Please enjoy this transcript of a special Random Show with Kevin Rose commemorating the 10th Anniversary of The Tim Ferriss Show. As many listeners know, Kevin was my very first guest on the podcast, way back in April 2014.
Who is Kevin Rose? Kevin (@kevinrose) is a partner at True Ventures, an early-stage venture-capital firm that has invested more than $3.8 billion in a portfolio of more than 350 companies. He also hosts The Kevin Rose Show, which offers glimpses of the future into investing, artificial intelligence, wellness, and culture, featuring conversations with experts at the vanguard of their fields.
In this episode, we discuss the dangers of audience capture, novel mental-health treatments, modern dating, Ozempic, time dilation, Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul, and much, much more.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the conversation on YouTube here.
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
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Tim Ferriss: Good afternoon, everybody.
Kevin Rose: Hello, hello.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks for being here. Hi, Kevin.
Kevin Rose: TimTim. We’re doing it.
Tim Ferriss: KevKev. We’re doing it. Is this our first ever live Random Show?
Kevin Rose: I think so. I think we’ve always just been at your apartment or house drinking tequila.
Tim Ferriss: That’s usually how it goes. It’s a very formal affair. So thanks for being everybody.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Cheers.
Tim Ferriss: Cheers.
Kevin Rose: With our water.
Tim Ferriss: With our quote-unquote “water.”
Kevin Rose: It’s good to see everyone. Thank you for coming out. This is awesome. We have a lot to talk about and a lot to celebrate because Mr. Tim Ferriss has hit one billion downloads of his podcast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you are the first to hear this. It actually happened mid last year and I was waiting for the right time to talk about it. And so I figured why not talk about it today? So hell of a milestone. Who would’ve thought?
Kevin Rose: So many bots.
Tim Ferriss: So many bots. And after our first episode where I asked you if you had to be a breakfast cereal, what you would choose and why, and then you busted my balls relentlessly and that continues.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So some things stay the same. And 10th anniversary is coming up.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Next month.
Kevin Rose: 10 years. How long are you going to keep doing this?
Tim Ferriss: I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s fun. I still enjoy doing it. I’ll probably tighten things a little bit in the sense that — return to some basics, really try to be aware of not automatically following the majority in terms of trends or new platforms. I think that’s a dangerous seduction. Can be helpful, but you want to be thoughtful about it. So I’ll probably back off of video in a lot of ways is one example, and especially personally we’ll back off of short form video, not because there’s anything inherently bad about it, but that’s just not my game. So I like to choose games where there’s some Venn diagram overlap of energy in for me, recharging and also capability. So a good question that I like to ask friends, I like to ask myself is what is easier for you than other people? Whatever that is.
And typically you’ll have an advantage there. You either have some particular skill or you have some particular type of endurance that will give you a competitive advantage. Not that you have to compete. It’s not zero-sum, but holy shit, is podcasting crowded. It is really, really crowded. And there’s some very, very, very talented interviewers out there. So it’s become a much more saturated red ocean of sorts. And the practice for me as I pause at 10 years will be to think about how I can create more blue oceans for myself, which I find more exciting. But if it’s 15 years, 20 years, I’m going to be having these conversations no matter what. The question is, do I record them and then put them on a podcast? I don’t know. But I’ll continue to have these conversations. So my feeling is why not just record them? It’s not a heavy lift.
Kevin Rose: When you think back over say those last 10 years, there has to be, and not in a slamming way, but there has to be some really challenging interviews that you’ve had in terms of just like someone was just so sharp you couldn’t keep up or just like, “Oh, God, I was really hoping this would go better.” Any fun stories? Maybe not that this would go better, but who was just so sharp they just absolutely blew you away?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, there’s so many. There are a lot. Martine Rothblatt comes to mind as one who’s just incredibly, incredibly sharp. There are many others. I can tell you one where I was the most intimidated and it showed up in the recording, which was with Ed Catmull of Pixar at the time, who was the first person I interviewed who I had not had any previous contact with. And we got on, had no established rapport, of course. Very nice guy, very sharp. And I was so nervous. I’ll flash forward and give you the punchline on Twitter and other places I saw feedback, dozens of tweets that said something like, “Great podcast, but, mmm…” Like M-M-M, dot, dot, dot, M-M-M. And I was like, “What the fuck?” And I went back and I listened to it and every time Ed said anything I was like, “Mmm.” Super Japanese. I can say that. I used to live there and I was just like, “Wow, I am compulsively, nervously indulging myself with this tic.” And these days we would fix something like that. But at the time I was like, “Oh, still work to do.”
Kevin Rose: Who is the biggest, I have to say, I think I can probably guess this, but in terms of fanboy? Obviously Arnold now you’re best friends with. We see your pictures, you’re skiing, you guys play chess, you do all this shit together. Arnold must have been a huge one for you.
Tim Ferriss: Huge, huge.
Kevin Rose: But Hugh Jackman must have been —
Tim Ferriss: Also huge.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Huge Jackman. He’s a large man and everything you would hope him to be, as a side note. I would say there were a few inflection points in terms of guests because at the time celebrities on podcasts was pretty uncommon. And A-listers on podcasts are quite uncommon, I would say. Arnold was certainly one, that first conversation for me. Tony Robbins was also another that was a big one. And a lot of these folks did their first podcasts on The Tim Ferriss Show, which was also really fun for me. Jamie Foxx took a year and a half, two years to get booked and that just blew my mind. He is the ultimate performer on every level.
Jamie Foxx and Hugh Jackman, I would say, certainly standouts in terms of decathletes of entertainment. They can do everything. It’s incredible. So I’d say those stand out certainly as a couple of inflection points.
And it’s just been experiment after experiment and it’s very personally driven and that is to keep my interest high. And it’s also to try to counteract any impulse to chase Google trends and whatever might be in the news cycle. So for instance, there was a year where my first interview with Balaji went parabolic and completely insane in terms of downloads. Millions upon millions upon millions of downloads. And there was —
Kevin Rose: Is this one where he got a lot of predictions right?
Tim Ferriss: He did, yeah. He got a lot of predictions right.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: He got a lot of predictions right. I would say that in that particular case, we had an internal conversation and I think that you have to be very careful about your audience shaping you. You can become a caricature of your most extreme views or behaviors, and if you allow that to drive your behavior, you can become the mask that you wear. And I’ve seen that. We’ve both seen that with folks who have their most extreme views and headlines reinforced on, say, YouTube, and then they suddenly replicate that and emphasize it and they become that person. They become the actor on the stage. So you have to be careful about that.
