#391: The Random Show — On Fasting, Forest Bathing, How to Say NO, Rebooting the Self, and Much More

Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose https://www.instagram.com/kevinrose/), rejoins me for another episode of The Random Show. In this one we discuss Japanese whisky, domestic speakeasies, wooden saddles, the rebooting power of Anthony de Mello's Awareness https://www.amazon.com/Awareness-Opportunities-Reality-Anthony-Paperback/dp/B00ZT18PNO/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, poetry, the art of surrender and letting go, mushroom cultivation in the Pacific Northwest, fasting, learning to say no, and much more! This podcast is brought to you by 99designs http://99designs.com/tim, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs http://99designs.com/tim. You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas, or hire the perfect designer for your project based based on their style and industry specialization. It's simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you'll end up with a design that you're happy with. Click this link and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade http://99designs.com/tim. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Hiring can be hard, and it and be super expensive and painful if you get it wrong. Today, with more qualified candidates than ever — but also more noise than ever — employers need a hiring solution that helps them find the right people for their businesses. LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim provides just that by screening candidates with the hard and soft skills you're looking for so you can quickly find and hire the right person. LinkedIn can make sure your job post gets in front of people you want to hire — people with the skills, qualifications, and other insights that help LinkedIn paint a better picture of potential candidates. It's no wonder great candidates are hired every eight seconds on LinkedIn. Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. You can pay what you want, and the first $50 is on LinkedIn. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim to get $50 off your first job post! Terms and conditions apply. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find an amazing designer and create designs you'll love. From logos, to branding, to packaging, to books, you name it, they have it. And I've used them for just about everything. 99designs is the go-to creative resource for any budget. I've used them for years now, for book covers, for instance, mock-ups of The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for the multi-volume Tao of Seneca, including the cover, and many other creative projects. I've been very impressed by the quality of their work. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook.

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  The illustrations worked out great, I loved working with the designer we selected, and I plan to work with him on more projects in the future. And that's something you can do. You don't have to start from scratch every time. And right now, my listeners can get $20 off, plus a free $99 upgrade on their first design contest. Simply submit a brief on the site describing what you need, and designers who are interested in your project, often from around the world, will submit concepts for you to choose from. You refine as you go, give feedback, and once you're ready, you choose one to finalize. It's a great way to get started and find the right match. A great designer, and a great design, at a great price. So head to 99designs.com/tim to learn more or get started today. You can also see examples of some of the work that I have done with designers on 99designs.

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  So check it out, 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:59Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Hiring can be hard, can be super, super expensive and very painful if you get it wrong. I certainly have had that experience multiple times, have made a lot of mistakes. I am not eager to repeat any of them. So I try to do as much vetting as possible now on the front end. Today, with more qualified candidates than ever, but certainly more noise than ever, employers need a hiring solution that helps them find the right people for their businesses without wasting time, without wasting money. LinkedIn Jobs provides just that. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you specify that you're looking for, so you can quickly find and hire the right person.

• 2:40Tim Ferriss?

  They also look beyond work skills, so collaboration, creativity, adaptability, to connect you with candidates who match your business perfectly. They have endless business-specific data points that help them to massage this and that which can help you to find the best fit. LinkedIn can make sure your job post gets in front of people you want to hire, people with the skills, qualifications, and other insights that help LinkedIn paint a better picture of potential candidates. It's no wonder that great candidates are hired every eight seconds on average on LinkedIn. That's pretty wild, every eight seconds. So find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on LinkedIn. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim for more details.

• 3:24Tim Ferriss?

  Again, that's LinkedIn.com/Tim to get $50 off your first job post. Let's check it out. LinkedIn.com/Tim. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 3:38Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to Kevin. Oh, he's cheating with a little sip. I'm just having a little sip of the whiskey that we poured.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Another random show.

• 3:50Tim Ferriss?

  This is a random show slash crossover Tim Ferriss of wow, I haven't even had any booze yet. Tim Ferriss show slash wherever this gets cross posted.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  This is a more like one of your episodes that you do when people or you drink and people call in.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  The drunk dial episodes.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, have you done one of those in a while?

• 4:09Tim Ferriss?

  I have not done a drunk dial in quite a long time, so we can consider this a drunk dial among friends.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're here in person like we're not in this remote, which is awesome.

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I have to say that it's, it's really good to see you, man.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:22Tim Ferriss?

  And it's my first time getting to check out your pad in.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Portland.

• 4:28Tim Ferriss?

  Undisclosed location, okay, Portland. I wasn't sure how secret that was or not. And it made me think as we were prepping to sit down and do a random show. How long I've known you because you mentioned that toaster, your dog just turned nine, he's getting old.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:43Tim Ferriss?

  Er, and I remember when he ate the cables during one recording of the random show. I don't know if you remember that.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:50Tim Ferriss?

  When he was a little pup.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Oh dude, he was eating everything back then. He actually, the scariest thing that ever happened with a toaster. This shows you how, what a bad parent I am. Um, he ate through an actual entire plugged in outlet. No, sorry. It was not plugged in. It was a heating pad that had, you know, but he ate through the entire thing and I didn't even notice. And I looked down and can you imagine if that was plugged in? Like he, there would be no toaster.

• 5:14Tim Ferriss?

  He would have turned into a toaster.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. He'd have been burnt. Big time.

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  So we have, we have a bunch of display items that are out on this table in front of us. But before we get to that, do you want to describe where we're sitting?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're sitting, um, so I have, ah gosh, I would say that one of the things that I was, um, that is awesome about living in Portland, Oregon versus living in the Bay area is that, uh, I was actually able to afford a place that is bigger than the size of a little apartment in San Francisco. So I built a house out here in Portland. So it took us, took us three years to build it. Finally got it done. And I think when you're like, you know, well, not 12, because I sort of wanted alcohol. When you're like 18 years old, you always think like, how cool would it be to have like a secret passageway that leads into like a bar or something, right?

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  Speak easy.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little speak easy. And you know, I always wanted something like that. And we were gonna put in a little entertainment room that would be bar slash, you know, listening to vinyl, like a place to go and just kind of hang out anyway. And so I talked to the architect and I was like, can you put like a secret door to get in here? And so we built this like fake bookcase and it kind of swings open and then you have a bar. So we're in our, our little bar here.

• 6:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's really minimalist, very Japanese in feel. Reminds me of some of the bars we've been to.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was definitely inspired. Yeah.

• 6:47Tim Ferriss?

  And what was that one bar we went to? Gen or something or other?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Something's bar. There's Bar Gen, which is.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  It might be Bar Gen.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  And the bartender has something like six or eight seats inside. And amazingly enough, I had met him many years before and we sat down. You might remember this a couple of years ago in Tokyo and he's like, I think I know you. And I was like, I think I know you. And it turned out that for the food, the food marathon that I did for the four hour chef, which was 26.2 dishes in 24 hours. These are large portions generally. We went to a restaurant called Brushstroke, I think it was called. And at the time, he was their superstar master bartender who would chip these softball sized ice spheres by hand with a little ice pick.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  That's one of the best parts of Japan is when they make their ice by hand with a pick.

• 7:46Tim Ferriss?

  Very high labor.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:47Tim Ferriss?

  And this has that feel. And in fact, if you look at the wall, I'll try to paint a picture for those of you listening.

• 7:55Tim Ferriss?

  There is be this beautiful black wood behind the bar where the floating shelves are, which have down lighting coming up onto these beautiful bottles of various types of alcohol and liqueur and so on. What is the texture or the technique behind what I'm looking at? It has, I'm not gonna say scalloped, but if you could imagine if you had pure black slate in a, in a shower on the wall and water rivulets were running down that wall. It kinda has that look. It's shiny. What is that?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Well, it's, this is a wood that I first learned about in Japan where they take this, these planks of wood and they actually use it for the exterior of houses and they burn it. And so they actually take a torch to it, set it on fire, let it burn for a certain amount of time. It gets all the oils out and kind of just really hardens the wood. They put it out and then it has this really beautiful aged kind of burnt wood look to it. So we decided to use that rather than have like wallpaper or something in here. We decided to use that as the backdrop. So it's all this like Japanese burnt wood. So it does, when you shine light on it, it looks like there's kinda like water coming down it or like a little scaly or, but it's just really beautiful stuff.

• 9:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's gorgeous. And we will put a link in the show notes to the actual technique and you can see how it's done because it's also used, obviously as you can see here, outside of Japan. And it's a technique.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  I actually had this brought up.

• 9:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, these were brought in Japan?

• 9:32Speaker 03

  I don't know if they do it here.

• 9:34Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, so if you wanna go super homono, homono is like the real deal, the real McCoy in Japanese, they would say homono. And so if you wanna go real, real, super homono, then you can bring the wood from Japan.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Well, the nice thing about doing it, bringing it in from Japan, honestly, is that.

• 9:51Tim Ferriss?

  The cost?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Well, no. We weren't doing an entire house, right? This is not our exterior. It's one little room, right? So it really wasn't that expensive to bring it in.

• 10:02Tim Ferriss?

  And what do we, what are we drinking? I haven't had a sip yet. Am I skipping ahead?

• 10:06Speaker 03

  No, no, no. Let's do it. Let's do it. So.

• 10:07Tim Ferriss?

  So what is this?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Um, to kick things off, um, this is a very special Japanese whiskey.

• 10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Which I've never tried.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called the card series. And so, um, essentially what you're looking at here is this is the Joker. And it's done by, um, Ichiro's malt. And so this is, um, basically what happened is they had all these whiskies, 52 different whiskies, that were put into barrels and then kind of forgotten about for a while. And then the, uh, distillery went under. Um, they found the barrels and they decided to put it into 52 different bottles with different card faces. So this is the Joker right here. Um, and essentially every card has a different quantity. So this one here, um, this is the least rare, um, with 3,690 bottles of the Joker that were produced.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  And the most rare, I think were like 50 bottles or something like that. Um, so if you want to collect them, you can get the entire, you know, 52 cards and they're really kind of hard to find because it became very culty and, um, sought after. And now you can find them up at auction and things like this. So this was, um, a little gift that, uh, to me that I tend to consume, um, rarely when I have good friends in town. Uh, because they are really expensive, but, um, you know, you always got to have a couple awesome ones in on the top shelf.

