2025-12-11 01:26:05
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei), the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.
Dr. Li has served as a board member or advisor in various public and private companies and at the White House and United Nations. She earned her BA in physics from Princeton in 1999 and her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She is the author of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, her memoir and one of Barack Obama’s recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Dr. Li, it is nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Hi, Tim. Very nice to be here. Very excited.
Tim Ferriss: And we were chatting a little bit before we started recording about how miraculous, and I suppose unfortunate it is, that somehow we managed to spend three years on the same campus and didn’t bump into each other.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I know. And now I’m wondering which college you were at and which clubs.
Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah. I was Forbes. I was in Forbes College.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Forbes College. No, I was Forbes too.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. This is for people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. There are these residential colleges where students are split up when they come into the school. And Forbes was way out there in the sticks, right next to a fast food spot like 7-Eleven called Wawa.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Wawa.
Tim Ferriss: And next to the commuter train. And then there’s something called eating clubs at Princeton. People can look them up. But they’re effectively co-ed fraternity/sororities where you also eat unless you want to make your own meals. And I was in Terrace.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I was not any of that. But for those of you wondering why we didn’t meet, we should say we were very studious students who were only in the libraries.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We were very studious. I actually made my, whatever it was, $6 an hour at Gest library working up in the attic.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Tim, I worked in the same library. I don’t understand why we did not meet.
Tim Ferriss: That’s really hilarious. Okay. Yeah. So, well, now we’re meeting.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Did you change name or something? Maybe we did meet.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t change my name, but here we are. So we’ve reunited. That’s wild that we didn’t bump into each other. I was also gone for a period of time because I went to Princeton and Beijing and went to the — what was it? Capital University of Business and Economics after that. And so I was gone for a good period of time and then took a year off before graduating with the class of 2000. So still, we had a lot of overlap.
But let’s hop into the conversation. And this is a very perhaps typical way to start, but in your case, I think it’s a good place to start, which is just with the basics chronologically. Where did you grow up? And could you describe your upbringing? Because based on my reading, your parents were pretty atypical for Chinese parents in my experience, certainly.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You know a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Could you speak to that please?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. I would say my childhood and leading up to the formative years is a tale of two cities. I grew up in a town in China called Chengdu. I was born in Beijing, but most of my childhood was spent in Chengdu where it’s very famous for panda bears. And at the age of 15, my mom and I joined my dad in a town called Parsippany, New Jersey. So I went from a relatively typical middle class Chinese family Chinese kid to become a new immigrant in a completely different world, of all places, New Jersey. And to learn a new language, to learn a new culture, to embrace a new country. And then from there on, I went to Princeton as a physics major, but I did take some of the classes you took and then went to Caltech as a PhD student to study AI, and the rest is history.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s dig into — I want to hear about both your parents, but I want to hear a little bit about your dad because he seems like, based on my reading, a very whimsical, creative soul, which is a sharp contrast in some ways to, for instance — I had Bo Shao on the podcast, amazing entrepreneur. And his father was, I suppose, what some folks might think of when they imagine, not a tiger mom, but like a tiger dad. So in the case of Bo’s upbringing, his father was very strict, but if he meaning Bo won a math competition, then he would get extra love and he would be allowed to have certain treats and things like that. Could you just describe your parents a little bit?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So first of all, clearly you read my book. Thank you for that. It is true. As a child, you don’t realize that. As I was just going through my own science memory, I was writing it. The more I wrote about it, the more I realized, oh my God, I really did not have a typical dad. My dad loved and still loves nature. He’s just a curious mind. He finds humor and fun in unserious things. He loves bugs, insects. He loves taking me as a kid. Growing up in the 1980s in China, there isn’t much abundance in terms of material resources. But my city Chengdu was expanding so we lived in apartment complexes at the edge of the city, even though my dad and my mom worked in the middle of the city. So on the weekends, my dad and I would just play in the fields where there’s still rice fields, there’s water buffaloes. I had a puppy and my dad would just — really, all my memory is just like finding bugs really.
And then sometimes my dad and I will follow some — I don’t know. We took an art class. I took a kid’s art class. I will go to the neighboring mountains to draw. My entire childhood memory of my dad is just a very unserious parent who had no interest in my grades or what I’m doing in class. Did I achieve anything? Did I bring back any competition awards? Nothing to do with that. Even when I came to New Jersey with my parents, life became extremely tough. It was immigrant life. We were in a lot of poverty. And even that, my memory is that he has so much fun in yard sales. I would just go to yard sales. Every weekend it was just, “Yay, let’s go to yard sales and just use that as a treasure hunt almost.” He’s a very curious and childlike mind in that way.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m asking about your parents in part because I know you’re a parent and ultimately I’m going to want to ask how you think about parenting and that will come up at some point. But since listeners will certainly be asking themselves this question, and we’re not going to get into any geopolitics because there are plenty of people who want to get into that and fight over that, which we’re not going to do, but why did your parents leave China? What was the catalyst or what were the reasons behind leaving what you knew or leaving what they knew and coming to a very different foreign country? You’re going from Chengdu, which is a city to suburban New Jersey, which is, as I think you’ve described it felt very empty, right? And then you have the language barriers and the financial barriers. There’s so many things. Why the move?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So I’ll give you two answers. The early teenage Fei-Fei would say, “I have no idea.” Because my dad left when I was 12 and my mom and I joined him when I was 15. And those years, you’re a teenager, right? There’s so many strange things in your head. And all I knew is that they said, “Let’s go to America.” I had no idea. I really did not know what happened. There was this vague sense of there’s opportunities of freedom. Education is very different. And I had a hunch that I was not a typical kid in the sense that I was a girl and I loved physics. I loved fighter jets of all things. I can tell you all the fighter jets I love from F=117 to F-16 to all the different things that I loved. So that’s all I knew.
In hindsight, as a grown up Fei-Fei, I appreciated my parents. They’re very brave people because I don’t know this age myself would just pick up and leave a country I’m familiar with and go to — I don’t know. A completely different country that I speak zero language and I have zero connectivity to. And mind you, that’s pre-internet, pre AI age. So when you are going to a different country, you might as well go to a different planet.
Tim Ferriss: You’re cut off. Yeah.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So I think they’re very brave. The grownup Fei-Fei realized that they wanted me to have an opportunity that they think will be unprecedented for my education, and it turned out that’s true.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, certainly looking at your bio, it’s mind-boggling to imagine all the different sliding door events and different paths you could have taken. So we’re going to hop pretty closely along chronologically, but we’re going to ultimately get to a lot of the meat and potatoes of the conversation. But I want to touch on maybe some other formative figures. And I would like to hear about your mother as well, because just with the context of your dad, it’s like, okay, that seems fascinating and very unusual, particularly if you’ve spent any time in China, especially during that period of time.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: He is very unusual that way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Very unusual. So then people might wonder, well, where does the drive come from? Where does the technical focus come from? And I’d love to hear your answer to that and also hear you explain who Bob Sabella was, if I’m pronouncing that correctly.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There are two questions. Mostly, is my mom the one who putting the drive and the technical passion and what role did Bob play in my life? So first one, first of all, my mom has zero technical genes. She really has no — I sometimes still laugh at her. She cannot do math, let’s put it this way. So I think the technical passion is just, I was born with it.
Tim Ferriss: Innate.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: My dad is more technical, but he loves insects more than equations for sure. So I think as an educator for so many decades now myself and also as a parent, you have to respect the wonders of nature. There is this inner love and fire and passion and curiosity that comes with the package. But my mom is much more disciplined person. She’s still not a tiger mom in a sense. I don’t remember my mom ever going after me on grades she really did not. Both my parents never ever cared about me bringing any awards home.
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but I can tell you in our house, there’s zero wall hangings of anything. Which actually carry to today. Even for myself, my own house, my own office have zero of those decorations of achievements or awards. It’s just my mom did not care about that. But she did care about me being a focused person if I want to do something. She doesn’t want me to play while doing homework. That kind of thing would bother her. She would say, “Just finish your homework.” Say by 6:00 P.M. if you don’t finish your homework, you’re not allowed to do more homework. You have to deal with the consequences. So she instilled some discipline, but that’s about it. She’s tougher than my dad. She is very rebellious. She had a unfinished dream herself. She was very academic when she was a kid herself and Cultural Revolution really crushed all her dreams. So she became a more rebellious person in that sense that I think I did observe and experience as a daughter. So maybe part of immigration is even part of that.
Many years later, she would say, “I had no plan coming to New Jersey, but I think I’m going to survive. I just believe I’m going to survive and I’m going to make sure Fei-Fei survives.” I think that is her strength, her stubbornness, and her rebelliousness.
Tim Ferriss: When does Bob enter the picture and who is Bob?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Bob Sabella was a high school math teacher in Parsippany High School. He was my own math teacher as well as many, many students. He entered my life in my second year, so it was bordering sophomore to junior year in Parsippany high school when I started taking AP calculus. But he quickly became the most influential person in my formative years as a new American kid, immigrant, as a teenager, because he became my mentor, my friend, and eventually his entire family became my American family. And he became my friend when I was a very lonely ESL English as second language student. I was excelling in math, but I think it’s more because I was lonely and he was very friendly. He treated me more like a friend who talks about books we love, talk about the culture, talks about science fiction, and also listened to me as a very — I wouldn’t say confused, but a teenager undergoing a lot of life’s turmoil in my unique circumstance. And that unconditional support made me very close to him and his family.
One thing he did to me that I did not appreciate till later is that when Parsippany High School couldn’t offer a full calculus BC class because it just didn’t have that, he just sacrificed his lunch hour, his only lunch hour to teach me Calculus BC. So it was a one-to-one class. And I’m sure that contributed me, a immigrant kid getting to Princeton eventually. But later as I became teacher myself, it’s exhausting to teach all day long. And the fact that on top of that, he would use his lunch hours to do that extra class for me is just such a gift that I now appreciate more than I was as a teenager.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thank God for the teachers who go the extra mile. It’s just incredible, especially when you get a bit older and you have more context and you can look back and realize.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I really think these public teachers in America are the unsung heroes of our society because they’re dealing with kids of all backgrounds. They’re dealing with the changing times. The kind of stories Bob would share with me in terms of how he went extra miles, not just with me, but with many students, because Parsippany is a heavily immigrant town. So his students are from all over the world and how he helped them and their family. Those are the stories that people don’t write about. That’s part of the reason I wrote the book was to celebrate a teacher like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I have so much I want to cover and I know we’re going to run out of time before we run out of topics. I want to spend more time on Bob and at the same time, I want to keep the conversation moving. So we’re going to do that and I’ll just perhaps hit on a few things and then dig into a number of questions. But certainly at Princeton, you, but also your entire family had to survive. So you were involved with operating a dry cleaning shop in New Jersey as one option, right? You ran that for seven years. So through that it feels like you’ve gained perspective on many different levels that have then helped inform what you’ve done professionally. So you learn to think about not just people who are protected in an ivory tower, but people all the way down across in society, so from every swath of society.
Your mother also, although she was not technical, she imbued in you this discipline and also seems to have had a very broad appreciation and knowledge of literature and international literature. So now you have this global perspective, presumably at the time in Chinese. And then you end up at Princeton.
And I know we’re going to be hopping around quite a bit, but I’m curious to know how ImageNet came about. You can introduce this any way you like. You can tell people what it is and what it became and why it’s important, and then talk about how it started, or you can just talk about how it started, but it’s such an important chapter.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So let me just explain what ImageNet is. ImageNet on the surface was built between 2007 and 2009 when I was assistant professor at Princeton and then I moved to Stanford. So during this transitional time, my student and I built this, at that time, the field of AI’s largest training and benchmarking dataset for computer vision or visual intelligence. The significance today after almost 20 years of ImageNet, it was the inflection point of big data. Before ImageNet AI as a field was not working on big data. And because of that and a couple of other reasons, which I’ll get into, AI was stagnating. The public thinks that was the AI winter, even though as a researcher, young researcher at that time, it was the most exciting field for me, but I get it. It wasn’t showing breakthroughs that the public needs. But ImageNet together with two other modern computing ingredients — one is called neural network algorithm. The other one is modern chips called GPU, graphic processing unit. These three things converged in a seminal work, milestone work in 2012 called “ImageNet Classification, Deep Convolutional Neural Network Approach.” That was a paper that a group of scientists did to show that the combination of large data by ImageNet, fast parallel computing by GPUs and a neural network algorithm could achieve AI performances in the field of image recognition in a way that’s historically unprecedented.
And that particular milestone is — many people call it the birth of modern AI. And my work ImageNet that was one third of that, if you count the elements. I think that was the significance. I feel very, really, very lucky and privileged that my own work was pivotal in bringing modern AI to life.
But the journey to ImageNet was longer than that. The journey to me — ImageNet started in Princeton when I was an undergrad. You were in the East Asian Study Department. I was hiding in Jadwin Hall, which is our physics department.
I loved physics since I was a young kid. I don’t know how. Somehow my dad’s love of bugs, insects and nature translated in my head into just the curiosity for the universe. So I loved looking to the stars. I loved the speed of fighter jets and then the intricate engineering of that eventually translated into the love of the discipline that asks the most audacious question of our civilization, such as what is the smallest matter? What is the definition of space-time? How big is the universe? What is the beginning of the universe? And in that early teenage hood love, I loved Einstein. I loved his work. And then I wanted to go to Princeton for that.
But it turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious question. So by the end of my undergrad years, I wanted my own audacious question. I wasn’t satisfied with just pursuing some of the else’s audacious question. And through reading books and all that, I realized my passion was not the physical matters, it was more about intelligence. I was really, really enamored by the question of what is intelligence and how do we make intelligent machines? So at that time, I swear I did not know it was called AI. I just knew that I wanted to pursue the study of intelligence and intelligent machines. And then I applied to grad school and I went to Caltech. Caltech was my PhD. I started in the turn of the century, 2000. And I think I considered that moment I became a budding AI scientist. That was my formal training as a computer scientist in AI. Then my physics training continued in the sense that physics taught me to ask audacious questions and turn them into a north star. And in scientific terms, that north star became a hypothesis. And it was very important for me to define my north star.
And my first north star for the following years to come was solving the problem of visual intelligence. How we can make machines see the world. And it’s not just by seeing the RGB colors or the shades of light, it’s about making sense of what’s seen, which is, I’m looking at you, Tim, I see you, I see a beautiful painting behind you. I don’t know. Yeah. It was real. I see you’re sitting on a chair. Like that is seeing. Seeing is making sense of what this world is. So that became my north star question. And that hypothesis that I had is I have to solve object recognition. And then that was in my entire PhD was the battle with object recognition. There were many, many mathematical models we have done and there were many questions, but me and my field was struggling. We could write papers, no problem, but we did not have a breakthrough. And then luckily for me, Princeton called me back as a faculty in 2007. It was one of my happiest moment of my life. I feel so validated my alma mater would consider giving me a faculty job. So I happily moved back to Princeton as a faculty this time and I continue to be a Forbes member actually.
So at Princeton, there was an epiphany is that I realized there was a hypothesis that everybody missed, and that hypothesis was big data.
Tim Ferriss: This is the point that I’m so, so curious about. I just want to pause for a second. Also, for people who are interested in some of the history of Princeton, it’s pretty crazy. They should look up the history of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. I remember taking some of those East Asian studies classes that you referred to in classrooms where Einstein taught. And it’s just the aura, the veneer. You want to believe that you can feel it just permeating the entire campus. And it’s fun. In that respect, it’s very fun.
But I’m going to read something from a Wired piece that discussed you at length. And as you mentioned, big data before and after in terms of its integration into the type of research that you’re describing. And as it was written — and please feel free to fact check this or push back on it, but in Wired, they said the problem was a researcher might write one algorithm to identify dogs and another to identify cats. And then you, it says, Li, began to wonder if the problem wasn’t the model, but the data. She thought that if a child learns to see by experiencing the visual world, by observing countless objects and scenes in her early years, maybe a computer can learn in a similar way. And I want you to expand on that for sure.
The question for me is like, why did you see it? Why didn’t it happen sooner?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: We’re all students of history. One thing I actually don’t like about the telling of scientific history is there’s too much focus on single genius. Yes. Agreed. We know Newton discovered the modern laws of physics, but yes, he is a genius, not to take away any of that from Newton, but science is a lineage and science is actually a non-linear lineage. For example, why was I inspired by this hypothesis of big data? Because many other scientists inspire me. In my book, I talked about this particular lineage of work by Professor Irv Biederman, who was a psychologist. He was not interested in AI, but he was interested in understanding minds. And I was reading his paper and he particularly was talking about the massive number of visual objects that young children was able to learn in early ages. So that piece of work itself is not ImageNet, but without reading that piece of work, I would not have formulated my hypothesis. So while I’m proud of what I have done, my book especially wanted to tell the history of AI in a way that so many unsung heroes, so many generations of scientists, so many cross-disciplinary ideas pollinate each other.
So I was lucky at that time as someone who is passionate about the problem, but also someone who benefited from all these research. So yes, something happened in my brain, but I would really attribute to many things happen across so many people’s work throughout their lifetime devotion to science that we got to the point of ImageNet.
Tim Ferriss: I’m so glad that you’re underscoring this because if you really dig as a — I don’t consider myself a scientist, but I love reading about the history of science. There’s so many inputs, so many influences, so many interdependencies.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And the simplicity of the single hero’s journey is appealing in it’s simplicity, but it’s almost never true.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: It probably is never true. Even my biggest hero, Einstein, right? Anybody who knows me, anybody who read my book knows how much I revere him and I love everything he’s done. The special relativity equation is a continuation of Lorentz’s transform. So even Einstein, he builds upon so many other people’s work. So I think it’s really important, especially, I’m sure we’ll talk about it. I’m here calling you in the middle of Silicon Valley and we’re in the middle of an AI hype. And obviously I’m very proud of my field, but I think that when the media or whatever tells the story of AI, it almost always just talk about a few geniuses and it’s just not true. It’s generations of computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers who made this field happen.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For sure. Everyone knows Watson and Crick, for instance, but without Rosalind Franklin and her x-ray crystallography, it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen point-blank.
