#709: In Case You Missed It: November 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

0:00Hey folks, Tim here. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. My new card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing people at Exploding Kittens is now a national bestseller. Things are going completely bananas. It just launched everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8 ,000 plus retail locations, anywhere you can buy games. So check it out. See some videos of gameplay at coyote game dot com. 300 million social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind blowing. Takes just minutes to learn. I guarantee you'll have a lot of laughs. This has been in the works for two years. Please enjoy it. Check it out.

0:34Coyote game dot com. Now back to the episode. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday. my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time because after all the podcast the books they can be quite long and that's why I created five bullet friday it's become one of my favorite things I do every week it's free it's always going to be free and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash friday that's tim.blog forward slash friday I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with.

1:35And little known fact, I've met probably 25 % of them because they first subscribed to 5 Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. 5 Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with 5 Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out. tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time.

2:12So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.

2:32cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

2:44Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-betweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite.

3:13It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together, and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description, probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

3:34First up, a YouTube Q &A with Tim, featuring Tim's thoughts on new religions, AI companions, longevity levers, resurrecting forgotten languages, tactics for writer's block, and much more.

3:54Are there any global or national trends in the next five to 10 years that aren't talked about enough or you believe more people should be paying attention to? If applicable, how are you personally preparing for this or these shifts? I would say one that comes to mind is, for lack of a better term, digital emotional surrogacy. I'm sure there is a sexier or more elegant term for this, but the inevitable development that we will have, I would say, within the next probably two years, photorealistic avatars that we can interact with through, say, virtual reality. And if you haven't seen the demo of the meta metaverse with Zuckerberg, with Lex Friedman on his recent podcast on YouTube that showcases what this can look like, I would encourage everybody to at least watch the first five minutes to get a taste of things to come.

4:54With the ability to interact with photorealistic avatars, furthermore, with the ability to interact with photorealistic avatars who might be your favorite celebrity, like a Taylor Swift, with very convincing facial expressions, we are getting to a point where companies like Replica, for instance, Replica with a K at the end, K-A instead of C-A, where digital companions are going to become, for many people, not just a supplement to human interaction, but a replacement for human interaction. So I would say that the loneliness epidemic, from my perspective, is probably only going to get more nuanced, more complex, and more challenging to address in some respects.

5:42Because, especially for people like myself who are introverts, I'm taking active steps. I'll answer that second part of your question to maybe preemptively gird myself for this. But for those people who are already intimidated or taxed by going out and interacting with one person or groups of people, you could see the case of for many of them opting out completely. And I think we already have problems with declining birth rates. And there are many countries that are below replacement rates at this point. So I am very curious to see what societal impact that will have. The way I am counteracting that for myself is booking things on the calendar in advance.

6:25And by in advance, I mean, at this point, I'm probably six months out, booking trips, booking time with friends, booking time with family, getting it on the calendar, putting money behind it. It doesn't have to be a lot of money, but enough money that you can benefit from the sunk cost fallacy and feel invested so you won't cancel things. And really giving myself very few options for opting out of social interactions that I've proven to myself over time are always in my best interest. Even if I will drag my feet to get there in the first place, I will leave being better off. So those are a few thoughts in terms of trends.

7:11People are paying a lot of attention to, say, AI in broad strokes or machine learning in broad strokes. But my interest and certainly what I'm also watching in my audience are some of the societal implications and the psychological, sort of mass psychological implications of these things. So you will be able to take steps to perhaps put a moat around yourself to minimize the damage, but this is something to pay attention to. And I would also say that as these tools become more and more convincing, we've blown away the Turing test. It's already been beaten or passed. So as these tools and machines become more and more convincing, more and more appealing, I think that there will be the very natural impulse to offload more and more of the things that we currently handle in our own heads or manually.

8:06And if you want to preserve some of those abilities, you're going to have to decide to be perhaps a selective Luddite, or at least for periods of time, be a selective Luddite. For instance, how many people here would say their parents are better at directions offline, not using Google Maps, than the younger generations. And I would imagine a lot of people would raise their hand. And this is perhaps not controversial because people have decided to embrace something like Google Maps or many other competitors to help them with convenience and accuracy and so on. However, if you don't use it, you lose it.

