#712: The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much More

24:52So New Year's resolutions, what else do you have? And do you have a date? I'm just going to hold your feet to the fire a little bit. For your three months, have you decided on a start date? oh so i've got i'm gonna invite you to this my birthday's in february and you're invited i got really lucky to get to know the artist sohn s-o-h-n do you know son at all i don't stuff oh so good so sohn has become a nice friend and he agreed to come play my birthday party for like 30 people amazing and so he's gonna fly out he's in spain right now he's gonna fly out and play and i gotta have a couple drinks there we're gonna have a little market yeah that would be a you'd be failing before you started it.

25:31If your first day were the day before your birthday. Yeah. So I'm going to, after my birthday is when I'm going to kick this off. So that'll be good. But so really quickly to hit on mine. So no drinks for three months, daily meditation, no brainer. I want to organize my brain in digital form. And so this is what's really interesting. In the last three months, multiple note-taking apps have enabled AI. And what they're doing now is they're saying, screw knowing where your notes are. ask questions of your corpus of data. So it's changing into a world where you can just enter all the data, enter all of Tim's brain into some place and say, hey, what was that one note I had that one time when I was at that Mexican restaurant?

26:14And I think it was about cat beds. And it will literally serve you up that note based on the AI and its crawling abilities. And I think that's just fascinating. So Notion has added that. There are three, They call them second brain note-taking apps that are really four that I'm considering. I'm still working through all of them to see which one I like the best. My candidates are Notion, Craft is amazing. Craft is a really beautiful note-taking app. It's a little bit more about here's the current day, start taking notes, and then you can interconnect the notes and do all kinds of fun things there.

26:47Is it spelled like the dictionary word, spelled like Kraft cheese? Yes. C-R-A-F-T. Yeah, Kraft. Obsidian is another one. Have you heard of Obsidian? I've heard of it. Or maybe I just like the name. It's more like graph-based interconnected nodes. All these backlinks, tying together thoughts and ideas. You've seen these cloud mappings of interconnected nodes. Note-taking apps and services, also a very crowded market. Very crowded. And capacities is the last one I'm looking at. I'm leaning towards craft. I think that's probably going to be my go-to. It won app of the year last year on iOS. Okay.

27:22And it's pretty fantastic. And I will say in that list and still actually, I think the largest market share, barely bidding out Notion is Evernote still. And so I installed Evernote, the latest version. I'm like, damn, this is actually a lot better. I thought for a minute there, it was going to go under. I was like, because it traded hands a little bit. There was a little bit of drama there. Yep. And got overly diversified, overextended. Yeah, but it's quite good. They've revamped the app and it's nice. So that and launching my podcast. And so just keep it simple. Launching the Kevin Rose Show.

27:55I'll give it a one second plug, which is kevinrose.com. If you want to sign up, I'll let you know when it launches. But I got some great guests lined up for that show. And taking it seriously, building out a real studio, doing it professionally, professional editors, the whole thing. So it's going to be great. It is going to be great. I can't wait to see. I want to keep it simple. What the roster is like. Not 10 things, but just like three or four. Yeah. What are yours? mine are and then i'm going to come back don't worry folks it's not going to consume the whole show but i want to ask you a question about ai so i'll preload that in your head which is where do you think people compromise their privacy because of really compelling convenience where they might regret it i'm just like where they might click yes in providing access where later they'll be like oh i really shouldn't have done that i two quick answers for that one i think is going to be photos.

28:48People believe that don't ever click yes to all photo access, especially if you've got dick pics. Wow. No, listen, I went there because a buddy of mine just got compromised last week. I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I'm not going to say who. This is, I swear to you, Tim, this is a true story. My buddy got SIM swapped. somebody took over his iCloud account and he's got a very my wife knows this so I can say this freely he's got a very beautiful wife and you know he's a good looking dude he's good solid B you know kind of like us you know like B minus whatever and he's got pictures of his wife like all in his iCloud he's traveling a lot and she's saying a little little naughty naughty and I'm like dude are you sending a little back or you know Because those are the ones, no one's going to complain about your wife getting leaked online.

29:45It's like, are your pics going to get out there online? And it was a really stressful few days for him. I am sure. Honestly, not to judge anyone who's fond of shooting around dick pics, I don't understand how anyone ends up in that position. Yeah. I'm just like, don't do it. No, don't do it. There are certain commandments. It's like, thou shalt not send dick pics. The downside is so much higher than any possible upside. Right. Plus, I mean, look, maybe I'm biased. I'm just like, who was, like, I don't think I have, you know, the Shrek of penises, but it's like, I don't understand what the appeal is also.

30:21Well, that's because you don't like penises. I'm not, yeah, I don't have a, I guess, like a collage of Schwanzas made into a piece of artwork on my wall. So maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just, that's based on the team. I mean, it's, for some people, that's kind of, they're like, you know, the way they flirt remotely and things like that. And that's, it's not me. I don't, I don't do that either, but I'm actually doing a full episode on my podcast on Dick Becks and on, on, on, on locking down specifically iCloud. Cause I think it is the scariest place for hackers to gain access to because they get your iMessage messages and they also get your, your photos as well.

31:01Any quick tips for folks? Just a little teaser. Here's a quick teaser. Number one thing you can do. So you want to hear the crazy shit that happened to him? No, no. This will blow your mind. Oh, God. Here. We can 10x my paranoia. Here we go. It actually wasn't a SIM swap. Okay. So what happened is, is that Apple, as you know, if you forget your password, they have something called I forgot, which is like, you can go there and say, I forgot my password, right? And it says, okay, well, do you have another device that you can confirm? No, I don't have another device. Okay. hey, well, what's your backup phone number, right?

31:33And so you can reset that password with the backup phone number that you put into the system. That all makes sense, right? A SIM swap, somebody steals your phone number and they get access to it and then that's how you get compromised. SIM swaps are getting harder to do because some of the big providers have caught on and they've tried to kind of like prevent that from happening, ask you more questions, all of that nature. Well, someone called in on his behalf to let's just say, you might want to bleep that out if they're a sponsor at some point but they called in they faked like it was him yeah and they didn't ask for a sim swap what they asked for they said hey can you forward the phone number just for an hour to this other number because i need it forwarded so normally this was straight social engineering no but you're straight social engineering but listen to this normally a forward wouldn't work because the text message doesn't get forwarded Only calls do.

32:25But you can go into Apple and you can say, I have auditory problems. I can't hear. Can you call me with the security code? So they did a quick forward. They called. It didn't go to his phone. It went to the hacker's phone. Apple read the security code to them via audio. They put it in, compromised, reset it, changed his phone number, compromised, download all of his data, and then tried to blackmail him to get his data back. Oh my God. Okay, so in terms of teasers for - Yes, teaser, number one thing to do is that you want a cell phone provider where there is not a phone number to call and it's really, truly, securely locked down.

33:04Your best provider for that in the United States is Google Fi. And what you do is you don't set it up with your Google account. You create a brand new Gmail account that no one knows, TimTimSecure8537 at gmail.com. Damn it, you just doxed me so hard. Exactly. And then you two-factor the off the crap out of that, turn on Google's advanced protection there. Then you sign up for a Google Fi account, which is a brand new phone number. Then you tell Apple that is your backup phone number because Apple can still service your main number, but only use that backup number to reset passwords. So there's no possible way anyone would know that backup number.

33:41So it's a whole thing. There's more steps to it than that. You get hardware keys involved, like Google's Titan key, which is the most hardcore of the usb c keys hardware keys uh uses uh one of their titan chips which is legit it's a whole thing but it's scary yeah terrifying yep time for me to double down my phone has been acting funny recently it's making me spooked a bit it dude it scares the crap out of me yeah it's like my phone has been acting a little funny and i'm like weird you know what sucks too is i've been going to whatsapp more and doing that seven days like delete all my messages because honestly, tell me if you feel this way.

34:19I know you feel this way because we have these conversations on text. There are things that you say with your friends that you're just like, if anyone read this out of context, I would seem like the most insert whatever. Oh, every person who uses group threads, if you are remotely interesting at all and funny, you're all fucked. Like if anything were made public, everybody's screwing. The number of jokes I've made that are not something I would want the world to see, but are all in good fun and just amongst friends, it's like in the thousands, right? And if that shit got online, I would deny it all.

34:54I didn't write that. Yeah, I did. The AI. But yeah, it's tough. So this is actually really good tequila. It's really smooth. So on the AI front, real brief. And then - Oh, we said photos was the one part. You asked what were the two places where, or what were the places where AI might compromise your data? So that's the first one. Yeah. So I think photos would be the main thing. And then the second one would be just this idea of these note-taking apps. Because if you're journaling, like for me, I have a fantastic therapist. I journal all of that. And so things like Obsidian, the reason I'm drawn to that one in particular is it's local only.

35:30So it only doesn't sync to the cloud. And when it does, it uses a local encrypted key. So not even they can read your data. I trust Notion. I trust it. But if someone were to compromise their key on their end, in theory, even though the data is encrypted at rest, meaning when it's not being used, it's encrypted on their hard drives, is still a potential vulnerability there. But at the end of the day, if someone really wants to read my therapy notes, it's like, whatever. We live in a world where you can just be like, ah, someone made that up. There's a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI, and there's a whole new world of exploits.

36:04Yeah. Wild.

36:08Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can. But I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. And right now you can earn 5 % APY, that's the annual percentage yield, with the Wealthfront cash account.

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37:33They have an AI feature, and they've trained this AI on all of my transcripts. So if you want to ask questions of 700 or so transcripts of the Tim Ferriss show, you can do that. And the results, in a lot of cases, are surprisingly good. There's several startups working on this. I saw one that actually indexed your show. And if you ask a question of it, we'll return the clip in which you said the answer to it, which is amazing. I was thinking the other day about a great startup that I don't have the time to build would be a podcast app that imagine this world and tell me that this is interesting to you.

38:13So it trains on all of your data. I'm listening to Tim Ferriss show. I'm halfway through an episode and you mentioned something that I don't understand or I'm just not familiar with. Oh, let's just say I was going for something random. Okay. And I hit pause and I hit the Tim AI button. Now it's trained on your voice so it can respond in your voice. And I say, Tim, what is ayahuasca actually before we continue the show? And you respond, you say, well, ayahuasca is this. And I talked about it in episode number 12, blah, blah, blah. And also number 27. And here's a clip of me saying this. And then you can rejoin the stream of the podcast and continue.

38:46So it's almost like you show up as a coach mid podcast for any questions I have about that show. So I can pick your brain and also as applied to your books. So I could go into your entire corpus of books that I have and ask questions of that data as well. That has to be the future, right? Yeah, that's interesting. How do you feel about it as a content creator? Does that make you a little uneasy? It doesn't make me uneasy on a content level because I operate from a place of abundance with my stuff because my stuff is so dense. It's not dense necessarily in a bad way, but it's like I could talk about the content of, say, one of my books for hours on dozens of podcasts and not come close to exhausting even 20 % of that book.

39:31so i'm very forthcoming with that the one flag i would say that i have for that particular example is that if it's my voice and so on and this is going to come up a lot with ai what is the indemnity what does liability look like right right if someone uses an ad and they're like well this tim ai told me that i should do a b and c or that i should right it's it's good x y 0.0001, you hope, percent chance to get it wrong, and then as applied to something dangerous. Because that could be telling you from the four-hour chef how to make runny eggs the wrong way, who cares? But it's like telling you to take the wrong supplement dosage is a whole other can of worms.

40:14There's dangerous, and then there's just opportunity for scammers. Right. Well, that's happening regardless, dude. Well, it is. Tim's going to be calling me up in no time. Well, not just on the AI kind of social engineering side, But for instance, there are, we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but there are people called career plaintiffs out there. Unfortunately, I know what this is. But for instance, there will be a law firm. What they do is they file class action lawsuits based on a couple. And like, Barbara and Bob Jones are the couple that they work with all the time. And they're like, hey, Barbara and Bob, Subway Sandwiches is selling 11 and a half inch subs, but they're calling them footlong.

40:52Go buy two of them and then complain with us and we'll file this thing and we'll give you 10 % of the upside. And I think that some of these AI models will provide a nice juicy bite of the apple. That was actually a real lawsuit, by the way, that you're mentioning. Oh, I know. Yeah. Oh, I know. But we won't get into the details of why I know that. But God, the US, man, some of these things, it's just astonishing that the rules provide for some of these creatures to exist and profit. Coming back to New Year's resolutions. Yeah. We had a nice big boomerang on that. Mine are, I would say, simple, not necessarily easy, as is true with a lot of things.

41:29The first is minimalist delegation. And what that means to me is delegating the why and the who, but not necessarily the how. So I think my predisposition is to be very detailed when I delegate various types of tasks or projects. In other words, what I would like to do more of is here is at the simplest level, five words of what I want to do, figure it out. And you can handle all the specifics. You should know that we should have at least three bids if we're putting something out that's expensive, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. But to really take my hands off the wheel in terms of over-prescribing the details, which I have a tendency to do because my mind is very detail-focused.

