Please enjoy this transcript of another rousing edition of The Random Show with my good friend Kevin Rose. We reunite over tequila to talk Zen retreats, learning to rock climb at (almost) 50, mortality and grief, why you should stop saying “one day,” AI predictions , and much more.
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The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for Someday
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors.
Tim Ferriss: KevKev.
Kevin Rose: TimTim. Good to see you, man.
Tim Ferriss: Good to see you. And let’s figure out which one. There we go. Cheers.
Kevin Rose: Cheers.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I know the cool kids are down on alcohol, but every once in a while, I think there’s a place for it.
Kevin Rose: There’s a time and place. And this is the time.
Tim Ferriss: I think this is the time and the place and I think paying a tax for it the next day is a feature and not a bug.
Kevin Rose: Are you getting taxed harder on alcohol?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, of course. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Is it getting worse?
Tim Ferriss: Every old bastard.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know.
Tim Ferriss: That’s gender neutral, gets taxed as you can process ethanol less and less well over time.
But I’m cool with it. I don’t have that much, but today has been hectic.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I feel like you had a hard day today.
Tim Ferriss: Take a little edge off and people may not like the sound of that. It’s a little antiquated maybe for all the cool ketamine kids. No offense.
Kevin Rose: Don’t put that shit on me. I try it one time and I get freaking ambassador.
Tim Ferriss: You fuck a goat once and then they call me the goat fucker. You can’t get around it.
Kevin Rose: I still stand by that experience. When you’re doing it in a supervised setting by a medical professional—
Tim Ferriss: Oh, here we go.
Kevin Rose: No, I’ve been telling you, you’ve done it.
Tim Ferriss: Of course I have.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So there we go.
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, because I wanted to be able to speak from—
Kevin Rose: I saw you at a party one time and you were just like, “Woo.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s not true. That’s not true.
Kevin Rose: I’m just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: Still have all my nostrils intact. No ketamine cramps.
Kevin Rose: I don’t even know what that is. Is that a thing?
Tim Ferriss: That’s when you use too much.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Way, way, way, way too much.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I heard it’s bad on the bladder.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, your bladder can get a little grumpy or a lot grumpy as the case might be.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’m good.
Tim Ferriss: I’m good. Kevin, random show number 3,479.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. You know what’s crazy, dude? Is I looked up a random show the other day and you had a bit of hair way back in the day.
Tim Ferriss: Way back. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: We were babies.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Kevin Rose: So much shit has happened.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Kevin Rose: The only constant I think is, like, maybe like Toaster, who’s barely alive.
Tim Ferriss: Toaster right now, seriously. Toaster was a tiny, tiny little pup who was chewing through the XLR cables.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: On your couch in San Francisco way, way, way back in the day. Toaster.
Kevin Rose: Toaster’s 15. And I’ll tell a quick little story. A week ago I get this call and Darya calls me and she’s like, “You’ve got to get over to the house. Toaster is shaking violently.” And he’s 15. He’s running into walls and shit. He’s getting up there and his legs are collapsing so he can’t stand up and he couldn’t stand up and he’s shaking violently and I’m just flying over there.
I throw him in my car. He’s on my lap, driving to get to this emergency vet as fast as possible and he just sprays shit all over me. Literally, I heard it, I felt his stomach be like, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.
Tim Ferriss: Here we go.
Kevin Rose: And then like 10 seconds later, I’m not even talking like, “Oh, he had a little shit.” No, no, no, no. Shotgun against the car door, the whole thing. And it’s all down my pants.
Tim Ferriss: Poor Toasty.
Kevin Rose: I know, but you know what’s funny, dude? It’s like I rushed him in and, long story short, he’s okay now.
Tim Ferriss: What was it?
Kevin Rose: He had gone into the vet the day prior and he was so nervous that he stood for, he had to be there for like a multi-hour blood draw because he was having some other issues and he stood for like six hours straight.
Tim Ferriss: That’s too long for an old dog.
Kevin Rose: And dude, he can only stand for like 10 minutes, max. And so he had just overtaxed himself and got like, there’s a syndrome that they can get when they’re, like, super stressed out and all that.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Little Molly’s at it or big Molly. She’s on the floor right here. She’s sleeping. Molly’s 12. Hard to believe.
Kevin Rose: That’s crazy. But long story short, he’s okay. But I thought to myself, it’s so weird because when I walked in there and there was shit and literally I’m in tears because I think I’m about to have to put down my dog.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course.
Kevin Rose: And I just thought it’s okay. I’ll do this any day for this dude. When you care about your animals that much, none of that matters. You would do anything for them. You know?
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Kevin Rose: And it’s just, just that love. It’s so crazy how much you love these little beasts. It’s insane too. It’s like a kid. It’s like a kid.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s wild to think about if you really sit down and think about it. Some of these super common daily experiences like communing with a dog or pointing and having a dog recognize that you’re pointing, for instance, that’s really rare in the animal kingdom, that recognition of pointing, as just one example. But how unusual it is that we have this—and yes, we have cats. I grew up with four cats and two dogs. I get it.
But in particular, dogs as, like, companions, co-hunters, et cetera, the fact that we’ve co-evolved in a sense and sort of co-domesticated also. It’s not necessarily one way, read The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan for more on that, it is incredible. The fact that we’re totally calm having this 60-plus-pound beast with giant fangs on the floor is nuts.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve seen those Instagram posts where it’s like where I was and where I am now today? And they show the wild wolf out in the countryside eating a rabbit and then they show a poodle in a tutu outfit and shit, all dyed up.
Tim Ferriss: The meme is, “I’m going to go grab some scraps from those weird monkeys. What’s the worst that could happen?” And then it’s like, “10,000 years later, you’re a Chihuahua with a bonnet on.”
What else is going on, Kevin? I’ve got a couple things on my list, but we’ve got—
Kevin Rose: There’s a lot to talk about.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot to talk about.
Kevin Rose: First I’ll say that lately, life has been lifing me. It’s been doing all the things. We lost a dear colleague, Om Malik.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, very sad.
Kevin Rose: Very notorious, just amazing early tech, just creative author.
Tim Ferriss: Brilliant writer. Brilliant thinker. Very sweet guy. The nicest.
Kevin Rose: The nicest.
Tim Ferriss: And now we lost him within the last week or so.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. He passed away so that was tough. That was really tough. I found out when I was at a retreat. I went to a five-day silent meditation retreat, which is great, but bummer to hear that. But this is the thing that I realized the other day I was thinking about Toaster and Om and other stuff I have going on and my mom getting older and falling and all these things. And in some sense, it’s unavoidable, number one. And number two, I kind of wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s what makes life interesting. When Om passed—
Tim Ferriss: You mean death?
Kevin Rose: Well, just everything, the chaos of it all. If you can just take a step back and be like, “Well, or I could just be sitting there living a really boring life and nothing could be happening.”
When Om passed, what I felt was a severe sense of loss and sorrow and sadness. But I realized that that gap is just love, at the end of the day, because I wouldn’t have it unless I loved this man so much. I cared for this person so much. How lucky am I to have crossed paths with this person, to get to know them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And you were tied in through True Ventures obviously and prior to that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But like anyone in general that you lose that you love. When I lost my dad, that is just a gaping hole of love manifested through sorrow and sadness. And once you realize that, it’s like, wow, I had this great father that did all these amazing things with me. And that you can kind of convert that or just be okay with it. Not that you need to change that feeling.
Tim Ferriss: Recognize that it’s a consequence of the love that you have.
Kevin Rose: That’s a consequence of the love, the deep love.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I heard about his passing and I want to give credit where credit is due for a few things. Matt Mullenweg, a mutual friend. He was incredibly close to Om and I’m really grateful to Matt for a few things. One, I mean many things, I could give a long list, but there are a few.
One is he organized a trip to Antarctica. I’ve never been to Antarctica or hadn’t. And on that trip were just a handful of people, including Om. So I got to spend quality time. I mean, trust me, when you’re in Antarctica, you are indoors most of the time. What that means is you’re either trying to sleep in your tent, but it’s going to be during the summer so it’s like a spotlight in your face 24 hours a day. Or you’re in one of these other structures where you’re probably like having wine and junk food, let’s be honest.
And there’s a lot of talking. So we got to hang out and Om was also an avid photographer. And so we got to go to this nearby emperor penguin colony, which was a once in a lifetime experience and you just sit and talk. And if there were going to be any small talk, which there wasn’t going to be with Om or me really for that matter, it all falls away after the first half a day. And then everybody’s kind of psychologically naked.
So I really want to thank Matt for that opportunity to bond with him. I’d spent a lot of time with him, but it was always in these little bits and pieces, not for several days straight where you’re basically like locked in together.
And separately, Matt introduced me to this short blog post by someone who typically writes very long blog posts, Tim Urban, called “The Tail End.” I don’t know if I ever sent this to you.
Kevin Rose: People should know it by Wait But Why.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Wait But Why.
Kevin Rose: Fantastic blog.
Tim Ferriss: And “The Tail End” makes the point among many others that by the time you, I think it’s graduate from high school, let’s assume you’re headed off to college away from your parents. You’ve spent something like 90, 95 percent of the total hours you will ever spend with your parents by the time you graduate from high school. And when you start to visualize that, and Tim Urban’s really good at laying it out visually, it can provoke some really profound changes for me. I mean, just reading that short blog post sent to me by Matt ended up leading to taking my family on these family trips. As awkward and uncomfortable as that was at points, because my family doesn’t really emote much and so you stick us together in the way that I was together with Om and it can be super uncomfortable. But making the effort, at least feeling like, look, this runway is not infinite and it’s like, let me just make the effort. And I’m glad I did because we got to a point where it’s like with my dad’s mobility, he’s really compromised and needs a wheelchair now for a lot and—
Kevin Rose: I just saw him a few days ago and it was great to see him, dude. It was so great to see him. He’s so kind. He’s like, “Kevin,” so happy. And he had a little cane and it was just like so sweet to see him, man. I hadn’t seen him for years.
Tim Ferriss: Long time.
Kevin Rose: It had been like seven years or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, something like that. And I’m glad I took those trips because before you know it, you can’t do it anymore. And it makes me think of, you mentioned meditation, this really good short, I’ll call it a meditation for simplicity, but it’s like an audiobook chapter by Sam Harris called “The Last Time.” I think it’s called “The Last Time,” and he reflects on these various experiences that, at the time, you don’t recognize are the last time for something. So he went skiing, he went skiing, he went skiing, and there was a time when he stopped, but he didn’t realize that was going to be the last time.
Kevin Rose: You don’t know. Right.
Tim Ferriss: And you just fucking don’t know.
Kevin Rose: Do you ever try, I think about this dude and then I try and do it one more time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s how I always end up injured.
Kevin Rose: Dude, I went to the bouncy house with my kids and like I’m 49 and I was like, “I’m going to fucking do a flip right now.” And literally people were like, “Don’t do it. Don’t,” calling me off. And I did it and I stuck it, and it felt good.
Tim Ferriss: You’re good on a trampoline.
Kevin Rose: It might be my last time.
Tim Ferriss: It might be your last time. You are good on a trampoline. This is so weird, man. Dude, I kid you not. I had a dream last night of the two of us going to House of Air at Crissy Field in San Francisco and you were doing front flips off your knees.
Kevin Rose: I can do that.
Tim Ferriss: You dropped your hat and then you kicked the trampoline to bounce it back up to your head. And I was like, “What?”
Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait, wait. So you know I sent you that video of me dropping my hat and kicking it back on my head.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen you do it live, too.
Kevin Rose: So it just made its way into the dream.
Tim Ferriss: And I was just like, “What?” I literally had that in my dreams last night. That’s wild.
Kevin Rose: And I have the assless chaps on like I normally do in your —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you had the assless chaps on, which, depending on your angle, can be kind of awkward.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Because you like doing the straddle flip. You like doing the straddle flip. So it’s a little awkward, but —
Kevin Rose: I’ve heard about these dreams before. I know how they go.
Tim Ferriss: I always text them to Kevin. I’m like, “I was thinking of you last night.”
Kevin Rose: The chaps were back.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you got, man? My hands are too sweaty, because I’m thinking about death.
Kevin Rose: Chaps.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and the chaps. Wow, that was perfect audio.
Kevin Rose: Well, the retreat was fantastic. I spent five days going really deep on my koan doing a lot of work on it.
Tim Ferriss: Mu.
Kevin Rose: Mu. Which you can listen to Henry Shukman on your podcast if people are interested about what Zen is all about, like real true traditional Zen with koans. And you’ve probably heard the sound of one hand clapping that actually is one of 500-plus koans.
Yeah, it was fantastic. I had a couple little micro insights, which was good and I was kind of rushed through to the Zen master to explain them and try and get some clarity on them, which is great.
Tim Ferriss: How do you know that you’re having a micro insight? So it’s not like my balls are chafing in this position, it’s something else.
Kevin Rose: Yes, it’s not that, but close. No, I essentially was sitting and Henry, one of the Zen masters that you’ve had on the show, a dear friend of ours, was there and then his roshi from Japan was there. So it was very special. He only comes every two years.
