AI transcript
0:00:05 In the last handful of years, I’ve become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding
0:00:11 microplastics, and many other commonly found compounds all over the place.
0:00:13 One place I looked is in the kitchen.
0:00:18 Many people don’t realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be.
0:00:23 A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals,
0:00:28 PFAS, in other words, spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that
0:00:30 ends up in your body.
0:00:31 Teflon is a prime example of this.
0:00:35 It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using.
0:00:41 So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor, and the first thing I did was look
0:00:45 at the reviews of their products and said, “Send me one.”
0:00:48 And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
0:00:53 And the claim is that it’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating, so that means zero
0:00:56 forever chemicals and durability that will last forever.
0:00:58 I was very skeptical.
0:00:59 I was very busy.
0:01:00 So I said, “You know what?
0:01:01 I want to test this thing quickly.
0:01:03 It’s supposed to be nonstick.
0:01:04 It’s supposed to be durable.
0:01:05 I’m going to test it with two things.
0:01:10 I’m going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster
0:01:15 in anything that isn’t nonstick with the toxic coating.
0:01:18 And then I’m going to test it with a steak sear, because I want to see how much it retains
0:01:20 heat.
0:01:27 And it worked perfectly in both cases, and I was frankly astonished how well it worked.
0:01:31 The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.
0:01:37 It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine.
0:01:39 And the design is really clever.
0:01:44 It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product.
0:01:48 It’s tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy duty scrubbing.
0:01:50 You can scrub the hell out of it.
0:01:54 You can use metal utensils, which is great, without losing any of its nonstick properties.
0:01:56 So stop cooking with toxic pans.
0:02:00 If they’re nonstick and you don’t know, they probably contain something bad.
0:02:03 Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
0:02:05 While you’re at it, you can look at their other high-performance offerings that are
0:02:10 toxin-free, like the Wonder of an Air Fryer, their Griddle Pan, and their Precision-Engineered
0:02:12 German Steel Knives.
0:02:15 And right now, our place is having their holiday sales.
0:02:20 So you can save between 10% and 37% on your order now through January 12th.
0:02:24 The Titanium Always Pan Pro is at 30% off right now.
0:02:26 I use that thing all the time.
0:02:32 So head to fromourplace.com/tim to see why more than a million people have made the
0:02:33 switch to our place.
0:02:38 And with their 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can shop with
0:02:39 total confidence.
0:02:42 Shop the Our Place Holiday Sale right now.
0:02:46 Check it out fromourplace.com/tim.
0:02:51 The following quote is from one of the most legendary entrepreneurs and investors in
0:02:53 Silicon Valley, and here it goes.
0:03:00 This team executes at a level you rarely see, even among the best technology companies.
0:03:03 That is from Peter Thiel about today’s sponsor, Ramp.
0:03:07 I’ve been hearing about these guys everywhere, and there are good reasons for it.
0:03:12 Ramp is corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and
0:03:14 put money back in your pocket.
0:03:16 In fact, they’re already doing that across the board.
0:03:21 Ramp has already saved more than 25,000 customers, including other podcast sponsors like Shopify
0:03:27 and 8Sleep, more than 10 million hours and more than $1 billion through better financial
0:03:29 management of their corporate spending.
0:03:33 With Ramp, you’re able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions
0:03:39 and automate expense reporting, allowing you to close your books 8 times faster on average.
0:03:43 Your employees will no longer spend hours upon hours submitting expense reports.
0:03:48 I mean, within companies, fast-growing startups, or otherwise, a lot of employees spend half
0:03:50 their time, it seems, trying to get all this stuff together.
0:03:51 No more.
0:03:53 Ramp saves you time and money.
0:03:58 You can get started, issue virtual and physical cards, and start making payments in less
0:04:02 than 15 minutes, whether you have five employees or 5,000 employees.
0:04:05 They’ve streamlined everything.
0:04:09 Businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% in the first year.
0:04:12 Now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.
0:04:21 Let’s go to ramp.com/tim.
0:04:51 cards issued by SuddenBank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.
0:05:21 to the Ramp.com/tim.com/tim.
0:05:22 I am chill right now.
0:05:27 I’m feeling very good, and there are a bunch of reasons for that that I could talk about.
0:05:28 We’ll get to that.
0:05:32 But there are some contributing elements that you’re actually very familiar with, so we’ll
0:05:33 come back to that.
0:05:38 But I’ve had more comments in the last week or two from close friends of mine, people that
0:05:40 know me, were like, “You seem really chill.
0:05:42 You seem very grounded right now.”
0:05:46 And I’m like, “Yeah, I feel very chill and very grounded right now.”
0:05:49 And there’s still a lot going on.
0:05:51 It’s not for the absence of things going on.
0:05:59 It’s actually somewhat amazing that given how many projects are in process right now,
0:06:02 I’m getting those comments, which makes me feel like I must be doing something, right?
0:06:06 Or I’m just lucky because who knows, I’m sleeping well in Hawaii.
0:06:12 Could be that set the AC to negative 500 degrees, which I had to override every system in the
0:06:13 hotel to do.
0:06:14 Yeah.
0:06:15 They have those things on lockdown.
0:06:19 They open the door, it shuts the AC off, it’s like, that’s the whole thing.
0:06:20 Yeah.
0:06:23 70 degrees would be dangerously cold, so it’s sometimes hard to get the AC low.
0:06:25 But let’s hop into it, man.
0:06:26 We have a lot to talk about.
0:06:27 Where should we begin?
0:06:31 Oh, man, let’s start off with, when I think about these year-end specials, we’ve done
0:06:32 a few of these.
0:06:33 Yeah.
0:06:37 And we typically do a little bit of like, “What are you doing in the new year?
0:06:39 You know, like, what do you get to change this year?”
0:06:41 And it’s the same list every year for me.
0:06:44 And drink less exercise more.
0:06:45 Yeah, exactly.
0:06:47 But we’ll talk about that.
0:06:48 But you know, there’s a lot of stuff.
0:06:51 I thought some predictions would be fun because I have some good ones for next year.
0:06:52 Yeah.
0:06:53 You’re the right guy for that.
0:06:56 I might have some predictions, but you have a better track record than I do.
0:06:58 I don’t think you’ve got a few right.
0:06:59 I mean, I occasionally get one right.
0:07:01 It’s not that my track record is bad.
0:07:07 I think you have such a 30,000-foot view on so many different sectors and also just
0:07:16 as a general partner, a true and as a more active investor than yours truly, you get
0:07:20 to see a lot that is coming down the pike, right?
0:07:29 You really get to observe patterns on a weekly basis that most humans do not, including me.
0:07:34 But I do see things occasionally, so we’ll see if I can riff off of some of your predictions.
0:07:35 So where would you like to start?
0:07:41 Let’s start off with something that I just thought was a fun one to just really get your
0:07:43 take on this because I think we’re screwing up society.
0:07:48 So every year, Apple does these things like, “Hey, you’re the 15 apps that we love.
0:07:49 This is the best gaming app.
0:07:52 This is the best productivity app,” all this stuff, right?
0:07:54 And I tend to go in there and poke around it.
0:07:58 I’m always checking out what the new hot thing is, especially on the gaming side or stuff
0:07:59 where I really just don’t pay attention.
0:08:01 I’m like, “Just tell me the best thing.
0:08:03 Go check it out,” right?
0:08:08 And I noticed one thing that I keep seeing is over and over, and it’s driving me nuts
0:08:13 because it dovetails into some of the videos that we send each other on a side thread.
0:08:15 But okay, so we’ve sent a couple of these videos back.
0:08:17 You mean the mutually assured destruction thread?
0:08:18 We can say Saka.
0:08:19 These are more civilized.
0:08:20 Okay, got it.
0:08:23 Yeah, so you mean Saka will be like sending text.
0:08:27 This one of those threads, I don’t know, this one’s that bad, but we’ve been on some threads
0:08:29 where there’s a lot of pigs going around.
0:08:32 Nothing horrible, but definitely I’ll move on from there.
0:08:41 So there’s basically these new AI videos of MMA fighters, and they’ll get knocked out,
0:08:45 and when they fall to the ground, they get in go-karts and shit and start driving around.
0:08:46 Have you seen this where they blend AI?
0:08:48 Yeah, I’ve seen that.
0:08:51 And it’s messing with my head.
0:08:54 I look at that stuff, and I’m like, “This is really bending reality.”
0:08:59 I don’t know if it’s because there’s a psychedelics component there where you’re like, “Why am
0:09:04 I seeing something that I would typically see in a different realm, like in this realm?
0:09:05 Weird stuff’s happening in the brain.”
0:09:10 But one of the things I noticed in the App Store, as I said, the best app of the year
0:09:16 was a Adobe app, which they make great stuff, and they had Adobe Lightroom on there as winning
0:09:21 the Apple App Store 2024 winner, Mac App of the Year.
0:09:24 And why they were so stoked on Lightroom, when you think about Lightroom, you’re like,
0:09:27 “Oh, this is like software that’s been around for a couple of decades.
0:09:30 Why is this anything new?”
0:09:35 And they had a video there that showed these kids running around in their backyard.
0:09:40 And you’ve seen this thing where you can erase shit, like you can drag your finger across.
0:09:43 Like Google does all these ads where they’re like, “Hey, is there someone weird standing
0:09:44 in your photo?
0:09:45 Erase them.”
0:09:48 Dude, this video, we’ve gone too far.
0:09:50 So they’re like, “These kids playing in the backyard.”
0:09:56 They were like hedges, and then they erased their yard door to get out of their backyard.
0:09:58 And it made more hedges.
0:10:02 And I was just like, “Can you imagine when these kids are like 35 or 40?”
0:10:07 And then looking back at their photos, and they’re like, “Do we have a backyard door?”
0:10:09 And they took the dog out and shit.
0:10:11 I’m like, “Why are you taking the dog out?”
0:10:13 The dog’s part of the family.
0:10:15 Just sowing the seeds for gaslighting yourself later.
0:10:17 No, but do you know what I mean?
0:10:18 What is going on?
0:10:24 They’re erasing all of our real memories and replacing them with almost imperceivable,
0:10:26 at this point digital alternatives.
0:10:27 Yeah.
0:10:28 And it’s really worrisome to me.
0:10:29 I don’t know.
0:10:31 Do you do any of this shit to erase anybody out of your photos?
0:10:33 I don’t erase people out of my photos.
0:10:42 I also feel like a lot of that editing is for sharing outside of your immediate circle.
0:10:43 Like social media stuff.
0:10:51 Social media or effectively applying digital plastic surgery to your life so you can share
0:10:56 highlights that look better than they actually do in real life.
0:11:04 And I am very cautious to play with that because I feel like it’s similar to getting
0:11:10 your first little dabble with itucks or facelift.
0:11:15 And then there’s this creeping tendency to add more and more and more and more.
0:11:23 And similarly I don’t want to become delusionally dissatisfied with my life because there are
0:11:29 little things that in my mind I aren’t perfect for broadcast like a door in the hedges, right?
0:11:30 Right.
0:11:34 Because then what happens when you’re doing that constantly and then you sit in your backyard
0:11:36 and you’re looking at that door, does it drive you insane?
0:11:37 Right.
0:11:38 When it really shouldn’t?
0:11:42 And then also, but think of the downstream effects too where your friends are like, “Okay,
0:11:47 you just take something that is a mild visual nuisance out of the equation.”
0:11:50 And it’s like, “Oh, they had that perfect beat shot.
0:11:53 They are so lucky if only I could have that thing.”
0:11:55 And then you go and you’re like, “Oh, it was crowded.
0:11:56 We didn’t have the same thing they did.”
0:12:01 But in reality, they just like magically erase it all their friends are all the people behind
0:12:02 them out of it.
0:12:05 And I’m just like, “It’s creating a fake everything.
0:12:06 I don’t know.
0:12:07 I just something about it.
0:12:08 I love AI.
0:12:09 I think there’s a lot of fun.
0:12:11 There’s so much I use it for every single day.
0:12:15 But this is one of those things where I’m just like, “I don’t want my kids to grow up
0:12:17 thinking they need perfection.”
0:12:18 And that’s what this is doing.
0:12:20 It’s creating a better, perfect scene.
0:12:21 You know?
0:12:22 Oh, yeah.
0:12:23 I mean, and people are already using that.
0:12:24 Of course.
0:12:26 I mean, it’s like Zoom filters on steroids, right?
0:12:27 Right.
0:12:28 Totally.
0:12:33 And I think, I’ll just throw this in there.
0:12:39 Not sure exactly what form this is going to take, but I do think there will be a pendulum
0:12:48 swing away from certain digital environments when people realize just how contorted constant
0:12:55 exposure will make your perception, your satisfaction, your dopamine rewards system.
0:13:00 I really feel like the impact is going to be felt in a way that people could perhaps
0:13:04 rationalize away or brush aside in years past.
0:13:09 They’re like, “Well, I know that Twitter’s a cesspool on X, Y, and Z levels, but I get
0:13:10 A, B, and C.”
0:13:17 But once people are put into environments where what’s up is down, what’s left is right,
0:13:23 what’s fake is real, and what’s real is fake, this psychological toll, the emotional toll,
0:13:27 I think will become much harder to dismiss.
0:13:28 And people are going to look for things offline.
0:13:31 I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for that.
0:13:38 You see that in, I think you see early indications of that with, for instance, like running clubs
0:13:45 and various in real life activities that have become very popular in place of or as supplements
0:13:50 to online dating and dating apps as an example, like those things are exploding in New York
0:13:51 City and a lot of major cities.
0:13:57 You see that in potentially, certainly this is a trend, at least in a few countries outside
0:13:58 of the US.
0:13:59 I’d have to look at the data.
0:14:00 I think it’s mildly true.
0:14:07 We see some improving numbers in print book sales that could be attributed to a number
0:14:13 of other factors outside of people moving from digital formats to print, but at least
0:14:20 as a thought exercise, I think we can explore different ways in which people are going to
0:14:26 seek out something tangible they can hold and know is real, look at in person and know
0:14:27 is real.
0:14:33 So that’s certainly extrapolating from just what I see in a small circle of people who
0:14:36 are hyper-exposed to a lot of this.
0:14:43 I feel like people like you who are perhaps way, it’s called prematurely saturated with
0:14:49 exposure to these things are canaries in the coal mine, you’re like, “Oof, holy shit.
0:14:50 We need an exit.
0:14:56 We need a way to step off the stage so we’re not looking at this manufactured reality.”
0:14:57 It’s funny, you say that.
0:15:00 I was talking to another friend of mine that’s deep in this stuff.
0:15:04 You know, Chris Hutchins, I was talking to him about raising daughters and the kids are
0:15:05 getting older.
0:15:06 He’s like, “Dude, you know what’s funny?
0:15:10 When we got bullied as kids, somebody would be like, “You know, I hooked up with your
0:15:11 mom or whatever.”
0:15:12 Right?
0:15:14 And they would just be like, “They school yard slams or whatever.”
0:15:15 Right?
0:15:19 And now in like three years, I hooked up with their mom, “Look at this video.”
0:15:22 And it’d be like, “The mom hooking up with a kid because it’s AI and shit.”
0:15:23 He’d be like, “Damn.
0:15:24 You’re hooking up my mom.”
0:15:30 You know, but it won’t be real, but it’ll be like just slams, AI look real enough.
0:15:32 The bullying’s going to get hardcore.
0:15:33 Yeah.
0:15:35 Yeah, of course it will.
0:15:40 Or just sharing videos of the person you want to bully doing things they didn’t do.
0:15:41 Right.
0:15:42 Exactly.
0:15:43 It’s going to get bad.
0:15:44 Yeah.
0:15:45 And there are plenty of upsides.
0:15:50 I mean, look, I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude like 10 to 15 times today with my team.
0:15:52 I’m doing a company offsite here in Maui.
0:15:54 That’s why I’m in Maui.
0:15:59 And there are reasons for the location we can get into, but it’s very useful.
0:16:06 But the dose makes the poison, the application also makes the poison, and it pays to just
0:16:09 be cognizant of how you are using these things.
0:16:10 Yeah.
0:16:11 So that’s one.
0:16:12 All right.
0:16:13 What else you got?
0:16:18 Are there any personal New Year’s resolutions that come to mind or specific ones where you’re
0:16:23 like, okay, some of these might rhyme with things in the past, but here’s how I’m going
0:16:25 to approach them differently.
0:16:26 Yeah.
0:16:27 Oh, man.
0:16:28 Okay.
0:16:32 So the exasperated exhale is always a good place to start.
0:16:38 Well, I mean, the hard thing for me is that I get into this really bad situation where
0:16:42 come November, I just let myself go.
0:16:43 Yeah.
0:16:44 It happens every single year.
0:16:45 Yeah.
0:16:47 I just go ham on shit.
0:16:48 Everything comes around.
0:16:51 And I hate too much nutmeg.
0:16:54 It’s like, or not nutmeg, eggnog, nutmeg too.
0:16:58 You know what, I can’t stand.
0:16:59 It’s close.
0:17:00 Let’s talk about close for a minute.
0:17:01 Yeah.
0:17:05 No, but like, I do like a little eggnog with a little at brandy in there.
0:17:07 You know, you put in a little Tonyac and your eggnog.
0:17:08 Yeah.
0:17:09 And so like, but that goes straight to your gut.
0:17:10 You know?
0:17:11 Of course it does.
0:17:15 And so I hate this because this is like the freaking 70 year of random shows or whatever
0:17:19 where it’s like, every December, it’s like, I want to be less fat and drink less.
0:17:23 And like, it’s like, you know, I get a good running start on the new year though.
0:17:24 So I am going to go into this.
0:17:29 Maybe we’ll put together like a compilation video of all the times we’ve said over like
0:17:30 10 years.
0:17:32 Plus I don’t look at drinks.
0:17:34 Yeah, exactly.
0:17:37 So I think I’m just going to lean into the exact opposite.
0:17:38 Just keep eating and just keep drinking.
0:17:39 I’m just kidding.
0:17:40 I’m just kidding.
0:17:41 That’s horrible.
0:17:44 No, but I think one of the things that you and I were trading links on a couple of days
0:17:49 ago, which I’d really curious to get your take on this is like, there’s like this movement,
0:17:50 well, not movement.
0:17:54 It’s called the movement, but it’s old people movement of like, you know, you and I, when
0:17:59 we first met, the name of the game is bro is this might sound is like we wanted to put
0:18:00 muscle mass on.
0:18:01 Like we were like, you know,
0:18:02 Sure.
0:18:03 Meathead central.
0:18:04 Yeah.
0:18:05 Yeah.
0:18:07 Like I wouldn’t say full meathead, but there was a good amount of meat there.
0:18:08 It’s pretty meathead.
0:18:14 So the transition from meathead to like somebody that actually just wants to like be able to
0:18:15 like stretch.
0:18:16 Yeah.
0:18:17 And do like functional stuff.
0:18:20 Like we were talking about functional patterns because, you know, it was an account that
0:18:25 I had followed for a while and they had some kind of more non-traditional ways of approaching
0:18:31 your gate and your movement and really setting you hopefully up for years of good solid longevity
0:18:35 in terms of joint health, back health, all these things.
0:18:40 And I sent you another one that you were checking out as well.
0:18:44 What’s been your take here because I’m starting to make this move into like, okay, I want
0:18:50 a lot of movement and a lot of core plus plus strength.
0:18:51 I’d love to be lean.
0:18:53 I don’t need to be ripped.
0:18:57 Although do you see the new Hugh Jackman Wolverine with him dead pool?
0:18:58 He’s a beast.
0:18:59 Yeah.
0:19:02 Do you think that was freaking animated or was that really Hugh Jackman’s body at this
0:19:03 stage?
0:19:04 I think it’s really him.
0:19:05 That’s insane.
0:19:06 How can he freaking?
0:19:09 They have a pretty good authority.
0:19:10 That is him.
0:19:11 Yeah.
0:19:12 Dude, how does he get cut like that?
0:19:13 It was insane.
0:19:14 He takes it seriously.
0:19:16 Follows the basics, follows the rules, doesn’t waver.
0:19:19 He’s very dedicated and he is a real athlete.
0:19:22 I mean, you watch him move.
0:19:23 He moves like a dancer.
0:19:25 He can lift like a powerlifter.
0:19:32 His endurance on sick, on a rower like a concept too is unbelievable.
0:19:38 The wattage that he can sustain over periods of time would boggle the mind of even some
0:19:40 people who have been former competitive rowers.
0:19:42 He is a true athlete.
0:19:43 Okay.
0:19:44 So that explains.
0:19:45 Legitimate.
0:19:46 Yeah.
0:19:49 So anyway, my point being is that there’s this little micro trend I see occurring where
0:19:54 a lot of people are making this move to a more functional, holistic kind of movement-based
0:19:59 health and strength and training that is non-traditional as we define it.
0:20:01 Where do you see that playing into your own routine?
0:20:02 Is that something that you’re looking into?
0:20:03 Yeah.
0:20:05 I’ve thought about this a lot.
0:20:12 Our texts were well-timed and I want to give credit where credit is due.
0:20:17 First to you for introducing me to this account and then I ended up doing a bunch of research
0:20:20 on this account that I did not tell you about.
0:20:24 So I will probably pronounce the name incorrectly and for that I apologize.
0:20:28 But I believe his name is Enseema Inyang.
0:20:33 Now the spelling on that will be more accurate than at my pronunciation, but N-S-I-M-A, that’s
0:20:38 probably all you need to find him on YouTube, Inyang-I-N-Y-A-N-G.
0:20:44 So Enseema has this video which you sent to me called the Live Traditional Strength Training.
0:20:49 Now yes, that is YouTube, clickbait on one hand, but he actually does deliver on that.
0:20:54 His production value is incredible, his delivery is impeccable.
0:20:56 I was very, very impressed.
0:20:58 I went back and watched certain sections of this.
0:21:00 His agility too, which is insane.
0:21:01 His agility is incredible.
0:21:07 In terms of power, he’s a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor as well at a very, very high level.
0:21:12 I think he won Worlds or Masters Worlds at Brown Belt most recently.
0:21:14 He’s now a Black Belt, which is no joke.
0:21:22 And I reached out to a friend of mine, Mark Bell, who is very well known in the powerlifting
0:21:27 community. He also has a number of products that have done very, very well.
0:21:37 And I met, I realized, Enseema at Super Training Gym in Sacramento like a decade ago when he
0:21:42 was still really focused on powerlifting, met him very, very briefly.
0:21:44 I’m almost 100% confident.
0:21:48 I remember he was doing deadlift band polls while I was there checking out the gym for
0:21:49 the first time.
0:21:51 That was a long time ago.
0:21:59 So I chatted with Mark about Enseema who, Mark, reinforced is the real deal on every
0:22:01 possible level.
0:22:06 And the piece that I took from that video specifically was paying attention to what
0:22:09 he calls and others have called the Spinal Engine.
0:22:15 And there’s a book actually by that title, the Spinal Engine, the name again, tough one.
0:22:21 I think it’s Serge Grakowetsky, S-E-R-G-E, and we’ll put a link in the show notes.
0:22:27 But in effect, I’ll actually pull this up because I think it’s worth reading.
0:22:32 So the Spinal Engine, and you can watch the video, Enseema does a great job with video
0:22:37 of explaining this, but the book has in its Amazon description, and there’s no digital
0:22:38 version.
0:22:41 You have to buy paperback for like $115, so I’m not saying you should.
0:22:45 I haven’t read it, but this book deals with the human spine with particular emphasis on
0:22:46 the lumbar spine.
0:22:50 Human gait is traditionally believed to be the exclusive function of the legs, or say
0:22:52 the swinging of the arms and the legs, which play a part.
0:22:56 But going back to the description, the book presents arguments and data that challenge
0:22:57 that belief.
0:23:00 It proposes that the spine is the primary engine that makes us move, and it goes on
0:23:02 and on.
0:23:10 And what I think Enseema does such a nice job of is showing that, demonstrating the implications
0:23:21 of that theory through video, and also using tools like rope swings and other things to
0:23:27 demonstrate how you can develop mobility through different planes of motion.
0:23:33 So you have various things, lateral flexion, you have flexion extension in terms of this
0:23:38 type of forward-backward plane, and it really got me thinking, and I started experimenting
0:23:45 with some of the motions in that video, primarily because his counter example, which is effectively
0:23:49 the lie of traditional strength training, is how if you’re constantly bracing, you’re
0:23:53 constantly, say, holding your breath in certain portions of a lift to increase intraabdominal
0:24:01 pressure, that ultimately, as a side effect, you can produce a lot of rigidity in the spine.
0:24:06 And I really have never had an interest in being a powerlifter or even an Olympic weight
0:24:10 lifter, although I think they should more accurately be called powerlifters.
0:24:17 I’ve always been focused on weight training in service of athleticism, and I have loved
0:24:18 playing sports.
0:24:24 I have traditionally competed a lot, and I may actually compete in 2025 in some form
0:24:25 of sport.
0:24:27 I would like to have something on the calendar for that.
0:24:33 Number of cautionary notes, and then I’ll come back to how I’m thinking about maybe framing
0:24:34 exercise for myself.
0:24:39 The first is that you should not go from all fucked up and broken and stiff to I’m going
0:24:45 to do the most exaggerated rotational movements possible, or pulling a sled backwards in this
0:24:48 compromised, rounded back position.
0:24:50 You will break yourself if you do that.
0:24:56 So I think the name of the game is micro progressions and progressive resistance, but being very,
0:24:57 very smart about it.
0:25:01 Because as you have experienced, certainly as I have experienced, as you get older and
0:25:07 you accumulate injuries, it takes a lot longer to heal, and sometimes those things do not
0:25:09 heal completely, no matter what you do.
0:25:13 I got one of those splits machines where you can put your legs in there.
0:25:14 Oh, Chuck Norris special.
0:25:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:25:17 I had the Chuck Norris thing on the outside.
0:25:20 I was doing it and I was getting further and further and further each week, and my plies
0:25:23 instructor was like, “What the hell are you doing?”
0:25:26 And I’m like, “I’m going to do the splits in a couple months,” and she’s like, “You have
0:25:31 no supporting muscles at all for any of this.”
0:25:36 She’s like, “When you get done, you’ll go down once, and then you won’t even be able
0:25:41 to like, everything else will rip,” and I was like, “Oh, shit, that’s a good call.
0:25:43 I’m glad I didn’t take it that far.”
0:25:48 Yeah, so for me, I am focused on a few things, and I’ve actually made a lot of progress with
0:25:54 this over the last handful of months, and in 2025, I will be very focused on this.
0:25:56 For the first two months of the year, I’ll be focused on skiing.
0:26:03 I’ll be in the mountains for two months, and that is a great motivator to develop, say,
0:26:09 different types of stability and strength, single legs, so glyphs and so on, and having
0:26:12 that context in which to test myself, right?
0:26:17 So if I’m carving in one direction and then in the other, say the inside leg is very unstable,
0:26:22 for some reason, it’s chattering a lot, well, that’s something to fix, and the skiing serves
0:26:28 as a fun, assuming you don’t overdo it, and blow yourself apart, diagnostic tool for bringing
0:26:31 to awareness some of these things you need to work on.
0:26:36 And I’d say priorities, these aren’t necessarily in ranked order, but number one, as you get
0:26:42 older, you lose muscle mass, you just do, and that’s age-related muscle loss, sarcopenia
0:26:49 is directly correlated to any number of issues, I’m sure, including all cause mortality.
0:26:57 So weight training, resistance training, building muscle mass is an undeniable priority for
0:27:00 functional health span as you get older.
0:27:06 But for me, that means compound movements once or twice a week.
0:27:09 You really don’t need to overdo it or do it five days a week.
0:27:15 A lot of people use five days a week or every day as an excuse to not get started.
0:27:19 You can make a lot of progress, especially if you haven’t done much weight training,
0:27:26 with one day, one session per week, if you’re using, say, high-intensity training, one set
0:27:27 to failure type protocol.
0:27:31 I recognize it’s very simple, I recognize there are some very experienced athletes who
0:27:36 will say, “Well, now you want to do five sets of three or five sets of five or whatever
0:27:40 it might be with three to five-minute rest intervals in between to replenish the creatine
0:27:41 phosphate.”
0:27:47 But complexity can be the enemy of execution, as Tony Robbins and others say a lot.
0:27:51 And it’s just scaled down to what you can do if you’re starting an exercise habit.
0:27:56 If that means you go to the gym every day and you do five minutes on a treadmill, make
0:28:00 the bar low enough that you can clear it and you are not tempted to make excuses.
0:28:02 Let me ask you a question.
0:28:07 If you’re like, “Okay, I don’t want to be a meathead, but I want a little muscle mass,
0:28:10 so I want some tones and definition, a little muscle mass.”
0:28:14 And I’ve seen the pros and cons of one set to failure and the data around it.
0:28:19 It seems to be that it’s good, but not as good as multiple sets of failure for a single
0:28:20 muscle group.
0:28:23 Would you say that you believe that to be true?
0:28:27 Or are you doing one set to failure with, if you’re doing bicep, let’s just take bicep
0:28:28 for example.
0:28:32 If you’re doing one set to failure, are you doing several exercises on the bicep one set
0:28:35 to failure, or are you just talking about you’re just doing hammer curls until you fail
0:28:38 and that’s it for biceps that day?
0:28:40 Let’s just take skiing as an example.
0:28:43 So my priority is going to be skiing and there are actually a few other sports I’ll be training
0:28:44 for at the same time.
0:28:48 So I’ll be a busy, busy boy for the first two months of the year, which is great.
0:28:52 So I’ll need to lose all this fat that I accumulated over Thanksgiving and Christmas because I know
0:28:55 those Danish butter cookies that my mom bought at Costco are just waiting for me.
0:28:56 I know it.
0:28:58 I know they’re sitting there.
0:29:05 So the one set to failure or multiple sets to failure, training to failure can inhibit
0:29:10 your ability to train something sport specific like skiing if you overdo it.
0:29:15 For instance, I would not even though you could pack on tons of muscle doing 20 rep set to
0:29:19 failure for squats, if you do that and then you try to go skiing the next two or three
0:29:26 days, you’re going to be garbage from a sort of fine motor control perspective.
0:29:30 But to answer your question directly, I have not looked at the most recent data on any of
0:29:31 this.
0:29:35 I’m not sure there exists data comparing these in meaningful ways that do not bias towards
0:29:42 one method or another, because I have volunteered to be a participant, a subject in certain
0:29:43 weightlifting trials.
0:29:46 I’m not going to mention the university because I don’t want to throw them under the bus.
0:29:52 But when I went in there, the protocol required us to do 10 reps of bench press for X number
0:29:53 of sets.
0:29:56 And I went in there and you’d see one guy get on the bench because there was a circuit,
0:29:57 right?
0:30:01 They’re trying to make use of basically an open class period for volunteers.
0:30:07 You’d see one person who’s basically dropping the weight onto his chest at a risk of breaking
0:30:14 every one of his ribs and bouncing it off, using terrible form, terrible form, very,
0:30:16 very little time under tension.
0:30:20 And then you’d see someone else who’s doing like two seconds up, four seconds down, pause
0:30:22 at the chest.
0:30:24 Those are not the same 10 repetitions, right?
0:30:26 So I do think I’m under tension is completely different.
0:30:29 Yeah, so I think garbage in, garbage out for a lot of studies.
0:30:32 So I don’t weigh them too heavily.
0:30:38 But what I will say is, if you are reasonably novice, even intermediate for training, and
0:30:41 by the way, if you’ve been training for a bunch of years and you haven’t made a lot
0:30:43 of progress, I would consider you novice.
0:30:49 If you do a single set to concentric failure per exercise, and I’ll come back and then
0:30:57 I answer the what type of exercise and so on that you asked, you will see excellent results.
0:31:01 And there may be some incremental gain from doing multiple sets, but it’s going to dig
0:31:03 into your recovery ability.
0:31:05 So you’re saying one set?
0:31:06 Yeah.
0:31:07 And now let me tell you what the one set means.
0:31:08 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:31:09 What the one set means.
0:31:13 And I’ve gone back to all of my books kind of function this way, like all of my books
0:31:15 are sort of reference books for myself.
0:31:20 I go around, I gather these best practices that I’ve tested, and then I refer back to
0:31:21 them.
0:31:26 So in the case of say the four hour body, the Occam’s protocol and a handful of compound
0:31:31 movements still does the trick for the vast majority of the population.