• 11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, cheers, Ben.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, cheers.

• 11:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's, uh, it's so nice to see you and your family.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:36Tim Ferriss?

  And to see.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  It's different, isn't it?

• 11:37Tim Ferriss?

  The previously grievously irresponsible Kevin Rose as a doting father is, is quite a.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  It's different.

• 11:46Tim Ferriss?

  Twilight Zone experience.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Well, it's nice actually, like honestly, the other night when you guys got in, um, you know, we like had a dinner. Like, you know, didn't go crazy on the wine, just had a little bit of wine, uh, jumped in the sauna, uh, got in the hot tub and like called it a night at like 10, you know?

• 12:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  And so like, that's kind of what you have to do. You have to wake up for kids at 7 a.m. So.

• 12:09Tim Ferriss?

  This is a spectacular.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Isn't that amazing?

• 12:11Tim Ferriss?

  Spectacular.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really good stuff.

• 12:14Tim Ferriss?

  This is single malt whiskey. This is really nice. And I'm not a whiskey guy, I hate to admit, because that makes me, it sort of demotes me 17 levels on the manliness scale for some people. But there are few types of whiskey that I like. This is one, and then you happen to have-

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Oh dude, I have the six of hearts up there. That one was another gift, where I went to a tasting, where they were doing the card series tasting, and they had, you can see how much is left in that bottle, I mean, probably one finger worth, you know, in terms of height. There was probably two fingers in total when I got it, and the lady that was doing the tasting was like, you can just take the bottle with you, like, take it home. And the bottles alone sell for, like, that one, I think, is about a $15,000 bottle, which is crazy.

• 12:58Tim Ferriss?

  And- Just take the bottle. You're like, I will thank you.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  I'm like, that's like, four grand right there. Like, absolutely. Like, thank you so much. So it was amazing. So those are the only two bottles. I do not collect these. I think it's a-

• 13:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the pappy up there is also-

• 13:15Speaker 03

  That's, that's good stuff as well.

• 13:17Tim Ferriss?

  That is just incredible stuff.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I also started collecting the, uh, the Japanese whiskeys, like the Hibiki, aged Hibiki, you can see up there as well. So what's interesting about Hibiki, and Tim, you probably remember this, but like, when we were going to Japan back in the day, Japanese whiskeys, you could go in Tokyo and down in the, um, the train station, there's actually one of my favorite places to buy Japanese whiskey. And you go in there, and I was buying bottles of Hibiki 30-year for right around, you could get them for like $400 for an entire bottle. And it was, I mean, that's a lot of money for a bottle. Like, it's crazy, right? And you buy it, um, and you let your friends try it, and it's a crazy 30-year Japanese whiskey. And then probably about seven or eight years

• 14:02Speaker 03

  later, they started running out of it, because it became very popular. And now they don't produce it at all.

• 14:08Tim Ferriss?

  Did it become popular with Japanese people, or was it foreigners?

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Foreigners, yeah. So foreigners got, like, they started realizing the Japanese were doing whiskey at a really high level, um, and then they bought up all the 30. And so they ran out. And so now, what's crazy is a bottle that, you know, is just a few hundred dollars. And that same goes for the, um, the 17 up there, which they also discontinued, which I heard they're bringing back for a short amount of time. Um, but anyway, the bottles went like 10x in price. And so now, I think those are like four grand a bottle, or something like that. It's crazy. But if you were buying it back in the day, it was like, nobody knew, you know, it was just like, oh, wow, this is just a really crazy expensive, I'll just get one bottle, try and, you know.

• 14:51Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me wonder also if there's something to be said for developing a taste for whatever is unpopular at the time or unrecognized, right?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:00Tim Ferriss?

  So if, if Japanese whiskey is really popular, you could, you could look at whiskey from a much lesser known location and get the best of that. Or you could look at something that maybe has lost its sex appeal temporarily, like sake, we did a, a tasting trip through part of Japan, you must remember that.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 15:18Tim Ferriss?

  And we had.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  You took me out for my birthday.

• 15:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:20Tim Ferriss?

  And we had the sake sort of right out of the.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Oh, God, that was so good.

• 15:24Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not gonna say barrels, but, uh, right out of the containers.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:28Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  I still have some of that, by the way.

• 15:30Tim Ferriss?

  And it was stellar and very, very, very reasonable in terms of price.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:36Tim Ferriss?

  You could really get something that was only found in Japan, beautifully done, something that you could share with friends on a special occasion, that would not break the bank.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, the thing about, you know this, Tim, way better than I do, but like the thing about, I think I love most about Japan is that you can take any hobby or any profession and they do it at the highest level, right? So it can be aged coffee. Remember when we had that aged coffee?

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I do.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Uh, it's, you know, 30 year old aged coffee by a little guy in a shop and, and there's, um, you know, six or seven other people sitting around the table.

• 16:12Tim Ferriss?

  Good news, delicious. Bad news, it's a 45 minute pour over.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Right. It's a really long process. Like you have to sit there and wait, but there's something amazing about being able to relax and sit there and wait for it and appreciate that person for what their, their craft. And we don't do that in the States, man. We don't have that appreciation for people, individual people doing something at a high level. And you know what's awesome about that is that guy is recession proof, right? Like there's nothing's gonna automate his job away. It's the commodity stuff that's getting completely destroyed by technology, you know?

• 16:42Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, it's, it makes me think of something that, um, As a general theme I bring up a lot when I'm talking to people who are starting businesses or thinking of starting businesses and they have a high level of skill in anything and almost every person has a superpower, something that is at the very least easier for them to do than for other, most other people. They may recognize it, they may not recognize it, but when I am talking to friends or acquaintances who are thinking of, say, starting a business, it's part of the reason why I always like to start with the conversation of what if

• 17:25Tim Ferriss?

  you charged more than everyone else? Like what would you have to create that is sort of based on this superpower related to it that would then be worth a price that is at the highest end? In part because it makes you recession proof, right? Like you have to look at things through such a different lens and the market doesn't have to be large to have a successful coffee shop like that. The market isn't large, right? But this guy is such a specialist and has ritualized something into sort of the plug and play cult format for people like you or like me.

• 18:09Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you like that shit. You got horse like saddles and shit at your house. I do, I do. You know what? That, yeah, I do, I do. I'm an unapologetic Japanophile and I can see the good, the beautiful, the bad and the ugly in Japan as I can say in the US, but the attention to detail, the beautiful and bordering on pathological obsession to detail just scratches every itch for me. Yeah. And for that reason, you mentioned the saddles. I don't think I've ever talked about this, but when, I don't spend. A whole lot of money on toys.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  And I do spend money on a handful of things. But it's been very slow in development, just growing up with a family that was very, very money. Sort of scarcity minded in a way. But for The Four Hour Body, when I was writing The Four Hour Body, I remember promising myself, if, not if, at that point it was when I finish writing this book, if it is number one, New York Times, not number two, but if it's number one, I'll reward myself with buying a Japanese antique of some type, which I'd never, I'd never bought any antiques of any type.

• 19:36Tim Ferriss?

  And love Japan, have this, have always had, I mean, for decades, this obsessive fascination with martial arts. And years bef, around the same time, actually, I was exploring a television series that involved doing horseback archery in Japan, which people can find online, actually, if they search Trial by Fire, I think it was Trial by Fire, can find this weird video of me in Japan doing horseback archery. And so I decided to get a saddle. That was what I would reward myself with. And so I ended up with one of these saddles. And in fact, one was really cheap. Some of these auctions are so weird, I haven't participated in many of them. But you'll see the unpredictability of auction dynamics,

• 20:21Tim Ferriss?

  where you'll, you'll see one item that, for whatever reason, has like two, you know, big swinging dick muckety mucks who are just punching each other in the face to win with the ego reward of having this item. And so it goes for five times what was anticipated. And then there's another one, because that happened, like knocks out a bunch of folks and it's just empty, like no one's doing anything. So I ended up getting two saddles, kind of for the price of one, because who the hell wants Japanese saddles? Turns out, not a large market.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Wooden Japanese saddles.

• 20:55Tim Ferriss?

  Wooden Japanese saddles, and I love them. They give me so much joy every day. And something I've been thinking about, I want to give someone credit. And I think I'm getting the pronunciation right here, but Adeo Rossi,

• 21:11Tim Ferriss?

  who's been involved in the startup scene for a very long time, I think it's Founder Institute. Am I getting that right? Maybe not. In any case, but Adeo was recently in Austin, where I live, and he was doing a panel with a number of folks who were all very, very good. And it was a discussion of mental health. And he said something that I wrote down because it makes sense to me. And I think I've bumped into this occasionally and I'm like, oh, there is some truth to this. And that is to the benefits of looking at things in the world and decisions, things you create and so on, not just through the lens of is this good or bad? Which can often be an ethical choice, right? Like, is this good for me and the world?

• 21:54Tim Ferriss?

  Is this bad for me in the world? But also through the lens of is this beautiful or not? And I think the Japanese pay a lot of attention to this, right? Like, you can get a cup of coffee, perfectly great cup of coffee in many places in Japan. But like, can this guy we're talking about, for instance, just create a beautiful, unusual experience that you talk about 10 years later?

• 22:19Tim Ferriss?

