2026-07-30 14:43:42
Please enjoy this transcript of a wide-ranging Q&A I did with subscribers. We explore reinvention, enduring skills for the age of AI, friendship, mental health, fitness, language-learning, privacy, cognitive longevity, and more.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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Tim Ferriss: I am going to just hop into it. Take advantage of everybody being here. Thanks for joining. There were a lot of questions submitted, hundreds upon hundreds. Narrowed that down to a few dozen. And I will answer a handful, and then we’ll hop to the live feed and answer questions there.
So the first question is from Christine, and here it is, “Over the years, we’ve watched you going through quite a transformation from a driven, hyper-optimized logical business investor to a grounded, relationship-focused man talking openly about trauma, mental health struggles, and meditation. What are your comments on the transformation? And for someone who is still stuck in the driven hyper-optimized logical phase and sees that they need to change something, what advice would you give?” So the first observation, or perhaps question I would pose in response to that is, are you stuck? Maybe you’re not stuck. And I say that because my shift certainly eventually, and it took me decades to get there, focusing on addressing childhood sexual abuse and so on, which I’ve written about extensively so I won’t belabor it here and drag people into that.
Was because I recognized over time that the 17 separate problems I thought were separate were in fact all stemming from this unaddressed elephant in the room that required some, I don’t want to say handling, maybe it’s metabolizing, maybe it’s revisiting, maybe it’s re-contextualizing as an adult. So that was a necessary step for me. I couldn’t proceed past go without addressing that. I don’t think everyone requires that. And there are tools I think that almost anyone can benefit from that may steer you towards introspection or more internal validation versus external validation. Some of you will recognize this, the book Awareness by Anthony de Mello. I still read it at least once a year. There are frameworks that I think nearly anyone can benefit from like IFS, Internal Family Systems. And I did a live session on this podcast with the founder of IFS, Richard Schwartz.
I would caution, though, that just as you frame the question as being stuck in a driven, hyper-optimized phase, it is just as easy, if not easier, to get stuck in doing the “work.” And you only have to visit Austin to see what I’m talking about. There are lots of people who can’t seem to get past a hyper-reflective, never-ending cycle of polishing the self. And I think that any obsession with the self, whether that is validated by others through your bank account or achievements, or getting pats on the back for doing the “work” is poisonous in excess, right? The dose makes the poison and I think it applies here. So I would say maybe you’re not stuck, number one, that deserves some examination, that deserves some examination. But I do think Awareness, IFS, there are a handful of things that anyone that I know, certainly, has benefited from or can benefit from. So I would start there. So I’ll leave it there for now.
The next question is from Mike R. “Much of your work focuses on reversible experiments, but the stakes of reinvention rise in your late 40s when career, family, health, plus financial responsibilities make big moves harder to test. How would you distinguish a genuine next chapter from an impulse to escape your current life? Would you use a 30-day experiment or is there a better framework for evaluating a major career/life pivot?” So I’m going to try to keep this short, but I would say read a blog post by Derek Sivers that is titled “There Are Always More Than Two Options.” And you can find that very easily, but it is sive.rs/options. And I’m going to see if I can pull this up for a second. And in effect, he says, “When people say they only have two options, it means they got stuck. Once people get two options, they start comparing pros and cons of those two and forget to think of more. As an example, a friend was trying to decide whether to stick with this frustrating job or quit and start his own company. I suggested some other options.”
This is all reading from his blog post. Bullet number one, “Build your new company outside of work hours. Do this until the income from the new company is 50 percent of your salary, then quit.” Bullet two, “Show up to your job, but secretly just work for your own company all day. Do this until you get fired.” Bullet three, “Bring your new company idea to your boss and propose it as a division of their company so you can stay on salary.” Last bullet, “Do neither and move to New Zealand to be a tour guide. After exploring more options, my friend realized that he didn’t actually want to start a new business. He was just avoiding fixing his current situation.” All right. I’m not saying that’s the case for you, Mike, but I would say that you probably have a lot of options you could list out if you took the time.
And we all fall prey to the A versus B trap. But there’s—you can always come up with C, D, E, F, and G. So that would be step number one for me. And then beyond that, I would say write down all the things that you find might lead you to want to escape your current life. What are those? And I think a lot about something that Chris Bosh shared in a conversation with me on this podcast. He’s an 11-time NBA all star. And he talked about in the context of gratitude, metaphorically, if you were to sit around a table, and he might have been crediting someone else, but if you had five people and they all put all their problems on the table, you would pick your problems right back up. So sometimes your problems seem really bad because you are most intimate with what you experience. But if you were to take all of the insecurities and friction and challenges and relationship woes of your five best friends, put everything on a table, you might rush to pick up your own problems again.
So I would say that, as a thought exercise, that is also valuable. 30-day experiments, I’m always a fan of two- to four-week experiments, but you don’t have to make it binary, right? You could do it after hours, you could do it on the weekends. This is something that I’ve recommended in The 4-Hour Workweek with respect to developing your own businesses or lifestyle muses. And I still think it applies to many, many, many different things. And coming back to dose, there may be something that you really enjoy in small doses. And this also harkens back to a story in The 4-Hour Workweek, which dives into, let’s just say, surfing. If you love surfing, maybe on the weekends, because it is an alternative, a contrast to what you do throughout the week, that does not mean that you would enjoy surfing as your job if you had it as an obligation from Monday to Friday. So you want to expand the volume of something like that to test the hypothesis before you jump from A to B.
So I’m not sure if that answers your question super directly, but that’s how I might try to think through it.
All right. Next question is from Nathan B. And he talks about his father watched electricity reach his community and these various technological changes over time. And then I’ll hop to the crux of the question. “So, in effect, AI feels different, and I would agree with that, not merely another tool, but…five-year predictions now seem almost unserious. So here’s my question. If you are a capable but non-famous, intellectually curious person responsible for protecting and providing for a family, determined to remain useful, healthy, financially resilient, and morally grounded, what concrete practices, skills, relationships, and experiments would you prioritize during the next 12 months to prepare for the coming decade?” So that is a tall order. It’s a very good question.
I don’t know if I can, and I don’t think it would be helpful actually, maximally, for me to try to parse that into each bullet point, but I can tell you how I’ve been thinking about this with respect to teaching children or upskilling yourself or maybe creating a flak jacket of sorts. And I have approached this from dozens of different angles and I keep coming back to learning, asking questions, written and verbal communications, and negotiating. Those are a handful of skills that I think will remain constant. And I could defend each of those, but I will say that with AI and certainly with so many people having their massive bank accounts and net worths tied into this, there is a lot of selling of all of the change that is coming. And there is a lot of change that is already here and it’s going to accelerate.
But the more things change, the more certain things, I think, remain constant. The necessity of, in real life, close human relationships is not going away as a prerequisite for mental and spiritual health—that social component, we could just call it social health, which includes all of that. But I would focus on learning, and this is going to sound like I’m shilling my own bags here, but the meta-learning section of The 4-Hour Chef, I think The 4-Hour Chef as a book tried to do too much, but the very first section, which is something like 80 pages on meta-learning, I do think is worth a revisit if you haven’t in a while. And learning, once you try to break it down into its constituent building blocks, really comes down, in many cases, to asking questions. And the asking of questions is important not just for interviewing other people or asking questions of other people to try to separate fact from fiction. It’s equally important for asking yourself questions.
And this is where all things are interrelated and Awareness by Anthony de Mello and so on will tie into this. 80/20 analysis, it’s really a collection of questions for examining your assumptions and separating signal from noise. So we come down to asking questions, and then we have written communications and verbal communication. And I think in many cases, and Kevin Kelly, for instance, the founding editor of WIRED Magazine, would say that he doesn’t write what he knows. He writes in order to better understand what he thinks, to figure out what he thinks. And I don’t think these are going away. Sure, you could try to just walk and talk into an LLM, and I do that as well. But there’s a lot of bias built into that, not just by the people who design the systems, but by the force of memory function across different chats and threads.
You’re going to get a lot of self-reinforcing feedback. So I do think getting offline, like I did today, I spent 90 percent of my day today with pen and paper. And maybe that just dates me as a boomer, but I don’t think so. It removes distraction. And I’m able to be much more nonlinear off of a keyboard where I have to hit return, return to go down, right? I really like to use arrows and so on. So anything that will improve written comms. There are many books on this, certainly On Writing Well by Zinsser. Verbal comms, it’s going to sound so antiquated, but join a local Toastmasters or something like that. Get used to standing up and talking. And that would be on the group side, and then separately, negotiating. That’s not going anywhere. So learning how to propose and craft deal structure for, in most cases, ideally win-win outcomes, but that’s not reality a hundred percent of the time.
But negotiating, whether that’s, and these are some older callbacks for me, but I think it’s The Secrets of Power Negotiating by Dawson, I remember had a huge impact on me. Getting Past No had a large impact on me. There are other books that provide frameworks and I’ve interviewed a lot of these people. So you can also look at the archive of the podcast for people involved with the Harvard Negotiating Project. And I actually interviewed one of the co-authors of Getting to Yes. I think it’s William Ury. And those are all worth jumping into. But learning, asking questions, written comms, verbal comms, and negotiating is really where I would focus. I think that those are meta skills that can be applied across disciplines to almost everything and anything. So that’s probably where I would focus. In terms of morally grounded, I mean, man, read philosophy.
Philosophy is not for people in academic ivory towers. In my opinion, if you look back, it’s learning how to live. And I think that you can establish consistent moral codes. Religion would be another option, certainly. I’m not averse to that. There are many different paths to the same goal, which is having rules that you follow consistently that allow you to view yourself as a morally grounded person.
All right. Next is from Mason H. “When you returned from your sabbatical in 2024…” So FYI, on the 10th anniversary of the podcast, some of you might remember I took a four-month hiatus where we republished episodes. I didn’t record or publish any new episodes. And part of this was to experiment with killing the golden goose. Does the world end when I bench the goose for a short period of time? And I had a lot of fear around that.
Turns out as with most fears, it was ungrounded and it was fine. But here’s the question: “When you returned from your sabbatical in 2024, you set a new set of rules for the kind of podcast you were going to do moving forward. Which of those rules have made it in the last two years and which do you discard? Any generalizable insights for those of us trying to stay in blue oceans in our own endeavors?” All right. So the last part about generalizing, I would say if you haven’t read it, read The Blue Ocean Strategy. It is going to be increasingly critical and important. And certainly for a lot of businesses, existential in the coming years. This is going to become more and more valuable real estate to figure out how to navigate. All right. So The Blue Ocean Strategy.
The other generalizable insight would be fear-setting. Use that exercise. You can find it for free online. I did a TED talk about it. You don’t have to buy anything. Use that to stress test your fears related to any action. What is holding you back? Right? What are the costs of inaction? It’s all laid out very clearly. So look at that. But to answer your question, I thought, why rely on my recollection? Because sometimes our own assessments and recollection memory is an act of creating or recreating might be self-serving. I might hallucinate to look at things more favorably. So I asked one of my key employees what his answer would be. And the rules that stuck, which ended up being very gratifying, number one, no book-launching episodes. So changing the rules around book launches, that was probably the biggest change. Just did not want to be in the podcast-o-sphere rotation of the same guests being on 20 podcasts at a time.
Number two, living legends. I wanted to interview people who are older, who perhaps had either not been on podcasts or might not be on many podcasts before they could no longer do that and operate at a high level for a few hours. So we had Andrew Weil, 84, Richard Thaler, 80, Tish Rabe, 74, Wade Davis, 72, David Whyte, Frank Miller, Danny Hillis, right? There are many examples. And whether or not these episodes had maximum downloads, I would not expect them to because a lot of these names are relatively unknown compared to celebrities, certainly, and everything is being pushed to short clips with name recognition or sensational stuff. And I try to avoid both of those. I really enjoy doing this. And the only way I’m going to have any endurance in playing any game I choose to play, which includes podcasting, is if I enjoy doing it. Because if I enjoy doing it, I have this prerequisite foundational layer of energy, which allows me, in turn, to have attention, which allows me to take advantage of time and outlast trends.
And that could still be a fatality if everything gets pushed to LLMs or whatever, but you get the idea. Number three, experiments. So co-hosting episodes with, like, Nick Kokonas, Kevin Kelly. I should do more of that. So it was nice to do this review. Thank you for the question. Guided meditations with Henry Shukman. The Meditation Mondays, if you haven’t had a chance to check those out, go check them out. You will feel better if you incorporate them. Tim’s Founder Kitchen, having given up on that one. I’m going to do more of that. That actually had a lot of impact behind the scenes. But again, wasn’t one of the most downloaded episodes of the last year. But in terms of impact and a few very important ways that we were tracking that are not reflected on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, very successful. And then the Simplify Your Life episodes, which I really, really, really enjoyed doing those compilations.
We had a couple of household names, right? We had a handful of household names, Tim McGraw and so on, which were fun. So that 90/10 split, meaning I’m going to interview people in a barbell strategy who are either relatively unknown, like Tish Rabe, who is the heir apparent of Dr. Seuss. Amazing story, you should check it out. Last name is spelled R-A-B-E, or Tim McGraw, right? Almost everybody, let’s just say within certain demographics knows who that is. A lot of fun. And people also who have just not been on podcasts like Steve Young. All right. So that is the answer to that question. And I’m going to do one more, and then I’m going to hop into the live questions and we’ll grab a couple. So I will hop in just a second.
All right. The next one is from Alec B. And my answer will be pretty short to this.
So then we’ll hop into the live chat in a second. “I’m a therapist, so building emotional closeness is literally my job and it’s always come easy with women, but I’ve never cracked male friendship. If you were a 30-something with zero old friend groups to lean on, what’s the actual first move? And how do you get past how weird it feels to initiate with another guy?” All right. Let me tell a story first. So I was in the mountains of Montana with a small group of guys. This has shown up in some of my writing a couple months ago. And we’re sitting around this fire chatting and we’re having these really deep conversations after a full day of activities together. All right. So while we’re doing the activities, we’re hiking, we’re carrying weight, we’re tending llamas, long story. We’re fishing. We’re climbing over rocks and doing stuff that is somewhat dangerous.
All of that is activities together. And then late at night, I think—maybe I’ll admit, there was some tea, there might’ve been some whiskey, who knows? And later on, we were going to grab some really magnified binoculars and look at the full moon standing up on a rock, which ended up being incredible, by the way, if you have something with a stabilizer. But while we were around the fire, we were having this very deep conversation. And one of the guys there said, “You know why this works so well?” And he said, “You know why, also, perhaps men in particular,” and I’m not saying this is limited to men, but “love fires so much, is no eye contact. You’re staring at the fire. It’s not some weird sit-down session where two guys are staring at each other, which I think activates some type of millions-of-year-old machinery that reads as threat.”
We’re just sitting around a fire. No one’s making eye contact. It’s kind of dark. And we’re talking about all of this deep stuff, right? But it was a relatively small percentage of the total day. And this is a long way of saying that I think men and women are pretty different. And women are much more adept at the face-to-face verbal, social element for lots of fantastic evolutionary reasons. And I think men just require, and I’m talking about, I guess, heteronormative whatever, whatever, but maybe not. That’s my reference point, of course, is shared activities. Men just bond in different ways. And I’ve tried both. I’ve tried everything in between. I’ve tried the extremes, and I would just find activities.
There was another question from someone else about moving to a new city. “How would you build relationships?” My answer would be to really have all of it revolve around shared activities.
So take your pick. Is it morning swims? I like to do something active. Is it rock climbing? Is it fill-in-the-blank? Something inherently social where you have a partner or people you’re working with. Maybe it’s a run that is followed by some beers on fill-in-the-blank place, right? There’s a lot of this stuff out there. But those are some of my thoughts. May not be the most research-supported, but I think it’s evolutionarily supported. And certainly when I look at all of my male friends who have the closest male friendships, whether they’re from 20 years ago or from a year or two ago, shared projects or shared activities is the answer. And I have some relatively new male friendships, say with Elan Lee, and have we had a lot of deep conversations? Yeah. But did we spend a year building a card game together? Yes.
You get to see kind of through the cracks and indirectly talk about a lot of deep stuff without actually opening the kimono and talking about it head on. And I think that’s one example that comes to mind.
All right. Long answer, but let’s hop into the live questions. I’m going to see what we have here. Thank you, Hannah, “Love your episodes with women authors like Anne Lamott, Liz Gilbert, Margaret Atwood, Cheryl Strayed.” Yeah, for sure. Mary Karr is also just phenomenal. If you haven’t heard that one, check that one out, please.
All right. Question about the SAINT protocol. This is a TMS protocol that I’ve used for generalized anxiety disorder and OCD. I have actually tested a number of things since.
SAINT can be incredibly effective getting, in some people 70 to, or I should say some groups of people, 70 to 80 percent remission in treatment resistant depression, things like that. So it’s accelerated TMS. You’re applying basically a paddle or a helmet to your head to affect different brain regions. And sometimes it’s not so much a chemical issue. You just have anatomical structures that are firing in the wrong order, right? It’s as if you were trying to, say, drive a manual car, but you were using the clutch and shifting the gears and so on out of order. You have to get those in the right sequence. And I’m simplifying, but this is one way to look at it.
There is a company that I recently got involved with maybe six to 12 months ago called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A. And Jonathan Downar, Dr. Jonathan Downar is involved with this company and they have developed a one-day protocol. So instead of five days, which is SAINT, you’re getting 10 stimulations a day. It’s pretty much all you’re doing for a week. What they’ve done is compress that into a single day. And with what they call the ONE-D protocol, they pre-administer a drug called D-cycloserine, which is actually an antibiotic. They just give you a small amount. That helps induce plasticity. So I was able to get three to four months of complete relief after one day, which is bananas. I mean, it still blows my mind. And I’m focused at this point more on these ultra-condensed, possibly pharmacologically enhanced options because most people can’t take five days off of work. Most people can’t afford what is involved in traveling to five days of treatment. But a single day suddenly really opens up the aperture of who this could help. So I am paying a lot of attention to that area and might have more on that soon.
All right, let’s see. The question from Craig, I’m going to keep trying to answer these. Oh, there’s a lot of questions coming in. So it kind of got bumped. But Craig was asking me keys to building a long-term dedicated fan base. Honestly, the best advice I could give, I think, is just try to be your authentically weird self and follow your own obsessions. And if something, at least in the nonfiction space, if you are contending with a problem, a challenge, a dream, and you’re trying to figure out how to get to that. I think the personal is the most universal.
So don’t try to read the tea leaves to guess what your audience wants. Just do what is interesting to you. Don’t be ashamed of your obsessions, and that’s going to come up in some later answers as well. And if you do that, at least you’re taking care of yourself along the way. There’s a lot more to it, but the tools, the platforms, the formats, all of that changes over time. But this is how I think about it. And also, I’m not aiming to impact a hundred million people. I’m like, “Well, this helped me. Maybe it’ll help somebody else. Let me take good notes. I’ll share it. And if it really helps five people, I will consider that very, very well worth the time.”
All right. Moving down. Okay. Sebio, “Still using kettlebells in your training. What’s an average week of training look like for me recently?” I do still use kettlebells, especially for overhead pressing. I don’t do as much swinging as I used to simply because of some lower spinal issues, but I will do cleans, and then from cleans into shoulder pressing.
My workout routine right now is pretty simple. The backbone, pun intended of that, is lifting two to three times a week. That really is the crux of it. I just think for longevity, weight training, if I had to choose one modality would be the pick. So I’m roughly breaking that into pushing exercises, pulling exercises, and legs. And those are my three weight training workouts per week. Each one’s about an hour. Then yoga, one to two times a week. I really like Iyengar yoga specifically for alignment and use of props and so on. It’s very adaptable in that way. And then some form of movement daily, biking, swimming, walking. And as I get older, I think rule number one is don’t get injured because they accumulate. And then number two, something’s better than nothing. So if for whatever reason life got in the way, you were defeated and you’re not going to be able to make it to the gym for an hour, it’s like, look, do 10 laps in the pool. Do 20 pushups. Do something. There’s no excuse that you can give that would take those types of options away.
So rather than pushing it and pushing it and pushing it to another day, just scaling down to something minimal. And I think if you do that consistently, it’s pretty hard to lose over time.
And that was overlapping a lot with a question from Barbara C., “How are you staying fit these days, physically, mentally and soulfully?” Mentally and soulfully, honestly, it’s being very clear on the one or two things that you are focused on, say professionally, and then being very, very clear on the one or two relationships that you’re focused on most. And then booking stuff with your friend group. And you can identify the most “important friends” for all of those things I just mentioned by doing a past-year review. And people can look up “past-year review” to see how I do that. That’ll pop right up.
Here’s one from Steven, “What workouts from The 4-Hour Body are you still prioritizing in your routines?” There’s a lot from The 4-Hour Body. In the “Reversing Injuries” chapter, you had chop and lift, those types of exercises where you’re basically in a half kneeling position with a cable pulley and you’re rotating from kind of like bottom right to top left or say top right to bottom left or switching to the other side. I think that kettlebells still have a place, right? I’m not doing as many swings, but doing single sided one arm presses, for instance, with kettlebells can I think be incredibly effective for the time invested. I am certainly using some variant of Occam’s Protocol. So typically in my weightlifting workouts, I’m going to be doing very strength focused stuff. So it might be kind of greasing the groove along the lines of Pavel Tsatsouline, where I’m doing 10 sets of two pull-ups with like 30 to 60 seconds in between. Very submaximal, right?
And then at the end of the workout, I’ll do some type of pulling movement with a five second up, five second down cadence to failure, right? So that would be reminiscent of Occam’s Protocol. And by and large, if you look at my body, I mean it is from a body composition perspective, strength perspective, the spine issues have affected axial loading, top down loading somewhat. But I’ve been able to maintain very, very well between say 30 and almost 50 now. So if you look at it, what I’m doing seems to be working. There are always tweaks to be made, but I think simple works where complex fails a lot of the time.
This is from Aaron G., “Imagine that your next podcast guest is a high school senior who will become one of the most successful people of their generation, but today they look completely average. What skills, abilities, qualities would you be listening for that teachers or schools often overlook?” This is pretty simple and this is also how I find a lot of interesting technologies, stuff on the cutting edge before it makes it to the mainstream. And that can inform how you invest, that can inform how you think about life. It’s just a fun way to explore this thing called being human. I would look at what they’re doing on the weekends and evenings, probably. I would look at what these kids are doing related to their obsessions. What are their obsessions? Are they doing any projects? Are they using initiative to create things? Are those approaches unorthodox? Are they self-teaching? If they’re teaching themselves something, what are they teaching themselves, and what are the lessons beneath that?
Because you might be tempted to dismiss something quickly. If it’s like, “Okay, it’s Minecraft. Who cares?” It’s like, “Well, hold on a second. What is that actually teaching? All right. Which elements of that are they best at? Which elements are they most interested in?” Those are the types of things that I would be looking for.
Next one is Neha G. “How do you distinguish between needing a vacation, being burned out, and simply having outgrown the life you’ve built? And once you realize you’ve outgrown it, what would you do to [home] in on what needs to change?” I’m only going to address the first part of that. So how do you distinguish between needing a vacation, being burned out, and simply having outgrown the life you’ve built?
So step number one would be take a vacation. Since that is a temporary intervention and if that fixes the problem, then you know that perhaps was the answer, right? So if you’re asking yourself a question, is it A, B, C, D, E? Or should I do A, B, C, D, or E? If there’s one that is of short duration, try it. Cross it off the list, right? That would be the first thing. And then being burned out might be related to needing a vacation. And then simply having outgrown the life you’ve built. I would say take a mini-retirement. And that is another concept from the The 4-Hour Workweek. I still do it once or twice a year. This is taking, ideally, at least three or four weeks away from your usual routine or business, right? And I frame it in or through the lens of business for, say, entrepreneurs a lot.
This is most applicable to people who are self-employed or most easily applied, although literally thousands of people who have done this who are employed. So there’s flexibility. But the reason three or four weeks is important is that if you take a week off, maybe even two, and you don’t change anything before you leave, you can come back, you can try to triage while you’re gone. So you’d be tempted to hop in and put out small fires before they become big fires. And when you come back, you can end up doing two to three weeks of damage control to reverse all the things that went wrong. When it’s three or four weeks or five, six, seven, eight weeks, all of a sudden before you leave, you have to take a very hard look at your systems, your policies, how well you are eliminating things, automating things.
If you’re doing a lot of things that don’t need to be done in the first place, you might stop those. You might hit pause on a bunch of things for that three-to-four-week period and see what happens, much like I did with my podcast sabbatical, right? And by doing that once or twice a year, you’re effectively doing a controlled burn, which prevents much bigger forest fires. And it gives you also perspective, much like writing a book. Right now I am on a new draft of a book and I let it sit for a few weeks because I cannot look at it with fresh eyes—I’m too close to all the problems in every edit—until I’ve let it marinate for a few weeks. So the benefit of a mini-retirement, and I’m sure people have written about this online so you don’t necessarily have to buy The 4-Hour Workweek, is that you have to set up systems and policies and improve all of that before you leave.
And by the way, leave could mean that you’re in the same place, although I do recommend a change of geography for this. And then when you come back, you will also be able to look at things with fresh eyes and a clearer vision, I would say. So that is probably the approach that I would take. When I am in doubt or a lot of different problems are starting to cohere together and I’m having trouble separating them, in the immediate term, I’ll start doing TM meditation again twice a day, Arnold Schwarzenegger found this, a lot of problems tend to glom onto one another and it seems unresolvable. Meditation twice a day, specifically twice a day, is important. You could also use The Way app by Henry Shukman or someone else. Twice a day is important. And I have theories for why that’s the case, but just do that for like a week or two.
And then if there’s still lots of outstanding questions and it just seems like you’re spinning too many plates, I will try to get a mini-retirement on the calendar. And it doesn’t need to be next week. It could be two months, three months from now. But get it on the calendar, and then defend it. That is how I approach it. May or may not apply to your situation. Hopefully that wasn’t boring as fuck.
Next question is, I’m not sure if this is going to be helpful, but I’ll just throw it out there because the simple response is McKinley W.
And I apologize if this is a dissatisfying answer on my part, but, “I work in public education. I’ve spent years in child and teen mental health and suicide prevention,” thank you for that, first and foremost, super important work. “What advice would you give to practitioners and educators who are caring for our youth through unprecedented times?” I’m going to just hop in for a second. I would look very, very closely at Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T, not only his books, but also what he’s doing with his small group of researchers. They’ve actually changed certain legislation on a state-by-state basis for restricting phone use in schools. And I think it’s very, very interesting. So I would take a look at that.
Getting back to the question, “You’ve had many great guests who have touched on this and you’ve shared boldly about your own experience. What would you say to a 16-year-old in 2026?” I would say that everything on this Black Mirror is designed to hijack your free will and to turn you into a puppet of the machine of some type. One machine or another, whether that’s Meta or fill-in-the-blank, right? And that this could be a digital mini-retirement. I would try to get them off of social media for a period of time. And then talk to them. Be like, “Hey, this is going to be an experiment. You can get back on it and use it 10 times as much, but I’m going to challenge you and we’re going to come up with a plan for other things that you can do. Delete the apps from your phone for three to four weeks. We’re going to do an assessment beforehand to look at how you feel, your anxiety levels, maybe depressive symptoms, how much you’re getting done, what you say you want to do versus how you’re spending time. And then we’re going to look at it afterwards. And no expectations, no pressure on what you do with those results. But let’s start there. And if you want to have a beautiful life that has some element of peace of mind and healthy relationships, I think it’ll benefit you. If you want to be a world beater and you want to build anything or operate at the highest levels in any way, also, this will help you.”
So I would probably pitch it that way. That’s what I would do. All right. Next one is going to be a little inside baseball, but I’m going to jump into it because it’s a topic that I love.
This is from Sebastian. And I’m going to abbreviate this a little bit. All right. So I’ve talked a lot about language learning in the past and have had blog posts and resources from people like Benny Lewis, the Irish Polyglot.
And Seb’s question, or Sebi’s question is, “Has any of this thinking changed with advancements in AI?” And here are some questions. “What’s the purpose of language learning?” “If, in the end, we’re all plugged in with a chip and blah, blah, blah, what does language learning provide for the human experience?” So for me, number one, actually population level, zoom out. There seem to be some crazy longevity and cognitive benefits to language learning. This is relatively new. I put it in the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter, so I can’t recall it from memory, which is ironic. I get it. But there seem to be some really significant benefits to acquiring multiple languages. All right. Secondly, it doesn’t take that long to get conversationally functional in a new language. You probably know this already, but between eight to 12 weeks, and not to beat a dead horse, but again, the meta-learning section of The 4-Hour Chef goes into this at length.
And I’ve written a lot on the blog, tim.blog, I think there’s a section called Language Learning, but if you just search language learning, you’ll be able to find a ton of stuff. So it’s also not as heavy a lift as people expect, right? To get to a point where you have a thousand words, you can go to a country and navigate 80 percent of your transactional conversations in a restaurant, at a hotel, whatever, all in your target language. You could probably actually do that in about two weeks. I know that sounds crazy, but I believe that is entirely achievable. And I’ve taught people to do that. There are plenty of other people out there who teach folks. It’s very, very achievable, right? So it seems like limited downside in terms of time investment and very high, durable upside.
But the purpose of language learning for me also is that I agree with Wittgenstein that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. And whether it’s through grammatical structure or vocabulary or words like saudade in Portuguese, which is actually pretty close to like natsukashii in Japanese or komorebi, this term for dappled light in Japanese. Or the phrases like arigata-meiwaku in Japanese, which is people have heard arigato, right? Arigato. Arigata-meiwaku is like pain in the ass. So arigata-meiwaku is like when somebody does you a favor you don’t want. When someone does you, like, a favor you don’t really want or gives you a gift you don’t want.
And then you feel obliged to do stuff for them and it’s a huge pain in the ass. All of that is compressed into this one expression, arigata-meiwaku, which is just beautiful, hilarious, fun. And we’ve all heard that the Inuit have 30 words for different types of snow. Hawaiians have many, many, many different words for various types of rain. Also, some of them are location dependent, like rain at a specific place. All of these concepts broaden your ability to experience life, right? In the same way that if you’re looking around here where I’m sitting or you’re driving around and walking through the woods, let’s just say. And what you see are trees. That’s what you see. Trees and plants. But you don’t have any specific knowledge that allows you to see anything really more than that. Perhaps somebody could put two different types of leaves in your hand, you’d be able to say, “Yes, they’re different.”
But if you went on a walk as I will do with, say, a botanist or somebody who works at a local plant shop, doesn’t have to cost much money. It’d be 20 bucks. And they start to describe to you, for instance, “Oh, you’re in upstate New York. Here are the six to eight trees that constitute more than 90 percent of all the trees. And here’s how you tell them apart. And by the way, here are the three different leaf structures that matter.” Or with birds, “Here’s how owl feet are different from passerine, which are different from this.” Suddenly, because you have these labels, your experience of reality is much higher resolution. And when it’s higher resolution, when you have also, and these are not exactly the same thing, but a better frame rate, I think you extend your experiential lifespan. So if you want to live in full color HD as opposed to black and white, and if you want to be able to watch super slow-mo, to extend your life without waiting for some magical, biological intervention that all the billionaires are funding to live forever, probably not going to happen any time soon, you can do that right now.
And one of the ways that I find helps is by learning languages. All right. That was a long one. And I didn’t even get to the second part. All right. So have I thought about how to systematically integrate AI into language learning process? There are lots of people who have lots of takes on this. And I was one of their earliest investors, so I’m biased here, but I don’t think so. If anyone’s going to crack AI for language learning, I do think it’s going to be Duolingo. They’re already using it. There may be some AI native companies that approach it, but I do think Duolingo’s probably ahead of the game.
There are lots of other options. So for instance, just in the last few weeks, Instagram auto dubbing has become really good. And my team sent me a clip of me speaking in Japanese, right? So The Random Show. And there was a segment. And it was my voice. It sounds like me. Dubbed into, as far as I can tell, perfect Japanese, idiomatic, perfect Japanese. And I was like, “Holy shit.” Now I don’t want to spend all day listening to myself, but because I knew the content of that conversation, I was able to improve my Japanese, which is already pretty good. It’s not perfect, but it’s advanced. I was able to improve my Japanese in five minutes of watching something, watching content I knew in this target language, right? So you can use AI. I think one of the more interesting uses of AI for language learning for kids specifically, or younger people, older people too, would be personalizing the experience based on your interests, based on what you want to learn.
What native content can I aggregate that will be interesting to you? Right? The Duolingo Spanish podcast was phenomenal. I don’t know what the equivalent is in Mandarin. I’m trying to brush up on my Mandarin Chinese right now. And it’s like, well, I would love to do that. So I’m going to go to—and I just did this earlier today—ChatGPT or Claude and ask them that question. I liked the Duolingo Spanish podcast, which by the way, at one point was like one of the top 10 podcasts or 20 podcasts in the world. Crazy. And I want the equivalent from Mandarin. What might that look like? Now, if it doesn’t exist, I would imagine that within a year, AI will be able to create that for me. And that would be a great use case for me, for AI enhancing language learning. But frankly, old and boring and analog, I think, works fantastic because as soon as you are learning a language on this, you are competing.
