The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — Bitcoin Pros and Cons, 2021 Resolutions, Fave Books, Lucid Dreaming, Couples Therapy, and More (#493)

Please enjoy this transcript of another episode of “The Random Show.” Once again, I am joined by technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose). In this one we discuss Bitcoin, portfolio rebalancing, energy management versus time management, maximizing our enjoyment of nature, lucid dreaming, couples therapy, healthy Hawaiian venison, and more.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.

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Tim Ferriss: Welcome to another episode of the Random Show. This is episode number 7,496. 97 — 

Kevin Rose: Kevin Rose.

Tim Ferriss: [inaudible].

Kevin Rose: It is good to see you, my friend.

Tim Ferriss: You too. You too.

Kevin Rose: It’s been too long. When was the last time we actually saw each other in person? You were in Portland.

Tim Ferriss: It would have been in Portland, 100 years ago. Because it was simultaneous with, I think it was AcroLove Festival, where you had hundreds of people just smothering each other with body contact. One another with body contact. But that is a pre-COVID activity.

Kevin Rose: Yes.This was probably a year and a half ago. It’s been about that long.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s crazy. It’s sad.

Tim Ferriss: It is. It’s wild. And what I’m reassured to see is you have your Japanese podcasting robe on. And you seem to have new eyeshadow or mascara, which really brings out your eyes.

Kevin Rose: It’s called five hours of sleep, dude. It’s called babies, is what it is.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I like it. You’re converging with the raccoon gods that you upset so long ago, by tossing one of their brethren downstairs. For people that want that security footage, you can search Kevin Rose raccoon and it will pop right up.

Kevin Rose: You’re determined to make that what’s on my grave. Like what I’m best known for is the raccoon toss.

Tim Ferriss: Your Wikipedia legacy. I want it in the first paragraph. So we shared a Google spreadsheet that you created beforehand of things we might talk about. And I’m sure we’ll talk about all sorts of stuff. Where do you want to start, man?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, we can start with the Bitcoin stuff, because you were super excited about that, which is odd because you’re typically not the biggest — I’d never seen you as a hardcore crypto guy.

Tim Ferriss: I would definitely not self-describe as a hardcore crypto guy at all. I just happened to have this combination of ignorance and laziness, which led me to hold on to the Bitcoin that I had.

Kevin Rose: Oh, so you’re stoked? That’s why. I’m “Why is Tim so excited about this?” Because you have a boatload of money right now.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, I don’t know if it’s a boatload, but I’ve held onto it. I mean, look, anyone who is holding — just to put a timestamp on this. It’s January 8th, 2021, Bitcoin, I believe for the first time ever, just crossed $40,000 per Bitcoin. Anyone — 

Kevin Rose: It was 41 this morning. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So anyone who has ever bought Bitcoin, to the unexamined or unexamining eye, looks like a complete genius. But it’s not possible that everyone bought Bitcoin for the right reasons, or through the right process. But nonetheless, here we are and it’s exciting to watch, even if it may implode. And people are drawing comparisons and certainly pointing out the differences between 2017 and now, where we saw this huge spike several years ago and then a consequent crash. Now, I should also point out — 

Kevin Rose: It’s happened several times now.

Tim Ferriss: It’s happened several times. And I should also point out that I got into crypto in a meaningful way, right before that crash in 2017. So if I had consequently sold all of it, I would have done so at a pretty massive loss. And I was “Well, look, I’m playing with house money, in the sense that I can afford to lose whatever I am putting into crypto, so I’ll just hold onto it.”

And the premise that I used, or the set of assumptions I used to get into crypto, ended up being totally wrong in a lot of ways. At least in the sense that I was investing in crypto as a hedge. Specifically against, say, a huge drop in the stock market, since I had a few different pending IPOs and so on with — 

Kevin Rose: This was pre-Uber IPO, basically.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. And so I made a bunch of very tenuous leaps of faith in my logic to look for different ways to hedge against the possibility that a market collapse could drag Uber down with it. So nothing stock-specific. Meaning nothing Uber-specific in that case. And — 

Kevin Rose: I mean, you literally could have just hedged the market though at the same time, right?

Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, I could have hedged the market. I don’t know much about shorting, or hedging, or anything like that. And when I looked at it, even in a cursory way, looking at the stuff that’s allowed, no gray hat stuff, it seemed very expensive to do it effectively. And so I decided to become involved with crypto, also because if you’re in certain social circles with certain very smart people, yourself included, I mean, you’ve played a lot in the crypto sandbox, so I want to hear from you more than me, it’s easy to get intoxicated. And it’s easy to kind of walk into this reality distortion field, where you’re like, “The world is going to Mad Max in the next 48 hours, and crypto will be all that survives,” I’m not saying that’s your argument.

But the point I wanted to make is that if you look at the timeline, so 2017, boom. The tulip bulb craze of crypto at the time, sort of tanks, or at least Bitcoin. And this time around, with COVID, a lot of Bitcoin bulls and so on were expecting that Bitcoin would be inversely correlated with these crashes and it would shoot to the roof. But that’s not what happened. Not what happened with gold, either. And I think what was underestimated was how many people would need cash. And when you need cash, you sell whatever you happen to have.

And if you have, for instance, there’s a lot of people got themselves into trouble by borrowing against assets. So they took out, say, lines of credit based on the value of their stocks. And then when the stocks cratered, those all got called. And bankers and everyone else calling up Joe Smith like, “Hey, Joe Smith, we want all our money right now.” And they had to sell anything they could sell that was liquid. And that would include a lot of crypto. So it took a few months for crypto to recover to pre-COVID, whereas gold took off immediately after COVID. It did drop in the very short term, the early March to early April, and then picked back up.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it wasn’t a big run-up though. We never saw massive, the crypto-like gains that we’ve seen with Bitcoin. Gold’s picked up a bit, but not a ton.

Tim Ferriss: No, not that much. And I’m referring to GLD specifically for people interested. But what are your thoughts right now on all this cryptomania? I mean, there are differences, huge differences between right now and 2017. Namely, the entry of, at least one of them, is the entry of institutional investors, and just a few months ago, Paul Tudor Jones, and some other legends kind of dipping their toe in the water and beginning to make some allocations in their portfolios. Fund portfolios, which is a big difference. Not just personal, I believe that’s true. Somebody can fact-check me. But what do you make of all this? This is a terrain that you’re much more familiar with than I am.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. My take is that with any new, crazy, wild idea, come just a ton of skeptics. As there should be. And when Bitcoin was first launched and we were all playing around with the very early wallets, and I remember just buying coins and picking them up. And I wasn’t really early, early. I wasn’t in the pennies. But I was buying them around 10, $12 a coin, something like that.

And it was the wild west. It was very difficult to do anything. To buy crypto, to — we were all setting up mining rigs back then and trying to mine our own Bitcoin. And then eventually pools came out, so you could join in with other people to do it more efficiently. But this is fresh new technology that hadn’t been hammered and beaten up. And so anytime there’s something that is directly linked to your finances, it takes years or decades for people to get comfortable with a new emerging technology to where they’ll commit any serious capital to that technology.

So I think largely what we’re seeing here is, well, one it’s there’s a lot of stimulus money hitting the market. There’s a lot of people buying on Square Cash App. It’s much easier to purchase Bitcoin than it has ever been. It used to be, you have to go to some shady exchange somewhere, hold up a picture of your driver’s license with literally your date written underneath it to make sure it was you. Shady stuff that I’ve been on some of these exchanges. My identification has since been hacked on many of these exchanges.

Thankfully, I don’t live at any of those addresses. But I had those IDs I was holding up in front of the camera. But I do get text messages of people trying to phish me all the time. Trying to get me to — 

Tim Ferriss: That’s so creepy. It’s so creepy.

Kevin Rose: It’s crazy. It happens at least twice a week. It’s insane. Because my information is out there. So whatever. But the point being is that it was extremely difficult to get to purchase Bitcoin. And now PayPal came online just a couple months ago and is offering the ability to purchase Bitcoin and Ethereum directly inside of PayPal. It’s just insane how easy this is now.

So you’re unlocking massive customer bases. Hundreds of millions of users with PayPal. Square Cash is, I think the second or third-largest buyer now of Bitcoin that’s — 

Tim Ferriss: This is on the retail side, right? This is just on the retail side.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So that’s not even right talking about the institutional money going in. So I work at True Ventures, venture capital firm, several billion dollars under management. We have positions in Bitcoin. We’ve been doing that for a while. So — 

Tim Ferriss: When you say you guys have positions in Bitcoin, that means you’ve invested in startups that focus on Bitcoin or — 

Kevin Rose: No, that means we actually own Bitcoin.

Tim Ferriss: How does that work? As a venture capital fund, you’re operating a private endowment?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, every fund is a little bit different. In our specific case, we have allocated as part of our formation documents for the fund, a certain percentage of the fund can be in cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency-related companies. So we can say — I’m just throwing out a random number here. I’d have to go look at the docs see what the actual number is. But let’s just say 10, 15 percent of the overall fund size. We have $600 million plus fund that you can only invest that much from this specific fund into cryptocurrency.

And so if we’re going to go into a purchase, typically, dollar-cost average your way in over a couple months and buy in a place that has really strong security. we don’t hold this ourselves. It’s not at our office. You’re using like — there’s big financial houses like Fidelity and Coinbase Custody and others that now provide these types of services.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t just have a bunch of hardware wallets sitting in your jacket pocket?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s right here. Just at my house. No I don’t. Actually, I don’t mess with that stuff anymore. I used to have wallets and I actually had a laptop that I bought specifically for cryptocurrency. And I wanted to keep it in cold storage. Meaning that back in the day, when I was doing the craziest coins that you’ve never heard of on these weird exchanges, I went out, I bought a laptop. It was an Apple, hooked it up to the internet. Did all the software updates. Just put the wallets on there, transferred the funds, and then immediately powered it down so that it wouldn’t be online anywhere, hackable, and then put it in a safe. And that was the way I kept my cryptocurrency. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.

But yeah, so there’s been enough time has gone on. This current run-up though is just nuts. I mean, the thing you have to do with all these things is just don’t look at the last three months, because it looks like a decent graph. And you’re like, “Oh, that looks reasonable. Maybe I should buy some.” Zoom out to the five — 

Tim Ferriss: Look at the last year.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Zoom out the five-year view, the 10-year view. That’s when you see really what’s happening here. And it’s not even like a hockey stick. It’s even more — it’s insane how the run-up has been. And so I get nervous when you see — it’s always a good tell around — well, in this case, it was like the virtual Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner when Uncle Harry is asking you if they should be buying Bitcoin. That’s when my Spidey sense tingles a little bit and be like, “Huh, everybody wants this now.”

And it’s just — if I were going to enter the market now, I would do it in a way that is you pick the dollar amount. Let’s say it’s a $1,000. And this is not investment advice; I’m just telling you what I would do. Pick a $1,000 and I’d say, “Okay, I want to own Bitcoin. I believe in the future of Bitcoin. I think this isn’t going away,” which all those things are true. And that there are things that I believe it’s a proven technology now. Let’s take that $1,000 and invest it over six months.

And so just divide it up by six and do those — I’ll say the first of every month and just go in, doesn’t matter what the price is, you don’t care. You just buy that set amount. And that way, at least you’re averaging your way in over six months.

Tim Ferriss: How do you personally think about crypto for yourself as part of your portfolio or percentage of your total? I mean, you’re kind of famous for telling — not famous. Well, you’re famous to me for telling me when I should buy stuff and then not telling me when you’ve sold stuff, which I appreciate. So — 

Kevin Rose: I love that call, by the way. You’re like, “Are you still holding this?” I’m like, “No, I sold it for like at 10X, like six months ago.” And you’re like, “I’m down.” Or something bad will happen and you’ll have been screwed by the fact that we didn’t talk.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. That happens with some fair frequency. But what is your current thinking in terms of crypto?

Kevin Rose: Well, honestly, I — 

Tim Ferriss: Are you steering clear? Do you still have a certain position? Is it an investment for you? Is it an insurance policy for you? Some people have drawn that distinction, just sort of philosophically as looking at cryptocurrency as an insurance policy or hedge.

