#875: The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday”

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? Now what is the method you're coming in? What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Kev Kev. Tim Tim. Good to see you, man. Good to see you. Let's figure out which one there we go. Cheers. Cheers. All right. You know, I know the cool kids are down on alcohol, but every once in a while, I think there's a place for it. There's a time and place. And this is the time. I think this is the time and the place, and I think paying a tax for it the next day is a feature, not a bug. Are you getting taxed harder on alcohol? Of course. Is it getting worse? Every old bastard. Yeah, I know. That's gender neutral. He gets taxed as you can process ethanol less and less well over time. But I'm cool with it. I don't have that much, but today has been hectic. Yeah. Take a little edge off. And people may not like the sound of that. A little antiquated maybe for all the cool ketamine kids. No offense. Don't put that shit on me. I try it one time and I get a freaking bastard. Your fucker goes once and then they call me the Godfucker. You can't get around it. I still stand by that. When you're doing it in a supervised setting by a medical professional. Oh, here we go. I'm telling you, you've done it. Of course I have. Okay, so there we go. Well, yeah, because I wanted to be able to speak. I saw you at a party one time, and you were just like, whoa. That's not true. That's not true. Still have all my nostrils intact. No ketamine cramps, you know. I don't know what that is. Is that a bang? That's when you use too much. Okay. Way, way, way, way too much. Oh, yeah, I heard something bad in the bladder. Yeah, your bladder can get a little grumpy. or a lot grumpy, as the case might be. Yeah, I'm good. You know, I'm good. Kevin, random show number 3,479. Yeah. You know what's crazy, dude, is I looked up a random show the other day, and you had a bit of hair, like, way back in the day. Way back, yeah. We were babies. I know. So much shit has happened. I know. The only constant, I think, is like Toaster, who's barely alive. Yeah, yeah. Toaster, I know. Seriously. Toaster was a tiny, tiny little pup who was chewing through the XLR cables. Oh, my God. On your couch in San Francisco way, way, way back in the day. Toaster's 15. And I'll tell a quick little story. A week ago, I get this call. Daria calls me, and she's like, you got to get over to the house. Like, Toaster is shaking violently. And he's 15. He's, like, running into walls and shit. Like, you know, he's getting up there. And his legs are collapsing so he can't stand up. and he couldn't stand up and he's shaking violently and I'm like just flying over there I throw him in my car, he's on my lap driving to get to this emergency vet as fast as possible and he just sprays shit all over me, like literally I heard it like, I felt his stomach be like here we go 10 seconds later, I'm not even talking like, oh he had a little shit like no, no, no, no like shotgun against the car door like the whole thing and it's all in my pants we're toasty i know but you know what's funny dude it's like i rushed him in and long story short he's okay now what was it he had gone into the vet the day prior and he was so nervous that he stood for he had to be there for like a multi-hour blood draw because he's having some other issues and he stood for like six hours straight. That's too long for an old dog. And dude, he can only stand for like ten minutes. Like max. And so he had just overtaxed himself and got like, there's a syndrome that they can get when they're like super stressed out and all that. Sure. So little Molly's at it or big Molly. She's on the floor right here. She's sleeping. Molly's 12. It's crazy. But long story short, he's okay. But I thought to myself, it's so weird because when I walked in there and there was like shit. Literally I'm in tears because I think I'm about to have to put down my dog. Yeah, of course. And I just thought, it's okay. I'll do this any day for this dude. When you care about your animals that much, none of that matters. You would do anything for them. For sure. Just that love. It's so crazy how much you love these little beasts. It's insane, dude. It's like a kid. It's like a kid. Yeah. It's wild to think about if you really sit down and think about it. some of these super common daily experiences, like communing with a dog or pointing and having a dog recognize that you're pointing, for instance, that's really rare in the animal kingdom, that recognition of pointing as just one example. But how unusual it is that we have this. And yes, we have cats. I grew up with four cats and two dogs. I get it. But in particular, dogs as like companions, co-hunters, et cetera. The fact that we have evolved, co-evolved in a sense, and sort of co-domesticated also, it's not necessarily one way. Read The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan for more on that. It is incredible. Yeah. Right? The fact that we have like, we're totally calm having this 60 plus pound beast with giant fangs on the floor is nuts. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you've seen those Instagram posts where it's like, where I was and where I am now today. and they show the wild wolf out in the countryside eating a rabbit. And then they show a poodle in a tutu outfit and shit all dyed up. The meme is, I'm going to go grab some scraps from those weird monkeys. What's the worst that could happen? And then it's like 10,000 years later, you're a chihuahua with a bonnet on. What else is going on, Kevin? I got a couple things on my list, but we got a lot to talk about. There's a lot to talk about. First, I'll say that lately life has been lifing me. It's been doing all the things. We lost a dear colleague, O'Malek. Oh, man. Very sad. Very notorious, like amazing early tech, just creative author. Brilliant writer. Writer. Writer thinker. Very sweet guy. The nicest. The nicest. And, yeah, we lost him within the last week or so. Yeah. He passed away, so that was tough. That was really tough. I found out when I was at a retreat. I went to a five-day silent meditation retreat, which is great. But bummer to hear that. But, I mean, this is the thing that I realized the other day. I was thinking about, you know, Toaster and OM and other stuff I have going on and my mom getting older and following and all these things. And in some sense, it's unavoidable, number one. And number two, I kind of wouldn't have it any other way. It's what makes life interesting. When OM passed. You mean death? Well, just everything, the chaos of it all. if you can just take a step back and be like, well, or I could just be sitting there living a really boring life and nothing could be happening. Like when Om passed, what I felt was a severe sense of loss and sorrow and sadness. But I realized that that gap is just love at the end of the day. Because I wouldn't have it unless I loved this man so much. Like I cared for this person so much. How lucky am I to have crossed paths with this person to get to know them? And you were tied in through True Ventures, obviously, and prior to that. Yeah, but like anyone in general that you lose, that you love. You know, I mean, when I lost my dad, like that is just a gaping hole of love manifested through sorrow and sadness. And once you realize that, it's like, wow, I had this great father that did all these amazing things with me. And you can kind of convert that or just be okay with it. Not that you need to change that feeling. Recognize that it's a consequence of the love that you had. The consequence of the love, the deep love. Yeah, you know, I heard about his passing, and I want to give credit where credit is due for a few things. Matt Mullenweg, a mutual friend, he was incredibly close to Om. And I'm really grateful to Matt for a few things. One, I mean, many things. I could give a long list, but there are a few. One is he organized a trip to Antarctica. I've never been to Antarctica, or I hadn't. and on that trip were just a handful of people, including Om. So I got to spend quality time. I mean, trust me, when you're in Antarctica, you are indoors most of the time. What that means is you're either trying to sleep in your tent, but it's going to be during the summer, so it's like a spotlight in your face 24 hours a day, or you're in one of these other structures where you're probably like having wine and junk food. Let's be honest. And there's a lot of talking. So we got to hang out, and Om was also an avid photographer. and so we got to like go to this nearby empire penguin colony which was a once in a lifetime experience and you just sit and talk and if there were going to be any small talk which there wasn't going to be with om or me really for that matter it all falls away after the first half day right and then everybody's kind of like psychologically naked so i really want to thank matt for that opportunity to bond with them. And I'd spent a lot of time with them, but it was always in these little bits and pieces, you know, not for several days straight where you're basically like locked in together. And separately, Matt introduced me to this short blog post by someone who typically writes very long blog posts, Tim Urban called The Tail End. I don't know if I ever sent this to you. People should know by way but why. Yeah. Way but why. Yeah. Fantastic blog. And The Tail End makes the point, among many others, that by the time you, I think it's graduate from high school, let's assume you're headed off to college away from your parents. You've spent something like 90, 95% of the total hours you will ever spend with your parents by the time you graduate from high school. And when you start to visualize that, and Tim Urban's really good at laying it out visually, it can provoke some really profound changes for me. I mean, just reading that short blog post sent to me by Matt ended up leading to taking my family on these family trips as like awkward and uncomfortable. That was the point because my family doesn't really emote much. So you stick us together in the way that I was together with the home and it's, it can be super uncomfortable, but making the effort, right? At least feeling like, look, this runway is not infinite. Yeah. And it's like, let me just make the effort. And I'm glad I did because we got to a point where it's like with my dad's mobility is really compromised and needs a wheelchair now for a lot. I just saw him a few days ago, and it was great to see him, dude. Yeah. It was so great to see him. He's so kind. Yeah, he is. He's like, Kevin, like so happy. Yeah. And, you know, he has a little cane. Wow. It was just like so sweet to see him, man. I hadn't seen him for like years. Long time. It had been like seven years or something like that. Yeah, something like that. And I'm glad I took those trips because before you know it, you can't do it anymore. Right. And it makes me think of, you mentioned meditation, this really good, short, I'll call it a meditation for simplicity, but like an audiobook chapter by Sam Harris called The Last Time. I think it's called The Last Time. And he reflects on these various experiences that at the time you don't recognize are the last time for something. Right? So he went skiing, he went skiing, he went skiing, and there was a time when he stopped. Yeah. But he didn't realize that that was going to be the last time. Right. And you just fucking don't know. Do you ever try and like, I think about this, dude, and then I try and do it one more time. Yeah, that's how I always end up injured. Dude, I went to the bouncy house with my kids. And like, I'm 49, you know? And I was like, we'll have to fucking do a flip right now. And like, literally, people are like, don't do it. Don't like call me off, you know? And I did it. And I stuck it. And it felt good. You're good on a trampoline. It might be my last time. You might be your last time. You are good on a trampoline. This is so weird, man. Dude, I kid you not. I had a dream last night of the two of us going to House of Air at Chrissy Field in San Francisco. And you were doing like front flips off your knees. I can do that. You dropped your hat and then you like kicked the trampoline to bounce it back up to your head. And I was like, what? Wait, wait, wait. So you know I sent you that video of me dropping my hat and kicking it back up to my head. I've seen you do it live too. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it just made its way into the dream. And I was just like, what? I literally had that in my dreams last night. That's wild. Can I have the assless chaps on like I normally do when you're in? Yeah, you have the assless chaps on, which depending on your angle can be kind of awkward. Yeah, exactly. Because you like doing the straddle flip. You like doing the straddle flip. Yeah. So it's a little awkward. I've heard about these dreams before. I always text them to Kevin. I'm like, I was thinking of you last night. The chaps are back. The chaps. long-time listeners know how important privacy is to me in fact my friends would call me paranoid or they used to call me paranoid and now they think i was just oppression in a sense these days you may have noticed it is a lot harder to protect privacy anyone can find your information with a quick search it's shockingly easy and i've had friends and paid people to read to me to try to find my info. And what you'll notice is that shadowy data brokers quietly collect and trade your home address, phone, family members, and more. It's a mess. You have to have a plan for defense and you can fight back with Incogni. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I. Incogni automatically removes your information across 420 plus data brokers with 1,000 plus additional sites covered in their unlimited plan, and they keep it scrubbed automatically. Deloitte has independently verified the headline numbers, in other words, 245 million-plus removal requests, and the company adheres to strict security standards with an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau. And with their unlimited plan, if you find your info on a site they don't monitor, send them a link, and their privacy team will handle it. Go to incogni.com slash Tim, I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash Tim, and use code TIM at checkout to get 60% off of an annual plan. One more time, incogni.com slash TIM. What do you got, man? I mean, people should check out. My hands are too sweaty because I'm thinking about death. Yeah, and the chest. Wow, that's the perfect audio. Well, the retreat was fantastic. I spent five days going really deep on my koan, doing a lot of work on it. Moo. Moo, which you can listen to Henry Shookman on your podcast if people are interested about what Zen is all about, like real, true, traditional Zen with koans. And you probably heard the sound of one hand clapping. That actually is one of 500-plus koans. Yeah, it was fantastic. I had a couple little micro-insights, which was good. And I was kind of rushed through to the Zen master to explain them and try and get some clarity on them, which is great. How do you know that you're having a micro-insight? So it's not like my balls are chafing in this position. It's something else. Yes. But close. I essentially was sitting and, you know, Henry, one of the Zen masters that you've had on the show, a dear friend of ours, was there. And then his Roshi from Japan was there. So it was very special. And then it comes over two years. What's his name? Yamada? Yamada Roshi. Yamada Roshi, yeah. So basically I was kind of, old Henry aside, you're not supposed to, he's not talking, but I was like, he's like, you know, how's it going? Like this and that. I was like, well, I had this thing happen. Like, what do you think about this? And he's like, you got to come with me right now. Well, not come with me, but he like got me right in front. There's a line to see the Roshi to go have your private interview where you go and like check your practice with them. So it's behind closed doors. You go in, you sit down with the Roshi. You typically get between two and ten minutes to sit down and talk about your progress on your practice. And you do that like once every day and a half when you're out there. And this was. That's cool. Enough to where Henry was like, you should go talk to him right away. Skip the line. TSA pre-check. Like, go through the pre-check. And it was beautiful. It was a micro little thing. I can share it if you're curious. Yeah, of course I'm curious. Yeah, so there was this sense. I get bored of hearing myself talk. That's why I'm here to talk to you. So I'm sitting here staring against the wall because in Zen you stare against the wall with your eyes open. You're staring about three quarters down, kind of just glancing out. I'm working on my colon. and for people that don't know how you do that is essentially on the out breath, you just like slowly internally say your koan. It's almost like a mantra in some sense, but a little bit more involved. Yeah, it's like a question you're kind of asking yourself slowly that doesn't make sense, and eventually it pops. But what happened is I had about two seconds of this sense that there was, and this is going to be hard to explain because it's not from the world of thought, which is already hard to explain. It's like a sneeze in the perineum. No. No. All right. I had it close. I had a sense of nothing lacking. That sounds nice. Nothing needed to be added and nothing even possibly could be added and nothing possibly could be taken away because everything at that moment was full in the way that it should be. But what was interesting about it is it wasn't an emotion. It was just like a steady state of being. So it wasn't like, oh, I feel free right now. No, none of that. It was just like, oh, everything is here, perfectly present. And it was just wild. Wild in what sense? in the felt sense of that experience or realization? Wild in the sense that... Wild in the I just drank too much tequila after not having much tequila. I haven't had any tequila. In the sense that we oftentimes so often go outside or inside into our brain to try and find something, figure something out, an emotional state that's either bothering you or feels good or feels bad or something else, And then just to know that everything, and I don't mean like objects, like everything was one unit of nothing lacking. And it was just a micro sense of kind of like, oh, there's actually nothing to do because everything's already here. They talk about this in Zen a bit where you already have everything that you need. So it's just they call it the removal of the veil. Well, it's an expansive awareness that you get from a deep continued practice over years and decades. But it was already there all along. Can I give a shameless plug? Yeah, let's hear it. All right. So you and I are both involved with The Way, which is this guided single path meditation app, which is guided by Henry Shukman, you mentioned. and it's the progressive development of skills on a single path, which I really like, as opposed to just what is the meditation du jour with no coherence. And a few of my favorite meditations, I have a lot of different sessions bookmarked. I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And by the way, for people who are like, oh, these guys are just shilling their bags, I do think it can be a good business, but this is sort of an ideologically philosophical investment of time and money. It's like the reason we invested in the dog aging study with rapamycin. Yeah, exactly. University of Washington is like, this needs to exist. It needs to exist. It's good for the world. Let's try it. So, sure, we've got some chips on the table, but this is mostly because we believe in it. And a few of my favorites, if people ever try it, Whole Earth is Medicine is one. Another one is This Too Is Me, which makes me think about what you're saying. So This Too Is Me is a meditation led by Henry, which this is going to sound maybe esoteric, but it's not. When you recognize that all of the things you experience are mediated by your mind, right? And therefore, when you hear something, when you feel something, when you're interrupted by something, etc., etc., anything you can possibly imagine experiencing is also you. Because ultimately, it is entirely mediated by your mind. Let's just use that instead of brain. and it's incredibly, at least for me, and I'm not comparing it to your experience because I think it's probably characteristically different, is incredibly relaxing to let go, even just for a moment because my brain is like the ultimate dog chasing a squirrel kind of brain, right? Like I'm always looking for something to fix, something to improve, what I need to do, what is happening next week, and meditation is... You are the squirrel. I am the squirrel. It can be excruciatingly painful. Yeah. Like meditation can be super hard. That's a very common thing. People are like, I can't do this. But when Henry gives you permission to include all of that as you, I know this might sound very bizarre, it allows you to kind of drop this burden that you didn't realize you were carrying. So in any case, you don't have to do a week-long meditation retreat. If you're just doing 10 minutes twice a day, And I do think there's some alchemy to twice a day. I don't know why exactly. I have some theories around vagus nerve stimulation and stuff, but you get a lot out of it. In any case, I didn't mean to interrupt your story. No, I think there's two things that I love that Henry says quite often when he starts some of these meditations, which is take everything that you came in the door with, like all of the thoughts, worries, emotions, things, and leave it at the door just for now. You can come back to it in 20 minutes. But just for now, the permission to set those things down for yourself just for now is such a beautiful thing. And then, like, the little instructions where he's like, drop your jaw an eighth of an inch. And I'm like, whoa, I didn't even realize I was, like, I was clenching my jaw. Can I tell you something crazy about that? Yeah. All right. So I got fitted for a mandibular device, which is a fancy way of saying a double-decker mouthpiece. Yeah. That is an easier approach to resolving sleep apnea or snoring. So I don't snore a ton, but every once in a while I do drives my lady insane, understandably. And if you take the jaw and drop it down an eighth of an inch and forward an eighth of an inch, you open your airway. And I was thinking about that because Henry will often say, as you're alluding to, like drop your jaw. and leave it forward as if it's resting on a small pillow ever so slightly. Yeah. And it increases your airflow. I mean, these ancients hit on some stuff by trial and error that really just works. It's like, yeah, if you want to have better respiration while you're meditating and better alignment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just do it. Henry's describing. And I will say his dulcet British tones. Yeah. If you just want a relaxing voice that will help you with chilling the fuck out when your monkey mind is ricocheting inside your skull, try Henry out. You can find free stuff everywhere. I've had him on the podcast a bunch, as well as Meditation Mondays for a while, which were these very short episodes of guided meditations. In any case, you know, I've been so, it's the right word. I mean, overjoyed sounds too dramatic, but I'll just say happy for you to watch your path with meditation. because it seems like you get so much nourishment and grounding from it. And no offense, you're kind of a spaz. You're kind of a spaz. Like you get excited about shit and then you drop stuff that is very well exemplified. And like, Tim, you got to buy this stock. And then you never tell me when you sell. And I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm fucked. Oh, hold on, hold on. No, no, no. Because you gave me a real winner. You should have held. It's fine. No, but anyway, literally Tim gives me this tip and I'm like, all right, I'm in. And then like a day and a half later, I'm down like, I know that's why you got to wait. The point of the story is I thought it was meditation thing. Just like every nine months, you're like, I'm moving to Android. And then I'm like, yeah, let me start the timer for two weeks before you come back to iPhone. I'm like, yes, meditation thing. Yeah, sure. We'll see. I give it two weeks and you've stuck with it. And five years now. Yeah. It's really made me happy as your friend to see something that gives you that consistency. That's it. There's nothing more to add. I've been really not sure of the right way to put it. I've just been very reassured by you having that constant in your life. One of the things I'm curious about speaking of constants and kind of like how things change since we've known each other and you had hair and all that other shit. My hair wasn't great. Still got plenty of hair. It's not on my head. Yeah, exactly. The braids down there. The question I'm curious about is I've been thinking a lot lately as I kind of march towards 50, what are the things that I've always said that I want to do that I'm just like, you know, I've got a thousand bookmarks on Instagram, like all these Japanese woodworking things. It's always woodworking. It's always woodworking. You know this is how bad of my, speaking of the monkey mind and bouncing around, I literally have, for some reason, the algorithm is now giving me, like, those motherfucking boats inside of bottles. Like, people making the boats in the bottles. I'm like, am I going to be a boat and the bottle guy? Like, I don't know, maybe. Like, I realize now, I think the next couple decades, like, I want to stop bullshitting myself and stop saying, like, hey, one day. One day I'll get into Japanese woodworking. One day I'll do this and really start doing some things. Yeah. You've been really good because you, archery, hunting, the stuff that you've gotten into, you've gone deep on the last few years. Are there any things that are on your bucket list of things where you say, one day, you're busy with your podcast. Oh, podcast, shoot me in the head. It's fine, and it's fun most of the time, but it's so crowded. It's like, man, if 20 other people are trying to do the same job, I don't want to do this job. It is wild how many new podcasters there are out there. And they're also optimizing every little freaking thing. All the thumbnails. All the thumbnails. What you need to know before your crypto crashes next week now. And I'm like, oh, God. I just don't want to play that game. And for me, I would say the most top of mind is rock climbing, actually. Oh, really? I just did some outdoor rock climbing a couple days ago. And I love rock climbing. I was always, for at least the last 15 years, limited by my right elbow, which I had surgically repaired. So it's ready to go. and I want to do some multi-pitch stuff in Yosemite. Let's go. Yeah. So, I don't know if I want to say this. All right, that's a good start. So, you know who's a big rock climber? Yeah. Yeah, he goes to Yosemite. I'm sure. We should go. Okay. He's like, I'm sure he's good. He looks like someone who would be good. Apparently he's amazing. Yeah. And I'm like, dude, I can't go do multi-pitch with Yosemite. He's like, ah, just come out, we'll have fun, blah, blah, blah. No, that's how you end up fucked. Yeah, exactly. I did multi-pitch when I was like 24, and it was like three pitches. Like I didn't do Yosemite. Yeah, no, that's a commitment. Yeah, so the idea of having something like that to strive for, having some type of physical goal like that for me is very helpful because just not dying, like training to not die sooner than is necessary, is not sufficient for me. I'm just like, it's such a depressing, uninvigorating goal. I'd much rather have something that has a deadline, right? It's like, all right, you need to be able to do X. In the case of the archery, it's like Lancaster Classic. Here's the date. You need to do this type of training and this type of volume with this type of deliberate practice in order to be prepared to train and then compete. Similarly, for something like a multi-pitch, it's