#617: In Case You Missed It: July 2022 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? No, I'm just seeing it.

My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton. Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in between episode which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite.

It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we Press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to Tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up

Live Bere. One of the UK's most successful poker players. Winning both European poker tour. and World Series of Poker Championship titles During her professional career.

What the hell happened in the morning? And you can contextualize this however you want. No, I mean what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments, not of ones quite this size.

But I had still played a lot of tournaments at this point. And I was there before before it actually started. Usually I p people turn up late, but for some reason I was there in my chair. before the first hand was dealt. And I remember they the company Poker Stars, whose event it was, You know, they dimmed the lights of like welcome to EBT San Remo, huge, we've got incredible field, blah blah blah.

And then they dim the lights and they put on on the screens around the room just like a promo exciting video. Promo video, you know. And I remember distinctly the music. It was Chemical Brothers Hey Boy, Hey Girl. Which I always loved. I always loved that song. Yeah, good choice. Yeah. And you know, I was like, Oh, this is cool. Yeah, I'm excited. And while I was just like listening to it, Just Like out of nowhere this like a bolt of lightning felt like. There was like this like And this voice in my head said

You are going to win this tournament. And it sounded like my own voice. But what I can't remember is whether it was I am gonna win or you are gonna win. But I'm pretty sure it was you are gonna win. But it's literally sounded like my own voice. And it was sounded like your own voice. Yes. So it was like the you know, when you speak in your head, like the the voice you hear, like

Most people have that right now. You know. That Tuesday voice that everyone hears. Um It sounded like how I would s sound in my own head to to myself. And it said, You are gonna win this tournament. And I got this rush of goosebumps. It's even happening a little bit like the hairs up on my you know, on my arms.

And I remember looking around the room like Did I just say that out loud? Did anyone else hear this? And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever, and I was like Well that was freaky. And Then the lights came back up and I'm like, Okay, cool, shuffle up and deal and I was still like stunned and I was like

Okay, cool. And then like halfway through the day you know, and then I sort of a little bit forgot about it, but then like halfway through the day I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips. You know, it's always a bad feeling when that happens. And I was like, Oh man, I'm nearly out of the tournament. I guess that was bullsh, you know. So like no I had like little multiple moments Over the next few days where It clearly was a real thing because I I've like checked in on it. And I even told a friend of mine on this. You mean checked in on it. Meaning you remembered that it had happened. That it had happened. Well because obviously the rational explanation to this is the it was just a false memory.

You know, the I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like making it. Exactly I reconstructed it. Yes. And I even have a friend, my my my friend Melanie, who was there and I bumped into her in the in the women's bathroom on like day two. And she's like, Oh, you got a lot of chips, it's going well. I was like, Yeah, yeah, uh th things are going well. Really weird. I feel like I'm gonna win this. In fact, I almost had a premonition that I did. And she's like, Yeah, you seem really confident. I uh we actually had this conversation and to the point that she, after I won it, she was like What the fuck was that? You like predicted this.

I'm like, I know, I don't know. So Yeah. I don't know how to explain it. I think you said string or series.

Of experiences. Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that? And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker. So what was interesting was awesome. Doing this herky jerky.

Did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger than you recall. No. No. I was not like a weird kid or yeah, you know, that had Sorry, I'm Let me start. You weren't like the kid from the Sixth Sense. No, I wasn't the Sixth Sense kid, no. Uh No, I did not, is to answer that question. I had not really ever had, I think, anything

Like I never saw a ghost or anything like that. Don't lump me in with the ghost hunters. Come on. I want to just paint the picture of that I was a very in fact, like a deep sceptic. Right. Well you still are a deep skeptic in all this. Right. But like certainly then, like I'd never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any conventional way. I've certainly not had any time loops or anything like that. Or weird voices in my head. But yeah, to answer your question of like is it a sort of common thing in poker? No, not so much a common thing in poker. But Have you since had more of those types of experiences?

Not of like explicit premonitions. No. I'm not nothing even close to that. I have had One really notable thing.

That I am happy to talk about it. It's If you change your mind we can cut it later. For want of a better word, I had And extreme energy healing.

An almost accidental one. So it was a few years ago. And Seemingly out of the blue I started getting this very unpleasant sensation in my ear. Where

It was like a sort of Low frequency Buzzing, humming quite frequently. Like so some some kind of tinnitus. Yeah. But it was almost like a pressure. And

voices, particularly men's voices. distorted to the point that they were Unbearable to listen to. And it was really bumming me out.

It would come in like clusters. I would have it like for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day. And it was stopping me from doing any social events because any loud scenario was unbearable, but particularly men speaking. I just couldn't handle it. And This went on and off for a few months and I went and saw a doctor multiple doctors and had hearing tests and they said, Oh, you're losing your hearing and the the the low frequencies of your of your hearing in that ear.

We think you have many ears disease. many years is this degenerative thing which usually people end up Completely deaf. when they have it, where basically the nerve cells in in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why. They think it's something to do with like salts and ion channels. And it's incurable.

