2026-10-22 02:21:02
Please enjoy this transcript of my recent subscriber Q&A. We explore what The 4-Hour Workweek looks like in the age of AI, rebuilding momentum when you’re stuck, navigating friendships, making room for serendipity, and much, much more.
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Tim Ferriss: So let’s hop into it. And the first question I will attempt to address is from Val N. The question is, what does The 4-Hour Workweek look like in a world of agents? Some of you will be familiar with the first book. 20th anniversary is coming up in April of 2027. And here is my answer because I have been asked this in private settings and I’ve thought about it a fair amount. The book structure is laid out as a four step process and that process is D-E-A-L. So the acronym is DEAL. And those letters respectively stand for definition that is defining exactly where you want to go, pointing yourself in the right direction, then assigning or calculating the total monthly income and other numbers that are necessary to design a particular life or lifestyle.
Then, E is elimination, that is removing using 80/20 analysis and other things, all of the trivial many so that you can focus on the critical few. Then there’s automation. We’re going to come back to this, which as the word would imply is using processes, technology and so on to automate as much as possible. When the book came out initially in 2007, that was focused in some respects on virtual assistants, but that gets too much airplay. They are a means to an end. And I still use plenty of humans, but really it is defining the rules and policies that govern your life and your business. And following those with very pristine categories of what you will do and won’t do and only optimizing the things that have been pre-identified and then left with room to breathe as the critical few. So that’s D-E-A. And then L is liberation, which is taking advantage of things using the time and the void that you’ve created in the most enjoyable, but also high leverage ways possible.
And my feeling is that in a world of agents, in the world of AI, and I’m invested in a lot of the frontier labs, I have a lot of exposure to behind-the-scenes conversations with smaller companies that are at the cutting edge, I would say that the first two steps, definition and elimination are going to be more and more important because technology tools and AI in particular are accelerants. They make more of whatever is. And if you do not first identify the critical few, the very, very limited set of things that stand a chance of making a huge difference, AI and so on simply multiplies the useless. It multiplies the unimportant, the trivial, the distracting. And you can end up then trying to automate all of those things.
So far with, I would say the vast majority, and by vast majority, I mean 90%-plus of the use cases I’ve seen, people are taking things that probably shouldn’t be done at all and they’re doing them very, very quickly and using AI to create more work, not reduce work. That is why AI creating infinite leisure time where people spend all of their time basket weaving and painting with watercolors is, I think, a completely false promise. No technology has ever delivered that. Many have been ushered in with that promise, none have delivered. And I think AI will be the exact opposite when used as a blunt force instrument. It will create much more work, much more stress, and you will drown in the unimportant. So definition, elimination, and I would say I’ll stop there for now, but nothing in that book from a principle perspective is new. It was a collection of best practices from, you could say millennia, but certainly several hundred years. And I was acting as a curator of those concepts and they were included because I expected them to age very well.
The tools will change, right? Whether you learn to draw or not, the basic principles of drawing, metaphorically speaking, remain the same. If you then want to use a pen, a pencil, watercolors, acrylic, you still need the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are definition and elimination. All right. I’ll add one resource to that. Read old books that contain principles like The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker would be one that stands out. It’s very short. It is very, very tactic and principle dense and you can update the things that are outdated very easily.
Next question is from David J. Of everything you’ve put into the world that gets quoted back to you, which piece do you wish most people would stop following and what did it cost you to realize you’d got it wrong? I went through all of my books thinking about this question and I would say that there is not a whole lot that I could identify as a blanket answer to that question. And the reasons for that are several. The first is that I really try to write books that will be durable and evergreen. So I am, in the editing process, looking for cuts I can make with anything that is overly timely. I do that in the podcast also most of the time. However, however, however, I would say that it’s important to keep in mind, not just with my book, but with all books you read, in what chapter of life the author was writing said book.
So if for instance, you’re reading many books written by an entrepreneur, you may want to pick up the book that corresponds to your particular chapter in life. I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek when I was 29. I am now 49. And as you approach the tail end of your life, and I’m not quite there hopefully, but with the experience of friends and family passing, with accidents claiming the lives of friends as a plane accident, plane crash did with a friend not too long ago, you reframe things as your responsibilities change, as you have say a spouse, family, grandkids, whatever it might be, as you retire. When you hit these particular milestones, the lenses with which you view the world, the way that you value different things changes of course. And for that reason, I would just be aware of where someone is in their journey when you read books. So that is the caveat that I would add to what I have put out in the world.
There are things that I think are neglected that I wish people would pay more attention to, like the Filling the Void chapter in The 4-Hour Workweek. That I think is a critical step for preemptively heading off a lot of the digital malaise and overwhelm and sense of meaninglessness that is ramping exponentially as we certainly, I imagine, most of you have felt on one level or another. But I will stop there for now and keep plugging through.
Next one is from Daniel and I’m going to try to summarize this because it’s a long question, but Tim, I’m 46 on difficult crossroads. I’ve built businesses, led teams, et cetera, et cetera. He’s had a lot of professional and personal setbacks. He’s found himself in a state of paralysis. And I’ll skip ahead. I’m highly introspective. I journal, read, exercise, and spend considerable time trying to understand my behavior, but I’ve started wondering whether all this introspection has become another sophisticated form of avoidance. Pause. Tim, interjection. I catch myself often doing the same thing. Here’s back to the question. My question is, when someone has lost momentum and confidence in their ability to execute, how do they rebuild trust in themselves and regain agency over their life? More specifically, what would you recommend doing in the first 30 days to break the cycle of overthinking avoidance and inaction?
Of course, it’s hard to give a catchall answer to this, but I have spoken with friends who are in your situation. I have close friends who have been in your situation. I have friends who are currently in your situation and I’ve been, I think, psychologically in a somewhat similar situation. And what I have seen work is a bias towards immediate small actions. What I mean by that is, and Atomic Habits by James Clear does a good job of outlining this. I think BJ Fogg out of Stanford also does a good job of describing this, is starting with small actions that cumulatively, inevitably will have a larger impact and simply beginning to put action on your daily menu.
So for instance, five pushups before each meal, right? It could be 10 minutes of meditation immediately before bed using an app like The Way or anything else. It could be, and I think this is one of the stronger tactics in the beginning, making an effort to brighten someone else’s day and express gratitude by reaching out, say via phone call or text, better phone call, and thanking someone because the question I think implicitly acknowledges something that is for people like me, for many of you listening or watching perhaps is easy to fall into and that is the trap of self-help becoming self-fixation, which is a recipe for self-recrimination and I think poor mental health overall. So adding in something that is as simple as a call to someone else once a day or in person, could be a barista at a coffee shop, thanking them, introducing yourself, et cetera. Starting to layer in being very conservative, small actions that allow you to rebuild trust in yourself as an agent of change. That’s probably where I would start.
I would do less than you think you’re capable of doing so that you are able to do it daily, do it daily so that you are able to convincingly reclaim the story that you are a person of action. It is rebuilding your identity and you start simple and then over time, as you develop confidence, it’s very hard to trick yourself at the deepest level, so you need proof and the proof is daily action. So as you rebuild that, then I think you will find it easier to take a slightly larger bite and then a slightly larger bite, but do the minimum effective dose first. Start small. As much as it might feel like there’s a rush, you have time over the span of several weeks to develop that muscle. That’s what I’ve seen work for me and for others who are close to me.
All right, next one. This is from, and I apologize if I completely butcher this name, Murod. I am a professor of research of communication in Japan and have been following you for many years, including professionally. My students and I often discuss metacognitive aspects of your podcast in our seminars. And I’m going to skip to the last question because we have a lot of questions to get to, but the question is, if possible, if your podcast was one question only podcast, what question would you end up asking your guest and why? I’ll stick with that. There are more questions, but again, we have a long list.
Well, at first thinking about this question, my question that I came up with was what are you most excited about and why. And then a follow -up, if I had one, would be what keeps you up at night and why? But I revised those and I think you’ll understand why, so I won’t belabor the point, but it relates back to Daniel’s question about action. I don’t want high concept abstract discussions, so I would rephrase both of those. And again, I’m cheating. I could ask either one of these as a one question as long as I’m allowed to ask follow-ups and I think we could have a very fruitful conversation. So rather than what are you most excited about and why, I would ask, what are you most excited about and what are you doing about it? Similarly, what keeps you up at night and what are you doing about it? I’m more interested in when the rubber hits the road what actions is someone taking or what are they considering doing with whether it is the excitement or the concern, the worry, et cetera.
This is from Victor T. Tim, the forces pulling people apart feel bigger than any of us. Old friends are deep in their own rabbit holes with different feeds, values, even realities and AI will probably widen the gap. Tim, interjection. To state the obvious, not only are old friends deep in their own rabbit holes with different feeds, values and realities, so are we. Sad fact, but that is also true. You’ve said, back to the question, you’ve said your best years are the ones where you’ve spent the most time with your favorite people. How do you stay close to people whose world has drifted from yours and how do you decide what’s worth the energy? What’s worth the energy is a much bigger conversation and in the book that I’m about 80%, 90% done with now, codenamed The No Book, right now I really spend a lot of time on that. But let me give you an answer.
And the first is, in terms of staying close to people whose world has drifted from yours, I would say number one, hone your ability to communicate, sharpen the saw, that is your responsibility. So read books, whether that’s like crucial conversations, for instance, there are many others I’ll probably mention later in this Q&A podcast. And then, if you’re trying to, I don’t want to say stage an intervention because that implies a certain level of moral superiority, but if you’re trying to reconnect with friends who you feel have drifted maybe into the land of nihilism or pessimism or complaining, let’s just take that as an example, then my suggestion is rather than giving them advice from on high, which very rarely goes well, I would take your own advice first and tell them what you’re doing and/or you could suggest doing things together like social media cleanses, deleting social media apps from your phones. Trust me, you’ll survive, probably thrive in response to that.
Experimenting with things like 30 days or 20 days of no complaining. If you search my 30 day no-complaint experiment and my name, you’ll see how I’ve approached that in books that support it. Could be language, right? You could ask them to check you, raise a finger maybe every time you use an absolute, everyone, no one, A, B and C always does X, A, B and C never does Y. Finger. Ask them to correct you when you mention absolutes because you think it’s reflective of stories you’re telling yourself that are disabling that cause stress or upset you, et cetera, et cetera. And if they’re paying attention, they will get the message without you explicitly judging them, let’s call it for what it is. So that is one of my recommendations. And I suppose to also be Caption Obvious, I will say sometimes people drift too far and it’s very difficult to reconnect. The good news is that there are amazing, thoughtful people all over the world and that is still true and sometimes paths diverge and not all of them are worth trying to salvage, nor are all of them salvageable.
I will say, just as a side note, and it’s going to be a while before this book is out, so I don’t want to tease something so far in advance, but The No Book is in some ways the spiritual successor to the The 4-Hour Workweek really built accidentally for the world of AI. I think that it will really help with the definition of elimination and question of what to put energy into because humans are not evolved to deal with infinite optionality and that is what these tools seem to provide. It’s actually very, very, very dangerous. Not dangerous in the world exploding, humans turning into paperclips kind of thing, if you get the reference, but precarious for the human psyche.
All right, let’s keep going and I’ll take a break for live questions in just a little bit, but let me keep running. Next one is from Powell and the question is, how do you distinguish between this needs more time and this is never going to break through and what’s the earliest signal you can act on before you’ve wasted another year? So for many of these questions, I will try to grasp the spirit, the gist of the question and answer it in that fashion. So a very good question. In other words, what do you decide to further commit to even though you’re not seeing obvious fruits from the labor? That could be professional, could also be personal. And how do you separate that from the things that are on some level never going to work?
Well, I think in the case of say a business, I’ll just use that because it’s simpler to unpack, you could borrow say a question from Peter Thiel as a thought exercise first. I know he’s controversial, but he is very smart and has placed a lot of very good asymmetric bets over decades. His question is roughly, and I’m paraphrasing, if you had to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months, what would you do?
Okay, so applying Parkinson’s law, creating a very tight deadline for yourself, and I know this seems impossible, even if it’s just as a thought exercise to journal on or to speak into Wispr Flow, for instance, so it transcribes your 10-minute brain dump and you can throw it into something like Claude for cleanup, how would you answer that? And the point of a question like this is not to produce an answer automatically that allows you to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months. It’s to force you out of your routine ways of thinking. It is to free you from constraints that perhaps you’ve artificially applied to the situation. It’s a way of finding perhaps the non-obvious or as one of my questions I repeat often would go, “What might this look like if it were [inaudible 00:23:06] these go together?”
And then, I would also spec out in advance, are there milestones that I could reach, say in the next six months, that are guaranteed to give me much more energy? And I say that because that is the fundamental currency that gives you endurance. And if you don’t have endurance, you have no competitive advantage. So that is, I think, also a key question. And last but not least, I would ask friends, and if they’re truly kind, not just nice, you can ask them to do this, ask them to red team. Red teaming, you can look up this concept. It’s applied in many different circumstances. The red, back in the day, referred to the Soviets because it was used in a military context, but effectively, I’ll give another example, you could hire hackers to try to break into your corporate system, but they’re still good guys. They’re on your payroll because you are asking them to act as an opponent or a bad actor, right?
So you’re asking your friends, in other words, a question like the following, which I learned from one of the best CPG investors, so consumer packaged goods. Think about anything you might buy in a grocery store or GNC, drinks, food, you name it, right? Very, very, very good. His track record is absolutely absurd, and he’s also built multiple companies to huge exits. And one of the questions that he always asks founders is, “If you guys fail or have a huge breakup in three years, what are the most likely reasons?” The breakup question can really open up a can of worms, but you could ask your friends, “If this company, if this project, if this relationship failed in two years,” you have to force their hand because most people want to tell you what you want to hear. They want to be encouraging even if you’re going in the wrong direction. So you have to force them, you have to paint them into a corner.
So, “If this company, if this relationship fails in two years, what do you think the most likely reasons would be?” That does not give them the option to back out. If they try to back out, then you ask somebody else. But I would really try to force the issue because it is common that friends, thinking they’re doing you a favor, will encourage you to pursue something even if they think you’re terrible at it. Maybe you’re… Who knows? You are hoping to be a professional musician as a vocalist, but what your friends aren’t telling you is you’re actually terrible. This happens all the time. Or behind closed doors, they’re like, “Man, I can’t tell him, but nobody’s ever going to buy that.” You want to take all this stuff and bring it to the surface if you can, and questions like that are very helpful.
Okay. Next question is from Brandon D. What is your latest toolkit? Any updates or items I’ve discarded related to age-related vision problems since your interview with Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg? Now, this is going to sound a little funny. I have found things. Now, you’ll notice that I’m wearing very, very minimally magnified glasses at the moment. That is because I am on book deadline and it gives me another two hours of endurance, and it is a game of tonnage on some level to finish a book. It’s a lot like a marathon. It’s like,” Oh, you’re 90% done. Congratulations. You only have 50% left.” It’s one of those situations. If I were not on book deadline, I would not be wearing these.
The most interesting technology, the most interesting tool that I’ve come across is something called Oryx, O-R-Y-X, and it is software that allows you to, it’s pretty incredible, fix your near-term vision without changing your lens or anything else. As you get older, your lenses stiffen and they have less accommodation, therefore you end up holding your iPhone and so on at arm’s length and then, you run out of length in your arms, and that’s why you’re turning on the light on your iPhone at restaurants to read the menu and so on. I used the Oryx software, and I’m an investor in this company, which only happened after I tested it because I used it for 30 days, eight minutes a day, and I went from not being able to really read anything at this distance to being able to read a menu with tiny font at night in a restaurant with very dim lighting, and that is fucking bananas.
So the tool is not widely available. They’re still piloting it. It’s based on very good research that has been published. However, if you guys want to try it, I mean, look, there aren’t many spots and it’s not cheap, but I’ll tell you what the deal is, and that’s why I have iMessage on because I wanted to tell you about it. If you go to tim.blog/oryx, O-R-Y-X, and if you’re hearing this after the livestream, you can still sign up for the wait list, so I would encourage you to do that if you’re interested. It works, and for a lot of people, it’s durable, meaning it lasts months, years.
It’s something I’ve never seen before, but they’re basically training your upstream visual processing to get better at distinguishing blurred images and constructing a reality that is sharper. It’s kind of like that fake tool in all of these police crime scenes and television shows where they’re like, “Enhance image,” and you’re like, “Come on.” It’s pixelated. In reality, you wouldn’t be able to enhance image, that’s ridiculous. But with your brain, it turns out that you can do this. And I was so, so skeptical, but if you go to tim.blog/oryx, the use of this on a tablet is usually 1,300 bucks and they’re offering 100 spots for 9.99. So if you want to try it, give it a go, zero pressure. But that is, I would say, the most interesting thing that I have found. There are eyedrops you can use, certainly, that give you a temporary increase in accommodation of the lens. I think there’s a place for that. You just have to be careful with the version you use because you can increase the risk of certain types of injury. I will leave it at that.
So as soon as I’m done with the book, I’m going to take these off because you want to abstain from using glasses for a period of time to the extent possible to derive maximum adaptation. But I will say I’ve never seen anything like it. It is something that kind of defies belief. So I’ll leave it at that. For those of you who are interested, there are hundred spots, so you can take a look at that. Let me hop out of iMessage and back to our live chat. I’m going to answer a few more questions and then, we’ll come to the livestream. I’m going to plant a seed for you all because I’m going to have a question later that I want your input on, and that is related to doing more unscripted podcasts like The Random Show. I’m interested in knowing what formats you would like to see or that you would watch or listen to. Okay? Don’t post your answers now, but I’m going to ask that later. So we’re going to come back to that, and I’d love to get your comments in the live stream of comments, and people will also have the opportunity to put on X if that’s easier for some reason. Okay. Next question. This is from Luke O. Great question. All these are great questions or I wouldn’t even be reading them. Here’s the question. At this stage in your life, what are you deliberately choosing not to optimize anymore, and why? Well, it’s good to define this term, optimize. I would say that often, it can be thought of as bleeding the stone. I mean, you’re really trying to wring every last drop of efficiency and improvement out of that wet towel. And I still do that in some areas. But your question, I’m going to answer perhaps in a slightly odd way. Rather than telling you what I’m not optimizing anymore, I’m going to tell you what I’m overinvesting in.
Because when you overinvest in things, they crowd out a lot of the things I would put on that no longer optimize list. And I’ll borrow a heuristic from Ramit Sethi, who is better known as a sort of finance guru of sorts, has a great podcast where he interviews couples about various money problems and so on. He’s very, very good at what he does. And I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact wording, but he’ll ask people what would it look like to invest 10 times more in one or two areas that matter most? He is not focused on ultra frugality, or foregoing your lattes, or anything like that. So for me, I am trying to invest 10 times more in my health. What would that look like? This is another absurd question, like the Peter Thiel question. Even if you don’t have an immediate answer, it forces you to think differently about your life.
Investing 10 times more in health, what would that look like? Investing 10 times more in relationships, what would that look like? Those are the two big ones. And if you invest 10 times more in your health and 10 times more in your relationships, there’s not a whole lot left over, which is a good thing. You have less free roaming time to completely burn on wasteful activities that might have a veneer of productivity. So I’m going to leave it at that because I think that is the most high leverage way to approach these things, at least that I’ve found. So focusing on your more to do 10 X list as opposed to your not to optimize list. I will revisit this with a question that comes up a little bit later. I’m going to do one more, and then as promised, I’ll get to the live feed. So don’t post your questions yet, but get ready.
This one is, and I’m going to butcher this name, Ridika H. asks the following question, and I’m going to… I’ll read most of it. There’s an appealing idea that the good life is something we can consciously design, identify our values, understand our priorities, eliminate the unnecessary, organizer circumstances accordingly. That would echo certainly the emphasis on the DEAL and the DE of that. That’s my comment. But so many of the most meaningful experiences in life seem to arise from things we couldn’t have planned or optimized for. Do you think there’s a point at which being too deliberate about the life you’re building makes you less receptive to life that might emerge unexpectedly? How do you leave room for serendipity when you’re naturally inclined to be intentional? I do 100% agree that if you over engineer your life, you are almost definitionally less receptive to life that emerges. And first and foremost, I’d say there is no magic answer for this that you apply every day in an ongoing way, at least not for me.
You can have periods of heavily engineered focus and you can have periods of, in my case, reasonably engineered serendipity where I am placing things in my calendar that are likely to produce these chance encounters. And I would say that my approach to this is one that embraces the belief that these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, I may very deliberately try to interview, and by the way, that’s just talking to people, but interview in my case, people who completely disagree with me, have totally different sets of opinions. For instance, someone I know in Austin, perhaps not surprisingly, is politically, from a voting perspective, on the far right. I am not on the far right. I’m not on the far left. I’m very issue by issue, but this particular friend is very, very smart. So to dismiss him as some type of non-thinking knuckle dragger doesn’t hold water.
He’s very, very intelligent and he’s very good at questioning assumptions. So sitting down and asking questions there opens me up to ideas and opinions that are not going to get served up in a feed that has been personalized to reinforce my own biases, which is by the way, every feed on any platform. So that would be one example. And there are, and very interestingly, this is what makes me think sometimes that I’m in a simulation. I wrote down a book I wanted to mention and then someone else asked about the author 10 questions later, of course. I read a book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. This was recommended to me by Kevin Rose. And it was deliberately to offer me a counter example. I didn’t know before I read it if it would be a good or bad example of less over-engineering with intention and planning and blueprinting of your life.
