#838: The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello

0:00 Kev Kev, good to see ya. Tim Tim. Another episode of The Random Show. You look very dashing for people who can't see you. You have sort of hair slicked back. Jacket with wide open lapel.

0:15 A leading man from the outsiders that movie back in the day. You just need like A cigarette in your pocket. and some other goodies, but uh you're looking good. Looking good. You also have, as you disclosed to me, your secret weapon nearby, an Ikea light that is providing very

0:35 Seductive. Shadows and contours on your face. So I think we're both kinda hacking it together today. Yeah, today has been uh putting together the boxcar on the way down the hill, in a sense from an equipment standpoint. But here we are. Here we are. Now you asked me

0:53 To Grab Oh, a glass of wine, which I didn't I ended up grabbing a Class of

1:01 Jin. Caledonia Spirits Bar Hill Jin. For anybody who's curious, I do like my Jin, B A R R Hill. But This might surprise people, and it surprised me. Because last time we spoke, I think you had hit what was it, six months or however long it was.

1:20 Six months sober. So what Is unfolding before our very eyes. Well, what's unfolding is a glass of champagne. But uh I will say that I almost made it to seven months, but then I just decided my original goal was three months, then I made it to six. And you know, was I gonna continue to go on like this?

1:39 And I had hung out with some friends. We had a dinner in San Francisco and I thought, you know I'm gonna have a glass of Vino. I'm just gonna have a glass of wine because I don't want to make this There was a great book, uh you know the book Awareness, which you've recommended to me. It's one of my favorites. I have one of my many copies downstairs right now. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so Anthony DeMello, Jesuit Priest, correct? Is that right?

2:03 Jesuit priest who is also a psychotherapist who is Now since past, but Incredibly, incredibly compelling writing. I'm sure we'll get more into this. 'cause I listened to the audiobook you recommended, so we'll come back to that. Awesome. But All right.

2:19 Take us back to the story you're telling. So you're sitting there at dinner. Well, prior to that, I had re-listened to that book. And I got it on audio. And one of the things that hit me That he said in the book was I know what it was. Can I guess? Yeah, you do. Yeah, go for it.

2:34 That Abstinence or asceticism renunciation is as much a trap as Or can be as much a trap as anything else because it ties you, it binds you to the thing that you are abstaining from. Exactly right. That's exactly right. It makes it your lifelong enemy.

2:52 Yeah. And it binds you to it. And so you're like, Fuck it, YOLO, let's have some more. Well, I want to be bound to it, and I did that with a glass of wine. Yeah.

3:01 No, but Yeah, exactly. The plan was never to to be sober for life. It was to reevaluate my relationship with alcohol and get to a point where I could truly Say to anyone that asked, like the cravings have gone away.

3:17 And my goal going forward is something I just call the Two two two rule, which is Maximum of two drinks. And any given night. Never two days in a row.

3:28 And then two days a week. So just lightweight. That's kind of my new thing. And then also Special occasions. Like I want it to be about a celebration of something or a gathering it in some way that is meaningful. Not just because, you know, a football game's on or something. Yeah.

3:45 Well First I have more to say, but Cheers. I have my little Japanese mug full of bar Hel Gin. Cheers. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Like straight up gin? It's just straight gin. I didn't have any ice. You've inspired me to cut way back on my drinking, so I haven't really had much. I don't want to open a bottle of wine that I'm not gonna finish with friends or something. Yeah, I mean you'll finish gin, so I just grabbed what I had open, which will stay good for a long while once open, which was this gin. So I'm not gonna drink.

4:14 A full glass of gin. But I will have a sippers with you. I think we're both gonna be uh cheap dates maybe then, because we haven't drank in a while. We might get really sloppy really fast. Yeah. Very, very cheap dates. So Let me follow up on this story and the two two two plan. How are you intending if at all to catch yourself if you start slipping?

4:35 Do you have a people who you want to hold you accountable? Do you have Some type of calendar reminder in place. How do you keep an eye on that? Recognizing that you may very well be totally fine.

4:50 But given the history that you have, it seems like it'd be a good idea. To put some guardrails in there. I agree with you wholeheartedly if my issue with alcohol had been one of excess consumption in that like I was never a six or seven drink or even five drink person.

5:06 For me it was more consistency. So the one that is easier to catch is you wake up the next morning and you say, Okay, I'm just not drinking tonight because you're catching it in a sober state, which is huge. The big foul that I had over the last few years, you know, especially as you start with COVID. was just, you know, two drinks a night, maybe three. And just continuing that and taking like a day or two off a week. That was

5:28 That's not healthy as my liver enzymes would report back. But uh you know I'm not as concerned about that, but also, you know, I've talked to my therapist about this and She's amazing and she's like, Hey, I'm I'm gonna check in with you and just make sure that you're truly sticking to this. But I I think an accountability partner is absolutely a a necessity, especially when When it's been such a kind of staple of your life for decades. Yeah, for sure. And I think for you

5:53 One thing that immediately hops to mind, which seems super mundane, but I know you have a lot of anxiety around flying, and I don't think that flying counts as a special occasion. Right. So you'll need to Oh, it absolutely does. It absolutely does. Like that counts as especially you fly so much, though. We are in the air. Like we shouldn't be able to do that as humans. Like it is an amazing feat of engineering. Yeah, it's so yes, it's special. Tim, don't take this away from me, goddammit. All right. Well, this is my one thing.

6:22 I can- I'm gonna call that a yellow flag in the making. But I'm fine with one yellow flag. I do fly a bit. But

6:29 You know what's funny is when I came back from SFO when I w actually had that first drink, I didn't ha want a second drink on the plane. And it's honestly it's kind of that just like anxiety of the whole process of it all, the security and the the Packed jets and the people coughing next to you. And kinda once I get settled, I'm pretty good, unless it's international flight and I'm with friends. So yeah, I think it's the first drink actually goes a long way.

6:53 Yeah, on that note. First drink goes a long way, especially if it's just straight up gin. So where else should we segue? Because we can come back to this, but we have a lot to catch up on. There is so much to catch up on. Why don't we just go back and forth and just like have it be old school random show where everything's random, we have no idea what we're about to talk about. Yeah, let's go for it. So I'll share an update on my side, which Folks might find Interesting.

7:17 As you know and long term listeners know, I have been one way you could put it is an early adopter looking at bioelectric medicine. of different types, whether that is legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. By the way, there aren't many options that would fall in that category, interviewing people like Dr. Kevin Tracy, but also looking at most acutely Transcranial magnetic stimulation. So TMS. Which is a form of brain stimulation. I'll keep it simple. That has existed for decades, but there was an innovation by the very recently late Nolan Williams, sadly.

7:53 And others called accelerated TMS, where you basically take Something like fifty stimulations, like fifty different sessions, and you compress it into You know, one week. is opposed to doing it over the course of many months, and this type of dense

8:10 Dosing schedule produces some in many people incredible effects. And you saw me after my first experience. Uh Accelerated TMS. Which was with the device. called MagVenture device. It uses neurotargeting. So you need a resting state, FMRI, and so on to determine where they're actually going to

8:30 place this stimulation depending on your condition and your own individual neuronatomy and activity. So if it's depression, they might point it in one direction or in one place. If it's anxiety or O C D, they might point it somewhere else. And I effectively had Let's just call it. eight or nine out of ten kind of resting state generalized anxiety. Was this self reported, meaning like when you went in there to get the resting state scan? Were you like, hey, I'm coming in here with E D and general anxiety. I need you to treat this for me. Did you say

9:04 Yeah, yeah. I mean I know it's an issue. But I we can cut this if you want. Nice. Nice, very very cute. No, but I'm joking aside, like how did you how did you determine the areas? Did you have to tell them like this is what I'm coming in to treat? Oh, for sure. Well they'd run you through They do interviews. And assessments that are qualitative, let's just say, asking you what your symptoms are. Why are you coming here in the first place? Then they would dig into the details and then they would run you through.

9:40 various standardized tests or assessments. So you might have the modrus, you might have the ham D you might have the Y box, they're different. assessments that are accepted as standardized for Diagnosing, say O C D. or any number of other psychiatric conditions. And then

10:00 you get an FMRI. So you get this scan of your brain, which I did at I think it was Mass General in uh Massachusetts, as you would guess. And based on that, they can do some precision targeting. And Just to give people the upshot of that, I did five days of stimulations. And that gave me basically three to four months.

10:24 Of effectively a zero on a scale of zero to ten. of generalized anxiety. So from that point forward, effectively no anxiety. The rumination, the kind of anxious Mental loops that I would get involved with late at night that would then in turn affect my sleep and cause onset insomnia, et cetera. That went to zero for a period of, say, three to four months, which blew my mind.

10:52 Just out of curiosity, were you tracking Aura data and whatnot? So you could see kind of the impact of this as measured by different devices? I wasn't looking at Aura. At that point in time I have been tracking with Aura, at least for the last three to four weeks. And so I'm gonna be taking a closer look at things like HRB and so on. In terms of trending, but the upshot of it is

11:13 And I'll try to compress this a little bit, but that first time I did accelerated TMS. I had this incredible effect, much more durable in terms of its intensity of effect and relief. than even any psychedelic therapy. or psychedelic assisted therapy that I've looked into and those were effectively the ended up being the two modalities with the greatest

11:37 effect size on the psychiatric conditions that I was most personally interested in and where I funded a lot of early stage science. Unfortunately, when I then went to do boosters. to do shorter duration, two or three days. Nothing happened. My symptoms started creeping back in, which seemed to be hereditary, just to put that out there. I recognize objectively, I'm like, there isn't really Anything I should be.

12:01 So anxious about. I recognize that very clearly. None the less I get caught in these sort of O C D slash G A D generalized anxiety disorder loops. And I see that in family members. So it seems to be somewhat Genetic. In any case, none of these boosters worked. And then I was like, Fuck, this is terrible. Okay, well, let me go back and do the full five days. Full five days didn't do anything. Then I was looking back at the calendar. and trying to identify anything that might have

12:31 Correlated or preceded the first treatment that helped make it work. And I did see that I'd spent a few weeks in the Amazon. ending about two weeks prior to that treatment. So since I was ingesting plants of various types that are known to induce some degree of neuroplasticity, I I thought, well, it could be that it was a Plasticity issue. Sort of a preconditioning that helped that first session. So I tried to replicate that using psilocybin and did another five days. Null effect. Didn't have any effect. And

13:06 was starting to feel really hopeless about this, but then came across Some research. that this is gonna sound pretty wild and this is definitely early, early, early stages. So To my knowledge, I am maybe one out of fewer than a hundred people who have

13:23 Been one of the first monkeys shot in the space. Doing this specifically for Anxiety. It has been applied to more people with depression, but decided to try

13:35 Simultaneous. Dosing. with something called D cyclocerin in parentheses D C S. So Dyclocerin, D hyphen, C Y C L O S E R I N E is very, very interesting. So it is an antibiotic that historically has been used to treat tuberculosis and urinary tract infections.

