0:00:03 When I told family members I’m studying Zen,
0:00:06 a huge red flag goes up in the religious community saying,
0:00:08 “That’s Buddhism. That’s praying to another God.”
0:00:11 Zen is absolutely not a religion.
0:00:14 What is true is that there’s so many definitions for what it might be.
0:00:17 The idea that Zen equates to calm,
0:00:19 as long as there’s a kind of positive association with it,
0:00:22 but what Zen really means is…
0:00:26 Walk me through your first moment of discovery.
0:00:29 And I was very sort of angry, rebellious kid, kind of difficult,
0:00:30 but thrown out of school.
0:00:35 Then when I was 19, I was on a beach and I was just studying a sunset.
0:00:37 It was very beautiful.
0:00:39 And then suddenly, what century is this?
0:00:41 I don’t have to be who I think I am.
0:00:43 It was mind-blowingly beautiful.
0:00:46 It felt like belonging to the whole universe.
0:00:49 It’s hard to describe, but I became.
0:00:56 So if you know me, I’m always trying out the latest and greatest stuff.
0:00:58 Always bouncing around, trying out different apps.
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0:01:13 I use Notion as my life dashboard.
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0:02:43 So I recently used a scanner that goes out there and looks and sees what information is available.
0:02:49 And no surprise, my phone number, my email, multiple email addresses, my physical address,
0:02:52 all the information was out there because of data breaches.
0:02:56 You hear about these data breaches like every single week now.
0:02:57 It’s crazy.
0:03:00 And I’m sure you’ve heard about the importance of freezing your credit reports.
0:03:02 Like that’s a no-brainer.
0:03:03 Of course, you have to do that.
0:03:09 But that’s not going to stop your personal data from being resold through something called data brokers.
0:03:15 Now, these are absolutely evil corporations that resell everyone’s data.
0:03:19 And when your data is out there and a hacker can just tap into it or someone that’s fishing,
0:03:21 you can just tap into it and grab it.
0:03:22 They can use this.
0:03:26 They can use it to call, say, your cell phone provider, try and do a SIM swap.
0:03:31 They can use that information to try and reset passwords or to facilitate phishing scams.
0:03:35 Not to mention, they can even use your home address and find photos of your house,
0:03:39 sometimes even the interiors on the MLS website.
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0:03:42 You have to remove that data.
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0:04:27 Protect yourself, protect your family, and a huge thank you to Delete Me for sponsoring the show.
0:04:29 Henry, it is so great to have you on the show.
0:04:32 Kevin, thank you very much indeed for having me here.
0:04:33 It’s great to be with you.
0:04:35 I have so many questions for you today.
0:04:41 A lot around Zen, living, death, life, like we’re going to get into a lot of it.
0:04:49 I want to start though with one thing that for me has always been, it’s been this problem
0:04:56 I have when I talk to Zen with other people where they see Zen, especially in America,
0:05:01 as something that is on almost every piece of commercial packaging.
0:05:07 Like this will create Zen in you, or this is like, you know, drink this energy relaxing
0:05:10 drink, you’re going to have like a Zen moment or something, right?
0:05:13 Like, why do you think that is?
0:05:17 Like, it’s such a confusing thing because I would love for you to think about why that’s
0:05:20 been co-opted in a way.
0:05:21 What is it about Zen?
0:05:26 And then actually, what is true Zen so that we can tell the difference because there’s
0:05:28 so many definitions for what it might be.
0:05:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, and the, that phrase Zen and the art of has been used on every
0:05:35 book.
0:05:36 That’s right.
0:05:38 Zen and the art of diaper changing.
0:05:39 Yes.
0:05:46 Look, first of all, I mean, it’s a three-letter word that is kind of beautiful.
0:05:47 Zen.
0:05:54 You know, Z-E-N, it’s just, it’s extraordinary to have a word like that that’s so beautiful,
0:05:59 so sure, and can convey a lot.
0:06:05 And it’s been, it entered the culture of America and the West in the fifties, basically, and
0:06:06 sixties.
0:06:07 Yeah.
0:06:15 And it became this emblem of a whole worldview, like that famous book, Zen and the Art of
0:06:16 Motorcycle Maintenance.
0:06:17 Yes.
0:06:18 You know?
0:06:19 Fantastic book.
0:06:20 It’s an incredible book.
0:06:21 Yeah.
0:06:26 You know, 50 years on or whatever it is, but it’s, it said so much.
0:06:30 It wasn’t just kind of a technique.
0:06:36 It was a whole view of life in the world that could get encapsulated in three letters, just
0:06:37 like that.
0:06:45 It just had tremendous sort of counter-cultural power and then mainstream sort of a way of
0:06:51 distilling philosophy and approach to life into just three letters.
0:06:58 I think that’s part of its power and why it has been co-opted in a lot of marketing and
0:06:59 stuff.
0:07:06 Personally, I don’t mind, because actually the idea that Zen equates to calm or something
0:07:07 like that.
0:07:08 Yeah.
0:07:10 Peacefulness, relaxation, a moment of Zen, you know.
0:07:11 Yeah.
0:07:12 That’s fine.
0:07:20 It’s a great way to the deeper meaning of the word and what it also connotes, just to
0:07:25 have, as long as there’s a kind of positive association with it, I think it’s a good
0:07:26 thing, basically.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:32 And so, but what, what it, I mean, you can, you can approach it in many ways, but what
0:07:41 then really means, you know, what it really connotes is a deep path of existential training
0:07:42 by existential training.
0:07:49 I mean, a way of coming to experience life in a different way, that if you do, it’s
0:07:56 a training, you know, and of course, for each of us, how it will sort of train us is a little
0:08:06 bit different, but it’s a path that medium to long term of coming to experience life
0:08:14 in a very different way, that’s so much richer and so much wider, where in any moment, you
0:08:20 can come back to here and now, and you’re right here and now, and also aware of something
0:08:21 bigger.
0:08:30 It’s as if this little tiny word can open up a much wider sense of an ordinary moment.
0:08:34 When you say training, take me back to through the lineage of this.
0:08:43 So it was Chen in China, and then that when it made its way over to Japan, changed the
0:08:46 word change to Zen to be the Japanese version of that word.
0:08:47 That’s right.
0:08:49 What was the training?
0:08:54 Because when I think of like, people talk about, I’ve heard people say, hey, I do headspace,
0:08:59 I practice Zen, like, you know, because they think of Zen as just relaxation, you know?
0:09:02 And so what is the training of Zen?
0:09:06 Like at its core, is it just meditation?
0:09:12 Is it a specific different flavor of meditation that sets itself apart from everything else?
0:09:13 Yeah, it’s a great question.
0:09:18 I mean, you can, again, it’s going to be a little bit of a multi-valent answer because
0:09:24 it can mean several kinds of training, one of which is just de-stressing.
0:09:30 Zen has always said from the early Chan days, actually, that there are different kinds of
0:09:37 Chan or Zen, meaning some people want it for just calming down, for regulating the nervous
0:09:38 system.
0:09:42 Some people want it for being, you know, more effective at work.
0:09:49 You can actually get more concentration, more power of focus, getting into flow states more
0:09:51 easily with work, you know?
0:09:53 It can be very good on that front.
0:10:04 But the deeper side of it goes beyond those is this real sort of study of who am I?
0:10:06 What is this experience I’m having right now?
0:10:12 Because we take so much for granted, you know, this is my body, I’m somewhere in the body,
0:10:20 I’m a me, I’m a nugget or core identity that I have that’s sort of in this body for a given
0:10:22 number of decades, I hope, you know?
0:10:26 And then it’s over or whatever our belief system might be.
0:10:33 But actually that formulation can be interrogated, can be studied.
0:10:38 So the deeper path of Zen is studying essentially what’s going on here.
0:10:44 You know, there’s consciousness, there’s a human mind, human body, human heart with its
0:10:45 feelings.
0:10:49 But what actually is this experience?
0:10:54 And you know, it’s a little subtle and maybe not so easy to get one’s head around it.
0:11:02 Because basically it’s saying we take for granted the experiences arising.
0:11:05 There’s consciousness and there’s experience.
0:11:08 But how come it’s arising?
0:11:09 What actually is it?
0:11:15 We get so sort of locked on to what we’re experiencing and managing all of that.
0:11:22 To take the step back, say, well, hold on, what is it to be experiencing at all?
0:11:26 Are you talking about contemplation of life and death?
0:11:27 That comes into it.
0:11:28 Because we can…
0:11:30 Like why does life exist?
0:11:34 Why was I gifted into this universe?
0:11:35 Exactly.
0:11:41 And along with that, what actually is it to be alive, you know, to be having conscious
0:11:47 experience is actually something that if you get sort of quiet enough through the practice
0:11:54 of meditation, you can study, you know, what is going on in any ordinary moment?
0:12:00 And the more we study it, the more we rest in it and can sort of look at it, we find
0:12:03 there’s something here that we’d overlooked.
0:12:09 Before we go into that, when you say the word study, that’s a little bit of a loaded term.
0:12:13 Because I think academically, people often think of like, well, there’s a book I should
0:12:14 read.
0:12:17 And if you’re a Christian, you study the Bible.
0:12:19 If you’re Mormon, it’s the Book of Mormon, like the Quran.
0:12:21 There’s many, many religious texts.
0:12:23 What is that for Zen?
0:12:25 Oh yeah, it’s totally different.
0:12:26 You know what I mean?
0:12:27 Yeah, yeah.
0:12:28 What we’re studying is experience.
0:12:29 But is there any books?
0:12:35 Is there any books that like are considered the kind of like, you know, the corpus of
0:12:41 data, the information that I need to know how to practice Zen, or is it, how is this
0:12:42 handed down?
0:12:47 How do I know that you’re practicing Zen versus what they were practicing in China?
0:12:48 Yeah.
0:12:49 Oh, so long ago.
0:12:50 Yeah.
0:12:51 Okay, that’s a great question.
0:12:55 There isn’t an equivalent in terms of, it’s laid out here, just read it and you’ll understand
0:12:56 it and then you’ll get it.
0:12:58 No, there isn’t that.
0:13:07 There are, what Zen has a real special thing it has is these things called koans.
0:13:12 And koans are little phrases that are apparently paradoxical.
0:13:14 They don’t make a lot of sense.
0:13:17 Like, what is the sound of one hand is a famous one.
0:13:18 Yeah.
0:13:21 You know the sound of two hands clapping, but do you know the sound of one hand?
0:13:27 And so that is an actual Zen koan, which is, when did that originate?
0:13:33 Yeah, that actually, yeah, they mostly the koans originated in China in the time of Chan,
0:13:34 which was…
0:13:35 How many years ago?
0:13:36 What have we talked about here?
0:13:37 All right, the more, more, thousands.
0:13:38 Okay.
0:13:45 I mean, there was this great period of Zen’s first great sort of flourishing was Tang Dynasty
0:13:52 China, which is 600 to 608 to 918 or something like that, something like that.
0:13:57 Maybe I got that slightly wrong, but 600 to 900 in China.
0:14:05 So 1400 to 1100 years ago, basically, so during that time, essentially, by the way, Zen is
0:14:06 a form of Buddhism.
0:14:07 Right.
0:14:09 I was going to say, what made the link there?
0:14:10 So was there a link from India?
0:14:11 Yeah, that totally is.
0:14:12 Okay.
0:14:16 Yeah, because there was a form of, there was a form of Buddhism in India.
0:14:21 This is according to Zen, Jhana Buddhism or Jhana Buddhism, which is a kind of, it is
0:14:28 actually a bona fide thing, Jhana practice, where you’re developing your power of essentially
0:14:31 developing flow states in meditation.
0:14:37 So that, according to Zen, is what sort of was brought from India to China.
0:14:42 When it was in China in that, and it was really flourishing, that process happened over 500
0:14:43 years.
0:14:47 Who is the master in China that was considered to be the one that adopted in China first?
0:14:51 Well, according to sort of legend or possibly some history, there was a figure called the
0:14:58 Bodhidharma, who came in the sixth century from India to China, was said to have lived
0:15:06 to the age of 150, and it’s somewhat legendary, no doubt, but there probably was an actual
0:15:12 master called Bodhidharma, who came, who did practice this deep meditation Buddhism, as
0:15:18 opposed to other kinds of Buddhism with other practices, like more sort of veneration or
0:15:22 worship or sacrifice or whatever, other kinds of.
0:15:24 Were there other going on at the same time?
0:15:27 Was this in the age of Confucius or before Confucius?
0:15:29 This is after that, after that.
0:15:33 Daoism was already well established in China.
0:15:40 And so it infused the form that Buddhism took in China, the Daoism did.
0:15:46 But the Koan thing arose in that early period of Zen, 600 to 900.
0:15:53 And essentially what happened is that masters or practitioners who have gone through the
0:15:59 training and that something’s happened to them and they’re living in a slightly different
0:16:05 state of mind from most of us, they would say things and do things that apparently didn’t
0:16:07 make sense.
0:16:12 But actually, if you could sort of get to their frame of mind, they did make sense.
0:16:19 So the Koan became a kind of entry point, that you could sit with this bizarre thing
0:16:25 somebody said, or sometimes a tiny little narrative or something they did, and you take
0:16:34 it into your meditation and in order for it to start to make sense to you, it can trigger
0:16:37 a shift in your own experience.
0:16:48 And then suddenly what seemed like jibberish, suddenly you have a minor or a major epiphany.
0:16:53 What parallels do you have in a non-enlightened person’s reality?
0:16:56 Because what you’re talking about is like, you’re saying there’s an awakening moment
0:17:02 where a shift happens in the mind and that idea of what you said there with the sound
0:17:06 of two hands, what is the sound of one hand, all of a sudden, if I had gone through that,
0:17:11 I’d be like, well, I know what that, I got it, is that more or less like, I would understand
0:17:12 it instantly?
0:17:18 Yeah, it’s like, it is actually like that, it’s beautiful, I mean, imagine an aha moment
0:17:22 when we suddenly, when suddenly we understand something.
0:17:25 The only thing I can think of is pre and post kids.
0:17:29 All my friends could tell me what it’s like to have a kid and the love that you will feel
0:17:30 for a child.
0:17:36 And that was just like, I know what love feels like and it was like, I could understand it
0:17:42 from a like, 10,000 feet kind of point of view, but when you have one and you’re holding
0:17:50 that little being, a chamber opens up in your heart that was always there, but is revealed
0:17:55 in a new, more compassionate and deeper way that you just can’t put into words.
0:17:56 That’s exactly right.
0:17:57 It’s very analogous.
0:17:58 Is that similar?
0:18:04 It’s very, very similar, because actually what happens in a moment of awakening, if
0:18:11 we call it that, is this shift where you discover something that had been going on all along
0:18:18 anyway, that you just hadn’t noticed and it actually always touches the human heart.
0:18:20 Our heart’s open.
0:18:22 It’s very analogous.
0:18:27 Is it a laughing type moment, because like some of the accounts I’ve heard of people
0:18:33 going into having this shift, they almost, some burst out laughing and I can imagine
0:18:37 in my head, and correct me if I’m wrong here because obviously I’ve not had this shift,
0:18:41 but it would seem like, it would be funny because it was so obvious that it was there
0:18:42 all along.
0:18:43 Yes.
0:18:44 It’s like, how did I forget this?
0:18:46 Oh, it’s how did I forget this?
0:18:47 Yes.
0:18:51 So it’s not a discovering, it’s a, you had forgotten it.
0:18:52 It feels like that.
0:18:57 It feels like you’re just rediscovering something that had been here all along, that had been
0:18:58 long forgotten.
0:19:03 Forgotten in the previous life, forgotten since childhood.
0:19:04 I don’t know.
0:19:06 I would guess since early childhood.
0:19:14 Because I remember being a child and having these moments of just like, just ease and
0:19:17 just, there was no care, there was no expectations.
0:19:20 There was like, it was very present.
0:19:23 I didn’t care what was going to happen tomorrow and I didn’t care what happened yesterday.
0:19:28 It was all about like, and I know that’s not the same, but is there a bit of my, my feeling
0:19:29 on something?
0:19:30 Yeah.
0:19:31 Yeah.
0:19:32 It’s totally on it.
0:19:36 I mean, what, let me see if I can put it another way.
0:19:41 We’re, we’re living in a certain way and our, you know, as we grow up through childhood
0:19:48 into adulthood, we get very conditioned to be thinking ahead and looking back to learn
0:19:53 from the past and thinking ahead of the future and planning and sort of being on a path,
0:20:00 a track, you know, and this would be a sudden moment when all that drops and we, we just
0:20:04 enter into this moment very, very vividly.
0:20:09 And so it’s got that in common with childhood presence.
0:20:12 And sometimes it’s, it’s even wider and sort of deeper.
0:20:20 We find that the whole of our life had been held by something much greater that we’ve
0:20:24 always been part of, which seems to, you know, feel like it’s, sometimes you can feel like
0:20:28 it’s the whole cosmos, you know, is present right here now.
0:20:34 And sometimes it’s less cosmic and just more like, wow, I’m kind of part of this very room
0:20:35 that I’m in.
0:20:42 It’s like the separation between me and my surroundings drops away and it’s, everything’s
0:20:46 here and joined in one kind of substance.
0:20:52 And it’s a beautiful discovery and it’s not a, whether it’s a discovery or the recovery
0:20:56 of something long forgotten, in a way, it doesn’t matter because it hasn’t been present
0:20:57 to me.
0:21:01 And when it suddenly is, it changes everything.
0:21:02 It really changes everything.
0:21:04 And is this what’s called enlightenment?
0:21:09 Well, I don’t know whether the word enlightenment or awakening, I don’t know.
0:21:14 The western mind put the word enlightenment on it, but the, actually the word enlightenment
0:21:21 has different meanings in the West, you know, historically, it’s a movement of, of political
0:21:25 and science rebirth and stuff in the 17th, 18th centuries.
0:21:29 But this is, so we use that word a lot in the West.
0:21:36 I know the original Sanskrit word Bodhi, which the word Buddha comes from as well, is to
0:21:38 do with awakening.
0:21:45 It’s like waking up from a dream and, and waking into a greater reality, you know, it’s very
0:21:46 beautiful.
0:21:53 And, and the thing about it is it’s not, it’s real, that’s the most important thing.
0:22:00 It’s not that we’re sort of distorting our minds into doing something unusual, you know,
0:22:06 or going into some special place or even going into an altered state.
0:22:07 I don’t think so.
0:22:11 It’s actually, we’ve actually been living in a kind of altered state and we’re, and
0:22:15 which has been a tightening and a constricting of our experience.
0:22:19 And that releases, relaxes and releases.
0:22:24 And then we’re, we’re actually back in a more real experience, but we just got so conditioned
0:22:28 to, to living in a narrower sense of things.
0:22:32 And so we’re relaxing into a much broader sense of things.
0:22:37 And then when, so coming back to the koan, when, when we’re sitting with a koan, it’s,
0:22:42 it’s, we’ll use our minds to try to unravel this crazy riddle and we get nowhere.
0:22:48 And it eventually at some point, the mind just gives up, really gives up.
0:22:53 And, and then often it’s a, it’s even some despair that I’ll God, I’ll never get this.
0:22:54 I’ll never get this.
0:22:55 I’m giving it up.
0:23:01 You know, two days later, somebody might, having given up like that, suddenly they’re,
0:23:06 you know, they’re in a supermarket aisle, reaching for the frozen peas.
0:23:14 And suddenly they just get hit by this, oh, I’m part of everything or, you know, as pop
0:23:15 this changes shift.
0:23:16 Yeah.
0:23:17 This happens.
0:23:22 But that will be, you say giving up, we shouldn’t go a little bit into koans and how they apply
0:23:27 to practice because it says, so far we’ve mentioned, there’s these riddles.
0:23:34 If someone is going to practice legitimate Zen and take up koan study, yeah, when you
0:23:39 say back to your example of, and we can introduce move, you would like as well, but you’re back
0:23:43 to your example of the, what is the sound of one hand?
0:23:44 What are you practicing?
0:23:47 Like, like, like it’s like, yeah, I have this printed on the piece.
0:23:48 This is paper, kiss into one hand.
0:23:49 Okay.
0:23:50 Now what do I do?
0:23:51 Yeah.
0:23:52 Good question.
0:23:53 And then there’s a book.
0:23:54 We should tell the people there is a book of these koans.
0:23:55 Five hundred plus of them.
0:23:56 Is there more than that?
0:23:57 Like there’s several books.
0:23:58 Yeah.
0:23:59 Several great collections.
0:24:00 Yeah.
0:24:05 Like the blue cliff record is one and the gate list gate is another, for example, they’re
0:24:11 from Tang, mostly from actually just after the Tang Dynasty in China, they got collected
0:24:13 around a thousand years ago.
0:24:15 But yeah, good question.
0:24:21 What really has to happen is that somebody is already meditating, they already have a
0:24:22 regular meditation practice.
0:24:26 And that’s just following the breath, is that like classic, like the way we think of meditation
0:24:34 when we’ve taken any handful of apps, it’s like I’m just, the goal of what I’m supposed
0:24:42 to be doing is to focus on a singular point, follow that breath, and when a thought enters
0:24:47 the mind, recognize it, let it go, don’t take offense to it, and move back to the focusing
0:24:48 on the breath.
0:24:50 Is that what you consider to be a basic meditation practice?
0:24:53 Yes, but there’s others that are also basic.
0:24:54 Okay.
0:24:59 And broadly speaking, there’s two big sort of categories of meditation.
0:25:05 One is like that, focus attention on a single given object, for example, the breath.
0:25:13 But another whole cap of early, and in long-term meditation too, is open awareness.
0:25:17 And Zen has that as well, by the way, not only the koan path.
0:25:22 Open awareness means you’re actually not trying to focus on any one thing, you’re trying to
0:25:29 be wide open, and instead just be aware of whatever is uppermost in attention.
0:25:30 What’s that called?
0:25:32 Shikantasa, or just sitting.
0:25:33 Okay.
0:25:34 Just sitting.
0:25:40 And other traditions have it, not only Zen, where you just say you’re just sort of resting
0:25:45 in awareness, and you might notice the breath, you might notice the sound, you might notice
0:25:51 your foot, you might notice your seat, then a thought comes, and you’re just open to any
0:25:52 of it.
0:25:57 And you’re not trying actually to guide your attention, you’re just sort of resting open.
0:25:59 This is sort of being like a mirror.
0:26:05 So that’s also a foundational and long-term path of practice.
0:26:10 So, if you’re sitting with a koan, what would happen, or if you pick up a koan, you want
0:26:17 to try practicing with a koan, you’re doing either of those kinds of practices.
0:26:22 And so, you got your piece of paper, it says, “What is the sound of one hand?”
0:26:23 What does that even mean?
0:26:24 I don’t know.
0:26:25 Right.
0:26:28 So, we just try saying it in our minds, “What is the sound of one hand?”
0:26:35 And then we come back to our practice, whichever it may be, and we just sort of feel, it does
0:26:40 saying that phrase in my mind, “Have any effect.”
0:26:45 Like, is there some, is there anything, how, what’s the spacing look like there?
0:26:52 So if you said that, and then you go to feel it, is it a repetitive, almost like a mantra
0:26:53 type?
0:26:57 Because when I think of mantra-based meditation, a transcendental meditation, they’ll give
0:27:03 you a word and they say, “This word is to be repeated over and over and over again.”
0:27:06 And if you’re doing a proper 25 minutes said, you probably said it hundreds of times.
0:27:07 Yes.
0:27:09 How does that differ with koan-based study?
0:27:14 Is it a saying it, reflection period of x number of seconds, and then saying it again,
0:27:15 what’s…
0:27:20 There are different ways, we’re getting into the real weeds here, it’s great.
0:27:28 So you can do it on every exhale, that’s one common method is just repeat the phrase
0:27:29 on every exhale.
0:27:35 And by the way, what is the sound of one hand is not by any means the only early one.
0:27:37 You could ask, “Who am I?”
0:27:38 Who am I?
0:27:39 I like that one better.
0:27:40 It’s probably a better beginning.
0:27:41 Would you say this about beginners?
0:27:42 I think it is, actually.
0:27:47 Although I’ve known people sit with, there’s some surgeon who was doing, a military surgeon
0:27:56 who was doing some practice loosely with me, who came out of the operating theatre, he’d
0:28:00 been sitting with, what is the sound of one hand, and all of a sudden, he just exploded
0:28:04 in a huge experience of awakening through the sound of one hand.
0:28:06 So it can happen.
0:28:12 But typically, “Who am I?” is a bit easier because you can kind of…
0:28:16 It’s not so obviously nonsensical kind of thing.
0:28:19 But there are others too like, “Who hears?
0:28:20 Who hears?
0:28:21 Let me just repeat it.”
0:28:25 So can be on every exhale, you repeat it.
0:28:31 Can also be, you say it, this is all in your mind, silently in the mind.
0:28:34 You hear it in your mind, “Who hears?”
0:28:36 And then you just wait.
0:28:43 And then a few seconds later, or 10 or 20 seconds later, you repeat it, and you see.
0:28:50 Where it can be, you just drop in it and sort of forget about it and do maybe breath practice
0:28:55 or maybe just the open awareness practice.
0:29:01 And maybe it comes back to you in five or 10 minutes, you just repeat it again.
0:29:06 But you don’t really, you don’t have to do the repetitive use of it.
0:29:09 But that is also a common method too.
0:29:11 You mentioned “moo” actually.
0:29:18 So there’s a common, one of the sort of common early co-uns to use.
0:29:22 Arguably this would probably be the most non-commercial famous.
0:29:25 Like the sound of one hammer is probably the most commercial famous in terms of, most
0:29:27 people have heard of that.
0:29:33 But you would say in terms of, correct me if I’m wrong here obviously, you’re the experts.
0:29:38 In terms of beginners getting started, is it typically the go-to?
0:29:40 Yes, it usually is.
0:29:41 Normally.
0:29:44 Although that would depend a little bit on which lineage and which school, but it very
0:29:45 often is.
0:29:53 But that would only be when somebody has got a steady practice and has clearly got a curiosity
0:30:01 and feels that this is, they’ve got a curiosity about examining the state of experience, what
0:30:02 it is.
0:30:03 What do they want?
0:30:07 When someone, what’s the common thread you see amongst your students?
0:30:08 What curiosity?
0:30:09 What are they looking for?
0:30:12 Can I speak for me?
0:30:17 I’ll just be really transparent and vulnerable for a minute.
0:30:27 I don’t know where I’m going and my dad has passed away and I miss him severely.
0:30:34 And I want to know what happens after debt and I have a fear of debt.
0:30:38 Like internally I feel like it’s a scary thing.
0:30:43 And so, is that common for people?
0:30:46 Does people come into this?
0:30:51 Is that a curiosity that is valid to have?
0:30:56 What are the common curiosities that people approach you with and what can Zinn solve
0:30:57 for them?
0:31:01 Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing to share, thank you.
0:31:05 So you’ve probably heard me mention on the podcast, in the past or other podcasts, there
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0:31:16 The sauna is huge.
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0:33:07 It’s absolutely probably the most common.
0:33:11 It’s like, “Well, what’s going to happen?
0:33:14 I’m in this life, and suddenly I’m not going to.”
0:33:16 I know that’s going to happen.
0:33:17 And I’ve lost someone.
0:33:20 I’m in love.
0:33:22 How do I process it?
0:33:24 What does it mean?
0:33:29 So that’s actually what Zen is for.
0:33:39 It’s really for revelation or gentle, it’s sort of exposing us to more dimensions of
0:33:46 what life actually is to getting, it’s as if we’ve had a two-dimensional view and we
0:33:48 can have a three-dimensional view.
0:33:53 Well, I actually think we’ve got a three-dimensional view, but we can have a four-dimensional view
0:33:55 or a five-dimensional view.
0:34:00 We can literally open up to sensing another dimension at least.
0:34:01 In real time.
0:34:02 In real time.
0:34:03 Right now.
0:34:04 Like you feel this right now.
0:34:05 Yeah.
0:34:06 There’s obviously a great space here.
0:34:07 Right now.
0:34:08 It’s not.
0:34:09 You know, we’re talking to each other.
0:34:10 Why do we create space?
0:34:13 I think it’s a great space of love.
0:34:22 And that love holds both life and death and it makes death okay because it shows us that
0:34:24 love is bigger than we think it is.
0:34:26 Life is bigger than we think it is.
0:34:32 You know, Zen, they talk about this awakening experience is finding your own original nature
0:34:36 or finding your seeing your own original face.
0:34:42 And it’s discovering something outside time that’s present always.
0:34:46 And some people say it’s awareness itself.
0:34:50 Some will say, “Eh, maybe, but maybe it’s space.”
0:34:53 Some will say, “Not sure, maybe it’s nothing.
0:34:54 Maybe it’s empty.”
0:34:57 But all of them are good.
0:35:06 It’s finding this extra dimension that puts our whole life as we know it in a different
0:35:07 perspective.
0:35:11 And from that different perspective, you know, our hearts are open.
0:35:18 We feel suffering readily and we sort of don’t mind because our heart makes our hearts more
0:35:22 open and our hearts are supposed to feel they’re not supposed to be closed.
0:35:25 Of course, they often get that way because we get hurt.
0:35:26 We get afraid.
0:35:30 We’re afraid of our existential situation.
0:35:36 But this discovery and it can come in little glimpses and different time does not always
0:35:38 one earth-shattering revelation.
0:35:41 No, it doesn’t need to be.
0:35:47 All hits that soften and open our hearts and we start to sense, “Ah, there’s something
0:35:51 more here, no.”
0:35:53 Not in some future time, but right now.
0:35:55 And we’re being held.
0:36:01 It’s like being held by a greater reality and it’s a beautiful thing to sense.
0:36:08 And some of it we can put into words and some of it we just can’t, but we know it.
0:36:10 But it’s kind of a different kind of knowing.
0:36:14 It’s not the kind of knowing you can get from words on paper.
0:36:15 It’s not book knowledge.
0:36:17 It’s not book knowledge.
0:36:25 And in a way, it puts all the things we can know through book knowledge in another perspective,
0:36:33 too, that there’s this wider sense of belonging and of participating in sort of in the life
0:36:40 of the universe is really what it feels like or at least the life of this world, where there’s
0:36:43 something bigger here.
0:36:49 And I just love it because I’ve been on the trail of it since I was a kid, actually, for
0:36:50 various reasons.
0:36:55 Walk me through your first moment of discovery.
0:36:56 Yeah.
0:36:57 Yeah.
0:37:04 I mean, I had a, I was, I’ve taught, I’ve written about this, you know, I don’t want to,
0:37:05 I was lucky.
0:37:07 I got lucky in a certain sense.
0:37:14 I’d had actually rather a difficult childhood with a severe skin affliction and, you know,
0:37:21 and so on and a difficult parental divorce, very difficult, actually.
0:37:26 And then when I was, and I was very angry, rebellious kid, kind of difficult, got thrown
0:37:29 out of school and stuff happened.
0:37:37 Then when I was 19, I was, I’d gone away, I grew up in Oxford, England, you know, and
0:37:42 I’d actually got an early place to go to Cambridge.
0:37:45 But I kind of didn’t want to, actually.
0:37:49 That my family was very academic, you know, both my parents were professors.
0:37:54 It was like, you should do this because you’re, it’s like, I had a dad like that, too.
0:38:00 It was like, this is the path, follow what I’m doing, you’re in trouble if you don’t.
0:38:02 And you’ve carved your own road.
0:38:03 Yeah.
0:38:04 Totally.
0:38:05 I ended up rebelling a lot, actually.
0:38:06 Yeah.
0:38:10 And then not doing certain things that you wanted me to do, but yeah, so please continue.
0:38:16 So I went off and actually, I worked in South America and for a few months and then traveled
0:38:23 backpacked before going to university, I had a big chunk of time off and I wrote my first
0:38:25 book actually during that time.
0:38:32 I was a, I’d been a young poet, you know, so towards the end of my trip out in South
0:38:41 America, I was, I was on a beach all alone, having finished my book, which brought a great
0:38:48 sense of accomplishment, you know, I was only 19 and I’d written a book, you know, and and
0:38:54 I was, I was curious about the world, you know, and I was just studying a sunset as
0:39:00 it happened, just watching the process of the sun going down over the horizon, the great
0:39:07 Pacific, you know, and it was very beautiful experience thoroughly all alone, just studying
0:39:17 this sunset and then suddenly out of nowhere, really out of nowhere, I had no interest in
0:39:19 the kind of thing we’ve been talking about.
0:39:20 You’d never meditated at this point.
0:39:25 No, actually, I had a little bit as a 14, 15 year old, okay, from reading Be Here Now
0:39:26 by Ram Dass.
0:39:30 I just tried it a little bit, but it wasn’t part of my life at all.
0:39:35 You know, I was, I was basically a, you know, literary, I was interested in poetry, you
0:39:42 know, looking at the scene of the beautiful sunset, Pacific Ocean, sun going down, lovely
0:39:48 beach, nobody around at all, all alone, and suddenly, you know, I’m all alone.
0:39:50 What century is this?
0:39:57 It could have been any century, this young human looking at the sun, by the ocean, nothing.
0:40:01 There was actually nothing in the scene to tell me it was 20th century.
0:40:03 It was just a thought that hit your head?
0:40:04 What century is this?
0:40:05 Yeah.
0:40:06 Yeah.
0:40:07 I realized.
0:40:10 Was it a confusing thought or were you just be like, oh, crazy, this could be any sense.
0:40:11 It was liberating.
0:40:17 It was like, it was suddenly like, I don’t have to be who I think I am.
0:40:20 That was the first thing, like, I don’t really know.
0:40:25 I’m just a human body, male human body, young in the world.
0:40:33 And suddenly it was as if the trappings of my life, who I am, you know, my nationality,
0:40:35 time and place sort of fell away.
0:40:40 That was the first thing.
0:40:46 And then freed of who I thought I was for just a moment, I suddenly joined what I was
0:40:47 looking at.
0:40:53 It’s hard to describe, but I became the whole scene.
0:41:01 Instead of I’m in here looking out, it was rather I joined, I dropped away in my normal
0:41:08 sense of being Henry and became part of a greater whole that was showing up as this
0:41:09 scene.
0:41:10 What did that feel like to you?
0:41:12 It was mind-blowingly beautiful.
0:41:16 It felt like belonging to the whole universe.
0:41:24 And actually, it got deeper because then once I was part of the scene, the fabric, the things
0:41:30 in the world, as if I just dropped right into the fabric of creation is what it felt like.
0:41:33 And I could see in that you were the creator.
0:41:37 No, no, no, no, no, I’m the observer.
0:41:38 Not the observer I am.
0:41:39 Part of everything.
0:41:40 Part of everything.
0:41:41 Fully integrated.
0:41:42 Fully integrated.
0:41:50 It was like I felt that I was part of the whole universe, that the beginning of time was
0:41:54 just here and the end of the cosmos was just here.
0:41:57 When you say just here, you’re still doing separation with your hands.
0:42:05 It’s more like it was just one feel that had no dimension.
0:42:08 It’s one sort of, it’s really very difficult to describe.
0:42:10 How long did this last for?
0:42:11 Not very long.
0:42:12 Like 10 seconds?
0:42:16 I think it was probably a little longer, but probably less than, I’d say it was very lightly,
0:42:17 less than five minutes.
0:42:20 Okay, so you’re not practicing meditation.
0:42:22 And I’m not holding anything.
0:42:25 And you literally like, did someone like drug me?
0:42:26 Yeah, exactly.
0:42:27 Laced my coffee.
0:42:28 No.
0:42:29 Well, I knew that.
0:42:30 You must have been confused though, right?
0:42:31 Like how can you not be confused?
0:42:32 It was so beautiful.
0:42:33 The beauty was overwhelming.
0:42:34 So I just, I just…
0:42:35 You just went with it?
0:42:36 I went with it.
0:42:37 Yeah.
0:42:41 And there really wasn’t anybody left to resist.
0:42:45 And I felt that it was really like, I mean, honestly, it was, if I get into the detail,
0:42:51 it was like all there was was this field kind of made a nothing with all these little shifting
0:42:52 sparks.
0:42:56 And that’s what I was, and it’s what the cosmos was.
0:42:59 Could you have stood up and walked around at that point or were you just falling over
0:43:01 because everything was so like…
0:43:02 I don’t know.
0:43:03 That’s a good question.
0:43:07 The thing I think about is, like, you know, I’ve had some experience with psychedelics
0:43:08 for therapy reasons.
0:43:13 I did a Heroptos and Mushrooms one time after my dad passed, and I had to use the bathroom.
0:43:19 And then you take the mask off and I’m like, I can’t even get two feet, I will collapse.
0:43:24 Like, was it that disorienting where you were just like, whoa, like, wow, feel like, did
0:43:27 it just knock your socks off kind of thing?
0:43:29 Did you have to stay seated for a minute or…?
0:43:31 I think I was standing.
0:43:32 Oh, wow.
0:43:33 Okay.
0:43:39 But honestly, in the thick of it, there could have been no thought about, do I need to walk?
0:43:40 That’s wouldn’t have come up.
0:43:43 I was just, I was gone.
0:43:44 And then I remember…
0:43:45 Henry was gone.
0:43:46 Henry was gone.
0:43:52 And it was, huh, the separate body, it was all gone.
0:44:01 And then it sort of, it faded to the extent that, oh, I’m standing on this beautiful beach.
0:44:02 I was back.
0:44:03 You were back.
0:44:11 Knowing where I was, but when I was back, I had this just overwhelming feeling of love
0:44:12 in my heart.
0:44:21 There was like a physical flame of love, just beautiful, pouring flame of, I mean, it didn’t
0:44:28 burn, but it was like a flame, just pouring pouring for the next 48 hours or something.
0:44:32 And I was, I was, it was just overwhelmingly beautiful.
0:44:41 And I’d found, I’d found, I’d found, I hadn’t been a seeker at all, but I’d found I was
0:44:45 a seeker’s seeker without being a seeker.
0:44:46 That doesn’t make any sense.
0:44:51 Well, people call us a seeker, meaning they’re on a spiritual search, right?
0:44:52 Yes.
0:44:58 I had found the answer, you know, I found to seek.
0:45:01 I wasn’t looking, but it had showed itself anyway.
0:45:02 See what I mean?
0:45:08 So I had suddenly found what I years later, I come to realize seekers are looking for.
0:45:15 They’re looking for this, that they believe rightly that there’s some kind of union between
0:45:19 me and the universe that can be found and they’re right.
0:45:20 That’s what I feel.
0:45:21 Right.
0:45:22 It can be found.
0:45:23 Okay.
0:45:30 Why I got it without looking for it, I don’t know, but I know that it was not the end of
0:45:37 the road for me because after that, so I had this, you know, yeah, awakening experience.
0:45:44 Everything, the whole, everything was different thereafter because I’d found what my real life
0:45:45 really was.
0:45:51 I believe it was a master Dogen that said body and mind drop, drop away.
0:45:52 Yeah.
0:45:53 Yeah.
0:45:54 Was it Dogen?
0:45:55 He did say that.
0:45:56 Yeah.
0:45:57 Was that what you experienced?
0:45:58 Was it not to that level?
0:46:00 I suspect it wasn’t to that level.
0:46:03 Can we talk about the gradients of awakening?
