Rabbit Hole: Does Tim Ferriss Dream In Japanese? - #1105

27:07From a coffee shop to, I don't know, like a flower shop to a restaurant. A dog that you regularly see with its walker. I walk in a restaurant.

27:16Tim Ferriss:I'm like, I sat there. You know, this person was next to me. I knew exactly what we talked about. I knew exactly how that moment ended. And I could replay that every single time I took another step. Dude, one of the best stories I've heard about this is from Alain de Botton. And he's describing being in Paris. And it's a early summer day, beautiful weather outside, a little cloudy, a little bit of sun. And it's sort of late afternoon, classic European fashion. This French couple are sat around a small table, wrought iron chairs, and they've got a couple of espressos and they're just so deeply in love.

27:51Young couple, sort of maybe mid-20s, something like that. He's got this line he says i looked at them and realized that this beautiful memory would be one of the greatest sources of pain to one of these people if the relationship ever ended so it's strange that this thing that at the time is really really wonderful right actually becomes the thing that's kind of the i'm never going to paris again i'm fucking moving to rome or whatever it is because i need to totally change my context and that's also the same when it comes to phones right i I tried to stop using my phone and this still kind of works.

28:25I just changed the pocket that I put it in because I realized that for an entire decade, I'd had my phone in my right pocket and like a speed shooter withdrawing his firearm. I would just mindlessly put my hand in my pocket. The number of times that I pulled my wallet out when I changed it to look at my wallet, it's just habitual. It's just this obsessive sort of routine. You guys know about this phantom vibrations? So it turns out people have their phone on their pocket, right? and I went to a meditation retreat. And no phones, just meditation. And I felt vibrations. I didn't even have my phone in my pocket.

29:03Do you have a vibrator? Two of them. There we go. That might have been my dildo. But no, Alexi. We don't call that meditation retreat where I'm from. Fair enough. What does Bonnie Blue call that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, true. Tuesday. It was really interesting. It turns out, I Googled it. it turns out that's actually a real thing. People feel phantom vibrations from their phone. You can go check it out. And I was like, wow, your body is so tuned to this over, every time you get a notification, every time you get whatever. And most people have their phone on silent now. So the vibration's really like a thing with the haptics.

29:37You pavlovianly programmed yourself. Pretty much. To expect this thing to happen. So like this sort of device is now a potential part of your, the way that you sort of feel and understand the world. in this case, kind of like a touch type sense, but it was remarkable. And I went down the rabbit hole and I looked at it and I was like, wow, this is not just me. There's so many individuals. Like you said, if I move my phone in the other pocket, the other one will completely vibrate. My wallet's going to be vibrating. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for some people that might be a feature. Again, true. Wow.

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31:22That's timeline.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. To play devil's advocate on the whole, the ability to remember everything being a bad idea, I think a lot of these conversations, rather than a light switch, it's more dimmer and different people, different occasions, it will be good and bad for. Because a lot of people look at us being able to remember everything now, very similar to when writing came along. So before writing, we couldn't store any information down. So that completely changed us. But I always think of, so do you guys know, I've forgotten the name of Grenfell Tower in the UK.

32:02Have you heard about what Grenfell Tower is? So it's one of the biggest tragedies that's ever happened in the UK where a council estate, which will be the equivalent of your projects, was poorly designed, set on fire. Can you get a photo of it up? Loads of people - Jared Grenfell Tower. Loads of people burned alive in it. And it was a huge government inquiry, how are we going to fix it? What are we going to change about it? And what was the crazy thing about the day was that as this building was on fire, kind of like 9-11, a baby was picked up on the news, was dropped from the top floor. So a baby was picked up from the top floor and dropped and somebody caught it.

32:41And it was this kind of miracle in this horrific day that happened. And it got reported everywhere. There was about five different eyewitnesses. And about six months later, after the emotion of the event settled down, a few physicists started looking at it and going, well, hold on. That baby had hundreds of feet in the air. If we just ran the math here, it would just disintegrate on the catch. And as soon as they started to inquire at the eyewitness testimony, it was a completely hallucinated memory. So on the one hand, the ability to store memories will mean that we can't let go of certain things, but it may also mean that we let go of complete fictions that we're telling ourselves that never happened.

33:22Or that we would invent them as well, right? Because if you're Tim, your recollection of the flames is in 4K, but the mirage of a baby being thrown out. You know, the terminal velocity of a cat is non-fatal. What do you mean? I can't say it any other way. There's only one. If I drop a cat from any distance, the speed that it reaches when it hits the ground, on average, is non-fatal.

33:53Tim Ferriss:So it doesn't die. I'm going to just raise an eyebrow. Ask ChatGPT, a cat's terminal velocity depends on its size, body position. Yeah, whatever. Estimated thermal velocity is about 60 miles an hour. Some studies and veterinary analysis place it between... Okay, so see, look, see, depends on posture. So if you've got a cat... Around five to seven stories. Yeah, okay. I mean, that's higher up than I would expect. Some cats survive because they reach thermal velocity, stop accelerating, relax, and then orient themselves for impact. Look, it's trying to caveat, like, basically, am I okay to throw a cat out of a window?

34:25That's what ChatGPT thinks I'm doing.

34:27Tim Ferriss:Now, this is one of those cases when somebody's like, you know when people die they release dmt from their brains and i'm like how would you know that though like who which families consented to have some scientists be like i know this is a hard moment but let me like tap your grandma's brain and this is like your terminal velocity of a cat no but i'm saying injuries often increase up to around five to seven stories like i just want to seven stories where in like sierra leone they're like okay let's take these 40 cats and drop them Just put it into one of those t-shirts. Five, 10, 15 stories. T-shirt firers that they set.

35:00Yeah, yeah. T-shirt cannon that they've got in. What's the highest the cat's found?

35:04Tim Ferriss:Speaking of hallucinating, I just want to fact check myself. Daniel Temmet. T-A-M-M-E-T. There you go. Powerlessly close. All right. What'd you bring to the table? Hallucinating is a really fascinating subject. So people talk about AI hallucinations. Now we're in my zone. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Hold on. This is, we're still going. The highest reliably documented fall survived by a cat is generally believed to be 32 stories. Sabrina in New York City, 1987. She fell from the 32nd floor of a skyscraper, survived with a chipped tooth, collapsed lung, and minor chest injuries. After treatment, she reportedly recovered fully.

35:33Dude, telling you, terminal velocity of a cat, non-fatal. They're able to slow themselves down, right? Effectively. Like a parachute-ish. I mean, they're not flying squirrels. Wow. This is remarkable. What did I get you with the other day? It was when we were talking about the fact that if a man doesn't have a girlfriend, the way that he behaves between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. at night can only be destructive. And I told a friend about this. Unless there's the internet. Well, even with the internet, it's still destructive, right? Because you're just embedding bad habits and doom scrolling and it's all bullshit.

36:09Self-destructive, I suppose. However, I asked a friend about this and he said, yeah, so my buddy was single and I'm in a relationship. and apparently at like 8.30 p.m. at night, he would just receive photos of his friend headstanding, just like selfies of him doing headstands.

36:27Tim Ferriss:What could go wrong? All right, Nirav, what have you brought? Come on, give me some pages. I think the hallucination thing is really fascinating. People have this debate on AI hallucinations and there's a bunch of these topics that are written in. Andrei Kirpoff, he's written a bunch of this stuff. And it turns out, you know, humans hallucinate as well. Almost all the features of AI today that exist um they exist in humans in some way shape or form and people are often um really baffled by it right they hate the hallucinations i think i think of them as more of like just a replication of the human mind and how it works and turns out people hallucinate memories all the time people manipulate memories in fact if you look at things in the past you're effectively removing you you remember often fond memories or really painful stuff the middle kind of fades away oftentimes i'm curious to get your thoughts on this tim about like i think about this a lot because for our product we have to like make sure these things are low and context is there do you want to explain what you do we're building kind of um you know today the iphone is kind of a when you look at it when you go for a glance people always tap on apps and you have to go and pull whatever you need to know we're kind of building a layer on on devices that is kind of glanceable information directly on your home screen that's entirely processed by ai what you might want to know right now or things might be important to you and the idea of intelligence today as it exists it's much more i'm gonna go ask it a question create this giant prompt do all this stuff and you know basically you have to do the heavy lifting where we try to do the heavy lifting for you by making that presentation layer directly on your home screen that sort of understands what's happening already in the background and surfaces it when you need to know it so it's kind of an agentic home screen for your iphone turns out the iphone home screen hasn't changed in 20 years you're roughly using the same device the same thing widgets i guess yeah and they're underutilized i think we use them in a creative way yep and so and so um like you know we're not gonna go we're like two people three people so we can't really build a device we can't really invest hardcore so we have to operate in the application layer and utilize all the things that are affordances that the os exposes to us as developers so um creatively we we sort of um build this experience and we're a few weeks old pretty awesome but it's been so much fun to be able to think about the way that ambient ai will really work.

39:01Imagine you go into a room. There's a screen. It has presence detection, knows who you are, what you might want to see or know or do if you wake up in the morning. These are the things that will kind of light up over time. And so this stuff might be in your life persistently, if you want to, with your permission. Have you thought about what to call it? It feels like sort of context-dependent. Ambient AI is good. Ambient AI is lovely. Good for you. Geordi as well, AI. Ambient AI. AI. But I think, I don't know if the terminology is there. It turns out all the terminology that exists in the past, the hashtags of Twitter and whatnot are invented by their users.

39:41And people are like, oh, we should call it that. Bottom up, not top down. Yeah, exactly. We're still waiting for a fucking name for this series on the podcast. Do you think the future user interfaces are the glasses that everybody predicts? Because I was thinking the other day as somebody who has zero experience in designing hardware or products, that the, I think the future is probably the AirPod case where you put the AirPods in. And I heard, I saw a tweet the other day that Apple have just patented cameras at the edge of the AirPods. So it could feasibly pick up the visual information here.

40:11And then with this little box that you have, it could be, you could be speaking to this device. You could even have like a little - That would be your signal receiver, right? Yeah, so we're not always on these screens. We just have the little AirPod case, ears in, and then the box here. One of the problems you have with the hardware is that you need some processing power that's outside of it. That was the hardcore... I mean, you had an Apple Vision Pro before you sent it back. Yes. And you need, if you're going to have something on your face or something that's wearable, you need to think about ergonomics and weight.

40:40And that means you need to send the processing off to a different location. I don't know. I mean, you're right that VR is really not delivered. I think there's always, it's good to the next thing. We're going to wait for the more, it'll be comfortable, the slimline down or whatever. It'll get there. You think? Yeah.

40:58Tim Ferriss:How long? Until what? What would be a good, like, not quite Turing test, it's not the right example. Okay, so like, the sort of level of penetration that we've seen with... Now we're talking. With AI, or with, like, pick any sort of normal device. But AI would be good. That's the name of your podcast. Yeah, depth of penetration. New series. Very shallow. Very shallow. Why, though? Like that. I don't know, like half a billion or a billion users of either one product or a category of products that has something to do with... That type of mass adoption is a high bar, but I would say getting to the point where people actually enjoy, let's just call it thousands of people spending hours a day using some type of lightweight VR AI, strongly AI native system, three years.

41:56Maybe less. I've seen some shit that's made by Meta that blew my fucking mind. It's their next after the next set of glasses. And that was like absolutely wild to be able to see that. It's still, they're still clunky and dorky, right? But they'll, over the time that they're building this out to get it down to the form factor that you need. But I mean, these things, wherever, those things are like, they're really good. The best thing about those, not an ad, best thing about those is the fact that you can take a photo or a video without using your phone. You know, there's that famous video, was it?

