#171: The Random Show - New Favorite Books, Memory Training, and Bets On VR

This is not going to be a long-form interview where I dissect and deconstruct a world-class performer...at least not in the usual fashion. Instead, this is a special edition of The Random Show. I am joined by Kevin Rose (@KevinRose http://www.twitter.com/kevinrose), serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, and all around wild and crazy guy. We discuss a wide range of topics, including new favorite books, memory training, meditation tactics, multiple wives, and bets for or against virtual reality. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2 to 5 minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment, add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc.,

• 1:48Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by

• 2:32Tim Ferriss?

  Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I use 99designs

• 3:16Tim Ferriss?

  to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy, or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are from the worlds of athletics, business, strategy of any type, or fashion, entertainment or otherwise. This episode is a little bit different. It is not going to be a long-form interview where I dissect and deconstruct a world-class performer, or at least not In the usual fashion. Instead, this is a special edition of The Random Show. I am joined by my usual co-host in this capacity, Kevin Rose, @kevinrose on Twitter, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, and that is not an exaggeration. He's one of the best product guys, for those in Silicon Valley or tech and investors I know. What makes

• 4:40Tim Ferriss?

  him unique perhaps is an unusual combination, and that is he's very good at early-stage investing, very early-stage seed investing, and also very good at the public markets. And he's also a all-around wild and crazy guy, which makes for a fun conversation. So we go all over the place. We talk about new favorite books, memory training, multiple wives, or maybe I talk about that, bets for or against virtual reality, and much, much more. So, please say hi to us on the socials and enjoy.

• 5:16Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to another episode of The Random Show. I think it is episode 477. I'm Tim Ferriss.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  And I'm Kevin Rose. Thanks for joining us. It's been a while.

• 5:27Tim Ferriss?

  It has been, to be precise. It has been a long while.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:31Tim Ferriss?

  And we are sitting in your new place.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Just moved in today.

• 5:36Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of life changes.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Speak about, talking about, speaking of, sorry, I've had, I swear I've only had two glasses of wine. Speaking of Random Show, you hit me up today, or last night.

• 5:48Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  And were like, hey, let's do a Random Show. And it was like midnight. I'm like, you said on Tuesday, and it was, yesterday was Tuesday. I'm like, I'm not getting out of bed to do a Random Show.

• 5:58Tim Ferriss?

  That would have been very random, though.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  You meant Wednesday.

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  I did mean, I did mean Wednesday. And

• 6:03Speaker 03

  You're in town for one night.

• 6:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  And we're in a spot.

• 6:06Tim Ferriss?

  Just a sniper shot in and out. And I'm excited to dig in because we have a bunch of new interests, but we also have new questions.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:17Tim Ferriss?

  Because I realized, when I was just developing my Bambi legs in the podcasting and interview game.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Episode one.

• 6:25Tim Ferriss?

  Episode one of The Tim Ferriss Show, which we didn't even have a name for at that point, although you nominated Tim Tim Talk Talk, which

• 6:33Speaker 03

  I still think that's the best name, and I think you should rename your show.

• 6:35Tim Ferriss?

  Go to hell. Kevin has stuck, and people still refer to it as Tim Tim Talk Talk.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  I see that on Twitter from time to time. I always laugh my ass off every time I see it.

• 6:45Tim Ferriss?

  Things have hopefully evolved and not devolved, but I remember you giving me so much shit when I asked you, I put together my list of questions and I asked you if you could be a breakfast cereal, or if you had to be a breakfast cereal, which would you be? And you were like, oh, it's gonna be one of those interviews. And I was like, ah, stop busting my balls. I'm nervous already, even though you're my friend. It's my first time recording audio. And so I want to, I'm gonna at some point lob some questions at you that I've asked a lot of my other guests that I don't know your answers to. And it sounds like you have some top secret questions to volley from your side.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Yes, we decided to go before the show, you know, Tim and I spent probably five, 10 minutes putting together kind of a, just a bullet list of outline and stuff that we want to talk about. And you mentioned wanting to do those new kind of refreshed questions on me. And so of course, I've got to come back to you and do some on you as well, because, you know, you're always on the interviewing side of this equation. Why not throw some back to you and see what you come up with? Because I feel like you grill your guests sometimes. You're like, what would you put on a billboard? And they're like, oh, you know, it's really difficult to answer this stuff in real time.

• 7:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, some of them are really tough.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  I'm curious to see how you're gonna do. We'll see.

• 7:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we'll see how well I can tap dance. I've grown better at the asking, not necessarily the answering of questions, but do you have anything new on yours? And I should also say, just for those people who are wondering at the prep, so we both bullet out a couple of ideas or items that are new for us, whether they're books or gizmos or otherwise, but we don't share those notes with each other beforehand. Otherwise, it would be boring.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  That's right. So we tend to leave it to be just like fresh stuff that we just came up with. It's typically stuff that we've used and discovered since the last time we saw each other.

• 8:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  And so I've got, I've got kind of three things. You want me to kick it off with the first one?

• 8:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  So this one is actually thanks to you. I called you on the phone and talked to you about this, the TM meditation.

• 8:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  So transcendental meditation is a form of meditation that I hadn't actually heard of until You first brought it up. I have another buddy, Anish, who's been doing it since he was a child. You know, Anish, he was at my bachelor party. I do. And then also, our mutual friend, Dr. Peter Attia. I was just talking to him. I'm like, hey, what are some great ways that you reduce stress in your life? And he's like, oh, I've looked at the literature, like TM, he's trained in it as well. And he's like, you should just go. And he did an introduction to some of the folks over at the center. And I was like, okay, well, I want to go give this a shot. And I called you up and I was like, what do you think? And you were like, yeah, go do it.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Well, I was introduced to bring it full circle. So of course, Peter's been on the podcast. Yeah. And I was convinced to do my first proper training with TM by two other guests. So it was Chase Jarvis and Rick Rubin. Oh, crazy. Specifically, I effectively asked them the same question that you asked Peter. And I just took a while for me to get it through my thick skull that I should try it. Because of the costs involved and various things. It's not cheap. It's not cheap. And I may hopefully collaborate with some folks involved at the higher levels of TM to change that. We will see. But there are some quirky aspects to it, right?

• 10:11Speaker 03

  You sent me a photograph of your My sacrifice. Your flowers and fruit with the comment, I feel like I'm joining a cult. Some of it is, for a secular person, it's a little, it's a little tough. I mean, here's the deal. Like, I grew up religious and I drank the blood of Christ at communion and whatnot and like, did all of that stuff. So I'm used to, you know, certain formalities around certain things. And, you know, I go to the introduction meeting, which is free, and you sit down and you're like, almost in like a church type setting. And, you know, they're like, hey, like, welcome. They kind of start explaining some stuff.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  And I'm like, okay, this all sounds great. Everything you're saying sounds great. They're like, here's the cost. I'm like, eh, a little pricey, but if it's going to change my life, whatever. And then they're like, by the way, on your first day, I want you to bring three pieces of fruit and some flowers for like, the introduction to like, the dude and the offering that you must give him on the table. We burn incense. And I was like, what?

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  And by dude, you mean there's a large mural of the dude from The Big Lebowski?

• 11:22Speaker 03

  That's right. No, it's by the founder. I never recall the founder's name.

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  Maharishi?

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Maharishi, yes. So, you know, whatever. I'm not gonna buy in if it's any kind of religious thing.

• 11:33Tim Ferriss?

  Dari is making faces.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  She is, she's making faces. But essentially, are we allowed to talk about this, by the way? This is the other thing. They told us, like, we couldn't talk about any of this stuff. Will they sue us?

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think so. I mean, ultimately, this is like a, I would say, a ringing endorsement of the benefits of TM, probably, but there's some weird stuff.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:57Tim Ferriss?

  Let's call a spade a spade. And people have talked about it before.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so basically, you go into a little room, you-

• 12:03Tim Ferriss?

  Swing a dead cat over your head 13 times. No, you don't do that, I'm kidding.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  You do your little ritual sacrifice thing, it's fine. I gave fruit. And that lasts like 30 seconds. And then they give you a mantra. So a mantra, for people that don't know, there's a few different types of meditation. The type that I'm used to is the Headspace variety, which is the app, which is mindfulness. Meaning, you sit there, you follow your breath, you know, the attention is directed at the at the in and out flow of your breath, and that's kind of it. So mantra-based meditation is taking a word that doesn't mean anything, and you repeat it over and over and over in your head. And so you sit there for 20 minutes, and you take this word, and it's just like, let's say it's cheeseburger,

• 12:49Speaker 03

  and it's just like cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, like, over and over. And then eventually, you enter this somewhat hypnotic state. Did you find that that's kind of where it took you as well?

• 12:59Tim Ferriss?

  It does, or it can, I should say. And you can think of it, at least, and I'm sure there are people who are experts in this, who take issue with the analogy, but you can think of it almost as- A white noise machine for a waking state. So if you use a white noise machine to help you get to sleep, let's say, then this would be the equivalent for helping you to achieve a sort of alpha brainwave level of relaxed attentiveness that you, that some people might associate with flow.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 13:31Tim Ferriss?

  So it does help you to get into a hypnotic state. And what it, where I find it very helpful is if you feel compelled when you've practiced or attempted meditation in the past to kind of swat your thoughts away as if they were like flies buzzing in your face, it can get very, very frustrating. And by repeating a mantra, you are effectively overriding a lot of the internal dialogue or monologue.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:57Tim Ferriss?

  But yes, you can get into a very, very altered state of sorts, enhanced state.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, what's funny is it's a four day training course and I did the first day and it was literally the fruit sacrifice, then the introduction of the mantra. And by the way, the reason I said it's cheeseburger, cheeseburger is like they give you this mantra and you're not allowed to tell it to anyone. It's, it's like private, just to you. Later I looked them up online and there's like, you know, 15 of them. So you can just guess which one mine is, starts with an M. No, I'm just kidding. But essentially you do that and then I was a little upset. I finished day one and I was like, why did I, why did I really pay all this money for this?

• 14:40Tim Ferriss?

  Why do I have to say pun tang, pun tang over again?

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, like I could just like, I literally read it on the internet. I can just do this. And I was like, you know what? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to go back for day two. And I went back for day two and it all made sense after day two and I stayed for the entire four days. And the reason being is it's not-

• 14:56Tim Ferriss?

  And to be clear, when you say four days, at least when I went through the process, you're really, it's like an hour to two hours a day.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  I'm talking an hour and a half per day. Yeah. So in day two, it's funny because you learn it and it's really easy, but day two through four is all about helping you get over the little hurdles that appear throughout the entire process. And it's funny how they, they occur for everyone. It sounds really simple, but as you're doing the mantra, certain things happen. Like all of a sudden for me, I was doing the mantra and I started- Syncing the mantra with my heartbeat. And I'm like, whoa, that's weird. And then, of course, that distracts me, takes me away from the mantra. And then I don't, I don't know what to do. I'm kind of frozen. And so imagine like that, but with, there's probably 15 different things that you'll run into that are distractions.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  And they teach you how to kind of come back to the mantra, how to embrace that stuff. And, and it's, it's really, that's where the value is.

• 15:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's the practical tactical stuff.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Where there are, I think, two chief benefits, at least for me. One is you have someone holding you accountable to meditate for two sessions in between the in-person meetings.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:07Tim Ferriss?

  In other words, there is a consequence, i.e. embarrassment, to not performing the assigned work.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  Whereas when I tried meditation in the past, I'd buy a book, I'd be like, 90% of this makes no sense, I don't understand, but here's a little sidebar, fine, I'll follow my breath. And then I do it, and I'm like, am I doing this right? I don't know, I've got all these thoughts, I'm no good at this, I'm losing in meditation. I quit.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  And after a few days, I would stop doing it. But when you have someone you're going to meet with each day, who is going to want, in that hour and a half, to talk about your last two sessions, do post-game analysis, and help you with the issues that came up.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:41Tim Ferriss?

  You feel compelled, given that social pressure of sorts.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was great.

• 16:47Tim Ferriss?

  And the sunk cost. Quite frankly, I think that if I were to point to a benefit of the payment, although I hesitate to do that, but one of the benefits is, it's you, in a beneficial way, succumb to the sunk cost value. So you're like, wow, I already paid for it, so I might as well do it.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. And honestly, I asked a ton of questions, got a lot of value out of it. So that was great. And it's been about a month and a half now. I've been practicing and doing 40 minutes of meditation every day, seven days a week.

