#884: How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More

21:19And three years later, they said, I'll sell it back to you for 5 million.

21:24Tim Ferriss:Better late than never. Exactly. It wasn't a great sale, but it was a lot better than it would have been because I just didn't like where things were going. And the conclusion has been that I haven't touched really e-commerce since then. You know, it's solved. Startups have to solve a problem. Even if you don't realize that problem is there, when you see it, you're like, oh yeah, that is a problem I had. And right now, I can't, I mean, I can get anything delivered to my house in like 27 seconds. I can return it. It's inexpensive. So I don't know how to do better. I don't have any ideas. Whereas in many other fields, you know, cure for cancer, nuclear energy, psychedelics, there are things to be built that have not been built that will improve the world a lot.

22:06Tim Ferriss:Let's wind back the clock as I promised listeners earlier. So we're going to get to the helps launch the blank website. Before that, we have Yale economics, Prudential Investment Corp. Yeah, investment banking, investment banking, INSEAD, Euro Disney. Was there anything that you learned or developed in those chapters that then helped you when you moved to United Media? Like, is there anything sort of crucial or critical? The key thing is I was quite financially oriented and very comfortable. I've always been very comfortable with numbers and understanding fundamental trends and the business. And that is a component of business and life.

22:46And so all of that was business. And then I went finance and then going into operations at Disney. So we had to manage hotels. And it was a exciting project. We launched Euro Disney, you know, 15 ,000 hotel rooms, 50 ,000 people every day, huge project launches one day. So I learned a lot about that, but I decided I didn't want to work for large companies anymore. So I thought there's a lot of training, wasn't incredibly enjoyable. I then wanted to go back to New York. I got a job to be the CFO of 180 person division of United Media. For me, that was a big job. I was managing 50 people. I managed all the operations and the finance.

23:22And it was a turnaround, made a lot more money. For me, it was a huge step up. I was now CFO and COO.

23:29Tim Ferriss:What is the blank that I'm leaving out of here? I still remember, I read an article in Businessweek that talked about a thing I did not know, which was called the internet. internet. You may have heard of it. And I remember reading that thinking, oh my God, that is incredibly cool. Like we can all be in touch with each other. We can send each other messages. We could buy things. And remember, there's no browser at the time. So by 95, I launched because we owned a lot of intellectual property. And one of the things was Dilbert. And so I launched the Dilbert website, which became extremely successful.

24:01And the reason was there were a lot of tech people who could use the internet without a browser. And so we had enormous traffic. I started selling advertising, which was a hard-coded ad just up there. IBM was the first person. They took it for two weeks. I made up a price on the spot. I mean, how do you price something that's literally never existed? And we did our own merchandising. So we started selling t-shirts and ties and things like that. And so a year later, we had a very successful business. I went to the parent company and I said, this internet thing is going to be big. And we have a head start.

24:33So why don't you give me, I was thinking as a loyal corporate citizen, give me a couple million dollars and I'll build up an internet division. We can do it for other companies. And the disturbing thing is the guy I was talking to was very nice, smart, traditional media guy. And he said, no, because we're going to wait for the next internet. What does that even mean? I don't know. First of all, I know you don't know what you're talking about. There is no next internet. And the disturbing part is I remember thinking, you're just really too old for this. And he was exactly the age I am today. And a very successful executive in other things just wasn't in touch with what was happening right at that moment.

25:12So I then concluded, this is not my future, but I believe in my thesis. I thought this might be, and it turned out to be true.

25:19Tim Ferriss:Was that a gut feeling or were you tracking numbers outside of traffic? What made you have that conviction? No, I could see at that time, if you're around in 96, it was just early, but starting to boom. Companies were starting, more and more people were online. No one was getting offline. They were starting to buy things. They were starting to use maps. You could just see it worked. I mean, the things we take for granted now that you can buy something from anywhere or see content from anywhere that never existed. And now I saw that. I'm like, this is a no brainer. Everyone in the world is going to be doing this.

25:50So I think it was like your point on, is e-commerce going to grow? Yes, it is. It's just better. It was a no brainer. And so I said, I'm going to go out and start an internet company. I met, I mean, it was a very tiny world at that point. People in Silicon Valley wanted to bring me on to join existing companies. Like, I don't know if you remember, Excite, a bunch of companies like this.

26:10Tim Ferriss:Drove by them on the one-on-one. Yeah. And at that point, I had a year of internet experience, which made me one of the most experienced people at the time. So people were super excited to have me join and do something. And then I ran across two guys who had started DoubleClick six months before and who were very smart, very technical. And I still have great relations with both of them. And so they said, why don't you come join us? And I wanted to stay in New York. I thought that was going to be a successful company. And so I joined. I was the 10th or 12th person. I started for a couple months as CFO, became the president, and then became the CEO.

26:42Tim Ferriss:What do you think contributed to that ascension to CEO? What skill set or otherwise contributed to that? I felt like a founder. Technically, I'm not, but I felt like I was. And so I just was a team player and wanted to make this company successful. And I adapted extremely quickly to making decisions very, very quickly. You have to make your decisions faster than other people. Because if I wait, so for example, we opened offices in 25 countries in those first three years. And our competitors were only in six. And when I went to Microsoft or Procter & Gamble, we do business in a lot of countries.

27:24We need to work with you. And then once you had all them, And smaller players were like, well, Procter & Campbell and Microsoft, and everyone working with you, so we'll work with you. So we just ended up almost dominating our space. And I think I did adapt to that of fast decision-making, understanding the numbers, willing to take risks. We were in 20 countries before our first country was profitable. Like, if it never worked, you'd be like, what were you doing? And we made some mistakes along the way. But in general, we built the world leader. Double click today, as an independent company, would be worth$100 billion.

27:53Tim Ferriss:So I want to talk about that. not exactly building the parachute on the way down, but the AliCorp model, let's just say, especially in the first few years, because I hesitate to put it under the label of incubator because it's different in a lot of ways. Unlike say a Y Combinator, it's not a bunch of people coming in with their own ideas that you select. Then you take a tiny percentage for a tiny amount of money and teach them how to pitch a demo day. It's not what you do. And I guess my understanding is, I guess in the early days, you and your partner were putting in maybe 500K each into each company, acting as co-founders, building each for about six months as a proof of concept, and then going out to raise venture.