And the impulse was to do more crypto, more crypto, more crypto. And I said, “No, we’re not going to do that. Actually, we’re going to do zero crypto for a while just to make it clear that our priorities for the show are a little bit different.” So I continue to be thrilled by the conversations. I’ve had a lot of fun and I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s interesting.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Because if it’s not interesting for me, that’s going to be clear to the people who listen. Do you know what I mean?
Kevin Rose: A hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: We’ve got a lot to talk about.
Tim Ferriss: We have a lot to talk about and we have much more limited time than we would normally have.
Kevin Rose: Yes. 47 minutes left.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s jump into it.
Kevin Rose: You want to start? You want me to start?
Tim Ferriss: You can start.
Kevin Rose: All right. So we’ve come up classic Random Show style with a handful of things to just BS about. Speaking of crypto, it’s having a moment again.
Tim Ferriss: It is.
Kevin Rose: Obviously very cyclical type environment. We’re back up, things are going crazy. I did something wild. And we always do this weird thing where we say, not weird, but important thing where we say not investment advice.
Tim Ferriss: Very important.
Kevin Rose: Over the years when you leave various jobs, you tend to have a little 401(k) sitting over here or if you’ve done a Roth IRA or something like that. The nice thing about the fact that we actually have ETFs now is that you can put actual crypto and you buy these actual ETFs that are crypto. We all saw that that got approved. And so what I decided to do was take all of those retirement accounts and there’s like three or four of them and just convert them all to Bitcoin ETFs. And this sounds crazy and I’m not saying that this is for everyone, because certainly I believe diversification —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not for everyone.
Kevin Rose: It’s not for everyone. But the nice thing about it is that at retirement you get all those gains tax-free. And the thing that people don’t know —
Tim Ferriss: If there are gains.
Kevin Rose: If there are gains. Yes, that’s right. If there are gains, but the thing that people don’t know is that there are so many competitive ETFs that are out there, right? You’ve got BlackRock, you’ve got Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, you’ve got probably another dozen or so and they all charge management fees. But if you take a look behind the scenes and you actually peel back who is providing the services underneath these just tickers, it’s largely Coinbase. Fidelity is the only one I think that does their own custody of actual crypto. There might be one or two others, but almost everyone is Coinbase on the backend.
So really at the end of the day, what you want is the lowest fee. And so Franklin Templeton has the lowest expense ratio of all of these. And so I just moved everything into Franklin Templeton’s ETF and just keep it that way. And then at retirement, 59 and a half, you get to start taking disbursements of that. And if there are gains, you get them tax-free. So it’s a fun little hack to do just if you want to see that upside over the next couple of decades, if there is upside, and take it out tax-free. Which is, I typically would never. Obviously if you’re just going to go buy and hold Bitcoin, why pay the fees?
There’s tons of exchanges you can go and pay less. You don’t have to pay an annual fee like you would with an ETF, but if you’re going to do it in a tax-free account, that makes a lot of sense.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: That’s my one little fun little thing I did the last couple of weeks. I’ve had a lot of fun little things the last couple of weeks, but that was one.
Tim Ferriss: What would be second place on the roster?
Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus. Well, we sold Proof. So with my NFT adventure —
Tim Ferriss: Congratulations.
Kevin Rose: — over the last two years, went to Yuga Labs, which I’m happy found a home at a place that is actually building what I consider to be a very high quality game with a micro economy and something that has some real legs to it that hopefully will turn into something that is durable and that is large.
They want to build, the quote I heard was Roblox for adults, which is an infrastructure where you can go and build and create worlds inside of a 3D environment that has its own built-in currency and economy powered by NFTs and actual assets inside of that world. So I realized finally, I came to the stage where after being a couple years in, I know I’m not the hardcore degen, I’m not going to be getting there on stage trying to tell people things —
Tim Ferriss: Tell people about crypto.
Kevin Rose: — [crosstalk] up and up and up and up. Yeah, well, I mean —
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: We talked about this at length a podcast ago, last time we did The Random Show, but I wanted to find a good home so it was no easy feat to go and work and try and find someone like Yuga who, if anyone’s going to make it, good Lord, I hope they do.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Kevin Rose: So that’s been a nice transition and new move.
Tim Ferriss: So personal question related to this, my experience as someone with front row seats to your entrepreneurial journey is every time you have an exit or finish a company, you say, “I’m never doing a company again.”
Kevin Rose: Never doing one again.
Tim Ferriss: Never again. And then six months later you start another company. So if you were me, what odds would you give Kevin Rose to sticking to that?
Kevin Rose: 99 percent I’m not going to start another company. No, I’m telling you. Well, here’s the thing. I realize this is the true story and people that have followed this stuff and I won’t —
Tim Ferriss: Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. No, more, more. Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. More, more.
Kevin Rose: Listen, you want to start going down some shit? He brought in tequila behind the scenes — you’re not supposed to.
Tim Ferriss: It’s all my fault.
Kevin Rose: We had a little bit of that.
Tim Ferriss: Such an enabler.
Kevin Rose: So there we go. We might get kicked offstage now. I had to come back with something. That’s all I’ve got.
Tim Ferriss: That’s all you’ve got. All he has.
Kevin Rose: So here’s the deal. The one thing I did realize with this startup, the two things, is that any time you tie finances to a startup, meaning people’s financial well-being, it is a whole ‘nother level of emotion that you get from people that are participating in what you do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Kevin Rose: And that’s the most challenging startup I’ve ever faced. And then the second thing I realized is that I love that early stage ideation coming up with the idea for Zero fasting early on before it was a thing, or Digg in the early days, I don’t like the scaling aspect. I appreciate the one woo out there. Somebody remembers Digg. But I don’t appreciate the scaling. I’m just not good at it. It’s not in my DNA to be able to manage the call it when you’re just getting started. It’s the 10 things you need to do and then you get to five to 10 people, 15 people, 20 people, and all of a sudden there’s emotions involved and not everyone’s up to speed.
There’s a lot more of the just logistical management of humans, which is challenging for me personally. I like the idea side of things. So yeah, I’m done. I’d much rather focus on things like content creation and hopefully finding and seeing around corners early enough with the podcast where we can expose people to the next big thing and they decide whether they want to get involved or not. Not me creating that next big thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for people who’ve been paying attention for a long time, Kevin has given previews of the future many, many times on The Random Show on this podcast. So I do think one of your superpowers is either super early stage or actually public market, super mature, but not in between. Not so much in between.
So I want to switch gears a little bit and mention something that I am incredibly excited about, which is the most impressive, let’s call it mental health intervention that I have encountered in the last 10 years. So as some of you may know, I’ve been very involved with supporting a lot of research, basic science and so on related to psychedelic compounds and psychedelic-assisted therapies. That has been because I believe they can really change the lenses through which we look at psychiatry, mental health, and so-called mental disorders completely, due to some of the effect sizes and durability of say, effects on complex PTSD, treatment-resistant depression and so on.