42:30The Chandelier on New Year's Eve, maybe 2023. And I swear it's just this street of people and all you can see, the entire thing is just phone screens from behind, right, looking at the thing you're supposed to be looking at. So dystopian. And it is just phone screens. Ridiculous. Well, you heard about me at the Louvre if I told you this story. So I had these on at the Louvre in Paris, being a sophisticated individual that I am. So I had these on and everybody was just looking at people's feet under the bathroom stalls. George collects feet. So that's... You can buy them. It's no longer a permit.

43:09You can't really have eye contact with people in the Western culture because it's like a whatever. So people are always looking down on their feet. And that's where George comes in. Here it is. So I had this experience at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. So everybody was there with their phones taking a photo, but I had these glasses on. But the problem is because the Mona Lisa is so small and I'm so far back. My girlfriend now has a photo of me. So there's loads of people taking a photo of the Mona Lisa. And then there's me with my glasses in the air. I'll get the photo out of here. It's horrific.

43:37It's horrific. It is nice, though, to be able to record something without taking yourself out of the moment. And I think just that. Yes. You know, oh, I don't like the battery life or this thing. Or they're still a little bit clunky. Or I don't usually wear glasses or whatever. Like, I get it. I get it. I get it. but the opportunity to be able to just take a photo or a video without having to feel like, oh, I'm back on this screen that I hate. I'm back in this digital environment that kind of just compresses my memory down into one time of me being on this screen. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element.

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45:01Tim Ferriss:Do you think you would feel better or worse after six months of not being able to take photos or video of anything? Other than like, okay, you need to take a photo of a business card or a scan for like business purpose is fine for me taking photos doesn't get in the way of my life anywhere near as much as just the ambient pinging and navigating of the digital device itself yeah the photos i'm in and out i have seen some marathon photo sessions being taken uh at sunset i went to um uh somewhere on long island i can't quite remember where uh there was a beautiful sunset happening over a lake and 15 16 17 year old skull group it was like it was a endurance sport of photo taking okay that's something else like that's kind of almost pathological but for me it's i don't know what about you do you think it would make a marked difference to your life if you couldn't take photos or videos for six months i think it's useful thought exercise.

46:08Tim Ferriss:I would suspect it'd be better. I mean, I have not had any real... Says the man with a photographic memory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can train people to have better visual memory. Okay. Can we do it? What was that? Can you show me? Oh, it's not like a you know. Now you know Kung Fu. It's not like an Oz Perlman like 60 second bang, you know. It's not one of those. But what's the Pareto basics to get better at a visual memory? Start producing. So I would have people get a book like Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, which is a bit of a misnomer in the way that it lateralizes things hemispherically.

46:44Tim Ferriss:But if you practice, for instance, this is one tool in the toolkit, practice drawing. And for instance, if I had a flower and a vase on this table, which would be not the most compelling way to get someone to draw, but we're all practicing drawing. What you would notice with most people is that they look at the flower, they go down to draw it, and they start drawing their mental concept of a flower. They're not actually referring to the thing in front of them. And then there are different tricks you could use. for instance, if even right now, as we sit in Austin, Texas, bright outside could have you look at a tree or a bush around here, sit down, I'd be like, okay, draw that.

47:29Tim Ferriss:But I want you to only start with the black parts. And you'd be like, but it's a bright day. It's a green thing. I'm like, look again. And you'd be like, oh shit, there are actually black parts. Okay. We'll start with that. And as you start to do that, or depending on where you are, it's like when most people walk through say, I mean, in Austin, it's easy because it's like cedar tree, juniper ash, oak, like that's it. I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but there's not as much tree diversity as in other places. But if all you see is quote unquote trees, it's like, okay, well, let me just teach you.

48:05Tim Ferriss:It's also subject dependent, right? Like the six most common trees in upstate New York, Austin, wherever it might be. And all of a sudden, instead of just seeing trees, you start to differentiate. So all of those, it's partially visual acuity dependent, it's partially attentionally dependent, so that you're referencing something as opposed to referring to your concept of tree, table, person, whatever it might be. And then there's kind of a label dependency. How fine-tuned or fine-sliced is your ability within a given domain? right so if you were doing like live gesture drawing which i think is a great way to practice drawing and there are a number of places around austin and a lot of places where you can do live gesture drawing you'd have you know a model in front of the room it's not always going to be a hot naked chick i hate to break it to you guys sometimes it's going to be like obese naked dude but that's fine and they would start with say five minute poses or they might start with like one minute poses typically that start with like very short poses so you can't over analyze or intellectualize what you are doing you have to keep your hand moving and then they would go to longer and longer held poses and uh you'd be shocked how much your visual memory improves if you do that and you are not constantly self-interrupting so for me i mean i don't have any social media on this phone i haven't for a couple of years i do not think i've sacrificed one iota of quote-unquote being informed at all um i don't have vibrate on i do not have ring on which can produce some funny like death spirals of people trying to like call one another but neither person has the phone ringing but i also think you know there's there's something to suggest that if people have fewer mirrors in their homes they are generally self-report as being happier you know this is a mirror right this is the black mirror so i just i feel like the less you look at this thing haven't run a study on this but i would bet a healthy chunk of change I just think the less you interact with this, the better, especially given how prevalent fake feeds are.

50:14Tim Ferriss:It's just like the machine is an illusion, most of it. Did you guys see that quote where, I think this philosopher, I forgot the name, but it was like, man was never meant to have a mirror. Self-reflection like that is detrimental in some ways. We wouldn't have known what we looked like until, Jared, can you find out when mirrors were invented? You would know with water. Yeah, you would go to the pond, for example, and look at your face. Their nature... Or narcissists. This is why if you look at animals, for a variety of reasons, obviously, with intelligence or whatever, but they're often very baffled by their presence in the mirror.

50:53And now we're looking at ourselves more often than ever before. The selfie cameras effectively changed the dynamics of everything. During COVID, there was something called Zoom Face. there was a marked increase in people getting cosmetic surgery because they were seeing themselves more because they were spending so many hours now there's there's ai filters on google meet and zoom skin smoothing for my interview exactly you would add makeup or whatever going back to your point about the photographic memory thing did you guys ever play that which i don't have to be clear no i know i know people who can do this and then

51:28Tim Ferriss:10 minutes later read it back to you right from memory that is photographic memory i don't have that. You know that game you used to play as a kid when somebody would draw on your back and you'd have to figure out what they drew? Yeah, yeah. It was actually a really interesting skill building game because then you'd have to effectively imagine different senses coming together. So you feel what somebody's drawing whether it's a flower or a mountain or a sun or whatever. Always a penis. And if you're... Exactly. Always a penis. Also a good podcast name. Always a penis.

52:01That game was remarkable.

52:02Tim Ferriss:All roads lead to penis, maybe? Pretty much. I know you like the Roman Empire. Downfall of penis. I was just double-checking then about the history of the mirror. Can I say how much I live how you say double? I can't even fucking say it. Double. God, it adds at least seven IQ points. I'm from Rochdale originally, Tim. And whenever you're in the UK, it's a big tourist scene. You'd love it. I'll take you there. You'd love it. You'd love it. What is that? The mirror. So the mirror, the creation of the mirror, but as part of AI coming bigger and bigger, I've been going down like old revolutions of the industrial revolution and the Guttenberg printing press revolution.

52:41So Guttenberg, when he was creating the printing press, he was originally trying to create, I think, a mirror machine and accidentally or ended up morphing into what became the printing press. Wait, what the hell is a mirror machine that makes mirrors? Yeah. So here you go. So around - I don't know how you get from that to the printing.

52:59Tim Ferriss:1438 to 14 - You grind sand to make mirrors. 39. Guttenberg was in Strasbourg running a partnership to mass produce pilgrim mirrors, small polished metal badges that pilgrims pinned to their hats to catch holy rays, radiating from relics, then carried home to benefit relatives. That's cool. I like that idea. It's like a capacitor for religious goodwill. So his capital was running out to appease investors. Guttenberg said he would share a secret with them, art and adventure, research that was the basis for his yet-to-be built printing press. That's cool. Wow. Nice. All right, Tim, you must have some heaters.

53:34What have you brought from home? Show me something.

53:36Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I've got something. This is an article. I've got a bunch of stuff, but I'm going to take kind of a slight left turn. It's related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about, but this caught my attention. It's an article called Riding the Leopard by Packy McCormick. and it was it was it was sent to me i had never read anything of his and this was sent to me a few days ago by uh someone adjacent to one of the top ai technologists out there which is part of what makes it interesting so i'll just i'll read a couple of sections here and then i want to get your sense and thoughts on things so what do we get to talk to a room of technology people this is a transcribed talk that pack a year sierra just raised at 15 billion anthropic crossed a 44 billion run rate and launched a new company with some huge funds that have 1.5 billion to deploy blah blah blah open ai did the same thing but with 4 billion blah blah blah blah this billion that billion all of which raises an important question who gives a shit i mean that why do we care and then it goes down and he says last night a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over Substack DM.

54:49Tim Ferriss:She said she'd been diagnosed with stage four cancer. She's now on remission. She'd been confronted with the question we've all been facing, what happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity or in her case, the need to be productive. To answer it, this is the interesting part, right? She analyzed more than 200 sci-fi books across all of these books. By far the most common thing left to solve for post-scarcity is meaning. 59 % of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next at 17%. 15%. And then it goes on and, you know, their questions, if new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy?

55:27Tim Ferriss:Right? If we have means our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis? And then it quotes Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, who wrote, the truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. And ultimately in the piece, he ends up talking about, he really goes out there. Well, I would bet that dear Paki has done a fair amount of drugs, but, and that's meant as a compliment, Paki, if you hear this, but we get into non-duality. We get into differentiation as moral obligation, but I want to explain the, the origin of the name of the piece, riding the leopard, and it's from Joseph Campbell.

56:13Tim Ferriss:Effectively, he's talking about the hero's journey, and I'll read two parts and then I'll stop. But the goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of yourself being Buddha consciousness or the Christ. That's the journey. It's all about finding that still point in your mind where commitment drops away. The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen but experienced unity and identity in us all. All right. Then this is the sort of wellspring of the name of the piece.

56:44Tim Ferriss:You must return with the bliss and integrate it. The return is seeing the radiance everywhere. All right. The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard without being torn to pieces. And it goes on. It's worth reading. it does get a little squirrely uh later on but what i'm curious about is how you guys think about if you do solving for meaning because i tend to skew i wouldn't say dystopian but hyper vigilant and have a lot of concern for the next five ten years uh not just with ai but with the reaction to ai right so so it's one thing if if ai quote-unquote takes jobs but if everyone fears it is going to take jobs there's a there are consequences of that in of itself right but i'm wondering how you guys think about or solve for meaning and i'll just add one more thing which is um actually no i'll save it i'll park that for for maybe injecting a little later how do you guys think about it you know one thing that comes to mind this is the weirdest thing by the way which is um i like aviation and there's this is all going to connect which is you know um turns out airplanes crash only because there's multiple systems that go wrong whatever and and um the reason why that came to mind tim was that um a captain has a decision to make when something bad happens how much do you communicate what happened to the passengers like what do you say do you do you like hey you know we've lost hydraulics we've lost stuff you know multiple systems are wrong whatever completely transparent you freak people out um do you not share enough information people are like oh what's going on why is it turbulent how does that marry to ai the people who are building these systems how much do they communicate what they think are things that might change about the future things that might have a turbulent nature to them.

