#527: The Random Show — Life-Extension Misadventures, Blockchain/Crypto Investing, NFT Experiments, Dogecoin, Zen Buddhism, and Weathering Sharp Elbows

The Random Show — Life-Extension Misadventures, Blockchain/Crypto Investing, NFT Experiments, Dogecoin, Zen Buddhism, and Weathering Sharp Elbows | Brought to you by UCAN http://ucan.co/tim endurance products powered by SuperStarch®, Vuori http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim comfortable and durable performance apparel, and Tonal http://tonal.com/ smart home gym. More on all three below. Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose https://tim.blog/2021/02/23/episode-500-kevkev-timtim-talktalk/ (@KevinRose https://www.instagram.com/kevinrose/) rejoins me for another episode of "The Random Show." In this one we explore crypto investing, NFT experiments, Dogecoin, Zen Buddhism, current workouts, sleep supplements, and much more. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by UCAN http://ucan.co/tim. I was introduced to UCAN http://ucan.co/tim and its unique carbohydrate SuperStarch by my good friend—and listener favorite—Dr. Peter Attia, who said there is no carb in the world like it. I have since included it in my routine, using UCAN’s powders to power my workouts, and the bars make great snacks. Extensive scientific research and clinical trials have shown that SuperStarch provides a sustained release of energy to the body without spiking blood sugar. UCAN http://ucan.co/tim is the ideal way to source energy from a carbohydrate without the negatives associated with fast carbs, especially sugar. You avoid fatigue, hunger cravings, and loss of focus. Whether you’re an athlete working on managing your fitness or you need healthy, efficient calories to get you through your day, UCAN http://ucan.co/tim is an elegant energy solution. My listeners can save 30% on their first UCAN order by going to UCAN.co/Tim http://ucan.co/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Vuori clothing http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim! Vuori http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim is a new and fresh perspective on performance apparel. Perfect if you are sick and tired of traditional, old workout gear. Everything is designed for maximum comfort and versatility so that you look and feel as good in everyday life as you do working out. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at VuoriClothing.com/Tim http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim, but you’ll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. * This episode is also brought to you by Tonal http://tonal.com/! Tonal is the world’s most intelligent home gym and personal trainer. It is precision engineered and designed to be the world’s most advanced strength studio. Tonal http://tonal.com/ uses breakthrough technology—like adaptive digital weights and AI learning—together with the best experts in resistance training so you get stronger, faster. Every program is personalized to your body using AI, and smart features check your form in real time, just like a personal trainer. Try Tonal http://tonal.com/, the world’s smartest home gym, for 30 days in your home, and if you don’t love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit Tonal.com http://tonal.com/ for $100 off their smart accessories when you use promo code TIM100 at checkout. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. DISCLAIMER FROM TIM FERRISS: I am not an investment adviser. Nor is Kevin Rose. All opinions are mine alone. Or his. There are risks involved in placing any investment in securities or in Bitcoin or in cryptocurrencies or in anything. None of the information presented herein is intended to form the basis of any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person, and that includes you, my dear listener or reader. Everything you’re going to hear is for informational entertainment purposes only. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Viori Clothing, spelled V U O R I, Viori. I've been wearing Viori at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out, it can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viori, and this was her response. "I do love their stuff. Been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI,

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  first for my partner, t-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough, I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga, running, loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discreet logo." So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  her response via text. "Vuori," again spelled V U O R I, "is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good. And it's, it's non-offensive that you don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. And my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. Their men's KORE short, K O R E, the most comfortable lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The Banks short, this is their go to land to sea short is the ultimate."

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which if I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now. They're thin, performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice. So you gotta check it out. P O N T O, Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Vuori isn't just an investment in your clothing. It's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this.

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  And so am I. vuoriclothing.com/Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out. vuoriclothing.com/Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com/Tim. And discover the versatility of Vuori Clothing.

• 3:28Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Tonal, T O N A L. Get ready for the smartest home gym you've ever seen. That's a men's health headline about Tonal, folks, and that gives you the gist. If you're wondering about the smart part, Tonal's homepage also features a quote from the New York Times. Quote, "The machine knew my strength better than I did," end quote. More on that in just a minute. "By eliminating traditional metal weights, Tonal can deliver 200 pounds of resistance in a device smaller than a flat screen TV. Tonal mounts on your wall with no floor space required." I've had a Tonal unit now for six to 12 months, which I got after a number of very close friends recommended Tonal. And it allows me to do things I would normally need a much larger gym for, like cable chop and lift or rotational exercises,

• 4:12Tim Ferriss?

  things I wrote about in The 4-Hour Body. And it allows me to do these things that are nearly impossible otherwise, like eccentric loading. Which I'll mention later. Tonal is precision engineered and designed to be the world's most advanced strength studio and personal trainer. It uses breakthrough technology like adaptive digital weights and AI learning, together with the best experts in resistance training, so you get stronger faster. So what are these adaptive digital weights? Tonal's patented digital weight system makes thousands of calculations a second to deliver you a smooth weightlifting experience using advanced electronic motor technology. Tonal lets you adjust the weight in one pound increments, something that was never possible with traditional dumbbells. It's easy to dial weights up and down with the touch of a button right in the grip itself. It's pretty cool.

• 4:57Tim Ferriss?

  Tonal also has built in dynamic weight modes like chains, eccentric, that's E-C-C-E-N-T-R-I-C, and their patent pending SmartFlex technology, so that you can experiment with more ways to get stronger, faster, without the hassle of extra equipment like chains and bands. And it, once again, fits on the wall like flat screen TV, so you can make the best use out of the smallest footprint in your home or garage, wherever you end up putting it. So try Tonal, T-O-N-A-L, the world's smartest home gym for 30 days in your home, and if you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit www.tonal.com, that's T-O-N-A-L, and for a limited time, get $100 off of the smart accessories when you use promo code TIM100 at checkout.

• 5:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's www.tonal.com, promo code TIM100. Tonal, be your strongest. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? No, this isn't appropriate time.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 6:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Kevin Rose. Welcome to the Kev Kev Tim Tim Show, otherwise known as The Random Show. Kevin Rose, I have him here. How are you, sir?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Dude, you sound just like me. You said you're Kevin Rose. I'm stoked, man. We're back, back doing The Random Show again. This is gonna be one that I hope I can make it through.

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  If you make it to the end without vomiting onto the screen, we will consider it at least a success. And we require, I think, some context for people listening. Got a text from you about 45 minutes ago, asking if we might be able to reschedule. What are the reasons for that? Not to name any, any people's names, but we can talk about

• 6:50Speaker 01

  We won't name, yeah. Okay, compounds. So you and I, we, we tend to, I mean, you're the one that got me into this stuff. It's really your fault.

• 6:58Tim Ferriss?

  Dubious, honor.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  You, you got me into the whole scene of trying out these different compounds and, and seeing what happens on the body. And actually, you know what? It's, it's, it's a really good thing. It's a good story because I am going to hopefully live longer. Not that I want to have my main, I don't want to live forever. I'm not one of those people that is like, you know, waiting for the flipping to happen where AI takes over and we just live forever. Like, I don't care about that. But I want to have a good, long, healthy life for my little girls, right? So I pay close attention to all the different biomarkers. And one of the things that has always been an issue for me has been glucose disposal. So you and I, we sit next to each other. I don't, actually, I don't know how you're, let's just say, a healthy person. I don't know how your glucose levels are. And I used to eat all those bear claws.

• 7:39Tim Ferriss?

  True.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  You do love bear claws. So the issue I have is if I sit down next to a healthy person, we both eat the exact same carbohydrate. If we're wearing a continuous glucose monitor, I will spike higher and the glucose will stay elevated in my blood longer than most people. That's not good. You don't want elevated glucose levels. It's what they would call, like, close to a pre-diabetic. So, you know, I just need to watch that stuff pretty carefully. Cardiovascular exercise is huge. High intensity interval training, zone 2 training, all that stuff is really helpful. But there are also some compounds that you can take. That help here. So one of them is called a Zempic, which is this subcutaneous shot that you do. So you just shoot yourself anywhere you want.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I just do it my belly and it lowers your glucose levels. It's pretty amazing. It just works really well. And actually, the, some of the other benefits, it's been shown in studies to be cardio protective. So a physician that I work with actually prescribed it to me and they said, hey, the one thing you may want to worry about, like it can cause a little bit of nausea in some people. I'm like, okay, like, you know, and they're like, you may want to ramp this up, right? So the little like syringe thing that it comes with, you can twist the little knob and you can choose how much you want to inject. And like, I had a buddy that was doing it too. And he's like, okay, just do point two five for like four weeks and then you could work up to point five and then eventually one milligram.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  And I'm like, well, all the benefits and I should say another benefit is that the number one side effect is that people lose weight as well. So like you lose like your beer gut, you get slimmer, you have better glucose control. I mean, it sounds like a win, win, win across the board until it comes down to vomiting side of things.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  The misery, the long and lean misery.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, I just kind of jumped a step like yesterday, you know, I had a couple beers and I'm like, you know, I just should just go in because like I just don't want this to go straight to my gut.

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's combined. Just, I want to juxtapose here. This is worth highlighting. After a few beers, continue.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Well, I, dude, first of all, I live in Portland, Oregon, best breweries out here. It is very harder than sometimes. I bet it, there's been a major heat wave here, Tim.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  Better stay hydrated with that alcohol.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Better stay hydrated. All jokes aside, thankfully we got through the heat wave and it is, the beers here are phenomenal. So it was 4th of July, you know, there was a lot of fun stuff happening. So basically I just go into the, where the fridge is and I pulled it out of the fridge and I inject myself and I turn to point five right away. I'm like, I'm gonna skip that point two five stuff. Let's just like jump into the benefits, right? So I did it and I felt fine. I was like, you know, no big deal. Waited an hour, two hours, everything was fine. Went to bed, woke up at about 4:00 AM, just wanting to vomit.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Just so bad. And just, I haven't laid on the ground of my bathroom in a very long time, maybe since when I was doing my old Dignation podcast, like, like 15 years ago or something. It was not good. So I just kind of stayed in bed this morning, called off a couple of my meetings, and you made a good suggestion on something that decreases nausea. I did that. And here we are. Good to go.

• 10:49Tim Ferriss?

  Good old Zofran. It helps. Also, really important side note, generally when people use something like ketamine in a clinic, they'll give you Zofran beforehand. So it does work. Can work really well.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right. Because ketamine causes a little bit of nausea as well at the higher doses, right?

• 11:06Tim Ferriss?

  It can. Yeah. Very different purposes. As far as I know, ketamine will not give you a six pack.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you have glucose issues?

• 11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Not really. Not really. I mean,

• 11:17Speaker 01

  So you're just like, you wake up in the morning, if you were to test yourself, you're like 75, 80, 85?

• 11:22Tim Ferriss?

  Take a look. I mean, you have to keep in mind also, I haven't worn a continuous glucose monitor since, check this out, 2008 or 2009?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Oh, man, you're missing out.

• 11:34Tim Ferriss?

  That was Gen 1 Dexcom. You could not get it unless you were a type 1 diabetic. And the insertion procedure was terrible. And the device itself, you had to track the readout on a proprietary device. There was no integration with anything like a smartphone or an iPhone. And it was really helpful. I will say that most of the takeaways were pretty straightforward. It's like, yeah, you need a huge meal, even if it is quote unquote, good food, you really have this gigantic bolus of carbohydrate intake, even if it isn't carbohydrate, really high protein, still spikes. So most of it was kind of self

• 12:17Tim Ferriss?

  evident. And after a few weeks, I was like, I think I have a pretty good read on what my triggers are, including foods that I respond to strangely. So I didn't feel the need to wear it. Continuously passed a few weeks.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I remember when we went to the movies and you first had that thing on and you had this back then it was massive. You had this massive like third party, like the mini tablet with those little device was.

• 12:42Tim Ferriss?

  Looked like a pager that was on my hip.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a huge page. I'm like, what are you doing? Like, no one had ever, I'd never heard of those devices before. And, and you're right, the procedure back then was this massive needle that they would, they wouldn't even hide it. They didn't put it behind any like thick plastic so you wouldn't see it. Like you would watch the needle go in, inject another little thing into you and then you would have to manually pull the needle out. It was so brutally invasive and now, dude, you gotta try the new ones. They're amazing.

• 13:11Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't put it in yet. Okay, the old Dexcom, if someone can think of like a barbecue kind of two timed pitchfork that you use to like flip steaks or something. It kind of looked like a miniature version of that. It was two long prongs that were kind of like needles that you'd have to push into your abdomen laterally and they were.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Right. And there was no spring loaded. It wasn't like, like today's you push a button. It's one press button and you pull it off and it's done. Yeah.

• 13:46Tim Ferriss?

  So one of many things I did for the four hour body. So are you planning on continuing to take, what is the name of the drug again? I know that.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Ozempic.

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Uh, Google Ozempic.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  O Z E M P I C, I believe.

• 14:04Tim Ferriss?

  Something like, yeah, O Z E M P I C. We are not recommending that you use this people, just to be.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, you'd have to get a prescription for your doctor, but yeah.

• 14:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's the deal. Like I, I feel that, well, we can say it because Atiya has had a podcast on this compound and a couple other glucose controlling compounds.

• 14:25Tim Ferriss?

  Are you taking Metformin?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I am not taking Metformin.

• 14:27Tim Ferriss?

  Why not?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I think that, well, I mean, the, the thing is like you, Tim, it's like, we, we just have to listen to the scientists and what they're saying. And that for me is all the, the scientists and people analysts that Atiya trains or works with and, and, and it is a company. So they look at that and say, yeah, there is a benefit for people with type two diabetes, but it's not necessarily clear if you don't have diabetes, if there's a health benefit there.

• 14:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  So I think it's, it's too, too early.

• 14:57Tim Ferriss?

  You know, you're talking about beer consumption, just to talk about the putting life in your years instead of years in your life side of the equation. Can I share with you an alcoholic beverage that I've become quite fond of? Yes. This is new for me, new for me. So here's the problem, one problem that I have is I don't drink beer. It just does not really affect my system very well. So what ends up happening is I'll go out with someone like you and you'll be like, yeah, let's have some beers. I'll be like, I don't really have beer. Okay. What do you want? I'll have a gin and soda and then we're going kind of gin and soda for one beer, gin and soda for one beer, which ends in tears. Like it just. Yes. Oh, that's the worst. It ends really, really poorly.

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  And then I was approached by this company to sponsor the podcast and I'd never heard of them, June Shine. And June Shine makes hard kombucha, had not heard of them. And I was like, okay, well, I like kombucha. I do in fact enjoy alcohol, even though it's fallen out of fashion. And people are like, I only use ketamine. I'm so evolved. I'm like, well, we should talk about that, but. People say, people say that you. At parties. Yeah. People are. Really? People are. I only use ketamine. I don't use alcohol? Yeah, that's, that's turned into this substitute for alcohol, which you know, may or may not have a place. But suffice to say, I don't have ketamine in my house for a lot of reasons. We could get into those. It has a place, but I will have this right here, this June Shine.

• 16:21Tim Ferriss?

  And it comes in many different flavors. Yeah, it's great. And so I've reached out to my team to ask them about the company. And one of them was like, oh yeah, I know June Shine. I have three boxes of it right next to me. And I thought to myself, well, okay, that tells me something because my team, I consider to have very good taste. Not literally, although they might have that too. And it's great because it's carbonated. It has, I believe, 6% alcohol by volume. And you can get a nice buzz from one because it's highly carbonated and certainly also has alcohol. And I just don't seem to have the hangover nor the losing arms race of doing like gin and sodas

• 17:03Tim Ferriss?

  per each other person's beer. It's been really nice. So this has turned into more of a recreational, light alcoholic beverage for me. I'm a, I'm a huge fan.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't. The one thing I was curious about is how much sugar were. I always see these types of beverages at the store, like these hard kombuchas or the hard seltzers, all that stuff, you know? And I hadn't tried that White Claw before, but I tried it for the first time. Have you tried the White Claw?

• 17:30Tim Ferriss?

  The White Claw. I haven't tried the White Claw. It's like the Facebook. The White Claw. I haven't, but how did you feel after that?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  It's not that good. It's not that good. It's, I get why it's, it's like, I don't know. I feel like when we were growing up, it was, what was the hot thing? Like the wine coolers. It's essentially kind of like a wine cooler type style drink.

• 17:51Tim Ferriss?

  Wasn't the Zima?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. That's the first alcohol I ever got drunk off of was Zima. That's so funny.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  But yeah, 3.6 grams of sugar. That's not so bad. I'm looking at, at their site right now.

• 18:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. It's allowed me to be socially, to socially drink alcohol without just crucifying my brain cells. And I've really enjoyed it. You want to see a bad decision? You want to, I can share a bad decision with you.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:16Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, a bad decision is this mug I'm going to show you. This is a mug that I bought some time ago as a gift for my girlfriend. And as context, just so people don't lose their minds completely, my girlfriend will often text me various things like calm down, sugar tits. She calls me sugar tits for reasons that are unclear to me, but sometimes she'll call me sugar tits. So I thought it would be very funny when I was walking through this random store and I saw some people chuckling at a mug. And so I bought this mug. I'm going to show it to you first. UCAN you see what this says?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says calm your tits.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Calm. It says calm your tits. And it has two little dots in the O and the U of U are, so you can imagine that. And then, lo and behold, we end up reuniting because we were traveling separately. And in between the time that I bought this and had like put it aside for her in a place where I knew she would find it. The day before we were to meet up, we got into this huge fight.