But I’m actually tool agnostic. Just like with startup investing, I’m looking for uncrowded bets with super high-leverage potential outcomes. I’m quite agnostic about the tools. And I will say, and you and I have talked about this privately a little bit, but in the last, let’s call it year, especially the last six months, I’ve done a very deep dive on a new iteration of an older technology, which is TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. So this is a type of brain stimulation. The technology has existed for a number of decades, but the protocols and the neuro targeting has advanced really quickly.
Kevin Rose: There was full subreddits where you could go and learn how to do it yourself at home.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t DIY this. Do not.
Kevin Rose: People were literally having burns on their skin from doing it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is Darwin Awards territory.
Kevin Rose: And you said “Try that.”
Tim Ferriss: Don’t do this guys, in part because you can make things a lot worse if you don’t do it the right way. But to jump to the punchline, I have gone through two rounds of something called accelerated TMS, and you can learn a lot about this by looking at a number of scientists including Nolan Williams out of Stanford. I did an interview with Nolan on the podcast for people who want to do a deep dive. And they developed what was previously known, it’s gone through some rebranding, the SAINT Protocol, which is a condensed protocol for administering TMS. So you have these magnets, they elicit, in this case theta bursts. And typically you might have TMS treatments over the span of many weeks, many months. They’re compressing 50 sessions into 10 days, or actually 50 sessions into five days, excuse me.
Kevin Rose: Pause for one second though. For people that don’t know, what does this look like for you? You said magnets, I’m thinking — I don’t know what I’m thinking, but what are you actually doing? Are you hooking shit up to your head? Are you in a lab? Are you doing it at home?
Tim Ferriss: No, you’re not doing it at home. So you are in a clinic or a lab and there are different iterations of this. So my first round was with a company called BrainsWay and they use a particular H7 coil, they’re developing new technologies, that’s effectively a helmet that you then attach to your head with a chin strap and based on specific targeting, depending on the condition you’re trying to address, which could be depression, treatment resistant depression, could be generalized anxiety disorder, could be OCD, any number of things.
Kevin Rose: ED.
Tim Ferriss: Right, ED. Sure.
Kevin Rose: Everybody’s got their thing.
Tim Ferriss: If there’s magnetic Viagra, then there’s a whole new business I need to invest in. So yeah, sure. And then the second round was with Magnus Ventures and a slightly different technology, but it effectively looks like a paddle that is placed on the head and they use computer vision and pretty sophisticated targeting. But the upshot of this is going into it, no one will be surprised. I remember when I had my first diagnostic interview with one of these psychiatrists and we went through this long multi-hour process and they said, “You score X, Y, and Z and it seems like you have moderate to severe OCD.” And they’re like, “This might take a little while. I know this is heavy news if you need to take a break.”
And I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is a surprise to no one. Let’s move on.” So I went in with pretty high assessment scores for, just to simplify the whole thing, OCD, which looking at my family, you’d be like, “Yeah, obviously.” And then anxiety and a lot of long-term listeners will know, bouts of depression. That also is pretty much genetically hardwired. Did these two sessions and with three months so far of durability, no longer meet any diagnostic criteria for any of those.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: It has been the most durable, noticeable on a day-to-day week-to-week basis change in my state that I’ve ever experienced.
Kevin Rose: If you care to share, can you give something like, let’s just say on the OCD side where you were doing it previously, you had the treatments and now it’s no longer a thing?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ll give examples. And I should say your mileage will vary and the sample sizes are still very, very small for accelerated TMS, which I’m an early stage guy too. I like to get involved, but there are many unknowns, many open questions. They’re still in, I want to say, thousands in terms of subjects. In some cases for, say, OCD, it’s probably fewer than 200 would be my guess. I’m making up some of these numbers, but I don’t think they’re very far off. So there’s still a lot to figure out. But as an example, I’ve had lifelong onset insomnia where my brain will just not quiet down. My mind is like, “I’ve been waiting all day to talk to you.” And it can take me an hour or two hours to fall asleep. In three months, that’s effectively gone to zero. None of that.
Kevin Rose: Shit, that’s crazy.
Tim Ferriss: The best sleep I’ve had in decades.
Kevin Rose: Do you look at Oura data as well to see, am I getting the proper deep sleep? Am I getting —
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t gone super granular. I recognize how that could be helpful in a sense, but I really feel like we can outsource our awareness to devices and metrics where it’s pretty —
Kevin Rose: Well, you know when you wake up too.
Tim Ferriss: If the effect size is large enough, it should be pretty obvious. And I will say just there are some people who respond inversely to this. It can worsen some people’s conditions. I’ve seen a number of lives transformed. We have the most data for depression by far, and if you talk to really competent, sophisticated psychiatrists who’ve looked, keep abreast of the latest technology, they’ll say, “Finally, TMS is delivering on what we hoped it would deliver. The promise is finally, finally we’re seeing some of the results we’re hoping to see.”
Kevin Rose: There’s been so many devices, even at-home devices that claim to do TMS that you can literally — I’ve seen them on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: But here’s the real question is, okay, obviously you did all of the proper due diligence around figuring out who’s the best of the best in this business that’s actually doing the real science. How soon until that actually propagates out to clinics where you would feel comfortable saying, “Okay, now’s the time when the average person can go and do this?”
Tim Ferriss: It’s hard to say, I will say on a widely distributed basis, but that’s also like Uber Black got all this criticism early on, and then those people subsidized the development of Uber X and over time cost went down and that’s how —
Kevin Rose: What’s the price?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I would say it ranges at this point, because insurance will not cover accelerated TMS, at least as far as I’m aware. From let’s call it, if we’re looking at competent, well-trained outfits who are vetted $5 to $15k for that five-day period. But here’s the thing, depending on your conditions, depending on your resources, if you were to ask me, “How much would you pay to go back 20 years and have this treatment,” I’d be like, “Take half my net worth. It’s fine.”
Kevin Rose: That big of change?
Tim Ferriss: The payoff is so noticeable. Now, it’s not a silver bullet, nor are psychedelic-assisted therapies, by the way. It’s not one shot, one kill with conditions. So most people will go back for boosters every three to six months for, say, a single day of treatment, not necessarily five days, but when I say effect size, people can look this up. But the magnitude of change and durability is so far beyond pretty much any conventional treatment that I can think of, especially if you exclude maintenance therapies that are really just covering symptoms or suppressing symptoms. I’m very, very excited about this. In terms of time, I couldn’t tell you, I think that it will be more widely available at retail where people pay out of pocket in the next six months to 12 months.
