Episode 1: Kevin Rose

I consider Kevin Rose one of the best "stock pickers" in the early startup game, and he can predict even non-tech trends with stunning accuracy. Kevin is a tech entrepreneur who co-founded Digg, Revision3 (sold to Discovery Channel), Pownce, and Milk (sold to Google). Since 2012, he is a venture partner at Google Ventures. He's also a hilarious dude, and this episode involves heavy drinking.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This is episode one of the Tim Ferriss Podcast. My name is Tim Ferriss. For those of you who don't have any context on me, I'm the author of The Four Hour Work Week, The Four Hour Body, and The Four Hour Chef, which have been translated into more than 35 languages. And all three books are comprised of self-experiments. I travel the world. I find people who are world-class in different skills. And then I try to dissect that skill and test it all myself. And that can range from performance-enhancing drugs to hacking the NFL Combine, to outsourcing my life to India, to cramming two years of culinary school into 48 hours, or trying to learn a foreign language in a few days well enough to go on live television and be interviewed. And it's in search of a toolkit. You do not have to be superhuman to get superhuman results. And to that end,

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  this podcast is going to be a lot like Inside the Actor's Studio, but not limited to actors. We will have in-depth conversational interviews with actors, investors, hackers, professional athletes, black-market chemists, and everybody in between. It will be very wide-ranging. But covering it all is really the 80/20 analysis. And in the process of speaking with these people, we'll try to suss out, what are the critical few things versus the trivial many? What are the 20% of tactics, philosophies, principles that they use to get 80% of the results they've had? And there should be a lot of actionable bits hidden in there, or not so hidden in there, for you to use in your life, or at least to inspire you. So it'll range from tactics to strategies

• 1:30Tim Ferriss?

  to philosophies to motivations that they use to become the best in the world. Without further ado, I would like to introduce you, through the interview, to our first guest, who is Kevin Rose, a very good friend of mine, a world-class investor and entrepreneur in his own right. And his thoughts on investing translate to many different areas in life. So I hope you enjoy it, and thank you for listening.

• 1:55Speaker 01

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

• 2:00Tim Ferriss?

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 2:02Kevin Rose?

  No, we'll just see an appropriate time.

• 2:05Speaker 03

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

• 2:15Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So, hold on. All right. Let's start over. This is experimental. We're figuring it out. So Kevin, would you mind doing the honors?

• 2:22Kevin Rose?

  I'll do the intro as long as you promise I don't have to do this every single time.

• 2:25Tim Ferriss?

  You do not.

• 2:26Kevin Rose?

  Okay, thank you.

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  Once it's recorded, I can just use it repeatedly.

• 2:29Kevin Rose?

  Tim, Tim, Talk, Talk, Episode One.

• 2:35Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome, everybody. Sexy and smart, ladies and gentlemen. This is not Tim, Tim, Talk, Talk. We have to think up a better name.

• 2:41Kevin Rose?

  I know. That was the original joke name.

• 2:44Tim Ferriss?

  Although I do like the idea of calling it T4.

• 2:47Kevin Rose?

  T4?

• 2:48Tim Ferriss?

  Which stands for Tim, Tim, Talk, Talk, but it cannot be.

• 2:51Kevin Rose?

  Well, it also sounds like a Terminator. It sounds like you're hardcore like that.

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  T4 or thyroid hormone, the less active form, but that's too boring.

• 3:00Kevin Rose?

  Nobody knows that.

• 3:01Tim Ferriss?

  So, everybody out there, this is Tim Ferriss, author of a few books that all sound like infomercial products. You'll see after the rotisserie chicken at 3:00 in the morning. This is an experimental podcast. I have my good friend Kevin Rose with me to make it a low-stress, no-stakes experiment for my Episode One. Thank you, Kevin.

• 3:19Kevin Rose?

  No problem. You know, it's funny. You said that we should do this and I said, why do you want me as your first guest? Because we do the Random Show together, which appears on your blog from time to time.

• 3:27Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 3:28Kevin Rose?

  And it's like, I think your audience would be like, oh, this is just the Random Show on audio.

• 3:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's going to be so much better. Number one, because the audio is going to be incredibly impressive.

• 3:38Kevin Rose?

  High bitrate?

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  High bitrate. Assuming I don't mouth the mic and screw it up with my spittle. And I'm going to ask you questions that I normally wouldn't ask on the Random Show.

• 3:49Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, so one thing I wanted to ask you is like, why did you want to do this? What's the inspiration behind this?

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  So the inspiration behind doing this is multifold. Number one, I, over the last year, have had a chance to be on a couple of podcasts that I really enjoyed, like the Joe Rogan Experience, Marc Maron, WTEF Podcast, Brian Callen, Adam Carolla. And I really enjoy the longer format, having the time to deep dive and also be really informal. I assumed it had to be very produced and edited and involved a lot of labor after the fact. And with, for instance, the Joe Rogan Experience, I was able to see that it can be done really easy, casually, and still be fun for everyone involved. I have a great time as a participant and also seemed like over the next few months, I'll be doing a lot of travel.

• 4:39Tim Ferriss?

  I can't say all too much, but doing a primetime TV show on maximizing human performance, using myself as the guinea pig, which starts filming very, very soon. And I'll be on the road a lot. So I figured this would be a fun way for me to get to know people I want to get to know.

• 4:55Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  Just spend two hours drinking wine and digging in. And I think the, the other purpose of the podcast, and this might evolve over time, but is to, very similar to all three books, kind of deep dive with people and try to extract small actionable bits that people can use.

• 5:12Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. It seemed to me like you're on the road so much and you're constantly bumping into obviously really interesting folks. It's just a shame that you're not capturing those conversations that you're having anyway.

• 5:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Kevin Rose?

  And just put it out there for people to consume.

• 5:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Because I, I'll go to these dinners or have wine and we'll get to that in a second and learn so much. And I'm like, God, you know, it's a shame there are only two people here, three people here, four people here. Nothing super confidential was said. I mean, it would be amazing to just offer people the opportunity to be a fly on the wall, listening to some of the people I bumped into who are far smarter than I am. So what are we drinking, Kevin?

• 5:49Kevin Rose?

  So we are having a glass of, or a bottle of wine from a friend of mine, Chris, who owns a little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny wine bar in San Francisco. And when I mean tiny, I mean, you can probably fit like 35 people in the entire place. It's a little hole in the wall down an alleyway. It's actually where I met my wife for our first date.

• 6:11Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't know that.

• 6:12Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. And it's called Hotel Birone, B I R O N. And if you're ever in San Francisco, go there, say hi to the owner. His name is Chris, if he's there and tell him that you heard this on Tim, Tim Talk Talk and you will get a discount. No, I'm just kidding. But he probably could say that. He probably would give you this because he's a cool guy like that. But yeah, he just thought, I was just there actually meeting another friend hanging out and he gave me, he's like, do you want a bottle to go? And I was like, yeah, I'm going to do Tim, Tim Talk Talk. I need a bottle of wine. So the reason I'm saying the name over and over is I want it to stick.

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  I know. You're incepting people. You're a fucker. I know. I know. I know how you operate.

• 6:46Kevin Rose?

  So anyway, the name of the bottle of wine is. Gambling and McDuck.

• 6:51Tim Ferriss?

  As in Scrooge McDuck.

• 6:53Kevin Rose?

  Scrooge McDuck. The thing is, um, what you'll find there is that he is a really, he's a fanatical, like, kind of crazy wine connoisseur that likes really rare, obscure wines and great stories. So every wine that he'll pour you, he's like, oh, I got this crazy story. I met this winemaker, blah, blah, blah. They live in this little region and I like it because it's really obscure, hard to find grape. And so it's not really expensive wine. Like you'll go in there and like that, I think, I mean, they don't have like multi hundred dollar bottles of wine. It's like standard, you know, just good prices and heavy pours. Anyway, he's a good, he's a good dude. He's a good dude.

• 7:27Tim Ferriss?

  Should be his tagline.

• 7:30Tim Ferriss?

  And also for people who are, say, visiting San Francisco, it is right around the corner from a restaurant called Zuni Cafe.

• 7:37Kevin Rose?

  Awesome.

• 7:37Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very, very well known. Judy Rogers, originally, I believe, out of Chez Panis. They do incredible things with their food. And you could, you could look into something called dry brining, which they do with their roast chicken, which is amazing. So Kevin, for those people who are listening and do not know who you are, let's start at the beginning.

• 7:57Kevin Rose?

  Ah, at the beginning.

• 7:58Tim Ferriss?

  You know that phrase because you use it.

• 8:01Kevin Rose?

  My little podcast.

• 8:03Tim Ferriss?

  But why don't you tell people a little bit about your background, where you grew up, et cetera?

• 8:06Kevin Rose?

  Sure. Um, you know, I, I grew up kind of a boring life in Las Vegas, um, of all places, which I don't like to admit to many people because it, it's a fun place to visit, but it's not really a place I consider home anymore. Uh, I do like going and hanging out with friends. Obviously the occasional bender out in Vegas is always fun. But, um, so, you know, moved out to the Bay Area in 2000 and started working at, um, you know, dot coms at the tail end of that in the tech space. Um, ended up working at Tech TV and starting there in 2002, late 2002.

• 8:44Kevin Rose?

  Kind of behind the scenes, eventually ended up doing segments on a show called The Screensaver. So I was actually on Air Talent.

• 8:50Tim Ferriss?

  And where was this?

• 8:51Kevin Rose?

  Uh, this is in San Francisco.

• 8:52Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And how did you end up in SF?

• 8:53Kevin Rose?

  Um, I just moved out here, working with, uh, I was actually doing some marketing. Uh, I was in. Ad buys and helping them track the conversions on

• 9:02Tim Ferriss?

  Tech TV.

• 9:03Kevin Rose?

  I know for a little startup, a CMGI funded startup. It was an online furniture store. We thought we were going to make billions. But it turns out people don't like to pay the shipping for really heavy furniture on the internet. So

• 9:17Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of like kettlebells.

• 9:18Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, it didn't work out. Yeah, it was very heavy stuff. So anyway, I ended up hosting a television show on the Screensavers. The name of the show was called The Screensavers on Tech TV. And then started my own first startup, which was called DIG, which is a social news site. And that grew that to a pretty decent size. Started a couple of other companies, ended up angel investing, sold a few companies, got acquired by Google. Long story short, had a big, long seven, eight, nine, 10 year run in the tech space. And then eventually ended up as a venture capitalist at Google Ventures. So I'm a VC there that is funding companies and helping find the next big thing.

• 10:04Tim Ferriss?

  That was a very efficient self introduction. Thank you for that.

• 10:07Kevin Rose?

  No problem.

• 10:09Tim Ferriss?

  Couple of questions. Actually, I should give some background, I suppose, or just my personal views on things. Since that's, I guess, part of the podcast. I think you're one of the best product guys in Silicon Valley. Meaning your ability to not only conceptualize and come up with product ideas, which you do all the time. And then you just give them away or drop them or whatever. But you come up with like a different, a different company idea that could work ostensibly, I think every week just about. And you're also extremely good at betting on the right horses. And of course, no investor is 100%. I mean, they can't bat 1,000. But what, what do you think makes you good at that? I mean, because I think many people would share that same opinion.

• 10:53Tim Ferriss?

  You're, you're good at guessing what's coming next or predicting what will pop or what will not pop. Is that just genetic ability? I mean, you're like, LeBron James of angel investing. Or is, are there characteristics that you see in yourself or in other people who are also good at it? That, that you can explain?

• 11:15Kevin Rose?

  It's, that's a great question. I think that for me. You know, I can remember analyzing people and trends all the way back in high school. The first time I remember it, I remember there was this one kid in my class that he wore a fluorescent orange jumpsuit to school. It was like a garbage man, like what the garbage man would wear, you know? Or an inmate. Yeah, or an inmate, exactly. And so, he was wearing that, and I remember everyone thought that was the coolest thing. And everyone's like, "Oh, he's got that jumpsuit on, and blah, blah." And like, kids started going out and like, literally buying these. You could buy them, they weren't made by Dicky's, but a very similar brand. And they sold them, actually, I think that maybe they were made by Dicky's, but they sold them at Kmart. And so, kids started buying them,

• 12:00Kevin Rose?

  wearing them in high school. And I remember at that point, I realized that there are certain very early adopters, like tastemakers. I was like, "If you could only, like, this person can spread a trend." And at the time, I was thinking about fashion. Right. Because like, this kid was like, considered by many other classmates to be like, the cool kid, right? And so, once he did something, he would influence all these other people. And so, I started thinking about, like, it just made me think, like, what could I make that he would think was cool, and then it would spread throughout the class? That was like, what I got excited about. And then I just realized that I just like, I kept coming up with all these ideas. And I've always been the kind of person that, that just like, starts to think about, and I think it's, it was honestly, it was just something that actually hurt me in school. Because I was always

• 12:45Kevin Rose?

  daydreaming about different things. And I actually got really crappy grades, and just like, you know, didn't do well in school, because my mind was always someplace else. Yeah. And I think that it was always, um, once I got connected up with computers, and I got really into computers, it was always about what I could build with software. And so, you know, I built a couple of little things that I launched as shareware, and had on shareware blogs and stuff like that, and made some money. And then it kind of clicked that, you know, you write the software once, you charge for it, and you don't have to keep paying to have it made. You can just make more and more copies. Money while you sleep. It was insane, you know? And so, like, that clicked. And then I started thinking about, like, what are the things that...

• 13:29Kevin Rose?

  That I would like as a consumer and that that I feel could spread and like really take off and then you know I was kind of like analyzing these companies and looking at these different things and seeing them and and being that early adopter where you want to play with everything. I think you have to have like a natural.