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  Two sessions, split into 20 minutes.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Two sessions, split into 20 minutes. And my wife, like Daria says, she notices a big difference. I don't know, I mean, I feel a little bit more relaxed, and I certainly, like, for me, my pressure points are, if too much is going on in my life, meaning if I have a lot of travel, combined with work, combined with board meetings, combined with fundraising, or whatever's going on, when I hit a certain critical mass, I kind of like... Break down a little bit and that's, that's where it's just too much going on. Why are you laughing?

• 17:47Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm laughing because this doesn't happen to anyone else. I don't know what, why you have this particular defect.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I know it happens to you too, so. This is, this is seriously, but it, that hasn't happened as much and I've been able to weather the storm a lot better. I don't, I'm not experiencing any type of effect other than just like, I would do the meditation and I will come out of it in a kind of slight daze. In fact, they tell you when you finish the session, the 20 minute session, to spend three minutes, um, just kind of slowly reintroducing yourself to the world.

• 18:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's like coming up from scuba diving. They're like, okay, hold on, you gotta equalize.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it's funny because I, I said, well, one time I didn't have that three minutes. I just got up and went and I felt a little weird afterwards. And, and the, the lady at the, that was instructing me said, actually, if that's going to happen and you know, you have to run, you have to go out to someplace, cut back the meditation time and still spend that three minutes because it's really important. You go pretty deep inside yourself and you're kind of a little dazed and people can get headaches or all kinds of things that they come out too fast.

• 18:51Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the, uh, the very,

• 18:56Tim Ferriss?

  Daria, if they come out too fast, Daria's pointing to a shirt that she had printed for herself, which says, that's what she said.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And that's why I married my wife. She makes those kinds of jokes.

• 19:04Tim Ferriss?

  And let's, uh, but let's, let's make it more concrete. Uh, we were just at dinner. We had a really nice dinner together and Daria said, you have been a rock. Like there's this, the, the, in the best way possible, meaning very stable and a dramatic difference. And I think that for, for someone who is doing that type of work, it can be in some, not all cases, difficult to discern the progress because it's like if you're, you know, gaining, uh, say a half pound of fat a month and then like, you know, a decade later, you're going to be pretty fat, but, uh, you won't notice it.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  A year later, you'd be pretty fat too.

• 19:44Tim Ferriss?

  That also, but the, the point being is terrible comparison, but it's like the boiling frog, but like you don't notice the improvement because you're exposed to it every day.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I noticed a big change in my sleep in particular. The onset to sleep has changed dramatically. I will be the first to admit, I am not as consistent. At all with afternoon sessions. So it's mostly for me first thing in the morning.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:11Tim Ferriss?

  And this particular type of meditation, I would say is probably not for everyone, but it can be very useful for some people. I think the social accountability, the camaraderie and also teacher-student relationship was what was most important for me.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you know, I like that. I really do like the foundation that they put in place in that they, once you pay for the session, it is, do you remember how much it was? I think it was like $1,200, something like that.

• 20:40Tim Ferriss?

  Something like that. It's, the cost has decreased over time from like $1,500 to $1,200.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you get to go back whatever you want. So like the teacher was like,

• 20:47Tim Ferriss?

  Refresh your courses.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, come back anytime. You don't have to pay anything. Hang out and I'll help you if you have running any more roadblocks. Like they were really friendly people.

• 20:55Tim Ferriss?

  So let me give a couple of suggestions. The first is, and the team folks are probably gonna hate me for this, but you can experiment with this, right? Using some type of mantra. And I hate that term. I think it's very loaded. But you could use a word that is say, like a two syllable word like nature, right? Like nature, nature.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Well, it's not supposed to mean anything.

• 21:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's not supposed to mean anything, but let's, let's not let

• 21:20Speaker 03

  When I like om.

• 21:21Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect be the enemy.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Om is a very common mantra.

• 21:24Tim Ferriss?

  You could use om also for, for some people who are allergic to yoga, like I was for a long time. They'll have negative associations. So you could use that. I've actually, even though I do have a mantra, I've used nature, that exact example.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  What does your mantra start with?

• 21:36Tim Ferriss?

  I am not gonna tell you.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  You can say the letter it starts with.

• 21:39Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna lie to you. It starts with Z. I'm such a hyper analytical person. I enjoy having a few superstitions that I hold on to.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  You drank the Kool-Aid. You totally drank the Kool-Aid.

• 21:47Tim Ferriss?

  No, I also don't like using red pens for like

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Signing anything. Yeah, I won't use red pens. I don't like cheersing.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Who even has a red pen?

• 21:54Tim Ferriss?

  I don't like cheersing with water.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  I don't like cheersing with water either. That's just weird. I'm not doing it for a superstition reason.

• 22:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so a couple of alternatives for people.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  No, I'm not. What, she's saying I'm doing it for superstition. I just don't like the idea of like, everyone drinking alcohol and I'm not, I don't have a glass of alcohol. No, it's not superstition.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's pure heart science.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Like, I like alcohol. I want a glass of alcohol.

• 22:19Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we won't belabor that. But for people who are interested in experimenting with this kind of thing, you can sort of bootleg an imperfect variation of it and experiment. I do think that people would derive benefit from it. But, like you said, having someone who can answer very specific questions, like, okay, you travel a lot. What are you gonna do if room service knocks on the door, comes in when you're in the middle of meditation? Like, what are the options? What is optimal? Et cetera, et cetera. And going through all those contingencies is very valuable. But you pointed out one, Headspace has worked tremendously well for a lot of my friends and a lot of people listening to this, for that matter.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Calm is another one that's worked well.

• 22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Calm is another. People, there are others who have enjoyed, and I've enjoyed quite frankly, I'm not a purist about it. I've used guided meditations from Tara Brach, who was introduced to me by Maria of Brain Pickings. Popova, Popova, Maria, I need to, I need to do a refresher on your name pronunciation. I apologize. What was it? Popova, there we go. I'm being, we need Daria here as a consistent fact checker. And the guided meditations by Tara Brach, B R A C H, are fantastic. She's also been on the podcast. Sam Harris has some great guided meditations. I think it's samharris.org.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  And there are many options out there for starting your day off in a relaxed, non-reactive, calmly effective state. And those are some of the options, I would say.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, one thing I will add on to that, and I agree with you, I would say if you're going to try mantra-based meditation, try to pair up with a friend or someone that you know that's done it before that can help you get over those hurdles. If you don't want to pay for the class. The nice thing about paying for the class, the only nice thing about paying that much money is it's, it truly is a forcing function to make you take it seriously.

• 24:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  I mean, I Went to day two because I was kind of pissed.

• 24:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  And I was like, why did I pay this much for it? I'm gonna get something out of it, you know? And then I went, I was like, okay, actually, I get it.

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? Like, this is way with all courses.

• 24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's true with a lot of skills also that are very frustrating in the beginning, right?

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 24:26Tim Ferriss?

  Like, let's take slacklining as an example.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Oh, God, I tried that at your house.

• 24:30Tim Ferriss?

  So slacklining is difficult and most people completely lose interest and quit after the first or second sessions because neurologically, they're not capable of the neurological and muscular control and coordination.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:46Tim Ferriss?

  You need a certain, this is my, at least.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  I mean, you saw me.

• 24:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you, yeah, your legs just go.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Like it was having seizures.

• 24:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so you require a certain number of sleep cycles, as far as I can tell, to sort of consolidate this procedural knowledge, right? Meditation, in this particular case, I think is very, very similar. It's like going out and snowboarding and like, I don't know of anyone, first day snowboarding, who's like, that was so much fun.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:12Tim Ferriss?

  You just eat shit and catch edges and smash your head on the slopes or your ass and tailbone for the entire time.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And if, in the world of meditation, that's where 95-plus percent of people quit.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 25:26Tim Ferriss?

  But if they were forced to do five days, they would, they would see the potential, right?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 25:32Tim Ferriss?

  They would have one good run or one good stretch and they'd be like, okay, now I'm hooked.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 25:35Tim Ferriss?

  A lot like surfing.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  That's why I like to take 10 from Headspace.

• 25:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Where they give you 10 days, 10 minutes a day. That was the first time where I got through all 10 days and I was like, ah. It was about day eight where I was like, oh, I get it.

• 25:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  I'm coming out of this more relaxed. I'm feeling stronger as an individual after I do this. So, anyway, we don't have to keep talking about meditation the entire time.

• 25:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, last thing I would say is it's, it's very similar to physical training for non-reactivity. So if you're interested and have been interested in the Stoic philosophical episodes that have been on this podcast before, related to Seneca and so on, a number of episodes by Ryan Holiday, if that interests you as an operating system for, for thriving in high-stress environments, that meditation is sort of the, one of the found, or mindfulness, which both terms bother me, but that type of non-reactivity, training that mentally as you would train yourself physically, is a foundational skill.

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  A meta-skill that allows all the other pieces of the puzzle to function well. Yeah. All right, what's next? Yeah, that was mine. What's yours? What's mine? Well, I'll give a couple of specifics. One is a fiction book that I just finished. And I said fiction with that particular emphasis because I've almost always been a non-fiction snob in the sense that I've taken a very hoity-toity position with fiction, which is, well, if I just want to make stuff up, I can do that myself. I want to get something, I want to get something concrete out of this. If I'm going to invest the time into reading a goddamn book, it needs to be valuable, actionable, takeaways, this and the other.

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  I've realized a few errors in that thinking. The first is that, just like, as is the case with movies, there are movies for entertainment, there are movies or TV shows just for complete stress relief, right? Like a Dumb and Dumber or something like that, which are brilliant in their own way. And then there are documentaries that you might watch, like Fog of War, to learn something or two. And I think it's very true with reading, not only that, but that you can better remember and incorporate some of the lessons from fiction, because they're stories well told and we are programmed to be story remembering machines.

• 28:01Tim Ferriss?

  The truths and the truths that are embedded in fiction often are more utilitarian than the dense non-fiction that is just going to fall through your brain or out of your brain like sand through the fingertips. That's been my experience. So I've actually realized that fiction can have not only a rejuvenating, relaxing effect by turning off your problem-solving apparatus, but you can actually incept yourself or embed truths that are helpful. And one book that was actually recommended by our mutual friend, Chris Sacca, who's been on this podcast, on track to be, or if not already,

• 28:43Tim Ferriss?

  the most successful venture capitalists of all time, based on his first fund. The novel is How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I think I'm getting the title right. And I'm blanking on the author's name. Pakistani author. And that's, that's as I remember it. And it is a fascinating novel. It's beautifully written. And the, I've never seen such incredibly glowing reviews of any book. I mean, it's, it's just woven together in such a powerful way. And what makes it very, very unique is the voice that is used and the perspective.

• 29:28Tim Ferriss?

  So the entire book is written from first person. What I mean by that is it's like you awake to pain in your left eye. You're laying down under your mother's cot with your head on the dirt.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Oh, I like this. This sounds cool.

• 29:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I was told about this by Chris.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  It sounds like a video game almost.

• 29:46Tim Ferriss?

  It does. And Chris told me about this. And I thought to myself afterwards, I should really, I should really read that. And the second thought was that conceit, like that way of, of, of writing the book will be really fascinating and cute for like 10 pages and then it's going to drive me insane.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  And it didn't at all. You just seamlessly become this character. And it, I don't want to kind of spoil it, but it goes, it's, and it's written as a parody of a self-help book, which is awesome and hilarious. And there's a lot of truth and a lot of sort of timeless wisdom embedded in this book.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Is it on Audible or just?

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm sure it is. Thank you. Yeah, there we go. Thank you, Daria. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a novel, Mohsin Hamid. M O H S I N, last name H A M I D.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  The reason we're not getting our facts right is I have no internet at the house right now. So Daria's like looking things up on her phone.

• 30:46Tim Ferriss?

  And here is the. Quote, and there are many like this, from Michiko Kokutani of the New York Times, audacious Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers. It's a beautifully written book. Cool. So if people are looking for a shift in the gears, perhaps a break from the relentless pursuit of dry facts, then I think this is a fantastic way to spend a few days. I got so into this, I read this book in maybe three days, tops, I think two days probably, read it in a weekend. It's fantastic. So that would be the most recent read that I'm into.