As far as I know. And so I was told that's what I probably have. And they're like pretty r really sorry, it's you know it was just bad news to find that out. And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people like vomiting and so on. And so You can imagine I was like really down in the dumps finding this out. And then cut to

Three months later or so. Go to Burning Man. And I have for the first time one of these vertigo attacks. one of the days. I mean, I wasn't completely sober, but it was not a good time, as you can imagine, having a vertical attack while not being sober for the first time. So I was then really down in the dumps. And then on the last night of the Burn

I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl who I kind of I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mention about my ear. And she's like, Oh, well I I do energy healing. I'm an energy healer. I was like.

I I don't know what that is, but sure, do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like I I can try. And After She sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes. And then

She says I remember saying something like There's something there, I need to get it. And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth. Like not. Touching it, but just like phew.

And it was really unpleasant. So like you can imagine that sensation of someone like Inhaling over your ear. And I was like, Oh please stop. She's like, No, I need to get this, there's something there. And she does it, I don't know, for a few minutes.

And then eventually kinda. collapses in a heap on the floor crying. And freezing cold, going Oh my God, that was That was bad. I don't know what that was.

That was really, really bad. Again, I was not fully sober, so this is a slightly uh you know, retelling. But I just remember being so shocked. I just didn't expect anything to actually happen.

I didn't really feel anything other than this like unpleasant sensation of her sucking. But I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting. Because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her. And she said afterwards, or she you know, she came around after a little while and she was like, I don't know what it was. It was like Bad energy, I don't know. It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's it's gone away.

And I was like, Well, okay, what does that mean for my symptoms? Am I cured? She's like, Yeah, yeah, you'll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks and then you'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. And I haven't had any problems since. It kinda just like

It just blew my world open because Aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about. I have not. Ever subscribe to anything like that. I like I'm a physicist. In fact like you know I've proud like I kind of built a career of being a like

materialist, rationalist. Physicist. And I don't have any time for any of that stuff. It's all nonsense. It's all confirmation bias. No one's ever actually tested it empirically or proven it. Show me the study and I'll believe it. But

Here I am having that experience with Two What feel like pretty incontrovertible data points. That's

something that I cannot explain. Happened. And unfortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me. Such a blessing.

Next up Luis Vaughan. the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. The most popular language learning platform And the most downloaded education app

In the world. Let's also come back to the org chart. And Layla, could you Describe.

How that was done. what it ended up looking like. what were the implications and just kind of walk us through that. And I remember in our first conversation I told the story of maybe not the best example, the since it is ultimately has been superseded by Netflix and superior technology, but Blockbuster back in the day when Blockbuster as a company was a about to become a Blockbuster. Brought in. Believe someone from McDonald's and exec.

to specifically help them with org chart design. I've never designed an org chart. So Could you just describe What happened and where you landed with it. mean we've gone through a bunch of different work charts. When we were From zero to call it thirty employees or chat was was very flat as in

I was managing everybody. That was that. And I actually think, you know, maybe I took it a little too far. But I actually think for the first zero to N where N is around maybe twenty to thirty people.

The best thing you can do as a CEO is be a micromanager. I actually believe that. when you are such a small company, usually you don't quite yet have product market fit. You haven't really figured everything out. You have one goal. Get the product market fit. And I don't think you should be in the business of coaching people for this or that.

Yeah. Just I think you just micromanage people to like get to product market fit. I actually believe that. At some point it really shifts even if you love micromanaging, which I Love micromanaging, but I've learned not to do that anymore. Even if you love it, at some point this is just becomes you just can't do it as well. And It is in your best interest to start actually developing people.

You know, that shift should happen maybe at around twenty. I I don't know the exact number. That is when You should really start. Having Kind of a couple of managers, I think splitting things up into teams. What we did then it's not like we had a pretty good idea of exactly what our orc chart should look like, but what we did was

We hired our first manager. That was in me. It's a woman that this was maybe I don't know, seven years ago, something like that. It's a woman that's still with us. She's now the head of all of engineering. Uh she used to be uh director of engineering at Google. And I knew her because after selling recapture, I spent some time at Google. I knew her. I really liked her. Her name is Natalie Glans. She's she's amazing. And she took a much smaller job at Duelingo. She was managing uh, you know the larger job that she had and she took a smaller job at Dueling. I think she really believed in us and she helped us from her I s where I learned how to manage people really much better. She actually knew how to manage people.

And she really helped us kind of start having a structure of well, we have some managers. That really made a big difference starting to have teams. Then the thing that we did after that is we discovered this idea of Metrics based teams. Which to this day we use, and I think has been a really, really good thing. I think this is not the common thing, although some companies do do it, it's not the common thing. So

The standard thing that you would have in a company, for example, at Duelingo, we have The app has a bunch of different features. One of the features could be like we have a leaderboard, for example. I'm a leaderboard, that's a feature. In many companies, comment the normal thing to do is that you have a leaderboard team. A team that owns that big feature.

So just kind of you split it up by feature. These are feature based teams. We do not do feature based teams, we do metrics based teams, so we don't have a team that owns the leaderboard. Instead, we have a bunch of teams that own each a single metric. So for example, a metric.

That we have is Time spent learning. What they own is the number of minutes per day that the average user uses Duolingo for. And it turns out that changes to the leaderboard.