• 19:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's the next day. I somewhat forget about this gift.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  She thought you put that out there?

• 19:28Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I did put it out there, but it was two weeks earlier when everything was groovy. And so then she pulled it out and she was like, calm your tits. Hmm. Thank you, babe. And I was like, oh, oh, I'm in trouble. I'm getting pulled into the deep water. Oh, I did this to myself.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  I feel like she would find that funny under normal circumstances.

• 19:48Tim Ferriss?

  Under normal circumstances, she would have found it hilarious. But the fact that we had a heightened, let's call it a heated, a passionate discussion within 24 hours that had not yet been fully resolved led to calm your tits not being as funny as I had hoped.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 20:05Tim Ferriss?

  So, so good decision, bad decision. What else do we have on the roster?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Oh, man, lots of stuff to talk about.

• 20:13Tim Ferriss?

  We got a lot.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things we can, we did put out a little tweet asking for people's questions. Lots of questions around blockchain and NFTs, all that crazy stuff. We can save that for later. We can go and stay on the health front. You want to do that or do you want to go into some of the blockchain stuff? Up to you.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  You know, since I will be mostly just staring at you with a blank expression once we get to all of the technical details of crypto and blockchain, I'd say let's stick with health for a little bit longer.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, actually, you know, looking at the video now, we're going to put this video out or no? Be video as well?

• 20:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, why not?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you got a little like device up above your door frame behind you. Yeah, that little guy right there. So one of the questions that I had for you actually is like, you know, we're not as young as we used to be. And for me, flexibility has been such an important thing to focus on. And flexibility with supporting muscles to so that when you do get flexible, you're just not just like a blob. And I'm curious, you know, I saw that machine hanging up behind you. Is that for flexibility? What do you do? Like, what's your focus these days on the training side? Are you, as you're getting older, are you incorporating more around like the, not longevity,

• 21:30Speaker 01

  but more around just less mass and more just, you know, practical, like old people stretching? What are you doing?

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  Watching a lot of Richard Simmons videos.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:42Tim Ferriss?

  I am, so for people who can't see this, there is a pull-up bar within the door jams behind me. And so the design is such that as you pull down on it, the physics of the engineering cause it to sort of buckle outwards without damaging the inside of the door frame. So it's a cool design. It's a really elegant design. You can find them on Amazon. And I use that for hanging and really just decompressing or compressing, depending on how you look at it, my back scapula and also just relieving my lower back and hip flexors from sitting

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  for too long a period of time. My priorities from a training perspective right now, I would say, I can just lay it out pretty simply, would be conventional weight training once or twice a week, probably no more than that. It's really to maintain muscle mass, perhaps build a bit of muscle mass, and also to make it a little easier to maintain healthy glucose levels, right? So if you are increasing your muscular mass, particularly if you're doing these workouts prior to a meal, your glucose disposal is just going to be improved, like glute four transporters and so on will be more effective at doing

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  their job. So let's say once or twice a week. On top of that, right now, my activities are kind of seasonal these days, and they're seasonal in part because I really want to identify types of exercise that not only I enjoy, but that I can do with my girlfriend. And that's actually byproduct of a conversation at one point with an incredible trainer, performance coach, and all-around hilarious guy named Kelly Starrett, who's a beast. Like when he turned, I think when he turned 40, he celebrated by running the Quad Dipsey, which is an ultra marathon. By the way, he weighs like 220 or 230 pounds. He's extremely muscular.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 23:47Tim Ferriss?

  Doing a standing backflip and like cleaning and jerking 350 pounds or something like that. That's how he celebrated his 40th birthday, just to give you an idea of who this guy is.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  It's a party.

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a party. And great guy.

• 24:00Tim Ferriss?

  The Ready State, you can look him up, Kelly Starrett. And he was telling me about how he has prioritized activities with his wife over everything else. He's like, once you have kids, you've got a family, you've got business demands. Anything that you choose outside of that is pulling you away from time with your wife or your family. And so he's really tried to prioritize that. And before I have kids, I'm hoping to develop some of those habits. So for instance, rock climbing is something that I'm doing more and more and absolutely love. For basically everything that involves pulling, you're going to check the box. And I really, really enjoy it. It's very cognitively challenging too.

• 24:42Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's like putting together like an upside down Tetris.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, they call them, they literally call them problems, right? If you're bouldering, they're called problems because you have to sit there and spend 15 minutes thinking about what you're going to do before you even attempt it.

• 24:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I really enjoy that. And so we'll, we'll go to the climbing gym two or three times a week. Usually the lifting will happen after the climbing in the same gym. Cattle bell swings once or twice a week. I'm going to get around to answering your macro question. These are all mostly strength and muscle mass focused.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  But the climbing does help with mobility. So I would say that my focus more than focusing on flexibility, which invokes this image of passive stretching, you know, laying on the ground with your legs split and like reaching forward and just kind of hanging out there for 60 seconds, 90 seconds.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  The Van Damme moment.

• 25:37Tim Ferriss?

  Van Damme, Van Damme.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Everybody wants to do the Van Damme though.

• 25:41Tim Ferriss?

  Everybody wants to do the Van Damme. This is true. However, where I have had what people would consider the greatest flexibility gains and also just the most practical transfer of seeming more limber, it's been through weighted mobility. So acro yoga, for instance, involves a lot of pressing, handstand work, inversion, a lot of pressing. And in the process of doing something like acro yoga for the legs and the hips, or rock climbing for less of the upper body, but more the hips and the way that you rotate to improve your reach and so on. Has been really, really helpful. There's something called Jefferson curls that you can do, and you must do very safely. I describe how to do it via someone named Coach Sommer,

• 26:25Tim Ferriss?

  who is the former men's team, men's national team coach, how to do something called the Jefferson curl, which is effectively a slow rounded back stiff leg deadlift. And you're using very light weights, but you kind of roll down almost as you would do in a yoga class, vertebra by vertebra. And when you get more comfortable under weight in these end ranges of movement, then your body effectively says, oh, okay, now that we've developed some strength in this end range, we can extend the end range.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Interesting. So it opens up naturally a little bit. Once you've got a supporting structure there.

• 27:02Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. And it relates to the Goldie tendon reflex and all sorts of things. But when I'm trying to develop flexibility, my question is usually, how do I actually develop strength at my current limitation? And that's also part of the reason why something called PNF is very effective for stretching, which is a more active sort of contract and release based form of stretching.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  What is PNF? What does that stand for?

• 27:29Tim Ferriss?

  Propreceptive neuromuscular facilitation, I believe. It's been a few decades since I've thought of it. But PNF usually, I shouldn't say usually, but it's very often involves partner stretching, where someone would take, for instance, your leg extended, you'd be laying on your back, one leg is extended above you, they would push it forward until you reach the end range of your hamstring, you would then push against them for, say, seven seconds, and then relax, and then they would increase the stretch, and you would go a bit further, and then you'd repeat that.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Is this what you see like NBA players, like before they're about to go into a game, you see them kind of laying on their back, and they have a trainer come in, and they're pushing the leg in, there's always a trainer kind of supporting the leg and pushing it in, they're pushing against it. Is that the same type of stretching, or is that different?

• 28:14Tim Ferriss?

  Good question. I would suspect it's different, just because PNF can be taxing, and you would spread it out, much like you would spread out weight training. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't, as far as I know, you wouldn't do PNF every day, for instance. You would, you do PNF a few times a week. So my focus right now is This is gonna sound kind of funny because it's so simplistic, but just feeling good, because there are times when I've been huge, right? I mean, I weigh 170 pounds right now. I've been 220 pounds and not fat, I mean, huge, but did I feel comfortable walking around? No, I couldn't turn my head. I was like a turtle, you know, I had to like rotate at the feet. I mean, it was ridiculous. So being comfortable, I'm doing a lot of

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  weighted hiking also. So I'd say mobility, meaning strength in the end ranges, strength training, and then rucksacking, which I love doing when you have access to hiking trails, which you do in, in Oregon, certainly.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And is that with that one backpack we talked about a long time ago? Use this weighted backpack that you take with you?

• 29:18Tim Ferriss?

  It is, yeah. Go Ruck. So Go Ruck is the brand I use. There are many other brands. You can get vests. Personally, don't love the vests. If you're gonna run with these things, which I'm never going to do, then I think the vests probably make more sense. But I prefer to use the weighted backpacks. And I have a 20-pound, a 35-pound, and a 45-pound, and then you can add different things to that depending. It is a lot harder than people might think. And what you don't want to do is what I did in San Francisco the very first time I got a weighted vest. And I was like, well, at the time, I was really big. I was like, I could squat X number of pounds for Y number of reps. No problem. I'm just gonna put on a 60-pound weight vest. And then I very, very stupidly just started

• 30:01Tim Ferriss?

  walking with no plan, right? I was just like, well, I'll just walk. And then when I start getting tired, I'll turn around. And I kept logging. And I got to the point where it hurt so much that I had to take it off. And I was like, well, how do I get this home? I was like, two miles away. So I had to leave the weight vest on a sidewalk. And then I was like, if anybody steals this, they deserve it. Like, if somebody's gonna, if somebody's gonna steal a 60-pound weight vest, like, good for them. Because clearly, they have more endurance than I do. And so then I had to walk back, sort of do the walk of shame back to my house without this vest, and then get a car and go pick it up. But very big on, on the rucking, very, very big. And honestly, these days also, and this might

• 30:43Tim Ferriss?

  sound like a cop out, but for a long time, my maxim was, as far as resistance training goes, train to failure. Right, one set trained to failure. There are many, many, many ways to build strength. I'm not saying that is the one and only way. Some people get very dogmatic about these things. It's just for bang for the buck, like per minute of workout time, that's a great approach. However, as I have gotten a little bit older and I've been looking at things like time outside, time in nature, sun exposure, I'm not trying to optimize to get it under 20 minutes or under 30 minutes. I actually enjoy the process of doing it. So those are a few of the ways that I'm thinking about it.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Let me ask you a couple of questions there I'm curious about. So granted, this information is a bit dated, but I was, I was climbing a lot in my youth and did quite a bit of indoor and outdoor.

• 31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And one of the things, one of the people that I trained with was like a, you know, semi-pro climber that would tell me a couple of things. One, every ounce of muscle he considered to be a potential negative in that it's some, it's weight that can pull you off the wall. Because in his mind, he's like, it's dense weight and you want to be as lean as possible. And then the second piece was that he was a big fan of low weight, high rep. So just, you know, I mean, the guy could do 100 pull-ups in a row. It was just like insane, right? I'm curious, was it the pub?

• 32:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's Molly going crazy. She doesn't like the idea of 100 pull-ups, apparently.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  I'm curious though, what is your style? Like if you're not going for mass and you're going for lean strength, it's not about gaining, you're not eating really high protein then? Or what are you, what are you doing there?

• 32:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there are also many, many, many, many different ways to train and I don't think I have particular insight when it comes to climbing, although I have asked around, I've taken lessons and have thought about it. So my short answer is I'm doing some high rep work, like the kettlebell swings are generally going to be higher repetition. And I'm using a 53 pound and then maybe a 72 pound kettlebell, doing two and one-handed swings.

• 33:05Tim Ferriss?

  You get a lot out of that exercise. Then when I'm doing other types of exercises like inversion training, where I'm doing handstand work, where I'm really developing actually a lot of finger strength and shoulder extension, kind of bringing your shoulders to your ears if your hands were extended over your head, for instance, as well as some of the training for bouldering specifically, it's super short duration. So you could view that almost as you would view powerlifting. I'm trying to avoid a burn, generally speaking, in those types of scenarios, and I'm looking to build kind of neurally based strength, better recruitment of motor units and things like that. So I'm

• 33:47Tim Ferriss?

  combining the two, but certainly I agree with your friend 100%. It's like the more weight you gotta haul up that wall, the harder you're gonna have to work. It's like cycling. Like cyclists do not want to have large upper bodies. It's just drag. That's all it is. And for me right now, I am perfectly happy to be smaller and strong and working on things like climbing. There's no need for me to be large. And a lot of people don't want to be muscularly large, but it's hard to find anyone who wants to be weak. I think everybody would

• 34:25Tim Ferriss?

  like to be strong. And you can develop incredible relative strength and really develop yourself as a strength athlete while adding minimal body mass, even as a male, you can do that.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  I gotta say, man, the biggest change for me going into my 40s that has been absolutely fantastic. Well, let me stop for a second. Jump back, you know, I've got a three-year-old and a two-year-old. When Zelda started getting a decent size, and when you have a little toddler running at you at full speed, and they want you to like catch them, and you like, especially when it's not straight on, it's kind of out of the alley, and you're doing these one-arm, like touchdown, like football catches with the one hand, like you're doing that with like a, you know, 25-pound little toddler or whatever. I literally like have thrown my back out like five times. Like to where I am on the ground and cannot move and I had to crawl to my bed and lay there for like a day and a half.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's terrible.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  And it dude, it is like when you, I never knew that back pain, cause you know, when you're a kid, you're jumping off walls, you're doing all kinds of crazy shit. Like you're, you know, I was jumping off my house under the trampoline.

• 35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And then you get older and you realize like, things just start breaking and back pain is a real thing. I mean, I know you've had some back issues in the past, like it is no joke. And I needed to fix it. So I started doing Pilates twice a week and I stuck with it. And it's been about six months now, maybe five months, and I haven't had a single issue. I have not had a single issue since developing that core. It is crazy. And I can, I can toss the little kids around as much or more than I could back then. It's just insane to me. Cause like it's, I was always like you, well, I would always go to the gym and be like, okay, biceps, triceps, chest, back out. Right? And like same, you know, our shoulders too, you know, and like the same workout every single time.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  And like you look in the mirror and you're like, yeah, I look pretty good. But then, then it's like, you know.

• 36:24Tim Ferriss?

  And your toddler takes you down.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, toddler. Exactly.

• 36:29Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do in person or do you do virtual?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Over Zoom.

• 36:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh man.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So she's amazing.

• 36:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. Don't mention her name. Cause then she'll get the hug of death, but I want a referral after we finish. Because I have been, and this is where a lot of our listeners are probably going to be like, oh my God, they've totally lost it. But Pilates, really technical Pilates is not easy. And

• 36:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 36:56Tim Ferriss?

  I have never felt better than when I am doing a combination. If I look back and like when I have felt the strongest, the fastest, the most limber. It's when I was doing a combination of Olympic weightlifting, Pilates and Acro yoga. I have felt so limber and simultaneously strong at all of these crazy end ranges.

• 37:19Tim Ferriss?

  And the Pilates with a really technical trainer is incredibly, incredibly beneficial. And there's a lot of carryover in the same way that gymnastics strength training à la Coach Sommer, S O M M E R, has a lot of carryover. So despite the connotations that people might have associated with that word Pilates, and there's a lot of ridiculous, ridiculous stuff also, done technically, it is really hard. I'll give you an example. I remember last summer, I was doing Pilates over Zoom and a friend of mine was visiting who is a former international level competitor in kickboxing. I mean, he went to the world

• 38:02Tim Ferriss?

  championships multiple times, was also a high level athlete in a number of other sports. He's a fit guy, had decades of competition. And we got halfway through this Pilates class and he was, I think, in some type of kind of side plank bridge, doing stuff with his obliques. And he just, he just collapsed and he was like, Jesus Christ, this is embarrassing. This is what's happening. It was great. It is not easy.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:30Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I'm definitely a proponent, a strong proponent.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really, you appreciate all those little small muscles that you never really pay attention to. And it just like, yeah, and it is such a little, a good teacher will get in there and really help you work all those little tiny stabilizing muscles.

• 38:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And yeah, it's, it's just fantastic. Anyway, if anyone out there is having back issues, highly recommend.

• 38:56Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out. And I think it's easy for people who lift weight in some fashion to be heavily biased against body weight or calisthenic type exercises. And it's very easy for people who do body weight, calisthenic type exercises, including something like rock climbing, to glance askance at people who are lifting weights. And I think they are very, very complimentary. But man, I have seen some gigantic bodybuilders and powerlifters do a yoga class and just end up on the floor because it is a different

• 39:37Tim Ferriss?

  exercise. So I do think they, they complement each other very, very well.

• 39:45Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by UCAN. UCAN, what you eat and how you live, exercise, sleep, stress, all play an important role in how your body handles glucose, its main form of energy. You might think of blood sugar, that is glucose. When glucose levels are steady and you avoid spikes, you're improving your metabolic fitness. An important way to take control of your metabolic fitness is to eat and fuel with foods that help regulate blood sugar. To help enhance my own metabolic health, I was introduced to UCAN by Dr. Peter Attia, who said, "There is no carb in the world like it." UCAN's patented ingredient, SuperStarch, has the remarkable ability to provide a steady

• 40:26Tim Ferriss?

  release of energy without spiking blood sugar levels. I use UCAN's energy powders and low calorie bars to maintain focus throughout long days, for exercise, better performance when training, and to avoid fatigue without making metabolic compromises. So when I need a Scooby snack, when I need a little pick-me-up, I reach for UCAN. UCAN has a variety of different products with SuperStarch to help you balance your blood sugar, from energy powders and bars to granola and almond butter, there's a whole suite. Check out my favorites at ucan.co/tim. That's u-c-a-n.co/tim and save 30% on your first order. That's u-c-a-n.co/tim.