Very much enjoyed it. I think that if you squint a little too hard, you’ll see that Michael must have said no to many, many, many things in order to focus on some of the things that are outlined in the book, which raises questions about overall surrender versus selective surrender. So maybe that’s a conversation I’ll have with Michael at some point, but it’s so extreme in counterbalancing my default way of being in the world that I read that book and I did find it very helpful. Coming back to the over-investing, what would it look like if you invested 10 times more in health and relationships? These are also two things that open you up to serendipity, at least how I approach, let’s just say health, which includes group fitness activities and things like that, coaching and so on, interacting with people I would otherwise never meet in a professional context. So these are all, I think, attempts at coming at your question or the problem that you’re underscoring.
But I do agree with you that yes, if you are overly deliberate, if you indulge too heavily in the illusion of control, you make yourself blind to things that are around you. And it’s a fine line because you can certainly, if you take on the identity of someone who goes with the flow and simply surrenders to everything, you can end up a floating generality as Seth Godin would say, where you indulge every distraction as an opportunity. And I’m certainly writing a lot about that right now and what the sweet spot looks like for me and some people that I know. But I will stop there for now and let’s hop into the live feed. So let me see if I can answer some questions here. It’s going to take me time to read. So there will be some type of delay.
Oh, Rob. Rob M. This is a perfect question actually. “Tim, what do you get from these live streams besides content, et cetera, et cetera?” Part of it is serendipity. I don’t choose the question you guys submit. I’m usually in the business of asking questions. So for me, this is a way to get a gestalt of what you guys are thinking about. I respect and I do respect you guys. My audience tends to be very well read, very curious, often has a bias towards action. And I was able to look at, for instance, I mean, I won’t show this because it’ll dox a bunch of people, but patterns using LLM analysis of the questions that come in. And then I’m able to answer or attempt to answer some of these questions. So for instance, AI comes up in roughly one of five submissions and then it goes into the reasons for that.
Health questions, asking about my protocols, the frequency with which different types of questions come up, and so on and so forth. So these live streams are an opportunity for me to do something I know I enjoy doing. I get energy from these while also being forced out of, I don’t want to call them ruts, but patterns of thinking and asking questions by virtue of getting a bunch of stuff thrown over the transom that I cannot predict. So that would be my answer for that. That’s funny. Somebody’s asking me. “Crimp, sloper, or pinch. How’s climbing going?” I would say pinch. I’m working on my extensor strength after my elbow surgery from a year ago. So I’m very focused on pinch, slopers, still my nemesis, true for so many. And crimping I have to be a little careful with because I got to strengthen the DIP, PIP joints and all of that jazz in my fingers, which I’m working on.
If you’re interested in how to strengthen your fingers, revisit my episode with Dr. Keith Baar, B-A-A-R. His stuff really does work. Who would win in a fight between Tim Tim and Kev Kev? You see more battle tested, but Kevin’s got that old man dad strength. It’s an open question. I think I would immediately go for Kevin’s ankles. He’s got huge triceps, but I feel like I could work on those ankles. So TBD. This is a question, “What type of OCD treatment did I mention in a few of my episodes that was helpful?” I mentioned accelerated TMS and you can get it from reputable providers. I’m involved now with a company called Ampa Health because I think their device is very, very interesting for targeting and therapist and user friendliness.
But a lot of ketamine clinics and mental health clinics, let’s just say writ large, will offer accelerated TMS. The protocol that I’ve used, which it was developed by some folks, I’ll probably have on the podcast at some point, is called the ONE-D protocol, O-N-E hyphen D protocol where you preload with a drug called D-cycloserine. It’s a very mild neuro… Well, I shouldn’t say mild, neuroplasticity agent, but it increases neuroplasticity before you go into the stimulations and they’ve compressed from say a three to four month duration of protocol down to one week, which is what Nolan Williams and others did at Stanford and elsewhere. And then they have since with this drug assistance, which makes you just more malleable for the changes, compressed it into one day. And Jonathan Downar at Ampa Health was one of the pioneers behind this.
And it is, I would say, most established for treatment of depression. It has also been applied to generalized anxiety disorder, GAD, and it would seem like there are also other applications to OCD, which is in my case, a close cousin of the GAD, and sleep improvement writ large. So that is the protocol. You’re looking for intermittent theta burst, intermittent theta burst. And I could give more specifics, but I’ll probably save that for another time. You can do some homework though. There are places that offer this. It doesn’t have to be the Ampa Health device. There’s Brainsway, which is, I would say the market leader as far as hardware goes. Then there is MagVenture as far as hardware again. But you should find someone, I think, who’s familiar with accelerated TMS and ideally, and this is based on my personal experience, familiar with the ONE-D protocol and using this D-cycloserine, which is sometimes abbreviated to DCS because most people cannot take five days off work or it’s very expensive to do that or they use up a bunch of their PTO, et cetera.
And the more time you have in the clinic, the more time you’re using clinicians, the more expensive it’s going to be. So those are, I suppose, the main points that I would make on that before getting to other things. Okay. Let’s see. Oops. Milonga Tango or Waltz. I loved the Waltz, which is a very circular form of Tango. I just love the Waltz music. Corazón de Oro, there are many, many songs that I could listen to. I don’t generally listen to Tango music in my off time, and it’s been a long time since I’ve hit the dance floor, but I would say Waltz, Tango, Milonga in that order. I always found Milonga very difficult for some reason.
All right. Okay. Related question to the earlier ones from Daniel. Any developments on medicine is electricity? Yes. Bioelectric medicine. Certainly I mentioned the accelerated TMS. I do think Kevin Tracey and vagal nerve stimulation, most of which is bogus and nonsense online, frankly.
I hope to have some announcements related to that soon. But if you’re getting the cymba concha on the ear, you are able to access some limited portion of the vagus nerve and there’s interesting stuff to be done there. You can also use box breathing or other cold exposure, other types of combinations to improve vagal tone. I recommend The Great Nerve, which is a book by Dr. Kevin Tracey for diving more into that. And then the conversation with Michael Levin out of Tufts I have on the podcast is a great one to dig into. Susan, “Do you see yourself becoming a parent in this lifetime?” Yes. 100%. 100% without any shadow of a doubt. And, “You’re very kind. I think you would make a great or a wonderful dad.” Thank you, Susan. Yes.
Did you see there was a device in Time Magazine 2026 Top Inventions? I assume you’re talking about accelerated TMS and yes, I believe that was Ampa Health. So you can check it out. Ampa Health has a website. You can also take a look at it. Lots of questions about kids. Yes, I’m still keen. 100%. Okay, here’s a fun one. Jacob, “You’re good at answering questions. How have you honed your ability to craft good answers quickly? Do you have certain framework structure for answering questions?” Well, yes, I do have some heuristics that I find helpful. Generally I approach it, and this is borrowing from Tony Robbins who I’m sure was informed by other people, a progression, and I use this for everything, including writing, including working, hard conversations, and that is state, story, strategy. In other words, most people hop straight to the, “What should I do?” Which is the strategy, but let me give you two contrasts.
The first would be, “I am tired. I didn’t sleep well. I’m feeling shitty. I haven’t had coffee.” Fill in the blank. That’s my state. It’s a negative state or a low energy state. The story then tends to be disabling. I can never this. Oh, I can’t focus. I can’t this. I’ll never that. And from that, if you try to sit down and journal on what should I do, you’re going to end up with a poor outcome. You’re not going to get good answers. So in my case, let’s just use your specific question. If I want to be fast in answering, I need my biochemistry to be dialed in. I need to have reliable source of fuel. I need to have stable, either blood glucose or some other form of energy production. And for podcasts like this, I take exogenous ketones about 15 minutes beforehand. You have to be very careful with this stuff.
It’s not good to take it all the time. Every once in a while for a recording, I will do that. I use Delta G ketones. There’s some concerns around the 1,3-butanediol, which is the most commonly used ketone, let’s just call it for simplicity in the commercial products. But in this particular case, the delta G has the 1,3-butanediol bound to BHB, which is then liberated and you get some interesting effects. I do not take more than 15 grams at a time. I think it, in this product, corresponds to the milliliters. So I use the health version of Delta G. I have no affiliation with this company. And that is very helpful. In the afternoon, I don’t like to re-up with caffeine. I also will use though, now I’m going to immediately prove myself a liar. There are, I think they’re called Nootropicks, P-I-C-K-S, that Chris Williamson manufactures, and they’re these toothpicks that have 25 milligrams of caffeine and it hits you immediately, right?
So I’ll take 25 milligrams, not a nitro cold brew. Let’s just say it five to 10 minutes before I sit down. And I had a meal two hours ago. So I’ve basically provided myself with a slow carb form of glucose supply. I’m taking the ketones on top of that. I have a small amount of caffeine and I got a little bit of movement in earlier today for lactate, which is also something you can use as energy, it turns out. And that’s stage one, that’s the state. And then for answering questions, I would say rule number one is do not rush. And as a counter example, in the podcast when I first started, I would use filler words. So buying myself time as I thought. You don’t need to do that. You can just pause and you can either be silent or you can say, “Give me a second to think about that. That’s a good question. Let me give you a good answer or try to give you a good answer…”
You’re buying time. By the way, you may have noticed that ChatGPT and other LLMs do this. You ask your question, they’re like, “That’s a really smart question. I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Bullshit. Doesn’t care if it’s a good question. Hasn’t been thinking about it. It is buying the entire machinery time to do what it needs to do on the backend, right? So humans, machines, same trick. And then in my case, look, I’ve got copious notes. I’m not doing this off the cuff. I prepared myself for your written answers or… See, I stumbled too. I prepared myself for your written questions. Live stream’s a different thing and I mostly lean on the biochemistry and state for that.
All right. Which film do I re-watch the most and why?
I mean, I’ve seen Spirited Away probably a hundred times. Snatch, probably 100 times. Babe, about the little pig, masterpiece, probably 100 times. These are movies that I play on mute while I’m writing books. So for each book, generally, I will do a lot of writing late at night, but that can feel very lonely, very isolating. So I will throw something up on the TV, and it has to be a movie that I know inside and out so I don’t get distracted. I will let it run, but mute it. That gives me people in the room. And then I will put on my headset, usually over ear. I use my Bathys… Where is it? Headset that’s sitting somewhere around here, expensive buggers. And I’ll listen to music, typically something without vocals, like a deadmau5 Work Moar, M-O-A-R playlist, which you can find pretty easily. And then I’ll rock and roll and I pay attention to state there as well.
But that’s why I’ve seen those movies. I loved them in the first place. Then I was like, “Let me pick something that I will enjoy just having on an endless loop all night long.” I might watch Babe, for the four hour body, I watched Babe like eight times an hour, something like… I’m sorry, not eight times an hour. I watched Babe like eight times an evening. That adds up real fast.
All right. Jonathan, “I thought you looked a touch jittery.” Yeah. No, I’m not jittery. I am just coming into today full of energy. I’m not shifting around too much, although I am having a major back surgery next week, so some of that could be the pain in the low back.
Let’s see. Nora, “Do you meditate? You do TM twice a day for 20 minutes before meals. Great way to go about it.” I do meditate. Right now I’m using The Way app with Henry Shukman. I am involved in that app. I’m a small investor, but I really like a single dedicated teacher with a logical progression of skills.
And I keep them short. You can make them various lengths. I do 10 minutes. I try to do it twice a day. And the twice a day really seems to be the force multiplier for many, many other benefits. And TM first demonstrated that to me. I still use TM on occasion and doing it frequently seems to matter more than doing it for a long time. I’ve chatted with a few people about this. There is an argument to be made that it’s having an effect on vagal tone. So it could be breath work. It doesn’t need to be something that involves you sitting in the half lotus or full lotus with your eyes closed focusing on a candle flame. It could be the breathing alone done twice a day. And the reason that I connected these dots, which could be spurious, maybe I’m making a mistake, is that when you do vagal nerve stimulation, you’re doing it twice a day.
You’re doing it on the same cadence, given the durability of the effect on HRV and so on. So it may not be the exact, and probably isn’t the exact content, of the form of meditation, but something that as a cocktail affects vagal tone. Who knows? There’s a lot more to it. I mean, I certainly think the explanation of skills separating, say, the inside from the outside using labeling, being able to observe things without trying to change them, even if your mind is going insane and your monkey mind is ricocheting around in your skull like a bullet, these are all valuable skills that you can then take outside of meditation. So for me, using something like The Way makes sense. I want skills that can be translated, not just the 12-hour improvement in HRV.
Let’s just say that that is the guarantee for many, many different types of what we would put into the category of meditation. But I think if you were to do box breathing in a cold bath or something like that, which I also do, I think you get some of the same, but not all of the same benefits.
Wow, we got a lot of questions. I’m going to do a few more and then I’m going to hop back into the written questions. Okay, this is a good one. It’s a business name, so I’m not going to read it. I apologize. But what are your thoughts on the book Healing Back Pain by John Sarno? So I know this book very well, and I will say to kick off that I have multiple friends who were plagued by low back pain. In some cases, they couldn’t walk several blocks and they fully credit this book, Healing Back Pain, with fixing them. And that’s non-trivial, right?
That is legitimate. I also know acolytes of John Sarno, and I know people who had rigorous debates with John Sarno directly, and I’ve read the book. Here’s my take. And for people who are not familiar, I would say that the synopsis of the book, and this is going to sound unfair, is that almost all back pain is psychosomatic and that you should go about resuming all of your old activities and its outdated belief system. And if that weren’t the case, back pain wouldn’t move around from location to location, et cetera, et cetera. And he’ll go through the mechanical explanations for back pain, ruptured discs, bulging discs, et cetera, and to his satisfaction, but not mine, knock them off as irrelevant. And he’ll cite research, and I have question marks around this research, that show people with what appear to be mangled spines on MRI are asymptomatic, where people with much fewer injuries, let’s just call them, or deterioration, which he would put in quotation marks, like disc degeneration, are symptomatic, therefore…
And I disagree with that. And I’ve had conversations with some of these folks who are really hard liners and Sarno maximalists, maybe you might say. Sometimes I get frustrated and I’ll say, “If I took a ball-peen hammer to your L5 and just whacked on it like I was trying to chop wood, would that cause pain? Would it cause long-lasting pain?” And they have to say yes. They have to say yes. Not everything is internally generated from the mind. I know people who have had life-changing, durable effects with interventions, whether that’s… And there are risks with some of these interventions, of course, whether that’s fusion, procedures like intercept or others. Some of it can be PT resolved, depends on the nature of your low back pain. What I would say is the low back and low back pain is, as far as I can tell, the Bermuda triangle of effective diagnoses.
And whenever you’re trying to navigate a complex medical issue like this, in contrast to something like my elbow. My elbow blew apart because it got snapped backwards in jujitsu ages ago, and it turns out my extensors were just torn. This is a carpentry problem. Any decent surgeon can go in and piece it back together and your elbow heals. The low back is a much trickier animal. This applies to many, many, many different medical issues, by the way. I’m not a doctor, don’t play one on the internet, but as a layperson who’s reasonably scientifically and medically literate, I’ll say, when you meet with specialists, they know their tool and therefore they’re going to default to recommending or finding a solution within their tool. The tricky part is that there’s often at least a sliver of truth to what each of them say.
So the PT will say, “This is a muscular problem. It’s not a skeletal and nerve problem.” And they will give you exercises. And some of them might help. The neurosurgeon’s going to want to do what a surgeon does, right. The acupuncturist is going to want to do what an acupuncturist does. If you talk to a Hakomi therapy practitioner or someone in psychotherapy, they’re going to land on the mental or psycho-emotional. They’re going to want to work with that tool. And it’s a case of the multiple blind men holding onto different parts of the elephant. And one says, “It’s a snake,” because he’s holding onto the trunk. The other one’s like, “No, it’s like a rat,” because he’s holding onto the tail. The one holding onto the leg says, “It’s a tree.” And that doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t make them wrong. It just makes their portfolio of techniques and expertise siloed, is limited. So it’s taken me fucking forever to finally land on some converging diagnoses and I’m going to pursue that path.
I feel very good about it. I’ve done six years of due diligence. For God’s sake, it takes forever. And look, I’m going to be very transparent about how it turns out, but I will say that I think John Sarno’s work is very valuable for a lot of people. But I take major issue with any type of largely one-size-fits-all remedy, which implies that in this case, there are almost no mechanical causes of pain. And also on a person-by-person basis, for instance, just to address the MRI argument, different people are differently sensitive. Some people have better smell. Some people are more sensitive to light. Your composition of nociceptors, people can look that up, that’s a fun rabbit hole, nociceptors is different. So the way you feel pain can be very different from one person to the next. And how you magnify or interpret different sources of pain can be very different.
How you think about it, your belief structure, what you avoid, et cetera. I mean, all of these constructs that you develop to cope with pain are real. That is not to dismiss the mental component, but as you’ve probably picked up, I think that Sarno is good at what he’s good at, but he’s holding onto one part of the elephant. And I think it is insulting to imply that it’s all in everyone’s head. That’s where I’ve landed, so … Thanks for coming to my TED Talk on Sarno. And again, I have multiple friends who 100% credit that book with solving longstanding back pain that never recurred. So there’s something there.
Let’s see. Stuart McGill, Back Mechanic. Great book. I’m a fan. I’ve spent time with Stuart. He’s very smart. Do I have flat feet? Yes, I do. There’s all sorts of stuff going on. Egoscue Method, yes, it helps. I do use The Egoscue Method. I wrote about it. There’s an entire chapter on The Egoscue Method. I’ll spell that for people. E-G-O-S-C-U-E. I do exercises from The Egoscue Method every night before bed so that I’ll have a better chance of sleeping through the night. They are very, very helpful and continue to be. And actually, this is a great segue. I’m going to go back to the written questions because one of the questions, let me track it down here, bear with me, is related to The 4-Hour Body. So give me a second.
All right. This is a question from Duncan. “Hi, Tim. Do you think the basic principles in The 4-Hour Body still apply to those over 40, over 50, et cetera? Specifically, I’m thinking about Slow-Carb Diet, but feel free to answer in relation to other parts of the book. Thanks for everything.” Yes, 100%. There is very little in that book that I would rescind or revise. It has been shockingly stable and highly predictive. If you go back to when I wrote it, 2008, 2009, it was published in 2010. I was using a first-generation Dexcom or maybe second-generation Dexcom continuous glucose monitor. I think I was one of the first non-Type 1 diabetics to use that device. And a lot of what’s in that book has now become mainstream. The Egoscue Method still stand by it. The Slow-Carb Diet, 100% stand by it.
And I still use the Slow-Carb Diet myself if I need a reboot. That is certainly one of my top picks. I will alternate sometimes with the ketogenic diet for coming back to State, Story, Strategy, look up metabolic psychiatry or listen to my interview with Chris Palmer of Harvard for more on that. But for optimizing state, for stabilizing and maximizing energy production, in my particular case, I find the ketogenic intermittently to be very helpful. So my default, however, is actually a hybrid of those two, which is Slow-Carb Diet with intermittent fasting where I am fasting for at least 16 hours and then I have an eight-hour window of eating, sometimes less. So what that looks like on most days is I will fast up until 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 PM and then start eating and that will go for another eight hours until I finish dinner.
And by the way, you should make sure that you stop your clock when you finish eating, not when you start eating dinner, pro tip. And what that does over time is it, in my case, dramatically changes your say oral glucose tolerance test and insulin sensitivity. It is remarkable how little it takes, four to six weeks and my tests were completely a world apart. So I’m becoming fat and keto adapted through the intermittent fasting and then I’m using Slow-Carb Diet for the rest of the time. And people can look up How to Lose 100 Pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet and that’ll bring up a blog post, read it for free. It’s got all you need with photos, before and after photos. It is still, for my money, the simplest, most reliable diet for recomposition and performance change with the highest likelihood of success because the best diet that you follow is a lot better than the perfect diet that you quit.
And I do stand by that. I’m in prep for surgery. I’m using Occam’s Protocol from that book to increase muscle mass with the expectation that I will have quite a bit of atrophy in the four to six weeks post surgery. So I’m still using almost everything in that book. The one caveat is the PAGG stack. This is a supplement combination. I have no stake in any of it. Could have made a lot of money if I had done it, but I didn’t want people to question my motives. So I did not launch a sports nutrition company along with the book. The PAGG protocol, which is policosanol alpha-lipoic acid, decaffeinated green tea extract, and then garlic. The only question mark really that I have in that stack is policosanol. I was on the fence, but slightly over the fence at the time of publication.
I’d have to go back and really look at the research that is not funded by some form of industry to fully assess that. But that’s really the only asterisk that I would add to that book. Everything else in my opinion still applies. Could be missing something, but that’s where I land at the moment. Okay. Here’s a question from Matt. “What tools and approaches besides psychedelics have you found most useful for grieving?” I pulled up a book that has helped a lot of my friends after parents have died, after spouses have died unexpectedly. And I have not personally read this book in a long time. It’s been ages. I did look at it when it was first recommended to me, but it’s called On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. It’s by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, David Kessler, who’s the author narrator for the audiobook.
I guess he is the author, co-author and so on. But On Grief and Grieving, you can find it very easily on Amazon, it has 4.7 stars with almost 3,500 reviews. That has been recommended most by people I know, love, and trust. So I hope that is helpful and I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through.
Coming back to the written list. This one’s from Alice. “Hey, Tim, I had my first baby a year ago and motherhood has kicked my ass.” Pause. Congratulations, Alice. Continuing now with the question, “If you were a new parent, which of your protocols would you prioritize and which would you scrap in the interest of familial, personal and marital wellbeing, assuming you have limited financial resources and minimal family help?” There are two things that came to mind for me, and this should sound somewhat familiar because it echoes my answers to the Ramit Sethi question of, “What would it look like to invest 10 times more in the one or two levers that matter most?”