28:43Tim Ferriss:Is that a fair description? Maybe a year. A year. Okay. But we really built the product, generally launched the product, and then went out to raise money. And so we were really focused on those companies. And we did three, and then we did another batch of threes. We did a total of six. Three of them were hugely, hugely successful. Guilt, Business Insider, and Mongo. After the formation of Alley Corp, when were those founded? All between 2005 and 2008. And the last three were started in the same year. At that time, were you doing eight companies a year or did that end up much later? Much later.

29:15Because there was really only two of us. And at the time, my partner, he's retired now, but Dwight Merriman, is one of the most brilliant technical minds that we've seen. So he's really the brains behind the DoubleClick technology and the Mongo technology, along with one other person. And so we had this great partnership where everything technical, he really handled. I didn't even worry about it. And then everything on the business side, finding the CEO, building it, raising money, things like that. I focused on that. It seems like you have a number of incredible strengths, and I'm sure there are more, but

29:51Tim Ferriss:there's the trend opportunity identification. There is recruitment of talent, capital formation, being able to raise money. In some cases, a lot of money, depending. And as you mentioned with DoubleClick, right, getting to 25 countries before the first is profitable, because when a larger company wants to partner with you, they're going to want that global footprint. And you raise the capital necessary to reach that critical mass, escape velocity, choose your metaphor. And I'm wondering how you think about that when in the, say, first three to five years of Alicorp, when you were founding companies, and some of them took longer, obviously.

30:33Tim Ferriss:MongoDB, I think, stands out as an example of that. But let's just say with Business Insider, for instance. I listened to an interview we did with Sampar and Sean Puri, and you mentioned how in the beginning you had a handful of people covering everything. We could talk about the problem and the gap that that addressed, but just for the time being, I think this is worth spending a moment on. So in the beginning, you had a handful of journalists handling everything. They were only handling Silicon New York technology. Okay. They're handling New York technology. It's important to start narrow. So they handled New York technology.

31:07Tim Ferriss:And then at a certain point, though, I imagine, right, they were spread thin. But then once you got the traffic that allowed you to hire more, and so you could stair-step it in a way that I think a lot of people would be hesitant to. But ultimately, that allowed you to dominate space. And I'm not delivering that in a very eloquent way. So maybe you could explain it. I'm just wondering how that type of thinking manifests in other companies that you started. And Guilt and Business Insider, even though they're very different businesses, we did the same way, which is that Guilt started with one sale a week of women's clothing.

31:42And then we went to two and then three and then five. And then maybe a year later added men's and then kids and then travel and then home. And in Business Insider, we start because it's better to do one thing really well than a bad job on everything. And so we started with only three people. So we discovered New York tech, which wasn't that big, but we did a good job and then expanded and had a wall street vertical and then added another vertical. And then as we added more people, they would add a vertical, eventually defense, retail, things like that. And, you know, we then got to 600 journalists at one point and did a great job.

32:19But, you know, we have roughly when we sold our afters, we had six people covering defense. That's great coverage.

32:25Tim Ferriss:When you and Dwight were putting in the initial million dollars split 50 50, presumably you're taking, I don't know, 30 plus percent of the company, something like that. Day one more and then it gets diluted down. Right. Exactly. Right. You're planning for that dilution with the later raise in the early, let's just call it the 2005 to 2008 period. How did you get very, very smart, capable people to quit their jobs and come run these companies? And they have to believe that one, the idea is a great idea. They have to believe that we are adding value and that there's something here and then we should do it together.

33:02And those are the things they have to believe and then we can help them. And so we had just sold the company in New York City that was the most valuable startup company ever created at that time. So we had credibility. They thought, you know what, we're going to get you in to raise money and help you do that. And we did. And we're able to do that. So that was the pitch. You know, Henry Blige is a perfect example. He was an incredibly talented person. At the time, had a mixed reputation because of what had happened on Wall Street years before, but a great writer.

33:34Tim Ferriss:And just for clarity, he basically said he was uncomfortable with something that was standard practice, right? That was his sin. No, I stand by what he said and did, actually. But he came on board, and I knew him a little bit, but brought him in. And after 30 minutes, he's like, this is a great idea. We should do it. What did the pitch look like? It's so simple now you won't believe it. There was no business news site that was online, that was inherently online. And at the time, Wall Street Journal and Businessweek did not update their sites during the day. Yeah. And so - Got to wait for the paper.

34:08And so all the things we did, and we're not maybe the only ones, but we were one of the very first ones, are standard today. Meaning we posted multiple stories as it built, got more information, had punchy headlines, tested our headlines. It's just hard for people to switch medium. So Business Week doesn't worry about their headline in the magazine. Does a good headline give them more revenues? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.

34:32Tim Ferriss:Online it does. They care about the cover, but they don't care about the headlines of the articles. And so we would try four headlines, which was incredibly innovative at the time, for five minutes apiece. And then see, oh, this one is pulling better. Let's use that one. So all these things are absolutely standard today. And Henry was very good. I mean, he's incredibly talented. And we got Peter Kafka. Some people are still very significant journalists today. We got them early on in their careers. But it took a long time. I mean, it took years. But luckily, we had enormous growth. Also, it was hard to raise money for it.

35:03Our strategy was, we're never going to do marketing. So by the way, you've never seen an ad for Business Insider. We're going to write stuff that's so good that eventually we'll have 100 million uniques. And everyone's like, that's not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy. And that is exactly what happened.

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37:26Tim Ferriss:Many of the most successful startups I advise today also use Shopify. From fast-growing new companies to some massive juggernauts, they all use Shopify. I started my first online business back in 2001. Back then, It meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails, and headaches after headaches after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours, ran 24-7 without drama, and ShopPay, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add to cart to paid in seconds.

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38:28Tim Ferriss:Now you have, how many full-time employees do you have at Alley Corp now? 23, 24. Okay. So still not gigantic. All right. When you go back to yesteryear, back when you and Dwight, and maybe there were one or two other people, how did you do the opportunity analysis to decide on what you were going to launch? How did you stress test what seemed interesting? No, it was just the two of us. Okay, great. So how did you choose what to do? Literally just sitting there in the conference room, brainstorming ideas, talking about it, thinking about it. Sometimes we'd go months and had nothing. and then you have to just trust at a certain point that it'll be no different if you met someone who's single and is out there dating and said how do I know this is the person you have to hope you know when you know what does it feel like to know with some of these ideas or any others but preferably earlier examples what does it feel like I recognize it because I start with a business crush meaning there's an idea and I can't stop thinking about it and then a week later, I'm still thinking about it.