• 41:07Tim Ferriss?

  All right, I say with a sigh, blockchain, DeFi. Yeah, will Tim ever make his own NFT? I would like your advice here because I'm fascinated by NFTs. I have tracked them very closely, although I stopped following it quite as closely, maybe a month or two ago. I do find the technology very interesting. Conceptually, I think there are many, many, many, many, many applications of NFTs, well outside of, say, artwork. And I've also made some investments in OpenSea, for instance, which I think there was a question on Twitter

• 41:47Tim Ferriss?

  also about picks and shovels and so on. I think that OpenSea, not to narrowly put it into that category, but I do think that they're in a very good position to establish themselves as a dominant player, regardless of what types of standards might be developed, for instance. All of that said, great interest. So why the hell have I not done it? I have not done it in part because there has been this mad dash and money grab related to NFTs. And I don't want to be perceived, nor do I maybe subconsciously even want to be driven by trying to capitalize on a hugely speculative bubble, right?

• 42:28Tim Ferriss?

  Where the goal is not to enjoy the artwork, the goal is to resell the artwork for more. And that's fine. I mean, it's fine that a market exists. That's true in a lot of traditional art as well, or I would say less digital NFT type art. So I would love to create an NFT just to learn more about the process, right? To mint my own NFT and to go through with all of it, maybe more than one NFT. I would be curious to know how you would think about that if you were in my shoes, or in your own shoes for that matter, but in my shoes, because I'm giving you my confessional here.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that with NFTs, there, you're right, is a mad dash by a lot of people, a lot of celebrities entering the space and they are quick to attach their name to a project. Oftentimes, they're not even the ones doing the artwork, which is also just kind of like crazy to me. Like, so you'll have a list celebrity come in, say, I'm releasing an NFT. And it's like, I did a partnership with this person. And it's like this beautifully rendered 3D animated thing. And you're like, yeah, they actually never touched the computer, did they? It's like, you know, it's like they're just associating their name with it.

• 43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Which also happens in more traditional art. If anyone hasn't seen The Price of Everything, I think, it might be The Price of Anything. The Price of Everything, though, I believe, or The Price of Anything, there's a documentary that goes into some of this. But yeah, it's

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I have to watch it.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  You'll love it.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  It's awesome. Yeah. So basically, yes, there is some of that also. But at the same time, though, you have some really legitimate kind of emerging artists that are using NFTs as this new medium. And I have collector friends that are not treating it like, let's just grab and flip, but they're going to be holding on it to for many, many decades. So there's a combination of both that are happening. Someone in your position, you're right. There's the risk that you run is that you launched the Tim Tim NFT. And it's like, oh, great. Tim's making, you know, a half a million dollars off selling this NFT or whatever it ends up going for. He just did it for the money grab, right? So I think if anything, man, you don't need the money. Like, just do it for charity.

• 44:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would donate, but let's take that as an example. Okay, so 500K. What the hell would I sell for 500K?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Well, you're a good artist.

• 44:43Tim Ferriss?

  With the understanding that a lot of things have sold for, I mean, there was, there was, you know, people sold One Piece, this collage for $69 million, right? So there's certainly, he's an incredible artist. First, I should, I should say, like, the guy is a machine and also virtuosic in what he does.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And also insanely funny.

• 44:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Have you had people on your show yet or no?

• 45:01Tim Ferriss?

  No, I haven't.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  The guy is just a riot. He's amazing.

• 45:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and good for him, you know, because he, well, people can look up his story, but I mean, created every day for what? 5,000 days straight, something like that.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Was not clearly not doing it for the money when he's got started.

• 45:16Tim Ferriss?

  I could not be, I could not be happier that people like him are doing well in this environment. I have some graphic art ability. I could do something that was graphically inclined.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  You basically have a few different avenues to explore. One, I love the putting it underneath the charity, 100% of proceeds go to charity, fantastic, boom. You check that box, no one's going to complain. The second thing is, what do you do? Do you take existing media that you have? So maybe it's a portion of one of your episodes, maybe it's a something that you said one time that has resonated with a lot of people that is you want to memorialize in, in an audio clip with a, a, a cover art of your podcast or I, you can do anything you want there.

• 46:00Tim Ferriss?

  Episode one.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I better get some royalties on that bitch. I interviewed you.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  So yeah, definitely split the royalties with whoever else was on the show.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  No, but the other thing is like, you are an artist. Like I've seen some of your stuff. You can, you can do some amazing things or you could get super artsy. You can like mash a body part on a piece of paper.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  You could do something like that. You know, you have hardcore fans.

• 46:26Tim Ferriss?

  Get all art Basel. Yeah. Tape a banana on a wall, smash a body part against it, sell it for a few mil.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people don't know this probably, but I wanted to be a comic book penciller for probably 10 years. So I spent a lot of time looking at graphic art, was an illustrator for a period of time. So I suppose I could do that.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Listen, I love Gary Vee. I love him. He's a good friend of ours. You've seen his art out there, you know, he's put out some NFTs. Like dude, I've seen your art too. I would say that you have the skills to put out your own NFTs. Like Gary could do it. You can do it, brother. Like seriously.

• 47:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I'm grateful to people who are experimenting and pioneering and trying all these various things in the space because not everything is going to work. Certain things will work. And I feel like also it's really, really hard to perhaps look at it through this lens, but with NFTs, like yes, there's, there are going to be some amazing things. There's also going to be a lot of noise, but it's kind of like tech companies in 99 or 2000. It's like, yes, someone could say all of those companies were garbage, but you know, amidst all the noise, you had the Googles and the Amazons, right?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 47:45Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know if it was in 99, 2000 or shortly thereafter, but it was, it was in the same window. And those are like world changers, right? Those are history changers in a lot of ways.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. The thing is, it's just a new canvas type. I don't see it as like, there's a shit ton of like, how many craft fairs have you been to? Where you go down and it's like, oh, the Sunday craft fair. And you go down and you're like, oh my God, there's like people are painting on canvas. You're like, I would never buy that. Right? So it's just. That's happening in the world of NFTs, right? Anyone with Photoshop and the export and save as PNG file can create an NFT, you know? So anyone and everyone can participate. I think that's a good thing and there will be some amazing kind of cream that rises to the top. And that is, you know, we're already starting to see it. There's a handful of names out there that are NFT kind of native that are starting to gain a lot of momentum

• 48:37Speaker 01

  and serious collectors and followings and X copy is a great example of an artist that puts out these just crazy, almost seizure inducing flashing NFTs. No, they're insane, but has been doing it since day one. And now some of his one of ones are selling for over a million dollars in Christie's and they're, they're going on some of the major auction houses. And there's a handful of those folks that are, that are doing some really unique things in this space. So it's not all crap, I guess, is what I'm trying. I think art blocks too, is another one to, to check out on the generative side. They're kind of like, to answer your question about how do you sift through all the crap? I don't know if you had that question, but I will answer it.

• 49:17Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. I'll let you create my questions for me.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. Essentially art blocks, they have this editorial kind of board of other artists that then kind of vote in who gets accepted and, and put on the platform. And so the curated side is, are the only the people that meet that bar. And I think we're going to see more of that.

• 49:35Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of that in the curated marketplaces.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly.

• 49:39Tim Ferriss?

  What is the story with the artwork on your, your Twitter, your Twitter?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my, my Twitter?

• 49:49Tim Ferriss?

  Phew, man, that Junshine's going to my head.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Are you drinking right now? Are you really drinking or were you just, I thought you were just holding the can?

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  I just, I just scalded one. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm good.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 50:00Tim Ferriss?

  What is this artwork on your Twitter profile?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  What you're seeing right there is-

• 50:04Tim Ferriss?

  Looks like a bunch of pills.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a squiggly. So this is crazy. Essentially, it's funny, we were talking about art blocks. So that piece of art right there is the very first project to launch on art blocks. And it is this little squiggly and it looks very simple, like a little tiny snake, a multicolored snake. And essentially what art blocks is, is it's a generative art platform.

• 50:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you should define what generative is for folks.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's, let's define that. So basically, if you think about traditional art, it's always an artist, they sit down, they do something, they mint it, they paint it on canvas, whatever it may be. And the artwork is, you know, quote unquote, done. And then that is then sold. Generative art is essentially a artist that comes in and says, I'm going to write an algorithm that is a piece of math that will define the basic parameters of a piece of art. But I'm going to introduce some randomness to it. And that randomness is going to be created by the end user. So when you click to mint a piece of generative art, you are then putting that time code, that kind of timestamp of randomness into the algorithm. And then the algorithm spits out your unique piece of art.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  So you have no idea what you're going to get until it actually arrives in your wallet. And so what you're seeing there, that little squiggly is something that I minted. I didn't know what it was going to be. And some of them have more rare attributes than others, different colors, different thicknesses. And people collect them because they love the kind of luck of the draw and what you're going to get. And they love the output because sometimes the output is even more interesting than what the original artist could have ever contemplated when writing that initial algorithm. I think it is a really interesting new form of art that can be captured and held by the blockchain. Because generative art has been around for a long time.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  You know, people have been doing computer generative art and they would always like, you could go to showrooms and they would have like, you know, computer screens or monitors up showing off this stuff. And it was always a computer sciencey kind of thing over the last 20 years. But there was never a way to capture that and save it. I mean, you could save it as a file, but then, you know, blockchain actually provided a way to say, okay, the output is now captured and saved in the blockchain. It is a unique asset that can then be transferred and traded. So it's actually essentially a new form of our new art form.

• 52:23Tim Ferriss?

  We can give you title to this unique digital asset.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So this is kind of a new form that is only possible or enabled by the blockchain, which I think is really fun, you know? And so that's why it's getting a lot of traction. I'll give you a sense of how quickly this market is growing. So Art Blocks, two months ago, did around 2 million in secondary sales of all of their works of art. Last month, because we're just getting into July now, last month, they did over 9 million in secondary sales. It's really taking off. So I think it's like third, it's like NBA Top Shots, CryptoPunks, and then I think Art Blocks is the third platform.

• 53:00Tim Ferriss?

  Say that one more time?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  NBA Top Shots, like the NBA Collectibles?

• 53:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's number one.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  It depends on the month, because sometimes CryptoPunks or some other project will appear that is, you know, massive and blows up. But you know, CryptoPunks is the OG original, not generative art, but it was the original kind of randomly created, I guess you could consider it kind of generative in some way, but the random output was captured with all these different attributes.

• 53:25Tim Ferriss?

  People can check it out at larvallabs.com. Larval Labs is amazing. I mean, they do all sorts of fascinating stuff.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Really cool stuff. And do you know that Jay-Z set his Twitter bio to a CryptoPunk a couple of weeks ago?

• 53:38Tim Ferriss?

  Did not know that. Wow. Let me take a look at that. That's a big deal.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  That's a big deal.

• 53:43Tim Ferriss?

  Huh. Wow. Go Jay-Z. It's one way to add some value to the market you're participating in.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  I feel that it's silly for people to say this is just all hype, you know? And there is a lot of that out there. They're like, oh, this is just going to go away. It's funny, if you look at like historically, when these new mediums come out, like what happens and what people say. I actually did a bit of research on all this. And I don't know if you knew this, but back in the, when Canvas was first introduced, before that was largely like cathedral wall and like wooden, mostly on wooden planks that, oh, are you still there, Tim? I lost you.

• 54:25Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that was fucking crazy. My house got hit by lightning and the whole, the whole show came to a grinding halt.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Did your house actually get, was it your house that got hit by lightning or no?

• 54:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's unclear, but there was a massive thunderstorm and lightning and thunder all around this remote house at an undisclosed location. And I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere for context. And everything just went out. And I was like, oh yeah, this is why you have a generator. This is why I have generators in places like Austin where I was the only house on my street with power during the snowpocalypse. It's just like, it's incredible. We'll come back to Jay-Z and the Crypto Punks in a second, but it's just incredible how fragile the infrastructure around us actually is.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  It's, yeah. I mean, I had the same thing. I lost power for seven days in Portland during this last winter storm. We had an ice storm and it took everything out.

• 55:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's wild. It's wild. And, you know, I do worry about or think a good amount about attacks on the power grid, cyber attacks on the power grid. And there's actually a book that I highly suggest people check out called Lights Out, subtitle, A Cyber Attack A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath by Ted Koppel. And it will scare the shit out of you.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, dude, I feel like these, these types of things just make one more paranoid, you know?

• 56:01Tim Ferriss?

  You've heard the expression, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you, which isn't, isn't intended to be a justification for like building spider holes in the back of your house and going really above and beyond the call of duty to ridiculous lengths to prep in any sense, but having some basic provisions and basic backup plans in case of disaster, I think is pretty smart. I mean, we, most of us have fire extinguishers. We hope never to use them, but we recognize that having one for a hundred bucks or less, 20 bucks is worth the downside protection. Similarly, wearing seatbelts, like when's the last time you had a head on collision? Not recently, probably. But we all wear seatbelts because it's relatively.

• 56:47Tim Ferriss?

  Easy to do that and mitigate high levels of downside. I think generators fall in that category. I think backup water falls in that category. It's just a very present reminder for me of just how if we saw it during, or personally, I saw it during Hurricane Sandy, when I was working on a chapter related to disaster preparedness in The Four Hour Chef. There's an extensive section on that, which seems to not match at all with anything related to cooking or chefs, but in fact, does relate. It was kind of too long-winded to explain, but I was going back and forth with my editor at the time, and they were like, "Look, Tim, I'm into prepping, and even for me, this seems ridiculous." And then what happened?

• 57:28Tim Ferriss?

  Hurricane Sandy hit, and everything was totaled, and people in New York were going without power. And I just think it's a good pop quiz from the universe in a lightweight way. When your power goes out in this way, it's like, "All right, how much water do you have? How much ability do you have to charge your devices without access to the power grid?" It's just super basic stuff, right? Because I was thinking, okay, we were going to record this, because we were texting back and forth, but as soon as the power went out, what happened? All the cell towers were overwhelmed. So my bars went from like three to one immediately. And I was like, "Well, you suggested we could record via phone, like have the conversation and just record locally in a quick time, which is

• 58:12Tim Ferriss?

  what we're going to do." But that also, you have to think out like the tertiary effect of something like that. And- Sure. Up until a certain point where you're just like, "This is overkill." That's the problem I have is like, where do you draw the line? Well, do you have backup water at home? I mean, I have like- Do you have like a week of water for your family? No. It's like a few hundred bucks, man. You should definitely do that.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Well, here's the deal. Do I need a week of water?

• 58:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'll give you an example. So in Austin, Texas, there have been multiple boil warnings where there are high levels of rain, some type of flooding, the municipal water treatment facilities become overwhelmed and they issue a boil warning. So you can drink the water as long as you boil it.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  But I have a HEPA, not HEPA, but I have the equivalent of that on the water side that does 99.99% of viruses and bacteria. So I have like the crazy, over the top, like water sanitation, like coming in to the house.

• 59:11Tim Ferriss?

  You can just like take your kids diapers and recycle it into drinking water.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. Yeah, you just, exactly. I can just pee into the thing. It just works.

• 59:19Tim Ferriss?

  So, yeah, you know, it's, I just, I just do these things. I'm like, why not have a few hundred bucks of distilled water?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  I get it. I have, I have basically, I would say probably about four or five days worth of water.

• 59:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's good. Just for you. Your family can fend for themselves.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Well, I can get in a car and drive to someplace where there's water.

• 59:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's the thing though, is like in, in Austin, it was like within 24 hours, all water at every grocery store was gone. So it just raises interesting questions for me. Right? Cause then you're like, okay, well, if that happens, what are people going to do? They're going to think about driving outside of the limits of Austin. Okay. So then what? And then what? And then what? But I don't think I'm that crazy about it.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  I don't think that's crazy. No.

• 1:00:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not like, walking around downtown in a ghillie suit or something.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Do you have a gas mask?

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  I do not have a gas mask. I had one in San Francisco and I don't have one. Do you have a gas mask?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  I do not. Do you have any type of full body virus protection suit?

• 1:00:16Tim Ferriss?

  Like a hazmat suit?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  Do you?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Oh, so you're not that bad. Yeah, I've got to kill those.

• 1:00:23Tim Ferriss?

  My kids wear them from nine to five. It's pretty standard in their rural household. No, I don't have those. In part because right now I'm in a very rural environment. I'm in the middle of nowhere. But you realize quickly also without the amenities of a city center, how dependent you are on things that are easy to take for granted, like power or telecommunications. And if a tree goes down and lands on the lines, you're just out of luck until it gets fixed.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm on the waitlist for one of those Tesla Power

• 1:00:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, those are cool. Those are cool.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  They're all backordered.

• 1:00:58Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. Right? And then what? Then the 0.1% of poop in your water is going to kill you.

• 1:01:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's kidding.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Something has to get you, man.

• 1:01:08Tim Ferriss?

