#617: In Case You Missed It: July 2022 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This is a special inbetweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can easily jump around to get a feel for the episode and guest. Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the first recap episode. For instance, @hypersundays on Twitter https://twitter.com/hypersundays/status/1496997636846780416 suggested that the bios for each guest can slow the momentum, so we moved all the bios to the end. See it as a teaser. Something to whet your appetite. If you like what you hear, you can of course find the full episodes at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap. Please enjoy! *** This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=timblog&utm_medium=timblog&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship, my very own email newsletter that every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world. It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=timblog&utm_medium=timblog&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship. *** Timestamps: LIV BOEREE: 00:03:14 LUIS VON AHN: 00:12:27 NOAH FELDMAN: 00:18:58 BALAJI SRINIVASAN: 00:24:06 DR. MATT KAEBERLEIN: 00:33:38 MARK PLOTKIN AND HAMILTON MORRIS: 00:43:39 Full episode titles: Liv Boeree, Poker and Life — Core Strategies, Turning $500 into $1.7M, Cage Dancing, Game Theory, and Metaphysical Curiosities (#611) https://tim.blog/2022/07/28/liv-boeree/ Luis von Ahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo — How to Be (Truly) Mission-Driven, Monetization Experiments, 10x Growth, Org Chart Iterations for Impacting Metrics, The Intricate Path to an IPO, Best Hiring Practices, Catching Exam Cheaters, The Allure of Toto Toilets, The Future of Duolingo, and How to Stand Out in Your Career (#607) https://tim.blog/2022/07/12/luis-von-ahn/ Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary (#606) https://tim.blog/2022/07/04/balaji-srinivasan-network-state/ Signal Over Noise with Noah Feldman — The War in Ukraine (Recap and Predictions), The Machiavelli of Maryland, Best Books to Understand Geopolitics, The Battles for Free Speech on Social Media, Metaverse Challenges, and More (#608) https://tim.blog/2022/07/20/noah-feldman-2/ The Life-Extension Episode — Dr. Matt Kaeberlein on The Dog Aging Project, Rapamycin, Metformin, Spermidine, NAD+ Precursors, Urolithin A, Acarbose, and Much More (#610) https://tim.blog/2022/07/27/matt-kaeberlein-life-extension/ Hamilton Morris and Dr. Mark Plotkin — Exploring the History of Psychoactive Substances, Synthetic vs. Natural Options, Microdosing, 5-MeO-DMT, The “Drunken Monkey” Hypothesis, Timothy Leary’s Legacy, and More (#605) https://tim.blog/2022/07/01/mark-plotkin-and-hamilton-morris/ *** 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. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors. 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/, Balaji Srinivasan https://tim.blog/2021/11/15/balaji-srinivasan-2/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, Dr. Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/, and many more. 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 Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week.

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's free, it's always gonna be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog/friday. That's tim.blog/friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So, check it out, tim.blog/friday.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot, and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So, easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog/friday, and thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves you.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between-isode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description, probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app, or, as usual, you can head to tim.blog/podcast and find all the details

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  there. Please enjoy.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  First up, Liv Bari, one of the UK's most successful poker players, winning both European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles during her professional career.

• 3:14Tim Ferriss?

  What the hell happened in the morning? And you can contextualize this however you want.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Sure. No, I mean, what happened was, I played a bunch of these tournaments, not of ones quite this size, but I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point. And I was there before it actually started. Usually, people turn up late, but for some reason, I was there in my chair before the first hand was dealt. And I remember the company, PokerStars, whose event it was, you know, they dimmed the lights, they're like, "Welcome to EBT San Remo. Huge. We've got incredible field, blah, blah, blah." And then they dimmed the lights and they put on the screens around the room, just like a promo, exciting.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

  Promo video.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Promo video, you know. And I remember distinctly the music. It was Chemical Brothers' "Hey Boy, Hey Girl," which I always loved. I always loved that song.

• 3:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, good choice.

• 3:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, you know, I was like, "Oh, this is cool. Yeah, I'm excited." And while I was just like, listening to it, just... Like out of nowhere, this like a bolt of lightning felt like it was like this like and this voice in my head said, you are going to win this tournament. And it sounded like my own voice, but what I can't remember is whether it was I am gonna win or you are gonna win, but I'm pretty sure it was you are gonna win, but it's literally sounded like my own voice and it was so-

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  Sounded like your own voice?

• 4:24Speaker 05

  Yes. So it was like, you know, when you speak in your head, like the, the voice you hear, like, most people have that, right?

• 4:31Tim Ferriss?

  You know, that Tuesday voice that everyone hears.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Oh, man, I'm letting, letting a lot out here. Um, it sounded like how I would sound in my own head to myself. And it said, you are going to win this tournament. And I got this rush of goosebumps. It's even happening a little bit like the hairs up on my, you know, on my arms. And I remember looking around the room like, did, did I just say that out loud? Did anyone else hear this? And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever. And I was like, well, that was freaky. And then the lights came back up and they're like, okay, cool. Shuffle up and deal. And I was still like stunned and I was like, okay, cool. And then like halfway through the day, you know, and then I sort of a little bit forgot about it. But then like halfway through the day, I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips. You know, it's always a bad feeling when that happens.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  And I was like, oh, man, I'm nearly out the tournament. I guess that was bullshit. You know, so like, I had like little multiple moments over the next few days where it clearly was a real thing because I like checked in on it. And I even told a friend of mine on date-

• 5:31Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean checked in on it? Meaning you remembered that it had happened?

• 5:34Speaker 05

  That it had happened. Well, because obviously the rational explanation to this is that it was just a false memory, you know, that I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like making-

• 5:45Tim Ferriss?

  You reconstructed it.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 5:46Tim Ferriss?

  But you have multiple points at which you referred to it.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Yes. And I even have a friend, my, my friend Melanie, who was there and I bumped into her in the, in the women's bathroom on like day two. And she was like, oh, you got a lot of chips. It's going well. I was like, yeah, yeah. Things are going well. Really weird. I feel like I'm gonna win this. In fact, I almost had a premonition that I did. And she's like, yeah, you seem really confident. And we actually had this conversation and to the point that she, after I won it, she was like, what the fuck was that? You like predicted this? I'm like, I know, I don't know. So, yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  I don't know how to explain it.

