New Health Gadgets, How to Drink Less, AI, & More

1. 0:00 – 0:44

   Start.

   1. KRKevin Rose0:00

      I took my whole genome, dumped it into AI, and we worked out a playbook together on where we could find methyl donors to, and which methylated B vitamins I could give to help fix the broken cycle, 'cause I have the MTHFR genetic mutation. It's a very fancy way of saying one biomarker completely jacked up. My dad died of heart disease. I don't wanna die of heart disease. How can we fix this shit, right?

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:25

      [laughs]

   3. KRKevin Rose0:26

      So we worked through a way for me to start adding on supplements. I'm eight weeks in, and for the first time my homocysteine is at normal levels-

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:34

      Hmm

   5. KRKevin Rose0:35

      ... after many years of trying to figure this out. And I was working through this process in tandem with my AI, which

2. 0:44 – 7:29

   Two old men discuss the importance of regular medical checkups.

   1. KRKevin Rose0:44

      was crazy.

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:45

      Kevin, good to see you, sir.

   3. KRKevin Rose0:46

      Tim Tim, always a pleasure. Good to be here.

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:49

      So the ravages of childhood illness are ripping through your household at the moment?

   5. KRKevin Rose0:55

      Uh, yeah. I mean, it was one of those things where I hit you up this morning, I was like, "Yeah, there's a cold going around. Can we boot this podcast?" You're like, "I have to have my colon examined." And so we decided to do it today.

   6. TFTim Ferriss1:06

      [laughs]

   7. KRKevin Rose1:07

      So I feel, I feel pretty good though, actually, all things considered.

   8. TFTim Ferriss1:09

      [laughs]

   9. KRKevin Rose1:11

      True story. [laughs]

   10. TFTim Ferriss1:12

       A true story. True story. We have all of the fun things to discuss in our advancing years. But, you know, one step at a time.

   11. KRKevin Rose1:19

       Yes.

   12. TFTim Ferriss1:19

       One step at a time.

   13. KRKevin Rose1:20

       By the way, I have a lot of pro tips for the colonoscopy if you have never-

   14. TFTim Ferriss1:24

       Oh

   15. KRKevin Rose1:24

       ... done one.

   16. TFTim Ferriss1:25

       Let's do it. I have done a colonoscopy before.

   17. KRKevin Rose1:27

       Okay.

   18. TFTim Ferriss1:27

       The reason that I am methodical about this is, not to immediately start on a down note, but a friend of mine ended up getting terminal colon cancer which metastasized, I guess, prior to that diagnosis to his liver. And so I have been very much on schedule with doing this type of checkup. Even though it's inconvenient, even though it's unpleasant, you gotta do it. You just have to do it.

   19. KRKevin Rose1:55

       I had a friend who actually had a big massive chunk of his colon removed because of this.

   20. TFTim Ferriss2:00

       Yeah.

   21. KRKevin Rose2:01

       He had some cancer so, yeah, very important to stay on top of. But I will say, the drugs they give you when you're going in, the propofol, yeah.

   22. TFTim Ferriss2:08

       [laughs]

   23. KRKevin Rose2:09

       That shit, that's what Michael Jackson died on.

   24. TFTim Ferriss2:11

       Yeah.

   25. KRKevin Rose2:12

       Do you know that? That's what he died on.

   26. TFTim Ferriss2:13

       Well, that's why I won't self-administer. [laughs]

   27. KRKevin Rose2:16

       No, you don't self-administer that. But I will say, if you have a cool doc-

   28. TFTim Ferriss2:20

       [laughs]

   29. KRKevin Rose2:21

       ... and it's typically the anesthesiologist that does this, they will do what's called the slow ramp-

   30. TFTim Ferriss2:25

       [laughs]
3. 7:29 – 10:34

   Zen and the art of 32 Sounds.

   1. TFTim Ferriss7:29

      All right. Should we move on from-

   2. KRKevin Rose7:30

      From dying?

   3. TFTim Ferriss7:31

      ... old man roll call? [laughs]

   4. KRKevin Rose7:32

      Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

   5. TFTim Ferriss7:34

      [laughs]

   6. KRKevin Rose7:35

      From death.

   7. TFTim Ferriss7:36

      From death. All right. I'll kick us off with, with something that I think is pretty fun that I certainly was not aware of, and it's a documentary. So this is a documentary. It's called 32 Sounds, and people can check this out. If you're going to watch it, watch it with a headset. It could be in-ear AirPods, something like that, but certainly if you have higher quality headphones, I would use those. Here's the description. It has 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. "32 Sounds is an immersive feature documentary and profound sensory experience from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sam Green, featuring original music by JD Samson. The film explores the elemental phenomenon of sound by weaving together 32 specific sound explorations into a cinematic meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us." It's just a fundamentally different moviegoing or film watching, in this case, listening experience than anything I've ever seen.

   8. KRKevin Rose8:40

      Mm.

   9. TFTim Ferriss8:40

      So from that perspective, I thought it was worthwhile, very worthwhile, and it will certainly lead you to, for a period of time afterwards, relate to the world of sound and this ability that sometimes we take for granted, which under the hood is pretty bizarre or at the very least amazing. So that's a recommendation to get us out of death land and into savoring life land.

   10. KRKevin Rose9:05

       So walk me through this as someone that hasn't even seen a trailer for it.

   11. TFTim Ferriss9:08

       Mm.

   12. KRKevin Rose9:08

       Are we talking like sound bath action here? Like are we, are we seeing visuals on the screen? What is it?

   13. TFTim Ferriss9:14

       You're seeing visuals. There are points in the documentary, for instance, where they'll prompt you to close your eyes if you are sighted, because they don't assume that everyone is, and it weaves the visual and the auditory together along with background context from the filmmaker into a documentary that is just unlike anything I've seen.

   14. KRKevin Rose9:39

       That's awesome.

   15. TFTim Ferriss9:40

       So I, for that reason, thought I would throw it out there because as you know, Kevin, and maybe we'll talk about this, but we spent some time together, my first time with Henry Shukman in New Mexico. We did a mini Zen retreat, and you can really sharpen your awareness, broadly speaking, by honing in on the specific, right? So you might do a session where you're focused just on breathing in and out and the sensation at the nostrils, for instance.

   16. KRKevin Rose10:11

       Mm-hmm.

   17. TFTim Ferriss10:11

       You might also focus on soundscape, and when we were sitting, we did a lot of focusing on soundscape, different types of sounds, things that are intermittent, things that are one-off, things that are droning in the background. And this documentary can be a tool in the toolkit. I just think it's a nice way to jumpstart that type or magnify the awareness that we already have.

4. 10:34 – 13:49

   Going with the low-poly Flow.

   1. KRKevin Rose10:34

      This is one of those things where, I don't know about you, but I found myself drawn to more kind of indie, weird documentary style stuff lately-

   2. TFTim Ferriss10:43

      Mm-hmm

   3. KRKevin Rose10:43

      ... just because there's so much commercial shit out there where I'm like, "I don't need another show. I don't need more violence in my head."

   4. TFTim Ferriss10:49

      Yeah.

   5. KRKevin Rose10:50

      I watched Flow not too long ago. We talked about that once before. That was fantastic movie. You didn't like it though, right?

   6. TFTim Ferriss10:56

      I haven't watched it yet.

   7. KRKevin Rose10:58

      Oh, shit.

   8. TFTim Ferriss10:59

      And I guess what I wanna know is how long does it take for you to get accustomed to the sort of lo-fi aesthetic of that particular animation, right? Because it looks... I'm not even sure how you would describe it. Like very polygonal, right? It's very... If I'm getting [chuckles] the pronunciation right, somebody can-

   9. KRKevin Rose11:22

      Polygonal. Low poly.

   10. TFTim Ferriss11:24

       Low poly, yeah, which polygon, polygonal. There we go. Something like that.

   11. KRKevin Rose11:28

       Yeah.

   12. TFTim Ferriss11:28

       I'm getting too fancy for my own good. But how long does it take you to get accustomed to, and if, if my memory serves me right, it's from a filmmaker somewhere in like Hungary or Lithuania, something like that. Animated film, all about animals. The visual, I guess, aesthetic, the look is what kept me from watching it. So maybe you could just speak to that for a second.

   13. KRKevin Rose11:51

       It does have this very low poly kind of Nintendo type vibes to it [chuckles] where it's not the PS5. It's kind of like a crappier version where you can see some of the artifacts, and it's just completely silent film. Well, not silent. It has sounds, but there's no talking at all, and it's kind of post-apocalyptic vibes. This cat is trying to kind of make its way through this new world. It's beautiful. I'd say about five minutes of that weird like, "Where am I? Why is this low poly?" And then all of a sudden-

   14. TFTim Ferriss12:20

       You're used to it

   15. KRKevin Rose12:20

       ... you feel polyamorous. What is it when you get, like, used to something like that?

   16. TFTim Ferriss12:24

       [laughs]

   17. KRKevin Rose12:24

       Is it polyamorous? You would know, Tim.

   18. TFTim Ferriss12:26

       Low polyamorous. [laughs]

   19. KRKevin Rose12:27

       Low polyamorous, yeah.

   20. TFTim Ferriss12:28

       [laughs]

   21. KRKevin Rose12:28

       So you get used to it [laughs] whether you like it or not.

   22. TFTim Ferriss12:32

       Yeah.

   23. KRKevin Rose12:33

       But it was Latvia was where it was, it came out of

   24. TFTim Ferriss12:35

       There we go. Sorry, Latvia.

   25. KRKevin Rose12:36

       But it's beautiful. Watch the trailer. It's, like, a minute and a half long. It's, it's absolutely stunning. It's like this cat forms these relationships with these birds and these dogs, and they're all, all trying to survive, and it's 84 minutes of just good, fun, low-poly documentary.

   26. TFTim Ferriss12:53

       Is there a minimum required amount of enhancement before you watch such a thing?

   27. KRKevin Rose12:57

       No.

   28. TFTim Ferriss12:57

       Or were you watching it stone cold? Okay, just making sure.

   29. KRKevin Rose13:00

       Dude, I'm clean. I'm clean these days. Well, that's actually something I wanna talk about. I'm so clean right now.

   30. TFTim Ferriss13:05

       Let's talk about clean, 'cause sometimes clean, when I hear you say clean, that means that you've been clean for, like, 13, 14 hours. So what are we talking here? Let's hop right into it.
5. 13:49 – 20:57

   KevKev goes cleanclean and sober.

   1. KRKevin Rose13:49

      anyway, on to... Should we just switch to-

   2. TFTim Ferriss13:52

      Kevin being clean?

   3. KRKevin Rose13:54

      Yeah, clean. Let's do it. So, dude, here's the deal. Okay.

   4. TFTim Ferriss13:57

      [laughs] .

   5. KRKevin Rose13:58

      We've had this conversation a few times.

   6. TFTim Ferriss14:00

      Yep.

   7. KRKevin Rose14:00

      And you and I will get on a phone call, and I'll be like, "How you doing?" You're like, "Oh, dating's hard 'cause you have to drink every night." And, you know, I'm like, "Life's hard, so you have to drink every night." [laughs] .

   8. TFTim Ferriss14:10

      [laughs] .

   9. KRKevin Rose14:10

      I'm like, "Being married's hard, so you have to drink every night," you know? [laughs] .

   10. TFTim Ferriss14:13

       Yeah.

   11. KRKevin Rose14:13

       So it's kinda like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

   12. TFTim Ferriss14:15

       [laughs] .

   13. KRKevin Rose14:16

       No, but all jokes aside, one of the things that I realized is that earlier this year I made this very proud statement that I'm gonna go 90 days without drinks, and everybody says 90 days is where the magic happens, you know, this and that. You know, classic Kevin bullshit where I fail after, like, a week, right?

   14. TFTim Ferriss14:33

       Yep [laughs] .

   15. KRKevin Rose14:33

       And so I went close to a month. I had a couple little things where I was like, "Well, I got this event. I'm gonna allow myself to have two or three drinks," whatever. And, you know, so it was kinda cheating, but I- I did a month-ish, right?

   16. TFTim Ferriss14:45

       Mm-hmm.

   17. KRKevin Rose14:46

       Around the holidays and then after I lost my house in the fire, I realized that... There was this moment where I just realized what I'm doing is no longer serving me, and it's really... I just didn't feel like drinking was the solution to anything. I wasn't having the same joyous kinda fun with friends type drinking. It was more out of habit and also continuous.

   18. TFTim Ferriss15:16

       Mm-hmm.

   19. KRKevin Rose15:16

       So what I mean by that is I've never been the, like, "Oh, damn it. I had six drinks last night." Like, I mean, maybe at Dignation or some stupid shit like that. But outside of the random podcast once a year, it was more a consistency thing. And then I got some really scary blood work back from my doctor where I went to have my quarterly blood check, and my liver enzymes were, like, 150.

   20. TFTim Ferriss15:35

       Mm-hmm.

   21. KRKevin Rose15:35

       Which is just insane.

   22. TFTim Ferriss15:37

       Yep.

   23. KRKevin Rose15:38

       They should be, like, under 20.

   24. TFTim Ferriss15:40

       That's like Barry Bonds in his peak level liver enzymes [laughs] .

   25. KRKevin Rose15:43

       Right. Exactly. Like, I should've been jacked as shit from juicing, but instead it was just me hitting, you know, champagne or drinks. The problems I would have, two things. One, my liver is just not what it used to be as I get older, and two, you know, the consistency, like I said, two or three drinks just, like, a lot of nights in a row.

   26. TFTim Ferriss16:01

       Mm-hmm.

   27. KRKevin Rose16:02

       And it was really easy for my wife and I to crack a bottle and just finish it together and just call it a night. So long story short, I was like, "I need to change something, and what I'm doing is not working. And if I really wanna go 90 days, I have to surround myself with people that can help me here," right?

   28. TFTim Ferriss16:19

       Mm-hmm.

   29. KRKevin Rose16:20

       And so I have had now th- three friends that have done one version of a 12-step program. One I think has actually been on your podcast before. I called them all up and I said, "Hey, I don't think I can do 90 days by myself."