We’re going to hop to modern day in a second, but with ImageNet, I would love for you to speak to some of the decisions or, let’s say decisions or moments, that were just formative in making that successful. Because for instance, if you’re going to try to allow a machine to — and I’m using very simple terms because I’m not technical enough to do otherwise. To learn to identify objects closer to the path that a child would take, you have to label a lot of images. And so I was reading about how Mechanical Turk came into play and then there’s a competitive aspect that seems to have driven some of the watershed moments. Could you just speak to some of the elements or decisions that made it successful?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: A lot of people ask me this question because after you mentioned that many, many people have attempted to make data sets, but still only very few are successful. So what made the ImageNet successful? I think one of the success was timing, is that we truly were the first people who see the impact of big data. So that very categorical or qualitative change itself is a part of the success. But it’s also, as you were asking — the hypothesis of big data is not just size. A lot of people actually misunderstand ImageNet’s significance as well as other dataset significance. Coming with the dataset is a scientific hypothesis of what is the question to ask. For example, in visual recognition, you can make a dataset of discerning RGB, and that would not be as impactful of a dataset that is organized around objects. We can go down a rabbit hole of why. Not because RGB is easier per se, it’s because you have to ask the scientific question in the right way.
So another example is, instead of making a data set of objects, why don’t you make a data set of cities? That’s even more complicated than objects. But then that’s dialing too complicated. So, every scientific quest, you have to have the right hypothesis and asking the right question. So that’s one part of the success is we defined visual object categorization as the right hypothesis. That was one rightness, I guess. Another rightness is that people just think, “Oh, it’s easy. You just collect a lot of data.” Well, first of all, it’s laborious, but even aside from being laborious, how do you define the quality? You could say, “Well, if quality is big enough, we don’t care about quality.” But how do you dial between what is big, what is great, what is good, and how do you trade off? That is a deeply scientific question that we have to do a lot of research on.
And then another decision that is a set of decision that is really hard is what defines quality in terms of image? Is it every image has higher resolution? Is it it’s photorealistic? Is it because it’s everyday ImageNet look very cluttered? Is it all product shots that look clean? These are questions that if you’re too far away, you wouldn’t even think about asking, but as a scientist, as we were formulating the deep question of object recognition. We have to ask this in so many dimensions.
And then you mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk. That is actually a consequence of desperation. Because when we formulated this hypothesis, our conclusion is we need at least 10s of millions of high quality images across every possible diverse dimension, whether it’s user photos or is it product shots or is it stock photography? And then we need also high quality labels. Once we make that decision, we realize this has to be human filtered from billions of images. So with that, we became very desperate. We’re like, “How are we going to do that?” I did try to hire Princeton undergrads and as you know, Princeton undergrads are very smart, but —
Tim Ferriss: They have very high opinion of the value of their tongue.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. And they’re expensive. But even if I had all the money in the world, which we didn’t, it would have taken so long. So we were very, very stuck for very, very long. We thought we had other shortcuts, but the truth is human labeling is a gold standard and we want to train machines that are measured against human capabilities so we cannot shortcut that at that time. So we had to go to what we eventually found out is called crowd engineering, crowdsourcing. And that was a very new technology. Was barely a year old or so by Amazon. They created a online marketplace for people to do small tasks to earn money when these tasks can be uploaded on the internet.
I remembered when I heard about Amazon Mechanical Turk, I logged into my Amazon account, I checked the first task I checked out to do just to try was labeling wine bottles or transcribing wine bottle labels. The task will give you a picture of a wine bottle and you have to say, this is 1999 Bordeaux and all that. So people upload these micro tasks and then online workers, like someone in their leisure time, like me, if I had leisure time, I would just go sign up and get paid to do that. And we realized that was, again, out of desperation, that was a massive parallel processing with online global population to do this for us. And that’s how we labeled billions of images and distilled it down to 15 million high quality images.
Tim Ferriss: So, all right. It’s just so wild when you look at these stories. I just finished a book on Genentech and there were all these little technical inflection points that also allowed things to happen. So if it had been five years earlier, or maybe three years earlier, without Mechanical Turk, oh boy, it presents a challenge. But also as you pointed out, in science, it’s one thing to get answers, but you need the input on the front end with a proper hypothesis or a good question. And even with Mechanical Turk, if you’re only focused on the mechanics of employing that, you can get yourself into trouble because if humans are incentivized to, let’s just say — I think this was the example I read about, identify pandas in photographs and they’re paid for identifying pandas well, what’s to stop them from identifying a panda in every photo, whether they exist in the photos or not?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So you have to follow the incentives as well. How did you solve for that?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. I know. This is where my student and I had — I cannot tell you how many hours and hours of conversation we have about controlling the quality. We have to solve for that in multiple steps. We need to first filter out online workers who are serious about doing the work. So for example, we have to have some upfront quizzes so that they understand what a panda is. They read the question. And then once they qualify for that, we ask them to label pandas, but there are some pandas. There are some images we have free. We know the correct answer. Some are true pandas, some of them are not true pandas. But the labelers don’t know so in a way, we implicitly monitor the quality of the work by knowing where the gold standard answers are. So these are the kind of computational tactics we have to use to ensure the quality of labeling.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Yeah. Just incredible. All right. So I’ll actually just put a recommendation out there for a book, Pattern Breakers, by a friend of mine, Mike Maples Jr. He taught me the ropes initially of angel investing. But in terms of identifying inflection points and in some cases, converging technological trends that for the first time makes something possible, which then opens an opportunity for something with the right prepared mind, in your case and those of your collaborators and the people you built upon for something like ImageNet, Pattern Breakers is a really good read for folks.
So let’s hop to modern day then for a moment. And I would love to ask you — because you’ve been called the godmother of AI in our alumni magazine, in fact, and elsewhere, but you’ve had such a — not just technical but historical viewpoint, meaning you’ve over a broad timeline, broad by AI standards, been able to watch the development and forking and perils and promise of this technology. What are people missing? What do you think is eating up all the oxygen in the room? What are people missing, whether it’s things they should know or things they should be skeptical of or otherwise?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Especially I’m here calling you from the heart of Silicon Valley. I think people are missing the importance of people in AI and there’s multiple facades or dimensions to this statement is that AI is absolutely a civilizational technology.
I define civilizational technology in the sense that because of the power of this technology, it’ll have or already having a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society. This is unverified, but I just heard that 50% of the US GDP growth last year is attributed to AI growth. So apparently this number is 4% for US GDP have grown 4%. If you take away AI, it’s only 2%. That’s what it means. So that’s civilizational from an economic point of view. It’s obviously redefining our culture. Think about, you’re talking about the word sucking oxygen out of the room, everywhere from Hollywood, to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, to political campaign, to TikTok to YouTube to ESA.
Tim Ferriss: Taxis in Japan. I was just there and the videos playing on the back of the headset and the taxi were all talking about AI. It’s everywhere.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: It’s culturally impactful, not only impactful, it’s shifting our culture and it’s going to shift education. Every parent today is wondering what should their kids study to have a better future? Every grandparent say, “I’m so glad I’m born earlier. I don’t have to deal with AI,” but still worry about their grandchildren’s future. So AI is a civilization of technology, but what I think it’s missing right now is that Silicon Valley is very eager to talk about tech and the growth that comes with the tech. Politicians are just eager to talk about whatever gets the vote, I guess. But really at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI, people will be using AI, people will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI. And no matter how AI advances, people’s self-dignity as individuals, as community, as society should not be taken away. And that’s what I worry about because I think there’s so much more anxiety that because the sense of dignity and sense of agency, sense of being part of the future is slipping in some people. And I think we need to change that.
Tim Ferriss: Now, I’ve heard you say that you’re an optimist because you’re a mother. And both optimism and pessimism to an extreme can bias us in ways that are unhelpful or create blind spots. And I’m curious, if you try to put your most objective hat on, which is difficult for any human, but if you try to do that, do you think people are too worried, not worried enough, or worrying about the wrong things? For people who are not the CEOs and builders and engineers behind AI. Because you’re right, of course. everybody will agree with this, that a lot of people are very worried. And I’m just wondering if it’s ill-placed. If you talk to some of the VCs who are the biggest investors, of course, they have this sort of, in my view, beyond all possibilities, techno-optimist view of the future where AI solves everything. And it’s hard to believe there’s a free lunch there. And then you have the doomers, the doom and gloom where suddenly it’s Skynet next year and we’re all slaves to robots or eliminated, turned into paperclips. And reality’s probably in between those two. So do you think people are worrying about the right things or have they lost the plot in some way?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: First of all, I call myself a pragmatic optimist. I’m not a utopian, so I’m actually the boring kind. I don’t believe in the extreme on both sides. I travel around the world. Just last month I was in Middle East. I was in Europe, I was in UK and I was in Canada. I came back home in America. I think people in America and people in Western Europe are more worried about AI than say people in Middle East, in Asia. And I think we don’t have to litigate on why they’re more worried, but just to come closer to home, just talk about US I wish I have a megaphone to tell people in the US that you’re known to be one of the most innovative people. Our country have innovated so many great things for humanity, for civilization. We have a society that is free and vibrant, and we have a political system that we still have so much say in how we want to build our country. I do wish that our country has more an optimism and positivity towards the future of using AI than what is being heard now.
I think people like me, technologists living in Silicon Valley has a lot of responsibility in the right kind of public communication. So there’s a lot of things that was not communicated in the effective way. But I do hope that we can instill more sense of hope and self-agency into everybody in our country, because I think there’s so much upside of using AI in the right way. And I want not just people in Silicon Valley or in Manhattan, but I want people in rural communities, in traditional industries everywhere, 50 states to be able to embrace and benefit from AI.
Tim Ferriss: Why are you building what you’re building? What is World Labs? Why decide to do this?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I actually answer this question very often to every member of my team. I built World Labs. There are two levels of this answer from a technology point of view. World Labs is building the next generation AI focusing on spatial intelligence because spatial intelligence, just like language intelligence, is fundamental in unlocking incredible capabilities in machines so that it can help humans to create better, to manufacture better, to design better, to build better robots. So spatial intelligence is a linchpin technology. But one level up, why am I still a technologist is because I believe humanity is the owning species that builds civilizations. Animals builds colonies or herds, but we build civilizations and we build civilizations because we want to be better and better. We want to do good. Even though along the way, we do a lot of bad things, but there is a desire of having better lives, having better community, having better society, live more healthily, have more prosperity and that desire is where civilization is built upon. And because I believe that humanity can do that, I believe science and technology is the most powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools in building civilizations. And I want to contribute to that. That’s why I’m still a scientist and a technologist, and I’m building World Labs for that.
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain to people what spatial intelligence is and what the product is, so to speak, at least as it stands right now that you’re building?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So spatial intelligence is a capability that humans have, which goes beyond language. Is when you pack a sandwich in a bag, when you take a run or a hike in a mountain, when you paint your bedroom. Everything that has to do with seeing and turning that scene into understanding of the 3D world, understanding of the environment, and then in turn, you can interact with it, you can change it, you can enjoy it, you can make things out of it. That whole loop between seeing and doing is supported by the capability of spatial intelligence. The fact that you can pack a sandwich means you know what the bread looks like. You know how to put the knife in between. You know how to put the lettuce leaf on the bread. You know how to put the bread or sandwich into a Ziploc bag. Every part of this is spatial intelligence.
And does today’s AI have that? It’s getting better, but compared to language intelligence, AI is still very early in that ability to see, to reason, and also to do in world, in both virtual 3D world as well as real 3D world. So that’s what World Labs is doing. We are creating a frontier model that can have intelligent capability in the model to create world, to reason around the world, and to enable, for example, creators or designers or robots to interact with the world. So that’s spatial intelligence.
Tim Ferriss: Could you expand on the designers or creatives or robots interacting with the world? So does that mean that you could — and my team has been playing with some of the tools, so thank you for that. What does that mean? If you could paint a picture for let’s say a year from now, two years from now, how might someone use this or how might a robot use this?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I was just talking to someone a couple of weeks ago and it was really inspiring is that high school theaters are very low budget. Sometimes I go to San Francisco Opera or musicals and the sets that’s built for theater are just so beautiful, but it’s very hard for high school or middle school —
Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: To have that budget to do that. Imagine that you can take today’s World Labs model, we call it marble, and then you create a set in, I don’t know, in medieval French town. And then you put that in the background and use that digital form to help transport the actors and action into that world. And of course, depending on the auxiliary technology, whether you’re on a computer or eventually people can use a headset or whatever, you can have that immersive feeling of being in a medieval French town. That would be an amazing creative tool for a lot of creators. That was an example someone and I was talking about it a couple of weeks ago, but we already see creators all over the world. Some of them are VFX creators. Some of them are interior design creators. Some of them are gaming creators. Some of them are educators who want to build some worlds that transport their students into different experiences are already starting to use our model because they find it very powerful at their fingertip to be able to create 3D worlds that they can use to immerse either their characters or themselves into.
Tim Ferriss: And just process wise, if someone’s wondering how this works, let’s just say it’s a public school teacher, let’s just say, who’s hoping to inspire and teach their students going the extra mile.
What does it look like for someone to use it? Are they typing in text, describing the world they’d like to create, uploading assets or photos, almost like an image board? How does it work if someone’s non-technical?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. So they don’t need to be technical at all. They open our page on desktop or in their phone, but desktop is more fun because it has more features. And then they can type a French medieval town, or they can actually go anywhere. They can use Midjourney or Nano Banana to create a photo of a French medieval town, or they can get an actual photo about that. And then they upload it, we call it prompt. And then after a few minutes, our model gives you a 3D world that is say a part of the town. It does have a limit in its range. And then that 3D world is generally 3D because you can just use the mouse to drag and turn around and walk around and see that world. And then downstream, if you want to use it, you could have many ways to use it. You can actually create a movie out of it by using one of our tools on the website to just put cameras and you can make a particular movie out of it. If you’re a game developer —
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say, it sounds a lot like a gaming engine.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. You can put a lot of characters in it. If you’re a VFX professional — we have a lot of VFX professionals. They can actually take this and put it in the workflow of their movie shooting and have real actors shooting movies. We also have psychology researchers using that immersive world in particular psychiatric studies. We could also use that as the simulation for robotic training because a lot of robotic training needs a lot of data and then use that for generating a lot of different data. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So is it almost like a flight simulator for robots before they go into the real world?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: That’s part of the goal. We are still early, so the flight simulator is not complete yet, but that’s part of the journey.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned psychiatric studies. I think that’s what you just mentioned. Yes. What might that look like?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So we actually got this researcher who called us and they’re studying people who have psychological disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder where they’re triggered by certain environments and they want to study the trigger and also just study how the treatment. But how do you trigger someone who, let’s say particularly have issue with, let’s say, a strawberry field. I’m just making it up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You can take them to a strawberry field, but what about you want to know if it’s strawberry field in the summer or strawberry field at night, or it’s strawberry, or it’s many strawberry? How do you do this? Suddenly this researcher realized we give them the cheapest possible way of varying all kinds of dimensions and they can test this out and do their studies.
Tim Ferriss: That’s really interesting. Yeah. I could see it being applied to — it might be called exposure therapy, but in terms of — now that you’re describing it, I could see how it could be added into pretty much everything. If you think about how humans operate in the real world.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Incredibly good.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: And the boundary between real world and digital world is less and less. Thinner and thinner because we live in many screens, we live in the real world. We do things in virtual world, we do things in real world. We’ll create machines that can do things in real world and virtual world. So there’s a lot we do in digital and physical spaces.
Tim Ferriss: Who are some scientists or researchers who you pay attention to, who are not necessarily the big brand names and marquee lights that are already very public in the world? Is there anybody who stands out where you’re like, there’s some really tremendous people doing good work who —
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Well, that’s part of the reason I wrote the book is, especially in the middle chapters where I wrote about the journey of doing ImageNet that combines cognitive science with computer science. I actually talk about psychologists and neuroscientists and developmental psychologists in — some of them are still with us, some of them are not. For example, the late Ann Treisman, Irv Biederman, they all passed away in the last few years, but they were giants in cognitive science whose work has informed computer science and eventually AI. There are still lots of scientists around the world. Many of them are in the US who are thinkers in developmental psychology. In AI, I follow their work. Yeah. I think that the world of science, just to name some names, Liz Spelke in Harvard, Alison Gopnik in Berkeley. I love Rodney Brooks, who was a former MIT professor in robotics. And there’s just a lot of them. I don’t mean to just single them out, but you’re asking me for names that are not in the news of AI.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s perfect. Thank you. I would also love to get your perspective on what might be — this is a very strong word. But seemingly inevitable in terms of developments in the near intermediate future. And I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In 2008, 2009, I became involved with Shopify, the company, back when they had like 10 employees. And there were a few things happening around that time. And you could ask questions in the next 10 years or 20 years, will there be more broadband access or less? More. Okay. Will there be more e-commerce or less? There’ll be more. Okay. And when you have four or five of those that seem over a long enough time horizon, absolute yeses, it begins to paint a picture of where things are going. Are there any things that in the next handful of years you think are perhaps underappreciated as near inevitabilities?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You want me to talk about underappreciated? I don’t know if they’re over appreciated, but they’re definitely appreciated. The need for power is appreciated. The trend of more AI, not less AI is appreciated. The long-term trend of robots coming is appreciated. So these are appreciated. What’s underappreciated is — spatial intelligence is underappreciated in the sense that everybody’s still now talking about language, large language models, but really world modeling of pixels of 3D worlds is underappreciated because like you were saying, it powers so many things from storytelling to entertainment to experiences to robotic simulation. I think AI in education is underappreciated because what we are going to see is that AI can accelerate the learning for those who want to learn, which will have downstream implication in our school system, as well as in just human capital landscape, like how do we assess qualified workers? It used to be which school you graduate from, with which degree, but that will be changing with AI being at the fingertip of so many people. That’s underappreciated.
I think AI’s impact in our economic structure, including labor market is underappreciated. The nuance is underappreciated. I think this whole rhetoric of either total utopia post-scarcity is hyperbolic or like everybody’s job will be gone is hyperbolic, but the messy middle is how from knowledge worker to blue collar, to hospitality, to all these changes that’s happening, it’s underappreciated by our policy workers, by our scholars, by just overall society.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the nuances from the job perspective? Maybe this ties into what I promised earlier I was going to ask you, which is what you are telling or will tell — I don’t know their ages. Your children. Or recommending. Let’s just say, I don’t know how old they are, but if we assume that they, just for the sake of discussion, of the age where they’re trying to decide what they should study, where they should focus, things of that nature, how would you think about answering that even provisionally?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I think the ability to learn is even more important because when there was less tools, fewer tools to learn, it’s easier to just follow tracks. You go through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and then get some training vocationally, and that’s a path. And with that is a set of structured credentials from degrees and all that. But AI has really changed it. For example, my startup, when we interview a software engineer, honestly, how much I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now. It’s more about what have you learned? What tools do you use? How quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools? And a lot of these are AI tools. What’s your mindset towards using these tools matter more to me.
