everywhere. It's cheap. It's fast to learn, has 4.8 stars out of five. People are loving it. CoyoteGame.com will take you to all the retailers but you can find it everywhere. It is a game of thinking fast and laughing faster. Think charades meets hot Potato meets a bunch of brain fun. It's good for your head. It's perfect for families with kids age 10 plus or adults who are kids at heart or don't take themselves too seriously. A lot of adults love this game, and as I said, it's available everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target 8,000 plus retail locations, you name it. So please check it out. I loved making it. People are really enjoying it. It has 3 or 400 million plus social views of gameplay online. And try it, enjoy it this holiday season.
- [46:11]
B
Check it out.
- [46:11]
A
CoyoteGame.com one more time. That's CoyoteGame.com or anywhere you buy your games. Now back to the episode.
- [46:22]
All right, Kevin, what you got?
- [46:24]
B
I'm a technologist and we've talked about some of that stuff on the show before. So I kind of wanted to give people a quick little update on the State of the Union around all things AI.
- [46:33]
A
Yeah, please, I could use it too.
- [46:36]
B
Yeah, it's just such a fascinating time in that every. I'd call it four to eight weeks, maybe a slight bit longer, sometimes less. So we're seeing leapfrogs in what is possible. And one of the things that I would caution people against is forming an opinion about AI and then locking yourself in time around that opinion. Like, I'll give you a great kind of practical example. I have a lot of engineers that said, hey, I tried AI for code.
- [47:04]
A
It was horrible.
- [47:05]
B
And my first question is, when did you try it? And they said, oh, three months ago. And I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. It's three to four times better than it was three months ago.
- [47:14]
A
Right.
- [47:15]
B
And so we have to make sure that even if you are looking at some of these technologies and say, hey, it can't do X or it's horrible, it's hallucinating in this way, it's giving me the wrong answer. This is without a doubt the massive Motorola block phone version of the iPhone. We are in that realm of AI. Like, this is the very first innings of it all. And every few months, I mean, even Opus 4 or 5 came out three, four days ago or whatever, it's amazing.
- [47:44]
A
Explain what that is.
- [47:45]
B
Okay, so when you think about frontier models, meaning, like, do you have the bigs, anthropic, you've got Google, you've got OpenAI, and then I'd throw a couple others in there, Meta's kind of trying in some sense and perplexity and whatnot, but when you think about the big, big massive models that are running that are at the bleeding edge of all this, meaning they are the best of the best, the most expensive per query, what happens is they have to train these data sets and then they go in and they eventually release a model.
- [48:14]
A
Right?
- [48:14]
B
And these are typically marked by software Versioning numbers like, you know, ChatGPT3 versus ChatGPT4 versus ChatGPT5 and then they'll do 5, 1, 52 or you know, 4.142 or whatever. So it's like software kind of versioning on these models and whenever you see a new release, you're talking a jump in terms of both sometimes the capacity to understand information. And they call that like the token context windows. And then also they're just natural built in abilities of the things that they can do well. And so some things they can do at a graduate level now, some things they can do, you know, their novel ideas is still pretty low down the chain in terms of what they can do around original thinking. But they have all these benchmarks, they have probably 15 or 20 different benchmarks that they run it against. Like can it complete the bar exam is one. Right. And so now they're able to do it and then now the question is how quickly can they do it in. Right. Did it take them 25 minutes before? Now it's five minutes. So then there's a bunch of inference side of benchmarking as well. So we're seeing Gemini 3 came out just a couple weeks ago and it was fantastic. And I will say that, you know, I called Nvidia on here way back in the day, it was 1.8 trillion, I think back in the day when I said, hey, I think this is going to run when you and I were talking about it. And it did, because I knew GPUs were just going to be the most precious commodity we have as technologists. I have seen that Google now is in the driver's seat here and I'm really excited for them because one, I worked at Google, they acquired one of my companies and I spent a few years there and I've seen inside the belly of the beast. And I will tell you that they were built for this day and age. The fact that they've been training their entire life for this moment. Like they have all of the PhDs and all of the folks that they need to go pull this off across the entire suite. And so what do I mean by the entire suite? And this is where it gets really interesting, Tim. Like if you think about what OpenAI has to do to compete, they have to go and buy up as much data center space as possible and they have buy a shit ton of GPUs from Nvidia. That's what they need because they don't own the stack, they own the software, the training, the engineering, the Soft goods side of the business, but they don't own the hardware side. This is a fantastic, really interesting stat. When Gemini 3 came out a couple weeks ago, it was the first time they had trained a frontier model like the best of the best. When it dropped, it was the best model in the world. Exclusively on Google chips. So they have these chips called TPUs, tensor processing units. They have the full stack. Dude, they don't even need Nvidia. It's wild. They didn't use an Nvidia chip to train their AI and they have world class AI, so it's just really exciting. This is such a fun time to be alive because right now you can take someone that is a technologist in the sense that they have a, a rough understanding of the available tech that's out there and you could build and produce and ship any app that you want within a few days. Now with what we have and it's.
- [51:27]
A
Just going to get better and better.
- [51:28]
B
So the creativity and the shipping unlockments that we're about to see over the next five years is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen before. If you have the idea for an app or a product or a service, anything digital, you will be able to take it from ideation and you know, drawing it out on a piece of paper to actual shipping something to your customers within, you know, call it less than a week, which is just never been done before at a price that is, I don't know, $500. Right. And so if Tim wanted his own app five years ago, I'd have been like, okay, great, you want the Tim Ferriss fan site Ed Help app, then you could use it to build that. To build that had would be 50 grand. Right?
- [52:14]
A
I feel like you, and I feel like you have a problem that we need to talk about. You're just bringing it up so much after that half a glass of champers.
- [52:22]
B
I feel like it went straight to my head.
- [52:23]
A
Number one, turning into a mini confessional here.
- [52:26]
B
We need to talk about your relationships. Because one of the things that whenever I get on, I'm telling you, whenever we do a random show, people are always like, they send me a message. And they're like, I love how you give Tim shit. Number one. And number two, we want to hear more about his personal life. I know you've got a new special someone in your life.
- [52:43]
A
I do.
- [52:43]
B
Which I'm very excited for.
- [52:44]
A
Yeah, we can talk about that. Nice.
- [52:46]
B
Let's jump into that now that we've covered Google.
- [52:48]
A
Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to ask you for a counterpoint on a previous. I wouldn't call it necessarily a prediction, but we talked about, I think it was in the last episode of the random show a bit about venture capital. And I wouldn't say that you said across the board venture capital would be dead because there are capital intensive businesses that require hardware and build out and wet labs and all this stuff. But I'm wondering if I just put on my future vision goggles, which I wish I had, but let's just pretend I do and I look forward. It doesn't need to be five years, I look forward two years. And what you are describing is a reality. The barrier to entry, the hurdle is so low that suddenly from ideation to product takes a week and there is an absolute glut. This just overwhelming tsunami of products. Now on the positive side, yes, what would have cost people millions and millions of dollars to do 10 years ago, let's say 15 years ago, suddenly AWS and rentable infrastructure comes along, that cost goes down. Now AI comes along, cost further goes down. But I imagine the war for attention is going to get so incredibly expensive. Do you think that products that get traction will nonetheless, if they don't have the income stream to support it, raise venture capital purely for marketing war chest and customer acquisition. I'm just wondering if you think, think you could make the argument that the customer acquisition costs are going to get or user acquisition costs are going to get so high because everyone, you're going to have 100x the number of bidders now who knows what the forum will be. I don't know if it'll be Google AdWords, maybe it'll be something else. What are your thoughts?