• 13:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the number of apps you have on your phone is incredible to me.

• 13:48Kevin Rose?

  You have to have like a natural curiosity. You have to like say, okay, I want to like, I get excited. I get a hit of like freaking dopamine and like my like flutters in the stomach when I see something that is new and original and has never been done before.

• 14:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Kevin Rose?

  And so like I feel that.

• 14:03Tim Ferriss?

  What would be a few examples of that?

• 14:05Kevin Rose?

  Well, I think that, you know.

• 14:06Tim Ferriss?

  What are a few companies you've invested in or missed for that matter where you got the flutters in your stomach?

• 14:10Kevin Rose?

  Well, I mean, so Twitter, for example, um, you know, it was very early days when I invested in Twitter and um, and you were shortly thereafter. We were both investors early on.

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Two weeks later, I managed to come in after around a finance and close.

• 14:24Kevin Rose?

  You got screwed.

• 14:26Tim Ferriss?

  The person selling it to me was very smart.

• 14:29Kevin Rose?

  Very shrewd. We got two very different valuations. I got really lucky on that one and Tim Gunn got screwed. But the thing is like, you know, when you were looking at Twitter, one, there was two things that really caught my attention. One was that Jack Dorsey, the guy that created it, had created a model that was not about mutual friendship. So up until this point, it was about, you know, Facebook and MySpace and others, you had to send a friend request and someone had to accept your friend request. And that's the way that a social relationship happened on the internet. Jack was smart enough to think like, hey, well, maybe it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe you can tail and like, kind of like, like follow someone that you don't actually know. And so when he created that, I remember thinking

• 15:12Kevin Rose?

  like, wow, this is crazy. Like, there was a bunch of like influential people that started to sign up, you know, and I was like, I can kind of like peek over their shoulder and kind of be with them on this journey that they're going on and like, watch what they're up to without actually knowing them. And I was like, wow, okay, what if celebrities actually figure out how to use this thing? And it's really easy because all you have to do to tweet is send a text message. And then, you know, you saw a celebrity. To sign up and I'm like, okay, this is gonna be pretty huge because if this keeps happening and more and more celebrities sign up, it's gonna be their platform because they don't know how to blog. They don't have

• 15:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's low, it's low labor.

• 15:49Kevin Rose?

  It's low labor, low, like the barrier to entry is extremely low. You can misspell everything and it can be two sentences and it's still like content, right? And so seeing that and then also figuring out that a follower count wasn't portable. So if you think about like you have an email newsletter, you can move that from email provider to email provider.

• 16:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right, wherever, to MailChimp, to whatever.

• 16:10Kevin Rose?

  You can't move your followers to Facebook. You can't move your followers so that was very defensible in that way. And seeing those couple of things and thinking like, okay, well, this could be something. And again, I didn't know. It was just like, it was a gamble. And a lot of angel investing is, for me, is going on your gut. And so I placed a bet and just happened to win there. But like, I think that for me, it's like, hopefully finding an insight like that and then also finding something that you yourself like plays to like me as a consumer. Like I think I'm kind of an every, every man, like every woman, every, I don't know, I'm a woman, but I mean, I didn't mean that, but

• 16:45Tim Ferriss?

  You are like every woman, Kevin.

• 16:46Kevin Rose?

  I am like every woman. But no, seriously though, I think that like, I, I kind of feel like if, if it's something that will appeal to me and I can see myself using it on a daily basis, like I'm gonna open my phone to do this two to three times per day.

• 16:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:59Kevin Rose?

  It could be a big deal. And I think that like, you know, that's what I look for. That's when I'm, I'm trying to, you know, find the next Instagram or whatever it may be. It's like, I'm looking for something I'm gonna use on a daily basis. Something that's gonna sit in my, you know, there's like 20 spaces on your iPhone in the default screen. Like what are one of those icons gonna be? Is there gonna be something that's that prominent that that is that important? That it will take up some of that real estate, some of the default real estate on my home screen.

• 17:23Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are some examples of, and we'll talk about a lot more than investing, but I think it's a good way to look into how you think about people and companies and just creation in general. What are examples of companies you've invested in that other people did not invest in? Where you were not necessarily investing alone, but going against maybe the consensus? And why, and why did you, what were the factors that led you to decide to go in? In investments that worked out. We'll also talk about ones that didn't.

• 17:58Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that

• 18:02Kevin Rose?

  It's, there's always investors that say no, including myself, and a lot of things that actually end up being really successful. So you can't really blame somebody. It's like, I feel like, and I'm sure there's this case for you. It's like you look at, you know, 20, 30, 50, and now as a professional venture capitalist, like hundreds of deals per year.

• 18:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 18:22Kevin Rose?

  And you're gonna say no to a lot of winners out there. So, you know, it's, it's, for me, it's like, I don't feel as though I've gone into something all in, into something that like totally has, everyone was against, because there's always somebody willing to invest in that startup.

• 18:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. Look, I guess a startup where it wasn't the hottest girl at the dance of the moment, because you know exactly what I mean by that. There are some deals where it's like, everybody wants in, everybody thinks it's amazing. Not one of those deals. A deal that was, had less hoopla surrounding it.

• 18:57Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's, there's been a few of those, not, not to, like, within the last even year and a half or so. I've gone into a handful of deals that are now starting to work out. Like Nextdoor, I think is a great example.

• 19:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Kevin Rose?

  Of one that I invested in maybe a year and a half ago.

• 19:13Tim Ferriss?

  That we both invested in.

• 19:14Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, so it was like, it's a neighborhood social network, and I think that there was a lot of people that were like, ah, I just, you know, I don't know what that's all about or what it means. And, and for me, you know, it's funny, it's like, I don't want to come off on this podcast sounding like I'm, like I'm a know-it-all, because like, I've been wrong on a lot of deals.

• 19:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 19:34Kevin Rose?

  But like, every once in a while, you, you, you kind of like see a market before it's about to happen, and then sometimes you just miss it altogether. Like Pinterest, I had an opportunity to invest very early on, saw it, liked it, ended up passing, and I'm kicking myself every single day.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 19:50Kevin Rose?

  But, you know, Nextdoor was one where I saw it, and I was like, okay, well, this is connecting neighbors on a very social level, which I like, because it's something where, in San Francisco and big cities, we don't know our neighbors. It's not like you can walk across the street and be like, oh, hey, Jim, how's it going? You know, like, you might know one house in any direction, but not two or three houses. You don't know who those people are. So the idea of like creating that social fabric so that you can have like ad hoc things come together like social, like neighborhood watch programs like and eventually like commerce on top of a neighborhood graph, which I think is really interesting.

• 20:24Tim Ferriss?

  What types of commerce?

• 20:25Kevin Rose?

  Like, like goods, goods being sold. Like I see couches for sale on next door, which were for sale on Craigslist, you know, six months ago. So things like that, like that trusted neighborhood network are starting to create really unique opportunities for people to exchange goods and services. You know, there's like a plumber that was on there last week being like, hey, I'm a plumber. I live in the neighborhoods. If anybody ever needs me, you know, it's like, it's like, it's just a different platform that was created out of, out of neighborhoods that have like people getting to know each other in their local neighborhood that I thought was interesting. And, and I think that, you know, a year and a half ago, that nobody was really talking about it. Nobody just really thought it was, that was that exciting.

• 21:03Tim Ferriss?

  What do your, what do your investment mistakes have in common, if anything? If you were to, if you were to say like, you know what, I should have known better because X, I did X, I didn't do X, such and such happened, shouldn't have done it.

• 21:20Kevin Rose?

  Well, I think there's, um, there's, there's, for, for me, it's, it's, it's the mistakes that, that have occurred, I think are one in, in passing on deals. Like I, I think that when you're using your own money, especially when you're an angel investor, you are very extremely picky, almost too much. So in that, you know, on a one to 10, meaning 10 is like, you're just over the, over the moon excited about doing this deal. When you're an angel and you have limited capital, you're thinking like, okay, well, I have to be a nine or higher to make this happen, to actually want to put money into this company. And I think that there was a lot of great eights in there that I just passed on.

• 22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Kevin Rose?

  And that, you know, had I had more cash at the time, I probably would have done those deals. And some of those have turned out to be-

• 22:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's also because, I mean, as an angel, you have- Very significant downside, meaning you can lose all of your own capital.

• 22:16Kevin Rose?

  Right.

• 22:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then you have the potential upside of a relatively, say, small investment because it's your own cash, whereas if you're working at a fund like Google Ventures, you have hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy.

• 22:29Kevin Rose?

  Sure. And so you can place little 100K bets all day long.

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And there's zero personal downside and ride the winners.

• 22:36Kevin Rose?

  Right. So I think a lot of mistakes have been there. A lot of mistakes have been, you know, there's always the deals that you fund because you're really friendly with, you know, as an angel, you're friendly with some people and it's not necessarily, and you're backing them as an entrepreneur because you really like the person and there's nothing wrong with that. You're betting on a person, you might not necessarily like the general space that they're in, but you're betting that they can kind of figure it out.

• 23:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Kevin Rose?

  And sometimes you lose on those and that's fine. I mean, you just kind of.

• 23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's, I mean, that's true also even with the example you gave, which is Twitter. I mean, if we're looking at audio.

• 23:12Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Tim Ferriss?

  And, I mean, it's, or.

• 23:15Kevin Rose?

  For people that don't know, audio was the startup that became Twitter.

• 23:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And I mean, Ev has had a lot of businesses, as you've mentioned in interviews before, or he's mentioned in interviews before, I mean, VHS tapes to teach people how to use the internet.

• 23:27Kevin Rose?

  Right.

• 23:28Tim Ferriss?

  What was your first business?

• 23:31Kevin Rose?

  My first business was a piece of software. Well, I mean, it goes way back before that. When I was like 12, I had a little software company called Full Edge Software. And it wasn't actually a software company, but I had business cards made. So it felt like a software company, but I basically.

• 23:50Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you?

• 23:50Kevin Rose?

  I remember maybe 12, something like that. And I basically wrote little programs in BASIC. And then I would actually, I found this program that would compile, actually it wasn't BASIC. I wrote some like tricky little utilities, actually using batch, like in batch files. And then I wrote, I got some software that compiled them to EXEs and then tried to sell them to shareware. But anyway, it was, that was super geeky, but I've always been tinkering for a long time.

• 24:17Tim Ferriss?

  What if you were not in tech? Actually, no, that's fine.

• 24:23Tim Ferriss?

  Let me dial back. Actually, it's probably not 12 years old. So maybe it was later. What was the shittiest job you've ever had?

• 24:29Kevin Rose?

  Uh, working in Olive Garden. I made breadsticks there. I smelled like garlic all the time.

• 24:35Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's important. This is something a mutual friend of ours has said as well, Chris Saka, that it's important. I think it's important to have had at least one shitty job, preferably in the service industry. I don't know. I think it really teaches you a lot about yourself and service and humankind in general. So you were making the breadsticks in the back. Did you ever have a like busboy or waitering job or anything like that?

• 25:02Kevin Rose?

  Uh.

• 25:05Tim Ferriss?

  If not, I forgive you.

• 25:05Kevin Rose?

  No, not really. I was never a waiter. I mean, I would see people at tables at Olive Garden as well, but like the, don't, don't hate on my breadsticks. Breadsticks were a tough job, dude. Like those waiters would get pissed at you if you didn't have the breadsticks out on time because they get, they made their tips on breadsticks.

• 25:20Tim Ferriss?

  They made their, how do they make their tips on breadsticks?

• 25:23Kevin Rose?

  Because you had to have breadsticks on the table, dude. Breadsticks always have to be on the table. I still have dreams about this. Breadsticks need to be on the table. If the customers don't have their breadsticks, they are not happy.

• 25:33Tim Ferriss?

  They're pissed, yeah.

• 25:34Kevin Rose?

  It's all you can eat breadsticks and salad.

• 25:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's a lot of breadsticks.

• 25:38Kevin Rose?

  I mean, dude, it's a lot of breadsticks. I was cranking them like at any given time, there's two big ass trays of breadsticks going on in Olive Garden in the, in the oven.

• 25:46Tim Ferriss?

  All right. All right. Let's, uh, I'm going to do a couple of rapid fire questions just to mix things up. Actually, let me, I wanted to also just add a bit of context to the angel investing discussion because it may seem outside of the scope of your daily life, but things are going to change very dramatically very soon.

• 26:06Kevin Rose?

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 26:07Tim Ferriss?

  So September 23rd, uh, something called general solicitation, uh, is going to have a big impact on, uh, investing in general where, uh,

• 26:18Tim Ferriss?

  Average Joe or Jane, so to speak, the public will have access to deals that are advertised by or promoted by angel investors, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, and so on and so forth. This is something that's unprecedented and related to the JOBS Act, which means that deals people previously had to be part of a very small club of to have access to, they will see promoted on the internet and elsewhere, who knows, television perhaps. So I think the mechanisms for determining your own risk tolerance and deciding on investing will become in some ways more complex because people are going to get hit with a lot of promotion.

• 27:02Tim Ferriss?

  So just a passing recommendation to people would be to read the annual letters by Warren Buffett, and which are compiled and, I should say, yeah, they are compiled and gathered in paperback form. And of course, the first rule of investing is do not lose money. Rule number two, see rule number one, according to Buffett. But as an angel, I think that's important. I mean, you need to develop rules. You're going to miss some winners, but develop rules so that you can at least avoid losing a large chunk of capital. And that is all I have to say about that.

• 27:37Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think that there's going to be, this act is going to open up new worlds for everyday investors to come in and do more angel-style investing.