At this point in 2025, hiring at World Labs, I would not hire any software engineer who does not embrace AI collaborative software tools. It’s not because I believe AI software tools are perfect. It’s because I believe that shows, first of all, the ability of the person to grow with the fast-growing toolkits, the open-mindedness, and also the end result is if you’re able to use these tools, you’re able to learn, you can superpower yourself better. So that is definitely shifting. So coming back to your question, what do you tell young people, tell children? I think the timeless value of learning to learn, the ability to learn is even more important now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me as we’re talking that it’s only going to get increasingly easier for the ambitious to act as superpowered autodidacts, right? We’ve already seen this. Certainly YouTube has a nice track record now. You can either entertain yourself to death and avoid doing things that help with self-growth and development or you can supercharge it. And similar With AI, you flash forward. We don’t even need to flash forward, but it’s how does a teacher audit that their students are doing the work they’re supposed to be doing?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: On so many levels, it’s getting to the point, there are some exceptions, but of near impossibility. Students can either avoid all work or they can supercharge their own work, but the output might look very similar at least for a period of time. So schooling is going to change a lot. It’s very, very interesting.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I actually think, Tim, if the school evaluation is structured in a way that whatever AI gives and whatever the student gives is the same, there’s something wrong with the structure of the evaluation.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Can you say more about that? That’s interesting.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So for example, English essay. This is not me. This is me hearing a story that I so agree with. I’ll retell the story. As a high school freshman English class teacher, I heard that someone told me the story of their kids’ school. On the first day of school, the teacher actually said to the class, “I want to show you how I would score AI.” So the teacher give an essay topic. Show the students this is what the best AI gave me and I’m going to show you how I think this is good, this is bad, how this is suboptimal, and I’ll give it a B minus. Now I will tell you, this is my bar. If you’re so lazy that you ask AI to write your essay, this is what you’re going to get. But you can use AI, that’s totally fine. But if you can do the work, learn, think, be the best human creator you can and work on top of that you can get to A, you can get to A pluses. And that would be, in my opinion, the right way to structure the evaluation. Is not to pit humans against the AI and then try to police the use or not use of AI. Is that to show where the bar of the tools are and where the bar of the human learner should be.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m going to sit with that example and try to think of more examples. It’s very interesting. And boy, oh boy, I’ve been shocked by how quickly the models improve. But yes, as a thought experiment. I’m going to chew on that. I know we only have a few minutes left. Fei-Fei, I wanted to ask you a question I ask a lot, which is if you could put a quote or a message, something on a billboard, something to get in front of millions, billions of people, just assume they all understand it. It could be an image, could be a question, could be a quote, anything at all, a saying, a mantra, doesn’t matter, could be almost anything. What would you or what might you put on that billboard?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: What is your north star?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. What is your north star? This is of course critically important. And coming back to how you define that or find that for yourself. You were talking about audacious questions and then that leading to a north star hypothesis. Is there another way that you would encourage people on top of that to think about finding their north star?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I believe that’s how that makes us so human and makes us to be so fully alive is that we as a species can live beyond the chasing of just basic needs, but dreams and missions and goals and passion. And everybody’s north star is different and that’s fine. Not everybody have AI as their north star. But finding that goes to the heart of education again. And I don’t mean formal classroom education, it’s just the journey of education. A lot of that is the ability to learn who you are and to learn how to formulate your north star and how to chase after that.
Tim Ferriss: Last question. I was just going to ask, Did your parents ever explain to you why they named you Fei-Fei?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. It’s because when my mom was going through labor, my dad was characteristically late to the hospital and along the way he caught a bird. He let it go, but he did catch a bird. I don’t know if he was just distracted. It was in Beijing, in the city of Beijing. My dad was bicycling to my mom’s hospital. And that inspired him to call me Fei-Fei.
Tim Ferriss: Fei-Fei.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Fei-Fei. Oh wait, sorry. For those who don’t speak Chinese, I forgot — you do speak Chinese, but for those who don’t speak Chinese, fei means flying.
Tim Ferriss: Means flying.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So be inspired by a bird.
Tim Ferriss: Really quick, I’ll just say, because it’s funny. My first Chinese name that I had was [foreign language], which is because I was very blunt and honest, so [foreign language]. But [foreign language]. But when I was first starting, my tones in China were not polished and people thought I was saying that my name was [foreign language 01:21:02], which is airport.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Airport.
Tim Ferriss: So I petitioned my teachers and we changed my name to something less confusing.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: What’s your new name?
Tim Ferriss: [foreign language]. It’s [foreign language] but it’s without the [foreign language] at the bottom.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Oh, wow. Fancy name. That’s way more sophisticated than mine.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I get to script it with my Chinese teachers, so I have an unfair advantage.
Dr. Li, thank you so much for the time. We will link to the show notes for everybody at tim.blog/podcast. They’ll be able to find you easily. And everybody should check out worldlabs.ai and we’ll put every other link, your social and so on in the show links. But thank you for the time. I really appreciate it.Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Thank you Tim. I enjoyed our conversation.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-10 06:13:01
Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.
She has served as a board member or advisor in various public and private companies and at the White House and United Nations. Dr. Li earned her BA in physics from Princeton in 1999 and her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She is the author of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, her memoir and one of Barack Obama’s recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023.
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“Really, at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI, people will be using AI, people will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“It turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious questions.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“We’re all students of history. One thing I actually don’t like about the telling of scientific history is there’s too much focus on single genius.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“AI is absolutely a civilizational technology. I define civilizational technology in the sense that, because of the power of this technology, it’ll have—or [is] already having—a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“I believe humanity is the only species that builds civilizations. Animals build colonies or herds, but we build civilizations, and we build civilizations because we want to be better and better.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“What is your North Star?”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li
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Want to hear another podcast episode with someone who helped build the computational foundations of modern AI? Listen to my conversation with legendary inventor Danny Hillis (and Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly), in which we discussed pioneering parallel computing at MIT, studying artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky, building what experts called impossible, hiring Richard Feynman, working with Steve Jobs, 400+ patents, the distinction between “real AI” and imitation intelligence, and much more.
The post Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-04 15:02:01
Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose (digg.com)! We explore the promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, Kevin’s AI stack and where AI is heading, the challenges of modern dating, wisdom from Anthony de Mello, bioelectric medicine, and much, much more.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Kev-Kev, good to see you.
Kevin Rose: Tim-Tim, another episode of The Random Show. Glad to be back.
Tim Ferriss: Another episode of The Random Show.
Kevin Rose: This is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: You look very dashing. For people who can’t see you, you have hair slicked back, jacket with wide open lapels, reminiscent of a leather jacket. You look like a leading man from The Outsiders, that movie back in the day. You just need a cigarette in your pocket and some other goodies, but you’re looking good, looking good. You also have, as you disclosed to me, your secret weapon nearby an IKEA light that is providing very seductive shadows and contours on your face. So, well done.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think we’re both hacking it together today.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, today has been putting together the boxcar on the way down the hill in a sense, from an equipment standpoint, but here we are.
Kevin Rose: Here we are.
Tim Ferriss: We made it. Now, you asked me to grab a glass of wine, which I didn’t do. I ended up grabbing a glass of Gin, Caledonia Spirits Barr Hill gin. For anybody who’s curious, I do like my gin, B-A-R-R Hill. But this might surprise people and it surprised me because last time we spoke, I think you had hit, what was it, six months or however long it was. Six months sober. So what is unfolding before our very eyes?
Kevin Rose: Well, what’s unfolding is a glass of champagne is what’s unfolding, but I’ll say that I almost made it to seven months, but then I just decided — my original goal was three months, and then I made it to six, and was I going to continue to go on like this? And I had hung out with some friends. We had a dinner in San Francisco, and I thought, “You know, I’m going to have a glass of vino. I’m just going to have a glass of wine because I don’t want to make this…” It was actually, there was a great book. You know the book Awareness, which you’ve recommended to me.
Tim Ferriss: It’s one of my favorites. I have one of my many copies downstairs right now. Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So, Anthony de Mello, Jesuit priest. Correct? Is that right?
Tim Ferriss: Jesuit priest, who is also a psychotherapist who is now since passed, but incredibly, incredibly compelling writing. I’m sure we’ll get more into this because I listened to the audiobook you recommended, so we’ll come back to that.
Kevin Rose: Oh, cool. Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: But all right, so take us back to the story you’re telling. So, you’re sitting there —
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Well, prior to that, I had re-listened to that book and I got it on audio. And one of the things that hit me that he said in the book was —
Tim Ferriss: I know what it was. Can I guess?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, you do. Yeah, go for it.
Tim Ferriss: That abstinence or asceticism. Renunciation is as much a trap, or can be as much a trap as anything else because it ties you, it binds you to the thing that you are from.
Kevin Rose: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. It makes it your lifelong enemy. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it binds you to it. And so, you’re like, “Fuck it, Yolo. Let’s have some wine.”
Kevin Rose: Well, I want to be bound to it. And then I did that with a glass of wine, so no, but I —
Tim Ferriss: Break those chains.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. But the plan was never to be sober for life. It was to reevaluate my relationship with alcohol and get to a point where I could truly say to anyone that asks, the cravings have gone away. And my goal going forward is something I just call the 2-2-2 rule, which is maximum of two drinks at any given night, never two days in a row, and then two days a week. So, just lightweight. That’s my new thing. And then also special occasions, I want it to be about a celebration of something or a gathering in some way that’s meaningful, not just because a football game’s on or something.
Tim Ferriss: Well, first I have more to say, but cheers. I have my little Japanese mug —
Kevin Rose: Cheers.
Tim Ferriss: — full of Barr Hill gin. Cheers.
Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, straight up gin?
Tim Ferriss: That’s just straight gin. I didn’t have any ice. You’ve inspired me to cut way back on my drinking, so I haven’t really had much. I don’t want to open a bottle of wine that I’m not going to finish with friends or something.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean, you finished your bottle of gin.
Tim Ferriss: So I just grabbed what I had open, which stay good for a long while once open, which was this gin. So, I’m not going to drink a full glass of gin, but I will have a sip with you.
Kevin Rose: I think we’re both going to be cheap dates maybe then, because if we haven’t drank in a while, we might get really sloppy really fast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very, very cheap dates. So, let me follow up on this story and the 2-2-2 plan. How are you intending, if at all, to catch yourself if you start slipping? Do you have people who you want to hold you accountable? Do you have some type of calendar reminder in place? How do you keep an eye on that? Recognizing that you may very well be totally fine, but given the history that you have, it seems like it’d be a good idea to put some guardrails in there.
Kevin Rose: Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly if my issue with alcohol had been one of excess consumption in that, I was never a six or seven drink or even five drink person. For me, it was more consistency. So, the one that is easier to catch is you wake up the next morning and you say, “Okay, I’m just not drinking tonight because you’re catching it in a sober state, which is huge.” So, it’s the big foul that I had over the last few years, especially to start with COVID was just two drinks a night, maybe three, and just continuing that and taking a day or two off a week, that’s not healthy as my liver enzymes would report back. I’m not as concerned about that. But also, I’ve talked to my therapist about this and she’s amazing.
And she’s like, “Hey, I’m going to check in with you and just make sure that you’re truly sticking to this.” But I think an accountability partner is absolutely a necessity, especially when it’s been such a staple of your life for decades.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And I think for you, one thing that immediately hops to mind, which seems super mundane, but I know you have a lot of anxiety around flying, and I don’t think that flying counts as a special occasion, right? So, you’ll need to —
Kevin Rose: Oh, it absolutely does. It absolutely does. That flying —
Tim Ferriss: You fly so much though.
Kevin Rose: We are in the air, we shouldn’t be able to do that as humans. It is an amazing feat of engineering. So, yes, it’s special. Tim, don’t take this away from me, God damn it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Wow, I’m going to —
Kevin Rose: This is one thing.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to call that the yellow flag in the making, but you know what —
Kevin Rose: I’m fine with one yellow flag. I do fly a bit, but you know what’s funny is when I came back from SFO when I actually had that first drink, I didn’t want a second drink on the plane. And honestly, it’s that just like anxiety of the whole process of it all, the security and the packed jets and the people coughing next to you. And once I get settled, I’m pretty good, unless it’s an international flight and I’m with friends. So, yeah, I think it’s that first drink actually goes a long way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. On that note, first drink goes a long way, especially if it’s just straight up gin.
Kevin Rose: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: Where else should we segue? Because we can come back to this, but we have a lot to catch up on. There is lot.
Kevin Rose: So much to catch up on and why don’t we just go back and forth and just have it be an old school Random Show where everything’s random, we have no idea we’re about to talk about.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s go for it. So, I’ll share an update on my side, which folks might find interesting. As you know and long-term listeners know, I have been one way you could put it as an early adopter looking at bioelectric medicine of different types, whether that is legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. By the way, there aren’t many options that would fall in that category, interviewing people like Dr. Kevin Tracey, but also looking at most acutely transcranial magnetic stimulation. So, TMS, which is a form of brain stimulation. I’ll keep it simple, that has existed for decades. But there was an innovation by the very recently late Nolan Williams, sadly, and others called accelerated TMS, where you basically take something like 50 stimulations, like 50 different sessions.
And you compress it into one week, as opposed to doing it over the course of many months. And this type of dense dosing schedule produces some, in many people, incredible effects. And you saw me after my first experience of accelerated TMS, which was with a device called MagVenture device. It uses neuro targeting. So, you need a resting state fMRI and so on to determine where they’re actually going to place this stimulation depending on your condition and your own individual anatomy and activity. So, if it’s depression, they might point it in one direction or in one place. If it’s anxiety or OCD, they might point it somewhere else. And I effectively had, let’s just call it eight or nine out of 10, resting state generalized anxiety.
Kevin Rose: Was this self-reported? Meaning, when you went in there to get the resting state scan, were you like, “Hey, I’m coming in here with ED and general anxiety, I need you to treat this for me.” And then they would —
Tim Ferriss: Did you say ED?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah. I know it’s an issue, but oh, we can cut this if you want. We can cut this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, nice, nice. Very cute.
Kevin Rose: No, but all the joking aside —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Kevin Rose: — how did you determine the areas? Did you have to tell them, this is what I’m coming in to treat, or is this something they see?
Tim Ferriss: Well, they do interviews and assessments that are qualitative. Let’s just say asking you what your symptoms are, why are you coming here in the first place? Then they would dig into the details and then they would run you through various standardized tests or assessments. So, you might have the MADRS, you might have the HAM-D. You might have the Y-BOCS. They’re different assessments that are accepted as standardized for diagnosing, say OCD or any number of other psychiatric conditions. And then you get an fMRI. So, you get this scan of your brain, which I did at, I think it was Mass General in Massachusetts as you would guess. And based on that, they can do some precision targeting.
And just to give people the upshot of that, I did five days of stimulations and that gave me basically three to four months of effectively a zero on a scale of zero to 10 of generalized anxiety. So, from that point forward, effectively, no anxiety.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: The rumination, the anxious mental loops that I would get involved with late at night, that would then in turn affect my sleep and cause onset insomnia, et cetera, that went to zero for a period of say, three to four months, which blew my mind.
Kevin Rose: Just out of curiosity, were you tracking Oura data and whatnot, so you could see the impact of this as measured by different devices?
Tim Ferriss: I wasn’t looking at Oura at that point in time. I have been tracking with Oura at least for the last three to four weeks. And so, I’m going to be taking a closer look at things like HRB and so on in terms of trending. But the upshot of it is that, and I’ll try to compress this a little bit. But that first time I did accelerated TMS, I had this incredible effect, much more durable in terms of its intensity of effect and relief than even any psychedelic therapy, or psychedelic assisted therapy that I’ve looked into. And those were effectively ended up being the two modalities with the greatest effect size on the psychiatric conditions that I was most personally interested in. And where I have funded a lot of early stage science.
Unfortunately, when I then went to do boosters to do shorter duration, two or three days, nothing happened. So, my symptoms started creeping back in, which seemed to be hereditary. Just to put that out there, right? I recognize objectively, I’m like, “There isn’t really anything I should be so anxious about. I recognize that very clearly. Nonetheless, I get caught in these OCD/GAD, generalized anxiety disorder loops, and I see that in family members. So, it seems to be somewhat genetic. In any case, none of these boosters worked. And then I was like, “Fuck, this is terrible. Okay, well let me go back and do the full five days.” Full five days, didn’t do anything.
And then I was looking back at the calendar and trying to identify anything that might have correlated, or preceded the first treatment that helped make it work. And I did see that I’d spent a few weeks in the Amazon maybe ending about two weeks prior to that treatment. So, since I was ingesting plants of various types that are known to induce some degree of neuroplasticity, I thought, well, it could be that it was a plasticity issue, a preconditioning that helped that first session. So, I tried to replicate that using psilocybin and did another five days, no effect, didn’t have any effect, and was starting to feel really hopeless about this. But then came across some research that this is going to sound pretty wild, and this is definitely early, early stages.
So, to my knowledge, I’m maybe one out of fewer than a hundred people who have been one of the first monkeys shot in the space doing this specifically for anxiety. It has been applied to more people with depression, but decided to try simultaneous dosing with something called D-cycloserine (DCS). So, D-cycloserine, D-C-Y-C-L-O-S-E-R-I-N-E, is very, very interesting. So, it is an antibiotic that historically has been used to treat tuberculosis and urinary tract infections, but it is also now being studied. And for the last several years, people have been looking at this as a cognitive enhancer for treating various neuropsychiatric conditions.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Now, how they figured this out, I’m not sure. I mean, it could have been working backwards through the purported mechanism of action. So, D-cycloserine has been looked at in conjunction with say, CBT, like cognitive behavioral therapy and all sorts of different things. And part of what people believe makes it effective as an amplifier of effects, although there can be side effects and sometimes the pendulum swings the other direction is that it is a partial agonist at the glycine binding site of the NMDA glutamate receptor. Now, ketamine also works on NMDA receptors, but it’s an antagonist. So, it’s very different in that respect. But I will again try to cut to the punchline.