Can increase or decrease time spent learning if you do the kind of the right or the wrong thing. So that team messes with the leaderboard a lot, but they don't own it. The only thing they do is they have this one metric and every quarter. It has to increase. And so they just work on increasing this one metric and they run hundreds of A B tests to increase this metric. So

We discovered that, you know, soon after Natalie showed up, we discovered these metric based teams and we started at first our first metric based team was our retention team, which is all you have to do is make sure that users come back every day. And that team, you know, has has done all kinds of things, really optimized the streak on Duolingo. So this this this notion of a streak that people have. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The streak is crazy. Um, we have well, the number's a little larger, but now that we're a public company, we can't reveal numbers as the the latest number we've revealed is that we have one and a half million daily active users that have a streak longer than a year. Meaning they have not missed a single day. In the last year or longer. That's a very powerful mechanic. The retention team has worked on that. So basically

What we did is we discovered these metric based teams and what we do now at Dualing was when we care about a metric that we want to optimize. So a a metric could be daily revenue. Or you know, whatever it is, we form a team around that metric. That has worked out pretty well. So that's that's kind of one big shift with us. That happened?

So that that worked out pretty well. At some point we we had like Fifty teams, I don't know, maybe a little less, maybe like forty teams. That was starting to become we use the term goat rodeo. It started to become this craziness. And so

What we did is we we decided to pool the teams together that were similar to each other into this thing called areas. So now for example we have a monetization area. Inside the monetization area, we have a team that owns add revenue per day.

We have a team that owns subscription revenue per day. And then we have another area called the growth area where it's just growing our active users. We have a team that owns time spent learning. We have a team that owns Retention. We have another team that owns new user retention. Et cetera. And so we split up into areas. And that's how we're split up now.

And what has been really good is And the shift for me has been it went from micromanager to kinda learning how to manage Two Now

What I do is I you know, I'm a manager of managers. Well, I'm a manager of managers of managers of managers, but at some point that kinda doesn't matter that much. You're just a manager of managers is kind of what matters and I've learned how to start managing managers much better. I'm I I've gotten good at it. Next up Noah Feldman

A Harvard Professor. Ethical philosopher and advisor Public intellectual. Religious scholar and historian And author of ten books.

Including his latest The Broken Constitution Lincoln. Slavery. And the refounding.

of America Do any books come to mind or people Who you find or that you find Particularly interesting. or informative with respect to geopolitical strategy.

Brinkmanship. on this geopolitical Three dimensional chessboard. or warfare in any capacity. For people who would like to get a better understanding of how these games are played, maybe historical precedents, how different conflicts have turned out depending on

Different stratagems used by Opposing parties, for instance. Any books or people. You find Interesting.

One is something that a lot of listeners will have heard of, maybe all listeners will have heard of, and some will have read, especially people who are veterans and definitely people who've been in the service academies will have read. And it's not that long and it's unbelievably good. And it's this book called On War.

by von Klausowitz, a German general. It's the single most influential book on war written since Sun Tzu's Art of War. And As I said, it's required reading in military academies in every country in the world.

It's shockingly well written. It's unbelievably clear. And It has a very specific philosopical view about what war is like. And what war is for.

And it's famous for the line that War is the continuation of politics. By other means. And That's a profound statement.

Біз да інтес. Of political actors. And is prosecuted to achieve those interests. But the other thing about it that's really fascinating is he wrote it from the point of view that says the only w smart way to fight a war is to fight it absolutely. Without holding back.

Put all your cards on the table. Sorry, but all your chips on the table. And You know, try to win the war. And

That maximizes the odds that you will, and it'll be over faster. And if it's over faster, that's also good for everybody, he says, because Then it won't Kill more people and You'd have more resources. And yet, despite the fact that the first idea of von Klausovitz, the idea that war's politics by other means, is accepted by everybody in the domain of war and politics.

There are lots of wars that aren't fought. In the extreme all out. From Casidence. What? Tons of them.

Including a bunch of US wars which have not been fought that way. Wars which notably we haven't won. You know, more like Vietnam and Iraq. And arguably but Afghanistan. So

I would strongly recommend that book. I can't. Actually recommend it. Strongly enough. It really makes you think. And they're

You know, it's easy to buy. You can buy it in any bookshop and I'm sure you can buy it in On Amazon, you know, in twenty seconds. In terms of contemporary people Writing about the geopolitics.

You know, I really like to mix and match. I Like to read work by People who are thought of as realists who think that national self interest is all that matters, and I like to read work by people who are called idealists. We think that Moral principles matter as well.

And I really like historical perspective. So on anything to do with Ukraine I love the work of A historian called Tim Snyder.

Who teaches it yeah. And He's First of all, a fantastic historian who's genuinely a Ukraine expert. I mean His first few books before he got famous.

Were highly technical historical studies of Ukrainian history. And then each book he writes gets a little broader in terms of its audience, and now he writes very broad and general books. And he's a Terrific historian and he's really the person to read on Ukraine and its history. And he also takes you beyond just Ukraine.

And discusses the relationship between Germany And Russia. And really the whole twentieth century's concept of war.