And if you might recall, my answers were health/fitness and relationships. So here are a few that come to mind. There’s an audiobook called Fierce Intimacy by Terry Real. I find Terry to be a beacon of clarity in a world of hand-wavy relationship advice. He’s very opinionated and has a lot of experience. He’s one of the highest paid couples’ therapists on the planet and you can get a lot of his greatest hits through fierce intimacy. There’s no print version, there’s no Kindle version. It was something that he recorded based on the core principles and tenets and strategies that he uses with his clients. And I have found that incredibly useful. His other books are also very, very good. So that is one that comes to mind. You could also look at Crucial Conversations, which I mentioned earlier, but if you had to pick one, I’d say listen to Fierce Intimacy.
I’m guessing your time to listen is greater than your time to read text. So fierce intimacy would be one. And then from a physical fitness perspective, that’s the next one, is, it is the great force multiplier, not to overuse that, but I recall, and I wrote about this in the introduction to The 4-Hour Body, the first time I spent any time with Richard Branson, well before I interviewed him for the podcast, it was with a small group and somebody asked him, “If you could give one tip for productivity, what would it be?” And his answer was, “Exercise.” And he said, “By exercising every day, I give myself something like three to four more hours of focused productivity.” Now, in your case, it’s not necessarily focused productivity, but it is energy. So I would say from a physical fitness perspective, there are two things you can do that require very little money, no gym membership.
The first I’ll mention that you can check out is from Jerzy and Aniela Gregorek. I’ve had Jerzy, J-E-R-Z-Y, both from Poland who now live in California on the podcast. I was introduced to them by Naval Ravikant. They have a book and a program called The Happy Body, and they’re in their 60s. They can run up trees and grab kites. They can do things that most 30-year-olds cannot do. Jerzy, I want to say he’s now, he’s got to be 70, 71. He can load a barbell, get on an Indo Board, one of those balance boards, and do a full snatch landing ass-to-heels and stand up and repeat while maintaining his balance. I mean, it’s incredible. And they do a lot of things, but they credit most of it to this daily practice of doing a sequence of exercises called The Happy Body.
And you really basically need next to nothing. Maybe a yoga mat, couple of dumbbells, you’re good. Shouldn’t cost you more than $50 to get what you need. And if you can’t afford dumbbells, you can find a way to hold weight, right. You can fill up some jugs full of water or something like that. So The Happy Body. And then the second one is gymnastic strength training, GST. And you can look up coach Chris Sommer, S-O-M-M-E-R. He’s in Tools of Titans. He has also been interviewed on the podcast. A hilarious, salty old dog, just like Jerzy. Kind of specialize in interviewing these salty old dogs. They’re such a pain in my, but they’re so good. Love both of those guys and both of them would laugh hearing me say that. And GST is phenomenal. It is bodyweight exercises. In the modern sort of cool kid YouTube parlance, some of it would be called calisthenics, but it requires very, very little.
You just need a floor. You can do a lot. You don’t need a ton of equipment. And I have been in the best shape of my life in the last few decades when I was combining GST plus The Happy Body plus AcroYoga, of all things, L-basing. If you want to look up that, you can certainly, but that is a little more involved than the other two. So that’s what I would say. That’s what comes to mind.
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2026-10-21 23:57:50
This episode explores what The 4-Hour Workweek looks like in the age of AI, rebuilding momentum when you’re stuck, navigating friendships, making room for serendipity, and much, much more.
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The post Q&A with Tim — The 4-Hour Workweek in a World of AI, Rebuilding Personal Agency, The 4-Hour Body After 40, and More (#887) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-10-12 01:08:47
Please enjoy this transcript of another hilarious edition of The Random Show. This time, I reunite with Kevin in L.A. to talk AI super assistants that run your life over text message, agentic shopping, beta-alanine for climbing endurance, walnuts and sperm quality, dream engineering and anesthesia dreams, boner pills, man makeup, The Dark Wizard, my upcoming book, a Jean-Claude Van Damme splits bet, and much more.
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors.
Tim Ferriss: Kev Kev.
Kevin Rose: Tim Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Good to see you, man.
Kevin Rose: Dude, glad we’re doing this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So fun to hang.
Kevin Rose: Back in L.A.
Tim Ferriss: Back in L.A. for a little bit, and it is a nice court of the world.
Kevin Rose: It’s not bad.
Tim Ferriss: Until the failed state implodes, it’s going to be lovely.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. We’ll enjoy it while we can.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, you have lots that we can talk about.
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got some things jotted down. Where should we start?
Kevin Rose: Let’s start with probably the most talked about thing these days, which is AI.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Kevin Rose: And I know people are tired of hearing about all this AI stuff, but I think there’s been an inflection point in the last, I’d call it three weeks, that I am just really blown away by.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Kevin Rose: AI has turned into something that I kind of saw it coming, but I didn’t think it would come this rapidly, which is it is replacing—so, when I first thought of AI, I thought, “Okay, we have this chatbot, we can launch it. We can ask questions of, whatever, like, “I’ve got to repair this light switch. How do I do it?” That’s typical AI use case over the last, call it two years.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: In the last call it month, there has been a release of a handful of AI assistants that are not your typical ChatGPT, Claude. They’re different. So have you played with Instinct at all?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t, but I know people are. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: You have heard about it?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. But you should provide some context for folks who don’t recognize it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Well, so let’s start off. So, let me first put the—these are the people in the ring that are entering this new kind of era of personal assistant AI, which is I would say Instinct, Muse, which is a Meta product. And then you have Grok Bot, which is essentially Grok, which is Elon’s project. So, when Instinct dropped, someone sent me a text invite and was like, “Hey, you’ve just got to sign up for this.” I’m like, “Oh, man, I don’t want another AI thing.” I already do this all day long. I’m using it for coding and all that stuff. I’m like, “Whatever.” So, the first thing that you notice is it’s not another app to download. It actually is iMessage. So they have reverse engineered and they actually give you just a phone number to chat with.
Tim Ferriss: It’s closer to WeChat in China in a sense.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. So, I have this phone number. I texted. It was like, “Hey, auth your Google account.” And I know this is your nightmare from a privacy standpoint, but it’s like, “Give us your Gmail, give us your Google Drive.”
Tim Ferriss: “Here’s a link.ru, just click here.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. It’s like Russian inside or something. But I click through, I authed, I’m like, “Whatever, there’s some hype. I hear it happening. People are doing this.” I don’t have any nudes, but you probably do. I don’t know how much you keep all that stuff online. Probably not.
Tim Ferriss: What was this?
Kevin Rose: Your nudes. Do you keep it in Google Drive?
Tim Ferriss: I just post those to my Tumblr account.
Kevin Rose: Just your private Tumblr?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: In all seriousness though, do you lock down, do you have a separate offline storage for sensitive shit?
Tim Ferriss: I probably should.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, you should. We should talk about this off camera.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: There’s just certain things that in my mind I’m always like, “Okay, what’s the blast radius of if something gets hacked?”
Tim Ferriss: Something.
Kevin Rose: What is out there?
Tim Ferriss: One more thing Kevin gives me to worry about.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So you auth in everything and the first thing I notice is that this bot texts me back and it’s like, “Hey, you missed this DocuSign from a couple of days ago.” And I was like, “Oh, shit. Well, that was kind of helpful.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So I went in there and did it. And then it’s proactively just watching everything and it learns by my responses, everything I’ve done prior, and it really understands what I care about and what I should pay attention to.
Tim Ferriss: And who manufactures Instinct?
Kevin Rose: It’s just a startup.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a self-named Instinct startup.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s a startup. It went from zero to $10 billion in valuation in four months. It’s crazy.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like a sign of the times.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Now, why would you trust a smaller company from a privacy and access perspective versus a larger—
Kevin Rose: Versus Muse from Meta or something?
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Kevin Rose: I trust Muse certainly more because it’s just going to be battle tested. Listen, I—
Tim Ferriss: They are used to the regulatory scrutiny. I mean, not that they’re always the best actors, but at same time, right?
Kevin Rose: Well, they also—
Tim Ferriss: Maybe more checks and balances.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. And they came out and they actually did a whole briefing on their security model around their private instance of—
Tim Ferriss: Who’s they?
Kevin Rose: Meta did.
Tim Ferriss: Meta.
Kevin Rose: With Muse. Yeah. So, Muse is a very similar product. It actually has an app. I think they’re adding a phone number and whatnot. And so, it’s wild. It’s wild in that this is something where I never thought it would connect the dots in the way that it does. I’ll give you an example. I was doing an international flight and I was like, “Okay, I want to have a prescription for Gabapentin so I can get some sleep on the flight.” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Be careful with that, kids.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I know. Yes, be careful with it, whatever. So, I had a prescription coming in, it got called in to get filled, and Instinct was like, “Hey, just so you know, your prescription’s ready. You should go pick it up. Leave by this time because your flight’s on time.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s very helpful.
Kevin Rose: “And if you want to grab it, go over here now, grab it then and then head to your airport.”
Tim Ferriss: Can I tell you something crazy?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Just in terms of synchronicity. So, three months ago, I drafted a preface to the new book, this book on No that I’m writing, because there are many examples in the book around assistants. And some of the very early reader feedback, because I tested it with 100-plus people, was some of these seem like 1% of problems. And so I wrote a preface, which was a letter from—it was called “A Letter from the Future.” And it basically talked about how in 2000, let’s call it 2007, 2008, I was using a Gen-1 Dexcom, which was like sticking barbecue tines under your skin.
Kevin Rose: I was with you. You got me on to that.
Tim Ferriss: You remember that.
Kevin Rose: The plunger. It was a plunger, for people who don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: It was so painful.
Kevin Rose: This is a continuous glucose monitor.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: And now you push a button, it’s like, “Ooh, tingly.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And you get it in, you stick a plunger into your body.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You basically had to stick two very long prongs under your abdominal skin.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Now it’s like a little peck on the cheek.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so much better, but at the time it was like, “Nobody’s going to use this.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t agree with that because the tech’s going to improve very quickly.”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And particularly once it went from this weird beeper device to smartphone, it was pretty clear that the adoption was going to be rapid and then get outside of type one diabetics, certainly type two, but then get to kind of healthy normies and worried well.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And on the assistant side, I was also pointing out back in the day, yes, it was a 1% problem, just like inbox overwhelm and everybody has six inboxes now. But in the case of assistants, it’s like, sure, it went from full-time in-person to virtual assistant to digitally enhanced virtual assistant. And I was like, “By the time you read this, we will have AI assistants that can do 99% of what I’m describing.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it already happened, which is—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I’ve had it change flights for me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I’ve told that there’s a restaurant that’s like a hard reservation to get into.
Tim Ferriss: This is all Instinct.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. And I’ve told it, “Hey, there’s a hard reservation to get into.” And it’s like, “Hey, I can’t log in with your OpenTable, but it drops at this time every two weeks. But if you give me a link—” and it’s a secure vault, and I gave it my OpenTable login. And then it snagged the reservation for me perfectly and adds my calendar. And then the cool thing is, if you have multiple friends with Instinct, you can friend your Instincts together. So, I said to a couple of my friends, there was one person I wanted to take to dinner and our Instincts became friends. And so I said, “Share the calendar invite and all the details.” And the Instincts just talk to each other and figure out the schedule, pick up. It’s magic.
Tim Ferriss: This is how Skynet autopopulates for all the Illuminati. By the way, they don’t exist, people, but put them all in the same calendar invite to get them in the one spot so the drone swarm can strike them at once.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s going to be awesome.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m definitely going to use this. Everyone is going to be using this.
Kevin Rose: I mean, ChatGPT just announced Dots. That’s their version of it now. So that’s come out.
Tim Ferriss: How do you think about your history, memory, context, if you’ve predominantly used something? Let’s just say this may or may not be true, but if you’ve predominantly used ChatGPT, would you be inclined to use Dots or would you be inclined to use something else? I don’t know if they’ve made it harder or impossible to export your data—
Kevin Rose: You can export memories and some of that, but they are, I mean, this is the wedge that they’re looking for. They want to have something that is uniquely theirs that isn’t just—what’s happening right now with the AI enthusiasts is that if there’s a new model that comes out, there’s zero loyalty.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: It’s like, “Oh, Claude’s better? I’ll go use Claude. Oh, ChatGPT’s better.” And people are jumping all over the place. This is finally becoming this durable storage of your life and your story and your history and all the things that you’re into. And that is going to be, I think, something where they’re going to lock that down.
Tim Ferriss: The agentic AIs, once you authorize all that shit, you don’t want to do that every time a new model drops somewhere else.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So, question for you. I saw a little news around this. Somebody, a friend of mine who’s keen on startups and investing, texted me about decisions, contrast in styles, and business models between Amazon and Shopify. And this may have developed very, I’m sure it has developed very rapidly, but I think that Amazon blocked Meta’s agent in part because Amazon’s business model, I think it’s, I don’t want to hazard a number, it was texted to me, but they have sponsored placement, they have advertising. I mean, there are a lot of drivers that get circumvented, revenue drivers that get circumvented by agentic commerce.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So they blocked it. And then 24 hours later, Shopify’s like, “We are open for business. Agents welcome.” How do you think that plays out?
Kevin Rose: So this is actually, you’re hitting on a very fascinating trend, which is this idea where applications, destination websites, all those things go away. So in a world where you say, “Hey, I just need some new towels for my house.” Rather than going on Amazon and searching for new towels or whatever it may be, or Shopify or whatever independent shop, you just ask ChatGPT. Now what Amazon is worried about is if they are top of funnel, if ChatGPT is the entry point, they can just be swapped out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Right? So, it’s like, “Oh, you know what? Walmart has the same thing for $10 less.” And they just push that right into the feed. And so for them, they’re like, “Oh, shit, this was our moat because we were the destination. Everyone comes to Amazon.com, they shop there and now the AI is deciding and buying on their behalf.” So, brilliant by Shopify, but this is happening everywhere. So, I’ll give you another example. I just shot a podcast with Henry Shukman, our Zen Master friend, and I was like, “I don’t want to send this over to an editor. I’m just going to do it myself.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so Blackmagic is a maker of cameras and editing software.
Tim Ferriss: Great stuff.
Kevin Rose: They have great stuff. They have an editing package called DaVinci Resolve. And it’s like Premiere, Final Cut, any of these editing software suites that are out there. Well, what they did is they launched an MCP server, which essentially means that with one click, you can tie it to your AI. So I drop in three camera shots, two pieces of audio, and I said, “Go make the podcast.” And I just said that, I told that to ChatGPT. It connected directly. I’m watching on the screen. It’s rearranging everything, editing it, doing all that stuff. Same thing happens with Photoshop now. Same thing happens with CAD software. You don’t need the software anymore. You just tell the AI. And essentially this could be headless. I would never need it to see Photoshop ever again.
I’m like, “Hey, just go build me this book,” or whatever I want to do, or “Remove this stain,” or whatever it is, and it’s just done. It’s wild because you don’t need these destination sites like an Amazon anymore. You just talk to your clients. So in some sense, all of these apps are up for grabs. It’s whoever’s going to play nicely with that point of entry. And that was always Google, right? But the thing about Google, it was always pushing you to the final destination. They weren’t doing the commerce themselves. And so now it’s going to be all in the one suite. So you’ll never need to leave Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. It just does it for you. It’s so crazy.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think Amazon does? Because Amazon does have huge advantages in terms of economies of scale, pricing, distribution, physical distribution of product, speed of delivery, et cetera. They still crush, last I checked, in most cases they crush everybody else.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: But they don’t want to take whatever the hit is for all of these sponsored placements and everything else.
Kevin Rose: They’re going to have to.
Tim Ferriss: They’re going to have to.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So do you think they launch their own agent? If so, are they able to—
Kevin Rose: I mean, they already have their own AI.
Tim Ferriss: Are they able to compete?
Kevin Rose: I don’t think so.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Because you have on device, so Apple, Apple Intelligence, those models will get better. Don’t count Apple out. Give them three years, right? And probably not even that, a year and a half. That will be that domain. You have Gemini on Android, which is going to power all of Android. And then you have ChatGPT and Anthropic and probably a couple of others that will probably just be like, “Oh, I don’t prefer Coke to Pepsi.” You want your own AI. It’s better at certain things. And that will be the entry point for all of the internet, all of the applications, all of everything. Sponsor ad revenue on Amazon goes away largely because it’s going to be sales, most commerce will start to funnel. We saw this back in the 2000s. So, in the 2000s, it was like, okay, online versus offline commerce. It was like, of course everyone goes to Sears to buy their tools.
And then all of a sudden, oh, guess what? 10% of tools are being sold on Amazon now or online now. And all of a sudden a decade goes by and you’re seeing the vast majority of stuff that is just being purchased online. And that’s why Sears and JCPenneys and all these big retailers just go out of business. So I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to see that transition happen once again, but it’s going to be through the front ends of AI interfaces. So you’ll just be talking to your AI, you’ll be like, “Hey, I just need a refill of this. Can you have it here?” “Yeah, we’ve got you covered with Walmart. They get to you in two hours.” Or, “Do you want to go with Amazon? It’s $2 cheaper, but it’ll be here tomorrow.” It’ll be those types of real-life conversations that you’ll just be having with your AI agent. It’s a wild transition time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been watching this, but I’ve actually been waiting to have this conversation. I mean, we’ll continue, obviously, chatting offline to figure out where to start. Well, maybe you can just tell everybody. So, it’s like if people are using, let’s just say if they’re already using Claude and—
Kevin Rose: Claude doesn’t have theirs out yet though.
Tim Ferriss: And ChatGPT.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. And they’re like, “Well, look, if there’s an advantage to using Meta’s,” what is it called again?
Kevin Rose: Muse.
Tim Ferriss: Muse. “If there’s an advantage to using Muse, let me know. Maybe. If there’s an advantage to using Instinct, let me know, maybe.” How would you suggest somebody who is non-technical experiment with these things?
Kevin Rose: Well, if you have the ChatGPT app on your phone and you’re paying for it, it’s going to be there right now, I believe, for everyone. Instinct’s still invite-only. So they’re slowly rolling that out. So you’d have to know somebody and you can poke around online on Twitter or whatever and you’ll find somebody. And then Muse has been number one in the App Store for the last couple of weeks. So that one’s pretty easy to get and you can just sign up for it. So I would say probably Muse and Grok is still behind. Their models aren’t the best. That one I would just sit on for a bit. It’s a little bit more technical. But yeah, you can just start right away and then just play with it because you’ll launch your little bot and then it gives you a phone number so you can actually call your bot. And so, listen to this, this is actually, I’m calling my agent right now on the phone. This is ChatGPT.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. “Hi, I’m Sabrina.”
Kevin’s AI Agent: Hey, there. Good to hear from you.
Kevin Rose: I wanted a sexy voice. I wanted a sexy voice. Sorry. Can you tell me about the podcast that I’m shooting today?
Kevin’s AI Agent: Sure. Let me pull up what I’ve got on that. You’re recording with Tim Ferriss today. It’s 12:30 to 3:30, at [redacted].
Tim Ferriss: Could probably bleep some of that out. Your Social Security number is—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I can just call this at any time. It doesn’t cost against your AI credits. So you can be in the car and just be like, “Hey, can you move this for me?” Or, “Can you follow up with this email?” Or whatever it may be. It does everything.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. All right. I need to mess with that.
Kevin Rose: It’s fun.
Tim Ferriss: It’s time for me to actually—
Kevin Rose: It is time. Step in. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Step into the arena. Amazing. All right. Call to action. I’m in.
Tim Ferriss: Should we talk about some other items on our random non-agenda? I wanted to bring back an oldie but goodie. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this.
Kevin Rose: I’ve not.
Tim Ferriss: So this is a bottle of tablets and this is something that I’ve played with for at least a decade, probably more.
Kevin Rose: Two tablets of erectile dysfunction. This is interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s called beta-alanine. And the reason I started playing with this again, this is a dietary supplement, is I have, I think you know, been getting back into climbing.
Rock climbing, and have been training really seriously for about two months. It’s not very long, but I have coaches or I had coaches when I was on the East Coast and in Austin, but now I’m still traveling. So, that’ll get figured out. But I wanted to see what I could do to improve endurance because I think, like many people, when you get on the wall, you’re going to use your arms too much. You’re going to end up in these locked-off positions, meaning your arms are bent, and you’re going to flame out your forearms or other parts of your upper body. So, yes, you need to learn how to use your feet and I’m doing all of that, but I wanted to see if I could address some of the physical constraints.
And I didn’t want to use some of my normal standards like creatine, because creatine leads to water retention and weight gain. And the last thing I need at 180 pounds with these tiny little squirrel paws, with another limiter being finger strength, obviously, to add weight. I didn’t want to add weight. It really adds an additional hurdle to progress. So beta-alanine was something that I surfaced again and I wanted to see if it had ever been applied to climbing. And it turns out that there have been studies done specifically with elite climbers, and there’s not a lot, but randomized and double-blinded, 15 elite climbers taking four grams a day for four weeks or placebo. And somewhat like creatine, depending on which protocol you use, they are large pills. This will be fun to watch.
Kevin Rose: Why?
Tim Ferriss: Kevin just had two.
Kevin Rose: What’s wrong with it?
Tim Ferriss: I’ll explain some—
Kevin Rose: Is this not beta-alanine?
Tim Ferriss: No, it is.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll explain some of the—
Kevin Rose: Side effects.