Tim Ferriss: What’s his name? Yamada Roshi?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yamada Ryoun Roshi. Yeah. So basically I kind of pulled Henry aside, you’re not supposed to, he’s not talking, but he’s like, “How’s it going like this and that?” And I was like, “Well, I had this thing happen, what do you think about this?” And he’s like, “You’ve got to—”
Tim Ferriss: “Come with me right now.”
Kevin Rose: Well, not come with me, but he got me right in front because there’s a line to see the roshi to go have your private interview where you go and check your practice with them. So it’s behind closed doors, you go in, you sit down with the roshi, you typically get between two and 10 minutes to sit down and talk about your progress on your practice and you do that like once every day and a half when you’re out there.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: And this was enough to where Henry was like, “You should go talk to him right away.”
Tim Ferriss: Skip the line. TSA pre-check.
Kevin Rose: Go to the pre-check. And it was beautiful and it was a micro little thing. I can share it if you’re curious.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course I’m curious.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So there was this sense, I’m sitting there—
Tim Ferriss: I get bored of hearing myself talking. That’s why I’m here, to talk to you.
Kevin Rose: I’m sitting here staring against the wall because in Zen you stare against the wall with your eyes open and you’re staring about three quarters down and kind of just glancing on. I’m working on my koan and for people that don’t know how you do that is essentially on the out breath, you just like slowly internally say your koan. It’s almost like a mantra in some sense but a little bit more involved.
Tim Ferriss: Confounding.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s like a question you’re kind of asking yourself slowly that doesn’t make sense and eventually it pops. But what happened is I had about two seconds of this sense that there was, and this is going to be hard to explain because it’s not from the world of thought, which is already hard to explain.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a sneeze in the perineum.
Kevin Rose: No. No.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Close.
Kevin Rose: I had a sense of nothing lacking.
Tim Ferriss: That sounds nice.
Kevin Rose: Nothing needed to be added and nothing even possibly could be added and nothing possibly could be taken away because everything at that moment was full in the way that it should be. But what was interesting about it is it wasn’t an emotion. It was just like a steady state of being. So it wasn’t like, “Oh, I feel free right now.” No, none of that. It was just like, “Oh, everything is here, perfectly present.” And it was just wild.
Tim Ferriss: Wild in what sense? In the felt sense of that experience or realization?
Kevin Rose: Wild in the sense that —
Tim Ferriss: Wild in the, I just drank too much tequila after not having much tequila sense?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I haven’t had any tequila, but —in the sense that we oftentimes so often go outside or inside, into our brain to try and find something, figure something out, an emotional state that’s either bothering you or feels good or feels bad or something else. And then just to know that everything and I don’t mean objects, everything was one unit of nothing lacking and it was just a micro sense of kind of like, “Oh, there’s actually nothing to do because everything’s already here.”
And they talk about this in Zen a bit where you’re actually not, you already have everything that you need. So it’s just they call it the removal of the veil. It’s an expansive awareness that you get from a deep continued practice over years and decades, but it was already there all along.
Tim Ferriss: Can I give a shameless plug?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s hear it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you and I are both involved with The Way, which is this guided single path meditation app, which is guided by Henry Shukman, who you mentioned. And it’s the progressive development of skills on a single path, which I really like as opposed to just what is the meditation du jour with no coherence.
And a few of my favorite meditations, I have a lot of different sessions bookmarked and I’ve done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And by the way, for people who are like, “Oh, these guys are just shilling their bags.” I do think it can be a good business, but this is sort of an ideologically philosophical investment of time and money.
Kevin Rose: It’s the reason we invested in the dog aging study with rapamycin.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. University of Washington, it’s like, “This needs to exist.”
Kevin Rose: These exist.
Tim Ferriss: It’s good for the world. Let’s try it. So sure, we’ve got some chips on the table, but this is mostly because we believe in it. And a few of my favorites, if people ever try it, “[The] Whole Earth is Medicine” is one.
Kevin Rose: That’s a good one.
Tim Ferriss: Another one is “This Too is Me,” which makes me think about what you’re saying.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So “This Too is Me” is a meditation led by Henry, which this is going to sound maybe esoteric, but it’s not. When you recognize that all of the things you experience are mediated by your mind. And therefore when you hear something, when you feel something, when you’re interrupted by something, et cetera, et cetera, anything you can possibly imagine experiencing is also you, because ultimately it is entirely mediated by your mind. Let’s just use that instead of brain.
And it’s incredibly, at least for me, and I’m not comparing it to your experience because I think it’s probably characteristically different, is incredibly relaxing to let go even just for a moment because my brain is like the ultimate dog chasing a squirrel kind of brain. I’m always looking for something to fix, something to improve, what I need to do, what is happening next week and meditation is—
Kevin Rose: You are the squirrel.
Tim Ferriss: I am the squirrel. You’re right. It can be excruciatingly painful. Meditation can be super hard.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. 100 percent. That’s a very common thing.
Tim Ferriss: Super, super hard.
Kevin Rose: People are like, “I can’t do this.”
Tim Ferriss: But when Henry gives you permission to include all of that as you, I know this might sound very bizarre, it allows you to kind of drop this burden that you didn’t realize you were carrying. So in any case, you don’t have to do a week-long meditation retreat. If you’re just doing 10 minutes twice a day and I do think there’s some alchemy to twice a day. I don’t know why exactly. I have some theories around vagus nerve stimulation and stuff, but you get a lot out of it. In any case, I didn’t mean to interrupt your story.
Kevin Rose: No, I think there’s two things that I love that Henry says quite often when he starts some of these meditations, which is, “Take everything that you came in the door with, all of the thoughts, worries, emotions, things, and leave it at the door just for now. You can come back to it in 20 minutes, but just for now.”
The permission to set those things down for yourself just for now is such a beautiful thing. And then like the little instructions where he’s like, “Drop your jaw an eighth of an inch.”
And I’m like, “Whoa, I didn’t even realize I was clenching my jaw.”
Tim Ferriss: Can I tell you something crazy about that?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So I got fitted for a mandibular device, which is a fancy way of saying a double decker mouthpiece that is an easier approach to resolving sleep apnea or snoring. So I don’t snore a ton, but every once in a while I do, it drives my lady insane, understandably. And if you take the jaw and drop it down an eighth of an inch and forward an eighth of an inch, you open your airway.
And I was thinking about that because Henry will often say, as you’re alluding to, drop your jaw and leave it forward as if it’s resting on a small pillow ever so slightly and it increases your airflow. These ancients hit on some stuff by trial and error that really just works. It’s like, yeah, if you want to have better respiration while you’re meditating and better alignment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just do what Henry’s describing.
And I will say his dulcet British tones. If you just want a relaxing voice that will help you with chilling the fuck out when your monkey mind is ricocheting inside your skull, try Henry out. You can find free stuff everywhere. I’ve had him on the podcast a bunch as well as Meditation Mondays for a while, which were these very short episodes of guided meditations. In any case.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s great.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been so—what’s the right word? I mean, overjoyed sounds too dramatic, but I’ll just say happy for you to watch your path with meditation because it seems like you get so much nourishment and grounding from it and no offense—
Kevin Rose: Here it comes.
Tim Ferriss: —you’re kind of a spaz. You’re kind of spaz. You get excited about shit and then you drop stuff that is very well exemplified and you’re like, “Tim, you got to buy this stock,” and then you never tell me when you sell. And I’m like, “Oh, fuck, I’m fucked.”
Kevin Rose: Oh, you want to talk about—
Tim Ferriss: Hold on, hold on. No, no, no.
Kevin Rose: Okay, because you gave me a real winner.
Tim Ferriss: You lost [REDACTED]. You lost [REDACTED].
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You should have held. It’s fine. But anyway, the—
Kevin Rose: Literally, Tim gives me this tip and I’m like, “All right, I’m in.” And then a day and a half later, I’m down like [REDACTED].
Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s why you’ve got to wait. But the point of the story is I thought, I was at a meditation thing, just like every nine months you’re like, “I’m moving to Android.” And then I’m like, “Let me start the timer for two weeks before you come back to iPhone.”
Kevin Rose: Week and a half maybe, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m like, “Yeah, this meditation thing. Yeah, sure. We’ll see. I give it two weeks.” And you’ve stuck with it.
Kevin Rose: Coming up on five years now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s really made me happy as your friend to see something that gives you that consistency. That’s it. There’s nothing more to add. I’ve been really—what’s the right word? I’m not sure of the right way to put it. I’ve just been very reassured by you having that constant in your life.
Kevin Rose: One of the things I’m curious about, speaking of constants and kind of like how things changed since we’ve known each other and you had hair and all that other shit. My hair wasn’t great.
Tim Ferriss: Still got plenty of hair, just not on my head.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Those braids down there. The question I’m curious about is I’ve been thinking a lot lately as I kind of march towards 50, what are the things that I’ve always said that I want to do that I’m just like, I’ve got a thousand book marks on Instagram, like all these Japanese woodworking things, and like—
Tim Ferriss: It’s always woodworking. It’s always woodworking.
Kevin Rose: This is how bad my — Speaking of the monkey mind and bouncing around, I literally have, for some reason, the algorithm has now given me those motherfucking boats inside of bottles, like people making the boats in the bottles. I’m like, “Am I going to be a boat in the bottle guy?” I don’t know, maybe.
I realize now, I think these next couple decades, I want to stop bullshitting myself and stop saying like, “Hey, one day. One day I’ll get into Japanese woodworking. One day I’ll do this.” And really start doing some things.
And you’ve been really good because you archery, hunting, like the stuff that you’ve gotten into, you’ve gone deep on in the last few years.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super deep.
Kevin Rose: Are there any things that are on your kind of bucket list of things where you say, “One day.” You’re busy with your podcast and all the other shit you got going on?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, podcast, shoot me in the head. It’s fine and it’s fun most of the time, but it’s so crowded and it’s like, man, if 20 other people are trying to do the same job, I don’t want to do this job.
Kevin Rose: It is wild how many new podcasters there are out there. And they’re also optimizing every little freaking thing.
Tim Ferriss: All the thumbnails.
Kevin Rose: All the thumbnails.
Tim Ferriss: What you need to know before your crypto crashes next week, now. And I’m like, “Oh, God,” I just don’t want to play that game. And for me, I would say the most top of mind is rock climbing, actually.
Kevin Rose: Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss: I just did some outdoor rock climbing a couple of days ago and I love rock climbing. I was always, for at least the last 15 years, limited by my right elbow, which I had surgically repaired so it’s ready to go and I want to do some multi-pitch stuff in Yosemite.
Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s go.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So I don’t know if I want to say this.
Tim Ferriss: All right, that’s a good start.
Kevin Rose: So you know who’s a big rock climber is [REDACTED].
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s very well-built for it.
Kevin Rose: He goes out to Yosemite, I’m sure. We should go.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Because he’s invited me to go up there and do some climbing.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he’s good. He looks like someone who would be good.
Kevin Rose: Apparently he’s amazing. And I’m like, “Dude, I can’t go do multi-pitch with you at Yosemite.” And he’s like, “Ah, just come out, we’ll have fun, blah, blah, blah.”
Tim Ferriss: No, that’s how you end up fucked.
Kevin Rose: Exactly, exactly. I did multi-pitch when I was like 24 and it was like three pitches. I didn’t do Yosemite.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no, that’s a commitment. So the idea of having something like that, to strive for. Having some type of physical goal like that for me is very helpful because just not dying, like training to not die sooner than is necessary is not sufficient for me. I’m just like, that’s such a depressing, uninvigorating goal. I’d much rather have something that has a deadline. It’s like, all right, you need to be able to do x. In the case of the archery, it’s like Lancaster Classic, here’s the date. You need to do this type of training and this type of volume with this type of deliberate practice in order to be prepared to train and then compete. Okay.
Similarly, for something like a multi-pitch, it’s like, okay, you can break that down. And I just enjoy doing that stuff.
Kevin Rose: Dude, so let me ask you a question. The number two, I don’t know if you saw this on my story list. The number two story I had was this guy Michael Eckert. Do you know who he is?
Tim Ferriss: Tell me. No, no idea.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Okay. So Huberman and Rogan and all these guys, they’ve talked about him publicly, about this guy. He has won multiple pull-up world championships. And dude, when you watch him do a pull-up, he’s kind of one of those guys that can bring the bar all the way down and does the [crosstalk] style.
Tim Ferriss: The typewriter and all that stuff.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. You know where you can walk with your feet and shit.
Tim Ferriss: All the calisthenic stuff. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But he has a series of videos that teach you how to do finger strength training. And I bought his course and I’m doing this right now. But you got me into that wooden device.
Tim Ferriss: The Nug.
Kevin Rose: The Nug. So dude, you got to watch his videos. They’re amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
Kevin Rose: Seriously, Joe’s really into them. This guy, his name is Michael Eckert. You can find him on Instagram, and it’s all about grip strength, pull-ups. And he’s not big, but he’s shredded. And when I think about the next 10 years, I don’t need to be big, big.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s probably not what you want.
