Please enjoy this transcript ofanother episode of “The Random Show”with technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guyKevin Rose(@KevinRose).
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: KevKev, good to see you, man.
Kevin Rose: TimTim.
Tim Ferriss: Look at this.
Kevin Rose: In the flesh.
Tim Ferriss: In the flesh like grownups.
Kevin Rose: I know. Cheers.
Tim Ferriss: Sitting at a table in Austin.
Kevin Rose: Cheers, man.
Tim Ferriss: Look at this.
Kevin Rose: We’re together. Love it. Happy holidays.
Tim Ferriss: Happy Holidays. Happy early New Year’s, I suppose.
Kevin Rose: Was I supposed to shoot that?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: Sip it. This is quite good, that’s sipping.
Tim Ferriss: This is sipping?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so this is something that I’ve had on previous Random Shows, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it too much.
This is Lalo Tequila and Lalo Tequila, full disclosure, it’s my first and only alcohol-related investment. I was first introduced to this at a fantastic restaurant here in Austin called Suerte. Excellent restaurant and —
Kevin Rose: I feel like you’ve talked about this place before.
Tim Ferriss: It’s great.
Kevin Rose: Maybe I should go there tonight.
Tim Ferriss: An excellent restaurant.
Kevin Rose: Is it hard to get in or no?
Tim Ferriss: Not too bad and there is typically some walk-in available, they reserve some space for walk-ins.
Kevin Rose: Sweet.
Tim Ferriss: And I went there for the first time with Chase Jarvis.
Kevin Rose: Love Chase.
Tim Ferriss: You know Chase.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I had not seen Chase in ages. He was coming in from out of town wanted to do something Tex-Mexy, ended up at Suerte and we wanted to have tequila because we both both liked tequila, asked “what the server most recommended” and he recommended something I’d never heard of this Lalo and I ended up really liking it, both of us.
Bought a bottle turns out that the namesake, so Lalo is the grandson of Don Julio.
Kevin Rose: Oh, crazy.
Tim Ferriss: And this is additive-free. It is matured in the plant instead of in barrels. So it’s a blanco, only blanco, they don’t sell anything non-blanco, and they harvest from more mature plants.
So for a lot of the larger scale operations, they harvest, one could argue prematurely, and then they try to add a little razzle dazzle with additives and the way that they use the barrels and instead of doing that, they’re letting the plant do the work.
So this particular tequila for me at least, is a very clean drink and I know this is a topic du jour, of course, alcohol, no alcohol. I certainly find a place for it and then about six months, nine months later, a year later, out of the blue a friend of mine reached out who does a lot of CPGs. So consumer packaged goods stuff. He’s a genius when it comes to both operating and investing, he’s one of the best I’ve ever seen and he said, “I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of this particular brand, but would you have any interest in looking at Lalo?” I was like, “Yes, I would, because I drink it all the time.” And that’s how it came together.
Kevin Rose: That was going to be my question for you, because I feel like so many of us have had something that we’ve used in life and said, “Gosh, I wish I was an investor here.”
Have you done that with multiple companies? Has there been something where you’ve said, “This is so great, I have to invest?” And then if so, what is your strategy to get to that point where you can become friends with a founder, talk about a round.
Tim Ferriss: You are better at doing this than I am. You’re one of the best I’ve seen back when Twitter was usable, sorry, but I remember Twitter and you’ve used pretty much every channel available.
You’re very generous and sincere. When you find something you love, you share it.
Kevin Rose: Add value first.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You are able to get the attention of founders, historically.
I’ve seen you do this over and over again, and often I’ll do that. So these days for me, if I find something, and I will sometimes look at either my credit card statement or the stuff I use the most and run down the list to see if there’s anything I might want to invest in, for instance, and there are a few that got away. There are a bunch that got away.
Like 1Password, I should have —
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: And I knew the guys and they ended up raising money maybe a year or two ago.
Kevin Rose: Like gajillion dollars. It was massive.
Tim Ferriss: They’re great guys and I’m like, “Oh, if I had just…” And I didn’t want to because it didn’t feel right, but if I had pushed just a little bit more, maybe could have done something.
There were many stories like that that I could tell but these days I would say I try to be helpful. So I will take something and if it’s good, I’m like, “Look, even if I don’t end up being involved with the company, I want to help them out. The product’s fantastic.” So I might put it in the newsletter. I might mention it on the podcast. Do something like that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah you hear these stories every once in a while. I remember when Facebook was getting off the ground, Zuck wanted a mural painted, do you know this story?
Tim Ferriss: I do, but you should tell it anyway.
Kevin Rose: The artist actually at that time said, “Don’t pay me in cash, pay me in stock,” and that’s oftentimes a very good strategy where you say, “Hey, I might not have the capital to go invest in this thing, but I have a skill and that skill is somehow going to be useful to this company. If I can make friends with them, then at some point it’s like, let’s share the upside together.”
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Kevin Rose: And you don’t have to ask for a big massive percentage, but you can say, “Hey, is there some options available that I can have?” And that can work. I mean for that guy, I think it turned him into a billionaire or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: It turned into so much money.
Kevin Rose: At least several hundred million dollars.
Tim Ferriss: David Choe, who’s fascinating. .
He has done some incredible and hilarious things. He’s a very funny guy, very, very creative.
Kevin Rose: I don’t know him but I’ve heard that story so many times.
Tim Ferriss: He had a podcast called, I think it was DVDA, Double Vag Double Anal with Asa Akira, who’s a p*rn star and it may have all been taken down, but he is a polymath. He’s an incredible artist, incredible actor, also.
Kevin Rose: That could have been the name of your show. No one tried to come up with names for your show?
Tim Ferriss: Instead of TimTim TalkTalk?
Kevin Rose: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: You know, it was a close runner up. We all have to make decisions. I saw a shirt side note, well, I’ve had one sip of tequila and here we go already.
I saw a shirt at a climbing gym yesterday, which said “No solutions, only trade-offs,” and I was like, that is actually pretty interesting to sit with.
But on the advising front, because that’s really what we’re talking about, right? Where can people learn more about that? Because I used to point people, and maybe this is still a good reference, it’s a little dated, but Venture Hacks used to have a bunch on advisors and super advisors. This is worth unpacking a little bit for folks.
So if you look at, for instance, my track record, the vast majority of my lifetime earnings and startups have actually come from advising, and that’s not to say that it’s easy, that’s not to say that times haven’t changed, because certainly times have changed since 2008, 2009, 2010, but if you have a skill or you have a network or you have a platform, there are times when it will be appealing for both you and for a startup to have some type of trade for equity.
Sacca used to be fantastic at this before he became the Chris Sacca and in marquee lights that we know and love today and taught me a lot about this, but you might look for, let’s just say I don’t know how the landscape has changed, you could probably speak to this, but say 0.25 percent, right?
Kevin Rose: So it’s early.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, like a quarter point.
Kevin Rose: It means you’ve seen the company pretty early.
Tim Ferriss: Super early. And the way that that’s de-risked for the company, or one way that can be de-risked, is that it vests over a course of, say, two years.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So every quarter, a percentage of that basically becomes yours and the company can cancel at any time and that allows them in a sense to kind of try before they fully buy, they get to see what results you can deliver.
Any other thoughts on folks, or?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean I think —
Tim Ferriss: Thoughts on folks? Jesus.
Kevin Rose: No. We’re one sip in.
Tim Ferriss: Well, this is related to caffeine, which we’re going to come back to at some point.
Kevin Rose: So —
Kevin Rose: I think it’s important to remember that every company that’s out there, a private company, when they’re forming and putting together their cap table, like their list of investors, employees, all of that, they put together something called an options pool, which is a percentage of the company that is used to incentivize those employees to work there. So when you join a company, you get X number of options and you earn them over, say, typically three to four years.
A part of that, most founders will set aside for advisors, and so these are people that are not compensated with money, but rather just stock.
So in my mind, what I always do when I’m forming a new company is I say “Okay, I’m going to take one percent and I’m going to carve that into 10 roles and then I’m going to go out there and find the 10 most impactful people that I can possibly find to help me change the outcome of this company.” And you offer them in a role and you say “Hey, no fancy strings attached.” So I never say “To be an advisor, you have to tweet X number of times.” Like, screw that. You want it to come from a place of authenticity and so —
Tim Ferriss: And you’re often doing this with people you know —
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Presumably, right?
Kevin Rose: Or you could find someone that you’re just like, this is a really good match.
There’s an AI company that I’ve been working with and they needed someone that had a very specific expertise in a very small subset of a type of AI and they found an advisor and they didn’t know this person, but they reached out.
It never starts with, “Hey, we want to offer you an advisory role.” It’s a coffee, it’s a hangout, it’s a dinner, it’s let’s get to know each other. And it’s like, “Hey, you might be helpful” and sometimes they’ll say, “No, actually, you can hire me as a contractor.” Or it’s a mixture of both. They can say, “Hey, we’ll bring you on as a contractor for three months and we’ll give you an advisory role.”
So there’s no perfect science here, but just expect to get some fraction of one percent of a company as an advisor and your hope is that this turns into a 100, 200, 500 million dollar company and that becomes a very lucrative outcome for you.
Tim Ferriss: I would imagine part of the reason that you’re comfortable not having a laundry list of deliverables is because their advisor equity vests over a period of time.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, if that’s over a period of time, you can cancel it any time, so if you’re three months in and you’re like “Ah, this person’s not doing anything,” you can just cancel it and no hard feelings, they get a little small percentage of that and that’s fine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I would say that it’s best in my mind not to overcomplicate things, especially with celebrities. Celebrities don’t want to have some type of crazy, 20-page document they have to run by their agent and they have to go through with their attorneys and they have to figure out “Oh, I’m going to have to show up at this event.” Like, screw all that.
If you work with a celebrity and you find someone, you happen to know someone and they want to be an advisor, say, “No strings attached. Oh, by the way, we’re doing this party in two months, you can come or not.”
Oftentimes that actually frees them up to be like, “I don’t feel like I’m being used as a pawn here. Sure, I’ll show up for a half hour or 45 minutes” and that’s a win for you.
You want them to speak from the heart when they’re talking about a product.
Tim Ferriss: And I think you would agree that time kills deals, right? Some deals do not get better with time.
Kevin Rose: Yes, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Especially if you’re dealing with someone who has an entourage or a phalanx of lawyers, managers, agents, et cetera, you want it to be an easy yes. Make it an easy yes,
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent. So I’ll give you an example.
Back in the day when I launched Moonbirds, that PFP project, the NFT project that I launched, I talked to a handful of people and some people that I knew quite well that were very famous celebrities. There’s one NBA player that is a Hall of Famer that I gifted a Moonbird to and I said “Hey, listen…” He’s like, “I’m Web3 curious. I want to learn more about Web3” and it’s Ginóbili, like, you know him?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, huge.
Kevin Rose: So I gave him one and I said —
Tim Ferriss: Sweetheart of a guy, too.
Kevin Rose: He’s a super nice guy, and I said to him, I said, “Listen, you don’t have to tweet about it. This isn’t a pay for play thing. I would never want to do that. If for some reason down the road you think it’s really cool and you want to say something, you can.”
And he never tweeted about it, but that’s fine, you know what I mean? He just wasn’t vibing with it, didn’t feel that it was going in the right direction or whatever it may be and same thing for Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy was super kind, super nice, and he created a little parody account for his Moonbirds and was tweeting from it and he was figuring it out because he wanted to learn Web3 wallets, he set up his own wallet, he nested his own Moonbirds, meaning he interacted with smart contracts and dolls and it was because he was curious on the tech side and there was no money exchanged.
It wasn’t about that. So that’s the way I like to do these types of deals.
Tim Ferriss: And you tell me if this resonates with you. I would also think in terms of whether you’re building a company or an advisor, who would I like to work with on multiple companies?
Because I’ve seen, for instance, in many of the cases where I’ve been an advisor, assuming you do a decent slash good job, a lot of these people, if they’re good, are going to be serial entrepreneurs and then you end up just advising, advising, advising and they have their X-Men squad that they pull in to most startups.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That seems to me to be pretty common.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think there’s certain domain experts when you think about just strategies around different parts of your business where you say “Gosh, I would always want this person in my corner if I’m going to go launch a consumer internet product.”
And so you go back to those people or if you don’t know, a great example is I’m relaunching my podcast in January and one of the things that I just have been out of loop on is a TikTok strategy and I just really found a great company that had been recommended and had worked with multiple top 20 kind of podcasts on their TikTok strategy because that’s a hole that’s missing, right?
So I’m going to go out, I ask 10 friends, “Who’s the best of the best at this?” And then try and hone in on that person or people and then get them to work on your behalf.
In this particular case, I’m paying them for it, but that’s fine.
Tim Ferriss: I think twerking is the answer.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Like coordinated dances —
Kevin Rose: Twerking.
Tim Ferriss: And twerking, you might have a little —
Kevin Rose: That’s what you do for your advisory service?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a little case of werewolf buns. I don’t know if that’s a plus or minus on TikTok.
January.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, January.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about January. We’re coming up on the new year.
How are you thinking about New Year’s resolutions, that type of thing?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so we do this every year.
Tim Ferriss: We do.
Kevin Rose: I don’t even want to go revisit our list because I’m sure they’re horrible.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think your hit rate is on your previous list?
You had it written down. Do you have your last list? Can you look at it?
I don’t have it in front of me right now. I would say that over the years I’ve become better. My hit rate is higher.
Kevin Rose: 50 percent?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would say it’s 50 percent.
Kevin Rose: That’s about me too.
Tim Ferriss: I’d say it’s probably 50 percent, which hey, if that were start-up investing man, you’d be best of the best, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But you also don’t want to set your resolutions like “Brush my teeth three times a week.”
You don’t want to set the bar so low just for checking the box.
Kevin Rose: Right?
Tim Ferriss: So I would say it’s 50 percent, maybe a bit more than 50 percent. I think this year they’re simple enough that I could actually get to a hundred percent.
Kevin Rose: Yes, that’s exactly what I did. So this year for me, it’s about less, but make sure I can try to get to 75 to a hundred percent of them.
So mine are really straightforward. Last year I went one month without drinking. This year my therapist has told me, she’s awesome, and she’s like “Oh, you made it a month?” She’s like, “Oh, cool, cool. Congrats. Everybody does that.” And she’s like a little bit of a hard ass and I kind of like that about her and she’s like “No, go three months.” She’s like “That’s when the real benefits start to show up is at three months.”
And I’m like, “I mean, you could have said two,” but she’s at three. I’m going to go three months without drinking. That’s a big one for me. Daily meditations, obviously, have been a big part of my life. I’m going to continue that trend.
We can talk about Henry Shukman’s new app too, which is going to be a big part of that. The Zen Master that I study under is finally launching a new meditation app coming in January called The Way and very excited to help him with that app in terms of on the product side and just usability side, obviously he’s doing all the content. I’m not involved in it. I’m just an investor in it, but —
Tim Ferriss: Not involved in the content?
Kevin Rose: Not involved in content, right.
Yeah, I’m not a Zen Master.
Tim Ferriss: But you’ve studied very seriously with Henry —
Kevin Rose: Yeah for a few years now.
Tim Ferriss: You introduced us. He’s been on this podcast —
Kevin Rose: Twice now.
Tim Ferriss: Twice, and they’re very strong episodes. So I encourage people to check those out.
What makes The Way different?
Kevin Rose: So the one thing about as an investor, so I’m a part-time VC, I had this other NFT and art thing that I’m working on as well as a VC over at True, we are looking for novel ideas, things that haven’t been done before and the meditation app market is just completely saturated.
Tim Ferriss: Saturated?
Kevin Rose: Who would want to build an app in that space? I mean, Calm’s dominating, Headspace is dominating, you know Waking Up, fantastic app for more on the depth side, I would say Sam probably brings together the strongest group of teachers, I would say is a portfolio of meditation teachers.
Tim Ferriss: Like a university of meditation?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
So Henry, his approach is, you know, If you go into any of these other meditation apps, it’s like a meditation for sleep, a meditation for anxiety, and meditation for this three-minute meditation, two-minute meditation, 30-second meditation, you know it’s all these different — Henry’s very humble, but he’s one of only, I think, three fully accredited Zen masters in his lineage of Zen in the United States and he is bringing Zen, a flavor of Zen mixed in with some other types of meditation and his goal is simple. It’s The Way, it’s one path.
There’s no choose your own adventure, it’s like —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not The Ways.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s not The Ways, right. You can’t branch off and do a body scan over here and then come back for a sleep meditation or a sleep story, it’s none of that. It is a singular path and his goal is to lead you to some type of awakening moment sometime in the future.
So it’s for those that are like “Okay, I’ve tried the other meditation apps. I want to go deep. I want to get really serious about this.” So I can’t tell you when it’s going to launch. They’re in beta right now. I can tell you that thewayapp.com is going to be the place where you can put in your email address and I’ll let you know when.
You know what we can do for your show notes, let’s put a beta link, I think you can have up to a thousand testers. Let’s put it in your show notes and get a bunch of people testing it out.
Tim Ferriss: Lovely. Yeah, we’ll put it at tim.blog/podcast real quick.