42:18I'm very meticulous. But I've found that more often than not, I can point to examples of where I'm providing too much step-by-step detail. And also people who receive that, in some cases, feel like they're being micromanaged. Not only that, they're not building the muscle. Exactly. Because they need to understand, the only way they can kind of build that muscle around who you are and what you want is by making mistakes and you saying, hey, I would have done it this way a little bit differently because of X, Y, and Z. And then they learn from that mistake versus you just prescribing. And it saves you a shit ton of time.

42:50It saves a ton of time. So what I'm experimenting with, and I've already started doing this, and I think I've made a lot of progress, is say less. Say less and be available for questions, but otherwise make it clear that there's a certain degree of wiggle room and space for errors that is okay. So when your admin walks in, you say sandwich. If a meatball sandwich throws, you throw it against the wall and you say, wrong fucking sandwich. That would be one way to handle it. And I remember there was, I want to say a blog post a while ago that was written by either Ben Kaznoka or Reid Hoffman. But Ben Kaznoka used to be the, let's just call it like aid to camp or chief of staff for Reid Hoffman.

43:35and what reed had said to ben was something along the lines and i remember this because i had to look it up this would be a chance for me to interrogate like the reed ai like what do you mean by blah blah blah he said in the service i'm paraphrasing here but like in the service of speed i'm willing to accept 10 foot faults and i was like foot faults fuck does that mean and i think it's a tennis reference which is like when you step over the line when you're serving and you get called for a fault. But in the service of speed, basically the way I interpret that is you can get 10 % wrong. Ideally, it's not really expensive, catastrophic stuff, but I'm willing to accept a 10 % error rate in the service of speed.

44:17So I'm trying to think about it along those lines because there's so many things that are either reversible or inexpensive where it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. You're better off making sort of wrong decision and then right decision and doing both of those quickly because you course correct, then taking a ton of time to deliberate in your mind when oftentimes you don't even have complete information. You don't know. But also, imagine you get that down to 5%, the extra effort required. What is that doing to you as a burden versus just letting go a little bit and letting those faults happen?

44:49And it's got to be a little bit freeing. Yeah, totally. Question for you, because I thought you recommended at some point this book to me, and I have two or three friends who have recommended it since. The Surrender Experiment? Yeah. Are you still a fan? Michael Singer? Yes. Yeah, I'm still a fan. Okay. Could you say a little bit about it? Because I don't know if we've ever talked about it on the podcast. Yeah, I mean, I haven't read it for probably two and a half or so years now, but Michael Singer is, I would say, just a general kind of, I don't know how to put it other than just like, I don't want to say spiritual guru or more just kind of like a salt of the earth type guy that has figured out that surrender is kind of the ultimate freedom.

45:29Like this idea that you can just release and let go puts you more in the present moment than pretty much anything else. And the whole book is around how when stuff comes in, it doesn't hit you. It doesn't hit and stick. So like to hit and stick and marinate and fester is not surrendering. It's letting it, the energy build and bring you down oftentimes. And the book is framed around this idea that the more you can let go, the more freedom there is, the more happiness there is. And as Henry Shookman put it, the freedom comes from not the tight grip on reality, but the slow finger by finger letting go of that grip.

46:14And part of the appeal for me as it was described to me, I have not read the book, but a very close friend of mine is reading it right now. And he has a course, by the way. That's fantastic. Okay. It's on a sounds true. It's a video course and it's, it's quite good. It's a video course. Yeah. Did you watch the, is it necessary to watch the video? I just like, he's a, he's a quirky personality and he's great. He's great on video. He's just like really funny. Yeah. And it seems like the, that book at least is his personal story, which automatically makes it more engaging for me. A hundred percent.

46:43Hypothetically. All right. So yes, letting go. So the minimalist delegation and the second point is actually related to that. that is the, in a sense, letting go. Quick creative collaborations is the second one. I only have three things. It's minimalist delegation, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot, which is pretty straightforward to me. Again, it's simple, but not always easy. We got to get into my physical reboot here in a minute. Yeah, we're going to talk about it. So quick creative collaborations. This is an area where you have seen me actually kick the tires quite a bit in the last year with cock punch, which by the way there's a ton coming with that which is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people but i have done a number i cock punch notes real quick here uh buy nfts stem ferris cock punch that's right hashtag to the moon no not financial advice jesus oh that was ai talking i didn't say that and in the process i mean using this nft project way back in the day which is when it launched in December of 2022, I guess, as a vehicle through which to do creative experiments, right?

47:56Emergent long fiction. That was kind of the whole point. And I have walked that, walked the talk in the sense that since then, and a lot of this has been invisible, but it will soon be visible. I've done creative sprints in say upstate New York with some of the top D &D and Magic the Gathering artists, or as you say, people who have done amazing, iconic work for those brands. Yeah. Doing character design and concept art. How's that felt to you? It was so much fun. It was so much fun. And I have had this narrative that I'm a better IC, individual contributor. I'm better as a solo operator. And that in some sense, I think because I've heard from some publishers and so on, that I'm a bit of a problem author because I'm very, very, very unwilling to compromise quality.

48:43I am unwilling to compromise quality, and I'm very meticulous. And so if somebody's not on that same page, I'm a problem. And so I developed this narrative that I was just prickly and difficult and didn't play well with others. How much of that do you think is true? Have you ever done a 360 review? I have done a 360 review. The feedback wouldn't support, I wouldn't say it supports that narrative. And in this particular case, gathered all these folks, had some writers as well, which I thought was going to be harder than the art side, because I can step back and say, you are all much better at art than I am, but I have an identity as a writer.

49:20And it was great. I had two writers, three artists, and had an absolute blast. The output was spectacular, which I haven't made public yet. And that emboldened me to do more and more experiments. And so I can't talk too much about it right now, but I am actually working on my first book project in seven years, eight years, and I'm doing it with a collaborator, which I thought I would never do in a million years. Okay, wait, you got to give us a little more fiction, nonfiction, fantasy. Nonfiction. This is OG TF style. Five hour. No five hour, but very dense, hyper tactical. Not dense, like very rich.

50:02In other words, It's not a bunch of fluff. I'm not turning a blog post into a 300-page book. You're going to want each. Can you tell us what it is? I can't. I can't. Can you give me like a genre? I can't really give you a genre what I will say. It's not a cooking book again, is it? It's not. I think everybody got their fill of cooking with that. I'm very proud of that book, but holy shit, that almost killed me. No, I'm not doing that again. Okay. Also not making the foolish decision to say to myself, you know what I should do? you know what would be fun is for me to do 30 to 50 % of my own photography for a 700-page cookbook.

50:37Don't do that. Not archery? If you're not a photographer, don't do that. It is so much work. Oh my God. I really respect to the photographers out there. I underestimated that one. But you dodged the archery question. It is an archery book. It's not an archery book. I'm planning on doing more archery. That is part of the physical reboot. Okay. But the quick creative collaborations, this book is going to be about, I would say how to find the essential and ignore the trivial. That's the very broad strokes. I am collaborating on writing, which I thought I would never do. It is going better than I ever possibly could have imagined.

51:16And it has opened the floodgates for me to think about what other collaborations I could pursue. Screenplays, animation, television, who knows? but I've realized that if I am paired with someone who really gives a shit about quality and cares about being really proud of their work, I'm totally fine. I can collaborate really well with those people. They just have to have really high standards. And I'm excited to do more of that. So the screenplay side and the TV and animation is particularly interesting to me. So becoming more adept with a format like a screenplay. And the format itself has intimidated me.

52:01And I feel like I just need to be locked in a room with someone really good for two weeks and be like, you cannot leave until you have something to ship. It can be a rough draft, but it has to be pretty much ready. And I think that's doable. So the quick creative collaborations is something that I'll be doing more of. And then last on the physical reboot. I have been such a piglet in the last month. You're looking thick. That's a T-H-I-C-C, folks. Looking thick. And I'm not in terrible shape, but I am planning on continuing to be a little piggy for Christmas and the holidays because I'm going to be home with family.

52:42And I love butter cookies. I love gingerbread cookies. This is kind of like you not committing to your three months before your birthday. That'd be stupid. So I'm going to be spending January, February in really intense outdoor training and skiing and ski touring and so on. So I'm not worried about burning off what I'm accumulating because that's going to happen, especially at high altitude. I'm going to try and visit you by the way. Awesome. January. That would be fantastic. So the physical reboot is up there and I'm optimistic about that because on the internal level, meaning biomarkers and so on, almost every biomarker is the best that it's been in like a decade.

53:19Wow. After the last year. That is not me. That sounds amazing. Yeah. And some of that has been certainly physical practice exercise. A lot of that has been dietary. How's your ApoB? The best it's ever been. How low? I can't recall offhand. 20s or 30s? I mean, it's within the aggressive Atiyah. Yeah. target range. AST, ALT, fine? Oh yeah, those are always fine. Homocysteine, always good? Homocysteine's always fine. Yeah, my liver enzymes... What have been your issues then? What was that? What are your issues? What did you correct in your blood work? There are a couple of things that I've corrected.

53:52So I have historically high uric acid levels. Oh, but you're on allopurinol then? I'm not on allopurinol because I had a reaction to it, which can be very dangerous. Yes, it can. So I'm on something called Uloric, which is fine. It's actually a better, a cleaner drug, I think, at TSS. People can, yeah, there's a bunch of debate around it because there were some smaller studies that were arguably poorly designed that did some type of head-to-head and it got poo-pooed. But uloric, for me, is a good option, not medical advice. Talk to your fucking doctor, please. I don't play one on the internet.

54:21In addition to that. That's from your meat, by the way. You know that. That's your meat intake. No, it's not. Are you sure? Yes, I'm sure. Typically, uric acid, they used to call it the king's disease, right? Because it causes gout. And it was from like wine and meats and fats. It's considered a disease of apples. Okay, so the wine is more interesting. Okay. So yes, people associate it with, if I'm not mistaken, purines. And it gets associated therefore with protein intake also. But there's a blog post, it's easy to forget, I have a thousand plus blog posts, which actually bridged the books to the podcast.

54:55It's easy to forget that connective tissue. A thousand plus blog posts. One of them is called something like the hidden chapter from good calories bad calories good calories bad calories book great book uh gary and one of the chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor was about fructose and how it is anti right which also ties into uric acid yes so What I have seen in myself at least, it doesn't matter if I am carnivore diet, vegan, fasting, whatever dietary liver I try to pull, uric acid is high. It just does not matter. And that's also hered. This runs in my family. The other constellation of issues are all cardiac, like lipid profile related.

55:45Also hereditary. Dietary intervention, with the exception of one thing that I'll mention. Are you on a statin? I'm not on a statin. Okay, well, your ear will be, it's fine. Yeah, but just to be clear, so there are different reasons that your lipid profile can be out of whack. In my particular case, and I might be able to put something in the show notes as a resource. There are sophisticated labs or companies that will run labs that sort of fine slice a lot of this. Boston Heart? I think it's Boston Heart. Yeah. And then you need someone to interpret the tea leaves, obviously, in which case you need a very competent doctor.

56:21In my case, I'm a cholesterol hyperabsorber. More accurately, I'm a sterile hyperabsorber, which means I can also absorb a lot of sterols from, say, plant matter, which is why automatically if you reduce meat or eliminate meat, it doesn't mean that your cardiac and lipid profile will improve. And you actually see a lot of folks for which it goes the opposite direction because they end up consuming a lot more refined carbohydrates, their fasting glucose goes up, and they end up with a whole host of issues, in some cases associated with fructose, right? Like, oh, agave nectar, brilliant. Well, maybe not so brilliant.

56:56and for that reason in my case i'm taking azetimibe actually i'm taking something called nexlezette which is absurdly expensive welcome to the united states in this case but it's a combination of azetimibe and something called bempedoic acid azetimibe very well researched pretty well understood bempedoic acid a newer player on the scene but very interesting and the combination of those two plus the euloric are what got a number of biomarkers of concern, not crazy. And I've done not only the usual cardiac calcium scores, which are helpful, but incomplete in a lot of ways. I've also done angiograms, which you do not want to do willy-nilly all the time, but I wanted to see if there were any precursors to any issues.

57:43So far, so good. In my particular case, those things plus reducing saturated fat intake. dude saturated fat makes a difference killer it makes a difference all my numbers it makes a difference so in my case you know if it would be a bad idea for me to hit the like mct smoothies right right so yes bulletproof coffee bad idea for me also mct i don't know if it does it to you but it uh disaster pants yeah risk goes up yeah yeah risk goes up by about 10x yeah if if you're running the bathroom with the mct oil yeah yeah if you are thinking to yourself you know in 2024 I want to shit my pants more often.

58:18I would recommend a cocktail. Yeah. Yeah. Creatine, double espresso and MCT oil problem solved. Don't ask me how I know that, but you can guess. Don't have that right before you're driving to the airport for your international flight. Also pro tip. So the minimalist delegation, fast delegation, embracing reversible or low cost possible mistakes, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot. And honestly, with the physical reboot, a lot of that is old news. The stuff that works, works. It's like kettlebell swings, ski touring. Yeah. Zone two, which I'll get to very naturally with what I'm going to be doing in terms of hiking and ski touring and so on.