39:32And I'm now I'm thinking, oh my God, this would be good. And we could do that. And we could have this person. And it's, it's just building in my mind and I'm falling in love with my idea intellectually. And if that sticks with me for like two weeks, I generally do it. Like I don't actually spend more time. I know if I feel it and see it because there's no sense doing a business model. I mean, you know, who knows how many people are going to be looking at Business Insider. If you don't know that, you don't know anything. The question is, are people going to read their business news online? Can we do a better job than the established players?

40:08And can we do it differently? Do we have a vision for that? In the beginning, I want someone who is going to focus on product. I don't need a finance person. I don't need marketing. I need a great product. And Business Insider was a great product, which is why we got to 100 million. and guilt was a great product.

40:25Tim Ferriss:Also, Business Insider was in a sense in your sandbox because presumably it's dependent on advertising, right? So like you knew that once you had the eyeballs, you could develop that as a business. You know, it's harder to get the eyeballs than it is to sell advertising. If I hand you 100 million uniques, you just go out there, hire a guy to sell advertising and he'll sell. Getting 100 million uniques is 90%, 95 % of the job. At what point in the process are you like, you know what? I know exactly the person at Union Square Ventures or fill in the blank, friendly VC who would love this idea if we can show proof of concept.

41:02Yeah, no, I don't think that way. And I'm always wrong. Sometimes I'll think, I bet this person would like it. But the way to do it, once we go out to raise money, then at the time we would go out to 20 firms, 25 firms. And half the time, the person I thought wanted to do it, didn't want to do it for whatever reason. And someone else fell in love with the idea. So I don't preset that. I'm always, always shocked by it.

41:27Tim Ferriss:Got it. The fundraising is, we'll solve it later. Yeah. Kind of situation. I never preset. Also, I never think about exits. We need to focus on the product. Do we have a product that everyone wants to use? If you solve that, everything else follows. You can raise money. You can hire people. You can do everything. When did you guys, and I'm going to mispronounce this, invest in Valor Atomics? Is it Valor? Valor. Valor. Valor. Yeah. I had a 50-50 chance. That's V-A-L-A-R. Yeah. When did you guys invest? Nuclear company. Exactly. Three years ago. Three years ago. Not even three years ago. Okay. So this is, right, the - Small modular nuclear reactor.

42:06Tim Ferriss:Exactly. So the next-gen nuclear reactor. How did you approach this? Because, you know, nuclear is, pun intended, hot. It wasn't hot. It wasn't. No. Because fusion was kind of on fire. I mean, there. You had the Commonwealth Fusion Systems at MIT and you had Sam Altman raising his SPVs. I guess I'm wondering how you decided on that investment. Yeah. And so this came directly from my deep tech team. So it wasn't my relationship, but we just thought like always that there's an incredible team idea and that they're going to execute well. It was at a$20 million valuation three years ago. They just raised, it was announced publicly from Sequoia at 6 billion.

42:47And they have been crushing it. Where we got lucky is that the U.S. government was not behind nuclear at that time. And I'm not always the biggest fan of the Trump administration, but on psychedelics and nuclear, I think they're right on both. And they have moved both of them forward in a very substantial way.

43:06Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I hope you talk to some nuclear folks when you're in China because they are crushing energy production. Yeah. By the way, most people know france is must have 70 of its energy for 50 years from nuclear absolutely no problems great thing stable i am convinced that this should be an important part of our energy future do you guys as the companies the portfolio companies are raising money i mean that's a crazy markup right i mean just an amazing markup does alicorp take money off the table in these large rounds along the way strategically, or do you guys just park it and wait until the end?

43:44Tim Ferriss:How do you think about handling that? We've done it once so far. And in the past, I would personally take some money off the table, especially the QSBS enabled money, which can make sense. That's a small business exemption for tax purposes for people listening under whatever the asset cap. Yep. You get$10 million tax-free. But in general now, we think it's a good idea for a smaller fund like us in rounds four or five years in to sell a third of our position. So over the next year, we will be hedging in some ways and we will go out there, even though we feel good about these companies. But I think that's a sensible thing.

44:24It returns some money to everyone. It returns some money to the team. And some of these will do really well, some won't. So I think that's a good idea.

44:32Tim Ferriss:What does your LP base look like? It's very small. I'm the largest LP. And then we have mostly family offices and some institutions, some small endowments. So we have maybe 40 or 50 LPs. I mean, you have a spectacular track record. And the second fund, correct me if I'm getting this number wrong, or correct me if Astra is getting this number wrong. July, 2026,$335 million, second fund, something like that. The first fund is at the end of this quarter will be roughly at 60 % IRR. And my family office, the fund you were talking about before also was at 60%. And the$335 million fund is in that ballpark.

45:15We haven't had anything to date in our three sort of funds that's been below 50 % IRR. So we've been very lucky. We've had some great companies and things are going really well. you could raise a huge fund if you wanted to, right?

45:30Tim Ferriss:And maybe you could do more follow-on investing. Maybe you could have a separate fund for growth rounds, et cetera, et cetera. Why not do that? What are the reasons for not doing? What I like to do and what I think we are very good at and the team like to do are build companies. Whether we start them, most of them we're investing in. And we think a lot of the true value add is in those first five years. There are plenty of funds that are big. We're not trying to collect assets. You know how VC funds are typically 2 % and 20 % on the upside? Big funds focus on the 2%. We focus on the 20%. I don't want to be in that business of accumulating assets.

46:07Our funds will get bigger, but it'll be because we add verticals, we add some time. We might add a geography at some point. But I want to keep doing what we do well and what we find fun. I got to wake up every day and feel like I love what I'm doing. And I think we're, in our own small way, helping to change the world. You mentioned Zola. There'll be, I don't know, 150, 200 ,000 couples this year who will use a wedding registry. That was an idea I had 12 years ago. That's great. The nuclear company, I sat down and had drinks with the governor of New York three weeks ago. She's doing a great job.

46:43One of the things she wanted to talk about was nuclear and how we can bring that to New York state because we need to lock down and get more energy costs and bring down costs of energy and help data centers. And we're a part of these things. And psychedelics, I hope there are, we're sitting here 10 years from now, I hope 100 ,000 people who have PTSD have been helped by methalone because we discovered that compound and are going to help bring it to market.