Kevin Rose: I think that over time, as — well, a few things. One, let’s just talk about the ecosystem in general. I think that 99 percent, still, today, of the coins that you see on the market out there, are just garbage. I think a lot of them — and it’s hard for them really to go away. Just the volume in trades that happen just decrease over time. But they still have these somewhat impressive-looking market caps, just sitting out there very stagnant, developers kind of drop off. It’s just kind of they’re left for dead but they’re still around.

So there’s a lot of that. A lot of interesting innovation happening in the kind of decentralized finance space. So they call it DeFi. It’s mostly happening on Ethereum. So there’s a handful of projects where I say, “That’s really interesting.” It’s almost like an angel investment. Now I want to hold some of that but with the understanding that this could go to 10 percent of the value it is today. And so extremely high-risk. But still has the ability to have a 50X upside, right? Or at least a 20 or 30X upside.

If you just look at the market cap of a Bitcoin today, there’s not another 20 or 30X anytime soon coming to Bitcoin. It’s just too big. Right? The market cap is just too large.

Tim Ferriss: Why do you — now how do you come to that conclusion?

Kevin Rose: Well, I mean, first of all, there’s a few ways you can do it. I think that you just have to look at the market cap in general, which I don’t have in front of me right now. But I can type it in. The other thing is just look at the proxies for this. So what is the market cap of gold, of all gold out there? And it’s in the trillions. Let me see here, if — I did this the other day. So Bitcoin, right now, the market cap is 82.49 billion.

So where would we be at if that’s at a 10X from now? I mean, that’s just insanity. I can’t imagine that happening anytime soon. It would just be — 

Tim Ferriss: Now that’s insane because of the comparables that you might put next to it, like gold?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, Apple is worth two trillion, right? And so you just kind of have to — and I know it’s not the same in that we’re not talking about corporations here with cash flows and PEs and things that we would typically use to value a company. That is not this. The closest proxy that I think most people draw the comparison to is to just gold. How much gold has been mined? How much do we believe is there in the earth? What are people holding for an investment? How much of it is actually being worn? There’s a lot of other ways.

So there is a lot of potential upside in Bitcoin. But I don’t think — for me, it’s not that I wouldn’t hold it. I would definitely hold it. I think it’s going to be a rocky, bumpy ride, given the run-up that it’s had recently. It’s been forever. This has always been the case of Bitcoin. It’s been very bumpy. But the new low is higher than the last low. And it just continues to kind of — it wouldn’t surprise me to see this drop down to 25 or 30 again. But I don’t think it’s going to get back to 10. And there’s just too many institutional buyers coming in.

So I like it because there are a lot of governments, the US included, are probably one of the biggest offenders, just printing money right now. It’s really hard to understand what the value of a dollar is or what it will be in the future. This is a fixed number of coins forever that will never change. It’s universally accepted even more so every month, all over the world. So it’s kind of a global reserve currency that I’m comfortable with. So I do like it for that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if you — 

Kevin Rose: But I think there’s a lot of new interesting projects that are probably, have more upside.

Tim Ferriss: That also require more due diligence and expertise, right?

Kevin Rose: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: Or attention to detail. So if we talk about Bitcoin, just to continue on this thread. It’s currently at, let’s just call it $40,000 a Bitcoin. And you were saying, well, it’s hard to see a 20X upside. If we look at proxies or comparisons to gold, or certainly if we draw comparisons to Apple, all that’s a little bit categorically, I guess, a different comparison.

But if we’re looking at certain trends or growth trends that have been accelerated thanks to or due to COVID. If we look at, say, Amazon or Shopify or Peloton, companies that we’re both quite familiar with and or investors in. A lot has been accelerated, and the growth trajectory of the graph has changed dramatically for a lot of companies, SaaS companies, adoption of remote work, et cetera. Could someone make an argument that that is why in part, at least, we are seeing this adoption of Bitcoin and that it is on some level reasonable? Or I guess in your mind, when you’re thinking of how much this price can be explained via factors, external happenings, storming the capital, et cetera, certainly NMT and all of this kind of stuff versus just pure mania. Because the Bitcoin bulls will sort of lay out, often regurgitated, but sometimes cogent arguments for why this is explainable and reasonable.

And then the bears will say, “Here’s the tulip bulb craze of such and such a year. And this is exactly what’s happening. It’s just pure mania. There’s nothing to it besides greed and human psychology run amok.” Where do you fall in thinking about explaining the price? Because if you look at institutional adoption, we’re still super early, super early in institutional adoption. And by institutional, I mean, there are wide ranges of institutions. And certainly I think at the more conservative end. If we’re talking about endowments and pension funds and so on, it’s super early. Not to mention sovereign wealth funds and so on. The really gigantic kind of nation, state players. So yeah. What do you think?

I mean, from an institutional adoption perspective, it’s super, super early. That does not mean though that the tiny amount of adoption up to this point plus Square, plus PayPal, have organically produced $40,000 per Bitcoin prices, right? That’s a lot of word salad I just threw at your face via Zoom. So maybe you can speak to that.

Kevin Rose: Well, I think that it is really hard. If you look at the people that are actually looking at the blockchain and watching where assets are moving, some promising and also some really scary things start to emerge. And so I think the promising side is just the average consumer now has access to purchase this with just a couple of clicks in Apple Pay and everything else. The ease of purchase has gone — as we mentioned earlier, it’s simple now.

So that has unlocked certainly a lot of demand, especially around the hype cycle. We know about the institutional side. I agree with you that it’s very early days there. And there’s been several proposals and there are new ones out there for a Bitcoin ETF. I think that happens, and we start seeing these appear in people’s 401k accounts and things just go bonkers. The scary side of things is some of the price manipulation that’s going on.

And so there are ways to manipulate the price. And this is — well, I’ll bring it up with the caveat that it’s being talked about on the internet, so I’m bringing it up here. It is not my view that this is happening, but it is being talked on the internet, so it’s worth mentioning. So I say that from a news perspective, not from an accusatory perspective. And that is that there is — 

Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot of preamble from Kevin Rose.

Kevin Rose: Well, I’m trying to say that because I don’t want them to come after me and just sue the shit out of me basically. So there’s a stable coin out there. When I mean stable coin, for those people that don’t know, there are a bunch of coins out there that you can hold as cryptocurrency that are pegged to an asset like a fiat asset that we know. It’s like, say, the US dollar. So if you hold a USDC, is what it’s called, the coin. And you hold one of those coins, it is worth $1. And that never changes, just pegged at that price.

And so there are a bunch of these. And one of the larger ones is called Tether. And so Tether is — we don’t have — well, here’s the thing. There’s been some analysis of some of these transactions. And Tether, if you can imagine if you control — and it is centralized. If you control — the way that Tether is supposed to work is this. If you send Tether a $1,000, they issue you a $1,000 worth of Tether coins. That makes sense. If you go to redeem them, they give you back $1,000. And so it kind of grew. Well, I shouldn’t say, kind of grew. It’s massive now and — 

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you a novice question. What is the use case for that? Why would someone do that? They want a mobile, anonymized — 

Kevin Rose: They want stability.

Tim Ferriss: They want stability?

Kevin Rose: Yes. So imagine you’re sending your aunt in Costa Rica $100, and you want to make sure $100 gets there. Not $92 because Bitcoin dropped or maybe she’d like it if it went up. But it’s — you need the stability. And it can also be used for a whole slew of other things. They do lending with it, we earn interest on it. That’s what a lot of the decentralized finance comes from.

Anyway. So a Tether coin, for example, is one of the first ones. One of the first stable coins. And it has a $23.93 billion market cap. Now, there are currently some ongoing investigations into what’s going on behind the scenes at Tether, because there are some allegations that they’re just issuing new Tether and buying Bitcoin without there being the reserve USD to actually back it up. So there’s been a handful of articles. You can search Tether, whatever you want to call it, scandal or whatever you — maybe in Google news.

And you’ll see that people are looking at this and saying, “Huh,” there — and there’s several organizations like government organizations that are looking at this. And they’re saying, “Okay, we need to peer inside here and make sure everything is kosher. Because if it’s not, they could be just propping up the Bitcoin market and buying Bitcoin with fake minted Tether as stablecoins. And if that’s the case and that comes out, that’s going to be a shit-show for a few days. It’s the best way I can describe it.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think — yeah, that’s probably a [crosstalk] description.

Kevin Rose: [inaudible]

Tim Ferriss: The shit-show. Do you think, not knowing anything about it, that they have sufficient volume to prop up, so to speak, the Bitcoin price or to inflate it?

Kevin Rose: Well, I mean, just to give you a sense, in the last 24 hours, they’ve done 114.31 billion in volume. So it’s heavily used on some exchanges. Some exchanges won’t touch it. There’s some changes that you won’t even — you can’t even purchase Tether if you wanted to. So it is the one piece that I look at and I just say, “Ah, gosh. I don’t like where this is trending and some of the people that are looking into this, this could really put a big black eye on the market.” It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is a fraud. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a legitimate technology that works well. It’s well secured. It’s been hammered on there’s — it doesn’t mean — this doesn’t mean Bitcoin goes away. But it does mean that — 

Tim Ferriss: It could spook the hell out of lots of people.

Kevin Rose: It spooks the hell out of a lot of people, and it also shuts down ETF talks and all those other things. Because a lot of the reasons why these ETFs for Bitcoin aren’t being approved is because of these claims of this type of market manipulation. So but if you really ask around, “What do you — how do you think of this when it comes to portfolio construction?” And again, I’m a venture capitalist, not a registered investment advisor. This is not financial advice. But for me personally, I think — 

Tim Ferriss: Informational purposes only. This is informational and entertainment purposes only.

Kevin Rose: If Tim says it, it’s [chimpanzee sound]. 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you bastard. That’s not true.

Kevin Rose: You’re going to cut that out.

Tim Ferriss: You rat bastard.

Kevin Rose: So basically I would say for me personally, I think, okay, maybe up to five percent of my overall portfolio and consider it super high-risk. But I like your strategy, Tim. It’s kind of one you have to take with cryptocurrency. If this gets cut in half or cut in three quarters, you just have to say, “Okay, bad day, bad week, bad month.” And just ride it out for the next 10 years because in 10 years it will bounce back and the returns are going to look better than ever. So that’s kind of how you have to play it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And it’s a test of conviction and process also, right? In the sense that I’ve been talking to friends and you sort of, the kind of Uncle Harry equivalents are like, “I want to put money into Bitcoin and Ethereum.” And I’m like, “Can you tell me what Bitcoin is?” And they can’t even hazard a guess. It’s just something that’s going up in value very quickly. And the sort of observation I’ve made, because usually — is your uncle actually Harry? I don’t want to throw this guy under the bus.

Kevin Rose: No. No.

Tim Ferriss: That’s made up. Okay, good.

Kevin Rose: That’s made up.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So okay. So Uncle Harry usually will have a story that is something like this. “My friend Bob has invested in crypto. And over the last seven months, he’s made…” let’s just make up a number, “$500,000.” And my question is always, “Did he sell all of his Bitcoin and pull out $500,000?” And the answer is, “No.” And my follow-up to that is, “Well, it all looks good on paper, but if it’s not enough to just buy something that is going up in value, unless you believe it’s going to go up in value indefinitely, you also have to have a plan for if, and when you are going to sell that asset and redeem.”

Now some pure believer or true believers would say, “You never sell Bitcoin.” And that’s one option. But unless you have deliberately, conscientiously decided that, and you have that as a bulletproof, emotion-proof strategy, you sure as hell better have a plan for if and when you are going to redeem to some type of fiat. And if you don’t have a defined time horizon, the likelihood of you losing money because you sell in a panic when it plummets is pretty goddamn high.

Kevin Rose: That’s why I like the lower percentage points of your overall portfolio. Because it has to be money that doesn’t matter. So you can hold it for the long term if you want to hold it for the next 20 years. But I guess what you’re saying is it does get to meaningful money at some point, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Because naturally, if it does 5X from here, or 10X from here, then it’s going to be no longer five percent of your portfolio, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: So in that case, I would force myself to every year or every other year just rebalance.