   30. TFTim Ferriss16:33

       Mm-hmm.
6. 20:57 – 22:15

   The first rule of AA is you do not talk about AA.

   1. KRKevin Rose20:57

      drinking. You're not supposed to talk about these things when you go and check them out

   2. TFTim Ferriss21:01

      Oh, it's like Fight Club

   3. KRKevin Rose21:02

      It's like Fight Club

   4. TFTim Ferriss21:03

      Wait, you're not supposed to talk about them? Why not?

   5. KRKevin Rose21:07

      Well-

   6. TFTim Ferriss21:07

      'Cause I know people, for instance, who have been like, "Yeah, I'm in Narcotics Anonymous," or whatever

   7. KRKevin Rose21:12

      Well, I'll give you an example. So Brad Pitt got a bunch of shit for saying he was in AA

   8. TFTim Ferriss21:16

      Okay

   9. KRKevin Rose21:17

      If you're in AA, you're not supposed to say you're in AA

   10. TFTim Ferriss21:19

       Oh, he got shit from AA people, or people in AA

   11. KRKevin Rose21:22

       Yeah, exactly

   12. TFTim Ferriss21:23

       Okay. I would think that would be a good thing because he would draw attention to-

   13. KRKevin Rose21:28

       I would too

   14. TFTim Ferriss21:29

       ... a lifeline for people who are having trouble with alcohol. That's interesting

   15. KRKevin Rose21:33

       Right, exactly. Most of these organizations don't want you chatting about them, you know, and so it's really fascinating

   16. TFTim Ferriss21:40

       Weird

   17. KRKevin Rose21:41

       But not in like a culty way. It sounds very culty-ish, but in reality it's just to protect who's in them and also not make it be about the organization if someone fails

   18. TFTim Ferriss21:50

       Mm

   19. KRKevin Rose21:51

       'Cause if I were to go back and say, "Hey, listen, I'm trying this thing out right now," or, "I tried this thing," or, "I went to two meetings of this thing," then later you hear, "I only made it 45 days," you're like, "Oh, that must suck," as an organization, right?

   20. TFTim Ferriss22:01

       Yeah

   21. KRKevin Rose22:01

       And so it's like you don't associate yourself with any of these things 'cause a lot of people might see that as a, as a failure and then never try it, so that's one of the other things-

   22. TFTim Ferriss22:09

       Huh

   23. KRKevin Rose22:09

       ... that they, they say

   24. TFTim Ferriss22:10

       Okay

   25. KRKevin Rose22:10

       Yeah

   26. TFTim Ferriss22:10

       Well, I don't want you to come under the wrath of the spider web of AA. [laughs]

7. 22:15 – 24:19

   LEGO bricks (and Nanoblocks) as art for grown-ups.

   1. KRKevin Rose22:15

      One thing of that I can suggest-

   2. TFTim Ferriss22:17

      Ooh, all right

   3. KRKevin Rose22:17

      ... is LEGO. [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss22:20

      LEGO

   5. KRKevin Rose22:20

      LEGO

   6. TFTim Ferriss22:20

      [laughs]

   7. KRKevin Rose22:22

      If you're not watching the video, I'm holding up a massive Japanese wave called The Great Wave of Kanagawa, which is a, a woodblock print that was done.

   8. TFTim Ferriss22:30

      This is a Hokusai

   9. KRKevin Rose22:31

      Yeah, Hokusai

   10. TFTim Ferriss22:32

       Yeah

   11. KRKevin Rose22:32

       From the, it was the Edo period, I think, right, when he, he did these woodblock prints

   12. TFTim Ferriss22:36

       Yeah

   13. KRKevin Rose22:36

       But I spent, like, three days making this with my oldest daughter, which is amazing

   14. TFTim Ferriss22:42

       [laughs]

   15. KRKevin Rose22:43

       So much fun

   16. TFTim Ferriss22:44

       Yeah. Just a quick note on that particular piece. So it's very easy to find. Most people have seen it. A lot of people have seen it. If you just search Hokusai, H-O-K-U-S-A-I, Hokusai's wave, you'll see this pop up, but if you search evolution of Hokusai's wave, you get to see over time his, like, prototyping and tweaking and changing of that particular wave until it landed on what we now recognize as this timeless, iconic piece, which is quite cool. So people can take a look at that if they're interested

   17. KRKevin Rose23:16

       It's so cool. Yeah, his, his stuff is amazing, and the fact that LEGO makes adult LEGOs now, it's so much fun

   18. TFTim Ferriss23:23

       Are they just bigger for larger hands? What makes them adult? Or they're just instead of being the Batcar, they're Hokusai's wave

   19. KRKevin Rose23:30

       Well, the pieces are smaller, so they tend to look a lot more realistic. Like, you could hang this on the wall-

   20. TFTim Ferriss23:35

       Oh, I see

   21. KRKevin Rose23:35

       ... and actually be, like, art versus a LEGO. And then they're doing it with, like, little mini bonsai trees, and I did with the bamboo shoots, and, like, they're actually pieces that you kind of wanna have around your house

   22. TFTim Ferriss23:46

       Mm-hmm

   23. KRKevin Rose23:46

       Oh, check this out. This one you'll like, too. I haven't done this one yet, but this is one that you can only find in Japan, but I think you can find them on Amazon.

   24. TFTim Ferriss23:55

       Oh, Nanoblocks

   25. KRKevin Rose23:55

       This one's called Nanoblocks. It's like a LEGO competitor

   26. TFTim Ferriss23:58

       Yeah. Mm-hmm

   27. KRKevin Rose23:58

       Yeah, so these are really tiny little pieces. I bought this one when I was in Tokyo, but this is a cherry blossom tree, and I, I can't remember how many pieces this one is, but they can be in the thousands. Yeah, this one's 990 pieces for this little tiny tree

   28. TFTim Ferriss24:12

       [laughs]

   29. KRKevin Rose24:14

       They're fun to do, but it just gives you something. You know, I realize what I need is...

8. 24:19 – 27:36

   Maintaining sobriety with a partner who still drinks.

   1. KRKevin Rose24:19

      A friend of mine actually said he took up golf with his wife, and he was like, "Hey, I, I took up golf with her because all we did was drink or talk about our kids. It was one of two things." And-

   2. TFTim Ferriss24:28

      Hmm

   3. KRKevin Rose24:28

      ... you know, you need to have something that you go and do in the evenings, whether it be rock climbing or some type of physical activity that is not that substance, you know?

   4. TFTim Ferriss24:37

      The physical activity piece, I mean, I've always found super effective because you get punished if you're drinking too much, [laughs] if you're-

   5. KRKevin Rose24:44

      Yeah

   6. TFTim Ferriss24:44

      ... doing something that's really physically intensive. Y- you mentioned this guy going to play golf with his wife, and so my question for you, we can always cut this too, but since it is about- ... your surroundings and so on. Is Daria also on board with the not drinking, or are you able to take that on yourself while she's partaking? How is that working out?

   7. KRKevin Rose25:11

      She's still drinking, and I would say that the one nice benefit has been that she's cut back a lot just naturally-

   8. TFTim Ferriss25:19

      Yep

   9. KRKevin Rose25:19

      ... which was cool to see.

   10. TFTim Ferriss25:21

       Mm-hmm.

   11. KRKevin Rose25:21

       She's always kind of wanted to cut back, but I, I don't know how much of it is a result of seeing just my general energy levels going up, and I feel a hell of a lot better. Oh, by the way, my liver enzymes are back down to like, you know, low 30s, which is great.

   12. TFTim Ferriss25:35

       Mm-hmm.

   13. KRKevin Rose25:36

       So I'm starting to see, like, my complexion and, like, all these weird things are happening. They're just getting better. Turns out not drinking is actually good for you. [laughs]

   14. TFTim Ferriss25:43

       [laughs]

   15. KRKevin Rose25:43

       It's one of those things where I think that is inspiring her to drink less, which is, which is fantastic, but she still drinks, and it doesn't bother me. It is what it is. She has a hard time with certain things around the house when it comes to the kids and noise levels and, and stuff that I think it's easier for her to have a drink or two just to kind of calm the nerves a little bit.

   16. TFTim Ferriss26:02

       Yeah.

   17. KRKevin Rose26:02

       But I think it's already showing, you know, it's wearing off on her as well, which is great.

   18. TFTim Ferriss26:06

       Nice. Well, I'm excited to see what happens at day 90. It seems like a huge difference now is you have the Phone a Friend support system put in place.

   19. KRKevin Rose26:17

       The Phone a Friend is huge, but also there is this group of people that get together, and they have a weekly Zoom, and I jump on that, and it's a bunch of... This one's guys only. It's a bunch of guys that, you know, don't really want to be drinking.

   20. TFTim Ferriss26:36

       Mm-hmm.

   21. KRKevin Rose26:36

       And it is a bonding moment to just talk about, you know, how these people are showing up, and to hear stories about people that are showing up as better dads in particular, like, really hits home with me. Not that I was showing up as a bad dad, but, like, when I think about my father and how kind of, you know, some of the verbally abusive stuff, and his wasn't related to alcohol, but just, like, dads showing up at the, as the best versions of themselves means a lot to me.

   22. TFTim Ferriss27:07

       Mm-hmm.

   23. KRKevin Rose27:07

       Like, it means a lot to be an awesome dad to my kids, and when I see these other dads that would've otherwise been, you know, alcoholics in their home talking about how much they love their children and how they have more patience for their kids now and patience for their partner because of the fact that they've stopped drinking or severely cut back on drinking is just like, it's a blessing just to watch that unfold. And yeah, I'm seeing it-

   24. TFTim Ferriss27:31

       Mm

   25. KRKevin Rose27:32

       ... in this large group of people that talk about these things, you know?

   26. TFTim Ferriss27:35

       Yeah.

9. 27:36 – 30:05

   Addressing under-the-hood reasons behind addiction with a group.

   1. TFTim Ferriss27:36

      It's top of mind because I had Terry Real on the podcast-

   2. KRKevin Rose27:39

      Mm

   3. TFTim Ferriss27:39

      ... a couple of weeks ago, and his first book, which put him on the map, is I Don't Want to Talk About It-

   4. KRKevin Rose27:45

      Love that book

   5. TFTim Ferriss27:46

      ... which is specifically focused on male depression, and he talks about covert depression, meaning men have these common modes of covering up depression, whether that be workaholism, alcoholism, sex addiction, fill in the blank, right? Typically, some type of kind of compulsive busying or dulling addiction. It could be drugs, I suppose. It could be cocaine. That's not dulling. But it's quite a laundry list of things that he discusses as coping mechanisms for depression, right?

   6. KRKevin Rose28:20

      Yeah.

   7. TFTim Ferriss28:21

      And I don't think that substance abuse is always that, right? Some people just meet a molecule that is really not a good fit from an addiction profile perspective, right? I do think that it could be certainly a predisposition as simple as that. It's like your body, your [laughs] bloodline really shouldn't play with this molecule. Uh, but then there are other cases where there's other stuff under the hood. Do the people in your group talk about that at all? Does that come up?

   8. KRKevin Rose28:53

      Oh, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. I would say that, if I had to guess, the vast majority of it is the under the hood stuff. It's not addressing all of the childhood trauma or, you know, our kind of family of origin stories, where and how we grew up, and there's almost always a bit of that. So kind of as we popcorn around the Zoom and talk about different things, the one of the things that commonly comes up is just not only how are you showing up today, but some of these little bits get exposed around, you know, these traumas that were largely left unaddressed and so led to this kind of dependence or this escape that, you know, alcohol can provide, which is just this dulling of my general ease, you know? Being able to sit there and be comfortable in your own skin because of a lot of the things that occurred to you as a child and not even knowing it, you know?

   9. TFTim Ferriss29:44

      Yeah.

   10. KRKevin Rose29:44

       And so addressing that stuff, I think, is a big part of a lot of these different step programs that are out there. You know, they have different means and ways in which you can go and get that, put pen to paper, get out a lot of those things and address them and put them out there to the world, and hopefully move on from them and heal from that.

   11. TFTim Ferriss30:04

       Yeah,

10. 30:05 – 37:45

    TimTim talks Taiwan and tea.

    1. TFTim Ferriss30:05

       totally. All right, so I just got back from the most travel I've done in quite a while, four to five weeks. I was in Taiwan for a week, which was spectacular, and I'll come back to that. Japan, as always, fascinating, interesting, beautiful, frustrating, depend on which side of it you hit. [laughs] We've talked about this before, but it's kind of like Japan is, like, 20% to 30% Blade Runner and, like, 70% to 80% DMV in terms of, like, [laughs] rules and paperwork-

    2. KRKevin Rose30:37

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss30:37

       ... and so on, but I love Japan. And then also spent a bit of time in the UAE, actually in Abu Dhabi unexpectedly. So lots of travel updates. I will say for Taiwan, I had not been back to Taiwan since 1999 or 2000, so 25 years, and- I had had a very tough time when I studied abroad in Beijing. I studied at two universities, and this was 1996, and it was a very, very rough experience at the time for a host of reasons. One was there was a lot of political tension between the US and China, and I had my head shaved and looked like military, particularly back then. I was a bit bigger. And it was just not a particularly welcoming environment. Also, there were concerns about foreign students affecting domestic students, Chinese students, so we were put in a foreign experts dormitory. We were completely separate, so it was actually very hard to learn Chinese in the way that I was hoping to learn Chinese. My Japanese got better because there were a lot of Japanese students [chuckles] in the dormitory, and also met some great people who lived in Beijing, so it wasn't exclusive. But I had a really rough time, and when I got back to the US, basically decided to stop studying Mandarin. And a friend of mine who is a white guy born in the south of Japan, so he had perfect Japanese, southern dialect. His English was a little unusual because he sounded like a Japanese person who had learned to speak English very well. This is a guy who looks like, [chuckles] you know, you or me. So there was something funky and really funny and awesome about that. He also spoke Korean really well and spoke Chinese really well, and he said, "You have to at least go visit Taiwan before you lay down your pen and retire your Chinese." And so I ended up spending, uh, about a month in Taiwan, and it just blew my mind, right? Because without the cultural revolution in Taiwan, a lot of the older culture from China had been preserved, also native sort of indigenous Taiwanese culture and cultures had been preserved. Very different from a kinda interpersonal perspective and just had the best time one could possibly imagine. And in fairness, I have been back to mainland China in other places more recently, and it's a very different experience now, although once again, we're back in tension city between the US and China. But what I would say is if you have the chance to go to Taiwan, you should take the chance. And this might sound also, I don't think it's pessimistic, I think it's inevitable, that at some point Taiwan will be reabsorbed by mainland China, and it's gonna change really dramatically, culturally, linguistically. Perhaps the ability to travel there will get more complicated. I don't know how it's gonna change, but it will change a lot, and that I could see happening within the next few years. Very surprisingly to me, people on the ground, at least the Taiwanese locals I spent time with, and I was with locals the whole time I was there, I wasn't with any expats, they're completely unconcerned.