0:31:36 I’m sure people are going to take issue with this, but I have now like hundreds of thousands,
0:31:40 millions of people who have tried these things, and I’ve seen the success studies, like it
0:31:41 does work.
0:31:42 Yes, it’s simple.
0:31:45 Yes, it could be more sophisticated.
0:31:52 It is idiot proof for a reason that if I go into lift, I’m not going to be doing direct
0:31:53 bicep work.
0:31:59 I’m going to be doing something like a seated row and then a pull down.
0:32:03 And if I’m hitting the back from a few different angles, that’s it.
0:32:09 I might honestly just do one of those, like I might do one compound pulling movement,
0:32:12 one compound pressing movement, and then one or two leg movements.
0:32:14 That’s the whole workout.
0:32:16 The whole workout should take less than 20 minutes.
0:32:18 People will say, “What about warm-up sets?”
0:32:23 Well, if you’re tracking your progress well, you’re using the same equipment and you’re
0:32:26 lifting at a slow cadence, this is key.
0:32:30 The first handful of reps effectively function as your warm-up.
0:32:35 Now what I’ll often do is take like 30% of the target working weight that I’m going to
0:32:41 use for my one set to failure, and I’ll do three, four, five reps just to make sure my
0:32:46 joints aren’t flared up, that I’m not feeling any pain.
0:32:49 And then I would have, say, an A workout and a B workout.
0:32:54 So let’s just say, hypothetically, I’m making this up, but you might have something like
0:33:00 a close grip incline bench press to just avoid issues with your shoulders, let’s just say.
0:33:05 Then you have pull downs, like close grip supinated.
0:33:11 So palm facing you, pull downs, and then a leg press or split squats, holding dumbbells
0:33:12 on either side.
0:33:15 So you’re also hitting your traps on that one, right?
0:33:20 That’s your whole workout.
0:33:24 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
0:33:26 This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
0:33:31 Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide,
0:33:33 including me, including mine.
0:33:34 What business you might ask?
0:33:38 Well, this year, one way I’ve scratched my own itch is by creating cockpunch coffee.
0:33:40 It’s a long story.
0:33:45 All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saise Foundation, fund research for mental
0:33:46 health, et cetera.
0:33:51 Anyway, we use Shopify for the online storefront and my team raves about how simple and easy
0:33:52 it is to use.
0:33:55 Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel.
0:33:59 Doesn’t matter if you’re selling satin sheets from Shopify’s in-person POS system or offering
0:34:03 organic olive oil on Shopify’s all-in-one e-commerce platform.
0:34:06 However you interact with your customers, you’re covered.
0:34:11 Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, plus Shopify’s award-winning
0:34:15 help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions.
0:34:17 This is possibility powered by Shopify.
0:34:21 The best time to start your new business is right now.
0:34:26 Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business, and get your first sale.
0:34:29 Established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
0:34:36 So sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/tim all lowercase.
0:34:41 Go to Shopify.com/Tim to start selling today with Shopify.
0:34:48 One more time, Shopify.com/Tim.
0:34:51 One thing we didn’t cover that thing is really important is you say one step to failure,
0:34:54 but what’s your target raps here?
0:34:58 Are you going for like, you know, some people say lift heavy and do eight to 10.
0:35:02 Some people say go a little bit lighter and get to 20 to where you fail at 20.
0:35:03 What are you aiming for here?
0:35:08 For safety purposes, and again, everybody’s got a fucking opinion with this stuff, but
0:35:12 use something that can do a super slow protocol, which is like five seconds up, five seconds
0:35:16 down, and then you can do six to 10 reps.
0:35:22 But I wouldn’t increase the weight until you get to like an eight to 10 rep range.
0:35:26 You can increase that for the legs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I wouldn’t make
0:35:27 it complicated.
0:35:34 I would say five seconds up, five seconds down, that’s one, 1,000, two, 1,000 slow.
0:35:37 And let’s call it six to 10 reps to failure.
0:35:41 Positive or concentric failure means you’re on the, in the case of the pull down, the
0:35:42 pulling motion.
0:35:45 This is when the muscle is overlapping and shortening.
0:35:49 In the case of the leg press, let’s just say, or the squats, it would be when you’re pushing
0:35:51 out, not when you’re lowering.
0:35:55 In the case of the close grip bench press, it would be when you’re lifting the weight
0:35:56 up.
0:35:59 And then you get to the point where you stick, you can’t move it.
0:36:00 All right.
0:36:03 Push for another 10 seconds, as hard as you can, try to move it a millimeter at a time,
0:36:06 and then lower for 10 seconds, you’re done.
0:36:08 And then you have to log the entire workout.
0:36:09 It’s not hard to do.
0:36:10 You need to take notes.
0:36:13 If you don’t take notes, you’re not going to make the progress you want to make.
0:36:16 And then the second workout, just to, again, hypothetical, it doesn’t really matter that
0:36:17 much.
0:36:19 As long as it’s safe and it’s a compound movement, you’re doing it to failure, you’re
0:36:20 going to make progress.
0:36:24 So let’s just say that your shoulders are healthy enough to do this.
0:36:29 You could be like overhead press or a military press and equipment agnostic.
0:36:31 People can argue about free weights versus machines.
0:36:36 My position now is whatever is safest, yeah, and whatever you can do consistently.
0:36:40 So if you’re traveling a lot, then hire a personal trainer or a power lifter or someone
0:36:45 with a very good technique to coach you on how to use free weights, because those are
0:36:50 going to be uniform around the country or around the world instead of equipment, which
0:36:52 is going to be highly variable.
0:36:57 So on the next one might be like overhead press or seated overhead press, then we already
0:36:58 did the pulldown.
0:37:02 So maybe it’s a seated row or a bent row with a barbell.
0:37:03 Then for legs, we already did.
0:37:08 I think I was talking about split squats with dumbbells, so maybe at this time it’s leg
0:37:09 press.
0:37:12 I have, for instance, my right leg is 1.1 centimeters.
0:37:19 I had full leg x-rays done a year ago because a number of doctors thought I was full of
0:37:20 shit with this.
0:37:22 I really think one leg is longer than the other.
0:37:24 I’ve looked at it a number of different ways.
0:37:30 My right leg is about femur length is 0.8 centimeters to 1.1 centimeters.
0:37:32 I did two takes of x-rays.
0:37:38 So what happens if I’m doing, say, a back squat, is it introduces a rotational force,
0:37:45 and that is how I initially turned my mildly bad back pain into really acute horrifying
0:37:48 back pain that has persisted now for two years or so.
0:37:52 I’ve had a lot of progress, and I can talk about what’s contributed to that.
0:37:57 Actually, an experiment recently with stem cells seemed to be delivering some very interesting
0:37:58 results.
0:38:01 I’m not ready to recommend any laboratories related to the production or harvesting the
0:38:06 stem cells, nor any clinics, because I want to wait until I see more launch-to-enol results
0:38:07 for myself.
0:38:14 But the early indications are very positive, and the TLDR on that is that I did not want
0:38:16 to inject anything intradiscal.
0:38:20 I didn’t want to puncture any discs, and there are many reasons for that.
0:38:24 I’ve spoken to a lot of spine mechanic experts and so on.
0:38:29 It seems that the long-term risk of having some type of issue with your disc or a rupture
0:38:32 is higher if you ever puncture the disc.
0:38:38 So I didn’t want to do that, and rather than do that, because my pain is localized to like
0:38:44 the SI joint and L4, L5, where I do have a bunch of structural issues, we did something
0:38:50 maybe a little unorthodox in a sense, and there’s something called the iliolumbar ligament,
0:38:53 and you have two of them, and people can look this up.
0:38:59 But I used to think, and I do still think this, you’re effectively as old as your joints
0:39:00 feel, right?
0:39:02 I really think there’s something to that.
0:39:05 Especially when you throw your back out and you’re like, “Fuck.”
0:39:09 You’ve never felt older in your life, and when you have to crawl to your bed on your
0:39:12 hands and knees because your back is thrown out.
0:39:17 Or lay on your bed, or you have to constantly fidget because your back is bothering you.
0:39:23 Where I’ve started to think there may be, for me, some interesting interventions, because
0:39:27 what we did is we did an injection, I mean, the needle’s huge.
0:39:29 That’s like five to eight inches long.
0:39:36 But an injection in the SI joint, but then also bathing the … I didn’t want an injection
0:39:40 directly into the ligament just because I couldn’t take the recovery time for that.
0:39:50 But to bathe around the ligament with these stem cells, MSCs, and literally within a day,
0:39:52 I felt relief in that area.
0:40:02 So it raises questions for me around how you diagnose back pain or look at structural issues
0:40:04 and what’s visible versus less visible.
0:40:09 So in other words, when you look at back pain, oftentimes you do imaging.
0:40:17 You look at the spine, and you fixate on the set joints and the vertebral bodies, the segments,
0:40:19 and so on.
0:40:22 And if you’re over the age of 40, your back’s going to look fucked in some way.
0:40:24 It’s going to look great.
0:40:28 As you get older, just like you get wrinkles on your face, your back is going to show degenerative
0:40:33 changes almost 100%, especially if you’ve done any lifting or athletic anything.
0:40:40 And what is less obvious though is the health or inflammation associated with some of these
0:40:41 ligaments.
0:40:45 So I’ve become super interested based on my recent experience.
0:40:50 And I know friends from friction massage who have seen tremendous back pain relief.
0:40:52 What is friction massage?
0:40:55 You could use a gua sha tool.
0:40:56 There are different ways to do it.
0:40:59 It’s like cupping and shit, where they break the fascia up.
0:41:02 It’s like a rapid pressure movement back and forth.
0:41:04 So you could use a gua sha tool.
0:41:07 It’s probably going to be too big for this particular area.
0:41:10 You might use probably using manual therapy.
0:41:13 But I have friends who have seen incredible relief.
0:41:19 And what appears to be the case is that if I address those ligaments, a lot of my low
0:41:20 back pain goes away.
0:41:24 Now the contrast between my right side, which was treated, my left side, which was untreated,
0:41:27 but my left side, I considered the healthy side.
0:41:30 I now realize it’s actually in a lot of pain.
0:41:33 So what I may do, I’m part of a clinical trial and you have to take a six month break
0:41:37 between stem cells for a host of reasons.
0:41:41 I may actually do PRP, platelet-rich plasma, on that left side.
0:41:42 We’ll see.
0:41:44 Get the vampire facial while you’re at it.
0:41:47 I’ll get a two for one vampire facial while I’m there.
0:41:48 Get the package deal.
0:41:49 So hopefully that helps.
0:41:54 And we only talked about one aspect of how I’m thinking about health, which is the muscle
0:41:55 mass.
0:42:00 For me, since I am doing the skiing training and other things, I will probably not do extended
0:42:03 sets to failure because it’ll inhibit my training.
0:42:08 I will probably do something in the order of more like the three to five rep range, still
0:42:13 doing it slowly enough that I feel like it is very under control, nothing ballistic.
0:42:17 I’m going to get plenty of ballistic and dynamic movements from the skiing itself.
0:42:22 One question on the recovery side is back in the day, it was like one gram of protein
0:42:27 per pound of body weight to get any type of muscle growth.
0:42:29 What’s your current regimen look like for something like this?
0:42:32 Because you’re not going for massive gains here, so it’s not like it’d be perfect.
0:42:33 Are you still getting adequate protein?
0:42:36 Are you putting a lot of protein in there when you’re doing these training days?
0:42:37 Yeah, I will.
0:42:41 I mean, especially because I’ll be training, I’ll basically be training at the gym at
0:42:47 night before dinner and I will be skiing and taking very serious technical lessons and
0:42:51 trying some pretty gnarly stuff for me in terms of reasonably intense training.
0:42:52 Some shit or?
0:42:53 No, no, no, no.
0:42:54 Not that intense.
0:42:55 No.
0:42:56 You doing a half pipe?
0:42:57 No, not half pipe.
0:42:58 What are you doing?
0:43:01 I’m just talking about like bumps and backcountry stuff.
0:43:02 Oh, backcountry stuff, yeah.
0:43:06 Also like ski touring, I’ll be skinning basically, you work your way up the mountain and then
0:43:07 you ski down and stuff.
0:43:10 So it’s going to be physically intensive.
0:43:13 I’ll also be eating quite a lot of carbs, but probably I will almost certainly get at
0:43:17 least one gram of protein per pound body weight.
0:43:19 I don’t think that’s overkill.
0:43:20 All right.
0:43:21 Yeah.
0:43:23 If you want more thing, that’s kind of fun.
0:43:24 Yeah.
0:43:25 And I’ve been looking very closely at this.
0:43:31 I don’t feel comfortable promoting any brands yet because I have some technical questions,
0:43:37 but I have been experimenting with something called the acronym is LICUS, L-I-C-U-S, which
0:43:43 is, so I’ve got this and then another one over here.
0:43:46 If you’re not seeing the video, it looks like he’s part cyborg now.
0:43:51 This patches with electrodes and cables coming off and then you set how many hours you want
0:43:57 on this thing and it is low intensity continuous ultrasound.
0:43:58 Is this why you’re so chill right now?
0:43:59 What’s going on?
0:44:00 What is this thing doing?
0:44:01 No, no.
0:44:02 This is not why I’m so chill.
0:44:03 I mean, who knows?
0:44:04 I don’t think so.
0:44:11 This is a device that safely administers low intensity ultrasound over a period of one
0:44:14 to four hours per site of treatment.
0:44:19 I currently have two of these coupling patches, one on the front of my shoulder, one at the
0:44:20 rear of the shoulder.
0:44:23 I have a bunch of tendonitis around the insertion points.
0:44:25 Oh, so this has nothing to do with your Hawaii trip.
0:44:26 It’s not like for us…
0:44:27 No, no, no.
0:44:28 This is when I’ve been playing with this for a month.
0:44:29 Talking to dolphins.
0:44:31 No, no.
0:44:37 This is for recovery, but also the low intensity continuous ultrasounds like is LICUS.
0:44:41 You can find a lot of interesting studies on this and I’ll mention a site.
0:44:49 I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but consensus.app, which uses AI to assess published
0:44:55 literature from reputable journals to determine if something is a thumbs up, thumbs down or
0:44:56 inconclusive.
0:45:00 So you could put something in like, is there any evidence that low intensity continuous
0:45:04 ultrasound helps with tissue remodeling or sports recovery?
0:45:05 You’ll get an answer.
0:45:08 It’s not perfect, but it’s actually very helpful to get an initial indication.
0:45:15 One of what I find interesting about this is unlike some other types of, say for instance,
0:45:16 electrical stimulation.
0:45:21 There are 10 units that you can use that will effectively reduce pain by, and this is not
0:45:27 scientific description, but they’re effectively overriding your nerves or overstimulating your
0:45:32 nerves with certain frequencies to turn off or mute the pain signaling.
0:45:34 That’s not what this is doing.
0:45:38 This technology seems to actually help with tissue remodeling and proliferation of different
0:45:41 growth factors.
0:45:45 I really remember the first time I used this within an hour, this acute pain in my shoulder
0:45:47 just vanished.
0:45:48 Crazy.
0:45:49 Now, could that be placebo?
0:45:50 It could be placebo.
0:45:52 What’s the cost on this?
0:45:53 It’s not cheap.
0:45:54 Yeah.
0:45:57 Which is why most people go into a clinic to use something like this.
0:45:59 But they get you with the razor blades approach.
0:46:03 So the device itself, who knows, but these coupling patches are very expensive.
0:46:09 So to get, if I’m using it once a day or twice a day, I’ve been using it a lot.
0:46:12 It’s like 10 grand for two months.
0:46:13 Jesus.
0:46:14 It’s expensive.
0:46:15 How much are the patches?
0:46:20 Like a grand a pop, like one box of four, I think it’s four, four, four, four.
0:46:23 So it’d be like 16 patches or something like 900 bucks.
0:46:25 It’s very expensive.
0:46:29 But there are some people out there for whom this will be out of reach, but you may be
0:46:33 able to find a clinic where you could do this on sort of an as needed basis.
0:46:34 Who knows?
0:46:38 Once a week, there may be some minimum cadence necessary to see the results that you would
0:46:39 want.
0:46:41 But there are also people out there for whom this may make sense.
0:46:45 And hopefully, as this technology, and you’ve seen this happen a million times.
0:46:52 So if I, as it becomes more popular, as the technology gets more developed, as there’s
0:46:55 more competition, the price drops tremendously.
0:46:59 You know, what’s funny is I’ve seen in podcasts, you know, you and I have been part of this
0:47:02 where like you mentioned something that’s like three grand or whatever or something
0:47:03 crazy.
0:47:07 And there’s like, well, that Tim fucking rich guy can like afford all these things, blah,
0:47:08 blah.
0:47:12 But honestly, what happens that I think is so beautiful about this stuff is like, if
0:47:17 you can get the higher end folks to like that want to go and experiment at the edges here
0:47:22 that have the disposable income, they’re doing nothing but dropping the prices for the masses
0:47:24 because they have to ramp up production over time.
0:47:27 And it’s like, it’s funny, I’ve seen this happen so many times, even in drugs stuff
0:47:28 as well.
0:47:33 I think of rapatha as an alternative to cholesterol meds, and it wasn’t covered out of pocket.
0:47:37 It was like $2,500 a month was like ridiculous.
0:47:39 And now Amazon has it for 500.
0:47:40 That’s no insurance.
0:47:43 You know, it’s like, it just, it takes time for these things to come down and hit the
0:47:44 masses.
0:47:48 And with those VO2 max machines too, that you can get home now, I don’t know if you messed
0:47:49 around with those.
0:47:50 I just got one of those.
0:47:51 It’s insane.
0:47:52 It’s insane.
0:47:55 But it’s great because you say you don’t have to go to the clinic and you can save the
0:47:57 time and then eventually these would be less expensive for everyone.
0:47:58 Yeah.
0:48:02 I mean, we’ve seen it with Uber, right, Uber Black in the beginning was definitely kind
0:48:06 of a one percenter thing, but it subsidized the development of, I mean, that was jet travel
0:48:07 though as well.
0:48:09 UberX, Tesla, same thing.
0:48:11 I mean, there are many, many examples.
0:48:17 I would say I’ll get people some recommendations that are not expensive at all, which I’m equally
0:48:22 focused on, actually more focused on, like this is a nice bonus and I’m still experimenting
0:48:23 with it.
0:48:27 It seems to be very helpful, but I want to see longer term.
0:48:33 There is a chapter in, and I’ll see if I can share some of this.
0:48:35 I’ll put a link in the show notes for people.
0:48:37 I’ll share at least some of this.
0:48:43 There’s a chapter in the four hour body called reversing permanent injuries.
0:48:51 I will link to it for folks, but the exercises in that still deliver so much like the bang
0:48:56 for the buck, in doing some of the gray cook exercises, the chop and lift with cable machines,
0:49:02 the Turkish get up, even if you’re just doing the first portion of that on the ground for
0:49:03 shoulder health.
0:49:11 I mean, there’s so many benefits to a handful of exercises in terms of injury prevention.
0:49:14 You have to invest in that stuff as you get older.
0:49:19 If you want to be active, if you want to be athletic, your body just does not have the
0:49:24 elasticity and the regenerative ability that it used to.
0:49:28 That for instance, part of the reason I went back to that chapter is that the chop and
0:49:37 lift exercise have a slow under control rotational component that I felt was not dynamically,
0:49:44 but still compatible with getting me closer to developing or redeveloping the spinal engine
0:49:46 that Nsime and Yang talks about.
0:49:54 I was like, “Okay, look, let me take small safe steps towards incorporating some very
0:49:59 mild rotational exercises.”
0:50:00 That’s where I’m starting.
0:50:01 It feels good.
0:50:02 It feels great.
0:50:06 I’m doing it first thing in the morning, wake up, cold brew coffee right now and then Hawaiian
0:50:07 coffee is incredible.
0:50:13 This has been my reentry week after my 30, 40 days of abstinence.
0:50:17 Wake up immediately, have a cold brew and then go to the gym.
0:50:19 That’s a big shot.
0:50:21 Hawaiian coffee is no joke.
0:50:23 That’s some strong stuff.
0:50:24 It’s so good.
0:50:25 It’s delicious.
0:50:26 It’s one of my favorite coffee on the planet.
0:50:32 There’s something about how does dark and dense, and it feels very nutrient rich, antioxidant
0:50:33 rich to me.
0:50:35 It’s good stuff too.
0:50:36 Kona coffee is good.
0:50:37 All right.
0:50:39 So, we’re getting a few other predictions and fun things?
0:50:40 Yeah.
0:50:41 Yeah, let’s do it.
0:50:42 Okay.
0:50:43 So, we got tons.
0:50:44 We have several TED Talks.
0:50:45 So, you should …
0:50:46 Yeah.
0:50:47 So, I’ll just do …
0:50:48 Let a rapid fire.
0:50:49 Fun stuff here.
0:50:50 So, damn January.
0:50:51 I’m going to drink a six or less drinks a month.
0:50:52 Moving on to investments.
0:50:55 I like how you ran through that one.
0:50:59 Listen, the drinking thing, well, I actually am cutting back a ton.
0:51:00 You know what I’m not drinking tonight.
0:51:01 Look at that.
0:51:02 Look at that.
0:51:03 All right.
0:51:04 Baby steps.
0:51:05 Baby steps.
0:51:09 One of the things I’ve realized, especially as you get older, is that as life gets more
0:51:14 complex, there has to be this kind of continual, especially as you have kids and other things,
0:51:21 because continual reevaluating of your processes, like every year, how can you turn down the
0:51:24 knob and automate more things than you had the previous year?
0:51:25 Just from my own sanity.
0:51:27 Or eliminate more things too.
0:51:28 Yes.
0:51:29 Yes.
0:51:32 And so, in that theme, I’ve gotten really simple in investing front.
0:51:35 Like the vast majority of my exposure is at True Ventures, where we take on a lot of
0:51:36 risk.
0:51:37 That’s what we do for our day jobs.
0:51:39 I’m going to try a new app called Monarch.
0:51:43 It’s not new, but it’s been around for a while for tracking my finances and finally get a
0:51:45 budget under control starting January.
0:51:46 You’ve been using it, right?
0:51:47 For a bit?
0:51:48 Yeah, but he’s in it.
0:51:49 It’s great.
0:51:50 What do you like about it?
0:51:51 So, there’s a couple of things that I really like.
0:51:57 I like for holistic net worth, just where am I in the world.
0:51:59 There’s a bunch of tools out there.
0:52:00 Projection Lab is good.
0:52:01 Where am I in the world?
0:52:02 Meaning like…
0:52:03 Big picture.
0:52:04 What does my whole thing look like?
0:52:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:52:11 And so, I would say that Projection Lab is kind of looking where you’re spending in terms
0:52:15 of like, how soon can I retire and what does my retirement look like?
0:52:18 In planning for different scenarios, I think that’s probably the best app out there.
0:52:20 What was it called?
0:52:21 Projection Lab.
0:52:25 Co-Pilot has always been my favorite on mobile, but Monarch is now just…
0:52:31 It ties together all my accounts in a view that I think is more data rich, especially
0:52:33 on the budgeting side than Co-Pilot.
0:52:40 So, I’ve kind of started to move over to Monarch more full-time, which is great.
0:52:45 Those two, and then, gosh, I’m drawing a blank of the last one for the kind of like overview
0:52:46 of everything.
0:52:48 You’re going to kill me because it’s a fantastic app.
0:52:49 Pouring out premium?
0:52:50 What’s that?
0:52:51 Pouring out premium?
0:52:52 Exactly.
0:52:53 So, there’s Tim.
0:52:54 He’s back.
0:52:55 He’s back, everybody.
0:52:59 Now, I can’t even blame it on the booze.
0:53:00 Yeah, exactly.
0:53:02 Before you were like, “I’m married.”
0:53:04 Did you actually buy their premium?
0:53:05 No.
0:53:06 No, no, no.
0:53:10 You would answer it like, “Yeah, I’m not sure my public favorites.”
0:53:11 Yeah, exactly.
0:53:12 Pouring up.com/timtim.
0:53:13 20% off.
0:53:14 Kubera.
0:53:20 Kubera is my overview app that I think is the best for like tracking off kind of your
0:53:21 larger investments and like…
0:53:22 Why was the name?
0:53:23 No wonder you forgot it.
0:53:24 Kubera.
0:53:25 K-U-B-E-R-A.
0:53:26 I love Kubera.
0:53:29 I think it’s really high quality software.
0:53:30 Anyway, that’s that.
0:53:33 So, let me just go quickly down the investment front.
0:53:35 VTI, because it gives you global exposure.
0:53:36 I love that.
0:53:38 I get the total stock market index there.
0:53:39 It’s Vanguard.
0:53:41 It’s low cost.
0:53:45 It’s like, I want to have the majority of my stuff in there.
0:53:52 I have moved my crypto allocation to 10% of overall net worth from about 4% to 5%.
0:53:54 Oh, you increased your holdings.
0:53:55 I increased.
0:53:56 Now, okay.
0:53:58 Did you increase it or is that just reflective of an increase in value?
0:53:59 No.
0:54:00 I increased it.
0:54:01 You bought more.
0:54:02 Yes, I’ve been buying more for the last few months.
0:54:07 I had this feeling that Trump was going to win and I started buying more crypto when
0:54:14 I had that gut feeling just because I think that he’s going to push a massive crypto agenda.
0:54:19 And I believe that if this is probably in the more prediction side, I think in the next
0:54:22 couple of years, we’re going to see for the very first time the US government is going
0:54:25 to start adding crypto to our reserves.
0:54:27 We’ll treat it as a currency that we hold in our reserves.
0:54:30 And when that happens, it’s going to be nuts.
0:54:37 I think we’re going to hit my gut says 250,000 or more, a coin in the next couple of years.
0:54:39 So we’ll see where that goes.
0:54:43 Now, if somebody listens like Kevin’s just shilling his bags, what would you say to that?
0:54:45 I would say a lot of people have said this.
0:54:46 I don’t know.
0:54:47 I was talking about…
0:54:48 I’m not saying that.
0:54:49 I’m just saying.
0:54:50 No, no.
0:54:51 I get it.
0:54:52 But like, this isn’t…
0:54:53 Here’s the deal about shilling your bags.
0:54:54 I’m giving the PTSD five bags.
0:54:55 No, no, no.
0:54:56 But this is the real truth.
0:54:57 Okay.
0:55:01 Let’s go and take a look at how much Bitcoin traded today in terms of volume.
0:55:02 Okay.
0:55:08 So I love our podcast that we’re both going to syndicate this episode on our respective
0:55:14 feeds, but we’re not moving trillions of dollars of Bitcoin because I say it’s going to 250
0:55:15 Bitcoin.
0:55:20 I could go right now on Coinbase right now and say sell 20 million in Bitcoin, press
0:55:25 a button at market, and it would hardly even tick like a little tiny tick because there’s
0:55:27 so much volume.
0:55:30 No amount of shilling could move it in any meaningful way.
0:55:31 It just can’t happen.
0:55:36 Now, 10 years ago, you and I go on here talking about Bitcoin, and we just made ourselves
0:55:38 like 5 million bucks, but you know what I mean?
0:55:39 That’s not the case anymore.
0:55:41 It’s just too massive.
0:55:44 So anyway, there’s no such thing as shilling anymore, at least when it comes to Bitcoin.
0:55:48 Now, if we were talking about shitcoins, which are happening a lot right now, that’s the
0:55:49 stuff that’s just so stupid.
0:55:50 I don’t even get involved in.
0:55:52 So anyway, I hold Bitcoin.
0:55:56 I purposely hold it in an account that I can’t touch.
0:56:01 So I like this because Coinbase has a feature called custody where you can’t withdraw for
0:56:04 like three days, enterprise level, self-control.
0:56:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:06 It’s like a forced hold.
0:56:10 I like doing it, and I’ve now stopped trading it.
0:56:11 So I don’t even look at the price.
0:56:13 I’m like, it’s just part of my overall holdings.
0:56:16 I’m going to hold it for the next 50 plus years.
0:56:18 I want to hand my kids Bitcoin.
0:56:21 It’s gone from when do I sell it, like, ooh, is it too high?
0:56:22 Should I sell right now?
0:56:23 Those days are over.
0:56:25 Now, it’s just part of the portfolio.
0:56:27 So it goes, it’s digital assets.
0:56:28 It’s not going away.
0:56:33 You can’t put digital assets back in the box, like back in the tube or wherever the genie
0:56:34 comes out of.
0:56:35 Back in the tube.
0:56:36 Yeah.
0:56:39 You can’t put some genie back in the toothpaste tube.
0:56:40 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:45 So last thing I will say, now I do like to play, you know, do little one-off stock buys
0:56:46 every now and then.
0:56:50 I got very, really lucky because we called NVIDIA pretty early on your podcast before,
0:56:56 which was good, but I have enough friends that are large executives at major companies
0:57:02 in the tech arena that they are all talking about nuclear power.
0:57:07 And I don’t know how to play it, but my gut tells me over the next decade, there’s going
0:57:11 to be, I’m pretty bullish on the return of nuclear to the United States, just out of
0:57:15 our sheer capacity for power that we need for data centers on the AI side.
0:57:18 Like we need alternative forms of energy.
0:57:20 Especially if coal plants are shut down.
0:57:22 Well, I mean, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
0:57:23 I’m not saying all.
0:57:24 I’m not saying all.
0:57:27 If you want to play the broad basket and you’re thinking about this over the long term, and
0:57:32 I was speaking for myself, this is not investment advice, but I did find there’s a fund that
0:57:38 like holds like uranium manufacturers and some like nuclear plants and some of the companies
0:57:41 that are thinking about doing these new smaller plants.
0:57:44 And so it’s like a basket of public nuclear stocks right now, and they will add to it
0:57:46 as other nuclear companies go public.
0:57:50 And so like I’m not in the game of going and saying, Hey, this is the nuclear future.
0:57:52 It’s just one company, right?
0:57:56 Because that to me would be like, it seems too much like angel investing or something
0:57:57 else.
0:58:01 So anyway, the one I look at is the only one I could really find was NLR, which is the
0:58:07 Venek ETF trust uranium and nuclear basket of stocks.
0:58:10 It’s got a pretty high expense ratio, but like I’m doing a really small piece into it
0:58:13 just because I think over the next decade is going to outperform the S&P.
0:58:14 That’s all.
0:58:17 That’s all for fun on the kind of investment going into the new year.
0:58:18 And then I got a bunch of predictions.
0:58:19 Yeah.
0:58:20 There are some of the predictions up.
0:58:21 Okay.
0:58:25 So prediction number one, Bitcoin hits 250 US government starts adding into reserves.
0:58:26 You think that’s in 2025?
0:58:29 I think that is in the next two years.
0:58:31 So I’ll kick that out say within the next two years.
0:58:36 I think several AI companies next year struggle to raise capital and go under and I’m talking
0:58:40 some of the bigs that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars because I think what’s
0:58:44 going to happen is that I shouldn’t say the bigs, the big players that are in the
0:58:49 startup space now, I think the quote unquote bigs like the alphabet companies are just
0:58:52 going to run the table when it comes to most AI related things.
0:58:57 And if that’s the case, I kind of just want to hold those stocks.
0:59:00 Open AI, I’m still like, you know, they’re so intertwined with Microsoft, I think that
0:59:01 they’ll be fine.
0:59:03 Plus they’re working on other devices as well.
0:59:06 Speaking of which, one of my predictions, it will be that opening a launch is some type
0:59:11 of mobile device, maybe some type of smart headphones this coming year because they have
0:59:15 to be at the metal level, meaning like they have to be at the device level that we all
0:59:17 carry around.
0:59:21 And when you have press and hold Apple intelligence, just by holding on the side of your phone
0:59:26 now, and you have press and hold like, you know how you used to query like Siri or whatever.
0:59:29 And now you have that same going on with Jim and I with Google.
0:59:35 Now you’ve got AI at the phone level already carried by the big providers to get someone
0:59:40 to think like, oh, I got to go download chat GPT so I can go and switch it out as my assistant
0:59:42 and get all this and set up shortcuts and all that.
0:59:47 And it’s like, if it’s like 90% is good, people won’t care.
0:59:48 You know what I mean?
0:59:54 It’s like, I don’t care if I’m streaming Lord of the Rings off of freaking Hulu or Prime
0:59:57 or Apple TV, I just want to watch the movie, right?
1:00:00 And so it’s like, I think AI is going to be kind of like that where we’ll just like,
1:00:01 oh, I have an Apple phone.
1:00:02 So I use Apple intelligence.