Which interestingly he thinks of Ukraine as having been at the middle of, not because Ukraine was so important, but because the countries, Germany and Russia that were fighting these wars We're fighting in part. over the territory that includes Ukraine. So I would strongly recommend any of his books.

His grand book is called Bloodlands. It's Long. And Intense.

But it's very, very, very beautifully and and clearly written. And if you can still make a book about The wars of the twentieth century, you'll learn a ton about geopolitics. And the region in the process. Thank you for those recommendations. Sounds like I have some von Klausovits to read. First and foremost.

Ha. He would totally be on your pot he would totally be on your podcast if you were still alive. Next up Balaji Srinivasan

Angel investor. Entrepreneur. And author of the new book The network state. How to start a new country.

Which is also available for free. Mat. The network state. dot com So what do you think the US looks like in five years?

Just if we could paint a picture. Oh sure. It's Like BLM and Jan Sixth

All the time. You mean in terms of events or in terms of discussion? In terms of There will be mobs that are gathered online. There will be it's like stochastic network warfare. Between two groups.

Is it five years? Might be ten years. I don't know the exact time frame. It could happen faster, it could happen slower. But fundamentally I think the catalyst is If you look at interest rates and you look at the graph, have you ever looked at look at like the long term graph of interest rates?

Yeah, I have, actually. But we should put it in the show notes for people. We should put in the show notes because I just wanna find this graph a long term chart. So if you go to This

Graph and you click Max. Alright, so this is trading economics dot com slash united hyphen states slash interest. hyphen rate. Yeah, so United States interest rate, United States Fed Funds rate at TradingEconomics dot com, right? And they click

Max on this chart. I'm looking at Max. Mm. Okay. And so what do you see? You essentially see something where Over a you know forty year time frame. You have

A trend which is very much down into the right. Yeah. Yep. And What that is, is it's basically This is something where

Is And Dalio's actually also talked about this. There are trends that affect humans. That are

longer than the cycles that we're intuitively familiar with. For example, you're familiar with the cycle of your breath. That's a few seconds, right? You're familiar with a day. You're familiar with Basically the seasons of a year.

And That's actually what most people are familiar with. Beyond that, maybe the election cycle, you know, in four years. Or The longest thing somebody might be filming with, frankly, are

Venture capital funds or startups, which are like 10 year cycles, that might be the longest thing where you can run an experiment and see a few reps of it. in a five or ten year time frame over your life, right? A venture capitalist might see hundreds or thousands of five or ten year long experiments that most people don't really track things over that time frame. And any normal human cannot really track things over Forty or fifty years.

You have to kinda dedicate your life to that, right? Same thing that's happening over multiple decades. You really need Really good charts and stuff to see what the heck is happening. This graph is one of the best and most important because it's so unambiguous. And what it shows is essentially that the US

Economy We have run out of Juice. Federal reserve being able to print money and so on, it just keeps going down on this trend, like interest rates. And

If you notice every time they try to jack it up. It has to be pushed back down and kept down for longer and longer and longer. If you're seeing that in that graph. Yeah. And now the next time when they're they're gonna be forced probably

Two Bring interest rates all the way to the floor, maybe before the twenty twenty four election. And I think you will see Very serious inflation is a function of that. Because they'll print money. And we'll actually have genuine goods shortages.

Because we have all these supply chain things that are hitting. You have China doing its crazy, you know, the stuff with the with the ports and the Covid lockdowns. You have the uh you do do you have the slow steaming regulations? I do not know the slow steaming regulations. Basically like, you know, some ESG thing, this is a great example of how like moral You know the moral flipping. I'm getting this second hand, so I might have it.

Wrong, but I believe it is Reducing the speed of cargo ships to cut down carbon emissions. Let me just define two things real quickly. So you mentioned Dalio, just for people who don't know, Ray Dalio, former let's just call him head principal at Bridgewater Associates, at least at the time that I interviewed him, largest hedge fund in the world, about hundred and seventy five billion dollars or something like that. ESG environmental, social, and governance. factors. So just that bleeds into the

what you were just discussing. So please continue. Just to summarise it, basically We have more money. They'll eventually gonna need to print again. We have literally fewer goods. Where China's cutting off supply

There's sanctions, there's wars like Ukraine. There are covet lockdowns. There's stuff like slow steaming, which is this huge self inflicted wound by the ESG thing where every single container ship in the world has to slow down now. So you have A lot of things That can sum up into something where it gets nonlinear fast.

And If that happens and you do have Not just the inflation we have now, but genuine serious inflation or even hyperinflation. That is when society comes apart in the US because I mean r people have been so freaking angry at each other during the twenty tens

In a relatively booming market. Like in the twenty tens Up until twenty nineteen, things were like decent decent economically, but man, were people mad at each other. And when there's like actual genuine scarcity, if that does happen, if physical goods are hard to come by and your inflation, you know, inflation destroyed your currency and so on, and you have a country where people are heavily armed and they're yelling at each other on social media, and you've got fifty governors res like. You've got a very potent cocktail for bad things. And we've sort of seen this in lots of other

Countries. That Frankly, America was involved in in, you know, partially destabilizing, like look at Libya or something like that. Or Mexico or what have you. But I

People just really do believe on some level quote it can't happen here. Um But I think American anarchy unfortunately Is sort of where we're heading. And what exactly does that mean? You know, I'll try and paint a picture. So

First of all In eighteen sixty one, if you go and look at The map in eighteen sixty one. You have The Union and you have the Confederates and it's

The ideological and the geographical coincide. You have the north and you have the south. And we take for granted that the victory condition Was For the North to just

Invade the self. Because by invading their capital and burning and so on, they didn't just destroy their supply chain, they also killed their morale, and eventually they got the entire south to concede and they could flip them ideologically and Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, they uninstalled the software in their heads and installed software with new moral premises. Same in World War Two. Invade Nazi Germany. denazify them, capture the capital.