Your attention is competing with a thousand other distractions that are more tantalizing than using spaced repetition or SuperMemo or something like that, Anki, to acquire vocabulary, right? So I like printed out flashcards. I like watching, for instance, any time you’re watching Netflix or whatever, Amazon Prime. Okay. Here’s the thing, I don’t actually believe you learn a target language, let’s say Italian. I’ve been watching some Italian movies recently. I love Italian as a language. I can watch, say, Roberto Benigni. Incredible, right? Life is Beautiful. But if I miss something and I’m watching English subtitles, if I miss it, I miss it. I don’t get it. However, if I’ve spent, let’s just say, 72 hours using a Lonely Planet phrase book intended for travelers about Italian, they give you like a 10-page grammar overview, if I have a basic understanding, then I can watch a movie I know in and out, right?
Die Hard, Babe is one of my favorites. The Bourne Identity, whatever, where you know the dialogue, Snatch, whatever it might be. And then just turn on the subtitles in your target language. So now I’m watching, right now I’m watching Parks and Rec. Okay. And we’re going to come back to Parks and Rec. But I’m watching from season one, episode one through Parks and Rec. It’s highly conversational, lots of different characters, right? And you can watch it as you would normally watch it or you can just turn on some subtitles and whatever your target language is and you will acquire a lot of language, a lot of vocab. All right. So not sure that is helpful, but that’s how I’m thinking about it. And I’m definitely going to be learning more languages. So I do think about this.
All right. Let’s hop into—and my laptop battery’s doing so well. I can’t believe I’ve ever recorded podcasts indoors. Ludicrous. Should always do it outside with nice weather like this. All right. I’m going to hop back into the live chat and see if we got anything I can hop into. Also, some of you have heard me talk about this. Michel Thomas, M-I-C-H-E-L T-H-O-M-A-S, Michel Thomas Method. If you want something you can listen to and really acquire the fundamentals of a language in a week or two, the Michel Thomas Method is outstanding. The languages he recorded himself, which I think are French, Spanish, Italian, maybe, certainly German, are world-class. The Korean that I went through, I was very skeptical that anyone other than Michel would be able to use his method to teach well, and it was awesome. So I would take a very close look at Michel Thomas. His background is nuts. All right.
Okay. Michael R., “What’s one of your recent favorite TV shows or movies? All time favorite TV shows or movies?” Well, I just mentioned some of my favorite movies. And when I’m writing a new book, very often I’ll write late at night and I will take one of my favorite movies and I’ll play it on the TV or on a projector and mute it. And then I’ll just listen to music. But I like having the company late at night so it doesn’t feel too isolating. And it’s been different movies for different books, but I mean, I’ve seen Babe like a thousand times. I’ve seen The Bourne Identity like a thousand times. Spirited Away, I’ve probably seen a few hundred times because I’m playing them every night. And there are many others.
Right now, and this comes to a question someone else asked, Len A. “I’ve always enjoyed your ‘What purchase under $100 has made a big impact?’ question. Why have you stopped asking that?” I don’t have a great answer to that. “And do you have any new purchases that would make such a list?” And this ties into favorite TV shows. All right. So like millions of people, I had seen many short clips on social of Parks and Rec, Parks and Recreation. I’d even seen one or two episodes, but I’d never watched it as the good Lord intended, which is from season one, episode one, all the way through. And there are 120 plus episodes and goodness gracious, is that a fantastic show.
It is just wholesome goodness, 90 percent of the time. I think family friendly 99 percent of the time. Not that I care about that right now, but it’s so positive and such a feel good pallet cleanser given the insanity that we get waterboarded with all day through doom scrolling. And even if you don’t want to be subjected to it it’s just everywhere. It really has turned into this nightly ritual with my lady. And we just watch one episode every night, one or two. So good. And that’s literally months and months of payoff because they have seven seasons. So buying the full seven seasons is my best purchase of under $100.
This is from Timothy K. “You said, ‘Walking is my number one daily hack.'” I’m just revisiting the memory banks to try to confirm that I’ve said that, but it doesn’t really matter.
“What actually happens in [my] mind on those walks that doesn’t happen at a desk? Intentional, or does it just unfold?” I will say that it’s not always about what happens in the mind. I just pay, even though I might be known in some circles as an early-stage tech investor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I’m looking at the new, new, new, new, new thing. I pay more attention to the old, old, old thing. And evolutionary drives that have withstood millennia and millions of years to prove durable. And we’re designed to move. We’re designed to walk a lot, right? And most of us don’t do as much of that as we have evolved to be capable of. So I just find the health benefits, the mood elevation, it is across the board beneficial to me. If I’m walking, sometimes it’s going to be just letting my mind wander, trying to let ideas percolate from wherever the muse might yank them if I’m working on a book.
Might be listening to an audiobook, might be doing phone calls, but walking, walking, walking. I mean, you can fix a lot of problems by walking. And when I say walking, I mean walking like two hours plus a day. It’s a lot of walking. But for me, any amount of walking helps, but just meditating twice a day is fundamentally different for me. If you can meditate, for instance, if you could choose 15 minutes twice a day or 30 minutes once a day, I’d do 15 minutes twice a day. And similarly with the walking, any amount helps, but there seems to be something magical that happens after at least an hour, right? Preferably two. So that’s where I’ll leave that.
Scissor Liquor, that’s pretty funny. “My top tip for more restful sleep at the moment when falling asleep is fine, but hitting a full night’s rest is challenging.” I think that’s a question. I mean, number one, look, if you’re waking up to pee a lot, stop drinking water an hour or two before you go to bed. Two hours, right? Just stop drinking so much water. I drink water compulsively, so that is something that I have to tell myself. And putting aside drugs and all that kind of stuff, because I don’t think we want to get into that rabbit hole right now. Falling asleep, for me, so cutting down on primary insomnia or onset insomnia. The TMS, the one day TMS, has just been remarkable for that. So people can look up Ampa Health if they want to try to find a place that might offer a one-day. It’s called the ONE-D protocol. You can also look up literature on that.
But otherwise, sun, lots of exercise. So boring. Isn’t that boring? But if I get plenty of sun exposure, if I’m seeing lots of natural light, especially when the sun is going down, like right now, I mean, in the morning, yes, to wake up, but also plenty of light exposure. And I am exercising so that I feel tired. It sounds so ridiculous for me to say, but it bears repeating because I think in modern environments, in modern life, it’s very easy to do what? To suffer from a deficiency of sunlight, get very little sunlight exposure, and to not be tired because you’re sitting in front of one of these screens at 18 inches for the majority of the day. So those would be a few. That’s another reason why I like to walk, because I can get a lot done if I push this horrible thing called the inbox to phone calls, and then just do a few hours of calls, which I do almost every Tuesday when I’m having one-on-one calls with my direct reports, as an example. Let me know if you have follow-ups on that, but that’s what comes to mind.
This is a question, let’s see if I can answer this, I didn’t have immediate thoughts. This is a question from Oksana, “As someone who naturally values privacy, how did you reconcile that with choosing such a public career and has that changed over time?” Well, the first thing I would say is that I didn’t really think through choosing a public career because the first book was turned down by 25 plus publishers, and then bought for nothing. And my expectation was that it wasn’t going to do very much. And even though I stacked the deck so that it would have a snowball’s chance in Hell, I did not expect it to blow up.
And by the time it did blow up, and then I was saying yes to things and became publicly exposed, the genie was out of the bottle, toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube, however you want to think about it. But if I could hit control Z, there are times when I would be tempted to say, “Yes, I would take that.” And I think the silver lining on it is that the half-life of fame is just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Some of you might remember, let’s just call it 10 years ago, you would get a hilarious meme video. And that video would make the rounds for like a week. How long do the videos make the rounds now? 60 seconds? Three hours? One day? Everything is becoming more ephemeral in the world of sort of digital visibility. And over time, I might shutter the podcast or stop doing video because I have no desire for more facial recognition.
But I think, depending on what you’re trying to do, for better and for worse, if you’re maybe in growth mode, it’s going to get harder and harder to have any durable public profile. Now on the flip side, it’s going to get easier and easier for everyone to find you. So I do think it’s important to think about digital protections, privacy protections, and so on, but that’s a much longer conversation for another time. But yes, I am paranoid and incredibly focused on privacy. I think that privacy, in some ways, even though it was a, let’s call it a God-given right for millennia upon millennia, it is now a luxury of sorts. If you do not take proactive action, if you do not have defenses put up, your whole life is on display or available for the right technical person who can do a deep dive or for the right price.
So you really, in their tools you can use like Incogni and others for scraping stuff off the web. I think that’s just going to become a privacy survival imperative if you want it. Then there’s other stuff that’s interesting. If you want private money, right? Which by the way, for a long time cash was that. Now it’s like, go to your bank and try to take out $9,000. You’re going to get cross-examined. Government doesn’t like private money, even though the default was kind of fiat currency for a long time, which allowed you to live your life and do your thing without having Big Brother breathing on your face at every second. So stuff like Zcash is kind of interesting. Obviously crypto can lead you into dangerous waters and you can lose everything very quickly, but I do find some of the privacy coins and stuff interesting. So we’ll see where all that goes. That does not mean invest, by the way. It is very, very easy to lose all your money in that stuff.
All right. Let me answer a few more and then we’ll hop off and I’ll let everybody get back to their lives. All right, this one is from Josh, “Tim, what are three to five things in your life now that you happily pay top dollar for? In other words, what luxuries do you think are absolutely worth upgrading for?” I’m going to mention a few. The first is massage and manual therapy. And I wanted to mention this first because even when I was very poor, right out of school and driving around in a used, hand-me-down minivan that the rear seats had been stolen out of, I’m not making this up, like really a A+ piece of shit car, and had a bunch of roommates and slept on a futon a lot, I saved my money for manual therapy, meaning massage therapy, once a week. And not for relaxation, for, like, sports massage, fix-the-broken-car type of work. And that is a commitment that I made early because I saw the dividends and I really think it is paid off over time.
And I think that is a core component of my longevity, health span constellation of things. So that’s one. I really try to get massage work done with a good therapist once a week. And again, a little is better than nothing. Can’t afford an hour? Do 30 minutes. Can’t afford 30 minutes? Try to find somebody to do 15 minutes. I guarantee you, you can find somebody who can help you out. Even if they’re only working on your IT bands for five minutes, scale back instead of going to zero. All right. Ease of travel. I think travel can be very stressful the more people you have involved. I’ve got a dog. So anything that makes travel a bit smoother, a bit easier, I was their first advisor, so again, full disclosure, but like CLEAR, TSA pre-check, anything that makes travel a little bit easier, right?
If it’s going to be a hassle to lug your stuff around, if you hurt your elbow and you’ve got heavy luggage, ship your luggage. There’s a lot you can do. When I was spending a lot of time in New York City, I actually stayed at the same hotel most of the time. And what I did at one point is I bought a trunk, a big trunk, and I put a week’s worth of clothing and some of the supplements I always use, and a bunch of the stuff that is in my everyday carry in my primary home, and I just had a trunk of stuff that they stored in the basement at the hotel. What did that mean? I never had to pack, right? I could grab a toothbrush and get on a plane and go to New York and I was totally covered. Had a couple of different pairs of shoes, had workout outfits, everything. Bathing suit. Didn’t need anything. In one trunk, that’s it. So ease of travel would be number two.
And then last, and I’m sure I could think of other stuff, but healthcare for myself and loved ones would be way up there. And that includes in some cases, and I’m fortunate that I have the means to do this, but for some people, like for my parents and other people paying for trainers, paying for doctors, paying for meal prep or meal delivery, this kind of thing. It’s like the man or woman who is well wants a million things; the sick man or woman wants only one thing: not to be sick. The injured man or woman only wants one thing: not to be injured. So just really taking care of that is another place where I’m happy, not just to spend a lot, but to overspend.
So what does that mean? That means that feeling like I have an insurance policy or a safety net available just in case. Having, say, concierge medicine such that, God forbid something happens and I need to get ahold of somebody at 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, a Saturday, whatever, that I can reach a doctor, gives me a peace of mind that helps with everything else, even if I never use it, right? It’s like having a very safe car. Even if you never get into a head-on collision, God forbid, there’s a reassurance that comes with having a very, very well-rated safe car for you and your family. So I feel very similar to that. Just having the ability to do A, B, C, D, or E with respect to health, fitness, medicine, specialists, I find to be a very good investment. And by the way, sometimes you do need that stuff.
And some of you may have seen the announcement in The New York Times, but I’m going to be getting very heavily involved in a startup called Neko Health, which is expanding to the US very soon. It’s already in the UK and Sweden, if you want to check it out. Co-founded by Daniel Ek, the co-founder, longtime CEO of Spotify. Going to be doing some very interesting stuff. So I’m hoping to make world-class preventative healthcare available to millions of people. That is just the basis of everything else. If you don’t have your health, what do you have?
This is a good one from Hannah. All right. “What’s the one most important thing you’re doing to prevent cognitive decline? Both my parents have Alzheimer’s and I’m overwhelmed with all the hacks.” I know how you feel because I have multiple relatives I’m caring for with Alzheimer’s right now. I would say that if I had to pick one thing, it would be the exercise. Okay. So if I had to pick one thing for cognitive health, it is the exercise. And my conversation with Dr. Tommy Wood gets into specifics around this, but I’ll give you one example. Doing something called the Norwegian 4×4, which is a type of interval training. Doing that, I want to say three times per week for six months, provided five years of benefits, something like that. And Zone 2 also counts for mitochondrial health.
Alzheimer’s, frankly, is very poorly understood. And I think we’re still in the dark ages in a lot of respects. I don’t totally believe, actually often don’t believe, and I’m no doctor, I don’t play one on the internet, so this is just my personal experience. But the remove amyloid beta and tau tangles and all will be well hypothesis, which a lot of therapeutics are predicated on, I really don’t buy it. I think a lot of it is vascular dementia and some of it certainly is mitochondrial dysfunction. So I’m looking at things like I am taking Urolithin A myself for checking in some respects a mitochondrial box. Paying a lot of attention to insulin sensitivity and glucose disposal. Again, that comes back to the weight training, but also doing plenty of intermittent fasting and so on.
There is a supplement called Avmacol that I think is pretty interesting. It’s basically a sulforaphane precursor plus a few other ingredients that I think help with enzymatic conversion and things like that. But if I had to pick one, it would be the exercise. And then there’s lots of other stuff I do. I don’t know if you guys can see it, but there’s a barrel sauna over there. Sauna use is very interesting, heat shock proteins, et cetera. So I’m throwing a lot at it because it terrifies the living hell out of me. But I think you can pop all the pills you want and cobble together all sorts of mini interventions. But if you’re not doing the exercise, if you’re not eating good food, if you’re spiking your glucose constantly over and over again, and always eating by the clock and never doing any type of intermittent fasting.
And by intermittent fasting, I’m talking about along the lines of a researcher named Mark Mattson. So at least 16 hours of fasting, preferably more, so that you deplete glycogen in your liver and switch to some ketone production. If you’re only cobbling together lots of pills and potions, I don’t think that’s going to do it. But I’m throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it. So hopefully that is somewhat helpful. If you guys think it would be interesting, at some point I might do a dedicated podcast, just a solo podcast, talking about exactly what I’m doing for preserving cognitive health and function. Again, not that I’m a doctor or an MD, but frankly, a lot of those folks are so siloed and specialized that sometimes it’s hard to assemble a full picture for practical implementation. And there are things coming hopefully down the line. I invested in a company called Jocasta Neuroscience, J-O-C-A-S-T-A, looking at injectable Klotho for humans, hopefully.
I think Klotho, K-L-O-T-H-O, is very interesting, and hopefully that’ll be a therapeutic, but in the meantime, guess what provokes natural Klotho production or release? Exercise of different types. So when in doubt, get to the gym.
All right guys, I think that’s all I have for right now. I’m going to hop off and get a bite to eat since I haven’t had anything since a small breakfast. And I think we’re going to wind down and come to a close in just a few moments. So thank you everybody for the questions. Thank you for tuning in from around the world. And for those people who might be listening to this, if we publish it, we will have show notes linking to all sorts of stuff that I mentioned at tim.blog/podcast. And I’m not sure what the hell you would search to find this particular episode, but you’re smart people. I’ll let you figure it out. But show notes will be at tim.blog/podcast. And once again, everybody, thanks for tuning in and hope to do another one of these soon.
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2026-07-30 03:08:16
In this wide-ranging Q&A, I explore reinvention, enduring skills for the age of AI, friendship, mental health, fitness, language-learning, privacy, cognitive longevity, and more.
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2026-07-23 14:30:56
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Andrew Huberman, (IG: @hubermanlab), a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab. Andrew is the author of Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body and the host of the Huberman Lab podcast, which became, and remains, the most popular health and science podcast in the world.
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Tim Ferriss: Well, why don’t we just do a quick call back, The Dark Wizard. This sounds like an Ozzy Osbourne album, but it’s not.
Andrew Huberman: It’s not.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a documentary, and we were chatting about it before we started recording since it’s top of mind. Why don’t you just describe what that’s about because this involves a character that I tracked for a super long time.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Dean Potter.
Tim Ferriss: Dean Potter. So what is The Dark Wizard? Why has it struck you so?
Andrew Huberman: So I learned about this movie from Andy Stumpf, who’s a former retired Navy SEAL, tier one operator who then set two world records with the Red Bull high performance team doing wing suiting. BASE jumping, wing suiting, whatever you want to call it, the squirrel suits.
Tim Ferriss: Squirrel suits.
Andrew Huberman: And he told me about this movie, The Dark Wizard, which is about Dean Potter, who started off as a climber and then became, people can watch the documentary, and then got into parachuting and then what he called free basing, which was climbing and then jumping off a rock and parachuting and then eventually wing suiting. I won’t give away anymore, but it’s a really interesting four-part series that gets into his mental health challenges, how he was able to funnel, let’s just call them the high dopamine more manic states into incredible feats of performance and then how he balanced out the lows. But the most interesting part about it to me is at the level of something I think about a lot these days, which is energy. We’re born into this world with a certain amount of energy and we think about it as time and longevity, but there are people that seem to, I don’t want to give anything away here about the movie, but there are people that seem to have more of this thing that we call energy and when they’re able to focus it, they take performance to just outrageously high levels.
And you see how the energy folds back on him and almost destroys him at times, and also times when he’s somehow able to harness it and put it to these incredible feats.
But the most important thing about the film is he talks about and he demonstrates through the activities I talked about before, wing suiting, et cetera, he demonstrates how when you are in competition with other people, it’s a misuse of the energy that can harm you, but when you are seeking, what he calls just seeking beauty, like really trying to chase the feeling, the pure experience of taking that energy and putting it into something that you love, that’s when the really impressive feats land and they move you forward.
So there does seem to be something almost spiritual about whether or not we’re funneling energy into things that really reflect us at our best, what he calls funneling into beauty, versus competition and competition it turns out is what destroys people. And everyone will say, “No, no, no. It’s actually what allows you to reach a higher and higher bar.” But if you watch all four episodes, you realize, no, that’s an illusion. And when you get caught in that, you’re limiting your output. You’re limiting your performance. It also has multiple cameos by the great Alex Honnold, and their competition is extremely interesting. I’ll leave it at that. It’s a long teaser, but it’s a real insight into human psychology and energy, which is something, again, I’m just obsessed with because ultimately it’s where we place our efforts.
Tim Ferriss: Foundational.
Andrew Huberman: That’s all we’ve got. That’s all we’ve got.
Tim Ferriss: And Dean Potter, also, fascinating character. I’m going to watch this and if people have enjoyed slack lining, he helped popularize slack lining, certainly as cross-training for climbing, but overall, and I can’t help but mention the incredible Laird Hamilton also because we’re sitting here in Malibu. So if anybody’s ever done standup paddleboarding, eFoiling. Fewer people have done tow-in surfing certainly, but people should watch, I think it’s Riding Giants about their early chapters of Laird. Standup paddleboarding goes way back, probably thousands of years, but he certainly helped to repopularize it.
We are going to talk about all sorts of frontier topics. We’re going to talk about perhaps some revisions. Updates maybe a better way to put it. And I’m just going to hop into this very long list that we will almost certainly not complete, but let’s hop into one that is of personal interest to me and I want to hear how this experience informed your training.
Dorian Yates. So I have interviewed Dorian, but I’ve never met him. You had the chance to train with Dorian. He is multiple time Mr. Olympia.
Andrew Huberman: Six, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Six times. He was legendary not only for his accomplishments in bodybuilding, but also for, in the eyes of many, the bizarreness of his training methods, which in contrast to many were pretty minimalist in certain respects. So could you just speak to the experience of training with Dorian and what you took away from that in terms of application to your own training?
Andrew Huberman: I’ve had the honor and pleasure and pain of training with Dorian Yates once here in Los Angeles. We did a back workout, back and rear delts workout. And then I just came back from Marbella, Spain, where we trained legs together, and it’s the sorest I’ve ever been. And I should say the science caught up to Dorian. What Dorian did to train for Mr. Olympia and what Mike Mentzer, who I’ll explain in a moment, were proponents of is now very well-supported by the peer-reviewed data. And a bunch of physio folks are probably jumping out of their seats going, “No, no, you don’t have to go to failure beyond failure, and you actually need more sets.” But if you look at their training, which was essentially a couple of warmups, a light set to just familiarize yourself with a movement, a medium set, maybe like 50% of what you would use on your work set, work set somewhere between five and 12 repetitions typically, and then maybe a third warmup for just a couple of reps, kind of practice sets.
And then Mentzer, Mike Mentzer, was a big proponent of one all outset to failure. Okay. Turns out that’s probably not enough for most people to stimulate hypertrophy and strength increases because it demands so much focus, intensity, and effort. There’s a kind of a systemic neural fatigue to it and a lot of people just can’t contract the muscles with enough focus and intensity for one set to absolute failure to work. Dorian basically is more proponent of two sets per exercise, maybe two or three exercises per major body part, major body part being quads, not legs, right? So training with Dorian essentially consists of what I just described, a couple of warmups, two all out sets to failure, or one set and then some assisted reps or a drop set or a rest pause where you rest after failure and then do a couple more reps.
Now, what’s unique about that training is you feel very tired at the end of a workout, but a couple hours later you’re fine. And indeed, if you do it right, you get stronger every single workout with the caveat, and Dorian made this clear to me, that about every six or eight weeks or so you need to come off the gas pedal a bit and just stay out of the gym for a week or you do a kind of more moderate week. Now, what Mentzer, and let’s just stick with what Dorian said, because let’s call it low-ish volume, high intensity. What he’s a proponent of was heresy back in the day. Certainly the opposite extreme would be like the Schwarzenegger two hours, twice a day type workouts. And then people will say, “Well, Dorian was using loads of steroids and growth hormone, et cetera.” The scientist in me will, in no attempt to defend him, will just accurately say, “What’s the one thing that he was doing differently?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That was par for the course, right?
Andrew Huberman: That’s the key. Everyone was and is taking some testosterone and other anabolics and androgenics and some were taking growth hormone. But the point is, and at the top level, all of those guys have incredible genetics, long muscle bellies. What makes Dorian, even now at 65, he carries a ton of muscle mass. He’s doing a lot of biking, he’s doing functional training, he’s doing a lot of other things, but just the sheer density of muscle that he carries speaks to his genetics and the amount of training.
What I’ve been doing for years is the same split. Three days a week, one day legs including calves, rest a day or two, train chest and back, rest a day, shoulders and arms, and also some neck training because I didn’t wrestle, and neck is important to train, especially for guys, otherwise it looks like the wrong head is on the body. And also as the upper spine, it’s important for shoulder stability, et cetera.
But that split, most people say, “Well, that doesn’t square with the science. What does the science say?”
The science says, and this is Brad Schoenfeld’s work and other people’s work, which is fantastic, which is when you stimulate a muscle to grow, you have about 48 to 72 hours in which there’s protein synthesis after the training. So the logic says, well, logically speaking, you would say, “Okay, well, then train every muscle group three times a week or twice a week.” The problem is that when you do that, you’re not taking into account the other things that you might be doing. Like I run three times a week, one long slow run for about 60 minutes, one high intensity interval type training, like sprint for 30 seconds on the assault bike, rest for 30 seconds, then just repeat that six to eight times, right? Kind of a max heart rate training and then maybe one moderate session of like 20 or 30 minutes of running or biking.
If you’re doing those other things, you have to take that into account. And so what ends up happening if you do this split of training your legs, taking a day off, then the next day doing some sort of chest back workout, the next day running for 30 minutes. Now your legs, if you train them properly, are still probably a little bit sore.
Okay, well, it’s not going to stimulate hypertrophy, but if then you do a Airdyne bike high intensity workout, you’re getting some stimulus to your legs. It’s enough to carry you to the next week. So in reality, this arrangement of three times per week of resistance training, three times a week of cardio, you’re training everything directly once a week and indirectly a second time and you’re getting a lot of cardio.
Because all these studies have hypertrophy and strength training, it’s on a background typically of not doing any cardio.
And so when I look at what the science says, of course people are saying, “Oh, anywhere from 10 to 20 work sets per week,” that to maximize hypertrophy. Okay, 10 sets of quads per week distributed into two or three different sessions, plus I’m supposed to sprint outside or on the Airdyne bike, plus I’m supposed to do a long run? All of a sudden you run into, you have collisions all over the place. So turns out that for years I was doing this split, and then when I talked to Dorian, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s more or less what I did when—” He split things up into a four-day split, wasn’t doing quite as much cardio. He’s like, “Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Once directly high intensity, low-ish volume. Once indirectly.” Like when you train your chest and back, you’re hitting your arms and then you train your arms directly, so it’s twice a week. When you do the Airdyne bike, there’s some stimulus of like your lats and pushing and pulling. Again, it’s not for hypertrophy, but it gets you to the next week.
And what I’ve found from training with Dorian is you think you’re training to failure, you’re not training to failure. And this is the other piece. People will say, “Oh, the data say two or three sets taken like one or two reps in reserve.” Yeah, it’s true. You can get a lot of hypertrophy and strength increases doing that. Maybe it’s less taxing on the nervous system. But what is failure? Like if somebody really put a gun to your head and said, “Curl that bar one more time or I’m going to kill your family,” you’d curl the bar. Now it’s not pleasant nor is it appropriate to think that way in the gym and there are probably some guys thinking that way in the gym. It’s just impossible to generate that kind of mental intensity. So you go, “All right.”
If you just step back, the way Dorian is training now, the way he basically trained for the Olympia, six Olympia wins, is you train each body part directly once per week, it gets hit indirectly a second time per week, you give it plenty of rest, you’re doing four to eight sets per body part, two to three exercises per body part, so you’re splitting up those work sets. Yeah, it all kind of works out. And so this is the big revision for me is if you just look at the science, you’d say, “Okay, 10 to 20 sets, more volume of these sets almost to failure or even to failure is maximizing hypertrophy.” Yet if you’re doing curls and leg extensions for a study, but what about all the other stuff?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Andrew Huberman: Okay. So that’s the gist of it.
Tim Ferriss: If you want to look back at this approach to training, I mean, there are a lot of examples, but you can go back to Arthur Jones, then Mike Mentzer, and then of course you have Dorian, Blood and Guts. I remember having that black and white book that describes some of the training. And for those who may doubt the efficacy of this type of, let’s just call it short duration, because you can do what Dorian recommended. The workouts can be quite a bit shorter, and in some cases—
Andrew Huberman: And with the warmup, it ends up being, you do a couple minutes on the bike, you do your warm up sets. By the time you get to the second or third exercise for a given body part, you’re only doing one warmup.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And what I would say is you can look at, now this is somewhat of a complicated case study, but like Casey Viator with Arthur Jones, crazy example. There’s some sort of muscle memory, which we won’t get into right now, that enabled a lot of those gains. But suffice to say this type of minimalist training can be applied in a lot of places and I think according to many competitive powerlifters, the best powerlifter of all time, Ed Coan, also pretty similar recovery schedule, right? And very interestingly similar in terms of overlap with Dorian Yates. So what does your split look like now?
Andrew Huberman: So the split I follow now is essentially the same one I’ve always followed and it is—I want to be clear why I’m saying Monday or Tuesday, because there needs to be flexibility in one schedule, too. This is important. So Monday or Tuesday, I train my legs. Calves, hamstrings, quads, maybe some direct glute training, but probably not. A couple warmups, two to three, maybe, but usually just two hard sets to failure. If I have a training partner, there may be some assisted reps. So quads would be two working sets of leg extensions. I’ll leave out the warmups. Two to three, because I need a bit more there, lying hamstring curls to failure. Then belt squat, my favorite movement. I actually bought a belt squat machine because you don’t have to load the shoulders.
Tim Ferriss: Which machine do you like?
Andrew Huberman: I use the Pit Shark.
And Rogue’s got now one that’s kind of more of a fan based one and there are a bunch of—it’s a lot of fun to go on Instagram and some of the gym equipment assessment accounts is a whole world. Sorinex has one. There are all sorts of great ones out there. I bought the Pit Shark.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll reinforce the belt squat.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Love the belt squat. It takes a little bit getting used to because some people feel as if it’s like jamming into their hips or something. You can put a towel there if you need to. I mean, all the Westside Barbell guys would talk about belt squat. They would load it up. You can actually march with it to build all sorts of stabilizing muscles. I mean, that’s an incredible cardio workout. You just put a couple plates on each side and you just march, lifting your knees, and after like a minute you’re like, “There’s no way I can continue.” That’s a great workout. But I end up doing leg extensions, leg curls, then belt squat, and then I may throw in a couple work sets of hack squat and that’s it. And that’s Monday or Tuesday. The day after legs is always a rest day.
If you train legs properly, the next day should be a rest day. You should need it. Ideally, I would do sauna and cold that day. These days I haven’t had time.
Systemically, you have to ask yourself, am I systemically exhausted? Did my nervous system take enough of an ass beating on that Monday or Tuesday that I need two days off after legs? And if it was very, very intense, then I’ll do some sort of 20- or 30-minute cardio. Typically, it’s a run, not an all out run, not a jog, just somewhere in between. Probably in the zone, let’s just call it zone three-ish, zone three, four. Okay? You’re not sucking for air, but it’s not a sprint workout. It’s not zone two. And then I’ll do a push pull. I’ll do chest and back workout and neck.
Tim Ferriss: What do you use for neck?
Andrew Huberman: I have a 4-way neck machine.
Tim Ferriss: You do?
Andrew Huberman: I do.
Tim Ferriss: Which brand do you use?
Andrew Huberman: Hammer Strength.
Tim Ferriss: Hammer Strength.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And again, the reason I’m asking this guys is not to plug particular manufacturers. It’s because the physics and the geometry and so on really matters.
Andrew Huberman: It really matters.
Tim Ferriss: Especially in my experience with something that has injury potential, I have a 4-way neck machine also.
Andrew Huberman: Oh, cool.
Tim Ferriss: I do it very, very slowly myself. Don’t overdo it. If you’ve never trained neck, do not rush into high velocity stuff. But that’s why I was asking.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Neck is very important. I’ll talk about specifically what I’ll do if I don’t have access to that. But some people will be like, “Chest and back same day, and rear delts?” Yeah. I think of it as like a torso workout because I’m not a bodybuilder. I’m interested in posture. I’m interested in strength, and I essentially do some sort of pushing movement like a low incline press and then some sort of fly type movement. Although sometimes I’ll just do low incline bench press for, so couple warmups, two or three warmups, two or three work sets, in the failing somewhere between five and 12 repetitions. And then dips, weighted dips. Big believer in these. I think it’s like an upper body squat, whatever that means. Weighted dips typically with a weight vest and it looks ridiculous, but the chains are great if you can throw those on, because you can toss one off and then keep going if you want to keep going.
Whereas if you got a weight hanging between your legs, which always just feels weird to me anyway, you’re like waddling around the gym, it’s clanking into your ankles. I’ll do some sort of dip and then I’ll do some sort of row for the back, typically like a low row or a dumbbell row, one arm dumbbell row and then some sort of chinning movement. Although I put the chins first because we’ve all got this thing of how many can I do. And I recently bought a Nautilus pullover machine based on the training with Dorian and it’s from 1976 and it’s one of only two that still exist and there’s a whole, it’s kind of like some guys like muscle cars, I like old school strength training equipment.
Tim Ferriss: Dorian loves his pullovers. Just like Arthur Jones.
Andrew Huberman: And by the way, if you’re rowing heavy and you’re doing these things, you’re getting some forearm training, but then I’ll do the neck training and I’ll either use the 4-way neck machine or I’ll do—Jeff Cavaliere from Athlean-X has a great video on how to train with a plate. You wrap it in—a trained neck with a plate and a bench so you could do that anywhere. You wrap it in a towel, you lie on your side and you’re just—you have to be careful about closing the chain so you’ve got one leg down and you’ve got a hand down on the ground. The video describes it, and maybe we could put a link to it.
One thing that’s very important I learned about training neck is you need to nasal breathe the whole time, have your tongue on the roof of your mouth and make sure that you’re not sticking your chin out at any point while you’re bending it to the side because then you start getting clicking in your jaw and my spinal surgeon friends tell me that it’s a great way to slip a disc in your neck.