Kevin Rose: It’s probably not.
Tim Ferriss: Especially for rock climbing.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you need to be lean and strong. And that’s what I love about this. I’m doing these every single day. Well, I’m two days in. I’m getting into it. Tell us about The Nug, because that was something that you turned me onto.
Tim Ferriss: Well, The Nug, I mean, I have it in my suitcase at the hotel here. It’s just a simple little wooden device. It looks like a very large bar of soap with these different indentations carved into the sides.
Kevin Rose: Like little finger indentations.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So you can use a carabiner to connect it to, say, a cable machine of some type in any gym. Look, you could use a loading pin and all this, that, and the other thing on a daisy chain, but let’s put that aside. At a gym, you could use a cable and connect it through the loop with a carabiner, and work on your hand strength.
Kevin Rose: And you brought this to Santa Fe when we were out there doing the meditation thing.
Tim Ferriss: I did. Yeah. I mean, it’s literally—
Kevin Rose: It travels probably so easy.
Tim Ferriss: Something small enough to slip into my sweatshirt pocket. So it’s easy to travel with. I always travel with that and a band for multiple purposes, for something called DNS kind of core exercises.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I know DNS.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I use a band for that, and it’s incredibly easy to travel with. And then a handful of other things. There’s something called an Alpha Ball, which I use for different types of kind of mobility. It’s the size of a very large soft softball. And all this stuff fits into the corner of a suitcase. And then I’ll do also something that maybe we haven’t talked about, called Abrahangs, which so Abrahamsson, Emil Abrahamsson, very well known rock climber on YouTube and Abrahangs—
Kevin Rose: I’m writing this down right now. Abrahangs.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Abrahangs are pretty simple. I mean, it’s partial body weight hangs in different positions for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, for 10 minutes. And you do that twice a day, and it’s very, very moderate in intensity.
Kevin Rose: With like a wooden kind of rock climbing kind of like type thing?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you could use a hangboard.
Kevin Rose: Hangboard, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, you could also use a pull up bar depending on how you position your hands. And that’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, was that kind of stuff, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off. And the endurance and strength gains that you get in your hands are just insane. I should say your lower arms, and it really helps. So I’ve been doing indoor climbing, but ultimately I’m like, you know what? As a stretch goal, multi-pitch outdoor Yosemite, that just—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I am deadly terrified of heights, deadly. Just talking. If you just look at my hands, I’m sweaty just talking about heights.
Kevin Rose: When I watch Free Solo, my hands are sweating the entire time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: For people who haven’t seen the documentary, even if you’re not into rock climbing, that is amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, watch Free Solo. It’ll freak you out. So that’s one that I’m thinking about going deep on. I’d say that’s very high up on the list, because—
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome dude. Let’s do that together. I’m totally down. I’m into it.
Tim Ferriss: I am totally into it. I mean, the rock climbing when approached in a reasonable way, like a systematic, reasonable way, not with crazy dyno movements on bouldering, necessarily. I mean, look, younger bodies can handle it, certain bodies can handle it. My body, not so much. I do not want to fall repeatedly from 10, 15 feet up. I’m just not into it. So in the case of doing it reasonably though, for instance, I spent a bunch of time, I’ve spent a lot of time in Utah, and climbing in some of the Salt Lake City indoor gyms, you have incredible athletes. And I’ll make that a little finer tuned. When I would go to the gym, it was generally like 11:00 a.m.? Who the hell goes to the rock climbing gym at 11:00 a.m. on a weekday? These are retirees and moms. So you would see, for instance, these like 60, 70, 75, almost 80-year-olds who were doing like 5.11 plus.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit. This is when you were single, so that was like, prime hunting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Cougarville. And you would just see these people in their 60s and 70s doing things that I could not even imagine doing, with complete inversion on overhangs.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this.
Tim Ferriss: 60, 70 feet up. You had the national speed climbing team, you had Olympians. But more than like the young guns, the 15 year olds who are doing all this crazy stuff because they’re impervious, it was the people in their 60s and 70s who were climbing every day that inspired me to want to take this more seriously. So I was like, “Okay, I want to play the long game here. What can I do that’s fun?” It’s a puzzle. There’s a lot of Tetris.
Kevin Rose: They’d literally call bouldering, they call them problems.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, problems. Yeah, exactly. And so there’s a lot of brain power involved, and also it’s just to give an idea of the technicality, I mean, there are, for example, women who cannot do five pull-ups, who can climb 5.13, 5.14. That’s very, very, very, very, very hard just for people who have no reference point, like world-class, like 5.14, 5.15, insane, insane. That’s when you’re in the magazines.
Kevin Rose: Oh, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s because of the technical depthness. Yeah, there’s like ape index and other physiological factors that play into it, but that is a very long answer to your question of what I’m thinking about now, which is rock climbing.
Tim Ferriss: The archery was great and the competition was fantastic. I love competing. However, archery is, by definition, incredibly solitary. You’re just by yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again thousands of times, and I’ve had enough of that in my life. I’ve hit my quota. I want to hang out with other people. I want to have—
Kevin Rose: Climbing is super social, because you’ll sit there and if neither of you can do it, you’ll be like, “What if you put your foot in like that, and kind of lunged up that way and stretched?” You know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then you can ask other people for tips, like beta. Like, “Hey, can you give me some beta on this?” It’s fun. It’s really fun. I just love it. I wanted to mention something, if people haven’t read it, The Blade Itself, which is a series, it’s not very long. I think it’s two or three volumes by Joe Abercrombie. It’s fantasy novels. They’re really good. The audiobooks are incredible. And the reason I thought of this, The Blade Itself, is because of our conversation around Om and Toaster, and a friend of mine just died in a plane crash—
Kevin Rose: Jesus.
Tim Ferriss: A couple weeks ago, not even two weeks, less than two weeks ago.
Kevin Rose: The NetJets one that went—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: You knew him?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Josh.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God, that was at latitude too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. I know. I know. So you just don’t know when your time is up. And in The Blade Itself, I mean there are a lot of various like—
Kevin Rose: Sorry, that sucks.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. And we weren’t super close friends, but certainly friendly acquaintances. It wouldn’t be strange to text and you just don’t know when your time is up and The Blade Itself explores this in a million different dimensions. It’s really, really outstanding. I say that as someone who’s read a lot of fantasy and it just talks about the randomness of life or death in war. It’s like you happen to squat down, take a, and the guy next to you gets an arrow through the head.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, totally.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just dumb luck, which is a way to, I suppose, reiterate the gratitude piece that you were mentioning earlier. I mean, that’s going to be a tough act to follow, but where do you want to go from that?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean a few things. Let’s change it up to, well, let’s just go straight into working out. Have you tried this?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have actually. It’s great.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I really like it. So for people that are on audio, I just got turned onto this new protein called Pioneer Pastures and it’s 30 grams in this little tiny shake. It’s A2. So it has lactose removed and it’s also from that special genetic cow. Do you know more about the A2? Can you speak to it?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard about the A2. I don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s like the Holstein and some other cow and da, da, da, da, da. Apparently, more people tolerate A2 better than not.
Kevin Rose: I don’t get any stomach issues or anything with this type of whey protein. Anyway, I’m not an investor or any shit like that. You can get it at Target or whatever. It’s tasty as hell and it’s 30 grams and I don’t know. If you’re trying to put a little muscle mass on—
Tim Ferriss: I love that this is next to the LALO tequila.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you could mix them if you want.
Tim Ferriss: Everything a growing boy needs.
Kevin Rose: Anyway, I just wanted to know if you had tried it because we always, this is The Random Show, we do random shit.
Tim Ferriss: I tried it. Yeah, I tried it.
Kevin Rose: You like it?
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah. There’s a gym, I can’t remember exactly. I think it was Brooklyn Barbell Club where they sold this and I tried it then and I did. Yeah, tolerated it super well. Didn’t get the grumpy guts as one might when they—
Kevin Rose: What’s your favorite protein, out of curiosity?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, my protein, I mean, this is a softball pitch, but funny you should ask, Kevin. And look, I’m involved with this one, but you know what? I always disclose, have you noticed how few fucking people disclose what they’re involved with? They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of this great thing. Oh, my God.” And they never disclose they’re involved. The fact that I’m involved—
Kevin Rose: You can literally go to jail for that shit.
Tim Ferriss: No, I know. But the FTC doesn’t enforce that stuff. Anyway, I mean, right now I’m traveling with Maui Nui as usual. This one though is kind of interesting. I probably get 40 percent of my protein from Maui Nui venison. This is wild harvested axis deer from Hawaii. There’s a long story there, but incredibly nutrient dense.
Kevin Rose: I love this shit and this is not an ad, but I do have a hard question for you, like a real hard question. This is how you know that it’s not an ad, because you have no idea what I’m about to say.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s hear it.
Kevin Rose: Processed meat nitrates linked to a lot of cancer and bad shit. What are your thoughts on that?
Tim Ferriss: This is very, very, very minimally processed. So you can get summer sausage or the sticks. This is free of most of that bullshit.
Kevin Rose: What do you think that is? Because it is real. People that eat more like, nitrate processed, ultra processed meats—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If it’s ultra processed and the shelf life is like three years, I would raise an eyebrow and probably hit pause. So the fact of the matter is most of this stuff that is minimally processed almost definitionally is not going to last very long on the shelf.
Kevin Rose: What do they mean by minimally processed when you see a meat stick? What do you think about that versus— Is it the amount of salt content that creates the nitrates? What—
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s actually, nitrates are totally separate categories. So you’re looking to— I mean, I think an easy heuristic for this is just shelf life. How long will this last?
Kevin Rose: How long are those good for?
Tim Ferriss: Your eyes are going to be better than mine. If you can read this size two font on this, then you can tell me.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let me look at that.
Tim Ferriss: Give it a go. And I’ll buy you some time. In the meantime—
Kevin Rose: 27 years. No, I’m just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: 25 years.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t say on here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’ll stay somewhere on the box. There we go.
Kevin Rose: Oh, ’27.
Tim Ferriss: Best by. Yeah, ’27. So it’s like less than one year, I think, actually looking at it here.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so—
Kevin Rose: Less than one year. Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And what makes this interesting is that this I give also, Molly looks really good for 12 years. I give her probably two or three of these a week. The way I think of this, this is Peppered 10, so there are a bunch of these different sticks. Every professional team you can imagine uses these things in their training, but this is made with wild harvested venison liver and heart. So it has some organ meat in it. You do not taste that. It just tastes like regular jerky stick, but I treat this like a multivitamin. So it’s like I take, let’s call it two or three of these a week and limit it to that and then the rest of the time I’m taking their other either peppered or regular sticks.
But this is when I’m on the go, I mean, literally this was in my bag when I got here. When I’m on the go, I’m traveling with this, probably some nuts of some type like pistachios or whatever. Walnuts are pretty good for a host of reasons and that’s about it. I mean, I might have a couple of servings of exogenous ketones, but I haven’t taken that stuff in a couple of months.
Kevin Rose: You told me, you freaked me out, it messes up your liver.
Tim Ferriss: This is a controversial topic. So yeah, there are certain exogenous ketones that contain something called 1,3-Butanediol. It’s very common and there’s a lot of debate around this. So the jury is still out, but some people believe that that can produce liver toxicity. So I consume anything with 1,3-Butanediol in moderation. Now, to play not devil’s advocate, but to do a counterpoint, a lot of the people who are putting forth that hypothesis or claiming that’s true are selling their own ketone salts. So they’re actually selling a competitive product.
Kevin Rose: I see. I see.
Tim Ferriss: So question mark, question mark. But I mean, look, you can look at the peer reviewed literature and decide for yourself. What I have decided personally is that you should use the exogenous ketones very intermittently. I have experimented a lot with every type of exogenous ketone you can imagine and—
Kevin Rose: I mean, you got me on that good. It’s expensive as hell, but like that stuff goes straight to your head. The one that you didn’t want to talk—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Delta G. We can talk about it.
Kevin Rose: You know what’s funny is when Tim, this is how you know it’s good, off camera, Tim’s like, “I don’t want to mention the brand because if I do, it’ll sell out and I won’t be able to get my own supply.” And that’s how I knew I was like, “That’s some good shit.” If Tim wants to guard his own supply of it, you know it’s good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And it is good, but it’s BHB. I won’t get too much into the technicality here, but it’s beta-hydroxybutyrate bonded to 1,3-Butanediol. So you’re still getting that 1,3-Butanediol, which means you should take it. In moderation. But in a pinch, when you want it for a podcast or something like that, man, it really works.
Kevin Rose: It does work.
Tim Ferriss: It really works. And I mean, I’ve given it to relatives with dementia and within 20 minutes, their sentences have like 5Xed in length and they’re more acute verbally. It’s wild.
Kevin Rose: How do you give it? I wish they had it in pill form because in some sense it’s really hard to give that to someone that has dementia because it tastes like gasoline.