- [54:44]
B
There's a couple things there. The best products I've ever invested in, period, full stop, have been ones that don't rely upon paid acquisition to grow. So they have come up with something that is unique and novel enough to where word of mouth is their number one driver. That said capital and deployed the right way and spent the right way around ad purchases is just fuel for the fire, which is great. And so VC is dead in the sense that the seed round was like okay, I have a kind of idea, ish. I'm going to go out and take $3 million and I'm going to give away 20% of my company. What happens in the future is not that you don't need that capital because I think you're right, you will need it for a variety of things. Like if you're hitting insane scale, there will be moments where you need to put more warm bodies in seats to help you do all the things. And you may need to raise venture, but the difference is when you have product market fit, you go from raising and selling 20% of your business for $3 million to selling 20% of your business for$15 million.
- [55:45]
A
Yeah.
- [55:45]
B
Which is just fantastic for the entrepreneur. So it's not that venture is dead, it's just that that what we're going to see is the entrepreneur is in control like they've never been before, which is fantastic. And if they say, okay, I'm off to the races and things are going so well, but guess what, I'm actually charging for my product and I'm break even, you don't ever have to raise VC and then now you own 100% of the business and you're Jason Fried, which we know is one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time, that invented SaaS that just has never taken any external investment and you're just happy and you don't report to anyone, which is a beautiful thing as well.
- [56:21]
A
Well, so do you think it's just like the killing fields for early stage folks and the value capture just gets pushed to later and later stage?
- [56:29]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think largely on just tech that is understandable by AI, meaning if you're writing typescript or any of these languages that AI can figure out and write high quality code for, you just don't need to raise capital. You can do it nights and weekends on your own.
- [56:47]
A
Yeah. Amazing. Okay, so if you had to, is it fair to say if you had to bet on one horse in the AI race that you would bet on Google? And then I have a follow up question.
- [56:58]
B
Oh wow.
- [56:59]
A
Now I know a little bit too much behind the scenes. If you had no stake in any companies.
- [57:04]
B
Yeah. How would you? Well, I never answer like that. I would always give you the true.
- [57:09]
A
Answer, even if I got to say it. But yeah. Where would you put, put first, second, third, bet?
- [57:18]
B
Well, at these valuations, I wouldn't put a single dollar into the top three or five, largely because what are you going to do? Is Google going to 3x maybe in the next 10 years?
- [57:29]
A
Well also it remains to be seen how much AI cannibalizes their current money printing machine in terms of search and sponsored ads.
- [57:37]
B
I'm less worried about that because they own the largest distribution platform on Earth, which is Android. And so they will find a way in there. And then also I think if Google had to pick their poison and Say okay, you can either base the Future business off a 25amonth pro subscription to Gemini or a free account that is just ad know. I think they'll take that hybrid model all day long.
- [58:03]
A
Yeah, that's a good point. Interesting thing. Okay, so you wouldn't put any money into the big ones. So do you choose then? Are you trying to find Amazon in 1998, 1999. Right. Just in the absolute noise of AI slop doesn't just apply to Sora videos, it also applies to startups. Right. There's so much bullshit floating around, some of it's dressed up in very fancy clothing with fancy names. So if you're investing in AI writ large, how do you even. I mean this is your job, right?
- [58:39]
B
I think there's three buckets. One is power. Without a doubt we're all going to need power. Small nuclear reactors are going to be a thing. The United States needs 3 to 5x its power capacity in the next decade, if not more. And there is going to be a huge push into energy. So there's a bunch of plays there. You can look them up up There are even ETFs that track bundles of nuclear related companies that are out there. That's one play. I think power is without a doubt the most important piece of this. And then data centers, there's publicly traded data center companies out there. There are the bigs like Microsoft and Google and Amazon that are just expanding as fast as they possibly can and buying up land all over the United States. They're always going to be a premium on that. They're going to need that Nvidia, they've got competition from amd, they got competition from Google. Now obviously they have such incredible tooling on the software side that there's a lot of defensibility there. It's a name to own. Would I buy in today at today's prices? I don't know. But I will say that if you think of this less about I'm just going to pick one horse or more like I'm going to pick a basket of things. These are the things that I would be putting into that basket. And then lastly I would take large companies that have insane bloat from headcount that can be automated in the next, call it two to three years where they will reduce sadly and I hate to see this happen, but it's going to happen no matter what. They're going to reduce their headcount, they're going to automate with AI and their profit margins are going to go through the roof. And I think those companies will reap the benefits of efficiency that comes from AI and their stock prices will as well.
- [60:11]
A
How do you identify companies that have the most bloat with also the fewest hurdles to adopting AI for what you're describing? Right. Because in some of the them they may be, who knows just put in a position where they, from a process or regulatory perspective or whatever, they just can't do it. At least in the near term.
- [60:28]
B
Yeah, in the near term it's listening to earnings calls and it is. I want to hear the CEO saying that they are absolutely forcing their engineers to use AI.
- [60:37]
A
Forcing.
- [60:38]
B
You have to be. It is not optional at this point to ask your engineers to play with it. You have to be using it every single day in your workflow. And the folks that are doing that, even though it's not perfect today, they're going to reap all the benefits 12 to 18 months from now. That's what I'm looking for more than anything else is who is wise enough because a lot of the CEOs are old. Who is wise enough to say, you know, it's true, we know these folks and they're, they just don't. If you ask them the difference between haiku 4, 5 and sonnet, they would have no idea how to tell you if they can't answer those, those basic model related questions like what are you doing? So it's finding those people like the Jack Dorsey in the world and the folks that are just like, well, I wouldn't want to say young because I want to be ageism but they have to be leaning into this in a way that is going to. They have to believe that their entire business is going to be rebuilt from the ground up over the Next call it five years.
- [61:32]
A
Yeah.
- [61:33]
B
And you have people like Salesforce CEOs doing that. Obviously Benioff's on board with this. There's a handful of folks that have said we are making sure this is a mandate from the top down. Google did this quite well where they had this like red alarm or thing that they called off probably three years ago or said it is all hands on deck. AI and Apple did not do that. And now look what's happening. They're probably most likely Apple's going to end up licensing Gemini from Google.
- [61:58]
A
Yeah. Wild world out there, kids. Wild world.
- [62:01]
B
Yeah. It's a fun time to be alive, man. It's fun to be playing.
- [62:06]
A
Yeah, totally. Let's see, I figure I could give people some maybe holiday gift ideas just in case.
- [62:11]
B
Oh yes, I've got some great ones.