Tim Ferriss: —side effects in a moment. That’s hilarious. But let me give you the data first.
Kevin Rose: Jesus. I mean, I just thought it was what you said it was.
Tim Ferriss: When you’re with Tim, rule number one is you should never just swallow a bunch of pills from a bottle that he puts on the table. But here’s the upshot of it. So, with longer traverse, that means getting on a wall moving sideways—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right? There was, in the intervention group with beta-alanine, after they had kind of saturated, it takes about two to three weeks to start seeing results if you’re going to see results. But 57% longer before falling versus 19% improvement with placebo and an additional 21 seconds of improvement beyond placebo. That is a ton.
Kevin Rose: It’s a ton.
Tim Ferriss: It is highly, highly statistically significant. And then looking at longer traverse, and by longer, this means one to two minutes. So the duration’s really important. One to two minutes, which on a say top roping, when you have a rope attached doing like a 35-foot wall, maybe that’s the duration, which I was doing. I wasn’t doing huge walls like 70 or something like that for indoor, but I was also doing top roping and also bouldering, which is a different thing. So it doesn’t really help super short bouldering, that’s without ropes, but doing, let’s just say five to 10 moves to get to the top. Campus board didn’t really help any of that stuff. I won’t bother with defining that. But say longer traverse moves completed, there’s basically a four-move improvement in the placebo group just from training effect. And then in the beta-alanine group, it was 10 moves. And I have noticed a difference. It took a while and you can’t really separate out all of the elements that go into it because I am training, I’m doing isometrics, I’m doing collagen plus vitamin C before training.
So collagen peptides from Momentous plus vitamin C, you don’t need very much. 500 milligrams or 1,000 milligrams. I think it was as low as 50 in the research. Boosts collagen production in the fingers.
Kevin Rose: What’s one scoop from them, by the way, because I take the same stuff. What’s a full scoop? Do you know?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t recall what’s on the label, but it’s like a scoop of that.
Kevin Rose: It’s a few grams, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Plus some vitamin C. And the type of collagen does matter. You kind of want hide if you can get it as opposed to bone just to avoid heavy metal and other contaminant issues. But the point being, I think this stuff has really helped to the extent that my coaches, it was almost by the clock. When I got to two and a half weeks of taking this, not before, they were like, “Whoa, what happened?” There seemed to be a phase shift where if I’m working on—and it did, for me, seem to translate to bouldering, which makes me wonder how much of it is the beta-alanine. But suffice to say, I’ve been very impressed and this is something where I’ve done testing before and after to try to track some of the improvements. So, it is a heavy lift though, because if I’m taking, in my case, not four grams, but 6.4 grams a day, roughly. I’m taking eight of these pills a day. It’s a lot.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I would suggest, and this gets to the side effects, this is Thorne beta-alanine-SR, that means sustained release, to minimize, and I might be getting the pronunciation wrong on this, one side effect, which is called paresthesia. It just means body tingling, basically. It feels like—
Kevin Rose: Like niacin flush. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —it feels like a niacin flush or many parts of your body fell asleep like you had crossed your legs for too long and sat down.
Kevin Rose: What do they attribute this to? Is this a cognitive thing? Is it ATP? Is it enhancement? What’s the underlying mechanism of action?
Tim Ferriss: I’m actually not sure of—it’s carnosine. I believe it’s carnosine saturation, muscular carnosine saturation, but I am getting over my skis. So, people can look it up. But beta-alanine has quite a bit of published literature on it. I was just very surprised that there was actually a study that got funded for 15 elite climbers. Who even pays for that?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I have no idea. Probably some—
Kevin Rose: Thorne.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Some supplement manufacturer, probably. So, that is one of the supplements. And since I brought it up in terms of, I had mentioned with the collagen and contaminants, just a quick public service announcement. If you’re taking, say, psyllium husks for fiber, very helpful for a lot of reasons. You don’t just need to be Boomers like us with aging colons and rectums. It’s also very helpful for glycemic control. You can take it before meals and stuff like that. If you take any kind of fiber, you do want to add water. But the point is there are a lot of heavy metals and contaminants in most common brands of psyllium husks.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So, Yerba Prima, Y-E-R-B-A, or Organic India are two that I have looked at testing results for, and those are good. But one doctor joked to me, he’s like, “Yeah, you could go to, fill in the blank, major pharmacy chain and grab something off the shelf, but it’s going to be 2% fiber and 98% arsenic.” It was a joke. It’s not quite that bad.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But the contamination actually is worth paying a lot of attention to, particularly if it’s something like this that you’d be taking on a daily basis.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I read another study recently that just was like, oh, shitty, this killed me, and that is, you know those seaweed chips that you can get at the grocery stores, like the little flat papers?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: So much microplastics in those because they’re pulling all that seaweed out of the ocean and they’re just filled with microplastics.
Tim Ferriss: You just can’t win.
Kevin Rose: You can’t win.
Tim Ferriss: You can’t win.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Speaking of supplements, you hate creatine.
Tim Ferriss: No, I don’t hate creatine. I love creatine. I just don’t find it to be the most helpful for climbing specifically.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, because it puts a few pounds of muscle on or whatever. Muscle water or whatever.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It helps me lift more weight though.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So, creatine, we’ve talked about this, I’m sure at least on—I mean, we’ve done what, like a couple of hundred Random Shows. I think we’ve talked about this, at least 10 of them, which is creatine can be your friend and sometimes not so much.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: If you overdo creatine, it is a problem with the GI. It can be.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Also, your airport—oh, God, yeah. Don’t do what Tim does. Well, I don’t do it anymore because I do learn. I’m slow. But yeah, if you’re like, “Let me have a double espresso, some creatine, and MCT oil” on your way to the airport, don’t do that because disaster pants potential is high.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I would say also because of some of the research, Rhonda Patrick has highlighted on the cognitive benefits.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 10 grams a day.
Tim Ferriss: I was taking 10 grams a day, but I started getting really wicked muscle cramps in my hands and my feet. And then I dialed it back to five, no cramps.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I’m at five right now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think that for my system at least, and I think Rhonda’s also observed this. I might not be getting that right, but I think she’s talked about it publicly, also experienced cramping at 10 grams-plus per day.
Kevin Rose: So, I’ve had all kinds—my stomach is horrible with creatine. I have just historically—
Tim Ferriss: You’re a delicate flower with the stomach anyway.
Kevin Rose: Sometimes. Yeah. It depends on the thing, but sometimes I’m actually really good. It’s very confusing. But anyway, long story short, I was doing some research and I don’t know this brand at all, so take this with a grain of salt, but the technology is legit. I looked up the study that the technology they’re using to create a delayed release creatine.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: And so this is the only one on the market. So if you look at these pills, they look wild. They have all these little tiny beads inside of them.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s fancy.
Kevin Rose: And they—
Tim Ferriss: Looks like, I think it was Dexatrim back in the day.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, totally. Yeah. But I will tell you, this is the first one I’ve been able to take because of the delayed release and it does not mess up my stomach at all.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s great.
Kevin Rose: It’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, you’re burying the lead here. Body Tech Elite, creatine beadlet. Oh, okay. Here’s the, I think, critical piece with NovaSpheres, registered trademark.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So, I did the research on what NovaSpheres [Ed. note: NovaQSpheres] are. And they’re time-release—
Tim Ferriss: N-O-V-A-Spheres technology.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Look at that. Cool.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, it’s just one of those things where like, listen, I have also, when I travel, I’ll use—flip brands all over the place, but lately I like the stuff from Momentous because of the quality checks they do. And I have their little travel satchels that I take with me and just mix them with some stuff. As long as I slow drink it over three hours, I’m fine. But this is the first time I’ve been like, “Okay, on the go, I can just chug five pills at once and no issues.” So, anyway, that one’s fun.
Tim Ferriss: Should we talk about sperm quality?
Kevin Rose: Let’s do it. Oh, that’s where I wanted to go next. How did you know? God.
Tim Ferriss: I got the request.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Kevin tried to anonymize it through the random YouTube live stream. And I was like, “Please talk about sperm quality.” I was like, “All right. I know it’s you, Kev Kev.”
Kevin Rose: Was this a question somebody wrote in?
Tim Ferriss: No. I’m kidding.
Kevin Rose: For yourself?
Tim Ferriss: So I have long been fascinated with nuts, not in the testicle sense, although that’s probably true also. Just some of the benefits of consuming different types of nuts, like Brazil nuts.
Kevin Rose: Jesus. Literally—fine. You were talking about a ball sack the entire time you were saying that.
Tim Ferriss: Well, there is a double entendre here. So, I talked about, for instance, Brazil nuts and selenium, way back in the day. And of course you have to look at the funding sources and so on, but there’s a brand of nut butters. I’m sure they do other things called Artisana. And I don’t know why their raw almond butter is just better than every other brand. In terms of consistency, they somehow homogenize, that might be the right word, the oils so that you’re not dealing with the oil slick on the top and getting it all over your countertops and stuff. But I ended up, just for shits and giggles, buying their walnut butter because I had never had walnut butter and it has some cashews in it. And I’d like to have a family, ideally a couple of kids, so it’s good as I age into my soon 50s, I’m like, I should keep the twins as healthy as possible. And I tend to think that if you optimize for fertility, you get a lot of other things right as downstream effects.
And the two ingredients are raw walnuts and raw cashews. I’m bringing this up because there are actually walnut-specific studies. There was a 2012 randomized control trial in 117 healthy men aged 21 to 35, and they were randomized to either continue their normal diet or add 75 grams a day of walnuts. And it’s not impossible. 75 grams just to turn that into something people might recognize, it’s like 0.6 cups of chopped walnuts, like two and a half handfuls. It’s not that crazy. And the improvements in sperm vitality, motility, and morphology all were statistically significant.
Kevin Rose: Wow. Just walnuts? Are there other healthy nuts?
Tim Ferriss: That’s the question. That’s the question. So generally speaking, nuts seem to be supportive of fertility. So in 2024, there was a meta analysis that showed that at least 60 grams per day, so that’s less than the 75 we talked about, so let’s call that two handfuls of nuts as an estimate, improved sperm motility, vitality and morphology, although it did not significantly improve sperm concentration. So, of course, be aware of the caloric density, right? If you’re just housing nuts all day—
Kevin Rose: [inaudible] calories.
Tim Ferriss: —you’ll have 6,000 calories of nuts is going to have other side effects. But I thought this was super fascinating and it only came about because I ended up loving this walnut butter and I was like, huh, I have read—or actually not read, I had been told that consuming walnuts could improve testosterone and free testosterone. And I was like, let me fact check that. And I did not get back confirmation on that, but I got back these research results related to sperm quality. I was like, fantastic.
Kevin Rose: Because with Brazil nuts and the selenium side of things, it was a reduction in prostate cancer, right? There was some study that was done—
Tim Ferriss: I don’t recall. For me, the reason that I was looking at that with 4-Hour Body, and man, it’s crazy to think about how hard fact checking and research was back then compared to now. Oh, my God. It’s like you kids have it good now. The ChatGPT and Claude and so on. It’s so much easier. You need to know how to interrogate the system. But the reason I was looking at that, and this is still relevant today, that looking at your micronutrient consumption and absorption matters. So if you have a copper deficiency or a selenium deficiency, that can be reflected in all sorts of issues with, say, sex hormones.
And I have friends, there’s actually multiple friends who had testosterone issues. They ended up, and I don’t know who the latest and greatest, I think it was SpectraCell back in the day, but I don’t know who the latest and greatest would be for options for testing. But they ended up just having three Brazil nuts a day and they’re like, “I feel like I’m on cocaine.” Their lived experience changed so dramatically. And sure, this isn’t randomized controlled. I don’t know if that was placebo or not, but I saw it enough times where I’m like, “Look, this seems to be low hanging fruit. Topsoil is depleted everywhere. You can be sure as shit that most vegetable matter you’re consuming is not as nutrient dense as you would like, probably.” So it’s just something to keep an eye on.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. And so people should also know that Brazil nuts, that nut, it receives its selenium from the soil itself. So it’s the uptake from the soil. I’ve seen this now at grocery stores. There’s Brazil nuts that aren’t even made in Brazil. So you have to make sure. It has to say “product of Brazil” on the back of the nuts. Is there a certain brand that you like when it comes to that or are you just checking for that on the label?
Tim Ferriss: I’m looking at, not really. I mean, I haven’t done the due diligence there. I’ve just been looking for organic because man, oh, man, I really want to minimize pesticide consumption. I understand there are issues with the designation of organic to begin with, but I mean, this is just a general kind of meta principle, or it underscores a meta principle that I think about a lot, which is there’s the expression you are what you eat, but that’s not sufficient. You are what you eat ate.
So if you’re eating salmon, not all salmon is created equal. What is the salmon consuming? Similarly, this applies to vegetables. It applies to salad greens. Where was this grown? How was it grown? What were the nutrients that were absorbed or not absorbed, that were present or absent? And with tools that you have now, I mean, it’s a lot easier to try to do this type of due diligence.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Most people don’t know that non-wild salmon, they add dyes to make them look more pink, which is just insane.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There’s a lot of this kind of stuff. And look, I mean, you don’t have to get every detail right, but there are little things here and there to pay attention to. And there are also lots of weasel words out there. When people say “all natural,” right? I mean, there are many terms that are just not defined in any meaningful way, so they can be used to confuse consumers. But look, point of the story is walnuts, perhaps good for your nuts.
Kevin Rose: I’m going to do it.
Tim Ferriss: And Artisana products are delicious, so why not try them out?
Should we just keep going on the food kick?
Kevin Rose: I have so many supplements and shit today. Supplement day. So this actually, I’ve been doing more gym time, which has been great. I’ve been trying to get a little lean, try to lift a little bit more weight. I’ve been trying to find a good source—I brought you this one.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks.
Kevin Rose: A good source of protein.
Tim Ferriss: Can I try it?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I have no, by the way, none of the stuff we’ve talked about today—
Tim Ferriss: We have no affiliation with any of this stuff.
Kevin Rose: —no affiliation with any of this stuff. So this was one that I found largely because A2 protein. Are you familiar with A2 at all?
Tim Ferriss: So I am. I have not done my own homework on this, but I can tell you how I came across this, just so people understand what we’re talking about. You want to read the label here because you sent me a hilarious video of your refrigerator where you’re like, “I got a little bit of this, a little bit of this.”
Kevin Rose: It’s all protein.
Tim Ferriss: “Then we have some protein,” and there were like 40 of these in your refrigerator.
Kevin Rose: Well, I mean—
Tim Ferriss: Pioneer Pastures.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So this is Pioneer Pastures. I mean, they literally sell it at Target and whatnot. A2 protein though was the only protein that cows would produce about a thousand or so years ago. They said 500,000 years ago, somewhere around there until this variant took over and it became non-A2 and it became a combination of A1 and A2. It’s a type of protein that comes from the casein, which is the slower digestion version of protein. Bodybuilders used to take casein at night before they would go to bed because of the—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like cottage cheese.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. But the thing about A2 and what’s so cool about it is that way less stomach discomfort. It is the natural, clean form of protein and it’s really hard to find. So I found this one drink, 160 calories, 30 grams of protein. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated until you open it.
Tim Ferriss: Lactose free.
Kevin Rose: Lactose free. And it tastes really good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s pretty good.
Kevin Rose: It was two grams of sugar. I mean, I enjoy it. So for me, this is a great, I just want something first thing in the morning to, especially if I trained hard the day before, to get some protein in the body, take this with some coffee. It’s fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: The first time I saw this, this is the first time I’ve tried it actually, but first time I saw this was in the offices of Chris Williamson, the podcaster.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no way.
Tim Ferriss: Who is jacked AF. I mean, the guy is basically a bodybuilder. I mean, he’s very strong, very lean. And much like your refrigerator, there were like 30 of these sitting in a fridge at the offices.
Kevin Rose: That’s crazy.
Tim Ferriss: And that was the first time that I had someone describe to me the difference, I suppose, or the differentiator with A2 protein.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t taste bad, right?
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s totally fine.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. There’s a lot of shitty tasting protein out there, so I was pleasantly pleased and totally surprised.
Tim Ferriss: There are a lot of protein products that are basically candy bars or junk food masquerading as health food.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So looking for the minimum effective dose of ingredients is helpful.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, this has monkfruit in it, but it doesn’t have any of the other fake sweeteners or anything.
Tim Ferriss: Very, very few ingredients relative to—if you were to compare, not to throw them under the bus, because I will occasionally have them when I’m caught in a pinch, but if you were to compare the number of ingredients on this Pioneer Pastures with, say, Muscle Milk—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: —it’s like seven ingredients versus 40.
Kevin Rose: Dude, Muscle Milk was the gym shake during the ’90s, right? Everybody wanted Muscle Milk.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, when desperate times—
Kevin Rose: What was that pre-workout that everyone took that just got you cranked as shit? N.O. XPLODE?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, that stuff. Yeah. I mean, basically just bodybuilder crack. It was so strong. On the Muscle Milk, you might find this interesting. When I was training to compete, this is probably two years ago in archery. So I had my period of intense training and the reason I’m not doing as much of it anymore is because it’s just very isolating. It is a solo practice and you’re repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again. I do still love it, but I wanted to do something more social and just a little more physically engaging, like rock climbing, which I just love to no end to every aspect of it.
Kevin Rose: So fun.
Tim Ferriss: The reason that Muscle Milk is relevant to this story is that I wanted training nutrition that could not be broken by inconvenience on the road. So basically when I was doing my training sessions, which would be like three to four hours, and this is going to sound gross, but basically I would only consume stuff that I knew I could get at almost any gas station because I knew my competition was going to be in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster’s actually a beautiful town, but I didn’t know where the competition would be and I suspected it would be in the middle of nowhere and I would only have access to gas stations or some type of quick convenience store like a 7-Eleven. And that turned out to be the case, but I was comfortable with Muscle Milk, almonds, like roasted almonds of some type.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Every gas station had those. I like—
Tim Ferriss: And then zero calorie Monster energy.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God.
Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. With some taurine, right? But I got comfortable using the most commonly available stuff so that I felt like I had, and even if it’s only psychological, a competitive advantage. Oh, and unsweetened iced tea. That’s it. And in any case, that was my sidebar note on Muscle Milk.
Kevin Rose: You look at the ingredients now, I don’t know if it’s changed, but back in the day it was not healthy stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And it’s like look, I mean—
Kevin Rose: Great name though.
Tim Ferriss: Great name. Also, as I continue to do intermittent fasting a few times a week, I don’t do it a ton because I’m actually trying to—I want to add some muscle mass and connective tissue strength and you just need nutrition for that.
Kevin Rose: Did you get that gripper by the way?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, look, I have grippers.
Kevin Rose: Did you get the one that our buddy sent us?
Tim Ferriss: No, I got a different adjustable gripper because my right arm is still recovering from the elbow surgery I had a year ago.
Kevin Rose: We should link that up in the show notes, that gripper that—that’s a really good one. The one I have.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We’ll link to a couple of different grippers if people are interested. I’m going pretty light because I’m still strengthening the extensors in the right elbow that was repaired. But you want to hear about something crazy?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That I’ve been getting really into, and this is going to get into crazy town, but we like getting into crazy town a little bit. So dream engineering and anesthesia dreams. So I’ve been going down this rabbit hole related to dream engineering. So can you modify dream content? Can you, for instance, facilitate two-way communication between scientists and dreamers while they are dreaming? And this is a longstanding interest of mine. I first read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by someone named Stephen LaBerge, the very, very beginning of high school and became very interested in lucid dreaming, which is, just to define terms, where you train yourself, and there is a process for this, to induce lucidity while you’re dreaming.
That just means you become conscious of the fact that you are dreaming and with exercises, you can get to the point where you’re able to modify your own dream content. I used to, for instance, in high school when I was competing in wrestling, I would do additional training sessions at night in my dreams. I’m not making this up, and I felt like there was a direct translation to improve performance. Okay. But flash forward, I connected, I ended up getting introduced to Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz who took research out of MIT and Harvard to make dream engineering a reality. So he has a startup called Dust, D-U-S-T. In full disclosure, I am an investor in that.
Kevin Rose: What does it do?
Tim Ferriss: They’re going to be helping people to modify dream content to address things like PTSD.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no way.
Tim Ferriss: Now, that’s where the conversation started, and he knows that I have a longstanding interest in psychedelic-related therapies, but psychedelics have taken a backseat for me in the last handful of years because most people—I shouldn’t say most. Many people will not be able to take psychedelics for whether it’s health reasons, contraindications. They have psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia in their family that mean it would be ill-advised to take them. So I’ve been really focused, as you know, on neuromodulation, brain stimulation, and I still am super, super bullish.
Kevin Rose: How often are you doing that now?
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to be doing it again probably in the next month. I would say every three to four months. The update there, I did get involved with one company, and I thought very heavily about it, called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A Health. They have the smallest, most modular option on the market, very easy to use. I think they’re the company, if I had to bet on one, that’s going to get to the point where you can actually power something off of an iPhone. They’re doing some really, really interesting work. Just to touch on that, they’re doing one-day protocols now. So instead of five days off of work—
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: —costs 30 grand or something, you’re doing one day of treatment accelerated with this very small dose of antibiotic called D-cycloserine, which induces plasticity in the brain, much like certain psychedelics. So you basically let that dissolve in your mouth beforehand. And from, let’s say a one to 10 in severity, let’s say my OCD-generalized anxiety, it’s at like an eight or nine, it has taken it to a zero or a one.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: One day. Now it gets crazier though because you can also use it—people can check out Ampa Health. They think they need to—
Kevin Rose: Do they do it in L.A. as well or no? Where can you do this?