1:00:03 Like that’s kind of.
1:00:04 Interesting.
1:00:05 Yeah.
1:00:06 So you think of like, where could they get the wedge in the door?
1:00:07 Right.
1:00:08 That sets interesting, right?
1:00:14 Because if they made a really good set of basically AirPod clones of some type.
1:00:17 But intelligent with AI built in, yeah, had that built in.
1:00:20 But basically, they’re not going to replace the iPhone, right?
1:00:24 They’re not going to replace good Android phones for people who already use those, but
1:00:28 they could replace wireless AirPods.
1:00:32 The only way I think they would have a chance at replacing, not replacing the iPhone, but
1:00:36 being a top seller would be that they do something.
1:00:42 So first principles oriented where it’s like a type of UI, UX that we just haven’t even
1:00:43 imagined yet.
1:00:46 I heard they were working with Johnny Ive on some of this stuff.
1:00:51 And so, you know, you got the former, like industrial designer, head of design for Apple
1:00:55 coming to the table with open AI saying, Hey, let’s go back to the drawing board and say,
1:01:00 if we had to build a phone today, would it be with a series of app icons on here or might
1:01:04 it be a different interface that makes us way more sexy, more fun?
1:01:10 Because like the future is not going to be, Hey, I’m going to go launch hotels.com app
1:01:15 and say, get me a room in Japan in two weeks, negotiate all the things, put in my credit
1:01:16 card credentials.
1:01:19 It’s going to be literally you open your AI and you say, Hey, can you get me a room for
1:01:22 Japan at this hotel in two weeks?
1:01:23 And it’ll be like, which room do you want?
1:01:24 These three things, blah, blah, blah.
1:01:27 And you like this room and it’s like, boom, it’s already got my information.
1:01:31 It’s all API is behind the scenes and it hands all that data over the exchange is done.
1:01:32 The payment is done.
1:01:37 And it’s just like, it’s finalized within 30 seconds versus the 15 minute thing.
1:01:43 I mean, I guess what someone like opening AI could do is something along the lines of
1:01:50 a fantasy I’ve had for a long time, which is like a very dumb phone that I remember last
1:01:54 year, almost a year ago, I was telling my friends, it’d be great to have a one button
1:02:01 phone and the one button phone at that time would have basically sent voice or routed
1:02:07 a phone call to a virtual assistant or someone who handles everything for me outside of like
1:02:08 Google Maps.
1:02:10 It’s like, all right, I have maps.
1:02:12 And then I have one request button for everything.
1:02:13 Right.
1:02:14 And that’s it.
1:02:20 Just to avoid the metastasized mess of having a thousand apps and so many people 1000 notifications
1:02:22 and all that bullshit.
1:02:28 And I know some very accomplished professionals who have stopped taking their iPhone into
1:02:34 their office, like they leave it in some type of locker or maybe they leave it someplace
1:02:39 safe at like the reception and they take their dumb phone into say the office where they’re
1:02:46 doing their real work and their family has that number right ringer is on for emergencies.
1:02:47 It has maps and that’s it.
1:02:49 Yeah, there’s nothing else.
1:02:54 So you couldn’t envision something that is effectively the one button phone, but it’s
1:02:58 using an AI system through this open AI 100 percent.
1:03:02 Yeah, I think you’re exactly right in that like there’s probably the two or three things
1:03:05 that you still need and it’s not Instagram.
1:03:07 It’s not a full suite of things.
1:03:12 It’s like, okay, I maybe I still need to call or hail an Uber at this corner and see when
1:03:13 it’s pulling up, right?
1:03:17 Like maps, maybe Uber and then music probably.
1:03:19 Yeah, music and like credit cards.
1:03:20 Like that’s right.
1:03:21 You don’t need anything else.
1:03:22 And like AI could serve up music.
1:03:25 I mean, I don’t know exactly how they would do it, but there’d be a way to do it.
1:03:26 They’ll have APIs with all that stuff.
1:03:29 They can just send APIs for everything.
1:03:33 And coming back to what we were saying earlier too, it’s like, okay, well, most people are
1:03:35 not going to replace their phone with that.
1:03:43 But could they get 100,000, 200,000 techies to overpay for that to do the basically field
1:03:45 testing for them?
1:03:50 Or they could 100% almost certainly as the technology kind of matures behind the scenes.
1:03:54 I mean, this is the playbook that I think is finally starting to work for meta where
1:03:58 they have these Ray-Ban glasses that it’s the first time I’ve seen a meta product where
1:04:03 I’ve said, okay, I mean, we’ve been talking about VR and AR for so long and how stupid
1:04:06 it is as long as this show has been around.
1:04:09 I know Adam Gazali still owes me a bottle of whiskey because he thought it was going
1:04:11 to win out, but that’s in your book.
1:04:12 Yeah.
1:04:17 So Ray-Bans finally is really starting to hit for meta in that you can walk up to people
1:04:21 now in Japan and get real-time translations, right?
1:04:23 And you don’t even look like you’re wearing anything.
1:04:24 Real-time doxing too.
1:04:30 You see the Harvard student who figured out how to use the Ray-Ban glasses to immediately
1:04:31 dox everyone.
1:04:33 You can be like, “Hey, are you so-and-so who researched so-and-so?”
1:04:35 They’re like, “Oh my God, how do you know?”
1:04:37 And it’s like, because they’re getting a terminal readout.
1:04:41 Yeah, you get the terminal readout totally, a little higher fidelity than those graphics
1:04:42 back then.
1:04:43 Yeah.
1:04:47 So a couple of things real quick on the prediction front and then I’m done, but I think Microsoft
1:04:51 releases an Android phone largely because they have the suite there.
1:04:55 They have Word, they have Excel, they have PowerPoint, they have Drive, they have all
1:04:57 the stuff, Outlook, you name it.
1:05:00 I think it’ll be Android-based and they have ChatGPT.
1:05:04 So I think on the open AI side, that will probably be integrated into the Microsoft
1:05:06 phone.
1:05:07 My gut tells me there’s a no-brainer for them.
1:05:12 So Microsoft would subsidize the development and all that of this hardware as opposed to
1:05:13 it.
1:05:14 But it’ll also be Android-based.
1:05:15 Okay.
1:05:16 It’s almost like getting a Google phone.
1:05:19 You know when you get a Google phone, you open it up and it’s got Gmail and Chrome and
1:05:20 everything baked in?
1:05:26 If it is Android-based, this is such a Luddite question, I should know the answer, but does
1:05:32 Gemini automatically come along for the ride, in which case that would be built-in competition
1:05:35 for open AI if they used an Android phone?
1:05:42 That’s a great question because I know that Google had some funky things back in the day.
1:05:47 If you wanted to use Android, you had to include certain types of Google services behind the
1:05:49 scenes even though it’s open source.
1:05:54 I don’t know to what extent and what you have to bundle, but I believe because if I look
1:05:57 at Samsung phones and they have their own browsers and they have their own email and
1:06:00 everything else and they’re based on Android, that they could do the swap here because Samsung
1:06:02 already does it on the AI side and everything else.
1:06:07 Lastly, I think we’ll get some type of confirmation of aliens.
1:06:12 One last thing which I think we’ll see is we’re going to see a very massive unlock and creativity
1:06:16 around music creation happening in the next couple of years.
1:06:20 The same way that we’re able to prompt and type in, “Show me a fox swimming underwater
1:06:25 grabbing an apple,” and now you can’t even tell it wasn’t shot, and it’s just being generated
1:06:32 these little four-case snippets, I think there’s going to be a way to prompt music creation
1:06:39 in a very fun and exciting explosion of creativity that will make an average consumer sound that
1:06:41 they can be a real producer for the first time.
1:06:45 Just because I’ve seen some of these early betas, and they’re a lot of fun.
1:06:47 I think that’s the next 12 months, maybe 18 max.
1:06:50 Yeah, I think 18 sounds about right.
1:06:52 You skipped over Damp January, which is fine.
1:06:53 Well, let that sit.
1:06:54 Yeah, it is.
1:06:55 Aliens.
1:06:57 So, tell me more about the aliens.
1:06:58 What the hell is going on in New Jersey?
1:07:01 Honestly, I just have been ignoring most of the news.
1:07:07 There’s been this, I feel, in the last three years, and I got a really awesome chance to
1:07:12 sit down with that Navy fighter pilot that saw some of these things, and there has been
1:07:17 so much inquiry now, and then there also is a new change in government, obviously, that’s
1:07:19 pushing for so much more transparency.
1:07:24 I think that when you have someone, and we don’t have to get into politics whether you
1:07:27 love them or hate them or anything else, but when you have someone like Elon Musk in there
1:07:34 being Elon, I can see this shaking free or at least the uncovering of whatever we know
1:07:41 in this domain being declassified, and that to me is just horribly scary/exciting at the
1:07:42 same time.
1:07:43 Yeah.
1:07:44 Who knows?
1:07:45 Crazy.
1:07:46 Yeah.
1:07:50 I mean, what are the odds that you would place, honestly, in my head, it’s like 90%, there’s
1:07:53 it like aliens out there, and that we know about it as a government.
1:07:56 I guess we haven’t talked about this because I don’t want to sound like a fucking crazy
1:08:04 person, but there was a point where this conversation was in the air enough, I was like, “Okay, let
1:08:11 me do a deep dive to see what we can say with any degree of certainty and what we can’t
1:08:18 say with any degree of certainty,” and looking at government reports, looking at various
1:08:27 first person testimony about the tic-tac and so on that are very widely cited, and trying
1:08:33 to account for the possibility that some of these people, not all of them and not necessarily
1:08:39 people involved tic-tac, may see some benefit or appeal like every human being on social
1:08:45 media to getting attention, so you have to add that in as a possible contributing factor.
1:08:53 What can we conclude based on the available data, and what seems to be the case if you’re
1:08:59 looking at UAPs, right, because it’s what unidentified aerial phenomena now, the rebrand
1:09:04 from UFO, so you don’t sound like someone wearing a tinfoil hat, and part of the reason
1:09:11 that it’s aerial phenomena as opposed to flying object is because the vast majority of these
1:09:19 can be explained by, say, high altitude weather balloons or meteorological phenomena that
1:09:27 cause a strange visual effect in the sky that is noticeable by humans from the ground, blah,
1:09:28 blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:09:34 There are like 95 plus percent can be accounted for by that, or 90 plus percent.
1:09:42 Then you have also a long government history of covering up test craft flights and so on
1:09:44 with reports of UFOs, right?
1:09:49 There’s a crash of some prototype of some type of weaponized technology or surveillance
1:09:55 technology, and especially many, many decades ago, they’re worried about that news getting
1:10:02 to our enemies/competitors overseas, so they drum up a misinformation campaign around it
1:10:03 being UFO.
1:10:04 Okay.
1:10:06 So there’s also a bunch of that.
1:10:10 Taking all of that into account, if you look at congressional testimony and a bunch of
1:10:16 other things, there do seem to be quite a few examples of documented phenomena often
1:10:23 recorded from multiple video sources that defy explanation.
1:10:30 They seem to defy explanation, and the descriptions of the behavior of these things seem to defy
1:10:35 any explanation using technology that is currently available to us.
1:10:43 But I would say that the idea that there are little green men in these ships strikes me
1:10:48 as kind of ridiculous unless they’re tourists who just are on safaris seeing what humans
1:10:56 are doing, because if they’re sufficiently advanced to do what some people report, these
1:11:03 craft doing, we’re already using drones for warfare and all sorts of things.
1:11:09 Why would they risk life and injury?
1:11:10 That’s why I don’t think it’s that.
1:11:11 I think it is tourism, dude.
1:11:12 You’re right.
1:11:13 It could be tourism.
1:11:17 And the ones at REC are the ones that you hear about in Africa when people go on safaris
1:11:20 and they have too many drinks and they just like fucking crash into a greenhouse or it’s
1:11:21 like getting eaten or whatever.
1:11:25 It’s like some of these aliens are coming down here and it has to be something like that.
1:11:30 We’ve had a few BEVs and they just fucking wreck their shit.
1:11:32 It’s like teenage alien to you guys.
1:11:33 Yeah.
1:11:34 Exactly.
1:11:35 Yeah.
1:11:36 Where’d Globlog go?
1:11:37 Oh, fuck.
1:11:38 Yeah.
1:11:39 It’s gone to earth again.
1:11:40 Did he drink?
1:11:41 Yeah.
1:11:42 You took a few.
1:11:43 Yeah.
1:11:44 I mean, maybe, maybe, right?
1:11:47 I do think there are many more questions than answers, of course, but actually, I’ll give
1:11:48 a shout out.
1:11:54 There is an app called Enigma, which runs machine learning on UAP sightings.
1:11:56 So if people want to check that out, it’s pretty interesting.
1:12:02 Of course, we’ve seen a huge spike in New Jersey over the last period of time, but that’s
1:12:05 worth checking out and I’m actually just going to double check.
1:12:08 Did you see Moment of Contact, by the way?
1:12:09 Nope.
1:12:10 Oh, you got to see this.
1:12:11 Yeah.
1:12:16 So Enigma is EnigmaLabs.io.
1:12:23 Make a note of this, Moment of Contact, it’s a Netflix documentary about this 1996 crash
1:12:30 in Brazil, and it’s like these citizens, dozens of them, saw not only the crash, but the
1:12:34 freaking aliens wandering around the neighborhood and shit after the crash.
1:12:38 And then all these military things came in.
1:12:39 It’s worth it.
1:12:40 It’s worth it.
1:12:41 It’s like ET, but in Brazil.
1:12:43 I put on an alien documentary like once a year.
1:12:44 Netflix knows me not.
1:12:45 Yeah.
1:12:46 It’s like, “Hey, you might like this.”
1:12:47 I’m like, “I might.”
1:12:52 JJ Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, they made some UFO miniseries.
1:12:53 I watched that on an airplane.
1:12:54 Did they?
1:12:55 That’s when you watch that kind of thing.
1:12:56 Yeah.
1:12:57 Yeah.
1:12:58 Exactly.
1:13:00 And so I watched this one and I was like, “Wow, holy shit.
1:13:01 It’s pretty compelling.”
1:13:06 Let me throw out a couple of alternate explanations, or supplemental explanations.
1:13:12 So one, when you see these reports, the vast majority of alien abduction reports are red
1:13:16 necks getting pulled up by a tractor beam and then having anal probes put in them.
1:13:19 And I’m just like, “Why is it that all these red necks are getting anal probed?”
1:13:21 Is it always anal probes?
1:13:24 There is a lot of probing typically involved.
1:13:25 But it is weird.
1:13:26 What’s going on there?
1:13:28 Why do they return them?
1:13:29 Take them.
1:13:30 I don’t know.
1:13:31 I don’t know.
1:13:36 Where I was going to go is the reports also of the appearance of these aliens.
1:13:41 So what you often see is the upside-down, tear-drop-shaped head with the big eyes, and it’s like, “Well,
1:13:42 look cross-culturally.
1:13:44 You see these reports everywhere.
1:13:46 Therefore, they must be real.”
1:13:54 Those types of entities often are cited in certain types of psychedelic drug experiences
1:13:55 also.
1:13:58 So what does that mean?
1:14:04 Are people having spontaneous drug-like experiences that are producing these visions?
1:14:12 Is it actually not that these particular alien creatures exist, but that there is some fundamental
1:14:17 production of this hallucination based on endogenous DMT release or something?
1:14:18 Who the fuck knows?
1:14:21 But I’m saying there could be a component of that.
1:14:29 The other one is, my thought is, if we take as a possibility that there are aliens from
1:14:37 God knows where, who are somehow getting to Earth by bending the time-space continuum
1:14:43 to get here from gazillions of light-years away somehow in these craft, then wouldn’t
1:14:55 it be equally plausible that these craft are sent by time-traveling humans, basically descendants
1:14:58 of us that are like, “Wow, we really fucked that up.
1:15:01 Let’s try to send back an intervention team.”
1:15:02 It sounds crazy.
1:15:07 I don’t think it’s any crazier than aliens figuring out how to get here from a gazillion
1:15:12 light-years away to go on safari and handle pro-rednecks.
1:15:14 It doesn’t strike me as any stranger.
1:15:17 You’ve heard that a lot of these sightings are around some of these nuclear facilities
1:15:20 as well, like the missile silos and stuff like that.
1:15:21 I have, yes.
1:15:25 What I’m doing right now is what I always try to do, and this is especially true with
1:15:26 things that I feel strongly about.
1:15:28 I’m like, “What else could explain this?
1:15:31 What are some possible alternate explanations?”
1:15:35 Particularly when I’m delving into some of the very weird edges of things that I’ve
1:15:40 done over the last 15, 20 years with respect to psychedelic assist therapies and so on,
1:15:42 like some very, very strange reports come back.
1:15:44 How do you cross-examine those?
1:15:49 One tool, and the toolkit is simply to say, “Let me try to strongman against whatever
1:15:52 my current explanation is.”
1:16:00 In the case of the nuclear sites, it seems like there’s a disproportionate number of
1:16:04 reports and videos and so on associated with these military sites.
1:16:11 However, you could also look at the data for brain tumor diagnoses.
1:16:15 If you were to look at the graph of something like that, and I’m making up this example,
1:16:21 but I think it’s probably true, it would look like there’s an explosion of brain cancer
1:16:28 that among the human populace, brain cancer is just on this crazy parabolic rise.
1:16:31 It’s probably just because our diagnostic tools have become better.
1:16:35 Our imaging tools are catching things earlier, they’re more sophisticated.
1:16:40 Similarly, at these nuclear sites or especially military sites with nuclear components, what
1:16:41 do they have?
1:16:46 They have a million times the surveillance of any other place.
1:16:49 It’s possible these things are flying around in the Alaskan tundra, but there’s nothing
1:16:51 there to capture them.
1:16:54 I think it’s certainly possible those are areas of interest.
1:17:02 To me, that would seem to lend weight to explanations of, I don’t know why aliens would be interested
1:17:09 in that, time-traveling humans, maybe, state actors, like China, oh, for sure, they’d be
1:17:10 very interested.
1:17:19 Soviet Union, for sure, but some of the propulsion and aeronautic behaviors of these craft do
1:17:24 not seem to reflect technology that’s available to any current state actor, including the
1:17:29 United States, which raises all sorts of questions, but there’s some very strange stuff out there.
1:17:36 It is a very, very, very small single-digit percentage of the total reported or documented
1:17:37 phenomena, but yeah, it’s strange.
1:17:39 That was my conclusion.
1:17:43 If we could ever find a hotspot and we get a chance to go out there, that would be fun.
1:17:46 I just get a group of people go out there and just do like a little UFO, what do you
1:17:47 mean?
1:17:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:17:49 There’s a lot of UFOs showing up, you know?
1:17:53 There are some of these places that are supposed to be better for viewing UFOs.
1:17:54 Yeah.
1:17:56 That would be fun, just get ready for like a week.
1:18:02 When I was a kid, I remember driving, my mom, babesitter at the time, I think my brother
1:18:06 was a baby, and we were driving, I remember exactly where we were, I’m not going to name
1:18:10 it, but I remember the exact road, and this kind of like cigar-shaped thing, so I went
1:18:13 whoop, and then just shot off.
1:18:17 We all saw it, and I was just like, what the fuck was that?
1:18:19 No idea, but we all saw the same thing.
1:18:21 Yeah, so who knows?
1:18:26 There was a fair amount of military testing out there, so maybe who knows.
1:18:27 That’s crazy.
1:18:28 Go figure, that’s awesome.
1:18:29 All right.
1:18:30 So that’s the aliens.
1:18:31 That’s all you got.
1:18:32 Or pseudo-aliens.
1:18:33 All right, that’s all you got.
1:18:36 So I’ll talk about a couple of things which are not related to predictions.
1:18:37 Maybe I have some predictions.
1:18:39 Maybe we’ll come out organically.
1:18:40 So you’re talking about protein.
1:18:44 I’ll mention a few things that might be of interest to folks.
1:18:50 So while I’ve been here, I’ve been on the go, I’ll also talk about why I seem so chill,
1:18:54 which I think I can nail pretty easily to one thing.
1:18:58 So the first, and this is a company I’m super heavily involved with, but I mean I’m involved
1:19:00 with it because I believe in it a lot.
1:19:05 So you’ve seen these venison sticks, these Axis Deer venison sticks, Maui Nui venison.
1:19:10 It’s the most nutrient dense red meat that you can get, and the most ethically harvested
1:19:12 in my opinion, red meat that you can get.
1:19:15 What’s interesting about this one, this is a brand new product.
1:19:16 I’ve been consuming two or three of these today.
1:19:23 It’s basically a multivitamin in a meat product because it has, this is called Peppered 10,
1:19:32 and it’s got 10% liver and heart in addition to the muscle, and it is incredible how much
1:19:34 nutrient density you get from that.
1:19:38 And then the other one, which I don’t actually have any official relationship with whatsoever,
1:19:44 but shout out to also Peter Tia, who we both know, who’s the chief science officer.
1:19:45 But this is David.
1:19:52 So these David bars have incredible protein per calorie ratios, 28 grams of protein, 150
1:19:53 calories.
1:19:58 So when I am traveling, especially when I’m traveling, this is basically the kit.
1:19:59 Yeah.
1:20:00 I do the David bars too.
1:20:01 They’re good.
1:20:04 One of them was a little too sweet for me, but the blueberry one’s really good.
1:20:05 Yeah.
1:20:09 Some of them are a little too sweet for my palate, but also there is a point where I’m
1:20:15 like, I cannot eat another venison stick because I eat so many of those per week.
1:20:19 And we’re in Maui, meaning my team and I are in Maui right now, because we wanted to
1:20:27 visit Maui Newly because Jake Muse is one of the most impressive company leaders and
1:20:32 operators I’ve ever seen, including all of my startups in tech and otherwise.
1:20:40 He’s so good at talent development, he’s so good at culture, and it’s a great example
1:20:42 of doing good through a for-profit.
1:20:48 And I just think that type of model is important to highlight because there is a lot of good
1:20:50 you can do through sort of market-driven solutions.
1:20:56 And in this case, what Maui Newly Venison does, people don’t know, Axis Deer were introduced,
1:21:02 they’re originally from India to Hawaii by King Kamehameha, the third or fifth, I can’t
1:21:03 recall exactly.
1:21:09 They have no natural predators and now there are like tens of thousands of these deer ravaging
1:21:10 the landscape.
1:21:17 And so they’re destroying the ecology and that has all sorts of downstream effects literally
1:21:24 and metaphorically, including destroying coral reefs because they produce a lot of erosion.
1:21:27 And it’s really alarming, it looks like wildfire effectively.
1:21:33 So what Maui Newly does is they harvest these deer, meaning they shoot them in the field
1:21:38 at night for lowest stress levels for the animals.
1:21:46 And it’s incredibly well run, their sort of efficiency ratio is as good as, say, slaughterhouses
1:21:50 for cattle, which are very stressful for the animals, right?
1:21:54 They’re factory farmed, then they’re put into shoots, they’re literally held in place and
1:21:57 then boom, like bolt in the head.
1:21:59 This for my money is infinitely more ethical.
1:22:06 I mean, the animal is wild and free, living its life until the very instant that it instantaneously
1:22:09 expires, then they package that and they sell it.
1:22:14 But what they also do, best way to go, yeah, well, let’s just go out of a Maui Newly field
1:22:18 or like gold, like they’ll just put us on the field at some point when we can no longer
1:22:21 harness our spinal engine.
1:22:25 It’s like, well, it’s time to put Kevin out to pasture, just give him a donut and a couple
1:22:26 of beer.
1:22:32 I’m sitting at a table and I’m like, Tim, why did you bring me to Maui Newy?
1:22:33 It’s so nice here.
1:22:34 Yeah, no, no, no.
1:22:35 Maui Newy retirement on.
1:22:36 You’re going to love it.
1:22:37 Exactly.
1:22:41 So what I did hear this trip, which I’d always wanted to do, but I’ve never done is I went
1:22:42 on a holoai.
1:22:48 And a holoai harvest is for the community here in Maui.
1:22:54 So the holoai food sharing program that was created in April 2020 as a response to food
1:22:59 insecurity in Hawaii, which had a lot of food security issues, emergency level caused by
1:23:00 the COVID lockdowns.
1:23:05 And what the Maui Newy team did is they completely sort of revamped everything so they could
1:23:11 first just drive venison by the tons straight to the food bank to donate it for communities.
1:23:17 And then after the devastating wildfires last year, they completely restructured their operations.
1:23:21 And I mean, I got the email sent to all investors and they’re like, hey, look guys, we are like
1:23:27 shifting our focus completely to helping our communities, which need food like this is
1:23:32 a disaster level crisis and change their business model.
1:23:39 And they have shared more than 120,000 pounds of venison, meaning donated since the 2023
1:23:40 fires.
1:23:41 It’s amazing.
1:23:44 So there are a lot of partners and other people who have helped them along the way.
1:23:49 But what I did is, and my team had the option of participating and they all opted in was
1:23:51 to go on a night harvest.
1:23:54 So their operation is like a special operation, vampire hour outing.
1:24:00 I mean, you go out, they have flur infrared cameras and scopes, they have display monitors,
1:24:07 they’re capturing information, which is like a current stop, no shot, current stop shot.
1:24:12 And they have like laser identifications for the rovers where the people who then go and
1:24:14 like retrieve the deer.
1:24:17 And I went through the butchering process, I wanted to get better at butchering.
1:24:22 So it’s like, I actually butchered, I don’t know, six or seven deer on this trip.
1:24:23 That’s amazing.
1:24:26 And did you take some meat with you or no?
1:24:27 Oh, of course.
1:24:28 Yeah.
1:24:29 I mean, the vast majority of that’s going to be donated.
1:24:35 But some of it I’m going to keep for myself and send to family members and so on.
1:24:39 But it can be very visually arresting.
1:24:44 It can be confronting for someone who’s used to getting food from a conveniently wrapped
1:24:47 plastic packaging from Whole Foods.
1:24:58 But I find it so grounding in the sense that it makes you fully aware of what is involved
1:25:01 to put food on your table if you choose to eat meat.
1:25:03 And I feel very unconflicted about it.
1:25:04 I know there’s something.
1:25:05 I do too.
1:25:06 You feel conflicted.
1:25:07 I don’t.
1:25:10 It’s funny you mentioned that because it’s like, I get if you’re a vegetarian or vegan
1:25:13 out there and you’re like, I don’t see eye to eye with anything that is being said right
1:25:14 now.
1:25:15 That totally makes sense to me.
1:25:20 But if you’re going and having a burger and like, I don’t know for me, if I’m eating
1:25:26 a burger and I can’t put down the animal that I ate it from, like that there’s a big disconnect
1:25:27 there.
1:25:28 Like it wasn’t just a couple of generations ago.
1:25:29 We were doing that.
1:25:30 You know what I mean?
1:25:33 And like now it’s been completely stripped out of our culture.
1:25:35 And you know, I don’t have the same amount of hunting experience that you did.
1:25:36 I went hunting with my dad once.
1:25:41 But you know, when I was, I’ve certainly done a shit ton of fishing and you know, it’s
1:25:44 not the easiest thing to put down a big ass salmon either.
1:25:48 But like, you know, you think it’s for its life and you make use of everything you can,
1:25:50 you know, and it’s, and it’s amazing.
1:25:51 Totally.
1:25:57 And they use everything, which is also deeply inspiring and they use everything from these
1:26:03 animals and in their effectively restoring an ecosystem, right.
1:26:10 They are feeding the local community and they’re providing the most nutrient dense.
1:26:11 Yes.
1:26:15 And they’re bringing back traditions of things that like, this idea that there’s a lot of
1:26:19 chefs that are doing this now where they call it like nose to tail, which is like, it’s
1:26:23 not about just getting the prime cuts and throwing everything else away and being wasteful.
1:26:27 It’s like cooking all of the different aspects and using all the different aspects of the
1:26:31 animal for either consumption or for product use or whatever it may be.
1:26:33 There’s no waste there or very little, you know.
1:26:39 And part of the reason they can do this is because they are harvesting these deer from
1:26:40 private land.
1:26:46 So to be clear, the reason that you buy farmed animals for food in the United States, because
1:26:47 that’s what you have to do.
1:26:48 You cannot buy game meat.
1:26:54 That’s illegal because you don’t want people poaching on public land and then selling meat,
1:27:00 which can lead to over killing and all sorts of issues with wildlife management cause imbalancing.
1:27:05 So the operation is incredibly unique in that respect.
1:27:09 And there are actually, and I don’t think it matters to out them here, like there are
1:27:15 a lot of say, vegans or vegetarians, there are I know vegans, this is going to sound
1:27:21 like a contradiction in terms, but who object to a lot of the animal husbandry practices,
1:27:24 especially factory farming and so on in the U S. So they don’t eat meat based on those
1:27:27 ethical grounds and they make an exception for Maui Nui.
1:27:29 It’s the only meat that they consume.
1:27:31 So anyway, that was this trip.
1:27:36 So my team got to ride around in these ATVs and see the displays and really see the whole
1:27:37 process.
1:27:40 How does that not surprise me that every single one of your team, like if you work for Tim
1:27:44 Ferris and you’re like, you’re like, Hey, we’re going on a hunt tonight.
1:27:47 Like is there one person that’s going to be like, I don’t know, you’re like, you’re
1:27:48 fucking fired.
1:27:50 No, I wouldn’t fire them.
1:27:51 I wouldn’t fire them.
1:27:52 I mean, it’s I’m kidding.
1:27:53 I’m kidding.
1:27:54 Yeah.
1:27:58 You know, it’s quite a bit to take it.
1:28:02 But what I wanted to do, and this is actually not my idea, this is the suggestion of one
1:28:03 of my employees.
1:28:10 They wanted first hand experience with one of the companies or nonprofits that I support.
1:28:13 And initially we thought about doing something with Amazon Conservation Team because I’ve
1:28:18 done a lot of work with them in Columbia and Suriname and other places.
1:28:23 But that would have involved two weeks off the grid and would have been very complicated
1:28:25 from a logistics perspective.
1:28:27 Maybe they’re talking about your psychedelic donations.
1:28:28 What was this?
1:28:32 Maybe they’re talking about your psychedelic research that you’ve been doing that.
1:28:36 I don’t think I feel comfortable sending my employees to the 17th dimension just yet.
1:28:38 But who knows?
1:28:40 So that’s what I’ve been up to.
1:28:47 And then on the calming side, you’re like a two on your typically like a nice toasty
1:28:50 seven or eight simmering seven, very chill.
1:28:51 Yeah.
1:28:57 And so I’d say chill, certainly Hawaii helps, certainly good sleep helps, exercise helps.
1:28:58 But…
1:28:59 Value.
1:29:03 You’re like I did three value before I started the show.
1:29:05 I’ve got the like it’s on this shoulder.
1:29:07 I’ve got my morphine drip on the other.
1:29:08 Yeah, exactly.
1:29:09 Your morphine patch.
1:29:10 No, it’s not morphine.
1:29:11 It’s not morphine.
1:29:12 It’s meditating twice a day.
1:29:13 Amazing.
1:29:14 Yeah.
1:29:20 And I’ve been doing it for probably a month now and I started it in part as a response
1:29:27 to a disappointing result from a booster of accelerated TMS.
1:29:34 So we spoke several shows ago about accelerated TMS and how my five day bout, let’s just call
1:29:41 it, or treatment with accelerated TMS had the greatest durable impact on my generalized
1:29:42 anxiety that I’ve ever experienced.
1:29:44 This includes psychedelic assist therapies.
1:29:50 The accelerated TMS, which is a noninvasive treatment using transcranial magnetic stimulation
1:29:54 over a five day period in this case, where you’re getting treated basically eight minutes
1:29:57 every hour on the hour for 10 hours a day.
1:29:58 It’s very involved.
1:30:01 Like when you’re doing it, that’s all you’re doing for effectively a week.
1:30:03 And it was phenomenal.
1:30:09 And I will almost certainly do it again, but five days is a lot and I wanted to see if
1:30:10 I could do it with less.
1:30:14 So first I tried a two day booster, I might have been a single day booster and it was
1:30:15 not enough.
1:30:16 I did nothing.
1:30:21 I went back and this is going to California and I did a three day booster.
1:30:22 Also not enough.
1:30:29 So I just wasted a lot of time, a lot of money trying to round down and it didn’t do anything.
1:30:31 And I found that very disheartening.
1:30:35 It just means I need to go back and do the five days and figure out the right cadence,
1:30:40 but it’s very expensive to do this and it’s very time consuming.