- [62:14]
A
First thing I can recommend, something you can fit in your pocket. So this right here looks like a golf ball with little not quite spikes, but like studs on it. They're flattened. This is called a rubz ball. R, U, B, Z. And I travel with this. You just roll out your feet on this before you go to bed. And I have felt this help everything from relaxing and winding down. What I have noticed, and this is something I spoke with Ed Cohn about a hundred years ago, long time ago. He's the greatest powerlifter of all time. Phenomenal athlete, very nice guy. But basically, if you address your feet, sometimes you feel it all the way up the kinetic chain. Lower legs, knees, even your low back can sometimes release. So this, I think it's cost less than 10 bucks. This is a. A Rubs ball. You can buy it on Amazon or anywhere else. That's a very easy one. That's just pocket sized. We can go back and forth. What you got?
- [63:11]
B
Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So this one is awesome, dude. You have my doc that I sent you, right? With the links to everything?
- [63:17]
A
Yeah.
- [63:17]
B
I don't know if you have it up in front of you, so if you click on the second one down, these bonsai nanoblocks. So I've been talking about nanoblocks for a while. Hear me out, dude. This is a fun stocking stuffer. People are gonna love this shit. So it's $38. It's these little baby bonsai trees. Nanoblocks are like Legos, but they're like one tenth of the size, so you need tweezers to assemble them. It is oddly satisfying to build these little tiny, like, bonsai trees. You get all six of them for $38. And if you use the code, Tim. No, there's no code. But if you. They're amazing. They're so fun. Anyway, nanoblocks are awesome. This is a little fun little pack. Great stocking stuffer. They're super tiny. They're cute and they make. Look at. There's nanoblocks up there. Up there behind me. See that beautiful tree?
- [64:05]
A
There it is. So you recommended a book to me. Do you want to mention it? It's last in your list. I bought the audiobook and I listened to it on my flights recently. I thought the narrator was really, really good also.
- [64:17]
B
Yeah, it's called Stop Fixing Yourself. Wake up, all is well. It's by Anthony Di Mello, who we were talking about the Jesuit priest and therapist that we talked about earlier. Tim when we had both somehow discovered this book originally, not this book, but the. We were talking about Awareness, Awareness. And it was really cool to hear that you were into it because it was one of my favorite books that we did not compare notes and we read this independently. I don't know how the hell that happened, but we both loved it. And this is another one where I was just like, damn, this is so good. Because there's so many core truths here that apply to my practice on the meditation side. And I just loved it. But it does require a little bit of understanding. It's not like someone from off the street can totally read this and be like, oh, that sense makes. Makes a ton of sense to me. I don't know if you felt that way.
- [65:03]
A
I feel like, well, there are two things I would say, just having read a lot of Anthony DeMello that I think. Awareness. Subtitle Conversations with the Masters. It used to be the Perils and Promise of Reality, but they changed the subtitle. I preferred the old one, but awareness by Anthony DeMello. His last name is two words. D E Space, M E L L O is 184 pages, and I've gifted it to at least 50 people. I mean, I have an entire bookshelf full of this book in my guest bedroom at my house just to give friends.
- [65:34]
B
Same dude. It's so funny.
- [65:36]
A
And I would recommend people read Awareness first. I don't think you need anything special in terms of background for that.
- [65:44]
B
Well, you do need one thing. You need to know that it is a lecture. So it reads like a lecture. It doesn't read like a book.
- [65:50]
A
Yeah. Which I like. Which I like. And he's very. No nonsense.
- [65:53]
B
Because people were like, I gave it to a couple friends and they started reading it and they're like, like, wait, is this a talk that he gave? And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. I should have told you that it's an actual talk.
- [66:01]
A
Yeah, it's a collection of polished lectures that he gave. So Awareness would be the first. And then in the case of the Stop Fixing Yourself, I really enjoyed it. There's a lot of overlap with Awareness, so there are certain points that get reiterated. The audiobook rendition of Stop Fixing Yourself is very, very good. Good. I disagree with some of the conclusions, which are effectively along the lines. I shouldn't say this might sound unfair, but in the conclusion, he talks about how ultimate freedom is not depending on anyone for anything, and you could be perfectly happy in isolation by yourself. And I was like, evolutionarily, I think that's actually a pretty hard sell. But what I would suggest is if you listen to or read these books, as with any book, expect that you're going to disagree with and maybe even discard 10, 20% of it. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. These are really, really helpful books. Well said. Yeah. So let me grab another one here. I'll recommend two others in case people are interested in books. So fiction Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I think it might just be Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Anyway, it's Tomorrow Three Times by Gabriel Zevin. Z E V I N It's a fiction book and it was on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It's a new one and it is all about entrepreneurship and game design and love unrequited and when I recommended this book initially in Five Bullet Friday, my newsletter, one of my attorneys who helped craft the agreement for Coyote, another stocking stuffer, the Card Game.
- [67:46]
B
Yeah, I noticed it's on Black Friday sale, by the way. It's a 38% off on Amazon right now or something like that.
- [67:50]
A
Yeah, at $799 right now. It's doing super well. The reviews are great. It's like 4.7 or 4.8 stars. I'm so proud of you, dude.
- [67:58]
B
This is so cool to see you having success here.
- [68:00]
A
Yeah, thanks.
- [68:01]
B
I thought you were going to do the Five Hour Body, and I was like, ah, you probably shouldn't go there. And it's nice to see you doing this. Yeah.
- [68:07]
A
So it's been super fun. But my attorney who helped with the negotiations on deal structuring for Coyote, specializes in video games and he's been involved with some epic deals and amazing mergers and acquisitions and all this crazy stuff. And he texted me after I put that in the newsletter and he said, that book is so good. It was eerie because it is so accurate down to the finest detail that it felt like somebody was looking over my shoulder when I was doing these deals. That is how well researched this book is. You would love it. I really think you would enjoy it.
- [68:40]
B
My old assistant Sarah, who's amazing, she gifted it to me and it burned in the fire when my house burned down.
- [68:47]
A
Oh, you got to read it.
- [68:48]
B
But I need to get it. Because she was like, you got to listen to this book.
- [68:51]
A
Oh, it's so good. Yeah, it's great. And then the last one I'll recommend because we gave some nonfiction, then just gave fiction. I'll give poetry, which people might not Expect. But it's little tiny compilation. This also has an entire shelf in my guest room. It's called Gold. It's by Rumi and then the translator Hala Liza Ghafori, last name G A F O R I. 112 pages. And it is just an incredible collection of poetry, of course, originally by the book the great Persian mystic Rumi, but with incredible new translations by Hala Eliza Ghafouri, who is an American poet of Persian descent. So she's a native speaker and also she herself a poet and musician. So if you read one or two of these poems before you go to bed at night, it just makes everything better. So I would also just recommend. So I can keep going with gift recommendations, but I suspect you have more. More?
- [69:49]
B
I've got some great ones, dude.
- [69:51]
A
All right, why don't we do two at a time? Why don't you do two and then I'll do another?
- [69:53]
B
Okay, I'm gonna make you a multi billionaire. From how many people buy this next one? I'm gonna say with your Amazon affiliate link. This right here, my friend, is the best purchase I've ever made in my life.
