#712: The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much More

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5708e5a037b2f6d1

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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I'll answer your personal question.
Now we're just seeing it.
a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscalarity.

No
Kev Kev, good to see you man. Tim Tim. Look at this.
In the flesh. In the flesh, like grown ups. Sitting at a table in Austin. Cheers, man. This we're together.
I love it. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Happy early New Year's, I suppose.
Was I supposed to shoot that?
No sip it. It's quite good. That's sipping.
This is sip. Yeah. Yeah. So this is something that I've had on previous
Random shows, but I don't think I've talked about it too much. This is Lalo Tequila.
And Lalo Tequila.
Full disclosure, it's my first and only
Alcohol related investment. I was first introduced to this
at a fantastic restaurant here in Austin.
Called Swarte.
Excellent restaurant.
And I feel like you've talked about this place before. It's great. It's maybe I should go there tonight. An excellent restaurant. Was it hard to get in or no?
Not too bad, and there is typically some walk in available. They reserve some space for walkins. Sweet.
And I went there for the first time with Chase Jarvis. And I had not seen Chase in ages.
He was coming in from out of town, wanted to do something.
Tex Mexi.
Ended up at Swarte and we wanted to have tequila because we both both like tequila. I asked what
The server most recommended and he recommended something I'd never heard of. This
Lalu.
And
I ended up
Really liking it both of us.
Bought a bottle.
Turns out that the
Namesake, so Lalo is the grandson of Don Julio.
Oh crazy. And this is additive free.
It is matured in the plant instead of in barrels, so it's a blanco.
Only Blanco, they don't sell.
anything non blanco and they harvest from more mature plants. So for a lot of the larger scale operations
They harvest one could argue.
Prematurely.
And then they try to
add a little razzle dazzle with additives and the way that they
use the barrels and instead of doing that, they're letting the plant do the work. So this particular tequila for me at least is a very clean drink.
And I know.
This is a topic, du jour, of course, alcohol, no alcohol. I certainly find a place for it. And then about six months, nine months later, a year later,
Out of the blue a friend of mine reached out who does a lot of CPGs, so conservated goods stuff. He's a genius when it comes to
both operating and investing. He's one of the best I've ever seen.
And he said I'm not sure if you've ever heard
of this particular brand, but would you have any interest in looking at Lalam? And I was like, Yes, I would
Because I drink it all the time. Yeah. And that's how it came together. That was gonna be my question for you because I I feel like
So many of us have had
Something that we've used in life and said, Gosh, I wish I was an investor here.
Like have you done that with multiple companies? Has there been something where you said this is so great, I have to invest? And then if so, what is your strategy to get to that?

Become friends with the founder, talk about around. You are better at doing this than I am. You're one of the best I've seen.
Back when Twitter was usable. Uh sorry, but I remember Twitter and you've you've used pretty much every channel available. You're very
generous and sincere. When you find something you love, you share it. Add value first.
Yes. Yeah. And you are able to get the attention of founders historically. I've seen you do this over and over again. And often I'll do that. So these days for me
If I find something and
I will sometimes look at
Either my credit card statement or
The stuff I use the most.
And
run down the list to see if there's anything I might want to invest in. For instance.
And there are a few that got away. There are a bunch that got away, right? Like one password. I should have and I knew the guys and they ended up raising money uh maybe a year or two ago. A gajillion dollars. Yeah, great guys. Yeah. And
I'm like, oh, if I had just and I didn't want to because it it didn't feel right, but if I had pushed just a little bit more, maybe could have done something. There are many stories like that that I could tell.
But
These days I would say I try to be helpful. So I will take something and if it's good, I'm like, look, even if I don't end up being involved with the company,
I wanna help them out. The product.
Fantastic. So I might put it in the newsletter. I might
Mention it on the podcast. Do something like that.
Yeah, one of the things that you hear these stories every once in a while, I remember when Facebook was getting off the ground
Zuck wanted a mural painted. Do you know the story?
And I do, but you should tell it anyway. The artist actually at that time said, You know, don't pay me in cash, pay me in stock.
And that's oftentimes a very good strategy where you say, Hey, I might not have the capital to go invest in this thing.
But I have a skill.
And that skill is somehow gonna be useful to this company.
If I can make friends with them, then at some point it's like
Let's share the upside together. Totally. You know, and you can you don't have to ask for a big massive percentage, but you can say, Hey, can I is there some options available that I can have? And uh that can work. I mean, for that guy, I think it turned him into like a billionaire or something like that. At least several hundred million dollars. David Show, who's fascinating.
He has done some incredible
And hilarious things. He's a very funny guy. Very, very creative. I don't know, but I've heard that story so many times. He had a podcast called uh uh I think it was D V DA
Double vag double anal
With Asa Akira, who's a porn star. And I it made of
all been taken down, but he is
A polymath, he's an incredible artist.
Incredible actor also. That could be the name your show. No one tried to come up with names for your show. Instead of Tim Tim Talk Talk. Exactly. You know, as a close runner up. We all have to make we all have to make decisions. I saw a shirt side note. Well I've had one sip of teal and here we go already.
I saw a shirt at a climbing gym yesterday which said no solutions, only trade offs and I was like, That is actually
pretty interesting to sit with. But on the advising front, because that's really what we're talking about, right?
Where can people learn more about that? Because I used to point people, and maybe this is still a good reference. It's a little dated, but Venture Hacks used to have a bunch on advisors and superadvisors.
This is
Worth
Unpacking a little bit for folks. So
If you look at, for instance, my track record, the vast majority of
my lifetime earnings in startups have actually come from advising.
Mm-hmm. And
That's not to say that it's easy. That's not to say that times haven't changed, because certainly times have changed since two thousand eight, two thousand nine, two thousand ten. But if you have a skill or you have a network or you have a platform
There are times when it will be
appealing for both you and for a startup.
to have some type of trade for equity. Right.
And
Saka used to be in.
Fantastic in this.
before he became the Krisakan mark you lights that we know and love today. Yeah.
And taught me a lot about this.
But you might look for
Let's just say
I don't know how the landscape has changed, you could probably speak to this, but say point two five percent.
That's early.
Yeah, like a quarter point. Super early. And uh the way that that's de risked for the company, or one way that that can be de risked is that it vests over a course of, say
Two years. Right. So every quarter.
A percentage.
Of that.
Basically becomes yours. Yeah.
And the company can cancel at any time. Yeah.
And that allows them in a sense to kind of try before they fully buy. Right. Right. They get to see what results you can deliver. Any other thoughts on folks or folks. Jesus. Well, I this is related to to caffeine, which we're gonna come back to at some point.
I think it's important to remember that every company that's out there
Private company.
When they're forming and putting together their cap table, like their list of investors, employees, all of that, they put together something called an options pool, which is
a percentage of the company that is used to incentivize those employees to work there. And so when you join a company, you get X number of options.
And you earn them over, say, typically three to four years.
A part of that
Most founders will set aside for advisors. And so these are people that are not compensated with money, but rather just stock.
And so in my mind, what I always do when I'm forming a new company is I say, Okay, I'm gonna take one percent.
And I'm gonna carve that into ten rolls.
And then I'm gonna go out there and find
The ten most impactful people that I can possibly find.
To help me change the outcome of this company.
And you offer them an arrol and you say, Hey, no fancy strings attached. So
I never say
Uh to be an advisor you have to t tweet X number of times. Like screw that. Like you want it to come from a place of authenticity.
And so, you know, And you're often doing this to people you know, right. Presumably, right. Or or you can find someone that you're just like, this is a really good match. There's an AI company that I've been working with and they
needed someone that had a very specific expertise in a very small subset of a type of AI.
And they found an advisor and they didn't know this person, but they reached out.
It never starts with, Hey, we want to offer you an advisory role. It's a coffee. It's a hangout. It's a dinner. It's let's get to know each other.
It's like
Hey, you might be helpful. And sometimes they'll say, No, actually you can hire me as a contractor. Or it's a mixture of both. You can say, Hey, we'll bring you on as a contractor for three months and we'll give you an advisory role. So there's no perfect science here.
But just expect to get some fraction of one percent of a company as an advisor. And your hope
Is that this turns into a hundred, two hundred, five hundred million dollar company.
And that becomes a very lucrative outcome for you. And
I would imagine part of the reason that you're comfortable not having a laundry list of deliverables is because their advisor equity vests over a period of time. Yeah, it vests over a period of time
You can cancel it anytime. So if you're three months in, you're like, ah, this person's not doing anything, you can just cancel it and you know
No hard feelings, everybody just he they get a little a small percentage of that, you know, and that's fine. Yeah.
I would say that
It's best in my mind not to overcomplicate things, especially with celebrities. Celebrities don't want to have
Some type of crazy, you know, twenty page document they have to run by their agent and they have to go through with their attorneys and they have to figure out
Oh, I'm gonna have to show up at this event or screw all that.
If you work with a celebrity and you find someone, you happen to know someone and they wanna be an advisor
Say no strings attached. Oh, by the way.
We're doing this party in two months.
You can come or not, right?
And oftentimes that actually frees them up to be like
I don't feel like I'm a uh being used as a pawn here.
Sure, I'll show up for a half hour or forty five minutes and that's a win for you, right? You want them to speak from the heart
When they're talking about a product.
And
I think you would agree that time kills deals, right? Like some deals do not get better. Exactly. Especially if you're dealing with someone who has an entourage or like a phalanx of lawyers, managers, agents, et cetera. You want it to be an easy yes. Make it an easy yes. I so I'll give you an example. Back in the day
When I launched Moonbirds that PFP project, the NFT project that I launched.
I talked to a handful of people and
Some people that I knew quite well that were very
Famous celebrities.
There's one NBA player that is Hall of Famer.
that I gifted him Moomber to and I said, Hey, listen, he's like, I'm Web Three Curious. I wanna learn more about you know Web Three.
And
It's Ghernobly, like you know, you know. Yeah, so
I gave him one and I said super nice guy. And I said to him, I said, listen, you don't have to tweet about it. Like that's this isn't a pay for play thing. I would never want to do that.
If for some reason down the road you think it's really cool and you want to say something
You can.
And he never tweeted about it. But no, but that's fine. You know,'cause like he did just wasn't vibing with her, didn't feel that it was going in the right direction or whatever it may be. And same thing for Jimmy Fallon. You know, Jimmy was super kind, super nice.
And he created a little parody account for his moon birds and was tweeting from it.
And he was figuring it out because he wanted to learn web three wallets. He set up his own wallet. He nested his own moon birds, meaning he interacted with smart contracts and dollars. And it was because he was
Curious on the tech side.
And there was no money exchange. There was nothing about it wasn't about that.
That's the way I like to do these types of deals.
And you tell me if this resonates with you. I would also think in terms of whether you're building a company
or an advisor, who would I like to work with on multiple companies?
Because I've seen for instance
In a many of the cases where I've been an advisor, assuming you do a decent slash good job.
A lot of these people, if they're good, are gonna be serial entrepreneurs. Right. And then you end up just advising, advising, advising, and they have their X Men squad that they pull in to most startups. Yeah.
That seems to me to be pretty common.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's certain domain experts when you think about strategies around different parts of your business where you say
gosh, I would always want this person in my corner if I'm gonna go launch a consumer internet product. And so
you go back to those people or if you don't know, like a great example is
I'm relaunching my podcast in January.
And one of the things that I just have been out of loop on is a TikTok strategy.
And I just really found a great company that had been recommended and had worked with
multiple top twenty kind of podcasts on their TikTok strategy because
That's a hole that's missing, right?
And so I'm gonna go out I ask like ten friends who's the best the best at this.
And then try and hone in on that person or people.
and then get them to work on your behalf. In this particular case I'm paying them for it, but that's fine.
I think twerking is the answer.
Yeah, coordinated dances and twerking.
You might have a little
Yeah, a little case of werewolf buns. I don't know if that's uh if that's a plus or a minus on on TikTok.
January.
Yeah, let's talk about January. We're coming up on the new year.
How are you thinking about
New Year's resolutions, that type of thing. We do this every year, really. We do. I don't even want to go revisit our list'cause I'm sure they're horrible. What do you think your hit rate is on the on your previous lists?
You had it written down. Do you have your last list? Can you look at it? I don't have it in front of me right now. I would say that over the years I've become
Better. My hit rate is higher.
Fifty percent.
Yeah, I would say it's fifty percent. I'd say it's probably fifty percent.
Which hey, if that were startup investing, man, you'd be best of the best, right? Yeah. But you also don't want to set your resolutions like brush my teeth three times a week. You don't want to set the bar so low just for checking the box. Right.
So I would say it's fifty percent, maybe a bit more than fifty percent. I think this year they're simple enough that I could actually get to a hundred percent. Yes. That that's exactly what I did. So this year for me, it's about less
But make sure I can try to get to seventy five to a hundred percent of them. So mine are really straightforward.
Last year I went
One month without drinking.
Mm-hmm. This year
My therapist has told me she's awesome and she's like
She's like, Oh, you made it a month. She's like, Oh, cool, cool. Like, uh, congrats, everybody does that. And I'm like, she's like a little bit of like a behart ass. And I kinda like that about her. Yeah. And she's like, no, go three months. She's like, that's when the real benefits start to show up.
