Music Kefkef, good to see you man. Tim Tim. Look at this. In the flesh. In the flesh like grownups. Sitting at a table in Austin. Cheers man. Look at this. We're together. Love it. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Happy early New Year's. I suppose.
This is quite good. That's sippin. This is sippin. Yeah. So this is something that I've had on previous random shows, but I don't think I've talked about it too much. Mm hmm. This is Lalo Tequila and Lalo Tequila. Full disclosure. It's my first and only alcohol related investment. I was first introduced to this at a fantastic restaurant here in Austin called Swerte. Excellent restaurant. I feel like you've talked about this place before. It's great. Maybe I should go there tonight.
In excellent restaurant. Was it hard to get in or no? Not too bad and there is typically some walk-in available. They reserve some space for walk-ins. Sweet. And I went there for the first time with Chase Jarvis. Mm hmm. Love to chase. And I had not seen Chase in ages. He was coming in from out of town, wanted to do something. Tex-Mexi ended up at Swerte and we wanted to have tequila because we both liked tequila. Asked what the server most recommended and he recommended something I'd never heard of. This Lalo. And I ended up really liking it. Both of us bought a bottle. Turns out that the namesake, so Lalo is the grandson of Don Julio. Oh, crazy.
And this is additive-free. It is matured in the plant instead of in barrels. So it's a Blanco. Only Blanco. They don't sell anything non-Blanco. And they harvest from more mature plants. So for a lot of the larger scale operations, they harvest one could argue prematurely and then they try to add a little razzle-dazzle with additives. And the way that they use the barrels. And instead of doing that, they're letting the plant do the work. So this particular tequila, for me at least, is a very clean drink. And I know this is a topic. Dijur, of course. Alcohol. No alcohol. And I find a place for it. And then about six months, nine months later, a year later, out of the blue, a friend of mine reached out to does a lot of CPJ. So consumer packaged good stuff. He's a genius when it comes to both operating and investing. He's one of the best I've ever seen. And he said, I'm not sure if you've ever heard of this particular brand, but would you have any interest in looking at Lalo? And I was like, yes, I would because I drank it all the time. And that's how it came together.
And that was going to be my question for you because I feel like so many of us have had something that we've used in life and said, gosh, I wish I was an investor here. Like have you done that with multiple companies? Has there been something where you said, this is so great, I have to invest? And then if so, what is your strategy to get to that point where you can become friends of the founder, talk about around, you are better at doing this than I am. You're one of the best I've seen back when Twitter is usable. Sorry. But I remember Twitter and you've used pretty much every channel available. You're very generous and sincere when you find something you love, you share it. Add value first. Yes. And you are able to get the attention of founders historically. I've seen you do this over and over again. And often I'll do that.
So these days for me, if I find something and I will sometimes look at either my credit card statement or the stuff I use the most and run down the list to see if there's anything I might want to invest in, for instance. And there are a few that got away. There are a bunch of the got away, right? Like one password. I should have. And I knew the guys and they ended up raising money maybe a year or two ago. A good, a million dollars. There's massive. There's great guys. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, if I had just and I didn't want to, because it didn't feel right. But if I'd pushed just a little bit more, maybe could have done something. There are many stories like that that I could tell.
But these days I would say I try to be helpful. So I will take something and if it's good, I'm like, look, even if I don't end up being involved with the company, I want to help about products. Fantastic. So I might put it in the newsletter. I might mention it on the podcast. Do something like that. Yeah.
One of the things that you hear these stories every once in a while, I remember when Facebook was getting off the ground, Zuck wanted a mural painted. You know this story. I do, but you should tell it anyway. The artist actually at that time said, you know, don't pay me in cash, pay me in stock. And that's oftentimes a very good strategy where you say, hey, I might not have the capital to go invest in this thing, but I have a skill. And that skill is somehow going to be useful to this company. If I can make friends with them, then at some point, you know, it's not, it's like, let's share the upside together. Totally. And you can, you don't have to ask for a big massive percentage, but you can say, hey, can I, is there some options available that I can have? And that can work. I mean, for that guy, I think it turned into like a billionaire or something like that. That was something crazy. At least several hundred million dollars. David Cho, who's fascinating. He has done some incredible and hilarious things. He's a very funny guy. I'm very, very creative. I don't know, but I've read that story so many times. He had a podcast called, I think it was DVDA, Double Vadge Double Annual with, wow, Asa Akira, who's a porn star. And I, it may have all been taken down, but he is a polymath. He's an incredible artist, incredible actor also. That could be named your show. No one tried to come up with names for your show. Instead of Tim Tim talk, you know, his close runner up. We all have to make, we all have to make decisions.
有一件事,你时不时会听到这样的故事,我记得当Facebook刚起步时,扎克想要画一幅壁画。你可能已经知道这个故事了,但你还是可以讲一下。那个艺术家当时实际上说,你知道的,别给我现金,给我股票。这通常是一个非常好的策略,你会说,嘿,我可能没有资金来投资这个项目,但我有一项技能。这项技能对这家公司来说会有用。如果我能和他们交朋友,那么在某个时候,你知道的,就像,我们一起分享好处。完全没错。你不必要求很高的比例,但你可以说,嘿,是否有一些可供选择的期权我可以得到?这可能是有效的。我的意思是,对那个人来说,我想他变成了亿万富翁之类的人物。那真是太疯狂了。至少几亿美元。大卫·赵是个很有魅力的人。他做过一些令人难以置信和搞笑的事情。他是个非常有趣和非常有创意的人。我不确定,但我已经读过那个故事很多次了。他有一个播客叫做《DVDA》,我想,和一个名叫Asa Akira的色情明星一起。也许已经被删除了,但他是一个多才多艺的人。他是一个了不起的艺术家,也是一个了不起的演员。这也可以成为你的节目名字。大家都应该给你的节目想一些名字,而不是叫Tim Tim Talk,你知道的,他是第二名。我们都必须做出决定。
I saw a shirt side note. Well, I've had one sip of tequila and here we go already. I saw a shirt out of climbing gym yesterday, which said no solutions only trade offs. And I was like, that is actually pretty interesting to sit with. But on the advising front, because that's really what we're talking about. Where can people learn more about that? Because I used to point people, and maybe this is still a good reference. It's a little dated, but Venture Hacks used to have a bunch on advisors and super advisors. This is worth unpacking a little bit for folks. If you look at, for instance, my track record, the vast majority of my lifetime earnings and startups have actually come from advising.
And that's not to say that it's easy. That's not to say that times haven't changed, because certainly times have changed since 2008, 2010. But if you have a skill, or you have a network, or you have a platform, there are times when it will be appealing for both you and for startup to have some type of trade for equity. And Saka used to be fantastic at this before he became the Chris Saka and Marky lights that we know and love today. And taught me a lot about this.
并不是说这很容易。也并不是说时代没有变化,因为自2008年和2010年以来,时代确实发生了变化。但是如果你拥有一项技能、拥有一个人脉网络或者拥有一个平台,有时候对于你和初创企业来说,进行某种形式的股权交易是有吸引力的。在 成为我们今天所熟悉和喜爱的 Chris Saka 和 Marky lights之前,Saka在这方面曾经非常出色,并向我传授了很多经验。
But you might look for, let's just say, I don't know how the landscape has changed. You could probably speak to this. It's a 0.25%. So it's early. Yeah, like a quarter point. I mean, you've seen the company pretty early. Super early. And the way that that's de-risked for the company, or one way that that can be de-risked is that it vests over a course of, say, two years. So every quarter, a percentage of that basically becomes yours. And the company can cancel at any time. And that allows them, in a sense, to kind of try before they fully buy. Right. They get to see what results you can deliver. Any other thoughts on folks or thoughts on folks, Jesus. No, one step in.
Well, this is related to caffeine, which we're going to come back to at some point. So it's important to remember that every company that's out there, private company, when they're forming and putting together their cap table, like their list of investors, employees, all of that, they put together something called an options pool, which is a percentage of the company that is used to incentivize those employees to work there. And so when you join a company, you get X number of options and you earn them over, say, typically three to four years. A part of that, most founders will set aside for advisors. And so these are people that are not compensated with money, but rather just stock.
And so in my mind, what I always do when I'm forming a new company is I say, okay, I'm going to take 1% and I'm going to carve that into 10 rules. And then I'm going to go out there and find the 10 most impactful people that I can possibly find to help me change the outcome of this, this company. And you offer them on a roll and you say, hey, no fancy strings attached. So I never say to be an advisor, you have to tweet X number of times, like screw that, like you want it to come from a place of authenticity. And so, you know, And you're often doing this to people you know, presumably, right? Or you can find someone that you're just like, this is a really good match.
Like, you know, I there's an AI company that I've been working with. And they needed someone that had a very specific expertise in a very small subset of a type of AI. And they found an advisor and they didn't know this person, but they reached out. It never starts with, Hey, we want to offer you an advisory role. It's a coffee. It's a hangout. It's a dinner. It's let's get to know each other. And it's like, Hey, you might be helpful. And sometimes they'll say, no, actually you can hire me as a contractor. But or it's a mixed mixture bowl thing and say, Hey, you know, we'll bring you on as a contractor for three months and we'll give you an advisory role. So there's no perfect science here, but just expect to get some fraction of 1% of a company as an advisor. And your hope is that this turns into, you know, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred million dollar company. And that becomes, you know, a very lucrative outcome for you.
And I would imagine part of the reason that you're comfortable not having a laundry list of deliverables is because their advisor equity vests over a period of time. Yeah, it's over a period of time. You can cancel it anytime. So if you're three months in, you're like, ah, this person's not doing anything. You can just cancel it. And you know, no hard feelings. Everybody just, they get a little small percentage of that, you know, and that's fine. Yeah. I would say that it's best in my mind not to overcomplicate things, especially with celebrities. Celebrities don't want to have like some type of crazy, you know, 20 page document. They have to run by their agent and they have to go through with their attorneys and they have to figure out, oh, I'm going to have to show up at this event or like screw all that.
Like if you work with a celebrity and you find someone, you happen to know someone and they want to be an advisor, say no strings attached. Oh, by the way, we're doing this party in two months, you can come or not. Right. And oftentimes that actually frees them up to be like, I don't feel like I'm a being used upon here. Sure. I'll show up for a half hour or 45 minutes. And that's a win for you, right? You want them to speak from the heart when they're talking about a product? I think you would agree that time kills deals, right? Like deals to knock it better with time. Exactly. Especially if you're dealing with someone who has an entourage or like a phalanx of lawyers, managers, agents, et cetera. You want it to be an easy yes. Make it an easy yes. 100%.
So I'll give you an example. Back in the day, you know, when I launched Moonbirds that PFP project, they had a T-project that I launched, I talked to a handful of people and some people that I knew quite well, that were very famous celebrities. There's one NBA player that is, you know, Hall of Famer that I gifted a Moonbird to. And I said, Hey, listen, he's like, I'm Web3curious. I want to learn more about, you know, Web3. And it's journalably like, you know, you know, yeah, huge. So I gave him one and I said, sweetheart of a guy, super nice guy. And I said, do him. I said, listen, you don't have to tweet about it. like that's, this isn't a pay for plaything. I would never want to do that. If for some reason down the road, you think it's really cool and you want to say something, you can. And he never tweeted about it. But that's fine, you know, because like he did just wasn't vibing with that or didn't feel that it was going in the right direction or whatever it may be. And same thing for Jimmy Fallon. You know, Jimmy was super kind, super nice. And he created a little parody account for his Moonbirds and was tweeting from it. And he was figuring out because he wanted to learn Web3 wallets. He set up his own wallet. He nested his own Moonbirds, meaning he interacted with smart contracts and it was because he was curious on the tech side and there was no money exchanged. There was no like there was nothing about it wasn't about that. So that's the way I like to do these types of deals. And you tell me if this resonates with you, I would also think in terms of whether you're building a company or an advisor, who would I like to work with on multiple companies? Because I've seen, for instance, in many of the cases where I've been an advisor, assuming you do a decent slash good job, a lot of these people, if they're good, are going to be serial entrepreneurs. And then you end up just advising, advising, advising. And they have their X-Men squad that they pull in to most startups. That seems to me to be pretty common. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's certain domain experts when you think about like strategies around different parts of your business where you say, gosh, I would always want this person in my corner if I'm going to go launch a consumer internet product. And so you go back to those people. Or if you don't know, a great example is I'm relaunching my podcast in January. And one of the things that I just have been out of loop on is a TikTok strategy. And I just really found a great company that had been recommended and had worked with multiple top 20 podcasts on their TikTok strategy. Because that's a hole that's missing. And so I'm going to go out, I asked like 10 friends, who's the best, the best of this? And then try and hone in on that person or people and then get them to work on your behalf. And in this particular case, I'm paying them for it. But that's fine. I think twerking is the answer. Yes. I think coordinated dances and twerking. You might have a little. That's what you do for your advisors.
Yeah, a little case of werewolf buns. I don't know if that's a plus or a minus on TikTok. January. Yeah. Let's talk about January. We're coming up on the new year. How are you thinking about New Year's resolutions, that type of thing? Yeah. So we do this every year. We do. I don't even want to go revisit our list because I'm sure they're horrible. What do you think your hit rate is on your previous list? You had it written down. Do you have your last list? Can you look at it? I don't have it in front of me right now. I would say that over the years I've become better. My hit rate is higher. 50%. Yeah, I would say it's 50%. I'd say it's probably 50%. Which A, if that were, start of investing, man. That would be the best of the best, right? Yeah. But you also don't want to set your resolutions like, brush my teeth three times a week. You don't want to set the bar so low just for checking the box. Right. So I would say it's 50%, maybe a bit more than 50%.
I think this year there's simple enough that I could actually get to 100%. Yes. That's exactly what I did. So this year for me, it's about less, but make sure I can try to get to 75 to 100% of them. So mine are really straightforward. Last year I went one month without drinking. This year my therapist has told me she's awesome. And she's like, oh, you made it to mom. She's like, oh, cool, cool. Congrats. Everybody does that. And I'm like, she's like a little bit of like a hard ass. And I kind of like that about her. And she's like, no, go three months. She's like, that's when the real benefits start to show up is at three months. And I'm like, could you, I mean, you could have said two, but she says that three, I'm going to go three months without drinking. That's a big one for me.
Daily meditation is obviously have been a big part of my life. I'm going to continue that trend. We can talk about Henry Schickman's new app too, which is going to be a big part of that. Zen master, the ice study under his finally launching a new meditation app coming in January called the way and very excited to help him with that app in terms of like on the product side and just usability side. Obviously, he's doing all the content. I'm not involved in it. I'm just an investor in it. Not involved in the content. Not involved in content, right? Yeah, I'm not as a master. But you know, you've studied very seriously with Henry. Yeah, for a few years. You introduced us. He's been on this podcast twice twice and they're very strong episodes. I encourage people to check those out.
What makes the way different? So the one thing about, you know, as an investor, so I'm a part time VC because I had this other, you know, NFT and art thing that I'm working on as well as a VC over true. We are looking for novel ideas, things that haven't been done before and the meditation app market is just completely saturated. Saturated. Like there's, there's who would want to build an app in that space. It's like it's, there's, I mean, comms dominating, you know, headspace dominating, like, you know, waking up fantastic app for more on the depth side. I would say Sam probably brings together the strongest group of teachers. I would say is a portfolio of meditation. Like a university of meditation. Yeah, exactly.