The neck aesthetically, it’s always weird when dudes are talking about aesthetics, but these days because of the looks maxing thing and all that, it seems to be like more—but there’s something actually very important in neck training—
Tim Ferriss: You’re not hammering your cheekbones?
Andrew Huberman: No, I’m definitely not hammering my cheekbones.
Tim Ferriss: Come on, Andrew.
Andrew Huberman: Nope, not hammering my cheekbones, not taking—I mean, that is such a wild thing. Yeah. No, no, no. But there is something interesting. So from a strength and stability standpoint, training one’s neck is really important because it’s the upper spine, and I do think it’s one of the reasons I’ve never had any shoulder issues and I’ve got long arms and everything points to the fact that I should have rotator cuff issues. I don’t do any direct rotator cuff work. I think it’s because I started training my neck a long time ago and aesthetically, like you have this, this is a great opportunity to point out just how perfectly constructed you are, Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, thank you.
Andrew Huberman: You train your neck. Really, if you look head on at a male face, if the neck sort of arrives right at the sort of like outer, right more or less, right, plus or minus a few, whatever, millimeters, and more or less at the outer jaw, the outermost point of the jaw, like below the ears, like touching there, you’ll notice like it looks kind of right. When somebody is really wide and their neck is not at that point, it looks like the wrong head was placed on a body.
Then you see Laird Hamilton and you realize like this dude just has a really big neck, but it’s appropriate for his body structure.
Then after the neck, I’ll do, I don’t know, three sets or two work sets per side, although you don’t train neck the same way, like to forced reps and all that.
And then I’ll do some core work. The core work that I’m a big fan of, because you also get some forearm work in, is I’ll hang from a bar and I’ll do some L sits, and if I’ve been doing them a lot lately, I’ll do some pikes. Five sets of five, piking my ankles up to my hands, and then slow on the descent and then into an L sit if I can, and I’ll do maybe three or five sets depending, and then lower back work. I have a 45 degree ankle hyperextension and I’m not taking that to failure. The low back thing is really important. I’ve found that and there are a lot of data out there that if you can strengthen the spinal erectors, your posture is better, you’re more injury resistant. But that whole workout takes an hour tops. The next day is the high intensity cardio day, just max heart rate. These days I get on an Airdyne bike. I would say for this for people, it’s whatever you can do without getting hurt.
Tim Ferriss: So question for you on the Airdyne.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I guess probably an AssaultBike.
Andrew Huberman: AssaultBike.
Tim Ferriss: This is a digression so I won’t indulge just too far, but to figure out why the AssaultBike worked and caught on where the Airdyne did not, right? You can look at footage from Dan Gable, legendary wrestler working out on Airdyne, but it never really spread until the AssaultBike reformatted it, improved it, in some ways. My question for you on that real quick, for people who don’t know, you’re using your arms on these isolateral, movable handles that power this fan. So you can pedal and use your arms, one or the other or both. And I find that my upper body fatigues a lot faster than my lower body. If I’m trying to do, let’s say like a Norwegian 4×4 or something like that, like four minutes on, three minutes off or four minutes on, four minutes off.
Do you find that not to be the case for yourself or how do you approach it? Because I’ve wanted to use the AssaultBike. It’s now easier to find an AssaultBike in say a hotel gym for me than a stationary bike that fits well otherwise. How do you approach that?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Well, the naming piece is interesting and maybe we get into this at some point deeper in the discussion, but naming is very important and it’s not just important in health and fitness and this kind of thing. It’s actually very important in science. And I’m a student of science as a field, not just the field of neuroscience in terms of the facts, but also you look at the culture of a scientific field. Oftentimes, the naming is what carries a field forward very quickly. And you go, “How can that be? Aren’t these scientists? Shouldn’t they just be focused on the data?” Nomenclature is important because if more people are doing something because they can talk about it to more people using the same language, it tends to accelerate a field.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Andrew Huberman: So also AssaultBike sounds cool. Stationary bike feels like you’re just peddling. The AssaultBike is interesting because I also, I get like a lot of lat work from it. Keep in mind, the day before I trained my chest and back.
Tim Ferriss: No, exactly. That’s why I’m asking.
Andrew Huberman: So it ends up being a second stimulus. It’s not a hypertrophy workout, but you end up feeling like almost like a pump type thing if you do it right. I can’t do more than 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off without experiencing what you experienced, which is that my legs just have all this gas and my arms, they can just keep going. It all transfers to the upper body. So Norwegian 4×4 on the AssaultBike just sounds like torture to me. This workout, if I can, I’ll get outside and sprint. And you could do it on a rower, you could sprint. I think it’s just important because it’s a near all out or all out workout, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, or maybe you jog a couple laps and then you do a couple—you do a 400 on the track and then walk a lap and then do a 400.
Whatever you do for this workout, you can come up with any number of different variations. It’s got to be something where you can apply max effort and not get hurt.
And then the next day is shoulders arms. You do some sort of pressing. I’m not big on lateral raises. Some sort of press for the shoulders, couple work sets of bicep curls, couple incline curls, some hammer curls of overhead tricep extension for the long head, couple work sets, some bench dips.
And there you go, like bench dips again. So now you’re getting a little bit of other stuff working even though it’s not an all out chest and back workout.
And then the next day, which is typically on a Sunday, I’ll do some long, slow movement ideally outside.
Maybe it’s a walk and a hike with my girlfriend. Maybe it’s I’m rucking and listening to a podcast if I’m alone. Maybe I’m jogging in the sand. It could be a long bike ride. Just something like—there’s something so nice to starting the week.
Tim Ferriss: Jogging in the sand sounds miserable—
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it’s slow. It’s a slow plod. You’re a mule. I like to think of like you’re kind of a mule or I’m a mule.
Tim Ferriss: That’s going to be my clip for the teaser.
Andrew Huberman: You’re the mule?
Tim Ferriss: I’m a mule. No, I’m kidding.
Andrew Huberman: Cool. No, that works. That works for me. And the real hard part about that workout is not going faster. It’s pretty easy to jog and then walk, jog and then walk. It’s probably beneficial. But that workout is as much for the mental stimulation, but it’s also, there’s something so nice about going into the work week. Maybe it lands on a Monday. I don’t know. But typically for me, it lands on a Sunday because there’s something so nice about going to the work week, having spent as much time as possible moving outdoors the day before.
But I do this and it ends up being six workouts a week, but some are very, very short. None of the resistance training stuff is terribly long. You’re done in an hour or so unless you’re waiting for equipment. At 50, I’m continuing to get stronger, I’m not—outrageously so. And it just works. It just works and it’s worked for everyone that I know. Now one key thing and a lot of people will, what I call they’ll kind of geek this and they won’t do compound movements. You can’t do lateral raises and I do some rear delt flys on the whatever, one or the other either chest and back day or the shoulders and arms day. You need that for shoulder posturally, aesthetically, et cetera. But people will think, “Oh, I can do leg extensions, leg curls to failure once a week.” No, you’re also hack squatting and belt squatting or hack squatting and front squatting to failure for a couple sets.
Where that’s intense and you need to do the compound movements. There’s no world where you can just do isolation movements this way. And that’s the thing that sometimes gets forgotten in the Yates-style training. He was doing a lot of compound movements and he’s still a proponent of that.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s hop around and we may come back to training. We spoke some time ago about psychedelics with a focus on MDMA and it seems like you may have some revised views, maybe a few caveats. I would be interested to hear your current thinking.
Andrew Huberman: So this is an area you’ve spoken about and thought about pretty extensively, or as I’m more of a newbie. As we talked about last time in case people didn’t hear that conversation, growing up, I made the mistake. It was truly a mistake of taking some psychedelics at a very young age, “Recreationally.” LSD, psilocybin, not giving any thought to what the long-term consequences might be. Fortunately, I didn’t feel any long-term consequences, but I had enough bad trips, meaning one, Robin Carhart-Harris would say, “You can’t have a bad trip.” You can have a bad trip, Robin. I’ve had one. It sucks. You’re in the pit for hours and hours. There’s no guide there if you’re doing it recreationally as a teen. The brain is hyperplastic. It made me very, very cautious, almost paranoid about psychedelics for many, many years. Then also the last time we spoke, I talked about how in an effort to resolve what I felt were some longstanding psychological traumas. I did clinically-supported MDMA. Standard MAPS protocol, right? I forget the milligram dosage, maybe take like—
Tim Ferriss: Probably 125, something like that.
Andrew Huberman: Sometimes there’s a booster about 90 minutes in, you have someone there, you’re doing talk therapy before, during, and after tremendously helpful to be able to feel my feelings, to be able to recognize what a whole body feeling was about. I mean, there was never the experience for me of wanting to dance or have sex while I was on it. It was like, no, there was some shaking. There was a little bit of that, but it was a very—it’s an empathogen. I think as you know, it’s not a psychedelic, it’s technically empathogen and raises both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which is very unusual for any compound to do and raises oxytocin quite dramatically. The data actually say the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not due to oxytocin through a kind of good control where you just give oxytocin and you don’t get the same clinical effects, but you could argue the cocktail effect, the synergy might be important.
So I did that a few times. I think it was a total of four times separated by a number of months or a year, clinically supported.
In any event, after a period of doing that, I took a break and on the suggestion of the same clinical group decided to partake in a psilocybin experiment and it was high dose psilocybin.
Now, psilocybin, as you know, leads to, I think in the words of our friend, Paul Conti, it almost recedes the waterline on the unconscious mind. So what I found in psilocybin was because my brain often thinks in analogies, it’s just how I structure my thinking, it’s reflexive for me off psilocybin. Almost everything that came to me in those sessions was out of symbolic representation analogies. For somebody else who represents their world not that way, maybe musically or through somatic experience, it’s likely that, from my understanding, that they will experience insights through those same kind of representations.
What I found from psilocybin work was it was exquisite at revealing to me the structure of my thinking and the ways that some of the patterns in my life that were not serving me well, how they were structured. It was like, oh, coming out of it there’s a like, wow, like there’s this form of self-seduction that I do, which takes actually eight forms, which look the following way in my life.
I can be seduced by the enchantment of some sort of promise of a future outcome that’s not realistic. And you can see that. I’m just kind of giving one example. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. And that for me was an incredible experience. I do think it was important to keep a journal afterwards, to take notes while off the drug. And for me, that was very, very helpful at allowing me to understand the structure of my thinking, both for things that serve me and don’t serve me. I will say, and this is getting a little—well, as long as people are doing like live streams of taking psychedelics, I feel on very solid ground, but who knows?
Tim Ferriss: Well, just wait until the second half of this conversation.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don’t want anyone to run out and take these things without clinical support. There are a number of people who shouldn’t be taking them and all the usual caveats apply, young people, et cetera, but the real, whoa, on session type rewiring, which was the hardest work I’ve ever done, having done lots and lots of therapy, but the hardest work I’ve ever done was to take MDMA and then a couple hours later, take a high dose of psilocybin. And I’ve only done that twice. Now, the reason it was such—by the way, if I ever try and run for public office, any mistakes I make, they’ll attribute to this. By the way, I’ve seen that publicly, but I’m going to make it very clear right now. Not only am I not going to run for office, I’m running from office. There’s been some speculation. But the interesting thing was no two days later drop, which you do experience with MDMA. I just did not experience that if I took psilocybin with it.
Remarkable. Had some of my best workouts, work weeks, et cetera. I was like, “Oh, wow, that can be avoided through this thing.” But what was remarkable is on MDMA as an empathogen, you feel very good about most anything you focus on. You can find the piece in it. You can find the love in it. It could be this yerba mate, which I happen to love, but you would really love—that’s the danger, right? You can get pulled into these force fields of thinking something’s really important that might not be that important when the session is over. That’s why I think it’s very important to have a trained guide with you, but there’s the drop.
Psilocybin for me was a very dark and harrowing experience, a lot of purging, a lot of vomiting about halfway through. These weren’t enormous doses. They weren’t small either. It was four to five grams, but this—
Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear for folks, of dried, Psilocybe mushrooms.
Andrew Huberman: So for me, it was terrifying to be on psilocybin alone. It was extremely difficult and the combination of the two, it was like having my really good friend Rob Mohr in there with me going, “You can do this.” Now, Rob wasn’t in there, so I’m just half joking because he’s here in the room with us now, but it was like, I can do this. I can lean into the hardest work. I’m going to give an example so it’s not too vague.
I’d spent a fair amount of time thinking about some of the harder things that had happened in my childhood, in my life, some of which were self-inflicted, some of which were not self-inflicted. And I’d come to peace about those through the work I described, standard psychotherapy, a lot of journaling, time, some MDMA, psilocybin, those separately. Taking them together, I had this voice in my head that was like, “It’s time to do the real work.” And I was like, “Oh, goodness.”
And I said out loud, “I thought we’re just going to listen to Grateful Dead today.” And the person helping me was like, “No, that’s not how this works. You know that.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t want to do this.” And I don’t even know what this is. I just know there’s something there that’s important.
Tim Ferriss: Something foreboding.
Andrew Huberman: And I’m like, “Oh, shit.” And I think it is important for people to understand this because it can be very, very scary and you feel it coming at you like a storm and you can push it away. I could have spent the entire time listening to The Grateful Dead, not a huge Grateful Dead fan, but people have encouraged me to listen to it. So I’ve been doing it and I like it, but I could have done that, but I didn’t. Instead, I was like, okay, with those two compounds in me, I was like, “I can do this. I’ve got myself held. I’m my own friend. That’s the empathogen. I can do this.” It wasn’t this like, “All right, let’s go. Let’s fight.” And that session took me through a brutally hard voyage of thinking about all the things that didn’t happen, all the things that I would wish had happened.
That I was in no position to make happen for myself. Heavy, gnarly. And coming through it, it was the perfect thing because I was like, “Those are the things I know I can create now.” There is no way, and this is why I feel it’s important to talk about these compounds. There is no way whatsoever that a therapist was going to sit down and go, “Hey, what’s ever on your mind today? Let’s talk about what didn’t happen.” No one’s ever done that for me. And if they had, there’s no way that I would have been in the full emotional experience of the lack.
Tim Ferriss: Or necessarily had access to it.
Andrew Huberman: Or had access to it.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Andrew Huberman: So I give that as an example. It’s certainly not what everyone would experience, but I’d never thought about the problem of what hadn’t happened as a viable option to explore. It’s so obvious now, but then the outcome of this brutally hard session was beautiful. No additional drug, nothing for—and it stayed with me. This was well over a year ago and I thought, “This is awesome. I can create these things. I know exactly what to aim for.” And I started to make steps in my life steering the ship in those directions and not surprisingly it’s like, “Yeah, I can do this. I can do these things. I need some practice.” And so I think that the medicines as we think of them are immensely powerful, immensely precarious. You need the support. I’ve been told in these sessions, “Hey, maybe we don’t go there. You don’t go there.”
That feels like a repeat. You need someone to help guide you. These are not to be used recreationally in my opinion, at least not for folks like me. I’m just not interested in that.
Andrew Huberman: But the lessons I learned is the following. Neuroplasticity is the goal directed toward something that oftentimes we can’t identify through standard therapy. Like you would say, “Oh, I’m trying to resolve my traumas.” That’s a sentence. If you can’t know exactly what the thing was, or even if you can, or the things that happened, what about the things that didn’t happen? It just never would’ve occurred to me. So it revealed both the thing that needed work and allowed me to do a lot of the work in real time and spit me out at the other end, which is how it felt. I wasn’t cratered coming out the other end. I was like, “Ooh, that was an ass-kicking of a whole other level.” And with a clear mission in mind of what to do in my daily life that has served me very, very well.
It also reminded me that we seem to have this one compound type view and I’m not suggesting that polypharmacology is the way, but it turned out in this case, was the appropriate tool for me. And it’s also a reminder that combined pharmacology with brain machine interface and stimulation. Combining ketamine therapy with TMS. I’ve not done ketamine nor TMS, but I think we are entering a really exciting new time where we’re going to be able to amplify the effects of machines and drugs, let’s call them what they are. It’s pharmacology, but drugs, that they can synergize in ways that are more directed, but ultimately that the directives in life are what matter. Do I feel better? What am I doing on a daily basis that’s serving me? If the anterior mid-cingulate cortex or the posterior insula gets 10% thicker, great. But if you’re not making better decisions, frankly, who gives a shit?
Tim Ferriss: Right, right. Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: So ultimately, the everyday outcomes, the clinical outcomes and everyday outcomes are what really matter. Brain imaging is important too, of course. So the experience with these compounds, I will also say left me in a place where I’m like, “I’m feeling pretty good right now.” I feel really good in fact. I don’t feel “called” to it again right now. Maybe I will at some point. I have not, for instance, I’ve never done ayahuasca. There seems to be this resurgence of the one shot theory in Silicon Valley, that there are these CEOs or company founders rather who will take ayahuasca and then quit the company or something. And I made the argument to Marc Andreessen like, “Well, maybe they’re happier.” And he made the argument quite astutely as pretty much everything Marc says is he said, “Yeah, but as an investor, that’s not what I’m looking for.” And I go, “Well, sure.”
Tim Ferriss: For sure. Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: But from a life satisfaction point, maybe yes. I think it depends on what your incentive structure is. And so I am very excited about plasticity tools, whether or not it’s talk therapy combined with a brain stimulation device that’s invasive or noninvasive or a vagal stimulation device. Those are getting better and better all the time. Whether or not it’s an empathogen and psilocybin high dose with therapeutic support or it’s daily microdosing for seven days with an undetectable subjective effect where you’re just like, “I feel fine. I feel normal.” But you’re doing a bunch of hard things and suddenly your brain is shifting more quickly. I think this is where the field needs to go enough with it “opens plasticity.” That’s a general statement, not about psychedelics, but includes psychedelics.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me chime in here. This is good terrain. So I would say a couple of things that might be helpful for folks or interesting just to bat around. So the first I would say is that when you induce plasticity, let’s just explore that within the context of psychedelics and I’m going to use some pretty primitive analogies here, but if you’re heating up the clay, that doesn’t immediately mean that in that window of plasticity or after that, you’re going to turn out better than you were before. You have to be very cautious about how you reshape the clay once you induce that plasticity.
Andrew Huberman: Well put. Totally agree.
Tim Ferriss: And I’d suggest people check out Gül Dölen. She’s at UC Berkeley. She’s looked at critical periods and the reopening of critical periods after psychedelics. She’s focused a lot on MDMA but also is exploring ibogaine among other things. And that’s part of the reason why historically if you talk to facilitators who have literally supervised thousands of sessions, more common in like the neo-shamanic kind of Northern California context for simplicity than the indigenous, but the two to three weeks following has always been viewed as this golden window for reformatting your behavior and your patterns.
And it turns out that modern science, Gul’s research being one good example of it reinforces this. So it’s not just taking the medicine in the form of a pill, a potion, whatever it might be. It’s actually, that is a catalyst that opens a period of time during which the work needs to be done. So that’s part number one. I would say that your experience also with the hippie flipping, so the MDMA plus psilocybin, or in this case, Psilocybe mushrooms, I would say blunting or eliminating the, let’s just call it energetic hangover MDMA, super typical. I don’t generally—well, not that I’m doing this at all, obviously for legal purposes, but let’s just say hypothetically, that’s part of the reason why some people will format say a weekend where you have breathwork, let’s just say as a lead in, then empathogen, and then the next day, something that is more, and this term is controversial, but the classical psychedelic. Again for simplicity, let’s just call it like psilocybin, LSD, whatever it might be, also tends to reduce that potential for the energetic hangover, right?
So that’s pretty common. People can check out also Transcend Therapeutics that just got acquired or at least the majority was purchased who have been commercializing methylone, which is a very, very interesting compound. It’s like the shorter acting softer cousin of MDMA, much less body load, very, very interesting compound. And what they did, which was very smart and I’m not saying MAPS/Lykos, whatever the current name is, wasn’t smart, but one of the problems that MDMA ran into is that it was coupled with psychotherapy and the FDA does not know how to regulate psychotherapy, that they don’t know how to standardize or think of as standardized. And so what Transcend did is they just completely separated the two and actually removed the psychotherapy completely and said, “How do people do with methylone, period?” That’s it. And they’ve done incredibly well, which is reflected in the acquisition. Really interesting compound, methylone like—
Andrew Huberman: Methylone.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: Interesting. I wasn’t aware of it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I think these are very interesting compounds and I used to have this view like, “Oh, psychedelic—” You’re increasing neuro modulators. SSRIs will do that too, differently and clearly a different experience. Actually, I’ve not taken SSRIs. I’m trying to think, have I ever taken an SSRI?
Tim Ferriss: Have you ever taken Trazodone? It’s not technically an SSRI.
Andrew Huberman: No, no. No, I haven’t. I think there’s so much important work to be done here and I will say, huge hat tip to you. You’ve been ushering this forward.
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 01:11:42].
Andrew Huberman: It’s amazing we can even have this conversation with things that have happened.
Tim Ferriss: Things have changed.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: My conclusion after all of that and lots of personal flight time with lots of things is that to state the obvious, it’s not a panacea. It’s for most people, not going to be one and done where the potion pill plant medicine does all the heavy lifting for you. The way I think about it now is it’s like very complicated knee reconstructive surgery. It’s like you’re going to want to pick the doctor very carefully, you’re going to want to know how to do your due diligence. You have the surgery and then guess what? The next, let’s even, could be like both shoulders, both knees. Boy, do you have a lot of rehab to do. And that’s the way that I myself think about it.
And also, it’s contraindicated for a lot of people, at least as of right now. There are exclusionary criteria for these clinical trials and I don’t think all of them will hold water long term. But if you have bipolar, if you have a family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, it is generally not a good idea. And coming back to the polypharma, do not underestimate the risk of cannabis when taken with or in proximity to these drugs. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble.
And then I would say to deliver on the brain stimulation side, that one of the most interesting things to me right now is the one-day protocol that’s been refined by Dr. Jonathan Downar at University of Toronto and others, but using an agent, in this case an antibiotic to induce neuroplasticity called d-cycloserine. So you take, in this case, it’s just a coincidence, but I think the most common dose that’s been used is a 125 milligrams, like an oral troche and you dissolve it an hour before your stimulation. And again, I’m pulling this from memory so people can read up on the literature, but you take that five day protocol that had been compressed by Nolan and team down from three to six months, they had compressed it down to five days, but people are still having to take five days off of work because you’re getting stimulated 10 times a day, right? Every hour on the hour, there are variable protocols, but that’s roughly it.
Very few people can take a week off of work and pay out of pocket, incredibly expensive. So this one day is pre-loading with the d-cycloserine and you take those five days and you compress it into one day. And I’ve had experiences with this one day protocol and full disclosure, I’m involved with this company, Ampa Health, which is co-founded by Jonathan Downar. So there’s that. But I experienced all this before any of these conversations and from that, I’ve been able to get like a 90% reduction in my generalized anxiety disorder and OCD for three to four months at a time. Some people get much longer durability.
Andrew Huberman: Wow, that’s impressive.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve met people who’ve had 18 months of durability with major depressive disorder one day and the side effect profile and there are other hardware providers and so on that you can look into, but having this accelerated TMS protocol enhanced by the neuroplasticity of this d-cycloserine, DCS for short, it’s been a real focus is trying to look at neuromodulation writ large as opposed to just psychedelics, right? Because if the only tool you have is hammer, and this is not my expression, right? A lot of things start to look like nails and psychedelics are not useful for everything. They just are not.
And if you look at any historical use of these compounds, having thousands and millions of people taking psychedelics is a brand-new experiment. If you look at most indigenous cultures who consume, whether it’s Psilocybe mushrooms or ayahuasca or something else, it is a very, very, very, very small percentage of the population, typically reserved for who you might consider the ethnobotanist/pharmacist/medicine man or woman. And pre-Columbian contact for instance with like in the case of ayahuasca, two things. Number one, the patients seldom drank. “The patients” because two of the principal uses of ayahuasca were for warfare and hunting. So this idea of like we just put LSD or whatever the psychedelic du jour is in the water and we have world peace, it ain’t a real thing, guys.
Andrew Huberman: No. It could be the opposite.
Tim Ferriss: Go to any psychedelic conference and look at the obscene infighting for any proof of that. It’s the worst. It’s so, so bad. What they do, coming back to your point, and alongside the d-cycloserine and many other compounds, is they induce neuroplasticity, which affords you a window of opportunity within which you can do some pretty cool stuff.
Andrew Huberman: I’m totally on board. It’s interesting because as we’re moving through exercise and psychedelics, which is really a conversation about neuroplasticity and mental health, perhaps physical health as well, it’s very clear that all the stuff about exercise, increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor—
Tim Ferriss: It’s all tied together.
Andrew Huberman: It’s all tied together. And then you think, “Well, why is my brain sharper after I exercise?” There’s an alertness thing, you’re using your own chemistry to wake you up, some BDNF, but then people sort of assume you just have to do the exercise part. You actually have to go try and learn something to get the plasticity. It doesn’t matter. You could quadruple the amount of circulating BDNF in your brain. Nothing’s going to change. I know this for a fact because for years, I studied neuroplasticity. You need precisely timed neural firing pre and post synaptically. You can do this with sensory input. We’re talking about reading, math, learning to vibe code, is that what they call it now, right? Which Rick Rubin invented. No, I’m kidding. He didn’t. He’s going to kill me for saying that, but the memes would make you think so.
Whatever it is that you want to rewire, you have to go do that hard work. Just getting the chemicals increased doesn’t do it. You need alertness, you need these chemicals circulating. It helps to have an emotional rise if it’s for certain kinds of work and perhaps not for others, more analytic work requiring probably less of an emotional rise. But the directed part is that that’s the next step and I think about that a lot. Having sat down as you have with so many guests now who are experts in psychiatry and psychology and self-help, for lack of a better way to put it, it’s reassuring to me that as with exercise, as with nutrition, as with psychedelics, some themes are starting to fall out. We’re starting to almost get to principles.
There’s this wonderful book in the field of neuroscience called Principles of Neural Science. Almost everyone gets it. It’s a big old thing.
Tim Ferriss: I think I have that textbook. It’s old, right?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Used to be Kandel, Jessell, and Schwartz, and then one of those folks got canceled and then passed away and so it’s got a different author line there, but that was the original one, Kandel, Jessell, and Schwartz. And the idea is principles of neural science. Yes, it’s filled with facts about receptors and neurotransmitters and tons of beautiful details of all these discoveries, but what you learn as a graduate student and a postdoc, and then when you eventually become a professor, you want to teach the students is what are the principles of how a nervous system builds itself? Attractants and repellents. What are the principles by which neural circuits change? Oh, you need coordinated firing. You can actually unwire things if they’re mismatched firing.
How do you build a memory and then move it someplace else so that you don’t have to fill the memory making area to its capacity? The principles are what eventually emerge and that’s very useful. In the fields, if you will, of health and wellness, which umbrellas, all the things we’ve been talking about and a lot more, we’re finally getting to that. This is the reason why I throw out exhale emphasized breathing slows you down, calms you down and inhale emphasized breathing wakes you up. Resistance training to or near or past failure, that kind of scales the number of sets.
We are finally at a place where because of social media, thank goodness, because of podcasts. Again, huge hat tip to you. Yours was the first podcast I ever listened to, still listen to. We are finally at this place where people are starting to hear like, “Yeah, I get it. The sunlight thing.” You go, “You get it? Okay, cool.” Ironically, the things that people have heard many, many times are often things they need to do every day and be reminded of many, many times. But it’s not about getting morning sunlight for X number of minutes, et cetera. It’s about understanding what is it in this morning sunlight thing.
I’ll tell you right now, the big eye-opener for me, no pun intended this last year was I did an episode on cortisol, the “stress hormone.” No, cortisol is involved with stress. Yes, that’s true. But cortisol mobilizes glucose from the liver and elsewhere into the body. It’s an energy deploying hormone. When you wake up in the morning, it’s because of a rise in cortisol. The cortisol awakening response. Adenosine is very low, melatonin is dropping, cortisol goes up, you wake up. If your alarm goes off, it spikes even more. Viewing bright light, ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning increases that morning cortisol spike by about 50%. Okay, and on and on, and I could say, and also cold water and caffeine and exercise. Exercise, by the way, will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels at any time of the 24-hour cycle.
So you go, “Okay, that’s a bunch more facts.” Ah, but the principle is if your morning cortisol is high and you can make it higher doing any number of the things I just described, it ensures that your evening and nighttime cortisol is low and that’s what sets you up for an increase in melatonin. It’s what helps ensure a great night’s sleep. And so you go, okay, so the real principle here is you want to bookend the day with high cortisol in the morning whenever your morning happens to be. It doesn’t matter if it’s 6:00 AM or 10:00 AM, bright light, caffeine, hydration, exercise. A little stress too probably will help and you want the end of your day to be low cortisol, high melatonin, high adenosine.
The more movement you get during the day, the better off you are and all of a sudden it doesn’t really matter if you have access or the time to do all of the things I just described. It’s not about morning sunlight per se. It just turns out that morning sunlight in your eyes is the best way to ramp up that morning peak and that ramped up morning peak is the best way to make sure that it’s low at night and if you experience any stress in the evening at night, it’s a quick blip in cortisol and that’s reduced. Otherwise, it’s a blip on top of a high baseline.
You look at cancer treatment outcomes, you look at anxiety, you look at—and by the way, what I just described is true for kids, pregnant women, perimenopausal, menopausal, and men. You want high morning, low evening and nighttime cortisol. Aim for that, that principle, whatever you have available to do that, if you’re on a plane, it looks different. If you’re in California, it looks different than if you’re in Scandinavia, different times of year. Whatever you do to try and ensure that book ending, high and low cortisol respectively morning and night, you won. You won the day and the night. And so it doesn’t really matter what the individual protocols are. And this to me is like the most important and exciting thing about where the “field” of health and wellness and public discourse about health has taken us, which is we finally have some principles to work with.
And then if people go, “Well, I don’t like the cold shower.” Okay, fine. “But I don’t like resistance training. I want to do pila—” Okay, fine.
Choose a different tool, but the principles are what count. And to me, that’s super exciting. That’s not boring.
Tim Ferriss: All right Andrew, I want to ask you about peptides. All the rage, you look at Google trends, everybody and their brother has a peptide startup, but there seems to maybe be something there. I don’t know if there’s a there there. For people who have heard the word, don’t know exactly what folks are talking about. I get texted every week multiple times from people asking about various peptides and I’d say half the time, depending on what they’re trying to do, I’m like, “Can’t you just be a grownup and inject testosterone or HGH instead if you’re trying to get there directly.” But I would be very interested to hear, I know there’s a broad spectrum of stuff that people are experimenting with. What are these things and what’s your current thinking?
Andrew Huberman: I also don’t completely disagree with you about just be a grown up and take cypionate and HGH if you want to maintain fertility, take some HCG as well. I’m being facetious, of course. I think there are risks to all of those, but it is the appropriate opening joke/reality because if you’re expecting cypionate HGH type results from peptides, you ain’t going to get them, at least not with respect to anabolic growth, feelings of wellbeing.
Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Insulin’s a peptide, et cetera. I cannot take credit for what I’m about to say next, but it’s a very, very important principle. I think this is kind of the theme today, I suppose.
Abud Bakri, who’s an MD, came on the podcast, talked about peptides and he said, “Look, for many, many hundreds, if not thousands of years, but certainly hundreds of years in the context of pharma, people have been searching for medicines in plants, isolating medicines from plants. Pharma companies still do this. Now people are starting to look for medicines within the body and peptides are a great example of that.” GLP, for instance, the drugs that increase GLP do so to thousandfold levels over the levels of circulating GLP that you would have and they result in, as we all know, robust weight loss. So that’s one category. I think we need to think about categories of peptides, but understand that peptides are all over, they’re made in your brain and body. Some of them may have benefits when made synthetically and delivered at very, very high doses, such as with these GLP agonists, Ozempic, Mounjaro. Retatrutide is one that we should talk about made by Lilly. It’s coming out soon. It impacts the GLP system, but also the GIP and the glucagon system.
Tim Ferriss: Careful with that one, kiddos.
Andrew Huberman: A lot of people are going to be microdosing it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: A lot of people are finding that microdoses can have similar effects and that’s an important kind of cost risk analysis.
Okay. So stepping back, peptides are made in your body. At high concentrations made synthetically, they may provide benefits that make them medicines. So we can think of the weight loss peptides, the GLPs being the most prominent example. The GLP drugs that increased levels of GLP hundredfold were used to treat diabetes for a while, still are, but they didn’t induce much weight loss. The ones that raised GLP levels thousandfold or more, those lead to robust weight loss, including muscle loss. And so that’s part of the controversy. Also, there’s discussion about maybe increasing some apathy. They reduced craving for alcohol and perhaps cravings more generally. At the recommended dosages in some people, they can create nausea, which is why some people are taking less of them and still getting the weight loss benefits, but less nausea. There’s a lot of stuff going on there.
But to stay on the GLPs and weight loss peptides specifically. Lilly developed retatrutide, which hits the GLP, GIP and glucagon system, leads to the most robust weight loss, seems to spare some muscle perhaps. People should always resistance train anyway to offset that. But it’s the most effective of those weight loss, let’s just call it, GLPs, even though it hits these other systems.