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t taste great. It’s not the worst thing. I mean, I’ve had a lot of foul stuff in my life. I just did a shot with this person and I was like, “I’ll do it with you.” And then we went for a walk and that was it. There are some concerns around 1,3-Butanediol and balance. So particularly in older adults, you do not want to contribute to any risk of breaking a hip.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: That’s just the death knell for a lot of people. I know.
Kevin Rose: I just had to put my mom into a different home that has—it’s actually kind of cool. It’s sad, because she’s been falling and they have this like new AI orb that sits up there and it kind of does like a kind of radar type situation and it detects falls.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose: So the second she falls in the home, they can rush in and help her out and all that and they carpet the hell out of it now and stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss: How do you think about sort of pre-grieving that or contending with that yourself?
Kevin Rose: In terms of—
Tim Ferriss: With family, that’s rough. I mean, it doesn’t sound easy. Because if you play forward the tape, it’s like, I mean, I think about this with my own parents and it’s just like, nobody lasts forever.
Kevin Rose: It’s one of those things where it’s so funny because when you’re a teenager and I remember when my dad was having a hard time standing and this was like when I was much younger before he passed and I was like, “Oh, dad’s going to be in the thing that I might have to push him on it if he has to sit down.” Kind of those walkers that can also be something you can push somebody on. I was so embarrassed. I was like, “Oh, people are looking at us or whatever.” And now I push my mom with pride in the inner walker thing and I’m like, I don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s like, the only thing you can do is just make sure to show up and hang out. And I’m very lucky that my mom has dementia, but it is a type that it’s not Alzheimer’s so it’s probably vascular or something. I can walk in and she knows who I am. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but she knows who I am, which is like, I’ll take that all day long.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I know you have family members that are in the same boat, which is tough.
Tim Ferriss: I have a ton of family members with Alzheimer’s. I mean, I literally got a call from one of my relatives wanting to discuss interventions and it’s a tough conversation because there really isn’t much. You have to, as far as I can tell, act preemptively, which is why, actually this relates to another bullet of mine. I—
Kevin Rose: You have five?
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Kevin Rose: How many Bulleits did you have?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, how many Bulleits did I have?
Kevin Rose: I was just curious.
Tim Ferriss: Of all the rye whiskeys, it’s the only one that I can tolerate. I loathe stationary bikes. I really find stationary biking to be one of the most soul crushing things in the world.
Kevin Rose: It’s the worst.
Tim Ferriss: However, I mean, I’ve tried Peloton and didn’t like the ergonomics and so on for a bunch of reasons. And then I have tried very expensive, very, very expensive setups recommended to me by fancy doctors and so on, which are just too uncomfortable. I’m incredibly hunched over. My back is basically parallel with the floor.
Kevin Rose: What are you talking about?
Tim Ferriss: And I’m kneeling myself in the stomach. It’s so uncomfortable.
Kevin Rose: Like crunching machines? What are you talking about?
Tim Ferriss: No, no, I’m talking about getting on a stationary bike. But if you’re in a racing position, you have to adopt this hunchback and there are a million reasons why I find that uncomfortable. There is a bike, however, it’s very easy to find. It’s pretty common in public gyms called the Keiser M3i Studio Indoor Bike. I don’t know why they have to make it so difficult in its nomenclature, but the Kaiser M3i is unique in my experience in that you can elevate the handlebars enough to sit in a comfortable position with a decent saddle, meaning the seat, such that I can do the V2 and the V4 and all of that training for me in a comfortable position without compromising my low back, which has been a huge step forward.
So this is the only bike that I’ve used consistently for this kind of training. I was having a number of conversations with a neuroscientist named Dr. Tommy Wood over a period of weeks. And if for instance, you do something called the Norwegian 4×4, there’s data to suggest that if you do—it’s VO2 max training, so it’s very, very, very intense, but it’s like—
Kevin Rose: Four on, four off?
Tim Ferriss: Four minutes on, three to four minutes off, let’s just call it three minutes. Four minutes on, three minutes off. And you do that for four rounds. This is the only bike that I’ve been able to use to do this consistently. And if you do that for, I think it’s three times a week for five to six months, the volumetric changes, meaning the neuroanatomical changes in the hippocampus and other areas that are certainly indicated in things like Alzheimer’s lasts for up to five years.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So if you do five to six months gutting it out three times a week, the results—
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: The dividends pay off for, it seems, up to or possibly beyond five years.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: Crazy.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of—
Kevin Rose: [crosstalk] sauna in there and you’re like—
Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s why I’m doing—yeah, I’m doing all the usual stuff, I’m doing the sauna. And don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You know what I mean? It’s like, okay, sure. You don’t have 30 minutes to do it, do 10 minutes. You can’t do a sauna, take a hot bath, figure it out.
Kevin Rose: You know what my good is that I like?
Tim Ferriss: What’s that?
Kevin Rose: It’s not perfect, but it’s good, which is I go on my treadmill, I set it to 4.75 or something incline. So it’s not crazy, but it’s not, I still do shit. And I set it to only like 2.5 on the walking and I’ll play Duolingo chess because they have chess on there now for Duolingo. They teach you chess, it’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: And you can play friends and live people and all that stuff and they do game replays and they teach—and I’m learning a ton. And 30, 40 minutes go by and you’re drenched in sweat. I know it’s not high intensity and all the benefits on the cognitive side seem to be around a lot of high [crosstalk].
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but who knows?
Kevin Rose: But it’s good.
Tim Ferriss: It’s doing something.
Kevin Rose: It’s doing something. So I’ve really enjoyed that. If you just want something to both be learning and engaged and kind of like having fun so you forget about the time. Do you know what I’m talking about where it’s like you just like, “Oh, wait, what time is it? Oh, shit, I’ve been on for 37 minutes. I can get off now.” I love that type of cardio.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, for me, I mean, this is going to sound like maybe a step down, but it’s like the older I get, the more I realize a little goes a long way. Like yesterday, for instance, I had a bunch of stuff stacked up and I won’t bore people with the commitments, but I didn’t really have any time to go to the gym and it was my day to go to the gym to do X, Y, and Z exercise. And I went in and I did like, three sets. I was literally in there for five minutes and I left, but it’s better than nothing.
Kevin Rose: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: Something is better than nothing. I’m not going to go to the Olympics with that approach, but let’s fucking be real. I’m not going to the Olympics, period.
Kevin Rose: You’re not going to the Olympics. I mean, maybe it’s like a bystander. Like, in the—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, I’ll throw some new random stuff in there. There’s a study that got my attention, it’s been out since 2025, September 2025. This is in JAMA and this is the title, Single Treatment with MM120, and then in parentheses Lysergide, I think is how that’s pronounced, in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. So this is—
Kevin Rose: GAD.
Tim Ferriss: GAD. This is a randomized clinical trial looking at anxiety, which is often comorbid, meaning happening at the same time as depressive disorders. And I think this is sponsored by a company called Definium, which used to be MindMed. In any case—
Kevin Rose: I love where this is going. I just looked it up. Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So what’s interesting about this, and they’re not going to maybe love my comparison, but so MM120, Lysergide, I mean, it’s comparable to LSD. And this is a multi-arm clinical trial. They did five arms, which is rare to do because—
Kevin Rose: Arms?
Tim Ferriss: The risk is that they’ll blend together. So the arm means a group who is treated with a different intervention in this case. So they’ve got placebo, 25 micrograms, 50 micrograms, 100 micrograms, and 200 micrograms. 100 mics is—
Kevin Rose: That’s what they give standard for LSD.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what you can think of as a standard hit, 100 micrograms. And the results are wild, man. If you look at the HAM-A score, this is up to 12 weeks out. You can see, I’ll just show you, how it’s dose dependent. The more you take, basically the better it goes up to, and I’m not sure how long the follow-ups continued, but where you land is you see that the 100 micrograms and 200 are very, very close to each other.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, so might as well take 100.
Tim Ferriss: 25 and 50 are certainly a lot higher.
Kevin Rose: Now are you still getting the same psychedelic experience with this stuff?
Tim Ferriss: In the case of this particular compound, I don’t know. My guess would be yes. I could be totally wrong in that. So Definium, feel free to correct me. I am guessing the answer is yes with MM120, but what that says to me is, hey, 12 weeks of relief with GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, which I’ve been clinically diagnosed with, that and OCD, 12 weeks is pretty good. And it seems like at least according to the data in this study, the minimum effective dose would be 100 micrograms. Now, 100 micrograms at least for me and for a lot of people, you’ll be tripping your balls off, not to get too technical.
Kevin Rose: Wait a second. Dude, it says that this was done at Neuroscape at UCSF.
Tim Ferriss: Was it really?
Kevin Rose: This is Adam’s lab.
Tim Ferriss: No shit. Are you serious?
Kevin Rose: I’m dead serious. I just clicked through on it. It says phase three trial of MM120 for GAD.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s amazing.
Kevin Rose: This is our buddy doing this.
Tim Ferriss: This is our buddy, Adam. Okay. Well, I have a text that I need to send then.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome. I wonder if I indirectly funded this because I helped fund some of Neuroscape’s stuff. That’s funny. I did not—
Kevin Rose: Isn’t that hilarious?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did not look at that. That’s hilarious. Small world.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. There you go. So it’s interesting for GAD. We were talking about dementia. There’s a case report with high dose psilocybe mushrooms, I don’t think it was actually psilocybin synthesized, looking at this particular thing was a Japanese elderly woman with dementia, may have been Alzheimer’s who took, I can’t believe they did this to her—
Kevin Rose: Five grams, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then she took five grams. So Terence McKenna, heroic dose, somehow fell asleep for like 19 hours or something obscene, which would be very, very worrisome if you’re like the child of said parent. Wakes up and then starts having like full expositional conversations in contrast with her previous like monosyllabic or single word responses to things. And it was transient. It didn’t last forever, but it raises some very interesting questions. I’ve seen at least some case reports also with LSD producing similar effects. And I’ve been interested in this for probably a decade. I’ve hypothesized this could be the case. It’s just like, do you really want to give your parent—
Kevin Rose: Especially that age.
Tim Ferriss: Under what circumstances is it ethical to give someone hallucinogens?
Kevin Rose: See, I could never do that to my mom because she was always anti all this stuff. And then the second, God forbid they have a bad trip, like why would you want to put them through that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So it’s curious. I was sent something by someone I won’t mention, but a very interesting case report on microdosing with LSD with someone with dementia.
Kevin Rose: Did it work?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And in terms of similar to the ketones, not saying the mechanism is the same, but producing much more verbal fluidity. Going from like, “I’m good. It depends.” I have relatives who are limited to that now. They’re basically giving answers that are non-answers. “Sounds good.” These things that you could use as a reply to anything, they’re not necessarily grokking what’s happening, to full paragraphs. Which means to my interpretation, it’s offline to online. It’s a really stark difference because with the one word, two word answers, you don’t actually know if they’re understanding what’s happening.
Kevin Rose: Do you have some MM120 on you right now?
Tim Ferriss: No, I don’t. I don’t. If I did, I would probably not take it tonight necessarily.
Kevin Rose: If you see a weird cut in the video and then we get infinitely smarter, you’ll know why.
Tim Ferriss: Little glitch here or there.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s a flash and all of a sudden we’re just like Rain Man.
Tim Ferriss: For the smarter, I would keep it probably to 20 mics or below. We’ll see. But I found this pretty interesting—
Kevin Rose: That’s so cool.
Tim Ferriss: For GAD especially and then for the dementia piece, but it raises a lot of ethical questions. What is ethical to use as a treatment in someone who cannot give consent? That’s a tough, gnarly problem.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Especially if you’re dealing with stuff that is not exactly prescription medication.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, that’s the whole thing. If it goes sideways, you feel like an asshole.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, to put it mildly.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, to put it mildly. But it’s amazing and it gives you another half day with a parent or a loved one and you can full on have conversations and they see you and you see them in a way that you hadn’t in six months or a year, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Or if it potentially slows the decline. I think it’s too much to hope for a reversal frankly, but there are some strange phenomena out there, man. There’s this phenomenon called terminal lucidity where someone on their deathbed when they’ve been vegetative—
Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve heard about this.
Tim Ferriss: —and, like—
Kevin Rose: There’s that book that—
Tim Ferriss: —right—
Kevin Rose: —I told you to read. Did you read that?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure.
Kevin Rose: The afterlife book?
Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t read that.
Kevin Rose: Okay, because they—
Tim Ferriss: But this is—
Kevin Rose: —talk about that case.
Tim Ferriss: —well documented, where people—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —suddenly, they’ve been basically vegetative or completely unable to respond to any stimulus.
Kevin Rose: In like the last two days they come—
Tim Ferriss: They—
Kevin Rose: —fully lucid, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —they become totally lucid, and they can have full-blown extensive conversations.
Kevin Rose: That’s why I know—
Tim Ferriss: What the fuck is going on there?
Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you, it is so weird to me that we think, like— Like a lot of the things that we do in physical form, like what we do in life mimics nature in many ways. And all of our data is backed up in the cloud, and we’re like, “Oh, we’re not backed up in the cloud in any way.”