So Henry is, is, is approaches like, you know, if you go into any of these other meditation apps, it's like a meditation for sleep, a meditation for anxiety and meditation for this three minute meditation, two minute meditation, 30 second meditation. You know, it's like it's all these different. Henry is like, he's very humble, but he's one of only, I think, three fully accredited Zen masters and his lineage of Zen in the United States. And he is bringing Zen, a flavor of Zen mixed in with some other types of meditation. And his goal is simple. There's, it's the way it's one path. There's no choose your own adventure. It's not, it's not the ways. Yeah, it's not the ways, right. There's, you can't branch off and do a body scan over here and then come back for a sleep meditation or a sleep story. Like it's none of that is a singular path and his goal is to lead you to some type of awakening moment, sometime in the future. So it's for those that are like, okay, I've tried the other meditation apps. I want to go deep. I want to, I want to get really serious about this.
So I can't tell you when it's going to launch there on beta right now. I can't tell you that the way app.com is going to be the place where you can put in your email address and I'll let you know when you know what we can do for your show notes. Let's put a beta link because that you can have up to a thousand testers. Perfect. Put it in your show notes and get a bunch of people testing out. Lovely. Yeah. We'll put it. Timed up, log slash podcast.
Great. I did, which was going to be what I was going to say next, which is this is my first investment in a meditation app and my first investment in any type of consumer app in a while, in fact, and that's based on my interactions. There's never known. You know, which wasn't, I mean, that wasn't a bad thing. That was, that was certainly not, it didn't turn into the thousand X, you know, 10,000 extra turn that I would like. They turned it around. Yeah. It's a good product again. It is a good product. You can still use it, believe it or not. Dude, I don't, this is actually on my, my list.
Okay. We'll get into that. But you have to finish your thoughts. Well, I was just going to say that I learned so much about product. I learned so much about startups. I learned so much about scaling, what to do, what not to do through my experience with that company where I was an advisor because I didn't have the capital early on to really build out a large portfolio with cash alone. And I was able to request, this is not a small thing for me. I was able to make requests of product changes directly. It's amazing that Lifeline CEO lifeline to the CEO and to the product team for me selfishly. If I'm using an app every day, that makes a difference to my quality of life. So I do not regret it. And part of your calculus, if you're going to be involved with the early stage has to be, I think the assumption that the vast majority are not going to return what you hope they're going to return. That's part out of 10 fail. It's just part of a power law distribution. Great book, by the way, power law.
So New Year's resolutions, what else do you have and do you have a date? I'm just going to hold your feet to the fire a little bit for your three months. Have you decided on a start date?
So I'm going to invite you to this. My birthdays in February, and you're invited. I got really lucky to get to know the artist, SON, S-O-H-N. Do you know SON and all of you? I don't. SON has become a nice friend, and he agreed to come play my birthday party for like 30 people. Amazing. And so he's going to fly out. He's in Spain right now. He's going to fly out and play. And I got to have a couple of drinks there. We're going to have a little breakfast. Yeah, that would be a. You'd be failing before you started. Exactly. If your first day were the day before your birthday. Yeah, after my birthday is when I'm going to kick this off, so that would be good. But yeah, so really quickly to hit on mine. So no drinks for three months. Daily meditation, no brainer. I want to organize my brain. I want to. In digital form. And so this is what's really interesting. In the last three months, multiple note-taking apps have enabled AI. And what they're doing now is they're saying screw knowing where your notes are. Ask questions of your corpus of data. So it's changing into a world where you can just enter all the data, enter all of Tim's brain into someplace and say, hey, what was that one note I had that one time when I was at that Mexican restaurant. And I think it was about cat beds. And it will literally serve you up that note based on the AI and its crawling abilities. And I think that's just fascinating. So Notion has added that. There are three. They call them second brain note-taking apps that are really forward that I'm considering. I'm still working through all of them to see which one I like the best. My candidates are Notion. Craft is amazing. Craft is a really beautiful note-taking app. It's a little bit more about, here's the current day, start taking notes and then you can interconnect the notes and do all kinds of fun things there. Is it spelled like the dictionary word, spelled like craft cheese? Yes. CRA. CRA. Craft. Obsidian is another one. Have you heard of it? I've heard of it. Or maybe I just like the name. It's more like graph-based inter-connected notes. Like all these backlinks, time together thoughts and ideas, kind of like brain. You've seen these cloud mappings of inter-connected notes.
But taking apps and services also a very crowded market. Very crowded. And capacities is the last one I'm looking at. I'm leaning towards craft. I think that's probably going to be my go-to one app of the year last year on iOS. And it's pretty fantastic. And I will say in that list, and still actually I think the largest market share barely bidding out Notion is Evernote still. And so I installed Evernote, the latest version. I'm like, damn, this is actually a lot better. I thought for a minute there it was going to go under. I was like, because it traded hands a little bit. There was a little bit of drama there. Yep. And but. Got overly diversified, overextended. Yeah. But it's quite good. They've revamped the app and it's nice. So that in launching my podcast.
And so just keep it in a simple launching The Kevin Rose Show, which is KevinRose.com. If you want to sign up, I'll let you know when it launches. But I got something great guest lined up for that show. And taking it seriously, building out a real studio, doing a professionally professional editors, the whole thing. So it's going to be great. It is going to be great. I can't wait to see.
因此,我们只需简单地推出"The Kevin Rose Show",即KevinRose.com网站。如果你想要订阅,我会在推出时通知你。但是我已经邀请了一些很棒的嘉宾来参加这个节目。而且我们会认真对待,建立一个真正的工作室,聘请专业的编辑人员,全方位地做好准备。所以这将是很棒的。我迫不及待想看到它的呈现。
I want to keep it simple about the raw store. It's not 10 things, but like just like three or four. Yeah. What are yours? Mine are. And then I'm going to come back. Don't worry, folks, it's not going to consume the whole show. But I want to ask you a question about AI. So I'll preload that in your head, which is where do you think people will make will compromise their privacy because of really compelling convenience where they might regret it? I'm just like where they might click yes in providing access where later the big. Oh, I really shouldn't have done that. So that's I have two quick answers for that.
One, I think is going to be photos. People believe that don't ever click yes to all photo access, especially if you've got dick pics. I'm just like, wow. Listen, I went there because the buddy mind just got compromised last week. Look, I kid you not. I kid you not. So this is a true story. I'm not going to say who. This is I swear to you, Tim, this is a true story. My buddy got sim swapped. Okay. Somebody took over his iCloud account and he's got a very and my wife knows it. So I can say this freely. He's got a very beautiful wife. And you know, he's a good looking dude. It's all be, you know, but kind of like us, you know, like me, be my, whatever. And he's got pictures of his wife, like all in his iCloud, like, you know, and she's like, he's traveling a lot. She's saying a little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little naughty naughty. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, are you, are you sending a little back or, you know, like those are the ones like no one's going to complain about your wife getting leaked online. It's like, are your pigs going to get out there online? It was a really stressful few days. I am sure.
Honestly, not to judge anyone who's, who's fond of shooting around dick pics. I don't understand how anyone ends up in that position. Yeah. I just like don't do it. No, there are certain commandments. Yeah. That shall not send dick pics. Yeah. Just like the downside is so much higher than any possible upside. Right. Plus some, I mean, look, maybe I'm biased. I'm just like, who was like, I don't think I have, you know, the Shrek of penises, but it's like, I don't, I don't understand what the appeal is also. Well, that's because you don't like penises. I'm not. Yeah. I don't have a like a collage of schwances made into piece of artwork on my wall. Yeah. So maybe, maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just, that's based on the team. I mean, it's for some people that's kind of they're like, you know, the way they flirt remotely and things like that. And that's, it's not me. I don't, I don't do that either. But I think I'm actually doing a full episode on my podcast on dick pics. And then take things and on, on, on, on locking down specifically iCloud. Cause I think it is the scariest place for hackers to gain access to because they get your iMessage messages and they also get your, your photos as well.
But any, any quick tips for folks just like teaser? Yeah. Here's a quick teaser. Number one thing you can do is that.
但是,你有什么对像我这样的人的快速提示吗?是的。这里有一个简单的提示。你可以做的第一件事就是。
So you want to hear the crazy shit that happened to him? No, no. It's a little low your mind.
所以你想听听发生在他身上的疯狂事情?不,不要了。内容可能会让你感到难以接受。
Oh, my God. Here. So we can tenx my paranoia. There we go.
哦,我的天啊。给我这个。这样我们就可以解决我对事情过于敏感的问题了。就这样。
It actually wasn't a sim swap. So what happened is, is that Apple, as you know, if you forget your password, they have something called iForgot, which is like, you can go there and say, I forgot my password, right? And it says, okay, well, do you have another device that you can confirm? No, I don't have another device. Okay. Well, what's your backup phone number, right? And so you can reset that password with the backup phone number that you put into the system. That makes sense, right?
A sim swap, somebody steals your phone number and they get access to it. And then that's how you get compromised. Their sim swaps are getting harder to do because, you know, some of the big providers have caught on and they've tried to kind of like prevent that from happening, ask you more questions, all that nature.
Well, someone called in on his behalf to let's, let's just say, because it was probably might want to bleep that out of their sponsor at some point, but they called in, they faked like it was him, you know, and they didn't ask for a sim swap. What they asked for, they said, Hey, can you forward the phone number just for an hour to this other number? Because I needed it for it.
So normally this was straight social engineering, no, but you was straight social engineering, but listen to this, normally a forward wouldn't work because the text message doesn't get forwarded only calls to, but you can go into Apple and you can say, I have auditory problems. I can't hear. Can you call me with the security code? So they did a quick forward. They called it didn't go to his phone and went to the hackers phone. Apple read the security code to them via audio. They put it in compromised, reset it, change this phone number, compromise, download all this data and then tried to blackmail him to get his data. Oh my God.
Okay. So in terms of teasers for yes, teaser would number one thing to do is that you want a cell phone provider where there is not a phone number to call and it's really, truly securely locked down. Your best provider for that in the United States is Google Fi. And what you do is you don't set it up with your Google account. You create a brand new Gmail account that no one knows. Tim Tim secure 8 5 3 7 at Gmail.com. You just docked me so hard. Exactly. And then you two factor the off the crap out of that turn on Google's advanced protection there. And then you sign up for a Google Fi account, which is a brand new phone number, then you tell Apple that is your backup phone number because Apple can still service your main number, but only use that backup number to reset passwords. So there's no possible way anyone would know that backup number. And so it's a whole thing. There's more steps to it than that.
好的。所以,对于吸引人的预告片,第一件要做的事情是找一个没有电话号码可以拨打的手机提供商,而且确实是安全锁定的。在美国,Google Fi是最好的选择。你要做的是不使用你的Google账号设置它,而是创建一个没人知道的全新Gmail账号,比如Tim Tim secure 8 5 3 7 at Gmail.com。你真的很冷静地干了我一波。没错。然后,你要 启用Google的高级保护功能,使用双重验证来保护账号。接下来,你需要注册一个Google Fi账号,这个账号会有一个全新的电话号码,然后告诉苹果这个号码是你的备用号码,这样苹果仍然可以服务你的主号码,但只能使用备用号码来重置密码。所以,没有任何人会知道你的备用号码。整个过程还有更多步骤。
You know, you get hardware keys involved like Google's Titan key, which is the most like hardcore of the USB C, you know, keys, hardware keys. It uses one of their Titan chips, which is legit. It's a whole thing, but it's a terrifying time for me to double down. My phone has been acting funny recently.
It's making me spooked a bit. It scares the crap out of me.
这让我有点害怕。它把我吓得要命。
Yeah. It's like my phone has been acting a little funny and I'm like, weird.
是的,就好像我的手机表现得有点奇怪,让我感到有些奇怪。
You know what sucks to is I've been going to what's at more and doing that seven days like delete all my messages because honestly, there are, tell me if you feel this way. I know you feel this way because we have these cards on text. There are things that you say with your friends that you're just like, if anyone read this out of context, I would seem like the most. Oh, insert whatever.
Every person who uses group threads, if you are remotely interesting or if you're funny, you're all fucked. Like, if anything, we're made public. Everybody's good. The number of like jokes I've made that are not something I would want the world to see, but are all in good fun and just amongst friends. It's like in the thousands, right? And if I chick on line, I would deny it all. I didn't write that. I did. The AI. But yeah, it's tough.
So anyway, this is actually really good tequila. It's really smooth.
所以,无论如何,这款龙舌兰酒实际上真的很好。它非常顺滑。
So on the AI front, real brief. And then we said photos was the one part. You asked what were the two places where or what were the places where AI might compromise your data? Yes. So that's the first one.
The main thing and the second one would be just this idea of these note taking apps. Because if you're journaling, like for me, I have a fantastic therapist. I journal all of that, right? And so things like Obsidian, the reason I'm drawn to one, that one in particular is it's local only. So it only doesn't sync to the cloud. And when it does, it uses a local encrypted key. So they not even they can read your data. I trust notion. I trust it. If someone were to compromise their key on their end in theory, even though the data is encrypted at rest, meaning when it's not being used as encrypted on their hard drives, is still a potential vulnerability there. So that does, but at the end of the day, if someone really wants to read my therapy, it's like whatever. We live in a world where you can just be like, oh, someone made that up. Yeah, there's a whole new world of plausible deniability with AI. And there's a whole new world of exploits. Yeah.
And on the AI side, for people who might be curious, I've actually not on my personal notes, but we have trained, or I should say rather automatic, which runs WordPress.com. And I rely on their enterprise side of things for all of my websites. They have an AI feature and they've trained this AI on all of my transcripts. So if you want to ask questions of 700 or so transcripts of the Tim Ferris, so you can do that. The results in a lot of cases are surprisingly good. There's several startups working on this. I saw one that actually indexed your show. And if you ask a question of it, we'll return the clip in which you said the answer to it, which is amazing. I was thinking the other day about a great startup that I don't have the time to build would be a podcast app that imagine this world and tell me that this is interesting to you. So it trains on all of your data. I'm listening to Tim Ferris show. I'm halfway through an episode. And you mentioned something that I don't understand or I'm just not familiar with. Well, just to say I wask for something random. And I hit pause and I hit the Tim AI button. It's trained on your voice so it can respond in your voice. And I say, Tim, what is I waskah actually? Before we continue the show. And you respond, you say, well, I waskah is this. And I talked about it in episode number 12, blah, blah, blah. And also number 27. And here's a clip of me saying this. And then you can rejoin the stream of the podcast and continue. So it's almost like you show up as a coach mid podcast for any questions I have about that show so I can pick your brain and also as applied to your books. So I could go into your entire corpus of books that I have and ask questions of that data as well. That has to be the future, right? Yeah, that's interesting.
How do you feel about it as a content creator? Does that make you a little uneasy? It doesn't make me uneasy on a content level because I operate from a place of abundance with my stuff because my stuff is so dense, right? It's not dense necessarily in a bad way, but it's like I could talk about the content of say one of my books for hours on dozens of podcasts and not come close to exhausting even 20% of that book. So I'm very forthcoming with that. The one flag I would say that I have for that particular example is that if it's my voice and so on and this is going to come up a lot with AI, what is the indemnity? What does liability look like? Right. Right. If someone uses an ad and they're like, well, this Tim AI told me that I should do A, B, and C or that I should or could X, Y, and Z.
作为一个内容创作者,你对此有什么感觉?这让你有点不安吗?就内容本身而言,这并不让我感到不安,因为我的作品基于丰富的素材,我的内容是如此深度的,对吧?它的深度并不一定是坏的,而是说,我可以在数十个播客中讨论我任何一本书的内容,甚至不会接近耗尽书中的20%。所以我对此非常愿意分享。但是,对于上述特定例子,有一个值得关注的问题是,如果是我的声音等等,这在人工智能方面会涉及到很多,那么责任归属是什么样的呢?对吧。如果有人使用广告,然后说:嗯,这个 Tim AI 告诉我应该做 A、B 和 C,或者应该或可以做 X、Y 和 Z,那么这个问题就会出现。
Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z. When you start a day in Africa, you're gonna be nervous.