- [70:07]
A
Whoa. That's a strong statement.
- [70:09]
B
No, I mean, okay, maybe not, but it's high up there. Okay, so have you ever been in one of those situations where you need a small little screwdriver or a screw? You're like, you can't find the right one that fits.
- [70:23]
A
Yeah.
- [70:23]
B
So this is 25 different micro everything from hex nuts to screwdrivers to flatheads. And it's a magnetic little insert into the actual wand. Now you think, okay, who cares? But it's $7.79, and it acts like a $25 screwdriver. It is the best stocking stuffer in the world. You know, once a year or twice a year, you'll get something where it takes like two double A's or whatever. And it's like, oh, there's a little tiny screwdriver thing you gotta undo. And I'm like, where am I gon find something that fits that? This is that thing. And then when you want to, like, tweak your glasses or whatever, you need those micro screwdrivers. Dude, $7. This thing rocks. It's amazing.
- [71:03]
A
How did you find this thing?
- [71:05]
B
You know, it had good reviews on Amazon. I bought it, and when I got it, I was like, they should be charging three times as much for this thing. The torque doesn't actually ruin the bit heads, which is great because oftentimes with the cheaper ones, like the Bit heads get ruined anyway.
- [71:18]
A
It's.
- [71:19]
B
You have to have it in every junk drawer in your house. You know, it's one of those things. I love these things because you often ask me, you said back in the day when you were doing Five Bullet Friday, where you wanted me to, like, contribute stuff, you would say, hey, what's the best thing under $50 or whatever.
- [71:32]
A
That you love, you know, for sure.
- [71:33]
B
And this is one of those things that's under $10 that is absolutely worth every penny.
- [71:38]
A
Yeah, love it. All right, so under $10, I don't know if it's $10. Might be a little bit more. But in addition to the Rubs Ball, I'll just give a couple of Quick fire. There's something called the Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. It was actually introduced to me by Insima Inyang, who you or Yang, I think is how he pronounces it. But you sent me his video, so you are responsible for me ultimately connecting with him. But this Alpha ball, for rolling out your hips, for traveling with it, it's about the size of a softball, but it's just the perfect density and texture. You can get everywhere you need to get, get. Which you cannot do with a foam roller, nor is it easy to travel with a foam roller. And I just love this thing. I use it pretty much every day.
- [72:22]
B
I didn't see it on video. Did you hold it up?
- [72:24]
A
No, I have it downstairs in my suitcase, actually.
- [72:26]
B
Okay, let me look it up. What's it called again?
- [72:28]
A
Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. You can find it on Amazon. And I'll actually tell you, since I don't want to misrepresent. It's. Yeah, it's $19.99 more. More than worth every penny. And I can send you a link to it, of course. Sweet. Then other things I'll throw in there. This is going to be one of those things. This is my version of your little TED talk that you just gave on the $7 screwdrivers where people are like, you got to be kidding me. This is my version of that, which is the. I don't know how to pronounce this. Maestry M A E S T R I Maistry House Rechargeable Milk Froth.
- [73:07]
B
Wow.
- [73:08]
A
Yeah, I know.
- [73:09]
B
Mine was better than that, but I.
- [73:10]
A
Well, hold on, hold on. So I have owned so many of these frothers for coffee, for tea, for whatever, right? Protein shakes or whatever. These little hand frothers. Yeah, yeah.
- [73:20]
B
They all break. They all suck, dude.
- [73:22]
A
They all break. Or the batteries Die, and then you can't recharge it. Or it's like an outboard motor and you're like, oh, let me just do this for my tea and relax. And it shoots liquid all over the place.
- [73:33]
B
Right.
- [73:34]
A
There's so many issues. This thing is. It's like the Lamborghini of milk frothers. Costs.
- [73:41]
B
Ooh, I love that.
- [73:42]
A
Yeah, it Costs how much? 30 bucks. It's not that crazy, but it's USB C too.
- [73:47]
B
Charging. That's amazing.
- [73:48]
A
It's USB C. And you basically turn the very top of it to adjust in any increment. You want the intensity of the agitation. And I have to tell you, I asked somebody on my team to just due diligence and get me a frother that would solve all these problems that I mentioned. And he knows how to do a lot of research. And this was his conclusion. And I got it. And I was like, where has this been all my life? Oh, my God. Has almost 3,000 reviews or 2,600 reviews. 4.5 stars. This thing is just amazing. I use it every day. So that's one. And when I put this in five below Friday, what I wrote was it reminds me of sage wisdom from Kevin Kelly, who is the founding editor of Kelly. Amazing guy.
- [74:33]
B
We did a walk with him together.
- [74:34]
A
Exactly. So he had, at that time, I think it was a draft of a book that he put together, this tiny book called Excellent Advice for Living, which are these pithy little quotes from Kevin that he used to put in his. I think they were his birthday letters to friends where he'd be like, Here are the 10 things I learned this year. And one of his pieces of advice is, take note. If you find yourself wondering, where is my good knife? Or where is my good pen? That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
- [75:02]
I have shelves full of shitty frothers that have been sent to me or that I've bought, and they're just terrible. So I just got rid of all of them and replaced them with this.
- [75:12]
B
Thing that's so awesome.
- [75:13]
A
Other things, real quick. Microphone. I got this microphone for travel called the Elgato. One word.
- [75:21]
B
Oh, yeah. Love Elgato.
- [75:22]
A
Elgato. Wave three. It is a gorgeous piece of design. It makes me think of Braun design back in the day, B R E. And it actually solves somehow. Bounce and echo. Better than even this fancy mic, this shure mic that I'm speaking into right now. It is really impressive. I don't know what they do with the firmware software. Whoever the hell designs These types of things. But this has become my favorite travel mic is the Elgato Wave 3.
- [75:53]
B
Have you seen their prompter, by the way? They make a tiny little prompter, like if you want to like read scripts or anything like that. Oh, Elgato makes this beautiful little prompter you can control with an iPhone or an iPad. And for people that are doing kind of like monologues and podcasts and stuff like that, Elgato's some great gear. And it's not that expensive. It's well priced.
- [76:13]
A
Yeah. This one, the wave three. I'll check out the prompter. It's got almost 10,000 reviews. 4.7 stars. 150 bucks. And I rely on it to the extent that I'm professional. Professional level of recording. And there's a lot more I could jump into. I'll tell you what, I'll give one that's expensive but the best of breed which is the tank M3 push sled. This is a sled I literally sit sitting right outside my door about 100ft away. I have tried so many different sleds for resolving back pain, for building all posterior chain development strength, glute activation, you name it. Pushing and pulling a sled just gives you so many dividends. Knees over toes. Guy also talks about this at length, but the tank M3 push sled is holy shit.
- [77:08]
B
It's price.
- [77:08]
A
I see bar none, the best sled I've ever used. Yeah. How much is it? You just pull it up?
- [77:12]
B
1500 on Amazon?