0:46:08 Because like so many people think, and this is like, I’m just drawing from personal experience
0:46:12 from friends, conversations, they think that awakening is a switch.
0:46:16 And it’s like, if you’re awakened, it switched on and you’re awakened and you are now a
0:46:18 perfect human.
0:46:19 Yes.
0:46:20 I would differ.
0:46:21 I would differ.
0:46:22 Yeah.
0:46:23 I know.
0:46:26 I’m really curious because like, you know, I think that it may be the, I mean, I could
0:46:32 say that, okay, for me, I, you know, for a few weeks, I was in a blessed transfigured
0:46:39 state, but then I went home and in that very open state, all the unhappiness in my childhood
0:46:40 just overwhelmed me.
0:46:45 I was retraumatized and I went through a really hellish time for a few years.
0:46:47 Then I got on the path.
0:46:53 I actually then got on the path of training of doing the therapy and a lot of meditation.
0:47:01 And so I’ve come to understand that for anyway, for me, it’s a part of healing and awakening.
0:47:07 And it’s true that God, 25 odd years later, after a lot of training, I did actually go
0:47:15 through various other, you know, revelatory moments, kind of like that, but different.
0:47:20 And then eventually something else happened that was sort of, I think it was deeper, actually,
0:47:26 when really there was just nothing and in the most beautiful way and different from
0:47:29 that, that early experience.
0:47:34 And then I kind of, that really did seem to make a decisive shift, actually.
0:47:40 But I would still wouldn’t say, I mean, I now have a very, you know, sort of whole
0:47:44 kind of view of the whole thing and I don’t even, I love Henry.
0:47:48 You know, I don’t have a feeling I’ve got to get rid of Henry.
0:47:50 You know, it’s like, I mean, I don’t…
0:47:51 And Henry is flawed.
0:47:52 Henry is deeply…
0:47:53 Even to this day.
0:47:54 Yeah.
0:47:57 You can still get into arguments with your wife.
0:47:58 I wish I did.
0:48:01 I can be difficult, you know.
0:48:02 Yeah.
0:48:08 I hope I kind of catch it sooner, you know, and I certainly, when I catch it, I can get
0:48:09 free of it sooner.
0:48:10 That’s for sure.
0:48:14 That’s always been this thing where it’s like, there’s this perception that someone
0:48:22 that is awakened or enlightened or has this moment is now operating from a plane that gives
0:48:28 them kind of carte blanche to do whatever they want to be this, you know, guru.
0:48:29 I know.
0:48:32 It really screws with people because they follow these individuals.
0:48:38 I think of Wild Wild West, the documentary about Ojo, right?
0:48:43 You read his stuff and you’re like, there’s some valuable awesome teachings here.
0:48:44 For sure.
0:48:48 And then you look at that documentary and you’re like, my God, the guy had like guns
0:48:54 and like was manipulating women and like all these horrible things.
0:48:57 How do you come to terms with that?
0:49:05 Is it that we can have these moments of awakening a guru can and have insights, but then use
0:49:07 them for evil?
0:49:08 Is that a possibility?
0:49:09 It totally is.
0:49:13 I mean, there’s the, actually, if I can use the language, there’s the technical term,
0:49:14 the enlightened asshole.
0:49:15 Oh.
0:49:16 That can happen.
0:49:17 Yeah.
0:49:18 You know.
0:49:25 I mean, okay, what I’d say, Kevin, is we need checks and balances, you know, and so when
0:49:30 it comes to, I mean, for example, actually, why teach?
0:49:37 You know, just because you may have been through a wonderful shift, but maybe you share it
0:49:42 just in the way you live and in your generosity and your compassion.
0:49:50 I used to go to prisons and share meditation or just being with within, may say, did a
0:49:54 fair bit of hospice work and being with people who were dying because it was very easy to
0:50:00 be with people who were dying from that state because you already know that you’ve seen
0:50:07 that life is this beautiful thing, but in a way, it’s not as solid as we think it is.
0:50:09 You know, so it’s kind of okay.
0:50:15 I mean, even after that first experience I had, I could have died that night as a 19-year-old
0:50:19 and knowing my life had been completely fulfilled.
0:50:21 That’s what it gave me for a bit.
0:50:26 What do you tell someone that’s in hospice that’s laying there and says, Henry, where
0:50:27 am I going?
0:50:29 Yeah, or I don’t want to die.
0:50:30 Or I don’t want to die.
0:50:35 I’ve been with somebody who is dying very young, who was a friend, actually, but I just sat
0:50:43 with her and this was in her last days when she still, you know, she didn’t want to go.
0:50:51 But sitting together when she’s in that very still state in the last days, not really drinking
0:51:00 even, you know, just a little spun swab on the lips and very still and actually in that
0:51:07 stillness there was, we could sort of meet, maybe this sounds a bit woo-woo, but when
0:51:12 I was meditating with her, which, you know, I said, let’s meditate, you know, for several
0:51:13 days.
0:51:14 Was she a practitioner as well?
0:51:18 Not really, but kind of wanted to try that.
0:51:26 I mean, you could feel at moments, well, I think I could feel that some part of her met
0:51:33 with something that I was feeling and we sort of joined in it and there was peace.
0:51:37 And so there wasn’t really peace through words, but there was, I think, moments of
0:51:45 peace through know-what and just being in stillness together because, I mean, you know,
0:51:52 in the end, when it gets really near the end, there’s a great release that happens.
0:51:58 And it can be very beautiful even when somebody, you know, we all think this is the wrong time,
0:51:59 this shouldn’t be happening now.
0:52:07 But even then, there can be this surrender, you know, and that surrender is always beautiful.
0:52:08 It’s freeing, right?
0:52:09 It’s freeing.
0:52:10 Because you’re not carrying the burden anymore.
0:52:13 You’re like, I’m surrendered.
0:52:14 Exactly.
0:52:21 And that’s what I think every awakening experience, certainly that I’ve ever had and especially
0:52:30 that bigger one that I’m just briefly referenced that came later, it was a great surrender.
0:52:36 And when Durgan talked about body and mind fall away, that’s sort of what it means.
0:52:42 It’s a kind of total surrender where everything that we think we are and that we understand
0:52:46 the world to be, we just let it go.
0:52:47 Yeah.
0:52:51 And we don’t know how that happens because we actually can’t make it happen, but it can
0:52:52 happen.
0:52:53 And then we’re kind of freed.
0:52:54 Yeah.
0:52:55 I mean, that’s the beautiful thing.
0:52:57 Then what are we freed for?
0:52:58 Well, we’re freed to feel.
0:53:01 Our heart’s open is the main thing.
0:53:05 I mean, that’s why, you know, my new book actually coming out in July is called Original
0:53:12 Love because I’ve taken that phrase “original nature” in Zen or “original face.”
0:53:14 They talk about “see your original face.”
0:53:17 And actually, why see it?
0:53:20 Because of the love it opens up.
0:53:25 So I call it original love, which I think is actually an accurate word.
0:53:30 But wait, coming back to the gurus and stuff, you know, so why not just experience it and
0:53:31 not teach?
0:53:35 I mean, I only started teaching for one reason.
0:53:44 My teachers told me to and they themselves were told by their teachers, you know.
0:53:46 So it’s part of a lineage.
0:53:48 How do they vet you?
0:53:53 How do they say, “Henry, you are now sanctioned to teach Zen,” because this is coming from
0:53:54 Japan, right?
0:53:55 It is.
0:53:56 This is like…
0:53:57 Yeah.
0:53:58 What was that process like?
0:54:01 Like, how can they say, “Okay, this is a good one.
0:54:03 We want to deputize you to be a teacher.”
0:54:08 How do they confirm, “Is it via your understanding of Kouen?”
0:54:11 Actually, it is largely that.
0:54:14 But I would say also, they do it gradually.
0:54:18 Like in our lineage, first you’re, you know, a fairly junior assistant teacher, then you’re
0:54:22 a full teacher, and then you’re an associate master, and then you’re an authentic master.
0:54:24 And it’s step by step.
0:54:28 And those steps might take two decades to go through or something like that.
0:54:35 And so what, but yes, for each kind of grade or whatever of responsibility, which is what
0:54:43 it is, really, it’s about meeting with the master, who’s the abbot of the whole lineage,
0:54:49 with a Kouen, how he can vibe, how clear you are on this Kouen.
0:54:54 If you’re clear on it, it means, if you’re clear on the Kouen in some way, you’re clear,
0:54:56 but you can get clearer and clearer.
0:54:58 There’s more and more that can fall away.
0:54:59 What do they call that?
0:55:01 The clearing of the eye or something like that?
0:55:03 Yeah, they do, actually.
0:55:12 So you basically have this keeper of knowledge, like these Zen masters have a full complete
0:55:21 understanding and a, what do you call it when someone has been a transmission of this knowledge,
0:55:28 and they will sit down with you and they will do checking terms to try and check your knowledge.
0:55:33 And it’s almost like a, what do they call it, a Dharma combat or something like that?
0:55:34 It can be.
0:55:35 It can be.
0:55:36 Yeah.
0:55:37 So do they throw stuff at you?
0:55:40 You have to quickly respond back, like with whatever you’re feeling.
0:55:45 When you respond without thinking, you know, and so I wouldn’t call it a knowledge.
0:55:48 It’s more like an openness.
0:55:50 It’s how open are you?
0:55:57 So the master asked some, some question, you know, and, and if you’re still holding somewhere,
0:55:59 you think, oh, what did I say to that?
0:56:01 And then it’s over.
0:56:02 You didn’t pass.
0:56:04 Because this isn’t going to come out of thought.
0:56:10 And if someone was listening, and I know these are private kind of closed interview sessions
0:56:15 you have, if there happened to be someone in that room when this checking is going on,
0:56:18 would they just be like, what the hell are you guys talking about?
0:56:19 They might.
0:56:20 I don’t know.
0:56:21 I don’t know.
0:56:22 I don’t know.
0:56:23 It’s what your thing is.
0:56:26 You know, the thing I was talking about, there’s great, there’s something greater.
0:56:32 So if you are not plugged into that, right, the questions will come and they won’t make
0:56:33 sense.
0:56:34 Right.
0:56:37 If you think, oh, well, I could try this, you know, but no, but if you’re plugged into
0:56:38 it.
0:56:39 Because you don’t speak that language.
0:56:40 You don’t, you, you aren’t tapped in.
0:56:41 Exactly.
0:56:45 It’s like, I think it’s really like the movie, what’s it called, Arrival.
0:56:47 Do you remember those, the, the Heptapods?
0:56:48 Yes.
0:56:49 You know that movie?
0:56:55 That language in ink, like Zen circles, Zen ink circles, the kind of, they’re speaking
0:57:02 a language that she can’t understand it until she’s been changed, until her view of time.
0:57:03 I got to go watch that again.
0:57:04 That was a good movie.
0:57:05 It’s like a co-entraining.
0:57:10 You’re learning a language, but you can’t learn this language until your whole mind
0:57:12 and heart has gone through a revolution.
0:57:17 So the, actually learning the language isn’t learning a language on the level that you
0:57:18 understand reality.
0:57:21 You have to have a different sense of reality to get the language.
0:57:22 I understand.
0:57:23 That’s what it’s like.
0:57:24 It’s a unique language.
0:57:30 Can you, can you give me an exact, are you allowed to share like the sound of one hand?
0:57:33 Could you give me what a checking question would sound like?
0:57:34 Or would that be?
0:57:38 Well, I mean, the questions would be something like, how big is the sound of one hand?
0:57:40 That would be a question to be asked.
0:57:42 How big is the sound of one hand?
0:57:43 Yeah.
0:57:44 Show me the sound of one hand.
0:57:45 Oh my God.
0:57:46 Oh shit.
0:57:47 How old is the sound of one hand?
0:57:48 Yeah.
0:57:49 The question is like that.
0:57:54 So, I have no answers to that, but you’re saying if I had that shift, I’d be like, well,
0:57:58 this, and you’d be like, okay, next question.
0:58:03 How many coins did you have to pass to become a full accredited Zen master?
0:58:08 Well, it’s not, you know, honestly, I’ve been through that about, I think accurately,
0:58:14 there’s something like 460 coins in our, in our lineages, sort of curriculum.
0:58:15 Which is San Bozen.
0:58:16 San Bozen.
0:58:17 San Bozen.
0:58:24 And I’ve been through it under, you know, supervision with a master, kind of two and
0:58:27 a half times, twice with…
0:58:28 Of all of them.
0:58:29 All of them.
0:58:30 Wow.
0:58:31 That’s a lot of work.
0:58:32 Yeah.
0:58:33 That’s multi days, right?
0:58:35 That’s not like something you do.
0:58:37 No, it’s a decades process.
0:58:38 Yeah.
0:58:41 But so, you know, not everybody has to go into it as deeply as this.
0:58:45 You can get a lot out of it with, you know, even just a few comments.
0:58:50 And, or no comments, it’s not our only methodology, by the way.
0:58:55 You can also just, you can do the kind of open awareness practice as I was describing.
0:59:01 And I’ve got a training now that is really sort of gentler, you know, where it’s building
0:59:04 up the foundations of mindfulness from early Buddhism.
0:59:07 Then you’re moving into discovering connection.
0:59:09 Are you talking about the app that you’re working on?
0:59:10 The app.
0:59:11 Got it.
0:59:12 We got to talk about that.
0:59:13 Yeah.
0:59:17 You know, one of the things that I’m curious about with these koans is, you know, this
0:59:21 is part of a lineage which started in Rinzai.
0:59:22 Is that right, koans?
0:59:23 Yeah.
0:59:24 The Rinzai sect?
0:59:25 Is that correct?
0:59:26 That’s right.
0:59:27 The koan method did.
0:59:28 Right.
0:59:29 Yeah.
0:59:35 And so, one of the things that scares people off, especially in my family, so my family
0:59:39 grew up Lutheran, like hardcore Christian.
0:59:45 I can appreciate the teachings of Jesus, but I’m no longer a quote unquote Christian.
0:59:48 I think he had a lot of great things to say.
0:59:56 If you go back to the core of a lot of those principles and when I told family members I’m
1:00:03 studying Zen, a huge red flag goes up in the religious community saying that’s Buddhism.
1:00:05 That’s praying to another God.
1:00:08 That is another religion.
1:00:15 How much of that is true, and then how compatible is Zen with insert any religion?
1:00:17 Yes, that’s a great question.
1:00:21 In a certain way, Zen is absolutely not a religion.
1:00:26 It’s about changing our hearts and minds, and there are Zen masters who are friends
1:00:32 of mine or even a teacher of mine who’s a practicing Christian, no problem whatsoever.
1:00:39 He says, Zen has made me a better Christian, unquestionably in his mind.
1:00:45 It’s a misconception from the Western view that all religions must be sort of praying
1:00:46 to a deity.
1:00:55 In fact, as late as 1840, you had a Western view that there were only four religions on
1:00:56 earth.
1:01:03 Mohammedanism, as they call it, this is the European view, Judaism, Christianity, and
1:01:04 idolatry.
1:01:05 Four religions.
1:01:11 They just didn’t understand, but now we understand much better that there’s actually a thing
1:01:17 called the spiritual life of a human being, and religions, of course, speak to that, but
1:01:21 you don’t even need a religion to speak to it, to address it.
1:01:27 By spiritual life, I mean exactly the kind of things we’ve been talking about, but sort
1:01:38 of studying the nature of who I am, and how do I nourish my hurt heart, my wounded heart?
1:01:39 How do I help it?
1:01:41 How do I love it more?
1:01:43 How do I find more love in life?
1:01:46 How do I find, is there such a thing?
1:01:54 Could there be such a thing as an intrinsic loving essence in every moment, that somehow
1:01:59 the very gift of this moment has some kind of love in it?
1:02:04 And if there is, could it be that that isn’t really a religious thing?
1:02:09 It’s something in the intrinsic nature of being, in the intrinsic nature of consciousness.
1:02:12 I say yes to all those things.
1:02:15 There is a loving nature right here.
1:02:19 There’s a dimensionless aspect to right here.
1:02:26 There’s a selflessness right here, and all of that is, I mean, I’m not a religious person.
1:02:34 And on the other hand, actually, I’m an atheist, actually, but I might be a pantheist, where
1:02:38 you think God’s everything, if there’s a God, it’s everything, but the idea of a sort
1:02:43 of separate God, I think there’s, I mean, it can be very useful, and of course, a lot
1:02:49 of people find all the support and nourishment they want in that.
1:02:50 No problem.
1:02:54 Do you think of prayer can be a form of meditation?
1:02:55 Yes, I do.
1:02:56 I do.
1:03:01 And I love this idea, you know, in 18th century London, that enlightenment time, there was
1:03:09 this famous figure, Dr. Johnson or Samuel Johnson, he’s a remarkable guy, a real learned, brilliant
1:03:10 guy.
1:03:16 And he said, even if there’s no God, because atheism was a current question at that time,
1:03:19 he said, even if there’s no God, we should still pray.
1:03:20 It’s good for us.
1:03:28 But actually, there’s a value in the sort of a centering and stillness and supplication
1:03:29 and surrender.
1:03:35 I mean, it’s, in some sense, like we do people that don’t pray, get some form of that in
1:03:36 journaling.
1:03:37 Yes.
1:03:41 I’m coming out and saying, this is my thoughts, my feelings, my desires, my hopes, my concerns.
1:03:42 Yes.
1:03:48 You know, they’re not directing it towards a deity, but we’ve already seen the benefits
1:03:49 of that.
1:03:50 Yes.
1:03:51 Studied quite well.
1:03:52 Yes, exactly.
1:03:53 Exactly.
1:03:57 And there’s also research now on chanting, that when a group of people are chanting together,
1:03:58 it’s great.
1:04:03 And Neuroscientifically, they’ve shown that, you know, everybody gets in this fetus state
1:04:04 or whatever.
1:04:05 Oh my God.
1:04:11 I was in Mexico for my wife’s birthday, and they had a ceremony that you could sign up
1:04:14 for that is one of these huts.
1:04:21 It’s called like mezcalani ceremony, something like that, where it’s in a hut of basically
1:04:25 a stone complex, like a dome, and you duck in to go in through a little hole, and they
1:04:30 pile in hot rocks, like over and over again, then they shut the door, and they steam the
1:04:38 crap out of it, and then they chant, and there’s drums, and it’s loud and reverberates in there,
1:04:42 and you sing along, and you start to pick up the lyrics and kind of sing along, these
1:04:46 ancient chants, and then you go around the room and open up about different things that
1:04:51 are going on in your life, love, your gratitude, the things you’re feeling about is a very
1:04:56 powerful thing to chant with a group, especially in that environment.
1:04:57 Sounds like a sweat lodge.
1:04:58 It is.
1:04:59 It is very much.
1:05:03 There was no drugs involved, but it was like, I walked out of there being like, wow, that
1:05:06 was as good as a deep therapy session.
1:05:07 Yeah, absolutely.
1:05:08 Absolutely.
1:05:09 It’s sort of purifying.
1:05:14 Well, actually, I mean, I did a whole phase of life with a lot of sweat lodges in it,
1:05:22 and loved that, but these days, when I sit, when I just meditate, I get that kind of purifying
1:05:23 sense.
1:05:28 Even if it’s been like a somewhat scattered sit, because I’m very loose and open about
1:05:29 it.
1:05:32 I don’t mind if thoughts come, I just let it be as it is.
1:05:35 But I get up from the seat where I’ve been meditating.
1:05:41 However poorly, don’t care, and there’s something sort of cleaner.
1:05:48 There’s a little minor cleansing that, ah, ready.
1:05:53 When you see so many students that come to you and say, I’ve had this cleansing moment,
1:05:58 I’ve had this amazing thing, but for me, it’s after I do an ayahuasca retreat.
1:06:00 And I’ve never done that.
1:06:02 I’ve been tempted by many friends.
1:06:03 Maybe one day I’ll try it.
1:06:04 I don’t know.
1:06:09 But I’ve tried other things as well.
1:06:13 Have you tried these things to see how they compare to the state that you feel?
1:06:18 And then also, how many of your students have done this, and where do you stand on psychedelics
1:06:19 these days?
1:06:20 Yeah, yeah.
1:06:21 It’s interesting.
1:06:25 I mean, I think anything that helps is great, and I think there’s no question about this
1:06:27 therapeutic value of psychedelics.
1:06:28 Oh, for sure.
1:06:33 Especially PTSD, severe depression, there’s some things where I look at, I’m like, why
1:06:34 would you not?
1:06:35 Exactly.
1:06:39 If someone’s going to kill themselves, they don’t have 10 years to meditate to figure
1:06:40 this out.
1:06:41 Exactly.
1:06:42 Like, let’s get them some help right away.
1:06:43 Exactly.
1:06:48 And I’m also, I’m very interested in the combination of meditation and plant medicine.
1:06:50 I think there’s a lot of people looking at that now.
1:06:56 I think strategic tactical use of plant medicine may be very helpful for somebody on a meditative
1:06:57 path.
1:07:00 To achieve awakening, loosen things up.
1:07:01 Loosen things up.
1:07:02 Yeah.
1:07:08 And so on the path to awakening, I think I, I mean, actually, I’ll tell you, I have some
1:07:15 friends who are part of a kind of brotherhood that do occasional psychedelic journeys.
1:07:22 And I was invited recently and a few months back to try the 5MEO thing.
1:07:23 Oh, wow.
1:07:24 Okay.
1:07:26 I’ve never tried that, but I’ve been, I’ve been tempted.
1:07:30 Well, I was curious because yeah, the account sound somewhat like the kind of awakening
1:07:36 that I’ve experienced and, and that I often sort of live in, actually, in a certain sense.
1:07:37 So I tried it.
1:07:41 Is that, one question before you tell me if it’s false.
1:07:47 If I’m in your shoes and I’m like, okay, my day-to-day life is 5MEO DMT, like I’m loving
1:07:52 life, like I’m happy, it would scare the crap out of me that you might go into something
1:07:57 that in a wire gets twisted and all of a sudden you’re kicked out of your, your, you see what
1:07:58 I’m saying?
1:08:02 No, because I’m, you know, my heart’s being broken.
1:08:03 So it’s open.
1:08:06 So I’m not trying to hold anything together.
1:08:07 You know what I mean?
1:08:08 Wow.
1:08:13 The broken heart is, is the first, we have to break our hearts.
1:08:17 Then we can have an open heart and then that means we have a whole heart.
1:08:23 I see it as a sequence, broken heart, open heart, whole heart, but you can’t have a whole
1:08:27 heart unless it’s been broken.
1:08:29 That’s what I sincerely believe now.
1:08:31 So I wasn’t worried about that at all.
1:08:33 So, so I’ll tell you what happened.
1:08:39 I went almost immediately to where I just often go.
1:08:43 Wait, so this is where you, yeah, you’re taking it from a, hold it in for as long as
1:08:46 you can and maybe try and take a second one if you can kind of thing.
1:08:47 No, I think we did two.
1:08:48 Okay.
1:08:51 10 seconds in, 10 seconds out, 10 seconds out.
1:08:58 And I just sort of glide it off to where I quite often go in meditation where basically
1:09:06 there isn’t anything except an intense love in my heart area.
1:09:11 I don’t really, it’s not like I’m very conscious of the body, so it doesn’t feel like this
1:09:19 is my heart area, but somewhere in the middle, this deep, powerful, tender, exquisite, overwhelming
1:09:23 love and nothing else, literally nothing else.
1:09:26 That’s not the experience for everyone that does five AMEO DMT.
1:09:32 Some people see frog gods and all kinds of weird shit, so like you have a very specific
1:09:34 clean experience, sounds like.
1:09:36 Yeah, maybe if I did it, it got to be different.
1:09:41 But I think in a way that I’ve done a lot of kinds of work over the years and I think
1:09:47 probably I’ve got to a point where there’s less to work through.
1:09:53 I mean, I, maybe I’m wrong and life will prove me wrong if I am wrong for sure.
1:09:57 I say those words with a little trepidation, but maybe I’m right, there’s less to work
1:09:59 through.
1:10:10 But what I loved about it was that maybe people can get some taste of this love I’m talking
1:10:17 about that way, where it’s just, we’re just finding that all we’ve got to do is surrender
1:10:23 in this incredible, you know, I don’t, I feel it’s the love of the universe.
1:10:29 I think the universe is one great organ of love that I think, I mean, I don’t know how
1:10:35 we’d ever prove it, but the fact that it’s creating itself and we’re part of it and actually
1:10:41 we do have a special place, I think, even though it’s just evolutionary happenstance,
1:10:47 but we are more aware and we can communicate about being aware.
1:10:52 That is a step up from, you know, grasshoppers, you know, whatever, you know, I mean, in a
1:10:56 sense that the nervous system has got to the point, the neurology has got to the point
1:11:00 where we can be aware that we are aware and we can connect with each other about it.
1:11:05 And I think we can be aware that we are the whole universe, not as an idea, but as an
1:11:06 actual experience.
1:11:16 And do you see that as a kind of like a carrot to get people to embrace a serious practice?
1:11:23 Because in my experience, like, I’ve had so many friends that have done ayahuasca and
1:11:31 they’ve said, “Oh my God, like, I ego, what did they call it, like ego death has occurred.”
1:11:37 And for 48 hours, they got that halo effect and their life is forever good and then two
1:11:41 weeks later, it’s like, well, you know, maybe I’ll do another one next month.
1:11:46 And then all of a sudden, I’ve talked to some friends that are like, you know, 75 sessions
1:11:54 plus deep into this same thing, whereas I wonder to myself, is that just a temporary
1:12:04 state versus a dedicated multi-decade meditation seems like a gradual permanent rewiring versus
1:12:11 a short duration fix, which might be good to say, “Hey, I can see the mountain now.”
1:12:15 A helicopter took me up there and I sort of mount on top and I was like, “Holy shit.”
1:12:19 But then the helicopter quickly took me back down to the base versus what you’re talking
1:12:24 about sounds like a lot more durable in terms of when there’s a deep awakening moment with
1:12:31 Zen that is going to be something where I won’t have to go back to doing a special
1:12:36 ceremony to experience more or less the same thing, but maybe even a deeper level.
1:12:39 I mean, you don’t have to be an Accurator.
1:12:47 You know, I hate to make sort of declarations that might not work out for people.
1:12:52 But I think it is basically, like you said, I think the promise of a long-term meditation
1:13:04 practice can be that you come to experience your ordinary moment, your ordinary awareness,
1:13:10 your ordinary state of things in a very different way, so you therefore don’t need wonderfully
1:13:12 different experiences.
1:13:18 It’s about, I mean, I’m talking about now always, this very, you know, it’s a little
1:13:23 unusual, we’re sitting here chatting with your mics and stuff and having what will
1:13:28 be a public conversation, but that doesn’t matter because actually it’s just two of
1:13:34 us in a room and three of us with an engineer, you know.
1:13:39 And this other dimension is totally present.
1:13:42 In other words, it’s present regardless of the circumstances.
1:13:48 And you don’t have to be in some heightened state or altered state to know it.
1:13:54 It’s just, so I think the path of sort of, and we talked about that word study earlier,
1:14:01 like it is a kind of examination of your own experience.
1:14:06 And over time, just through, you know, through the stillness and through being without words
1:14:12 actually, for a chunk of time each day, of course there may be words in the mind, but
1:14:20 over time it’ll get quieter and you can just be with your ordinary experience with no
1:14:22 outside input.
1:14:31 And gradually it just, it just opens, it softens and tenderizes and opens and we start having
1:14:41 a wider sense of, you know, and it may have sudden jumped in that process.
1:14:52 And but mostly it’s a gradual deepening, broadening, clarifying of what this moment is.
1:14:58 And it’s not unusual, if you sort of mean, so that, you know, it’s not an odd thing we’re
1:14:59 going to.
1:15:03 It’s in the heart of ordinaryness.
1:15:06 That’s a really interesting way that you put it, is it’s not a thing that we’re going
1:15:14 to because one of the things that I worry about is that you, I showed you my library,
1:15:17 I went upstairs a few minutes ago and you pointed out a bunch of those in books that
1:15:19 I have.
1:15:21 That’s book knowledge that I’m picking up, right.
1:15:26 And of course the seats there and that’s, that’s the place I should be focusing my efforts.
1:15:29 But there’s a lot of book knowledge sitting on that shelf, right.
1:15:38 And in some sense, there’s this, this like idea that I can intellectually get my way
1:15:43 to a better state of mind by understanding something.
1:15:49 And one time I heard you experience, someone asked you the question of what are we?
1:15:57 And you said, oftentimes it’s better to ask the question, not, not really what are we
1:16:02 and not hold on to this idea of what we are, but you called it the finger by finger letting
1:16:05 go of who we think we are.
1:16:11 And so it’s the exact opposite of book knowledge and trying to figure something out.
1:16:13 But it’s more about releasing.
1:16:15 Can you explain that a little bit?
1:16:16 Yes.
1:16:22 I mean, first of all, I just want to say books are great for inspiration, for encouragement,
1:16:24 for sometimes course correction.
1:16:29 And it’s actually fine to have some understanding of why I’m doing this, you know, to have that
1:16:35 kind of, you know, knowledge, well, yeah, understanding, view, you know, yeah, there’s
1:16:37 a lot of suffering in the world.
1:16:42 I suffer, friends suffer, the whole community of the human beings is suffering.
1:16:45 Can we create less suffering?
1:16:46 What would it take to do that?
1:16:52 And how can I be part of the project of less suffering and more compassionate world with
1:16:57 less violence, and all the hideous things that go on, by us humans, you know.
1:17:07 So understanding is not bad by enemies, but the process of, of releasing is, you’re absolutely
1:17:08 right.
1:17:15 It’s like, rather than it being, I’m going to find X, it’s more, I’m going to just loosen
1:17:21 my hold on Y, like the letter Y, I mean, you know, X, Y.
1:17:30 So just letting gradually just being softer in my sense of who I am and what things are.
1:17:34 So I suppose it’s a different kind of use of the word understanding, there’s understanding
1:17:39 and sense of like getting oriented for why I’m doing this practice and how this might
1:17:45 work and the practice specific practices I’m doing, how they might work, that kind of understanding
1:17:51 and getting inspired and encouraged, which man we need, you know, it’s a long journey.
1:17:59 But then on the other hand, there’s the way I construct experience is actually conditioned.
1:18:03 And none of us probably would believe that, we think we got it right, I know I’m in here
1:18:10 and I know the world’s out there, well, actually, not so fast, you know, it can be experienced
1:18:17 differently. And it can just show itself very naturally, that actually we’re part of what
1:18:25 we think we’re, we’re outside of or separate from. And that comes through gently releasing
1:18:30 a process of releasing. And it’s true, sometimes it’s sudden, you know, we don’t know how,
1:18:37 but something let go. There’s an openness that we never knew could happen when the world
1:18:44 floods in and, you know, we love it and it loves us and in a most remarkable way. Yeah,
1:18:51 yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m curious to have to after coaching so many students, you know,
1:18:55 when I talk about my practice comes up from time to time with other entrepreneurs or people
1:19:00 that I’m interacting with. And the number one thing people say, I’m sure you’ve heard
1:19:06 this is just I don’t have time. I’m just too busy. Yeah, yeah.
1:19:10 Is it something where you use tell a student like maybe just now isn’t the time for you
1:19:15 to take up a practice or their actual strategies that for someone that has start and stop start
1:19:22 I’ve tried his face for 10 minutes. I’ve done this. What is it that actually works there?
1:19:32 What creates a real sticky lasting multi decade commitment to a practice, especially because
1:19:39 I would say that most practice in my mind, it was like, at least a year in to my commitment
1:19:44 would during COVID. Thankfully, they’re well, not thankfully it was COVID, but thankfully
1:19:49 COVID gave me the time to have practice because I could work from home more. And it wasn’t
1:19:53 like there was this aha moment, but I felt a little bit more at ease. And I was starting
1:19:58 to seem some benefit, but that’s like six, eight, 12 months in. Yeah, most people are
1:20:03 not going to stick around that long. How do you convince people to turn this into something
1:20:08 that they’re not finding time for, but they’re making time for it? Yes, that’s exactly the
1:20:16 right terminology, actually, is that I mean, like any habit, you know, we have to decide
1:20:22 we want it. We have to reinforce it. We have to make it easier. We it’s really helpful
1:20:28 to have some guidance. I think a lot of people actually in early meditation stages benefit
1:20:34 from guided meditations because you can have a better time quicker if you so that’s that’s
1:20:40 where apps come in. Yes, you know, and I don’t know, do we want to talk about 100% so this
1:20:44 is what I’m really excited to talk about. So in full disclosure, you know, I’ve been
1:20:52 friends for a while now, you’ve been a fantastic mentor and coach to me over the years. And
1:20:55 you and I had always kind of like talked about like, wouldn’t it be cool because you started
1:21:00 doing more zoom stuff during COVID. And you were having these classes that were showing
1:21:07 up and they were well attended. And I remember we were thinking like, well, you should build
1:21:11 something, you should build something that’s a little bit because all these apps in my,
1:21:15 you know, as a venture capitalist, when I go out and look at the landscape of apps.
1:21:18 And I don’t want to call anyone out because I think there is a time and place for every
1:21:24 type of app when I see an app that puts you helps put you to sleep and gives you some
1:21:31 really good strategies for sleep. Fantastic. Right. But I had, you know, in you had seen
1:21:37 as a gap in this space where there wasn’t really it was almost like everything was to
1:21:42 choose your own adventure. And with that can cause a little bit of, you know, almost anxiety
1:21:47 in the sense that like, huh, well, where do I go today. And then a lot of her like, well,
1:21:54 how can I do the most viral loop to pull you in? Which is sometimes like, you know, a one
1:21:58 minute meditation. It was like, it felt like a race to the bottom in terms of just do less
1:22:00 and less and less. And we’re going to add journaling in and we’re going to add some
1:22:07 other stuff. And, you know, when I, when I started studying under you was in, I thought,
1:22:13 wow, wow, here’s something, something so much deeper. And for those that crave it, gosh,
1:22:16 wouldn’t it be cool if there was a product that would that would address that market.
1:22:20 And so you went off and created something new. Like, can you tell us about it?
1:22:25 Yes, yes. Well, we do have this app called the way, which is a, we think it’s a first
1:22:31 of a kind meditation app where what what the distinguishing feature of it is that it’s
1:22:37 a single pathway. You don’t really have, I’m afraid so you don’t have a lot of choice.
1:22:46 But the on the plus side, you’re being guided gently day by day, step by step, deeper into
1:22:52 the realms that meditation can open up. But it is very gradual. You know, we, we cover,
1:22:57 we want you to get grounded in mindfulness. So you really know what it is to be present
1:23:03 to your own, how to handle difficult emotion, be with it, how to be more appreciative of
1:23:10 sense experience in the moment and more just more aware of here and now. Then we go into
1:23:14 discovering support and connection, which is a critical part of meditation. You know,
1:23:20 often we think of it as a solitary pursuit. We have ideals like the lone adept in the
1:23:26 cave on the mountain or something. Actually, no, meditation is about drawing support from
1:23:33 many sources, you know, not being alone. Actually, in fact, overall, the journey is one of being
1:23:38 more and more part of the world, belonging more than we also have a sort of stage of
1:23:45 going to flow states in meditation, which is beautiful, where you find, you know, this
1:23:52 present moment is utterly fulfilling. Just without without anything, just being, you
1:23:59 know, it’s beautiful. It’s very, it’s like flow, you know, that people can find in activities,
1:24:06 but you can do it in meditation. And then there’s awakening glimpses of less being less,
1:24:14 less attached to self, less attached to my idea of me little hints of the greater awareness
1:24:22 that’s holding us. It’s always here falling into it more. So it’s a gradual part of tasting
1:24:30 these different flavors and but all leading towards, you know, more of a losing the sense
1:24:38 of separateness. Is your hope that this will be that long term and I know there’s no such
1:24:45 thing as knowing it’s not like you can say, hey, get to lesson number 50 and pop, you’re
1:24:50 going to have this moment, right? Because it can be random. It is, I guess, more or less
1:24:56 random. But when someone would experience this deeper type of awareness and awakening,
1:25:02 is it your hope that this will be an amp that leads to those type of events? Yeah, I hope
1:25:08 with a little I hope it’ll lead to various kinds of shifts and openings and events in
1:25:14 people’s lives, including those. What we’re going to do is actually we loop round and
1:25:21 round. So we go through the mindfulness to awakening path again, and again, deeper and
1:25:27 deeper over time is multi year is the is the plan. And that along the way, you get more
1:25:33 and more little openings, you know, so may not be huge major ones, you know, just little
1:25:41 shifts that that was nice. You know, just, oh, man, I was silent. My mind was silent throughout
1:25:47 that’s it. Well, that’s a really nice thing. It may not be blinding cosmic revelation, but
1:25:54 it’s lovely. Yeah, to find out and this piece kind of carried me through my day totally
1:25:59 on especially when it came from your practice, because you’re doing it. So I want people
1:26:07 to have all these. Yeah, those are beautiful moments. It’s like I’m not as you know, I’ve
1:26:13 not had one of these awakening moments, but I have had these glimpses of just general
1:26:21 ease that was not there prior to having a dedicated practice. Right. And it’s just like
1:26:28 that alone is like worth it all. We’re only talking about like, you know, I’m sitting
1:26:33 25 minutes a day. But you when you start the app, you’re actually you you start people
1:26:37 off around eight to 10 minutes and like 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day. Yeah. And
1:26:42 we’ll very gradually invite longer. Yes, if they want it and have talks interspersed
1:26:46 there as well. So it’s like, it’s not just meditation, meditation, meditation, it’s
1:26:50 there’s knowledge as well that comes along the way. Yeah, a little bit of orientation
1:26:56 and guidance and encouragement, which we will need. But it but it actually you can see the
1:27:01 pathway, you know, these four sort of like mountains that we’re going to go through.
1:27:05 And each one has these little sets, we call them retreats. Each retreat has a cluster
1:27:09 of meditation sessions. You can sort of see what’s coming and what you’re going to be
1:27:16 doing. But you have to go step by step. We think it’s a training. We think it’s a training.
1:27:21 I think it’s a fantastic idea because it’s it’s like, I just want and many people, especially
1:27:28 in a busy world, we just want to have just lead us, you know, lead us and like help us.
1:27:33 You’ve been down this path, you know, the twists and turns and like, but having that
1:27:38 that dedicated, like single focus is going to be so key. Do you think you’ll ever tie
1:27:44 this up with like, how much of this do you think is is doable? I know you’ve done a
1:27:51 lot of zoom testing over the years. Yeah, how much of this is doable via video via app?
1:27:55 And then will there ever be a component, and maybe we’re getting a little too far out,
1:28:00 but would there ever be a physical like retreat component to this where you could see members
1:28:05 of the way getting together annually for some type of real in-person event? Yeah, we’d
1:28:09 really like that to happen. I mean, we have the online digital training that I’ve been
1:28:16 offering the last two, three years. It’s actually having its first in-person event in January,
1:28:23 late January. Yeah, the three day. And obviously, we’ll see how that goes. But the moment we
1:28:27 launch it, it was 50% filled. You’re going to need a bigger space. You’re going to take
1:28:32 mountain clouds instead of do some expansion. I think it could really happen. But yeah,
1:28:41 so that will be part of it, probably. But I really want it to be sufficient. My real
1:28:48 hope and intention is that if all they can do is 10 minutes a day, that’s great. And
1:28:56 because of following this curated path, those 10 minutes a day are actually going to lead
1:29:02 you. They’re going to be taking you somewhere. It’s not just same distress every day, which
1:29:08 hopefully we hope you’ll get. It’s actually, you know, you’re really on a journey. And
1:29:15 if that journey is enough for you at 10 minutes a day, terrific. I really hope it will be.