当你在非洲开始一天时,你会感到紧张。
There are, we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but there are people called career plaintiffs out there. Unfortunately, I know what this is. But for instance, there will be a law firm. What they do is they file a class action lawsuits based on a couple. And like, you know, Barbara and Bob Jones are the couple that they work with all the time and they're like, Hey, Barbara and Bob, Subway sandwiches is selling 11 and a half inch subs, but they're calling them footlong go by two of them and then complain with us and we'll file this thing. We'll give you 10% of the upside. And I think that some of these AI models will provide a nice, juicy bite of the apple. That was actually a real lawsuit, by the way, that you're mentioning. Oh, I know. Yeah. Oh, I know. But we won't get into the details of why I know that the US man, some of these things, it's just astonishing that that they, the rules provide for some of these creatures to exist in profit.
Coming back to New Year's resolutions. Yeah. We had a nice big boomerang on that mine are, I would say simple, not necessarily easy. As is true with a lot of things. The first is minimalist delegation. And what that means to me is delegating the why and the who, but not necessarily the how. So I think my predisposition is to be very detailed when I delegate various types of tasks or projects. In other words, what I would like to do more of is here is at the simplest level, five words of what I want to do, figure it out. Right. And you can handle all the specifics, you should know that we should have at least three bids if we're putting something out that's expensive, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, but to really take my hands off the wheel in terms of over prescribing the details, which I, which I have a tendency to do because my mind is very detail focused. I'm very meticulous. But I have found that more often than not, I can point to examples of where I'm providing too much step by step detail. And also people who receive that, in some cases feel like they're being micromanaged. Not only that, they're not building the muscle. Exactly. Because they need to understand where the only way they can kind of build that muscle around who you are and what you want is by making mistakes. And you're saying, hey, I would have done it this way a little bit differently because of X, Y, and Z. And then they learn from that mistake versus you just prescribing, it saves you a shit ton of time saves a ton of time. So what I'm, what I'm experimenting with and I've already started doing this, and I think I've made a lot of progress is say less, say less, and be available for questions. But otherwise, make it clear that there's a certain degree of wiggle room and space for errors that is okay.
So when you're admin walks and you say sandwich, meatball sandwich throws you throw it against the wall and says, Oh, I'm fucking sandwich. That would be one way to handle it. And I remember there was, I want to say a blog post a while ago that was written by either Ben Casnoka or Reid Hoffman, but as Ben Casnoka used to be the let's just call it like aid to camp or chief of staff for Reid Hoffman. And what Reid had said to Ben was something along the lines. And I remember remember this because I had to look it up. This would be a chance for me to interrogate like the Reid AI. What do you mean my blah, blah, blah? He said in the service of speed, I'm willing to accept 10% foot faults. And I was like, foot faults. What does that mean? And I think it's a tennis reference, which is like, when you step over the line, when you're serving and you get called for a fault. But in the service of speed, basically, the way I interpret that is you can get 10% wrong. Ideally, it's not really expensive catastrophic stuff, but I'm willing to accept the 10% error rate in the service of speed. So I'm trying to think about it along those lines, because there's so many things that are either reversible or inexpensive, where it doesn't really matter. Yeah, doesn't really matter. You're better off making sort of wrong decision and then right decision and doing both of those quickly, because you course cracked, then taking a ton of time to deliberate in your mind when oftentimes you don't even have complete information. Right. You don't know. But also like, imagine you get that down to 5%, the extra effort required. What is that doing to you as a burden? Yeah, versus just letting go a little bit and letting those faults happen. And it's got to be a little bit freeing. Yeah, totally.
Question for you, because I thought you recommended at some point this book to me, and I have two or three friends who have recommended it since the surrender experiment. Yeah. Are you still a fan? Michael Singer? Yes. Yeah. I'm still a fan.
Okay. Could you say a little bit about it? Because I don't know if we've ever talked about it on the podcast. Yeah. I mean, I haven't read it for probably two and a half or so years now, but Michael Singer is, I don't want to say spiritual guru or more just kind of like a salt of the earth type guy that has figured out that surrender is kind of the ultimate freedom. Like this idea that you can just release and let go puts you more in the present moment than pretty much anything else.
And the whole book is around how when stuff comes in, it doesn't hit you. It doesn't hit and stick. So like to hit and stick and marinate and and fester is not surrendering. It's like it's letting it the energy build and bring you down oftentimes. And the book is framed around this idea that the more you can let go, the more freedom there is, the more happiness there is. And as Henry Shukman put it, the freedom comes from not the tight grip on reality, but the slow finger by finger letting go of that grip. And part of the appeal for me as it was described, I have not read the book, but a very close friend of mine is reading right now. He has a course, by the way, that's fantastic. It's on Sounds True. It's a video course. And it's quite good.
It's a video course. Did you watch the, is it necessary to watch the video? Or is it just like he's a quirky personality and he's great on video. He's just like really funny. And it seems like that book at least is his personal story, which automatically makes it more engaging for me.
All right. So yes, letting go. So the minimalist delegation and the second point is actually related to that. That is the, in a sense, letting go. Quick creative collaborations is the second one. I only have three things. It's minimalist delegation, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot, which is pretty straightforward to me. Again, it's simple, but not always easy. We have getting to my physical reboot here. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about it.
So quick creative collaborations. This is an area where you have seen me actually kick the tires quite a bit in the last year with Cock Punch, which by the way, there's a ton coming with that, which is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people, but I have done a number. I cock punch. We know it's real quick here. Bye, NFTs, I'm Farah's Cock Punch. That's right. Hashtag. Hashtag to the moon. No, not financial advice. Jesus. That was AI talking. I didn't say that. In the process, I mean, using this NFT project way back in the day, which is when it launched in December of 2022, I guess, as a vehicle through which to do creative experiments, right, an emergent long fiction, that was kind of the whole point.
I've walked the talk in the sense that since then, and a lot of this has been invisible, but it will soon be visible. I've done creative sprints in, say, upstate New York with some of the top D&D and magic, the gathering artists, I should say, people who have done amazing iconic work for those brands. Yeah. Doing character design and concept that you, it was so much fun. It was so much fun.
I have had this narrative that I'm a better I see, right, individual contributor, better as a solo operator, and that in some sense, I think because I've heard from some publishers and so on that I'm a bit of a problem author because I'm very, very, very unwilling to compromise quality. I'm unwilling to compromise quality and I'm very meticulous. And so if somebody's not on that same page, I'm a problem. And so I developed this narrative that I was just prickly and difficult and didn't play well with this. How much did that do you think is true? Have you ever done a 360 review?
I have done a 360 review. The feedback doesn't usually, I wouldn't say it supports that narrative. And in this particular case, gather all these folks had some writers as well, which I thought was going to be harder than the art side because I can, I can step back and say, you are all much better at art than I am, but I have an identity as a writer. And it was great. I had two writers, three artists, and had an absolute blast. The output was spectacular, which I haven't made public yet. And that emboldened me to do more and more experiments. And so I can't talk too much about it right now. But I am actually working on my first book project in seven years, eight years. And I'm doing it with a collaborator, which I thought I would never do in a million years.
Wait, you gotta give us a little more fiction, nonfiction, nonfiction. This is this is OG TF style. This is five, no five hour, but very dense hyper tactical. I'm not dense, like very rich. In other words, it's not a bunch of fluff. I'm not turning a blog post into a 300 page book, right? Like, you're going to want to tell us what it is. I can't. I can't. Can you give me like a genre? I can't really give you a genre. What I was cooking book again. It's not I got I think everybody got their fill of cooking with that. I'm very proud of that book, but holy shit, that almost killed me. No, I'm not doing that again.
I also not making the foolish decision to say to myself, you know what I should do? You know, it would be fun is for me to do 30 to 50% of my own photography for a 700 page cookbook. Don't do that. Now, archery. If you're not a photographer, don't do that. It is so much work. Oh my God. I really respect to the photographers out there. I underestimated that one. You dodged the archery question. It is an archery book. It's not an archery book. I'm I'm planning on doing more archery. That is part of the physical reboot. Okay.
But the the quick creative collaborations, this book is going to be about I would say how to find the essential and ignore the trivial. That's the very broad strokes. I am collaborating on writing, which I thought I would never do. It is going better than I ever possibly could have imagined. And it has opened the floodgates for me to think about what other collaborations I could pursue, screenplays, animation, television, who knows. But I've realized that if I am paired with someone who really gives a shit about quality and cares about being really proud of their work, I'm totally fine.
I can collaborate really well with those people. They just have to have really high standards. And I'm excited to do more of that. So the the screenplay side and like the TV and animation is particularly interesting to me. So becoming more adept with a format like a screenplay. And the format itself has intimidated me. And I feel like I just need to be locked in a room with someone really good for two weeks and be like, you cannot leave until you have something to ship. It can be a rough draft, but it has to be pretty much ready. And I think it's doable. So the quick creative collaborations is something that I'll be doing more of.
And then last on the physical reboot, it's I have been such a piglet in the last month. And I'm sick. That's a T H I C C folks, I have I'm not in terrible shape, but I am planning on continuing to be a little piggy for Christmas in the holidays. I'm gonna be home with family. And like I love I love butter cookies. I love gingerbread cookies. I'm not this is kind of like you not committing to your three months free birthday. That would be stupid. Yeah. So I'm going to be spending January, February in really intense outdoor training and skiing and ski touring and so on. So I'm not worried about burning off what I'm accumulating because that's gonna happen, especially at high altitude. I'm gonna try and visit you, by the way. Awesome. January. That would be fantastic. So the physical reboot is is up there. And I'm optimistic about that because on the internal level, meaning biomarkers and so on, almost every biomarker is the best that it's been in like a decade.
Wow. After the last year. That is not me. That sounds amazing. Yeah. And some of that has been certainly physical practice exercise. A lot of that has been dietary since I was your APOB. The best it's ever been. Hello. I can't recall offhand. Okay. It's with with 20s of 30s. I mean, it's within the aggressive atia. Yeah. Target range. STA, ALT fine. Oh, yeah. Those are always fun. I'm assisting always good. I'm assisting to always fun. Okay. Yeah. My my liver and so I'm sitting here issues then. What was that? What are your issues? What did you correct in your blood?
There are a couple of things that have corrected. So I have historically high uric acid levels. But you're not all pure and all then. I'm not an alpyr and all because I had a reaction to it, which can be very dangerous. Yes, it can. So I'm on your something called your loric, which is fine. And it's actually a better cleaner drug. I think it is people can. Yeah. There's a bunch of debate around it because there were some smaller studies that were arguably poorly designed that did some type of head to head and it got poo-pooed. But you loric for me is a good option. Not medical advice. Talk to your fucking doctor, please. I don't play one on the internet. In addition to that, that's from me, by the way, you know that. That's your meat intake. No, it's not. Are you sure? Yes. Because typically uric acid, you know, they used to call it the king's disease, right? Because it causes gout and it was from like wine and meat and fats. It's considered a disease of apples.
Okay. So the wine is more interesting. So yes, people associate it with, if I'm not mistaken, purines and it gets associated there for with protein intake also. But there's a blog post, I it's easy to forget. I have a thousand plus blog posts, which actually bridged the books to the podcast. It's easy to forget that connective tissue with a thousand plus blog posts. One of them is called something like the hidden chapter from Good Calories, Bad Calories, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Book, Great Book, Tom's Gary, Tom's Gary, Tom's Gary, Tom's and one of the chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor was about fructose and how it is anti right, which also ties into uric acid.
Yes. So what I have seen in myself at least, it doesn't matter if I am carnivore diet, vegan, fasting, whatever dietary liver I try to pull, uric acid is high. It just does not matter. And that's also hereditary. This one's in my family. The other constellation of issues are all cardiac, like lipid profile related. Also hereditary dietary intervention with the exception of one thing that I'll mention. Are you going to statin? I'm not on a statin.
Okay. Well, your book is fine. Yeah. But just to be clear, so I there are different reasons that your lipid profile can be out of whack in my particular case. And I might be able to put something in the show notes as a resource. There are sophisticated labs or companies that will run labs that sort of find slice a lot of this. Boston heart. I think it's Boston heart. Yeah. And then you need someone to interpret the tea leaves, obviously, in which case you need a very competent doctor.
In my case, I'm a cholesterol hyper absorber. More accurately, I'm a sterile hyper absorber, which means I can also absorb a lot of sterols from say plant matter, which is why automatically, if you reduce meat or eliminate meat, it doesn't mean that your cardiac and lipid profile will improve. And you actually see a lot of folks for which it goes the opposite direction, because they end up consuming a lot more refined carbohydrates. Their fasting glucose goes up and they end up with a whole host of issues, in some cases associated with fructose, right? Like, Oh, agave an actor, brilliant. Well, maybe not so brilliant.
And for that reason, in my case, I'm taking a zetamibe, actually, I'm taking something called Nexlazette, which is absurdly expensive. Welcome to the United States, in this case, but it's a combination of a zetamibe and something called Bempedoic acid. A zetamibe very well researched, pretty well understood, Bempedoic acid, a newer, a newer player on the scene, but very interesting. And the combination of those two plus the euloric are what got a number of biomarkers of concern, not crazy. And I've done not only the usual cardiac calcium scores, which are helpful, but incomplete in a lot of ways. I've also done angiograms, which you do not want to do willy-nilly all the time, but I wanted to see if there were any precursors to any issues.
So far, so good. In my particular case, those things plus reducing saturated fat intake, makes a difference. All my numbers, it makes a difference. So in my case, it would be a bad idea for me to hit the MCT smoothies. So bulletproof coffee, bad idea for me. Also my MCT, I don't know if it is a TU, but it. Disaster pants, risk goes up. Yeah. Risk goes up by about 10x. Yeah. If you're like running the bathroom with the MCT oil.
Yeah. If you are thinking to yourself, you know, in 2024, I want to shoot my pants more often, I would recommend a cock-on-sto-bade. Yeah, creatine, double espresso, and MCT oil, problem solved. Don't ask me how I know that, but you can guess. Don't have that right before you're driving to the airport for your international flight. Also, pro tip.
So the minimalist delegation, fast delegation, embracing reversible or low-cost possible mistakes, quick creative collaborations, and then physical reboot. And honestly, with the physical reboot, a lot of that is old news. The stuff that works, works, it's like kettlebell swings, zone two, ski-trang. Yeah, zone two, which I'll get to very naturally with what I'm going to be doing, and in terms of hiking and ski-trang and so on, basic, basic, basics. Like, I shouldn't say basics. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. Yeah. And just when in doubt, return to fundamentals. It's like weight training once a week. That is better than nothing once a week. And then the zone two, but also for me, it's like one or two sessions of very, very hard technical pilates to hit everything that I'm going to miss anyway, like medial glute and transverse abdominis. I'm getting back a lot of new years, by the way. Yeah. And that's about it. Do less than you think you can do. If some of your goals are around physical reboot or recomposition, set the bar where you are sure you can clear it. Yeah.
Right. So I wanted to talk to you real quick about, you mentioned the physical body reboot. One of the things that all of my physicians, bougie, say all my physicians, my primary care physician, tell us President Obama, has been concerned about is I have slightly elevated blood pressure. And it's not to the point where I should have it treated with medicine. But there's breathing exercises you can do. There's a device called Respirate, which Peter Tia recommends. I don't know. Yeah, it's fantastic. It hooks around your chest. It's like a strap. And then you put in some ear pods that are connected to this device and it walks you through a series of breathing exercises, and it's clinically proven to lower your blood pressure. So Tia recommends that as kind of first line defense for a slightly elevated blood pressure.