And then there’s these people with full-blown entanglements in their brain, full on, you know, the Alzheimer’s—
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
Kevin Rose: —for like a decade, and then they become completely lucid.
Tim Ferriss: Lucid. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Where is that coming from?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I see what you’re saying. I wasn’t tracking that fully for a second, but if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s like, if it’s all localized—
Kevin Rose: In the cloud. Right.
Tim Ferriss: No, I’m saying if all of that ability is localized within the confines of the skull, how do you explain this?
Kevin Rose: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Given all the structural deterioration.
Kevin Rose: Damage. Exactly. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t have good answers for that. I just don’t. It is a well-documented, as far as I know, a well-documented phenomenon. So it’s like, go figure that one out. I mean, I’m not qualified, way above my pay grade. Crazy, man. It’s wild.
Kevin Rose: It is wild.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ll give a shout-out to somebody. We’re not going to open this right now because we’ll start chewing on them and we’ll be up all night.
Kevin Rose: Is that the 120?
Tim Ferriss: No, this is Neutonic, N-E-U-T-O-N-I-C, Nootropics. See, that’s a pun. Nootropics, because these are toothpicks that I was given by a podcaster you may recognize named Chris Williamson. And they have—
Kevin Rose: Oh, nice.
Tim Ferriss: —they have, like, 20, I want to say 20, I might be getting that off, but like 20, 25 milligrams of caffeine in each toothpick.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: And there are a couple of other nootropics, AKA—
Kevin Rose: That’s a quarter-cup—
Tim Ferriss: —smart drug—
Kevin Rose: —of coffee, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —yeah, smart drugs in there. And they’re great. It’s just, like, suck on a toothpick.
Kevin Rose: Because if I have cups of coffee, I will chug a cup of coffee and then if it gets refilled, I’ll chug another cup of coffee, and it’s a problem. These actually is, in terms of pacing—
Tim Ferriss: Hm.
Kevin Rose: —have been fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. So that’s been my sort of, not exactly quite as interruptive for people to get that, but sort of ad libidum interruptus.
Yeah. Avoiding over-consumption of coffee and other stimulants, this helps me to kind of pace it. Because even if I chew on this thing until it’s fragments of wood, max I can squeeze out of it is 20, 25 milligrams.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What else do you got, Kevin?
Kevin Rose: Let’s take a little look-see. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I have that I think is interesting is what’s happening in the world of—I don’t want to talk a lot about AI because I’m just frankly AI’d out, but I will say that the idea that we can all now kind of take control of our productivity and pretty much anything that we want to control now, like device-wise, we can do with just a few simple prompts on AI.
And I had a buddy that came over to my house and he was like, “Hey, you got cameras in your house.” I have something called Ubiquiti, which is like, they have cameras and it’s a very common kind of household type situation when you want to have security system, front door thing, cameras, sensors, water detectors underneath the things in case things leak and you’re out of town, whatever.
And so I’ve got this whole setup and he’s like, “Hey, you know they have a full on API where you can just tell Claude or whatever to code against it.” And I was like, “Okay, well that’s interesting. Well, what can it do? ” And so, the cameras now have AI sensors where they can detect who it is that’s walking in.
So it’s like, “Oh, Tim’s coming up to your door.” “Oh, that’s your daughter,” or “That’s your dog.” It detects my dog, Toaster. It sees him and it puts a little dog emblem above his head when he’s walking around and it knows that it’s Toaster. But the crazy shit is I was like, “Okay, well what if I can go further and I can tell it to do actions,” because there’s a speaker hooked up to it as well, so that’s for security.
So basically if anyone loiters in my alleyway and it detects it, it’s like I play some really funky shit where it’s like “Detected,” like, “Loiterer in the alleyway” or whatever and just to scare people off in case they’re—
Tim Ferriss: I am the Batman.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, but you could draw little areas around where they shouldn’t be, which is like at your door fiddling with your door and say, “If they stand here for more than 30 seconds, place that audio out of speaker.” So I was like, okay, this is interesting. Well, what if when I walk in my house, if I’m wearing a hat of my favorite sports team and they’re playing, it reads me the scores like I walk in.
So you can think about all these things where it’s doing stuff based on your activity, right?
So like if you’re out there gardening, it’ll be like, “Hey Kevin, I noticed that the plant over here wasn’t watered enough.” So it’s watching all of this stuff and so there’s a lot of, “If then, then that” kind of situation, like, “If I see you doing X—” So the latest I have is, like, I programmed it so when it sees the license plate on my car, it automatically knows to open the gate because it knows it’s me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool.
Kevin Rose: And the camera looks at the license plate on the freaking car, checks it against the database, and allows me in. How crazy is that? And for people that are listening, I’m not talking about, like, $10,000 systems. The camera’s like $200. Anyone can do this at home, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild.
Kevin Rose: It’s just wild to think about. Finally, we had all these kind of discrete systems that you had some Nest stuff, and I had some Google Home stuff, and now they’re all talking to each other. So you can just do kind of really crazy. I know you would like this because you’re the kind of person that you’ve told me before, like, you don’t like to answer your door because if the delivery person is like, “Tim!” then all of a sudden your address is, like—
Tim Ferriss: Then I need—
Kevin Rose: —all over the internet.
Tim Ferriss: Then I’m doxxed. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I know you’ve said you don’t—I’m also pretty AI’d out, but at the same time it’s like, I can’t resist going back to the opium den. It’s so fascinating.
Kevin Rose: What are you doing now with AI stuff?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, I’m more curious to hear your thoughts and predictions frankly, because I think you’re better at it. But, I mean, I’m using Claude Code with APIs to do tons of inbox analysis and stuff—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —right? I’m doing a 20-year retrospective analysis of angel investing. It’s like, who made what introductions? Which companies did I not reply to that ended up being successes?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Which did I turn down that ended up being really important?
Kevin Rose: Do you really want to do it to yourself?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I suspected it would be worse than it was. I actually have not—I haven’t missed that many explicit opportunities. I wanted to test my own stories against data, right? Because I have all sorts of stories—
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: —about why I did certain things—
Kevin Rose: Right, right, right.
Tim Ferriss: —and why certain things worked out. And I have certain stories about my batting average and I’m like, “But is it true?”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: “Really?”
Kevin Rose: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: “Is it really true?”
Kevin Rose: Because—
Tim Ferriss: “Let’s look at some hard numbers.”
Kevin Rose: —the sad truth, and I have a buddy that wears up the bracelet, and you’ve seen me with the necklace around the way it categorizes your AI and it listens to you 24/7, it’s about 70-ish percent that we think we know, but it’s actually what we know. Out of the hundred percent of what we think we know, this is the truth. I said I wanted a dark chocolate bar at 7:00 p.m.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s like, “No, you said it at 5:00, and you said it this way.” You know, it’s like—
Tim Ferriss: And you said it was milk chocolate.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. So it’s always about 20 percent off from where you actually think—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: —your brain’s at.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Which is brutal.
Tim Ferriss: Well, plus, I mean, that’s like last week, right? If you’re talking about 15 years ago.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, if you listen to any genesis story of any startup, you’re like, “Eh—”
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: “—wait a minute now.” This is like a startup comic working on material, but he’s been working on this one five-minute bit so long that now he believes that’s actually truth. I mean, the sanitizing and the editing of these startup genesis stories is hilarious, and there’s no reason to think that I would be or you would be exempt from it—
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: —right? When you’re telling your—
Kevin Rose: Absolutely not.
Tim Ferriss: —own story, even if you’re just telling it to yourself.
Kevin Rose: So what’s the number one thing that you’ve learned by applying AI to your life in this fashion? What’s the thing where you walked away and said, like—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: —”Damn, that was insightful and I’m going to change my behavior,” or, “I learned something new about myself that I wouldn’t have if I had not used AI”?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I think from a holistic health perspective, by “holistic” I mean having enough data related to medications, supplements, predispositions, side effects, what happened to me two weeks ago, the LLMs have been incredibly helpful. I mean, the picture that they get and the speed with which they can deliver an answer that I can interrogate is just incredible. So I—
Kevin Rose: What did you learn? What was the thing that you, like—
Tim Ferriss: I mean, honestly, it’s mostly avoiding disaster, right?
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like, are any of these things contraindicated with one another? Could A, B, or C explain D? Right? And you have to keep in mind these things can still hallucinate, but you can, I don’t want to say, eliminate that, but minimize it by just fact-checking across LLMs. Right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And so there’s that. I would say that there’s a lot of insight on hopefully that that can translate to future decision-making related to investing, which is, investing for me is not just amassing more chips. What’s fun about investing to me is it’s a way to scorecard your thinking and decision making.
Kevin Rose: Mm.
Tim Ferriss: Right? It’s just a very objective way to decide if something was the right or the wrong decision. And you can fine slice that and there are ways that you could maybe question that. But if you’re asking yourself, “Was I thinking well last month?” that’s not a very helpful question. Where do you go from there.
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
If you’re logging maybe every decision you make every day, and then trying to cross reference outcomes with blah, blah, blah, like yeah, but you’re never going to do that. But when you’re making relatively frequent investments, you can do that. You can also run counterfactuals, right? “What if I did the opposite? What if I had not sold that? What if I had kept that? What if I had done this? What if I had done that?”
Kevin Rose: Is that worth your time though? At the end of the day—
Tim Ferriss: It’s worth—
Kevin Rose: —you can throw everything into S&P 500—
Tim Ferriss: Well—
Kevin Rose: —and just go to bed.
Tim Ferriss: —well, there’s that. I would say it’s worth it to me because I find it interesting. I actually enjoy the intellectual exercise of it, but otherwise I would say with in terms of like how AI has impacted me, I would say that the honest answer is not that much, because most shit isn’t worth doing in the first place.
People are finding very, very clever ways to expedite automating workflows of all different types, and doing something well does not make it important or worth doing in the first place. So there’s a lot, I think the level of bullshit that is being done just at a very fast efficient rate is skyrocketing, but simultaneously there are definitely cases where I look back at, say, this analysis of 20 years of stuff, to do that manually would be impossible.
Kevin Rose: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: All right? It would take me a year full time with multiple people to do that, and with a Claude code, like Gmail API and leaving my computer running for a handful of hours a few times, that’s like, what you get back is fucking incredible. It’s unbelievable. And I haven’t even scratched the surface.
I will say also another way that AI has maybe affected my life in a net negative way and I’m not, we have another mutual friend who maybe we shouldn’t name who feels very similarly. Is—
Kevin Rose: [REDACTED].
Tim Ferriss: We’ll bleep that out, but yeah, Jesus Christ. So is, if you train AIs on your writing, they’re really good.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s, I think I feel—I mean, this is a stretch of a comparison obviously because I’m not an adept like a world class Go player, but when AlphaGo defeated one of the top Korean players, he was kind of like, “I’m done. I don’t find joy in this anymore, like, if we’re playing against machines.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And when I see these AIs very beautifully, I’m not going to lie, and we’re like in the top of the first inning, right? This stuff is going to get so much better, spit out stuff that is so much better—I mean, I can still write, but what they can do in 30 seconds is what would take me 30 hours. And I’m just like, “Fuck.” I don’t know. It really drains the motivation for me to put in those 30 hours.
Why wouldn’t it? Of course it would, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But in some sense you can consider it a really good copilot, because for it to come up with novel ideas that would engage an audience, that’s still the holy grail where it’s not quite there yet. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s going to make you sound—It’s going to button up your copy, and it might expand upon it in ways that you wouldn’t, but it’s not going to come up with the original thesis for the whole thing, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s going to have trouble with the original thesis, but even there I think it does a pretty good job.
Kevin Rose: Really, it’s—
Tim Ferriss: Like, you just—
Kevin Rose: —getting better?
Tim Ferriss: —you just—
Kevin Rose: I haven’t tried with writing stuff, so.
Tim Ferriss: Well, if you just do a data dump and you’re like, “Create an amazing—”
Kevin Rose: Oh, you sent me that link.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if you just do a data dump, you’re like create—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, where you sent me that link you were like, “What should Tim do in the next five years?” Remember?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, that was good.
Kevin Rose: That was really interesting. Tell people what you did, because they might find this, I think it applies to their own life.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. So, you could do this in whichever model you’re using, whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. If it knows you, right, if it—
Kevin Rose: You can tie in your inbox too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can tie in your inbox. In my case, I didn’t do that, but if it has enough history on you, you can just ask, “What do you think I should do in the next five years? What might be some rewarding paths of exploration?” I think I put something like that, like, “What are three to five ideas that you think could be rewarding career exploration for me—”
Kevin Rose: I love this.
Tim Ferriss: “—in the next X period of time?”
Kevin Rose: So, if for people listening—
Tim Ferriss: And the answer’s—yeah.
Kevin Rose: —if they’ve used AI for, let’s call it, three to six months, and you’ve probably given it several hundred things to think about, it will span cross those conversations as long as you turn this on. I think it’s on by default now, but it used to be an opt-in thing where you’d say, “Allow the AI to look cross-conversation,” so it has a wholistic understanding of who you are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the answers were fucking outstanding.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean really, really good.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I sent it to a few friends, sent it to you, I sent it to a few of my closest friends and they’re like, “That’s pretty good.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean—
Kevin Rose: It was really cool.