Kevin Rose: How will someone know if that has been the same thing that you are doing? Is there some type of certification or what do you look for? Because I’ve seen these types of clinics, I’ve seen it being offered in various places.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would look for people who have real clinical experience who are working with established hospitals and have some bona fides. There’s a lot of fly-by-night TMS operations, just like there are lots of rent-a-shamans on Craigslist and Facebook who did some weekend yoga course in Costa Rica and suddenly they’re going to save your soul. Probably not a great idea. Similarly, if it’s like, “Yeah, we run a dentist office and we offer TMS,” maybe you don’t do that. Or if people are like, “Yeah, we’ll fix your nails and give you semaglutide.” They’ll be mixed in the bathroom. Maybe you don’t do that. So I think common sense applies, but it has been really fascinating. And the reason you don’t want to DIY it, or one of the many, many reasons you don’t want to DIY it is that you’re dealing with very sensitive circuitry.
This whole thing in our heads, as far as I know, is powered on roughly the electricity of a light bulb. We really don’t know how it works, how we are able to function at such a high level. I suspect there are all sorts of, and this is true for all factions, but like quantum effects and many, many complicated mechanisms that we just do not understand. And when you’re applying a magnetic pulse to your brain, and this is simplified, but you’re either activating or deactivating, enhancing or suppressing some degree of activity or a network of activity. And if you screw that up, you can get the opposite of what you’re looking for.
Kevin Rose: Is there any real-time feeling? When you’re sitting there, are you seeing shit?
Tim Ferriss: It feels like someone flicking the side of your head. There are no visuals or anything, but you feel like someone’s flicking the side of your head and each day you feel like you ran a mental ultra marathon. If you were cramming for the LSATs every day for 15 hours straight, that is the degree of mental exhaustion. It’s very tiring.
Kevin Rose: Do you find that it’s improved your cognitive tasks? Are you able to —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Is there any performance-enhancing benefits to this as well?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I do think TMS is going to be used for performance enhancement. I think it could be used for sports enhancement in many things. So I do think especially in the world of anti-doping and so on, that athletes are going to start to use TMS pre-competition for enhancing, who knows, visual acuity reaction speed. That’s going to happen for sure, because you can already use TMS to change hypnotizability. If you want to make people more susceptible to being hypnotized, you can use this. It’s going to get super wild really quickly.
I will say that one thing I have noticed on the plus or negative side, depending on how you look at it, is that I’ve been so much less productive in the last few months.
Kevin Rose: You seem really chill right now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, super chill. Here’s what I would say. I wouldn’t trade the productivity for my current sense of calmness. And I was chatting with a therapist about this and they said, “Well, I think for a lot of people, that anxiety is used as a fuel to work to basically run away from things, not run towards things.” And I was like, “Yeah, I could see that.” That doesn’t seem shocking to me. So a question I’ve tried to ask myself with a lot of different projects is, am I running away from something or am I running towards something? That seems a very important distinction to make. And also another reason not to DIY this, is in a lot of cases, you are, let’s just say in the case of anxiety, so you have too much fight or flight or freeze, let’s just say. So you want to dampen that a little bit so you can move around without being a head case.
Okay, great. You still need some of that fight or flight in your life, so you can over dampen that. Or maybe you want to increase your parasympathetic response. This is going to be very personal. I didn’t really think I would talk about this publicly, but so there’s a shorthand in medical school, they say point and shoot. In other words, parasympathetic to get an erection, sympathetic to orgasm. Both of those are really important. So after I got my sympathetic smashed, I couldn’t orgasm for two weeks, and I was freaking the fuck out. I was like, “Did I just completely screw up my hard-wiring? I’m never going to orgasm again? That seems like a high tax to pay. Ah, fuck.”
Kevin Rose: Was the engine there?
Tim Ferriss: Scary moment.
Kevin Rose: You didn’t have a problem with the thing?
Tim Ferriss: The point, no.
Kevin Rose: No. Okay. It was just the finish.
Tim Ferriss: It was the shoot that was the problem. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Jesus, man.
Tim Ferriss: So that could freak you out. Or let’s say —
Kevin Rose: This is classic Tim Ferriss, early trying the craziest.
Tim Ferriss: I’m taking the bullet so other people don’t necessarily have to, but these are all reasons why you don’t want to buy a kit on Amazon and just start zapping your brain while you’re watching Netflix.
Kevin Rose: Unless you’re fast and you need to slow down.
Tim Ferriss: If somebody else wants to run that N-of-1, knock yourself out. But I’m not going to do that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. All right.
Tim Ferriss: Anyway, moving on.
Kevin Rose: So last question and then we can move on. Is there a website or anything where you went? Where did you go? If someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “I want to go where Tim went?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is where I would like to have, and this is not for any reason other than I’m going to defer on that just because I want to have some more experience. Also, I want to do a follow-up. I want to see what the durability looks like before I start recommending outfits.
Kevin Rose: I appreciate that.
Tim Ferriss: So I will do that. I’ll have more to say about this, but for people who want to do a deep dive, Dr. Nolan Williams and the podcast that I did with him touches a lot of this. I will also say just a quick note, which is there are some theories around, say, depression, which are not chemically focused. So instead of like, “Oh, serotonin imbalance, this imbalance,” which is a little antiquated in a bunch of senses, it’s not that it isn’t a non-variable, but it doesn’t seem to be the primary determinant, it could be that different structures in the brain are firing out of sequence, and you can use the TMS to correct that sequence.
So instead of firing like BAC, it’s like, “Oh, well, let’s slightly tweak that system so it’s firing in what we see in normal healthies, which is ABC.” Pretty interesting to be able to basically just reset the trip wire sequence. So something I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the next handful of years, and it is better tolerated than most medications, from a risk profile perspective, for most people. In very rare cases, it can trigger seizures. There are adverse side effect potentials, but for the vast majority, very well tolerated. So I’m excited about it because for instance, psychedelic-assisted therapies, contraindicated for lots of people. There are many people who should not take this or engage in that type of therapy. Too many risks involved. People with say borderline personality disorder with family history of schizophrenia, et cetera. But they wouldn’t necessarily be automatically excluded from doing something like accelerated TMS. So that’s exciting to me.
Kevin Rose: All right. We’ve got 22 minutes left.
Tim Ferriss: What you got?
Kevin Rose: Then they’re cutting us off. So one of the things that dawned on me at South by Southwest, and I’m curious to get, we’ll do a poll at some point here, but one of the things that’s really challenging, at least for me personally, is when we go to these events or you go to events and gathering social gatherings, I am okay on stage. I’m okay interviewing folks, but I actually don’t like social events. I get a little anxiety around them, and it’s largely because it’s a lot of —
Tim Ferriss: Thank God you had the tequila beforehand.
Kevin Rose: Exactly. The social lubricant does help, but it’s largely because it’s a lot of small talk, like, “What do you do for a living,” like this and that.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Kevin Rose: I had this fantastic guest, Charles Duhigg, recently on the podcast just a couple days ago.