  Drinking all, taking all these life extension drugs and then the poopy water is going to get you.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So Jay-Z, you know, I looked it up while I was futzing around and messing around. And for those who haven't seen it, Mr. Carter at SC, it's actually surprisingly hard to find on Twitter. Despite that, has 3 million followers and zero following. But Jay-Z does in fact have a CryptoPunk as his profile pic. Is that the right term to use?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Tim Ferriss?

  That's wild to me. When did that happen?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Couple of weeks back, two, three weeks ago.

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  Guys.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  It's a big deal. It's a big validation.

• 1:01:46Tim Ferriss?

  Big validation. Also, I'm sure if he owns one or 20 of those, that he just 3Xed his investment, probably. Or does that not translate? Like, what, what types of things affect the pricing dynamics for the CryptoPunks? And people can look at this if they go to larvalabs.com and then go to projects and click on CryptoPunks. You can look at the top sales. These things have been covered everywhere. And like you said, they're the, they're the OGs, the kind of first edition. They're like the Model Ts of NFTs. So you can look at largest sales.

• 1:02:30Tim Ferriss?

  So right now, to give people an idea, and when you look at these, people are going to just end up gaping jaws, falling to the floor, looking at these things and wondering why on earth? An alien with a pipe in his mouth would be worth 7.57 million?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  That's outdated.

• 1:02:48Tim Ferriss?

  Dollars. It's outdated.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, there's been an alien sale now at Sotheby's for 13 million.

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. That's crazy. I see. So off platform.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I mean, these are 20 by 20 pixel little things, too. These are not massive images. They're just so, they just happen to be the first.

• 1:03:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just imagine like playing Spy Hunter or one of these loadrunner, one of these really old games and the graphics associated with that. That's basically what you're looking at. Okay, so that's outdated. So I see. So the, this is, and I know these, these transactions have taken place off of the platform of

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  Larva Labs. I got it. So this is not an accurate reflection at all of the top sales.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Right, because the top sales are now going off to Sotheby's and Christie's and the, the traditional auction houses are stepping in and saying, actually, we consider NFTs to be real art. We're going to offer them to our collectors, which

• 1:03:38Tim Ferriss?

  Surprise, surprise.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  As you can imagine, exactly. Surprise, surprise. Turns out they also charge a 20% commission.

• 1:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very reasonable 20% commission.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Suddenly they're art, you know, but no, it's, it's cool. It's cool that they embrace this and they put their stamp of approval. They've also done that with a handful of other projects now, some other really top artists in the NFT space. So.

• 1:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It is, it is just a new. Really on top of it. I mean, they were kind of ahead of the curve with the NFTs for sure. I mean, they're really able to capture a lot of that market very quickly at the high end. So I have to give them credit for that. So it looks like now, maybe you can explain to people because I know you, I know you have the explanation, but we're looking at the largest sales at larvalabs.com/cryptopunks. And you've got two aliens, so 7.57 million and 7.58 million respectively. Then you've got four gorillas, then an alien, then a something I can't even identify. I don't even know why.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  They're apes, by the way.

• 1:04:42Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. All right. We've got four apes, an alien, number eight, just looks like, like a pediatric cancer patient. I don't know what this, I have no idea what that is. Then a bunch of aliens. Not aliens. This is what I get for having too many hard kombuchas on my random show.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  So I'm looking at the, you're looking at the top, top 12. I'm looking at the top, yeah.

• 1:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So what is number eight?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  What is number eight?

• 1:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Number eight is-

• 1:05:10Tim Ferriss?

  Number six, four, eight, seven.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  So it just looks like a plain person, right?

• 1:05:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  And the reason why that one is so valuable is it is because it has zero attributes. So there was nothing applied to it. So if you sort by attributes, there's only, I think, like seven or eight that actually have zero or something like that.

• 1:05:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, got it, okay.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like, just like a bald person.

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it'll, it'll blow people's minds to look at this and some of the transactions that are going on. So have all of the highest priced transactions left this platform and moved more to the auction houses and so on?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Anytime someone has one of these aliens now, they know it's going to fetch double digit millions of dollars. And so they want to obviously get as many collector's bidding as possible. And what better way to bring in the old money into the game than to go with the Christie's or Sotheby's and pull from that collector base?

• 1:06:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  So that's, that's been the approach.

• 1:06:04Tim Ferriss?

  Wild, so wild. That's really, it strikes me as significant. Maybe I'm overweighting it that Jay-Z has as his profile pic

• 1:06:18Tim Ferriss?

  a CryptoPunk. Am I overstating that? It just, I mean, that, that is really pretty on the nose, right? I mean, it's not subtle.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  I think it, it also speaks to kind of what's going on behind the scenes. I mean, Jay-Z has a music company called Tidal.

• 1:06:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Which is a big streaming provider on the music side. And they recently sold that to Square, which Jack Dorsey is CEO and founder of, and also obviously CEO of Twitter. Square is now, I believe, the number two largest purchaser of Bitcoin because people use Square Cash App to buy Bitcoin. As you can imagine, there's been a lot of talk around how artists can potentially monetize songs using NFTs or other works of art using NFTs. And Jack's in the middle of all that. So it would not surprise me that the Square Cash App eventually turns into a way to showcase and kind of purchase and trade in NFTs. There's been some rumors now that Twitter is going to-

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Jump into the NFT game in some way. Jack famously auctioned off his first tweet for millions of dollars and turned it into an NFT.

• 1:07:24Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  So, you know, Jay-Z is in the mix of all of this. So I'm sure he's kind of learning what's going on. And obviously you have to come back to the original project, which defined the NFT standard.

• 1:07:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Which is CryptoPunks.

• 1:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So wild. What do you foresee as developments in the crypto or blockchain space? Or what are you watching closely?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's, it's funny because people get so caught up in these kind of bull and bear markets and watching these coins and saying like, oh, it's crazy. It's down 20%, it's up 20%. And I try not to get caught up in the weeds there and just zoom out even further. Because I think once you do that, the lines start to smooth out a bit and you understand that we're in the very early kind of first innings of this entire rewriting of the financial stack. And so, you know, that's part of the reason why I created the podcast to cover these things is because there's just so much going on right now.

• 1:08:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  We need to bring the average consumer up to speed so they know how to get into this stuff early before it's a, you know, on paypal.com, which is what Bitcoin and Ethereum are now, you know?

• 1:08:30Tim Ferriss?

  At modern underscore phi, you mean?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Oh, that's my Twitter. Yeah. Just modern.

• 1:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Modern finance. Modern dot finance, modern finance podcast. Check it out, folks.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  On the web.

• 1:08:40Tim Ferriss?

  On the tweets, on the Twitters, it's at modern underscore phi. All right. So you're tracking that. You're saying people get caught up in the micro cycles, right?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  That's right. And they think it's over.

• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  Fair weather speculators are going to get their faces ripped off in panic and then end up in a bad position.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  It's because they're always buying at the highs and selling at the lows, you know? I mean, that's a very common thing here. And, and I mean, Tim, you know this, man. You bought in right when everything crashed or just before it crashed.

• 1:09:10Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  And you got decimated for about four.

• 1:09:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I did. I did. Yes, I did. I came in, in probably, what was it? Mid 2017, something like that. And promptly got my face ripped off.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Right. But you were smart. You didn't do anything.

• 1:09:25Tim Ferriss?

  I was just like, there isn't a compelling, based on the thesis that I had, which is a fancy way of saying what I hoped would happen in the future, based on a couple of assumptions. There was no real reason to sell, right? It was, uh, there are these really jagged, acute, short-term moves. But if I actually had high conviction in the assumptions that led me to buy in the first place, it would be hypocritical and self-defeating to sell at that point. So I didn't sell. Yeah.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was great because that ended up, it's probably what? Up at least 5X or more since, since all that happened?

• 1:10:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's up a bit. It's up a bit. Yeah. I mean, it's not up as much as it was, I guess, end of April, beginning May, but that's okay. That's okay. I mean, I think there are just these sort of hype and deflation cycles that you see in everything. And my biggest regrets in all of investing are actually the times that I sold prematurely. It's not having invested in things. In other words, it's not, it's not having missed opportunities to invest. It's having not held the things I invested in for a longer period of time.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Shopify.

• 1:10:35Tim Ferriss?

  Shopify. Shopify was a huge one. I mean, that was my biggest misfire of all time was. But at the time, that represented in absolute dollars, a really significant win for me to try to get to the point where I didn't have to be preoccupied with money. So it made sense, right? Like, the logic of selling that actually made sense. Do I regret it? Yes. A better example would be in 2008, when I had one stock that I had put a bunch of my, a very double-digit percentage of my net worth into. Can you guess what it was? And I put it in maybe in 2005.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Uh, WordPress?

• 1:11:21Tim Ferriss?

  No. No. Although I am an advisor to WordPress and I'm a, or rather to Automattic and I'm a big fan, but.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Trying to think of what you would have bought back then. Maybe Amazon?

• 1:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I bought Amazon in like 2005 or something like that. Maybe a little bit later, taking a look right now, but.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  So wait, you regret that? No, you don't regret that.

• 1:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  I regret selling it. I sold it.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  I sold it like three years later.

• 1:11:46Tim Ferriss?

  Sold it when the subprime crisis landed and everything was just going through the floor. And boy, oh, boy, that was a mistake. Should have held on to it. And I didn't have clear rules for myself then. It was, I had rules for buying, but not rules for holding or selling. And I think people, at least I get my, I have gotten myself into a lot of trouble by having rules for buying, which I sort of intuitively have a pretty good feeling for. I think you have an even better feeling for it. Honestly, you're just, that's absolutely one of your mutant powers. But then, how long to hold, when to sell, having rules for that in advance

• 1:12:30Tim Ferriss?

  is something that I have historically not been as good at. And that has been a big problem, certainly with Amazon is sort of the textbook example of that. You know, selling 2008 on a panic and now it's, who knows, five or 10x, I have no idea.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oops. But yes, all right. So coming back to blockchain

• 1:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  or crypto, I mean, there's sort of like one, the latter is contained within the former. What else are you paying close attention to? Of course, you're observing the sort of mass behavior, right? And misbehavior.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:06Tim Ferriss?

  What else are you watching?

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we do a lot of crypto investing at True Ventures, we're on the partner over there. Yeah. So we've probably deployed, I'd say 50 million or so, so far this year, just in crypto related deals. So that's a pretty decent chunk of our fund. So it's something that we track very closely and I would say that the problem for the average consumer is that there's just a lot of garbage in there. There's just a lot of crap. So, you know, I would say that unless you're educated and you are really deep in the space and you're listening to all the podcasts and you're, you know, reading all the different CoinDesk every morning and. If you're at that level, then you can probably go out there and say, if you feel like it,

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  you can go out and say, I believe, I see where the momentum is taking things. And so that's kind of what I do as a profession. Now, I don't recommend that people do that with their everyday, just random pick of a doggy coin. Cause like all the, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of hype around these different meme coins that are appearing. And those come down crashing as fast as they go up. So we have a problem similar to NFTs, where anyone can spin up a new coin, which is a few modifications to some of the open source software that's out there, make a meme around it, pump it, and then dump it, and people get burned. So.

• 1:14:28Tim Ferriss?

  KevKevCoin.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. The K. Tim, Tim.

• 1:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Tim, Tim Tokens.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Tim, Tim Tokens.

• 1:14:34Tim Ferriss?

  Tim, Tim KevKev.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  I mean, we could like literally, I, within an hour, we could launch a new Tim, Tim token. And, and it would be live. And then we could put some liquidity on Uniswap. We could get it trading. We get people. I mean, that happens every single day.

• 1:14:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  It's really frustrating, but it is what it is. It's an unregulated market. There's a lot of stuff going on. It's super exciting. There's a lot of innovation happening, a lot of really high quality projects, but a lot of, of crap to, you know, buyer beware. So you just have to be careful on, on how you evaluate these different opportunities and definitely do not buy into the memes that are out there. Like it's just that those are, those are silly. And I'm not saying that one of them isn't going to eventually, because there's this like fine line between community support and that turns into something real and a meme, right? And something that's being used to kind of pump and dump.

• 1:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  So would you, would you consider Dogecoin a meme coin?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  It started off as a meme coin, and I think that there are attributes of it that I really like.

• 1:15:37Tim Ferriss?

  Started tweeting about. The Doge.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. Elon Elon started pumping up the Doge. Well, here's the deal with Doge. Like, I knew the founder really well. I had him on my podcast seven years ago, or whatever it was. And we talked about Dogecoin, and it was a joke to initially. It was just like a fun, like, he set the supply super high. Everybody was using it to tip using these little bots on Reddit. And, you know, I had literally millions and millions and millions of Dogecoin because they were worthless. And I was tipping out, you know, 10,000 at a time here, 5,000 over here. Like, it was just like, we all did it. It was just fun, right? And it was just kind of like a way, like a tip of the hat to someone like.

• 1:16:16Tim Ferriss?

  It was monopoly money.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Monopoly money. So that has now evolved into, it had a really strong community back then. It died down for a few years, and then the community came back, and then Elon jumped on top of it. But it's still lacking a few things, like the underlying developers that are working on it. Now, this could be changing, and I've I've heard that they're seriously considering refactoring the codebase. But it was just a dead project that had minor bug fixes applied to it. So there was no real, outside of it being a quote unquote meme coin, and being hilarious and watching it go up in price, the technology stack that it was written on wasn't being well, it was being maintained just so that it didn't break. There was no innovation happening there.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  And so that is not the future of currency. The future, like, currency that is going to really be a real true utility has to have an active development community behind it, supporting it and evolving it over time. And so that is happening on a handful of other projects, not so much on Doge. But there is so much interest in Doge now, and it is being listed on a bunch of other major exchanges again. I could see, it wouldn't be crazy if you said, hey, Kevin, guess what? Five years from now, they now have 5,000 active developers doing all these really funky weird things on Doge. I'd have been like, well, that makes sense, because it had had the community drive a lot of that, you know? But outside of Doge, they call them like the doggy coins. There are a bunch of other

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  doggy style coins that are just like, basically, well, I'm sorry, Tim, like, they're just, they're similar, they're similar doggy coins. I'm sorry that your mind went there.

• 1:17:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, dude, put that on me.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  They're doggy themed.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  They're doggy themed coins that are just like literally just out there for to get people excited. The prices go up, the whales sell and you know, it's it ends in tears.

• 1:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  Ends in tears. So, all right. So Dogecoin, that's not a primary position in the True Ventures portfolio, I'm guessing.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  No, it is not.

• 1:18:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Okay. How do you, well, actually a number of questions. So since we invoked the name of the great Elon, you've spent some time with Elon. I have everly not, but there are those who attribute the recent correction slash crash to various tweets associated with Elon, including one related to the environmental costs of Bitcoin. Some think that is overstated. Some think that is just, some think it's understated. A lot of controversy around it. Then there are those who'd say, you know, Elon is a small, perhaps contributing factor,

• 1:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  but really it's just a overall macro run from risk assets. So even though people attribute the correction, or some people do, to that type of comms from Elon, it's not really accurate and that it's really a macro trend that happened to coincide at the same time. What are your thoughts? Do you have any thoughts on any of that?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Well, Elon certainly carries a lot of weight, or I think people more recently, even though he's tweeted a few times about cryptocurrencies since all of this went down, and it didn't seem to really impact prices as much as it did back when he first started doing it. So I would say he probably has a little bit less sway and people really got pissed off.

• 1:19:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  When, when he did this. I think that, you know, listen, we had a massive run up over the last, you know, six months. So to see a sell off or correction like that just totally makes sense to me. I don't know that I pin it all on Elon. I think that certainly his comments and pulling it out of, you know, Tesla from accepting Bitcoin and it certainly sparked something that everyone was already thinking behind the scenes. And that's true. You know, Bitcoin is a very dirty currency. I would say. That I have read reports and I have talked to folks that are in the camp of, you know, they will point out that the mining operations have really led to a lot of renewable

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  energy. So a lot of these Bitcoin mines around the world are placed in places where renewable energy is there and in place and operating because it is the cheapest form of energy. Now, granted, there are other places where it's running purely off of coal. So I don't know that I fully buy that. So I think that I'd have to set that aside. I don't think that the underpinnings of Bitcoin are going to be rewritten anytime soon. It is such a, you know, the fact that Satoshi disappeared, it's kind of like this, I know they have folks that are in charge, but it's, it's almost like, don't touch it unless it's really broken. There's like just, you know, it's such a massive market cap and it does one thing really well, which is just

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  store of value. So while there is a lot of little additional add-ons that are helping it scale, no one is thinking about completely rewriting it from the ground up in the way that say they're doing on Ethereum. Like Ethereum is being rewritten right now to switch to proof of stake from proof of work. So out of the dirty CPU GPU mining world into something that is insanely clean and more efficient. And that upgrade will take place sometime in the next year or so. So there are other cryptocurrencies that certainly realize that this is an issue and they want to get away from the useless. Well, I mean, it's, it's a very, you're also in some sense, when you do these proof of work operations that require a lot of CPU and GPU and are very

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  power intensive, that is how the security of the network is maintained. So they are useful in that sense, but we have, I just think we have better cleaner tech now that we can apply to the same problem.

• 1:22:02Tim Ferriss?