  You know, case, case in point, he can. And that's, there's a value to that. It's hard to really smack a label on it, but there's really, there's something in the essence of that, that I've grown to appreciate more over time.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  I hope some of that starts to carry over more into the United States and our, you know, appreciation of that as a culture, because I feel like, you know, as a technologist, like, I can just see it 10, 15 years from now, like, automation in a serious way is coming to pretty much every industry and every job, right? And if it's something that can be taught in a very easy, predictable way, it will be automated, right? It's the stuff that is creative, the stuff that is unique, the stuff that is Hard to do and produce at mass at scale that will stand out and you'll always be secure. Now, you're not gonna make, you know, that guy that's doing the thirty, forty year old aged coffee. He's pouring, you know, fifteen of those a day or whatever.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  The guy's not in a mansion like living it up in Tokyo, right?

• 23:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  But, you know, he takes a lot of pride in that. I think that if you can be content and really believe in and enjoy what you're producing and it fulfills you.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Then that's all you really need.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And Japan's a great, in a way, it's sort of like a, an art exhibit or a zoo of pocket obsessions.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:47Tim Ferriss?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 23:48Tim Ferriss?

  You can walk through.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Every alleyway.

• 23:50Tim Ferriss?

  You can walk through, exactly. You can walk through certain neighborhoods, down alleyways, and each shop is, I mean, the size of a broom closet.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:57Tim Ferriss?

  But specializes in, there's one that specializes in like, I'm making this up, but like succulent display containers that you put on the wall in a small room like a bathroom. And that's the entire shop.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's all they do.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:12Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  They go really deep down one particular little avenue that is their own, that they can own, you know?

• 24:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. What else, what else appeals to you most about Japan? Because I think there are many things I could talk about that appeal to me about Japan. I've lived there. I have a total love affair, longstanding love for the language. What appeals to you about Japan?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Well, I think the cleanliness is a huge piece of it. You could eat off the ground pretty much everywhere in Tokyo, right? And it's a massive city.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  It is unbelievably clean, which, not to interrupt, but at all, which reflects not just a priority on the state or government level, but a collective behavior.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:55Tim Ferriss?

  That doesn't happen top down. It's a collective.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Right. I don't know how they, they kind of cultivate that. Like, how does that, you know, at a young age, how do you, how do you kind of like make sure that carries on to the next generation, right?

• 25:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I I I I'm not, I don't have a ready answer for that, but I would say that very often, I mentioned personal superpowers earlier, they're very often right next to our greatest defects. Like they're somehow also very close to our our greatest weaknesses. It's very frequent. And I think in Japan, there is this light and dark side.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  The shame side?

• 25:36Tim Ferriss?

  Shame. Exactly. I was gonna bring up shame. So embarrassment, losing face, shame, bringing shame upon your family, very big deal.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:45Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Like being in, remember, I don't know, like, they're embarrassed for you, which is crazy. Like, sometimes, like, when you do something that's, like, awkward, they'll, like, rush out to give you something so that you're not embarrassed because they're embarrassed for you.

• 25:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. There are multiple levels of, like, recursive humiliation in Japan. It's it's like the, just like the language and the culture has so many complex etiquette rules around hierarchy. And there are, there is honoring language, there is what you would call in English, I guess, humbling language for yourself, which is self-deprecating. There are all these different layers of grammar and words that change based on how you relate to someone else. And it's the same with embarrassment. I think that's something that

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  they've teased out into a very complex set of rules and awkward interactions.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  I I think the thing that sealed it for me is one time I was waiting for an Uber out there and in Tokyo, and I was looking around and I saw this old man coming outside of his house, and he had a rag in his hand, and he was polishing his mailbox. Like, like, seriously, like, putting, and I was there waiting, like, 20 minutes for the Uber, and the guy's, like, polishing it nonstop. And I'm like, wow.

• 27:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  I don't polish my mailbox.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  You know, it's just like that. That's like next level, kind of like commitment to cleanliness and just respect for your items. Like, how often do we just like throw shit out and just like, don't recycle? And ah, I wish we had more of that in our culture, but you know, you're right. It's a double edged sword. There's, there's a shame component as well.

• 27:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but it's, it's worth exposing yourself to if you have the opportunity or the means to do so. Uh, I get asked a lot, what is your favorite place to travel? And it's an impossible question for me to answer because it really depends on.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  China?

• 27:44Tim Ferriss?

  For what? Yeah, China. I love parts of China. I've had great trips to China. I've spent time in Taiwan, but there, there are also some really rough, I mean, having lived in Beijing where I decided it was healthier not to run outside because my, I would just blow soot out my nose afterwards.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  We had the worst trip. Well, we had, it was awesome, but.

• 28:03Tim Ferriss?

  We had a tricky trip. Yeah. Where you got completely scammed with artwork.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, not only that, but think about, we, Tim and I went out to like the middle of nowhere.

• 28:14Tim Ferriss?

  Show. If you search probably random show China edition.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll see.

• 28:18Tim Ferriss?

  That you, you can flashback a couple of years.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  A couple of years. That was like.

• 28:22Tim Ferriss?

  Long time ago.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Eight years ago or something. Anyway, there was maggots that we were having to shit into and it was really disgusting.

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  It was a rough trip.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  It was rough.

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  It was a rough trip. Yeah. Uh, and there are many answers that I could give, right? I mean, I, I have really enjoyed some trips in China. I've really enjoyed, but it depends on what you want to get out of the trip.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right? If you want to feel totally lost, like an alien in, on a new planet, but at the same time be in almost no danger whatsoever.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Japan's perfect.

• 28:55Tim Ferriss?

  A hundred percent Tokyo. Yes. If you want to visit an alien landscape.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  And really feel like an alien.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  You will get off the plane and everything will be alien and in all the right ways. Like people, the cool thing about Japan is no one's a dick to you if you don't know Japanese.

• 29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which is amazing.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Which is amazing.

• 29:12Tim Ferriss?

  If you think about it.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Everybody's super friendly and you know, obviously if you're going to be a good tourist, as you should, you should pick up like, you know, a half dozen little phrases that you can say to people. But outside of that, you really don't need to know the language.

• 29:25Tim Ferriss?

  And, and, uh, they have the most, um.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  From a linguistic perspective, the most layup, friendly, overreactive encouragement you can imagine, right? Let's contrast this. I love Paris. It's one of my favorite cities in the world.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:44Tim Ferriss?

  But there are certain people, actually, this is more common in Montreal, not to throw them under the bus, but if you don't speak really good French, that you'll kind of get scoffed at. And it's very and hard.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Dude, I have gotten it like taxi drivers in Paris are dicks, like straight up. Like, you know that.

• 30:09Tim Ferriss?

  So, right. So if you, in other words, even if you speak, if you're 80% of the way there, if you're a B plus student, you're still gonna have a tough time impressing anyone.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Or getting a pat on the back.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:21Tim Ferriss?

  Whereas in Japan, if you can, and when we were there with a couple of friends, including our mutual friend, Tony Conrad, Tony thought this was hilarious. I'm like, imagine for a second what you sound like to them. If you can imagine somebody in the most broken English possible being like,

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:38Tim Ferriss?

  Can you, where is hunger bathroom, please? You know, that's basically what you sound like in Japanese to them.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:45Tim Ferriss?

  And, but you say that and you sound like sloth from The Goonies and they're like, oh, oh, jous da ne, oh, sugo, sugo, sugo, sugo. And they do give it this like hand clap for like performing like a seal.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 31:01Tim Ferriss?

  At SeaWorld. And it's, it feels really good.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:04Tim Ferriss?

  But, but yeah, all you need to know is, is good morning and where's the bathroom?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:09Tim Ferriss?

  And you're, you're, you're like the Michael Jordan of Japanese to most folks that you're gonna encounter. What else do we have here? We got, we got some other random items laid out.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  The thing is with this, people have listened to it before. We've done these random shows where we talk about books that we're reading, we talk about products that we're liking, like things like that. So, I mean, I just grabbed a couple of things that are actually there. I might as well continue down the Japanese theme. So, I, moving to Portland, have been into forest bathing. Which is started in Japan. And the idea is that there are so many people because of the work culture out there that they actually prescribe, doctors prescribe going into the forest and using it as a way to walk and relax and unwind. And there's been a bunch of research that's been done in these forests. Um, trying to figure out what is it that's dropping people's cortisol levels that's dropping?

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Like, uh, increasing their, um, uh, what is the killer cell count? Like, they, they did all these studies where they drew blood and they checked on people that were walking in the forest and all these different biomarkers improved. And so there were a few things that they were able to conclude. One, there's a certain bacteria in the soil that's supposed to be really good for you. Um, that's in Japan. And, uh, the second is, uh, I'm sure just disconnecting and being in the forest is a big part of it, but also the scents and the aromas that the trees were putting off. And so, um, there is a few trees in particular that they pulled out, um, and distilled down into essential oils.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  And then in the hospitals, they would diffuse them out so that, and they saw a dramatic decrease in people getting sick at the hospitals in terms of like people getting flus and colds and things like that. And so I basically read this entire book on forest bathing and decided to buy a few of these essential oils and use them. Um, you know, you can either diffuse them in your room or you can, uh, pour them over, you know, hot coals in a sauna. Um, Hanoki is obviously a very, um, popular tree out there. So I got some Hanoki oil. Um, and there's, I think there's four or five different ones. Um, another one is a Heba wood. This is another one here that you can smell. And they smell fantastic.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  I don't, I'm not here to sell you essential. So I don't have any, I don't have any brands to recommend, but they're, I mean, smell that. It smells like a Japanese spa. Which one is that? That's the Heba wood. Heba wood.

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  That does smell fantastic.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really cool stuff. But anyway, so there's a couple of different books out there on forest bathing. You can just search Amazon for that. If you're really into just trying to figure out how to slow down a little bit and learn more about the kind of Japanese way of disappearing into the forest and walking in the forest for longevity and health, you can learn a lot about it in this book. And they outline all of the different essential oils there.

• 34:06Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember which one you read?