58:48And that is a delicate art, which is, you know, you see Dario going on pods and saying stuff like, software engineering is solved, you know, software will be free. Once that happens, you know, you get these ripple effects, whatnot, all this stuff happens. And there's other people who are, like, much more optimistic about the world, which is like, hey, you know what? Every revolution has created jobs. Certainly it has eliminated them, but we've progressed. And so it's really fascinating. I think this is an interesting environment where people are like, how much do you, even as a lot of researchers in San Francisco, for example, really believe that we've solved almost every problem, roughly, that the dominoes will fall very quickly from here on out.

59:34If you have AI self-correcting, self-researching, you get to AGI, what happens?

59:43Tim Ferriss:How do you solve personally? How do you think about meaning? If you do, this is not like a prejudgment either. I'm like, what? You don't think about meaning? You crass capitalists. I tend not to, I'm not a planner. Too much, you know, I think planning is good in some sense, but also kind of detrimental. It occupies bandwidth that would otherwise be more useful for now. I think people tend to live in the future a little bit more than they tend to, they should. Are you religious? What was that? Are any of you religious? No? No. I'd say I'm spiritual, but not necessarily organized religion or whatnot.

1:00:20Welcome to Austin. What was that? Welcome to Austin. We all do a bit of Scientology every now and again, right? Do a bit of Scientology. You make it sound like weed. Yeah, come on. Come on. Come on. We do a bit of Scientology. Did you guys see what Brian Johnson posted yesterday? It was like prayer. He's talking about prayer. He's like, I've been trying to pray more, and I don't know what prayer means. Or I don't know what prayer is. If Brian goes full circle and ends up being a Mormon again, that is going to be... There was a quote tweet exactly like this. He's like, turns out the answer to everything is just Jesus Christ.

1:00:50Honestly, dude. Or longevity or whatever.

1:00:52Tim Ferriss:There was a funny comment. I mean, I think that's an interesting one coming from Brian. I would actually love to talk to him about that more than a lot of the biohacking, given his history. Brian's a sweetie. I mean, there was a... I like Brian. There was a comment that they said, wait, let me get this straight. Brian left Mormonism. Now he's telling us we can't drink alcohol.

1:01:15Tim Ferriss:i thought that was pretty good um but okay so what is what is this and again i don't want to belabor this but i actually really want to know from you guys yeah how you think if you think about it i guess there's two there's a few different parts as i'm saying i know a lot of uber successful people who can logic and debate their way through the labyrinth of intellectuals around them who have lots of money who are ready to fucking jump off a cliff like that stuff doesn't and do you think that that would be stopped if they had more meaning you think the reason that they would jump off a cliff is because of their lack of meaning i think that that is one large contributor and there's a difference like there yes there's a loneliness epidemic but solving for loneliness doesn't solve for meaning so totally this is there's quite a lot of strands I'm going to like unpack.

1:02:08Chess is an interesting one, right? The AI can beat any human being at chess, but human beings still play chess. Magnus Carlsen seems to have a very enjoyable time playing chess. And, go on. Well, there's an interesting anecdote there that we, this idea that, oh, it's going to take away everything. It's therefore humans won't have any purpose. Yeah, it's seemingly better than everybody at chess. Yet chess is still popular and people are still doing it. The big thing for me, I mean.

1:02:37Tim Ferriss:And the question I'm asking is not whether AI will remove meaning. It's more like, forget it, but let's, we could strip AI out of it completely. I'm just curious, like, how you guys think about it, if you do. So I think we discussed it when I've been in this chair before, but the idea of the precautionary principle. So the precautionary principle is human beings have a very, very, very, very good time at forecasting problems, but we have a very, very difficult time of forecasting the solutions that will come because by definition, if we had the solution, therefore there'd be no problem. But you have all these billions of human beings that end up working on this problem.

1:03:11My inevitable thing is, and this is where I feel it's a bit of a strawman argument, if this AI is so intelligent that it's replaced us all, and it's this super God, you'll probably figure out how to get us meaning. You know what I mean? George feels that the argument is a little bit logically - George believes that benevolence comes along with processing power.

1:03:29Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I wouldn't make that last statement myself. I know some people like the sort of extremes of techno-optimism would say that. But the point that Paki makes in his piece too, he's like, most of the arguments tend to at some point land on like, we're going to cure cancer. and it's like well at this point like he's like there are 8.3 roughly billion people on the planet who are not going to die of cancer at least not in the near term and a lot of them are miserable so it's like it doesn't it might solve for certain biotech and health tech medical problems could it let us understand the brain and then figure out why these people are miserable this is what i mean around i'm not even suggesting this is going to be the case there's just things that we can't even forecast.

1:04:11I mean, I don't have to happen. You've done a wonderful Bernie Sanders job of two or three times now not answering the question of how to personally think about meaning. I've said Scientology, but you didn't want to listen. That's not me. That's Tim. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One Scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink.

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1:05:22Or heading to drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. How do you guys, do you guys think this is an active process in people's minds? Meaning creation? Yeah. Yeah. Like, do people really, like, think about it in that realm? Or is it just a byproduct of existence in some sense?

1:05:41Tim Ferriss:I think we're a natural byproduct of existence. Look, I would just say, maybe you see this, maybe you don't. I mean, you guys all interact on the interwebs. The degree of apathy and nihilism and foreboding that I think is adjacent or overlapping with a creeping dread of meaninglessness in my audience over the last five years is fucking terrifying. And do you think that AI is contributing to that? I think that technology, and look, I'm not saying technology is a bad thing. Like ever since we were, our ancestors used some stick to fish out, you know, a termite mound. It's like, I bet on technology.

1:06:22Tim Ferriss:It's, you know, I've lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years, still very actively involved with different types of technology. But I do think that there is the equivalent of digital poison. And a lot of us are drip feeding it every day. So it's not necessarily AI. I think AI, like money, power, alcohol, psychedelics, it's an amplifier. It's an accelerant. accelerant? Well, certainly most people's relationship to technology now is negative. I don't know many people, perhaps except you, who have a above 80 % positive interaction with technology. I was on the treadmill in the gym the other day, and I was looking at doing a little bit of boom scrolling on my phone.

1:07:06And I had a screen in front of me here. And then I had five screens here, and then another five screens there. And then there's a video wall that's got an advert here. I'm like, dude, I'm supposed to be in the gym. And I'm trying to listen to a podcast. I'm trying to listen to a funny podcast. It's just a safe space hang. I'm not supposed to be thinking and I'm supposed to be tuned into this. And every single different screen had subtitles on. Some of them had adverts on. This one's my 600 pound life. That one's the news from New York City. And I'm like, dude, I have to actively avoid screens.

1:07:40Now, even if I choose to go screen free. So yeah, I think most people's relationship to technology is proto-negative. So when they think about if this gets more, that is more of the negative, and it's already removed it from me a bit. I had a really interesting conversation with Nick Bostrom. So he did his second book, which is kind of like a spiritual sequel to superintelligence, What If Things Go Wrong? And then the next one was What If Things Go Right? What are the problems of a solved world? world. And he had this really interesting example where he said, basically everything that we value in other humans can be refined down to the fact that you need to negotiate with a world that is scarce.

1:08:22Why do I like motivation in someone else? Why do I like discipline? Why do I like the ability to tell the truth? Why do I like prudence? Why do I like good judgment? Because you need those things to be able to navigate through a world which is going to apply pressure to you. And if you remove that, so many of the traits that we look for in other people, they may not be, that creates a strange weightlessness with all of the different values that we've tended to prefer for all of human history because we've been negotiating with a world that's pushed up against us. And if we move that out of the way, then what does that mean?

1:08:54So yeah, I think, dude, I think the meaninglessness thing is great. George is infuriatingly optimistic, which means that these conversations with him are always if ai is that smart why won't it be benevolent enough to fix our problems that's kind of i guess you're i'm not saying if if there had never been if the

1:09:11Tim Ferriss:transformer had never made the leap to the i guess gpt3 or 4 the sort of social media and digital environment in and of itself just with more of a linear growth rate as opposed to more exponential still would be a problem right it's just over so we like the ai conversation is just it sucks up all the fucking oxygen in the room do you know what i mean so it's like we can strip that out uh as a thought exercise right i mean i'm curious how you would answer it if if and i mean look this is something i've been thinking about a lot because my audience but also for me for like my family and uh i've thought a lot about these debates that jordan peterson and sam harris have had where first one was a fucking car crash where well yeah i mean look they've they've had car crashes but one of the takeaways for me was like can any meaningful critical mass of humans from like first principles develop a moral and value code for themselves that is secular, that is in any way gratifying, grounding, supportive in times of great duress.

1:10:27Tim Ferriss:I feel like Sam would be more on that side of things. And then Jordan's like, it's not going to happen. That is why people need religion, because you have this out-of-the-box certainty. And in a world of seemingly increasing incomprehensibility, where there is this inability to separate fact from fiction. People need some type of foothold of certainty. And so, I mean, I think religion, I mean, I don't have to think it, it's already happening, but it's like huge resurgence in religion. With Latin mass as well, which is Latin mass is one of the, if not the most ascendant attended religious services.

1:11:11And it's a service that's entirely done in a language that nobody in the audience speaks and i wonder whether what what that's doing is it's almost bypassing people's ability to scrutinize it well that's obviously not true but you know i can realize maybe they don't want to scrutinize it that's the point that's what i think that what they're doing is they're purposefully going oh maybe it's just that it feels more archaic it's more steeped in history etc etc maybe the music's better i don't know um but yeah i i i definitely get the sense that people are going to scrabble around to try and reverse from first principles?

1:11:43How do I make myself feel good? But there is an interesting question, which is if what we're bothered about is human flourishing, humans feeling good, why not have a comforting delusion? Let's say that it's delusion. I'm not saying that it is, but why not have a comforting delusion? Like if the outcomes of religious people are more happiness, more meaning, they live longer, they've got better community, they've got better health, they've got da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

1:12:07Tim Ferriss:Suddenly seems very rational instead of irrational. So this is what I learned from Alex O 'Connor. And it is Richard Dawkins speaking to Ayaan Hirsi Ali on stage. And Ayaan was supposed to be the fifth horseman of the atheist apocalypse, but she couldn't make the meeting that day. And then Ayaan is on stage talking to Richard and the audience is sort of half her fans and half Richard's. and she said i wanted to take my own life not long ago i was really low and religion found me jesus found me christianity found me god found me and after the lowest moment that i had um i'm really really happy to say that my mental health's in a better place and i'm religious and you know you get the sort of smattering of kind of like empathetic applause around the room and alex told me that Richard's almost immediate response was, yes, but do you really think that Jesus moved the stone out of the way on the third day of Aramea?

1:13:05And what you see is a guy who is playing a game of optimizing for rationality whilst ignoring effectiveness. And you go, how can you say that it's anything but a positive when this person's life essentially was saved by this thing? And it makes me, and this is one of the reasons I think that atheism is not cool at the moment, that it feels in a world that's increasingly bereft of meaning, it feels like really sterile and quite judgmental and quite harsh. And it makes me, when I think about it, I'm like, it just doesn't seem very nice to me. And I'm aware, removing comforting delusions, why should you allow someone to indulge in their silly fantasy?