Tim Ferriss: Do you actually do that, though?

Kevin Rose: 100 percent.

Tim Ferriss: Because there are — 

Kevin Rose: 100 percent.

Tim Ferriss: You do?

Kevin Rose: I did it with Peloton.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. So now you would do regardless of the duration of holding that investment? Or do you wait for long-term cap gains? Is there — 

Kevin Rose: I would wait for long-term cap gains unless it is something just absolute bonkers. So if it’s absolute bonkers and you’re just — I mean, look at Tesla right now. Just look at that chart. Click on the five-year in your Apple Stocks app. It’s just like — you’re like, “How is it not bending over?” It feels like it should fall backwards, it’s getting so high. It’s ridiculous. And so if I’m holding short-term cap gains there — 

Tim Ferriss: I just want to point out that you are also a lover of Tesla products, right?

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So you’re not saying this is as a Tesla hater. You love their stock.

Kevin Rose: Listen, I have two Teslas. They’re fantastic vehicles. They’re my favorite. I have a truck on order. I can’t wait to get that thing.

Tim Ferriss: And yet, when it’s a straight line…

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So it’s just one of those things where if it is getting an outsized percentage of your portfolio, then it’s absolutely smart to — and I kind of have this thing where — I mean, we talked about — I think you and I traded some texts on this. But we talk about just your overall mixture of assets and everything that you have kind of put together. Like what does your allocations for multiple things look like? And most of my stuff is just fully diversified, set it and forget it forever. Like Wealthfront style, just put it in there and have it be fully diversified and safe.

And then I have a category that is, let’s just call it 25 percent of my overall assets that I’ll say, “These are 5X capable stocks or greater. And those, I know they’re super risky. Well, somewhat risky. And they have real cash flow and all that. But I’m going to invest in those.” And I’ll put — Peloton is in that kind of camp. Some of the riskier stuff like the Neos, the Chinese Tesla, a few other things that I’ve bought over the last couple of years. So but then I always go in and pruning and readjusting and saying, “Oh, actually my 5X stocks are now 40 percent of my portfolio. Let’s trim that back to 25.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I appreciated your strong buy recommendation on PornHub. That was genius. Thank you for that.

Kevin Rose: Well, you’re co-owner now, which is odd, but it’s your thing. The AcroYoga.

Tim Ferriss: I’m on the team. I’m on the team tab.

Kevin Rose: You have a masthead.

Tim Ferriss: Free premium for the next two months. Use code TimTimKevKev. That’s a — 

Kevin Rose: I really hope they make that code. That would be fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: That is a joke, people. Joke, joke. Joke, joke, Kev, Kev.

Now, I had a follow-up to that. The follow-up was really more a commentary, because I think some people will be very interested in this conversation, and others will find it inside baseball or just they’ll think that it’s kind of rarefied error investment talk.

I would, on one level, agree with that, and on one level, disagree with it, because we’re sitting here at the beginning of 2021. 2020 has been such a fascinating and punishing laboratory for looking at the consequences of good and bad decisions. And there are many places where it’s difficult in many ways to quantify those upsides and downsides and risks. Certainly with COVID with certain information available, other information unavailable or pending, it’s been challenging. But one of the playing fields in which you can look at decision-making as sort of a microcosm of the macro, right? You get to see how decision-making, that transcends investing, shows itself with stocks, crypto, whatever it might be, right?

In other words, if you are able to observe and hone your decision-making with even very small investments, I believe that if you’re self-aware, that can transfer into better decision-making in other areas, right? Because we’re all investors of time, energy, capital. And you can choose to become better at those things, or you can remain blissfully unaware. But one way or another, you are making decisions about investment every day.

That’s another reason why I’ve paid attention to this a lot in the last year. I mean, I think there’ve been some incredible opportunities also in the last 12 months. But more than that, it’s just a lens through which you can look at how rational you are, how subject to emotional swings and corresponding bad decisions you are. And it tells you a lot about how you might make decisions or more concretely, make rules for yourself in 2021. So you — 

Kevin Rose: Can you give me an example of that? I’m really curious, outside of finance, how have you applied this to other areas of your life?

Tim Ferriss: Well, so for instance, in 2020, one of the biggest lessons or takeaways that I had for myself in investing, then I’ll talk about how I would apply that, is that — this is going to sound so rudimentary, but I’ve been very lucky and also I think very good at picking things to invest in over time, right? If you just look at the last 10 years, 12 years, net net, things have worked out pretty well. And there are a lot of circumstances. There are certain trends that I accidentally took advantage of. Some that I deliberately took advantage of. But blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m pretty good at placing bets.

I am very weak, I would say, on exit strategy and knowing when to get out of positions. This past year, I realized that three years, looking at a three-year time horizon for anything publicly traded, seems to be incredibly comfortable for me in the sense that I can’t predict what things are going to do, what companies are going to do what in the next three months, six months. I have no fucking idea. No idea. I mean, there are just so many curve balls that can be served to any company.

Five years? I mean, geez, five years. Now we’re talking about Google starting to usurp Yahoo, right? I mean, that’s a long enough period of time, especially with exponentially developing technologies, that five years is very hard to call.

But like three years, if I’m looking at certain types of companies that I feel like I understand pretty well. Amazon, Shopify would be two examples. I think Spotify also. I’m an investor in all of those. And again, this is not investment advice. I don’t know how many times we have to say this to cover our asses. But your mileage may vary. And I only invest in things that I feel like I really, really understand deeply. And — 

Kevin Rose: I’m the same way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so three years, I’m looking at certain trends. I have an audience, fortunately, and a lot of friends who are kind of the tip of the spear with early adoption. Not all of those things work out. But when you see then it begin to kind of hop the fence from, say, my friends or my audience to people one degree removed, I’m like, “Okay, that, I think, is worth paying a lot of attention to.” So that has been a new rule that I have established for myself specifically for publicly traded equities.

The way that that’s applied to my life more broadly, and don’t worry folks, we’re going to get to other points besides crypto and investing, is looking at doing a full review of 2020, and then looking forward to 2021. Thinking out three years, as opposed to just 2021, and thinking about what types of sort of regularly occurring practices I want to have, and I can give some examples when we get into it, over a three-year period is really calming for me. Yeah — 

Kevin Rose: I think — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 10 years is kind of like, “I don’t know, man.” I mean, there’s just so much that could change. I mean, who knows if Texas is going to secede along with — maybe Texas and Montreal will become sister cities or whatever, sister provinces, and they’ll secede from the nation. I’m being a bit ridiculous with that. But like 10 years is a long, long time and a lot can happen.

Three years, I just find that to be a very calm place for me when it comes to planning now, but also thinking about personal development and building a family and so on and so forth. So it’s kind of like if you were to paddle out in the ocean at a surf break, right? When you first paddle out, let’s just say it’s a beach break for simplicity, you’re going to have to get through these first sets of waves, and then you’re going to have some calm, and then you’re going to get to the outer breakers and you’re going to be in the impact zone again. It’s going to be exciting, but it also can be really stressful. And I find like three years for me is just kind of comfortably in between those two.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I like what you said about also doing these kind of thematic investing where you say, “Okay, I don’t know…” you just named off the exact same companies that I pay attention to around e-commerce, because obviously, we know e-commerce is — well, it’s more so online these days than ever, but it’s still a fraction of in-person commerce, right? So if we believe that trend is going to continue, which it will, who are the players in that space?

So rather than say, “Well, actually, I think it’s going to be Amazon and not Shopify or Square,” it’s like I just would rather own the entire bucket, right? So I go in, get Amazon, Shopify, Square, PayPal, and I think that pretty much covers the future of payments when I think about mobile payments and just happening on your phone. And eventually when Coinbase goes public, I’ll probably pick some of that up as well. But just having that and sitting on those, and then just watching and kind of as leaders start to emerge, kind of dollar cost average and a little bit more to get a little bit more upside in the clear winners, if there are going to be any. That’s kind of what I’ve done historically that’s proved to be pretty successful.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and we’re talking about kind of pickaxes and shovels, right? I mean, in the sense that a lot of these companies, not all of them, but a lot of these companies offer services that other companies capitalize on, or other creators.

My choices also were based on different scenarios related to COVID. So it was like, “Okay, let’s say COVID, wave a magic wand, it gets solved tomorrow.” But we were decimated, behaviors changed, growth trajectories changed for let’s just call it severely for like six to 12 months. Okay, what does that look like for an Amazon? What does that look like for a Shopify? Okay.

And then let’s say COVID continues. Let’s say there’s a new strain and A, B, and C happens. And rather than best case, it’s certainly maybe not worst case, but a terrible case. What does that look like for these various companies? Okay. And just came to the conclusion personally that in most scenarios you could play out as an exercise, these companies still seem to do well. And in the case of, say — 

Kevin Rose: Right. But you also have to play out the other side too, right? What happens once the vaccine happens and COVID subsides? This is why I’m not holding Zoom right now. Zoom may be a great — it’s a great company, great product. We’re using it right now. But it’s like I just don’t see — when people sort of return to work, what gets hit the hardest? So that’s part of the reason why — I mean, I missed out on a ton of upside with the climb of and rise of Zoom, but it doesn’t pass that post-vaccine test.

I want to have to believe in my heart of hearts that I will close my eyes and hold this thing for five years before doing an investment. Otherwise it’s just gambling at that point.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, well, I mean, it depends on how you define your time horizon and if you have the skills and the emotional control or stoicism to be able to stick to your plan, right? So for me, one of the reasons I came to three years is, again, five years, I just don’t have confidence that I can look into the crystal ball and understand where technology is going to be in five years. There are companies I expect will still be around, certainly.

But let’s just take in the case of Spotify, for instance. I looked at Spotify really closely, and I’m on Spotify. I understand the technology. I use the product. I saw them investing incredibly heavily in non-music audio content. And certainly at the top of that list in terms of their capital expenditures would be podcasts. And you have Rogan, you’ve got all these different folks.

For Spotify, compared to, say, Amazon, there are people who would argue that podcasts are an existential priority, right? They have to really heavily invest and be the A player, high bidder for a lot of this core talent and these teams who can create content, because their economic model is, in some respect, dependent on the improve margins through non-music audio, right?

Amazon sells everything, right? Amazon sells a million things. And Amazon Music and the team who’s on podcasts with Amazon is a fantastic team. But within Amazon itself, it’s hard for me to imagine that that has the same level of urgency and priority that it would have for Spotify, just given the range of options. So for me — 

Kevin Rose: Yeah, but what about Apple?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Apple is huge. But Apple also is — I think Apple is amazing. They have, by far, the most market share right now. They have, I would expect, certain constraints, right? I don’t think they’re going to pursue anything incorporating advertising models, at least not in the short term, right? They just haven’t had a lot of luck with that. They don’t seem inclined to pursue it.

Also, again, just because the — what is the lion’s share of Apple revenue? I have to imagine it’s hardware and AppleCare and so on. I mean, the sort of incremental revenue add is pretty nominal when it is compared to, say, a Spotify, who absolutely has to make this work.

So for me, I’m like, “All right, Apple, Amazon are going to be really deliberate. They’re not going to rush. They have endless powder in the keg,” right? Once they find things that work, they can make them ubiquitous.

I think that’s going to take time. Is it going to happen in one year? Maybe, but I think pretty unlikely. Which is why I think Spotify will continue, I mean, if I had to guess, to invest very heavily in trying to solidify their position as the go-to platform for sort of talent and content creation within the kind of predefined parameters of non-music audio.