Tim Ferriss: They’re all over the country. I mean, what I’m hoping is that people who are already administering things like ketamine or who are offering CBT or whatever will just offer this as an add-on because most of the devices that are available now are the size of a refrigerator. You have to sign a quarter-million-dollar lease. This stuff is like three—the Ampa Health product for providers is like three grand a month. You can cancel any time. I think that’s still accurate and it can fit in the trunk of a car. It’s much easier to use. But what’s also amazing, and I did this recently when I was traveling, met a technician and did two hours of, I think it was stims every 30 minutes just for a handful of minutes each stimulation.
Kevin Rose: When you say stims—okay, stimulations. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Just for sleep.
Kevin Rose: Different target area of the brain then?
Tim Ferriss: In this case, it was the same target. It’s a target that they’re not talking about super publicly yet, but very easy for therapist, technicians to find.
Kevin Rose: How do they find it? Are they just measuring your head and shit looking like—
Tim Ferriss: It’s all based on really, really good science. They’re looking at overlapping networks that are identified by looking at data from deep brain stimulation, data from lesion research.
Kevin Rose: No, but I mean when they sit down with you, if you’re going to go into this place and they’re like, “Hey, I’ve got to find this region in the brain.”
Tim Ferriss: So part of what makes how they do it interesting is they’re finding targets that are more uniform person to person. So certain places like the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, certain areas on the front of the skull or front of the brain, front of the head, are a little more variable. You have to be very precise. So they’re finding ways to make it very effective, very fast, and less likely to suffer from clinician error. Because if you really have to thread the needle, sometimes you get no effect. That happened to me when I was using earlier targets with other hardware. If they were off by a half a centimeter, nothing. And you just wasted a week and 30 grand. So expensive.
Kevin Rose: And no downside? Are you not getting headaches afterwards or anything weird?
Tim Ferriss: Mild headache. Mild headache for a day.
Kevin Rose: Does that not freak you out though? I mean, that’s the only reason I haven’t tried any of this stuff. I’m like, I don’t know. It’s like they’re just putting magnets in your brain and shit.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, just to bust your balls before I started recording, you were talking about some drugs you’re experimenting with.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, but that’s just a good old time. Those are tried and true.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: You’ve done it too.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, I’m no stranger to pharm—
Kevin Rose: If you’re going to say it online, I’m going to say it.
Tim Ferriss: I’m no stranger to pharmacology. I’m just saying. In this particular case, I personally found the—I think the risk-benefit ratio is much more attractive for the general population than psychedelics, which is why I’m spending so much—
Kevin Rose: Interesting.
Tim Ferriss: —time looking at it. I think it is much, much, much more attractive. It’s faster. And frankly—well, let me come back to these crazy stories of dream engineering and anesthesia dreams. So from the startup Dust, and people can check out the Ampa Health, I encourage them to check it out, but they’re all over the country now.
Kevin Rose: Is that the publicly traded company one or no?
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s private.
Kevin Rose: Okay, private.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So Dust does the dream engineering. And then he introduced me to some research out of Stanford. Here’s some of the headlines of pieces published by Stanford Medicine. “Could Anesthesia Induced Dreams Wipe Away Trauma?” Another one. “Could Anesthesia Dreams Be A More Palatable Psychedelic Therapy?” All right. So what does this actually mean? Let me read some of this stuff. All right.
Kevin Rose: What dreams are they—
Tim Ferriss: Here’s the dream protocol.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s what I want to know. What’s the protocol?
Tim Ferriss: I tried to convince, I was getting an endoscopy recently just to look at my throat. You got to do that stuff, the endoscopies, colonoscopies, and so on. And I was trying to convince this doctor I’d never met to do this for me, and he was like, “Yeah, I don’t think so.” But the dreaming protocol is five steps. “Number one, tell a patient they might dream under anesthesia. Number two, use propofol.”
Kevin Rose: Oh, this is great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s very common.
Kevin Rose: Well, it’s what Michael Jackson died on.
Tim Ferriss: Michael Jackson used that plus six other things.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I have a great story about that, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: You should not DIY propofol, but using propofol as an anesthetic as the patient is emerging from anesthesia. So here’s the thing. If someone has surgery, they’re not changing the anesthesia delivered for the surgery. They’re basically using propofol to taper them out and tune them to a very particular dose, and let’s call it radio station, so they have pleasant dreams. But step number three is monitor brain activity, et cetera, with EEG. Ensure at least 10 minutes of quiet, undisturbed emergence. This is really important. If you don’t do that, then dream recall is shot, and then you have to ask them about dream recall.
But the point of this is that what they’re seeing, and this is not really super speculative. I mean, it is at the edges now, but they are seeing people with longstanding complex PTSD, they have one of these dreams where they taper out on propofol and they rehearse beforehand to basically imagine their traumatic event ending in a better way with some kind of resolution. Some of these people, 10 months later, still zero symptoms of complex PTSD.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: They go from severe to zero. The reason I find this so interesting and other people find it interesting is that it underscores the possibility that, and I’ve thought this for a very long time, but the trip matters. Because in the world of psychedelic medicine and business right now, the name of the game, if you want to ramp up your market cap and have an exit for $2 billion or whatever, or launch something with an IPO and make tons of money is you say, okay, psychedelics, broadly speaking, a whole lot of them hit these serotonin type 2A receptors. Let’s create a drug that hits the same receptors, but that doesn’t cause the trip because the trip doesn’t matter. The trip is a side effect.
Kevin Rose: Same bullshit, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, what’s interesting is that I think it’s both, but just to be clear, you can hit the serotonin type 2A receptor with no trip, like an LSD variant, and it can be very effective for things like cluster headaches.
Kevin Rose: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: It does something.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, but I’m talking about the emotional release that comes from that.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. So I would say also some of these psychedelics, and not all of them are primarily hitting the type 2A receptor, but have potent anti-inflammatory effects at sub-perceptual doses. So also I think that could lead to anti-depression and stuff.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: However, if dream engineering, like ala Dust, if they can dream engineer people to have fewer nightmares, which they can, and that has psychedelic-like outcomes, is it possible that even though there are millions of people for whom psychedelics will never be appropriate, like tripping balls for four to six hours, and there are shorter acting psychedelics and so on, methylone and so on, I get it, but there are plenty of people who will never be able to take psychedelics. Is it possible that every night you have an opportunity to harness something similar? And if so, who are the scientists who are going to figure out how to mold that and shape it and do the prep work? I think it’s all touching the same stuff.
Kevin Rose: Let me ask you a question. What does Dust do? Is it a coaching service? Because I have this app that, by the way, I have no affiliation with this, but you should check this out too, Tim. I think you’d really like it. Before I go to bed, there’s an app I use called Claria, C-L-A-R-I-A, and it is the best hypnosis app that I’ve found out there for a variety—
Tim Ferriss: Who makes Claria? I may have tried this.
Kevin Rose: You would recognize the scientists and the team behind it. It’s amazing. It’s expensive. It’s 150 a year, so it’s not cheap, but I found it to be a beautiful way to drift off to sleep, and I swear I feel better the next day. And there’s a variety of different topics. It could be anxiety, it can be whatever. But anyway, my point is, and my question about Dust is, okay, what is the thing? Could you sit there in this propofol kind of state coming out—
Tim Ferriss: So just to be clear, Dust isn’t doing anything with propofol. That’s totally separate.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Okay. So could you do this with hypnotherapy?
Tim Ferriss: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. I also, just to be on the safe side, I don’t know what they’re disclosing publicly. So people can check out the website and whatever it says, it says, but it’s something I’m keeping an eye on. But broadly speaking, that ended up being the wedge in the door for me to get back into doing a deep dive on basically dream shaping, which is 100% possible. And it’s already been demonstrated that you can have dreamers who achieve lucidity communicate with researchers while they are provably in an REM state by memorizing eye movement patterns in advance, like Morse code basically, like right, right, left, left, right, left, something like that to indicate I know that I’m dreaming and I’m telling you I’m dreaming. It’s fucking crazy.
Kevin Rose: Have you talked to Matt Walker about this?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Matt about this stuff yet.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So Matt used to run the, for people that don’t know, he wrote the Why We Sleep book and also used to run the Berkeley Sleep Lab for a long time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: He’s still very active.
Tim Ferriss: He’s in Dallas now, has a huge lab, is doing lots of good work. He and I, on the sleep front, have mostly talked about the DORA class of drugs.
Kevin Rose: I still have a ton of that, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I’m using something called Quviviq instead of Belsomra now.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And talk to your doctor, guys. This is not stuff to—
Kevin Rose: Well, they can’t get it without the doctor anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, who knows though, if they’re buying stuff online from Mexico or whatever. Just don’t screw around with any of this stuff without talking to your doctor. But the point of that, for people who maybe haven’t heard anything about this, Matt Walker has a good podcast episode on this. It’s probably six to nine months old at this point about the DORA, like Dora the Explorer, D-O-R-A, class of drugs that’s dual orexin receptor antagonist drugs. There’s some evidence to suggest it might be helpful for people with family histories of Alzheimer’s and things like that for—
Kevin Rose: Didn’t they do a spinal tap and saw the—
Tim Ferriss: —the beta amyloid clearance and so on.
Kevin Rose: —it produced amyloid clearance or helped amyloid clearance?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Not just in animals, but they’ve looked at human data. So for me, honestly, even though it might be speculative at this point, because no one’s proven that it prevents Alzheimer’s, I’m like, “You know what? That shit is so scary.” And I’ve seen relatives just disintegrate. I’m like, “Eh, since I’m APOE3/4, I’m genetically predisposed. Let me just be on the safe side.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I bring it with me. I’m actually going to Japan soon, and that’s when I use it. I’m like, “I’d rather do that than some type of these other class of sleep drugs that have been shown to do all kinds of horrible things, including cancers and you name it. They look like, on paper so far, to be the safer class of sleep drugs.
Tim Ferriss: They’re pretty interesting.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, there’s some other drugs that seem not to affect sleep architecture horribly, like the Ambiens of the world. Trazodone might be a decent choice, but for a host of reasons, I wanted to—it just seemed to make sense to me to look at the DORAs. All right. What else you got?
Kevin Rose: Okay. I’m going to do rapid fire.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.
Kevin Rose: I’ve got a few things. First of all, have you ever seen these before?
Tim Ferriss: Plum Flower Curing Pills?
Kevin Rose: Yes. Plum Flower Curing Pills, my friends.
Tim Ferriss: No. Economy size!
Kevin Rose: Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, this gets better and better.
Kevin Rose: I had a buddy that was like—he’s like, “Kevin, you don’t understand. I was actually in Paris and I had a little bit of a stomach. Oh, man, my stomach’s a little bit off, blah, blah.” And he goes, “I was about to get food poisoning. I felt it coming on.” I think it was oysters or something he had. He goes like, “I took two of these. It’s from a Chinese practitioner.” And he goes, “I dodged a bullet.” Every time, and let’s just call it once every eight weeks where you’re like, “Ooh, my stomach’s a little sideways.” I take one of these little packets and it freaking works. Dude, I’m telling you, I know it sounds crazy. And so before the podcast—
Tim Ferriss: Is it just laced with tons of antibiotics?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. No, before the podcast, I wanted to look it up because it’s a traditional Chinese medicine and I can’t pronounce any of the shit in it. It’s a bunch of wild—it’s like 15 different Chinese herbs.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is unlike the A2 protein. This has like 27 different ingredients in the size two font.
Kevin Rose: I’m telling you, these little packets are like 50 cents a piece on Amazon. You can buy them in a smaller thing.
Tim Ferriss: I just love that they’re called “curing pills.”
Kevin Rose: They work, dude. You know what they work with really? Is if you had too much to eat and you’re like, “Oh, I’m bloated. I just feel bloated.” Just take one little packet. Take a couple with you to go.
Tim Ferriss: I’m good.
Kevin Rose: I’m 10% owner in the company.
Tim Ferriss: I’m like, “What? Executive Chairman, Kevin Rose, what is this?
Kevin Rose: Exactly. My picture’s on the outside of the box.
Tim Ferriss: How did he get to Shanghai?
Kevin Rose: This thing, a rapid fire, Airofit.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’ve got one of those in my bag, actually.
Kevin Rose: In your bag? What the fuck? On you right now?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t have it right now, but it’s in my backpack.
Kevin Rose: So tell people about it.
Tim Ferriss: I was not able to get the app to work very well.
Kevin Rose: I got it working.
Tim Ferriss: You did? Was it a pain in the balls?
Kevin Rose: It was a little bit of a pain. So you can get the one without the smart technology in it, but this will also work if you just don’t even use the app.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.
Kevin Rose: So for people that don’t know, this device right here—
Tim Ferriss: I should just use it without the app because it’s been—basically, I downloaded the app and then they’re like, “Oh, you want any utility out of this app at all? Pay $79 a month,” or whatever. And I was like, ugh, I’m not going to do that.
Kevin Rose: You just ask ChatGPT for a training protocol. There’s two knobs on here on each side of this thing that adjust the resistance on inhale and exhale. So you put this thing in your mouth like this.
Tim Ferriss: This is to train your respiratory muscles.
Kevin Rose: That’s difficult for me to do. They showed, after eight weeks, a 30% increase in lung capacity when you train with this thing, which is just insane.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The respiratory muscle training devices are really cool. I had Bas Rutten, this UFC, but also prior to that, in Japan, MMA legend on, and he’s done this stuff basically daily for multiple years. There’s good data to suggest reductions in lower back pain, all of these different issues if you improve the strengthening of the muscles that aid in respiration.
Kevin Rose: That’s wild. Do you got the same model, the same type?
Tim Ferriss: I have a white one that’s got Bluetooth and all this fancy technology that I think I do not need.
Kevin Rose: When did you buy it?
Tim Ferriss: I bought it probably a year ago.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I don’t know why this had the latest firmware on it and it works fine. I haven’t had any issues with the connectivity, but I did have one before my house burned down and it was always having issues connecting. I don’t know what model.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe I need a new one, but Airofit, please improve your app if you haven’t in the last year because I found it to be incredibly difficult. Plus, your baseline of programming for somebody who’s bought a device should be decent. But I do have one in my bag at home, so I will just use ChatGPT or Claude to help me figure out a Bluetooth-free option for training.
Kevin Rose: What I’ve been doing with it is ruck backpack, 6% incline on the treadmill.
Tim Ferriss: That sounds comfortable.
Kevin Rose: With this in my mouth, and it’s really helped.
Tim Ferriss: I’m guessing the people on the treadmills next to you just clear out, huh?
Kevin Rose: It’s at my house. I’m not doing this in public. It’s ridiculous. Okay. The last one I have is about man makeup, but we can get to that.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s come back to man makeup. I’ll give another bit of science that I think is pretty fascinating to watch. This was sent to me by an oncologist who specializes in, on one level, cancers around the eye. I had a scare. I might have told you about this, I’m not sure. It’s still a little bit of a scare, but there was a nevus found at the back of my eye, which is like a large freckle. And that can develop into cancer.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: The good news is they can get rid of it. The bad news is you lose your eye. So this is something I’ve tracked first every three months, then every six months. It hasn’t changed in size, but really came to admire—
Kevin Rose: How’d you find this by the way? Eye exam?
Tim Ferriss: Eye exam, but with retinal scanning, with advanced imaging. Certainly, I was happy to find it, but I mean very scary to find because you don’t know if it’s been there for 20 years or if it’s been there for a month and it’s growing.
Kevin Rose: This is my brain aneurysm. I had a little tiny brain aneurysm that was like one millimeter or whatever.
Tim Ferriss: So you found that with a Biograph or Prenuvo or something?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, Prenuvo, I did. They’re like, “Okay, well we have to watch this and it could explode if it gets too big.” Then after two years they’re like, “Oh, you’ve probably just had this since you were born.” I’m like, “Oh, shit. Okay.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. So she occasionally will send me science that she finds interesting. This one, I mean this is probably not the description of the study itself, I think I went to the lay person’s interpretation of it, but the headline here, which I put in my newsletter, 5-Bullet Friday, check it out. Tim.blog/Friday, but “Brain Stimulating Contact Lenses Match Prozac in Depression Study.” All right. So this isn’t an animal model, but let me read the synopsis.
“Material scientists have developed a wearable drug-free contact lens capable of treating depression by delivering mild electrical signals through the retina.”
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: “The study demonstrates that these specialized lenses are as effective as fluoxetine,” that’s the active ingredient Prozac, “at reducing behavioral, neural and physiological signs of depression in mice.” Mice are not just little furry humans, so just keep that in mind. “This technology leverages the eye’s anatomical connection to the brain to stimulate mood-regulating circuits non-invasively.”
So that is pretty fascinating.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Imagine if—now I don’t know mechanistically what it’s actually doing with the stimulation. Is it affecting vagal tone? Is it affecting something else? Who knows? I haven’t done the deep dive on it yet, but imagine this is where bioelectric medicine, whether it’s different types of stimulation for increasing vagal tone—there are a lot of bullshit devices out there, folks, so just beware. I’m not aware of any one commercially available that is not prescription that is credible. But you talk to like Michael Levin of Tufts, will we more and more be able to use electricity instead of pills to treat conditions?
I think that that will be the case. In fact, you look at, say, anesthesia, anesthesia is one of those things where we’re like, “Yeah, it’s just anesthesia.” Anesthesia, when you start scratching the surface, is so incredibly strange.
Kevin Rose: They really don’t know how it works, right?
Tim Ferriss: There are many anesthetics, people have no idea how they work. I mean, a few things. If you look at Michael Pollan’s new book, he talks about how anesthesia is effective on plants, even though they have obviously completely different nervous systems slash I should say more anatomy. But it would seem—how should I get into this without making a mess of things? There are some hints of quantum effects of anesthesia, but putting that aside, because I’m not credible enough to talk about that at length, some of these anesthetics are inert. They shouldn’t do anything.
So what is happening? It would seem that it might be physics and not chemistry. It’s not within the realm of chemists to say, “Oh, it’s binding to this receptor and doing A, B, or C,” even though they might observe effects that mimic those things, that it’s somehow affecting bioelectrical fields. That’s the limit of the extent of my cursory understanding, but it’s just fascinating. There’s so many things like this that we take for granted that we think are understood by the “experts,” and we have no idea what the mechanism of action is.
Tim Ferriss: There are many examples like that.
Kevin Rose: But isn’t that crazy?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s something we just take for granted. We’re like “Yeah, let’s pop two of those.” We have no idea how it works. What the fuck?
Tim Ferriss: There are a lot of those. I think for a while that was true of modafinil. There are many, many, many, many drugs.
Kevin Rose: Oh, do you take tadalafil?
Tim Ferriss: Tadalafil?
Kevin Rose: Tadalafil.
Tim Ferriss: Whatever that is, the Cialis?
Kevin Rose: Cialis, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Boner pills.
Kevin Rose: Do you take it?
Tim Ferriss: No, I don’t.
Kevin Rose: You don’t?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t because I know there’s supposed to be maybe plausible cognitive benefits and so on. I get—
Kevin Rose: Low dose. I just do a little halfer.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I get, and this is not actually that uncommon, I get horrible back pain.
Kevin Rose: Oh, back pain. Weird.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s not super common, but in a percentage of people, it’s reported in the literature.
Kevin Rose: How about with the other ones?
Tim Ferriss: Horrible back pain.
Kevin Rose: What about the other ones? Like Viagra?
Tim Ferriss: Like what?
Kevin Rose: Viagra.
Tim Ferriss: Viagra, it’s similar. Back pain.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: What’s the deal? Do people know why the back pain? They don’t know?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, they do. Yeah. I mean, they’re like—
Kevin Rose: Does it work?
Tim Ferriss: There are different types of phosphodiesterase, PDE inhibitors. I think I’m getting this right. I’m going to have to fact check this before this gets published. Basically, I want to say it’s like PDE5 or something like that.
Kevin Rose: So Huberman was talking about there’s potential benefit both on the cognitive side and also obviously the blood pressure side as well. It brings down your blood pressure a little bit and you don’t have to take much of this stuff. You can just take a little half of it.
Tim Ferriss: A little nibs.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just on so many things. I’m trying to—
Kevin Rose: But they work for you. Even though it hurts your lower back, you’re like a Superman.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, sure. I mean, I’ll have a huge boner but look like a UFC fighter roundhouse kicked me in the kidney. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Oh, because your kidneys, it pops out, like your back flares?
Tim Ferriss: No, it doesn’t pop out, but my low back hurts so much that I’m like, I can’t sit. I can’t stand.
Kevin Rose: I felt like your back muscles got hard or something and you got bulges on your kidneys now.
Tim Ferriss: No. No, I’m just saying it’s hard to enjoy the boner if you’re crippled with low back pain.
Kevin Rose: That’s fair. That’s fair. I’ve got to tell, for people that have never tried these, I don’t need these—but no, but hold on. This is The Random Show. We’re supposed to be able to talk about this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, sure.
Kevin Rose: When you try them for the first time, it is the weirdest shit.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, look—
Kevin Rose: Because you reach down and it’s not you. Because you’re like, “Whoa, how large?”
Tim Ferriss: This is where you have to be careful with augmentation, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because it’s like, for instance, if your eyes are going a little bit and then you wear glasses and you’re just like, “Holy, this is a different world.” How do you go back to black and white?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: You know what I mean? This is another reason why, sure, technically people might be able to use all of these peptides, and testosterone, and GH, and all these things and then just get off because you have post psychotherapy or whatever. But psychologically, people can get so addicted to the results because they are obvious if these things are used correctly. So it’s kind of like similarly with, this extends back to the AI conversation. It’s like, man, the siren song, the temptation to use AI for almost everything is so strong. I’m working on this new book right now and it’s like, I am not using it to write for me because if I do that, I’m done. It’s good. It’s too good.