  What are your hopes for? Chia, if any, and could you describe what Chia is?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Chia is a cryptocurrency that was created by Bram Cohen, who's the inventor of BitTorrent. We all, you know, remember BitTorrent from when we were pirating movies or whatever it may be. It was the kind of first peer-to-peer elegant way to swap large files. Bram went on to create Chia. Chia is definitely, you know, it's one of our investments at true, so full disclosure there.

• 1:22:32Tim Ferriss?

  Me too, I'm an investor.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, the reason why we backed Bram is because, I mean, there's a handful of engineers that you, if they raise their hand, they say, I'm going to do something new.

• 1:22:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  You just realize that the caliber.

• 1:22:43Tim Ferriss?

  He's an animal.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just, yeah, it just, it's just one of the top tier engineers in the world. So you say, always say yes to something like that. So he's come up with a way to do proof of space and proof of time, a blockchain that uses hard drives for farming. So he calls it farming. And it essentially, part of the reason why I was attracted to it initially is because everyone has additional hard drive capacity. And you can turn a normal computer into a farming rig that goes out and will actually plot and farm and do the same functions of a cryptocurrency, meaning providing space as a way to protect the network, rather than just GPU and CPU. And it is just so much more green.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  It uses like one, one thousandth of the amount of energy of say, like using a Bitcoin CPU or GPU. And potentially democratizes in a much more broader way. And so what I mean by that is that, you know, if you were to compete and you're to mine Bitcoin today, you would have to go out and buy a very custom kind of ASICs, custom processor rig, or a really fast GPU if you're mining on Ethereum and spend thousands and thousands of dollars to go out and participate in the network. So you just can't use an off-the-shelf computer anymore, the way you could when it first launched, you know, in its first year or so. So now with something like Chia, and you know, Ethereum's moving this way as well with proof of stake, you don't really need the hardware requirements.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  So you can go out and And just use some extra hard drive space, join a pool and then you can be farming kind of instantly. So the number of active participants in the network goes up, which means it's more decentralized, which means it's better for overall security. So rather than just it being controlled by several thousand, you know, the hope is with something like Chia, you get hundreds of thousands of people participating and, and doing this farming. And so far it's, it's, it's been working quite well. I mean, they've got a lot of people. They had, you know, a warning when out several big publications wrote kind of warnings that hard drives were being sold out everywhere. So you couldn't go to like an electronics store like Best Buy was selling out of their top end hard drives because people were using them for, for mining on Chia.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  And so there was going to be this massive hard drive shortage. So what Western digital stock like went up because of it. And it was just, it's just crazy, but

• 1:25:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's wild.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  It's wild. It's wild. But it's, I would say, you know, just playing both sides of the coin. Obviously I said I was a fan because we're investors, but also, you know, it's early days for this. So I wouldn't go out and say, hey, buy a bunch of Chia. If anything, I would say just fire up an extra hard drive that you have sitting around and play with it and see what you think. None of this is investment advice.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. To be clear, we are not registered investment advisors or other professionals. It's for informational purposes only. Continue, please.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. So I mean, with all this stuff though, Tim, like, you know, like when I walked you through some of that Metamask stuff one time, it's like the only way to learn this stuff and to get into it and understand what you're buying, rather than just blindly buying is to play. Put a hundred dollars in, go lose a hundred dollars or something crazy that you didn't, didn't understand, but by the end of it, you, you do. And so that's where you learn. And I think it's the most valuable piece of all this.

• 1:25:55Tim Ferriss?

  So in an ocean of options, and again, this is you and the other partners at True have significant informational advantage and many other advantages compared to anyone, almost anyone listening to this. So this is not intended to be advice, but just so I have a better understanding. How do you vet? How do you choose blockchain slash crypto investments? Because there is so much out there. There's this paradox of choice. How do you choose things? At this point, are there any particular checkboxes or criteria?

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. So the way that I think about it is that first you have to say where have we been and where are we going? And so when you start out the kind of where have we been, when these chains first launched, they had one utility. They were like a store of value and a way to send digital currency to and from one wallet to another. Right? That was Bitcoin for the first few years. And now, when you think about where we're going, there are just a whole slew of different arenas that this blockchain technology has been applied to. So you know, you have decentralized exchanges. You have, you know, the NFTs that we talked about and marketplaces around that.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  All of the Web 3 kind of censorship resistant communication protocols. You have insanely high performance protocols are blockchains like Solana and some of the others that are out there and that could do 50,000 transactions per second. And so what gets unlocked when you have that type of speed operating on a blockchain? Then you have existing big behemoth blockchains like Ethereum and like how are we going to scale Ethereum in the short term? So you talk about what they're called layer two scaling solutions. The entire financial stack is being rewritten from the ground up. So thinking about what is the future of checking and savings accounts? What does it mean to stream money to people in real time and how does that work?

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  And so, you know, there's a world where a startup pitch is not just recently where they've figured out a way to stream money to people in real time. And so what that means is rather than going into work and like clocking in and, you know, waiting two weeks to get paid, you clock in and money hits your account every 25 to 30 seconds in real time as it's being earned. And so there's just like this complete Rethinking of the distribution of financial assets. So what once was, let me pull up like Wells Fargo right now, but if you pull up like a big bank and you say Wells Fargo, Wikipedia, and you take

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  a look at the headcount that they have to employ to pull off a traditional, so they have 7,200 branches in 2021, 13,000 ATMs and 268,000 employees. Yeah. For Wells Fargo. So think about what that payroll must look like. Yeah, it's a lot of mouths to feed. Lot of mouths to feed and that that bloat that is in the financial system. And so what do you get in return? You have a checking savings account, you get some FDIC insurance, which is nice, and you get absolutely nothing. You get no interest. I get that it's nice that they handle fraud on the check side and you know, there's, there's a phone number to call and all of that,

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  but all of that money that they're taking your money and lending it out on your behalf behind the scenes and their revenue for 2020 was $72.34 billion for 2020. So that money now in a decentralized fashion on the blockchain where now you have some of these people writing things like AVE, some of these lending platforms, or you have like a BlockFi that is partially centralized and partially decentralized. You have these new banks and new financial institutions and these new protocols that are emerging that take just a handful of people to write code,

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  manage and operate. And then all of that wealth creation is being distributed back to the individuals. So I'm excited for the future of finance because I think that, for example, you know, I've talked about BlockFi before, it is a company that is providing. You and I've talked quite a bit about it. Yes, in BlockFi, for example, Zach, I had the CEO on my show. We talk about what they're really good at is these interest accounts that give people real insane interest at right now. I think it's like 7.5% right now on stable coins, which is just nuts. Like, what are you going to get from a bank? If you keep $100 in your BlockFi account, and then I don't mean this to be an ad for BlockFi, I'm not going to put any affiliate code anywhere in anything in Tim's show notes

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  or anything, but it's like, it's essentially, it's just they're giving you 7% on your money on these on these stable coins, which are US dollar coins, which don't change. You don't have to worry about them going up or going down because they're able to go out and pass that savings. They don't have that massive overhead that a traditional bank would have, and they just pass it right back to the end consumer. And so a lot of these platforms, whether it be Compound or AVE or some of these platforms, you can go and bring your cryptocurrency in, you can lend it back to the platform and you'll get paid interest back to your wallet, which is just awesome. It's it's nice to see that finally going back to the consumers versus just being kept by the big banks.

• 1:31:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's super fascinating to me. And you introduced me to BlockFi and have since become an investor and don't place a lot of bets in this space. But the idea, and who knows net-net, like, at the end of the day, what the pie chart is going to look like, but the idea of a blockchain-first banking or finance company is very interesting, right? It allows you to do certain things like offer this 7% or 7.25% or whatever the APY is on accounts that otherwise don't really exist. Because as you said, there are all of these intermediate

• 1:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  Cost centers, including headcount associated with traditional banking that are just simply removed when you shift to this type of technology. The ability to say borrow based on your cryptocurrency assets or anything that's related, these are new frontiers in a lot of respects. And that's part of what makes it super exciting. Obviously, both of us are fans of BlockFi and many other things. What are the risks that you foresee on the horizon? And this is a common question, but I'm going to ask it because I think people will be interested in your answer. How much do you worry about sort of regulatory overstep or shutdown?

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  As we've seen what's happened in China, of course, China is not the United States. But how concerning for someone who invests a lot or for a firm that invests a lot in crypto and blockchain is the regulatory side of things?

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Honestly, I'm very much looking forward to regulation. I think it's going to be a great thing. The lack of clarity around how to treat certain types of assets in this world is what's holding it back, I believe. The big question to ask here is the one like you hinted at with China, where is it? Does the US wake up one day and say, actually cryptocurrency is illegal? Shut it all down. And I just can't see that being the case here. It's too far entrenched in into everything that we're doing. Every major bank, whether they like it or not, is now embracing blockchain in some capacity. It's a fantastic underlying technology. So it would just be odd to say we're banning a certain type of technology.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Like, I just can't see that happening in the United States. I hope that there's more clarity because a lot of it is very confusing right now. And to be fair, a lot of it's being defined in real time. We don't know how to handle certain types of assets. There's just weird things coming out of this. Like, I'll give you an example. There's a protocol called Alchemix that are these self-repaying loans. It sounds nuts, but in the world of DeFi.

• 1:34:31Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  It's crazy. So.

• 1:34:34Tim Ferriss?

  I could use some of those. Self-repaying loans.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Well, basically what it does is it goes out and you come in and you take a certain amount of cryptocurrency, let's just say it's $10,000, right? And they take that entire principal and they go invest it into yield generating protocols that are out there in this world of decentralized finance. And they instantly give you half of it back into straight, let's just call it a stablecoin, like a US dollar a stablecoin. So you take 10,000, they give you 5,000 to go do whatever you want with. And because of the yield that they're able to generate on the entire principal, they take all of the interest payments and pay it back into the loan so that it pays itself off automatically.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  And at the current rates, it's a little over two years and the loan just automatically pays itself back. So you're receiving your interest payments upfront, if that makes sense. But this is only something that would be possible in the world of DeFi where you're having smart contract work with smart contract and not in traditional lending. It just wouldn't make sense because you're taking all of the benefit and giving back to the customer. And in traditional lending, when you have Mals DeFi, as I mentioned with the Wells Fargo example, they would never give you that full yield back, right?

• 1:35:52Tim Ferriss?

  They can't.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So this is like-

• 1:35:55Tim Ferriss?

  They're only making a mere 72 billion.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And the odd thing, though, is like these repayments are happening in near real time, paying down the loan in near real time. And so talk about like all these little microtransactions that are occurring over that two years and change. Now, how do you treat those repayments? Who's paying them and where are they coming from and what's your cost basis? And you could imagine like it just makes you go cross that. Like no one in the IRS is going to tell you how to do this. Like this has never been defined before. How do you even file something like that with the IRS to explain to them what you're doing?

• 1:36:35Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, even handling basic crypto stuff right now with filings is very challenging. You can do it, but it's very involved.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  So there's some very sophisticated financial, these new tools, these new types of code that is being deployed in these smart contracts and we don't really have a clean way to even report them, you know, let alone understand how to, what tax rate we should be charged. So I don't know, I'm excited for some of the more regulation to come into place. I think the

• 1:37:05Tim Ferriss?

  Just to remove the uncertainty. So even if the rules are stringent and punitive in some respect, at least the rules will be clarified and defined.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I want to pay my taxes. I don't want to go to jail. I just don't know how quite to do it, right?

• 1:37:19Tim Ferriss?

  I wasn't implying otherwise, but

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I'm just saying, I'm just saying in the world of DeFi,

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  I'm saying in the world of DeFi, this is what people are running into is they don't know how to handle this stuff. So it's a very exciting space, but it's a very kind of bleeding edge, enter at your own risk kind of world. To answer your question of like, what am I scared of? What are the risks that are out there? I think there's a few. One is you mentioned the regulation side, that that's certainly one that kind of is off there lingering in the background, which I'm not so much worried about what's going to happen on the US, but I'm worried about what if another country bans it? Cause that causes some instability in the markets when other countries ban it.

• 1:38:02Tim Ferriss?

  Which would be the most impactful countries were they to ban crypto? Outside of China, are there any countries that stand out that one might not expect? So outside of the US, like who are the players who would really move the markets?

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think China was the big one, to be honest. And now that that's kind of over, obviously the European Union would be huge. Anything with the UK would be huge, but I just don't see those markets cracking down. So there's nothing out there that is like the big scary whale that we're just waiting for that to happen. Like I don't know of any other big countries. If anything, we're seeing countries now embracing cryptocurrency and making it an accepted form of tender. Like it's, it's, so that's happening, which is just fantastic. Okay, so let's just put that regulation aside, a part aside. There's two other pieces that I always think about. One is that the meme coins, the shitty coins that rise to the top and people think because it's a top 25 traded coin, they should buy it.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  That's a huge risk. The second thing is if people don't dollar cost average their way into the markets. So that means that they just buy a big chunk, oftentimes too much, and then they panic sell.

• 1:39:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  So, you know, dollar cost averaging is a very simple concept. You have a thousand dollars, let's just say $1,200 that you want to invest total into cryptocurrency. And you're like, listen, my chunk, what I can afford for me is $1,200. You take a hundred dollars and you do one buy, the first of every month for a year. And you dollar cost average your way in. That way, you're never buying at the high, never buying at the low. You're kind of getting that nice blend over 12 months. 12 months may seem like a long time. I, I personally would do something like that over like three to four months and just figure out what is that? Don't look at the markets in terms of like trying to time it. You just say every, this is the day, second week of every month on every Monday, or whatever it may be, whatever your day is, and then you go off and you make that buy. And the third piece is that people run into, and this is something that comes up a lot,

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  is that people take on too much risk. So it has to be something where if it goes, it drops by 75%, you will not sell. So it can't be so meaningful that you're freaking out and you do a panic sale. Because this is where the risk is, but also, you know, with risk comes the reward, obviously. So when you're playing in these crazy waters, these shark infested waters, like there's going to be some really bloody days. And if that's the case, you have to just be able to sit there and take it and not panic sell. Because you know, and you believe in your heart of hearts, that the future is digital currencies. And if that's the case, the market is going to be bigger five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And if that remains true, back to that, like what is my original thesis around this market?

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  Then you're going to be good in the long term, but you have to be able to sit there and close your eyes on those really horrific days, and they will come, and there'll be multiple.

• 1:40:50Tim Ferriss?

  Lots and lots and lots. For me, I've realized if I am not comfortable making an investment for at least three years, I just shouldn't do it. Because I probably haven't done sufficient homework to have strong conviction.

• 1:41:08Tim Ferriss?

  On my base assumptions that should underlie that type of decision. And if I'm not willing to hold for at least three years, like you're going to get punched in the face at least a few times over

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:22Tim Ferriss?

  three years. And if I've committed to that and I've only allocated so much that I can afford to easily have sidelined, right, for that period of time and illiquid, you're going to end up panic selling. And just as I did with Amazon 2008, which was a huge mistake, right? I'd taken too much. I put it into an excellent company, but I didn't have rules for when I would sell or why I would sell, right? I only had my reasons for buying, but my reasons for buying were based on kind of present tense evaluation, not looking at long-term trends. So I didn't have myself set up for success for that investment, which was a bummer. And I ended up selling and then buying back in, in early April of, I

• 1:42:07Tim Ferriss?

  guess, last year, yeah, early April 2020. But man, oh, man, it would have been a lot better to actually hold on to it for the entire period of time.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  Here's the crazy thing, Tim. I'm curious to get how you think about it these days, but the one thing that is a little bit different than what you said there around stocks versus crypto is that the people that are the true believers will say, there is, if you really believe that the future of currency is digital, then there is nothing to sell. Like, why would you, what would you, what would you sell into? Because you're already holding the best form of that thing, that you're holding currency.

• 1:42:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  You don't sell into the US dollar. Why? When they're just printing more US dollars? That would just be silly.

• 1:42:51Tim Ferriss?

  Totally, totally. Right. So I don't want to come out with like super strong opinions, but I'm generally not selling the primaries, right? Like the primaries being Bitcoin, Ethereum. Like I have not sold any Bitcoin or Ethereum in years, and I don't have any plan to in the, in the near future. There are other things, I'm not, I don't think we should name them, but more speculative things that might.

• 1:43:16Tim Ferriss?

  On paper, offer a market cap that just does not make sense compared to the utility and ubiquity of other things, in which case, okay, maybe you take some of that off of the table. But because there's not a equally high degree of confidence in the durability over time of those things, right?

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Or you just can't find a compelling logic to be like, why is this worth X% of the total market cap of Bitcoin?

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:48Tim Ferriss?

  Then I consider that. But I hear you. I mean, there are definitely, in the true believer camp, it's like, look, if you actually believe A, B, and C, what you're saying, you should never sell. Never is a, but never is a strong word, though. I would say,

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:59Tim Ferriss?

