#453: The Random Show — Zen, Investing, Mike Tyson, Artificial Intelligence, and the World's Best Beers

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go to drinkage one dot com slash Tim. That's drink AG One, the number one. Drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG1.com. Slash Tim. Check it out. Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. This is a special edition, the Random Show, with Kevin Rose, my good friend, a serial tech founder and entrepreneur and investor of all different types. He really spans the spectrum, does a lot of things. And in this episode, we talk about many things. It is called the random show for a reason, after all. Surfing the waves of COVID, deleting social media apps.

Zen quickenings, strange beers Kevin's been enjoying. Some of the best in the world, it turns out, for not that much money. Grilling. Investing. We talk about investing towards the end. And we cover a lot of ground, a few caveats. We are not. Registered investment.

advisors or professionals of any type. We are not medical doctors. We don't play either on the internet. And anything you find in this conversation is for informational purposes only. So before Taking any action on anything in this. Please consult your local qualified. Professional. And with all that said, please enjoy this

Wide ranging and rambling conversation with Kevin Rose. Yeah. Here we are again. Here we are again. I love it.

Good to see you. You're in the The the dark cavernous Is that a man cave? Is that a bar? Where are you looking at? Alternate universe.

Yeah, you you look uh a lot more peaceful than my kind of dungeon. I'm I'm down here in the uh this is The bar actually. But it's now it's office. It was a bar. It was a kind of a cool place to hang out and have people friends over. But in Covid times it's uh an office and I got a mic hooked up here and all my computer crap and mail and all the other stuff. So it's I feel like all of your BDSM dungeon equipment is hiding in the shadows behind you.

That is you. Do you want to talk about that? No. No, look, look, I am actually in my acupuncture office. You may recognize the acupuncture shelves behind me. I am in fact in an acupuncture office, but it's not mine. Are you just renting one out or what are you doing? I'm borrowing fast Wi Fi. in an undisclosed rural location where my internet speed is otherwise 0.5 megabits per second, which doesn't allow us to do calls like this. I am

On a farm. And in the middle of the woods I have a bear living About well, in fact probably hundreds of feet from me at times. Like a real full on bear. Yes, a huge black bear, but it's a huge bear. It's a gigantic, healthy black bear. Like a friendly trained one kind of thing, or not trained, no tricycles.

No tricks, no dancing and on the sidewalk for pennies. This is a wild black bear. We haven't yet met. Yeah. Uh I've met Fox.

Coyote. All sorts of other Animals but have not yet met the bear. Just seeing photographs that my friends have taken. Have you done bear training?

I have not done any bear training. So that's a real thing. Yeah. No, I haven't, but uh our mutual friend Mike Maser sent me photend. He went up and did some he lives in Montana and he did some bear training. Like they bring in real loud bears of the tackle you That's where he's like r wrestling with big dudes with beards. Is that pr pretty much San Francisco San Francisco style? Exactly. I think I did otter training when I was in San Francisco, but no real legitimate bear training. I've done raccoon and squirrel. Those are my my two certifications. If if People have not actually seen Kevin's raccoon video, he's not lying. He he didn't actually do any raccoon training, but you got thrown into the swimming pool and like turned into an Olympic swimmer.

Your your little pup toaster. People can Search Kevin. Rose raccoon and get to that. I haven't done bear training. If you're in Montana, you need to legit bear training because you have

Terrestrial. Great White Sharks, AKA. Grizzly bears, which are Very, very different from The supposedly

The black guards are pretty chill, right? They they seem like they avoid humans and tend not to prey upon humans. So that's a good thing. You carry bear's bread though, I take it. I do not currently carry bear spray.

Uh make a lot of noise when I'm hiking. Mm. But that's about it at this point. Probably should do more research, but one of the things I've been getting into is Plant and suppose this would be a subset of that, but tree identification. So that's been something I've been spending a lot of time on.

I've been doing probably two to three hours of hiking in the woods per day. And That involves a whole bunch of gear. Aside from my my lack of bear spray. So I wear a limitic pants. They have permethrin in the fabric. So you avoid ticks, which is super important if you're anywhere certainly on the east coast and anywhere else. And then have you ever seen a go ruck?

Rucksack. I believe they're based in in San Francisco. No, I don't I don't believe so. There are Backpacks designed by Uh

Well the CEO and founder of his former special forces to carry Uh customized weight plates. So for a s a replacement to running because I like to think that I like to want to run, but I don't actually enjoy running very much and it it bothers my knees. You can do these weighted hikes where you'll have, say, twenty or thirty

or more pounds on your back, but the backpacks are just specifically designed to carry these square weight plates that sit high. on your upper back. So that you can have better ergonomics as you hike. And it's been awesome. I'll just I was I'm curious about that because I have a weighted one like you order on Amazon and I was u use on the treadmill sometimes just for like a super low grade Uh, but you know, adds an extra fifteen or twenty pounds on how is this I take it just position the weights are positioned better so that you don't hurt your back.

Yeah, the way that it's pitched, and I've I've only used a weight vest once Just as a quick side note, so when I used a weight fest Yeah. I had no point of reference. This was probably two thousand eight or two thousand nine when I was working on the four hour body and I thought

I can work with a weight vest and this was but I I think it was before they used weight vests and the CrossFit games and so on. And I had no idea how much weight to use. And I was like, uh I'll just get like fifty or sixty pounds. That seems like a good a good starting point. And so I put on sixty pounds and I would usually go for like a three mile walk. In San Francisco and I got three miles out and I was like I'm fucking done. I can't do this. And so I left the vest on the sidewalk and walked back. I couldn't I couldn't hack it. It was uh also in the summer, but If you read the website, would be led to believe that the vests have more of a suffocating effect because you also are carrying weight on the chest. These are intended to mimic more of

long distance Piggybacking erg ergonomics. Yeah, right. Uh it's actually piggybacking, but with the weight higher up on your back. So I've found it surprisingly comfortable. I have Some spinal issues in my upper thoracic back. So let's just call it lower. Cervical.

And wearing backpacks for long periods really bothers my back, but these these bags actually Allow me to train. Usually for no more than about h an hour and a half. without any subsequent back pain as long as I don't overdo it. So it's been it's been really nice to build up the lower legs. I'm also jumping rope.

Uh using both in a way to prepare for possible trail running. And uh feeling great. Feeling just fantastic. I'll listen to audio books or do phone calls typically while I'm doing that. Two questions. One, I had always heard, at least back in the day, like when you're backpacking, they always tell you get a backpack where all the weight is kind of pushed down to your hips. So you're carrying it on your hips and it's not so much on your back. Why wouldn't you want something like that? And to your jump rope point.

Did you hear that Tyson's gonna fight again? Yeah. I did hear that Tyson's gonna fight against you. It is crazy. Well start start with the the hip stuff. All right, so the hip stuff I I would imagine if you are carrying a lot more weight, or if you're just hiking for efficiency and not as a workout, that probably makes a lot of sense. What I have found

personally is that if I have a backpack with a weight strap and shoulder straps, maybe I'm just using them incorrectly. but it tends to pull me backwards and I jump my head forward quite a lot. There are training recommendations and guidelines on this. this site. I think it's just gorge.com. And

I followed those. So they encourage you not to lean forward. They encourage you to stand up straight. And very deliberately do not have a chest strap or a waist harness. I'm sure you could train with other approaches, but the fact of the matter is my Let's just call it back. Always hurt.

after a short period of time of carrying backpacks. wherever I would be walking around in the city, whether it was San Francisco years ago or in Austin or elsewhere. And doing this, I got a great work out, but without that. Subsequent.

It's really spinal pain, basically the musculature around the spine or maybe maybe even the connective tissue is activated. So when it when it seizes up to I don't know how many times you've had your back seize on you, where you're like you just can't move. Oh my God, it's like it's like worst. It is. Yeah. And it's like I have two little monkeys like hanging on me all day long with little girls, you know, and I'm just like they just tweak you one way, or now like I'm in my forties, like if I cough my with my head pointed the wrong direction, my back is just like seizes up on you. Well, I feel like that's a good segue. to uh what lazy

bastards we are compared to Tyson who's in his fifties, isn't he? I know. He's he's like six almost sixty. So let me ask you a question, like straight up. Ten million dollars. No, no, no. That's not enough money for Tim Ferris. Tim Ferris. Uh two hundred million dollars. No bullshitting, no falling to the ground. Would you step in the ring with Tyson?

Today. Absolutely not. No. There's no fucking way. You don't think you could win? Well, uh number one, absolutely would not win. Dude, you have a black belt. I mean yeah, in Judo. I mean it's sport judo. It's very different from like raised in I think it was about Brownsville.

With Yeah, I think it's a good thing. Oh, absolutely. If we're talking boxing or anything, unless I jumped guard and just hung on for dear life like a koala bear, I would not last one round. I probably wouldn't think it last I think you could last one round. I don't think so, man. If you covered up completely, like you just put your arms in full turtle position and just let him punch you in your arms. Your fucking head would fly off. Yeah. I most people have not been hit by a trained fighter. I've been hit by trained fighters And

It's a lot worse than you think it is. It's a lot worse. And as someone who's had head trauma before and concussions 'Cause I was never a very good striker. I was I was a better grappler and I wasn't a great grappler either, but I was I was decent. with a lot of wrestling background and judo and so on, but

I would just get Whacked in the head. Have you ever seen space balls? Yes, of course. Where uh what dark helmet is held at bay with one arm and he's swinging and isn't hitting anything. I was basically Dark Helmet whenever I sparred because I was heavy for my height. And so I'd end up with these goddamn six foot two, like hundred and fifty pounders who would just

T off on my head from a distance, nonstop. And I ended up, I think, with some long term damage and consequences from that. So Traumatic brain injury I have zero interest in these days. So I would not for any price.

Not even if it was like grappling, like MMA style with Tyson. The problem is I wouldn't risk it. I wouldn't risk it, man. You would definitely get in one good shot. That's right. That's right. All that's all it takes, right? Like he you could try and then he just needs to get the right angle and then you're out. It's just the other the other thing to remember too is that Speed goes with age. I mean, speed is one of the first things. If you watch, say, uh, Roy Jones Jr. or a lot of these fighters. Who had a

winning style predicated on speed. Once they lose half a step, they start getting knocked out. Tyson was very, very fast, but he's also Ungodly strong. And He's got old man strength, then

Has not diminished. I have watched some of his Back in shape videos. Yeah, his pad and network videos. Oh God. And uh we'll we'll put some in the show notes.

for people to to check out. I mean if they just search, you know, Mike Tyson. new videos, I'm sure they'll pop right up. Uh They're terrifying. They're really, really terrifying because I've I've been hit by some Decent

Strikers. And А мію філ. afterwards your s the the bruising of your brain. I mean your brain is bount ricocheted off the sides of your skull like a big Ice cube being shaken in a fucking shaker.

And that's not good for you. You know, it can contribute to depression, it can contribute to dementia, early onset Alzheimer's like I am so Uninterested. Yeah. I'll take my chances with the bear over Tyson any time. I don't know. Four four hour body Tim would have would've might have been interested a few a few years ago.