Tim Ferriss: Great author.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, fantastic, called [Supercommunicators]. How many people have a hard time at events? Raise of hands, just out of curiosity. A lot of people. It’s a challenging thing. And so those icebreakers and all that shit, I don’t know what to say. And this author was fantastic. So [Supercommunicators] is the book that I just am in the process of reading right now, and it’s really about a couple of things. One, how can you get to a deep conversation quickly, and then how to build trust with the person you’re having a conversation with.
And that can be used for relationships like first dates, it can be used for eventually working business partnerships. How is trust actually formed in terms of social interactions? And a lot of it comes down to the questions that you ask and actually the follow-up questions that you ask, and then the reciting of what the person said to make them know that you actually heard what they were saying. And so it’s just a fascinating, fun topic. And I was just curious, is that something that you’ve ever had issues with or have you ever studied how to create these lasting, long, bonded kind of connections with other humans?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think about it all the time.
Kevin Rose: You really?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, for sure. And I also, I can pretend to be the extrovert and play the extrovert on stage like this where I’m safely at a distance talking to one person in front of a lot of people, but I am very introverted. You’ve seen this, where it’s like if I’m at a big group dinner, I’ll take 20 bathroom breaks. And it’s not because my prostate is old, it’s because I need to do Lamaze breathing in the bathroom, be like, “Okay, I’m okay.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Smile and I can get back out there. So I’ve thought about this a lot because what I’ve found also is that if you study this type of thing, it makes you more comfortable and less overwhelmed in these circumstances.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So it is not only helping the person or making the person across from you feel more comfortable. In my case, it helps me feel a lot more comfortable. So what have you learned from this book? Are there any particular —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, there’s a couple of things. One is —
Tim Ferriss: — questions, follow up questions?
Kevin Rose: One is that —
Tim Ferriss: If you were a breakfast cereal, what would you be?
Kevin Rose: Not that question, but that was a good first podcast question. The one thing that you do is you write down five things that you could talk about when you’re at this event or questions that you might want to ask. And there was this research study that was done that people that wrote down these questions and they put them in their pocket, they never used the questions, but it put them at ease knowing that they had the backups in their pocket, and then it led to more natural conversation.
And then the second thing is just really going in and being naturally curious about the person and asking, if you were saying, “Hey, I just tried this new brain stimulation technique,” it’d be like, “Oh, that sounds really fun.” That’s a dead end to that, right? You would say, “Well, I’ve read a little bit about this, but can you tell me more about how it’s actually helped you?”
Tim Ferriss: Like what you just did.
Kevin Rose: Yes, exactly. I was actually ninja-ing in on you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I feel very at ease with you.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I’m not going to go anywhere. I could go there. But it is one thing where there’s these little tactics, but the interesting thing is you’re not faking it. Because the first thing I asked him, I was like, “Well, that feels like you’re faking it and you’re just like, ‘Oh, I’ve got these tactics and I’m going to go use these tactics.’” And he goes, “No. Once you start using these, you build a muscle and you get comfort, and then it naturally just happens to where you can walk into a social setting and you’ll have that muscle and the comfort is there, the anxiety is gone.” And it flips it from something that is like, “Should I go to this event or not?” to, “I can actually thrive at this event.” Because for me, you walk out of an event and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I just ran a marathon.”
You feel emotionally drained, and it turns it into something that is actually, you probably have a friend where they walk out of events and you’re like — like Gary Vaynerchuk, like, “How the fuck does he do what he does?” The dude —
Tim Ferriss: He’s got different batteries. Different batteries. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: He’s got different batteries.
Tim Ferriss: Different batteries.
Kevin Rose: And you watch someone like that and you’re like, “How do you feed off of that versus getting drained from it?” And there’s a lot of tactics there. So anyway, I just want to throw it out as a fun book to tune into, and it was a really fun podcast that we did.
Tim Ferriss: This is a side note, which is related to something you said about having the backup topics and then never using them.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: A friend of mine, Neil Strauss, who I’ve known forever, very, very funny, skilled author. He was also a journalist for a long time and interviewed dozens of the top celebrities and politicians and so on of the era, and he would do tons of tons of prep. He would have all these questions written out on a piece of paper, he’d fold it up, put it in his pocket, never look at it for the interview, and it was just to have that confidence and comfort going in.
Kevin Rose: Well, if you hit a dead end, you’ve got something to fall back on, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and I would also say quite apart from that, part of how I have resolved for myself some of the social anxiety is just assume that anyone you meet, everyone knows everyone in the sense that if you go to a party with 30 people and you talk to one person for the whole night, that is not a waste of time. Even if you misfire, over time having that habit, it’s a very small world.
Kevin Rose: Oh, here’s a good one. Speaking of talking to one person, have you ever found yourself in a conversation where you’re like, “I’ve got to get out of this conversation,” right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: You want to move on to the next person?
Tim Ferriss: Abort. Abort.
Kevin Rose: This is a really good hack actually. He told me, he said —
Tim Ferriss: “Do you want to do some heroin?” And they’re like, “What?”
Kevin Rose: Exactly, exactly. You offer them heroin. They’re like, “I’m going to go that way.” No, what you do, this is a brilliant one. It was one of my favorite ones that he dropped on my podcast at kevinrose.com. What he did is he said that what you can do is, what you want to do is you want to go in there and you want to say, “Hey, listen, I have some other people here that I need to go have a conversation with, but I want to ask you one more thing about what you were just saying,” because then it’s not that I’m not interested in what you are saying. You’re not just dismissing yourself. You’re saying, “I’m going to do this thing, but tell me a little bit more about what was so interesting about you,” which is a really fascinating little hack.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good softening. Instead of like, “Hey, my cat’s on fire. I’m so sorry.”
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I want to give people a little Scooby snack, which is totally unrelated to zapping brains or point and shoot. This is if people want to hear something that 99 percent of you will hate, I’ll give it to you anyway. This was, I’ll give credit to S, I’m not going to mention her full name, but there’s a band called Jinjer, J-I-N-J-E-R. This is a Ukrainian metal core band. It is super hardcore. The range is impressive with the vocalists involved. It’s very hardcore, but this was introduced to me and I’ve been listening to it. “Pisces,” let’s start with that track, and so if you want something really strange to listen to, you’re welcome.
Kevin Rose: This is The Random Show.
Tim Ferriss: It’s The Random Show. Got to live up to the name.
Kevin Rose: Okay, I’m going to give you one then. Sohn, S-O-H-N.
Tim Ferriss: Ah, yes.
Kevin Rose: The artist, Sohn.
Tim Ferriss: You’ve been texting me nonstop about Sohn.