The ideological and geographical coincide, and that's how we think of wars as working. Now Today though. If you go and look at a map of the US and you look at Republican Democrat.

It's not. In clean states. It's very fractal. It's at the individual county level. You've got a little red here, a little Blue here, purple here. It's extremely Group together, it's fractal.

And so that means is that in physical space These two nations are cheek by jowl. But in digital space As that graph I showed you showed, those two social networks

Or just clustered apart in digital space. They are separated in digital space. Did I show you that graphic? Did you see it? Yeah, you did. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I got it.

And did we and we'll put this uh we'll put this in the show notes for everybody. Mm-hmm. So when you see that graph, you're like, oh, okay, so in physical space people are cheek by gel, but in digital space they're far apart. And that's where the battlefront is. And you can reconceptualize the last several years. as a social war. Because if in a physical war

The goal is to invade territory. In a social war, the goal is to invade mines. And now when we think about cancellation, deplatforming, hashtags, et cetera, et cetera. The point is Yeah. What you're trying to do is get

A node on their side to flip from blue to red or red to blue. And how do you do that? Because they're now uttering Your hashtag slogan. Right, BLM or MAGA or something like that. They're h uttering that slogan. That note is flipped. It's like capture the flag. You're seeing from their utterance. That they are saying the thing that indicates that are now on your team.

They're raising a flag over their company, et cetera. And You are able to cancel in silence. Those people who are saying things that are contrary to your view and so on and so forth. It is essentially something where Because you are constrained from using physical violence,

Since what are you gonna do? Invade a cornfield, invade a city, that doesn't actually work. You're winning. Digitally. It's digital warfare. Now when I say constrained from using physical violence

As we've seen, that's actually we're starting to see stochastic digital violence. You know The Proud Boys in Antifa and so on punching it out in the street. That's actually An extremely unusual thing in the nineties and two thousands America, you just never saw like Left and right wing militias Punching it out in the streets.

But you see that now, that's actually something which is De regour. I don't know, we're on the hundredth or Three hundred th it's like it's like an event. You wouldn't be like sh totally shocked that that's happening, that political violence is happening in America, but it is. And it's on a ramp. And so you put all that together and basically what I see is

Serious inflation. You know, Bitcoin mooning And then the US government trying to freeze or seize the bitcoin. With something that's similar to Executive Order six one oh. Six one oh two.

Next up Dr. Matt Cabrline. A profess of laboratory medicine and pathology. At the University of Washington School of Medicine. with adjunct appointments in genome sciences and oral health sciences.

He is the founder and co director. of the Dog Aging Project. Let me Revert back to the dog aging project for a second. You mentioned the clinical study side.

And I would love for you to describe the hypothesis going into that. What what is the and I hesitate to use the word hope, right? But w with the intervention of Rapamycin.

What might you see based on Previous Data. Or Studies.

So let me take a step back. Because I think it's useful to first Just briefly talk about how this idea even came about. Really in my mind I think the first time I really

Thought of the idea of doing a clinical trial in dogs was It's going on 10 years ago now. I think it was probably 2013. And Daniel Promislo, who's co-director of the Dog Aging Project, and Kate Crevey, who's our chief veterinary officer, had been thinking about the longitudinal study well before this. So I actually was actually in conversations with them that got me thinking about companion dogs living in the human environment as a an animal that we could actually study and learn about the biology of aging. And I'm a dog person, I've always had dogs. And so the idea When it's solidified in my mind, there's really no reason why

these interventions that we can increase life span and health span in mice, they're gonna work in dogs. Like I am I don't know that all of them are gonna work. I don't know Rapamice is gonna work, but I am Hundred percent rock solid confident that some of them are gonna work. And being a dog guy and wanting my dog to live longer. When that light bulb went off in my head, I was like This goddamn has to happen. Yeah. Right.

This has to happen. And so that was really what got me on the path of then thinking, okay, how do we do it? How do we actually А допрос. Хавишли тест вет. I hadn't settled on Rapamecin at that time. would have this effect in dogs. And so that was the process of going through how do you set up a clinical trial. One thing to consider is companion dogs very much like people's children. So you kind of think about a clinical trial the way you would a pediatric clinical trial. You really have to be sure whatever intervention you're using isn't going to Kill somebody's dog.

Or harm somebody's dog. So these are all the things that I started thinking about, and I settled on Rapamycin because There was enough evidence at that point that To convince me that it could be done safely. That was really the only concern with rapamycin, based on the side effects I talked about in organ transplant patients, that it could be done safely. And because it was our best bet. for the interventions that we knew about then and I would say still now

For being likely to have an effect on lifespan and health span for the reasons that we've sort of already gotten into. So what might we expect based on What we know in Mice. So I talked about some of the Tissues where rapamycin makes things better.