• 6:18Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I think you said string or series of experiences. Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that? And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  So what was interesting was after-

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, may I ask, I apologize for doing this herky-jerky questioning style, but did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger?

• 6:39Speaker 05

  No.

• 6:39Tim Ferriss?

  That you recall? No?

• 6:40Speaker 05

  No, I was not like a weird kid or, you know, that had... Sorry, let me start again.

• 6:46Tim Ferriss?

  Weird kid. You weren't like the kid from The Sixth Sense.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  No, I wasn't the Sixth Sense kid, no.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  No, I did not, is to answer that question. I had not really ever had, I think, anything, you know, like I never saw a ghost or anything like that.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not asking about ghosts. Don't lump me in with the ghost hunters, come on.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  I want to just paint the picture of that I was a very, in fact, like a deep skeptic.

• 7:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Well, you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  Right, right, but like certainly then, like I'd never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any conventional way. I'd certainly not had any time loops or anything like that or weird voices in my head. But yeah, to answer your question of like, is it a sort of common thing in poker?

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  No, not so much a common thing in poker, but have you since had more of those types of experiences?

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Not of like explicit premonitions, no. I'm not, nothing even close to that. I have had one really notable thing that I am happy to talk about it, it's-

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  If you change your mind, we can cut it later.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Exactly. For want of a better word, I had an extreme energy healing, an almost accidental one. So it was a few years ago and seemingly out of the blue, I started getting this very unpleasant sensation in my ear where particularly, it was like a sort of low frequency buzzing, humming quite frequently. Like so, some, some kind of tinnitus.

• 8:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  But it was almost like a pressure. And voices, particularly men's voices, became distorted to the point that they were unbearable to listen to. And it was really bumming me out. It would come in like clusters. I would have it like for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day. And it was stopping me from doing any social events because any loud scenario was unbearable, but particularly men speaking. I just couldn't handle it. And this went on and off for a few months and I went and saw a doctor, multiple doctors, and had hearing tests. And they said, oh, you're losing your hearing and the low frequencies of your of your hearing in that ear. We think you have many ears disease. Many ears is this degenerative thing, which usually people

• 8:52Speaker 05

  end up completely deaf when they have it, where basically the nerve cells in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why. They think it's something to do with like salts and ion channels. And it's incurable, as far as I know. And so I was told that's what I probably have. And they're like, it's pretty, really sorry. It's, you know, it was just bad news to find that out. And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people be like vomiting and so on. And so you can imagine, I was like really down in the dumps finding this out. And then cut to three months later or so, go to Burning Man. And I have for the first time, one of these vertigo attacks, one of the days. I mean, I wasn't completely sober, but it was not a good time, as you can imagine, having a vertigo attack while

• 9:33Speaker 05

  not being sober for the first time. So I was then really down in the dumps. And then on the last night of the burn, I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl who I kind of, I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mentioned about my ear. And she was like, oh, well, I do energy healing. I'm an energy healer. I was like, I don't know what that is, but sure, do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like, I can try. And after, she sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes. And then she says, I remember saying something like, there's something there. I need to get it. And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth, like not touching

• 10:14Speaker 05

  it, but just like, and it was really unpleasant. Like, you can imagine that sensation of someone like inhaling over your ear. And I was like, oh, please stop. She's like, no, I need to get this. There's something there. And she does it, I don't know, for a few minutes, and then eventually kind of.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  Collapses in a heap on the floor crying and freezing cold going, oh my God, that was, that was bad. I don't know what that was. That was really, really bad. Again, I was not fully sober, so this is slightly, you know, retelling. But I just remember being so shocked. I just didn't expect anything to actually happen. I didn't really feel anything other than this unpleasant sensation of her sucking. But I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her. And she said afterwards, you know, she came around after a little while and she's like, I don't know what it was. It was like bad energy. I don't know. It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's gone away. And I was like, well, okay, what does that mean for my symptoms? Am I cured? She's like, yeah, yeah, you'll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks

• 11:14Speaker 05

  and then you'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. And I haven't had any problems since. It kind of just like, it just blew my world open because aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about, I have not ever subscribed to anything like that. I like, I'm a physicist. In fact, like, you know, I'm proud, like, I kind of built a career of being a like materialist rationalist physicist. And I don't have any time for any of that stuff. It's all nonsense. It's all confirmation bias. No one's ever actually tested it empirically or proven it. Show me the study and I'll believe it. But here I am having that experience with two what feel like pretty incontrovertible

• 11:56Speaker 05

  data points that something that I cannot explain happened and fortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me. Such a blessing.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Next up, Louise Van An, the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the most popular language learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world.

• 12:27Tim Ferriss?

  Let's also come back to the org chart. And Leila, could you describe how that was done? What it ended up looking like? What were the implications? And just kind of walk us through that. And I remember in our first conversation, I told the story of maybe not the best example, since it is ultimately has been superseded by Netflix and superior technology. But Blockbuster, back in the day when Blockbuster as a company was about to become a blockbuster, brought in, I believe, someone from McDonald's, an exec, to specifically help them with org chart design. I've never designed an org chart. So could you just describe what happened and where you landed with it?

• 13:11Speaker 06

  I mean, we've gone through a bunch of different org charts. When we were from zero to call it 30 employees, our chat was was very flat, as in I was managing everybody. That was that. And I actually think, you know, maybe I took it a little too far. But I actually think for the first zero to N, where N is around maybe 20 to 30 people, the best thing you can do as a CEO is be a micromanager. I actually believe that. When you are such a small company, usually you don't quite yet have product market fit. You haven't really figured everything out. You have one goal, get the product market fit. And I don't think you should be in the business of coaching people for this or that. No, no, just I think you just micromanage people to like get to product market fit. I actually believe that.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  At some point, it really shifts, even if you love micromanaging, which I love micromanaging, but I've learned not to do that anymore. Even if you love it, at some point, this is just becomes, you just can't do it as well. And it is in your best interest to start actually developing people. And you know, that shift should happen maybe at around 20. I don't know the exact number. That is when you should really start having kind of a couple of managers, I think, splitting things up into teams. What we did then, it's not like we had a pretty good idea of exactly what our org chart should look like, but what we did was we hired our first manager. That wasn't me. It's a woman that this was maybe, I don't know, seven years ago, something like that. It's a woman that's still with us. She's now the head of all of engineering. She used to be a director of engineering at Google.