1:29:19 And if you want more, there’ll be ways you can plug into more because our Zoom events
1:29:23 are going to carry on, you know, every other Sunday or something like that in the next
1:29:29 couple of years. So people from the app could always join us if they want that additional
1:29:34 boost, a little bit more time and see other people be in a gathering that’s not physical,
1:29:39 but it is still, it feels weirdly supported, the Zoom gatherings that we’ve been having
1:29:47 with a few hundred people, you know, and that’ll carry on as a resource.
1:29:53 The app is slated to come out late January. This podcast is slated to come out mid to
1:30:00 late January right around the corner. If for some reason the app is not out, I will put
1:30:03 a link in the show notes to the beta link so they can sign up and actually get on the
1:30:08 app early and play because we’ll have the latest beta to provide to people. So we can
1:30:12 have people that are watching, but it should be available in the app store. But the easiest
1:30:19 way to do that is going to be to go over to thewayapp.com. So that’s the website. So if
1:30:24 you want to see the current state of it and have a link to download it will be thewayapp.com
1:30:28 which is, which is awesome. Yeah, and you can get, you can pre-order it and be ready
1:30:31 for it. Yeah. Oh, that’s right. You can see, you can
1:30:36 say, I deliver this to me when it’s, when it’s out. Yeah. Fantastic. It’s going to be
1:30:41 so cool. I’m, I’m thrilled for you, Henry. This is like, and actually I want to touch,
1:30:47 touch on one thing that you may not, that’s a little sensitive. You have not wanted to
1:30:51 be called a Zen master before. I’ve heard you say like, does it make you uncomfortable
1:30:56 to be called a Zen master? Because you are a fully accredited, fully sanctioned, from
1:31:02 Japan, Roshi, which is a true Zen master. Is that not right?
1:31:08 Yes. I suppose it’s, I suppose it is technically true. It’s officially or technically true.
1:31:10 And you’re only one of a few in the United States.
1:31:15 Yeah, it’s true. Well, I think in the, in the US there’s very few actually in the world
1:31:21 there’s only four or five of us sanctioned by this particular lineage in the way, in
1:31:30 that way. But honestly, I, you know, it’s, it’s the word master that suggests I’m really
1:31:38 on top of it infallibly. That’s not the case. And I don’t even aspire to that. I, you know,
1:31:46 like I was saying earlier, the only thing that I try to do and don’t do perfectly by
1:31:54 any means is be fully, fully open hearted, you know, have a very open heart. And what
1:32:01 I call whole hearted. Well, I can, I’m ready to feel whatever wants to be felt.
1:32:05 I need more of that. My wife, my life would be really happy if I had more of that.
1:32:11 Honestly, I think one of the misconceptions also about that word Zen is that it means
1:32:16 some kind of, you’re above it all your, you’re in a serene equanimity that isn’t touched
1:32:23 by the world. I’m rubbish. That’s what it means. It’s, it’s the opposite. It’s being
1:32:29 ready to, I mean, I’ve been so feeling so much around Gaza and, you know, the horrors
1:32:36 there and, and, and, and of course the horrors of October 7, no less. And there’s sufferings
1:32:42 everywhere. I mean, when I think that my grandparents on my father’s side, you know, they were Jewish,
1:32:48 they left Poland, Ukraine in the early 20th century. You know, they had my dad very late
1:32:55 and, you know, and, and they, I mean, late in life. And so they, but they fled the pogroms
1:33:00 all that suffering and misery and persecution to think what, what would they think if they
1:33:06 saw what, what, what’s going on in Gaza right now? The horror that, that’s being perpetrated
1:33:11 on the inhabitants there. And the idea that that kind of remorseless violence is going
1:33:18 to achieve anything good. You know, it’s, and I feel it. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m sure
1:33:27 it many of us do, but I want it, I want to feel it. And I want to be, you know, whatever,
1:33:36 whatever the extent this might be an offering that will reduce suffering just a little bit.
1:33:44 Yeah. It’s, it’s all I hope for it. I think the more that, the more of us, the more we
1:33:55 find peace in ourselves and, and an ease and a wholeheartedness, you know, frankly, a love
1:34:02 that is non conditional and unconditional love, the more, the more of us taste that and the
1:34:11 more that we do taste it, I think the better. It’s, it’s not a, it’s not enough, but it’s
1:34:16 something. Yeah. And I think, you know, because we got to do something, you know, this, we’re
1:34:22 such a top top species. Yeah. You know, we’re in the most amazing species in, in our way,
1:34:26 but we’re so messed up. Oh man. This toxicity that we carry is.
1:34:33 I think about AI and I’m just like, it’s going to usher in so many amazing things and also
1:34:40 so many destructive things. And so as a technologist, I’m like sitting with that and then it’s, it’s
1:34:46 a lot when you can see and you know what’s coming in the next five years and it’s going
1:34:48 to be crushing for a lot of people. Right.
1:34:53 And it’s also going to cure cancers. Like, and so it’s like, but why couldn’t what we’re
1:35:01 doing with the way harness some of that and be, I mean, imagine if AI can tell us quicker
1:35:06 how to help people get these shifts. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve thought about that deeply because
1:35:15 one of the things that I know is coming is taking in large corpus of data and feeding
1:35:21 it into AI and being able to ask questions of that data in real time.
1:35:28 So you have a podcast, we should also talk about the mountain cloud Zen Center podcast.
1:35:32 It’s where you do your Dharma talks, which are essentially talks that you do to your community.
1:35:36 So it’s a very kind of intimate thing, meaning like you’re, you’re actually Zendil community.
1:35:41 They’re not like stage talks. They’re like, no stage. Yeah, they’re, but they go to thousands
1:35:46 of people tune into us, but they’re fantastic. I listened to, I’ve listened to a lot of them
1:35:49 when I jump the sauna, I put one on and I’m always, I’m always like, I wish I had a pen
1:35:54 and you read some of those nuggets, but the cool thing about that is in the next year
1:35:59 to two years, maybe even less, we’ll be able to feed all of that content into AI, right?
1:36:04 They will understand it all. And I can have a conversation with you, the AI version of
1:36:09 you based on what you’ve said throughout the years in your talks.
1:36:14 And so that at some point will make its way into your app as well, right?
1:36:21 And so that’s a really fascinating idea where I’m going to say, gosh, Henry, you know, I
1:36:26 had one too many drinks last night. I’m in struggle with alcohol. What are your thoughts?
1:36:30 And you’ll somewhere in one of your talks, you know, I’m just making this up, but like
1:36:34 there might be a point where you referenced and had a conversation about that. It can
1:36:41 bring the clips in your perspective in, hopefully in an accurate way, and really provide people
1:36:45 with some guidance. Speaking of which, I got to touch on that real quick. One of the funniest
1:36:50 things and biggest shifts for me, I was talking to you about drinking alcohol one time and
1:36:54 I was like, I like some champagne. I like to have a drink at night, especially after
1:36:59 a long day, you know, and I’m like, Henry, do you drink? Like what’s going on? And you
1:37:04 were like, you said something to the effect that it makes it dulls life down to a point
1:37:10 where it’s less enjoyable if you were to get drunk, like where your everyday life is better
1:37:14 than what a drink can provide for you. Did I get that right?
1:37:19 Yeah, I think that I think that’s like, if you drink, you’re like, this is not as good
1:37:23 as what I’m experiencing without drinking. I’m just checking that out. I think that’s
1:37:31 basically true. On the other hand, I actually love and I haven’t done it in, I don’t do
1:37:37 it anymore actually, but I would love a glass of beer, you know, so it’s not forbidden,
1:37:41 but it’s just like you don’t take it to an extreme. No, I would get that. There’s a
1:37:46 little buzz, you know, for the first little while called the champagne effect, like the
1:37:54 you first have that first sip, exactly. That’s enjoyable. But I mean, there’s no sense that
1:38:01 I need that because you used to drink. I mean, I started adult life as a, you know, as I
1:38:06 said, you’re in the UK, right? So in the UK, and that whole literary scene was just, it
1:38:12 happened in the pub. Yeah, basically. And there was heavy drinking. And I was part of
1:38:16 that. What happens when you get to a certain level of Zen where that falls away? Because
1:38:20 your advice to me one time, as I said, Oh, I should, I should quit drinking or I should
1:38:24 limit it. And you said, Kevin, if you practice, it will kind of naturally. Yeah, exactly.
1:38:28 You don’t really need to make it go away. He just won’t want to as much. You don’t have
1:38:34 to cut it out. I mean, my master in Japan, who’s, you know, has been a very successful
1:38:40 businessman all his life. Yeah. He drinks, you know, Japanese business culture is notorious
1:38:44 for drinking. Right. I don’t think he goes heavy. Yeah. But I’ve been out and done some
1:38:51 deals in Japan and it’s always over beers and Japanese whiskey in a smoky, light filled
1:38:56 room, you know, right? Well, I imagine he must have been there. Yeah. But I mean, I’ve
1:39:02 never, I think these days, you know, he is very light, but he does, he does have the
1:39:08 old glass of wine. Yeah. It likes a glass of champagne. And it’s, but it’s, you know,
1:39:13 it’s not a problem. It’s sort of a, it’s not in order to feel better, we could say like
1:39:19 that. Interesting. Like the, actually, if you, I mean, he’s told me that he’ll come
1:39:27 back from work, tired, maybe a little stressed, just have a sit. And it all drains out. And
1:39:33 it’s, he says, if he’s just been in a spa or something, it’s drained out. Ah, lovely.
1:39:39 It’s interesting to say that because that is my one rule that I have where I say to myself,
1:39:43 let’s say it’s six o’clock. And let’s just say it was a brutal day. It’s like back to
1:39:48 back meetings, communities blowing up in some weird way, something’s happening. I feel
1:39:53 emotionally drained. Yeah. And I haven’t had a sit. Yeah. I will make it a rule where
1:40:01 I say, yes, that glass of champagne is downstairs, but I’m going to sit first. Yeah. I’m good.
1:40:06 And I, and I sit first. Yes. And I do it. And, you know, often more than not, I will
1:40:09 go down and say, Hey, we’re having a meal. I’m going to have that glass of champagne
1:40:15 still. Yes. But at least I, it’s like a forcing, like I said, I’m going to take care of myself
1:40:21 first on that level. That’s great. Yeah. That’s very good. Very good. Good. Gold start. That’s
1:40:25 the right thing to do. Okay. Because you get, you get the, you actually get, you get rid
1:40:30 of the need. And then you can go and enjoy it. Right. You know, which is even better.
1:40:36 Yeah. And there’s also that, that weird pleasure in deferring a pleasure. Right. You know, that
1:40:42 we show we’ve got the self-control to wait. Yes. And that actually feels good. Yes. Do
1:40:46 you know what I mean? Yeah. There’s a sort of, like it’s a little bit stoic, maybe that
1:40:51 you just don’t actually just reach for it the instant you want it. And then there’s, there’s
1:40:57 actually this pleasure in, Oh yeah, I can control myself. Right. That’s, that feels good.
1:41:01 Yeah. Oh, 100%. Yeah. It’s just, it’s like a, it’s a feather on the cap of like, I made
1:41:08 it to that. I didn’t have to immediately jump into that. And it’s funny, my therapist has
1:41:14 this thing where like, I, I, she said, great, you may want a drink or you may want, or you
1:41:19 have an insert anything, like a fear of turbulence or whatever it may be. Yeah. Yeah. Just sit
1:41:24 with it for a minute and just, just observe it. Right. And just journal about it. How
1:41:29 are you feeling? Where is the feeling? Yes. Well, where is it coming up? And she goes,
1:41:33 we finished that for 10 minutes. Go have that drink if you want it. Yes. But, but you’ve
1:41:38 noted it down. Yeah. And, and, and there’s something to that that leads to, I think it’s
1:41:44 slowly an understanding of the motivations that are hidden behind why you’re driven to
1:41:48 do that in the first place. Exactly. That’s a great therapist. Yeah. She’s amazing therapist.
1:41:52 And that’s really compatible with meditation where we’re getting more aware. Yeah. So that
1:41:58 would include awareness of our sort of impulses and yearnings. Yeah. Wanting this, wanting that.
1:42:03 Couple, I know we got to go and wrap things up, but I have a couple really kind of insane
1:42:12 questions for you that I wanted to run by you just because it’s stuff that I’ve come
1:42:18 across over the last couple of years in the world of Zen. And I’ve said to myself, how
1:42:26 is this possible? And I know anytime we read any type of historic, especially, you know,
1:42:31 texts that are thousands of years old, there can be either parables that are like exaggerated
1:42:34 or just things that like, you’re like, okay, that person didn’t chop off that person’s
1:42:39 arm when they’re telling the story about, you know, about greed or whatever like that.
1:42:45 It was just an example, right? Yeah. And so I want to know if this stuff, from your point
1:42:51 of view, if there’s any truth to it, or do you just consider it to be part of the lore
1:42:58 of what Zen is, right? Yeah. They’re in the three pillars of Zen. I’m sure you read the
1:43:03 book if you’re familiar with it. There is a quote here that I wanted to read to you
1:43:07 that I just didn’t quite, wasn’t able to wrap my head around. Okay. Let me see if I can
1:43:10 shed light on it or not. Yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe you can’t, but like, I just want
1:43:14 to know if they’re like, given your background, like, is there anything here that you can
1:43:21 comment on? Yeah. It goes something like this, it says, and this is a bit into the book,
1:43:30 it says the second of the five kinds of Zen is called Gido. Gado. Gado, okay. Gado literally
1:43:36 means literally an outside way. And then it goes on to say, another feature of Gado Zen
1:43:45 is that is often practice in order to cultivate various supernormal powers or skills. Or to
1:43:52 master arts beyond the reach of the ordinary person. An example of this is the Tempu Nakamura,
1:43:57 the man who I mentioned earlier, it is reported that he can make people act without moving
1:44:04 a muscle or saying a word. The aim of the Emma method is to accomplish such feats as walking
1:44:12 barefoot on sharp sword blades or staring at sparrows that they become paralyzed. All
1:44:19 these miraculous exploits are brought about through the cultivation of joriki, the particular
1:44:26 strength or power which comes from strenuous practice of mind concentration. Can you paralyze
1:44:36 sparrows with your mind? Have you ever seen Kung Fu, the old TV show from the 1970s?
1:44:40 Oh yeah, of course. Grasshopper and all that. Oh, those are fun to watch just like on the
1:44:45 background, leave them playing. That’s what they’re talking about there. Really, I mean,
1:44:51 no, they did not part of Zen. Okay, so it’s like, it’s kind of, you know, it’s just, it’s
1:44:58 just legend. Okay, I mean, but on the other hand, it’s kind of cool that maybe, I mean,
1:45:03 you know, in Kung Fu, look at the way the blind old guy could fight, kill 14 brigands,
1:45:07 you know, without even seeing them. Do you feel any of that is true? Do you get any sense
1:45:14 of like, you mentioned earlier this idea that, you know, there’s no separation. Yeah. If
1:45:20 there’s no separation, is there control of external things? But the thing is, but the
1:45:25 thing is, if you think in a way, if you’re thinking of controlling something, that you’re
1:45:33 separate from it. So I think this discover you with your Zen knowledge. That’s not me.
1:45:37 Right. It’s like, it’s more like, if you’re, if you’re really in this experience of oneness,
1:45:44 they sometimes, you know, you’re not there. Right. So you’re separating yourself. So it’s
1:45:51 not really oneness. I get it. Yeah. And but I think it’s, I think I do have read about,
1:45:56 I don’t know, I’ve just read the old story of people who did sort of manipulate meditation
1:46:03 to, to get some kind of dark power or something like that, which that sort of sounds like
1:46:08 maybe that’s not particularly dark, but paralyzing a sparrow seems relatively innocent versus
1:46:11 some of the kind of less of a sparrow and you’re like, what the hell’s going on again
1:46:18 in the movie? Yeah, well, true. But, um, you know, did you see that movie, Spring, Summer,
1:46:22 Winter? Yes, whatever. That’s fantastic. I love that movie. I love that too. But remember
1:46:27 how that guy could make the boat move? Yes. You know, it’s more like, I think we’re into
1:46:32 the realm of was it crouching tiger hidden dragon? Yeah. You know, it’s Kung Fu really.
1:46:37 Right. You know, it’s more in that realm. Okay. I wanted to go check that with you.
1:46:43 And this one is, this one’s a little bit harder because it is real in that, um, I have the
1:46:53 actual, uh, notes on it here. So in, in the 1990s, 1992, there was a very famous alternative
1:46:59 rock band still very famous called Rage Against the Machine. Um, they had a cover, an album
1:47:08 cover that looks like that. So, oh man. Yeah, that is, is that Vietnam? That is a man is
1:47:18 that’s, that’s in Vietnam, uh, named Tiquan Duc. Uh, and on June 11th, 1963, he was protesting
1:47:24 the persecution of Buddhists by the US backed South Vietnamese government. Yeah. Um, the
1:47:29 picture went, you know, the equivalent of whatever viral would be today. Yeah. He, the
1:47:35 story goes something like this. He was protesting hundreds of people around, pulled out a mat,
1:47:41 dump gasoline on his head, struck the match on his, on his own will. Yeah. And lit himself
1:47:48 on fire. Yeah. Everyone that witnessed it, not a single scream, not a single screech,
1:47:57 nothing burned for 11 minutes, fell over backwards and it passed away. Yeah. Um, that is an extreme
1:48:04 sacrifice. It is an extreme statement, but it is also as someone that burns the tip of
1:48:11 my finger on a stove and freaks out because of the sheer pain of even a quarter inch of
1:48:20 a severe burn. Yeah. How can someone’s brain shut off pain like that? Yeah. Well, I would
1:48:30 guess that it didn’t shut off pain, but it didn’t mind pain. In other words, he had developed
1:48:38 what we call equanimity, which is not mind where you’re not trying to have nice experiences
1:48:43 and you’re not trying to push away unpleasant experiences by getting into a state of very
1:48:48 deep Samadhi. You know, I was talking about those flow states in meditation, they’re known
1:48:56 as Samadhi or Jhana as well. If you get very, very, very, very thoroughly absorbed and you
1:49:03 might with the additional impetus of the cause of doing something for intensely suffering
1:49:09 people, this was not for him. This was for the whole nation than the whole communities
1:49:16 that he felt he was representing and belonged to, who were suffering intensely and for their
1:49:23 sake. In other words, it’s selfless from the start. So with less self, we, we, I mean,
1:49:30 I’m not, I have no idea about that kind of intense pain, but I can sort of understand
1:49:37 that it might well be possible. Yeah. For a very seasoned meditator. That’s just
1:49:41 unbelievable. On behalf of others, you know, really, really
1:49:47 sacrificing themselves. And we can argue about, well, is that a, is that a good kind of self-sacrifice
1:49:49 or whatever we could, you know, who knows. Sure.
1:49:55 But aside from that, just how to do it, I mean, it’s a remarkable, it’s a most, it’s,
1:50:02 it’s an extraordinary act to be so, so giving up of your own life. I mean, there’s the stories
1:50:08 in the, there’s this, there’s these tales about Buddha, you know, that developed sort
1:50:14 of in the course of Buddhist history and about, they had the reincarnationist view back then.
1:50:19 So there’s stories about his former lives and that he lived and there’s one of them
1:50:25 where he was a rabbit who came across a family that was starving and they had a little fire,
1:50:31 they were huddled around and in this tale, he just leapt onto the fire so they could
1:50:37 eat, you know, that, that, I mean, you know, whatever, you know, there’s sort of folk tale
1:50:43 or whatever it is, but it’s, it’s a similar sense of that, I’m going to give up my life.
1:50:49 Your life is what I care about. Wow. And that’s, that’s the spirit of, I can’t claim to be
1:50:56 anywhere near there, but that’s the spirit of what we call a bodhisattva in, in the word,
1:51:01 the meaning of the word changed over time, but the later meaning of the word from about
1:51:08 2000 years ago onwards has been a being who is more concerned with the well-being of others
1:51:15 than of themselves. And that’s, I mean, it’s actually, it’s an incredible thing to aspire
1:51:22 to, you know, just a, especially in our culture, whereas it’s so counterintuitive that there
1:51:29 might be a path to happiness that wasn’t about getting more for me, but more about helping
1:51:36 others, helping others flourish, to be joyous at the successes of others and to be wishing
1:51:43 them having their hearts fulfilled and, and meeting their hearts desires, wanting that
1:51:50 and wanting others to be free from suffering, you know, as opposed to my suffering, my wanting,
1:51:56 you know, you know, that what a shift that might be. And it’s, it’s very, you know, it’s,
1:52:03 it’s not what we’re conditioned in our modern world is to, to really regard as a way to,
1:52:08 to happiness, but it could be that we’ve really got it back to front, that our normal way
1:52:16 of trying to get happy won’t actually ever work. It will get a hit of, you know, I got
1:52:22 this great and then the hits gone and we need it again. But those aren’t real happiness.
1:52:27 You know, it’s, I remember hearing the Dalai Lama just, you know, who was, he actually
1:52:34 came to Santa Fe one. And he, he was really excited to know about skiing. And a friend
1:52:41 of mine actually was, was his sort of guide, the 24 hours or something that he was in town.
1:52:46 And he was very sort of, he shyly asked after he’d done various, we’ve got these sort of
1:52:51 meetings, meeting the mayor or the this or that, you know, do you think we might be able
1:52:56 to go out the mountain? I want to see the ski, ski slope. Santa Fe has a ski slope.
1:53:01 And, and so they arranged it. And, and, and then, you know, he, he rode the chairlift,
1:53:08 he rode. And then afterwards he was in the, they went to have a cup of hot chocolate or
1:53:13 something in the cafeteria. And he was, he, he wanted to talk to the, the waitress, you
1:53:18 know, you know, how are you, my dear? What do we do? Just engage her. And she said, I’m
1:53:23 so honored to meet you. Can I ask you a question? You know, what, what is the meaning of life?
1:53:28 What is the purpose of life? He said, oh, that’s very easy. Purpose of life, meaning of life
1:53:35 is to be happy. But how to be happy? That’s not so simple. This is, this was recorded
1:53:41 in the newspaper, reading it. And, you know, the point is that the ways that we think we’ll
1:53:49 find happiness, we might have it back to front, where we think by getting what we want and
1:53:54 pushing away when we don’t want, that’s the path to happiness. And it’s very natural and
1:54:02 very understandable. But it could be that there’s another way that’s actually deep, which requires
1:54:09 us to let go of it. And then we find that we’re part of something already, which gives us
1:54:15 basically an infinite amount of happiness, an infinite happiness. In other words, we
1:54:21 don’t know the end of the happiness that can come when we release our hold on our sense
1:54:28 of self. It’s actually literally a limitless happiness. I really, I find that I find that
1:54:35 to be like, it speaks so deeply to me because, you know, I’ve as as a technologist and a
1:54:41 builder over the years, I’ve been very fortunate and that I’ve made some right decisions and
1:54:49 had some good monetary wins. And every time I have bought something, especially in my
1:54:55 call it early thirties, where I just always hadn’t had a windfall from some company going
1:55:03 public or something. And I would immediately follow up with something physical, you know,
1:55:10 and you get this buzz for 48 hours. And then you realize it’s just so hollow. And it’s
1:55:20 just a show. And it’s like, what about that? It’s just so silly sometimes how we get caught
1:55:26 up in things. And then that later was social media. How can I get more followers? How can
1:55:32 I get more likes? How can I get more of this and that? And we got to be careful. And I’m
1:55:39 glad we have a guy like you to help us disconnect from some of that and rethink that because
1:55:43 it’s so, it’s so important. It is. But, you know, Kevin, it’s not silly in the sense that
1:55:51 we is, you know, millions of years of evolution. We like the shiny thing. We like except the
1:55:56 shiny thing with social media is every time you open the app due to the algorithm. I have
1:56:03 this, I have this crazy theory that like, so if you think about, imagine, like, remember
1:56:08 like it was called the nineties, and you go out with a friend and you hang out and something
1:56:13 funny comes up, and you just laugh your ass off because you’re with a good buddy, right?
1:56:19 And it was a fantastic time. Or you’re watching the, you know, dating myself at the 11 o’clock
1:56:23 news or whatever, and you see something ridiculous that makes you laugh. And then there was that
1:56:26 funny show, America’s Funny Home Videos that came out where you’d see more of these funny
1:56:31 clips. And it was a really well watched show because people liked to laugh at the hilarious
1:56:37 person falling off the trampoline or whatever it may be. Then today, you have a product
1:56:46 that you open up, and it literally is putting the absolute most viral content specifically
1:56:52 designed for you and making you laugh over and over. You’re having one of the best days
1:57:00 of your life every 30 seconds, something that you used after weeks for every 30 seconds.
1:57:03 And then when you go without that and put that device away, you’re like, well, wait
1:57:07 a second, I want to have more of the best day of my life. I need to pick this up.
1:57:14 So I can get that stimulation, that aha moment, that laughter, that, you know, connection.
1:57:17 And it’s just like, I’m really concerned about that.
1:57:20 Yeah. So it’s just playing to this addictive nature.
1:57:21 Yes.
1:57:22 Of wanting to fix.
1:57:23 Yes.
1:57:24 Wanting to fix.
1:57:25 So, so how do we counteract that?
1:57:26 Right.
1:57:29 I think, honestly, putting an app on a phone, which people are using all the time, that
1:57:33 is taking them on a journey back to themselves.
1:57:34 Yes.
1:57:37 Satisfaction is already here.
1:57:38 Yeah.
1:57:45 The satisfaction that we can find, I mean, the fulfillment, like we’re needing no more
1:57:50 than we can find in just being. That’s what the meditative path is really for. It’s that
1:57:59 so you don’t need, actually, it’s to do away with need. Yes, you need more to a food anymore.
1:58:06 But basically, what if that’s it, right? You could just be, I mean, do you see the difference?
1:58:10 You don’t need to take in anything, whether it’s, whether it’s champagne or social media
1:58:16 or Ferrari, you just, you might, I never bought a Ferrari for the record. I never bought a
1:58:17 Ferrari.
1:58:24 Well, for the record, you don’t need, you know, sorry, you don’t need those things because
1:58:28 you’re already, you might choose it, yeah, but you don’t need it.
1:58:29 Right.
1:58:36 Because you’re already totally fulfilled. That’s, that’s what is, I mean, and this is
1:58:44 not some pie in the sky or like, are you going to do 40 years of RDS training? No, it can
1:58:50 be found relatively easily with the right guidance. That’s, that’s what we’re trying
1:58:52 to, that’s what I’m trying to offer, Rick.
1:58:59 I’m so excited for it. Well, let’s wrap things up. I wanted to plug a couple of things. You
1:59:05 know, like we said, the way app.com is the place to go to check out this app. It’s going
1:59:11 to be awesome. Also, you’ve previously written a book that goes into great detail about your
1:59:17 experience of awakening and, and just your history and trials and tribulations and what
1:59:23 led you to this path called One Blade of Grass. Obviously you can get this on Amazon. I’ll
1:59:28 put a link to it in the show notes at KevinRose.com. So people can find it there. Fantastic book.
1:59:32 And then more importantly, well, not, I don’t know about more broadly, but equally as important,
1:59:37 you have a new book coming out. What’s the publication date for that? July 9th. July
1:59:40 9th. Okay. So if you’re waiting and you want your Henry Fix, you got the app and you got
1:59:44 this book here and you got the Mountain Cloud Zen Center podcast, which I’ll link up in
1:59:49 show notes. And that’s called Original Love. That’s right. OriginalLove.org. Oh, sorry.
1:59:54 Two things. Yeah. The book, Original Love, July the 9th from Harper One. Is that preordered
1:59:57 now or no? Yeah, you can preorder it. Great. They’ve just put it up on Amazon. Okay. And
2:00:05 it’s got a great cover, by the way. And then there’s also meditation training, OriginalLove.org.
2:00:10 Which is also, you can check out for Sunday morning sitting. That’s fantastic. I’ve always
2:00:15 kind of wanted to have a proper Sunday morning. As someone that grew up going to church in
2:00:22 Sunday morning, it’s nice to have a spiritual day reset. It’s just like, it’s a beautiful
2:00:28 thing. I know. And I really feel a loss in that. And then not having that after giving
2:00:34 up the organized religion kind of world. So… That’s partly what we made that program for,
2:00:39 which is to have a Sunday morning thing. Awesome. Well, Henry, thank you so much. It’s been an
2:00:44 honor and a pleasure wishing you so much success with these new adventures. And I have no doubt
2:00:50 there’ll be a huge hit because your content is absolutely fantastic. You’re very kind.
2:00:54 Kevin, thank you so much. It’s been just a real joy to get time with you.
2:00:58 Well, let’s get you back on the show after you launched the book. And talk again. I’m
2:01:03 sure we’ll have a whole slew of new questions based on the book. So…
2:01:04 I’d love that.
2:01:05 All right. Thank you.
2:01:05 It’s so good to be with you.
2:01:06 – Thank you, dear.

0:00:04 So when I first saw blockchains, what was interesting about it is that maybe this is a
0:00:07 way that we can build new… I think blockchains are the only credible technology.
0:00:10 …reaching a two-year high above $57,000.
0:00:14 There’s often a lot of kind of confusion around what is crypto? What are blockchains?
0:00:18 What problems do they solve? Why would you want to use them? The internet was supposed to be
0:00:22 a decentralized network. Anyone can go put up a website. There’s a few aspects to that.
0:00:26 Like one is control and then number two is the economics. Like is it free or maybe you put ads
0:00:30 or maybe you charge for something. But it also had, I think, an explosion of entrepreneurship.
0:00:34 You know, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and all these great companies is they knew they could
0:00:36 put up a website, build it, and they would own it.
0:00:39 What are your thoughts on NFTs and how they evolved over the last couple of years?
0:00:45 Like NFTs are an atomic unit of ownership. What if we have all of this sort of big complicated
0:00:48 thing with everyone in the world and the internet can now own things? Okay, well that sounds
0:00:53 complicated. So NFTs are a way to simplify that. Here’s a little container. It’s a little box and
0:00:56 you can put something in it and that’s the unit of ownership. That’s what an NFT is. It’s a very
0:00:59 abstract concept. There have been a lot of dumb and empty projects. There’s been a lot of dumb
0:01:03 shit on the internet. But over time, I think these technologies have a logic of their own
0:01:10 because people run experiments and build things around it. So you’ve probably heard me mention
0:01:15 on the podcast in the past or other podcasts. There are two activities that I love. One is
0:01:21 Rucking, which is where you are hiking with a weighted backpack. Peter Tia got me into that one.
0:01:27 And then also the sauna. The sauna is huge. I did it at 175 degrees Fahrenheit, 20 to 25 minutes.
0:01:33 And there’s great data around reduction in dementia, cardiovascular improvements,
0:01:39 lower all-cause mortality. It’s just awesome. Tons of benefits. And I do this six times a week.
0:01:45 So I mention these because they both really make you sweat like a ton. And after that,
0:01:50 you definitely need to replenish your electrolytes. Sadly, a lot of the electrolyte powders out there
0:01:55 are packed with sugar. And that’s just a no-go for me. That goes straight to the gut.
0:02:00 I don’t like to spike my glucose. And for that reason, I use a product called Element.
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0:02:49 could just share your Element with a friend. Lastly, and this is the best part, it’s totally
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0:03:04 Get yours today at kevinrose.com/LMNT. The deal is only available through this link,
0:03:11 so you must go to kevinrose.com/LMNT. And huge thanks to Element for sponsoring today’s show.
0:03:16 So if you know me, I’m always trying out the latest and greatest stuff, always bouncing
0:03:22 around trying out different apps. But I will say there is one app in particular
0:03:28 that I absolutely love and just keeps getting better and better with time.
0:03:32 And I’m proud to say that they’re a sponsor of the show, and that is Notion. I use Notion as
0:03:37 my life dashboard. It tracks all my angel investments. It has travel documents for my
0:03:44 family, vaccination records. We use it for vacation planning, storing family recipes,
0:03:49 pretty much everything. I even have a separate workspace for my entire podcast workflow. So
0:03:56 that’s like guest outreach and booking, editing notes. It’s all in there. It’s really my Swiss
0:04:02 Army knife tool for all important data. Notion combines your notes, your documents, and projects
0:04:08 into one space that’s simple. And for me, this is key that’s just beautifully designed. It’s
0:04:13 really clean. And the mobile app’s awesome too. It’s nice that it’s just all in one tool. And
0:04:19 of course, we know it is the season of AI and AI is built right inside of Notion. So you don’t have
0:04:25 to bounce out to another tool and then come back to Notion. It’s built into it. And I personally
0:04:31 believe that having an AI power tool to summarize and leverage all of your data is definitely the
0:04:36 future. And Notion is right at the forefront of that. So try Notion for free when you go to
0:04:44 Notion.com/KevinRose. That’s all lowercase letters, Notion.com/KevinRose to try the powerful, easy
0:04:50 to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, now, I know you could just go to Notion.com. But
0:04:55 if you go to Notion.com/KevinRose, you’re actually supporting the show. I’d really appreciate it,
0:04:58 Notion.com/KevinRose. Chris, thank you so much for joining me today.
0:05:02 Thanks for having me, Kevin. Great to see you. Good to see you as well. I know you’re such a
0:05:09 busy guy. And the whole crypto side of Andreessen Horowitz has absolutely exploded. Just to give
0:05:14 people a sense of how many assets you manage, what does it look like on the crypto side now at
0:05:21 Andreessen? Yeah, I mean, the number we disclosed is $7 billion under management on the crypto
0:05:26 side. And so we’re one division within the broader firm. And so the firm does all sorts of other
0:05:34 things like AI and enterprise software. And we have a bio fund. But I run sort of a division,
0:05:39 which is a crypto fund, which has $7 billion under management. So that’s exactly why I want to
0:05:44 lead into this question, which is with that much under management, you’re an insanely busy guy.
0:05:52 Why write a book right now? Yeah, I mean, so it’s a great question. So one is I felt like we needed
0:05:59 a book. We meaning the kind of the category, the space of blockchains and crypto. And that came
0:06:04 from, as I’m sure you and lots of other people in the industry do, you go out and you speak to
0:06:13 people. And I speak to policymakers and to friends and potential business partners and
0:06:21 prospective employees. And there’s often a lot of confusion around, what is crypto? What are
0:06:26 blockchains? What they ask questions like, what problems do they solve? Why would you want to
0:06:32 use them? And I’ve done countless podcasts and meetings where I try to explain it.
0:06:39 And I finally kind of came to the conclusion that it’s just a topic that requires kind of a little
0:06:46 more than an hour. Yeah, and specifically, you’re not scalable to talk. Yeah, it just, yeah. I mean,
0:06:50 even then in an hour, it’s hard. I mean, and specifically, and I think you know this, Kevin,
0:06:55 is that if you come from the internet as a background, you have certain kind of working
0:07:00 assumptions that aren’t that widespread. So in the first part of the book, I kind of try to bring
0:07:05 people up to speed on kind of how I think folks like you and me and other sort of more internet
0:07:12 veterans think about the internet. So you can kind of think of the book as taking sort of the
0:07:19 things internet veterans know and trying to kind of in a pretty compact, hopefully very accessible
0:07:25 way, kind of share that and then sort of take things that the crypto blockchain people all
0:07:30 kind of know and share that and then sort of put it all together and show why it matters and why
0:07:36 it’s important and how this can lead to not just sort of what people see in the news of like speculation
0:07:40 and kind of casino stuff and FTX, a lot of the public impression is formed by that, right? They
0:07:45 see Bitcoin going up and down or some token going up and down and they say, what’s the point of this?
0:07:51 Isn’t this just speculation? And, you know, I’m here and I think you’re here and a lot of other
0:07:54 folks that I work with are here because we think that there are productive applications
0:07:59 that can be built using this technology. And so that’s ultimately what I want to explain is kind
0:08:04 of that. That’s what the book lays out is that vision of how and specific and the specific kind
0:08:10 of problem that I think blockchain solve is the internet, you know, so the introduction of the
0:08:16 book I talk about this, the internet was supposed to be and was originally a decentralized network
0:08:22 where, you know, anyone could go like you could sort of go back to the 90s. Anyone can go put up
0:08:27 a website. They can have a build a direct relationship with their audience if they’re
0:08:34 an entrepreneur or a creator or be a writer or an artist or an entrepreneur or make a video game,
0:08:37 whatever you’re doing or just a, you know, personal blog or whatever it might be,
0:08:42 you put it up there and you sort of build an audience, right? And having that direct
0:08:46 relationship with the audience means there’s a few aspects to that. Like one is control.
0:08:52 You kind of control your own destiny. You know, you can build your audience. You kind of have
0:08:57 a direct relationship. You own that audience. And then number two is the economics. Like you
0:09:01 can decide, hey, do you want to, is it free or maybe you put ads or maybe you charge for something.
0:09:07 And if you, to the extent you have the, you know, a business model, you get that money, you get
0:09:12 basically all of that money in the original, the way the web worked. And that, that led to,
0:09:18 I think, both, both at the kind of smaller scale, lots of really cool kind of experiments and, you
0:09:23 know, just sort of, I think of the 90s and 2000s web is just a really exciting time where there
0:09:28 was just all these kind of cool, weird things going on. So that was one benefit is just sort of
0:09:33 this kind of explosion of creativity. But it also had, I think, an explosion of entrepreneurship,
0:09:37 right? I mean, the reason you had, you know, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube and all these great
0:09:41 companies is they knew they could put up a website, build it and they would own it. They weren’t
0:09:45 sharing that with some intermediary, right? They had a direct relationship with the audience.
0:09:50 And I believe that a lot of that is, is, has been lost and is at risk of getting even,
0:09:55 getting even worse, honestly. So I go through this in the intro of the book. It’s essentially,
0:10:00 if you look at all the kind of key statistics, sort of revenue generated, traffic,
0:10:05 the internet has basically become consolidated around five companies. These are companies we
0:10:13 know, Apple, Facebook, you know, Meta, Amazon, et cetera, right? Google. And those five companies
0:10:17 have the 95% ish, depending on which category you’re looking at, of the traffic, of the money,
0:10:21 of the market cap, of all those kinds of things, right? And more and more, and I see this on the
0:10:25 entrepreneurial side, it’s the internet has become a place you have to ask for permission.
0:10:29 Right? I mean, of course, yes, you can still put up a website, but you need that website to get
0:10:33 indexed by Google. You need to build an app that gets accepted by the app store. You need to get
0:10:36 distribution. You need to show up in search results. You need to show up in social rankings,
0:10:40 right? And you don’t control that. You can build, I can tell you countless stories of people that
0:10:45 have built audiences on Twitter or on TikTok. And then one day, mysteriously, that, you know,
0:10:50 someone turns dial internally, of course, it’s really probably a machine, AI or something,
0:10:55 but it goes away, right? Yeah, you mentioned this a couple of times in your book,
0:11:00 there were two examples you had. One was, you said when Twitter wanted the handle at X,
0:11:06 they just took it back. And there was another one on Instagram. Instagram took Metaverse.