Kevin Rose: And you put a little bit of cash in too, which is great.
Tim Ferriss: I did, which was going to be what I was going to say next, this is my first investment in a meditation app and my first investment in any type of consumer app in a while, in fact, and that’s based on my interactions —
Kevin Rose: Since Evernote.
Tim Ferriss: Y’know, which wasn’t, that wasn’t a bad thing, It didn’t turn into the thousand x, 10,000 x return, that I would like —
Kevin Rose: I’ve got to tell you they turned it around. It’s a good product again.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is a good product. I still use it, believe it or not —
Kevin Rose: Dude, this is actually on my list anyway, we’ll get into that but yeah, finish your thought. Sorry.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I was just going to say that I learned so much about product. I learned so much about startups. I learned so much about scaling, what to do, what not to do, through my experience with that company where I was an advisor because I didn’t have the capital early on to really build out a large portfolio with cash alone, and I was able to request, this is not a small thing for me. I was able to make requests of product changes directly.
Kevin Rose: It’s amazing, that lifeline to the CEO.
Tim Ferriss: Lifeline to the CEO and to the product team for me selfishly, if I’m using an app every day that makes a difference to my quality of life.
So I do not regret it. And part of your calculus, if you’re going to be involved with early stage has to be, I think, the assumption that the vast majority are not going to return what you hope they’re going to return.
Kevin Rose: Nine out of 10 fail.
Tim Ferriss: That’s just part of a power law distribution. Great book, by the way. Power Law.
So New Year’s resolutions. What else do you have and do you have a date? I’m just going to hold your feet to the fire a little bit for your three months. Have you decided on a start date?
Kevin Rose: Oh, so I’m going to invite you to this, my birthday’s in February and you’re invited. I got really lucky to get to know the artist Sohn, S-O-H-N.
Do you know Sohn at all?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: Have you listened to his stuff?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t.
Kevin Rose: Oh, so good. So Sohn has become a nice friend and he agreed to come play my birthday party for 30 people.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing.
Kevin Rose: And so he’s going to fly out, he’s in Spain right now, he’s going to fly out and play, and I’ve got to have a couple drinks there. We’re going to have a little bartender.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that would be, you’d be failing before you started.
Kevin Rose: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: If your first day were the day before your birthday.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so I’m — after my birthday is when I’m going to kick this off, so that’ll be good. But yeah, so really quickly to hit on mine.
So no drinks for three months, daily meditation, no-brainer, I want to organize my brain in digital form and so this is what’s really interesting in the last three months, multiple notetaking apps have enabled AI and what they’re doing now is they’re saying, “Screw knowing where your notes are, ask questions of your corpus of data.”
So it’s changing into a world where you can just enter all the data, enter all of Tim’s brain into someplace and say “Hey, what was that one note I had that one time when I was at that Mexican restaurant and I think it was about cat beds?” And it will literally serve you up that note based on the AI and its crawling abilities.
And I think that’s just fascinating. So Notion has added that, there are three, they call them second brain notetaking apps that are really for that I’m considering. I’m still working through all of them to see which one I like the best.
My candidates are Notion, Craft is amazing. Craft is a really beautiful notetaking app. It’s a little bit more about here’s the current day, start taking notes, and then you can interconnect the notes and do all kinds of fun things there.
Tim Ferriss: Is it spelled like the dictionary word, or spelled like Kraft cheese?
Kevin Rose: Yes. C-R-A-F-T. Yeah, Craft. Obsidian is another one. Have you heard of Obsidian?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard of it or maybe I just like the name.
Kevin Rose: It’s more like graph-based, interconnected notes, all these backlinks tying together thoughts and ideas. My Brain, you’ve seen these cloud mappings of interconnected notes.
Tim Ferriss: Notetaking apps and services also are a very crowded market.
Kevin Rose: Very crowded and Capacities is the last one I’m looking at. I’m leaning towards Craft. I think that’s probably going to be my go-to. It won app of the year last year on iOS, and it’s pretty fantastic and I will say in that list, and still actually I think the largest market share, barely bidding out Notion, is Evernote, still.
And so I installed Evernote, the latest version. I’m like, “This is actually a lot better.” I thought for a minute there it was going to go under because it traded hands a little bit, there was a little bit of drama there.
Tim Ferriss: It got overly diversified, overextended.
Kevin Rose: Yeah but it is quite good. They’ve revamped the app and it is nice.
So that and launching my podcast. And so just keeping it simple, launching The Kevin Rose Show. Yeah, I’ll give it a one-second plug, which is kevinrose.com. If you want to sign up, I’ll let you know when it launches, but I’ve got some great guests lined up for that show and taking it seriously, building out a real studio, doing it professionally, professional editors, the whole thing.
So it’s going to be great.
Tim Ferriss: It is going to be great. I can’t wait to see —
Kevin Rose: I want to keep it simple though this year.
Tim Ferriss: — what the roster looks like.
Kevin Rose: Not 10 things, but just like three or four. What are yours?
Tim Ferriss: Mine are, and then I’m going to come back. Don’t worry, folks. It’s not going to consume the whole show. But I want to ask you a question about AI, so I’ll preload that into your head, which is where do you think people will compromise their privacy because of really compelling convenience where they might regret it, where they might click in providing access, where later they’ll be like, “Oh, I really shouldn’t have done that?” So that’s —
Kevin Rose: I have two quick answers for that.
Tim Ferriss: Go for it.
Kevin Rose: One I think is going to be photos. Don’t ever click “Yes” to all-photo access, especially if you’ve got dick pics.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Kevin Rose: No, listen, I went there because a buddy of mine just got compromised last week. I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I’m not going to say who. I swear to you, Tim, this is a true story.
My buddy got SIM-swapped. Somebody took over his iCloud account and he’s got a very, and my wife knows this so I can say this freely, he’s got a very beautiful wife and he’s a good-looking dude.
He’s a solid B, you know, kind of like us, B minus, whatever, and he’s got pictures of his wife on his iCloud and she’s like, he’s traveling a lot and she’s sending little, little hoo hoo, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Little naughty, naughty.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, and I’m like, I’m like, “Dude, are you sending a little [whistle] back?” Because those are the ones, no one’s going to complain about your wife getting leaked online. It’s like, “Are your pics going to get out there online?” And it was a really stressful few days for him.
Tim Ferriss: I am sure, honestly, not to judge anyone who’s fond of shooting around dick pics. I don’t understand how anyone ends up in that position. I’m just like, don’t do it.
Kevin Rose: No, don’t do it.
Tim Ferriss: There are certain commandments, “Thou shalt not send dick pics.” The downside is so much higher than any possible upside.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Plus, I mean, look, maybe I’m biased. I’m just like I don’t think I have the Shrek of penises, but it’s like I don’t understand what the appeal is also.
Kevin Rose: Well, that’s because you don’t like penises.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not, yeah, I don’t have a, I guess, a collage of schwanzes made into a piece of artwork on my wall. So maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m just, that’s based on the team.
Kevin Rose: I mean for some people that’s the way they flirt remotely and things like that and it’s not me.
I don’t do that either, but I think I am actually doing a full episode on my podcast —
Tim Ferriss: On the dick pics?
Kevin Rose: On the dick pics, no on locking down specifically iCloud. I think it is the scariest place for hackers to gain access to because they get your iMessage messages and they also get your photos as well.
Tim Ferriss: Any quick tips for folks, just a sort of teaser?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Here’s a quick teaser. Number one thing you can do is that, so you want to hear the crazy that happened to him.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.
Kevin Rose: This’ll blow your mind.
Tim Ferriss: God, here we can 10 X my paranoia. Here we go.
Kevin Rose: It actually wasn’t a SIM-swap.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: So what happened is that Apple, as you know, if you forget your password, they have something called iForgot, which is like you can go there and say, “I forgot my password,” and it says “Okay, well do you have another device that you can confirm?” “No, I don’t have another device.” “Okay, well, what’s your backup phone number?”
So you can reset that password with the backup phone number that you put into the system. That all makes sense, right? A SIM-swap, somebody steals your phone number and they get access to it, and then that’s how you get compromised.
Their SIM-swaps are getting harder to do because some of the big providers have caught on and they’ve just tried to prevent that from happening, ask you more questions, all of that nature.
Well, someone called in on his behalf to, let’s just say —, because it was —. You might want to bleep that out if they’re you’re sponsor at some point. But they called in, they faked like it was him, and they didn’t ask for a SIM-swap.What they asked for, they said, “Hey, can you forward the phone number just for an hour to this other number? Because I need it forwarded.” So normally this would —
Tim Ferriss: So it was straight social engineering?
Kevin Rose: No, but — straight social engineering — but listen to this. Normally a forward wouldn’t work because a text message doesn’t get forwarded, only calls do. But you can go into Apple and you can say “I have auditory problems, I can’t hear, can you call me with the security code?”
So they did a quick forward, they called, it didn’t go to his phone, it went to the hacker’s phone. Apple read the security code to them via audio. They put it in, compromised reset, it changed his phone number, compromise, download all of his data, and then tried to blackmail him to get his data back.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. Okay. So in terms of teasers for?
Kevin Rose: Yes, teaser number one thing to do is that you want a cell phone provider where there is not a phone number to call and it’s really, truly, securely locked down.
Your best provider for that in the United States is Google Fi and what you do is you don’t set it up with your Google account. You create a brand new Gmail account that no one knows, TimTimsecure8537@gmail.com —
Tim Ferriss: Dammit, you just doxxed me so hard.
Kevin Rose: Exactly, and then you two-factor the auth the crap out of that, turn on Google’s advanced protection there. Then you sign up for a Google Fi account, which is a brand new phone number. Then you tell Apple that is your backup phone number, because Apple can still service your main number, but only use that backup number to reset passwords.
So there’s no possible way anyone would know that backup number. So it’s a whole thing. There’s more steps to it than that. You get hardware keys involved. Like Google’s Titan Key, which is the most hardcore of the USBC keys hardware keys, uses one of their Titan chips, which is legit. It’s a whole thing, but it’s scary.
Tim Ferriss: It’s terrifying.
Kevin Rose: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Time for me to double down. My phone has been acting funny recently. It’s making me spooked a bit.
Kevin Rose: It scares the crap out of me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like my phone has been acting a little funny and I’m like, weird.
Kevin Rose: Well, you know what sucks too is I’ve been going to WhatsApp more and doing that in seven days, delete all my messages because honestly, there are, tell me if you feel this way, I know you feel this way because we have these conversations on text.
There are things that you say with your friends that you’re just like, “If anyone read this out of context, I would seem like the most insert whatever.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, every person who uses group threads, if you are remotely interesting —
Kevin Rose: Or if you’re funny.
Tim Ferriss: At all.
Kevin Rose: If you’re funny.
Tim Ferriss: And funny, you’re all f*cked. If anything were made public everybody’s screwed.
Kevin Rose: Exactly. The number of jokes I’ve made that are not something I would not want the world to see, but are all in good fun and just amongst friends, it’s like in the thousands, right? And if that sh*t got online, I would deny it all. I didn’t write that AI did.
Tim Ferriss: The AI did.
Kevin Rose: But yeah, it’s tough, so anyway, this is actually really good tequila.
Tim Ferriss: It’s really smooth. So on the AI front, real brief and then —
Kevin Rose: Oh, we said photos was the one part. You asked “What were the places where AI might compromise your data?”
Tim Ferriss: Yes. So that’s the first one.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so I think photos would be the main thing and then the second one would be just this idea of these notetaking apps. Because if you’re journaling, for me, I have a fantastic therapist, I journal all of that, right? So things like Obsidian, the reason I’m drawn to that one in particular is its local only. So it doesn’t sync to the cloud and when it does, it uses a local encrypted key so not even they can read your data.
I trust Notion, but if someone were to compromise their key on their end in theory, even though the data is encrypted at rest, meaning when it’s not being used, it’s encrypted on their hard drives, it is still a potential vulnerability there.
But at the end of the day, if someone really wants to read my therapy note, it’s like whatever. We live in a world where you can just be like, “Ah, someone made that up.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there’s a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI and there’s a whole new world of exploits, wild.
On the AI side. For people who might be curious, I’ve actually, not on my personal notes, but we have trained, or I should say rather Automattic, which runs wordpress.com and I rely on their enterprise side of things for all of my websites.
They have an AI feature and they’ve trained this AI on all of my transcripts. So if you want to ask questions of 700 or so transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can do that and the results, in a lot of cases, are surprisingly good.
Kevin Rose: There’s several startups working on this. I saw one that actually indexed your show and if you ask a question of it, will return the clip in which you said the answer to it, which is amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen this.
Kevin Rose: I was thinking the other day about a great startup that I don’t have the time to build would be a podcast app that, imagine this world, and tell me if this is interesting to you, so it trains on all of your data. I’m listening to The Tim Ferriss Show. I’m halfway through an episode and you mentioned something that I don’t understand or I’m just not familiar with, right? I will just say “ayahuasca” for something random, and I hit pause and I hit the Tim AI button.
Now it’s trained on your voice so it can respond in your voice.
I say “Tim, what is ayahuasca, actually, before we continue the show?”
And you respond. You say “Well, ayahuasca is this, and I talked about it in episode number 12, blah blah, blah and also number 27, here’s a clip of me saying this,” and then you can rejoin the stream of the podcast and continue.
So it’s almost like you show up as a coach mid-podcast for any questions I have about that show so I can pick your brain and also as applied to your books so I could go into your entire corpus of books that I have and ask questions of that data as well.
That has to be the future, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Kevin Rose: How do you feel about that as a content creator, does that make you a little uneasy?
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t make me uneasy on a content level because I operate from a place of abundance with my stuff because my stuff is so dense, right? It’s not dense necessarily in a bad way, but it’s like I could talk about the content of, say, one of my books for hours on dozens of podcasts and not come close to exhausting even 20 percent of that book. So I’m very forthcoming with that. The one flag I would say that I have for that particular example is that if it’s my voice and so on, and this is going to come up a lot with AI, what is the indemnity? What does liability look like?
Kevin Rose: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: If someone uses an AI and they’re like, “Well, this Tim AI told me that I should do A, B, and C, or that I should or could X, Y, and Z.”
Kevin Rose: Right. It’s the 0.0001, you hope, percent chance they get it wrong. And then as applied to something dangerous, right? Because that could be —
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: Telling you from The 4-Hour Chef how to make runny eggs the wrong way, who cares? But telling you to take the wrong supplement dosage is a whole another can of worms.
Tim Ferriss: There’s dangerous, and then there’s just opportunity for scammers.
Kevin Rose: Right. Well, that’s happening regardless, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it is.
Kevin Rose: Tim’s going to be calling me all the time, pitching me a new book.
Tim Ferriss: Well, but not just on the AI social engineering side, but for instance, we don’t have to spend a lot of time on this, but there are people called career plaintiffs out there. Unfortunately, I know what this is. But for instance, there will be a law firm. What they do is they file class action lawsuits based on a couple. Barbara and Bob Jones are the couple that they work with all the time. And they’re like, “Hey, Barbara and Bob, Subway sandwiches is selling 11 and a half inch subs, but they’re calling them foot-long. Go buy two of them and then complain with us and we’ll file this thing and we’ll give you 10 percent of the upside.”
And I think that some of these AI models will provide a nice, juicy bite of the apple.
Kevin Rose: That was actually a real lawsuit by the way that you’re mentioning.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know. But we won’t get into the details of why I know that. But God, the US, man, some of these things, it’s just astonishing that the rules provide for some of these creatures to exist and profit.
Coming back to New Year’s resolutions, we had a nice big boomerang on that. Mine are, I would say simple, not necessarily easy, as is true with a lot of things. The first is minimalist delegation. And what that means to me is delegating the why and the who, but not necessarily the how. So I think my predisposition is to be very detailed when I delegate various types of tasks or projects. In other words, what I would like to do more of is, “Here is, at the simplest level, five words of what I want to do, figure it out. And you can handle all the specifics. You should know that we should have at least three bids if we’re putting something out that’s expensive, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.” But to really take my hands off the wheel in terms of over-prescribing the details, which I have a tendency to do because my mind is very detail-focused. I’m very meticulous, but I have found that, more often than not, I can point to examples of where I’m providing too much step-by-step detail. And also people who receive that in some cases feel like they’re being micromanaged.
Kevin Rose: Not only that, they’re not building the muscle.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly, the confidence.
Kevin Rose: Because they need to understand, the only way they can build that muscle around who you are and what you want is by making mistakes and you saying, “Hey, I would’ve done it this way a little bit differently because of X, Y, and Z,” and then they learn from that mistake versus you just prescribing. And it saves you a sh*t-ton of time.
Tim Ferriss: It saves a ton of time. So what I’m experimenting with, and I’ve already started doing this, and I think I’ve made a lot of progress, is say less. Say less and be available for questions, but otherwise make it clear that there’s a certain degree of wiggle room and space for errors that is okay.
Kevin Rose: So when your admin walks in, you say, “Sandwich.” If a meatball sandwich shows up, you throw it against the wall and say, “Wrong f*cking sandwich.”