There are many other tissues where it hasn't really been looked at in that context of better But where at least we're not going to be able to If you give it life long. the declines are delayed, at a minimum we can say that. So that's true in brain, it's true in kidney, it's true in liver. May I pause for a second? Yeah. What type of degeneration or changes are delayed or reversed in the brain? This has been studied both in the context of normal aging and in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.

In every case you see improvements in function. So these are behavioral tests in mice. There are these ma water maze tests, things like that, right? So to the extent That they are actually telling us What we think they're telling us about cognition. You see improvements in the wrap of mice and treated mice versus the control mice.

Task performance space. Those functional measures are the ones that I put the most faith in. I think sure you wanna see changes in pathology and molecular biomarkers and things like that. I don't care if the biomarker changes if it doesn't make it function better, though. So that's why I start there. But people have done lots of studies looking at cerebral blood flow. So that's one model that's been put forth. There's decreases in neuroinflammation, as we would expect, given the effect of rapamycin on inflammation. in increases in metabolic function or mitochondrial function in the brain. So there are plausible molecular mechanisms by which Rapamycin could be having these effects. And that's pretty much

True in the other tissues where Rapamycin has been shown to have effects is a lot of people have been studying this and made I think reasonable models at a molecular level for how rapamycin is acting. So I'll just I'll cut it short and just say pretty much every tissue where people have looked, you can find evidence that function has been at least preserved. The one that might be worth commenting on briefly and and coming back to because we touched on it is muscle. So Early on, there was a lot of concern, I think particularly am among muscle biologists, that rapamycin would increase sarcopenia or or enhance muscle loss with aging and make things worse. And that's because It's known in muscle biology that MTOR

promotes muscle growth, or at least it's required for protein synthesis, which is part of muscle growth. So the Conventional wisdom was that when you inhibit MTOR, that would lead to a decrease in muscle mass, muscle function. Several studies now in both mice and rats have shown it's exactly the opposite. You maintain muscle function better. With age. when the mice or the rats are given rapamycin. Dose is probably important. So I do think if you were to push the dose too far.

you know, you might impair muscle growth or muscle maintenance. But if the doses that also extend lifespan and have all these other effects muscle is actually functioning better. In old animals than in control animals. And this is why I constantly I constantly tell The people in my lab and and other scientists, you gotta do the experiment.

You cannot Go into it. thinking that you know the answer and not do the experiment because you're dogmatic belief says this is how it's gonna work. You gotta do the experiment. So based on the

Mice data, let's just say. life span in terms of percentage increase in this case. What might be the the range. I think the upper side for what's been shown in mice so far with Rapamycin is about twenty five percent increase in in life span. I do And I mean that that's certainly possible in in dogs. I I would say if I had to guess, I would guess it's not gonna be that the magnitude of effect on a percent basis is not gonna be as big and longer lived.

animals. That's just a guess. I don't have any data to support that. Which, you know, might mean that the the the magnitude of effect in people is is gonna be even smaller, because people are much longer lived than than dogs are and much longer lived than mice are. So but it could be as much as twenty five percent. So you know if you're talking about A large dog that maybe would normally live to be fourteen years old, you're talking another three years. Study worth doing. And I say that as I'm looking around you to My dog Molly, seven years of age, laying on the floor.

Yeah. And The function matters, right? I mean the function really matters. Absolutely. I think most people would agree that the function matters more than the absolute lifespan. I think almost everybody says if you to ask them, you know, would you want to live longer They're like, No, not if I'm gonna live longer in a decrepit state.

Now w is it fair to say that that is one of the valid criticisms of at least certain forms of, say, claoric restriction. Well, I don't know, maybe. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily pick on caloric restriction. I think there's evidence that at least in mice, that caloric restriction can maintain function later in life as well. Now, you could make an argument about quality of life, for sure. I would pick on caloric restriction then in people. But I think the general question, is that a valid concern in targeting the biology of aging, I would say it is and it isn't. So nothing that I have ever seen. And I've seen a lot of things that extend lifespan.

Nothing has ever convincingly extended the bad part of life, the decrepit state. There's a little bit of debate in the C. Ellegan's field about that, but I think that's These are people arguing over silly stuff. I've never seen anything that does that. Sea elegance. It's a nematode worm. It is, right? Even there, I think it's a it's a semantic argument, not a real argument. But it's certainly in mammals. Nothing that extends lifespan Makes the

end period only extends the end period of life. I think it's a legitimate question whether some of these interventions might proportionately extend lifespan, where you're proportionately extending health span. But you also at an absolute sense do have a longer period of decline. That is hard to really completely resolve. I would say things like Rapamycin and caloric restriction, which those are the two most potent interventions we've got right now, really do seem in mice to push the declines in function and diseases back later into life. So you really have disproportionately extended health span compared to lifespan.

But again, that's my interpretation of the data, but it's a hard case to make quantitatively. Last but not least Mark Plotkin. In conversation with Hamilton Morris,

for the Plants of the Gods podcast. The audio of which appeared for the first time on the Tim Ferris show. Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist. who serves as president of the Amazon conservation team.