1:13:53I'm like, bro, I think we're getting toward the stage where comforting delusions are allowed, because if not, so maybe it is Mormonism all along. Do you guys, intellectuals oftentimes get in this territory where they try to use proof by counterexample? So they'll try to find one counterexample in something that you're saying and then effectively void the whole thing. It's a very common thing because this is what you do in a math setting or anything. and they they tend to do that in kind of a religious setting as well and it's like that's not applicable here just because x y x is not true doesn't mean invalidates the rest of it um and this is why people tend to like you know i think richard dawkins is like religion is a pick and choose kind of buffet you know you can go pick and believe in something he also did say that ai is uh sentient with claud right how old's richard though now 70s 70s i think as soon as anybody gets over 65 you've got to give them a little bit of leeway public breathing breathing room yeah why have you been around anybody over 65 richard dawkins yeah yeah i was on stage with me he said that he would consider trying psychedelics i wish to get him to admit to that that was fun but yeah what do you guys think of that the richard dawkins play i mean if anybody would go around and figure out if there is sentience associated with ai maybe richard dawkins might be an okay person to go and figure that out i don't know i don't know how much you guys but i'm curious to get your thoughts on what he discovered or how he discovered it

1:15:27Tim Ferriss:oh it's way above my pay grade i have no idea i would need people to define sentience and also like there whenever we get into sentience consciousness i'm like let's just let's make before we argue about what god does or doesn't like let's define god similarly right i would just want to make sure i understand those terms because once you get into like integrated information theory and all this stuff it's very easy to like get into these weeds and then you're like 30 pages into reading this and i don't think anyone quite defined what the fuck they mean so i don't know i don't actually know the context yeah but i certainly have no strong position same thing's kind of true with meaning though you know i've read baumeister's paper on meaning meaning happiness that kind of legendary one from 2010 i think it is and uh hey they're good hey the i mean they're very tasty i don't know what's in them uh 15 milligrams of caffeine and and and some tasty shit.

1:16:18Sorry if I'm completely off here. What? But part of me thinks that, well, again, I hate to sound like I'm doing an affiliate link for the beginning of infinity, which I am. I'll post it in the link. But problems are infinite. So even now is a great example. So AI, which is first off, we're having this hypothetical conversation about this hypothetical thing, which I think could happen, but it's completely hypothetical. But assuming that hypothetical is true, we first have the problem of, well, if this AI is so smart, why can't it fix this? Because those two things seem paradoxical. We need to want to fix it.

1:16:50Yeah, which again, which is a different question. But if it is so smart, why can't it fix it is the first point. The second point is, even now, are we not having quite a meaningful conversation about this problem? Is this not an example where this hypothetical AI solved everything, yet it hasn't solved meaning? And we're now constantly talking about how we're going to get more meaning for human beings? I don't think that the problem is necessarily that meaning would be impossible to access. but if you make meaning harder to access, you end up with some pretty gnarly outcomes in the same way as it's not impossible to eat healthily, but it is harder to not be fat in a calorie-dense, high-processed food environment.

1:17:27And if you make it a meaning oasis, it's sparser to get to meaning, then it makes life harder for everybody to find that. Can I ask a dumb question? Yeah, is it how to open the toothpaste?

1:17:41Tim Ferriss:i was i was watching you send him here back to the back to the factory let's talk to this co-pack oh my god amazing i want i have another dumb question which is how do most people or normal people think about meaning like well how do they define it what is the underlying element i think i mean the way they're like i don't know if i'm normal i'm probably pretty abnormal but I mean, I do think that like meaning may be the wrong term to use because you can apply it to defining a term. You'd apply it to was this conversation meaningless or meaningful? Well, yeah, we talked about a bunch of stuff that we is mutually intelligible.

1:18:21Tim Ferriss:So I guess sure, by definition, it's meaningful. But I think we could say purpose, like people feeling they have a purpose, right? There is a point to what they're doing or their life in general, right? That's sort of how I would think. I just, the, I mean, that's, that's, if, if I had to put in a placeholder, that's what I would sort of. Western society always attributes, you know, when you go to a party, what do you do, Tim? What do you do? Like, you know, this is a canonical question that people ask. It's like. Oh, what do I do? What do you do? What do you do at a party? What do you do? Yeah, you know.

1:19:02The cocktail party question. The cocktail party question. I tend to try to not ask this question anymore, but I used to. And it's always funny.

1:19:10Tim Ferriss:Trade heroin on the dark web is usually the answer. There you go. I mean, that would be a good, that would be an amazing great comment. They're like, oh, okay. It's better than saying podcasting. But like, that is so - It's pretty similar, actually. It's a job. The attribute of Western society, to a certain extent, with all the focus on productivity and looking at your calendar and managing your time and sort of going from meeting to meeting to meeting and then having a full schedule and organizing a meetup one month later with your friends and putting it on the calendar. It's so fascinating because effectively a lot of people treat it as allocating time.

1:19:49And if they allocate time, that's what kind of people are trying to do. And oftentimes, going back to this, the reason why I ask what you do is a lot of the meaning elements for individuals is tied to their craft, their job, their sort of livelihood. Is it possible to have meaning without resistance? Because I was thinking about the chess example that you were talking about, but part of the reason that the game of chess is meaningful is that you're meeting resistance, even if the resistance is of another player and not the best player in the world that would be a computer but part of that requires some sort of friction in the system because there's very few things that i can think of that are meaningful that are also totally frictionless or just there is no challenge in it going back to this like think about relationships we made access to relationships kind of less friction than ever you get a catalog of individuals browse through find the next person onto the next wow i mean you've created it sort of an abundant layer on what was previously scarce yeah and then you have grinder which is post abundance post abundance yeah there you go have you guys heard about sniffies no no what it's like a new gay sex anonymous sex okay what how are they innovating on grinder what went wrong well this is what i know because i have some friends what were they serving what were they serving that the grinder app wasn't how do spell that by the way

1:21:23I've got to end this podcast both phones ping hold on Match Group just put in$100 million into the app and it's growing like crazy people don't talk about I used to have this thing that one of the reasons why it was never discussed in parliament or never discussed in congress was who owns Pornhub, what's the name of the company is it MindGeek MindGeek had whilst the Congress was talking about the monopoly that Google had, that Meta had, MindGeek had the most absurd monopoly of the pornography industry, which you'd argue there's a free market solution that OnlyFans came along and good old OnlyFans fixing the market.

1:22:03Democratizing porn. Another example is the dating apps. If you look at who owns all the dating apps, I'm pretty sure they own Match, Tinder, Hinge. I don't know if they know Bumble. Pretty much everything. No, no, Bumble's public. Okay, so Bumble's separate. Raya maybe. Raya's separate too. Match Group owns everything except for Raya and Bumble, roughly. But it's crazy that they're allowed such a monopoly on what is now modern dating and nobody discusses it because it's sort of icky to discuss. You see, it's hard to define. The market's so difficult to define in some sense.

1:22:32Tim Ferriss:Those apps are also really struggling. There's been a massive downturn on all those apps. You see what Whitney Wolf-Hurd's been saying recently that Bumble is going to have my AI avatar date your AI avatar and then it'll feed that back up. Did you see there was an interview you just did like last week or whatever. And she's like, this is the end of the swipe era. And Bumble's introducing this sort of AI matchmaker or whatever. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co last night. But they're non-alcoholic.

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1:24:00But going back to your point, Chris, which was the idea, the capitalism removes friction, right? Like the idea is that you have this invisible layer in society sort of that is that is fixing supply and demand such that there's this equilibrium at all times and turns out that reduces friction because accessibility i mean doordash you can like i can get an amazon delivery in 15 30 minutes you got a fancy dress outfit in less than an hour yesterday yeah because that's what i do on a sunday needed a costume needed a costume yeah right some of these new apps i mean it was remarkable i need a furry with a cape and that went straight on to whistler or whatever it's yeah i was in i was in um i was in like a carmel and i didn't have a bathing suit because people were going in the pool or whatever it was like oh i can just door dash it in 30 minutes and somebody will bring me a bathing suit because i didn't have and that's that's remarkable and i think going back to this it's like yeah obviously I think it reduces value of things when the friction goes down.

1:25:05I do think a great example is Winston Churchill. I posted this the other day. Churchill's biography is so good. You go, Jesus Christ, did this man - Which one? The big, I think it's Andrew Roberts, Churchill biography. First off, Jared, could you pull it up? How many times Winston Churchill nearly died? He outbeats a cat. Like the number of, I think he almost drowns. He gets run over. What's the terminal velocity of Winston Churchill? He gets ran over. but Churchill used to, and famously a sufferer of depression, as he called it, black dog. He used to plant, sorry, he used to lay 200 bricks per day for a significant period of his life just to keep himself busy.

1:25:43Tim Ferriss:What was he building with those 200 bricks? Apparently, he wasn't actually that good to the stories that the asphaltic layers came in afterwards, but he would always do, yeah, you can have a look. So here we go. Battlefield dangers in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa. Escaped from, yeah, he escaped from the Boer prisoner of war camp. Frontline combat in World War I. Got hit by a car. Believed he was preserved for a purpose. Yeah. Felt he was walking with destiny. Well, Winston Churchill famously said when he was, I believe, a teenager, that I will save Western civilization. Which is up there with John D.

1:26:14Rockefeller saying, I will become the richest man ever to exist. Called their shots. But for every Churchill, for every Rockefeller, there's a thousand dickheads. Massive survival. We're in Newcastle right now. All right. So I got in trouble, speaking of the UK, I got in trouble for comparing the UK to where it would rank if it was a state. And I thought that this was a relatively innocuous thing to say because me and George are both shit on the UK quite a bit. You know, you're allowed to. You're allowed to. As immigrants having moved from your own country, you're allowed to sort of cast a spurt.

1:26:40This is why I left, so to speak. We were the second in the world in millionaire exits not long ago, second only to China, who's got, you know, like 30 times the population or something. so uh i decided to post this chart and this chart explains if the uk was a state where it would rank on the list here it is if the uk were u.s state where would it rank among 50 states so life expectancy first lowest homicide rate first lowest gun deaths first lowest prisoner population first health care coverage first paid maternity leave a lot of high numbers statutory paid holiday first years in education first lowest road deaths first lowest drug deaths second oh minimum wage third, pupil performance fifth, environmental performance fifth, human development index ninth, lowest obesity tenth, and GDP per capita 51st.

1:27:31Tim Ferriss:What do you attribute that to? Well, I mean - The 51st. The fact that it's 51st? The fact that the US just absolutely rules when it comes to capitalism? You guys are like the Floyd Mayweather of capitalism. Would most countries, I know that the UK is not, Europe, you know, Brexit is Brexit, But would countries in Western Europe also look like this in terms of GDP per capita? Probably, right? I would guess so. I mean, what people on the internet got mad at me for is, well, these are stupid things to judge. Obviously, you've got the lowest gun deaths because you cucks gave up your guns. the paid maternity leave doesn't matter when this thing the statutory paid holiday is pointless because the level of productivity the road deaths because you don't have big enough roads the drug deaths don't matter because you've got no cool drugs there was basically an American excuse for every single one of these even the lowest obesity and I was like it was just surprising to me because for the most part British people are very prepared to laugh at Britain very prepared to point and we've done i've done episode i've done entire episodes on this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong but as soon as you begin to compare the u.s to the uk and in some areas because the whole joke here is that there's lots of things that we're ranking better than the u.s in apart from one of the most important things which is how much fucking money we make uh and yeah they're selective but But sing it.