  Given the current information, given what we know currently, given current information, I don't have any plans to sell BTC or Ethereum.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Right. So in my mind, what I think is, okay, if I think about Amazon, of course, Amazon's going to continue to scale and be the leader in that space. If I believe the same in the digital cryptocurrency space, but I'm in a coin where I think to myself, gosh, I really see this emerging player that's coming up that I really believe in as well, then I might do a lateral move where I say, okay, well, I have a lot of gains in this one particular cryptocurrency, but I also want to get a little exposure to this other one. I'm going to sell part of this and then move into another coin and that just kind of diversifies my cryptocurrency basket a little bit more. Now, one other piece is we talked about kind of right sizing the position that you're holding so that you

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  don't freak out if there's a big dip. At some point, because I believe this market will expand and continue to grow over the next couple of decades, that position, let's just say you put in 10,000, you know, over the next three months, and that turns into a half a million dollars. At some point, you're going to look at that holding and be like, wow, this is now meaningful. I am going to freak if it drops by 75%.

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  And so what do you do then? So my playbook is one, and I'm just speaking for myself, but what it is, is if cryptocurrency grows to the point where it is no longer, whatever your number is, 10% of your overall holdings, 20% Whatever you're comfortable with and all of a sudden it's 40% of your overall net worth. Then my way of trimming is not to say sell and grab some US dollars. What I do is I say, let's sell, but then diversify into stocks and bonds and more traditional assets. So more of the wealth front style, kind of fully diversified. That to me is more of the boring, old school, hoping for 7% a year, you know, type of style investing.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  But I'm definitely not one of these people, you talk to pomp or something and they'll be like, oh, I'm 100% Bitcoin. You're like, what stocks do you hold? No, no, no, just Bitcoin. You're like, wait, what? Like, uh, that, that's a little aggressive, you know? So I'm definitely a fan of having, you know, other assets as well. So it's not just all about crypto.

• 1:46:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. And I should say also, I mean, 7% sounds terrible, but like if, if it's a decent number to begin with, and you don't sell and rebuy and rack up all of these transaction fees and management fees and so on. You could do worse.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, totally.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  People, a lot of people go to zero trying to chase like 40% annual returns. Actually, I have a lot of sympathy for people who had the experience, their first experience investing in this last run up with crypto, because they're just ruined forever. You know, in a way, I'm just like, oh my God, like this is, I don't want to say a non-recurring phenomenon, but it's just like, if, if your baseline is set at hundreds of percentage per year, it will be very hard to convince you that it makes sense to invest in something with a reasonably predictable seven to 10% per year, let's just say. And that's a tough position psychologically for people to be in, you know?

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:47:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  The one hack I did want to share with the audience that I think is a really worthwhile one is Well, I don't want to, I also say like, I think that the mistake a lot of cryptocurrency holders are doing today is that they are holding their cryptocurrency where they're not earning anything for their cryptocurrency. So a lot of people will have a Robinhood account. I'm an investor at Robinhood, so I'm slamming them right now. And I'm sorry, I'm not an investor. We invested at Google Ventures and I hold some of their funds. So I don't mean to talk bad about Robinhood, but they don't give you any interest when you're holding your crypto there. The same thing goes for Coinbase. Coinbase just now said, if you have our stablecoin,

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  USDC, we'll give you 4%. But actually, they do Ethereum 2 staking, which is nice. But outside of that, they're not really giving you any interest if you hold Bitcoin there. There are some places that you can go, that you can transfer your cryptocurrency to, you know, PayPal doesn't give you any interest, that you can earn interest on your crypto paid in crypto. So you paid in kind. So you're getting more crypto as you're sitting there holding it. So my strategy is that there's two sites that I like, BlockFi, which we already mentioned. They give you interest on Ethereum, Bitcoin, a whole slew of other coins. And then Gemini is another really world-class exchange that gives you interest on just holding your crypto there. So every time I launch my wallet, I see that I have more crypto, because every month I'm earning interest on it. And I just would hate for

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  people to be letting their crypto sit there and not earn any type of interest. Now, there are risks, because they're lending your crypto out on your behalf. But that's why, actually, I, to plug my show again, I did an episode all around risk with the head of risk of both of those organizations to talk about how they're doing it behind the scenes. And after listening to that episode, I'm confident and comfortable in what they're doing. So I've been using BlockFi for years now and getting outrageous interest rates. It's a great thing to do when you're sitting on some crypto, why not earn more?

• 1:49:11Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. What else should we talk about? Kev, Kev?

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we covered crypto pretty well.

• 1:49:17Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for the "we."

• 1:49:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'll take it.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  It's a fun world, man. You're doing fine, Tim.

• 1:49:25Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Just keep hold your Bitcoin in there.

• 1:49:26Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I'm just breathing while I listen. Yes, thank you. I'm doing great.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Those are great. You know, one thing I wanted to cover is a question came in from Twitter asking, and I guess then we can wrap it up unless you have more, but one of the ones that we have on the last on our list here is the most recent thing you've added to your daily architecture, any new rituals? Question mark. I was really curious when that came in because we haven't talked about this in a while. Like, what have you picked up both in COVID and then kind of like a coming out of slowly coming out of COVID, anything new for you?

• 1:50:01Tim Ferriss?

  So the first thing that comes to mind is anything and all things related to sleep. This is a perennial topic, but you know, in the last, I would say, month, I've had probably 10 days at least of the best sleep I've ever had. And a lot of that stemmed from a conversation I had with a neurobiologist from Stanford named Andrew Huberman, really interesting guy. And we talked quite a lot about sleep. He studies the visual system very intensely.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  Was he on your podcast?

• 1:50:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, he was.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Awesome. Yeah, he was on Daria's podcast, too.

• 1:50:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's a smart guy. He's a smart guy. And we spoke a lot about sleep. We spoke about testosterone and increasing testosterone, talked about performance, the risks of increasing testosterone, different methods, et cetera. And in the sleep camp, we, or I should say, he rather, told me about increasing fish oil, specifically EPA, to at least one gram per day. And I'd been taking fish oil, but I had not been taking that quantity. And I began taking fish oil and a number of other supplements, including magnesium beyond just magnesium three and eight, which is very good for sleep.

• 1:51:19Tim Ferriss?

  And on top of that, paying more attention to circadian and cyclical cues that he and I talked about. So I've been trying to ensure as soon as I wake up that I go outside and spend at least five minutes in the sun. And I'll do that by jumping rope and walking around with Molly, my dog, but to really ensure that to the extent possible, I don't wake up and then brush my teeth and then check my phone and then check my calendar and sit inside, dilly-dallying, or even doing important work for an hour or two before getting outside

• 1:51:58Tim Ferriss?

  exposure. I've really been trying to very consistently get sun, even if it's cloudy outside, just like solar slash sky exposure as soon as I get up. And I've been having some of the best sleep of my life. It's really, really, really remarkable. So I'd say- What are you using to track your sleep? Right now, because I shifted locations recently, I mean, not full time, but I'm just, I'm outside of my usual home base. So I have an Oura ring that is charging. I haven't been wearing it. I do use 8Sleep also on the bed, which is incredibly helpful for- Yeah, we love ours.

• 1:52:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, creating two zones. And my girlfriend, if she could sleep inside a sauna at 90-plus degrees, she would probably do it. I really need to sleep at kind of a surrounding temperature of like 67 degrees, where I have an incredibly hard time getting to sleep. So the 8Sleep does provide some tracking. And I've found that 8Sleep's, I suppose, inference or extrapolation from what they can sense in the bed is pretty good, even when they're paying attention to HRV, certainly the number of times that you're tossing and turning, getting up, etc. Surprisingly accurate, from what I can tell. I was very skeptical. I do use the Oura ring. That's

• 1:53:20Tim Ferriss?

  going to be the primary for looking at sleep quality and HRV.

• 1:53:26Tim Ferriss?

  So those would be the two tools predominantly, but you know, at the end of the day, even though I find these tools very useful, you know, by 1pm, if you had a good night's sleep or not, and you probably know as soon as you get up. And so it's, it's a subjective feel as much as anything else. And I am a different person. If I get three or four nights of excellent sleep, I am a different human being. Like qualitatively and probably quantitatively in a bunch of ways, I am just a different human being. So, so those are, those are a few of the things that-

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Couple of questions.

• 1:53:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  So when you are, when you have a bad night's sleep and you look at your ORID data, what does that mean for you? Does that mean lack of REM sleep, lack of deep sleep, or is there anything that jumps out?

• 1:54:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for me, it's, it's lack of deep sleep. It's lack-

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, same.

• 1:54:13Tim Ferriss?

  It's lack of restorative sleep. And I don't know how deeply, pun intended, I should read into that, but my deep sleep is very easily compromised. It is very easily compromised also if I have more than two alcoholic drinks. Of course, not all alcoholic drinks are created equal. So 6% is very different from tequila shots, but I've paid a lot of attention to that. And that is another reason why I was actually more than happy to have a drink or two this early, since we started recording at 3pm my time. Because if I drink a little bit earlier, this is not, this is coming out really off terribly.

• 1:54:56Tim Ferriss?

  Cause I'm not suggesting that people become day drinkers. But if I drink at say happy hour, like an early happy hour, which is not really my thing, but just for the sake of illustration, like a, like a four or 5pm, my body is able in a waking state to seemingly metabolize a lot of that before I go to bed.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:19Tim Ferriss?

  And I consequently do not wake up with the rapid heartbeat and like-

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  Ah, that's the worst.

• 1:55:24Tim Ferriss?

  The alcohol night sweats, it's the worst. And-

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  I hate that rapid heartbeat where you wake up and you've just got that like, you could just feel it going and you're like, ah, what do I do? I'm hot.

• 1:55:34Tim Ferriss?

  You can't do anything. Yeah, you can't, you can't do anything. You just have a terrible night's sleep. So having even an additional three hours to metabolize before going to bed.

• 1:55:45Tim Ferriss?

  Makes a huge difference for me. So I've been paying attention to that as well. But almost all of my changes recently have been associated with improving sleep quality.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Can I ask you what type of, what manufacturer of omega threes do you take?

• 1:56:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I can tell you. Let me grab it.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  All right, Tim has left the room. We'll see if this makes the edit or not. I'm betting it's Carlson Wild Caught Omega Threes.

• 1:56:11Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, here we are.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  You having another one?

• 1:56:17Tim Ferriss?

  These are delicious.

• 1:56:20Tim Ferriss?

  Don't judge me, Kevin. This is not my usual, but in any case, the first I have two here. This is a Nordic Naturals Pro Omega 650 EPA, 450 DHA. And that is right here, this guy, which I've been using. And then the second that I have is Thorn. That's T H O R N E, super EPA. And that's this guy right here. Those are what I end up choosing. And the effect is really remarkable. And it's difficult, I would say it's impossible. Let me be clear.

• 1:56:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's impossible for me to say that my sleep quality improvements are entirely caused by this. I'm also spending more time outside. I'm doing rucksacking. I'm getting more exercise. I'm getting a lot more sun exposure. I'm in nature. My body tends to just down regulate. It's not the right word, but my nervous system downshifts a lot when I'm surrounded by nature.

• 1:57:26Tim Ferriss?

  So there are many factors. There are many environmental changes in my life that have taken place in the last few weeks. But I have spent a lot of time in nature at many other points and my sleep has not had this dramatic change. So it leads me to think that there are other causal factors. And this is the most obvious. This is the most obvious thing.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I've been taking a couple grams of omega threes for a while now and I just find for me, I actually see the benefits on the joint side. Like I just have less like kind of joint, joint issues.

• 1:57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've noticed, I've noticed that actually in my feet.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  It's like the old man episode.

• 1:58:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's the old man episode, but my family has a history of gout. So my family has gout on at least the maternal side and a precursor indicator of that is often high uric acid levels. And I've been pretty loathe to start another medication, which will be a maintenance medication forever. In this case, it'd be allopurinol.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, I've been taking allopurinol for five years now.

• 1:58:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, even though it's very, very well tolerated, right? As far as drugs go, it's very well tolerated. But I'm like, oh God, I'm going to end up that old guy with the pill case with a hundred pills that I've taken every day. I don't take that many things right now. I've really tried to minimize it, although compared to the normal people, I probably seem like a complete disaster. In any case, the EPA, or perhaps it's both, including the DHA, the higher levels of fish oil consumption, unexpectedly, I was stretching and I noticed, oh wow, I don't have that usual stiffness, which I thought might be some type of degeneration in the joint, although I had x-rays and it didn't

• 1:59:09Tim Ferriss?

  appear to be the case. The stiffness and pain that I feel in that big toe joint, which is very often where gout first presents, which I was very concerned about. I was like, oh fuck, I have gout? Really? Am I like some fat aristocrat from like the 1700s in France? Like, what is this? Like, really? How can I have gout? Some people think that that's primarily caused by, I think it's purines in DNA and that's associated with protein and therefore people take by extension that to mean that animal protein should be decreased. It's not quite as simple as that. There's actually a chapter that I published on my blog, to the blog, people can find it,

• 1:59:47Tim Ferriss?

  on gout and the understated culprit, which is fructose, is found in high fructose corn syrup and in fruit to a lesser degree. So it's not quite as simple as people might paint it to be. Nonetheless, what I noticed is like, holy shit, like that pain in my toes is like 90% gone after a week of doing it. And I cannot think, because this has been consistent for years now that I've had this

• 2:00:16Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  pain. I mean, it's been a, it's been a static level of pain. And after a week or two, again, maybe it's placebo, who knows? But I wasn't anticipating this as an effect. So it's hard for me to think that it's expectation. It's like, you know what? It's hard for me to come up with many reasons not to do this. So I'm going to give it a go. If you take too much, more is not better. I think you could probably cause intestinal bleeding or all sorts of problems if you were just to chew these like gummy bears or something. So, you know, word to the wise, talk to your doctor about things like this. But I've certainly found it beneficial. What about you? Your daily architecture?

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would say-

• 2:00:56Tim Ferriss?

  That's a very, very kind of highfalutin way to put it. But yeah, your daily architecture, Kevin, tell me.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The only thing I would say that I've, I've really stuck with that, well, a lot of people want to know about our sauna routines. And if we're still doing sauna, that was a hot topic in the, in the-

• 2:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hot topic, doggy style.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  On the Twitter. I gotta tell you, man, sauna, sauna for me has been, it's just the best. It was, it's the best money I've ever spent outside of having a nanny from time to time. It's like sauna, sauna is just so key. I just feel so much better. I mean, there's all the health benefits and the studies, they just, there's more and more coming out all the time. I will say one thing, one pro tip, do not oil your sauna. So I oiled my sauna.

• 2:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  What does that even mean? You like-

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  So they have this sauna oil on Amazon. And like when the wood dries out, you're supposed to put oil on it, you know? And so I buy the sauna oil on Amazon, I oil it, and then it literally off gases like smoke, like smoky oil.

• 2:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  Terrible.

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  And no, listen to this, dude.

• 2:02:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a skillet on the oven, on the stove top. That's terrible.

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  Yes. And so I was like, okay, this is crazy. So I went in, I sanded it down, like, tried to get it all out, you know, scrubbed it with like soap and shit. And then, dude, it's still off gassing. So then I started wearing my N95 mask in there.

• 2:02:28Tim Ferriss?

  This is why you need a gas mask to use your own sauna.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Daria's like, what are you doing? She's like, I'm not going in that sauna again. And I'm like, listen, I'm like, it'll let me burn it out because it'll, but I still need to get my sauna on. So I use my gas mask. And then, dude, I go in there and my eyes, when I walk out after, after 20 minutes, my eyes are bloodshot because the like, the smoke is hitting my eyes and my eyes were burning.

• 2:02:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's not the gummies?

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  No, it was not the gummies. It's not your gummies that you hand me and send me.

• 2:02:56Tim Ferriss?

  My gummies.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  The, honestly, it's just like, so I, I ripped out my entire sauna, had all the wood removed and had to buy a new sauna. Yeah.

• 2:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  So that sucks. Anyway, so routine, routine wise, architecture wise, it's been one year, almost coming up on one year of meditation. And that, my friend, is the biggest game changer I've ever had is when I decided to take it seriously and not just do it like an app, just but like really sit and, and do it really like real practice.

• 2:03:30Tim Ferriss?

  So what, what does real mean? This is an hour a day? What are we talking?

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  You know what's funny, Tim?

• 2:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  And it's Zen style? This is, this is with your teacher?

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's.

• 2:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  Or in accordance with his instructions?

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  That's right. So what's funny, Tim, is one time, I don't know if you ever remember, we were talking about meditation. This was probably seven, six, seven years ago. And you said something to the effect of like, I think that most people, they just close their eyes and think about things when they're meditating or like you didn't like, it's almost like you didn't believe it.

• 2:04:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I still think that's true. I mean, I think there are benefits to meditating, but I think most people are just thinking about bullshit with their eyes closed. Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask you, have you ever found yourself in deep on, have you meditated where you've been like, I mean, because you did the, you did the opposite side, you did the, you're really famous, you talk about that.

• 2:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  The Vipassana.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  You have Vipassana.

• 2:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  Psychotic breakdown? Yes.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, your breakdown.

• 2:04:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that was, that was pretty deep, having that full psychotic break. I would say it's pretty deep. I, I have felt, yes, I have had very, very deep experiences. Some of the best experiences I had were actually blanking on the style and the name currently.

• 2:04:45Tim Ferriss?

  Naval would have

• 2:04:45Speaker 01

  Give me some hints.