    4. KRKevin Rose33:56

       Hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss33:56

       They really don't seem to be thinking much about this type of transition, either because they think it's not gonna happen or because they view it, as I just said, somewhat as an inevitability. So they're like, "Yeah, it'll change. Things will change, but so it goes." There doesn't seem to be a lot of hand-wringing and fretting about it, which was super surprising to me. I will say, though, if you want to visit a place that is really warm, where the people are really funny, where the food is outstanding-

    6. KRKevin Rose34:25

       Hmm

    7. TFTim Ferriss34:26

       ... and it almost feels like there's a blended courtesy that you might recognize also from Japan, and certainly Japan has a long history there, so that could be some of the influence. Really, I encourage people to check out Taiwan and do it soon. And I wanna give a shout-out to a restaurant there that two of the locals I know are involved with, and you're gonna love the name of this restaurant. It is customized, although it predates, I'm pretty sure it predates Google. The name of this restaurant is Really Good Seafood. [chuckles] That is the actual name.

    8. KRKevin Rose35:05

       I mean, it's very descriptive. You know what you're gonna get.

    9. TFTim Ferriss35:09

       Yeah, it's very descriptive.

    10. KRKevin Rose35:10

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss35:10

        Fantastic sculpture also, like bronze sculptures in this restaurant, strangely enough. But Really Good Seafood, highly recommend people check it out, and you just can't go wrong in Taiwan. Try to get at least outside of Taipei for a short period of time, and there are amazing hikes in the mountains.

    12. KRKevin Rose35:29

        Yeah, I was gonna ask you, did you do any tea? 'Cause obviously the oolongs in, out of Taiwan are just absolutely stunning.

    13. TFTim Ferriss35:34

        Yeah. They're stunning.

    14. KRKevin Rose35:35

        Did you do any tea tours?

    15. TFTim Ferriss35:36

        We drank a lot of tea. Did not do a tea tour, but actually if you hold on for a second, let me go grab some tea. I haven't even unpacked. I literally got back yesterday.

    16. KRKevin Rose35:46

        Oh, sweet.

    17. TFTim Ferriss35:46

        So hold on one second. I'm gonna go grab something.

    18. KRKevin Rose35:48

        Yeah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss35:49

        All right. So I brought some tea back, and Taiwan has a lot of everything from a tea perspective, but certainly what gets the most air time is oolong tea. You really hear about oolong. They have so many incredible teas, but this right here, Cha Cha Tea, which certainly is [chuckles] not Chinese, but they have these incredible teas, and this one in particular was recommended, which is called Oriental Beauty Oolong Tea. And there are a million different varieties. Certainly, if you spend time there, I would say do not miss out on the tea. If you think tea is boring, if you think tea doesn't really spark your interest, doesn't capture you, I would suggest just going whole hog on as much tea as you can. And get out in the mountains. I mean, even an hour outside of Taipei, you can go on these walks in rainforests that are, to my eye, denser than the Amazon. I mean, it is so lush and so dense Waterfalls, rivers, monkeys, you just get to see it all. It is really incredible from a biodiversity perspective, and I do think sadly, at least for ease of travel with Taiwan as it exists right now, the window could be quite narrow for a lot of tourism. So I would say maybe things will change, maybe they won't if and when the big red dragon basically subsumes Taiwan, but I would say get there sooner rather than later. You will not be disappointed, and certainly check out really good seafood. [laughs] I have to give a shout-out to [laughs] my friend's restaurant.

    20. KRKevin Rose37:43

        Really good seafood.

11. 37:45 – 43:52

    A Japanese coffee bender.

    1. TFTim Ferriss37:45

       And then of course, going from Taiwan to Japan, pretty easy transition. It's a very short flight, and I guess somewhere between three and four hours. And instead of tea in Japan, just went on the rampage with coffee actually this time around, and one of the main reasons for the trip was to visit my host family who I stayed with when I was 15. I'm still very close to them, and so we, we were able to go out to this rambunctious local ramen joint and just [laughs] you know, act like old times and catch up as if no time had passed. It's just so nice to have those deep relationships, and like everyone everywhere, they're getting older, meaning my parents, my host brothers, their kids, and it was wild to see my, my oldest host brother's older boy is now 16. He's taller than I am.

    2. KRKevin Rose38:41

       Holy shit.

    3. TFTim Ferriss38:42

       I remember seeing him when he was a baby, right? Because I went to my host brother's wedding prior to that, and he is the age that I was when I was in Japan.

    4. KRKevin Rose38:52

       Oh, that's wild.

    5. TFTim Ferriss38:53

       Which is just so wild. It's so wild, and wanted to give a couple of recommendations for people if they wanna try a bunch of coffee. There's, there are a million options out there, but I don't know how to explain it, and people are gonna think this sounds really funny, but the latte at Glitch Coffee in Ginza, for whatever reason, a number of people had it, and we were all like, "What did they do with this latte?" I don't know if it was how they blended it.

    6. KRKevin Rose39:24

       Oh, dude, it's Hokkaido milk, of course.

    7. TFTim Ferriss39:26

       Well, no, no. No, that's the thing, though, because we had, like, 20 different lattes, but at Glitch, in Ginza specifically, the way that they blended it and put the whole thing together was so obscenely good. It is very small. It's a pain in the ass to wait outside, especially if it's raining like it was when I was there, but I would highly recommend checking it out. But you're right that Hokkaido milk is famous throughout the world, certainly throughout all of Asia, and it's just a different thing. It just tastes [laughs] so much better than the milk that I've had at least here in the US. And I'll give one more, which is Sendai, Sendai Coffee, and people can check that out as well. Very cute. Different style, and there I would suggest checking out, they have a few varieties of Colombian coffee, Colombian Quindío wine yeast peach infused honey. Now, there's no sweetener in this, but all of these notes are super, super obvious, this stuff right here. They really know their coffee, man. They really do.

    8. KRKevin Rose40:32

       Have you been to Kaffe Mameha out there?

    9. TFTim Ferriss40:35

       I was gonna go to Kaffe Mameha, but we did not end up going, so I've not been.

    10. KRKevin Rose40:41

        Okay, Mameha's by far my favorite in Tokyo. It is insanely legit.

    11. TFTim Ferriss40:46

        Uh-huh.

    12. KRKevin Rose40:46

        They have a couple of different locations, but there's one that they have, they serve the coffee in, in, like, wine snifters.

    13. TFTim Ferriss40:53

        Yeah.

    14. KRKevin Rose40:53

        And, you know, it's like $35 a cup, and they're getting the world's best geishas in there, and they're just making this fantastic varietal of coffee.

    15. TFTim Ferriss41:02

        Just for clarity, the geisha is the coffee, not the people.

    16. KRKevin Rose41:05

        That's right.

    17. TFTim Ferriss41:06

        [laughs]

    18. KRKevin Rose41:07

        Have you tried any of the aged coffees in Tokyo?

    19. TFTim Ferriss41:09

        I mean, I might have in the course of going to all these different places, but perhaps not Mameha. I wanted to go to check that out. It's a whole production, right? Like, if you go to the-

    20. KRKevin Rose41:18

        Yes

    21. TFTim Ferriss41:18

        ... one location where they give you the omakase, it's like a whole three-hour commitment.

    22. KRKevin Rose41:22

        Yes.

    23. TFTim Ferriss41:22

        And just at that point in the trip with the amount of time we had, I was like, number one, because tourism has exploded, I mean, I have never seen even a quarter of the number of tourists in Japan that I saw this last trip because the yen is weaker and a lot of people-

    24. KRKevin Rose41:39

        Mm

    25. TFTim Ferriss41:39

        ... are coming in from all over, not just China, but also Thailand and many other places. If you want to book a reservation, you need to do it far in advance. For instance, you wanna go to, like, Ghibli Museum, I used to be able to do that a week or two in advance. Now, you gotta do it months in advance.

    26. KRKevin Rose41:56

        Yeah, last time I was out there it was just insane how many tourists were coming over, and I, I saw Craig Mott out there, which is fantastic. He took me to a secret little coffee spot that I don't wanna blow up and ruin by mentioning on your podcast. [laughs] But it was, it was fantastic. Another one, just Google L-A-M-B-R-E aged coffee beans Tokyo, and they have coffee beans that they've been sitting on for over 20 years.

    27. TFTim Ferriss42:21

        [laughs]

    28. KRKevin Rose42:21

        So they'll serve you coffee beans that are, you know, 20 or 30 years old. It's a different experience altogether when you get these kinda, like, slightly fermented aged coffee beans.

    29. TFTim Ferriss42:30

        Yeah.

    30. KRKevin Rose42:31

        This place, this little shop seats, like, eight people. It's, it's fantastic. Highly recommend.
12. 43:52 – 44:54

    An "expresso" intervention.

    1. KRKevin Rose43:52

       media.

    2. TFTim Ferriss43:52

       Kevin, I have to stage an intervention. If you're gonna be a coffee nerd, you can't say expresso. You gotta say espresso. [laughs]

    3. KRKevin Rose43:59

       Okay, espresso. I-

    4. TFTim Ferriss44:00

       [laughs]

    5. KRKevin Rose44:02

       Did I say expresso?

    6. TFTim Ferriss44:04

       You said it twice, yeah. [laughs]

    7. KRKevin Rose44:05

       Okay. All right.

    8. TFTim Ferriss44:06

       [laughs]

    9. KRKevin Rose44:08

       Listen, cut that out, fucker. [laughs] I'll, uh, I'll get you.

    10. TFTim Ferriss44:10

        [laughs] It's too good. It's too good.

    11. KRKevin Rose44:12

        I have these sayings that, like, Daria always calls me out on, where I say things where I think I picked them up from my parents, and there's, like, three or four things that I, are completely, like, not even close to the actual word.

    12. TFTim Ferriss44:23

        [laughs]

    13. KRKevin Rose44:24

        It was from my family, my upbringing, I think. E- expresso was one of them.

    14. TFTim Ferriss44:27

        [laughs] Well, my mom, her mom, as a joke, would say certain words totally incorrectly. Like, instead of horizon, she would say the horizon. And then my uncle went into school to give a presentation when he was a little kid, and he said [laughs] horizon and just got, like, laughed out of class. [laughs]

    15. KRKevin Rose44:48

        [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss44:48

        And then his mom was like, "Oh, yeah, no, I was totally wrong. I was just kidding." It's like, "Ah, come on, Mom." [laughs]

13. 44:54 – 46:10

    Where Americans can get Taiwanese tea if they can't make the trip.

    1. KRKevin Rose44:55

       Oh, I gotta tell you, before we move on-

    2. TFTim Ferriss44:56

       Yeah

    3. KRKevin Rose44:56

       ... people should know if they don't get a chance to go out to Taiwan, and it's something I, I desperately wanted to do, and, and I wholeheartedly agree, it seems that, sadly, tensions are rising, so there is a small window. But a friend that I met in San Francisco, have you ever been to that Red Blossom Tea Company in SF?

    4. TFTim Ferriss45:13

       Yeah, I have.

    5. KRKevin Rose45:14

       So I think they are the best importer, domestic importer, a- at least in the United States-

    6. TFTim Ferriss45:19

       Mm-hmm

    7. KRKevin Rose45:20

       ... of high-quality oolong tea. So if you cannot make it out, and I have no affiliation with them at all, but if you can't make it out to Taiwan, but you wanna try some of these teas that Tim is talking about, Red Blossom Tea Company, just Google them. The website, it has fantastic oolongs, and they're reasonably priced. They're pretty awesome.

    8. TFTim Ferriss45:40

       Yeah, and also, just to be clear, guys, this doesn't need to be expensive. These coffees, you might have to wait a little while, or these teas, but they're not gonna cost necessarily... If you go to a super fancy place, sure, but 99% of what I had is gonna cost less than what you had at Starbucks.

    9. KRKevin Rose45:57

       100%.

    10. TFTim Ferriss45:57

        Right? It's not expensive. It is not outside of reach. All right, man, where should we, where should we move next?

    11. KRKevin Rose46:04

        I definitely wanna cover how you did on that meditation retreat. We can talk about that at some point, but I can also talk about some tech stuff as well.

14. 46:10 – 52:48

    Kevin's new WHOOP wearable and quantifying health benchmarks/goals.

    1. TFTim Ferriss46:10

       Why don't we do a, a tech debrief, then we can talk about the Zen retreat.

    2. KRKevin Rose46:15

       The tech debrief, I would say, for me, the latest and greatest is that the new WHOOP finally came out, which is this little guy here on my wrist. It's about, I think, 12% smaller. Now I'm Aura'd, WHOOP'd, and Apple Watch'd up all at the same time.

    3. TFTim Ferriss46:30

       [laughs]

    4. KRKevin Rose46:30

       The WHOOP band, the reason I like it, or I had historically liked it, is that it does not have a display on it, and so it's not competing with your time in any way. You kinda check the stats in the, in the morning or at night or whatever you may be, and they really maximize the hell out of this hardware, because they had not updated the device in, like, four years. So it was the same hardware, but they kept doing firmware updates, and the heart rate tracking got better. Everything was just continually getting better via these firmware updates. This is the first new device in, like, four y- years. This one's called the MG, which stands for medical grade. It does feel a lot smaller, and there's some new features that I think are worth mentioning that are, are pretty awesome, some stuff that the Apple Watch doesn't do. So this one now has blood pressure monitoring as well.