47:10Tim Ferriss:Yeah, we can chat about methalone. That's a beautiful molecule and we will talk about it. But before we get there, I want to take a break from some of the investing stuff just for a moment. How did you end up pursuing a serious level of ping pong? We just started in high school. I played, I had a table in the basement. So I was one of the better people in my neighborhood. And then we had a high school tournament. And then I sophomore year and I won that. And I realized I was pretty good. Then they had a regional tournament. So I went to that and I won that. And then I finally found the state level tournament and I got my ass handed to me there.

47:42then i started playing in new york because new york has great pink was that the defeat that you

47:46Tim Ferriss:needed you're just like oh okay yeah all right well i just didn't play enough i didn't have a coach i was just playing in my neighborhood so then i found a ping pong club that doesn't exist anymore on right near here on white and walker found a guy named musa who was the 14th in the olympics in 1992 he's from nigeria the freak of nature and started playing with him so then i I played some tournaments. And then when I went on the board of Yale, I called up the ping pong team and said, hey, can I come play with you? And they're like, sure. And then I went and played with them and realized that I could hold my own there with the varsity team.

48:22And so I would go play with them. I still do when I can get up to New Haven. And so I just like to play with, you know, I'm not incredible, but I'm pretty good.

48:30Tim Ferriss:How often do you play and what kind of coach or coaching do you have? So I actually weirdly still play with Musa and then with another guy as well. my son is pretty good. And so he and I, he's 28, he's in New York. And so we'll be playing tomorrow, actually. So I probably play every two or three weeks. I just love it. It's incredibly fun. Seems great for your brain. The Chinese will all say, and I think they're not wrong, that it's unbelievably good because brain is hand-eye coordination reacting extremely quickly and subtly. And so that's got to be very good for you. Talking about the brain, we are going to get back to meth alone, but I want to talk about vacation first.

49:13Tim Ferriss:Got a quote here. Again, feel free to fact check. This is attributed to one Kevin Ryan. I think everyone should take four to five weeks of vacation. I would rather have somebody who works 47 weeks of the year pretty intensely. And then it says, knowing that his CEOs will be influenced more by his behavior than by policy, he takes eight to 10 weeks off annually now. but you're not entirely off the grid when you take that time. So can you tell me what your split looks like? And was it the same in the early years of Alley Corp? Like how long has that been the case? I told all my CEOs that when I was building DoubleClick, obviously, as you heard, pretty intense.

49:50And we went public 24 months after we started, just another project.

49:53Tim Ferriss:Different world now, huh? Yeah, yeah. It was a good old days. And I knew I had to change my life and I could only do three things. That family, I took my kids to school. I got it. So you're burning the midnight oil on that one and that led to the realization? Yeah. And I, I, I've never burned out at all because I paced myself. And so I needed to be working hard, spending all the time I needed to with my family and staying in shape. Everything else I cut by like 80 % and that's costly. That's time with friends. I used to be a guy who'd do the cool cultural things all over. You know, I used to watch my 20s sports on Sunday afternoon, all gone.

50:32I prioritized those three things. And then, you know, eight years ago, my kids went off to college and things, and I could layer in new things and different things and have more time. And so it always became more interesting. I didn't ever want to be in a situation where my kids are 18, and I thought, oh my God, I didn't spend time with them. And we did spend at least four to five weeks vacation doing great things together, great memories. That's extremely important. Today, I spend eight to 10 weeks out of the office. I do work every day, but sometimes it'll be two to three hours just keeping things moving.

51:07I can do that. And sometimes it's a full day. Like I'll be week after next, I have a wedding in Ibiza. So I'll be there for four days. And the first five days before that, I'll be in my house in France. And so in the morning, I will be doing intensive sports, incredible biking there. You need to come at some point. Great biking, tennis, swimming. And then I have already blocked out that I'll do the three hours, nine to 12 New York time locked in for meetings. And then one of the days I'll also do the night shift. So I'll do eight hours the next day. But that's an amazing day. Or if I ski in France back by three o 'clock and then work from three till 8.30 and then have a great dinner,

51:48Tim Ferriss:it's an incredible day that is an amazing day how to change your mind by michael pollan what did that do for you i reached the age of 54 which was eight years ago and had never thought about psychedelics at all certainly never tried anything and didn't know very much read the michael pollan book it was on the new york times in 2017 10 best books of the year which is something I always go over to see what I should be reading there. Read the book and it literally did change my mind. It was called How to Change Your Mind. And I realized later than most people that I was wrong, that these medicines could be very useful for people.

52:29And that there's a lot of academic results, even at the time that showed that they could help PTSD and depression and anxiety. And at the time I was still on the board of Yale. So I went and I realized that Yale, I think you talked to John Crystal at one point.

52:41Tim Ferriss:Interviewed John Crystal on his work on ketamine, foundational work with respected depression and much more. Also, I've had conversations with Ben Comendy, who I'm so happy for. I just spent a week in the desert with Ben. Never met him in person. Oh, you need to meet him. Only fun. He's fantastic. And so John Crystal is great. I'm trying to get together with him in the next couple of weeks. Realized Yale had done amazing work. Got them all there. They have a Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. and I just became persuaded in terms of long-term trends. I wasn't thinking about investing at all at the time.

53:11I was just thinking, this is something I am persuaded that most people don't realize is going to be very effective and very important. I'm probably one of the bigger donors to the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research, doing great work. Then in 2021, I decided in talking to Ben Comendy, who was a professor there, that the next phase was going to be a for-profit phase and it was the right thing. And the reason is it takes, whether we like it or not, it takes roughly 200 to 250 million dollars to get one compound through the FDA process. And I wish that were less, but it is what it is right now. And we're not going to be able to raise that money from a nonprofit point of view, even though you contribute, I contribute, but it's not going to be enough.

53:56And so then I said, you know, we should look and see if we should start a company in the space and then worked with Ben and a guy in my team who was on the Alley Corp team, Blake, Mandela. And so we worked on the idea, came up with this methalone, largely due to Penn, and then said, let's start this. We think it has very promising. Blake spun out of Alicorp, which sometimes happened to be the CEO of the company. And then we started the company.