Is that three months. And I'm like, but could you I mean you could have said two, but so she's the three
I'm gonna go three months without drinking. That's a big one for me.
Daily meditation has obviously have been a big part of my life. I'm gonna continue that trend.
We can talk about Henry Shuchman's new app too, which is gonna be a big part of that.
Zen Master the I study under
is finally launching a new meditation app coming in January.
Called the Way.
And uh very excited to help him with that app in terms of like on the product side and just usability side. Obviously he's doing all the content. I'm not involved in it, I'm just an investor in it. But not involved in the content. Not involved in content, right. Yeah, I'm not as investor. But you know, you've studied very seriously with Henry.
Yeah, for a few years. You introduced us, he's been on this podcast twice. Twice. Yeah. And they're very strong episodes. So I encourage people to check those out. What makes the way different?
The one thing about, you know, as an investor, so I'm a part time VC because I have this other, you know, NFT and art thing on that I'm working on as well.
Is a V C over true
We are looking for
novel ideas, things that haven't been done before, and the meditation app market is just completely saturated. Saturated. Who would want to build an app in that space?
I mean coms dominating, you know, headspace dominating, like
Yeah, waking up fantastic app for more on the depth side.
I would say
Sam probably brings together the strongest group of teachers, I would say, is a portfolio of meditation. University of meditation. Yeah, exactly. So Henry's approach is like
If you go into any of these other meditation apps, it's like
A meditation for sleep, a meditation for
Anxiety and meditation for this, three minute meditation, two minute meditation, thirty second meditation. You know, it's like it's all these different Henry's like, okay.
He's very humble.
But he's one of only I think three fully accredited
Zen Masters and his lineage of Zen in the United States.
And he is bringing Zen.
A flavor of Zen mixed in with some other types of meditation.
And his goal is simple. It's the way it's one path.
There's no choose your own adventure.
It's not the ways. Yeah, it's not the ways. Right. There you can't branch off and do a body scan over here and then come back for a sleep meditation or a sleep story. Like it's none of that.
A singular
path and his goal is to lead you to some type of a awakening.
Moment. Sometime in the future.
So it's for those that are like
Okay, I've tried the other meditation apps. I wanna go deep.
I wanna get really serious about this. So
I can't tell you when it's gonna launch, they're in beta right now.
I can't tell you that the way app dot com
is gonna be the place where you can put in your email address and let you know when.
You know what we can do for your show notes? Let's put a beta link.
Because I think you can have up to a thousand testers.
Just put it in your show notes and and get a bunch of people testing it out. Lovely. Yeah, we'll put it
Tim.blog slash podcast. And you put a little bit of cash in too, which is great. I did. Which was gonna be w what I was gonna say next, which is this is my first
investment in a meditation app and my first
investment in any type of consumer app in a while, in fact. And that's based on my interaction. You know, which wasn't that wasn't a bad thing. That was
Certainly not. It didn't turn into
the thousand X, you know, ten thousand X return that I would like. They turned it around.
Yeah. It's a good product again. It is a good product. I still use it, believe it or not.
This is actually on my list. Okay. We'll get into that, but uh yeah, finish your thoughts. Well, I'm just gonna say that I learned so much about
product, I learned so much about startups, I learned so much
about scaling what to do, what not to do through my experience with that company where I was an advisor.
Mm-hmm.'Cause I didn't have the capital early on to really build out a large portfolio with cash alone. And
I was able to request this is not a small thing for me. I was able to make requests of product changes directly.
It's amazing. That lifeline to the CEO. Lifeline to the CEO and to the product team for me selfishly. If I'm using an app every day, that makes a difference to my quality of life.
So I do not regret it. And part of your calculus, if you're gonna be involved with early stage, has to be, I think, the assumption that the vast majority are not going to
return what you hope they're gonna return.
Nine out of ten fail.
That's just part of a power law distribution. Great book, by the way.
Parallel.
So
New Year's resolutions, what are your what what what else do you have and and do you have a date? I'm just gonna hold your feet to the fire a little bit, for your three months.
Have you decided on a start date? Oh so I've got
I'm gonna invite you to this. My my birth is in February and you're invited. I got really lucky to get to know the artist Sewn, S O H N. Do you know Sewn and all of you stuff? Oh so good.
So
is become a nice friend and he agreed to come play my birthday party for like thirty people. Amazing. And so he's gonna fly out. He's in Spain right now. He's gonna fly out and and play and
I gotta have a couple drinks there. We're gonna have a little marking there. I got it. Yeah, that would be a you'd be failing before you started it. Exactly. If your first day were the day before your birthday. Yeah. So I'm I'm gonna after my birthday is when I'm gonna kick this off. So that'll be good. But so really quickly to hit on mine. So no drinks for three months, daily meditation, no brainer.
I want to organize my brain.
In digital form.
And so this is what's really interesting. In the last three months
Multiple.
Note taking apps have enabled AI.
And what they're doing now is they're saying screw
Knowing where your notes are.
Mm-hmm. Ask questions of your corpus of data.
So it's changing into a world where
You can just enter all the data.
Enter all of Tim's brain into some place and say, Hey, what was that one note I had that one time?
When I was at that Mexican restaurant
And I think it was about cat beds. And it will literally serve you up that note based on the AI and and its crawling abilities. And I think that's just fascinating. So Notion has added that.
There are three they call'em second brain note taking apps that or really four that I'm considering.
I'm still working through all of them to see which one I like the best.
My candidates are
Notion.
Craft is amazing. Kraft's a really beautiful note taking app.
It's a little bit more about
Here's the current day, start taking notes and then you can interconnect the notes and do all kinds of uh fun things there.
Yeah, craft.
Uh Obsidian is another one.
Have you heard of Obsidian? I've heard of it. I or maybe I just like the name. It's more like graph based interconnected nodes, like all these backlinks, you know, tying together thoughts and ideas, kind of my brain you you've seen these cloud mappings of of interconnected nodes. Note taking apps and services also a very crowded market. Very crowded.
And capacities is the last one I'm looking at. I'm leaning towards craft.
I think that's probably my gonna be my go to. It won app of the year last year on iOS. Okay. And it's uh it's pretty fantastic. So and I will say
in that list and still actually I think the largest market share, barely bidding out Notion.
Is Evernote still.
Mm. And so I installed Evernote, the latest version, I'm like, damn, this is actually
A lot better. I thought for a minute there it was gonna go under. I was like'cause it trade it hands a little bit, there was a little bit of drama there. Yep.
And but overly diversified, overextended.
Yeah.
But it's it's quite good. They they've revamped the app and it's nice. So
That and launching my podcast. And so just keeping it simple, launching the Kevin Rose show.
I'll give it a one second plug, which is kevinrose.com if you want to sign up.
I'll let you know when it launches, but I got some great guests lined up for that show.
And taking it seriously, building out a real studio, doing it professionally, professional editors.
the whole thing. So can be great.
It is gonna be great.
I can't wait to see I wanted the roster looks like not ten things, but like just like three or four. Yeah. What are yours? Mine are and then I'm gonna come back. Don't worry, folks, it's not gonna
consume the whole show, but I want to ask you a question about AI. So I'll
pre-load that in your head, which is
Where do you think people
compromise their privacy because of
Really compelling convenience. Mm-hmm.
Where they might regret it.
I'm just like where they might
click yes in providing access where later they'll be like, Oh, I really shouldn't have done that.
Uh two quick answers for this one. One I think is gonna be photos.
People believe that
Don't ever click yes.
to
All photo access, especially
If you've got d
Wow. No, listen, I I went there because a buddy of mine just got compromised last week.
Yeah.
I I I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I'm not gonna say who
This is I swear to you, Tim, this is a true story.
Got Sim swapped. Okay. Somebody took over his iCloud account. And he's got a very my wife knows this, so I can say this freely. He's got a very beautiful wife. And you know, he's a good looking dude. Saw B, you know. Kinda like us, you know, like maybe B minus, whatever. And he's got pictures of his wife.
Like all in his iCloud. He's traveling a lot and she's saying little nutty naughty. And I'm like I'm like, dude, are you are you sending a little back? Or you know,'cause like those are the ones like no one's gonna complain about your wife getting leaked online. It's like
Are your pics gonna get out there online and
It was a really stressful few days for him.
I am sure. Honestly.
Not to judge anyone who's fond of shooting around dick pics. I don't understand how anyone ends up in that position.
Yeah. I'm just like don't do it. No. There are certain commandments. Yeah, like th thou shalt not send dick pics. Yeah. The downside is so much higher than any possible upside. Right.
Plus um I mean look, maybe I'm buying it's like who has like
I don't think I have to have a
uh you know, the shreck of penises, but it's like I don't I don't understand what the appeal is also.
Well that's because you don't
Mm.
Like penis is I'm not yeah, I don't have a I I don't have a I guess a
Like a collage of Schwanzas made into a piece of artwork on my wall. So maybe
Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just
That's based on the team. I mean it's for s for some people that's kinda their like, you know, the way they flirt remotely and things like that. And that's it's not me. I don't I don't do that either. But
I'm actually doing a full episode on my podcast on Dick Bic. Uh Dick Biggs. On on locking down specifically iCloud, because I think it is the the
scariest place for hackers to gain access to.
Because they get your iMessage messages and they also get your your phot as well.
Any quick tips for folks just on the teaser? Here's a quick teaser.
Number one thing you can do so you want to hear the crazy shit that happened to him. No. So we can 10X my paranoia, here we go.
Okay. So what happened is
Is that
Apple
As you know, if you forget your password, they have something called I forgot which is like you can go there and say, I forgot my password, right?
And it says, Okay, well, do you have another device that you can confirm? Uh uh No, I don't have another device.
Okay.
Well, what's your backup phone number, right? And so
you can reset that password with the backup phone number that you put into the system.
That all makes sense, right?
A SIM swap, somebody steals your phone number and they get access to it and then that's how you get compromised. SIM swaps are getting harder to do because some of the big providers have caught on and they've tried to kind of like prevent that from happening, ask you more questions.
All of that nature.
Well,
Someone called in on his behalf to let's just say
Yeah.
Well you might want to bleep that out to your sponsor at some point. But
They called in, they faked like it was him. Yeah.
And they didn't ask for a sim swap.
What they asked for, they said, Hey, can you forward
The phone number.
just for an hour to this other number because I needed it forwarded. So
Normally this straight social engineering. No, but you s uh straight social engineering, but listen to this. Normally a forward wouldn't work because a text message doesn't get forwarded. Only calls do.
But
You can go into Apple and you can say
I have auditory problems. I can't hear
Can you call me with the security code?
So they did a quick forward. They called it didn't go to his phone. It went to the hacker's phone.
Apple read the security code to them via
audio and put it in compromise, reset it, changed phone number, compromise, download all of his data, and then tried to blackmail him to get his data back. Oh my God. Okay, so in terms of teasers for Yeah, teaser would number one thing to do.
Is that
You want a cell phone provider where there is not a phone number to call and it's really truly securely locked down. Your best provider for that in the United States is Google Fi. And what you do is you don't set it up with your Google account. You create a brand new Gmail account.
Then no one knows.
Tim Tim Secure.
8537 at gmail.com. Exactly.
And then you you two factor the off the crap out of that, turn on Google's advanced protection there.
Then you sign up for a Google Fi account, which is a brand new phone number.
Then you tell Apple that is your backup phone number. Because Apple
can still service your main number, but only use that backup number to reset passwords. So there's no possible way anyone would know that backup number.
So it's a whole thing, there's more steps to it than that. You know, you get hardware keys involved like Google's Titan key.
which is the most hardcore of the USB C keys, hardware keys. Uh uses uh one of their Titan chips, which is legit.
It's a whole thing, but it's scary.
Terrifying.
Yep.
Time for me to double down.
My phone has been acting funny recently.
It's making me spooked a bit. Yeah. It's like my phone has been acting a little funny and I'm like
Weird. You know what sucks too is is I've been going to uh WhatsApp more and doing that seven days, like delete all my messages.
Because honestly
Tell me if you feel this way. I know you feel this way,'cause we have these cards on text. There are things that you say with your friends
That you're just like if anyone read this out of context, I would seem like
The most
Insert whatever Oh every person who uses group threads, if you are remotely interesting. Or if you're funny, you're all fucked. Like if anything were made public, everybody's screwed.
The number of jokes I've made that are not something I would want the world to see, but are all in good fun and just amongst friends.
It's like in the thousands, right? And if that shit got online I would deny it all. I didn't write that. I think I did.
The AI.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's it's tough. So this is actually really good tequila. It's really smooth.
So on the AI front, real brief.
And then we said photos was the one part you asked what were the two places where or what were the places where AI might compromise your data. So that's the first one. Yeah, so I think photos would be the main thing. And then the second one would be
Just
this idea of these note taking apps.
Because if you're journaling like for me, I I have you know a fantastic therapist and I journal all of that.
And so
Things like Obsidian, the reason I'm drawn to one that one in particular is it's local only. So it only it doesn't sink to the cloud. And when it does
It uses a local encrypted key, so they not even they can read your data.
I trust Notion, I trust that but you know if someone were to compromise their key on their end
In theory, even though the data is encrypted at rest.
Meaning like when it's not being used, it's encrypted on their hard drives is still a potential vulnerability there.
But at the end of the day, if someone really wants to read my therapy notes like whatever. We live in a world where you can just be like ah someone made that up