14:00 But it is also now being studied, and for the last several years, people have been looking at this as a cognitive enhancer for treating various neuropsychiatric conditions. Wow. Now how they figured this out, I'm not sure. I mean, it could have been working backwards through the purported mechanism of action. So decyclocine. has been looked at in conjunction with, say, CBT, like cognitive behavioral therapy. and all sorts of different things. And Part of what people believe makes it.

14:33 effective as an amplifier of effects, although there can be side effects and sometimes the pendulum swings the other direction, is that it is a partial agonist. at the glycine binding site of the NMDA. Glutamate receptor. Now, ketamine also works on N MDA receptors, but it's an antagonist. So it's very different in that respect. But I will again try to cut to the punchline. So instead of doing five days. I did one day.

15:02 Just one day of Basically. A stimulation every hour on the hour for 10 hours. And pre-loaded with a lozenge that you just let them melt in your mouth with this decyclocarium.

15:16 And it worked. One day. It had some side effects. I had insomnia for about two weeks. Which seems to happen in some patients who have undergone this. Some people have really bad insomnia for like a month and then it goes away. And I was willing to take that risk. There's some other things that can crop up like Temporary loss of some fine motor control and some other weird stuff. Jesus tinnitus in some people. Wow, with the just the treatment in general.

15:41 The papers that you're signing that say this may happen. Yeah, I mean with any of the stuff you're writing. your life away with some psychiatric. But frontier stuff, yeah. Yeah, but the point That I'm trying to make here in a pretty long

15:55 Winded Way is number one. It worked. So that leads me to believe that the original hypothesis that it was around neuroplasticity, so I needed to like warm up the Play Doh before it could be molded properly. Could be Accurate.

16:09 That could be true. Secondly And this is incredibly important. Most people I know who are really busy, or most people who can't afford it can't take five days off of work. They can't take a week off of work. to do this treatment.

16:26 No matter how bad their symptoms might be. And the fact that this Dcyclocerane, like DCS. Enhanced treatment? Was able to be compressed into a single day, I feel like it opens up. The multitude of people who can potentially use this.

16:44 Tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, who knows? And it should also At the same time, really decrease the cost. So it's made me even more bullish around accelerated TMS. And it's been I'd have to go back and look, maybe a month, six weeks, but it's still sticking, which is remarkable. So Hm. In any case, for people who want to hear more, they can listen to my podcast with Nolan Williams that goes into a lot of detail.

17:08 around this, but very exciting stuff. It turns out a lot of these things might be interrelated and that certain types of TMS, when implemented properly, actually seem to also stimulate the vagus nerve in some interesting ways. So This is kind of the next frontier that I'm most interested in exploring right now is bioelectric medicine. Sort of computer chips.

17:31 Over. Pells. Yeah. So on I I think it allows you in some respects to get much more targeted. So that's good news for me, but I think it's also obviously at the edges of medicine right now, but I think that in the next two to three years, I could see this becoming A much more accessible

17:48 therapeutic for millions of people. And there's some companies you can watch. I mentioned one. Mag Venture or Mag Ventures. The other is called Brainsway and they're actually a very small company, but publicly traded. And I'm sure they're gonna be more entrance. So super exciting stuff. But now I feel like I have

18:09 A recipe worth trying to replicate. Where maybe once a quarter, maybe twice a year. Depending on when I think it's a when, not if I see Symptoms start to creep back in. I don't think this is a one and done.

18:23 nor is any psychedelic assisted therapy that I'm aware of. So I expect it'll be some type of ongoing treatment that I do. one to four times per year. Yeah. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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21:06 I When you think of the you know, potential in of one. inability to replicate this again in others. I know you put a lot of cash personally into, you know, philanthropic things around research and studies. Are you curious to push on these buttons and see can you put together a trial with Fifty people and what's your thoughts there?

21:27 Yeah, I would Definitely be interested in finding more Research the brain stimulation lab at Stanford. I've already funded some research within. Very sadly, Nolan Williams, who helped develop a lot of these technologies. Died. I I mean I wanna say it was

21:43 A month or two ago by suicide, very sadly. Oh jeez. And he was a friend. And Really heartbreaking.

21:53 To see and I mean, it's hard to put that aside for the moment, but putting it aside for the moment, I did fund research within that lab. I suspect that's gonna take time to implement, particularly given the leadership vacuum that was created by his very, very tragic death. But I am interested in finding more research. And this is an ongoing thing, as you know. My my foundation, the Si Found, is funded All sorts of on the edge research.

22:23 Since 2015 or so, I would say. So this is for sure where I would like to fund more research, particularly looking at these combinations. And that could be Something like D cyclusarine plus stimulation. And at certain clinics they have cohorts of say sixty I think it's at the time that I did it, there were sixty patients who had been treated for

22:49 some form of anxiety disorder with this combination. I think that's At least at that particular clinic on the depression side, the numbers are larger, probably 200 or so. But It's exciting. It's exciting. I mean, that's enough to get a signal. And sure you need to

23:08 check all the boxes and do the randomized placebo controlled studies with Multiple arms and all that, but it is enough to start to see a signal. Especially when you have treatment resistant cases that haven't responded to other things. And that's enough to inform at least the design of a study that would take much longer. So we'll see. I will say that

23:31 Much like Some people experience with GLP one. Agonists like Truzepit, Munjaro, or Mozempek or whatever. After these treatments and maybe it's just from Really

23:44 putting the brakes on a lot of the O C D like circuitry that I had much less desire to over consume caffeine, to overconsume alcohol. It made dialing all of those things back a lot easier. You know that's a massive benefit of GLP ones for a lot of people. Which is huge. Well dude, I'm pumped for you, man. It's like I'd love to see you getting some relief here. That's even if just for a few months and it

24:10 That's fantastic. It's repeatable. Yeah. Yeah, so fingers crossed, we'll see. And for people who want to learn more, I I would suggest they start with the as eerie as it might be my conversation on the podcast with Nolan Williams. All right, man. You're up. Right.

24:25 Speaking of brain related things. I was at a dinner with a friend. And I was Kind of lamenting and and talking about just my inability to remember Faces, names, and then how that extended into childhood for me, which was

24:40 Doing poorly on tests and just I couldn't quite retain the information. The way that My friends could I just could never explain it. And somebody at dinner, my buddy Mal, said to me, Do you have aphantasia? And I said, I have no idea what that is.

24:59 And then he said, Okay, I want you to close your eyes right now. And this is gonna blow some people's minds right now. I know close your eyes and picture an apple in your mind's eye. You know, picture an apple. What do you see? Do you see A red apple, do you see

25:15 Water droplets on it. Does it look fresh? Does it look Like an H D image. And that's what he said to me. I go What are you talking about? And he goes, Well, what does it look like to you? And I go, There's no apple.

25:27 He goes, What do you mean there's no Apple? And I said, Well, there's kind of like an outline, kind of ghosty, foggy thing, maybe ish. And he goes, Oh, you have aphantasia. And I was like immediately jumped like, you know, whatever, chat GPT. And I had no idea.

25:41 that people suffer from this condition, and it's in the low single digit percentage of people, and they have no idea that this is a thing. You cannot picture something in your mind's eye. Had you heard of this before or no? No, I hadn't uh until you dropped it in one of our Group kind of friend text threads. This was

26:01 I guess a couple of weeks ago. But Fantasia is spelled like the Disney movie, but actually no, that would be with an F. It's A Fantasia. A P H A N T A S I A. Yeah, is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images. first described in eighteen eighty. Mm-hmm. So you knew this was like when you close your eyes, what do you see? Because they give you a scale there. And a five is like an HD. full on beautiful apple.

26:27 What do you see? Do you see perfect quality Apple? So Aphantasia can be uh considered the opposite of hyper fantasia. I am the exact opposite. I have Hyper. visual

26:41 recall and the ability to Visualize. I can probably draw The vast majority of restaurants or the floor plans that I've ever visited.

26:52 I can absolutely spec it out. And have very, very vivid. Visualization. So I would be on the far other end of the spectrum. So when you think of a new idea, do you see it? In some ways.

27:07 Because I feel it. You are very similar to my friend Mike, because I remember Mike and I have a lot of shared flight time with psychedelic experiences, and he was describing how He has almost no visual imagery and it's almost purely kinesthetic for him. And that is as hard for me to imagine as it is for him to imagine my experience, which is overwhelmingly. Explosively visual.

27:33 What's crazy, dude, is how many things I thought were jokes. Like When people said they counted sheep before they went to bed. I was like, Oh, that's funny. Like, yeah, but like I what do you count numbers in your head? But I didn't know they see sheep. Ha ha I didn't know in if you're younger, mute the podcast for ten seconds.

27:52 I didn't know this bank bank was a real bank. Like you could visit. I didn't even know that was a thing. Ha ha I seriously. It's not a bank with like tellers and your head. You can open up the box and go back and like see that sh I can't see any of that!

28:12 Ha. Ha ha ha. My buddy from Dignation Podcast was like after we stopped recording, he's like, You gotta be kidding me, so you can't go back and like look at like, you know People you've dated in the past during intimate moments and see revisualize that. I'm like, No, I have no idea what you're talking about.

28:29 He's like, Oh, he felt so bad for me almost like Was almost starting to cry for me. It's horrible. Well what do you think you have, if anything kind of developed in compensation. Yeah.

28:44 Well The one thing that I have never been able to explain is that The feeling side of it. Everything is a feeling. So I have a friend of mine and I'm not this way, but she composes music and she said that she sees in her head music is represented as colors. So when I come up with ideas for projects.

29:02 I'm not seeing something, I'm traversing kind of a a feeling of a path. Rather than a visual thing. And so it's a lot more on It's funny you mentioned the fear of flying. I think part of the reason why I have a such a vivid fear of flying is I that feeling comes so strong of the plane crashing, not that I see the plane crashing. Yeah so it's just a different thing. But

29:23 I wouldn't trade that for the world. That has served me quite well in investing and seeing around corners early and things of that nature. But when I explain that to people, like you feel a new idea There's been a bunch of people that have no idea what I'm talking about. And something they can. I think you can probably have both, but New ideas come from

29:41 Um rising of feeling, not uh not visual, if that makes sense. Wild. I mean it doesn't really make sense to me, but it would make sense to my friend Mike. And Thinking about all this and hearing about your friend who I think you said C's musical notes as colours. That's often referred to as synesthesia. And there's a really amazing little book that I read ages ago. It's been around.