1:30:46 So I then was looking at different meditation options and this has since become a company
1:30:52 that I’m very heavily involved with, but the way Henry Schuchman, your man, who you initially
1:31:00 introduced me to and I’ve introduced my employees to the way, which is an app and the sessions,
1:31:02 you can make them longer or shorter.
1:31:07 I set them at 10 minutes and I was very skeptical because I did TM, you know, Transcendental
1:31:10 Meditation back in the day, which is 20 minutes twice a day.
1:31:15 And I assumed at 10 minutes like, yeah, it’ll be kind of relaxing, but it’s really not going
1:31:16 to have much of a cumulative effect.
1:31:23 And I was completely wrong doing 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes either before dinner
1:31:25 or before bed, but making it like brushing your teeth.
1:31:26 It’s a non-negotiable.
1:31:27 Right.
1:31:28 It’s just a non-negotiable.
1:31:32 You just do it like you do anything else that is non-negotiable.
1:31:40 And doing those 10 minutes twice a day has been incredible because it has effectively
1:31:48 gotten me to, I think, a similar level of lower generalized anxiety that I got from
1:31:55 spending 30 to 50 grand to do this experimental TMS therapy, which that is all inclusive,
1:31:56 right?
1:32:01 So that’s like the treatment, the hotels, the flights, so on and so forth.
1:32:02 It adds up.
1:32:03 And you can do it for less.
1:32:06 That was with a MAG Ventures device, which I think is quite interesting.
1:32:10 Brainsway is another one that’s very interesting and worked well for a lot of other people.
1:32:11 It doesn’t have to be that expensive.
1:32:16 But for me, I was like, look, let me pay for like the white glove ultra high touch best
1:32:17 option.
1:32:23 And if that doesn’t work for me, I’m going to conclude that I cannot recommend this
1:32:27 therapeutic intervention because this is as good as it gets.
1:32:33 And the idea that you can meditate 10 minutes a day with an app and people can check it
1:32:34 out.
1:32:36 Thewayapp.com is the app.
1:32:41 Henry Shookman has the most relaxing voice you’ll ever hear in your life.
1:32:47 And I think the app gives you 30 sessions for free so you can get a real flavor for
1:32:48 it.
1:32:49 It’s not like, oh, you get two chances.
1:32:52 And at least when I used it the first time, I didn’t have to use my credit card.
1:32:57 And by the way, even though I’m an investor, because I product test everything and love
1:33:02 giving feedback, as Kevin has seen, I’ve sent like a million looms to co-founders as
1:33:03 product feedback.
1:33:07 And I was like, no, I want to pay for it because if there’s a glitch in the system, I want
1:33:10 to know what the glitch is and I want to report it.
1:33:13 So I paid for it and you get 30.
1:33:16 So that’s either if you’re doing 10 minutes a day, that’s 30 days.
1:33:17 If you’re doing two a day, that’s two weeks.
1:33:21 It’s plenty of time to either notice or not notice in effect.
1:33:24 But what else would you say about about Henry?
1:33:29 I will say that what is a challenging thing that I’ll always navigate on the investment
1:33:33 stuff, although I love my new as well, I just ordered the sticks, the 10 sticks, it was
1:33:34 gonna be good.
1:33:35 They’re so good.
1:33:38 I’m not an investor there, but I do love their product is like the one thing that you won’t
1:33:42 see that I’ll tell you the behind the scenes is like, Tim, I was hitting you up and I was
1:33:46 like, oh dude, you know, you invested, but you hadn’t really given it a full deep dive
1:33:47 run.
1:33:48 Right.
1:33:51 And you were like, oh man, I don’t know, like I really have to like to your defense and
1:33:52 your credit.
1:33:56 And this shows you kind of like the behind the scenes of why Tim, I respect you so much
1:34:02 is like, you didn’t want to ever really kind of talk about this or really like overly
1:34:07 endorse it until you had really put it through your own personal rate or deep dive.
1:34:08 Yeah.
1:34:11 And then the first thing is I get on the phone call with the team because we do investor
1:34:15 updates with them or I do investor updates with them because I let their round every month.
1:34:20 And they’re like, yeah, Tim sent us like another 10 looms, like he’s got all his feedback.
1:34:23 He’s got all his feedback and he’s like, and they were quick to implement that stuff.
1:34:30 And they have been one of the fastest teams to update product, which is not to say they
1:34:32 have to take all my feedback or suggestions.
1:34:33 They certainly don’t.
1:34:40 It’s their product, but they have been so fast at fine tuning the product.
1:34:42 I’ve been really impressed.
1:34:43 Yeah.
1:34:44 Well, they’ve loved the feedback.
1:34:46 It’s all been super valid stuff.
1:34:48 So that’s, that’s awesome.
1:34:51 But anyway, what I would say about it is like, you know, I started studying with Henry during
1:34:55 before he had an app during the pandemic and, you know, this is what really got me into
1:34:56 Zen.
1:35:02 And I think one of the things that meditation struggles from is this race towards the bottom
1:35:07 in that there’s been a commercialization of meditation that says, Hey, do the two minute
1:35:11 meditation know the one minute meditation know the like, how can I just like productize
1:35:13 meditation and sell meditation?
1:35:18 And like, this is like a real Zen master teaching course that it’s for people that really you
1:35:23 may have tried calmer headspace, but you want to go deep, deep and really go for something
1:35:24 much bigger here.
1:35:32 That to me is the exciting promise of this app because it’s not just a hired pretty voice
1:35:33 on the thing.
1:35:38 It’s like an actual Zen master teaching you and it comes through in the knowledge transfer.
1:35:43 It’s just you can feel it, you know, and it’s also it’s skill development, right?
1:35:50 It’s not pleasant story de jure, where you’re just jumping around listening to different
1:35:52 things, which could be soothing.
1:35:53 Maybe it worked for some people.
1:35:58 It’s never really worked for me, particularly well, if I approach it that way.
1:36:07 This is skill development in a logical progression, which you notice like you recognize it, you
1:36:12 will recognize as you go through and maybe you’re going through a particular retreat that
1:36:17 is themed on hindrances, for instance, and then you’re doing a sit where you’re focusing
1:36:21 on a version and you can label it.
1:36:24 And then, for instance, I went out to dinner two nights later.
1:36:29 This was table of ladies who’d had a few too many drinks and they were cackling like fucking
1:36:30 crazy.
1:36:35 And normally I would just I would sit there just seething, right?
1:36:38 And then I’m not proud of saying this, but I would just be like, God damn it.
1:36:41 Like, you know, I’d want to exact some vigilante justice.
1:36:45 I’d be like, well, if nobody’s going to talk to her, like, how are they going to learn?
1:36:46 And like, nobody else is going to go over there.
1:36:51 So I have a moral obligation like be like, hey, ladies, and then if they’re like, hey,
1:36:55 pal, fuck yourself, then I’m going to be like all spun out and dysregulated sitting down
1:36:59 to like eat my cheesecake, like trembling and fury.
1:37:03 So I was like, oh, and it popped up and as soon as it popped up, I was like aversion.
1:37:05 You’re experiencing aversion.
1:37:10 And I used exactly the skill that I had practiced two days before in the meditation, and I was
1:37:14 like, boom, and it defuse the whole thing.
1:37:16 And that’s what you want.
1:37:20 Like you’re not meditating in an app just to feel good while you’re using the app.
1:37:22 How can you bring into everyday life?
1:37:26 And what I also like about it is it doesn’t let you skip.
1:37:30 You have to follow the program for good reason.
1:37:36 You don’t get to skip around indulging your whim and impatience.
1:37:37 You have to follow through.
1:37:43 So if you try to skip ahead, it’s like, hey, buddy, yeah, glad you’re excited, but sorry,
1:37:46 you’re not allowed to skip around because this program does X, Y, and Z.
1:37:48 So enjoy.
1:37:49 It’s good stuff.
1:37:51 It’s perfect time to use New Year’s, like get a New Year’s resolution.
1:37:54 This is like going to be, this is going to be a big one for me.
1:37:57 You know, it’s funny because I’m looking at the number of retreats because I’ve done
1:38:00 quite a few now and I’m like, oh, God, I don’t want this to end.
1:38:03 Like what am I going to do when, when I’m like through the entire program, I’m like
1:38:06 going to run out of Henry, but I have so much left.
1:38:07 That’s great.
1:38:08 Also, you’re going to come with me to a seven day retreat.
1:38:11 We got to make the happen this year, like an in-person one.
1:38:12 Yeah, I’m game.
1:38:13 We’ll do a five day one.
1:38:17 Look, I’m open to it as long as you don’t eat them mushrooms before you go.
1:38:18 Yeah.
1:38:22 Fast for six days and eat microdose while I’m doing it from probably overkill.
1:38:24 You probably have some PTSD from that one.
1:38:28 Oh, it was not a wise set of decisions.
1:38:30 There were, there were bad decisions were made on my part.
1:38:32 I’d be game to talk about that.
1:38:34 So let’s talk about actually New Year’s resolutions for a second.
1:38:35 Yeah.
1:38:36 This ties in.
1:38:40 I actually just did my past year review, which I do every year, I go through my calendar
1:38:41 kind of week by week.
1:38:42 I did that today.
1:38:48 I also looked forward to the next year and what I’ve already been doing over the last
1:38:51 month or two, and I’d encourage people to think about this.
1:38:55 I can, instead of thinking about New Year’s resolutions, think about New Year’s reservations.
1:38:56 New Year’s reservations.
1:38:57 What does that mean?
1:38:59 It means what are you putting in your calendar?
1:39:01 If it’s not in your calendar, it’s not real.
1:39:02 Right?
1:39:03 It’s like, okay.
1:39:06 I’m going to translate to this and this and this.
1:39:10 Hire a trainer or book a program or buy a membership.
1:39:12 Get time in your calendar.
1:39:13 Right?
1:39:14 So what are your New Year’s reservations?
1:39:20 And for me, the core of that is extended periods of time with close friends.
1:39:28 Those people who I know are going to give me energy or going to leave me feeling better
1:39:33 about my life and the world and optimistic.
1:39:35 Those are the relationships I want to invest in.
1:39:39 So I go through the year and, for instance, January, February, it’s like I’ve rented a
1:39:43 house and it’s stupidly expensive for me.
1:39:47 But I put together a Google spreadsheet and I’m inviting friends to come join.
1:39:48 I’ll see you late January.
1:39:50 I don’t know if you saw it on our list.
1:39:51 Yeah.
1:39:52 I’m going to buy some skis too.
1:39:53 I’m going to do some skiing.
1:39:54 Awesome.
1:39:55 Yeah.
1:39:56 It’s going to be fantastic.
1:39:58 And I’ll give you another example, and you’re invited.
1:40:00 I haven’t actually talked to anybody about this.
1:40:09 I did it on the slide, but next August I booked a week in the Rockies for Alpine survivalist
1:40:12 training with this amazing outdoorsman.
1:40:15 And I’m going to invite, you know, five to seven guys.
1:40:17 Dude, that sounds amazing.
1:40:18 Yeah.
1:40:20 So if you’re interested, I can tell you more about that.
1:40:21 It’s going to be incredible.
1:40:22 Yeah.
1:40:23 That sounds fantastic.
1:40:25 I pay a lot of attention to the details for this type of thing.
1:40:28 I’ve always loved that shit, you know, like with the Eagle Scout and being a Boy Scout.
1:40:32 Like I want to dig little tunnels that I can like sleep in and shit and the fucking ice
1:40:33 and shit.
1:40:34 Like I’m totally down.
1:40:37 So we’ll have adventures like that, and it doesn’t have to be a week long.
1:40:38 It could be a long weekend, right?
1:40:39 It could be.
1:40:40 Yeah.
1:40:44 Every year, some of my closest friends come and it depends on the cast of characters.
1:40:48 Like it’s not always the same people every year, but for like an annual reunion in the
1:40:50 summer of old friends.
1:40:54 And in this case, because I do get questions about this sometimes like, well, why isn’t
1:40:55 it a mixed group?
1:41:00 It’s not a mixed gender group because unfortunately in modern society, especially on the coasts
1:41:04 where people tend to get highfalutin and fancy and brainwash themselves into all sorts of
1:41:10 unproductive things, that there are very few socially acceptable male only activities or
1:41:15 groups and they’re just not many options outside of perhaps certain sports environments.
1:41:21 So since that is a rarity, people are by default going to be in mixed groups.
1:41:27 And I think women generally do a very good job and it’s socially acceptable to have female
1:41:30 only activities and groups and so on.
1:41:32 But a lot of men don’t have that.
1:41:35 Most of my friends don’t have that.
1:41:41 And that type of experience becomes less and less common as they get married and have kids
1:41:42 and so on.
1:41:46 So for me, I feel like the gift I can give is blocking out a few options for people over
1:41:51 the year.
1:41:54 Take them away from their wives for a week, you know what I’m saying?
1:41:55 Yeah.
1:41:56 It’s a gift you’re given.
1:41:57 Yeah, really good.
1:41:58 Really get some time.
1:41:59 And the kids and little break.
1:42:00 Yeah, yeah.
1:42:03 And then also it’s like, I think a lot of men in my experience, it’s like they don’t bond
1:42:06 necessarily and I know I’m painting with a broad brush and there are always exceptions
1:42:07 and so on.
1:42:10 But it’s like they don’t bond in the same way that women do in the sense that a lot
1:42:15 of guys just want to not talk and do shit together, right?
1:42:17 And there just aren’t many options for doing that.
1:42:22 And the beauty of saying setting this up and having reservations and it doesn’t only apply
1:42:23 to men, it applies to women too.
1:42:28 Like if you don’t cultivate and nourish those friendships, they will actually, they will
1:42:29 go away.
1:42:30 Yeah.
1:42:31 It’s interesting.
1:42:34 I have to convince my wife, Daria, to like do these social things with women because
1:42:36 it’s not your DNA to do that.
1:42:37 Yeah.
1:42:39 And so like tonight I was like, I’m going to record podcast, she’s like, okay, I’m going
1:42:40 out with my girlfriend.
1:42:41 I’m like, awesome.
1:42:42 Go do that.
1:42:43 Take some time.
1:42:44 Have a moment.
1:42:45 I’m going to massage.
1:42:48 Like, whatever you got to do, like to prep for the holidays, like you deserve it.
1:42:51 And it’s so important to have those breaks.
1:42:52 It’s important to have the breaks.
1:42:56 And I mean, this idea that, I can’t remember where I read this recently, but I was reading
1:43:02 a piece, this idea that you’re going to spend 24/7 together with your partner is a very
1:43:08 new idea, relatively speaking, and get everything and anything from your partner unreasonable.
1:43:09 That’s not going to work.
1:43:10 Yeah.
1:43:11 They’re everything.
1:43:15 You’re your best, your partner, your best person, you’re like, and he’s like, that doesn’t
1:43:16 work.
1:43:17 Yeah.
1:43:18 So I have a number of these blocked out for the year.
1:43:22 I try to have probably like four or five and they’re not all a week long and they’re
1:43:24 not all dedicated time.
1:43:29 For instance, like with the skiing, it’s like people are bringing their wives, people are
1:43:30 bringing their kids.
1:43:35 It’s like that’s a family or a couple adventure.
1:43:37 And then there are a few that are boys only.
1:43:42 So the New Year’s reservations is something I’ve done this now for at least five years,
1:43:45 maybe longer where it’s like, I’m blocking these things out.
1:43:46 They’re in the calendar.
1:43:47 They will not get crowded out by other things.
1:43:49 So that’s a big one for me.
1:43:50 That’s great.
1:43:57 And then other news, finished my knob num, which is no booze, no masturbating 30 day challenge,
1:44:00 which a lot of my readers and fans joined me on.
1:44:02 I also did no coffee.
1:44:05 So I was allowed to have tea, but I didn’t do coffee.
1:44:08 And it was a fantastic reset.
1:44:13 And in the last week, I’m not to get too TMI, but it’s like, okay, all of those things
1:44:14 have been reintroduced.
1:44:16 And I’m like, yeah, use one to town.
1:44:24 I really liked the cleansing of the dopamine palette and these can be addictive behaviors,
1:44:25 right?
1:44:26 All of them.
1:44:29 So I think there’s a very good chance that I’m going to be, I have to think about it a
1:44:33 little bit just because so many people will be visiting, but very, very either completely
1:44:35 dry for January.
1:44:40 Oh, you’re like, so many people are visiting, I just couldn’t have to like masturbate and
1:44:41 living.
1:44:44 I guess so many friends coming over.
1:44:47 Just gotta go down.
1:44:50 What kind of party is this?
1:44:51 I didn’t get the memo.
1:44:52 Yeah.
1:44:56 Tim’s back on, like just give him a few minutes like, you understand, he’s been depriving himself
1:44:58 like Tim ever is not in his bathroom.
1:44:59 Exactly.
1:45:00 Yeah.
1:45:02 So no, that’s the alcohol side.
1:45:08 So yeah, all that stuff, I think I might continue all of that for January, we’ll see.
1:45:11 But it really was a fantastic reset.
1:45:15 And I think it contributed to the lowered anxiety and kind of how chill I am right now.
1:45:16 Frankly.
1:45:17 Yeah.
1:45:20 And there was an interview, I think Peter Teeter did with a psychiatrist, female psychiatrist
1:45:25 who was saying when somebody comes in and say they’re a heavy cannabis user and they
1:45:29 use it for like a reducing anxiety and chronic pain or whatever.
1:45:32 Actually, in this case, it wouldn’t be chronic pain, it would be they’re using it for what
1:45:35 they believe to be reducing anxiety.
1:45:40 But they’ve developed this sort of hedonic adaptation to the cannabis consumption that
1:45:45 before she’ll prescribe other medications, before she’ll work on the talk therapy, she’ll
1:45:49 try to get them to abstain from say cannabis use for two to four weeks.
1:45:54 And lo and behold, in many cases, anxiety drops to the floor just by that intervention.
1:46:01 And that was partially what inspired me to do the 30 days of abstinence from these things
1:46:05 is to see, okay, what does it look like to reset the system?
1:46:06 And it’s great.
1:46:08 Nothing against those things in moderation.
1:46:13 But like, I think, for instance, with me and coffee, it’s like, if I’m allowed to unrestrain
1:46:18 to consume as much coffee as I want, I will consume a lot of coffee.
1:46:20 And it’s easy for me to over consume.
1:46:24 So I do occasionally, I mean, look, I’ve been loving my cold brew.
1:46:28 So maybe I’ll just limit it to one cup of coffee in the morning, which I can actually
1:46:32 do if I’m getting out of the house and getting on the mountain for a few hours, rather than
1:46:36 sitting at a coffee shop where it’s like, there’s a fixation with beverages and it’s
1:46:40 like, yeah, or if you’re in a restaurant, they just like a diner, they keep pouring
1:46:43 coffee, like, and before you know it, you’ve had five cups.
1:46:46 So anyway, some of the things on my mind, what else you got, Kevin, anything else you’d
1:46:47 like to add?
1:46:49 I’m in the same boat as you with the alcohol stuff.
1:46:53 It’s so funny how the last few years, if you go back, it’s been like, well, I’m going
1:46:56 to do X number of days and there’s been like this hard and fast rule and it was like, don’t
1:46:57 break it.
1:46:59 Just force yourself through it.
1:47:02 And it’s like one of the things I realized in the last few weeks, especially the holiday
1:47:08 parties and things that I’ve had, I’m like, I just have to understand there are going
1:47:11 to be moments when you go out and you have a couple drinks with friends.
1:47:18 But it has to be an occasion, not just a night at home where you’re like, oh, let’s pop a
1:47:20 bottle of wine and have some alcohol.
1:47:26 I would much rather it be about a special moment with a friend enjoying a good meal than
1:47:34 have it be just this constant thing that just makes you not hungover but just not your best
1:47:36 version of yourself.
1:47:41 Like you said about the anxiety stuff, a lot of that, you don’t even realize it because
1:47:47 you think that substance is actually reducing anxiety, but in reality, if it’s too many
1:47:53 times in a month, it’s depleting of all kinds of nutrients and B vitamins and it adds to
1:47:56 actually more anxiety by just partaking in it.
1:47:58 So it’s like this horrible thing.
1:47:59 It also fucks up your sleep, right?
1:48:02 So I mean, the big one is like, yeah, it’s going to reduce your anxiety for two to three
1:48:06 hours and then you’re going to feel like dog shit for 12.
1:48:11 And some people handle it better than others, but what I’ve found also is that by doubling
1:48:17 down on exercise, like exercise is the lead domino that tips over all of these other habits
1:48:18 more easily.
1:48:25 What I mean by that is, if I know I have a half day ski lesson that starts at 8 30 or
1:48:30 8 AM depends on the snowfall and then I have more training later that night.
1:48:33 If I have had two or three drinks tonight before, I’m going to be punished, right?
1:48:41 There are consequences and maybe it’s not feeling terrible, but my performance is terrible
1:48:42 and I hate losing.
1:48:43 I hate not improving.
1:48:47 I love improving and it’s a corrective mechanism.
1:48:54 If I don’t have that in place, I’m just sitting in front of a laptop and maybe the performance
1:48:55 drop isn’t as noticeable.
1:48:57 It’s not as obvious.
1:49:03 Then it’s harder for me to hold myself to that line, perhaps, but the more movement,
1:49:07 more exercise, the more everything else falls in line in my experience.
1:49:08 Agreed.
1:49:09 Yeah.
1:49:10 All right, man.
1:49:11 Well, I’m excited for 2025.
1:49:12 I got all sorts of great shit coming.
1:49:13 I’m super stoked.
1:49:14 And we’re going to hang, I’m presuming it’s South by.
1:49:15 Oh, yeah.
1:49:16 We’ll see you in January.
1:49:17 Of course.
1:49:18 Yeah.
1:49:21 And then we’re going to see each other in Jan and then got a lot of fun stuff coming
1:49:22 for South by.
1:49:26 Yeah, we’ll have to let people in on that at a later date in terms of when to come hang
1:49:27 with us.
1:49:29 But yeah, we’re going to do a little, we’ll do something.
1:49:32 We’ll do something on stage and something fun around that time.
1:49:36 Keep your eyes and ears peeled for news at some point in the near future, which should
1:49:37 be very exciting.
1:49:38 Sounds good.
1:49:40 Good to see you, buddy.
1:49:41 Yeah.
1:49:42 Happy New Year and happy holidays.
1:49:43 Give your family the best.
1:49:44 Yeah.
1:49:45 Same to you, man.
1:49:51 Happy New Years and for everybody listening, we’ll put links to stuff we mentioned in the
1:49:56 show notes, tim.log/podcast, and we’ll put everything in there.
1:50:02 And I’ll give one more rec, which is I’m totally unaffiliated with this.
1:50:08 But in addition to the way I’ve been listening to a recording, which was actually sent to
1:50:12 me by a friend who took the audio tapes and converted it into empty three, but there’s
1:50:14 an easier option because I found it on audible.
1:50:19 It’s called The Present Moment, a retreat on the practice of mindfulness by Thich Nhat
1:50:20 Hanh.
1:50:26 So Thich Nhat Hanh, I’ve been a fan of forever and his books had a huge impact on me.
1:50:28 But I’d never heard his voice.
1:50:29 I’d never heard his voice.
1:50:36 And this is a recorded retreat with guided meditations and so on from Thich Nhat Hanh.
1:50:39 And it is quite mesmerizing.
1:50:44 And I mean, he’s got the accent, which gives it the necessary level of exotic gravitas,
1:50:45 which always helps.
1:50:51 But I will say that the way sort of greased the groove for me to be more open to this.
1:50:55 And when I’ve just been laying in the bath after doing a bunch of activities after my
1:51:01 night armist or whatever, and I’m really sore, I will listen to these chapters from
1:51:02 The Present Moment.
1:51:04 Let me give one book recommendation as well.
1:51:09 I’m not affiliated with Fireaway by Bruce Grayson, MD.
1:51:10 It’s called After.
1:51:11 Have you heard of After?
1:51:14 I have, because I had Bruce Grayson on the podcast.
1:51:15 No way.
1:51:16 Yeah.
1:51:17 Yeah.
1:51:18 Holy shit, I got to go listen to that.
1:51:19 Was it good?
1:51:20 It was outstanding.
1:51:21 Yeah, he was really good.
1:51:22 From University of Virginia.
1:51:23 Yeah.
1:51:28 So essentially this book, the subtitle is, “A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences
1:51:30 Reveal About Life and Beyond.”
1:51:35 I am like halfway through it, and I just like, I can’t put it down, like it’s so good.
1:51:40 After/Dr. Grayson is a very credible researcher.
1:51:44 This guy is not like hand wavy woo woo guy in beads, no offense to beads, but you get
1:51:45 the idea.
1:51:50 He’s not like the archetype of some guy who’s got like a heavy dose of conspirituality and
1:51:52 can’t really sort fact from fiction.
1:51:57 This is a very credible researcher, and he is fascinating.
1:52:01 And I debated having him on the podcast or not for quite a long time, and then I realized,
1:52:02 what am I so afraid of?
1:52:12 I actually feel quite good about his documentation, the research he’s put out, and his observations
1:52:18 don’t ring as wildly speculative, and these are documented phenomena.
1:52:20 People have these experiences.
1:52:24 So let’s take a closer look at near-death experiences.
1:52:28 And I’m really glad I did it, really glad I did it, but I was hemming and hawing for
1:52:30 probably a year or two.
1:52:38 I was worried that it would open the door to criticism of not being sufficiently skeptical
1:52:43 or critically minded with guests, but he delivered what I hoped he would deliver, which is a
1:52:53 very sober, fascinating account of a well-reported phenomena that is poorly understood that he
1:52:59 has researched for several decades now at this point, which he became interested in quite
1:53:01 accidentally and reluctantly.
1:53:06 Oh my God, the story about how he became interested in it and what happened to him is just wild.
1:53:07 It’s bananas.
1:53:10 I won’t ruin it, but people check out the book or when the podcast came out a couple
1:53:11 years ago.
1:53:13 No, podcast came out like a few months ago.
1:53:14 Oh, geez.
1:53:15 I gotta check it.
1:53:16 Awesome.
1:53:17 Yeah, yeah.
1:53:18 It’s amazing.
1:53:19 That’s fun.
1:53:21 I’ll link to the Dr. Grayson episode as well for folks after.
1:53:23 Didn’t Daria also read that?
1:53:24 Yeah, that’s how I had it.
1:53:25 It was in my Audible library.
1:53:28 She said, “You gotta read this,” and then when you share an Audible library, you just
1:53:30 see what your partner’s buying.
1:53:31 Yeah, cool.
1:53:34 And so I just downloaded it, and yeah, it’s been awesome.
1:53:35 Dig it.
1:53:36 Awesome, brother.
1:53:38 Well, lovely to see you.
1:53:42 As always, give a hug to Dardar and the kiddos and Toasty for me.
1:53:43 We’ll do.
1:53:47 Please pet Molly for me and tell your parents I said hello.
1:53:48 I will.
1:53:49 And happy holidays, brother.
1:53:50 Love you.
1:53:51 And I’ll see you in Jan.
1:53:52 Yeah, love you too, buddy.
1:53:53 I’ll see you in January.
1:53:54 Happy holidays.
1:53:55 Happy holidays.
1:53:56 Hey, guys.
1:53:57 This is Tim again.
1:54:01 I have one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.
1:54:05 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
1:54:07 before the weekend?
1:54:10 Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super
1:54:13 short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:54:15 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
1:54:20 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve
1:54:24 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
1:54:26 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:54:32 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
1:54:36 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
1:54:42 of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field.
1:54:45 And then I test them and then I share them with you.
1:54:50 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you
1:54:52 head off for the weekend, something to think about.
1:55:00 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday,
1:55:02 drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
1:55:05 Thanks for listening.
1:55:09 The following quote is from one of the most legendary entrepreneurs and investors in
1:55:12 Silicon Valley, and here it goes.
1:55:18 This team executes at a level you rarely see even among the best technology companies.
1:55:21 That is from Peter Thiel about today’s sponsor, Ramp.
1:55:25 I’ve been hearing about these guys everywhere and there are good reasons for it.
1:55:30 Ramp is corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and
1:55:32 put money back in your pocket.
1:55:34 In fact, they’re already doing that across the board.
1:55:40 Ramp has already saved more than 25,000 customers, including other podcast sponsors like Shopify
1:55:45 and Aidsleep, more than 10 million hours and more than $1 billion through better financial
1:55:47 management of their corporate spending.
1:55:51 With Ramp you’re able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and
1:55:57 automate expense reporting, allowing you to close your books eight times faster on average.
1:56:01 Your employees will no longer spend hours upon hours submitting expense reports.
1:56:06 I mean, within companies, fast growing startups or otherwise, a lot of employees spend half
1:56:09 their time, it seems, trying to get all this stuff together.
1:56:10 No more.
1:56:11 Ramp saves you time and money.
1:56:16 You can get started, issue virtual and physical cards, and start making payments in less than
1:56:22 15 minutes, whether you have five employees or 5,000 employees, they’ve streamlined everything.
1:56:27 And businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% in the first year.
1:56:30 And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.
1:56:33 Just go to ramp.com/timp.
1:56:39 All spelled out, that’s ramp.com/timp, R-A-M-P.com/timp.
1:56:43 Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.
1:56:49 In the last handful of years, I’ve become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding
1:56:55 microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place.
1:56:58 One place I looked is in the kitchen.
1:57:02 Many people don’t realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be.
1:57:06 A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals
1:57:13 P-FAS, in other words, P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends
1:57:14 up in your body.
1:57:15 Teflon is a prime example of this.
1:57:20 It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using.
1:57:25 So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor, and the first thing I did was look
1:57:30 at the reviews of their products and said, “Send me one.”
1:57:33 And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
1:57:37 And the claim is that it’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating.
1:57:41 So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that will last forever.
1:57:42 I was very skeptical.
1:57:43 I was very busy.
1:57:44 So I said, “You know what?
1:57:46 I want to test this thing quickly.
1:57:47 It’s supposed to be nonstick.
1:57:48 It’s supposed to be durable.
1:57:49 I’m going to test it with two things.
1:57:55 I’m going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster
1:57:59 in anything that isn’t nonstick with the toxic coating.
1:58:03 And then I’m going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains
1:58:04 heat.”
1:58:12 And it worked perfectly in both cases, and I was frankly astonished how well it worked.
1:58:16 The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.
1:58:21 It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine.
1:58:23 And the design is really clever.
1:58:29 It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product.
1:58:32 It’s tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy duty scrubbing.
1:58:34 You can scrub the hell out of it.
1:58:39 You can use metal utensils, which is great, without losing any of its nonstick properties.
1:58:41 So stop cooking with toxic pans.
1:58:44 If they’re nonstick and you don’t know, they probably contain something bad.
1:58:47 Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
1:58:50 While you’re at it, you can look at their other high-performance offerings that are
1:58:55 toxin-free, like the Wonder of an Air Fryer, their Griddle Pan, and their Precision Engineer
1:58:56 German Steel Knives.
1:58:59 And right now, our place is having their holiday sale.
1:59:04 So you can save between 10% and 37% on your order now through January 12th.
1:59:08 The Titanium Always Pan Pro is at 30% off right now.
1:59:10 I use that thing all the time.
1:59:16 So head to fromourplace.com/tim to see why more than a million people have made the
1:59:18 switch to our place.
1:59:22 With their 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can shop with total
1:59:24 confidence.
1:59:29 With the Our Place Holiday Sale right now, check it out fromourplace.com/tim.
1:59:33 [MUSIC PLAYING]
1:59:43 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:11 microplastics, and many other commonly found compounds all over the place.
0:00:13 One place I looked is in the kitchen.
0:00:18 Many people don’t realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be.
0:00:23 A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals,
0:00:28 PFAS, in other words, spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that
0:00:30 ends up in your body.
0:00:31 Teflon is a prime example of this.
0:00:35 It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using.
0:00:41 So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor, and the first thing I did was look
0:00:45 at the reviews of their products and said, “Send me one.”
0:00:48 And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
0:00:53 And the claim is that it’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating, so that means zero
0:00:56 forever chemicals and durability that will last forever.
0:00:58 I was very skeptical.
0:00:59 I was very busy.
0:01:00 So I said, “You know what?
0:01:01 I want to test this thing quickly.
0:01:03 It’s supposed to be nonstick.
0:01:04 It’s supposed to be durable.
0:01:05 I’m going to test it with two things.