• 31:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'll bring up one other one that's really weird, or maybe an odd, an odd choice and an impulsive purchase, which is a book of poetry. I'm not a poetry reader. And I was in a Barnes and Noble at Union Square in New York City, and there was a, there was a very, really thin collection of poetry sitting there called, I might need Dari again, I think it's Night with Exit Wounds. And I think the author is Ocean Vuong. That's a great title, by the way. Oh, it's fantastic. That's what caught me. And the last name, I'm pretty sure is

• 32:09Tim Ferriss?

  Vietnamese, V U O N G. And, so I got it right. It's a Night with Exit Wounds. And I was like, whoa. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Night Sky with Exit Wounds, thank you. And I opened up this book, it's very small, and I started reading one poem in the morning when I wake up, and one at night. Or if I feel stressed, I use it, just like I use fiction, to short circuit the pro-con, hyper-analytical what-if brain that can drive me completely bonkers. And it works, works really well. Now, I will warn people what I didn't know about this.

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm not, I don't think it would have affected my purchase, but this author is very gay and very explicit. So there's some pretty hardcore action in this, in this book. So if you're reading along, if you're reading along and you're like, whoa, hey now, like that will- Seems to be some crazy shit. That will probably happen a few times, but the language and some of the poems, I don't like at all. And that's okay. But like every third or fourth I read, and this is a first for me. The wording is so evocative of unusual imagery, like the night sky with exit wounds,

• 33:27Tim Ferriss?

  that it twists my brain. It's almost like mental yoga. It's because my brain struggles to piece together an image that makes sense. And a lot of these poems don't seem to make a lot of sense, but there are four or five turns of phrase that stretch my ability to visualize in such a way that I find it just opens doors to perception or gives me other lenses through which I can view the rest of my day. Oh, sweet. Sounds odd, I know, but, and I've never really read or pursued poetry in this way. But very impulsive chanting, very impulsive purchase based on chanting across this book.

• 34:10Tim Ferriss?

  And I've really enjoyed it. So I think it's going to reignite my interest in certain types of poetry, like those that were introduced to me by Rolf Potts, the writer and author of Vagabonding, one of my favorite books. So that's a to be continued. I don't think I will become a poet. I don't have sort of the hubris to think that I have the capacity for that. But also the way this book is formatted is so odd as someone who's accustomed to- Narrative fiction or nonfiction, because the words will be scattered around the page for one poem, then the next will be an unbroken paragraph of text with no punctuation.

• 34:52Tim Ferriss?

  And it's just so jolting that I find it serves as a pattern interrupt for me, just kind of like.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  It's almost like an art in a way.

• 35:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  You're getting a little piece of art on every page.

• 35:04Tim Ferriss?

  It absolutely is. So that's been an interesting experiment, unintended experiment of mine recently.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 35:12Tim Ferriss?

  The last, I would say, is, maybe not the last, but probably would jump into some questions after this, is that I am going to be, as promised, donating at least $100,000 to psychedelic research at top universities this year, 2016. And I've already raised, I think it was 90-something thousand dollars for Johns Hopkins in looking at the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, it's depression that has not been addressable by any conventional means. And I'm going to be doing more work and funding research. So thank you, first and foremost, to everybody who contributed to that campaign. It was a huge success.

• 35:57Tim Ferriss?

  Things are already underway. Very excited about what will be discovered that can be used in that trial.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  What is that? Give me the quick 30 seconds for people that aren't familiar with this. Like, what is the trial? What are you testing?

• 36:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  I get that it's depression that can't be treated with anything else, but what does the actual trial look like? What do they receive?

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  So the structure of the trial, so if I will, if people want to read all the details, they can go to crowdrise.com/timferris. The trial has actually been upgraded. So what happened, it will be relatively small sample size. So if I'm pulling this from memory, but I think it's six to 12 people.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Can I be one of the...

• 36:36Tim Ferriss?

  Unfortunately not, unless you want to move to Baltimore and fill out a very long questionnaire and qualify for it. But the purpose is to determine whether, as I, again, I'm pulling this from memory, so I encourage people to check out the website. A single or several administrations of standardized psilocybin.

• 36:59Tim Ferriss?

  And if I had, this is again, totally guessing, but if I'm guessing probably .25 to .35 migs per kgs, milligrams per kilogram, which would translate to what would generally be considered a heroic dose.

• 37:13Tim Ferriss?

  And if I'm getting this wrong, then you can go to my blog and leave a comment and let me know. But to see the effects, measurable effects and persistence of effects of psilocybin in patients who have not responded, chronic depression that has not been addressable or treatable with other pharmaceutical or therapeutic means. And they will be also using, again, pulling from memory, this was a few months ago, FMRI and other imaging tools to look at, to try to determine how, if there is a demonstrable and statistically significant effect, how psilocybin has this particular effect.

• 37:58Tim Ferriss?

  And there is, there is good science and more science on the way to indicate that there are some incredibly powerful applications of psilocybin, for instance, in the treatment of different types of addiction. And it's not a panacea, it can't be used for everything, but in terms of nicotine addiction or alcoholism, tremendously effective, at least based on the preliminary data that we have thus far.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  So when you're administering this psilocybin to someone, I mean-

• 38:32Tim Ferriss?

  Can I finish one thing?

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, go for it.

• 38:34Tim Ferriss?

  So the purpose of me bringing it up was not to say, "Hey, guys, I'm donating a bunch of money to psilocybin, please give me a gold star." It was to say that I'm doing a second campaign.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Oh, sweet.

• 38:43Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm going to be, instead of using crowdfunding, because I want, as everyone listening who's a long-term listener knows, to run an experiment. I want to, I want to figure out not only what works in the scientific arena with these compounds or not, but what are the most effective, non-traditional ways of fundraising for scientific studies? So I'm going to be, and have already designed and will be selling a number of themed t-shirts that should be available by the time you hear this, and you can check those out by going to fourhourworkweek.com/mushroom.

• 39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, which is traditionally where one finds psilocybin. Uh, not all mushrooms, so don't go out foraging yourself. That's a good way to get dead. But, um, yeah, fourhourbreak.com forward slash mushroom. And I'm, I'm curious to see if merchandising is a more efficient way to raise, say, a hundred thousand dollars for scientific research than crowdfunding? And in turn, comparing those to the, the usual approach, which is a director of, of development for, say, fill in the blank university or fill in the blank nonprofit, has a dinner at someone's house where they invite a bunch of muckety mucks and then they have one-on-one conversations infused

• 40:04Tim Ferriss?

  with a lot of wine to convince people to donate X amount of dollars.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Fifteen to 25 grand and that's what you hope for.

• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

  Or you try to land a whale, right?

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to see if there are more elegant ways of doing that.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. The t-shirt looks pretty cool. You're wearing it right now.

• 40:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm wearing, I'm wearing one of the shirts right now. It's very comfortable. I, uh, I am, I, I spent a disturbing amount of time picking out the materials for these shirts. Just a real stickler. It's always bugged me when, uh, let me give two examples. So I've seen some shirts I would have been totally down to wear that are, now these are from, say, South by Southwest, where like every startup is giving away free shirts, which is generally a waste of money, by the way, startups, but some of them are so comfortable that I've worn ridiculous shirts just because they're a good material.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  The problem is they always give you extra large.

• 40:54Tim Ferriss?

  But they give you like extra large mu mu shirts with like a 20 by 20 inch logo that makes the front all stiff and plasticky. It's just like, who is gonna wear that?

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:04Tim Ferriss?

  You tried to cut corners to make a like, a minimally expensive shirt and as a result, you wasted all of it, right? So it's like you spent whatever, I'm making these numbers up, but like you spent five dollars or like two dollars a shirt.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  It's more like 10.

• 41:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So you spent like $10 a shirt. You did a thousand shirts just because you didn't want to spend 15,000 and now that 10,000 is going to be entirely wasted because no one's going to wear it. Whereas you could have just spent 50% more and actually have some measurable ROI of some type. Anyway, sorry, it's a pet peeve. I fucking hate. I have no fashion sense. I wear a lot of t-shirts. I happen to, I think a lot about t-shirt comfort.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  I have a question about mushrooms.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  So, you know, the typical college Kevin, like, you know, that has experience with mushrooms is, you know, you get a chocolate, you get a bag, something like that. When you do these trials, how do they, how do they measure this? Are they grinding up mushrooms and weighing them out? Like, how do they actually administer?

• 42:04Tim Ferriss?

  My understanding is that it's synthesized.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:08Tim Ferriss?

  It could be extracted, but this is actually one of the largest constraints. I mean, with a compound that is effectively as tracked and regulated as like plutonium. It's scheduled in the same class as cocaine and heroin. So it is extremely difficult to get the approvals on many different levels, including, you know, IRB for human trials, to initiate this type of research. But let's just say you get all the approvals. And I'm making these numbers up. I wish I had a few people here to help me with accuracy, but let's just, for the sake of argument, say that you get the approvals and then you want to get, say, five grams

• 42:51Tim Ferriss?

  of psilocybin. It's something crazy, like $15,000 a gram to get a hold of it because there are no economies of scale since the, since the

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Who's growing it?

• 43:04Tim Ferriss?

  The research is

• 43:05Speaker 03

  It's not being grown. It's all synthesized.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  Synthesized or extracted. I don't know specifically I should, but the, so there's a nonprofit, pretty sure it's a 501(c)(3) called, oh, man, Daria, maybe if you could help me out here. I think it's USONA, U-S-O-N-A, or maybe USANA, which has, I believe they're behind this, has purchased a very large quantity.

• 43:32Tim Ferriss?

  In bulk, so that they can then distribute at cost to researchers. It's actually a really brilliant approach. And doing this all through legitimate legal means, so they have all the necessary clearances. But what this does is it removes the, one of the largest constraints currently, which is a capital constraint. Universities have fundraising, fundraising has to be allocated. If you have a six-person study and it's going to cost, whatever it is, an additional 50 to 100 grand, even if all your research is well-planned, even if you get all of the proper boxes checked, if you don't have the money, you don't have the money.

• 44:12Tim Ferriss?

  So this will in part remove that limitation. So it should greatly improve the, the number of researchers who are performing studies using psilocybin, which is very exciting.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  That's great. Yeah, the first time I'd read about it being used in research was probably about six months to eight months ago. There was a, a study that was done, I don't know if you heard about this, in New York, actually. This, this, this kid that was actually studying to become a doctor came down with cancer. And he was having absolutely horrible anxiety. And he knew how to check himself because he was pre-med, and so he was like rubbing his lymph nodes all the time and like really freaking out to the point where the doctors were like, "You need to stop rubbing your lymph nodes." He was causing rashes where he was rubbing them to check for cancer, like just went off the deep end. And they, they had this study, he took part, he swallowed these, these capsules or whatever

• 45:15Speaker 03

  they had, this psilocybin, and knocked out his anxiety 100%. Even though he still had, at the time, like stage four cancer, he was just okay with dying at that point.

• 45:26Tim Ferriss?

  This is where I, this is one of the areas that is...

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  Very active, I mean, very being relative to such a controlled substance is end of life anxiety or depression for, as in one instance, terminal cancer patients. And so there's actually a very good article written some time ago by Michael Pollan called The Trip Treatment, which was in The New Yorker, very much worth reading, and talks a good deal about this. So that is one type of study that I'm looking to and will be funding more of. And there are actually two on deck. And I think it's very important to fund studies

• 46:11Tim Ferriss?

  that are easily defended at this point, at this nascent stage of research with a very unfairly scheduled compound. You have to really be on the up and up and be on best behavior and have as many sort of insurance assurances and insurances as possible to ensure that you can defend a study, not just scientifically, but politically, right? So these, these particular populations in the early stages are important to choose wisely. And it's very hard to say like, fuck the cancer patient who's gonna die. Like,

• 46:54Tim Ferriss?

  let that guy have as much, have incredible anxiety and depression. Very, very hard to attack that. And similarly, you know, I find it very compelling to look at the treatment resistant depression, right? Something that has not responded to other medical options to date. Or veterans with PTSD.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Don't you feel like you can use kind of marijuana as a template here? Like, they've been very successful at creating cannabis related compounds to treat and help cancer patients with pain and other things. That was kind of like the foot in the door strategy to kind of open the door to further research.

• 47:31Tim Ferriss?

  Potentially, potentially, definitely. And I've spoken with, I've spoken with some people who have had very deep involvement on the sort of political legislative side with cannabis. But yes, I do think there are lessons to be learned, both things to do and things not to do. So that is, that's something that I continued to be very passionate about. So if you want some super comfy.