8:49And it's easy to embrace convenience and not recognize severe atrophy of capabilities until it's very hard to reverse. So I think that that is a meta-awareness that needs to be developed as we are interacting with these increasingly seductive and powerful tools. So long answer, but these are things that I think about.

9:20Next up, the South Korea episode, recorded in Seoul and featuring Steve Jang, Tim's longtime friend and founder of early stage venture capital fund, Kindred Ventures.

9:37Just because I've teased it so much, what is Han? Just like Natsukashi is quite Japanese. Super Japanese. For Koreans, Han is probably the most talked about recent collective trait of Koreans that Koreans talk about, but then now people outside are talking about. And what it essentially boils down to is this idea of this collective suffering that the Korean people have through history. And manifests in this sort of, it's very complicated feeling of we are suffering and we share that pain with each other. It's not always a negative. it can sometimes drive us to express ourselves in strong ways.

10:27It can drive us to suffer together collectively. So collectivism is a very Asian thing, and independence is something that we revere in the U.S. That collectivism in Korea is Han. It's Han. And is it generally, you mentioned suffering, There are a lot of different descriptions of this. I was doing a little bit of reading. It's really hard to explain in English, actually. It seems very hard. Is it a type of, so sadness would be a component of that? Yeah. And also anger and angst. I was talking to David Chang from Momofuku. He's an old friend. And he asked me about Travis Kalanick. He had never met him.

11:08And he said, you knew him. He seems like he has a lot of Han. And I said, yeah, he's intense. and it expresses in a drive to succeed, right? And obviously we all know that story. But for Koreans, Han can be a drive to do great things, to bond together, to understand each other, to empathize. But it can also just be, like you said, the anger and the K-rage that you're talking about, which channeled correctly allows you to build an entire industry and succeed on a global level to create... What is it? Chips on the shoulder, make chips in the pocket? Pop culture phenomenons that win Grammys and that movies that win Oscars and light up the world to what's happening in this little country that used to be a poor developing country that was broken after colonization and a war.

12:01Where does that come from? And so I think a lot of Koreans romantically will describe it as like, we have this Han that drives us, but it's not perfect. It's not always positive. It can just result in chaos and destruction too. But it's this thing that feels very real. And I think that's what you're seeing in like Korean movies. That's what you're seeing in industries, the positive energy that can come out of it, not just the negative energy. So it's very complicated. But Jung, and these are like very simple Chinese characters and Korean characters. I wonder what the, I don't know the hunch off or any of these.

12:34So Jung is this connection or affection, this bond that you feel. And so a lot of people will say that they don't have 정 with someone or that a person does not have 정. This is a much more bonding, affectionate thing. And it's a very simple word, but it means a lot. 정 is also a complicated thing too. It's hard to describe without using a lot of words and adjectives and feelings and emotions in English. But when you say that in Korean, it's very simple. It means a thing that isn't translatable. And then if I were to take two words that would describe Korean people, and again, I'm not Korean. I'm Korean American.

13:19I'm gyopo. So I'm somewhat inside, but somewhat outside. And so I can compare it to how we are in America or other countries. And Han and Jung would pretty much cover. What is nunji? So nunji, I mean, you know Bobby Kim, Bobby Hunter. Yes. You had him on the show. I did. A friend of mine as well. Great conversation. He really got it right, which is it's reading the room, but nunci is like nun is your eyes. And it's the ability to see what's really going on, reading between the lines or reading the room. And this is really important. This is not a like happy, positive thing. This is, again, a defensive, inquisitive, analytical skill.

14:08Discerning eye. It's very critical. Yeah, critical eye. There are things that come up when you talk about people, and you talk about your connection with them. And so, if I come in and kind of bluntly or obtusely am rude in a group, I walk into a dinner or a room, I change the topic really obtrusively,

14:32he just like didn't read the room just kind of came in like a bull in a china shop yeah yeah there isn't and then you know with Han that's something that I actually have not heard a lot of Koreans talk about it I feel like a lot of Korean Americans and gyopo talk about it so it's an interesting thing I think it's a more recent modern definition and term. I don't think it's like an old classic phrase or term. So my sense is anecdotally that it's something that's been a little bit created. And then also with Jung, that's something that my parents talk about a lot. And my parents don't talk about Han.