0:01:10 I’m going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster
0:01:15 in anything that isn’t nonstick with the toxic coating.
0:01:18 And then I’m going to test it with a steak sear, because I want to see how much it retains
0:01:20 heat.
0:01:27 And it worked perfectly in both cases, and I was frankly astonished how well it worked.
0:01:31 The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.
0:01:37 It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine.
0:01:39 And the design is really clever.
0:01:44 It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product.
0:01:48 It’s tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy duty scrubbing.
0:01:50 You can scrub the hell out of it.
0:01:54 You can use metal utensils, which is great, without losing any of its nonstick properties.
0:01:56 So stop cooking with toxic pans.
0:02:00 If they’re nonstick and you don’t know, they probably contain something bad.
0:02:03 Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
0:02:05 While you’re at it, you can look at their other high-performance offerings that are
0:02:10 toxin-free, like the Wonder of an Air Fryer, their Griddle Pan, and their Precision-Engineered
0:02:12 German Steel Knives.
0:02:15 And right now, our place is having their holiday sales.
0:02:20 So you can save between 10% and 37% on your order now through January 12th.
0:02:24 The Titanium Always Pan Pro is at 30% off right now.
0:02:26 I use that thing all the time.
0:02:32 So head to fromourplace.com/tim to see why more than a million people have made the
0:02:33 switch to our place.
0:02:38 And with their 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can shop with
0:02:39 total confidence.
0:02:42 Shop the Our Place Holiday Sale right now.
0:02:46 Check it out fromourplace.com/tim.
0:02:51 The following quote is from one of the most legendary entrepreneurs and investors in
0:02:53 Silicon Valley, and here it goes.
0:03:00 This team executes at a level you rarely see, even among the best technology companies.
0:03:03 That is from Peter Thiel about today’s sponsor, Ramp.
0:03:07 I’ve been hearing about these guys everywhere, and there are good reasons for it.
0:03:12 Ramp is corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and
0:03:14 put money back in your pocket.
0:03:16 In fact, they’re already doing that across the board.
0:03:21 Ramp has already saved more than 25,000 customers, including other podcast sponsors like Shopify
0:03:27 and 8Sleep, more than 10 million hours and more than $1 billion through better financial
0:03:29 management of their corporate spending.
0:03:33 With Ramp, you’re able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions
0:03:39 and automate expense reporting, allowing you to close your books 8 times faster on average.
0:03:43 Your employees will no longer spend hours upon hours submitting expense reports.
0:03:48 I mean, within companies, fast-growing startups, or otherwise, a lot of employees spend half
0:03:50 their time, it seems, trying to get all this stuff together.
0:03:51 No more.
0:03:53 Ramp saves you time and money.
0:03:58 You can get started, issue virtual and physical cards, and start making payments in less
0:04:02 than 15 minutes, whether you have five employees or 5,000 employees.
0:04:05 They’ve streamlined everything.
0:04:09 Businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% in the first year.
0:04:12 Now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.
0:04:21 Let’s go to ramp.com/tim.
0:04:51 cards issued by SuddenBank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.
0:05:21 to the Ramp.com/tim.com/tim.
0:05:22 I am chill right now.
0:05:27 I’m feeling very good, and there are a bunch of reasons for that that I could talk about.
0:05:28 We’ll get to that.
0:05:32 But there are some contributing elements that you’re actually very familiar with, so we’ll
0:05:33 come back to that.
0:05:38 But I’ve had more comments in the last week or two from close friends of mine, people that
0:05:40 know me, were like, “You seem really chill.
0:05:42 You seem very grounded right now.”
0:05:46 And I’m like, “Yeah, I feel very chill and very grounded right now.”
0:05:49 And there’s still a lot going on.
0:05:51 It’s not for the absence of things going on.
0:05:59 It’s actually somewhat amazing that given how many projects are in process right now,
0:06:02 I’m getting those comments, which makes me feel like I must be doing something, right?
0:06:06 Or I’m just lucky because who knows, I’m sleeping well in Hawaii.
0:06:12 Could be that set the AC to negative 500 degrees, which I had to override every system in the
0:06:13 hotel to do.
0:06:14 Yeah.
0:06:15 They have those things on lockdown.
0:06:19 They open the door, it shuts the AC off, it’s like, that’s the whole thing.
0:06:20 Yeah.
0:06:23 70 degrees would be dangerously cold, so it’s sometimes hard to get the AC low.
0:06:25 But let’s hop into it, man.
0:06:26 We have a lot to talk about.
0:06:27 Where should we begin?
0:06:31 Oh, man, let’s start off with, when I think about these year-end specials, we’ve done
0:06:32 a few of these.
0:06:33 Yeah.
0:06:37 And we typically do a little bit of like, “What are you doing in the new year?
0:06:39 You know, like, what do you get to change this year?”
0:06:41 And it’s the same list every year for me.
0:06:44 And drink less exercise more.
0:06:45 Yeah, exactly.
0:06:47 But we’ll talk about that.
0:06:48 But you know, there’s a lot of stuff.
0:06:51 I thought some predictions would be fun because I have some good ones for next year.
0:06:52 Yeah.
0:06:53 You’re the right guy for that.
0:06:56 I might have some predictions, but you have a better track record than I do.
0:06:58 I don’t think you’ve got a few right.
0:06:59 I mean, I occasionally get one right.
0:07:01 It’s not that my track record is bad.
0:07:07 I think you have such a 30,000-foot view on so many different sectors and also just
0:07:16 as a general partner, a true and as a more active investor than yours truly, you get
0:07:20 to see a lot that is coming down the pike, right?
0:07:29 You really get to observe patterns on a weekly basis that most humans do not, including me.
0:07:34 But I do see things occasionally, so we’ll see if I can riff off of some of your predictions.
0:07:35 So where would you like to start?
0:07:41 Let’s start off with something that I just thought was a fun one to just really get your
0:07:43 take on this because I think we’re screwing up society.
0:07:48 So every year, Apple does these things like, “Hey, you’re the 15 apps that we love.
0:07:49 This is the best gaming app.
0:07:52 This is the best productivity app,” all this stuff, right?
0:07:54 And I tend to go in there and poke around it.
0:07:58 I’m always checking out what the new hot thing is, especially on the gaming side or stuff
0:07:59 where I really just don’t pay attention.
0:08:01 I’m like, “Just tell me the best thing.
0:08:03 Go check it out,” right?
0:08:08 And I noticed one thing that I keep seeing is over and over, and it’s driving me nuts
0:08:13 because it dovetails into some of the videos that we send each other on a side thread.
0:08:15 But okay, so we’ve sent a couple of these videos back.
0:08:17 You mean the mutually assured destruction thread?
0:08:18 We can say Saka.
0:08:19 These are more civilized.
0:08:20 Okay, got it.
0:08:23 Yeah, so you mean Saka will be like sending text.
0:08:27 This one of those threads, I don’t know, this one’s that bad, but we’ve been on some threads
0:08:29 where there’s a lot of pigs going around.
0:08:32 Nothing horrible, but definitely I’ll move on from there.
0:08:41 So there’s basically these new AI videos of MMA fighters, and they’ll get knocked out,
0:08:45 and when they fall to the ground, they get in go-karts and shit and start driving around.
0:08:46 Have you seen this where they blend AI?
0:08:48 Yeah, I’ve seen that.
0:08:51 And it’s messing with my head.
0:08:54 I look at that stuff, and I’m like, “This is really bending reality.”
0:08:59 I don’t know if it’s because there’s a psychedelics component there where you’re like, “Why am
0:09:04 I seeing something that I would typically see in a different realm, like in this realm?
0:09:05 Weird stuff’s happening in the brain.”
0:09:10 But one of the things I noticed in the App Store, as I said, the best app of the year
0:09:16 was a Adobe app, which they make great stuff, and they had Adobe Lightroom on there as winning
0:09:21 the Apple App Store 2024 winner, Mac App of the Year.
0:09:24 And why they were so stoked on Lightroom, when you think about Lightroom, you’re like,
0:09:27 “Oh, this is like software that’s been around for a couple of decades.
0:09:30 Why is this anything new?”
0:09:35 And they had a video there that showed these kids running around in their backyard.
0:09:40 And you’ve seen this thing where you can erase shit, like you can drag your finger across.
0:09:43 Like Google does all these ads where they’re like, “Hey, is there someone weird standing
0:09:44 in your photo?
0:09:45 Erase them.”
0:09:48 Dude, this video, we’ve gone too far.
0:09:50 So they’re like, “These kids playing in the backyard.”
0:09:56 They were like hedges, and then they erased their yard door to get out of their backyard.
0:09:58 And it made more hedges.
0:10:02 And I was just like, “Can you imagine when these kids are like 35 or 40?”
0:10:07 And then looking back at their photos, and they’re like, “Do we have a backyard door?”
0:10:09 And they took the dog out and shit.
0:10:11 I’m like, “Why are you taking the dog out?”
0:10:13 The dog’s part of the family.
0:10:15 Just sowing the seeds for gaslighting yourself later.
0:10:17 No, but do you know what I mean?
0:10:18 What is going on?
0:10:24 They’re erasing all of our real memories and replacing them with almost imperceivable,
0:10:26 at this point digital alternatives.
0:10:27 Yeah.
0:10:28 And it’s really worrisome to me.
0:10:29 I don’t know.
0:10:31 Do you do any of this shit to erase anybody out of your photos?
0:10:33 I don’t erase people out of my photos.
0:10:42 I also feel like a lot of that editing is for sharing outside of your immediate circle.
0:10:43 Like social media stuff.
0:10:51 Social media or effectively applying digital plastic surgery to your life so you can share
0:10:56 highlights that look better than they actually do in real life.
0:11:04 And I am very cautious to play with that because I feel like it’s similar to getting
0:11:10 your first little dabble with itucks or facelift.
0:11:15 And then there’s this creeping tendency to add more and more and more and more.
0:11:23 And similarly I don’t want to become delusionally dissatisfied with my life because there are
0:11:29 little things that in my mind I aren’t perfect for broadcast like a door in the hedges, right?
0:11:30 Right.
0:11:34 Because then what happens when you’re doing that constantly and then you sit in your backyard
0:11:36 and you’re looking at that door, does it drive you insane?
0:11:37 Right.
0:11:38 When it really shouldn’t?
0:11:42 And then also, but think of the downstream effects too where your friends are like, “Okay,
0:11:47 you just take something that is a mild visual nuisance out of the equation.”
0:11:50 And it’s like, “Oh, they had that perfect beat shot.
0:11:53 They are so lucky if only I could have that thing.”
0:11:55 And then you go and you’re like, “Oh, it was crowded.
0:11:56 We didn’t have the same thing they did.”
0:12:01 But in reality, they just like magically erase it all their friends are all the people behind
0:12:02 them out of it.
0:12:05 And I’m just like, “It’s creating a fake everything.
0:12:06 I don’t know.
0:12:07 I just something about it.
0:12:08 I love AI.
0:12:09 I think there’s a lot of fun.
0:12:11 There’s so much I use it for every single day.
0:12:15 But this is one of those things where I’m just like, “I don’t want my kids to grow up
0:12:17 thinking they need perfection.”
0:12:18 And that’s what this is doing.
0:12:20 It’s creating a better, perfect scene.
0:12:21 You know?
0:12:22 Oh, yeah.
0:12:23 I mean, and people are already using that.
0:12:24 Of course.
0:12:26 I mean, it’s like Zoom filters on steroids, right?
0:12:27 Right.
0:12:28 Totally.
0:12:33 And I think, I’ll just throw this in there.
0:12:39 Not sure exactly what form this is going to take, but I do think there will be a pendulum
0:12:48 swing away from certain digital environments when people realize just how contorted constant
0:12:55 exposure will make your perception, your satisfaction, your dopamine rewards system.
0:13:00 I really feel like the impact is going to be felt in a way that people could perhaps
0:13:04 rationalize away or brush aside in years past.
0:13:09 They’re like, “Well, I know that Twitter’s a cesspool on X, Y, and Z levels, but I get
0:13:10 A, B, and C.”
0:13:17 But once people are put into environments where what’s up is down, what’s left is right,
0:13:23 what’s fake is real, and what’s real is fake, this psychological toll, the emotional toll,
0:13:27 I think will become much harder to dismiss.
0:13:28 And people are going to look for things offline.
0:13:31 I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for that.
0:13:38 You see that in, I think you see early indications of that with, for instance, like running clubs
0:13:45 and various in real life activities that have become very popular in place of or as supplements
0:13:50 to online dating and dating apps as an example, like those things are exploding in New York
0:13:51 City and a lot of major cities.
0:13:57 You see that in potentially, certainly this is a trend, at least in a few countries outside
0:13:58 of the US.
0:13:59 I’d have to look at the data.
0:14:00 I think it’s mildly true.
0:14:07 We see some improving numbers in print book sales that could be attributed to a number
0:14:13 of other factors outside of people moving from digital formats to print, but at least
0:14:20 as a thought exercise, I think we can explore different ways in which people are going to
0:14:26 seek out something tangible they can hold and know is real, look at in person and know
0:14:27 is real.
0:14:33 So that’s certainly extrapolating from just what I see in a small circle of people who
0:14:36 are hyper-exposed to a lot of this.
0:14:43 I feel like people like you who are perhaps way, it’s called prematurely saturated with
0:14:49 exposure to these things are canaries in the coal mine, you’re like, “Oof, holy shit.
0:14:50 We need an exit.
0:14:56 We need a way to step off the stage so we’re not looking at this manufactured reality.”
0:14:57 It’s funny, you say that.
0:15:00 I was talking to another friend of mine that’s deep in this stuff.
0:15:04 You know, Chris Hutchins, I was talking to him about raising daughters and the kids are
0:15:05 getting older.
0:15:06 He’s like, “Dude, you know what’s funny?
0:15:10 When we got bullied as kids, somebody would be like, “You know, I hooked up with your
0:15:11 mom or whatever.”
0:15:12 Right?
0:15:14 And they would just be like, “They school yard slams or whatever.”
0:15:15 Right?
0:15:19 And now in like three years, I hooked up with their mom, “Look at this video.”
0:15:22 And it’d be like, “The mom hooking up with a kid because it’s AI and shit.”
0:15:23 He’d be like, “Damn.
0:15:24 You’re hooking up my mom.”
0:15:30 You know, but it won’t be real, but it’ll be like just slams, AI look real enough.
0:15:32 The bullying’s going to get hardcore.
0:15:33 Yeah.
0:15:35 Yeah, of course it will.
0:15:40 Or just sharing videos of the person you want to bully doing things they didn’t do.
0:15:41 Right.
0:15:42 Exactly.
0:15:43 It’s going to get bad.
0:15:44 Yeah.
0:15:45 And there are plenty of upsides.
0:15:50 I mean, look, I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude like 10 to 15 times today with my team.
0:15:52 I’m doing a company offsite here in Maui.
0:15:54 That’s why I’m in Maui.
0:15:59 And there are reasons for the location we can get into, but it’s very useful.
0:16:06 But the dose makes the poison, the application also makes the poison, and it pays to just
0:16:09 be cognizant of how you are using these things.
0:16:10 Yeah.
0:16:11 So that’s one.
0:16:12 All right.
0:16:13 What else you got?
0:16:18 Are there any personal New Year’s resolutions that come to mind or specific ones where you’re
0:16:23 like, okay, some of these might rhyme with things in the past, but here’s how I’m going
0:16:25 to approach them differently.
0:16:26 Yeah.
0:16:27 Oh, man.
0:16:28 Okay.
0:16:32 So the exasperated exhale is always a good place to start.
0:16:38 Well, I mean, the hard thing for me is that I get into this really bad situation where
0:16:42 come November, I just let myself go.
0:16:43 Yeah.
0:16:44 It happens every single year.
0:16:45 Yeah.
0:16:47 I just go ham on shit.
0:16:48 Everything comes around.
0:16:51 And I hate too much nutmeg.
0:16:54 It’s like, or not nutmeg, eggnog, nutmeg too.
0:16:58 You know what, I can’t stand.
0:16:59 It’s close.
0:17:00 Let’s talk about close for a minute.
0:17:01 Yeah.
0:17:05 No, but like, I do like a little eggnog with a little at brandy in there.
0:17:07 You know, you put in a little Tonyac and your eggnog.
0:17:08 Yeah.
0:17:09 And so like, but that goes straight to your gut.
0:17:10 You know?
0:17:11 Of course it does.
0:17:15 And so I hate this because this is like the freaking 70 year of random shows or whatever
0:17:19 where it’s like, every December, it’s like, I want to be less fat and drink less.
0:17:23 And like, it’s like, you know, I get a good running start on the new year though.
0:17:24 So I am going to go into this.
0:17:29 Maybe we’ll put together like a compilation video of all the times we’ve said over like
0:17:30 10 years.
0:17:32 Plus I don’t look at drinks.
0:17:34 Yeah, exactly.
0:17:37 So I think I’m just going to lean into the exact opposite.
0:17:38 Just keep eating and just keep drinking.
0:17:39 I’m just kidding.
0:17:40 I’m just kidding.
0:17:41 That’s horrible.
0:17:44 No, but I think one of the things that you and I were trading links on a couple of days
0:17:49 ago, which I’d really curious to get your take on this is like, there’s like this movement,
0:17:50 well, not movement.
0:17:54 It’s called the movement, but it’s old people movement of like, you know, you and I, when
0:17:59 we first met, the name of the game is bro is this might sound is like we wanted to put
0:18:00 muscle mass on.
0:18:01 Like we were like, you know,
0:18:02 Sure.
0:18:03 Meathead central.
0:18:04 Yeah.
0:18:05 Yeah.
0:18:07 Like I wouldn’t say full meathead, but there was a good amount of meat there.
0:18:08 It’s pretty meathead.
0:18:14 So the transition from meathead to like somebody that actually just wants to like be able to
0:18:15 like stretch.
0:18:16 Yeah.
0:18:17 And do like functional stuff.
0:18:20 Like we were talking about functional patterns because, you know, it was an account that
0:18:25 I had followed for a while and they had some kind of more non-traditional ways of approaching
0:18:31 your gate and your movement and really setting you hopefully up for years of good solid longevity
0:18:35 in terms of joint health, back health, all these things.
0:18:40 And I sent you another one that you were checking out as well.
0:18:44 What’s been your take here because I’m starting to make this move into like, okay, I want
0:18:50 a lot of movement and a lot of core plus plus strength.
0:18:51 I’d love to be lean.
0:18:53 I don’t need to be ripped.
0:18:57 Although do you see the new Hugh Jackman Wolverine with him dead pool?
0:18:58 He’s a beast.
0:18:59 Yeah.
0:19:02 Do you think that was freaking animated or was that really Hugh Jackman’s body at this
0:19:03 stage?
0:19:04 I think it’s really him.
0:19:05 That’s insane.
0:19:06 How can he freaking?
0:19:09 They have a pretty good authority.
0:19:10 That is him.
0:19:11 Yeah.
0:19:12 Dude, how does he get cut like that?
0:19:13 It was insane.
0:19:14 He takes it seriously.
0:19:16 Follows the basics, follows the rules, doesn’t waver.
0:19:19 He’s very dedicated and he is a real athlete.
0:19:22 I mean, you watch him move.
0:19:23 He moves like a dancer.
0:19:25 He can lift like a powerlifter.
0:19:32 His endurance on sick, on a rower like a concept too is unbelievable.
0:19:38 The wattage that he can sustain over periods of time would boggle the mind of even some
0:19:40 people who have been former competitive rowers.
0:19:42 He is a true athlete.
0:19:43 Okay.
0:19:44 So that explains.
0:19:45 Legitimate.
0:19:46 Yeah.
0:19:49 So anyway, my point being is that there’s this little micro trend I see occurring where
0:19:54 a lot of people are making this move to a more functional, holistic kind of movement-based
0:19:59 health and strength and training that is non-traditional as we define it.
0:20:01 Where do you see that playing into your own routine?
0:20:02 Is that something that you’re looking into?
0:20:03 Yeah.
0:20:05 I’ve thought about this a lot.
0:20:12 Our texts were well-timed and I want to give credit where credit is due.
0:20:17 First to you for introducing me to this account and then I ended up doing a bunch of research
0:20:20 on this account that I did not tell you about.
0:20:24 So I will probably pronounce the name incorrectly and for that I apologize.
0:20:28 But I believe his name is Enseema Inyang.
0:20:33 Now the spelling on that will be more accurate than at my pronunciation, but N-S-I-M-A, that’s
0:20:38 probably all you need to find him on YouTube, Inyang-I-N-Y-A-N-G.
0:20:44 So Enseema has this video which you sent to me called the Live Traditional Strength Training.
0:20:49 Now yes, that is YouTube, clickbait on one hand, but he actually does deliver on that.
0:20:54 His production value is incredible, his delivery is impeccable.
0:20:56 I was very, very impressed.
0:20:58 I went back and watched certain sections of this.
0:21:00 His agility too, which is insane.
0:21:01 His agility is incredible.
0:21:07 In terms of power, he’s a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor as well at a very, very high level.
0:21:12 I think he won Worlds or Masters Worlds at Brown Belt most recently.
0:21:14 He’s now a Black Belt, which is no joke.
0:21:22 And I reached out to a friend of mine, Mark Bell, who is very well known in the powerlifting
0:21:27 community. He also has a number of products that have done very, very well.
0:21:37 And I met, I realized, Enseema at Super Training Gym in Sacramento like a decade ago when he
0:21:42 was still really focused on powerlifting, met him very, very briefly.
0:21:44 I’m almost 100% confident.
0:21:48 I remember he was doing deadlift band polls while I was there checking out the gym for
0:21:49 the first time.
0:21:51 That was a long time ago.
0:21:59 So I chatted with Mark about Enseema who, Mark, reinforced is the real deal on every
0:22:01 possible level.
0:22:06 And the piece that I took from that video specifically was paying attention to what
0:22:09 he calls and others have called the Spinal Engine.
0:22:15 And there’s a book actually by that title, the Spinal Engine, the name again, tough one.
0:22:21 I think it’s Serge Grakowetsky, S-E-R-G-E, and we’ll put a link in the show notes.
0:22:27 But in effect, I’ll actually pull this up because I think it’s worth reading.
0:22:32 So the Spinal Engine, and you can watch the video, Enseema does a great job with video
0:22:37 of explaining this, but the book has in its Amazon description, and there’s no digital
0:22:38 version.
0:22:41 You have to buy paperback for like $115, so I’m not saying you should.
0:22:45 I haven’t read it, but this book deals with the human spine with particular emphasis on
0:22:46 the lumbar spine.
0:22:50 Human gait is traditionally believed to be the exclusive function of the legs, or say
0:22:52 the swinging of the arms and the legs, which play a part.
0:22:56 But going back to the description, the book presents arguments and data that challenge
0:22:57 that belief.
0:23:00 It proposes that the spine is the primary engine that makes us move, and it goes on
0:23:02 and on.
0:23:10 And what I think Enseema does such a nice job of is showing that, demonstrating the implications
0:23:21 of that theory through video, and also using tools like rope swings and other things to
0:23:27 demonstrate how you can develop mobility through different planes of motion.
0:23:33 So you have various things, lateral flexion, you have flexion extension in terms of this
0:23:38 type of forward-backward plane, and it really got me thinking, and I started experimenting
0:23:45 with some of the motions in that video, primarily because his counter example, which is effectively
0:23:49 the lie of traditional strength training, is how if you’re constantly bracing, you’re
0:23:53 constantly, say, holding your breath in certain portions of a lift to increase intraabdominal
0:24:01 pressure, that ultimately, as a side effect, you can produce a lot of rigidity in the spine.
0:24:06 And I really have never had an interest in being a powerlifter or even an Olympic weight
0:24:10 lifter, although I think they should more accurately be called powerlifters.
0:24:17 I’ve always been focused on weight training in service of athleticism, and I have loved
0:24:18 playing sports.
0:24:24 I have traditionally competed a lot, and I may actually compete in 2025 in some form
0:24:25 of sport.
0:24:27 I would like to have something on the calendar for that.
0:24:33 Number of cautionary notes, and then I’ll come back to how I’m thinking about maybe framing
0:24:34 exercise for myself.
0:24:39 The first is that you should not go from all fucked up and broken and stiff to I’m going
0:24:45 to do the most exaggerated rotational movements possible, or pulling a sled backwards in this
0:24:48 compromised, rounded back position.
0:24:50 You will break yourself if you do that.
0:24:56 So I think the name of the game is micro progressions and progressive resistance, but being very,
0:24:57 very smart about it.
0:25:01 Because as you have experienced, certainly as I have experienced, as you get older and
0:25:07 you accumulate injuries, it takes a lot longer to heal, and sometimes those things do not
0:25:09 heal completely, no matter what you do.
0:25:13 I got one of those splits machines where you can put your legs in there.
0:25:14 Oh, Chuck Norris special.
0:25:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:25:17 I had the Chuck Norris thing on the outside.
0:25:20 I was doing it and I was getting further and further and further each week, and my plies
0:25:23 instructor was like, “What the hell are you doing?”
0:25:26 And I’m like, “I’m going to do the splits in a couple months,” and she’s like, “You have
0:25:31 no supporting muscles at all for any of this.”
0:25:36 She’s like, “When you get done, you’ll go down once, and then you won’t even be able
0:25:41 to like, everything else will rip,” and I was like, “Oh, shit, that’s a good call.
0:25:43 I’m glad I didn’t take it that far.”
0:25:48 Yeah, so for me, I am focused on a few things, and I’ve actually made a lot of progress with
0:25:54 this over the last handful of months, and in 2025, I will be very focused on this.
0:25:56 For the first two months of the year, I’ll be focused on skiing.
0:26:03 I’ll be in the mountains for two months, and that is a great motivator to develop, say,
0:26:09 different types of stability and strength, single legs, so glyphs and so on, and having
0:26:12 that context in which to test myself, right?
0:26:17 So if I’m carving in one direction and then in the other, say the inside leg is very unstable,
0:26:22 for some reason, it’s chattering a lot, well, that’s something to fix, and the skiing serves
0:26:28 as a fun, assuming you don’t overdo it, and blow yourself apart, diagnostic tool for bringing
0:26:31 to awareness some of these things you need to work on.
0:26:36 And I’d say priorities, these aren’t necessarily in ranked order, but number one, as you get
0:26:42 older, you lose muscle mass, you just do, and that’s age-related muscle loss, sarcopenia
0:26:49 is directly correlated to any number of issues, I’m sure, including all cause mortality.
0:26:57 So weight training, resistance training, building muscle mass is an undeniable priority for
0:27:00 functional health span as you get older.
0:27:06 But for me, that means compound movements once or twice a week.
0:27:09 You really don’t need to overdo it or do it five days a week.
0:27:15 A lot of people use five days a week or every day as an excuse to not get started.
0:27:19 You can make a lot of progress, especially if you haven’t done much weight training,
0:27:26 with one day, one session per week, if you’re using, say, high-intensity training, one set
0:27:27 to failure type protocol.
0:27:31 I recognize it’s very simple, I recognize there are some very experienced athletes who
0:27:36 will say, “Well, now you want to do five sets of three or five sets of five or whatever
0:27:40 it might be with three to five-minute rest intervals in between to replenish the creatine
0:27:41 phosphate.”
0:27:47 But complexity can be the enemy of execution, as Tony Robbins and others say a lot.
0:27:51 And it’s just scaled down to what you can do if you’re starting an exercise habit.
0:27:56 If that means you go to the gym every day and you do five minutes on a treadmill, make
0:28:00 the bar low enough that you can clear it and you are not tempted to make excuses.
0:28:02 Let me ask you a question.
0:28:07 If you’re like, “Okay, I don’t want to be a meathead, but I want a little muscle mass,
0:28:10 so I want some tones and definition, a little muscle mass.”
0:28:14 And I’ve seen the pros and cons of one set to failure and the data around it.
0:28:19 It seems to be that it’s good, but not as good as multiple sets of failure for a single
0:28:20 muscle group.
0:28:23 Would you say that you believe that to be true?
0:28:27 Or are you doing one set to failure with, if you’re doing bicep, let’s just take bicep
0:28:28 for example.
0:28:32 If you’re doing one set to failure, are you doing several exercises on the bicep one set
0:28:35 to failure, or are you just talking about you’re just doing hammer curls until you fail
0:28:38 and that’s it for biceps that day?
0:28:40 Let’s just take skiing as an example.
0:28:43 So my priority is going to be skiing and there are actually a few other sports I’ll be training
0:28:44 for at the same time.
0:28:48 So I’ll be a busy, busy boy for the first two months of the year, which is great.
0:28:52 So I’ll need to lose all this fat that I accumulated over Thanksgiving and Christmas because I know
0:28:55 those Danish butter cookies that my mom bought at Costco are just waiting for me.
0:28:56 I know it.
0:28:58 I know they’re sitting there.
0:29:05 So the one set to failure or multiple sets to failure, training to failure can inhibit
0:29:10 your ability to train something sport specific like skiing if you overdo it.
0:29:15 For instance, I would not even though you could pack on tons of muscle doing 20 rep set to
0:29:19 failure for squats, if you do that and then you try to go skiing the next two or three
0:29:26 days, you’re going to be garbage from a sort of fine motor control perspective.
0:29:30 But to answer your question directly, I have not looked at the most recent data on any of
0:29:31 this.
0:29:35 I’m not sure there exists data comparing these in meaningful ways that do not bias towards
0:29:42 one method or another, because I have volunteered to be a participant, a subject in certain
0:29:43 weightlifting trials.
0:29:46 I’m not going to mention the university because I don’t want to throw them under the bus.
0:29:52 But when I went in there, the protocol required us to do 10 reps of bench press for X number
0:29:53 of sets.
0:29:56 And I went in there and you’d see one guy get on the bench because there was a circuit,
0:29:57 right?
0:30:01 They’re trying to make use of basically an open class period for volunteers.
0:30:07 You’d see one person who’s basically dropping the weight onto his chest at a risk of breaking
0:30:14 every one of his ribs and bouncing it off, using terrible form, terrible form, very,
0:30:16 very little time under tension.
0:30:20 And then you’d see someone else who’s doing like two seconds up, four seconds down, pause
0:30:22 at the chest.
0:30:24 Those are not the same 10 repetitions, right?
0:30:26 So I do think I’m under tension is completely different.
0:30:29 Yeah, so I think garbage in, garbage out for a lot of studies.
0:30:32 So I don’t weigh them too heavily.
0:30:38 But what I will say is, if you are reasonably novice, even intermediate for training, and
0:30:41 by the way, if you’ve been training for a bunch of years and you haven’t made a lot
0:30:43 of progress, I would consider you novice.
0:30:49 If you do a single set to concentric failure per exercise, and I’ll come back and then
0:30:57 I answer the what type of exercise and so on that you asked, you will see excellent results.
0:31:01 And there may be some incremental gain from doing multiple sets, but it’s going to dig
0:31:03 into your recovery ability.
0:31:05 So you’re saying one set?
0:31:06 Yeah.
0:31:07 And now let me tell you what the one set means.
0:31:08 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:31:09 What the one set means.
0:31:13 And I’ve gone back to all of my books kind of function this way, like all of my books
0:31:15 are sort of reference books for myself.
0:31:20 I go around, I gather these best practices that I’ve tested, and then I refer back to
0:31:21 them.
0:31:26 So in the case of say the four hour body, the Occam’s protocol and a handful of compound
0:31:31 movements still does the trick for the vast majority of the population.
0:31:36 I’m sure people are going to take issue with this, but I have now like hundreds of thousands,
0:31:40 millions of people who have tried these things, and I’ve seen the success studies, like it
0:31:41 does work.
0:31:42 Yes, it’s simple.
0:31:45 Yes, it could be more sophisticated.
0:31:52 It is idiot proof for a reason that if I go into lift, I’m not going to be doing direct
0:31:53 bicep work.
0:31:59 I’m going to be doing something like a seated row and then a pull down.
0:32:03 And if I’m hitting the back from a few different angles, that’s it.
0:32:09 I might honestly just do one of those, like I might do one compound pulling movement,
0:32:12 one compound pressing movement, and then one or two leg movements.
0:32:14 That’s the whole workout.
0:32:16 The whole workout should take less than 20 minutes.
0:32:18 People will say, “What about warm-up sets?”
0:32:23 Well, if you’re tracking your progress well, you’re using the same equipment and you’re
0:32:26 lifting at a slow cadence, this is key.
0:32:30 The first handful of reps effectively function as your warm-up.