There is a device that is approved in the UK and the EU, and it's called Actia in its horrible name. What is Actia? It's a system for the Tia. Yeah. So it's AKKTIA. I'm wearing it on my wrist right now. So if you're watching the video version, you can see this thing is smaller than the smallest fit bit. It's super tiny. The battery life is five days. It does every hour blood pressure monitoring. It's clinically like proven accurate. And Tia is testing it right now in his lab with his folks there. It is not approved in the US. So what I had to do is I bought it online. First, I got a VPN. I proxied into the website to make it look like I was in the UK. And then I bought online, shipped it to a friend in the UK who sent it to me in the States. I then created a fake iCloud account in the UK with a fake email address and VPN to act like I was in the UK on a separate phone that I had not sent in like one of my older iPhones. And then I was able to get the app installed through the UK App Store because it's not available in the US App Store and got it to work. So technically this is not legal in the United States. But it's, you know, I'm actually monitoring it and the breathing exercises are helping.
High salt intake combined with water is huge. If you have a salty steak or anything, like I can notice like just like when we remember when we first got into CGM's you were way before I was but into continuous glucose monitors, you got me into them and you would be surprised because you was there and you'd be like, oh, banana doesn't do anything. And some people banana shoots you through the roof, right? Or rice for me. Oh my god, through the roof. I don't know about you, but rice for me is a huge offender. Rice affects me less than it affects you, but it affects a lot of folks.
Yeah. Footnote in a previous episode, we talked about the rice cooker, the rice cooker, which drains out the water, which dramatically reduces the glycemic response. Yeah. But back to our schedule program. Yeah, we can link that link down the show notes as well. But this for me has been like, okay, I just had a salty meal. Now let me chug a bunch of water along with that meal. And actually, I will notice a difference. I do not get into those, what they call like the high orange levels of blood pressure just by my water consumption. So meaning you help or hurt by drinking water. Drinking water. And there's evidence of back this up, which he's happy on the podcast. I've talked about this. But anyway, it's another device that I hope not going with a submitted to the FDA. Hope is that we'll have this device approved in the States here. I don't know, next six months to a year. So we'll see.
Very cool. Anything else on the physical reboot side? I mean, the three months with no booze, I think it's going to be if you can do it, no offense, it'll be a revelation, I think. It's going to be amazing. Speaking of it, you don't, it looks like you're not a big fan of your own tequila. I just know I'm not really drinking any. So first of all, no, I mean, if you don't like it, it's just salam in its food. It's also, we started recording a three p.m. So usually I'm not a three p.m. drinker. But you know what, I want to be him dead by seven. So it'll be, you know, when, oh, she's okay. So, you know, since since we're going, we're just checking back into the home anyway, where they're going to put our socks on and put us to bed. No problem. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Dude, let's retire at the same retirement home. That'd be so fun. That'd be so much fun. Yeah. I'm going to say. Cheers, man. Cheers. And so let's talk about.
Sorry. I was enjoying taking breaks from stuff because I have kind of a wild story, which I don't think we've talked about at all. I have number of wild stories. Oh, yeah. I got one big one for today. You have a big one too. And I think these are going to be interrelated in a sense. I'll piggyback half of it after what I believe you're going to share.
But I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated, which was the first cold turkey, which was the first time I've done that's probably I would have to imagine since I was what 16. I mean, it's been forever. Let me ask you a good idea. Why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like, Oh, I have a cup of coffee today and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later, like why go? This is like the extreme temp. Well, did you get headaches? It's extreme. Yeah, I got headaches. But but it was during a period where I could, you have no, I didn't use Viking. I knew that I could accept the headaches. And I had a period of time where there really was a low cost where like professionally, I was taking three to four weeks off the grid. And I knew that I had a grace period where I can sustain it.
So I did effectively no caffeine, no alcohol. And I suppose the most important other sex, no sex, no ejaculation, which is sweet and talk about that. That's pretty easy. The the harder one is I did nothing sweet. So not just containing sugar, but nothing sweet. So anything that has an artificial sweetener was out, would you consider this tequila sweet? I would not consider this tequila sweet. And there is there is a bit of subjectivity for a lot of it. That's what notes to it. Like it's, yeah, it's got some floral notes to it. But by the kind of letter of the law, I wouldn't consider this subjectively to be sweet. But for instance, any kind of juice out, any type of sweetener, of course, out, let's just say different types of plantains. If they are sweet to the taste, they're out sweet potatoes out. And is that hard for you? That that's not hard for me. It doesn't seem hard. But let's just extend this. Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol or some kind of crap in it that is a sweetener. So no brush your teeth for two weeks. I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb, just baking soda. I brush my teeth with that for a handful of weeks. And what you also realize is in the US, or in this case, when I went to Korea, if you ask people if A, B or C has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost everything that you come across. That was interesting. It was challenging because it's severely limited what I could eat. But the caffeine was an amazing experience.
Now, I alluded to this a little bit earlier. I'm back on the sauce over the last week, week and a half, which I regret, number one. And I'm paying a lot for like there are costs I can explain. Is it asleep? So let me back up and I'll just give you the punch line.
Tell us why you did this to begin with because you didn't mention that. There wasn't a New Year's resolution. Why? Yeah. So the reason I did, it started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff and there were restrictions. And then I just extended everything. But weird stuff, psychedelic stuff. Yes, psychedelics. Okay. Which will tie into a part of my strange story later.
But I hadn't done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years. And so I took restrictions very seriously. I think that is important, in my opinion. And then I extended them all. And I wanted to see in part because I met someone who said they had stopped drinking anything caffeinated, cold turkey, because they felt like a loser because they become dependent on it. And they missed a really important ski day, like one of the first days of the season. And they're a really good skier. And they were with a group of people and they were the only, I believe they were the only person who skipped. And that day, they were just like no more. And to this day, like two years later, caffeine free. I agree, I lost something there. When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing because they couldn't have coffee? Because they didn't have coffee that morning. And they were so tired that they felt like they couldn't do it. So they stayed on the ski lift instead of getting off, they just went around and went straight back down and called it a day.
And to their credit, the other one. I think I had the weather or something. But they were just like, this is fucking loser behavior enough. And they went to zero. That caught my attention because when you talk to someone, no offense to anyone who fits in this category. But let's just say if someone is a Mormon and they've never had caffeine, that's not my life. They've never had a hit of the sauce. I mean, although technically, there were grounds like Diet Coke instead of coffee, but we're not going to get into the weeds here. But if somebody hasn't had a taste of the delicious poison, there's so many things, there's so many things like this where it's like, okay, if you've had one significant other and you've never been out and about and like sampled the buffet of the world, like we can't really have, it's very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships. Like it's just, it's a different situation. Same with caffeine, but this person had been hitting the sauce for decades. And then they got off. And that was inspiring to me.
Then I had this restriction and I just extended it. And just to give the punchline, my sleeping issues that I've had for decades, every single one, just vanished. Best sleep of the last 20 years woke up wide awake every morning after the first, let's just call like a week and a half, had tons of energy and got super high volume of stuff done. And what I realized and the part of the reason to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things? I was curious what my real baseline was. Like, what does real baseline look like? What is Tim untouched, unaffected by all these various supplements? That's another thing. I took a month off of all supplements. I only took my prescription meds like the Eluoroc and so on. Yeah, I got rid of all supplements and no deca or tesophan, no deca, no nothing. And I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what the sort of pure baseline Tim is. And it turns out baseline Tim does really well.
And why go back then? Well, you got hungover. No, I didn't get hungover. I didn't get hungover. It was good after I hang over a little bit of lead juice. So I also, before I went to South America, I listened to an audiobook, which was called or is called the easy way to quit caffeine. And that is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it's the easy way to quit smoking. And I know people who have literally multiple people who have listened to this, they have their last cigarette and they're done and they stop. So it's a little hokey, but that made an impact on me as well. I'll do that for January and write that down on my list. January, no, and now that I know I can do it, I'm definitely going to do it again.
The reason that I got back on it, and this is, I'll actually add just a little bit of color.
我重新参与其中的原因是,而且这就是,我将添加一点点色彩。
The first is that there were days without caffeine where I would say to myself, I'm tired. I really want a cappuccino. But I realized, because I interrogated, I was like, well, I'm not allowed to have a cappuccino. Am I really tired? And I came to the conclusion that no, I wasn't actually tired. I just wasn't fucking wired. You see what I mean? Like my normal had become multiple coffees in the morning, and God knows what else. So I had taken as my baseline a default. I mean, wired sounds too negative, but like stimulated state. And when that was removed, the story that I conjured was I'm tired.
But when I was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast, podcast turns out great. I'm like, okay, let me revisit this. I wasn't tired. I was just calm. Interesting. Interesting.
And why did I get back on coffee? Coffee for me, I've realized, is probably like alcohol for a lot of folks. And there's sometimes, I'm not going to lie. Look, let's be honest here. Like there are times I was like, I want to take the edge off. Sure. Have a drink. Yeah. Right. But more often, because I don't drink that much, I use coffee as like a security blanket.
When my life gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted and things seem a little out of control, or I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through something, like walking to the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee, it's a life raft of consistency. We saw this during COVID, right? Where people would line up at Starbucks for three hours to get a coffee because it was like the one semblance of more balance. You know, and there's also a high to it. So it's like, also a high. So even though I realize intellectually that it's kind of productive, like when I am feeling as I have been for a host of reasons that I won't bore people with, but just gone through a pretty challenging week or two, my response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee, even though it increases anxiety.
Now, are you a cos- Physiologically. This is one thing actually we've known to have a long time idea. I don't know the answer to this. I don't know that I have seen you do this. Are you an afternoon coffee guy at all? I don't know that I've seen you do matte maybe a little bit later, but I typically do not have coffee in the afternoon. Yeah. And I really try not to have caffeine in the afternoons, which I violated this week. So in the last like two days, I should say in the past seven days, I have violated that.
And what I've realized, because I've run the end of one now, and there are a bunch of different variables. So I realize this is imprecise. It's not a perfect science, is that I can drink coffee and fall asleep. That's not the problem. But it disrupts my sleep architecture. I wake up after three days, very little time, three days of drinking caffeine. I wake up and I have circles under my eyes, like dark circles. Are you are you quantifying this in the sense of like, are you wearing an aura ring? Do you have any other data where you're looking at it? I'm not currently capturing the data with an aura ring, but I have in the past.
Yeah, I've seen what it looks like. So I know that's the case. I'm falling asleep. My time in bed, if we're just looking at a clock is fine, but I'm waking up tired. I hate that. And then what do you want? You want another hit? Of course. You want more of the sauce. And there's a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. I don't think for the rest of my life, I'm going to be caffeine free. But now I have a better awareness of what my baseline looks like. So I can return to that.
So let me tell you something crazy. This was before I met Dario. So I'm trying to go back in years now. So probably let's just call it 15 years ago. I gave up coffee for about six months, six months. Yeah. That's legit. Well, but I wasn't really that addicted to it. I was having like a cup every other day or whatever. And I went back. I remember I was living in San Francisco at a time and I went to Rachel coffee, which is fantastic coffee place. Great place. And I ordered a tall like single origin coffee. And I drank the whole thing when you go six months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee, you feel high as a kite. I was like 10x what I feel today with a cup of coffee. Yeah. Because your body just like, I mean, it is a powerful drug when you've gone without it for a while. Super powerful.
Do you have any sense of how long it takes to like get that back? Like how long have you done any research? To get what back? An initial like like childhood high of like the first cup of coffee. How long do you go without before you get back up? Yeah. Until you like, I don't know, I don't know.
I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking. How long does it take to develop tolerance and experience with withdrawal symptoms? It is so fast. Oh, so fast. And one day, if you go without coffee, so fast, your coffee drinkers will be headaches. Yeah.
Well, I would say furthermore, if you stop drink coffee and I'm using coffee as a bit of scapegoat here, like I love coffee. But if you if you go without caffeine and then you get back on caffeine and you're on it for two or three days and then you stop again, my personal experiences, you are going to feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is unlike most other drugs. It is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug. Right? Like, I'm not recommending this, but hypothetically, if you were like smoked cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you're fine. Yeah. No problem. You're not going to have a headache the next day. But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that's in part because it is often disrupting sleep architecture. That's my that's my vote, at least.
One question for you. One of the things that I have yet to try that I've been really curious about is I know that there are cultures, I can't remember, I'm going to screw it up. I don't know if it's like an Inca or I can't remember exactly which culture it is from Mexico that did high dose chocolate, almost like a cow, like a cow ceremony where they drink like this like super purified cacao, like insane amounts of caffeine. And they like reach these kind of spiritual states. Have you ever heard anything about that? I haven't read reports, but I know that for instance, I want to say in some places in Mexico, certainly in Guatemala, you have cow ceremonies. I don't know. I was invited to one one time on cacao ceremony. So I don't know how much I don't know the historical record, right? I don't know how much of these things were used 100 years ago, 1000 years ago. There are there are many new practices that have created the narrative of age old use, for a veneer of credibility when in fact things were very different 1000 years ago. You have to imagine cacao was a cacao has been around for a while.
So in the case of cacao, my understanding is it contains theobromine, which in and of itself is a fascinating word. So theobroma, theo like theology, broma, food, food of the gods, theobromine, which is pharmacokinetically is very meaning. Just if you were to look at the graph of peak and half life and so on, it's quite different from caffeine is my understanding. Is that the vasodilator of the plant? What causes, because I know like cocovia, for example, are you familiar with that supplement? Yeah, it's like it's a cacao supplement from a large company, I believe. Yeah, from from Mars actually. But the crazy thing is, is like, I was not going to run to Patrick about this. And she has had one of her, I think it was her mother-in-law or something like that, high blood pressure takes cocovia, drops it down because of vasodilator, and is a big fan of it as well. And I've been showing cognitive improvements as well. Yeah, I'm not sure it very well could be the case. I mean, when you get the dose makes the poison, the dose also makes the transcendence for a lot of different plants. Yeah.
所以对于可可而言,我的理解是它含有可可碱,这个词本身就非常有趣。Theobroma中的theo类似于神学,broma则表示食物,可可碱意味着“神的食物”,药物动力学上的意义非常明确。如果你看一下峰值和半衰期等方面的图表,就会发现它与咖啡因非常不同,这就是我所了解的。那是植物的舒血管剂吗?是什么原因导致的?因为我知道像可可维亚这样的补充剂,你对它熟悉吗?是的,那是一个大公司的可可补充剂,我相信是从 Mars 公司出品的。而疯狂的是,我本来不打算与 Patrick 谈论这个问题。她的一个亲戚,我想是她的婆婆之类的人,患有高血压,服用可可维亚后,由于舒血管剂的作用,血压降低了,她也是可可维亚的忠实粉丝。而且我也在认知方面有所提升。是的,我不确定,很可能情况确实如此。就像剂量决定毒物一样,剂量也决定了许多不同植物的超越性能。
So in the case of cacao, I have experienced higher, let's call it higher dose cacao, and you can reach an ultra state for sure. I'm going to caveat what I'm about to say with the do not ever do this warning, but there, for instance, there are plants that at high enough doses are absolutely psychedelic, which I would never recommend because you can die, I'll repeat that, fatal risk. So do not, do not try this at home.
But tobacco as an instance, as an example, has a very rich history in South America and elsewhere, but especially in South America, where high doses of juice have been consumed, you have to die. Every mode of administration you can imagine is has been done and is very common down there. There's a book by Johannes Wilbert, which is titled along the lines of tobacco and South American or tobacco in South American shamanism. It is very dense. It reads like a PhD dissertation. But when you consume pretty much through any route imaginable enough tobacco, you can experience a psychic experience. Can I tell you a story about this? I've had this.