0:11:10 When they switched the name, when Meta changed the name to Metaverse, they just took the name,
0:11:13 Metaverse. Those are the most kind of extreme dramatic examples when they just sort of say,
0:11:18 hey, we’re, you know, we own this. It’s ours. This is ours. But I think actually the more,
0:11:23 the really the more insidious thing is the much more subtle things that happen. So
0:11:27 I hear this right now from a lot of TikTok creators where they built up audiences,
0:11:30 you know, like a hundred million followers and things like this. I know one,
0:11:35 one group that did this. And TikTok’s internal strategy is, hey, we don’t want any of these
0:11:39 single creators to get too big. Let’s turn down the dial. The TikTok would rather have
0:11:45 a million people or 100,000 creators with 100,000 followers than five with a million, because,
0:11:49 you know, millions, because that kind of starts to give too much power to the kind of supply or
0:11:54 power in business speak. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why. And so there’s, there’s all these
0:11:59 social networks and, and other kinds of web properties are have all of these optimization
0:12:03 systems that make sure that they kind of spread the traffic however they want. And then also the
0:12:08 money, remember now to TikTok, they control the money, they put up the ads, they take all that
0:12:12 money. You know, most people that are on these networks are forced to do all of these kinds of
0:12:17 gymnastics to figure out a business model, like selling things in the offline world and
0:12:21 sponsorships and just all sorts of things because they can’t go direct, right? Because they lost,
0:12:25 because we lost that, that thing we have with the web, which is you could just put up a website
0:12:28 and have an ad. And actually, this is one reason you see kind of a move back to things like
0:12:32 sub stack and email, because people are sort of trying to go back to, in some ways, it’s a way
0:12:37 to sort of back to the future of trying to go back to the older model where you do hope a direct
0:12:43 relationship with your audience. So that’s kind of the problem. And, and, you know, I think that
0:12:46 really started and I kind of go through this in the book, I tried it in the book to talk a lot of,
0:12:50 you know, to give sort of historical examples and anecdotes. And a lot of it I experienced
0:12:55 directly. You, I think you were also there for a lot of it. The, you know, I think that really
0:13:01 kind of happened around the early 2010s, like 2012 ish. And I think I use RSS as a specific kind
0:13:08 of case study where RSS, for those who don’t know, was a kind of an open alternative to social
0:13:13 networks like Twitter and Facebook. And had RSS succeeded, I think a lot of the problems I’m
0:13:16 describing would not be problems. So you would have, you would have sort of social networking
0:13:20 done in this sort of open, decentralized way where people could have a direct relationship
0:13:25 with their audience. And around 2012 or ’13 is when, you know, basically Twitter and Google,
0:13:30 all the other companies stopped supporting RSS and the numbers declined precipitously and things
0:13:35 like this. Anyways, and that’s actually when I, so when I first saw blockchains, you know,
0:13:39 obviously that started in 2008 and nine with Bitcoin, but then kind of really developed
0:13:43 over the 2010 era and the sort of initial ideas were expanded.
0:13:49 To me, what was interesting about it is that it said, hey, maybe this is a way that we can build
0:13:57 new systems, new services that have, that are able to compete with these modern systems like
0:14:02 Facebook and Twitter, but have a lot of the benefits of the early internet. And that’s
0:14:06 sort of the core thesis of the book. But I think sort of to understand that you asked
0:14:10 why to write a book is that you need some context, you need a little bit of history.
0:14:14 And you also need to know like the way I think about it, Kevin, is like you and I,
0:14:18 like what business, you and I have been in kind of the consumer internet business for most of our
0:14:21 careers, right? When you’re in the consumer internet business, I think it’s sort of taken
0:14:27 for granted that, that you were basically in the business of building networks, right? If you
0:14:32 think about you with Dig and Moonbirds, you’re building networks. For the most part, entrepreneurship
0:14:36 on the internet is building networks, right? So Facebook is a network, Twitter’s a network,
0:14:40 Uber’s a network, Ebay’s a network. So the internet, corporate networks, those are corporate
0:14:43 networks, though. That’s right. That’s right. They’re owned by companies. But like the internet,
0:14:47 so this is sort of the reason I had to write a book is that I think a lot of people don’t have
0:14:50 this context. The way I see it is the internet is a network of networks, right? There’s the base
0:14:55 layer sort of internet protocol, like a hardware and basic software that connects it. But on top
0:14:59 of it are networks that we build. And that’s sort of the core activity that I’ve spent my career
0:15:03 doing is investing in or building networks. And you, of course, have been building networks.
0:15:07 And that’s what you do as an entrepreneur. And so when blockchains came along to me,
0:15:12 it was sort of, I was like, wait a second, this is a new, cool new way to build networks, right?
0:15:17 And that obviously, would you consider that? One thing I’m curious about there is like, when I
0:15:23 think about these corporate networks, you know, they’re very much like, you know, Elon can say
0:15:26 anything and it just goes on the corporate network side, right? So you have one single unified
0:15:31 source of power that stops at the CEO or chairman or whatever it may be at the board. And, you know,
0:15:35 they can, you know, laterally just make decisions that affect, you know, millions of people.
0:15:40 Do we need to pause now and say like, okay, it’s time to actually get back to building
0:15:45 more protocol networks? Because, you know, in some sense, like email has probably been the most
0:15:50 resilient against this, right? It’s an open protocol that can just, you know, or HTTPS or
0:15:56 whatever, right? Like, these are open standards that anyone can build on top of and they still
0:16:02 are around today. Like, is it, is it, is that the movement that you think Web3 needs to, like,
0:16:07 how do we actually, now that there’s so much power and so much lobbying power and everything
0:16:13 else, like, how do we get back to basics and, you know, disrupt those big, large massive corporate
0:16:17 networks? Yeah. So no great question. So the, just so maybe just so the audience has the context,
0:16:23 in the book, I use sort of slightly novel nomenclature just for clarity, which is I call sort
0:16:27 of the three kinds of networks. There’s protocol networks, corporate networks, and blockchain
0:16:31 networks. And protocol, protocol networks are often called protocols, but so are blockchain.
0:16:35 So I had to use some words to distinguish them. That’s why I called them those things.
0:16:39 So protocol networks are sort of the original networks of the internet. That’s, as you described,
0:16:44 the two big ones are the Web, the World Wide Web, HTTP, and email. Also, you know, the protocol
0:16:50 is called SMTP. And those, those were created in the 80s. I think a lot of the success honestly
0:16:56 was due to the fact that there wasn’t really competition. You know, had you had sort of Gmail,
0:17:00 I’m making it up, but like, you know, Gmail’s of course built on SMTP. But if you had, you had
0:17:05 sort of companies of that caliber, like Google and the 80s and the internet, it’s sort of hard
0:17:09 to imagine, but just imagine, like, I think it would have been harder. And there’s been a long
0:17:15 history of people trying to build new protocols, right? There’s like Jabber and Diaspora and RSS,
0:17:22 and like, I go through and I list like 50 of them in the book. So, in different parts. And by the
0:17:26 way, I’ve been a supporter of those. I’m a big fan of those. And I’ve been blogging about that
0:17:32 stuff for 15 years. Like I’ve, you know, so I, and if, if those could succeed, if RSS could succeed,
0:17:39 I would be very happy and, and be very supportive. Okay. But I would say, you know, the evidence is,
0:17:42 it’s now been, you know, a lot of people have tried, there’s been a lot of startups around
0:17:48 that kind of stuff. And it’s been 30 years and nothing has succeeded. And I would argue that,
0:17:53 and I do argue in the book that that is, you know, fundamentally, that those protocol networks
0:18:00 can’t compete with, with these big companies. And, and I use YouTube as an example. Like one big
0:18:07 reason is funding, right? So YouTube spent many, many billions of dollars in the early days subsidizing
0:18:12 free video hosting, right? I mean, that was kind of their strategy. It was, it was expensive in the
0:18:17 lawsuits they had, the copyright lawsuits. And also the video, you know, in the 2005, when they
0:18:21 launched to host high quality video on your site and stream, it was quite expensive. And so what
0:18:26 they did is a strategy, right? As they said, they said, Hey, you can upload your video. Hey,
0:18:29 you blogger, because there wasn’t people, people weren’t going to YouTube them, right? They were
0:18:34 going directly to websites like yours website or my website or startup websites. And they said,
0:18:39 Hey, you for free, you can, you can host video. We’ll put it on our site, but we’ll also let you
0:18:43 embed it on your site. That was their kind of killer feature in the beginning was the embed
0:18:47 feature. And people were like, Great, this solves all my problems. It’s easy. And they pay for it.
0:18:51 Right. And then what happened, of course, over time is they would dual host it, right? You’d
0:18:55 have it embedded on your site. And it would also be on YouTube.com. And eventually YouTube.com had
0:18:59 so much interesting stuff that people just started going there directly fast forward. It’s, you know,
0:19:05 the big, big website it is today. Meanwhile, like RSS, there were, there were things called a media
0:19:09 RSS. That was a competitor to it. It was a media version of RSS that was meant to be hosting,
0:19:12 you know, video hosting, but you had to pay for it yourself. And there were no, and there was
0:19:17 like this kind of ragtag group of developers kind of hacking away on it, right? As there are with
0:19:23 these protocol networks. There was no funding. There was, you know, in YouTube, you know, once
0:19:28 especially they acquired by Google, they had, they had sort of infinite resources. So my argument is
0:19:35 that after 30 years of, so my arguments, I guess one, I, I’m a big proponent of protocol networks,
0:19:41 if they could succeed, I would be supportive. But after 30 years of them not working, I feel like,
0:19:47 you know, perhaps there’s something fundamentally difficult about making about about, about helping
0:19:53 those succeed. And specifically, I argue that there’s sort of one of the main issues is funding.
0:19:57 And the other main issues sort of features and functionality. And then sort of the, then the,
0:20:01 then the kind of the concluding part of my argument is that blockchains essentially solve
0:20:05 those problems. So you can, in some ways, you can think of blockchain networks as evolved protocol
0:20:12 networks that have evolved to have sort of, you know, internal sources of funding and more advanced
0:20:17 feature sets. So for example, I’m talking about this in the history part of the book, that there was
0:20:22 a whole bunch of people trying to create social networks using RSS in the late 2000s to compete
0:20:26 with sites like Facebook, and they kept having a problem of where do you put the social graph,
0:20:31 where do you store it? Because, because protocol networks like the web and email have no place,
0:20:35 no, no database, no place to store things. And of course, that’s blockchain is a community on
0:20:40 database. And so blockchain lets you put those, there’s like new social networks like Farcaster
0:20:45 and Lens and these other things, which are kind of RSS like, except they store the social graph
0:20:48 on the blockchain. So I don’t want to go too deep in the weeds there. But essentially, I, the kind
0:20:54 of the, the, the high level argument is that protocol networks are great for, have all these
0:20:58 positive societal benefits. So do blockchain networks, but blockchain networks are kind of
0:21:05 further evolved and allow and more likely to, to, to be able to compete head to head with these big
0:21:11 kind of corporate networks. And what do you think when I think of each of these, call it like 10
0:21:18 plus year cycles, you know, starting with web one, you think about, there was always this,
0:21:22 there was always two camps that felt like one camp that would say, Hey, this is, this is hype,
0:21:27 this is bullshit. Like, you know, there was, you know, they call them dot bombs back in the day
0:21:31 when like the dot comms were just like, you know, popping up as an IPO. And then just like, I have
0:21:36 a board game. I think it’s called dot bomb. I still have it on my shelf. It’s from like 2003.
0:21:40 And it was like this mocking board game of all of the ridiculous web one ideas.
0:21:44 Well, remember, that’s what I don’t, I’m sure, you know, Philip Kaplan member of fucked company
0:21:48 that was there was a whole site. Every day, it was like the company’s winding down.
0:21:54 The funniest thing about the dot bomb game is almost every idea, I actually blogged about it
0:21:58 once almost every idea, like turned out to like 10 years later, be a hit startup, it was like
0:22:04 grocery, you know, like restaurant food delivery and like video conferencing and internet payments.
0:22:12 I was just too early. But I mean, out of that first web 1.0, you know, we obviously saw Google,
0:22:17 PayPal, Amazon, like a lot of the bigs that we know today come out of that web two, same thing,
0:22:23 some social networks, Uber, you know, some great companies that emerged there.
0:22:27 Web three, I think, you know, you have this, like you had mentioned earlier in the book,
0:22:34 you call this this kind of casino mentality. And there can be, we get a lot of black eyes,
0:22:40 right? Like, like we get a lot of PR black eyes and like absent a killer app that everyone can
0:22:46 point to and say, hot damn, like this is why web three matters. I wonder, like, when do we
0:22:50 actually, you know, we can beat the drum all day long, but if we keep just getting beat up on
0:22:55 the PR and press side, yeah, we’re it’s really doing a lot of damage. So I’m wondering, you know,
0:23:00 obviously, Bitcoin store value, no brainer, like that that that’s that’s a done deal, right?
0:23:06 What else do you see as being like, what’s going to what’s going to stick? We look back
0:23:10 five, seven, 10 years from now and say, ah, that was the Amazon of that era.
0:23:17 No, I mean, and I guess to to build on your point, I do think so I do. So and I describe this a
0:23:20 little bit in the book, because I think there’s sort of two cultures around blockchains, right?
0:23:25 There’s the there’s the, and a productive side that we’re talking about. And there’s just kind
0:23:31 of casino side. And I do think the casino side has created done a lot of damage, both to consumers
0:23:36 who, you know, for example, who lost money at places like FTX, but also just from a, you know,
0:23:40 as you mentioned, like kind of PR and image wise. And I think in this goes to policy questions,
0:23:44 which we may or may not want to talk about today, but I think like a smart policy approach would
0:23:51 be to to try to minimize the casino and maximize the productive use cases. I don’t think we have
0:23:56 that that that policy, the US is taking that policy approach today. So I think that’s one,
0:24:01 you know, one important thing that could happen is just sort of really putting guardrails around it
0:24:07 and encouraging the good stuff and discouraging the bad stuff. But but a precondition of that
0:24:10 is understanding what the good stuff is, right, which is also you asked me why I wrote a book,
0:24:13 that’s part of it is like the book is like, this is the positive vision, like you may or may not
0:24:17 believe it, but this is the positive vision. And this is how it could lead to the positive vision
0:24:22 and why it might be worthwhile to have policies that encourage that positive vision.
0:24:26 To your sec, to your point also, like, look, I don’t think we’ve had our kind of quote iPhone
0:24:32 moment or, you know, chat GPT moment. Let’s take AI. I mean, AI, you know, to some people,
0:24:37 AI started in 2023. You know, in fact, it’s, you know, the first paper on neural networks was
0:24:44 from 1943. So 80 year gap there. And I started a machine learning company in 2008 called Hunch,
0:24:49 they got acquired by eBay. We got acquired by eBay, we ended up being part of the product. But in
0:24:54 all honesty, you know, we were we were too early. And and the product didn’t work the way that I
0:24:58 hoped it would work because the technology just simply hadn’t evolved to the point it did. And
0:25:01 it’s interesting to ask like, why did it evolve to the point it did? There’s a bunch of smart
0:25:07 people building algorithms. But the core reason was GPU GPUs, companies like Nvidia created better
0:25:12 and better GPUs. Why did they do that for video games? So, you know, just this is just to illustrate
0:25:16 that like these things can take long, very long times and follow very kind of circuitous paths.
0:25:22 Who would have thought that like video games would lead to, you know, AGI, like that was not
0:25:28 sort of the obvious, the obvious kind of prediction. So so I don’t think we’ve had
0:25:33 that sort of chat GPT moment. I think, I think there’s a few reasons I mentioned the policy kind
0:25:38 of stuff. I think that we’ve unfortunately, we’re in a situation now where a lot of the good actors
0:25:48 are burdened by lots and lots of kind of legal. I’d say in an average company financing, we do
0:25:53 have let’s say 10 million dollar series a three plus maybe five million goes to legal and policy
0:25:59 kind of stuff. Like it’s just a major, major kind of overhead piece of overhead. And then, you know,
0:26:04 of course, the bad actors are offshore anonymous. They just don’t care. And so they in some ways,
0:26:09 you know, so have sort of this lack of clarity and and and the fact that it’s going to be playing
0:26:13 out in course for years, I think benefits those folks. So that’s number one, number two, like I
0:26:16 think infrastructure always matters in computing movements. And I think the blockchains is a
0:26:21 computing movement. Steve Jobs is a genius. But the reality is, you know, you couldn’t have done
0:26:24 that and probably to you know, the iPhone came in 2007, you probably couldn’t have done it three
0:26:29 years earlier. And had he not done it, someone else would have probably done it at some point,
0:26:33 because at some point, you know, the chips got good enough to fit on a small thing, you had
0:26:38 capacitive touchscreens, you had, you know, cellular technology, all these other kinds of
0:26:43 components got good enough. So you kind of can go back in history and look at a lot of the things
0:26:48 that happen and look at the underlying kind of Moore’s law curves. And, you know, I’m not saying
0:26:53 that, of course, entrepreneurs and geniuses like Steve Jobs matter, but there is these very powerful
0:26:58 underlying forces. And I think blockchains have those as well. And that anyone who’s tried to use
0:27:02 something like Ethereum lately, you know, will tell you that like it’s a clunky experience,
0:27:06 you pay too much for gas, the transaction times are low. So that surpassed. So I think the
0:27:12 infrastructure stuff has to get fixed, the policy stuff has to get fixed. Do you think that it’s
0:27:18 likely the kind of leaning out and rewriting of the financial stack, you know, on the lending side,
0:27:24 maybe even mortgages, like this, that whole infrastructure that gives way to Web3 first?
0:27:29 I think that that is so I think financial applications are very interesting. There’s
0:27:32 been some very sophisticated stuff done, especially around like kind of deep so-called
0:27:37 DeFi. I think one of the things overlooked in the last couple of years is that DeFi protocols like
0:27:43 Uniswap and Compound and Ave worked perfectly throughout all of the ups and downs and market
0:27:51 volatility. And the really, really interesting kind of new constructions that I wish more people
0:27:55 would look at. I think honestly, the challenge there is regulatory. I mean, like right now,
0:28:01 you want to connect any of those systems to, you know, kind of outside of this sort of blockchain
0:28:09 microcosm and you run into all sorts of regulatory issues. So if you want to put the so-called real
0:28:17 world assets and put them on chain and, you know, kind of put all these, use all these new tools,
0:28:23 you just have to, right now, it’s just very, very unclear from a regulatory point of view. So I do
0:28:28 think that the tech there is very sophisticated and evolved. And I think it’s really that particular
0:28:32 one. I mean, finance is a very, it’s like healthcare. You know, there’s a few areas of the
0:28:35 economy that are just extremely heavily regulated. And I think that’s kind of the main sticking point
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0:32:27 How much do you think the average consumer will have to know about Web 3 in the future,
0:32:31 meaning like, you know, when I’m on Gmail, I’m not asking, I mean, of course, it’s a
0:32:35 Google database, but I’m not asking if Oracle’s behind the scenes running the database or whatever
0:32:40 it may be. I’m just interacting with an application. And when I think about, you know, Web 3 largely
0:32:46 today, I mean, us geeks, we get how there’s like five hurdles to get to a layer two and the things
0:32:51 you have to sign. And, you know, even we get, you know, hosed sometimes and hacked or whatever it
0:32:56 may be. So it’s like, I have to think there’s a certain amount of tooling and adoption that either
0:33:01 has to just disappear, where the consumer doesn’t even know they’re using Web 3 tech behind the
0:33:07 scenes. Or it just needs to be, you know, maybe it’s a new layer one that comes up that just makes
0:33:11 it one click instead of five, maybe it’s Solana that ends up, you know, shining here because they
0:33:16 don’t have the baggage of layer twos and the additional complexity. What are your thoughts on
0:33:22 that? Yeah, no, I think, look, I think most of the kind of friction stuff should and will be abstracted
0:33:25 away. Like you should not have to see all those things, right? And that should be, and the security
0:33:29 needs to be improved. And just the whole kind of model of like looking through and looking at these
0:33:34 kind of, these kind of strange popups and all that kind of stuff that that should be, I do think that
0:33:41 some of the some of the concepts will will come through will be understood. So, you know, just
0:33:45 think about, I think a regular internet user has some sense that like a website is different than
0:33:50 their, you know, Twitter handle, right, in the sense that they kind of own their website,
0:33:55 right? I think that’s a pretty broadly understood concept. And so I think this concept, one of the
0:33:59 really the core idea, the reason the book’s called Read Right Own, own is the is kind of the key
0:34:04 thing, the third part, I think this sense of ownership of like, hey, this is an object,
0:34:09 this is a name in a social network, this is a digital collectible, this is a,
0:34:15 you know, some other kind of asset that might be part of a video game asset or whatever it might be
0:34:20 that I actually own, I think that needs to come through to the end consumer, they need to know
0:34:24 it’s different. And it’s not just something that you’re sort of borrowing from this application.
0:34:28 And that you actually have this sort of this kind of persistent inventory
0:34:32 that you carry around with you to different services, right? That’s a very different that’s
0:34:38 sort of flipping. Web3 flips that model, right? So right now, to the extent they’re sort of objects
0:34:43 on the internet, those are owned by the service you use, and you’re just kind of come in and borrow
0:34:47 it, right? If you come into a social network, and the name is owned by Twitter, you come into a
0:34:52 video game, the objects are owned by the game, right? You all of those anything you interact with
0:34:59 is owned by the service. So I think that concept of flipping that and having the user have control,
0:35:02 like in an ideal world, they would have control of things like their,
0:35:08 you know, their tastes, you know, so like their preference, like to taste, meaning like you’re
0:35:14 going to have all of these algorithm AI systems that learn about you and recommend things to you.
0:35:18 And does that data sit with the service? And do they own it? Do they go and do all the things
0:35:23 these services do today with your data? Or do you own it? And then do you give them permission
0:35:28 to use it in certain ways? Like so I think flipping the key idea to me is flipping the power dynamic
0:35:32 away from the service toward the user. And I think that part needs to come through to the end
0:35:38 user. I don’t think all of the kind of visual cruft should come through, hopefully. Like that
0:35:43 there’s no need for that, right? Yeah, when you mentioned in the book, like this is a moment where,
0:35:48 you know, the thing that’s nice about these blockchains is they’re democratic and they’re
0:35:53 transparent. And if we want, it’s something that we can rely on not to be changed over
0:35:59 time. You know, and so I could imagine a world where I opt into an algorithm that sorts my data
0:36:03 for me. And I understand completely, maybe not completely, but to a large extent, how it’s doing
0:36:08 that. So I’m just not artificially getting, you know, weird things happening, like shadow banning
0:36:13 or certain pieces of content getting promoted over others. Is that kind of how you see it unfolding?
0:36:17 Yeah, and like, exactly. And like, think about it today, like you buy, I was just looking at
0:36:20 these some cool new AI devices that are coming out. If you follow those things, I think they’re
0:36:24 really cool. But I just like, what’s going to happen with my data? I’m supposed to read the
0:36:29 current model is just, I think, kind of ridiculous, which is I’m supposed to read a 40 page privacy
0:36:36 policy, these popups to come up. And like, it’s just absurd, the system, right? And then, oh,
0:36:41 you had a clause in the privacy policy that said you could use all of your data in these different
0:36:46 ways. And by the way, I talk about this in the book. All of these services go through this cycle,
0:36:50 I believe, which is they start off kind of, I call it the attract extract cycle. And I’ve seen
0:36:56 this now for decades, which is they start off your new AI service, and you’re like, you want users,
0:37:02 you want content, you want to your super friendly, you’re super open, don’t worry about extracting
0:37:08 money out of it. But then over time, you raise venture money, you, you know, got competitors,
0:37:13 you’ve gotten to enough scale. Like, I’ve been on the boards of companies, and it’s just depressing
0:37:16 to see, I’ve been, you know, at like, you’re on the board, and you’re like, okay, now we have to
0:37:21 start extracting and like, and like legally show it as a S curve in the book. Yeah, yeah,
0:37:26 it’s like very friendly. Yeah, and it happens over, look at Google now, I can’t even use,
0:37:30 you’ve been, I can’t even use a service anymore. It’s all sponsored links on mobile. Most of time,
0:37:33 now it’s all, remember their whole thing, the entire pitch at the beginning was we don’t put
0:37:38 all these ads everywhere. Now it’s all Google services and sponsored links. Amazon, I just,
0:37:44 you just, I love, I love Amazon, I use it, but like, I just now I’m just trained to scroll down,
0:37:47 you know, so much. And I don’t know, regular people, probably they don’t do it, regular people,
0:37:52 because they obviously, that’s why Amazon does it, people click on it. And it’s, and it tricks them,
0:37:55 and it’s not, it’s not, it’s not an honest way to do business. But that’s what they do. I mean,
0:38:00 like, it’s legal, they put it, I’m sure there’s some clause in that 40 page privacy policy.
0:38:06 But it’s just not a good system. And I think it worked for a while, because they were in that
0:38:11 kind of early honeymoon phase. But now we’re seeing the kind of the consequences of it. And I
0:38:14 think it’s only going to get worse. And by the way, I’m a big fan of AI. We do a lot of AI and
0:38:18 investing at the firm. AI is going to further can just going to make all these issues even
0:38:23 greater. It’s going to further consolidate the internet. It rewards companies that have lots of
0:38:29 data and lots of money and lots of compute. And that’s going to sort of further entrench the big
0:38:33 companies. It’s going to make these data issues much bigger. I have a chapter in the book about
0:38:38 this. It’s going to like one of it’s going to break the I call it break the covenant that the
0:38:42 internet has today with creative people. So with creative people, like you think about Google,
0:38:46 like they’re sort of an implicit covenant, who’s never agreed to it just kind of evolved.
0:38:51 But the covenant is you, you know, you content creator, I’m a web, I’m a news site, I’m a travel
0:38:58 site, I’m an artist, you let you let Google crawl you index you and show snippets on the search
0:39:03 result. And in return, they’ll send you some amount of traffic, right? And in AI world,
0:39:06 that’s not going to they’re just going to show you the answer, or they’re just going to give
0:39:09 you an image, right? You’re going to say, Hey, give me an image of X and it’s going to give you
0:39:13 the image. And why would it bother to link back, right? The user doesn’t need to click through,
0:39:17 Hey, here’s the travel times, here’s the recipe, here’s the whatever. And so in that world, it
0:39:22 breaks that covenant, right? So you no longer have so so those creators, then what happens,
0:39:26 you’re already seeing this happen, like a like Twitter and Reddit are already pulling back on
0:39:30 their API as people are adding paywalls. So great. So then we have five companies. This is really
0:39:34 where we’re headed right now. And like, like, I think we have a direct path to it. And I don’t
0:39:39 know why people aren’t talking about it. But we’re gonna have five big companies with AI services.
0:39:44 And then a bunch of people, you know, creators are going to be fighting them locking down their site,
0:39:48 taking them to court, the big, you know, New York Times just all the big lawsuit,
0:39:52 and you’re gonna have years and years of court battles. And, you know, and this is how much of
0:39:56 that do we have to, do you think we have to live with just because of the pure efficiency that it
0:40:01 affords us? Like, sometimes when I think, okay, maybe let’s pretend I’m shopping for the next
0:40:05 smartphone, I’m on the Android ecosystem, I have a lot of choice. And I’m like, who has the best
0:40:13 camera right now in production that I can buy today? I ask AI, and I say, Hey, look at the top 10
0:40:19 review sites and give me give me the winner, right? And it gives me spits me back one line of text.
0:40:24 Like, in some sense, I’m pretty happy about that result. But also, I see how it’s screwing people
0:40:28 over. So there’s like convenience, you know, but it’s also kind of like, how do we, how do they
0:40:33 get paid? Yeah, look, I’m not saying that we should like, we should, we should that we should
0:40:38 not build these AI systems. Like, I think that they are better for users, and they are better
0:40:43 ultimately for, you know, humanity and productivity and human flourishing. And look for, I was talking
0:40:47 about the creator side on the sort of supply side on the flip side, they help creators create things
0:40:52 right there, like your but your co pilot that helps you do stuff. And so I think they’re very
0:40:56 powerful, important technology, and we shouldn’t and we shouldn’t sort of, you know, kind of handicap
0:41:02 them. I think that I guess my what I would argue, and this is both true of blockchains and AI is
0:41:06 that we’re sort of taking the wrong approach to the policy kinds of questions, which is we’re
0:41:11 sort of saying, Okay, these right now, there’s a conflict going on between New York Times and open
0:41:15 AI, and they’re going to go to court. And then a judge is going to, you know, two years from now,
0:41:22 a judge is going to interpret documents from 200 years ago as to how they apply to AI. And I’m
0:41:27 saying it’s and it’s very reactive. And I’m saying a better way to think about it is proactively,
0:41:31 right, which is you describe the positive vision, which is what I tried to do for blockchains and
0:41:35 read write on somebody should do that for AI. I’m probably not me. I’m not going to do it. But
0:41:40 someone should like someone should describe the positive vision. And then we should construct
0:41:45 policies that that find the best balance that like in the case of AI, like what’s what’s a good set
0:41:50 of policies that allow the AI systems to flourish, but also make sure that creators get paid, right,
0:41:54 you need both. Like we can’t we don’t want an internet where everybody’s afraid to put their
0:41:57 content on the internet, like that’s not a good internet. And that that’s where we’re going to
0:42:01 be headed if we don’t think about that, the creators need to get paid, and they need to get paid
0:42:06 fairly, and they should get paid like they do contribute like the like with the AI thing, like
0:42:12 there’s this kind of philosophical question of like, does does the AI system copy like when it
0:42:18 learns from, let’s say it learns some art style from a bunch of artists, is it copying it? Or is
0:42:23 it inspired by it? Is it more like a human being inspired by it? Or you know, and some judge will
0:42:28 two years from now will decide that the truth is there’s no answer to that question. Like it’s
0:42:33 kind of this new thing. There’s no actual like way to interpret the Constitution or some other
0:42:38 document that tells you the answer to that question. I think instead, we should be asking the question
0:42:42 of like, look, if you’re contributing, if the AI system is valuable, and you created something
0:42:47 that contributed to it, through machine learning training or some other mechanism, like you should
0:42:51 get some of that money that that some of that value creates, right? And I don’t know the exact
0:42:55 mechanism of how that that is formed, I suggest some things, I think blockchains can play an
0:43:00 important role because blockchains are kind of effectively economic machines that let you sort
0:43:05 of do collective bargaining between large groups of people and other services. That’s, I think,
0:43:08 one way you could imagine policy approaches. But to me, that’s the way you should think about it,
0:43:11 is like, how do you get the best of both worlds? Like, I think you can get the best, like, how do
0:43:15 you get like, you should not force a consumer to jump through hoops to find out what the best camera
0:43:22 is in order to get the camera review sites paid, you should let the user have the best experience
0:43:27 and make sure that the money that’s made off of that sort of cascades back to the people who
0:43:32 contributed to it in whatever way they did. It’s actually really interesting because blockchains
0:43:37 in some sense are a really good use case here because they’re transparent. So you can see what’s
0:43:42 going on, the waterfall, the cascading money. Exactly. So if we can see the waterfall and say,
0:43:49 okay, I just asked for, you know, the ultimate martini recipe, and it pulled from 150 data
0:43:54 sources, like weighed them in this particular way. And, you know, these are the micro payments that
0:44:00 went out to all those sources based on the weight of that data. Like that to me is, it feels like
0:44:04 that should be the kind of transparency we need around this. I agree. I completely agree. I mean,
0:44:10 that’s one of, blockchains provide this incredible kind of transparent audit trail
0:44:14 for these sorts of things. It also lets a bunch of creative people kind of get together and
0:44:19 collectively bargain. They can come together and through a blockchain say, you can use our data,
0:44:22 but you need to give us X percent of the revenue as an example. And then they can say,
0:44:26 but, and instead of you bargaining with each one of us, a million of us individually, where,
0:44:30 where the, you know, the big company would have all the power by being together,
0:44:36 we get more leverage, right? And like in a world where blockchains weren’t politicized as they are
0:44:40 today, and you have people, partly because of casino culture and partly because the world,
0:44:45 everything in the world seems politicized these days. But for some reason, like there’s a set of
0:44:49 people who just won’t consider blockchains, which of course, they’re just a software construction.
0:44:53 There’s not, they’re not, they don’t have a political orientation. It’s a, it’s a way to
0:44:59 build certain software systems. They are very valuable for solving a lot of the problems that,
0:45:05 that AI will create. And again, I’m pro AI, I think that we should have these systems, but I think
0:45:11 that we need complementary systems. And I think blockchains are very powerful,
0:45:15 sort of complementary systems to help mitigate some of the problems that AI creates.
0:45:21 One of the, you brought this up a couple of times, but the title of the book is Read
0:45:25 Right Own. On the own side, obviously a big piece of this, and you cover this, you know,
0:45:31 a bit in the book is around NFTs as well. And so, you know, we’ve in the NFTs space taken our fair
0:45:38 share of black eyes, because there’s been all different types of, you know, participants in
0:45:45 this space in it for all different reasons, you know, and so it’s challenging because I see some
0:45:48 of the use cases you outlined in the book and some of the use cases that I think about,
0:45:52 especially around interoperable gaming components, you know, ownable assets,
0:45:57 instead of some of these virtual worlds, you know, certainly on the digital art side, being a huge
0:46:02 piece that I think is durable in here to stay, generative art here to stay.
0:46:07 What are your thoughts on NFTs and how they evolved over the last couple of years?
0:46:14 Yeah, I mean, so, you know, NFTs are, they are an atomic unit of ownership, right? They’re very
0:46:18 abstract concepts. I kind of talk about this in the book. I talk about this software concept of,
0:46:21 it was called encapsulation. It’s an old, old idea in software, which is you can take something
0:46:26 complex and you can encapsulate it in something simple. And so, for the example I used is the
0:46:31 website. So, when you have the original vision of the web, when Tim Berners-Lee and the others who
0:46:35 were kind of imagining it, it was like, what if we had all the information in the world linked
0:46:40 together, anyone can contribute to it? Okay, that sounds complicated. Well, let’s simplify it. We’ll
0:46:44 have a little unit is called a website and you control, someone controls that website and there’s
0:46:49 things called links and they connect them, right? So, the web 3 vision is what if we have all of
0:46:52 this sort of big complicated thing with everyone in the world and the internet can now own things?
0:46:57 Okay, well, that sounds complicated. So, NFTs are a way to simplify that. Here’s a little container.
0:47:01 It’s a little box and you can put something in it and that’s the unit of ownership. That’s what
0:47:06 an NFT is. It’s a very abstract concept. You mentioned it like it being like, I thought this
0:47:10 was an interesting take where you said it’s almost like an artist, maybe you didn’t say
0:47:13 baseball card, but like signing something, right? Like almost like an autograph on something.
0:47:21 Well, that’s a specific. So, I just described a very general concept of an NFT. A specific,
0:47:28 one specific type of NFT are these kinds of artistic NFTs where you buy it from the artist
0:47:33 and they kind of sign it and you have cryptographic proof they signed it. And that may or may not
0:47:37 have value to people depending on how they, a lot of things in the world, a lot of value in the
0:47:46 world is subjective. Most fashion, most sneakers and collectibles and baseball cards. And I would
0:47:53 argue most fancy cars and most nice clothes. Like, sure, there’s some kind of… The US dollar.
0:47:57 Yeah, I mean, there’s some utilitarian kind of objective value. It’s not back like gold, yeah.
0:48:02 Like of like, yeah, this sweater sure keeps me warm and this and that, but I probably paid a
0:48:06 premium for it because of the brand and how it looked. And that’s a very common thing. So,
0:48:12 some people may choose to value those things. I think the key point though is a lot of the
0:48:19 people negative in NFTs, I think are confusing the specific sort of presentation of NFTs that
0:48:25 happened in 2021 with the broader concept, right? It’d be kind of like if somebody invented the
0:48:29 web and the early websites, a bunch of them were like kind of dumb websites or something, right?
0:48:33 That doesn’t mean the web is a bad idea. It means that the early websites weren’t great, okay?
0:48:38 That’s kind of what… And look, that happened with social media, by the way. You were there,
0:48:43 like I was early on. People were like constantly mocking it as like, these are like these nerds
0:48:46 talking about what they’re having for lunch. But if you step back and you looked at…
0:48:51 That was Twitter in the early days. Why would I want to know what Chris Stix and Kevin
0:48:56 Rose is having for lunch? Like, I heard that… Chris, a question for you. Have you downloaded
0:48:59 your Twitter history, like backed it up? I think I did it at one point, yeah, yeah.
0:49:04 So I did it with mine and they actually have a… When you launch and you unzip it, the file,
0:49:09 is that they actually have a beautiful interface for kind of searching and bruising your old data
0:49:15 and you can sort by date. I would do it again and save it before Elon decides to change that
0:49:21 interface because it’s actually quite good. When you get that data, do a look at your oldest tweets
0:49:25 and they’re so embarrassing. They’re literally like… It is actually what you were having for lunch.
0:49:28 Is anyone here? I was like… Because it was right after they launched. I’m sure you were on that too
0:49:34 back then. Yeah. It was like, yeah, that’s funny. No, but that’s what it was, right? It was silly.
0:49:37 But that’s the thing is like, when you look back, so say you’re 2006 or something, looking at social
0:49:46 media, you could look at Twitter as this, you know, this is these sort of whatever these
0:49:50 self-promoting nerds who are talking about what they’re having for lunch. Or you could say,
0:49:54 look at it kind of more abstractly, which is, wow, this is a new way, this is a new protocol for
0:50:00 global communication. And of course, the more abstract way to look at it ended up being the
0:50:06 correct way. And I believe that that’s sort of a core thing you need to do in technology if you
0:50:14 want to try to predict the future is you need to look at things and sort of throw away the accidental
0:50:20 trappings of how it kind of shows up. If you look just at the superficial aspects, you’re
0:50:23 going to miss the essence of it. You need to look at the essence of it. What is it really?
0:50:28 And because what it really is kind of gives you some insight into how it may evolve.
0:50:31 And I think that’s the core mistake people are making around NFTs right now, is they’re looking
0:50:35 at, yes, there’s been a lot of dumb and empty projects. There’s been a lot of dumb shit on
0:50:41 the internet my entire career. Like, it’s just like, there’s a lot of dumb websites. It’s all of
0:50:47 humanity and people, you know, like, there’s good and bad, right? But over time, I think these
0:50:51 technologies have a logic of their own and they evolve into kind of what their essence should be,
0:50:55 because people run experiments and build things around it. And so that would be
0:51:01 a miracle with NFTs is like, are you, for the critics, do you dislike specific things that
0:51:05 happened a couple of years ago or projects you saw? Or do you dislike the idea of an atomic
0:51:09 unit of ownership on the internet? Because I bet you if they thought about the latter concept,
0:51:13 they’d realize it’s actually a really interesting and important idea. And I continue to think that.