The gray market is the “for research purposes only” stuff that you can buy online. It’s perfectly legal to sell for research purposes only, not for animal or human use. And I joked on X a while ago like, “Wow, all these home labs, everyone’s buying this.”
Of course people are injecting them. The concern is about contamination with things like lipopolysaccharide or you’re not getting what you think you’re getting.
So many people are already taking retatrutide even though it hasn’t been formally released because it’s pretty easy to synthesize. And so, it’s being sold on the gray market, people are taking it.
There’s a second category, and then I’ll return to the gray market issue.
The second category would be things to increase growth hormone. So-called growth hormone secretagogues, things like Sermorelin, Ipamorelin, Tesamorelin. These are all variants on the theme of get the brain neurons that project down to the pituitary to stimulate release of growth hormone at night. Typically, you don’t eat a couple hours before sleep is the idea. Probably good for sleep anyway. It is good for sleep anyway. Then you inject this stuff. Typically, it leads to maybe a three to eightfold increase in growth hormone, IGF-1. Some stimulate appetite quite a bit like MK677, some don’t.
I’ve tried sermorelin very briefly. Dramatically increased my slow wave deep sleep, nuked my REM sleep. This is a common theme. Spiked my prostate specific antigen. I’ve never had any problems with PSA. I came off it. PSA went back to normal. No one’s been able to give me a mechanistic explanation for that. I’m not about to run the experiment again. I didn’t find that I got much fat loss from it, but I didn’t use it very long. I didn’t find that I got stronger. Just didn’t seem worth it to me, given the PSA thing. A lot of people take these thinking they’re going to get these really dramatic increases in growth hormone. They sound dramatic, three to eightfold, but whether or not they’re meaningful in terms of fat loss, it doesn’t really seem they’re that robust, especially given that you have all the GLPs now.
So the growth hormone secretagogues also include things like CJC, and there’s some variants on these which can lead to some insulin resistance, but maybe it spikes GH a bit more. I don’t know. None of those to me really seem worth it personally, just given the effects aren’t that great. If someone can afford it and they can get a script for it, probably better to just take pharma grade somatropin or omnitrope growth hormone. And the bodybuilders would take 8 IUs a day or something crazy like that. But in the trials that have been done with metformin and GH, typically it’s people are taking 1 to 2 IUs five nights per week. That will dramatically increase deep sleep and probably sleep overall, and the effects on fat loss and just tissue repair healings and feelings of wellbeing and just cognitive function.
Anecdotally and subjectively people say, “Wow, I just feel so great.” This is the getting up in the morning and being like, “Wow, my joints feel good.” And just being ready to go, go, go. It’s not anabolic as much as something like testosterone, et cetera. But I’m not telling people to run out and do GH, but if you could get a good script, a script for real GH and take a low dose versus taking a bunch of unknown secretagogue peptides, that seems like an obvious one for me.
Then there’s a category of things like BPC-157, Body Protection Compound 157, which is an amino acid chain that is in gastric juice, but it’s this isolated amino acid chain that seems to be the one that’s most popular. And at the same time, it’s the one for which most people probably are taking it for all the wrong reasons. I’ve tried it. I definitely feel like after a pain or strain, the recovery is faster, but I can’t do the control experiment because it goes systemic. So it’s not like you could—let’s say you hurt both biceps. You can’t inject into one bicep and not the other and assume that it’s just acting locally. It’s going to go systemically.
There are capsule forms of BPC that people claim are just as good. I don’t know. Do you have to inject locally close to the injury? It seems that might be helpful. The animal data on BPC are really impressive. Cartilage regrowth, fibroblast migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth. It’s a literature I’ve spent a lot of time with. There’s not a single published human trial. Where I think the most interesting use of it perhaps is, is I know someone recently she wrote to me and she said that her dog had a spinal injury and she said, “Does BPC work in animals?”
I go, “Actually, pretty much all the data are in animals.”
So if my dog, God forbid, had an injury, I’d be willing to give him or her BPC. You have to work out the appropriate dosage.
Tim Ferriss: How would you source that, hypothetically?
Andrew Huberman: So you can get it from compounding pharmacies now, so you need a doctor to write that script. Depending on your risk tolerance, you could go to the gray market for research purposes only. I wouldn’t do that. Peptide Sciences shuttered their doors, windows, whatever. They closed a few months back. They sensed the he at coming on and they’re like, “We’re out.” They took their money and they’re out. Smart move Peptide Sciences.
So nowadays, you can find doctors that will prescribe it. There’s also pentadecapeptide, which is just a different form of BPC, seems to have same function. It’s easier to find. And getting it from a compounding pharmacy, of course, compounding pharmacies vary in stringency, but is going to be cleaner than the gray market sourcing, of course. But I have no relationship to these pharmacies. But for instance, Tailor Made, Upstate, Revive Pharmacy, these are kind of the better known and trusted compounding pharmacies.
Compounding pharmacies were allowed to compound drugs that are still under patent during shortages and can compound generic drugs. They’ll also truly compound peptides. You can get BPC with another one, the TB500, the so-called Wolverine Stack. I don’t know. I’ve never tried TB500. I keep some BPC-157 in the fridge. If I have a strain, I’ll inject it.
Tim Ferriss: Can I hop in for a second?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: The challenge with so much of this stuff is you can’t do the control.
Andrew Huberman: Can’t do the control.
Tim Ferriss: Because I took the Wolverine Stack after I had elbow surgery and I’m like, “Did it help?”
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I have no idea. Frankly, I have no idea.
Andrew Huberman: I will say this, I’ve used it a few times, very short runs of it. I’m not interested in using it as a general recovery tool or every day or any—I don’t have any gut issues. So people have used high doses of BPC to resolve gut issues. That was the original use. In this clinical trial, they did BPC enemas at very high dosages.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like an Austin party.
Andrew Huberman: And supposedly, I learned this from Abud, Pavlov actually had a side gig. He was a health influencer. He would give people gastric juices to try and resolve ulcers and things like that. And we know gastric juices contain a number of beneficial peptides, but I don’t recommend that.
Tim Ferriss: How did they down those or how did they get them in there?
Andrew Huberman: How’d they down them and how’d they get them?
Tim Ferriss: Shot glass of gastric juices?
Andrew Huberman: I mean, maybe he had a cabinet of people with the—they’re tapping them. Yeah, rough.
So people say, “Should I take BPC-157?”
No, you shouldn’t unless you have an injury or maybe in that case you get clean, compounded pharmacy BPC and you inject it locally, or you take it systemically. You try it, see if it helps. But why would you take it ongoing? That just doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t make any sense to me, frankly. And again, you go back to your sort of half joke at the beginning, you really want to recover quickly from exercise, take an IU or 2 IUs of GH every night before sleep, and you’ll recover magnificently well. For the Enhanced Games, the swimmer, the massive lats guy, he recently put—
Tim Ferriss: His regimen.
Andrew Huberman: —his stack out. And I think it was 200 milligrams of cypionate per week. So that’s 1 cc of standard cypionate. That’s a lot. I have to say, most people I know, and we can talk about this—and I’ve talked about my cypionate use from the beginning and the experiment much, much lower. I believe in microdosing that, if at all. He’s taking 200, plus I think he’s doing 2 IUs of growth hormone per night or five nights per week. And he’s taking EPO. They can only take FDA approved drugs. It’s enhanced, but—
Tim Ferriss: I mean were they testing at all to verify if they’re FDA approved versus—
Andrew Huberman: I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: —FDA non-approved? That would be a complicated test to run.
Andrew Huberman: It’s kind of interesting to ask, was there any rule breaking in the steroid Olympics?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe it was a sink test, you’ve heard this, right? Like urine sample and they just pour it in the sink. Passed.
Andrew Huberman: Some of the powerlifters like Thor were very open about the fact that they were not allowed to use the things they would normally use because they weren’t FDA approved. So it’s kind of interesting. It seemed like they were running the middle of the road, but—
Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot of juice. I think he was also, if I’m thinking of the same Australian swimmer—
Andrew Huberman: I think so, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure. But yeah, he was also quoted, this was many months before the actual competition, but he’s like, “I am going to juice to the gills.” So those would be—
Andrew Huberman: Well, it looks like he almost grew gills, because his lats were like, not Yates size, but he’s a very tall guy.
A few Olympics ago, I think it wasn’t the last one. It was the one before that. This female runner got popped for Deca, and she claimed it came from a burrito that she ate, the Deca burrito. And I’m a track and field fan, and so are some other folks around the studio.
Tim Ferriss: That’s Deca-Durabolin for people that don’t know.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I might be mispronouncing it.
Andrew Huberman: No, yeah, that’s correct.
Tim Ferriss: Nandrolone.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Non-aromatizing, doesn’t convert to estrogen as far as we know. People use it for joint healing and things of that sort. I’ve never tried it. But someone in our studio said this, and I think they’re spot on. They hope she used it. Because if she didn’t and she got nailed for it from a burrito or some other source, that sucks. Because there’s a huge stigma that goes with that. She goes, she can’t compete. And you never really shake that reputation. So my hope is that she actually took it and got caught as opposed to didn’t take it and got caught for something she didn’t do.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, the burrito—the burrito alibi is pretty flimsy. Last time I checked, you can’t just nibble on Deca and have it do much for you.
Andrew Huberman: Well, and Canelo Alvarez got popped for Clenbuterol, and he claimed it came from some food he ate in Mexico, the Clen cow hypothesis.
Tim Ferriss: Right, Clen cow. Do you remember back when, I think, modafinil was fair game if it were prescribed. And it was something like the majority, if not all of the finalists in some of the track and field events, were all diagnosed narcoleptics. They were all—
Andrew Huberman: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: What are the chances that these mutants would all be narcoleptics?
Andrew Huberman: Totally. BPC would be very hard to detect because your body makes it naturally. As with the GLPs, again, they stimulate such a massive increase in action at those receptors that you probably detect it.
So those are the kind of the healing ones, the tissue repair ones, TB-500, BPC, there are others, but those are the main ones. And then there’s the miscellaneous category, things like epitalon, which actually comes from the pineal, which is weird, because there’s also a peptide called pinealon, which doesn’t come from the pineal.
Tim Ferriss: That is confusing.
Andrew Huberman: Epitalon is thought to allow for preservation of histone and DNA structure. It’s very vague. There are some decent data on visual repair for animal models of retinitis pigmentosa, maybe more robust circadian setting when you travel. I may have tried this recently, a capsule form of epitalon combined with some sunlight in the morning for the first two days, did seem to shift my clock more quickly, but I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: For jet lag.
Andrew Huberman: For jet lag.
Tim Ferriss: You know what tip I got?
Andrew Huberman: Maybe, but I’m not going to do it again because I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if there’s a there there, but I was chatting with this friend of mine. She’s a frequent traveler from Japan to the US. She lives in Japan. She’s constantly going back and forth. And she’ll come for just a few days and then head back. The possibility for getting brutalized is high, just hopping so many time zones. And she gave me a tip and I tried it, and it could be placebo. Who knows? She was just like, just fast. She’s like, “On the long flights, I just fast.”
And I tried that going to Asia is always a little bit easier than coming back. I was totally fine. I couldn’t believe it, because I had to do a very short trip for reasons I won’t bore people with. Don’t know what the mechanism would be, but I was like, “Oh, maybe there’s something there.” I don’t know.
Andrew Huberman: Well, we have our central circadian clock, SCN. Most people have heard of that now. The eyes connect to it directly, which is why sunlight and other forms of light are so efficient at shifting our clock. But we have a lot of peripheral clocks, liver clocks, gut clocks, and those are usually the last to shift, which is why a lot of people have kind of a feeling like their stomach is off, digestion is off when they travel. Maybe not traveler’s diarrhea, but they just sort of feel like waking up in the middle of the night, they’re hungry, they’re on the previous location’s meal schedule. Fasting may allow for shifting of those clocks. Mealtimes are a very robust thing in terms of raising our levels of arousal. There’s you eat every day at noon. A couple minutes before you get that arousal, the well time systems. So that’s not totally surprising.
Pinealon is one I’ve experimented with and is very interesting and I have to say there are very few things that increase REM sleep. Most things deplete REM sleep. In fact, I always joke if somebody needs a PhD quick and nothing’s working, have them do a study of sleep and give any drug, and it disrupts REM sleep. I don’t study sleep, but that’s a kind of a well-known joke in labs.
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell Pinealon?
Andrew Huberman: P-I-N-E-A-L-O-N.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, they really wanted to be as confusing as possible.
Andrew Huberman: And it does not come from the pineal. The nomenclature sucks in this area. And we don’t even have names for these different bins.
Tim Ferriss: Some half-baked postdoc is like, “You know what would be really funny?”
Andrew Huberman: To call the stuff of the pineal, epitalon, spelled two different ways, by the way, out there, Epithalon and epitalon. And Pinealon, and then swap them. Pinealon comes from the cortex. It’s made in the cortex, neocortex.
And I will say there are a couple things that will increase REM. With no pharmacology, you can heat up your sleeping environment in the final two hours of your sleep. You’ll get much more REM. Thank you, Matt Walker for that trick. It’s awesome. So cool at the beginning of the night, cold in the middle of the night and warm toward morning. Or throw on a heated blanket or whatever, a weighted blanket or some socks and a wool cap if you wake up about two-thirds of the through your sleep, use the bathroom. You’ll be surprised how much better your REM is.
The other thing is, and this is a nice one if you want to work out late in the day, you don’t want to take caffeine because you still want to sleep that night. If you take alpha GPC, 900 mg of alpha GPC, alpha GPC, which as you know, increases—it’s like choline donor, acetylcholine, that system. You can still sleep that night and it will increase your REM sleep. And it is true. Remember we said high cortisol morning, low cortisol at night. That’s the optimal setup that we should aim for. If you exercise after work, and you do, let’s say, a high intensity session of any kind, the resistance training we were talking about earlier, for instance, you will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels.
I should also earmark that as all this stuff online, which seems mainly directed towards women like, “Oh, cold showers and baths, ice baths are going to spike your cortisol. That’s terrible.”
The increase in cortisol from deliberate cold exposure is trivial compared to what working out with weights will do. So late day cortisol spikes are no problem if it comes up and down, but you also wouldn’t want to take caffeine on top of that and disrupt your sleep. So if you have a late day workout and you need a bit of a stimulant, alpha GPC is a good tool, and you’ll likely get more REM sleep. So it’s a nice one. And then, pinealon, I will use every once in a while.
Tim Ferriss: For what reason?
Andrew Huberman: You get three hours of REM if you’re me. Three hours. And it doesn’t disrupt your slow wave deep sleep. It is wild. And here’s the cool part. It works that night and it seems to work all the nights after.
Tim Ferriss: There’s some carryover.
Andrew Huberman: There’s carryover, and it seems the hypothesis based on the animal data is that it can help “regenerate the pineal,” which is a dangerous term because you don’t want cells proliferating either. So who knows what it’s doing, but I’ll use it every once in a while.
Tim Ferriss: Always a good place to start.
Andrew Huberman: Now Abud likes it in the daytime. He’ll take it in the daytime. People use it for cognitive enhancement. He claims there’s a founder of a major company that has all his employees on it for daytime work. I know someone that takes it during the daytime because—
Tim Ferriss: Don’t tell HR.
Andrew Huberman: Because he’s a songwriter, a very talented songwriter, and he likes the hypnotic state it puts him in. I’m interested in sleeping at night and being alert during the day. Great tool for occasional use.
Tim Ferriss: Is that subcutaneous injection or what is that?
Andrew Huberman: They also have oral forms. I’ve only tried the subcutaneous injection. And you do need to find a doctor that can prescribe it and get it from a compounding pharmacy. I think pinealon’s a very interesting compound. And I’ve been monitoring my blood work the whole time doing this. So tried sermorelin, stopped using it. I’ve never used a GLP. I’m kind of curious because a lot of people are talking about low dose tirzepatide or retatrutide, like a 10th of the prescribed dose for not just weight loss but for just cognitive wellbeing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, neuroprotective effects.
Andrew Huberman: Neuroprotective effects, maybe other things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m interested in that stuff. I’m so curious, and maybe there’s literature out there. I haven’t read it. But if it’s a direct—if the mechanism of action is separate from the metabolic effects.
Andrew Huberman: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Because if you take someone who has insulin resistance or is on the path to insulin resistance and you correct for that, then that in and of itself on some level should be neuroprotective, right? Especially if you’re looking at vascular dementia or any number of things.
Andrew Huberman: Glaucoma, there’s some interesting data that tirzepatide may reduce eye pressure, so that’s interesting. BPC-157 has this asterisk next to it. It will cause angiogenesis. So people are saying you don’t want to vascularize a tumor, obviously, accelerate cancers, that kind of thing. You don’t want to supply more blood nutrients to a tumor. It’ll gobble them up and grow. But it is not mutagenic. So it’s not carcinogenic mutagenic per se. And that’s important.
Here’s something interesting, too. There’s the kind of sociology behind all of these. There are a couple more we can touch on, but the GLPs, the prescription GLPs and the massive growth of that area is guilty of making the general public comfortable with injections. So it’s kind of interesting, the battles online are between—
Tim Ferriss: Here we go.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. It’s like, you created this problem. Most people don’t talk about this, but the traditional media and medicine like to couch the peptide thing as a bunch of gym bros. Mm-mm. Massive market in women.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Andrew Huberman: Most people taking these peptides are not gym-going guys. It’s women who want to take a low-dose reta, but reta’s not out yet. Or they want to take low-dose tirzepatide cocktailed with NAD, with some GHK-Cu or GHK copper, which is for—there’s some studies that show that in combination with red light therapy or some sun exposure just enough might remove wrinkles. The biggest market is women. And I’m not trying to defend the bro science guy, but it’s kind of funny that the target has been like these guys on X who are selling peptides. That’s not where to place—
Tim Ferriss: It’s an easier target, right.
Andrew Huberman: There’s also this very interesting sociology around natty or not stuff.
Tim Ferriss: What the hell does that mean?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. If someone takes GLPs, are they now—
Tim Ferriss: Oh, not natural? Okay.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. But for men, that’s kind of the thing. Does someone get called out or not? My recommendation, this is what I’ve always done, is always just talk about everything you’ve taken or are taking or not taking.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also, can I pause for a second just to say, I think I’m getting the name of the doc right? Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which has Mark Bell and Chris Bell, I think it was, who directed and made the film. Great film to watch. It’s older. But at some point, they’re talking about this. And they put up, I want to say, it’s a four point quadrant, I mean by definition, and they’re like, “Okay, so you can inject EPO to increase red blood cell count and like oxygen carrying capacity.” And they’re like, “Or you can live at altitude, or you can have an altitude simulation tent.” And they’re like, “Are any of these natural?”
Andrew Huberman: Right. You get an infusion of your own blood.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Huberman: Testosterone cypionate will increase red blood cell count.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure.
Andrew Huberman: And people don’t talk about—it’s not EPO like, but certainly, cardio gets better. So even without the addition of muscle, recovery gets better.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’ll tell you, I mean, personally, and I’ve written about this, which is funny just to maybe air a grievance, right? I talked at length in The 4-Hour Body about post-surgical anabolic use, and then online it’s like, “Tim Ferriss admits—”
And I’m like, “Admit? I fucking wrote about it at length.”
Andrew Huberman: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: Just the wording is such a weasel word, I admitted.
Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah. Well, somehow, even though five years ago I said, “Oh, yeah, I decided to run an experiment where I tried cypionate with HCG.” Keep sperm production online, and just low dose, and just see what’s the minimal effective dose. I’m not competing in any sports. I don’t think it makes that big of a difference except in terms of recovery. I didn’t change my training before or after I went off and on again. I do think that, okay, so that’s within the male community.
And the women and peptides, there’s this other piece which is like who’s getting plastic surgery and who’s not, who’s getting—nowadays, the dermatologists certainly in Los Angeles, but in Northern California too, recommend some amount of laser resurfacing to reduce cancer risk, but it also reduces wrinkles. So what are people doing? None of it is particularly natural. I think for competitive sports is where it becomes an important issue. But I think that the pharma grade GLP world made sticking little tiny needles, 31 gauge or 30 gauge needles into one’s skin to inject something just kind of like, “Okay, no biggie.”
And I’ll tell you the first person to sell pharma grade, maybe compounded pharmacy peptide pens where you just dial it in, it’s not a syringe. People are much more comfortable with pens than they are with syringes. They’re going to make a killing.
So then there are a bunch of other things like Melanotan, makes people tan, but it can make you way too tan. It can cause priapism like permanent erection or dangerously long erection, greatly increase libido. But keep in mind Vyleesi is a FDA approved drug for female hyposexuality. Lowers orgasmic threshold, stimulates libido. It also works in men. I’ve never tried it, but it also works in men.
Tim Ferriss: Not sure most men want that.
Andrew Huberman: So I asked someone at Stanford who’s in the department of urology.
Tim Ferriss: I never do this.
Andrew Huberman: In the department of urology—actually, there are a lot of interesting drugs that are pro-libido for men, but they’ll never get marketed. Because the idea of more men wanting more sex is just not something that society seems to want.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: Although with the shift in kind of self-hatred, and one could argue diminished aspects of mental and physical health in men, maybe some people would really benefit from it. But Melanotan is yet another example.
Andrew Huberman: My view on the peptides thing is this, you do you, whoever you are, you decide what your risk thresholds are, but just be logical about it. Why would you take BPC if you don’t have an injury? It’s not going to accelerate your recovery that much. Certainly not as much as getting better sleep. So maybe you would think of pinealon, but get your relationship to light correct, get your relationship to caffeine correct. And I have to say, I’ve gotten great benefit from the Mag, Threonate, Apigenin, Theanine stack. I don’t think you need pinealon until you’ve tried everything else and then maybe try a supplement stack or even just one of those things. And then if you still need it, then pinealon makes sense. But just leaping to pinealon doesn’t make sense given how little data there are. But there are some interesting drugs out there, too, like the DORAs.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I’m taking Belsomra, mostly because of the Alzheimer’s it runs in my family.
Andrew Huberman: Interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Super prevalent.
Andrew Huberman: Does it help your sleep?
Tim Ferriss: It does. I can end up feeling a bit groggy in the morning, but you could explain. I ended up chatting with, as probably you did at some point, Matt Walker about this, very knowledgeable. It’s still preliminary, but pretty interesting mechanistically in terms of clearance of various goodies that you do not want in your brain, at least as far as we know now. So, we’ll see. It does help with sleep. The daytime sort of morning grogginess can be a bit of a hassle. So I’ve been cycling on and off of it.
Andrew Huberman: I tried Quviviq once, which is one of the DORAs. I got zombie sleep. I woke up in the same position I fell asleep in. I didn’t feel rested even though I had slept through the night. I’ve just not gone to prescription tools for it. But some people seem to like prescription tools. I think incidentally, there’s a really nice paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA showing that short meditations can increase lymphatic clearance in the daytime. This is very interesting, I think.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, very cool. When you go into this meditative state, long exhales, focusing on breathing, meditation of—more clearance of waste products on the brain during the meditation and in sleep that night, it seems increased, which is really interesting. Many people care about their nighttime HRV. Best way to increase nighttime HRV. So as long as you don’t have apnea or some other issue is to do some exhale emphasized breathing practice during the day. Even just a few deliberate exhales during the day can increase nighttime HRV. So there seems to be this daytime, nighttime relationship that’s pretty cool.
Tim Ferriss: Interestingly, something for future research, but I’ve seen HRV changes post TMS.
Andrew Huberman: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that makes sense.
Tim Ferriss: Pretty fascinating to check out, yeah.
Andrew Huberman: Post TMS, sorry, for a moment I heard TM because I was like—I think Tim Ferriss, TM I think.
Tim Ferriss: Well, probably both, right?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So yeah, the glymphatic stuff also is very intertwined with a lot of psychedelic science. Not to bring us back to that, but the glymphatic clearance is really fascinating. So I’d love to check out that. We’ll put it in the show notes, so I’ll get that from you.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Yeah, very cool paper. The author sent it to me before it came out. I think it’s just a really important finding. I go into a little bit in my book, but it was a recent finding so didn’t have time to go into it too much. But if ever you needed another incentive to meditate for a few minutes, that’s one. The peptide thing, it’s funny, I feel like people feel safe enough to try them because they’re enough like supplements, enough like drugs that they feel comfortable doing it. And cypionate sounds so scary. It’s like, okay. Or GH sounds so scary, but there’s a lot more data and they’re pharma grade. And small dosages are always going to be better than big dosages. And the fertility thing on anything that increases testosterone is very real. They’ve talked about inhalants and oral forms that don’t disrupt fertility, but anyone that wants to maintain fertility is going to have to take HCG while taking that, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or Post-Cycle Therapy with Clomid or something, but yeah.
Andrew Huberman: Right. Yeah. So I think that the peptide thing is very interesting. I get excited anytime the general public is thinking about biology and this—I love Abud’s framework of people are now mining the body for medicines. And maybe that’s why people feel like you’ll see these criticisms. And they’re understandable like, oh, all these people that wouldn’t take a prescription drug will take these peptides. I think that when people hear that something’s of the body, even if it’s a synthetic form of something of the body, they’re more likely to take it. And I can’t quite relate to that psychology, but I sort of get it. I sort of get it. It’s not some like stardust thing. At the same time, you’re not going to see huge effects from any of these things except perhaps pinealon and that’s still anecdotal, and the GLPs from retatrutide. Those have really robust effects.
Everything else, BPC can have its potential role in healing for some people but there are no trials. And by the way, no one’s going to do a trial and no one’s going to do it properly. I keep hearing, oh, there’s going to be a hamstring injury trial. There’s going to be—no one wants to put the time and effort. And having run a clinical trial and having done experiments in preclinical animal format for launch, it’s a lot of work to do properly. You need to know what the endpoints are. [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive. Who’s going to pay for it also?
Andrew Huberman: Right. And I just don’t see it happening. I think people are just going to take this stuff. I think the big win for someone out there, someone with an entrepreneurial spirit is going to be American made clean peptides with verified sourcing and all that so people can trust what they’re getting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve seen, as you might imagine, like a thousand different startups trying to produce their own peptides, whatever it might be. I don’t think I can talk about it yet, but the only one I backed is actually going to be verifying supply chain and all of that. It’s just a stamp of this is what it says that’s on the box, basically.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And it’s interesting that unlike anabolic steroids, which in the ’80s and in the ’90s, and to some extent still today but really in the ’80s and ’90s where there were these outrageous adverse events, right? People committing murders, massive acne, dying, brain tumors and all, which is the consequence of probably a bunch of things, GH and steroids. To my knowledge, there has not been a reported adverse event that can be tacked back to one of these non-FDA approved peptides. I’m not saying that means they’re safe, but it’s interesting that there are a lot of women taking them. There are a lot of men taking them, but there are a lot of women taking GHK copper in cream form or injectable form. If they’re having terrible adverse—well, adverse, terrible, that’s redundant, adverse events, they’re not reporting.
Tim Ferriss: So this is super important. I think there’s a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, who’s an MD from the UK. There are a number of chapters that are not relevant to US audience, but it’s a helpful book for teaching yourself to think in a structured way, scientifically about medicine. I think what you said is really important in the sense that—well, let me use an analogy. Let’s say we’ve got Honda Civic, tons of Honda Civics. Man, they’ve been around a long time, or just to say a cars. Okay, you’ve got all this data on all these horrible accidents, you’ve got vehicular manslaughter, you’ve got all this stuff, right? Pretty bad report card, right? Lots of deaths. And then you’re like, “But we’ve got this brand new Tron motorcycle fresh off the press, right? No documented deaths, therefore it must be safe.” And you’re like, wait a second.
Andrew Huberman: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: That thing has not had a lot of mileage on it. Only one person has used it. And I’m using a bit of an exaggerated example because this absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. And this is true also, again, not to sound like a broken record, but whether it is gray market reta or DIY for research purposes only peptide use or psychedelics, which still remain illegal in most places, there’s no real reporting mechanism. It’s like if you have a doctor and they prescribe you something and they ask you, “How’s it going?” And you’re like, “I’m growing horns. I’ve got hemorrhoids, whatever the side effects might be. I’m feeling really anxious.” There is some means by which the feedback makes it back into the system, right? And certainly with clinical trials and so on, you would hope that to be the case. So for me, it’s like when I’m looking at these things, I’m like, “All right, they might be great, but I feel some degree of reassurance.” I haven’t taken any anabolics in forever.
Maybe if I were trying to have six kids, I’d be like, “Yeah, let’s do HCG,” which does seem to have a pretty, for me at least, profound impact on libido which is sometimes nice.
Andrew Huberman: HCG.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.
Andrew Huberman: That’s probably due to the fact just an opportunity to throw in perhaps something useful is the old lore was guys want high testosterone, low estrogen. You want your estrogen as high as you can without getting side effects for libido purposes, for endothelial health, for brain health—
Tim Ferriss: Cardioprotective for reasons.
Andrew Huberman: Cardioprotective.
Tim Ferriss: Bone density also.
Andrew Huberman: Guys that quash their—they take tamoxifen or anastrozole to quash their estrogen levels, that is a mistake. They often find that they have reduced libido. They are sort of dry out so to speak. They get more vulnerability to injuries. Hardly anybody nowadays does testosterone replacement therapy with an anastrozole. Almost every person goes like, “I just feel better when I don’t take it.” Now, guys are getting gyno and all sorts of things they need to be careful. But for brain health, for libido, for all those things, HCG is going to increase both testosterone and estrogen. And even for just skin vitality look, not something men talk about too often, but if testosterone’s too high and estrogen’s low, skin doesn’t look good. It just doesn’t look good. It’s the chicken skin. It’s like the thin chicken skin thing.
Tim Ferriss: Heavy anabolic users, not known for their pretty skin.
Andrew Huberman: Not known for their pretty skin. I think it’s just really interesting that the peptide thing is all the rage. To my knowledge, not a lot of adverse events that can be separated out from—I always hear infected injection site. Okay, so use an alcohol swab, pin yourself carefully, don’t—
Tim Ferriss: Well, I just want to double click on that for a second because when people get cavalier with injections, it’s like speaking to someone who from a professional ended up getting a staph infection in the elbow.
Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Take your hygiene seriously when it comes to injections, right?
Andrew Huberman: Oh, my God. I’m just looking—
Tim Ferriss: Don’t run and gun and like you’re—
Andrew Huberman: This is a running joke around here.
Tim Ferriss: —behind the dumpster at the Denny’s with no alcohol swab. Don’t do that.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, don’t do that. Don’t reuse needles. Don’t dip back into the vial with a needle because you didn’t get enough because you can contaminate the vial. Use good practices. But a lot of people think that moving to creams or to capsules is going to sell more peptides. Very interesting observation I think is that people want the injectables. It feels more real. Capsules feel more like supplements, which are a mixed bag. It’s interesting, right? If I told you, okay, BPC and capsule form, same as injectable. Yeah, but if I inject the injury site, it just feels more is going on. This is where placebo effect may actually be real. Or it may be that the capsule forms are not as good.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also we’re getting in the weeds here, but just because something is oral also doesn’t mean it’s safer than injectable, right?
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Tim Ferriss: Because you look at Anadrol 50 versus injectable t-cypionate, it’s like if you are smashing your liver, you can do a lot of damage.
Andrew Huberman: Oh, absolutely. I don’t think people should run around doing anabolics by all means. Certainly, the number of guys in their 20s, 30s and even 40s that think that they need it. It’s not necessarily so. One thing that I think would be wonderful, I’m very excited about this, but it would be wonderful for the overall field but for supplementation in particular. Blood work has gotten relatively inexpensive now. The number of companies… they brought the cost of blood testing way down. People are now comfortable having someone take their blood and sending them their blood work. So there’s a sociology to this. There’s a shift. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get your blood work done? And then I envision a 3D printed blister pack with your morning and your afternoon or your morning and nighttime supplements that are tailored to your blood work.
Three months later, you do your blood work again and you get to see whether or not markers are moving into range better, update the 3D printing. Ideally pharma grade, that’s how supplementation should be done. And I’m excited for that possibility and that’s much more my focus now, at least in terms of this stuff. I have a lot of different foci, but in terms of injectables and pills and things like that, then thinking about what’s happening with peptides, because the legislation is changing constantly. Next administration could come in, whoever that happens to be, it could all get revamped. It’s not a Wild West, but it’s just not a well-defined field yet.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I think it’s pretty Wild West. It’s just my two cents. I mean—
Andrew Huberman: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m very conservative with this stuff these days. Maybe I’m just getting old and boring. I don’t know.I think as I’ve gotten older, whether it’s through the literature or maybe being on the receiving ends of a lot of anecdotal reports of adverse events for various things, I’m just like, man, there’s such a typical lack of reporting in wide population adverse events that I’m like, man, you just got to measure twice and cut once.”
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Tim Ferriss: And if I can pick something that has 50 or 100 years of research where I know with some certainty what the adverse events are and the probability of those adverse events versus the latest and greatest thing where it’s like, “Yeah, fly down to Honduras and have this gene therapy and hope it goes well.” I’m like, “Ah.”
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, the gene therapy thing is not ready in my opinion. We have a colleague in the health field who got an injection of stem cells into his spine and ended up with paralysis and almost died.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, terrible.