So I was in San Francisco at the time and they have, this was a call a decade ago, they have a bunch of chefs that are very experimental. I won't name this chef, but it was a one Michelin star chef that tried, that infused tobacco leaves into an alcohol. And you have to be insanely careful. If you look up online, like you said, if you put too many leaves in the infusion, you will have a lethal overdose of nicotine that will kill you. And so this chef knew what they were doing. I would never try this at home. They made me a bourbon infused tobacco cocktail. And I was like, it sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot. Hope you don't need to sleep anytime soon. No, I drank this one drink. And I'm like, having a good time getting a little chatty. Like, who is fun? And then do I get up to use the bathroom? Oh boy. And I swear to God, it felt like my feet were sinking into the ground as I was walking. Like I was walking down like to the stumps of my knees. Like I was like, my legs were like collapsing as I was walking. You're like, wait a minute. I was like, because I don't smoke tobacco at all or anything like that. And it like hit me like a ton of bricks. And I'm like, I am I a shit. Like it is a very potent substance. Like you go, especially for non smokers, you got to be really careful.
So come in full circle. Right. So cacao powerful, fascinating plant sacred in a number of different cultures. Tobacco, be very careful, folks. It is powerful and potentially lethal. And then coming back to caffeine. It is the, as I understand it, the world's most commonly consumed psychoactive plant. Right? V is is is the number one tea and coffee. Yeah. And it has this place. I love my cup of coffee. Trust me. I had one this morning. And I think the exercise, if you can do it, not everyone can, but of rediscovering what your baseline is, like what you actually felt like when you were 12 or 15, right? Right. And this down so valuable. It is so valuable because I now know what that feels like. And I know that I can return to it as an adult.
Yes. That holds true to anything that you're doing that, you know, call it alcohol, any substance that you become dependent upon. Yeah. Right. It doesn't have to be just caffeine. It can be anything that you've like that you almost feel like you can't live without. Yeah. Sugar, carbs, yeah. Some activity. Traveling late night pizza. Yeah. Late night pizza. I mean, if you're a road warrior and you just travel all the time, because you say yes to everything, like okay, what does it feel like to sit at home? Yeah, if such a thing exists for you for one month, what does that feel like? Yeah. And if a bunch of weird stuff comes up, like maybe as Tara Brock would say, like the, you know, to the, to one sage, only one question matters. What are you unwilling to feel? Oh my God, I have to have around the podcast. That is one of my guests. I guess. Yeah. So if you haven't read it, folks, radical acceptance, which I owe Dardar, thanks for.
So if you don't know where is my wife, Daria, we call him Tim Tim. So which came about actually, let's give people like a real look into the archive. So Tim Tim came about because we were on a trip to China to drink Puerh tea all over the place, which was one of the weirder trips I've ever been on for a lot of reasons. We were in the Uno and province together and we don't know where we had some very strange experiences on that trip. drank a lot of tea, had a motley crew of people with us along for that ride. And there was another Tim on the trip. So there was a question of how do we keep the two of you separate and you came up with, I believe, Tim Tim. I mean, it was a collaborative kind of real time. That's how Tim Tim came about.
So Daria, who is neuroscientist by training, which is why I actually took the book, Radical Acceptance seriously, because at all due respect, I love Tara, love this book and a huge impact on me. But the title gave me an allergic reaction. I was like, Oh, God, another one of these like, I just, I just sound hand wavy. Okay, kumbaya, did you redo like, okay, I just can't do it. But the fact that Daria, who has one of the one of the lowest tolerances for bullshit, hand wavy stuff that I know of, the fact that she said she gained from it, gave me permission to dive into it, which then had a really big impact on me.
So coming back though, if you feel like you are, you can't live without X, that is often a great signal, or at least a prompt to ask yourself, what might an experiment look like for two to four weeks to go without X? It's been super valuable for me. It's awesome. I wrote it down, no caffeine in January, I'm going, I'm serious. You know, I might double down do it with you. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. No calf. All right. Let's talk about my experiments, shall we? Yeah, let's do it. I'm excited. I'm excited about this because I also don't know the details. I know that. You saw the text messages. I saw some of the text messages and I was very curious. Okay.
So this is a big one. I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant. What was the one where I'm supposed to think I got pregnant? I can't remember the name. Yes, I know the mood. Basically that's, I have the same physique too.
So basically, you know, for people that know me or don't quite know me, like, you know, I've done a bunch of stuff in terms of being like an entrepreneur and an investor and these different things. And one of the hats that I put on, you know, a couple of years ago was dabbling in the world of Web3. And Web3 for those untrained, you know, it's cryptocurrency. It's decentralized internet. It is NFTs and art on the blockchain ownership, right? If 1.0 is read only internet, 2.0 is read right, 3 is actually owning a piece of what's on the plane.
So it's a very exciting frontier and it's filled with a bunch of explorers that I would say are it's a small number of people in terms of people that are excited about digital art, call it, you know, 250,000 people or less. But it is, you know, a serious group of people that are enabling a new canvas to take form in front of us. And I believe in my heart of hearts that for all the bad press that we see about NFTs and all the scams and don't get me wrong, there's tons of that shit. There is something true about if you had to close your eyes and wake up in 20 years, will collectable digital art be a thing? Of course it will, right? Like, and the blockchain is a perfect, perfect place to like prove provenance, to prove scarcity. There's a lot of advantages there.
Long story short, you know, I launched something called Moonbirds, which was a PFP project. I remember the text I got on the day of that launch. Oh my god. Yeah. So we launched this, you know, collectable NFT and it skyrocketed way beyond what we had ever thought. So to give you all a sense from launch to one year in, over a billion dollars has been traded in Moonbirds NFTs. That's so long. And I did not expect that. You know, I really didn't.
But with that comes trading. And I have never lived the world of trading. I have grown companies to quite some size, but never publicly, I've never taken a company public. And when you take a company public, i.e. Nasdaq, you know, New York Stock Exchange, you deal with the ups and downs and feedback from people that are now stakeholders of that particular company. It's different. This is an equity holding an F2 does not make you a shareholder. It's very different, but they still pay attention to what is the price of this NFT.
So when the NFT goes up, times are good. People are happy. And when it goes down, people are not happy. I've had people truly hug me and say they paid off their house because they sold one of my NFTs for $200,000 and they were stoked. And it was like tears kind of hugging. I've had people basically tear me apart saying, I am the other person on the other side of that equation that bought that NFT for, let's call it whatever, $50,000, not $75,000. $10,000 doesn't really matter. It's all relative to how much that person has as an individual. And how are you going to fix this? Because NFTs are down and they need to go up, right?
And some of it is on what we build to try and build bigger and better things for the ecosystem and try and hopefully prove that we are a company here for the long term. It has taken an serious emotional toll on me as an individual. I've had many, many sleepless nights. I've had anxiety like I've never had before. I've had to work with therapists. And I've had to, I've had to reach out to my primary care physician and get anti-anxiety medicine, which I've never had to do before. I have had some dark moments, some, some, not dark, like in suicide, but dark as in, you know, it's destroyed me because I've always considered myself an honest person. I've never been here to screw anyone over.
You're also a very, I consider you to be an empathic feeler. Maybe the right word is like, you're a deep feeler. I am a feeler. So, for sure. If something like, if something like that is sitting with you, you take it very personally. And I remember when you had like stomach issues.
Yes. Oh my God. IBS related issues. That so this year, I've been treated multiple times for these types of issues with physicians, all kinds of things. They discovered, you know, the high blood pressure thing was discovered because I have a brain aneurysm right now that's on the smaller side and they're watching it and I'm fine. But those grow the more stress you're under because the more blood pressure that builds up the larger the aneurysm can grow. And so, you know, as you could imagine, all these things hit you at once.
Yeah. And so I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn't go to work. I felt like I kind of just needed to reset, you know, and Huberman, who I love, who's been on my podcast, Andrew Huberman is a top 10 podcast now. Oh my God. I'm killing it. I love that guy. He's doing such an amazing job of executing.
I don't think I've seen anyone better at doing monologues and the way that he can do them about scientific topics. I mean, just if you haven't subscribed to Huberman's podcast, I mean, it's along with the Tia's, you know, a top five medical podcasts to subscribe to, along with Rhonda Patrick. I mean, they're they're all heroes.
Huberman did a couple hour episode on ketamine therapy. And ketamine therapy, you know, it's used for PTSD. It's used for severe depression and it's used for anxiety. And it sounded really interesting. It rewires neuro pathways and Huberman's episode highly recommend I'm not a scientist, but he is. And he goes in depth about what it actually is doing on the brain.
And I always thought of ketamine clinics as being these shady places, these places where, you know, there are real people with real addictions that they treat, you know, if you're hooked on everything from amphetamines to, you know, any type of serious addiction problems, they see these types of people and also people that are about to kill themselves, like really suicidal. Like if you go to an emergency room right now, and you say, I'm going to end my life in the next 10 minutes, they will most likely treat you with some type of ketamine to just like get you out of that state. It's a very common emergency room, Hail Mary, to like get you back into a state of like just being, okay, I don't want to end my life right now. And now we can work this out or take you to an institution where you can get help.
So I was never there. But I got to the point where I was like, I need to do something dramatic and different. And I need to reboot because I can't take the comments I'm getting on Twitter. Now, did you see the Huberman episode organically? It's only sent to you organically. It's came across. It's came across. And I was like, oh, boy, it's been interesting. I mean, I heard about ketamine in a recreational setting. And, you know, sadly, who's a friend? Matthew Perry. Yeah, Matthew Perry just touched the college report came back and said that he was on ketamine when he drowned. And, but there's we can get into why that that is in a minute.
But in a, let's focus on your personal experience. And I'll just say also, so ketamine and jacuzzis or pools or water to not mix. Exactly. There are multiple fatalities. Don't mix those two things.
Well, when you go into ketamine, you are literally sedating yourself to where they can give you surgery. So the associate of anasthenics. Yeah. So what my doctor has told me, the ketamine there, the doctor, she's an emergency room doctor that did my treatments. Is she said to me that if you came, she was a 10 year, I think 10 or 15 years emergency room doctor. And she goes, if you came in and you had like dislocated your hip, she goes, I want to inject, I would give you what they call a bolus dose is that what they call when they a bolus is right. I mean, they're giving you a lot at once. A lot of once they just like push it all in, right? Yeah.
And she's like, I would give you that to about like, you know, I can't remember the exact acts, but it was a multiple on which they give you for therapy to put you under so I can get that hip back into place. And then you wake up feeling fine.
Unfortunately, with Matthew Perry, he took a dose that was equivalent of subconscious fainting, falling asleep, you know, drowning type dose. And they said the toxicology report, I read it, he had that level in him that would have put him in that state of kind of like passing out, right? Yeah, drugs and water don't mix.
Anyway, so it wasn't the fault of the ketamine. It was he was using it recreationally versus under supervision of a professional, which is, which is what his needs.
无论怎样,这并不是氯胺酮的错,而是他滥用而不是在专业监督下使用,而这才是他需要的。
So I found this, this clinic in, in LA, they literally have the set and setting right. So they're all about like you come in, it's just beautiful, comfortable, peaceful music, really relaxing reclining chairs, I mask because it's important to go inward. It's not about just getting this therapy and looking around the room, music with like drums and beautiful, like sometimes I pick my own play that said a little bit more like chanting, none, none, you don't want like lyrics or, you know, anything to distract you. And they have you hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that measures throughout the time, a heart rate monitor, like really professional setting.
It's called Golden Afternoon is the name of the clinic. And it's an amazing name. It's an amazing name. And the doctor there, top tier, you know, school emergency room doctor is legit as they come.
I saw I felt really comfortable because you know, a lot of this is about set and setting and comfort. Yeah. And safety and safety. Yeah. So I went in there and they, I was like, I'm going to give this a shot because you know, Huberman convinced me that that this can help me with anxiety.
And so, you know, I laid down on this comfortable chair turn on the heating, like they have a heating element in the chair, tilty back a little bit, you know, put on my nose canceling headphones, the gamey and IV and IVs does sound hardcore. But for for people like you and me that do IVs like, or do like draws like every other week. Yeah. Who cares? Like I don't care about this shit, but it does sound how hard to most people. The gamey and IV.
And you know, I closed my eyes and I went to a place, man, I went to a place and it's a beautiful place. And it made me over multiple treatments. And I did eight in total. And they normally do six for depression, which is really interesting because she said that it's typically anxiety is harder to treat than depression in her experience. And they gave me eight in total, you two, two per week.
And about halfway through, the best way I can describe it is imagine that life is a series of crunches. And I say crunches like the ab workout, whereas like nobody likes to work out their ads, right? Like, and because abs are like, Oh, fucking ab day, like, you know, nobody wants to do that. And I didn't realize it, but I had had a 35 pound weight on my chest the entire time I was doing ab workouts. And it took that weight off. And I had, and I still have, and it's been weeks later, a bit of grace and lightness to the way I'm carrying myself throughout life, that is just a piece that I haven't felt since I was probably 10 or 12 years old.
Were you interacting with anyone in the sessions or was all internal? No, it's all internal. So it's headphones on music. I mask entire session lasts for about an hour and a half. They have a camera that's watching you. If anything comes up, one time I have my music accidentally stop and I raise my hand, they're in there within 30 seconds. They bring you hot tea when you're done. They let you take your time to slowly kind of like come to. And then you can literally walk out of there and carry on with your day.
And you know, the first session, I was like, okay, that's beautiful. Second session was a little difficult. Imagine it's kind of loosening up like the plaque in your brain and like rewiring circuits and like it's not always going to be easy. But by the by I remember the sixth session, I just walked out there and she got Dr. Jen came in and she goes, how are you? And I said, I could run a marathon right now. I feel amazing. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest. And I just, this is such important work that you do, such important work because it's not about being, I don't feel there's not an addiction to the substance. I don't need to go back.
Some people go back for boosters, depending on what they have. They have, she told me that some people that have depression, they'll come back in every three months, every six months. She says, some people she never sees again. And it kind of takes the anxiety and puts it pulls it apart from your body so that you can see it for what it is, which is silliness because life is play. And when you realize life is play and we're all here just trying to figure out our shit. Yeah. Why are we taking it so seriously? Yeah, there's a lot that just does not matter. It doesn't matter. So we can just chill, man. It doesn't really matter. So that they have clean drinking water. Yeah. Like what the fuck are we complaining about?
So that the weight on the chest, was that something that you can't put words to that you just felt release or and you don't need to get into details or was there content to it? We're like, Oh, no, interesting. Was in content. Content was beautiful.
And I don't know if you've ever experienced this, Tim, I've never done it. I wasca, although at some point I would love to try it. But like, I opened my eyes and it was when the mask is on. And I was seeing things that were as high of fidelity as what we see today, like right now. Yeah. Where you're like, I am in a room right now. And I felt very present, my dad's passed away. I felt very present with a father source there at times. I felt very connected. At one point, I saw the entire world and I saw how small I was. And I was just like, it immediately gave me this sense of just like gratitude for that being that little speck, but also at the same time, not having to take and carry the burdens of the world on me for being that little speck. And so there's bits and pieces of that.
But I would say at the end of the day, when you come out of it, it's not like you had this epiphany. It's more like Dr. Jen calls it, the ketamine's time on she goes, it's time on brain. How can we make this sit and do the rewiring on your brain and give you time on brain with the drug and the compound and let it do its work? And so it was a lot of surrendering. There's a lot of saying, you do what you want to do. I don't care where you take me emotionally, mentally, whatever, it doesn't really matter. It's time on brain with the compound. And after a certain number of sessions, you just feel this natural lift and lightness. And it felt like I'm not a ballerina, big surprise. But it felt like a little bit of a like walking through life is a little bit of a dance now that it is such a struggle.