This is not the only reason, but for that reason — also looking at potential upside, right? I mean, in the sense that if you want Amazon to double, what needs to happen for that to happen? Right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then if you look at Spotify, for Spotify to double, what might need to happen in order for that to be the reward that the market and retail investors sort of bestow upon it? The answer is — I mean, I feel like a lot less needs to happen for Spotify, right? I’m not saying Spotify would ever do this, but if Spotify were just to redomicile and avoid all of these various problems that they have with their current situation, not that they would do that, but certainly there are steps they could take, if they needed to, that would dramatically change their financials. And again, what the hell do I know? Right? I’m not an analyst, but — 

Kevin Rose: Yeah, but this is your world though. I mean, podcasting is — that’s your DNA. So I feel like you would know a lot when it comes to that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and I also see, and you and I have texted about this, where people you wouldn’t have expected to use Spotify are now using Spotify.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right? And it’s made that hop over the fence in the United States. In Europe, the behaviors are very different. In Spanish speaking countries and regions, Spotify is extremely dominant, it would appear, based on polling my own audience. And there’s just — 

Kevin Rose: Yeah, the — 

Tim Ferriss: — a lot of room. There’s a lot of room to grow, I think.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I agree with that. I think Spotify is interesting from that standpoint. It’s a really crappy, razor-thin margin business on the music side. Any time they can get you anywhere away from one of the major labels, they’re making money, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Because you’re paying that $15 a month or whatever it is, $12 a month. I just found out they have a — I downgraded from a family plan to the duo plan, which is just for two people. So my wife and I just use the duo plan and save myself three bucks a month.

Tim Ferriss: Well done.

Kevin Rose: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Well done, Kevin.

Kevin Rose: Thank you. Anyway, yeah, so it’s a great product too. I love the technology.

Tim Ferriss: It is. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: I think that they have invested heavily on the kind of AI and machine learning side of things to get recommendations better than anyone has, which is so key for music discovery. So yeah, I’m a fan on that front as well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and — 

Kevin Rose: I was going to say — 

Tim Ferriss: — one more thing. One — 

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I was going to say one more thing on the finance side as well.

Tim Ferriss: Fire, fire, fire.

Kevin Rose: We should close off finance and move on to that, because I know we had — 

Tim Ferriss: Yes, I agree.

Kevin Rose: — a few more topics to hit. But I spent a crap ton of time researching and doing my due diligence on the various financial applications for tracking finances. So I just wanted to share this with people, because I let my work benefit you in some way.

I feel that what I’ve done is I — all of us or most of us, we dabble in a bunch of things, whether it be cryptocurrency or a little bit of E*TRADE or whatever your broker is, or Wealthfront, or have a little bit of stuff here. Maybe you have a home or not, or a car payment or not. And I want a universal dashboard to bring all that stuff together. It’s like one place where you can see holistically what’s going on with all of your finances everywhere, credit cards, all that stuff. And I’ve tried all of the stuff out there.

Real quick, Quicken sucks. It’s horrible. It doesn’t work with half the crap out there. It won’t tie to Wealthfront. It won’t tie to a bunch of stuff. It’s just horrible. So avoid that at all costs. Even though that’s the old school one that sounds like, “Maybe Quicken’s better now.” It’s not better. It sucks.

Now, I have this theory that a bunch of the Quicken engineers got together and were like, “Yeah, this place kind of sucks, but let’s go create a new product.” So Quicken came out with a new product that is actually quite good. It’s called Simplifi. It’s simplifimoney.com. S-I-M-P-L-I-F-I. You can just Google it. Don’t try and spell that. Anyway, Simplifi, it’s by the makers of Quicken. It’s actually a fantastic product, and it’s somehow competing against Quicken, their own product. Which is very weird.

I think what happened is, as with any old piece of software, you’ve got an old school audience that’s been baked in for decades, that if you change any user interface element, they go apeshit and they freak out on you, right? That’s the case with why all these software packages like Word and Excel and all these others, they just turn into bloatware. You look at them and you’re like, “Why so many icons?” It’s because people will complain if you remove anything. It’s always hard to take features out. So this is just a really streamlined, beautiful — it’s like three bucks a month. It’s fantastic.

Now, if you don’t like this — one thing I do like about this, I’ll just tell you one of the features I thought was really cool and I used this over the holidays. You know how you go and you return something? Like you got a sweater, you return it. But you never know if it really hits your account again. You don’t pay attention. There’s a way to say, “I returned this, and notify me when I get the credit back or not, if the credit doesn’t come back.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Kevin Rose: Just some really cool little features like that. Anyway, I was pretty impressed with it. It does link with a lot of the stuff. It’s very confusing why it links with a lot of the places that Quicken doesn’t, even though they’re the same company. But anyway, that’s that.

I think Personal Capital though is the best one that’s out there. Have you used Personal Capital before?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: I don’t use them on the investing side. I don’t put my money with them, because they also have an investing thing. I use Wealthfront for that. But Personal Capital, in terms of the interface, the holistic interface to bring together all the accounts, it’s completely free. You don’t have to spend any money on it. And it kind of brings everything into one dashboard for you. So anyway, and I’ve looked at like 10 others that I won’t even bore you with, but those are my picks for the show.

Tim Ferriss: Sweet. Now, you are — how would I put it? You have a financial dashboard fetish. Some people — 

Kevin Rose: I do.

Tim Ferriss: — like tentacle porn. Some people — 

Kevin Rose: Some people like shoes.

Tim Ferriss: — like Japanese coffee, which you also like. But you have a financial dashboard fetish. So what I’m curious about is does it just tickle your balls and you get a little feeling in your — butterfly in your anus. Makes — 

Kevin Rose: I wish we were having wine right now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it makes you really happy to look at this? Is it just like a Zen garden for you? Or do you actually learn anything? Does it inform your decisions? Has it changed how you behave in any way?

Kevin Rose: It has, because what it does is it does a pretty good job at kind of categorizing everything that’s going on in my life. So it has a beautiful cash flow feature where I can see, “I’ve spent this much, this was my budget, and this is how much income I have coming in.” So I like to kind of track that and watch the trends over time.

And overall net worth is cool, because it lets you tie in your house in there, lets you put your cars in there. Anything else that you may have, any jewelry, anything. And you can kind of watch as certain things appreciate or they don’t and they go down. I like the idea of being able to pull all this stuff together into like one interface.

Because if you think about, “Okay, now I’ve got to go log into Coinbase. Now I’ve got to go log into Wealthfront. And now I’ve got to go log into my bank to see my checking account. And I have a credit card over at Chase, and I have an Apple Pay card.” And there’s a bunch of stuff to check. That means in terms of transactions as well. I mean, I’ve caught some fraud on these and it alerted me to things where I was like, “I didn’t buy that,” and I went and canceled the card.

So just having a way that I can go and every couple days just see that and just do a quick gut check like, “Is everything sane here?” It’s nice. And I don’t have to log into multiple places, and it’s free. So I don’t know, it’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: So you avoid logging into multiple places by giving all of your login information to one entity, or is there some type of auth that allows you to circumvent that, also producing centralization? Which would make me nervous.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so Plaid, it powers all of this on the backend. Plaid is a company you may or may not have heard of. It was one that we invested in when I was at Google Ventures.

They work with all the financial institutions to connect and provide data to apps like Personal Capital. So you’re actually not sharing your login credentials with Personal Capital, you’re sharing them with Plaid. Plaid secures them. They issue a token to Personal Capital. So Personal Capital never actually has your credentials. And then they can view your data through that one secured vault. So — 

Tim Ferriss: Cool.

Kevin Rose: — it is nice like that. Yeah, I was worried about that as well.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll add one more thing on the finance front, which is I am fucking tired of thinking about anything related to finance or investing or — 

Kevin Rose: That’s been you forever, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know, I know.

Kevin Rose: That’s been you for five years.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. But especially in the last, I would say, six to 12 months. One of my goals is to do as much possible in terms of batching activities or setting rules for myself, strict rules like you can’t eat bagels. I don’t eat bagels anyway, although they’re delicious. But making very binary rules for myself, because I think it is very easy. And if we look at just human behavior, I think it’s very natural but often harmful to one’s health.

If you have something that is moving up or down, or up and down, if you have something easily quantifiable that to your mind seems like points on the scoreboard, whether positive or negative, it’s really easy to spend a lot of time being distracted by these things and looking at these things. I’m thinking a lot more about energy management over the next year than time management. I feel like time management should be a downstream decision based on your energy management priorities and roles. That is how I’m approaching it. So I am hoping to do effectively zero investing unless I have to make defensive moves or disaster befalls me, which I hope will not be the case.

So that is all to say I kind of crammed a lot of decisions. Because as you know, Kevin, I was mostly sitting on the sidelines since, I don’t know, 2015, with the exception of that crypto position. And I don’t enjoy it in the same way that some of my friends do and maybe you do, just the tracking of all of it. I feel like it’s kind of a leaching of energy for me, even though it is very addictive. So I’m looking forward to doing things that have nothing to do with investing.

We were, in prep for this conversation, talking about — or I guess in the Google spreadsheet, talking about this year, meaning 2021, new year’s resolutions last year. And I do every year, for the last handful of years, a past year review where I go through my calendar week by week from the previous year and look at the things that gave me the most energy, took the most energy. Some of them are worth it. Most of them are not. And trying to identify the kind of peak emotional experiences, positive and negative, and who the people and activities are on both of those lists. I’m sorry to say, Kevin, you ended up on my negative. No, I’m kidding. That’s how I then go through and look at scheduling things and spending time or not spending time with activities and people for the next year.

The most consistent energy giver was time in nature and activities in nature. Just part of the reason I was so thrilled, and we can kind of go in any direction, but to get as a gift, this book, which is Of Wolves and Men by Barry Holstun Lopez. It is probably the best nonfiction book I’ve read in the last five years. It is so — 

Kevin Rose: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: — unbelievably good. I have highlights on almost certainly in every chapter. I had to modify the way I highlighted because I highlighted so much. His writing is as crisp and clear as Michael Lewis, the structure of his writing, and is right up there with John McPhee. And the beauty of his prose and just the wordsmithing and use of metaphor is right up there, I would say, with Mary Oliver. I was blown away. I kept stopping my friends and wanting to read them paragraphs and chapters, and they got pretty annoyed after a while. But it is a spectacular nonfiction book, and — 

Kevin Rose: Very cool.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s — 

Kevin Rose: It’s funny, Tim. I don’t know if you remember telling me this, but you told me, I don’t know, maybe was it six months ago, you were like, “I’m not reading any new books.” What was it? You were saying something like that. What was the deal with that?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, for 2020, I read no books that were published in 2020. So I was reading books, but I put up a blog post as a policy. And I think the title of the blog post was Making the Single Decision that Removes a Thousand Decisions. That relates to the burden of getting hit up by hundreds of people a year who want me to read their books that are coming out a week later or two months later. It’s not that they’re bad people, but they very often have a book coming out. They want to be on the podcast. And I end up, oftentimes, or I have ended up, with just stacks of hundreds of books.

The fact of the matter is we don’t have that much time on the planet, unless we figure out how to recycle 20 year old blood like vampires like some people do, who shall not be named, or whatever, using fancy drugs, rapamycin, metformin, et cetera. Maybe you eke out a few more years. Okay, that’s possible. But if I look at the average age of death of males in my family, going back many generations, as far as I could easily do the math, it’s about 85. It doesn’t really matter what you do. As long as you don’t get hit by a bus or fall off a cliff, you’re probably going to die around 85.

So I’m 43. That means I’ve crossed the 50 percent mark. I think it’s helpful to just assume that. And you can sit down and do the math. How many really good books do you read per year? People do the math and maybe they end up at five, maybe they end up at 20. It’s hard to read 20 amazing books unless you’re really deliberate about it. You probably read a fair amount of garbage. So you figure out like, “Okay, this book took me a long time to find, and it was gifted to me. Even though it had been recommended many times, I still didn’t read it.”

Kevin Rose: You said a long time to find, meaning you just hadn’t heard of it or it’s out of print?

Tim Ferriss: No. No, no, it’s not out of print. It’s a long time to find — it took a long time for it to happen, I guess is what I’m saying. It had been recommended many times, but we get bombarded with reading assignments all day long, right? Maybe it’s just something on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Although I deleted all of those from my phone.

Kevin Rose: Good. Same.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, all of those have been deleted from my phone for about six months now, which is great.

Kevin Rose: Wait, I saw you posted on Instagram the other day. I didn’t — 

Tim Ferriss: Okay, there’s a workaround.

Kevin Rose: — see your post. Darya told me you did, because I don’t go on Instagram.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. How’d you know?

Kevin Rose: No, no, she — 

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s okay.