Kevin Rose: Sohn is amazing. Underrated. He’s got some tracks that have millions of views, but underrated, amazing music just to chill out to. So S-O-H-N.
Tim Ferriss: S-O-H-N. Also the name of a great finance conference, unrelated.
Kevin Rose: All right.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Android/Gemini. I want to hear about this.
Kevin Rose: Well, yeah. Okay. I’ll hit one real quick. You hit one real quick and then we’re coming up on time.
Tim Ferriss: We got 14 minutes.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s true. Every six months I try to move to Android and I fail and it sucks. I really want to do it, and I get the phone and I’m like, “Okay, I’m excited.” This is the first time where I installed the beta for Gemini and Gemini is their AI stuff, right? Their ChatGPT competitor. Gemini sucked six months ago. Not even that, three months ago. It was horrible. It’s got a lot better, and no doubt. It’s Google, right? You’re going to throw some serious resources at this and figure out this problem. They did this update where you can actually integrate it into and replace the assistant on your phone now, much in the way that you can assign to the new Apple iPhone, you can take this new button that’s in the corner, the action button and assign it to the ChatGPT.
Tim Ferriss: I saw him using this in the green room.
Kevin Rose: We had a disagreement about —
Tim Ferriss: Actually, I was very impressed.
Kevin Rose: — milligrams in coffee, caffeine.
Tim Ferriss: There were a few hallucinations.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But it was pretty convincing up until the punchline.
Kevin Rose: But the crazy thing is that for the first time I realized that I can’t move to Android full time because of the freaking bubbles, the green bubbles. But aside from that, I will say that it was providing me insights that were actionable, relevant, and unexpected, which I thought was just fascinating. I’ll give an example. I was supposed to head to the airport to catch a flight to come out here, and I’m with my family, with my kids. I want to say goodbye to my girls. Getting to LAX from my house is about an hour-ish and change. You never know. And I got a notification, it was like, “Hey, we saw on your calendar the flight. We know that with the time you have to leave, this is your check-in, this is your carousel, and you actually have an extra 30 minutes.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” That was all proactive. And you ask Siri something, you’re like, “Hey, how many points did Steph Curry score last night?” And sometimes —
Tim Ferriss: “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Or it’s like, “Here’s your results from the web.” And you’re like, “Gee, thanks. Okay. I could have Googled that, Siri.” But Gemini now is giving you all that shit in real time.
Tim Ferriss: That’s great. It’s great.
Kevin Rose: And I’m like, “It’s on.” Apple has to really go hard, as obviously they are, and they just haven’t announced it yet, but it’s getting pretty awesome. I’m excited for the future of what this is going to bring.
Tim Ferriss: Also, translation and simultaneous translation of our conversation on Android is incredibly impressive and it’s going to get better. It’s only going to get better.
Kevin Rose: This is a true story. Right now, yesterday I saw my podcast fully translated into Spanish and Japanese in my voice and in my guest’s voice, and then I have another company that is doing the lips perfectly, and so now they —
Tim Ferriss: You have very supple lips.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, they’re very plump. I get the injections. I don’t. That’ll just be pulled out and put on Twitter.
Tim Ferriss: It’s going to be on my YouTube.
Kevin Rose: They’ll be released actually in all these other languages. And I’m imagining you’re going to be doing that at some point soon.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s surprisingly straightforward. It’s wild.
Kevin Rose: We’ll all be hitting a global audience in every product and everything we do in the next two to three years.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the sheer volume of content production is going to be so outrageous that I think there are going to be a number of secondary, tertiary effects, including I think the half-life of fame is going to go down dramatically. There’s not going to be another Oprah who has command over half of a country with a show like that, and the decay rate is going to be really fast, which I’m looking forward to personally.
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. There’s some —
Tim Ferriss: This public thing gets a little tiring.
Kevin Rose: What do you think about Jake Paul and Tyson?
Tim Ferriss: If I’ve read some — oh, God. Okay, so if we’re going to —
Kevin Rose: Would you get up into the ring with Tyson?
Tim Ferriss: Tyson is 57 years old. He’s in incredibly good shape, given everything.
Kevin Rose: Did you watch those clips of him punching? He’s still got some serious —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in the tight turquoise shorts.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I hope he wears those shorts when he fights. So, yes. Look, I don’t want to fight Tyson. I have heard rumors they’re going to require headgear and 18 ounce gloves.
Kevin Rose: That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. They can’t do that.
Tim Ferriss: That gives too much advantage to the young buck with more endurance. I’d say if you’re going to fight, make it a real boxing match.
Kevin Rose: If someone said, “Tim, you don’t ever have to podcast again, $200 million dollars, step in with Tyson.”
Tim Ferriss: No. No. Absolutely not.
Kevin Rose: Dude, you wouldn’t take two rounds?
Tim Ferriss: You take one punch from a professional fighter and the TBI, you’re not going to be able to count afterwards.
Kevin Rose: Well, you’ve got your magnets and shit, you’ll be fine.
Tim Ferriss: Got my magnets. Yeah, no, I need no more head trauma in my life.
Kevin Rose: I think Tyson’s going to kick his ass.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: I respect the guy because he went from YouTuber to legit fighter. No doubt.
Tim Ferriss: He would make a very good —
Kevin Rose: He’s a serious fighter.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s a serious fighter. I would say if it is to be a credible fight, no headgear and regulation-size boxing gloves. Having spent some time doing this kind of stuff, if you make them the giant sumo costume protective outfits —
Kevin Rose: No one wants to watch that though. There can’t be headgear.
Tim Ferriss: No. People watch it. People will watch it. But if you have all those protective mechanisms in place, it discounts the power and it rewards the speed and endurance, and that’s going to favor a younger fighter.
Kevin Rose: Tyson’s not going to wear headgear, but he is?
Tim Ferriss: I’m saying just the rumors I’ve heard is that both of them wore both, but that negates the advantage that Tyson has and should have in such a fight.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: My opinion.
Kevin Rose: It’s going to be crazy.
Tim Ferriss: So make it real. If you’re going to do it, make it a real fight. So let’s see. Let’s take a look at —
Kevin Rose: I wish we could do some audience questions, but we didn’t set that up ahead of time.
Tim Ferriss: We didn’t set it up ahead of time. Oh, here, I got one we should touch on since we talked about point and shoot. Do you want to talk about Kevin’s deflated balls? That’s my line-up here.
Kevin Rose: That’s your notes? Yeah, we can. Thanks, Tim. Appreciate that. How do we even go into this? So one of the things that I find fascinating is these GLP-1 inhibitors that they’re going around the Ozempic and the —
Tim Ferriss: Mounjaro.
Kevin Rose: — Mounjaro.
Tim Ferriss: Et cetera.