    5. TFTim Ferriss47:19

       Hmm.

    6. KRKevin Rose47:20

       So you calibrate it with your cuff, which I did last night, and then it's gonna give me insights throughout the week. It will kinda give you a range or a score range, so it's not gonna give you exact cuff measurements, but it'll generally let you know how you're doing, whether or not you, you wanna pay more attention or not. So it's in beta right now, but it seems, so far, it seems pretty good and pretty accurate, and granted, I've only had this for a few days now. The VO2 max tracking is awesome. The zone training is great. It's gotten better. They have this feature called WHOOP Age. The WHOOP Age, I think, is pretty cool because basically what it does is it takes a look at a bunch of different metrics across the board. So you can think of this as resting heart rate, sleep quality, heart rate variability, stress levels, which is getting through a couple different algorithms that they have, your VO2 max, a slew of different things, and it combines them all into this score, and it says, "Okay, how do we think you're doing? Are you at an accelerated aging pace right now? Are you flat, or do we think you're actually below average and that you're aging slower than most people?" Which is where you wanna be.

    7. TFTim Ferriss48:25

       Mm-hmm.

    8. KRKevin Rose48:26

       And so they give you this cool little WHOOP Age insight, which is fun. I would say out of all the devices that I've played with and own, the WHOOP probably is the geekiest of them all, in that it gives you the most data points and the most insights, and now they have this little AI agent you can have a conversation with. You can say, "Hey, how did I do yesterday? Like, is there anything I should be paying attention to?" And it'll come back and pull from your real-time data that's on your phone. So I like it. It's a little bit pricey, but the one I have is 359 a year, and they do have some that are less expensive. But You know, it's early days. We've only had it for a few days, but it's something to pay attention to in terms of the wearables out there that track everything as related to all the different metrics that you can pull from.

    9. TFTim Ferriss49:11

       I don't know if you've had a chance to do this, but I've really been increasing the frequency of my zone two training, and the way that I've typically calibrated that is with the talk test sort of per Peter Attia, right? Keeping it simple, like you're on a bike, and you could hold a conversation on the phone or with someone in full sentences, but you wouldn't really want to.

    10. KRKevin Rose49:34

        Right.

    11. TFTim Ferriss49:34

        Right? That's my understanding of the simple way to measure it. Now, I've talked to other people who are involved [laughs] with, like, professional cycling teams, and they're like, "Well, actually you really wanna do A, B, C, D, and E to calibrate it," which sounds very complicated, and I'm probably not gonna do it. Have you had a chance to compare what the WHOOP says about zone two and something like the talk test to see if they correspond?

    12. KRKevin Rose49:59

        It's a great question, and I think one that I'm with you in that I wanna get more zone two. I'm trying to get, like, a half hour in per day at least, and Attia really pushes for, you know, close to an hour or tr- tries to get to an hour. There's an equation for this as well, which is age divided by plus... There's a few of these out there that are like, "How do you-

    13. TFTim Ferriss50:17

        Right

    14. KRKevin Rose50:17

        ... figure out what zone two is for you?"

    15. TFTim Ferriss50:20

        Mm-hmm.

    16. KRKevin Rose50:21

        For me, this one is they're using their own model. So they have their own model that they kind of give you a range, but one of the things that I do like, 'cause I was messing around with this last night, is if you go in and you do a real legit VO2 max test, where-

    17. TFTim Ferriss50:36

        Mm-hmm

    18. KRKevin Rose50:36

        ... they're actually hooking up to the full gear, they're putting you on the treadmill, you can plug that in and it will feed it into the model, or you can manually define the zones as you see them. So you can go in there and type in what you want your zones to be, and it will use that versus their own internal tool, which is quite nice. But yeah, they're using some type of model. I'm not sure which one they're using.

    19. TFTim Ferriss50:55

        Okay. Cool. Yeah, maybe I'll compare them since I'm in Austin so I have access to, you know, the Ten Squared facility, and I can go in, and I did a VO2 max test not too long ago with the whole kit and caboodle, the Bane mask on and everything-

    20. KRKevin Rose51:11

        Yeah

    21. TFTim Ferriss51:12

        ... which is very uncomfortable as a first-timer. So I'm curious to see what type of acclimating or practice effect there is on my next VO2 max training. Even if my [laughs] capacity hasn't increased, do I get better results because I'm just more comfortable with the gear and the settings and the cycling and so on? We'll see. We'll find out. It's gonna be hard to tease that out.

    22. KRKevin Rose51:36

        The one thing I will say is that there is a great YouTuber that I like called The Quantified Scientist, and what he does is he goes in and he takes every single wearable, at least mainstream wearable, that's out there, and he has the hardcore, you know, VO2 max devices at his house. He has all the ECG devices that measure sleep, and he's basically a statistician and comes in and gives you the data and says, "How does this actually compare to the gold standard-

    23. TFTim Ferriss52:05

        Mm-hmm

    24. KRKevin Rose52:06

        ... for these different measurements?" And so he has yet to do that on the new WHOOP, but, like, in the Oura Ring and the Apple Watch and the Garmins and everything out there, he'll actually put on the full VO2 max mask, like you're saying, and then compare them and say, "This is the closest to the gold standard without having to wear the mask."

    25. TFTim Ferriss52:23

        Oh. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. I would love to check that out.

    26. KRKevin Rose52:26

        Yeah, The Quantified Scientist is awesome.

    27. TFTim Ferriss52:28

        For sleep, I guess it could be any number of things. It might be EEG if we're talking about brainwaves.

    28. KRKevin Rose52:32

        That's what it is. EEG. That's right.

    29. TFTim Ferriss52:35

        The ECG is electrocardiogram.

    30. KRKevin Rose52:38

        Yeah, this-
15. 52:48 – 54:16

    I'm getting a new exercise bike because the old one rubbed me the wrong way.

    1. TFTim Ferriss52:48

       All right. I'm literally getting another bike... Well, I should say bike. It's more of an ergometer this week because [laughs] I love so much about this company, but the Peloton seat is just completely breaking my cock. It's so [laughs] bad. And to, like, retrofit it or to try to modify it is really, really challenging. So I think that in the interest of reproductive health, and I'm not kidding about that actually, like you can do-

    2. KRKevin Rose53:16

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss53:16

       With the wrong seat with cycling, you can actually do a lot of damage.

    4. KRKevin Rose53:19

       Dude, are you... How are you flexing on this? Like-

    5. TFTim Ferriss53:21

       [laughs] Well, because when my elephant-

    6. KRKevin Rose53:22

       You're like, "I'm so massive, the seat is just absolutely just destroying my junk."

    7. TFTim Ferriss53:26

       Well, when my... Yeah, my elephant trunk, I need to wrap it around this pole in the front.

    8. KRKevin Rose53:30

       [laughs] Yeah, exactly. Just loop it over the front bars. You'll be fine.

    9. TFTim Ferriss53:34

       Safety first. But I'm, I'm serious that if people are doing a lot of cycling and they're having any type of sexual dysfunction or reproductive issues, it's worth taking a look at the seat. Like, this is something that got flagged to me, fortunately, in advance because I was like, "Huh." As I was doing some of my workouts, I noticed it seemed like almost a tingling or lack of circulation in one of my legs, and I was like, "That can't be good." So as it stands, I'll test the new device before I give it any kind of endorsement, but I'm moving to another ergometer just so I can do that and have the ability to easily swap seats if need be. So I might have more on that. Should I hop in with some new experiments or at least observations?

16. 54:16 – 57:09

    Kevin keeps COVID and cooties at bay with Profi in his schnozz.

    1. KRKevin Rose54:17

       Actually, let me give you one more quick one that I think is gonna be fun for people-

    2. TFTim Ferriss54:20

       Yeah

    3. KRKevin Rose54:20

       ... that a physician turned me on to that I have been using now when I travel, which is amazing. So I, again, no affiliation with any of this stuff, but it was a Stanford scientist that came out with this nasal spray called Profi, P-R-O-F-I.

    4. TFTim Ferriss54:36

       Okay.

    5. KRKevin Rose54:37

       And I bought it on Amazon. And so it's essentially this spray that it's like this hydrogel that goes up into your nasal cavity, and you spray one per each side just in your nose, and it is like a gel that basically if you just breathe in through your nose when you're on a flight or you're traveling or when you're in a big room of people, it will trap and it holds all of the different viruses and bacteria that you're inhaling into this gel and destroys them at the gel level. And people are- ... getting less sick. They're not picking up the average cold when they're in big rooms. They did a small study in a hospital setting around COVID. I'll find it. It wasn't with this particular brand. I think it was another generic brand of the same type of gel, and they just showed that the odds of you getting COVID or the flu were severely reduced for people that were using this gel inside of their nose.

    6. TFTim Ferriss55:29

       Huh.

    7. KRKevin Rose55:30

       So I was like, you know, it's like 15 bucks or something. I was like, "Hell yes." And so I picked it up and I've been using it when I travel, and knock on wood, I've been doing a lot of travel like you over the last few weeks, haven't got sick at all.

    8. TFTim Ferriss55:40

       Huh.

    9. KRKevin Rose55:40

       It was only when I didn't do it at home when my kids were sick [laughs]

    10. TFTim Ferriss55:43

        Yeah

    11. KRKevin Rose55:44

        ... that I end up getting a cold. But anyway, it's pretty awesome. It was developed over at Stanford, and, and recommend checking it out.

    12. TFTim Ferriss55:51

        Huh. Okay. So we'll get a link to that. And actually for years now, I don't know if I ever told you this, for at least 10 years, when I'm about to go on any extended travel, I will get a saline mist spray from CVS or Walgreens and just, just simply moisturize or hydrate inside my nasal passages, which seems to make a big difference also for the purposes of just avoiding my nemesis, which is sinus infections.

    13. KRKevin Rose56:18

        Mm.

    14. TFTim Ferriss56:19

        If my nasal passages and my sinuses get dry, I've had issues with sinus infections since I was a very, very little kid, and if I'm consistent with this type of nasal spray, it seems to help. So maybe the next step up is the [laughs] Profi.

    15. KRKevin Rose56:35

        Profi.

    16. TFTim Ferriss56:37

        [laughs] That's a hell of a brand name.

    17. KRKevin Rose56:38

        Espresso.

    18. TFTim Ferriss56:39

        [laughs] Espresso.

    19. KRKevin Rose56:41

        [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss56:42

        I literally saw a sign in a coffee shop in Romania, this was in Brașov, and it said espresso. [laughs] It said, "Dear Americans, espresso does not have an X in it" [laughs]

    21. KRKevin Rose56:55

        [laughs]

    22. TFTim Ferriss56:55

        Which I thought was, was amazing.

    23. KRKevin Rose56:58

        Then I'm not alone. I feel validated now.

    24. TFTim Ferriss57:00

        Yeah, no, you're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. Kind of makes sense. Express, you wanna be in the express lane. Espresso, right? [laughs]

    25. KRKevin Rose57:07

        Yeah, exactly.

    26. TFTim Ferriss57:07

        Um [laughs]

    27. KRKevin Rose57:08

        Thank you.

17. 57:09 – 1:01:42

    Sippin' dashi and conquering anxiety with Awareness.

    1. TFTim Ferriss57:09

       I'll share a couple of just rapid fire, like Scooby Snacks for people, and then I'll talk about a recent experiment. So this is another one from Japan, and this is, is not very expensive, but if you can find it online, you might be able to find it at something like a Nijiya Market or a Japanese market of some type. This is a dashi, and it's got dried bonito and dried anchovies and dried flying fish and sweet kelp, all this stuff. It's from a place called Okume, which was established in 1871. And you can see here, it's a little hard to see, but the package basically looks like a tea package. You have these individual sachets that are full of this dashi, and you put it into hot water, so you can have it like tea in the morning-

    2. KRKevin Rose57:58

       Oh, I love that. Yes

    3. TFTim Ferriss57:59

       ... without making it a big production. And this is just their classic dashi. They have a million different options. But man, I feel like a dose of dashi and broth a couple times a week does a lot to keep the doctor away. So this is gonna be a very easy... I have tea so many times a day already, just to swap in one of these as part of the routine will make it more interesting and also I think could potentially do some really nice things for health. There's a book that I read on my travels, have been reading. I've read it at least 10 times, and every time I read it, particularly if I've taken a break of two or three years, where I say to myself, "This is why I need to read the book more often," and it's this one. This is Awareness by Anthony de Mello.

    4. KRKevin Rose58:49

       Oh, I love that book. Fantastic book.

    5. TFTim Ferriss58:53

       It's so good. It's such a good book, and different things hit you at different times.

    6. KRKevin Rose58:58

       Mm.

    7. TFTim Ferriss58:58

       I started reading this, and we'll get to it in a second, after our Zen retreat, 'cause it talks about a lot that overlaps, even though Anthony de Mello was largely based, maybe entirely based, in India, but he was a Jesuit priest, also a psychotherapist, and the density, I would say, of, like, insights per page on this-

    8. KRKevin Rose59:23

       Mm

    9. TFTim Ferriss59:23

       ... is just incredible. It's effectively a cleaned up, organized version of his greatest hits given as lectures. And it's very easy to read. It's very funny. It's very short. It's only about 170 pages. And once again, I'm reading it and different things are popping out at different points in life, and I actually have [laughs] multiple hard copies that I've highlighted at different points, and the highlights are different things. They're really different, the passages that resonate at different points in time.

    10. KRKevin Rose59:54

        Oh, man.