Kevin Rose: — told me because you posted the chocolate bar that we got you.

Tim Ferriss: I did, yeah. I have a workaround. The way that I post to Instagram without using Instagram is I use — 

Kevin Rose: Your assistant does it.

Tim Ferriss: No, I use — well, I mean, that sometimes happens too. But I use an app called Onlypult. Onlypult, like catapult but Onlypult, P-U-L-T, allows me to post to Instagram without having the application on my phone. So I’m sure there are other things that allow you to do this. Maybe Hootsuite or others. But I’ve used Onlypult, and it’s really kind of a — it is not a Swiss Army knife. It is for a specific posting.

Kevin Rose: What is it? It’s just Instagram in ASCII? You’re scrolling — I like to — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s a — 

Kevin Rose: — think that — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a strict — 

Kevin Rose: — your assistant is calling you up and being like, “Kevin is wearing a red shirt today, and Darya seems to be holding their dog,” describing you post by post.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m like, “Take out the semicolon. Who uses semicolons?” No. I use Onlypult. Think of it as a Buffer for Instagram specifically. So you can schedule social media posts or post immediately using this application and it posts to your Instagram account for you. So what that allows me to do is I can take a photo of something I think is beautiful or useful, put it on Instagram, and do so without ever being exposed to my feed in any way. So in other words, it is write only instead of read only.

Kevin Rose: I mean, you could just unfollow everyone too, and then when you go, there’s a blank feed.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, I could do that, but I — 

Kevin Rose: But then you don’t get the DMs and stuff, I guess.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t — 

Kevin Rose: Well, how do you look at your DMs?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t really use DMs.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I don’t either.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s just over — the volume isn’t manageable. So the point being with these books is look at your track record of reading books. I remember Tim Urban wrote about this, the creator of Wait But Why, in an amazing piece called The Tail End, which everyone should read. It talks about how precious time actually is. Everybody listening to this, if you haven’t read The Tail End by Tim Urban, read it, reread it. I reread it regularly. The fact of the matter is, I don’t know, maybe I have a few hundred books left to read, like good ones. So I don’t want to be reading stuff, generally speaking, that hasn’t stood some test of time, right? This guy, Barry Lopez, won the National Book Award. He was nominated for the National Book Award for this book Of Wolves and Men. I mean, this is a very high bar, right?

They just published the 25th anniversary edition. It changed how people wrote about nature or how people thought about constructing nature writing in non-fiction period. The guy completely reshaped an entire genre of writing. It’s incredible. If you have that high bar, there are still too many books. So, I’m trying to be much more purposeful about my reading. That was why in 2020, I’m not reading any books published this year, which I am going to extend for 2021. So I’m not going to read any books published in 2021 either.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome. I love that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it feels good. Once you make the rule, it depersonalizes it. This is really important because it’s hard to say no when you’re making one-off decisions, right? If somebody comes to you and they’re like, “Hey, can you contribute to my GoFundMe because I lost my shoes and I want to buy a nice pair of shoes or whatever,” you just get hit up with so much stuff. If it is a personal no, it’s hard for people to receive. If it is a policy and you can point them somewhere, even if you say it’s a policy, it often takes the sting out. But I can just point to, if you go to tim.blog/new books, I think it is, it’s a short URL. It takes people directly to that post on the finding single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of decisions.

Yeah, there it is. Yeah. So if you just go to tim.blog/new books, then it takes you to finding the one decision that removes a hundred decisions. And so, if I get hit up via email, via text, via fill in the blank by someone I actually know who wants me to read a book, I’m just like, “I wish I could, but I can’t. I’ve set this public policy, so I don’t have to choose among friends.” Boom. And I send a link, and that’s it. That’s the template response.

Kevin Rose: Can I ask you how you — well, I’ll tell you why I’m asking this question. I’m asking this question because as part of the training that I’m doing with Henry, who we talked about on previous podcasts, who’s a Zen master that I study with, one of the things that I do is when I go for walks in nature, and you mentioned enjoying nature is one of the big highlights, the easy thing to do is to put on a podcast or an audio book, right? On top of that is to set it at two and a half speed so you can get through it as fast as possible. My instructions have been to take out my headphones and just treat it as a way to listen, just listen to nature, just let it all come in and put your focus and attention on the sounds that are happening around you.

I found that to be a much more — it’s like an amplifier on top of the already awesome walk, just this idea of really being there rather than try and do extra things while you’re on that walk, right? And so, my question is when I’ve been listening to audio books, I’ve actually said, “Okay, 1X speed,” because if I’m going to do a book, I’m going to give it my full attention. Are you doing anything like that? Or do you jam through books? Do you read them at night? How do you consume?

Tim Ferriss: Well, so there are a few things I’d love to reflect on that you just said. The first, as far as nature goes, I would say that — and I try to think about, much like the energy management leading then to time management, I think a lot as you know, about the sequencing of things. Like what is the natural waterfall cascade order in which these things belong? For me, spending time in nature is about cultivating a very detailed awareness of nature or acute awareness of nature first and foremost. If I do that, the enjoyment or the contentment that I feel in nature automatically goes up dramatically.

Part of the reason I’m thinking about this so much because I’ve had a very hard time reacclimating to Austin. It’s not because of just all the swarms of locusts, aka Californians descending upon this fair city, although I’m hypocritical to say that, obviously. It’s because it’s a city. It’s a city. And I spent a lot of time in the wilderness on a farm, I don’t want to mention locations, but for the entire summer. So I spent several months walking through the woods every day, where there are black bear and coyotes and so on, and seeing the changes. I would walk for hours and I got to recognize these very minor, or I should say minute changes on my walks. I would see which trees changed color first as we got closer to autumn. I would see how tracks presented themselves in certain places at certain times of the day, dependent on weather.

When I came back to Austin, I want to say one thing also. One of the ways that I increased my appreciation for what was around me, because I think if the walk isn’t interesting enough for you, you’re probably just not interested enough. So I asked and I’m going to be finding someone to pay to help me with this in Austin, found wildlife biologists and specialists, or even people who work at, say, garden shops and things like that, to walk with me through the woods to identify things, to point things out to me. The recommendation they gave me at one point was start with the trees because flowers and wildflowers are very complex. There are going to be dozens, if not, hundreds of different varieties. Start with the trees, because in any given location, you might have at least where I was, let’s just call it eight to 12 trees. If you learn the classifications and how to tell them apart and how to describe the different characteristics that separate them or distinguish them, you’re going to be able to identify 90 percent of the trees that you see. How cool is that?

Before that point in time, they’re just trees. You might identify a maple, let’s say, because the leaf looks like something you’d see in Canada. But by and large, it’s just trees. It’s green stuff that’s really high. After that, you suddenly click the dial a few notches towards high-def and your experience of the walk changes tremendously. So I would occasionally take phone calls when I was walking, but I spent, I would say, at least 70, 80 percent of my time listening to bird calls, learning to identify birds. There is — 

Kevin Rose: You’re a birder now. Are you a birder?

Tim Ferriss: I’m not a birder. I’m not a birder, but if — 

Kevin Rose: It’s okay if you are.

Tim Ferriss: No, no, I’m not a birder. Someone will be able to find this. There’s actually an app on Android — sadly, last I checked, it wasn’t on iOS — that is Shazam for bird calls. It’s amazing. In other words, you can hold your phone up, click a button, and it will identify which bird is calling, which is awesome. I do think — 

Kevin Rose: Are you doing this? Are you doing Shazam for birds out in the forest because — 

Tim Ferriss: No, because I use iOS. I use iOS. So I had to do it the old-fashioned way and go online and listen to different bird calls and try to compare them. The other thing that I found really fun to do, because not everyone’s going to have access to someone who can point out different plants, is to use the Google app to do image searches on different plants, and it is incredibly accurate most of the time. I was stunned. It’s so cool. Just walk around your house, how many people, and I’m going to plead guilty here, know the names or the types of all the plants they might have in or around their houses? Very, very few, I would guess, right? Using the Google app and image search, which is very easy, you can pretty quickly identify the vast majority of plants, trees and so on. It’s awesome. I’ve used it on walks here in Austin to identify trees.

Kevin Rose: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So those are a few of the ways that I think about nature of which we are part, right? It’s very easy to feel separate from nature, and I think that feeling of separateness is intensified if you have earbuds in and you’re listening to something at rapid speed. Nature doesn’t really rush, right? So to meet it at its own cadence without listening to anything but what is around you, I find really therapeutic. As far as reading, these days I definitely don’t rush. If I’m rushing through a book, I should generally just drop the book. It’s not good enough. You should only be choosing books that you are sad to see end, right? If you’re not, “Oh, man, what am I going to do now that I finished it? Oh, no, I have to find another book.” If you don’t have that feeling, then you’re not reading the right books.

I’ll give you another example. So this book is one that I was given by my girlfriend for Christmas, and it’s an awesome book. I hadn’t read it in probably 20 years. It’s this. It’s called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, L-A-B-E-R-G-E, and Howard Rheingold. This is an incredibly detailed, tactical how-to book about lucid dreaming and developing the different skills related to lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming, I was really dedicated to a lot of these practices towards the very end of high school or certainly the first few years of college. I actually reached out to Stephen LaBerge or his team when I was in college. I couldn’t get a hold of him, but I did get the attention of his team because I said, “You may want to look at, if you haven’t already, Huperzine A.” Huperzine A is a supplement. You can get it anywhere, but certainly online, which acts as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. This just a very long-winded way of saying — 

Kevin Rose: It sounds bad.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, it’s not just — 

Kevin Rose: Is it choline in the brain?

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s not turning off acetylcholine production, but it has anecdotally the ability to help one induce lucidity. How and why that happens, I don’t know. At the time, I had a very well-developed pet theory for why this mechanistically and plausibly why it worked. But the point being that Stephen LaBerge came out of Stanford. Lucid dreaming, to define that, is the phenomenon of realizing that you are dreaming when you’re dreaming. So you effectively wake up in your dream and you’re like, “Holy shit, I’m dreaming.” Normally, you get excited and then you wake up.

Kevin Rose: In Zen, they call that enlightenment, but it’s not when you’re dreaming.

Tim Ferriss: There you go. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: You’re awake and then you wake up, and you realize this is a dream.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, you could start with the lucid dreaming.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you do with that. But this is actually a phenomenon that can be demonstrated in laboratory settings because your eye movements during REM sleep correspond to your eye movements in dreams. So you could hook someone up to, I suppose it would be an EEG in a sleep lab. You will know when they are sleeping and in REM states and so on, based on brainwave activity. And then if they have agreed with the experiment or on a predefined set of eye movements, let’s just say like right, right, left, right, right, left, or something like that and they become lucid in their dream, they could look in that, following that pattern and indicate to someone who is in the lab that they are in fact aware they’re dreaming. It’s pretty cool.

Kevin Rose: Or they could just be closing their eyes and doing that?

Tim Ferriss: Well, they wouldn’t be able to pull that off because — 

Kevin Rose: Because the EEG wouldn’t show it, right?

Tim Ferriss: That’s right. The EEG would just show that they’re being dickheads and trying to fool people.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But the lucid dreaming, it makes you more aware in your normal waking life because you develop the habit of doing what some people might call reality checks, and that is asking yourself the question, “Am I dreaming or am I awake?” while you’re awake. And then you would test it. The way you would test that, for instance, if you had a book cover like this with text on it, in a dream, you looked at the cover, at the text, you look away, you look back, the text is generally going to change because your brain is producing the entire experience moment by moment. So that would be one test. You’re looking at text, looking away, looking back. Another would be looking at patterns, like I’m looking at the wall in front of me in my kitchen and the tiles are laid a certain way. If I looked away and looked back at those tiles, they might be running the opposite direction or at a diagonal.

Kevin Rose: Are your dreams that vivid? My REM dreams are just kind of like, I never really believe that they’re real. Do you actually like — 

Tim Ferriss: Well, if you never believed they were real, you would always be lucid, right?

Kevin Rose: Right. But I don’t think I don’t ever remember picking up a book and being like, “Oh, it has text on it.” I don’t get to that high fidelity like you.