0:51:20 I know it’s not a popular view. I’m like, I just feel 100% sure this is like one of the most important
0:51:25 things. No, I’m 100% sure as well. It’s silly to me to think that like, you know,
0:51:32 oftentimes one of the things I do is I just kind of close my eyes and say, okay, if I were to like
0:51:37 be in a coma for the next 10 years, and I wake up, will this still be true, right? Like, and like,
0:51:44 just kind of like played out in your head, like what and the idea that ownable digital assets,
0:51:50 like verifiable scarcity, guaranteed provenance, like ownable digital assets is going away is
0:51:55 just like laughable to me. Like, of course, that will be a thing in the future. Like,
0:52:01 digital currency, like if I have a brand new island and I say, hey, this is my new country,
0:52:06 what am I going to do go by printing presses? Of course, I’m going to embrace a digital currency.
0:52:12 So some of these things I just think it’s funny, the very first quote that you had in your book,
0:52:18 I thought was a fantastic one where by Freeman Dyson, where it says, when the great innovation
0:52:25 appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. Like that, that’s
0:52:30 and there’s more to the quote there, but that that was, he says, at first glance, they will look crazy.
0:52:36 And so you believe that to be true. I’m obviously put the be, yeah, look, let’s be very true with
0:52:39 web through. And I talk about this, another, another important thing in the book is this concept of,
0:52:43 if you recall, there’s outside, I called outside in versus inside out technologies.
0:52:47 And so like, if you just look at the history of computing, I think that it kind of bifurcates
0:52:51 very pretty cleanly into these two camps. And let me describe it. So the one camp is kind of
0:52:56 things that come from established institutions. And so for example, the iPhone came from Apple,
0:53:00 right, and sort of smartphones and AI, AI was, you know, done at places like Stanford and Google.
0:53:04 And then there’s this other kind of thread, which is the kind of outside in, I call it,
0:53:09 because it comes from the fringes. The worldwide web was like this, right? I mean,
0:53:13 Tim Berners-Lee was at a physics lab. I mean, that was not sort of, you know,
0:53:16 the obvious place for internet innovation and was competing against Comcast and Disney and
0:53:21 Microsoft and a bunch of people who were kind of central casting. Linux is probably the best
0:53:26 example, right? I mean, people saw people don’t realize this is 90. I mean, it must be 99% of
0:53:31 operating systems in production in the world or Linux, every backend servers, Linux, every, you
0:53:36 know, Android phones are all Linux, every new device is Linux. It is completely one.
0:53:42 Yeah, like your Mac was based on what? Yeah, I know it’s still has a lot of Unix stack and not
0:53:47 Linux, but Unix back in it, which is closely related. And in fact, I think like some is a very
0:53:51 high percentage of Apple software is built on open source software. And so and then this and
0:53:56 that’s not even counting like databases and web servers and, you know, Apache and Postgres and
0:54:03 just like 99% of like running software in the world at 95 to 99 something like that is open
0:54:07 source software, right? Which is a crazy thing when you look back on it, which is open source
0:54:13 software. It began probably in the 80s with Richard Stallman at MIT. And it was this kind of weird
0:54:17 fringe kind of left wing political movement that didn’t believe that anyone should own anything
0:54:23 and let alone software. And then it morphed in the 90s, you know, Linus with Linux into sort of
0:54:29 more of a pragmatic computing movement. But in the 90s, it was not a thing, a mainstream thing,
0:54:34 even the early 2000s, it wasn’t. And then eventually, you know, some companies started getting built
0:54:40 around it, really the rise of kind of cloud computing, you know, that those cloud computing
0:54:45 providers like AWS, they all adopted open source. And now it’s dominant. And so that came from the
0:54:51 fringes, right? And so for me, like, and blockchains and crypto was outside in, just if it’s not
0:54:56 obvious AI is inside out blockchains. So the outside in ones, they always start off kind of weird
0:55:02 and amorphous. And they’re there, you know, like this idea that like this, you know, Norwegian guys
0:55:08 hacking project, where he’s got a rag tag group of people without funding who are creating an
0:55:12 operating system is now going to be the dominant operating system world, like you had to have,
0:55:16 you know, you had to sort of understand a lot of things. And, and I think there’s lessons,
0:55:19 by the way, that that are very interesting ones as to why that ended up winning and why the web
0:55:23 ended up winning and a bunch of other, you know, PCs to some extent, we’re outside in, you know,
0:55:27 the Apple to Wozniak and jobs at the Hack homebrew computer club, all the incumbents at the time
0:55:32 didn’t take it seriously. Because, you know, it was classic innovative dilemma where they’re
0:55:35 selling to their business customers or like, we want faster computers, we don’t want those little
0:55:41 crappy things, you know. And so, so a lot of the history of computing has been these outside in
0:55:46 things. And they come as I was describing it, they come kind of disguised. They come looking
0:55:50 like something else. And I’ve, this is what I’ve, look, my personal, I’ve always been interested
0:55:56 in the outside in stuff. You know, I grew up using Unix and sort of always used open source
0:56:02 software, I’m sort of an open source software maximalist and, and protocol networks and blockchains.
0:56:07 And I see this as sort of the next, this natural evolution of that. And that’s the thing is that
0:56:10 they come that that’s actually what’s made it interesting for me career wise is that is like
0:56:14 figuring out those puzzles, right, like to your point about the quote, that’s what make the you
0:56:20 know, it’s like, Hey, it’s your first impression is wrong, you need to go dig into it. And you need
0:56:23 to understand it. And there’s value in doing that, by the way, if you want to be an entrepreneur or
0:56:27 an investor or something, because you, it helps give you insight into where the world’s going.
0:56:34 And so anyway, so that’s why I did love that quote is that it, you kind of summarize how I
0:56:39 think about how I think about a lot of the interesting threads of in the history of technology.
0:56:46 When, when we think about the future and the terminology we use with consumers,
0:56:53 how much damage has been done in terms of Web three today, and how much backtracking do we in
0:56:58 reframing do we have to do, I, I say that largely because, you know, in looking at your book,
0:57:05 there’s no mention of Web three on the cover nor of crypto. And, you know, do we need to stop calling
0:57:10 them NFTs? Do we need to like rethink how to position this? By the way, I’m not anti those words
0:57:13 and like, look, our fund is called crypto. I’m not trying to like hide from it. I just
0:57:19 wanted to sidestep the sort of tribal battles inside of the crypto space. And I didn’t want
0:57:23 to get involved in them. And so the reason I, I just tried to use descriptive sort of type,
0:57:27 like kind of more technical words. Mostly I do mention crypto and Web three and say, hey,
0:57:30 these are other words for it in the book. But yeah, I don’t feature prominently. So I just,
0:57:33 it was more of just the tribalist thing. Like I would argue, I mean, I’d love your view on this,
0:57:39 Kevin, but I would argue that like, I remember with when I had my AI company, we wouldn’t, we
0:57:43 wouldn’t use the word AI because AI had a bad word for, it had bad name for a long time because
0:57:49 it was seen as sort of emblematic of the, the space over promising. Right. And so we said machine
0:57:53 learning. That was kind of the thing you said back then, right? Now people say AI again. I think
0:57:58 there’s a lot of, you know, look MP threes, like that’s like the worst name in the world. Those
0:58:03 things became popular. GIFs, JPEGs, like there’s a lot of bad names in tech. I would argue that tech
0:58:08 is driven more by products than naming. And that, and that what we really need is going back to our
0:58:14 earlier conversation, a chat GPT iPhone kind of killer app. And if you do that, all the naming
0:58:19 just takes care of itself. I think it drops away. I think to your point about MP threes is that it’s
0:58:24 just spot on. Like we don’t ask, is this file an MP three or a AC or what is it behind the scenes?
0:58:29 We just stream our shit and it works. Like, you know, so it’s like, I feel like that’s just going
0:58:34 to be what happens here. Once the killer, you just need things that people products that people use
0:58:37 and then the, I think the names take care of themselves. So that’s why I kind of have stayed
0:58:42 out of some of those naming debates. I just, I think, I think everything in tech is product driven
0:58:48 and to the end, consumers product driven and then under the hood is tech driven. And so those are
0:58:53 the kind of things we should focus on. Now, all that said, like, look, the history of tech of
0:59:01 internet tech, computing tech hasn’t had this policy angle before, like for the most part,
0:59:05 people are building PCs and internet had some regulation, but it has been a much lighter touch.
0:59:09 It’s completely changed now. I think AI is about to experience it unfortunately.
0:59:15 But like today, building on the internet is much more like it is building in the offline world,
0:59:20 where like, you know, like, go try to build a building or a train or train tracks or something
0:59:24 else. Like, there’s a lot of kind of regulatory and legal stuff you got to deal with. And I think
0:59:31 the internet world is becoming like that. And I think to the extent that names end up, you know,
0:59:36 influencing the policy debate, maybe that, you know, maybe it’s different. That is different
0:59:42 this time, right? That you need to, I don’t know. Like the difference here is that perception can
0:59:49 become react like if there’s enough negative perception, that you can then sort of entrench
0:59:53 that into bad policy that that makes it much harder for entrepreneurs to operate.
1:00:00 Yeah, I’d like that you like frame Lee squarely put this, the use the word casino and just say,
1:00:04 because it, it’s such a great way to say, no, no, no, that’s not what we’re talking,
1:00:09 we’re not talking about the casino, right? And when you say that it puts all those people in
1:00:14 a bucket, and it kind of separates them out of the conversation, you know, how you lead the business.
1:00:19 I will see how the, how the, what the reaction is, I think it won’t be popular with some crowds.
1:00:24 But, but like, I feel very strongly that that’s not why I got involved. And
1:00:30 it’s not why I’m excited. And I don’t think, you know, like, I mean, I think there’s,
1:00:34 I think of it like domain names or other real estate for, let’s make real estate people know
1:00:39 it better, like there is real estate speculation. And I think we all accept that that is a necessary
1:00:44 byproduct of ownership, right? But the point of ownership is that somebody can own a house that
1:00:49 they can, you know, save money through that, you know, have that appreciate. I think that they can
1:00:56 have the emotional satisfaction of knowing they own it, of improving it, of caring about their
1:01:00 house and building it out, caring about the community. Like that’s why home ownership really
1:01:07 matters, right, is for families to have a sense of, you know, a true home that they own and being
1:01:13 part of a community and the incentives that that ownership creates on top of it. And that should
1:01:16 be the same thing with blockchains, right, that should be the core of it is that this is about
1:01:20 ownership and there will be spec like anytime you have ownership, you have speculation. I would,
1:01:25 I use this, I forgot if I think I have this in the book. Imagine if we had a world where
1:01:32 you could only rent houses. This is sort of a wacky thought expert, philosophical thought experiment.
1:01:36 And no one could own houses. And then one day somebody flipped a switch and you could buy houses.
1:01:40 Like you’d probably have a couple of years of like crazy speculation. Like I kind of think of that
1:01:45 as a little bit of a web three, right? Like we had this internet where you couldn’t own anything.
1:01:49 And now suddenly you could. And the first thing people do, you know, some set of people do is
1:01:54 they start speculating on it, right? But like, I hope that that both through policy and just through
1:02:00 kind of just, just time, yeah, it gets tamped down and that the real point of ownership,
1:02:04 which is all the things I talk about in the book becomes the becomes the heart of it.
1:02:10 Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I have a couple last questions for you. One, you know, I just want
1:02:15 to pick your brain on is someone that is always really good at seeing around corners before
1:02:24 anyone else. One odd thing that I’ve been scratching my head on is watching this idea of
1:02:31 federated communities really start to kind of take shape specifically around activity pub and
1:02:37 really looking at Facebook and seeing our meta and saying, okay, this is an area where they know
1:02:44 they cannot dominate, but they want to play. And so they’ve lost to X. They can’t win the
1:02:52 Twitter kind of Global Town Hall, you know, world for now. But they’re saying in some sense,
1:02:59 maybe if I support Federation and a new protocol network, we can create something that will
1:03:02 overthrow the incumbent here. Do you think they have a shot at that?
1:03:08 Yeah. So I think, I guess the question is like, would Facebook, a company whose entire
1:03:16 business is built around network effects really go all in on the technology that’s
1:03:22 meant to undermine their network effect? Well, if they’re dying, they might be forced to, right?
1:03:27 Like if they can’t dominate an area. I just, maybe I’m too cynical about it, but I feel like,
1:03:32 you know, it’s like a nice marketing strategy, but I have trouble, you know, I don’t know. I just
1:03:36 have trouble believing that they’re going to do it fully. But I do think, look, I think that,
1:03:39 I talk about the federated networks in the book, I think they’re very interesting. I’m pro federated
1:03:45 networks. I’m pro anything that’s sort of more open and not, I think that social networks should
1:03:49 not be controlled by a few individuals, which they are today, and they should be controlled
1:03:52 by communities. And I think federated networks are one way to get there. I think there’s a
1:03:56 risk with federated networks, which is, and you already see this on things like Macedon,
1:04:00 which is, it’s right now, it’s, there’s a lot of friction between the different so-called servers.
1:04:06 So if you go on like, macedon.social versus macedon.something else, like there’s, it’s very,
1:04:09 there’s a lot of high friction of like following people on other servers and doing other things.
1:04:14 So what, so what ends up happening is people coalesce around a single server. And that server
1:04:19 has to pay for hosting costs and all sorts of other things. So I do worry that like,
1:04:26 Facebook could have, you know, on threads, support activity hub, but is there in fact
1:04:30 going to be just an effective network effect? I call this protocol COOS in the book, I talk about
1:04:33 a little bit, which is, I think it’s kind of happened with Twitter and RSS, which is people
1:04:37 started originally, if you remember, early Twitter, people were kind of seeing it as like a hub for
1:04:43 RSS because you could both take RSS in and out, right? And people would post on our on Twitter
1:04:49 as like an RSS server. And saw it as, in fact, I have old blog posts where I’m like, and these
1:04:52 all these heated debates about like, whether that’s a good idea or whether Twitter will undermine it
1:04:58 at some point. And so I think that the risk is just that like, it starts off that way. But then
1:05:03 over time, threads is sort of the dominant node in the activity pub network. And then we’re just
1:05:09 sort of back to where we started, right? And then look, this is my argument. One of my arguments
1:05:13 for blockchains is blockchains, they’re, I call them computers that can make commitments. They,
1:05:19 you lock it in, you make your commitments in immutable software. And so you can’t change it.
1:05:23 So the user and the developer and everybody else can see those commitments very transparently
1:05:28 and decide whether to adopt them. So you’re not dependent on corporate assurances in terms of
1:05:33 service and privacy policies, right? You can look at open code. And so it’s like, maybe, maybe it’ll
1:05:40 happen. I don’t want to be overly cynical about it. But like, but, but I, you know, I sort of feel
1:05:45 like after this many years of these other approaches not working, we should try something else. And
1:05:48 my proposal in the book is blockchains. But
1:05:54 yeah, I’m always wondering, you know, when, when, if there’s a company like a Facebook or something
1:06:00 where their own internal products are starting to, to, to kind of flounder or not be as hot,
1:06:04 especially in social networks, if they don’t try, yeah, it’s like, they call like a sort of the
1:06:09 Android strategy, the arm the rebels strategy, people call it sometimes like Shopify, right?
1:06:13 Like the, you know, so like, if you, if you’re losing something bad, like say with Android,
1:06:15 right? They were, they, when they launched that they were, they weren’t that far behind,
1:06:20 but the iPhone clearly had momentum. So they took a, they kind of took a zig zag to their zig
1:06:24 strategy of like, let’s make the operating system free, which is by the way, really smart move at
1:06:27 the time against Microsoft, who was trying to charge 100 bucks for their operating system.
1:06:33 And let’s make Samsung and Sony and LG and all these, you know, at the time phone providers
1:06:39 are ally instead of our enemy and make, you know, and so we’ll go and unite with telecom carriers
1:06:46 and handset manufacturers and get this coalition to, to go against Apple. And that was very smart.
1:06:49 And that’s, that’s a, that’s a time-tested strategy. And so I think you could argue that
1:06:54 maybe Facebook is saying with respect to X that, that segment of social networking,
1:07:01 they’re taking kind of an arm the rebel strategy as opposed to head to head against the incumbent.
1:07:07 So that would be the positive spin on it. The more cynical spin would be that it’s sort of just a,
1:07:12 you know, feel good marketing thing. And then they, and then they switch it later on.
1:07:19 Last question for you, you know, I keep coming back to the title on the, you know,
1:07:25 read write own, on the own side, you know, it’s so many people, they think about,
1:07:30 okay, I should have seen this coming, you know, I should have seen AI coming, I should have,
1:07:33 you know, and I’m not asking you for make, to make investment advice here, but like,
1:07:39 you know, I should have bought Nvidia stock five years ago, you know, when all this, given that,
1:07:44 you know, web three, and you see these technologies starting to kind of take shape and we’re still
1:07:49 in those early days, you know, like we’re in the, the, the kind of like, you know, early web 1.0 days
1:07:53 where people were like picking apart the ideas and saying it wasn’t going to work and all of that.
1:07:57 Like, where should people be spending their time if they want to play on the edges here
1:08:05 and, and, and really learn, you know, about these projects and about, you know, maybe try and, and
1:08:09 spot some of the ones that are going to take hold or take shape here. Like, how, how do you think
1:08:14 about that when you’re trying to educate yourself about the space? I mean, like what I would recommend
1:08:18 to people is probably what you and I did in early in our career. I mean, I think almost every
1:08:24 internet service, you know, I bet you and I were users one through something, you know, very early
1:08:29 on. I used to love that. Did you use CompuServe? I used CompuServe. I’ve used ever, I’ve used that.
1:08:33 Prodigy? I’ve used ever, ever, yes. And like, and like, I use.
1:08:37 Netcom? Did you use Netcom? I used Dig. I used Reddit. I used Twitter. I mean, and all those
1:08:40 things, I was very early and I was always, because I like, I like the software. I mean,
1:08:45 I just did it because I liked it. It’s not like some, but, but I, but I think it really,
1:08:53 you know, I really sort of lived on that kind of early adopter part of the curve because I enjoyed
1:08:58 it. I like, I still like, I’m not doing AI professionally right now, but I just bought a
1:09:02 bunch of these AI devices and I’m just always like intro, I have all the VR stuff. I’m like,
1:09:07 I just am excited about early tech. And I think you must have bought a rabbit then as well.
1:09:11 I bought one. I look cool. The teenage, the teenage engineering design got me.
1:09:16 Dude, they’re just so good. So good. Yeah. How does it get any cooler than of a company
1:09:20 than d-engineering? It’s insane. I agree. I think it’s cool. Although I will tell you,
1:09:23 I’m like an open source maximum. So what I really want is like a Raspberry Pi with like,
1:09:28 you know, with like an open source, one of the open source, like the, the-
1:09:31 You want like an AI chumby, member chumbies?
1:09:36 But I would, I’m max, I would want like Lama 2, like a, it was a Mithril like Lama 2, Mistril,
1:09:42 like a real open source backend and like some kind of, yeah, the device doesn’t have to be
1:09:46 that complicated, right? It’s just like, probably just has to send the commands, the voice data back
1:09:52 up to the cloud and have all the work done there, I assume. So I look, I think a lot of it is like,
1:09:56 I would just say like, especially like, I’m not, I think less in terms of investors and more in
1:10:01 terms of like 20-somethings thinking about their career, I would, I think a great career strategy
1:10:07 is just to be excited about new technology, be trying it. I’d be trying AI, I’d be trying VR,
1:10:12 I’d be trying, you know, blockchain crypto stuff. What is, what is your, what does your
1:10:16 home life look like though? Like, are you like, with your, like when VR came out, were you like,
1:10:22 goggles on, slicing watermelons and shit, like trying to feed this? So I also, you know, at the
1:10:27 firm at Andreessen Orbital, I invested, I invested in Oculus in 2013. So I had the business reason,
1:10:33 but I’d like, I think, by the way, what excites me about VR is not the headsets, what excites me
1:10:40 about VR is the, is the creativity, the new thing unlocks. Okay. So like, I’m not actually like
1:10:44 that into the hardware. When I’m into, have you seen, like, have you seen like Gorilla Tag as an
1:10:50 example? So like, my son plays it, it’s hilarious because he’s like sitting there with a headset on
1:10:55 and he’s waving his arms madly, right? So Gorilla Tag is like some hacker made this and like,
1:11:00 it’s cool because there’s all these other people making these big elaborate games that let her
1:11:05 kind of more like, you know, console games. And then this Gorilla Tag is, what’s cool is it’s,
1:11:09 it’s VR native. And so what I mean by that is like, it couldn’t exist outside of VR. And so
1:11:13 you’re a Gorilla and you move your arms to make your Gorilla run. And you run around and play
1:11:18 with other Gorillas who are other humans in VR. Right. And so that’s one example. Like, I think
1:11:22 superhots are really good. There’s a couple of these that are like VR native. Supernatural is
1:11:25 what my wife is like all the time. Supernatural is cool too. But like, it’s like, it’s like,
1:11:29 what are, what are the cool things that developers are going to, are going to come up with? That’s
1:11:33 the part that I like is the creative part, right? Like same with the, it’s not the device itself,
1:11:37 right? It’s the, and same with blockchains, like blockchains are a means to an end. In the end,
1:11:41 what’s cool is like, what are all the app layer kind of creative things that’s going to unlock?
1:11:47 Same with web too, right? It wasn’t the HTML, HTTP, the, all the other kinds of, you know,
1:11:50 I mean, the tech was a means to the end. The cool thing was, hey, what can humans do now that you
1:11:55 can have a, an internet that’s not just one way. It’s two way. You can, you can both read and
1:12:00 write. You can also publish, you know, like what are all the, what’s your, one of the things I’m
1:12:05 curious about is like, you’re, you’re always, you’re always so good at spotting this stuff early.
1:12:11 Like, what is your, people ask me this a lot too. Like, how do you get your information?
1:12:14 Like, do you have like a handful of friends that hit you up on WhatsApp and be like, dude,
1:12:17 you got to check this out. When you see enough of those people hit you up,
1:12:21 you’re like, this is something to pay attention to. Like, what is that, what is that inflow? Like,
1:12:26 how do you know how to cut out the crap? I would say, I, okay, so I almost, I read
1:12:31 very little kind of traditional news. I don’t find that’s a good signal at all. In fact, it’s
1:12:36 in tech. It’s a negative signal. It’s probably pretty off. I read it more like just curious
1:12:41 what they’re, you know, saying or something, but it’s not some social media, like definitely
1:12:46 like following the right people. I find, you know, I find there’s no replacement for conversations,
1:12:49 direct conversation. I read a lot of books and things too, but there tend to be like lagging
1:12:54 a little bit, but direct conversations, like conversations with entrepreneurs, conversations
1:12:59 with smart people, like, because you think about a conversation, like what you and I are having now,
1:13:04 like you’re distilling so much information that, you know, you’ve gone out, we’ve each gone out
1:13:09 and done all this work and all these conversations and all this reading. And then we’re here distilling
1:13:13 it in this very compact form, right? And I think one of the cool things about venture capital,
1:13:16 like the best thing about venture capital is it’s basically you’re paid to go have conversations
1:13:20 with smart people. What about you, Kevin? It’s kind of one of those things where, like you said,
1:13:25 if, if there’s two or three people you respect on social that have bubbled something up,
1:13:29 and they’re like, Oh, this is cool because of this. I’m like, huh, I’ve seen that hit my radar
1:13:34 now three times in the last 24 hours. And then just, you know, having small little micro communities,
1:13:38 like I have a small little WhatsApp group with probably 20 of the smartest people I know in AI
1:13:42 that are just, you know, sharing stuff and, you know, to having conversations with some of those
1:13:49 people. And it’s, it’s, it’s those little pings that I think when, because there’s only a certain
1:13:53 number of hours in the day and like, I don’t have time to read ever and check out every single product.
1:13:57 So it’s like, it has to be two people have told me about it that I really trust. Or one person
1:14:02 that’s like, No, Kevin, trust me, drop everything, go play with this. And like, if that happens,
1:14:07 then it’s like, Okay, fine, I’ll go check it out. You know, it’s exactly your point. It’s just,
1:14:12 you know, it’s a version of that instead of from social media, I’m getting it from conversations.
1:14:17 But you just keep hearing these words from smart people, and it’s an incredibly powerful signal.
1:14:21 You got to go do your own work afterwards and decide if it’s real. Sometimes it isn’t. But
1:14:26 I agree with you. I think that’s like the by far the most important kind of filter.
1:14:31 Yeah, awesome. Well, Chris, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I know you’re a busy
1:14:35 guy. Thank you for for coming on the show and talking about your book. I just want to tell
1:14:40 people it drops January 30th. It can be found on Amazon. Is that your preferred place for people?
1:14:45 Yeah, read write own.com. We have other. So if you want to support smaller booksellers, but yeah,
1:14:50 any of those awesome read write own.com building the next era of the internet.
1:14:55 Chris, thank you so much. This is like, I went through it, I read it, I thought it was,
1:15:00 it’s going to help a lot of people because there is, you’re right, there is this gap. And I’ve been
1:15:04 a part of these conversations too, where it’s like, you’re at the cocktail party, it’s like, no,
1:15:04 no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
1:15:30 no, no, no. Convince me of Web 3 and you’re like, “Oh, God, how much time do I have?” Like, you know, so this is like just a point. I’m hoping it’ll be the book that you give to just give people and sort of say, “Hey.” Exactly. It’s a very gift, it’s a very giftable book. Like this is something you can give to pretty much anyone. They don’t have to be super technical, you know, and even if you are technical, you’ll learn something as well. So it’s a fantastic read. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me, Kevin. Well, thanks for being on the show. Talk soon.

0:00:02 – We’re gonna talk about life hacks, finance hacks,
0:00:04 health hacks, you’re kind of this Swiss army knife
0:00:06 of optimization of all things.
0:00:07 – Oh, this is the thing.
0:00:09 I like having better outcomes
0:00:10 and I don’t like spending money on it.
0:00:14 And that’s led to a life of research and…
0:00:18 – You put me on a Singapore Airlines flight.
0:00:19 – That was first class.
0:00:19 – First class.
0:00:21 It was crazy because you paid for it all on points.
0:00:24 – If you want to make your points go really far,
0:00:25 something like what you did in Singapore Suite,
0:00:26 ooh, here’s what you should do.
0:00:28 – That’s your superpower basically.
0:00:29 Let’s talk about some of the other hacks
0:00:30 that you’ve been up to.
0:00:32 Biohacks, this is kind of new for you.
0:00:35 I don’t know that you’ve been a massive biohacker.
0:00:37 – Having kids really jumpstarted this,
0:00:38 like I need to be healthy.
0:00:40 And so that’s pushed me to say, what do I need to do?
0:00:42 What do I need to dial in?
0:00:43 What kind of exercise do I need to do?
0:00:46 – November of last year, my blood pressure was high.
0:00:47 I have a small brain aneurysm.
0:00:50 And you were like, oh dude, I got this crazy hack.
0:00:51 This is some crazy shit.
0:00:52 Yeah, so.
0:00:55 – Hey everyone, Kevin Rose here.
0:00:57 Welcome to another episode of The Kevin Rose Show.
0:00:59 Today I’m talking to my dear friend, Chris Hutchins.
0:01:02 We are talking about all the hacks.
0:01:04 We’re talking about life hacks, finance hacks,
0:01:06 personal health and longevity hacks.
0:01:09 He, of course, is the host of the podcast, All the Hacks.
0:01:11 Let’s get into it right after this.
0:01:16 So I recently used a scanner that goes out there and looks
0:01:18 and sees what information is available.
0:01:20 And no surprise, my phone number,
0:01:24 my email, multiple email addresses, my physical address,
0:01:26 all the information was out there because of data breaches.
0:01:30 You hear about these data breaches like every single week.
0:01:31 Now it’s crazy.
0:01:33 And I’m sure you’ve heard about the importance
0:01:35 of freezing your credit reports.
0:01:36 Like that’s a no-brainer.
0:01:38 Of course you have to do that.
0:01:40 But that’s not gonna stop your personal data
0:01:44 from being resold through something called data brokers.
0:01:47 Now these are absolutely evil corporations
0:01:50 that resell everyone’s data.
0:01:52 And when your data is out there and a hacker can just tap
0:01:54 into it or someone that’s fishing,
0:01:56 you can just tap into it and grab it.
0:01:56 They can use this.
0:01:59 They can use it to call, say, your cell phone provider,
0:02:00 try and do a SIM swap.
0:02:03 They can use that information to try and reset passwords
0:02:06 or to facilitate phishing scams.
0:02:08 Not to mention they can even use your home address
0:02:10 and find photos of your house,
0:02:14 sometimes even the interiors on the MLS website.
0:02:15 So what do you need to do?
0:02:17 You have to remove that data.
0:02:19 And I found the best service out there to do this,
0:02:20 it’s called Delete Me.
0:02:24 So they use a power of attorney to work on your behalf
0:02:26 to find and methodically remove your data
0:02:28 from these data brokers.
0:02:31 And then they also continuously monitor these sites
0:02:33 and keep removing data as it shows up,
0:02:36 which unfortunately with all these data breaches
0:02:37 it constantly does.
0:02:40 So I gave it a try and it’s a fantastic service
0:02:41 that’s been protecting me and my family
0:02:44 from the risks of identity theft and other fraud.
0:02:46 And listeners of this show can get 20% off
0:02:49 Delete Me US customer plans
0:02:51 when you go to kevinrose.com/deleteme.
0:02:54 Use the code kevinrose, all one word.
0:02:57 That’s kevinrose.com/deleteme.
0:02:59 Protect yourself, protect your family
0:03:01 and a huge thank you to Delete Me
0:03:02 for sponsoring the show.
0:03:07 This episode is brought to you by Manscaped.
0:03:09 Okay, this is a true story
0:03:10 and it’s part of the reason why I’m stoked
0:03:12 to have them as a sponsor.
0:03:16 So a few years ago I got the razor called the Lawnmower.
0:03:18 Now it’s just fantastic.
0:03:21 Largely because when you trim sensitive areas
0:03:22 it doesn’t cut you.
0:03:25 They have something called the Skin Safe Blade.
0:03:27 I’ve been using it ever since.
0:03:29 It’s one of the best products out there.
0:03:32 But secondly, and this is my favorite product
0:03:33 that they offer, I truly love this.
0:03:36 You’ll notice when you watch me on the podcast
0:03:37 and you watch the video version,
0:03:41 I keep a pretty standard length like trimmed beard.
0:03:44 They have a product called the Beard Hedger.
0:03:47 Now it has 20 different length adjustments
0:03:49 with this little zoom wheel
0:03:51 that you use in the center of it.
0:03:54 And it always keeps my beard at just the perfect length.
0:03:55 Now I don’t wanna mention other brands
0:03:59 but I was a pretty hardcore electric razor junkie.
0:04:02 I tried probably 20 different trimmers.
0:04:06 And I have to say, truly, not only is this the best trimmer
0:04:10 and easiest to use, but it’s also insanely easy to clean
0:04:11 and it’s waterproof.
0:04:13 I also travel a ton.
0:04:15 So I love that it’s USB-C.
0:04:18 This is getting pretty geeky, but it’s USB-C.
0:04:20 So you don’t have to bring another adapter with you.
0:04:22 You can already use your standard USB-C
0:04:24 that you’re carrying around you for everything else.
0:04:27 It comes with a really awesome, tough case
0:04:29 and also a 30 day money back guarantee.
0:04:31 If you have a beard, you have to try this product.
0:04:33 And if you don’t have a beard,
0:04:34 you definitely have hair in other places
0:04:36 unless you laser, if you’re a dude
0:04:38 and you laser your junk, that’s fine.
0:04:39 It is what it is.
0:04:41 But if you have hair down there,
0:04:42 check out their Lawn Mower.
0:04:44 That is also a really awesome product.
0:04:47 So head on over to manscaped.com.
0:04:50 Use the code KevinRose all one word
0:04:53 for 20% off plus free shipping.
0:04:56 You’ll thank me and your partner will definitely thank you.
0:04:58 Chris, great to have you, man.
0:05:00 – Dude, I’m excited to be in this new studio.
0:05:03 – This is the first time I’ve actually broken
0:05:04 in the studio in this way.
0:05:05 This is the real setup.
0:05:07 We got the lights, got all the multiple cameras.
0:05:09 Like you’re the first real guest.
0:05:10 – This is a real thing.
0:05:11 – The real thing.
0:05:12 Thanks for flying down.
0:05:13 – Yeah, I’m excited to be here.
0:05:15 – So for people that don’t know,
0:05:17 I mean, you and I go way back.
0:05:19 We have like started a company together.
0:05:20 We sold it to Google.
0:05:22 We ended up working at Google together.
0:05:24 – A lot of commutes.
0:05:26 – Yeah, a lot of commutes.
0:05:29 – We talked about faking our own injuries
0:05:31 so we wouldn’t have to commute
0:05:33 and we could work from home before that was a thing.
0:05:34 – They called it vest in peace.
0:05:37 Remember where like you would just like vest your stock
0:05:41 and like try not to have to do the commute down to Google.
0:05:42 ‘Cause it was an hour and a half
0:05:44 to get down there from San Francisco.
0:05:45 If we were lucky, it was brutal.
0:05:46 – Traffic was bad.
0:05:47 – Yeah.
0:05:49 But I will say since then,
0:05:51 obviously you’ve gone to do your own thing.
0:05:52 You have your podcast now,
0:05:54 all the hacks with Chris Hutchins.
0:05:56 – Yep.
0:05:58 – You, that made complete sense to me.
0:06:00 I remember when you were first talking to me
0:06:04 about doing a podcast and you know,
0:06:09 you have always been someone where every friend of yours
0:06:12 hits you up, it must be all the time,
0:06:15 about like little tiny things,
0:06:19 little tiny hacks that are both life optimization,
0:06:22 travel optimization, like you name it,
0:06:24 you’re kind of this Swiss Army knife
0:06:27 of optimization of all things.
0:06:29 Is that accurate or how do you frame it?
0:06:31 – I like having better outcomes
0:06:32 and I don’t like spending money on it.
0:06:36 And that’s led to a life of research
0:06:38 and optimization and relationship building
0:06:40 to try to get to the bottom of it.
0:06:43 – Was the first time that you actually had a breakout moment,
0:06:45 was that when you wrote that credit card piece?
0:06:47 What was the first time where,
0:06:48 ’cause I remember some news outlets
0:06:50 started to pick up something that you had written
0:06:53 or what was the first time you realized
0:06:54 this was gonna be like broadly applicable
0:06:56 to a lot of people?
0:06:59 – I think I knew that it was broadly applicable early on.
0:07:01 So I remember just having dinners
0:07:03 and people are like leaning in and asking questions.
0:07:04 I was like, oh, this is the thing.
0:07:06 And I encourage everyone listening.
0:07:08 What I do isn’t your thing,
0:07:08 but whatever that thing,
0:07:10 when you’re having dinner with friends
0:07:12 and they all lean in and they ask you questions,
0:07:13 think about that thing more.
0:07:16 ‘Cause for me, I probably now, like you said,
0:07:18 oh, it makes total sense.
0:07:20 It took me like 20 years to figure it out.
0:07:23 And all my friends knew it, but I never asked them.
0:07:25 So everybody listening, ask your friends,
0:07:27 what’s that thing that I’m known for?
0:07:29 Maybe there’s a business you could start there.
0:07:30 – That’s your superpower basically.
0:07:32 It’s like when people lean in,
0:07:34 you’re like, okay, I’m good at this one thing.
0:07:35 Maybe I should expand that.
0:07:39 – Yes, and so for me, I remember writing a blog post.
0:07:42 I actually looked, I’ve started a blog three or four times
0:07:44 and I wrote a post on credit card points
0:07:47 and it just wasn’t the medium.
0:07:50 So I knew it was a thing that I liked to talk about,
0:07:51 but I had never found the medium
0:07:54 until I’d been on a bunch of podcasts
0:07:56 and I was like, oh, I like this medium.
0:07:59 Let’s try it from the other side and it worked.
0:08:01 But before I thought I tried posting tweets
0:08:05 about life optimization, credit card points and miles,
0:08:06 personal finance, I tried writing a blog post.
0:08:08 It just never clicked.
0:08:10 So even though I thought I knew the thing,
0:08:12 I didn’t know how to kind of turn it into
0:08:14 what I guess now is like a career.
0:08:16 – Yeah, it’s your full-time gig now.
0:08:17 – It’s my full-time gig.
0:08:20 It’s my wife joined full-time and we’re doing it together.
0:08:22 And it’s like our family business kind of.
0:08:23 – That’s amazing.
0:08:27 The one time I will say the first big aha moment for me
0:08:30 that you helped me out with was when I was going
0:08:32 to Tokyo with my wife.
0:08:36 And I remember I did a home renovation and NSF
0:08:37 and I had a bunch of points.
0:08:39 Just like, you know, as you do with credit cards
0:08:40 and buying stuff and just sitting there.
0:08:43 And everybody at this point in your career,
0:08:45 I mean, this was years ago, but at this point,
0:08:47 people knew you as like, oh, I’ve got points.
0:08:48 What do I do with them?
0:08:52 How can I help traverse all of the like multi-point jumps
0:08:53 that you can do to get like the best,
0:08:56 like upgraded, you know, business class, first class,
0:08:57 things like that.
0:09:01 You put me on a Singapore Airlines flight,
0:09:03 which was, is that first class?
0:09:04 – That was first class.
0:09:05 – First class.
0:09:09 And it was crazy because you paid for it all in points.
0:09:10 I think I may be paid like a, well, taxes.
0:09:13 – Yeah, usually maybe 100, 200 bucks a person in taxes,
0:09:14 but not a lot.
0:09:16 – Right, so it was a couple hundred bucks in taxes.
0:09:19 This flight, just so you, and we’ll show a picture
0:09:22 of this in the video, this flight comes with,
0:09:24 if you get two seats next to each other,
0:09:26 you can fold down the center column,
0:09:29 you can join the beds together,
0:09:32 and then they have closing doors.
0:09:35 So you essentially have your own, like, was it like,
0:09:37 I would say it’s like a queen bed?
0:09:40 – Yeah, maybe it’s a full double, I don’t know.
0:09:41 – But it’s a decent size bed.
0:09:45 They put like rose petals on the bed,
0:09:48 and like, it’s as close as you’re gonna get
0:09:52 to like free range, like mile high club,
0:09:56 like go for it kind of like situation in the air.
0:09:58 – Yeah, I think the downside is,
0:09:59 for everyone’s imagining this right now,
0:10:01 if you’re listening on audio, you’re like, wow, of course.
0:10:03 The only downside is, I think it’s like six or seven feet
0:10:05 tall, or maybe like six feet tall.
0:10:06 – I think it’s like six feet, right.
0:10:09 So if someone really wanted to peek over, they could.
0:10:11 – Yeah, so it’s not fully enclosed.
0:10:14 If you were to fly on the Etihad residences,
0:10:17 though Etihad has the apartments and then the residences,
0:10:19 you have a fully enclosed room with a bed.
0:10:23 – So I had never heard of Etihad before, what is Etihad?
0:10:25 – So Etihad’s an airline based in Abu Dhabi.
0:10:28 There’s kind of three or four big airlines that all compete,
0:10:32 Emirates, Etihad, Qatar based in Qatar.
0:10:34 And like those airlines are all competing
0:10:36 for the best cabins.
0:10:37 Qatar has Q Suites.
0:10:40 I don’t think Emirates has anything,
0:10:42 just call it first class, but it’s very nice.