54:20Tim Ferriss:Yeah. Methalone, for people who don't know, I want you to hold me in check here, but methalone, if I were describing it, I had my first methalone experience probably 2015 early, but it had to basically fall off the back of a truck it was very very hard to find even on the underground but an incredibly beautiful gentle experience and maybe the soft-spoken shorter staying cousin absolutely mdma so rather than coming in and you're like when's this guy gonna leave six hours it's more like wow that was so pleasant came over didn't overstay as welcome so i'd love to hear how you landed on methalone or just whatever you'd like to share about methalone specifically, because I think it is, it was just the bullseye.

55:05Tim Ferriss:I mean, what a good choice. What a good choice in terms of the horse to bet on. Let's start there. Let's start with methalone itself because it's one that many people will not be familiar with. Yeah. And even more so at the time, from a business point of view and impact to society point of view, we wanted to find something that people didn't know about, but had some preliminary results that meant that we thought that it could be impactful. And so what most people didn't realize at the time that it has some advantages over MDMA. And by the way, I think MDMA is fantastic, both recreationally and therapeutically.

55:38The results in the trials were very good. But there are some advantages. And so what you were referring to, put another way, you can take methalone once a week in our trials. You actually can't take MDMA once a week. It's a little bit more toxic. It depletes your serotonin a little bit more.

55:55Tim Ferriss:Yeah, Sasha Shulgin would say if more than four times a year it loses its magic, a lot of people become resistant, non-responsive. And so sometimes a slightly softer substance has advantages. Also, you tend not to have the downer that some people have an MDMA. And the duration of action is much more compatible with healthcare as we know it. Yeah. So it had those advantages, and you still don't know until you do a full double-blind study. And so then we started that process or raised the money and the results ended up to be incredible. And the results, this is within the indication of PTSD. Yeah.

56:31We have a patent for PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which is very valuable. So no one else can use it for 20 years in these three categories. But you can only start with one indication because it's$200 million each time. And at the time, if you remember two years ago, we went through a period in psychedelics where it was the desert period. It was hard to raise money. wasn't easy. So there was no way we were going to be able to do all three.

56:54Tim Ferriss:Well, I think part of the reason it was hard to raise, there was stigma, but there were plenty of enthusiastic capitalists who wanted to make something happen. I think there were a few common mistakes. One was assuming it would be easier than it is to get something that lasts four to six hours, let's just call it. You have to prove that it can be scalable as a treatment and you can deliver a certain quality of care, but what does that mean? You have extra nurses, you have extra people, and suddenly the cost is very out of reach. Separately, I would say the combining, we saw this with Lycos, the combining of psychotherapy, the bundling of psychotherapy, and then you put it in front of the FDA advisory committee, and they're like, we don't know how to evaluate or standardize psychotherapy.

57:43And since we don't, no pass.

57:46Tim Ferriss:I I mean, there's a lot more to that story, as you know. How did watching the ecosystem, maybe seeing some of the early unforced errors inform how you guys approached meth-one? Oh, it definitely did. And there's a saying there, early worm gets the bird, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Oh, the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Yeah, so sometimes it's better to be the second mouse. First mouse gets smashed. The cheese is still there, and then you have it. So it's like the iPod. Yeah. Yeah. So we tried to learn from what we saw out there and change certain things.

58:22I think also the FDA has changed over time and the Trump administration has sent a signal that they would like this to happen. And I think, as you know, I mean, you were super early in 2015, but now I would imagine that huge percentage of your random friends have tried psychedelics.

58:40Tim Ferriss:Oh, sure. Yeah. In 2015, that number must have been small. well it was small and unless you happen to be like me living in the bay area people were pretty yeah mom's the word about it yeah i mean there's some i think maybe the pendulum in some cases swung too far it's like if i have to listen to one more trip report about neon crocodiles this is like listening to somebody's dreams every morning you know it's like okay i get it at the same time yeah it was very different and i mean look i don't want to take us too far afield but even though i did a podcast on ibogaine in 2015 did you really wow yeah with martin polanco and dr dan engel looking at some of the work that was being done in mexico but it was way i mean early days wow you were early yeah first hundred monkeys shot in the space right i was not going to sign up for it but i never would have guessed that ibogaine would have been the one that gets mentioned in the Oval Office as an executive order is being signed.

59:39Tim Ferriss:And in retrospect, though, it makes a lot of sense. And I have to imagine the application of PTSD to this politically immune group. Like if you're on the left or the right as a politician, you cannot say fuck the veterans, that the indication of PTSD also as sort of a tip of the spear has that benefit. It does. And one thing I haven't mentioned to you is that we set up Transcend as a public Benefit Corporation. Yes, I wanted to talk about this, yeah. And that means that the initial shareholders had committed to give 10 % of their gains to what is essentially a foundation, and that Blake and I will be giving out that money.

1:00:17And so we will be giving$20 million in the next nine months to causes linked to psychedelics. And so we're in that process right now. I've hired a part-time person to do that. But it has come up because we focus on veterans for PTSD for political reasons, we being the entire industry. The number one source is sexual assault. And that's why our trials were actually 60 % women, because more women have PTSD than men. And I think it's a little bit undercovered. And so we're going to look into some causes and support that and try and see if we can give some of that money out into that area.

1:00:53Tim Ferriss:So I guess a few things. The first is kudos to you. And I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, but like a public benefit corp has its charter, its stated mission. I've interacted with a number of them. But ultimately I remember one of the questions I had for somebody else running one of these, I was like, well, if you change your mind later, how are you held accountable? And he was like, silence. And I was like, you can kind of break the rules and get away with it. So the fact that you guys are following through means a lot. How are you thinking about, I'm sure it's not just an open casting call because you'd get a million wackadoodle things in the inbox that somebody that I have to come through.

1:01:30Tim Ferriss:How are you thinking about how to allocate that 20 million? So we're still thinking about it. We already have 50 organizations that I'm not meeting with companies. Yeah, you seem like a busy guy. Yeah. But Nicolas Boileau, who's the person who is in charge of this, has been meeting with people. We're assembling it, looking at the world. There's going to be a big PSFC meeting in October, and then we're going to start diving into it. This Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, although now they've expanded beyond just the science, but PSFC. But it's the largest collection of donors in the psychedelic space.