- [77:14]
A
Yeah, 1500 bucks and it looks amazing though I would not trade it. You can easily rotate it. It has mechanical resistance. So for instance, I'm pushing it in a gravel driveway. It's not just skids. You can use this on turf, you can use this on carpets, you can use it indoors without destroying the floor. It's just an amazing. So if people are looking for best of the best in my opinion and versatility, that's one. And then if you don't want more stuff where you want to give something to friends or family who don't need more things like physical things. I am talking my book a little bit here because I'm involved with the company. But the way the way app, it's so easy, right? I mean we're going to be doing hopefully another retreat in person together. It started out as just my hand down favorite meditation app. It's the easiest way to get back in the habit. I just used it yesterday morning and this morning. I tend to do 10 minute sessions and then sometimes do an extra 10 minutes of TM or something after the fact. But I think you can get 30 sessions for free with no credit card required to try it out. And then if you want to give an annual membership that's a hundred bucks and you can just download the app for free and then tap my way and, and share it with people that way with a gift button.
- [78:31]
B
I'll definitely add on to that and I'll say that I met Henry, the creator of the Way app, and he's one of the very few Zen masters that are fully accredited in the United States. It is such a treat to interact with and have Henry as a guide and you get a pocket Zen master. And I don't want to sell this, but I will say that in the last I started with him in training with him in terms of meeting with him over Zoom Doom during COVID and now it's been a few years. There is no better money spent in terms of. For me it was been more retreats and things like that that I've been to of his. But meditation in terms of my just general anxiety and general just way of moving through life, it's been a game changer. It's been a game changer. And Henry, I will give him a ton of credit there. One of the things that he told me early on, which I thought was still hits me today, is it's not out. Can I put in an hour a day of meditation? It's better to put in just 10 minutes a day or 5 minutes a day and do it consistently than it is to try and achieve the mountaintop and go all out. Can you just show up consistently? And I think if you do it for the first 30 days, you'll feel it. You'll feel it.
- [79:42]
A
Oh, you'll notice something much earlier in my experience. And if Henry has this expression, I'm going to paraphrase it. But basically if you do the practice, even if in some sessions or you're like, my mind is all over the place, I feel like that was a waste of time. If you walk consistently in the fog, you can't help but get wet is one of his expressions, meaning it compounds over time. And even if you feel like individual sessions aren't doing much, it does actually compound. And if people want to keep it simple, you can find a qr code@thewayapp.com Tim and that'll give you 30 free sessions with no credit card. So people can check that out if they they want. What else do we have? Kevin?
- [80:22]
B
Yeah, I've got one more that's fun. It's on the slightly pricier side. It's a little over $200. Close to $300, actually. It's a walking treadmill. My wife Daria, turned me onto this. It is a very thin, tiny, little walking treadmill that has phenomenal reviews. And you just throw it underneath your desk, and for under $300, you can set the incline to, like, you know, 10. And it's all with a little tiny remote control, and there's nothing to hold onto because you have your desk and you can just work and it rolls away because it only weighs, like, 50 pounds, and you can just stash it in the corner. And I think it's the best walking treadmill. We did a bunch of research, and it's the best one. 100, $300. Great way to get some exercise in there. Throw on a weighted vest there. You're in a really good place.
- [81:08]
A
Oh, yeah, that'll be plenty. Yeah. Dig it. Yeah, I saw that when Daria was showing me her office, I was like, oh, look at. Look at that. There it is.
- [81:15]
B
That's right. You got the tour. I wasn't even home, and you came over and stole my sleeping meds and.
- [81:20]
A
Staggered your bellsommer and took a spin on the walking treadmill and then took off. Yeah. I still owe you a trade for that. But I do see in your notes, do you want to take a second and run people through Kevin's current AI Stack? Since this is all Greek to me, I probably don't even understand what half of this means.
- [81:37]
B
Well, real quick, I don't know if you want to touch on New Year's resolutions really fast.
- [81:43]
A
A stack.
- [81:44]
B
Okay, so AI Stack. One of the things that I've noticed is becoming more and more kind of ubiquitous in this space is this idea of an AI assistant that is not your phone, but something that you can kind of call when you need to remember something, when you need to take notes, when you, you know. And Tim, I was wearing that little pendant when you and I got together.
- [82:04]
A
Hate it. Hate it.
- [82:05]
B
It's always recording. Tim goes to me. He's like, it's always recording.
- [82:08]
A
I was.
- [82:09]
B
Yeah. And he goes, I hate to ask you this, but can you just take it off? It's too much anxiety for me, so I had to take off that pendant and put it in my bag. But I agree with you in that it is weird. It does kind of cripple our conversations in our honesty when, you know, there's something that's there listening all the time.
- [82:27]
A
Right Yeah, a hundred percent.
- [82:29]
B
And so a couple things. Nothing, the Android phone company, I'm not an investor or anything like that. They make headphones, which I'm wearing right now for this podcast. And but one of the things that was really cool is just like when they released these headphones a month ago, they have a little talk button on the headphones and so if you hold down talk as you're holding your headphones case, I can record anything and it goes into their AI and it creates to do lists for me notes, whatever it may be.
- [82:55]
A
That's a cool feature.
- [82:55]
B
It's just fun. Yeah. And so there's a company called Sandbar and we invested it.
- [82:59]
A
True.
- [82:59]
B
It wasn't my deal.
- [83:00]
A
So quick question. Do you need to have an Android phone to use?
- [83:05]
B
Yes, you need to have a nothing phone.
- [83:06]
A
Okay, bummer.
- [83:07]
B
That's the problem. But the idea is sound in that it's not always on, it's just when.
- [83:11]
A
You need it, right? Yep, yep.
- [83:13]
B
And one of the things that Sandbar did, and I have one of their prototype rings around here somewhere, but one of the things that Sandbar did is they created a ring, almost like an aura ring where if you just lightly touch it, you can whisper to any notes that you might want. And it saves it in the AI cloud on your phone, Android os, whatever. And it's a way to have a conversation. And if you have headphones in, it'll respond back to you. So you'd be like, hey, remind me, what's that meeting I have tomorrow? Just like quietly, it doesn't listen to the entire room and then it gives you that data back in your headphones. Anyway, Sandbar's not out yet. It's coming out middle of next year. Highly recommend. Sandbar.com, checking out. Like I said, it is something that we invest in at the fun level, but it's not my deal. But I will say I like where this is going. Even if it's not Sandbar, something like this, that is a little companion that is not your big ass phone that can be engaged with when you want to jot something down is quite cool. Outside of that, I would say AI on the notion front has been quite good. Notion. The agents that they've added inside of Notion are phenomenal and that continues to get better.
- [84:17]
A
What do you use that for? How do you use that?
- [84:19]
B
Well, Notion just added note taking now. So if you're in a zoom or any type of video call, it will automatically prompt you to to record the entire thing. And so by default I Always say to people, hey, I'm just, you know, notion's not actually recording the audio, but they are transcribing it. And they put the meeting notes and the bullet points into my notion for me, and then I can ask questions of that transcript later on. So call it like a week or two later. I'm like, hey, Tim mentioned some really cool book by Anthony DeMello. Which one was it? And it would boom right there. It's like within two seconds. That's really cool. And then you can ask questions of your entire corpus of data. So if you're storing a bunch of stuff in there, like, I have my ein number for one of my LLCs, and I'm like, hey, what's the ein number for this llc? It's like, two seconds later's out, right? So that's fun.