30:06 For a long time. I'm looking at it right now. It was published in 1987, but it's uh 192 pages. Anyone who's interested in memory and mind and the fast differences between people might be interested in this. It's called the mind of a nemanist, I think is how it's pronounced, like mnemonic device. M-N-E-M-O-N-I-S T. A little book about a vast memory. Author's name is AR, those are initials, A. R. Luria. L-U-R I A And the description's very short, so I'll just read it. This study explores the inner world of a rare human phenomenon, a man who is endowed with virtually limitless powers of memory. From his intimate knowledge of S, the name is gained from conversations and testing over a period of almost thirty years.

30:51 A. R. Luria is able to reveal in rich detail not only the obvious of S's astonishing memory, but also his surprising weaknesses, his crippling inability to forget, his pattern of reacting passively to life, and his uniquely handicapped personality. Fascinating, fascinating book. that I really recommend to people. But Fantasia. Who knew? You know who I should talk to is uh Josh Waitskin,'cause he didn't he say that he feels chess. And for people that don't know, he was the guy that was based on the movie uh Searching for Bobby Fisher. Yeah, Searching for Bobby Fisher was originally a book and then a movie which was based on the

31:26 Childhood. chess prodigy chapters of Josh Waitskin's life. And Josh hates that term prodigy. He has some unusual hardware, to be sure. But he also has a really incredible framework that he's applied to now four or five different fields to become World class in all of them.

31:46 But he does have a feeling. about certain things. So he was playing one of the stories that he told has told me is he was playing a simulation Which means he was playing I don't know what the number was. Twenty to forty people simultaneously, where he's walking around a room and

32:02 Oh yeah, you do it really fast, right? You just look and he's he's just moving from table to table really quickly. And I think it was with some like very high level high school players. Something like that. Maybe they were younger, I can't recall. But he was going around, he's playing twenty or thirty simultaneous games in his head. And then at one point he explained it as it feels like you're juggling twenty or thirty balls in the air. And then he got to one table and he felt all the balls come crashing to the ground. My God. And he said it felt

32:34 As though I just missed a ball and they'd all fallen on the ground. And he couldn't quite figure out why that was the case. And then he was able to deduce that one of the kids had cheated. One of the kids had moved a piece. And it was just a gut feeling and then that visual. That allowed him to

32:53 figure out which of the kids had cheated. People can even do that. Yeah. Josh. Yeah, if you want to listen to Josh Witskin's first ever podcast. You were podcast episode number one and he was podcast episode number two, if I remember. That's amazing. Yeah. Wild character. Oh man.

33:11 Let's see. All right, you're up. I'm up. Well You know, I'll give another sort of medical one that I think is interesting and I've been Texting and interacting with Matt Walker.

33:22 a lot on this. Matt is a scientist. He wrote a book, Why We Sleep. And is about as credible as you can be within the world of sleep science. He's the best. And he's a great human. Fantastic. He's a great guy. Great guy. Has the most pleasing dulset tones with that British accent and Kind lilt in the voice. Yeah. Plus ten or twenty IQ points with the accent. But

33:51 His podcast is also excellent. And we can link to it in the show notes, but He did an episode on a class of sleep medication called Dora's. And D-O-R-A stands for dual orxin receptor antagonists and The reason that Dora's became very interesting to me is

34:10 Is that I have Alzheimer's in my family. And it's left, right, and center for me right now because I have three relatives currently diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Holy shit. And these are Apo E four negative folks.

34:24 It includes APOE four negative, folks. So we won't get too far into the genetics, but people who should not be Based on that particular Parameter should not be particularly inclined to Alzheimer's, nonetheless have Alzheimer's. And then there are, of course, people who have three, four I don't think any of them are APOE three three. I am APO E three four. So compare it to a three three, then at least as I understand it would predispose me, say two point five times.

34:53 You and my wife and Ronda Patrick and a Tia too actually is a three four. Yeah, there you go. All of you guys. I'm the only one that's not. Crazy. So In effect To our

35:04 Current understanding. you want to mitigate the accumulation of two things. One is beta amyloid plaque, another is tangles That are created by Cao proteins. And

35:16 Sleep is really imperative for this. And if you have sleep issues, as I have for decades, the onset insomnia. low percentage of deep sleep. Etc. you're effectively unable to have your garbage service within the brain.

35:33 Clear out these at a rate that offsets the accumulation. And by the way, we don't know if these are causal, right? There's never been any conclusion whether these are causal. They're most likely the protective effects of something else gonna wry. Do you agree with that? I would say that based on our best understanding, if you can mitigate the accumulation of these things, there seems to be a at the very least delaying

35:56 of the progression of these diseases. And there are different drugs and fusions like Denonimab and so on that are kind of predicated on that understanding of of the mechanism. This is still early days in the world of Alzheimer's, but it seems very defensible with our understanding currently that The less of the stuff you accumulate, the better off you are. Do you uh follow Dale Bredison's work, by the way? I don't. Let's come back to that. Okay. Let me just quickly tie this up and say that an example of Adora would be Belsamra. There are many others, or I should say a handful of others, but I

36:32 have taken as I believe you have either tr well actually no, it was too strong. Yeah, that's right. You gave me the belsomera. I gave you a bunch of balsamera, and you were gonna give me some other shit back, and you never gave me anything good. Well, hold on, hold on. That's still pending, but let me let me come back. So you gave me the balsamra, but I started using it. I was gonna get it on a prescription. It's expensive as fuck. Yeah, I paid a shit ton for it and then I didn't use it.

36:55 Yeah, and I was like, All right, I'll take your bell summer. But the Trazodon I got off of Trasidone and switched as a sleep medication to In this case Belsamra, because it was literally Down the street in an Uber at your house, not recommending you use your friends Like

37:12 Drugs, by the way. Talk to your doctor, but we also have physicians that are looking at all our shit. So it's not Yeah. Yeah. I have been now on Belsimer for a few months. As hopefully A it's too strong to say it's a preventative strategy, but at least a delay strategy for

37:30 potentially Alzheimer's and other uh associated neurodegenerative conditions. So I would encourage people and I'll link to this in the show notes to check out Matt Walker's podcast on this specifically. You know what they did with Belsomer where they tap the spines of people that took it and they noticed there were less tau in the proteins in the spinal fluid? Yeah, they cleared a lot more. I mean, I think it was they looked at animal models and then they looked at humans. And in that Podcast episode also. Matt discusses data related to comparing, say, Belsomra or I should say Dora's

38:01 to ambient. And not all sleep medications are created equal. A lot of sleep medications effectively sedate you. But in the case of Dora's A rexin, as I understand it, is a wakefulness.

38:17 I think it's a hormone. But This is effectively inhibiting wakefulness as opposed to sedating. And By using that particular approach, you're able to create more naturalistic sleep. So it's preserving sleep architecture, increasing certain things like REM sleep. In any case it's very interesting because as it stands, look, sure. Exercise

38:42 For a natural lease of cloth, though. Watch your diet. Blah blah blah. There are a handful of things here. Sleep. Super critically important. Uh if we're talking about again staving off

38:54 hopefully neurodegenerative disease, but there really just aren't that many tools in the toolkit. So to come across some of this data via Matt Walker was very eye opening to me. That's awesome. That's also something that I'm looking at really closely. I will say the scariest test I have done.

39:11 In my life was about three months ago I went and had my blood work done and had the towel. Before like they can check your blood now to see if you are producing We're always producing it. But if you are out of bounds, meaning you're above the norm in your production of these types of proteins. And if you are It's like You know, ninety nine percent chance you're on the path to some form of dementia, right?

39:33 And Did you do that test? I have just done a whole battery of different tests. Uh Did you do the P T Al one though? Yeah, I'm gonna have all that stuff. So I will scary dude. I when you come hang with me, we'll have a drink or something. Um I'm looking at all my results in probably two or three weeks because I have a few online batteries that I'm gonna do assessments. It is absolutely terrifying because

39:58 The doctor was like, Hey, do you want to do this? I have this available and I was like, Sure, go ahead. And then like three days afterwards, I'm like, I should look up what that test is all about. And I did there's like three of them now that can detect these various proteins that are essentially if you have elevated levels, like your marching orders or you're heading towards some type of dementia. And I realized that and I was like, wow, if this comes back positive. This is an emergency situation where High intensity interval training every single morning for an hour. Like there's a lot of things you have to get into.

40:27 And it's a very frightening thing. It's a very frightening thing. Yeah, it can be super frightening. And there's certain other things that I think are just holistically good for my particular goals, cognitive

40:43 psychological physical like the ketogenic diet, right? I've recently did a podcast with David Bazuki, the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, and He and his wife have a foundation that is one of the large it is the largest funder of science related to metabolic therapies with a particular focus on ketogenic. therapy. So I will be doing

41:06 All of December. In ketosis as an example. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, just to keep that metabolic machinery. Humming. Because I do think it's

41:17 plausible that it could help long term with a lot of the stuff we're talking about. So Tim, real quick just to put a bow on this, I Dale, yes. So the reason I like Dale, Dale's a uh a scientist that studies all forms of dementia. He has a book called The End of Alzheimer's. You've probably heard of that book. It's pretty popular. I've come across his name. Yeah. Yeah, so

41:35 He's a little bit different than most of the scientists out there where he believes that Alzheimer's and these other dimensions are they're they're not just A kind of one size fits all one thing went wrong, but it can be a suite of different things that go wrong that lead you down this path. And so it's metabolic disorder, it's potential toxins. It's like, you know, I think he's like the f four major contributors to different various forms of dementia. And he's developed this protocol that. Can stabilize and even reverse a lot of this early cognitive decline if you catch it early enough.

42:06 And it's a little bit of like throwing the whole kitchen sink at it because the it's everything. And he's not quite sure exactly what is doing the fix here. But it's fascinating the research that he's done. I highly recommend Two things that stood out to me that he recommends is one getting this P Tau test done on the blood front and also recommends the ketogenic diet. This kid die is huge for people, and he's seeing that alone.

42:29 stabilize people from mental decline. And not that they're not eventually going to get it. But the point is like do you want to go into full decline within five years, or do you want it to be fifteen years? Right. And so that's kind of what he's his lab's focused on. Cool. Yeah, I'll check'em out. I mean I've seen not that this is a necessarily sustainable or

42:50 scalable approach, but with some of my relatives with Alzheimer's where it's pretty progressed and they tend to give No one word answers. Or get confused and give the wrong answer to questions. Giving them say

43:05 Thirty five milliliters of Exogenous ketones, so they're not ink ketosis. They're following The terrible diet they've always followed, but Give them thirty five milliliters of kinda high octane.