Four hour body tom is like evil can evil, right? Like I'm gonna jump Grand Canyon and just wipe out into the wall break every bone of my body and At the time I think I just assumed that I could automatically repair all of that and The fact is Uh not to imply that there's a lot of that in the book. I don't think there is, uh but

There's a certain f sense of immortality or Invincibility that you have when you're younger, which you you learn is very misplaced when you get a little bit older. And that's not to play the crotchety old like oh my God, once it's thirty, it's all downhill. Once it's thirty five, it's all downhill. You always meet lazy people who say that shit because they just don't want to They just don't want to put in the work. Because it takes a little more work when you're not in hormonal nirvana to, you know, keep that little

Python that swallowed a goat physique in a like dad bought at bay. Uh but The fact of the matter is, like without higher testosterone levels and so on, your recovery time and And everything else is is extended, right? So I am so uninterested in injuries these days, especially during COVID, right? The last thing I want to do is

put up some home based parkour. course and like break a wrist trying to scale the garage and then have to go to the emergency room. No way. No, thank you. Roy Jones Jr. on exhibition fight with Mike Tyson.

You don't know what Mike might do. Is it Roy Jones Jr.? That would be a huge weight class mismatch. Let me just Fact check this real fast. But Roy Jones Jr. was boxing not that long ago, right? It's been a while. It is it is Roy Jones Jr. Oh, it is Roy Jones Jr. Yeah. Eight round exhibition fight. This ship super, super interesting. Roy Jones Jr. I watched A lot.

And uh these are both fighters who Capitalized on incredible speed. All right, and now they're older. They're both strong. Tyson absolutely has a strength advantage. Oh, Jesus, Tyson is five ten two forty. Roy Jones Junior is one ninety three. I don't know what his height is.

Does it say here? But one ninety three to two forty, that's a big weight difference. Yeah, you really don't want to get hit by either of these guys. Uh So

To make that exhibition looks like an exhibition fight on September twelfth. That's really soon. That Roy Jones Junior is gonna have to dance. He's really gonna have to dance and I don't know.

the last time that he had a dance card with stakes quite this high. I mean, and he might be laughing all the way to the bank, but honestly it's like If Mike Tyson hits you hard enough, you're gonna have trouble finding the bank. Yeah. Exactly. Ha. Oh my God. I'll definitely watch that fight though. Are you kidding?

That's crazy. It's good to see him back though, man. You know the cool thing about it is I saw Tyson being interviewed And he pledged one hundred percent of the proceeds to charity. Um he's he doesn't care about making any money off of this. That's not where his happiness comes from anymore. Like it just seemed like really like a different version of Tyson that was refreshing to see. You know, it seems like he's done a lot of A lot of work on himself.

Yeah, it seems that way. I mean it's uh I imagine it's not biting off ears anymore, I don't think it's not biting off ears. That's a good start. In self development. To stop biting off ears. And it it seems like he's done a lot of work. I saw video

On Which was an interview. of Tyson describing his Five MEO, five Methoxy DMT experience. Oh crazy. Yeah.

Yeah, and I I don't know who the the sitters were for that. Yeah. But You either have to be really, really, really good with lots of safeguards, or you have to be incredibly fucking stupid. To be in a room where you volunteered to hold down Mike Tyson when he's on five MEMD. Fuck that. No thanks.

Yeah, you you get a big padded room. And you kinda have to do it. The uh Like through the phone. Yeah, exactly. All right, Mikey. Here's the two here's the tube through the window. Exactly. You're gonna do great. Oh my God. It's like the Hulk when he like erupts and just like, you know, you can't contain him.

Yeah, you don't want to be you don't want to be anywhere close to that. So what have you been up to, man? It's been actually quite a while since we've caught up. It's been uh at least a few weeks since we had a a proper, proper conversation. Yeah, I know. And then our last podcast that we did, I mean, we were just in like a horrible place. Like our last podcast was when COVID was really starting to hit. And we're both like, Well, we'll see ya, I hope to see ya sometime. You know, like we thought the end was near. Please do. You still kinda feel that way though, huh? Well

Not the end. But lots of changes for sure. I'm less concerned about the virus wiping out everyone, which I didn't think was gonna happen to begin with, but I I didn't like the At the time what we understood to be the characteristics and kinetics Of the virus. Still very, very glad that I

made the public statements and publish the blog posts that I did, which I still stand by. Uh but I am very concerned about the the secondary and third order effects of economic destruction and high rates of unemployment.

uh very understandable. Uh Anger and frustration. And strong emotions coming from

Not having Work. uh not having a sense of purpose for millions of people. And also just having a very, very polarized political machines for capitalizing on

That Heightened emotion. to try to further their aims on on all sides. This is this is this is a defining I would say characteristic of a sort of opportunistic political maneuvering. So I'm I'm very concerned.

uh about the country. So I am not the the game is far from over. If we had a working vaccine tomorrow and were prepared to distribute, what percentage of the US do you think would volunteer, even if they were told they that it were mandatory. Who would comply? What percentage of the population do you think would comply and actually get a vaccine? And since we don't have any

State to state. restrictions in terms of travel. I mean there are recommended Fourteen day Uh Right. Self quarantines and so on, but there's no real enforcement. There's no real follow up. That's right.

Yeah. So what I mean, what percentage of the country do you think would actually take a vaccine? Fully distributed Thought to be effective. Yeah, I mean I think I I guess it also depends on the window of time that you're you're talking about, right? I mean, I think that a lot more people will take it on month three versus month one. Yeah. So um I would say that Does it well, I guess my the qu the question though is does it really matter? Like you and I are gonna take it, right? Like

Th there'll be a certain subset of people that won't and You know It's like you're kinda rolling the dice with your own life and at that point there's you've done all you can do. Yeah. I mean it sounds horrible to say that, but like how do you you can't force someone to like stick a needle in their arm. So you have to do the best you can at education, at demonstrating uh safety and efficacy, and then you, you know, hope for the best.

I would say though it's probably gonna be more than you would think. Uh Well, what percentage of folks get the flu shot every year? I guess that would be a good proxy. Um Yeah.

I don't know is the answer. And then and then I would say it'll be higher than that, because flu is very optional for a lot of people, not as deadly. So Um, yeah, it's it's hard. It's it's hard to to back into a number like that, but I I would imagine it would be somewhere around seventy percent or or greater. Would you think it w you're probably thinking like twenty percent. I'm thinking twenty to thirty percent by month three.

That would be my that would be my guess. That's what I would bet. Are you doing it month one? You know, this is this is where we're gonna get ourselves into trouble. I'm not a medical professional. Not giving medical advice. I would not want to be the first monkey shot into space. Uh but we might edit this out later,'cause I also don't want to discourage people from getting a vaccine, but

If the if we're breaking every land speed record in Developing a vaccine. For A virus that we understand very incompletely. You know, I have my own misgivings. I I do think vaccines are incredibly valuable to

the individual and to community and humanity overall. And we s we simply don't have a lot of data. On this virus. So Well to your point about the economy though, though, I think that's gonna be the difficult piece of this in getting folks back to work and getting the average consumer to trust

restaurants again, to trust bars again, to trust all concert venues, all of the things that we used to do to to drive up the economy and and you know uh I I just can't see it bouncing back as fast as people Have said it's going to. Um I think I I think we're in minimum

Yeah, a year and a half, two year old Yeah, tough feels that tough feels right. Tough trench. Yeah. So I I guess as you put it as as you poetically put it to me some time ago, I think we're in for a slow donkey. I think. I think we are looking at a slow donkey here. Yeah, sometimes people quote you and you're like, there's no way I said that. Like I definitely said that. That sounds like something I would say.

Well, here's the crazy thing, man. Like I've been thinking more about universal basic income. And And The one thing the the biggest At at first I was like, No, there's no way. Why do we need it? It seems like a waste of money. You know, it's like just giving out money doesn't seem to be a solution for anything. And then

Two weeks ago. A new uh API came out from a group called O uh OpenAI, which is this artificial intelligence group. Have you seen anything created by this GPT three? Have you seen this at all? I've seen Kris Saka's experiments with it. I haven't played with it yet. He's he seems incredibly impressed. I don't know.

Uh what his involvement is, if any, but You tell me. So what I saw. It was some of the demos that I've seen lately Are

Uh, you give the AI a couple websites. So you go like here's a website I like and here's another website I like. Now design me a website that looks like those websites, but is about a text based messaging app and it literally created a beautiful ready to go fully website. in like minutes that it came up with. And And you're like

Well, there goes all the graphic design jobs. Like you know, like maybe not in the next six months or next year, but that is where it's going. And like if that's gonna be on a whole like AI is gonna kill so many technical jobs and it and it it's it's just crazy. I I don't see any way out of this. Like you have to become like a Basket weaver or a potter or a cult or a cult leader. Those are

That's immediate way. That's the first thing Daria said. I was talking to my wife about it. She was like, you know, it's gonna be down to like artisan craft, like the AI can't do like touched by human hands. And I'm like, Well, yeah, but like how many people need baskets? Like, how many you know what I mean? Like how many artisan like artists do we need to be doing this? Like I I just don't know that there's that many jobs there. So Maybe something like universal basic income does make sense when eventually that hits. Um And and I worry they they talk the talk now on on the street is that a lot of these jobs just aren't gonna come back.

You know, the talk on the talk on the street. That's a phrase I haven't heard you. The street like Wall Street. Oh okay. Yes. A word on the street around the corner. I got it. All right. Yeah, the jobs aren't gonna come back. Yeah. I mean If if this is like V zero, right? If this is

Rough draft. It's Hugely I mean it's awesome in the Mike.

eighteenth century sense of the word. Right. I mean it's awe inspiring and kind of staggering in its implications and also really terrifying. Mm-hmm. It is. Yeah. It's it's like writing books now. Like you're you're gonna be soon out of work as did you see some of the stuff it's writing? Like you can say, uh write me a bedtime story, and then it just goes and creates these beautiful like you could take that.

Tweak a couple words and like put your name on it. And people will do that. And it's not gonna show up again in any plagiarism dictionaries or anything like that. It'll But it'll be like ninety percent AI written. So I mean that would be a way to rough draft stuff. Right. As as as I although I have to imagine it's polling from other sources that might end up then having claims of plagiarism, but from other sources than the terms of creating its its mental model and understanding model of the data. So but so are we all, right? Like the only reason you can write your books is'cause you're pulling from all your childhood experiences and all the other crap. So it's the same

All the crappy childhood experiences also. For those people that don't know, very uh um very, very successful. investor, previous operator, first fund of delivered something like two fifty X, I guess. And has done very well. Uh he drafted a number of tweets and then let Uh open AI, but that's not the phrase he used. It's what was the other term that you used?

Oh GPT three. GPT three, what does that refer to? Uh that's just their most uh recent iteration of this type of technology. It was two and now it's three. I don't know what the GPT stands for exactly. I can find out though. Catchy. Catchy. First I thought he was talking about Grand Theft Auto and he'd smoke too much weed. I wasn't sure what he was texting me about. And he he wrote a string of tweets and then he let GPT three Write the next two or three. And

Effectively impossible. to tell apart, right? I mean they did seem like tweets that he would write. Yeah, it's spooky. It's really cool. It i it for it for those of you that are listening, they're like, I have no idea what these guys are talking about. Like definitely Go on Twitter, um, type that in and just look for they have so many examples being tweeted out. They're just fun. They're they're crazy and fun and wacky and

But but it it's one of those things where You realize a major shift has happened. Like this is truly a big uh AI shift and that. You know, I talked to to Siri today and it doesn't understand half the shit I'm trying to tell it. And and you go into what you watch what this thing can do and you're like, wow, like this is an order of magnitude better than what we had just a couple of months ago, you know? Hey Siri.