Andrew Huberman: And grateful to the neurosurgeons at UCSF, shout out to Chair of Neurosurgery, Eddie Chang, who didn’t do the surgery but one of his surgeons in his department did, and that injected with stem cells person is now mobile and healthy and strong, but it was a really close call. I know I actually got a call during the surgery about how it was going. This was a really good example of how even with attempted best practices and stem cell injections, there’s always the potential for local infection and rejection.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me give you one more. Not to be like the old guy who can’t deal with the young whippersnappers, but—
Andrew Huberman: Well, the goal nowadays is to be the old guy.
Tim Ferriss: Well, here’s the thing. Also, there’s mechanical risk in the sense that I’ve had stem cell injections from like the most vetted at every step of the process stem cells. And from young donors, I won’t go into all the details, but like very, very well vetted and involving US doctors,. And the doctor happened to have, I don’t know if he was busy, preoccupied, distracted, but a little sloppy technique on trying to give me stem cells around the medial collateral ligament and injected my fat pad in the knee and made a bunch of structural damage. And my knee was fucked, and like still, like this is a year or two later, have residual pain in my knee. That is from physical damage with the needle.
Andrew Huberman: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So it’s like depending on what you’re doing, if it’s intraarticular or you’re getting in there, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it’s going to be a smooth ride. And this is someone with thousands of injections, like they have the mileage. And this is as far as I can tell talking to other orthos and people who do similar injections, like it’s a routine injection. The path of injection is very well established. Nonetheless, off day, smash, blew up to the size of volleyball the next day.
Andrew Huberman: Helen Blau lab at Stanford School of Medicine had a beautiful paper where they had mouse data and human data inhibiting a specific molecule. I don’t recall which, and you could regrow cartilage in the knee. That’s clearly headed off to clinical trials in pharma, but the effects that were demonstrated were incredible. There’s an active inhibitor of cartilage regrowth and apparently you can inhibit the inhibitor and bring back cartilage. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Again, mining the body for its own “Medicines.” I mean, none of this stuff was supposed to happen naturally. And so we’ve been pushing and prodding from the outside, taking things, plant derivatives that mimic neurotransmitters. Psilocybin is just one example, but all these drug companies, bioprospect from plants, learned that from Chris McCurdy, the expert on Kratom.
And it’s cool, it’s really cool. I think medicine’s on the fast track, and I’m super excited about AI as a tool for self-directed medical exploration. Not necessarily for deciding which peptides to take, but maybe. But in terms of people trying to figure out like, “Hey, am I taking anything that might make my autoimmune condition worse?” I have a friend who’s got MS and takes a bunch of things, eats a bunch of things, turns out certain forms of mustard can flare up MS. Not everybody, but—AI can look at your food intake, look at your habits, look at supplementation, make recommendations, and that’s super powerful. And I just feel like AI is going to be an incredible medical tool, not just in terms of its ability to outperform physicians or aid physicians, but for people to really understand their blood work and understand the trajectories of their sleep scores and all this stuff. Like I’m very, very excited. Then again, I’m born and raised in Silicon Valley. So I’m not thinking about the dystopian view of AI robots or robots taking over. I’m thinking about people having more information and agency.
Tim Ferriss: Coming right up, for me right now, the most interesting application of the LLMs is for health purposes. I mean, it’s remarkable. I have friends who have the best doctors you can imagine, the most expensive folks you can conceive of and they have still caught stuff because no one’s going to take your health as seriously as you are. Nor will, even if they take it seriously, will they have the time that you will dedicate to it. And they’ve uploaded their genomes, added in the various bits and bobs from wearables and taken PDFs of labs and thrown them in and found very, very material insights that had not surfaced earlier in decades.
And it’s not one person, it’s not two people, this is at least four or five people I can think of who have all the means, all the time, all the interest. And yet it took these LLMs as a data dump and the ability of those LLMs to mine everything and to look for interrelated components to surface these, in their cases, actionable insights and it’s early. This is top of the first, right? It’s early for these things. So it’s just going to get better.
Andrew Huberman: It is just going to get better. And one thing that Eddie Chang, this incredible neurosurgeon who studies speech and language at UCSF, again, I’ve known him since I was seven and he’s just this phenom. What he pointed out to me is that all the LLMs, they’re all trained on the internet. Right now, AI is trained on the internet. It’s not like trained on human brain activity. The next big step is recording your brain activity non-invasively ideally and building some AI tools from your brain activity. Like what’s going on when you’re in your most focused mode? What does that look like? What does it look like if you take a hundred milligrams of a given stimulant? What’s your brain activity look like? Are there ways that you could modify your pharmacology and behavior and sleep and all that to really get your brain activity working the way you want?
And so the real holy grail of AI, he tells me, is AI built on neural activity, not based on the internet which is the output of our neural activity. Of course that occurred to me, but it hadn’t occurred to me in that form. And he and others are developing these ways of reading from the nervous system. You mentioned wearables, whether it’s a WHOOP or it’s an Oura, it’s your Eight Sleep, it’s measuring heart rate and body motion mainly. Accelerometers, HRV. By the way, the HRV is the reflection of how often that descending branch of the vagus slows your heart rate down. That’s what it is. So every time you’re increasing HRV, you’re slowing your heart rate down, that’s the vagal reflection in your WHOOP score, in your sleep score from your Oura. The HRV is that.
Well, that’s great. That’s not a direct readout of your autonomic nervous system. That’s heart rate. Okay. Well, that’s a start, but what about direct read of the autonomic nervous system? What about a little sticker that can record non-invasively the number of nerve impulses traveling up a branch of the vagus? A lot of them travel really superficially, behind the ears. What about a non-invasive brain stimulator that looks like a baseball cap? A few years ago, there were things like Halo, which were designed to ramp up neural activity, accelerate plasticity. I don’t know how good or bad the data were, but it didn’t really stick to be honest.
Writing to the nervous system, writing to the body, that’s where it’s at. And I think everyone who’s thinking about AI seems to also be thinking about that. The not so well-kept secret among the big AI companies. If you notice like a lot of them are starting to acquire biotech companies. There’s an interest in biotech. I don’t think it’s about advanced search engines per se. I think it’s about how are we going to control our own neural activity in brain states and bodily states? I’m certain that’s where it’s all headed. So what’s going to be the first thing to break through? There have been a number of things that have commercial vagal stimulators to try and calm people down. They haven’t worked that well. I’m going to piss some people off there, but they’re weak sauce.
Tim Ferriss: Most of them are garbage.
Andrew Huberman: Most of them are.
Tim Ferriss: They don’t actually stimulate the vagus nerve, most of them.
Andrew Huberman: Right. Or do it specifically enough or robustly. Totally agree. I think a really interesting place is if we look at sleep, like sleep states and measuring sleep states has gotten really good even with just heart rate and body motion. And now like with something like Eight Sleep, using AI, it’s making temperature adjustments for you. This would be amazing to have for waking states. Let’s just say during the course of this conversation, the room was dynamically changing in temperature. The seat was changing a little bit. I don’t know, maybe my vagus was being stimulated a little bit just to keep me in whatever zone was optimal for this. It would just figure it out. AI would just figure it out.
I think that the big first use of writing to the nervous system is going to be for sleep. And I’ll just give you three examples.
First, there is a study where they looked at a rocking of a bed, a mechanical slow rocking of a bed and how that improves sleep, and it’s remarkable. How much it accelerates the transition into sleep, how deep people’s sleep gets, et cetera. They also did that study, how fast people need to walk back and forth while rocking their baby. Turns out a certain number of paces. There’s a paper I can send you the reference in Cell Reports. Turns out parents figure out the ideal pace and I forget how many hertz it is, but it very closely mimics what the bedrocking needs to be. So you go, “Okay, what is all this? Okay, we were born in water.” No, yeah, that’s not what it’s about. That’s from a sound ceremony. No disrespect to the sound ceremony. It’s been just some pretty cool sound ceremony. The thing about this is in order to fall asleep, you need to forget your body position.
Huge important step in falling asleep. And it turns out that there’s a way to do this. There’s this crazy eye movement thing that was published in Reader’s Digest some time ago and went viral, even though viral wasn’t around then. Where they told people to make themselves fall asleep by closing their eyes and slowly moving their eyes to one side, then the other side, then counterclockwise, then clockwise, then crossing their eyes and looking at their nose and then doing a long exhale. What in the world is this? I’ve tried this. Yes, you generally find yourself waking up the next morning. It’s wild, but the really cool thing happened when there are a couple of guys at MIT reached out and they’re like, “Hey, we’ve got this sleep mask. We’d love for you to try it.” It measures REM directly by looking at eye movements, and it can induce sleep in under six minutes. Like how? They’re like, “Oh, it creates with stimulation behind the ears, it can stimulate eye movements and you forget your body position, you fall asleep.”
Tim Ferriss: So it’s affecting the vestibular system.
Andrew Huberman: Right. So the eyes are linked to the vestibular system through to control retinal slip. There’s this whole thing like pitch, yaw, and roll. As you move through space, you need to stabilize images in the retina. So your cerebellum in your vestibular ocular pathways, there’s a couple synapses in between. I’m very familiar with this because this is what my lab used to work on for a significant portion of time. I figure out which retinal cells and which targets in the brainstem and on and on. Anyway, flocculus of the cerebellum, but this eye mask is really cool, you put it on. I have no relationship to this company. I think they sort of approached me, but I didn’t do anything with them, but I think it’s just really, really cool. You put the eye mask on and you feel a little twitch behind your ear, you adjust it down so you don’t feel it anymore. And what’s wild is your eyes just start moving.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like that would keep me up. I guess maybe you get used to it after a night or two.
Andrew Huberman: And it makes you feel very sleepy. So there’s also a relationship between certain eye movements and overall arousal state. Now, this stuff, I don’t want to call it crude, but this is the first foray into writing to the nervous system to induce a brain state. And what I love about it is it’s so objective. Again, I’m not selling this thing, but if you were to try this thing, you’re like, “This didn’t really help me. I want my money back guarantee.” You’re good. Whereas a lot of the stuff for plasticity, for focus, it’s subjective. And it’s subject to the placebo effect. I think sleep have been the first place where reading from the nervous system has been really prominent with Ouras and WHOOPs and Eight Sleeps and things of that sort. I think sleep is also going to be the place where writing to the nervous system is going to happen first.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about writing in a different way. You are a podcast native, and yet the author of the upcoming book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. What should people expect in the book?
Andrew Huberman: So an introduction that defines how to use the book. I’ve always liked those, how to use this book. And my backstory and the energetic drive, the spiritual drive behind wanting to do a book that teaches science and is about health and wellbeing and performance. People can skip it or they can read it. It doesn’t really matter to me.
The first chapter is all about sleep. So you’re going to learn the science of sleep. And you’ll learn the various protocols from most important, most effective, to still effective but lesser important protocols for sleep. And most importantly, why they work based on the science you just learned.
Then a chapter on exercise, defines the program we talked about. Also a section on mobility. A lot of people talk about walking in steps, but really identifies what’s needed there, what the science actually says. A section on cardiovascular exercise and how to structure that.
Again, the goal being, yes, I think that program will work exceptionally well for anybody, but the principles to fall out of it are not, you need to do this class or that class. Once a week, get your heart rate as close to maxed out as you can in a controlled, safe way. Once a week, do this. Okay. And why and what the benefits are, what the science says.
The part about resistance training was also a lot of fun to really dig into the now excellent science that’s been done about what actually triggers hypertrophy and strength. Turns out you can do anywhere from five to 30 repetitions as long as you take them to failure and still get the same hypertrophy results.
But then you have to be practical. You step back and go like, “Am I going to do 30 reps of bicep curls? Maybe. But am I going to do 30 reps of squats to failure?” Well, those first 20, people don’t often acknowledge that.
Tim Ferriss: If you haven’t tried that, have fun.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. And it’s very hard to keep perfect form with high repetitions. It’s actually easier to do with moderate to heavy weights, heavy for the individual that is.
Third chapter is about stress and stress mitigation. That was a fun one because that was an active area of my lab for a long time. The next chapter is about light, talking about how LEDs are not necessarily a problem. Can’t get incandescents anymore. But if you’re not getting enough long wavelength light, how that’s problematic for a number of things related to mitochondrial health, retinal health.
Tim Ferriss: Is long wave light a decent way to think of natural light? Or?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So the sun is full spectrum. Everything from UV all the way up to red, near infrared, and infrared. The heat from the sun being infrared. When the sun is low in the sky, you’re going to glean more of the long wavelength light and less UV because of something called Rayleigh scattering. That’s why the sun appears more yellow or orange when it’s low in the sky.
The goal really is to get as much long wavelength light. It’s the high quality protein of light without getting too much UV. You need some UV. The challenge is in the middle of the day when the sun is overhead, you’re going to get full spectrum light, but you’re going to get too much, many people will get too much UV.
Now this is controversial. People are like, “Oh, sunlight. The more sunlight you get, the longer you live.” Time of day that you get your sunlight is important, not just for setting of circadian clocks, but for other things.
I also talk about how long wavelength light can actually penetrate through a t-shirt like yours, go all the way through your body. And because long wavelength light is absorbed by water, it actually is absorbed in the portions of your cells that enhance movement on the electron chain in mitochondria.
This notion that we are batteries is kind of true. If you ever go snorkeling, you’ll notice after about 10 feet or so, the red fish disappear. They didn’t disappear. The red was absorbed in the top meters of water. And actually a lot of animals and fish will come up to the surface because there’s a lot of interesting nutrients happening.
Long wavelength light bounces off greenery. If you were to put infrared goggles on during the daytime, the greenery is just reflecting long wavelength light like crazy. Which is weird because it’s green, which means it should be absorbing the long wavelength light. I talk a little bit about light and electromagnetic energy in a way that should be accessible to people.
So that chapter was like, I was like, “This is so much fun.” I haven’t thought about the sun that way in a long time, but the goal is for people to understand the difference between red light therapy. If you’re under a lot of LED lights or in front of screens at night, why it’s important to try and get some sunlight during the day to offset some of that.
Not just because of the sleep effects, but what you don’t want is a lot of short wave LED light without long wavelength light in your 24-hour cycle or daylight cycle. It can lead to myopia, lengthening of the eyeball, which means the image focuses to the front of the retina, so why people wear corrective lenses. And a few other things about the relationship between light on the skin and hormone production and why that’s helpful in longevity.
Okay, that’s five. All right. Then chapter six is about neuroplasticity, learning and ways to increase alertness and I go through it all. All the behavioral tools, the pharmacology, I talk about Adderall, Sunosi. I talk about how throughout history people have, since they discovered it, have found ways to get caffeine and nicotine into their system. They will not quit doing this.
I talked about the relative benefits and risks of these different things, delivery mechanisms. And I talk about the real science of neuroplasticity and that of course is an old love of mine and wheelhouse of mine. So to really talk about what it takes to do, I call them learning belts. If you’re going to sit down and do something hard, I mean, I think that’s what the writing of the book was for me is the way I described it. Is the need to experience that internal friction and how important that is, not just for the relief of when it’s over, but how important that is for brain longevity.
And I really hope people will take it upon themselves to learn something new. I know this was a active area for you. Learning tango, learning kickboxing, learning so many things. To cook. And just the incredible value of that for life enrichment, but also for brain health and longevity.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. Even multilingualism is correlated, to be clear, correlated to longer health span.
Andrew Huberman: That’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: There’s some really interesting stuff out there. So yeah, keep learning.
Andrew Huberman: There’s an Instagram page. I’ll find it. I discovered it in the wee hours of travel. I got to find this kid’s name. And all he does is he takes three days to learn things from complete beginner to extreme performer of one thing, like the hardest clarinet song.
And you see him start at the beginning, he’s all, “Excuse me, I’m spitting everywhere.” But that’s what he did too. And then at the end, he’s playing this clarinet. He’s like, “Yes.” Or can he do juggling a soccer ball? Can you do that for 100 kicks and then kick it into the basket and swish it?
He just shows how if you just completely pour yourself into things, you can learn this stuff. But the range of things that he’s doing is totally outrageous. I don’t know him, but if he had faked one of them, you might be able to detect it. I don’t think he did, but he’s just music, sport, all sorts of cool, cool stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Give us the handle.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I’ll find it.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll put it in the show notes.
Andrew Huberman: It’s really, really cool. This kid is so—he’s got that energy. It reminds me a lot of your experiments in neuroplasticity. When you’re like, “I’m going to play a drum solo in front of a ton of people.” Put the pressure on and it’s just so cool.
And then the last chapter, I had a hard time titling because it’s not about relationships. I thought about calling it relationship to self. It’s really about personal development, like how to structure all the information that’s out there. And it has a number of things.
It has a section on how to navigate grief based on the science and practices of navigating grief. Which those practices, just even the understanding of what grief is, this remapping of our understanding of what’s actionable and what’s not. I mean, it really is an activation of the reward circuitry that can’t be fulfilled. It’s like as if I was dying of thirst and I’m trying to reach for this and I can’t get it. That’s what grief really is.
Occasionally I’ll get a call from my graduate advisor who passed and I was very close with, from her daughter. She uses her phone number and it still comes up as her mom’s name. And there’s this moment where I’m like—and I’m like, “Oh.” And you feel this sink. I love talking to her daughter. She actually became a neuroscientist.
But grief is this perpetual feeling of like, “Oh, I can’t smell the person or the thing.” There are their glasses and I can’t do anything. There’s this yearning piece and how that needs to remap. And the kind of work that we can actually do to, in a healthy way, remap that grief circuitry. And then how the notion of somebody that we lost, or a pet perhaps, gets reframed in our mind as an not actionable now, but we still have a relationship with kind of concept. And to me, that was an important thing to include.
But the big one for me was there seems to be this contradiction in the self-help literature and psychology. Which is about half of the stuff you see is like, “Get after it.” Like, “Suck it up, fulfill your roles in life. Don’t be a lazy piece of shit. Exercise, do all—” And then the other half is like, “Don’t just do and drift from yourself, your true self, your core self, your essential self.”
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So I think many years ago I could have really used this chapter. That was basically it. It was like I could have used all the chapters. I had sleep issues, so I could have used that chapter. I could have used the stress chapter, all of it. A lot of the science wasn’t known, so this book would have been impossible.
But when Jim Hollis, this incredible Jungian psychoanalyst came on the podcast and he was 84 years old then, and 86 now. And I expected him to talk about essential self and heart’s desire. He wrote Under Saturn’s Shadow on the healing and trauma of men. He also wrote The Eden Project about relationships and the struggle of relationships and romantic relationships.
I expected him to give me all this kind of high level stuff, deep heartfelt stuff. And he basically nailed it. He was like, “You have to shut up, suit up, and show up.” And I go, “Okay, that sounds like kind of boomer advice.” He goes, “No, but it’s not what you think.” He’s like, “Stop complaining. Somebody’s definitely suffering more than you.” That one’s about gratitude.
So it’s not exactly shut up. It’s be grateful for something, you’re alive. You have to get to that level when you’re suffering. It’s like, “Cool.” And it ratchets up from there. There’s a lot of data on gratitude as we know.
Then there’s suit up. We have to be prepared. We need to learn to prepare ourselves, prepare. It’s not just about clean your room. I mean that too, but it’s about like we have to prepare ourselves to show up. We have to get into a head space. We have to develop processes that allow us to show up in our different roles.
And then we need to show up for those roles. We need to fulfill roles. And I’d done a lot of role fulfillment in my life, as you have too, and it’s super important. If somebody’s adrift, we have to do this. And he explains how critical this is to our psyche, how critical it is to our feelings of self-worth.
And then he also has this other thing about how critically important it is to ideally once a day, but at least a few times a week, to get out of the stimulus and response that is shut up, suit up, show up. And really touch into what’s true for you, like what he calls your heart’s desires.
This was more of the Hollis that I expected. And how just quieting the mind, not feeling like you have to do anything in that moment, allows things to come up from your unconscious that lets you really ask yourself. And he used these examples like, “Is the 40-year marriage I’ve been in really the one I want to be in?”
Because I made the example of like, “How beautiful is that?” And he’s like, “Yeah, but there are a lot of people who end life after these long marriages.” And then they’re like, “I didn’t really want to be in it.” The tragedy of that, right? And how much better it would have been that people can identify who they really are, what they really want, like really touch into what’s important to them. And I was like, “Shit, this sounds so simple and yet that’s hard work.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, simple, not easy.
Andrew Huberman: Simple, not easy. And how important it is to do both. And I thought, well, this chapter might be boringly simple, but that’s the important work. And you could take any number of different self-help books and kind of bend them into those, or different chapters into those.
Tim Ferriss: So the book, again, Protocols, easy to remember. Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. The pub date?
Andrew Huberman: September 15th.
Tim Ferriss: September 15. And I think most people will know at this point, but where should people find more about Dr. Huberman online?
Andrew Huberman: Oh, thanks. If you put Huberman Lab into the internet, you’ll probably see some stuff that’s not true and you’ll probably also find a website called Huberman Lab, where we have AI links to episodes. And the book is going to be wherever standard stuff.
Tim Ferriss: You’ll find it.
Andrew Huberman: You can find the book. And the Huberman Lab site is actually, I have to say, the team has done a great job with that. It’ll take you to specific timestamps. If you want to know about dopamine and exercise, it’ll take you to those specific timestamps.
I’m really proud of the team, they put up with me while writing this book and all the rest. And yeah, I mean, I’m out there. And I also am really excited about the young upstarts who are coming for our jobs.
Tim Ferriss: You can have mine. Andrew’s going to fight it out with you guys.
Andrew Huberman: I’m not going to fight it out. When you watch the Dean Potter movie, you will realize why it is a bad idea to try and prevent the person coming up the ladder. Don’t kick out the rungs behind you. And in his case, especially if that person is Alex Honnold, you’re going to lose.
Tim Ferriss: Andrew, great to see you, as always.
Andrew Huberman: Great to see you, man.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks for taking the time, man.
Andrew Huberman: Thank you. I have tremendous respect and admiration for you. I don’t think I’d be podcasting or here at all were it not for you. I’m a fan. I consider you a friend. I’m very, very, very grateful to you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man.
Andrew Huberman: Thank you for everything you’re doing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We should break bread at some point.
Andrew Huberman: Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: While I’m in this neck of the planet. And for everybody watching, as always, tim.blog/podcast, Huberman, just look for the most recent. You’ll be able to find all the links. We will have a lot of links to studies, to MIT eye masks, we’re going to have, if they exist. I’m not even sure they’re online.
Andrew Huberman: They do, actually. I think they’re a small company, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. So we’ll link to everything. You can find it there. And as per usual, until next time, be a bit kinder than as necessary to others. Dramatic flourish with the eyeglasses back on, but also to yourself. And until next time. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Andrew Huberman — Peptides, Performance, and Protocols (#876) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-07-23 02:54:49
Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., (IG: @hubermanlab) is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab. His research spans brain development, visual perception and repair from blinding diseases, the neuroscience of stress and resilience, and neural plasticity. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles in top journals including Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron, and his honors include the Cogan Award, the McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award.
In 2021, he launched the Huberman Lab podcast, which became and remains the most popular health and science podcast in the world. Dr. Huberman is the co-founder of Scicomm Media, the company behind the podcasts Huberman Lab, Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, and David Senra.
He is the author of Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.
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“But what is failure? If somebody really put a gun to your head and said, ‘Curl that bar one more time or I’m going to kill your family,’ you’d curl the bar.”
— Dr. Andrew Huberman
“Not only am I not going to run for office, I’m running from office.”
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“If the anterior mid-cingulate cortex or the posterior insula gets 10% thicker, great. But if you’re not making better decisions, frankly, who gives a shit?”
— Dr. Andrew Huberman
“There does seem to be something almost spiritual about whether or not we’re funneling energy into things that really reflect us at our best … versus competition. Competition, it turns out, is what destroys people.”
— Dr. Andrew Huberman
“It’s as if I was dying of thirst and I’m trying to reach for this and I can’t get it. That’s what grief really is.”
— Dr. Andrew Huberman
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2026-07-18 02:27:28
Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and he is the author of one of my favorite essays on making a living as a creator: “1,000 True Fans.”
But if 1,000 True Fans tells you who your customers might be, how do you figure out what to sell them, especially in the age of AI?
I recently published “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?“, and reader Andy Vaughn recommended another Kevin Kelly essay in the comments: “Better Than Free.”
“Better Than Free” answers the what question, and I was shocked I hadn’t seen it before, as it first came out in 2008.
As luck would have it, I know Kevin, so I asked him if he’d like to update or revise the piece. He did so and kindly offered to let me post it here.
When perfect copies of your work cost nothing to make and distribute, what can you actually sell? In 2008, the copy machine was the internet. In 2026, it’s AI, which can produce not just copies but competent variations—of words, images, music, code, and advice—in seconds.
Fortunately, there is still terrain left for humans.
P.S. I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Which of these eight “generatives” are you betting on? What have you tried, and what has actually worked?
[At the request of Tim Ferriss, I’ve condensed this short essay, which I wrote back in 2008, updating it a bit now that Patreon and Kickstarter are almost clichés. I did not have to change much; the central theme still stands: You need to sell things which can’t be copied.]
In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy. That friction worked as a constraint to limit the propagation of copies. If you wrote a book or developed a photograph or carved a statue, it took trouble to reproduce it. We invented a legal system whereby we would reward the creator of the book or the photo or the art or the music or the device by preventing others from reproducing copies of it without the creator’s permission. Creators were granted a temporary monopoly to make the only copies available via a copyright—the right to make copies. Selling legal copies became the livelihood of most creators.
In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet as a superconductive fluid that transmits copies everywhere, all the time. Once a creation is brought into contact with the internet, it will be copied forever, and those copies never leave. With copies free and freely distributed, the traditional livelihood of creators selling copies is gone.
We now live in a digital age. If perfect reproductions of our best efforts as creators are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless, and stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
Well, what can’t be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” You can’t purchase trust. You can’t duplicate it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, a stranger will always prefer to deal with someone they can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.
There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we purchase when we pay for something that could otherwise be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free in the eyes of the creator. Eight uncopyable values. I call these values “generatives” because they must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured in context of the exchange with the buyer. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, faked, replicated, counterfeited, banked, or reproduced. Instead the generative value must be generated uniquely, in place, in time. These generatives are what are sold, not the copies that carry them.
1. Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, the second it is produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via streaming or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. You might pay for a writer’s timely newsletter to get their insights that later appear for free on the web. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often devalued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.
2. Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound acoustically perfect in your particular living room — as if it were performed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, no ads). Aspirin is practically free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA would be very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time-consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset and will be reluctant to switch and start over.
3. Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free; the software manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. Consultants make their living doing exactly that. For instance, for 25 years the for-profit company Red Hat has been selling support, training, consultation for enterprises using Linux and other free open source software. The copy of the code, being mere bits, is free — and becomes valuable to a user only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting a copy of your DNA is not free, but soon it will be. In fact, I’d bet that pharmaceutical companies will eventually PAY you to get your genes sequenced because they can sell targeted drugs to you that don’t work for everyone. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.
4. Authenticity — You might be able to grab an app for free, but you might like to be sure it is bug-free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was, indeed, actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.
5. Accessibility — Free doesn’t mean it is easy to get. A clearinghouse that can offer otherwise free material in a format that we find easy to use will get our money (Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc.). We want our particular music (remember my tastes), at any time, anywhere in the world. Ditto for books and blogs and movies and apps. In fact, ownership is overrated. Even free stuff has to be stored, backed up, and tended to keep it accessible. An agency can do that for a fee. It works with us to keep everything in order, at our fingertips, with a uniform and dependable interface and therefore acts as a generative force for the copies.
6. Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a phone. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res 16K on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. That hardcover book is embodiment. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same physical room? Sure, the hi-res of today — which may draw ticket holders to a big theater — may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new, insanely great display technology that consumers won’t have and will have to move their bodies to. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. The book is free; the bodily talk by the author is expensive. The movie is free, but the toy merch is expensive. This formula is a common one for many creators.
7. Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if (1) it is very easy to do, (2) it entails a reasonable amount, and (3) they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. The advent of Patreon, a reliable platform that enables fans to easily, dependably, and satisfyingly pay for free stuff is a great boon to creators. I run two different Substack newsletters that are free. But many readers pay for it (via the easy subscription mode) just because they want to establish a connection with me — by directly supporting me. I thank them personally.
8. Findability — A price of zero does not help direct attention to a work. In fact “free” may sometimes make it easy to ignore. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen. Unfound masterpieces are worthless to the world. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of movies, millions of apps, millions of agents, millions of everything all demanding our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable. We pay the big aggregators like Netflix (and some users, like me, pay YouTube) in part to help us find good free stuff, which is why creators hook up with them. Right now the technologies of findability favor the economic interests of the big aggregators, rather than the creators, who only get a fraction of what the audience spends on their work. Alternatives like my 1,000 True Fans model can help, but are still constrained by the difficulty of findability. One of the promises of AI is that it could enable a more decentralized matchmaking function that would connect the creator who has a one-in-a-million interest with the thousand possible fans in the world with the same one-in-a-million interests.
***
In short, money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution to the demise of the copy because they are attention magnets. Ads have almost been the ONLY solution to the conundrum of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. Ads do work, but I think they are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.
Maintaining generatives is a lot harder than duplicating copies. These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not dependent upon the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse. These generatives are very human skills, by the way, which AIs are not very good at – yet.
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and the bestselling author of books including What Technology Wants, The Inevitable, and Excellent Advice for Living. Explore his work at KK.org, subscribe to his KK Substack, or follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram and on YouTube. Kevin’s most recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show explored his life philosophy, optimism, advice for younger generations, and more.
***
Back to me, Tim:
To make this concrete and provide a dose of inspiration, here are a few friends and past guests who each embody at least one principle brilliantly.
The post Better Than Free: How To Differentiate In The Age Of AI appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-07-17 09:13:56
Please enjoy this transcript of another rousing edition of The Random Show with my good friend Kevin Rose. We reunite over tequila to talk Zen retreats, learning to rock climb at (almost) 50, mortality and grief, why you should stop saying “one day,” AI predictions, and much more.
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Tim Ferriss: KevKev.
Kevin Rose: TimTim. Good to see you, man.
Tim Ferriss: Good to see you. And let’s figure out which one. There we go. Cheers.
Kevin Rose: Cheers.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I know the cool kids are down on alcohol, but every once in a while, I think there’s a place for it.
Kevin Rose: There’s a time and place. And this is the time.
Tim Ferriss: I think this is the time and the place and I think paying a tax for it the next day is a feature and not a bug.
Kevin Rose: Are you getting taxed harder on alcohol?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, of course. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Is it getting worse?
Tim Ferriss: Every old bastard.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know.
Tim Ferriss: That’s gender neutral, gets taxed as you can process ethanol less and less well over time.
But I’m cool with it. I don’t have that much, but today has been hectic.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I feel like you had a hard day today.
Tim Ferriss: Take a little edge off and people may not like the sound of that. It’s a little antiquated maybe for all the cool ketamine kids. No offense.
Kevin Rose: Don’t put that shit on me. I try it one time and I get freaking ambassador.
Tim Ferriss: You fuck a goat once and then they call me the goat fucker. You can’t get around it.
Kevin Rose: I still stand by that experience. When you’re doing it in a supervised setting by a medical professional—
Tim Ferriss: Oh, here we go.
Kevin Rose: No, I’ve been telling you, you’ve done it.
Tim Ferriss: Of course I have.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So there we go.
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, because I wanted to be able to speak from—
Kevin Rose: I saw you at a party one time and you were just like, “Woo.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s not true. That’s not true.
Kevin Rose: I’m just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: Still have all my nostrils intact. No ketamine cramps.
Kevin Rose: I don’t even know what that is. Is that a thing?
Tim Ferriss: That’s when you use too much.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Way, way, way, way too much.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I heard it’s bad on the bladder.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, your bladder can get a little grumpy or a lot grumpy as the case might be.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’m good.
Tim Ferriss: I’m good. Kevin, random show number 3,479.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. You know what’s crazy, dude? Is I looked up a random show the other day and you had a bit of hair way back in the day.
Tim Ferriss: Way back. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: We were babies.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Kevin Rose: So much shit has happened.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Kevin Rose: The only constant I think is, like, maybe like Toaster, who’s barely alive.
Tim Ferriss: Toaster right now, seriously. Toaster was a tiny, tiny little pup who was chewing through the XLR cables.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: On your couch in San Francisco way, way, way back in the day. Toaster.
Kevin Rose: Toaster’s 15. And I’ll tell a quick little story. A week ago I get this call and Darya calls me and she’s like, “You’ve got to get over to the house. Toaster is shaking violently.” And he’s 15. He’s running into walls and shit. He’s getting up there and his legs are collapsing so he can’t stand up and he couldn’t stand up and he’s shaking violently and I’m just flying over there.
I throw him in my car. He’s on my lap, driving to get to this emergency vet as fast as possible and he just sprays shit all over me. Literally, I heard it, I felt his stomach be like, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.
Tim Ferriss: Here we go.
Kevin Rose: And then like 10 seconds later, I’m not even talking like, “Oh, he had a little shit.” No, no, no, no. Shotgun against the car door, the whole thing. And it’s all down my pants.