43:16 exogenous ketones before going for a walk and within thirty minutes They're speaking in full sentences. It's wild. You see some really wild temporary But nonetheless very interesting transformations, which comes back to what you said about metabolic syndrome and

43:33 There are good reasons why some folks refer to Alzheimer's as type three diabetes. A hundred percent. And that's what he says in his book, is like that is definitely a contributor. Like excess glucose levels and all the downstream inflammation effects that come from that. It's bad news bears, as you like to say. Bad news bears.

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46:18 Back to the episode. All right, Kevin, what you got? I'm a technologist and we've talked about some of that stuff on the show before, so I kinda wanna give people A quick little update on the state of the union around all things

46:32 AI. Yeah, please. I could use it too. Yeah, it's it's it's just such a fascinating time in that Every I'd call it four to eight weeks, maybe a slight bit longer, sometimes less so.

46:46 We're seeing leapfrogs in what is possible. And one of the things that I would caution people against is forming an opinion about AI and then locking yourself in time. Around that opinion. Like I'll give you a a great kind of practical example. I have a lot of engineers that said, Hey, I tried AI for coding. It was horrible. And my first question is when did you try it? And they said, Oh, three months ago and I'm like No You don't understand

47:10 It's three to four times better than it was three months ago. Right. And so we have to make sure that even if you Or looking at some of these technologies and say, Hey, it can't do X, or it's horrible, it's hallucinating in this way, it's giving me the wrong answer. This is Without a doubt.

47:27 The massive Motorola block phone version of the iPhone. Like we are in that realm. Of AI. Like this is the very first innings of it all. And every few months, I mean, even the Opus four five came out. Three, four days ago or whatever, or it's amazing.

47:43 Explain what that is. When you think about frontier models, meaning like Do you have the bigs, Anthropic, you've got Google, you've got you know open AI. And then I'd throw a couple others in there, Meta's kinda trying in some sense and perplexity and whatnot, but When you think about the big

48:00 Massive models that are running That are at the bleeding edge of all this, meaning they are the best of the best, the most expensive per query. What happens is they have to train this data sets. And then they go in and they eventually release a model, right? And these are typically marked by software versioning numbers like you know, chat GPT three versus chat GPT four versus chat GPT five. And then they'll do five one, five two, or you know, four one, four two, whatever. So it's like software kind of versioning on these models.

48:28 And whenever you see a new release You're talking a jump in terms of both Sometimes the capacity to understand information and they call that like the token context windows. And then also their just natural built in abilities of the things that they can do well. And so some things they can do at a graduate level now, some things they can do, you know, their novel ideas is still pretty low down the chain in terms of what they can do around original thinking.

48:55 But they have all these benchmarks. They have you know probably fifteen or twenty different benchmarks that they run it against, like can it complete the bar exam is one, right? And so now they're able to do it. And then now it's the question is how quickly can they do it in, right? Did it take them twenty five minutes before? Now it's five minutes. So then there's a bunch of inference side of of benchmarking as well. So We're seeing Gemini three came out just a couple of weeks ago and it was fantastic. And I will say that, you know, I called the NVIDIA on here way back in the day. It was one point eight

49:27 trillion. I think back in the day when I said, Hey, I think this is gonna run when you and I were talking about it. And it did because I knew GPUs were just gonna be the most precious commodity we have and t as technologists. I have seen That Google now.

49:44 is in the driver's seat here. Okay and I'm really excited for them. Because one, you know, I worked at Google, they acquired one of my companies, and I spent a few years there, and I've seen inside the bell of the beast, and I will tell you that. They were built for this. Day and age.

50:01 The fact that they've been training their entire life for this moment. Like they have All of the PhDs and all of the folks that they need to go pull this off. across the entire suite. And so what do I mean by the entire suite? And this is where it gets really interesting to I'm like If you think about what open AI has to do to compete.

50:19 They have to go and buy up as much data center space as possible and they have to buy a shit ton of GPUs from NVIDIA. That's what they need because they don't own the stack. They own The software, the training, the engineering, the soft goods side of the business, but they don't own the hardware side. This is a fantastic Really interesting stat.

50:36 When Gemini Three came out. A couple weeks ago. It was the first time they had trained a frontier model, like the best of best. When it dropped, it was the best model in the world. Exclusively. on Google Chips.

50:51 So they have these chips called TPUs. Tensor processing units. They have the full stack, dude. They don't even need NVIDIA. It's wild. They didn't use an NVIDIA chip to train their AI and they have world class AI.

51:06 So It's just really exciting. This is such a fun time to be alive. Because right now You can take someone that is a Technologists in the sense that they have a

51:17 a rough understanding of the available tech that's out there. And you could build and produce and ship any app that you want. Within a few days. Now with what we have. And it's just gonna get better and better. So the creativity and the shipping unlockments that we're about to see over the next five years. It's going to be unlike anything we've ever seen before. If you have the idea.

51:37 For an app. Or product. Or service anything digital. You will be able to take it from ideation and you know Drawing it on a piece of paper.

51:46 to actual shipping something to your customers within You know To call it less than a week. Which is just Never been done before at a price.

51:55 That is I don't know. Five hundred dollars? Right. And so If Tim wanted his own app

52:01 Five years ago, I'd have been like, Okay, great, you want the Tim Ferris uh fan site. Slash E D help app. Then you could eat it to build that. To build that. Would be fifty grand, right? I feel like you and I I feel like you have a problem you with that we need to talk about. You just

52:17 Yeah. After that half a glass of champers, I feel like number one. We needed to talk about your relationships because one of the things that whenever I get on Whenever we do a random show, people are always like

52:33 They send me message and they're like I love How you give to him shit, number one. And number two, we want to hear more about his personal life. And I know you've got a new special someone in your life, which I'm very excited for. Yeah, we can talk about that. Let's jump into that now that we cover Google. That's uh I wanna ask you. For A counterpoint.

52:53 on a previous I wouldn't call it necessarily a prediction, but We talked about I think it was in the last episode of the random show. A bit about venture capital and I wouldn't say that you said across the board venture capital would be dead because there are Capital intensive businesses that require hardware and build out and

53:14 wet labs and all this stuff. But I'm wondering if I Just put on my Future vision. Goggles, which I wish I had, but let's just pretend I do.

53:24 And I look forward Doesn't need to be five years, right? Look forward two years, and what you are describing is a reality. The Barrier to entry. The hurdle is so low.

53:36 That suddenly from ideation to product takes a week. Yes. And there is an absolute glut this just overwhelming tsunami of products. So now on the positive side Yes. What would have cost people

53:52 millions and millions of dollars to do. 10 years ago, let's say 15 years ago, suddenly AWS and rentable infrastructure comes along, that cost goes down. Now AI comes along. Cost further goes down. Sure. But I imagine the war for attention is going to get so incredibly expensive. Do you think that products that get traction will nonetheless

54:18 If they don't have the income stream to support it. raise venture capital purely for marketing war chest and customer acquisition. I'm just wondering if you think You could make the argument that the customer acquisition costs are going to get or user acquisition costs are going to get so high because everyone You're gonna have a hundred X the number of bidders. Now, who knows what the form will be. I don't know if it'll be Google AdWords, maybe it'll be something else.

54:43 What are your thoughts? There's a couple of things there. The best products I've ever invested in Period full stop have been ones that don't rely upon paid acquisition to grow. So they've come up with something that is unique and novel enough to where word of mouth is their number one driver. That said capital and deployed the right way.

55:01 you know, and spent the right way around ad purchases are is just fuel for the fire, which is great. And so V C is dead in the sense that The seed round. was like okay I have a kind of idea ish.

55:14 I'm gonna go out and take three million dollars and I'm gonna give away twenty percent of my company. What happens in the future is not that you don't need that capital, because I think you're right, you will need it for a variety of things. Like if you're hitting insane scale, there will be moments where you need to put More warm bodies and seats to help you do all the things. And you may need to raise venture. But the difference is

55:35 When you have product market fit. You go from raising and selling twenty percent of your business for three million dollars. to selling twenty percent of your business for fifteen million dollars. Yeah. just fantastic for the entrepreneur. So it's not that venture is dead. It's just that what we're gonna see is the entrepreneur is in control like they've never been before, which is fantastic. And

55:57 If they say okay. I'm off to the races and things are going so well. But guess what? I'm actually charging for my products and I'm break even. You don't ever have to raise V C. And then now you own a hundred percent of the business and you're a Jason Freed.

56:10 Which we know is one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that invented SAS. That just is never taken any external investment. And you're just happy and and you don't report to anyone, which is a beautiful thing as well. So do you think it's just like the killing fields for early stage folks and the value Capture just gets pushed to later later stage.

56:29 Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it largely on just tech that is understandable by AI, meaning If you're running type script or any of these languages that AI can figure out and write qu high quality code for. You just don't need to raise capital. You can do it nights and weekends on your own. Yeah. Amazing.

56:48 Okay, so if you had to is it fair to say if you had to bet on one horse In the AI race that you would bet on Google? And then I have a follow up question. Oh wow. Uh now I know a little bit too much behind the scenes. If you had no stake in any companies Yeah.

57:05 How would you Well I never answer like that. I would always give you the the true answer, even if I know I'm just gonna I gotta say it. But Yeah, where would you put Like first, second, third bet. Hm. Well

57:18 At these valuations I wouldn't put a single dollar into the top Three or five. Largely because what are you gonna do? Is Google gonna three X maybe in the next 10 years? Well, also it remains to be seen how much AI cannibalizes their current. Money printing machine. In terms of

57:36 Search and sponsored ads. I'm less worried about that because they own The largest distribution platform on earth, which is Android. And so they will find a way in there. And then also I think if Google had to pick their poison and say, Okay, you can either base the future business off

57:54 A twenty five dollar a month pro subscription to Gemini. Or a free account that is just ad driven. You know, I think they'll take that hybrid model all day long. Yeah, that's a good point. Interesting.

58:06 Okay. So you wouldn't put any money into the big ones. So do you choose then Are you trying to find Amazon in nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine, right? Just in the absolute noise of

58:20 AI slot doesn't just a apply to You know, sort of it is. It also applies to startups, right? There's so much bullshit floating around. Some of it's dressed up. In very fancy clothing with fancy names. So if you're Investing in AI writ large.

58:36 How do you even I mean this is your job, right? I think there's three buckets. One is power. Without a doubt, we're all gonna need power. There's small nuclear reactors are gonna be a thing. The United States needs

58:48 three to five X's power capacity in the next decade, if not more. And there is it gonna be a huge push into energy. So There's a bunch of plays there. You can look them up. There are even ETFs that track bundles of of nuclear related companies that are out there.