58:59Basic, basic, basics. I shouldn't say basics. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. And just when in doubt, return to fundamentals. It's like weight training once a week. That is better than nothing. Once a week. and then the zone two. But also for me, it's like one or two sessions of very, very hard technical Pilates to hit everything that I'm gonna miss anyway, like medial glute and transverse abdominis. I'm getting back to my glars in a year, by the way, yeah. And that's about it. Do less than you think you can do. If some of your goals are around physical reboot or recomposition, set the bar where you are sure you can clear it.

59:38Yeah. So I wanna talk to you real quick about, you mentioned the physical body reboot. One of the things that all of my physicians, not all, it sounds bougie to say all my physicians, my primary care physician - Tell us, President Obama. Has been concerned about is I have slightly elevated blood pressure. And it's not to the point where I should have it treated with medicine. But there's breathing exercises you can do. There's a device called Respirate, which Peter Atiyah recommends. I don't know. Yeah, it's fantastic. It hooks around your chest. It's like a strap. And then you put in some ear pods that are connected to this device and it walks you through a series of breathing exercises and it's clinically proven to lower your blood pressure.

1:00:19So ATIA recommends that as kind of first line defense for slightly elevated blood pressure. There is a device that is approved in the UK and the EU and it's called Actia and it's a horrible name. Actia, not ATIA. They're going to get a suicide from ATIA. Yeah, so it's A-K-T-I-I-A. I'm wearing it on my wrist right now. So if you're watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest Fitbit. It's super tiny. The battery life is five days. It does every hour blood pressure monitoring. It's clinically proven accurate. And Atiyah is testing it right now in his lab with his folks there.

1:01:01It is not approved in the US. So what I had to do is I bought it online First, I got a VPN. I proxied into their website to make it look like I was in the UK. And then I bought it online, shipped it to a friend in the UK who sent it to me in the States. I then created a fake iCloud account in the UK with a fake email address and VPN to act like I was in the UK on a separate phone that I had not sent in, like one of my older iPhones. And then I was able to get the app installed through the UK App Store because it's not available in the US App Store and got it to work. So technically this is not legal in the United States.

1:01:39Yeah, contraband. But it's, you know, I'm actually monitoring it and the breathing exercises are helping. High salt intake combined with water is huge. If you have a salty steak or anything, I can notice, just like when we, remember when we first got into CGMs, you were way before I was, but in the continuous glucose monitors, you got me into them and you would be surprised because you would sit there and you'd be like, oh, banana doesn't do anything. and some people banana shoots you through the roof, right? Or rice for me, oh my God, through the roof. I don't know about you, but rice for me is a huge offender.

1:02:12Rice affects me less than it affects you, but it affects a lot of folks. Yeah. Footnote, in a previous episode, we talked about - The rice cooker. Which drains out the water - Yeah. Which dramatically reduces the glycemic response. Yeah. But back to our scheduled program. Yeah, we can link that in the show notes as well. But this for me has been like, okay, I just had a salty meal. now let me chug a bunch of water along with that meal and actually i will notice a difference i do not get into those what they call like the high orange levels of blood pressure just by my water consumption so meaning you you help or hurt meaning if i drink water by drinking more water drinking water and there's evidence to back this up but he's had people on the podcast have talked about this but anyway it's another device that i hope knock on wood they've submitted to the fda Okay.

1:02:59The hope is that we'll have this device approved in the States here. I don't know, next six months to a year. So we'll see. Very cool. Anything else on the physical reboot side? I mean, the three months with no booze, I think it's going to be, if you can do it, no offense, it'll be a revelation. I think it's going to be amazing. Speaking of it, it looks like you're not a big fan of your own tequila. I just noticed you're not really drinking any. So first of all, no, I mean, if you don't like it, it's just selling it. It's also, we started recording at 3 p.m. So usually I'm not a 3 p.m. drinker, but you know what?

1:03:32I want to be in bed by seven. So it'll be good. Since, you know, when, oh, geez. Okay. So since we're checking back into the home anyway, where they're going to put our socks on and put us to bed, no problem. Yeah, yeah. All right. Dude, let's retire at the same retirement home. That'd be so fun. That'd be so much fun. Yeah. I'm not going to say something. This is going to be bad. Cheers, man. So let's see. Cheers. And so let's talk about, but taking breaks from stuff because I have kind of a wild story, which I don't think we've talked about at all. I have a number of wild stories. Oh, yeah. I got one big one for today.

1:04:08You have a big one too, and I think these are going to be interrelated in a sense. So I'll piggyback half of it after what I believe you're going to share. But I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated, which was the first - Cold turkey, which was the first time I've done that probably, I would have to imagine, since I was, what, 16? I mean, it's been forever. Let me ask you a question here. Why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like, oh, a half a cup of coffee today, and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later? Like, why go? This is like the extreme Tim. Well, did you get headaches?

1:04:44It's extreme. Yeah, I got headaches. But it was during a period where I could accept - You had Vicodin, so you were - No, I didn't use Vicodin. I knew that I could accept the headaches, and I had a period of time where there really was a low cost, where professionally I was taking three to four weeks off the grid and I knew that I had a grace period where I could sustain it. So I did effectively no caffeine, no alcohol, and I suppose the most important other item. No sex. No sex, no ejaculation, which we can talk about that, but that's pretty easy. The harder one is I did nothing sweet. So not just containing sugar, but nothing sweet.

1:05:24So anything that has an artificial sweetener was out. Would you consider this tequila sweet? I would not consider this tequila sweet. And there is a bit of subjectivity for a lot of it. It has sweet notes to it. Yeah, it's got some floral notes to it. But by the kind of letter of the law, I wouldn't consider this subjectively to be sweet. But for instance, any kind of juice, out. Any type of sweetener, of course, out. Let's just say different types of plantains, if they are sweet to the taste, they're out sweet potatoes. out. Was that hard for you? That's not hard for me. It doesn't seem hard, but let's just extend this.

1:06:00Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol or some kind of crap in it that is a sweetener. So no brushing your teeth for two weeks. I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb, just baking soda. Straight up. I brush my teeth with that for a handful of weeks. And what you also realize is in the US, or in this case, when I went to Korea, if you ask people if A, B, or C has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost everything that you come across. And that was interesting. It was challenging because it severely limited what I could eat. But the caffeine was an amazing experience. Now, I alluded to this a little bit earlier.

1:06:48I'm back on the sauce over the last week, week and a half, which I regret, number one. And I'm paying a lot for. There are costs. In terms of sleep? Let me back up, and I'll just give you the punchline. Tell us why you did this to begin with, because you didn't mention that. It wasn't a New Year's resolution. Why? It started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff, and there were restrictions. And then I just extended everything. But weird stuff, psychedelic stuff. Yeah, psychedelics. Okay. which will tie into a part of my strange story later. But I hadn't done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years.

1:07:26So I took restrictions very seriously. I think that is important in my opinion. And then I extended them all. And I wanted to see in part because I met someone who said they had stopped drinking anything caffeinated, cold turkey, because they felt like a loser because they'd become dependent on it and they'd missed a really important ski day, like one of the first days of the season. And they're a really good skier. And they were with a group of people and they were the only, I believe they were the only person who skipped. And that day they were just like, no more. And to this day, you know, like two years later, caffeine free.

1:08:02Wait, wait, wait. I lost something there. When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing? Because they couldn't have coffee. Because they didn't have coffee that morning and they were so tired that they felt like they couldn't do it. So they stayed on the ski lift. Instead of getting off, they just went around and went straight back down and called it a day. And to their credit, they were just like, this is fucking loser behavior. Enough. And they went to zero. And that caught my attention because when you talk to someone, no offense to anyone who fits in this category, but let's just say if someone is a Mormon and they've never had caffeine, that's not my life, right?

1:08:47They've never had a hit of the sauce. Yeah. I mean, although technically their workaround is like Diet Coke instead of coffee, but we're not going to get into the weeds here. But like, if somebody hasn't had a taste of the like delicious poison, there's so many things, right? There's so many things like this where it's like, okay, if you've had one significant other and you've never been out and about and like sampled the buffet of the world. Like we can't really have, it's very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships. Like it's just, it's a different situation. Same with caffeine, but this person had been hitting the sauce for decades and then they got off and that was inspiring to me.

1:09:26Then I had this restriction and I just extended it. And just to give the punchline, my sleeping issues that I've had for decades, every single one just vanished. Best sleep of the last 20 years. Woke up wide awake every morning after the first, let's just call it a week and a half. Had tons of energy and got super high volume of stuff done. And what I realized, and part of the reason to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things. I was curious what my real baseline was. Like, what does real baseline look like? What is Tim untouched, unaffected by all these various supplements?

1:10:10Oh, that's another thing. I took a month off of all supplements. I only took my prescription meds, like the Uloric and so on. Yeah. I got rid of all supplements. No Deca or Tesoptero or anything? No Deca. No nothing. Okay. And I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what the sort of pure baseline Tim is. And it turns out baseline Tim does really well. Why go back then? You got hungover. No, I didn't get hungover. I didn't get hungover. Because it's good after I hangover, a little bit of a little juice. So I also, before I went to South America, I listened to an audio book, which was called or is called The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine.

1:10:52That is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it's the easy way to quit smoking. And I know people who have literally, multiple people who've listened to this, they have their last cigarette and they're done and they stop. So it's a little hokey, but that made an impact on me as well. I'll do that for January and write that down on my list. January, no caffeine. And now that I know I can do it, I'm definitely going to do it again. The reason that I got back on it, and this is, I'll actually add just a little bit of color. The first is that there were days without caffeine where I would say to myself, I'm tired.

1:11:24I really want a cappuccino. But I realized, because I interrogated, I was like, well, I'm not allowed to have a cappuccino. Am I really tired? And I came to the conclusion that no, I wasn't actually tired. I just wasn't fucking wired. You see what I mean? Like my normal had become multiple coffees in the morning and God knows where else. So I had taken as my baseline a default, I mean, wired sounds too negative, but like stimulated state. And when that was removed, the story that I conjured was I'm tired. But when I was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast, podcast turns out great.

1:12:12I'm like, okay, let me revisit this. I wasn't tired. I was just calm. Interesting. Crazy. Interesting. And why did I get back on coffee? Coffee for me, I've realized, is probably like alcohol for a lot of folks. And there's some times, I'm not going to lie, look, let's be honest here. There are times when it's like, I want to take the edge off. Sure, have a drink. But more often, because I don't drink that much, I use coffee as a a security blanket. When my life gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted, and things seem a little out of control, or I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through something, walking to the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee, it's a life raft of consistency.

1:13:00Yeah. We saw this during COVID, right? Where people would line up at Starbucks for three hours to get a coffee because it was like the one semblance of normal. It's like a ritual, you know? And there's also a high to it. There's also a high. So even though I realize intellectually that it's counterproductive, like when I am feeling as I have been for a host of reasons that I won't bore people with, but just gone through a pretty challenging week or two, my response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee, even though it increases anxiety physiologically. This is one thing actually we've known each other for a long time.

1:13:34I don't know the answer to this. I don't know that I've seen you do this. Are you an afternoon coffee guy at all? I don't know that I've seen you do mate maybe a little bit later. I typically do not have coffee in the afternoons. Yeah. And I really try not to have caffeine in the afternoons, which I violated this week. So in the last two days, or I should say in the last, let's just say in the past seven days, I have violated that. And what I've realized, because I've run the N of one now, and there a bunch of different variables so i realize this is imprecise it's not a perfect science is that i can drink coffee and fall asleep that's not the problem but it disrupts my sleep architecture quality of sleep yeah i wake up after three days very little time three days of drinking caffeine i wake up and i have circles under my eyes like dark circles are you quantifying this in the sense of like are you wearing an aura ring do you have any other data where you're looking at it i'm not currently capturing the data with an Oura ring, but I have in the past.

1:14:37I've seen what it looks like. So I know that's the case. I'm falling asleep. My time in bed, if we're just looking at a clock, is fine. But I'm waking up tired. I hate that. And then what do you want? You want another hit? Of course. You want more of the sauce? First thing, a little juice. And there's a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. I don't think for the rest of my life I'm going to be caffeine free. But now I have a better awareness of what my baseline looks like. So I can return to that. So let me tell you something crazy. This was before I met Doria. So I'm trying to go back in years now.

1:15:14So probably let's just call it 15 years ago. I gave up coffee for about six months. Six months. Yeah. That's legit. Well, but I wasn't really that addicted to it. I was having like a cup every other day or whatever. I went back. I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time and I went to Ritual coffee, which is fantastic coffee place. Great place. And I ordered a tall, like single origin coffee and I drank the whole thing. And I will tell you when you go six months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee, you feel high as a kite. I was like 10 X what I feel today with a cup of coffee.

1:15:46Cause your body just, I mean, it is a powerful drug when you've gone without it for a while. Super powerful. Do you have any sense of how long it takes to like get that back? Have you done any research? To get what back? That initial like childhood high of like that first cup of coffee. How long do you go without before you get back? Yeah, until you like... I don't know. I don't know. I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking, how long does it take to develop a tolerance and experience with withdrawal symptoms? It is so fast. Oh, so fast. And one day, if you go without coffee, for serious coffee drinkers will be headaches.