- [85:06]
A
When do you think Gemini built into G suite will be good enough to do that for an inbox? It is now. Is it okay? Because it was so disappointing as of.
- [85:15]
B
Even a few weeks ago, I just enabled it. This kind of like, deeper integration. I don't know if I'm a beta tester, but they let me in and it does exactly what I just said. So it's within the coming weeks if I've happened to be on some beta list and whatever. But, you know who will do this right now is actually the Gemini. Oh, what are they calling it? It's their kind of AI suite, where you can drop documents into it and everything. Everyone's screaming at it, right? I mean, you know what I'm talking about, right? Have you played with this?
- [85:40]
A
No, no. Oh, wait, you talking about Notebook lm?
- [85:43]
B
Yeah, Notebook lm. Yeah, Notebook LM is getting better and better. So here's a fun hack. Okay? This is a great one for your audience because they're like your productivity, everything. One thing that's really fun is imagine there's something you want to learn that's new. Insert anything. You want to learn how to do basic Pilates, right? Go to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else and say, hey, give me a deep research guide on the fundamentals of Pilates. And then you hit go, right? You wait five minutes, whatever. It gives you back a whole script and you copy that, paste it into NotebookLM and say, create me a five minute podcast on the fundamentals of plotties and you have an instant podcast primer on that thing. I use that for coding technologies. I've used that for quantum computing. Tim, do you know how quantum computing works? Do you know how gates fold on each Other, like, I didn't. And so I dropped that in there. And you say, explain it like I'm five in a podcast, or not five, but you would say, explain it like I'm like a freshman in college. Yeah, exactly. Grader, whatever. I have Aphantasia, and I have no way to recall this later. So it gives you this great little podcast, and it's a fun little way to learn anything new on the go.
- [86:58]
A
I have to give a plug. And I am an investor in this company, but because it came up in a group thread, I don't think he would mind me mentioning this, but our mutual friend Chris Sacca was like, my daughter just taught herself about stock trading and this, this, and this. And he took a screenshot and he's like, she created her own curriculum and da, da, da, da, da. And it was from a startup called Oboe. And if people go to Oboe, that's O, B, O, E, F, Y, I. So Oboe, FYI, it just says, what do you want to learn about? We'll make you a course. And you literally just type it out, and it gives you everything in one place.
- [87:35]
B
Now, are you an investor in this?
- [87:37]
A
Yeah, I'm an investor.
- [87:39]
B
Because I noticed you had mentioned before, what was it? And this would be kind of fun for 30 seconds. Seconds when you were pitched this because you were very. You say no to a lot of things, which is great. Every investor should. What was it about this that really hooked you in?
- [87:53]
A
I mean, there were a few things, right? So it was the people involved. I had some familiarity with the people involved, and I had confidence in their ability to execute. And also, this is what I do, right? In the sense that if I have tried to hone any single skill, it is deconstructing and simplifying complex subjects, then putting material in some type of logical sequence, doing 8020 analysis on the 20% of material that makes the difference, and the material beats method a lot of the time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I've thought a lot about this, and I was like, all right, the thesis and the mission of the company makes a lot of sense to me now. Will they be the way winner? I have no idea. That is a much harder question. And that informs bet sizing and things along those lines. But I have a lot of confidence in the founders. The company itself was introduced to me or the founding team behind it by another founder who's had exits, who is an investor, who's a friend of mine. And I thought to myself, well, even if this just goes towards creating a product that I myself will use, which is really where I start with a lot of my investing and sometimes I succeed when I stray from that. But my hit rate is a lot higher when, say, in the case of Uber or Shopify or any of these other.
- [89:17]
B
Yeah, it's a core lingo of yours.
- [89:19]
A
I know. At least I am a market of one for all of these products and Oboe would fall in that category. So that's how I decided to invest. And with these, these companies, it's also not a bet the farm scenario, at least not for me. You're creating a portfolio with the recognition that 70, 80% of your investments are going to go to zero. But I try to look at the. Or answer the question, how can I win even if this goes to zero? And how can I win? It's like, well, if I help to in some way support a product and the development of a product that I use myself to learn a bunch of stuff quickly, then given the leverage that I think I can create or find in the world, it's like, wow. If I have a smooth way, an elegant way to learn more about a few different. I'll give you an example. If I'm considering, and I've already done this, if I'm doing due diligence on a company that I can't talk about right now, but it's innovating in biotech and I want to learn as much as possible about different types of MRNA therapeutics, it's like, well, I'm not coming from a background that enables me to do that. So if I then am able to do due diligence a hundred times faster because I'm not sending out 15 emails to people I think might be able to assist, and I might still do that level of due diligence. But if, let's just say that 50k investment allows me to then do due diligence in a way that allows me to place two or three other bets more effectively. It's like I've made my money back or very likely made my money back. So whether it's with investing or choosing projects like the card game Coyote or anything else, my fundamental underlying question is, can this be a win? Even if it fails with, let's just say, the primary external metric of sales or exit or whatever it might be, and if I'm developing skills and relationships that snowball and transcend any single project, then that's a vote in favor of doing something. So that's like Oboe, FYI, kind of fit into that bucket for me. And it made me so happy to see Saka's daughter when it's like whatever, 12 or 13 creating her own course, I was like, okay, that's a good sign. That makes me happy.
- [91:40]
B
I just clicked on one of the things to create a course for me and it was pretty cool because right away it said, do you want this in podcast format, which is seven minutes, or do you want this in lectured recording, which is 20 minutes? That's awesome. That's built into the product. From step one.
- [91:54]
A
Yeah, from step one. And like you said, this is the blocky brick Motorola version. The rate of iteration for something like this is going to be so extreme, it's going to be head spinning. So we'll see. But I'm excited about it. All right.
- [92:09]
B
The moment you all been waiting for. Tim's girlfriend.
- [92:13]
A
Come on, dude.
- [92:14]
B
Thought I got on.
- [92:15]
A
No, no, no, no.
- [92:16]
B
People are going to. They want to know what's up with Tim's personal life.
- [92:19]
A
Yeah, look, I'm not going to dox anyone who doesn't opt into being doxxed, so I'll skip any identifying particulars, but Gina's getting serious quickly. She's incredibly sweet, incredibly self aware, intelligent, and for people who are wondering, of all places met on hinge, have to kiss a lot of frogs or go on a lot of dates. It's a lot of reps, a lot of swipes and a lot of noise to get to that point. But it did work.
- [92:48]
B
What was the first date like?
- [92:49]
A
First date was Greek food, very chill, felt very much. And I pay a lot of attention to this, you know that I have a very sensitive nervous system and I just immediately felt kind of down regulated and at ease with her. And that's a lot. That's not a small thing for me and keeps me on my toes, is very funny, is very good at calling me on my bullshit.
- [93:21]
So I'm optimistic. We'll see. We'll see. But super, super happy. So doing Thanksgiving together.