0:32:35 Now what I’ll often do is take like 30% of the target working weight that I’m going to
0:32:41 use for my one set to failure, and I’ll do three, four, five reps just to make sure my
0:32:46 joints aren’t flared up, that I’m not feeling any pain.
0:32:49 And then I would have, say, an A workout and a B workout.
0:32:54 So let’s just say, hypothetically, I’m making this up, but you might have something like
0:33:00 a close grip incline bench press to just avoid issues with your shoulders, let’s just say.
0:33:05 Then you have pull downs, like close grip supinated.
0:33:11 So palm facing you, pull downs, and then a leg press or split squats, holding dumbbells
0:33:12 on either side.
0:33:15 So you’re also hitting your traps on that one, right?
0:33:20 That’s your whole workout.
0:33:24 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
0:33:26 This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
0:33:31 Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide,
0:33:33 including me, including mine.
0:33:34 What business you might ask?
0:33:38 Well, this year, one way I’ve scratched my own itch is by creating cockpunch coffee.
0:33:40 It’s a long story.
0:33:45 All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saise Foundation, fund research for mental
0:33:46 health, et cetera.
0:33:51 Anyway, we use Shopify for the online storefront and my team raves about how simple and easy
0:33:52 it is to use.
0:33:55 Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel.
0:33:59 Doesn’t matter if you’re selling satin sheets from Shopify’s in-person POS system or offering
0:34:03 organic olive oil on Shopify’s all-in-one e-commerce platform.
0:34:06 However you interact with your customers, you’re covered.
0:34:11 Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, plus Shopify’s award-winning
0:34:15 help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions.
0:34:17 This is possibility powered by Shopify.
0:34:21 The best time to start your new business is right now.
0:34:26 Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business, and get your first sale.
0:34:29 Established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
0:34:36 So sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/tim all lowercase.
0:34:41 Go to Shopify.com/Tim to start selling today with Shopify.
0:34:48 One more time, Shopify.com/Tim.
0:34:51 One thing we didn’t cover that thing is really important is you say one step to failure,
0:34:54 but what’s your target raps here?
0:34:58 Are you going for like, you know, some people say lift heavy and do eight to 10.
0:35:02 Some people say go a little bit lighter and get to 20 to where you fail at 20.
0:35:03 What are you aiming for here?
0:35:08 For safety purposes, and again, everybody’s got a fucking opinion with this stuff, but
0:35:12 use something that can do a super slow protocol, which is like five seconds up, five seconds
0:35:16 down, and then you can do six to 10 reps.
0:35:22 But I wouldn’t increase the weight until you get to like an eight to 10 rep range.
0:35:26 You can increase that for the legs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I wouldn’t make
0:35:27 it complicated.
0:35:34 I would say five seconds up, five seconds down, that’s one, 1,000, two, 1,000 slow.
0:35:37 And let’s call it six to 10 reps to failure.
0:35:41 Positive or concentric failure means you’re on the, in the case of the pull down, the
0:35:42 pulling motion.
0:35:45 This is when the muscle is overlapping and shortening.
0:35:49 In the case of the leg press, let’s just say, or the squats, it would be when you’re pushing
0:35:51 out, not when you’re lowering.
0:35:55 In the case of the close grip bench press, it would be when you’re lifting the weight
0:35:56 up.
0:35:59 And then you get to the point where you stick, you can’t move it.
0:36:00 All right.
0:36:03 Push for another 10 seconds, as hard as you can, try to move it a millimeter at a time,
0:36:06 and then lower for 10 seconds, you’re done.
0:36:08 And then you have to log the entire workout.
0:36:09 It’s not hard to do.
0:36:10 You need to take notes.
0:36:13 If you don’t take notes, you’re not going to make the progress you want to make.
0:36:16 And then the second workout, just to, again, hypothetical, it doesn’t really matter that
0:36:17 much.
0:36:19 As long as it’s safe and it’s a compound movement, you’re doing it to failure, you’re
0:36:20 going to make progress.
0:36:24 So let’s just say that your shoulders are healthy enough to do this.
0:36:29 You could be like overhead press or a military press and equipment agnostic.
0:36:31 People can argue about free weights versus machines.
0:36:36 My position now is whatever is safest, yeah, and whatever you can do consistently.
0:36:40 So if you’re traveling a lot, then hire a personal trainer or a power lifter or someone
0:36:45 with a very good technique to coach you on how to use free weights, because those are
0:36:50 going to be uniform around the country or around the world instead of equipment, which
0:36:52 is going to be highly variable.
0:36:57 So on the next one might be like overhead press or seated overhead press, then we already
0:36:58 did the pulldown.
0:37:02 So maybe it’s a seated row or a bent row with a barbell.
0:37:03 Then for legs, we already did.
0:37:08 I think I was talking about split squats with dumbbells, so maybe at this time it’s leg
0:37:09 press.
0:37:12 I have, for instance, my right leg is 1.1 centimeters.
0:37:19 I had full leg x-rays done a year ago because a number of doctors thought I was full of
0:37:20 shit with this.
0:37:22 I really think one leg is longer than the other.
0:37:24 I’ve looked at it a number of different ways.
0:37:30 My right leg is about femur length is 0.8 centimeters to 1.1 centimeters.
0:37:32 I did two takes of x-rays.
0:37:38 So what happens if I’m doing, say, a back squat, is it introduces a rotational force,
0:37:45 and that is how I initially turned my mildly bad back pain into really acute horrifying
0:37:48 back pain that has persisted now for two years or so.
0:37:52 I’ve had a lot of progress, and I can talk about what’s contributed to that.
0:37:57 Actually, an experiment recently with stem cells seemed to be delivering some very interesting
0:37:58 results.
0:38:01 I’m not ready to recommend any laboratories related to the production or harvesting the
0:38:06 stem cells, nor any clinics, because I want to wait until I see more launch-to-enol results
0:38:07 for myself.
0:38:14 But the early indications are very positive, and the TLDR on that is that I did not want
0:38:16 to inject anything intradiscal.
0:38:20 I didn’t want to puncture any discs, and there are many reasons for that.
0:38:24 I’ve spoken to a lot of spine mechanic experts and so on.
0:38:29 It seems that the long-term risk of having some type of issue with your disc or a rupture
0:38:32 is higher if you ever puncture the disc.
0:38:38 So I didn’t want to do that, and rather than do that, because my pain is localized to like
0:38:44 the SI joint and L4, L5, where I do have a bunch of structural issues, we did something
0:38:50 maybe a little unorthodox in a sense, and there’s something called the iliolumbar ligament,
0:38:53 and you have two of them, and people can look this up.
0:38:59 But I used to think, and I do still think this, you’re effectively as old as your joints
0:39:00 feel, right?
0:39:02 I really think there’s something to that.
0:39:05 Especially when you throw your back out and you’re like, “Fuck.”
0:39:09 You’ve never felt older in your life, and when you have to crawl to your bed on your
0:39:12 hands and knees because your back is thrown out.
0:39:17 Or lay on your bed, or you have to constantly fidget because your back is bothering you.
0:39:23 Where I’ve started to think there may be, for me, some interesting interventions, because
0:39:27 what we did is we did an injection, I mean, the needle’s huge.
0:39:29 That’s like five to eight inches long.
0:39:36 But an injection in the SI joint, but then also bathing the … I didn’t want an injection
0:39:40 directly into the ligament just because I couldn’t take the recovery time for that.
0:39:50 But to bathe around the ligament with these stem cells, MSCs, and literally within a day,
0:39:52 I felt relief in that area.
0:40:02 So it raises questions for me around how you diagnose back pain or look at structural issues
0:40:04 and what’s visible versus less visible.
0:40:09 So in other words, when you look at back pain, oftentimes you do imaging.
0:40:17 You look at the spine, and you fixate on the set joints and the vertebral bodies, the segments,
0:40:19 and so on.
0:40:22 And if you’re over the age of 40, your back’s going to look fucked in some way.
0:40:24 It’s going to look great.
0:40:28 As you get older, just like you get wrinkles on your face, your back is going to show degenerative
0:40:33 changes almost 100%, especially if you’ve done any lifting or athletic anything.
0:40:40 And what is less obvious though is the health or inflammation associated with some of these
0:40:41 ligaments.
0:40:45 So I’ve become super interested based on my recent experience.
0:40:50 And I know friends from friction massage who have seen tremendous back pain relief.
0:40:52 What is friction massage?
0:40:55 You could use a gua sha tool.
0:40:56 There are different ways to do it.
0:40:59 It’s like cupping and shit, where they break the fascia up.
0:41:02 It’s like a rapid pressure movement back and forth.
0:41:04 So you could use a gua sha tool.
0:41:07 It’s probably going to be too big for this particular area.
0:41:10 You might use probably using manual therapy.
0:41:13 But I have friends who have seen incredible relief.
0:41:19 And what appears to be the case is that if I address those ligaments, a lot of my low
0:41:20 back pain goes away.
0:41:24 Now the contrast between my right side, which was treated, my left side, which was untreated,
0:41:27 but my left side, I considered the healthy side.
0:41:30 I now realize it’s actually in a lot of pain.
0:41:33 So what I may do, I’m part of a clinical trial and you have to take a six month break
0:41:37 between stem cells for a host of reasons.
0:41:41 I may actually do PRP, platelet-rich plasma, on that left side.
0:41:42 We’ll see.
0:41:44 Get the vampire facial while you’re at it.
0:41:47 I’ll get a two for one vampire facial while I’m there.
0:41:48 Get the package deal.
0:41:49 So hopefully that helps.
0:41:54 And we only talked about one aspect of how I’m thinking about health, which is the muscle
0:41:55 mass.
0:42:00 For me, since I am doing the skiing training and other things, I will probably not do extended
0:42:03 sets to failure because it’ll inhibit my training.
0:42:08 I will probably do something in the order of more like the three to five rep range, still
0:42:13 doing it slowly enough that I feel like it is very under control, nothing ballistic.
0:42:17 I’m going to get plenty of ballistic and dynamic movements from the skiing itself.
0:42:22 One question on the recovery side is back in the day, it was like one gram of protein
0:42:27 per pound of body weight to get any type of muscle growth.
0:42:29 What’s your current regimen look like for something like this?
0:42:32 Because you’re not going for massive gains here, so it’s not like it’d be perfect.
0:42:33 Are you still getting adequate protein?
0:42:36 Are you putting a lot of protein in there when you’re doing these training days?
0:42:37 Yeah, I will.
0:42:41 I mean, especially because I’ll be training, I’ll basically be training at the gym at
0:42:47 night before dinner and I will be skiing and taking very serious technical lessons and
0:42:51 trying some pretty gnarly stuff for me in terms of reasonably intense training.
0:42:52 Some shit or?
0:42:53 No, no, no, no.
0:42:54 Not that intense.
0:42:55 No.
0:42:56 You doing a half pipe?
0:42:57 No, not half pipe.
0:42:58 What are you doing?
0:43:01 I’m just talking about like bumps and backcountry stuff.
0:43:02 Oh, backcountry stuff, yeah.
0:43:06 Also like ski touring, I’ll be skinning basically, you work your way up the mountain and then
0:43:07 you ski down and stuff.
0:43:10 So it’s going to be physically intensive.
0:43:13 I’ll also be eating quite a lot of carbs, but probably I will almost certainly get at
0:43:17 least one gram of protein per pound body weight.
0:43:19 I don’t think that’s overkill.
0:43:20 All right.
0:43:21 Yeah.
0:43:23 If you want more thing, that’s kind of fun.
0:43:24 Yeah.
0:43:25 And I’ve been looking very closely at this.
0:43:31 I don’t feel comfortable promoting any brands yet because I have some technical questions,
0:43:37 but I have been experimenting with something called the acronym is LICUS, L-I-C-U-S, which
0:43:43 is, so I’ve got this and then another one over here.
0:43:46 If you’re not seeing the video, it looks like he’s part cyborg now.
0:43:51 This patches with electrodes and cables coming off and then you set how many hours you want
0:43:57 on this thing and it is low intensity continuous ultrasound.
0:43:58 Is this why you’re so chill right now?
0:43:59 What’s going on?
0:44:00 What is this thing doing?
0:44:01 No, no.
0:44:02 This is not why I’m so chill.
0:44:03 I mean, who knows?
0:44:04 I don’t think so.
0:44:11 This is a device that safely administers low intensity ultrasound over a period of one
0:44:14 to four hours per site of treatment.
0:44:19 I currently have two of these coupling patches, one on the front of my shoulder, one at the
0:44:20 rear of the shoulder.
0:44:23 I have a bunch of tendonitis around the insertion points.
0:44:25 Oh, so this has nothing to do with your Hawaii trip.
0:44:26 It’s not like for us…
0:44:27 No, no, no.
0:44:28 This is when I’ve been playing with this for a month.
0:44:29 Talking to dolphins.
0:44:31 No, no.
0:44:37 This is for recovery, but also the low intensity continuous ultrasounds like is LICUS.
0:44:41 You can find a lot of interesting studies on this and I’ll mention a site.
0:44:49 I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but consensus.app, which uses AI to assess published
0:44:55 literature from reputable journals to determine if something is a thumbs up, thumbs down or
0:44:56 inconclusive.
0:45:00 So you could put something in like, is there any evidence that low intensity continuous
0:45:04 ultrasound helps with tissue remodeling or sports recovery?
0:45:05 You’ll get an answer.
0:45:08 It’s not perfect, but it’s actually very helpful to get an initial indication.
0:45:15 One of what I find interesting about this is unlike some other types of, say for instance,
0:45:16 electrical stimulation.
0:45:21 There are 10 units that you can use that will effectively reduce pain by, and this is not
0:45:27 scientific description, but they’re effectively overriding your nerves or overstimulating your
0:45:32 nerves with certain frequencies to turn off or mute the pain signaling.
0:45:34 That’s not what this is doing.
0:45:38 This technology seems to actually help with tissue remodeling and proliferation of different
0:45:41 growth factors.
0:45:45 I really remember the first time I used this within an hour, this acute pain in my shoulder
0:45:47 just vanished.
0:45:48 Crazy.
0:45:49 Now, could that be placebo?
0:45:50 It could be placebo.
0:45:52 What’s the cost on this?
0:45:53 It’s not cheap.
0:45:54 Yeah.
0:45:57 Which is why most people go into a clinic to use something like this.
0:45:59 But they get you with the razor blades approach.
0:46:03 So the device itself, who knows, but these coupling patches are very expensive.
0:46:09 So to get, if I’m using it once a day or twice a day, I’ve been using it a lot.
0:46:12 It’s like 10 grand for two months.
0:46:13 Jesus.
0:46:14 It’s expensive.
0:46:15 How much are the patches?
0:46:20 Like a grand a pop, like one box of four, I think it’s four, four, four, four.
0:46:23 So it’d be like 16 patches or something like 900 bucks.
0:46:25 It’s very expensive.
0:46:29 But there are some people out there for whom this will be out of reach, but you may be
0:46:33 able to find a clinic where you could do this on sort of an as needed basis.
0:46:34 Who knows?
0:46:38 Once a week, there may be some minimum cadence necessary to see the results that you would
0:46:39 want.
0:46:41 But there are also people out there for whom this may make sense.
0:46:45 And hopefully, as this technology, and you’ve seen this happen a million times.
0:46:52 So if I, as it becomes more popular, as the technology gets more developed, as there’s
0:46:55 more competition, the price drops tremendously.
0:46:59 You know, what’s funny is I’ve seen in podcasts, you know, you and I have been part of this
0:47:02 where like you mentioned something that’s like three grand or whatever or something
0:47:03 crazy.
0:47:07 And there’s like, well, that Tim fucking rich guy can like afford all these things, blah,
0:47:08 blah.
0:47:12 But honestly, what happens that I think is so beautiful about this stuff is like, if
0:47:17 you can get the higher end folks to like that want to go and experiment at the edges here
0:47:22 that have the disposable income, they’re doing nothing but dropping the prices for the masses
0:47:24 because they have to ramp up production over time.
0:47:27 And it’s like, it’s funny, I’ve seen this happen so many times, even in drugs stuff
0:47:28 as well.
0:47:33 I think of rapatha as an alternative to cholesterol meds, and it wasn’t covered out of pocket.
0:47:37 It was like $2,500 a month was like ridiculous.
0:47:39 And now Amazon has it for 500.
0:47:40 That’s no insurance.
0:47:43 You know, it’s like, it just, it takes time for these things to come down and hit the
0:47:44 masses.
0:47:48 And with those VO2 max machines too, that you can get home now, I don’t know if you messed
0:47:49 around with those.
0:47:50 I just got one of those.
0:47:51 It’s insane.
0:47:52 It’s insane.
0:47:55 But it’s great because you say you don’t have to go to the clinic and you can save the
0:47:57 time and then eventually these would be less expensive for everyone.
0:47:58 Yeah.
0:48:02 I mean, we’ve seen it with Uber, right, Uber Black in the beginning was definitely kind
0:48:06 of a one percenter thing, but it subsidized the development of, I mean, that was jet travel
0:48:07 though as well.
0:48:09 UberX, Tesla, same thing.
0:48:11 I mean, there are many, many examples.
0:48:17 I would say I’ll get people some recommendations that are not expensive at all, which I’m equally
0:48:22 focused on, actually more focused on, like this is a nice bonus and I’m still experimenting
0:48:23 with it.
0:48:27 It seems to be very helpful, but I want to see longer term.
0:48:33 There is a chapter in, and I’ll see if I can share some of this.
0:48:35 I’ll put a link in the show notes for people.
0:48:37 I’ll share at least some of this.
0:48:43 There’s a chapter in the four hour body called reversing permanent injuries.
0:48:51 I will link to it for folks, but the exercises in that still deliver so much like the bang
0:48:56 for the buck, in doing some of the gray cook exercises, the chop and lift with cable machines,
0:49:02 the Turkish get up, even if you’re just doing the first portion of that on the ground for
0:49:03 shoulder health.
0:49:11 I mean, there’s so many benefits to a handful of exercises in terms of injury prevention.
0:49:14 You have to invest in that stuff as you get older.
0:49:19 If you want to be active, if you want to be athletic, your body just does not have the
0:49:24 elasticity and the regenerative ability that it used to.
0:49:28 That for instance, part of the reason I went back to that chapter is that the chop and
0:49:37 lift exercise have a slow under control rotational component that I felt was not dynamically,
0:49:44 but still compatible with getting me closer to developing or redeveloping the spinal engine
0:49:46 that Nsime and Yang talks about.
0:49:54 I was like, “Okay, look, let me take small safe steps towards incorporating some very
0:49:59 mild rotational exercises.”
0:50:00 That’s where I’m starting.
0:50:01 It feels good.
0:50:02 It feels great.
0:50:06 I’m doing it first thing in the morning, wake up, cold brew coffee right now and then Hawaiian
0:50:07 coffee is incredible.
0:50:13 This has been my reentry week after my 30, 40 days of abstinence.
0:50:17 Wake up immediately, have a cold brew and then go to the gym.
0:50:19 That’s a big shot.
0:50:21 Hawaiian coffee is no joke.
0:50:23 That’s some strong stuff.
0:50:24 It’s so good.
0:50:25 It’s delicious.
0:50:26 It’s one of my favorite coffee on the planet.
0:50:32 There’s something about how does dark and dense, and it feels very nutrient rich, antioxidant
0:50:33 rich to me.
0:50:35 It’s good stuff too.
0:50:36 Kona coffee is good.
0:50:37 All right.
0:50:39 So, we’re getting a few other predictions and fun things?
0:50:40 Yeah.
0:50:41 Yeah, let’s do it.
0:50:42 Okay.
0:50:43 So, we got tons.
0:50:44 We have several TED Talks.
0:50:45 So, you should …
0:50:46 Yeah.
0:50:47 So, I’ll just do …
0:50:48 Let a rapid fire.
0:50:49 Fun stuff here.
0:50:50 So, damn January.
0:50:51 I’m going to drink a six or less drinks a month.
0:50:52 Moving on to investments.
0:50:55 I like how you ran through that one.
0:50:59 Listen, the drinking thing, well, I actually am cutting back a ton.
0:51:00 You know what I’m not drinking tonight.
0:51:01 Look at that.
0:51:02 Look at that.
0:51:03 All right.
0:51:04 Baby steps.
0:51:05 Baby steps.
0:51:09 One of the things I’ve realized, especially as you get older, is that as life gets more
0:51:14 complex, there has to be this kind of continual, especially as you have kids and other things,
0:51:21 because continual reevaluating of your processes, like every year, how can you turn down the
0:51:24 knob and automate more things than you had the previous year?
0:51:25 Just from my own sanity.
0:51:27 Or eliminate more things too.
0:51:28 Yes.
0:51:29 Yes.
0:51:32 And so, in that theme, I’ve gotten really simple in investing front.
0:51:35 Like the vast majority of my exposure is at True Ventures, where we take on a lot of
0:51:36 risk.
0:51:37 That’s what we do for our day jobs.
0:51:39 I’m going to try a new app called Monarch.
0:51:43 It’s not new, but it’s been around for a while for tracking my finances and finally get a
0:51:45 budget under control starting January.
0:51:46 You’ve been using it, right?
0:51:47 For a bit?
0:51:48 Yeah, but he’s in it.
0:51:49 It’s great.
0:51:50 What do you like about it?
0:51:51 So, there’s a couple of things that I really like.
0:51:57 I like for holistic net worth, just where am I in the world.
0:51:59 There’s a bunch of tools out there.
0:52:00 Projection Lab is good.
0:52:01 Where am I in the world?
0:52:02 Meaning like…
0:52:03 Big picture.
0:52:04 What does my whole thing look like?
0:52:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:52:11 And so, I would say that Projection Lab is kind of looking where you’re spending in terms
0:52:15 of like, how soon can I retire and what does my retirement look like?
0:52:18 In planning for different scenarios, I think that’s probably the best app out there.
0:52:20 What was it called?
0:52:21 Projection Lab.
0:52:25 Co-Pilot has always been my favorite on mobile, but Monarch is now just…
0:52:31 It ties together all my accounts in a view that I think is more data rich, especially
0:52:33 on the budgeting side than Co-Pilot.
0:52:40 So, I’ve kind of started to move over to Monarch more full-time, which is great.
0:52:45 Those two, and then, gosh, I’m drawing a blank of the last one for the kind of like overview
0:52:46 of everything.
0:52:48 You’re going to kill me because it’s a fantastic app.
0:52:49 Pouring out premium?
0:52:50 What’s that?
0:52:51 Pouring out premium?
0:52:52 Exactly.
0:52:53 So, there’s Tim.
0:52:54 He’s back.
0:52:55 He’s back, everybody.
0:52:59 Now, I can’t even blame it on the booze.
0:53:00 Yeah, exactly.
0:53:02 Before you were like, “I’m married.”
0:53:04 Did you actually buy their premium?
0:53:05 No.
0:53:06 No, no, no.
0:53:10 You would answer it like, “Yeah, I’m not sure my public favorites.”
0:53:11 Yeah, exactly.
0:53:12 Pouring up.com/timtim.
0:53:13 20% off.
0:53:14 Kubera.
0:53:20 Kubera is my overview app that I think is the best for like tracking off kind of your
0:53:21 larger investments and like…
0:53:22 Why was the name?
0:53:23 No wonder you forgot it.
0:53:24 Kubera.
0:53:25 K-U-B-E-R-A.
0:53:26 I love Kubera.
0:53:29 I think it’s really high quality software.
0:53:30 Anyway, that’s that.
0:53:33 So, let me just go quickly down the investment front.
0:53:35 VTI, because it gives you global exposure.
0:53:36 I love that.
0:53:38 I get the total stock market index there.
0:53:39 It’s Vanguard.
0:53:41 It’s low cost.
0:53:45 It’s like, I want to have the majority of my stuff in there.
0:53:52 I have moved my crypto allocation to 10% of overall net worth from about 4% to 5%.
0:53:54 Oh, you increased your holdings.
0:53:55 I increased.
0:53:56 Now, okay.
0:53:58 Did you increase it or is that just reflective of an increase in value?
0:53:59 No.
0:54:00 I increased it.
0:54:01 You bought more.
0:54:02 Yes, I’ve been buying more for the last few months.
0:54:07 I had this feeling that Trump was going to win and I started buying more crypto when
0:54:14 I had that gut feeling just because I think that he’s going to push a massive crypto agenda.
0:54:19 And I believe that if this is probably in the more prediction side, I think in the next
0:54:22 couple of years, we’re going to see for the very first time the US government is going
0:54:25 to start adding crypto to our reserves.
0:54:27 We’ll treat it as a currency that we hold in our reserves.
0:54:30 And when that happens, it’s going to be nuts.
0:54:37 I think we’re going to hit my gut says 250,000 or more, a coin in the next couple of years.
0:54:39 So we’ll see where that goes.
0:54:43 Now, if somebody listens like Kevin’s just shilling his bags, what would you say to that?
0:54:45 I would say a lot of people have said this.
0:54:46 I don’t know.
0:54:47 I was talking about…
0:54:48 I’m not saying that.
0:54:49 I’m just saying.
0:54:50 No, no.
0:54:51 I get it.
0:54:52 But like, this isn’t…
0:54:53 Here’s the deal about shilling your bags.
0:54:54 I’m giving the PTSD five bags.
0:54:55 No, no, no.
0:54:56 But this is the real truth.
0:54:57 Okay.
0:55:01 Let’s go and take a look at how much Bitcoin traded today in terms of volume.
0:55:02 Okay.
0:55:08 So I love our podcast that we’re both going to syndicate this episode on our respective
0:55:14 feeds, but we’re not moving trillions of dollars of Bitcoin because I say it’s going to 250
0:55:15 Bitcoin.
0:55:20 I could go right now on Coinbase right now and say sell 20 million in Bitcoin, press
0:55:25 a button at market, and it would hardly even tick like a little tiny tick because there’s
0:55:27 so much volume.
0:55:30 No amount of shilling could move it in any meaningful way.
0:55:31 It just can’t happen.
0:55:36 Now, 10 years ago, you and I go on here talking about Bitcoin, and we just made ourselves
0:55:38 like 5 million bucks, but you know what I mean?
0:55:39 That’s not the case anymore.
0:55:41 It’s just too massive.
0:55:44 So anyway, there’s no such thing as shilling anymore, at least when it comes to Bitcoin.
0:55:48 Now, if we were talking about shitcoins, which are happening a lot right now, that’s the
0:55:49 stuff that’s just so stupid.
0:55:50 I don’t even get involved in.
0:55:52 So anyway, I hold Bitcoin.
0:55:56 I purposely hold it in an account that I can’t touch.
0:56:01 So I like this because Coinbase has a feature called custody where you can’t withdraw for
0:56:04 like three days, enterprise level, self-control.
0:56:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:06 It’s like a forced hold.
0:56:10 I like doing it, and I’ve now stopped trading it.
0:56:11 So I don’t even look at the price.
0:56:13 I’m like, it’s just part of my overall holdings.
0:56:16 I’m going to hold it for the next 50 plus years.
0:56:18 I want to hand my kids Bitcoin.
0:56:21 It’s gone from when do I sell it, like, ooh, is it too high?
0:56:22 Should I sell right now?
0:56:23 Those days are over.
0:56:25 Now, it’s just part of the portfolio.
0:56:27 So it goes, it’s digital assets.
0:56:28 It’s not going away.
0:56:33 You can’t put digital assets back in the box, like back in the tube or wherever the genie
0:56:34 comes out of.
0:56:35 Back in the tube.
0:56:36 Yeah.
0:56:39 You can’t put some genie back in the toothpaste tube.
0:56:40 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:45 So last thing I will say, now I do like to play, you know, do little one-off stock buys
0:56:46 every now and then.
0:56:50 I got very, really lucky because we called NVIDIA pretty early on your podcast before,
0:56:56 which was good, but I have enough friends that are large executives at major companies
0:57:02 in the tech arena that they are all talking about nuclear power.
0:57:07 And I don’t know how to play it, but my gut tells me over the next decade, there’s going
0:57:11 to be, I’m pretty bullish on the return of nuclear to the United States, just out of
0:57:15 our sheer capacity for power that we need for data centers on the AI side.
0:57:18 Like we need alternative forms of energy.
0:57:20 Especially if coal plants are shut down.
0:57:22 Well, I mean, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
0:57:23 I’m not saying all.
0:57:24 I’m not saying all.
0:57:27 If you want to play the broad basket and you’re thinking about this over the long term, and
0:57:32 I was speaking for myself, this is not investment advice, but I did find there’s a fund that
0:57:38 like holds like uranium manufacturers and some like nuclear plants and some of the companies
0:57:41 that are thinking about doing these new smaller plants.
0:57:44 And so it’s like a basket of public nuclear stocks right now, and they will add to it
0:57:46 as other nuclear companies go public.
0:57:50 And so like I’m not in the game of going and saying, Hey, this is the nuclear future.
0:57:52 It’s just one company, right?
0:57:56 Because that to me would be like, it seems too much like angel investing or something
0:57:57 else.
0:58:01 So anyway, the one I look at is the only one I could really find was NLR, which is the
0:58:07 Venek ETF trust uranium and nuclear basket of stocks.
0:58:10 It’s got a pretty high expense ratio, but like I’m doing a really small piece into it
0:58:13 just because I think over the next decade is going to outperform the S&P.
0:58:14 That’s all.
0:58:17 That’s all for fun on the kind of investment going into the new year.
0:58:18 And then I got a bunch of predictions.
0:58:19 Yeah.
0:58:20 There are some of the predictions up.
0:58:21 Okay.
0:58:25 So prediction number one, Bitcoin hits 250 US government starts adding into reserves.
0:58:26 You think that’s in 2025?
0:58:29 I think that is in the next two years.
0:58:31 So I’ll kick that out say within the next two years.
0:58:36 I think several AI companies next year struggle to raise capital and go under and I’m talking
0:58:40 some of the bigs that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars because I think what’s
0:58:44 going to happen is that I shouldn’t say the bigs, the big players that are in the
0:58:49 startup space now, I think the quote unquote bigs like the alphabet companies are just
0:58:52 going to run the table when it comes to most AI related things.
0:58:57 And if that’s the case, I kind of just want to hold those stocks.
0:59:00 Open AI, I’m still like, you know, they’re so intertwined with Microsoft, I think that
0:59:01 they’ll be fine.
0:59:03 Plus they’re working on other devices as well.
0:59:06 Speaking of which, one of my predictions, it will be that opening a launch is some type
0:59:11 of mobile device, maybe some type of smart headphones this coming year because they have
0:59:15 to be at the metal level, meaning like they have to be at the device level that we all
0:59:17 carry around.
0:59:21 And when you have press and hold Apple intelligence, just by holding on the side of your phone
0:59:26 now, and you have press and hold like, you know how you used to query like Siri or whatever.
0:59:29 And now you have that same going on with Jim and I with Google.
0:59:35 Now you’ve got AI at the phone level already carried by the big providers to get someone
0:59:40 to think like, oh, I got to go download chat GPT so I can go and switch it out as my assistant
0:59:42 and get all this and set up shortcuts and all that.
0:59:47 And it’s like, if it’s like 90% is good, people won’t care.
0:59:48 You know what I mean?
0:59:54 It’s like, I don’t care if I’m streaming Lord of the Rings off of freaking Hulu or Prime
0:59:57 or Apple TV, I just want to watch the movie, right?
1:00:00 And so it’s like, I think AI is going to be kind of like that where we’ll just like,
1:00:01 oh, I have an Apple phone.
1:00:02 So I use Apple intelligence.
1:00:03 Like that’s kind of.
1:00:04 Interesting.
1:00:05 Yeah.
1:00:06 So you think of like, where could they get the wedge in the door?
1:00:07 Right.
1:00:08 That sets interesting, right?
1:00:14 Because if they made a really good set of basically AirPod clones of some type.
1:00:17 But intelligent with AI built in, yeah, had that built in.
1:00:20 But basically, they’re not going to replace the iPhone, right?
1:00:24 They’re not going to replace good Android phones for people who already use those, but
1:00:28 they could replace wireless AirPods.
1:00:32 The only way I think they would have a chance at replacing, not replacing the iPhone, but
1:00:36 being a top seller would be that they do something.
1:00:42 So first principles oriented where it’s like a type of UI, UX that we just haven’t even
1:00:43 imagined yet.
1:00:46 I heard they were working with Johnny Ive on some of this stuff.