Kevin Rose: Well, there’s even—
Tim Ferriss: I’m using it for version control. If somebody provides edits, I’m like, compare this to this and give me a graphic overview so I can print it out and look at it in color. It can do some tremendous things, but if you want to retain a function, a cognitive ability, be very careful about what you outsource.
Kevin Rose: Well, let me throw this out there for people that aren’t aware of it because most people won’t be. In the world of AI, what they do sometimes is they put these elegant pieces of code that kind of sit on top of the AI that makes it turbocharge the AI to do special things. They’re called harnesses. There is a new harness that came out recently just for writers.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God.
Kevin Rose: And so if you thought Claude or ChatGPT was really good at helping you write, wait until you throw this harness on top of it. There’s a company called Every out there and they had released a package for coders called Compound Engineering. You can just type in every compound engineering writer harness and it’ll show you the right one. You just install it into your ChatGPT or Claude and it will write the book for you. It’s going to be insane.
Yeah, you’re done.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t know if I’m done. I mean, I don’t think so because I mean, you’ve talked about this online and I think we’ve texted a little bit about it, but it’s like, what’s the moat? Reputation.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it is reputation.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So I don’t think I’m dead.
Kevin Rose: No, no, no.
Tim Ferriss: I think books are harder and harder to sell as a viable format of the media.
Kevin Rose: Well, it’s funny, when Tim was writing these books back in the early days, because I first met you when—
Tim Ferriss: 2008.
Kevin Rose: I met you the day your first book came out, The 4-Hour Workweek, came out at the party. Then you would tell me, “Hey, I’m working on this book,” and you would want to keep everything hush-hush. You wouldn’t want to tell anybody because you were like, “Okay, someone can front run me with this idea, with the ideas that I have in here, if any of this leaks out.” You were super guarded. That is more of the reality these days. I mean, if someone were to find out the next book you’re writing on and got a leaked copy of it, they can rewrite the entire thing and have it out in like 48 hours, published and printed.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, the defense is—
Kevin Rose: No, I know there’s still the moat of you.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m just saying that is why if you are writing about the realm of ideas, that is going to be a hard game to play. If you are writing about lived experience, like I did X, Y, and Z, then I think you have more defensibility. But I think, I’m not sure we talked about this, but I’ve just kind of come down to deciding that I’d rather write now. I’m also still half pregnant with this book. It’s like 80% of the way there.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. You’ve been working on this one for a long time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have. I mean, it’s taken—in a way, honestly, I’ve been waiting for the technology to catch up so that I could make the point that I wanted to make, which is, look guys, this is not a 1% problem. This is a 99% problem. And the tools are also available to 99%. I was like, if I published this five years ago, people would be like, “Oh, cry me a river. Tim Ferriss has too much inbound.” But now I’m like, how many—I’m like, “Okay, you’ve got what? You’ve got iMessage, WhatsApp, two email addresses, DMs.”
Kevin Rose: Slack channels, it’s like all of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Everybody’s fucking drowning. Everybody’s drowning. But I couldn’t have made that argument as well six years ago. As you know, robots are so good at imitating humans. Although I do test—my team will test things if I’m like if this is 100% AI written, it’s automatic X. It’s automatic archive. Coming back to—I would just rather write a book for 10,000 people than do short form videos for 10 million who forget it 10 seconds later.
Kevin Rose: Right, right, right.
Tim Ferriss: I want to share one piece of long form for people who can still digest it, which is hopefully many of you. This is a speech and I read the transcript. It is exceptional. It’s called “Personal Renewal.” It’s by John Gardner, G-A-R-D-N-E-R. I have no idea how I found this thing. It was delivered to McKinsey and Company in November 1990. How did I find this? I have no idea. But it is full of gems. You can find an audio version. Just search “Personal Renewal,” John Gardner, that’s G-A-R-D-N-E-R. It’s really about personal renewal, continual learning throughout life. It’s really, really good, but it does require a little bit of foreplay to get to the gems.
Here’s a really good one, and I’m quoting from the piece here. “Remember I mentioned earlier the myth that learning is for young people. I want to give you some examples. In a piece I wrote for Reader’s Digest not long ago, I gave what seemed to me a particularly interesting true example of renewal. The man in question was 53 years old. Most of his adult life had been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. In military service he received a battlefield injury that denied him the use of his left arm. And he was seized and held in captivity for five years. Later he held two government jobs, succeeding at neither.
“At 53 he was in prison—and not for the first time. There in prison, he decided to write a book, driven by Heaven knows what motive — boredom, the hope of gain, emotional release, creative impulse, who can say? And the book turned out to be one of the greatest ever written, a book that has enthralled the world for ever 350 years. The prisoner was Cervantes; the book: Don Quixote.”
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: What a fucking crazy story.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: There are many examples like this. “Personal Renewal” by John Gardner, just maybe print it out, single task, get away from notifications. I’ve read this one a few times now and I just get something from it every time.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing. Man makeup.
Tim Ferriss: Man makeup.
Kevin Rose: Do you wear makeup?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t wear makeup.
Kevin Rose: Never?
Tim Ferriss: Never.
Kevin Rose: On your TV show?
Tim Ferriss: My TV show? You mean when I was on actual TV?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, look, they’ve got makeup people who want to de-gloss my head. They’ll use oil patches and stuff.
Kevin Rose: On your podcast, you don’t do any little touch-ups?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t. I probably should, but I don’t.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no touch-ups.
Kevin Rose: So I was on a podcast a month ago, and I looked like hell. I had just flown into the city.
Tim Ferriss: You’re like Al Pacino after a bender.
Kevin Rose: No, seriously. I had just flown into the city and I slept like shit for some reason because I was at altitude where I was at, and I went on the screen. I get rosacea sometimes in my cheeks and stuff, and I just looked like shit. I was like, “Fuck, I need to do something in case—” Sorry, you can bleep that. I need to do something in case I just go on camera.
Tim Ferriss: Wait, what did we just bleep?
Kevin Rose: The F word.
Tim Ferriss: Come on. You had 30 of those in the last episode.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So I went into the store—okay. I’m going to say I went to Sephora. I went to fucking Sephora. I’d never been in that shit before ever in my life. And it was all ladies. I went in there and I didn’t want makeup. I was just like, “Hey, do you have something for when your cheeks get extra red, like rosacea and stuff like that? Is there anything you can get?”
Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “When I’m putting on my little black dress and my high heels.”
Kevin Rose: Exactly. I was decked out to the nines.
Tim Ferriss: Gussied up.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Gussied up. This is a horrible name for a product, but it’s Dr. Jart. It has something called Cicapair, which is, get this, it’s green. Okay? I’m like, “Why is it green?” Its color, when mixed with red, will even out the tone.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a complementary color.
Kevin Rose: And it’s SPF.
Tim Ferriss: Christmas neutralizer.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so watch this. We can’t get a Zoom here. There’s little dots right here. Now hold on. Watch the difference now. Hold on. I need a mirror or something.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot.
Kevin Rose: Is it a lot?
Tim Ferriss: I mean you—
Kevin Rose: Okay, watch. I’m going to just rub it in.
Tim Ferriss: All right. How are you doing? This is like an infomercial. You’re doing the one side. I love it. In comparison.
Kevin Rose: If we look now, do you notice how much less red it is in the other side? And it’s SPF too.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t.
Kevin Rose: You don’t?
Tim Ferriss: But it looks very well-moisturized.
Kevin Rose: It is very well-moisturized. It’s got an SPF. Anyway, my only point is that—
Tim Ferriss: Dr. Jart’s Cicapair, C-I-C-A-P-A-I-R, soothing color connecting treatment.
Kevin Rose: The reason why I bring this up is because I know a lot of people have rosacea, and it’s a shitty thing. For me, it’s like spicy foods or something, and you get extra red cheeks and all that. Let me tell the truth. I wanted something, this is like matte, so if you’re on camera or whatever, it won’t let you down.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you don’t look like you—
Kevin Rose: And it’s SPF.
Tim Ferriss: —took a bath in olive oil.
Kevin Rose: I feel for people that have problems that they don’t know how to fix. I was like, okay, rosacea a lot of people have. I might as well talk about it on the show.
Tim Ferriss: You look like you have fewer crow’s feet than I recall. Have you been doing Vampire?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I do Vampire facials and I do OneSkin.
Tim Ferriss: Vampire facials is PRP.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, PRP where they draw your blood.
Tim Ferriss: Still haven’t tried it. How often do you do that?
Kevin Rose: Oh, dude. I do it twice a year.
Tim Ferriss: Twice a year.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So they draw your blood. It’s the only reason—I mean, I still have wrinkles. If I scrunch up, you can still see them on the side, but it’s way better. They draw your blood, they spin it, they take out the platelet-rich plasma, and then they rub it on—well, first they microneedle your face. This is going to sound like a lot, but there was a discount package. They microneedle your face and then they rub it in. Then I swear after two weeks, the wrinkles just go away.
Tim Ferriss: Do you look like you got in a street fight for a couple of days?
Kevin Rose: You’re a little red. Yeah, that’s why you get this stuff. You’re a little red, and it works wonderful. And then OneSkin with the peptides is awesome. Again, I did put a small angel check into OneSkin because it worked so well for me, but that’s it.
Tim Ferriss: Man makeup. I want to mention two other things that I have really been enjoying, finding thought-provoking at least. One is a miniseries. I’m curious if you’ve seen it. It’s a four-part miniseries called The Dark Wizard. Have you seen this?
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So The Dark Wizard, which was first recommended to me by Andrew Huberman and then a couple of other folks recommended it, it’s about this wild, brilliant, but totally tormented artist and athlete named Dean Potter. Dean Potter, way back in the day, I’m going to get the timing wrong, but I want to say early ’90s, sometime in the ’90s, he was on the cover of Outside magazine, and this guy’s story was so captivating to me that I kept that issue of Outside magazine with this black and white photo of him. Very handsome-looking guy, super athletic, and he pioneered all these new approaches to rock climbing.
He also was one of the main, I would say, proselytizers of slack lining and then high lining, which is doing a slack line over a canyon. Just the scariest stuff.
Kevin Rose: With the big long poles and shit, right?
Tim Ferriss: No poles.
Kevin Rose: No poles.
Tim Ferriss: Just hands.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then he ended up wanting to push the boundaries of free soloing. But the problem is, as he roughly stated it was, well, when you’re free soloing, you always have to climb well within your limits. And he’s like, “I want to push my limits.” So he started doing something called free basing where he was combining free soloing with base jumping.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’ve heard that people do this.
Tim Ferriss: And this four-part series is insane and it’s incredibly well-produced. All of this archival footage, drawings and notes from Dean’s personal journals, all woven together. And there’s a lot of darkness. He struggled with a lot, many inner demons and depression. And on the flip side, he was just this absolute genius on so many different levels. So I found it to be a really, really thought-provoking watch. I actually binged. I started one at—I think each is an hour long, roughly an hour long. And I started one at 11:00 p.m. and my lady fell asleep in 20 minutes. It wasn’t really her jam and it was bedtime anyway. And I binged the entire series.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: I stayed up until three in the morning watching this stuff. I just couldn’t stop watching it.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit, that’s a strong recommendation. I’m going to check that out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It ties into a lot of current interests and also old demons of my own. So it brought up a lot for me and many people have enjoyed it. So The Dark Wizard, that was his nickname. And then there’s a book that people might not expect I would bring up. This is not a new book. This is a book by Studs Terkel. Talk about a good name. T-E-R-K-E-L, Studs Terkel. He won the Pulitzer Prize at one point, I think, for Working [Ed. note: Terkel won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War.]. I might be getting the title wrong. But the book that I was introduced to is called Hard Times: An Illustrated Oral History of the Great Depression. And it was introduced to me by a Brit of all things, a great guy named Ed Cooke, who I’m not sure if you know Ed Cooke.
Kevin Rose: I know Ed Cooke, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Total lunatic.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Awesome guy. One of the best and most famous memory competitors, formerly world champion of mastery of memory.
Kevin Rose: Super good person. I love that. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And he’s very good at coaching people to get incredibly good at memory competition. There was an entire book written about this called Moonwalking with Einstein. And he has a startup called MindMax, which is a learning app if people want to check it out. But this book, Hard Times: An Illustrated Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel contains many dozens of vignettes and profiles of people who went through the depression from the most destitute to the rich who lost everything to the jingle writers who actually had the most incredible explosion of creativity during that period. And they’re very bite-sized profiles.
The stories are told both in their own words and in the words of Studs, who’s trying to convey different perspectives on everything from these different vantage points. And it is a page-turner. It’s so well written, and it fleshes out the Depression into something very real and complex. It’s not just like one mom with her hungry kids sitting on a doorstep looking forlorn. There’s so many different angles to it. And I just feel like it’s one of the better and most unique depictions of history that I’ve ever come across.
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome. Is there Audible on that or no?
Tim Ferriss: I wouldn’t be surprised if there is. Hard Times, it’s very, very well written. And Ed told me, he’s like, “Hard Times is good, but if you like that, Working is incredible.” And Working, as I understand it, is kind of like Dirty Jobs before Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, but looking at all these different professions across the United States. But Hard Times is the one that I’ve been cracking. So if I have 15 minutes and I’m just killing time waiting for something, I’ll pull it up on my Kindle and I’ll read that because you’ll get through one or two profiles.
Kevin Rose: So I’ve been doing this in the sauna where I put on an audiobook and it’s my way to just crank through something. And I did something very similar, speaking of new books, and I’ve been trying to push myself in new directions of things I would normally never listen to. What is something that would never be on my radar and just give me a whole new perspective on what people are consuming media wise? And so my friend, Brit, she was like, “Hey, I’ve got a recommendation for you. There’s this whole genre of books that are big.” Apparently women in their mid-30s into their 40s love the genre. Have you heard of fairy porn?
Tim Ferriss: No. I don’t know what fairy porn is. Is this, what is it called? The Fourth Wing?
Kevin Rose: This is called A Court of Thorn and Roses. Have you heard of that book?
Tim Ferriss: No. No.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So I’m like, “Okay, I’ll buy it.” And I downloaded it on Audible. It’s damn good.
Tim Ferriss: Is it like dime store romance novels with Fabio?
Kevin Rose: No, no, no, it’s more sophisticated than that.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what they all say.
Kevin Rose: I never thought I would be listening to this shit.
Tim Ferriss: How many times does the word “throbbing” come up?
Kevin Rose: So far, maybe twice.
Tim Ferriss: “Manhood?” Times four.
Kevin Rose: No, but what’s different than the old, when you go to the grocery store, you see the dudes with the chiseled abs and everything, is they actually are taking these very sophisticated, almost like it’s fantasy. It’s like well-written fantasy. And then there’s a little bit of [whistle] thrown in there that everyone’s like, “Ooh, he did that.” I would never listen to this shit ever. But I will say it’s interesting because they had, it was only 30,000 five-star reviews.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Kevin Rose: I’m like, “How is this a genre I’ve just never heard of?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a lot. That is a lot.
Kevin Rose: So I’m trying to force myself to say, okay, once or twice a year, pick a genre that’s just—
Tim Ferriss: That’s great.
Kevin Rose: —completely different than you would ever expose yourself to and go deep. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that with any—
Tim Ferriss: I do this all the time just to find things that I would never read. Hard Times is a good example where I was just like, “Ed, give me a book that I would never find.” And he was like, “I’ve got one for you.” So I did bring up The Fourth Wing because this is one that was everywhere. I’m sure it has 100,000.
Kevin Rose: Let me see if you have a picture of it.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure it has 100,000 reviews on—it’s like that.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And basically I saw, again, early to mid, maybe 30- to 40-year-old women all over the place reading this book, and they seem to be businesswomen. And I was like, “What is going on?”
Kevin Rose: Yeah, the personal recommendation like this is professional.
Tim Ferriss: Why are they reading fantasy? Something doesn’t add up here.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And then not to diminish it, I’m sure they’re great books, but it’s like dragon porn. It’s like there is a porn aspect to the whole thing.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, there has to be.
Tim Ferriss: And what some people may not know, and I think I’m getting this right.
Kevin Rose: It’s not like porn. It’s not porn. It’s a romance. Well, I mean, yeah, there’s sex, but porn is very different. That’s not, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, it depends on what we’re talking about, but yeah. It’s not like gang bangs every five pages, but there’s still some pretty explicit stuff. What people may not realize, I am almost 100% sure I’m getting this right, but I’m not going to fact check it now on my phone. Do you know how Fifty Shades of Grey started?
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: It was fan fiction. It was Twilight series fan fiction. So somebody was writing an extension of within the Twilight world, her own fiction, super sexualized, and that turned into Fifty Shades of Grey.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wild.
Tim Ferriss: Isn’t that crazy?
Kevin Rose: That is insane.
Tim Ferriss: It is something like that. It may not be Twilight specifically, but it was fan fiction, fantasy that then got converted into its own franchise in the form of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever read that book?
Tim Ferriss: I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do the writing. I tried.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I never read it.
Tim Ferriss: All due respect to the author, I could not digest the prose, but what it demonstrated to me was the power of a simple premise. It’s just like you have—I mean, people are probably familiar with the series, but it’s like you have this whatever it is, what’s his name? Christian Grey, this billionaire rich guy with a sex dungeon and super explicit. And I remember a number of different pieces of coverage described it as mommy porn, for what that’s worth. But it impressed me. I tried to get through the prose, I couldn’t do it, but the power of a simple premise, it’s like how visceral and simple is your premise and concede. And honestly, that’s where, for instance, my third book, 4-Hour Chef, that’s where it failed. It tried to do too much. It was like three books in one. It was not a simple premise. It was very complicated.
Kevin Rose: Why do you see that failed? Because I felt like it was well received.
Tim Ferriss: It was well received. I mean, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It sold 120,000 copies the first week, but that was a function of my diehard audience who would take me at my word that it’s worth reading. But if you went blind, unfamiliar with me at all, to the, say, Amazon page, it tried to do too much. And I think this is true with presentations. If I’m talking to someone who’s going, for instance, I was just coaching someone who’s going on 60 Minutes and they wanted to talk about messaging. Or if I’m talking to somebody who’s got a TED Talk coming up and they’re asking for advice, my advice is always the same. I didn’t come up with this.
Somebody else gave it to me, which is presentations fail from too much information, not too little information. And I think that’s true with books too. It’s like, does this conjure a simple image in someone’s head immediately? And that is not easy to do while being differentiated. So Fifty Shades of Grey nailed it, completely nailed it. And that has turned this thing into a global phenomenon. Whereas this third book, which I’m still very proud of, I think it’s a great book, but it’s really three or four books combined into one. And to try to convey that to anyone in a paragraph is next to impossible.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, the same applies to so much in life though. I mean, even on the product side, of all the products that I’ve built over the years, it is—I watch entrepreneurs going to launch new consumer products or whatever it may be. The ones that boil the ocean and throw in every single feature and they’re like, “Oh, but wouldn’t it be great if it had this?” I’m like, “Yeah, maybe, someday.” But can you really distill down this idea to that one concept so that when you’re in that, I used to call it the crowded bar conversation, not the elevator pitch, but the crowded bar. If you want to say in two sentences what your thing does, can you get it out there where they say, “Oh, yeah, I’ll go check that out?” Oftentimes you can’t do it. The battle is cutting features out. This is what Steve Jobs was so good at. It’s like he could have added App Store on day one for the iPhone, but it was like he didn’t. He was like, “It’s going to do these 10 things really well and then slowly build on that base.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, if the V1 iPhone could get away with no copy paste, remember that?
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like, bro, talk about minimalist.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so true.
Tim Ferriss: And this is also part of the reason why, frankly, the book that I’m working on right now has taken so long, because I’m like, “It’s not ready just yet,” because the way that I try to explain it in the crowded bar test, there are ways I could probably do market analysis to get more comfortable or to confirm or disconfirm this concern maybe. But if I talk to, say, some of our friends who are super busy and I tell them it’s a book on saying “No” and focusing in a world of noise, how do you create systems for that? They’re like, “Fuck, I need that right now. Please send me the draft today. I don’t care if it’s rough.”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But for nine out of 10 people who are not one of our friends or one of the podcast guests who have been on, when I tell them that, I do not see the slight eye-opening and lean in. I don’t see it. They’re like, “Oh, interesting.” And I’m like, “Hmm.”
Kevin Rose: Is it because most people are looking for more things to say “Yes” to because they don’t have the opportunity to—
Tim Ferriss: Well, this is what I’m working on deducing. Is it the title? Maybe it’s the title. So I was just playing around with that yesterday. Is it the description where the promise is unclear? Is it the fact that it sounds perhaps negative instead of affirming, saying “No” versus something else? Because a third of the book actually is how to pick the one or two things that change everything to say “Yes” to. So it’s like, “Maybe the book positioning should be more focused on that.” It would require a very heavy lift on revamping a bunch of the positioning in the book or explanatory stuff in the book. But I am trying to learn from past mistakes. I don’t think this book tries to do too much. I don’t think that’s a problem. And everybody who actually reads it, a test reader, they’re like, “I was never bored. I would gift this book to my friends more than any of your other books.”
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So it’s working, but if people go to the Amazon page and the title and the description don’t work, it doesn’t matter, you’re dead. Right?