1:29:06Huh? You can sing it if you want. Sing what? God save our gracious King. God save our... Right. So I just got into a lot of shit and I was surprised. I thought that Americans would be able to take this with a bit more humility. I do tend to think the Americans... Also, humility first. Just shit. Yeah.

1:29:30But yeah, lowest drug deaths is... I mean, like Wyoming, I imagine. Speaking of America will be lowest obesity at some point very soon with the advent of GLPs and... They're going to be... Someone, I saw this thing the other day that Red Atrutide is going to be one of the most successful drugs in history. For sure. One of the most widely used drugs. Scott Galloway has the idea. He says it's the best... America's the best place to earn money and Europe's the best place to spend money. Yeah. Well, the UK is a wonderful country to be poor in and a horrible country to be rich in. And America is a great country to be rich in and a horrible country to be poor in.

1:30:07Which is kind of interesting if the value of the dollar goes up. It's like American productivity, GDP or whatever goes up. And it's Americans will go and spend it to Europe, right? And get the best value for the bang for the buck, or if you will. Yeah. I mean, I do think the UK is the greatest, the country of all time. I do think that's like a fact. but America's America's going through its golden age right now just we're living on borrowed time mate you know my position on this I think that we're living on borrowed time and this is seen nowhere more clearly than the arrests countries with the most arrests for posting on social media in 2023 United Kingdom 12 ,183 coming in at nearly double second place which was Belarus with 6 ,205 and Russia is down with 400 China with 1 ,500.

1:31:00Might be some reporting problems in a couple of those countries. But that number, which is from the Times, it was a Times.

1:31:07Tim Ferriss:The Ministry of Social Enforcement isn't returning their emails. What a great group to be part of. Dude, 12 ,000 arrests for posting on social media in 2023. And that number's from the Times with Freedom House stats. So that's legit. 12 ,183. And that was one of the most common. How many people, like where would you rank if it was the number of people that it's been. And I'm like, also first, actually. Yeah, we have made some mistakes over the years. Alan Shuring. Yeah. Oscar Wilde. Yeah. Not good. We don't treat our gays well. No. We haven't. Alan Carr's pretty good. Alan Carr's treated well.

1:31:43Yeah. Douglas Murray treated relatively well. Yeah. I had this, because I find now that every time you bring up some negative about the UK, I've got to bring up something positive to counteract it. Like the angel and the devil, the Northeast and the Northwest. which is I was back home in London, central London, and I was walking around these beautiful buildings in London. And I used to live in a house that's older than America. And some of the architecture that exists in the UK, like New York has some quite, like the New York City library is beautiful. It feels like you guys have stolen that from us.

1:32:20And even the Statue of liberties from France, right? But a lot of the architecture in the US, my friend summarized it great, which is everything looks like the back entrance. So even the front looks like what would be the back entrance. And I feel as a Brit being in America, my parents have the most beautiful place in the world. And I'm around this mess of a house where the people are just, it's a lot more functional right now. But the UK is, the architecture is stunning. and you don't make buildings like that we're really grasping at fucking straws though when we're talking about the architect big ben's good big ben's good that's the difference between the us and the uk is that it feels that everything in the us has or a lot of things in the us i shall fix has a functional name so i was like why is it called joshua tree it's like oh it's because it has a lot of joshua trees or like you have temp street i go why is it temp street because it's next to 9th street and before 11th street whereas big ben nobody really knows why it's called big ben we think it was after some bloke called ben but it's not actually been clarified the big big ben is the it's not the actual clock it's the bell that's inside of it i think have a look because i remember i went down a rabbit hole and i couldn't find it out yeah it's remarkable how if you think about in the grander scheme of things young how young america is it's like what is it like a teenager maybe less or something with respect to civilization or modern civilization and um turns out everything is kind of whereas if you were to create a blank slate of a country and now use the best of whatever exists and maybe this is kind of what dubai's done right in a way that you think about dubai from an infrastructure standpoint it's just totally like artificial yeah it's it's absolutely just plowed its way through the desert and said how do we want to have our roads?

1:34:12How do we want to have our downtown? I know that there's lots of road accidents that you said. I wasn't aware of this. But if you're driving in Dubai, you can be doing 70 miles an hour and looking at Google Maps and you're three minutes from your destination, which is in the middle of a built-up area. You're just like pounding it and then you peel off on this perfectly modern designed flyover and then you're deposited outside of the fountains at the bottom of the Burge or whatever. So that's kind of interesting. Whereas if you drive in London, it will take you like 30 minutes. London's okay, but once you've been to LA, everything feels fucking unbelievable.

1:34:45Tim Ferriss:Well, you know I've chatted about this before, but I'm just increasingly bullish on neuromodulation, brain stimulation. And there was a piece in the New York Times, could at-home brain stimulation reduce psychiatry's reliance on SSRIs? And I think part of the framing challenge around, and just to define terms here. so brain stimulation in this particular case i believe in that new york times piece is referring to something called tdcs where you can basically use i think it's tdcs where you can basically use a nine volt battery it's a headset that you can wear at home and it's intended to treat depressive disorder and then you have other types of neuromodulation and i use that term because you might not be stimulating you might not be exciting something you might be inhibiting something so that would include uh tms which i've spent a lot of time with so transcranial magnetic stimulation so you're using magnets with different targets depending on what you're trying to do and i think those are just it's the very very that's the model t of what's coming with with neuromodulation and i think there's going to be a lot of acceleration in the next two years i I think it's going to move a lot faster than people expect.

1:36:07How does it work?

1:36:09Tim Ferriss:Well, so for instance, you might have in say my case, right? So what I figured out took me my whole life to figure it out. But a few years ago is that even though I had kind of been diagnosed and diagnosed myself prior to that, as someone with some type of depressive disorder, I think that it was a combination of a few things. Number one was Lyme disease, which is like very much multiple times verified real Lyme disease, not like chronic fatigue masquerading as Lyme disease from Long Island, which is if you look at the CDC map, the Center for Disease Control, it is like the is the bullseye outbreak, pun intended, because you sometimes get a rash that looks like a bullseye.

1:36:55Tim Ferriss:But I think that a lot of psychiatric conditions are downstream of acute infections that then led to chronic neuroinflammation. That's taking us a little further afield from the point I was going to make, which is you can use these magnetic pulses in the case of something like accelerated TMS. And in my case, I realized that it was actually anxiety and rumination. So a combination, the DSM constantly changes in terms of how you diagnose these things. psychiatry is kind of where surgery was like 300 years ago i would say right it's very early days but if i do an f f fmri right so you're getting this imaging of the brain you identify targets for say anxiety like anxiosomatic target you can inhibit or excite depending on what you're trying to do a target with these magnetic pulses intermittent theta bursts is what it's called And it just feels like a light tapping on your head.

1:37:50Tim Ferriss:That's it. It's very tolerable. And in my case, you might do, for instance, in the latest round of what I've done, take something, it's a drug. So you take a neuroplasticity agent beforehand. And there are a lot of things that can increase neuroplasticity. But in this case, it's a somewhat antiquated, maybe antibiotic called decyclycerine. So you stick it in your mouth, you let it dissolve for an hour before the stems, and then you're doing three minutes on the hour or maybe even every half hour for 10 stems. And that's it. And I got three to four months of going from, say, eight or nine out of like generalized anxiety and just OCD rumination to like a zero or one.

1:38:37Wow.

1:38:38Tim Ferriss:Different people. I mean, those are two different lived experiences. and and then after three or four months it starts to creep back in and then you can go get say a booster of some type and i know people with depression specifically there's a lot more data on depression of different types who basically similarly got taken from like i can't move i'm at home some people are cutting and they go from like again this i'm not a doctor i'm not giving medical advice and these are anecdotes but there are also published studies people can look into There's a great scientist named Jonathan Downer, unfortunate name for someone looking, working with someone in depression, but amazing scientist, D-O-W-N-A-R.

1:39:17Tim Ferriss:People can look him up. I think he's at the University of Toronto. And you see durability in some people, including the son of a friend of mine, 18 months. so instead of three to four months you get like 18 months and so you can start to wonder it's like all right if we look at let's just say ssris which are miraculous for some people but the general chemical imbalance theory of depression or anxiety is pretty much thoroughly debunked at this point right you're not depressed because you have low serotonin levels by and large and when you take pharmaceuticals i'm sure it's true with glp1s i don't think there's a very rarely a biological free lunch but let's put that aside uh with psychiatric medications typically you have off-target effects right they're going to be side effects they could be sexual dysfunction they could be whatever their weight gain their million different options and often they stop working or people don't need them anymore and then there's no plan for deprescribing and off-ramping these people so they just stay on forever right so the idea that you could use electricity is super super super interesting and um i think i'm hopeful that it will displace a lot of the blunt instrument approach to using over prescription we'll see I mean, it's going to take a lot of tech innovation, which in this case, AI, go team AI is going to accelerate things a lot.

1:40:54Tim Ferriss:I'm already seeing it. At like a personal level, what's it like going from, did you say a nine to a one? Yeah. Like an eight or nine to a one. What's that like? It's like a felt experience. Insomnia, gone. Right. Like instead of taking 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep, like lay down five minutes later, I'm asleep without any sleep medication. Yeah. I mean, that alone is, it's impossible to overstate the effect that has on your daily life every day. Right. Easier to get over just kind of the scrapes and bruises of life. Right. Little issues. You basically, for me, it was like, I find it very useful.

1:41:33Tim Ferriss:Like if I'm using the toolkit of stoicism or mindfulness or whatever, like it's a fucking struggle. Right. It's not native to my constitution, but after this, like, oh, wow, suddenly I can meditate for 20 minutes and I feel like I've been doing it for years as opposed to constantly like slapping my monkey mind on the wrist. right so really tremendous and i i i what we will see is that you can also use it i this is not that controversial but for performance enhancement right like you can um i believe you can affect like handedness trait hypnotizability like you can and it's not risk-free but compared to a lot of the mechanic the medications that you might get people for these conditions the risk profile is pretty good it's interesting that you can have an intervention that makes other interventions more effective so if you can do some sort of tms thing and that makes your trait hypnotizability more that means that you've now opened up the world of hypnotism yeah you're you're exactly so you're choosing the right domino to tip over first right and i mean it's not the time to get into a porn habit then straight after this god god damn it i just locked this i mean it brings whistler or tickler or whatever it's called also a good podcast um this podcast is sponsored by when i sit down for a good wank on porno with my athletic brew do you want a man to come around in two minutes man on man uh life and times uh it a lot of i mean a lot of what i think about is just sequencing right like there's a lot of stuff out there off the rack that works kind of right but if you figure out the right sequence like you can suddenly it's true language acquisition too like where most of the mistakes are made i think is in the sequencing and you just fix the sequencing you shuffle things a little bit you put the right domino in front and it makes a huge difference like and also this is true with it's like psychedelics in the sense that like gul dolan who's at you know uh uc berkeley she used to be at hopkins but her sort of framework of reopening critical windows with the use of psychedelics is very interesting so and underground facilitators have known this for a long time but it's like the two or three weeks after a psychedelic, which in this case would include MDMA, although that's a longer conversation, you have the ability, and this could extend to, say, stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor control or speaking things that typically is limited to a very short, relatively short window as a child, right?