like, okay, you can break that down. And I just enjoy doing that stuff. Dude, so let me ask you a question. The number two I don know if you saw this on my the number two story I had was this guy Michael Eckhart Thomas No no idea Oh my God Okay so Huberman and Rogan and all these guys they talked about him publicly about this guy He has won multiple pull-up world championships. Okay. And dude, when you watch him do a pull-up, he's kind of one of those guys that can bring the bar all the way down. Yeah, right. The typewriter and all that stuff. Yeah, like, you know, like, you can walk with your feet and shit. All the calisthenics stuff. Yeah, but he has a series of videos that teach you how to do finger strength training and i bought his course and i'm doing this right now all this because but you got me into that yeah wooden device the nug the nug so dude you gotta watch his videos they're amazing seriously like joe's really into them like this guy is michael eckhart you can find him on instagram and it's all about grip strength pull-ups he's not big but he's shredded when i think about like in the next 10 years, like I don't need to be big, big. It's probably not what you want. Right. Especially for rock climbing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you need to be lean, right? Like, and strong. And that's what I love about this. So I'm getting into, I'm doing these every single day. I've not, well, I'm two days in. I'm getting into it, you know? Tell us about the Nug, because that was something that you turned me on to. Well, the Nug, I mean, I have it in my suitcase at the hotel here. It's just a simple little wooden device. It looks like a very large bar of soap with these different indentations carved into the sides. Like little finger indentations. Yeah, exactly. So you can use a carabiner to connect it to, say, a cable machine of some type in any gym. And, look, you could use a loading pin and all this and the other thing and a daisy chain. But let's put that aside. At a gym, you could use a cable and connect it through the loop with carabiner and work on your hand strength. And you brought this to Santa Fe when we were out there doing that meditation thing. I did, yeah. It's literally something small enough to slip into my sweatshirt pocket. So it's easy to travel with. I always travel with that and a band for multiple purposes for something called DNS, kind of core exercises. Oh, yeah. I know DNS. Yeah. So I use a band for that, and it's incredibly easy to travel with. and then a handful of other things something called alpha ball which i use for different types of kind of mobility it's the size of like a very large soft soft ball and all this stuff fits into the corner of a suitcase and then i'll do also something that maybe we haven't talked about called abrah hangs abrahamsen emil abrahamsen very well known rock climber on youtube and abrah hangs I'm writing this down right now. Yeah. Abrahangs are pretty simple. I mean, it's partial body weight hangs in different positions for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off for 10 minutes. And you do that twice a day. And it's very, very moderate in intensity. With like a wooden kind of rock climbing kind of like type thing. Yeah, you could use a hangboard. Hangboard, yeah. You could use it. I mean, you could also use a pull-up bar depending on how you position your hands. And that's what I was doing in Santa Fe was that kind of stuff, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off. and the endurance and strength gains that you get in your hands are just insane. I should say your lower arms. And it really helps. I've been doing indoor climbing, but ultimately I'm like, you know what? There's a stretch goal, multi-pitch, outdoor Yosemite. That just hurts. And I am deadly terrified of heights. Just talking. I don't know if you can just look at my hands. I'm sweaty just talking about heights. When I watched Free Solo, my hands were sweating the entire time. Yeah. For people that haven't seen the documentary, even if you're not into rock climbing, like, that is amazing. Yeah, watch Free Solo. It'll freak you out. So that's one that I'm thinking about going deep on. I'd say that's very high up on the list. That's awesome, dude. Let's do it together. I'm into it. I'm into it. I am totally into it. I mean, the rock climbing, when approached in a reasonable way, like a systematic reasonable way, not with, like, crazy dyno movements on bouldering, Younger bodies can handle it. Certain bodies can handle it. My body, not so much. Like, I do not want to fall repeatedly from 10, 15 feet up. I'm just not into it. So in the case of doing it reasonably, though, for instance, I spent a bunch of time. I've spent a lot of time in Utah. And climbing in some of the Salt Lake City indoor gyms, you have incredible athletes. And I'll make that a little finer tuned. And when I would go to the gym, it was generally like 11 a.m. Who the hell goes to the rock climbing gym at 11 a.m. on a weekday? These are retirees and moms. So you would see, for instance, these like 60, 70, 75, almost 80-year-olds who are doing like 5'11 plus. This is when you were single, so that was like I'm hunting. Yeah, exactly. Cougarville. and you would just see these people in their 60s and 70s doing things that I could not even imagine doing with complete inversion on overhangs oh yeah I've seen this 60 70 feet up you had the national speed climbing team you had olympians but more than like the young guns right the 15 year olds are doing all this crazy stuff because they're impervious it was the people in their 60s and 70s who were climbing every day that inspired me to want to take this more seriously. So I was like, okay, I want to play the long game here. What can I do that's fun? It's a puzzle. There's a lot of Tetris. They literally call bouldering, they call problems. Problems, yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot of brain power involved. And also, it's just to give an idea of the technicality. I mean, there are, for example, women who cannot do five pull-ups who can climb 513, 514. That's very, very, very, very, very hard just for people who have no reference point, like world class, like 514, 515. Like, insane, insane. Like, that's when you're in the magazines, right? Oh, 100%. And it's because of the technical depthness. Yeah, there's like APINDEX and other physiological factors that play into it. But that is a very long answer to your question of what I'm thinking about now, which is rock climbing. Lately, navigating the financial landscape can feel like a full-time job, and it's not a very fun full-time job. It's stressful, but it does not have to be that way. You can simplify. Wealthfront helps you tune out the noise and earn more on every dollar with sophisticated, easy-to-use products like their cash account. You get fee-free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts. And when you're ready to invest, transferring to their expert-built investing accounts is simple. For a limited time, my listeners can earn up to 4.30% variable APY on cash. 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Details in the episode description. the archery was great and the competition was fantastic i love competing however archery is by definition incredibly solitary like you're just by yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again thousands of times and i've had enough of that in my life i've hit my quota i want to hang out with other people i want to having is super social because you sit there and if neither of you can do it you'll be like ah like what if you put your like foot in like that and like kind of lunged up that way and stretched you know i mean like yeah and then you can ask other people for tips like beta right yeah give me some beta on this yeah it's fun it's really fun i just love it you know i wanted to mention something if people haven't read it the blade itself which is a series it's not very long i think it's two or three volumes by joe abercrombie it's a fantasy novels. They're really good. The audiobooks are incredible. And the reason I thought of this, The Blade itself, is because of our conversation around Toaster and a friend of mine just died in a plane crash less than two weeks ago. The NetJets one? You knew him? Yeah, Josh. Oh, God. That was a latitude, too. Yeah, I know. I know. You just don't know when your time is up. And in the Blade itself, and there are a lot of various... Sorry, that sucks. Yeah, thanks. And we weren't super close friends, but certainly friendly acquaintances. It wouldn't be strange to text. And you just don't know when your time is up. And the Blade itself explores this in a million different dimensions. It's really, really outstanding. I say that as someone who's read a lot of fantasy. and it just talks about the randomness of life or death and war right it's like you happen to like squat down take a shit and the guy next to you gets an arrow through the head it's like it's just dumb luck yeah um which is a way to i suppose reiterate the gratitude piece that you were mentioning earlier so i mean that's going to be a tough act to follow where do you want to go from that yeah a few things let's change it up to well let's just go straight into like working out um have you tried this yeah i have actually okay i really like it yeah so for people that are on audio i just got turned on to this new protein called pioneer pastures and it's 30 grams in this little tiny shake it's a2 so it has lactose removed and it's also from that special genetic cow do you know more about the a2 can you i've heard about the a2 i don't know a whole lot about it it's Like the Holstein and some other cow and da-da-da-da-da. Apparently, more people tolerate A2 better than not. I don't get any stomach issues or anything with this type of whey protein. Anyway, this is not – I'm not an investor or any shit like that. You can get it at Target or whatever. It's tasty as hell, and it's 30 grams, and I don't know. If you're trying to put a little muscle mass – I love that this is next to the Lalo tequila. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can make some of you on it. Everything you're growing by needs. Anyway, I just wanted to know if you had tried it, because like we always, it's the random shit. I've tried it. Yeah, I tried it. Do you like it? I do, yeah. There's a gym, I can't remember exactly, Brooklyn Barbell Club where they sold this and I tried it then and I did. Yeah, tolerated it super well. Didn't get the grumpy guts as one might. What's your favorite protein out of curiosity? I mean, my protein, I mean, this is a softball pitch, but funny you should ask, Kevin. And look, I'm involved with this one, but you know what? It's like I always disclose Have you noticed how few fucking people disclose what they're involved with? They're like, yeah, I've heard of this great thing. Oh, my God. And they never disclose they're involved. You can literally go to jail for that shit. No, I know. But the FTC doesn't enforce that. Anyway, I mean, right now, like I'm traveling with Maui Nui as usual. This one, though, is kind of interesting. I probably get 40% of my protein from Maui Nui venison. This is wild harvested axis deer from Hawaii. There's a long story there. but incredibly nutrient dense. I love this shit, and this is not an ad, but I do have a hard question for you, like a real hard question. This is how you know that it's not an ad because you are what I'm about to say. Let's hear it. Processed meat, nitrates, linked to a lot of cancer and bad shit. What are your thoughts on that? This is very, very, very minimally processed. So you can get summer sausage or the sticks. This is free if most of that bullshit. What do you think that is? Because it is real. Like people that eat more nitrate processed, ultra processed meat. Yeah. If it's ultra processed and the shelf life is like three years, I would raise an eyebrow and probably hit pause. So the fact of the matter is most of this stuff that is minimally processed almost definitionally is not going to last very long on the shelf. What do they mean by minimally processed when you see like a meat stick? Like what do you think about that versus the amount of salt content that creates the nitrates? No, it's actually nitrates are totally separate categories. So you're looking to – I think an easy heuristic for this is just shelf life. Like how long will this last? How long will those go for? Your eyes are going to be better than mine. If you can read the size 2 font on this, then you can tell me. I'm going to get that. Give it a go. And I'll buy you some time. In the meantime – 27 years. No, I'm just kidding. 