• 47:59Tim Ferriss?

  They'll make your nipples hard, but in a good way. T-shirts, go to fourhourworkweek.com/mushroom. And one is very subtle, one is not so subtle. And you can, you can decide if you want, if you want to sport some team colors. And all of the proceeds, I'm not keeping any of it. All of my proceeds 100% are going directly to research. So that is something I'm very much looking forward to.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Awesome. All right, so I have one quick little book and then we can move into the Q and A's. Does that sound good?

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  All right, so the book that I'm halfway through right now, and I hate to, to recommend something when I'm only halfway through it, but I'm really enjoying it so far, is called Moonwalking with Einstein. Have you read it?

• 48:42Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't, but I know a good, I know a good deal about it. Joshua Ford?

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's essentially, he was a writer that eventually went on to, well, he was, he was covering national memory champions. And so he was assigned this beat. He thought he was just gonna write a single article about these memory champions. And then he got pulled into actually performing and learning the tricks of the trade to become a memory champion.

• 49:05Tim Ferriss?

  Now, memory champion includes things like memorizing the order of the cards in a shuffled deck.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  That's right. Or a unpublished poem handed to you, names and faces of like 50 some people. They hand you like these cards with names and faces and you get like a minute to memorize all of them.

• 49:25Tim Ferriss?

  Digit strings, maybe?

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, random strings of digits. Just, it's, it's insane stuff that for someone like me that has a really horrible memory was like attracted to this book. And so, you know, kind of where I'm at right now, they talk about this idea, I'm sure you've heard this before, of a memory palace. Do you know much about this?

• 49:44Tim Ferriss?

  I know all about it.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so why don't you?

• 49:46Tim Ferriss?

  The Loki technique.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, give your, your take on it. I'm curious.

• 49:50Tim Ferriss?

  A memory palace, I used to be really, really into this stuff. And also, I don't know if he's popped yet, up yet in the book, but Ed Cook, who's the coach. In Moonwalk with Einstein, or at least one of the coaches is a very close friend of mine.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  No way.

• 50:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 50:06Tim Ferriss?

  And he has been on the podcast, talking about memory stuff.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 50:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  How did I miss that episode?

• 50:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, he's great. And we did it when I was on the West Coast and he was in London. So he was, he had plenty of booze. It was great. And he's hilarious. He's a hilarious Brit to start with.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  They talk about them drinking in the episode and going out.

• 50:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's no joke.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  And like using it to hit on girls and stuff by memorizing.

• 50:29Tim Ferriss?

  It is hilarious. So you should definitely check out the episode. But he, to the memory palace. Memory palace has been used for ages in, in one form or another, in many different cultures. And unless I'm getting this wrong, it's also called the loci technique, which means location. And the way it's used is very simple. You have a predetermined location or route that you are familiar with.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 51:00Tim Ferriss?

  And you can then, in the process of giving yourself a tour of this location in a predetermined, say clockwise fashion around the, the perimeter of the inside of a concert hall, or walking from your front door to your favorite coffee shop, where you pass 16 different buildings and a bunch of different landmarks and so on. You can place items that you want to remember along that route in a particular order.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:31Tim Ferriss?

  And that allows you to do some very interesting things. Not only can you remember things by using imagery, which we're, we're definitely visual creatures, you can also recall them out of order. So somebody could give you, and let me get, let me take one step further. So if you wanted to remember, I used to do this as a party trick. In college, I was really into this stuff for, for a very brief flash in time. I was a neuroscience major. I was very interested in how to stretch the capacity of cognition. And you, what you can do is take the abstract and convert it into the concrete, ideally into the form of images. And you can do that with.

• 52:12Tim Ferriss?

  With numbers, for instance, you could take the numbers from 1 to 100, right? So 1, 2, 3, da, da, da, then you have like 21, 73, whatever it might be. Convert the numbers 0 to 9, so 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 into specific letters. All right, so let's just say 0 is S or Z, 1 is T or D, which both have 1 downstroke, right, 3 is M, 3 downstrokes, 4 is R, let's just say, like 4, last letter R, okay? And so on. And then, let's just say, you decide well in advance that 12, as an example, is 10,

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  right? So T and then N, 2 downstrokes, so 10. And so anytime you have a 12, it's automatically 10. And maybe that's the Tin Man. All right, and so let me show you where this goes. So let's just say you have, you are, this is what I used to do. You have a route from your front door to your coffee shop, and somebody gives you a $1 bill, $5 bill, 10 and a 20. And you say, "Okay, I'm gonna memorize the serial code numbers on all of these," and give them back to you. The way you would do that is, the way I did it at least, is I would take, I would take pairs of numbers and go in fours.

• 53:39Tim Ferriss?

  So let's say my first stop, I walk out the door, and there's a, there's a yellow fire hydrant. That's the first kind of landmark that I pass. So if, if the first 4 numbers are like 1, 2, I'm just making this up, like, K's, I'm sorry, 7, 0, all right, I'm making that up. So the reason I said K is that 7 is a K, and then 0 is S or Z, like I said. So 1, 2, 7, 0. All right, so 10, I have Tin Man. 7, 0, I'm just making this up. Let's say it's, okay, Kaz would be 1, right? So Kaz, in my mind, I associate with this guy named Bill Kazmeyer, who was the world's strongest man champion for ages, just a complete beast. I know what he looks like. So now I have the Tin Man and Kazmeyer, Bill Kazmeyer, Kaz, fighting.

• 54:27Tim Ferriss?

  Around this

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yellow fire hydrant. Okay, now I have my, I have four numbers. Boom, I can move on to the next one. And by doing that, you can get to the point very, very quickly where you're memorizing a hundred plus random numbers at a time.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's really incredible.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  So I'll give you my, my very first exercise in the book that I, that I came up upon is that it's the same idea. This time you picture your childhood house and you, everyone tends to know their childhood house pretty well. Or a location that you know quite well. You lived there for a long time. And they start you off at the sidewalk. So you're standing on the sidewalk, right by your mailbox. And so you think you're gonna put an item down right there. And so in this case, he wants you to memorize like 15 different items on a grocery shopping list. And the first thing is pickled garlic. And so you put a glass of pickled garlic right there when you're walking in, right on the corner.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  You visualize the glass, you visualize how it tastes in your mouth. The logo on the outside, the type of screw down cap that it has. And the more connections you can make to how it feels, how it tastes, the size of it, what it looks like, the stronger of, you know, of reinforcement is in your brain. And so that is one location. So just like you, you pick, next one up is like, you know, by your garage door or either the, the front door. And next one is, you know, inside the house in your kitchen or whatever comes next. And so you pick like, you know, these 10 different locations. You place one object down at each location. And sure enough, like I can go back days later and tell you exactly where the pickled garlic was, right?

• 56:11Tim Ferriss?

  And anyone, I mean, I shouldn't say anyone, but almost anyone can do this. And what I used to do, I was lazy. I didn't want to use, so if, if you use the same location over and over and over and over again, I found at least that there was a fair amount of interference. And I would get confused because I recall something that I already put in a specific place. So what I would do, if I was sitting in, you know, the equivalent of like a bar on Princeton campus, hanging out with somebody and they're like, oh, you do some, I heard you do some weird memory shit. Like, hey, like, you know, dance for me monkey. And I'd be like, okay. And, and so I would actually look around the room that I was sitting in. And I would place wherever, within the direction I happened to be facing, and I would place the images.

• 56:56Tim Ferriss?

  Around the room and what was so wild about that is that it was so unique a signature, it was so unique a frame that I could see the person two, three days later and I'd be like, hey, do you still have that five in your wallet? I'd be like, go out the cereal code backwards and they'd be like, what? And people can get to that level of proficiency within a week or two of practice.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's not complicated.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, this is a great book. I'm enjoying it so far. If you're looking to improve your memory, you know, there's a bunch of little tricks that they're starting to unveil about halfway through the book. It's been a fun read and it's also on Audible too.

• 57:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've heard great things about it. There's another book, for those of you who want a compliment that I found extremely helpful and I believe the author, I haven't seen the book in probably 20 years, but I think it's Higbee is the last name, H I G B E E, Your Memory and How to Improve It. Barely sure I'm getting that right or partially right.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 58:02Tim Ferriss?

  And that is a-

• 58:03Speaker 03

  I'll check that one out as well.

• 58:04Tim Ferriss?

  That is a tremendous resource there because in my, I'd say sophomore year, all of the recreational reading I did was related to mnemonic devices and studying this type of, some people would call it artificial enhancement of memory.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  That's so funny. I, we didn't even know this when I sat down. Like you didn't even know I was gonna bring this book up.

• 58:28Tim Ferriss?

  No, I had no idea.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  I had no idea.

• 58:29Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there's another one, there's another book that's just a description of us, basically a super mind called Mind of a Mnemonist, like mnemonic, M N E M A, blah, blah, blah. Mnemonist, you can figure it out. Mind of a Mnemonist by A.J. Luria and talks about synesthesia and all this kind of crazy, crazy stuff, just Rain Man like-

• 58:52Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 58:52Tim Ferriss?

  ...abilities and beyond, which is, I thought was very inspiring, but it also highlighted- That when you have those types of gifts, it's often a very mixed bag.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:02Tim Ferriss?

  You have a lot of issues.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  They bring that up a lot in this book. They walk through a couple profiles of individuals that have had more or less perfect memories. And it's very daunting not to be able to forget certain things. It actually has really bad, like you want to be able to forget certain things. Like, we're built to forget certain things.

• 59:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  And it shows the consequences there, and they're not pretty.

• 59:23Tim Ferriss?

  No, they're not, which is why when I look at technology and living in Silicon Valley as I do, and the perspective of memory enhancement.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Using technological means. And I think that there's a lot of promise in developing some of these technologies, which are well in development at this point. I mean, well in development. I mean, this is not science fiction.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  You're talking about the low voltage to the brain stuff?

• 59:49Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm not talking about the, I'm not talking about TDCS, which would be the transcranial direct current stimulation.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Sounds right.

• 59:55Tim Ferriss?

  Am I getting that right? No, I've experimented with that.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Have you?

• 1:00:00Tim Ferriss?

  I have.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Gosh, we could just keep going on.

• 1:00:02Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna get to the Q and A. Yeah, we'll get, we'll do Q and A. And if you guys want to talk more about cognitive enhancement and memory, we can certainly do that.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  We should do another random show.

• 1:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, I have another recommendation for people, which is, have you guys seen Black Mirror?

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:00:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my God, you haven't seen Black Mirror?

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Wait, I did see that. You mean the little mini-series?

• 1:00:22Tim Ferriss?

  The mini-series that's like The Twilight Zone based on technology?

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  Oh. The first one was just kind of like...

• 1:00:28Tim Ferriss?

  The first one, look, the first one is creepy and gross.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  It is creepy and gross.

• 1:00:32Tim Ferriss?

  But there are, I really enjoyed it. There's some very good episodes.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  The one where like the, I watched the one where the president's like...

• 1:00:41Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's...

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Daughter gets kidnapped or whatever.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's the first, I think that's the first one.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's the first one.

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's a mind trip, but there's one episode about a not-too-distant future where you can replay memories that are, because your reality, your waking reality is being recorded through your eye. And you can replay them or project them for people, rewind, search for certain things. I don't think that we're that far away.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:01:11Tim Ferriss?

  But it definitely highlights some of the risks involved in that.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  I mean, that could be amazing, but it also could be really horrible.

• 1:01:17Tim Ferriss?

  I think it could be both, will be both. All right, Q and A.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Q and A, let's do it.

• 1:01:21Tim Ferriss?

  You want to take a stab first?

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  I'm gonna start first. This is kind of fun. I get to interview you and your podcast. I guess the random shows are a shared show, but this is more or less your channel. So here we go. What is one illegal substance that you've tried that has changed you for the better?

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Oh, got Tim Tim on this one.

• 1:01:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, psilocybin.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Psilocybin?

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  That's your number one?

• 1:01:52Tim Ferriss?

  That would be, I would say, the, that was the, I had a number of very transformative and formative experiences with psilocybin that were, I think, the tipping point for certain decisions and reprogramming.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  What did it do for you? What's the thing that, I mean, clearly, as mentioned just a few minutes ago with the research that you want to do, something happened, something happened and then it changed you.

• 1:02:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  What was, what was the change that happened there?

• 1:02:23Tim Ferriss?