So, instead of doing five days, I did one day, just one day of basically a stimulation every hour on the hour for 10 hours and preloaded with a lozenge that you just let of melt in your mouth with this D-cycloserine, and it worked one day. It had some side effects. I had insomnia for about two weeks, which seems to happen in some patients who have undergone this. Some people have really bad insomnia for a month and then it goes away. And I was willing to take that risk. There’s some other things that can crop up, like temporary loss of some fine motor control and some other weird stuff.
Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus.
Tim Ferriss: Tinnitus in some people.
Kevin Rose: Wow, with just the treatment in general. Did the papers that you’re signing and say, this may happen?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, with any of this stuff, you’re writing your life away with some signatures.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s like frontier stuff. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but the point that I’m trying to make here in a pretty long-winded way is number one, it worked. So, that leads me to believe that the original hypothesis that it was around neuroplasticity, so I needed to warm up the Play-Doh before it could be molded properly, could be accurate, right? That could be true. Secondly, and this is incredibly important, most people I know who are really busy, or most people who can’t afford it, can’t take five days off of work. They can’t take a week off of work to do this treatment no matter how bad their symptoms might be. And the fact that this D-cycloserine, like DCS enhanced treatment was able to be compressed into a single day, I feel like it opens up the multitude of people who can potentially use this tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, who knows?
And it should also at the same time really decrease the cost. So, it’s made me even more bullish around accelerated TMS, and it’s been, I’d have to go back and look maybe a month, six weeks, but it’s still sticking, which is remarkable. So, in any case, for people who want to hear more, they can listen to my podcast with Nolan Williams that goes into a lot of detail around this, but very exciting stuff. It turns out a lot of these things might be interrelated and that certain types of TMS when implemented properly actually seem to also stimulate the vagus nerve in some interesting ways. So, this is the next frontier that I’m most interested in exploring right now is bioelectric medicine, right? So, computer chips over pills and so on. I think it allows you, in some respects to get much more targeted.
So, that’s good news for me, but I think it’s also obviously at the edges of medicine right now. But I think that in the next two to three years, I could see this becoming a much more accessible therapeutic for millions of people. And there’s some companies you can watch. I mentioned one MagVenture or Magventures. The other is called Brainsway, and they’re actually a very small company, but publicly traded, and I’m sure there are going to be more entrants. So, super exciting stuff. But now I feel like I have a recipe worth trying to replicate where maybe once a quarter, maybe twice a year, depending on when — I think I see symptoms start to creep back in. I don’t think this is a one and done, nor is any psychedelic assisted therapy that I’m aware of.
So, I expect it’ll be some type of ongoing treatment that I do one, two to four times per year.
Kevin Rose: And when you think of the potential in one and inability to replicate this again in others, I know you put a lot of cash personally into philanthropic things around research and studies, are you curious to push on these buttons and see, can you put together a trial with 50 people and
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Kevin Rose: What’s your thoughts there?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would definitely be interested in funding more research. The Brain Stimulation Lab at Stanford, I’ve already funded some research within. Very sadly, Nolan Williams, who helped develop a lot of these technologies died, I mean I want to say it was a month or two ago by suicide, very sadly.
Kevin Rose: Oh, jeez.
Tim Ferriss: And he was a friend and really heartbreaking to see. And I mean it’s hard to put that aside for the moment, but putting it aside for the moment, I did fund research within that lab. I suspect that’s going to take time to implement, particularly given the leadership vacuum that was created by his very, very tragic death. But I am interested in funding more research, and this is an ongoing thing. As you know, my foundation, the Saisei Foundation, has funded all sorts of on the edge research since 2015 or so, I would say. So, this is for sure where I would like to fund more research, particularly looking at these combinations. And that could be something like these, like a D-cycloserine plus stimulation.
And at certain clinics, they have cohorts of say 60 — I think it’s at the time that I did it, there were 60 patients who had been treated for some form of anxiety disorder with this combination. I think that at least at that particular clinic on the depression side, the numbers are larger, probably 200 or so. But it’s exciting, it’s exciting. I mean that’s enough to get a signal, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And sure, you need to check all the boxes and do the randomized placebo controlled studies with multiple arms and all that, but it is enough to start to see a signal, especially when you have treatment resistant cases that haven’t responded to other things. And that’s enough to inform at least the design of a study that would take much longer. So, we’ll see.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: But I will say that much some people experience with GLP-1 agonists like Tirzepatide, and Mounjaro or Ozempic or whatever, after these treatments and maybe it’s just from really putting the brakes on a lot of the OCD like circuitry, that I had much less desire to over consume caffeine, to over consume alcohol. It made dialing all of those things back a lot easier, which has been —
Kevin Rose: And you know that’s a massive benefit of GLP-1s for a lot of people?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which is huge. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Well, dude, I’m pumped for you, man. It’s like I love to see you getting some relief here, even if just for a few months, and that’s fantastic, it’s repeatable.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. So, fingers crossed. We’ll see. And for people who want to learn more, I would suggest they start with, as eerie as it might be, my conversation on the podcast with Nolan Williams. All right, man, you’re up. What’s next?
Kevin Rose: Speaking of brain-related things, I was out a dinner with a friend and I was lamenting in talking about just my inability to remember faces, names, and then how that extended into childhood for me, which was doing poorly on tests and just I couldn’t quite retain the information the way that my friends could. I just could never explain it. Somebody at dinner, my buddy Mau said to me, “Do you have aphantasia?” And I said, “I have no idea what that is.” And then he said, “Okay, I want you to close your eyes right now,” and this is going to blow some people’s minds right now. “Close your eyes and picture an apple in your mind’s eye. Picture an apple.
What do you see? Do you see a red apple? Do you see water droplets on it? Does it look fresh? Does it look like an HD image?” And that’s what he said to me. I go, “What are you talking about?” And he goes, “Well, what does it look like to you?” And I go, “There’s no apple.” He goes, “What do you mean there’s no apple?” And I said, “Well, there’s like an outline, ghosty foggy thing, maybe-ish.” And he goes, “Oh, you have aphantasia.” And I was immediately jumped, whatever, ChatGPT. And I had no idea that people suffer from this condition and it’s in the low single digit percentage of people, and they have no idea that this is a thing where you cannot picture something in your mind’s eye. Had you heard of this before or no?
Tim Ferriss: No, I hadn’t until you dropped it in one of our group friend text threads. This was, I guess a couple of weeks ago. But Fantasia is spelled like the Disney movie, but actually no, that would be with an F. It’s aphantasia, A-P-H-A-N-T-A-S-I-A, yeah, is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images first described in 1880. Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: When you close your eyes, what do you see? Because they give you a scale there, and a five is like an HD full on, beautiful apple. What do you see? Do you see a perfect quality apple?
Tim Ferriss: So aphantasia can be considered the opposite of hyperphantasia. I am the exact opposite. I have hyper-visual recall and the ability —
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: — to visualize. So I can probably draw the vast majority of restaurants or the floor plans that I’ve ever visited, right? I can absolutely spec it out and have very, very vivid visualization. So I would be on the far other end of the spectrum.
Kevin Rose: So when you think of a new idea, do you see it in some ways? Because I feel it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You are very similar to my friend Mike, because I remember Mike and I have a lot of shared flight time with psychedelic experiences, and he was describing how he has almost no visual imagery, and it’s almost purely kinesthetic for him. And that is as hard for me to imagine as it is for him to imagine my experience, which is overwhelmingly explosively visual.
Kevin Rose: What’s crazy, dude, is how many things I think I thought were jokes. When people said they counted sheep before they went to bed. I was like, “Oh, that’s funny. Would you count numbers in your head?” But I didn’t know they see sheep. I didn’t know. And if you’re younger, mute the podcast for 10 seconds, I didn’t know the spank bank was a real bank you could visit. I thought I didn’t even know that was a thing. I seriously didn’t —
Tim Ferriss: Well, to be clear, it’s not a bank with tellers and —
Kevin Rose: No, but it is in your head.
Tim Ferriss: — safety security boxes.
Kevin Rose: It’s in your head. You can open up the box and go back and see that. I can’t see any of that. It sucks. My buddy from Diggnation Podcast was like, after we stopped recording, he’s like, “”You’ve got to be kidding me. So, you can’t go back and look at people you’ve dated in the past during intimate moments and see, revisualize that?” I’m like, “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And he goes, “Oh, yeah.” He’s like, “Oh,” he felt so bad for me. He was almost starting to cry for me. It’s horrible. It’s horrible.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think you have, if anything, developed in compensation of that?
Kevin Rose: Well, the one thing that I have never been able to explain is that the feeling side of it, everything is that everything is a feeling. So I have a friend of mine, and I’m not this way, but she composes music and she said that she sees in her head music is represented as colors. And so, when I come up with ideas for projects, I’m not seeing something. I’m traversing a feeling of a path, rather than a visual thing. It’s funny you mentioned the fear of flying. I think part of the reason why I have such a vivid fear of flying is that feeling comes so strong of the plane crashing, not that I see the plane crashing. So, it’s just a different thing, but I wouldn’t trade that for the world.
That has served me quite well in investing and seeing around corners early and things of that nature. But when I explain that to people, you feel a new idea. There’s been a bunch of people that have no idea what I’m talking about and something they can’t. I think you can probably have both, but new ideas come from this rising of feeling, not visual, if that makes sense.
Tim Ferriss: Wild. I mean, it doesn’t really make sense to me, but it would make sense to my friend Mike. And thinking about all this and hearing about your friend who I think you said sees musical notes as colors, that’s often referred to as synesthesia. And there’s a really amazing little book that I read ages ago. It’s been around for a long time. I’m looking at it right now. It was published in 1987, but it’s 192 pages. Anyone who’s interested in memory and mind and the vast differences between people might be interested in this, it’s called The Mind of a Mnemonist, I think is how it’s pronounced, like mnemonic device, M-N-E-M-O-N-I-S-T, a little book about a vast memory. The author’s name is A.R. Those are initials, A.R. Luria, L-U-R-I-A. And here the description’s very short, so I’ll just read it.
“This study explores the inner world of a rare human phenomenon — a man who was endowed with virtually limitless powers of memory. From his intimate knowledge of S., the mnemonist, gained from conversations and testing over a period of almost thirty years, A.R. Luria is able to reveal in rich detail not only the obvious strengths of S.’s astonishing memory but also his surprising weaknesses: his crippling inability to forget, his pattern of reacting passively to life, and his uniquely handicapped personality.”
Fascinating, fascinating book that I really recommend to people, but aphantasia, who knew?
Kevin Rose: You know who I should talk to is Joshua Waitzkin, because didn’t he say that he feels chess? And for people that don’t know, he was the guy that was based on the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Searching for Bobby Fischer was originally a book and then a movie, which was based on the childhood chess prodigy chapters of Josh Waitzkin’s life. And Josh hates that term prodigy. He has some unusual hardware to be sure, but he also has a really incredible framework that he’s applied to now four or five different fields to become world-class in all of them. But he does have a feeling about certain things. One of the stories that he has told me is he was playing a simul, which means he was playing, I don’t know what the number was, 30 or 20 to 40 people simultaneously where he is walking around a room and playing —
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, you do it really fast, right? You just look and then move.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s just moving from table to table really quickly, and I think was with some very high level high school players, something like that. Maybe they were younger, I can’t recall. But he was going around, he’s playing 20 or 30 simultaneous games in his head. And then at one point, he explained it as it feels like you’re juggling 20 or 30 balls in the air. And then he got to one table and he felt all the balls come crashing to the ground.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: And he said, it felt as though I just missed a ball, and they’d all fallen on the ground, and he couldn’t quite figure out why that was the case. And then he was able to deduce that one of the kids had cheated, one of the kids had moved a piece.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no way.
Tim Ferriss: And it was just a gut feeling. And then that visual that allowed him to figure out which of the kids had cheated. It’s just insane.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: That people can even do that. Yeah, yeah. Josh. Yeah, if you want to listen to Joshua Waitzkin’s first ever podcast, you were podcast episode number one, and he was podcast episode number two, if I remember correctly.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Wild character. Oh, man. Let’s see.
Kevin Rose: All right, you’re up.
Tim Ferriss: I’m up. Well, I’ll give another medical one that I think is interesting. And I’ve been texting and interacting with Matt Walker a lot on this. Matt is a scientist. He wrote a book, Why We Sleep, and is about as credible as you can be within the world of sleep science and —
Kevin Rose: He’s the best. And he’s a great human.
Tim Ferriss: He’s a great guy.
Kevin Rose: Fantastic human.
Tim Ferriss: Great guy, has the most pleasing dulcet tones with that British accent and kind lilt in the voice.
Kevin Rose: Plus 10 IQ accent, basically.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Plus 10 or 20 IQ points with the accent. But his podcast is also excellent, and we can link to it in the show notes, but he did an episode on a class of sleep medication called DORAs and DORA stands for dual orexin receptor antagonists. And the reason that DORAs became very interesting to me is that I have Alzheimer’s in my family, and it’s left right and center for me right now because I have three relatives currently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I —
Kevin Rose: Holy shit. That’s your APOE e4 negative folks?
Tim Ferriss: It includes APOE e4 negative folks. So, we won’t get too far into the genetics, but people who should not be, based on that particular parameter, should not be particularly inclined to Alzheimer’s, nonetheless have Alzheimer’s. And then there are of course people who have three, four, I don’t think any of them are APOE e33, I am APOE e34. So, compared to a 33 that, at least, as I understand it would predispose me and say 2.5 times.
Kevin Rose: You and my wife and Rhonda Patrick, and Attia, too, actually is a 34.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go.
Kevin Rose: All of you guys. I’m the only one that’s not. Crazy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, in effect, to our current understanding, you want to mitigate the accumulation of two things, is one is beta amyloid plaque, another is tangles that are created by tau proteins. And sleep is really imperative for this. And if you have sleep issues as I have for decades, the onset insomnia, low percentage of deep sleep, et cetera, you’re effectively unable to have your garbage service within the brain clear out these at a rate that offsets the accumulation.
Kevin Rose: But we don’t know if these are causal, right? There’s never been any conclusion whether these are causal. They’re most likely the protective effects of something else gone awry. Do you agree with that?
Tim Ferriss: I would say that, based on our best understanding, if you can mitigate the accumulation of these things, there seems to be, at the very least, delaying of the progression of these diseases. And there are different drugs and fusions like Donanemab and so on that are predicated on that understanding of the mechanism. This is still early days in the world of Alzheimer’s, but it seems very defensible with our understanding currently that the less of this stuff you accumulate, the better off you are.
Kevin Rose: Do you follow Dale Bredesen’s work, by the way?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t. Let’s come back to that.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Let me just quickly tie this up and say that an example of a DORA would be Belsomra. There are many others, or I should say a handful of others, but I have taken as I believe you have — well, actually no, it was too strong for you, but —
Kevin Rose: I gave you some, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, that’s right. You gave me the Belsomra.
Kevin Rose: I gave you a bunch of Belsomra and you were going to give me some other shit back and you never gave me anything good.
Tim Ferriss: Well, hold on, hold on. That’s still pending, but let me come back. So, you gave me the Belsomra, but I said using it, I was going to get it on a prescription. It’s expensive as fuck.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I paid a shit-ton for it, and then I didn’t use it.
Tim Ferriss: And I was like, all right, I’ll take your Belsomra. But the Trazodone, I got off of Trazodone and switched as a sleep medication to, in this case, Belsomra, because it was literally down the street in an Uber at your house, not recommending you use your friend’s bootleg drugs, by the way, talk to your doctor, but —
Kevin Rose: We also have physicians that are looking at all our shit, so it’s not —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, right. But I have been, now, on Belsomra for a few months as hopefully a — it’s too strong to say it’s a preventative strategy, but at least a delay strategy for potentially Alzheimer’s and other associated neurodegenerative conditions. So, I would encourage people, and I’ll link to this in the show notes, to check out Matt Walker’s podcast on this specifically.
Kevin Rose: You know what they did with Belsomra where they tap the spines of people that took it and they noticed there were less tau, the proteins in the spinal fluid?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they cleared a lot more. I mean, I think it was they looked at animal models and then they looked at humans. And in that podcast episode also, Matt discusses data related to comparing, say Belsomra or I should say DORAs to Ambien, right? And not all sleep medications are created equal. A lot of sleep medications effectively sedate you. But in the case of DORAs, orexin, as I understand it, is a wakefulness. Hmm, I think it’s a hormone, but this is effectively inhibiting wakefulness as opposed to sedating. And by using that particular approach, you’re able to create more naturalistic sleep. So it’s preserving sleep architecture, increasing certain things like REM sleep.
In any case, it’s very interesting because as it stands, look, sure, like exercise for a natural release of cloth, watch your diet, blah, blah, blah. There are a handful of things here. Sleep, super critically important if we’re talking about, again, staving off, hopefully neurodegenerative disease, but there really just aren’t that many tools in the toolkit. So, to come across some of this data via Matt Walker was very eye-opening to me. So, that’s —
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: That’s also something that I’m looking at really closely.
Kevin Rose: I will say the scariest test I have done in my life was about three months ago. I went and had my blood work done and had the towel, the full on, you can check your blood now to see if you are producing, or we’re always producing it, but if you’re out of bounds, meaning you’re above the norm in your production of these types of proteins. And if you are, it’s like 99 percent chance you’re on the path to some form of dementia, right? And did you do that test?
Tim Ferriss: I have just done a whole battery of different tests. And —
Kevin Rose: Did you do the p-tau one though?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m going to have all that stuff. So, I will —
Kevin Rose: It’s scary, dude. You come hang with me, we’ll have a drink or something.
Tim Ferriss: I’m looking at all my results in probably two or three weeks because I have a few online batteries that I’m going to do assessments.