1:44:25Tim Ferriss:You can basically reopen the malleability to develop those things using these drugs in the subsequent two to three weeks. So, for instance if you've just done a bunch of psychedelics maybe a very bad time to suddenly do a bunch of overdosing on porn and and sort of instilling habits that you would otherwise maybe come and go but in this case would could really stick like your play-doh is has been warmed up in the microwave so you want to be careful about those two or three weeks afterwards i think that could also apply to TMS potentially. Well, I did a two-sided SGB at the start of this year, and the same thing is true for that.

1:45:04It's like, hey man, you've got a window here where your nervous system is unusually absorbent. So treat it with appropriate care. That was wild though, that SGB that I had. You should explain what that is. Stellate ganglion block. So there is a bundle of nerves on both sides of your neck that are essentially running to the rest of your nervous system. And you can get an ultrasound guided anesthetic injection that goes into it. And it essentially shakes the etch-a-sketch of your nervous system. Way to think about it. It is a relatively hard reset and you do one side and then you do another. You can't do them both together because it actually makes half of your face and half of your throat go to sleep.

1:45:46So if you were to do both, I think that you might die. You certainly wouldn't be able to swallow. you can't do much stuff. Sounds problematic. You end up with one side of your eye is sort of eyelids half closed and speaking's a little bit difficult. Anyway, I did one side one day, one side on the other with Matt Cook at BioReset, who's kind of the number one in America for this. And it was fascinating, really, really fascinating experience. Would you do it again? I would, yes. What were the benefits? It was an interesting slate clean of some nervous system buildup. So just agitations, the sort of ambient buzzing that you often have, rumination reduced.

1:46:33It was very interesting, but I think the thing that's always fascinating to me because you've got a felt sense of how this thing impacted you. And because our felt sense is so subject to, did I sleep well? Am I in a good place with this person? Have I got the, how's business going? what's happening in my life but when you see in data too and because i track everything with whoop it was a 30 increase in hrv i was gonna ask you about hrv the 30 increase in hrv overnight and that held for i mean i'm what three four months now after it started to tickle back down now but uh that held for a long time and uh resting heart rate also did the same not quite as much It was basically a 30 % change in HRV, and that stuck about for a while.

1:47:19And they do this. It's a one-stop shop for PTSD in soldiers. It's a really aggressive intervention for guys that are super, super, super struggling. And it just gives you a little bit more room to breathe. And I was interested in it. And I trust Matt, the guy that did it. So I was like, okay. You mentioned before risks with the TMS-type stuff. What are some of the risks?

1:47:44Tim Ferriss:generally very low i mean i would say that again not a uh not a phd or doctor don't play one on the internet so do your homework talk to your professionals but my understanding is that i can give you my personal example right uh occasionally in the case with my target with my brain uh after the treatment you can have what's almost like a rebound exaggeration of symptoms for a short a period of time, which is pretty unpleasant, where you might have insomnia for a few days, which I did. I've had that twice. And you've done this twice? No, I've done it probably five or six times. And it's not, it has not worked 100 % of the time, which is very frustrating.

1:48:27Tim Ferriss:It's part of the reason why, and I'm supporting a nascent brain stimulation lab here at UT Austin, getting involved with a couple of the companies because I want to, like, I actually know these machines and I've talked to the technicians and I've talked to scientists. I'm like, I can actually be very, I think, helpful here. So I'm hoping to figure out how you can make that much more reliable. It's also just pure self-interest, right? I want to be able to use this. And I also want to figure out how to get durability out further, right? Instead of three to four months, it's like, look, if it's one day every quarter, like, and it goes from a nine to a one, fantastic.

1:49:03Tim Ferriss:But if only it works once out of every four shots, then that sucks in a lot of respects. So some of the side effects, the insomnia that I mentioned, in very, very rare cases, people will get temporary tinnitus. They'll get like a ringing. These are all pretty uncommon. And I should say that using this for generalized anxiety disorder, ocd etc is very much tip of the spear stuff so the sample size is not very large with the depression there's much more data and you can go on pubmed or elsewhere consensus.app is another decent option if you want like an ai interface and look at the published papers they're right there for you if you are like smacking down your sympathetic nervous system okay this is the perfect place to talk about this on a pod large podcast um after my first effective tms treatment the first one that worked i could not ejaculate for like two weeks and i fucking lost it you can imagine i'm just like i'm like is this a good news bad news situation like yeah good news you're not as anxious bad news you're never going to ejaculate again i was like what the fuck and the doctor like yeah we've never seen that before i was like oh fantastic uh but eventually mechanistically he was like it could be a dosing problem where we're basically we dialed down the volume on your sympathetic nervous system too much because it's sympathetic to get erect sympathetic to come yeah they say point and shoot parasympathetic yep sympathetic damn yeah and i was like okay well maybe we try a lower dose which i think is part of the reason why it didn't work for me because i try i was like hey if that was at the time that was five days and i was like i really didn't enjoy those two weeks so let's try how much you try let's try let's try two days i'm a big fan of a jaguar you know sounds like we found the time uh yeah yeah you need to get on whistler so i need to get tickler tickler uh yeah uh my podcast is accepting sponsors tickler uh so then i tried two days nothing right then i tried three days uh a few months later increasing nothing right and And then eventually got back to five days, still nothing.

1:51:23Tim Ferriss:But then went back to adding the de-cyclisterium, this plasticity agent beforehand, one day, boom. And I was like, okay. Now that is when I became much more, it's just called One Day Protocol. And Jonathan Downer, who I mentioned, is one of the, if not the sort of innovator in the space behind that, along with Don Vaughn and some other people. but that one day when that worked i was like now this is interesting because currently the insurers are slowly coming around but all this stuff a lot of innovation starts with people with money spending way too much money right right that's just the way it is right that's true with electric cars it's true with uber it's true with a million different the early generation iphones right didn't even have a copy and paste you fucking kidding me right these early adopters who have money and they're willing to spend it like the accelerated tms protocol some of the early rounds that i did it's like all in 30 grand out of pocket i mean it's expensive and when it got down to one day i was like okay now it's about reducing sort of unit cost and increasing throughput with these devices because putting aside the out-of-pocket cost a lot of people, they cannot take five days off of work.

1:52:42Tim Ferriss:Yep. Do this. Yep. But once you get it to one day now, I'm like, okay, that just went from a very small sort of addressable patient population, a much larger, still too expensive, but let's try to work on getting it down. And that's just TMS, right? You have other things like focused ultrasound that might be interesting for different types of addiction, for instance, where you could actually get enough penetration that You could hit the nucleus accumbens and other anatomical structures associated with chemical dependence. And it's like, okay, this is very, very, very interesting. Who's the best company in America for this at the moment?

1:53:18Tim Ferriss:I mean, there are a couple of really good ones. The two older ones that have the most time on the market are Brainsway, which is out of Israel. Very good machines. It's a publicly traded company. Full disclosure. I invested in them when they were a public trade company. MagVenture has a device as well, which I've used. And then the company that I'm involved with is called Ampa. And that is the smallest form factor. And the people behind it develop the one-day protocol. And I think the trainability of that device, instead of taking weeks, let's just say to train a technician properly, You can do it in a few hours.

1:54:08Tim Ferriss:And it's something that fits in the trunk of a car, like a Corolla, as opposed to being the size of a refrigerator. And I think they're really, otherwise it wouldn't be involved, very well positioned to finally scale this treatment to millions of people instead of a hand, like a few thousand. So those, like all three of those are on the market. And the lowest cost would certainly be AMPA, but all these devices. amper a mpa amp health um and we'll see we'll see i mean i am i'll be i mean not just because i'm involved because it took me a long time i did a fuck ton of due diligence um i don't think a lot of folks don't realize like how much due diligence i do before i put something in my newsletter or whatever it's like i guess this is ocd like harnessed when i am in full throttle being used very well being friends with you is is highly useful in situations like this in the same way i went to go and get lasik in the uk ali abdahl productivity dude british guy um ex is a doctor right was an md or the equivalent of an md gp in the in the uk and um i knew that he'd got lasik and i was like no one's done more research about who's the best obstetrician operator in all of the UK, messaged Ali and he's like, yeah, I spent three weeks speaking to all of my friends and doing all of the reviews and looking at the particular machines.

1:55:42I was like, okay, who was that? And he introduced me and it's funny. This is good. I just get to speed run all of the work that you did. Canary down the mine. I'm the end of the guy in the human centipede, but I'm benefiting.

1:55:52Tim Ferriss:You want to be first in the line. I'm at the end, but it gets better. progressively as it goes through yeah that's cool man i'm glad that it's i'm glad that it's helped it's exciting it's it is exciting i mean and i mean i think it's i think it's saying something when you know as somebody who's been so active in funding the science related to psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapy since 2015 that in the last three years i've done almost almost no psychedelics it's been purely focused on the neuromodulation i think gets that important uh we'll see because a lot for a lot of people like psychedelics are nuclear power for the psyche like you just they are not suitable for all people there are plenty of people i would carve out for exclusion from many times you end up with a chenobal or a fokushima yeah yeah it's just it's it's a lot squirrelier it is um you need to be really careful with that stuff as opposed to just not being able to come.

1:56:52Tim Ferriss:It has its place. Can I zoom in more on this? What was that like at the end of the few weeks? You know you said you went from a nine to a one. Did you hit a minus seven? No, no, I didn't. I mean, I was - Fantastic for the girlfriend. I was pretty - Fukushima. Yeah, I was pretty - I was understandably concerned. Had you have known that it was going to end after two weeks, presumably you would have just been - the fear was this is going to be for it yeah yeah yeah right yeah so now but you couldn't feel the anxiety but but interesting interestingly for for like the every time it has worked for me i've had that side effect but now i know that there's an end point so i don't freak out and it's fine yeah you just know that you're going to get a couple of really good weeks where you're kind of like a stallion babe i can just you know don't worry about me how do you um i had a question for you you know on on the other side of the spectrum have you seen these devices that stimulate your vagus nerve or whatever yeah i know i know a lot yeah what are your thoughts on those like most of them are bunk are they yeah uh there there's a scientist you might want to have him on at some point he's incredible uh named kevin uh tracy he is the most credible he wrote a book called the great nerve he's the most credible publicly not really uh educating scientist credible very highly published uh scientist who talks about this uh most of the non-invasive vagus nerve stimulators or that are purported to be vagus nerve stimulators don't don't actually hit it the right way um and they're they're there's neck based right and then there's ear based uh the neck tbd but uh there are they've been cleared fda cleared for i think it's either migraines or cluster headaches yeah some people seem to benefit i had a friend who tripled his hrv using a neck-based device i think it was either true vega or it was the prescription equivalent of true vega and it worked really well for him this can be pretty i've never i've used I had a friend I was talking to.

1:59:05I suffer from migraines. And so I have to carry around medication all the time. And somebody told me about these things. And they were like, okay, it has all these benefits of like HRV, you know, increase of HRV, all sorts of stuff. It's a temporary state, if you will. But ultimately. You should use it daily.

1:59:22Tim Ferriss:It's like a few minutes in the morning, a few minutes at night. Yeah, it's kind of reset the nervous system. That's kind of the marketing terminology that they've been utilizing. Yeah, I mean, really, what it's doing is it's stimulating the vagus nerve, which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side. It's like roughly 100 ,000 fibers on either side. So super high bandwidth. It innervates everything, just about organs, GI tract, etc. And when you stimulate it, you can…

1:59:57Tim Ferriss:I guess the right way to put it, activate isn't quite right, but something called the inflammatory reflex. And so it can be applied to things like rheumatoid arthritis, different autoimmune disorders can be applied to something like asthma attacks. It's very, very, very interesting. So it could be worth looking into for you, right? The neck-based devices tend to also activate the superficial muscles of the face. So it pulls your face down. It depends on how high you turn it up. Yeah, it depends on how high you turn it up, but it can be a little uncomfortable. The ear-based devices. You say you've used it?