  The change, I've, I would say I've always been a worrier. I've always had a fair degree of anxiety, which is not uncommon among A-type personalities.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Dude, this is me to the T.

• 1:02:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I heard at one point, and I want to know the attribution on this, so somebody, please, let us know. Just hit us up on the Twitters. At T. Ferris, at Kevin Rose. Let us know. But this expression that I heard, which rang so true to me, was anxiety is being trapped in the future and depression is being trapped in the past. So if you're a planner, if you're a control freak, what are you doing? You're constantly planning, what if this, what if that? Contingency A, contingency B. Makes you a fucking stress case. Dude, that's me. Yeah, so, and it manifests in different ways, right? Some people get angry, some people start losing their temper, other people develop physical symptoms.

• 1:03:17Tim Ferriss?

  Some type of, whether it's any GI discomfort, acid reflux, whatever it might be, right? Acid reflux, I've had it all. Yeah, so, so what my experience was, is that at sufficient dose, and this is something you really need to do with proper supervision, and I'm not just saying that as ass-covering sort of liability lip service. There are many cases of people using psychedelics in the wrong circumstances and dying. You can make very bad decisions, step out in front of traffic, you can jump out of a window. Like, there are many different ways that you can horribly injure or kill yourself if this is not used. But not from like overdosing from this little side, right? No, it's from making very poor decisions because you think you can fly or something like that.

• 1:04:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right, or drive your car or something stupid. Right, all terrible ideas. So you need proper supervision, but with all those caveats, let's use a comparison. I think we've all had the experience of opening up a computer. Let's say you're using Chrome, doesn't really matter. You have thirty tabs open. And you're running out of storage. Yeah, okay, I'm looking at Kevin's computer right now, it looks just like mine. So you have like thirty tabs open. That's at least thirty. You have thirty tabs open. Warning, startup disk almost full. Oh shit, what do I do? And then Dropbox is syncing. Why is my computer running so slow? Oh, Slack's also on. And, not necessarily the Mac, but something else, it's like, why is my system so goddamn slow?

• 1:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the antivirus is on. You have antivirus on a Mac? I don't, I said on a non-Mac. Okay.

• 1:04:53Tim Ferriss?

  For me, what a high dose or moderate, moderate to high dose psilocybin experience does is it serves as a hard reboot. It basically just cleans that entire system, flushes the cache, and allows me to regain a sort of 30,000-foot view sanity in view of larger pictures and my most important priorities and remove all of that noise. And the anxiolytics, so the anxiety decreasing and sort of depression, which I've also battled with, suppressing effect, for me, the first time I used it lasted, I want to

• 1:05:38Tim Ferriss?

  say, three to six months.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:05:40Tim Ferriss?

  It was unbelievable. It was just unbelievable how persistent it was. And so I would say that is my answer.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Hmm. That's fascinating. That's awesome. Good answer.

• 1:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks. So I'm going to ask a few questions that I don't think I got around to asking the first time.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  When you hear the word "successful," who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, I would probably say Philip Rosedale.

• 1:06:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Who's Philip and why?

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  So he created Second Life way back in the day, the virtual world Second Life. And I have interviewed him on my show, Foundation, back in the day. I had a podcast called Foundation. You can still find it. So I think it's foundation.bz, where I interviewed a bunch of entrepreneurs several years ago. And the reason that I like him is on a couple fronts. One, I feel that he is a very creative person that doesn't

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  It fully accepts risk and just goes in headfirst and is willing to try really wild and crazy ideas and really doesn't care if they fail and always has done that throughout his entire career and had been very successful at it and he continues to do that today. And I just, you know, I really admire people that aren't afraid of failure and willing to try big, bold things. And I think like Elon Musk would be an easy answer on this front because he's trying so many really cool, big, bold ideas. But-

• 1:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  Founders of Google, another, I mean, another example.

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, the founders of Google, but I-

• 1:07:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's Larry Page who said, you know, the, one of the things that people miss is that if you're, and I'm paraphrasing here, but if you aim big enough, it's very hard to fail completely. Like you take something from it or you learn lessons that then you can parlay into the next thing that is successful.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  I think that the problem I have with the founders of Google, and I've had the pleasure of meeting these guys, and I think they're, I'm not knocking them at all. They're really brilliant guys, like clearly have created an amazing organization that continues to do great work. The issue I have is that, and the reason I like Philip and I picked him over like the founders of Google-

• 1:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  You're mad about your AdSense account.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  They banned my AdSense account. No, no, seriously, it's because that Philip has these ideas that are just so crazy. Like you'll have to go back and listen to my other podcasts about like how to manage people and how to manage projects and how to get group think to come together and create beautiful things. And it's just, they're kind of out of this world ideas and I, I'm attracted to that. For some reason, I like the really crazy thinkers. Like I just had Jason Fried on my podcast that I do for the journal podcast that I do, and he has created an amazing startup, but he, he was like, we were talking about the culture that he creates at his company. One of the things that he said is that I want to pay people for getting eight hours of sleep.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Like, and he wants to track that. Like, you come in with your Fitbit, you auth in your account, and it shows that you slept a full eight hours and you get paid a bonus. Like, that's amazing. Like, he really cares about how can I take care of the entire life cycle of an individual in ways that I've never heard about before. So those are the types of ideas that aren't just, you know, how can we create a better browser? How can we create a self-driving car? They're just really, I don't know.

• 1:09:21Tim Ferriss?

  I was just, I was thinking with a Fitbit, you could, you could try to pay people for having like an hour of sex a day.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  That, that.

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  Has an accelerometer. You should be able to figure it out.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  But it says.

• 1:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. You'd have to wear a belt while you were boning, I guess.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  There's, there's, um.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, this question is where would you attach it?

• 1:09:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's true.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  There could be like a Fitbit cock ring or something, I guess you could do. So, no, no, seriously, let me, let me say one last thing on this topic and then we can move on.

• 1:09:52Tim Ferriss?

  The butterfly.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, my head all messed up now. The la, the last thing, though, is that, um, I think that in, in being a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley for so many years, like, we see the same pitches over and over, and you see modifications of, hey, I'm the Uber for this. Hey, I'm the Twitter for that. Hey, I'm the MySpace for this.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  Me too, also ran stuff.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  It's the, it's the, um, Peter Thiel, like, true zero to one jump. Like, those big ideas that are new and beautiful and ugly and scary and all those things that you find them so rarely in founders. And I, I like those types of founders, and so that's, that's why he came to mind.

• 1:10:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and Philip also has a tremendous amount of stamina. I mean, he's been in the game for a long, a long time. He knows how to kind of modulate and, uh, I'm not gonna say, I don't think pacing is the right word, but he's been very consistent.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Big time meditator, too.

• 1:10:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Invented, invented his own form of meditation. I'm not joking.

• 1:10:54Tim Ferriss?

  What, what characterizes it?

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  He counts to like, what was it? It's more than 3,000. He gets like 10,000 a day. So he does mantra based, but based on counting.

• 1:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  And he just single, single digits, one, two, three.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were sitting there and he's like, yeah, I'm at 587 right now.

• 1:11:14Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, he does it as.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 1:11:16Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, wait, but as he's doing other activities? Oh, my God, that sounds difficult.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  He doesn't stop down to like, do it. He'll like have like.

• 1:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  So he'll like a conference call and he's at like 6,737.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  Right. And then he stops and then he goes, does it if he has a minute, he does an extra hundred.

• 1:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. Picks up.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, picks up.

• 1:11:35Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds so stressful.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  It totally does to me, but it works for him.

• 1:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, whatever works.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, all right. Next question. Let's bank through these. We got, it's after midnight now.

• 1:11:46Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  All right. Um, if you could, uh, that one, I kind of already asked. Well, let me ask it again. If you could change any law, what would it be? And you can't say drugs.

• 1:11:55Tim Ferriss?

  If I could change any law, what would it be? And I can't talk about.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  You asked me.

• 1:12:00Tim Ferriss?

  Mind altering substances. Uh.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  You asked me what my favorite breakfast cereal was on podcast one. So this is.

• 1:12:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's true. No, I asked you even, even worse question. I asked you if you could be a breakfast cereal, what would you be? What a fucking terrible question. God.

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  You were just getting started.

• 1:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  You know, we all, we all, we all start off a little wobbly. Oh, Lord. Uh, changing law. Let me think about this for a sec.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Is there anything that just drives you nuts where you're just like, why is that a law? You gotta have some political somewhere.

• 1:12:30Tim Ferriss?

  I do. I do. I mean, and I, well, I just because I've gone through this recently. I guess I've been told that I am a libertarian. I don't know if that's true or not, but I think that, let me give kind of a, a larger picture answer to that. I think that there are laws and perhaps all laws should be revisited and reassessed on occasion. Because there are certain laws that are put in place to, in the best cases, create the greatest good for the greatest number of people in circumstances that then change. So for instance, you know, I, I, I'm, uh, building a barrel sauna.

• 1:13:12Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, it's relatively small. It looks like a gigantic wine barrel, effectively. Based on plans that were given to me by Rick Rubin, who got them from Laird Hamilton. It's an incredible setup. Surprisingly inexpensive. And to put that on my own property out of view of any neighbors was just.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Like trying to broker a fucking peace treaty between like North and South Korea. Why did you tell your neighbors? What's that? Why did you tell your neighbors? No, no, no, no. It has nothing to do with my neighbors. It has everything to do with just getting city and town permits and all of that kind of stuff. Oh, just don't do that. Just do it yourself. Just don't do it? No, no, no. You have to do that. It's, uh, there are, in any case, this, this is, uh, this is just one example, but I really, I'm generally a small government guy. Uh, I, I really feel like, if you look at, for instance, um, crises or natural disasters, and this is a conversation I had with Sebastian Younger not too long ago, who wrote a great

• 1:14:12Tim Ferriss?

  book called Tribe, it talks about this, in earthquakes, in the, the blitz when London was being bombed during World War II. People develop social structures and rules that, uh, that keep the peace and assign roles to different types of people and, and create order amongst themselves. Now, I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying the government shouldn't exist, but I do think that we've edged too far into a nanny state type of dependency, which is, it's, it's not a healthy dependency whatsoever.

• 1:14:52Tim Ferriss?

  I think that it's, uh, it's created a stifling environment for certain things, whether it is this barrel sauna or hiring really good non-US citizens to work at your startup. Right. Uh, and I know a lot of icons in Silicon Valley, I've been working on it, but it's just like, why is this so hard? It's ludicrous. It is completely ludicrous. Uh, so those are, uh, you know, especially based in a country where the blend of cultures and innovation that we have is directly a consequence of massive immigration. It's just outrageous. So, uh, in any case, that's, that's my rant, but, um...

• 1:15:39Tim Ferriss?

  If I could change any law, yeah, nothing super specific.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  The sauna laws.

• 1:15:44Tim Ferriss?

  The sauna laws. I really need to, I need to provide more money to the sauna lobby, I think is what this comes down to.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Just do a fundraiser for the sauna.

• 1:15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm sure I could come up with a better answer if I thought more about it.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 1:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, here's one. I think that it should be easier to, for people to, and this is, I'm sure, state by state, not just federal. I think it should be easier for a loved one to take their loved one off of life support or provide ethical euthanasia in cases where that has been sort of pre-arranged. I don't think that the state should have a say in that. I think that if, if, if that is something that has been documented and agreed upon beforehand, I think that that should be an option in more circumstances.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Sucks to see people suffer.

• 1:16:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  All right. What's my question?

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, your question. These are, these are pretty, pretty short ones.

• 1:16:49Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what is the book or books that you've gifted most to other people?

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Uh, number one would be Miracle for, uh, Miracle of Mindfulness. Have you, uh?

• 1:16:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's, uh, Tikhon, huh?

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  That's right. Have you ever read that book?

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  Great book.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great. I mean, it was, it was the one that really got me into mindfulness and, um, really applying it to kind of everyday life. There's a story, um, in there where he talks about washing the dishes, uh, to wash the dishes.

• 1:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, instead of thinking about, I think it's the, the plum that you're gonna eat after the dishes.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 1:17:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's such a good anecdote, though, because, and, and the point being, like, if you're thinking about the plum when you're washing the dishes, when you're eating the plum, you're gonna be thinking about your fucking email or whatever it is.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Right. So his whole thing is, I mean, we should be in the moment and focusing on the task at hand, putting our full attention on that and really living that moment. And this is just a great, really short read. You can pick it up on Amazon for like 12 bucks. It's not an expensive book. And it's, it's one of my favorite when it comes to mindfulness.