Kevin Rose: It is absolutely terrifying because the doctor was like, “Hey, do you want to do this? I have this available.” And I was like, “Sure, go ahead.” And then three days afterwards, I’m like, “I should look up what that test is all about.” And there’s three of them now that can detect these various proteins that are essentially, if you have elevated levels, you’re on marching orders or you’re heading towards some type of dementia. And I realized that and I was like, “Wow, if this comes back positive, this is an emergency situation where high intensity interval training every single morning for an hour. There’s a lot of things you have to get into.” And it’s a very frightening thing. It’s a very frightening thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it can be super frightening. And there’s certain other things that I think are just holistically good for my particular goals, cognitive, psychological, physical, like the ketogenic diet. I recently did a podcast with David Baszucki, the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, and he and his wife have a foundation that it is the largest funder of science related to metabolic therapies with a particular focus on ketogenic therapy. So, I will be doing all of December in ketosis as an example.
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, just to keep that metabolic machinery humming because I do think it’s plausible that it could help longterm with a lot of the stuff we’re talking about.
Kevin Rose: So, Tim, real quick, just to put a bow on this, Dale. Yeah, so the reason I like Dale, Dale’s a scientist that studies all forms of dementia. He has a book called The End of Alzheimer’s. You’ve probably heard of that book. It’s pretty popular.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve come across his name. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: He’s a little bit different than most of the scientists out there where he believes that Alzheimer’s and these other dementias, they’re not just a one size fits all, one thing went wrong, but it can be a suite of different things that go wrong that lead you down this path.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: And so, it’s metabolic disorder, it’s potential toxins. I think he’s like the four major contributors to different various forms of dementia. And he’s developed this protocol that can stabilize and even reverse a lot of this early cognitive decline if you catch it early enough. And it’s a little bit of throwing the whole kitchen sink at it because it’s everything. And he’s not quite sure exactly what is doing in the fix here, but it’s fascinating, the research that he’s done, two things that stood out to me that he recommends is one, getting this p-tau test done on the blood front and then also recommends the ketogenic diet. And this ketogenic diet is huge for people. And he’s seen that alone stabilize people from mental decline.
And not that they’re not eventually going to get it, but the point is, do you want to go into full decline within five years or do you want it to be 15 years, right? And so, that’s what his lab’s focused on.
Tim Ferriss: Cool. Yeah, I’ll check him out. I mean I’ve seen, not that this is a necessarily sustainable or scalable approach, but with some of my relatives with Alzheimer’s where it’s pretty progressed and they tend to give one word answers or get confused and give the wrong answer to questions, giving them, say, 35 milliliters of exogenous ketones. So, they’re not in ketosis, they’re following the terrible diet they’ve always followed, but give them 35 milliliters of high octane exogenous ketones before going for a walk. And within 30 minutes, they’re speaking in full sentences. I mean, you see some really wild temporary, but nonetheless, very interesting transformations, which comes back to what you said about metabolic syndrome. And there are good reasons why some folks refer to Alzheimer’s as type three diabetes, right?
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent. And that’s what he says in his book. He’s like, that is definitely a contributor, like excess blood glucose levels and all the downstream inflammation effects that come from that. It’s Bad News Bears, as you like to say. That’s Tim Ferriss is —
Tim Ferriss: Bad News Bears. All right, Kevin, what have you got?
Kevin Rose: I wanted to give people a quick little update on the State of the Union around all things AI.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please. I could use it too.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s just such a fascinating time in that every, I’d call it four to eight weeks, maybe a slight bit longer, sometimes less so, we’re seeing leapfrogs in what is possible. And one of the things that I would caution people against is forming an opinion about AI and then locking yourself in time around that opinion. I’ll give you a great practical example. I have a lot of engineers that said, “Hey, I tried AI for coding. It was horrible. My first question is, when did you try it? And they said, “Oh, three months ago.” And I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand. It’s three to four times better than it was three months ago,” right?
And so, we have to make sure that even if you are looking at some of these technologies and say, “Hey, it can’t do X or it’s horrible, it’s hallucinating in this way. It’s giving me the wrong answer. This is without a doubt the massive Motorola block phone version of the iPhone.” We are in that realm of AI, the very first innings of it all and every few months. I mean even Opus four or five came out three, four days ago, whatever, it’s a means —
Tim Ferriss: Explain what that is.
Kevin Rose: Okay, so when you think about frontier models, meaning do you have the bigs Anthropic, you’ve got Google, you’ve OpenAI, OpenAI, and then I’d throw a couple others in there, Meta’s trying in some sense and perplexity and whatnot. But when you think about the big massive models that are running that are at the bleeding edge of all this, meaning they’re the best of the best, the most expensive per query, what happens is they have to train these data sets and then they go in and they eventually release a model, right? And these are typically marked by software versioning numbers know ChatGPT 3 versus ChatGPT 4 versus ChatGPT 5, and then they’ll do 51, 52 or 41, 42 or whatever. So, it’s like software kind of versioning on these models.
And whenever you see a new release, you’re talking a jump in terms of both sometimes the capacity to understand information, and they call that the token context windows. And then also their just natural built-in abilities of the things that they can do well. And so, some things they can do at a graduate level now, some things they can do, their novel ideas is still pretty low down the chain in terms of what they can do around original thinking. But they have all these benchmarks, so they have probably 15 or 20 different benchmarks that they run it against. Can it complete the bar exam is one, right? And so, now they’re able to do it, and then now the question is how quickly can they do it in? It would take them 25 minutes before now it’s five minutes.
So, then there’s a bunch of inference side of benchmarking as well. So, we’re seeing Gemini 3 came out just a couple of weeks ago and it was fantastic. And I will say that I called NVIDIA on here way back in the day. It was 1.8 trillion I think back in the day when I said, “Hey, I think this is going to run, when you and I were talking about it,” and it did because I knew GPUs were just going to be the most precious commodity we have as technologists.
I have seen that Google now is in the driver’s seat here and I’m really excited for them because one, I worked at Google, they acquired one of my companies and I spent a few years there. And I’ve seen inside the belly of the, and I will tell you that they were built for this day and age, the fact that they’ve been training their entire life for this moment.
They have all of the PhDs and all of the folks that they need to go pull this off across the entire suite. And so, what do I mean by the entire suite? And this is where it gets really interesting, Tim. If you think about what OpenAI has to do to compete, they have to go and buy up as much data center space as possible, and they have to buy a shit ton of GPUs from NVIDIA. That’s what they need because they don’t own the stack. They own the software, the training, the engineering, the soft good side of the business, but they don’t own the hardware side. This is a fantastic, really interesting stat. When Gemini three came out a couple weeks ago, it was the first time they had trained a frontier model. The best of best when it dropped, it was the best model in the world exclusively on Google chips.
So, they have these chips called TPUs, tensor processing units. They have the full stack dude, they don’t even need NVIDIA. It’s wild. They didn’t use an NVIDIA chip to train their AI and they have world-class AI. So, it’s just really exciting. This is such a fun time to be alive because right now, you can take someone that is a technologist in the sense that they have a rough understanding of the available tech that’s out there, and you could build and produce and ship any app that you want within a few days now with what we have, and it’s just going to get better and better. So, the creativity and the shipping unlockments that we’re about to see over the next five years is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
If you have the idea for an app or a product or service, anything digital, you will be able to take it from ideation and drawing it on a piece of paper to actual shipping something to your customers within, call it less than a week, which is just never been done before at a price that is, I don’t know, $500, right? And so, if Tim wanted his own app five years ago, I’d have been like, “Okay, great. You want the Tim Ferriss fan site/ed help app, then to build that would be 50 grand,” right?
Tim Ferriss: I feel like you have a problem that we need to talk about. You’re just bringing it up so much. After that half a glass of champagne, I feel like —
Kevin Rose: It went straight to my head, number one and number two —
Tim Ferriss: Turning into a mini confessional here.
Kevin Rose: We need to talk about your relationships because one of the things that whenever I get on —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.
Kevin Rose: No, I’m telling you whenever we do a Random Show, people are always like, they send me messages and they’re like, “I love how you give him shit, number one, and number two, we want to hear more about his personal life.” And I know you’ve got a new special someone in your life, which I’m very excited for.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about that. Yeah, nice segue.
Kevin Rose: Let’s jump into that. Now that we’ve covered Google, let’s jump into your personal life.
Tim Ferriss: Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to ask you for a counterpoint on a previous, I wouldn’t call it necessarily a prediction, but we talked about, I think it was in the last episode of The Random Show, a bit about venture capital. And I wouldn’t say that you said across the board, venture capital would be dead because there are capital intensive businesses that require —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, hardware.
Tim Ferriss: — hardware and build out and wet labs and all this stuff. But I’m wondering if I just put on my future vision goggles, which I wish I had, but let’s just pretend I do and I look forward, it doesn’t need to be five years. I look forward two years. And what you are describing is a reality, right? The barrier to entry, the hurdle is so low that suddenly from ideation to product takes a week. And there is an absolute glut, this just overwhelming tsunami of products. Now, on the positive side, yes, what would’ve cost people millions and millions of dollars to do 10 years ago, let’s say, 15 years ago, suddenly AWS and rentable infrastructure comes along, that cost goes down. Now AI comes along, cost further goes down.
Kevin Rose: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: But I imagine the war for attention is going to get so incredibly expensive. Do you think that products that get traction will nonetheless, if they don’t have the income stream to support it, raise venture capital purely for a marketing war chest and customer acquisition? I’m just wondering if you think you could make the argument that the customer acquisition costs are going to get, or user acquisition costs are going to get so high because everyone, you’re going to have a hundred X the number of bidders now who knows what the form will be. I don’t know if it’ll be Google AdWords, maybe it’ll be something else. What are your thoughts?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think, well, there’s a couple things there. The best products I’ve ever invested in, period, full stop, have been ones that don’t rely upon paid acquisition to grow. So, they have come up with something that is unique and novel enough to where word of mouth is their number one driver. That said, capital and deployed the right way and spent the right way around. Ad purchases is just fuel for the fire, which is great. And so, the thing VC is dead in the sense that the seed round was like, “Okay, I have a idea-ish. I’m going to go out and take $3 million and I’m going to give away 20 percent of my company.” What happens in the future is not that you don’t need that capital, because I think you’re right.
You will need it for a variety of things. If you’re hitting insane scale, there will be moments where you need to put more warm bodies in seats to help you do all the things, and you may need to raise venture. But the difference is when you have product market fit, you go from raising and selling 20 percent of your business for $3 million to selling 20 percent of your business for $15 million, which is just fantastic for the entrepreneur. So, it’s not that venture is dead, it’s just that what we’re going to see is the entrepreneur is in control like they’ve never been before, which is fantastic. And if they say, “Okay, I’m off to the races and things are going so well, but guess what?
I’m actually charging for my product and I’m breakeven.” You don’t ever have to raise VC. And then now you own a hundred percent of the business and you’re a Jason Fried, which we know is one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that invented SaaS that just has never taken any external investment. And you are just happy and you don’t report to anyone, which is a beautiful thing as well.
Tim Ferriss: So, do you think it’s just like the killing fields for early stage folks and the value capture just gets pushed to later and later stage.
Kevin Rose: Pushed out.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think largely on just tech, that is it’s understandable by AI. Meaning, if you’re running TypeScript or any of these languages that AI can figure out and write high quality code for, you just don’t need to raise capital. You can do it nights and weekends on your own.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. So, is it fair to say if you had to bet on one horse in the AI race that you would bet on Google? And then I have a follow-up question.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: Well, now I know a little bit too much behind the scenes. If you had no stake in any companies, how would you please —
Kevin Rose: Well, I never answer like that. I would always give you the true answer, even if I didn’t —
Tim Ferriss: No, I know. I’ve got to say it, but yeah, where would you put first, second, third bet?
Kevin Rose: Honestly, these valuations, I wouldn’t put a single dollar into the top three or five, largely because what are you going to do? Is Google going to 3X in the next 10 years?
Tim Ferriss: Well, also, it remains to be seen how much AI cannibalizes their current money-printing machine in terms of search and sponsored ads and so on.
Kevin Rose: I’m less worried about that because they own the largest distribution platform on Earth, which is Android. And so, they will find a way in there. And then also I think if Google had to pick their poison and say, “Okay, you can either base the future business off a $25 a month pro subscription to Gemini or a free account that is just ad-driven,” I think they’ll take that hybrid model all day long.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. Interesting. Okay, so you wouldn’t put any money into the big ones. So, do you choose then? Are you trying to find Amazon in 1998, 1999, right? Just in the absolute noise of — AI slop doesn’t just apply to Sora, it also applies to startups, right? There’s so much bullshit floating around. Some of it’s dressed up in very fancy clothing with fancy names, right? So, if you’re investing in AI writ large, how do you even — I mean, this is your job, right?
Kevin Rose: I think there’s three buckets. I think there’s three buckets.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have to think about it.
Kevin Rose: One is power. Without a doubt, we’re all going to need power. Small nuclear reactors are going to be a thing. The United States needs 3 to 5Xs power capacity in the next decade, if not more. And there is going to be a huge push into energy. So, there’s a bunch of plays there. You can look them up. There are even ETFs that track bundles of nuclear-related companies that are out there. That’s one play. I think power is without a doubt, the most important piece of this. And then data centers. There’s publicly traded data center companies out there. There are the bigs like Microsoft and Google and Amazon that are just expanding as fast as they possibly can and buying up land all over the United States.
There’re always going to be a premium on that. They’re going to need that. NVIDIA, they’ve got competition from AMD, they’ve got competition from Google now. Obviously, they have such incredible tooling on the software side, there’s a lot of defensibility there. It’s a name to own. Would I buy in today at today’s prices? I don’t know. But I will say that if you think of this, less about, I’m just going to pick one horse and more like I’m going to pick a basket of things, these are the things that I would be putting into that basket.
And then lastly, I would take large companies that have insane bloat from headcount that can be automated in the next, call it two to three years, where they will reduce sadly, and I hate to see this happen, but it’s going to happen no matter what. They’re going to reduce their headcount. They’re going to automate with AI and their profit margins are going to go through the roof. And I think those companies will reap the benefits of efficiency that comes from AI and their stock prices will as well.
Tim Ferriss: How do you identify companies that have the most bloat with also the fewest hurdles to adopting AI for what you’re describing, right? Because some of them, they may be, who knows, just put in a position where from a process or regulatory perspective or whatever, they just can’t do it, at least in the near term.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, in the near term, it’s listening to earnings calls and it is, I want to hear the CEO e saying that they are absolutely forcing their engineers to use AI forcing. You have to be, it is not optional at this point. To ask your engineers to play with it, you have to be using it every single day in your workflow. And the folks that are doing that, even though it’s not perfect today, they’re going to reap all the benefits 12 to 18 months from now. And so, that’s what I’m looking for more than anything else is who is wise enough? Because a lot of the CEOs are old. Who is wise enough to say it’s true, we know these folks and they just don’t —
If you ask them the difference between Haiku 4, 5, and Sonnet, they would have no idea how to tell you. If they can’t answer those basic model related questions, what are you doing? So, it’s finding those people like the Jack Dorseys in the world and the folks that are just like — well, I wouldn’t want to say young because I want to be Asian, but they have to be leaning into this in a way that they have to believe that their entire business is going to be rebuilt from the ground up over the next, call it five years. And you have people like Salesforce, CEOs doing that. Obviously, Benioff’s on board with this.
There’s a handful of folks that have said, “We are making sure this is a mandate from the top down.” Google did this quite well where they had this red alarm, or thing that they called off probably three years ago, where it said it is all hands on deck AI and Apple did not do that. And now look what’s happening. Most likely, Apple’s going to end up licensing Gemini from Google.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Wild world out there, kids. Wild world.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s a fun time to be alive, man. It’s fun to be playing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, totally. Let’s see. I figure I could give people some maybe holiday gift ideas just in case they’re —
Kevin Rose: Oh, yes, I’ve got some great ones. First thing I can recommend, something you can fit in your pocket. So, this right here looks like a golf ball with little, not quite spikes, but studs on it. They’re flattened. This is called a Rubz ball, R-U-B-Z, and I travel with this. You just roll out your feet on this before you go to bed and I have felt this helped everything from relaxing and just winding down. What I have noticed, and this is something I spoke with Ed Coan about a hundred years ago, long time ago. He’s the greatest powerlifter of all time, phenomenal athlete and very nice guy.
But basically if you address your feet, sometimes you feel it all the way up the kinetic chain, your forelegs, knees, even your low back can sometimes release. So this, I think it cost less than 10 bucks. This is a Rubz ball. You can buy it on Amazon anywhere else. That’s a very easy one. That’s just pocket sized. We can go back and forth. What have you got? What you —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s do it. Okay, so this one is awesome, dude. You have my doc that I sent you right with the links to everything?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do.
Kevin Rose: I don’t know if you have it up in front of you. So, if you click on the second one down these bonsai Nanoblocks. So, I’ve been talking about Nanoblocks for a while.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you are.
Kevin Rose: Hear me out, dude. This is a fun stocking stuffer. People are going to love this shit. So, it’s $38. It’s these little baby bonsai trees. Nanoblocks are like LEGOs, but they’re like one 10th of the size. So, you need tweezers to assemble them. It is oddly satisfying to build these little tiny bonsai trees. You get all six of them for $38 and if you use the code, Tim — no, there’s no code, but they’re amazing. They’re so fun. Anyway, Nanoblocks are awesome. This is a little fun little pack, great stocking stuffer. They’re super tiny and they’re cute. Look, there’s Nanoblocks up there behind me. See that beautiful tree?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. There it is. So you recommended a book to me. Do you want to mention it? It’s last in your list. I bought the audiobook and I listened to it on my flights recently. I thought the narrator was really, really good also.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s called Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well. It’s by Anthony De Mello, who we were talking about the Jesuit priest and therapist that we talked about earlier. Tim, we had both somehow discovered this book originally. Not this book, but the other one we’re talking about.
Tim Ferriss: Awareness.
Kevin Rose: Awareness. And it was really cool to hear that you were into it because it was one of my favorite books that we did not compare notes and we read this independently. I don’t know how the hell that happened, but we both loved it. And this is another one where I was just like, “This is so good because there’s so many core truths here that apply to my practice on the meditation side and I just loved it.” But it does require a little bit of understanding. It’s not like someone from off the street can totally read this and be like, “Oh, that makes a ton of sense to me.” I don’t know if you felt that way.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like, well, there are two things I would say. Just having read a lot of Anthony De Mello that I think Awareness, subtitle, Conversations with the Masters, it used to be The Perils and Promise of Reality, but they changed the subtitle. I preferred the old one, but Awareness by Anthony De Mello. His last name is two words, D-E M-E-L-L-O is 184 pages and I’ve gifted it to at least 50 people. I mean, I have an entire bookshelf full of this book in my guest bedroom at my house just to give friends.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, same, dude. It’s so funny.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I would recommend people read Awareness first. I don’t think you need anything special in terms of background for that.