0:10:43 We’ve flown it together.
0:10:45 – Yeah, we went and we talked to the conference together
0:10:47 and you got us upgraded free first class
0:10:49 from the conference providers in Emirates,
0:10:52 which was nuts because they had a shower on the plane.
0:10:56 Like you could literally go and shower on the plane.
0:10:57 By the way.
0:10:58 But this is a shared shower.
0:11:01 In the Etihad residences, you have your own shower.
0:11:03 – Wait, so you mean, wait,
0:11:04 how many showers are there on their plane?
0:11:07 – I think on Emirates, there’s one or two
0:11:08 for all the first class people.
0:11:11 You go in, you have like 10 or 20 minutes and all that.
0:11:14 In the residences, you walk in and you’ve got a bench
0:11:15 and it’s your chair.
0:11:17 You’ve got a TV, you’ve got a private bathroom
0:11:18 and then you have a bedroom.
0:11:20 This is all yours.
0:11:23 – What does it cost to fly something like that?
0:11:26 – So if you were to say, I want to fly this
0:11:28 for the sole purpose of flying it and you’re like,
0:11:32 I’m just going to fly from Abu Dhabi to Mumbai.
0:11:35 – Do they have any stateside travel or is it just?
0:11:37 – So there was a window of time where they took it off
0:11:38 and then they put it back on.
0:11:40 So I can’t say exactly what’s running.
0:11:42 For a while it was JFK to Abu Dhabi.
0:11:43 – Okay.
0:11:45 – The cheapest way to fly it would be
0:11:46 to fly these short routes.
0:11:48 So if you just want to tick the box,
0:11:51 you could fly a few hours from Abu Dhabi to Bombay
0:11:54 or Colombo and Sri Lanka or something like that.
0:11:57 But if you want to fly from JFK,
0:12:00 we’re talking $20,000, $30,000 each way.
0:12:01 – Per seat.
0:12:02 – Per seat.
0:12:03 That’s insane.
0:12:04 – It’s insane.
0:12:08 And it’s one of the kind of elusive white whales
0:12:10 of these things because you can book it with points.
0:12:12 And I just looked at it before this,
0:12:15 but it’s going to take you like 3 million points,
0:12:19 which not to say 3 million points is the worst deal
0:12:21 for something that might cost 30 or $40,000,
0:12:22 but there’s a lot better way to redeem your points.
0:12:24 – So as much as I would say,
0:12:25 if someone listening is like,
0:12:27 I want the absolute best way
0:12:29 to join the Mile High Club in privacy.
0:12:30 – Right.
0:12:31 – I mean, you might as well fly private also.
0:12:32 – Yeah.
0:12:34 – Anti-odd residences would be it.
0:12:37 However, if you want to make your points go really far,
0:12:38 something like what you did in Singapore Suite,
0:12:40 I think it was like 120,000 points.
0:12:43 So you could do that 30 times.
0:12:43 – Right.
0:12:44 – So.
0:12:45 – Yeah, the Singapore area was great.
0:12:47 And they had fantastic food and all of that.
0:12:48 And it was just like,
0:12:51 I never knew you could have your own little private dwelling
0:12:53 where they closed the doors and everything,
0:12:55 which was awesome.
0:12:57 And just to get that purely on points
0:13:00 and spend a couple hundred dollars, it’s fantastic.
0:13:00 – Yes.
0:13:02 – So just out of curiosity,
0:13:05 like can you get kicked off an airline?
0:13:07 Or like, because they’re kind of,
0:13:10 when they put rose petals on the bed,
0:13:12 they’re kind of saying like it’s a, you know,
0:13:15 not to like have a romantic time, blah, blah.
0:13:17 So can you get kicked off an airline for that?
0:13:20 – I mean, people can get kicked off airlines.
0:13:21 They’re not gonna, you know,
0:13:23 Alaska style just opened the door and let you go.
0:13:24 – Right.
0:13:27 – But, I mean, I imagine they would ask you to stop
0:13:31 before they, you know, aborted the flight and landed.
0:13:34 So I’d say, if you want to experiment and they get upset,
0:13:36 I wouldn’t keep going.
0:13:37 But I don’t know.
0:13:40 I mean, I’ve heard definitely people who are, you know,
0:13:42 try to sneak two people in the bathroom and get in trouble,
0:13:43 but they’re not going to land the plane over it.
0:13:46 They’re just going to be like, stop.
0:13:48 Fun hack, all of the bathrooms on airplanes
0:13:50 can be opened from the outside.
0:13:52 So there’s this little metal thing that says laboratory.
0:13:54 If you flip it up, you can see the latch.
0:13:56 So it’s not as much privacy as you want.
0:13:58 – Yeah, it’s funny because if I saw somebody actually do
0:14:00 that word that we’re knocking on the door,
0:14:01 the person wouldn’t answer.
0:14:03 And I was like, oh, how’s this flight attendant
0:14:05 gonna get in?
0:14:08 And that little sign, it looks like a little placard.
0:14:10 You just take your fingernail underneath it and pull it up.
0:14:14 And there’s a slider right there to unlock any lavatory,
0:14:16 like restroom, like instantly.
0:14:18 – Yeah. And I think it’s actually a good tip for parents
0:14:20 because I imagine there’s an age where your kid’s like,
0:14:21 well, I want you to walk me to the bathroom,
0:14:23 but I don’t want you to come in with me.
0:14:25 And if they lock themselves in there, you’re safe.
0:14:29 – Yeah. So you used to be a big kind of points person
0:14:32 in terms of like that was, you wrote about it.
0:14:34 People are probably wondering, you know,
0:14:36 when you think about, gosh, 100,000 points
0:14:39 is still spending $100,000 to get those points, right?
0:14:42 Like, well, I guess you can get three for one or four for one.
0:14:44 Like, do you still play that game anymore?
0:14:46 Or like, if you get the ultimate credit card,
0:14:49 you get more points and they can transfer them to travel?
0:14:50 Or is that, are you kind of done with that?
0:14:51 – I’m still playing the game.
0:14:53 I just did an episode a couple of weeks ago,
0:14:55 what’s in my wallet for 2024, where I’m like,
0:14:58 here’s all the categories, here’s the cards I’m using.
0:14:59 Here’s where I’m personally focused.
0:15:02 I’ve got probably 15 million points right now.
0:15:04 So I probably need to work more on the spending
0:15:05 than the earning.
0:15:08 – But you didn’t, you didn’t like spend $15 million
0:15:09 to get 15 million points.
0:15:10 – I have 15 million points.
0:15:11 – Right.
0:15:11 – That would be a very big problem.
0:15:13 – So how did you get 15 million points?
0:15:16 – So I think something interesting,
0:15:18 and I want people to not get too caught up in,
0:15:20 you know, seeing the forest for the trees.
0:15:22 So you could get the perfect credit card
0:15:24 that gives you the most points on gas.
0:15:26 There’s when the Wyndham business earner card
0:15:28 is like eight X points on gas.
0:15:31 However, like, if you don’t spend a lot on gas,
0:15:34 are you really over-optimizing for the wrong thing?
0:15:36 Right now, there’s,
0:15:39 I think Amex Platinum has a referral offer right now
0:15:41 that’s 150,000 points.
0:15:43 If you spend, I’m gonna probably miss it.
0:15:45 There’s like $8,000 over six months,
0:15:47 which I think the average person is probably able
0:15:49 to spend $8,000 over credit cards this month.
0:15:50 – Right, well, that’s gonna get you
0:15:52 that Singapore Air private room right there.
0:15:53 – Right there.
0:15:53 – That’s amazing.
0:15:55 – And so when I think about points,
0:15:57 and I think about people getting into the game,
0:15:59 I think there’s, look, if you spend a lot of money
0:16:01 on certain categories,
0:16:04 why not make sure you have the right card to earn the most?
0:16:07 But I built this big tool.
0:16:09 I called it like my card optimization tool,
0:16:10 and you could download it for $1
0:16:13 at allthehacks.com/cardtool, I think.
0:16:15 And I put all these cards in,
0:16:17 and then I went to the go get,
0:16:19 there’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data, I think,
0:16:21 on how the average American household
0:16:25 that earns over $100,000 spends their money.
0:16:27 And I went down the list of how everyone spends their money.
0:16:28 I calculated the cards,
0:16:31 and I was like, what is the perfect combination of cards,
0:16:33 and where do you start to see real diminishing returns?
0:16:37 And like really optimal two cards,
0:16:39 every third, fourth, fifth card you add
0:16:41 really starts to diminish the return.
0:16:43 – Is that because you’re paying a annual fee
0:16:45 for some of these cards, or like what’s the–
0:16:46 – It’s a little bit the annual fee,
0:16:49 and it’s a little bit like, okay,
0:16:51 if I’m gonna earn two X on everything,
0:16:53 and there’s a card that’s gonna give me three X
0:16:55 when I rent cars,
0:16:56 like you’re not really spending enough
0:16:59 on the rental cars to make it worth it.
0:17:01 So the killer combo was the AmEx Gold,
0:17:04 which is four X on dining and groceries,
0:17:06 and the Capital One Venture or Venture X,
0:17:07 which is two X on everything.
0:17:10 And that earned on average for the American household,
0:17:12 I think around 2.65 points per dollar,
0:17:13 based on how you spend.
0:17:17 You could add AmEx Platinum earns five X on flights.
0:17:19 You spend 50 grand a year on business flights,
0:17:21 it’s worth it to get a card that’s gonna
0:17:24 take your flights from three X to five X,
0:17:26 but if you buy a couple flights a year,
0:17:28 it’s not really there.
0:17:30 However, let’s take this example,
0:17:33 let’s say you spend $10,000 a year on flights,
0:17:35 and the card you have today earns three X points,
0:17:37 and there is a card that earns five.
0:17:40 So you’re gonna get extra two points on $10,000.
0:17:42 So you’re gonna get 20,000 extra points on flights.
0:17:45 If you just open the AmEx Platinum right now
0:17:47 with a referral link, you’re gonna get 150,000 points.
0:17:50 – Right, which is years worth of extra, yeah.
0:17:52 – You take you seven years of all those spending on flights
0:17:54 to earn that same number of points.
0:17:59 So the most accelerated way to open an account
0:18:00 and amass a lot of points,
0:18:03 is to focus on really high signup bonuses.
0:18:08 And I would say in general, 75 to 100,000 point plus bonuses.
0:18:12 And I’ve done one for 250,000, which is probably the highest,
0:18:16 then one for 190,000, and I’ve done lots for 100,000 plus.
0:18:20 And so that’s the easiest way to start racking up points.
0:18:22 I won’t go as far down the rabbit hole as we could
0:18:24 on the impact on your credit score and all that,
0:18:26 but it’s surprisingly not that bad.
0:18:28 There are people who’ve opened up between them
0:18:32 and their partner, like 25 cards in the course of 18 months,
0:18:34 and their credit scores went up over time.
0:18:36 I’ll send you a link to this graphic, it’s crazy.
0:18:37 Like they opened up all these cards
0:18:38 and their credit score went up.
0:18:39 – Yeah, are they closing them though, afterwards?
0:18:40 Like are you redeeming it?
0:18:44 Say there’s a signing bonus of 100,000 points, you do it.
0:18:46 They say you have to stay with them what, six months a year?
0:18:48 – So here’s my rule of thumb.
0:18:50 Never close a card in the first year.
0:18:52 Because they have these rules that, you know,
0:18:53 they’re basically like, if we catch you closing them
0:18:57 in a year, we’re gonna maybe put a red mark on your name.
0:18:57 So always close it.
0:19:00 If you don’t want it, close it in the 13th month.
0:19:02 Annual fee posts the second year.
0:19:03 If you cancel it within 30 days,
0:19:05 you can usually get it back, almost always.
0:19:07 So close it in the 13 month if you don’t need it.
0:19:09 But there’s a lot of cards out there,
0:19:11 like Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve.
0:19:13 You can downgrade to the Chase Freedom Unlimited
0:19:14 or the Chase Freedom Flex,
0:19:16 and those cards have no annual fee.
0:19:17 So there are a lot of cards
0:19:19 where you get a really expensive United card
0:19:20 that gives you a lot of access.
0:19:21 – And then you just downgrade.
0:19:21 – Downgrade it to the free United card.
0:19:23 – So you call in and you’re like,
0:19:24 rather than canceling, getting a ding,
0:19:25 something like that, you call in like,
0:19:26 ah, this card’s not for me anymore.
0:19:27 – Can you just mention to the seller?
0:19:28 – Gotcha.
0:19:30 – Or you say, this happened to me
0:19:31 with the Mx Platinum one year.
0:19:32 I called in and I was like,
0:19:33 I’m just not getting the value.
0:19:34 And they’re like, well,
0:19:35 we’ve been a customer for so many years.
0:19:36 We really want to keep you.
0:19:38 What if we just waived the annual fee this year?
0:19:41 I’m like, okay, like we’ll punt this decision here.
0:19:42 So you can call and say,
0:19:43 I’m thinking of canceling this card.
0:19:44 Is there anything you could do for me?
0:19:45 And you can live chat that
0:19:47 if you don’t want to get on the phone.
0:19:48 And a lot of times they’ll be like,
0:19:49 well, if you can spend two grand,
0:19:50 we’ll give you 20,000 points or something.
0:19:51 And maybe it makes it worth it.
0:19:54 So cancel the card is like the last resort.
0:19:57 Because if you can get a free card,
0:20:00 or if you can end up getting the annual fee comped, great.
0:20:04 But in general, I’m opening cards to get points.
0:20:06 I’m opening cards because they have perks.
0:20:07 I might not never spend on them,
0:20:08 but it might be worth it for the perks.
0:20:09 Or I’m opening cards
0:20:12 ’cause it really impacts my spending bonuses.
0:20:14 Not if it just kind of is my spending bonus.
0:20:17 – The one thing I had said to you before is like,
0:20:20 I’m not thinking in every situation,
0:20:21 like I’m at dinner,
0:20:23 I’m like, okay, I probably should.
0:20:26 But I’m not like, okay, Mx Platinum, 4x Dinner.
0:20:30 It does take a little bit of a mental load to remember,
0:20:32 oh, I’m in this situation.
0:20:34 I should pull out this card, right?
0:20:34 It’s not worth it.
0:20:36 – That’s why I like the two card solution.
0:20:37 It’s like, you have two cards,
0:20:39 dining, groceries, and everything else.
0:20:40 – Yeah, but what about somebody
0:20:43 that just wants like the ultimate cash back?
0:20:45 They’re like, I don’t wanna worry about anything.
0:20:47 I just want like the highest percent
0:20:49 of just straight cash back.
0:20:50 – So I don’t know when this will come out.
0:20:53 I’m gonna try to make the case for cash back.
0:20:54 Because one of the things that’s interesting,
0:20:56 you bring up, we brought up Singapore.
0:20:57 What a great deal.
0:20:59 Because that flight probably would have been $20,000.
0:21:02 And you ended up getting it for like 120,000 points.
0:21:06 So you’re getting almost 20 cents a point as unreal.
0:21:08 Maybe it was $10,000, maybe it’s 10 cents a point.
0:21:10 But that’s a lot of cents per point, right?
0:21:12 If you have a card that’s getting you two points
0:21:13 and you’re getting 10 cents,
0:21:15 that’s like 20% cash back on everything.
0:21:18 Now, if you wouldn’t otherwise pay for first class,
0:21:20 then you’re not really getting that value, right?
0:21:21 It’s not saving.
0:21:23 If I would spend a thousand on economy,
0:21:25 now I can get a free first class upgrade.
0:21:27 But you didn’t really save 20 grand.
0:21:31 But a lot of airlines sell their miles and points
0:21:33 and they go on sale all the time.
0:21:37 So you have access to buy 100,000 points on some airlines
0:21:38 for $1,000.
0:21:40 So I’m starting to think,
0:21:42 what if you just maxed your cash back
0:21:44 and then you could buy tickets with cash
0:21:47 or you could buy tickets by buying the points
0:21:50 on the airline and booking the flights.
0:21:51 Haven’t recorded this episode.
0:21:53 So I’m not ready to definitively say
0:21:55 how the steelman argument comes out.
0:21:58 But I will say there are a couple cards
0:22:00 that I’m really intrigued by this year.
0:22:04 So the US Bank Altitude Reserve card
0:22:06 because you can get three X,
0:22:07 they call them points, but it’s just cash back.
0:22:11 You get three X points on mobile wallet payments.
0:22:13 So anytime you can use Apple Pay,
0:22:15 which if you’re using Safari on a Mac,
0:22:16 there are a lot of websites
0:22:19 where you can use Apple Pay online.
0:22:20 And the way they allow,
0:22:22 there’s a way that they let you redeem those points
0:22:24 for one and a half cents each,
0:22:26 which means four and a half percent cash back
0:22:27 anytime you use Apple Pay.
0:22:29 – Wait, how do you get to four and a half percent?
0:22:30 ‘Cause you have three percent.
0:22:31 – So you get three X points
0:22:33 and they let you redeem them for one and a half cents.
0:22:34 – Okay, gotcha.
0:22:36 – And it’s this weird thing called real-time rewards
0:22:39 where it’s like anytime you purchase something in travel,
0:22:40 there’s a way to get kicking back.
0:22:41 So I don’t wanna go–
0:22:42 – So four and a half percent?
0:22:43 – On everything.
0:22:44 – That’s better than so when you–
0:22:45 – On Apple Pay.
0:22:46 – On Apple Pay.
0:22:48 But still, you use Apple Pay for most things.
0:22:49 – Yeah, Costco.
0:22:53 – Yeah, Amazon Prime, that card gives you 5%
0:22:54 with a prime membership.
0:22:57 So that’s like the best online that I know of.
0:23:02 – There’s no way I know of to get more than 5% cash back
0:23:04 except for in a few very edge case scenarios.
0:23:10 But the tried and true cash back card for a lot of people
0:23:14 is in the Bank of America Premium Rewards card.
0:23:16 And so they have this whole status thing
0:23:19 where if you have over $100,000
0:23:22 parked in Bank of America or Merrill Lynch.
0:23:23 – Can that be equities?
0:23:24 – To give you equity, you can buy stocks
0:23:26 in a Merrill brokerage.
0:23:29 It doesn’t have to be anything that you’re losing money on
0:23:30 by keeping it there.
0:23:31 – So you can transfer some of your Nvidia stock
0:23:32 or whatever and then you just hold it there.
0:23:35 – Yeah, you got an old Roth IRA, put it there.
0:23:40 And so they have this card earns one and a half points
0:23:43 on everything or cash back, but one and a half.
0:23:46 And then I think it earns two on travel and dining.
0:23:51 But you boost that by 75% if you have 100 grand
0:23:54 in these accounts, which makes it effectively,
0:23:58 you’re getting 3.5% cash back on travel and dining
0:24:02 and 2.625% cash back on everything else.
0:24:06 That is like the one card solution, everything,
0:24:07 it’s pretty good.
0:24:08 Now, if you’re using a lot of Apple Pay,
0:24:09 maybe the altitude reserves better,
0:24:14 but those two cards have me thinking,
0:24:16 if I can make the cash back worth more than the points,
0:24:19 which I’ll provide the argument against,
0:24:22 then there are cards that can basically make sure
0:24:25 you’re probably averaging around 3% cash back
0:24:27 on everything, throw in the Amazon card,
0:24:31 you’re getting five there, you get the Target debit card,
0:24:32 which you don’t even have to impact your credit score,
0:24:34 you get 5% off at Target.
0:24:37 You could probably get an average a little above 3%,
0:24:40 but I took this example that I wrote down
0:24:41 ’cause I wanted to get it right,
0:24:42 of booking a flight to Bora Bora,
0:24:45 which I’ve done twice on points.
0:24:47 The flight’s almost always in business class
0:24:50 at around $5, $5,500, $6,000.
0:24:52 And so if you wanna just book it,
0:24:55 any of these airlines lets you use your points
0:24:57 to book in their travel portal for one cent a point.
0:24:59 So the general rule of thumb is,
0:25:01 one cent a point is the floor.
0:25:02 There are some ways that you could use gift cards,
0:25:03 and it’s like even less,
0:25:06 but one cent per point is the floor.
0:25:07 So it’s gonna be half a million points.
0:25:10 So then Chase, if you have the Chase reserve card,
0:25:11 they’ll give you one and a half cents,
0:25:14 so you can get it down to 365,000 points.
0:25:17 But if you transfer that point to United
0:25:20 and book on United’s website for a United flight,
0:25:23 I’ve booked it for about 140,000 points,
0:25:25 which means 3.8 cents per point.
0:25:27 But if you transfer it to Air Canada,
0:25:28 and you book it for 110,000,
0:25:31 you get about five cents per point.
0:25:33 So I’ve pretty consistently been able to get
0:25:36 more than two cents per point.
0:25:37 So from my perspective,
0:25:40 if I’m using a card like the MX Gold,
0:25:42 4X on dining, 4X on groceries,
0:25:44 and I’m getting two cents per point or more,
0:25:46 and in this example, I got five,
0:25:50 then I’m getting eight plus percent cash back.
0:25:51 – That’s insane. – So that’s why
0:25:52 I love points, right?
0:25:55 There’s an extreme example of booking the perfect flight
0:25:57 for 10 or 15 or 20 cents per point,
0:25:59 where, I mean, this sounds so crazy,
0:26:03 but Amix Platinum, 5X points, 10 cents per point,
0:26:05 50% cash back.
0:26:06 That’s nuts.
0:26:08 So I still love playing the points game,
0:26:12 but, and I just get to do things I wouldn’t do.
0:26:12 – So if I had cash back,
0:26:15 would I really spend it to fly in first class in Japan?
0:26:18 Could I pull the trigger on a $6,000 flight?
0:26:19 No, I mean, you know me.
0:26:21 There’s no way I could pull the trigger on that.
0:26:24 – Yeah, so, but when they’re just sitting there as points,
0:26:26 and it makes it seem like it’s funny money,
0:26:28 you just, you’re willing to spend it.
0:26:30 Let’s talk about some of the other hacks
0:26:32 that you’ve been up to.
0:26:35 The Biohacks, this is kind of new for you.
0:26:37 I don’t know that you’ve been a massive Biohacker
0:26:39 in the past.
0:26:43 – No, because I think there’s two really compelling reasons
0:26:44 to go down this path.
0:26:46 One is to be healthy, that’s fine.
0:26:47 And then you have kids and you’re like,
0:26:49 now I just wanna live longer to see my kid.
0:26:53 I don’t wanna, you know, see myself fall apart
0:26:54 and my body fall apart.
0:26:56 And so having kids really jumpstarted this like,
0:26:58 I need to be healthy.
0:27:00 I wanna be able to, you know,
0:27:02 we had kids in our mid 30s, late 30s even.
0:27:05 So like, I wanna be able to, you know, run with them.
0:27:07 And, you know, we all probably see people
0:27:10 and whether they’re our parents or our parents’ generation,
0:27:12 some of them are like running around the track,
0:27:14 playing tennis, and some of them are very sedentary.
0:27:15 – Right, totally.
0:27:16 – I wanna be that former group.
0:27:19 And so that’s pushed me to say, what do I need to do?
0:27:20 What do I need to dial in?
0:27:23 What kind of exercise do I need to do?
0:27:27 And it’s taken me on a path that previously,
0:27:29 it’s not like Biohacking’s new, you know,
0:27:30 but I was like, eh, who cares?
0:27:31 Now I have a purpose.
0:27:35 – So if you know me, I’m always trying out
0:27:36 the latest and greatest stuff,
0:27:39 always bouncing around, trying out different apps.
0:27:44 But I will say there is one app in particular
0:27:46 that I absolutely love and just keeps getting better
0:27:48 and better with time.
0:27:51 And I’m proud to say that they’re a sponsor of the show
0:27:52 and that is Notion.
0:27:54 I use Notion as my life dashboard.
0:27:56 It tracks all my angel investments.
0:28:00 It has travel documents for my family, vaccination records.
0:28:03 We use it for vacation planning,
0:28:06 storing family recipes, pretty much everything.
0:28:08 I even have a separate workspace
0:28:10 for my entire podcast workflow.
0:28:13 So that’s like guest outreach and booking, editing notes.
0:28:15 It’s all in there.
0:28:17 It’s really my Swiss Army knife tool
0:28:19 for all important data.
0:28:23 Notion combines your notes, your documents and projects
0:28:25 into one space that’s simple.
0:28:28 And for me, this is key that’s just beautifully designed.
0:28:30 It’s really clean and the mobile app’s awesome too.
0:28:33 It’s nice that it’s just all in one tool.
0:28:37 And of course, we know it is the season of AI
0:28:39 and AI is built right inside of Notion.
0:28:42 So you don’t have to bounce out to another tool
0:28:43 and then come back to Notion.
0:28:45 It’s built into it.
0:28:49 And I personally believe that having an AI-powered tool
0:28:51 to summarize and leverage all of your data
0:28:52 is definitely the future.
0:28:55 And Notion is right at the forefront of that.
0:29:00 So try Notion for free when you go to Notion.com/KevinRose.
0:29:01 That’s all lowercase letters.
0:29:06 Notion.com/KevinRose to try the powerful, easy-to-use
0:29:07 Notion AI today.
0:29:09 And when you use our link, now I know
0:29:10 you could just go to Notion.com.
0:29:13 But if you go to Notion.com/KevinRose,
0:29:14 you’re actually supporting the show.
0:29:16 I’d really appreciate it.
0:29:19 Notion.com/KevinRose.
0:29:21 So you’ve probably heard me mention on the podcast in the past
0:29:22 or other podcasts.
0:29:25 There are two activities that I love.
0:29:27 One is rucking, which is where you are hiking
0:29:29 with a weighted backpack.
0:29:31 Peter and Tia got me into that one.
0:29:33 And then also the sauna.
0:29:34 The sauna is huge.
0:29:38 I did it at 175 degrees Fahrenheit, 20 to 25 minutes.
0:29:41 And there’s great data around reduction in dementia,
0:29:45 cardiovascular improvements, lower all-cause mortality.
0:29:46 It’s just awesome.
0:29:47 Tons of benefits.
0:29:49 And I do this six times a week.
0:29:52 So I mentioned these because they both really
0:29:54 make you sweat, like a ton.
0:29:56 And after that, you definitely need
0:29:58 to replenish your electrolytes.
0:30:01 Sadly, a lot of the electrolyte powders out there
0:30:02 are packed with sugar.
0:30:03 And that’s just a no-go for me.
0:30:05 It goes straight to the gut.
0:30:07 I don’t like to spike my glucose.
0:30:10 And for that reason, I use a product called Element.
0:30:12 There’s no sugar.
0:30:14 And it has the science-backed ratio
0:30:18 of 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium,
0:30:21 and 60 milligrams of magnesium.
0:30:23 This is a super clean product.
0:30:25 No coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten,
0:30:29 no fillers, no sugar, just absolutely no BS.
0:30:31 Element is used by everyone from podcast hosts
0:30:35 to NBA, NFL, and NHL players, Olympic athletes,
0:30:38 even everyday moms and dads, and exercise enthusiasts
0:30:40 like myself.
0:30:44 And right now, Element is offering a free sample pack
0:30:44 with any purchase.
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0:30:55 so you know which one you love, or you
0:30:57 get to share your Element with a friend.
0:30:59 And lastly– and this is the best part–
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0:31:21 And huge thanks to Element for sponsoring today’s show.
0:31:24 Yeah, so you and I both did the same thing,
0:31:25 which we should talk about.
0:31:26 Yep.
0:31:28 It’s a little embarrassing.
0:31:31 It’s not necessarily the thing you want to admit to everyone.
0:31:36 But I’ll tell you what happens on my side.
0:31:39 So about– let’s call it 2 and 1/2 years ago,
0:31:41 maybe three years ago–
0:31:44 my kind of longevity doctor, Peter Atia,
0:31:48 was investigating these new class of drugs,
0:31:53 these GLP-1 inhibitors that essentially are glucose-controlled
0:31:55 drugs, but they also– one of the big side effects
0:31:58 is that people are losing a lot of weight on them.
0:32:02 So Ozympic probably being the biggest one in the category.
0:32:07 He– for me at that time–
0:32:08 so my issues has never been–
0:32:10 I haven’t been super obese.
0:32:14 But as you know, visceral fat is a bad type of fat.
0:32:19 And I’ve always had– call it 10 pounds just to get rid of.
0:32:21 And my blood pressure, for me personally,
0:32:25 is severely impacted by plus or minus 10 to 15 pounds.
0:32:28 Like, it’s higher if I’m heavier, right?
0:32:33 And so I said, I’ll try it.
0:32:34 So a couple of years ago, I went on Ozympic
0:32:37 just to see what would happen for just a thing
0:32:39 I did for about a month.
0:32:41 I got super nauseous.
0:32:43 And you had bad reactions.
0:32:45 Yeah, I just got really nauseous.
0:32:49 And I did drop that 10 pounds, which is great.
0:32:50 But I didn’t really enjoy it.
0:32:52 I mean, it just didn’t sit right with me.
0:32:54 I just didn’t like the fact that there
0:32:56 was this nausea that came along with it.
0:32:58 And I was like, us grew it.
0:33:01 And then later, Atea’s team had done the research and said,
0:33:04 hey, we’re also noticing via DEXA scans, which
0:33:06 are these low radiation scans that you can get done
0:33:08 on your entire body, which shows bone density.
0:33:10 It shows visceral fat, which is muscle mass.
0:33:15 It’s an insanely accurate body scan that you can get done.
0:33:16 He was showing muscle loss.
0:33:18 And I think the majority of that–
0:33:20 I’d have to talk to Atea about it.
0:33:22 But the majority of that is, you’re literally not
0:33:23 eating any protein.
0:33:25 Like, you’re kind of not hungry at all.
0:33:26 Right, you’re not eating anything.
0:33:28 So it’s not really surprising that you would
0:33:30 lose some muscle mass as well.
0:33:34 But muscle mass, if you’ve read Atea’s latest book, Outlive,
0:33:38 it is very important to maintain over your lifespan.
0:33:41 Like, it’s a very important piece of longevity.
0:33:45 So there has been new drugs that have come out since.
0:33:48 One of them is called Manjaro.
0:33:52 And Manjaro is a slightly more elegant drug.
0:33:54 It works a little bit better.
0:33:57 It’s still a GLP1 inhibitor, but it’s also a dual GIP inhibitor.
0:34:00 And by the way, to anyone listening, we’re not doctors.
0:34:01 We’re not giving medical advice.
0:34:03 No, none of this is medical advice.
0:34:07 But we’ll just tell you our kind of path through this.
0:34:12 So November of last year, I was in the same predicament,
0:34:15 where I was like, OK, I’m probably 15 pounds overweight.
0:34:18 I broke 200 for the first time, which I was not proud of.
0:34:19 This is my exact scenario.
0:34:22 If I break a 200, it’s like, there’s something for me.
0:34:23 We got to make a change.
0:34:24 Yeah, exactly.
0:34:25 So I’m normally at like 185.
0:34:27 And so I broke 200.
0:34:28 And I’m like, OK, this sucks.
0:34:30 And of course, my blood pressure was high.
0:34:34 I have a small brain aneurysm that they keep an eye on.
0:34:37 And the thing that causes a brain aneurysm to grow.
0:34:39 And while you hear they’re so dangerous is what they grow.
0:34:40 They burst.
0:34:42 And if they burst, you have a 50% chance of survival.
0:34:43 And it’s not good.
0:34:46 So you got to keep your blood pressure tight, tight, tight.
0:34:50 So anyway, I talked to Nadia about my primary care physician.
0:34:54 I was like, hey, like, can you hook me up a little bit?
0:34:59 Like I just need a little juice just to get me on the right path.
0:34:59 Right?
0:35:02 Like if I can get like a little few shots on the side and drop
0:35:04 a tenor, then I’m like, good to go into the new year.
0:35:05 Right?
0:35:08 And so he’s like, OK, I got you.
0:35:12 So I went in and since then, it’s been approved for weight loss.
0:35:15 It’s now coming out under a new brand name as well.
0:35:16 But you know, with the sole purpose
0:35:21 to get my blood pressure down and, you know, I got it off label.
0:35:24 So obviously it was not off label, but I’m off prescription.
0:35:26 So obviously it was not paid for.
0:35:30 I used a coupon that I found online so you can get for 500 bucks a month.
0:35:33 And it’s expensive, but I did it.
0:35:36 And of course, you know, I lost that like, you know, call it 10, 12 pounds.
0:35:40 And then followed up with cardio, protein, all the bright things.
0:35:42 And then now, you know, working back into getting into good shape again.
0:35:44 So that was great.
0:35:47 I talked to you and you were like,
0:35:51 oh, dude, I got this crazy hack like this is some crazy shit.
0:35:53 Oh, tell me what you did.
0:35:56 Yeah. So a similar experience, except instead of having a doctor
0:36:00 that I could talk to about it, there’s probably 20 startups now
0:36:01 that you go online, you fill out a profile.
0:36:04 And if you meet a certain number of requirements,
0:36:07 they will cook you up with a doctor that helps prescribe things for weight loss.
0:36:11 So like Teladoc Teladoc, but they’re specifically designed.
0:36:15 I won’t say, I mean, they are buying a Zempik and Manjaro keywords on Google.
0:36:18 They’re not out there saying like, click this button and we’re going to prescribe
0:36:21 this drug, because what they’re going to do is click this button, talk to a doctor
0:36:23 and the doctor is going to find the right solution for you.
0:36:27 Right solution is often GOP one inhibitors, but like it’s very clear
0:36:30 what keywords they’re buying on Google in their advertising.
0:36:34 So I went to one and I was like, hey, I’m in a similar box, cross 200.
0:36:37 One of this, I didn’t have the blood pressure.
0:36:38 I had the cholesterol.
0:36:43 And so it’s usually helpful to be like from a diagnosing these things.
0:36:46 It’s like they want like maybe one other thing to improve.
0:36:49 So whether it’s cholesterol or prediabetes or blood pressure.
0:36:53 And so prescribed Manjaro and there was a coupon.
0:36:55 What was the name of the site that you used?
0:36:56 I think I used one called Alfie.
0:36:59 OK, there’s there’s a lot of them now.
0:37:02 You know, I haven’t used them all so I can, you know, I had a fine experience.
0:37:06 But there was a coupon a year, maybe last year or sometime
0:37:08 where it would bring the cost down to almost nothing.
0:37:12 And but that coupon no longer works.
0:37:13 Now it brings it down to like five hundred dollars.
0:37:17 I haven’t tried this out since then, but went on for three months.
0:37:21 I had a very different experience to you, which was did you get nausea?
0:37:23 I didn’t get any nausea with majority at all.
0:37:30 None. Yeah. And I went from like 207 to like 175 or something.
0:37:32 That’s a lot of draw 90 days.
0:37:35 And I didn’t put a lot of thought into it.
0:37:37 I wasn’t doing all the like protein research.
0:37:38 So that was it.
0:37:43 And I but I ended up stopping it a little early and then I had in the fridge.
0:37:47 I still had like a month or a month or two months of supply left.
0:37:48 And I was like, well, I’m not going to use this now.
0:37:49 Like I hit this target.
0:37:53 One thing that’s really important to realize is because you’re consuming so few calories,
0:37:56 your metabolic rate goes down significantly.
0:37:59 So a lot of people get off these drugs and they gain the pounds right back
0:38:03 because if you’re used to consuming eight hundred calories a day for 90 days
0:38:05 and then you get off and you’re like, well, now I’m hungry
0:38:07 and you’re eating 2,000, you’re going to gain it right back.
0:38:08 Could you see abs at that point?
0:38:11 Were you like getting shredded? No, no, I was not shredded.
0:38:14 OK. And so I realized you weren’t working out
0:38:15 though either. No, I don’t know.
0:38:18 See, you just like basically just lost a bunch of muscle.
0:38:20 And you were just like flabby, like just like.
0:38:21 No, I mean, I wasn’t.
0:38:24 You were doughy, though. You weren’t like buff.
0:38:26 I know I wasn’t working out. Yeah.
0:38:29 And I probably went back up to 185 at the end and stayed there for a while.
0:38:31 OK. And I was like, that was great.
0:38:34 It like I wasn’t one that was consistently gaining weight.
0:38:36 So it was like, I just needed to do a little reset.
0:38:40 And then we had another kid and just the end of like all this stuff
0:38:42 started happening. I was like, it’s happening again.
0:38:44 And I wasn’t serious about exercise this year.
0:38:48 I have been like pretty diligent about stuff.
0:38:50 And then I was like, you know, at this time, I mean,
0:38:52 I want to get the last little use out of the stuff that’s in the fridge.
0:38:54 Let’s do another one.
0:38:56 But I want to go through the hassle of another prescription.
0:38:58 And I started looking online.
0:39:02 And the crazy thing is, Majaro, you can get it in 2.5 to 15 milligram dosages.
0:39:06 OK. So when you when you mention that, so what people should know is that
0:39:10 the way that you take Manjaro is that it is a subcutaneous shot.
0:39:12 It’s a single use pen.
0:39:15 And so it looks like, you know, I mean, it could be like whatever,
0:39:17 a bulb or pen or whatever you push down on it.
0:39:19 When you push down on the end of it,
0:39:22 it shoots a needle that is a super fine little tiny needle
0:39:24 about a quarter inch into your fat.
0:39:26 So you kind of pinch your fat, push it down.
0:39:28 You hold it there for what about five seconds.
0:39:30 Yeah, it pops back out, pops back out.
0:39:32 It’s done. You throw away the whole cartridge
0:39:34 and you’re done onto the next one.
0:39:35 And you do that once per week.
0:39:38 So that’s just a little primer of how it’s used.
0:39:39 And they make pens like that.
0:39:41 I think it might be a more you can ratchet the pen.
0:39:43 That’s right. You can adjust the dosage.
0:39:46 Yeah. What’s crazy about Manjaro is you can’t adjust the dosage, right?
0:39:49 But the cost for 15 milligrams is the same as the cost.
0:39:51 And maybe I’m off by a couple of dollars,
0:39:53 but like relatively the same as the cost for two and a half.
0:39:56 But they never want to start you with that crazy high.
0:39:59 They want to start you with two and a half and scale your way up, right?
0:40:01 And because I’d done this for 90 days,
0:40:03 they’d scaled me up to 10. OK.
0:40:06 And, you know, I don’t know if I need to be on 10.
0:40:08 I felt like I was fine at five. Yeah.
0:40:10 So when I was like, let’s go back, I was like, I have these pens at 10.
0:40:12 It seems like a total waste.
0:40:14 I don’t need 10, but usually one way to do this.
0:40:15 And I just search online.
0:40:18 And there are people that are showing you how simple it is
0:40:22 to basically take a little wrench, open the pen up
0:40:26 and put into, you know, what it was, sterile vials,
0:40:30 add bacteriostatic water to help with the longevity of the medicine
0:40:35 and to kind of increase the number of CCs of liquid or milliliters of liquid
0:40:40 and then use the same needle, but as a diabetes syringe kind of thing
0:40:42 to basically split doses.
0:40:45 So a lot of people out there who either by dosing up
0:40:48 or by just being honest with their doctor and saying,
0:40:50 this is a super expensive medicine, I would like to use it.
0:40:54 Can you help me get to a 50 milligram prescription and I’m going to dose it out?