• 14:39Speaker 06

  And I knew her because after selling Recaptcha, I spent some time at Google. I knew her. I really liked her. Her name is Natalie Glance. She's amazing. And she took a much smaller job at Duolingo. She was managing, you know, just a larger job that she had. And she took a smaller job at Duolingo. I think she really believed in us. And she helped us from her eyes where I learned how to manage people really much better. She actually knew how to manage people. And she really helped us kind of start having a structure of, well, we have some managers. That really made a big difference, starting to have teams. Then the thing that we did after that is we discovered this idea of metrics-based teams, which to this day we use, and I think has been a really, really good thing. I think this is not the common thing, although some companies do do it. It's not the common thing. So the standard thing that you would have in a company, for example, at Duolingo,

• 15:24Speaker 06

  we have, the app has a bunch of different features. One of the features could be like, we have a leaderboard, for example, have a leaderboard. That's a feature. In many companies, kind of the normal thing to do is that you have a leaderboard team, a team that owns that big feature. So just kind of you split it up by feature. These are feature-based teams. We do not do feature-based teams. We do metrics-based teams. So we don't have a team that owns the leaderboard. Instead, we have a bunch of teams that own each a single metric. So for example, a metric that we have is time spent learning. What they own is the number of minutes per day that the average user uses Duolingo for. And it turns out that changes to the leaderboard can increase or decrease time spent learning if you do kind of the right or the wrong thing.

• 16:08Speaker 06

  So that team messes with the leaderboard a lot, but they don't own it. The only thing they do is they have this one metric and every quarter it has to increase. And so they just work on increasing this one metric and they run hundreds of A B tests to increase this metric. So we discovered that, you know, soon after Natalie showed up, we discovered these metric-based teams. And we started at first, our first metric-based team was our retention team, which is all you have to do is make sure that users come back every day. And that team, you know, has has done all kinds of things, really optimized the streak on Duolingo. So this this this notion of a streak that people have.

• 16:40Tim Ferriss?

  If people have used it, what, every day for seven years? I was looking at the streak.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The streak is crazy. And we have, well, the number is a little larger, but now that we're a public company, we can't reveal numbers as the the latest number we've revealed is that we have one and a half million daily active users that have a streak longer than a year, meaning they have not missed a single day in the last year or longer. That's a very powerful mechanic. The retention team has worked on that. So basically, what we did is we discovered these metric based teams. And what we do now at Duolingo is when we care about a metric that we want to optimize. So a metric could be daily revenue. Or, you know, whatever it is, we form a team around that metric. That has worked out pretty well. So that's that's kind of one big shift with us that happened. And so that that worked out pretty well.

• 17:25Speaker 06

  At some point, we we had like fifty teams, I don't know, maybe a little less, maybe like forty teams. That was starting to become, we use the term goat rodeo. It started to become this craziness. And so

• 17:38Speaker 06

  what we did is we we decided to pool the teams together that were similar to each other into this thing called areas. So now, for example, we have a monetization area. Inside the monetization area, we have a team that owns ad revenue per day. We have a team that owns subscription revenue per day. And then we have another area called the growth area, where it's just growing our active users. We have a team that owns time spent learning. We have a team that owns retention. We have another team that owns new user retention, et cetera. And so we split up into areas, and that's how we're split up now. And what has been really good is, and the shift for me has been, it went from micromanager to kind of learning how to manage to now what I do is, you know, I'm a manager of managers. Well, I'm a manager of managers of managers of managers. But at some point, that kind of doesn't matter that much.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  You're just a manager of managers is kind of what matters. And I've learned how to start managing managers much better. I I've gotten good at it.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Next up, Noah Feldman, a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher and advisor, public intellectual, religious scholar and historian, and author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

• 18:58Tim Ferriss?

  Do any books come to mind or people who you find or that you find particularly interesting or informative with respect to geopolitical strategy, brinksmanship on this geopolitical three-dimensional chessboard, or warfare in any capacity? For people who would like to get a better understanding of how these games are played, maybe historical precedents, how different conflicts have turned out, depending on different stratagems used by opposing parties, for instance, any books or people you find interesting?

• 19:35Speaker 07

  One is something that a lot of listeners will have heard of, maybe all listeners will have heard of, and some will have read, especially people who are veterans, and definitely people who have been in the service academies will have read. And it's not that long, and it's unbelievably good. And it's this book called On War by von Clausewitz, a German general. It's the single most influential book on war written since Sun Tzu's Art of War. And as I said, it's required reading in military academies in every country in the world. It's shockingly well-written. It's unbelievably clear. And it has a very specific philosophical view about what war is like and what war is for.

• 20:18Speaker 07

  And it's famous for the line that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." And that's a profound statement because it suggests that war serves the interests of political actors and is prosecuted to achieve those interests. But the other thing about it that's really fascinating is he wrote it from the point of view that says the only smart way to fight a war is to fight it absolutely without holding back. Put all your cards on the table, sorry, put all your chips on the table and, you know, try to win the war and that maximizes the odds that you will and it'll be over faster

• 21:01Speaker 07

  and if it's over faster, that's also good for everybody, he says, because then it won't kill more people and eat up more resources. And yet, despite the fact that the first idea of von Clausewitz, the idea that war's politics by other means, is accepted by everybody in the domain of war and politics, there are lots of wars that aren't fought in the extreme, all-out von Clausewitz way, tons of them, including a bunch of US wars which have not been fought that way, wars which notably we haven't won, you know, wars like Vietnam and Iraq and arguably even Afghanistan. So I would strongly recommend that book. I can't actually recommend it strongly enough. It really makes you think and they're, you know, it's easy to buy.