Kevin Rose: Well, you do need one thing. You need to know that it is a lecture, so it reads like a lecture. It doesn’t read like a book.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which I like, which I like and he’s very no-nonsense.
Kevin Rose: I gave it to a couple of friends and they started reading it and they’re like, “Wait, is this a talk that he gave?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I should have told you that. It’s an actual talk.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a collection of polished lectures that he gave. So, Awareness would be the first. And then in the case of the Stop Fixing Yourself, I really enjoyed it. There’s a lot of overlap with Awareness. So, there are certain points that get reiterated. The audiobook rendition of Stop Fixing Yourself is very, very good. I disagree with some of the conclusions which are effectively along the lines — I shouldn’t say, this might sound unfair, but in the conclusion, he talks about how ultimate freedom is not depending on anyone for anything and you could be perfectly happy in isolation by yourself. And I was like, “Evolutionarily. I think that’s actually a pretty hard sell.”
But what I would suggest is if you listen to or read these books, as with any book, expect that you’re going to disagree with and maybe even discard 10 percent, 20 percent of it, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. These are really, really helpful books.
Kevin Rose: Well said.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, let me grab another one here. I’ll recommend two others in case people are interested in books. So, fiction, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I think it might just be Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Anyway, it’s tomorrow three times by Gabrielle Zevin, Z-E-V-I-N. It’s a fiction book and it was on the New York Times’ list of the hundred best books of the 21st century. It’s a new one and it is all about entrepreneurship and game design and love unrequited. And when I recommended this book initially in 5-Bullet Friday, my newsletter, one of my attorneys who helped craft the agreement for Coyote, another stocking stuffer, the card game that I made which is 20 —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know this is on a Black Friday sale, by the way, it’s 38 percent off on Amazon right now or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s 7.99 right now. It’s doing super well there. The reviews are great. It’s like 4.7 or 4.8 stars.
Kevin Rose: Man, I’m so proud of you, dude. This is so cool to see you having success here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks man.
Kevin Rose: I thought you were going to do The 5-Hour Body and I was like, “Ah, you probably shouldn’t go there,” and it’s nice to see you doing this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, it’s been super fun. But my attorney, who helped with the negotiations on deal structuring for Coyote, specializes in video games and he’s been involved with some epic deals and amazing mergers and acquisitions and all this crazy stuff. And he texted me after I put that in the newsletter and he said, “That book is so good. It was eerie because it is so accurate down to the finest detail that it felt like somebody was looking over my shoulder when I was doing these deals.” That is how well researched this book is. You would love it. I really think you would enjoy it.
Kevin Rose: My old assistant, Sarah, who’s amazing, she gifted it to me and it burned in the fire when my house burned down.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you’ve got to read it.
Kevin Rose: But I need to get it because she was like, “You’ve got to listen to this book.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s so good. Yeah, it’s great. And then the last one I’ll recommend just because we gave some nonfiction, then just gave fiction. I’ll give poetry, which people might not expect, but it’s a little tiny compilation. This also has an entire shelf in my guest room. It’s called Gold, it’s by Rumi. And then the translator, Haleh Liza Gafori, last name G-A-F-O-R-I, 112 pages. And it is just an incredible collection of poetry, of course, originally by the great Persian mystic Rumi, but with incredible new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, who is an American poet of Persian descent.
So, she’s a native speaker and also, she herself a poet and musician. So, if you read one or two of these poems before you go to bed at night, it just makes everything better. So I would also just recommend. I can keep going with gift recommendations, but I suspect you have more. I would like to mention anymore.
Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve got some great ones, dude. Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: Why don’t we do two at a time? Why don’t you do two and then I’ll do another two.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I’m going to make you a multi-billionaire from how many people buy this next one, I’m going to say with your Amazon affiliate link.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: This right here, my friend, is the best purchase I’ve ever made in my life.
Tim Ferriss: Whoa, that’s a strong statement.
Kevin Rose: Okay, maybe not, but it’s high up there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever been in one of those situations where you need a small, little screwdriver or a screw head and you can’t find the right one that fits?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: This is 25 different micro, everything from hex nuts to screwdrivers to flatheads, and it’s a magnetic little insert into the actual one. Now you think, okay, who cares? But it’s $7.79 and it acts like a $25 screwdriver. It is the best stocking stuffer in the world.
Once a year or twice a year you’ll get something where it takes two double As or whatever, and there’s a little, tiny screwdriver thing you’ve got to undo.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Kevin Rose: Where am I going to find something that fits that? This is that thing. And then when you want to tweak your glasses or whatever, you need those micro screwdrivers. Dude, $7, this thing rocks. It’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: How did you find this thing?
Kevin Rose: It had good reviews on Amazon. I bought it and when I got it, I was like, they should be charging three times as much for this thing. The torque doesn’t actually ruin the bit heads, which is great because oftentimes with the cheaper ones, the bit heads get ruined.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Anyway. You have to have it in every junk drawer in your house. It’s one of those things. But I love these things. Back in the day, when you were doing 5-Bullet Friday where you wanted me to contribute stuff, you would say, “Hey, what’s the best thing under $50, or whatever, that you love?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. This is it.
Kevin Rose: This is one of those things that’s under $10 that is absolutely worth every penny.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, love it. All right. So under $10, I don’t know if it’s $10, might be a little bit more, but in addition to the Rubz ball, I’ll just give a couple of quickfire. There’s something called the Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. It was actually introduced to me by Nsima Inyang, or Inyang, I think is how he pronounces it, but you sent me his video, so you are responsible —
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — for me ultimately connecting with him. But this Alpha Ball for rolling out your hips, for traveling with, it’s about the size of a softball, but it’s just the perfect density and texture, you can get everywhere you need to get, which you cannot do with a foam roller, nor is it easy to travel with a foam roller.
I just love this thing. I use it pretty much every day. So, that’s the two —
Kevin Rose: I didn’t see it on video. Did you hold it up?
Tim Ferriss: No, I have it downstairs in my suitcase actually. But the —
Kevin Rose: Okay, let me look it up. What’s it called again?
Tim Ferriss: Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. You can find it on Amazon. It’s 19.99, more than worth every penny. I can send you a link to it, of course.
Kevin Rose: Sweet.
Tim Ferriss: Then other things I’ll throw in there, this is going to be one of those things. This is my version of your little TED talk that you just gave on the —
Kevin Rose: Screwdrivers.
Tim Ferriss: — $7 screwdrivers where people are like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” This is my version of that, which is the — I don’t know how to pronounce this, Maestri, M-A-E-S-T-R-I. Maestri House rechargeable milk frother. All right.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. Right?
Kevin Rose: Mine was better than that, but —
Tim Ferriss: Hold on —
Kevin Rose: Keep going.
Tim Ferriss: — hold on, hold on. I have owned so many of these frothers for coffee, for tea, for whatever, protein shakes or whatever, these little hand frothers. They always —
Kevin Rose: They all break. They all suck, dude.
Tim Ferriss: They all break, or the batteries die and then you can’t recharge it, or it’s —
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: — like an outboard motor and you’re like, oh, let me just do this for my tea and relax, and it shoots liquid all over the place.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: There’s so many issues. This thing is like the Lamborghini of milk frothers. It costs —
Kevin Rose: Ooh, I love that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It costs how much? 30 bucks. It’s not that crazy.
Kevin Rose: It’s USB-C 2 charging. That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: It’s USB-C. You basically turn the very top of it to adjust in any increment you want the intensity of the agitation. I have to tell you, I asked somebody on my team to just do diligence and get me a frother that would solve all these problems that I mentioned. He knows how to do a lot of research and this was his conclusion, and I got it and I was like, “Where has this been all my life? Oh, my God.”
Has almost 3,000 reviews, or 2,600 reviews, 4.5 stars. This thing is just amazing. I use it every day. That’s one. When I put this in 5-Bullet Friday, what I wrote was, “It reminds me of Sage Wisdom from Kevin Kelly,” who is the founding editor of —
Kevin Rose: Oh, I love Kevin Kelly.
Tim Ferriss: — Wired magazine. Amazing guy.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. We did a walk with him together.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. He had, at that time, I think it was a draft of a book that he put together, this tiny book called Excellent Advice for Living, which are these pithy little quotes from Kevin that he used to put in his — I think they were his birthday letters to friends where he’d be like, “Here are the 10 things I learned this year.”
One of his pieces of advice is, “Take note if you find yourself wondering where is my good knife or where is my good pen. That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.” I have shelves full of shitty frothers that have been sent to me or that I’ve bought and they’re just terrible, so I just got rid of all of them and replaced them with this thing.
Kevin Rose: That’s so awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Other things, real quick: microphone. I got this microphone for travel called the Elgato, one word.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I love Elgato.
Tim Ferriss: Elgato Wave:3. It is a gorgeous piece of design. It makes me think of Braun design back in the day, B-R-A-U-N, and it actually solves, somehow, bounce and echo better than even this fancy mic, this Shure mic that I’m speaking into right now. It is really impressive. I don’t know what they do with the firmware, software, whoever the hell designs these types of things, but this has become my favorite travel mic, is the Elgato Wave:3.
Also, not that expensive.
Kevin Rose: Have you seen their prompter by the way? They make a tiny, little prompter —
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t seen it.
Kevin Rose: — if you want to read scripts or anything like that. Oh, Elgato makes this beautiful, little prompt you can control with an iPhone or an iPad. For people that are doing monologues and podcasts and stuff like that, Elgato is some great gear and it’s not that expensive. It’s well priced.
Tim Ferriss: This one, the Wave:3 — I’ll check out the prompter — it’s got almost 10,000 reviews, 4.7 stars, 150 bucks. I rely on it to the extent that I’m professional, a professional loves recording.
There’s a lot more I could jump into. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give one that is expensive, but the best of breed, which is the TANK M3 push sled. This is a sled. It’s literally sitting right outside my door, about 100 feet away. I have tried so many different sleds for resolving back pain, for building all posterior chain development and strength, glute activation, you name it. Pushing and pulling a sled just gives you so many dividends. KneesOverToesGuy also talks about this at length, but the TANK M3 push sled is —
Kevin Rose: Holy shit, it’s pricey.
Tim Ferriss: — bar none the best sled I’ve ever used. Yeah. How much is it? Did you just pull it up?
Kevin Rose: 1,500 on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 1,500. Yeah, 1,500 bucks. I would not —
Kevin Rose: It looks amazing though.
Tim Ferriss: I would not trade it. You can easily rotate it. It has mechanical resistance. For instance, I’m pushing it in a gravel driveway. It’s not just skids. You can use this on turf, you can use this on carpets, you can use it indoors without destroying the floor. It’s just an amazing sled. If people are looking for best of the best, in my opinion, and versatility, that’s one.
And then if you don’t want more stuff or you want to give something to friends or family who don’t need more physical things — I am talking my book a little bit here because I’m involved with the company, but The Way App. It’s so easy, right?
Kevin Rose: Henry’s the best, man.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to be doing hopefully another retreat in-person together. It started out as just my hand-down favorite meditation app. It’s the easiest way to get back in the habit. I just used it yesterday morning and this morning. I tend to do 10-minute sessions and then sometimes do an extra 10 minutes of TM or something after the fact.
I think you can get 30 sessions for free with no credit card required —
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — to try it out. And then if you want to give an annual membership, that’s 100 bucks. You can just download the app for free and then tap My Way and share it with people that way with a gift button.
Kevin Rose: I’ll definitely add onto that. And I’ll say that I met Henry, the creator of The Way App, and he’s one of the very few Zen masters that are fully accredited in the United States. It is such a treat to interact with and have Henry as a guide and you get a pocket Zen master.
I don’t want to sell this, but I will say that in the last — I started training with him in terms of meeting with him over Zoom during COVID, and now it’s been a few years, there is no better money spent in terms of — for me it has been more of retreats and things like that that I’ve been to of his. But meditation in terms of my just general anxiety and general way of moving through life, it’s been a game changer. It’s been a game changer.
And Henry, I will give him a ton of credit there. One of the things that he told me early on, it still hits me today, is, “It’s not about, ‘Can I put in an hour a day of meditation?’ It’s better to put in just 10 minutes a day or five minutes a day and do it consistently than it is to try and achieve the mountaintop and go all out.”
Can you just show up consistently? And I think if you do it for the first 30 days, you’ll feel it. You’ll feel it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you’ll notice something much earlier, in my experience. Henry has this expression, I’m going to paraphrase it, but basically if you do the practice, even if in some sessions you’re like, my mind is all over the place, I feel like that was a waste of time, “If you walk consistently in the fog, you can’t help but get wet.” is one of his expressions, meaning it compounds over time and even if you feel like individual sessions aren’t doing much, it does actually compound. If people want to keep it simple, you can find a QR code at thewayapp.com/tim and that’ll give you 30 free sessions with no credit card, so people can check that out if they want.
What else do we have, Kevin? You have —
Kevin Rose: I’ve got one more that’s fun. It is on the slightly pricier side. It’s a little over $200, close to $300. Actually, it’s a walking treadmill. My wife, Darya, turned me onto this. It is a very thin, tiny, little walking treadmill that has phenomenal reviews. You just throw it underneath your desk and for under $300 you can set the incline to 10 and it’s all with a little, tiny remote control. There’s nothing to hold onto, because you have your desk. You can just work and it rolls away because it only weighs 50 pounds, and you can just stash it in the corner.
I think it’s the best walking treadmill. We did a bunch of research and it’s the best one under $300. Great way to get some exercise in there. Throw on a weighted vest there and you’re in a really good place.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, that’ll be plenty. I saw that when Darya was showing me her office. I was like, oh, look at that. There it is.
Kevin Rose: That’s right. You got the tour. I wasn’t even home and you came over and stole my sleeping meds and —
Tim Ferriss: Snagged your Belsomra —
Kevin Rose: That’s it.
Tim Ferriss: — took a spin on the walking treadmill and then took off. Yeah, I still owe you a trade for that.
I do see in your notes, do you want to take a second and run people through Kevin’s current AI stack? This is all Greek to me, I don’t even understand what half of this means.
Kevin Rose: Okay, real quick. I don’t know if you want to touch on New Year’s resolutions really fast —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it after the AI stack.
Kevin Rose: AI Stack, one of the things that I’ve noticed is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the space is this idea of an AI assistant that is not your phone, but something that you can call when you need to remember something, when you need to take notes, when you — Tim, I was wearing that little pendant when you and I got together.
Tim Ferriss: Hate it, hate it.
Kevin Rose: It’s always recording, and Tim goes to me, he is like, “It’s always recording?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he goes, “I hate to ask you this, but can you just take it off? It’s too much anxiety for me.” So I had to take off that pendant and put it in my bag.
But I agree with you, in that it is weird. It does cripple our conversations in our honesty when you know there’s something that’s listening all the time, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 100 percent.
Kevin Rose: A couple things, Nothing, the Android phone company, I’m not an investor or anything like that, they make headphones, which I’m wearing right now for this podcast. But one of the things that was really cool, when they released these headphones a month ago, they have a little talk button on the headphones. If you hold down talk as you’re holding your headphones case, I can record anything and it goes into their AI and it creates to-do lists for me, notes —
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: — whatever it may be.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a cool feature.
Kevin Rose: It’s just fun. Yeah. There was a company called Sandbar and we invested. True, it wasn’t my deal.
Tim Ferriss: Quick question. Do you need to have an Android phone to use those?
Kevin Rose: Yes, you need to have a Nothing phone.
Tim Ferriss: Bummer.
Kevin Rose: That’s the problem. But the idea is sound in that it’s not always on, it’s just when you need it, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yep, yep.
Kevin Rose: One of the things that Sandbar did, and I have one of their prototype rings around here somewhere. One of the things that Sandbar did is they created a ring, almost like an Oura ring, where if you just lightly touch it, you can whisper to any notes that you might want and it saves it in the AI cloud on your phone, Android OS, whatever.
If you have headphones in, it’ll respond back to you. So like, “Hey. Remind me, what’s that meeting I have tomorrow?” just quietly. It doesn’t listen to the entire room, and then it gives you that data back in your headphones.
Anyway. Sandbar is not out yet. It’s coming out middle of next year. I highly recommend sandbar.com, checking out. Like I said, it is something that we invest in at the fund level, but it’s not my deal. But I will say, I like where this is going. Even if it’s not Sandbar, something like this that is a little companion, that is not your big ass phone, that can be engaged with when you want to jot something down is quite cool.
Outside of that, I would say AI on the Notion front has been quite good. The agents that they’ve added inside of Notion are phenomenal and that continues to get better.
Tim Ferriss: What do you use that for? How do you use that?
Kevin Rose: Notion, just added note-taking now. If you’re in a Zoom or any type of video call, it will automatically prompt you to record the entire thing. By default, I always say to people, Notion’s not actually recording the audio, but they are transcribing it, and they put the meeting notes and the bullet points into my Notion for me, and then I can ask questions of that transcript later on.
Call it a week or two later, I’m like, “Hey, Tim mentioned some really cool book by Anthony de Mello, which one was it?” and it would, boom, right there, it’s within two seconds. That’s really cool. And then you can ask questions of your entire corpus of data. So, if you’re storing a bunch of stuff in there — I had my EIN number for one of my LCs and I’d be like, “Hey, what’s the EIN number for this LC?” Two seconds later, it’s out. That’s fun.
Tim Ferriss: When do you think Gemini built into G Suite will be good enough to do that for an inbox?
Kevin Rose: It is now. It is now.
Tim Ferriss: Is it?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it is.
Tim Ferriss: Because it was so disappointing as of even a few weeks ago.
Kevin Rose: I just enabled it, this deeper integration. I don’t know if I’m a beta tester, but they let me in, and it does exactly what I just said. It’s within the coming weeks if I’ve happened to be on some beta list and whatever.
Who will do this right now is actually the Gemini — oh, what are they calling it? It’s their AI suite where you can drop documents into it and everything. Everyone’s screaming it right at me. You know what I’m talking about, right? Have you played with this?