• 34:08Speaker 03

  I do. If you were to, I can, you know what, I can pull it up and-

• 34:11Tim Ferriss?

  I just searched forest bathing on Google and the third result, well, let's go in order, four, these are the suggested results, forest bathing, forest bathing book, forest bathing Portland is number three.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  No way. Well, that's because it knows you're here. It's using GPS.

• 34:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, fuckers. So creepy.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  We did some forest bathing today, which was nice.

• 34:34Tim Ferriss?

  We did. I have to say Portland is one of the, certainly from a mycological, from a fungi mushroom perspective, one of the most incredible forest bathing opportunities out there.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the book that I read right here, Forest Bathing, How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness by Dr. Quing Li. And so that was one of the researchers that was doing all of this out in Tokyo. So-

• 35:00Tim Ferriss?

  Forest bathing in Japanese is shinryyoku. Shinryyoku. S-H-I-N-R-I-N. Yoku is the bath portion of that. What, what is, is that one of your items right over there?

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't really want to talk about that.

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we're gonna skip that.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  We have so many oils. This is another oil. It's like a beard oil I use. It's great.

• 35:22Tim Ferriss?

  So, you know, one of the, one of the books that I am rereading, and I don't reread a lot of books, but this is one that I've read probably five or six times in the last 18 months, is one that came through a recommendation from someone you also know, Peter Maluk. And he was a podcast guest. Mostly involved in finance and wealth management and things along those lines, investing. But the book he recommended was Awareness by a Jesuit priest also, as I recall, a psychotherapist named Anthony DeMello. Have you ever read this book?

• 36:00Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 36:01Tim Ferriss?

  And he mentioned it somewhat briefly in our conversation, but the, the sales pitch, which wasn't intended to be a pitch, that got me was, every time I read this book for, for a few weeks afterwards, I feel an incredible sense of peace. And I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like that. And I was like, that's an odd statement, coming out, coming from the rest of the conversation.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  It was a sharp contrast to a lot of the subject matter. And I thought, interesting. All right. Well, Awareness, and I looked it up, and I think the subtitle, there are two different subtitles for some reason, but one of the subtitles is the, the Promises and Perils of Reality, or something like that. And I was like, interesting subtitle. And read this book, pairs very well with Sam Harris's Waking Up app, actually, but has a lot of sort of, oh, fuck caliber aha moments in this book, from, from the perspective of self-awareness and distinguishing between, say, the labels and stories you use from yourself and the self.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's also a very funny book. It's effectively a transcript of lessons or weekend courses that were given by Anthony DeMello. And as I am always, I was very skeptical going into this book, because I thought it might just be another collection of woo-woo, hand-wavy bullshit, because a lot of these books are.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:29Tim Ferriss?

  And it, it really had an impact on my life immediately, and has become this sort of reboot, in the sense that occasionally, I'm sure everyone has, has had the experience that the, your phone is just kind of slow, things aren't working, maybe your bars are dropping, shit's just going kind of wonky. And you're like, you know what? I need to restart my phone.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have real phone issues. Like, I mean, outside of that, like, I can't text you. It turns into like those green texts.

• 37:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. My phone needs an update. This is a very old phone. I tend, I'm very dull edged when it comes to phones. I wait until, I want as many bugs to be fixed.

• 38:07Tim Ferriss?

  Found and fixed with new versions of iOS, new phones. Such an old man thing to say. It is. Give me the old. I have an iPhone 6S or whatever this is. It's ancient. Yeah. Eventually I'll get a new phone. But the, but the, the point that I'm making is when your phone isn't working, when you're having trouble with your computer, when you're in trouble with iCal, one of the first things that someone is going to ask you if you go to a genius bar or deal with the tech, sort of tech savvy person is, when's the last time you rebooted this? When's the last time you quit and restarted? And for me, this book, Awareness by Anthony DeMello, has that effect. That's awesome. Psychologically and emotionally. You're gonna sell a thousand, 100,000 copies of this by saying this. Sounds awesome. And I'm happy to.

• 38:52Tim Ferriss?

  This, this is one of a handful of books that I now buy by the dozen in paperback. It's a short book. It's very fast read that I buy by the dozen to have in my house so I can give them to friends. I, I literally have an entire shelf in my guest bedroom that I can tell you what the other books are. Well, I appreciate you. I, this is the first time I'm hearing about. Where's my copy, dude? I give this to all my friends.

• 39:18Tim Ferriss?

  You don't understand. My friends.

• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  My friends who visit Austin. I know you have an entire brood, you know, sort of pending Socrates that you need to cart around the world, but the, uh. Awareness, dude. It's not an audible. You don't see it there, right? If it's not an audible, I probably tried to get the rights at some point. Did you? No, then I must not have. But Awareness by Anthony DeMello, you can get it on Kindle, that much I know. Well, I have the new Kindle right there. That's one of the things I was gonna talk about. This book has a probably 90% hit rate with people I recommend it to. That's awesome. It's really good. The other books that I have are How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan. So I have a whole rack of that book.

• 39:59Tim Ferriss?

  And then also The Gift, which is a collection of poems by Hafiz, H A F I Z, which, uh, which is just a wonderful and very funny collection of, of poems. And, uh, I'm not the person historically who has read poetry. Yeah. By any stretch. That's so crazy. Are you starting to get into poetry? Uh, I, in the last few years, I've been reading a few poets, not many, and also become very open to, uh, it seems, it seems like maybe unrefined poetry in the sense that I, I've, I've been turned off of poetry many times in the past.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:42Tim Ferriss?

  I think because there's a, there's a breed of poet or a breed of poetry fan who seems to be similar to the hoity-toity fan of, say, abstract art. Where it's like, if, if it, if you need an explanation, then you don't get it.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of thing. There's a lot of poetry where I read it, I'm like, I don't fucking get it.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm not into that kind of poetry.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:06Tim Ferriss?

  But Hafiz is, makes perfect sense to me. You know, maybe spending a little bit of time in psychedelic space helps with that. And then poetry like Mary Oliver. Mary Oliver's amazing. I've really become a huge fan of her work. A handful of folks. I, I, I don't have a lot of exposure, but have you been reading poetry?

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Well, I just got a book on how to read poetry, actually, um, that I thought was pretty interesting. I went down to Powell's, um, probably just a month or so ago, and I was, uh, Powell's is a, for people that don't know.

• 41:40Tim Ferriss?

  Powell's is amazing.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  It's, it's like one of the best, well, I would say it's the best bookstore in the United States for sure. It's actually still a bookstore, that's independent bookstore that's thriving and doing really well here in Portland. Uh, it's massive. It's like the size of like a Costco or something.

• 41:55Tim Ferriss?

  It is, it is truly enormous.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they, they have a, they have a whole poetry section. And you know, for me, I've, I've always been a fan of, I, I invested in a company called Jour, um, that does, um, guided journaling on iOS and iPad.

• 42:09Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell it?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  J O U R. It's like short for journaling. So they do these like encrypted guided journals that you can do. Um, and the reason I wanted to get into that is I've just read about the benefits of actually kind of just opening up your heart and pouring out a little bit of what's going on inside as a way to be very, uh, therapeutic and just kind of release certain things you may be holding on to. And there's a lot of, uh, obviously that's a big part of poetry as well. And so I was like, well, I'd like to read what other people are, how they're releasing their emotions and also maybe eventually get into this myself, um, not in a way that I would ever share publicly, but you know, just something like, you, I think that you and I are the same in that we're both like, want to experiment with different things, like all the time, right?

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Trying new things. And so this is just one of those things where I was walking down the aisle and I was like, sure, I'm gonna pick up a book on poetry. Why not? You know?

• 43:00Tim Ferriss?

  Grab, grab the gift. It's, it's really good.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 43:03Tim Ferriss?

  And it's funny. The guy is a really funny fucker. Like he's very funny and, uh, very irreverent. Uh, actually got into a lot of, a fair amount of trouble, uh, back in the day, uh, from present day Iran and just, you, you read, you read 50 pages and you're like, if this guy were alive today, he would be my top 10 people I would want to have drinks with.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  He's very, very funny and profound and it's, it requires a, a very high level of sensitivity and artistry and wordsmithing. Of course, these are translated by Daniel Ladinsky in this case. Uh, to achieve that. It's a very hard effect to produce in such a short format. Well, I think.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:55Tim Ferriss?

  What else are you reading?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I will say the thing in the last three months that probably, well, it just consumed me this summer. Um, was a course on by Michael Singer, uh, who wrote The Untethered Soul. So he, um, has a course over, um, that was on, uh, it sounds true. You know that, that they're like a publisher. Yeah. So he has a course that's a video course, um, and it's a five, uh, session, like hour and a half, two hours per, per video. Uh, no, sorry. Eight session, eight or nine session, hour and a half, two hours per video, um, on surrender. And just really how to embrace surrender and incorporate it in your everyday life and how that is one of the most powerful things that you can do.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  And how it just really, really simplified, um, letting things unfold for me.

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  How do you? How do you, or could you give an example of how you might use this concept of surrender without becoming driftwood in the flow of life?

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 45:06Tim Ferriss?

  Because it's sort of in, for some people, myself included, has a connotation, which is from my own experience, I suppose, or just perception of passivity.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 45:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get that.

• 45:19Tim Ferriss?

  That like you've lost your free will and you're just sort of an impassive creature, taking whatever life throws at you.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think it's, well, there's a couple of things. One of the things that I appreciated about the course, and when I'm still continuing to learn, because I'm going back and listening to it, you know it's good when you go back and listen to it like two or three times. And one of the things that he talks about is just this idea that I think we can all agree on, that we have these little programs that are essentially in us that have been either handed down to us by teachers, or parents, or whatever it may be, that are how we interpret the world as it hits us. So, for example, if you were cheated on by a girl in the past, and something kind of comes close to that by a new person that you're dating, maybe they're stayed out too late

• 46:10Speaker 03

  and didn't call you, or something like this happens that activates that little scar that you have, you can then go and really work yourself up, right? And that applies to so many different things. I mean, it's like, you know, we were talking about coffee earlier, I can enjoy an amazing single origin coffee from a Japanese artisan, but you hand that same cup of coffee to someone that's Mormon, that has been told that coffee is a sin, and it's against your religion, you're going to have a completely different experience.