Tim Ferriss: Poor Toasty.
Kevin Rose: I know, but you know what’s funny, dude? It’s like I rushed him in and, long story short, he’s okay now.
Tim Ferriss: What was it?
Kevin Rose: He had gone into the vet the day prior and he was so nervous that he stood for, he had to be there for like a multi-hour blood draw because he was having some other issues and he stood for like six hours straight.
Tim Ferriss: That’s too long for an old dog.
Kevin Rose: And dude, he can only stand for like 10 minutes, max. And so he had just overtaxed himself and got like, there’s a syndrome that they can get when they’re, like, super stressed out and all that.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Little Molly’s at it or big Molly. She’s on the floor right here. She’s sleeping. Molly’s 12. Hard to believe.
Kevin Rose: That’s crazy. But long story short, he’s okay. But I thought to myself, it’s so weird because when I walked in there and there was shit and literally I’m in tears because I think I’m about to have to put down my dog.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course.
Kevin Rose: And I just thought it’s okay. I’ll do this any day for this dude. When you care about your animals that much, none of that matters. You would do anything for them. You know?
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Kevin Rose: And it’s just, just that love. It’s so crazy how much you love these little beasts. It’s insane too. It’s like a kid. It’s like a kid.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s wild to think about if you really sit down and think about it. Some of these super common daily experiences like communing with a dog or pointing and having a dog recognize that you’re pointing, for instance, that’s really rare in the animal kingdom, that recognition of pointing, as just one example. But how unusual it is that we have this—and yes, we have cats. I grew up with four cats and two dogs. I get it.
But in particular, dogs as, like, companions, co-hunters, et cetera, the fact that we’ve co-evolved in a sense and sort of co-domesticated also. It’s not necessarily one way, read The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan for more on that, it is incredible. The fact that we’re totally calm having this 60-plus-pound beast with giant fangs on the floor is nuts.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve seen those Instagram posts where it’s like where I was and where I am now today? And they show the wild wolf out in the countryside eating a rabbit and then they show a poodle in a tutu outfit and shit, all dyed up.
Tim Ferriss: The meme is, “I’m going to go grab some scraps from those weird monkeys. What’s the worst that could happen?” And then it’s like, “10,000 years later, you’re a Chihuahua with a bonnet on.”
What else is going on, Kevin? I’ve got a couple things on my list, but we’ve got—
Kevin Rose: There’s a lot to talk about.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot to talk about.
Kevin Rose: First I’ll say that lately, life has been lifing me. It’s been doing all the things. We lost a dear colleague, Om Malik.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, very sad.
Kevin Rose: Very notorious, just amazing early tech, just creative author.
Tim Ferriss: Brilliant writer. Brilliant thinker. Very sweet guy. The nicest.
Kevin Rose: The nicest.
Tim Ferriss: And now we lost him within the last week or so.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. He passed away so that was tough. That was really tough. I found out when I was at a retreat. I went to a five-day silent meditation retreat, which is great, but bummer to hear that. But this is the thing that I realized the other day I was thinking about Toaster and Om and other stuff I have going on and my mom getting older and falling and all these things. And in some sense, it’s unavoidable, number one. And number two, I kind of wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s what makes life interesting. When Om passed—
Tim Ferriss: You mean death?
Kevin Rose: Well, just everything, the chaos of it all. If you can just take a step back and be like, “Well, or I could just be sitting there living a really boring life and nothing could be happening.”
When Om passed, what I felt was a severe sense of loss and sorrow and sadness. But I realized that that gap is just love, at the end of the day, because I wouldn’t have it unless I loved this man so much. I cared for this person so much. How lucky am I to have crossed paths with this person, to get to know them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And you were tied in through True Ventures obviously and prior to that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But like anyone in general that you lose that you love. When I lost my dad, that is just a gaping hole of love manifested through sorrow and sadness. And once you realize that, it’s like, wow, I had this great father that did all these amazing things with me. And that you can kind of convert that or just be okay with it. Not that you need to change that feeling.
Tim Ferriss: Recognize that it’s a consequence of the love that you have.
Kevin Rose: That’s a consequence of the love, the deep love.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I heard about his passing and I want to give credit where credit is due for a few things. Matt Mullenweg, a mutual friend. He was incredibly close to Om and I’m really grateful to Matt for a few things. One, I mean many things, I could give a long list, but there are a few.
One is he organized a trip to Antarctica. I’ve never been to Antarctica or hadn’t. And on that trip were just a handful of people, including Om. So I got to spend quality time. I mean, trust me, when you’re in Antarctica, you are indoors most of the time. What that means is you’re either trying to sleep in your tent, but it’s going to be during the summer so it’s like a spotlight in your face 24 hours a day. Or you’re in one of these other structures where you’re probably like having wine and junk food, let’s be honest.
And there’s a lot of talking. So we got to hang out and Om was also an avid photographer. And so we got to go to this nearby emperor penguin colony, which was a once in a lifetime experience and you just sit and talk. And if there were going to be any small talk, which there wasn’t going to be with Om or me really for that matter, it all falls away after the first half a day. And then everybody’s kind of psychologically naked.
So I really want to thank Matt for that opportunity to bond with him. I’d spent a lot of time with him, but it was always in these little bits and pieces, not for several days straight where you’re basically like locked in together.
And separately, Matt introduced me to this short blog post by someone who typically writes very long blog posts, Tim Urban, called “The Tail End.” I don’t know if I ever sent this to you.
Kevin Rose: People should know it by Wait But Why.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Wait But Why.
Kevin Rose: Fantastic blog.
Tim Ferriss: And “The Tail End” makes the point among many others that by the time you, I think it’s graduate from high school, let’s assume you’re headed off to college away from your parents. You’ve spent something like 90, 95 percent of the total hours you will ever spend with your parents by the time you graduate from high school. And when you start to visualize that, and Tim Urban’s really good at laying it out visually, it can provoke some really profound changes for me. I mean, just reading that short blog post sent to me by Matt ended up leading to taking my family on these family trips. As awkward and uncomfortable as that was at points, because my family doesn’t really emote much and so you stick us together in the way that I was together with Om and it can be super uncomfortable. But making the effort, at least feeling like, look, this runway is not infinite and it’s like, let me just make the effort. And I’m glad I did because we got to a point where it’s like with my dad’s mobility, he’s really compromised and needs a wheelchair now for a lot and—
Kevin Rose: I just saw him a few days ago and it was great to see him, dude. It was so great to see him. He’s so kind. He’s like, “Kevin,” so happy. And he had a little cane and it was just like so sweet to see him, man. I hadn’t seen him for years.
Tim Ferriss: Long time.
Kevin Rose: It had been like seven years or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, something like that. And I’m glad I took those trips because before you know it, you can’t do it anymore. And it makes me think of, you mentioned meditation, this really good short, I’ll call it a meditation for simplicity, but it’s like an audiobook chapter by Sam Harris called “The Last Time.” I think it’s called “The Last Time,” and he reflects on these various experiences that, at the time, you don’t recognize are the last time for something. So he went skiing, he went skiing, he went skiing, and there was a time when he stopped, but he didn’t realize that was going to be the last time.
Kevin Rose: You don’t know. Right.
Tim Ferriss: And you just fucking don’t know.
Kevin Rose: Do you ever try, I think about this dude and then I try and do it one more time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s how I always end up injured.
Kevin Rose: Dude, I went to the bouncy house with my kids and like I’m 49 and I was like, “I’m going to fucking do a flip right now.” And literally people were like, “Don’t do it. Don’t,” calling me off. And I did it and I stuck it, and it felt good.
Tim Ferriss: You’re good on a trampoline.
Kevin Rose: It might be my last time.
Tim Ferriss: It might be your last time. You are good on a trampoline. This is so weird, man. Dude, I kid you not. I had a dream last night of the two of us going to House of Air at Crissy Field in San Francisco and you were doing front flips off your knees.
Kevin Rose: I can do that.
Tim Ferriss: You dropped your hat and then you kicked the trampoline to bounce it back up to your head. And I was like, “What?”
Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, wait, wait. So you know I sent you that video of me dropping my hat and kicking it back on my head.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen you do it live, too.
Kevin Rose: So it just made its way into the dream.
Tim Ferriss: And I was just like, “What?” I literally had that in my dreams last night. That’s wild.
Kevin Rose: And I have the assless chaps on like I normally do in your —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you had the assless chaps on, which, depending on your angle, can be kind of awkward.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Because you like doing the straddle flip. You like doing the straddle flip. So it’s a little awkward, but —
Kevin Rose: I’ve heard about these dreams before. I know how they go.
Tim Ferriss: I always text them to Kevin. I’m like, “I was thinking of you last night.”
Kevin Rose: The chaps were back.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you got, man? My hands are too sweaty, because I’m thinking about death.
Kevin Rose: Chaps.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and the chaps. Wow, that was perfect audio.
Kevin Rose: Well, the retreat was fantastic. I spent five days going really deep on my koan doing a lot of work on it.
Tim Ferriss: Mu.
Kevin Rose: Mu. Which you can listen to Henry Shukman on your podcast if people are interested about what Zen is all about, like real true traditional Zen with koans. And you’ve probably heard the sound of one hand clapping that actually is one of 500-plus koans.
Yeah, it was fantastic. I had a couple little micro insights, which was good and I was kind of rushed through to the Zen master to explain them and try and get some clarity on them, which is great.
Tim Ferriss: How do you know that you’re having a micro insight? So it’s not like my balls are chafing in this position, it’s something else.
Kevin Rose: Yes, it’s not that, but close. No, I essentially was sitting and Henry, one of the Zen masters that you’ve had on the show, a dear friend of ours, was there and then his roshi from Japan was there. So it was very special. He only comes every two years.
Tim Ferriss: What’s his name? Yamada Roshi?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yamada Ryoun Roshi. Yeah. So basically I kind of pulled Henry aside, you’re not supposed to, he’s not talking, but he’s like, “How’s it going like this and that?” And I was like, “Well, I had this thing happen, what do you think about this?” And he’s like, “You’ve got to—”
Tim Ferriss: “Come with me right now.”
Kevin Rose: Well, not come with me, but he got me right in front because there’s a line to see the roshi to go have your private interview where you go and check your practice with them. So it’s behind closed doors, you go in, you sit down with the roshi, you typically get between two and 10 minutes to sit down and talk about your progress on your practice and you do that like once every day and a half when you’re out there.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: And this was enough to where Henry was like, “You should go talk to him right away.”
Tim Ferriss: Skip the line. TSA pre-check.
Kevin Rose: Go to the pre-check. And it was beautiful and it was a micro little thing. I can share it if you’re curious.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course I’m curious.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So there was this sense, I’m sitting there—
Tim Ferriss: I get bored of hearing myself talking. That’s why I’m here, to talk to you.
Kevin Rose: I’m sitting here staring against the wall because in Zen you stare against the wall with your eyes open and you’re staring about three quarters down and kind of just glancing on. I’m working on my koan and for people that don’t know how you do that is essentially on the out breath, you just like slowly internally say your koan. It’s almost like a mantra in some sense but a little bit more involved.
Tim Ferriss: Confounding.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s like a question you’re kind of asking yourself slowly that doesn’t make sense and eventually it pops. But what happened is I had about two seconds of this sense that there was, and this is going to be hard to explain because it’s not from the world of thought, which is already hard to explain.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a sneeze in the perineum.
Kevin Rose: No. No.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Close.
Kevin Rose: I had a sense of nothing lacking.
Tim Ferriss: That sounds nice.
Kevin Rose: Nothing needed to be added and nothing even possibly could be added and nothing possibly could be taken away because everything at that moment was full in the way that it should be. But what was interesting about it is it wasn’t an emotion. It was just like a steady state of being. So it wasn’t like, “Oh, I feel free right now.” No, none of that. It was just like, “Oh, everything is here, perfectly present.” And it was just wild.
Tim Ferriss: Wild in what sense? In the felt sense of that experience or realization?
Kevin Rose: Wild in the sense that —
Tim Ferriss: Wild in the, I just drank too much tequila after not having much tequila sense?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I haven’t had any tequila, but —in the sense that we oftentimes so often go outside or inside, into our brain to try and find something, figure something out, an emotional state that’s either bothering you or feels good or feels bad or something else. And then just to know that everything and I don’t mean objects, everything was one unit of nothing lacking and it was just a micro sense of kind of like, “Oh, there’s actually nothing to do because everything’s already here.”
And they talk about this in Zen a bit where you’re actually not, you already have everything that you need. So it’s just they call it the removal of the veil. It’s an expansive awareness that you get from a deep continued practice over years and decades, but it was already there all along.
Tim Ferriss: Can I give a shameless plug?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s hear it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you and I are both involved with The Way, which is this guided single path meditation app, which is guided by Henry Shukman, who you mentioned. And it’s the progressive development of skills on a single path, which I really like as opposed to just what is the meditation du jour with no coherence.
And a few of my favorite meditations, I have a lot of different sessions bookmarked and I’ve done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And by the way, for people who are like, “Oh, these guys are just shilling their bags.” I do think it can be a good business, but this is sort of an ideologically philosophical investment of time and money.
Kevin Rose: It’s the reason we invested in the dog aging study with rapamycin.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. University of Washington, it’s like, “This needs to exist.”
Kevin Rose: These exist.
Tim Ferriss: It’s good for the world. Let’s try it. So sure, we’ve got some chips on the table, but this is mostly because we believe in it. And a few of my favorites, if people ever try it, “[The] Whole Earth is Medicine” is one.
Kevin Rose: That’s a good one.
Tim Ferriss: Another one is “This Too is Me,” which makes me think about what you’re saying.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So “This Too is Me” is a meditation led by Henry, which this is going to sound maybe esoteric, but it’s not. When you recognize that all of the things you experience are mediated by your mind. And therefore when you hear something, when you feel something, when you’re interrupted by something, et cetera, et cetera, anything you can possibly imagine experiencing is also you, because ultimately it is entirely mediated by your mind. Let’s just use that instead of brain.
And it’s incredibly, at least for me, and I’m not comparing it to your experience because I think it’s probably characteristically different, is incredibly relaxing to let go even just for a moment because my brain is like the ultimate dog chasing a squirrel kind of brain. I’m always looking for something to fix, something to improve, what I need to do, what is happening next week and meditation is—
Kevin Rose: You are the squirrel.
Tim Ferriss: I am the squirrel. You’re right. It can be excruciatingly painful. Meditation can be super hard.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. 100 percent. That’s a very common thing.
Tim Ferriss: Super, super hard.
Kevin Rose: People are like, “I can’t do this.”
Tim Ferriss: But when Henry gives you permission to include all of that as you, I know this might sound very bizarre, it allows you to kind of drop this burden that you didn’t realize you were carrying. So in any case, you don’t have to do a week-long meditation retreat. If you’re just doing 10 minutes twice a day and I do think there’s some alchemy to twice a day. I don’t know why exactly. I have some theories around vagus nerve stimulation and stuff, but you get a lot out of it. In any case, I didn’t mean to interrupt your story.
Kevin Rose: No, I think there’s two things that I love that Henry says quite often when he starts some of these meditations, which is, “Take everything that you came in the door with, all of the thoughts, worries, emotions, things, and leave it at the door just for now. You can come back to it in 20 minutes, but just for now.”
The permission to set those things down for yourself just for now is such a beautiful thing. And then like the little instructions where he’s like, “Drop your jaw an eighth of an inch.”
And I’m like, “Whoa, I didn’t even realize I was clenching my jaw.”
Tim Ferriss: Can I tell you something crazy about that?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So I got fitted for a mandibular device, which is a fancy way of saying a double decker mouthpiece that is an easier approach to resolving sleep apnea or snoring. So I don’t snore a ton, but every once in a while I do, it drives my lady insane, understandably. And if you take the jaw and drop it down an eighth of an inch and forward an eighth of an inch, you open your airway.
And I was thinking about that because Henry will often say, as you’re alluding to, drop your jaw and leave it forward as if it’s resting on a small pillow ever so slightly and it increases your airflow. These ancients hit on some stuff by trial and error that really just works. It’s like, yeah, if you want to have better respiration while you’re meditating and better alignment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just do what Henry’s describing.
And I will say his dulcet British tones. If you just want a relaxing voice that will help you with chilling the fuck out when your monkey mind is ricocheting inside your skull, try Henry out. You can find free stuff everywhere. I’ve had him on the podcast a bunch as well as Meditation Mondays for a while, which were these very short episodes of guided meditations. In any case.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s great.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been so—what’s the right word? I mean, overjoyed sounds too dramatic, but I’ll just say happy for you to watch your path with meditation because it seems like you get so much nourishment and grounding from it and no offense—
Kevin Rose: Here it comes.
Tim Ferriss: —you’re kind of a spaz. You’re kind of spaz. You get excited about shit and then you drop stuff that is very well exemplified and you’re like, “Tim, you got to buy this stock,” and then you never tell me when you sell. And I’m like, “Oh, fuck, I’m fucked.”
Kevin Rose: Oh, you want to talk about—
Tim Ferriss: Hold on, hold on. No, no, no.
Kevin Rose: Okay, because you gave me a real winner.
Tim Ferriss: You lost [REDACTED]. You lost [REDACTED].
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You should have held. It’s fine. But anyway, the—
Kevin Rose: Literally, Tim gives me this tip and I’m like, “All right, I’m in.” And then a day and a half later, I’m down like [REDACTED].
Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s why you’ve got to wait. But the point of the story is I thought, I was at a meditation thing, just like every nine months you’re like, “I’m moving to Android.” And then I’m like, “Let me start the timer for two weeks before you come back to iPhone.”
Kevin Rose: Week and a half maybe, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m like, “Yeah, this meditation thing. Yeah, sure. We’ll see. I give it two weeks.” And you’ve stuck with it.
Kevin Rose: Coming up on five years now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s really made me happy as your friend to see something that gives you that consistency. That’s it. There’s nothing more to add. I’ve been really—what’s the right word? I’m not sure of the right way to put it. I’ve just been very reassured by you having that constant in your life.
Kevin Rose: One of the things I’m curious about, speaking of constants and kind of like how things changed since we’ve known each other and you had hair and all that other shit. My hair wasn’t great.
Tim Ferriss: Still got plenty of hair, just not on my head.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Those braids down there. The question I’m curious about is I’ve been thinking a lot lately as I kind of march towards 50, what are the things that I’ve always said that I want to do that I’m just like, I’ve got a thousand book marks on Instagram, like all these Japanese woodworking things, and like—
Tim Ferriss: It’s always woodworking. It’s always woodworking.
Kevin Rose: This is how bad my — Speaking of the monkey mind and bouncing around, I literally have, for some reason, the algorithm has now given me those motherfucking boats inside of bottles, like people making the boats in the bottles. I’m like, “Am I going to be a boat in the bottle guy?” I don’t know, maybe.
I realize now, I think these next couple decades, I want to stop bullshitting myself and stop saying like, “Hey, one day. One day I’ll get into Japanese woodworking. One day I’ll do this.” And really start doing some things.
And you’ve been really good because you archery, hunting, like the stuff that you’ve gotten into, you’ve gone deep on in the last few years.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super deep.
Kevin Rose: Are there any things that are on your kind of bucket list of things where you say, “One day.” You’re busy with your podcast and all the other shit you got going on?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, podcast, shoot me in the head. It’s fine and it’s fun most of the time, but it’s so crowded and it’s like, man, if 20 other people are trying to do the same job, I don’t want to do this job.
Kevin Rose: It is wild how many new podcasters there are out there. And they’re also optimizing every little freaking thing.
Tim Ferriss: All the thumbnails.
Kevin Rose: All the thumbnails.
Tim Ferriss: What you need to know before your crypto crashes next week, now. And I’m like, “Oh, God,” I just don’t want to play that game. And for me, I would say the most top of mind is rock climbing, actually.
Kevin Rose: Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss: I just did some outdoor rock climbing a couple of days ago and I love rock climbing. I was always, for at least the last 15 years, limited by my right elbow, which I had surgically repaired so it’s ready to go and I want to do some multi-pitch stuff in Yosemite.
Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s go.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So I don’t know if I want to say this.
Tim Ferriss: All right, that’s a good start.
Kevin Rose: So you know who’s a big rock climber is [REDACTED].
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s very well-built for it.
Kevin Rose: He goes out to Yosemite, I’m sure. We should go.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Because he’s invited me to go up there and do some climbing.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he’s good. He looks like someone who would be good.
Kevin Rose: Apparently he’s amazing. And I’m like, “Dude, I can’t go do multi-pitch with you at Yosemite.” And he’s like, “Ah, just come out, we’ll have fun, blah, blah, blah.”
Tim Ferriss: No, that’s how you end up fucked.
Kevin Rose: Exactly, exactly. I did multi-pitch when I was like 24 and it was like three pitches. I didn’t do Yosemite.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no, that’s a commitment. So the idea of having something like that, to strive for. Having some type of physical goal like that for me is very helpful because just not dying, like training to not die sooner than is necessary is not sufficient for me. I’m just like, that’s such a depressing, uninvigorating goal. I’d much rather have something that has a deadline. It’s like, all right, you need to be able to do x. In the case of the archery, it’s like Lancaster Classic, here’s the date. You need to do this type of training and this type of volume with this type of deliberate practice in order to be prepared to train and then compete. Okay.
Similarly, for something like a multi-pitch, it’s like, okay, you can break that down. And I just enjoy doing that stuff.
Kevin Rose: Dude, so let me ask you a question. The number two, I don’t know if you saw this on my story list. The number two story I had was this guy Michael Eckert. Do you know who he is?
Tim Ferriss: Tell me. No, no idea.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God. Okay. So Huberman and Rogan and all these guys, they’ve talked about him publicly, about this guy. He has won multiple pull-up world championships. And dude, when you watch him do a pull-up, he’s kind of one of those guys that can bring the bar all the way down and does the [crosstalk] style.
Tim Ferriss: The typewriter and all that stuff.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. You know where you can walk with your feet and shit.
Tim Ferriss: All the calisthenic stuff. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But he has a series of videos that teach you how to do finger strength training. And I bought his course and I’m doing this right now. But you got me into that wooden device.
Tim Ferriss: The Nug.
Kevin Rose: The Nug. So dude, you got to watch his videos. They’re amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
Kevin Rose: Seriously, Joe’s really into them. This guy, his name is Michael Eckert. You can find him on Instagram, and it’s all about grip strength, pull-ups. And he’s not big, but he’s shredded. And when I think about the next 10 years, I don’t need to be big, big.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s probably not what you want.
Kevin Rose: It’s probably not.
Tim Ferriss: Especially for rock climbing.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you need to be lean and strong. And that’s what I love about this. I’m doing these every single day. Well, I’m two days in. I’m getting into it. Tell us about The Nug, because that was something that you turned me onto.
Tim Ferriss: Well, The Nug, I mean, I have it in my suitcase at the hotel here. It’s just a simple little wooden device. It looks like a very large bar of soap with these different indentations carved into the sides.
Kevin Rose: Like little finger indentations.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So you can use a carabiner to connect it to, say, a cable machine of some type in any gym. Look, you could use a loading pin and all this, that, and the other thing on a daisy chain, but let’s put that aside. At a gym, you could use a cable and connect it through the loop with a carabiner, and work on your hand strength.
Kevin Rose: And you brought this to Santa Fe when we were out there doing the meditation thing.
Tim Ferriss: I did. Yeah. I mean, it’s literally—
Kevin Rose: It travels probably so easy.
Tim Ferriss: Something small enough to slip into my sweatshirt pocket. So it’s easy to travel with. I always travel with that and a band for multiple purposes, for something called DNS kind of core exercises.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I know DNS.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I use a band for that, and it’s incredibly easy to travel with. And then a handful of other things. There’s something called an Alpha Ball, which I use for different types of kind of mobility. It’s the size of a very large soft softball. And all this stuff fits into the corner of a suitcase. And then I’ll do also something that maybe we haven’t talked about, called Abrahangs, which so Abrahamsson, Emil Abrahamsson, very well known rock climber on YouTube and Abrahangs—
Kevin Rose: I’m writing this down right now. Abrahangs.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Abrahangs are pretty simple. I mean, it’s partial body weight hangs in different positions for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, for 10 minutes. And you do that twice a day, and it’s very, very moderate in intensity.
Kevin Rose: With like a wooden kind of rock climbing kind of like type thing?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you could use a hangboard.
Kevin Rose: Hangboard, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, you could also use a pull up bar depending on how you position your hands. And that’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, was that kind of stuff, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off. And the endurance and strength gains that you get in your hands are just insane. I should say your lower arms, and it really helps. So I’ve been doing indoor climbing, but ultimately I’m like, you know what? As a stretch goal, multi-pitch outdoor Yosemite, that just—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I am deadly terrified of heights, deadly. Just talking. If you just look at my hands, I’m sweaty just talking about heights.
Kevin Rose: When I watch Free Solo, my hands are sweating the entire time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: For people who haven’t seen the documentary, even if you’re not into rock climbing, that is amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, watch Free Solo. It’ll freak you out. So that’s one that I’m thinking about going deep on. I’d say that’s very high up on the list, because—
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome dude. Let’s do that together. I’m totally down. I’m into it.
Tim Ferriss: I am totally into it. I mean, the rock climbing when approached in a reasonable way, like a systematic, reasonable way, not with crazy dyno movements on bouldering, necessarily. I mean, look, younger bodies can handle it, certain bodies can handle it. My body, not so much. I do not want to fall repeatedly from 10, 15 feet up. I’m just not into it. So in the case of doing it reasonably though, for instance, I spent a bunch of time, I’ve spent a lot of time in Utah, and climbing in some of the Salt Lake City indoor gyms, you have incredible athletes. And I’ll make that a little finer tuned. When I would go to the gym, it was generally like 11:00 a.m.? Who the hell goes to the rock climbing gym at 11:00 a.m. on a weekday? These are retirees and moms. So you would see, for instance, these like 60, 70, 75, almost 80-year-olds who were doing like 5.11 plus.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit. This is when you were single, so that was like, prime hunting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Cougarville. And you would just see these people in their 60s and 70s doing things that I could not even imagine doing, with complete inversion on overhangs.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this.
Tim Ferriss: 60, 70 feet up. You had the national speed climbing team, you had Olympians. But more than like the young guns, the 15 year olds who are doing all this crazy stuff because they’re impervious, it was the people in their 60s and 70s who were climbing every day that inspired me to want to take this more seriously. So I was like, “Okay, I want to play the long game here. What can I do that’s fun?” It’s a puzzle. There’s a lot of Tetris.
Kevin Rose: They’d literally call bouldering, they call them problems.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, problems. Yeah, exactly. And so there’s a lot of brain power involved, and also it’s just to give an idea of the technicality, I mean, there are, for example, women who cannot do five pull-ups, who can climb 5.13, 5.14. That’s very, very, very, very, very hard just for people who have no reference point, like world-class, like 5.14, 5.15, insane, insane. That’s when you’re in the magazines.
Kevin Rose: Oh, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s because of the technical depthness. Yeah, there’s like ape index and other physiological factors that play into it, but that is a very long answer to your question of what I’m thinking about now, which is rock climbing.
Tim Ferriss: The archery was great and the competition was fantastic. I love competing. However, archery is, by definition, incredibly solitary. You’re just by yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again thousands of times, and I’ve had enough of that in my life. I’ve hit my quota. I want to hang out with other people. I want to have—
Kevin Rose: Climbing is super social, because you’ll sit there and if neither of you can do it, you’ll be like, “What if you put your foot in like that, and kind of lunged up that way and stretched?” You know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then you can ask other people for tips, like beta. Like, “Hey, can you give me some beta on this?” It’s fun. It’s really fun. I just love it. I wanted to mention something, if people haven’t read it, The Blade Itself, which is a series, it’s not very long. I think it’s two or three volumes by Joe Abercrombie. It’s fantasy novels. They’re really good. The audiobooks are incredible. And the reason I thought of this, The Blade Itself, is because of our conversation around Om and Toaster, and a friend of mine just died in a plane crash—
Kevin Rose: Jesus.
Tim Ferriss: A couple weeks ago, not even two weeks, less than two weeks ago.
Kevin Rose: The NetJets one that went—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: You knew him?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Josh.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God, that was at latitude too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. I know. I know. So you just don’t know when your time is up. And in The Blade Itself, I mean there are a lot of various like—
Kevin Rose: Sorry, that sucks.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. And we weren’t super close friends, but certainly friendly acquaintances. It wouldn’t be strange to text and you just don’t know when your time is up and The Blade Itself explores this in a million different dimensions. It’s really, really outstanding. I say that as someone who’s read a lot of fantasy and it just talks about the randomness of life or death in war. It’s like you happen to squat down, take a, and the guy next to you gets an arrow through the head.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, totally.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just dumb luck, which is a way to, I suppose, reiterate the gratitude piece that you were mentioning earlier. I mean, that’s going to be a tough act to follow, but where do you want to go from that?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean a few things. Let’s change it up to, well, let’s just go straight into working out. Have you tried this?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have actually. It’s great.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I really like it. So for people that are on audio, I just got turned onto this new protein called Pioneer Pastures and it’s 30 grams in this little tiny shake. It’s A2. So it has lactose removed and it’s also from that special genetic cow. Do you know more about the A2? Can you speak to it?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard about the A2. I don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s like the Holstein and some other cow and da, da, da, da, da. Apparently, more people tolerate A2 better than not.
Kevin Rose: I don’t get any stomach issues or anything with this type of whey protein. Anyway, I’m not an investor or any shit like that. You can get it at Target or whatever. It’s tasty as hell and it’s 30 grams and I don’t know. If you’re trying to put a little muscle mass on—
Tim Ferriss: I love that this is next to the LALO tequila.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you could mix them if you want.
Tim Ferriss: Everything a growing boy needs.
Kevin Rose: Anyway, I just wanted to know if you had tried it because we always, this is The Random Show, we do random shit.
Tim Ferriss: I tried it. Yeah, I tried it.
Kevin Rose: You like it?
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah. There’s a gym, I can’t remember exactly. I think it was Brooklyn Barbell Club where they sold this and I tried it then and I did. Yeah, tolerated it super well. Didn’t get the grumpy guts as one might when they—
Kevin Rose: What’s your favorite protein, out of curiosity?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, my protein, I mean, this is a softball pitch, but funny you should ask, Kevin. And look, I’m involved with this one, but you know what? I always disclose, have you noticed how few fucking people disclose what they’re involved with? They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of this great thing. Oh, my God.” And they never disclose they’re involved. The fact that I’m involved—
Kevin Rose: You can literally go to jail for that shit.
Tim Ferriss: No, I know. But the FTC doesn’t enforce that stuff. Anyway, I mean, right now I’m traveling with Maui Nui as usual. This one though is kind of interesting. I probably get 40 percent of my protein from Maui Nui venison. This is wild harvested axis deer from Hawaii. There’s a long story there, but incredibly nutrient dense.
Kevin Rose: I love this shit and this is not an ad, but I do have a hard question for you, like a real hard question. This is how you know that it’s not an ad, because you have no idea what I’m about to say.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s hear it.
Kevin Rose: Processed meat nitrates linked to a lot of cancer and bad shit. What are your thoughts on that?
Tim Ferriss: This is very, very, very minimally processed. So you can get summer sausage or the sticks. This is free of most of that bullshit.
Kevin Rose: What do you think that is? Because it is real. People that eat more like, nitrate processed, ultra processed meats—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If it’s ultra processed and the shelf life is like three years, I would raise an eyebrow and probably hit pause. So the fact of the matter is most of this stuff that is minimally processed almost definitionally is not going to last very long on the shelf.
Kevin Rose: What do they mean by minimally processed when you see a meat stick? What do you think about that versus— Is it the amount of salt content that creates the nitrates? What—
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s actually, nitrates are totally separate categories. So you’re looking to— I mean, I think an easy heuristic for this is just shelf life. How long will this last?
Kevin Rose: How long are those good for?
Tim Ferriss: Your eyes are going to be better than mine. If you can read this size two font on this, then you can tell me.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let me look at that.
Tim Ferriss: Give it a go. And I’ll buy you some time. In the meantime—
Kevin Rose: 27 years. No, I’m just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: 25 years.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t say on here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’ll stay somewhere on the box. There we go.
Kevin Rose: Oh, ’27.
Tim Ferriss: Best by. Yeah, ’27. So it’s like less than one year, I think, actually looking at it here.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so—
Kevin Rose: Less than one year. Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And what makes this interesting is that this I give also, Molly looks really good for 12 years. I give her probably two or three of these a week. The way I think of this, this is Peppered 10, so there are a bunch of these different sticks. Every professional team you can imagine uses these things in their training, but this is made with wild harvested venison liver and heart. So it has some organ meat in it. You do not taste that. It just tastes like regular jerky stick, but I treat this like a multivitamin. So it’s like I take, let’s call it two or three of these a week and limit it to that and then the rest of the time I’m taking their other either peppered or regular sticks.
But this is when I’m on the go, I mean, literally this was in my bag when I got here. When I’m on the go, I’m traveling with this, probably some nuts of some type like pistachios or whatever. Walnuts are pretty good for a host of reasons and that’s about it. I mean, I might have a couple of servings of exogenous ketones, but I haven’t taken that stuff in a couple of months.