• 21:44Speaker 07

  You can buy it in any bookshop and I'm sure you can buy it on Amazon, you know, in 20 seconds. In terms of contemporary people writing about the geopolitics, you know, I really like to mix and match. I like to read work by people who are thought of as realists, who think that national self-interest is all that matters, and I like to read work by people who are called idealists, who think that moral principles matter as well. And I really like historical perspective. So on anything to do with Ukraine, I love the work of a historian called Tim Snyder, who teaches at Yale. And he's, first of all, a fantastic historian who's genuinely a Ukraine expert.

• 22:25Speaker 07

  I mean, his first few books before he got famous were highly technical historical studies of Ukrainian history. And then each book he writes gets a little broader in terms of its audience and now he writes very broad and general books. And he's a terrific historian and he's really the person to read on Ukraine and its history. And he also takes you beyond just Ukraine and discusses the relationship between Germany and Russia and really the whole 20th century's concept of war, which interestingly, he thinks of Ukraine as having been at the middle of, not because Ukraine was so important, but because the countries Germany and Russia that were fighting these wars were fighting in part over the territory that includes Ukraine. So I would strongly recommend any of his books.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  His grand book is called Bloodlands. It's long and intense, but it's very, very, very beautifully and clearly written. And if you can stomach a book about the wars of the 20th century, you'll learn a ton about geopolitics and the region in the process.

• 23:28Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for those recommendations. Sounds like I have some Von Clausewitz to read. First and foremost.

• 23:34Speaker 07

  You're gonna love Von Clausewitz.

• 23:36Tim Ferriss?

  I just like saying the name.

• 23:37Speaker 07

  He would totally be on your podcast if he were still alive.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Next up, Balaji Srinivasan, angel investor, entrepreneur, and author of the new book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which is also available for free at thenetworkstate.com.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  So what do you think the US looks like in five years? Just if we could paint a picture?

• 24:11Balaji Srinivasan?

  Oh, sure. It's like BLM and Jan 6th all the time.

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  You mean in terms of events or in terms of discussion?

• 24:22Balaji Srinivasan?

  In terms of there will be mobs that are gathered online. There will be, it's like stochastic network warfare between two groups. Is it five years? Might be 10 years. I don't know the exact timeframe. It could happen faster, it could happen slower. But fundamentally, I think the catalyst is if you look at interest rates and you look at the graph, have you ever looked at like the long-term graph of interest rates?

• 24:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I have actually, but we should put it in the show notes for people.

• 24:47Balaji Srinivasan?

  We should put it in the show notes because I just want to find this graph, a long-term chart. So if you go to this graph and you click Max.

• 24:56Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So this is trading economics.com slash United hyphen states slash interest hyphen rate.

• 25:03Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah. So United States interest rate, United States Fed funds rate at trading economics.com, right? And they click max on this chart.

• 25:09Tim Ferriss?

  I'm looking at max.

• 25:11Balaji Srinivasan?

  Okay. And so what do you see? You essentially see something where over a, you know, 40 year timeframe, you have a trend which is very much down and to the right. Yeah.

• 25:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 25:23Balaji Srinivasan?

  And what that is, is it's basically, this is something where, one of the things I write about is, and Dalio has actually also talked about this, there are trends that affect humans that are longer than the cycles that we're intuitively familiar with. For example, you're familiar with the cycle of your breath. That's a few seconds, right? You're familiar with a day. You're familiar with basically the seasons of a year. And that's actually what most people are familiar with. Beyond that, maybe the election cycle, you know, in four years, or the longest thing somebody might be familiar with, frankly, are venture capital funds or startups, which are like 10 year cycles. That might be the longest thing where you can run an experiment and see a few reps of it in a five or 10 year timeframe over your life,

• 26:08Balaji Srinivasan?

  right? A venture capitalist might see hundreds or thousands of five or 10 year long experiments that most people don't really track things over that timeframe. And any normal human cannot really track things over 40 or 50 years. You have to kind of dedicate your life to that, right? Same thing that's happening over multiple decades, you really need really good charts and stuff to see what the heck is happening. This graph is one of the best and most important because it's so unambiguous. And what it shows is essentially that the US economy, we have run out of juice. The Federal Reserve being able to print money and so on, it just keeps going down on this trend like interest rates and If you notice, every time they try to jack it up, it has to be pushed back down and

• 26:53Balaji Srinivasan?

  kept down for longer and longer and longer, if you're seeing that in that graph.

• 26:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Balaji Srinivasan?

  And now, the next time, when they're going to be forced, probably, to bring interest rates all the way to the floor, maybe before the 2024 election, and I think you will see very serious inflation as a function of that, because they'll print money and will actually have genuine goods shortages, because we have all these supply chain things that are hitting. You have China doing its crazy, you know, stuff with the ports and the COVID lockdowns. You have the, do you know the slow steaming regulations?

• 27:25Tim Ferriss?

  I do not know the slow steaming regulations.

• 27:28Balaji Srinivasan?

  Basically, like, you know, some ESG thing, this is a great example of how, like, moral, you know, the moral flipping. I'm getting this secondhand, so I might have it wrong, but I believe it is reducing the speed of cargo ships to cut down carbon emissions.

• 27:42Tim Ferriss?

  Let me just define two things real quickly. So you mentioned Dalio, just for people who don't know, Ray Dalio, former, let's just call him head principal at Bridgewater Associates, at least at the time that I interviewed him, largest hedge fund in the world, about $175 billion or something like that, ESG, environmental, social, and governance factors. So just, that bleeds into the, what you were just discussing. So please continue.

• 28:07Balaji Srinivasan?