59:03 That's one play. I think power is without a doubt the most important piece of this. And then, you know, data centers, there's publicly traded data center companies out there. There are the bigs like Microsoft and Google and Amazon that are just expanding as fast as they possibly can and buying up land all over the United States. There always gonna be a premium on that. They're gonna need that. NVIDIA, you know

59:25 They've got competition from AMD, they got competition from Google now. Obviously they have Such incredible tooling on the software side. There's a lot of diff defensibility there. It's a name to own. Would I buy in today at today's prices, I don't know, but I will say that If you think of this less about I'm just gonna pick one horse or more like I'm gonna pick a basket of things.

59:43 Like these are the things that I would be putting into that basket. And then lastly I would take large companies that have insane bloat from headcount. that can be automated in the next call it two to three years. Where they will reduce sadly, and I hate to see this happen but it's gonna happen no matter what. They're gonna reduce their headcount, they're gonna automate with AI and they're gonna be their profit margins are gonna go through the roof.

1:00:05 And I think those companies will reap the benefits of efficiency that comes from AI and their stock prices will as well. How do you identify companies that have the most bloat with also the fewest hurdles to adopting AI for what you're describing, right? Because in some of them, They may be Who knows, just put in a position where they from a process or regulatory perspective or whatever, they just can't do it.

1:00:26 At least in the near term. Yeah, in the near term, it's listening to earnings calls and it is I want to hear the CEO saying that they are Absolutely forcing their engineers to use AI. Forcing. You have to be it is not

1:00:39 Optional at this point. To ask your engineers to play with it. You have to be using it every single day. in your workflow. And the folks that are doing that, even though it's not perfect today.

1:00:50 They're gonna reap all the benefits twelve to eighteen months from now. That's what I'm looking for more than anything else is who is wise enough because a lot of the CEOs are old. Who is wise enough to say You know, it's true. We know these folks, and they're they just don't if you ask them the difference between Haiku four five and and Sonnet, they wouldn't have no idea how to tell you.

1:01:11 If they can't answer those basic model related questions like what are you doing? So it's finding those people like the Jack Doris in the world and the folks that are just like Well, I wouldn't want to say young because I wanna be Asian, but they have to be leaning into this in a way that is gonna They have to believe that their entire business is gonna be rebuilt from the ground up over the next, you know, call it five years.

1:01:32 Yeah. And you have people like Salesforce CEOs doing that, you know, obviously Benioff's on on board with this. There's a handful of folks that have said We are making sure this is a mandate from the top down. Google did this quite well, where they they had this like red alarm or you know thing that they called off probably three years ago where said it is all hands on deck AI. And Apple did not do that. And now look what's happened.

1:01:53 They're probably most likely Apple's going to end up licensing Gemini from Google. Yeah. Wild world out there, kids. Wild world. Yeah. It's a fun time to be alive, man. It's fun to be playing.

1:02:04 Yeah. Yeah, totally. Let's see. I figure I could give people some Maybe holiday gift ideas? Oh yes, I've got some great ones.

1:02:13 First thing I can recommend, something you can fit in your pocket. So this right here looks like a golf ball with little Not quite spikes, but like studs on it. They're flattened. This is called a rubs ball R U B Z. And I travel with this. You just roll out your feet on this before you go to bed. And I have felt this help everything from relaxing and just winding down.

1:02:38 What I have noticed is And this is something I spoke with Ed Cohn about a hundred years ago, long time ago. He's the greatest power lifter of all time. Phenomenal. Athlete. Very nice guy.

1:02:50 But basically if you address your feet. Sometimes you feel it all the way up the kinetic chain. Lower legs, knees, even your low back can sometimes release. So this, I think it's cost less than ten bucks. This is a Rob's ball, you can buy it on Amazon or anywhere else. That's a very easy one. That's just pocket sized. We can go back and forth. What you'll do it. Okay, so this one is awesome, dude. You have my doc that I sent you, right, with the links to everything.

1:03:17 Yeah. So if you click on the second one down These bonsai nanoblocks. So I've been talking about nanoblocks for a while. Yeah, hear me out, dude. This is a fun stalking stuffer. People are gonna love this shit. So it's thirty eight dollars.

1:03:31 It's these little baby bonsai trees. Nanoblocks are like Legos, but they're like one tenth of the size. So you need tweezers to assemble them. It is oddly satisfying to build these little tiny like bonsai trees. You get all six of them for thirty eight dollars. If you use the code Tim No, I'm there's no code. But if you it's they're amazing. They're so fun.

1:03:53 Anyway, nanoblocks are awesome. This is a little fun little pack, great stocking stuff, or they're super tiny. They're cute and they make look at the there's nano blocks up there on my Up up there behind me, see that beautiful tree? There it is. So

1:04:06 You recommended A book to me. Do you want to mention it? It's last in your list. I bought the audiobook and I listened to it on my flights recently. I thought the uh narrator was really, really good also. Yeah, it's called Stop Fixing Yourself. Wake up, all is well. It's by Anthony DeMello, who we were talking about, the Jesuit priest. And therapists that we talked about earlier. Tim, we when we we had both somehow discovered this book originally, not this book, but the other one we were talking about, and Awareness. Awareness and

1:04:33 It was really cool to hear that you were into it because I was one of my favorite books that We did not compare notes when we read this independently. I don't know how the hell that happened. But we both loved it. And this is another one where I was just like, Damn, this is So good because there's so many core truths here that apply to my practice on the meditation side.

1:04:52 And I just loved it. It's it's but it it does require a little bit of understanding. It's not like uh someone from off the street can totally read this and be like, Oh, that makes a ton of sense to me. I don't know if you felt that way. I feel like well, there are two things I would say, just having read a lot of Anthony DeMelo, that I think awareness Subtitle Conversations with the Masters. It used to be the Perils and Promise of Reality, but they changed the subtitle. I preferred the old one, but Awareness by Anthony DeMello. His last name is two words. D E space M E L L O.

1:05:23 is a hundred and eighty four pages. And I've gifted it to at least fifty people. I mean, I have an entire bookshelf full of this book in my guest bedroom at my house just to give friends. Same dude. Yeah. And I would recommend people read awareness first. I don't think you need anything special in terms of background for that.

1:05:43 Well, you do need one thing. You need to know that it is a uh a lecture. So it it reads like a lecture. It isn't it doesn't read like a book. Yeah, which I like. Which I like. And he's very no nonsense. People were like, I gave it to a couple of friends and they started reading and they're like, Wait, is this a talk that he gave? And like Oh yeah, yeah, I should have told you that. It's an actual talk. Yeah, it's a collection of Polished.

1:06:04 lectures that he gave. So awareness would be the first and then In the case of the stop fixing yourself. I really Enjoyed it. There's a lot of overlap with awareness. So there are certain points that get reiterated. The audiobook rendition of Stop Fixing Yourself is very, very good.

1:06:24 I disagree with some of the conclusions, which are effectively Along the lines I shouldn't say this might might sound unfair, but in the conclusion he talks about how ultimate freedom is not depending on anyone for anything and you could be perfectly happy in isolation by yourself. And I was like, evolutionarily, I think that's actually a pretty hard sell, but What I would suggest is If you listen to or read these books, as with any book, expect that you're going to disagree with and maybe even discard 10, 20% of it, but don't throw the baby with the bathwater. These are really, really helpful books. Well said.

1:07:01 Yeah. So let me grab Another one here. I'll recommend two others in case people are interested in books. So Fiction Tomorrow And tomorrow and tomorrow. I think it might just be tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow. Anyway, it's tomorrow three times by Gabriel Zevin, Z-E-V-I-N. It's a fiction book. And

1:07:19 It was on the New York Times list of the hundred best books of the twenty first century. It's a new one. And it Із All about Entrepreneurship and game design and love unrequited and

1:07:33 When I recommended this book initially in Five Ball of Friday, my newsletter. One of my attorneys who helped craft the agreement for coyote, another stocking stuffer. The card game. I noticed it's on Black Friday s sale, by the way. It's a thirty eight percent off on Amazon right now or something like that. Yeah, it's seven ninety nine right now. It's doing super well. The reviews are great. It's like four point seven or four point eight stars. Man, so I'm so proud of you, dude. This is so cool. Yeah, I thought you were gonna do the five hour body and I was like ah you probably shouldn't go there and it's nice to see you doing this. Yeah, so it's been super fun, but my attorney who helped with the negotiations on deal structuring for Coyote specializes in video games, and he's been involved with some epic deals and amazing

1:08:19 mergers and acquisitions and all this crazy stuff. And he texted me after I put that in the newsletter and he said, That book is so good. It was eerie because it is so accurate down to the finest detail that it felt like somebody was looking over my shoulder when I was doing these deals. Like that is how well researched this book is. You would love it. I really think you would enjoy it. My old Assistant. Sarah, who's amazing, she gifted it to me and it burned in the fire when my house burned down. Oh, you gotta read it. But I need to get I need to get it because I she was like you gotta listen to this book. Oh, it's so good. Yeah, it's great. And then the last one I'll recommend because I gave we gave some nonfiction, then just gave fiction. I'll give poetry, which people might not expect, but it's Little tiny compilation. This also has an entire shelf in my guest room. It's called gold.

1:09:07 It's by Rumi and then the translator, Hala Liza Gaffori, last name G-A-F-O-R-I, 112 pages, and it is just an incredible collection of poetry, of course, originally by the great Persian mystic Rumi, but with incredible new translations by Halaliza Gofore, who is an American poet of Persian descent. So she's a native speaker. And also she herself. a poet and musician. So if you read one or two of these poems before you go to bed at night, it just makes everything better. So I would also

1:09:43 Just recommend. So I can keep going with gift recommendations, but I suspect you have more. I've got some great ones, dude. All right. While we do two at a time, why don't you do two and then I'll do another. Okay. I'm gonna make you a m multi billionaire from how many people buy this next one I'm gonna say with your affili Amazon affiliate link.

1:10:01 This right here. My friend. is the best purchase I've ever made in my life. Whoa. That's a strong statement. No, I w I mean okay, maybe not, but it's up there. Yeah, okay.

1:10:14 So have you ever been in the one of those situations where you need a small little screwdriver or a screwhead and you're like you can't find the right one that fits. Yep. So this is twenty five different micro Everything from hex nuts to screwdrivers to flatheads, and it's a magnetic little insert into The actual one. Now you think, okay, who cares? But it's seven dollars and seventy nine cents.