• 27:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so the way that people go on to Kickstarter and give money to people for prizes or rewards of different types, they'll be able to do that for equity, actual percentages in a company.

• 27:59Kevin Rose?

  It's crazy in that, like, you know, when you hear about most of the stuff, you think like, oh, it's those people out in Silicon Valley in California doing all this stuff. And it's like, and you're right to be thinking that, like, there's obviously a lot of that stuff gets funded and everything out here, but like, this, when this happens, and eventually the tools that form around it will enable anyone, anywhere, to really participate and get involved at a much earlier stage, which is exciting. I mean, there's, you know, there's a lot of risk, but there's also potentially a lot of reward on that stuff.

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. I mean, we've talked about this before, but... I mean, I tend to take personally, at least as sort of a barbell, that's a Nassim Taleb term, barbell approach to investing, which is say 20% and highly speculative startup stuff and then 80% is just safe cash like equivalents of some type. So don't gamble with more than you can afford to lose is I think a good way to go about it. All right. So let's, let's do a couple of rapid fire questions. Borrowing these from all over the place. If you could be a breakfast cereal, what breakfast cereal and why?

• 29:03Kevin Rose?

  Oh, boy. It's these kind of questions. This is like the Google interview questions. Like when they're like, how many ping pong balls?

• 29:08Tim Ferriss?

  Can you fit into 747?

• 29:10Kevin Rose?

  Exactly.

• 29:11Tim Ferriss?

  McKinsey style. This is easier. What kind of breakfast?

• 29:14Kevin Rose?

  Breakfast cereal? I hate the and why part. I like, I mean, I can easily be like some nice like.

• 29:20Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, you can just give a cryptic answer. No, no why required.

• 29:24Kevin Rose?

  Breakfast cereal. You know, I'm gonna go with the steel cut oats.

• 29:27Tim Ferriss?

  It's very Amish of you.

• 29:30Kevin Rose?

  Well, are we talking like kids cereal?

• 29:34Tim Ferriss?

  It can be whatever, man.

• 29:35Kevin Rose?

  I don't want to like suggest something that's bad for people's health out there. Then they start consuming it and all of a sudden.

• 29:40Tim Ferriss?

  We're like double fisting wine here. You can't suggest cereal.

• 29:44Kevin Rose?

  Okay, okay. So I would say like straight up kids breakfast cereal would probably be like the Choco Puffs.

• 29:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, now I'm gonna go back on my word. Why? Why Choco Puffs?

• 29:58Kevin Rose?

  Well, I mean, just because I really like chocolate.

• 30:00Tim Ferriss?

  Cheers, by the way.

• 30:01Kevin Rose?

  I don't really have any like, oh cheers. I don't have any like great, great answer other than just like.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  That was a terrible question or even worse answer. All right, let's continue.

• 30:10Kevin Rose?

  This is a beta, man. This is your first podcast. Never again will the breakfast cereal question come up.

• 30:15Tim Ferriss?

  That was a shitty lead on my part. Complete this statement. My favorite time of day is? And why?

• 30:23Kevin Rose?

  Probably evening, just because I get to decompress a little bit.

• 30:26Tim Ferriss?

  How do you decompress in the evening?

• 30:28Kevin Rose?

  Um, you know, it's dinner with my wife and just kind of like hanging out and having, you know, a glass of wine or something and especially like wine with with good food is awesome. We cook a lot at home.

• 30:41Tim Ferriss?

  What is your favorite meal and wine to decompress?

• 30:44Kevin Rose?

  So without a doubt, and I found this little charcuterie place around the corner from my house that sells like aged beef.

• 30:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 30:53Kevin Rose?

  And 100 day dry aged, big old chunk of beef sous vide in the water bath like at medium rare and then just like flash grilled. So you like render all the fat and like, and then just a big old tasty cab. I mean, I

• 31:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds great.

• 31:10Kevin Rose?

  I just, I know you'd like that, right?

• 31:12Tim Ferriss?

  I would like that. I would. So medium rare would be what, like 125?

• 31:16Kevin Rose?

  Uh, 130 to 135 is medium rare.

• 31:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 31:21Kevin Rose?

  How did I know that and you don't? And I have a, you have a cooking book. You're gonna cut this out of the podcast.

• 31:27Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm not gonna cut it out. 125 is fine.

• 31:29Kevin Rose?

  125, that's on the rare side.

• 31:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know. But if it's thin and then you're

• 31:34Kevin Rose?

  It doesn't matter with sous vide though.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  Flash sear it. No, hold on though. If it's thin and then you sear it.

• 31:38Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, it'll cook.

• 31:38Tim Ferriss?

  You're gonna have some carryover.

• 31:39Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Jesus, chafing my ass already. All right. As you've gotten older, this is a two parter. As you've gotten older, what has become more important to you and what has become less important to you?

• 31:54Kevin Rose?

  Um, oh my gosh. So more important to me as I've gotten older is probably

• 32:05Kevin Rose?

  just honestly time to like stay in shape. Just like more gym time, more time to actually like actually keep the beer gut down.

• 32:16Kevin Rose?

  You know, it's harder as you get older. And less important, I would say, is like some of the hardcore tinkering. Like, I used to like to build computers from scratch.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 32:25Kevin Rose?

  I just want my computer to work now. I put freaking OS 10 Mavericks on my laptop, which is like the beta version of OS 10. And it's crashing shit. And I'm just like, are you kidding me? Like, what am I doing? I'm like, I don't know why I had to have it, but I did. And like, now I can't even like write an email. My browser locks up. So I think I just, you know, it's like the get off my lawn.

• 32:48Tim Ferriss?

  I want shit to work.

• 32:49Kevin Rose?

  I just want shit to work. But, you know, it's weird how that happens.

• 32:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Tim Ferriss?

  I have the same thing. I mean, there's a point where you just fear, you feel the scarcity of time.

• 33:01Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Tim Ferriss?

  And the value of time increasing because you start, you start seeing gnarly shit happen to people. Or like friends dying or.

• 33:10Kevin Rose?

  Oh, I know. That's the scariest part, man.

• 33:12Tim Ferriss?

  It freaks you out.

• 33:13Kevin Rose?

  I didn't know anyone.

• 33:15Tim Ferriss?

  And then you're like, you know what? I'm not gonna spend a week figuring this like bait out. That's bullshit. I just want this to work.

• 33:19Kevin Rose?

  You know what's funny is when you're a kid, like you just don't know anyone. You think like everyone's just healthy.

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 33:24Kevin Rose?

  And then all of a sudden you become an adult and like, you know, I, gosh, man, I've had some really bad experiences. And then like, I've seen friends of mine that aren't that older that like, you know, a friend, a good friend of mine's wife has cancer now. And like, he's a few years older than me. And I'm like, that's scary as hell.

• 33:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Kevin Rose?

  So, yeah, you start to value time a lot more.

• 33:44Tim Ferriss?

  Who's the first person that comes to mind when you hear the word successful? And why is that?

• 33:51Kevin Rose?

  Successful, I would say that, you know,

• 33:58Kevin Rose?

  I think that it's Philip Rosedale is the first person to come to mind.

• 34:02Tim Ferriss?

  Philip's awesome. Do you want to tell us, tell us, tell us a little bit of, just to, so people know who Philip is?

• 34:07Kevin Rose?

  So it's interesting in that it's weird that, that actually when I think about that I would pick Philip. And the reason being is that Philip, so, thank you for the wine. I wonder if that's picking them by the speaker. It sounds like.

• 34:19Tim Ferriss?

  I'm aggressively pouring, so it will be picked up by this, by the mic.

• 34:25Kevin Rose?

  So Philip created a virtual world back in the day that was really popular, way before its time, called Second Life. And it become, it became extremely popular and.

• 34:37Kevin Rose?

  Later, like all internet things, eventually declined in usage because it just wasn't as cool as it was when it came out. And he then went on to start a company that, you know, he tinkered around with a handful of different things that didn't quite work out. And now he's on to his next thing called High Fidelity. But the reason that I say Philip is that success in my mind doesn't necessarily mean like huge IPOs and exits and things like that. The thing that I like about him, and I did, I shot a couple of video interviews with him on my series on Foundation that you can search Philip Rosedale Foundation on Google and find, but

• 35:18Tim Ferriss?

  Foundation dot care.

• 35:19Kevin Rose?

  Foundation dot care.

• 35:20Tim Ferriss?

  Because you let the dot com slip.

• 35:22Kevin Rose?

  No, yeah, right. Foundation dot com was not available.

• 35:25Tim Ferriss?

  The dot net? Which one did you lose?

• 35:26Kevin Rose?

  It's dot biz, or something like that. I let dot care slip, but I got it back. So, anyway, the thing I like about Philip is that he is such a rare person to discover. I feel like I'm lucky that I even know him because he's a big thinker. He's a crazy mad scientist. When you watch his interview, you realize that his ideas and his passion and just where his head takes things is so unique and so big picture, like bigger than you could ever dream up on your own. Like when you think of ideas where like, oh, wouldn't it be better if there was a better way to keep our, you know, like, and it's something like super stupid that you want,

• 36:07Kevin Rose?

  like, you know, like, I feel like our ideas are like, you know, just improvements of the

• 36:14Tim Ferriss?

  Incremental.

• 36:15Kevin Rose?

  Incremental, like pre-existing, like little problems that we have that like, my toilet paper runs out, I'd like to get a notification. Like, it's like dumb stuff, right? You talk to him and like, you realize that like, he is thinking about things like virtual economies and like currencies and using your iPhone as a miniature computer while you're sleeping that does little virtual tasks and assist people like in other places. And you're like, dude, you like, they will someday, when you finally have that moment, that idea, that is the right idea at the right time, when it hits, like they will write books about this guy and movies about this guy. It's rare to find those people.

• 36:54Tim Ferriss?

  The Nikolai Tesla of the internet age.

• 36:56Kevin Rose?

  It's the Tesla. It's like potentially like an Elon Musk is another one of those.

• 36:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was just gonna say, so what, what do you think? Enables them to think that way. Is it something that can be taught? I mean, are they, is it something that they learned how to do? Are they just genetically predisposed?

• 37:10Kevin Rose?

  I think a lot of it comes down to fear. A lot of it comes down to fear.

• 37:14Tim Ferriss?

  How so?

• 37:15Kevin Rose?

  When people don't have fear, they aren't scared of big ideas. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs every single day and all they want to do is do incremental improvements on pre-existing stuff. Because it's safe.

• 37:27Tim Ferriss?

  Sell a company for 20 million.

• 37:29Kevin Rose?

  They can sell it for 20 million to Yahoo. They can sell it for 10 million to Google, whatever it may be. There is a, there's a safety net there. Who wants to go and create electric car company? Who wants to go and create a freaking next generation like, like spaceship company? Like, these are, these are just, these are hard problems, you know? It takes a certain kind of person.

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  And they're binary too, right? I mean, you either, you don't partially succeed.

• 37:50Kevin Rose?

  Right. You either succeed or fail. And it's like, and Philip is one of those guys that he's just like, I have a crazy idea. I'm gonna go build it and I don't care what, nothing's gonna get in my way. I can just do it. Like, and I don't know how to do it right now, but I can figure it out because I'll surround myself with smart people. And that's, that's what he does. And it's like, those people are really rare, man. Like, I see so many just, um, you know, it's, it's, it's not a lot of like, willing to throw everything out and to start from scratch and tackle something that is, is, is gonna change the world. And, and when you find those people, and I've only met a couple, you know? I, I, then you get really excited and you feel lucky just to know them.

• 38:30Tim Ferriss?

  Who, uh, any other examples immediately jumped to mind besides, uh, Philip and Elon?

• 38:35Kevin Rose?

  Uh, you know, I think that, um, Reid Hoffman is another really big idea guy. I think that he's really like, I'm excited to see if he eventually decides to get back in it. Like, you know, he's chairman at LinkedIn and if he ever decides to go and, and tackle something, like what that will become.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any idea what, uh, Philip, if he did, I don't know his, his educational background. But did he, did he finish school? Did he study anything in particular?

• 39:03Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. I mean, he's, he's like super hardcore, like machine code.

• 39:07Tim Ferriss?

  He is.

• 39:07Kevin Rose?

  Computer science guy.

• 39:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Because, I mean,

• 39:09Kevin Rose?

  I don't know if he dropped out or not, or if you guys agree.

• 39:11Tim Ferriss?

  See if there are any commonalities because, I mean, Reid, many people don't know this, but, uh, I think he has either masters or PhD in, in philosophy. I mean, very big thinker, as you know, is, Regarded as one of the oracles or the oracle of Silicon Valley. I mean, the guy's brilliant.

• 39:30Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 39:33Tim Ferriss?

  What is your, it's not policy really, but do you keep in touch with friends from back in the day? I mean, childhood friends, any of them?

• 39:42Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, there's a couple.

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I mean, that's been, I'd be curious to hear what your experience has been as you've had more and more

• 39:54Tim Ferriss?

  success in various ways and entered new peer groups and so on and so forth. How has that affected your relationships with people that you grew up with, if at all? And from what period of time?

• 40:07Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, it's hard because, you know, growing up in such a city like Las Vegas, like no one really stayed there. So it's not like when I go back to town, I see all my friends from high school or whatever it may be or college like it's, we all split off and went to different places. I have one friend that's still there. But other than that, like everyone's in different cities, some are back east, some are in LA, like they're just all over the place. But, you know, I try and keep in touch and I'll trade texts and I have like, you know, there's certain times of the year, certain things that come up in your head that pop in your mind. You're like, oh my gosh, that was so crazy when we did this. And he's like texting your buddies, remember when we, you know, broke the law this way? Something like that, you know? So there's like, there's that kind of stuff.