Tim Ferriss: —it’s—
Kevin Rose: Some of the ideas I was like, “Damn, you should do that dude.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s—
Kevin Rose: We had this one business idea for you to do, and it wasn’t a book, and I was like, “Dude, I texted you back.” I was like, “That’s awesome. Go build that.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, there were business ideas, there were certainly kind of non-revenue, but philosophically-aligned ideas. It was shocking to me. I mean, that’s actually a very good example of something that has deeply informed what I’m mulling over as I imagine the future. I was like, “Man, that actually is a really good—”
Because, keeping in mind, I’m asking questions about things of interest, things I like, things I don’t like. I am asking questions about different scientific interests related to Saisei Foundation, my nonprofit foundation. I’m asking questions about investing, I’m asking questions about writing, I’m asking questions about relationships, I’m asking questions about organizing trips for friends. I’m asking so many different questions.
Kevin Rose: Am I still on the board of your nonprofit?
Tim Ferriss: I think you’re like secretary or something.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, something like that. I haven’t heard anything about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe you were honorably discharged—
Kevin Rose: No, I don’t—
Tim Ferriss: —I don’t know.
Kevin Rose: —think you did—I never got any paperwork around it. I haven’t heard anything in, like, three years.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, well I said it was going to be a light lift. It’s a light lift.
Kevin Rose: There’s a light lift.
Tim Ferriss: And I mean, that’s a very good example, right? I mean, that may be the best example because if that even 10 percent informs a major next chapter—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: —holy shit, that’s a big deal for me.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Certainly. And—it makes me think a little bit about podcast listeners especially, readers also, but to a greater extent, podcast listeners who come up to me and most listeners I run into are really great and I mean, there are always a couple of weirdos, but most are fantastic and they’ll say something often like, “I’m so sorry, you don’t know me at all, and I feel like I know you.”
And what I say a lot of the time is, “Actually, if you listen to my podcast every week or even every month, you do know me pretty well.” And then you think about a machine that never forgets. It’s going to know you pretty damn well.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s spooky in a way, but I started getting more out of the LLMs when I started asking questions. Now you have to be, I think, a little careful with outsourcing this and absolving yourself of responsibility to think about these things.
But when you ask it open-ended personal questions in the way that you would ask a close friend, “What do you think are three to five creative ways I might explore things professionally in the next five years?” As opposed to something that you think is more suitable for a robot—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —you get some really interesting responses.
Kevin Rose: It’s so cool. That’s a great use case.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: The one thing I’ve been playing around with lately that I haven’t told you about yet, but I think about all these AI startups and everyone that’s creating all these different apps and all that stuff and for me, it’s kind of fun to watch as a kind of bystander being like, “Oh, cool, you’re going to make this.”
But I really want to explore things that just no one has done before. It’s always been interesting to me more than just iterative kind of, like, sanding down with the rough edges. A lot of startups will go out there and be like, “Hey, you know what sucks is word processing doesn’t do this so I’m going to make a slightly better word processor.” I’m just making this up.
But I like the kind of like wilder, crazier, like, I’d rather have it fail and say, “I did something new,” than just do something boring, if that makes sense.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I get it. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so, lately what I’ve done is—
Tim Ferriss: Part of why I have so many fatalities.
Kevin Rose: So many fatalities. Yeah. Exactly. Same. What I’ve done lately is I’ve taken—I went and bought a bunch of these decks of cards on Amazon that are values cards.
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?
Kevin Rose: Meaning they give you like a deck of a hundred things and they’re like, “What are your core values?”
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: And you’re like, “Empathy,” or, “Kindness,” or like you flip through them. And the way they typically work is that you have like a, this is a really high value, a medium, and a low value, and then you put them into different stacks and then you walk away and you say, “Oh, this is my high value stack of things that are my core values that mean a lot to me.”
Tim Ferriss: Hm.
Kevin Rose: And it might be 10 or 15 different cards, right? And what’s interesting is to do that with friends and partners and things like that and then compare them and say, “Hey, what do we align on what we don’t align?” And I can imagine for an intimate partner, this would be a pretty important thing to do, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so I started there and I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m going to scan these cards in, and then I’m going to pare it down and make these core values where you come in and say, “This matters to me.” It’s almost like a swiping dating app or something like, “Yes, I’m into—”
Tim Ferriss: “Yes, I’m into—”
Kevin Rose: “—into this—”
Tim Ferriss: “—empathy.” “No, I’m not.”
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly. But you swipe through them and then when you’re done with that, then you’ve got your list of these values, and they can change over time. And so I think the important thing is to log that and say, “These are my values today, but tomorrow one might shift a little bit.” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: And then I thought about contractual bonds, and so the working title I have for it is just called “bond” and where I can say like, with a partner, I’m going to create a contract with you where we both have to shake on it, meaning like a virtual shake. You think of it as almost like a SimCity-like situation. This is my city, this is her city, or a friend’s city, and we’re going to agree that I take the trash out every Tuesday night.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: And there’s an emotional shake on both sides, and if I break this bond, it results in what? And so from the partner side, it will result in a one to 10 on how much damaging this is to me.
So not taking the trash out, probably be like, “Ah, that sucks because the trash is going to overflow.” That’s probably three—
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: —to most people, right? And so, then I kind of get negative points in case I break that bond. But what’s interesting though is that that will link back to a core value of theirs and a core value of mine.
And I want to show up as a good partner, and there’ll be a core value associated with that. And then you could see those bonds between multiple people. And the reason I say this is because I’ve always been one of these people historically that have said yes to so many things, and then, like, be the last minute. I’m the worst at that, you know?
Where I’m like, “I’m in.” And then I’m like, “I’m an introvert. I’m out—”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: —at the last minute, right? And so I just think that there needs to be a system where, almost like a LinkedIn for like values and trust and bonds, there’s a great Wu Tang quote that’s like, “Word is bond.” And ultimately I really believe that. There’s something really cool about saying, “We have the Better Business Bureau, that’s like the best we’ve got.” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Like, “Oh, this person, they did well by their customers 2,000 times.” What about individuals and saying, like, “Hey, this person was always empathetic towards me or this person was kind and helped me move on a Sunday.”
Tim Ferriss: What prompted all this?
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it. Just, like, well I—the thing I think about is that there—
Tim Ferriss: That was such a dissatisfying—
Kevin Rose: Well, I call it—
Tim Ferriss: —answer.
Kevin Rose: No, hold on. Let me give you the real answer. I call this “dark information.”
Tim Ferriss: “Dark information—”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —okay.
Kevin Rose: So “dark information” is information that exists in the real world, but we have yet to put in physical form.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay.
Kevin Rose: And so right now you and I have a trust thing. You know that you could, if the camera was turned off, there are certain things that you can tell me that you’re pretty certain I will not tell anyone else. Every once in a while I do, but you will know you know where that line is, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Kevin Rose: But that hasn’t been concretized in any type of, like, visual, real format. And so there’s something interesting, I’m just brainstorming with you in real time because we’ve had a couple of drinks, but like my point is if there was a system where I could say, “I’ve created these bonds, I’ve built up this reputation,” but it would also give me a way to reflect back and be like, “Oh, you know what? I can see now historically that I’ve often bailed on events that I’ve signed up for, let me improve that in myself.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: The whole point of what you brought up a minute ago was, if I use AI to go back historically and look across things, I can detect these trends and then make course corrections based on those trends, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so there’s something interesting about this idea of, there are these different facets, so there’s these like emotional facets that we have with every individual, how might we track those?
Tim Ferriss: Well, what jumps out at me about this is maybe a cool use case would be identifying, you could write it out or you could have cards, your values, but maybe to put a finer point on it, the type of person you believe yourself to be.
Kevin Rose: Right, because—
Tim Ferriss: Or the—
Kevin Rose: —it’s very different than what people perceive you to be.
Tim Ferriss: —or the type of person you want to be.
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: And then it’s like, “Let’s take a look at your calendar and your email and your iMessages to see how much your story of what—
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: —you think you are or what you want to be matches up with your behavior.”
Kevin Rose: So I built—
Tim Ferriss: And then you get a report card.
Kevin Rose: —I built a prototype for exactly this. So remember maybe seven years ago you did a 360 review for me?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So—
Tim Ferriss: Those things are brutal.
Kevin Rose: —for people that don’t know what 360 reviews are, it’s like you give 10 of your friends to somebody, they interview them, they collect all the data anonymously—
Tim Ferriss: Could also be like coworkers, employees—
Kevin Rose: Coworkers, employees—
Tim Ferriss: —bosses, whatever.
Kevin Rose: —friends, whatever. And then you get a report back being like, “Here are the deficiencies and positives that this person brings.”
Tim Ferriss: Anonymized.
Kevin Rose: And anonymized.
Tim Ferriss: Brutal.
Kevin Rose: And they are very different than what you think—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: —how you show up.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Kevin Rose: And so that’s the idea.
Tim Ferriss: I literally was looking at mine from, like, 12 years ago—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I think we did one around the same mind—
Tim Ferriss: —a couple weeks ago and I was just like—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I know.
Tim Ferriss: —”So tough.”
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Because you get it back and you’re like, “Who said this?”
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Like—
Kevin Rose: Like some of this—
Tim Ferriss: —some of it’s brutal.
Kevin Rose: I think I know what you said, by the way. Do you ever use the word “child rearing”?
Tim Ferriss: “Child rearing”?
Kevin Rose: Did you ever say that?
Tim Ferriss: “Child rearing.” I mean—
Kevin Rose: To throw me off, would you ever say that?
Tim Ferriss: Throw you off the scent trail?
Kevin Rose: Because before I had kids, somebody in my anonymous 360 review said, like, “Oh, he’s going to have a hard time with child-rearing.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no, that wasn’t me.
Kevin Rose: I’m like, “Who the fuck—”
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: “—would say ‘child-rearing’?”
Tim Ferriss: No, that’s not me, that’s not me.
Kevin Rose: I don’t have any friends that even have that in their vocabulary. And I’m like, “The only person that could do that would be Tim trying to throw me off with a fucking smart-ass word.”
Tim Ferriss: No, that wasn’t me.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: That wasn’t me. That wasn’t me.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: No, no. I think I’d be able to identify whatever responses I gave.
Kevin Rose: Okay, I got it I guess. That’s the one thing that stuck with me for like 15 years. I’m like, “Who’d said that?”
Tim Ferriss: Man, you’re lucky if you got off with that. Man, I’ve got so much more. Good Lord. Ah. You know what I’ve been doing that has been really helpful, because the blank page is something I struggle with with writing, which is part of the reason why the AI is so demoralizing in a sense, because the LLMs, within like 30 seconds, are just like, “Boom, how you like me now? Try to match that.”
But using, even though I certainly don’t know the future of this company because it might get replaced by features that are innate to X, Y, or Z, but Wispr Flow.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God, I love it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, using Wispr Flow as a data dump—
Kevin Rose: I wish I was an investor, it’s freaking awesome.
Tim Ferriss: —and you may have recommended this to me, I can’t recall, but—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —basically doing a dump of a conversation as I’m walking with Wispr Flow into a note on my phone, then taking that, dropping it into Claude, asking it to clean it up and turn it into something readable has been so helpful, not necessarily for publication, but for emails, especially uncomfortable emails where like, “Oh, God, I’m putting it off. I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to do it.”
Just doing like a 10-minute brain dump, it’s shocking how quickly things come together, incredibly helpful. And I’ll just give a shout-out to my friend Elan Lee, co-founder of Exploding Kittens. He recommended this headset because I was on a call with him and I’m like, “Man, that audio is awesome. What are you using?”
Kevin Rose: Can you put it on just for the viewers—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I will. It’s—
Kevin Rose: — and let’s see if it’s going to look as good as I hope it does?
Tim Ferriss: It looks so good.
Kevin Rose: There, see? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s pretty good, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So this is the Shokz, S-H-O-K-Z, OpenMeet UC, open ear bone conduction headset. So he was talking and I’m like, “What the hell are you wearing?” I was like, “Audio’s really good.” So it looks pretty dorky. This is like a—
Kevin Rose: Nah, it’s great.
Tim Ferriss: And the bone conduction is right here, effectively in my cheekbones. And when you first use them, you’re like, “Wait a second, I feel like this is playing out of speakers, like, this is nonsense,” right? “This is—”
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: —complete BS.” But then you totally plug your ears and you can still hear perfectly well, which is crazy.
Kevin Rose: Oh, crazy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And what I like about these is, A, the audio quality is great, and the connectivity varies, but the audio quality is fantastic. You can hear. So if I’m walking my dog, walking Molly, and I want to be able to hear traffic and so on, I can use this because especially if I’m using Wispr Flow to data dump into a text file of some type, I don’t really need to be listening. It’s not like I’m on a phone call or a Zoom call or something.