Makes me super happy, man, to hear that. It feels amazing. And I remember getting the text, some of the texts from you, and I was excited to have this conversation, which we haven't had. This is the first time we're talking about it. It is. And I'll say a few things. The first is that I have seen a number of cases where ketamine therapy has changed or saved lives. So a friend of mine, for instance, who suffered from depression, his entire adult life had a similar experience to yours. And he went to a clinic, I believe it was in New York City, very well run. And he goes back once every six months for a single tune up, let's just say session. And I actually know also not going to mention their name, but someone we know as a mutual friend, who you probably don't know also does this once every three to six months. And separately, I know someone who's in law enforcement who is heavily disincentivized from talking about mental health with his superiors, because you will be put on leave, generally. If you even hinted that and you're in certain professions, line pilot, for instance, you're going to be put on leave. And it's a nice way to say you practice a nice way. It's a career risk to bring these things up, which puts many more people at risk, right? There should be better processes for this.
But nonetheless, he was suicidal at one point. We're talking about somebody who was carrying around a firearm all day. And ketamine was an intervention that was incredibly effective for him for pattern interrupting. And I use that very literally because the pattern was a thought loop. This is personal. This is permanent. This is never going to change. And when you're able to at least interrupt that for a short period of time, you provide people with hope or at least a window within which they can consider other options. So for acute suicide, suicidal ideation, also for chronic pain, very interestingly, ketamine is super interesting. Yes. It's interesting to say that because she, Dr. Jen over at this clinic has told me she treated quite a few people for chronic pain as well. And it works quite well.
So I unexpectedly, because have you done it? So before I talk to anyone about anything like this, generally, I am volunteering to be the monkey shot in the space.
So several years ago, I did six sessions over three weeks. Ketamine. Yeah. Oh shit. Did you ever tell me this? I didn't realize I didn't tell you. So I did six sessions. This would have been with a mask on. And in this particular case, it was music, but it was not mask on. The way that this particular clinic ran things was with video, which was very strange to me. But nonetheless, it was sort of nature scapes. I was like, okay, well, this is new to me. I'll try it. And it ended up being supremely interesting. I was not going in with an acute condition. So it was hard for me to evaluate, ultimately, a lot of the efficacy.
They found it very strange. And I found it kind of hilarious because they would do an intake each day of active sessions. And they would ask me to do various assessments for anxiety. And my anxiety levels were going up over time, which they found very confusing because you may have experienced a little bit of this. Ketamine can compromise your short-term memory in the short-term, like a after session. So you might like, forget where your wallet is or forget where your backpack is. I didn't have any of that. Okay. So that can happen.
And that happened to me. And it happened to be the case that while I was doing these sessions, because I shoehorned it into my schedule, I also had a number of huge podcasts coming up, like LeBron James and so on. And it was freaking me out that I kept forgetting shit. And so my anxiety was going up over the course of treatment, which was not typically what they said. So I did the same thing. They gave me a whole breakdown. It was one to five on a bunch of different scales. They had a pretty standardized thing that they gave you. I can't remember what the anxiety scales are. But mine went down to literally a zero on all of them, which is amazing. It is amazing.
And I want to mention a few other things. So I'm sure humans episode is excellent for people who want to have a comprehensive overview of ketamine. I'm sure humans is great. So listen to that first. It's fantastic. I also did an episode with John Crystal, who Dr. John Crystal, who is the chairman of psychiatry Yale, who did a lot of the seminal research with respect to ketamine as an antidepressant in humans. So the protocols that get used, which I think are generally like 0.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, et cetera, over experience time with y number of infusions. So those are the protocols that he developed with his other investigators.
And I want to mention a number of things just to make sure that I'm doing my safety first, Ferris duty. So the first is that part of the reason, and this is pure speculation, but I think that it was risky for Matthew Perry to use ketamine, is that he had a history of abuse. Ketamine can be very addictive for people who are unwilling or un-eager to feel certain things. It's a dissociative anesthetic. So if you have, for instance, a history of alcohol abuse, it is, I would say, increasingly likely that you might abuse ketamine, which is why if someone were to consider ketamine therapy, I feel very strongly that it should be IV or intramuscular injection and not at home treatment, where you have access to, say, lozenges or nasal spray. Because there are companies that do lozenges at home.
But I will say one thing, Tim, real quick, and I'll let you continue. I noticed my desire for alcohol go down. So there are this, I think that that can happen. And I'm just saying for folks who, for instance, may be coming out of or part of AA and they have issues with depression. My personal take after everything I've seen is that prior abuse of alcohol, highly correlated to potential abuse of ketamine. And I would say furthermore, there are some urological risks if you use ketamine chronically and alongside that, if you use ketamine chronically, and this is true for a lot of drugs, actually.
That's for snorting though, right? I mean, because you wouldn't be in your logical track otherwise, because it metabolizes in the liver. Well, most people who consume ketamine recreationally. Oh, the would be their mouth or it'll be a lot of it'll be snorting of one way of one sorter and other. So they'll either have it in it'll be in suspension and liquid, or it will be a powder this snort in the same way they would snort cocaine. A lot of people carry little lockets around their necks with ketamine. I've seen this a lot. By the way, that's not what I'm talking about. No, no, no, no, I'm not. But those are two very different.
They are. So just to be very clear, ketamine therapy with IV or IM has a track record of being incredibly promising for a physician for a number of other things. But where where some folks get lost is they go from they go from instead of clinical setting, higher dose supervised, they bleed into more casual recreational use, in which case it's very important for me to say that ketamine can be very helpful for people with say, treatment resistant depression or chronic depression. If you use it chronically though, it flips the other way and it actually makes you predisposed to more depression. So it's just something for people to be aware of.
Yeah. And as is true with so many things, more is not better. What was the drug that Michael Jackson died of? Do you remember the name of that? Sure. I think it was a synthetic opioid or no, no, no, it was basically some type of anesthetic. Yeah. So it was funny. I went and, you know, because I'm old now in my 40s, I wouldn't have my first colonoscopy because like you're supposed to do that shit, you know, part of time. Have you done that yet or no? I have. Yes. Yes. I went and did mine. And by the way, this is very sad, but do not skip your fucking colonoscopies. No. A very good friend of mine. Since we last spoke, Roland Griffiths, who's an amazing scientist from Johns Hopkins, he died of terminal cancer. And I had a long conversation with him a few days before he died, before I went to South America, he was completely razor sharp up until the end. And my recollection is that part of the reason that was caught too late is that he was a few years late in having his exam. So I had mine done and they caught a couple precancerous as they do with most people these days. Yeah. Do your fucking screens. And you got to do your screens. But anyway, long story short, when I was going in, the anesthesiologist came in the room and he was kind of a funny guy. It was cool. I like those guys, you know, yeah. And I asked him, I said, can I have a slow ramp? And he's like, what's the slow ramp? And I'm like, were you just kind of get to me a little bit of time just like just like feel like going into that like that zone, you know? Yeah. And he's like, it's funny. You say that. He's like, I'm giving you the same drug they gave Michael Jackson when he died. And I was like, Oh, that's crazy. I'm like, why? And he's like, he was just addicted to it. And so he gave me the slow ramp. And I remember this feeling about probably, let's call it 30 seconds into it where I felt like I was okay with dying. It was just like this moment of like, this is beautiful. Yeah. And I was like, Oh my God, this is what Michael Jackson was feeling right now. Propeful. Propeful. Yeah. Exactly. That was it. All right.
没错。就像很多事情一样,更多并不一定更好。迈克尔·杰克逊死于什么药品?你记得那个药的名字吗?是的,我记得。我认为那是一种合成阿片类药物,或者不,不,不,基本上是某种麻醉剂。是的。很有趣。我去做了我的首次结肠镜检查,因为我已经40多岁了,你知道,你应该做这个事情,及时检查。你做过了吗?我做了。是的,是的。我去做了,话虽如此,但你千万不要跳过该死的结肠镜检查。不。我的一个很好的朋友 Roland Griffiths,他是约翰·霍普金斯大学的一位了不起的科学家,他死于晚期癌症。在我们上次交谈之后的几天,我和他进行了一次长谈,在我去南美之前,他一直非常清醒,我记得他被发现太晚部分原因是他推迟了几年才进行体检。所以我自己做了检查,他们发现了一些几乎快癌变的东西,像他们这些天对大多数人做的一样。是的,做你他妈的检查。你也得做你的体检。总之,当我去的时候,麻醉师进来了,他是个很搞笑的人,很酷。我喜欢那些人,你知道的,是啊。我问他,我说,我可以慢慢进入吗?他说,慢慢进入是什么意思?我说,你能给我一点时间,就像慢慢进入那个状态一样,你知道吗?他说,很有趣,你这么说。他说,我给你的是迈克尔·杰克逊死时也用的同样药物。我说,哦,这太疯狂了。我说,为什么?他说,他只是对它上瘾了。所以他给了我慢慢进入的方式。我记得大概在30秒左右的时候,我感觉自己对死亡很满意。就像这一刻是美丽的。是啊,我就觉得,哦,天啊,这就是迈克尔·杰克逊现在的感受。舒服的。舒服的。就是这样。
And so I get it. But it's but this is like to the point of Matthew Perry dying in the pool, like this stuff puts you under. Yeah. It puts you under so that you can have surgery. Yeah. And that is what ketamine does as well. So and ketamine broadly speaking is an incredibly well tolerated safe drug. Part of the reason that ketamine is I believe listed in the World Health Organization's top 100 most essential medicines is because it is generally very well tolerated. Yes. And it does not suppress respiration. Yes. Exactly. Right. Which is a huge one. Right. That gigantic. And it's an incredible compound. And you just need to know the risk profile. And there are risk profiles for everything. Of course. You know, we have tequila and we have water in front of us. Water has risk profile too. People die every year. You came up in a trimea because they drink too much water when they're training for or running in a marathon. And that causes disruption of sort of electrochemical signaling. And then boom, they drop and I people die every year. I didn't hear about this. But there was a radio host DJ. Oh, I remember this. You know, I'm talking about these water drinking competitions. People die overdosing on water. This has happened many times. Right. So as Paracalysis would say, the dose makes the poison. But sometimes the frequency in the use pattern makes the poison. Yeah. And I think ketamine is incredibly interesting. Yeah. And firstly, because the when you get into the actual science behind it, we're not just using this as an escape. It's actually rewiring the brain. Yeah. And and Huberman will get into that the kind of neurology behind it and what's happening. And why these are more lasting changes and why some people, not everyone, but some people can go and do this and they don't ever have to go back for a booster or anything else. And it changes them forever.
So I don't know if I should get into this. So we can always cut it. Well, someone very close to me. She was closest to a side. And she's she's a dear friend. She's a sweetheart of a person. And she was the first time I'd ever heard a ketamine there. This was probably four years ago. And she said I was about to take, you know, the closer taking her life. And she had heard about ketamine therapy. It was like kind of new at the time. And she paid for the six pack, the six sessions, you know, the whole six. And and she hated every single session. And it was funny when I talked to Dr. Jen at the clinic that I went to, she said, it's very common people that have depression. They don't enjoy the experience. And I thought it was fantastic. I love the whole thing. But but like when my my friend said that as session, session six, she heard a pop in her brain, like a physical pop, like a psychic chiropractor adjustment. Literally, the depression lifted. And she has been amazing ever since. So while and this has been like five years ago. And it's like, I believe her, she's like doing insanely well now. And it's like, Oh my God, like dude, I so Tim, I just want to like one, thank you for how much money and effort you've put into psychedelic research, because thanks, after experiencing this, I realized that there is something here. And we don't have it figured out. Yeah, obviously we don't like we're in the baby stages, but you know, 10, 20, 30 years with AI, maybe 10 years, like this will get figured out. And it will be largely because people like you help fund this type of research. So I just want to say thank you for that. Thank you for that. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I was so happy to see this text.
Yeah, I got to tell you, if you're in the if you're in the LA area, and obviously you'll talk to her as a doctor, this is her advice not ours. And you'll you'll go through the whole screening process. But golden afternoon dot clinic, I think is the website. And she is an amazing human, very caring, comes in pre and post checks in on you, like a really well run facility, depression, anxiety, PTSD, war veterans, all these people are going in to see her. And it's God's work if wherever you believe in God or not. Yeah, there are some there are some great clinics out there. I will say there are also a lot of fly by night clinics 100%. So do your homework. Yes.
The one of the main advantages, or it is a main advantage of ketamine as compared to other psychedelics is that in the United States, it is currently legal. Yes. And that is a non trivial advantage. And I will say that one question you may want to ask in doing your due diligence, if you consider this as an option. And I do feel after canvassing many different compounds, many different treatments that for for acute suicidal ideation, that ketamine is at the very top of the list, it is on a very short list of interventions that have incredible promise for at least creating the space for someone to consider treatment options.
And the question, the due diligence question that I recommend, and this is true for any type of drug assisted therapy, it's actually true for surgeons too. It's true for doctors in general, ask them what types of adverse events they've observed, what type of abuse potential they've observed. If their answer is, everything is always fine. We've never had an adverse event. Yeah, that is a huge red flag. Yes. Anyone who has enough mileage, if they are ketamine clinic physician, if they are an ER physician, they will be able to tell you what things look like when things go sideways, yes, and how they handle those situations. And if they don't volunteer any of that, it means either they're inexperienced or they're delusional generally. 100%. And I'm giving people a bit of a break, or it means they're lying. And in all three cases, you do not want to have anything to do with that particular practitioner.
By the way, I looked her up, she's a Princeton. Princeton? Yeah. Go Tigers. Look at that. That's where my doctor was going. Phil Wolfson, for instance, has done a lot of writing on this. Do your homework. You are signing up for, let's just call it, psychoactive brain surgery. So to the extent that you would do your due diligence related to a surgeon who is going to be physically opening your head, carving a hole in your skull and performing manual brain surgery, do a commensurate amount of homework on the person who is going to be providing you with compounds that have a significant impact on cognitive functioning, not necessarily only in the short term, but in the longer term. Yeah.
You want to hear another crazy drug story? Let's hear it. That's why we're here. Yeah. All right. I'll give you a refill. Speaking of drugs, Andrew Huberman would not be pleased. With dysentery. With dysentery. Oh, like straight, straight, tequila. Yeah. Occasionally, a teal will have a drink or two. You just know what he's signing up for. Anyway, we can come back to this.
Part of the reason that I had a wild experience in Portugal recently, no matter how much wine I have there, I do not have a headache the next day. And I think it's additive related. I can feel tired. It will fuck up my sleep. At the end of the day, it is alcohol. But fascinating how different my physiological response can be. In any case, that's true with this stuff too, for me personally with Lala. That's great to hear considering I'm consuming a good portion of it. Yeah, good portion.
All right. So let's, I got to talk to you about my tattoo at some point. Okay. All right. You know what? I'm going to leave that as a cliffhanger and come back to a wild drug story. That's right. That's right. That's right. I'm here in town. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. We're going to hear about the crazy machine. Okay. Let's tattoo and crazy machine. What's going on?
One of the, the, the premier generative artists went in by what, when I say generative, what I mean by that for those that don't know is like there's a whole genre of art that is code-based. You know, you write actually computer science code like, and you create art. And one of the, the premier artists in the space has been sold at Christie's and Sotheby's and all of the place is Tyler Hobbs. He's based here on- Such an awesome guy too. Another sweetheart of the guy. He told me he's always enjoyed hanging out with you. So he's hanging out with the occult. What a nice guy. He's, he, he and his wife are just lovely beyond words. Such great people. Yeah. And so Tyler lives here in Austin. And you know, his NFTs, you can say what you want to be a T's, but his NFTs are just absolutely gorgeous pieces of artwork and, and you can sell for at times millions of dollars. Like they're, they're really sought after. Also a legit visual artist outside of Cook. Oh my God. Like I went to the studio today and he pulled up in binders. He's been doing like decades of his visual art. And it's just like, he's not in this for the quote unquote NFTs. Like he's an artist, like to his core. He strikes me as the person that's always saying, what's next? How can I push things in a different direction? Right.