Tell me predict what the slow donkey's gonna do. Slow donkey. Yeah. Okay. Ha ha. Yeah. Oh my god.

That's so fucking creepy, man. Why does Ciri Oh it's because I said hey Siri auto activate it on my phone and then had slow donkey. I didn't get that. Could you try again? All right, Siri. That's enough out of you. Oh boy. So you were asking what what we've been up to. I mean, I I just for me it's been more the same in Portland, though, you know, just kind of like enjoying the protests out here. Like not enjoying them, that was a joke. It's it's been really brutal. Downtown in Portland.

Um The weather's been fantastic. Uh, but you know, it's like you gotta look on the bright side with all this stuff going on and And try and find ways to I don't know, just Return to some

resemblance of like some kind of normal. And I don't know how you do that. For for us, it's like Darry and I, like on Friday nights, even though we don't leave the house, like we actually get dressed up like we're gonna go out to dinner. And I know that sounds cheesy, but it's like Breaking that. Pajama routine is a big deal. You know, and like eating outside now is nice. Like we're we have a backyard in Portland, so we can go and eat outside, which

Is is a huge change. Um But yeah, how about how about you guys? How is it um What have you been up to? Well, it's it's made a big difference, at least for my mental well being. Uh

to move from a more urban environment to a very rural environment. to have access to Uh Wilderness got some muck boots for people who uh

Are looking for some bushwhacking boots. Muk boots are amazing. boots that you can wear through mud and anything you might wanna walk through. They're they're not actually that suffocatingly hot for your feet. So I'll throw those on. I'll throw on the Tick pants. And uh

Just hike for hours. And uh there's so much land in so much of the US that you if you're able to move yourself from point A to point B. And there are a lot of areas outside of Austin, outside of a lot of major cities. LA, outside of New York City. Where you can find space. That has been

Incredibly clearing for me. I also Deleted. Uh Social.

apps from my phone four weeks ago. That's crazy. You know I did that a couple months ago. Yeah. I did the same experiment and I it's been fantastic. Yeah, I have I've I have missed exactly Nothing.

of great importance. That that I'm aware of. Meaning I talk to friends. I Well occasionally on laptop. Look at

Say. Things that are trending on Twitter that might be relevant. To Anything that I can affect. Positively, right? Or areas where I can mitigate risks or something like that. But the vast majority of news

is gonna make you either anxious Or really pissed off. And if you're not prepared or able to take action. on something that is within your sphere of control. It's really just

Creating Energy leaks. That will drain you. And I realized Uh somewhere between

I'd say six and eight weeks ago. That I was Extremely fatigued. I was very tired. And it was I think

Because I had so many Stimuli in the form of different notifications or apps on my phone, social, et cetera. Which were creating these

Powerful emotions. without any ability to direct them towards something. Positive and actionable. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. So I've so I so I deleted them from my phone. And

Talk to a lot of friends and Uh also Will talk to members of my team. Yeah, employees.

Uh we do Team calls. uh of various types and feel like the signal to noise ratio has improved so much Since I did that. And I will occasionally.

Probably twice a week. Look at At replies. On Twitter. Because my

Uh listeners and readers are extremely helpful. And helping me to find high signal articles or research studies that are really relevant to things they know I care about and focus on. But outside of that It has been such a freeing experience and I really feel like

Social by and large has been a huge net negative. Dude, it's so crazy that we came to the same realization. Like a two a couple months ago. I post on Instagram my like final post saying I'm not gonna be on here for a while and the same thing with Twitter. And I removed all of them from my phone, all all the apps from my phone. I And I stopped looking them all together.

I Have not been on Instagram since. Uh it's been like, you know, uh at least a couple of months. And I have gone back on Twitter because like you

Uh well two th reasons. One, I Some people communicate me with with them there over DMs that I don't actually have their phone number. And so sometimes there's important things that come through. And then also, um, there is important stuff in terms of the research I do for my job and investing and on tech companies and all that. Like it is a good source of that type of data. So but I I still kept it off my phone. So it is a desktop only experience for me now. And I will tell you You're right. Like the anxiety goes down a ton, the notifications to your device goes down and you don't realize

You know it's funny, I don't know if you got this feeling, but the first like week I it was opening my phone up like Oh, I wonder what's oh wait, I don't have the app anymore. Did you like get that like like a few times you're like, Oh, wait a second, I don't I don't have that app. The other thing I did, which you might want to try, this is kind of uh And this is this is just dumb stuff if people are listening. Like don't like I'm not trying to be holier than thou when I do this type of stuff. It's just like it's it's fun to do these little micro experiments. The other thing I did is I said, Okay. How can I reduce the stress on my phone even more? And that would be uninstalling even more garbage that I don't use that might may or may not send me notifications, but with every app, there's like a micro mental burden somewhere buried in there of having just like one more thing to check or one more thing that

is a potential uh distraction. So I said if I can't fit the apps on the home page. I'm not gonna have them on my phone. So no swiping sideways for more apps. So basically I have one screen app. You just have folders with like seventy five apps inside of them. I do have folders, but here's the rule of the folders. The folders cannot swipe sideways.

So I I can only so that means a total of nine apps and folders. So basically this is my my home screen right here. And so you can see I just have the option there. Is that that many? Yeah, the bottom the re people are looking at the bottom, the bottom, the I do have a a screen that goes sideways that I put all the Apple utilities and crap that you kinda can't uninstall, like the compass app and the measure app and the calculator and like all that stuff in its own little side folder thing. But the categories in those buckets in those folders. So here's what I have. My categories are

Audio. Which means for me that's Pocketcast, Music App and Spotify, Audible Sonos for Home Stuff, and Pandora. So that's good. Health. I have waking up. I have the strong app, Dexcom.

Or uh less Um zero. Uh, for learning all the the language learning apps that I wanna go back to and uh Lumosity and master class. Um and then finance stuff. I have one screen of that, which is um, you know, personal capital, financial times, well, she journal, wealth front. Um I like

Playing around with Clarity Money and Barons and Simplify. Um, and then I have home apps like home control. Now home means like I got a trigger barbecue, which has been a fantastic addition this summer, by the way. So I also got a trigger. That's really funny. Are you serious? Which one did you get? Looks like we're on uh parallel tracks here. Uh the the one that uh Timberline eight seventy. I got

The I actually did get the Timberline eight seventy. That's fucking crazy. That's the one I got. I did get that. And So I have that in Austin and at the undisclosed rural location I have I think it's a six fifty, so I got a slightly smaller one because I looked at the eight seventy and I was like It's like you can cook

You can cook twenty chickens at one time, and I'm like, I don't need to cook twenty chickens at one time. So I got a smaller Smaller unit. No, I maybe I did get a smaller unit as well. Uh Now you have me curious to see which one I got. It doesn't say on the app. Right away.

Uh I think it is the smaller of the the Timberline version. But anyway, that's a that's a great one. So last last one. So the home stuff has like things like that where it's like, you know, ring and Lutron and that stuff. And to be clear, you have an app You have a Traeger app which helps you to control the grill. So you can check the temperature and So on and so forth. Yeah. So we I just um by the way, we wild salmon is running and it's on sale right now. Um, but it's it's I've been smoking salmon like crazy. I've gone through six or seven different recipes. I finally found the perfect smoked salmon that I'll I'll send you which one on the trigger app that is it's fantastic. But you gotta let it cure twenty four hours. That's the key. You gotta let it can't do any of these like little rubs where you do like four two or four hours. You gotta do a full twenty four hour cure on it.

Cool. That's amazing. Yeah, I've been I've been dialing in the trager like crazy. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Dry Farm Wines. I'm a wine drinker. I love it. Love a few glass over meals with friends. That said I hate

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Yeah, I've been cooking uh A lot. Period, right? We've been cooking a lot at home. And cooking a lot of venison also. Uh I don't know if I don't know if you even know this, Kevin, but I ended up

Uh You know. You definitely know. You can you can confirm this. I invest in very, very few things these days. And uh about a year ago I invested in

A venison harvesting operation. in Hawaii called the Maui Nui venison. For those people who are not watching the video, Kevin is laughing. And uh really thought to myself, there's no way this is ever going to make any money, but I like the Ethos and the

principles behind it because Axis deer are an invasive species in Hawaii. Uh they've destroy a lot of ecosystem. Uh they've damaged or compromised coral reefs because of runoff. Uh after removing vegetation.

And Uh this operation harvests Axis deer. And They they just approach it in such a thoughtful Such a surgical way.

And the meat is so incredibly good. Peter T is obsessed with this also, by the way. And which he and and he's the one in a in a way who convinced me to combine the traeger with this this Maui Nui. Venison. So the the leg medallions are better for cooking indoors, but rib racks. stakes all of that are just incredible. And you've probably realized this on the trigger that one of the benefits of having, and for people who don't know What the hell we're talking about.

This is a Wood this is a wood pellet fueled grill. You could also think of it as a smoker. And in in a lot of ways, I tend to think of it more as a smoker than a grill because you're not going to get it's it's more difficult to get, say, the searing on a burger. Yeah, there's no direct f direct flame.

That's right. But But if you cook ribs at super low temperature. like a hundred and sixty five or a hundred and eighty five, you just get the most incredible flavor. Oh yeah. I did I did ribs last night. I did some heritage um pork ribs. Uh by the way, speaking of uh trading uh like places to buy meat, um, have you used Crowd Cow at all?

I've not used CrowdCal. You know, there are a couple of these companies. I have used ButcherBox, which might be similar. I I'm not sure. I don't know CrowdCow. Yeah, so CrowdCow is essentially what they've said is like, okay, there are you know, a dozen or so probably more amazing farms in the United States that are these like small little tiny mom and pop farms that don't really have way to get Proper distribution online. First of all, they don't even know how to set up their own online, you know, site. And so let's go to them and and put them on our site and it's only like The best

Small little Amazingly run. Farms and also They work with Japanese farmers as well. So they get in some of the best wagu that I've ever had.

A five um certified with all the holograms and everything on there. And they work with a couple of really small farms out there. And that that's fun stuff. So do you choose you then choose the farms you want to buy the meat from? You pick individually? Yeah, so you can do it I think how they started was like you had to kind of put together a portion of a cow, like X number of pieces, and then you would save like you're going in on a cow. Now it's like all I think I that's a feature in there somewhere, but now it's like all a la carte now. So you can just go, I just want some amazing ribeyes or I want a rack and like they're just right there ready to buy. Cool.

Yeah, butcher box kind of mixes and matches and you get a membership. Uh so I have pork and beef from them as well. Another one That is close to our Long ago. home in Norcal is Bel Campo. I don't know if you've tried any of their stuff. No.

Bel Campo has Incredible ribeyes. So those those are the two non-venison sources that I've I've been trying these days. But that's That's about it. Uh it as far as as meat goes, I've tried to really

do a uh take out less is not less as more, but like if you're gonna eat meat, like really Do it in as thoughtful way. As possible. Yeah, which uh I recognize is in a sense a luxury, right? I mean it it it is.

uh because we have the the means to sort of explore some of these options and some of them aren't cheap. Certainly triggers aren't cheap. Um tragers aren't that expensive, man. They make ones that are further down the line that aren't the fancy, fancy ones that actually do a great job smoking. My buddy has one of the ones that you can buy at Costco. And it's it's it's phenomenal. And they're they're not they're not crazy. I mean, they're not cheap, but they're not crazy crazy. We're not talking thousands of dollars or anything, you know. Yeah. So I've been enjoying it.