- [93:27]
B
Wow. Like family introduction time and all that shit.
- [93:30]
A
Oh, she met my family already quite a while ago.
- [93:33]
B
I've only met her once. One final question, then I'll let you off the hot button box. What is the hardest thing for you at this stage? Because it's like you get to this point where there's this honeymoon phase and then all of a sudden that starts to kind of peel off and it's in the nitty gritty of life. What's the hardest, most challenging part about this next kind of, I call it six months.
- [93:58]
A
Yeah, I mean, I Don't know if I have the ability to predict, but my guess would be, I mean, I think this is what I'm about to describe as a plight of modern dating in general, at least as I've seen it among my friends and pretty much anyone who I've ever spoken to about this, or if I ever mention modern datings and the app based dating world, it's such a game of roulette. I mean, the apps are designed to be as addictive as possible. So I think the challenge for almost anyone who is part of that playing field is, is when things get hard, when things are hard, when you have friction that lasts more than a day or a week to stay the course and do the work necessary to resolve that, as opposed to just being like, ah, fuck this, I'm just going to.
- [94:51]
B
Go back to the well because the well's right there. It's 20 seconds away and a swipe away. Right. That's the downfall of these whole things. It's so easy to move on to the next thing.
- [95:02]
A
Yeah. They are all designed to be, of course, as addictive as possible. And even though they might say they're designed to be deleted, that by definition, since they have a fiduciary responsibility, a legal fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, their business model is entirely dependent on recurring revenue. So they're designed to keep you using the app as long as humanly possible. And I don't blame them for that. That's just the way, way that this ecosystem works. But it is something to be aware of because they are seductive and they're designed to be seductive, these apps in every way conceivable. So I would say that step number one, take that stuff off your phone and then number two is fortunately, I feel like over my last few long relationships, because I've had some very long relationships, five, six years in two cases, is that I've developed a toolkit. I can always use more work and more refinement. But do you have the basics of something approximating nonviolent communication? Do you ask for what you want and do you tell someone if they're doing something that you don't want? These seem like very obvious, self evident things you should do, but a lot of people struggle with both of those and then that breeds resentment or people bottle things up and then they explode and they say things they can't take back. So to what extent have you tried to mitigate those things? Do you have a toolkit? There are very good books out there, very good workshops and I've read a lot of these books and I've gone to a lot of workshops. And as much as I've felt like I wanted to poke my eyes out with bicycle spokes at points in these workshops and seminars because I can only take so much of it.
- [96:47]
B
Same.
- [96:48]
A
They do help though. It could be something really small and there are things you learn along the way. At least I have as you get older, which is you can have almost anything you want in life if you discuss it openly and early. So if you have weaknesses, if you have requests, if you have needs, if you have things that you value that are maybe weirdly out of proportion to most people, just talking about that stuff early sets the stage for success or at least communication. So very early on in this relationship, having conversations about conversations, if that makes sense, having open communication about how, how we like to communicate, the challenges we have with communication, how we're going to communicate, biasing towards honesty and being direct, even if you need to do a little bit of cleanup afterwards, has just saved a lot of brain damage. And in this case, I think we both have very growth oriented mindsets. I think both of us are pretty good at taking feedback and there are times when you're just too sleep deprived or pissed off or bitchy or irritable and you're not good at taking feedback. You're always going to to have those days. But overall, I think we're both eager to improve and we're good at giving feedback in a way that generally doesn't come off as too holier than thou judgmental. So we'll see. We'll see. But in terms of the challenges, I think the challenges are always. I shouldn't say always. It's a big word. But so much of it just comes down to communication. It's like, do you have the tools? Have you say, read or listened to Terry Real? Have you both listened or read read terryreal so that you have some scripts or some shared language that you can use as shorthand?
- [98:38]
B
The problem I have with Terry Real is that if it's taken too literally, it can sound formulaic. I'm like, I don't want to do the formula. Let's just talk. It can be a bit.
- [98:49]
A
Yeah, here's what I would say about that. I'd say that almost anything that works repeatedly is a formula. And in the beginning I think it's important. As rote as it might seem to. Let's just say the book Nonviolent Communication, I think it's Marshall Rosenberg, it's a great book. But After a while you're like, oh, my God, am I really going to say again, when you did X as a video camera would have recorded it, I felt Y. And the story is X.
- [99:21]
B
The story I make up kills me.
- [99:24]
A
But here's the. The thing. I know it kills me.
- [99:26]
B
They're like, stop saying the story I make up.
- [99:28]
A
But here's the thing. But here's the thing. As much as you might hate it, what you would hate more is, Kevin, I fucking hate when you do X. It makes me feel Y, because you always do Z. That's worse. I think you might be like, ah, with the formula. But the amount of damage you can do when you evolve veer completely away from it is a lot. And then once you have the basic mastery or fluency with the formula, then you can deviate. Right, right, right. Then you can start to deviate. But, for instance, I mean, Terry, as any couples therapist will, has certain frameworks and formulas, but there are also underlying philosophical principles that I think apply to a million different things that are outside of formulas. And I'll give you an example. So one thing that Terry says, and I think this is in fierce intimacy, which is an audiobook, you can't find a print version of it. I highly recommend it to folks. And the point he makes is it's real simple. Objective reality has no place in a relationship. Now, what the hell does that mean? What that means is, is if you're out at dinner and then the waiter comes over and the wife orders, and then the waiter walks away, and the husband's like, you know, honey, you don't need to yell at him. And she's like, I wasn't yelling. And then it turns into like a whole bullshit argument about whether she was yelling or not. Like, if the husband were to say, well, honey, actually I hired a professional audiologist with the latest cutting edge technology and recording equipment, and they're sitting right at the table next to us. And if we accept the commonly defined threshold for yelling at X, y, Z decibels, if you look at these numbers, you can see that in fact you were, by scientific definition, yelling. Is that going to fix the problem? No, it's going to be a huge fucking mess. And so his point is the stories matter and the subjective matters, and shorthand for that is objective. He may not word it exactly this way, but objective reality just doesn't have a place in, let's just say, an argument. And we're going to make mistakes occasionally, especially someone like me is going to try to appeal to some objective Measure of God knows what. But if you can just postpone that judgment even for a minute or two, it just makes a world of difference. Maybe it makes me sound like I'm really remedial in the EQ communication department. I actually don't think that's. That's true. I think I'm pretty good. It's like going to the gym. It's like playing pool or shooting archery or whatever. It's like you can't just. It's not a one and done thing. If you don't practice these things, you will revert to whatever your parents did, period.
- [102:26]
B
It's so true.
- [102:26]
A
I don't want to model that. That was a goddamn mess.
- [102:30]
B
Yeah. I found that if my partner gets upset, just kind of like sitting down and saying calm down is huge. It works every time.
- [102:41]
A
Yeah.
- [102:42]
B
Or you're being like your mother. Like those are things that are just really, you know, just home runs.
- [102:49]
A
Why are you so hysterical? Like your mother? Yeah.
- [102:54]
Works like a charm. I think that's Terry Real's second principle.