2:00:32No, somebody recommended me the ear-based device.

2:00:34Tim Ferriss:Most of the ear-based devices are not actually in the right place. Got it. It needs to be very, very, very precise. It's called the Simba Concha. It's going to be hard to see. It's right here, kind of where this fold is. It's at the bottom of that inside, like right there. Most of the devices being sold on the market, including devices that have lots of fancy names and lots of fancy institutions on the website, they're not in the right place. There's a fucking shit ton of money behind some of those companies. Yeah, very few fibers make it to the ear. Got it. I've got a couple of things. I had a few things sent to me.

2:01:08I had one that's a handheld device with the two-prong, and you can kind of just stick it on like you want to - Just tase yourself. Yeah, like that. and then uh there's a pair of headphones that have a lug that comes down and sits here and um obviously that one's way way more convenient but there's some weird stuff with that you've got to lubricate the end of the adapter because it needs to be able to have quite a smooth surface to be able to so you have to change the again whistler uh you have to change the little heads out on this thing and put that in i i didn't do it consistently enough to be able to say whether or not it was

2:01:45Tim Ferriss:effective yeah i think i think for you for migraines it's worth looking at what's your uh migraine manifestation do you have aura with it oh my god yeah which one um what what do you mean which one olfactory visual it's visual visual and it'll come on and i can i i've had these since i was five years old and people were like the fuck is going on i i didn't even know and yeah you get these auras it's like almost as um you're on like an acid trip and everybody everything just looks blurry but moving in in a weird way and then and then after a while if you don't take medication during that period um then it kicks in then it kicks in what do you take no tech uh sumatriptin as one just kicked in yep oh fuck sorry it's no no it's all good it's i don't even know i think i typically track it with um it's either lighting yep um it's environmental like weather changes weirdly enough or the last element of it is either i have caffeine or uh wine without any food right and it's it's really fascinating is you know they they ask you to keep a diary of your day and to figure out retro retroactively what caused it yep there's no other mechanic and it's so people don't know why people don't know for what reason people some people think it's autoimmune some people think it's not and it's a fascinating um so i have to carry medication all the time and i always recommended this yeah so the the prescription version of true vega spelled tr uva g a is called gamma core got it g-a-m-m-a-c-r-e is fda cleared in the u.s for both acute treatment of migraine pain in adults and prevention of migraine episodic and chronic uh few practical points real the effect evidence is real but modest compared to top tier migraine medications like cgrp inhibitors appears to work best for people who treat attacks early migraine with aura patients who want to reduce medication use those who can't tolerate triptans and cgrps right speaking of those devices by the way have you guys seen there's some companies that are being um now that they're sort of reinvention of input into computers so for example less keyboards more voice more like natural types of interactions with with technology and devices in general um there are these devices that are coming out one of my friends demoed this to me i think apple just acquired a company where you just put sort of a small device that listens in this sort of region and um without you actually saying anything it can detect um you know as if you were talking makes sense roughly it's it's remarkable and and um You can imagine a lot of scenarios with this as technology and input layers become much more natural, much more conversational.

2:04:33And you don't have these affordances to speak all the time where imagine that device can effectively read what you want to say without you ever having to say it. And it lives roughly in this region. Any idea why it's sat there to detect? Is it as if you're moving your mouth but not talking? I'm not sure.

2:04:52Tim Ferriss:Let me just sidebar real quick. Just because I want to make a safety point. We're talking about the relative safety profile of brain stimulation or neuromodulation with these devices. That does not mean anyone should DIY this stuff. You can, the brain is incredibly sensitive. If you hit the wrong target, you can fuck yourself up or make your symptoms a lot worse. So do not DIY this. Go to a decent clinic. For people who want to explore it, I have no stake in any of these. Acacia Clinic in Sunnyvale in California. Salience, which I think is in Dallas. They may have other locations. Owen Muir, M-U-I-R, who's in New York.

2:05:37Tim Ferriss:There are a couple of clinics that I know have very good reputations, but work with somebody who knows these devices. No 9-volt battery in one of those pads that people use for their... I was about to go home with a little Duracell battery. there's also it's not i don't think indicated for migraines it's i'm pretty sure it's specific to ra to rheumatoid arthritis but setpoint medical has an implant wow about the size of a small omega-3 that they it's like an outpatient procedure in the neck and then it just stimulates like twice a day the vagus nerve no way yeah that was on the front front it was on the front cover of the new york times the day that i interviewed kevin tracy who was involved with the development of that device.

2:06:22Wow. And so they implant it directly into your neck. Yeah. How do you recharge it? Induction? I'm not sure. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it does get...

2:06:30Tim Ferriss:It does get... You've got the lights. It's magnetic charging on your neck. Could you imagine? Only a device that kind of reads your thoughts. One thing you discover as you get more into meditation is just how sometimes your thoughts aren't even you. Like the ultimate example, even if you've not experienced any form of meditation, would be like a song that's stuck in your head. I wonder how the device would differ between a song that's stuck in your head and something that you actually want it to do. Because I remember a great meditation technique. I'm just imagining my ruminating, giving a microphone back into my ear.

2:07:06I think the distinction being that there's sort of this concept of mind reading and or expression of a thought. And the expression of a thought is typically, you know, when you're starting to speak, Like roughly you would have to, it's not purely like a thought reader in some sense. You would have to have an intent associated with it. To going back to your previous point on devices though, my thesis is that the device that you'll probably wear when you interact with AI or whatever, if you want to, has not been invented yet. And it will have this combination of input output that is much more, um, less visible.

2:07:46didn't open ai claim that they were going to have a three products or something and obviously they've got johnny ive and the guy that made the the iphone the original iphone and then they bought his company which was called io yeah io and then there was this very cool sexy video of him and sam in a totally not fake bar somewhere right having a conversation uh i think it'd be the airports yeah they're actually building a phone apparently okay um they said three different things and one of them is something that no one's ever seen before. Which makes maybe a lapel thing, a little button, something like that.

2:08:21The AirPod case makes the most amount of sense because we're already using them. People wear them 24-7. The AirPod's, what's that stat around? If the AirPod was a startup, it'd be like one of the most - Eighth in the world. Oh, really? That's why. It's remarkable. Just that alone. And half that's me contributing to - Should we talk about that? Yeah. We've never spoken about this. I've - Let's see if I can pull it up. Going back to your three devices thing, I think there's probably one device that is an affordance that's kind of listening and or...

2:08:52Tim Ferriss:You asked me your, wait, you were a raw dog that took a deer leg, let's get rid of this free advertising. There's this sort of one device that probably listens to input in some mechanic or tries to process what you want in possibly a new way. That could be like a device that's kind of have a microphone or whatnot. there's another device where it's like a her type situation where he's wearing that earpiece and constantly speaking to it and then maybe that third device is kind of this glanceable world right where you have this phone um turns out now you know applications are becoming less like people are using chat gpt or claude for everything right like you go i want to set a timer you can do that in chat gpt you don't necessarily need a dedicated app maybe you want one or whatnot but the idea of the app ecosystem being less valuable than it was before given that elon's big on this right he thinks that all apps are going to go away and your phone is just going to create whatever you need whenever you need it roughly exactly and and i think generally um today it's possible to build that type of device without having this ecosystem effect that was necessary in the past i wonder if that would open up uh a hole in the market because at the moment the dominance has been apple pretty tough despite the fact that apple have kind of shit the bed a lot you know they've totally the phones have really started to peter out in terms of the progress at least from what i noticed as a user like yeah i can zoom in 15x i can zoom in 20x and at some point it's like what it's a slab of glass and a combination things like what do you do it's a bit the screen's brighter or sharper or something but it's less noticeable You remember when it was what, the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 12, and each time it was a noticeable leap forward, almost the same that's been happening with the AI models.

2:10:39You know, it seems to have started to at least, in terms of noticeable user experience for me, it seems.

2:10:45Tim Ferriss:I think iOS gets worse every time I upgrade. The keyboard at the moment just fucking sucks. It's so bad. But they do have an incredible war chest. so what do you think i don't know against the guy with a massive pile of money well i'm just what they can do is they can buy companies so i'm wondering i don't know you have any thoughts on who they should buy you know there's there's a group of people that think that apple's like the smartest company because they've let the world sort of play itself out people spending a lot of money and they're just waiting to see where it hits and then effectively um do what they do best which is never enter the market first yeah but be the best yeah yeah it's exactly what happened to cell phones or smartphones exactly what happened to kind of airpods there's all these some some wireless do with the ipod too ipod too um yeah the ipod was the first element of it even the computer in some sense um plenty of mp3 and so it's like they've saved all of this cost for capax um never spent anything like go forth and split test these products for us my minions yeah exactly It's a ton of other companies.

2:11:54They effectively let others do the R &D work to a certain extent and then refine that world potentially. And there's an argument to be made that that is a - You don't need to be first. You just need to be best. They also make, what, 20 billion per year from Google with a Google search for free. So Google keeps going up and up and up. So yeah, they're not going to dabble with touching that, which is why Siri's still - What we haven't discussed is how much revenue you contribute to Apple on an annual basis. I think I'm on my 17th AirPods.

2:12:32Tim Ferriss:Because they're a slippery bar of soap. Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's more. I've had a few stolen. I don't like having things on me as well. So I'll just like leave things. So like the amount of times I've left them at Dean's. Just a gift to the universe over and over again. But the most frustrating thing is, Tim, is you can see where they all are. So there's one in particular right now that's in Cameroon, and I can see where his house is, right? No, no, no, I still don't. No, because I'm a sad little man. I'm not willing to fly into Cameroon to confront the man, but I am willing to press the play sound button.

2:13:08Oh, my God. Do it at night while they're sleeping? Yeah. Oh, my God. Isn't there a single AirPod that's in the WHO building? Yeah, that was Cattie's AirPods that were in the WHO building. Yeah, just one AirPod was in the single AirPod that he was playing this sound through from the WHO building in New York City. There you go. It's just there right now. Oh, he's in Ghana. He's in Ghana. Oh, it's... There we go. Eight minutes ago. Have you guys ever... That's incredible. But what a great... I mean, I never leave my house without my AirPods. This is why I think it's such a power user. It's ridiculous.

2:13:42It's such a power user. I keep sounding like a broken record here, but I assume the device is a little pod thing that we have now headphones in cameras in but then it's almost you could have a like a holographic screen so people aren't on these glass screens as much and you can make it big make it small that feels inevitable i mean there's rumor that the next airpods like you said do have visual the cameras and that's that's crazy if you think about it you're walking around there's sort of two spatially aware cameras around you well it's kind of like uh what was it dark

2:14:11Tim Ferriss:night returns or dark night rises when they had the cell phones oh yeah they mapped it them at the entire, yeah. I mean, what do you think Apple's going to do with that data? I don't understand how they're going to do the whole Neuralink thing that you mentioned of, they will read your thoughts because of the fact that some thoughts I have, I didn't want to have. It wasn't me. But there's this meditation technique I once sat in, which is, it's a real cool one. So it sounds like you're pretty serious in meditating. Yes. Yeah. It was originally to fight off a skin condition and then it ended up fixing - Fix that with AI.