1:02:04Tim Ferriss:PSFC.co, I think. Yeah. They do great work. But the point is what we're going to look to do is not make 500 grants, but make like 20 and have real grants. Most of these organizations are small. So there's a good chance we'll be the largest donor to the psychedelic industry in the next 12 months, just for 12 months. And I don't have the full answer to that yet. We're starting to think of where can we have impact? What can be done that other people are not doing? We probably won't give as much to pure academic research. You know, even in Oregon and Colorado who have legal psychedelics. Or at least decriminalized.

1:02:41There's a program in each state that is legal to give it out and be able to do it. Right.

1:02:46Tim Ferriss:With the sort of parallel structure, yeah. Yeah. but not even 0.5 % of people with depression or PTSD have been able to access this yet. One of the biggest challenges we have, it's too expensive. And one of the things I am interested in is trying to show that group therapy works as well. So I think maybe even better in some cases. I think maybe even better. My bet would be better. Same here. There's a reason that AA does it in a group setting because you get support from other people and you've probably been in some group ceremonies and they can be very powerful. FDA has been very nervous about that.

1:03:24That's a whole new thing. How do you monitor that? So we need to get to the point. We need to bring down the cost is the bottom line.

1:03:30Tim Ferriss:What would your hope be for the for-profit ecosystem? Would your hope be that more people would follow in your footsteps? If so, how can they, as the better version of themselves or the best version of themselves ensure that when incentives get really tempting later, they don't change their mind. On the public benefit corp. Exactly. I have been incredibly disappointed with how many centimillionaires, billionaires have had their lives changed by these things, but have in no material way supported the ecosystem or the science upon which ultimately a lot of your work depends. It's been personally very upsetting to me as someone who put like 20 % of his entire net worth in at one point.

1:04:19Tim Ferriss:That is not to say that I think academia is the cure-all for all the reasons you said, like the market-driven solutions for the very expensive FDA processes involved. Incredibly important. What do you think can be done to encourage people? I mean, you're doing a great job by doing it, right? Just showcasing it. And I think a lot of good will radiate from that. Any thoughts on how to encourage more people to get involved? I don't know how to force them, but what I know I'm doing is I'm actually having a series of conversations with people and talking through who have called me. And what I'm doing, I'm going to be speaking at the smaller PSFC group to give an example of why we did it this way, what we did.

1:05:04You know, we did for a couple of reasons. One, at the end, we thought it was fair. to it reminded everyone in the company that this is a mission-driven company. Yes, at the end, it may be a good exit, but we are doing this and everyone needs to join this company because they want to make the world a better place. And we want to help these people who have PTSD. There are 10 million people and it's a real problem. And then eventually depression as well. And so everyone joining knew that the original shareholders, board members, chairman had already committed to do this. And we're going to put their money where their mouth is.

1:05:36and I think we just have to push everyone on this to do it. I don't know a better way to force them.

1:05:43Tim Ferriss:Well, I'm so glad you're doing it. I hope more people follow suit. Friend of mine who's a VC, he's very successful as an angel, joined a venture capital firm, very well known, did incredibly well. And a while back, he started kind of stepping back and I've had people suggesting I started fun forever and I, for a host of reasons, I'm not convinced I'd be good at it or particularly enjoy it. I don't know. But he said, oh, early stage ventures dead. And I was like, what do you mean early stage ventures dead? And what he meant was if your bread and butter is a lot of consumer facing tech, he's like, I just made a clone of Twitter in 12 hours as a non-technical person using vibe coding and X, Y, and Z.

1:06:28Tim Ferriss:Ultimately, that's not enough to just displace X, but is the deep tech focus because there are more defensible moats in deep tech, or is there more to it? It's partly that, but it's also probably that world is changing. So in that consumer idea you're talking about, you know, there are 164 soft drinks. The odds of you coming up with one that stands out is pretty slim. Whereas the changes that are occurring or have occurred in solar or wind or geothermal or nuclear, you know, there are going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars of contracts signed to produce energy. Robotics, the same thing.

1:07:12We're seeing extraordinary developments. We're getting 10x and 100x improvements in robots, which will change the world. I don't see the same thing in e-commerce. Healthcare can be done better in this country. We spend a lot, we don't have great results, complicated issue, but that's why, you know, we really do what I call traditional software. AI is one group, healthcare is one group, and deep tech is one group. Those are our three areas of focus. We have dedicated teams, but we do more deep tech than we did four or five years ago. Absolutely. That's the one that's grown the most for these various reasons.

1:07:47And it's intellectually interesting. You learn a lot, space. We have an investment in space, a company called Portal that can help move satellites from one area to another. And there's just a whole ecosystem that's sort of a second order implication of having 10 times more satellites, which we'll have.

1:08:04Tim Ferriss:On the robotics side, what are some second or third order effects that might present opportunities? Because investing in someone who actually, like Boston Robotics, way beyond my pay grade. But I'm like, maybe if that's where the focus is, I'm saying this in a very simple way, but if a lot of people are focused on that, maybe like the second or third order effects are more neglected. So let's look at the movement and societal shifts and are there going to be more robots in 10 years? Yeah, I think so. Right. A hundred times more. I mean, this is one where it's literally going to be somewhere between a hundred and a thousand or 10 ,000 times more.

1:08:40And so I think the business opportunities are going to be in very vertical uses, a textile factory, things like that, or a car factory or things like that. And so, and those are happening right now and they're going to continue to happen. where it's harder is in things like a restaurant because robots are best early on when they can do one thing and do it really well when they have to chop vegetables take the garbage up the stairs and go to a nearby deli to buy a product that we need humans can do that quite well robots that's tougher so single use is the best way and factories are the best way for that so that's going to be colossal in every single factory.

1:09:19Tim Ferriss:Are you still bullish on robot massage? And to what extent are you looking at unfilled jobs as a maybe one criteria? I am bullish. And we were an investor in Escape, which is doing that. That's a product that's still evolving, but it's going to work. I remember as of two years ago, there were 17 ,000 unfilled jobs in massages in this country. And you must have gone to a hotel like I have and you arrive and you're like, yeah, can I get a massage tomorrow afternoon? Like, totally booked up. Yeah, how about three days from now at 9 a.m. and you're like, no. I'm not gonna be in the hotel. Or you say 8 a.m.

1:09:59or 9 a.m. No way, no one works at that time. 7 p.m., no one works. If you had a machine and 25 % of people prefer to have a robot. Some people think it'd be much better to have a person. There are a lot of people that don't like to take their clothes off, don't feel comfort with it, and feel better about a robot. So just another example of something you wouldn't think of, it is a solvable problem. And we're probably 70 % of the way there to solving it.