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  When trying to consume that beverage, right? So, there are all these little things, these little programs that have been installed, whether we know it or not, you know, and a lot of them we don't know. So, it can just be a reaction to something that has previously happened to us when in our childhood, or even, you know, through our parents yelling at us, like, I'm... Thankfully, I'm the opposite of my father. My father was a very verbally aggressive thing, uh, per human. And so, um, when I hear certain types of aggression like that, I tend to kind of back away from it because it's hitting that stuff inside of me.

• 47:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  So, his whole thing is, this, this idea of surrender is really being able to identify when that is happening and seeing when that's happening and understanding which programs aren't really serving you any longer and being able just to release and let them go. And when you can release and let go of those little scars that we've been accumulating over, you know, decades, we can just become free. And it's so amazing when you can finally just rest and let the world kind of unfold and not get pissed off about the person that cuts you off in traffic, or any number of little events that happen throughout the day. Um, and he has really some amazing, really compelling examples throughout this entire

• 47:56Speaker 03

  course, but it's, it's helped me really examine my reactions. And it goes hand in hand with meditation in that, that way, you know?

• 48:04Tim Ferriss?

  You're gonna love awareness.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Awesome. Yeah, I sounded like it.

• 48:07Tim Ferriss?

  These, these sound like birds of a feather, very complimentary.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:13Tim Ferriss?

  Very complimentary ways of, of feeding your mind and emotions. And you've been talking about this, this surrender course for a while now in our conversations. So I'm definitely intending to check it out. And the Untethered Soul, his book.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:27Tim Ferriss?

  Has been recommended to me on a number of occasions. So I'm gonna.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  I think you really enjoyed this course because it's, you're gonna sit back and it's, it's video and I would just let it play when I had some downtime. And, um, there's just, it's funny what people think of, your reaction was the exact same one that I had initially, where, um, surrender is this, this, this kind of passive thing. And it's like, gosh, it seems like, it feels like a weak thing, actually, if you think about it. Like you're surrendering. Oh, that's, that's the weakest thing. But think about it this way. It is the hardest thing to do. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you're like, that motherfucker, right? Like, what's harder? To get angry at them or to surrender and just let that pass through you rather than hit you?

• 49:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  It's hitting you in some way, right? And so it's not, this course is not about like having people step all over you. Because obviously that would be a horrible thing and no one wants that. But it's, it's really about understanding and being able to choose and let go of, of probably 98% of it. Right? Like, there's still things that I get amped up about. Certain things aren't going well in our country. Or there's certain things that, you know, people are getting mistreated. Or, you know, there's things that will really still charge me to do things. But I realize now after taking this course and kind of revisiting it, that most things you realize really don't have a whole lot to do with you. If someone's really pissed off at you, they're dealing with something. Why should it then come out and affect you and your being, you know?

• 49:54Speaker 03

  You should have compassion for that person because they're going through a rough time, you know? There's a way to flip this stuff that gets really interesting.

• 50:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And even if you don't have compassion, just taking the second to pause and recognize that it's not serving you. Like, it's not going to translate into any action that is productive.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:12Tim Ferriss?

  Like, what are you gonna do? Chase the guy down to cut you off and like get out of your car at his office that he's running into because he got into a fight with his wife and punch him in the throat?

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Right. People do that.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  People do. But it's, it's not like that, that's bad energy allocation.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  And something that's predictable. Like, that's gonna always happen to you. It's like, that's like, getting cut off is gonna happen to you for the rest of your life, you know, hundreds of times. Like, why are you gonna get so charged up about it every single time? It's ridiculous, you know?

• 50:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. I'm excited to hear what you think of awareness.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:47Tim Ferriss?

  It'll pair very well with that.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love stuff like that. It's just like, you know, any way that we can just kind of get a little better understanding. And to your point earlier about Sam Harris's course, I think that Sam has the best meditation course for people that want to take it seriously. You know, I made a meditation app with the thinking of just doing a free unguided timer and some very basic instructions, but like, that's great if you want something that's free. Like Sam's is a paid course, and I think that he goes deeper. And I love it. It's not, it's not just window dressing. It's like really taking meditation seriously. I know you completed the 50 days as well.

• 51:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just finished up the 50 days and I thought it was phenomenal.

• 51:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's super strong. And, you know, there are different strokes for different folks in terms of meditation styles.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure.

• 51:40Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, you know, his, his style is not for everybody, but for the right person, it's, it's really helpful as a skill progression, as a, as a sort of logical progression of skill development. What am, what am I holding up here? This is something.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  Might as well, can we talk about this?

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's talk about it.

• 52:01Tim Ferriss?

  Might as well talk about it. This is something that I've been downing a lot of since I got to your house. But, and on it, on the can, it says DRAM, D-R-A-M, and then the particulars, that's the brand, and then cardamom and black tea. Below it, no sugar, zero calories. What is this thing that I'm holding?

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is interesting. And this is a company that actually someone that I know here in Portland was like, you gotta try this sparkling.

• 52:35Tim Ferriss?

  A chef?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  She knows, yeah, she's a chef, and she knows I drink sparkling water. And she's like, you gotta try this sparkling beverage. Like, it'll change your world. And I was like, well, why? There's so many of them out there. Like, every Whole Foods aisle or whatever has, you know, a hundred of these, right? And she goes, no, this is different. They're actually bitters makers. So remember like bitters and cocktails? And they create these concentrates from real herbs and spices and like very bitters focused and then put them in sparkling water. So it's not like you're, you're never gonna see on the side of like one of these cans, like natural flavorings. Like, that's not what they do. Like, they're, they're hand pressing their ginger, they're doing all, they make these zero calorie beverages. And I would say, I don't know if you agree with me, but it's like, An order of magnitude better than anything you find in the store.

• 53:21Tim Ferriss?

  They're really, really good.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  They're really good.

• 53:24Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  The black tea cardamom is my favorite, by the way. I think that's.

• 53:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this one, I tried a bunch. This is my, this is the, my, the current fave. You have an entire refrigerator full of these. And you and Tony, who I mentioned earlier, brought this to my attention. I'd never tried it before that.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  And we should say, just in full disclosure, we're looking at it and I've talked to the founders and we're, we're considering investing. Neither you or I have invested in this company.

• 53:48Tim Ferriss?

  We haven't. But whether, whether I invest or not, it's really good stuff.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really good. And they do CBD one. Can I say that you tried it? You're okay with that?

• 54:00Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  I said, you just like adults. You're fine saying you did a little CBD at my house. They, they make a CBD one that has 25 milligrams of CBD, which is what Michael's, ah, Michael Singer.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Michael Singer loves CBD cardamom. Oh, wait, no, I take that back. Don't sue us.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Matthew Walker, from Why, Why We Sleep, the Berkeley scientist out of, that has a sleep lab in Berkeley. He recommends 25 milligrams of CBD for sleep and they do some of the best. There's one called Beauty Bubbles. That is the best CBD. You wouldn't even know there's CBD in it. That's how you know it's good.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  You have no idea.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  You have no idea.

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  There's from a taste perspective.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  It doesn't taste like weed.

• 54:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, that'd be terrible.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it'd be terrible. And it has a bunch of different adaptogens in there as well, but these things are awesome. You can buy them on their website. You can just search like DRAM, D R A M sparkling beverage.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Dramapothecary.com from Colorado.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's, it's my favorite sparkling beverage and they do direct to consumer. They're not in all the stores yet.

• 55:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's really good. I mean, I, I've had, sorry, Kevin, probably like nine of these in the last.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  It's all good.

• 55:13Tim Ferriss?

  24 hours. Fantastic. What else is on your mind, man?

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Ah, gosh, um, just trying to kind of like, uh, do less work stuff, um, not in terms of like, taking on less startups, like not actually building stuff, more just investing. And so I've been doing that through True Ventures. Um, and then also just exploring, um, rather than do, you know, 20 things at once that I want to explore and get excited about, picking two or three and then just really following through on them and doing them really deep. So, you know, this summer for me was all about, um, because I live in the Pacific Northwest, now it's all about mushrooms. And so, you know, I went out and bought, um, a couple thousand mushroom plugs, um, cut down some, uh, oak trees, not, not big oak trees, but branches, and then inoculated,

• 56:02Speaker 03

  um, those branches with lion's mane and a couple other specimens.

• 56:06Tim Ferriss?

  So that means, just, just to paint a picture, you're drilling holes into these logs that kind of simulate branches that would have fallen in the forest.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 56:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then you're, you're

• 56:19Speaker 03

  You're drilling about a

• 56:20Tim Ferriss?

  ejecting mushroom spores into this wood.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Right. So you can drill about a inch into the wood. And then you get these little wooden dowels that are inoculated. So they look like little, you know, pieces of round peg wood and they are all frosty with like, you know, fungi growing on them, um, or mycelium, I guess. And then you pound it into the log with like just a, a rubber mallet. And then you put a thin layer of wax on the outside of that to prevent, um, anything else from getting in there. Um, and then you cover them mostly in the summer with like, because it gets, does get a little hot here. And so we cover them with like some shade cloth and I went out there and watered them kind of once a day, just to kind of keep the logs a little moist. And then in the fall, either this year or next year in the fall, um, the lion's mane will really start to just come out of them.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  And I'll have these massive lion's mane that'll turn into, uh, chop them up, uh, saute it with a little bit of, uh, garlic and butter. And you'll have just an amazing, um, uh, mushroom that is also really good for the brain. There's been a lot of studies done on lion's mane in the brain and brain health. Um, and, uh, helping you with memories and recall and it's, yeah, it's good stuff.