• 1:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  What's second place?

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. Um, you know, just because of, of doing the whole social internet thing in the early days,

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  I would say that Wisdom of Crowds was a big one for me. That, that meant a lot to me and there's still some, some, uh, great little tidbits in there. Um, gosh, I'd have to think outside of that.

• 1:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Green Eggs and Ham.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  Green Eggs and Ham. I think those are my probably my top two.

• 1:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic. Since I gave a long-winded answer, I'll give you some airtime. I'll ask another question. Recent purchase, doesn't have to be recent, of a hundred dollars or less that has positively impacted your life. Or any purchase of a hundred dollars or less that had a significant positive effect in your life.

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  You know, I, I hate to plug my, my other podcast, but on episode number two,

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  I went out and of the journal, I went out and interviewed this guy that is a master of pens. Like he just knows more about pens than we do about anything else on earth. And he recommended like three pens that are, have the absolute best rollerball pen, the best fountain pen, and these are all like four dollar pens.

• 1:19:11Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  Some of them are really hard to find. Some of them like you can only find in Japan and.

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's convenient.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  No, but like you can find them online, but they're just harder to find. And I swapped out my entire stock of pens at the office at my desk with these cheap little three or four dollar pens and they're amazing.

• 1:19:29Tim Ferriss?

  Do you recall the names of any?

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  Yes, I can put them in your show notes. I will give his top three and they'll, they'll be there in the show notes.

• 1:19:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right. We'll put these in the show notes, guys. Fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And you can find show notes for this and all the other episodes.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  But that's just like, I think that for me represents kind of who I am as a person in that I like to, and you know this about me, I like to geek out on something and go really, really, really deep. And you think you're like this too.

• 1:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  I'm like this too.

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  Like you find something that you're into and I'm like, really? There's a better pen? Tell me more, you know? And he's like, ended up having a 30 or 40 minute podcast about notebooks and pens. And I'm like, well, that was super geeky. And I don't know if anyone will like it, but I have some awesome notebooks now. So that's, that's kind of what I like to do.

• 1:20:14Tim Ferriss?

  I like, I dig pens. I have a bit of a pen fetish myself. So this is, this is right up my alley.

• 1:20:20Speaker 03

  The next question for you.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  All right. What is one body experiment you wish you didn't do?

• 1:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, one physical experiment that I wish I didn't, that I did not partake in.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  You can't mention the double circumcision.

• 1:20:38Tim Ferriss?

  I can't mention the double circumcision. I'm sorry I did that to Toaster.

• 1:20:43Tim Ferriss?

  I do regret that. Sorry, Toasty.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  He's sleeping.

• 1:20:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, all right.

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  He's still in pain.

• 1:20:50Tim Ferriss?

  Good boy. Uh, the one that comes to mind is, uh,

• 1:20:59Tim Ferriss?

  all right, so I was in Cape Town, South Africa, doing research related to a number of chapters in the four hour body. I was getting muscle biopsies, which involves having something the size of a large pen stabbed into the side of your leg to cut muscle tissue out. Not super comfy. That one I don't regret. That got me a lot of really interesting enzymatic information, uh, related to endurance and so on, but also muscle fiber analysis, which was really fascinating. I was at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, and Dr. Timothy Noakes is there, brilliant guy, incredibly well-versed in the, in the worlds of ultra-endurance

• 1:21:42Tim Ferriss?

  and hydration, or lack thereof, and how the body responds to different states of hydration and performance implications. I wanted to do a very, uh, I should say, well-known, well-established running test. It's going to be an endurance test, which I'm not known for to start with. And I decided that I could use every advantage possible, and I had read in a number of places that resveratrol, which most people associate with longevity, which is the excuse, the excuse they use to drink red wine, whereas in reality, you'd have to have like 72 cases a day to get sort of the therapeutic dose used in clinical, something

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  absurd like that. Resveratrol also has apparently some incredible implications for endurance. And I remember seeing this video, I believe it was Super Rat. So there was like Normal Rat and then Super Rat, running on a treadmill. I want to say this is David Sinclair, perhaps, who did, and...

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  And they gave Super Rat resveratrol.

• 1:22:49Tim Ferriss?

  And it just, it's, it's endurance like doubled. It was just, it's runtime to exhaustion doubled, or something just obscene like that. And I said, okay, well, let me look at the research, figure out the dosing they used on the rats. Oh my god. The milligrams per kilogram. And then I- Oh my god, you ratted yourself. And then I ordered like, I ordered like five months' worth of resveratrol, like multiple bottles. Oh no. And consumed, don't do this at home, kids, consumed all of the bottles, because I had to consume something like 120 capsules to get the proper milligrams per kilogram. Now- Why would you do this? This is dumb. Well, there are, there are a couple of issues here, folks, for those of you who haven't realized this is dumb yet.

• 1:23:32Tim Ferriss?

  I couldn't, I couldn't figure out a way to expediently, if that's the right word, expeditiously perhaps, have this administered through injection, which is almost certainly how it was given to these rats, because they didn't feed the rats like resveratrol chow, I'm pretty sure. So they most likely injected it intramuscularly or intravenously. I didn't have that as an option, so I did it orally. Well, there are a bunch of issues that come up here. Now, I'll just flash forward and give you guys a snapshot, then I'll explain what happened. So I'm sitting there in this meeting, and I wish I could remember this guy's name, he was such a serious, brilliant, hilarious guy. I want to say it was Tertius, just a fantastic name.

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  And he's sitting there, and he's like, I'm not gonna try to do a South African accent, I wish I could, but he's like, what you have to understand here, you know, and he's like explaining this very, very seriously to me, and it's like a 10-minute kind of intro to what I'm about to do. And out of nowhere, I just start sweating fucking bullets, like cold sweat. How many pills did you take at this point? Oh, I had all of them, like a half hour beforehand. Yeah, I had like 90 or 120 capsules. So you were drinking like 10 at a time, like just kind of gulping them down? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm really good at swallowing pills. So I just start, I get this profuse cold sweat, like out of nowhere, click. It's just like pouring down my face. And he's giving me this very serious speech, and I'm trying to pay attention, I'm like blinking, because the sweat's coming into my eyes, and he's like- Are you okay?

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  You're like, I need a hamster wheel stat.

• 1:25:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, uh, do you have a bathroom nearby? And he's like, uh, sure. And he points me down the hallway and I kind of do like the butt squeeze waddle down the hallway and do like a reverse broad jump through the stall and just stay there for the next 45 minutes. So what I didn't realize, what was not listed in the ingredient list on these pills is, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting this right, there's something called, there was something used as a filler called Imodin and Imodin acts as a laxative. Yeah, no, I think it was Imodin. And I was just a disaster. So needless to say, completely killed my endurance. I did the running test.

• 1:25:43Tim Ferriss?

  It was 10 times worse than it would have been if I had not swallowed 120 pills.

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  You probably like lost a ton of water.

• 1:25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it was a complete disaster. So that was, that was-

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  You're lucky you didn't like have some crazy horrible side effect like, you know?

• 1:25:57Tim Ferriss?

  I, yeah, I mean, look, I don't recommend mimicking that behavior, but to the extent possible, I did do my homework. I read a lot on PubMed. I knew that there was a risk that I would have GI distress. I just didn't know that it would be like-

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  That severe.

• 1:26:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exorcist like style, but at the other end type of issue. So live and learn. I saw, I saw a T-shirt, I was walking around here, we're in New York City right now. And there's this other shirt that said, "Bad decisions make good stories." So I guess this is one of those examples.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:26:31Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give to your 20 or 25 year old self? You can choose which and place us like where you are and what you're doing.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  I don't know whether I should go 20 or 25. Okay, let's go 25.

• 1:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  So right around that time was, uh, let's just place it right around when I was creating Dig for the first time and, and created that site. And that kind of exploded and got a bunch of users and we grew that company to a pretty decent size. The issue though, was at that age- I had just really, I was still really immature. I just, and my biggest issue in what I would sit down with my younger self, I would say to that person would be to seek out mentors and to stop acting like you know it all.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  In that, when I didn't know something, I refused to learn it because I wanted to focus on what I already knew I was good at. And so, I was really good at the kind of creative side and coming up with like new feature ideas and product ideas and things like that. But when it come, when it came down to hiring a staff or interviewing folks or, you know, just all the other pieces of a business that you have to learn in order to succeed, I just didn't have any of that.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  And rather than admit that I didn't know it, I kind of just turned a blind eye to it and that caused a lot of problems later. For me, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to focus on this small little domain and hire other people to take over my kind of weak spots. And I just, first of all, didn't even know how to hire the right folks. And we hired some great people, don't get me wrong, but I kind of gave the keys to the castle to folks rather than taking on the hard work, which was, was admitting that I didn't know these things and, and putting in the time and effort to, to become proficient in them.

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  So that was, that's probably what I'd go back to that 25-year-old self is say, you know, it's a lot of the stuff that I'm, I'm still learning today. It's like now as like, you know, probably a fourth time, fourth or fifth time entrepreneur having a startup, it's like I'm putting a lot of time and effort. I feel like I'm mature enough now and then granted, I'm almost 40. But you know, it's, it's finally, it's, if I don't know something, I immediately go and say, okay, who's the smartest person in the room or who can point me in the right direction so that I can go and get schooled up on this? Because it's important. You can't just, you know, shuffle that stuff to the side and, and kind of let, let an ego get in the way when it, it shouldn't be.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Does that make sense?

• 1:29:36Tim Ferriss?

  Makes perfect sense. Yeah, I mean, the sort of short-term ego pain prevents the long-term sort of catastrophic pain.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly. And it only happens once, right? You have that small, little bastard ego for 10 minutes, but you get introduced to the right folks and you, you know, you admit that you don't know something. And then guess what? That, that never comes up again because you can go and get schooled up on that and...

• 1:30:04Tim Ferriss?

  So that's good advice. What is the, what is the worst advice that you hear being thrown around for startup founders or to startup founders? What is, what is some bad advice that's given frequently, do you think?

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  Hmm. Some bad advice that is given frequently to startup founders?

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  Or just bad advice in general. Something that you think is bad advice that you hear a lot?

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Well, certainly I know that I've seen many a startups that they believe that when they have a little bit of traction, now is the time to go raise a bunch of capital and just spend into that and hope for the best. And oftentimes you see a lot of bloat created and a lot of extra pressure to hit certain milestones that don't make sense and then cause you to make kind of really bad, short-term decisions for the business to bring in revenue when it's really not going to help you out in the long term. So, you know, I think there's a bunch of examples I could give here and I don't want

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  to pick on any one individual company, but let me pick on one company.

• 1:31:18Tim Ferriss?

  When people are like, "I don't want to be an asshole," but that usually means they're immediately going to be an asshole.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. There's that great Onion article that says, "Devil's advocate turns out to be just big asshole." I love that article. So true.

• 1:31:32Tim Ferriss?

  I heard this, sorry, side note, I heard this comedian say, when someone says, I'm a taxpayer, it means they're about to be an asshole.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  Totally. So, you know, I think a great example of this is like, you know, a company like, and I've seen this happen to a dozen different companies, but a company like fab.com, I was an angel investor there, brilliant, great founder, great seed of an idea, actually a great pivot from the site they were before into kind of very design oriented e-commerce play. Had a great following, was doing, you know, their conversions on these little flash sales that we're doing were working quite well, went out, raised several monster rounds, hired up a bunch of employees and just like really spent into this business and blew through a bunch of capital.

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  And then when that novelty kind of wore off, the business went away. That said, you know, there's, I think that growing thoughtfully and in line and in track and in parallel with your revenue and being a little bit more responsible around that and not going crazy on the kind of over raising capital and, you know, spending too much cash upfront is, makes a lot of sense. And, and I think that we're getting better at that as an industry. I think there's been enough fires now that people can see that's not the wisest way to go. That said, we still see things like Uber and others that are just raising monster amounts of cash. But the good news is that they have real revenue to back it up.

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  I think this was, this was very much a thing when you don't have the revenue and you're going and doing this, it's a, it's a bad, bad decision.

• 1:33:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's also, I mean, if we're looking at say fab versus Uber, right? The fab example is very different in the respect also that it's not necessarily a winner take all market where they have to dominate, say, a City or a country or a continent to become the de facto choice for, say, ride sharing, where there are certain network effects or marketplace dynamics at least, where if they have the most drivers, then they'll have the most riders, because the riders want to have the fastest pickup time.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:33:43Tim Ferriss?