There's a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI and there's a whole new world of exploits. Yeah. Wild.

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On the AI side.
For people who might be curious.
I've actually not on my personal notes, but we have trained
Or I should say rather automatic, which runs WordPress.com and
I rely on their enterprise.
side of things for all of my websites. They have an AI feature and they've trained this AI on all of my transcripts. So if you want to ask questions
Of
Seven hundred or so.
Transcripts of the Tim Ferriss show you can do that. And the results
in a lot of cases are surprisingly good.
There's several startups working on this. I saw one that actually
Indexed your show.
And if you ask a question of it, we'll return the clip.
In which you said the answer to it, which is
Amazing is.
I was thinking the other day about a great startup that I don't have the time to build.
Would be a podcast app.
that imagine this world and tell me that this is interesting to you.
So
It trains on all of your data. I'm listening to Tim Ferriss show. I'm halfway through an episode and you mentioned something that I don't understand or I'm just not familiar with. I'll just just say ayahuasca for something random, okay?
And I hit pause and I hit the Tim AI button. Now it's trained on your voice, so it can respond in your voice.
And I say,
Tim, what is ayahuasca actually? I before we continue the show, and you respond, you say, Well, ayahuasca is this, and I talked about it in episode number twelve, blah, blah, and number twenty-seven. And here's a clip of me saying this, and then you can rejoin
The stream of the podcast.
And continue. So it's almost like
You show up as a coach mid podcast for any questions I have about that show. So I can pick your brain and also as applied to your books.
So I could go into your entire corpus of books that I have and
And ask questions of that data as well. That has to be the future, right?
Yeah, that's interesting I How do you feel about that as a content creator? Does that make you a little uneasy?
It doesn't make me uneasy on a content level.
Because
I operate from place of
abundance with my stuff because my stuff is so dense. It's not dense necessarily in a bad way, but it's like I could talk
about the content of, say, one of my books.
For hours on dozens of podcasts and not come close to
exhausting even twenty percent of that book. So I'm very
forthcoming with that. The one
flag I would say that I have for that particular example is that if it's my voice and so on, and this is going to come up a lot with AI.
What is the indemnity?
What does liability look like? Right. Right. If someone uses an ad and they're like, Well, this Tim AI told me that I should do A, B, and C or that I should
Right. It's it's it's X, Y, and Z.
percent chance they get it wrong and then as applied to something dangerous. Because that could be telling you from the four hour chef how to make runny eggs the wrong way, who cares? But like it's like telling you to take the wrong supplement dosage is a whole nother can of worms. There's dangerous and then there's just opportunity for scammers. Right.
Well that's happening regardless, dude. Well it is. Kim's gonna be calling me a new ball. Well not just
on the AI kind of social engineering side, but for instance
There are we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but there are people called career plaintiffs out there. Unfortunately, I know what this is. But for instance, there will be a law firm, what they do is they file class action lawsuits based on a couple and like
Barbara and Bob Jones are the couple that they work with all the time and they're like, Hey, Barbara and Bob
Subway Sandwiches is selling eleven and a half inch subs, but they're calling them footlong. Go buy two of them and then complain with us and we'll file this thing and we'll give you ten percent of the upside.
And I think that some of these AI models will provide
A nice juicy bite of the apple. That was actually a real lawsuit, by the way that you're mentioning. Oh, I know. Yeah. Oh, I know. But we won't get into the details of why I know that. But God, the US, man, some of these things. It's it's just astonishing that that they the the rules provide for
Some of these creatures to exist in profit.
Coming back to New Year's resolutions. Yeah.
We had a nice big boomerang on that.
Mine are
I would say simple, not necessarily easy.
As is true with a lot of things. The first is minimalist delegation, and what that means to me is
Delegating
the why and the who, but not necessarily the how. So
I think my
predisposition is to be very detailed when I delegate various types of tasks or projects.
Mm-hmm.
In other words.
What I would like to do more of is here is
At the simplest level.
Five words of what I wanna do.
Figure it out.
Right. And you can handle all the specifics. You should know that we should have th at least three bids if we're putting something out that's expensive.
dot dot dot dot dot but to really take my hands off the wheel
In terms of over prescribing the details.
Which I have a tendency to do because my mind is very detail focused. I'm very meticulous. But I have found that
More often than not.
I can point to examples of where I'm providing too much step by step detail and also people who receive that
in some cases feel like they're being
Micromanaged.
Not only that, they're not building the muscle.
Exactly.
Because they need to understand the only way they can kind of build that muscle around who you are and what you want is
By making mistakes and you saying, Hey, I would have done it this way a little bit differently
Because of X, Y, and Z. And then they learn from that mistake versus you just prescribing and it saves you a shit ton of time. It saves a ton of time. So what I'm experimenting with, and I've already started doing this, and I think I've made a lot of progress.
Is
Say less.
Say less.
And be available for questions, but otherwise make it clear that there's a certain degree
of wiggle room and space for errors that is okay. So when your admin walks in, you say sandwich. If a meatball sandwich doesn't throw you throw it against the wall and you say sandwich. That would be one way to handle it. And I remember there was I want to say a blog post a while ago
That was
written by either Ben Casnoca or Reed Hoffman, but Ben Casnoka used to be
The
Let's just call it like aide de camp or chief of staff for Reed Hoffman.
And uh
What Reed had said to Ben was something along the lines, and I remember this because I had to look it up. This would be a chance for me to interrogate like the Reed AI. Like, what do you mean by blah blah blah?
He said in the service I'm paraphrasing here, but like in the service of speed, I'm willing to accept ten percent.
Foot fault. And I was like Footface?
Fuck does that mean? And I think it's a tennis reference, which is like when you step over the line when you're serving and you get called for a fault. But in the service of speed, basically the way I interpret that is.
You can get ten percent wrong.
Ideally it's not really expensive catastrophic stuff, but I'm willing to accept a ten percent error rate.
In
the service of speed. So I'm trying to think about it along those lines because there's so many things that are either reversible or inexpensive where it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Doesn't really matter. You're better off making
sort of wrong decision and then right decision and doing both of those quickly because you course correct. Right. Then taking a ton of time to deliberate in your mind when oftentimes you don't even have complete information. Right. You don't know.
But also like imagine you get that down to five percent.
The extra effort required.
What is that doing to you as a burden?
Yeah. Versus just letting go a little bit and letting those faults happen. Yeah.
And the the it's gotta be a little bit freeing. Yeah, totally. Question for you because I thought
You recommended at some point this book to me, and I have two or three friends who have recommended it since.
The surrender experiment? Yeah.
Are you still a fan?
Michael Singer? Yes. Yeah. I'm still a fan. Okay. Could you say a little bit about it? Because I don't know if we've ever talked about it on the podcast. Yeah, I mean, I haven't read it for probably two and a half or so years now, but Michael Singer is I would say just a general
kind of I don't know how to put it other than just like I I don't wanna say spiritual guru or or more just kind of like a
Salt of the earth type guy that has figured out
that surrender is kind of
the ultimate freedom.
Like this idea that you can just
release and let go.
puts you more in the present moment.
than pretty much anything else. And
The whole book is around how when stuff comes in
It doesn't hit you. It doesn't hit and stick.
Mm-hmm. So like to hit and stick and marinate and fester.
Is not surrendering.
It's letting it
The energy build and and bring you down oftentimes.
And
The book is framed around this idea that the more you can let go, the more freedom there is, the more happiness there is.
And as Henry Shuman put it, the freedom comes from not the tight grip.
on reality.
But the slow finger by finger letting go of that grip.
Mm-hmm. And part of the
appeal for me as it was described. I have not read the book, but uh very close friend of mine is reading it right now and he has a course, by the way, that's fantastic. Okay. It's on uh Sounds true.
It's a video course and it's it's quite good. It's a video course. Yeah.
Did you watch the is it necessary to watch the video? I just like he's a g he's a quirky personality and he's great, he's great on video. He's just like really funny. Yeah. And it seems like the that book at least is his personal story, which automatically makes it more engaging from hypothetical.
Yes, letting go. So the minimumist delegation and the second point is actually related to that.
That is the in a sense letting go. Quick creative collaborations is the second one. I only have three things. It's minimalist delegation, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot.
Which is pretty straightforward to me. Again, it's simple, but not always easy. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna talk about it. So quick creative collaborations.
This is an area where you have seen me actually kick the tires quite a bit in the last year.
With
Cockpch. Mm-hmm. Which by the way, there's a ton coming with that, which is gonna be a big surprise to a lot of people, but I have done enough. Buy cock punch.
That's right.
No, not financial advice. Jesus. That was AI talking. I didn't say that.
And uh
In the process.
I'm using this NFT project way back in the day, which it's when it launched in December of twenty twenty two, I guess.
As a
vehicle through which to do creative experiments, right? An emergent long fiction. That was kind of the whole point. And I I have walked that, walked the talk in the sense that since then, and a lot of this has been invisible, but it it will soon be visible. I've done
creative sprints in, say, upstate New York with some of the top
D and Magic the Gathering artists or I should say people who have done amazing iconic work for those brands. Yeah.
Doing character design and concept.
It was so much fun. It was so much fun and
I have had this narrative that I'm a better
I see. The individual contributor. I'm better as a solo operator. And that in some sense, I think because I've heard from
some publishers and so on that I'm a bit of a problem author because I'm very
Very
Very
unwilling to compromise quality. Like I'm just I am unwilling to compromise quality and I'm very meticulous. And so if somebody's not on that same page,
I'm a problem. Mm-hmm. And so I developed this narrative that
I was just prickly and difficult and
How much of that do you think is true?
Have you d ever done three sixty review?
I have done a three sixty review.
The feedback wouldn't support
I wouldn't say it supports that narrative. And
In this particular case.
Gathered all these folks, had some writers as well, which I thought was going to be harder than the
art side because I can step back and say you are all much better at art than I am, but I have an identity as a writer. And it was great.
I had two writers.
three artists and had an absolute blast. The output was spectacular, which I haven't made public yet.
And that emboldened me to do more and more experiments. And so I can't talk too much about it.
right now, but I am actually working on my first book project in
Seven years? Eight years?
And I'm doing it with a collaborator, which I thought I would never do in a million years. Okay, wait, you gotta give us a little more of a fiction, nonfiction, nonfiction. This is OG
T F style.
I know five hour. But but very dense, hyper tactical. I not dense, like very rich. In other words, it's not a bunch of fluff. I'm not turning a blog post into a three hundred page book. You're going to want to Can you tell us what it is? I can't.
I can't. Can you give me like a a genre?
I can't really give you genre what I will cooking a book again. It's not
Ha ha

I got I think I everybody got their fill of of cooking with that. I'm very proud of that book, but holy shit, that almost killed me. No, I'm not doing that again.
also not making the foolish decision to say to myself, you know what I should do? You know what would be fun is for me to do
thirty to fifty percent of my own photography for a seven hundred page cookbook.
Don't do that. Archery. If you're not a photographer, don't do that. It is so much work. Oh my God. I di I really
respect to the photographers out there. I underestimated that one. But you dodged the archery question. It is an archery boy book. It's not an archery book. I'm I'm planning on doing more archery. That is part of the physical
Okay.
But the quick creative collaborations
This book is going to be about
I would say
How to
Find the essential
And
Ignor the trivial. That's the very broad strokes.
I am collaborating.
On writing, which I thought I would never do, it is going better than I ever possibly could have imagined.
And
It has
opened the floodgates for me to think about what other collaborations I could pursue. Screenplays.
Animation, television, who knows?
But I've realized that
If I am paired with someone
who really gives a shit about quality and cares about being really proud of their work.
I'm totally fine.
I can collaborate.
really well with those people.
They just have to have really high standards. And I'm excited to do more of that. So the screenplay side and like the TV and animation is
particularly interesting to me.
So becoming more adept with a format like a screenplay.
And the format itself has intimidated me.
And I feel like I just need to be locked in a room with someone really good for two weeks and be like, You cannot leave until you have something to ship.
It can be a rough draft, but it has to be pretty much ready.
And I think that's doable.
So the quick creative collaborations is something that I'll be doing more of
And then last on the physical reboot, it's I have been such a piglet in the last
Month and thick.

That's a T H I C C folks. Look and think. And I am I'm not in terrible shape, but
I am
Planning on continuing to be
A little piggy.
For
Christmas and the holidays'cause I'm gonna be home with family and like I love butter cookies. I love gingerbread cookies.
This is kinda like you not committing to your three months before your birthday. That would be stupid. Yeah. So I'm gonna be spending January, February in really intense
outdoor training and skiing and ski touring and so on. So I'm not worried about burning off what I'm accumulating because that's gonna happen.
Especially at high altitude. I'm gonna try and visit you, by the way.
Awesome. January. That would be fantastic. So the physical reboot.
is up there and I'm optimistic about that because on the internal level
meaning biomarkers and so on.
Almost every biomarker is the best that it's been in like a decade. Wow. After the last year. That is not me. That sounds amazing. Yeah. And some of that has been
Certainly physical practice exercise, a lot of that has been dietary since how's your uh Apo B?
The best it's ever been. Hello.
I can't recall offhand.
Twenties or thirties? I mean it's within the aggressive AT. Yeah.
Target range. A S T A A L T fine. Oh yeah, those are always fine. Homocysteine always good.
Homocysteine's always fine. Okay. Yeah. My my liver enzymes. What was that? What are your issues? What did you correct in your blood work? There are a couple of things that I've corrected. So I have historically high uric acid levels. Oh so but you're on allopurinol then. I'm not on allopurinol because I had a reaction to it, which can be very dangerous. Yes, it can. So I'm on your something called Uloric, which is fine. And
It's actually a better cleaner drug, I think it is. People can yeah, there are there's a bunch of debate around it because there were some smaller studies that were arguably poorly designed that
Did some type of head to head and it got poo-pooed, but Euloric for me is a good option, not medical advice. Talk to your fucking doctor, please. I don't play one on the internet.
In addition to that
That's from your meat, by the way, you know that.
That's your meat intake. No it's not.
Are you sure? Yes. Typically uric acid, you know, they used to call it the King's disease, right?'Cause it causes gout.
And it was from like wine. It's considered a disease of apples. Okay, so the wine is more interesting.
Okay. So yes, people associate it with, if I'm not mistaken, purines and it gets associated therefore with with protein intake also.
But there's a blog post I it's easy to forget. I have a thousand plus blog post, which actually bridged the books to the podcast. It's easy to forget that connective tissue with a thousand plus
blog post. One of them is called
Something like the hidden chapter.
from good calories, bad calories. Good calories, bad calories, book
Great book. Tabbs. Uh Gary Tobs Gary Tubs.
And one of the chapters that
ended up on the cutting room floor.
Was about
Fructose.
And how T is anti, which also ties into
Uic acid. Yes.
So
What I have seen in myself, at least, it doesn't matter if I am carnivore diet, vegan, fasting, whatever dietary lever I try to pull.
Uic acid is high. It just does not matter. And that's also hereditary. This runs in in my family.
The other
Constellation of issues are all cardiac.
Like lipid profile related.
Also hereditary. Dietary intervention, with the exception of one thing that I'll mention. Are you on a satin?
I'm not on a statin. Yeah, but just just to be clear, so there are different reasons that your lipid profile
Can be out of whack.
In my particular case
And I might be able to put something in the show notes as a resource.
There are
Sophisticated
labs or companies that will run labs that sort of fine slice a lot of this.
Boston Heart.
I think it's Boston Heart. Yeah.
And then you need someone to interpret the tea leaves, obviously, in which case you need a very confident doctor. In my case, I'm a cholesterol hyperabsorber. More accurately, I'm a sterile.
hyper absorber, which means I can also absorb a lot of sterile from, say, plant matter, which is why automatically
If you reduce meat or eliminate meat, it doesn't mean
That your
cardiac and lipid profile will improve.
And you actually see a lot of folks for which it goes the opposite direction because they end up consuming a lot more refined carbohydrates.
their fasting glucose goes up and they end up with a whole host of issues, in some cases associated with fructose, right? Like oh agave in actor, brilliant. Well, maybe not so brilliant. And
For that reason.
In my case I'm taking a Zetomib actually I'm taking
Something called Next Lazette, which is absurdly expensive. Welcome to the United States in this case, but it's a combination of a zetomib and something called Bempadoic Acid.
A Zetomide very well researched.
Pretty well understood. Bempadoic acid and newer.
Player on the scene.
But very interesting. And the combination of those two.
Plus the Uloric.
Or what?
Got.
A number of biomarkers of concern.
Not crazy.
And
I've done not only
the usual cardiac calcium scores, which
Are helpful but incomplete in a lot of ways. I've also done angiograms, which you do not want to do willy-nilly all the time, but I wanted to see if there were any precursors to any issues. Yeah. So far, so good.
In my particular case, those things plus reducing saturated fat intake.
Dude, statuary factory. Killer screws up all my numbers. It makes a difference. So in my case, you know, if
It would be a bad idea for me to hit the like M C T smoothies, right? Right. So Bulletproof Coffee, bad idea for me. Also the M C T, I don't know if it does it to you, but it uh
Disaster pants. Yeah. Risk goes up Yeah. Risk goes up by 10X. Yeah. If if you're like run to the bathroom with the M C T oil. Yeah. Yeah. If you are thinking to yourself, you know, in twenty twenty four I want to shit my pants more often, I would recommend Constipate. Yeah, cre yeah, creatine, double espresso, and M C T oil
Problem solved. Don't ask me how I know that, but you can guess. Don't have that right before you're driving to the airport for your international flight also. Pro tip. So the minimalist delegation
Fast delegation.
Embracing reversible or low cost.
Possible mistakes.
Yeah.
Quick creative collaborations and then
physical reboot and honestly with the phys a lot of that
Is old news.
The stuff that works, works. It's like kettlebell swings. Zone two cards. Key touring.
Yeah, zone two
which I'll get to very naturally with what I'm gonna be doing.
And in terms of hiking and ski touring and so on.
Basic, basic, basics. Like the I shouldn't say basics. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. Yeah. And just when in doubt, return to fundamentals. It's like weight training once a week.
That is better than nothing. Once a week
And then the zone two.
But also for me it's like one or two sessions of very, very hard
Technical Pilates.
to hit everything that I'm gonna miss anyway. Like medial glute and transfer here, by the way. Yeah. And uh that's about it.
Do less than you think you can do. If you if some of your goals are around physical reboot or recomposition.
Set the bar where you are sure you can clear it.
Yeah.
So I wanna talk to you real quick about you mentioned the physical body reboot. One of the things that
All my a physicians not all uh it sounds
Bougie to say all my physicians. My primary care physician has been has been concerned about is
I have slightly elevated blood pressure and it's not to the point where I should have it treated with medicine. Yeah. But you know, there's breathing exercises you can do. There's a a device called Respirate, which uh Peter Tia recommends. I don't know. Um yeah, it's fantastic. It hooks around your chest. It's like a strap.
And then you put in some ear pods that are connected to this device and it walks you through a series of breathing exercises and it's clinically proven to lower your blood pressure. So the T recommends that as kind of first line defense for slightly elevated blood pressure.
There is a device that is approved in the UK and the EU.
And it's called Actia and it's a horrible name. What?
Actia.
Not ATI. Yeah, so it's A K T I I A. I'm wearing it on my wrist right now.
So if you're watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest Fitbit. It's super tiny. The battery life is five days.
It does
Every hour
Blood pressure monitoring.
It's clinically like proven accurate.
And Atia's testing it right now in his lab with his folks there.
It is not approved in the US, so when I had to do
Is I
Bought it online. First I got a VPN.
I proxied into their website to make it look like it was in the UK. And then I bought online, shipped it to a friend in the UK.
Who sent it to me in the States, I then
created a fake iCloud account in the UK with a fake email address and VPN to act like I was in the UK.
on a separate phone that I had not sent in, like one of my older iPhones.
And then I was able to get the app installed through the UK app store because it's not available in the US app store.
And got it to work. So
Technically this is not legal in the United States. Contraband. But it's uh you know, uh it's uh I'm I'm actually monitoring it and the breathing exercises are helping.
It high salt intake.
combined with water is huge. If you have a salty steak or anything
I can notice just like when we remember when we first got into CGMs, you were way before I was, but into continuous glucose monitors, you got me into'em and you would be surprised because you would sit there and you'd be like, Oh, banana doesn't do anything. And some people banana shoots you through the roof, right?
Or rice for me, oh my God, through the roof. I don't know about you, but rice for me is a huge offender. Rice affects me less than it affects you, but it affects a lot of folks. Yeah.
Footnote in a previous episode we talked about the rice cooker. Which drains out the water. Yeah.
Which dramatically reduces the glycemic response.
So but back to our scheduled program. Yeah, we can link that in the show notes as well. But this for me has been like, Okay, I just had a salty meal.
Now let me chug a bunch of water along with that meal. And actually I will notice a difference. I do not get into those what they call like the high orange levels of blood pressure.
Just by my water consumption.
Meaning you
You help or hurt.
By drink water. By drinking more water. Yes. Drinking water.
And there's evidence that back this up, but she's had people on the podcast that have talked about this.
But anyway, it's another device that
I hope not gone when they've submitted to the FDA.
Uh hope is that we'll have this device approved in the States here
Yeah, I don't know, next six months to a year, so we'll see.
Very cool.
Anything else on the physical reboot side? I mean the three months with no booze, I think is gonna be if you can do it, no offense. It'll be a revelation, I think. It's gonna be amazing. Speaking of that
Looks like you're not a big fan of your own tequila.
Well I I just know you're not drink really drinking any, so there's that first of all.