1:10:37 And it acts like a twenty five dollar screwdriver. It is the best stocking stuffer in the world. You know, once a year or twice a year, you'll get something where it takes like two double A's or whatever and it's like, Oh, there's a little tiny screwdriver thing you gotta undo. And I'm like, Where am I gonna find something that fits that? This is that thing. And then when you want to like tweak your glasses or whatever, you need those micro screwdrivers.

1:10:59 Dude, seven dollars? This thing rocks. It's a How did you find this thing? You know, it had good reviews on Amazon. I bought it and when I got it, I was like they should be charging three times as much for this thing. If the torque doesn't actually ruin the bitheads, which is great because oftentimes with the cheaper ones, like the bitheads get ruined. Anyway, it's

1:11:18 You have to have it in every junk drawer in your house, you know? It's one of those things. I love these things because you often ask me, you said you back in the day when you were doing Five Bullet Friday where you wanted me to like contribute stuff, you would say, Hey, what's the best thing under fifty dollars or whatever that you love. For sure. And this is one of those things that's under ten dollars that is absolutely worth every penny. Yeah, love it. All right. So under$10. I don't know if it's ten dollars, might be a little bit more, but in addition to the rubs ball, I'll just give a couple of quick fire.

1:11:46 There's something called the Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. It was actually introduced to me by Nsima In Yang. Who you Or young, I think is how he pronounces it, but you sent me his video. So you are responsible for me ultimately connecting with him. But this alpha ball For rolling out your hips.

1:12:04 For traveling with it. It's about the size of a softball, but it's just the perfect density and texture. You can get everywhere you need to get. Which you cannot do with a foam roller, nor is it easy to travel with a foam roller. And I just love this thing. I use it pretty much every day. I didn't see it on video. Did you hold it up? No, I have it downstairs in my suitcase, actually. Okay, let me look it up. What's it called again? Alpha Ball

1:12:29 By Tune Up Fitness. You can find it on Amazon. And I'll actually tell you since I don't want to misrepresent. It's yeah, it's 1999. More than worth every penny. And I can send you a link to it, of course. Sweet. Then other things I'll throw in there. This is gonna be one of those things that this is my version of your little TED Talk that you just gave on

1:12:52 The seven dollar screwdrivers where people are like, You gotta be kidding me. This is my version of that. which is the I don't know how to pronounce this maestry M A E S T R I Maestry House rechargeable milk frother. Wow. Yeah, I know. Mine mine was better than that, but I well hold on, hold on, hold on. So I have owned so many

1:13:14 Of these frothers for coffee, for tea, for whatever, right? Protein shakes or whatever, these little hand frothers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They all break. They all suck, dude. They all break. Or the batteries die and then you can't recharge it, or it's like an outboard motor and you're like, Oh, let me just do this for my tea and relax and it like shoots liquid all over the place. Right. There's so many issues. This thing is It's like the Lamborghini of milk frothers costs ooh I love that. Yeah, it costs how much? Thirty bucks. It's not that crazy. USB C2 charging. That's amazing. USB C

1:13:49 And uh You basically turn the very top of it to adjust in any increment you want the intensity. of the agitation and it I have to tell you I asked somebody on my team to just due diligence and get me a frother that would solve all these problems that I mentioned. And he knows how to do a lot of research and this was his conclusion and I got it and I was like where has this been all my life? Oh my God. Has almost three thousand reviews or twenty six hundred views, four point five stars. This thing is just amazing. I use it every day. So that's one. And you know when I put this in Five Low Friday

1:14:25 What I wrote was it it reminds me of Sage Wisdom from Kevin Kelly, who is the founding editor of Wire Magazine. Amazing guy. We did a walk with him together. Exactly. So he had at that time I think it was a draft of a book that he put together, this tiny book called Excellent Advice for Living, which are these pithy little quotes from Kevin that he used to put in his, I think they were his birthday letters to friends, where he'd be like, Here are the 10 things I learned this year. And one of his pieces of advice is take note if you find yourself wondering, where's my good knife or where is my good pen? That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those. Like I have shelves.

1:15:03 full of shitty frothers that have been sent to me. Or that I've bought and they're just terrible. So I just got rid of all of them and replaced them with this thing. That's so awesome. Other things real quick. Microphone. You know, I got this microphone.

1:15:17 for travel called the Elgato, one word. Oh yeah, love El Gato. Elgato Wave Three. It is a gorgeous piece of design. It looks it makes me think of brawn design back in the day, BR A.

1:15:30 And Yeah. Actually solves somehow. Bounce and echo better than even this fancy mic, this sure mic that I'm speaking into right now. It is really impressive. I don't know what they do with the firmware, software, whoever the hell designs these types of things, but this has become my favorite travel mic is the Elgato Wave Three.

1:15:52 Have you seen their prompter, by the way? They make a tiny little Prompter. Like if you want to like read scripts or anything like that. Oh, Elgato makes this beautiful little prompter you can control with an iPhone or an iPad. Yeah. For people that are doing kind of like monologues and podcasts and stuff like that.

1:16:08 Elgado's some great gear and it's not that expensive. It's well priced. Yeah, this one, the wave three, I'll check out the prompter. It's Scott. Almost ten thousand reviews, four point seven stars, hundred and fifty bucks, and I rely on it for

1:16:24 To the extent that I'm professional, professional level recording. And uh there's a lot more I could jump into. I'll tell you what, I'll give one that's Expensive. But the best of breed, which is the tank M3 push sled. This is a sled I literally sitting. Right outside my door, about a hundred feet away. I have tried so many different sleds for resolving back pain for building

1:16:50 All posterior chain. development and strength. Glute activation, you name it, pushing and pulling a sled. Just gives you so many dividends, knees over toes guy.

1:17:01 also talks about this at length, but the tank M three push sled Is holy shit, it's pricey. Barn on the best sled I've ever used. Yeah. How much is it? Do you just pull it up? Fifteen hundred on the fifteen hundred. Yeah, fifteen hundred bucks. And It looks amazing, though. I would not trade it. You could easily rotate it. It has mechanical resistance. So for instance, I'm pushing it in a gravel driveway. It's not just Skids you can use this on turf, you can use this on carpets.

1:17:30 You can use it indoors without destroying the floor. It's just an amazing Slate. So if people are looking for best of the best, in my opinion And versatility, that's one. And then If you don't want more stuff or you want to give something to friends or family who don't need more things, like physical things, I am talking my book a little bit here because I'm involved with the company, but the way, the way up. It's so easy, right? I mean, we're gonna be doing hopefully another retreat in person together. It started out as just my hand down favorite meditation app.

1:18:02 It's the easiest way to get back in the habit. I just used it yesterday morning and this morning. I tend to do 10 minute sessions and then sometimes do an extra 10 minutes of like TM or something after the fact. But I think you can get 30 sessions for free with no credit card required. to try it out and then if you want to give An annual membership. That's a hundred bucks and you can just download the app for free and then

1:18:27 Tap my way. share it with people that way with a gift button. I'll definitely add on to that. And when I'll I'll say that I met Henry the the creator of the Way Up and he's a one of the very few Zen masters that are fully accredited in the United States. It is such a treat. to interact with and have Henry as a guide and you get a pocket

1:18:46 Zen Master and I don't wanna sell this, but I will say that in the last you know, I started with him and training with him in terms of meeting with him over Zoom. During Covid. And now it's been a few years. There is no better money spent.

1:19:00 In terms of For me it was been more of like retreats and things like that that I've been to of his, but Meditation in terms of my just general anxiety and general just like way of moving through life. It's been a game changer. It's been a game changer. And Henry

1:19:16 I will give him a ton of credit there. One of the things that he told me early on, which I thought was is still sits hits me today, is it's not about Can I put in an hour a day of meditation? It's better to put in just ten minutes a day or five minutes a day. And do it consistently.

1:19:30 than it is to try and, you know, achieve the mountaintop and go all out. Like Can you just show up consistently and I think if you do it for the First thirty days, you'll feel it. You'll feel it. Oh, you'll notice something much earlier in my experience. And uh you know, if Henry has this expression, I'm gonna paraphrase it, but basically if you do the practice, even if in some sessions you're like My mind is all over the place. I feel like that was a waste of time. If you walk consistently in the fog, you can't help but get wet is one of his expressions, meaning like it compounds over time. And even if you feel like individual sessions aren't doing much, it does actually compound.

1:20:10 And If people want to keep it simple, you can find a QR code at thewayapp.com slash Tim, and that'll give you thirty free sessions with no credit card. So people can check that out if they want. What else do we have, Kevin? Yeah, I've got one more that's fun. It's on the slightly pricier side. It's a little over two hundred dollars, close to three hundred dollars. Actually It's a walking treadmill. My wife Daria turned me on to this. It is

1:20:32 A very Thanks. Tiny little walking treadmill that has eight Phenomenal reviews. And you just throw it underneath your desk.

1:20:41 And for Under three hundred dollars. You can Set the incline to like, you know, ten And it's all with the little tiny remote control.

1:20:48 There's nothing to hold on to'cause you have your desk. And you can just work. And it rolls away because it only weighs like fifty pounds. And he just Stash it in the corner. And I I think it's the best walking treadmill. We did a bunch of research and it's the best one.

1:21:03 Three hundred dollars. Great way to get some exercise in there. Throwing a weighted vest there. You're in a really good place. That'll be plenty. Yeah. Dig it. Yeah, I saw that when Dario was showing me her office. I was like, Oh, look at that. There it is. That's right. You got the tour. I wasn't even home and you came over and

1:21:18 And stole my sleeping meds and stagged deer Bell Samra and took a spin on the walking treadmill and then took off. Yeah, I still owe you a trade for that. But I do see in your notes, do you want to take a second and run people through Kevin's current AI stack? Since I don't I this is all Greek to me. I can't I probably don't even understand what half of this means. Well

1:21:37 Real quick. I don't know if you want to touch on New Year's resolutions really fast, but that would be a fun one to end it with. Okay, so AI stack. One of the things that I've noticed is becoming more and more kind of ubiquitous in this space is this idea of an AI assistant that is not your phone. But something that you can kind of

1:21:54 Call. When you need to remember something, when you need to take notes, when you you know, and Tim, I was wearing that Little pendant when you and I got together. Hate it. Hate it. It's always recording. Tim goes to me, he's like, Is that's always recording? I was like, Yeah.

1:22:09 And he goes. I I hate to ask you this, but can you just take it off? That's too much anxiety for me. So I have to take off that pendant and put it in my bag. It but I agree with you in that it is weird. It does Kind of Cripple our conversations in our honesty when you know there's something that's there listening all the time, right? Yeah, 100%. And so a couple things.