1:00:51 And so, you know, you got the former, like industrial designer, head of design for Apple
1:00:55 coming to the table with open AI saying, Hey, let’s go back to the drawing board and say,
1:01:00 if we had to build a phone today, would it be with a series of app icons on here or might
1:01:04 it be a different interface that makes us way more sexy, more fun?
1:01:10 Because like the future is not going to be, Hey, I’m going to go launch hotels.com app
1:01:15 and say, get me a room in Japan in two weeks, negotiate all the things, put in my credit
1:01:16 card credentials.
1:01:19 It’s going to be literally you open your AI and you say, Hey, can you get me a room for
1:01:22 Japan at this hotel in two weeks?
1:01:23 And it’ll be like, which room do you want?
1:01:24 These three things, blah, blah, blah.
1:01:27 And you like this room and it’s like, boom, it’s already got my information.
1:01:31 It’s all API is behind the scenes and it hands all that data over the exchange is done.
1:01:32 The payment is done.
1:01:37 And it’s just like, it’s finalized within 30 seconds versus the 15 minute thing.
1:01:43 I mean, I guess what someone like opening AI could do is something along the lines of
1:01:50 a fantasy I’ve had for a long time, which is like a very dumb phone that I remember last
1:01:54 year, almost a year ago, I was telling my friends, it’d be great to have a one button
1:02:01 phone and the one button phone at that time would have basically sent voice or routed
1:02:07 a phone call to a virtual assistant or someone who handles everything for me outside of like
1:02:08 Google Maps.
1:02:10 It’s like, all right, I have maps.
1:02:12 And then I have one request button for everything.
1:02:13 Right.
1:02:14 And that’s it.
1:02:20 Just to avoid the metastasized mess of having a thousand apps and so many people 1000 notifications
1:02:22 and all that bullshit.
1:02:28 And I know some very accomplished professionals who have stopped taking their iPhone into
1:02:34 their office, like they leave it in some type of locker or maybe they leave it someplace
1:02:39 safe at like the reception and they take their dumb phone into say the office where they’re
1:02:46 doing their real work and their family has that number right ringer is on for emergencies.
1:02:47 It has maps and that’s it.
1:02:49 Yeah, there’s nothing else.
1:02:54 So you couldn’t envision something that is effectively the one button phone, but it’s
1:02:58 using an AI system through this open AI 100 percent.
1:03:02 Yeah, I think you’re exactly right in that like there’s probably the two or three things
1:03:05 that you still need and it’s not Instagram.
1:03:07 It’s not a full suite of things.
1:03:12 It’s like, okay, I maybe I still need to call or hail an Uber at this corner and see when
1:03:13 it’s pulling up, right?
1:03:17 Like maps, maybe Uber and then music probably.
1:03:19 Yeah, music and like credit cards.
1:03:20 Like that’s right.
1:03:21 You don’t need anything else.
1:03:22 And like AI could serve up music.
1:03:25 I mean, I don’t know exactly how they would do it, but there’d be a way to do it.
1:03:26 They’ll have APIs with all that stuff.
1:03:29 They can just send APIs for everything.
1:03:33 And coming back to what we were saying earlier too, it’s like, okay, well, most people are
1:03:35 not going to replace their phone with that.
1:03:43 But could they get 100,000, 200,000 techies to overpay for that to do the basically field
1:03:45 testing for them?
1:03:50 Or they could 100% almost certainly as the technology kind of matures behind the scenes.
1:03:54 I mean, this is the playbook that I think is finally starting to work for meta where
1:03:58 they have these Ray-Ban glasses that it’s the first time I’ve seen a meta product where
1:04:03 I’ve said, okay, I mean, we’ve been talking about VR and AR for so long and how stupid
1:04:06 it is as long as this show has been around.
1:04:09 I know Adam Gazali still owes me a bottle of whiskey because he thought it was going
1:04:11 to win out, but that’s in your book.
1:04:12 Yeah.
1:04:17 So Ray-Bans finally is really starting to hit for meta in that you can walk up to people
1:04:21 now in Japan and get real-time translations, right?
1:04:23 And you don’t even look like you’re wearing anything.
1:04:24 Real-time doxing too.
1:04:30 You see the Harvard student who figured out how to use the Ray-Ban glasses to immediately
1:04:31 dox everyone.
1:04:33 You can be like, “Hey, are you so-and-so who researched so-and-so?”
1:04:35 They’re like, “Oh my God, how do you know?”
1:04:37 And it’s like, because they’re getting a terminal readout.
1:04:41 Yeah, you get the terminal readout totally, a little higher fidelity than those graphics
1:04:42 back then.
1:04:43 Yeah.
1:04:47 So a couple of things real quick on the prediction front and then I’m done, but I think Microsoft
1:04:51 releases an Android phone largely because they have the suite there.
1:04:55 They have Word, they have Excel, they have PowerPoint, they have Drive, they have all
1:04:57 the stuff, Outlook, you name it.
1:05:00 I think it’ll be Android-based and they have ChatGPT.
1:05:04 So I think on the open AI side, that will probably be integrated into the Microsoft
1:05:06 phone.
1:05:07 My gut tells me there’s a no-brainer for them.
1:05:12 So Microsoft would subsidize the development and all that of this hardware as opposed to
1:05:13 it.
1:05:14 But it’ll also be Android-based.
1:05:15 Okay.
1:05:16 It’s almost like getting a Google phone.
1:05:19 You know when you get a Google phone, you open it up and it’s got Gmail and Chrome and
1:05:20 everything baked in?
1:05:26 If it is Android-based, this is such a Luddite question, I should know the answer, but does
1:05:32 Gemini automatically come along for the ride, in which case that would be built-in competition
1:05:35 for open AI if they used an Android phone?
1:05:42 That’s a great question because I know that Google had some funky things back in the day.
1:05:47 If you wanted to use Android, you had to include certain types of Google services behind the
1:05:49 scenes even though it’s open source.
1:05:54 I don’t know to what extent and what you have to bundle, but I believe because if I look
1:05:57 at Samsung phones and they have their own browsers and they have their own email and
1:06:00 everything else and they’re based on Android, that they could do the swap here because Samsung
1:06:02 already does it on the AI side and everything else.
1:06:07 Lastly, I think we’ll get some type of confirmation of aliens.
1:06:12 One last thing which I think we’ll see is we’re going to see a very massive unlock and creativity
1:06:16 around music creation happening in the next couple of years.
1:06:20 The same way that we’re able to prompt and type in, “Show me a fox swimming underwater
1:06:25 grabbing an apple,” and now you can’t even tell it wasn’t shot, and it’s just being generated
1:06:32 these little four-case snippets, I think there’s going to be a way to prompt music creation
1:06:39 in a very fun and exciting explosion of creativity that will make an average consumer sound that
1:06:41 they can be a real producer for the first time.
1:06:45 Just because I’ve seen some of these early betas, and they’re a lot of fun.
1:06:47 I think that’s the next 12 months, maybe 18 max.
1:06:50 Yeah, I think 18 sounds about right.
1:06:52 You skipped over Damp January, which is fine.
1:06:53 Well, let that sit.
1:06:54 Yeah, it is.
1:06:55 Aliens.
1:06:57 So, tell me more about the aliens.
1:06:58 What the hell is going on in New Jersey?
1:07:01 Honestly, I just have been ignoring most of the news.
1:07:07 There’s been this, I feel, in the last three years, and I got a really awesome chance to
1:07:12 sit down with that Navy fighter pilot that saw some of these things, and there has been
1:07:17 so much inquiry now, and then there also is a new change in government, obviously, that’s
1:07:19 pushing for so much more transparency.
1:07:24 I think that when you have someone, and we don’t have to get into politics whether you
1:07:27 love them or hate them or anything else, but when you have someone like Elon Musk in there
1:07:34 being Elon, I can see this shaking free or at least the uncovering of whatever we know
1:07:41 in this domain being declassified, and that to me is just horribly scary/exciting at the
1:07:42 same time.
1:07:43 Yeah.
1:07:44 Who knows?
1:07:45 Crazy.
1:07:46 Yeah.
1:07:50 I mean, what are the odds that you would place, honestly, in my head, it’s like 90%, there’s
1:07:53 it like aliens out there, and that we know about it as a government.
1:07:56 I guess we haven’t talked about this because I don’t want to sound like a fucking crazy
1:08:04 person, but there was a point where this conversation was in the air enough, I was like, “Okay, let
1:08:11 me do a deep dive to see what we can say with any degree of certainty and what we can’t
1:08:18 say with any degree of certainty,” and looking at government reports, looking at various
1:08:27 first person testimony about the tic-tac and so on that are very widely cited, and trying
1:08:33 to account for the possibility that some of these people, not all of them and not necessarily
1:08:39 people involved tic-tac, may see some benefit or appeal like every human being on social
1:08:45 media to getting attention, so you have to add that in as a possible contributing factor.
1:08:53 What can we conclude based on the available data, and what seems to be the case if you’re
1:08:59 looking at UAPs, right, because it’s what unidentified aerial phenomena now, the rebrand
1:09:04 from UFO, so you don’t sound like someone wearing a tinfoil hat, and part of the reason
1:09:11 that it’s aerial phenomena as opposed to flying object is because the vast majority of these
1:09:19 can be explained by, say, high altitude weather balloons or meteorological phenomena that
1:09:27 cause a strange visual effect in the sky that is noticeable by humans from the ground, blah,
1:09:28 blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:09:34 There are like 95 plus percent can be accounted for by that, or 90 plus percent.
1:09:42 Then you have also a long government history of covering up test craft flights and so on
1:09:44 with reports of UFOs, right?
1:09:49 There’s a crash of some prototype of some type of weaponized technology or surveillance
1:09:55 technology, and especially many, many decades ago, they’re worried about that news getting
1:10:02 to our enemies/competitors overseas, so they drum up a misinformation campaign around it
1:10:03 being UFO.
1:10:04 Okay.
1:10:06 So there’s also a bunch of that.
1:10:10 Taking all of that into account, if you look at congressional testimony and a bunch of
1:10:16 other things, there do seem to be quite a few examples of documented phenomena often
1:10:23 recorded from multiple video sources that defy explanation.
1:10:30 They seem to defy explanation, and the descriptions of the behavior of these things seem to defy
1:10:35 any explanation using technology that is currently available to us.
1:10:43 But I would say that the idea that there are little green men in these ships strikes me
1:10:48 as kind of ridiculous unless they’re tourists who just are on safaris seeing what humans
1:10:56 are doing, because if they’re sufficiently advanced to do what some people report, these
1:11:03 craft doing, we’re already using drones for warfare and all sorts of things.
1:11:09 Why would they risk life and injury?
1:11:10 That’s why I don’t think it’s that.
1:11:11 I think it is tourism, dude.
1:11:12 You’re right.
1:11:13 It could be tourism.
1:11:17 And the ones at REC are the ones that you hear about in Africa when people go on safaris
1:11:20 and they have too many drinks and they just like fucking crash into a greenhouse or it’s
1:11:21 like getting eaten or whatever.
1:11:25 It’s like some of these aliens are coming down here and it has to be something like that.
1:11:30 We’ve had a few BEVs and they just fucking wreck their shit.
1:11:32 It’s like teenage alien to you guys.
1:11:33 Yeah.
1:11:34 Exactly.
1:11:35 Yeah.
1:11:36 Where’d Globlog go?
1:11:37 Oh, fuck.
1:11:38 Yeah.
1:11:39 It’s gone to earth again.
1:11:40 Did he drink?
1:11:41 Yeah.
1:11:42 You took a few.
1:11:43 Yeah.
1:11:44 I mean, maybe, maybe, right?
1:11:47 I do think there are many more questions than answers, of course, but actually, I’ll give
1:11:48 a shout out.
1:11:54 There is an app called Enigma, which runs machine learning on UAP sightings.
1:11:56 So if people want to check that out, it’s pretty interesting.
1:12:02 Of course, we’ve seen a huge spike in New Jersey over the last period of time, but that’s
1:12:05 worth checking out and I’m actually just going to double check.
1:12:08 Did you see Moment of Contact, by the way?
1:12:09 Nope.
1:12:10 Oh, you got to see this.
1:12:11 Yeah.
1:12:16 So Enigma is EnigmaLabs.io.
1:12:23 Make a note of this, Moment of Contact, it’s a Netflix documentary about this 1996 crash
1:12:30 in Brazil, and it’s like these citizens, dozens of them, saw not only the crash, but the
1:12:34 freaking aliens wandering around the neighborhood and shit after the crash.
1:12:38 And then all these military things came in.
1:12:39 It’s worth it.
1:12:40 It’s worth it.
1:12:41 It’s like ET, but in Brazil.
1:12:43 I put on an alien documentary like once a year.
1:12:44 Netflix knows me not.
1:12:45 Yeah.
1:12:46 It’s like, “Hey, you might like this.”
1:12:47 I’m like, “I might.”
1:12:52 JJ Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, they made some UFO miniseries.
1:12:53 I watched that on an airplane.
1:12:54 Did they?
1:12:55 That’s when you watch that kind of thing.
1:12:56 Yeah.
1:12:57 Yeah.
1:12:58 Exactly.
1:13:00 And so I watched this one and I was like, “Wow, holy shit.
1:13:01 It’s pretty compelling.”
1:13:06 Let me throw out a couple of alternate explanations, or supplemental explanations.
1:13:12 So one, when you see these reports, the vast majority of alien abduction reports are red
1:13:16 necks getting pulled up by a tractor beam and then having anal probes put in them.
1:13:19 And I’m just like, “Why is it that all these red necks are getting anal probed?”
1:13:21 Is it always anal probes?
1:13:24 There is a lot of probing typically involved.
1:13:25 But it is weird.
1:13:26 What’s going on there?
1:13:28 Why do they return them?
1:13:29 Take them.
1:13:30 I don’t know.
1:13:31 I don’t know.
1:13:36 Where I was going to go is the reports also of the appearance of these aliens.
1:13:41 So what you often see is the upside-down, tear-drop-shaped head with the big eyes, and it’s like, “Well,
1:13:42 look cross-culturally.
1:13:44 You see these reports everywhere.
1:13:46 Therefore, they must be real.”
1:13:54 Those types of entities often are cited in certain types of psychedelic drug experiences
1:13:55 also.
1:13:58 So what does that mean?
1:14:04 Are people having spontaneous drug-like experiences that are producing these visions?
1:14:12 Is it actually not that these particular alien creatures exist, but that there is some fundamental
1:14:17 production of this hallucination based on endogenous DMT release or something?
1:14:18 Who the fuck knows?
1:14:21 But I’m saying there could be a component of that.
1:14:29 The other one is, my thought is, if we take as a possibility that there are aliens from
1:14:37 God knows where, who are somehow getting to Earth by bending the time-space continuum
1:14:43 to get here from gazillions of light-years away somehow in these craft, then wouldn’t
1:14:55 it be equally plausible that these craft are sent by time-traveling humans, basically descendants
1:14:58 of us that are like, “Wow, we really fucked that up.
1:15:01 Let’s try to send back an intervention team.”
1:15:02 It sounds crazy.
1:15:07 I don’t think it’s any crazier than aliens figuring out how to get here from a gazillion
1:15:12 light-years away to go on safari and handle pro-rednecks.
1:15:14 It doesn’t strike me as any stranger.
1:15:17 You’ve heard that a lot of these sightings are around some of these nuclear facilities
1:15:20 as well, like the missile silos and stuff like that.
1:15:21 I have, yes.
1:15:25 What I’m doing right now is what I always try to do, and this is especially true with
1:15:26 things that I feel strongly about.
1:15:28 I’m like, “What else could explain this?
1:15:31 What are some possible alternate explanations?”
1:15:35 Particularly when I’m delving into some of the very weird edges of things that I’ve
1:15:40 done over the last 15, 20 years with respect to psychedelic assist therapies and so on,
1:15:42 like some very, very strange reports come back.
1:15:44 How do you cross-examine those?
1:15:49 One tool, and the toolkit is simply to say, “Let me try to strongman against whatever
1:15:52 my current explanation is.”
1:16:00 In the case of the nuclear sites, it seems like there’s a disproportionate number of
1:16:04 reports and videos and so on associated with these military sites.
1:16:11 However, you could also look at the data for brain tumor diagnoses.
1:16:15 If you were to look at the graph of something like that, and I’m making up this example,
1:16:21 but I think it’s probably true, it would look like there’s an explosion of brain cancer
1:16:28 that among the human populace, brain cancer is just on this crazy parabolic rise.
1:16:31 It’s probably just because our diagnostic tools have become better.
1:16:35 Our imaging tools are catching things earlier, they’re more sophisticated.
1:16:40 Similarly, at these nuclear sites or especially military sites with nuclear components, what
1:16:41 do they have?
1:16:46 They have a million times the surveillance of any other place.
1:16:49 It’s possible these things are flying around in the Alaskan tundra, but there’s nothing
1:16:51 there to capture them.
1:16:54 I think it’s certainly possible those are areas of interest.
1:17:02 To me, that would seem to lend weight to explanations of, I don’t know why aliens would be interested
1:17:09 in that, time-traveling humans, maybe, state actors, like China, oh, for sure, they’d be
1:17:10 very interested.
1:17:19 Soviet Union, for sure, but some of the propulsion and aeronautic behaviors of these craft do
1:17:24 not seem to reflect technology that’s available to any current state actor, including the
1:17:29 United States, which raises all sorts of questions, but there’s some very strange stuff out there.
1:17:36 It is a very, very, very small single-digit percentage of the total reported or documented
1:17:37 phenomena, but yeah, it’s strange.
1:17:39 That was my conclusion.
1:17:43 If we could ever find a hotspot and we get a chance to go out there, that would be fun.
1:17:46 I just get a group of people go out there and just do like a little UFO, what do you
1:17:47 mean?
1:17:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:17:49 There’s a lot of UFOs showing up, you know?
1:17:53 There are some of these places that are supposed to be better for viewing UFOs.
1:17:54 Yeah.
1:17:56 That would be fun, just get ready for like a week.
1:18:02 When I was a kid, I remember driving, my mom, babesitter at the time, I think my brother
1:18:06 was a baby, and we were driving, I remember exactly where we were, I’m not going to name
1:18:10 it, but I remember the exact road, and this kind of like cigar-shaped thing, so I went
1:18:13 whoop, and then just shot off.
1:18:17 We all saw it, and I was just like, what the fuck was that?
1:18:19 No idea, but we all saw the same thing.
1:18:21 Yeah, so who knows?
1:18:26 There was a fair amount of military testing out there, so maybe who knows.
1:18:27 That’s crazy.
1:18:28 Go figure, that’s awesome.
1:18:29 All right.
1:18:30 So that’s the aliens.
1:18:31 That’s all you got.
1:18:32 Or pseudo-aliens.
1:18:33 All right, that’s all you got.
1:18:36 So I’ll talk about a couple of things which are not related to predictions.
1:18:37 Maybe I have some predictions.
1:18:39 Maybe we’ll come out organically.
1:18:40 So you’re talking about protein.
1:18:44 I’ll mention a few things that might be of interest to folks.
1:18:50 So while I’ve been here, I’ve been on the go, I’ll also talk about why I seem so chill,
1:18:54 which I think I can nail pretty easily to one thing.
1:18:58 So the first, and this is a company I’m super heavily involved with, but I mean I’m involved
1:19:00 with it because I believe in it a lot.
1:19:05 So you’ve seen these venison sticks, these Axis Deer venison sticks, Maui Nui venison.
1:19:10 It’s the most nutrient dense red meat that you can get, and the most ethically harvested
1:19:12 in my opinion, red meat that you can get.
1:19:15 What’s interesting about this one, this is a brand new product.
1:19:16 I’ve been consuming two or three of these today.
1:19:23 It’s basically a multivitamin in a meat product because it has, this is called Peppered 10,
1:19:32 and it’s got 10% liver and heart in addition to the muscle, and it is incredible how much
1:19:34 nutrient density you get from that.
1:19:38 And then the other one, which I don’t actually have any official relationship with whatsoever,
1:19:44 but shout out to also Peter Tia, who we both know, who’s the chief science officer.
1:19:45 But this is David.
1:19:52 So these David bars have incredible protein per calorie ratios, 28 grams of protein, 150
1:19:53 calories.
1:19:58 So when I am traveling, especially when I’m traveling, this is basically the kit.
1:19:59 Yeah.
1:20:00 I do the David bars too.
1:20:01 They’re good.
1:20:04 One of them was a little too sweet for me, but the blueberry one’s really good.
1:20:05 Yeah.
1:20:09 Some of them are a little too sweet for my palate, but also there is a point where I’m
1:20:15 like, I cannot eat another venison stick because I eat so many of those per week.
1:20:19 And we’re in Maui, meaning my team and I are in Maui right now, because we wanted to
1:20:27 visit Maui Newly because Jake Muse is one of the most impressive company leaders and
1:20:32 operators I’ve ever seen, including all of my startups in tech and otherwise.
1:20:40 He’s so good at talent development, he’s so good at culture, and it’s a great example
1:20:42 of doing good through a for-profit.
1:20:48 And I just think that type of model is important to highlight because there is a lot of good
1:20:50 you can do through sort of market-driven solutions.
1:20:56 And in this case, what Maui Newly Venison does, people don’t know, Axis Deer were introduced,
1:21:02 they’re originally from India to Hawaii by King Kamehameha, the third or fifth, I can’t
1:21:03 recall exactly.
1:21:09 They have no natural predators and now there are like tens of thousands of these deer ravaging
1:21:10 the landscape.
1:21:17 And so they’re destroying the ecology and that has all sorts of downstream effects literally
1:21:24 and metaphorically, including destroying coral reefs because they produce a lot of erosion.
1:21:27 And it’s really alarming, it looks like wildfire effectively.
1:21:33 So what Maui Newly does is they harvest these deer, meaning they shoot them in the field
1:21:38 at night for lowest stress levels for the animals.
1:21:46 And it’s incredibly well run, their sort of efficiency ratio is as good as, say, slaughterhouses
1:21:50 for cattle, which are very stressful for the animals, right?
1:21:54 They’re factory farmed, then they’re put into shoots, they’re literally held in place and
1:21:57 then boom, like bolt in the head.
1:21:59 This for my money is infinitely more ethical.
1:22:06 I mean, the animal is wild and free, living its life until the very instant that it instantaneously
1:22:09 expires, then they package that and they sell it.
1:22:14 But what they also do, best way to go, yeah, well, let’s just go out of a Maui Newly field
1:22:18 or like gold, like they’ll just put us on the field at some point when we can no longer
1:22:21 harness our spinal engine.
1:22:25 It’s like, well, it’s time to put Kevin out to pasture, just give him a donut and a couple
1:22:26 of beer.
1:22:32 I’m sitting at a table and I’m like, Tim, why did you bring me to Maui Newy?
1:22:33 It’s so nice here.
1:22:34 Yeah, no, no, no.
1:22:35 Maui Newy retirement on.
1:22:36 You’re going to love it.
1:22:37 Exactly.
1:22:41 So what I did hear this trip, which I’d always wanted to do, but I’ve never done is I went
1:22:42 on a holoai.
1:22:48 And a holoai harvest is for the community here in Maui.
1:22:54 So the holoai food sharing program that was created in April 2020 as a response to food
1:22:59 insecurity in Hawaii, which had a lot of food security issues, emergency level caused by
1:23:00 the COVID lockdowns.
1:23:05 And what the Maui Newy team did is they completely sort of revamped everything so they could
1:23:11 first just drive venison by the tons straight to the food bank to donate it for communities.
1:23:17 And then after the devastating wildfires last year, they completely restructured their operations.
1:23:21 And I mean, I got the email sent to all investors and they’re like, hey, look guys, we are like
1:23:27 shifting our focus completely to helping our communities, which need food like this is
1:23:32 a disaster level crisis and change their business model.
1:23:39 And they have shared more than 120,000 pounds of venison, meaning donated since the 2023
1:23:40 fires.
1:23:41 It’s amazing.
1:23:44 So there are a lot of partners and other people who have helped them along the way.
1:23:49 But what I did is, and my team had the option of participating and they all opted in was
1:23:51 to go on a night harvest.
1:23:54 So their operation is like a special operation, vampire hour outing.
1:24:00 I mean, you go out, they have flur infrared cameras and scopes, they have display monitors,
1:24:07 they’re capturing information, which is like a current stop, no shot, current stop shot.
1:24:12 And they have like laser identifications for the rovers where the people who then go and
1:24:14 like retrieve the deer.
1:24:17 And I went through the butchering process, I wanted to get better at butchering.
1:24:22 So it’s like, I actually butchered, I don’t know, six or seven deer on this trip.
1:24:23 That’s amazing.
1:24:26 And did you take some meat with you or no?
1:24:27 Oh, of course.
1:24:28 Yeah.
1:24:29 I mean, the vast majority of that’s going to be donated.
1:24:35 But some of it I’m going to keep for myself and send to family members and so on.
1:24:39 But it can be very visually arresting.
1:24:44 It can be confronting for someone who’s used to getting food from a conveniently wrapped
1:24:47 plastic packaging from Whole Foods.
1:24:58 But I find it so grounding in the sense that it makes you fully aware of what is involved
1:25:01 to put food on your table if you choose to eat meat.
1:25:03 And I feel very unconflicted about it.
1:25:04 I know there’s something.
1:25:05 I do too.
1:25:06 You feel conflicted.
1:25:07 I don’t.
1:25:10 It’s funny you mentioned that because it’s like, I get if you’re a vegetarian or vegan
1:25:13 out there and you’re like, I don’t see eye to eye with anything that is being said right
1:25:14 now.
1:25:15 That totally makes sense to me.
1:25:20 But if you’re going and having a burger and like, I don’t know for me, if I’m eating
1:25:26 a burger and I can’t put down the animal that I ate it from, like that there’s a big disconnect
1:25:27 there.
1:25:28 Like it wasn’t just a couple of generations ago.
1:25:29 We were doing that.
1:25:30 You know what I mean?
1:25:33 And like now it’s been completely stripped out of our culture.
1:25:35 And you know, I don’t have the same amount of hunting experience that you did.
1:25:36 I went hunting with my dad once.
1:25:41 But you know, when I was, I’ve certainly done a shit ton of fishing and you know, it’s
1:25:44 not the easiest thing to put down a big ass salmon either.
1:25:48 But like, you know, you think it’s for its life and you make use of everything you can,
1:25:50 you know, and it’s, and it’s amazing.
1:25:51 Totally.
1:25:57 And they use everything, which is also deeply inspiring and they use everything from these
1:26:03 animals and in their effectively restoring an ecosystem, right.
1:26:10 They are feeding the local community and they’re providing the most nutrient dense.
1:26:11 Yes.
1:26:15 And they’re bringing back traditions of things that like, this idea that there’s a lot of
1:26:19 chefs that are doing this now where they call it like nose to tail, which is like, it’s
1:26:23 not about just getting the prime cuts and throwing everything else away and being wasteful.
1:26:27 It’s like cooking all of the different aspects and using all the different aspects of the
1:26:31 animal for either consumption or for product use or whatever it may be.
1:26:33 There’s no waste there or very little, you know.
1:26:39 And part of the reason they can do this is because they are harvesting these deer from
1:26:40 private land.
1:26:46 So to be clear, the reason that you buy farmed animals for food in the United States, because
1:26:47 that’s what you have to do.
1:26:48 You cannot buy game meat.
1:26:54 That’s illegal because you don’t want people poaching on public land and then selling meat,
1:27:00 which can lead to over killing and all sorts of issues with wildlife management cause imbalancing.
1:27:05 So the operation is incredibly unique in that respect.
1:27:09 And there are actually, and I don’t think it matters to out them here, like there are
1:27:15 a lot of say, vegans or vegetarians, there are I know vegans, this is going to sound
1:27:21 like a contradiction in terms, but who object to a lot of the animal husbandry practices,
1:27:24 especially factory farming and so on in the U S. So they don’t eat meat based on those
1:27:27 ethical grounds and they make an exception for Maui Nui.
1:27:29 It’s the only meat that they consume.
1:27:31 So anyway, that was this trip.
1:27:36 So my team got to ride around in these ATVs and see the displays and really see the whole
1:27:37 process.
1:27:40 How does that not surprise me that every single one of your team, like if you work for Tim
1:27:44 Ferris and you’re like, you’re like, Hey, we’re going on a hunt tonight.
1:27:47 Like is there one person that’s going to be like, I don’t know, you’re like, you’re
1:27:48 fucking fired.
1:27:50 No, I wouldn’t fire them.
1:27:51 I wouldn’t fire them.
1:27:52 I mean, it’s I’m kidding.
1:27:53 I’m kidding.
1:27:54 Yeah.
1:27:58 You know, it’s quite a bit to take it.
1:28:02 But what I wanted to do, and this is actually not my idea, this is the suggestion of one
1:28:03 of my employees.
1:28:10 They wanted first hand experience with one of the companies or nonprofits that I support.
1:28:13 And initially we thought about doing something with Amazon Conservation Team because I’ve
1:28:18 done a lot of work with them in Columbia and Suriname and other places.
1:28:23 But that would have involved two weeks off the grid and would have been very complicated
1:28:25 from a logistics perspective.
1:28:27 Maybe they’re talking about your psychedelic donations.
1:28:28 What was this?
1:28:32 Maybe they’re talking about your psychedelic research that you’ve been doing that.
1:28:36 I don’t think I feel comfortable sending my employees to the 17th dimension just yet.
1:28:38 But who knows?
1:28:40 So that’s what I’ve been up to.
1:28:47 And then on the calming side, you’re like a two on your typically like a nice toasty
1:28:50 seven or eight simmering seven, very chill.
1:28:51 Yeah.
1:28:57 And so I’d say chill, certainly Hawaii helps, certainly good sleep helps, exercise helps.
1:28:58 But…
1:28:59 Value.
1:29:03 You’re like I did three value before I started the show.
1:29:05 I’ve got the like it’s on this shoulder.
1:29:07 I’ve got my morphine drip on the other.
1:29:08 Yeah, exactly.
1:29:09 Your morphine patch.
1:29:10 No, it’s not morphine.
1:29:11 It’s not morphine.
1:29:12 It’s meditating twice a day.
1:29:13 Amazing.
1:29:14 Yeah.
1:29:20 And I’ve been doing it for probably a month now and I started it in part as a response
1:29:27 to a disappointing result from a booster of accelerated TMS.
1:29:34 So we spoke several shows ago about accelerated TMS and how my five day bout, let’s just call
1:29:41 it, or treatment with accelerated TMS had the greatest durable impact on my generalized
1:29:42 anxiety that I’ve ever experienced.
1:29:44 This includes psychedelic assist therapies.
1:29:50 The accelerated TMS, which is a noninvasive treatment using transcranial magnetic stimulation
1:29:54 over a five day period in this case, where you’re getting treated basically eight minutes
1:29:57 every hour on the hour for 10 hours a day.
1:29:58 It’s very involved.
1:30:01 Like when you’re doing it, that’s all you’re doing for effectively a week.
1:30:03 And it was phenomenal.
1:30:09 And I will almost certainly do it again, but five days is a lot and I wanted to see if
1:30:10 I could do it with less.
1:30:14 So first I tried a two day booster, I might have been a single day booster and it was
1:30:15 not enough.
1:30:16 I did nothing.
1:30:21 I went back and this is going to California and I did a three day booster.
1:30:22 Also not enough.
1:30:29 So I just wasted a lot of time, a lot of money trying to round down and it didn’t do anything.
1:30:31 And I found that very disheartening.
1:30:35 It just means I need to go back and do the five days and figure out the right cadence,
1:30:40 but it’s very expensive to do this and it’s very time consuming.
1:30:46 So I then was looking at different meditation options and this has since become a company
1:30:52 that I’m very heavily involved with, but the way Henry Schuchman, your man, who you initially
1:31:00 introduced me to and I’ve introduced my employees to the way, which is an app and the sessions,
1:31:02 you can make them longer or shorter.
1:31:07 I set them at 10 minutes and I was very skeptical because I did TM, you know, Transcendental
1:31:10 Meditation back in the day, which is 20 minutes twice a day.
1:31:15 And I assumed at 10 minutes like, yeah, it’ll be kind of relaxing, but it’s really not going
1:31:16 to have much of a cumulative effect.
1:31:23 And I was completely wrong doing 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes either before dinner
1:31:25 or before bed, but making it like brushing your teeth.
1:31:26 It’s a non-negotiable.
1:31:27 Right.
1:31:28 It’s just a non-negotiable.
1:31:32 You just do it like you do anything else that is non-negotiable.