15:15It's like, maybe the people that really feel it don't want to talk about it. And the people that want to find some reason or some rhyme to why they feel a certain way or something is happening to them, they'll create a concept. But I think it is very interesting to look at those two concepts, Han and Jung, and then that'll help you understand a lot in Korean society. It helps me a lot, actually. I'll give you one example. If you're a visitor to Korea, there's a host mentality. in Japanese called omotenashi. In Korean, there's a concept of you're my sonnim, my guest. And it's very strong, very similar to Japanese omotenashi, right?

15:59They want to exceed in treating you well. They want to give you food. They want to take care of you. They want to do that. They want to create this concept of jeong. Not to create the concept, but to have jeong with you. And that would be the ideal. because Koreans, most Koreans, not all maybe, but Koreans want to have that connection, that deep connection. They want to drink with you. They want to stay out late with you. They want to wrestle with you. They want to argue with you. They want to put their arms around your shoulder and sing a song after like downing some soju, right? They want to feel that like real visceral connection with you.

16:39And people often, I don't really enjoy it, but people often in business, even in technology, which is somewhat of a more cerebral industry. They want to go out late and have drinks until five, six in the morning. And in the US, we're like, hey, this is just way too much. Like, this is bedtime. They want to do that to know that they have a bond with you. They want to create that somewhat like abruptly, right? But you see that. Yeah, I'm trying to find the character for Jung. It's really bothering me that I don't. Oh, wait, wait. Okay. Yay. Jung is good. Jung is positive. Jung is optimistic. Yeah, a warm feeling of attachment.

17:21Yeah. Han, not so much. Yeah, Jung, you see that character, the Chinese character, I'm pretty sure in concepts like sympathy, those types of sort of feeling, emotive concepts. Empathy, sympathy, affection, bonds. in every movie, in every TV series. They're moving in and out of Han and Jung in the narrative, in the storytelling. And that's, I think, if you were to whittle it down, if you had to really simplify and reduce it to something very, like, at root level, I think it would be that Koreans are moving between Jung and Han in their storytelling, in their life, their business. There's a moment with probably with your friends in high school where it's all happy and positive.

18:15Then maybe after a critical moment or an emotional thing, or maybe if you guys were drinking beers at night as teenagers, where it flipped. Yeah. Usually I could tell if the eyes got really big, I'd be like, oh boy, here we go. I'm red. Yeah. Yeah. Red face, big eyes. I'm like, oh, oh, oh, oh. I think we're getting into Hulk smash. There's an energy frequency has changed. But yeah, so that, I mean, I wanted to, yeah, that's what I would think about when I think about, like, how to whittle it down to something basic.

18:54Next up, Dr. Willoughby Britton, clinical psychologist and founder of Cheetah House, a nonprofit that provides evidence-based information and support for meditators in distress.

19:11Are there any intensive retreats that you recommend or extended retreats? And I suppose the broader question is how can one know where to practice and vet properly, right? If someone wants to do a meditation retreat. And the reason I ask is, for instance, with psychedelics, which are still largely underground at this point, even though at some point, hopefully there will be an entire framework for administering them reasonably safely to people who fit certain criteria. If someone finds a facilitator who says, no one under my care has ever had a bad trip, that is a huge red flag because it means they're either deluding themselves, they're lying, or they're really inexperienced.

19:58Those are kind of the only options on the table because you're effectively using nuclear power to change the plasticity of the mind, of course, there are going to be adverse events. Of course, there are going to be outliers. And so you want someone who has actually handled those cases to push my F1 analogy. If you go to a racetrack, let's just say, and you're going to a track day and the track runner says, we've never had any accident of any type on our track. That's a bad thing because someone's going to have an accident. You want to make sure they have protocols in place, they have experience, they have the presence of mind to handle it calmly, et cetera, et cetera.