25 years. It doesn't say on here. Yeah, it'll say somewhere on the box. There we go. Oh, 27. That's by. Yeah, 27. So it's like less than one year, I think, actually looking at it here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, less than one year. Wow. Yeah. And what makes this interesting is that this I give also, Molly looks really good for 12 years. I give her probably two or three of these a week. The way I think of this, this is peppered 10. So there are a bunch of these different sticks. Like every professional team you can imagine uses these things in their training. but this is made with wild harvested venison liver and heart so it has some organ meat in it you do not taste that it just tastes like regular jerky stick but i treat this like a multivitamin so it's like i take let's call it two or three of these a week and limit it to that and then the rest of the time i'm taking the other either peppered or regular sticks but this is when i'm on the go, I mean, literally, this was in my bag when I got here, right? When I'm on the go, I'm traveling with this, probably some nuts of some type, like stash, whatever. Walnuts are pretty good for a host of reasons. And that's about it. I mean, I might have a couple of servings of exogenous ketones, but I haven't taken that stuff in a couple of months. You told me, you freaked me out. It messes up your liver. This is a controversial topic. So, yeah, there are certain exogenous ketones that contain something called 1,3-butanediol. It's very common. And there's a lot of debate around this. So the jury is still out, but some people believe that that can produce liver toxicity. So I consume anything with 1,3-butanediol in moderation. Now, to play not devil's advocate, but to do a counterpoint, a lot of the people who are putting forth that hypothesis or claiming that's true are selling their own ketone salts. So they're actually selling a competitive product. So question mark, question mark. You can look at the peer-reviewed literature and decide for yourself. What I have decided personally is that you should use the exogenous ketones very intermittently. I have experimented a lot with every type of exogenous ketone you can imagine. I mean, you got me on that good shit. It's expensive as hell, but that stuff goes straight to your head. The one that you didn't want to talk about. Yeah, Delta G. We can talk about it. You know what's funny? When Tim... This is how you know it's good. Off camera, Tim's like, I don't want to mention the brand because if I do, it'll sell out and I won't be able to get my own supply. And that's how I knew. I was like, that's some good shit. If Tim wants to guard his own supply of it, you know it's good. Yeah. And it is good, but it's BHB. I won't get too much into the technicality here, but it's beta-hydroxybutyrate bonded to 1,3-butene dial. So you're still getting that 1,3-butene dial, which means you take it in moderation. But in a pinch, when you want it for a podcast or something like that, man, it really works. It does work. It really works. And I mean, I've given it to relatives with dementia, and within 20 minutes, their sentences have like 5X in length, and they're more acute verbally. It's wild. How do you give it? I wish they had it in pill form because in some sense it's really hard to give that to someone that has dementia because it's like it tastes like gasoline. It doesn't taste great. It's not the worst thing. I mean, I've had a lot of foul stuff in my life. I just did a shot with this person and I was like, I'll do it with you. And then we went for a walk and that was it. There are some concerns around 1,3-butanediol and balance. so particularly in older adults you do not want to contribute to any risk of breaking a hip that's just the death knell for a lot of people I just had to put my mom into a different home it's actually kind of cool it's sad that she's been falling they have this new AI orb that sits up there and there's a radar type situation and it detects falls so the second she falls in the home they can rush in and help her out and all that. They carpet the hell out of it now and stuff like that. How do you think about pre-grieving that or contending with that yourself? In terms of... With family, that's rough. It doesn't sound easy. You know... Play forward the tape, right? I think about this with my own parents. Nobody lasts forever. It's one of those things where... It's so funny because when you're a teenager... I remember when my dad was having a hard time standing and this was when I was much younger before he passed. I was like, oh, dad's going to be in the thing that I might have to push him on if he has to sit down. Kind of those walkers that can also be something you can push somebody on. I was so embarrassed. I was like, oh, people are looking at us or whatever. And now I push my mom with pride in the inner walker thing. And I'm like, I don't know. You don't know what's going to happen, but the only thing you can do is just make sure to show up and hang out. and I'm very lucky that I my mom has dementia but it is a type that is not Alzheimer's so it's like it's probably vascular or something so I can walk in and she knows who I am she can't tell you what she had for breakfast but she knows who I am which is like I'll take that all day long I know you have family members that are in the same boat I have a ton of family members with Alzheimer's I mean literally I got a call from one of my relatives wanting to discuss interventions and it's a tough conversation because there really isn't much like you have to as far as i can tell act preemptively yeah which is why actually this relates to another bullet of mine i yeah five what was that i just have any but how many bullets did you have oh how many bullets yeah that was good of all of all the rye whiskeys it's the only one that i can tolerate I loathe stationary bikes. I really find stationary biking to be one of the most soul-crushing things in the world. It's the worst. However, yeah. I mean, I've tried Peloton and didn't like their ergonomics and so on for a bunch of reasons. And then I have tried very expensive, very, very expensive setups recommended to me by fancy doctors and so on, which are just too uncomfortable. I'm incredibly hunched over. My back is basically parallel with the floor. Dude, what are you talking about? And I'm like meeing myself in the stomach. It's so uncomfortable. Like a punching machine? No, no, I'm talking about getting on a stationary bike. But if you're in a racing position, you have to adopt this hunchback. And there are a million reasons why I find that uncomfortable. There is a bike, however, it's very easy to find. It's pretty common in public gyms called the Kaiser M3i Studio Indoor Bike. I don't know why they have to make it so difficult in its nomenclature, but the Kaiser M3i is unique in my experience in that you can elevate the handlebars enough to sit in a comfortable position with a decent saddle, meaning the seat, such that I can do the V2 and the V4 and all of that training for me in a comfortable position without compromising my low back, which has been a huge step forward. So this is the only bike that I've used consistently for this kind of training. And I was having a number of conversations with a neuroscientist named Dr. Tommy Wood over a period of weeks. And if, for instance, you do something called the Norwegian four by four, there's data to suggest that it's VO2 max training. So it's very, very, very intense, but it's like four minutes on, three to four minutes off. Let's just call it three minutes, four minutes on, three minutes off. And you do that for four rounds. this is the only bike that i've been able to use to do this consistently and if you do that for i think it's three times a week for five to six months the volumetric changes meaning the neuroanatomical changes and the hippocampus and other areas that are certainly indicated in things like alzheimer's lasts for up to five years wow so if you do five to six months gutting it out three times a week. The results, the dividends pay off for it seems up to or possibly beyond five years. Holy shit. Crazy. Wow. So that's probably some sauna in there and you're like, good to go. Well, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, I'm doing all the usual stuff, right? I'm doing the sauna and don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like, okay, sure. You don't have 30 minutes to do it. Like do 10 minutes. Like you can't do a sauna, take a hot bath. Like, yeah, figure it out. You know what my good is that I like? it's not perfect but it's good which is I go on my treadmill I set it to 4.75 or something incline so it's not crazy but it's not you know I can still do shit and I set it to only like 2.5 on the walking and I'll play Duolingo chess because they have chess on there now for Duolingo they teach you chess it's amazing and you can play friends and live people and all that stuff and they do game replays and I'm learning a ton and 30, 40 minutes go by and you're drenched in sweat. I know it's not high intensity and all the benefits on the cognitive side seem to be around like a lot of high. Yeah, but who knows? But it's good. It's doing something. It's doing something. Right. So I've really enjoyed that. Like if you just want something to both be learning and engaged and kind of like having fun. Yeah. So you forget about the time. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where it's like you just like, oh, wait, what time is it? Oh, shit. I've been on for 37 minutes. I can get off now. You know? I love that type of cardio yeah I mean for me I mean this is going to sound like maybe a step down but it's like the older I get the more I realize like a little goes a long way yesterday for instance like I had a bunch of stuff stacked up and I won't bore people with the commitments but I didn't really have any time to go to the gym and it was my day to go to the gym to do X, Y, and Z exercises and I went in and I did like three sets I was literally in there for five minutes and I left but it's better than nothing Right, totally. Something is better than nothing. I'm not going to go to the Olympics with that approach, but let's fucking be real. I'm not going to the Olympics, period. I mean, maybe it's like a bystander. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. You know, I'll throw some new random stuff in there. There's a study that got my attention. It's been out since 2025, September 2025. This is in JAMA. And this is the title. single treatment with mm120 and then in parentheses lisergide i think is how that's pronounced in generalized anxiety disorder so this is this is the cat this is a randomized clinical trial looking at anxiety which is often comorbid meaning happening at the same time as depressive disorders and i think this is sponsored by a company called definium which used to be mind med. In any case... I know where this is going. I just looked it up. Yeah, well, this... So what's interesting about this, and they're not going to maybe love my comparison, but... So, MM120, Lysergide, I mean, it's comparable to LSD. Right? And this is a multi-arm clinical trial. They did five arms, which is rare to do because the risk is that they'll blend together. So the arm means a group who is treated with a different intervention in this case. So they've got placebo, 25 micrograms, 50 micrograms, 100 micrograms, and 200 micrograms. 100 mics is standard for LSD. That's what you can think of as a standard HIT, 100 micrograms. And the results are wild, man. If you look at the HAM-A score, this is up to 12 weeks out. You can see, I'll just show you, how it's dose-dependent. The more you take, basically, the better it goes. Over up to, and I'm not sure how long the follow-ups continued, but where you land is you see that the 100 micrograms and 200 are very, very close. Yeah, yeah. Like 25 and 50 are certainly a lot higher. Now, are you still getting the same psychedelic experience with this stuff? In the case of this particular compound, I don't know. My guess would be yes. I could be totally wrong in that, so Defini, feel free to correct me. I am guessing the answer is yes with MM120. But what that says to me is, hey, 12 weeks of relief with GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, which I've been clinically diagnosed with, that and OCD, like 12 weeks is pretty good. And it seems like at least according to the data in this study, the minimum effective dose would be 100 micrograms. Now, 100 micrograms, at least for me and for a lot of people, you will be tripping your balls off, not to get too technical. Wait a second. Dude, it says that this was done at Neuroscape at UCSF. Was it really? This is Adam's lab. No shit. Are you serious? I'm dead serious. I just clicked through on it. It says Phase 3 trial of MM120 Brigad. Oh, that's amazing. This is our buddy. This is our buddy Adam. Okay. Well, I have a text that I need to send them. Oh, my God. That's awesome. I wonder if I indirectly funded this because I helped fund some Neuroscape stuff. That's funny. Isn't that hilarious? Yeah, I did not look at that. That's hilarious. Small world. Yeah. Okay. There you go. So it's interesting for GAD, we were talking about dementia. There's a case report with high-dose psilocybin mushrooms. I don't think it was actually psilocybin synthesized. looking at this particular thing was a Japanese elderly woman with dementia, may have been Alzheimer's, who took, I can't believe they did this to her. Five grams, right? Yeah, and then she took five grams. So Terrence McKenna, heroic dose, somehow fell asleep for like 19 hours or something obscene, which would be very, very worrisome if you're like the child of said parent, wakes up and then starts having like full expositional conversations in contrast with her previous like monosyllabic or single word responses to things. And it was transient. It didn't last forever, but it raises some very interesting questions. I've seen at least some case reports also with LSD producing similar effects. And I've been interested in this for probably a decade, right? Like I've kind of hypothesized this could be the case. It's just like, do you really want to give your parents, like, under what circumstances is it ethical to give someone hallucinogens? Yeah, I could never do that to my mom because she was always anti all this stuff. Yeah. And then the second, like, God forbid they have a bad trip. Like, why would you want to put them through that, you know? So it's curious. I was sent something by, well, someone I won't mention, but a very interesting case report on microdosing with LSD with someone with dementia. Did it work? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. And in terms of similar to the ketones, not saying the mechanism is the same, but producing much more verbal fluidity, right? Going from like, I'm good. It depends. Right. I have relatives who are limited to that now. Like they're basically giving answers that are non-answers. Sounds good. Right. Like these things you could use as a reply to anything. Right. They're not necessarily grokking what's happening to full paragraphs, right? Which means, to my interpretation, it's like offline to online, right? It's a really stark difference. Because with the one-word, two-word answers, you don't actually know if they're understanding what's happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Do you have some MN120 on you right now? I don't. I don't. If I did, I would probably not take it too much necessarily. if you see a weird cut in the video and then we get infinitely smarter you know why A little glitch here there Exactly It a flash and all of a a sudden we just like Yeah for the smarter I would keep it probably to 20 mics or below We'll see. But I found this pretty interesting for GAD especially, and then for the dementia piece, but it raises a lot of ethical questions. What is ethical to use as a treatment in someone who cannot give consent? Right. That's a tough, gnarly problem. Right? Yeah. especially if you're dealing with stuff that is not exactly prescription medication. Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing. If it goes sideways, you feel like an asshole. Well, yeah, to put it mildly. Yeah, to put it mildly. But it's amazing, and it gives you another half day with a parent or a loved one, and you can full-on have conversations, and they see you, and you see them in a way that you hadn't in six months or a year. That's amazing, right? Yeah, or if it potentially slows the decline. I think it's too much to hope for a reversal, frankly. But there are some strange phenomena out there, man. There's this phenomenon called terminal lucidity where someone on their deathbed when they've been vegetative. There's that book that you read. Did you read that? I'm not sure. The afterlife book? No, I didn't read that. Okay. But this is well documented where people suddenly have been basically vegetative or completely unable to respond. In the last two days, they become fully lucid. They become totally lucid and they have full-blown extensive conversations. That's what the fuck is going on there. I'm telling you, it is so weird to me that we think like a lot of the things that we do in physical form, like what we do in life, like mimics nature in many ways. And all of our data is like backed up in the cloud. And we're like, oh, we're not backed up in the cloud in any way. And then there's these people with like full-blown entanglements in their brain, full-on Alzheimer's for like a decade. and they become completely lucid? Where is that coming from? Okay, I see what you're saying. I wasn't tracking that fully for a second. If I'm hearing you correctly, it's like if it's all localized. No, I'm saying like if all of that ability is localized within the confines of the skull, how do you explain this? Given all the structural deterioration. Exactly. Yeah, I don't have good answers for that. I just don't. It is a well-documented, as far as I know, a well-documented phenomenon. So it's like, go figure that one out. I mean, I'm not qualified, way above my pay grade. Crazy, man. It's wild. So I'll give a shout-out to somebody. We're not going to open this right now because we'll start chewing on them, and we'll be up all night. Is that the 120? No. This is Newtonic, N-E-U-T-O-N-I-C, No Tropics. See, that's a pun. nootropics because these are toothpicks that i was given by a podcaster you may recognize named chris williamson and they have they have like 20 i want to say 20 i might be getting that off but like 20 25 milligrams of caffeine in each toothpick oh wow and there are a couple of other nootropics aka smart coffee yeah yeah smart drugs in there and they're great because if i have cups of coffee, I will chug a cup of coffee and then if it gets refilled, I'll chug another cup of coffee and it's a problem. These actually, in terms of pacing, have been fantastic. So that's been my sort of, not exactly coitus interruptus for people to get that, but ad libitum interruptus, avoiding overconsumption of coffee and other stimulants. This helps me to kind of pace it because even if I chew on this thing until it's fragments of wood, max I can squeeze out of it is 20-25 milligrams. Yeah. What else do you got, Kevin? Yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I have that I think is interesting is what's happening in the world of, I don't want to talk a lot about AI because I'm just frankly AI'd out, but I will say that the idea that we can all now kind of take control of our productivity and pretty much anything that we want to control now, like device-wise, we can do with just a few simple prompts on AI. and I had a buddy that came over to my house and he was like, hey, you got cameras in your house. I have something called Ubiquity, which is like they have cameras and it's a very common kind of household type situation when you want to have security system, front door thing, cameras, sensors, water detectors underneath your, things in case things leak and you're out of town, whatever. And so I've got this whole setup and he's like, hey, you know, they have a full on API where you can just tell bot or whatever to code against it. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Like, what can I do? And so the cameras now have AI sensors where they can detect who it is that's walking in. So it's like, oh, Tim's coming up to your door. Oh, that's your daughter. That's your dog. It detects my dog, Toaster, like sees him, and it puts like a little dog emblem above his head when he's walking around, and it knows that it's Toaster. but the crazy shit is I was like okay well what if I can go further and I can tell it to do actions there's a speaker hooked up to it as well so that's for security so basically if anyone loiters in my alleyway and it detects it it's like I have a place I'm like really funky shit where it's like detected like loiter in the alleyway like whatever and just scare people off in case they're like I am the bad man you can draw the areas around like where there like they shouldn't be, which is like at your door fiddling with your door. And if they stand here for more than 30 seconds, play said audio out of speaker. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. Well, what if when I walk in my house, if I'm wearing like a hat of like my favorite sports team and they're playing, it like reads me the scores like I walk in. So like you can think about all these things where it's like it's doing stuff based on your activity. so like if you're out there gardening it's like it'll be like hey kevin i noticed that the plant over here wasn't watered enough so it's watching all of this stuff and so there's a lot of if then then that kind of situation like if i see you doing x so like the latest i have is like i programmed it so when it sees the license plate on my car it automatically knows to open the gate because it knows it's me yeah yeah and the camera looks at the license plate on the freaking car checks it against the database and allows me in. How crazy is that? And this is like, for people that are listening, I'm not talking about like $10,000 systems. The camera is like $200. Anyone can do this at home, you know? And it's just wild to think about. Finally, we had all these kind of discrete systems that I had some Nest stuff and I had some Google Home stuff and now they're all talking to each other. So you can just do kind of really crazy. I know you would like this because you're the kind of person that you've told me before, Or like you don't like to answer your door because if the delivery person is like, Jim, then all of a sudden your address is like all over the Internet. Docs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know you said I'm also pretty AI'd out. But at the same time, it's like I can't resist going back to the opium den. It's so fascinating. What are you doing now with the AI stuff? Well, I mean, I'm more curious to hear your thoughts and predictions, frankly, because I think you're better at it. But I mean, I'm using cloud code with various APIs to do tons of like inbox analysis and stuff, right? I'm doing a 20-year retrospective analysis of angel investing. It's like who made what introductions? Which companies did I not reply to that ended up being successes? Which did I turn down that ended up being really important? You really want to talk to yourself. I suspected it would be worse than it was. I haven't missed that many explicit opportunities. I wanted to test my own stories against data, right? Because I have all sorts of stories about why I did certain things and why certain things worked out. And I have certain stories about my batting average. And I'm like, but is it true? Right. Really? Is it really true? Like, let's look at some hard numbers. The sad truth, and I have a buddy that wears the bracelet, and you see me with a necklace around the way it categorizes your AI and listens to you 24-7. It's about 70-ish percent that we think we know, but it's actually what we know. Like, out of the 100% of what we think we know, like, this is the truth. Like, I said I wanted a dark chocolate bar at 7 p.m. It's like, no, you said it at 5, and you said it this way. And you said it was milk chocolate. Yeah, exactly. So it's always about 20% off from where you actually think your brain's at. Sure. Which is brutal. Well, plus, I mean, that's like last week, right? If you're talking about like 15 years ago. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you listen to any Genesis story of any startup, you're like, wait a minute now. This is like a startup comic working on material, but he's been working on this one five-minute bit so long that now he believes that's actually truth. The sanitizing and the editing of these startup Genesis stories is hilarious, And there's no reason to think that I would be or you would be exempt from it. Right. Right. When you're telling your own story, even if you're just telling it to yourself. What's the number one thing that you've learned by applying AI to your life in this fashion? Like, what's the thing where you walked away and said, like, damn, that was, like, insightful and I'm going to change my behavior. Or I learned something new about myself that I wouldn't if I had not used AI. Well, I think from a holistic health perspective, and by holistic I mean having enough data related to medications, supplements, predispositions, side effects, what happened to me two weeks ago. The LLMs have been incredibly helpful. The picture that they get and the speed with which they can deliver an answer that I can interrogate is just incredible. What did you learn? What was the thing that you – I mean, honestly, it's mostly avoiding disaster, right? And it's like, are any of these things contraindicated with one another? Could A, B, or C explain D? And you have to keep in mind these things can still hallucinate, but you can, I don't want to say eliminate that, but minimize it by just fact-checking across LLMs. There's that. I would say that there's a lot of insight on, hopefully, that can translate to future decision-making related to investing, which is investing for me is not just amassing more chips. What's fun about investing to me is it's a way to scorecard your thinking and decision making. It's just a very objective way to decide if something was the right or the wrong decision. And you can fine slice that and there are ways that you could maybe question that. But if you're asking yourself, was I thinking well last month? That's not a very helpful question. Where do you go from there, right? If you're logging maybe every decision you make every day and then trying to cross-reference outcomes with blah, blah, blah, like, yeah, but you're never going to do that. But when you're making relatively frequent investments, you can do that. You can also run counterfactuals. What if I did the opposite? What if I had not sold that? What if I had kept that? What if I had done this? What if I had done that? Is that worth your time, though? At the end of the day, you can throw everything into S&P 500 and just go to bed. Well, just that. I would say it's worth it to me because I find it interesting. I actually enjoy the intellectual exercise of it. But otherwise, I would say with, in terms of like how AI has impacted me, I would say that the honest answer is not that much because most shit isn't worth doing in the first place. people are finding very very clever ways to expedite automating workflows of all different types and doing something well does not make it important or worth doing in the first place so there's a lot i think the level of bullshit that is being done just at a very fast efficient rate is skyrocketing but simultaneously like there are definitely cases where i look back at say this analysis of 20 years of stuff. To do that manually would be impossible. It would take me a year full time with multiple people to do that. And with a cloud code like Gmail API and leaving my computer running for a handful of hours a few times, it's like what you get back is fucking incredible. It's unbelievable. And I haven't even scratched the surface. I will say also another way that AI has maybe affected my life in a net negative way and I'm not we have another mutual friend who maybe we shouldn't name who feels very similarly we'll bleep that out but yeah Jesus Christ so if you train AIs on your writing they're really good and I think I feel this is a stretch of a comparison obviously because I'm not an adept like a world class Go player but when AlphaGo defeated one of the top Korean players. He was kind of like, I'm done. Like, I don't find joy in this anymore. Like, if we're playing against machines. And when I see these AIs very beautifully, I'm not going to lie, we're like in the top of the first inning. This stuff is going to get so much better. Spit out stuff that is so much better. I mean, I can still write, but what they can do in 30 seconds is what would take me 30 hours. And I'm just like, fuck, it really drains the motivation for me to put in those 30 hours. Yeah. Why wouldn't it? Of course it would. Right. Yeah. But in some sense, you can consider it a really good copilot because for it to come up with novel ideas that would engage an audience, that's still the holy grail where it's not quite there yet. Right. Like it's going to make you sound, it's going to button up your copy and it might expand upon it in ways that you wouldn't but it's not going to come up with the original thesis for the whole thing, right? Yeah, it's going to have trouble with the original thesis but even there I think it does a pretty good job. It's getting better. I haven't