1:16:22Yeah, well, I would say, Furthermore, if you stop drinking coffee, and I'm using coffee as a bit of a scapegoat here. I love coffee. But if you go without caffeine, and then you get back on caffeine, and you're on it for two or three days, and then you stop again, my personal experience is you are going to feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is unlike most other drugs. It is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug. I'm not recommending this, but hypothetically, if you were to smoke cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you're fine. Yeah. No problem. You're not going to have a headache the next day.

1:16:55But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that's in part because it is often disrupting sleep architecture. That's my vote, at least. One question for you. One of the things that I have yet to try that I've been really curious about is I know that there are cultures, I can't remember, I'm going to screw it up. I don't know if it's like an Inca or, I can't remember exactly which culture it is from Mexico that did high-dose chocolate, almost like a cacao ceremony, where they drink this super purified cacao, insane amounts of caffeine, and they reach these kind of spiritual states.

1:17:32Have you ever heard anything about that? I haven't read reports, but I know that, for instance, I want to say in some places in Mexico, certainly in Guatemala, you have cacao ceremonies. I don't know. I was invited to one one time, a cacao ceremony. So I don't know the historical record. I don't know how much of these things were used 100 years ago, 1 ,000 years ago. There are many new practices that have created the narrative of age-old use for a veneer of credibility when, in fact, things were very different 1 ,000 years ago. You have to imagine cacao was a staple. Cacao has been around for a while.

1:18:11So in the case of cacao, my understanding is it contains theobromine, which in and of itself is a fascinating word. So theobroma, theo, like theology, broma, food, food of the gods, theobromine, which is pharmacokinetically is very meaning. Just if you were to look at the graph of peak and half-life and so on, it's quite different from caffeine is my understanding. Is that the vasodilator of the plant? What causes, because I know like cocovia, for example, Are you familiar with that supplement, CoCoVeA? Yeah, it's a cacao supplement from a large company, I believe. Yeah, from Mars, actually. From Mars, yeah.

1:18:48But the crazy thing is, I was talking to Rhonda Patrick about this, and she has had one of her, I think it was her mother-in-law or something like that, high blood pressure, takes CoCoVeA, drops it down because it's a vasodilator, and is a big fan of it as well. And it's been showing cognitive improvements as well. Yeah, I'm not sure. It very well could be the case. I mean, when you get, the dose makes the poison, the dose also makes the transcendence for a lot of different plants. And so in the case of cacao, I have experienced higher, let's call it higher dose cacao, and you can reach an ultra state for sure.

1:19:22I'm going to caveat what I'm about to say with the do not ever do this warning. But for instance, there are plants that at high enough doses are absolutely psychedelic, which I would never recommend because you can die. Let me repeat that fatal risk. So do not try this at home. But tobacco, as an example, has a very rich history in South America and elsewhere, but especially in South America, where high doses of juice have been consumed. Every mode of administration you can imagine has been done and is very common down there. There's a book by Johannes Wilbert, which is titled Along the Lines of Tobacco and South American or tobacco in South American shamanism.

1:20:09It is very dense. It reads like a PhD dissertation. But when you consume pretty much through any route imaginable enough tobacco, you can experience a psychedelic experience. Can I tell you a story about this? I've had this. So I was in San Francisco at the time and they have, this was called a decade ago. They have a bunch of chefs that are very experimental. I won't name the chef, but it was a one Michelin star chef that infused tobacco leaves into an alcohol. And you have to be insanely careful. If you look up online, like you said, if you put too many leaves in the infusion, you will have a lethal overdose of nicotine that will kill you.

1:20:49And so this chef knew what they were doing. I would never try this at home. They made me a bourbon infused tobacco cocktail. And I was like, it sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot. You don't need to sleep anytime soon. No, listen, I drank this one drink and I'm like having a good time, getting a little chatty, you know, like, Ooh, this is fun. And then dude, I get up to use the bathroom and I swear to God, it felt like my feet were sinking into the ground as I was walking or like I was walking down to the stumps of my knees. Like I was like, my legs were like collapsing as I was walking. You're like, wait a minute.

1:21:24I was like, cause I don't smoke tobacco at all or anything like that. And it like hit me like a ton of bricks. And I'm like, I am high as shit. Yeah. Like it is a very potent substance. Like especially for non-smokers, you gotta be really careful. So come in full circle. Right. So cacao, powerful, fascinating plant, sacred in a number of different cultures. Tobacco, be very careful folks. It is powerful and potentially lethal. And then coming back to caffeine. It is the, as I understand it, the world's most commonly consumed psychoactive plant. Tea is the number one. Tea and coffee. Yeah. And it has this place.

1:22:09I love my cup of coffee, trust me. I had one this morning. And I think the exercise, if you can do it, not everyone can, but of rediscovering what your baseline is, what you actually felt like when you were 12 or 15 is so valuable. It is so valuable because I now know what that feels like and I know that I can return to it as an adult. Yes. That holds true to anything that you're doing, call it alcohol, any substance that you've become dependent upon. It doesn't have to be just caffeine. It can be anything that you almost feel like you can't live without yeah right sugar carbs yeah some activity traveling late night pizza yeah late night pizza i mean if you're a road warrior and you just travel all the time because you say yes to everything like okay what does it feel like to sit at home yeah if such a thing exists for you for one month what does that feel like yeah and if a bunch of weird stuff comes up like maybe as tara brock would say like to one sage only one question matters what are you unwilling to feel oh my god i have to have her on the podcast that is one of my top guests yeah so So if you haven't read it, folks, Radical Acceptance, which, Dar Dar, I owe Dar Dar thanks for.

1:23:23So if you don't get the reference. Dar Dar is my wife, Daria. And we call him Tim Tim. Which came about, actually, let's give people like a real look into the archives. So Tim Tim came about because we were on a trip to China to drink Puerh tea all over the place, which was one of the weirder trips I've ever been on for a lot of reasons. We were in the Yunnan province together in the middle of nowhere. We had some very strange experiences on that trip. drank a lot of tea, had a motley crew of people with us along for that ride. And there was another Tim on the trip. So there was a question of how do we keep the two of you separate?

1:23:57And you came up with, I believe, Tim Tim. I mean, it was a collaborative kind of real time. That's how Tim Tim came about. So Daria, who is a neuroscientist by training, which is why I actually took the book Radical Acceptance seriously, because all due respect, I love Tara, love this book, it had a huge impact on me, but the title gave me an allergic reaction. I was like, oh God, another one of these? I just, sounds hand wavy. Okay, kumbaya, didgeridoo, like, okay, I just can't do it. But the fact that Daria, who has one of the lowest tolerances for bullshit hand wavy stuff that I know of, the fact that she said she gained from it, gave me permission to dive into it, which then had a really big impact on me.

1:24:45So coming back though, if you feel like you can't live without X, that is often a great signal or at least a prompt to ask yourself, what might an experiment look like for two to four weeks to go without X? Been super valuable for me. That's awesome. I wrote it down. No caffeine in January. I'm going. I'm serious. You know, I might double down and do it with you. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Nocalf. All right. Let's talk about my experiments, shall we? Yeah, let's do it. I'm excited. I'm excited about this because I also don't know the details. I know that - You saw the text messages. I saw some of the text messages and I was very curious.

1:25:23Okay. So I don't know how to frame this. Let me start off at the best I can. So this is a big one. You're pregnant. I'm pregnant. What was the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger got pregnant? What was that? I can't remember the name. But yes, I know the movie. Basically, I have the same physique too. So basically, for people that know me or don't quite know me, I've done a bunch of stuff in terms of being an entrepreneur and an investor and these different things. And one of the hats that I put on a couple of years ago was dabbling in the world of Web3. And Web3, for those untrained, it's cryptocurrency.

1:26:01It is decentralized internet. It is NFTs. It's art on the blockchain. Ownership, right? If 1.0 is read-only internet, 2.0 is read-write, 3 is actually owning a piece of what's on the plane. So it's a very exciting frontier. And it's filled with a bunch of explorers that I would say, it's a small number of people, call it probably, in terms of people that are excited about digital art, call it 250 ,000 people or less. But it is a serious group of people that are enabling a new canvas to take form in front of us. And I believe in my heart of hearts that for all the bad press that we see about NFTs and all the scams, and don't get me wrong, there's tons of that shit.

1:26:43There is something true about if you had to close your eyes and wake up in 20 years, will collectible digital art be a thing? Of course it will. And the blockchain is a perfect place to prove provenance, to prove scarcity. There's a lot of advantages there. long story short i launched uh something called moonbirds which was a pfp project i remember the text i got on the day of that launch oh my god so we launched this collectible nft and it skyrocketed way beyond what we had ever thought so to give you all a sense from launch to one year in over a billion dollars has been traded in Moonbird's NFTs.

1:27:26That's so wild. And I did not expect that. I really didn't. But with that comes trading. And I have never lived the world of trading. I've grown companies to quite some size, but I've never taken a company public. And when you take a company public, i.e. NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange, you deal with the ups and downs and feedback from people that are now stakeholders of that particular company. It's different. This is an equity. Holding an NFT does not make you a shareholder. It's very different. But they still pay attention to what is the price of this NFT. So when the NFT goes up, times are good.

1:28:06People are happy. And when it goes down, people are not happy. I've had people truly hug me and say they've paid off their house because they sold one of my NFTs for$200 ,000 and they were stoked. And it was like tears kind of hugging. I've had people basically tear me apart saying, I am the other person on the other side of that equation that bought that NFT for, let's call it whatever, 50 ,000, not 75 ,000, 10 ,000, doesn't really matter. It's all relative to how much that person has as an individual. And how are you going to fix this? Because NFTs are down and they need to go up, right? And some of it is on what we build to try and build bigger and better things for the ecosystem and try and hopefully prove that we are a company here for the long term.

1:28:57It has taken a serious emotional toll on me as an individual. I've had many, many sleepless nights. I've had anxiety like I've never had before. I've had to work with therapists and I've had to reach out to my primary care physician and get anti-anxiety medicine, which I've never had to do before. I have had some dark moments, not dark like in suicide, but dark as in it's destroyed me because I've always considered myself an honest person. I've never been here to screw anyone over. You're also a very, I consider you to be like an empathic feeler. Maybe the right word is like you're a deep feeler.

1:29:41I am a feeler. So if something like that is sitting with you, you take it very personally. And I remember when you had like stomach issues for so long. Oh my God. IBS related issues. So this year I've been treated multiple times for these types of issues with physicians, all kinds of things. I had, they discovered, you know, the high blood pressure thing was discovered because I have a brain aneurysm right now that's on the smaller side and they're watching it and I'm fine. But those grow, the more stress you're under because the more blood pressure that builds up, the larger the aneurysm can grow.

1:30:17And so, you know, as you could imagine, all these things hit you at once. And so I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn't go to work. I felt like I kind of just needed to reset, you know? And Huberman, who I love, who's been on my podcast, Andrew Huberman is a top 10 podcast now. Oh my God. He's killing it. Killing it. Love that guy. He's doing such an amazing job of executing. I don't think I've seen anyone better at doing monologues the way that he can do them about scientific topics. I mean, just if you haven't subscribed to Huberman's podcast, I mean, it's along with Atiyah's top five medical podcast to subscribe to along with Rhonda Patrick.

1:30:55I mean, they're all heroes. Huberman did a couple hour episode on ketamine therapy. And ketamine therapy, you know, it's used for PTSD, it's used for severe depression, and it's used for anxiety. And it sounded really interesting. It rewires neuropathways, and Huberman's episode, highly recommend, I'm not a scientist, but he is, and he goes in depth about what it actually is doing on the brain. And I always thought of ketamine clinics as being these shady places, places where there are real people with real addictions that they treat. If you're hooked on everything from amphetamines to any type of serious addiction problems, they see these types of people.

1:31:41And also people that are about to kill themselves, like really suicidal. If you go to an emergency room right now and you say, I'm going to end my life in the next 10 minutes, they will most likely treat you with some type of ketamine to just get you out of that state. It's a very common emergency room, like a Hail Mary to like get you back into a state of like just being, okay, I don't want to end my life right now. And now we can work this out or take you to an institution where you can get help. So I was never there, but I got to the point where I was like, I need to do something dramatic and different.

1:32:13And I need to reboot because I can't take the comments I'm getting on Twitter. Now, did you see the Hubern episode organically? Did someone send it to you? Organically. Just came across it. It just came across and I was like, oh, I've always been interested in ketamine. I'd heard about ketamine in a recreational setting. And sadly, who was the friend? Matthew Perry. Yeah, Matthew Perry. Just the toxicology report came back and said that he was on ketamine when he drowned. We can get into why that is in a minute. Let's focus on your personal experience. And I'll just say also, ketamine and jacuzzis or pools or water do not mix.

1:32:49There are multiple fatalities. Don't mix those two things. Well, when you go under ketamine, you are literally sedating yourself to where they can give you surgery. It's the associative anesthetic. So what my doctor has told me, the ketamine doctor, she's an emergency room doctor that did my treatments, is she said to me that she was a 10-year, I think 10 or 15 years emergency room doctor. And she goes, if you came in and you had dislocated your hip, she goes, I would give you what they call a bolus dose. Is that what they call it? A bolus is right. Right. I mean, they're giving you a lot at once.