Tim Ferriss: That would be one way to handle it. And I remember there was, I want to say, a blog post a while ago that was written by either Ben Casnocha or Reid Hoffman, but Ben Casnocha used to be the, let’s just call it aide-de-camp or chief of staff for Reid Hoffman. And what Reid had said to Ben was something along the lines, and I remember this because I had to look it up — this would be a chance for me to interrogate the Reid AI — “What do you mean by blah, blah, blah?” He said, “In the service,” I’m paraphrasing here, but, “In the service of speed, I’m willing to accept 10 percent foot faults.” And I was like, “Foot faults? What does that mean?”
And I think it’s a tennis reference, which is like when you step over the line when you’re serving and you get called for a fault, but in the service of speed, basically, the way I interpret that is you can get 10 percent wrong. Ideally, it’s not really expensive, catastrophic stuff, but I’m willing to accept a 10 percent error rate in the service of speed. So I’m trying to think about it along those lines. Because there are so many things that are either reversible or inexpensive where it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter. You’re better off making the wrong decision, and then right decision and doing both of those quickly because you course correct. Then taking a ton of time to deliberate in your mind when oftentimes you don’t even have complete information, you don’t know.
Kevin Rose: But also, imagine you get that down to five percent, the extra effort required. What is that doing to you as a burden versus just letting go a little bit and letting those faults happen? And it’s got to be a little bit freeing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. Question for you, because I thought you recommended at some point this book to me, and I have two or three friends who have recommended it since, The Surrender Experiment.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Are you still a fan?
Kevin Rose: Michael Singer?
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’m still a fan, I think.
Tim Ferriss: Could you say a little bit about it? I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it on the podcast.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I haven’t read it for probably two and a half or so years now. But Michael Singer is, I would say just a general kind of, I don’t know how to put it other than just like, I don’t want to say spiritual guru or more just kind of like a salt-of-the-earth type guy that has figured out that surrender is kind of the ultimate freedom. This idea that you can just release and let go, puts you more in the present moment than pretty much anything else. And the whole book is around how when stuff comes in, it doesn’t hit you. It doesn’t hit and stick. So to hit and stick and marinate and fester is not surrendering. It’s letting the energy build and bring you down oftentimes. And the book is framed around this idea that the more you can let go, the more freedom there is, the more happiness there is. And as Henry Shukman put it, the freedom comes from, not the tight grip on reality, but the slow, finger-by-finger letting go of that grip.
Tim Ferriss: And part of the appeal for me, as it was described to me, I have not read the book, but a very close friend of mine is reading it right now.
Kevin Rose: He has a course, by the way, that’s fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: It’s on Sounds True. It is a video course, and it is quite good.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a video course?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Is it necessary to watch the video or is it —
Kevin Rose: He’s a quirky personality and he’s great on video. He’s just really funny.
Tim Ferriss: And it seems like that book at least is his personal story, which automatically makes it more engaging for me.
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So yes, letting go. So the minimalist delegation, and the second point is actually related to that. That is the, in a sense, letting go. Quick creative collaborations is the second one. I only have three things. It’s minimalist delegation, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot, which is pretty straightforward to me. Again, it’s simple, but not always easy.
Kevin Rose: We’ve got to get into my physical reboot here in a minute.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we’re going to talk about it. So quick, creative collaborations. This is an area where you have seen me actually kick the tires quite a bit in the last year with co*ckPUNCH, which by the way, there’s a ton coming with that, which is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people. But I have done enough.
Kevin Rose: Buy co*ckPUNCH, I’m taking notes real quick here. Buy NFTs, Tim Ferriss, co*ckPUNCH.
Tim Ferriss: That’s right.
Kevin Rose: Hashtag financial advice to the moon.
Tim Ferriss: No, not financial advice. Jesus, that was AI talking. I didn’t say that. And in the process — using this NFT project way back in the day, which is, when it launched in December of 2022, I guess, as a vehicle through which to do creative experiments, emergent long fiction, that was kind of the whole point. And I have walked that. I’ve walked the talk in the sense that since then, and a lot of this has been invisible, but it will soon be visible. I’ve done creative sprints in say, upstate New York with some of the top D&D and Magic the Gathering artists, I should say. People who have done amazing iconic work for those brands doing character design and concept art.
Kevin Rose: How’s that felt to you?
Tim Ferriss: It was so much fun. It was so much fun. And I have had this narrative that I’m a better IC, individual contributor. I’m better as a solo operator. And that in some sense, I think because I’ve heard from some publishers and so on that I’m a bit of a problem author because I’m very, very, very unwilling to compromise quality. I am unwilling to compromise quality, and I’m very meticulous. And so if somebody’s not on that same page, I’m a problem. And so I developed this narrative that I was just prickly and difficult and didn’t —
Kevin Rose: How much of that do you think is true? Have you ever done a 360 review?
Tim Ferriss: I have done a 360 review. The feedback doesn’t usually fit, I wouldn’t say it supports that narrative. And in this particular case, gather all these folks, had some writers as well, which I thought was going to be harder than the art side because I can step back and say, “You are all much better at art than I am. But I have an identity as a writer.” And it was great. I had two writers, three artists, and had an absolute blast. The output was spectacular, which I haven’t made public yet, and that emboldened me to do more and more experiments. And so I can’t talk too much about it right now, but I am actually working on my first book project in seven years, eight years. And I’m doing it with a collaborator, which I thought I would never do in a million years.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Wait, you’ve got to give us a little more, fiction, nonfiction, fantasy.
Tim Ferriss: Nonfiction. This is OG TF style.
Kevin Rose: Five-hour.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, five-hour, but very dense, hyper tactical, not dense, very rich. In other words, it’s not a bunch of fluff. I’m not turning a blog post into a 300-page book. You’re going to want —
Kevin Rose: Can you tell us what it is?
Tim Ferriss: I can’t. I can’t.
Kevin Rose: Can you give me a genre?
Tim Ferriss: I can’t really give you a genre of what I would —
Kevin Rose: It’s not a cooking book again?
Tim Ferriss: It’s not. I think everybody got their fill of cooking with that. I’m very proud of that book, but holy sh*t, that almost killed me. No, I’m not doing that again. Also, not making the foolish decision to say to myself, “You know what I should do? What would be fun is for me to do 30 to 50 percent of my own photography for a 700-page cookbook.” Don’t do that.
Kevin Rose: Not archery.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re not a photographer, don’t do that. It is so much work. Oh, my God, I really respect the photographers out there. I underestimated that one.
Kevin Rose: But you dodged the archery question. It is an archery book.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not an archery book. I’m planning on doing more archery that is part of the physical reboot. But the quick, creative collaborations this book is going to be about, I would say, how to find the essential and ignore the trivial. That’s the very broad strokes. But I am collaborating on writing, which I thought I would never do. It is going better than I ever possibly could have imagined. And it has opened the floodgates for me to think about what other collaborations I could pursue. Screenplays, animation, television, who knows? But I’ve realized that if I am paired with someone who really gives a sh*t about quality and cares about being really proud of their work, I’m totally fine.
I can collaborate really well with those people. They just have to have really high standards. And I’m excited to do more of that. So the screenplay side and the TV and animation is particularly interesting to me. So I’m becoming more adept with a format like a screenplay and the format itself has intimidated me. And I feel like I just need to be locked in a room with someone really good for two weeks and be like, “You cannot leave until you have something to ship.” It can be a rough draft, but it has to be pretty much ready. And I think that’s doable.
So the quick creative collaborations is something that I’ll be doing more of. And then last on the physical reboot, I have been such a piglet in the last month.
Kevin Rose: You’re looking thicc.
Tim Ferriss: That’s T-H-I-C-C, folks.
Kevin Rose: Looking thicc.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m not in terrible shape, but I am planning on continuing to be a little piggy for Christmas and the holidays because I’m going to be home with family. And I love butter cookies. I love gingerbread cookies. This is kind of like you not committing to your three months before your birthday. That would be stupid. So I’m going to be spending January, February in really intense outdoor training and skiing and ski touring and so on. So I’m not worried about burning off what I’m accumulating because that’s going to happen, especially at high altitude.
Kevin Rose: I’m going to try and visit you, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: Awesome.
Kevin Rose: January.
Tim Ferriss: That would be fantastic. So the physical reboot is up there, and I’m optimistic about that because on the internal level, meaning biomarkers and so on, almost every biomarker is the best that it’s been in like a decade.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: After the last year.
Kevin Rose: That is not me. That sounds amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And some of that has been certainly physical practice exercise. A lot of that has been dietary
Kevin Rose: How’s your Apo B?
Tim Ferriss: The best it’s ever been?
Kevin Rose: How low?
Tim Ferriss: I can’t recall offhand.
Kevin Rose: Okay. 20s to 30s?
Tim Ferriss: It’s within the aggressive Attia target range.
Kevin Rose: AST, ALT, fine?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Those are always fine.
Kevin Rose: hom*ocysteine always good?
Tim Ferriss: hom*ocysteine is always fine.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. My liver enzymes and —
Kevin Rose: What have been your issues then?
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Kevin Rose: What are your issues? What did you correct in your blood work?
Tim Ferriss: There are a couple of things that I’ve corrected. So I have historically high uric acid levels.
Kevin Rose: But you’re on an allopurinol then?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not on an allopurinol because I had a reaction to it.
Kevin Rose: Oh, dang.
Tim Ferriss: It can be very dangerous.
Kevin Rose: Yes, it can.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m on something called Uloric, which is fine.
Kevin Rose: It’s actually better, a cleaner drug, I think, Attia says.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There’s a bunch of debate around it because there were some smaller studies that were arguably poorly designed that did some type of head-to-head, and it got poo-pooed. But Uloric for me is a good option. Not medical advice. Talk to your f*cking doctor, please. I don’t play one on the internet. In addition to that —
Kevin Rose: That’s from your meat, by the way. You know that? That’s your meat intake.
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s not.
Kevin Rose: Are you sure?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I’m sure.
Kevin Rose: Because typically uric acid, they used to call it the king’s disease, right? It causes gout and it was from wine and meat and fats.
Tim Ferriss: It’s considered a disease of [inaudible]. So the wine is more interesting.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: So yes, people associate it with, if I’m not mistaken, purines, and it gets associated, therefore with protein intake also. But there’s a blog post. It’s easy to forget. I have a thousand plus blog posts, which actually bridged the books to the podcast. It’s easy to forget that connective tissue with a thousand plus blog posts. One of them is called something like “The [Missing] Chapter from Good Calories, Bad Calories.” Good Calories, Bad Calories book, great book.
Kevin Rose: Daniel Taubes.
Tim Ferriss: Gary Taubes.
Kevin Rose: Gary Taubes
Tim Ferriss: And one of the chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor was about fructose and how —
Kevin Rose: Which Attia is anti.
Tim Ferriss: Right, which also ties into uric acid.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So what I have seen in myself, at least, it doesn’t matter if I am carnivore diet, vegan, fasting, whatever dietary liver I try to pull, uric acid is high. It just does not matter. And that’s also hereditary. This runs in my family. The other constellation of issues are all cardiac, like, lipid profile related. Also hereditary. Dietary intervention, with the exception of one thing that I’ll mention.
Kevin Rose: Are you on a statin?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not on a statin.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Well, your Apo B is fine.
Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear. So there are different reasons that your lipid profile can be out of whack. In my particular case, and I might be able to put something in the show notes as a resource, there are sophisticated labs or companies that will run labs that fine slice a lot of this.
Kevin Rose: Boston Heart?
Tim Ferriss: I think it’s Boston Heart. And then you need someone to interpret the tea leaves, obviously, in which case you need a very competent doctor.
In my case, I’m a cholesterol hyper absorber. More accurately, I’m a sterile hyper absorber, which means I can also absorb a lot of steriles from, say, plant matter, which is why automatically if you reduce meat or eliminate meat, it doesn’t mean that your cardiac and lipid profile will improve. And you actually see a lot of folks for which it goes the opposite direction because they end up consuming a lot more refined carbohydrates. Their fasting glucose goes up and they end up with a whole host of issues, in some cases associated with fructose. Like, “Oh, agave nectar, brilliant. Well, maybe not so brilliant.” And for that reason, in my case, I’m taking ezetimibe, actually, I’m taking something called NEXLIZET, which is absurdly expensive. Welcome to the United States in this case. But it’s a combination of ezetimibe and something called bempedoic acid. Ezetimibe, very well researched, pretty well understood. Bempedoic acid, a newer player on the scene, but very interesting.
And the combination of those two, plus the Uloric, are what got a number of biomarkers of concern, not crazy. And I’ve done not only the usual cardiac calcium scores, which are helpful, but incomplete in a lot of ways. I’ve also done angiograms, which you do not want to do willy-nilly all the time, but I wanted to see if there were any precursor to any issues. So far so good. In my particular case, those things, plus reducing saturated fat intake.
Kevin Rose: Dude, saturated fat makes a difference. It’s the killer.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it makes a difference.
Kevin Rose: It screws up all my numbers.
Tim Ferriss: It makes a difference. So in my case, it would be a bad idea for me to hit the MCT smoothies. Right?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So Bulletproof coffee, bad idea for me.
Kevin Rose: Also, the MCT, I don’t know if it does it to you, but it —
Tim Ferriss: Disaster pants.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Risk goes up.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Risk goes up by about 10x.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you’re —
Kevin Rose: You run to the bathroom with the MCT oil.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. If you are thinking to yourself, “In 2024, I want to sh*t my pants more often,” I would recommend a coffee —
Kevin Rose: If you’re constipated.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Creatine, double espresso, and MCT oil, problem solved.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my god.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t ask me how I know that. But you can guess. Don’t have that right before you’re driving to the airport for your international flight, also, pro-tip. So the minimalist delegation, fast delegation, embracing reversible or low cost possible mistakes, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot. And honestly, with the physical reboot, a lot of that is old news. The stuff that works works. It’s like kettlebell swings.
Kevin Rose: Zone two cardio.
Tim Ferriss: Ski touring, zone two, which I’ll get to very naturally with what I’m going to be doing in terms of hiking and ski touring and so on. Basic, basic basics, I shouldn’t say basics. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. And just when in doubt, return to fundamentals, it’s like weight training once a week, that is better than nothing. Once a week. And then the zone two. But also for me, it’s like one or two sessions of very, very hard technical Pilates to hit everything that I’m going to miss anyway, like medial glute.
Kevin Rose: I’m getting back Pilates in the new year, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: And that’s about it. Do less than you think you can do. If some of your goals are around physical reboot or recomposition, set the bar where you are sure you can clear it.
Kevin Rose: So I wanted to talk to you real quick about, you mentioned the physical body reboot. One of the things that all of my physicians, not all, it sounds bougie to say, all my physicians, my primary care physician —
Tim Ferriss: Tell us, President Obama.
Kevin Rose: — has been concerned about is, I have slightly elevated blood pressure. And it’s not to the point where I should have it treated with medicine, but there’s breathing exercises you can do. There’s a device called RESPeRATE, which Peter Attia recommends.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s fantastic. It hooks around your chest. It’s like a strap. And then you put in some EarPods that are connected to this device and it walks you through a series of breathing exercises, and it’s clinically proven to lower your blood pressure. So Attia recommends that as kind of first line defense for slightly elevated blood pressure. There is a device that is approved in the UK and the EU, and it’s called Aktiia. And it’s a horrible name.
Tim Ferriss: What?
Kevin Rose: Aktiia, not Attia. They’re going to get a cease and desist from Attia. Yeah. So it’s A-K-T-I-I-A. I’m wearing it on my wrist right now. So if you’re watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest Fitbit. It’s super tiny. The battery life is five days. It does every hour blood pressure monitoring. It’s clinically proven accurate. And Attia is testing it right now in his lab with his folks there.
It is not approved in the US. So what I had to do is, I bought it online — at first, I got a VPN, I proxied into their website to make it look like I was in the UK. And then I bought online, shipped it to a friend in the UK, who sent it to me in the States. I then created a fake iCloud account in the UK with a fake email address and VPN to act like I was in the UK on a separate phone that I had not sent in, like one of my older iPhones. And then I was able to get the app installed through the UK app store because it’s not available in the US App store and got it to work.
So technically this is not legal in the United States.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, contraband.
Kevin Rose: But I’m actually monitoring it and the breathing exercises are helping. A high salt intake combined with water is huge. If you have a salty steak or anything, I can notice, just remember when we first got into CGMs, you were way before I was, but in the continuous glucose monitors, you got me into them. And you would be surprised because you would sit there and you’d be like, “Oh, banana doesn’t do anything.” And some people, banana shoots you through the roof, right? Or rice for me, oh, my God. Through the roof. I don’t know about you, but rice for me is a huge offender.
Tim Ferriss: Rice affects me less than it affects you, but it affects a lot of folks. And footnote, in a previous episode, we talked about —
Kevin Rose: The rice cooker.
Tim Ferriss: Which drains out the water.
Kevin Rose: Carbs.
Tim Ferriss: Which dramatically reduces the glycemic response. But back to our scheduled program.
Kevin Rose: We can link that in the show notes as well. But yeah, so this for me has been like, “Okay, I just had a salty meal. Now let me chug a bunch of water along with that meal.” And actually I will notice a difference. I do not get into those, what they call the high orange levels of blood pressure just by my water consumption.