So I find this very, very helpful so that I can actually pay attention to my surroundings. And that’s all I got. It’s basically this and AirPods. I mean, there are other headphones that I will use for professional recording and stuff, but thus far I’ll share one more tech thing real quick. These, this little baggie here, is the Sennheiser Pro Audio Condenser Microphone. It’s very simple.
I’ve just been very impressed With the audio, when I’m on the road recording stuff for the podcast like intros or sponsor reads or whatever, it’s just a simple live mic. It’s so simple, but the audio quality, even in a hotel room that is really bouncy, lots of glass, lots of metal where it should sound terrible, if I use a fancy, like this is a sure mic that we have right here, if I were to use this exact mic because I have it at home, in some of these bouncy rooms, it would sound worse, I’m not kidding, than what I get for my purposes—
Kevin Rose: Wow, crazy.
Tim Ferriss: —with this.
It’s pretty wild, and I love Shure. I use their mics on a lot of podcasts, but in terms of minimizing bounce, for whatever reason, this little baggie that I can stick in a pocket, right? It’s like, “This is my portable sort of recording studio.”
Kevin Rose: Have you recorded on the iPhone with it?
Tim Ferriss: I have.
Kevin Rose: It sounds good?
Tim Ferriss: It sounds great.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And I don’t have my phone with me. There is an app that you can use for really high fidelity recording. It’s called Ferrite or something like that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s like lossless recording, right?
Tim Ferriss: Lossless recording. It’s like F-E-R-R-I-T-E, something like that. I’ll put the link in the show notes for this for people who are interested. The quality is absurd. And you can also use Descript or one of these programs to do AI cleanup and it’s crazy how smooth it is.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, you don’t need Descript anymore. You can just use all the models to do it. Gemini is actually quite good at multimodal audio video, all that stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, cool. Yeah. Gemini, honestly, I’ve been using Gemini more and more just because it’s such plug and play with—
Kevin Rose: It’s fast too.
Tim Ferriss: —with G Suite also.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, 35 Flash is a great model. Although the new Sonnet just came out and that’s from Anthropic that just came out. I haven’t played with it yet because it was literally launched today and it’s supposed to be fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you think the landscape looks like in a few years? You’ve got Anthropic and OpenAI racing to IPO. See where that goes. You’ve got Mythos/Fable taken off.
Kevin Rose: Mythos is out tomorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: Back out tomorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Okay. Was a national security threat yesterday, but it isn’t today.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think? I mean, I think the—
Kevin Rose: It’s the big three. It’s three players. It’s Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. And X is trying and I would never ever count out Elon. Obviously he has the funds to make it happen.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also Anthropic and Google are buying excess capacity from Colossus, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But that means that their product isn’t working because they bought that capacity for themselves.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: So that means that no one’s using Grok. I mean, I actually like Grok. They have done—
Tim Ferriss: I use Grok more than people might realize.
Kevin Rose: Well, here’s what’s interesting about it.
Tim Ferriss: For current events and synthesizing.
Kevin Rose: Yes. So it has direct access to the X API and that it has actually X tools built into Grok. So if you want to get, like you said, current events, news, things like that. And they’ve also said that it is one of the most grounded models and doesn’t hallucinate so that it’s really good at. And so on Digg, when we relaunch it and we use a lot of AI to come up with the different stories and all of that, we use it a ton because we want that grounded information that is true. And so it’s really important to have that. I don’t know. I mean, I think I wouldn’t count them out. I should probably include them in that list but that’s it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So big three.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think things look like in two years? You’re very good at this. I’m not saying, obviously this is just fucking bullshitting and speculating, but what’s your guess?
Kevin Rose: I mean—
Tim Ferriss: I went pretty heavy into Alphabet thanks to you, which—
Kevin Rose: You went heavy in Alphabet?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then they had a 40 percent pop on a $4 trillion company. What is going on?
Kevin Rose: I haven’t even watched. Is it up?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, well, I mean, look, this was a while back. A while back in AI time, which is like dog years. So by that I mean like five months ago.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Listen, exactly. Five months is like 10 years now. So here is why I like Google. They own the full stack. They have their own chips. And so one of the things that I did a deep dive on was the chips that they are building are, they—really confused the industry. It’s my understanding that they made an insanely high bandwidth and kind of memory throughput when everyone was like, “Hey, why are you opening up these channels and making them so high bandwidth for this kind of data flow?”
And I talked to a buddy and he was like, “Yeah, everyone was confused at first when they saw the architecture for their latest AI chips.” And then they realized that we will live in a world right now where a model drops. Fable goes live tomorrow on Wednesday, right? And the next OpenAI model goes live in two weeks or whatever because they have that rumored one. It’s like old software deployment where it was like model trained, released, out, model trained, released, out. That’s the cadence we’re on right now. What Google is betting, and I know I know they’re all thinking this, but what Google’s betting with this high throughput kind of wide memory architecture is the future is continuous learning. And so everyone is saying like we’re 12 to 18 months out, maybe a little bit longer—
Tim Ferriss: From what?
Kevin Rose: From self-improving models.
Tim Ferriss: I see. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So 27/7, it’s no longer about like, “Oh, Mythos came out today. Woo, crazy.” It’s not about those new models dropping. It’s about—
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a child learning day by day.
Kevin Rose: Tomorrow, it’ll be better than today, forever. And when that happens and they own the full stack, Google’s got the chips, granted they’re going to be constrained by TSMC, which is the only player that’s producing —I mean, there’s a few others, Samsung and Micron and a few others, but TSMC is like the leader and I believe they’re producing Google’s chips as well. But they’ve got the chips architecture, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the engineers. They’re freaking—I mean, they lost a great one a week ago, but it’s crazy what they’re paying these engineers. Did you see some of this? It’s like a billion dollars situation. It’s insane what they’re paying some of these people to stay around.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s what Meta was doing to poach also.
Kevin Rose: Meta, I just don’t think they’re going to make it, man.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Listen, they have great businesses. Instagram is phenomenal. They’ve got these fantastic assets, but I just don’t think they have the talent to pull off what these other bigs are pulling off.
Tim Ferriss: What do the big three look like in two years, do you think? Because Google has a lot of advantages, like you mentioned, right? I mean, also vast data center expertise, right?
Kevin Rose: They have the data centers. They have Android, which is like 60 some percent of the population or something like that. So they have the install base. I have a hard time believing that if you believe that AI inference and all the costs associated with AI eventually kind of settles and it’s affordable, and yes, it’ll probably be like a Netflix type plan where we’re all like, “Oh, yeah, that’s our extra $30 a month to get all the AI shit, whatever.” If it’s coming on your device and also Google’s powering a lot of Apple shit, though Apple has some unique tech.
It’s interesting. Apple is kind of coming up. I wouldn’t write off Apple either. Apple’s another one, but they’re probably another couple years out. I don’t know. I mean, at the end of the day, for me, I’m old enough now to not want to be like, “Hey, this is the 10xer.” Actually, it’s interesting. I called on your podcast. I don’t know if you know this, but four years ago I was like, “Dude, NVIDIA’s going to crush it, blah, blah, blah.” There’s been some dumb predictions. We’ve definitely made some bad ones too. So I’m not going to say it’s been all good, but we’ve called out some stuff. In the world of AI, I don’t think it’s winner take all. Unless somebody hits some kind of crazy escape velocity that is like truly it’s like, aware.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you think, just I’m curious, because you’re so much better at this kind of stuff than I am. I’m like good at my dumb little corners here and there, but you’ve worked at Google, and you worked on their ill-fated social product at one point, right? What was it called? I can’t remember.
Kevin Rose: Google Plus.
Tim Ferriss: Google Plus, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it was horrible. I left right away.
Tim Ferriss: Right. And very wisely segued to Google Ventures. I guess my point is when people think consumer, not enterprise, when they think AI right now, they think ChatGPT, right? ChatGPT has raised a ton of fucking money. They’ve got to figure out ads almost certainly. That’s not easy. That is very, very, very hard to do. I’m pretty familiar with the ads business at Google. Very hard to do at a high level.
However, when average Joe or Jane on the street thinks AI, they think ChatGPT. And when I have tried to set up the Gmail API for Claude, the process on the Google side is such dog shit. The UX is terrible. It is so bad and I’d like to think myself reasonably decent with tech stuff, not as technical as you are, but pretty good, I would like to think. Nonetheless, I need someone on my staff to walk me through step by step to do it because it’s so counterintuitive and there are errors all over the place.
And then you’ve got Anthropic, which is, if we are to believe the headlines on ARR just like crushing on the enterprise side.
Kevin Rose: 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: Like the fastest scaling business of all time on a lot of different measures. However, they’ve gotten a number of pretty strong bitch slaps from the administration. At the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these frontier labs are going to be left unconstrained by the government, so that’s like a huge question there.
Kevin Rose: I think China will push that.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Tell me.
Kevin Rose: Well, so China’s been launching new models and they just did one a week ago that was on par with Fable and they—
Tim Ferriss: Was that Alibaba or someone else?
Kevin Rose: No, it’s…
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t matter, but yeah.
Kevin Rose: But these are open source models. So it’s actually really interesting because China is like, “Okay, listen, we’re going to open source this and people will use our tech.” They’re almost doing it the American way. They’re not closed sourcing anything. They’re like, “Okay, here’s the free model. Come use ours because we’re going to charge you—you can run it yourself if you want, locally.” And that is going to be increasingly, I think that will be increasingly common.
AMD came out, I don’t know if you saw what she, the CEO, she’s brilliant. She came out with this new box that is this little $4,000 box or somewhere around there and it can run like these massive multi-billion parameter models locally. So those charges that you were getting for like $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month or whatever in AI expenses is now just that one box that just runs the model locally.
Now granted, it’s probably eight months behind in terms of like the model it can run versus the frontier models.
Tim Ferriss: For a lot of people, who cares?
Kevin Rose: For a lot of people, who cares?
Tim Ferriss: So from a business perspective, and I know that’s tightly related to all sorts of technical considerations, but where do you think Google, I still hate saying Alphabet. Let’s just say Google—
Kevin Rose: The word on the street is that they have models that are more advanced than Fable. They have not launched them because one, the government’s going to step in and stop them and two, they are very expensive to run and it would cost them a lot of money. They would lose money doing so. And so I think in a year we’re really—12 months, we won’t really know where Google’s at because I’m telling you—
Tim Ferriss: They’re holding on.
Kevin Rose: They’re holding shit back.
Tim Ferriss: Of course they are.
Kevin Rose: They’re holding shit back.
Tim Ferriss: Because they have the bank roll to do that.
Kevin Rose: And it’s fucking Google. You don’t understand. My time there, I walked—Sergei took me, and I’m not saying this as a flex. I’m just like, this is just what happened.
Tim Ferriss: Such a flex. Such a flex.
Kevin Rose: Sergei took me and Bill Maris, who ran Google Ventures—
Tim Ferriss: Smart dude.
Kevin Rose: Bill’s amazing. Through Google X, and this was years ago.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, cool, fun.
Kevin Rose: We got the tour and he was like—
Tim Ferriss: That’s the moonshot factory.
Kevin Rose: It’s like, dude, you already worked there and they make you sign when you walk in, like, “Don’t fucking say anything or we’ll kill you.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Google X is like the Willy Wonka.
Kevin Rose: So I’m like seeing the Waymos before they even talked about them freaking 10 plus years ago, before it was even a thing. And so I saw all the crazy balloon projects and a couple others that they shuttered that I can’t even talk about. But I’m telling you, they’re sitting on tech that’s like five years out that don’t underestimate how many freaking PhDs they have working on this shit. You just can’t imagine what’s under the hood there.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, yeah.
Kevin Rose: So for me, I’m not a fan of like at this point when I think about investing into the future, and this is not investment advice, but when the Anthropics and the OpenAIs and the Googles, you name the top five, it’s kind of almost like what they said back in the day when they had the, what was the acronym they used for like Netflix, Google, what was the —
Tim Ferriss: It changes all the time.
Kevin Rose: But you know what I’m talking about.
Tim Ferriss: FANG?
Kevin Rose: FANG. Yeah. FANG was a thing and then there’s another one and there’s another one. You’re going to want to own like those five and you’ll sit back and you’ll be like, “Damn, if I’d only just owned Google, I’d be up 70 percent.” But you’re like, “Oh, you know what? In combination, I’m up 30 percent and the market’s doing 10 percent.” You’ll be stoked, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you sent me a graph. We can delete this if we need to.
Kevin Rose: Oh, the NASDAQ 100?
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, for you looking forward, because you bust my balls about some of the swings that I take, which is good. No, you should bust my balls.
Kevin Rose: I bust it because I’m like, “Tim, what are you optimizing for, dude? Another zero? You don’t need another zero on the bank accounts.”
Tim Ferriss: I get it, I get it, I get it. But I’m asking you, right? I mean, look, we’re all looking for the feeling of being alive. Part of the way I feel alive is by taking swings, right?
Kevin Rose: Fair. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: My question for you is, you’re not just going to do S&P 500. I find that hard to believe.