- [102:57]
B
Yeah. Just say calm down and then you're good, you're good. They'll be like, oh, I was being so crazy. You're right. I should just calm down.
- [103:04]
A
Down.
- [103:07]
Yeah. And I think also not just expecting there to be bumps. There are always going to be bumps. And we'll see, we'll see. But it's been great so far. I feel super, super lucky. Really, really fortunate because there's a point.
- [103:23]
B
I mean, you only date supermodels, so you should feel lucky.
- [103:28]
I met her. You have a supermodel on your hands.
- [103:31]
A
So she's very pretty, but she's also very, very smart. Knows how to adult, knows how to take care of things in the world. Right. I mean, which isn't asking too much. But it's surprising how many aspiring stay at home girlfriends you can find out there who have no intention of operating in the world. So I feel very, very lucky. Super, super fortunate.
- [103:55]
B
I'm excited for you, dude. Can't wait to spend some more time with her. Our first interactions were great. I'm excited to get to know her about better.
- [104:01]
A
Yeah, she's incredibly kind. Not a malicious bone in her body, but at the same time.
- [104:08]
Hilariously blunt in some cases. And sometimes not so hilariously blunt. But you know, I'll take.
- [104:14]
B
It's packaged. You got a bit of that too though, right?
- [104:17]
A
I got some of that, yeah. I do too. Yeah, I've got some of that for sure.
- [104:21]
B
I've known enough of your ex girlfriends to know that. You got a little bit of that.
- [104:25]
A
Yeah, I got a little bit of that. It's true. Oh, man. Well, that's. I think I've probably checked the box of talking about the girlfriend. Yeah.
- [104:34]
B
Awesome.
- [104:35]
A
We're going to have dinner very shortly and Happy Thanksgiving, man. Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.
- [104:40]
B
Thanksgiving. Yeah. I would say the only thing on my side just to bring people up to speed on is I have a new tech podcast that I'm very excited about that I'm going to launch in the new year. And so KevinRose.com for my four bullet fresh Friday, which is much faster read. No, I only put out one email every month and a half, but it's always packed with the latest AI stuff. I'm playing with all that stuff. Anyway, that's my only plug of the show is KevinRose.com for the newsletter.
- [105:10]
A
Yeah, check it out. Check it out, folks. We'll hit New Year's resolutions and stuff next time we do a random show.
- [105:15]
B
Let's do it.
- [105:16]
A
Yeah, we'll do that. Because I need to dust mine off and blow the film that has settled on the. And look at them in higher resolution. So I could use a little extra time. And we'll love it. We'll get after it.
- [105:27]
B
Love you, brother. Always good to see you too, bud. Thanks for sharing more of the personal side with us. Everybody gets a kick out of that and it's always fun to hear your adventures, but I'm excited for you marching forward. I have good vibes about this one.
- [105:39]
A
Yeah, thanks, man. It's a fucking jungle out there. Modern dating is a. It is simultaneously.
- [105:48]
So fun if you hit your groove.
- [105:52]
In a playing the field kind of way, but it's also so incredibly exhausting and frustrating and can be very demoralizing.
- [106:00]
B
Yeah, I don't feel bad for you, honestly. I've gotten some of your texts. I think you had a damn good run, brother.
- [106:05]
A
You had a good run. Yeah, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying I feel most at home, at ease, at peace when I am with my current girlfriend. And it's qualitatively a world of difference from just running around like some horny bastard with his hair on fire. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
- [106:31]
B
Yeah. Not that there's any hair left, but.
- [106:33]
A
Yeah, not there's any hair left. And also just be aware whether you're on X or Instagram Jam, but especially on the dating apps because it is selling sex and things that are hardwired to hijack your attention. Your faculties are being exploited to the Maximum degree possible. And it's just something to be aware of, really. Check your state before and after using these things to determine how much you might want to use them or if you want to put safeguards around how long you spend on these. These things. All right. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Cool brother. Love you very much. Please give a hug to Daria and the girls for me.
- [107:16]
B
Will do. Same on. On my side. How's Molly doing? Molly's good.
- [107:21]
A
Molly's great. Yeah, Molly's doing great.
- [107:23]
B
How does Molly now?
- [107:24]
A
Molly's 10. I'm actually going to adopt a puppy. I'm going to get a second dog next month.
- [107:29]
B
Super Toaster is 15 now. You saw him when you came to the house. I wasn't there when you there, but is he moving slow, lower? It's hard.
- [107:36]
A
He was. Well, he was also had just come from the vet and his paw was all taped up and he was drugged out of his mind. I know when I saw him. Yeah, 15 just getting up there.
- [107:46]
B
I know we gave him rapa. So I'm hoping for. I mean, we've already seen the kind of 20% boost in lifespan, so.
- [107:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. I need to get Molly on Rapa. That's going to be one of my tasks for December as well. One step at a time.
- [107:58]
B
Awesome. All right, brother.
- [107:59]
A
All right, brother. Great to see you, bud. And everybody listening. You can go to the show Notes. We'll have links to everything at Tim Blog, podcast, random show. Just look for the newest one and we'll have it for you. So happy holidays, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
- [108:15]
B
Happy holidays.
- [108:16]
A
I'll see you soon, Kevin. Take care, bud.
- [108:19]
B
Peace.
- [108:21]
A
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim Blog Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Sleep is the key to it all. It is the foundation Many of you heard me talk about how today's sponsor, Eight Sleep has improved my sleep with its pod cover. Pod 5 introduces Eight Sleep's latest product, the Blanket, which uses the same technology as the Pod's cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body. On average, members report the podcast Pod has helped them fall asleep 44% faster, 34% deeper sleep, and given them up to one added hour of sleep each night. Also, the pod snoring detection and automatic elevating platform have reduced user snoring by 45%. You'll also get a personalized report each morning allowing you to track your sleep stages, heart rate, variability, respiratory rate and more, all without having any devices strapped onto you. And from now until the December 31st, listeners get $400 off the Pod5 Ultra. You can try it at home for 30 days and return it if you don't like it. Just go to 8sleep.com Tim for $400 off shipping is available to many countries worldwide. 8sleep.com Tim you know that move when you hold your phone at an arm's length just to try to read a message. You squint, you try to get even further away. Does that sound familiar? If so, you may have presbyopia or age related blurry near vision. Luckily we now have an option beyond reading glasses. I suffer from presbyopia. It is not fun. So I'm excited to introduce you to this episode's sponsor, Closei Qlosi, an FDA approved prescription eye drop designed to improve your near vision and help you see things up close more clearly with once or twice daily dosing packaged in single dose vials. Closely fits into your routine and is ready when you need it. In clinical studies, people could read letters in the eye chart equivalent to reading menus, recipes and phone screens with fast acting near vision improvement often starting in just 20 minutes. Most side effects and studies were mild and short lived including eye discomfort and headaches in 5 to 8 of users. So give those readers a break and ask your eye doctor if Closei is right for you. Visit Closei.com Tim to find an eye doctor along with full prescribing information that's Q-L-O-S-I.com, tim. One more time. Q l o s I.com, tim.