tried with writing stuff. Well, if you just do a data dump and you're like, create Oh, you sent me that link. Yeah, if you just do a data dump and you're like, create Or you sent me that link and you're like, what should Tim do in the next five years? Oh yeah, that was good. That was really interesting. Tell people what you did because they might find this because it's their own life. Sure. So you could do this in whichever model you're using, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. If it knows you. You can tie in your inbox too. Yeah, you can tie in your inbox. In my case, I didn't do that. But if it has enough history on you, you can just ask, what do you think I should do in the next five years? What might be some rewarding paths of exploration? I think I put something like that. What are three to five ideas that you think could be rewarding career exploration for me in the next X period of time? So if they've used AI for, let's call it three to six months, and you've probably given it several hundred things to think about, it will span across those conversations. As long as you turn this on, I think it's on by default now, but it used to be an opt-in thing where you say allow the AI to look across conversation. Right. So it has a holistic understanding of who you are. Yeah. And the answers were fucking outstanding. Yeah. I mean, really, really good. Yeah. I sent it to a few friends, sent it to you. I sent it to a few of my closest friends and they're like, that's pretty fucking good. Yeah. It was really cool. Some of the ideas I was like, damn, you should do that. Yeah. It had this one business idea for you to do. It wasn't a book. Yeah. And I was like, dude, I texted you back. I was like, that's awesome. Like, go build that. Yeah. I mean, there were business ideas. there were certainly kind of non-revenue but philosophically aligned ideas. It was shocking to me. So that's actually a very good example of something that has deeply informed what I'm mulling over as I imagine the future. I was like, man, that actually is a really good, because keeping in mind, I'm asking questions about things of interest, things I like, things I don't like. I am asking questions about different scientific interests related to Saise Foundation, my nonprofit foundation. I'm asking questions about investing. I'm asking questions about writing. I'm asking questions about relationships. I'm asking questions about organizing trips for friends. I'm asking so many different questions. Am I still on the board of your nonprofit? I think you're like the secretary or something. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you were honorably discharged. I don't know. I've heard anything in my career. I'm like, okay. Yeah, well, I said it was going to be a light lift. It's a light lift. And, I mean, that's a very good example, right? I mean, that may be the best example because if that even 10% informs, like, a major next chapter, 100%. Like, that's a big deal for me, certainly. And it makes me think a little bit about podcast listeners especially, readers also, but to a greater extent podcast listeners to come up to me. And most listeners I run into are really great. And they're always a couple of weirdos. But most are fantastic. And they'll say something often like, I'm so sorry you don't know me at all. And I feel like I know you. And what I say a lot of the time is actually if you listen to my podcast every week or even every month, you do know me pretty well. Yeah. And then you think about a machine that never forgets. Yeah. it's going to know you pretty damn well. Yeah, of course. And it's spooky in a way, but I started getting more out of the LLMs when I started asking questions. And you have to be, I think, a little careful with outsourcing this and absolving yourself of responsibility to think about these things. But when you ask it open-ended, personal questions in the way that you would ask a close friend, what do you think are three to five creative ways I might explore things professionally in the next five years. Yeah. As opposed to something that you think is more suitable for a robot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get some really interesting responses. It's so cool. That's a great use case. Yeah. The one thing I've been playing around with lately that I haven't told you about yet, but, you know, I think about all these AI startups and everyone that's creating all these different apps and all that stuff. And for me, it's kind of fun to watch as a kind of bystander being like, oh, cool, you're going to make this. but I really want to explore things that just no one has done before. It's always been interesting to me more than just like iterative kind of like standing down under the rough edges. A lot of startups will go out there and be like, hey, you know what sucks is, you know, word processing doesn't do this. So I'm going to like make a slightly better word processor. I'm just making this up. But I like the kind of like wilder, crazier, like I'd rather have it fail and say I did something new than just do something boring. Yeah. Oh, I get it. And so lately what I've done. Pardon why I have so many fatalities. Yeah, exactly. Same. What I've done lately is I went and bought a bunch of these decks of cards on Amazon that are values cards. Meaning like they give you like a deck of 100 things. And like what are your core values? And you're like empathy or kindness or like you like flip through them. And the way they typically work is that you have like a really high value, a medium, and a low value. And then you put them into different stacks. And then you walk away and you say, oh, this is my high value stack of things that are my core values that mean a lot to me. And it might be 10 or 15 different cards. And what's interesting is to do that with friends and partners and things like that and then compare them and say, hey, what do we align on what we don't align on? And I can imagine for like an intimate partner, this would be a pretty important thing to do. And so I started there. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to scan these cards in. And then I'm going to pare it down and make these core values where you come in and say, this matters to me. almost like a swiping, like, you know, dating app or something. Like, yes, I'm into – Yes, I'm in empathy. No, I'm not. Yeah, exactly. And so you – but you swipe through them, and then when you're done with that, then you've got your list of, like, these values, and they can change over time. And so I think the important thing is to log that and say, these are my values today, but tomorrow one might shift a little bit. And then I thought about contractual bonds. And so, like, the working title I have for it is just called Bond, and where I can say, like, with a partner, I'm going to create a contract with you where we both have to shake on it, meaning like a virtual shake. Like you think of it as almost like a SimCity-like situation. This is my city. This is her city or a friend's city. And we're going to agree that I take the trash out every Tuesday night. And there's an emotional shake on both sides. And if I break this bond, it results in what? And so from the partner's side, it will result in a one to ten on how much damaging this is to me. So not taking this ratio, I'd probably be like, ah, that sucks because the trash is going to overflow. That's probably three to most people, right? Then I kind of get negative points in case I break that bond. But what's interesting, though, that will link back to a core value of theirs and a core value of mine. And I want to show up as a good partner, and there will be a core value associated with that. And then you could see those bonds between multiple people. And the reason I say this is because I've always been one of these people historically that has said yes to so many things. And then I'd be a last minute. I'm the worst at that, you know, where I'm like, I'm in. And then I'm like, I'm an introvert. I'm out. You know, last minute. Right. And so I just think that there needs to be a system where almost like a LinkedIn for like values and trust and bonds. There was a great Wu-Tang quote that's like word is bond. And ultimately, like, I really believe that. Like there's something really cool about saying, you know, we have the Better Business Bureau. That's like the best we got. Oh, this person, like they did well by their customers 2,000 times. What about individuals and saying like, hey, this person was always empathetic towards me or this person was kind and helped me move on a Sunday. What prompted all this? I don't know. I'm just thinking about it. Just like the thing I think about is that there is such a dissatisfying answer. No, hold on. Let me give you the real answer. I call this dark information. Dark information. Yeah, so dark information is information that exists in the real world, but we have yet to put in physical form. And so right now, you and I have a trust thing. Yeah, yeah. You know that if the camera was turned off, there are certain things that you can tell me that you're pretty certain I will not tell anyone else. Every once in a while, I do. But you will know, you know where that line is, right? But that hasn't been concretized in any type of, like, visual, real format. And so there's something interesting. I'm just brainstorming with you in real time because we've had a couple of drinks. But, like, my point is if there was a system where I could say I've created these bonds, I've built up this reputation, but it would also give me a way to reflect back and be like, oh, you know what? I can see now historically that I've often bailed on events that I've signed up for. Let me improve that in myself. The whole point of what you brought up a minute ago was if I use AI to go back historically and look across things, I can detect these trends and then make course corrections based on those trends, right? Yeah, yeah. And so there's something interesting about this idea of there are these different facets. So there's these emotional facets that we have with every individual. How might we track those? What jumps out at me about this is maybe a cool use case would be identifying. You could write it out or you could have cards, your values, but maybe to put a finer point on it, the type of person you believe yourself to be. Right. Because it's very different than what people perceive you to be. Or the type of person you want to be. Right. And then it's like, let's take a look at your calendar and your email and your iMessage to see how much your story of what you think you are or what you want to be matches up with your behavior. So I built. And then you get a report card. I built a prototype for exactly this. So remember maybe seven years ago you did a 360 review for me? Yeah. Those things are brutal. For people that don't know what 360 reviews are, it's like you give 10 of your friends to somebody, they interview them, they collect all the data anonymously. Could also be like coworkers, employees, bosses, whatever. And then you get a report back being like, here are the deficiencies and positives that this person brings. Anonymized. Anonymized. Brittle. And they are very different than what you think you show up. Totally. And so like that's the idea. I literally was looking at mine from like 12 years ago. Yeah. A couple weeks ago, and I was just like. Yeah. I know. So tough. I know. So you get it back, and you're like, who said this? I know. Some of it is brutal. I think I know what you said, by the way. Do you ever use the word child rearing? Child rearing. Would you ever say that? Child rearing. I mean. To throw me off, would you ever say that? To throw you off the sun trail? Because before I had kids, somebody in my anonymous 360 review said, like, oh, he's going to have a hard time with child rearing. Oh, no, that wasn't me. I'm like, who the fuck is a child rearing? No, that's not me. I don't have any friends that even have that in their vocabulary. And I was like, the only person I could do that would be Tim trying to throw me off with a fucking smart-ass word. No, that wasn't me. That wasn't me. That wasn't me. No, no. I think I'd be able to identify whatever responses I gave. That's the one thing that stuck with me for, like, 15 years. I'm like, who the fuck's in that? Man, you're lucky if you got off with that. I've got so much more. Good Lord. You know what I've been doing that has been really helpful? Because the blank page is something I struggle with with writing, which is part of the reason why the AI is so demoralizing in a sense, because the LLMs are within like 30 seconds, which is like, boom, how do you like me now? Try to match that. But using, even though I certainly don't know the future of this company because it might get replaced by features that are innate to X, Y, or Z, but Whisperflow. Oh, God, I love it. Yeah, so using Whisperflow as a data dump. I wish I was an investor. You may have recommended this to me. I can't recall. But basically doing a dump of a conversation as I'm walking with Whisperflow into a note on my phone, then taking that, dropping it into Claude, asking it to clean it up and turn it into something readable, has been so helpful, not necessarily for publication, but for emails, especially uncomfortable emails. you're like oh god like i just like i'm putting it off i'm procrastinating because i don't do it just doing like a 10 minute brain dump it's shocking how quickly things come together like i incredibly helpful and i'll just give a shout out to my friend alan lee co-founder of exploding kittens he recommended this headset because i was on a call with him i'm like man that audio is awesome what are you using can you put it on just for the viewers yeah i will it's gonna look as good as i hope it does it looks so good yeah it's pretty good right so this is the shocks S-H-O-K-Z, OpenMeet UC, Open Ear Bone Conduction Headset. So he was talking, and I'm like, what the hell are you wearing? I was like, audio is really good. So it looks pretty dorky. This is like a – No, it's great. And the bone conduction is right