  If they have the most riders, then they will be able to recruit the most drivers, et cetera. So that it's a virtuous cycle for the person who owns the most market share on both sides of that equation.

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:55Tim Ferriss?

  But in a fab case, or many cases like it, people just want to, and I think, I mean, I don't want to take us necessarily down this rabbit hole, but there are a lot of perverse incentives at play, and there are always perverse incentives, but particularly perverse incentives at play in an environment like we are either just coming out of or still in, wherein, and there are many people who disagree with this, and I don't have issues with smaller examples, but there are startups that are on their way to failure, the founders know, and they take a ton of money off the table, the employees see nothing, and then it just craters.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  And that, that is a byproduct of being able to raise these monster rounds, in part, riding momentum of eyeballs and so on as opposed to revenue.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:34:45Tim Ferriss?

  And, well, I think that's, yeah, I mean, one of the reasons that I just kind of got dismayed and disillusioned with a lot of the exchanges, I wouldn't even call them, because certainly not long-term relationship building, but a lot of the sort of transactional exchanges that happen in that startup ecosystem.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of positives to taking venture capital. One of the negatives is that the founders are pushed to build a bigger, bigger business. And so, you know, I think that if you go out and you, so for example, when I first launched Dig, I launched it as just a tech-only news site, and it quickly became the largest tech news site in the world. Like, there was no doubt, we had more traffic than every, at the time, it was like CNET's site, like CNET was big and a couple of their blogs. But when a certain amount of dollars came to the table, it was like, hey, we love what you're doing with Dig as a tech site, why don't you go into world news and politics and, you know, science, all these other categories? And so, we did that. And then it was like, well, you know what?

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  That's great. And you have 38 million people a month coming to your site. But wouldn't it be great if you could get to 50 or 100 million people coming to your site per month? So why don't you expand into something that, you know, my mom would like to use and embrace some of the traditional news sites and help them promote their content and things that just weren't naturally organic in our DNA?

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  And I think that that is the danger there. And that's where if a fab had stayed small, if a dig had stayed small, if some of these other sites had just really focused on their core and stayed true to their DNA, they wouldn't be forced to make these unnatural decisions that eventually lead to them being, not really servicing the right, their, their audience, their core audience.

• 1:36:32Tim Ferriss?

  Now, in fairness, though, I'll play devil's advocate slash asshole here, which is if you sign up for taking venture capital.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:36:39Tim Ferriss?

  You have to understand the.

• 1:36:41Speaker 03

  That's the.

• 1:36:42Tim Ferriss?

  You have to understand the economics of venture capital, which mean they, they need you to grow, right? Because they in turn have their bosses, who are the LPs, and they have a fiduciary responsibility to try to generate whatever it is, a 10x, 100x return for a few startups, because the rest are going to be dogs or dead or zombies, right?

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  And I think that's where as a founder, as Kevin, the 25-year-old founder versus where I am today, the difference is that the 25-year-old Kevin would have taken that as gospel, in that they're like, hey, you should go do X, Y, and Z. Okay, I'm going to go do that. It sounds great. You guys have been down this road before. Kevin today would say, thank you very much, trusted advisor, as you are as like if they have a seat at the board or something like that. And take that into consideration, because oftentimes it is great advice and, you know, eight times out of 10, you're going to agree with them. But there's that couple of times there where you're going to say, that doesn't make sense for my business and say, you know, I respect you and your idea, but we're not going to do that. That's just not, you know, and they can't force your hand at that unless they have

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  control of the board, in which case.

• 1:37:46Tim Ferriss?

  You're yourself in a really whole separate conversation.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Whole separate conversation there.

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  All right, I have two more questions for you.

• 1:37:55Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  First one, rapid, two rapid fires. Biggest misconception people have about you?

• 1:38:03Tim Ferriss?

  That I have an issue with hard work. I don't have an issue with hard work. I have an issue with hard work applied to stupid things. So you should focus on being effective, picking the right things to do before you focus on being efficient, which is doing things well.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Because you really only work four hours a week.

• 1:38:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God. The, here's the reality, and you know this, you're just like, I know you're like verbally just fucking tickling my balls to make me uncomfortable. The, the, the fact of the matter is, and you know this, I don't have to work at all if I don't want to work. Right? It's like, the, that is not the driver for me at this point in my life. The-

• 1:38:42Speaker 03

  I was just joking, you don't have to answer this question.

• 1:38:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God damn it. Not allowed to have booze right now, I could use some booze, but I'm not gonna do it for reasons I can't discuss, top secret. Continue.

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  Okay, next question. This is a very serious question, and I don't know if you'll like this question, actually.

• 1:38:58Tim Ferriss?

  It was very serious, and I dislike it, my favorite type of question already.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  But I, I think that, I think that other people out there, if I didn't know you as well as I know you, I'd be curious about this, okay?

• 1:39:08Tim Ferriss?

  The rumors about my 21-inch cock are all true.

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:39:13Tim Ferriss?

  I can't even blame it on the booze, I haven't had any. I guess I'm just-

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  You're 39.

• 1:39:17Tim Ferriss?

  39, dirty old man.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  39, is that right?

• 1:39:19Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm 38.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  38, sorry.

• 1:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Jesus.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  One year behind me.

• 1:39:22Tim Ferriss?

  Early, all set, Alzheimer's at my own age, too.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  So, you're not married yet?

• 1:39:27Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  You, I've known you for quite a while now, and I've seen you through a handful of relationships, but for those that don't know you, what do you look for in a, a woman? And what's like your take on, on dating? I'm curious, like, who dates Tim Ferriss? Like, what do you, what do you look for?

• 1:39:43Tim Ferriss?

  Masochistic, uh, ill-advised women. I know, that's not true, I'm joking. What do I look for? Well, I'll tell you, what I'm looking for is a half-Japanese, half-Italian, bisexual architect, super athlete, part-time swimsuit model.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  You're not joking, either. That's the funny part. I know you all enough to know that, like, you're joking for the podcast, but you're really not joking.

• 1:40:06Tim Ferriss?

  Who does, who does, who knows how to squat with at least body weight?

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  This is, well, actually, what you're looking for.

• 1:40:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'll put it this way, I wouldn't mind that. That sounds, that sounds like very enjoyable conversation.

• 1:40:23Tim Ferriss?

  I, what do I look for in a woman? I look for, I think, I think it's what, it's generally what I look for in a human being.

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  Do you want someone that can kick your ass, though? Like, do you have to meet someone? Like, you're a hardcore person.

• 1:40:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  I was saying of all my friends, like, you are like, even though you can relax and you meditate and all that stuff, but you're like, you're very into shit and take stuff very seriously.

• 1:40:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm hardcore about a lot of things and I can be hard around the edges. So, these are characteristics that I, I don't know if I could fix and I'm not sure I want to fix them because I've seen so many benefits from them. I mean, they've been useful tools.

• 1:41:07Tim Ferriss?

  So I will tell you, I've, I've dated women who are very, very feminine and yin. I mean, very kind of swirling in emotional range and very nurturing. And I've also dated women who are extremely tough and make me want to be more resilient, less reactive, hyper-driven. And both of those can work for me. I think what is important is that you can have someone who is driven and tough like

• 1:41:47Tim Ferriss?

  that, who doesn't feel the need to, to constantly butt heads to assert being an alpha. That is something I, I can't have in a relationship because I'm already that way. You can't have two of those in one room. It's like, what are they called? They're like Chinese fighting fish? You put them in a ball and they just fucking kill each other? Like, you can't, that, that, that in a dynamic doesn't work, right? Whether it's a, you know, heterosexual, homosexual, whatever sexual relationship, there, there has to be a complement of personality traits and strengths and weaknesses.

• 1:42:24Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I could go down a long list.

• 1:42:28Tim Ferriss?

  What do you want me to focus on? I can.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  I'm just curious like what it is that you're looking for now and like you, you know, we don't have to go, what's that? Yeah, I think that was a good answer.

• 1:42:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, and I'll be honest, there's a big part of me, I not too, too long ago, got out of a very long, very serious, fantastic relationship that I reflect on a lot. But ultimately, I wasn't sure what I was looking for in my life as it relates to family and or marriage. And that led to an indecision that was unfair, a level of indecision that was unfair to my partner at the time. And so when you ask me, what are you looking for? Part of me wants to say, I don't know. Like, I know what I can't stand, I can tell you that.

• 1:43:23Tim Ferriss?

  But what I, what I might look for in person that I'm envisioning as the mother of several kids of mine is very different from what I envision, say, if I, if I'm considering that my life might be a combination of different women.

• 1:43:43Speaker 03

  Oh, shit.

• 1:43:45Tim Ferriss?

  Or a lack of marriage entirely. But having, say, maybe I have a wife and then a mistress. Maybe I have who's like they, and they both know each other. Maybe I have two wives. Maybe I have a raise the Red Lantern situation with like six wives. Sounds like a huge headache on a lot of levels to me personally, but, or maybe it's a series of very intimate lovers that I stay in touch with. I don't know, honestly. I just, it's a big question mark to me. And for the time being, I'm, I'm spending time.

• 1:44:21Tim Ferriss?

  With people, and this includes women, that I think these are very important, who I respect a lot. So whether they are super hardcore and driven, or just very good at what they do, but extremely soft and able to counterbalance some of my like hard edged, steely attributes, which can be really damaging in excess. Like I need someone to help temper that. I respect them because they're good at what they do. I enjoy spending time with them because I learn from them. They don't take themselves too seriously, so they can laugh at themselves. They take care of themselves physically.

• 1:45:06Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, for most of my friends, that's, that's a criteria, that's one of the criteria as well. Like I, I want to be averaged up in all ways possible by the people I surround myself with. So even if I have friends, some friends who might not take care of themselves physically, I need at least a few close friends who do, because if I'm the average of the five people I associate with most, well shit, I need to be very careful about how I kind of allocate those interactions, right?

• 1:45:33Tim Ferriss?

  And what else? I like really nice hamstrings. I like big brown eyes, little brown ankles, as one friend would put it.

• 1:45:45Tim Ferriss?

  Big brown eyes, little brown ankles. That's how he describes the type of woman he likes. I like generally long hair, but I can think of an exception to all these things. That's, that's the thing. People are like, oh, what's your type? And I'm like, I don't like super hot and smart and funny. I don't know. Like color doesn't matter to me.

• 1:46:08Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of like short hair, long hair, eh, like tattoos, no tattoos, piercings, no piercings. Like I've dated every possible permutation of those. So I don't know what to tell you. I just, I love women, period. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure what to do about that. That's, I think that's part of the challenge that I'm having.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I, that was a great answer.

• 1:46:34Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's all we got. I think that's all we got.

• 1:46:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, how should we close out? Do you have any parting thoughts, recommendations, reflections?

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  Yes, I do. In fact, sign up for my newsletter, thejournal.e-mail on the internet. And I send out once a month newsletter of all my kind of crazy, chaotic stuff and gear and tech stuff that I'm checking out.

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  That also has a podcast on iTunes. And then also, I think virtual reality sucks. I tried the HTC and it's stupid.

• 1:47:14Tim Ferriss?

  So I think you're gonna lose this bet.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  You sent out a tweet saying, "Virtual reality has blown my mind. I now see the light." I saw that tweet from you, like three months ago.

• 1:47:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I don't take it back. I stand by it.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  It's so dumb. Virtual reality is so dumb.

• 1:47:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  Did you try the HTC one? We put it on your head?

• 1:47:31Tim Ferriss?

  I tried the Vive with...

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  The Vive, yeah.

• 1:47:36Tim Ferriss?

  I think it was Valve with... What was that?

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  At Adam's lab?

• 1:47:40Tim Ferriss?

  No, a different lab.

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:47:41Tim Ferriss?

  With Valve software running on it.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  And you were really that blown away?

• 1:47:45Tim Ferriss?

  I was very impressed. Maybe I can just have... I have better long-term vision than you do. Maybe I can see the potential.