• 57:27Tim Ferriss?

  You are also doing a lot of fasting.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:30Tim Ferriss?

  You want to talk about that?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I talked to you, you know, when we checked in when I first got here. And we were chatting about fasting and you're like, yeah, I've been fasting for 18 hours now. And I was like, oh, really? Like, how often are you doing that? And then we had a whole discussion about it.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:44Tim Ferriss?

  How often, yeah, what are you using?

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Well, I, you know, I started Zero, the fasting app, about two years ago. And that really has, has taken off. We've had, um, gosh, close to, I think, over 40 million fasts now or something like that.

• 57:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's really wild.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we've, we've got a million people fasting on a month. Um, and it's growing like crazy.

• 58:04Tim Ferriss?

  Zero.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, and it's completely free. Um, Peter Tia just joined as the chief medical officer to really help put some medical rigor around what you should be doing, especially with extended fasting. You know, there's like magnesium and some other supplements and things you want to be considering when you're doing longer, especially water only fasts. So, um, you know, for me, I do a quarterly, uh, five day fast. Um, and then I will try and do, uh, at least five days a week of 18 hours. Um, and that for me, I can find, you know, I, I gotta tell you, I still do love those, these Portland beers out here are really good. And I know is, I, well, this is, this is the hell that I have to face, right? Because I love like meditation and all these things, but I also like to have a couple beers.

• 58:49Tim Ferriss?

  So, so on, on the other side, Kevin is fasting 18 hours a day. All of his other calories he consumes are from beer.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Uh, I have a window of two hours where I just get hammered. No, it's, no, seriously though, um, in the summertime, the beers, beers are so amazing that I will just become a little piggy and I'll just get super fat.

• 59:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Um, because I'm just having these amazing beers and they go right to my gut. I find that at 18 hours, um, I can pretty much throw anything at me. Not that I, I want to, because I want to try and eat healthy and, and pretty well rounded. But, um, I can slim up quite well, um, and not, and not have issues with weight, which, um, The dads, my dad's side of the family was all obese and had heart disease and all that stuff. So it's something I take pretty, pretty seriously and try and maintain, um, you know, a pretty lean physique. So, um, 18 hours is kind of my sweet spot there.

• 59:42Tim Ferriss?

  When you do your five day fasts, once a quarter, are those water fasts? Are they fast mimicking diet fasts?

• 59:51Speaker 03

  I did only one, uh, five day water fast and it was so brutal. It was, it was brutal, not because of the hunger, but because of the sleep.

• 59:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  I had a really hard time sleeping and I got

• 1:00:02Tim Ferriss?

  Rapid heart rate.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Rapid heart rate, all that good stuff. And magnesium will help with a little bit of that stuff. But, um, yeah, you, you really want to, if you ever do anything like that, you want to talk to a doctor, be under the supervision.

• 1:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  You really want supervision.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  So I'm doing something called a, um, fasting, uh, mimetic, which is like you do, um, limited calories, about 500 calories a day.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  It's like the Walter Longo FMD, fast, fast mimicking diet.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Exactly. So this is, uh, Walter Longo is a scientist out of, uh, USC. Um, and he basically developed this protocol for cancer patients. Um, it really helps reduce, um, the effects of chemotherapy. So you're not getting a lot of the nausea and things of that nature.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  Um, and makes, makes it more effective too, as I understand it.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, and we know friends. I mean, I'm not gonna mention names, but.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Oh, he's come out, the CEO of Zero.

• 1:00:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, great.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Right now, Mike Mazur has come out and talked about this. He had stage four cancer and used, uh, this, this fasting as part of his regimen within conjunction with chemotherapy.

• 1:01:01Tim Ferriss?

  Pre-treatment.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  He would do the three day fast or something along those lines?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it was two days prior to chemo and then during chemo and then two days after. So that was his five days. And he was, uh, in a lot better shape. I remember one time he called me up and he's like, I didn't fast for my last round of chemo and I'm just obliterated. Like he could really tell the difference. And they have, Walter has done some amazing work and, um, you can go and, and search his work on YouTube and you'll see the, the videos of, of the rats and mice that he's, he's, uh, inoculated with chemotherapy and he does the fasting ones with the non fasting ones. And the ones that fasted are running around the cages, same does. chemotherapy and the ones that are that are have eaten food are just like on their sides.

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I want to say that that was also from remembering correctly Mike's experience where he did the fasting and other folks he got to know who were undergoing treatment at the same time were like laid out on the couch.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Tim Ferriss?

  Having a tough time moving and he was doing like 10 mile runs.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was running, which is crazy. So it's, you know, there's the one piece of actually the one study that I really love was this one that they had these women that had had breast cancer but were in remission. And it was something like 2,500 women. It was a decent sized pool. They had them do just a very simple circadian rhythm kind of fast, which is, you know, you don't have any food after sunset and then you fast for 13 hours. So it's mostly just kind of like, you know, sleeping.

• 1:02:28Tim Ferriss?

  Sun up, you're allowed to eat.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Tim Ferriss?

  Basically.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Basically, and of those women that followed the protocol, they had a 36 or 38% reduction in recurrence of breast cancer just by fasting 13 hours, which is nothing. That is the easiest fast you could do. So there's a lot of benefits to it in terms of inflammation markers, in terms of your obviously better glucose levels if you're not nighttime snacking. You don't have elevated glucose when you go to bed, which is huge.

• 1:02:57Tim Ferriss?

  I think we blew the nighttime snacking yesterday.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Well, you went whole hog on that tub of ice cream.

• 1:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  I went whole hog. What?

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  It was, I would say it was we we split it.

• 1:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, engage in some behaviors that make make one.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Eat ice cream.

• 1:03:18Tim Ferriss?

  Indulge in things like ice cream.

• 1:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  That ice cream was amazing.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know what that is, but it has this layer of like ganache.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Yes, the chocolate.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's got like, it's got about a quarter inch of ganache on the top.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  With sea salt on top of that. And then it's a caramel ice cream underneath it.

• 1:03:36Tim Ferriss?

  What is that stuff? Do you know the name?

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Jewel dude, it's a local place here.

• 1:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  Ruby jewel. It is unbelievable. If you don't want to eat an entire pint of ice cream, do not buy it because it will not last.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the problem I have. I, I, I, because it's local here and they always come out with these summer flavors with like strawberries and stuff and so you can see why I do the 18 hour fast.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  I really am good most of the time, but I do go off the rails. I'm like you, dude. You used to do those cheat days.

• 1:04:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  I remember going with you in the morning to the bakery and you get these massive bear claws.

• 1:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, they're delicious.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  And just put those, those were like huge. Those were like nine inch bear claws.

• 1:04:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I miss those. They're so good. Yeah. Uh, man. Time for, uh, time for dinner?

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we gotta go to dinner soon. Anything else to, to plug or talk about?

• 1:04:27Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, well, I would say.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Someone posted on my podcast too. You have any, like, do you talk about the fact that you're doing anything with the new book or anything or no? We have to cut this out.

• 1:04:36Tim Ferriss?

  Well, no, I can talk about it. And actually, I'm surprised I haven't told you this. So I was working on a new book. I'm not gonna.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Oh my God, you pulled the plug on it?

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  I pulled the plug.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 1:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  This is a book about, I'll give, this is an exclusive. So I was working on a book entirely about saying no.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:52Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  I knew that.

• 1:04:53Tim Ferriss?

  Gathering, I know you knew that.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, there's other people listening.

• 1:05:00Tim Ferriss?

  A book on saying no and gathering tactics and systems and rules and language and so on from many, many people who are good at this. And, uh, one of the challenges of writing a book on no, at least for me, is that I kept on coming up with all these reasons why I shouldn't write the book. And so I said no to the book. I returned the advance. I canceled the contract.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 1:05:28Tim Ferriss?

  But I have, and I could, I could go into that. Well, let me go into it. Let me, I think this is maybe worth talking about for a minute. What I realized was it was putting a real strain on my relationship with my girlfriend who I love dearly. And.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  She's awesome, by the way. This is the first time I've met her, which is crazy.

• 1:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  She's great and really, really wonderful. And I was putting a strain on the relationship. And particularly I'd misjudged how long the book would take to do. I thought I could sprint over the summer and do it in three to four months. Turned out it was going to be much more complex, would require a lot more writing on my part. And would have to be extended at least six months. And that would require canceling the vast majority of things in my calendar. And disappointing my girlfriend on a number of levels that were important to me and her that, uh, that I not bend on.

• 1:06:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, for what? For what? To write a book for the world, broadly speaking, to jeopardize this relationship? No. Like, that's, that's, that's a decision that young Tim would have been like, fuck that. I was just gonna say that. Yeah. Young Tim, younger Tim, I mean, I'm embarrassed to say probably not that much younger Tim, but younger Tim would have viewed returning in advance and canceling a book as a, it's a gigantic sign of weakness. And quitting, and I've spent a lot of my life developing a very high pain tolerance and being able to just out endure. And I would

• 1:07:08Tim Ferriss?

  have forced it, but I was able to zoom out. I mean, it sounds like this is right along the lines of the surrender course, right along the lines of the awareness. I was able to zoom out and say, wait a second. I'm viewing this as a very binary thing. Maybe this isn't a binary thing. What I realized was, at this point in my career, I'm very fortunate that I don't have to publish anything on any given timeline. And by returning the advance and canceling the book, I still have 200 pages of material. That's a lot of material. I was just gonna ask you about that. And I'll give a teaser for folks. I'm going to completely redesign and relaunch the, the website, the tim.blog website, which hasn't been done in forever. Do you have a designer? It's all, it's basically done. Yes. Oh, wow. Crazy.