Tim Ferriss: You work on dream recall first, so you would cultivate dream recall. It is your grasp on the coattails of details of these dreams is so tenuous that there’s definitely a protocol and an etiquette to maximizing dream recall. If you don’t do it immediately upon waking, if you move around, if you brush your teeth, if you go take a piss, it’s gone. All of your dreams are gone. You have to be really methodical and strict about it, but it is incredible how quickly your dream recall ramps up and you get to the point where you’re remembering oftentimes three, four or five dreams at night and taking them down. There are ways to improve that. You can wake up in the middle of the night, stand for two, three hours, go back to bed. I mean, there are all these different techniques that are outlined in this book that really, really work.

So, in high school, when I first became reasonably good at this, I’m not going to say great, but I could usually induce lucidity in dreams at least every other night and I was in my final wrestling season, and I would manifest this guy, John Smith, who was a famous gold medalist and at a particular type of wrestling with low leg attacks. I think he was out of Oklahoma. I would train with him. I’d never met him and I never have met him, but I would train with him. I’d seen a lot of his video footage. I would train with him in my dreams and wrestling and found that to carry over into my normal practices. So there are all sorts of things.

Let’s say you have stage fright. There are all sorts of anecdotes/case studies of people who will then create, Inception style, right? They’ll create the environment of performing in front of a crowd. They practice this in their dreams and it gives them an opportunity to rehearse facing their fears, right? So, I’m really interested in lucid dreaming. There are some commonalities between the neurological or biochemical responses to REM sleep as compared to the effects produced by LSD-25, right? There are some really spooky similarities. So, this came back to me. This is a book I read many times in late high school, certainly early college, my own copy, which is covered in highlight to somewhere. And then it was just gifted to me again. So I have many books in my house now that I would willingly read a second time, and I think that should be the bar for reading anything once. It has to be that good.

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s awesome. Yeah, I have many books that I’ve never touched.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, me too.

Kevin Rose: You must have, but I want to get to. It’s just like, I tend to clean out all the — because I know what you mean. If anyone that has a podcast that has more than 10 viewers, that you just get books sent to you. You get on some publisher’s list and all of a sudden, a new book.

Tim Ferriss: Of course.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s crazy. So I tend to get those mostly away to friends and whatnot. Cool. So, what else were we going to cover today? There was a couple of things I wanted to hit. I was going — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I’d be curious to know how you’re thinking about 2021 and what kind of resolutions you have, if any, or how you think about planning for the new year?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, I think there was two things looking as similar to you in that I spent a good chunk of time looking back on the year. I didn’t go through a calendar, but I did look at my New Year’s resolutions from last year, which were — that I failed at all of them. I mean, I look at what I want to do differently this year. And so I’ve set up some procedures in place. And then there was some things, some wins that I did have mid year, but they weren’t resolutions because I didn’t know we were going to be in COVID. And so, I think that COVID, what it did for me is immediately caused me to start drinking more. It was very easy to finish a bottle of wine with my wife, and where you typically were like, “Oh, we had some left over from last night. Should we pour a little?” It’s like, no, we cleared a bottle out, no problem, and then went for a beer or something because we were like, “We’re going to die.” It’s like, “If I’m dying, might as well drink.”

So I was basically just freaking out there for the first couple of months. That kicked off a point to where I got to and I said, “I’m fat. I feel like I’ve drank too much and I need to, of course, correct.” And so, if I’m honest with myself, I felt really depressed, not in a clinical way, but in a just this really beat me down. I miss my friends. I miss traveling. And then part of me is like, “Well, we have clean drinking water. We have food. We have jobs. Life is good.” But I think it’s impacted everyone a little bit differently. What I immediately went to is said, “Well, how can I stop and cut back on drinking? And then given that I only have so much free time with two little girls, what can I introduce that is new that gives me some relief and brings my spirits back into a positive place?”

And so, I tried a bunch of stuff. I tried walking through the forest because I live in Oregon and I’ve got a forest in my backyard. I’ve tried sauna, tried cold plunge, meditation, Pilates, working out, lifting weights, all those things. I would do a couple of weeks of them and say, “Okay, which one of these, if you had to stack rank them, which ones are having the biggest impact on me?” Because I can’t do them all. Which ones can I do that are having the biggest impact? Without a doubt, I would say the two things are walking and sauna. Those are the two things that are just so key. I walk every single day now. It is a no phone, no AirPods kind of walk. It’s crazy what 45 minutes in the forest will get you in, in terms of just a mood boost, like swinging the arms, moving the legs. It’s fantastic. So that’s been huge.

Also, in being totally transparent, I did some couples therapy, which I thought was fantastic. It’s not because I thought I was going to end my marriage. I’d never got that crazy, but it’s just suddenly you’re cooped up with somebody else with a couple of little toddlers and it gets chaotic sometimes. It’s like there’s no work escape. Work is in the home. There’s no way to have that natural break that you get, whether it be grabbing a beer with another friend and then coming back to your spouse. There’s none of that. You’re just on top of each other. And so we had done couples therapy back before and after we got married to give us a toolkit to deal with issues, and it’s fantastic. I highly recommend it. Every single time I’ve done it, I’ve never been pissed that I did it. I’ve always liked — 

Tim Ferriss: What recommendations would you give to people who are listening to this and considering it as an option? Any best practices or recommendations for people?

Kevin Rose: Well, I would say at first I was curious like, are there any new tech plays that I can get into here, like these talk spaces and some of these other things that are out there? And I find that those are really kind of like lightweight, not really meant for couples. It was just like text your therapist. I was like, “I don’t need this.” So I found someone that I could actually meet with over a secure Zoom type connection that is a real licensed therapist. Not that they aren’t on that, but a dedicated person to you that’s going to give you a full hour. It is not texting back and forth.

I would say I have another buddy that did the same thing and he had to get to a second therapist to find the right one. So it’s not just because you find one that you go to and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t what I expected,” it doesn’t mean that the idea of the practice is wrong. You might just not have the right person. And so, we found a fantastic woman that is just really good at driving me back to the source of why am I feeling this way and just opening up the lines of communication to let us and remind us that we’re both on the same team. We both want what’s best for each other and to support each other and help each other because we’re coming from a loving place, but sometimes we get caught up in other things and other loops and cycles and score keeping.

I’m a big scorekeeper because I’ve always avoided confrontation. My dad was a very verbally aggressive, abusive guy to my mom and had many, many, many good traits. I always like to say that about my dad because he did, but definitely not teaching me on the relationship side. Fantastic father, horrible husband, confusing for me as all hell as a kid.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Kevin Rose: But I think that I tend to avoid confrontation and then just keep track of things. Then I get upset and I have something that’s like all of these things just come out. And so, just trying to address things in more real time has been a big help for me. Yeah, there’s been a ton of little things that I picked up. But anyway, I just wanted to tell people out there, if you’re going through rough times, because I hear divorce rates are through the roof right now. The courts are backlogged. It doesn’t mean necessarily you found the wrong person. You might just need a little help and that’s okay.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think the real time versus dropping the motherload of 17 complaints and freeze framed infractions is really important.

Kevin Rose: Would you share that line that you told me that you use that I think is really helpful?

Tim Ferriss: Which one?

Kevin Rose: The one that you said — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I mean, so I owe my girlfriend for all of these because certainly I didn’t come up with these on my own. I think she is very conscientious about how she uses wording and language. You would expect that I would have that as a writer or supposedly. But when I get upset, I think I tend to throw haymakers, right? Not literally, but I’m less careful with my wording when I’m upset and it usually escalates or damages things more than it helps. I’m not a yeller. I never yell, but I can be very blunt. The wording that she used, and I noted it and I have also used, is really simple. It’s just “The story I am making up in my head is…” Right? And then you have, “The dishes are left in the sink because you expect me to clean them up, and when I believe that thought, I feel vexed,” right? So you’re not a — 

Kevin Rose: It disarms it quite a bit, doesn’t it?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s really — and it’s not just being nice. I mean, it’s being more effective because as soon as someone is put on the defense, it’s game over. You’re not going to get where you want to go. This is also something if people wanted to study Nonviolent Communication. I think Marshall [Rosenberg] — hey, Toasty. I think Marshall something or other, you can find it. If you just search Marshall Nonviolent Communication, I can’t remember the last name, but there is an audio course that is quite good. That’s one structure. And you would think, as I did, I was like, well, if we’re constantly both saying “The story I’m making up in my head is that…” it’s going to be so formulaic that we’re going to be like, “Come on. What the fuck?” It’s not going to work. I have not found that to be the case. It just continues to be really helpful, even if it is — 

Kevin Rose: But it is true though, that’s why, because it is a story you’re making up in your head, right? I mean, it’s always what it is.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t know a lot about couples therapy. My girlfriend and I have worked with people before. We’re going to likely work with someone again, just because I have phone calls on a weekly basis with someone who looks after me. My girlfriend has phone calls at least once or twice a week with people who look after her. But there is no one currently whose sole priority is to be a sort of midwife, even if male, for the relationship, right? The cultivator of the relationship, us together. My feeling is even if they’re not the Jedi master of relationship coaches, just having someone who can create a neutral, safe space where each person can get whatever they need to get off their chest off their chest is a huge service so that it doesn’t bottle up, bottle up, bottle up, and then explode into this 20-exhibit assault on someone, which they just can’t easily recover from. They can’t easily defend themselves against, and it’s really jarring ultimately for everyone involved.

And it can force people to just throw their hands up and be like, “Well, fuck, I don’t feel like I can win here. I just can’t win.” Right? I think this has happened a lot during COVID. I know that my girlfriend and I have both felt that way at different points. It’s like, “Well, shit, man. This is set up in a way I don’t feel like there’s any way I can win here. There’s nothing I can do that is going to lead to me feeling like I’m being successful.” I think that is much more likely to happen when it’s bottled up and given out as a massive dosage of 10 or 20 things, instead of on a weekly basis having someone else say, “Well, Tim, is there anything else on your mind or anything on your heart that you’re withholding right now?” And then I’m responding to a question as opposed to snapping over something stupid and then letting all this stuff fly out of my face.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I think that the thing that she’s helped me with that I forgot to mention is that really just identify who the cast of characters are in your head and how they react to certain situations, because we all have triggers. We all have these little rough patches that if you just poke the right way, it’s going to put you in an angry or upset or frightened or scared state. I certainly have those as well. And so, I can come at something defensively or offensively from a place that is one of these cast of characters that has taken over my brain at that moment. When you can name them, define them, their wants, their needs, their fears, their hopes, you can say, “Oh, that so-and-so appearing that has a fear of this and she’s triggering that right now.”

So, just that bringing awareness to that, just like if you can catch yourself a little bit, not that it makes it go away, but you’re like, “Oh, okay. Here’s who’s making an appearance. I know how to deescalate this person, this type of my personality a little bit better than before” and have a rational conversation where you actually have an outcome. That is one that puts that person away for good, or at least for that time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, definitely. There’s something. It’s not helpful for everyone and there are different formats for it. Some of it I’ve found very clunky. Some of it I’ve found depending on the facilitator, quite helpful for couples, and that is Imago therapy, I-M-A-G-O. People can look it up and very quickly decide whether it’s helpful or not, but it does help you to convey in a non-violent, non-aggressive way, some of the parts work that you’re referring to that certainly for my girlfriend and I was very impactful. Kevin, if you had to choose a word for 2021 for you, like a theme — 

Kevin Rose: Patience.

Tim Ferriss: Patience.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: It’s something I’m really trying to cultivate.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like you’re a pretty patient guy. Are you an impatient guy?

Kevin Rose: Well, I mean, I just think about what we have ahead of us in terms of vaccines, that who knows when we’re going to get them, the crazy scariness of potential mutations of a virus, new incoming administration, all the anxiety and unrest out in the streets. There’s a lot of things where I’m very anxious. And so, I want things to be resolved and I want matters on the problem-solver. It’s like, I just need to have a little bit more patience, just slow down and just let things unfold the way they’re going to unfold and stop trying to project my mind into the future into some crazy scenario, you know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: That’s a big one for me. The other thing for 2021 is just really asking myself, like for the drinking thing. I’ve been really, really good lately. This is COVID drinking, so it’s like I’m not going crazy, but it is more than I’d like to drink. Well, my new framework that I’ve put together for myself has been — 

Tim Ferriss: Blackouts only on Tuesdays.