• 40:51Kevin Rose?

  But, you know, what was the, I mean, I know the question was like,

• 40:57Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, maybe, maybe it seems like an odd question.

• 40:59Kevin Rose?

  Is this something that you're having a hard time with?

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's a challenge in some cases for me. I've just found that I grew up in a very odd place. I grew up on the eastern end of Long Island, in the Hamptons, where you have two groups. Actually, there are more than two groups, but for simplicity's sake, you have the city people who are Manhattan, Richmond hot nights typically, who come out to summer in the Hamptons, and then you have the townies. And the townies range, but typically include,

• 41:30Tim Ferriss?

  People involved in service industries, so let's just say landscapers, waitresses, waiters, real estate brokers, although they're getting pushed out by people like Sotheby's who are based in Manhattan. And there is a lot of alcoholism, not very good education. It's a pretty dismal picture. So I found it very difficult for myself to transition from having more in common with the townies to having more in common with the city people. It's been like a real existential issue for me.

• 42:06Kevin Rose?

  So you don't have things in common with the city people anymore?

• 42:09Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. I had, as I went through, say, high school and then left Long Island, I initially was 100% townie. And then I started to move where I'm like, okay, 90% townie, 10% city person as I went to undergrad. And then like 70% townie, 30% city person and then...

• 42:28Kevin Rose?

  Where do you think you are now?

• 42:29Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I can empathize with the city people now. And I feel like I'm straddling both, right? So it's like, so I go back and it's like I've had, I have some of my closest friends who have died in the last two years of drug overdoses.

• 42:49Kevin Rose?

  That's crazy.

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I, so I feel like I'm kind of trapped in between these, not trapped, that's not the dramatic word, but I'm straddling these two worlds where I grew up hating people who came in from Manhattan. I mean, they were just like so rude and entitled and annoying and irritating. Part of it was that I was working as a busboy, so I saw the worst that humanity had to offer. And now it's difficult for me sometimes to identify and let's say have a conversation about shared interests with some of the friends I grew up with. Not because I'm better by any stretch of the imagination, we're just in such different tracks.

• 43:29Kevin Rose?

  I still feel more at home with my younger friends than I do, I feel like a fish out of water in the Bay Area.

• 43:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, okay, so I would caveat what I just said with the fact that I left Long Island to go to, actually petitioned my parents to do this, to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire. And that's where I forged my closest friendships that I still have to this day. So I... I'm absolutely closest to those people. When I went to college, didn't have a lot of close bonding experience because I already had the away from home scenario. But it's, I don't feel like a fish out of water in the Bay Area, but it's proven harder to develop really close friendships, I think. The further you get along in a certain professional track. Not always.

• 44:21Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I do have close friends in the Bay Area, but not to meander too far. But it's just, it's something that I've seen some people have a lot of challenges with and other people don't have any with.

• 44:32Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, I think that for me, you know, I grew up in a pretty lower middle income family and I feel that that's always felt at home. And I have a bunch of really crappy 90s tattoos.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  And so. What's your worst tattoo? Can you explain to someone?

• 44:51Kevin Rose?

  Like freaking flames on my leg. Like I've got really bad tattoos. They're in the process of getting removed, but.

• 44:57Tim Ferriss?

  I would pay you $10,000 if I can put a tramp stamp on your lower back.

• 45:01Kevin Rose?

  I'll give you 20 and we'll do the same thing.

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  You'll give me 20 if I put a tramp stamp on your lower back?

• 45:08Kevin Rose?

  So, no, here's the deal though. Like I feel like, I just like, I feel at most home with, with like people that understand that because I go to the gym, I go to this like really like meat heady gym, you know?

• 45:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's perfect.

• 45:23Kevin Rose?

  And like, yeah, dude, I'm surrounded by dudes with really crappy 90s tattoos. And I'm like, oh, I feel at home here.

• 45:29Tim Ferriss?

  They have like Tasmanian devil tattoos on their arms.

• 45:31Kevin Rose?

  Oh, what's up, bro? Hell yeah. It's the best.

• 45:34Tim Ferriss?

  Alison Shans, what's up?

• 45:36Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Tim Ferriss?

  What did you want to be when you were growing up?

• 45:39Kevin Rose?

  I always knew I wanted to be in computers ever since I was probably 10 or 12 years old.

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  Nothing else?

• 45:45Kevin Rose?

  I knew, I knew the second I got a computer that I was hooked. I moved the computer into my bedroom and my parents thought it was weird. And I was like, I need to have this machine as close as possible so I can hear the fan at night. It makes me sleep. I'm serious. I loved it, dude. Everything about, I'd leave it on all the time. I'd get on it and I learned every single DOS command. You could ask me how to do anything in DOS right now, I can tell you how to do it. Like I loved it.

• 46:06Tim Ferriss?

  I wish I could. I have, I definitely have non-engineers in security when it comes to, or non-coders in security. When it relates to tech and startups, I really should learn how to code, at least in one language. Everyone's, not everyone, but a handful of friends have been telling me I should go after Python first, which I'm inclined to do. I get to it eventually. Natural language is first, programming language is second, I guess. Interesting.

• 46:33Tim Ferriss?

  Outside of computers, if you could study with any expert in the world, who would you study with? And what would you study?

• 46:42Kevin Rose?

  I would probably pick some type of meditation guru. And I know this is totally doable, but like, I think that like, the issue that I have now is that I feel that all of this computer, like the computers and the constant like stimulus and, and, and all this like, you know, I don't know about you, but like, there is no such thing as, it's extremely blurred, the personal time versus work time. And so like, you know, I'll be at dinner and like, you know, it's not this bad because Daria makes me shut down the laptop at dinner, but like, you know what I mean? It's like, it bleeds into everything

• 47:23Kevin Rose?

  that you do. And so because of that, I feel like my brain is being slowly scrambled. Like, I feel like it's always on edge. It's being fragmented. And I feel that like, we're gonna realize in short order here in the next 10, 20 years, that like, all of this distraction and stuff is really messing with our brains. And I feel it like, I need to find that balance. And I haven't done that yet. So I think if I, if I could study with anyone, it would probably be like a, a two or three month, like, just straight up retreat with like, some like awesome Buddhist monks somewhere that would teach me, you know, walking meditation

• 48:03Kevin Rose?

  or whatever it may be, like some, some way to like, like gain my soul back.

• 48:10Tim Ferriss?

  Kevin has lost his soul. That would be the title of this podcast. Kevin Rose loses his soul.

• 48:16Kevin Rose?

  As long as it's like, Tim Tim Talk Talk, Kevin Rose loses his soul. No, but seriously though, I feel like it's, it's, it's so hard, man.

• 48:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's easy to feel lost. I mean, I've, we've, I don't think I've talked about this all too publicly, but.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's been, uh, I feel like I'm in AA or something wording it this way, but it's been, it'll be 11 weeks as of this Sunday that I've meditated twice a day, every day for that period of time, which is incon- it would have been incomprehensible to me that I would actually meditate that consistently.

• 48:49Kevin Rose?

  You're not counting masturbation as meditation though, because that-

• 48:53Tim Ferriss?

  No, no.

• 48:53Kevin Rose?

  Because if you are, then that would not-

• 48:55Tim Ferriss?

  Then, then, then you're like four a day.

• 48:57Kevin Rose?

  You're like once a week then?

• 48:59Tim Ferriss?

  I never, I've never masturbated. I have no idea what you're implying. Uh, the-

• 49:04Kevin Rose?

  It's a late night show, people. I'm sorry.

• 49:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's a late night show. Sorry, all you seven year olds listening, but in three years you'll learn. Uh, the, um, not counting masturbation.

• 49:13Kevin Rose?

  Is this a late night show though, seriously? Cause like we talk about more vulgar stuff?

• 49:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What, what do you want to?

• 49:19Kevin Rose?

  I mean, I don't have anything else I want to talk about, but like-

• 49:21Tim Ferriss?

  Talk about penises? What's going on?

• 49:22Kevin Rose?

  I don't want, there's nothing else. I was just worried.

• 49:24Tim Ferriss?

  You always talk about penises. Just might as well admit it to everybody.

• 49:26Kevin Rose?

  You know what I heard a fuck, now I don't even think-

• 49:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Say what you want. Say what you didn't want to say.

• 49:31Kevin Rose?

  No, I mean, it's nothing that's, that's interesting.

• 49:33Tim Ferriss?

  That's fine. Sounded, it sounded defensive, which you should bring up.

• 49:36Kevin Rose?

  My buddy that, that, uh, that, that owns this wine bar, we were just like talking about it. He got Square, you know that credit card swiping system?

• 49:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I first-

• 49:44Kevin Rose?

  Well, I'm, I'm explaining to the users out there, your readers. So Square is basically like this little tiny dongle that you can plug into your iPad or iPhone and you can swipe your card and like-

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  A dongle is a little square that you plug in. Sounds very pornographic.

• 49:57Kevin Rose?

  You swipe your card and that's how you pay for things. Everyone's kind of seeing this now. So basically he was telling me that 30% of his signatures, like you know how you have to sign the iPad with your finger? Like you sign it in, 30% are penises.

• 50:12Tim Ferriss?

  That is awesome. I'm going to start doing that. Because then if the credit card company, like, is this your signature? I'm like, what the fuck do you think? It's a penis. And of course it's not my signature.

• 50:19Kevin Rose?

  I see more scribbled penises than like, he's like, you even believe. He's like, people are drunk and they just sign a penis. I thought that was pretty funny.

• 50:27Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. Why have I never done that?

• 50:29Kevin Rose?

  I don't know.

• 50:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never signed a penis before.

• 50:35Kevin Rose?

  So if you go there and you see Chris and you get that discount, sign with a penis.

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Sign with a penis. So speaking of balance, technology and so on, so I don't count masturbation, just to come back to that. Twenty minutes a day, twice a day, transcendental meditation, blah, blah, blah. I'll talk about it more another time. I want to focus on you, Kevin Rose.

• 50:57Tim Ferriss?

  Technology, it does cause a lot of blurring. So you get this work-life blending instead of balance. What is one technology you think you could live without?

• 51:08Kevin Rose?

  Or two? Television. Absolutely. Except for football.

• 51:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 51:12Kevin Rose?

  And.

• 51:13Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what if we can't, now, let's just say, because there are a lot of self-righteous San Francisco techies, and I'm sure they're elsewhere, who are like, "Oh, I never watched television. I don't even have a television." And then they watch five hours of fucking YouTube every day. And that's just ridiculous. You can't say you don't watch television. No, no, that's fine. But if you're watching like Jaguars attacking crocodiles and like kitten videos and fucking parkour for four hours on the internet, like, it's the same thing.

• 51:39Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. Time-wise, yeah. I mean, they talk about how much like the average American household watches TV. And like, don't get me wrong, I do enjoy a great movie. I enjoy a mini-series like, like, you know, about Star Galactica or something like that, but only once it's been a few seasons in and people are like, "Oh, you gotta see this."

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Kevin Rose?

  But like, rather than that, I would rather spend time working on businesses or building my own stuff. I think that's like one of the key, you were talking earlier about like traits that entrepreneurs, like successful entrepreneurs have. And like, no, all the great entrepreneurs I know, like, they, they, they work, their projects bleed into their personal life, and it's, it's sad, but it's true. And they, they, they're focused on that. And so like, you know, when I was building several, some of the companies I built in the past, like, it has always been about. Cutting out that type of stuff, like figuring out where you can prune and cut and create more space so that you can actually have the time to put in the 10, 12 hour days. It doesn't feel like it, especially when it's something you're really passionate about.

• 52:38Kevin Rose?

  It doesn't feel like you're putting in that much time, but like it's you, you can't expect to be a successful entrepreneur, just working at nine to five. Like it just doesn't work that way.

• 52:47Tim Ferriss?

  And you know, just to address a common, I think misconception with the whole four hour shit that uh

• 52:53Kevin Rose?

  Ah, everyone's gonna

• 52:54Tim Ferriss?

  I know.

• 52:55Kevin Rose?

  The second I said that, they're like, oh, you haven't tried.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  I know. Tim Ferriss, what the fuck? So let me address that. The, for people who haven't read it, uh, the four hour work week is about optimizing per hour output. That's it. End of story. So you maximize your per hour output, increase it five to 10x. Then if you're, let's say a VC or investment bank or whatever, you still work the same number of hours, but you just have, you have improved volume of output. Uh, same for startup people. The objective is to use your time wisely and allocate it to the things that you're passionate about. And in that case, for you, it would be, let's say, some of your startups that you've worked on. For me, where I feel like I am an Archimedes lever or can utilize the Archimedes lever to really have the broadest impact is say with the book. So I'll spend

• 53:42Tim Ferriss?

  three years on a book. That's a serious investment of time, but uh, the, the objective is not to be idle. So just to emphasize that. Uh, and I think that once you, you should be looking for something that consumes you in a way. And I know that might sound negative to some people, but it's like, if you're not a hell yes about what you're doing, then why are you doing it? Uh, or should you be looking for something else?

• 54:08Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. I think that's a good point.

• 54:11Tim Ferriss?

  So television. All right. Fair enough. Speaking, all right. Let's, let's drop TV. You mentioned documentary. Any favorite documentaries?

• 54:24Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, oh gosh, I'd have to go back and look at the stuff that I've watched like, what is it, like Food, Inc.?

• 54:32Tim Ferriss?

  Food, Inc.'s, Food, Inc.'s a good one.

• 54:34Kevin Rose?

  That's a great one. I really enjoyed that one. Kind of like shed some light on like the industrial food process and how nasty and horrible it is.