Kevin Rose: You told me, you freaked me out, it messes up your liver.
Tim Ferriss: This is a controversial topic. So yeah, there are certain exogenous ketones that contain something called 1,3-Butanediol. It’s very common and there’s a lot of debate around this. So the jury is still out, but some people believe that that can produce liver toxicity. So I consume anything with 1,3-Butanediol in moderation. Now, to play not devil’s advocate, but to do a counterpoint, a lot of the people who are putting forth that hypothesis or claiming that’s true are selling their own ketone salts. So they’re actually selling a competitive product.
Kevin Rose: I see. I see.
Tim Ferriss: So question mark, question mark. But I mean, look, you can look at the peer reviewed literature and decide for yourself. What I have decided personally is that you should use the exogenous ketones very intermittently. I have experimented a lot with every type of exogenous ketone you can imagine and—
Kevin Rose: I mean, you got me on that good. It’s expensive as hell, but like that stuff goes straight to your head. The one that you didn’t want to talk—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Delta G. We can talk about it.
Kevin Rose: You know what’s funny is when Tim, this is how you know it’s good, off camera, Tim’s like, “I don’t want to mention the brand because if I do, it’ll sell out and I won’t be able to get my own supply.” And that’s how I knew I was like, “That’s some good shit.” If Tim wants to guard his own supply of it, you know it’s good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And it is good, but it’s BHB. I won’t get too much into the technicality here, but it’s beta-hydroxybutyrate bonded to 1,3-Butanediol. So you’re still getting that 1,3-Butanediol, which means you should take it. In moderation. But in a pinch, when you want it for a podcast or something like that, man, it really works.
Kevin Rose: It does work.
Tim Ferriss: It really works. And I mean, I’ve given it to relatives with dementia and within 20 minutes, their sentences have like 5Xed in length and they’re more acute verbally. It’s wild.
Kevin Rose: How do you give it? I wish they had it in pill form because in some sense it’s really hard to give that to someone that has dementia because it tastes like gasoline.
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t taste great. It’s not the worst thing. I mean, I’ve had a lot of foul stuff in my life. I just did a shot with this person and I was like, “I’ll do it with you.” And then we went for a walk and that was it. There are some concerns around 1,3-Butanediol and balance. So particularly in older adults, you do not want to contribute to any risk of breaking a hip.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: That’s just the death knell for a lot of people. I know.
Kevin Rose: I just had to put my mom into a different home that has—it’s actually kind of cool. It’s sad, because she’s been falling and they have this like new AI orb that sits up there and it kind of does like a kind of radar type situation and it detects falls.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose: So the second she falls in the home, they can rush in and help her out and all that and they carpet the hell out of it now and stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss: How do you think about sort of pre-grieving that or contending with that yourself?
Kevin Rose: In terms of—
Tim Ferriss: With family, that’s rough. I mean, it doesn’t sound easy. Because if you play forward the tape, it’s like, I mean, I think about this with my own parents and it’s just like, nobody lasts forever.
Kevin Rose: It’s one of those things where it’s so funny because when you’re a teenager and I remember when my dad was having a hard time standing and this was like when I was much younger before he passed and I was like, “Oh, dad’s going to be in the thing that I might have to push him on it if he has to sit down.” Kind of those walkers that can also be something you can push somebody on. I was so embarrassed. I was like, “Oh, people are looking at us or whatever.” And now I push my mom with pride in the inner walker thing and I’m like, I don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s like, the only thing you can do is just make sure to show up and hang out. And I’m very lucky that my mom has dementia, but it is a type that it’s not Alzheimer’s so it’s probably vascular or something. I can walk in and she knows who I am. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but she knows who I am, which is like, I’ll take that all day long.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I know you have family members that are in the same boat, which is tough.
Tim Ferriss: I have a ton of family members with Alzheimer’s. I mean, I literally got a call from one of my relatives wanting to discuss interventions and it’s a tough conversation because there really isn’t much. You have to, as far as I can tell, act preemptively, which is why, actually this relates to another bullet of mine. I—
Kevin Rose: You have five?
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Kevin Rose: How many Bulleits did you have?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, how many Bulleits did I have?
Kevin Rose: I was just curious.
Tim Ferriss: Of all the rye whiskeys, it’s the only one that I can tolerate. I loathe stationary bikes. I really find stationary biking to be one of the most soul crushing things in the world.
Kevin Rose: It’s the worst.
Tim Ferriss: However, I mean, I’ve tried Peloton and didn’t like the ergonomics and so on for a bunch of reasons. And then I have tried very expensive, very, very expensive setups recommended to me by fancy doctors and so on, which are just too uncomfortable. I’m incredibly hunched over. My back is basically parallel with the floor.
Kevin Rose: What are you talking about?
Tim Ferriss: And I’m kneeling myself in the stomach. It’s so uncomfortable.
Kevin Rose: Like crunching machines? What are you talking about?
Tim Ferriss: No, no, I’m talking about getting on a stationary bike. But if you’re in a racing position, you have to adopt this hunchback and there are a million reasons why I find that uncomfortable. There is a bike, however, it’s very easy to find. It’s pretty common in public gyms called the Keiser M3i Studio Indoor Bike. I don’t know why they have to make it so difficult in its nomenclature, but the Kaiser M3i is unique in my experience in that you can elevate the handlebars enough to sit in a comfortable position with a decent saddle, meaning the seat, such that I can do the V2 and the V4 and all of that training for me in a comfortable position without compromising my low back, which has been a huge step forward.
So this is the only bike that I’ve used consistently for this kind of training. I was having a number of conversations with a neuroscientist named Dr. Tommy Wood over a period of weeks. And if for instance, you do something called the Norwegian 4×4, there’s data to suggest that if you do—it’s VO2 max training, so it’s very, very, very intense, but it’s like—
Kevin Rose: Four on, four off?
Tim Ferriss: Four minutes on, three to four minutes off, let’s just call it three minutes. Four minutes on, three minutes off. And you do that for four rounds. This is the only bike that I’ve been able to use to do this consistently. And if you do that for, I think it’s three times a week for five to six months, the volumetric changes, meaning the neuroanatomical changes in the hippocampus and other areas that are certainly indicated in things like Alzheimer’s lasts for up to five years.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So if you do five to six months gutting it out three times a week, the results—
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: The dividends pay off for, it seems, up to or possibly beyond five years.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: Crazy.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of—
Kevin Rose: [crosstalk] sauna in there and you’re like—
Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s why I’m doing—yeah, I’m doing all the usual stuff, I’m doing the sauna. And don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You know what I mean? It’s like, okay, sure. You don’t have 30 minutes to do it, do 10 minutes. You can’t do a sauna, take a hot bath, figure it out.
Kevin Rose: You know what my good is that I like?
Tim Ferriss: What’s that?
Kevin Rose: It’s not perfect, but it’s good, which is I go on my treadmill, I set it to 4.75 or something incline. So it’s not crazy, but it’s not, I still do shit. And I set it to only like 2.5 on the walking and I’ll play Duolingo chess because they have chess on there now for Duolingo. They teach you chess, it’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Kevin Rose: And you can play friends and live people and all that stuff and they do game replays and they teach—and I’m learning a ton. And 30, 40 minutes go by and you’re drenched in sweat. I know it’s not high intensity and all the benefits on the cognitive side seem to be around a lot of high [crosstalk].
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but who knows?
Kevin Rose: But it’s good.
Tim Ferriss: It’s doing something.
Kevin Rose: It’s doing something. So I’ve really enjoyed that. If you just want something to both be learning and engaged and kind of like having fun so you forget about the time. Do you know what I’m talking about where it’s like you just like, “Oh, wait, what time is it? Oh, shit, I’ve been on for 37 minutes. I can get off now.” I love that type of cardio.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, for me, I mean, this is going to sound like maybe a step down, but it’s like the older I get, the more I realize a little goes a long way. Like yesterday, for instance, I had a bunch of stuff stacked up and I won’t bore people with the commitments, but I didn’t really have any time to go to the gym and it was my day to go to the gym to do X, Y, and Z exercise. And I went in and I did like, three sets. I was literally in there for five minutes and I left, but it’s better than nothing.
Kevin Rose: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: Something is better than nothing. I’m not going to go to the Olympics with that approach, but let’s fucking be real. I’m not going to the Olympics, period.
Kevin Rose: You’re not going to the Olympics. I mean, maybe it’s like a bystander. Like, in the—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, I’ll throw some new random stuff in there. There’s a study that got my attention, it’s been out since 2025, September 2025. This is in JAMA and this is the title, Single Treatment with MM120, and then in parentheses Lysergide, I think is how that’s pronounced, in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. So this is—
Kevin Rose: GAD.
Tim Ferriss: GAD. This is a randomized clinical trial looking at anxiety, which is often comorbid, meaning happening at the same time as depressive disorders. And I think this is sponsored by a company called Definium, which used to be MindMed. In any case—
Kevin Rose: I love where this is going. I just looked it up. Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So what’s interesting about this, and they’re not going to maybe love my comparison, but so MM120, Lysergide, I mean, it’s comparable to LSD. And this is a multi-arm clinical trial. They did five arms, which is rare to do because—
Kevin Rose: Arms?
Tim Ferriss: The risk is that they’ll blend together. So the arm means a group who is treated with a different intervention in this case. So they’ve got placebo, 25 micrograms, 50 micrograms, 100 micrograms, and 200 micrograms. 100 mics is—
Kevin Rose: That’s what they give standard for LSD.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what you can think of as a standard hit, 100 micrograms. And the results are wild, man. If you look at the HAM-A score, this is up to 12 weeks out. You can see, I’ll just show you, how it’s dose dependent. The more you take, basically the better it goes up to, and I’m not sure how long the follow-ups continued, but where you land is you see that the 100 micrograms and 200 are very, very close to each other.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, so might as well take 100.
Tim Ferriss: 25 and 50 are certainly a lot higher.
Kevin Rose: Now are you still getting the same psychedelic experience with this stuff?
Tim Ferriss: In the case of this particular compound, I don’t know. My guess would be yes. I could be totally wrong in that. So Definium, feel free to correct me. I am guessing the answer is yes with MM120, but what that says to me is, hey, 12 weeks of relief with GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, which I’ve been clinically diagnosed with, that and OCD, 12 weeks is pretty good. And it seems like at least according to the data in this study, the minimum effective dose would be 100 micrograms. Now, 100 micrograms at least for me and for a lot of people, you’ll be tripping your balls off, not to get too technical.
Kevin Rose: Wait a second. Dude, it says that this was done at Neuroscape at UCSF.
Tim Ferriss: Was it really?
Kevin Rose: This is Adam’s lab.
Tim Ferriss: No shit. Are you serious?
Kevin Rose: I’m dead serious. I just clicked through on it. It says phase three trial of MM120 for GAD.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s amazing.
Kevin Rose: This is our buddy doing this.
Tim Ferriss: This is our buddy, Adam. Okay. Well, I have a text that I need to send then.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome. I wonder if I indirectly funded this because I helped fund some of Neuroscape’s stuff. That’s funny. I did not—
Kevin Rose: Isn’t that hilarious?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did not look at that. That’s hilarious. Small world.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. There you go. So it’s interesting for GAD. We were talking about dementia. There’s a case report with high dose psilocybe mushrooms, I don’t think it was actually psilocybin synthesized, looking at this particular thing was a Japanese elderly woman with dementia, may have been Alzheimer’s who took, I can’t believe they did this to her—
Kevin Rose: Five grams, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then she took five grams. So Terence McKenna, heroic dose, somehow fell asleep for like 19 hours or something obscene, which would be very, very worrisome if you’re like the child of said parent. Wakes up and then starts having like full expositional conversations in contrast with her previous like monosyllabic or single word responses to things. And it was transient. It didn’t last forever, but it raises some very interesting questions. I’ve seen at least some case reports also with LSD producing similar effects. And I’ve been interested in this for probably a decade. I’ve hypothesized this could be the case. It’s just like, do you really want to give your parent—
Kevin Rose: Especially that age.
Tim Ferriss: Under what circumstances is it ethical to give someone hallucinogens?
Kevin Rose: See, I could never do that to my mom because she was always anti all this stuff. And then the second, God forbid they have a bad trip, like why would you want to put them through that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So it’s curious. I was sent something by someone I won’t mention, but a very interesting case report on microdosing with LSD with someone with dementia.
Kevin Rose: Did it work?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And in terms of similar to the ketones, not saying the mechanism is the same, but producing much more verbal fluidity. Going from like, “I’m good. It depends.” I have relatives who are limited to that now. They’re basically giving answers that are non-answers. “Sounds good.” These things that you could use as a reply to anything, they’re not necessarily grokking what’s happening, to full paragraphs. Which means to my interpretation, it’s offline to online. It’s a really stark difference because with the one word, two word answers, you don’t actually know if they’re understanding what’s happening.
Kevin Rose: Do you have some MM120 on you right now?
Tim Ferriss: No, I don’t. I don’t. If I did, I would probably not take it tonight necessarily.
Kevin Rose: If you see a weird cut in the video and then we get infinitely smarter, you’ll know why.
Tim Ferriss: Little glitch here or there.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s a flash and all of a sudden we’re just like Rain Man.
Tim Ferriss: For the smarter, I would keep it probably to 20 mics or below. We’ll see. But I found this pretty interesting—
Kevin Rose: That’s so cool.
Tim Ferriss: For GAD especially and then for the dementia piece, but it raises a lot of ethical questions. What is ethical to use as a treatment in someone who cannot give consent? That’s a tough, gnarly problem.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Especially if you’re dealing with stuff that is not exactly prescription medication.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, that’s the whole thing. If it goes sideways, you feel like an asshole.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, to put it mildly.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, to put it mildly. But it’s amazing and it gives you another half day with a parent or a loved one and you can full on have conversations and they see you and you see them in a way that you hadn’t in six months or a year, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Or if it potentially slows the decline. I think it’s too much to hope for a reversal frankly, but there are some strange phenomena out there, man. There’s this phenomenon called terminal lucidity where someone on their deathbed when they’ve been vegetative—
Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve heard about this.
Tim Ferriss: —and, like—
Kevin Rose: There’s that book that—
Tim Ferriss: —right—
Kevin Rose: —I told you to read. Did you read that?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure.
Kevin Rose: The afterlife book?
Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t read that.
Kevin Rose: Okay, because they—
Tim Ferriss: But this is—
Kevin Rose: —talk about that case.
Tim Ferriss: —well documented, where people—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —suddenly, they’ve been basically vegetative or completely unable to respond to any stimulus.
Kevin Rose: In like the last two days they come—
Tim Ferriss: They—
Kevin Rose: —fully lucid, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —they become totally lucid, and they can have full-blown extensive conversations.
Kevin Rose: That’s why I know—
Tim Ferriss: What the fuck is going on there?
Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you, it is so weird to me that we think, like— Like a lot of the things that we do in physical form, like what we do in life mimics nature in many ways. And all of our data is backed up in the cloud, and we’re like, “Oh, we’re not backed up in the cloud in any way.”
And then there’s these people with full-blown entanglements in their brain, full on, you know, the Alzheimer’s—
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
Kevin Rose: —for like a decade, and then they become completely lucid.
Tim Ferriss: Lucid. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Where is that coming from?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I see what you’re saying. I wasn’t tracking that fully for a second, but if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s like, if it’s all localized—
Kevin Rose: In the cloud. Right.
Tim Ferriss: No, I’m saying if all of that ability is localized within the confines of the skull, how do you explain this?
Kevin Rose: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Given all the structural deterioration.
Kevin Rose: Damage. Exactly. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t have good answers for that. I just don’t. It is a well-documented, as far as I know, a well-documented phenomenon. So it’s like, go figure that one out. I mean, I’m not qualified, way above my pay grade. Crazy, man. It’s wild.
Kevin Rose: It is wild.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ll give a shout-out to somebody. We’re not going to open this right now because we’ll start chewing on them and we’ll be up all night.
Kevin Rose: Is that the 120?
Tim Ferriss: No, this is Neutonic, N-E-U-T-O-N-I-C, Nootropics. See, that’s a pun. Nootropics, because these are toothpicks that I was given by a podcaster you may recognize named Chris Williamson. And they have—
Kevin Rose: Oh, nice.
Tim Ferriss: —they have, like, 20, I want to say 20, I might be getting that off, but like 20, 25 milligrams of caffeine in each toothpick.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: And there are a couple of other nootropics, AKA—
Kevin Rose: That’s a quarter-cup—
Tim Ferriss: —smart drug—
Kevin Rose: —of coffee, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —yeah, smart drugs in there. And they’re great. It’s just, like, suck on a toothpick.
Kevin Rose: Because if I have cups of coffee, I will chug a cup of coffee and then if it gets refilled, I’ll chug another cup of coffee, and it’s a problem. These actually is, in terms of pacing—
Tim Ferriss: Hm.
Kevin Rose: —have been fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. So that’s been my sort of, not exactly quite as interruptive for people to get that, but sort of ad libidum interruptus.
Yeah. Avoiding over-consumption of coffee and other stimulants, this helps me to kind of pace it. Because even if I chew on this thing until it’s fragments of wood, max I can squeeze out of it is 20, 25 milligrams.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What else do you got, Kevin?
Kevin Rose: Let’s take a little look-see. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I have that I think is interesting is what’s happening in the world of—I don’t want to talk a lot about AI because I’m just frankly AI’d out, but I will say that the idea that we can all now kind of take control of our productivity and pretty much anything that we want to control now, like device-wise, we can do with just a few simple prompts on AI.
And I had a buddy that came over to my house and he was like, “Hey, you got cameras in your house.” I have something called Ubiquiti, which is like, they have cameras and it’s a very common kind of household type situation when you want to have security system, front door thing, cameras, sensors, water detectors underneath the things in case things leak and you’re out of town, whatever.
And so I’ve got this whole setup and he’s like, “Hey, you know they have a full on API where you can just tell Claude or whatever to code against it.” And I was like, “Okay, well that’s interesting. Well, what can it do? ” And so, the cameras now have AI sensors where they can detect who it is that’s walking in.
So it’s like, “Oh, Tim’s coming up to your door.” “Oh, that’s your daughter,” or “That’s your dog.” It detects my dog, Toaster. It sees him and it puts a little dog emblem above his head when he’s walking around and it knows that it’s Toaster. But the crazy shit is I was like, “Okay, well what if I can go further and I can tell it to do actions,” because there’s a speaker hooked up to it as well, so that’s for security.
So basically if anyone loiters in my alleyway and it detects it, it’s like I play some really funky shit where it’s like “Detected,” like, “Loiterer in the alleyway” or whatever and just to scare people off in case they’re—
Tim Ferriss: I am the Batman.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, but you could draw little areas around where they shouldn’t be, which is like at your door fiddling with your door and say, “If they stand here for more than 30 seconds, place that audio out of speaker.” So I was like, okay, this is interesting. Well, what if when I walk in my house, if I’m wearing a hat of my favorite sports team and they’re playing, it reads me the scores like I walk in.
So you can think about all these things where it’s doing stuff based on your activity, right?
So like if you’re out there gardening, it’ll be like, “Hey Kevin, I noticed that the plant over here wasn’t watered enough.” So it’s watching all of this stuff and so there’s a lot of, “If then, then that” kind of situation, like, “If I see you doing X—” So the latest I have is, like, I programmed it so when it sees the license plate on my car, it automatically knows to open the gate because it knows it’s me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool.
Kevin Rose: And the camera looks at the license plate on the freaking car, checks it against the database, and allows me in. How crazy is that? And for people that are listening, I’m not talking about, like, $10,000 systems. The camera’s like $200. Anyone can do this at home, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild.
Kevin Rose: It’s just wild to think about. Finally, we had all these kind of discrete systems that you had some Nest stuff, and I had some Google Home stuff, and now they’re all talking to each other. So you can just do kind of really crazy. I know you would like this because you’re the kind of person that you’ve told me before, like, you don’t like to answer your door because if the delivery person is like, “Tim!” then all of a sudden your address is, like—
Tim Ferriss: Then I need—
Kevin Rose: —all over the internet.
Tim Ferriss: Then I’m doxxed. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I know you’ve said you don’t—I’m also pretty AI’d out, but at the same time it’s like, I can’t resist going back to the opium den. It’s so fascinating.
Kevin Rose: What are you doing now with AI stuff?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, I’m more curious to hear your thoughts and predictions frankly, because I think you’re better at it. But, I mean, I’m using Claude Code with APIs to do tons of inbox analysis and stuff—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —right? I’m doing a 20-year retrospective analysis of angel investing. It’s like, who made what introductions? Which companies did I not reply to that ended up being successes?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Which did I turn down that ended up being really important?
Kevin Rose: Do you really want to do it to yourself?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I suspected it would be worse than it was. I actually have not—I haven’t missed that many explicit opportunities. I wanted to test my own stories against data, right? Because I have all sorts of stories—
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: —about why I did certain things—
Kevin Rose: Right, right, right.
Tim Ferriss: —and why certain things worked out. And I have certain stories about my batting average and I’m like, “But is it true?”
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: “Really?”
Kevin Rose: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: “Is it really true?”
Kevin Rose: Because—
Tim Ferriss: “Let’s look at some hard numbers.”
Kevin Rose: —the sad truth, and I have a buddy that wears up the bracelet, and you’ve seen me with the necklace around the way it categorizes your AI and it listens to you 24/7, it’s about 70-ish percent that we think we know, but it’s actually what we know. Out of the hundred percent of what we think we know, this is the truth. I said I wanted a dark chocolate bar at 7:00 p.m.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s like, “No, you said it at 5:00, and you said it this way.” You know, it’s like—
Tim Ferriss: And you said it was milk chocolate.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. So it’s always about 20 percent off from where you actually think—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: —your brain’s at.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Which is brutal.
Tim Ferriss: Well, plus, I mean, that’s like last week, right? If you’re talking about 15 years ago.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, if you listen to any genesis story of any startup, you’re like, “Eh—”
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: “—wait a minute now.” This is like a startup comic working on material, but he’s been working on this one five-minute bit so long that now he believes that’s actually truth. I mean, the sanitizing and the editing of these startup genesis stories is hilarious, and there’s no reason to think that I would be or you would be exempt from it—
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: —right? When you’re telling your—
Kevin Rose: Absolutely not.
Tim Ferriss: —own story, even if you’re just telling it to yourself.
Kevin Rose: So what’s the number one thing that you’ve learned by applying AI to your life in this fashion? What’s the thing where you walked away and said, like—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: —”Damn, that was insightful and I’m going to change my behavior,” or, “I learned something new about myself that I wouldn’t have if I had not used AI”?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I think from a holistic health perspective, by “holistic” I mean having enough data related to medications, supplements, predispositions, side effects, what happened to me two weeks ago, the LLMs have been incredibly helpful. I mean, the picture that they get and the speed with which they can deliver an answer that I can interrogate is just incredible. So I—
Kevin Rose: What did you learn? What was the thing that you, like—
Tim Ferriss: I mean, honestly, it’s mostly avoiding disaster, right?
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like, are any of these things contraindicated with one another? Could A, B, or C explain D? Right? And you have to keep in mind these things can still hallucinate, but you can, I don’t want to say, eliminate that, but minimize it by just fact-checking across LLMs. Right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And so there’s that. I would say that there’s a lot of insight on hopefully that that can translate to future decision-making related to investing, which is, investing for me is not just amassing more chips. What’s fun about investing to me is it’s a way to scorecard your thinking and decision making.
Kevin Rose: Mm.
Tim Ferriss: Right? It’s just a very objective way to decide if something was the right or the wrong decision. And you can fine slice that and there are ways that you could maybe question that. But if you’re asking yourself, “Was I thinking well last month?” that’s not a very helpful question. Where do you go from there.
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
If you’re logging maybe every decision you make every day, and then trying to cross reference outcomes with blah, blah, blah, like yeah, but you’re never going to do that. But when you’re making relatively frequent investments, you can do that. You can also run counterfactuals, right? “What if I did the opposite? What if I had not sold that? What if I had kept that? What if I had done this? What if I had done that?”
Kevin Rose: Is that worth your time though? At the end of the day—
Tim Ferriss: It’s worth—
Kevin Rose: —you can throw everything into S&P 500—
Tim Ferriss: Well—
Kevin Rose: —and just go to bed.
Tim Ferriss: —well, there’s that. I would say it’s worth it to me because I find it interesting. I actually enjoy the intellectual exercise of it, but otherwise I would say with in terms of like how AI has impacted me, I would say that the honest answer is not that much, because most shit isn’t worth doing in the first place.
People are finding very, very clever ways to expedite automating workflows of all different types, and doing something well does not make it important or worth doing in the first place. So there’s a lot, I think the level of bullshit that is being done just at a very fast efficient rate is skyrocketing, but simultaneously there are definitely cases where I look back at, say, this analysis of 20 years of stuff, to do that manually would be impossible.
Kevin Rose: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: All right? It would take me a year full time with multiple people to do that, and with a Claude code, like Gmail API and leaving my computer running for a handful of hours a few times, that’s like, what you get back is fucking incredible. It’s unbelievable. And I haven’t even scratched the surface.
I will say also another way that AI has maybe affected my life in a net negative way and I’m not, we have another mutual friend who maybe we shouldn’t name who feels very similarly. Is—
Kevin Rose: [REDACTED].
Tim Ferriss: We’ll bleep that out, but yeah, Jesus Christ. So is, if you train AIs on your writing, they’re really good.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s, I think I feel—I mean, this is a stretch of a comparison obviously because I’m not an adept like a world class Go player, but when AlphaGo defeated one of the top Korean players, he was kind of like, “I’m done. I don’t find joy in this anymore, like, if we’re playing against machines.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And when I see these AIs very beautifully, I’m not going to lie, and we’re like in the top of the first inning, right? This stuff is going to get so much better, spit out stuff that is so much better—I mean, I can still write, but what they can do in 30 seconds is what would take me 30 hours. And I’m just like, “Fuck.” I don’t know. It really drains the motivation for me to put in those 30 hours.
Why wouldn’t it? Of course it would, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But in some sense you can consider it a really good copilot, because for it to come up with novel ideas that would engage an audience, that’s still the holy grail where it’s not quite there yet. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s going to make you sound—It’s going to button up your copy, and it might expand upon it in ways that you wouldn’t, but it’s not going to come up with the original thesis for the whole thing, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s going to have trouble with the original thesis, but even there I think it does a pretty good job.
Kevin Rose: Really, it’s—
Tim Ferriss: Like, you just—
Kevin Rose: —getting better?
Tim Ferriss: —you just—
Kevin Rose: I haven’t tried with writing stuff, so.
Tim Ferriss: Well, if you just do a data dump and you’re like, “Create an amazing—”
Kevin Rose: Oh, you sent me that link.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if you just do a data dump, you’re like create—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, where you sent me that link you were like, “What should Tim do in the next five years?” Remember?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, that was good.
Kevin Rose: That was really interesting. Tell people what you did, because they might find this, I think it applies to their own life.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. So, you could do this in whichever model you’re using, whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. If it knows you, right, if it—
Kevin Rose: You can tie in your inbox too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can tie in your inbox. In my case, I didn’t do that, but if it has enough history on you, you can just ask, “What do you think I should do in the next five years? What might be some rewarding paths of exploration?” I think I put something like that, like, “What are three to five ideas that you think could be rewarding career exploration for me—”
Kevin Rose: I love this.
Tim Ferriss: “—in the next X period of time?”
Kevin Rose: So, if for people listening—
Tim Ferriss: And the answer’s—yeah.
Kevin Rose: —if they’ve used AI for, let’s call it, three to six months, and you’ve probably given it several hundred things to think about, it will span cross those conversations as long as you turn this on. I think it’s on by default now, but it used to be an opt-in thing where you’d say, “Allow the AI to look cross-conversation,” so it has a wholistic understanding of who you are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the answers were fucking outstanding.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean really, really good.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I sent it to a few friends, sent it to you, I sent it to a few of my closest friends and they’re like, “That’s pretty good.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean—
Kevin Rose: It was really cool.
Tim Ferriss: —it’s—
Kevin Rose: Some of the ideas I was like, “Damn, you should do that dude.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s—
Kevin Rose: We had this one business idea for you to do, and it wasn’t a book, and I was like, “Dude, I texted you back.” I was like, “That’s awesome. Go build that.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, there were business ideas, there were certainly kind of non-revenue, but philosophically-aligned ideas. It was shocking to me. I mean, that’s actually a very good example of something that has deeply informed what I’m mulling over as I imagine the future. I was like, “Man, that actually is a really good—”
Because, keeping in mind, I’m asking questions about things of interest, things I like, things I don’t like. I am asking questions about different scientific interests related to Saisei Foundation, my nonprofit foundation. I’m asking questions about investing, I’m asking questions about writing, I’m asking questions about relationships, I’m asking questions about organizing trips for friends. I’m asking so many different questions.
Kevin Rose: Am I still on the board of your nonprofit?
Tim Ferriss: I think you’re like secretary or something.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, something like that. I haven’t heard anything about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe you were honorably discharged—
Kevin Rose: No, I don’t—
Tim Ferriss: —I don’t know.
Kevin Rose: —think you did—I never got any paperwork around it. I haven’t heard anything in, like, three years.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, well I said it was going to be a light lift. It’s a light lift.
Kevin Rose: There’s a light lift.
Tim Ferriss: And I mean, that’s a very good example, right? I mean, that may be the best example because if that even 10 percent informs a major next chapter—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: —holy shit, that’s a big deal for me.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Certainly. And—it makes me think a little bit about podcast listeners especially, readers also, but to a greater extent, podcast listeners who come up to me and most listeners I run into are really great and I mean, there are always a couple of weirdos, but most are fantastic and they’ll say something often like, “I’m so sorry, you don’t know me at all, and I feel like I know you.”
And what I say a lot of the time is, “Actually, if you listen to my podcast every week or even every month, you do know me pretty well.” And then you think about a machine that never forgets. It’s going to know you pretty damn well.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s spooky in a way, but I started getting more out of the LLMs when I started asking questions. Now you have to be, I think, a little careful with outsourcing this and absolving yourself of responsibility to think about these things.
But when you ask it open-ended personal questions in the way that you would ask a close friend, “What do you think are three to five creative ways I might explore things professionally in the next five years?” As opposed to something that you think is more suitable for a robot—
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —you get some really interesting responses.
Kevin Rose: It’s so cool. That’s a great use case.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: The one thing I’ve been playing around with lately that I haven’t told you about yet, but I think about all these AI startups and everyone that’s creating all these different apps and all that stuff and for me, it’s kind of fun to watch as a kind of bystander being like, “Oh, cool, you’re going to make this.”
But I really want to explore things that just no one has done before. It’s always been interesting to me more than just iterative kind of, like, sanding down with the rough edges. A lot of startups will go out there and be like, “Hey, you know what sucks is word processing doesn’t do this so I’m going to make a slightly better word processor.” I’m just making this up.
But I like the kind of like wilder, crazier, like, I’d rather have it fail and say, “I did something new,” than just do something boring, if that makes sense.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I get it. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so, lately what I’ve done is—
Tim Ferriss: Part of why I have so many fatalities.
Kevin Rose: So many fatalities. Yeah. Exactly. Same. What I’ve done lately is I’ve taken—I went and bought a bunch of these decks of cards on Amazon that are values cards.
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?
Kevin Rose: Meaning they give you like a deck of a hundred things and they’re like, “What are your core values?”
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: And you’re like, “Empathy,” or, “Kindness,” or like you flip through them. And the way they typically work is that you have like a, this is a really high value, a medium, and a low value, and then you put them into different stacks and then you walk away and you say, “Oh, this is my high value stack of things that are my core values that mean a lot to me.”
Tim Ferriss: Hm.
Kevin Rose: And it might be 10 or 15 different cards, right? And what’s interesting is to do that with friends and partners and things like that and then compare them and say, “Hey, what do we align on what we don’t align?” And I can imagine for an intimate partner, this would be a pretty important thing to do, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so I started there and I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m going to scan these cards in, and then I’m going to pare it down and make these core values where you come in and say, “This matters to me.” It’s almost like a swiping dating app or something like, “Yes, I’m into—”
Tim Ferriss: “Yes, I’m into—”
Kevin Rose: “—into this—”
Tim Ferriss: “—empathy.” “No, I’m not.”
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly. But you swipe through them and then when you’re done with that, then you’ve got your list of these values, and they can change over time. And so I think the important thing is to log that and say, “These are my values today, but tomorrow one might shift a little bit.” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: And then I thought about contractual bonds, and so the working title I have for it is just called “bond” and where I can say like, with a partner, I’m going to create a contract with you where we both have to shake on it, meaning like a virtual shake. You think of it as almost like a SimCity-like situation. This is my city, this is her city, or a friend’s city, and we’re going to agree that I take the trash out every Tuesday night.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: And there’s an emotional shake on both sides, and if I break this bond, it results in what? And so from the partner side, it will result in a one to 10 on how much damaging this is to me.
So not taking the trash out, probably be like, “Ah, that sucks because the trash is going to overflow.” That’s probably three—
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Rose: —to most people, right? And so, then I kind of get negative points in case I break that bond. But what’s interesting though is that that will link back to a core value of theirs and a core value of mine.