Really paying attention to the fundamentals for me, just hearkening back to what you said about us being in a pretty Bad place, stressed out place. Anxious, stressed out place for a really long time. uh once I kinda s saw the the comet of

Covid headed towards planned Earth slash United States. since early February, right? So I've had this low grade or high grade anxiety for months and eventually you just get fucking tired of the anxieties you want to figure out approaches to to lessen it.

And for me it's it's really been keep it simple, stupid, right? Eat good food, cook food, take time to prep. It's super meditative. If you're using a sharp knife, you gotta pay attention or you're gonna chop your little pretty fingers off. Uh and uh I've been doing HRV training, so heart rate variability training with breath work. Mm-hmm. And it's the jury's still out. I've been doing that for five weeks, twice a day for twenty minutes. Can I ask what that practice looks like?

Yeah, it looks like using an app. I'm using one called breath or actually it has a very generic name, but uh this is not to imply that it's the best app out there, but it's the one breathing. It's just called breathing. And it's a circle that opens and contract. to help you time the duration of your inhale and exhale. What is the um the the you know, sometimes there's a four, seven, eight breath, there's five and a half seconds and five and six. This one is I think I'm doing Three point seven second inhale. And

six point three second exhale and I arrived at that or I didn't I'm working with a doctor um I I don't want to mention her name just yet but I'm working with a a PhD who sent me a kit. Which includes a pulse oximeter. Which you put on your thumb to track Your Paul's.

And heart rate and and then blood ox as well, right? And blood ox, although sh I think we're looking less at that. And then a a resp a respiration strap. So it looks like basically a bra that you put on uh under your nip-nips. And uh well it'd be just above your navel. And as you breathe and it expands, there are sensors that

Track that. And so you can Correlate. and superimpose your breathing on your heart rate. And

She would then take me through we would we would use Zoom, share screen, and she would take me through different exercises to identify Which Duration of inhale and exhale. seemed optimal for me in terms of activating my sympathetic, I'm sorry, my parasympathetic nervous system. So more more of a autonomous relaxation response. And if people have trouble separating the two, so sympathetic, you can think of stimulating S equals stimulating, sympathetic like fight or flight. Fight, flight, freeze.

It's not quite that simple, but it's a useful Shorthand. And then parasympathetic would be uh more of the letting go calming. And I have incredible hyper vigilance. I mean uh I don't think we're gonna get into it today, but Well, as she would put it, I am cardiac hyper reactive.

So little things will send my heart rate shooting to the ceiling and then my heart rate will stay elevated for hours. And And I that's part of the reason. To the tune of what, like what ninety beats a minute? Like it's not crazy. Yeah, eighty to Eighty to ninety, but that's I mean if we're talking like six, seven hours, that's a long time.

No, I was worried you're gonna tell me something worse, but yeah, that is that is that's like you know, that you probably should be walking the dog at that rate. You know what I mean? Like that's not just sitting there, that that is elevated. Yeah, and Your fatigue has been this Lifelong. battle of minds since I would say

Age sixteen, seventeen, especially with Lyme disease on Long Island and all these undiagnosed Lyme and then later diagnosed, which is how a Now the people are familiar with serologic testing. You know, I I I was tested with when I when I was suffering acute symptoms, and they said, Well, you're positive for the short term antibodies, but you realize you've already had Lyme disease because you're testing positive for the long term as well. And uh s so I've really tried in The last my dog's pacing all over the place you can

You'd see. Where is she? Right, Molly. I mean there she is. Yeah. I think she has to pee. I might have to take a little break to let her out. But

Uh long story short, this this fatigue is like my battle. Right, it's like without sufficient energy you you really can't execute well on anything else. And by execute well. I would include like relaxing and enjoying yourself.

Right. Yeah, if the tank is empty, the tank is empty. So the fundamentals, the food the HRV slash meditation, all these things have been focused on identifying Like cracks in the vessel where I'm leaking. Energy.

Mm-hmm. And so so a lot of those I've found to be really helpful, right? Like the jumping rope. I'm not talking about like ten rounds of jumping rope. I'm not Mike Tyson getting back into shape to to try to lop Roy Jones Jr.'s head off. I'm talking about like three to five minutes jumping rope first thing in the morning just to get outside to make sure I get outside into some sun ideally and move my body. That's it. And if people are interested in the

the intersection and the interplay between exercise and the brain and brain health and brain neurotrophic or brain derived neurotrophic factor and all these various things. BDNF. There's a book called Spark that gets into this, but If you want to get out of your Monkey Mind.

least for me, one of the fastest ways is through the body. And it doesn't take a lot. It really doesn't take a lot. Get outside walk for a few minutes, jump rope for three to five minutes, and then go back inside. Um So those are a few of the things I've been doing. I don't know if if you found any Routines or other practices helpful.

Yeah, you know it's it's funny, um I've just now recently started getting back into meditation, but in a in a different way. You know, before I had done. Um, Sam's course, you know, which I think that you you've done as well, uh said Harris Waking Up app. So are you still doing the the tantric self pleasuring meditation that you told me about?

The one that you zoom with me on? Yeah, we're we're still doing that. Wednesday every day. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um

No, no, this is uh it's it's interesting. I I was um I was on Sam's app and this was uh uh several weeks ago, and I Saw that there was a new course on there by Henry Shuchman, who is a Um he practices uh a certain lineage of Zen and he's based out of um Uh, where is he based up? Not Arizona, but um New Mexico.

And He just had uh these beautiful ten minute meditations on these Zen Koans. Do you know much about Zen Koans? Yeah. Yeah, paradoxical. Statements or parables that are intended to As I understand it, intended to

derail the rational mind, right? to sort of sideline the rational mind. So like what is the sound of one hand clapping type of stuff. Right. And they they're these beautiful little uh unsolvable riddles, you know, that that pe that that are part of the practice and that they will meditate with them and on them. Um and then take back their kind of insights that are gathered from these.

uh over time back to their teachers. And it's kind of like a uh you know, you talk them through with your teacher. There is no real Answer to them. But they're used as they're very difficult to to describe, but they're they're used as a part of the the Zen training. And so I had was very fortunate to reach out to Sam and Sam introduced me to Henry. And Henry um has since come on my podcast and

He had a uh a book that um he recently published called one Blade of grass. Um by Henry Shuckman. I'm just pulling it up right now. It's on Amazon. Fantastic book.

That talks about It's bas basically a a biography of his life. And he talks about All the struggles that he faced. He had severe eczema all over his body where he was like hospitalized. bleeding knuckles, like really bad

For for decades. How do you spell his last name? Uh his last name is spelled S H U K M A N Got it. Thanks. And so yeah, he's a he's this fantastic Zenmaster. And I I

I um I read his book and he talks about his path to These stages of enlightenment and how He was able to Slowly over time. He was one of these people that

had a very early experience and didn't even know how to put into words what had happened to him because he wasn't training at the time. Uh, and then later went into Zen and had other experiences and then all the way through to Today Where he describes The falling away of basically of everything. The the the just everything falls away at some point uh during this training.

And it's a beautiful story on Zen and really just Um Reemphasize to me that that I mean he's he's you know had a career as a writer and he was uh an award winning poet. And you know, Oxford trained, um, very busy, productive human.

Wife, two children. And has still been able to go off and obtain These uh very deep life Uh Well, it he's now kind of flipped onto the side of the they're lasting now. The changes are lasting versus going back to reality after a couple of weeks.

Um fascinating story, but also Just one where I I by the end of the book, I was like, I need to get back into Zen. Like I because I yeah, I I don't I've told you at some point, you knew I you used to come over to my house when I live right next to the Zen center. But my my first training uh in San Francisco was at that Zen Center. Um and then I I fell away from it because I didn't really take it seriously. But uh yeah, so Henry's gonna help me really get back in his in and he's uh I'm

I'm excited to to go to his he has the Mountain Cloud Zen Center that he runs. And uh I'm gonna be taking some courses there and and I really wanna take this seriously. I figure I'm in my forties now. It's time to devote. A a decent percentage of my life to this type of training. Like I I I feel like it's it's time.

I'd love to hear you elaborate on that because I know you've you've tried all sorts of different Types of meditation. Uh still interested to know if you recommend the surrender course. Buy. I do. Michael Singer. Michael Singer. But you you have

You've explored these various tools and modalities What is it about Zen? that differentiates it for you or that you find attractive, right? Because you could you could reach out to Or get a hold of your one of your magic powers is getting hold getting a hold of anybody. Basically you want to get a hold of. Why then?

What is it? Uh I would say that When I first took my the when I first took the introductory course to Zen I appreciated

The mystery behind it in some sense. So I was attracted to How It could be a strict discipline in s in some ways. Like you know, like kind of the one of these things where you show up for Zazen and if you're not there

the second you're supposed to be there, they'll keep you out from coming in and you're you're rejected. Or if you want to train and and actually set up a residence there, like you have to prove it by sleeping outside for like two months. Like all these stories that you hear they Henry actually talks about can be super hardcore, or like he's let you go to the Zazen. uh room and you're you're separated by these like cubicle walls, right? And so you're you're sitting in Zazen, it's like seated meditation with your face about a foot and a half away from a wooden wall. And then if you start to nod off, they might hit you with a little wooden switch. Right. Things like that. Exactly. Yeah. So You know, I I kind of I was initially attracted to that. Now Henry's discipline that he's into, uh that he's teaching is is a little bit more laid back, which I which I can appreciate. Cause this is like, you know, when you're going to to to You had to enter with your right foot when you're entering into

to say it. Like you have to enter into the room the correct correct way. You can't cross over the mat in the wrong way. Like there's all these rules, right? Too many rules. But it's also very Japanese. But but I I it is very Japanese, which I you know we all both of us really love. Um But the one thing I will say about Zen in is that in a Especially with the way that Henry's been teaching, at least that that I gather through his book and and through our conversation. is that their

They make Enlightenment less mysterious and less about being a perfect person. And making it actually seem like it's something that is attainable by everyone. And it doesn't have to mean that you're this ultimate spiritual guru the second you snap into these different states of states of consciousness. And that

There are these really beautiful moments when people Have this flip. Like this flip in their brain, the switch that goes and then they're they're jolted, almost shocked. Into this The state of consciousness like sometimes

Like there's these stories of these Zen masters where they'll look at a student the right way and the the student won't grasp it and the student can't they've been stu they've been teaching and sitting and they just can't and they'll just shake them in a certain way and it'll spontaneously jolt them in the right way into enlightenment. And then these these funky little things like that that are just like beautiful stories. And like, you know, you always take a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt, but Coupled with this coen training. Which I which I highly recommend listening to on on the Waking Up app. They're they're fantastic by Henry. Um

It it just it's it checks all the boxes that I'm curious about. And I think for me, the curiosity at this point. is the most important thing because it's encouraging me and it gives me the drive to go and sit for a half hour every morning consistently. And you know, that's what it's gonna take. It's gonna take a real dedication. And I I think that if I can get the proper uh training coupled with these coans and uh I I don't know, just

I I've I've done the transdental meditation, I've done a few other disciplines, and this one for some reason Um, maybe it's because I'm a Japanophile. Like I don't know all the reasons, but I I'm I'm attracted to it. Cool. Do you know what the training is gonna look like and what the meditation sessions are gonna look like? Yeah, I mean they're very simple. You just sit.