• 54:42Kevin Rose?

  That's definitely top of my list.

• 54:45Kevin Rose?

  I don't have any that jump out as being super exciting that's

• 54:48Tim Ferriss?

  Man on Wire is worth watching. That's fun.

• 54:50Kevin Rose?

  Have you seen Who Killed the Electric Car?

• 54:52Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 54:53Kevin Rose?

  Is that any good? I heard that was pretty good.

• 54:55Tim Ferriss?

  Graham's giving the thumbs.

• 54:56Kevin Rose?

  Graham or

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Partner. This three person podcast. Who Killed the Electric Car? What's it about?

• 55:04Kevin Rose?

  Well, just the, how the electric car died the first time around when they tried to get off the ground.

• 55:10Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, the GM EV one.

• 55:13Tim Ferriss?

  Who was it that came out with the Nova at one part, at one point? Thank you, wine, for that English fuck up. And

• 55:24Kevin Rose?

  The Nova?

• 55:24Tim Ferriss?

  The Nova, and then they tried to sell it in Spanish speaking countries and it was the Nova. It doesn't go. And so they couldn't sell the car.

• 55:31Kevin Rose?

  That's funny.

• 55:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oops.

• 55:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 55:38Tim Ferriss?

  If you could stop the clock and live forever at a particular age, what age would you choose?

• 55:43Kevin Rose?

  Man, that's a good one. Probably, I mean, that's a good question because obviously you don't know how things are going to feel in the future, but I would say as far as like my, my general

• 55:53Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure your joints and muscles will improve.

• 55:55Kevin Rose?

  I'd say 24.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  Spunk, eh?

• 55:59Kevin Rose?

  Your spunkiness and, and just ability to recover from

• 56:02Tim Ferriss?

  You're doing a shitty job on your wine.

• 56:04Kevin Rose?

  Dude, I, I told you I had a glass, two glasses before I got here.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not trying to be an enabler. I'm just saying you're doing a shitty job.

• 56:11Kevin Rose?

  If you're trying to promote alcoholism or your shit first podcast, it's a little hardcore.

• 56:16Tim Ferriss?

  Waiting for the

• 56:18Tim Ferriss?

  Waiting for the alcohol brands to sponsor me for my third episode.

• 56:23Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. So what was the question again? You want to know?

• 56:25Tim Ferriss?

  Any age, wherever you.

• 56:26Kevin Rose?

  Oh, 24.

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  24. Okay.

• 56:28Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 56:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 56:30Kevin Rose?

  I think the 24, I mean, your mid twenties are kind of like your prime, right? Physically.

• 56:37Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of your pet peeves?

• 56:40Tim Ferriss?

  What are things that drive you insane?

• 56:43Kevin Rose?

  Pet peeves, one of the things that drives me insane is that I feel as though in our industry, there are a lot of people that are.

• 56:49Tim Ferriss?

  Tech.

• 56:50Kevin Rose?

  Tech. That aren't really direct. It drives, it drives me nuts when people beat around the bush. And really you just need to say the truth because like, even though it's painful and it stings now, at least people know where you stand.

• 57:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Kevin Rose?

  And I feel.

• 57:04Tim Ferriss?

  Saves everybody a lot of time.

• 57:05Kevin Rose?

  It saves everyone a ton of time and I feel that that's like.

• 57:07Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of that?

• 57:09Kevin Rose?

  Well, I mean.

• 57:09Tim Ferriss?

  What circumstance?

• 57:11Kevin Rose?

  It just feels that, you know, I, I see this all the time and even my world and the venture capital world, like a lot of people will say, I, I recently changed the way that I say no to people now.

• 57:22Tim Ferriss?

  This is of great interest to me.

• 57:23Kevin Rose?

  I would say that the majority of the time, like venture capitalists, when you go out and you're an entrepreneur and you're looking to raise some money and, um, you know, you meet with a, a, someone at a VC firm and they sit down and say, oh, show me your idea and then you go through it. And then typically you get an email 24 to 48 hours later saying, this is how we want to proceed or not proceed. And oftentimes the email on not proceeding is like, you know, I talked with our partnership and I don't think it's a good fit at this time, or, you know, um, I, I'm so busy with my current investments that I, I don't think I have time to take on anything new, but thank you for your time. And like.

• 58:00Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk, let's talk in six months or whatever.

• 58:02Kevin Rose?

  It's such BS, man.

• 58:04Tim Ferriss?

  The soft maybe slash no.

• 58:06Kevin Rose?

  It's a soft, and it's just like. I was like, it's funny, I just, the other day, I was sitting there, I was writing a no, like saying no to someone email, which for me, in the past, has typically been like, you know, thought about it, really don't think it's something that we want to invest in, thanks, but love to talk to you in the future, blah, blah, blah, right? The typical one that you read everywhere else, right? And then, you know, I just started thinking like, gosh, there's gotta be, I'm gonna try and be very direct with the entrepreneur, and just like, see what the response is like, because I feel like that's just like, I might come off as a dick, and that's the worry, right? The concern is that you just come off like, you're just being-

• 58:47Tim Ferriss?

  A dick and they should talk you out of their places-

• 58:49Kevin Rose?

  But you know what, but I think that like, at least people would be like, you know what? We know where he stands. And so, I tried it, for the first time last week, actually, the entrepreneur wrote back and he was like, dude, thanks for being honest, I appreciate it.

• 59:02Tim Ferriss?

  What was your wording? I'm curious, because this is something I think a lot of people battle with, how to say no.

• 59:07Kevin Rose?

  So, I liked the idea. I thought that the space was generally really boring. I didn't know how big a business it would become. I thought that they had decent traction. They were clearly gonna get their next round of funding because of that traction. But it wasn't something where I was gonna be over the top excited about to answer their emails and get pumped up about, right? And so, I wrote the guy an email and I was like, listen, I don't think I'm the right partner for you. I think the idea is sound, but I am not excited about this space at all. It doesn't get me excited, and I just don't think like, when you need someone to reach out to and to help you out, like, I'm gonna be the one that's gonna to jump back and be the right partner, you know, more or less. And he wrote back, and he's like, dude, thanks for the direct feedback, or honest feedback,

• 59:52Kevin Rose?

  and, you know, look forward to see you next time you're in town, because he's out of town. And it was like, it was the first time where I was like, wow, actually like-

• 59:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's also a good founder, and can take it.

• 1:00:00Kevin Rose?

  I've done that before, in working with some engineers, and I feel like, it just, it always, I kinda like, I wanna start living by that, because I think it's the right thing to do.

• 1:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  So, I think, I think you're a very good communicator, you're also a very good negotiator. I've seen you live, I think both are very interrelated.

• 1:00:21Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think you're a good communicator? And why or why not? Well, yeah, let's do that first. And then the, obviously, the overarching question is, what makes a good communicator? Slash negotiator? I think they go together.

• 1:00:36Kevin Rose?

  I think I'm the, that's hard because I, it's funny. I was just negotiating a car lease today and I don't think I'm that good of a negotiator because this guy is like mop the floor.

• 1:00:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but you don't give a shit about your car lease. That's why.

• 1:00:48Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:00:48Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen you negotiate things you care about and you're good.

• 1:00:51Kevin Rose?

  No, that's probably true. So on the communications front, I feel that like.

• 1:00:56Tim Ferriss?

  Plus, that guy's done the same fucking negotiation a million times.

• 1:00:59Kevin Rose?

  He's really good.

• 1:01:01Tim Ferriss?

  He's like, I'm so glad you asked that blah, blah, blah bullshit. Let me now like verbally.

• 1:01:06Kevin Rose?

  I literally walked out of the place today, walked down the street and the guy's texting me like, come back, like, we can talk about this. And I'm like, why didn't we talk about this 20 minutes ago when I sat in your office for 45 minutes? Like, he's like, oh, we could, there's wiggle room now. And I'm like, how is there, there wasn't wiggle room 45 minutes ago? And you've brought me that crappy coffee? And I'm like sitting there in the office sweating my ass off because it's hot. Anyway, it was just like, I hate, I wish, I need to invent a new car startup because like, there needs to be like straight, transparent, real talk, like no negotiation. I don't know, there's a lot of car companies out there. But communication wise, I feel that, you know, I don't know that I'm, I appreciate

• 1:01:48Kevin Rose?

  the compliment, but I think for me, it's, it's, what people have said is that I don't really, sometimes I get in trouble for this. I always did when I was doing PR at DIG and I was like, I would just say whatever was the truth and not necessarily the best thing to say, but just really the honest thing. So like when we were having user revolts on our site, when, when I was running the DIG, the very, like it was a very social site. So we had like millions of users revolting against us on, online. Like, you know, I would get in front of the camera and just be like, yeah, it sucks. Our servers are falling over, we're getting crushed right now. And like, you know, PR would be like, okay, you can kind of like say like this and like, you should word it like this next time. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think like a lot of that.

• 1:02:33Tim Ferriss?

  I suck at that too.

• 1:02:34Kevin Rose?

  But that's the thing is like-

• 1:02:35Tim Ferriss?

  Because people don't trust you if you're reading off a script.

• 1:02:37Kevin Rose?

  Exactly. And that is an old, like, process, an old way of thinking. Like, people nowadays can see right through that crap. And so like, literally, just, you have to tell the truth. I mean, it's like, you just have, whether it sucks or doesn't suck, like, you know, I got in trouble one time. Uh, another time when I was on stage, I was talking about our engineering problems at DIG.

• 1:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  Who chastised you? This is board of directors, investor types?

• 1:03:02Kevin Rose?

  No, this was, um, uh, this was like, actually, so, I mean, well, I'm sharing some insider information here, but we had like, we had this like, group on Facebook that was a bunch of ex-DIG employees.

• 1:03:16Tim Ferriss?

  Uh.

• 1:03:16Kevin Rose?

  And, um, you know, I, first of all, for the-

• 1:03:21Tim Ferriss?

  Dedicated to being ex-DIG employees?

• 1:03:23Kevin Rose?

  They, they, they, they were, but like, I was also a member of that group because I had since left DIG. And, um, you know, the, the blame is definitely on me from the get-go because I'm the one that founded the company. So like, I can, I can't really, the buck stops with me.

• 1:03:36Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:03:36Kevin Rose?

  But, you know, I'm allowed to tweak and figure out what I did wrong so I can hopefully avoid those mistakes in the future.

• 1:03:42Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 1:03:43Kevin Rose?

  And so I was saying a lot of what I thought I did wrong, including not, like, as Jack Dorsey puts it, uh, in an interview that I did with him, he says that you need to constantly be pruning and editing your team to make sure that you have the, the right people in the right roles. And then that's like something that you, as a successful entrepreneur, he has constantly done. That means sometimes having very difficult, tough, uh, conversations with employees and letting people go.

• 1:04:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:04:10Kevin Rose?

  And so I talked about that on stage and talked about how I would have done things differently, blah, blah. And I upset a lot of, of past employees and I was kind of like-

• 1:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  What upset them?

• 1:04:19Kevin Rose?

  Well, just that- I would put the blame on engineering when they thought the blame was on upper management and blah, blah, blah. And, and don't get me wrong, the blame was absolutely on upper management. And there was, there's, I think that there's, you know, there's, you, there's, there's blame to be put all over the place. Like, it's, it's like, I could point to a thousand different things that, that we would do differently next time around.

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, if I, if I were to just try to bring it back to this original question, it seems like you're surprisingly comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. And I've seen you do this live a couple of times where you're asking for things that perhaps other people wouldn't ask for, but that you should ask for. Or you're saying things that maybe you shouldn't say by some political correct standard, politically correct standard, but you do. And how did you get to that point? Because it seems like the reason a lot of people fail in, whether it's negotiating for a raise, or negotiating any type of deal, or asking for anything they want, or coming clean and avoiding some huge fucking PR scandal

• 1:05:27Tim Ferriss?

  just by being honest at the outset, they're not willing to have those uncomfortable conversations. So why do you think you're so comfortable doing that?

• 1:05:36Kevin Rose?

  Um, I think it's probably because I want to avoid an even more difficult conversation down the road if I'm caught not speaking the truth the first time around.

• 1:05:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Kevin Rose?

  It's a lot more difficult to have the conversation to say like, oh, yeah, I kinda wasn't like fully bringing everything to light in this original conversation. So, and, and I feel like, I just, I don't know, man. Like, if you admit your faults, then other people can't point them out in you.

• 1:06:04Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:04Kevin Rose?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:06:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:06:06Kevin Rose?

  Like, if I, if I get in front of-

• 1:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you make, I mean, it's the same thing with like, stand-up comics who take, who take the piss. That's a really fucking Commonwealth expression, but, uh, make fun of themselves before the audience can. To just like steal the thunder in that way so that they can run the show and do what they want to do.

• 1:06:24Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, maybe that's that. I think, yeah, I'd never thought about this before. It's funny that you bring it up, but like I feel like that's probably the reason why, because I want to say everything there is to be said that's negative. So that we can get that out of the way. So I don't have to be ridiculed in some way. Like I think that at DIG especially, we were under a lot of scrutiny all the time.

• 1:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Kevin Rose?

  Because we had such a very vocal audience, like that was taking down sites and servers and because we had so much traffic.

• 1:06:51Tim Ferriss?

  Took down my server. First time my server, my servers got taken down. I remember very clearly it was in New York City. And I had this very odd blog post called From Geek to Freak, How I Gained Thirty Four Pounds of Muscle in Twenty Eight Days.

• 1:07:06Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Tim Ferriss?

  That hit the DIG front page and took down my whole fucking site. It was like a big deal and that was a very important defining moment for me. I remember, I mean, DIG was extremely powerful for a very long time.