  Just to summarize it, basically, we have more money, they're eventually going to need to print again. We have literally fewer goods, where China's cutting off supply, there's sanctions, there's wars like Ukraine, there are COVID lockdowns, there's stuff like slow steaming, which is this huge self-inflicted wound by the ESG thing, where every single container ship in the world has to slow down now. So you have a lot of things that can sum up into something where it gets nonlinear fast. And if that happens, and you do have not just the inflation we have now, but genuine, serious inflation, or even hyperinflation, That is when society comes apart in the US because, I mean, people have been so freaking angry

• 28:50Balaji Srinivasan?

  at each other during the 2010s in a relatively booming market. Like in the 2010s, up until 2019, things were like decent economically, but man, were people mad at each other. And when there's like actual genuine scarcity, if that does happen, if physical goods are hard to come by and your inflation's destroyed your currency and so on, and you have a country where people are heavily armed, and they're yelling at each other on social media, and you've got 50 governors, like, you've got a very potent cocktail for bad things. And we've sort of seen this in lots of other countries that frankly, America was involved in, in, you know, partially destabilizing, like, look at Libya or something like that, or Mexico, or what have you, but that people just really do believe on some level, quote,

• 29:35Balaji Srinivasan?

  "It can't happen here." But I think American anarchy unfortunately is sort of where we're heading. And what exactly does that mean? You know, try and paint a picture. So, first of all, in 1861, if you go and look at the map in 1861, you have the Union and you have the Confederates, and it's the ideological and the geographical coincide. You have the North and you have the South. And we take for granted that the victory condition was for the North to just invade the South. Because by invading their capital and burning and so on, they didn't just destroy their supply chain, they also killed their morale, and eventually they got the entire South to concede, and they could flip them ideologically and emancipation proclamation, reconstruction,

• 30:18Balaji Srinivasan?

  they uninstalled the software in their heads and installed software with new moral premises. Same in World War II, invade Nazi Germany, denazify them, capture the capital, the ideological and geographical coincide. And that's how we think of wars as working. Now, today though, if you go and look at a map of the US and you look at Republican, Democrat, it's not in clean states, it's very fractal, it's at the individual county level, you've got a little red here, a little blue here, purple here, it's extremely grouped together, it's fractal. And so what that means is that in physical space, these two nations are cheek by jowl. But in digital space, as that graph I showed you showed, those two social networks are

• 31:02Balaji Srinivasan?

  just clustered apart in digital space. They're separated in digital space. Did I show you that graphic? Did you see it?

• 31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you did. Yeah, I got it. And we'll put this, we'll put this in the show notes for everybody.

• 31:14Balaji Srinivasan?

  So when you see that graph, you're like, oh, okay. So in physical space, people are cheek by gel, but in digital space, they're far apart. And that's where the battlefront is. And you can reconceptualize the last several years as a social war. Because if in a physical war, the goal is to invade territory, in a social war, the goal is to invade minds. And now, when we think about cancellation, deplatforming, hashtags, et cetera, et cetera, the point is that what you're trying to do is get a node on their side to flip from blue to red or red to blue. And how do you do that? Because they're now uttering your hashtag slogan, right? BLM or MAGA or something like that. They're uttering that slogan. That node is flipped. It's like capture the flag. You're seeing from their utterance that they are saying the thing that indicates that

• 31:59Balaji Srinivasan?

  they're now on your team. They're raising a flag over their company, et cetera. And you are able to cancel and silence those people who are saying things that are contrary to your view and so on and so forth. It is essentially something where, because you are constrained from using physical violence, since what are you going to do? Invade a cornfield? Invade a city? That doesn't actually work. You're winning digitally. It's digital warfare. Now, when I say constrained from using physical violence, as we've seen, that's actually, we're starting to see stochastic digital violence. You know, the Proud Boys and Antifa and so on punching it out in the street. That's actually an extremely unusual thing in the 90s and 2000s America. You just never saw like left and right wing militias punching it out in the streets.

• 32:44Balaji Srinivasan?

  But you see that now. That's actually something which is de rigueur. I don't know, we're on the 100th or 300th. It's like, it's like an event. You wouldn't be like totally shocked that that's happening, that political violence is happening in America, but it is. And it's on a ramp. And so you put all that together and basically what I see is serious inflation, you know, Bitcoin mooning, and then the US government trying to freeze or seize the Bitcoin with something that's similar to Executive Order 6102.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Next up, Dr. Matt Kabreline, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine with adjunct appointments in genome sciences and oral health sciences. He is the founder and co-director of the Dog Aging Project.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  Let me revert back to the Dog Aging Project for a second. You mentioned the clinical study side, and I would love for you to describe the hypothesis going into that. What is the, and I hesitate to use the word "hope," right? But with the intervention of rapamycin, what might you see based on previous data or studies?

• 34:06Speaker 09

  So let me take a step back, because I think it's useful to first just briefly talk about how this idea even came about.

• 34:13Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 34:13Speaker 09

  Because really, in my mind, I think the first time I really thought of the idea of doing a clinical trial in dogs was, it was going on 10 years ago now. I think it was probably 2013. And Daniel Promislo, who's co-director of the Dog Aging Project, and Kate Creavy, who's our chief veterinary officer, had been thinking about the longitudinal study well before this. So I actually, it was actually in conversations with them that got me thinking about companion dogs living in the human environment as a, an animal that we could actually study and learn about the biology of aging. And I'm a dog person. I've always had dogs. And so the idea, when it's solidified in my mind, there's really no reason why these interventions that we can increase lifespan and health span in

• 34:56Speaker 09

  mice, they're going to work in dogs. Like, I am, I don't know that all of them are going to work. I don't know rapamycin is going to work, but I am 100% rock-solid confident that some of them are going to work. And being a dog guy and wanting my dog to live longer, when that light bulb went off in my head, I was like...

• 35:13Speaker 09

  This goddamn has to happen.

• 35:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 09

  Right? This has to happen. And so that was really what got me on the path of then thinking, okay, how do we do it? How do we actually? How do we start that process? How do we actually test whether or not an intervention? I hadn't settled on rapamycin at that time would have this effect in dogs. And so that was the process of going through. How do you set up a clinical trial? One thing to consider is companion dogs very much like people's children. So you kind of think about a clinical trial, the way you would a pediatric clinical trial, you really have to be sure whatever intervention you're using isn't going to kill somebody's dog or harm somebody's dog. So these are all the things that I started thinking about. And I settled on rapamycin because there was enough evidence at that point

• 36:00Speaker 09

  to convince me that it could be done safely. That was really the only concern with rapamycin, based on the side effects I talked about in organ transplant patients, that it could be done safely. And because it was our best bet for the interventions that we knew about then, and I would say still now, for being likely to have an effect on lifespan and health span for the reasons that we've sort of already gotten into. So what might we expect based on what we know in mice? So I talked about some of the tissues where rapamycin makes things better. There are many other tissues where it hasn't really been looked at in that context of better, but where at least if you give it lifelong, the declines are delayed at a minimum, we can say that. So that's true in brain. It's true in kidney.