0:40:58 There are other crazy people who are buying peptides from China
0:41:02 and like trying to batch themselves, Manjaro equivalent.
0:41:03 Yes, screw that. That seems crazy.
0:41:06 Well, even the it seems crazy to like.
0:41:10 So what you’re saying, essentially, is that like you can buy the 15 mil,
0:41:11 the actual, you know, pins.
0:41:14 Yeah. If you crack them open, you can extract two and a half.
0:41:17 And by crack open, just to be clear, you’re like, you’re taking.
0:41:18 There’s nothing breaking.
0:41:20 You’re not like pouring liquid out of a glass.
0:41:22 Yeah, you’re taking that same needle.
0:41:24 And the way the pen actually works, if you take it apart,
0:41:27 is there’s a plunger just like any normal syringe.
0:41:32 That pushes down and it pushes the liquid inside the medicine
0:41:36 out the tip of the syringe, but it pushes down so fast and it’s spring loaded.
0:41:37 It’s crazy when you take it apart.
0:41:42 If you release the spring, the little plunger will shoot 40 feet across the room.
0:41:45 Like it is a serious amount of force from that spring.
0:41:47 So when you take it apart, you remove the spring.
0:41:52 Why can’t you just put it right into an empty vial and shoot it all right.
0:41:53 So there are people that do that.
0:41:56 And if you go read all these red threads, people are doing that.
0:41:59 There are two reasons that you don’t want to do it is one.
0:42:02 These vials have a very small area to hit through.
0:42:06 So if you don’t line it up perfectly, right, you might damage the needle.
0:42:09 You might miss the top and lose the medicine.
0:42:11 And then two peptides are very sensitive.
0:42:14 So people are like, well, when I did that, it starts foaming a lot.
0:42:18 And it’s like the medicine was still worked, but like they’re very sensitive medication.
0:42:23 So I thought it would be safer to not shoot it in and have it have some
0:42:25 sort of reaction that creates foam.
0:42:26 I don’t like I’m not a doctor.
0:42:29 I don’t know what, but it seemed safer to do it a little slower.
0:42:35 And so we just I just split the tens and added 50 each pen is about 50 milliliters.
0:42:37 Or is that right 50 milliliters?
0:42:38 Yeah, I think so, or 50 ccs.
0:42:40 And so I had to take a pet.
0:42:41 Yeah, probably 50 ccs.
0:42:45 And then you take 50 ccs plus 50 ccs of water and then you’re doing the same.
0:42:49 Then you’re mixing it up and you’re just taking 50 out, which now has half the medication.
0:42:54 Gotcha. And so now you got to be, I mean, again, we said it before,
0:42:56 but this is you’re not saying to try this at home.
0:42:58 I’m this I’m not endorsing this.
0:43:01 Yeah, this is probably, you know, no one would probably recommend this.
0:43:05 No, not at all, because there is a world where you can contaminate this stuff.
0:43:09 Yeah. So I’m like, I have like my little table and I’m like wiping it down
0:43:10 with alcohol wipes while washing my hands.
0:43:12 I’m wiping down the top of the vial.
0:43:16 I’m wiping like I’m, you know, I’m taking a lot of precautions.
0:43:20 What made me comfortable with this was when my wife was going through IVF,
0:43:22 we had to do all the same stuff.
0:43:23 So we had a vial.
0:43:26 So if you had told me this pre IVF, I’d be like, this is insane.
0:43:30 Right. I’m drawing, you know, medicine out of a syringe and injecting my,
0:43:32 that seems crazy. Right.
0:43:35 But we went through this whole thing at UCSF when we were doing IVF and they’re
0:43:37 like, all right, here’s this medicine and I need you to take it out.
0:43:40 And I need you to put it in this other vial and mix it with this other thing
0:43:43 and mix it up so that the medicine and then take it out and then inject it.
0:43:46 And this was some of those were subcutaneous and some of them,
0:43:51 I think it was progesterone, was like a massive needle in the butt, like massive.
0:43:52 Intramuscular. Yeah.
0:43:56 And speaking of back to our old privacy on airplanes thing,
0:43:58 I remember you’re supposed to take it at the same time every day.
0:44:01 So we weren’t in the middle of trying to join the mile high club,
0:44:06 but I needed to stick a needle in my wife’s ass, like to inject his medicine.
0:44:08 And the time was in the middle of a flight to Tokyo.
0:44:10 And so we’re like, I remember we didn’t have sweets.
0:44:14 So I like made a tent out of a blanket and had like a little flashlight for my
0:44:17 phone because I was trying to give her the shot because like, you know,
0:44:19 in her seat or did you go to the bathroom in her seat?
0:44:22 Because the bathroom on a regular it’s too small, like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:44:24 So, uh, yeah.
0:44:26 So that made me comfortable with the process
0:44:29 because I was like, if doctors are going to approve this process,
0:44:32 which is almost identical in this other way, and we had success.
0:44:36 We now have two children, so it worked. Yeah, it made me comfortable with it.
0:44:38 I’m saying everyone should be comfortable.
0:44:42 But, you know, if you’re if you’re getting the medication for the same price
0:44:46 with more medicine and you split it out, it ends up being cheaper per month.
0:44:48 Yeah, this is not a drug that I want to take for years.
0:44:51 Right. Yeah, it’s not a drug I plan to take again.
0:44:53 But it’s been an interesting experiment.
0:44:55 I started tracking my macros, though,
0:44:58 and like how much how many calories am I consuming?
0:45:00 And the first week back on it, I was like, oh, my God,
0:45:03 I consume 500 calories in a day.
0:45:05 That’s insane. That’s insane.
0:45:06 I mean, that’s why you’re losing the weight.
0:45:08 And I’m sure there’s water weight there as well.
0:45:10 And yeah, but but I was still working out.
0:45:13 So then I got really aggressive about protein and I was like, OK,
0:45:15 I’m going to be consuming a lot of protein.
0:45:17 I’m not going to just consume 500 calories.
0:45:19 Like the calories can be low, but the protein has to be high
0:45:20 because I don’t want to do the muscle loss.
0:45:25 So I started trying all these protein cereals that we could put a link to a video
0:45:28 we were talking last night about making protein ice cream with the Ninja Colony.
0:45:29 Yes, yes.
0:45:34 Which I have yet to buy and use, but there are some great recipes
0:45:38 using like protein powder, sugar-free pudding mix and whole milk.
0:45:42 And you can make these like a couple of my friends do this
0:45:46 like delicious ice cream that is like 100 calories and super packed with protein.
0:45:48 And using the Ninja Creamy.
0:45:51 I got to get a Ninja cream, which is like an at home ice cream maker.
0:45:53 Me with the Ninja folks.
0:45:56 Yeah, the blender blenders. Yeah.
0:45:59 So now I’m aggressively focused on protein because I don’t want to have muscle loss.
0:46:00 I’m working out a lot.
0:46:05 Yeah, I’m doing a pre and post dexa scan to see how the effects of that are.
0:46:07 That’s good. Yeah.
0:46:09 And I started getting into these diagnostics.
0:46:13 I read a lot of Atea stuff and there are some things you could just change.
0:46:17 For me, cholesterol, I mean, anyone who has high cholesterol,
0:46:20 the craziest thing about cholesterol, which I just don’t understand it,
0:46:26 is the way our medicine system works is until you have like a 10 year likelihood
0:46:30 above X of getting a cardiovascular event, they do nothing.
0:46:33 And when you cross that camp, they treat it like it’s a huge problem.
0:46:34 Right. It’s too late.
0:46:36 When in reality, you could start a lot earlier.
0:46:41 And so I went and did a calcium score test, which I think if you do it,
0:46:45 depending on the place, but Stanford has a pretty inexpensive one, like hundreds of dollars,
0:46:48 you can find out, do I already have calcium in my arteries?
0:46:52 Yeah. And for people that don’t know, calcium in the arteries is just a sign
0:46:53 that damage has occurred.
0:46:59 And so there’s calcification deposits inside the artery walls.
0:47:04 And if anything comes back, meaning like you get the scan done and it’s not zero,
0:47:07 that means like all hands on deck, you need to pay attention.
0:47:12 Like a bad thing, having high cholesterol increases the propensity for plaque in the arteries.
0:47:14 And this means that not only is there plaque, but it’s calcified.
0:47:16 You can’t really remove it. It’s there.
0:47:19 But if you catch it early enough, you can really start to be aggressive.
0:47:22 So I did this. I had one of four arteries had a score of two.
0:47:25 And it goes from like zero to it could be over a thousand.
0:47:29 So I had the best worst outcome.
0:47:30 The best outcome is a zero everywhere.
0:47:33 The best worst outcome, I guess, would be a one in one artery and I had a two.
0:47:35 And did you do that with contrast or no?
0:47:38 So then I was like, OK, I want to know how much soft plaque there is.
0:47:40 So I met with a cardiologist at UCSF and he’s like, well,
0:47:46 if there’s a lot of soft plaque and it’s about to be calcified, that’s even worse.
0:47:52 And I went and got a CT angiogram, which is a more expensive thing, which I have no idea why,
0:47:53 but was covered by insurance.
0:47:56 And I don’t think it was supposed to be, but you know, I’m not I’m not questioning that.
0:48:00 And it came back with a zero on all four arteries.
0:48:00 That’s so crazy.
0:48:03 And then I asked if they could review.
0:48:04 Like I said, could you have the person?
0:48:05 I did the same facility.
0:48:09 I was like, could you have the person that did the first one and the second one talk?
0:48:11 Because it doesn’t make sense that I got mixed results.
0:48:14 And they were like, the results are within the margin of error.
0:48:15 So there’s no point in doing this.
0:48:17 So I don’t know if I have a two or a zero.
0:48:21 But having a zero on the CT angiogram makes me feel pretty good.
0:48:26 But my primary care physician, which is not a fancy price of one medical doctor,
0:48:28 was like, we’re going to put you on statins.
0:48:29 And we’re going to lower your APOB.
0:48:30 We’re going to lower your LDL.
0:48:31 APOB is a huge one.
0:48:34 We’ll put a link in the show notes to a lot of Ateas.
0:48:35 Yeah, he’s done a bunch of stuff.
0:48:35 Stuff like that.
0:48:38 I’m not an expert on cardiovascular disease and all this stuff.
0:48:40 But that set me on this aggressive path.
0:48:43 So I was like, OK, I think everybody should be doing their diagnostics.
0:48:43 Yeah.
0:48:44 Where’s my blood work?
0:48:49 You can change your APOB by taking statins, which is what I’ve done.
0:48:51 And you can change your LDL and all this stuff.
0:48:54 There are a few things that I’m now pretty interested in because they take longer.
0:48:58 So testing your VO2 max, testing your bone density, your visceral fats, those things.
0:49:00 You can’t change those overnight with a drug.
0:49:01 That takes time.
0:49:04 Yeah, but you got DEXA to give you the accurate results on that.
0:49:06 Those DEXA scans are where to go.
0:49:06 Yeah.
0:49:10 And so there’s a company called DEXAFIT, which I’m working with right now.
0:49:14 I’m actually meeting the founder this week because they have facilities all over the country.
0:49:19 And my goal, by the way, with the podcast, and I think I’m going to help push you to this goal,
0:49:23 is there are a lot of podcasts out there that have sponsors from whoever wants to pay them.
0:49:26 My approach to sponsorship, which I think if you have sponsors on the show,
0:49:29 will be the same, is I’m just going to find all the companies I love.
0:49:29 Yeah.
0:49:30 I’m going to reach out to all of them.
0:49:30 Yeah.
0:49:31 And I’m going to work with them.
0:49:32 That’s the only way to do it.
0:49:35 I’ve done hundreds of podcasts.
0:49:37 I mean, the Kevin Rose shows now.
0:49:42 Obviously, I took a little hiatus there, but it’s like 50 episodes plus deep.
0:49:44 Never took a sponsor.
0:49:47 And it was because if I ever take a sponsor,
0:49:52 I always wanted to be something I can truly back and get behind and believe in.
0:49:54 Because otherwise, you’re just killing your own reputation.
0:49:55 It’s horrible.
0:50:00 One of the things I want to ask you about real quick, though, is in spirit of all this
0:50:05 cardiovascular health, one of the things that many people point to, Peter,
0:50:09 especially Rhonda Patrick, the scientist who’s done a lot of research on this front,
0:50:12 is the benefits of hot sauna usage.
0:50:15 And I know that you just built a sauna.
0:50:18 I have a sauna here that’s a piece of crap.
0:50:19 We looked at it last night.
0:50:21 It came with the house.
0:50:21 It looks beautiful.
0:50:26 Looks beautiful, but it was built for beauty, not for comfort.
0:50:26 Wait, how does it work?
0:50:27 Built for…
0:50:29 It was built for someone to buy a house.
0:50:30 Built for comfort, not for…
0:50:32 Yeah, yeah, it was built for someone to buy a house.
0:50:34 So it’s got a lot of glass and it looks fancy,
0:50:36 but it’s actually a pretty shitty sauna.
0:50:37 It doesn’t get hot enough.
0:50:41 I will say you went really deep.
0:50:43 We were talking about this last night on how to build a sauna.
0:50:44 You built one.
0:50:46 You were swimming pictures along the way.
0:50:49 You were doing it near outside, right near my yard.
0:50:52 Yeah, I’ve got my studio, a sauna and a cold plunge.
0:50:53 And we’ll get the cold plunge later.
0:50:58 Yeah, so let’s just talk real quick about the data is out there.
0:51:00 Rhonda Patrick, if you look at our show notes,
0:51:02 it’ll be linked to Rhonda Patrick’s sauna.
0:51:06 She has a multi-page PDF that she talks about,
0:51:09 the benefits of it, the reduction in all cause mortality,
0:51:10 the reduction in dementia risk,
0:51:12 the reduction in cardiovascular disease.
0:51:14 It’s really meaningful.
0:51:15 A lot of these studies are in Finland
0:51:17 and they look at people that go four days a week
0:51:18 and no days a week.
0:51:19 And they are living longer.
0:51:24 But one of the key things in her document
0:51:25 is that you need to…
0:51:28 It looks like the sweet spot for this is about…
0:51:34 In Fahrenheit is 175 degrees Fahrenheit at the chest level,
0:51:37 20 to 25 minutes per session.
0:51:38 And that’s pretty hot.
0:51:40 Like most American saunas,
0:51:42 in fact, there’s these governors on some of the saunas
0:51:44 that won’t let them even go that hot.
0:51:49 You did the research, you went and studied the papers.
0:51:52 Tell us about that document that you found from the Finns.
0:51:53 Like what did you figure out?
0:51:54 What’s so funny?
0:51:57 So Finland is probably the D place to go.
0:51:59 If you’re like, I want to feel this word
0:52:01 and I’m going to mispronounce it called loily,
0:52:04 L-O-Y-L-Y, is like the finished word
0:52:07 for that experience and the feeling of being in a good sauna.
0:52:09 And it doesn’t translate perfectly.
0:52:11 Just like it’s like the umami of sauna.
0:52:12 It’s like there’s no perfect translation.
0:52:13 You just know it when you feel it.
0:52:14 Right.
0:52:17 And what the Finns say is that 90% of saunas
0:52:18 in North America are bad.
0:52:20 And then 10% are even worse.
0:52:20 Right.
0:52:24 And I experienced this when I was talking to people
0:52:25 about how to build saunas.
0:52:27 People love these barrel saunas.
0:52:30 And then you look at the actual way the sauna’s structured
0:52:31 and you’re like, what’s going on?
0:52:33 And so there’s this guide that we can link to in the show notes
0:52:36 called Trumpkin’s Guide to Sauna Building.
0:52:38 And then within that doc, there’s other pages
0:52:39 that are, you know, the guide to ventilation.
0:52:43 And each one of these guides is probably 50, 60 pages.
0:52:45 And I’ve gone through all of them, read all these details.
0:52:47 And I was like, this is the sauna I want to build.
0:52:49 And there are a lot of rules to building a good sauna.
0:52:52 But the kind of most important things,
0:52:53 if you want to just visually be like,
0:52:54 what’s the most important?
0:52:55 Feed above the stones.
0:52:58 Because how it generally works is there’s a heater
0:52:59 and the heater off puts heat.
0:53:00 And I think everyone probably knows that heat rises.
0:53:04 And so if you’re sitting on the same level as the heater,
0:53:07 the heat’s going up and you’re not in that cavity of warm air.
0:53:07 Right.
0:53:09 So you need to have your feet above the salt.
0:53:10 You need to have your feet above the stones
0:53:13 and not in that cold zone.
0:53:14 And then you want proper ventilation.
0:53:17 And you want ventilation in a way that’s kind of funny
0:53:18 because we were looking at your sauna.
0:53:20 And your sauna is like the exact opposite way
0:53:21 that you should ventilate a sauna.
0:53:24 You want this intake coming from above the heater.
0:53:26 And you want an exhaust coming from like the other side
0:53:28 of the room on the floor.
0:53:30 And what that does is it’s pulling the air
0:53:31 that’s right above the heater, the hottest,
0:53:33 and circulating around the sauna.
0:53:36 So you have a nice, even feeling of warmth.
0:53:37 Well, one question there.
0:53:42 Because in my head, if the intake is above the heater
0:53:44 and heat rises, why wouldn’t that just be
0:53:46 turn into the outtake and the heat would just go out that way?
0:53:49 So there’s a fan in, we have a fan in each.
0:53:52 So the fan on the intake is blowing in.
0:53:54 And the fan on the exhaust is blowing out.
0:53:55 So it creates this cycle.
0:53:57 And there’s some cool ways to visualize it.
0:53:59 You see, it kind of circulates a little.
0:54:00 It creates this.
0:54:02 And the fans all have vents on them.
0:54:03 So you can kind of, it’s not like you,
0:54:07 you know, if someone’s hooked up on an exterior, you know.
0:54:09 Or there’s like lawn blower things, blowing air.
0:54:10 And it’s not that extreme.
0:54:14 And that, that’s, that’s the basics.
0:54:16 Obviously there’s like 70 pages that will do it.
0:54:18 You can go deep.
0:54:20 But if you look at a lot of these saunas,
0:54:22 yours is a great example.
0:54:24 A lot of the barrel saunas out there,
0:54:26 your feet are on the ground.
0:54:28 And the heater, so like you’re, you’re,
0:54:29 you want your feet above the stones.
0:54:30 But in a lot of these saunas,
0:54:32 you don’t even have your chest above the stones.
0:54:34 And so that was always really important.
0:54:37 So you need a sauna that’s like probably ideally seven,
0:54:39 eight feet tall so that you can put a heater on the ground
0:54:41 and then be above it.
0:54:43 And so I was, I was trying to figure out what to do.
0:54:46 And I found this company that made a barrel sauna that,
0:54:49 usually barrel saunas, you sit on the sides
0:54:52 and they did one that was narrow and you sit on the back wall.
0:54:53 And I was like, okay, this kind of works.
0:54:54 It’s not ideal, but it’s okay.
0:54:57 And then I was in this signal group
0:55:00 with a bunch of people who’ve sold companies
0:55:02 and two guys just happened the day
0:55:03 before I was going to check out on the sauna company,
0:55:05 we were like, we’re launching the sauna company.
0:55:08 It’s called Haven sauna.
0:55:10 And they haven’t, they haven’t launched yet.
0:55:13 So there’s a landing page, but, and I was like,
0:55:14 oh, let’s talk to him.
0:55:16 Like I’ve just gone so deep on the sauna.
0:55:18 – The sauna company to do what, like installation saunas?
0:55:21 – Build saunas, like, like the prefab saunas
0:55:23 that you can customize a bit and put outdoors.
0:55:26 So think, if you remember that,
0:55:28 one of the Airbnb founders launched this ADU company
0:55:31 where you can customize an ADU in your backyard.
0:55:33 You know, you choose like five or six different things.
0:55:35 But it’s not a full custom build.
0:55:36 – Right, right, right.
0:55:37 – And so I talked to them.
0:55:38 – It’s prefab essentially, like, yeah.
0:55:39 – With a little bit of change.
0:55:41 It’s not, it’s not like a tough shed
0:55:42 where you just buy the model.
0:55:43 – But done the right way.
0:55:44 Like they get it.
0:55:46 – And I talked to them and they were like,
0:55:46 talking about Trumpkin.
0:55:49 And I was like, oh, you guys know your stuff.
0:55:52 And they’re like, yeah, we want to build the best saunas,
0:55:54 but we want those saunas to be very high quality
0:55:56 and actually a good experience.
0:55:59 Because the longevity studies of saunas in Finland,
0:56:03 you know, if you create a sauna and you think it’s 175,
0:56:04 but it turns out like, if you didn’t have a thermometer
0:56:08 in yours at chest height, you can set it to 175.
0:56:09 But at chest height, it might only be 100 degrees.
0:56:11 – Oh yeah, I mean, I brought, I have these,
0:56:17 I went on Amazon and bought literal like remote meat probes
0:56:18 that you can stick into steaks and like,
0:56:20 you know, they’re Bluetooth.
0:56:22 And so I, and I brought it in the sauna
0:56:24 and I just set it at my chest height.
0:56:25 So I wasn’t touching it.
0:56:27 So I wasn’t heating it up myself.
0:56:28 And it was like 110.
0:56:29 And I’m just like, this is, this is not.
0:56:31 – Your sauna was probably set to like 200.
0:56:34 – Well, at the ceiling, it was like 230 or whatever.
0:56:36 That’s the other thing too, we should talk about
0:56:40 because most saunas that you buy in the States,
0:56:42 they have a maximum heat of what, 190?
0:56:45 – Yeah, so there’s, there’s this like universal code,
0:56:47 UL thing, and there’s, and there’s all these rules
0:56:50 about how hot things can go and shutoffs.
0:56:52 And so a lot of American saunas, if you import heaters,
0:56:55 or if you buy a saun, heaters built to sell in the US,
0:56:57 you also want to vent under the heater
0:57:00 to keep the heater elements at the bottom of the heater cool.
0:57:03 Because that’ll prevent them from tripping
0:57:04 and shutting off for 10, 15 minutes.
0:57:07 And you could read a lot about that in this guide also.
0:57:09 There’s a company called Hume, H-U-U-M,
0:57:10 which sells sauna heaters.
0:57:13 But I think technically they’re classified
0:57:14 as baseboard heaters.
0:57:17 And so they don’t follow that regulation.
0:57:19 TBD, whether that’s on a burned your house down,
0:57:22 how that might affect your insurance, I’m not sure.
0:57:25 But in general, you know,
0:57:26 there’s a lot you can do to make a good sauna.
0:57:30 I’ll back up and say, if you buy a sauna from Costco,
0:57:33 which by the way, Costco is one of the best deals for saunas,
0:57:36 you can get a nice four-person non-barrel sauna
0:57:41 for $4,000 on Costco, that I would say is pretty good.
0:57:42 Even a barrel sauna is not going to be
0:57:43 the worst sauna in the world.
0:57:45 I know lots of people that have them and love them.
0:57:47 So I’m saying you could go as far as you want,
0:57:48 you could buy really nice headphones,
0:57:50 or you can buy $2 earbuds.
0:57:51 There’s a spectrum.
0:57:53 And I think you’re probably going to get a decent amount
0:57:55 of the value from a longevity
0:57:58 and especially relaxation standpoint in any sauna.
0:58:02 But, you know, I like, my focus is on better outcomes.
0:58:04 So like, how do I get the best sauna?
0:58:06 – And so you went with that Hume baseboard heater?
0:58:09 – Hume heater, it’s called a Hive Mini.
0:58:12 And it’s great, it’s got, I think it’s beautiful also,
0:58:14 but it’s very functional, it gets the room hot.
0:58:18 And yeah, so I worked with these two guys,
0:58:20 Zach and Ross, who started the sauna company.
0:58:23 And you know, we were kind of like a demo of experimenting.
0:58:26 And so we built the sauna, it’s up and running,
0:58:27 it’s fantastic.
0:58:28 – What all in price?
0:58:31 Like, so you could have done that or you could have gone Costco.
0:58:32 What’s the all in price?
0:58:35 – I would say the range in saunas is probably somewhere
0:58:38 between $2,500 would be like, I mean,
0:58:40 they have these weird saunas you can buy on Amazon
0:58:43 that are like, basically like a heater
0:58:46 and a bunch of material that you can wrap around your body
0:58:48 and stick your head out the hole.
0:58:51 Like, you could probably get a sauna for $300.
0:58:53 – Yeah, and those work too.
0:58:54 I have a friend that does that,
0:58:55 that actually has one of those body ones
0:58:58 that they just lay in a sleeping bag type situation.
0:59:00 They sweat their ass off and it goes up to their neck.
0:59:03 And but, you know, like she can’t afford
0:59:04 to have a $4,000 sauna.
0:59:05 – And that’s fine, yeah.
0:59:06 For the health benefits.
0:59:07 – Is there any one of those that you liked?
0:59:08 You know, having this?
0:59:10 – I haven’t tried one, I haven’t used one.
0:59:13 – I’ll put a show note to the one that my friend uses.
0:59:17 She swears by hers and she sweats her ass off in it.
0:59:19 – But part of the reason we love the sauna is,
0:59:22 Amy, my wife and I, we go in the sauna
0:59:25 after we put the kids down for like 20, 30 minutes at night
0:59:28 and we have this uninterrupted, no devices,
0:59:32 time for us to talk, to catch up, to relax.
0:59:33 Like, you know, all kinds of stuff.
0:59:35 So like that, you’re not gonna get that
0:59:37 in like a sleeping bag with a heating unit.
0:59:40 So that’s part of the reason we want it.
0:59:42 But I’d say the low end, you could find,
0:59:43 so Costco has these great,
0:59:44 I don’t know how they get away with this.
0:59:46 There’s this company, Almost Heaven.
0:59:47 You could buy an Almost Heaven sauna on the internet
0:59:48 or you could buy it at Costco.
0:59:50 And you’re gonna save way more
0:59:52 than the $65 Costco membership.
0:59:54 Just by buying it through Costco.
0:59:55 Though, if you’re thinking to buy an Almost Heaven sauna.
0:59:56 – Does it get hot enough?
0:59:59 – Yeah, it has good heaters, like all this stuff.
1:00:00 It’s a great sauna.
1:00:04 Our problem was we had a very specific place
1:00:07 we wanted to put it and the dimensions weren’t correct.
1:00:08 And, you know, the design element,
1:00:11 like I wouldn’t say it’s a beautiful, modern design.
1:00:13 If you go to havensana.com
1:00:14 and see kind of what they’re building,
1:00:16 it looks different.
1:00:19 And those could probably be in the range of $20, $25,000.
1:00:22 And so it’s a spectrum, you know,
1:00:23 if you’re focused just on the health benefits,
1:00:25 you don’t need to go all the way up.
1:00:26 If you want to focus on aesthetics
1:00:28 and you could spend a lot more.
1:00:31 But I think if you’re spending more than $30,000 on a sauna,
1:00:32 like there’s probably a lot.
1:00:35 – Yeah, let’s talk about cold plunge.
1:00:37 One of the things that I started doing,
1:00:39 you saw me this morning, I jumped in my pool,
1:00:42 which was freezing and then I did the contrast
1:00:45 with the jacuzzi went back and forth.
1:00:48 You did not join me this morning.
1:00:49 – I didn’t know it was happening.
1:00:50 I had already showered.
1:00:51 – I know.
1:00:52 But it was great.
1:00:54 It’s funny ’cause I done the Wim Hof Method,
1:00:56 you know, 10 years ago.
1:00:58 And the Wim Hof Method is, you know, the ice man,
1:01:02 he trains you on how to endure kind of cold exposure.
1:01:05 I had so much energy and just felt amazing
1:01:07 after doing that.
1:01:08 By the end of the Wim Hof Method,
1:01:12 I was 15 minutes up to my neck in ice water in a bathtub.
1:01:16 So like I bought 10 bags of ice, I put it in the bathtub.
1:01:21 And I think in terms of like probably like the best comparable
1:01:23 I can give you would be like a couple cups of coffee.
1:01:26 Like it just like gives you that energy in the morning
1:01:28 and that clarity that is beautiful.
1:01:29 You feel amazing.
1:01:32 I know there’s not as much longevity data
1:01:34 on the science side to support the cold plunge,
1:01:37 but I will tell you just for me personally
1:01:40 and people that I know that do it, they love it.
1:01:42 And so, you know, I know Tony Robbins,
1:01:43 I’ve talked to him about it.
1:01:46 He’s done it. He talked about that on my podcast.
1:01:49 You know, Joe Rogan’s done it.
1:01:51 He continues to do it.
1:01:54 He, I just saw a post about his, you know,
1:01:55 obviously Tim’s done it.
1:01:57 A bunch of our friends have done this.
1:01:58 I’m really enjoying it.
1:02:00 It’s kind of like my thing that I’m getting into.
1:02:03 You told me last night, ’cause I was telling you,
1:02:05 I’m using my pool for this right now.
1:02:07 But the pool, you know, summer months,
1:02:09 it’s gonna be warm to where I’m not really
1:02:10 gonna get the benefits, right?
1:02:11 Like that I really want the really cold, cold.
1:02:12 – Yeah, you want that.
1:02:13 – Excitement, you want that.
1:02:14 – Exactly.
1:02:15 – Kicking the gut in the morning.
1:02:16 – Yeah, exactly.
1:02:18 So, I’m wondering, you know,
1:02:20 you said that you had done a little bit of research
1:02:22 or you know of a company or two that does,
1:02:23 you mentioned two companies last night
1:02:25 when we were chatting.
1:02:27 What have you heard on the cold plunge front?
1:02:28 What are people liking?
1:02:29 What are some of the brands that you think
1:02:30 are doing a good job?
1:02:32 – Yeah, there’s a, again, a wide spectrum here, right?
1:02:34 Like, cheapest, take a cold shower.
1:02:37 Like, clock in your shower at the coldest temperature.
1:02:38 – I mean, that’s what they have you do
1:02:40 with the Wim Hof Method when you start.
1:02:41 – Yeah.
1:02:43 – Like, hey, turn the shower on the coldest possible setting
1:02:46 for 30 seconds, and then that’s like day one.
1:02:47 – Yeah.
1:02:48 – So, it’s like, and I think that’s a good way
1:02:51 before you drop the cash on an actual big ass plunge
1:02:53 and spend a lot of money,
1:02:55 see if you can get through the first couple of weeks
1:02:56 of the Wim Hof Method and know if you like it.
1:02:59 – I will say there’s something that, I don’t know why,
1:03:02 but feels easier about just like jumping into the water
1:03:04 as opposed to like, I don’t know, walking in a cold shower.
1:03:07 It’s just, it’s like cheaper, but mentally,
1:03:07 I think it’s pretty hard.
1:03:09 – Yeah.
1:03:10 – And so, that’s one end.
1:03:12 You can buy, you know, freezers,
1:03:15 like chest freezers and like retrofit them.
1:03:18 The way most cold plunges work is there’s a chiller,
1:03:19 and it’s a thing you plug into the wall,
1:03:21 use electricity, cycles water through,
1:03:22 and keeps the water cold.
1:03:26 And so, you hook up a chiller to a bath,
1:03:28 either by buying a chiller and, you know,
1:03:30 connecting hoses and a Home Depot setup
1:03:32 to a freezer or other method.
1:03:34 – Yeah, just so people know that,
1:03:36 that chest freezer hack, you can find them online.
1:03:38 They’re those little mini freezers
1:03:40 that you can get to like store meat in your garage
1:03:41 or whatever, you know.
1:03:42 They’re like the sideways freezers,
1:03:44 not like the vertical freezers.
1:03:47 And I’ve seen people retrofit those,
1:03:50 ’cause in theory, they’re waterproof, they’re sealed.
1:03:51 I don’t know that they can,
1:03:54 I’ve seen people like do all kinds of like,
1:03:55 additional waterproofing to them,
1:03:57 and then turn them into these freezers
1:03:59 where they plug them into the wall,
1:04:00 they let the water get to temperature,
1:04:01 and then they climb it.
1:04:04 The important thing to note,
1:04:07 unplug the freezer before you get into it.
1:04:09 You do not wanna use a device like that,
1:04:11 like that’s plugged into the wall.
1:04:13 Oh, it’s on, you gotta do it.
1:04:14 ‘Cause like, they’re not meant to be.
1:04:15 – No, no, no, I just,
1:04:16 I’ve seen some people that just use it
1:04:19 as an insulated thing with an external chiller.
1:04:20 – Right, right, right.
1:04:21 – But that’s the way to do it.
1:04:22 – Using the freezer as the chiller.
1:04:23 – Yeah, oh, I’ve seen people do it as a freezer.
1:04:24 I’m like, you’re gonna get electrocuted
1:04:26 ’cause ultimately there’s gonna be a leak
1:04:28 and it’s gonna hit that freaking 110
1:04:30 and you’re gonna be fried, so not good.
1:04:32 – And then there’s a company called Ice Barrel,
1:04:34 which sells just, it’s literally like,
1:04:35 you know those blue drums?
1:04:36 It’s just like a drum.
1:04:38 But then you gotta, it’s B-Y-O-Ice.
1:04:39 – You need ice.
1:04:40 – Yeah.
1:04:42 – And so, I mean, you can use your bathtub and ice.
1:04:43 – Yeah.
1:04:44 – But you gotta buy an ice maker
1:04:46 or you gotta go, you know, drive to the store
1:04:47 and buy ice all the time.
1:04:50 And so, then there’s some really high-end ones,
1:04:52 but the company that’s probably the most well known
1:04:55 for this is called the Cold Plunge or Plunge.
1:04:56 I think they used to be the Cold Plunge,
1:04:58 now the brand is Plunge.
1:05:00 And they make a beautiful white tub,
1:05:02 kinda looks like a fancy bathtub,
1:05:05 and they have a chiller either external
1:05:06 or integrated into the unit.
1:05:08 You can keep it down to 39.
1:05:10 You can keep it at 55, whatever you want.
1:05:11 It has a filtration system, like a hot tub.
1:05:12 Like you put–
1:05:13 – Can you have one of these?
1:05:15 – I have a Cold Plunge from Plunge.
1:05:16 – Okay.
1:05:17 Do you have the integrated one or the external one?
1:05:18 – The external one.
1:05:21 The integrated one hadn’t been built when we did that.
1:05:23 And it’s great.
1:05:25 The water’s always at the right temperature.
1:05:26 You treat it like a hot tub,
1:05:27 like you put the little strip in,
1:05:28 you see what the chemical levels are,
1:05:30 you add it. – Is that a pain in the ass though?
1:05:31 – So here’s what’s funny.
1:05:33 We have a hot tub and we have a Cold Plunge.
1:05:35 And the hot tub, I feel like I’m always adding
1:05:36 chemicals to it.
1:05:38 And the Cold Plunge, I feel like I’m always testing it
1:05:39 with a strip.
1:05:42 And very rarely is it out of balance.
1:05:45 pH is good, alkalinity is good.
1:05:49 So I add like a tablespoon of sanitizer once a week
1:05:51 or twice a week or once every two weeks.
1:05:53 Just kind of depending on the level of,
1:05:55 I think it’s bromine is what they recommend.
1:05:56 It’s not that much.
1:05:58 Like they also have a, I forgot what it’s called,
1:06:00 but it keeps the water clear,
1:06:00 but the water’s already clear.
1:06:01 So I don’t even–
1:06:03 – Are you checking about the UV light stuff?
1:06:04 ‘Cause they–
1:06:04 – No, no, no.
1:06:06 I can’t remember what the name of it is,
1:06:07 but there’s a thing that makes water clear
1:06:09 and the thing that makes water clean.
1:06:10 – Oh, I didn’t check that, yeah.
1:06:12 – And so it’s really not that much.
1:06:15 Like hot tub maintenance to me feels 10 times more.
1:06:16 – And it has a cover for it.
1:06:17 You keep it outside.
1:06:20 – They even send like a thing to attach a phone
1:06:23 to hang over the edge, which we actually use in the sauna.
1:06:25 We suction cup it to the wall so we can look at the baby
1:06:27 monitor while we’re in the sauna.
1:06:29 And it’s great, it’s at the right temperature.
1:06:31 We’re using it more at night.
1:06:34 Sauna, hop in the Cold Plunge for five minutes,
1:06:36 hop back in the sauna.
1:06:37 – That contrast therapy is amazing.
1:06:38 – It’s great.
1:06:39 And we love it.
1:06:41 I don’t use it that much in the morning,
1:06:43 like you do to kickstart my day.
1:06:44 But at night, it’s great.
1:06:45 I feel like–
1:06:46 – Are you using it like five times a day?
1:06:47 Like, or a week?
1:06:48 Or what are you–
1:06:49 – Well, we probably three, four times a week.
1:06:50 – Okay.
1:06:52 – I probably should get to four
1:06:53 from all the data on the studies,
1:06:55 but we’re using it.
1:06:59 And man, you just sauna in Cold Plunge and go to bed.
1:06:59 You sleep so well.
1:07:00 – Yeah, it’s amazing.
1:07:01 – It’s amazing.
1:07:03 The impact on sleep is great.
1:07:05 And so, yeah, Cold Plunge.
1:07:06 And like I said earlier,
1:07:10 we gotta get you set up with deals for your listeners also.
1:07:12 But I think we got a deal for Cold Plunge.
1:07:14 Hopefully we got one for Dex-a-Fit.
1:07:16 I’m just gonna plug all the hacks.com/deals.
1:07:17 I’m not gonna plug all these URLs.
1:07:20 But if you go there, any company that I love,
1:07:22 I have tried to source a deal for.
1:07:22 – Sweet.
1:07:27 You mentioned, we’ve talked about using chat GBT
1:07:29 for all kinds of stuff in our life,
1:07:31 especially over the last, it feels like,
1:07:33 six months to a year.
1:07:37 You mentioned uploading your blood work to chat GBT.
1:07:38 – Yeah, I mean, it’s just so funny.
1:07:42 I got my blood work done for cholesterol three years ago.
1:07:45 And I went to my doctor, real doctor, like, has an MD.
1:07:47 And I was like, what do you think I should do?
1:07:50 And the doctor’s advice was like, you know,
1:07:52 eat healthy and exercise.
1:07:55 And I was like, okay, but it’s been this way for a long time.
1:07:56 And finally, there were other doctors
1:07:58 that were telling me other things.
1:08:01 And so I found that chat GBT for almost anything
1:08:04 is great as a sounding board and it doesn’t cost anything.
1:08:07 So I’m like, I took a screenshot of my biomarkers,
1:08:09 took the screenshot, uploaded to chat GBT.
1:08:10 – As a PDF.
1:08:11 – As an image.
1:08:12 – Image, okay.
1:08:13 – And then I was just like, what can you tell me
1:08:14 about my biomarker?
1:08:15 – Did you say act like you’re Peter Atia and give me?
1:08:17 – That would have been even better, I was like, thank you.
1:08:20 Go read Peter Atia’s website and now give me advice.
1:08:21 I probably could have done that.
1:08:23 And I was just like, tell me what you see.
1:08:26 And then I was like, tell me if looking at it
1:08:28 comprehensively instead of individually,
1:08:29 are there any things you notice
1:08:32 because multiple things are out of whack?
1:08:35 What other diagnostics could I take
1:08:38 if I wanted to drill into this thing?