No, I mean if you don't like it, it it's you're just selling it. That's fine.
It's also we started recording at three PM. So usually I'm not a three PM drinker. But you know what? I'm gonna be in bed by seven, so it'll be since even Oh jeez. Okay. So since we're checking back into the home anyway, where they're gonna put our socks on and put us to bed. No problem. Yeah, yeah.
All right. Dude, let's retire at the same retirement home.
That'd be so much fun. Yeah.

And uh so let's talk about
I always enjoyed it. Taking breaks from stuff because I have kind of a wild story.
Which I don't think we've talked about at all.
I have a number of wild stories. Oh yeah. I got one big one for today. You have a big one. We have a big one too, and I think these are gonna be
Interrelated in a sense.
So
I'll piggyback half of it.
After
What I believe you're gonna share. But I took a month off of
Caffeine.
Anything happened at a time.
Which was the first turkey?
Cold turkey, which was the first time I've done that s probably, I would have to imagine, since I was what, sixteen? I mean it's been forever. Let me ask you a question here. W why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like oh a half a cup of coffee today and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later? Like why go
This is like the extreme Tim where you're just Well did you get headaches? Yeah, I got headaches. But but it was during a period where I could Vicadens. No, I didn't use Vicadens. I I knew that I could accept the headaches.
And I had a period of time where there really was a low cost. Where like professionally
I was taking
three to four weeks off the grid.
And I knew that
I had a grace period.
Where I could sustain it. So I did effectively
No caffeine.
No alcohol.
And I suppose the most important other items.
No sex, no ejaculation, which is we can talk about that, but that's pretty easy. The harder one is I did nothing sweet.
So not just containing sugar, but nothing sweet. So anything that has an artificial sweetener was out. Would you consider this tequila sweet?
I would not consider this to get sweet. And there is a there is a bit of subjectivity for a lot of it. It has sweet notes to it. Like it's Yeah, it's it's got some floral notes to it. But
By the kind of letter of the law, I wouldn't consider this subjectively to be sweet. But for instance, any kind of juice out.
Any type of sweetener, of course, out.
Let's just say different types of plantains. If they are sweet to the taste, they're out. Sweet potatoes out.
And
Is that hard for you th that that's not hard for me?
Doesn't seem hard, but let's just extend this.
Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol.
Or some kind of crap in it. Right. That is a sweener. So no brush your teeth for two weeks. I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb, just baking soda. Straight up. I I brushed my teeth with that for a handful of of weeks. And what you also realize is in the US
Or in this case when I went to Korea.
If you ask
People if A B or C has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost
everything that you come across.

And
That was interesting. It was challenging'cause it severely limited what I could eat.
But the caffeine
was
An amazing experience. Now I alluded to this a little bit earlier. I'm back on the sauce over the last
Week, week and a half, which I regret, number one.
And I'm paying
A lot.
For like there are costs.
In terms of sleep?
Let me back up and I'll just give you the the punch. Tell us why you did this to begin with,'cause you didn't mention that.
It wasn't a New Year's resolution. W why?
It started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff and there were restrictions. And then I just extended everything. But weird stuff, let's let's psychedelics stuff. Yeah, psychedelics. Okay.
Which will tie into
a part of my strange story later.
But
I hadn't done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years. So I took restrictions very seriously. I think that is important, in my opinion. And then I extended them all.
And uh
I wanted to see in part because I met someone who said they had covered
Stopped drinking anything caffeinated, cold turkey.
Because they felt like a loser, because they'd become dependent on it and they'd missed
a really important ski day, like one of the first days of the season and they're a really good skier.
And they were the group of people and they were the only I believe they were the only person
Who skipped and that day they were just like no more.
And
to this day, you know, like two years later.
Caffeine free. Yeah. We we uh I lost something there.
Mm-hmm.
When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing'cause they couldn't have coffee? Because they didn't have coffee that morning and they were so tired.
Oh but they felt like they couldn't do it. So they stayed on the ski lift. Instead of getting off, they just went around and went straight back down. That's amazing. And called it a day. And and to their credit, the other weather or something that's but to their credit they were just like
This is fucking loser behavior.
enough and they they went to zero.
And uh that caught my attention.
Because
When you talk to someone, no no offense to anyone who fits in this category, but let's just say
If someone is a Mormon and they've never had caffeine.
That's not my life.
Right. They've never had a hit of the sauce.
Yeah. I mean, although technically there are workarounds like diet coke instead of coffee, but we're not gonna get into the weeds here. But like if somebody hasn't had a taste
Of the like delicious poison. There's so many things, right? There's so many things like this where
It's like okay, if you've had one significant other and you've never been out and about and like sampled the buffet of the world, like we can't really have
It's very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships. Like it's just it's a different
Right.
Same with caffeine, but this person had
Been
Hitting the sauce.
For
decades and then they got off. And that was inspiring to me. Then I had this restriction and I just extended it.
And just to give the punchline.
My sleeping issues that I've had for decades.
Every single one.
Just vanished.
Best sleep of
The last twenty years.
Woke up wide awake every morning after the first like let's just call it like a week and a half.
Had tons of energy.
And uh got
Super high volume of stuff done.
And what I realized, and part of the reason to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things, I was curious what my real baseline was. Like what does real baseline look like? What is Tim
Untouched, unaffected by all these various
Supplements. Oh that's another thing. I took a month off of all supplements.
I only took my prescription meds like the Uloric and so on. Yeah.
I got rid of all supplements.
And No Decca or Tisaka or anything. No Decca. No nothing. Okay. And uh
I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what
The sort of pure
Baseline Tim is.

And uh turns out baseline Tim does really well.
Why go back then?
You got hungover. No, I didn't get hungover. Coffee. I didn't get hungover. So I also before I went to South America, I listened to an audio book
Which was called or is called the easy way to quit caffeine.
that is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it's the easy way to quit smoking. And I know people who have literally multiple people who've listened to this, they have their last cigarette and they're done and they stop.
So it's a little hokey.
Okay. That made an impact on me as well. I'll do that for January. I'm wrong that down on my list. January no caffeine. And um now that I know I can do it.
I'm definitely gonna do it again.
The reason that I got back on it and this is
I'll actually add just a little bit of color. The first is that there were days
without caffeine where I would say to myself, I'm tired. I really want a cappuccino. Mm-hmm.

But I realized because I interrogated, I was like, Well, I'm not allowed to have a cappuccino. Am I really tired?
Right.
And I came to the conclusion that no, I wasn't actually tired.
I just wasn't
Fucking wired. You see what I mean? Like my normal