Tim Ferriss: No, no. Oh, wait, are you talking about NotebookLM? No.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, NotebookLM. Yeah, NotebookLM is getting better and better. Here’s a fun hack. This is a great one for your audience because they like your productivity, everything. One thing that’s really fun is, imagine there’s something you want to learn that’s new. Insert anything. You want to learn how to do basic Pilates. Go to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else and say, “Hey, give me a deep research guide on the fundamentals of Pilates,” and then you hit go. You wait five minutes, whatever, it gives you back a whole script.
You copy that, paste it into NotebookLM, and say, “Create me a five-minute podcast on the fundamentals of Pilates,” and you have an instant podcast primer on that thing. I use that for coding technologies. I’ve used that for quantum computing. Tim, do you know how quantum computing works? Do you know how gates fold on each other when —
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: I didn’t. I dropped that in there and then you say, “Explain it like I’m five in a podcast.” Or not five, but you’d say, “Explain it like I’m a —
Tim Ferriss: Fifth grader.
Kevin Rose: — freshman in college.” Yeah, like I’m a fifth grader, whatever. I have aphantasia and I have no way to recall this later. It gives you this great, little podcast and it’s a fun, little way to learn anything new on the go.
Tim Ferriss: I have to give a plug, and I am an investor in this company. It came up in a group thread. I don’t think he would mind me mentioning this. Our mutual friend, Chris Sacca, was like, “My daughter just taught herself about stock trading,” and this, this, and this. He took a screenshot and he’s like, “She created her own curriculum,” and —
It was from a startup called Oboe. If people go to Oboe, that’s O-B-O-E.fyi, so oboe.fyi, it just says, “What do you want to learn about? We’ll make you a course.” You literally just type it out and it gives you everything in one place.
Kevin Rose: Are you an investor in this?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m an investor. Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: I noticed you had mentioned before — what was it? This would be fun for 30 seconds. When you were pitched this, because you were very — you say no to a lot of things, which is great, as every —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: — investor should. What was it about this that really hooked you in?
Tim Ferriss: There were a few things. It was the people involved. I had some familiarity with the people involved and I had confidence in their ability to execute. Also, this is what I do, right? In the sense that if I have tried to hone any single skill, it is deconstructing and simplifying complex subjects, then putting material in some type of logical sequence, doing 80/20 analysis on the 20 percent of material that makes the difference, and the material beats method a lot of the time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I’ve thought a lot about this and I was like, all right, the thesis and mission of the company makes a lot of sense to me. Will they be the winner? I have no idea. That is a much harder question. That informs bet sizing and things along those lines. But I have a lot of confidence in the founders. The company itself was introduced to me, or the founding team behind it, by another founder who’s had exits, who is an investor, who’s a friend of mine.
And I thought to myself, even if this just goes towards creating a product that I, myself will use — which is really where I start with a lot of my investing. Sometimes I succeed when I stray from that, but my hit rate is a lot higher when — say, in the case of Uber or Shopify or any of these other —
Kevin Rose: Yes, it’s a core competence of yours.
Tim Ferriss: Duolingo, these are — I know at least I am a market of one —
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: — for all of these products, and Oboe would fall in that category. That’s how I decided to invest. With these companies, it’s also not a bet-the-farm scenario, at least not for me. It’s you’re creating a portfolio with the recognition that 70, 80 percent of your investments are going to go to zero.
But I try to answer the question, how can I win even if this goes to zero? How can I win? It’s if I help to in some way support a product and the development of a product that I use myself to learn a bunch of stuff quickly, then given the leverage that I think I can create or find in the world, it’s like, wow. If I have a smooth way, an elegant way to learn more about a few different —
I’ll give you an example. If I’m considering, and I’ve already done this, if I’m doing due diligence on a company that I can’t talk about right now, but it’s innovating in biotech, and I want to learn as much as possible about different types of mRNA therapeutics, I’m not coming from a background that enables me to do that. If I then am able to do due diligence a hundred times faster because I’m not sending out 15 emails to people I think might be able to assist, and I’d still do that level of due diligence, but if let’s just say that 50 K investment allows me to then do due diligence in a way that allows me to place two or three other bets more effectively, I’ve very likely made my money back.
Whether it’s with investing or choosing projects like the card game, Coyote, or anything else, my fundamental, underlying question is: Can this be a win even if it fails with, let’s just say, the primary external metric of sales or exit or whatever it might be? If I’m developing skills and relationships that snowball and transcend any single project, then that’s a vote in favor of doing something. oboe.fyi would fit into that bucket for me.
It made me so happy to see Sacca’s daughter when she’s whatever, 12 or 13, creating her own course. I was like, okay, that’s a good sign that makes me happy.
Kevin Rose: I just clicked on one of the things to create a course for me. It’s pretty cool because right away it said, “Do you want this in podcast format, which is seven minutes?” or, “Do you want this in lectured recording, which is 20 minutes?”
Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome.
Kevin Rose: That’s built into the product from step one.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, from step one. And like you said, this is the blocky, brick, Motorola version. The rate of iteration for something like this is going to be so extreme, it’s going to be head spinning, so we’ll see.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: I’m excited about it.
Kevin Rose: All right, the moment you all have been waiting for, Tim’s girlfriend.
Tim Ferriss: Thought I —
Kevin Rose: Come on, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Thought I got out of —
Kevin Rose: No, no, no. People are —
Tim Ferriss: I —
Kevin Rose: They want to know what’s up with Tim’s personal life.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not going to dox anyone who doesn’t opt into being doxed, so I’ll skip any identifying particulars. It’s getting serious quickly. She’s incredibly —
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: — sweet, incredibly self-aware, intelligent.
For people who are wondering, of all places, met on Hinge. Have to kiss a lot of frogs or go on a lot of dates, it’s a lot of reps, a lot of swiping and a lot of noise to get to that point. But it did work.
Kevin Rose: What was the first date like?
Tim Ferriss: First date was Greek food, very chill, felt very much — I pay a lot of attention to this. You know that I have a very sensitive nervous system, and I just immediately felt down-regulated and at ease with her. That’s a lot. That’s not a small thing for me. Keeps me on my toes, is very funny, is very good at calling me on my bullshit.
I’m optimistic. We’ll see. We’ll see. Super, super happy. Doing Thanksgiving together and —
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow. Family introduction time and all that shit?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, she met my family already quite a while ago. It’s —
Kevin Rose: I’ve only met her once. One final question then I’ll let you out the hot box. What is the hardest thing for you at this stage? Because you get to this point where there’s this honeymoon phase and then all of a sudden that starts to peel off and it’s in the nitty-gritty of life.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: What’s the hardest, most challenging part about this next, call it, six months?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I have the ability to predict, but my guess would be — I think what I’m about to describe is a plight of modern dating in general, at least as I’ve seen it among my friends and pretty much anyone who I’ve ever spoken to about this or if I ever mention modern datings in the app-based dating world. It’s such a game of roulette.
The apps are designed to be as addictive as possible. I think the challenge for almost anyone who has been part of that playing field is when things get hard, when things are hard, when you have friction that lasts more than a day or a week, to stay the course and do the work necessary to resolve that as opposed to just being like, ah, fuck this, I’m just going to go back to the well.
Kevin Rose: Because the well’s right there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s 20 seconds away and a swipe away, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: That’s the downfall of these whole things. It’s so easy to move on to the next thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. They are all designed to be, of course, as addictive as possible. And even though they might say they’re designed to be deleted, by definition, since they have a fiduciary responsibility, a legal fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, their business model is entirely dependent on recurring revenue. So, they’re designed to keep you using the app as long as humanly possible. I don’t blame them for that. That’s just the way that this ecosystem works. But it is something to be aware of because they are seductive and they’re designed to be seductive, these apps, in every way conceivable.
I would say that, step number one, take that stuff off your phone. And then number two is, fortunately I feel like over my last few long relationships — I’ve had some very long relationships. Five, six years in two cases — that I’ve developed a toolkit. I can always use more work and more refinement, but it’s like, do you have the basics of something approximating Nonviolent Communication? Do you ask for what you want and do you tell someone if they’re doing something that you don’t want?
These seem like very obvious, self-evident things you should do, but a lot of people struggle with both of those, and then that breeds resentment or people bottle things up and then they explode and they say things they can’t take back. To what extent have you tried to mitigate those things? Do you have a toolkit?
There are very good books out there, very good workshops. I’ve read a lot of these books and I’ve gone to a lot of workshops. As much as I’ve felt like I wanted to poke my eyes out with bicycle spokes at points in these workshops and seminars because I can only take so much of it —
Kevin Rose: Same.
Tim Ferriss: — they do help though. It could be something really small. And there are things you learn along the way, at least I have, as you get older, which is you can have almost anything you want in life if you discuss it openly and early. If you have weaknesses, if you have requests, if you have needs, if you have things that you value that are maybe weirdly out of proportion to most people, just talking about that stuff early sets the stage for success or at least communication.
Very early on in this relationship, having conversations about conversations, if that makes sense, having open communication about how we’d like to communicate the challenges we have with communication. How we’re going to communicate, biasing towards honesty and being direct, even if you need to do a little bit of cleanup afterwards, has just saved a lot of brand damage.
In this case, I think we both have very growth-oriented mindsets. I think both of us are pretty good at taking feedback. There are times when you’re just too sleep deprived or pissed off or bitchy or irritable, and you’re not good at taking feedback. You’re always going to have those days. But overall, I think we’re both eager to improve and we’re good at giving feedback in a way that generally doesn’t come off as too holier than now, judgmental. We’ll see, we’ll see.
But in terms of the challenges, I think the challenges are always — I shouldn’t say always, that’s a big word. Man, so much of it just comes down to communication. Do you have the tools? Have you, say, read or listened to Terry Real? Have you both listened or read Terry Real so that you have some scripts or some shared language that you can use as shorthand? And —
Kevin Rose: The problem I have with Terry Real is that if it’s taken too literally, it can sound formulaic.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: I don’t want to do the formula, let’s just talk, it can be a bit —
Tim Ferriss: Here’s what I would say about that. I’d say that almost anything that works repeatedly is a formula. In the beginning, I think it’s important, as rote as it might seem, to — let’s just say the book, Nonviolent Communication, I think it’s Marshall Rosenberg, it’s a great book, but after a while you’re like, oh, my God, am I really going to say again, “When you did X, as a video camera would’ve recorded it, I felt Y. And the story I make up is X.”
Kevin Rose: That stuff. “The story I make up…” kills me.
Tim Ferriss: But here’s the thing. I know it kills you and —
Kevin Rose: Stop saying, “The story I make up…”
Tim Ferriss: But here’s the thing. As much as you might hate it, what you would hate more is, “Kevin, I fucking hate when you do X. It makes me feel Y, because you always do Z.” That’s worse, I think, right? You might be like —
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — ah, with the formula, but the amount of damage you can do when you veer completely away from it is a lot. And then once you have the, I’d say, basic mastery or fluency with the formula, then you can deviate, right?
Kevin Rose: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: Then you can start to deviate. But for instance, Terry, as any couples therapist, has certain frameworks and formulas. But there are also underlying philosophical principles that I think apply to a million different things that are outside of formulas. I’ll give you an example.
One thing that Terry says — I think this is in Fierce Intimacy, which is an audio book, you can’t find a print version of it. I highly recommend it to folks. The point he makes is — it’s real simple — objective reality has no place in a relationship. What the hell does that mean?
What that means is if you’re out at dinner and then the waiter comes over and the wife orders and then the waiter walks away and the husband’s like, “Honey, you don’t need to yell at him,” and she’s like, “I wasn’t yelling,” and then it turns into a whole bullshit argument about whether she was yelling or not.
If the husband were to say, “Honey, actually I hired a professional audiologist with the latest cutting-edge technology and recording equipment, and they’re sitting right at the table next to us. If we accept the commonly defined threshold for yelling at XYZ decimals, if you look at these numbers, you can see that in fact you were, by scientific definition, yelling,” is that going to fix the problem? No, it’s going to be a huge fucking mess, right?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: His point is the stories matter and the subjective matters and very — shorthand for that is objective — he may not word it exactly this way, but objective reality just doesn’t have a place in, let’s just say, an argument. We’re going to make mistakes. Occasionally, especially someone like me is going to try to appeal to some objective measure of God knows what.
But if you can just postpone that judgment even for a minute or two, it just makes a world of difference, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe it makes me sound like I’m really remedial in the EQ communication department. I actually don’t think that’s true. I think I’m pretty good. It’s like going to the gym, it’s like playing pool or shooting archery or whatever, it’s not a one-and-done thing, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If you don’t practice these things, you will revert to whatever your parents did. Period.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s so true.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I don’t want to model that. That was a goddamn mess.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I found that if my partner gets upset, just sitting down and saying, “Calm down.” is huge.
Tim Ferriss: That works —
Kevin Rose: It just works every time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Or, “You’re being like your mother.” Those are things that are just really just home runs.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. “Why are you so hysterical like your mother?”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Works like a charm. I think that’s Terry Real’s second principle. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Just say “calm down” and then you’re good, you’re good. They’ll be like, “Oh, I was being so crazy. You’re right. I should just calm down.”
Tim Ferriss: I think also just expecting there to be bumps. There are always going to be bumps and — we’ll see, we’ll see. But —
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s been great so far. I feel super, super lucky, really, really fortunate.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, you only date supermodels, so you should feel lucky.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not true. That’s not true.
Kevin Rose: I’ve met her. You have a supermodel on your hands. She’s great.
Tim Ferriss: She’s very pretty, but she’s also very, very smart, knows how to adult, knows how to take care of things in the world. Which isn’t asking too much, but it’s surprising how many aspiring stay-at-home girlfriends you can find out there who have no intention of operating in the world.
I feel very, very lucky, super, super fortunate.
Kevin Rose: I’m excited for you, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah —
Kevin Rose: Can we just spend some more time with her? Our first interactions were great. I’m excited to get to know her better.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, she’s incredibly kind, not a malicious bone in her body, but at the same time, hilariously blunt in some cases and sometimes not so hilariously blunt, but I’ll take it. It’s a package deal, I’ll take it.
Kevin Rose: You’ve got a bit of that too though, right? So, it’s like —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got some of that. Yeah, I do too. I’ve got some of that, for sure.
Kevin Rose: I’ve known enough of your ex-girlfriends to know that you’ve got a little bit of that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ve got a little bit of that. It’s true. Oh, man. I think I’ve probably checked the box of talking about the girlfriend.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to have dinner very shortly. Happy Thanksgiving, man.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, happy Thanksgiving. I would say the only thing on my side, just to bring people to speed on, is I have a new tech podcast that I’m very excited about that I’m going to launch in the new year. Kevinrose.com for my 4-Bullet Friday, which is a much faster read. No, I don’t — I only put out one email every month and a half or every — but it’s always packed with the latest AI stuff I’m playing with, all that stuff.
Anyway. That’s my only plug of the show, is kevinrose.com, for the newsletter.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, check it out. Check it out, folks. We’ll hit New Year’s resolutions and stuff next time we do a Random Show. Let’s do it. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll do that, because I need to dust mine off and blow the film that has settled on those and look at them in higher resolution, so I could use a little extra time. And we’ll —
Kevin Rose: Love it.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll get after it.
Kevin Rose: Love you, brother. Always good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, love you too, bud.
Kevin Rose: And thanks for sharing more of the personal side with us. Everybody gets a kick out of that and it’s always fun to hear your adventures. But I’m excited for you marching forward and I have good vibes about this one.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man. It’s a fucking jungle out there.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Modern dating, it is simultaneously so fun if you hit your groove in a playing-the-field kind of way, but it’s also so incredibly exhausting and frustrating and can be very demoralizing. And —
Kevin Rose: I don’t feel bad for you, honestly. I’ve gotten some of your texts. I think you had a damn good run. You had a good run.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not complaining. I’m just saying I feel most at home, at ease, at peace when I am with my current girlfriend. It’s qualitatively a world of difference from just running around like some horny bastard with his hair on fire. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but —
Kevin Rose: Not that there’s any hair left, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Not that there’s any hair left. And also just be aware, whether you’re on X or Instagram, but especially on the dating apps because it is selling sex and things that are hardwired to hijack your attention, your faculties are being exploited to the maximum degree possible. It’s just something to be aware of. Really check your state before and after using these things to determine how much you might want to use them or if you want to put safeguards around how long you spend on these things.
All right. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Kevin Rose: Love it.
Tim Ferriss: Cool, brother. Love you very much. Please give a hug to Darya and the girls for me.
Kevin Rose: Will do.
Tim Ferriss: And —
Kevin Rose: Same on my side. How’s Molly doing? Molly’s good?
Tim Ferriss: Molly’s great. Yeah, Molly’s doing great. And —
Kevin Rose: How old is Molly now?
Tim Ferriss: Molly’s 10. I’m actually going to adopt a —
Kevin Rose: Ah.
Tim Ferriss: — puppy. I’m going to get a second dog next month. Super excited.
Kevin Rose: Toaster’s 15 now. You saw him when you came to the house.
Tim Ferriss: I did.
Kevin Rose: I wasn’t there when you were there.
Tim Ferriss: Oh.
Kevin Rose: Isn’t he moving slower? It’s hard to watch.
Tim Ferriss: He was. He also had just come from the vet and his paw was all taped up and he was —
Kevin Rose: Oh, geez.
Tim Ferriss: — drugged out of his mind —
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: — when I saw him. Yeah, 15, he’s getting up there.
Kevin Rose: I know. We gave him rapa, so I’m hoping for — I mean, we’ve already seen a 20 percent boost in lifespan, so we’ll see.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I need to get Molly on rapa. That’s going to be one of my tasks for December as well. One step at a time.
Kevin Rose: Awesome. All right, brother.
Tim Ferriss: All right, brother. Great to see you, bud.
Kevin Rose: Great to see you.
Tim Ferriss: Everybody listening, you can go to the show notes. We’ll have links to everything at tim.blog/podcast. Random Show, just look for the newest one and we’ll have it for you.
Happy holidays, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
Kevin Rose: Happy holidays.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll see you soon, Kevin. Take care, bud.
Kevin Rose: Peace.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello ( #838) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-04 05:26:26
Welcome to another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose (digg.com)!