Kevin Rose: I dabble.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So if you were—
Kevin Rose: I’m like you. I bought Waymo stock and you got pissed at me because I didn’t offer you any.
Tim Ferriss: Such a prick. Keeps all the shiny stuff for himself. He’s a greedy little piglet.
Kevin Rose: I didn’t know you wanted it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you 100 percent know that I want it because I sent—this actually turned out pretty well. It’s part of the reason why I pulled the trigger on Google was it’s such a simple approach. I took five names, was it? It was like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Waymo, handful of other companies. And there was Vercel, Crusoe, a couple of others.
Kevin Rose: God damn it.
Tim Ferriss: And I sent this list out and I sent it to, I don’t know, five smart people I know who are very, very good investors and have good track records, across asset classes, and a few of them sent that to their technical analysts who specialize in different fields. And I was like—
Kevin Rose: That’s maybe when I gave you bad advice.
Tim Ferriss: But I was like—maybe, maybe not. And I was like, “You have 10 chips. Where do you put those 10 chips as a bet?” That’s it. No further guidance, no caveats, no explanation. And look, I’m not saying this is the most sophisticated investment thesis in the world, but you know that I wanted Waymo because it was on that list and it was one of the winners that came back in terms of if we are to believe the consensus of this small cohort.
Kevin Rose: And to be a fair, I offered you some of my own purchase and you turned me down.
Tim Ferriss: I may still take you up on it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, you’re gonna just wait till the six-months evaluation—
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Kevin Rose: “Hey, remember, brother? I think [inaudible] cost.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s on the news. I would love to revisit our conversation from earlier.
Kevin Rose: But I think for the average person listening, the good news is that these companies are going out soon, meaning they’re going to be publicly traded companies. They may seem very expensive and very pricey and you’d be right to say that. And so did Amazon when it went out in 2000.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, what was the market cap on Amazon IPO though?
Kevin Rose: It was like—
Tim Ferriss: It’s got to be tiny.
Kevin Rose: No, no, no. It’s not about market cap. It’s about price to earnings, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.
Kevin Rose: So I looked at the price—
Tim Ferriss: Well, now price to earnings will depend a lot — I mean, it’s going to be very different for OpenAI and Anthropic, right?
Kevin Rose: Well, what’s crazy is SpaceX is like 30 percent bump on price to earnings on the peak of Amazon. So SpaceX is like—did you invest in SpaceX or no?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I started investing in SpaceX like 10, 12 years ago.
Kevin Rose: Oh, you’re stoked.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, yeah, I’m fine. But the point, I would say here also, it’s like if you’re like, “Oh, I missed it because only the fancy people get to invest beforehand.” It’s like, no, I mean, SpaceX right now, I’m looking at the chart launched at 160, had this huge bump obviously, but then dropped down and you could have bought it for 156, 154, 153, and now it’s climbing back up. I mean, there’s a lot going on here. And honestly, I still find public equity investing terrifying because there’s so many sharks and there’s short sellers and derivatives and all this craziness going on. And what happens when it’s listed and put into these indexes and blah, blah, blah? All those dynamics are way beyond my capability.
Kevin Rose: That’s why I don’t do the day trading thing.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t do day trading.
Kevin Rose: No, I’m just saying, for example, SpaceX, I don’t have a position in SpaceX, but if I did, it would be to hold it for the next 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: Here’s a good takeaway. You’re asking what’s the takeaway from my 20-year analysis of the angel investing? It’s still incomplete. There’s a lot left to do and—
Kevin Rose: Shopify.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Well, that’s a good example, right? It’s like this is going to sound so dumb and, “Yeah, duh,” to so many people who are more just better investors than I am, but yeah, I mean, I’ve done pretty well. I think the decisions I made at the time to sell certain things were very logical given the information and my financial status at the time.
Kevin Rose: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Totally reasonable, right? So I don’t want to judge a good poker play based on where I am 20 years hence, that’s not reasonable. But the takeaway is like, you’ve got to let your winners run as long as possible.
Kevin Rose: 100 percent. I’ve lost more money by selling stocks early than I’ve ever probably made buying the original stock.
Tim Ferriss: And the other thing I would say also, for people listening who are like, “Oh, my God, if these one percenters are jerking each other off any longer, I’m going to vomit.” If you had just, and some very famous firm did this, maybe it was Sequoia or Benchmark, I can’t recall, but they looked at their gains from initial investment all the way through follow on rounds to IPO and then six months post. So after lockup for, let’s just keep it simple for all intents and purposes. And then they looked at what you would have gained if you bought at IPO and just held for like 10 years and you would have made as much or more if you would just bought as a retail investor.
Kevin Rose: Yep. I mean, that is the silver lining here, which is, I for some reason get fed all a lot of these Instagram videos and two of them that—
Tim Ferriss: You’re on Instagram so much. You send me so many fucking Instagram pics.
Kevin Rose: They’re funny though, right? I send some funny shit.
Tim Ferriss: You do.
Kevin Rose: But the interesting thing about it is so many times as individuals, and I’ve fallen into this trap as well, which is you find something that you love and you buy said object when you should actually buy the company. So let’s just pretend you’re going to spend $500 on an iPhone every year since it came out, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And there was this great woman that came in and she was like, “Okay, how do you just for the first four years of the iPhone coming out, rather than buy an iPhone—
Tim Ferriss: Put it into Apple.
Kevin Rose: —just put it into Apple.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.
Kevin Rose: And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And my buddy, sadly, I love you, Prager. David Prager, the second the Tesla came out, not the first one, but the one that was consumer friendly, he went out and he had made a little money and he’s like, “You know what? I’m going to do it. I’m going to splurge. I’m going to deck it out, spend a hundred grand on this thing.” And he got the freaking top of the line Tesla. We did the math for him because we’re bastards and it was like $15 million or something like that had he just invested in Tesla the second he loved the product.
But the moral of the story is like if you love something and this is going to happen over and over again for decades to come, if you’re like, “Hey, Claude is my shit. I use it every single day. I think it’s great because of X, Y, and Z.” And they go public, set it and forget it. Come in, whatever you can afford, I don’t care if it’s $100 or $1,000 or $100,000, it’s meaningful at the end of the day. I don’t know. That’s my reaction.
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s great advice. I mean, look, that’s part of the reason and I have gotten so much shit from this by some VCs, I won’t mention their names, who are just like, “What?” Because they’ve got their 30 slide, our proprietary investment thesis shit that they show pension funds and stuff, right? And I’m like, I just try to invest in stuff that I will use every day and it’s not true for everything, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, I’m not using them every day, SpaceX, outside of Starlink, but it’s like there are exceptions. But it’s like with something like this, where it’s like I am eating close to half of my protein calories every day of this stuff and I’m like, “I should just invest in the company.” It’s just like that is what makes sense. You know the first stock I ever bought? This was when I was like —
Kevin Rose: Dildonics. I mean, something you use every day.
Tim Ferriss: Teledildonics. Yeah. Can’t go wrong.
Kevin Rose: For people that don’t know what Dildonics is—
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’ll be another random show.
Kevin Rose: Show notes.
Tim Ferriss: Show notes. It was Pixar.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. My dad bought me some book on stock investing. Honestly, I couldn’t make any sense of it because it was getting into like price to earning and this and that, earning per share. And I was like, “Ah, I don’t really understand this.”
Kevin Rose: That’s so cool your dad bought you that book.
Tim Ferriss: It was cool.
Kevin Rose: That’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: It’s cool. It’s cool. It was his way of showing love. We can’t all do it the way necessarily people want to receive it. But in any case, the point of that was I loved comics. I tracked comics and animation and I saw Toy Story, number one, I even saw shorts and I was like, “That is the future.”
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I know that’s the future.
Kevin Rose: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: And when I was whatever, 15 or something, first stock, Pixar.
Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I have the original shareholder poster they mailed out.
Kevin Rose: No way. Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: Like Lasseter and Jobs and stuff.
Kevin Rose: Oh, dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for me it’s like, look at your credit card statement. Do you know what I mean? I mean, this is not investment advice. I’m just saying this is the way I personally approach it so informational purposes only, but it’s like, yeah, if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on like Amazon and Amazon Prime, it’s like, well, maybe, who knows?
Kevin Rose: Totally. I mean that’s—
Tim Ferriss: Are you going to be spending more or less on that in five years? Just forget about the market, forget about analysts, like you personally. Will you be spending more or less on this in three or five years time?
Kevin Rose: That’s exactly right.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’ll put something in the intro on, this is not investment advice, but it’s like this stuff, you don’t need to be a quant hedge fund manager.
Kevin Rose: And to be fair, when you look at Buffett’s portfolio and the things that he’s bought over the years, it’s the consumer staples and the things that we’re just like, he’s like, “Yes, more people will want and drink Coca-Cola in the future. It’s a fantastic brand. The margins are impeccable. It’s a well-run business. I know the CEO.”
Tim Ferriss: Not prone to disruption.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. In downturns, guess what? People still drink Coke.
Tim Ferriss: He’s also a clever bastard though. He’s been very good with his like, “Aw, shucks, aw, shucks, grandpa,” branding. He’s very good at that, but that dude is a stone-cold killer in terms of Geico is a cash machine and being the lender of first resort.
Kevin Rose: Smart as shit.
Tim Ferriss: When shit’s going sideways, people call Uncle Buffett and he’s like, “Sure, here’s my offer, take or leave.”
Kevin Rose: He’s so smart.
Tim Ferriss: But yes, very bright guy. What have we missed?
Kevin Rose: The only thing I would say is that—
Tim Ferriss: Teledildonics.
Kevin Rose: Yes, that. I relaunched if you want to learn about the latest tech and AI news, I relaunched Digg.
Tim Ferriss: You were showing me some numbers. That’s crazy.
Kevin Rose: It’s crazy. We went from 20,000 people a week using it to now we have close to 500,000 so it’s been growing quite a bit and it’s pulling across the entire zeitgeist of the web. So we’re like, we don’t want to start another social network. So we pulled from X and we’ve pulled from a few other feeds and we’ve been putting in like videos from YouTube and TikTok and others and it’s just been a fun little hobby. It’s a fun hobby and it’s like doing millions of pages a month and I’m proud of that. It’s awesome to see it working again. So it’s good.
Tim Ferriss: D-I-G-G.com.
Kevin Rose: D-I-G-G.com, @KevinRose on Instagram, and, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Sweet. What should I say? I guess tim.blog, you can find 1,000 plus blog plus. If you want to read about my cadaver on the table, my book sales as a result of AI, that is a crazy blog post. I don’t even know if you were aware of this.
Kevin Rose: No, I’ve not seen this.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. All format book sales—
Kevin Rose: Oh, I saw that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, isn’t it crazy?
Kevin Rose: Went down.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you look at the graph and it’s like stable annuity, stable annuity, stable annuity, very predictable. And then in 2013, because what happened in November 2022, ChatGPT 3.5, and you see a slip by negative 5 percent, then you see a slip by like, I’m making up these numbers, but they’re close, negative 28 percent, then it’s like negative 49 percent.
Kevin Rose: But it turns out you’re going to be okay.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll be fine. But no, no, but the implications are pretty interesting and now if we continue the pace in 2026 down like 67 percent.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: These are sort of compounding in the wrong direction, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not quite the right terminology to use, but you get it. So stuff to think about. People can check that out. If you search AI nonfiction, Tim Ferriss, that’s a blog post that’s actually a pretty interesting read, but on the less dystopian view, ultimately the message isn’t dystopian. Tim.blog, @TimFerriss on Instagram @Tferriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, on Twitter. But honestly, I’m not so active on the socials because I’ve deleted those from my phone for a couple of years. You’re listening to the podcast so I don’t have to sell the podcast. Oh, Five Bullet Friday, my diary.
Kevin Rose: Can you add one?
Tim Ferriss: Can I add one what?
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. It’s like six bullets.
Tim Ferriss: Well, every once in a while, if I’m lazy, there are, I’d say—
Kevin Rose: Four bullets?
Tim Ferriss: No, if I’m lazy and I’m like, “I don’t want to do it.” Because I still do this thing myself.
Kevin Rose: I gotta pee. I really gotta go.
Tim Ferriss: Hold on one sec. We’re almost done. Relax, you and your prostate.
Kevin Rose: No, it’s not the prostate. It’s the fact that you gave me tequila.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I gave you tequila. You were over served? Hold on a second. Just give me two fucking seconds, you old man. You old bastard. Now I’m going to make this really long.
Kevin Rose: No, don’t. Come on.
Tim Ferriss: So yeah, Five Bullet Friday. Every once in a while—you did this to yourself—turns into Six Bullet Saturday if I’m just not feeling it. But yeah, two million subscribers, it’s free, easy to unsubscribe. Tim.blog/Friday and that’s all I got.
Kevin Rose: All right.
Tim Ferriss: You want to go pee, old man?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I will.
Tim Ferriss: All right, good to see you, bud.
Kevin Rose: Good to see you. Love you brother.
Tim Ferriss: Love you too.
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