And there's a company based out here called Black Dot that does, it has a machine. It's a robot that uses not tattoo needles, but you know when like people get like their eyebrows, like a cosmetically tattooed on, I can imagine it. It's a common thing. Like some, some, I don't want to be gender based here, but it's mostly women, they get like tattooed on as their eyebrows, but like they use a much finer needle than they would say a tattoo gun. Okay. And so this robot, this machine uses these really fine needles. And what they do is they take, and we can put this in the video as well, they put this kind of template on your arm that is more or less just like almost like a cure of massive QR code kind of like grid on your arms. That's my forearms. I was wondering about that. You sent me a text and I was like, what the hell other guess that another? Is that your tattoo? Okay. No, it's just like a giant QR code. Yeah, like a giant QR code across my forearm. And that allows the optical lenses and the lasers and everything to align the tattoo. It is doing 17,000 small micro like pushes into my skin with this needle. Okay. And it does it, they can gauge with like these depth sensors, like the correct depth of the dermis to go in, so that the ink doesn't spread out and fade over time. Yeah. So they can do insanely high fidelity tattoos. Like stuff you've never like picture perfect. Like even when you see those pictures of like, Oh, that person got that baby tattooed on their like chest. How cute. Like imagine 10x the fidelity of that where you'd be like somebody took a picture and like pasted it on their chest. Yeah. They have a machine that can do that. So you're never getting those off. So you change your mind.
What this is, is Tyler started with he drew me a sparrow. And the reason I like a sparrow is because to me, a sparrow is the most common low ego bird to me that's out there. It just reminds me that in like, like I'm just getting a little sensitive, but like reminds me that we are all just sparrows. We don't need to take each other. Like no one's better than anyone else. Yeah. We were all a common bird. We're all humans, right? And then what he did is he applied an algorithm to it that degrades the bird into a pixelated form over three images. That's cool. Yeah. And so the last one is his last algorithm of the more pixelated version. And so you can imagine I'm getting this tattooed on my arm tomorrow. And so wait, you're getting a tattoo tomorrow. What is that? This is just stencil. So I wanted to show you this today. Okay. Cool. So you can imagine a world where literally in the future, how long does that stencil last? You could wipe it off and with some alcohol and stuff, but it's like, you know, just there for the show of the show. But you can imagine a world where he can give you an algorithm like he does with his artwork. And you can walk in, put your arm underneath this machine and get a unique generative piece by an artist that is one of one unique to you. As defined by an insanely famous artist. Imagine if Picasso had the tools in his day to say, I'm going to create an algorithm that is a bunch of crazy swirls and chaos that is my brain. You're a bank here, whoever. Banks or whoever. And you stick your arm in and you get a one of one Picasso. Like it's, it's, they're only doing three of them. This is a brand new machine brand new technology. And so that's why I'm out here to do a one of one Tyler Hobbs. Wild.
With a sparrow. So that's cool. Black dot? Black dot. Yeah. Okay. That's a new kind of startup out here. Yeah, the us to man. There's a lot happening here. There's a lot happening. That's cool. It's so cool. Yeah. I want to show you the one they did of the Mona Lisa. It's amazing stuff. You don't have, do you have any tattoos at all? You don't know. I've been thinking about getting my first, which is why I asked about the stencil. So look at that. Oh yeah. It's like just the eyes of the Mona Lisa right there. Like, but look how high fidelity that is in the floor. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. That's pretty wild.
So you've been thinking about getting one. I've been thinking about getting one for years, which would be Molly. Molly's paw prints on my forearm. But what was that? You would not. Are you serious? Yeah. That'd be kind of awesome. Yeah. How does Molly now? I was eight between eight and nine. The toaster is slowing down, man. Yeah. It's tough. It's so sad. There is nothing more heartbreaking than starting to see your dog start to go on the decline. Yeah. Like he's falling now. Like, oh, no. You don't have to take the podcast there, but yeah, no, but it's like, hey, toaster's been with the podcast since day one. You've been reaching in the cables.
Oh, I do. I was just going to bring it up, man. Back in the day, this is still dig era, I guess. And we're at your apartment in San Francisco. I knew it was just a little pup chewing on the cables. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. He's still kicking about. He's mentally sharp as shit, which is great, which is like nice. Yeah. It's nice to see him. I remember playing with him. Friendly toast. Yeah. What a great dog. Yeah.
So for me, I, it's hard for me to imagine a world or any circumstances in which I would regret having the paw prints on the arm. Yeah. And there are many other. How much does that dog meant for you, personally? Because like, I've seen you through multiple relationships. Dogs are like this thing that is just like this steadfast love. Yeah. Like, has it been a good, like, I mean, obviously it's been a must have been insane emotional lift for you to have an animal like that. Yeah. It's changed me fundamentally on so many different ways, I think. And it's not just the receipt of that love, which is, it's like a task in and of itself, right? I mean, like to, and I actually saw this at one point, somebody had sketched it on to this piece of wood and I came across it and it was like, your task in life is to learn how to love and be loved. That's it. And being loved is actually not straightforward for everyone, right? Learning to receive that in a way.
So that has been a gift. But it's also been a practice of giving and thinking about someone else's welfare and having, say, a dog as a mirror also for yourself, where let's just say early on, when I was training, Molly, and I took training super seriously. Oh my God, I was there for that. Yeah. And I was, I ended up being pretty good at it and Molly's very well trained. But if she fucked up or made a mistake, I would get upset and you hit her. No, Jesus Christ. I did not hit my dog and beat her with a rod. So no, I wouldn't hit Molly, but I would get, I would get very frustrated. And then that would scare her. And not because I was flashing out, but I would just get so frustrated because I'd be like, God, this is the 37th time we've done this. And it was a mirror because Molly's not doing anything deliberately to piss me off. Right. That's ridiculous.
It was an incredible reflection in the pond for me to see what was going on and to see what's going on with me. Right. Like, I'm short tempered. If you're with other people, you can weave a story to justify it. Right. Well, like they should know, like, God, I'm getting sleep and they know that and da, da, da, da, da. But it said, always have to be in the morning that they blah, blah, blah. You can, you can really spin a yarn to rationalize why you're upset with someone else, but a really loving, well-behaved dog you're kidding? Like, that's a you problem, pal. Like that is not a dog problem.
Yeah. And so on all of those levels, she's just been such a wonderful companion and teacher. And I was away from her for a few weeks recently for the first time because I was in South America. Yeah. Absolutely not the right place for a dog where I was in the middle of the jungle. And I really, really missed her. So I mean, I've gone, I'll really like take us there. But like when I think about, which I do pretty often, like when she has her decline and then passes, like it's heartbreaking for me to imagine. And I'm going to get a second dog almost certainly in the next year. That would be on my nearest resolutions too. And I've thought about this for a few years, but I've pushed it off because there's part of it that doesn't want to accept that Molly is mortal. So I've pushed it off and pushed it off. But it's it's good to do it on the sooner side because when they're older, like I could never enter these another dog to toaster right now. Yeah. Because these two to old that handle that puppy energy. Yeah. Versus if you did now, then that can kind of like you. And Molly's really good with puppies and she loves puppies. Yeah. So I'm going to do that very soon in the next year.
And I at one point was volunteering. It's a long story, but I was volunteering around wolves. And I was like preparing food and so on for these wolves, which were the ones that like doing the teeth and stuff. Yeah, which were being sort of rehabilitated and raised in captivity because they'd either been bred and raised in captivity, in which case they can't be released. Or there are any number of conditions that led to them being non-viable as wild releases. I saw one of the volunteers had, he was on his rib cage. He had a print from this wolf that he had known for years until that wolf passed away. And I thought to myself, you know what? I've never felt pulled to have a tattoo. And the fact that I have no tattoos is kind of novel now, which is funny, right? Yeah. You know, tattoos are pretty cool. Oh, you got to go to Jess, my lady. She's amazing. So I might, I might. And I thought, you know, I really have a hard time imagining regretting doing that. And I can also see it being a really valuable reminder of a lot.
Tim, I've got something for you. Listen to this. Tell me. You know, I said, someone was going to play at my birthday. Yes. Jess is going to be out there at the same time. Okay. Why don't you sign up to get the tattoo at the party? I mean, not at the party. Like the day before, the day after, something like that. And she is like booked out by like a year. Like she did Bruce Willis's tattoos. Like she's like, she's like legit. She's legit. All right. Jess, Jess Muschetti on Instagram, like, insane. All right. Now she's booked out for five years. I just just took it up strings. This has been on my list for a while. It's been on my list for a couple of years. And I think partially because I'm nervous. You would love her.
Can I ask you a question? Yeah. I want to ask you a question that is a little bit more intimate just because we've had some tequila and we're talking about dogs and just kind of the companionship and what not speaking up kind of like New Year's resolutions and looking back on life. In the last 10 years, when it comes to both personal intimate, like relationships or private, what would you, if there's any one thing, what would you change about your interactions with either someone that you would been with on an intimate level or someone that like maybe it's like on a more kind of like, you know, friendship level? Is there anything that you can look back on and say, I would have done more of this?
That is an exceptional question. And you know, when I was driving over here, I was thinking about another question. We have the ultimate cliffhanger and the crazy drug story. So maybe we'll get to that. Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll do the next episode. But I was thinking also, I was like, what would Kevin tell his, I'm going to answer your question. But I was thinking, what would Kevin tell his 30 year old self, like current Kevin, like do this, maybe not do so much of that. I thought that could be a fun exploration.
With the interpersonal stuff, I think that I would say just because someone needs other things, things that are different from your needs does not make them high maintenance. And by the way, Tim, if they looked at you through the same lens, you were looking at them through, they would decide that you were high maintenance. So gather some tools, right? I would say read the five love languages as cheesy and schlocky as it might seem. That shit is so helpful as a framework for discussion, for identifying and easily labeling the different categories of needs that people might have, and putting them in some type of order.
Oh, interesting. You're a quality time person. Good to know. Number two would be this. You're a physical touch and then acts of service person as I am. These are shared vocabulary that you can use to really avoid and repair a lot of things. So I would say, handful of things. So gain Katie Hendricks, also conscious loving. There are a few books, if you resources, I would say, look, if you really care about someone, commit together to develop a shorthand, which allows you to not necessarily prevent. I don't think prevention is the key. I think repair is the key, right?
Like if you're in a startup and you're like, well, let's just prevent all the bad things from happening. That's never going to work. Right. Shit's going to happen. And people are going to have bad days and you're going to say things you regret and they're going to be disagreements. And by the way, if there are no disagreements, something's wrong. Right. Right. I understand. And therefore having a shorthand and a set of agreements, right? Like these are the rules that we agree to play by. And we're not going to be perfect. I would say that would be very high on the list.
And I would say for really close relationships, potentially, maybe why it's out, but who knows, MDMA assisted psychotherapy, let's just say anywhere from once a quarter to once a year, no more than once a quarter for a whole host of reasons. But I think that while MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is incredibly impressive and I've been very involved with that from, I don't want to say day one because that's not true, but certainly for the last 10 years or so, I've been very involved up through phase three and now onward. The results with treatment resistant PTSD is a complex PTSD where you see people who've had this diagnosis for 17 years, suddenly after two or three sessions end up asymptomatic, right? They would not meet the criteria for PTSD.
Right. With durability out to six, nine, 12 months, it's something that almost defies belief, right? It is causing a complete reexamination of psychiatry as we know it. I still think that is second place to couples work when it comes to MDMA. I think that that is that is an incredibly fruitful arena for seeing the full potential of MDMA psychotherapy. So that would be another one because sometimes, oftentimes couples end up, and I know multiple people now who have had this experience with professional guidance, which by the way, folks currently is legal. So before warrant, there are legal consequences or at least risks entailed with this, not to mention the fact that at least, I would say 60 to 70% of MDMA that you might purchase is adulterated or mixed with something else at this point. So you need to be very careful. Dance safe.org is a resource I would recommend for testing kits and so on. If you're going to go that route, I'm not recommending you do anything illegal. However, people are going to do it. International listeners are going to people are going to do it anyway. I just recognize it's like you can't just say to every teenager, don't have sex. Kids are going to have sex. So let's be realistic about it.
I did that shit one time. It's fun. It's sex. No. When I was 23, I did a, well, they were kind of ecstasy back then, but like, holy shit. Yeah. No compound. Yeah. And that can go, that can also go sideways just for for a record. Yeah. So like there are films out there now, how to change your mind, the mini series on Netflix, watch the MDMA episode. It is excellent. Yeah. And it's pretty heavy because it gets into some PTSD, but you'll be able to see live session footage if you want another alternative or compliment. He's great. And there is also a doc called trip of compassion, which is worth seeing, which has a lot of session footage as well. But those are a few of the things that would come to mind. And I was saying on a friendship level, I might suggest to my earlier self, let's just say 30 year old self, right? Something that I have really embraced and put into action in the last handful of years, which is going to sound a little anti social, but I don't view it that way.
Humans have a finite capacity for building and sustaining really deep relationships. You just can't do that with everyone. And when I've looked back, say, and I do this every year at a past year review, and I look back at my calendar every week of my last year. And on a piece of paper with positive and negative two columns, I write down the peak and peak negative and positive experiences. If I look at the commonalities for the peak positive experiences, it's usually the same 10 people or fewer, right? It's the same cast of characters. These are my close friends who are nourishing, supportive, good influence.
And before what I would say to my younger self is before you seek to develop a bunch of new relationships, ask yourself, are you spending enough time as much time as you would like with the people on that shortlist who you know are guaranteed to be nourishing for you. And if the answer is no, maybe you should double down on those relationships. Maybe you should reach out to those people to get something on the calendar before shit crowded out before you look for shiny objects in new relationships, which doesn't mean I don't develop new relationships. I occasionally do, but I'm at a point where I think recognizing the ephemeral nature of life, the finite limits, the constraints that we have is actually very enabling. It helps you to make cleaner, faster decisions. So for me, I would just say, before seeking to develop new deep relationships, ask yourself the question for my closest five friends, let's just say, in the last year, did I spend as much time as I would like with those people? If the answer is no, reach out to those five first. Yeah. Yeah. What about you?
Oh, man, I would say, honestly, I think that we're at the age now where every day just brings a new unknown in terms of like, how long are we going to last? I've had multiple friends with cancer now. I had one friend that I almost lost this year that was in the emergency room for weeks that we thought had stage four cancer and ended up being a horrible bacterial infection from some foreign country. And it's just like, I remember this. I just realized like, there's so many times when we hang out and we just give a hug and say, oh, good to see you. Like, well, but we don't say I love you. Yeah. We don't say, you know, I you are so essential to me in so many ways. And maybe it's the ketamine talking. But when I went through this whole thing with the ketamine therapy, I realized like at the end of the day, love is the, it's gonna sound cheesy, but it is like it is the most important thing that we tell each other and that we feel for each other. And like, you can really feel that and you say, this person is like so important. I mean, you let them know that and you feel it back. I don't know what what's better than that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What's more human than that too, right? Yeah. In a way, I mean, like love, you know, you can observe affection and love in many other species, but the ability to verbalize it and express it. Yeah. Do you feel that psychedelic springs that out of you? Because like, when I did the therapy, I had more love in me than I've had in so long. Do you feel that's a commonality amongst like psychedelics to like have a sense of just gratitude for existence?