1:10:27Tim Ferriss:Any other jobs with lots of unfilled positions that make for appealing terrain? Again, we haven't solved the restaurant one, and that's a big one. I wonder, I mean, to what extent, man, I'd love to have a conversation with Travis Kalanick about that. But man, he is more than anyone I know. So they put a lot of thought. Yeah, and he is industrializing. So he has a better chance of doing it. The truth is most restaurants are big mom and pop shops. And so it's harder to do that. But yeah, I mean, we're watching customer support. We had an incredible call where one of our AI agents was on the phone with someone.

1:11:04And after 15 seconds said, I'm sorry, would you be more comfortable in another language? and the person said, well, actually, yeah, could we speak Spanish? And he goes, muy bien, and then just handles the rest of the call in Spanish.

1:11:18Tim Ferriss:What a cool example. And if you listen to it, it changed completely the call because she had trouble explaining. It was a medical thing. She had a lot of trouble explaining in English and then right away, no issue and solve the problem. Yeah. Wow. It's coming fast. It is coming so fast. If you think of an example of one of the companies ideally one that you co-founded that was like pushing a boulder downhill it's like wow this is really things just fell into place in a sense ideally not just through luck and then one that was pushing a boulder uphill i'm wondering what the biggest difference is like what comes to mind and what were the differences between the two i'll give you a good uphill one which i'm still disappointed we realized there were going to be a lot it was basically shopify for healthcare companies.

1:12:10Because we were building these healthcare sites and we found we were building a lot of the same things. Scheduling for time. And this is three, four years ago. Scheduling, information, all this stuff. Didn't matter whether it was for your cancer care or your back problem.

1:12:25Tim Ferriss:A lot of repeating features. And it has to be HIPAA compliant, which most sites are not. So we set up a company to be Shopify for healthcare sites. For whatever reason, we put$6 million in. Eventually, it just didn't get there. people reluctant to sign up. They didn't see someone else. Maybe it wasn't good enough execution. Felt like that should exist. And we never pulled it off and then had to make a decision to close it down. Doesn't seem like you were too early. Are the reasons unknown? They are unknown for me. Did we not do a good enough job? Did we have to wait just another year to get the first 10 marquee clients?

1:12:59And that was enough. Obviously, most companies at the time where we're locked into outsource to someone else so i still don't i don't know and sometimes you don't know it's not it's still not quite a playbook there no double click was public 24 no 48 months what no it was public for seven years i'm sorry after it's for me yeah yeah 24

1:13:22Tim Ferriss:months after we started i mean there's like marking conditions and all that stuff also but then you have something like mongo db that was a decade before ipo why was that First of all, we didn't have any revenue for three and a half years. And if you're taking notes, don't do that because it made it hard to raise money. It's a hard product. It's also, if I said a database is like a pacemaker, if I said to you, I've got this startup pacemaker idea, do you want to try it? And you're like, no, no. Call me when a thousand people have used your pacemaker for two years. But if everyone says that, I can't get my pacemaker out there.

1:13:57So it took us a long time. I had to give it away for free for a long time. used for inexpensive things, and then slowly got there. So even after eight years, we were doing 40 million in revenue, which is not that much. But the usage was growing dramatically. The product worked. The product was getting better. And today it's worth, I don't know,$30 billion. And it's an incredible company.

1:14:20Tim Ferriss:What are your personal rules for what you do when a company he goes public. What is your policy for holding, selling a portion, selling all? How do you think about that? Because I know some angels, they're like, look, public market, not my game. As soon as it goes public, I'm going to sell 50 % and then just let the rest ride. And they keep it really simple. I definitely don't have a policy. I hold it as long as I still feel this is a great investment. And I think it's going to grow for a long time. At some point, you do need to get money if you have a firm to invest in other things. So I did not sell in the first year or two when it was public.

1:14:56And then the price went up and I just slowly started selling. And I still have shares today, but I've sold a big percentage of it over time.

1:15:04Tim Ferriss:We're going to land the plane now. So Kevin, if you could put anything, metaphorically speaking, on a billboard to get a message in front of millions, billions of people, we can just pretend that they all speak English. AI, you know, AI can figure it out. But what might you put on that billboard? Could be a motto, could be a quote, could be anything non-commercial. Does anything come to mind? So I'll give you something different than you think. I would love the United States to be a more balanced society and a more open and a more caring society that we take care of other people. I'm not worried about our startups.

1:15:41Our startups are doing great, technology, funding, all that's great, lots of entrepreneurs. I do worry long-term about the income inequality in this country. I don't think we're addressing that issue. I think the ability for people in this country to move up the ladder statistically has been diminished. And I think all of this is going to catch up to us. And it's not right. People have schools that are bad. They don't have support. We're going to have this transition. There's no doubt we can debate the time we're going to lose jobs to AI. And I don't think we're in a good position to help people have successful lives.

1:16:15So I would like the country to be thinking about that.

1:16:19Tim Ferriss:So whether we're at the highest levels of state government or you're in the Oval Office and it's like Kevin Carp Lange, you get to pull two levers. What are the levers to try to make a bit of progress in addressing some of the issues you just mentioned? One that's going to lead to it, we're going to have to address the budget deficit at some point. We don't know where that point is, but it could be sneaking up on us right now. We're going to have to end up having a more equitable tax system where the wealthy pay 30 % taxes, which they don't right now. We have to decrease that budget deficit because that decreases the interest rate, which impacts everyone to do that.

1:16:56And then we're going to have to just agree that we're going to do a better job of helping people go to the right colleges, get the right degrees. I don't mean necessarily college-based, I mean professional training, retraining, things like that. We have to get to the point where a higher percentage of people are doing well and they feel like their kids are going to do well. When families don't feel like their kids are going to do better, they get desperate and they go to the far right or they go to the far left, and neither one of those solutions is going to be the right solution. We're going to have to get more immigrants in this country.

1:17:29Tim Ferriss:How do you think you do that? Because I agree with you. And I mean, I've seen so much headache in, say, recruiting in Silicon Valley and this, that, and the other thing. It's wild. I mean, this is a country of immigrants. So how do you think you tackle that? The message has come down in the last several years from the president that immigrants are bad. And I just find it unfathomable. And everyone in Silicon Valley that has been supporting this has made their money backing immigrants. Yeah. It's pretty gross. I mean, look, should we have unlimited people coming over the border? Absolutely not.