We explore the promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, Kevin’s AI stack and where AI is heading, the challenges of modern dating, wisdom from Anthony de Mello, bioelectric medicine, and much, much more.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
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This episode is brought to you by David Protein Bars! I’m always on the hunt for protein sources that don’t require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. That’s why I love the protein bars from David. With David protein bars, you get the fewest calories for the most protein, ever. David has 28g of protein, 150 calories, and 0g of sugar. Their bars come in six delicious flavors, all worth trying, and I’ll often throw them in my bag for protein on the go. And now, listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show who buy four boxes get a fifth box for free. Try them for yourself at DavidProtein.com/Tim.
This episode is brought to you by Qlosi, an FDA-approved, prescription eye drop designed to improve your near vision and help you see things up close more clearly. With once- or twice-daily dosing, packaged in single-dose vials, Qlosi fits into your routine and is ready when you need it. In clinical studies, people could read letters in the eye chart equivalent to reading menus, recipes, and phone screens with fast acting, near-vision improvement often starting in just 20 minutes. Most side effects in studies were mild and short-lived, including eye discomfort and headaches. Give your readers a break and ask your eye doctor if Qlosi is right for you. Visit Qlosi.com/Tim to find an eye doctor, along with full prescribing information.
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Want to hear another episode where Kevin and I let our random flag fly? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed Kevin’s journey to 100 days sober, my best lab results in 10+ years from ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, the vibe coding revolution transforming $250k projects into $50 experiments, home defense and security, GLP-1 agonists, the future of venture capital in an AI-driven landscape, and much more.
The post The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello ( #838) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-29 08:28:18
Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, featuring three close friends and long-time listener favorites—Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck.
As we head into the new year, many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity.
So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question:
What are 1-3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026?
(1) From Derek Sivers — you’ll learn how Derek uses a radical approach to living from first principles instead of default settings.
(2) From Seth Godin — how a handful of hard rules can turn a messy professional life into something simple and focused on your best work.
(3) From Martha Beck — how making one radical commitment forced her through growing pains but led to a simpler life built around peace and meaning.
Please enjoy!
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS: Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity. WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above. WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
Derek Sivers
Hi, I’m Derek Sivers, and I’m fascinated with the implications of simplicity. Most people don’t want a simple life. They want an easy life. But a simple life can be hard. My life changed when I learned what simple really means. Simple comes from simplex. The opposite of complex. Complex comes from complex, the verb that means to intertwine.
This is important. Remember this, dear listener, your life is complex when it is intertwined with dependencies. You are depending on things and things are depending on you. Your life is simple when it is not complex. It’s not intertwined with other things, but that means depending on less. Notice how easy it was to make your life complex.
Just say sign me up. Just click buy now. Just say you are hired. Congratulations. You just made your life easier. But now it’s objectively more complex. Untangling. That means quitting, firing, unsubscribing, uninstalling, disconnecting, breaking ties, breaking commitments, and getting rid of a lot of the things you own.
But that makes life harder. And, hardest of all, it means letting go of big parts of your identity. No more superman self-image. It’s admitting you can’t do it all. You’ll disappoint people that depend on you. You’ll say no to almost everything. It’s kind of a sad mantra. No, no, nope, nope, sorry, no, nope. Maybe you don’t really want a simple life.
Maybe your deepest joy comes from all your entanglements, friends who depend on you, services and subscriptions and assistance and pets and tools of titans that make your life easier. You probably have a career and a spouse and a child and a hobby and a pet and a home, and I doubt you want to get rid of all but one of those.
So you have different aspects, and that’s that. But you can still simplify your life within each identity. Instead of intertwining them, untangle them, and keep them separate. When focused on one, give it your full attention and make the rest disappear. Like in my case, when I’m with my boy, my phone is off.
I’m unreachable, and if I think of anything else, then, like meditation, I let it go, and I bring my full attention back to him. Within each of your aspects, you can be temporarily simple. Your phone is the enemy of this since it intertwines everything. Anyway, enough preface. Tim, you asked for my three major simplifications.
Number one, no subscriptions. No Spotify, no Netflix, no memberships, no monthly obligations, no mortgage, no employees, no team, no publisher, no contracts. Nobody depending on me except my boy. We all draw the line somewhere.
Number two, programming. For me, this was huge, but most of your audience can’t relate, so I’ll make this quick.
For my fellow programmers, I simplified my computer programming code, so it has no dependencies, no external libraries. If something really matters to me, I code it myself. If I don’t want to code it myself, then it must not be that important, and I do without it. It’s harder upfront to make what I need, but long term, it makes everything objectively simpler, easier to understand, maintain, and change.
Long-term, it feels better, and feelings matter. To my fellow programmers listening, go find my code on GitHub and email me if you want. I love talking tech.
Number three, building a house from scratch. I mentioned this briefly on our last podcast, and I got so many emails about it. I didn’t like living in existing houses full of shit I don’t need.
So I bought a piece of off-grid land in the forest in New Zealand. Then my son and I started living full-time in a tiny cabin there to see what we really need. Starting from scratch makes you question the necessity of everything. Do I really need lights? Do I really need curtains? Do I really need a kitchen?
Do I really need an indoor bathroom? Instead of assuming I do, I try living without it in practice, instead of just in theory. It’s no by default and a very reluctant yes, only when proven to be necessary. In all three of my examples here, life would be easier up front if I said yes instead of no. But long-term, my life is objectively simpler without them.
Less comforts, but less complexity. Less dependencies, less obligations, less to maintain, easier to change. Like a hermit crab. The less you’re bound to, the easier it is to grow. It’s thinking long term versus short term deep happy versus shallow happy. It makes me deeply happy to shed some comforts in return for a simple life, simple code, simple home.
It’s easy at first to make your life complex, but it’s a long-term trap. It’s hard at first to make your life simple, but it’s a deeper long-term benefit for the peace of mind, self-reliance, control, and freedom to change.
Seth Godin
Hey, it’s Seth Godin. I’m an author of 21 Bestsellers, a daily blogger and entrepreneur, and a teacher, and I’m thrilled to be with you today talking about the hard work of simplifying. I start with the idea that it’s hard work because if it was easy, you would’ve done it already. We are surrounded by systems, invisible systems, persistent systems, systems that push us to be stuck where we are. And if we’re going to leverage our agency, take advantage of our freedom and change the systems around us, it helps to begin by acknowledging it’s not easy.
So there are a few things that I would like to share. Simple ways to simplify, but they weren’t easy. The first one is this real clarity about what it’s for and who it’s for. Particularly the who. Start with who. This work you are doing, who is it trying to please? If you’re trying to make the stock price go up, make the stock price go up.
Don’t be surprised that the kid down the street isn’t impressed with what you do for a living. If you are writing something for people who speak English, don’t be upset if someone who speaks Italian can’t read what you wrote. Make hard decisions, difficult choices about who it’s for, and then ignore everyone else.
So if you write a book. Someone gives you a one star review on Amazon. They’re telling you nothing about how good the book is. All they’re telling you is that it wasn’t for them. No reason to read that. They weren’t on your list of who it’s for again and again. When I come back to the discipline of being clear about who I am here to serve, I can then highlight whether I’ve made a good decision or not about that who. Then I can go back to work.
Number two, finding clarity about the gray areas. Because it’s when there are gray areas when we have to constantly analyze left or right up or down a little bit more or a little bit less, things get complicated. I begin with this. Budgets and deadlines. Choose to be a professional.
Never go over budget, never miss a deadline. That’s simple. When you run outta money or you run outta time, you’re done. You don’t have to weedle or plead or negotiate or rob Peter to pay Paul. When you run outta money or you run outta time, you are done. This makes you much more focused when you accept a budget, when you accept.
A deadline because you have a code, you’re not gonna miss either one.
Second, yeses and nos. Make your yes mean yes. Make your no mean no. Say your no quite clearly without offending people, but with clarity, get it over with. No, I won’t be able to do that. Yes, I can take this on when we are clear about what’s a yes.
And what’s a no? Life gets much simpler. It doesn’t get easier. It’s easier to just sort of waffle your way through and see what happens. But with the simplicity comes leverage comes clarity, and then we can get to work.
The third one, a tiny one. Don’t go to a meeting if a memo will suffice. In big organizations, this can save you 30 hours a week.
Even as a soloist, as a freelancer, it forces us into clarity. Say what you need to say and move on. Conversations are great. I’m in favor of conversations, but meetings, meetings almost always make things complicated.
And the last one I’ll share with you is personal boundaries, which is a version of budgets and deadlines.
We make a promise to ourselves. When are we on the hook for work and when are we not? You can’t shortcut your way to success by spending more time than everyone else. You are gonna run out of time anyway. So when I add all this up, it means no social media unless it serves the project. No reading of reviews unless you’re doing it in a way that’s going to make your work actually better.
Don’t take a gig where you can’t do a good job and be happy about doing it. And tell the same story to everyone. It makes it much easier to keep your life organized and that makes it simple. We have plenty of horsepower, plenty of ideas, plenty of energy to do extraordinary work, but then the systems make things complicated.
Resist the easy path of making it more complicated. When you make it simple, you put yourself on the hook. On the hook to show up to do what you said you were gonna do, and to do it with grace and care work that matters for people who care. Here’s the thing, nobody signs up for a complicated life. Nobody signs up to find themselves wasting a lot of time in a swamp of complications.
We get there drip by drip, bit by bit. Compromise by compromise. We get there trying to play it safe, spreading things out instead of being specific.
So a few really specific examples from me so you can think about the ramifications and repercussions of deciding to play it simple. For example, I don’t go to meetings.
I don’t watch television on my own. I don’t look at Facebook or Twitter.
If you get rid of these four things, how many hours a day would be freed up? It would make your life simpler. Also, the stakes would be much higher because you’d have to put yourself on the hook for specific things, things you got great at because of the things you just gave up, or figuring out what you stand for.
When I got to business school, I looked at the cases that they were giving people. There were about eight pages of prose and eight pages of spreadsheets, and I realized professors needed to have students who, when they called on them to analyze the case, would give them the kind of feedback that they needed to keep the discussion going.
I decided on that first day to simplify my life and never do a spreadsheet, that if a professor called on me and asked me for a numerical analysis, I would simply say I didn’t have one. It wouldn’t take long for professors to realize that they could embarrass me if they wanted to, but then the class wouldn’t flow.
But in exchange for that simplification, I had to be really ready and really good at coming up with something useful. For the pros section, something that would be referred to at least twice through the rest of the discussion. By focusing on that, by simplifying, I put myself on the hook and it ended up becoming part of what I stood for.
Same thing with building a reputation for doing offbeat sort of book projects at the same time saying I will never miss a deadline and I will never go over budget. Made my life simpler. It also made it a bit scarier. One more example, also, very prosaic. Makes things simpler and makes things harder. When I give presentations and I’ve given more than a thousand of them around the world, I have a very specific rider about how I do it.
I don’t change the rules. I don’t have a discussion with the client saying do you want me to do it this way or do you want me to do it that way? My friend Simon Sinek, he shows up, he wants a flip pad. Me, I show up and I say I will not work in the round because no audience member has ever said, oh, it was great that way.
I got to see their back half the time, and I always use the same tech setup. Why? It’s not ’cause I don’t like exploring new ideas; it’s because by simplifying the way I do one thing, I open the door to make other things richer, deeper, and more complicated.
Martha Beck
Hi, I’m Martha Beck. I’m an author, a coach, podcaster, mom, and I’m here to tell you about one decision that radically simplified my entire life.
It also helped me create this deep sense of meaning and purpose and peace that I can always access now, so I highly recommend it. It started when I was 29 years old. I made a decision to follow the experience of joy above all other factors or considerations. I don’t just mean any positive feeling. Like we can feel happy, we can feel up when we’re manic, when we’re on drugs, when, uh, we buy something that we don’t need and get a dopamine hit. In fact, almost all the things that we turn to to feel better, create that jolt of dopamine and other hormones in the brain that we come to crave, and then we have to do more and more and more to feel as happy as we did the first time we did that. So that’s not really functional. What I’m talking about is a sort of quiet release that resonates through every aspect of our nervous systems.
When we connect with it, all our muscles relax, and you can’t fake that. When you think of somebody you love and you hold their image in your mind, your muscles will relax, as long as there’s no argument going on. And we may breathe more deeply, especially exhaling like that sigh of relief. Or we may smile spontaneously even if there’s nobody there to see it.
And we feel a sense of lifting or opening. It is a physical and emotional sense of freedom. So once I’d made this decision to follow only that sensation, my way of charting a course through life became really radically simplified. It wasn’t always easy, but it was very simple.
So the only rule was if it feels like true joy, go toward it, if it feels like misery and pain, go away from it. And here’s the kicker: no matter what. So I began following this credo, and it was like playing a game of you’re getting warmer, you’re getting cooler. If it’s more like joy, I’m getting warmer. If it’s less like joy, if it’s more tense, I’m getting cooler.
And I found that even when something felt daunting or frightening, it was clear and simple. You need a bit of practice to access the sensations, but once you get there, if you can feel any trace of joy in the body, heart, mind, soul. It becomes really distinct. You can use it as you are getting warmer, getting colder measurement.
So I started doing this no matter what I. That included breaking the rules of a lot of relationships I’d had, because they didn’t feel like joy or the way they were being played out didn’t feel like joy to me. So I would either back off or I’d really change the behavior, my own behavior in that situation, until I felt joy.
So some people dropped away from my life. Actually, a lot of people did. I’ll get to that in a minute. It won’t happen to you. But after I’d been living this way for a while, even though it did create some short-term chaos in my life, I began to feel stronger and clearer than I ever had and more at peace.
I had a little cluster, a large cluster actually, of autoimmune illnesses for which there was no cure. They all went into remission. People started asking me why this was happening and why I always seemed to have amazing luck. I was always in a situation that was sort of benevolent or beneficent to me. So I began talking to people and it turned into coaching people.
I would say, okay, here we go. This is the instruction. Pay close attention. If something feels really great to you, if you can feel it feeding your soul and your body and your heart, maybe do a little more of that. But if something always drains you and leaves you feeling miserable, maybe do less of that.
Like, this is not rocket science here, but I’m, I’m gonna repeat it to make it crystal clear, because weirdly people have trouble wrapping their minds around it. So I’m gonna say to whoever’s listening, if you wanna try this, if a person, a place, a task, even a thought, in fact, especially a thought, if that specific thing feels peaceful and joyful and makes your muscles relax and your face smile spontaneously, do more of it.
Go toward that. And if something makes you feel crunched up and miserable. And again, this can be anything from a significant relationship or a career or anything in your life, all the way down to the most fleeting thought. If it makes you feel miserable, do less of it. It’s always amazed me that people are amazed by this.
It’s so simple, right? But we can get caught in culture and pressure to do things that don’t bring us joy. So to my own astonishment. I made an entire career out of teaching people to adopt this one incredibly simple but radically honest approach to life. So what prompted this? When I was 29, I had surgery, and while I was in surgery, I had a near death like experience.
And there was a bright light that appeared. Maybe it was my brain, maybe it was, I don’t know, some mystical being, I don’t know, but its presence filled me with a level of joy that I’d never remembered experiencing before. And it seemed to communicate with me again. Could be my subconscious. And it said, your entire task in life is to live in a way that feels like you’re feeling now.
So I very suddenly made a total commitment to joy, and I never went back on it. Some chaos did result. Everything that wasn’t working in my life left me or I left it, and in my case, that meant my entire culture, because I’d grown up in a very, very, very deeply dogmatic religion. I left that. That meant that I left my family of origin.
They stopped talking to me. I eventually left my marriage, my job, my career. My house that I was living in at the time, pretty much everything that gave me my identity, but also created harm or exhaustion. All those things left with astonishing speed. I felt grief and fear while this was happening, but those emotions were now overlaid on a sort of bedrock of peace.
Something I think came from the deepest part of me, beginning to trust that I would actually take care of it. What was hard? What was easy? It was very hard to keep my promise when in relationship with others who didn’t approve.
It was hard to face the judgment of people who didn’t go along with my new credo, but my life as a whole became so much easier. It was so easy to tell only the truth. Lies and secrets are very hard on the emotions. What has been the payoff? Every single moment of pure delight or deep meaning I’ve experienced since, and there have been so, so, so, so many.
The payoff was finding my way to wonderful relationships. The payoff was doing only the work I love in this world, so the sense of purpose, the sense of being on purpose never leaves me. The payoff ultimately was coming home. I realized that home was inside me, and when I went there, the entire world felt like home. The payoff is never, ever having to leave a state of peace and I wish you that experience.
I wish it for everyone. Hope it helps.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck (#837) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-27 05:44:18
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
As we head into the new year, many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity.
So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question:
What are 1-3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026?
To explore that, I invited three close friends and long-time listener favorites—Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck.
(1) From Derek Sivers — you’ll learn how Derek uses a radical approach to living from first principles instead of default settings.
(2) From Seth Godin — how a handful of hard rules can turn a messy professional life into something simple and focused on your best work.
(3) From Martha Beck — how making one radical commitment forced her through growing pains but led to a simpler life built around peace and meaning.
Please enjoy!
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Derek Sivers is an author of philosophy and entrepreneurship, known for his surprising, quotable insights and pithy, succinct writing style. Derek’s books (How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Your Music and People, Anything You Want) and newest projects are at his website: sive.rs. His new book is Useful Not True.
Website | Podcast | Twitter | YouTube | GitHub
Seth Godin is the author of 21 internationally bestselling books, translated into more than 35 languages, including Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, andPurple Cow. His latest book, This Is Strategy, offers a fresh lens on how we can make bold decisions, embrace change, and navigate a complex, rapidly evolving world.
Website | Seth’s Blog | Instagram | Facebook
Dr. Martha Beck has been called “the best-known life coach in America” by NPR and USA Today. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science and has published nine non-fiction books, one novel, and more than 200 magazine articles. The Guardian and other media have described her as “Oprah’s life coach.” Her latest book is Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose.
Website | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
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Want to hear another episode with someone committed to the disciplined pursuit of less? Listen to my conversation with Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism and Effortless, in which we discussed how Gandhi would sum up Essentialism, the joys of simplicity, the difference between effortless action and effortless results, questions to cope with pet peeves, actionable gratitude, and much more.
The post How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck (#837) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