• 2:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  Naval would have the answer. I'll tell you the general approach and the general approach is having nothing to do. You actually sit there. You do not repeat a mantra. You do not pay attention to the breath. You just sit there and this is going to sound paradoxical, but you actively try to do nothing. You just sit there. And doing this in a group environment for a period of time, did it with a small group. This was one hour in the morning, one hour. Let's just call it 5pm, like 8am and 5pm. And doing it in a group, I do think there's a dynamic that has gained.

• 2:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly a different dynamic that presents itself in a group. I don't have any explanation for this. There are theories, certainly pet theories, but doing it in a group, two hours a day for a period of even a week, produced some very, very, very, very deep states. And I would say in terms of kind of ROI in a short period of time, I found that very interesting. When I came back to so-called normal life, I did not sustain that twice daily cadence for very long. And I think in part because I was doing it by myself or with my girlfriend and not in a group, having that accountability was very, very helpful. But I have experienced some very deep states in meditation.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Have you found those to be pleasant states or just kind of like when you walked away, did you have a smile on your face? Did you feel like

• 2:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, very pleasant, very, very peaceful. Yeah, very pleasant and very at peace for sure. Oftentimes, what I've noticed, this can be, for me at least, facilitated by doing a very intense but short sauna session for say 15 to 20 minutes. And then sitting outside and sort of air cooling.

• 2:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  And meditating for 20 minutes.

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's nice. That's just a great feeling.

• 2:06:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's incredible. Found that to be very consistent. So to answer someone's question that you brought up, I still do sauna very, very regularly and view it as a key and simple lever that I'm able to pull for mental health. Whether it helps me physically or not, I don't know. I mean, maybe, sure, heat shock proteins, all of that. Yeah, okay, maybe. I'm not going to know if it did anything until I'm dead. So

• 2:07:15Tim Ferriss?

  jury's out. But from just a day to day psycho, emotional and mental perspective, doing a sauna, especially late afternoon, if I do it to close to bedtime, it interferes with my sleep. But if I do it, you know, four or five o'clock, then it seems to help and also dramatically increase HRV the next day.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:07:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've noticed that, as have a couple of other people. So, but coming back to architecture and your meditation. So one year anniversary, congratulations. That is the anniversary of what? Maybe you can describe for us?

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I've been like most people that have ever played around with meditation apps. You know, I'd been dabbling and even, you know, helped build one that is a free meditation app. But it just was dabbling. I was always dabbling. I was doing the 10, 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, you know, just those little sessions guided and they were fantastic. Very, very great prescriptive meditation. Oh, you have something wrong, you're feeling stressed, you know, fear of flying, whatever it is, like there, there's all these courses for that. You can take them. There's not a lack of apps that offer this type of content. I think that the shift and the change was telling myself that this is a long road to practice, to really train the brain. Like, if you think about,

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  Tim, you know this better than, way better than I do. If you want to be really good at something, it can't just be an afterthought casual, I'm going to make time for this.

• 2:08:45Tim Ferriss?

  When I feel like it.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  When I feel like it. Exactly. So I made that shift in my brain and said, okay, I believe there is something worth pursuing here that a dedicated, longer practice, longer duration, in a more serious discipline. So for me, that was a form of Zen called Sanbo Zen.

• 2:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  Sanbo?

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sanbo is like the, the offshoot. It's more kind of a lay.

• 2:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell it?

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  S A N B O.

• 2:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  Sambo Zen.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah, so.

• 2:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  When I heard about this and was introduced to my teacher, Henry, got excited about it and really decided to dive in and say, okay, I'm going to read a few of the books that are out there on this type of Zen and then create a real practice that is 55 minutes of sitting a day. And I would say.

• 2:09:35Tim Ferriss?

  How much is it?

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  55 minutes.

• 2:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Why 55 minutes?

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  Well, you do.

• 2:09:42Tim Ferriss?

  I like 25.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do 25 minutes of your first sit and then you do a five minute walking meditation and then another 25 minutes.

• 2:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, cool. And for those wondering, so as I just looked it up, Sambo Kyodan, Sambo Kyodan is a lay Zen sect derived from both the Soto and the Renzi traditions. Sambo literally means three treasures. I wonder what the treasures are. Sang is like ichi ni sang, sang, three. Sambo, bo is like bo chung, like my, my darling, my treasure kind of thing. But yeah, Sambo is three treasures and then Kyol, we can get into the Japanese another time, but yeah, Kyodan, religious organization or teaching organization. That's cool. So 55 minutes, what are, do you know what the three treasures are by any chance?

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the one treasure is the sangha, so the, the group.

• 2:10:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  The other one is the Dharma, the teachings, and the third one is, escape me right now. You can just type in three treasures, it'll, three treasures apply more to, than just Sambo.

• 2:10:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, yeah, here we go. Okay, wait a minute, three jewels are the Buddha, the fully. Yeah, three jewels, three treasures, you can translate either way, at least in Japanese. The Buddha, the fully enlightened one, the Dharma, the teachings expounded by the Buddha, hence the term or phrase Dharma talks, if you've ever heard that, and the sangha, the monastic order of Buddhism that practice dharmas, but that's also colloquially thought of as the group that practices together. Roger that. Okay. So you've done 55 minutes a day for a year.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  I will say that I have certainly missed a few days, but nothing, nothing crazy. Not like where I'm like, oh, I missed that entire week. Like there'll be a day or two where it just didn't work out. And there's been also a handful of days that are on the 25 minute side. Like there was definitely versus doing the 55, but yeah, for the most part I've, I've been really consistent.

• 2:11:41Tim Ferriss?

  What is the practice? What is the session? I know you mentioned it in brief already, but what does a session look like and feel like to you?

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on where you are in your practice. When you're first being instructed, the teaching is essentially kind of counting or just following the breath. So very almost like Vipassana style, just to get that base level of concentration honed. So, you know, it's a very, like, there's a teaching where they talk about the Zen master that was sitting and, and the concentration, it was so intense that they're, they're sweating. Like you can see sweat on their brow because they, it is like a very active thing that is happening with the honed concentration.

• 2:12:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. They hit you with a switch if you're not, if you're nodding off.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  If you, if you would like to request it, you can go in the, in the zendo and you can request that that happened. It's not for pain. It's for, for a jolt, you know, like me, it's not like a beating practice.

• 2:12:37Tim Ferriss?

  This is for you, not for me.

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the initially, it's just that initial kind of counting and awareness. And then eventually if your teacher and you feel you're ready for it, you know, you take on a koan, which is one of these things to sit with. Like a Zen kind of saying or word to sit with that is used as kind of a, what's the best way to put it? Kind of like just a.

• 2:13:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a paradoxical cue, right? Or it's something like that. Yeah. Paradoxical anecdote or riddle used in Zen Buddhism demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. That is the definition that comes up for me.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  So what you do is when you sit with that con, eventually you will be able to answer it. And there are hundreds of them. And there are checking questions that are done with your instructor.

• 2:13:31Tim Ferriss?

  Checking questions?

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  That's right. So if you sit down with a Zen master and they ask you, probably the most famous one is the sound of one hand clapping.

• 2:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  You would then be able to answer that question through a series of checks. And eventually you can go through and kind of answer all of them.

• 2:13:54Tim Ferriss?

  So there's a right and a wrong answer to something like that?

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Oh, more or less, yeah.

• 2:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  God damn, that's stressful.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  But I mean, they get it, you get it wrong a lot. So essentially, like if you're going to do one of these, they call them like a session where you go and do these like multi-day retreats. You will go and you will sit and then you have a one-on-one session with your Zen master at that in the evening when you're kind of wrapping up, you know? And they'll sit you down and say, what is the answer to this question, whatever you're sitting with? So some people sit with, most common one is one called moo. And they'll say, you know, what is moo? And if you, and then you can either say, I don't know, and you can walk out and that's fine. They ring the bell and the next person goes in, or you can try and answer it.

• 2:14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, what is moo? I mean, not that, I'm not asking you to give the cheat sheet for people, but.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  I don't know the answer to that question.

• 2:14:45Tim Ferriss?

  But broadly speaking, is moo a character? Is it?

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a Japanese character for it. It means emptiness or not.

• 2:14:54Tim Ferriss?

  Like mushin, mushin is like no mind or?

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  No, no, not exactly.

• 2:14:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mushin.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  So basically, there, where that came from is there was a very famous Zen teacher, Zen master named Joshu. And Joshu was asked by a monk one day, the monk came up to him and said, in all earnest, this monk asked Joshu, does a dog have Buddha nature? And Joshu's answer was just moo. And that was coming from, they will tell you that answer was coming from a non-dual world. So it was like.

• 2:15:30Tim Ferriss?

  Gets a little tricky.

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So.

• 2:15:35Tim Ferriss?

  I can give you a breather if you like. I've got some, I've got some stuff, but yes, continue.

• 2:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you just basically sit with, what are you talking about? What are you talking about breather?

• 2:15:45Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just saying, if you want a moment to gather yourself, because it's some pretty esoteric shit, I can read what I found on the Sascha, the checking questions.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  But I can read the answers? No, no, read what you found.

• 2:15:57Tim Ferriss?

  Read the answers, like the

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  Just ruin my entire practice.

• 2:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Like the mantras for transcendental meditation, where they're just listed out by age. Yeah, I could do that, just like to really make everyone cry. And I say that as someone who paid for the training and still uses it.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  I paid for it.

• 2:16:12Tim Ferriss?

  I still use it. So, teachers may probe students about their koan practice using Sascha checking questions to validate their satori understanding, although I would debate the translation of satori there. Or kensho, which is a really cool

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:25Tim Ferriss?

  word, like seeing the nature, seeing the phenomenon. For the muu koan and the clapping hand koan, there are 20 to 100 checking questions depending on the teaching lineage. The checking questions serve deep in the inside of the student, but also to test his or her understanding. That's wild that there would be questions. I'm just trying to imagine, I'm not asking you to spill the beans on the secret cult that you've joined, but the questions that would be related to something like, what is the hand of one hand clapping? Right?

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but thing

• 2:16:54Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like it's unanswerable by definition. Because it's intended to show the

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  inadequacy of logic.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  That's right. And so, the best way it's been described to me, and this wasn't by my Zen teacher, but I've heard it described elsewhere, is like, the answers are going to be something that you will only understand if you've had that kensho awakening type moment. Or you would only be able to provide.

• 2:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  So, your answers, in the same way that when the monk asked, you know, does a dog have Buddha nature? And Joshi's response was muh, like, that would make no sense, make no sense at all. So, your answers are also going to make no sense in this plane, if that makes sense. But your teacher will understand them because they will be listening from another plane.

• 2:17:40Tim Ferriss?

  Does that make sense? Kind of, sort of. I mean, it's, it's, oh, here, let me give it an analogy, it's gonna be terrible. You're gonna love it. So, it's like, if you're trying to explain

• 2:17:52Tim Ferriss?

  Like ejaculation to someone who's never ejaculated and you're like, it's kind of like a sneeze in your balls. And they're like, what? And like, there's never going to understand it. But if they've had the

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a bad one, Tim.

• 2:18:02Tim Ferriss?

  If they've had the experience of ejaculating, then like, there's kind of no explanation needed. And you can give like a moo type answer. And then I go, yeah, I hear you. Moo, it's so moo. That stuff is so moo. There you go.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  I don't know that that's how I'd describe it, but that I like it.

• 2:18:15Tim Ferriss?

  You're welcome.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's

• 2:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  This is three

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  You're practically a zen master.

• 2:18:19Tim Ferriss?

  This is three hard kombuchas later, I think I'm enlightened, I think.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  That's great. No, but that's the gist of it is like, we would never, even if we read the answers.

• 2:18:30Tim Ferriss?

  It can't be a reading based, logic based answer. It has to be something that you have a felt experience of.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:37Tim Ferriss?

  Through this thing that is given the label of

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  And that's why there's so many checking questions.

• 2:18:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, kinsho.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Because they'll, they'll be checking from a bunch of different angles, whether or not you've actually felt or had the experience.

• 2:18:46Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  Versus it just being like, just like a red response.

• 2:18:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's super interesting. I think the, honestly, I mean, the, even though in some respects are very different, there are similarities. Meaning the psychedelic ecosystem in the realm of whether it's psychotherapy assisted by different psychedelic compounds or otherwise, you know, there could be a place for these type of checking questions. And actually, in some of the indigenous traditions, there are, I don't want to call them fact checking questions, but there are sort of standards and experiences that are thought to be representative of different levels of awareness within the context of, say, an ayahuasca experience. So they're not that dissimilar. They're actually very similar. And I should correct something I said earlier, because I was thinking of a different character. Kinsho,

• 2:19:36Tim Ferriss?

  the shou is different than the, there are a lot of homonyms in Japanese, a lot of things that have the same pronunciation. So the shou in kinsho is a different character than I had envisioned. It's nature or essence is the shou. Ken is to see, like kengaku. If you wanted to go to, say, a judo school and observe but not participate, you'd ask if you could do kengaku. Kengaku is gaku is to study. So it'd be like visual studying. That's super cool, man. I'm so glad that you're digging deep into all this. That's really, it's great to see you stick with something for a year.

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, seriously. It's gonna be a long journey, man, but you know, now's the age to get started.

• 2:20:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Why do you think you've stuck with this? So there's a, God, what is the expression? Since we're on, well, we, I say, just like we explained cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff earlier, which was basically you talking. I'm kind of on this, you know, speaking in tongues Japanese kick right now. But there's this expression, I think it's hyasai samayasi. I think that's what it is. Somebody who's a native speaker of Japanese could correct me, but there's a, there's an expression in Japanese, which is like, he or she gets hot quickly and gets cold quickly, meaning they pick up habits and routines and various things. And then they stick with them for very short periods of time. Like they get really excited about something and then they just drop it. Right. Which I think you and I both do, although I think you take it to a whole new level.

• 2:21:03Tim Ferriss?

  So why do you think you've stuck with this for a year? In the way that you have, what, what has changed in you or what is it about this particular thing? That has, has grabbed you?

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  Well, I would say that I told myself that I knew that the upfront work of just being able to sit for an hour and be comfortable with it was going to take some time. And to spill the still the mind to the point where you can just get comfortable and it not feel like just this crazy effort that you're like, why the hell am I doing this? Is a lot of work, but I said, I'm going to push through until I can at least get to the point where when I get up off the cushion, I feel better than when I sat down. And I don't feel like it was a, just a waste of my time. Like oftentimes,

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  it was a challenge initially to say, can I calm my mind? To the point where I will actually consider this a net positive. And I say it took about three months, took about three months to get to the point where when I would get up after 55 minutes, I would say to myself, this is great. I feel really good.

• 2:22:18Tim Ferriss?

  How did you stick with it for that long? Three months is not, I mean, it's not the, you know, we're not talking about like a hundred years of solitude, but it's a non-trivial period of time for someone who operates at really high RPM. So like, why even have that as a goal?

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  Honestly, Tim, if I'm being really truthful, it was because I was really depressed. We had a lot of stuff going on, both in the country and with the pandemic and having a second child and just having all of this stress hit all at the same time. I just felt like I just needed something. I just needed something to be able to sink into that wasn't the news, that wasn't what was going on around us. And it was right during the pandemic that I decided to, that's why I decided to do this was because I just couldn't, you know, you're sitting at home and you're not really going out and doing anything. And it's just like, I can either drink, you know, or, or insert any other bad thing to do here, or I can pick up something.

• 2:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  I was kidding. I hear you.

• 2:23:19Speaker 01

  No, but like, it was a lot of that where I was just like, I thought we were all gonna die. And I was just like, I need to go deep here. And then luckily that was enough of a driver to get to the point where then it was tolerable and then enjoyable.

• 2:23:32Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so happy for that.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm not anywhere close to being anything in this world, in the world of Zen. Like I'm, it's like, it's gonna be 20 plus years or longer for me to get really, really deep. But two things, I'm glad I started because I am at the point now where it is enjoyable. And two, I would say that the only thing I've noticed is that little things that just used to get underneath my skin really don't quite hit me as hard. And so those little edges have been sanded down a little bit, those little rough edges. And so I can take a sharp elbow with ease in ways that I couldn't before. So I think that's, that's the one benefit and, and whatever else comes on top of that is gravy and I'm excited for, but you know.

• 2:24:18Tim Ferriss?

  It's also super weird Zen Buddhism. And I think that that is a more.

• 2:24:27Tim Ferriss?

  Accurate reflection of what we call reality than the kind of clean, abstracted pictures we like to paint of reality that we would like to be the case because it allows us to grasp it and kind of navigate it so much more easily. You know, for that reason, I think that the journey through Zen Buddhism actually has a lot in common with deep study of psychedelics. I think they're very similar because the further you get in, the more you realize nobody fucking knows what's going on. Like, this is actually very, very, like, the more I know, the less I know, in a sense. And I find that very liberating, actually, and very liberating.

• 2:25:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, nobody knows what's going on. Okay.

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  Well, my goals to eventually to get you to study some Zen. I think you would be so, you're the perfect person for it because it is, there are actual obtainable things. You know what I mean? Like, in some sense, the whole practice is about obtaining nothing. So it's not like, it's like, but the fact that there just are checking questions is like, I'm a kind of person that wants to check a box, you know?

• 2:25:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that appeals to me, for sure.

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that appeal to you as well.