1:33:23A lot at once. They just like push it all in, right? Yeah. And she's like, I would give you that to about like, I can't remember the exact X, but it was a multiple on which they give you for therapy to put you under so I can get that hip back into place. And then you wake up feeling fine. Unfortunately, with Matthew Perry, he took a dose that was equivalent of subconscious, fainting, falling asleep, deep drowning type dose. And they said the toxology report, I read it, he had that level in him that would have put him in that state of kind of like passing out, right? Yeah. Drugs and water don't mix, folks.

1:33:58Don't mix. Anyway, so it wasn't, my point, it wasn't the fault of the ketamine. It was, he was using it recreationally versus under supervision of a professional, which is what is needed. So I found this clinic in LA that they literally have the set and setting right. So they're all about, like, you come in, it's just beautiful, comfortable, peaceful music, really relaxing, reclining chairs. I mask, because it's important to go inward. It's not about just getting this therapy and looking around the room. Music with, like, drums and beautiful, like, sometimes I pick my own playlist. I did a little bit more chanting.

1:34:36You don't want, like, lyrics or, you know, anything to distract you. And they have you hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that measures throughout the time, a heart rate monitor, like really professional setting. It's called Golden Afternoon is the name of the clinic in LA. It's an amazing name. And the doctor there, gosh, I'm going to draw a blank for where she, I think she was, was she Penn? I can't remember where she got her MD, but like top tier school emergency room doctor is legit as they come. So I felt really comfortable because you know, a lot of this is about set and setting and comfort.

1:35:10Yeah. And safety and safety. Yeah. So I went in there and I was like, I'm going to give this a shot because, you know, Huberman convinced me that this can help me with anxiety. And so I laid down in this comfortable chair, turn on the heating, like they have a heating element in the chair, tilt you back a little bit, put on my noise canceling headphones. They gave me an IV and IVs does sound hardcore, but for people like you and me that do like blood draws like every other week, who cares? Like, I don't care about this shit, but it does sound hard to most people. They gave me an IV and I closed my eyes and I went to a place, man.

1:35:46I went to a place and it's a beautiful place. And it made me over multiple treatments and I did eight in total. And they normally do six for depression, which is really interesting because she said that it's typically anxiety is harder to treat than depression in her experience. and they gave me eight in total and you two per week and about halfway through the best way i can describe it is imagine that life is a series of crunches and i say crunches like the ab workout okay whereas like nobody likes to work out their abs right like and because abs are like oh fucking ab day. Nobody wants to do that.

1:36:29And I didn't realize it, but I had had a 35-pound weight on my chest the entire time I was doing ab workouts. And it took that weight off, and I still have, and it's been weeks later, a bit of grace and lightness to the way I'm carrying myself throughout life that is just a piece that I haven't felt since I was probably 10 or 12 years old. Were you interacting with anyone in those sessions or was it all internal? No, it's all internal. So it's headphones on, music, eye mask. The entire session lasts for about an hour and a half. They have a camera that's watching you. If anything comes up, one time I had my music accidentally stop and I raised my hand, they're in there within 30 seconds.

1:37:16They bring you hot tea when you're done. They let you take your time to slowly kind of like come to, and then you can literally walk out of there and carry on with your day. And you know, the first session I was like, okay, that's beautiful. Second session was a little difficult. They say, imagine it's kind of loosening up the plaque in your brain and like rewiring circuits and like, it's not always going to be easy. But by, I remember the sixth session, I just walked out there and she, Dr. Jen came in And she goes, how are you? And I said, I could run a marathon right now. I feel amazing. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest.

1:37:51And I just, this is such important work that you do. Such important work. Because it's not about, there's not an addiction to the substance. I don't need to go back. Some people go back for boosters, depending on what they have. She told me that some people that have depression, they'll come back in every three months, every six months. She says some people she never sees again. And it kind of takes the anxiety and pulls it apart from your body so that you can see it for what it is, which is silliness, because life is play. And when you realize life is play, and we're all here just trying to figure out our shit, why are we taking it so seriously?

1:38:32Yeah, there's a lot that just does not matter. It doesn't matter. We can just chill, man. It doesn't really matter. So that… We have clean drinking water. like what the fuck are we complaining about so that the weight on the chest was that something that you can't put words to that you just felt release or and you don't need to get into details i'm just curious or was there content to it we're like oh no interesting wasn't content content was beautiful i don't know if you've ever experienced this tim with i've never done ayahuasca although at some point i would love to try it but like i opened my eyes and it was when the mask is on and And I was seeing things that were as high of fidelity as what we see today, like right now.

1:39:17Where you're like, I am in a room right now. And I felt very present. My dad's passed away. I felt very present with a father source there. At times, at one point, I saw the entire world and I saw how small I was. And it immediately gave me this sense of gratitude for being that little speck, but also at the same time, not having to take and carry the burdens of the world on me for being that little speck. And so there's bits and pieces of that. But I would say at the end of the day, when you come out of it, it's not like you had this epiphany. It's more like Dr. Jen calls it time on brain. How can we make this sit and do the rewiring on your brain and give you time on brain with the drug and the compound and let it do its work?

1:40:04And so it was a lot of surrendering. There was a lot of saying, you do what you want to do. I don't care where you take me emotionally, mentally, whatever. It doesn't really matter. It's time on brain with the compound. And after a certain number of sessions, you just feel this natural lift and lightness. And it felt like, I'm not a ballerina, big surprise, but it felt like a little bit of a walking through life is a little bit of a dance now than it is such a struggle. It makes me super happy, man, to hear that. It feels amazing. And I remember getting some of the texts from you, and I was excited to have this conversation, which we haven't had.

1:40:41This is the first time we're talking about it. It is. And I'll say a few things. The first is that I have seen a number of cases where ketamine therapy has changed or saved lives. So a friend of mine, for instance, who suffered from depression his entire adult life had a similar experience to yours. And he went to a clinic, I believe it was in New York City, very well run. And he goes back once every six months for a single tune-up, let's just say, session. and I actually know, also I'm not going to mention their name, but someone we know as a mutual friend who you probably don't know also does this once every three to six months.

1:41:25And separately, I know someone who's in law enforcement who is heavily disincentivized from talking about mental health with his superiors because you will be put on leave generally if you even hinted that. And you're in certain professions, a line pilot, for instance, you're going to be put on leave. And it's a - On leave is a nice way to say you probably fire it. It's a career risk to bring these things up, which puts many more people at risk. There should be better processes for this. But nonetheless, he was suicidal at one point. We're talking about somebody who was carrying around a firearm all day.

1:42:07And ketamine was an intervention that was incredibly effective for him. for pattern interrupting. And I use that very literally because the pattern was a thought loop. This is personal. This is permanent. This is never going to change. And when you're able to at least interrupt that for a short period of time, you provide people with hope or at least a window within which they can consider other options. So for acute suicidal ideation, also for chronic pain, very interestingly, ketamine is super interesting. It's interesting you say that because Dr. Jen over at this clinic has told me she treated quite a few people for chronic pain as well and it works quite well so i unexpectedly because have you done it so before i talk to anyone about anything like this generally i am volunteering to be the monkey shot in the space so several years ago i did six sessions over three weeks ketamine yeah oh shit dude why did you never tell me this i didn't realize i didn't tell you so i did six sessions this would have been with a mask on and like in this particular case it was music, but it was not mask on.

1:43:15The way that this particular clinic ran things was with video, which was very strange to me. But nonetheless, it was sort of naturescapes. And I was like, okay, well, this is new to me. I'll try it. And it ended up being supremely interesting. I was not going in with an acute condition. So it was hard for me to evaluate ultimately a lot of the efficacy. They found it very strange. And I found it kind of hilarious because they would do an intake each day of active sessions and they would ask me to do various assessments for anxiety and my anxiety levels were going up over time, which they found very confusing because you may have experienced a little bit of this.

1:43:56Ketamine can compromise your short-term memory in the short term after session. So you might like forget where your wallet is or forget where your backpack is. Okay. So that can happen. And that happened to me. And it happened to be the case that while I was doing these sessions, because I shoehorned it into my schedule, I also had a number of huge podcasts coming up, like LeBron James and so on. And it was freaking me out that I kept forgetting shit. And so my anxiety was going up over the course of treatment, which was not typically what they say. So I did the same thing. They gave me a whole breakdown.

1:44:30It was one to five on a bunch of different scales. I think it's a pretty standardized thing that they give you. I can't remember what the anxiety scales are. But mine went down to literally a one on all of them, or zero on all of them, which is amazing. It is amazing. And I want to mention a few other things. So I'm sure Huberman's episode is excellent. For people who want to have a comprehensive overview of ketamine, I'm sure Huberman's is great. So listen to that first. It's fantastic. I also did an episode with John Crystal, who, Dr. John Crystal, who is the chairman of psychiatry at Yale, who did a lot of the seminal research with respect to ketamine as an antidepressant in humans.

1:45:09So the protocols that get used, which I think are generally like 0.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, et cetera, over X period of time with Y number of infusions, those are the protocols that he developed with his other investigators. And I want to mention a number of things just to make sure that I'm doing my safety first Ferris duty. So the first is that part of the reason, and this is pure speculation, but I think that it was risky for Matthew Perry to use ketamine, is that he had a history of abuse. Ketamine can be very addictive for people who are unwilling or uneager to feel certain things.

1:45:51It's a dissociative anesthetic. So if you have, for instance, a history of alcohol abuse, it is, I would say, increasingly likely that you might abuse ketamine, which is why if someone were to consider ketamine therapy, I feel very strongly that it should be IV or intramuscular injection and not at-home treatment where you have access to, say, lozenges or nasal spray. Because there are companies that do lozenges at home. Yeah, I completely agree. But I will say one thing, Tim, real quick, and I'll let you continue. I noticed my desire for alcohol go down. Yeah, I think that that can happen. And I'm just saying for folks who, for instance, may be coming out of or part of AA and they have issues with depression, my personal take after everything I've seen is that prior abuse of alcohol highly correlated to potential abuse of ketamine.

1:46:49And I would say, furthermore, there are some urological risks if you use ketamine chronically. And alongside that, if you use ketamine chronically, and this is true for a lot of drugs, actually. But that's for snorting though, right? No, it's not for snorting. I mean, you wouldn't get your logical track otherwise, because it metabolizes in the liver. Well, most people who consume ketamine recreationally... Well, it would be their mouth or... It'll be, a lot of it will be snorting of one way, of one sort or another. So they'll either have it in, it'll be in suspension and a liquid, or it will be a powder that they snort in the same way they would snort cocaine.

1:47:29A lot of people carry little lockets around their necks with ketamine. I've seen this a lot. And by the way, that's not what I'm talking about here today. No, no, no, no. I'm not... But those are two very different things. They are. So just to be very clear, ketamine therapy with IV or IM has a track record of being incredibly promising for a number of other things. But where some folks get lost is they go from, instead of clinical setting, higher dose supervised, they bleed into more casual recreational use. in which case it's very important for me to say that ketamine can be very helpful for people with say tremor resistant depression or chronic depression if you use it chronically though it flips the other way and it actually makes you predisposed to more depression so it's just something for people to be aware of yeah and as is true with so many things oh my god more is not better do you know what what was the drug that michael jackson died of do you remember the name remember that?

1:48:34I'm not sure. I think it was a synthetic opioid. No, no, no. It was basically some type of anesthetic. Yeah. I'm not sure. It was funny. I went and, you know, because I'm old now in my forties, I wouldn't have my first colonoscopy because like you're supposed to do that shit, you know? Party time. Have you done that yet or no? I have. Yes. Yes. I went and did mine and, um, and by the way, this is, this is very sad, but do not skip your fucking colonoscopies. No. A very good friend of mine since we last spoke, Roland Griffiths, who's an amazing scientist from Johns Hopkins. He died of terminal cancer.

1:49:06And I had a long conversation with him a few days before he died, before I went to South America. He was completely razor sharp up until the end. And my recollection is that part of the reason that was caught too late is that he was a few years late in having his exam. Yeah, so I had mine done, and they caught a couple precancerous, as they do with most people these days. Yeah, do your fucking screens. And you got to do your screens. But anyway, long story short, when I was going in, the anesthesiologist came in the room, and he was kind of a funny guy. It was cool. I liked those guys, you know?

1:49:43Yeah. And I asked him, I said, can I have a slow ramp? And he's like, what's a slow ramp? And I'm like, well, you just kind of get to me a little bit at a time. Just like, I just feel like going into that zone, you know? And he's like, it's funny you say that. He's like, I'm giving you the same drug they gave Michael Jackson when he died. And I was like, oh, that's crazy. I'm like, why? And he's like, he was just addicted to it. And so he gave me the slow ramp. And I remember this feeling about probably, let's call it 30 seconds into it, where I felt like I was okay with dying. It was just like this moment of like, this is beautiful.