1:22:30 Nothing the Android phone company. I'm not an investor or anything like that. They make headphones, which I'm wearing right now for this podcast. And but one of the things that was really cool is just like when they released headphones a month ago, they have a little talk button on the headphones. And so if you hold down talk as you're holding your headphones case. I can record anything and it goes into their AI.

1:22:51 And it creates to do lists for me, notes, whatever it may be. That's a cool stuff. It's just fun. Yeah, and so there's a company called Sandbar and we invest it true, it wasn't my deal. So quick question, do you need to have an Android phone to use those Yes, you need to have another phone. Okay. Bummer. That's the problem. But the idea is sound in that it's not always on. It's just when you need it, right? Yep.

1:23:12 Yeah. One of the things that Sandbar did, and I have one of their prototype rings around here somewhere, but one of the things that Sandbar did is they created a ring almost like an aura ring. Where if you just lightly touch it, you can whisper to any notes you might want, and it saves it in the AI cloud on your phone, Android, OS, whatever. And it's a way to have a conversation if you have headphones in, it'll respond back to you.

1:23:33 Seems like hey, remind me Well, what's that meeting I have tomorrow? Just like quietly. It doesn't listen to the entire room. And then it gives you that data back in your headphones. Anyway, Sambar's not out yet. It's coming out middle of next year. Highly recommend Sanbar dot com. Check it out.

1:23:47 Like I said, it's it is something that we invest in at the fund level, but it's not my deal. But I will say I like where this is going, even if it's not sandbar, something like this. That is a little companion that is not your big ass phone. That can be. be engaged with when you want to, you know, jot something down is is quite cool.

1:24:05 Outside of that, I would say You know, AI on the notion front has been quite good. Notion is is gotten The agents that they've added inside of Notion. are phenomenal and that continues to get better. What do you use that for? How do you use that?

1:24:19 Well Notion just added note taking now. So if you're in a Zoom or any type of video call, it will automatically prompt you to record the entire thing. And so By default, I always say to people, hey, I'm just you know, notion's not actually recording the audio. But they are transcribing it.

1:24:37 And they put the meeting notes and the bullet points into my notion for me. And then I can ask questions of that transcript later on. So call it like a week or two later. I'm like, hey, Tim mentioned some really cool book by Anthony DeMello. Which one was it? And it would boom right there. It's like within two seconds. That's really cool. And then you can ask questions of your entire corpus of data. So if you're storing a bunch of stuff in there, like I had my EIN number for one of my LCs, and I'm like, Hey, what's the EIN number for this LC? It's like two seconds later, it's out, right?

1:25:05 So that's fun. When do you think Gemini built into G Suite will be good enough to do that for an inbox'cause It is it? Okay,'cause it was so disappointing as of even a few weeks ago. I just enabled it this kind of like

1:25:18 Deeper integration. I don't know if I'm a beta tester, but they they let me in. And it does exactly what I just said. So it's it's within the coming weeks if I've happened to be on some beta list and whatever, but You know who will do this right now is actually the Gemini Oh, what are they calling it? It's their kinda AI suite where you can drop documents into it and everything.

1:25:37 Everyone's screaming at it right at me. You know what I'm talking about, right? Have you play with this? No. I d oh wait you talking about Notebook LM? Yeah, Notebook LM. Yeah. Notebook Ellen is getting better and better. So here's a fun hack. Okay, this is a great one for your audience because they like Your productivity, everything.

1:25:52 One thing that's really fun. Is Imagine there's something you want to learn that's new. Insert anything. You wanna learn how to do Basic Pilates, right?

1:26:02 Go to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else and say, Hey Give me A Deep research guide on the fundamentals of Pilates. And then you hit go. Right.

1:26:13 You wait five minutes, whatever, it gives you back a whole script. And you copy that. Paste it into Notebook LM. It's a create me a five minute podcast on the fundamentals of Plotties. And you have an instant podcast primer. on that thing. I use that for coding technologies. I've used that for um

1:26:32 Quantum computing. Tim, do you know how quantum computing works? Do you know how gates fold on each other? Like I didn't. Yeah. And so I drop that in there and you say explain it like I'm five in a podcast, or not five, but you would say explain it like I'm a j uh like a freshman in college. Yeah, exactly, fifth grader. Whatever. Like I have aphantasia and I have no way to recall this later. So

1:26:53 It gives you this great little podcast and it's a fun little way to learn anything new on the go. I have to give a plug and I am an investor in this company, but because It came up. In a group thread, I don't think he would mind. me mentioning this, but our mutual friend Chris Saka was like, My daughter just taught herself about

1:27:11 Stock trading and this, this, and this. And he took a screenshot and he's like she created her own curriculum and dot that and it was from A startup called Obo. And if people go to Obo, that's O B. O E dot F Y I so Obo dot F Y I.

1:27:28 It just says, What do you want to learn about? We'll make you a course. And you literally just type it out and it gives you Everything in one place. Now are are you an investor in this? Yeah. I'm an investor. Mm-hmm.

1:27:39 'Cause I noticed you had you'd mentioned before what what was it and this would be kind of fun for thirty seconds. When you were pitched this,'cause you were very You say no to a lot of things, which is great. Every investor should. What was it about this that really cooked you in? I mean there were a few things, right? So it was the people involved. I had some familiarity.

1:27:57 with the people involved and I had confidence in their ability to execute. And also This is what I do, right? In the sense that if I have tried to hone any single skill it is deconstructing and Simplifying complex subjects than putting

1:28:19 material in some type of logical sequence. doing eighty twenty analysis on kind of the twenty percent of material that makes the difference and like the material beats method a lot of the time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So I've thought a lot about this and I was like, all right, the thesis and the mission of the company makes a lot of sense to me. Now, will they be the winner? I have no idea. That is a much harder question and that informs kind of bet sizing and things along those lines. But I have a lot of confidence in the founders. The

1:28:47 company itself was introduced to me or the founding team behind it by another founder. who's had exits, who is an investor. who's a friend of mine. And I thought to myself, Well Even if this just

1:29:03 goes towards creating a product that I myself will use, which is really where I start with a lot of my investing. And sometimes I succeed when I stray from that, but my hit rate is a lot higher when Say in the case of Uber or Shopify or any of these other people. It's a cool link of yours. These are I know at least I am a market of one. for all of these products and Obo would fall in that category. So that's how I decided. To invest.

1:29:28 And you know, with these companies, it's also not a bet the farm scenario, at least not for me, right? It's you're creating a portfolio with the recognition that 70, 80% of your investments are going to go to zero. But I try to look at the or answer the question, how can I win even if This goes to zero. And how can I win? It's like well if I help to in some way. Support.

1:29:53 a product and the development of a product that I use myself to learn a bunch of stuff quickly, then given the leverage that I think I can create or find in the world, it's like wow, if I have a smooth way, an elegant way to to learn more about a few different I'll I'll give you an example, right? If I'm considering and I've already done this, like if I'm doing due diligence on a company that I can't talk about right now, but it's innovating in biotech. And I want to learn as much as possible about different types of MRNA therapeutics. It's like well

1:30:28 I'm not coming from a background that enables me to do that. So if I then am able to do due diligence. Like A hundred times faster because I'm not sending out 15 emails to people I think might be able to assist. And I might still do that level of due diligence, but If let's just say that fifty K investment. allows me to then do due diligence in a way that allows me to place two or three other bets more effectively. It's like I've made my money back, or very likely made my money back. So

1:30:58 Whether it's with investing or choosing projects like card game coyote or anything else. My fundamental underlying question is Can this be a win even if it fails? with let's just say the primary external metric of sales or exit or whatever it might be.

1:31:13 And if I'm developing skills and relationships That Snowball. and transcend any single project then That's a vote in favor of doing something. So that's like obo.fy out kind of fit into that bucket for me.

1:31:29 And it made me so happy to see, you know, Saka's daughter when she's like whatever, you know, twelve or thirteen, like creating her own course. I was like, Okay, that's a good sign. That makes me happy. I just to clicked on one of the things to create a course for me and it was pretty cool because right away it said, Do you want this in podcast format, which is seven minutes. Or do you want this in lectured recording, which is twenty minutes? That's awesome. Like that's built into the product from like step one.

1:31:53 Yeah, from step one. And like you said, this is the blocky Brick Motorola. Version. Like the Yeah. The rate of iteration for something like this is going to be so extreme. It's going to be head spinning. So we'll see. But I'm excited about it. All right, the moment you all been waiting for Tim's girlfriend.

1:32:12 No People are gonna they wanna know the what's up with Tim's personal life. Yeah, look, I'm not gonna dox anyone who doesn't opt into being doxxed, so I'll I'll skip any identifying particulars, but Yeah, it's getting serious quickly. She's incredibly sweet. Incredibly

1:32:31 Self aware. Intelligent. And for people who are wondering, of all places met on hinge. Have to kiss a lot of frogs or go on a lot of dates. It's a lot of reps, a lot of swiping. And a lot of noise to get to that point, but it did work. What was the first day like?

1:32:49 First date was Greek food. Very chill. Felt very much, and I and I pay a lot of attention to this. Like you know that I have a very sensitive nervous system. And

1:33:02 I just immediately felt kind of down regulated and at ease with her. And That's a lot. That's not a small thing for me. And keeps me on my toes, is very funny, is very good at calling me on my bullshit. So I'm I'm optimistic. We'll see.

1:33:23 We'll see, but super, super happy. So doing Thanksgiving again. Wow. And like family introduction to time and all that shit. Oh, she met my family already quite a while ago. I've only met her once. One final question, then I'll let you off the hot box.

1:33:37 What is the hardest thing? For you. At this stage because It's like you get to this point where there's this honeymoon phase and then all of a sudden that starts to kinda peel off and and it's in the nitty gritty of life. What what's the hardest, most challenging part?

1:33:53 About this Next kind of like call it six months. Yeah, I mean I I don't know if I have The ability to predict. But my guess would be I mean I think this is a What I'm about to describe as a plight of modern dating in general.

1:34:07 At least as I've seen it. among my friends and pretty much anyone I who I've ever spoken to about this, or if I ever mention kind of modern datings and the app based Dating world. It's such a game of roulette. I mean

1:34:24 The apps are designed to be as addictive as possible. So I think the challenge for almost anyone who is part of that playing field Is When things Get hard when things are hard.

1:34:38 when you have friction that lasts more than a day or a week. to stay the course and do the work necessary to resolve that, as opposed to just being like, ah, fuck this. I'm just gonna go back to the well. Cause the well's right there. Yeah. It's twenty seconds away in a swipe away, right? That's the downfall of these whole things. It's it's so easy to move on to the next thing. Yeah.