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: So that Fifty Shades of Grey genius, I want to get that right, which is part of the reason why I’m like, “I don’t need to publish a book. I didn’t take an advance,” which has its own drawbacks. I don’t have a gun to the head. I don’t have accountability to a publisher, which actually can be a bad thing because we have 20 different things we’re doing at any given time. It’s very easy to be like, “Eh, I’ll just push it off another six months. It’s fine.” And that’s actually not a great thing when it comes to writing books. So TPD, but that’ll get figured out. I feel pretty confident in that. My aim is to have the book done in the next eight weeks.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow. And so when you go from that to no publisher, how do you think about printing? How do you think about distribution? Are you going to do Authors Equity or these other independent—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m leaning towards Authors Equity. I’m a small investor in that company. I mean, not enough to—
Kevin Rose: People should know that’s James Clear’s from Atomic Habits.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, James Clear’s one of the largest investors. I mean, talk about a phenomenon, man. Holy shit. What is it? 25, 30 million copies sold. Nobody does that. In prescriptive nonfiction, nobody does that. I mean, James is a non-recurring phenomenon. Very nice guy, very smart guy. And he’s one of the largest investors in Authors Equity. Great team at Authors Equity. So I’m leaning towards doing something with them. I don’t know what the exact form will take. Do I do all formats? Do I do some formats? I’m not overly worried about that. I was just chatting with them the other day just to figure out what are the actual lead times if we’re going to do the dead tree format in addition to other things. I’ve thought about only doing Kindle and Audible, but I feel like this book—here’s a hot take.
Kevin Rose: Feels like a giftable book.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s a giftable book, but here’s the other hot take, is the more this become—I’m holding up my iPhone. The more these become a digital leash that is feeding you 24/7 distraction, the more I want to have a format that forces people to single task. And the only option for that right now, I suppose you could do it on a Kindle if people are using an actual Kindle device that is not internet connected for distraction, but print is a great way to single task.
Kevin Rose: Oh, I know.
Tim Ferriss: And this is a workbook. This is not a passive spectator book. If you put in the work, if you put four hours of work into this book, it should save you.
Kevin Rose: I hope it’s four.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you put four, let’s call it five. If you put five hours of work, inflation. If you put five hours of work into this book, it should save you 100 hours in the next year, if you’re a busy person, without question. And it just goes up from there. So we’ll see. But the goal is to be done in the next eight weeks.
Kevin Rose: What is the lead time, just out of curiosity, for someone looking to make an actual physical book? Is it three months, five months?
Tim Ferriss: It depends a lot on who you’re talking to. Some publishers—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. How big the first run is, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the size doesn’t matter as much as you might think if it’s a simple page layout, black and white or two color. I would say it’s still pretty slow. But there’s a lot that goes into it. If you’re going to get a polished book and you’re not just self-pubbing whatever comes off your laptop, if you’re going to have copy editors and professional layout and so on, there are things that make that easier. I’m sure AI could do a lot of page layout at this point. I’m sure people are developing harnesses that’ll help with that specifically. But if you’re looking to have—and I’m not sure how relevant this is to me at this point, honestly, in terms of retail distribution, I don’t know how much it matters in terms of market share at this point. Things are changing so quickly and have been changing so quickly. But if you really want the full traditional experience, I would say, from what you consider a finished book, but there’s still people who are going to do copy editing and everything else, probably a year.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, maybe more.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit, that’s slow.
Tim Ferriss: Now, there are cases where you can do a crash book where it’s like, okay, let’s just say—I mean, this is maybe not a lovely example, but it’s like Princess Diana dies, publisher wants to be first out of the gate. Can they get a book printed and out the door in three months? Yeah, they can. If they make it the top priority and everything else goes to the back of the line, yeah. If their primary distribution is in the US and they have printers in the US, a lot of publishers print overseas. So those are all factors that go into it. And part of me is like, “Man, once I’m done with this, I want it out ASAP. I don’t want to wait for a year.” So what does that mean? Do I not do print? Do I do some small print run?
Kevin Rose: It might be interesting to just do one print run ever.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Do I do publish on demand? You can get out the door quickly with POD and the quality has gone up a lot.
Kevin Rose: But the collectibility of a single run of 10,000 could be really interesting.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, yeah, I could do that. Who knows? Maybe I do that and then I’m like, “Hey, if you want the book, you can either get a hard copy now and there are 10,000 copies, or you can get it in a year, or you can get a different format.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Kevin Rose: That’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: I get excited about it. It’s a strong book. I feel very, very good about it. I wouldn’t put it out, otherwise. I cut it from, I think it was 870 pages down to 350. That is a lot of cutting.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot of cutting. So everything that is in the book right now has been rated by test readers and proofreaders, multiple test readers as an eight, nine, or 10 out of 10 in quality. Everything that remains is kind of cream of the crop.
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it should be strong.
Kevin Rose: I’m excited to check it out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we’ll see. Anything else we should talk about?
Kevin Rose: No, I think I’m good. I think I covered everything I wanted to cover. You know what? I’ll send out some of those invites. I can get more of those Instinct invites. Kevinrose.com newsletter over there, sign up and I will send a bunch out when this goes live.
Tim Ferriss: Sweet. And then just to add to the dueling email newsletters.
Kevin Rose: You already mentioned yours earlier, bitch.
Tim Ferriss: I know I’m doing tim.blog/friday. I don’t even know if I’m pointing to the right camera.
Kevin Rose: No, your newsletter is great.
Tim Ferriss: 5-Bullet Friday.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, there’s five bullets. The kevinrose.com newsletter is slightly longer, a little bit more information dense, probably more takeaways there. So just kevinrose.com.
Tim Ferriss: Also includes a free nude.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I’ll include one foot picture with every new subscriber.
Tim Ferriss: “Please join my OnlyFans.” I’m going to make one more recommendation, which is, I’m not going to say anti-AI, but it’s a nice counterbalance. I don’t know if he wants credits. I’m not going to mention our friend who sent this to us, but there is a short article called “Please Use AI” by someone called Shawn Smucker, S-M-U-C-K-E-R, “Please Use AI.” And it’s a beautiful piece about preserving the beauty and integrity of human interaction and why you should not always strive for optimizing efficiency with LLMs and computers. So check it out. “Please Use AI” by Shawn, that’s S-H-A-W-N, Smucker. It’s really, really good. I’ve been sending that to different friends of mine. Because I put it in the newsletter not too long ago, maybe two months ago, and I mentioned that the “Please Use AI” piece reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, passage that is about telling his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope.
So this is Kurt Vonnegut, wrote Breakfast of Champions and tons of other classics. So this is Kurt. She says, “Well, you’re not a poor man. Why don’t you go online and buy 100 envelopes and put them in the closet?” And so I pretend not to hear her and go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I’m going to meet a lot of people and see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by and I give them the thumbs up and ask them what kind of dog that is. And I don’t know. The moral of the story is we’re here on Earth to fart around and don’t let anybody tell you different. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. What the computer people don’t realize or they don’t care is we’re dancing animals. So check out “Please Use AI” by Shawn Smucker.
Kevin Rose: I love that.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a good one.
Kevin Rose: I’m actually very, very, very bullish on this idea that AI will make almost everything that we need to do in terms of the tactical day-to-day stuff just almost handled to the extent to where we can get together in person, in real life, hang out, hopefully have more leisure time. I think there will—like with everything, we’ve seen them as alcohol in the last decade. Alcohol consumption’s at an all time low right now. There’s always a pendulum that swings back the other way.
Tim Ferriss: You got the ketamine going the other direction, but yeah.
Kevin Rose: No doubt. But we see this, social media, oh, now it’s bad for us. People are wanting less of that.
Tim Ferriss: Now, here’s something I didn’t think of. Could the decline in alcohol consumption actually be reflective of people sitting at home and not socializing outside?
Kevin Rose: That, I don’t know. I love alcohol.
Tim Ferriss: Do you know what I mean though?
Kevin Rose: I have no idea.
Tim Ferriss: But you know what I’m talking about, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It could actually correlate to people spending more time at home on their computers and their phones. What I would say is with the AI stuff, I hope it results in people having more in-person interactions. I do think that people are going to feel the poison. The dose makes the poison. I think they’ll feel that it’s not good for them in a very visceral, deep way that has not perhaps been as obvious in the last five years minus AI. And I’m not the first person to observe this, it’s like if interacting with a digital companion is easier than interacting with your actual partner, if they’re always supportive and saying the right things and they’re not getting dysregulated and freaking out like all humans do, if kids find their customized LLM a better parent easier to deal with because it eliminates some of the messiness of unpredictable human interactions, what are the consequences of that?
The leisure time, I hope that’s true. I have not ever—there have been so many technologies with that promise, the Industrial Revolution, we can go through a long list and I have not yet seen it. I don’t know anyone who’s like, “I used AI to free up a bunch of free time that I’m now using for kite boarding and knitting.” They’re like, “I was doing two projects, but now I can do 10 projects.” Or—
Kevin Rose: Something always fills the gap, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Something’s always going to fill the gap and you have to be very selective about what’s going to fill that gap. But I will say for me, the daily grind of email and a lot of those other things, now that I have these and it’s going to be like, “Hey, Kevin, you need to pay attention to this.” I don’t have to check all the other spam and all the other crap that’s coming in there. It has freed up time. Now, am I using it to AI code then? Yes, I am. I’m going right back in. But in theory, I could be doing woodworking or some other thing.
Tim Ferriss: The woodworking.
Kevin Rose: Japanese woodworking.
Tim Ferriss: The woodworking comes up every nine months.
Kevin Rose: I love Japanese woodworking. You know Japanese joinery is amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I know. Your Japanese woodworking is like my Jean-Claude Van Damme splits. I’m like, someday.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to get there.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no doubt.
Tim Ferriss: Someday between two chairs, I’m going to be doing splits. It’s like, “Yeah, we’ll see with those hips.” Not getting any younger.
Kevin Rose: Should we have a competition?
Tim Ferriss: For which one?
Kevin Rose: Who can do the splits first.
Tim Ferriss: I thought it was going to be if you can get to Japanese woodworking before I get to the splits.
Kevin Rose: No, no, no, I’ve been going to StretchLab. I’ve been having people stretch me out. I’ll be able to do the splits—the Van Damme splits—within six months.
Tim Ferriss: Within six months?
Kevin Rose: Oh, 100%.
Tim Ferriss: How much you want to bet?
Kevin Rose: You want to do $500 for charity?
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Charity of my choice.
Tim Ferriss: Well, hold on. First of all, this is just a bet about whether Kevin does something in six months.
Kevin Rose: The splits.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m out of the picture.
Kevin Rose: Why are you out of the picture?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m just saying. You’re—
Kevin Rose: Oh, you don’t want to do the splits?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t care that much about it, frankly.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But if you’re saying you’re going to get to Jean-Claude Van Damme splits in six months, I’m like, “I will take the other side of that bet.”
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: 500 bucks to charity?
Kevin Rose: To charity. A charity of your choice or mine. So either brain stim or Zen meditation is where it’s going.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Yeah. Something apolitical, not bullshit.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So, just for clarity, you’re saying you’re going to be able to do Jean-Claude Van Damme splits between two chairs in six months.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So just as a reminder, just so I have this correct, one leg on one chair, the other on the other chair, hovering in the air.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a straight—
Kevin Rose: Do I have to be a full straight line?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, you can have like—
Kevin Rose: Like an inch and a half.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, inch and a half.
Kevin Rose: Okay. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: You’re going to do that in six months.
Kevin Rose: But do I have to hold myself up? Is that hard to do? I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you have to be stupidly strong in your adductors. Otherwise, it just tears your legs out like chicken legs. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: We’re going to do this live on the podcast. I’m going to rip my groin and I’ll be in a wheelchair for six months for 500 bucks.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure. On that note, folks, another Random Show. Kev Kev, great to see you.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ll put stuff in the show notes. God knows. Sorry to my post-production team—
Kevin Rose: Lots of supplements.
Tim Ferriss: —for all the things that you’re going to need to put in, but tim.blog/podcast for people who want to check it out.
Kevin Rose: Kevinrose.com. It’s a great newsletter.
Tim Ferriss: There you go. All right. Thanks for tuning in, guys. See you.
Kevin Rose: See you.
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2026-10-09 22:24:27
In this edition of The Random Show, I reunite with Kevin in L.A. to talk AI super assistants that run your life over text message, agentic shopping, beta-alanine for climbing endurance, walnuts and sperm quality, dream engineering and anesthesia dreams, boner pills, man makeup, The Dark Wizard, my upcoming book, a Jean-Claude Van Damme splits bet, and much more.
Please enjoy!
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2026-10-04 03:31:07
Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode on how to simplify your life. It features wisdom and advice from Chip Conley, Greg McKeown, David Allen, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Oliver Burkeman.
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CHIP CONLEY
Hi, I’m Chip Conley, the founder and executive chair of MEA, and also formerly the modern elder of Airbnb and the founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre, the second largest boutique hotel company in the US.
Tim asked me to talk about simplifying life. My God, I don’t know why he would ask me because I tend to complicate my life, but I can say that I’ve had two experiences in my life where my health forced me to simplify my life. And then I could—I learned some new tools and practices. So let me, let me give a little storytelling. When I was in my late 40s, I had this boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, which means joy of life, that I’d started in San Francisco.
Ultimately, we had 52 hotels around California. We were the second largest boutique hotelier in the US. But in my late 40s, my life was really complicated. We were going through the dot-com bust and 9/11, and then we were going through the Great Recession, and I didn’t want to be doing this anymore. And I ended up having an NDE, a near-death experience. And NDE happened because I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.
So I was giving a speech on stage in St. Louis and I went flatline. And I ended up in the hospital for three days because they were trying to figure out what went wrong. Yeah, why did I go flatline nine times over 90 minutes? Bottom line was that experience woke me up. The hotelier needed a wake-up call. And the wake-up call was this. I had started that company because I wanted creativity and freedom.
But with 3,500 employees and going through our second once-in-a-lifetime downturn in the same decade, I realized that the identity that I was attached to—being the founder and CEO and the VIP status I had—it was less important to me than my health. And while it wasn’t—I didn’t have a heart attack. It was an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. It might as well have been a heart attack because I was living my life that was a very complicated life.
And so I decided to do something that I call mindful decoupling. Mindful decoupling. This is not unconscious or conscious uncoupling. This is not a Gwyneth Paltrow thing. Mindful decoupling means I said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next, but I know I’m not supposed to do this anymore. I don’t know what my next identity is going to be, but I know that the identity that I have been so reliant upon, the VIP status, and now I may be a PIP, a previously important person. I know that that is what I need to move toward. I need to move toward this fertile ground, this chrysalis space.”
You know, between caterpillar and butterfly, there is a chrysalis. In the chrysalis, the transformation happens. And what I learned by selling my company at the bottom of the Great Recession, by actually changing a lot of my habits and even changing friendships and ending a romantic relationship that wasn’t working anymore, but I wasn’t willing to leave it because I felt like it was my life preserver.
I was holding on to it at a difficult time. I made space in my life. And what I wanted to say is if you are a talented person, create space in your life, especially in midlife. I have become sort of an expert on midlife. And midlife is where we actually have to let go of who we’ve been in order to allow something else to emerge. But in the meantime, in between, the decoupling that has to happen is you have to be willing to let go of the identity and the roles in order for something new to emerge.
I spent two years from age 50 to 52 in what I would call, or Mary Catherine Bateson, Margaret Mead’s daughter, would call the midlife atrium. So what we know about an atrium is that an atrium is a very simple space. An atrium has light and air and all kinds of beauty that allows you to see what’s going to actually emerge from that space. During—between age [unclear], I spent a lot of time in a hammock in my backyard.
I did a lot of reading. I got really curious. Curious—curiosity is not something you do when you’re really busy. So I got curious about hot springs. So I went around the world exploring hot springs and learning about the geothermal properties of hot springs. I got interested in emotions because when I was struggling through my emotions in my late 40s, I didn’t feel like I was emotionally fluent. And ultimately I wrote a book called Emotional Equations, which became a New York Times bestseller.
But the thing that was the most fun was I decided I wanted to go around the world and become the world’s leading expert on festivals. I was the first board member of Burning Man. Who knew Burning Man had a board? But the six founders of Burning Man came to me and said, “Chip, we’re going to take our non—our for-profit and turn it into a nonprofit. We want you to be part of the board.” So I spent two years, you know, going around the world.
I went to 36 festivals in 16 countries just in one year. I brought Tim, Tim Ferriss, to my 50th birthday party at Burning Man. And I learned an awful lot about the cultural curiosity that happens in festivals around the world. And then at age 52, in the midst of all that, I got asked by the three founders of Airbnb, a company nobody had heard of, but was also based in San Francisco like I was, to join them.
And so I created this space, I simplified my life. I went out and had fun. I got curious. And out of that fertile ground, that good soil, came this Airbnb opportunity, which was quite beautiful. I loved it. And I spent seven and a half years there helping the founders of Airbnb turn that little tech startup into the world’s most valuable hospitality company. So that’s one experience about simplifying life. And from that simplified life, something beautiful grew.
The more recent experience that I’m going to talk about, I talked with Tim about it in 2019 when I was on his show. Tim surprised me. He showed up in Austin and we were going to have lunch before we did the show. And I was talking about the fact that I had found out I had cancer, prostate cancer. At that point, it was stage one. And we talked a lot about it on the show. So over the course of the last seven years, since that time, seven and a half years, my cancer’s moved from stage one to stage two to stage three.
And I have learned that I’ve done what I’ve always done. I’ve made my life more complicated, but it’s not so much just being complicated. It’s like I have such a sense of calling in what I’m doing that I take on a lot. And when I have the sense—I’m now at stage three with my cancer—I have this thing called holy urgency.
I call it holy urgency. The sense like I have a calling and I’m supposed to pursue it because I don’t know how much time I have left. But it actually makes me a little bit manic. And the thing I’m learning right now is, how do I turn manic into magic? It’s just changing one letter to go from manic to magic. And so the kinds of things I’m doing to simplify my life, to try to actually be more magical in my approach to my calling: Number one is I do a Sunday sabbatical as much as I can.
I try to take Sundays off. And I try to do that, and I try to actually not look at my—I go offline for the day. And I do that partly because it’s great for my nervous system. It’s great for my creativity. It gives me time to meditate for an extended time. It gives me time to take long walks.
I’m also doing something this coming February that I’m really excited about. I call it the month I died. You know, I think one of the things that’s really interesting about our lives is we do a very poor job of telling people how much we love them while they’re living.
At the funeral, we do the eulogies, but we don’t do that while we’re living. And so I call this the social eulogy. So in February, I’m going to take the whole month off. Sabbatical, but I’m gonna do it in a sort of a radical kind of way. I’m gonna actually do the following. I’m gonna act—I’m gonna wake up one day, the first day of February, and say, “Who am I?” And my real name, you know, on my passport is Steve, and chip off the old block from Steve Jr. I am gonna be Steve for the month.
I have nothing on my calendar. I’m not gonna use my phone. I’m gonna have a burner phone. I am gonna simplify my life by not checking email for the whole month. I am going to just almost disappear. But what I’m going to do before I actually take this month off, that month off where no one will know where I am except for a couple of friends in case there’s an emergency—is, and I have no idea where I’m going to be, by the way. I’m going to wake up and just say, like, “Where do I want to be?” But what I’m going to do is I’m going to do these social eulogies.
I’m going to simplify my social life down to having three social eulogies. One in San Francisco, I have a lot of friends. One in Santa Fe, where MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, has a campus and I have a lot of friends. And the last one in Baja, where MEA also has another campus, where I have groups of friends. And with small groups of friends, we’re gonna actually come together, have a dinner, and we’re gonna give the eulogy for each other that we would give if we were to die tomorrow. Because when you have stage three cancer, and I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna live, I wanna hear that while I’m still living.
Because one of the things that’s beautiful about the experience I had when I was 47 years old and I had my flatline experience is what I experienced was I saw birds. During my time in that liminal space between life and death, I was in this 40-foot tall ceilinged living room and I had the capacity and ability to fly. And there were all these small birds in there and I could talk bird talk and they could talk to me.
And so they were saying to me, “Slow down. You can’t see beauty [unclear] awe unless you slow down.” So my life today in terms of simplifying my life is learning how to fuse or alchemize slowing down with holy urgency. Slowing down because often when I slow down, I have my best ideas. I have my best conversations. I feel a sense of spaciousness.
I do love my Sundays. I love my silent retreats that I do, often with MEA at one of our MEA campuses. Um, but I also have that holy urgency, that sense of purpose, that sense that what I’m supposed to do in my—with my life, I’m doing, and I feel very passionately about it. Um, so my biggest, uh, lesson in life right now is, how do you alchemize two things that sound opposites?
Slow down, holy urgency. And most importantly, I think what’s true of many people as they get closer to death—and Laura Carstensen at Stanford has proven this at the Stanford Center on Longevity—is the less perceived time you have left in your life, the more you focus on what’s important. You don’t focus on the future or the past, you focus on the present moment. And in focusing on the present moment, you often are happier. So how could you go out and focus on the present moment? How could you go out and get curious and create the space for something to emerge? I hope this was helpful.
Simplifying is something that is really bounded in wisdom. MEA is the world’s first midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping people in midlife get wiser. And the difference between knowledge and wisdom is knowledge is something you accumulate, you add. Wisdom is something you distill, you simplify. It’s like the difference between a plus sign and a division sign and the square root of something. So simplification is what wisdom is all about. Thanks so much, Tim, for letting me share this and wishing you all the best.