Which has partnered with around eighty tribes To map and improve management and protection, Of approximately one hundred million acres. Of ancestral rainforests. Hamilton Morris

Is a chemist? Filmmaker. And science journalist. He is the writer and director of the documentary series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia

In which he explores the chemistry and traditions. Surrounding psychoactive drugs. Well I want to make the point here that we're not doing commercials for any of these substances. And in all the episodes I point out that these things can be lethal, and you've mentioned that on your show and in some of your writings and interviews. But even of cannabis.

Which people sort of think of as this harmless thing that can't hurt anybody and I was reading something uh of yours recently that talked about problematic relationships with cannabis. So I wonder if you could give an example of that. So that people understand that all of these plants are the gods and fungi are the gods and frogs are the gods, uh may have a downside. Yeah. I think it's it's

Very important. to Have a balanced perspective on these things because There's been something. really polarizing about the way they've been publicly discussed from the very beginning. They're either a panacea,

It's going to cure all of society's ill. They're going to prevent us from being mean to each other, they're gonna end all wars. Or They're Poisonous.

agents that will Destroy your mind and leave you intellectually crippled. And of course the Truth is somewhere in the middle. where for some people under some circumstances they can have a tremendous benefit and they can be

Truly life changing. And under other circumstances they can have a damaging effect. And with you know, cannabis I think is an interesting example. Because it also includes the political dimensions of all this because

the people the people that have been using these substances For Decades. Have been Persecuted.

And That creates a sort of Insecurity complex. Understandably, justifiably. If the government says

that this is dangerous and they're willing to lock you in a cage for it. If your employer can terminate your employment if they find traces of this substance in your hair or your urine, which is an insane invasion of privacy that nobody should tolerate. then it makes sense that you'd wanna really stand up for this stuff and say, Hey, wait a second.

It's never killed anybody. It's safer than alcohol, safer than tobacco. This stuff is innocuous. In fact, you can smoke it every single day and you'll be totally fine. And in many instances that might be true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you should. And it doesn't mean that

We I think this is the tendency as we go too far in one direction or another. And a lot of it has to do with this Um Yeah, this insecurity from people demonizing these substances for so long.

Agreed. But uh can you give s perhaps an example of a problematic relationship with cannabis? Because your your point is well taken, but that is even cannabis can have a downside. Oh certainly. Yeah. I mean w I think one of the most interesting examples is there's a Disorder called cannabis hyperemesis disorder. Are you familiar with this?

um it wasn't described into in the medical literature until somewhat recently. It's a very odd phenomenon where people who smoke enormous quantities of cannabis. Will

Start vomiting. Continuously. And the only thing that relieves their nausea is taking a hot shower. And People started showing up in emergency rooms when they ran out of hot water because they couldn't

Control their vomiting. And This seemed really bizarre because wait a second, people have been using cannabis for thousands of years. What are the chances That Now.

all of a sudden a new cannabis related disorder would emerge. It couldn't be the cannabis itself. It must be A pesticide. It must be some contaminant in the cannabis, otherwise how could this possibly be explained? And the explanation is that yes, it is the cannabis itself. This is a product

Of chronic hyper stimulation of C B one receptors and the reality is that people are smoking More cannabis now. than any other time in human history. So new use disorders are actually emerging.

And although this is described as a somewhat obscure phenomenon, it's not as obscure as people think. I've known two people. That had this disorder. Didn't know they had it. And And it's especially insidious because

Cannabis. has an anti emetic effect. So you're nauseous, you think, Oh man, I'm so sick. I uh I need to smoke some cannabis because I'm really nauseous, but the cannabis is actually making it worse. It's the cause it's the source of the nausea. And

This uh during the pandemic I had a a friend who this uh happened to'cause he was just getting Really, really stoned all the time. And uh and I had noticed that he was constantly Soaking wet And I thought like why is this guy

Is he like taking showers five times a day? Why is he always so wet? And And he then told me, you know, I don't know what's going on, I've just been You know, vomiting all the time in a hot shower is really the only thing that that helps. And I thought, Wow, all right.

Yeah, I know what you have. This is a So th that's, you know, to I don't want to bring that up as a an example of something that everyone should be really terrified of because this is something that only afflicts people who are extremely stoned All the time. Um But

It's just an example of how Yes. Plant that's considered totally innocuous. uh under some circumstances can have a negative effect. Also I think there's something to be said for

uh maybe just not being stoned all the time. And I say this as somebody that likes cannabis personally. I'm not Uh trying to Hate on cannabis. It's just there's a like I said, a tendency to go. to these extremes of either cannabis is terrible or you should be stoned all the time because cannabis is a medicine. Well my mentor Richard Schultees would often describe mind altering plants as scalpels in the hand of a shaman, it can heal.

But it can also harm if it's not used. Correctly. And so once again, all of these plants, all of these fungi, all of these substances need to be used with caution and approached with reverence. And carefully. And uh that's why uh I often tell people You shouldn't be experimenting on your own with very powerful substances.