Tim Ferriss: Meaning you help or hurt by drinking more water?
Kevin Rose: Yes, drinking water. And there’s evidence to back this up, but he’s had people on the podcast who have talked about this. But anyway, it’s another device that, I hope, knock on wood, they’ve submitted to the FDA, the hope is that we’ll have this device approved in the States here, I don’t know, next six months to a year. So we’ll see.
Tim Ferriss: Very cool. Anything else on the physical reboot side? The three months with no booze I think is going to be, if you can do it, no offense, it’ll be a revelation, I think.
Kevin Rose: It’s going to be amazing. Speaking of it looks like you’re not a big fan of your own tequila. No. I just noticed you’re not really drinking any.
Tim Ferriss: Well, first of all, no.
Kevin Rose: If you don’t like it — you’re just selling it, that’s fine.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also, we started recording a 3:00 p.m. so usually I’m not a 3:00 p.m. drinker, but you know what?
Kevin Rose: I want to be in bed by seven, so, okay.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, geez. Okay. Since we’re just checking back into the home anyway, where they’re going to put our socks on and put us to bed. No problem. Yeah, yeah. All right.
Kevin Rose: Dude. Let’s retire at the same retirement home.
Tim Ferriss: That’d be so fun.
Kevin Rose: That’d be so much fun.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I was about to say something bad.
Tim Ferriss: Cheers, man. It’s nice to see you.
Kevin Rose: Cheers.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk about —
Kevin Rose: Sorry. I was enjoying that.
Tim Ferriss: — taking breaks from stuff because I have kind of a wild story, which I don’t think we’ve talked about at all. I have a number of wild stories.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I’ve got one big one for today.
Tim Ferriss: You have a big one too. And I think these are going to be interrelated in a sense. So I’ll piggyback half of it after what I believe you’re going to share. But I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Which was the first —
Kevin Rose: Cold turkey?
Tim Ferriss: Cold turkey, which was the first time I’ve done that, probably I would have to imagine since I was what? 16. It’s been forever.
Kevin Rose: Let me ask you a question here. Why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like, “Oh, I have a cup of coffee today, and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later.” Why go — this is like the extreme Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s —
Kevin Rose: Did you get headaches? You must have gotten something.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I got headaches, but it was during a period where I could —
Kevin Rose: But you had Vicodin before.
Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t use Vicodin. I knew that I could accept the headaches, and I had a period of time where there really was a low cost, where professionally I was taking three to four weeks off the grid and I knew that I had a grace period where I could sustain it. So I did effectively, no caffeine, no alcohol, and I suppose the most important other item —
Kevin Rose: No sex.
Tim Ferriss: No sex and ejacul*tion, which we can talk about that, but that’s pretty easy. The harder one is I did nothing sweet. So not just containing sugar, but nothing sweet. So anything that has an artificial sweetener was out.
Kevin Rose: Would you consider this tequila sweet?
Tim Ferriss: I would not consider this tequila sweet. And there is a bit of subjectivity for a lot of it.
Kevin Rose: It says sweet notes to it. It’s not —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s got some floral notes to it. But by the kind of letter of the law, I wouldn’t consider this subjectively to be sweet. But for instance, any kind of juice, out, any type of sweetener, of course, out, let’s just say different types of plantains, if they are sweet to the taste, they’re out. Sweet potatoes out.
Kevin Rose: Is that hard for you? That’s not hard for me.
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t seem hard. But let’s just extend this. Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol or some kind of crap in it that is a sweetener.
Kevin Rose: So no brushing your teeth for two weeks.
Tim Ferriss: I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb, just baking soda.
Kevin Rose: Just straight up.
Tim Ferriss: I brush my teeth with that for a handful of weeks. And what you also realize is in the US or in this case, when I went to Korea, if you ask people if A, B, or C has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost everything that you come across. That was interesting. It was challenging because it severely limited what I could eat. But the caffeine was an amazing experience. Now, I alluded to this a little bit earlier. I’m back on the sauce over the last week, week and a half, which I regret, number one. And I’m paying a lot for, there are costs.
Kevin Rose: In terms of sleep?
Tim Ferriss: Let me explain. So let me back up and I’ll just give you the punchline.
Kevin Rose: Well, tell us why you did this to begin with, because you didn’t mention that, it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. Why?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So the reason that I did — it started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff and there were restrictions, and then I just extended everything.
Kevin Rose: By weird stuff, psychedelic stuff?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, psychedelics, which will tie into a part of my strange story later. But I hadn’t done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years. And so I took restrictions very seriously. I think that is important in my opinion. And then I extended them all. And I wanted to see in part because I met someone who said they had stopped drinking anything caffeinated, cold turkey, because they felt like a loser because they’d become dependent on it. And they’d missed a really important ski day, one of the first days of the season. And they’re a really good skier. And they were with a group of people and I believe they were the only person who skipped. And that day they were just like, “No more.” And to this day, two years later, caffeine free.
Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait. I lost something there. When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing because they couldn’t have coffee?
Tim Ferriss: Because they didn’t have coffee that morning and they were so tired.
Kevin Rose: Oh, I see.
Tim Ferriss: That they felt like they couldn’t do it. So they stayed on the ski lift, instead of getting off, they just went around and went straight back down.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And called it a day. And to their credit —
Kevin Rose: They’ve got to be under the weather or something if they had to miss a day of skiing, there.
Tim Ferriss: But to their credit, they were just like, “This is f*cking loser behavior. Enough.” And they went to zero. And that caught my attention because when you talk to someone, no offense to anyone who fits in this category, but let’s just say if someone is a Mormon and they’ve never had caffeine, that’s not my life, right? They’ve never had a hit of the sauce. Although technically their workaround is Diet co*ke —
Kevin Rose: You are the furthest from a Mormon I know.
Tim Ferriss: — instead of coffee, but we’re not going to get into the weeds there. But if somebody hasn’t had a taste of the delicious poison.
Kevin Rose: Sweet, sweet nectar.
Tim Ferriss: There’s so many things, right? There’s so many things like this where it’s like, okay, if you’ve had one significant other and you’ve never been out and about and sampled the buffet of the world, we can’t really have — it’s very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships. It’s a different situation. Same with caffeine.
But this person had been hitting the sauce for decades, and then they got off. And that was inspiring to me. Then I had this restriction and I just extended it. And just to give the punchline, my sleeping issues that I’ve had for decades, every single one just vanished. Best sleep of the last 20 years.
Woke up wide awake every morning after the first, let’s just call it week and a half, had tons of energy and got a super high volume of stuff done. And what I realized, and the part of the reason to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things? I was curious what my real baseline was. What does real baseline look like? What is Tim, untouched, unaffected by all these various supplements? That’s another thing. I took a month off of all supplements. I only took my prescription meds like the Uloric and so on. I got rid of all supplements.
Kevin Rose: No Deca or testosterone or anything.
Tim Ferriss: No Deca, no nothing.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what the sort of pure baseline Tim is. And turns out baseline Tim does really well.
Kevin Rose: Why go back then? Why?
Tim Ferriss: Well —
Kevin Rose: You got hung over.
Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t get hung over. I didn’t get hung over coffee.
Kevin Rose: Because it’s good after a hangover, a little bit of Le juice.
Tim Ferriss: Also, before I went to South America, I listened to an audiobook, which was called or is called The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine. And that is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it’s The Easy Way to Quit Smoking. And I know literally multiple people who’ve listened to this, had their last cigarette, and they’re done and they stop. So it’s a little hokey, but that made an impact on me as well.
Kevin Rose: I’ll do that for January. I’m write that down on my list. January. No caffeine.
Tim Ferriss: Now that I know I can do it, I’m definitely going to do it again. The reason that I got back on it, and I’ll actually add just a little bit of color. The first is that there were days without caffeine where I would say to myself, “I’m tired. I really want a cappuccino.” But I realized, because I interrogated it, I was like, “Well, I’m not allowed to have a cappuccino. Am I really tired?” And I came to the conclusion that, no, I wasn’t actually tired, I just wasn’t f*cking wired. You see what I mean?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: My normal had become multiple coffees in the morning and God knows what else.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So I had taken as my baseline a default, wired sounds too negative, but stimulated state. And when that was removed, the story that I conjured was, “I’m tired.” But when I was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast, podcast turns out great. I’m like, “Okay, let me revisit this.” I wasn’t tired, I was just calm. Interesting.
Kevin Rose: Crazy.
Tim Ferriss: Interesting. And why did I get back on coffee? Coffee for me, I’ve realized, is probably alcohol for a lot of folks. And there’s sometimes, I’m not going to lie. Look, let’s be honest here. There are times when it’s like I want to take the edge off, “Sure, have a drink.” But more often, because I don’t drink that much, I use coffee as a security blanket when my life gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted and things seem a little out of control or I’m not sure how I’m going to make it through something, walk into the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee is, it’s a life raft of consistency. We saw this during COVID, right? Where people would line up at Starbucks for three hours to get a coffee because it was like the one semblance of normality.
Kevin Rose: It’s like a ritual and there’s also a high to it, so it’s like —
Tim Ferriss: There’s also a high.
Kevin Rose: — yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So even though I realize intellectually that it’s counterproductive. When I am feeling as I have been for a host of reasons that I won’t bore people with, but just gone through a pretty challenging week or two, my response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee, even though it increases anxiety physiologically.
Kevin Rose: This is one thing actually, we’ve known each other for a long time, I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t know that I’ve seen you do this. Are you an afternoon coffee guy at all? I don’t know that, I’ve seen you do matte maybe a little bit later.
Tim Ferriss: I typically do not have coffee in the afternoons. And I really try not to have caffeine in the afternoons, which I violated this week. So in the last two days, or I should say in the last, let’s just say in the past seven days I have violated that. And what I’ve realized, because I’ve run the N of one now, and there are a bunch of different variables, so I realize this is imprecise, it’s not a perfect science. Is that I can drink coffee and fall asleep, that’s not the problem. But it disrupts my sleep architecture.
Kevin Rose: Quality of sleep, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I wake up after three days, very little time. Three days of drinking caffeine, I wake up and I have circles under my eyes, dark circles.
Kevin Rose: Are you quantifying this in the sense of, are you wearing an Oura Ring? Do you have any other data where you’re looking at it?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not currently capturing the data with an Oura Ring, but I have in the past, I’ve seen what it looks like. So I know that’s the case. I’m falling asleep. My time in bed, if we’re just looking at a clock is fine, but I’m waking up tired.
Kevin Rose: I hate that.
Tim Ferriss: And then what do you want? You want another hit?
Kevin Rose: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: You want more of the sauce.
Kevin Rose: First thing, a little juice.
Tim Ferriss: And there’s a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. I don’t think, for the rest of my life, I’m going to be caffeine free. But now I have a better awareness of what my baseline looks like, so I can return to that.
Kevin Rose: So let me tell you something crazy. This was before I met Darya, so I’m trying to go back in years now. So probably, let’s just call it 15 years ago, I gave up coffee for about six months.
Tim Ferriss: Six months?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s legit.
Kevin Rose: But I wasn’t really that addicted to it, I was having a cup every other day or whatever. And I went back, I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time and I went to Ritual Coffee, which is a fantastic coffee place.
Tim Ferriss: Great place.
Kevin Rose: And I ordered a tall single origin coffee and I drank the whole thing. And I will tell you, when you go six months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee, you feel high as a kite.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super.
Kevin Rose: I was like 10x what I feel today with a cup of coffee. Because your body just, I mean it is a powerful drug when you’ve gone without it for a while.
Tim Ferriss: Super powerful.
Kevin Rose: Do you have any sense of how long it takes to get that back? Have you done any research to —
Tim Ferriss: To get what back?
Kevin Rose: — an initial childhood high of that first cup of coffee?
Tim Ferriss: I see. How long do you go without before you get back to that?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, we can tell you like —
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. I don’t know. I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking. How long does it take to develop a tolerance and experience withdrawal symptoms? It is so fast.
Kevin Rose: Oh, so fast. One day if you go without coffee —
Tim Ferriss: It’s so fast.
Kevin Rose: — for serious coffee drinkers will be headaches.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I would say furthermore, if you stop drinking coffee, and I’m using coffee as a bit of scapegoat here, I love coffee. But if you go without caffeine and then you get back on caffeine and you’re on it for two or three days and then you stop again, my personal experiences, you are going to feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is unlike most other drugs. It is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug. I’m not recommending this, but hypothetically, if you were to smoke cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you’re fine. No problem. You’re not going to have a headache the next day. But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that’s in part because it is often disrupting sleep architecture. That’s my vote, at least.
Kevin Rose: One question for you. One of the things that I have yet to try that I’ve been really curious about, is I know that there are cultures, I can’t remember, I’m going to screw it up. I don’t don’t know if it’s an Inca or I can’t remember exactly which culture it is from Mexico that did high dose chocolate, almost like —
Tim Ferriss: Cacao?
Kevin Rose: — a cacao ceremony where they drink this super purified cacao, insane amounts of caffeine, and they reach these kinds of spiritual states. Have you ever heard anything about that?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t read reports, but I know that for instance, I want to say in some places in Mexico, certainly in Guatemala, you have cacao ceremonies.
Kevin Rose: I was invited to one, one time, a cacao ceremony.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t know the historical record. I don’t know how much of these things were used a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. There are many new practices that have created the narrative of age-old use for a veneer of credibility when in fact things were very different a thousand years ago.
Kevin Rose: You have to imagine cacao was a staple.
Tim Ferriss: Cacao has been around for a while.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So in the case of cacao, my understanding is it contains theobromine, which in and of itself is a fascinating word. So theobroma, theo like theology, broma, food, food of the gods. Theobromine, which is pharmaco*kinetically very — meaning, just if you were look at the graph of peak and half-life and so on, it’s quite different from caffeine, is my understanding.
Kevin Rose: There’s actually the vasodilator of the plant. What causes — because I know CocoaVia, for example, are you familiar with that supplement, CocoaVia?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a cacao supplement from a large company, I believe.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, from Mars, actually.
Tim Ferriss: From Mars, yeah.
Kevin Rose: But the crazy thing is, I was talking to Rhonda Patrick about this and she has had one of her, I think it was her mother-in-law or something like that, high blood pressure, takes CocoaVia, drops it down because it’s a vasodilator and is a big fan of it as well. And it’s been shown cognitive improvements as well.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not sure, it very well could be the case. I mean, when you get — the dose makes the poison, the dose also makes the transcendence for a lot of different plants. So in the case of cacao, I have experienced higher, let’s call it higher-dose cacao and you can reach an altered state for sure. I’m going to caveat what I’m about to say with the “Do not ever do this” warning. But for instance, there are plants that, at high enough doses, are absolutely psychedelic, which I would never recommend because you can die. Let me repeat that. Fatal risks, so do not try this at home.
But tobacco as an instance, as an example, has a very rich history in South America and elsewhere, but especially in South America where high doses of juice have been consumed. Every mode of administration you can imagine has been done and is very common down there. There’s a book by Johannes Wilbert, which is titled along the lines of [Tobacco and Shamanism in South America], it is very dense, it reads like a PhD dissertation. But when you consume pretty much through any route imaginable enough tobacco, you can experience a psychedelic experience.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Can I tell you a story about this?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: I’ve had this. So, I was in San Francisco at the time, and they have, this was, I call it a decade ago, they have a bunch of chefs that are very experimental. I won’t name the chef, but it was a one Michelin star chef that infused tobacco leaves into an alcohol.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.
Kevin Rose: And you have to be insanely careful. If you look up online, like you said, if you put too many leaves in the infusion, you will have a lethal overdose of nicotine that will kill you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so this chef knew what they were doing. I would never try this at home. They made me a bourbon-infused tobacco co*cktail. And I was like, “This sounds interesting, I’ll give it a shot.”
Tim Ferriss: Hope you don’t need to sleep anytime soon.
Kevin Rose: Dude. No, listen, I drank this one drink and I’m having a good time getting a little chatty and like, “Ooh, this is fun.” And then, dude, I get up to use the bathroom.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.
Kevin Rose: And I swear to God, it felt like my feet were sinking into the ground as I was walking, or I was walking down to the stumps of my knees, like my legs were collapsing as I was walking.
Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Wait a minute.”
Kevin Rose: And I was like — because I don’t smoke tobacco at all or anything like that. And it hit me a ton of bricks and I’m like, “I am high as sh*t.” It is a very potent substance, especially for non-smokers, you’ve got to be really careful.
Tim Ferriss: So coming full circle. So cacao, powerful, fascinating plant, sacred in a number of different cultures. Tobacco, be very careful, folks. It is powerful and potentially lethal. And then coming back to caffeine, it is the, as I understand it, the world’s most commonly consumed psychoactive plant.
Kevin Rose: Via tea. Tea is the number one.
Tim Ferriss: Tea and coffee. And it has this place, I love my cup of coffee. Trust me, I had one this morning. And I think the exercise, if you can do it, not everyone can, but of rediscovering what your baseline is. What you actually felt like when you were 12 or 15.