• 2:25:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, that's good. I mean, it has always been an interest to me. I mean, even when I was in Japan, you know, I spent time with, I remember passing these monks who would be, what is the expression? Asking for alms. I mean, they would have to do a tour of duty where they would ask for money. They'd have to beg for their food, money to buy food. And I would always pass these monks, not all of them were necessarily Zen Buddhism monks, but I would pass them every day as I was walking back from school and I was 15 as an exchange student in Japan and have spent a lot of time.

• 2:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  Recognizing that Zen is not uniquely Japanese, although Zen, the word, that pronunciation is Japanese, is a tradition that predates its introduction to Japan.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it came from China, right? Initially, like, it was called Chun.

• 2:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, something like that. I don't know the character that was used for that. It's probably the same character, actually. Let me just, let me look it up. It's probably the same.

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  Chun.

• 2:26:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Chun, Chun, second tone. Yeah, so Chun, second tone in Mandarin, and then Zen in Japanese, and then Korean, I guess that's Jun. Jun? Somebody could tell me. I'm pretty rusty on my Hangul, but my, looking at the, at the Korean, I think it's Jun. And then we have Vietnamese and so on. What I like most about Zen is that it embraces paradox. Because so much of our existence, I think, is paradoxical. And so much of what we want and so many of our conflicting goals can sort of be

• 2:27:36Tim Ferriss?

  symbolized by this word paradox, that it's such a fundamental aspect of our existences, but it's so uncomfortable to look at directly also, because it's not easily put on a shelf and organized and just slotted into some category that you can understand and figure out.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  Dude, I want you to have a Zen master on your show. Why wouldn't you do that? Like, Sam's had some great-

• 2:28:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'd do that.

• 2:28:01Speaker 01

  You should have Henry on your show, man. He's amazing.

• 2:28:04Tim Ferriss?

  I'd be open to having Henry on the show. I mean, I think part of it is that I, I don't feel like I am qualified to ask

• 2:28:13Tim Ferriss?

  informed questions about it, if that makes sense.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  He's had a lot of students also that have dabbled in psychedelics, so he has some good background there as well. And kind of comparing, like, senior students that also practice Zen and do psychedelics. It'd be interesting to draw some more parallels there.

• 2:28:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I'm not a, even though I support a ton of the science and I'm very involved with the policy and regulation and all sorts of aspects of the psychedelic ecosystem right now, I'm not a hammer looking for nails. I don't think that psychedelics should fantasy is, and-

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  I mean, you're on mushrooms right now.

• 2:28:48Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it wouldn't be out of character for that to be the case, but I'm not, I'm not on mushrooms right now.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  You're just casually chewing in the background, just like-

• 2:28:56Tim Ferriss?

  Just chomping on some mushrooms, like trail mix. No, no, I'm on, I'm on the, I'm on the hard kombucha kick right now, but I would love to have somebody on.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  I think that would be a really fascinating conversation because you are, I mean, you have such a great background in all things Japanese and obviously the whole space with psychedelics and Japan, all these things that they're all interconnected in some way, you know?

• 2:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, they're, they're definitely interconnected. I mean, I, and also I don't view these tools as mutually exclusive. And I was listening to an interview recently with Dennis McKenna, who I'm gonna have on the podcast soon. Dennis McKenna is the younger brother of Terrence McKenna, who is considered the Irish bard of psychedelics, very, very smart guy, incredible storyteller. Dennis is more of the scientist and the, the ethno-pharmacologist, phytochemist of the two. He's, he's very scientifically literate and understands organic chemistry and synthesis and

• 2:29:58Tim Ferriss?

  things like this. And, you know, one of the points that he's made and did make in this interview I heard was our experience of reality is mediated through chemistry and neurotransmitters. So when you hear people talk about, say, getting to certain states naturally and arguing that is better than augmenting or using psychedelics, the argument rings somewhat hollow when you really start to dig underneath it. And that's not to say that one should not develop self-directed capabilities without the use of drugs or plants to achieve these states. I'm not saying that. But the fact

• 2:30:42Tim Ferriss?

  is when you practice something, unless we're gonna go into transpersonal psychology and some really gnarly terrain, which I could do, but-

• 2:30:54Tim Ferriss?

  What we're talking about is an experience of reality, which is a hallucination that we are creating as the mind applies filters to incoming information to optimize for a few things like propagation of the species. And when you enter in a non-ordinary state of reality, whether it is through ingesting, say, four or five grams of dried mushrooms, in the case of psilocybe mushrooms, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, or doing very dedicated Zen practice, like you are changing the cocktail. Hundred percent. And in that respect, they're actually very close cousins.

• 2:31:35Tim Ferriss?

  Although certainly some compounds and plants, I think, are better for achieving states similar to satoryo kinsho, maybe, than others. Like meth, probably not, right? I mean, I don't think that anyone's going to suggest meth for coming to terms with some of these deeper realizations necessarily. But I think there's more common ground than not, at least for those who make a really deep study of it, like Dennis, as an example, who I really encourage everyone to check out. Very, very bright guy. I'd love to have him on.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  I think it'd be great. Yeah, Henry Schickman. He's done a couple of Q and As with Sam. Sam has him creating a lot of content for Sam Harris's meditation app. So he has a whole dedicated Zen section in there. But I think you'll find him fascinating because he's also really well-versed in all the latest science and studies going on. And especially some of the neuroscience that's happening around the study of emptiness, which is this kind of, Henry can speak to it, but it is like the state, like that kinsho state of no thing, like non-existence.

• 2:32:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, mushin.

• 2:32:44Speaker 01

  So I think you guys would love it.

• 2:32:46Tim Ferriss?

  I would be very interested. I think mostly, and maybe this wouldn't be the case with Henry. I mean, sometimes you can get into kind of dangerous pop science territory unless you're talking to someone like Adam Gazali. How the hell does he say his last name? Gazali?

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  Gazali.

• 2:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Gazali. Gazali. Side note, who got crazy treatment somewhere in the Middle East because of his last name. Did he tell you this story?

• 2:33:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:33:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a sort of iconic figure in, I want to say Persian, but it could have been actually in Saudi Arabia or somewhere, in Middle Eastern.

• 2:33:18Tim Ferriss?

  Culture and history was Ghazali, G H A Z A L I. And they saw his name and he landed at the airport and they're like, are you Adam Ghazali? And he's like, yes. And they're like, you don't need to wait in this line, sir. Like you come with us. And he was like, uh, what?

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  Is it gonna be really awesome or really bad?

• 2:33:37Tim Ferriss?

  Really, really bad. Yeah. So Adam Ghazali, Ghaz Ghazali, I should know this after decades of knowing the guy, but is a world-class neuroscientist, right? So speaking to him about science is one thing. I would be most interested with Henry to just talk about his personal experience and to see how well he can describe his personal experience. For me, it's like either, like you gotta choose one end of the pole or the other. It's gotta be like randomized, controlled studies or personal experience. Like both of those, I'm very open to. It's the stuff in the middle that gets really wonky and kind of MacGyvered and, and hard to defend.

• 2:34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. His descriptions of enlightenment and waking up and some of the, they're the best I've ever heard. They're just like, cool. Yeah. You will be blown away and you'll have so many, and you could ask him about the check-in questions because he does that with the students, right? So he's clearing all the students and how many of them make it? That'd be really curious.

• 2:34:34Tim Ferriss?

  But are those off limits? Are those like the level 29 of Scientology where I can't ask that until I

• 2:34:41Speaker 01

  Dude, it's not a Scientology type thing, man.

• 2:34:44Tim Ferriss?

  I know. I'm just saying, is that like protected knowledge, right?

• 2:34:48Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 2:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And he can always say, I can't tell you also, which is fair. Like, I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm not comparing what you're doing to Scientology. No disrespect to Scientology. I know you guys like to sue people. Don't sue me.

• 2:35:04Tim Ferriss?

  Some of my best friends are Scientologists.

• 2:35:09Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm into it, man. Oh, boy. Here we go.

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  I was just about to make some Scientology comments.

• 2:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  Kevin, I love you guys. Kevin hates you guys. It's so definitely.

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I studied for a while and thought it was great. You know, I had a good time there. A good, good fae on Sundays.

• 2:35:30Tim Ferriss?

  Oh God. All right. Here we go. Into the Thunderdome we enter.

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  We're both dead next week.

• 2:35:37Tim Ferriss?

  About dead next week. It was nice knowing you guys.

• 2:35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:40Tim Ferriss?

  So where do we go from here? Hard to segue. I would be interested. Yeah.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  Sweet. I'll do the introduction.

• 2:35:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. Email intro, Henry and.

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  I'm excited for this. This will be fun.

• 2:35:51Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be into that. I mean, it overlaps with so many of my interests.

• 2:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm not averse to it. I don't have an aversion to it. The word enlightenment, I'm not going to lie, bothers the shit out of me.

• 2:36:01Speaker 01

  Cause you gotta say that then, bring that up. I'd be really curious to.

• 2:36:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's just like the idea of, because it just, it creates this bifurcation between like the unenlightened and the enlightened. And it kind of creates this priesthood. And I have some fundamental allergic reaction to like this intermediate to the divine. If that makes any sense. And I'm not saying that is how it is presented within Zen Buddhism, but I do see how that could be used to create power dynamics that are unhealthy.

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So. That's, that's, that's one of the things that I was concerned with having grown up in a religious household and later, you know, kind of understanding that some of what I was told was not necessarily true.

• 2:36:42Speaker 01

  But the reason I'm so attracted to Zen, when we were talking about earlier is just like, they ask you, it's not about believing what they say. They ask you to taste it for yourself. That's what they say, you know?

• 2:36:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I dig that. That's cool. I can get behind that. Awesome, man. Well, please make the intro and then I'll, I'll chat with Mr. Henry.

• 2:37:02Speaker 01

  What an episode this has been. We've had lightning strikes.

• 2:37:08Speaker 01

  I almost threw up at the beginning.

• 2:37:09Tim Ferriss?

  Technology, Kevin almost puked in the beginning. Technology was taken down by an act of God.

• 2:37:17Tim Ferriss?

  Covered a lot of ground here. Yeah. Yeah. Good times, man. Well, it's a good thing. Good to spend some time together. Anything else you'd like to, to mention before we, before we wrap?

• 2:37:27Speaker 01

  I asked my wife what we should talk about on the show and she said, how about my podcast? So I should, I thought that was funny one. And yeah, so my wife, Daria Rose, she's a PhD neuroscientist from UCSF and she has a fantastic new show called The Daria Rose Show. She's covering some crazy topics, dude. She has other scientists on so they can talk science.

• 2:37:50Tim Ferriss?

  You should give some, some background on Daria for people who, who don't know. I mean, she has a lot of scientific training. So you should just maybe explain that for those who may be first time listeners.

• 2:38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we just talked recently about Adam Gazzoli and his lab over at UCSF. So she worked with Adam. So she's got her PhD from there in neuroscience, studied stem cell biology and anything above and beyond that is outside of my pay grade. But for her, what she loves to do these days is really focus on how to take science and break it down, like things that we can actually trust and break it down so that the average consumer can understand it. So she has several episodes on like, how can we trust vaccines? Why should we trust vaccines? What does the science actually say? Who should we look for or to for that information? She's going to be covering like birth control and what we understand

• 2:38:44Speaker 01

  in the science there. A lot of women's issues as well. How to raise children in a thoughtful way that doesn't damage them forever. She had Dr. Andrew Weil on recently and they talked about how to trust alternative medicine. Like what do you know is true out there? There's so much BS. How do you vet that stuff? So I'm just really proud of her. You know, she's just kicking ass doing, she and Andrew Huberman on the show, like you said about whole episode on sleep. So many great takeaways there. But yeah, she's done a great job. And yeah, Daria Rose Show.

• 2:39:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Daria is very legit and very, very smart, very good at translating without dumbing down also, which is very hard to do. It is very hard to translate without dumbing down. And she does a great job of that. Miss Dardar.

• 2:39:35Speaker 01

  I know. We need to get together, dude. We need to do a little couples thing.

• 2:39:40Tim Ferriss?

  Please give hugs to Daria and people definitely check it out. Anything else?

• 2:39:45Speaker 01

  That's it, dude. You can find me at Kevin Rose on Twitter. Modern dot finance is the podcast. I shouldn't say dot. It's called modern finance, but if you want to go to the website, it's modern dot finance on the web. And yeah, dude, thanks for having me on. This is fun as always.

• 2:39:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, man. Super, super fun. And yeah, for me, I don't have much to say. You can find me on Tim D'Up Blog. Everything I do is there. Twitter at T Ferris, two R's, two S's. At T I M Ferris. At Tim Ferris on Instagram.

• 2:40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, at Tim Tim Coin is the new coin.

• 2:40:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  I'm gonna launch that. I can do a salon coin. Can I launch a cryptocurrency under your name?

• 2:40:23Tim Ferriss?

  Please don't.

• 2:40:24Speaker 01

  This is called Tim Tim Coin.

• 2:40:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that'd be, that'd be really great for my liability.

• 2:40:32Tim Ferriss?

  Just what I want to think about as I'm going to bed. By the way, just launched two minutes ago, 11:12 PM. Tim Tim, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it.

• 2:40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll put it on your wallet.

• 2:40:42Tim Ferriss?

  What a mess. What a mess. Yeah, I won't do that. But I may do, I may do some, I may do some NFTs.

• 2:40:48Speaker 01

  You should do an NFT, dude. You really should.

• 2:40:49Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, why not? Right? I mean, like, people don't have to buy it. It's like, if you understand, it's a speculative experiment. I'm doing something weird to learn more about it. Why not?

• 2:40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely bid on your, your first.

• 2:40:59Tim Ferriss?

  Tim Tim.

• 2:41:04Tim Ferriss?

  All right, Kev Kev. Well, it's good to see you, man.

• 2:41:07Speaker 01

  Hey, brother. Good chatting.

• 2:41:08Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, you'll be able to find show notes, links to everything, all the companies, books, compounds, God knows what. Then we mentioned Japanese terms. Sorry, show notes, friend. You'll be able to find it at timduplog/podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found. Or that I've been pondering over the week.

• 2:41:51Tim Ferriss?

  That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Viori Clothing, spelled V U O R I. Viori.

• 2:42:35Tim Ferriss?

  I've been wearing Viori at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viori and this was her response. "I do love their stuff. Been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI first for my partner. T-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff.

• 2:43:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough, I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out." In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, "With the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga, running, loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discreet logo." So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. Vuori, again spelled V U O R I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running.

• 2:44:02Tim Ferriss?

  You can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable. And it looks so good and it's, it's non-offensive that you don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. And my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. They're men's Core Short, K-O-R-E. The most comfortable lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The Banks Short, this is their Go to Land to Sea Short is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to folks

• 2:44:46Tim Ferriss?

  out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pants. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about. But I'm wearing them right now. They're thin, performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice. So you gotta check it out. P-O-N-T-O, Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Vuori isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this. And so am I. vuoriclothing.com/Tim.

• 2:45:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out. vuoriclothing.com/Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com/Tim. And discover the versatility of Vuori Clothing. This episode is brought to you by Tonal, T-O-N-A-L. Get ready for the smartest home gym you've ever seen. That's a men's health headline about Tonal, folks, and that gives you the gist. If you're wondering about the smart part, Tonal's homepage also features a quote from the New York Times, quote, "The machine knew my strength better than I did",

• 2:46:12Tim Ferriss?

  end quote. More on that in just a minute. "By eliminating traditional metal weights, Tonal can deliver 200 pounds of resistance in a device smaller than a flat-screen TV." Tonal mounts on On your wall with no floor space required. I've had a Tonal unit now for six to 12 months, which I got after a number of very close friends recommended Tonal. And it allows me to do things I would normally need a much larger gym for, like cable chop and lift or rotational exercises, things I wrote about in The Four Hour Body. And it allows me to do these things that are nearly impossible otherwise, like eccentric loading, which I'll mention later. Tonal is precision engineered and designed to be the world's most advanced strength studio and personal trainer. It uses breakthrough technology like adaptive digital weights and AI learning, together

• 2:46:56Tim Ferriss?

  with the best experts in resistance training, so you get stronger faster. So what are these adaptive digital weights? Tonal's patented digital weight system makes thousands of calculations a second to deliver you a smooth weightlifting experience using advanced electronic motor technology. Tonal lets you adjust the weight in one-pound increments, something that was never possible with traditional dumbbells. It's easy to dial weights up and down with the touch of a button right in the grip itself. It's pretty cool. Tonal also has built-in dynamic weight modes like chains, eccentric, that's E-C-C-E-N-T-R-I-C, and their patent-pending SmartFlex technology, so that you can experiment with more ways to get stronger faster without the hassle of extra equipment like chains and bands.

• 2:47:38Tim Ferriss?

  And it, once again, fits on the wall like a flat-screen TV, so you can make the best use out of the smallest footprint in your home or garage, wherever you end up putting it. So try Tonal, T-O-N-A-L, the world's smartest home gym for 30 days in your home, and if you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit www.tonal.com, that's T-O-N-A-L, and for a limited time, get $100 off of smart accessories when you use promo code TIM100 at checkout. That's www.tonal.com, promo code TIM100. Tonal, be your strongest.