1:50:16And I was like, oh my God, this is what Michael Jackson was feeling right now. Propofol. Propofol. Yeah, exactly. Propofol. That was it. All right. And so I get it. But this is like to the point of Matthew Perry dying in the pool, like this stuff puts you under. It puts you under so that you can have surgery. And that is what ketamine does as well. And ketamine, broadly speaking, is an incredibly well-tolerated safe drug. Part of the reason that ketamine is, I believe, listed in the World Health Organization's top 100 most essential medicines is because it is generally very well tolerated. Yes.

1:50:54And it does not suppress respiration. Yes, exactly. Right. Which is a huge one. Right, gigantic. And it's an incredible compound and you just need to know the risk profile. And there are risk profiles for everything. Of course. You know, we have tequila and we have water in front of us. Water has a risk profile too. People die every year of hyponatremia because they drink too much water when they're training for or running in a marathon. And that causes disruption of sort of electrochemical signaling. And then boom, they drop and people die every year. You probably didn't hear about this, but there was a radio host DJ.

1:51:33Do you remember this? Do you know what I'm talking about? Where they have these water drinking competitions and somebody died of overdosing on water. This has happened many times, right? It's so crazy. As Paracelsus would say, the dose makes the poison, but sometimes the frequency and the use pattern makes the poison. And I think ketamine is incredibly interesting. Especially when you get into the actual science behind it, we're not just using this as an escape, it's actually rewiring the brain. And Huberman will get into the neurology behind it and what's happening and why these are more lasting changes and why some people, not everyone, but some people can go and do this and they don't ever have to go back for a booster or anything else.

1:52:12And it changes them forever. So I don't know if I should get into this. We can always cut it. Someone very close to me, she was close to suicide and she's a dear friend. She's a sweetheart of a person. And she was the first time I'd ever heard of ketamine therapy. This was probably four years ago. And she said, I was about to take, you know, the closest to taking her life. And she had heard about ketamine therapy. It was like kind of new at the time. And she paid for the six pack, the six sessions, you know, the full six. And she hated every single session. And it was funny when I talked to Dr.

1:52:48Jenna at the clinic that I went to, she said, it's very common people that have depression, they don't enjoy the experience. And I thought it was fantastic. Loved the whole thing. But like when my friend said that at session six, she heard a pop in her brain, like a physical pops like a psychic chiropractic adjustment literally the depression lifted and she has been amazing ever since so wild and this has been like five years ago and it's like i believe her she's like doing insanely well now yeah so tim i just want to one thank you for how much money and effort you've put into psychedelic research because thanks man i after experiencing this i i realized that there is something here and we don't have it figured out.

1:53:36Obviously we don't. Like we're in the baby stages, but you know, 10, 20, 30 years with AI, maybe 10 years, like this will get figured out and it will be largely because people like you help fund this type of research. So I just want to say thank you for that. Thank you for saying that, brother. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I was so happy to see those texts. Yeah. I was so happy. I got to tell you, if you're in the LA area and obviously you'll talk to her as a doctor, This is her advice, not ours. And you'll go through the whole screening process. But goldenafternoon.clinic, I think, is the website.

1:54:09And she is an amazing human, very caring, comes in pre and post, checks in on you, a really well-run facility, depression, anxiety, PTSD, war veterans. All these people are going in to see her. And it's great. It's God's work, wherever you believe in God or not. Yeah, there are some great clinics out there. I will say there are also a lot of fly-by-night clinics. 100%. So do your homework. Yes. One of the main advantages, or it is a main advantage, of ketamine as compared to other psychedelics is that in the United States, it is currently legal. Yes. And that is a non-trivial advantage. And I will say that one question you may want to ask in doing your due diligence, if you consider this as an option, and I do feel after canvassing many different compounds, many different treatments that for acute suicidal ideation that ketamine is at the very top of the list it is on a very short list of interventions that have incredible promise for at least creating the space for someone to consider treatment options.

1:55:20And the question, the due diligence question that I recommend, and this is true for any type of drug-assisted therapy, it's actually true for surgeons too. It's true for doctors in general. Ask them what types of adverse events they've observed, what type of abuse potential they've observed. If their answer is, everything is always fine, we've never had an adverse event, that is a huge red flag. anyone who has enough mileage, if they are a ketamine clinic physician, if they are an ER physician, they will be able to tell you what things look like when things go sideways and how they handle those situations.

1:55:59And if they don't volunteer any of that, it means either they're inexperienced or they're delusional generally. And I'm giving people a bit of a break or it means they're lying. And in all three cases, you do not want to have anything to do with that particular practitioner. By the way, I looked her up. She's a Princeton. Princeton. Yep. Go Tigers. Look at that. That's where my doctor went with Princeton. And Phil Wolfson, for instance, has done a lot of writing on this. Do your homework. You are signing up for, let's just call it psychoactive brain surgery. So to the extent that you would do your due diligence related to a surgeon who is going to be physically opening your head, carving a hole in your skull and performing manual brain surgery, do a commensurate amount of homework on the person who is going to be providing you with compounds that have a significant impact on cognitive functioning, not necessarily only in the short term, but in the longer term.

1:57:00You want to hear another crazy drug story? Let's hear it. That's why we're here. Yeah. All right. I'll give you a refill. Speaking of drugs, Andrew Huberman would would not be pleased. Would disapprove. Neither would it to you. Disapprove. Although it's like straight tequila. Yeah, occasionally it'll have a drink or two. He just knows what he's signing up for. Anyway, we can come back to this. Part of the reason that, you know, I had a wild experience in Portugal recently. No matter how much wine I have there, I do not have a headache the next day. And I think it's additive related. I can feel tired.

1:57:31It'll fuck up my sleep. At the end of the day, it is alcohol. But fascinating how different my physiological response can be. In any case, that's true with this stuff too, for me personally with Lalo. That's great to hear considering I'm consuming a good portion of it. Yeah, a good portion. All right. So let's... Well, I got to talk to you about my tattoo at some point. Okay. All right. You know what? I'm going to leave that as a cliffhanger. We're going to come back to a wild drug story tattoo. Because that's why I'm here in town. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. We're going to hear about the crazy machine.

1:58:02What? Okay. Let's... Tattoo and crazy machine. What's going on? And you have a... What's the bracelet with the skull on it? Oh, that's just a... Brace of the skulls. Yeah, Brace of the skulls. Okay. So one of the premier generative artists, and by what I say generative, what I mean by that, for those that don't know, is like there's a whole genre of art that is code-based. You know, you write actually computer science code, and you create art. And one of the premier artists in this space that's been sold at Christie's and Sotheby's and all over the place is Tyler Hobbs. He's based here in Austin.

1:58:34Such an awesome guy, too. Another sweetheart of a guy. He told me he's always enjoyed hanging out with you. He's hanging out with you a couple of times. What a nice guy. He and his wife are just lovely beyond words. Such great people, yeah. And so Tyler lives here in Austin, and his NFTs, you can say what you want to have NFTs, but his NFTs are just absolutely gorgeous pieces of artwork, and it can sell for at times millions of dollars. They're really sought after. Also a legit visual artist outside of Coke. Oh my God. Like I went to the studio today and he pulled open binders that he's been doing for like decades of his visual art.

1:59:11And it's just like, he's not in this for the quote unquote NFTs. Like he's an artist like to his core. And so one of the things that he strikes me as the person that's always saying, what's next? How can I push things in a different direction? Right. And there's a company based out here called Black Dot that has a machine. It's a robot that uses not tattoo needles, but you know when people get their eyebrows cosmetically tattooed on? I can imagine. It's a common thing. I don't want to be gender-based here, but it's mostly women that get it tattooed on as their eyebrows. But they use a much finer needle than they would, say, a tattoo gun.

1:59:50And so this robot, this machine, uses these really fine needles. And what they do is they take, and we can put this in the video as well, they take and they put this kind of template on your arm that is more or less just like almost like a QR, a massive QR code kind of grid on your arm. So that's my forearm. I was wondering about that. You sent me a text and I was like, what the hell? I was like, is that another, is that your tattoo? Okay. No, it's just like a giant QR code. Yeah. Like a giant QR code across my forearm. And that allows the optical lenses and the lasers and everything to align the tattoo.

2:00:31It is doing 17 ,000 small micro pushes into my skin with this needle. Okay. And it does it, they can gauge with like these depth sensors, the correct depth of the dermis to go in so that the ink doesn't spread out and fade over time. Yeah. So they can do insanely high fidelity tattoos. Like picture perfect. Even when you see those pictures of like, oh, that person got that baby tattooed on there. like chest, how cute. Imagine 10X the fidelity of that, where you'd be like, somebody took a picture and like pasted it on their chest. They have a machine that can do that. So you're never getting those off if you change your mind.

2:01:11What this is, is Tyler started with, he drew me a sparrow. And the reason I like a sparrow is because to me, a sparrow is the most common low ego bird to me that's out there. It just reminds me that in like, I'm just getting a little sensitive, but like reminds me that we're all just sparrows. We don't need to take each other. No one's better than anyone else. We're all a common bird. We're all humans, right? And then what he did is he applied an algorithm to it that degrades the bird into a pixelated form over three images. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. And so the last one is his last algorithm of the more pixelated version.

2:01:48And so you can imagine, I'm getting this tattooed on my arm tomorrow. So wait, you're getting it tattooed tomorrow. What is that? This is just stencil. Oh. So I wanted to show you this today. Okay, all right, cool. So you can imagine a world where literally in the future - How long does that stencil last? You could wipe it off with some alcohol and stuff, but it's like, you know, just there for the show. But you can imagine a world where he can give you an algorithm like he does with his artwork, and you can walk in, put your arm underneath this machine, and get a unique generative piece by an artist that is one of one unique to you, as defined by an insanely famous artist.

2:02:28Imagine if, you know, let's backtrack here, but Picasso had the tools in his day to say, I'm going to create an algorithm that is a bunch of crazy swirls and chaos that is my brain. Or a Banksy or whoever. Banksy or whoever. And you stick your arm in and you get a one-of-one Picasso. They're only doing three of them. This is a brand new machine, brand new technology. And so that's why I'm out here to do a one-of-one Tyler Hobbs on my arm with a sparrow. That's cool. Black Dot? Black Dot, yeah. Okay. So that's a new kind of startup out here. Oh man, Austin, man. There's a lot happening here. There's a lot happening.

2:03:02That's cool. It's so cool. I want to show you the one they did of the Mona Lisa. It's amazing stuff. Do you have any tattoos at all? You don't, do you? No. I've been thinking about getting my first, which is why I asked about the stencil. So look at that. Oh yeah. It's like just the eyes of the Mona Lisa right there. But look how high fidelity that is in the floor. Yeah, that's wild. yeah that's pretty wild so you've been thinking about getting one i've been thinking about getting one for years which would be molly molly's paw prints on my forearm you would not what was that you would not are you serious yeah that'd be kind of awesome yeah how old is molly now well he's eight uh between eight and nine the toaster is slowing down man yeah it's tough it's so sad there's nothing more heartbreaking than starting to see your dog start to go on the decline yeah like he's falling he's falling now like his legs are falling out from anything i know we don't have to take the podcast there but yeah it's no but it's like hey toaster's been with the podcast since day one even when you're chewing the cable oh i do i was just gonna bring it up man back in the day this is still dig era i guess and we were at your apartment in san francisco and he was just a little pup chewing on the cables yeah i remember that toast yeah he's still kicking it out he's still mentally he's sharp as shit which is great which you like nice yeah it's nice to see him i remember playing with him friendly toast yeah what a great dog yeah so for me it's hard for me to imagine a world or any circumstances in which i would regret having the paw prints on the arm and there are many other how much has that dog meant for you personally because i've seen you through multiple relationships dogs are like this thing that is just like the steadfast love.

2:04:46Has it been a good, I mean, obviously it's been, it must have been an insane emotional lift for you to have an animal like that in your life. Yeah, it's changed me fundamentally on so many different ways, I think. And it's not just the receipt of that love, which is, it's like a task in and of itself, right? I mean, like, I actually saw this at one point, somebody had sketched it onto this piece of wood and I came across it and was your task in life is to learn how to love and be loved. That's it. And being loved is actually not straightforward for everyone. Learning to receive that in a way. So that has been a gift.

2:05:23But it's also been a practice of giving and thinking about someone else's welfare and having, say, a dog as a mirror also for yourself, where, let's just say, early on, when I was training Molly and I took training super seriously. Oh my God, I was there for that. Yeah, and I ended up being pretty good at it. And Molly's very well trained. But if she fucked up or made a mistake, I would get upset. Yeah. Well, you'd hit her. No. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Jesus Christ. I did not hit my dog and beat her with a rod. So no, I wouldn't hit Molly. But I would get very frustrated. Yeah. And then that would scare her.

2:06:09And not because I was flashing out, but I would just get so frustrated because I'd be like, God, this is the 37th time we've done this. And it was a mirror because Molly's not doing anything deliberately to piss me off. Right. That's ridiculous. Right. So it just was a, it was an incredible reflection in the pond for me to see what was going on and to see what's going on with me. Like if I'm short-tempered, if you're with other people, you can weave a story to justify it. Right, well, like they should know, like God didn't get any sleep and they know that and da, da, da, da, da. Why does it always have to be in the morning that they blah, blah, blah.