So it's like what happened I'm more interested in what hap what happens inside the head. So you sit Maybe you shave your head. I would love to see you with a shaved head. That'd be hilarious. Uh so we can bick kind of thing. Yeah, we can we can be brothers. We can be cue balls together. Uh get you some black robes with some some white inner linings. Be good, good luck for you. Uh you kinda already have that look. You gotta be able to do it. I was gonna say you've seen me with robes on. We've been in robes together in Japan. You already got that one aced. Okay, you sit and then what?

What happens on the internet? So I think there's a there's a few things. One, um The question initially is There is there's kind of table stakes to to play in the arena. And I would say like to to even Get to that point.

Um, at least for me, when I've when I've been told and what I can gather. And I'm I'm saying this as someone that is uh well to pretty new novice to this new sect of Zen. Um It's just sitting and and trying to quiet the mind. You know, and that means counting meditations. Um, you know, counting the 10 and repeating yourself, uh following the breath.

Uh it's it's that s classic Zen posture of looking at the wall, not closing your eyes, kind of glancing towards the ground with a a fuzzy awareness of everything going on in the room, but no strict focus on any one object. It's saying to yourself A thought. A distraction.

It's okay. It is Uh, the weights in a gym is what I need to get to the next like level of of of this. And so Not getting upset and and getting the mind to where it's a little bit malleable. And kind of Get into that place where

The the sits are becoming uh longer in duration, but also the mind is calming down a bit. I think Henry said it best in his book. Actually this is a I'm gonna butcher it, but I'll I'll I'll I'll tell you w the gist of it. He said the zen is like Pulling the plug. Being a w uh a boat in a bathtub and pulling the plug of the drain.

And Initially You kind of just notice a little bit of swirling, a little bit of like movement of the boat. And then you look around and you see the walls of the bathtub are a little bit Higher. And you're like, Oh, that's odd.

And then you notice A little bit more movement and all of a sudden you start to twist. And then all of a sudden you notice that there's a swirl going down the drain. And then there is The total annihilation of all things. And that's where you're headed. But you don't but you have to sit at the the surface for a while and just kind of like, you know, slowly

Realize that even though you're not feeling it. The daily practice is unplugging the drain and and you will eventually get there. So terrifying that's a terrifying description. Oh dude, wait till you read his book. His description Of his last tranche of

This passing into this, I think you would actually really like it because it reminds me of a lot of our conversations that you have had around like ayahuasca and some of the ego Uh just disintegrating and control death, yeah. He's getting that without any drugs, man. Just like intense Like

multi-day meditation kind of things that that happen. Yeah, for for I guess a lot of reasons. I think that scares me more because with With the T you're like all right, I'm gonna go to Crazy Town for four to six hours. Earth time.

And then I'll be back to some semblance of like normal computation and absorption of what we call Reality. But with the Zen practice with that description, it's it's almost like a slow motion. psychotic break that you've engineered for yourself. And that scares the living fuck out of me. So that's because I don't know how to back out of that. I don't know how to

Yeah. You can't that's the thing that's crazy, dude. I was when you read this book and you get to that point. I'm freaked out by this because when you go there All of a sudden you're viewing the world As an illusion, as a completely different

thing than you ever had before and there's no going back. What does Daria think about this? Is she supportive? Yeah, she listened to my interview with him when I did the podcast and she was like, Yeah, he sounds amazing and this is this is the path you want to go. Like I I support it. I mean I I don't think she's not worried about you like I don't know. wearing your shirt backwards and picking it navelint and like staring blankly the wall. You you have to you have you have to listen to his his post analysis of what happened,'cause he wrote the book after all this happened.

And I'm be curious to know if you would enjoy this world. I think you would. It sounds beautiful. Like every moment is a new and just Listening and it there's so much It's it's fascinating. I'm I'm gonna butcher it all. I think much like you with me and my various

Um Psedelic. Experiments of which there are now many, many, many, many for you. It's a lot. And uh I you've kinda let me be

The guinea pig. I think I'll let you be the first monkey shot into space on this slow motion engineered psychotic break. Tell me how that goes. Yeah, I mean here to support I I think well it's not like you're gonna see me in six months and like we're I'm just gonna be levitating. Like this is gonna be like a if I if I do it correctly, uh this is gonna be like a thirty year kind of journey, you know, to get to these these places or you know, who knows? There's no there's no pinning a a date on it. Unless you sh unless he It's like grabs you by your ears and shakes your head and gives you the the Highlander quickening like you were describing. I love that actually. Grab you by your eyebrows and bite your fucking upper lip and like throw your throw you off your chair. That's exciting.

Yeah, you should you should check out his book one blade of grass. I highly recommend it to anyone listening. It's it's a fun auto he has a fantastic uh you know British voice is from the UK, so his um his audio book is is is fun is a fun lesson. You know. Yeah. The the British accent gives you an automatic Plus twenty points of IQ. Oh, a hundred percent. At least for um at least for any Yanks listening to it, my God. Such a such an upgrade.

Uh, you know, I wanted to to thank you for something you introduced me to, actually, uh, because I've been uh consuming a ton of it. You remember when you gave me some peak Uh T Yes.

the P-I-Q-U-E for anyone wondering. N not inexpensive. But they're Powdered poo air. I've actually been having almost every morning.

Uh for the last while. And it's fantastic. I've been having that usually before I do So the the sequence for me would be Wake up. immediately do the breath work.

H R V. Meditation for twenty minutes. Then Heat the water. She like one seventy.

Uh pr pretty low temperature just because I I I I don't like continually burning the fuck out of my mouth when I forget how hot something is in an insulated mug. And then putting in the peak. Uh who air with

Uh I don't know if you've ever tried Laird Superfood Creamer, the unsweetened stuff. It's basically powdered MCT oil is one way to think about it. And uh I've been fasting. Well If people consider it fasting. I've been semi fasting until late lunch a lot recently. And so I'll have that.

And then go into the say jump rope and so on. But uh the the peak is um It's really good. Took me a while to get into. But I appreciate you int introducing me to that. It's funny because um

Yeah, I I I never know like sometimes I'll reach out to you and be like Anytime you plug me as someone that can get you stuff. On your on podcasts and stuff like that. All the when do I plug you to somebody? Well like every once in a while do a podcast together and you'll be like, Oh dude, thanks for that recommendation, blah, blah. And then like A week later, a hundred random emails. Hey, uh I had this like ball massage or can you get it to Tim? Like you love it, blah blah. And I'm just like everybody comes out and be like, give it to it. So I'm I'm like, you're like basically I try all the shit and then the good stuff I pass on to you. So Well I appreciate trying to tea.

The Peak is a a cool company. I met with um with with the founder and we were chatting about Um how he creates some of the stuff because they The the thing that's unique about it is that, you know, so many times like T, as you know, is like you you steep it and you discard the leaves when you're done. They Um

Skeep it. Crystallize it. Through this like crazy process and then they make a instant. So it's like you can just pour it in. You don't have to Think about

You don't have to think about steeping it. It's it's like if you took every tea and made it into matcha. Right, exactly. Yeah. And so it's uh it's really easy to consume and you you can't screw it up, which is uh a lot of people oversteep their tea and they're like a tea is so bitter, it's so, you know, and it's like no, it's not Weirdness, trend it's just that you've oversteeped it. That's the main complaint. Um

But anyway, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, they they do they do quality stuff. I'm I'm glad you got uh Glad you're enjoying it. Yeah. What uh What else is what else is new in your world, man?

Oh gosh, I would say New stuff that I'm into. Um Well, I've got boring stuff. Like I'm getting into salmon fishing, that's gonna be next. Oh, I've got one. I've got one. Uh I don't you're the app guy.

I'm the idiot who's like You know, in in two thousand twenty two, I'm like, I found this app called WhatsApp. It's really great. And you're like, Oh boy, here we go. Yeah. So I am I am pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to Apps, but I did find one because I was Um As I mentioned.

doing a lot of hiking, have been doing a lot of hiking. And Uh I'm in a very rural area. I don't want to wander onto somebody's property and have somebody like come outside with a shotgun and be like, hey What the hell are you doing on my property? And I also just want to be respectful, right? I don't want people showing up at my house. Uh but I I

really wasn't sure how to identify property boundaries. And Uh I've I met someone Who hunts locally

And introduced me to something called the on X. Hunting app. And it's just O N X. And on X Hunt is the app and

I'm not going to necessarily use this for hunting, but what it allows you to do. And they give you the premium features for free for seven days, which is super, super smart. If if they're actually listening to this. I would I think they would get such better conversion. And probably increase their revenue forty, fifty percent at least from this particular app if they had an onboarding process, which they don't, right? There's no automatic tutorial that I saw, which

meant I had to kind of fumble and go find online FAQs and figure it out. But the On X Hunt app allows you to see Property boundaries, it allows you to hit track. And track yourself as you hike. So maybe similar to a Straba in that sense. But in this particular case it's for It's for wilderness. You can save maps.

offline so you can use them when you don't have reception. You can look at Topographical view, satellite view, or combinations. You can take photographs. So for instance, if I find something of interest Uh, and I want to share that with someone, I can take a photograph, geotag it, and then just share it with someone else who's on the app. And

This is cool. It actually it also covers uh fishing as well, which is great. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a it's an extremely, extremely cool app. Uh so I've Uh been using that. on a

Pretty much daily basis. And it and um Really, really enjoying. And who knows? Maybe I will use it for hunting. I don't hunt much. I do it pretty infrequently, but Uh if I were to travel to say Hawaii to hunt Axis deer, which maybe at some point I will

It's not not particularly easy to do. I don't even know if I could get permission to do it, but I would use something like this so that I could see how much mileage I'm covering, where I was, where I went. Perhaps We go on a scouting. Trip. Uh

during non hunt hours or on a non hunt day, and I could take photographs of particular locations that I think might be Ideal. Mm-hmm. go back and review that. Uh so I've been I've been loving it. That's that's That's an app that might not otherwise come across your radar that

Uh you might get a kick out of playing with. It's cool. Yeah, it looks awesome. I I'll definitely give that a shot given how many hiking trails there are here, uh, you know, in Portland. There's just so many hundreds of miles of hiking trails just right in the city, which is crazy. Yeah um so I you asked me what I'm into lately. Actually I do have one thing I haven't told you about. Um You know, I've been

I I think that l lately I've put on some weight and I have been able to shed it back off through intermittent fasting. Um and then also, you know, doing a lot of cardio and things like that. But how do you typically what's what's your intermittent fasting look like? Just real quick. Uh, eighteen hours a day. If I'm in if I'm in lean mode. Like if I want to get lean, eighteen hours a day. If not At a minimum fourteen. I think that's when a lot of the the data I have a uh a friend uh out of um UC San Diego, she works with Longo out there and she said that the

I was just talking to her like a week ago and she said fourteen hours is what she does. And that's where a lot of the data looks really promising in terms of just like some of the longevity benefits. I think if you're gonna do it every year eating from what, like Between what hour and what hour. I well I I just basically when I use zero, obviously uh and uh you know when I when I'm done eating dinner, so it's are with the kids and putting them down and all that stuff, you never know when you're gonna actually finish your last bite. So whenever I'm done, I just hit start and whenever, you know, it tells me to eat again, then I then I eat. Um but it's fourteen hours after I finish my last bite, basically.