20:38So I could see that applying also to vetting meditation retreats, but putting myself in the position of someone listening to this, I might say, holy shit, of the people who've tried meditation once, X percentage have these persistent problems, this seems really, really dangerous. Maybe I just shouldn't meditate. So to maybe offset that a little bit. Are there retreats that you ever recommend? And how can someone vet if they're considering doing a retreat? A lot of it has to do with matching the goals to the person. So I don't want to necessarily rule out or recommend any particular retreat across the board.

21:20I think that there are certain retreats that are pretty repeat offenders. And those are ones that have high dose, 15 hours of meditation a day, no movement practice. Often you see an alternation between walking and sitting, and sometimes there's even yoga added. So more intense practices with no movement and also not necessarily tailored feedback from teachers. So I would be very careful before going on one of those. And I think just in general, there are so many different options for retreats these days. You can do like an afternoon retreat where it's only a couple hours. Start there. Titrate up.

22:11And you can do this at home. You don't even have to necessarily spend the money. You can just download an app and do that for a day and see how you do. Titrate up and add a day at a time rather than signing up for a 10-day retreat. Something I have not mentioned before is that I've done shorter meditation retreats, like two or three days with no issues whatsoever. So I just want to point that out. The other fine detail that I want to mention, because I think Spirit Rock runs a very good ship and I think they're very well formatted and they do have safeguards in place. that they explicitly advise against fasting.

22:49And I violated that rule. I overrode that. And also added the psychedelics, which certainly I had not mentioned to anyone until I had already sort of capsized. Yeah. This never used to be an issue. But I know that people are doing that, that people are bringing psychedelics on retreats. And I think a lot of the retreats, they have to manage a lot of people. People are already having challenging experiences, the regular kind of challenging experiences with meditation. And so to have to manage people who are also taking psychedelics, that's a lot. It's not really fair to a meditation retreat. No, it's going to be invisible to them for the most part.

23:36Yeah. I'm sure, right? It's not going to be reported. Just like people lie on their medical intakes about the psychiatric medications they're taking if they are wedded to taking psychedelics with a facilitator. This happens all the time. People sort of misrepresent their health status because they're so vested in this last Hail Mary, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Final Hope solution panacea that they see in psychedelics. And I have to imagine that also happens with meditation retreats. I should also say, I'd love for you to say a bit more about repeat offenders. Are there any other characteristics or format issues that you see producing more problems than others outside of what you already mentioned?

24:21So in terms of the retreat or meditation type or in terms of personal risk factors? The retreat or meditation type that seem to produce a higher volume of people with these issues? I would say retreats that recruit or are attracting a certain type of meditator, which, by the way, you fit the bill pretty exactly. When I heard the story, I was like, wow, that's pretty emblematic. textbook. Yeah. Young male, pretty educated, combining all sorts of tools, you know, fairly aggressive. We used to joke that one of the risk factors was zealotry, a kind of zealotry, a zeal. So something like that. And so there's a certain kind of almost like military, this is going to be a really, really hard retreat.

25:13Those types of retreats are a little bit more high risk. And I think there's also the combination of the person and the teacher slash format. One of the things that we found that was really shocking in the varieties of contemplative experience study is that on one hand, we expected to see people who ran into problems as people who had lots of problems in their lives. But when we actually looked at the data, 75 % had graduate degrees, MD, PhDs, JDs. These were like CEOs of major companies. These are like super high achieving people. And we're like, this is so interesting. How do we make sense of that?

25:52And we're like, oh, right. Being a high achiever is a risk factor. I was just about to say like the drug addiction in the medical profession is off the charts, like suicides off the charts. So it's because these are the kinds of people that you're like, okay, you're going to sit and follow your breath. And they're like, okay, like they're the ones that show up early for the meditation and they are the last ones to leave. They follow instructions. Exactly. And they would never modify the instructions for their own benefit. That would not even occur to them. Unless they make it more intense. You know, the kinds of people that, and this is kind of where trauma comes in.