For sure. I think it's I think it's very common. It's it's not always across the board. I mean, I would say that this might be a controversial statement, but the psychedelics to me are similar to there's a lot more to it, which we'll probably dive into, but kind of like alcohol or power or money in the sense that they magnify what's already there. And their term you sometimes hear is a non-specific amplifier. So I don't think that at all, there's no compelling evidence to me that psychedelics, if put in the drinking water, produce world peace, there's no evidence for that. Right.
I mean, you have plenty of civilizations. Maybe lithium though. No, no, no, no. Remember there was a member. I remember. Yeah, a little bit of lithium goes a long way. Yeah. Yeah. People can look this up. We'll try to find there's some. There's a study that people the populations where there is more lithium naturally found in the drinking water have lower rates of suicide anywhere else. All sorts of stuff. Yeah. So we'll see what we can find to put in the show notes. I do think low dose lithium is pretty interesting. Very low dose psychedelics are non-specific amplifier. There are many cases of civilizations where they had human sacrifice, played soccer with human heads, and they consume psychedelics. I still sacrifice people. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, that's me all day. You know, every once in a while on solstice. I mean, it's, I think it's all fair game, but the feeling of gratitude and love, I think for a lot of people who wish to enable that to experience it more, who have the conscious or subconscious desire to rekindle those things, the experience you're describing is very common.
Yeah. For sure. And I think part of that is the dissolution. This isn't true of all experiences, but the dissolution of self and consequently, the felt sense of unity with many or all things, which leads you to feel for most people less alone. Yeah. Which leads you to feel quite grateful because to state the obvious, I suppose, I mean, the despite the fact that we're more connected than ever with loose ties, I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression that is highly correlated to feeling of isolation. So when you can remedy that by feeling the exact polar opposite in some of these states, not necessary, but helpful, that the end result of that is a feeling of gratitude. For sure. Awesome. Yeah. What was the before we wrap things up because I know we're coming to the end and you still have some just a give it a thing. What was the cliffhanger you said you wanted to tell us?
Yeah. So I'll try to keep it short. I mean, I'll let you I'll tell you what, I'll keep it short and then you can excavate. Okay. As you like, I love to excavate. All right. So as you know, for the last year, I've been crippled by lower back issues. I mean, I've I've had trouble there are days when I've had trouble getting up and walking. I mean, it's been that bad. Yeah. And to be honest, Tim, you first told me about this, like eight years ago or something. Remember when you got those injections or something? Sure. Like you were like, I think I have degenerative disc disease. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had lower back issues for a long time. This is also a congenital issue. So I have what's called a transitional segment. In other words, there's a segment in my lumbar, there vertebra in my lumbar area that really mimic a sacral vertebral segment. And that's problematic for a host of reasons creates an abnormal angle. And if you can imagine just bending the paper clip over and over again in ways that it shouldn't be that that's sort of the feeling in the low back. And my brother has this, there are other people in my family who have this issue.
So standing extended slow walking like a museum walk cocktail party type of experience can be very painful, like the low back locks up. But in the last year, specifically had all sorts of issues and all sorts of MRIs and specialists and PT and adjustments and traction and this, that and the other thing. And it was a disaster and it caused it. Well, let me give myself a little more agency. I created a lot of anxiety around this because I was like, fuck, is this the new normal? Right. Is this really the new normal where? Well, because you project forward, like what is five years from now? Yeah, I'm like, I'm not that old, and I'm pretty active in your skincare is amazing. My skincare is amazing. I saw your Instagram video video. You know what's funny? Sidebar is how much time you can spend on like a blog post six, six months to put together.
Yeah. And it's like you get like crickets and a fart in the wind and then nobody ever reads it again. And then someone in your team is like, you know what? People ask about your skincare. Let's grab a couple clips and throw it up and it goes bananas. I'm on Instagram and the first thing pops up to me is like, Hi, I'm Tim Ferris. People ask me about my skincare regimen. Let me tell you, I use Bronner's natural soap. It's like, it's like, what the fuck is going to come into? Yeah. So here we are. Here we are folks. Your skin looks amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Coming back to the main through line here, terrifying experience with the back. And I had more or less given up. I was I was in the stage of grief where I was trying to get past denial and accept that this might be the new normal because no one could figure it out. And a lot of the advice I received, many of the diagnoses were conflicting.
And then decided, in part, because of this, to do a few things. And part of that was going to South America, which I'm not recommending, there are a lot of risks down in South America. It's generally like safety fifth. It's not safety first. So people get into a lot of trouble. But I went down and did this, did this training, which involved consuming much plants also involved fasting for a week. Also involved water fast water fast. Also days. Yeah. Also involved during that week, really not sitting and standing very little. So it was either hammock or caught basically. And I'm mentioning these things because they're confounders, translating that into basic English. That means that I can't really point back to one thing and say, this is what caused what I'm going to describe. But the during the first experience, which happened to be with ayahuasca, which is a huge gun. It's, I think, treated very casually by people who do not realize what they're signing up for.
I do not recommend it to most people as my ex who's going to become relevant in a second. Would tell you, I talk many, many, many more people, nine out of 10, out of, I'm not going to mention her name, but out my most recent ex out of using ayahuasca. Then I talk into using ayahuasca. Like nine out of 10, I say, you should not proceed. Do not pass go for a lot of reasons. But in this particular case, had a very, very, very difficult experience. And I can kind of rank order my hardest experiences over the last decade plus. And this would be the third most difficult, maybe the second for different characteristics, which is saying a lot. And there was a point at which in that experience, all I could imagine was having my head in the lap of my ex. Like, that's all I wanted. It was the only thing I could even visualize because I was in the impact zone. I was just getting hit by 100 foot waves from every angle. And there was no respite. It was 10 out of 10. There was no wave, meaning it didn't ebb and flow. It was just 10 out of 10 volume from peak until end of the night, effectively. It was, it was unusual and incredibly difficult. And that was true for everyone in the session.
Is shaman mixed the wrong? This guy's famous for having a brew that just cripples people and like, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of other full time clinicians from indigenous traditions will not drink his brew. I'll put it that way. Jesus. And coming back to the point of the story, I'm imagining, you know, the only thing I can envision is this woman holding my head and consoling me. That's the only thing I can imagine. And then I realized that for a year, because we separated a bit over a year ago. And this was totally subconscious, right? It wasn't a decision on my part. But I realized I had not allowed myself to feel the complete, obliterating heartbreak that was in fact, the core response to that separation. Right? Like I'd not allowed myself to fear from previous from that separation. Right? Like, in other words, my psyche had seemingly protected me because of my history of depression, right? Which I've come to manage better than ever before.
Like each year, I'm better able to manage it. And it's less and less frequent. It's less and less intense. But nonetheless, let's face the facts and college almost killed myself. Right? So there was a, there was a fear, at least subconsciously, that because of this separation, because of starting over at square one, that I could spiral into a deep depression and that could be dangerous. So my psyche protected me from that by not letting me feel the sadness, the pain, to the extent that ended up being important, which I realized in this moment.
So I allowed myself to soak in it in that moment. My trip reports are so fucking boring, most of the time, and I apologize to people who might be listening and thinking, go here we go again, because I get it. Trust me. But in this particular case, I experienced something I've never experienced as soon as I soaked in that. And I really soaked in it. It was awful. It was so dark and so heavy. And then I felt my back release. And literally, I've been 90 plus percent pain free since that fucking moment. And it blows my mind because at that point, I couldn't explain it with the fast, because the fast and ketones are highly anti-inflammatory. And I think that they actually played a role, hold on, in the durability of things. But the fact that there was an immediate release is interesting. It is interesting. I can't explain that through fasting. I can't explain that through the just being recumbent, laying down for seven days, because that was yet to come. And I would say that I made a tactical error in the last few weeks, which is, I was like, fuck man, I'm all good. And so I've neglected some of the basic self-care and strengthening and PT, which I think is important because my low back and QL and so on, which are some of the surrounding muscles, have atrophied over the last year of avoiding working with the back. There was that experience. And for people who may be interested in delving into this a little bit more, there is a book. I don't agree with everything in the book, but it is interesting in the sense that it was written by a Western trained MD who ended up then opening a healing clinic in South America, focused on ayahuasca and diets, which you will read about if you get into the book called the Fellowship of the River.
So I found that book quite interesting on a number of levels. But the reason I bring this all up, number one, people had recommended this book, I think it was called Healing Low Back Pain. I may be getting the title slightly wrong, could be fixing low back pain, but it's by Dr. Sarno, John Sarno. And this book was recommended to me. I've read it before. And the general gist is it's all in your head. Now, I took great offense at parts of this book, and a lot of it is scientifically indefensible. So he, unfortunately, I threw the baby out with the bathwater a bit because he sends a, he says a bunch of things that are ridiculous. And he cites these success statistics for his method while simultaneously saying, if I interview someone and they say they're not open to A, B, or C, I omit them from my treatment. And I'm like, okay, well, wait a second, your selection of biases out of control. Yeah.
I wanted to bring this up because that book has helped a lot of people, despite its flaws, and not everyone will at any point want to consume Ayahuasca, which I would advise against for 90 plus percent of the population. See, it can be very destabilizing for a lot of people and very risky. I would say there are a lot of things you should do beforehand, right? Like, try the talk therapy, try holotropic breathwork, consider after speaking with doctors, ketamine. After that, you can consider other tools. But Ayahuasca should be like, let's do a fifth on your wrist show on Ayahuasca. Is that possible? Yeah, possibly. Yeah, Ayahuasca would be like fifth or sixth on the list of progressions. It would not be first. But I would say the Sarno books are interesting. I know they've helped people like Brian Koppelman, who's been on the podcast, amazing writer, who was the co-creator of Billions, among others, rounders, etc. And it's something that I've always, in theory, agreed with. Yes, we store stress. That can have physiological effect. There are auto-unis orders that I think are intimately linked with different types of psychological disturbances.
So you can address the problem kind of from the physiological side first. Of course, the brain isn't entirely separate. There's no kind of Cartesian separation of mind and body. So yes, the brain is physiological, but you can attack it through content in a way, or you can attack it through pharmaceuticals and physiology first. I think you can go both ways. But the Sarno book, I think, is worth a lot of people reading.
The second thing I'll mention, which is very, very simple and tactical. If you have lower back pain, I'm shocked to take me this long to figure it out. And say sitting on hard chairs bothers you, or lumbar support helps you. For a year, I've been going to restaurants and asking if they have a cushion. Do you have a cushion or pillow or something I can use to fix fucked up seating situations? This is the solution right here. This is it. This is a Pilates ball. This is a pro-body Pilates. It doesn't really matter. But honestly, this thing folds up six in your pocket. I've been traveling with it. I've had it behind my back the whole time. And like, great for first dates, great for first dates, ladies love Pilates balls. And I, but I will say, for instance, like the last time I did a podcast in this seat, I did not use this. And my back was fucking killing me afterwards. But the killing me afterwards is not just an issue for today. That's an issue that causes inflammation that fucks up my sleep for three or four days. Use this ball, no problem. I can put it behind my back, or I can put it under my ass. And it folds up and fits in your pocket. So anyway, folks, there you have it from the sublime to the ridiculous Pilates ball. Amazing.
Alright, how are we doing? Any other topics? I feel pretty good. Next time we'll get to what you would tell your 30 year old self. Anything you'd like to add in that category? No, I just, you know, I think if we are, we wrap it up now. Cause I'd like to say some wrapping up comments. Wrapping up comments, please. Yeah. So my wrapping up comments would be this. I recently went out to dinner with five close friends of mine, who of which you know, most of them just like the crew, the Wu tank land. Yeah. Just good friends. And one of the things I did is I went around the circle and I said a few words of gratitude. And I think to my earlier point, one of the things that's really important to me after coming out of this therapy is just this vulnerability that allows us to speak from the heart because we don't know what tomorrow brings. And I just want to say that, Tim, you have been a friend of mine for so long now. And I have appreciated the fact that my career has been a series of ups and downs and all over the place. And you have been a steadfast friend, someone that sends me some of the funniest videos I've ever seen in my life always keeps it like lighthearted and fun. But I know that you care deeply about me and I just want to let you know that I love you and I care deeply about you. And I will always be here to have your back and I'm wishing you a fantastic new year. I hope that you hit all these milestones and more that you want to hit because I know that you are someone that I've always looked up to and someone that is just so inspirational to us all that listened to your show and your podcast because you inspire us to do more and to be better humans. And I just want to let you know that that's that means a lot to me and I love you.
Well, thanks, Kevin. That's amazing. That makes my night and happy to say it.
嗯,谢谢,凯文。太棒了!这让我的晚上变得愉快,我很高兴能这样说。
Yeah, it's the truth. I love you too, man. Our friendship has been such a such a constant for me. Such a lifeline in a way with all the ups and downs and holy shit.
I mean, both of us have had some pretty wily ups and downs. You've had a lot of hot chicks. You did. I didn't see that coming. When you talked about ups and downs, I was like, you've got a lot of ups, my friend.
Yeah, I mean, I've looked. That's one category. That's a one category. And I had a light up the moon a little bit and I'm and I'm grateful for that. And you know, life is like box chocolates, right? You just never know what's around the corner. It's true. And that's why it's important to say these things.
It is. It is. And you know, I have I have I'll tell you something you don't know. I have your Christmas slash New Year's card from like two years ago. So obviously out of date, it's like you and Daria and the kids. Yeah. And it's up in my kitchen. Amazing. And I kept it there because I just I love seeing you guys every day. And I think about you guys all the time. And just have such love for your family. And I'm so grateful for our friendship. So I love you too, man. It's important to say things are so uncertain.
And I've never experienced I've had friends pass from cancer before. But I've never been with them through. I've never been there every step of the way from diagnosis to last conversation a few days before they passed. That was new for me. Yeah. And it affected really deeply affecting me on a bunch of levels.
And I want to be deeply affected by that. And I want I don't want to push that aside. In part, because Roland was so joyful and curious and optimistic until the end in a very genuine way. I wasn't an act. It wasn't theater. That raised a bunch of aspirations in me. Because he was first and foremost a very dedicated meditator. Psychoelects were a piece of the puzzle. But first and foremost, he was a dedicated meditator for decades. That's amazing.
And attributed a lot of his equanimity and preparation for death, which I got to see firsthand. A lot of people talk about it. But let's be honest or I'll be honest. I've read all the Stoics or a lot of the Stoics and I've read all sorts of Buddhism and rehearsed death and momentum. Or in this other thing. But when I'm actually on as Roland said the final glide path, I don't know how I'm going to respond. I don't know. I have no idea.
So to see someone who really walked the walk in such a life affirming way that lit everyone up around him was tremendous. And he said what he was able to and he was willing to say what he meant to those people around him who meant things to him.
And you don't have to wait until you have terminal cancer diagnosis. You shouldn't wait. Just because it may not be that. It may be a car crash. It may be something where you don't get the chance to say these things. And so I just, yeah, it's important to do it now. Yeah, you got to do it.
Great to see you, man. Yeah, good to see you. Happy New Year.
很高兴见到你,伙计。是的,很高兴见到你。新年快乐!
I'm excited for this is going to be a Oh, don't you type talk a little bit about that. Cheers. To the new year. And all the listeners out there, you know, wishing you a happy and healthy new year. And yeah, I'm excited to continue this new.
I mean, it's always a new year of change, a new year of change and exploration. I think the one thing that you and I, let's take a sip. The one thing that you and I have in common is just this like lifelong pursuit of evolution.
Yeah, of like figuring out because they're the secret that no one will tell you is no matter how much money you make, how much success you have, we're all still figuring out. And in Ram Dass' words, we're all just walking each other home.