Yeah. Cool. And so when I'm doing eighteen hours, you know, sometimes I'm eating a late dinner and I that I'm not eating until one thirty two o'clock the next day. You know, which is which is a little brutal, but it's okay. I just have black coffee and I'm totally fine. Um but to

uh uh I actually the the point I was was gonna or what I was gonna chat about is that In choosing my alcohol and alcohol consumption, especially during COVID, there was like this period there where like March, April, I was like, We're all gonna die. I'm just gonna get drunk the entire time. You know, I'm just gonna- Oh, I I remember that. Every time I talk to you, you're like, hey, dark says whatever. I'm five glasses in. How the fuck are you? I'm like, I didn't say I didn't say five glasses, but I was definitely three. Yeah, it's like but it was you know, we were we we didn't know what was gonna happen and it was kind of freaky and it's like might as well open the good stuff, you know? Yeah so um in in my T cutting back and focusing more on health. What I've decided to do, and this is kind of a crazy thing, is like, okay, wine can get nuts though. Like you a really nice bottle of wine can be thousands of dollars for like crazy wines, right? Like nobody wants to do that.

I mean some people I guess wanna do that, but not on a regular basis. So What I was thinking is Why not go? I went to beer advocate. And I went to their top one hundred beers.

And I've been slowly finding and buying the top Ten rated beers in the world. And then trying them. Like just to consume. Like if you ever had the number one rated beer in the world, I hadn't. What is it?

It's right here. It's uh it's called the um Kentucky breakfast stout. And it is uh from topping toppling Goliath. Here, let me show you what it looks like one sec, since we have video. All right.

So out of the the top Uh Beers of the World, I would say out of the top ten, um, probably seven or eight of them are stout. So it's like the thick, dark, rich funky slow sip type stuff. Oh, good.

So look at the smelt on the top of that. That's cool. Now who hand numbered Two thirty three. So you you said beer advocate. I know nothing about beer. So beer advocate has like their their top just like some guy in named Tony in Newark, New Jersey who's rated these or who I think it's community based and and they they have a lot of a lot of the pros and stuff go on there that are really into this. But but this Kentucky Brunch Stout um by toppling Goliath is. It's so the vintage is twenty sixteen, so they age these like wine. Because they are so dense.

You can just basically put them uh in, you know, the wine cellar and let them sit for a decade or longer. And then they really mellow out over time. Um, so I just I picked this up. I found it. I found a great site actually, by the way. I'm giving away all my best links, but the people need to know about this because it's a fantastic site. Um My favorite place to buy aftermarket beer.

I've done a lot of research on this. Uh is mybeercollectibles dot com. So you say aftermarket, it makes it sound like you're buying a spoiler for your Miata or something. What does that mean? So what what that means is you know, this is bottle number two thirty three. Maybe they made five hundred bottles in this year. So it's impossible to find that you can't buy it new. You just can't buy it. I got it. So the site you mentioned is like the eBay Exactly.

It's the EBF beer. And so you can get Pliny the Elder on there. This one I got on there too. This is called the SR seventy one by the same manufacturer. This one's ranked like the number twelve or something like that. It's got you can't see it, but there's like a little blackbird stealth bomber on there. Uh or not itself, but it's a SR seventy one actually. And then all the ingredients and everything are written in binary on the side. These are so cool. They're like culty little fun beers. You you gave

A price anchor. on the wines, right? Thousands of dollars. You can go f I mean tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, right? I mean get wine gets super, super crazy. So what what does One of these. Very Well ranked beers go.

Okay, so let me give you it's wide ranging. So for example, I got um Some of them that can't be aged, you have to drink them fresh. So like there's a the number one ranked IPA I think it's the number two ranked IPA in the world is called Um, the Julius by a brand called Treehouse, okay.

So the Julius King Julius by Treehouse right now, a four pack. On the side. is going for thirty nine dollars and ninety nine cents. And that's the number one and number two ranked uh IPA in the world. That's so cool. Have fun. What was the name of the site again that you mentioned? Mybeercollectibles.com. That's such a great URL. Yeah, it's like it's such a janky site, but like they've got a lot of great great beers on here. It's on Geo Cities. Oh.

Mm-hmm. That's cool. That's super cool. Yeah, the uh the affordable Vices, right? There are certain things Where you can get

the best in the country or the best in the world for Less than fifty bucks. Right. I mean there are certain categories of thing. Where you can go very high end. I mean I I think Really good.

Chocolate would be an example of that. Right. If you really wanted to have a treat, I mean you don't ha necessarily have to break the bank to do that. But if you're like, Oh, I want to get the fanciest car The fanciest boat, the fanciest wine. I mean, you better have in inexhaustible funds or you're screwed.

Uh, and you know, at the end of the day, if you think about it too, it's like that stuff. Ages really poorly. Right. Neither of us collect that kind of stuff, but If

If you if you think of we know people who do. And it's like Four weeks after they've bought Something it loses its luster. For most.

And uh instead if you have this Uh in the cases we're talking about, right? The beer or the the chocolate, there's a there's something really special about the perishable nature of it. And it's It's an experience. Right. Well, that's the key, right? The exp it's an ex experience. Like that's what's been linked to happiness is like actually having experiences with friends and like this is sharing something like that, right? Yeah. It's great. Cool.

Love it. I love it. Well I I don't I don't have anything. I don't have any big ones on my on my list or anything that's coming to mind. One thing I wanna ask you before we wrap.

Uh I don't know if you'll share this actually. Uh you may not we might have to cut it, but um What are you so the stock market is so freaking crazy right now. Like gold gold is going up and individual stocks are going up. And I'm like, Well What that doesn't make sense. Like what what are you doing? Like what's the Tim Ferris uh four hour finance? Uh version of this.

Oh boy. Yeah. Be careful, everybody. Earmuffs, earmuffs, cover your ears. Uh I'll tell you what I've I can tell you what I've done. Yeah, what are you doing?

And it's not so much doing, it's more what I've done. And the I'm I'm glad you asked this because I recently turned forty three. And A while back I I Spoke with my parents, looked at the genealogy. Asked a lot of questions and determined that the average age of death of males on both sides of my family, if you adjust for some outliers.

Is Eighty five. So Forty three puts me past The half mile mark.

Right. And hopefully I live until a hundred and twenty, but I've also lived aggressively, right? So my system's taking a beating. And I don't assume I'm gonna live that long.

So I've been doing a lot of introspection and this birthday hit me kind of hard. Usually age, I'm just like, ah, whatever, it doesn't matter. But crossing Past that fifty percent mark. Hit me. Unusually. And I've been doing a lot of journaling, a lot of thinking, and I realized that

Number one, and you've seen this over the years, like I don't have A high burn. lifestyle, right? Like I don't I don't buy lots of stuff. Uh And

Like if I have a The ability to hike with my dog. My dog and my girlfriend are happy and healthy and you know, occasionally I'll splurge on nice food or something, but I don't I don't really You're not a flashy guy. Like I've never seen you with a sports car, I've never seen you with uh a fancy watch. I've seen you with fancy horse saddles. That's the only thing I've seen he's true, that's true. The only that was like probably the first time I ever splurged people think that he's joking. He's not actually joking. So for the For the four hour body. Because I killed myself on that book in more ways than one. And I was super proud of it. And I made a promise to myself because I very rarely celebrated. And

That's but that's been a weakness of mine as I don't celebrate. Right. I'm very hard on myself and I feel like you become comp well, the story I've told myself for a long time is you become complacent if you over congratulate yourself. So I tend to really not pause and smell the roses, so to speak. Not you guys, the other roses. And Smell you guys too, though. And

And Uh so celebrate has been this this kind of word of the year for many years for me. And when I finished The Four Hour Body, I promised myself if it hit number one New York Times. that I would

Horse saddles. Well, I didn't think about the horse house specifically, but I said I'll get something special for myself that relates to Japan because I used to live in Japan. I have this Deep love for For Japan and the Japanese people. And

Uh I had A around the same time, maybe a little bit afterwards, you might remember this. I did a a a TV show. Pilot. Where I went to Japan and attempted to learn

horseback archery in one week and y I'm pretty sure you can find it online. If you go on YouTube and search Trial by Fire, you might be able to find it. It's wild and it's fucking dangerous as hell. So I did that and I had I had been thinking maybe I'll get a sword, maybe I'll get some type of armor. And then I thought to myself, actually Because I had this experience, I'd really like to To get uh either a saddle or stirrups of some type. Initially I was just looking for stirrups because I thought they'd be cheaper and just easier to

Deal with And ended up finding a beautiful wooden carved saddle. So I do have a Japanese saddle. Uh, which at the end of the day wasn't that expensive, but for me it was it was like the f one of the first times I've ever treated myself to anything. So yes, aside from all that. And uh so to to z to zoom out.

Back to the The question about investing. I realized when I was journaling around my birthday that Uh thinking about money generally does not make me happy. It makes me more anxious.

And At the same time I feel like I'm pretty good at because I'm hyper analytical and over analytical, you might say, like I'm pretty good at Futz around and optimizing.

But the the optimizing At this point in my life Like I've figured out a lot of things that make me happy. I've figured out a lot of things that don't make me happy. Uh And most of the things that make me happy don't require a lot of capital. So this is just a long way of saying I decided that I wanted to make

All of my investing decisions Or like money decisions. Uh by my birthday, it didn't quite work out. So I gave myself a grace period. to Uh

Uh to the first of August. And then to take a six to twelve month break on all of that stuff. Meaning like I'm not allowed to consider new deals. I'm not allowed to look at stocks. I'm not allowed to do any of that stuff.

And uh So now I I'm glad I'm saying it publicly because I want to make myself accountable. Uh So I'll tell you what I did. Uh

It's pretty simple. Uh I've I've thought about and it's been made more complex, as you said, because all it's Alice in Wonderland. In

The markets right now. Like stuff is happening that just By any kind of rational prediction. pre-COVID just should not be happening. There's all sorts of weird stuff. And then I'm not sure what's happening right now, but certainly previously you had the the Fed buying high yield bonds, like all this stuff that

was off the playbook. And the there's such a dislocation between the market and the economic reality of millions of people in the United States, I mean tens of millions, of course the entire Entire

country for that matter. That I I I only wanted to put money in places where I felt I had some informational advantage Or

Not just in my head, but like in my heart and gut. Just had some conviction that I couldn't quite explain. Does that make sense? Where I'm just like this feels like it makes all the sense in the world. And I don't have that very much. So just to be clear to people, I'm not one of those people who who Uh uses

the word intuition as justification for lots of haphazard shit. That's just not me. Uh but You know, you and I I think is a way honestly to kind of distract us from the stress and uncertainty. At least in my case, like talked about

quite a bit of investing stuff over the last few months but we haven't talked in maybe the last I don't know, two months about this stuff. And uh you know, you had some predictions uh that I think turned out. really well. I don't know if you if you're open to talking about them, but like Peloton, right? Where I thought maybe that was already baked in. So I was like, uh, you know, like I I'm not gonna buy a bunch of different things from Peloton. I don't have enough room. I do have one bike and I love the bike, but I'm I'm not gonna buy a bunch. They've ended up doing really well, at least last I saw

So the the question I asked myself was Which companies If we're talking about the stock market, right? Because I I don't think it helps people if we talk about More esoteric stuff like distress debt. Or

Yeah, spacks or like weird. stuff that most people aren't gonna have access to. But when I looked at the stock market,'cause my biggest Uh I would say my most My highest conviction bets. Have been

In the In the stock market, which you know is crazy for me. I don't play in that sandbox. You do that all the time. Uh but I I I I just asked myself like This was around. Mid March.