• 1:07:22Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, it was, um, and because of a lot of that, the press used to always love to like, sit down with us and be like, what do you think about your audience and like the fact that they make these types of comments about certain users and or there's a post about, you know, uh, you know, certain ladies in bikinis and they hit the front page and it got all these clicks and all these men are saying these really crude things like, how does that make you feel? And I felt like I was always being hit with all of these kind of like, like, you suck. Tell us why you don't suck questions, you know? That I was just like, you know what? You're right. We do suck, you know? It's like, that's the only thing you can do.

• 1:07:59Tim Ferriss?

  Like, look, humanity's fucking brutal. Like, I'm sorry.

• 1:08:02Kevin Rose?

  I'm like.

• 1:08:03Tim Ferriss?

  If you have, how many, I mean, how many monthly unique visitors do you have?

• 1:08:08Kevin Rose?

  Thirty eight million was the highest.

• 1:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, so if you take like a thousand assholes in a fucking auditorium, like you're gonna have, not assholes, I'm sorry, like a thousand people in an auditorium, like think of any school play, right? Or like any little league game.

• 1:08:24Kevin Rose?

  Right. It's always gonna be hecklers.

• 1:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  And you have like three hundred dads, they're always gonna be four fucking. Fucking asshole dads are like yelling and screaming and blue in the face.

• 1:08:31Kevin Rose?

  Right.

• 1:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  So you take thirty eight million people and you extrapolate it out. Of course, you're gonna have a fucking mess in your.

• 1:08:36Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, it was so I just realized that like at that point, you just gotta surrender and not fight and just be like, listen. And it actually helps out a ton because they people are like, oh, he's just human. He's like, he's.

• 1:08:48Tim Ferriss?

  Well, dude, that's really important, I think, is to emphasize, not emphasize, but at least mention

• 1:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  the things you suck at as a way of qualifying.

• 1:09:01Tim Ferriss?

  Not like credentializing everything you say after that, but also qualifying the users that come to your site, right? So or that use your product by explaining who should not use your product, if that makes sense. What would you say that you are world class at?

• 1:09:18Kevin Rose?

  I would say

• 1:09:24Kevin Rose?

  every couple of years, I will come up with something idea wise that I have never seen done before. And so the thing that I enjoy more than anything else out of anything I've ever done in life.

• 1:09:41Kevin Rose?

  Outside of like the emotional side of like, you know, finding your wife and dating and things like that has to be.

• 1:09:47Tim Ferriss?

  Things like that.

• 1:09:48Kevin Rose?

  Well, I'm just saying like that's that's another thing because that's awesome too. But I'm saying like career wise has to be those moments where you have those original ideas, you know, that they come to you that you're just like, this has never been done before and you you prototype it and you build it and you look at it and you're just like, wow, like, I don't know if this is ever going to be anything big, but I'm the first person that thought of this. Like, that is a really cool idea. And like, we had, you know, maybe ten or fifteen moments throughout Diggs history where we were the first ones to do some of these things and like, that is the coolest feeling, man. When you create something that like millions of people end up using and you're just like,

• 1:10:30Kevin Rose?

  dude, I made that. Like, it's like you feel so emotionally tied to it. And then you also, you know, it's funny. It's because. We built a lot of stuff very early days at DIG that went on to be used in many other products, including everything from, you know, stupid things like Facebook using a like button. When we like created social voting way back in the day and had it spread to profiles and a lot of the the kind of nuts and bolts of how that stuff worked. Like a lot of that eventually, you know, some of the comment stuff that we did with the voting and like a lot of like really crazy stuff we did on like showing real time data around votes and like all this stuff eventually made it into much bigger products than what we had created. But dude, to know that you were there for a minute and played a little role in that, that, you know,

• 1:11:14Kevin Rose?

  that was really cool. Like I can remember when like Zuckerberg came down to my office at DIG, sat on my floor with his flip flops on, you know, Facebook at the time was like smaller than DIG and was like shooting the shit with me about like what he wanted to build at Facebook and like, you know, thought we were the shit. And I was like, damn, that was, you know, now that I look back on that, at the time I was like, who's this kid? Now I look back on that and I'm like, dude, that's so cool. Like that, that was like a moment where like we had created something that he was like caught up in and thought it was really cool. And baked some of those ideas into some of the stuff that he built and went on to, to, to obviously launch to an audience that's a hundred X what we ever were.

• 1:11:56Kevin Rose?

  But like, dude, just being a part of that, like that whole movement was, was something that I will forever cherish, you know? And it's like those, what I, so your question is like, what am I really good at? It's like, I enjoyed those moments and I think that like, if anything I can bring to my, my, like the people that have followed my work and that continue to follow the stuff that I do, I hope to have a few more of those in my lifetime. And, and be able to actually launch some stuff that people are like, wow, he, he, it doesn't have to be big. It can be super small. It just, I want people to think like, wow, that's something I've never seen before. I like that feeling.

• 1:12:31Tim Ferriss?

  So I feel exactly the same way and I enjoy the newness, the inventiveness, the

• 1:12:39Tim Ferriss?

  Aha moment more than the scaling. And I think it's sometimes to my detriment, right? So you say, uh, look at the quantified self movement and so on. It's like, I was at the first meeting, finished the beginning, did the four hour body, published 2010, which means that I was doing research in 2008, 2007, uh, recording date even before that.

• 1:13:01Kevin Rose?

  Did you see with the iPhone announcement a couple of days ago?

• 1:13:03Tim Ferriss?

  Biometrics?

• 1:13:04Kevin Rose?

  No, no, not that. The new chip, the, what is it called? The M7 chip?

• 1:13:08Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:13:09Kevin Rose?

  They're, so they're building in to a chip. They're offloading all the pedometer stuff. They can tell when you're in a car, when you're walking, when you're running, all that stuff is going to be built on chip, super low power, always on. So it's going to power like a whole nother like suite of, of quantified self stuff. But like, to your point, like you're on that shit a long time ago.

• 1:13:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And

• 1:13:31Kevin Rose?

  And now it's actually like hitting mainstream.

• 1:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Now it's hitting mainstream. So you have, I think people like, uh, Dave Asprey, who's, who's quite smart, uh, bulletproof coffee and so on, will probably generate more revenue for himself than I ever will personally. But I enjoy being there at the inception at like the big bang moment more than the scaling. And it's, it's something that I struggle with because I feel like, fuck, like, you know, if I could have caught that wave of like a year or two later, let someone else do all the R and D.

• 1:14:06Kevin Rose?

  Right.

• 1:14:06Tim Ferriss?

  You could monetize it so much more effectively.

• 1:14:08Kevin Rose?

  Dude, it's not too late, man.

• 1:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  But I enjoy the inception moment more than anything else.

• 1:14:13Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, okay. So fine. So like, what do you think I should do?

• 1:14:17Kevin Rose?

  I mean, I think

• 1:14:18Tim Ferriss?

  Not in terms of not being too late. I'm curious.

• 1:14:20Kevin Rose?

  I mean, honestly, the quantified self stuff, like just now in the last Android release, they're now automatically building in at the API level. Um, they can tell whether you're walking, running in a car. Apple just announced that in their latest chip like three days ago, same thing. Like the APIs and the hooks for all this stuff are there.

• 1:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Kevin Rose?

  It's up to you what you want to build on top of it. You could do, you could do so many different things on top of that.

• 1:14:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm just.

• 1:14:46Kevin Rose?

  And it's early days, man. Like if you think about all the stuff that you've looked at, like as far as reading like real time, I mean, dude, when I first, it's funny, I'll tell a great story, a Tim Ferriss story. Like, I think this is in your book too. When we were hanging out and we're watching a movie, do you remember what movie that was?

• 1:15:03Tim Ferriss?

  It was, uh, it was Inglourious Basterds, right?

• 1:15:07Kevin Rose?

  Oh, man, that was such a great movie. I loved that movie.

• 1:15:09Tim Ferriss?

  It was a good movie.

• 1:15:10Kevin Rose?

  So we're watching Inglourious Basterds and like Tim's doing research for his book.

• 1:15:13Tim Ferriss?

  No, this isn't my book.

• 1:15:15Kevin Rose?

  You were doing something for your book, right?

• 1:15:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, I was, but no, no, we haven't talked about this though.

• 1:15:20Kevin Rose?

  Okay.

• 1:15:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Kevin Rose?

  So we're sitting there in the movie theater and like we sit down and like literally you didn't even think to say a thing to me until we had sat down. Like we were like hanging out before then or something and like you sit down and like you're like, dude, I'm doing this crazy experiment or something like that. I'm like, what's, what's up? And you like pull up your shirt and you have like some kind of syringe in your side.

• 1:15:41Tim Ferriss?

  I had a glue, I had a, a continuous glucose monitor implanted into my side, in my abdomen.

• 1:15:47Kevin Rose?

  You have, but you have like a needle in you and then a wireless little thing.

• 1:15:51Tim Ferriss?

  Two or three needles stuck under my skin implanted into a transmitter that then went to a, a, a wireless receiver that was on my belt.

• 1:16:00Kevin Rose?

  Yeah. And I'm like, what the fuck is this guy doing? Like that was like, but like, talk about quantified self stuff. I mean, this was years ago.

• 1:16:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Kevin Rose?

  And like.

• 1:16:09Tim Ferriss?

  Long time ago.

• 1:16:10Kevin Rose?

  And, and you think about like, we don't, we still don't have that data available to us. But like, there's, there's a lot of talk in, in, at least in some of the startups that I've seen at external ways of gathering very similar data, like they're, they're doing a bunch of new ways that like get it heart rate, get it, um, that was the perspiration that you have coming off of you, like a bunch of different things.

• 1:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  Galvanic skin response.

• 1:16:32Kevin Rose?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:16:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's common. Yeah. There's a startup, I don't think I can talk about it yet. Basis is cool. I'm an investor in Basis. Uh, so the Basis watch is very cool. There's another startup, hopefully I can talk about sometime soon, uh, which is basically like a nicotine patch that tracks all that stuff 24/7.

• 1:16:50Kevin Rose?

  That's cool.

• 1:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  Fucking cool. Yeah. It's super, super cool.

• 1:16:53Kevin Rose?

  But anyway, what I'm getting at is like, it obviously, it's like, I feel like, especially in this sector, like, there's a lot of talk and like the origins of something, which obviously you were a big part of. And then there's that inflection point where the hardware catches up with the, with the, the general discussion. And then the hardware enables a whole slew-

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  Harbor. We're getting to a great blood alcohol content point now.

• 1:17:19Kevin Rose?

  No, the hard, the hardware, but the hardware is finally up to speed now to where like, you're gonna see in the next few years, like, a lot of this stuff that we thought was impossible, actually make it into devices that we wear.

• 1:17:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, exactly. And the issue has been up to this point, quite frankly, data entry, right? Because you have shitty devices, or I shouldn't say shitty, but very primitive devices that only capture accelerometer data. And every other biometric data point that you want, say, blood values, is really intrusive, right? You have to have someone come to your house, or you have to go to Quest Labs, or-

• 1:17:54Kevin Rose?

  Unless you're a cutter.

• 1:17:55Tim Ferriss?

  Lab Quest, rather. Unless you're a cutter, right. To, uh, watch The Secretary, everyone. It's a great movie.

• 1:18:02Kevin Rose?

  It's hardcore.

• 1:18:03Tim Ferriss?

  It's a good movie. But the, uh, the, the point being that you, you would have to have these intrusive, or I should say not intrusive, but invasive, uh, tests done to get the data that you want.

• 1:18:15Kevin Rose?

  Sure.

• 1:18:15Tim Ferriss?

  And I think-

• 1:18:16Kevin Rose?

  And there's time around that, too. It takes time to get the test back.

• 1:18:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it does. Takes a lot of time. So I think that, you know, the latency on that is, say, three to seven days, whereas as soon as that nut is cracked, where you have something like a nicotine patch that you can slap on, that's good for seven days, that tracks-

• 1:18:32Kevin Rose?

  Why does it have to be nicotine?

• 1:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, it's not nicotine. It's just like a patch. It's like a-

• 1:18:37Kevin Rose?

  I thought you were like, as a twofer, you get a little high.

• 1:18:39Tim Ferriss?

  As a twofer, you get nicotine. That stuff makes me so sick. Nicotine's so strong. I can't, I, I, we can talk about that another time.

• 1:18:45Kevin Rose?

  Dude, you need to trim, trim your toenails. That one is really long.

• 1:18:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're gross. I know. I have talons, people. Because if you come up to me-

• 1:18:51Kevin Rose?

  Those are literally like dragon talons.

• 1:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be like, uh-

• 1:18:54Kevin Rose?

  That big toe.

• 1:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  What's that, what's that bird, Graham? Any, any insight? There's a bird in cassowary. Yes. An Australian bird that will like rip your heart open with a, with a, with a, uh, with hooves, basically. Nails on its feet.

• 1:19:08Kevin Rose?

  This should be the title of your first show.

• 1:19:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's my podcast, The Cassowary.

• 1:19:13Tim Ferriss?

  Fucking no one will be able to spell it. There'll be like seventeen different SEOed versions. That would suck. Uh, hold on. So let me, uh, if you could, this is such a non-sack word, but whatever. We're going, going for it. Uh.

• 1:19:29Kevin Rose?

  You're a colored jelly bean. What color would it be?

• 1:19:32Tim Ferriss?

  Suck my balls. Uh.

• 1:19:34Kevin Rose?

  Wow.

• 1:19:35Tim Ferriss?