here, effectively my cheekbones. When you first use them, you're like, wait a second. I feel like this is playing out of speakers. Like this is nonsense. This is complete BS. But then you totally plug your ears, and you can still hear perfectly well, which is crazy. What I like about these, A, the audio quality is great. The connectivity varies, but the audio quality is fantastic. You can hear. If I'm walking my dog, walking Molly, and I want to be able to hear traffic and so on, I can use this, especially if I'm using Whisperflow to data dump into a text file of some type. I don't really need to be listening. It's not like I'm on a phone call or a Zoom call or something. I find this very, very helpful so that I can actually pay attention to my surroundings. And that's all I got. It's basically this and AirPods. I mean, there are other headphones that I will use for professional recording and stuff. But thus far, I'll share one more tech thing real quick. This little baggie here is the Sennheiser Pro Audio Condenser Microphone. It's very simple. I've just been very impressed with the audio. When I'm on the road recording stuff for the podcast, like intros or sponsor reads or whatever, It's just a simple lav mic. It's so simple. But the audio quality, even in a hotel room that is really bouncy, lots of glass, lots of metal, where it should sound terrible, if I use a fancy, like this is a Shure mic that we have right here. If I were to use this exact mic because I have it at home, in some of these bouncy rooms, it would sound worse, I'm not kidding, than what I get for my purposes with this. It's pretty wild. And I love Shure. I use their mics. on a lot of podcasts, but in terms of minimizing bounce, for whatever reason, this little baggie that I can stick in a pocket, right? It's like, this is my portable sort of recording studio Have you recorded on the iPhone with it I have It sounds good It sounds great That amazing And I don have my phone with me There is an app that you can use for really high fidelity recording. It's called Ferrite or something like that. Yeah, it's like Lossless Recording, right? Lossless Recording. It's like F-E-R-R-I-T-E, something like that. I'll put the link in the show notes for this for people who are interested. The quality is absurd. And you can also use Descript or one of these programs to do AI cleanup, and it's crazy. Yeah, you didn't need Descript anymore. Like, you can just use all the models to do it. Gemini is actually quite good at multimodal audio video, all that stuff. Oh, cool. Yeah, Gemini, honestly, I've been using Gemini more and more just because it's such plug and play with G Suite also. Yeah, I mean, 3.5 Flash is a great model. Although the new Sonnet just came out, that's from Anthropic, that just came out, and I haven't played with it yet because it was literally launched today, and it's supposed to be fantastic. So what do you think the landscape looks like in a few years? You've got Anthropic and OpenAI Racing DiPio. Let's see where that goes. You've got Mythos slash Fable taking off. Mythos is out tomorrow. Right. Back out tomorrow. Okay, it was a national security threat yesterday, but it isn't today. Yeah, exactly. What do you think? I think it's the big three. It's three players. Okay. It's Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Mm-hmm. And X is trying, and I would never, ever count out Elon. Yeah. Obviously, he has the funds to make it happen. Well, also, Anthropic and Google are buying excess capacity from Colossus, right? Yeah, but that means that their product isn't working. Yeah. Because they bought that capacity for themselves. Right. So that means that no one's using Grok, you know? I mean, I actually like Grok. They have done. I use Grok more than people don't realize. Well, here's what's interesting about it. For current events and synthesizing. Yes. So it has direct access to the X API, and it has actually X tools built into Grok. So if you want to, like, get, like you said, current events, news, things like that. And they've also said that it is one of the most grounded models and doesn't hallucinate. So that it's really good at. And so on DIG, when we relaunch it and we use a lot of AI to kind of, like, come up with the different stories and all that, we use it a ton because we want that grounded information that is true. And so it's really important to have that. I don't know. I mean, I think I wouldn't count them out. I should probably include them in that list. Alright, so big three. What do you think things look like in two years? You're very good at this. I'm not saying obviously this is just fucking bullshitting and speculating, but what's your guess? I went pretty heavy into Alphabet, thanks to you. Heavy into Alphabet? Yeah. And then they had a 40% pop on a $4 trillion company. What is going on? I mean, I haven't even watched. Is it up? Well, I mean, this is a while back. Yeah. A while back in AI time, which is like dog years. So by that, I mean like five months ago. Yeah. Listen, exactly. Five months is like 10 years now. So here is why I like Google. They own the full stack. Yeah. They have their own chips. Yep. And so one of the things that I did a deep dive on was the chips that they are building, they really confuse the industry. It's my understanding that they made them insanely high bandwidth and kind of memory throughput when everyone was like, hey, why are you opening up these channels and making them so high bandwidth for this kind of like data flow? And I talked to a buddy and he was like, hey, everyone was confused at first when they saw the architecture for their latest AI chips. And then they realize that we live in a world right now where a model drops, like Fable goes live tomorrow on Wednesday, right? And the next OpenAI model goes live in two weeks or whatever, because they have that rumored one. It's like old software deployment where it was like model trained, released out, model trained, released out. That's the cadence we're on right now. What Google is betting, and I know they're all thinking this, but what Google is betting with this high throughput kind of wide memory architecture is the future is continuous learning. And so everyone is saying like we're 12 to 18 months out, maybe a little bit longer from self-improving models. So 24 seven, it's no longer about like, Oh, mythos came out today. Woo. Crazy. It's not about those new models dropping. It's about just like a child learning. Tomorrow it will be better than today for forever. and when that happens and they own the full stack so Google's got the chips granted they're going to be constrained by TSMC which is the only player that's producing I mean there's a few others, Samsung and Micron and a few others, but like TSMC is like the leader and they're producing I believe they're producing Google's chips as well but they've got the chips architecture they've got the models the engineers, they're freaking I mean they lost a great one like a week ago but it's crazy what they're paying these engineers did you see some of this? it's like a billion dollars situation. It's insane what they're paying some of these people to do. That's what Meta was doing to Poach also. Meta, I just don't think they're going to make it, man. Listen, they have great businesses. Instagram is phenomenal. They've got these fantastic assets, but I just don't think they have the talent to pull off what these other bigs are pulling off. So what do you think the – what do the big three look like in two years, do you think? Because Google has a lot of advantages, like you mentioned, right? I mean, also like a vast data center expertise. They have the data centers. They have Android, which is like 60-some percent of the population or something like that. So they have the install base. I have a hard time believing that if you believe that AI inference and all the costs associated with AI eventually kind of settles and it's affordable. And, yes, it'll probably be like a Netflix-type plan where we're all like, oh, yeah, that's our extra $30 a month to get all the AI shit, whatever. If it's coming on your device and also Google's powering a lot of Apple shit, although Apple has some unique tech, it's interesting. Apple is kind of coming up. I wouldn't run off Apple either. Apple's another one, but they're probably another couple years out. I don't know. I mean, at the end of the day, for me, I'm old enough now to not want to be like, hey, this is the 10Xer. Actually, this is interesting. I called on your podcast. I don't know if you know this, but like four years ago, I was like, dude, NVIDIA is going to crush it, blah, blah, blah. There's been some dumb predictions. We've definitely made some bad ones too. So I'm not going to say it's been all good, but we've called out some stuff. In the world of AI, I don't think it's winner take all. unless somebody hits some kind of crazy escape velocity that is like truly, it's like aware. What do you think? Just I'm curious because you're so much better at this kind of stuff than I am. I'm like good at my dumb little corners here and there. But you've worked at Google and you worked on their ill-fitted social product at one point, right? What was it called? Yeah, Google Plus. Google Plus, right? Yeah, it was horrible. I left right away. Right. and very wisely segue to Google Ventures. I guess my point is when people think consumer, not enterprise, when they think AI right now, they think ChatGPT, right? ChatGPT has raised a ton of fucking money. They've got to figure out ads, almost certainly. That's not easy. That is very, very, very hard to do. I'm pretty familiar with the ads business at Google. Very hard to do at a high level. However, when average Joe or Jane on the street thinks AI, they think chat GPT. And when I have tried to set up the Gmail API for Claude, the process on the Google side is such dog shit. Like the UX is terrible. Like it is so bad. And I'd like to think myself reasonably decent with tech stuff, not as technical as you are, but pretty good, I would like to think. Nonetheless, I need someone like on my staff to walk me through step by step to do it because it's so counterintuitive and there are errors all over the place and then you've got you know anthropic which is if we are to believe the headlines on arr just like crushing right on the enterprise side like the fastest scaling business of all time yeah but on a lot of different measures however they've gotten a number of pretty strong bitch slaps from the administration at the same time it seems unlikely that any of these frontier labs are going to be left unconstrained by the government. So that's like a huge question. I think China will push that. Okay, tell me. Well, so China's been launching new models and they just did one a week ago that is on par with Fable and they... Was that Alibaba or someone else? No, it's... But these are open source models. So it's actually really interesting because China is like, okay, listen, we're going to open source this and people will use our tech. They're almost doing it the American way. Like they're not closed sourcing anything. They're like, okay, here's the free model. Come use ours because we're going to charge you. You can run it yourself if you want locally. And that is going to be increasingly, I think that will be increasingly common. Like AMD came out. I don't know if you saw what she, of the CEO, she's brilliant. She came out with this new box that is this like little $4,000 box or somewhere around there. and it can run like these massive multi-billion parameter models locally. And so those charges that you were getting for, you know, like $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month or whatever in AI expenses is now just that one box that just runs the model locally. Now, granted, it's probably eight months behind in terms of like the model it can run versus a bunch of models. For a lot of people who cares. For a lot of people who cares. You know? And so I, yeah. So what do you, from a business perspective? and I know that's tightly related to all sorts of technical considerations but where do you think Google, I still hate saying alphabet, let's just say Google the word on the street is that they have models that are more advanced than Fable, they have not launched them because one the government's going to step in and stop them and two, they are very expensive to run and it would cost them a lot of money, they would lose money doing so and so I think in a year, we're really, like, 12 months, we won't really know where Google's at. I'm telling you, they're holding shit back. And it's fucking Google. Like, you don't understand. My time there, I walked, it's like, Sergey took me, and I'm not saying this as a flex, I'm just like, Sergey took me and Bill Maris, who ran Google Ventures. Smart dude. Through, Bill's amazing, Google X. And this was years ago. Yeah, cool. And we got to tour, and he was like, That's the moonshot factor. It's like, dude, you already work there, and, like, they make you sign shit when you walk in. Like, don't fucking say anything. Yeah, Google X is like the Willy Wonka. So I'm, like, seeing the Waymos before they even talked about them, like, freaking 10-plus years ago, you know? Like, before it was even a thing. And so I saw all the crazy balloon projects and a couple of those, the Shudder that I can't even talk about. But I'm telling you, they're sitting on deck that's, like, five years out that, like, don't underestimate how many freaking PhDs they have working on. on this shit. You just can't imagine what's under the hood there. For me, I'm not a fan of, at this point, when I think about investing into the future, and this is not investment advice, when the Anthropics and the OpenAI's and the Google's, you name the top five, it's kind of almost like what they said back in the day when they had the acronym they used for Netflix, Google, what was the... That changes all the time. But you know what I'm talking about. Fang, yeah. Fang was a thing, and then there's another one, and there's another one. You're going to want to own those five. And you'll sit back, and you'll be like, damn, if I had only just owned Google, I'd be up like 70%. But you're like, oh, you know what? In combination, I'm up like 30%. The market's doing 10. You'll be stoked, right? Yeah, you sent me a graph. We can delete this. We need to. The NASDAQ 100? Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, for you looking forward, right, because you bust my balls about some of the swings that I take, which is good. No, no, you should bust my balls. I bust it because I'm like, Tim, what are you optimizing for, dude? Another zero? You don't need another zero on the bank account? I get it. I get it. I get it. But I'm asking you, right? I mean, look, we're all looking for the feeling of being alive. Part of the way I feel alive is by taking swings, right? Yeah. My question for you is, you're not just going to do S&P 500. You got to find that hard to believe. I dabble. Okay. So if you were- I'm like you. Yeah. I bought Waymo stock and you got pissed at me because I didn't offer you any. You're such a prick. keeps all the shiny stuff for himself. It's a greedy little piglet. I didn't know you wanted it. Oh, you 100% know that I want it because I sent, this actually turned out pretty well. It's part of the reason why I pulled the trigger on Google was such a simple approach. I took five names, was it? It was like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Waymo, a handful of other companies. And there's Vercel, Crusoe, a couple of others. God damn it. And I sent this list out, and I sent it to, like, I don't know, five smart people I know who are very, very good investors, have good track records, cross-asset classes. And a few of them sent that to, like, their technical analysts who specialize in different fields. And I was like, yeah. That's something I gave bad advice. But I was like, maybe, maybe not. And I was like, you have 10 chips. Where do you put those 10 chips as a bet? That's it. Yeah. No further guidance, no caveats, no explanation. and look I'm not saying this is the most sophisticated investment thesis in the world but you know that I want to weigh in because it was on that list and it was one of the winners that came back in terms of if we are to believe the consensus of this small cohort to be fair I offered you some of my own purchase and you turned me down I may still take you up on it you just can wait for the six months and evaluation hey remember brother it's all the news I would love to revisit our conversation from earlier. But I think for the average person listening, the good news is that these companies are going out soon. Meaning they're going to be publicly traded companies. They may seem very expensive and very pricey, and you'd be right to say that. And so did Amazon when it went out in 2000. I mean, what was the market cap on Amazon? It was like... It's got to be tiny. No, but... No, no, no. It's not about market cap. It's about price earnings, right? Yeah, okay. So I looked at the price... Well, now, price earnings will depend a lot. I mean, it's going to be very different for OpenAI and Anthropic, right? Well, what's crazy is like SpaceX is like 30% bump on price earnings on the peak of Amazon. So like SpaceX is like, did you invest in SpaceX or no? Yeah, I started investing in SpaceX like 10, 12 years ago. Oh, so you're stoked. I mean, look, yeah, I'm fine. But, you know, I would say here also it's like if you're like, oh, I missed it because only the fancy people get to invest beforehand. It's like, no, I mean, SpaceX right now, I'm looking at the chart, launched at 60, 160 excuse me, like had this huge bump obviously, but then dropped down and like you could have bought it for 156, 154, 153. And now it's climbing back up. I mean, there's a lot going on here. And honestly, I still find public equity investing terrifying because there's so many sharks and there's short sellers and like derivatives and all this craziness going on. Like what happens when it's listed and put into these indexes and blah, blah, blah. Like all those dynamics are way beyond my opinion. That's why I don't do the day trading thing. Well, I don't do day trading. No, I'm just saying, for example, SpaceX, I don't have a position in SpaceX, but if I did, it would be to hold it for the next 10 years. Here's a good takeaway. You're asking, what's the takeaway from my 20-year analysis of the angel investing? It's still incomplete. There's a lot left to do. It's Shopify. Oh, God. Well, that's a good example, right? It's like, this is going to sound so dumb and, yeah, duh, to so many people who are more, just better investors than I am. but I mean, I've done pretty well. I think the decisions I made at the time to sell certain things were very logical, given the information and my financial status at the time. Totally reasonable. So I don't want to judge a good poker play based on where I am 20 years hence. That's not reasonable. But the takeaway is you've got to let your winners run as long as possible. 100%. I've lost more money by selling stocks early than I've ever probably made buying the original stock. And the other thing I would say also, for people listening who are like, oh, my God, if these 1%ers are jerking each other off any longer, I'm going to vomit. If you had just, and some very famous firm did this, maybe it was Sequoia or Benchmark, I can't recall, but they looked at their gains from initial investment all the way through follow-on rounds to IPO, and then six months post, so after lockup for, let's just keep it simple, for all intents and purposes. And then they looked at what you would have gained if you bought at IPO and just held for like 10 years. And you would have made as much or more if you had just bought as a retail investor. That is the silver lining here, which is I, for some reason, get fed on a lot of these Instagram videos. You're on Instagram so much. You send so many fucking Instagrams. You do. So the interesting thing about it is so many times as individuals, and I've fallen into this trap as well, which is you find something that you love and you buy said object when you should actually buy the company. Yeah. So let's just pretend you're going to spend $500 on an iPhone every year since it came out, right? Yeah. And there was this great woman that came in and she was like, okay, how do you just for the first four years of the iPhone coming out, rather than buy an iPhone? Put it in Apple. Just put it in Apple. That's so cool. And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my buddy is having, like, I love you, Prager. David Prager, the second the Tesla came out, not the first one, but the one that was consumer friendly, you know, he went out. He's like, he had made a little money. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to do it on the splurge. I'm going to deck it out. Spend 100 grand on this thing. And he got the freaking top of the line Tesla. We did the math for him. Oh, God. Because we're bastards. and it was like $15 million or something like that. Had he just invested in Tesla the second he loved the product? The moral of the story is if you love something, and this is going to happen over and over again for decades to come. If you're like, hey, Claude is my shit. I use it every single day. I think it's great because of X, Y, and Z. And they go public, like set it and forget it. Come in, whatever you can afford. I don't care if it's $100 or $1,000 or $100,000. It's meaningful. at the end of the day. It's great advice. I mean, look, that's part of the reason that I have gotten so much shit from this by some VCs, I won't mention their names, who are just like, well, because they've got their 30 slide our proprietary investment thesis shit that they show pens and funds and stuff. And I'm like, I just try to invest in stuff that I will use every day. And it's not true for everything, like Commonwealth fusion systems, I'm not using them every day, but SpaceX, I mean, outside of Starlink, but it's like, there are exceptions, but it's like, with something like this, right, where it's like, I am eating close to half of my protein calories every day of this stuff, and I'm like, I should just invest in the company, right? It's just like, that is what makes sense. You know the first stock I ever bought was when I was like, Dildonics. That'd be something you use every day. Dildonics, yeah. Can't go wrong. People don't know what Dildonics is. No, it uses. Yeah, well, that'll be another random. Show show. Show notes. It was Pixar. Oh, shit. Yeah, my dad bought me some book on stock investing. Honestly, I couldn't make any sense of it because it was getting into, like, price to earning and this and that, earning per share. And I was like, ah, I don't really understand this. But – This is so cool your dad bought you that. It was cool. It was – Do you, like – that's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It was his way of, like, showing love, you know? Yeah. Like, we can't all do it the way necessarily people want to receive it. But in any case, the point of that was I loved comics. I tracked comics and animation. And I saw Toy Story, number one. I even saw shorts. And I was like, that is the future. That's amazing. I know that's the future. Exactly. And when I was, whatever, 15 or something, first stock, Pixar. I have the original shareholder poster they mailed out, like Lasseter and Jobs and stuff. Oh, dude, that's amazing. Yeah. And for me, it's like, look at your credit card statement. Do you know what I mean? I mean, this is not investment advice. I'm just saying this is the way I personally approach it, so informational purposes only. But it's like, yeah, if you're spending hundreds of dollars on, like, Amazon and Amazon Prime, it's like, well, maybe. Who knows? Totally. You know? Are you going to be spending more or less on that in five years? Like, just forget about the market. Forget about analysts like you personally. Will you be spending more or less on this in three or five years' time? That's exactly right. Okay. and we'll put something in the intro on this is not investment advice but it's like it does this stuff you don't need to be a quant hedge fund manager and to be fair like when you look at buffett's portfolio and the things that he's bought over your years like it's the consumer staples and the things that were just like he's like yes more people will want and drink coca-cola in the future it's a fantastic brand the margins are impeccable like it's a well-run business i know the ceo not prone to disruption yeah exactly in downturns guess what people still drink coke he's also a clever bastard though he's been very good with his aw shucks grandpa branding he's very good at that but that dude is a stone cold killer in terms of Geico as cash machine and being like the lender of first resort when shit's going sideways people call Uncle Buffett and he's like sure here's my offer take or leave but yes very bright guy All right. What have we missed? The only thing I would say is that – Tell Dildonics. Yes, that. If you want to learn about the latest tech and AI news, I relaunched Dig. You're showing me some numbers. That's crazy, man. It's crazy. We've got like – we went from 20,000 people a week using it to now we have close to 500,000. So it's been growing quite a bit, and it's pulling across the entire zeitgeist of the web. We don't want to start another social network. so we pull from X and we pull from a few other feeds where we'll be putting in like videos from YouTube and TikTok and others and it's just been a fun little hobby. It's a fun hobby. And it's like doing millions of page views a month and I'm proud of that. It's awesome to see it working again. So it's good. Digg.com. Digg.com at Kevin Rose on Instagram and yeah. Sweet. What should I say? I guess Tim.blog you can find thousand plus blog posts if you want to read about my cadaver on the table, my book sales as a result of AI, that is a crazy blog post. I don't even know if you're aware of this. Oh, yeah, my all-format book sales. Oh, I saw that. Yeah, isn't it crazy? Well, you look at the graph, and it's like stable annuity, stable annuity, stable annuity, very predictable, and then in 2013, because what happened in November 2022, chat GPT 3.5, and you see a slip by negative 5%, then you see a slip by, like, I'm making up these numbers, but they're close, negative 28%, then it's like negative 49%. But it turns out you're going to be okay. I'll be fine. The implications are pretty interesting. And now, if we continue the pace in 2026, down like 67%. Holy shit. These are sort of compounding in the wrong direction, right? It's not quite the right terminology to use, but you get it. So stuff to think about. People can check that out. If you search AI nonfiction, Tim Ferriss, that's a blog post that's actually a pretty interesting read. But on the less dystopian view, ultimately the message isn't dystopian tim.blog at Tim Ferriss on Instagram at T Ferriss, T-F-E-R-I-S-S on Twitter but like honestly I'm not so active on the socials because I have to leave those from my phone for a couple of years you're listening to the podcast so I don't have to sell the podcast oh Five Below Friday my diary can you add one can I add one what six bullets every once in a while if I'm lazy there are no if I'm lazy and I'm like, I don't want to do it because I still do this thing myself. Hold on one sec. We're almost done. Relax. You and your prostate. No, no, it's not the prostate. It's the fact that you gave me tequila. Oh, I gave you tequila? You were over-served? Hold on a second. Just give me two fucking seconds, you old man. You old bastard. I'm not going to make this really long. No, come on. 5-0 Friday. Every once in a while, you did this yourself. It turns into Six Bullets Saturday if I'm just not feeling it. But yeah, 2 million subscribers. It's free. Easy to unsubscribe. Tim.blog slash Friday and that's all I got. You want to go peel, man? Yeah, I will. Good to see you, bud. Good to see you. Love you, bro. Love you, too. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up. Easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. 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