And I listened to an interview with Chamoth. I can never say his last name. Uh But uh interview on investing and sort of his framework for looking at different investments and it it it catalyzed a bunch of questions for me. Some were the same questions he had listed out. I put I I put this interview In

Five Friday, the newsletter that I put out. So um I think the Interviewer. Was Pomp is his nickname or Pompaniano? I think we both talked about this

Podcast together. Maybe I sent it to you. I don't know. Maybe You might have sent it to me. There's a very good chance that you sent it to me. I mean, this is the kind of thing that you would send to me. So everybody listening, send your interviews to Kevin. Uh and Uh I began to wonder

Which companies technology companies. Would do extremely well If Covid were protracted. Or if Covid were somehow magically resolved in three months, like which companies

Would benefit from A Short period. of dramatic online acceleration. Even if it ended in three months, and especially if it continued for a year, year and a half. Uh, and at and at the same time I was I was looking closely at other countries like China, where I might be getting the numbers wrong, but there's something like s seventy nine percent all e commerce and where

Seventeen. Something like that. And Yeah. A lot of room to grow. And I wasn't trying to do any fancy spreadsheet analysis. And I know people are going to say, well, then you're speculating. And there there might be some truth to that, but

I only really And I ended up Deciding. This is when

Uh and I can tell you what the prices were too. So Amazon at about two thousand. And uh Shopify at About three eighty per share. This would have been in very I th I wanna say early April, but some point in April.

And I decided to initially I was looking at a bunch of different companies and what I Decided for myself was that if I If if I was Dividing my bets because I had low conviction. I shouldn't put money into any of

Those bats. And I'm not saying that's the right approach, but that logic made sense to me and I said, all right, I have high conviction around Amazon and Shopify. And If one dominates the other, then

you know, perhaps I still break even, right? But what I noticed was when I went I I use Amazon. All the time. And certainly my spending has increased dramatically. After Covid. And I remember when Amazon was limited to essentials and I couldn't get anything else.

Right. I would go to order like coffee filters and it was like four week delivery. And I thought to myself, These companies are fucked. Right. Like if if these people are are largely dependent on Amazon and they don't have

A uh an elegant or effective E commerce Plan B. They're going to need to do that immediately.

And Who's that gonna be? And as somebody who isn't at uh you know, one of the first advisors to to Shopify and then Uh, one could argue stupidly, but it made sense to me at the time. I ended up selling shortly after the lockup period when they IPO'd, so I became an advisor when they had eight to twelve employees and now they have whatever, two thousand.

Uh I always kicked myself, right? Because I love those guys. And They know what they're doing. They're good guys. The uh They're very strategically intelligent. They're great at executing. So I was always kind of kicking myself and I and and when they suspended

their guidance for twenty twenty and they got Pummeled, I just thought to myself All right. You know, if you really believe that And you're seeing this kind of trend.

then this would be the time to like push some serious chips in. And it's like either put in enough Yeah. If it grows. Like and and I kind of

In my mind. Thought okay. two to three X in share price over the next three years. Did not expect it to happen in three months. I mean that's just bonkers, right? Yeah. Uh but those are the only those are the only if I I I don't think I'm omitting anything, but I think those are the the two stocks that that I put a lot into. But it was really thinking about what would do well.

No matter what. And Of course there are lots of unknowns. There's there's uh key person risk. In both of these companies, but

The they've they've both been really, really smart and Yeah. Mm I don't know about you. I think you do this too. I mean, I base a lot of my investment decisions. This is true for early stage and it's also true for later stage, just based on my personal day to day experiences and how I'm spending money and how my behaviors are changing. And if I see those same behaviors changing in a dozen of my friends, I'm like, I think this is the thing.

Well, I mean that's that's the beauty of being an early adopter, which you are and which I am. Like you're early. Right. And if that's true, and uh all of our friends are early adopters and we're all early on something, we should be buying that stock, right? Because we're early. So I yeah, so I I follow the same uh kind of strategy in that I have two buckets. I have so

One, we should both say that neither of us are registered investment advisors, and this is not investment advice. This is just like what we would do personally. Two things. My sister. What will I tell her? I'll tell her don't buy any of individual stocks. Buy Wellfront, go into Wellfront, get a bunch of index funds, play it safe, do your thing.

Set yourself up for retirement, you're done. So one bucket of My portfolio is like that. It's just like ultra safe, like slow growth, nothing fancy, lots of index funds, blah blah. Then There's the okay, let's take this

And this is different for everyone in terms of what what their allocation would be. What but but some percentage of your overall Um net worth and say I'm going to take that and invest it in something that I hope will have a blended three X over the next five years, right? Or four X, whatever whatever you're kinda aiming for. And for me it's it's the same bucket. So I I was thinking, okay.

Heading into Covid. What are the things that are gonna do better, which would be a Peloton? Um, because you know Gyms. It's a fantastic product. The churn is

Effectively zero because when someone else buys a bike that is being sold used, a new subscriber is then activated, which is crazy. It's one of the very few products that has like zero churn. Um, and you have to imagine they're working on and they've hinted at this publicly. They're working on other types of equipment, right? So it's not just a one trick pony. They already had a treadmill, they pulled it back.

The so they're revamping it like that's So It it's you know, and it's a like right now, even today. It's a nineteen billion dollar company. Like If you think of this more as a technology subscription play and the future of fitness

I think there's a much larger business to be built here. And you know, we were Talking about this when it was Under ten billion. Yeah, in market cap. So That's interesting.

Amazon Obviously to your point about e commerce penetration being relatively low in the United States. This there is no bigger Goliath. There is no bigger giant than this, you know, beast of a company. And it's like they're just gonna continue to crush. Everything and so for me that's not a three X because it's already a 1.8 trillion dollar company or whatever it is now, like But it's

You know, there's some there's there's still some growth to be had there. And and I'd say I I I'm not betting against e commerce ever. And especially in a COVID world, people are gonna be shopping and doing more shopping online. So I I like that. Um Square, I love how they diversified their their product offering. Square Cash is a fantastic app. So it's not about brick and mortar. It's now about You know, they're doing stock trading, they're doing Bitcoin purchases, which they've made up a ton of money off this last quarter.

Um It it's about building out that suite of personal finance tools for the unbanked. Um directly in that cash app, which is I I just think you know it I'm so To my point earlier about the three to five X, you have to look at lower market cap companies. You can't be looking at

an Apple or an Amazon for those types of returns over time. So you know, Square is a sixty seven billion dollar company. There's I I believe there's more room to For them to grow there. Um W like you on Shopify for everything you've said. Uh

Tesla, same thing. I think it's Expensive right now, but I mean they're They're continuing to build up these massive giga factories. There's a reason why every other week they're like announcing a new giga factory. Like the demand is there and they have a fantastic product. Um yeah, I I just love it's hard to bet against them. Here's one that's interesting that I haven't told you about.

So I don't know if you know this, but Intel is kind of screwed right now. They've had a really hard time with their chip manufacturing and getting this this pr new process down, these smaller dye chips. Uh AMD has just been crushing them. But here's what's interesting. So Apple also moved away from Intel chips and now is now doing their own chips, right?

So Apple and AMD But the Apple is not using AMD, Apple's using their own silicon and doing everything. So who makes all these chips? It's a company called TSM. out of out of Taiwan. That makes all these next generation, they're like the better version of Intel.

So TSM, I think is gonna be I mean, they're already a three hundred and seventy five billion dollar company, so they're not tiny. But but T SM is massive and now Also consider this. We're going into the fall. Two things are happening. Play station, the new PlayStation, the new Xbox that are coming out.

Both of them. AMD architecture. Both of them being manufactured by TSM in terms of the chips themselves. So I I I'm excited about TSM. Um And then you know, I buy some some gold to hedge all of that. Uh And then that's pretty much about it. I got oh, you know.

Spotify, dude. I think Spotify is gonna be seen as the Netflix uh of audio and eventually we'll get into video as well. And I I think it's gonna be Um, there's a reason they haven't launched Joe Rogan on in the app yet.

And I think it's because they're revamping My gut my gut tells me they're revamping the player and they're gonna announce video at the same time. And it's gonna be like Spotify is gonna be like the next next Netflix. I think that was so I I agree with you and I I One of the discussed, publicly discussed but under discussed aspects of that deal was the inclusion of video that that his show would be coming off of YouTube.

And going into Spotify. Right. This is That's the thing that people are like, Oh yeah, and they're doing the video thing, but okay, but look at the audio and look at the price of the deal and I'm like No no no Right. That video is super fucking important. Right. Pay attention to that. That's a big, big, big deal.

It's huge. Yeah. Yeah, those guys are smart. They're really smart. Do they have the Michelle Obama podcast now that's exclusive to Spotify? And like I was it's funny, I was talking to talk about like speaking of early adopter stuff, I was talking to my my my wife, Daria, and she's like

You know, she we just had this conversation last night. She's like Ah, Google Podcasts is crashing for me. She goes, you know what? I'm just gonna use Spotify because everything's there and they got some exclusive content now. And I was like ding ding ding ding. Like that's just, you know. It's gonna be the default. Yeah, they're smart and they're being very, very aggressive in ways uh That

Some of their competition really can't. Um I mean they they technically could, but they're just not designed to be aggressive in the way that br that that Spotify's being aggressive. And uh be super curious to watch the space, obviously, because you know, I I play so much of the podcast world. But uh Do you think you'll ever join them?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean the Yeah. It would have to be an incredibly good offer. I I do I've thought about this quite a bit. I mean, as it relates to different options, right? Because There there have to be some responses or reactions from the big players, right? Like Apple, Amazon, Google are all going to

put a lot of capital and energy into this space because there's there's money to be had. And if if anyone's playing with music, they recognize that the margins and advertising dollars are much more interesting. The economics are much more attractive for podcasts and spoken word. I mean look at look at Audible, right? What a monster. Uh So dominant. Another reason that I'm bullish. Um actually one of the one of the reasons I I was really bullish on Amazon is I said, and this actually came from a friend of mine, Mike, who pointed it out.

And he said. What is gonna happen with live sports? How are they gonna broadcast? Sports. Two millions of people.

Who is equipped to handle this right now? And he's like Amazon with Twitch is equipped to handle this in some fashion, right? Like there are There's infrastructure within Amazon. that can be adapted. For all sorts. Of

gaps in the market. Um to Well the the beautiful thing Amazon gets paid no matter what because like who guess what happens when Google taps out their data centers what they light up next. They're lighting up Amazon Yeah, exactly. Everybody's letting up AWS when the stuff goes goes big. Exactly. So Uh Let me ask you a question about you you meant so a couple things real quick. So yes. confirmed that we are not registered investment advisors. And I think it's really important for me to provide a little more context around my comments where uh I said I put in

you know, enough chips where it would would would be meaningful with, say, Amazon. And um Shopify, man. You said Spotify. I always confuse the shit out of those two. Um I put

When I put money into both of those companies, I had Roughly Fourteen times more. in cash reserves. So this is really important to keep in mind. In other words, at the time

Right, if I put two percent of my liquid net worth into those stocks. I had something like thirty percent. in cash or cash like reserves. Right.