Kevin Rose: Tuesdays, no less than 10. No. Yeah, no. So, what I’m doing is no more than two. I have found that anything above and beyond two drinks just does not serve me well. I’m too old. I wake up hot in the middle of the night for no reason.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the worst. So bad.

Kevin Rose: Hot red wine sweats. Then the other thing is never two nights in a row.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good one.

Kevin Rose: So, I may say to myself I may be on night number two, and I say or I want to drink the second night, I just tell myself, “Can you go one day? Oh, of course I can.” Then you go one day, and it turns out the next day, you don’t want to drink, so then it’s two nights in a row. So, it’s funny how just separating drinks by a night will help a ton.

Then the last thing, and I think this is the most important, and the one I don’t have a good answer for, but I’m working on. This is part of my Zen friend, who’s coaching me on some of this stuff, is really asking yourself when you’re having a drink, like really, “Who is getting nourished right now?”

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good one.

Kevin Rose: It’s a really good one because what’s happening? What part of me? Because there’s something inside that’s getting nourished. I don’t have an answer for that yet, but it’s a deep one to sit with.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. So, a question for you, when you look at your graph of drink consumption, as it goes down, is your consumption of edible gummies going through the roof?

Kevin Rose: No. Although, I will tell you, I did try something new called CBN. Have you heard of this?

Tim Ferriss: CBN, I have heard of, actually, from a grower, but I’ve never consumed.

Kevin Rose: So there’s a, here in — 

Tim Ferriss: You should describe it for folks. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So, there’s a gummy manufacturer out here. And by the way, Tim is saying this, but you know I’m not a big user of gummies. I’m not — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m just fucking with you, but I do find — when you have had gummies, it is exceptionally clear in our text messages.

Kevin Rose: That’s probably accurate. There’s probably pictures of me eating pizza.

Tim Ferriss: Fucking typing with your elbows.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. So, basically on the gummy side, there’s a company called Wyld, W-Y-L-D. They make fantastic — 

Tim Ferriss: Wait. W-Y-L-D?

Kevin Rose: W-Y-L-D, yeah. I think they have them all on the West coast. They’re starting to spread all over the place, but they do a CBN. It’s not really psychoactive, but it really makes you sleep. I’m telling you, it’s the closest thing I’ve had to — I don’t know, it just feels like you took a sleeping pill or something. It does have a little bit of THC in there. They do put some with it, but Wyld makes a sleeping gummy.

So, for me, drinks, especially when, god, man, the news over the last few weeks and the months, it’s just been insane, so when you’re stressed out, that’s the nice thing about a glass of wine that, but a gummy with either CBD or CBN, but CBN more so these days, fantastic sleep with it. And I wear the Oura ring and I just got the Fitbit to try out the new sleep data on here. So I’m tracking all that stuff to see how it’s doing.

Tim Ferriss: If you have more than a few drinks, you see it so clearly in your Oura data. It is irrefutable. It turns your sleep into such garbage. It’s unreal.

Kevin Rose: Well, resting heart rate goes up by 10 points, and it’s elevated all throughout the night. HRV goes down. There’s just so many bad things that happen.

Speaking of which, in terms of awesome little finds that have been helping us get through these times, this right here. I’m going to send you some of this, Tim. You’ve got to try this.

Tim Ferriss: All right. What is it?

Kevin Rose: This is Hinoki wood in here. Hinoki wood is one of the seven sacred trees of Japan. When they talk about all the health benefits that come from forest bathing in Japan, because walking in the forest can be prescribed out there from a physician, it’s typically attributed to a lot of the fragrance from Hinoki, and this is Hinoki oil right here.

Tim Ferriss: Cool.

Kevin Rose: I found a fantastic manufacturer in Japan of high quality, cold-pressed Hinoki oil. I will tell you what it is. I have zero — I don’t know any of these people. They’re all in Japan. It is Hinokilab.com. H-I-N-O-K-I lab.com. These oils, they smell so — you’ve been to a Japanese, proper bathhouse where they have the essential oils. This is the stuff’s gold. Oh, I put it in the sauna too. So you can put it in some water and then pour it over the coals in the sauna.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it’s a type of cypress. It’s a beautiful tree. Really dense foliage. Cool.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I planted a few of them here in my yard, actually.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, no kidding?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I got some. I had some brought in.

Tim Ferriss: Jesus Christ. I love it. It’s good to be Kevin Rose.

Kevin Rose: Not from Japan.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you don’t have to qualify it. You can say you brought them in.

Kevin Rose: I flew them via freight from Japan.

Tim Ferriss: Hey man. All that crypto gold, I don’t know where it goes.

Kevin Rose: Exactly. I can almost 100 percent guarantee you that you have more crypto than I do. So, if you’re looking to ransack a place — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus Christ. Well, that’s not saying much because you divested yourself on a lot of things.

Kevin Rose: For sure. I’m definitely more — I’m scared the markets are just super overvalued right now, so I tend to go safer.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s a good argument to be made for that. If I were to pick a word for 2021 — 

Kevin Rose: Yeah, what is it?

Tim Ferriss: — right this moment, it would be “mischievous.” I think that I’ve taken a lot of things and myself way too seriously in 2020, and I think I want to bring more coyote energy and prankster mischievousness into 2021.

Kevin Rose: Interesting. What does that look like in you? Like no mask-wearing kind of thing?

Tim Ferriss: No, no, that’s just being a dick face. I don’t want to do that. No, a coyote — 

Kevin Rose: I was joking.

Tim Ferriss: — it’s more. Yeah. It’s more, I think a playfulness and an irreverence, not taking things too seriously. I’ll give you an example. I just, the other day, threw up — I love the original Willy Wonka movie with Gene Wilder. And so I threw up this animated GIF that is Gene Wilder eating candy, saying, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it’ll last.” And I just threw that up and it was hilarious to see how people responded because it’s so kind of oblique and vague that it acts as a Rorschach test for — 

Kevin Rose: Wait a second. Did you throw this up during the Trump Capitol takeover today?

Tim Ferriss: No, no, I threw it up right afterwards.

Kevin Rose: Oh geez. Fuel on the fire, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. I mean, you say terrible timing. I think that I want to cultivate an insensitivity to a kind of personality-by-consensus. What I mean by that is if you look at a lot of people, I’m not going to name names, but if you look, no, no, I’m not going to name names.

Kevin Rose: Manicured. Manicured feeds and stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you just look at personalities online over time, who spend a lot of time on social and they become caricatures of themselves because they have certain behaviors rewarded, certain behaviors punished, certain behaviors left unapplauded and they start to warp and bend their behavior to fit the most applause. And they turn into these kind of creepy caricatures. And I think that that ends up inevitably bleeding over into their real lives, right? I mean, their off-screen lives. And I think that’s really something I want to be hyper aware of, which is why I don’t have social on the phone, I’m using these workarounds, like Onlypult to post stuff, and I want to kind of hold up a mirror that allows people to look at their own reactions also, right?

So I think that a lot of what I’ll put up in 2021 will be Rorschach tests. And for people who don’t know that, those are the inkblot tests where they would put lots of ink, fold a piece of paper, show it to someone and say, “What do you see?” And they might see a murderer, they might see a butterfly, there might be something else. And then that is used as kind of a jumping-off point for psychoanalysis.

And that’s not going to be everything I put up, but I just think that life is too short to take yourself too seriously. And so, first and foremost, it’s for me, but doing things that don’t seem to have a point, doing things that are beautiful just because I think they’re beautiful. They don’t need to have some targeted outcome ROI or fill-in-the-blank, right. And just to kind of loosen my grip on whatever I think my identity is that’s been constructed over such a long period of time, and let’s not kid ourselves, identity can be revealed, but it’s largely constructed. And it’s just, I think we get so attached to our labels of what we are and what we aren’t, what we do and what we don’t do, that it’s just a — I think it’s a very socially reinforced trap that kind of constrains your awareness and sensitivity and openness to the world. So yeah, more coyote.

Kevin Rose: That’s good. I think the problem that we’ve fallen into with social media and part of the reason why I don’t like having an account there is it just becomes, it makes me sad in some sense, and that I see it’s always the best version of someone’s self. It feels very manufactured oftentimes, and it’s like it doesn’t feel authentic in the way that — it’s always about good times. There’s never any — I guess there has been more lately with some of the protests and some of the stuff that’s come out on there, but I mean, people, myself included, tend to put just the best version of yourself on there versus just letting it all hang out, which I guess is kind of what you’re saying in a sense. You’re just going to have more fun with it than just trying to create the Tim Ferriss image up on social media.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I don’t feel like I’ve done too much of that. I mean, I do. I very deliberately put out stuff that is true to me that I think could irritate some percentage of my followers just because I want to have some countervailing force against becoming this dancing sock puppet on the internet. So I do that to not become too attached to social feedback, but not to turn this into a discussion of The Social Dilemma, but if you are constantly exposed to these technologies, you are completely outgunned. You’re completely outgunned by engineers and neuroscientists and research and development teams who have, for all intents and purposes, infinite resources to turn you into a little rat in a Skinner box.

Kevin Rose: So you’re just going to keep me guessing?

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, I want to keep, yeah.

Kevin Rose: I love that the AI’s going to look at your feed and like, “I think Tim would like this.” They’re like, “Oh, shit. He posted a yellow pony. What the hell does he like now? Oh, damn it.” You’ll really keep them on their toes.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I want to keep myself guessing too, right? I don’t want to follow — 

Kevin Rose: I love that, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Follow less of a script and — 

Kevin Rose: You’ve always been good at that, though. You’ve always been — like one in every 10 of your Instagram posts, everyone’s like, “What the hell is he? Why is there a picture of that?” It’s clearly not that manufactured feed, which I’ve always appreciated.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, what was it? I can’t remember the — I don’t even remember what it was, but back when we were both on the apps, I remember one of yours was like, “And deleting in three, two, one.” To your credit, sometimes when I get a little far afield, you’re like, “Oh, I think you should probably delete that.” And I get a text from you, which I appreciate.

Kevin Rose: Well, I can just tell, speaking of, like you said about my gummies, I can tell when you’re a little ham too every once in a while, one will sneak out there.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s true. Yeah. It’s true. It’s dangerous. Dangerous to drink and to drink and post, that’s a dangerous habit. Well, it’s good to see you, man. It’s been too long.

Kevin Rose: Good to see you too. Last little thing. I know we always like to throw a bunch of nuggets out there for people to check out. I want to recommend a documentary since we have still so much time and months ahead of us at home. My Octopus Teacher, I thought was great.

Tim Ferriss: Great, great. Yes. Second that.

Kevin Rose: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: Fantastic. Beautifully shot.

Kevin Rose: Netflix.

Tim Ferriss: What else you got?

Kevin Rose: I liked The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan series. I know it’s a little bit old now, but it was fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: Timeless, though. Oh my God, if you’re like, “Yeah, I’m a competitor.” Okay. Watch that. Watch that series.

Kevin Rose: Yes, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s one of the best miniseries I’ve seen in years. If you want another documentary which is actually very uplifting, doesn’t sound uplifting based on the name, but it’s called Crip Camp and it begins with the story of a summer camp for crippled, I guess, young adults. And it won, I want to say the grand jury award at Sundance a year or two ago, and it’s really outstanding. So that’s one I would recommend, Crip Camp. Also, it just puts a lot in perspective also. So I really enjoyed that.

Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, or Pharmacopeia, just has a season three coming out now. For those who don’t know Hamilton Morris, he’s been on my podcast, exceptional biochemist, really good at synthesizing all sorts of things. Also, a very good storyteller and a hilarious, hilarious character, unlike any other. Also, happens to be the son of Errol Morris of Fog of War fame. And he’s a really, really good narrator and editor of the series called Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, which you can find on Amazon Prime. You can find it on, I want to say Vice, and season three just came out. And in each episode, he describes the history of the culture and the biochemistry of a psychoactive drug. So it could be meth, it could be angel dust, it could be LSD. It could be 5-MeO-DMT, ketamine, ibogaine. And in each episode, he also then consumes or administers each of these drugs to himself or has them administered, and records the entire experience and describes the entire experience. So it’s a really well-done series.