Kevin Rose: I’m actually writing this down, because —
Tim Ferriss: It’s so valuable. It is so valuable because I now know what that feels like and I know that I can return to it as an adult.
Kevin Rose: Yes. And that holds true to anything that you’re doing that, call it alcohol, any substance that you’ve become dependent upon.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t have to be just caffeine. It can be anything that you’ve, that you almost feel like you can’t live without. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sugar, carbs, some activity, traveling.
Kevin Rose: Late night pizza.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, late night pizza. If you’re a road warrior and you just travel all the time because you say yes to everything, okay, what does it feel like to sit at home, if such a thing exists for you? For one month, what does that feel like? And if a bunch of weird stuff comes up, maybe as Tara Brach would say, “To one sage, only one question matters. What are you unwilling to feel?”
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God, I have to have her on the podcast. That is one of my top guests I need to get.
Tim Ferriss: She’s great. If you haven’t read it, folks, Radical Acceptance, which DarDar, I owe DarDar thanks for. So if you don’t get the reference —
Kevin Rose: DarDar is my wife, Darya. We call him TimTim, so we — the family.
Tim Ferriss: Which came about, actually, let’s give people a real look into the archives. So TimTim came about because we were on a trip to China to drink Pu-erh tea all over the place.
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Which was one of the weirder trips I’ve ever been on for a lot of reasons.
Kevin Rose: We were in the Yunnan province together in the middle of nowhere.
Tim Ferriss: We had some very strange experiences on that trip, drank a lot of tea, had a motley crew of people with us along for that ride. And there was another Tim on the trip. So there was a question of, “How do we keep the two of you separate?” And you came up with, I believe, TimTim.
Kevin Rose: I mean, it was a —
Tim Ferriss: Collaborative decision.
Kevin Rose: Kind of real-time.
Tim Ferriss: That’s how TimTim came about.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So Darya, who is a neuroscientist by training, which is why I actually took the book Radical Acceptance seriously, because all due respect, I love Tara, loved this book, and a huge impact on me. But the title gave me an allergic reaction. I was like, “Oh, God, another one of these.” Sounds hand-wavy. Kumbaya. Didgeridoo. Like, “Okay, I just can’t do it.”
But the fact that Darya, who has one of the lowest tolerances for bullsh*t, hand-wavy stuff that I know of, the fact that she said she gained from it, gave me permission to dive into it, which then had a really big impact on me. So, coming back though, if you feel like you can’t live without X, that is often a great signal or at least a prompt to ask yourself, what might an experiment look like for two to four weeks to go without X? Been super valuable for me.
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome. I wrote it down. No caffeine in January, I’m going, I’m serious.
Tim Ferriss: I might double down and do it with you.
Kevin Rose: Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. No caf.
Kevin Rose: All right, let’s talk about my experiments, shall we?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it. I’m excited. I’m excited about this, because I also don’t know the details. I know that —
Kevin Rose: You saw the text messages.
Tim Ferriss: — I saw some of the text messages and I was very curious.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So, I don’t know how to frame this. Let me start off at the best I can. So, this is a big one.
Tim Ferriss: You’re pregnant.
Kevin Rose: I’m pregnant. What was the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger got pregnant, what was that? I can’t remember the name.
Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember the name. But yes, I know the movie.
Kevin Rose: But basically, I have the same physique too. So basically, for people that know me or don’t quite know me, I’ve done a bunch of stuff in terms of being like an entrepreneur and an investor and these different things. And one of the hats that I put on a couple of years ago was dabbling in the world of Web3. And Web3, for those untrained, it’s cryptocurrency, it is decentralized internet, it is NFTs, it’s art of the blockchain.
Tim Ferriss: It’s ownership, right? If 1.0 is read-only internet. 2.0 is read, write. Three is actually owning a piece of what’s on the plane.
Kevin Rose: So it’s a very exciting frontier and it’s filled with a bunch of explorers that I would say it’s a small number of people, call it probably, in terms of people that are excited about digital art, call it 250,000 people or less. But it is a serious group of people that are enabling a new canvas to take form in front of us. And I believe in my heart of hearts that for all of the bad press that we see about NFTs and all the scams, and don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of that sh*t, there is something true about, if you had to close your eyes and wake up in 20 years, will collectible digital art be a thing? Of course it will. And the blockchain is a perfect place to prove provenance, to prove scarcity, there’s a lot of advantages there. Long story short, I launched something called Moonbirds, which was a PFP project.
Tim Ferriss: I remember the text I got on the day of that launch.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. So, we launched this collectible NFT and it skyrocketed way beyond what we had ever thought. So to give you all a sense, from launch to one year in, over a billion dollars has been traded in Moonbirds NFTs.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so wild.
Kevin Rose: And I did not expect that. I really didn’t. But with that comes trading and I have never lived the world of trading. I’ve grown companies to quite some size, but never publicly, I’ve never taken a company public. And when you take a company public i.e, NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, you deal with the ups and downs and feedback from people that are now stakeholders of that particular company. It’s different. This is an equity. Holding an NFT does not make you a shareholder. It’s very different. But they still pay attention to what is the price of this NFT.
So, when the NFT goes up, times are good, people are happy. And when it goes down, people are not happy. I’ve had people truly hug me and say they’ve paid off their house because they sold one of my NFTs for $200,000 and they were stoked. And it was like tears kind of hugging. I’ve had people basically tear me apart saying, “I am the other person on the other side of that equation that bought that NFT for,” let’s call it whatever, 50,000, 75,000, 10,000, doesn’t really matter, it’s all relative to how much that person has as an individual, “and how are you going to fix this because NFTs are down and they need to go up.” Right? And some of it is on what we build to try and build bigger and better things for the ecosystem and try and hopefully prove that we are a company here for the long term.
It has taken a serious emotional toll on me as an individual. I’ve had many, many sleepless nights. I’ve had anxiety like I’ve never had before. I’ve had to work with therapists and I’ve had to reach out to my primary care physician and get anti-anxiety medicine, which I’ve never had to do before. I have had some dark moments with some, not dark like in suicide, but dark as in, it’s destroyed me because I’ve always considered myself an honest person. I’ve never been here to screw anyone over.
Tim Ferriss: You’re also a very, I consider you to be an empathic feeler. Maybe the right word is you’re a deep feeler.
Kevin Rose: I am a feeler. For sure. For sure.
Tim Ferriss: If something like that is sitting with you, you take it very personally. And I remember you had stomach issues for so long.
Kevin Rose: Yes. Oh, my God. IBS-related issues. And so this year I’ve been treated multiple times for these types of issues with physicians, all kinds of things. They discovered, the high blood pressure thing was discovered because I have a brain aneurysm right now. It’s on the smaller side and they’re watching it and I’m fine. But those grow the more stress you’re under because the more blood pressure that builds up, the larger the aneurysm can grow. And so, as you can imagine, all these things hit you at once. And so I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t go to work. I felt like I kind of just needed to reset. And Huberman, who I love, who’s been on my podcast, Andrew Huberman is a top 10 podcast now. Oh, my God —
Tim Ferriss: He’s killing it.
Kevin Rose: Killing it. Love that guy.
Tim Ferriss: He’s doing such an amazing job of executing.
Kevin Rose: I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better at doing monologues and the way that he can do them about scientific topics. I mean just, if you haven’t subscribed to Huberman’s podcast, I mean it’s along with Attia’s, top five medical podcasts to subscribe to, along with Rhonda Patrick, they’re all heroes. Huberman did a couple-hour episode on ketamine therapy. And ketamine therapy, it’s used for PTSD, it’s used for severe depression and it’s used for anxiety. And it sounded really interesting. It rewires neuropathways and Huberman’s episode, highly recommend, I’m not a scientist, but he is. And he goes in-depth about what it actually is doing on the brain.
And I always thought of ketamine clinics as being these shady places. These places where there are real people with real addictions that they treat. If you’re hooked on, say, everything from amphetamines to any type of serious addiction problems, they see these types of people and also people that are about to kill themselves, really suicidal. If you go to an emergency room right now and you say, “I’m going to end my life in the next 10 minutes,” they will most likely treat you with some type of ketamine to just get you out of that state. It’s a very common emergency room like, a Hail Mary to get you back into a state of just being, “Okay, I don’t want to end my life right now.” And now we can work this out or take you to an institution where you can get help. So I was never there, but I got to the point where I was like, “I need to do something dramatic and different and I need to reboot because I can’t take the comments I’m getting on Twitter.”
Tim Ferriss: Now, did you see the Huberman episode organically, did someone send it to you?
Kevin Rose: Organically.
Tim Ferriss: Organically. You just came across it?
Kevin Rose: It just came across and I was like, “Oh, I’ve always been interested in ketamine.” I’d heard about ketamine in a recreational setting. And sadly, who was the Friends star?
Tim Ferriss: Matthew Perry.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, Matthew Perry had just, the toxicology report came back and said that he was on ketamine when he drowned. But we can get into why that is in a minute. But in a —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s focus on your personal experience.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just say also, ketamine and jacuzzis or pools or water do not mix.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: And there are multiple fatalities. Don’t mix those two things.
Kevin Rose: Well, when you go under ketamine, you are literally sedating yourself to where they can give you surgery.
Tim Ferriss: It’s dissociative anesthesia.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So what my doctor has told me that, the ketamine doctor, she’s an emergency room doctor that did my treatments, is she said to me that, “If you came…” She was a 10-year, I think 10- or 15-years emergency room doctor. And she goes, “If you came in and you had dislocated your hip,” she goes, “I would inject, I would give you,” What do they call a bolus dose, is that what they call it?
Tim Ferriss: A bolus is — right. I mean, they’re giving you a lot at once.
Kevin Rose: A lot at once. They just push it all in, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And she’s like, “I would give you that to about…” I can’t remember the exact X, but it was a multiple on which they give you for therapy, “to put you under so I can get that hip back into place, and then you wake up feeling fine.” Unfortunately, with Matthew Perry, he took a dose that was equivalent of subconscious fainting, falling asleep, drowning type dose. And they said the toxicology report, I read it, he had that level in him that would’ve put him in that state of passing out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Drugs and water don’t mix, folks.
Kevin Rose: Don’t mix.
Tim Ferriss: Just don’t mix those two.
Kevin Rose: Anyway, my point it wasn’t the fault of the ketamine, he was using it recreationally versus under supervision of a professional, which is what is needed. So, I found this clinic in L.A. that they literally have the set and setting right. So they’re all about you come in, it’s just beautiful, comfortable, peaceful music, really relaxing, reclining chairs. Eye mask, because it’s important to go inward. It’s not about just getting this therapy and looking around the room. Music with drums and beautiful — sometimes I pick my own playlist, I did a little bit more chanting. You don’t want lyrics or anything to distract you. And they have you hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that measures throughout the time, a heart rate monitor, really professional setting. It’s called Golden Afternoon, is the name of the clinic in L.A.
Tim Ferriss: It’s an amazing name.
Kevin Rose: It’s an amazing name. And the doctor there she’s a — gosh, I’m going to draw a blank for where she — I think she was. Was she Penn? I can’t remember where she got her MD. But top-tier school, emergency room doctor, as legit as they come. So I felt really comfortable. Because you know a lot of this is about set and setting and comfort.
Tim Ferriss: And safety.
Kevin Rose: And safety, yeah. So I went in there and I was like, “I’m going to give this a shot, because Huberman convinced me that this can help me with anxiety.” And so I laid down on this comfortable chair, turned on the heating, they have a heating element in the chair, tilt you back a little bit, put on my noise-canceling headphones. They gave me an IV. An IV does sound hardcore, but for people like you and me that do IVs or do blood draws every other week, who cares? I don’t care about this sh*t, but it does sound hardcore to most people. They gave me an IV and I closed my eyes and I went to a place, man, I went to a place. And it’s a beautiful place. And it made me, over multiple treatments, and I did eight in total. And they normally do six for depression, which is really interesting. Because she said that, it’s typically anxiety is harder to treat than depression in her experience. And they gave me eight in total and you do two per week.
And about halfway through, the best way I can describe it is, imagine that life is a series of crunches. And I say crunches like the ab workout. Whereas nobody likes to work out their abs, right? Because abs are like, “Ah, f*cking ab day.” Nobody wants to do that. And I didn’t realize it, but I had had a 35-pound weight on my chest the entire time I was doing ab workouts. And it took that weight off and I had, and I still have, and it’s been weeks later, a bit of grace and lightness to the way I’m carrying myself throughout life that is just a peace that I haven’t felt since I was probably 10 or 12 years old.
Tim Ferriss: Were you interacting with anyone in those sessions, or it was all internal?
Kevin Rose: No, it’s all internal. So it’s headphones on, music, eye mask. The entire session lasts for about an hour and a half. They have a camera that’s watching you. If anything comes up, one time I had my music accidentally stop and I raise my hand. They’re in there within 30 seconds. They bring you hot tea when you’re done. They let you take your time to slowly kind of come to. And then you can literally walk out there and carry on with your day.
And the first session I was like, “Okay, that’s beautiful.” Second session was a little difficult. Because they caused it — they say it kind of like, imagine it’s loosening up the plaque in your brain and rewiring circuits and it’s not always going to be easy. But by, I remember the sixth session, I just walked out there and Dr. Jenn came in and she goes, “How are you?” And I said, “I could run a marathon right now. I feel amazing. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest. And I just — this is such important work that you do, such important work.” Because it’s not about being — there’s not an addiction to the substance, I don’t need to go back. Some people go back for boosters depending on what they have. She told me that some people that have depression, they’ll come back in every three months, every six months. She said some people, she never sees again.
But it kind of takes the anxiety and pulls it apart from your body so that you can see it for what it is, which is silliness because life is play. And when you realize life is play and we’re all here just trying to figure out our sh*t, why are we taking it so seriously?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there’s a lot that just does not matter.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t matter. We can just chill, man, it doesn’t really matter. We have clean drinking water. What the f*ck are we complaining about?
Tim Ferriss: So the weight on the chest, was that something that you can’t put words too that you just felt release or — and you don’t need to get into details, I’m just curious. Or was there a content to it where you’re like, “Oh, interesting.”
Kevin Rose: No, it wasn’t content. Content was beautiful. And I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, Tim with, I’ve never done ayahuasca, although at some point I would love to try it. But I opened my eyes and it was when the mask is on and I was seeing things that were as high of fidelity as what we see today, like right now. Where you’re like, “I am in a room right now.” And I felt very present, my dad’s passed away, I felt very present with a father source there at times. I felt very connected. At one point I saw the entire world and I saw how small I was. And I was just like, it immediately gave me this sense of just gratitude for that being that little speck, but also at the same time, not having to take and carry the burdens of the world on me for being that little speck.
And so, there’s bits and pieces of that, but I would say at the end of the day, when you come out of it’s not like you had this epiphany. It’s more like, Dr. Jenn calls it the ketamine’s time, she calls it time-on brain. How can we make this sit and do the rewiring on your brain and give you time-on brain with the drug and the compound and let it do its work? And so it was a lot of surrendering. It was a lot of saying, “You do what you want to do. I don’t care where you take me emotionally, mentally, whatever. It doesn’t really matter.” It’s time-on brain with a compound. And after a certain number of sessions, you just feel this natural lift and lightness. And it felt like, I’m not a ballerina, big surprise, but it felt like a little bit of walking through life is a little bit of a dance now than it is such a struggle.
Tim Ferriss: It makes me super happy, man, to hear that.
Kevin Rose: It feels amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And I remember getting the texts, some of the texts from you, and I was excited to have this conversation. Which we haven’t had, this is the first time we’re talking about it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it is.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll say a few things. The first is that, I have seen a number of cases where ketamine therapy has changed or saved lives. So, a friend of mine, for instance, who suffered from depression his entire adult life had a similar experience to yours. And he went to a clinic, I believe it was in New York City, very well run. And he goes back once every six months for a single tune-up, let’s say just say —
Kevin Rose: Call it a booster, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — session. And I actually know, I’m also not going to mention their name, but someone we know as a mutual friend who you probably don’t know also does this once every three to six months. And separately, I know someone who’s in law enforcement who is heavily dis-incentivized from talking about mental health with his superiors because you’ll be put on leave generally, if you even hinted that and you’re in certain professions, airline pilot for instance, you’re going to be put on leave and it’s —
Kevin Rose: “On leave” is a nice way to say you’re probably fired.
Tim Ferriss: — it’s a nice way. It’s a career risk to bring these things up, which puts many more people at risk, right? There should be a bit of processes for this. But nonetheless, he was suicidal at one point. We’re talking about somebody who was carrying around a firearm all day. And ketamine was an intervention that was incredibly effective for him for pattern interrupting. And I use that very literally, because the pattern was a thought loop. This is personal, this is permanent, this is never going to change. And when you’re able to at least interrupt that for a short period of time, you provide people with hope or at least a window within which they can consider other options. So for acute suicide, suicidal ideation, also for chronic pain, very interestingly, ketamine is super interesting.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yes. It’s interesting you say that because Dr. Jenn over at this clinic has told me she’s treated quite a few people for chronic pain as well, and it works quite well.