• 36:45Speaker 09

  It's true in liver.

• 36:46Tim Ferriss?

  May I pause for a second?

• 36:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 36:47Tim Ferriss?

  What type of degeneration or changes are delayed or reversed in the brain?

• 36:54Speaker 09

  This has been studied both in the context of normal aging and in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. In every case, you see improvements in function. So these are behavioral tests in mice. There are these water maze tests, things like that. Right? So to the extent that they are actually telling us what we think they're telling us about cognition, you see improvements in the rapamycin treated mice versus the control mice.

• 37:21Tim Ferriss?

  So it's performance. Task performance based.

• 37:24Speaker 09

  Definitely those functional measures are the ones that I put the most faith in.

• 37:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 37:29Speaker 09

  I think, sure, you want to see changes in pathology and molecular biomarkers and things like that. I don't care if the biomarker changes if it doesn't make it function better. So that's why I start there. But people have done lots of studies looking at cerebral blood flow. So that's one model that's been put forth. There's decreases in neuroinflammation, as we would expect, given the effect of rapamycin on inflammation, and increases in metabolic function or mitochondrial function in the brain. So there are plausible molecular mechanisms by which rapamycin could be having these effects. And that's pretty much true in the other tissues where rapamycin has been shown to have effects is a lot of people have been studying this and made, I think, reasonable models at a molecular level for how rapamycin is acting. So I'll just, I'll cut it short and just say, pretty much every tissue where people

• 38:14Speaker 09

  have looked, you can find evidence that function has been at least preserved. The one that might be worth commenting on briefly and coming back to, because we touched on it, is muscle. So, early on, there was a lot of concern, I think particularly among muscle biologists, that rapamycin would increase sarcopenia or enhance muscle loss with aging and make things worse. And that's because it's known in muscle biology that mTOR promotes muscle growth, or at least it's required for protein synthesis, which is part of muscle growth. So, the conventional wisdom was that when you inhibit mTOR, that would lead to a decrease in muscle mass, muscle function. Several studies now in both mice

• 38:55Speaker 09

  and rats have shown it's exactly the opposite. You maintain muscle function better with age when the mice or the rats are given rapamycin. Now, dose is probably important. So I do think if you were to push the dose too far, you know, you might impair muscle growth or muscle maintenance. But if the doses that also extend lifespan and have all these other effects, muscle is actually functioning better in old animals than in control animals. And this is why I constantly, I constantly tell the people in my lab and other scientists, you've got to do the experiment. You cannot go into it thinking that you know the answer and not do the experiment because your dogmatic belief says this is how it's going to work. You've got to do the experiment.

• 39:38Tim Ferriss?

  So based on the mice data, let's just say.

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Lifespan in terms of percentage

• 39:46Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 39:46Tim Ferriss?

  Increase in this case, what might be the, the range?

• 39:50Speaker 09

  I think the upper side for what's been shown in mice so far with rapamycin is about 25% increase in, in lifespan. I do, and I mean, that's certainly possible in, in dogs. I, I would say, if I had to guess, I would guess it's not going to be that the magnitude of effect on a percent basis is not going to be as big in longer lived animals. That's just a guess. I don't have any data to support that, which, you know, might mean that the, the magnitude of effect in people is, is going to be even smaller because people are much longer lived than, than dogs are and much longer lived than mice are. So, but it could be as much as 25%. So, you know, if you're talking about a large dog that maybe would normally live to be 14 years old, you're talking another three years.

• 40:30Tim Ferriss?

  Study worth doing. I say that as I'm looking around you to my dog Molly, seven years of age, laying on the floor. And the function matters, right? I mean, the function really matters.

• 40:44Speaker 09

  Absolutely. I think most people would agree that the function matters more than the absolute lifespan. I think almost everybody says, if you'd ask them, you know, would you want to live longer? They're like, no, not if I'm going to live longer in a decrepit state.

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is it fair to say that that is one of the valid criticisms of at least certain forms of, say, caloric restriction?

• 41:06Speaker 09

  Well, I don't know. Maybe. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily pick on caloric restriction. I think there's evidence that, at least in mice, that caloric restriction can maintain function later in life as well. Now, you could make an argument about quality of life for sure. I would pick on caloric restriction then in people, but I think the general question, is that a valid concern in targeting the biology of aging? I would say it is and it isn't. So, nothing that I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot of things that extend lifespan, nothing has ever.

• 41:38Speaker 09

  Convincingly extended the bad part of life, the decrepit state. There's a little bit of debate in the C. elegans field about that, but I think that's, these are people arguing over silly stuff. I've never seen anything that does that.

• 41:50Tim Ferriss?

  C. elegans is a...

• 41:51Speaker 09

  It's a nematode worm.

• 41:53Tim Ferriss?

  It is, right?

• 41:53Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 41:53Tim Ferriss?

  Nematode worm.

• 41:54Speaker 09

  Yeah. Even there, I think it's a semantic argument, not a real argument. But certainly in mammals, nothing that extends lifespan makes the end period, only extends the end period of life. I think it's a legitimate question whether some of these interventions might proportionately extend lifespan, where you're proportionately extending health span, but you also in an absolute sense do have a longer period of decline. That is hard to really completely resolve. I would say things like rapamycin and caloric restriction, which those are the two most potent interventions we've got right now, really do seem in mice to push the declines in function and diseases back later into life. So you really have disproportionately

• 42:38Speaker 09

  extended health span compared to lifespan. But again, that's my interpretation of the data, but it's a hard case to make quantitatively.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Last but not least, Mark Plotkin in conversation with Hamilton Morris for the Plants of the Gods podcast, the audio of which appeared for the first time on the Tim Ferriss Show. Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team, which has partnered with around 80 tribes to map and improve management and protection of approximately 100 million acres of ancestral rainforests. Hamilton Morris is a chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist. He is the writer and director of the documentary series, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, in which he explores the chemistry and traditions surrounding psychoactive drugs.