1:18:04No one's saying that. Should my companies have trouble getting PhD people in AI to come from other countries to come to the United States? How is that a good idea to stop those people from coming in? We should be opening our doors and saying, you have a master's in AI and computer science, something like that. Of course you can come work here. Come work here. You think they're going to go on unemployment? I doubt it. They're going to make$500 ,000 a year and they're going to join some company, and three years later, they're going to start their own company, employ 5 ,000 people. I mean, as you said, we're all immigrants.

1:18:37This should be the country where the most talented people in the world are coming to right now. And we shouldn't take 100 million of them, but we should take, you know, a million of them, 2 million of them. Population is going to be going down. That has some negative impact on us. We should be supplementing that. This is our entire history our immigrants do great. The data shows our immigrants from Haiti do great, from Nigeria do great, from Kosovo do great. They're just scrappy people who want to work their ass off in whatever they do, and I want more of them. And that's a contrarian view today.

1:19:15Tim Ferriss:I agree 100%. I mean, I've seen the same thing where it's like, okay, let me get this straight. You're going to keep these PhDs in X, Y, and Z out of the country. And guess what? They are talented, they're going to get used with great leverage and they're going to create something incredible. The question is, is it going to be here or not? Yeah. At Yale, we're seeing pressure on not getting academics in, on some academics feeling not comfortable. You know, we had one who left for Oxford and Cambridge, people left to go to Canada. That should not be happening. The premier league in English soccer is the best league in the world, not because of English players, because they have Norwegian players, they have Egyptian players, they have people from Ghana.

1:19:58Basically, they don't care. They want the best people. And that's what we have always been and need to continue to be.

1:20:04Tim Ferriss:Kevin, before we wind this to a close, anything else you'd like to say? Anything else you'd like to point people to? People can find Alicorp online, of course. It's spelled as it sounds, alicorp.com. I'll include the LinkedIn and Alicorp X and all these things in the show notes. Anything else you'd like to? The only thing I'd say, and the fact that you're in New York for a month or two, makes the point that New York is just booming. And we had an incredible summer with the Knicks and the World Cup and the US Open, but the restaurants, the startups, I could not feel better. We're very focused on New York, but I see so many people moving from Europe, coming to New York, starting up companies.

1:20:44Mongo was run by someone who was an immigrant. Datadog was started by French entrepreneurs. Those are the two most valuable tech companies here. Despite what I said, we're going to get more people coming here. New York's going to be very, very successful.

1:20:57Tim Ferriss:It's on fire. Yeah, it's really on fire. I mean, home base is Austin. Austin's a boom town for a million different reasons. That's not going to slow down anytime soon. But New York is New York. There's just, you know, having grown up as a New Yorker, it continually blows my mind. But this particular season, this season of New York has been just on fire. It's really exciting. And the higher level thing is, the more I go, I spend a lot of time outside the United States, but the United States, from a business tech point of view, is just crushing it. And we all see this, but the future industries, and we have to worry about China because China's doing a lot of great things, but we're doing a lot of great things.

1:21:34And everyone in Europe and Latin America looks to us and is both concerned and impressed.

1:21:40Tim Ferriss:Well, thanks for the time, Kevin. Lovely to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything in the show notes, tim.blog slash podcast, The one and only Kevin Ryan, just type in his name and everything will pop up. And until next time, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. 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 two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

1:22:17Tim Ferriss: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. And 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.

1:22:57Tim Ferriss: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 AG1, which I have taken for more than a decade. And it's coming up on close to 15 years, I would say. Long-time listeners have heard me call it my nutritional insurance. And that is exactly how I use it. The news today is they just launched AG1 Pro, designed for people focused on performance and longevity. I'll be traveling soon. I'm actually packing today, and I'm throwing a bunch of these in my bag to cover my bases while I'm on the road.

1:23:35Tim Ferriss:And I have noticed, perhaps some of you have, that it is harder and harder to put on muscle and to keep on muscle. I am a young 48 years old, and I've noticed that change. So past a certain age, you may be that age. Maintaining lean muscle becomes priority number one, and AG1 Pro is formulated to support exactly that. It includes HMB, a clinically studied compound that supports protein synthesis and helps reduce muscle breakdown, plus zinc carnosine to support the gut lining. So remember, training's only half the equation. You have to feed the machine, and as you get older, there's certain things that can help turn the dials just a bit in your favor.

1:24:16Tim Ferriss:Recovery is where the work compounds and AG1 Pro is built to support it. It's NSF certified for sports. So what's on the label is what's in the pouch. Get your free AG1 Pro Yeti shaker in the welcome kit at drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. So D-R-I-N-K-A-G, the number one dot com slash Tim. Many of you know that I've battled sleep for decades, had onset insomnia, I'm constantly hot because I'm a little meat cube, and the list goes on. But I've used 8Sleep for many years now, since the beginning, and man, it is a godsend. People have experienced up to 34 % more deep sleep, and by people, I mean customers, HRV improvements of 13 % on average.

1:25:02Tim Ferriss:They've transformed more than 1 million nights of sleep for their customers. 8Sleep just released the Pod 6. I'll explain where it is, and it is a major upgrade. But first things first, the Pod is a cover that fits over your existing mattress, kind wraps it, cools or heats each side of the bed independently. As I mentioned, I run super hot. My lovely partner tends to run cold. With the Pod, we each get the temperature we want and need for good sleep. No more fighting over the thermostat. No more pulling the blanket off, putting the blanket on, sticking one leg out, all that nonsense. Fixes all.

1:25:34Tim Ferriss:Now to the upgrades. The Pod 6 Hub, the latest and greatest, that runs the temperature system is 50 % smaller than the Pod 5 and fits under most bed frames. The thermal engine reaches your set temperature 20 % faster, so the bed is ready whenever you are. And the cover embeds nine times the number of biometric sensors, tracking things like heart rate, HRV, and sleep stages with no wearable. The Pod 6, check it out, starts at$1 ,999, the lowest starting price 8sleep has ever offered. Use code TIM at 8sleep.com slash TIM for up to$200 off of the Pod 6. spell it all out that's eight sleep.com slash Tim and use code tip