Tim Ferriss: So I unexpectedly, because —
Kevin Rose: Have you done it?
Tim Ferriss: So before I talked to anyone about anything like this, generally I am volunteering to be the monkey shot into space. So several years ago I did six sessions over three weeks.
Kevin Rose: Ketamine?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Oh, sh*t. Dude, why did you never tell me this?
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t realize I didn’t tell you. So I did six sessions, this would’ve been —
Kevin Rose: With a mask on and in the music.
Tim Ferriss: In this particular case it was music, but it was not mask on. The way that this particular clinic ran things was with video, which was very strange to me. But nonetheless, it was sort of nature-scapes. And I was like, “okay, well this is new to me, I’ll try it.” And it ended up being supremely interesting. I was not going in with an acute condition, so it was hard for me to evaluate ultimately a lot of the efficacy. They found it very strange and I found it hilarious because they would do an intake each day of active sessions.
Kevin Rose: That’s what —
Tim Ferriss: And they would ask me to do various assessments for anxiety, and my anxiety levels were going up over time, which they found very confusing, because, you may have experienced a little bit of this, ketamine can compromise your short-term memory, in the short term, after a session, so you might forget where your wallet is or forget where your backpack is.
Kevin Rose: I didn’t have any of that.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So that can happen, and that happened to me. And it happened to be the case that while I was doing these sessions, because I shoehorned it into my schedule, I also had a number of huge podcasts coming up like LeBron James and so on, and it was freaking me out that I kept forgetting sh*t, and so my anxiety was going up —
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Over the course of treatment, which was not typical of me.
Kevin Rose: So I did the same thing. They gave me a whole breakdown. It was one to five on a bunch of different scales.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I think it’s a pretty standardized thing that they give you. I can’t remember what the anxiety scales are, but mine went down to literally a one on all of them, or a zero on all of them, which is amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It is amazing. And I want to mention a few other things. I’m sure Huberman’s episode is excellent. For people who want to have a comprehensive overview of ketamine, I’m sure Huberman’s is great, so listen to that first.
Kevin Rose: It’s fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: I also did an episode with John Krystal, Dr. John Krystal, who is the chairman of psychiatry at Yale, who did a lot of the seminal research with respect to ketamine as an antidepressant in humans. So the protocols that get used, which I think are generally 0.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, et cetera, over X period of time with Y number of infusions, those are the protocols that he developed with his other investigators.
And I want to mention a number of things just to make sure that I’m doing my safety-first Ferriss duty. So the first is that part of the reason, and this is pure speculation, but I think that it was risky for Matthew Perry to use ketamine, is that he had a history of abuse.
Ketamine can be very addictive for people who are unwilling or uneager to feel certain things. It’s a dissociative anesthetic. So if you have, for instance, a history of alcohol abuse, it is, I would say, increasingly likely that you might abuse ketamine, which is why, if someone were to consider ketamine therapy, I feel very strongly that it should be IV or —
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Intramuscular injection and not at-home treatment —
Kevin Rose: Oh, a hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: Where you have access to, say, lozenges or a nasal spray.
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent, because there are companies that do lozenges at home.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I completely agree.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: But I will say one thing, Tim, real quick and I’ll let you continue. I noticed my desire for alcohol go down.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think that that can happen. And I’m just saying for folks who, for instance, may be coming out of or are part of AA —
Kevin Rose: Oh, yes.
Tim Ferriss: And they have issues with depression —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: My personal take, after everything I’ve seen, is that prior abuse of alcohol highly correlated to potential abuse of ketamine. And I would say, furthermore, there are some urological risks if you use ketamine chronically, and alongside that, if you use ketamine chronically, and this is true for a lot of drugs, actually, not all of them.
Kevin Rose: That’s for snorting though, right?
Tim Ferriss: Do a self-check. I mean, snorting —
Kevin Rose: Because it wouldn’t get in your urological tract, otherwise because it would metabolize in the liver.
Tim Ferriss: Well, most people who consume ketamine recreationally —
Kevin Rose: Oh, it would be their mouth, or —
Tim Ferriss: It will be a lot of, it will be snorting of one way —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Of one sort or another. So they’ll either have it in — it will be in suspension in a liquid, or it will be a powder they snort in the same way they would snort cocaine. A lot of people carry little lockets around their necks with ketamine. I’ve seen this a lot and —
Kevin Rose: And by the way, that’s not what I’m talking about here today.
Tim Ferriss: No. No, no, no. I’m not —
Kevin Rose: But those are two very different things.
Tim Ferriss: No, no. They are, they are. So just to be very clear, ketamine therapy with IV or IM has a track record of being incredibly promising for a —
Kevin Rose: Trained physician —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for a number of other things.
Kevin Rose: Like proper — yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But where some folks get lost is they go from, instead of clinical setting, higher-dose supervised, they bleed into more casual recreational use.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: In which case, it’s very important for me to say that ketamine can be very helpful for people with, say, treatment-resistant depression or chronic depression. If you use it chronically though, it flips the other way and it actually makes you predisposed to more depression. So it’s just something for people to be aware of.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And as is true with so many things —
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: More is not better.
Kevin Rose: Do you know what — what was the drug that Michael Jackson died of? Do you remember the name of that?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure. I think it was a synthetic opioid or —
Kevin Rose: No, no, no. It was basically —
Tim Ferriss: Some type of anesthetic?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure.
Kevin Rose: So it was funny. I went and — because I’m old now, in my 40s, I went to have my first colonoscopy because you’re supposed to do that sh*t, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Party time.
Kevin Rose: Have you done that yet or no?
Tim Ferriss: I have, yes.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so I went and did mine. And —
Tim Ferriss: And by the way, this is very sad, but do not skip your f*cking colonoscopies.
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: A very good friend of mine since we last spoke, Roland Griffiths, who’s an amazing scientist from Johns Hopkins, he died of terminal cancer.
Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus. Sorry, man.
Tim Ferriss: And I had a long conversation with him a few days before he died, before I went to South America. He was completely razor sharp up until the end. And my recollection is that part of the reason that was caught too late is that he was a few years late in having his exam.
Kevin Rose: And so I had mine done and they caught a couple pre-cancerous, as they do with most people these days.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Do your f*cking screens.
Kevin Rose: And you’ve got to do your screens. But anyway, long story short, when I was going in, the anesthesiologist came in the room and he was kind of a funny guy. It was cool. I like those guys.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And I asked him, I said, “Can I have this slow ramp?” And he is like, “What’s a slow ramp?” And I’m like, “Where you just kind of give it to me a little bit of time, just because I feel like going into that zone.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And he’s like, “It’s funny you say that.” He’s like, “I’m giving you the same drug they gave Michael Jackson when he died.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s crazy.” I’m like, “Why?” And he’s like, “He was just addicted to it.” And so he gave me the slow ramp, and I remember this feeling about probably, let’s call it 30 seconds into it, where I felt like I was okay with dying. It was just this moment of like, “This is beautiful.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And I was like, “Oh, my God. This is what Michael Jackson was feeling right now.”
Tim Ferriss: Propofol.
Kevin Rose: Propofol.
Tim Ferriss: Propofol.
Kevin Rose: Propofol. Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Propofol.
Kevin Rose: That was it.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: And so I get it, but this is to the point of Matthew Perry dying in the pool. This stuff puts you under.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It puts you under so that you can have surgery.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: And that is what ketamine does as well, so it’s like —
Tim Ferriss: And ketamine, broadly speaking, is an incredibly well-tolerated safe drug. Part of the reason that ketamine is, I believe, listed in the World Health Organization’s Top 100 most essential medicines —
Kevin Rose: 100 most — yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Is because it is generally very well-tolerated —
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And it does not suppress respiration.
Kevin Rose: Yes, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Kevin Rose: Which is a huge one.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Gigantic. And it’s an incredible compound. And you just need to know the risk profile. And there are risk profiles for everything.
Kevin Rose: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: We have tequila and we have water in front of us. Water has a risk profile, too.
Kevin Rose: It does.
Tim Ferriss: People die every year of hyponatremia —
Kevin Rose: Did you hear about that —
Tim Ferriss: Because they drink too much water when they’re training for or running in a marathon, and that causes disruption of sort of electrochemical signaling. And then boom, they drop. People die every year.
Kevin Rose: You probably didn’t hear about this, but there was a radio host DJ —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, he’s f*cking —
Kevin Rose: Do you remember this? Do you know what I’m talking about?
Tim Ferriss: Where they have these water-drinking competitions?
Kevin Rose: The water-drinking competitions.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. People died.
Kevin Rose: And somebody died of overdosing on water.
Tim Ferriss: This has happened many times, right?
Kevin Rose: It’s so crazy.
Tim Ferriss: As Paracelsus would say, “The dose makes the poison,” but sometimes the frequency and the use pattern makes the poison.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I think ketamine is incredibly interesting and for —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, especially — because when you get into the actual science behind it, we’re not just using this as an escape. It’s actually rewiring the brain.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And Huberman will get into the kind of neurology behind it and what’s happening and why these are more lasting changes and why some people, not everyone, but some people can go and do this and they don’t ever have to go back for a booster or anything else, and it changes them forever. So I don’t know if I should get into this.
Tim Ferriss: We can always cut it.
Kevin Rose: Well, someone very close to me, she was closest to suicide and she’s a dear friend. She’s a sweetheart of a person. And she was the first time I had ever heard of ketamine therapy. This was probably four years ago. And she said, “I was about to take…” The closest to taking in her life. And she had heard about ketamine therapy. It was kind of new at the time. And she paid for the six pack, the six sessions, the full six. And she hated every single session. And it was funny, when I talked to Dr. Jenn at the clinic that I went to, she said, “It’s very common, people that have depression, they don’t enjoy the experience.” And I thought it was fantastic. I loved the whole thing. But when my friend said that at session six, she heard a pop in her brain, like a physical pop.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a psychic —
Kevin Rose: Chiropractic.
Tim Ferriss: Adjustment.
Kevin Rose: Literally, the depression lifted and she has been amazing ever since.
Tim Ferriss: So wild.
Kevin Rose: And this has been like five years ago.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And it’s like, I believe her. She’s doing insanely well now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And it’s like, “Oh, my God. Dude.” So Tim, I just want to one, thank you for how much money and effort you’ve put into psychedelic research because —
Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man.
Kevin Rose: After experiencing this, I realized that there is something here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And we don’t have it figured out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Obviously, we don’t. We’re in the baby stages.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: But 10, 20, 30 years with AI, maybe 10 years, this will get figured out and it will be largely because people like you help fund this type of research.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks, man.
Kevin Rose: So I just want to say thank you for that.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you for saying that, brother.
Kevin Rose: It means a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I really appreciate that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I was so happy to see those texts.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I was so happy.
Kevin Rose: Well, I’ve got to tell you, if you’re in the L.A. area, and obviously you’ll talk to her as a doctor, this is her advice, not ours, and you’ll go through the whole screening process. But goldenafternoon.clinic, I think, is the website, and she is an amazing human, very caring, comes in pre and post checks in on you like a really well run facility. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, war veterans, all these people are going in to see her and it’s great. It’s God’s work, whoever you believe in God or not. I get it.
Tim Ferriss: There are some great clinics out there. I will say there are also a lot of fly-by-night clinics.
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: So do your homework.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: One of the main advantages, or it is a main advantage, of ketamine as compared to other psychedelics, is that in the United States, it is currently legal.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And that is a non-trivial advantage. And I will say that one question you may want to ask in doing your due diligence, if you consider this as an option, and I do feel after canvassing many different compounds, many different treatments that for acute suicidal ideation, that ketamine is at the very top of the list. It is on a very short list of interventions that having credible promise for at least creating the space for someone to consider treatment options. And the question, the due diligence question that I recommend, and this is true for any type of drug-assisted therapy, it’s actually true for surgeons too. It’s true for doctors in general. Ask them what types of adverse events they have observed, what type of abuse potential they have observed. If their answer is, “Everything is always fine. We’ve never had an adverse event,” that is a huge red flag.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Anyone who has enough mileage, if they are ketamine clinic physician, if they are an ER physician, they will be able to tell you what things look like when things go sideways —
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And how they handle those situations. And if they don’t volunteer any of that, it means either they’re inexperienced or they’re delusional, generally.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. A hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m giving people a bit of a break or it means they’re lying.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And in all three cases, you do not want to have anything to do with that particular practitioner.
Kevin Rose: By the way, I looked her up, she’s at Princeton.
Tim Ferriss: Princeton?
Kevin Rose: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Go, Tigers. Look at that.
Kevin Rose: That’s where my doctor went in Princeton.
Tim Ferriss: And Phil Wolfson, for instance, has done a lot of writing on this. Do your homework. You are signing up for, let’s just call it psychoactive brain surgery. So to the extent that you would do your due diligence related to a surgeon who is going to be physically opening your head, carving a hole in your skull and performing manual brain surgery, do a commensurate amount of homework on the person who is going to be providing you with compounds that have a significant impact on cognitive functioning. Not necessarily only in the short term, but in the longer term.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You want to hear another crazy drug story?
Kevin Rose: Let’s hear it. That’s why we’re here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right. I’ll give you a refill. Speaking of drugs, Andrew Huberman would —
Kevin Rose: Not be pleased.
Tim Ferriss: He would disapprove.
Kevin Rose: Neither would Attia —
Tim Ferriss: Disapprove —
Kevin Rose: Although Attia likes straight tequila.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, occasionally Attia will have a drink or two. He just knows what he’s signing up for. And anyway, we can come back to this. Part of the reason that I had a wild experience in Portugal recently, no matter how much wine I have there, I do not have a headache the next day. And I think it’s additive-related. I can feel tired, it will f*ck up my sleep. At the end of the day, it is alcohol. But fascinating how different my physiological response can be. In any case, that’s true with this stuff too for me personally with long.
Kevin Rose: That’s great to hear, considering I’m consuming a good portion of it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a good portion. All right, so let’s —
Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve got to talk to you about my tattoo at some point.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Should we? All right. You know what, I’m going to leave that as a cliffhanger. We’re going to come back to —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, we’ve got to come back to that.
Tim Ferriss: Wild drug story —
Kevin Rose: Because that’s why I’m here in town.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Kevin Rose: You’re going to hear about the crazy machine.
Tim Ferriss: What? Okay, let’s tattoo and crazy machine. What’s going on?
Kevin Rose: So —
Tim Ferriss: What’s the bracelet with the skull on it?
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s just a —
Tim Ferriss: Bracelet and skulls.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, bracelet and skulls.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: So one of the premier generative artists, and by when I say generative, what I mean by that, for those that don’t know, is there’s a whole genre of art that is code-based that you write actually computer science code and you create art. And one of the premier artists in this space that’s been sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and all over the place is Tyler Hobbs. He is based here in Austin.
Tim Ferriss: He’s such an awesome guy, too. Another sweetheart guy.
Kevin Rose: By the way, he told me he has always enjoyed hanging out with you.
Tim Ferriss: Oh.
Kevin Rose: So he’s hanging out with you a couple of times.
Tim Ferriss: He’s a nice guy.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: He and his wife are just lovely beyond words.
Kevin Rose: Such great people, yeah. And so Tyler lives here and in Austin and his NFTs, you can say what you want of NFTs, but his NFTs are just absolutely gorgeous pieces of artwork. And he can sell for, at times, millions of dollars.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: They’re really sought after. So —
Tim Ferriss: Also a legit visual artist outside of code.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I went to his studio today and he pulled open binders that he’s been doing for decades of his visual art.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, so fun. So fun.
Kevin Rose: And it’s just like he’s not in this for the quote, unquote NFTs.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: He is an artist to his core. And so one of the things that — he always likes to — he strikes me as the person who is always saying, “What’s next? How can I push things in a different direction, right?” And there’s a company based out here called Blackdot that has a machine. It’s a robot that uses not tattoo needles, but you know when people get their eyebrows cosmetically tattooed on?
Tim Ferriss: I can imagine it.
Kevin Rose: Well, it’s a common thing. Some, I don’t want to be gender-based here, but it’s mostly women that get it tattooed on as their eyebrows.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: But they use a much finer needle than they would, say, a tattoo gun.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: And so this robot, this machine, uses these really fine needles and what they do is they take, and we can put this in the video as well, they take and they put this kind of template on your arm that is more or less just almost like a QR of massive QR code kind of grid on your arm.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, okay.
Kevin Rose: So that’s my forearm.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I was wondering about that. You sent me a text and I was like, “What the hell? Is that your tattoo?” Okay.
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s just like a giant QR code.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, like a giant QR code across my forearm. And that allows the optical lenses and the lasers and everything to align the tattoo. It is doing 17,000 small micro pushes into my skin with this needle.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: And it does it. They can gauge with these depth sensors, the correct depth of the dermis to go in so that the ink doesn’t spread out and fade over time so they can do insanely high-fidelity tattoos. Like stuff you’ve never — it’s like picture perfect. Even when you see those pictures of like, “Oh, that person got that baby tattooed on their chest. How cute.” Imagine 10 x the fidelity of that where you’d be like somebody took a picture and pasted it on their chest.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: They have a machine that can do that.
Tim Ferriss: So you’re never getting those off until you change your mind.