  Not literally, lit figuratively, I want you to suck my balls. If you could outsource one of your daily tasks, what would it be and why? Because you have no fucking excuse, right? I mean, you're, you're like, you're doing well. You can pay whatever for whatever. Uh, but what of your current daily tasks, your repetitive tasks, daily or weekly? Would you like to outsource and why haven't you?

• 1:20:00Kevin Rose?

  Um.

• 1:20:04Kevin Rose?

  You know, I don't think there's anything else left that I have to, I want to outsource.

• 1:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:20:09Kevin Rose?

  I think I'm actually pretty set.

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So what do you bitch about that you don't want to outsource?

• 1:20:16Kevin Rose?

  Uh.

• 1:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  How's your wine, by the way?

• 1:20:17Kevin Rose?

  It's great. I think, I'm thinking I'm still working on it. I'm good. I'm like, I'm like at three. So I think that, you know, I don't know that I, uh.

• 1:20:28Kevin Rose?

  I, I think that if anything, I complain that I don't have time to focus on some of the things I'd really like to get behind. Like I, I want to learn how to garden properly. I know this sounds lame, but like.

• 1:20:37Tim Ferriss?

  Are you kidding me? That sounds amazing. What type of gardening?

• 1:20:40Kevin Rose?

  Well, I mean, I've got a vegetable garden right now.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  We both know Dr. Wile. You remember his garden?

• 1:20:44Kevin Rose?

  Oh, Dr. Wile. Dr. Wile is my freaking idol, man.

• 1:20:47Tim Ferriss?

  That guy's garden is amazing.

• 1:20:49Kevin Rose?

  So we, we were lucky enough to go up to Dr. Andrew Wile. If you, you probably know him as the dude with the big white beard on all the Whole Foods stores shelves.

• 1:20:57Tim Ferriss?

  MD that looks like Santa Claus.

• 1:20:58Kevin Rose?

  He looks like Santa Claus. Um, we got lucky to go to his house, uh, up in Canada and like freaking, the dude is like the master. Um, he had an amazing garden. Yeah. So anyway, um, yeah, I would like to learn more about that. I mean, I, I think that like right now it's a very, I have someone help out that comes by and like basically helps with the garden and I just, I understand the basics, but I need to understand like, I want to get to the level of like, understand the soil composition and a bunch of other things. And like, you know, I just don't have the time to do it. I wish I did. So I think there's a bunch of little hobbies. I think that you're getting that with the meditation and with the garden. Like there's probably, you know, a handful of things. I'd like to work in fast food again.

• 1:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  Elaborate, please.

• 1:21:43Kevin Rose?

  I have this really.

• 1:21:44Tim Ferriss?

  Reality camp.

• 1:21:45Kevin Rose?

  I have this.

• 1:21:45Tim Ferriss?

  We talked about reality camp.

• 1:21:46Kevin Rose?

  I have this really weird thing where I want to go and work in like fast food again.

• 1:21:50Tim Ferriss?

  We talked about this, reality camp.

• 1:21:52Kevin Rose?

  Until someone comes up and is like, Kevin, and then I'm going to run out. Like, I want, I want.

• 1:21:56Tim Ferriss?

  Chipotle line, extra guacamole is a dollar fifty, sir.

• 1:21:59Kevin Rose?

  No, I'm being dead serious. Like, I would like to do, do some of that, like, just.

• 1:22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we've talked about this, like, the cognitive tax that comes along with white collar work, right? In the sense that when you're in front of an inbox constantly, and you're on the phone in conference halls constantly, there is a, like, mental and soul tax that.

• 1:22:20Kevin Rose?

  You don't interact with people. It's like, it's not.

• 1:22:22Tim Ferriss?

  On your own, that does not allow you to interact with other people. And so we've both had this fantasy of, like, working on the Chipotle line in this, like.

• 1:22:32Kevin Rose?

  I will join.

• 1:22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Meditative, repetitive.

• 1:22:36Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Tim Ferriss?

  Context. How fucking awesome would that be?

• 1:22:38Kevin Rose?

  Also, I would really like to just analyze, I want to understand businesses that are fine tuned and all about, like, one of the things I respect about these businesses, I don't necessarily, Chipotle is decent in that I hear their ingredients are pretty good, but like McDonald's, a place that I would never, ever really want to work at, but I kind of do. And the reason I want to go work there is because I want to understand what processes they put in place to get the efficiencies that they do.

• 1:23:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Kevin Rose?

  And like, I really would like to, like, you, you got to imagine that you're dealing with, like, sixteen to eighteen year old kids as a majority of your workforce. These are like the most unruly, crazy spit in your hamburger type of like, like, how do you manage that? Like, that's the kind of be the hardest segment of people to manage. Like, I know when I was sixteen to eighteen, like, I was doing all kinds of crazy stupid stuff. And so, like, I would imagine that they have.

• 1:23:35Tim Ferriss?

  I wouldn't want you making my burgers when you were sixteen.

• 1:23:37Kevin Rose?

  No, I know. You wouldn't. You still wouldn't today.

• 1:23:41Kevin Rose?

  I would imagine that like when you look at like what they have in place, everything from like the ways that they monitor their employees to the the the system they have set up to like, here are the three things you have to do to make this burger. Here are the seven things you have to do to make this burger. Like, I just want to understand that process. So I can figure out how someone would successfully franchise and scale a business like that. I'm just curious. And I also think it would be, you know, there's something about like, there's something about like actually serving people. Like, I think that's like a cool thing to do. Like, I wouldn't mind, yeah, I would like to, and I actually I'd like to talk to you about this. I wouldn't mind like donating some of my time. I actually want to join the Boy Scouts again and help out. Because I was an Eagle Scout and I went, I was

• 1:24:25Kevin Rose?

  in Scouts all growing up. And I feel that like, I really miss, one of the things that my dad did when he was alive is that when I was a little kid, he was a mentor to a lot of other kids in our troop. And I think that it was really important and he enjoyed it because you have to understand that the Boy Scouts, even though there is, one of the things that nobody ever really talks about is that, at least in Las Vegas, was that there was a lot of kids that were dropped off by their moms who didn't have father figures. And they were like, this is the only way they're gonna get like a father figure in their life. And there were a lot of boys there that just like never knew their dads. And like, my dad was like, a second

• 1:25:07Kevin Rose?

  dad. And like, at my dad's funeral, there was like, you know, a couple of people, well, one in particular, that was a good, longtime friend of my dad's, that now is in his, you know, late 30s, that was like, you know, a scout that my dad kind of mentored because, you know, he considered him like a second father. And so, you know, I would like to to figure out like a way to like, get back and involved in that. And, you know, actually do something outside of the computer and just get, help help some people out.

• 1:25:34Tim Ferriss?

  Dude, I'll do that with you.

• 1:25:35Kevin Rose?

  That'd be fun, man.

• 1:25:36Tim Ferriss?

  I, I saw a poster today. I went to a meditation class, my check-in, like, Alcoholics Anonymous. Yeah, exactly. Kevin's doing a jerk off motion with his left hand.

• 1:25:49Kevin Rose?

  I did not. Well, I'm left-handed, but I was asking for more wine.

• 1:25:54Tim Ferriss?

  The universal more wine jerk off gesture. So I went to a meditation session, i.e. as Kevin would have it, if it were up to him, a masturbation session. And there was a poster for the Girl Scouts, so no more masturbation references, please. Which said, and I was really actually inspired by this today. It was this, it was a picture of this chick doing, sorry chick, what, you know, fuck you guys, chick is fun. Uh, it was a picture of this, this like badass chick doing Taekwondo and doing like a high kick and it said, Cleopatra ruled Egypt when she was 18 years old. What are you doing?

• 1:26:35Kevin Rose?

  Oh damn, that's strong.

• 1:26:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was a Girl Scouts poster and I was like, fuck, that is a good poster. Now I feel like a lazy asshole. I need to go do something, but it was very inspiring. And, uh, I feel like,

• 1:26:52Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like that's a place where you can have a huge amount of impact, certainly. And, uh, for me, you know, I always thought I was going to be a nine, ninth or 10th grade teacher, because I felt like that was a really critical time for me where I was deciding where my life is going to go. And I had a lot of bad influences to choose from and a lot of good influences to choose from.

• 1:27:11Kevin Rose?

  Actually ninth grade, man, is so key. That's the one.

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  So key. And so I thought I was always going to go back and teach ninth, 10th grade or one of the two.

• 1:27:20Kevin Rose?

  You'd be an awesome teacher, by the way. You should do it.

• 1:27:22Tim Ferriss?

  I would enjoy it. You know, I always thought I was going to, and it just turned out that the books and the blog and this and blah, blah, blah. Everything, everything came up as a vehicle for teaching.

• 1:27:31Kevin Rose?

  Have you, so here's one thing I just want to throw out there real quick. There's a lot of people talking about this unschooled movement.

• 1:27:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Kevin Rose?

  Where it's like open source school, like where like the kids can pick like the different classes and, and their own kind of like at their own leisure. Have you considered doing, like, you could put out episodes that are like some courseware and the class online that like, you know, that would, as long as you adhere to like some of the unschooled stuff, like you could basically create your own class for the same age group.

• 1:28:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'd be open to doing that. Uh, Graham, I'd be curious to get your thoughts on this, Kevin too, but I feel like the.

• 1:28:10Tim Ferriss?

  The figures that had, and again, speaking as a male, and so this may be unique to men or to me, but many of the people who had the biggest impact on me were males who were just like, here's the fucking way it is. And like, this is the program we're going to follow, whether that was wrestling coaches or teachers in specific subjects who gave me structure that I lacked. Alright, so.

• 1:28:38Kevin Rose?

  You needed a little bit more discipline. You needed a little bit more.

• 1:28:40Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's, I think it's very, I think that in order to be a good leader, you have to learn how to be a good follower first.

• 1:28:49Kevin Rose?

  Hmm. I feel like that's a famous quote that you just took from somewhere.

• 1:28:53Tim Ferriss?

  I may have stolen that from someone, but the, but that's, that's, I mean, that's my belief is that learning to be a good follower or disciple or soldier underneath someone else is very useful training for them being a leader later. And I don't think that it would have been a service to me as a, say, 15 year old. And I can, I can very clearly identify this, like 14, 15, 16 year old period where I was very lucky to encounter certain people who had a huge formative impact on my development. In that period, I feel like

• 1:29:32Tim Ferriss?

  I needed good guidance. I needed good leaders. I didn't need, I didn't need, nor would I have in retrospect, wanted someone to say, you decide what you want to do. I don't know. Maybe that's me being naive, but I really feel like at that point in time, I need someone to show me how to follow a good structure as opposed to admit my own. What are your thoughts?

• 1:29:56Kevin Rose?

  Um, I think everyone's different. I think that certainly that, that approach is, is one that is probably a little bit more traditional. I mean, that's the way things are today, right? Like people are saying like, this is the class you have to take. This is the thing that you have to.

• 1:30:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, but there's a difference between taking, say, four years of undergrad, doing all the fucking bullshit. I mean, I, you know, and I finished, I got my degree from Princeton, great and fantastic and. There are a lot of fucking retards who graduated from Princeton and every other Ivy League school, but people think I'm smart because I have that in my resume or whatever, uh, which is silly, but that's the way it is. Uh, I think there's that, which is four years versus having a good like Obi-Wan Kenobi. And I, I do think it's hard to go from like being born to being your own Obi-Wan Kenobi as opposed to having someone in between who really

• 1:30:50Tim Ferriss?

  puts you in check when you're just being arrogant prick as a 15 year old, which like,

• 1:30:57Tim Ferriss?

  perhaps it's not applicable to females. I can't speak to that because I'm not a woman, but like every 15 year old dude thinks he knows everything about fucking everything. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:31:07Kevin Rose?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Tim Ferriss?

  And you need like, you need an elder to just be like, that's great. I'm glad you're confident, but like, let me show you how this shit actually works. And like, I'm going to push you to the breaking point and you don't think you can do it, but I think you can do it. So I'm going to push you even further. And I remember just having this particular mentor of mine, Mr. Buxton, who is an amazing, amazing, amazing guy. Uh, the CEO of Donors Choose, for instance, and founder of Donors Choose. I mean, you just, you look at my wrestling team and you can just, you can telescope them out to these amazing outcomes and all of them, without exception, in my experience so far, I attributed it back to Mr. Buxton, being a fucking like brilliant hard ass

• 1:31:52Tim Ferriss?

  in wrestling. Like he would not, you thought you could give seven, he'd be like, no, no, no, you can give 10. And he would just push you to the breaking point. And, uh,

• 1:32:05Tim Ferriss?

  that was just, like, whenever I, whenever I face anything that is difficult in my life, I look back on my experience when I was high school and it's like, all right, is this harder than what Mr. Buxton pushed me to do? No, it isn't. Therefore, I can do it.

• 1:32:17Kevin Rose?

  I think there's, um, There's something to be said about like choosing your own path, but I don't think, I think that once you've chosen that path, there's, there's, I agree that like you can, there's no reason why you can't have a hard ass under that particular like vertical of whatever you've chosen, right? Like if you say, okay, I want to get into computer science, like you, you can have a badass like hard ass in computer science that like drives you to be the best, right? Like, I feel the same way. Like, I have a trainer at the gym. And why? Because I'll push myself to freaking six if I'm left to my own devices. If I go in with a trainer, I'm going 11 and walking out of there sore as hell and can barely limp back to my vehicle, you know? And so like, I, I, I agree.

• 1:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  To his vehicle.

• 1:33:01Kevin Rose?

  What is that?

• 1:33:02Tim Ferriss?

  Back to your vehicle.

• 1:33:03Kevin Rose?

  Come on, I didn't want to say scooter, because I have a scooter.

• 1:33:08Tim Ferriss?