Kevin Rose: Because it’s going to change everything. They’re talking about, honestly, with as much weight loss as it’s going to happen over the next decade, the cost of flights will go down because there’ll be less weight to actually — these are where they’re going with this. It’s insane.
Tim Ferriss: A lot of the major retailers budgeting for decreased snack consumption.
Kevin Rose: Yes, it’s crazy. So one of the things that people don’t know about this is that these started off not as weight loss drugs, people probably know this, but as type two diabetes drugs. And so they’re primarily used for glucose control and one of the things that I’ve always had an issue with, I went to Attia a decade ago and he tested —
Tim Ferriss: Peter Attia, also a great podcast.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, fantastic. Attia is great. The Drive podcast is fantastic. He made me do something called a glucose tolerance test. You drink a big sugary drink and you watch how quickly your body can dispose of the glucose. Unfortunately, mine’s really shitty. It takes me a long time to get the glucose out. And so these drugs were always interesting to me from that point of view. How can I have better glucose control? Largely because my dad died of a heart attack, my grandfather died of a stroke. Cardiovascular disease is rampant on my father’s side, and this is data we asked ChatGPT earlier. No, it’s real data though. You can go on their website. There’s a 20 percent reduction in cardiovascular events for people that are on these drugs.
Tim Ferriss: Even accounting for the weight loss.
Kevin Rose: Even taking account and controlling for the weight loss. And so I tried it a long time ago with Attia just because I was curious, this was six years ago, and you definitely lose your beer gut, which is great. Drew, I see in the audience, we like our beer and our drinks. Drew’s awesome. It does help on that front in the vanity front. But for me, I would wear a Dexcom and my glucose was just stable as hell, which was amazing, and I like the cardioprotective benefits of it. I didn’t want to stay on it because you lose muscle mass.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that was going to be the question.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So Attia started talking about this and saying, “Hey, I don’t put people on this because you lose muscle mass,” so what do you have to do? You have to go and do testosterone.
Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear, you lose muscle mass because you’re not eating.
Kevin Rose: Right, protein.
Tim Ferriss: In a lot of cases people are not consuming enough protein, nor calories.
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly. So you’re not getting enough protein, so you lose muscle mass, and so you can do testosterone replacement therapy to counter it. It’s a whole mess. But if you do, you’ve done testosterone replacement therapy.
Tim Ferriss: Did it post-surgery, yeah, I did a whole cocktail of things.
Kevin Rose: You’ve never had a little juice on the side?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: You hang out with Arnold, dude. You never had a little?
Tim Ferriss: It’s not like we’re having omelets and steroids for breakfast. No. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I think that post-surgery for certain instances and so on, I think it’s indicated. I think people need to be aware of the risks that they’re taking and post psychotherapy and various things that they need to take into account.
Kevin Rose: But well, if you do it also, you lose a lot of things down there. Your balls shrink down, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they turn into Raisinets, just as a side note.
Kevin Rose: Raisinets, yeah. So anyway, it is a balance. This longevity thing is a really tricky thing, and the thing for me is I’ve never wanted to be someone that — I don’t believe in living forever. I don’t want to do that. I just want to see my kids grow up. I’m an older dad. At the end, if I die at 75 or 80 —
Tim Ferriss: You’re an older dad? I’ve still got all the [inaudible].
Kevin Rose: What’s that?
Tim Ferriss: I said you’re an older dad!
Kevin Rose: I am an older dad.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know. I have some catch up to do is what I’m saying.
Kevin Rose: Oh, speaking of which —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.
Kevin Rose: No, you wanted to cover it, son.
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: You’re single.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. I am.
Kevin Rose: I actually hear, there’s surprisingly some ladies in the audience, which is amazing. Meet Tim Ferriss, he is signing books. No, how’s that going, dude? What’s it like now these days?
Tim Ferriss: Look, anyone here who’s participating in modern dating I think would agree that it’s pretty fucking bizarre. So look, there’s some amazing people out there. It is also, I think depending on your standards, one of my friends, I won’t name him, but he was like, “Oh, you and your standards,” but if you have reasonable standards, it is like finding a needle in the haystack because you’re starting from all the apps or all the humans in the world. So I think you need to have pretty tight criteria if you’re going to make that remotely tackleable. Dating on one hand is very fun, and on the other hand, it’s incredibly exhausting.
Kevin Rose: How low do you go? Just out of curiosity.
Tim Ferriss: How low do I go? What are you talking about?
Kevin Rose: I get how that could be taken a few different ways.
Tim Ferriss: As low as necessary.
Kevin Rose: Let’s just say somebody’s a fan. You’ve got one taker, you’ve got one taker later. That was quite the scream.
Tim Ferriss: Not against it. I’m not upset.
Kevin Rose: At your age. No. Are you going, what is it, 27, 30, 32?
Tim Ferriss: I would say — oh, God. All right. So I would say 28 plus is what I’m looking for. I want someone who has a reasonably formed identity and has demonstrated the ability to handle hard things in life and so on and so forth. If somebody is still really on the path to establishing in their own minds who they are, I think there’s a lot of risk in that. Because people develop in different directions and it’s good to see someone who’s reached some point of confidence in themselves and they have a degree of self-awareness in who they are, what they like, what they don’t like.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That takes time.
Kevin Rose: I will say one thing behind closed —
Tim Ferriss: But it could also be quite a bit above that. I’m not married to that, but I would say the lower bound.
Kevin Rose: But you also want kids.
Tim Ferriss: I also want kids, so that’s a whole hot third rail that I’m not sure I want to touch. It gets people very upset. But yeah, there are some biological realities for sure.
Kevin Rose: One of the things I will say that I do really respect about you is I’ve had the chance, as have you, to bump into a bunch of celebrities over our time in just mingling with folks. And when you get to a certain state of notoriety, it’s easier to date. And one of the things that you’ve always said to me is you want someone that is challenging you intellectually, and you’ve always had these really high standards in all the right ways.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not necessarily a canvassing Mensa for my next chess partner type of situation. The last thing I want is to date me with long hair. That’s a nightmare.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s scary.
Tim Ferriss: Let me jump off a building now and end it before it gets bad. But what I’m looking for is someone I can admire. There should be mutual admiration and the reasons for that can be many, but it’s somebody that impresses you, that you admire, which is very different from respecting. Respecting can have a negative connotation or an obligation feel to it. Whereas admiration, you can’t force that. You can’t do that because other people demand it. It’s a very organic thing, so I’m certainly looking for that. I’d say we’re going to get yelled at, but we can push a little bit.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, we can push it.
Tim Ferriss: No, we can push a little bit.
Kevin Rose: You got another 60 seconds?
Tim Ferriss: You guys okay with another five minutes?
Kevin Rose: All right.