1:31:40 And doing those 10 minutes twice a day has been incredible because it has effectively
1:31:48 gotten me to, I think, a similar level of lower generalized anxiety that I got from
1:31:55 spending 30 to 50 grand to do this experimental TMS therapy, which that is all inclusive,
1:31:56 right?
1:32:01 So that’s like the treatment, the hotels, the flights, so on and so forth.
1:32:02 It adds up.
1:32:03 And you can do it for less.
1:32:06 That was with a MAG Ventures device, which I think is quite interesting.
1:32:10 Brainsway is another one that’s very interesting and worked well for a lot of other people.
1:32:11 It doesn’t have to be that expensive.
1:32:16 But for me, I was like, look, let me pay for like the white glove ultra high touch best
1:32:17 option.
1:32:23 And if that doesn’t work for me, I’m going to conclude that I cannot recommend this
1:32:27 therapeutic intervention because this is as good as it gets.
1:32:33 And the idea that you can meditate 10 minutes a day with an app and people can check it
1:32:34 out.
1:32:36 Thewayapp.com is the app.
1:32:41 Henry Shookman has the most relaxing voice you’ll ever hear in your life.
1:32:47 And I think the app gives you 30 sessions for free so you can get a real flavor for
1:32:48 it.
1:32:49 It’s not like, oh, you get two chances.
1:32:52 And at least when I used it the first time, I didn’t have to use my credit card.
1:32:57 And by the way, even though I’m an investor, because I product test everything and love
1:33:02 giving feedback, as Kevin has seen, I’ve sent like a million looms to co-founders as
1:33:03 product feedback.
1:33:07 And I was like, no, I want to pay for it because if there’s a glitch in the system, I want
1:33:10 to know what the glitch is and I want to report it.
1:33:13 So I paid for it and you get 30.
1:33:16 So that’s either if you’re doing 10 minutes a day, that’s 30 days.
1:33:17 If you’re doing two a day, that’s two weeks.
1:33:21 It’s plenty of time to either notice or not notice in effect.
1:33:24 But what else would you say about about Henry?
1:33:29 I will say that what is a challenging thing that I’ll always navigate on the investment
1:33:33 stuff, although I love my new as well, I just ordered the sticks, the 10 sticks, it was
1:33:34 gonna be good.
1:33:35 They’re so good.
1:33:38 I’m not an investor there, but I do love their product is like the one thing that you won’t
1:33:42 see that I’ll tell you the behind the scenes is like, Tim, I was hitting you up and I was
1:33:46 like, oh dude, you know, you invested, but you hadn’t really given it a full deep dive
1:33:47 run.
1:33:48 Right.
1:33:51 And you were like, oh man, I don’t know, like I really have to like to your defense and
1:33:52 your credit.
1:33:56 And this shows you kind of like the behind the scenes of why Tim, I respect you so much
1:34:02 is like, you didn’t want to ever really kind of talk about this or really like overly
1:34:07 endorse it until you had really put it through your own personal rate or deep dive.
1:34:08 Yeah.
1:34:11 And then the first thing is I get on the phone call with the team because we do investor
1:34:15 updates with them or I do investor updates with them because I let their round every month.
1:34:20 And they’re like, yeah, Tim sent us like another 10 looms, like he’s got all his feedback.
1:34:23 He’s got all his feedback and he’s like, and they were quick to implement that stuff.
1:34:30 And they have been one of the fastest teams to update product, which is not to say they
1:34:32 have to take all my feedback or suggestions.
1:34:33 They certainly don’t.
1:34:40 It’s their product, but they have been so fast at fine tuning the product.
1:34:42 I’ve been really impressed.
1:34:43 Yeah.
1:34:44 Well, they’ve loved the feedback.
1:34:46 It’s all been super valid stuff.
1:34:48 So that’s, that’s awesome.
1:34:51 But anyway, what I would say about it is like, you know, I started studying with Henry during
1:34:55 before he had an app during the pandemic and, you know, this is what really got me into
1:34:56 Zen.
1:35:02 And I think one of the things that meditation struggles from is this race towards the bottom
1:35:07 in that there’s been a commercialization of meditation that says, Hey, do the two minute
1:35:11 meditation know the one minute meditation know the like, how can I just like productize
1:35:13 meditation and sell meditation?
1:35:18 And like, this is like a real Zen master teaching course that it’s for people that really you
1:35:23 may have tried calmer headspace, but you want to go deep, deep and really go for something
1:35:24 much bigger here.
1:35:32 That to me is the exciting promise of this app because it’s not just a hired pretty voice
1:35:33 on the thing.
1:35:38 It’s like an actual Zen master teaching you and it comes through in the knowledge transfer.
1:35:43 It’s just you can feel it, you know, and it’s also it’s skill development, right?
1:35:50 It’s not pleasant story de jure, where you’re just jumping around listening to different
1:35:52 things, which could be soothing.
1:35:53 Maybe it worked for some people.
1:35:58 It’s never really worked for me, particularly well, if I approach it that way.
1:36:07 This is skill development in a logical progression, which you notice like you recognize it, you
1:36:12 will recognize as you go through and maybe you’re going through a particular retreat that
1:36:17 is themed on hindrances, for instance, and then you’re doing a sit where you’re focusing
1:36:21 on a version and you can label it.
1:36:24 And then, for instance, I went out to dinner two nights later.
1:36:29 This was table of ladies who’d had a few too many drinks and they were cackling like fucking
1:36:30 crazy.
1:36:35 And normally I would just I would sit there just seething, right?
1:36:38 And then I’m not proud of saying this, but I would just be like, God damn it.
1:36:41 Like, you know, I’d want to exact some vigilante justice.
1:36:45 I’d be like, well, if nobody’s going to talk to her, like, how are they going to learn?
1:36:46 And like, nobody else is going to go over there.
1:36:51 So I have a moral obligation like be like, hey, ladies, and then if they’re like, hey,
1:36:55 pal, fuck yourself, then I’m going to be like all spun out and dysregulated sitting down
1:36:59 to like eat my cheesecake, like trembling and fury.
1:37:03 So I was like, oh, and it popped up and as soon as it popped up, I was like aversion.
1:37:05 You’re experiencing aversion.
1:37:10 And I used exactly the skill that I had practiced two days before in the meditation, and I was
1:37:14 like, boom, and it defuse the whole thing.
1:37:16 And that’s what you want.
1:37:20 Like you’re not meditating in an app just to feel good while you’re using the app.
1:37:22 How can you bring into everyday life?
1:37:26 And what I also like about it is it doesn’t let you skip.
1:37:30 You have to follow the program for good reason.
1:37:36 You don’t get to skip around indulging your whim and impatience.
1:37:37 You have to follow through.
1:37:43 So if you try to skip ahead, it’s like, hey, buddy, yeah, glad you’re excited, but sorry,
1:37:46 you’re not allowed to skip around because this program does X, Y, and Z.
1:37:48 So enjoy.
1:37:49 It’s good stuff.
1:37:51 It’s perfect time to use New Year’s, like get a New Year’s resolution.
1:37:54 This is like going to be, this is going to be a big one for me.
1:37:57 You know, it’s funny because I’m looking at the number of retreats because I’ve done
1:38:00 quite a few now and I’m like, oh, God, I don’t want this to end.
1:38:03 Like what am I going to do when, when I’m like through the entire program, I’m like
1:38:06 going to run out of Henry, but I have so much left.
1:38:07 That’s great.
1:38:08 Also, you’re going to come with me to a seven day retreat.
1:38:11 We got to make the happen this year, like an in-person one.
1:38:12 Yeah, I’m game.
1:38:13 We’ll do a five day one.
1:38:17 Look, I’m open to it as long as you don’t eat them mushrooms before you go.
1:38:18 Yeah.
1:38:22 Fast for six days and eat microdose while I’m doing it from probably overkill.
1:38:24 You probably have some PTSD from that one.
1:38:28 Oh, it was not a wise set of decisions.
1:38:30 There were, there were bad decisions were made on my part.
1:38:32 I’d be game to talk about that.
1:38:34 So let’s talk about actually New Year’s resolutions for a second.
1:38:35 Yeah.
1:38:36 This ties in.
1:38:40 I actually just did my past year review, which I do every year, I go through my calendar
1:38:41 kind of week by week.
1:38:42 I did that today.
1:38:48 I also looked forward to the next year and what I’ve already been doing over the last
1:38:51 month or two, and I’d encourage people to think about this.
1:38:55 I can, instead of thinking about New Year’s resolutions, think about New Year’s reservations.
1:38:56 New Year’s reservations.
1:38:57 What does that mean?
1:38:59 It means what are you putting in your calendar?
1:39:01 If it’s not in your calendar, it’s not real.
1:39:02 Right?
1:39:03 It’s like, okay.
1:39:06 I’m going to translate to this and this and this.
1:39:10 Hire a trainer or book a program or buy a membership.
1:39:12 Get time in your calendar.
1:39:13 Right?
1:39:14 So what are your New Year’s reservations?
1:39:20 And for me, the core of that is extended periods of time with close friends.
1:39:28 Those people who I know are going to give me energy or going to leave me feeling better
1:39:33 about my life and the world and optimistic.
1:39:35 Those are the relationships I want to invest in.
1:39:39 So I go through the year and, for instance, January, February, it’s like I’ve rented a
1:39:43 house and it’s stupidly expensive for me.
1:39:47 But I put together a Google spreadsheet and I’m inviting friends to come join.
1:39:48 I’ll see you late January.
1:39:50 I don’t know if you saw it on our list.
1:39:51 Yeah.
1:39:52 I’m going to buy some skis too.
1:39:53 I’m going to do some skiing.
1:39:54 Awesome.
1:39:55 Yeah.
1:39:56 It’s going to be fantastic.
1:39:58 And I’ll give you another example, and you’re invited.
1:40:00 I haven’t actually talked to anybody about this.
1:40:09 I did it on the slide, but next August I booked a week in the Rockies for Alpine survivalist
1:40:12 training with this amazing outdoorsman.
1:40:15 And I’m going to invite, you know, five to seven guys.
1:40:17 Dude, that sounds amazing.
1:40:18 Yeah.
1:40:20 So if you’re interested, I can tell you more about that.
1:40:21 It’s going to be incredible.
1:40:22 Yeah.
1:40:23 That sounds fantastic.
1:40:25 I pay a lot of attention to the details for this type of thing.
1:40:28 I’ve always loved that shit, you know, like with the Eagle Scout and being a Boy Scout.
1:40:32 Like I want to dig little tunnels that I can like sleep in and shit and the fucking ice
1:40:33 and shit.
1:40:34 Like I’m totally down.
1:40:37 So we’ll have adventures like that, and it doesn’t have to be a week long.
1:40:38 It could be a long weekend, right?
1:40:39 It could be.
1:40:40 Yeah.
1:40:44 Every year, some of my closest friends come and it depends on the cast of characters.
1:40:48 Like it’s not always the same people every year, but for like an annual reunion in the
1:40:50 summer of old friends.
1:40:54 And in this case, because I do get questions about this sometimes like, well, why isn’t
1:40:55 it a mixed group?
1:41:00 It’s not a mixed gender group because unfortunately in modern society, especially on the coasts
1:41:04 where people tend to get highfalutin and fancy and brainwash themselves into all sorts of
1:41:10 unproductive things, that there are very few socially acceptable male only activities or
1:41:15 groups and they’re just not many options outside of perhaps certain sports environments.
1:41:21 So since that is a rarity, people are by default going to be in mixed groups.
1:41:27 And I think women generally do a very good job and it’s socially acceptable to have female
1:41:30 only activities and groups and so on.
1:41:32 But a lot of men don’t have that.
1:41:35 Most of my friends don’t have that.
1:41:41 And that type of experience becomes less and less common as they get married and have kids
1:41:42 and so on.
1:41:46 So for me, I feel like the gift I can give is blocking out a few options for people over
1:41:51 the year.
1:41:54 Take them away from their wives for a week, you know what I’m saying?
1:41:55 Yeah.
1:41:56 It’s a gift you’re given.
1:41:57 Yeah, really good.
1:41:58 Really get some time.
1:41:59 And the kids and little break.
1:42:00 Yeah, yeah.
1:42:03 And then also it’s like, I think a lot of men in my experience, it’s like they don’t bond
1:42:06 necessarily and I know I’m painting with a broad brush and there are always exceptions
1:42:07 and so on.
1:42:10 But it’s like they don’t bond in the same way that women do in the sense that a lot
1:42:15 of guys just want to not talk and do shit together, right?
1:42:17 And there just aren’t many options for doing that.
1:42:22 And the beauty of saying setting this up and having reservations and it doesn’t only apply
1:42:23 to men, it applies to women too.
1:42:28 Like if you don’t cultivate and nourish those friendships, they will actually, they will
1:42:29 go away.
1:42:30 Yeah.
1:42:31 It’s interesting.
1:42:34 I have to convince my wife, Daria, to like do these social things with women because
1:42:36 it’s not your DNA to do that.
1:42:37 Yeah.
1:42:39 And so like tonight I was like, I’m going to record podcast, she’s like, okay, I’m going
1:42:40 out with my girlfriend.
1:42:41 I’m like, awesome.
1:42:42 Go do that.
1:42:43 Take some time.
1:42:44 Have a moment.
1:42:45 I’m going to massage.
1:42:48 Like, whatever you got to do, like to prep for the holidays, like you deserve it.
1:42:51 And it’s so important to have those breaks.
1:42:52 It’s important to have the breaks.
1:42:56 And I mean, this idea that, I can’t remember where I read this recently, but I was reading
1:43:02 a piece, this idea that you’re going to spend 24/7 together with your partner is a very
1:43:08 new idea, relatively speaking, and get everything and anything from your partner unreasonable.
1:43:09 That’s not going to work.
1:43:10 Yeah.
1:43:11 They’re everything.
1:43:15 You’re your best, your partner, your best person, you’re like, and he’s like, that doesn’t
1:43:16 work.
1:43:17 Yeah.
1:43:18 So I have a number of these blocked out for the year.
1:43:22 I try to have probably like four or five and they’re not all a week long and they’re
1:43:24 not all dedicated time.
1:43:29 For instance, like with the skiing, it’s like people are bringing their wives, people are
1:43:30 bringing their kids.
1:43:35 It’s like that’s a family or a couple adventure.
1:43:37 And then there are a few that are boys only.
1:43:42 So the New Year’s reservations is something I’ve done this now for at least five years,
1:43:45 maybe longer where it’s like, I’m blocking these things out.
1:43:46 They’re in the calendar.
1:43:47 They will not get crowded out by other things.
1:43:49 So that’s a big one for me.
1:43:50 That’s great.
1:43:57 And then other news, finished my knob num, which is no booze, no masturbating 30 day challenge,
1:44:00 which a lot of my readers and fans joined me on.
1:44:02 I also did no coffee.
1:44:05 So I was allowed to have tea, but I didn’t do coffee.
1:44:08 And it was a fantastic reset.
1:44:13 And in the last week, I’m not to get too TMI, but it’s like, okay, all of those things
1:44:14 have been reintroduced.
1:44:16 And I’m like, yeah, use one to town.
1:44:24 I really liked the cleansing of the dopamine palette and these can be addictive behaviors,
1:44:25 right?
1:44:26 All of them.
1:44:29 So I think there’s a very good chance that I’m going to be, I have to think about it a
1:44:33 little bit just because so many people will be visiting, but very, very either completely
1:44:35 dry for January.
1:44:40 Oh, you’re like, so many people are visiting, I just couldn’t have to like masturbate and
1:44:41 living.
1:44:44 I guess so many friends coming over.
1:44:47 Just gotta go down.
1:44:50 What kind of party is this?
1:44:51 I didn’t get the memo.
1:44:52 Yeah.
1:44:56 Tim’s back on, like just give him a few minutes like, you understand, he’s been depriving himself
1:44:58 like Tim ever is not in his bathroom.
1:44:59 Exactly.
1:45:00 Yeah.
1:45:02 So no, that’s the alcohol side.
1:45:08 So yeah, all that stuff, I think I might continue all of that for January, we’ll see.
1:45:11 But it really was a fantastic reset.
1:45:15 And I think it contributed to the lowered anxiety and kind of how chill I am right now.
1:45:16 Frankly.
1:45:17 Yeah.
1:45:20 And there was an interview, I think Peter Teeter did with a psychiatrist, female psychiatrist
1:45:25 who was saying when somebody comes in and say they’re a heavy cannabis user and they
1:45:29 use it for like a reducing anxiety and chronic pain or whatever.
1:45:32 Actually, in this case, it wouldn’t be chronic pain, it would be they’re using it for what
1:45:35 they believe to be reducing anxiety.
1:45:40 But they’ve developed this sort of hedonic adaptation to the cannabis consumption that
1:45:45 before she’ll prescribe other medications, before she’ll work on the talk therapy, she’ll
1:45:49 try to get them to abstain from say cannabis use for two to four weeks.
1:45:54 And lo and behold, in many cases, anxiety drops to the floor just by that intervention.
1:46:01 And that was partially what inspired me to do the 30 days of abstinence from these things
1:46:05 is to see, okay, what does it look like to reset the system?
1:46:06 And it’s great.
1:46:08 Nothing against those things in moderation.
1:46:13 But like, I think, for instance, with me and coffee, it’s like, if I’m allowed to unrestrain
1:46:18 to consume as much coffee as I want, I will consume a lot of coffee.
1:46:20 And it’s easy for me to over consume.
1:46:24 So I do occasionally, I mean, look, I’ve been loving my cold brew.
1:46:28 So maybe I’ll just limit it to one cup of coffee in the morning, which I can actually
1:46:32 do if I’m getting out of the house and getting on the mountain for a few hours, rather than
1:46:36 sitting at a coffee shop where it’s like, there’s a fixation with beverages and it’s
1:46:40 like, yeah, or if you’re in a restaurant, they just like a diner, they keep pouring
1:46:43 coffee, like, and before you know it, you’ve had five cups.
1:46:46 So anyway, some of the things on my mind, what else you got, Kevin, anything else you’d
1:46:47 like to add?
1:46:49 I’m in the same boat as you with the alcohol stuff.
1:46:53 It’s so funny how the last few years, if you go back, it’s been like, well, I’m going
1:46:56 to do X number of days and there’s been like this hard and fast rule and it was like, don’t
1:46:57 break it.
1:46:59 Just force yourself through it.
1:47:02 And it’s like one of the things I realized in the last few weeks, especially the holiday
1:47:08 parties and things that I’ve had, I’m like, I just have to understand there are going
1:47:11 to be moments when you go out and you have a couple drinks with friends.
1:47:18 But it has to be an occasion, not just a night at home where you’re like, oh, let’s pop a
1:47:20 bottle of wine and have some alcohol.
1:47:26 I would much rather it be about a special moment with a friend enjoying a good meal than
1:47:34 have it be just this constant thing that just makes you not hungover but just not your best
1:47:36 version of yourself.
1:47:41 Like you said about the anxiety stuff, a lot of that, you don’t even realize it because
1:47:47 you think that substance is actually reducing anxiety, but in reality, if it’s too many
1:47:53 times in a month, it’s depleting of all kinds of nutrients and B vitamins and it adds to
1:47:56 actually more anxiety by just partaking in it.
1:47:58 So it’s like this horrible thing.
1:47:59 It also fucks up your sleep, right?
1:48:02 So I mean, the big one is like, yeah, it’s going to reduce your anxiety for two to three
1:48:06 hours and then you’re going to feel like dog shit for 12.
1:48:11 And some people handle it better than others, but what I’ve found also is that by doubling
1:48:17 down on exercise, like exercise is the lead domino that tips over all of these other habits
1:48:18 more easily.
1:48:25 What I mean by that is, if I know I have a half day ski lesson that starts at 8 30 or
1:48:30 8 AM depends on the snowfall and then I have more training later that night.
1:48:33 If I have had two or three drinks tonight before, I’m going to be punished, right?
1:48:41 There are consequences and maybe it’s not feeling terrible, but my performance is terrible
1:48:42 and I hate losing.
1:48:43 I hate not improving.
1:48:47 I love improving and it’s a corrective mechanism.
1:48:54 If I don’t have that in place, I’m just sitting in front of a laptop and maybe the performance
1:48:55 drop isn’t as noticeable.
1:48:57 It’s not as obvious.
1:49:03 Then it’s harder for me to hold myself to that line, perhaps, but the more movement,
1:49:07 more exercise, the more everything else falls in line in my experience.
1:49:08 Agreed.
1:49:09 Yeah.
1:49:10 All right, man.
1:49:11 Well, I’m excited for 2025.
1:49:12 I got all sorts of great shit coming.
1:49:13 I’m super stoked.
1:49:14 And we’re going to hang, I’m presuming it’s South by.
1:49:15 Oh, yeah.
1:49:16 We’ll see you in January.
1:49:17 Of course.
1:49:18 Yeah.
1:49:21 And then we’re going to see each other in Jan and then got a lot of fun stuff coming
1:49:22 for South by.
1:49:26 Yeah, we’ll have to let people in on that at a later date in terms of when to come hang
1:49:27 with us.
1:49:29 But yeah, we’re going to do a little, we’ll do something.
1:49:32 We’ll do something on stage and something fun around that time.
1:49:36 Keep your eyes and ears peeled for news at some point in the near future, which should
1:49:37 be very exciting.
1:49:38 Sounds good.
1:49:40 Good to see you, buddy.
1:49:41 Yeah.
1:49:42 Happy New Year and happy holidays.
1:49:43 Give your family the best.
1:49:44 Yeah.
1:49:45 Same to you, man.
1:49:51 Happy New Years and for everybody listening, we’ll put links to stuff we mentioned in the
1:49:56 show notes, tim.log/podcast, and we’ll put everything in there.
1:50:02 And I’ll give one more rec, which is I’m totally unaffiliated with this.
1:50:08 But in addition to the way I’ve been listening to a recording, which was actually sent to
1:50:12 me by a friend who took the audio tapes and converted it into empty three, but there’s
1:50:14 an easier option because I found it on audible.
1:50:19 It’s called The Present Moment, a retreat on the practice of mindfulness by Thich Nhat
1:50:20 Hanh.
1:50:26 So Thich Nhat Hanh, I’ve been a fan of forever and his books had a huge impact on me.
1:50:28 But I’d never heard his voice.
1:50:29 I’d never heard his voice.
1:50:36 And this is a recorded retreat with guided meditations and so on from Thich Nhat Hanh.
1:50:39 And it is quite mesmerizing.
1:50:44 And I mean, he’s got the accent, which gives it the necessary level of exotic gravitas,
1:50:45 which always helps.
1:50:51 But I will say that the way sort of greased the groove for me to be more open to this.
1:50:55 And when I’ve just been laying in the bath after doing a bunch of activities after my
1:51:01 night armist or whatever, and I’m really sore, I will listen to these chapters from
1:51:02 The Present Moment.
1:51:04 Let me give one book recommendation as well.
1:51:09 I’m not affiliated with Fireaway by Bruce Grayson, MD.
1:51:10 It’s called After.
1:51:11 Have you heard of After?
1:51:14 I have, because I had Bruce Grayson on the podcast.
1:51:15 No way.
1:51:16 Yeah.
1:51:17 Yeah.
1:51:18 Holy shit, I got to go listen to that.
1:51:19 Was it good?
1:51:20 It was outstanding.
1:51:21 Yeah, he was really good.
1:51:22 From University of Virginia.
1:51:23 Yeah.
1:51:28 So essentially this book, the subtitle is, “A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences
1:51:30 Reveal About Life and Beyond.”
1:51:35 I am like halfway through it, and I just like, I can’t put it down, like it’s so good.
1:51:40 After/Dr. Grayson is a very credible researcher.
1:51:44 This guy is not like hand wavy woo woo guy in beads, no offense to beads, but you get
1:51:45 the idea.
1:51:50 He’s not like the archetype of some guy who’s got like a heavy dose of conspirituality and
1:51:52 can’t really sort fact from fiction.
1:51:57 This is a very credible researcher, and he is fascinating.
1:52:01 And I debated having him on the podcast or not for quite a long time, and then I realized,
1:52:02 what am I so afraid of?
1:52:12 I actually feel quite good about his documentation, the research he’s put out, and his observations
1:52:18 don’t ring as wildly speculative, and these are documented phenomena.
1:52:20 People have these experiences.
1:52:24 So let’s take a closer look at near-death experiences.
1:52:28 And I’m really glad I did it, really glad I did it, but I was hemming and hawing for
1:52:30 probably a year or two.
1:52:38 I was worried that it would open the door to criticism of not being sufficiently skeptical
1:52:43 or critically minded with guests, but he delivered what I hoped he would deliver, which is a
1:52:53 very sober, fascinating account of a well-reported phenomena that is poorly understood that he
1:52:59 has researched for several decades now at this point, which he became interested in quite
1:53:01 accidentally and reluctantly.
1:53:06 Oh my God, the story about how he became interested in it and what happened to him is just wild.
1:53:07 It’s bananas.
1:53:10 I won’t ruin it, but people check out the book or when the podcast came out a couple
1:53:11 years ago.
1:53:13 No, podcast came out like a few months ago.
1:53:14 Oh, geez.
1:53:15 I gotta check it.
1:53:16 Awesome.
1:53:17 Yeah, yeah.
1:53:18 It’s amazing.
1:53:19 That’s fun.
1:53:21 I’ll link to the Dr. Grayson episode as well for folks after.
1:53:23 Didn’t Daria also read that?
1:53:24 Yeah, that’s how I had it.
1:53:25 It was in my Audible library.
1:53:28 She said, “You gotta read this,” and then when you share an Audible library, you just
1:53:30 see what your partner’s buying.
1:53:31 Yeah, cool.
1:53:34 And so I just downloaded it, and yeah, it’s been awesome.
1:53:35 Dig it.
1:53:36 Awesome, brother.
1:53:38 Well, lovely to see you.
1:53:42 As always, give a hug to Dardar and the kiddos and Toasty for me.
1:53:43 We’ll do.
1:53:47 Please pet Molly for me and tell your parents I said hello.
1:53:48 I will.
1:53:49 And happy holidays, brother.
1:53:50 Love you.
1:53:51 And I’ll see you in Jan.
1:53:52 Yeah, love you too, buddy.
1:53:53 I’ll see you in January.
1:53:54 Happy holidays.
1:53:55 Happy holidays.
1:53:56 Hey, guys.
1:53:57 This is Tim again.
1:54:01 I have one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.
1:54:05 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
1:54:07 before the weekend?
1:54:10 Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super
1:54:13 short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:54:15 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
1:54:20 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve
1:54:24 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
1:54:26 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:54:32 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
1:54:36 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
1:54:42 of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field.
1:54:45 And then I test them and then I share them with you.
1:54:50 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you
1:54:52 head off for the weekend, something to think about.
1:55:00 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday,
1:55:02 drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
1:55:05 Thanks for listening.
1:55:09 The following quote is from one of the most legendary entrepreneurs and investors in
1:55:12 Silicon Valley, and here it goes.
1:55:18 This team executes at a level you rarely see even among the best technology companies.
1:55:21 That is from Peter Thiel about today’s sponsor, Ramp.
1:55:25 I’ve been hearing about these guys everywhere and there are good reasons for it.
1:55:30 Ramp is corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and
1:55:32 put money back in your pocket.
1:55:34 In fact, they’re already doing that across the board.
1:55:40 Ramp has already saved more than 25,000 customers, including other podcast sponsors like Shopify
1:55:45 and Aidsleep, more than 10 million hours and more than $1 billion through better financial
1:55:47 management of their corporate spending.
1:55:51 With Ramp you’re able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and
1:55:57 automate expense reporting, allowing you to close your books eight times faster on average.
1:56:01 Your employees will no longer spend hours upon hours submitting expense reports.
1:56:06 I mean, within companies, fast growing startups or otherwise, a lot of employees spend half
1:56:09 their time, it seems, trying to get all this stuff together.
1:56:10 No more.
1:56:11 Ramp saves you time and money.
1:56:16 You can get started, issue virtual and physical cards, and start making payments in less than
1:56:22 15 minutes, whether you have five employees or 5,000 employees, they’ve streamlined everything.
1:56:27 And businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% in the first year.
1:56:30 And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.
1:56:33 Just go to ramp.com/timp.
1:56:39 All spelled out, that’s ramp.com/timp, R-A-M-P.com/timp.
1:56:43 Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.
1:56:49 In the last handful of years, I’ve become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding
1:56:55 microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place.
1:56:58 One place I looked is in the kitchen.
1:57:02 Many people don’t realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be.
1:57:06 A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals
1:57:13 P-FAS, in other words, P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends
1:57:14 up in your body.
1:57:15 Teflon is a prime example of this.
1:57:20 It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using.
1:57:25 So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor, and the first thing I did was look
1:57:30 at the reviews of their products and said, “Send me one.”
1:57:33 And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
1:57:37 And the claim is that it’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating.
1:57:41 So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that will last forever.
1:57:42 I was very skeptical.
1:57:43 I was very busy.
1:57:44 So I said, “You know what?
1:57:46 I want to test this thing quickly.
1:57:47 It’s supposed to be nonstick.
1:57:48 It’s supposed to be durable.
1:57:49 I’m going to test it with two things.
1:57:55 I’m going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster
1:57:59 in anything that isn’t nonstick with the toxic coating.
1:58:03 And then I’m going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains
1:58:04 heat.”
1:58:12 And it worked perfectly in both cases, and I was frankly astonished how well it worked.
1:58:16 The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.
1:58:21 It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine.
1:58:23 And the design is really clever.
1:58:29 It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product.
1:58:32 It’s tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy duty scrubbing.
1:58:34 You can scrub the hell out of it.
1:58:39 You can use metal utensils, which is great, without losing any of its nonstick properties.
1:58:41 So stop cooking with toxic pans.
1:58:44 If they’re nonstick and you don’t know, they probably contain something bad.
1:58:47 Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
1:58:50 While you’re at it, you can look at their other high-performance offerings that are
1:58:55 toxin-free, like the Wonder of an Air Fryer, their Griddle Pan, and their Precision Engineer
1:58:56 German Steel Knives.
1:58:59 And right now, our place is having their holiday sale.
1:59:04 So you can save between 10% and 37% on your order now through January 12th.
1:59:08 The Titanium Always Pan Pro is at 30% off right now.
1:59:10 I use that thing all the time.
1:59:16 So head to fromourplace.com/tim to see why more than a million people have made the
1:59:18 switch to our place.
1:59:22 With their 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can shop with total
1:59:24 confidence.
1:59:29 With the Our Place Holiday Sale right now, check it out fromourplace.com/tim.
1:59:33 [MUSIC PLAYING]
1:59:43 [BLANK_AUDIO]
This time, we have a very special episode I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose. We cover 2025 predictions, AI, Bitcoin, aliens, fitness goals, and much, much more. Please enjoy!
Sponsors:
Ramp easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and more: https://Ramp.com/tim (Get $250 when you join Ramp)
Our Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “Forever Chemicals”: https://fromourplace.com/tim (Shop their Holiday Sale today!)
Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)
Timestamps:
[00:00] Start
[04:49] Aloha and happy holidays!
[07:35] Contemplating the societal impact of reality-bending AI.
[16:10] Meathead vs. holistic fitness.
[25:43] My current fitness priorities.
[28:00] The pros and cons of training to failure.
[37:09] Back pain causes and stem cell relief.
[42:17] Protein’s role in my regimen.
[43:20] LICUS (Low-Intensity Continuous Ultrasound Therapies).
[45:50] Early adoption leads to mainstream affordability.
[48:12] Inexpensive injury avoidance/reversal.
[50:45] Apps for tracking and planning finances.
[58:17] Bitcoin and other investment projections.
[59:03] AI mobile device predictions.
[01:06:07] AI’s place in the future of music creation.
[01:06:49] We’re not saying it’s aliens, but…
[01:18:31] David Bars, Maui Nui Venison, and ethical wild meat harvesting.
[01:27:29] Alternative field trips considered.
[01:28:32] From a simmering seven or eight to a chill two.
[01:30:40] Aversion-defusing meditation — this is The Way.
[01:37:48] Retreat!
[01:38:32] Making time for friendship bonding.
[01:43:50] NOBNOM complete. System reset.
[01:46:43] The benefits of taking a break from alcohol.
[01:49:08] A few reading recommendations.
[01:53:34] Parting thoughts.
*
For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors
Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.
For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.
Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.
Follow Tim:
Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss
Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss
YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss
Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss
Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.