• 1:07:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's basically done. You did it yourself. I got back into HTML. Looks great. Looks like GeoCities. And great, great, great help from Matt Mullenweg and the folks at Automattic. And I am actually going to get back to writing on a regular schedule. Oh, that's awesome. I'm gonna start putting stuff out. That's the plan, at least. In a way that mimics how this all started. I was before the book, before the four hour work week even. The blog was what helped launch things.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  I was just gonna ask you if you were gonna like, why not use this content? I mean, it's gonna be great.

• 1:08:34Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna, I'm going to use a bunch of it. And there's some fantastic stuff. And I can say there's some fantastic stuff because it's not dependent on me. I really found some people who are just fucking incredible at this.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  And give me a little hint on the book, though. I want to know, like, since we're doing a little exclusive here. What is one thing that you learned? Okay, let me put, let me phrase it, put it to you this way. What was the aha moment for you where you realized like, wow, I have something that is new and unique enough that I need to go write a book about this? Like, what did you, what was that moment?

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I'll answer it maybe in a way that is a bit lateral. But I decided to write the book not because I said, I know the magic sauce for giving the answer that people need. It was because I wanted to gather more tools and resources for myself to become better at it myself. Turns out that I think I'm pretty good at it. In other words, I would go to a lot of friends, asking them for advice. And they're like, dude, you're the best person I know at doing this. You should be writing that. And in some cases, that was true. In other cases, there are folks like our friend Josh, who's incredible at it, but he doesn't view himself that way. Right?

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Oh, Cook?

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Oh, he's really good.

• 1:09:54Tim Ferriss?

  He's really good, but, but it, his, his, his, in his position, in his work, relative to maybe some other Michael Jordans of saying, no, he wouldn't, he did, he didn't consider himself to be very good, even though he is. Uh, looking at any normal sort of group of people. He's excellent. So it started out as almost all my books do, as a very personal journey to learn how other people do this. So that I could borrow their principles and techniques and so on.

• 1:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  The aha moment I would say that I had, and this also coincided with realizing, oh shit, this is gonna take at least another six to nine months. This is not a sprint for three months. And I can do a lot in three months. I mean, I did 200 pages in three months, but I was like, to get it right, to make it, because I have no interest in writing good books. And I'm not saying my books are the best thing since sliced bread. I'm not saying they're good literature compared to Tolstoy or anyone you might pull out of a hat. But my goal at least is not to write a good book, because

• 1:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  if you're gonna put in that much effort, that's like running 20 miles of a marathon. It's like, no, do the last 6.2, which is really like the second half of the marathon,

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:11:16Tim Ferriss?

  which is the hardest, because you want to put out a great book. And I was like, alright, to do a good book, I could do a good book and my fans would buy it. And it would be helpful, but it wouldn't be enough. And I'll tell you what that means. You can get the best language in the world, template emails, auto responses, and so on, to give people. And that's part of what I thought I needed. And it's necessary but not sufficient. If you don't do a pretty major psychological overhaul, and develop this awareness that we've been talking about, like the observer status of your own patterns and stories and codependence also, where you feel like you're responsible for managing the emotional states and responses of other people.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:01Tim Ferriss?

  The templates and so on are going to seem really attractive, and then a week later, you're gonna be back in your email doing all the same shit.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's not gonna work. And...

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  Crazy. You should write this book. This sounds awesome.

• 1:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  I wrote a lot of it. I wrote a lot of it. And there were some really important pieces to touch upon.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  And what I realized is that you have topics that are sort of independently treated well in like five different genres. And to write a book on saying no that actually works, like that provides a systematic approach that really, really, really works, you kind of have to take those five genres and put them all into a book.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm curious, was this, did you plan on having this be something that you could apply to things outside? Of say a work scenario, because I know a lot of people would say, Tim, like dude, that's nice that you have a hundred thousand people wanting things from you. I don't have those demands on me. But I think there's even even more power in saying no to things like Netflix. Or saying no to something else and and just sitting. It's not it's not that you have to fill the time with something. That's like, I feel like that's what we're always trying to do. Like, how can I fill the time with something better?

• 1:13:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  But it really is.

• 1:13:16Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so you're you're also touching on something that made this book very difficult, which is when you start to really investigate no and the and a book on saying no is also has to be a book on why people have trouble saying no. Which is also a book on why people say yes to too many things.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:37Tim Ferriss?

  And before you know it, the book is about everything in the fucking universe. Like, it just, it bloats.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  And very quickly, and I put I put in a quote in actually the first chapter from John Muir, I think it was, which was, in effect, like, whenever you try to separate out one thing in the world, you real you find it hitched to the rest of the universe. And constraining this book was very, very challenging.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  I bet.

• 1:14:03Tim Ferriss?

  Because, as you pointed out, there are many different types.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  So many rabbit holes to go down, right?

• 1:14:07Tim Ferriss?

  There are many different types of temptations to which you should say no. Broadly speaking, they could be put into two categories. Internally generated distractions. And then sort of externally imposed invitations, distractions, requests, etc. And they both depend on certain types of psychological reformatting. And I decided to focus on some of the the commonalities. But the book, it's not going to be a book. But when I say it's not going to be a book, here's the thing. I could I could put a bunch of stuff on the blog, fine tune it, make it better, and then publish it as a book a year from now.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  Why don't you just do a series of blog posts to start?

• 1:14:52Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's the plan.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that'll be great.

• 1:14:54Tim Ferriss?

  And then if I decide to do a book, it's going to be a better book if I do it later. It'll be more refined. And the the saying no.

• 1:15:03Tim Ferriss?

  Is is really not limited or specific to work or personal. Some of the scripts are specific to work or personal. But it's like, because say declining going to a work meeting where someone of a similar level in the hierarchy is yourself or below is requesting your attendance. It's very different from, say, declining the baby shower invitation from someone who thinks that you're their best friend or one of their best friends. And you don't feel and you don't feel the same about them. That's different. Right. And the language you're going to use is probably very different.

• 1:15:46Tim Ferriss?

  The consequences could be very different. The way you might have to do damage control in those consequences, which is also a chapter that I started working on is like, if shit really goes sideways and you feel like you need to fix it, what do you do? What's the cleanup procedure? How do you become like the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction? Like the cleaner? What do you need to do? And

• 1:16:12Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of those skill sets apply not only to work situations. I think that work is actually the easiest, even though many people may not view it that way.

• 1:16:23Tim Ferriss?

  Even in the beginning stages of your career, or when you feel like you don't have many options. The fact of the matter is you always now I'm like getting into it, but you always have options. You always have options. They might just not be very attractive to you. You always have options, always. And so the book is also was intended to explore that, like, why do we artificially constrain our options? And if you are seeing a binary choice of A versus B and both are unattractive, what are you missing? And can you zoom out? What are the tools for zooming out so you can see the other paths you could take?

• 1:17:04Tim Ferriss?

  So there were aspects of it that were really fun to work on that were really, really useful to me immediately. Right? I would, I would, and that was, that was part of the litmus test for each chapter was like, all right, is this something that I can literally use in the next 12 hours? Yeah, I want these templates, dude. I really need no templates. I've got a bunch of them. I've got tons. That's awesome. Just like

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Tim Tim's template pack of like saying no.

• 1:17:31Tim Ferriss?

  Tim Tim's template pack, upsell, when all that fails, when you come back and you have all of your old behaviors still intact, here's the psychological makeover. So yeah, that's, that's something I'm really excited about and I'll just give a shout out also and a congratulations to the entire team at Johns Hopkins for the successful launch of the world's largest psychedelic research center.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 1:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  And the first psychedelic research and consciousness research center in the United States ever, which just launched at Johns Hopkins.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  And we should definitely mention, you probably won't, but you, dude, you've helped fund a lot of this, which is

• 1:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  a big deal. Thank you for doing that.

• 1:18:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  I know so many people that had reached out to me being like, I can't believe Tim did this, blah, blah, because they don't know you directly, but they know that I know you. And then it was like, people are freaking out about it, dude. It's a big deal.

• 1:18:28Tim Ferriss?

  It was, it was, uh, it's, it is a big deal, symbolically and practically for the field. A lot of conditions that are poorly treated or viewed as untreatable currently, whether that is, say, end of life anxiety, after terminal cancer diagnoses, treatment resistant depression, eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, which has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder alive. I don't realize that. Nicotine addiction, opioid dependence, et cetera.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  PTSD from

• 1:18:59Tim Ferriss?

  PTSD, from war, sexual trauma. Uh, these, uh, conditions seem to be treatable through paradigm shifting frameworks utilizing psychedelic compounds. And, uh, the, the, the results thus far are, are pretty staggering. I mean, they're, they're, they're very unlike anything that's been seen in the world of psychiatry up to this point. And The center at Hopkins, for me, was about a year and a half in the making.

• 1:19:40Tim Ferriss?

  So it was a very, very involved process. And there were a couple of folks who, along with my contribution, were able to get this funded. The foundation who provided the most money was the Stephen and Alexandra Cohen Foundation. They've done a lot of incredible work with veterans. And they put in a large slug, about half, maybe a little bit more than half of the total required, which is 17 million, for this center, which is a five-year commitment. Very important because it allows Hopkins to not only attract,

• 1:20:23Tim Ferriss?

  but also retain some of the best people in the country for doing this type of research. And then you have yours truly, Matt Mullenweg, just a beautiful human being, CEO of Automatic, which I mentioned earlier, Auto M A T T, I see. If you see what he did there. Yeah. There's about 1,000 distributed employees. They run WordPress.com, among other things. Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS. Oh, awesome. I didn't know Blake was involved. That's great. Yeah, Blake's involved. And then Craig Nuremberg, who's an investor, who's done some incredible things. He's very shy, so I won't get into much. But it was important that everybody be willing to allow their names to be used for this.

• 1:21:06Tim Ferriss?