Tim Ferriss: All right. We’ll go a little bit longer. To shift gears just a little bit, just because you mentioned something that has been on my mind a lot, if this might be helpful to anyone, lifespan, life extension. This is in the water. A lot of people are talking about it. A lot of people are obsessing over it, and a lot of folks are, mostly tech males if I’m being frank, but a lot of people are interested in not dying, so there is that. But there is a lot of bandwidth, a lot of money being allocated to thinking about life extension. And I would recommend, we mentioned Peter Attia earlier, Outlive, his book, talks a lot about healthspan, not just lifespan. Take a look at that. But on a very different level, I’ve been thinking a lot about experiential lifespan. So I think most people in this audience have probably experienced varying degrees of time dilation where maybe you go on an extended hike, maybe you take a few days to do X, Y, and Z.
Maybe it was during COVID because of everything that was changing minute to minute where you have, for periods of time, an increased frame rate. It’s your normal frame rate, I’m making this up, is 24 frames per second, but then you go to a thousand frames per second and an hour or a day or a week can feel like months. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how you can engineer that and schedule that in your life. And if you say schedule three or four things that produce this time dilation for you, if that say just based on the frame rate, expands your year experientially to be an additional three months, even if you don’t extend your max lifespan, you’ve extended your max experiential lifespan really significantly.
Kevin Rose: So what’s been your strategy for that?
Tim Ferriss: Because there are a lot of miserable fucks who want to live forever. Let’s be honest. I hate to say it, but it’s just like, “Oh, wow, you just want to make this painful journey as long as possible.”
Kevin Rose: Okay, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s one way to go about it. How do I what?
Kevin Rose: So what are your strategies for that? What is your — we all agree, as you get older, it seems like time is just compressing and going faster and faster.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There are a few things and there’s a great article from Johns Hopkins University Magazine called “Awestruck,” which I actually put on my blog because it resonated with me so clearly. I recommend people check that out because I do think awe, and there are assessments, of course, for ranking your experience of awe in different environments, but it’s worth thinking about because I do think it correlates to this time dilation. There are a few things that hop to mind. For me, extended time off the grid in, say, a mountainous environment seems to produce that.
Being in seasonal environments as opposed to in one place, say your experience in an equatorial place or someplace like Costa Rica, for instance, for a lot of people it seems much faster. Time passes faster than it does in a place with seasons, as one example. Another would be the last few months I was in the mountains and I was skiing for a half of each day, and you’re changing locations a lot and people have probably experienced this, where if you’re at South by Southwest and you change locations, you go to 10 different places in one day, even if that’s just eight hours, it feels longer than if you’re sitting at your kitchen table pecking away at email for that equivalent period of time. The experience of time is different.
So changing locations, that’s something you can very easily plan into your life. There’s certain states, of course, I’m not going to recommend this, it’s, like I mentioned, contraindicated for a lot of people, but certain psychedelic experiences certainly can produce this. But it’s not exclusive to that at all, right? If you’ve been, for instance, places that have a pervasive feeling of vastness, for instance, Montana, you go there, or Alaska, it just feels bigger. The sky and everything seems vaster, and that has an effect on your sensory experience that changes, I think for me, at least my perception of time. Lots of nonverbal stuff, interacting with animals, that’s a whole separate conversation. I’m thinking of those wolves.
Kevin Rose: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Tim Ferriss: With the birds landing on his arms. Yeah. Yeah. My experience with the wolves, certainly. So there are ways that you can engineer this, but I think that the most practical way to go about it is just to look back at the last two years, identify where you experienced these peak moments of awe and try to figure out what the characteristics are, the shared characteristics. I think this is a major unlock because frankly, humans have been trying to figure out the code of immortality and the fountain of youth forever. It hasn’t worked yet. I hate to be the one to deliver the news, and I don’t think we’re going to figure it out in the next 50 years. Maybe people would say that’s pessimistic. I think I would rather be pleasantly surprised when it works than to bank on it and have it not work. So in the meantime, there are some really straightforward things you can do.
Kevin Rose: Let me throw out one last little hack before we go that is related to this. Have you had Suneel Gupta on your show yet?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: He’s awesome. He’s a fantastic, just, human. And he wrote this book recently. It’s about the wisdom of Dharma and ancient techniques, tying back to India and how we can incorporate them into modern life. One of the things that he did some research on was these people that just have this energy that every day they just keep going. They just have this unbound energy. And one of the people that is like, this is Martha Stewart in her 80s. So people say that Martha Stewart, now in her 80s, has more energy than she did when she was younger. And they went back and they asked her, “What’s the secret here? How’d you do this?” And it’s breaks in the day and it’s like breaking up, don’t do back-to-back meetings. But taking 10 minutes to get outside to go for that walk for the day to break it up and actually you will de-stress yourself and also the day will seem fuller and longer.
But the interesting hack was that if you ever say, “Hey, we’re going to do a meeting, Tim and I, we’re going to jump on a call and you know what? I’m going to end 10 minutes early. It’s going to be from 1:00 to 1:50 instead of from 1:00 to 2:00,” it never ends that way, right? You always go till two o’clock. What he does is he starts his meetings 10 minutes late. So the meeting starts 10 minutes after the hour.
Tim Ferriss: That’s smart.
Kevin Rose: So he always gets that break. I thought it was brilliant.
Tim Ferriss: That’s smart.
Kevin Rose: And it’s another fantastic book to read.
Tim Ferriss: So to underscore that, I would say if you feel rushed, your time is going to feel compressed.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Seems self-evident, but it’s taken me a lifetime to figure this out. So there are a bunch of things you can do. That’s part of the reason, honestly, I don’t think there’s any magic to, say, transcendental meditation, but taking 20 minutes as a break twice a day.
Kevin Rose: I do The Way every day.
Tim Ferriss: What does that force you to do? It forces you to realize that if I stop for 20 minutes twice a day, my world does not completely fall apart, and you end up feeling less rushed. And I think it’s that cumulative enforced realization as much as the mantra and all this other stuff that is so helpful for folks. So it’s helpful for me at the very least. Anything else? We should probably vacate the stage.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think that’s it. We should plug The Way though. Our friend Henry’s meditation app.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it.
Kevin Rose: It’s a great 10 minutes a day to spend. Henry’s got a great meditation app that —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Henry is super legit. He’s been on my podcast twice. He’s been on your podcast. Henry Shukman, S-H-U-K-M-A-N, also has some —
Kevin Rose: It’s a good way to take 10 minutes and have a break.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. I guess that’s it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Thank you, everyone.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks, everybody.
Kevin Rose: Appreciate it.
Tim Ferriss: Really appreciate it.
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The main language in Japan is Japanese, but in major tourist cities you can find some places where people speak English.