Kevin Rose: What this is Tyler started with, he drew me a sparrow, and the reason I like a sparrow is because to me a sparrow is the most common low ego bird to me that’s out there. I’m just getting a little sensitive, but it reminds me that we’re all just sparrows.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: We don’t need to take each other — no one’s better than anyone else.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: We’re all a common bird. We’re all humans, right? And then what he did is he applied an algorithm to it that degrades the bird into a pixelated form over three images.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so the last one is his last algorithm of the more pixelated version. And so you can imagine I’m getting this tattooed on my arm tomorrow. And —
Tim Ferriss: So wait, you’re getting it tattooed tomorrow, what is that?
Kevin Rose: This is just stencil.
Tim Ferriss: Ah. Okay.
Kevin Rose: So I wanted to show you this today of what the stencil will look like.
Tim Ferriss: Cool.
Kevin Rose: So you can imagine a world where literally in the future —
Tim Ferriss: How long does that stencil last?
Kevin Rose: You could wipe it off with some alcohol and stuff, but it’s just there for the show of the show. But you can imagine a world where he can give you an algorithm like he does with his artwork, and you can walk in, put your arm underneath this machine and get a unique generative piece by an artist that is one of one unique to you as defined by an insanely famous artist. Imagine if, let’s backtrack here, but Picasso had the tools in his day to say, “I’m going to create an algorithm that is a bunch of crazy swirls and chaos that is my brain.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, or a Banksy or whoever.
Kevin Rose: Based on whoever. And you stick your arm in and you get a one-on-one Picasso. They’re only doing three of them. This is a brand new machine, brand new technology.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Kevin Rose: And so that’s why I’m out here to do a one-on-one, Tyler Hobbs on my arm with a sparrow.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: So that’s tomorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Blackdot?
Kevin Rose: Blackdot, yeah. It’s a new kind of startup out here.
Tim Ferriss: And here in Austin. Man, there’s a lot happening in here.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot happening. That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: It’s so cool. Yeah, I want to show you the one they did of the Mona Lisa. It’s amazing stuff. You don’t have — do you have any tattoos at all? You don’t, do you?
Tim Ferriss: No. I’ve been thinking about getting my first, which is why I asked about the stencil.
Kevin Rose: So look at that.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s like just the eyes of the Mona Lisa right there. But look how high fidelity that is in the forearm.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s wild.
Kevin Rose: It’s insane.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s fast pretty wild.
Kevin Rose: So you’ve been thinking about getting one?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been thinking about getting one for years, which would be —
Kevin Rose: What would you do? Molly.
Tim Ferriss: Molly’s paw prints on my forearm.
Kevin Rose: You would not.
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Kevin Rose: You would not. Are you serious?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: That’d be kind of awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: How old is Molly now?
Tim Ferriss: Molly is eight.
Kevin Rose: Oh, is it —
Tim Ferriss: Between eight and nine.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, Toaster is slowing down, man.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s tough.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so sad.
Kevin Rose: There’s nothing more heartbreaking than starting to see your dog start to go.
Tim Ferriss: On the decline.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: He is falling now. His legs are falling out from underneath him.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.
Kevin Rose: I know. It’s the worst. We don’t have to take the podcast there, but yeah, it’s bad.
Tim Ferriss: But hey, Toaster has been with the podcast since day one.
Kevin Rose: Remember when he’d chew on the cables? He’s like he was going to —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I do. I was just going to bring it up, man. Back in the day, this was still Digg era, I guess, and we were at your apartment in San Francisco and he was just a little pup chewing on the cables.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I remember that.
Kevin Rose: He was Toast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: He’s still kicking it though. Mentally, he’s sharp as sh*t, which is great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Which is nice.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s nice to see him. We were playing with him. Friendly Toast.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. What a great dog.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So for me, it’s hard for me to imagine a world or any circ*mstances in which I would regret having the paw prints on my arm.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And there are many others —
Kevin Rose: How much has that dog meant for you personally? Because I’ve seen you through multiple relationships.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Dogs are like this thing that is just like this steadfast love.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Has it been a good — I mean, obviously, it must been an insane emotional lift for you to have an animal like that in your life.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It has changed me fundamentally on so many different ways, I think. And it’s not just the receipt of that love, which is — it’s like a task in and of itself, right? I mean, like to — and I actually saw this at one point. Somebody had sketched it onto this piece of wood and I came across it and it was like your task in life is to learn how to love and be loved. That’s it. And being loved is actually not straightforward for everyone, right?
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Learning to receive that in a way. So that has been a gift, but it’s also been a practice of giving and thinking about someone else’s welfare. And having, say, a dog as a mirror also for yourself, where let’s just say early on when I was training Molly and I took the training super seriously.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. I was there for that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: You were so serious.
Tim Ferriss: And I ended up being pretty good at it. And Molly is very well-trained. But if she f*cked up or made a mistake, I would get upset.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And —
Kevin Rose: Or you would hit her.
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: Jesus Christ.
Kevin Rose: I’m exaggerating.
Tim Ferriss: I did not hit my dog.
Kevin Rose: Sorry.
Tim Ferriss: And beat her with a rod. So no, I wouldn’t hit Molly. But I would get very frustrated.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then that would scare her. And not because I was lashing out, but I would just get so frustrated because I’d be like, “God, this is the 37th time we’ve done this.” It was a mirror because Molly is not doing anything deliberately to piss me off.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s ridiculous.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And so it was an incredible reflection in the pond for me to see what was going on and to see what’s going on with me, right? I’m short-tempered.
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re with other people, you can weave a story to justify it.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Well, they should know like, “God, I didn’t get sleep, and they know that, and dah, dah, dah, dah.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah. They’ve done this.
Tim Ferriss: “Why does it always have to be in the morning that they blah, blah, blah?” You can really spin a yarn to rationalize why you’re upset with someone else, but a really loving, well-behaved dog, are you kidding? That’s a you problem, pal.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That is not a dog problem.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And so on all of those levels, she has just been such a wonderful companion and teacher. And I was away from her for a few weeks recently for the first time because I was in South America and absolutely not the right place for a dog where I was in the middle of the jungle. And I really, really missed her. So I mean, God, I’m really like, “Take us there.” But when I think about, which I do pretty often, when she has her decline and then passes, it’s heartbreaking for me to imagine. And I’m going to get a second dog almost certainly in the next year. That would be on my New Year’s resolutions too. And I’ve thought about this for a few years, but I’ve pushed it off because there’s part of me that doesn’t want to accept that Molly is mortal. So I push it off and push it off but it’s time —
Kevin Rose: It’s good to do it on the sooner side because when they’re older, I could never introduce another dog to Toaster right now because he’s too old to handle that puppy energy versus if you did it now, then they can chill with each other.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And Molly is really good with puppies and she loves puppies.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to do that very soon in the next year. And I at one point was volunteering, it’s a long story, but I was volunteering around wolves and I was preparing the food and so on for these wolves, which were —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, those are the ones that licked you in the teeth and stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Which were being sort of rehabilitated and raised in captivity because they’d either been bred and raised in captivity, in which case they can’t be released, or there are any number of conditions that led to them being non-viable as wild releases. And I saw one of the volunteers had — I think it was on his rib cage, he had a print from this wolf that he had known for years until that wolf passed away. And I thought to myself, “You know what? I’ve never felt pulled to have a tattoo.” And the fact that I have no tattoos is kind of novel now, which is funny, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Tattoos are pretty common.
Kevin Rose: Oh, you’ve got to go to Jess, my lady. She’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So I might, I might. And I thought, “I really have a hard time imagining regretting doing that, and I can also see it being a really valuable reminder of a lot.”
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Tim, I’ve got something for you.
Tim Ferriss: Yup.
Kevin Rose: Listen to this.
Tim Ferriss: Tell me.
Kevin Rose: You know how I said someone was going to play at my birthday?
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Kevin Rose: Jess is going to be out there at the same time.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Why don’t you sign up to get the tattoo?
Tim Ferriss: At the party?
Kevin Rose: I mean, not at the party, but the day before, the day after or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Oh. All right, all right.
Kevin Rose: And she has booked out by a year.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: She did Bruce Willis’ tattoos. No, she’s legit as they come.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, she’s legit.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
Kevin Rose: Jessmachete on Instagram. Insane.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Now she’s booked out for five years.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: I just —
Kevin Rose: We’ll book her up.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll pull up the strings.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: This has been on my list for a while. It’s been on my list for a couple of years, and I think partially because I’m nervous.
Kevin Rose: You would love her.
So can I ask you a question?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I want to ask you a question that is a little bit more intimate just because we’ve had some tequila and we’re talking about dogs and just kind of the companionship and whatnot. Speaking of kind of New Year’s resolutions and looking back on life, in the last 10 years, when it comes to both personal, either intimate relationships or private, if there’s any one thing, what would you change about your interactions with either someone that you’ve been with on an intimate level or someone that maybe it’s on a more kind of friendship level. Is there anything that you can look back on and say, “I would’ve done more of this?”
Tim Ferriss: That is an exceptional question. And you know when I was driving over here, I was thinking about another question. We have the ultimate cliffhanger and the crazy drug story, so maybe we’ll get to that, maybe we won’t. We will do that the next episode. But I was thinking also, I was like, “What would Kevin tell his…” I’m going to ask your question, but I was thinking, “What would Kevin tell his 30-year-old self, my current Kevin, do this, maybe not do so much of that, blah, blah, blah.” I thought that could be a fun exploration. With the interpersonal stuff, I think that I would say just because someone needs other things, needs things that are different from your needs does not make them high maintenance. And by the way, Tim, if they looked at you through the same lens you were looking at them through, they would decide that you are high maintenance.
So gather some tools, right? I would say read The Five Love Languages, as cheesy and schlocky as it might seem. That sh*t is so helpful as a framework for discussion, for identifying and easily labeling the different categories of needs that people might have and putting them in some type of order. Oh, interesting. You’re a quality time person. Good to know. Number two would be this. Oh, you’re a physical touch and then acts of service person as I am, right? These are shared vocabulary that you can use to really avoid and repair a lot of things, right?
So I would say a handful of things, right? So Gay and Katie Hendricks, also Conscious Loving. There are a few books, a few resources that would say, “Look, if you really care about someone, commit together to develop a shorthand, which allows you to not necessarily prevent, I don’t think prevention is the key. I think repair is the key, right?” If you’re in a startup and you’re like, “Well, let’s just prevent all the bad things from happening.”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s never going to work.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: sh*t is going to happen and people are going to have bad days, and you’re going to say things you regret and there are going to be disagreements. And by the way, if there are no disagreements, something’s wrong.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: And therefore, having a shorthand and a set of agreements, these are the rules that we agree to play by and we’re not going to be perfect. I would say that would be very high on the list. And I would say for really close relationships, potentially, maybe we’ll edit this out, but who knows? MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, let’s just say anywhere from once a quarter to once a year, no more than once a quarter for a whole host of reasons. But I think that while MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is incredibly impressive, and I’ve been very involved with that from, I don’t want to say day one because that’s not true, but certainly for the last 10 years or so, I’ve been very involved up through phase three and now onward. The results with treatment-resistant PTSD or a complex PTSD, where you see people who’ve had this diagnosis for 17 years, suddenly after two or three sessions end up asymptomatic, right? They would not meet the criteria for PTSD with durability out to six, nine, 12 months.
I mean, it’s something that almost defies belief, right? It is causing a complete reexamination of psychiatry as we know it. I still think that is second place to couples work when it comes to MDMA. I think that that is an incredibly fruitful arena for seeing the full potential of MDMA psychotherapy. That would be another one. Because sometimes, oftentimes couples end up, and I know multiple people now who have had this experience with professional guidance, which by the way, folks, currently is illegal. So be forewarned, there are legal consequences or at least risks entailed with this. Not to mention the fact that at least I would say 60 to 70 percent of MDMA that you might purchase is adulterated or mixed with something else at this point, so you need to be very careful. Dancesafe.org is a resource I would recommend for testing kits and so on if you’re going to go that route. I’m not recommending you do anything illegal, however, people are going to do it anyway.
Kevin Rose: You have international listeners.
Tim Ferriss: People are going to do it anyway. I just recognize it’s like you can’t just say to every teenager, “Don’t have sex.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Kids are going to have sex. So let’s be realistic about it.
Kevin Rose: I did that sh*t one time. It was fun as sh*t.
Tim Ferriss: Had sex?
Kevin Rose: No. When I was 23, I did, well, they were called ecstasy back then, but holy sh*t, that is a good compound.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and that can also go sideways, just for the record.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no doubt.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, there are films out there now, How to Change Your Mind, the miniseries on Netflix. Watch the MDMA episode. It is excellent.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s pretty heavy because it gets into some PTSD, but you’ll be able to see live session footage if you want another alternative.
Kevin Rose: Man, Pollan’s a hero.
Tim Ferriss: He’s great. And there is also a doc called Trip of Compassion, which is worth seeing, which has a lot of session footage as well. But those are a few of the things that would come to mind.
Let’s say on a friendship level, I might suggest to my earlier self, let’s just say 30-year-old self, right? Something that I have really embraced and put into action in the last handful of years, which is going to sound a little anti-social, but I don’t view it that way.
Humans have a finite capacity for building and sustaining really deep relationships. You just can’t do that with everyone. And when I’ve looked back, say — and I do this every year at a past year review, and I look back in my calendar every week of my last year, and on a piece of paper with positive and negative, two columns, I write down the peak negative and positive experiences.
If I look at the commonalities for the peak positive experiences, it’s usually the same 10 people, or fewer, right? It’s the same cast of characters. These are my close friends who are nourishing, supportive, good influence. And before — what I would say to my younger self is, “Before you seek to develop a bunch of new relationships, ask yourself, are you spending enough time, as much time as you would like, with the people on that shortlist who you know are guaranteed to be nourishing for you?”
And if the answer is no, maybe you should double down on those relationships. Maybe you should reach out to those people to get something on the calendar before sh*t crowds it out, before you look for shiny objects in new relationships. Which doesn’t mean I don’t develop new relationships, I occasionally do, but I’m at a point where I think recognizing the ephemeral nature of life, the finite limits, the constraints that we have, is actually very enabling.
It helps you to make cleaner, faster decisions. So for me, I would just say, before seeking to develop new deep relationships, ask yourself the question: “For my closest five friends, let’s just say, in the last year, did I spend as much time as I would like with those people?” If the answer is no, reach out to those five first.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What about you?
Kevin Rose: Oh, man. I would say, honestly, I think that we’re at the age now where every day just brings a new unknown in terms of how long are we going to last. I’ve had multiple friends with cancer now. I had one friend that I almost lost this year that was in the emergency room for weeks that we thought had stage four cancer and it ended up being a horrible bacterial infection from some foreign country.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I remember this.
Kevin Rose: I just realized there’s so many times when we hang out and we just give a hug and say, “Oh, good to see you, blah, blah, blah.” But we don’t say, “I love you.” We don’t say, “You are so essential to me in so many ways.” And maybe this is the ketamine talking, but like — no, but when I went through this whole thing with the ketamine therapy, I realized when I came out of it, I just realized that at the end of the day, love is the, this is going to sound cheesy, but it is the most important thing that we tell each other and that we feel for each other. And when you can really feel that and you say, “This person is so important to me,” and you let them know that and you feel it back, I don’t know what’s better than that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, what’s more human than that too, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: In a way. I mean, love, you can observe affection and love in many other species, but the ability to verbalize it and express it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Do you feel that psychedelics brings that out of you? Because when I did the therapy, I had more love in me than I’ve had in so long. Do you feel that’s a commonality amongst psychedelics to have a sense of just gratitude for existence?
Tim Ferriss: For sure. I think it’s very common. It’s not always across the board. I mean, I would say that this might be a controversial statement, but the psychedelics, to me, are similar to — there’s a lot more to it, which we’ll probably dive into, but kind of like alcohol, or power, or money in the sense that they magnify what’s already there and a term you sometimes hear is a non-specific amplifier. So I don’t think that at all. There’s no compelling evidence to me that psychedelics, if put in the drinking water, produce world peace, there’s no evidence for that. Right? I mean, you have plenty of civilizations —
Kevin Rose: Maybe lithium though. No, no, no, remember there was a study.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I remember. I remember. Yeah, a little bit of lithium goes a long way.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, people can look this up. We’ll try to find, there’s some —
Kevin Rose: There’s a study that people in populations where there is more lithium naturally found in the drinking water have lower rates of suicide than anywhere else in the world.
Tim Ferriss: All sorts of stuff. Yeah, so we’ll see what we can find. Put in the show notes. I do think low-dose lithium is pretty interesting. Very low dose. But psychedelics are a non-specific amplifier. There are many cases of civilizations where they had human sacrifice, played soccer with human heads, and they consumed psychedelics.
Kevin Rose: I still sacrifice people.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: You know. As we all do.
Tim Ferriss: Every once in a while in the solstice, I mean, I think it’s all fair game. The feeling of gratitude and love, I think, for a lot of people who wish to enable that, to experience it more, who have the conscious, or subconscious, desire to rekindle those things, that the experience you’re describing is very common.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. For sure.