• 1:47:53Speaker 03

  No, no. This is one of those things where it's a hype cycle in Silicon Valley. And sadly, the benefit to the consumer has to be in order of magnitude better than what they're already experiencing for it to ever get adopted. And that comes on both a couple of fronts. One, on the application front, in that they have to enjoy it at least 10x or greater. And then it also comes on the comfort and wearability and maintenance and setup and everything else that goes with owning a virtual reality system. And sadly, we're all going to realize that it's much like the Wii. And it was fun for the first five games of Wii bowling that I played, but then guess what? It ends up in a drawer. Just like 3D TV.

• 1:48:36Tim Ferriss?

  Well, here's what I think you're gonna miss, though. Here's what I think you're missing. And Daria is giving the like, hands up. I don't know what you're talking about. So.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, Zelda Wii was great.

• 1:48:47Tim Ferriss?

  So here's the difference. Here's the difference if we're looking at purely the entertainment applications, say restricted to video games, is that the Wii required entirely new types of games to be created, which basically were reminiscent of early Nintendo sports games. I mean, they're very different from the games that are currently blockbusters. But what if you take virtual reality and simply use that to enhance the most popular first-person shooter games and Call of Duty and so forth, which I don't think is that much of a stretch? I don't think that's a hard sell. I think that is substantially better than what is currently available.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  We'll see. We'll see. I think it's a pretty... Well, I would say there's a couple of different camps in the virtual reality space. There's one that thinks it's going to be accessory for gaming, and there's the other one that says it's like, we're going to be watching movies like that. We're going to sit around watching the Super Bowl. You know, everyone will have one. We're at a Super Bowl party. We're just like wearing headsets and trying to cram freaking nachos underneath the mask. That's a real thing. People are saying that kind of stuff. And I believe that the maintenance and setup, and it's just really difficult, you know?

• 1:50:00Tim Ferriss?

  See, I don't see the Super Bowl soon. I don't see that type of interaction happening because you're sacrificing an element... I mean, look, we could all watch the frickin' Super Bowl at home by ourselves, but we go to a Super Bowl party. Why do we go to a Super Bowl party? Why do we go to a movie theater? Like, there's a communal aspect to it, and there are elements of that experience that are not fully accounted for when, I think someone brings up the example of the Super Bowl party and using it so that you can like stand in the middle of the field and have a fucking crazy 300-pound guy charge at you. Like, oh, yeah, that sounds like fun. Maybe there are permutations on that that I think could work, but with something like Call of Duty, where you're like sitting

• 1:50:45Tim Ferriss?

  in a basement in your underwear playing it anyway.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:47Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think the setup costs. I think that that is an example. Where do you think, in that case, let's say it is a hype cycle?

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:54Tim Ferriss?

  What does the landscape of VR look like in three years, five years? Has it just been abandoned?

• 1:51:00Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's... Obviously, a lot of money is going into game development and app development right now for... in VR, like, you know, tens of, if not hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the top companies. But... It is, it's one of those things where if consumers don't demand this hardware and it doesn't sell through, then those funds are going to quickly dry up. It's a very much chicken and egg thing because you need original content, original experiences, like more so than just, you know, a flying whale coming by your head that's in a 30 second demo. Like you need real content that was developed for VR, which is expensive to create. And

• 1:51:41Speaker 03

  so, you know, it's a chicken and egg thing, but you need a hell of a lot of eggs. Like you need a lot of great games because if you get in there and you have a mediocre experience, or just like, ah, my buddy doesn't, I only have two headsets, we can't play co-op, you know, there's a, there's a thousand different use cases where I could describe it where it ends up frustrating the gamer and they just set it in the corner and they go back to the old, the way things were. And this has been tried time and time again. I mean, this isn't the first type of, I mean, I had a Nintendo Power Glove back in the day where I put my hand in the glove and I tried to do different things with it. Do you remember that thing?

• 1:52:18Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  A little keyboard on the side of it. Like we've tried these like devices to kind of augment our gaming experiences and yet we all still come back to the standard controller because it's easy, because I can toss you one, because we can sit there, we can drink a beer while we're doing it. Like there's a thousand different little things that you can do that you can't do with these big ass headsets on. And you need a dedicated room if you're going to walk around with them, you know, like you bump into a Frencher and shit. Like it just, there's so many hurdles to get over here. I just think that those hurdles are going to be a little too high. I do, I will say one thing, one little caveat here. Augmented reality is a, is very much different than virtual reality. And that, I still think the jury's out. I'm talking about where you put on a pair of glasses

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  that allow you to project, at least in your, back into your eye, the idea of there being little living creatures and different things crawling around your furniture. And if you've seen some of this-

• 1:53:15Tim Ferriss?

  I have. They scare the shit out of me.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  They scare the shit out of me. That is, is-

• 1:53:19Tim Ferriss?

  But I mean, it's not just that. It's like overlaying things onto reality as you visually experience it today.

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. So that, that I haven't written off yet, but this idea of virtual reality, and granted, like I, I'll be the first to admit I'm wrong. If two years from now, this is not the case. But I just have this gut feeling and sometimes I like to be a little bit different than everybody.

• 1:53:40Tim Ferriss?

  Stir the pot.

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, stir the pot.

• 1:53:43Tim Ferriss?

  The, you have a bet writing on this, do you not?

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  On virtual reality failing?

• 1:53:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  I haven't shorted Facebook or anything.

• 1:53:51Tim Ferriss?

  No, do you have a, don't you have a?

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  Adam, yeah.

• 1:53:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm betting a neuroscience friend of ours, he's.

• 1:53:59Tim Ferriss?

  Very well known.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  He has, the dude, he's on your podcast.

• 1:54:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Adam Gazali.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  He's drank the Kool-Aid. He's, he's like, he's the, poured the Kool-Aid in the water, mixed it and drank it.

• 1:54:10Tim Ferriss?

  Now, just, just as context, this is one of the, well, Daria, I used to work with Adam, was fair to say, like, one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world. M.D., Ph.D., studies gaming, has developed game, has a lab at UCSF, one of the best regarded in the country, certainly.

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  But what does that?

• 1:54:31Tim Ferriss?

  Seventy people, fifty people, no, something like that. So, I mean, so, I mean, this, this isn't like a homeless guy on the corner of the sandwich board saying VR is coming. I mean, this is, this is a, you have a qualified opponent.

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  I get that. I mean, I, I, I think that he is a good opponent. He's not a technologist. I mean, he's a neuroscientist. And he has a dedicated, big ass room for virtual reality. So when he goes and plays in virtual reality, and I've been in his lab and I've played with his equipment, it is quite fun, but he has a big ass room that he gets to, not everyone has that room. I don't have that room here in New York. You know, it's, it's a different environment when, no, not yet.

• 1:55:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but how specific is your, are your criteria for success or failure, right? So for me.

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  It's very loose.

• 1:55:24Tim Ferriss?

  It's like if there are fucking rooms all over a given city and then in every city where people can go experience virtual reality. That seems like virtual reality, at least is gaining a foothold. I mean, that would be some measure of success.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  I think that virtual reality as a form of like laser tag could be really interesting because I actually saw that a week ago and it looked pretty fascinating where it's it had, you know, 10 people in a room. They're all wearing headsets. They could see each other in the virtual world. Monsters would appear. They could run around corners. They could shoot them, things like that. But that's just Scandia fun. That's like mini golf. Like that's that's gonna be-

• 1:56:01Tim Ferriss?

  Scandia?

• 1:56:02Speaker 03

  Scandia's the thing on the west coast. It's like a mini golf course.

• 1:56:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  Where you go and like ride go karts and play mini golf. Like, that's, that's the kind of fun that that is. I think that what Adam's talking about is, is really this in, you know, almost every home and it being kind of a fixture of your, your household.

• 1:56:19Tim Ferriss?

  See, I don't think, I think you're overweighting the entire room experience, which is definitely an enhancement and an improvement over the stationary experience. But I could see people with immersive sound systems in the headsets themselves. So you have surround sound, using the headset in conjunction with the controller and having incredible virtual reality experience.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  We'll see, dude. I, so I'll tell you a story that I probably shouldn't tell, and I think I've mentioned at one point somewhere, but I was at Google and I went to Google X, which is very kind of limited access. Google X is where they do all the crazy top secret experiments, all that. I went in there and they had Google Glass, and this is before they announced it. This was this like, you know, prototype. Everyone's seen this.

• 1:57:07Tim Ferriss?

  I remember.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  It sits in your head and has a little thing. And I somehow talked the Glass team into giving me one of the first prototypes outside of the team. So we had, I, I got like, you know, probably one of the first 10 units and they gave it to me. I had the beta software on it. I had it hooked up to my Android phone. I could see all my text notifications. I could see, you know, it was like the coolest thing if you're in Silicon Valley to have back then because no one had one, you know? I wore it to a party one time. It was stupid.

• 1:57:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I remember. I mean, a friend of ours showed up at South by Southwest with Google Glass on and it was just like nerd magnet.

• 1:57:42Speaker 03

  Nerd magnet, right.

• 1:57:43Tim Ferriss?

  Just throngs of people surrounding her everywhere she went.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  And so, as my wife will tell you, I had mine for like, what, two weeks, something like that, less than that. And I gave it back to the Glass team and they were like, "What the fuck?" Fuck, like, everybody wants one of these. Why are you turning this in? They expected me to have it for the next three months and like install the beta software. And I'm just like, no one's gonna use this. It's like too dorky. It doesn't, it's yet another thing I have to charge, which we don't need more of those in our life. And it's heavy, it's bulky, the screen display, like, I just didn't understand it. And, you know, that was kind of like my gut consumer product person's take on it. And I ended up just abandoning it. And I feel the same way about virtual reality.

• 1:58:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, only time will tell. I don't think, I don't think it'll take that much time either. I mean, I think there's so many big announcements and launches coming up soon that, I mean, within the next year to 18 months, I feel like we should have a pretty good idea

• 1:58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:42Tim Ferriss?

  of what's gonna fly or not fly.

• 1:58:45Speaker 03

  Oh, what's the stake?

• 1:58:46Tim Ferriss?

  What's the stake in the bet?

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  Is a bottle of

• 1:58:49Tim Ferriss?

  Your bet with Adam.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  Hibiki, was it 30 year? Yeah, requires a trip to Japan to buy a bottle of Hibiki 30 year aged whiskey, which is, you can't find in the United States. They don't import it to the United States. That's the bet between the two of us.

• 1:59:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good bet.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a good bet.

• 1:59:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's a win-win.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  Because I'm gonna help him drink some of it.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  But it should be fun. It's gonna be, you know, I think that even if I lose the bet, I'll be pleasantly, I'll be actually pretty impressed and happy because if they come out with a few titles where I'm just blown away, I'll be the first to say, you know what, this is gonna take off, but I don't know. My gut doesn't tell me so.

• 1:59:26Tim Ferriss?

  The jury's out.

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 1:59:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, another random show on the books. And you already mentioned the journal. I will tell people, check out the t-shirts. I've never done t-shirts before. And 100% of the proceeds are going to psychedelic research, most likely psilocybin at top universities. I'm not making anything from it whatsoever. Everything is going to most likely senior scientists who are working on very, very fascinating applications of compounds that have been neglected that can address potentially some extremely debilitating conditions that have very few options.

• 2:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  Otherwise, it'd have panned out medically speaking. So check out the shirts. Who likes the shirts? American Apparel? What's that? American Apparel shirts? Uh, I'd have to look. I, I went through- Is it cotton or blend? Uh, most likely a blend. 10% psilocybin? I went through, I went through all of my own t-shirts and picked out the most comfortable. Yeah. And the designs that I liked and sat down with a sourcing team and looked at

• 2:00:34Tim Ferriss?

  how to make the most comfortable shirts possible. So I'm test driving the prototypes. They're not like made from mushrooms, like- They're not made from mushrooms. They don't disintegrate. You don't take a shower with them and sprout anything. You could grind them up and- Grind, grind them up and eat them. That would be pretty amazing, but no, sadly. Uh, 4hourworkweek.com/mushroom. Check them out. And, uh, find us on the Twitters if you have anything to correct or say or to add. And I feel like that's about it. That's it. Thanks for listening. All right. Thanks for listening, guys. And you can find show notes, links to various things that we have mentioned at 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, as well as show notes for every other episode and the episodes themselves.

• 2:01:20Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, until next time. See ya. Thanks for sticking around.

• 2:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  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? 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. 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, uh, the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:02:11Tim Ferriss?

  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 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.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 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I used 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things.

• 2:02:52Tim Ferriss?

  With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy, or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors.

• 2:03:35Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes. And dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim.

• 2:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account.

• 2:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.