Multiple coffees in the morning and God knows what else. So
I had taken as my baseline.
A
Default.
Mm. I mean wired sounds too negative, but like
Stimulated state.
And when that was removed, the story that I
conjured was I'm tired.
But when I
was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast.
Podcast turns out great.
Like
Okay, let me revisit this. I wasn't tired. I was just calm.
Interesting.
Crazy. Interesting.
And why did I get back on coffee?
Coffee for me I've realized
Is probably like alcohol for a lot of folks.
And there's some times, I'm not gonna lie, look, let's be honest here. Like there are times when it's like I wanna take the edge off. Sure, have a drink. Yeah. But more often
'Cause I don't drink that much.
I use coffee as like a security blanket when my life
gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted.
And
things seem a little out of control or I'm not sure how I'm gonna make it through something.
walking to the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee
It's a life raft of consistency. Yeah. We saw this during Covid, right? Where people would line up at Starbucks for three hours to get a coffee because it was like the one semblance of a little, you know, and there's also a high to it. So it's also a high. So even though
I realize intellectually that it's counterproductive. Like when I am feeling
as I have been for a host of reasons that I won't bore people with, but
Just gone through a pretty challenging
Week or two.
My response to feeling a little anxious.
Is to want coffee.
Even though it increases anxiety physiologically.
This is one thing actually we've known each other for a long time. I d I don't know the answer to this. I don't know that I've seen you do this.
Are you in
Afternoon coffee guy at all? I don't know that I've I've seen you do
Mate
Maybe a little bit later.
I typically do not have
Coffee in the afternoons. Yeah. And
I really try not to have caffeine in the afternoons.
Which I violated this week.
So in the last like two days or I should say in the last this is say in the past seven days.
I have violated that. And what I've realized
Because
run the N of one now. And they're a bunch of different variables. So I realize this is imprecise. That's not a perfect science.
Is that
I can drink coffee and fall asleep.
That's not the problem. But it disrupts my sleep architecture. Quality of sleep, yeah. I wake up
After three days, very little time, three days of drinking caffeine.
I wake up and I have circles under my eyes, like dark circles.
Are you quantifying this in in the sense of like are you wearing an aura ring? Do you have any other data where you're looking at it? I'm not currently capturing the data with an aura ring, but I have in the past. Yeah. I've seen what it looks like. So I know that's the case.
I'm falling asleep.
My time in bed.
If we're just looking at a clock is fine. But I'm waking up
Tired. I hate that. And then what do you want? You want another hit. Of course. You want more of the sauce. And uh there's a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. Like I don't think for the rest of my life I'm gonna be
Caffeine free. Yeah. But now
I have a better awareness.
of what my baseline looks like.
So I can return to that. So let me tell you something crazy. Uh this was before I met Daria, so I'm trying to go back in years now. So probably let's just call it fifteen years ago.
I gave up coffee for about six months. Six months? Yeah.
That's legit.
Well, but I wasn't really that addicted to it. I was having like a cup every other day or whatever.
I went back, I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time and I went to Richel Coffee, which is a fantastic coffee place. Great place.
And I ordered a tall like single origin coffee.
And I drank the whole thing and I will tell you when you go six months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee
You feel high as a kite. Yeah, super high. I was like
Ten X would I feel today with a cup of coffee. Yeah.
'Cause your body just I mean, it is a powerful drug when you we've gone without it for a while. Super powerful. Do you have any sense of how long it takes?
To like
Get that back.
Have you done any research like to get what back?
That or an initial like
childhood high of like that first cup of coffee.
I don't know, I don't know. Uh I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking.
How long does it take to develop a tolerance and experience with
withdrawal symptoms, it is so fast. Oh so fast. And one day if you go without coffee for serious coffee drinkers will be headaches. Yeah. Well I would say furthermore, if you stop drinking coffee
And I'm using coffee as a bit of a scapegoat here. Like I love coffee. But if you go without caffeine and then you get back on caffeine.
and you're on it for two or three days and then you stop again, my personal experience is you are gonna feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is unlike most other drugs. It is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug.
Right. Like it I'm not recommending this, but hypothetically if you were to like smoke cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you're fine.
Yeah.
No problem. You're not gonna have a headache the next day. But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that's in part because it is
Often disrupting sleep architecture. That's my vote at least. One question for you. One of the things that I have yet to try that I've been really curious about is I know that there are cultures I can't remember. I'm gonna screw it up. I don't know if it's like a Inca or
I can't remember exactly which
culture it is from Mexico.
That did high dose
Chocolate.
Almost like a uh like a cacao ceremony where they drink these super purified cacao, insane amounts of caffeine, and they reach these kind of spiritual states. Have you ever heard anything about that?
I haven't read
reports, but I know that for instance, I want to say in some places in Mexico, certainly in Guatemala.
You have
Cacao ceremonies. I don't know. I don't know. I was invited to one one time, a cacao ceremony. So I don't know the historical record. I don't know how much of these things were used.
a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. There are many new practices that have
created the
narrative use for a veneer of credibility when in fact things were very different a thousand years ago. You have to imagine cacao was a cacao has been around for a while. So it in the case of cacao, my understanding is it contains theobromine, which in and of itself is a fascinating word. So theobroma
Theo like theology, Roma, food, food of the gods.
Theoboromine, which is
Pharmaco kinetically
is very meaning just if you were look at the graph of
peak and half life and so on is quite different from caffeine is it is my vasodilator of the plant? What what causes'cause I know like Coca Villa, for example. Um are you familiar with that supplement?
Yeah, it's like a it's a cow cell. It's from a large company, I believe. Yeah, from from Mars, actually. From Mars, yeah. But the crazy thing is, is like I was talking to Ronda Patrick about this and
She has had one of her I think it was her mother in law or something like that.
high blood pressure takes coca via, drops it down because it's a vasodilator and is a big fan of it as well. And it's it's been showing cognitive improvements as well. Yeah, I'm not sure. It very well could be the case. I mean when you get
The dose makes the poison, the dose also makes the transcendence for a lot of different plants. So in the case of cacao, I have experienced higher, let's call it higher dose cacao, and you can reach an ultra state for sure.
I'm gonna caveat what I'm about to say with the do not
Ever do this.
warning, but for instance, there are plants that at high enough doses are absolutely psychedelic, which I would never recommend because you can die. Let me repeat that.
fatal risk, so do not try this at home.
But tobacco, as an example, has a very rich history in South America and elsewhere, but especially in South America.
where high doses of juice have been consumed. You have
Every mode of administration you can imagine has been done and is very common down there. There's a book by
Johannes Wilbert
Which is titled Along the Lines of
tobacco and south American or tobacco in South American shamanism and is very dense. It reads like a PhD dissertation.
But when you consume
Pretty much through any route imaginable enough tobacco, you can experience a psychedelic experience. Can I tell you a story about this? Sure.
So I was in San Francisco at the time and they have this was called a decade ago.
They have a bunch of chefs that are very experimental. I won't name the chef, but it was the one Michelin Star chef.
That infuse tobacco leaves into an alcohol. Oh boy. And you have to be insanely careful. If you look up online
Like you said.
If you
put too many leaves in the infusion, you will have a lethal overdose of
Nicotine. Yeah. That will kill you. Yeah.
And so
This chef knew what they were doing. I would never try this at home.
They made me a bourbon infused.
Tobacco cocktail. And I was like
Sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot. You don't need to sleep anytime soon. No, listen. I dr no, I drank this one drink.
And
I'm like having a good time, getting a little chatty, you know, like ooh, this is fun. And then dude, I get up to use the bathroom. Oh boy. And I swear to God.
It felt like my feet were sinking into the ground as I was walking. Well like I was walking down like to the stumps of my knees. Like I was like my my legs were like collapsing as I was walking. You're like, wait a minute. I was like'cause I don't smoke um tobacco at all or anything like that. And it like hit me like a ton of bricks and I'm like
I am high as shit. Yeah. Like it is a very potent substance. Like especially for non smokers, you gotta be really careful. So come in full circle. Right. So cacao
powerful, fascinating plant, sacred in a number of different cultures.
Tobacco
Be very careful, folks.
It is powerful and potentially lethal.
And then coming back to caffeine.
It is the
As I understand it, the world's most commonly consumed psychoactive plant.
Tea is the number one. Tea and coffee. Yeah.
And
It has this place.
I love my cup of coffee, trust me. I had one this morning.
And I think the
Exercise if you can do it.
Not everyone can.
but of rediscovering what your baseline is, what you actually felt like when you were twelve or fifteen is down so valuable. It is so valuable because
I now know
what that feels like and I know that I can return to it as an adult. Yes.
That it holds true to any thing that you're doing.
call it alcohol, any substance that you've become dependent upon. Yeah. Right. It doesn't have to be just caffeine. It can be anything that you've like
that you almost feel like you can't live without. Yeah. Sugar, carbs, some activity.
Traveling late night pizza. Yeah, late night pizza. I mean like if if you're a road warrior and you just travel all the time'cause you say yes to everything, like okay, what does it feel like to sit at
Home?
If such a thing exists for you for one month. What does that feel like? Yeah. And if a bunch of weird stuff comes up, like maybe
As Tar Brock would say, like to one sage, only one question matters. What are you unwilling to feel? Oh my God, I have to have her on the podcast. That is one of my top guests. So if you haven't read it, folks, Radical Acceptance, which
Dar Dar?
I owe Dar Dar thanks for the So if you don't get it. Daria. We call him Tim Tim, so the in the Which came about actually let's give people like a real look into the archives. So Tim Tim came about because we were on a trip to China to drink Puer tea all over the place. Right. Which was one of the weirder trips I've ever been on for a lot of reasons.
We had some very strange experiences on that trip. Drank a lot of tea.
had a motley crew of people with us along for that ride. And there was another Tim on the trip. So the there was a question of how do we keep the two of you separate.
And you came up with, I believe, Tim Tim.
I mean it was uh kinda real time. That's how Tim Tim came about. So Daria.
who is a neuroscientist by training. Yeah. Which is why I actually took
the book Radical Acceptance, seriously, because all due respect, I love Tara, love this book. It had a huge impact on me, but the title gave me an allergic reaction. I was like, oh God, another one of these. Like I just I just sound hand wavy. Okay. Kumbaya did redo like okay, I just can't do it. But the fact that Daria, who has
One of the lowest tolerances for bullshit hand wavy stuff that
I know of the fact that she said she gained from it.
gave me permission.
to dive into it, which then had a really big impact on me. So coming back though.
If you feel like you can't live without X.
Right. That is often a great signal.
Or at least a prompt to ask yourself.
What might an experiment look like
For
Two to four weeks to go without X.
Been super valuable for me. It's awesome.
I'm I I wrote it down.
No caffeine in January. I'm going.
I'm serious. You know, I might double down and do it with you.
Let's do it. Yeah.
Yeah.
No calf.
All right. Let's talk about my experiments, shall we? Yeah, let's do it. I'm excited. I'm excited about this because I also don't know the details. I know that's and I was very curious. Okay. So I don't know how to frame this. Let me start off at the best I the best I can. Let me
So
This is a big one.
I'm pregnant.
I'm pregnant.
Uh was the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger got pregnant? Yes, I know the movie. So basically
For people that that know me or or don't quite know me, like I've done a bunch of stuff in terms of being like an entrepreneur and an investor and these different things and one of the
hats that I put on a couple of years ago was Dabbling in the world of web three.
And web three, for those untrained, it you know, it's cryptocurrency. It's it is decentralized internet. It is
N F Ts. It's art on the blockchain ownership, right? If one point oh is read only internet.
Two point oh is read write, three is actually owning a piece of
What's on the plane. So it's a very exciting frontier. And it's fill with a bunch of explorers that I would say it's a small number of people, call it probably
You know, in terms of people that are excited about digital art, call it, you know, two hundred and fifty thousand people or less.
But it is a serious group of people that
are enabling a new canvas to take form in front of us. And I believe
In my heart of hearts that
For all the bad press that we see about NFTs and all the scams and don't get me wrong, there's tons of that shit.
There is something true about
If you had to close your eyes and wake up in twenty years, will collectible digital art be a thing? Of course it will. And the blockchain is a perfect place to prove provenance.
To prove scarcity, there's a lot of advantages there.
Long story short
I launched
Uh
Something called Moon Birds, which was a PFP project. I remember the text I got on the day of that launch. Oh my god.
So we launched this
Collectible NFT.
And it skyrocketed
way beyond what we had ever thought. So to give you
All a sense.
From launch to one year in, over a billion dollars has been traded in Moonbirds NFTs. That's so wild. And I did not expect that.
You know, I really didn't. But
With that comes trading.
And I have never lived the world of trading. I've
grown companies to quite some size, but never publicly I've never taken a company public. And when you take a company public, i.e. Nasdaq, you know, New York Stock Exchange.
You deal with the ups and downs and feedback from people that are now
stakeholders of that particular company. It's different. This is an equity
Holding an N F T does not make you a shareholder.
It's very different. But
They still pay attention to what is the price of this NFT.
Yeah. So when the NFT goes up.
Times are good.
People are happy.
And when it goes down, people are not happy.
I've had people truly
hug me and say they've paid off their house because they sold one of my NFTs for two hundred thousand dollars and they were stoked. And it was like
Tears kind of hugging. I've had people
basically tear me apart saying I am the other person on the other side of that equation.
that bought that NFT for let's call it whatever, fifty thousand, not seventy five thousand, ten thousand, doesn't really matter. It's all relative to how much that person has as a an individual.
And
How are you gonna fix this?
Because the NFTs are down and they need to go up. Right. Right. And some of it is on, you know, what we build.
to try and build bigger and better things for the ecosystem.
And try and hopefully prove
that we are a company here for the long term.
It has taken an in serious emotional toll on me as an individual. I've had
Many, many sleepless nights.
I've had anxiety like I've never had before.
I've had to work with
therapist and I've had to
Oh, I've had to reach out to my primary care physician and get anti anxiety medicine, which I've never had to do before.
I have had some dark moments. Not
Dark like in suicide, but dark as in
It's destroy me because
I've always considered myself
An honest person.
I've never been here to screw anyone over. You're also a very uh
I consider you to be like an empathic
Feeler. Maybe the right word is like you're a deep feeler. I am a feeler, for sure.
If something like that is sitting with you you take it very personally and I remember when you had like stomach issues for so my God, I B S related issues. So this year
I've been treated multiple times for
these types of issues with physicians
All kinds of things.
You know, the high blood pressure thing was discovered because I have a a brain aneurysm right now.
It's on the smaller side and they're watching it and I'm fine.
But those grow the more stress you're under because the more blood pressure that builds up, the larger the aneurysm can grow.
And so, you know, as you can imagine, all these things hit you at once. Yeah. And so I I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn't go to work. I felt
Like I I kinda just needed to reset, you know?
And
Huberman, who I love.
Who's been on my podcast, Andrew Huberman, his uh top ten podcast now. Oh my god, I'm killing it.
Killing it.
I don't think I've seen anyone better at doing monologues the way that he can do them about scientific topics.
I mean just
If you haven't subscribed to Humans Podcast, I mean it's along with the Tia's a top five
medical podcast to subscribe to along with Rhonda Patrick. I mean, they're all heroes.
Huberman did a
Couple hour episode on ketamine therapy.
Mm-hmm. And ketamine therapy.
You know, it's used for PTSD, it's used for severe depression, and it's used for anxiety.
And it sounded really interesting. It rewires neuropatways and Huberman's episode highly recommend. I'm not a scientist, but he is.
And he goes in depth about what it actually is doing on the brain.
And
I always thought of ketamine clinics as being these shady places.
These places where, you know, there are real people with real addictions that
A tree. If you're hooked on
Everything from amphetamines to any type of
serious addiction problems they see these types of people and also people that are about to kill themselves, like really suicidal. Like if you go to an emergency room right now,
And you say I'm going to end my life in the next ten minutes.
they will most likely treat you with some type of ketamine.
to just like get you out of that state. It's a very common emergency room like
Hail Mary to like get you back into a state of like just being
Okay, I don't want it in my life right now. And now we can work this out or or take you to an institution where you can get help. Mm-hmm.
So I was never there, but I got to the point where I was like I need to do something.
Dramatic and different.
And I need to reboot because I can't take.
The comments I'm getting on Twitter. Now did you see the Hubin episode?
Organically did someone send it to you? Organically. You just came. I was like
Oh, I've always been interested in ketamine. I'd heard about ketamine
in a recreational setting. And you know, sadly, who's the friend star? Matthew Perry. Yeah, Matthew Perry just
The uh toxicology report came back and said that he was on cat mean when he drowned.
We can get into why that that is in a minute, but
Yeah, yeah.
ketamine and jacuzzi's or pools or water to not mix. Exactly. There are multiple fatalities. Don't mix those two things. Well when you go under ketamine you are literally sedating yourself to where they can give you surgery.
It's associative anesthetic. Yeah.
So what my doctor has told me that the cateman therapy uh the doctor, she's an emergency room doctor.
That did my treatments.
Is she said to me that
She was a ten year I think ten or fifteen years emergency room doctor.
And she goes, if you came in and you had dislocated your hip.
She goes.
I would give you what they call a bolus dose, is that what they call when they A bolus is right. I mean they're giving you a lot at once. A lot at once. They just like push it all in, right? Yeah. And she's like I would give you that.
Two about like can't remember the exact X, but it was a multiple on which they give you for therapy.
To put you under
So I can get that hip back into place and then you wake up feeling fine.
Unfortunately with with Matthew Perry, he took a dose that was equivalent of
Subconscious
Fainting.
Falling asleep.
drowning type dose. And they said the Toxology Report, I read it.
He had that level in him.
that would have put him in that state of kind of like passing out, right? Yeah, drugs and water don't mix, folks. Don't mix. Anyway, don't point it wasn't the fault of the cat, I mean it was he was using it recreationally versus under the supervision of a professional, which is
What is needed. So
I found this clinic in LA.
That
They literally have the set and setting right. So they're all about
Like you come in
It's just beautiful, comfortable
Peaceful music.
really relaxing reclining chairs.
I mask because it's important to go inward. It's not about just getting this therapy and looking around the room.
music with like drums and beautiful like sometimes I I I picked my own playlist. I did a little bit more chanting. Non you don't want like lyrics or, you know, anything to distract you.
And they have you hooked up to a a blood pressure cuff that measures throughout the time.
a heart rate monitor, like really
Professional setting.
It's called Golden Afternoon is the name of the clinic in LA. It's an amazing name. It's an amazing name. And the doctor there