I'm playing it. From my perspective, kind of safe in that respect. And I do not recommend people stock pick in general. I just think it's a terrible idea. Uh And

If if you're gonna if you're gonna play in this world d like There's no such thing as timing the market and you just never know what's gonna happen. Like Always dollar cost average your way into any position. So that that means like if you have Five hundred dollars to invest. Rather than say, tomorrow I'm gonna go buy some Spotify for five hundred bucks and just call it a day. Like maybe divide that into five$100 investments over the course of five months or three months. You know, you're not buying at the bottom, you're not buying at the high, but you're getting that blended dollar cost average. And a lot of people do that to

as a as a little mini way to to hedge and and you know,'cause who knows what's gonna happen given how insane this market is. The second piece that I think is important to mention is and I think Tim, you're in this boat too, but I wouldn't be buying anything that I wouldn't want to hold for the next five plus years. So it doesn't really matter. I should have said that. I was planning On not. Touching these for three to five years. Yeah. So I mean if if something drops by forty percent.

Will I be crushed by looking at the price? Of course, but is I think long term I'm gonna be in a g in a uh just uh you know fine position. And that that's the way you kind of you you alluded to this too. It has to be something that you're comfortable losing at the same time, right? So it shouldn't be The life savings, right? Yeah, and we should also say it's like we're talking about companies that we actually really fucking No. Right. Some level. Right, I mean it not this doesn't mean that it's a different type of knowing than reading every analyst report.

And Um it it's just again a deep Product knowledge and the fact that Like we both like I I w I know dozens and hundreds of companies.

Use. Shopify. Right, as their e commerce solution. I use Amazon every day. For one thing or another. And

Uh I think that's important to keep in mind. And question about Uh Yeah, I think my dog really has to pee, so I'm gonna pick her out in a minute. She's Being very good. We we can we can we can wrap things up. We can wrap things up. I'll this this would be a good way to expedite the the answer to my question, which is you said you're buying gold.

How do you think about gold versus crypto? Because you've been very involved or knowledgeable of and tracking crypto for for quite a long time. And are you buying ETF? Are you buying uh you know bars in some vault in a foreign country. What are you doing?

And why gold versus crypto? How do you think of them about them differently? Well, on the gold side, I I like to look at the ETFs that that do warehouse their own gold and actually have, you know, full transparency reports about actually owning the bars and you know, so I I actually buy the iShares Gold Trust, which is IAU. And I like that A couple that won their the the biggest one out there is GLD, but their expense ratios are higher.

Um IU uh I believe there was a couple things I looked into in in that it's also like Like like Providence, like where were they keeping their gold as well? And the IU had was keeping it in Switzerland and I think one I think the UK as well. And it just

I wanna make sure where they're storing it is also s safe and secure and not sound a crazy war zone or something else that could, you know, potentially go really bad on that front. Bank of Sierra Leone. Yeah. So, you know, I just I I went with that one. There's a I'm sure that they're all the big ones are all probably pretty decent, but uh in terms of crypto. You know I have a bunch of

cryptocurrency that is not yet Tradable that Um, I've invested in over the last few years. And so that hasn't hit the market yet. So I already see my crypto as being pretty full. I don't think um holding Bitcoin or Ethereum is a bad idea. I just wouldn't make it any substantial

portion of my overall portfolio. Like I wouldn't it wouldn't be ten percent or something crazy, you know? Why do you have less confidence in crypto than gold? If I'm that's a leading question, but I'm just making an assumption here. And that does not to imply that I am a Super Bowl with crypto, but it seems like in some respects you are more confident in

Gold as a disaster hedge. versus crypto. Why why would that be the case if it's true? Well I just It is true, and I believe that you have to look. Uh what are the

safe asset choices that institutional investors have direct access to. And um there is no easy way, you know, ETF uh to buy cryptocurrency. It's just not there yet. And and I just um It's not to say that people won't turn to crypto and the prices won't, you know, five X by the time this video is released. Like who knows? But I I just I know that the gold is so time tested that I I just I feel it's

It's it's a it's a proper it's a it's a it's a proper hedge and I'm okay with with with having some portion of my portfolio being gold. Now, do you view that as a hedge against hyperinflation, a hedge against general equity collapse. What are you hedging with gold? I would say a little bit of both, but mostly general general equity collapse. Like just something I I'm hedging in that I believe if all like let's just say we have a vaccine that

Doesn't work. And this turns into a three or four year process instead of a one year and change process. Jobs don't come back. That's gonna be a pretty brutal place to play, right? Like the markets, I think at that point might start to sour. It's very confusing why they have it today, but like, you know, in in that case, I I I would like a little more something a little more something that's a little bit more concrete, like

having gold as part of a portfolio. But that's that's just me. Everybody's different. I have some friends that won't touch the s the stuff. So And then I have some friends that actually have bars in their like actual physical gold bars, which I'm sure you know some of those people as well. I do, yeah. You probably have to. No, I don't. I don't actually. But I'm just like I'm like if it gets that bad where it's like Mad Max and Marauders, are you gonna drive your fucking dune buggy with machine guns down to the seven eleven and like take a razor blade and shave off a sliver of gold to get your tampon? No, you're not. Right, like Tim's on the corner with like a little little hatchet, like he's like etching off some gold and like trading it for some lentils. If it gets that bad, like you're gonna have to use your gold as a weapon because it's not gonna have any functional value. But I mean, who knows? I mean it it's uh

God, it just feeds every like not paranoid but sort of apocalyptic Scenario planning. compulsion that I have, which so I try to I try to not get wrapped up in it. It's hard that's it's so seductive. It's so seductive. Yeah. Cool. Well thanks for thanks for thanks for answering that. Yeah. I um I think people should be prepared for a long haul.

Right. Like it's it's I think it's very dangerous to try to do any short term trading. And I actually heard an anecdote, I'm not gonna mention any names, but one of the Uh one of the best known.

hedge fund. investors in the world who has an incredible, incredible track record. I mean the guy's his compounded annual over decades is it are just ludicrous. And He came in, this is uh a couple of weeks ago and basically like said to his team, he's like, Guys, it's too fucking hard. Just like take a vacation. We're not gonna do we're not gonna try to Deal with this right now. So

If that is happening in like one of the top shops in the world I don't think it's a good idea. For 99.999% of people to do any short term trading. You're going to get eaten alive. Uh either by

Other traders who do this twenty four seven or high frequency folks. Or you're just gonna get murdered by the market, right? As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Yeah. Um it it's it's crazy when you read these Reddits, uh subreddits about you know these Robin Hood traders that are using that app to leverage their positions. And like these kids are going in there and just getting these crazy leverage positions on certain things. I mean, they're driving up bankrupt companies like Hertz and all these to like new record highs. And you're just like, This is not We shouldn't be playing. Don't don't play with this stuff. Well, that one kid, that poor kid, I don't know, did you hear about what happened?

I don't know. There are a lot of pocket's cables. Which one are you talking about? So You know, Robinhood the app, it's a it's a fantastic trading app. It's a great piece of software, but it allows people to opt into Options trading and leverage trading like with like three clicks. It's like super stuff. Terrifying it. Oh, I know. So So these kids go in and this one kid put in I don't uh I don't know what the dollar amount was, but he he

He got uh on the wrong side of being leveraged and it saw he saw I mean, he didn't know these things were gonna expire and he saw like a negative, like I don't make him number, but it was something like a hundred thousand dollars negative account and he killed himself. Oh my God. All over Robin Hood and this and it and just a misunderstanding of what was going to happen in the end. And Just got so wrapped up to a and it it's ooh. I it's playing fire. Yeah, it is. And uh honestly for me, you know, another reason why I'm Just hitting pause on all this stuff is that

You know for me. These days like the function of investing. time and energy, but certainly capital is to Increase your quality of life.

Right. So if If w if one agrees that that is Let's just take that as the primary objective. If you're making investments that cause you to lose sleep and to your fingernails and have cortisol pour out your eyeballs. It's a bad investment. Doesn't matter if it's two X's, ten X's, a hundred X's.

If for a protracted period of time, it's gonna have that psychological, psychoemotional effect on you. It's not a good investment. And you know, I've learned that the hard way too, right? I've chased returns, certainly in the startup world and all this stuff. And I was like This fucking sucks. Like this is not fun. And even if you're good at it, doesn't mean you should do it. Like watch after this podcast comes out, like venison futures are gonna like shoot up and like it mentions venison is the future. Venison is the future. Maui Nui get after that.

Cool, man. Well it's it's awesome to see you, brother. And uh miss hanging out. And uh It's a bummer to not be able to spend time in person. So hopefully we'll be able to do that before too long. Yeah, agreed, dude. It's been been too long. It was I'm actually really glad that you got to visit us just before this whole Covid thing happened. You know, it wasn't that many months before. So it was good to see you then. But it's uh It's been it's it's it's tough.

Stuff. Stuck in the house all the it's hard with significant others too, you know. It's like you really realize what your relationship's made of. But uh You get you get to see all the stuff. Exactly. And all your stuff. Uh I've got no shortage of of my stuff. You know, it's a daily project. And anything else you want to say before we wrap up? No.

Yeah, I mean I'm not on social really these days. I do tweet every once in a while at Kevin Rose. But um yeah, if you I would say one thing I I would like to mention is if people want to check out um that Zen interview I did on my podcast. With Henry. I thought it was quite good. It was like, you know, and I'm sure you Tim, you get like this too, you probably obviously don't say it publicly, but you record episodes and you're like episodes just okay. You know, it's like you know, sometimes you're like every once in a while you get one of those. Yeah. Yeah. So uh this one I was like, wow, actually I think I did a pretty decent job with this one. So I was I was pretty proud of it. So I think people will enjoy this one with with with Henry Shuckman. Um and you can find that at podcast.kevinrose.com. Sweet.

Yeah. For me, uh Really Love doing the Hugh Jackman. Interview. Must have been huge for you, dude. It was amazing. Yeah, it was just a dream come true. I mean, he's been on the wish list forever, and he just was so game.

Uh so the so if people wanna check that out, I think it's just Tim D have a list of you. I gotta listen to it because Dario was like, Did you hear that Tim interviewed Hugh Jackman? I'm like listening out of my mouth as I was like, he must have been shitting himself. Like that's like your dream episode. Yeah. I was super nervous. Uh It was great. It was great. So hopefully. Did you ask him about his training and stuff? I did, yeah. Oh I knew you would have. Yeah. Doing more brain and everything. I was like if you could only choose one exercise, what would it be and why and what would the protocol be? He he gave

He really gave the details and got into the state. Oh, that's exciting. That's awesome. So that one I'd recommend people check out. If you just search my name and Hugh Jackman or go to the your podcast app of choice. And then also I'd say one thing that I am still doing that I'm still really enjoying is Five Bullet Friday, which is the newsletter that goes out to between one and two million people every Friday. It's free. It's just five bullets of the five coolest things that I've come across that week or that I'm Thinking about using, experimenting with, pondering. And you can find that at Tim.blog. Forward slash Friday.

Yeah, That's it for me, man. But uh give a give a hug to the fam for me. Miss you guys. Yeah, miss you guys too. And uh yeah, let your dog go pee. Yeah. All right. Molly. Molly thanks us for getting off. All right. All right, brother. I do.

Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read. and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off. for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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