  I like vehicle, it's very, very efficient.

• 1:33:10Kevin Rose?

  I take a little scooter to and from the gym, it's efficient.

• 1:33:15Tim Ferriss?

  I love that you get fucking like super jacked at the gym and then jump on a Vespa.

• 1:33:20Kevin Rose?

  No, I'm really embarrassed because I got the wrong color. I got a freaking gold Vespa, it's so ugly.

• 1:33:25Tim Ferriss?

  Dude, that's ballsy. It's like being the fucking fat guy in like Ibiza, wearing the fucking man thong, just walking around.

• 1:33:32Kevin Rose?

  I wanted black and Dari didn't like black. And then I was like, she's like, gold's nice. And I'm like, yeah, gold's kind of nice. And I ended up getting the gold one. Who wants a gold scooter? It's the worst.

• 1:33:44Tim Ferriss?

  That's very confident. I like that.

• 1:33:46Kevin Rose?

  Anyway.

• 1:33:47Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So, so I mean, if you, if you could find a mentor, we're not going to do too much longer, but if you, if you could find a mentor of some type, like what type of mentor do you think you need?

• 1:34:00Kevin Rose?

  You know, I think that it's, it's, for me, it's, it's finding someone that fills in the gaps. I think that there is, you know, when, when you want to run a business or you want to start something new, the, the best thing that you can do, and the thing that I kind of like, was I would say that one of the big learnings that I had when I was a lot younger, in my early twenties and started a dig, was that I put my head down, I put my headphones on and I said, I'm gonna focus on product. Because it was the thing that I was comfortable with and it was the thing that I understood and I knew how to do well. I kind of, you know, closed my eyes to every other aspect of the business, whether it was financials, whether it was running the business, whether it was hiring, firing people, whether it was, you know,

• 1:34:46Kevin Rose?

  scaling, like there was a bunch of pieces that I just was like, I don't understand those. I'm gonna close my eyes and, and pretend they don't exist. I'm gonna hire other people to run them. And I'm going to just focus on what I know, what I know best. In retrospect, I would probably go in and say, well, I know for a fact, I would be honest with myself about what I don't know and go and absolutely try and pair up with mentors that can help me out. I think if anything that I've learned in the last, you know, 10 years of doing this, is that there is no shame in admitting that you don't understand something because you can either fuck it up and that's when you act, act like you understand something and you actually don't. Or you can admit it one time, learn it,

• 1:35:31Kevin Rose?

  and then move on and become a better person and just more well-rounded and actually, you know, get serious about building a business. Like there's, there's, you can, you, if you ever gonna be a founder and you're gonna run that business, you have to understand that you can't just be good at one thing. You have to understand the whole gamut, the A to Z and, and at least have enough knowledge to be able to make an educated decision around certain things. And I think that I was very immature and I hid from the things that I didn't understand. And so even today, there's a lot of things I still don't understand. When it comes to finance, like,

• 1:36:14Tim Ferriss?

  What are you worse at right now? I mean, what, if you could?

• 1:36:19Tim Ferriss?

  Conjure the perfect mentor from the ether. Like, what are the things that you would want to most improve upon?

• 1:36:27Kevin Rose?

  I think that for me currently, it, you know, I am decent at reading legal documents, but I'm by no means a pro. And so like, there's a lot of little weird things that attorneys like to throw on these little curveballs and weird things into financing documents that as a VC, you have to go through and pour through and like, look at, you know, certain terms, understanding how they might impact the company. And like even today, there was a term that I had never seen in a document. I thought it meant one thing and it actually meant something else. And our attorney like IMed me and she's like, "Do you actually realize that this means this and not this?" And I was like, "Oh shit, I didn't know that. Thank you." Like, that was awesome.

• 1:37:09Kevin Rose?

  Like, I had no idea it really would impact us if we ever decided to do X, Y, and Z. And so, um, you know, just, just like sitting down and, and saying like, "Can you explain these things?" And, and it just takes time, you know? And it's like, it's something that, that you can't be expected to know every little facet of every business, especially because there's so many diff- like, you don't go and get a degree in, you know, business and finance and marketing and like all these different areas. You get one degree, if that.

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, plus none of those teach you how to analyze venture capital agreements.

• 1:37:42Kevin Rose?

  Oh yeah, no doubt about that.

• 1:37:44Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there's, there is a very good book, uh, I believe it's called Venture Deals by Brad Feld and his partner, Jason, I believe it is.

• 1:37:55Tim Ferriss?

  What's happening?

• 1:37:56Kevin Rose?

  Sorry, I just drank that. That was water.

• 1:37:58Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's wine.

• 1:38:02Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very good at introducing people to some of the common terms of venture capital and just general startup finance agreements. Outside of that, what else? So we got that.

• 1:38:12Kevin Rose?

  Mentor wise?

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  Meditation. Mentor wise?

• 1:38:15Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, I mean, the meditation, the gardening, um,

• 1:38:20Kevin Rose?

  You know, the other thing I will say is it's really good to have an outlet to just vent. And that can be with your spouse, that can be with, you know, it's funny, it's like, it's trying to, you know, I mean, this is, we're getting really deep here. Do you want to keep going?

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 1:38:41Kevin Rose?

  I mean, it's, it's one of those things where I think that you're like this too, dude. Having known you long enough now that like you are a kind of a closed off person, you know, and so am I. And that like, you know, you hide some emotional stuff and you keep it like close to the chest.

• 1:38:56Tim Ferriss?

  People will fucking kill you if you don't.

• 1:38:58Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, but like also, you know, it's like.

• 1:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, just dealing with like value wagon shit, you'll get fucking slaughtered if you don't have some degree of protective.

• 1:39:06Kevin Rose?

  No, I know that. I know that. But I'm saying like, understanding the value in being able to freely vent to a significant other or to talk to someone or have like a good bro or even like seek counseling or whatever it may be like having an outlet to be able to go out there and um, get gut checks on different things, I think is a really healthy thing. And so like, you know, for me, like I've had some, some good friends uh, in, in the Bay area that like, you know, like you, for example, we've talked about a bunch of deep stuff before. I've, I've done that with Prager and some other friends and things like that. And I think that like, just having those, I think is a really healthy thing. And so like those act as mentors in a way, you know what I mean?

• 1:39:50Kevin Rose?

  Like I think that like your close friends like that can act as, as mentors.

• 1:39:54Tim Ferriss?

  So here's a question for you. So I've, I've recently, and this is nothing I've talked about before, but went to a therapist for the first time. Maybe two or three months ago, and I found it extremely helpful to speak with someone who is completely non biased. And I viewed it as a bit of a cop out in the beginning because I felt like it was a, it was a, an admission of weakness to go to a therapist.

• 1:40:20Kevin Rose?

  It absolutely is.

• 1:40:24Tim Ferriss?

  For the same reason that I haven't used antidepressant, no, like I've never used antidepressants, even though I've I've dealt with that shit in my own life. Like I've never taken Prozac or any like SSRIs or anything like that, because I feel like it's it's an admission of weakness and that I should be able to deal with it in other ways. So I'd never gone to a therapist per se, and many people might call it a business coach or whatever, just to hide the fact, but went to this therapist, found it very helpful and have not gone to a second session, even though I found the first session extremely helpful. Was why was it? Was it you just felt like afterwards, you're like, oh, God, I can't, because there's a stigma attached to that. No, there was, there was no overthinking it. I was just like, I'm fucking busy. Like, no, I'm not gonna do it. So.

• 1:41:10Tim Ferriss?

  Why not, though? There's no reason not to. It's funny, you should mention that, like I've. You know, it's like I did two hours of physical therapy today because I fucked up my right shoulder doing crazy fucking shit. I think we need to treat our brains like that, though. Like, you need to treat it like I'm another muscle that you would work out and you need to figure out, like, you know, that that's actually a good, positive thing. What? I wish there was a more casual therapist. Something that didn't involve. Something that didn't involve, like, goes sitting in a chair. Right. You know what I mean? Like, there's could be like a, like a friend. Gutcheck.com. Like, something where you're just like, oh, let's meet for a coffee. And it's like, somebody that's just like a friend that, but you'd pay them.

• 1:41:49Tim Ferriss?

  Paidfriend.co.uk. You know what I mean? There's gotta be a way to, like, lighten it up a little bit, so it's not like, let me in the chair, let me take out my new pad. There's so much, I think people have so much baggage associated with the title of therapist. Yeah. That it never happens. Oh, no doubt, man. It was just useful, and it may have been, quite frankly, just the fact that I was able to hear myself talk for an hour. Yeah. And think through shit without a friend who was subjectively trying to help me.

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see. So, what advice would you give to your, like, 20 or 25 year old self?

• 1:42:29Tim Ferriss?

  Given everything that you've gone through and everything you've learned? Uh, 20 to 25 year old self, I would say. What's it, 25?

• 1:42:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'd say drink a little bit less.

• 1:42:44Kevin Rose?

  That's a good question, actually. I haven't thought about, I mean, I think a lot of the things that we talked about today about like surrounding yourself with mentors and understanding to confront the things that you don't understand rather than hide from them. I think that, um, I would say that if it's from a straight business point of view, I would say that do, you can do more with less. I think that like, there's this temptation when you start seeing some success to like, throw bodies and servers and more people at the problem, when in reality, it's like just making sure that the, you have the right people in the right roles. I think they have this rule at Google, it's called,

• 1:43:29Kevin Rose?

  uh, I'm gonna screw this up, but you get the gist, that it's like the 10x rule. And like, the right person in the right role can do the work of 10 people in the wrong role. And so like, they, they've got this thing where, you know, if you can, if they can fit that, find that person for that right role, you'll get 10x the performance. And I totally believe that's true. I think that's, um, uh, so that, that, you know, there's a reason why Instagram grew to, you know, I don't know when they sold, it was 50 plus million people or something like that, using their product with 10 people, you know?

• 1:44:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Kevin's a smart boy.

• 1:44:05Kevin Rose?

  It's, um, what's that? Yeah, Kevin's a smart dude. But, you know, he was good like that.

• 1:44:11Tim Ferriss?

  The whole team did really well.

• 1:44:13Kevin Rose?

  Obviously. What, uh, so, all right. Last question, because I want to be sensitive to, obviously, everyone's time, you guys listening. The fine Kevin Rose, the third Esquire, involved with this interview. Uh, last question. I am the third, actually.

• 1:44:31Tim Ferriss?

  Are you really?

• 1:44:32Kevin Rose?

  Yeah, but not Kevin, Robert Rose.

• 1:44:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, nice. Well, I got that right.

• 1:44:38Tim Ferriss?

  Who do you think has to interview on this podcast in the future? Any nominations? I've had a lot of people say Dana White of the UFC.

• 1:44:46Kevin Rose?

  Interesting.

• 1:44:47Tim Ferriss?

  President of the UFC, which I'd totally be down for, obviously. Big UFC fan.

• 1:44:53Kevin Rose?

  I think that like the thing that that that would be fun is if you just, I mean, you got to get outside of tech. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of tech people, but in the in the Bay Area. But I think that the thing that I would love to hear about is if you as you, because you travel the world so much, you're like always all over the place in weird, crazy countries.

• 1:45:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Kevin Rose?

  You need to bring some of that culture to the show. And I think like even if you could like, if you did something where you spliced together a bunch of different interviews to fill out like a half hour, forty minutes, like if you were like, if you were in freaking the Philippines and you are in Thailand and you met some phenomenal freaking like chef making amazing noodles and you're like, did a five minute like on the street interview about like what drives them, what they use in their ingredients, like what they love about their life. Like, I think like, just like you, you see so much interesting stuff like that that I would love to get a little taste of that.

• 1:45:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47Kevin Rose?

  That'd be cool, you know? It's like, I know that you're you're always about like, the really minimalist, like crazy, like getting the actual feel of the culture. You're like, you're not the the average, like, I'm just going to go to like a third world country and stay in the Four Seasons.

• 1:46:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:46:03Kevin Rose?

  You know, so I think that like, bringing that flavor to the show and like, like bringing some of those personalities that are outside of of what we get here in the States, I think would be would be pretty awesome.

• 1:46:14Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. I am up for all of it. Well, guys, I want to be respectful to Kevin's time and Graham's time and your time, so I'm going to bring this to a close.

• 1:46:26Kevin Rose?

  So this three hour podcast.

• 1:46:28Tim Ferriss?

  Three hour podcast to a close.

• 1:46:29Kevin Rose?

  How long was it?

• 1:46:30Tim Ferriss?

  Uh.

• 1:46:31Kevin Rose?

  Hour forty five.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  Hour forty five, that's good.

• 1:46:33Kevin Rose?

  That's a little long.

• 1:46:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's like half the length of Joe Rogan's podcast.

• 1:46:37Kevin Rose?

  I think we lost pretty much everyone. At Reply Me, at Kevin Rose on Twitter with Tim Tim Good Good as the hashtag, if you even listen to it this far.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  I bet you this will be like four people.

• 1:46:50Tim Ferriss?

  Two or three people. And let me know what you think. I would love to hear your suggestions, what you liked, what you didn't like, what you'd like to hear more of, less of. Send me a note @tferriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. That's two S's, two R's for double religious, double sexy, just kidding. And let me know what you think. Thanks for listening so far and hope to do more of these, but only if you guys like it. So let me know what you think. And to that point, Kevin, cheers.

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  Cheers. Thanks for having me. Namaste.

• 1:47:25Tim Ferriss?

  Namaste. Until next time. Goodnight, guys.

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  If you want more of the Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G dot com.

• 1:47:43Speaker 04

  Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com/tferriss.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  Or on Facebook at facebook.com/timferriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.