2:14:40Yeah. Gemini fixed that. So the story there was - Gemini fixed your syphilis. The cypia. That's a non-fixed. AGI is here, man. Sniffer gave me the cypia.

2:14:53I had subatomic domeritis for about two years.

2:14:57Tim Ferriss:Subatomic? Suboric domeritis. Okay. I was like, wait, what? My face would break out like red and I wouldn't want to go outside the house. So I spoke to a few different doctors. A lot of them recommended topical steroid creams. A lot of them said it was because of stress. I got deep into meditation. I stopped eating like so such little sugar that I once flagged I once got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes um which was a complete false diagnosis which is type 1 is pretty hard which is another side story yeah but I won then when I was away I tracked my skin for years and nothing would work nothing would work so when I was away on holiday I just uploaded the file to Gemini and it just the file you mean a photo yeah no all the photos that I have and it just said oh just put Nisarol shampoo on your face.

2:15:41Oh, wow. And it's never, it's never had an issue ever since. So it was

2:15:43Tim Ferriss:fungal? Yes. So the biggest, the biggest recommendation I would give. So Miseral is ketoconazole for people who are wondering, yeah. This is for dandruff. And I do it once. Say again? This is for dandruff. It's also very effective for topical fungal infections. Really? I did it once every two weeks now and it's completely. Fucking crazy. It's completely gone. So any recommendation at home, like a practical thing would be just upload a photo of yourself to Gemini or ChatGPT and just say, hey, based off what you can see with my skin, recommend me moisturizers, recommend me everything, and it will be better than anything you've done before.

2:16:14Tim Ferriss:What do you use Gemini for versus other models? I'm an LLM whore, Tim. Famicuous. He's like the Andrew Huberman of LLMs. Yeah, I'm shifting each day. Oh, but too, sorry, I didn't finish the story. So the meditation point there, there's a great question, which I ended up learning was asking your mind what thoughts going to come up next. And it's like your mind gets a bit, it's almost this Mexican standoff. And the problem with these devices, I once asked myself that and my mind went quiet for six seconds. And then for whatever reason, there's this former Bayern Munich winger called Iron Robin, and it's just him checking in on the left foot in my head.

2:16:53And it's like, was that me? Why is that there? So if I have a Neuralink device, it's an interesting one of how does it know what was me versus what's just my monkey mind doing strange behaviors you know um

2:17:06Tim Ferriss:i can't wait to see the first failed demos of you know i mean like these epic software demo fails someone gets up and it's just like twat twat twat twat it's like no no sorry sorry penis penis especially given the likelihood of it being elon to do the first presentation is quite high a man with a mind that i don't think anybody wants to see broadcast out into public did you see that demo of the uh cyber truck where he was on smash the window and he smashed the window he's like wait that's not supposed to happen um the best film i've watched all year it's a british film it's probably one of the best like storytelling examples i've ever heard so people will know it from the brits award it was this horrific incident where michael b jordan went on stage and somebody shouted the n-word out and it was this huge controversial incident but what actually happened was it was a guy who has one of the most severe form of Tourette's and he was he was subject of he was subject of a film so he was at the BAFTAs so the film is called I swear and it's incredible because this guy grew up in Scotland which is like think about all the stereotypes you have about England like the further north you get the more like harsher it essentially is yeah it's why people from Aberdeen are some of the most like brutal people on the planet so this man grew up with extreme Tourette's in the 70s, 80s England, when nobody knew what the condition was.

2:18:24So the film's amazing because it's just him like walking to the shops going, fat twat. And he's just getting the shit beaten out of him and he can't explain what it is. So he's constantly getting into fights. There's a scene where he's walking his dog and this is real. So he's walking his dog, um, across the, um, about to go across a busy road and he loves this dog, but there's a car coming and he goes, walk forwards now. And then he has to grab the dog. he's Tourette's he's fighting against himself yeah he's fighting against himself it's so good it's such a good film where can you see it? if you just search I swear fuck you fuck you I missed it fuck you from living with Chris the man's a bit of a boomer and I'll often like give him a recommendation and I'll go where can I see it?

2:19:10and if it's not on Netflix he can't get it no no just google it no that's not fair that's not fair and that's not true but my response is what can I watch it on and I'll just say google it right but that's a fair I feel like this is a little bit like here's a fantastic new restaurant okay what streets it on I just want a little bit more information and the fact that you want me knowing what you know which is that you might understand what streaming service it's on saying to me that I have to go and google it when you could just say it's on Netflix and me and Tim this side of the table we just expect a little bit more decorum you know what I mean this is why I this is why I want AGI die to come because i'm so glad you brought this up all right all right all right going back to the photo thing do you guys know what people are utilizing um chat gpt and whatnot for when they upload photos of themselves looks maxing oh that's interesting do you know coves what are they what so they upload a set of photos there's these apps on the app store too now that kind of do a rapper experience but the idea is that effectively you know you upload photos to to gemini or chat gpt and then it suggests things that you might want to do,

2:20:16Tim Ferriss:whether it's a medical procedure, you know, jaw surgery, having a symmetric face, even things like hairstyle make a huge difference or a beard or whatever. I can skip that section. And roughly, it's really interesting that people are doing this because obviously there's this huge craze of looks maxing and whatnot. And it turns out, huge use case for AI. Dude, check out Cove's. I've just sent this to you, Jared. um qo yeah so look at this so this is glow up without surgery get your personalized facial analysis and transformation based on 2000 academic studies so i know the science team behind it the science team behind this are absolutely sick so look at the guy on the right and then like you should be able to do a transition you see how you can get the middle of the guy's face you should be able to click on it yeah exactly so move it all the way to the right you was worried about meaning tim look at this and then go to the left wow got it so it's like drive-by shooting suspect to soap opera star exactly uh get more career opportunities boost your self-confidence make a stronger first impression improve your dating life enhance your quality of life so basically it's go go let me see the one on the left again go the easy swing it she's really attractive i feel like that's one of those like sandra bullock oh she takes off the glasses and walks out she does yeah you're like wait she just put her hair on that's all she did ah she's shaped her face a bit do it again jared show me not that slow it down go rudy fucking hell uh what's slow that slow slow slow you know this is just irl facetune right um yeah yeah so if you there's like facetune has all of the facetune i don't do you guys know what facetune i don't i learned about it from frey rendir a couple of weeks ago one of the most it came out a long time ago israeli company and uh and it's it's just a easy way of manipulating the way that your face looks and, you know, slims your jawline or whatever.

2:22:09What do you mean? Gives you have a... Like, as in on a photo, not actually. So it turns out every Instagram or before they post, anytime people post photos, they typically went through the same workflows. And Facetune was kind of a, you know, just a bunch of tools that you can utilize. And now with AI, holy crap. I mean, the possibilities are quite limitless. And so, you know, it can regenerate that photo. And so at the bottom, there are all these like AI filters. and people use them so, so, so much. And often I heard this story where one of my friends met somebody from Instagram and they had all these photos and she looked nothing like herself real life.

2:22:53Let me give you this from Freya. From Freya? Freya India is a girl, a writer who just released a book called Girls.

2:23:01Tim Ferriss:The Nordic God. She does look a little bit like that, blonde hair. she's like a the what would what's the female equivalent of the uber mensch uber froing or whatever it's called the phone yeah uh she's that um yeah she uh she was telling me that when groups of young girls are out and they're taking photos at a party everybody fights to be the one whose phone is used to have the photo taken because that means that they're the one that's in charge of the face tuning yep so that they can work on themselves a little bit more i know i know It's actually a huge social faux pas if you post a picture where you look good and the other person doesn't.

2:23:40That is stitching your mate up a little bit. You know, there's a famous English footballer called Ashley Cole. Can you just search Ashley Cole's squad photo? And this, how old is this? 10 years? Yeah, when he was at Roma. And he's retired. Do you want to tell the story? Well, it's just a squad photo. It's one of those, I know it when I see it, ideas, I guess. but it's just a football photo of the entire Roma team and Ashley Cole who's this Brit is like trying to mingle with these Italians. He's just iconic. Yeah, top left. Because he's just awkwardly leaning on the outside. So then he gets memed everywhere.

2:24:17This became one of the biggest memes in the world.

2:24:19Tim Ferriss:For a long time it's a team. It looks like they're so realistic. What's the headline? Scroll down a little bit.

2:24:26Ashley Cole appears to be an outcast in an incredibly awkward Roma team picture. the amount of times me and chris have been out with like a group of guys and i'll do the ashley yeah he moves off to one side ruins it absolutely ruins it all right boys let's bring this one into land you all rule uh tim what have you got coming up where should people go to check out your things

2:24:43Tim Ferriss:uh you can find everything at tim.blog i'd say that's probably the easiest yeah check out the newsletter it's been going for like 10 12 14 god knows how many years five or a third day what was that one that most recent article about uh self-improvement what i learned from however many years of self-improvement. Ah, yes. Yeah, that was, it's called the self-help trap, what I learned after 20 years of quote-unquote, yeah, improving myself. That's awesome. Yeah, that's a long form. That's on the blog, 10, 12 pages. Tim.blog slash Friday. Sign up for the newsletter. A lot of the stuff that we're talking about.

2:25:18Tim Ferriss:Like, go back if you want some, also another reason to check out neurostimulation, go back and look at the Brainsway stock graph for the last two or three years. um so that type of stuff you'll learn about before other people okay not i'm not a registered investment advisor i should be blah blah blah blah blah you may lose money yeah um no i appreciate you guys having me on um our our app is called sky s-k-y-e and it's a fun little experience it's kind of a new way to experience your phone um it's kind of ironic that we're you know i talked about that having you know we talked about the digital detox or whatever but our goal is to kind of really make you stop using as much as you would otherwise by surfacing the things that you might care about before such that you don't go into this doom scrolling world or whatever imagine something that exists there it's there when you need it it's gone when you don't and we don't really have anything else so it's a fun little thing we couple people and we've got tens of thousands of people on a waitlist right now so we're trying to fulfill that inference is very expensive but uh it's been the time of my life to build this i'm i guess i i love technology so much um and i love interfaces and i love thinking about the world with respect to how the future might be in terms of people interacting with the with the with the technology in a meaningful way not necessarily in a um doom scrolling sort of this world that we've kind of built so i don't know where we'll go with that but it's been it's been an incredible time building um and uh what a time to be alive as if you're if you're any type of builder today it is probably one of the most remarkable times i've ever witnessed i'm baffled every day um and so it's been so much fun uh and we're just getting started so i'm really excited for that and at signal on x with two l's s-i-g-n-u-l-l if you want to see you call out the xbox ceo a little bit more that's pretty hilarious i wonder if she's going to watch this.

2:27:18Tickler.com slash signal.

2:27:20Tim Ferriss:Sniffies. Sniffies. Sorry, I need to take that username from that app. Match with me there. My end, highagency.com forward slash books. If you want to get a breakdown of all my best books, you told me to do this. There's going to be a book breakdown, a list of a load of different books, but the personal one of Oblomov, a Russian man from the 18th century who the first 50 pages are about him getting out of bed. So there's more resources like that. I get my best books and articles. That's it. Okay. All right. Let's go. See you next time, everyone. Yo. Cheers, gentlemen. Yes. There we go. Yeah. Good fun.

2:27:57When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found, and you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die.

2:28:34That's chriswillx.com slash books.