Gosh, I'm gonna draw a blank for where she I think she was
Was she pen? I can't remember where she got her her her MD, but like
Top tier
school emergency room doctor
As legit as they come. Mm-hmm.
I so I felt really comfortable because you know a lot of this is about set and setting and comfort. Yeah and and safety. And safety. Yeah. So I went in there
And I was like, I'm gonna give this a shot because you know, Huberman convinced me that this can help me with anxiety.
And so I laid down on this comfortable chair, turned on the heating, like they have a heating element in the chair, tilt you back a little bit.
Put on my noise cancelling headphones.
They gave me an I V and I V does sound hardcore, but for
People like you and me that do like blood draws like every other week. Yeah. Who cares? Like I don't care about this shit. But it does sound hardcore to most people. Um they gave me an IV and
You know, I closed my eyes and I went
To a place, man.
I went to a place.
And it's a beautiful place. And it made me
Over multiple treatments and I did eight in total.
And they normally do six for depression, which is really interesting because she said that
It's typically anxiety is harder to treat than depression in her experience. Mm-hmm.
And they gave me eight in total and you two per week.
And
About halfway through
The best way I can describe it
Is
Imagine that life is a series of crunches. And I say crunches like the ab work out. Okay. Whereas like
Nobody likes to work out their abs, right? Like and why'cause abs are like oh fucking ab day. Like you know, nobody wants to do that.
And I didn't realize it.
But I had had a 35 pound weight on my chest the entire time I was doing ab workouts. And it took that weight off.
And I had
And I still have
And it's been weeks later.
A bit of grace.
and lightness.
To the way I'm carrying myself throughout life.
That
is just a piece
That I haven't felt since I was
probably ten or twelve years old.
Were you interacting with anyone in those sessions or it was all internal? No, it's all internal. So it's headphones on, music.
I mask.
The entire session lasts for about an hour and a half.
Mm-hmm. They have a camera that's watching you. If anything comes up, one time I have my music
accidentally stop and I raise my hand, they're in there within 30 seconds. They bring you hot tea when you're done. They let you take your time to slowly kind of like come to. And then you can literally walk out of there and carry on with your day. And
You know, the first session I was like, Okay, that's beautiful. Second session was a little difficult.
They say it.
Imagine it's kinda loosening up the plaque in your brain and like rewiring circuits and like it's not always gonna be easy.
But by I remember the sixth session, I just walked out there and and she Doctor Jen came in and she goes
How are you? And I said,
I could run a marathon right now.
I feel amazing.
I feel like a a weight has been lifted off my chest.
And I just
This is
Such important work that you do.
Such important work because
It's not about
There's not an addiction to the substance. I don't need to go back.
Some people go back for boosters depending on what they have. They have she told me that some people that have depression they'll come back in
you know, every three months, every six months, she says some people she never sees again. Mm-hmm. And
It kind of takes
The anxiety and pulls it apart from your body.
So that you can see it for what it is.
Which is silliness because life is play.
And when you realize life is play
And we're all here just trying to figure out our shit. Yeah.
Why are we taking it so seriously? Yeah, there's a lot that just does not matter. It doesn't matter.
We can just chill, man. It doesn't really matter. So that that We have clean drinking water!
Like what the fuck are we complaining about?
So the the weight on the chest.
Was that something
That you can't put words to that you just felt
release or and you don't need to get into details, but I'm just curious, or was there a content to it where you're like, Oh interesting.
Wasn't content.
Content was beautiful.
I don't know if you've ever experienced this Tim with I I've never done a ayahuasca, although at some point I I would love to try it, but like
I opened my eyes and it was
When the mask's on. And I was seeing things that were
As
High of fidelity.
As what we see today, like right now. Yep.
Where you're like, I am in a room right now.
And I felt
Very present my dad's passed away. I felt very present with a father source there.
At times
At one point I saw the entire world and I saw how small I was and I was just like
immediately gave me this sense of just like gratitude for that being that little speck, but also at the same time
not having to take and carry the burdens of the world on me for being that little spec.
And so
There's bits and pieces of that, but I would say at the end of the day
When you come out of it
It's not like you had this
Epiphany
It's more like Dr. Jen calls it.
Time on brain.
How can we make this sit and do the rewiring on your brain?
and give you time on brain with the drug and the compound and let it do its work.
And so it was a lot of surrendering.
There's a lot of saying.
You do what you want to do. I don't care where you take me.
emotionally, mentally, whatever.
It doesn't really matter.
It's time on brain with the compound.
And after a certain number of sessions
You just feel this natural lift.
And lightness.
And it felt like
I'm not a ballerina, big surprise.
But it felt like a little bit of a walking through life is a little bit of a dance now than it is such a struggle. Hm.
Makes me super happy, man, to hear that and it feels amazing. And I remember getting the
Some of the tex from you and I was excited to have this conversation, which we haven't had. This is the first time we're talking about it. It is.
And I'll say a few things.
The first is that I have seen a number of cases where ketamine
Therapy has
changed or save lives. So a friend of mine, for instance
who suffered from depression his entire adult life.
had a similar experience to yours. And he went to a
Clinic, I believe it was in New York City.
Very well run, and he goes back once every six months for a single tune up, like a booster session. Yeah.
And I actually know also not gonna mention their name, but someone uh we know as a mutual friend who you probably don't know also does this once every three to six months. And uh separately I know someone who's in law enforcement who is
Heavily.
Disincentivized.
From talking.
about mental health with his superiors because the you will be put on leave.
generally. If you
Yeah. Even hint at that and you're in certain professions, airline pilot, for instance, you're gonna be put on leave. And it's uh on leave is a a nice way to say you put on leave. It's a nice way. It it's a it's a
It's a career risk to bring these things up. Yeah. Which puts many more people at risk. There should be better processes for this. But nonetheless, he was suicidal at one point. And we're talking about somebody who was carrying around a firearm all day.
And ketamine was an intervention that
Yeah.
was incredibly effective for him for pattern interrupting.
And I use that very literally because the pattern was a thought.
Mm, this is personal, this is permanent, this is never gonna change. And when you're able to at least interrupt that for a short period of time, you provide people with hope or at least a window.
within which they can consider other options.
So for
Acute suicidal ideation. Also for chronic pain, very interestingly. Ketamine is super interesting.
It's interesting you say that because she sh doctor Jen over at this clinic has told me
She treated quite a few people for chronic pain as well, and it works quite well. So I unexpectedly because Have you done it? So before I talk to anyone about anything like this, generally I am volunteering to be the monkey shot in the space. So several years ago I did
Six.
Sessions over three weeks.
Yeah. Oh shit, dude, why did you never tell me this? I didn't realize I didn't tell you. So I did uh six sessions this would have been with a mask on and like in the In this particular case it was music, but it was not mask on. The way that this particular clinic ran things was with
video, which was very strange to me, but nonetheless it was sort of nature scape. So I was like, okay, well, this is new to me. I'll try it.
And uh it ended up being uh supremely interesting.
I was not going in
with an acute condition. So it was hard for me to evaluate ultimately a lot of
The efficacy.
They found it very strange and I found it kinda hilarious because they would do an intake each day.
of active sessions they would and they would ask me to do
various assessments for anxiety and my anxiety levels were going up over time, which they found very confusing because you may have experienced a little bit of this.
Ketamine can compromise your short term memory.
In the short term after sessions. So you might like forget where your wallet is or forget where your backpack is. Okay. So that can happen and that happened to me.
And it happened to be
the case that while I was doing these sessions, because I shoehorned it into my schedule, I also had a number of huge podcasts coming up, like LeBron James and so on. And it was freaking me out that I kept forgetting shit. And so my anxiety was going up over the course of treatment, which was not
So I did the same thing. They gave me a whole like breakdown. It was one to five on you know a bunch of different scales. I think it's a pretty standardized like you know thing that they give you. I can't remember what the the anxiety scales are.
But like mine went down to literally a one on all of'em or zero on all of'em, which is amazing.
It is amazing. And I I wanna mention a few other things. So I'm sure Human's episode is excellent for people who want to have a comprehensive overview of Cetamine. I'm sure Humberman's is great, so listen to that first. It's fantastic. I also did an episode
With John Crystal.
Who uh Doctor John Crystal, who is the chairman of psychiatry at Yale, who did a lot of the seminal research.
with respect to ketamine as an antidepressant in humans. So the protocols that get used, which I think are generally like point five milligrams per kilogram of body weight, et cetera, over
X period of time with Y number of infusions. Th those are the protocols that he developed with his
other investigators.
And I wanna mention a number of things just to make sure that I'm doing my safety first Ferris duty.
So the first is that
Part of the reason, and this is pure speculation, but I think that it was risky for
Matthew Perry to use ketamine is that he had a history of abuse.
Ketamine can be very addictive for people who are
Unwilling or
uneager to feel certain things. Dissociative anesthetics. So if you have, for instance, a history of alcohol abuse, it is, I would say
increasingly likely that that you might abuse ketamine, which is why
If someone were to consider ketamine therapy
I feel very strongly that it should be
I V
Or
Yes. Intramuscular injection. And not
At home treatment or where you have access to, say, lozenges or nasal spray. Because there are companies that do lozenges at home. Yeah. Yeah, I uh completely agree. But I will say one thing, Tim, real quick and I'll let you continue.
I noticed my desire for alcohol go down.
Yep. I think that that can happen.
And I'm just saying for folks who, for instance, maybe coming out of or part of AA
And they have issues with depression.
My
personal take after everything I've seen is that
prior abuse of alcohol highly correlated to
potential abuse of ketamine. And
I would say furthermore, there are some uh urological risks if you use ketamine chronically.
And alongside that
If you use ketamine chronically,
And this is true for a lot of drugs, actually. Not that that's for snorting though, right? No, it's not for snort. I mean snorting it wouldn't be most your logical track otherwise,'cause it metabolizing the liver.
Well, most people who consume ketamine recreationally their mouth or It'll be a lot of it'll be snorting of one way of one sort or another. So they'll either have it in
It'll be
And by the way, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not sure.
But those are two very different things. They are. So just to be very clear.
Ketamine therapy with Ivy or I M?
has a track record of being incredibly
promising for a train physician. Yeah, like for a number of other things. Yeah.
But where some folks get lost.
Is they go from
Instead of clinical setting.
higher dose supervised they bleed into
more casual recreational use. In which case it's very important for me to say that
Ketamine can be very helpful for people with, say, treamor resistant depression or chronic depression.
If you use it chronically though.
It flips the other way and it actually makes you predisposed to more depression.
Mm. So it's just something for people to be aware of. Yeah. And
As is true with so many things. More is not better. Do you know what what was the drug that Michael Jackson died of?
Do you remember the name of that? Sure. I think it was a synthetic opioid or something. No. It was basically Some type of anesthetic. Yeah. I went and had my first Conoscopy'cause like you're supposed to do that shit, you know?
Part of time. Have you done that yet or no? I have, yes. Yeah, so I went and did mine
And um And by the way, this is this is very sad, but do not skip your fucking colonoscopies. No. A very good friend of mine, since we last spoke, Roland Griffiths, who's an an amazing scientist.
From Johns Hopkins.
He died of terminal
Cancer. And uh I had a long conversation with him a few days before he died, before I went to South America. He was completely razor sharp.
Up until the end.
And
My recollection is that part of the reason that was caught too late is that he was a few years late and having his
Exam. Yeah, so I had mine done and they caught a couple
Pre cancerous
As they do with most
people these days. Yeah. Do your fucking screens. And you gotta do your screens. But anyway
Long story short, when I was going in the anesthesiologist came in the room and
He was kind of a funny guy. W it was cool. I like those guys, you know. Yeah. And I and I I asked him, I said, Can I have the slow ramp? And he's like, What's the slow ramp and I'm like Well you just kinda get to me a little bit at a time just like it does like feel like going into that like that zone, you know?
And he's like, It's funny you say that. He's like, I'm giving you the same drug they gave Michael Jackson when he died.
And I was like, Oh, that's crazy. I'm like, Why? And he's like he was just addicted to it. And so
He gave me the slow ramp and I remember this feeling about probably let's call it thirty seconds into it where
I felt like
I was okay with dying.
It was just like this this moment of like, This is beautiful.
Yeah. And I was like, Oh my God, this is what Michael Jackson feeling right now.
Yeah, exactly. That was it.
Alright.
I get it, but this is like to the point of Matthew Perry dying in the pool. Like this stuff puts you under
It puts you under so that you can have surgery. Yeah. Yeah. And that that that is what ketamine does as well. So and ketamine, broadly speaking, is an incredibly well tolerated safe drug. Part of the reason that ketamine is, I believe
Listed in the
World health organization's top one hundred most essential medicines is because
It is generally very well tolerated. Yes. And it does not suppress respiration. Yes, exactly. Right. Which is a huge one. Right. Gigantic. And uh
It's an incredible compound.
And you just need to know the risk profile. And there are risk profiles for everything.
You know, we have
Tequila and we have water in front of us.
Water has a risk profile too. People die every year of hypernetremia because they drink too much water when they're training for or running in a marathon and that causes disruption of sort of electrochemical signaling. And then boom, they drop and I people die every yeah.
You remember this? Where they have these water competitions and some people die of overdosing on water. This has happened many times.
As Parasalsis would say, the dose makes the poison, but sometimes the frequency and the use pattern makes the poison. Yeah. And
I think ketamine's incredibly interesting. Yeah. And especially when you get into the actual science behind it.
We're not just using this as as an escape, it's actually rewiring the brain.
Yeah. And and Huberman will get into the neurology behind it and what's happening.
And why these are more lasting changes and why some people not everyone
But some people can go and do this.
And they don't ever have to go back for a booster or anything else. Yep.
And it changes them forever.
So
I don't know if I should get into this.
So we can always cut it. Someone very close to me, she was close to suicide.
And she's a dear friend. She's a sweetheart of of a person.
And she was the first time I'd ever heard academia therapy.
This was probably four years ago. Mm-hmm. And she said, I was about to take
You know, the close to taking her alive.
And she had heard about ketamine therapy. It was like kinda new at the time.
And she paid for the six pack, the six sessions, you know? The the the the full six and and
She hated every single session.
And it was funny when I talked to Doctor Jen at the clinic that I went to, she said
It's very common people that
have depression, they don't
Enjoy the experience.
And I thought it was fantastic. Love the whole thing, but but like when uh my friend said that at session six
She heard a pop in her brain, like a physical pop. Like a psychic chiropractic. Literally the depression lifted.
Mm. And she has been
Amazing ever since. Oh wow. And this has been like five years ago.
And it's like
I believe her. She's like doing insanely well now. Yeah.
So Tim, I just wanna one
Thank you for
How much
money and effort you've put into psychedelic research because thanks, man. I after experiencing this, I I realized that
There is something here.
And we don't have it figured out.
Obviously we don't. Like we're in the baby stages, but
You know
Ten, twenty, thirty years with AI, maybe ten years. Like
This will get figured out. And it will be largely because people like you help fund this type of research. So I just want to say
Thank you for that. Thank you for saying that, brother.
Yeah, I really appreciate that.
And
I was so happy to see those texts.
Yeah, so happy I I gotta tell you if you're in the LA area and obviously you'll talk to her as a doctor, this is her advice, not ours, and you'll you'll go through the whole screening process, but
Golden afternoon.
Dot clinic, I think is the website.
And she is an amazing human.
Very caring, comes in preimpose.
Checks in on you.
A really well run facility.
Depression, anxiety, PTSD.
war veterans
All these people are going in to see her and it's great. It's God's work if we're ever you believe in God or not. I guess there are some great clinics out there. I will say there are also a lot of fly by night clinics. A hundred percent. So do your homework. Yes. One of the main advantages or
It is a main advantage of ketamine as compared to other psychedelics, is that in the United States it is currently legal. Yes. And
That is a non trivial
Advantage.
And I will say that one question you may want to ask in doing your due diligence if you consider this as an option.
And I do feel
after canvassing many different compounds, many different treatments that for cute
Suicidal ideation, that ketamine is at the very top of the list. It is on a very short list of interventions.
That
Have incredible promise.
for at least creating the space for someone to consider
treatment options. And
The question, the due diligence question that I recommend, and this is true for any type of drug assisted therapy. It's actually true for surgeons too. It's true for doctors in general. Ask them.
what types of adverse events they've observed, what type of abuse potential they've observed.
If their answer is
Everything is always fine, we've never had an adverse event.
Yeah. That is a huge red flag. Yes. Anyone who has enough mileage, if they are ketamine.
clinic physician, if they are an ER physician, they will be able to tell you what things look like when things go sideways. Yes. And how they handle those situations.
And if they don't volunteer any of that, it means either
They're inexperienced or they're delusional, generally.
Hundred percent. And I'm giving people a bit of a break, or it means they're lying. Yeah. And in all three cases you do not want to have anything to do.
With that particular practitioner. By the way, I left her up, she's a Prince in.
President. Yep. Go Tigers. Look at that. That's where my doc my doctor will be president. Uh and
Phil Wolfson, for instance, has has done a lot of writing on this.
Do your homework. You are signing up for
Let's just call it psychoactive brain surgery. So to the extent that you would do your due diligence
related to a surgeon who is going to f be physically opening your head, carving a hole in your skull, and performing manual brain surgery.
Do a commensurate amount of homework on the person who is going to be
providing you with compounds that
have a significant impact.
on cognitive functioning, not necessarily only in the short term, but in the longer term.
You wanna hear an another crazy drug story? Let's hear it.
That's why we're here. Yeah. All right.
I'll give you a refill. Speaking of drugs.
Andrewman would
Not be pleased with disapproved. Although tequila Yeah, occasionally a tea will have a drink or two. He just knows what he's signing up for.
Anyway, we we can come back to this. Part of the reason that
You know, I had a wild experience in Portugal recently. No matter how much wine I have there, I do not have a
Headache the next day.
And I think it's additive related. I can feel tired. It'll fuck up my sleep. I mean at the end of the day it is alcohol.
But
Fascinating.
how different my physiological response yeah can be. In any case. That's true with this stuff too, for me personally with Lolis. That's great to hear considering I'm consuming a good portion of it. Yeah, a good portion. All right. So let's gotta talk to you about my tattoo at some point.
It's
Okay, should we all right. Well I've you know what? I'm gonna leave that as a cliffhanger, we're gonna come back to wild drug stories. I'm here in town.
Oh, I didn't know that. Oh yeah. You're gonna hear about the uh the crazy machine. What? Okay, let's
Tecto and Crazy Machine. What's going on?
And you have a what's the bracelet with the skull on it? Oh, that's just uh bracelet with skulls. Yeah, bracelet with skulls. Um