GREG MCKEOWN
Tim Ferriss: I write very long-winded books and I’ve done them over a long period of time. So every once in a while, I get quoted and I feel lost. So if that happens, let me know. I have everything in front of me. Could you talk about the Endowment Effect and how you turn around questions people might ask themselves about certain things, whether that is something they own or an opportunity that gets presented to them? I think this is really important.
Greg McKeown: Well, let’s use a metaphor to get to the Endowment Effect. Our closet is a pretty good metaphor for the problem and what to do about it. So for a lot of people listening, even, as you say, they don’t feel incredibly successful financially, incredibly successful in all the things in their life. Right. They probably still have more things in their closet than they actually can use usefully. It’s a bit cluttered. Maybe it’s a lot more than a bit cluttered.
I talked to somebody not too long ago and they said, “Oh, Greg, my closet – you’ve identified the pain point.” They said, “I have my closet organized by decade.” So they had organized it. I said, “You don’t have a closet, you have a museum.” They have the ‘70s and the ‘80s. She’s not using any of these things. She just has them. That’s an organized version of the problem, which is we just have so much stuff. Now that is true in the physical stuff. It’s literally true in the closet. But in the closet of our lives, it is equally true.
Now just staying with this metaphor for a moment, almost everybody has had a moment where they said, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to organize my closet.” They begin the process and they take an item off the shelf, off the floor, and they say, “It’s time to just get rid of this item.”
In the moment of picking it up and reflecting on it, as if to give it away, something mysterious, almost magical seems to happen to many of us, which is that in that moment, we think, “I’m not sure I want to get rid of it. I can use it some time in the future. So-and-so give it to me.” Something somehow in the act of giving it away, it’s harder to give it away than it was before we picked it up to give it away.
So what’s going on? It turns out there’s a heuristic, a brain heuristic pre-disposition that we have to all physical objects in our life and also all of the opportunities that we have in our life too. It is this – we value things more because we have them. That’s a good thing in certain situations. That’s why essentially owning a home is generally a good thing. People look after the home better.
It explains the phenomenon of why nobody in the history of the whole world has washed their own rental car. It’s a positive phenomenon until and unless we over-value something that we really ought not to have in the closet at all. It ought to go. It is actually not useful to us. It’s not valuable to us, but we are overvaluing it and therefore keeping it. So it’s over-valuing because we own it or it’s endowed to us.
So in our life, that is an incredibly real problem. I’ll give you an illustration. It’s not in the book but it’s something that happened to me that really hit a chord. It happened when I was staring at myself in the mirror dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper outfit.
Tim Ferriss: Where all good epiphanies start.
Greg McKeown: And I’m looking at myself and I realize two things. I realize that I have been thinking of this moment in some small degree for 30 years. This is true. I’m standing there staring. I’m in the Halloween store. This is not a cheap suit that I’m trying on. I remember that this goes back to like when I’m 10 years old. Maybe Return of the Jedi had come out or one of the Star Wars movies.
One of my older brothers had said to me in passing but with quite a lot of enthusiasm, “Wouldn’t it be a great to own a stormtrooper outfit just like from the movies, like the real thing?” Somehow, that got lodged in me, “That’s an idea. That’s something you should pursue. That would be so cool. My older brother thinks so, so it must be so.”
Somehow in the back of my mind, there it lives unquestioned for 30 years. Finally, I’m in the store thinking about whether to buy this. In that moment, I actually did have a eureka moment, which was: “There is no part of me that wants this. It’s stayed with me, but my 40-year old self doesn’t need this. This is ridiculous. Why are you in this suit right now?” I was able to sort of separate myself from the moment. That’s exactly what I’m advocating here.
I’m saying that for a lot of us, we have a lot of – it became a shortcut phrase. My wife will say it sometimes to me now: “Is that a stormtrooper that you’re pursuing? Is that a stormtrooper opportunity?” You used to think this was the thing, but you’re pursuing it because you caught on to it. You feel a sense of this Endowment Effect, this sense of, “It’s my opportunity. It’s my thing. It’s my goal. It’s not serving me anymore.”
I think a lot of people have a lot of stormtroopers in their life. So it’s not about the closet. It’s not about the stormtrooper outfit. It’s about the stuff that really we need to get past and let go so that we can pursue the right things now, not just the things we are pursuing because at one time, we wanted to pursue them or one time, they came into our life.
Tim Ferriss: And it seems like there are a number of ways to identify these, whether they’re stormtroopers or items, opportunities that we are endowing with greater value because we have them. We either own them or are being presented with them, right? You can take let’s just say that sweater from Aunt Mildred or whatever it is. Rather than asking, “How much do I value this item?” You turn it around and ask, “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” That turnaround seems really important to me.
Or in the case of opportunities – and I’m quoting directly from you here – “How will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity?” instead of that, “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?” That strikes me as a very powerful reframe. I think it was Andy Grove at Intel who also used this. There are many other business examples, but, “If we were not already in this line of business, how much would we pay to pursue it or would we pursue it in the first place?” as a way of pruning activities and conserving resources so they could be applied to the most important things.
Greg McKeown: Yes. The idea is to trick your brain, putting it in the position where you don’t own the thing, where you don’t have the opportunity. You have to reflect on it fresh. You have to say, “Starting now, do I want this thing now? How hard would I go after this now if I didn’t own it, if I didn’t have it.” It helps us to evaluate things without this inflation of the fact that we own it, which is, of course, the Endowment Effect.
DAVID ALLEN
Tim Ferriss: What are the first questions you ask, or exercises you do, when you sit down with high-functioning but, nonetheless, overwhelmed people, to work with them? What are some of the first things that you do with them?
David Allen: Well, aside from establishing rapport.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
David Allen: Which is, “Hi,” and, “Why did you bring me in here? And what is your presenting issue, as best you can describe it?” And, “Here’s a little bit about who I am and kind of what we’re going to do.” But ideally, and over the years, I discovered the less I tell people about what we’re going to do, the better. You know, “Surprise.”
So if I just walked in cold, the tabula rasa here is, first thing I would do, Tim, with you, would be, “Let’s make sure you have an in-tray.” A physical in-tray. We need some place to throw stuff until we can make decisions about what it means and what you’re going to do about it. But we need to collect a bunch of stuff first.
So that’s what we’re going to do first is get some sort of a material version of collection, or “capturing” stuff that has people’s attention. So we just get a big stack of printer paper, a favorite pen or pencil, sit them down and say, “Okay. What’s on your mind? What has your attention?” “Oh, I need cat food. Oh, I need a life. Oh, I need a new vice president of marketing. Oh, our next vacation is coming up. Oh God, my cell phone just crapped out. The printer broke.” Yada yada.
And we literally start writing, they write, each one of those items that has their attention on a separate piece of paper, and they toss that into their in-tray. You’d be surprised by, first of all, how many people don’t have an in-tray. Or if they do have one, it’s petrified because it’s just been sitting there with crap in it for weeks.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
David Allen: We need to have some sort of clear space to just collect all that stuff to begin with. That process, Tim, takes, usually, in my experience over all these years, for the mid- to senior level professional that we actually coach with this process, it takes one to six hours, just to capture what has their attention. Not to organize it. Not to prioritize it. Not to make decisions about it. Just to identify it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s so impressive and horrifying at the same time. And I was doing prep for this conversation, I found one paragraph that struck me as important that’s related to this, I think, in some capacity. This is from an older piece in Wired, and it reads as the following.
At his seminar, Allen asks the audience to try to capture all their stuff by writing a list, and at the end of a few minutes he tells us to look at the list and think about the way it makes us feel. He guesses that our feelings include a mixture of grief and relief. The relief, he suggests, comes from the simple fact of making the list. But where does the grief come from?
And this is the quote that really caught my attention.
“These items represent agreements you haven’t kept with yourself,” Allen says. “What happens when you break an agreement with yourself is that your self-esteem plummets.”
Could you speak to this a bit? Because I would imagine a lot of folks would say, “I feel guilt, perhaps, about all of the things I haven’t done for myself or for other people.” But this grief and agreements that you haven’t kept with yourself struck me as important, and at least got my attention. Could you speak to that?
David Allen: Well, I’m going to reverse engineer a little bit and come back to the fact that your breaking of the agreement is because you’re keeping track of it in your head, and where you keep track of that has no sense of past or future. So that part of you, that little subliminal part of you, thinks you should be buying cat food 24 hours a day, or hiring a vice president 24 hours a day. That’s why it wakes you up at 3:00 in the morning. “Oh, shit, cat food. What am I going to do?” Because that thing has no sense of past or future.
So because it doesn’t, you can’t do it all. You can’t do more than one thing at a time. And so there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing all of that all the time. So talk about a ton of broken agreements. But you don’t have to finish the thing to keep your agreement. You do need to get it out of your head.
See, agreements—and this is one of the things I learned back in the old personal growth days. Agreements, there’s an automatic price you pay when you break an agreement, is you disintegrate trust, either with other people or with yourself, or both. So if you don’t want to have a broken agreement, you have three options. One is don’t make the agreement, called “No, not going to do that.” Move it to someday, maybe, or something. Keep the agreement. Go buy the cat food. Go hire the VP. Go finish the thing. Or, most importantly for most people, is renegotiate the agreement.
If I made an appointment today, for instance, Tim, as people may hear ambient noise out there. There’s construction going on. If that was too loud, I would probably have to try to renegotiate and reschedule this talk with you. And then I don’t have a broken agreement if I don’t do it, because we’ve renegotiated it.
But you can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing. So most people have just made so many more agreements than they’re aware of. So all we do in our coaching is get people aware of, “What are all the agreements you’ve made? What are all the would-, could-, should-, need-tos, ought-tos?”
And that’s one of the reasons people feel good when they make a list is they look at it and go, “Well, gee, I can’t do all this right now.” No kidding, right? And so it comes back to externalizing stuff out of your head. That’s why it’s so critical to do that. And most people, I don’t think have really understood or certainly managed themselves with an understanding of that dynamic.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Tim Ferriss: When you do say an integrity check, and I had read that when Rayya was sick, for instance, you began deleting or archiving emails without responding as a bit of a treat to yourself.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Deleting. Not archiving, deleting.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Deleting, goodbye. When you say now, check in with yourself, and decide to say no to something—let’s just, to make it easier, make it concrete, via email, you get an invitation from a friend you do actually really like with something that could plausibly advance your career or be fun, but you check in with yourself and it’s like, “Nope, this isn’t a yes.” How do you phrase your nos or declines? Do you have any particular go-to language that you’d like to use?
Elizabeth Gilbert: I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not easy. I didn’t want to have any illusions for anybody that this is simple. And the closer the relationship, the harder it is. The closer and more intimately I’m involved with somebody, the more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me to tell the truth. That feels like it should be—there’s a paradox, the people you love the most should be the people that you are able to be the most honest with. Well no, because they’re the people who you want to hurt the least. Right? That’s where it’s really, really hard.
There’s a couple layers of it, right? So if it’s somebody—I now treat my inbox like it’s my home because I think it’s an extension of my home. So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn’t say how they got a key and asks for something, I delete that email. I will delete that email even if they are a producer for Good Morning America. You know, I’m just like, “I didn’t invite you in. There are proper channels, you know what they are. I don’t know how you got my personal email,” and I just, I just delete it. If I feel a sense in my sternum of offense, of feeling like this person has taken a liberty, I don’t believe that I owe them anything. I don’t believe that I owe them anything any more than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn’t know eating breakfast, I wouldn’t believe that I owed them to make them a cup of coffee. I’d be like, “Get out of my house. You’re not supposed to be here.” I don’t think I even owe them—I don’t even think I owe them a polite response. I owe them nothing. I didn’t ask you to come into my house, I don’t owe you anything.
That’s the easiest. Those are the ones that are easy and I now treat myself to doing that. I mean, I do that every day. I clear my inbox out very quickly that way. Then I’m entertained when they come back later and they’re like, “Just circling back,” and I’m like, “Yeah, just deleting you again.” Circle back as many times do you want, you are not coming in. So that’s simple.
Tim Ferriss: Just bumping this up because I know you—
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yeah, I’m just bumping you back—it’s like whack-a-moles. It’s like, I can do this all day. Delete, delete, delete. If it’s somebody who I care about, if it’s something that I’m interested in but I’m just not going to do it because I don’t want to, I will write back and say, “Thank you so much and I’m really honored that you invited me to this, but I’m not going to be able to do this at this time.” And I don’t feel the need to give a reason. I think a simple no is really, really good and sometimes the reason it’s good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator, as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice. So it won’t matter what you give as an explanation because they can come back and be like, “Well we can do it by audio,” you know? Or we can do, “Oh, well we can do it a different weekend.” Just no.
I learned a lot about this from my teacher Byron Katie, who teaches an amazing thing called The School for The Work. That’s a whole, she’s a whole ‘nother being who’s not at all living by the rules.
Tim Ferriss: She’s extraterrestrial, for sure.
Elizabeth Gilbert: She is extraterrestrial. She is the only fully enlightened human being I believe I have ever met. As such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and an honest no to people.
Tim Ferriss: Just to underscore that, because I did an in-person training with her. I mean, literally no hesitation—
Elizabeth Gilbert: None.
Tim Ferriss: No struggle, no conflict.
Elizabeth Gilbert: None.
Tim Ferriss: It’s bizarre and just mesmerizing to watch.
Elizabeth Gilbert: And she loves you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Elizabeth Gilbert: And she loves you. There’s also no hostility.
Tim Ferriss: No offense, no hostility—
Elizabeth Gilbert: I remember seeing somebody come up to her, somebody came up to her at an event, handed her a book that they’d written, which people do to me all the time too. So I really marveled at this and they said, “I wrote this and I want to share it with you,” and she said, “Oh, sweetheart, I’m never going to read that.” True. It’s just true. “I’m never going to read that.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know you could say that.” Right? It’s so—that’s amazing and she said it so lovingly like, “Oh. Oh no, I have no interest in reading that.”
She teaches—I don’t know if you did, when you took her training, did you do where she teaches a simple no and she does training on how to give a simple no?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think we actually spent much time on that. So I would love to hear you say more. We worked on the emotional one-pages and the turnarounds.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yeah, the turnarounds.
Tim Ferriss: We did a lot on the turnarounds, which is probably, we could do a whole episode just on that.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Everybody look up Byron Katie, she’s amazing. And if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take her nine-day School for The Work, it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself.
Tim Ferriss: Oh wow.
Elizabeth Gilbert: I say that quite simply. But she has a whole day in the nine-day School for The Work, which is about the simple no. The simple note is ways to say no. It always begins with, “Thank you,” and there’s never a “But,” because she feels that the word but is very cruel. It’s just an “And.” So it’s “Thank you” and “No.” That’s it, that’s a simple no. Then if they come back, you can say—
Tim Ferriss: Well, hold on, just to pause for a second. Is that literally the phrasing or is it just—
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yes. “Thank you” and “No.” Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. It’s a simple no. It still makes my stomach, because I’m like, “Oh, my God, you can’t just do that. You’ve got to give, you’ve got to like do the dance,” and she’s like, “You don’t have to do the dance.” And she’s the one who taught me, if the person is a good enough manipulator, it doesn’t matter what you bring, they’re going to manipulate it. Right? And the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives—in the jiu jitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back at you. They can say you’re being incredibly selfish and you can say, “I hear that and you might be right about that.” That’s another one. She always says, “You might be right about that. You might be right about that.” And no. And you just keep adding “and no” after the statement. So then there’s, you know, but you know, “I really—I need you to do this. I’m desperate,” and you say, “I see that, I see your desperation, and no.”
One other thing she’ll add is you can say, “If I change my mind about this, I’ll let you know. And no.” That’s been a game-changer for me. I just did one last week. Somebody who I have a professional relationship said, “I want you to do this one-hour video interview to promote this thing that I’m doing.” Old Liz would have thought, “I owe her that because she did this other thing for me that time.” I checked in with my inner compass and I was like, “Nothing in me wants to do this.” So I just wrote back to her, I said, “I’m sorry and I’m not going to be able to do this at this time,” and she wrote back and pushed in and said, “Oh, let me clarify. I wasn’t clear about why we need it. We really need it because right now, it’s really hard for us to sell things because we don’t have, because of COVID-19 and it’s just—you know, that’s why we need it.” I wrote back and said, “I hear you and I understand you and no.” And it goes away. They don’t tend to come back a third time.
It really does just stop. And let it sit at the no. The more words you add after that, more entangled you get. But again, I want to make clear, it’s hardest closest to home and it’s hardest with family and. With family, I find if I anticipate that I’m going to be asked something, I really have to practice. I really—because it’s scary and I have to really practice and be like, and just practice saying, “I’m not doing that right now. I’m not coming this year. I’m not doing it.” And I’ll say it a thousand times. I’ll just go for a long walk and I’ll just practice it and practice it and practice it. Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more difficult it is.
OLIVER BURKEMAN
Hello, I’m Oliver Burkeman. I’m the author of books including Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals and The Imperfectionist newsletter.
So, I have to answer this question about simplicity and simplifying my life, honestly, I think, and say that I have tried so many ways to simplify my life, only to discover that in subtle ways they’ve actually had the opposite effect. So I’m going to tell you what has truly simplified my life in a moment, but I want to get there by way of explaining what I think the downside is with quite a lot of simplification advice.
It’s just that pretty much any system, as we all know, creates overheads to maintain. So it becomes all too easy for some supposedly pro-simplicity practice to make things more complicated. One random example I like: famously, Barack Obama only wore, I think, two shades of suit in order to reduce decision fatigue. He didn’t have to worry about what range of suits he was going to choose from so that he could make more important decisions later in the day.
I always loved this example, but of course Barack Obama was the president and he had a team of people to keep his wardrobe of suits in perfect condition. Whereas for me, for most of us, you know, maintaining a wardrobe full of clean iterations of a work uniform, making sure that I always had everything I needed in order to only make a small number of choices, that’s actually going to be quite likely to add to my overheads.
It might be a good idea for other reasons, but I’m going to have to think about it, going to have to put in the upfront work to setting it up, and then a lot of maintenance work to make sure that it’s always ready. And actually, for me, it’s probably easier and simpler to just look inside my wardrobe and pick something that’s—that’s there and that’s clean and that basically works. There are some other systems I can think of that are equally kind of great in a way, but I do question if they make life simpler.
So, for example, I try to nominate specific time boxes during the week for calls and doing podcasts and things in order to safeguard time for writing. This is often described as a way of simplifying your life, a decision filter. And it’s true, it stops me having to think so much maybe about whether I can fit in another call outside of those predetermined boxes. But in fact, it actually makes for many more tough moments where I either have to tell someone no because I can’t fit them in, or alternatively have that time where I’m thinking, “Well, [unclear] an exception? This guy’s quite a big deal. I should probably alter my rules to make time for him.”
So it doesn’t actually end up simplifying my life to try to impose this alleged simplicity on it. You know, I think about the image of the obsessive minimalist in interior design who lives in a sort of perfectly simple apartment, all clean lines and stark bare surfaces. So that might be your idea of beauty and that’s fine.
I think I can really see the appeal. But it’s not actually very simple in the psychological sense of reducing the thought and cogitation and stress that has to go into keeping it that way. It’s actually pretty high maintenance, which, in the important sense here, I think is the opposite of simple.
So to stop being so negative and say something practical and positive instead, I think what all this is leading up to—and this is something that I’ve really taken from Zen Buddhism especially—is that I think true simplicity, the simplicity that actually practically helped me in life, is not a question of techniques; it is an attitude.
It’s a kind of a relationship between me and my reality. It’s the kind of relationship in which I’m just not so attached and clinging to how things are in the external world in which I can pass through my days less bothered by whether things are one way or another. So, you know, for example, it’s less about keeping a really minimalist home and more about not being made anxious because the home is a bit messy, not feeling that I can’t get down to work or to something else important until I’ve done every little bit of clearing up.
It’s less a case of rigidly time-boxing my day in order to reduce interruptions, though again I think that can have a role, and maybe more about being able more fluidly to drop back into work and to focus after an interruption has happened. I’ve seen this attitude described variously as entrusting everything to nature, entrusting everything to reality, letting go of the idea that reality needs me to help operate it, just sort of unclenching, withdrawing my claws from things and learning, as Krishnamurti put it rather wonderfully, to not mind what happens.
I don’t think that means to be a doormat or a pushover or to be passive. Far from it, the opposite. I think it is to be able to say, okay, look, well, reality is as it is, and that’s fine. I mean, it better be fine because it’s the truth of the matter. And now I can just be okay with that situation and take action, vigorous, bold action on the things I really want to do. So that is, after many learning experiences, what simplicity has come to mean for me. I hope it’s useful. Thanks.
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2026-10-02 14:10:28
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 this episode:
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“Knowledge is something you accumulate, you add. Wisdom is something you distill, you simplify.”
— Chip Conley
“I think a lot of people have a lot of stormtroopers in their life.”
— Greg McKeown
“You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.”
— David Allen
“I now treat my inbox like it’s my home because I think it’s an extension of my home.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
“True simplicity, the simplicity that actually practically helped me in life, is not a question of techniques; it is an attitude.”
— Oliver Burkeman
Want to hear more strategies for simplifying your life? Listen to my conversations with Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck, in which we discussed why simple is the opposite of complex (not a synonym for easy), living without subscriptions or dependencies, building a house from scratch in New Zealand, getting clear on who your work is for, eliminating gray areas, reclaiming time with personal boundaries, following true joy instead of dopamine hits, how a near-death experience sparked a radical commitment, and much more.
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