2:06:47You can really spin a yarn to rationalize why you're upset with someone else. But a really loving, well-behaved dog, you kidding? Like that's a you problem, pal. Like that is not a dog problem. Yeah. So on all of those levels, she's just been such a wonderful companion and teacher and I was away from her for a few weeks recently for the first time because I was in South America and absolutely not the right place for a dog where I was in the middle of the jungle and I really really missed her so I mean I've got me I'll really like take us there but like when I think about which I do pretty often like when she has her decline and then passes like it's heartbreaking for me to imagine and I'm gonna get a second dog almost certainly in the next year that would be on my new year's resolutions too and i've thought about this for a few years but i've pushed it off because there's part of me that doesn't want to accept that molly is mortal so i've pushed it off and pushed it off but it's it's time it's good to do it on the sooner side because when they're older like i could never introduce another dog to toaster right now yeah because he's just too old to handle that puppy energy yeah versus if you did it now then they can kind of like and molly's really good with puppies and she loves puppies yeah so i'm gonna to do that very soon in the next year.

2:08:04And I, at one point was volunteering. It's a long story, but I was volunteering around wolves and I was preparing the food and so on for these wolves, which were the ones that licked you in the teeth and stuff. Yeah. Which were being sort of rehabilitated and raised in captivity because they'd either been bred and raised in captivity, in which case they can't be released, or there are any number of conditions that led to them being non-viable as wild releases. And I saw one of the volunteers had, I think it was on his rib cage. He had a print from this wolf that he had known for years until that wolf passed away.

2:08:45And I thought to myself, you know what? I've never felt pulled to have a tattoo. And the fact that I have no tattoos is kind of novel now, which is funny, right? Like tattoos are pretty common. Oh, you got to go to Jess, my lady. She's amazing. So I might, I might. And I thought, you know, I really have a hard time imagining, regretting doing that. And I can also see it being a really valuable reminder of a lot. Tim, I've got something for you. Listen to this. Tell me. You know how I said someone was going to play at my birthday? Yes. Jess is going to be out there at the same time. Okay. Why don't you sign up to get the tattoo?

2:09:23At the party? I mean, not at the party, like the day before the day after or something like that. Oh, all right. All right. And she is like booked out by like a year. She did Bruce Willis' tattoos. No, she's like legit as they go. Yeah, she's legit. Okay. All right. Jess Machete on Instagram, insane. All right. Now she's booked out for five years. Yeah, exactly. I just took enough. This has been on my list for a while. It's been on my list for a couple of years. I think partially because I'm nervous. You would love her. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. I want to ask you a question that is a little bit more intimate just because we've had some tequila and we're talking about dogs and just kind of the companionship and whatnot.

2:09:59Speaking of kind of like New Year's resolutions and looking back on life, in the last 10 years, when it comes to both personal, either intimate relationships or private, what would you, if there's any one thing, what would you change about your interactions with either someone that you've been with on an intimate level or someone that maybe it's like on a more friendship level? Is there anything that you can look back on and say, I would have done more of this? That is an exceptional question. And you know, when I was driving over here, I was thinking about another question. We have the ultimate cliffhanger in the crazy drug story.

2:10:36So maybe we'll get to that. Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll do the next episode. But I was thinking also, I was like, what would Kevin tell his, I'm going to answer your question. But I was thinking, And what would Kevin tell his 30-year-old self? Like current Kevin. Like do this, maybe not do so much of that, blah, blah, blah. I thought that could be a fun exploration. With the interpersonal stuff, I think that I would say just because someone needs other things, needs things that are different from your needs, does not make them high maintenance. and by the way tim if they looked at you through the same lens you were looking at them through they would decide that you were high maintenance so gather some tools i would say read the five love languages as cheesy and schlocky as it might seem that shit is so helpful as a framework for discussion for identifying and easily labeling the different categories of needs that people might have and putting them in some type of order.

2:11:41Oh, interesting. You're a quality time person. Good to know. Number two would be this. Oh, you're a physical touch and then acts of service person, as I am, right? These are shared vocabulary that you can use to really avoid and repair a lot of things. So I would say a handful of things. Gay and Katie Hendricks, also like conscious, loving. there are a few books, a few resources I would say, look, if you really care about someone, commit together to develop a shorthand which allows you to not necessarily prevent. I don't think prevention is the key. I think repair is the key. If you're in a startup and you're like, well, let's just prevent all the bad things from happening.

2:12:28That's never going to work. Shit's going to happen. And people are going to have bad days. And you're going to say things you regret and there are going to be disagreements. And by the way, if there are no disagreements, something's wrong. Right. A hundred percent. And therefore having a shorthand and a set of agreements, these are the rules that we agree to play by. And we're not going to be perfect. I would say that would be very high on the list. And I would say for really close relationships, potentially, maybe we'll edit it's out, but who knows? MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, let's just say anywhere from once a quarter to once a year, no more than once a quarter for a whole host of reasons.

2:13:13But I think that while MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is incredibly impressive, and I've been very involved with that from, I don't want to say day one, because that's not true, but certainly for the last 10 years or so, I've been very involved up through phase three and now onward, the results with treatment-resistant PTSD is a complex PTSD where you see people who have had this diagnosis for 17 years, suddenly after two or three sessions end up asymptomatic, right? They would not meet the criteria for PTSD with durability out to six, nine, 12 months. I mean, it's something that almost defies belief.

2:13:51It is causing a complete re-examination of psychiatry as we know it. I still think that is second place to couples work when it comes to MDMA. I think that that is an incredibly fruitful arena for seeing the full potential of MDMA psychotherapies. That would be another one because sometimes, oftentimes couples end up, and I know multiple people now who have had this experience with professional guidance, which by the way folks currently is illegal so before warrant there are legal consequences or at least risks entailed with this not to mention the fact that at least i would say 60 to 70 percent of mdma that you might purchase is adulterated or mixed with something else at this point so you need to be very careful dance safe.org is a resource i would recommend for testing kits and so on if you're going to go that route i'm not recommending you do anything illegal however people are going to do it anyway international people are going to do it anyway i just recognize It's like, you can't just say to every teenager, like, don't have sex.

2:14:53Like, kids are going to have sex. So let's be realistic about it. I did that shit one time. It's fun as shit. Had sex? No. No, I did. When I was 23, I did, well, they were calling it ecstasy back then. But like, holy shit. That is a compound. Yeah. And that can also go sideways just for the record. Yeah. So like, there are films out there now. How to Change Your Mind, the miniseries on Netflix. watch the mdma episode it is excellent yeah and it's pretty heavy because it gets into some ptsd but you'll be able to see live session footage if you want another alternative or compliment he's great and there is also a doc called trip of compassion which is worth seeing which has a lot of session footage as well but those are a few of the things that would come to mind let's say on a friendship level i might suggest to my earlier self let's just say 30 year old self something that I have really embraced and put into action in the last handful of years, which is going to sound a little antisocial, but I don't view it that way.

2:15:57Humans have a finite capacity for building and sustaining really deep relationships. You just can't do that with everyone. And when I've looked back, say, and I do this every year at a past year review, and I look back at my calendar every week of my last year, and on a piece of paper with positive and negative, two columns, I write down the peak negative and positive experiences. If I look at the commonalities for the peak positive experiences, it's usually the same 10 people or fewer. It's the same cast of characters. These are my close friends who are nourishing, supportive, good influence.

2:16:41And before, what I would say to my younger self is before you seek to develop a bunch of new relationships, ask yourself, are you spending enough time, as much time as you would like with the people on that shortlist who you know are guaranteed to be nourishing for you? And if the answer is no, maybe you should double down on those relationships. Maybe you should reach out to those people to get something on the calendar before shit crowded out, before you look for shiny objects in new relationships, which doesn't mean I don't develop new relationships. I occasionally do. But I'm at a point where I think recognizing the ephemeral nature of life, the finite limits, the constraints that we have is actually very enabling.

2:17:29It helps you to make cleaner, faster decisions. So for me, I would just say before seeking to develop new deep relationships, ask yourself the question, for my closest five friends, let's just say, in the last year, did I spend as much time as I would like with those people? And if the answer is no, reach out to those five first. Yeah. Yeah. What about you? Oh, man. I would say, honestly, I think that we're at the age now where every day just brings a new unknown in terms of like, how long are we going to last? I've had multiple friends with cancer now. I had one friend that I almost lost this year that was in the emergency room for weeks that we thought had stage four cancer and it ended up being a horrible bacterial infection from some foreign country.

2:18:22And it's just like, I just realized like, there's so many times when we hang out and we just give a hug and say, oh, good to see you. But we don't say, I love you. You know, we don't say you are so essential to me in so many ways. Maybe it's the ketamine talking, but like, no, but when I went through this whole thing with the ketamine therapy, I realized at the end of the day, love is the, it doesn't sound cheesy, but it is the most important thing that we tell each other and that we feel for each other. And like, when you can really feel that and you say, this person is so important, I mean, you let them know that and you feel it back.

2:19:00I don't know what's better than that you know? yeah what's more human than that too right? yeah in a way I mean like love you know you can observe affection and love in many other species but the ability to verbalize it and express it yeah do you feel that psychedelics brings that out of you? because when I did the therapy I had more love in me than I've had in so long do you feel that's a commonality amongst psychedelics to have a sense of just gratitude for existence? For sure. I think it's very common. It's not always across the board. I mean, I would say that this might be a controversial statement, but the psychedelics to me are similar to, there's a lot more to it, which we'll probably dive into, but kind of like alcohol or power or money in the sense that they magnify what's already there.

2:19:55And their term you sometimes hear is a nonspecific amplifier. So I don't think at all, there's no compelling evidence to me that psychedelics, if put in the drinking water, produce world peace. There's no evidence for that. I mean, you have plenty of civilizations. Maybe lithium though. No, no, no. I remember there was that study. I remember. Yeah, a little bit of lithium goes a long way. People can look this up. We'll try to find. There's a study that people in populations where there is more lithium naturally found in the drinking water have lower rates of suicide than anywhere else. All sorts of stuff.

2:20:31Yeah. So we'll see what we can find to put in the show notes. I do think low-dose lithium is pretty interesting, very low-dose. But psychedelics are a non-specific amplifier. There are many cases of civilizations where they had human sacrifice, played soccer with human heads, and they consume psychedelics. I mean, I still sacrifice people. Yeah. Like, you know, as we all do. You know, every once in a while on the solstice, I mean, I think it's all fair game. But the feeling of gratitude and love, I think for a lot of people who wish to enable that, to experience it more, who have the conscious or subconscious desire to rekindle those things, that the experience you're describing is very common.

2:21:10For sure. And I think part of that is the dissolution. This isn't true of all experiences, but the dissolution of self and consequently the felt sense of unity with many or all things which leads you to feel for most people less alone yeah which leads you to feel quite grateful because to state the obvious i suppose despite the fact that we're more connected than ever with loose ties. I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression that is highly correlated to a feeling of isolation. So when you can remedy that by feeling the exact polar opposite in some of these states, not necessary, but helpful, that the end result of that is a feeling of gratitude, for sure.

2:22:01Awesome. Yeah. Before we wrap things up, because I know we're coming to the end and you still have some particular information, what was the cliffhanger you said you wanted to tell us. Yeah. So I'll tell you what, I'll keep it short and then you can excavate as you like. I love to excavate. All right. So as you know, for the last year, I've basically been crippled by lower back issues. I mean, I've had trouble. There are days when I've had trouble getting up and walking. I mean, it's been that bad. I mean, to be honest, Tim, you first told me about this eight years ago or something. Remember when you got those injections or something?

2:22:35you're like, I think I have... Disc disease. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had lower back issues for a long time. This is also a congenital issue. So I have what's called a transitional segment. In other words, there's a segment in my lumbar, there are vertebrae in my lumbar area that really mimic a sacral vertebral segment. And that's problematic for a host of reasons. Creates an abnormal angle. If you can imagine just bending the paper clip over and over again in ways that it shouldn't be bent, that's sort of the feeling in the low back. And my brother has this. There are other people in my family who have this issue.

2:23:13So standing, extended, slow walking, like a museum walk, cocktail party type of experience can be very painful. Like the low back locks up. But in the last year specifically had all sorts of issues and all sorts of MRIs and specialists and PT and adjustments and traction and this, that, and the other thing. And it was a disaster and it caused it. Well, let me give myself a little more agency. I created a lot of anxiety around this because I was like, fuck, is this the new normal? Is this really the new normal where? Well, because you project forward, like what is five years from now? Yeah. I'm like, I'm not that old, you know, and I'm pretty active.

2:23:56And your skincare is amazing. My skincare is amazing. I saw your Instagram video. You know what's funny? Sidebar. It's how much time you can spend on like a blog post. It takes six months to put together. And it's like you get like crickets and a fart in the wind and then nobody ever reads it again. And then someone on your team is like, you know what? People ask about your skincare. Let's grab a couple of clips and throw it up. And it goes bananas. I'm on Instagram. And the first thing that pops up to me is like, hi, I'm Tim Ferriss. People ask me about my skincare regimen. Let me tell you, I use Bronner's natural soap.