  I did not want any anonymous donors. Yeah. Because it just reinforces undeserved stigma for these compounds that have so much therapeutic potential and very, very demonstrated low toxicity at this point and anti-addictive properties. So that was a year and a half. And you've had this feeling, I'm sure, but it's kind of like after so much work and so much looking forward to this moment off in the distant future, after shipping it, there's this kind of, it's an odd feeling. This is kind of like postpartum, what now? Yeah. Oh shit, like we kinda, kinda shipped it. And of course, the scientists now get to do the fun stuff and the exciting stuff on their side.

• 1:21:49Tim Ferriss?

  But my job is mostly done. And uh-

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Let me ask you a question before we, before we wrap up. Um, this is, uh, I know they had been doing some research there.

• 1:21:59Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Um, was it just a very small scale? Like, what did this funding enable them to do?

• 1:22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  That's different than what they were doing before?

• 1:22:06Tim Ferriss?

  So Hopkins has done a lot of research when you consider how many sessions, say, they've administered of psilocybin, which is in the hundreds, probably somewhere between, I'm guessing here, but between 500, 700 sessions, uh, that has really reinvigorated the entire space. Some of their early studies helped to galvanize the resurgence of scientific research. What the center allows them to do is dedicate their full attention to this field. Uh, up to this point, and this is true at other places like NYU, UCLA, UCSF, uh, Yale, uh, people who've wanted to do psychedelic research have generally need

• 1:22:51Tim Ferriss?

  to spend anywhere from, let's just call it 30 to 75% of their time writing grants. We have a scientist in the room.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  My wife?

• 1:23:02Tim Ferriss?

  Your wife, Daria. Uh, so she's seen this firsthand, I'm sure, that people need to write grants to ensure they have salaries.

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and in the case of psychedelics, because there is effectively zero federal funding from agencies like the NIH or NIMH, uh, there's, there's a relative lack of funding. And therefore, these people who truly in their heart of hearts would like to spend 100% of their time unlocking the full potential of psychedelics and understanding the mechanisms, need to write grants for other studies that don't involve psychedelics just to pay the bills.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:41Tim Ferriss?

  And so you have the most productive teams in the world, including Hopkins, who are spending only a fraction of their time- On psychedelic research.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, because Ray Grant's is a whole job by itself.

• 1:23:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's a whole job by itself. So when you create a center that has, say, five years of salary support, you just open the floodgates. And I think the quote was from perhaps the chair of the psychiatry department, but one of the higher ups at Hopkins who said this should allow a quantum leap forward in the productivity of scientific researchers in the world, in the realm of psychedelics. What it also allows, and this is why I hope that the centers catalyzes multiple centers around the country and more ambitious thinking around building big things in this space, is that it also allows huge cost savings per study. So let's

• 1:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  just say this opioid dependence study, by itself, done piecemeal, because there's no sharing of resources, you have to recruit and staff each study independently, otherwise. Let's say that might cost, and I am kind of pulling these numbers out of my ass, but something like 3.2. And then within the structure of the center, it's like 1.7, 1.8. The cost savings are enormous. So you just get a lot more done, much more quickly. And if you look at the opioid crisis, you look at depression, you look at the costs associated with some of these conditions, these are problems that are compounding. And I think it pays to be ambitious and aggressive with funding tools that could identify completely

• 1:25:18Tim Ferriss?

  new pathways and mechanisms of action by which we can treat these things that up until this point have been largely untreatable.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a very noble cause and something that I've been tracking for the last few years and watching these kind of studies come out. And as someone that has benefited from a high dose psilocybin guided session, I can tell you that all of the, or a large chunk of the kind of trauma that I was dealing with, with my father being so verbally aggressive over the years and the causing like. That impression upon me, I was able just to release in six hours, which was amazing.

• 1:25:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's wild.

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  And the lightness you feel from that afterwards, um, sticks with you.

• 1:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  And so, I mean, and I have it easy. Like, think about the people that are addicted to opioids, or, you know, all these other people that came back from, uh, from fighting wars and have PTSD. And, uh, yeah, I mean, there's so many applications for it.

• 1:26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  It's really exciting.

• 1:26:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and there's some organizations, if you're, if you're not interested, uh, in engaging directly with the universities, although if, if, if you happen to have a close relationship with one and are, say, an alumni or trustee providing funding, then consider this as an avenue of exploration. It's, it's remarkable and...

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, how can people help out? Like, is, is it, I mean, obviously, the funding is done for this next five years, but can people actually still donate and get involved and extend that runway some?

• 1:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  They, they can, and they can do it at other universities. What I'm gonna do, uh,

• 1:26:49Tim Ferriss?

  harkening back to what I said earlier about relaunching the blog, one of my, my top priorities when I relaunch the entire site is to put out a post, which is effectively the top 10 options for supporting the psychedelic scientific renaissance. And there will, I will point out the targets that I think are extremely high leverage.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 1:27:10Tim Ferriss?

  In different places.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  And just keep that up to date, right? So it'll be a resource for people, basically?

• 1:27:14Tim Ferriss?

  It'll be a resource, and, uh, an easy place to learn more is maps.org. And, uh, I would also recommend that people check out a documentary. If you want to see what these sessions actually look like, actual session footage, go to tim.blog/trip, and that will take you to a documentary called Trip of Compassion. It's very intense, uh, but, but worth checking out, and you can learn more.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Sweet. Dude, well, thank you for doing that. That's, uh, I know that you got a massive New York Times article out of that as well.

• 1:27:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was wild. Yeah, thanks to, uh, thanks to everybody who helped make that happen. Um, Benedict Carey, the writer, who really took the time to, to ask a lot of questions of a lot of people and look at the nuances. Uh, Alan Burdick, uh, the, the editor, and, um, certainly all the people kind of behind the scenes. Uh, Michael Pollan also for his great work and ongoing work.

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Oh, man, the credibility that he added to the space by launching that book is so massive.

• 1:28:14Tim Ferriss?

  How to Change Your Mind, which is really, really, uh... Just added so much momentum to scientific research and increased the interest level of potential funders and allies and so on, who recognize that we have a lot of problems that are not being well addressed. And in oncology and neurology and immunology, all these other fields have been these massive breakthroughs over the last few decades. And in psychiatry, there have been relatively few discoveries that would be considered breakthroughs, very few. And if we look at the costs of mental illness, the prevalence of mental illness, the number

• 1:28:59Tim Ferriss?

  of people that I'm sure people listening know, who take antidepressants and nonetheless are still depressed, those affected by opioid dependence and addiction. The scale of these problems is so gigantic that if there are tools that have demonstrated low toxicity and anti-addictive properties, they're worth investigating. So I'm as gung ho as ever. And they're not panaceas, there are risks involved, but I think the risk benefit ratio is incredibly compelling. So, to be continued.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Awesome. Well, that is it for this episode of The Random Show.

• 1:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Slash Tim Show slash Kevin Show, depending on what feed you're listening to.

• 1:29:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. Where can people find you?

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so people can find me @KevinRose on Instagram, kevinrose.com. Also links to my podcast there that I do every few weeks. And I think that's it, yeah.

• 1:29:55Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. People can find me at tim.blog, podcast, Tim Ferriss Show. And the newsletter, I have a free newsletter that goes out every Friday to about one, somewhere between 1.6 and 2 million people now. And Five Bullet Friday is the five coolest things or most interesting things I've found that week. A lot of them get recommended to me by you.

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 1:30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Well, no, I mean, like every once in a while, some of them make in. Yeah. So Five Bullet Friday, you can just find it tim.blog/friday. That's free, it'll always be free. And that's one of the things I enjoy doing each week.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  Sweet. Awesome.

• 1:30:33Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  Let's get some food.

• 1:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  Off to food. Later, guys.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  See ya.

• 1:30:37Tim 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 world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:31:20Tim 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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Hiring can be hard. It can be super, super expensive and very painful if you get it wrong. I certainly have had that experience multiple times, have made a lot of mistakes. I am not eager to repeat any of them. So I try to do as much vetting as possible now on the front end. Today, with more qualified candidates than ever, but certainly more noise than ever,

• 1:32:01Tim Ferriss?

  employers need a hiring solution that helps them find the right people for their businesses without wasting time, without wasting money. LinkedIn Jobs provides just that. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you specify that you're looking for, so you can quickly find and hire the right person. They also look beyond work skills, so collaboration, creativity, adaptability to connect you with candidates who match your business perfectly. They have endless business-specific data points that help them to massage this and that which can help you to find the best fit. LinkedIn can make sure your job post gets in front of people you want to hire, people with the skills, qualifications, and other insights that help LinkedIn paint a better picture of potential candidates.

• 1:32:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's no wonder that great candidates are hired every eight seconds on average on LinkedIn. That's pretty wild, every eight seconds. So find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on LinkedIn. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim for more details. Again, that's LinkedIn.com/Tim. To get $50 off your first job post, so check it out. LinkedIn.com/Tim. Terms and conditions do apply. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find an amazing designer and create designs you'll love.

• 1:33:26Tim Ferriss?

  From logos to branding to packaging to books, you name it, they have it. And I've used them for just about everything. 99designs is the go-to creative resource for any budget. I've used them for years now for book covers, for instance, mockups of The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for the multi-volume Tao of Seneca, including the cover, and many other creative projects. I've been very impressed by the quality of their work. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook. The illustrations worked out great. I loved working with the designer we selected and I plan to work with him on more projects in the future. And that's something you can do. You don't have to start from scratch every time.

• 1:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  And right now, my listeners can get $20 off plus a free $99 upgrade on their first design contest. Simply submit a brief on the site describing what you need and designers who are interested in your project, often from around the world, will submit concepts for you to choose from. You refine as you go, give feedback, and once you're ready, you choose one to finalize. It's a great way to get started and find the right match, a great designer and a great design at a great price. So head to 99designs.com/Tim to learn more or get started today. You can also see examples of some of the work that I have done with designers on 99designs. So check it out. 99designs.com/Tim.