Tim Ferriss: I think part of that is the dissolution, this isn’t true of all experiences, but the dissolution of self and, consequently, the felt sense of unity with many or all things. Which leads you to feel, for most people, less alone.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Which leads you to feel quite grateful because, to state the obvious, I suppose, despite the fact that we’re more connected than ever with loose ties, I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression —
Kevin Rose: Oh, for sure.
Tim Ferriss: — that is highly correlated to feeling of isolation. So, when you can remedy that by feeling the exact polar opposite in some of these states, not necessary, but helpful, that the end result of that is a feeling of gratitude for sure.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: What was the — before we wrap things up, because I know we’re coming to the end and you still have some tequila to finish. What was the cliffhanger you said you wanted to tell us?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so I’ll try to keep it short. I’ll let you — I’ll tell you what, I’ll keep it short and then you can excavate —
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: — as you like.
Kevin Rose: I love to excavate.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So as you know, for the last year, I’ve basically been crippled by lower back issues.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, I’ve had trouble — there are days when I’ve had trouble getting up and walking. I mean, it’s been that bad.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, Tim, you first told me about this eight years ago or something. Remember when you got those injections or something?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: You were like, “I think I have degenerative disc…”
Tim Ferriss: “…disc disease.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I’ve had lower back issues for a long time. This is also a congenital issue. So I have what’s called a transitional segment. In other words, there’s a segment in my lumbar, there are vertebrae in my lumbar area that really mimic a sacral vertebral segment and that’s problematic for a host of reasons. Creates an abnormal angle. And if you can imagine just bending the paper clip over and over again in ways that it shouldn’t be bent.
That’s sort of the feeling in the low back. My brother has this. There are other people in my family who have this issue. So standing extended, slow walking, like a museum walk, co*cktail party type of experience, can be very painful, like the low back locks up. But in the last year, specifically, had all sorts of issues and all sorts of MRIs and specialists, and PT, and adjustments, and traction and this, that, and the other thing. And it was a disaster and it caused a — well, let me give myself a little more agency. I created a lot of anxiety around this ’cause I was like, “f*ck, is this the new normal?”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Is this really the new normal where —
Kevin Rose: Well, because you project forward, what does five years from now look like?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m like, I’m not that old.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m pretty active.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, and your skincare is amazing.
Tim Ferriss: My skincare is amazing.
Kevin Rose: I saw your Instagram —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.
Kevin Rose: — video.
Tim Ferriss: You know what’s funny, sidebar, is how much time you can spend on a blog post. Takes six months to put together and it’s like, you get crickets and a fart in the wind and then nobody ever reads it again. And then someone on your team is like, “You know what, people ask about your skincare. Let’s grab a couple clips and throw it up,” and it goes bananas.
Kevin Rose: I’m on Instagram and the first thing that pops up to me is like, “Hi, I’m Tim Ferriss. People ask me about my skincare regimen.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God.
Kevin Rose: “Let me tell you, I use Bronner’s Natural Soap,” or whatever. It’s like, “What the f*ck has Tim become into?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so here we are, folks. Here we are, folks.
Kevin Rose: Your skin looks amazing though.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you. Thank you.
Kevin Rose: Breathtaking.
Tim Ferriss: It’s —
Kevin Rose: All natural.
Tim Ferriss: — it’s working from the inside out. So, coming back to the main throughline here, terrifying experience, the back. And I had more or less given up. I was in the stage of grief where I was trying to get past denial and accept that this might be the new normal because no one could figure it out. And a lot of the advice I received, many of the diagnoses were conflicting, and then I decided, in part because of this, to do a few things. And part of that was going to South America, which I’m not recommending, there are a lot of risks down in South America. It’s generally like safety fifth, it’s not safety first, so people getting into a lot of trouble. But I went down and did this training, which involved consuming a bunch of plants, also involved fasting for a week, also involved —
Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait, wait, water fast?
Tim Ferriss: Water fast.
Kevin Rose: Jesus. Seven days?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Also involved during that week, really not sitting, and standing very little. So it was either hammock or cot, basically. And I’m mentioning these things because they’re confounders. Translating that into basic English, that means that I can’t really point back to one thing and say, “This is what caused what I’m going to describe.” But during the first experience, which happened to be with ayahuasca, which is a huge gun, it’s, I think, treated very casually by people who do not realize what they’re signing up for. I do not recommend it to most people. As my ex, who’s going to become relevant in the second, would tell you, I talk many, many, many more people. Nine out of 10 —
Kevin Rose: Which ex?
Tim Ferriss: — out of — I’m not going to mention her name, but out my most recent ex, out of using ayahuasca than I talk into using ayahuasca. Nine times out of 10, I say, “You should not proceed. Do not pass go.” For a lot of reasons. But in this particular case, had a very, very, very difficult experience.
And I can kind of rank order my hardest experiences over the last decade plus, and this would be the third most difficult, maybe the second for different characteristics, which is saying a lot. And there was a point at which, in that experience, all I could imagine was having my head in the lap of my ex. That’s all I wanted. It was the only thing I could even visualize because I was in the impact zone. I was just getting hit by hundred foot waves from every angle. And there was no respite. It was 10 out of 10. There was no wave. Meaning, it didn’t ebb and flow. It was just 10 out of 10 volume from peak until end of the night, effectively. It was unusual and incredibly difficult. And that was true for everyone in the session. Yeah, well, we’ll leave it at that.
Kevin Rose: Your shaman mixed the wrong —
Tim Ferriss: This guy is famous for having a brew that just cripples people.
Kevin Rose: The crippler.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of other full-time clinicians from indigenous traditions who will not drink his brew, I’ll put it that way.
Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus.
Tim Ferriss: And coming back to the point of the story, I’m imagining the only thing I can envision is this woman holding my head and consoling me. That’s the only thing I can imagine. And then I realized that for a year, because we separated a bit over a year ago, and this was totally subconscious, it wasn’t a decision on my part, but I realized I had not allowed myself to feel the complete obliterating heartbreak that was in fact the core response to that separation. I’d not allowed myself to feel —
Kevin Rose: From her or from previous?
Tim Ferriss: From that separation. In other words, my psyche had seemingly protected me because of my history of depression. Which I’ve come to manage better than ever before. Each year I’m better able to manage it. And it’s less and less frequent. It’s less and less intense. But nonetheless, let’s face the facts, in college I almost killed myself. So there was a fear, at least subconsciously, that because of this separation, because of starting over at square one, that I could spiral into a deep depression and that could be dangerous. So my psyche protected me from that by not letting me feel the sadness, the pain, to the extent that ended up being important, which I realized in this moment. So I allowed myself to soak in it, in that moment.
Trip reports are so f*cking boring most of the time. And I apologize to people who might be listening and thinking, “God, here we go again,” because I get it, trust me. But in this particular case, I experienced something I’ve never experienced. As soon as I soaked in that, and I really soaked in it, it was awful. It was so dark and so heavy. And then I felt my back release. And literally I’ve been 90 plus percent pain-free since that f*cking moment.
And it blows my mind because at that point, I couldn’t explain it with the fast, because the fast and ketones are highly anti-inflammatory. And I think that they actually played a role —
Kevin Rose: Yeah but —
Tim Ferriss: Hold on. In the durability of things. But the fact that there was an immediate release —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I was going to say the snap —
Tim Ferriss: — is interesting —
Kevin Rose: — doesn’t make sense —
Tim Ferriss: — is interesting. I can’t explain that through fasting. I can’t explain that through the just being recumbent, laying down for seven days because that was yet to come. And I would say that I made a tactical error in the last few weeks, which is I was like, “f*ck, man, I’m all good.”
And so I’ve neglected some of the basic self-care and strengthening and PT, which I think is important because my low back and QL and so on, which are some of the surrounding muscles have atrophied over the last year of avoiding working with the back.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But there was that experience. And for people who may be interested in delving into this a little bit more, there is a book, I don’t agree with everything in the book, but it is interesting in the sense that it was written by a Western-trained MD who ended up then opening a healing clinic in South America, focused on ayahuasca and diets, which you will read about if you get into the book, called The Fellowship of the River. So I found that book quite interesting on a number of levels. But the reason I bring this all up, number one, people had recommended this book, I think it was called [Healing Back Pain].
I may be getting the title slightly wrong, could be Fixing Low Back Pain, but it’s by Dr. Sarno, John Sarno. And this book was recommended to me. I’ve read it before. And the general gist is, it’s all in your head. Now, I took great offense at parts of this book, and a lot of it is scientifically indefensible. So unfortunately, I threw the baby out with the bathwater a bit because he says a bunch of things that are ridiculous. And he cites these success statistics for his method while simultaneously saying, “If I interview someone and they say they’re not open to A, B, or C, I omit them from my treatment.”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, okay, well wait a f*cking second. Your selection —
Kevin Rose: Hundred percent —
Tim Ferriss: — is out of control. But I wanted to bring this up because that book has helped a lot of people, despite its flaws. And not everyone will, at any point, want to consume ayahuasca, which I would advise against for 90-plus percent of the population, because it can be very destabilizing for a lot of people and very risky.
I would say there are a lot of things you should do beforehand. Try the talk therapy, try holotropic breathwork, consider, after speaking with doctors, ketamine. After that, you can consider other tools, but ayahuasca should be like —
Kevin Rose: Let’s do a —
Tim Ferriss: — fifth on your —
Kevin Rose: Let’s do a random show on ayahuasca.
Tim Ferriss: We could.
Kevin Rose: Is that possible?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, possibly. Yeah. ayahuasca would be like fifth or sixth on the list of progressions. It would not be first. But I would say the Sarno books are interesting. I know they’ve helped people like Brian Koppelman, who’s been on the podcast, amazing writer who was the co-creator of Billions, among others, Rounders, etc.
And it’s something that I’ve always, in theory, agreed with. Yes, we store stress that can have a physiological effect. There are autoimmune disorders that I think are intimately linked with different types of psychological disturbances. So you can address the problem kind of from the physiological side first. Of course, the brain isn’t entirely separate. There’s no kind of Cartesian separation of mind and body. So yes, the brain is physiological, but you can attack it through content, in a way, or you can attack it through pharmaceuticals and physiology first. I think you can go both ways, but the Sarno book, I think, is worth a lot of people reading. The second thing I’ll mention, which is very, very simple and tactical.
If you have lower back pain, I’m shocked it took me this long to figure it out and say, sitting on hard chairs bothers you, or lumbar support helps you — for a year, I’ve been going to restaurants and asking if they have a cushion. Do you have a cushion or pillow or something I can use to fix f*cked-up seating situations? This is the solution right here. This is it. This is a Pilates ball, this is a pro-body Pilates. It doesn’t really matter. But honestly, this thing folds up, sticks in your pocket, and I’ve been traveling with it. I’ve had it behind my back the whole time. And —
Kevin Rose: Great for first dates.
Tim Ferriss: Great for first dates. Ladies love Pilates balls. But I will say, for instance, the last time I did a podcast in this seat, I did not use this and my back was f*cking killing me afterwards. But the killing me afterwards is not just an issue for today. That’s an issue that causes inflammation, that f*cks up my sleep for three or four days. Use this ball, no problem. I can put it behind my back or I can put it under my ass and it folds up and fits in your pocket. So, anyways, folks, there you have it from the sublime to the ridiculous Pilates ball.
Kevin Rose: Amazing. All right, how are we doing? Any other topics?
Tim Ferriss: I feel pretty good. Next time we’ll get to what you would tell your 30-year-old self. Anything you’d like to add in that category?
Kevin Rose: No, I think if we’re — are we wrapping up now? Because I’d like to say some wrapping up comments.
Tim Ferriss: Wrapping up comments, please.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so my wrapping up comments would be this, I recently went out to dinner with five close friends of mine, who of which you know most of them. Just like the crew.
Tim Ferriss: The Wu-Tang Clan.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Just good friends, and one of the things I did is I went around the circle and I said a few words of gratitude. And I think to my earlier point, one of the things that’s really important to me, after coming out of this therapy, is just this vulnerability that allows us to speak from the heart because we don’t know what tomorrow brings. And I just want to say that, Tim, you have been a friend of mine for so long now, and I have appreciated the fact that my career has been a series of ups and downs and all over the place.
And you have been a steadfast friend, someone that sends me some of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen in my life, always keeps it lighthearted and fun, but I know that you care deeply about me. And I just want to let you know that I love you and I care deeply about you, and I’ll always be here to have your back. And I’m wishing you a fantastic new year. I hope that you hit all these milestones and more that you want to hit. Because I know that you are someone that I’ve always looked up to, and someone that is just so inspirational to us all that listen to your show and your podcast because you inspire us to do more, and to be better humans. And I just want to let you know that that means a lot to me, and I love you.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks, Kevin. That’s amazing. That makes my night and —
Kevin Rose: Happy to say it. It’s the truth.
Tim Ferriss: I love you too, man. Our friendship has been such a constant for me, such a lifeline, in a way, with all the ups and downs and holy sh*t, I mean, both of us have had some pretty wily ups and downs.
Kevin Rose: I mean, you’ve had a lot of hot chicks you’ve dated. I will say —
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t see that coming.
Kevin Rose: When you talked about the ups and downs, I was like, you’ve got a lot of ups, my friend.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, look, that’s one category — that’s the one category —
Kevin Rose: I had to lighten up the mood a little bit.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m grateful for that. And life is like a box of chocolates, right? You just never know what’s around the corner.
Kevin Rose: It’s true, it’s true and that’s why it’s important to say these things.
Tim Ferriss: It is. It is. And I have, I have — I’ll tell you something you don’t know, I have your Christmas/New Year’s card from two years ago. So, obviously at a date, it’s like you and Darya and the kids, and it’s up in my kitchen.
Kevin Rose: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And I kept it there because I love seeing you guys every day, and I think about you guys all the time and just have such love for your family. And I’m so grateful for our friendship. So I love you too, man, as you said, it’s important to say. Things are so uncertain.
Kevin Rose: Uncertain.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve never experienced — I’ve had friends pass from cancer before —
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — but I’ve never been with them through — I’ve never been there every step of the way, from diagnosis to last conversation a few days before they passed, that was new for me. And it really deeply affected me on a bunch of levels. And I want to be deeply affected by that. I don’t want to push that aside. In part, because Roland was so joyful and curious and optimistic until the end. In a very genuine way. It wasn’t an act. It wasn’t theater. That raised a bunch of aspirations in me because he was, first and foremost, a very dedicated, seasoned meditator. Psychedelics were a piece of the puzzle. But, first and foremost, he was a dedicated meditator for decades.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And attributed a lot of his equanimity and preparation for death, which I got to see firsthand. A lot of people talk about it, but let’s be honest, or I’ll be honest, I’ve read all the Stoics or a lot of the Stoics, and I’ve read all sorts of Buddhism and rehearsed death and memento mori and this, that and the other thing. But when I’m actually on, as Roland said, the final glide path, I don’t know how I’m going to respond. I don’t know. I have no idea. So to see someone who really walked the walk in such a life-affirming way that lit everyone up around him was tremendous. And he said what he was able to, and he was willing to say what he meant to those people around him who meant things to him. And you don’t have to wait until you have a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Kevin Rose: No, you don’t.
Tim Ferriss: You shouldn’t wait.
Kevin Rose: Just because it may not be that, right. It may be a car crash. It may be something where you don’t get the chance to say these things. And so it’s important to do it now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’ve got to do it. Great to see you, man.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, good to see you. Happy New Year. Excited for — this is going to be, oh, don’t you — top me off a little bit at cheers —
Tim Ferriss: Cheers buddy.
Kevin Rose: — to the New Year and to all the listeners out there, wishing you a happy and healthy new year. And yeah, I’m excited to continue this new — I mean, it’s always a new year of change, a new year of change and exploration. I think one thing that you and I, let’s take a sip. The one thing that you and I have in common is just this lifelong pursuit of evolution.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Of figuring out — because the secret, that no one will tell you, is no matter how much money you make, no matter how much success you have, we’re all still figuring out and in Ram Dass’ words, we’re all just walking each other home.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well said, man. I’m going to leave it there.
Kevin Rose: Here we go.
Tim Ferriss: Cheers, buddy.
Kevin Rose: Happy New Year.
Tim Ferriss: Happy early New Year, and happy New Year to everybody listening. And as always, be just a little kinder than is necessary until the next episode that applies to other people, but also applies to yourself. Take it easy. Take it easy. Life is short, but life is long, and we’re all just figuring it out. And by the way, as far as I can tell, you never really figure it out.
Kevin Rose: No, you don’t.
Tim Ferriss: So true. So true. CTFO, chill the f*ck out a little bit. Be a little easier on yourself. And we’ll put everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for all the stuff we talked about.
Tim Ferriss: Kevinrose.com is a better website. You can head over there.
Tim Ferriss: Kevinrose.com! Be sure to check out this amazing new podcast I’ve heard of.
Kevin Rose: New podcast. Kevinrose.com is the best place to go. Forget tim.blog.
Tim Ferriss: And KevKev KevKev TalkTalk coming at you soon. Make sure to listen to everybody.
Kevin Rose: See you.
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The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