2:24:30I was like, what the fuck has to come into? Yeah. So here we are, folks. Here we are, folks. Your skin looks amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Breathtaking. You know, it's working from the inside out. Coming back to the main through line here. Terrifying experience with the back. And I had more or less given up. I was in the stage of grief where I was trying to get past denial and accept that this might be the new normal because no one could figure it out. And a lot of the advice I received, many of the diagnoses were conflicting. And then decided in part because of this to do a few things. And part of that was going to South America, which I'm not recommending.

2:25:14There are a lot of risks down in South America. It's generally like safety fifth. It's not safety first. So people get into a lot of trouble. But I went down and did this training, which involved consuming a bunch of plants, also involved fasting for a week, also involved... Wait, wait, wait, water fast? Water fast. Jesus, seven days? Yeah. Also involved during that week, really not sitting and standing very little. So it was either hammock or cot, basically. And I'm mentioning these things because they're confounders. Translating that into basic English, that means that I can't really point back to one thing and say this is what caused what i'm going to describe but during the first experience which happened to be with ayahuasca which is a huge gun it's i think treated very casually by people who do not realize what they're signing up for i do not recommend it to most people as my ex who's going to become relevant in a second would tell you i talk many many many more people nine out of ten which ex out of, I'm not going to mention her name, but out my most recent ex out of using ayahuasca, then I talk into using ayahuasca.

2:26:22Like nine times out of 10, I say, you should not proceed. Do not pass go for a lot of reasons. But in this particular case, had a very, very, very difficult experience. And I can kind of rank order my hardest experiences over the last decade plus. And this would be the third most difficult, maybe the second for different characteristics, which is saying a lot and there was a point at which in that experience all i could imagine was having my head in the lap of my ex like that's all i wanted it was the only thing i could even visualize because i was in the impact zone i was just getting hit by 100 foot waves from every angle and there was no respite it was 10 out of 10 there was no wave meaning it didn't ebb and flow it was just 10 out of 10 volume from peak until end of the night effectively it was unusual and incredibly difficult and that was true for everyone in the session we'll leave it at that your shaman makes the wrong i this guy's famous for having a brew that just cripples people and like like yeah i mean there are a lot of other full-time clinicians from indigenous traditions will not drink his brew i'll put it that way jesus and uh coming back to the point of the story i'm imagining the only thing I can envision is this woman holding my head and consoling me.

2:27:42That's the only thing I can imagine. And then I realized that for a year, because we separated a bit over a year ago, and this was totally subconscious, right? It wasn't a decision on my part, but I realized I had not allowed myself to feel the complete obliterating heartbreak that was in fact the core response to that separation, right? Like I'd not allowed myself to feel - From her or from previous? From that separation, right? Like in other words, my psyche had seemingly protected me because of my history of depression, which I've come to manage better than ever before. Like each year I'm better able to manage it and it's less and less frequent.

2:28:26It's less and less intense. But nonetheless, let's face the facts. In college, I almost killed myself. So there's a fear, at least subconsciously, that because of this separation, because of starting over at square one, that I could spiral into a deep depression and that could be dangerous. So my psyche protected me from that by not letting me feel the sadness, the pain, to the extent that ended up being important, which I realized in this moment. So I allowed myself to soak in it in that moment. I, trip reports were so fucking boring most of the time. And I apologize to people who might be listening and thinking, go, here we go again, because I get it.

2:29:11Trust me. But in this particular case, I experienced something I've never experienced. As soon as I soaked in that, and I really soaked in it, and it was awful. It was so dark and so heavy. And then I felt my back release. and literally I've been 90 plus percent pain-free since that fucking moment. And it blows my mind because at that point, I couldn't explain it with the fast because the fast and ketones are highly anti-inflammatory. And I think that they actually played a role, hold on, in the durability of things. But the fact that there was an immediate release is interesting. It is interesting.

2:29:49I can't explain that through fasting. I can't explain that through the just being recumbent laying down for seven days because that was yet to come and i would say that i made a tactical error in the last few weeks which is i was like fuck man like i'm all good and so i've neglected some of the basic self-care and strengthening and pt which i think is important because my low back and ql and so on which are some of the surrounding muscles have atrophied over the last year of avoiding working with the back. There was that experience. And for people who may be interested in delving into this a little bit more, there is a book.

2:30:30I don't agree with everything in the book, but it is interesting in the sense that it was written by a Western trained MD who ended up then opening a healing clinic in South America focused on ayahuasca and diets, which you will read about if you get into the book, called The Fellowship of the River. So I found that book quite interesting on a number of levels. But the reason I bring this all up, number one, people had recommended this book. I think it's called Healing Low Back Pain. I may be getting the title slightly wrong. It could be Fixing Low Back Pain, but it's by Dr. Sarno, John Sarno.

2:31:09And this book was recommended to me I've read it before. And the general gist is it's all in your head. Now, I took great offense at parts of this book. And a lot of it is scientifically indefensible. So he, unfortunately, I threw the baby out with the bathwater a bit because he says a bunch of things that are ridiculous. And he cites these success statistics for his method while simultaneously saying, if I interview someone and they say they're not open to A, B, or C, I omit them from my treatment. And I'm like, okay, well, wait a fucking second. Your selection bias is out of control. But I wanted to bring this up because that book has helped a lot of people despite its flaws.

2:31:53And not everyone will at any point want to consume ayahuasca, which I would advise against for 90 plus percent of the population. It can be very destabilizing for a lot of people and very risky. You know, I would say there are a lot of things you should do beforehand, right? Like try the talk therapy, try holotropic breath work, consider after speaking with doctors, ketamine. After that, you can consider other tools, but ayahuasca should be like, let's do a fifth on your list. Let's do a random show on ayahuasca. Is that possible? Yeah, possibly. Yeah, ayahuasca would be like fifth or sixth on the list of progressions.

2:32:31It would not be first. But I would say the Sarno books are interesting. I know they've helped people like Brian Koppelman, who's been on the podcast, amazing writer, who was the co-creator of Billions, among others, Rounders, et cetera. And it's something that I've always, in theory, agreed with. Yes, we store stress that can have a physiological effect. There are autoimmune disorders that I think are intimately linked with different types of psychological disturbances. So you can address the problem kind of from the physiological side first. Of course, the brain isn't entirely separate. There's no kind of Cartesian separation of mind and body.

2:33:12So yes, the brain is physiological, but you can attack it through content in a way, or you can attack it through pharmaceuticals and physiology first. I think you can go both ways. But the Sarno book I think is worth a lot of people reading. The second thing I'll mention, which is very, very simple and tactical. If you have lower back pain, I'm shocked it took me this long to figure it out. And say sitting on hard chairs bothers you or lumbar support helps you. For a year, I've been going to restaurants and asking if they have a cushion. Do you have a cushion or pillow or something I can use to fix fucked up seating situations?

2:33:52This is the solution right here this is it this is a pilates ball this is a pro body pilates doesn't really matter yeah but honestly this thing folds up six in your pocket yeah and i've been traveling with it i've had it behind my back the whole time great and like great for first dates great for first dates ladies love pilates balls and uh i but i will say for instance like the last time i did a podcast in this seat I did not use this and my back was fucking killing me afterwards. But the killing me afterwards is not just an issue for today. That's an issue that causes inflammation that fucks up my sleep for three or four days.

2:34:31Use this ball, no problem. I can put it behind my back or I can put it under my ass and it folds up and fits in your pocket. So anyway, folks, there you have it from the sublime to the ridiculous Pilates ball. Amazing. All right. How are we doing? Any other topics? I feel pretty good. Next time we'll get to what you would tell your 30 year old self. Anything you'd like to add in that category? No, I just, you know, I think if we're, are we wrapping up now? Cause I'd like to say some wrapping up comments. Wrapping up comments, please. Yeah. So my wrapping up comments would be this. I recently went out to dinner with five close friends of mine who, of which, you know, most of them, you know, just like the crew, the Wu-Tang clan.

2:35:09Yeah. Just good friends. And one of the things I did is I went around the circle and I said a few words of gratitude. And I think to my earlier point, one of the things that's really important to me after coming out of this therapy is just this vulnerability that allows us to speak from the heart because we don't know what tomorrow brings. And I just want to say that, Tim, You have been a friend of mine for so long now. And I have appreciated the fact that my career has been a series of ups and downs and all over the place. And you have been a steadfast friend, someone that sends me some of the funniest videos I've ever seen in my life, always keeps it lighthearted and fun.

2:35:59But I know that you care deeply about me. And I just want to let you know that I love you. and I care deeply about you. And I will always be here to have your back. And I'm wishing you a fantastic new year. I hope that you hit all these milestones and more that you want to hit. Because I know that you are someone that I've always looked up to and someone that is just so inspirational to us all that listen to your show and your podcast because you inspire us to do more and to be better humans. And I just want to let you know that that means a lot to me. And I love you. Well, thanks, Kevin. That's amazing.

2:36:36That makes my night. Happy to say it. Yeah. It's the truth. I love you too, man. Our friendship has been such a constant for me, such a lifeline in a way with all the ups and downs. And holy shit. I mean, both of us have had some pretty wily ups and downs. I mean, you've had a lot of hot chicks you've dated. I will say. I didn't see that coming. Yeah. Well, you talked about the ups and downs. I was like, you've had a lot of ups. my friend. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I've look, that's one category. That's a one category. And I'm grateful for that. And life is like a box of chocolates, right? You just never know what's around the corner.

2:37:16It's true. That's why it's important to say these things. It is. It is. And you know, I have, I'll tell you something you don't know. I have your Christmas slash New Year's card from like two years ago. So obviously out of date, it's like you and Daria and the kids and it's up in my kitchen amazing and i kept it there because i just i love seeing you guys every day and i think about you guys all the time and just have such love for your family and i'm so grateful for our friendships i love you too man as you said it's important to say things are so uncertain and i've never experienced i've had friends pass from cancer before but I've never been there every step of the way from diagnosis to last conversation a few days before they passed.

2:38:09That was new for me. And it really deeply affected me on a bunch of levels and I want to be deeply affected by that. I don't want to push that aside in part because Roland was so joyful and curious and optimistic until the end in a very genuine way. It wasn't an act. It wasn't theater. That raised a bunch of aspirations in me because he was first and foremost a very dedicated seasoned meditator. Psychedelics were a piece of the puzzle, but first and foremost, he was a dedicated meditator for decades. That's amazing. And attributed a lot of his equanimity and preparation for death, which I got to see firsthand.

2:38:57A lot of people talk about it, right? But let's be honest, or I'll be honest. I've read all the Stoics, or a lot of the Stoics, and I've read all sorts of Buddhism, and rehearsed death, and memento mori, and this, that, and the other thing. But when I'm actually on, as Roland said, the final glide path, I don't know how I'm going to respond. I don't know. I have no idea. So to see someone who really walked the walk in such a life-affirming way that lit everyone up around him was tremendous. And he said what he was able to, and he was willing to say what he meant to those people around him who meant things to him.

2:39:39And you don't have to wait until you have terminal cancer diagnosis. You shouldn't wait. Just because it may not be that, right? It may be a car crash. It may be something where you don't get the chance to say these things. And so I just, yeah, it's important to do it now. Yeah, you got to do it. Great to see you, man. Yeah, good to see you. Happy New Year. I'm excited for, this is going to be, oh, don't talk me off a little bit of cheers. To the New Year. And to all the listeners out there, you know, wishing you a happy and healthy New Year. And yeah, I'm excited to, I mean, it's always a new year of change, a new year of change and exploration.

2:40:16I think the one thing that you and I, let's take a sip. The one thing that you and I have in common is just this lifelong pursuit of evolution, of like figuring out. Because the secret that no one will tell you is no matter how much money you make, no matter how much success you have, we're all still figuring out. And in Ram Dass's words, we're all just walking each other home. Yeah. Well said, man. I'm going to leave it there. There we go. Cheers, buddy. Happy New Year. Happy early new year and a happy new year to everybody listening. And as always be just a little kinder than is necessary until the next episode that applies to other people, but also applies to yourself.

2:41:02Take it easy. Take it easy. You know, life is short, but life is long and we're all just figuring it out. And by the way, as far as I can tell, you never really figure it out. So, so, so true. So CTFO, chill the fuck out a little bit, be a little easier on yourself. And we'll put everything in the show notes, Tim.blog slash podcast for all the stuff we talked about. KevinRose.com is a better website. KevinRose.com. Be sure to check out this amazing new podcast I've heard of. New podcast at KevinRose.com is the best place to go. Forget Tim.blog. And KevKevTalkTalk, coming at you soon. Thanks for listening, everybody.

2:41:41See you. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

2:42:26And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide, including me, including mine.

2:43:00What business you might ask. Well, this year, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cockpunch Coffee. It's a long story. All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saisei Foundation, to fund research for mental health, etc. Anyway, Cockpunch Coffee. It's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out. We use Shopify for the online storefront and my team raves about how simple and easy it is to use. It has everything we need and nothing we don't. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle.

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2:44:10Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions. This is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a$1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Shopify.com slash Tim. Go to shopify.com slash tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, shopify.com slash tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so.

2:44:57I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food-sourced nutrients.

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2:46:10That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280-band substances.

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