• 43:39Mark Plotkin?

  Well, I want to make the point here that we're not doing commercials for any of these substances. And in all the episodes, I point out that these things can be lethal. And you've mentioned that on your show and in some of your writings and interviews. But even of cannabis, which people sort of think of as this harmless thing that can't hurt anybody. And I was reading something of yours recently that talked about problematic relationships with cannabis. So I wonder if you could give an example of that so that people understand that all of these plants are the gods, and fungi are the gods, and frogs are the gods, may have a downside.

• 44:11Hamilton Morris?

  Yeah, I think it's very important to have a balanced perspective on these things. Because there's been something really polarizing about the way they've been publicly discussed from the very beginning. They're either a panacea that's going to cure all of society's ills. They're going to prevent us from being mean to each other. They're going to end all wars. Or they're poisonous agents that will destroy your mind and leave you intellectually crippled. And of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Where for some people, under some circumstances, they can have a tremendous benefit and they can be truly life-changing. And under other circumstances, they can have a damaging effect.

• 44:55Hamilton Morris?

  And cannabis, I think, is an interesting example because it also includes the political dimensions of all this. Because the people that have been using these substances for decades have been persecuted. And that creates a sort of insecurity complex. Understandably, justifiably, if the government says that this is dangerous and they're willing to lock you in a cage for it, if your employer can terminate your employment, if they find traces of this substance in your hair or your urine, which is an insane invasion of privacy that nobody should tolerate, then it makes sense that you'd want to really stand up for this stuff and say, hey, wait a second. It's never killed anybody.

• 45:38Hamilton Morris?

  It's safer than alcohol, safer than tobacco. This stuff is innocuous. And in fact, you can smoke it every single day and you'll be totally fine. And in many instances, that might be true. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you should. And it doesn't mean that... I think this is the tendency, is we go too far in one direction or another. And a lot of it has to do with this insecurity from people demonizing these substances for so long.

• 46:06Mark Plotkin?

  Agreed, but can you give perhaps an example of a problematic relationship with cannabis? Because your point is well taken, but that is even cannabis can have a downside.

• 46:15Hamilton Morris?

  Oh, certainly, yeah. I mean, I think one of the most interesting examples is there's a disorder called cannabis hyperemesis disorder. Are you familiar with this? It wasn't described in the medical literature until somewhat recently. It's a very odd phenomenon where people who smoke enormous quantities of cannabis will start vomiting continuously. And the only thing that relieves their nausea is taking a hot shower. And people started showing up in emergency rooms when they ran out of hot water because they couldn't control their vomiting. And this seemed really bizarre, because wait a second, people have been using cannabis for thousands of years. What are the chances

• 47:00Hamilton Morris?

  that now, all of a sudden, a new cannabis-related disorder would emerge? It couldn't be the cannabis itself. It must be a pesticide. It must be some contaminant in the cannabis. Otherwise, how could this possibly be explained? And the explanation is that, yes, it is the cannabis itself. This is a product of chronic hyperstimulation of CB1 receptors. And the reality is that people are smoking more cannabis now than any other time in human history. So new use disorders are actually emerging. And although this is described as a somewhat obscure phenomenon, it's not as obscure as people think. I've known two people that had this disorder, both of whom

• 47:41Hamilton Morris?

  didn't know they had it. And it's especially insidious, because cannabis has an antiemetic effect. So you're nauseous. You think, oh, man, I'm so sick. I need to smoke some cannabis because I'm really nauseous. But the cannabis is actually making it worse. It's the source of the nausea. And during the pandemic, I had a friend who this happened to, because he was just getting really, really stoned all the time. And I had noticed that he was constantly soaking wet. And I thought, like, why is this guy...

• 48:15Hamilton Morris?

  Is he like taking showers five times a day? Why is he always so wet? And, and he then told me, you know, I don't know what's going on. I've just been, you know, vomiting all the time and a hot shower is really the only thing that, that helps. And I thought, wow, all right. Yeah, I know what you have. This is a, so that's, you know, I don't want to bring that up as an example of something that everyone should be really terrified of, because this is something that only afflicts people who are extremely stoned all the time. But it's just an example of how this plant that's considered totally innocuous, under some circumstances, can have a negative effect. Also, I think there's something to be said for maybe just not being stoned all the time. And I say this as somebody that likes cannabis personally.

• 49:00Hamilton Morris?

  I'm not trying to hate on cannabis. It's just, there's, like I said, a tendency to go to these extremes of either cannabis is terrible, or you should be stoned all the time because cannabis is a medicine.

• 49:11Mark Plotkin?

  Well, my mentor, Richard Schultes, would often describe mind altering plants as scalpels in the hand of a shaman. It can heal, but it can also harm if it's not used correctly. And so, once again, all of these plants, all of these fungi, all of these substances, need to be used with caution and a prostrith reverence and carefully. And that's why I often tell people, you shouldn't be experimenting on your own with very powerful substances.

• 49:40Hamilton Morris?

  And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is Liv Boree. That's B O E R E E on Twitter, at Liv underscore Boree. She is one of the UK's most successful poker players, now a resident of Austin, Texas, winning both European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles during her professional career. Before poker, she studied astrophysics and now focuses her time as a TV host and YouTuber specializing in game theory, futurism, and rationality. What a world we live in that you can now do that on YouTube. It's fucking amazing. It's incredible. She also gives seminars on high stakes decision making and recently spoke at the annual TED Conference about the application of poker thinking to everyday life.

• 50:23Hamilton Morris?

  In 2014, she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, R E G, parenthetically, I'll try that again. She co-founded Raising for Effective Giving in parentheses, R E G.

• 50:37Tim Ferriss?