    11. TFTim Ferriss59:55

        To anybody out there who, and it's not exclusive to this, but if you suffer from anxiety or depression or if you just feel like you have a little too much edge, you're running a little fast, you feel a little over-committed, clogged, stuck at points, whatever it might be, this book is fast-acting medicine, and it's not a panacea, but it's really complimentary for almost anything else that you would do to help with the types of symptoms that I just described, which are really symptoms of modern living, ultimately, especially for people in urban environments. And even if you're not in an urban environment, if you've got one of these phones, you are plugged into the anxiosphere, right? It's like the world of anxiety, because that is how you keep clicking and that is how platforms continue to gather data they can sell in one form or another. So Anthony de Mello, Awareness, always recommend it. Haven't read it myself in a while, and long overdue, so I did wanna mention that.

    12. KRKevin Rose1:00:59

        Oh, man. Tim, thank you for reminding me about that book. Well, I don't have to keep coming back to this, but when my house burned down, [laughs] I lost, I lost all my books.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:01:06

        [laughs]

    14. KRKevin Rose1:01:07

        And it's funny, I forgot that that was one of my favorites that I had on my bookshelf there. And like you, I know you do this as well, there's like three or four books I would buy like five copies of, and I'd just leave them-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:01:16

        Yep

    16. KRKevin Rose1:01:16

        ... at my house because when I have a friend stop by- I'm like, "Oh, I, I need to give you this book," right? Like, there's ones that you absolutely love so much that you just want to gift out because you just, like, feel like you should give as many people as possible this book, right?

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:01:27

        Mm-hmm.

    18. KRKevin Rose1:01:27

        This was one of those books, and I just ordered it on Amazon. It's 10 bucks on Amazon in the US, and it said you first bought this in 2019, probably via your recommendation.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:01:37

        Yeah.

    20. KRKevin Rose1:01:37

        But yeah, fantastic, fantastic book. Thank you. I'm-- I just bought mine.

18. 1:01:42 – 1:05:20

    Getting a (Versa) Gripp on eclectic injuries.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:01:42

       Yeah, for sure. Actually, let me give a couple of other quick recommendations for folks, and one is an oldie but goodie, much like Awareness that I had not seen in probably, I want to say, 10 or 15 years. Now, who knows? Maybe the brand was different back in the day. But as a quick status update on my increasingly eclectic laundry list of, of injuries, so my right elbow has been a problem for 20-plus years. It started with an accident in jujitsu. My arm got hyperextended, pop, pop, and then over time, I've developed these tears in my extensors. So people think of tennis elbow, right? So if you kind of pull your fingers up on your arm towards your face where you're looking at your fing- fingernails, let's just say you're admiring a nice new [chuckles] manicure that you have.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:02:34

       Like this.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:02:35

       Yeah, exactly. So if you're just pulling your fingertips back-

    4. KRKevin Rose1:02:37

       All right

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:02:37

       ... towards your shoulder, you're using your extensors, and I have tears in both of those. It's gotten bad enough that I had to stop rock climbing. That was the first indication when I started to get to, say, like, 511s in the gym when you're crimping and starting to pull the knuckles back. I think I basically grabbed the paper tear and ripped it further.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:03:00

       Ugh.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:03:00

       Yeah, I'm at a point where I almost certainly need surgery, and I've tried everything under the sun.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:03:05

       And this is your right hand?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:03:06

       This is my dominant side, yeah.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:03:08

        Oh man, that's extra brutal for you.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:03:10

        Yeah, it's my dominant hand.

    12. KRKevin Rose1:03:12

        Yeah, you're gonna lose that one. That's not the one you wanna lose.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:03:15

        Yeah. So unfortunately [laughs] surgery is pretty straightforward. I don't know what you're thinking about, but-

    14. KRKevin Rose1:03:21

        [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:03:23

        I am not left-handed either.

    16. KRKevin Rose1:03:24

        [laughs] The stranger.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:03:27

        Yeah, the stran- [laughs]

    18. KRKevin Rose1:03:30

        [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:03:30

        Don't underestimate the stranger.

    20. KRKevin Rose1:03:32

        Never underestimate.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:03:33

        Oh, hello. Have we met before?

    22. KRKevin Rose1:03:35

        [laughs]

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:03:36

        If you get it, you get it. All right, let's move on.

    24. KRKevin Rose1:03:38

        [chuckles] Yes.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:03:39

        I will probably need two to three months of rehab before I'm able to get back to full force, and even now, for instance, using barbells for any kind of weight training creates too much torque and tension at the elbow, and it really ends up being incredibly painful, so I'm using a lot more dumbbells. The reason this is relevant is because of the back injury and the back compression, I don't really like putting barbells across my shoulders. I won't get into all the details, but I'm holding dumbbells for extended periods of time, and normally that's not a problem, but if you're doing most of your leg workout by holding onto kettlebells or holding onto dumbbells, the first thing that's gonna go is your grip, especially because my right elbow is really compromised right now. And to use standard basic lifting straps for dumbbells is really challenging. If anyone's used these, you know what I'm talking about, to sort of wrap the strap around multiple times and to get it into some type of symmetrical position with both hands. So this thing right here is another option, and what I'm holding is called Versa Gripps, V-E-R-S-A Gripps, G-R-I-P-P-S, and it's a lifting strap, but really all you're doing is folding it over once and then putting your hand on top of it. So it's a lifting strap that is much more amenable, much more straightforward to use pretty much for everything, but particularly for dumbbells, which I'm gonna be using not just to train to do prehab to get myself as strong as possible prior to surgery, but also post-surgery. So I would say if that's of interest, you can check that

19. 1:05:20 – 1:08:36

    Finding magic in the ordinary with Paul Madonna and Hayao Miyazaki.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:05:20

       out. I'll give one more rec and then we can move on. This is a book that's people have almost certainly not seen before. It's called Everything Is Its Own Reward by Paul Madonna, and it is a book of beautiful architectural drawings. You might think to yourself, boring. Most of it is in the San Francisco area or San Francisco Bay Area, but it's the philosophical musings and the writing that Paul has in this book that is so deeply fascinating and weird and thought-stirring to me. And I came across this the first time in a hotel in the Bay Area. I was just sitting in the coffee shop and I was killing time before doing something. I picked it up and I ended up sitting there and reading it for about two hours. [laughs]

    2. KRKevin Rose1:06:08

       Oh, wow.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:06:08

       Completely forgot to have dinner, and I've once again, much like the 32 Sounds documentary, never quite come across a book like this. It is so strange and I feel like the combination of 32 Sounds, Awareness, and this very, very weird, often funny, often profound Everything Is Its Own Reward by Paul Madonna, which is definitely gonna sell out on Amazon, so the race goes to the swift, creates almost an extended psychedelic experience in the sense that things that you're accustomed to seeing, things that you think or do or hear on autopilot most of the time because that's the only way you can survive is to have most things on autopilot, you see afresh as if you're encountering them for the first time after taking in a diet, doesn't have to be very long, even for a day or two with some of these different books and, uh, documentaries and so on. It's really just seeing, and I don't use this word lightly, it's more of a metaphor, but seeing the miracle in the everyday makes me think of some people who are really creative who seem to have one foot in that zone all the time.

    4. KRKevin Rose1:07:20

       Mm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:07:20

       For instance, I was watching an NHK, which is like the BBC in Japan mini-series on the creative process of Hayao Miyazaki, who's the founder of Studio Ghibli, which has made pretty much every Japanese animated film most people have heard of. My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away-

    6. KRKevin Rose1:07:39

       Mm-hmm

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:07:39

       ... Ponyo, et cetera, et cetera. He's sometimes called the Disney of Japan, which is a description he does not like because he says, "Walt Disney was a businessman. I'm just a director." Just a director. Very Japanese. But in one of the episodes talking about his creative process, he takes a video camera, this is an older docuseries, and tapes it, affixes it to the headrest of his driver's seat in his car because he says, "I want to see what I'm seeing because effectively there's magic hiding in the ordinary." He's like, "That's what you wanna find."

    8. KRKevin Rose1:08:12

       Mm.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:08:13

       And I feel like all of these tools help you to do that, which for me, is deeply therapeutic, beautiful, stress-relieving in ways that are hard for me to put words to. But you don't need drugs to get there. These, these are all things that can help recalibrate you just a few degrees to change your waking experience

20. 1:08:36 – 1:09:18

    The Well of Being is back in stock for a reasonable price.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:08:36

       in that way.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:08:36

       Tim, one other thing I'll say is that you had mentioned a book that immediately sold out before called The Well of Being-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:08:44

       Oh, yeah

    4. KRKevin Rose1:08:44

       ... several episodes ago, and I'm actually rebuying it right now because it's back in stock. I just wanna let people, that is now back in stock, 'cause it was going for several hundred dollars a copy after you mentioned it and it sold out.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:08:56

       Yeah. [laughs]

    6. KRKevin Rose1:08:56

       So now it's back for $35 again.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:08:58

       [laughs]

    8. KRKevin Rose1:08:59

       But that's still one of your favorites, yeah?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:09:01

       It's a great book. It's outstanding. Yeah, that's the children's book for adults.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:09:05

        Yeah. I'm excited. I'm picking that up again as well.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:09:07

        And the book you mentioned and the book that I just mentioned are books that you really want in hardcover if you can get them. That's, that's the intended medium for these two books,

21. 1:09:18 – 1:12:08

    Finding Asian artisanal goods in the US without having to travel.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:09:18

       for sure.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:09:18

       One thing I'll mention as a quick throw out there, not everyone can travel to Japan. We get that. There are lots of artisanal Japanese goods that are f- absolutely phenomenal. A lot of websites that import do so with very limited supply, and then also they mark them up like crazy. So you'll find some of these shops here-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:09:38

       Yeah

    4. KRKevin Rose1:09:38

       ... especially in LA, there's some of these shops you go to and it's just like things are just outrageously priced. One place I have found that I really like that, yes, it is a little premium, but is... I would say is one of the best curators of fine Japanese goods is, a friend of mine turned me onto this, it's called pojstudio.com.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:09:59

       POJ.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:10:00

       Yeah, you gotta check this out. I think you'll really like it.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:10:03

       Okay.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:10:03

       So if you go to POJ Studio and then click on Shop at the top there-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:10:07

       Mm-hmm

    10. KRKevin Rose1:10:07

        ... and just go Best Sellers, kinda like Shop All or whatever, and then look at some of these, these pieces. It's everything from, like, high-end Japanese towels to incense to these beautiful tie-dyed kinda door dividers, like the hanging things.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:10:22

        What was the name of the URL again? Or how do you spell it?

    12. KRKevin Rose1:10:26

        It's pojstudio.com.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:10:30

        Studio.com. In pursuit of perfection. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they got all sorts of beautiful stuff.

    14. KRKevin Rose1:10:37

        I mean, this stuff is absolutely stunning, imported Japanese kinda small production artisan stuff from little tiny trays and containers to room dividers to throw pillows to you name it. If you like that vibe... Oh, they have these beautiful hand-hammered little singing bowls that you can use for meditation. I got their Japanese hinoki wood incense. Smells amazing. Anyway, I think this is one of the best importers of small artisan Japanese goods that's out there. So highly recommend checking it out.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:11:15

        And also, if you wanna go low-end or, like, mid-tier, I mentioned Nijiya Market. They, they only have 12 stores across the U.S., mostly in California and Hawaii, but you can find Japanese markets, and you can also find, broadly speaking, East Asian markets, right? If you find East Asian markets, whether that's Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, fill-in-the-blank, chances are they're gonna have a lot of Japanese goods, and also they will have plenty of good stuff from their primary country in the sense that if it's Chinese-owned, let's just say China, if it's f- Vietnamese-owned, although I would put them in the Southeast Asian, I guess, category, but Korean, et cetera, you can just find some amazing, amazing, amazing teas as an example because culturally that is, is such a part of the lived experience of those places. Try it out. Walk through. Pick up something you can't read, make sure it doesn't have any allergens that are gonna kill you, and then give it a shot, you know? [laughs]

22. 1:12:08 – 1:13:29

    Squirrels: distracting dogs and humans for millennia.

    1. KRKevin Rose1:12:09

       [laughs]

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:12:09

       All right. Let's talk about the Zen retreat in a second. I will tell you one interesting hypothesis that I have related to something we've discussed once before, which is accelerated TMS.

    3. KRKevin Rose1:12:22

       Mm.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:12:22

       So the compressed administration of basically a mag- magnetic coil... Oh, you bastard. There's a squirrel on my squirrel-proof bird feeder just trying to go to town right now. You rat bastard. [laughs] I don't think he's gonna succeed. He's tr- oh, he is. Yo, you bastard. Squirrel-proof my ass.

    5. KRKevin Rose1:12:44

       Wait, it's... Pan over. I gotta see this. Can you pan the camera?

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:12:47

       It's not gonna work. I'll knock all my shit over.

    7. KRKevin Rose1:12:49

       All right.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:12:50

       Yeah, yeah. You bastard. I th- I think he's been... No. No, no. He's, he's really getting in there. All right. So I got distracted. Apparently accelerated TMS doesn't help with, with that kind of distraction.

    9. KRKevin Rose1:13:00

       [laughs]

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:13:00

        I've just never actually seen my bird feeder getting pillaged so badly as it is right now by this squirrel. Nice work, squirrel.

    11. KRKevin Rose1:13:08

        I love this version of Tim that's, like, bird-feeding, hummingbird feeders-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:13:12

        [laughs]

    13. KRKevin Rose1:13:12

        ... little anti-squirrel devices. [laughs]

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:13:15

        He just got set for, like, a whirligig spin, though, so there's, there's something. [laughs]

    15. KRKevin Rose1:13:19

        You need to get a webcam out there, dude.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:13:22

        I do.

    17. KRKevin Rose1:13:22

        Only squirrels.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:13:23

        [laughs] All right. Accelerated TMS. I feel like the dog in Up. "Squirrel."

    19. KRKevin Rose1:13:28

        Yeah, exactly. "Squirrel."