1:08:40 I’m not using it to replace the doctor,
1:08:42 but I’m using it to come up with a series of ideas
1:08:44 and questions and things that I can come to the doctor
1:08:47 and be like, hey, these three things are high.
1:08:50 These are three diagnostics that might help.
1:08:51 Which one would you prioritize?
1:08:55 And the question I loved asking my doctor was,
1:08:57 ’cause I think doctors so often are focused
1:08:58 on what’s gonna be covered by insurance.
1:09:00 And a lot of these things aren’t, right?
1:09:01 You want a whole body MRI, not covered.
1:09:04 You wanna do a grail test for, which is a blood test
1:09:06 for different types of cancer, not covered by insurance.
1:09:08 So I went to the doctor and I was like,
1:09:12 if I’m gonna spend $1,000 this year on my health
1:09:14 that’s not covered by insurance,
1:09:15 where can I have the most impact
1:09:18 either treating or testing something?
1:09:22 Because so often the advice they’re trained to give
1:09:26 is the advice on what they know is gonna be covered
1:09:27 because the doctor doesn’t wanna be like,
1:09:30 oh, here’s what you should do, this thing not covered.
1:09:32 Now also, by the way, many of these things,
1:09:35 biomarker tests are all FSA and HSA eligible.
1:09:38 So if you work in a company that lets you contribute
1:09:41 to an FSA, you can throw money in there, tax deductible.
1:09:42 If you have a high deductible health plan
1:09:45 that’s HSA eligible, you can put money there, use it there.
1:09:47 So there are ways to get a lot of these costs down
1:09:49 from a tax standpoint.
1:09:54 And so he recommended the calcium test.
1:09:57 He was like, that seems like if there’s a dollar for dollar
1:09:59 given your history, spending $500 here
1:10:02 would be probably the most valuable thing you can do.
1:10:03 But I did, and sure enough,
1:10:06 it was an incredibly great suggestion.
1:10:09 And so I like that question.
1:10:09 – Yeah.
1:10:13 – I also think, by the way, this is just a side note,
1:10:15 but when it comes to medical bills,
1:10:17 I don’t know if everyone knows they’re negotiable.
1:10:20 Like, if you go to the doctor and it’s a certain price,
1:10:22 you can say, hey, I’m paying out of cash.
1:10:23 Is there a better price?
1:10:26 If you get a bill from a hospital, you can negotiate it.
1:10:28 I did an episode with this guy, Marshall Allen,
1:10:29 who is a journalist.
1:10:32 He wrote this book called Never Pay the First Bill.
1:10:34 And I can link to it, we won’t go through it,
1:10:34 but basically it’s like,
1:10:36 you can almost negotiate all these medical bills.
1:10:38 And people have saved tens of thousands of dollars
1:10:40 negotiating their medical bills.
1:10:41 – What do you say?
1:10:43 Do you just say like, hey, I can’t afford this?
1:10:45 – He has scripts for this.
1:10:47 Both if you have a bill that has happened
1:10:48 and you’ve already had service,
1:10:51 there are some rules in many states that like,
1:10:55 facilities can’t charge more than what the average price is.
1:10:56 It doesn’t mean they can’t.
1:10:57 It just means that when you fight them,
1:10:58 they’re gonna have to lower.
1:11:02 So I went to, I thought I had something go wrong.
1:11:03 I didn’t know what it was.
1:11:04 It turns out it was shingles, but I didn’t know.
1:11:05 – Oh, I remember that.
1:11:07 – And I drove down to-
1:11:08 – You were in so much pain.
1:11:08 – I was in so much pain.
1:11:11 It felt like battery acid was leaking in my body.
1:11:13 So I drove to the emergency room
1:11:15 and the bill was like $11,000
1:11:16 to do a couple of diagnostics,
1:11:18 see a doctor and get some ibuprofen.
1:11:21 And fortunately, my insurance covered that.
1:11:23 But if my insurance didn’t cover that,
1:11:26 I’m fairly certain I could have negotiated that price.
1:11:28 In fact, one of the things that showed up,
1:11:31 and this is what’s crazy about our medical system,
1:11:34 I made sure that I went to an ER that was in network, right?
1:11:36 ‘Cause I have an EPO, only covers in network.
1:11:39 And I go to the ER and the ER was in network,
1:11:42 but the doctor that worked at the ER was out of network
1:11:43 and they tried to charge me for it.
1:11:46 And I fought that and I didn’t pay for it.
1:11:49 And so I would say if you have a medical bill,
1:11:50 go negotiate it.
1:11:52 If you have a really high deductible on your health plan
1:11:54 and you’re paying out of pocket,
1:11:57 most facilities have a cash rate that’s better
1:11:58 than the insurance rate
1:11:59 ’cause they have to go through a lot of hassle
1:12:00 to accept insurance.
1:12:02 So ask for that cash rate.
1:12:04 – Speaking of spending $1,000
1:12:06 and getting the most bang for the buck,
1:12:09 health-wise, the thing that I have been doing
1:12:12 that caught my brain aneurysm
1:12:14 was a company called Prinovo.
1:12:17 And so Prinovo does full-body MRIs.
1:12:18 You don’t need a prescription for it.
1:12:19 You don’t need to talk to a doctor.
1:12:21 You can go and sign up directly on the website.
1:12:23 They’ve got a handful locations here
1:12:24 in the United States now.
1:12:26 They’re opening up new offices all the time.
1:12:27 – It’s like a couple thousand dollars.
1:12:30 – Yeah, it’s basically $9.99 just to get the torso done.
1:12:34 Head and torso is $17.99 and then whole body is $24.99.
1:12:38 But it’s one of those things where they can catch
1:12:40 as early as stage one solid tumors.
1:12:42 Like they can get stuff really early.
1:12:45 And I was chatting with one of the doctors over there,
1:12:47 one of the radiologists and they said like,
1:12:50 he goes, you wouldn’t believe the number
1:12:53 of unopened bottles of wine I have sitting on my shelf
1:12:55 from people that send him thank you saying,
1:12:57 hey, you caught this at stage one.
1:13:00 And because of that, it was curable.
1:13:02 – We have a mutual friend who we worked with
1:13:04 that would not be alive today.
1:13:06 Had he not caught a cancerous tumor.
1:13:07 – Brain tumor, yeah.
1:13:10 – From a pernevo scan though like.
1:13:11 – I didn’t know it was cancerous.
1:13:13 – Oh, maybe it wasn’t, it was a brain tumor.
1:13:15 I don’t remember, maybe it wasn’t cancerous,
1:13:18 but caught a brain tumor that would have killed him.
1:13:20 Had he not caught it when he did.
1:13:23 – Yeah, it was insane what it shows.
1:13:25 Now there can be some false positives there as well.
1:13:29 – And it can send, yeah, there’s a lot of controversy
1:13:31 over this because you might find something
1:13:33 that left untreated would be fine.
1:13:36 But like force it, you can’t stop thinking about,
1:13:37 you don’t have a friend who has a tumor
1:13:40 that’s actually not something that is worth operating on.
1:13:43 But if you found out you had a tumor in your brain,
1:13:44 like it could drive you nuts.
1:13:46 – I mean, this is what happened with me.
1:13:48 I had the brain aneurysm and they’re like,
1:13:50 it’s not big enough to operate on.
1:13:52 And plus if you operate on an aneurysm,
1:13:54 it is, you know, it’s a scary procedure.
1:13:56 And there’s things they can do.
1:13:58 It’s almost like, it’s not a stint,
1:14:00 but it’s kind of like a stint where you can put these things
1:14:02 in there that prevent them from like, you know,
1:14:05 blowing up, which was what you don’t want.
1:14:07 And now you’re sitting there being like, you know,
1:14:09 either worrying about it or thinking about it.
1:14:10 And so, you know, you go back and get scans.
1:14:13 And if it doesn’t grow, you’re all good.
1:14:15 If it grows and you’re like, oh, shit,
1:14:16 now I have a taking time bomb, you know?
1:14:18 So there is some downsides to that.
1:14:20 But that said, you know, I’m glad I know
1:14:22 because now when it hits, I think it’s around
1:14:26 five to seven centimeters when it gets to that size,
1:14:28 then they can go and operate on it and take care of it
1:14:30 versus you just waiting for it to blow up
1:14:33 and not ever having known about it, right?
1:14:35 I don’t know if this is still possible,
1:14:39 but I reached out to Pranuvva when I wanted to do a scan
1:14:41 and I was like, is there a way to get a better price?
1:14:42 I mean, I do this for everything, right?
1:14:45 First of all, there’s this awesome thing I learned.
1:14:47 I interviewed this doctor, his name’s Aziz Ghazi Pura,
1:14:49 and he talks about rejection therapy
1:14:51 and like, as a way to build confidence.
1:14:52 And a great rejection therapy tactic
1:14:54 is just always ask for a discount
1:14:56 because you never know what happens.
1:14:58 And, you know, I don’t ask it in an aggressive way.
1:15:00 I’m just like, is there a way to get a better deal?
1:15:03 Pranuvva owns these machines to do MRIs.
1:15:06 And the only cost to run them is the electricity
1:15:09 and the administrator, which is not $2,500.
1:15:11 But, you know, it’s kind of a market price.
1:15:13 – Right.
1:15:14 – They came back to me and they were like,
1:15:18 if you are flexible enough to book it within 12 hours,
1:15:20 then there’s a–
1:15:21 – So they get a cancellation.
1:15:23 They’re paying for a tech to be there anyway.
1:15:24 – So I just sat on standby.
1:15:26 It’s about 20 minutes from my house.
1:15:28 And they were like, hey, we have some spots tomorrow
1:15:29 if you want to go.
1:15:31 And I got it for, I think, about half price.
1:15:32 – It’s amazing. – Which is a great deal
1:15:35 for them, right, like, otherwise it would go empty.
1:15:37 There are a lot of people who don’t have flexibility
1:15:38 in their day to just drop everything
1:15:41 on a few hours notice and go to a scan.
1:15:43 So I’m not saying that’s possible.
1:15:45 I’m talking to them right now about setting up a deal
1:15:47 for all the hacks members and listeners
1:15:49 that maybe by the time this airs, I’ll put on the page.
1:15:53 But I would say if you have a lot of flexibility,
1:15:54 it could be worth asking them
1:15:55 if they still do something like that.
1:15:58 They might have stopped doing it, but it’s worth an ask.
1:16:00 – Yeah, I should talk to, I met the founder.
1:16:01 He’s a super nice guy.
1:16:04 This was maybe two years ago.
1:16:06 He came in to say hi when I was getting my first scan
1:16:07 maybe three years ago.
1:16:09 And yeah, he was just expanding
1:16:11 and they’re doing great, great work.
1:16:15 I mean, the cool thing about this is like,
1:16:16 you may be listening to this episode and say like,
1:16:18 well, that’s nice guys.
1:16:21 You got 2,500 bucks to blow or whatever, even half that.
1:16:22 I don’t have that.
1:16:23 And that’s not the point.
1:16:26 The point is that if they can get to scale here,
1:16:28 and especially with AI coming to do
1:16:30 not a lot of the analysis as well,
1:16:32 it’s like there is a world where these get down to $500
1:16:36 or $700 and like, you know, a price point where hopefully
1:16:39 it can be something that’s just part of your annual physical
1:16:41 and it’s not that big a deal and insurance covers it, you know?
1:16:44 – Yeah, but we live in this reactive healthcare,
1:16:45 you know, health insurance system,
1:16:47 which is a little frustrating because it’s like,
1:16:49 you know, if we could prevent a lot of these things,
1:16:52 then the cost of care would go way down in the future.
1:16:53 I, we’re not gonna have an episode
1:16:55 about changing health insurance.
1:16:58 I did a whole episode on picking a plan
1:17:01 and what’s crazy about policies is actually,
1:17:04 they know that people are so scared to take care of themselves
1:17:05 that I was looking at two plans.
1:17:07 The best plan for me, cheapest plan,
1:17:10 if I wanted to spend all the money in that you’d think,
1:17:12 if I wanted to spend a lot on health care
1:17:13 would be the platinum plan.
1:17:15 The cheapest plan was the bronze plan.
1:17:18 The cheapest plan was actually like all in,
1:17:20 even if I met all the deductibles cheaper,
1:17:22 because they know that people on that plan
1:17:23 aren’t actually gonna pay out of pocket
1:17:24 to get those services.
1:17:26 So if you know that going to see a doctor
1:17:27 is gonna cost you $500,
1:17:28 most people aren’t gonna do it.
1:17:30 The challenge is I might not do it.
1:17:33 Like I like being able to see a doctor for $35
1:17:34 because I’ll do it.
1:17:36 If I knew I had to pay $500 to see a doctor,
1:17:37 I don’t know if I would.
1:17:40 And so I literally pay a premium
1:17:43 to fight a psychological problem that I have.
1:17:45 But one day, hopefully they’ll start covering
1:17:47 these preventative things
1:17:49 and the preventative things will get cheaper.
1:17:52 – I wanna chat a bit about a couple other life hacks
1:17:53 before we let you go.
1:17:55 One of the things that,
1:17:56 it may not be applicable to everyone,
1:17:59 but we can touch on it quickly is the,
1:18:03 you’re going through a property tax hack right now.
1:18:04 Can you tell people about that,
1:18:07 especially right now with interest rates being so high,
1:18:10 it’s a shitty time to obviously buy a house
1:18:12 and people are spending a lot of money
1:18:15 or they’re locked into an existing house.
1:18:17 And property taxes are this constant,
1:18:21 like just like suck of cash and capital every year.
1:18:24 What did you discover on this front
1:18:25 that I thought was really interesting?
1:18:28 – Yeah, so, I love figuring out ways to save money.
1:18:29 It’s great.
1:18:31 Downside of high interest rates,
1:18:34 if you get a house right now, your mortgage is expensive.
1:18:36 Because that mortgage is expensive,
1:18:39 we both looked to buy the same house we own now
1:18:42 at a higher interest rate could cost,
1:18:43 depending on how low the interest rate,
1:18:45 when you got it, could be almost double.
1:18:49 So like, if you were thinking I wanna buy a $800,000 house,
1:18:51 now the interest rates might be two, three, four times
1:18:52 what they were when you looked,
1:18:56 maybe you can only afford a $450,000 house.
1:18:59 That reduces demand, brings down prices,
1:19:01 which I guess is good if you can afford it.
1:19:04 But when interest rates change,
1:19:05 the nice thing about a mortgage is you can refinance.
1:19:07 So I would say it’s not,
1:19:11 it might in the long run be a better time to buy now.
1:19:13 I also don’t think we should expect interest rates
1:19:15 to go to 2.5% for mortgages for a really long time.
1:19:17 So we’re gonna, eventually you’ll have to accept
1:19:21 a new normal, but your property tax
1:19:23 in certain states is determined in different ways.
1:19:26 In California, the amount you pay for your house.
1:19:30 In some states, it’s based on what an assessor thinks.
1:19:31 And in some states, it changes every year.
1:19:34 And in some states, it’s locked in and just adjusts
1:19:37 for kind of some growth rate or inflation rate.
1:19:39 You could appeal that.
1:19:40 And most people don’t know this.
1:19:43 So right now, I was looking at houses
1:19:45 selling on our neighborhood and I was like,
1:19:47 if you look at the price per square foot of houses
1:19:49 that are like the house we bought three years ago,
1:19:50 it’s lower.
1:19:53 And if you convert the average price per square foot
1:19:54 of houses built around the same year,
1:19:57 our house was built about the same size,
1:19:59 you adjust for square footage,
1:20:03 our house should probably be like 25% less today.
1:20:07 Now, there are probably a few comps that I could pick
1:20:09 that wouldn’t be as great examples
1:20:11 of a drop in property value.
1:20:12 So…
1:20:13 – You left those out.
1:20:14 – Yeah, I left those out.
1:20:17 I picked, well, I tried to pick three fair,
1:20:22 but good examples and I think the assessed value
1:20:24 of my home should be about 20% less than today.
1:20:25 – What does that save you like net net?
1:20:26 Like what?
1:20:28 – Well, if you just take a house,
1:20:30 let’s say a house cost is worth a million dollars
1:20:32 on the property tax registrar.
1:20:33 Property tax, I don’t know.
1:20:35 It’s very dependent on where you live,
1:20:37 but let’s say like 1.2%,
1:20:39 you’ll pay 12 grand in property tax.
1:20:42 You reduce that by 25%.
1:20:44 You’re gonna save somewhere on the order
1:20:46 of $3,000 a year.
1:20:47 That’s not nothing.
1:20:48 – It’s not nothing.
1:20:49 – You have a $5 million house.
1:20:51 It’s even, you know, you’re gonna save $15,000 a year.
1:20:52 – Yeah.
1:20:55 – So, and I think it scales with the price of your house,
1:20:57 which probably scales with the impact
1:20:59 of $1,000 on your life.
1:21:02 So, I was looking into this and it all started
1:21:04 ’cause I got this letter from a company called Protax,
1:21:05 which I’d never even heard of.
1:21:06 It was like, hey, we wanna file this thing
1:21:08 to say your house is worth less.
1:21:09 And I was like, who are you?
1:21:10 How does this work?
1:21:11 And they were like, well, we’re gonna file this.
1:21:13 We’re gonna take 35% of what we save you.
1:21:15 And I was like, okay, but you gave me the form I can send.
1:21:16 And can I just do this myself?
1:21:18 Like, why do I need you to do it?
1:21:21 It turns out you file a form and then in California,
1:21:24 they schedule a hearing and between the hearing date,
1:21:28 you can negotiate with the assessment appeals person,
1:21:30 the assessor, and if you can come to an agreement,
1:21:32 great, if not, you go to a hearing.
1:21:33 I’m hoping I can come to an agreement
1:21:34 ’cause I don’t really wanna go to a hearing
1:21:35 and prepare all this.
1:21:36 But these companies will go to–
1:21:38 – I wanna see you go to an hearing.
1:21:40 – I kinda, like, I kind of want to–
1:21:42 – ‘Cause they give you the recordings of those too,
1:21:43 right?
1:21:43 – They might even be live streamed.
1:21:46 You know, like it’s like a local cease ban is like,
1:21:48 here’s Chris at his hearing.
1:21:49 But I was searching around
1:21:51 and I found this company called Onwell.
1:21:53 And they’re basically like a better modern version
1:21:56 of ProTax, and you type in your address on their website,
1:21:59 onwell.com, and you just search and they’ll say,
1:22:00 here’s what we think your house is worth,
1:22:01 what did you pay for it?
1:22:03 They can actually see in the property tax register,
1:22:04 what it costs, and they’ll be like,
1:22:06 we think we can save you money.
1:22:07 We’ll just do it all for you,
1:22:10 and we’ll take 25% of what we save you this year.
1:22:12 – And so they don’t get in perpetuity.
1:22:13 – They don’t get in perpetuity.
1:22:16 So if they do that, let’s just say it does go to court,
1:22:17 are they sending someone?
1:22:18 – They’re gonna go to the hearing.
1:22:19 – You don’t have to go?
1:22:20 – No.
1:22:20 – Oh, that’s amazing.
1:22:22 – And so if they were gonna save you $3,000,
1:22:24 they would take $750.
1:22:26 In California, where your property tax kind of,
1:22:29 because of Prop 13, just adjust not every year
1:22:31 at a market rate, but at inflation,
1:22:32 you’re gonna lock that in for a long time.
1:22:35 In Texas, they adjust it every single year.
1:22:36 So you might have to go through this process
1:22:39 every single year, and it could be frustrating.
1:22:40 – Yeah, but it’s gonna be a fixed amount
1:22:41 in Texas upgrade, right?
1:22:42 Like they’re not gonna like readjust it back
1:22:45 at its old amount, or do they just do a percentage?
1:22:46 – Texas is really interesting,
1:22:48 ’cause a lot of the comps aren’t public,
1:22:50 so you actually, as the owner, might have more,
1:22:52 and you have an information advantage,
1:22:54 whereas in California, everyone has the information,
1:22:56 and they have to prove that your information is wrong,
1:22:58 and they don’t have access to necessarily
1:22:58 all the information.
1:23:01 So there’s a world where Texas has some advantages,
1:23:03 the downside being you have to do this every year.
1:23:05 But there are a lot of states where you can fight this.
1:23:06 I reached out to the founder, and I was like,
1:23:08 hey, one, tell me about this industry,
1:23:09 ’cause I’m curious.
1:23:12 Two, like, help me understand this process.
1:23:16 And three, let’s get a deal for everyone that’s a listener.
1:23:18 And so, he was like, why don’t we do this?
1:23:21 Why don’t you go through this process so you can feel it?
1:23:22 And–
1:23:23 – You mean go through it on your own.
1:23:23 – On your own.
1:23:25 Do the comps, fill out the paperwork,
1:23:28 negotiate with the assessor, go to the hearing,
1:23:29 but we’ll be a resource.
1:23:31 If you have some questions, I’m happy to help you.
1:23:32 I go through this process,
1:23:34 I’m like, everyone should just hire a company to do this.
1:23:36 Like, do you really, it’s fun,
1:23:38 but it’s also fun to just look at the process
1:23:39 they went through.
1:23:40 – Yeah.
1:23:41 – The models, build the regression analysis.
1:23:42 – It’s just how much is your time worth, right?
1:23:43 – Yes.
1:23:44 – Because you’re gonna be spending,
1:23:46 you get them 25% and it’s like–
1:23:47 – For one year.
1:23:48 – For one year.
1:23:48 – You get it forever.
1:23:49 – Right.
1:23:51 – So, I’m glad because I like to be able to talk
1:23:53 about how this stuff works, that I went through it.
1:23:55 But keep in mind, that’s my job.
1:23:56 Like, my job is to create content
1:23:58 about optimizing your life.
1:24:00 So, in a way, going through the process was work.
1:24:02 For almost every person listening,
1:24:03 going through that process will not be their job.
1:24:04 – Yeah.
1:24:07 – And so, I would highly recommend,
1:24:08 I haven’t used the service,
1:24:10 but I would highly recommend looking at outsourcing this
1:24:12 instead of doing it yourself.
1:24:14 And so, we’ll see, we’re not gonna get
1:24:16 through all the agenda topics we have today.
1:24:17 If I come back, I’ll tell you how it goes
1:24:20 after I get through these negotiations.
1:24:22 But I’ve just found that there are a handful
1:24:25 of services out there where trying to do it yourself
1:24:26 isn’t worth the time.
1:24:27 – Yeah.
1:24:28 – And there are these companies
1:24:29 that will just do this thing.
1:24:31 And when they’re companies, it’ll do it.
1:24:34 As a frugal person, it’s hard for me to pay someone
1:24:36 to do a thing I can do.
1:24:38 But I think as I’ve learned what I call the skill
1:24:42 of spending, it’s like, don’t not optimize.
1:24:43 Optimize on something bigger.
1:24:46 So, instead of optimizing on saving 25%
1:24:48 of one year’s property tax savings,
1:24:51 why don’t I optimize on building my business 20%
1:24:52 revenue growth? – Right.
1:24:54 – Why don’t I optimize on, you know,
1:24:55 having a better family life?
1:24:58 Like there are millions in my health, like this year.
1:25:00 So, I’ve tried to stop optimizing
1:25:03 for the best delivery grocery site
1:25:06 for each individual shopping order that I have.
1:25:09 Who has the cheaper oatmeal or blueberries or something
1:25:11 and start optimizing on bigger, better,
1:25:13 more impactful things on my life.
1:25:14 And this is one.
1:25:15 – That’s awesome.
1:25:18 Anything else you’d like to cover while we got you here?
1:25:21 – I mean, one other example where I went through
1:25:23 this completely long and ridiculous process.
1:25:25 I’m gonna pull two things that we talked about together.
1:25:26 One is AI.
1:25:29 And in what I think it might,
1:25:30 the impact it might have on us,
1:25:32 and maybe especially our parents,
1:25:35 when it comes to privacy and cybersecurity and fraud
1:25:38 and all that, and a manual process.
1:25:39 So, anytime you go online,
1:25:41 we’ve probably put our address on the internet
1:25:43 thousands of times.
1:25:44 And there are companies like Amazon,
1:25:46 who I’m pretty sure are gonna go sell my address.
1:25:47 And then there are a lot of companies
1:25:50 that I’m 100% sure have sold my address.
1:25:52 And there’s all these data broker websites
1:25:52 that put it out there.
1:25:55 And so, it’s pretty crazy if you search your name
1:25:58 or your parents’ name and then put your street address.
1:26:00 Like if you live 123 Main Street,
1:26:04 search last name, quote, 123 Main, and quote,
1:26:06 you’re like, wow, my address is out there.
1:26:07 You can go search for your phone number.
1:26:09 Oh, my phone number’s out there.
1:26:10 And then think, okay,
1:26:12 there’s all these data breaches from Equifax.
1:26:14 Somebody probably get my social security number.
1:26:17 Like, I think it’s almost impossible
1:26:19 to prevent your information from being found.
1:26:21 But it’s very possible to make yourselves
1:26:22 not an easy target.
1:26:23 I feel pretty good.
1:26:25 You know, when I get the phishing emails,
1:26:27 when I get the texts that are like,
1:26:29 oh, can you, someone’s sending a wire,
1:26:30 can you call to us to approve?
1:26:31 I’m pretty good about that.
1:26:33 I’m not sure that my parents,
1:26:34 especially as they age,
1:26:36 especially as AI could probably voice generate,
1:26:38 especially with a podcast,
1:26:40 probably listen to my episodes, voice generate my voice,
1:26:42 call them in my voice and ask them this stuff.
1:26:45 So I’ve really started to think what are all the ways
1:26:47 that people could get more aggressive
1:26:50 about protecting their and their family’s information?
1:26:52 So one of them is these data brokers.
1:26:54 And so, I was asking around,
1:26:55 who’s the best company to use
1:26:58 to get your information removed online?
1:27:00 And there are a lot of companies that do this.
1:27:02 I went with Delete Me.
1:27:05 They became a partner of the show after I used them.
1:27:06 They actually have a list.
1:27:07 Here’s how to do it.
1:27:08 They give you a DIY opt-out guide.
1:27:10 You want to do this yourself, you can.
1:27:11 So I started going through this process myself
1:27:13 and there’s like 100 data brokers.
1:27:15 And you go to the website, you find your listing,
1:27:17 you fill it out, you ask them to remove it,
1:27:18 you follow up if they don’t.
1:27:21 And I’m like 20 hours into this process,
1:27:22 maybe 10 hours in,
1:27:24 and I haven’t even made it through the list.
1:27:25 And I’m like, this is insane.
1:27:28 They charge a couple hundred bucks a year,
1:27:30 even less as you start adding your family.
1:27:31 This is crazy.
1:27:32 I signed up.
1:27:33 They got it all removed.
1:27:34 I reached out to them.
1:27:35 I was like, can we work together?
1:27:36 Like this product’s awesome.
1:27:37 – And then it’s called Delete Me?
1:27:39 – Delete Me. – Okay.
1:27:41 – We’ve got a deal on that same deals page
1:27:42 on the All the Hacks site.
1:27:44 And it’s been great.
1:27:46 Like I signed up for Christmas.
1:27:48 I was like, I got all four of our parents
1:27:49 are now on Delete Me.
1:27:50 All their information’s removed.
1:27:51 – Yeah.
1:27:54 – I just could imagine a world where one of my parents
1:27:55 or Amy’s parents gets a phone call that’s like,
1:27:59 hey, your daughter X is in the hospital.
1:28:01 She was injured.
1:28:02 She’s not coherent,
1:28:04 but we can’t run her insurance to be able to operate
1:28:07 until you can give us her driver’s license number
1:28:08 or her social security number.
1:28:10 And it’s like, of course they’re gonna fall for that.
1:28:12 But what if I could just make sure
1:28:13 that that information’s not there?
1:28:15 Your siblings, your address, your phone number,
1:28:17 your email, all that stuff, remove it.
1:28:20 And then I went through, what else did I do?
1:28:21 You know, we talked about homes.
1:28:24 When you go to buy homes, the MLS websites,
1:28:27 like Zillow and Redfin, they’ll have pictures of your homes.
1:28:29 And even if you’ve sold your home
1:28:30 or bought your home years ago,
1:28:31 a lot of them are still up there.
1:28:34 For some reason, realtor.com seems to keep the pictures up
1:28:35 the longest, some sites.
1:28:36 – Can you request to have those removed?
1:28:38 – So you can request to have them removed.
1:28:39 And in fact, I recommend everyone,
1:28:41 when you’re buying a house, put a contingency
1:28:43 just so you don’t have to fight about it later,
1:28:46 that everyone removes everything.
1:28:48 So like the website that your realtor,
1:28:50 whoever sold the house to you had,
1:28:53 they probably put up 123mainestreet.com
1:28:56 and there’s a website with the floor plans of your house,
1:28:59 with all the pictures inside your house,
1:29:01 with all of this information about the house.
1:29:03 Do I feel like I’m such a target
1:29:05 that someone’s sitting in their basement,
1:29:07 mapping out the floor plan inside my house
1:29:09 and planning which windows my kids,
1:29:13 no, I’m not building bunkers and being that paranoid?
1:29:14 But it just seems like,
1:29:15 why not remove all the pictures
1:29:17 of the inside of your house off the internet?
1:29:18 – Right, right, right.
1:29:19 – It doesn’t seem like there’s upside.
1:29:22 – So do you have to go directly to a Redfin or a realtor?
1:29:23 – Is there a place on the website?
1:29:24 – So I went to the realtor’s and said,
1:29:25 can you pull it from the MLS?
1:29:28 And that took care about 90% of it.
1:29:30 The last 10% I had to reach out to a couple of those.
1:29:32 But DeleteMe has these customer requests.
1:29:34 So if you find information of yours somewhere,
1:29:35 they’ll just do these.
1:29:36 So I went to DeleteMe, I was like,
1:29:39 can you just go rent.com or apartments.com?
1:29:42 Just have this, like I, it wasn’t getting removed.
1:29:43 I was like, can you just go get this removed?
1:29:44 – Do they do it?
1:29:46 – Yeah, yeah, and they’ll go do these customer requests
1:29:47 and submit them on your behalf.
1:29:49 Like when you sign up for any of these services,
1:29:51 you’re effectively giving them like a limited power
1:29:53 of attorney to act on your behalf
1:29:54 to go get this stuff removed.
1:29:56 And so that was one.
1:29:57 – The other thing I was gonna tell you,
1:29:58 you may not know about this,
1:30:01 but when you pay for Google One, do you know Google One?
1:30:03 It’s like where you pay for their extra hard drive space
1:30:04 and all that.
1:30:06 There is an option in the security settings
1:30:08 for dark web monitoring.
1:30:09 And you can put in your phone number,
1:30:11 your address and all of that.
1:30:13 And they will go out, they hash it
1:30:14 so they don’t actually keep it,
1:30:17 but then they compare it to all the other hashed stuff
1:30:18 in the database.
1:30:20 And they’ve shown me exactly which sites
1:30:22 were compromised and when they had my phone number,
1:30:24 my address and so on.
1:30:26 So you can see if anything is out there.
1:30:27 – Yeah.
1:30:29 – And you can see exactly what was compromised
1:30:30 to get your data out there.
1:30:32 So even though it’s deleted from some of these sites,
1:30:34 there’s still dark web databases out there
1:30:36 that have your information on them.
1:30:41 – You’re not, I mean, I know people who have a PO box
1:30:43 and they don’t send any mail to their house.
1:30:44 They send it all to a PO box
1:30:46 ’cause they just don’t want their address out there.
1:30:47 But I’m like, you know, that’s kind of a hassle.
1:30:49 You can send the Amazon packages.
1:30:51 They’re people who have, you know,
1:30:52 we probably know some of them
1:30:53 that buy another house in their neighborhood
1:30:55 to have their DoorDash delivered to
1:30:56 so that no one finds their address.
1:30:58 Or they just create their DoorDash account
1:30:59 with a different name.
1:31:02 There’s a degree to how much you want to inconvenience
1:31:03 your life for privacy and security.
1:31:06 But I think personally, there’s a degree to which
1:31:08 it’s not that hard.
1:31:10 You can remove a lot of search results on Google.
1:31:12 If you find a search result that’s revealing information
1:31:14 you don’t want, you can ask Google to unlist it
1:31:16 if it’s your personal information.
1:31:18 Google has like advanced security protection
1:31:20 or whatever that thing is where you can add more security.
1:31:21 – I’ve done that, yeah.
1:31:23 – I’ve talked to all the banks and services I use
1:31:25 and I’ve been like, can I change the way?
1:31:27 Like, can you upgrade my security?
1:31:29 Can you, can I replace my mother’s maiden name
1:31:31 with an arbitrary password so that,
1:31:32 because my mother’s maiden name
1:31:33 is probably pretty easily finding?
1:31:34 – Yeah, yeah.
1:31:34 – Like you could take these steps
1:31:37 to just prevent yourself from bringing it to life.
1:31:40 You can get a second SIM card for $5 a month
1:31:42 and have that be your two-factor code
1:31:43 instead of your primary code.
1:31:44 – That’s what I do, yeah.
1:31:46 – So I just think you could blur your house on Google Maps.
1:31:49 Like, you could request it, although you can’t undo it.
1:31:52 So, you know, that’s an option.
1:31:53 There’s a lot of stuff you could do.
1:31:55 The one that keeps getting missed,
1:31:56 and I’m not gonna out who this was,
1:31:58 but I was walking down the street in our neighborhood
1:32:00 and there was some security cars in front of a house.
1:32:01 And I was like, oh.
1:32:01 – Security cars are being like.
1:32:04 – Like a private security where there’s two people,
1:32:06 24/7 in the car, looking at this house.
1:32:07 And it’s a bit unusual,
1:32:10 like our neighborhood is not one where you would expect that.
1:32:12 – But you’re in Silicon Valley, so you never know.
1:32:14 – Yeah, but you know, I was like, who is this person?
1:32:16 And I was like, I wanna know.
1:32:18 And obviously, if they’re gonna spend money
1:32:20 to hire private security, they’re gonna do all the stuff.
1:32:22 They did the data broker stuff, they hired these things.
1:32:24 But the one place that a lot of people don’t look,
1:32:26 which has a dual benefit,
1:32:29 like you can both protect yourself and make money,
1:32:31 is the state unclaimed money database.
1:32:34 And what happens is, you know, anytime there’s money owed
1:32:36 to you, after a certain period of time,
1:32:38 that money gets passed over to the state to handle.
1:32:40 So, you know, for example,
1:32:43 once I had a Delta $50 gift card that we just didn’t use
1:32:44 in a long enough period of time
1:32:46 that they transferred over the state.
1:32:49 Well, Delta transferred over my name and address
1:32:51 to the state so that I could go look in this database.
1:32:55 So, anyone who knew my name and the city I lived in
1:32:58 didn’t even need my address, who’d just search.
1:33:00 Or anyone could search by address.
1:33:02 So, you could go search the address,
1:33:04 which I did, of this house in my neighborhood.
1:33:06 And there were five names.
1:33:09 And so, five people had lived at that address
1:33:10 who had unclaimed money.
1:33:11 I mean, this is great.
1:33:13 How many people haven’t gone through this process?
1:33:15 And it was like a $20 thing.
1:33:17 So, I totally get it.
1:33:18 I looked up the five names.
1:33:20 Four of them had very few results on the internet,
1:33:22 and then one of them was like a CEO of a tech company.
1:33:25 I was like, “Hmm, I wonder which one this person is.”
1:33:28 And I reached out through a mutual friend to this person
1:33:29 and was like, “Hey, just so you know,
1:33:32 “you’ve got a security hole, you should clear it up.”
1:33:33 And a lot of times people look at this and they’re like,
1:33:36 “Well, I’m owed $5 from PG&E for like a house
1:33:38 “I haven’t lived in in 10 years.”
1:33:39 They’d got forwarded to my new address.
1:33:41 Is it really worth the hassle of filling out this form
1:33:43 and then sometimes get it notarized
1:33:44 to get my $5 back?
1:33:45 No.
1:33:47 So if you claim it, does it get removed from the database?
1:33:48 Yeah, it gets removed from the database.
1:33:49 Oh, then you gotta do it.
1:33:50 But sometimes when you don’t think about it
1:33:52 from a privacy standpoint, you’re like,
1:33:54 “Is it worth my time to go get a notarized document
1:33:55 “for $5?”
1:33:59 No, I’ve had listeners $5, $2500 to $3,000.
1:34:00 So like one, you should just check
1:34:02 ’cause you might hit the jackpot.
1:34:03 What do people Google for?
1:34:03 ‘Cause every state’s different, right?
1:34:04 Unclaimed money.
1:34:05 Unclaimed money, Texas.
1:34:07 Unclaimed money, California.
1:34:07 Unclaimed money.
1:34:08 Okay, and that’ll take you to the government.
1:34:09 The state database.
1:34:10 So you don’t want to go to some third-party website.
1:34:11 It goes directly to the state.
1:34:14 All the state databases are easy to find.
1:34:15 My party trick is any time we’re going
1:34:17 to someone’s house for an event,
1:34:18 I’ll just search if they’re owed money.
1:34:19 And I’ll be like, “Come to dinner.”
1:34:21 I’ll be like, “I don’t really do this.”
1:34:22 But like, “I didn’t bring a bottle of wine,
1:34:25 “but I found that the state owes you $180.”
1:34:26 That’s not creepy at all.
1:34:27 No, no, no.
1:34:28 I love that.
1:34:29 But you can find, check your parents,
1:34:31 check your cousins, check your siblings.
1:34:33 And you’d be surprised that I bet
1:34:35 at least someone in your immediate family
1:34:39 has like $100 plus owed to them
1:34:40 that they forgot about, didn’t know about,
1:34:41 and can collect.
1:34:42 And so it was a pain in the ass
1:34:44 ’cause I was owed less than $5,
1:34:46 and so I had to get a document notarized
1:34:49 to be able to claim my less than $5.
1:34:53 But now there’s not an easy place to search my name
1:34:55 and the state of California and find out where I live.
1:34:56 Yeah, amazing.
1:34:58 So that’s one.
1:34:59 I made a list of like 20 other things.
1:35:00 We’re not going to get to it today.
1:35:01 All right.
1:35:03 Well, we’ll have you back on the show.
1:35:05 Chris, this has been awesome.
1:35:07 You’re always bringing at least two or three things
1:35:08 where I’m just like,
1:35:09 “I’m going to go do this immediately
1:35:10 “after chatting with you.”
1:35:12 So I have my list.
1:35:16 Renegotiating my mortgage would be definitely high up there.
1:35:18 Where can people find more about you in your podcast?
1:35:21 Yeah, so allthehacks.com is the website.
1:35:23 That’s where you can find deals,
1:35:25 links to all the cards if you want to support us.
1:35:26 That would be awesome.
1:35:27 And then wherever you’re listening,
1:35:29 you got a podcast, all the hacks.
1:35:31 Every week, I’m going deep on something,
1:35:34 whether that’s insurance, cell phone plans,
1:35:35 all the kinds of stuff we talked about,
1:35:38 but just like 10 miles deeper.
1:35:38 You know all that stuff.
1:35:41 So check it out, scroll till you find something
1:35:43 you want to learn about and let me know what you think.
1:35:44 It’s a great show.
1:35:45 We’ll have you back on soon.
1:35:46 Thanks.
1:35:46 Sounds good.