So
one of the premier generative artists when by w when I say generative what I mean by that for those
I don't know is like there's a whole genre of art that is code based. You know, you write actually computer science code, like
and and you create art and one of the premier artists in the space has been sold at Chrissy's and Sutherby's and all over the place.
It's Tyler Hobbs. He's based here and awesome guy too.
Another sweetheart. By the way, he told me he's always enjoyed hanging out with you. He's he he he and his wife are just lovely beyond words. Such great people. Yeah. And so Tyler lives here in Austin.
And his NFTs, you can say what you want him NFTs, but his NFTs are just absolutely gorgeous.
Pieces of
artwork and it can sell for at times millions of dollars. Like they're they're really sought after.
Also legit.
visual artist outside of coast. Oh my God. Like I went to the studio today and he pulled open binders that he's been doing for like decades of his visual art. And it's just like
He's not in this for the quote unquote NFTs. Like he's an artist, like to his core.
And so
One of the things that
He strikes me as the person that's always saying
What's next? How can I push things in a different direction, right?
And
There's a company based out here.
Called Black Dot. The has a machine, it's a robot.
that uses not tattoo needles, but you know when like people get like their eyebrows like a cosmetically tattooed on?
It's a common thing like some I don't want to be
gender based here, but it's mostly women that get it like tattooed on as their eyebrows. But like
They use a much finer needle than they would, say, a tattoo gun. Okay. And so this robot, this machine
Uses
These really fine needles.
And what they do is they take and we can put this in the video as well.
they take and they put this kind of template on your arm
That is more or less just like
Almost like a a QR, a massive QR code.
Kind of grid. So that's my forearm. Oh, I was wondering about that. You sent me a text and I was like, What the hell? Like, is that another is that your tattoo? Okay. No. No, it's just like a giant QR code. Yeah, like a giant QR code across my forearm.
And that allows the optical lenses and the lasers and everything to align
The tattoo.
It is doing seventeen thousand
small micro
pushes into my skin with this needle. Okay. And it does it, they can gauge with like
There's
The correct
depth of the dermis to go in.
So that the ink doesn't spread out and fade over time. Yeah. So they can do insanely high fidelity tattoos.
Like picture perfect.
Even when you see those pictures of like, Oh, that person got that babed on there, like
Chest, how cute.
Imagine ten X the fidelity of that, where you'd be like
Somebody took a picture in like
Pasted it on their chest. Yeah.
They have a machine that can do that.
So you're never getting those off, so you change your mind. What this is is Tyler started with he drew me a sparrow.
And the reason I like a sparrow is because to me a sparrow is the most common
low ego bird to me that's out there. It just reminds me that in like I'm just getting a little sensitive, but like reminds me that
We're all just sparrows. We don't need to take each other like no one's better than anyone else. Yeah.
We're all a common
We're all humans, right?
And then what he did is he applied an algorithm to it.
that degrades the bird into a pixelated form over three images. Oh that's cool. Yeah yeah. And so the last one is his last algorithm of the more pixelated version.
And so you can imagine I'm getting this tattooed on my arm tomorrow. So wait, you're getting it tattooed tomorrow. What is that? This is just a stencil. Oh I wanted to show you this today. Like
So
You can imagine a world where literally in the future how long does that sense last?
You could wipe it off and and with some alcohol and stuff, but it it's like, you know, just there for the show. But
You can imagine a world where
He can give you an algorithm like he does with his artwork. And you can walk in, put your arm underneath this machine and get a unique generative piece by an artist that is one of one unique to you.
As defined by
An insanely
famous artist. Imagine if
You know, let's back track here, but
Picasso had the tools in his day to say
I'm gonna create an algorithm that is a bunch of crazy squirrels and chaos that is my brain. Or a banks or whoever's banks or whoever
And you stick your arm in and you get a one of one Picasso.
They're only doing three of them. This is a brand new machine, brand new technology.
And so that's why I'm out here to do a one of one Tyler Hobbs on my arm with a sparrow. So
Black dot?
Black Dot, yeah. Okay. It's a new kind of startup out here. Awesome, man. There's a lot happening here.
There's a lot happening. That's cool. It's so cool. I want to show you the one they did of
The Mona Lisa. It's amazing stuff.
Do you have any tattoos at all? You don't, do you?
I've been thinking about getting my first, which is why I asked about the stencil.
So look at that.
Oh yeah.
It's like just the eyes of the Mona Lisa right there, like
But look how look how high Fidelity that is in the floor. Yeah, that's wild. So you've been thinking about getting one.
I've been thinking about getting one for years.
Which would be Molly. Molly's paw prints.
On my forum.
Was that? Even not. Are you serious? Yeah. Kinda awesome.
How do Smolly now?
Oh it's eight.
Uh between eight and nine.
The toaster is slowing down, man. Yeah, it's tough. It's so sad. There's nothing
More heartbreaking than starting to see your dog.
Start to go. On the decline. Yeah. Like he's fall he's falling now, like his legs are falling off or anything. We don't have to take the podcast there, but yeah, it's been a lot. No, but it's I hey Toaster's been with the podcast since day one. Even when you chewing the cables. I do. I was just gonna bring it up, man. Back in the day, this is still
Dig era, I guess.
And we were at your apartment in San Francisco, and he was just a little pup chewing on the cables. Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah. He's still kicking it out. He's still it mentally he's sharp as shit. Which is great. Which is like nice. Yeah, it's nice to see him or playing with him.
Friendly toast. Yeah.
What a great dog. Yeah, so
For me.
It's hard for me to imagine a world
Or any circumstances in which
I would regret having.
The paw prints on on the arm. And there are many other reasons. How much has that dog meant?
for you personally because I've seen you through multiple relationships.
Dogs are like this thing that is just like the steadfast love. Has it been a good I mean, obviously it's been a it must been an insane emotional lift for you to have a animal like that in your life. Yeah, it's it's changed me fundamentally in so many different ways, I think. And
It's not just the receipt of that love, which is
It's like a task in and of itself, right? I mean, like I actually saw this at one point.
Somebody had sketched it onto this piece of wood and I came across it and it was
Your task in life.
is to learn how to love and be loved.
That's it.
And being loved is actually not
Straightforward for everyone.
Mm-hmm.
Learning to receive that.
In a way.
So that has been a gift.
But
It's also been
a practice of giving and thinking about someone else's welfare.
And
having say a dog as a mirror also for yourself.
Where let's just say early on.
When I was training mall and I took training super seriously. Oh my gosh, I was there for that. Yeah, and uh seriously. And I was I ended up being
Pretty good at it.
And Molly's very well trained, but
If she fucked up or made a mistake, I would get upset.
Yeah.
No, Jesus Christ. I did not hit my dog and beat her with a rod.
So no, I wouldn't hit mod, but I would get very frustrated. Yeah. And then that would scare her.
And not because I was flashing out, but I would just get so frustrated because I'd be like, God, this is this thirty seventh time we've done this.
And it was a mirror because
Molly's not doing anything deliberately to piss me off. Right. That's ridiculous. Right.
So it just was a
It was an incredible reflection in the pond for me.
To see what was going on and to see what's going on with me.
Like if I'm short tempered.
If you're with other people, you can weave a story to justify it.
Right. Well, like they should know like God I didn't get any sleep and they know that and da da da da da Why does it always have to be in the morning that they blah blah blah. You can really spin a yarn.
Mm-hmm. To rationalize why you're upset with someone else.
But
A really loving, well behaved dog, you kidding? Like
That's a you problem, pal. Like that is not a dog problem.
Yeah. So on all of those levels, she's just been such a wonderful companion and teacher and
I was away from her for a few weeks recently for the first time because I was in South America. Absolutely not the right place for a dog where I was in the middle of the jungle.
And
Uh really, really missed her. So
I mean I've got really like
Take us there, but like when I think about which I do pretty often, like when she
has her decline and then passes. Like it's heartbreaking for me to imagine.
And
I'm gonna get a second dog.
Almost certainly in the next year. That would be on my
Years resolutions too.
And I've thought about this for a few years, but I've pushed it off because there's part of me that doesn't want to accept that Molly is mortal.
So I've pushed it off and pushed it off, but it it's it's time. It's good to do it on the sooner side because when they're older, like I could never introduce another dog to toaster right now. Yeah. Because he's just too old to handle that puppy energy. Yeah. Versus if you did it now, then they can kind of like to do it. And Molly's really good with puppies and she loves puppies. Yeah so I'm gonna do that very soon in the next year.
And I at one point was volunteering it's a long story, but I was volunteering
Around wolves.
And I was preparing the food and so on for these wolves which were
Those are the ones that licked you in the teeth and stuff. Yeah, who were which were being sort of
rehabilitated and raised in captivity because they'd either been bred and raised in captivity, in which case they can't be released,
Or there are any number of conditions.
That
led to them.
being non viable is
Wild releases.
And I saw one of the volunteers had
I think it was on his ribcage. He had a print.
from this wolf that he had known for years until that wolf passed away. And I thought to myself, you know what?
I've never felt
Hold to have a tattoo?
And the fact that I have no tattoos is kinda novel now, which is funny. Right? Like
Tattoos are pretty cool. Oh, you gotta go to Jess, my my lady. She's amazing. So I might. I might. And
I've thought, you know
I really
have a hard time imagining
Regretting.
Doing that and I can also see it being a really valuable reminder of a lot.
Tim, I've got something for you. Listen to this. Tell me.
You know how I said someone was gonna play m at my birthday? Yes.
Jess is gonna be out there at the same time. Okay.
Why don't you sign up to get the tattoo at the party?
I mean not at the party, but like the day before, the day after or something like that. And she is like booked out by like a year.
She did Bruce Wills' tattoos. No, she's like legit as they guess she's legit. Okay. All right.
Jess Machete on Instagram. Insane.
All right.
Now she's booked out for five years. I just exactly
I'm stuck it up strings. This has been on my list for a while. It's been on my list for a couple of years. I think partially because I'm nervous. You would you would love her.
Can I ask you a question? Yeah.
I wanna ask you a question b that is a little bit more intimate, just because we've had some tequila and um
We're talking about dogs and and just kind of the companionship and whatnot.
Speaking of kind of like New Year's resolutions and looking back on life
In the last ten years when it comes to both personal
Either
Intimate.
relationships or
Private.
What would you if there's any one thing, what would you change?
About your interactions.
With either
Someone that you would be in with
on a intimate level or someone that
Maybe it's like on a more, you know, friendship level.
Is there anything that you can look back on and say, I would have done more of this?
That is an exceptional question. And you know when I was driving over here
I was thinking about another question. We have the ultimate cliffhanger and the crazy drug story, so maybe we'll get to that. Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll do that next episode. But
I was thinking also, I was like, what would Kevin tell his I'm gonna answer your question.
But I was thinking what would Kevin tell his
Thirty year old self.
Mm.
My current Kevin.
Like do this, maybe not do so much of that.
Ma
Thought that could be fun exploration.
With the interpersonal stuff.
I think that I would say
Just because someone needs other things.
Needs
Things that are different from your needs.
Does not make them high maintenance.
And by the way, Tim.
If they looked at you through the same lens you were looking at
Them through.
they would decide that you were high manage. So
Gather some tools. I would say read the five love languages, as cheesy and schlocky as it might seem.
That shit is so helpful.
as a framework for discussion. Mm-hmm.
for identifying and easily labeling.
the different categories of needs that people might have.
And putting them in some type of order. Oh, interesting. You're a quality time person. Good to know. Number two would be this. Oh, you're a physical touch and then acts of service person as I am, right? Like these are
Shared
vocabulary that you can use to really
avoid and repair a lot of things. So I would say
handful of things. Gay and Katie Hendricks, also like conscious loving. There are a few books, a few resources I would say look.
If you really care about someone.
Commit.
Together.
To develop a shorthand.
Which allows you to
Not necessarily prevent.
I don't think prevention is the key. I think repair is the key.
If you're in a startup and you're like, Well, let's just prevent all the bad things from happening, that's never gonna work.
Right. Shit's gonna happen.
And people are gonna have bad days.
And you're gonna say things you regret.
And
There are gonna be disagreements.
And by the way, if there are no disagreements, something's wrong. Right. Right. Hundred percent. And
Therefore having a shorthand
And a set of agreements. These are the rules that we agree to play by.
And we're not gonna be perfect.
I would say that would be very high on the list.
And
I would say for
really close relationships, potentially. Maybe we'll edit this out, but who knows.
M DMA assisted psychotherapy.
Let's just say anywhere from
Once a quarter to once a year. No more.
Than once a quarter.
For a whole host of reasons. But I think that
while MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.
is incredibly impressive and I've been very involved with that.
From
I don't wanna say day one'cause that's not true, but certainly for the last ten years or so I've been very involved up through phase three and and now onward.
The results with
Treatment resistant PTSD is a complex PTSD where you see people who have had this diagnosis for 17 years suddenly after two or three sessions.
end up asymptomatic, right? They would not meet the criteria for PTSD.
with durability out to six, nine, twelve months. I mean it's something that almost defies belief. It is causing a complete re examination of psychiatry as we know it.
I still think that is
second place to couples work when it comes to MDMA.
I think that that is an incredibly
Fruitful.
arena for seeing the
full potential of MDMA psychotherapies. That that would be another one because sometimes
Oftentimes couples end up and I know multiple people now who have had this experience with professional guidance, which by the way, folks, currently is illegal. So before warrant, there are legal consequences or at least risks entail with this.
Not to mention the fact that at least I would say sixty to seventy percent of MDMA that you might purchase is adulterated or mixed with something else at this point. So you need to be very careful.
danceafe.org is a resource I would recommend for testing kits and so on. If you're going to go that route, I'm not recommending you do anything illegal. However, people are gonna do it anyway. International. I I d I just recognize it's like you can't just say to every teenager, like don't have sex. Like kids are gonna have sex. So
Let's be realistic about it.
I did that shit one time, it's funny. Had sex. No.
Yeah.
No, I did When I was twenty three, I did uh I did Well, they were kinda ecstasy back then, but like holy shit, that is a compound.
Yeah, and that can go that can also go sideways just for for the record. Yeah. So like there are films out there now. How to change your mind, the mini series on Netflix, watch the MDMA episode. It is
Excellent. Yeah.
And it's pretty heavy'cause it gets into some PTSD, but you'll be able to see live session footage if you want another alternative or compliment.
He's great. And there's also a doc called Trip of Compassion
Which is worth seeing, which has a lot of session footage as well. But those are a few of the things that would come to mind.
What's it on a friendship level, I might suggest to my earlier self, let's just say thirty year old self.
Something that I have really embraced and put into action in the last handful of years, which is gonna sound a little anti-social, but I don't view it that way.
Humans have a finite capacity for
Building and sustaining really deep relationships. You just can't do that with everyone.
And uh
When I've looked back, say, and I do this every year at a past year review, right? I look back at my calendar.
Every week.
Of my last year.
And on a piece of paper with
Positive and negative, two columns. I write down the peak negative and positive experiences.
If I look at the commonalities.
For the peak positive experiences.
It's usually the same ten people.
Or fewer. It's the same cast of characters.
These are my close friends.
who are nourishing, supportive
good influence. And before what I would say to my younger self is before you seek to develop a bunch of new relationships, ask yourself, are you spend enough time, as much time as you would like?
With
The people on that short list.
who you know are guaranteed to be nourishing for you.
And if the answer's no
Maybe you should double down.
on those relationships. Maybe you should reach out to those people to get something on the calendar before shit crowds it out.
Before
You look for s shiny objects.
in new relationships, which doesn't mean I don't develop new relationships. I occasionally do.
But I'm at a point where I think
recognizing the
ephemeral nature of life, the finite limits, the constraints that we have
It's actually very enabling.
It helps you to make cleaner, faster decisions.
So for me I would just say.
Before
seeking to develop new deep relationships. Ask yourself the question.
For my closest five friends, let's just say.
In the last year did I spend as much time as I would like with those people.
If the answer is no.
Reach out to those five first.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What about you?
Oh man, I would say
Honestly, I think that we're at the age now where
Every day just brings a new unknown in terms of like how long are we gonna last. I've had multiple friends with cancer now.
I had one friend that alm I almost lost this year that was in in the you know emergency room for
weeks that we thought had stage four cancer and ended up being a horrible
bacterial infection from some foreign country. And it's just like this.
I just realized like
You know
There's so many times when we hang out and we just give a hug and say, Oh, good to see you like blah blah blah, but we don't say I love you.
Yeah.
We don't say you are so essential.
To me in so many ways. Maybe it's the the ketamine talking, but like
No, but when I went through this whole thing of with the ketamine therapy I realized
At the end of the day
Love is the sound cheesy, but it is the most important thing that we tell each other and that we feel for each other. And like when you can really feel that and you say
This person is so important. I mean you let them know that and you feel it back.
I don't know what w what's better than that, you know? Yeah.
Yeah, what's more human than that too, right?
Yeah.
In a way. I mean, like love, you know, you can observe affection and love in in many other species, but the ability to verbalize it and express it.
Yeah.
Do you feel that psychedelics brings that out of you? Because when I did the therapy, I I had more love in me than I've had in so long.
Mm. Do you feel that's a a commonality amongst
psychedelics to to like have a sense of just
Gratitude for existence.
For sure. I think it's very common. It's not always across the board. I mean, I would say that
This might be a controversial statement, but I the psychedelics
to me are similar to
There's a lot more to it.
Which we'll probably dive into, but
Kinda like alcohol or power or money in the sense that they magnify what's already there.
And uh they're uh
Term you sometimes hear is a non specific amplifier.
So
I don't think
At all. There's no compelling evidence.
To me that psychedelics
If put in the drinking water, produce world peace. There's no evidence for that. Yeah.
I mean you have plenty of civilization. Maybe lithium though. No. Oh I remember, I remember. Yeah, a little bit of lithium goes a long way. Yeah.
People can look this up. We'll try to find there's some. All sorts of stuff. Yeah. So we'll see what we can find.
Lithium is pretty interesting. Very low dose. But psychedelics are a non specific amplifier. There are many cases of civilizations where they had human sacrifice, played soccer with human heads.
And they consume psychedelics. I mean, I still sacrifice people. Yeah. Like you know, as we all do, every once in a while. I think it's all fair game, but
the feeling of gratitude and love, I think, for a lot of people who wish to
Enable that.
to experience it more, who have the conscious or subconscious desire to rekindle those things.
That
The experience you're describing is very common.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think part of that
is the dissolution, this isn't true of all experiences, but the dissolution of self
And consequently
The
felt sense of unity with many or all things.
Mm.
Which leads you to feel
For most people, less alone. Yeah.
Which leads you to feel quite grateful because