Kevin Rose: That is crazy.

Tim Ferriss: Well, certainly also put some fear of god and healthy respect into the conversations around these compounds too. Not everything turns out well. And although he’s usually fine, he’s very seasoned, but there are also other people who agree to have their experiences filmed and they don’t always turn out fantastically well.

Kevin Rose: That ibogaine stuff, man, that scares me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I think you should be very, very, very, very, very exceptionally cautious with ibogaine and iboga. It’s one of the few psychedelics that can kill you with cardiac complications. So that is definitely, as far as I’m concerned, personally, off menu, although it does have some incredible possible applications to opioid dependence and addiction.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’ve heard that. Yeah. That’s exactly it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you want to see, there’s a documentary called Dosed, D-O-S-E-D. I saw early versions of it, which I want to say came out in the last six to nine months, which does a good showcase in a sense, or provides an exploration of specifically opioid addiction and possible intervention with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, things along those lines. And ibogaine or iboga, I’m not sure which they used. Iboga would be the root, I want to say the root bark itself. Ibogaine would be the isolated alkaloid or synthesized, depending on how they approach it. So Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia is worth a gander if you’re interested in such things.

Kevin Rose: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: Anything else?

Kevin Rose: I think that’s it. That’s all that I have. Oh, no, I have one more. Have you seen the new jazz movie? The cartoon. Ah, why am I drawing a blank?

Tim Ferriss: Jazz movie?

Kevin Rose: You know what I’m talking about? The cartoon that everyone’s talking about.

Tim Ferriss: Jazz movie. I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Kevin Rose: Hold on. Cut out the extra space on this, on the audio side. Hold on.

Tim Ferriss: No, no. I want it to be as awkward as possible.

Kevin Rose: No, no. Jazz cartoon, Pixar.

Tim Ferriss: Soul.

Kevin Rose: Soul, yes.

Tim Ferriss: Excellent. Yes. I wholeheartedly recommend people check that out. Yeah. It’s really good.

Kevin Rose: I mean, that’s a must, it’s fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: I twisted my friend’s arm into signing up for Disney+ to watch Soul because it’s the only place that I believe you can watch it.

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And we watched it and then I ended up watching The Mandalorian and I was like, “If I had had the forethought to just use Disney+, I absolutely would have invested in Disney when it got smashed post-COVID.”

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, talk about the franchises they own, it’s just insanity.

Tim Ferriss: Marvel, Nat Geo, Pixar. I mean, Star Wars. The lineup is just absurd.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Tim Ferriss: So, also a lot of fun. Yeah. Mandalorian. Jon Favreau, congratulations, everybody involved, congratulations.

Kevin Rose: Fantastic show, yeah. That’s a great show.

Tim Ferriss: And let’s see, I’ll also mention if you’re looking for a healthy snack, I’ll mention a company that I’m involved with just because I love their stuff and have had a chance to spend time with the co-founders who are husband and wife, Jake and Kuʻulani Muise in Hawaii who run Maui Nui Venison. So if you’re looking — 

Kevin Rose: I do like that. Thank you for the box, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re welcome, you’re welcome.

Kevin Rose: Tim-Tim sent me a box and I have been, I highly recommend the jerky. It’s fantastic. Not the dog jerky. Toaster likes the dog — I almost broke into that because it came with everything else and I just saw jerky and I almost went for it and it looks good enough to eat but I — 

Tim Ferriss: The dog treats are Molly’s favorite. The human jerky, the bars and everything are fantastic. And the leg medallions are just incredible. So it’s — 

Kevin Rose: I haven’t eaten that yet, but I’m going to. How’s the bone broth, by the way? Because I haven’t tried it yet.

Tim Ferriss: Bone broth is exceptional. It’s extremely high protein and it’s all outstanding. I mean, this is the, as far as I’m concerned and as far as I can tell, the most nutrient dense meat you can possibly imagine. It is all wild-harvested. Although it’s for those people who might be worried about game harvesting on public lands, it’s all done on private lands on these large ranches because excess deer in Hawaii are massively damaging as an invasive species. And they actually not just destroy the vegetation where it looks so bad that people think it’s caused by wildfires, I mean, that amount of destruction, that leads to erosion and runoff that also damages the coral reef and the marine life on the Hawaiian islands. And this is specifically Maui. So, the ecological cost is huge. So, they work with USDA inspectors. They hunt at night at long range with rifles. They only take head shots to make the kill as stress-free as possible for the animals. The entire operation is like something out of special operations. It’s unbelievable.

Kevin Rose: It sounds like it. They’re like night-vision snipers with headshots.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they use infrared cameras.

Kevin Rose: Have you hunted them?

Tim Ferriss: I have. I didn’t — 

Kevin Rose: Oh, so you went out there?

Tim Ferriss: I did. Yeah. I hunted with bow. Also with rifle, but I feel, and I don’t hunt often, but I think it is a profoundly, profoundly, profoundly impactful way to reconnect with food.

Kevin Rose: Oh, dude, if you kill an animal and you — sorry, if you eat an animal, but you won’t kill it, you’re way disconnected from nature. You know what I mean? I’ve always told myself, I’ve never killed a cow, but I do eat cow, so if there was a way that I could do it in a humane fashion at a place that — I would probably have to do it just because I’d feel like a hypocrite otherwise.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you shouldn’t have said that. I’m going to find you a cow.

Kevin Rose: I don’t want to do it. I don’t really want to do it at all. But I’m just saying that, like I just, I don’t know. Do you know what I’m talking about? It would feel awkward saying, “I’m willing to eat you at someone else’s hand,” but not be willing to do it myself.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Hunting’s not for everybody. I was strongly, strongly militantly anti-hunter and hunting up until I worked on The 4-Hour Chef. And I decided for a portion of it that I wanted to do my best to learn to hunt and forage, to consume only those things that I procured myself. And had the opportunity while doing that deep dive to spend time with really hyper-intelligent, responsible hunters like Steven Rinella who’s written books on the American bison. He’s written all sorts of incredible books on multiple topics to see that it, as far as I’m concerned, can be approached in an extremely responsible, extremely eco-aware and thoughtful, conscientious manner. It really can. So the meat that I have here and the meat that I ate when I was hunting in Hawaii, was from what we got that day. And I feel very good about that. I feel very good about it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, that’s — the evil side of hunting, obviously, is built on the species that are in low numbers, which obviously is just a massive no-no, and then also for the trophy of it. I really respect the people that have learned how to do the full nose-to-tail processing of an animal and to make use of everything they possibly can. It’s really quite cool.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, if people are interested, check out the video on MauiNuivenison.com. The video is incredibly well done. It’s done with an award-winning cinematographer, and it shows the kind of ethos and mission and how they approach all this stuff. It’s incredible. So Maui, M-A-U-I, Nui, N-U-I venison.com and people can check it out. It is the startup, and you know, Kevin I’ve made basically no direct startup investments in the last handful of years and been helping these guys. It’s a very tough business. It’s the best product in the world, as far as I’m concerned. And I am so enamored of this company and the family and the people behind it and the ethos, it’s just, it checks all the boxes for me.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Hopefully, you check it out.

Kevin Rose: Your food investing is hilarious to me, by the way. Because like I would say on tech, fantastic track record, then the cricket protein. Remember you did those bars? But the funny thing about that is then they went and started a new company.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s killing it. Magic Spoon.

Kevin Rose: That is killing it, Magic Spoon is killing it. And you unfortunately missed out on that one.

Tim Ferriss: I did. I did miss, but I’m doing okay with food, man. I’m doing actually really — 

Kevin Rose: That’s the only two investments I know you have, so maybe you have a handful more that I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Blue Bottle did fine for both of us.

Kevin Rose: Oh, there you go. That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Blue Bottle did fantastically well and Hu, the chocolate makers, were just acquired, I think the announcement was last week by Mondelez and I was an advisor to — well, I suppose I still am an advisor to Hu. So that was also really fantastic.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome. I’m just giving you shit. I mean, literally 90 percent of the deals that we do go to zero, then that’s totally fine. That’s the name of the game on the early-stage investing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. But if I could choose one that I really want to not just survive but thrive, Maui Nui would be at the very top of the list just because the sort of benefits to community and ecology and the way that they’re walking the talk in a beautiful, philosophical sense is just, it’s rare. It’s super, super rare.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome. I will say that with the product that I have tried so far, I haven’t tried it all. If you’re scared of the idea of venison, you shouldn’t be because it’s very damn tasty jerky.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not gamey at all.

Kevin Rose: You would be surprised. It’s not gamey at all. And then I will say Magic Spoon for people that like old school cereal, like FruityLoops, but want a keto-friendly snack.

Tim Ferriss: Do you say FruityLoops, you 90-year-old?

Kevin Rose: No, they have FruityLoops flavor type cereal.

Tim Ferriss: Froot Loops. Froot Loops.

Kevin Rose: Oh, sorry. You know what? FruityLoops was the DJ software. Do you remember that? It was how you could make — it was how you made loops. It was something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I got it. Yeah. So Magic Spoon. I mean, I have an entire pantry full of their stuff and I’m really thrilled for the founders. They’ve done an extremely good job of making a great product. So yeah, if you liked Cocoa Puffs, Froot Loops, these types of cereals as a kid, you can have cereal that tastes very much the same that is basically zero carbs, super low net carb with high protein, and enjoy it with your real milk or fake milk of choice. And it’s fantastic. My favorite is the chocolate. I really like the chocolate flavor.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, the chocolate. They had one too that was like a cinnamon one that was quite good. Anyway. Yeah. Good stuff. Cool.

Tim Ferriss: Magic Spoon. Coolio, coolio, man. Well, do you want to tell people where they can find you?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, eventually this year, I’m going to start up on the Instagram again. That’s probably the best place. I’m just @KevinRose. You can find me there. And I also have a podcast that I put out one episode about every three months. It’s not that regular, but I do have really good guests. I just had — 

Tim Ferriss: You have some great ones.

Kevin Rose: I had Andy Rachleff on most recently, who’s the founder of Benchmark and also Wealthfront, Benchmark Capital being one of the most successful venture capital firms of all-time and fantastic interview about the importance of diversification. And yeah, he’s a brilliant, brilliant man. Have you ever had Andy on your show?

Tim Ferriss: I have, but I had it via Mike Maples’ show and he did an episode where Andy was featured. And so we published that audio on my podcast.

Kevin Rose: Gotcha.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Smart guy, extremely smart guy.

Kevin Rose: I wish he would write a book, man. He’s one of those guys you could sit down and talk to and everything that you throw at him, he has a different take on and most of the time he’s right. And you’re just like, this needs to be some — you know how Ray Dalio put out his Principles book? Andy needs his version of that. One can dream. I tried to talk him into it. He wouldn’t do it. He said he doesn’t want to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Books are a pain in the ass, but he could get a ghost writer/collaborator. And that person would just interview him like a few hours a day for a week straight and then they would have all they needed.

Kevin Rose: So there we go, Andy, if you’re listening, make it happen.

Tim Ferriss: All right, Kev-Kev. Well, it’s lovely to see you.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Good to see you as well. Let’s hang in person this year, man, let’s make it happen.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s make it work, long road trip. I’ll get in my armored Marauder vehicle and make my way across country to visit you in the forest. Maybe that’s the next move.

Kevin Rose: Do some forest bathing together. Just need a walk in the forest.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds exotic and erotic. I can’t wait.

Kevin Rose: I mean, we’ve done some of that in Japan.

Tim Ferriss: That’s true.

Kevin Rose: We need to get back to Japan. That would be fun.

Tim Ferriss: Man. Well, step-by-step, let’s figure out domestic travel first and then we can figure Japan.

Kevin Rose: Fair enough.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, absolutely. [Japanese] Okay, man. Well, to be continued and much love to you and the family, my man.

Kevin Rose: Same to you and everyone out there, please stay safe and healthy and take care of yourselves.

Tim Ferriss: Bye-bye.

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.