And I want to show up as a good partner, and there’ll be a core value associated with that. And then you could see those bonds between multiple people. And the reason I say this is because I’ve always been one of these people historically that have said yes to so many things, and then, like, be the last minute. I’m the worst at that, you know?
Where I’m like, “I’m in.” And then I’m like, “I’m an introvert. I’m out—”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: —at the last minute, right? And so I just think that there needs to be a system where, almost like a LinkedIn for like values and trust and bonds, there’s a great Wu Tang quote that’s like, “Word is bond.” And ultimately I really believe that. There’s something really cool about saying, “We have the Better Business Bureau, that’s like the best we’ve got.” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Like, “Oh, this person, they did well by their customers 2,000 times.” What about individuals and saying, like, “Hey, this person was always empathetic towards me or this person was kind and helped me move on a Sunday.”
Tim Ferriss: What prompted all this?
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it. Just, like, well I—the thing I think about is that there—
Tim Ferriss: That was such a dissatisfying—
Kevin Rose: Well, I call it—
Tim Ferriss: —answer.
Kevin Rose: No, hold on. Let me give you the real answer. I call this “dark information.”
Tim Ferriss: “Dark information—”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —okay.
Kevin Rose: So “dark information” is information that exists in the real world, but we have yet to put in physical form.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay.
Kevin Rose: And so right now you and I have a trust thing. You know that you could, if the camera was turned off, there are certain things that you can tell me that you’re pretty certain I will not tell anyone else. Every once in a while I do, but you will know you know where that line is, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Kevin Rose: But that hasn’t been concretized in any type of, like, visual, real format. And so there’s something interesting, I’m just brainstorming with you in real time because we’ve had a couple of drinks, but like my point is if there was a system where I could say, “I’ve created these bonds, I’ve built up this reputation,” but it would also give me a way to reflect back and be like, “Oh, you know what? I can see now historically that I’ve often bailed on events that I’ve signed up for, let me improve that in myself.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: The whole point of what you brought up a minute ago was, if I use AI to go back historically and look across things, I can detect these trends and then make course corrections based on those trends, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so there’s something interesting about this idea of, there are these different facets, so there’s these like emotional facets that we have with every individual, how might we track those?
Tim Ferriss: Well, what jumps out at me about this is maybe a cool use case would be identifying, you could write it out or you could have cards, your values, but maybe to put a finer point on it, the type of person you believe yourself to be.
Kevin Rose: Right, because—
Tim Ferriss: Or the—
Kevin Rose: —it’s very different than what people perceive you to be.
Tim Ferriss: —or the type of person you want to be.
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: And then it’s like, “Let’s take a look at your calendar and your email and your iMessages to see how much your story of what—
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: —you think you are or what you want to be matches up with your behavior.”
Kevin Rose: So I built—
Tim Ferriss: And then you get a report card.
Kevin Rose: —I built a prototype for exactly this. So remember maybe seven years ago you did a 360 review for me?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So—
Tim Ferriss: Those things are brutal.
Kevin Rose: —for people that don’t know what 360 reviews are, it’s like you give 10 of your friends to somebody, they interview them, they collect all the data anonymously—
Tim Ferriss: Could also be like coworkers, employees—
Kevin Rose: Coworkers, employees—
Tim Ferriss: —bosses, whatever.
Kevin Rose: —friends, whatever. And then you get a report back being like, “Here are the deficiencies and positives that this person brings.”
Tim Ferriss: Anonymized.
Kevin Rose: And anonymized.
Tim Ferriss: Brutal.
Kevin Rose: And they are very different than what you think—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: —how you show up.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Kevin Rose: And so that’s the idea.
Tim Ferriss: I literally was looking at mine from, like, 12 years ago—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I think we did one around the same mind—
Tim Ferriss: —a couple weeks ago and I was just like—
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I know.
Tim Ferriss: —”So tough.”
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Because you get it back and you’re like, “Who said this?”
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Like—
Kevin Rose: Like some of this—
Tim Ferriss: —some of it’s brutal.
Kevin Rose: I think I know what you said, by the way. Do you ever use the word “child rearing”?
Tim Ferriss: “Child rearing”?
Kevin Rose: Did you ever say that?
Tim Ferriss: “Child rearing.” I mean—
Kevin Rose: To throw me off, would you ever say that?
Tim Ferriss: Throw you off the scent trail?
Kevin Rose: Because before I had kids, somebody in my anonymous 360 review said, like, “Oh, he’s going to have a hard time with child-rearing.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no, that wasn’t me.
Kevin Rose: I’m like, “Who the fuck—”
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: “—would say ‘child-rearing’?”
Tim Ferriss: No, that’s not me, that’s not me.
Kevin Rose: I don’t have any friends that even have that in their vocabulary. And I’m like, “The only person that could do that would be Tim trying to throw me off with a fucking smart-ass word.”
Tim Ferriss: No, that wasn’t me.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: That wasn’t me. That wasn’t me.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: No, no. I think I’d be able to identify whatever responses I gave.
Kevin Rose: Okay, I got it I guess. That’s the one thing that stuck with me for like 15 years. I’m like, “Who’d said that?”
Tim Ferriss: Man, you’re lucky if you got off with that. Man, I’ve got so much more. Good Lord. Ah. You know what I’ve been doing that has been really helpful, because the blank page is something I struggle with with writing, which is part of the reason why the AI is so demoralizing in a sense, because the LLMs, within like 30 seconds, are just like, “Boom, how you like me now? Try to match that.”
But using, even though I certainly don’t know the future of this company because it might get replaced by features that are innate to X, Y, or Z, but Wispr Flow.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God, I love it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, using Wispr Flow as a data dump—
Kevin Rose: I wish I was an investor, it’s freaking awesome.
Tim Ferriss: —and you may have recommended this to me, I can’t recall, but—
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: —basically doing a dump of a conversation as I’m walking with Wispr Flow into a note on my phone, then taking that, dropping it into Claude, asking it to clean it up and turn it into something readable has been so helpful, not necessarily for publication, but for emails, especially uncomfortable emails where like, “Oh, God, I’m putting it off. I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to do it.”
Just doing like a 10-minute brain dump, it’s shocking how quickly things come together, incredibly helpful. And I’ll just give a shout-out to my friend Elan Lee, co-founder of Exploding Kittens. He recommended this headset because I was on a call with him and I’m like, “Man, that audio is awesome. What are you using?”
Kevin Rose: Can you put it on just for the viewers—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I will. It’s—
Kevin Rose: — and let’s see if it’s going to look as good as I hope it does?
Tim Ferriss: It looks so good.
Kevin Rose: There, see? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s pretty good, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So this is the Shokz, S-H-O-K-Z, OpenMeet UC, open ear bone conduction headset. So he was talking and I’m like, “What the hell are you wearing?” I was like, “Audio’s really good.” So it looks pretty dorky. This is like a—
Kevin Rose: Nah, it’s great.
Tim Ferriss: And the bone conduction is right here, effectively in my cheekbones. And when you first use them, you’re like, “Wait a second, I feel like this is playing out of speakers, like, this is nonsense,” right? “This is—”
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: —complete BS.” But then you totally plug your ears and you can still hear perfectly well, which is crazy.
Kevin Rose: Oh, crazy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And what I like about these is, A, the audio quality is great, and the connectivity varies, but the audio quality is fantastic. You can hear. So if I’m walking my dog, walking Molly, and I want to be able to hear traffic and so on, I can use this because especially if I’m using Wispr Flow to data dump into a text file of some type, I don’t really need to be listening. It’s not like I’m on a phone call or a Zoom call or something.
So I find this very, very helpful so that I can actually pay attention to my surroundings. And that’s all I got. It’s basically this and AirPods. I mean, there are other headphones that I will use for professional recording and stuff, but thus far I’ll share one more tech thing real quick. These, this little baggie here, is the Sennheiser Pro Audio Condenser Microphone. It’s very simple.
I’ve just been very impressed With the audio, when I’m on the road recording stuff for the podcast like intros or sponsor reads or whatever, it’s just a simple live mic. It’s so simple, but the audio quality, even in a hotel room that is really bouncy, lots of glass, lots of metal where it should sound terrible, if I use a fancy, like this is a sure mic that we have right here, if I were to use this exact mic because I have it at home, in some of these bouncy rooms, it would sound worse, I’m not kidding, than what I get for my purposes—
Kevin Rose: Wow, crazy.
Tim Ferriss: —with this.
It’s pretty wild, and I love Shure. I use their mics on a lot of podcasts, but in terms of minimizing bounce, for whatever reason, this little baggie that I can stick in a pocket, right? It’s like, “This is my portable sort of recording studio.”
Kevin Rose: Have you recorded on the iPhone with it?
Tim Ferriss: I have.
Kevin Rose: It sounds good?
Tim Ferriss: It sounds great.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And I don’t have my phone with me. There is an app that you can use for really high fidelity recording. It’s called Ferrite or something like that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s like lossless recording, right?
Tim Ferriss: Lossless recording. It’s like F-E-R-R-I-T-E, something like that. I’ll put the link in the show notes for this for people who are interested. The quality is absurd. And you can also use Descript or one of these programs to do AI cleanup and it’s crazy how smooth it is.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, you don’t need Descript anymore. You can just use all the models to do it. Gemini is actually quite good at multimodal audio video, all that stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, cool. Yeah. Gemini, honestly, I’ve been using Gemini more and more just because it’s such plug and play with—
Kevin Rose: It’s fast too.
Tim Ferriss: —with G Suite also.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, 35 Flash is a great model. Although the new Sonnet just came out and that’s from Anthropic that just came out. I haven’t played with it yet because it was literally launched today and it’s supposed to be fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you think the landscape looks like in a few years? You’ve got Anthropic and OpenAI racing to IPO. See where that goes. You’ve got Mythos/Fable taken off.
Kevin Rose: Mythos is out tomorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: Back out tomorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Okay. Was a national security threat yesterday, but it isn’t today.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think? I mean, I think the—
Kevin Rose: It’s the big three. It’s three players. It’s Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. And X is trying and I would never ever count out Elon. Obviously he has the funds to make it happen.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also Anthropic and Google are buying excess capacity from Colossus, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. But that means that their product isn’t working because they bought that capacity for themselves.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Kevin Rose: So that means that no one’s using Grok. I mean, I actually like Grok. They have done—
Tim Ferriss: I use Grok more than people might realize.
Kevin Rose: Well, here’s what’s interesting about it.
Tim Ferriss: For current events and synthesizing.
Kevin Rose: Yes. So it has direct access to the X API and that it has actually X tools built into Grok. So if you want to get, like you said, current events, news, things like that. And they’ve also said that it is one of the most grounded models and doesn’t hallucinate so that it’s really good at. And so on Digg, when we relaunch it and we use a lot of AI to come up with the different stories and all of that, we use it a ton because we want that grounded information that is true. And so it’s really important to have that. I don’t know. I mean, I think I wouldn’t count them out. I should probably include them in that list but that’s it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So big three.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think things look like in two years? You’re very good at this. I’m not saying, obviously this is just fucking bullshitting and speculating, but what’s your guess?
Kevin Rose: I mean—
Tim Ferriss: I went pretty heavy into Alphabet thanks to you, which—
Kevin Rose: You went heavy in Alphabet?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And then they had a 40 percent pop on a $4 trillion company. What is going on?
Kevin Rose: I haven’t even watched. Is it up?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, well, I mean, look, this was a while back. A while back in AI time, which is like dog years. So by that I mean like five months ago.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Listen, exactly. Five months is like 10 years now. So here is why I like Google. They own the full stack. They have their own chips. And so one of the things that I did a deep dive on was the chips that they are building are, they—really confused the industry. It’s my understanding that they made an insanely high bandwidth and kind of memory throughput when everyone was like, “Hey, why are you opening up these channels and making them so high bandwidth for this kind of data flow?”
And I talked to a buddy and he was like, “Yeah, everyone was confused at first when they saw the architecture for their latest AI chips.” And then they realized that we will live in a world right now where a model drops. Fable goes live tomorrow on Wednesday, right? And the next OpenAI model goes live in two weeks or whatever because they have that rumored one. It’s like old software deployment where it was like model trained, released, out, model trained, released, out. That’s the cadence we’re on right now. What Google is betting, and I know I know they’re all thinking this, but what Google’s betting with this high throughput kind of wide memory architecture is the future is continuous learning. And so everyone is saying like we’re 12 to 18 months out, maybe a little bit longer—
Tim Ferriss: From what?
Kevin Rose: From self-improving models.
Tim Ferriss: I see. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So 27/7, it’s no longer about like, “Oh, Mythos came out today. Woo, crazy.” It’s not about those new models dropping. It’s about—
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a child learning day by day.
Kevin Rose: Tomorrow, it’ll be better than today, forever. And when that happens and they own the full stack, Google’s got the chips, granted they’re going to be constrained by TSMC, which is the only player that’s producing —I mean, there’s a few others, Samsung and Micron and a few others, but TSMC is like the leader and I believe they’re producing Google’s chips as well. But they’ve got the chips architecture, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the engineers. They’re freaking—I mean, they lost a great one a week ago, but it’s crazy what they’re paying these engineers. Did you see some of this? It’s like a billion dollars situation. It’s insane what they’re paying some of these people to stay around.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s what Meta was doing to poach also.
Kevin Rose: Meta, I just don’t think they’re going to make it, man.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Listen, they have great businesses. Instagram is phenomenal. They’ve got these fantastic assets, but I just don’t think they have the talent to pull off what these other bigs are pulling off.
Tim Ferriss: What do the big three look like in two years, do you think? Because Google has a lot of advantages, like you mentioned, right? I mean, also vast data center expertise, right?
Kevin Rose: They have the data centers. They have Android, which is like 60 some percent of the population or something like that. So they have the install base. I have a hard time believing that if you believe that AI inference and all the costs associated with AI eventually kind of settles and it’s affordable, and yes, it’ll probably be like a Netflix type plan where we’re all like, “Oh, yeah, that’s our extra $30 a month to get all the AI shit, whatever.” If it’s coming on your device and also Google’s powering a lot of Apple shit, though Apple has some unique tech.
It’s interesting. Apple is kind of coming up. I wouldn’t write off Apple either. Apple’s another one, but they’re probably another couple years out. I don’t know. I mean, at the end of the day, for me, I’m old enough now to not want to be like, “Hey, this is the 10xer.” Actually, it’s interesting. I called on your podcast. I don’t know if you know this, but four years ago I was like, “Dude, NVIDIA’s going to crush it, blah, blah, blah.” There’s been some dumb predictions. We’ve definitely made some bad ones too. So I’m not going to say it’s been all good, but we’ve called out some stuff. In the world of AI, I don’t think it’s winner take all. Unless somebody hits some kind of crazy escape velocity that is like truly it’s like, aware.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you think, just I’m curious, because you’re so much better at this kind of stuff than I am. I’m like good at my dumb little corners here and there, but you’ve worked at Google, and you worked on their ill-fated social product at one point, right? What was it called? I can’t remember.
Kevin Rose: Google Plus.
Tim Ferriss: Google Plus, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it was horrible. I left right away.
Tim Ferriss: Right. And very wisely segued to Google Ventures. I guess my point is when people think consumer, not enterprise, when they think AI right now, they think ChatGPT, right? ChatGPT has raised a ton of fucking money. They’ve got to figure out ads almost certainly. That’s not easy. That is very, very, very hard to do. I’m pretty familiar with the ads business at Google. Very hard to do at a high level.
However, when average Joe or Jane on the street thinks AI, they think ChatGPT. And when I have tried to set up the Gmail API for Claude, the process on the Google side is such dog shit. The UX is terrible. It is so bad and I’d like to think myself reasonably decent with tech stuff, not as technical as you are, but pretty good, I would like to think. Nonetheless, I need someone on my staff to walk me through step by step to do it because it’s so counterintuitive and there are errors all over the place.
And then you’ve got Anthropic, which is, if we are to believe the headlines on ARR just like crushing on the enterprise side.
Kevin Rose: 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: Like the fastest scaling business of all time on a lot of different measures. However, they’ve gotten a number of pretty strong bitch slaps from the administration. At the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these frontier labs are going to be left unconstrained by the government, so that’s like a huge question there.
Kevin Rose: I think China will push that.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Tell me.
Kevin Rose: Well, so China’s been launching new models and they just did one a week ago that was on par with Fable and they—
Tim Ferriss: Was that Alibaba or someone else?
Kevin Rose: No, it’s…
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t matter, but yeah.
Kevin Rose: But these are open source models. So it’s actually really interesting because China is like, “Okay, listen, we’re going to open source this and people will use our tech.” They’re almost doing it the American way. They’re not closed sourcing anything. They’re like, “Okay, here’s the free model. Come use ours because we’re going to charge you—you can run it yourself if you want, locally.” And that is going to be increasingly, I think that will be increasingly common.
AMD came out, I don’t know if you saw what she, the CEO, she’s brilliant. She came out with this new box that is this little $4,000 box or somewhere around there and it can run like these massive multi-billion parameter models locally. So those charges that you were getting for like $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month or whatever in AI expenses is now just that one box that just runs the model locally.
Now granted, it’s probably eight months behind in terms of like the model it can run versus the frontier models.
Tim Ferriss: For a lot of people, who cares?
Kevin Rose: For a lot of people, who cares?
Tim Ferriss: So from a business perspective, and I know that’s tightly related to all sorts of technical considerations, but where do you think Google, I still hate saying Alphabet. Let’s just say Google—
Kevin Rose: The word on the street is that they have models that are more advanced than Fable. They have not launched them because one, the government’s going to step in and stop them and two, they are very expensive to run and it would cost them a lot of money. They would lose money doing so. And so I think in a year we’re really—12 months, we won’t really know where Google’s at because I’m telling you—
Tim Ferriss: They’re holding on.
Kevin Rose: They’re holding shit back.
Tim Ferriss: Of course they are.
Kevin Rose: They’re holding shit back.
Tim Ferriss: Because they have the bank roll to do that.
Kevin Rose: And it’s fucking Google. You don’t understand. My time there, I walked—Sergei took me, and I’m not saying this as a flex. I’m just like, this is just what happened.
Tim Ferriss: Such a flex. Such a flex.
Kevin Rose: Sergei took me and Bill Maris, who ran Google Ventures—
Tim Ferriss: Smart dude.
Kevin Rose: Bill’s amazing. Through Google X, and this was years ago.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, cool, fun.
Kevin Rose: We got the tour and he was like—
Tim Ferriss: That’s the moonshot factory.
Kevin Rose: It’s like, dude, you already worked there and they make you sign when you walk in, like, “Don’t fucking say anything or we’ll kill you.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Google X is like the Willy Wonka.
Kevin Rose: So I’m like seeing the Waymos before they even talked about them freaking 10 plus years ago, before it was even a thing. And so I saw all the crazy balloon projects and a couple others that they shuttered that I can’t even talk about. But I’m telling you, they’re sitting on tech that’s like five years out that don’t underestimate how many freaking PhDs they have working on this shit. You just can’t imagine what’s under the hood there.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, yeah.
Kevin Rose: So for me, I’m not a fan of like at this point when I think about investing into the future, and this is not investment advice, but when the Anthropics and the OpenAIs and the Googles, you name the top five, it’s kind of almost like what they said back in the day when they had the, what was the acronym they used for like Netflix, Google, what was the —
Tim Ferriss: It changes all the time.
Kevin Rose: But you know what I’m talking about.
Tim Ferriss: FANG?
Kevin Rose: FANG. Yeah. FANG was a thing and then there’s another one and there’s another one. You’re going to want to own like those five and you’ll sit back and you’ll be like, “Damn, if I’d only just owned Google, I’d be up 70 percent.” But you’re like, “Oh, you know what? In combination, I’m up 30 percent and the market’s doing 10 percent.” You’ll be stoked, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you sent me a graph. We can delete this if we need to.
Kevin Rose: Oh, the NASDAQ 100?
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, for you looking forward, because you bust my balls about some of the swings that I take, which is good. No, you should bust my balls.
Kevin Rose: I bust it because I’m like, “Tim, what are you optimizing for, dude? Another zero? You don’t need another zero on the bank accounts.”
Tim Ferriss: I get it, I get it, I get it. But I’m asking you, right? I mean, look, we’re all looking for the feeling of being alive. Part of the way I feel alive is by taking swings, right?
Kevin Rose: Fair. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: My question for you is, you’re not just going to do S&P 500. I find that hard to believe.
Kevin Rose: I dabble.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So if you were—
Kevin Rose: I’m like you. I bought Waymo stock and you got pissed at me because I didn’t offer you any.
Tim Ferriss: Such a prick. Keeps all the shiny stuff for himself. He’s a greedy little piglet.
Kevin Rose: I didn’t know you wanted it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you 100 percent know that I want it because I sent—this actually turned out pretty well. It’s part of the reason why I pulled the trigger on Google was it’s such a simple approach. I took five names, was it? It was like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Waymo, handful of other companies. And there was Vercel, Crusoe, a couple of others.
Kevin Rose: God damn it.
Tim Ferriss: And I sent this list out and I sent it to, I don’t know, five smart people I know who are very, very good investors and have good track records, across asset classes, and a few of them sent that to their technical analysts who specialize in different fields. And I was like—
Kevin Rose: That’s maybe when I gave you bad advice.
Tim Ferriss: But I was like—maybe, maybe not. And I was like, “You have 10 chips. Where do you put those 10 chips as a bet?” That’s it. No further guidance, no caveats, no explanation. And look, I’m not saying this is the most sophisticated investment thesis in the world, but you know that I wanted Waymo because it was on that list and it was one of the winners that came back in terms of if we are to believe the consensus of this small cohort.
Kevin Rose: And to be a fair, I offered you some of my own purchase and you turned me down.
Tim Ferriss: I may still take you up on it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, you’re gonna just wait till the six-months evaluation—
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Kevin Rose: “Hey, remember, brother? I think [inaudible] cost.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s on the news. I would love to revisit our conversation from earlier.
Kevin Rose: But I think for the average person listening, the good news is that these companies are going out soon, meaning they’re going to be publicly traded companies. They may seem very expensive and very pricey and you’d be right to say that. And so did Amazon when it went out in 2000.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, what was the market cap on Amazon IPO though?
Kevin Rose: It was like—
Tim Ferriss: It’s got to be tiny.
Kevin Rose: No, no, no. It’s not about market cap. It’s about price to earnings, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.
Kevin Rose: So I looked at the price—
Tim Ferriss: Well, now price to earnings will depend a lot — I mean, it’s going to be very different for OpenAI and Anthropic, right?
Kevin Rose: Well, what’s crazy is SpaceX is like 30 percent bump on price to earnings on the peak of Amazon. So SpaceX is like—did you invest in SpaceX or no?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I started investing in SpaceX like 10, 12 years ago.
Kevin Rose: Oh, you’re stoked.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, yeah, I’m fine. But the point, I would say here also, it’s like if you’re like, “Oh, I missed it because only the fancy people get to invest beforehand.” It’s like, no, I mean, SpaceX right now, I’m looking at the chart launched at 160, had this huge bump obviously, but then dropped down and you could have bought it for 156, 154, 153, and now it’s climbing back up. I mean, there’s a lot going on here. And honestly, I still find public equity investing terrifying because there’s so many sharks and there’s short sellers and derivatives and all this craziness going on. And what happens when it’s listed and put into these indexes and blah, blah, blah? All those dynamics are way beyond my capability.
Kevin Rose: That’s why I don’t do the day trading thing.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t do day trading.
Kevin Rose: No, I’m just saying, for example, SpaceX, I don’t have a position in SpaceX, but if I did, it would be to hold it for the next 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: Here’s a good takeaway. You’re asking what’s the takeaway from my 20-year analysis of the angel investing? It’s still incomplete. There’s a lot left to do and—
Kevin Rose: Shopify.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Well, that’s a good example, right? It’s like this is going to sound so dumb and, “Yeah, duh,” to so many people who are more just better investors than I am, but yeah, I mean, I’ve done pretty well. I think the decisions I made at the time to sell certain things were very logical given the information and my financial status at the time.
Kevin Rose: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Totally reasonable, right? So I don’t want to judge a good poker play based on where I am 20 years hence, that’s not reasonable. But the takeaway is like, you’ve got to let your winners run as long as possible.
Kevin Rose: 100 percent. I’ve lost more money by selling stocks early than I’ve ever probably made buying the original stock.
Tim Ferriss: And the other thing I would say also, for people listening who are like, “Oh, my God, if these one percenters are jerking each other off any longer, I’m going to vomit.” If you had just, and some very famous firm did this, maybe it was Sequoia or Benchmark, I can’t recall, but they looked at their gains from initial investment all the way through follow on rounds to IPO and then six months post. So after lockup for, let’s just keep it simple for all intents and purposes. And then they looked at what you would have gained if you bought at IPO and just held for like 10 years and you would have made as much or more if you would just bought as a retail investor.
Kevin Rose: Yep. I mean, that is the silver lining here, which is, I for some reason get fed all a lot of these Instagram videos and two of them that—
Tim Ferriss: You’re on Instagram so much. You send me so many fucking Instagram pics.
Kevin Rose: They’re funny though, right? I send some funny shit.
Tim Ferriss: You do.
Kevin Rose: But the interesting thing about it is so many times as individuals, and I’ve fallen into this trap as well, which is you find something that you love and you buy said object when you should actually buy the company. So let’s just pretend you’re going to spend $500 on an iPhone every year since it came out, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And there was this great woman that came in and she was like, “Okay, how do you just for the first four years of the iPhone coming out, rather than buy an iPhone—
Tim Ferriss: Put it into Apple.
Kevin Rose: —just put it into Apple.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.
Kevin Rose: And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And my buddy, sadly, I love you, Prager. David Prager, the second the Tesla came out, not the first one, but the one that was consumer friendly, he went out and he had made a little money and he’s like, “You know what? I’m going to do it. I’m going to splurge. I’m going to deck it out, spend a hundred grand on this thing.” And he got the freaking top of the line Tesla. We did the math for him because we’re bastards and it was like $15 million or something like that had he just invested in Tesla the second he loved the product.
But the moral of the story is like if you love something and this is going to happen over and over again for decades to come, if you’re like, “Hey, Claude is my shit. I use it every single day. I think it’s great because of X, Y, and Z.” And they go public, set it and forget it. Come in, whatever you can afford, I don’t care if it’s $100 or $1,000 or $100,000, it’s meaningful at the end of the day. I don’t know. That’s my reaction.
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s great advice. I mean, look, that’s part of the reason and I have gotten so much shit from this by some VCs, I won’t mention their names, who are just like, “What?” Because they’ve got their 30 slide, our proprietary investment thesis shit that they show pension funds and stuff, right? And I’m like, I just try to invest in stuff that I will use every day and it’s not true for everything, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, I’m not using them every day, SpaceX, outside of Starlink, but it’s like there are exceptions. But it’s like with something like this, where it’s like I am eating close to half of my protein calories every day of this stuff and I’m like, “I should just invest in the company.” It’s just like that is what makes sense. You know the first stock I ever bought? This was when I was like —
Kevin Rose: Dildonics. I mean, something you use every day.
Tim Ferriss: Teledildonics. Yeah. Can’t go wrong.
Kevin Rose: For people that don’t know what Dildonics is—
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’ll be another random show.
Kevin Rose: Show notes.
Tim Ferriss: Show notes. It was Pixar.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. My dad bought me some book on stock investing. Honestly, I couldn’t make any sense of it because it was getting into like price to earning and this and that, earning per share. And I was like, “Ah, I don’t really understand this.”
Kevin Rose: That’s so cool your dad bought you that book.
Tim Ferriss: It was cool.
Kevin Rose: That’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: It’s cool. It’s cool. It was his way of showing love. We can’t all do it the way necessarily people want to receive it. But in any case, the point of that was I loved comics. I tracked comics and animation and I saw Toy Story, number one, I even saw shorts and I was like, “That is the future.”
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I know that’s the future.
Kevin Rose: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: And when I was whatever, 15 or something, first stock, Pixar.
Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I have the original shareholder poster they mailed out.
Kevin Rose: No way. Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: Like Lasseter and Jobs and stuff.
Kevin Rose: Oh, dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for me it’s like, look at your credit card statement. Do you know what I mean? I mean, this is not investment advice. I’m just saying this is the way I personally approach it so informational purposes only, but it’s like, yeah, if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on like Amazon and Amazon Prime, it’s like, well, maybe, who knows?
Kevin Rose: Totally. I mean that’s—
Tim Ferriss: Are you going to be spending more or less on that in five years? Just forget about the market, forget about analysts, like you personally. Will you be spending more or less on this in three or five years time?
Kevin Rose: That’s exactly right.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’ll put something in the intro on, this is not investment advice, but it’s like this stuff, you don’t need to be a quant hedge fund manager.
Kevin Rose: And to be fair, when you look at Buffett’s portfolio and the things that he’s bought over the years, it’s the consumer staples and the things that we’re just like, he’s like, “Yes, more people will want and drink Coca-Cola in the future. It’s a fantastic brand. The margins are impeccable. It’s a well-run business. I know the CEO.”
Tim Ferriss: Not prone to disruption.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. In downturns, guess what? People still drink Coke.
Tim Ferriss: He’s also a clever bastard though. He’s been very good with his like, “Aw, shucks, aw, shucks, grandpa,” branding. He’s very good at that, but that dude is a stone-cold killer in terms of Geico is a cash machine and being the lender of first resort.
Kevin Rose: Smart as shit.
Tim Ferriss: When shit’s going sideways, people call Uncle Buffett and he’s like, “Sure, here’s my offer, take or leave.”
Kevin Rose: He’s so smart.
Tim Ferriss: But yes, very bright guy. What have we missed?
Kevin Rose: The only thing I would say is that—
Tim Ferriss: Teledildonics.
Kevin Rose: Yes, that. I relaunched if you want to learn about the latest tech and AI news, I relaunched Digg.
Tim Ferriss: You were showing me some numbers. That’s crazy.
Kevin Rose: It’s crazy. We went from 20,000 people a week using it to now we have close to 500,000 so it’s been growing quite a bit and it’s pulling across the entire zeitgeist of the web. So we’re like, we don’t want to start another social network. So we pulled from X and we’ve pulled from a few other feeds and we’ve been putting in like videos from YouTube and TikTok and others and it’s just been a fun little hobby. It’s a fun hobby and it’s like doing millions of pages a month and I’m proud of that. It’s awesome to see it working again. So it’s good.
Tim Ferriss: D-I-G-G.com.
Kevin Rose: D-I-G-G.com, @KevinRose on Instagram, and, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Sweet. What should I say? I guess tim.blog, you can find 1,000 plus blog plus. If you want to read about my cadaver on the table, my book sales as a result of AI, that is a crazy blog post. I don’t even know if you were aware of this.
Kevin Rose: No, I’ve not seen this.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. All format book sales—
Kevin Rose: Oh, I saw that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, isn’t it crazy?
Kevin Rose: Went down.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you look at the graph and it’s like stable annuity, stable annuity, stable annuity, very predictable. And then in 2013, because what happened in November 2022, ChatGPT 3.5, and you see a slip by negative 5 percent, then you see a slip by like, I’m making up these numbers, but they’re close, negative 28 percent, then it’s like negative 49 percent.
Kevin Rose: But it turns out you’re going to be okay.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll be fine. But no, no, but the implications are pretty interesting and now if we continue the pace in 2026 down like 67 percent.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: These are sort of compounding in the wrong direction, right?
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not quite the right terminology to use, but you get it. So stuff to think about. People can check that out. If you search AI nonfiction, Tim Ferriss, that’s a blog post that’s actually a pretty interesting read, but on the less dystopian view, ultimately the message isn’t dystopian. Tim.blog, @TimFerriss on Instagram @Tferriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, on Twitter. But honestly, I’m not so active on the socials because I’ve deleted those from my phone for a couple of years. You’re listening to the podcast so I don’t have to sell the podcast. Oh, Five Bullet Friday, my diary.
Kevin Rose: Can you add one?
Tim Ferriss: Can I add one what?
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. It’s like six bullets.
Tim Ferriss: Well, every once in a while, if I’m lazy, there are, I’d say—
Kevin Rose: Four bullets?
Tim Ferriss: No, if I’m lazy and I’m like, “I don’t want to do it.” Because I still do this thing myself.
Kevin Rose: I gotta pee. I really gotta go.
Tim Ferriss: Hold on one sec. We’re almost done. Relax, you and your prostate.
Kevin Rose: No, it’s not the prostate. It’s the fact that you gave me tequila.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I gave you tequila. You were over served? Hold on a second. Just give me two fucking seconds, you old man. You old bastard. Now I’m going to make this really long.
Kevin Rose: No, don’t. Come on.
Tim Ferriss: So yeah, Five Bullet Friday. Every once in a while—you did this to yourself—turns into Six Bullet Saturday if I’m just not feeling it. But yeah, two million subscribers, it’s free, easy to unsubscribe. Tim.blog/Friday and that’s all I got.
Kevin Rose: All right.
Tim Ferriss: You want to go pee, old man?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I will.
Tim Ferriss: All right, good to see you, bud.
Kevin Rose: Good to see you. Love you brother.
Tim Ferriss: Love you too.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday” (#875) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