23. 1:13:29 – 1:23:57

    My personal ups and downs with accelerated TMS.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:13:29

       So the accelerated TMS, uh, for people who are interested in learning more about this, I recommend listening to my podcast with Nolan Williams, who's a scientist out of Stanford, who's the head of their brain stimulation lab. But effectively Different types of brain stimulation, in this case transcranial magnetic stimulation, particularly when applied in this condensed format. In this case, it's 50 sessions of brain stimulation. They're about nine minutes long each. You're doing 50 sessions in five days, so you're doing 10 hours a day. Every hour on the hour, you're having this brain stimulation, and in my case, it's for an anxiosomatic target. That just means it's effectively to reduce symptoms of OCD, compulsive rumination. I don't wash my hands or flip the light switches and, you know, not to judge anyone who does, but it's like my form of OCD, which I've been diagnosed with and it's not surprising at all, is this repetitive perseveration, a loop of thoughts that even though I'm aware it's unproductive, even though I'm aware it's unpleasant, I feel powerless to stop. That type of perseverating, which then of course engenders anxiety and sometimes insomnia, et cetera. Of all of the things I've tried, and you and I spoke about this, when I did my first five-day sequence of accelerated TMS, bizarrely there was like a two-week delayed onset. Nothing really seemed to happen for about two weeks and then boom, for three to four weeks I had, let's just call it complete remission of symptoms. Like all of that stuff just went away.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:15:04

       Hmm. Wow.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:15:06

       And nothing has approached that in terms of amplitude and especially durability of effect, and that includes psychedelic therapies. But what's interesting about this is after that five-day treatment, I went back and I did a single day booster, which did nothing, and then I did a three-day booster, which also did nothing. Now, I'm not sure if I've talked about this publicly, maybe I have, maybe I haven't. Part of the reason I wanted to do lower dosing was after my first five-day sequence, I remember after a week or so I was like, "Hey, doc, [chuckles] I can't seem to ejaculate. Is that a known problem?"

    4. KRKevin Rose1:15:42

       Oh, shit.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:15:43

       And needless to say, that did not help my anxiety.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:15:46

       But you could still get the timbre, you just couldn't get the, the output.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:15:50

       Yeah, couldn't get the output so.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:15:51

       Okay.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:15:52

       And then the doc was like, "Huh, interesting. We haven't seen that," because this is still a very new treatment and particularly for anxiety and OCD. The depression has been mu-much better studied, but he said, "Yeah, it kind of makes sense if we're whacking down your sympathetic response." And he's like, "Yeah, there's this mnemonic in medical school which is point and shoot, meaning parasympathetic to get the erection and then sympathetic to have the ejaculation, to have the orgasm." And he's like, "Yeah, it makes sense," and I was like, "Okay, and is this fixable or am I like totally screwed forever?" And he's like, "No, it should just like return to baseline." And it did. I have an addendum to that, though. So I wanted to use lower dosing to avoid that.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:16:33

        Yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:16:34

        One day did nothing. Three days did, did nothing also, and then I was like, what the hell is going on? Okay, I guess I can do five days. You get nothing done for five days, right? 'Cause you're getting your brain zapped every hour, and it basically feels like you did an all-nighter for the LSATs 10 times a day. I mean, you get very, very tired.

    12. KRKevin Rose1:16:53

        When you say zapped, does it hurt?

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:54

        Doesn't hurt at all. It feels like somebody lightly flicking the side of your head.

    14. KRKevin Rose1:16:58

        Okay.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:16:58

        It doesn't hurt. Basically, for nine minutes it's like there's nothing and then it's like bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup and then there's a pause for, I'm just making this up, let's just call it, I don't know, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, and then bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup and it's a paddle that's pushed against your head. That's it. I don't find it painful at all. This is with a MagVenture or MagVenture's device. Uh, there are other devices that can have different types of effects, which have different types of helmets and caps that are used and so on. Doesn't hurt in this particular case. So then I was chatting with the doctor before planning another round and he was like, "Well, it is pretty strange that three days did nothing." And I was like, "Okay." And we're trying to brainstorm strategy, and what I did is I went back in my calendar and looked at the preceding few weeks before every one of these treatments and for the first treatment, the five-day treatment, I had had some psychedelic exposure and I was like, "Interesting," because I've long assumed there could be some type of synergistic effect with these two things and there are people who are looking at this very closely right now. So this time around, the hypothesis is that actually the improved neuroplasticity and who knows, maybe it's even anti-inflammatory effects, could be a million different things, from the psychedelic exposure worked synergistically with the five-day accelerated TMS-

    16. KRKevin Rose1:18:24

        Hmm

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:18:24

        ... to produce the effect that I then witnessed and experienced, which was incredible. Right? If, if I could figure out how to replicate that, then I would do it, let's just call it once a quarter, once every four months, something like that. Why wouldn't I do it, right? And, and I will say that it took the edge off, and by that I mean I was less motivated to do a lot of types of work maybe from tampening down the sympathetic nervous system, but what I found for myself was, number one, at this point in my life, totally fine with it and number two, I actually think it made me better at picking my targets and not doing work for the sake of movement, right? Because I didn't have the underlying anxiety that perhaps I was subconsciously coping with by some type of frenetic activity or over-committing to phone calls or work or creative projects or exercise or who knows what it was. So that extra space that was created by not having as much compulsive behavior across the board, I would say, is no discernible decrease over, say, three to four months in my sort of creative output. Like totally happy with it. I'm very curious to see how accelerated TMS ends up being enabled or disabled I think it might depend on the dose, with different types of pharmaceuticals and there's one that's been studied called setraline with an S, S-E-T-R-A-L-I-N-E. People can find studies related to this. So that's something I'm gonna be watching very closely. Now, I have an update because I know you wanna know about my ejaculation, Kevin.

    18. KRKevin Rose1:20:02

        No, as always. It's my first thing I ask you whenever we talk. Yeah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:20:05

        Yeah, exactly. [laughs] I don't think it was the TMS, so I actually had a theory that I tested and, you know, it's N of one, so take it with a huge grain of salt, but I thought it might be the trazodone, which some people use for sleep and it's interesting for sleep because it doesn't seem to disrupt sleep architecture as much as other drugs. However, one of the less common but known side effects can be delayed ejaculation. And I was like, "Interesting. Well, let me take that off the table." And I did take it off the table, and lo and behold, no issues. So who knows?

    20. KRKevin Rose1:20:47

        Back to two minutes.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:20:48

        Back to two [laughs] minutes.

    22. KRKevin Rose1:20:51

        Boom.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:20:52

        Oh, God. [laughs]

    24. KRKevin Rose1:20:55

        [laughs]

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:20:55

        This never happens, I swear. [laughs]

    26. KRKevin Rose1:20:59

        I normally have trazodone for this, but ah.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:21:01

        [laughs] If people are taking sleep medications, like you can end up treating the wrong thing very easily or pulling levers, forgetting about certain medications that you're using where you haven't taken a moment to look at side effects that are less commonly reported, but nonetheless statistically significant, right? So not saying that was definitively the cause because I couldn't prove that, but so far so good, [laughs] I guess.

    28. KRKevin Rose1:21:30

        So after these treatments or the ones that were successful, was there anything else that was a positive? Like, were, were you sleeping better at night or no?

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:21:37

        Well, for the three to four months that I mentioned, for sure, my sleep was so much better. Now, is that because my rumination is less? Is it because I have maybe like someone taking a Mounjaro or something, less compulsive behavior across the board? So I'm not drinking as much caffeine as like a fixation, maybe. I don't know.

    30. KRKevin Rose1:21:57

        Mm-hmm.
24. 1:23:57 – 1:29:24

    The current state of consumer-level sleep aid technology.

    1. KRKevin Rose1:23:57

       I'm curious when you think about how, you know, these are obviously very expensive treatments and, you know, you can't find them in every city. Are you seeing any application of this technology at the consumer level that you have tried or you've heard good things about? I know it's not the same, but Matt Walker, you know, you've had him on your podcast, sleep scientist out of-- ran the Berkeley Sleep Lab. He had a device called Somni, which I haven't tried, which does transcranial electric stimulation 15 minutes before you go to bed.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:24:25

       Mm-hmm.

    3. KRKevin Rose1:24:26

       It's supposed to increase your deep sleep. So he's involved in that product. So I'm seeing more of these kind of like consumer brain stimulation devices pop up in the market.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:24:34

       Mm-hmm.

    5. KRKevin Rose1:24:34

       Anything worth playing with here or is that just like all kind of not proven out yet?

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:24:40

       Not ready for prime time? Yeah. I can't speak to Somni. Definitely people, if they're interested in unpacking sleep, I mean, Why We Sleep, I believe is the title of, of Matt's book.

    7. KRKevin Rose1:24:50

       Oh, it'll scare the [censored] out of you.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:24:51

       It'll scare the [censored] out of you in, in I think a productive way and then he and I spoke on the podcast about things he might add to that or modify, update, et cetera. The consumer grade, it's timely that you should ask me that. So right before recording this podcast, I actually had an investor deck presentation with a company that is working on something. So you and I should talk about that separately. I think it's very interesting. As a category, it is incredibly hard to make work, both as technology, so just scientifically to show compelling cause and effect I think is very difficult in this category and from a business perspective, there are a number of different reasons that it can be very, very challenging. But I do think there might be some interesting tools on the horizon. What I will say is as a general rule of thumb- I can't speak to Somni and, and Matt Walker is a credible scientist, so let's exclude Somni from what I'm gonna say. But almost every at-home brain stimulation device or let's just for simplicity sake call it brain stimulation device I've seen is at best a scam and at worst could do a fair amount of damage. These tools, if they're used incorrectly, TMS let's just say, transcranial magnetic stimulation, if used incorrectly can actually worsen, so exacerbate the conditions that you're trying to treat. You see people online, you see people on YouTube or on Reddit who are just going to-

    9. KRKevin Rose1:26:27

       Oh, with burn marks and shit too. Like, they get, like, burns

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:26:30

        ... just DIY-ing this stuff.

    11. KRKevin Rose1:26:32

        Yeah.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:26:32

        I would strongly advise against that. The brain is really, really, really sensitive. You don't want to fuck with it without some real bonafide creds behind the device and instructions. So I would encourage people to, as a general rule, steer clear of anything that is be- being sold direct to consumer. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I would say for the most part, this is not across the board, but for the most part you're dealing with fly-by-night operations and you should not trust the integrity of your brain [chuckles] to these devices. I'm sure there are exceptions, but just as a general rule I would say that. Separately, I would say that, for instance, the therapy that I just paid for is very expensive, right? That because insurance doesn't currently cover accelerated TMS, or at least I'm not aware of insurance that will cover accelerated TMS, but I was texting with a friend of mine who is seeing very good results for her PTSD and it gets sort of comorbid with depression and other things, so it's, it's hard to untangle all of that. But she is doing TMS conventionally, which is less frequent, and her insurance is covering it. So I would say I'm optimistic that there is a future where insurance, at least some insurance carriers, will cover accelerated TMS, particularly when the, hopefully, cost benefit is really made incredibly clear through patient results because some of the stuff you see is incredible, right? Like 70% plus remission of treatment-resistant depression-

    13. KRKevin Rose1:28:09

        Mm

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:28:10

        ... after a week of treatment. These are the types of results that rival or exceed some of the psychedelic-assisted therapies, and when we're talking about these intractable or very difficult to treat psychiatric conditions, these outcomes are really, really notable. The data sets are super small for a lot of the applications of accelerated TMS, but I'm supporting that through the foundation scientifically because I do feel like a lot of the issues we're facing, we're facing because of effectively modern civilization [chuckles] and I don't foresee it getting any easier. So I do think it's important to try to support these technologies and interventions so that hopefully they can reach some level of scale. And I'm skeptical that taking people for a six-hour ride on a mind-bending psychedelic that takes them to the 17th dimension is scalable. I'm not even convinced that it's a good idea to do that-

    15. KRKevin Rose1:29:14

        Yeah

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:29:15

        ... with in- incredibly large numbers of patients. That's yet another layer of why I am really supporting some of these other technologies.

25. 1:29:24 – 1:31:49

    How full genome sequencing helped Kevin tame a once-insurmountable health issue.

    1. KRKevin Rose1:29:24

       It's super exciting. I, I think we're about to enter into a golden age of tech meets, you know, life sciences and see a whole slew of different compounds and therapeutics that are just gonna change the way that we live over the next five years. I didn't tell you this, but I did my whole genome sequencing, so not the 23andMe, but did the whole, whole thing. You spend, you know, I think it's about $700 now to get your full genome done.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:29:49

       Mm-hmm. It's incredible how cheap it's become, huh? Isn't that nuts?

    3. KRKevin Rose1:29:52

       It's crazy.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:29:53

       Yeah, compared to back in the day.

    5. KRKevin Rose1:29:54

       Back in the day was insane. It was like $20,000 or more or something just a few years ago. It was something crazy. And that was even if it was available, if you could find it, 'cause it was, like, really hard to, to even get someone to do it. But anyway, long story short, I have had the most stubborn homocysteine, which is a biomarker that it's not known to be causal, but it is oftentimes correlated with ma- different types of cancers and mainly heart disease. And even with multiple physicians helping me out, I have never been able to get it back to, to healthy levels. So I took my whole genome, dumped it into AI, and we worked out a playbook together on where we could find methyl donors to, and which methylated B vitamins I could give to help fix the broken cycle, 'cause I have the MTHFR genetic mutation. It's a very fancy way of saying one biomarker completely jacked up. My dad died of heart disease. I don't want to die of heart disease. How can we fix this shit, right?

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:30:51

       [laughs]

    7. KRKevin Rose1:30:51

       So we worked through a way for me to supplement, start adding on supplements. I'm eight weeks in, and for the first time my homocysteine is at normal levels-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:31:01

       Mm

    9. KRKevin Rose1:31:01

       ... after many years of trying to figure this out. And I was working through this process in tandem with my AI-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:31:10

        Mm

    11. KRKevin Rose1:31:10

        ... which was crazy.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:31:11

        Mm.

    13. KRKevin Rose1:31:11

        And it ended up being NAC was the thing that we had to add to the mix-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:31:15

        Huh

    15. KRKevin Rose1:31:15

        ... as a methyl donor to get it to work and hack around my MTHFR mutation.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:31:20

        Do you think any of that change in homocysteine could be a response to the cessation of drinking in the last, whatever it is, 27 days?