To state the obvious, I suppose. Despite the fact that we're more connected than ever with loose ties, I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression. That is
highly correlated to a feeling of isolation. So when you can remedy that by feeling the exact polar opposite in some of these states.
Not necessary, but helpful.
that the end result of that is a feeling of gratitude, for sure. Awesome.
Yeah. Before we wrap things up because I know we're coming to the end and uh you still have some particular finish. What was the uh cliffhanger you said you wanted to tell us? Yeah, so I'll I'll tell you what, I'll keep it short and then you can excavate as you like. I love to excavate.
Yeah.
Alright, so
As you know.
For the last year I've basically been crippled by lower back issues.
I mean I've I've had trouble there are days when I've had trouble getting up and walking. I mean it's been that bad.
I mean, to be honest, uh Tim, you first told me about this.
Eight years ago or something. Remember when you got those injections or something? You were like
I think I have Disc disease. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had lower back issues for a long time. This is also a congenital issue. So I have what's called a uh
Transitional segment. In other words, if there's a segment in my lumbar
They're vertebrae my lumbar area that
really mimic a sacral
vertebral segment. And
That's problematic for a host of reasons. Creates an abnormal angle. If you can imagine just bending the paper clip over and over again in ways that it shouldn't be bent, that's sort of the feeling in the low back. And my brother has this. There are other people.
In my family, you have this issue. So standing, extended, slow walking, like a museum walk, cocktail party type of experience.
can be very painful. Like the low back locks up. But in the last year specifically
had all sorts of issues.
And all sorts of MRIs and specialists and
PT and adjustments and traction and this, that, and the other thing, and
It was a disaster and it caused a well let me
Give myself a little more agency.
I created a lot of anxiety around this because I was like, fuck, is this the new normal? Is this really the new normal? Where well because you project forward, like what is five years from now? Yeah. I'm like, I'm not that old. You know, and I'm pretty active. And your skincare is amazing. My skincare is amazing. I saw your Instagram video. You know what's funny?
Sidebar how much time you can spend on like
A blog post takes six months to put together. Yeah. And it's like you get like crickets and a fart in the wind and then nobody ever reads it again. And then someone in your team is like, You know what, people ask about your skin care, let's grab a couple clips and throw it up and it goes bananas. I'm on w I'm on Instagram and the first thing that pops up to me is like
Hi, I'm Tim Ferris.
People ask me about my skincare regimen. Let me tell you.
I use Bronner's Natural Soap where the fuck is to be coming into Yeah. So
Here we are, folks. Here we are, folks. Your skin looks amazing, though. Thank you, thank you. Breathtaking. You know, it's it's working from the inside out.
Coming back to the the main through line here.
Terrifyance with the back.
And I had more or less
given up. I was in the
stage of grief where I was trying to get past denial and accept that this might be the new normal because no one could figure it out.
And a lot of the advice I received, many of the diagnoses were conflicting.
And then uh decided in part because of this to do a few things. And part of that was
Going to South America, which I'm not recommending. There are a lot of risks down in South America. It's generally like safety fifth. It's not safety first. So people can get into a lot of trouble.
But I went down and did this training which involved consuming a bunch of plants, also involved
Fasting for a week.
Also involved. Wait, wait, wait. Waterfast? Waterfast. Also days? Yeah.
Also involved during that week.
Really not sitting.
And standing very little. So he's either hammock or cot, basically.
And I'm mentioning these things because they're confounders.
Translating that into basic English, that means that I can't really point back to one thing and say, This is what caused what I'm gonna describe. But during the first experience
Which happened to be with ayahuasca, which is a huge gun. It's
I think treated very casually by people who do not realize what they're signing up for. I do not recommend it to most people.
as my ex who's gonna become relevant in a second.
Would tell you I talk many, many, many more people.
Nine out of ten. Which axe.
out of, I'm not going to mention her name, but out my most recent X, out of using ayahuasca, then I talk into using ayahuasca. Like nine times out of ten, I say
You should not proceed. Do not, Pasco.
For a lot of reasons. But in this particular case.
Had a very, very, very difficult experience.
And I can kinda rank order my hardest experiences over the last decade plus and
This would be the third most difficult. Maybe the second for
Different characteristics.
We're just saying a lot.
And
There's a point at which in
That experience.
All I could imagine was having my head in the lap of my ex. Like that's all I wanted. It was the only thing I could even
visualize because I was in the impact zone. I was just getting hit by a hundred foot waves from every angle and there was no respite. It was ten out of ten. There was no wave meaning it didn't ebb and flow. It was just
Ten out of ten volume.
From
peak until end of the night, effectively. It was
unusual and incredibly difficult. And that was true for everyone in the session.
We'll leave it at that. Your shaman makes the wrong Uh he this guy's famous for having a brew that just
cripples people. And like like yeah, I mean there are a lot of other
full time clinicians from indigenous traditions will not drink his brew. I'll put it that way. Jesus. And uh
Coming back to the point of the story, I'm imagining, you know, the only thing I can envision is
This woman
Holding my head and consoling me. That's the only thing I can imagine. And then I realized
That
For a year because we separated a bit over a year ago.
And this was totally subconscious, right? It wasn't a decision on my part, but I realized I had not allowed myself to feel
The complete
Obliterating.
Heartbreak.
That was in fact.
the core response to that separation, right? Like I'd not allowed myself to infer from previous
From that.
Separation. Right. Like in other words, my
Psyche had seemingly
protected me because of my history of depression.
Which I've come to manage better than ever before. Like each year I'm better able to manage it and it's less and less frequent. It's less and less intense. But nonetheless, let's face the facts, in college I almost killed myself. So there's a
Fear
At least subconsciously.
that because of this separation, because of starting over it.
Square one.
that I could spiral into a deep depression and that could be dangerous.
So
My
Psyche protected me from that by not letting me feel.
The sadness.
The pain.
To the extent that
ended up being important, which I realized in this moment. So
I allowed myself to soak in it.
In that moment I
Trip reports were so fucking boring.
most of the time and I apologize to people who might be listening and thinking, Oh, here we go again.
Because I get it.
Trust me.
But in this particular case, I experienced something I've never experienced. As soon as I soaked in that, and I really soaked in it, and it was
Awful.
It was so
Dark.
And so heavy.
And then
I felt my back release.
And literally I've been ninety plus percent pain free.
since that fucking moment and it blows my mind because at that point
I couldn't explain it with the fast because the fast and ketones
are highly anti-inflammatory. And I think that they actually played a role. Hold on in the durability of things.
But the fact that there was an immediate release. Yeah, that's gonna say that. I can't explain that through fasting. I can't explain that through
The
just being recumbent, laying down for seven days because that was yet to come.
Yeah.
And I would say that
I made a tactical error.
In the last few weeks, which is I was like
Fuck man. Like I'm all good.
And so I've neglected some of the basic self care and strengthening and PT, which I think is important because my low back
And Q L and so on.
Which are some of the surrounding muscles.
have atrophied over the last year of avoiding
Working with the back.
There was that experience.
And for people who may be interested in delving into this a little bit more, there is a book
I don't agree with everything in the book, but it is interesting in the sense that it was written by a Western trained M D
Who ended up then
Opening a
Healing Clinic.
in South America focused on ayahuasca and diets, which you will read about if you get into the book.
Called uh the Fellowship of the River.
So I found that book quite interesting on a number of levels.
But the reason I bring this all up
Number one.
People had recommended this book. I think it's called Healing Low Back Pain. I may be getting the title slightly wrong. It could be Fixing Low Back Pain, but it's by
Doctor Sarno, John Sarno.
And this book was recommended to me.
I've read it before.
And the general gist is it's all in your head. Now
I took great offense.
Uh.
Parts of this book.
And a lot of it is scientifically indefensible. So he unfortunately I threw the baby out with the bathwater a bit because he says a bunch of things.
That are ridiculous.
And he cites these success
statistics for his method while simultaneously saying if I interview someone and they say they're not open to A, B, or C
I omit them from my treatment. And I'm like, okay, well wait a fucking second, your selection process is out of control. Yeah. But I I wanted to bring this up because that book has helped a lot of people, despite its flaws.
And not everyone will
At any point.
want to consume ayahuasca, which I would advise against for ninety plus percent of the population.
See, it can be very destabilizing for a lot of people and very risky.
You know.
I would say there are a lot of things you should do beforehand.
Right, like try the talk therapy.
Try holotropic breath work.
consider after speaking with doctors ketamine.
After that you can consider other tools, but ayahuasca should be like
Let's do a uh fifth on your random show on ayahuasca. We could possibly. Yeah. Ayahuasca would be like fifth or sixth on the list of progressions. It would not be first. But I would say
The Sarno books are interesting.
I know they've helped people like Brian Kopman, who's been on the podcast, amazing writer who
was the co creator of Billions, among others, rounders, et cetera.
And
It's something that
I've always, in theory, agreed with yes, we store stress that can have a physiological effect. There are autoimmune disorders that I think are intimately linked with different types of psychological disturbances. So you can address the problem kind of from the physiological side first. Of course the brain isn't
Entirely separate. There's no kind of Cartesian
separation of mind and body. So yes, the brain is physiological, but you can at you can attack it through content.
In a way.
Or you can attack it through
pharmaceuticals and physiology first. I think you can go both ways. But the Sarno book I think is worth
a lot of people reading. The second thing I'll mention, which is very, very simple and tactical.
If you have lower back pain, I'm shocked took me this long to figure it out.
And say sitting on hard chairs bothers you.
or lumbar support helps you for a year.
I've been going to restaurants and asking if they have a cushion. Do you have a cushion or pillow or something I can use to fix
Fucked up.
Seating situations.
This is the solution right here.
This is it.
This is a Pilates ball. This is a probity Pilates. Doesn't really matter. But honestly, this thing folds up, sticks in your pocket.
Yeah. And I've been traveling with it.
I've had it behind my back the whole time. And like Grave for First Dates. Grave for first dates. Ladies love Pilates balls.
And uh I but I will say, for instance, like the last time I did a podcast in this seat.
I did not use this and my back was fucking
Killing me afterwards.
But the killing me afterwards
is not just an issue for today.
That's an issue that causes inflammation that fucks up my sleep for
Three or four days.
Use this ball, no problem.
I can put it behind my back or I can put it under my ass.
And it folds up and fits in your pocket. So
Anyway, folks, there you have it, from the sublime to the ridiculous Pilates ball.
Amazing.
All right, how we doing? Any other topics?
I feel pretty good. Next time we'll get to what you would tell your thirty year old self. Anything you'd like to add in that category?
No, I just you know, I think if we're are we wrapping up now,'cause I'd like to say some wrapping up comments. Wrapping up comments, please. Yeah. So
My wrapping up comments would be this.
I recently went out to dinner with five
close friends of mine who of which you know most of them you know just like the crew. The Wu Tang clan.
Yeah.
Just good friends. And
One of the things I did is I went around the circle and I said a few words
Of gratitude.
And I think
To my earlier point, one of the things that's really important to me
After coming out of this therapy.
Is
Just this vulnerability that allows us to speak
From the heart because we don't know what tomorrow brings.
And I just want to say that Tim, you have been
A friend of mine for so long now.
And I have appreciated
The fact that
My career has been a series of ups and downs and all over the place, and you have been a steadfast friend.
Someone that
Sends me some of the funniest videos I've ever seen in my life.
Lighthearted and fun.
But I know that you care deeply about me and I just want to let you know that I love you and I care deeply about you.
And I will always be here to have your back, and I'm wishing you
A fantastic new year.
I hope that you hit
All these milestones and more that you want to hit.
Because I know that you are someone that I've always looked up to and someone that is just so inspirational to us all that listen to your show and your podcast because
You inspire us to do more.
And to be better humans. And I just want to let you know that that that means a lot to me, and I love you. Well, thanks, Kevin.
That's amazing. That makes my night.
Happy to say it. Yeah. It's the truth. I love you too, man. It's our friendship has been uh
Such a
Constant for me.
Such a
Lifeline.
In a way, with all the ups and downs, and holy shit.
I mean both of us have had some pretty wily
Ups and downs.
Shakespeare. I will say, I didn't see that coming. Yeah, I when you talked about ups and downs, I was like, you got a lot of ups, my friend. Yeah, I mean yeah, I look that's in one category. That's in one category. And I'm and I'm and I'm grateful for that. And
Life is like box of chocolates, right? You just never know what's around the corner. It's true. Yeah, that's why it's important to say these things. It is. It is. And you know, I have I'll tell you something, you don't know.
I have your Christmas slash New Year's card from like
Two years ago.
So obviously out of date, it's like you and Daria and the kids and it's up in my kitchen.
Amazing. And I kept it there'cause I just I love
Seeing you guys every day.
And I think about you guys all the time.
and just have such love for your family.
And I'm so grateful for our friendships. I love you too, man.
As you said.
It's important to say
Things are so uncertain and I've never
experienced I've had friends pass from cancer before. Yeah. But I've never been there every step of the way from diagnosis to last conversation.
A few days before they passed. That was new for me. Yeah.
And
It affected really deeply affected me on a bunch of levels.
And I want to be deeply affected by that. I don't want to push that aside.
In part because Roland was so
Joyful and
Curious
And optimistic until the end in a very genuine way.
It wasn't an act, it wasn't theater.
That raised a bunch of
aspirations in me. Because he was first and foremost a very
Dedicated seasoned meditator.
Psychedelics were a piece of the puzzle, but first and foremost he was a dedicated meditator for decades.
That's amazing. And attributed a lot of his equanimity and
Preparation for death, which I got to see firsthand. A lot of people talk about it, right? But let's be honest, or I'll be honest.
I've read all the stoics or a lot of the stoics and I've read all sorts of Buddhism and
Rehearsed death and Mementomori and this, that and the other thing, but
When I'm actually on his roll into the final glide path, I don't know how I'm gonna respond.
I don't know.
I've no idea. So to see someone who really walked the walk.
In such a
life affirming way that lit everyone up around him was tremendous. And
He said what
He was able to
And he was willing to say what he meant.
to those people around him.
Who meant things to him.
And you don't have to wait until you have terminal cancer diagnosis. You shouldn't wait.
Just because it may not be that. Right. It may be a car crash. It may be something where you don't get the chance to say these things. And so I just yeah, it's important to do it now.
Yeah, you gotta do it.
Great to see you, man. Yeah, good to see you.
Happy New Year. Excited for uh this is gonna be uh Oh don't
Just pop off a little bit of cheers.
Um to the to the new year. And and to all the listeners out there, uh, you know, wishing you a happy and healthy new year.
And yeah, I'm excited to
I mean it's always a new year of change. A new year of change and exploration.
I think the one thing that you and I let's take a sip.
The one thing that you and I have in common
It's just a
Lifelong
Pursuit of
Evolution.
Of like figuring out because the secret
That no one will tell you is no matter how much money you make.
No matter how much success you have.
We're all still figuring it out.
And in Ram Das's words, we're all just walking each other home.
Yeah.
Well said, man.
I'm gonna leave it there.
Here we go. Cheers, buddy.
Happy New Year. Happy early New Year. And uh happy new year to everybody.
Listening.
And as always
Be just a little kinder than is necessary.
Until the next episode.
That applies to other people, but also applies to yourself. Take it easy.
Take it easy. You know, life is short, but life is long.
And
We're all just figuring it out. And by the way, as far as I can tell, you never really figure it out. No, you don't. So true. CTFO. Chill the fuck out a little bit. Be a little easier on yourself.
And uh we'll put everything in the show notes, Tim Dotblog slash podcast for all the stuff we talked about. KevinRoves.com is a better website. Be sure to check out this amazing podcast I've heard of. Forget Tim Dotblog. Uh and uh Kev Kev Talk Talk coming at you soon. Thanks for listening, everybody.

Yeah.
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?
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 fun, 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.
Thanks for listening.
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