  Let me try that again. In 2014, she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, R E G. We should keep all of those takes in. This is so bad. I'm trying to cut back on my caffeine, and this is the price I pay. A nonprofit based upon the philosophies of effective altruism that raised more than $12 million for its carefully selected list of maximally cost-effective charities. You can find her online, livebury.com, livebury.substack.com, and on all of the things, all of the socials, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, you can certainly search and find her, Livebury. My guest today is Luis Von Ahn. You can find him on Twitter, @Luis, L U I S V O N A H N.

• 51:21Tim Ferriss?

  Luis is an entrepreneur and consulting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is known for co-inventing CAPTCHAS, being a MacArthur Fellow, and selling two companies to Google in his 20s. He's currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a language learning platform created to bring free language education to the world. With more than 500 million users, it is now the most popular language learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world. Luis has been named one of the Brilliant 10 by Popular Science, one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover, one of the Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, and one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Luis also won

• 52:05Tim Ferriss?

  the 2018 Lemelson MIT Prize, the largest cash prize for invention in the United States. I'm thrilled to welcome back Noah Feldman. You can find him on Twitter, @NoahRFeldman. Noah is a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher and advisor, public intellectual, religious scholar and historian, and author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution, subtitle, Lincoln Slavery and the Refounding of America. He's also a hyperpolyglot. It tells you something when that can be omitted in the bio. Moving on, Feldman is host of the Deep Background Podcast, a Policy and Public Affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a former contributing

• 52:50Tim Ferriss?

  writer for the New York Times. He served as Senior Constitutional Advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution. He earned his AB summa cum laude from Harvard, finishing first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D Phil, which I just learned how to pronounce properly, from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle's Ethics. He received his JD from Yale Law School and clerked for Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court. Noah's 10 books also include Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building, Cool War: The United States, China, and the Future of Global Competition, Scorpions:

• 53:35Tim Ferriss?

  The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices, and The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius Partisan President. You can find him on Twitter, as mentioned, @NoahRFeldman, Instagram, @NoahRFeldman, and all things Noah can be found at noah-feldman.com.

• 53:59Tim Ferriss?

  My guest today is the one and only Balaji Srinivasan. You can find him on Twitter, @BalajiS. Balaji is an angel investor and entrepreneur. He has the first and second place records for longest podcast episodes ever on this podcast. We will probably keep it to two and a half to three hours, I say with great confidence now. Formerly the CTO- But people listen to them. They do. They do. People listen to them. They do. A lot of people. Yeah. These are two, the last two appearances were two of the most popular episodes, certainly in the last year to 18 months. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andrey Zinhorowitz, he was also the co-founder of Earn.com, acquired by Coinbase Council,

• 54:40Tim Ferriss?

  acquired by Myriad, Teleport, acquired by Topia, and Coin Center. He was named to the MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, won a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, and holds a BS, MS, PhD in Electrical Engineering, and an MS in Chemical Engineering, all from Stanford University. Also teaches the occasional class at Stanford in his spare time, including an online MOOC in 2013, which reached 250,000 plus students worldwide. His brand new book is The Network State: How to Start a New Country, and we will certainly wade into those waters and explore all of the related topics in depth. My guest today is Dr. Matt K. Berline.

• 55:22Tim Ferriss?

  You can find him on Twitter, M.K. Berline, let me spell that for you, K.A.E.B.E.R.L.E.I.N. And Matt is a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine with adjunct appointments in genome sciences and oral health sciences. Dr. K. Berline's research interests are focused on understanding biological mechanisms of aging in order to facilitate translational interventions that promote health span and improve quality of life for people and companion animals. Dr. K. Berline is the founding director of the University of Washington Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute, the director of the NIH Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging at University of Washington, director of the Biological

• 56:04Tim Ferriss?

  Mechanisms of Healthy Aging Training Program, and founder and co-director of the Dog Aging Project. You can find him online at kberline lab dot org, again, on Twitter, at M.K. Berline, and we will link to all the other social, LinkedIn, et cetera, in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Welcome to the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera, that you can apply to your own life. This time around, we have a very special edition of this podcast, featuring two of your favorite guests from the past, Dr. Mark Plotkin and Hamilton Morris.

• 56:47Tim Ferriss?

  Mark takes over my duties as host and interviews Hamilton for an episode of the Plants of the Gods podcast. You, my dear listeners, are hearing this audio before anyone else, so it's a Tim Ferriss Show exclusive. I've previously featured some of my favorite episodes from the Plants of the Gods podcast here on this podcast. You can find all of those at tim.blog/plantsoftheGods. These episodes cover a lot of fascinating ground. So let's get to the bios. Who is Mark? If you don't know, Mark on Twitter @DocD. Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team, which has partnered with roughly 80 tribes to map and improve management and protection of roughly 100 million acres of ancestral rainforests.

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  He is best known to the general public as the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books ever written about the rainforest. His most recent book is The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know. You can find my interview with Mark at tim.blog/MarkPlotkin. That's M-A-R-K-P-L-O-T-K-I-N. And the guest, his guest today is Hamilton Morris. Love Hamilton. Hamilton on Twitter @HamiltonMorris, M-O-R-R-I-S, is a chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist, graduate of the New School. He conducts chemistry research at St. Joseph's University. Hamilton is the writer and director of the documentary series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, pharmacopeia, depending on how you like to say it, in which he explores the chemistry

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  and traditions surrounding psychoactive drugs, very often subjecting himself to personal intake. You can find my most recent interview with him at tim.blog/Hamilton. And what you're about to hear is a tightly-packed 60-minute interview. Mark and Hamilton cover the history of different psychoactive substances, Timothy Leary's legacy, the drunken monkey hypothesis, conservation, microdosing, the differences between 5-MEO, DMT, that's 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine, and DMT, a disease that afflicts people who smoke enormous quantities of cannabis, yes, really, the impact of the placebo effect, synthetic versus natural options in this psychoactive spectrum of things, the role of ritual, and much, much more. Hey, guys, this is Tim again.

• 58:57Tim Ferriss?

  Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super-short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.