    17. KRKevin Rose1:31:29

        No, I've done bouts of not drinking before and tested and still completely elevated, so-

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:31:33

        Yeah

    19. KRKevin Rose1:31:33

        ... had nothing to do with drinking. I thought the same thing, 'cause the only thing I changed that I've added on now is, well, we slowly started adding on different methylated B vitamins, but it was the NAC that was the methyl donor that got me over the hurdle here and dropped it down dramatically.

26. 1:31:49 – 1:34:04

    Eyeing traffic at the intersection of AI and life sciences.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:31:49

       Yeah.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:31:49

       So I'm, I'm way in the healthy zone now, which is nuts. My, my physician is like, "What the hell did you do?" And I'm like, "Talking to AI."

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:31:55

       Wow.

    4. KRKevin Rose1:31:56

       But I'm just saying this is one of many things. We'll have an announcement next time we do a, a podcast together where I just put 15 million in to a protein, this novel protein coming out of UCSF that- ... is doing wonders around dementia and Alzheimer's. I did this via True Ventures, where I'm a partner over there. And so I joined the board of this company, and we've got some really interesting data coming out of that. It's just a very fun time to be alive at the intersection of AI and life sciences.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:32:24

       Yeah, it is. And just for reference, so Craig Venter, back in the day, his personal genome sequencing, that was in 2007, and people can do more homework on this, but that cost $10 million, estimated to have cost $10 million.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:32:40

       Wow.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:32:40

       And you just look at where we are now, and you can imagine moving forward, and actually this ties into my visit to the UAE and to Abu Dhabi specifically because what they can do and what they are doing with AI absolutely blew my mind. I mean, they have, number one, I think it's 70% of government services are administered through an app on smartphones, and there are AI assistants that people interact with. So for instance, if you're driving and you want to report a pothole, you just take a photograph of it, it geotags it, deals with it, gets it to the right agency, and then off you go, right? And I suppose looking kind of down the pike also with genomics, I think they're going to be a global leader in genomics because of just how much data they have, not only from a full genome perspective, but from a behavioral perspective and centralized electronic medical record perspective. Actually very, very interested to see what they do specifically with life sciences and AI because this intersection is going to be so fertile. I mean, it's, it's just unreal. If you look at AlphaFold and what AlphaFold has done.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:33:56

       Yes. The new AlphaFold's amazing.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:33:58

       I mean, we're looking at sort of eclipsing decades of human work in incredibly short periods of time.

27. 1:34:04 – 1:38:15

    Genetic data privacy concerns.

    1. KRKevin Rose1:34:04

       Have you done your full genome yet, Tim?

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:34:06

       I did my full genome a million years ago with a startup that effectively went out of business, so I should probably do it again just to boot that back up. I did delete all my data on 23andMe because I was panicked that they would get bought by someone, and your genomics data-

    3. KRKevin Rose1:34:21

       Which they did. Just got announced.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:34:23

       Yeah, so I was able to delete mine just in the nick of time. But I saw a demo, this was years ago, of a company taking genome data and with a sufficiently large data set, creating a, basically like a suspect sketch of the person's face based on their [laughs] genome data. Like, if they have photographs from multiple angles of these people, because this is what one of these companies was doing, and they have the, uh, full genome sequence, and who knows, maybe this is science fiction that they were peddling as something in the future.

    5. KRKevin Rose1:34:57

       This is crazy.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:34:58

       But I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think you can anonymize your genetic data in the way that we would hope to be able to anonymize it.

    7. KRKevin Rose1:35:07

       Do you care, though?

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:35:08

       Do I care?

    9. KRKevin Rose1:35:09

       Are they gonna really gonna clone me? Are they gonna clone you? I mean, they might make your Peloton seat fit better, like if they have [laughs] the full picture.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:35:17

        Yeah.

    11. KRKevin Rose1:35:17

        But outside of that, like, you know, like, what are they gonna do with it?

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:35:21

        Well, I run more on the hypervigilant side than you do.

    13. KRKevin Rose1:35:24

        Yeah, I know you do.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:35:24

        I would say for me, it's not a question of why do you care? It's a question of, like, what are the reasons to not have a tighter hold on it? And if there are secure ways to share it, I'm all for it. But for instance, I mean, the 23andMe thing, I'm not the only person who deleted their data for sure, right? And I suppose my feeling is we don't know what we don't know. I don't know how this data might be used.

    15. KRKevin Rose1:35:51

        Yeah.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:35:51

        I really have no idea. So I would prefer to have as much control of it as possible. And also, way back in 2010 when I was writing The 4-Hour Body, I guess it came out in 2010, so I was writing it prior to that, and I'm not sure if this conversation happened shortly thereafter, but it was with a very credible scientist who was at NASA at the time working on all sorts of advanced physics and chemistry and so on, and he was commenting on the [laughs] fact that it was very foolish for a very well-known billionaire at the time to release their full genome data. And he said, "Because if, if you wanted to develop a customized biological weapon to, say, walk up to that person in a crowd and, like, blow a powder into their face at TED or wherever," he's like, "You could do that very, very easily." He's like, "It's actually not hard to design something like that." So I was like, "Well-"

    17. KRKevin Rose1:36:48

        Okay, now you're freaking me out.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:36:49

        Yeah.

    19. KRKevin Rose1:36:49

        That is sh- [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:36:51

        That's scary shit [laughs] . And I also don't have the technical chops to call bullshit on something like that, but this guy didn't have a tinfoil hat. He had a real job. He was producing really good work. He was published. And that conversation stuck with me. That was around 2010.

    21. KRKevin Rose1:37:08

        Yeah, but think about this. Like, if I have the resources and the power to, like, build a custom gene-killing Tim Ferriss powder agent, I'm pretty sure I can hire someone just to walk up and shoot you.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:37:19

        Yeah.

    23. KRKevin Rose1:37:20

        Like, you have the resources. You really don't need to go that far to take somebody out with a custom, like-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:37:26

        No

    25. KRKevin Rose1:37:26

        Or you know what? The phlebotomist that leaves your house, I can just, like, pay them for a little dip of your, your juice and, like, go get it tested, right?

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:37:33

        There are ways to do that. I mean, but what I guess what I'm saying is I think that as soon as we ha- within 12 months, I mean, we're gonna have LLMs that are capable, I mean, hopefully they have the safeguards in place of enabling your average Joe or Jane to create biological weapons from household items, right? So-

    27. KRKevin Rose1:37:51

        Yeah

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:37:51

        ... I'm just saying I'd prefer not to tempt fate as a public figure by keeping the reins too loose on that stuff.

    29. KRKevin Rose1:38:00

        Do you remember that LifeLock guy? You remember that company LifeLock?

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:38:03

        I do, yeah.
28. 1:38:15 – 1:39:44

    Face to face with my deepfaked side hustler.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:38:15

       And I will also say that something happened to me a couple weeks ago that is like the flip side of the Cambrian explosion of discovery with the intersection of healthcare and AI, and I'm not sure how humans cope with this. But in a sort of post-fact world where what you don't touch and see with your own eyes in person is going to be a huge question mark.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:38:41

       Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:38:41

       And the reason I say that is a, a few weeks ago, I started getting all of these DMs and texts and so on saying, "Hey, is this you?" I was like, "Hey, is what me?" And I clicked through and there was a video of me selling or saying, "Sign up for X, Y, or Z, and I'll tell you the three stocks that are underpriced right now that'll make you rich," basically, something like that.

    4. KRKevin Rose1:39:04

       Yeah. Your side hustle.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:39:05

       My side hustle, yeah. [laughs]

    6. KRKevin Rose1:39:08

       [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:39:08

       And the video, I will say, was, like, 90% indistinguishable from me. The background, the clothing, facial hair, everything was dialed. There were just a couple of max headroom movements, for people who get the reference, like a couple of little glitches-

    8. KRKevin Rose1:39:23

       Yeah

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:39:23

       ... that raised questions, but in 12 months that's not gonna be there.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:39:26

        Right.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:39:27

        And I'm not sure, for instance, from a societal perspective, or let's just say from a personal perspective, like, how will people know what is real Kevin versus fake Kevin?

    12. KRKevin Rose1:39:39

        Yeah.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:39:40

        Do you have to train your whole audience to understand private and public keys? Like, what do you

29. 1:39:44 – 1:42:42

    Kevin's unsettling AI headphone review experiment and its implications for real humans.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:39:44

       actually do?

    2. KRKevin Rose1:39:45

       Dude, this is top of mind for me right now in a way that you would never believe. Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:39:49

       Yeah.

    4. KRKevin Rose1:39:50

       I mean, I'm working on this exact problem. So Alexis, the co-founder of Reddit, and I, you know, we, I think we mentioned this. We bought Digback, and we're gonna build a social platform for people to converse about a variety of different topics. And top of mind-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:40:03

       Yeah

    6. KRKevin Rose1:40:03

       ... is that in a agentic world where AI agents can be spun up for pennies because the cost is going to zero, and they can have conversations with you, they can convince you of things, they can do all of these different both good and bad things, how are you gonna know what's real?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:40:19

       Yeah.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:40:19

       Just as a test, what I did recently is I took a model, I picked a pair of $6 headphones on Amazon-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:40:27

       Okay

    10. KRKevin Rose1:40:27

        ... and I got all the details about the Amazon. And I said, "Sell this to me as if they will out-compete and outperform a $500 pair of headphones." And it wrote this, like, really detailed report about the craftsmanship and how they were able to get this in for only $5, and it was super compelling and convincing. And I was like, it's game over.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:40:50

        Yeah.

    12. KRKevin Rose1:40:50

        Anything we read online can no longer be trusted, right? And so there is a handful of people right now working on this exact problem, and we're trying to figure out how we can guarantee that there's a human on the other end of the keyboard, number one. And number two, when you go out and you talk about something with authority, how can we have and prove that you actually have wisdom or authority that passes through to what you're talking about? So for example... Oh, I don't wanna get too geeky, but for example, and to your point about this needs to be something average consumers can understand versus private and public keys and everything else.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:41:26

        Yeah.

    14. KRKevin Rose1:41:26

        But like, you know, I've owned an Oura Ring for, you know, let's call it five years now.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:41:30

        Mm-hmm.

    16. KRKevin Rose1:41:31

        Now, I could go on any forum online and say, "Hey, I love my Oura Ring. I've owned it for five years." Now, that could be an LLM that's, that's providing you complete bullshit, or it can be actually someone that's owned an Oura Ring for five years.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:41:42

        Mm-hmm.

    18. KRKevin Rose1:41:42

        There are technologies out there, they're really geeky, they're called ZK proofs-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:41:47

        Mm

    20. KRKevin Rose1:41:47

        ... that can go out and they can work with service providers and say, "We can guarantee with an algorithm and create a proof that this person is doing and saying what they said, what they're claiming to say," which is that I've actually had a paying subscription for the last five years, right? And we're going to need to have these proofs. Like, kind of a cheap way of thinking of this is, like, sometimes you see these, like, Trustpilot scores or whatever.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:42:12

        Right.

    22. KRKevin Rose1:42:13

        Or Better Business Bureau scores. There's gonna need to be that around everything that we talk about online. So including a Tim Ferriss ch- verifiable checkbox that when I click on it, it will say, "This was produced, created, published, and proven that it came directly from Tim Ferriss' lips and not some AI-generated world."

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:42:34

        Yeah.

    24. KRKevin Rose1:42:35

        That has to exist, otherwise everything is lost online.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:42:38

        Yeah. Well, keep up the hard work [laughs] folks working on that

30. 1:42:42 – 1:44:05

    Steps Kevin has taken toward proving he's a real boy.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:42:42

       problem.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:42:42

       I literally spent a half day over at World, which is Sam Altman's other startup around proving humanness, and the way they do it is they actually scan your eyeball. And I had my eyeball scanned and, you know, now I have an ID, a World ID, that is proof that I am that human. They don't own that. They don't have a copy of that. It lives on my device, and it's sharded and kept separate so it only can be reconstructed by me. But we're entering into this really weird time where there is a trade-off between privacy and proving that it's me, and it's gonna be messy for, for a few years.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:43:19

       [laughs] For a few years, yeah. It's gonna be messy for a few hundred years. [laughs]

    4. KRKevin Rose1:43:25

       It's bad.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:43:26

       Sounds like Minority Report, the eye scans. Yeah. It's gonna have to be something like that.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:43:30

       I've got a buddy right now that is a hardcore technologist that, that looks at these things and studies these things, and he, he claims right now he believes that 30% of the Internet's traffic, whether it be, you know, people writing back to you on Twitter or, you know, any of these social networks, he thinks it's all bots at this point.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:43:48

       Yeah.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:43:48

       And he has proof of some of them that will friend you up, create long-term relationships with you only to convince you of that one thing that they were trying to do, and they spent six months building up rapport with you, and it's all BS, dude. It's all for pennies.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:44:02

       Oh, God.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:44:02

        You know? It's crazy.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:44:04

        Have you seen that

31. 1:44:05 – 1:46:01

    "You were talking to models — you were just talking to large language models."

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:44:05

       great movie, Ex Machina?

    2. KRKevin Rose1:44:07

       Oh, of course. Fantastic movie.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:44:09

       So good. It's so scary. [laughs]

    4. KRKevin Rose1:44:11

       We gotta go revisit that. We also need to watch Her again. That'd be another one to watch again.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:44:16

       I mean, watching Her, I remember watching that and feeling like it was further off than it actually is right now.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:44:26

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:44:27

       I'm just realizing, like, it's basically here.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:44:29

       Right.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:44:29

       [laughs] It's basically right now.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:44:31

        [laughs] Yeah. Did you see that lawsuit that basically there was a bunch of, uh, guys that got together and did this lawsuit against OnlyFans. They sued the platform because they found out that they were just talking to bots and not the actual models themselves. Did you see this?

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:44:45

        No. [laughs]

    12. KRKevin Rose1:44:46

        So they're suing these, these creators.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:44:48

        How much are you gonna make from that, Kevin? 27 bucks?