1:35:02 They are all Designed to be, of course, as addictive as possible and Even though they might say they're designed to be deleted that By definition, since they have a fiduciary responsibility, a legal fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Their business model is entirely dependent on recurring revenue. So they're designed to keep you

1:35:24 using the app as long as humanly possible. And I don't blame them for that. That's just the way that this ecosystem works. But it is something to be aware of because either they are the seductive and they're designed to be seductive, these apps in every way conceivable. So I would say that Step number one, take that stuff off your phone. And then number two is fortunately, I feel like over my last few long relationships because you know I've had some very long relationships, five, six years in two cases.

1:35:58 that I've developed a toolkit, I can always use more work and more refinement, but do you have the basics of something approximating nonviolent? Communication. Do you Ask for what you want and do you tell someone if they're doing something that you don't want. These are seem like very

1:36:15 obvious self evident things you should do, but a lot of people struggle with both of those. And then that breeds resentment or people bottle things up and then they explode and they say things they can't take back. So like to what extent have you tried to mitigate those things? Do you have a toolkit, right? There are Very good books out there. very good workshops and I've read a lot of these books and I've gone to a lot of workshops. And as much as I've like felt like I wanted to poke my eyes out with bicycle spokes at points in these workshops and seminars because I can only take so much of it. Same.

1:36:47 They do help though. It could be something really small. And There are things you learn along the way, at least I have, as you get older, which is like you can have almost anything you want in life if you discuss it. Openly and early. So

1:37:03 If you have weaknesses. If you have requests, if you have needs, if you have things that you value that are maybe weirdly out of proportion to most people, Just talking about that stuff early. sets the stage for success or at least communication. So very early on in this relationship.

1:37:23 having conversations about conversations, if that makes sense. Like having open communication about how We'd like to communicate. the challenges we have with communication, like how we're going to communicate, biasing towards honesty and being direct. even if you need to do a little bit of cleanup afterwards. has just saved a lot of brain damage. And

1:37:46 You know, in this case, I think we both have very growth oriented mindsets. We're I think both of us are pretty good at taking feedback. And there are times when you're like you're just too sleep deprived or pissed off or bitchy or irritable, and you're not gonna take a feedback. You're always gonna have those days. But overall, I think we're both eager to improve and we're good at giving feedback in a way that generally doesn't come off as too holier than thou judgmental. So we'll see. We'll see. But uh you know, in terms of the challenges, I think the challenges are always

1:38:18 I shouldn't say always, that's a big word. But So much of it just comes down to communication. It's like do you have The tools have you, say, read or listened to Terry Real? Have you both listened or read? Carry rail so that you have to Some scripts for some shared language that you can use as shorthand.

1:38:37 Uh the problem I have with Terry Reel is that If it's taken too literally, it can sound formulaic, you know? I'm like, I don't want to like do the formula, like, let's just talk, you know, it can be a bit Yeah. Here's what I would say about that. I'd say that. Almost anything that works repeatedly. Is a formula.

1:38:55 And In the beginning, I think it's important. As rote as it might seem. Two let's just say

1:39:04 the book Nonviolent Communication. I think it's Marshall Rosenberg. It's a great book, but after a while you're like, Oh my God, am I really gonna say again? Like when you did X is a video camera would have recorded it, I felt why. And the story I make up is I know the st the story I make up kills me. But here's the thing.

1:39:25 I know it kills. Stop saying the story I make up. Like but here's the thing. But here's the thing. It's As much as you might hate it. What you would hate more. Is Kevin, I fucking hate when you do X. It makes me feel Y.

1:39:40 Because you always do Z, right? Like that's worse. I think. Right. Like you might be like uh With the formula, but the amount of damage you can do when you veer completely away from it is a lot, right? And then once you

1:39:54 Have the Basic mastery or fluency with the formula, then you can deviate. Right. Right, right. then you can start to deviate. But for instance, I mean

1:40:05 Terry as any couple's therapist. Well. Has Certainly frameworks and formulas.

1:40:13 But they're also Underlying filosofical principles that I think Apply to a million different things that are outside of formulas. And I'll give you an example. So one thing that Terry says, and I think this is in fierce intimacy. Which is an audio book. You can't find a print version of it.

1:40:31 I highly recommend it to folks. And The point he makes is it's real simple. Objective reality has no place in a relationship. Now what the hell does that mean? What that means is Yeah, if you're out at dinner.

1:40:44 And then the waiter comes over. And the wife orders and then the waiter walks away and the husband's like, You know, honey, you don't need to yell at him. And she's like, I wasn't yelling and then it turns into like a a whole bullsh argument about whether she was yelling or not. Like if the husband were to say, Well, honey, actually I hired a professional audiologist. with the latest cutting ed technology and recording equipment and they're sitting right at the table next to us.

1:41:12 And if we accept the commonly defined threshold for yelling at XYZ decibels. If you look at these numbers, you can see that in fact you were, by scientific definition, yelling. Like, is that going to fix the problem? No, it's going to be a huge fucking mess. Right. And so his point is The stories matter. And like the subjective Matters.

1:41:33 And Shorthand for that is like objective, he may not word it exactly this way, but like objective reality just doesn't have a place. In let's just say an argument. And we're gonna Make mistakes. Occasionally.

1:41:46 Especially someone like me is going to try to appeal to Some objective measure of God knows what. But if you can just postpone that judgment.

1:42:00 Even for a minute or two? It just makes a world of difference. You know, maybe it makes me sound like I'm really remedial in the EQ communication department. I actually don't think that's true. I think I'm pretty good. It's like going to the gym. It's like playing pool or shooting Archery or whatever. It's like you can't just it's not a one and done thing. If you don't practice these things, you will revert to whatever your parents did. Period. Yeah, like I don't want to model that.

1:42:27 That was a Goddamn mess. Yeah. I found that if my partner gets upset just kind of like sitting down and saying Calm down.

1:42:37 is huge. That works every time. Yeah. It just or or you're being like your mother. Like those are things that like are just really you know, just home runs. Why are you so hysterical like your mother? Yeah. Yeah. Works like a charm. I think that's Terry Real's second principle. Yeah. Just say calm down and then you're good. You're good. They'll be like, Oh, I was being so crazy. I you're right. I should just calm down Yeah. And you know, I I think also

1:43:10 Not I just expecting there to be bumps. There are always gonna be bumps and You know, we'll see. We'll see. But yeah, it's been great so far. I feel super, super lucky. Really, really fortunate because there's a plan. I mean you only date supermodels, so you should feel lucky. That's not her. You have a a supermodel on your hands, so it's very

1:43:32 Very pretty, but she's also very, very smart. Knows how to adult, knows how to take care of things in the world, right? I mean, which isn't asking too much, but it's surprising how many like aspiring stay at home girlfriends you can find out there who have no intention of operating in the world. So I feel very, very lucky. Super, super fortunate. I'm excited for you, dude. Can we just spend some more time with her? Her first interactions were great. I'm excited to get to know her better.

1:44:00 Yeah, she's incredibly kind, not a malicious bone in a body. But at the same time Like hilariously blunt. In some cases, and sometimes not so hilariously blunt, but you know, I'll take it's packaged to you. You got a bit of that too, though, right? I got some of that. Yeah, I do too. Yeah, I've got some of that. For sure. I've known enough enough of your ex-girlfriends to know that you got a little bit of that. Yeah, I got a little bit of that. It's true. Oh man.

1:44:28 Well that's I th I think I've probably checked the box of talking about the girlfriend. Yeah, awesome. We're gonna have dinner very shortly.

1:44:37 And happy Thanksgiving, man. Yeah, happy Thanksgiving. Yeah, but I would say the only thing on my side, just to bring people to speed on, is I I have a new tech podcast that I'm very excited about. that I'm gonna launch in the new year.

1:44:50 And so Kevin Rose dot com for my four bullet Friday. Which is Much faster read.

1:44:58 No, I don't I only put out like one email every month and a half or every but it's always packed with like of the latest AI stuff I'm playing with, all that stuff anyway. That's my only plug of the show is kevinrose.com for the newsletter. Yeah, check it out. Check it out, folks. We'll hit uh New Year's resolutions and stuff next time we do a random show. Let's do it. Yeah, we'll do that,'cause I need to dust mine off and Blow the film that is settled on those.

1:45:22 look at them in higher resolution. So I could use a little extra time and we'll love it. We'll get after it. Love you, brother. Always good to see you. Thanks for sharing more of the the personal side with us. I everybody gets a kick out of that and it's always fun to hear your adventures. But I'm excited for you marching forward. I have good vibes about this one. So Yeah, thanks, man. It's a fucking jungle out there. It's like the modern dating is a uh It is simultaneously So fun. If you like hit your groove.

1:45:51 In a playing the field kind of way, but it's also so incredibly exhausting and frustrating and can be very demoralizing. Yeah, I don't feel bad for you, honestly. Like I've I've gotten some of your texts. I think you had a damn good run, brother. Yeah, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying. I feel Most At home.

1:46:13 That is At peace when I am with My Current girlfriend and it's just it's Qualitatively.

1:46:23 a world of difference from just running around like, you know, some horny bastard with his hair on fire. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Yeah, not that there's any hair left, but yeah. Yeah. Not there's any hair left. And also just be aware, like whether you're on

1:46:38 X. Or Instagram. But especially on the dating apps, because it is selling sex and things that are hardwired. to hijack your attention like Your faculties are being

1:46:53 exploited to the maximum degree possible. And it's just something to be aware of. I mean like really Check your state before and after using these things to determine how much you might want to use them or if you want to put safeguards around how long you spend on these things. All right. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Cool, brother. Love you very much. Please give a hug.

1:47:13 To Daria and the girls for me. Well deal. Yeah. Same on on my side. How's Molly doing? Molly's good. Molly's great. Yeah, Molly's doing great.

1:47:23 How does Molly now? Molly's ten, I'm actually gonna adopt a puppy. I'm gonna get a second dog next month. Super. You saw him when he came to the house. Is he moving slower? It's hard. He was. Well, he was also had just come from the vet and his paw was all taped up and he was dragged out of his mind. I know when I saw him. Yeah, fifteen. Just getting up there. And uh we gave him RAP uh, so I'm hoping for I mean we've already seen the kind of twenty percent boost in lifespan, so yeah.

1:47:52 Yeah, I need to get Molly on wrap up. That's gonna be one of my tasks for December as well. One step at a time. Awesome. All right, brother. Great to see you, bud. And everybody listening. You can uh go to the show notes. We'll have links to everything at Tim.blog slash podcast random show. Just look for the newest one. And uh we'll have it for you. So

1:48:13 Happy holidays, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Happy holidays. I'll see you soon, Kevin. Take care, but Peace. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

1:48:31 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, Albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.

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