    14. KRKevin Rose1:44:50

        Yeah, exactly.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:44:51

        [laughs]

    16. KRKevin Rose1:44:51

        Here's the best part. The number one upvoted comment on that was like, "You were talking to models? You were just talking to large language models." Like [laughs]

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:44:58

        [laughs]

    18. KRKevin Rose1:44:58

        It was voted on my joke. So true.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:45:02

        Oh, man. Yeah. Well, here goes nothing, right? This is like the click, click, click going up on the rollercoaster.

    20. KRKevin Rose1:45:09

        I know.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:45:09

        And it's like, here we go. I came back from my travels realizing, like, wow, I really think it will behoove me to just take, like, a few weeks to a month and do a very deep dive on what I can do with these models because a lot of what I saw traveling and just how prescient and invested and advanced certain places are, like Abu Dhabi as an example.

    22. KRKevin Rose1:45:37

        Mm-hmm.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:45:37

        I was like, holy shit. From a geopolitical perspective, this is gonna be the haves and the have-nots.

    24. KRKevin Rose1:45:43

        Yeah.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:45:43

        Right? And it's like, okay, I guess I'll keep brushing up on my archery skills. It's why I need the, need the [laughs] elbow surgeries sooner rather than later.

    26. KRKevin Rose1:45:51

        Yeah.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:45:51

        [laughs]

    28. KRKevin Rose1:45:53

        Real quick before we wrap, dude, let's touch on the meditation theme because that is what I need more of, which is getting off the computer and stop, and, and actually disconnecting. You wanna talk about your

32. 1:46:01 – 1:47:48

    Exploding Kittens and I made a game together: Coyote.

    1. KRKevin Rose1:46:01

       experience?

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:46:01

       Let's talk about it. Let me give a quick update before we do that, like a quick, like commercial break, which is this guy. So you remember this guy? Coyote, the game that we talked about?

    3. KRKevin Rose1:46:11

       Yes.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:46:11

       It hadn't launched last time we were talking.

    5. KRKevin Rose1:46:14

       Oh, amazing.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:46:14

       Or maybe it had just launched. So this game, Coyote, which is kind of like rock, paper, scissors on steroids in a group dynamic where you can help or sabotage other players, the game has become one of the top-selling games at Walmart, where it is exclusively for a couple months. It's been one of the absolute top sellers. It has produced two or three of the videos of gameplay have become the most popular videos of all time from Exploding Kittens, which is the company I partnered with.

    7. KRKevin Rose1:46:47

       Oh my God, that's amazing.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:46:49

       I mean, tens of millions of views of gameplay. So it's all to say, like, it's going super, super well, and there's a lot more that I'm gonna explore with this over the next couple months. But so far, including people with younger kids, they've modified the rules a little bit. I have friends who played, Hutchins, our friend, Chris Hutchins played with his, like, four or five-year-old, I want to say. Uh, he sent me a testimonial [laughs] video from her. Not, not for public use, but she was a big fan. So you can play it with younger kids. And I would just say, couldn't be happier with how it's, it's turned out, so many thanks to Elon Lee and the whole Exploding Kittens team for going on this two-year journey of working on this thing together. So if people want to check that out, tim.blog/coyote, and you can find the game at pretty much any Walmart or order it online, and easy to find. Nine bucks, 10 bucks.

    9. KRKevin Rose1:47:39

       That's awesome. Dude, and thanks for giving it out to everyone that came out to the live Dig Nation at South By.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:47:43

        Yeah.

    11. KRKevin Rose1:47:43

        That was awesome for you to do.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:47:44

        Yeah, those are the first people to ever get their hands on one. My pleasure. Okay,

33. 1:47:48 – 1:55:11

    When meditation retreats go right (and wrong).

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:47:48

       zen. Getting offline.

    2. KRKevin Rose1:47:50

       Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:47:51

       You wanna kick us off? Tell us what it looked like. What was the format?

    4. KRKevin Rose1:47:54

       If you do a classic zen retreat, at least in this lineage of zen called Sanbo Zen, which is the lineage that Henry Shukman teaches, you're in for it. You're in for a little bit of an ass-kicking in that you get up at the crack of dawn and you sit, and then you sit some more, and you do a tiny little walk, and then you sit some more, and then you have some mush in a bowl, and then you sit some more. And you do that until about 8:00 PM at night, and you do it all over again, completely silent, for five to seven days. I've done a couple of these five- and seven-dayers. They're no joke. They're meant to be kind of slightly demoralizing/brutal.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:48:33

       [laughs]

    6. KRKevin Rose1:48:33

       They're truly designed to break you down in a, in a good way. Break down the ego, break down your willingness to live. [laughs] Like, I just... Like, it's, they're pretty hardcore.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:48:43

       Yeah.

    8. KRKevin Rose1:48:43

       But you're working on Zen koans, so you're, you're trying to crack a koan. Uh, Tim has a great interview with Henry Shukman on his podcast. Check it out, all about koans. But anyway, long story short, this was not that. We said, "Hey, if we get together a small group of people, we can talk at night, have some dinners, really intimate, call it, you know, like seven, eight people, small, and get Henry and Valerie, which are both zen masters, to come in and kind of instruct us during the day." No early call times. I think we got there around 9:00-ish.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:49:14

       That's perfect.

    10. KRKevin Rose1:49:15

        Which is perfect. You know, got that morning coffee in ahead of time. And had, you know, a great lunch, and then afternoon sit, and then we went, all went to a dinner at night. So did that for, what was it, three days?

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:49:26

        Yeah.

    12. KRKevin Rose1:49:26

        And it was, it was fantastic. I, I loved it, but I'd love to hear what you got out of it.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:49:30

        Well, I got a lot out of it, and I think one upfront benefit was it was, like, a very warm bath re-entry to meditation retreat.

    14. KRKevin Rose1:49:44

        You had a tough go your first one, right?

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:49:46

        Yeah, my first... I won't rehash it. For people who want to deep dive into what happened in my first extended Vipassana silent retreat, which I made a lot harder by fasting for a very extended period of time and then also adding microdosing, neither of which I recommend if it's your maiden voyage, they can listen to my interview with Willoughby B. Britton, B-R-I-T-T-O-N, on some of the occasional adverse events with meditation, which are very, very similar to those of psychedelics, actually. So if you want to check that out, you can check that out. I also did a conversation with Dan Harris of Ten Percent Happier where we got into this in some length. But putting that aside, because the end result was basically complete nervous breakdown- Getting back on the horse and doing it in this way was very much a form of recovery for me, right? Getting back to a point where I feel like there are forms of meditation I can engage with, specifically extended meditation, that don't necessarily run the risk of the types of issues that I ran into in my first silent retreat. Which by the way, I've spent, let's just say, a week in various jungles or mountains fasting before by myself, and the same types of issues crop up. [laughs] Your mind really gets going. I think the fasting actually is the main culprit-

    16. KRKevin Rose1:51:07

        Mm

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:51:07

        ... with increasing the intensity as much as it did, not the, the microdosing, but I'm sure they acted together. This particular format, and I think the type of meditation with a mixture of silence and intermittent guidance from Henry, was not only just a less strained, less risky way to go about it, I actually felt like it was very, very productive. And I know Henry and Valerie both commented on how it seemed that people made a lot of progress in a very short period of time in this smaller group. It could've been a function of the smaller group because if you have 40 people, there's always gonna be somebody like coughing or farting or fidgeting or whatever. In a smaller group [laughs] it's a little, everyone's on best behavior. And, uh, we're also i- in a small group that was taking it very seriously. But much like with anything else, density of practice matters. And when you are sitting once a day, like I meditated earlier this morning using The Way app, which we're both involved with, that involves Henry. I sat this morning. I'll sit again later today. But when you're doing a few hours a day, you're able to say to yourself, "Okay, in the next sit I wanna focus on this particular aspect." And then if you have a very uncomfortable meditation session, or you're just thinking about popcorn and cats the whole time or something stupid, and you're like, "Ah, fuck, I kinda failed that meditation," [laughs] you have another at-bat five minutes later, right?

    18. KRKevin Rose1:52:37

        Right.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:52:37

        And psychologically you can develop a certain level of not just confidence, but also momentum that you can take back into your daily less intense practice. So I, I found it really, really beneficial, so thank you for putting so much time and energy into helping organize that. And you know, the group makes the difference. This was just an outstanding group, very different perspectives. Some people had never really meditated before, certainly never done meditation retreats. For others like me, sort of intrepid people dipping their toe back in. And I found it incredibly rewarding and I would do it again, for sure.

    20. KRKevin Rose1:53:15

        That's awesome. Yeah, same. I had never done something with Henry that involved actually talking during the meditation because it was always like you get to sit with him in private interview once a day when you're doing a, a silent retreat. So you go back into a room and then you get, you know, five minutes to talk about were there any hurdles or obstacles that came up and how might we address these. That's typically how you do it in Zen style. So to address those at length in real time was awesome. So yeah, I mean, highly recommend trying to, to pick up a practice. It is challenging for monkey minds like myself and, you know, after a few years I'm just now starting to, to find my way. I mean, ever since then, Tim, I've been doing close to pretty much 50 minutes a day-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:54:01

        Wow. Nice

    22. KRKevin Rose1:54:01

        ... since we got back from that, which has been fantastic. But it's still a [laughs] challenge. You know, there'll be days where your mind just goes off the rails and you say, "Hey, that was today, so, so it goes." You know? You can't beat yourself up-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:54:14

        Yeah

    24. KRKevin Rose1:54:14

        ... I think at the end of the day.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:54:16

        [laughs] Yeah. I was busy with really good seafood. Didn't do as much meditating as I would've liked.

    26. KRKevin Rose1:54:21

        Yeah, really good seafood.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:54:23

        I will give a shameless plug because the reason I got involved with The Way with Henry, this app that he has, is because most people are not gonna have access to Henry directly in person. That's just not going to be feasible. But I mean, look, I can call Henry, I can text Henry, and 99% of the time I just use the app, which should tell you something. So if you go to thewayapp.com/tim, you can get 30 free sessions, and I'm pretty sure you don't need to, at least in the beginning you didn't need to use your credit card, so you're not in this kind of, it's not exactly a bait and switch, but this like boiling frog scenario is my understanding. Last time I checked, still didn't require a credit card. So 30 free sessions, you can try it out, thewayapp.com/tim. And I will literally be doing that in another, like two hours I'll be doing another session.

34. 1:55:11 – 1:59:19

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:55:11

       KevKev, anything else you'd like to add?

    2. KRKevin Rose1:55:13

       No, I think that was great. Yeah, people should know we did not plan to have that be a sponsor [laughs] or anything like that for The Way. I know you have to say all that stuff, but also it's just a fucking awesome app. [laughs] So it's like-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:55:25

       Yeah

    4. KRKevin Rose1:55:25

       ... that's the nice thing about being able to pick your sponsors and pick people that you work with, you know?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:55:29

       Yeah. Yeah.

    6. KRKevin Rose1:55:30

       I love that about podcasting. We started that Dig Nation podcast again with me and Alex, and I do that every three weeks now, and we have all these sponsors coming and it is so nice to be able to say no. You know? You're like-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:55:40

       Yeah

    8. KRKevin Rose1:55:40

       ... "No, I don't wanna do that because I don't believe it." [laughs] You know? So it's like-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:55:44

       Yeah

    10. KRKevin Rose1:55:44

        ... awesome that you're in that spot. But anyway, I will leave you with one last bit. Are we wrapping up? 'Cause I have one last quote of the day.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:55:50

        Let's do it.

    12. KRKevin Rose1:55:50

        So my quote for you all would be one that, uh, a friend of mine that gave up alcohol said to me, and I, I don't believe this originated with him but I thought it was a great one, which is, "I had my first drink for the same reason that I had my last, and that is to be a grown-up."

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:56:09

        Hmm. That's a good one.

    14. KRKevin Rose1:56:10

        That's a good one.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:56:11

        That's a good one. Well, keep it up, KevKev. I'm impressed.

    16. KRKevin Rose1:56:15

        Yeah.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:56:15

        I say that very sincerely. That's a very long stretch, and it sounds like you've cleared a couple hurdles. You have the phone-a-friend option.

    18. KRKevin Rose1:56:23

        Oh, yeah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:56:23

        And I'm rooting for you, man. I'm definitely rooting for you.

    20. KRKevin Rose1:56:27

        Everything gets better.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:56:28

        And having this conversation also reinforces that I think I'll just continue with my current ... cadence, which is like, okay, maybe once or twice a month, special occasion only. And outside of that, just really don't feel the need to do it. And also with everything else I've got going on, I recognize that... I'll give you another quote for booze, and this was actually something that a dear friend said to me at one point, and he likes to drink. He said, "Drinking is borrowing happiness from tomorrow."

    22. KRKevin Rose1:57:00

        Mm.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:57:01

        And if you're coping at night in some respect with alcohol, it's not a free lunch. You're gonna pay for it tomorrow, and that's also true with w- recreational ketamine use. Don't think that's a get out of jail free card, so don't fuck around with that. Kevin and I have talked about that ad nauseam before, so we can leave that alone. But very inspiring to hear you talk about this, this stretch and everything that has improved. So I'm gonna keep going.

    24. KRKevin Rose1:57:25

        Yeah, I gotta say, the main thing for me, man, I... that was unexpected, without a doubt, is the mood boost.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:57:31

        Yeah.

    26. KRKevin Rose1:57:32

        In the last week, I've noticed that I'm just... I'd never considered myself depressed or anything like that. I was a happy person, like pretty good, but, like, I don't take things as personally, which is like, it's weird. I'm, for some reason, I'm just getting a little 10% little, like, lift in mood, which I'm loving. Like, I'll take it all day long. It's great.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:57:51

        [laughs]

    28. KRKevin Rose1:57:53

        Last quote. I got one more g- good one too.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:57:54

        All right. All right.

    30. KRKevin Rose1:57:54

        I love good quotes. "Discipline is the strongest form of self-love. It's ignoring what you want right now for a promise of a better future." That's along the same lines as your quote there.

Episode duration: 1:59:30