And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is Liv Burie. That's B O E R E E on Twitter at Live Underscore Bree. She is one of the UK's most successful poker players. Now a resident of

Boston, Texas. Winning both European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles during her professional career. Before poker, she studied astrophysics and now focuses her time as a TV host and YouTuber, specializing in game theory, futurism, and rationality. What a world we live in that you can now do that on YouTube. It's fucking amazing. It's incredible. She also gives seminars on high stakes decision making and recently spoke at the annual TED Conference about the application of poker thinking to everyday life. In two thousand fourteen, she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving. R E G parenthetically. I try that again. She co-founded raising for effective giving in uh parentheses R E G Let me try that again.

In two thousand fourteen, she co founded Raising for Effective Giving, R E G. We should keep all of those takes in. This is so bad. I need I'm trying to cut back on my caffeine and this is the price I pay. A nonprofit based upon the philosophies of effective altruism that raised more than twelve million dollars for its carefully selected list. of maximally cost effective charities. You can find her online. Livebare.com, livbre.substack.com And on all of the things, all of the socials, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, you can certainly search and find her Liv Marie.

My guest today is Luis Von An. You can find him on Twitter at Luis L U I S V O N. AHN Luis is an entrepreneur and consulting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is known for co-inventing captures, being a MacArthur fellow, and and selling two companies to Google in his twenties. He's currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a language learning platform created to bring free language education to the world. With more than five hundred million users, it is now the most popular language learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world. Luis has been named one of the brilliant 10 by popular science, one of the fifty best brains in science by Discover, one of the innovators under 35.

By MIT Technology Review and one of the one hundred most creative people in business by Fast Company. Luis also won the 2018 Lemelson MIT Prize, the largest cast prize for invention in the United States. I'm thrilled to welcome back Noah Feldman. You can find him on Twitter at Noah R Feldman, F E L D M A N. Noah is a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher, and advisor, public intellectual Religious scholar and historian and author of ten books, including his latest The Broken Constitution subtitle Lincoln Slavery and the Refounding of America. He's also a hyper polyglot. It tells you something when that can be omitted in the bio. Moving on, Feldman is host of the deep. Background Podcast, a policy and public affairist.

or Bloomberg opinion, and a former contributing writer for the New York Times. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the coalition provisional authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution. He earned his A B Summa cum laudi from Harvard, finishing first in his class, selected as a road scholar He earned a D fill, which I just learned how to pronounce properly, from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle's ethics. He received his JD from Yale Law School and clerked for Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court. Notice ten books also include Divided by God. America's Church State Problem and What We Should Do About It. What We Owe Iraq, War and the Ethics of Nation Building, Cool War, Subtitle

United States, China, and the future of global competition scorpions, the battles and triumphs of FDR's great Supreme Court Justices And the three lives of James Madison, genius. Partisan. President.

You can find him on Twitter as mentioned at Noah R Feldman Instagram. At Noah R Feldman. And all things Noah can be found at Noah. Heffenfeldman.com I

My guest today is the one and only Bology S Sreenivas, and you can find him on Twitter at Bology S. Bology is an angel investor and entrepreneur. He has the first and second place records for longest podcast episodes ever on this podcast. We will probably keep it to two and a half to three hours, I say with great confidence now. Formerly the CTO people listen to them. They do. They do people listen to them. A lot of people. These are two. The last two appearances were two of the most popular episodes certainly in the last year to eighteen months. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreets and Horowitz. He was also the co founder of Earn.com, acquired by Coinbase Council, acquired by Miriad Teleport, acquired by Topia and Coin Center. He was named to the MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, won a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, and holds a BS MS PhD in electrical engineering, and an MS in chemical engineering all from Stanford University. Bology also teaches the occasional class at Stanford in his spare time, including an online MOOC in 2013, which reached

Two hundred and fifty thousand plus students worldwide. His brand new book is The Network State How to Start a New Country. And we will certainly wade into those waters and explore all of the related topics in depth. My guest today is Dr. Matt. Caberline

You can find them on Twitter, M. Kaberline, let me spell that for you. K-A-E-B-E-R L E I N And Matt is a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine with adjunct appointments in genome sciences and oral health sciences. Dr. Kaberlin's research interests are focused on understanding biological mechanisms of aging in order to facilitate translational interventions that promote health span. and improve quality of life for people and companion animals. Dr. Kaberline is the founding director of the University of Washington Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute, the director of the NIH Nathan Schock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging at University of Washington, Director of the Biological Mechanisms of Healthy Aging Training Program. and founder and co-director of the Dog Aging Project. You can find him online at KaberlineLab.org. Again on Twitter at MKLine, and we will link to all the other social LinkedIn, et cetera, in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast.

Okay. Welcome to the Tim Ferris Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera, that you can apply to your own. Life. This time around we have a very special edition of this podcast featuring two of your favorite guests from the past, Dr. Mark Plotkin and Hamilton Morris. Mark takes over my duties as host and interviews Hamilton for an episode of the Plants of the Gods podcast. You, my dear listeners, are hearing this audio before anyone else, so it's a Tim Farrish show exclusive. I've previously featured some of my favorite episodes from the Plants of the Gods podcast here on this podcast, and you can find all those at Tim Dotblog slash Plants of the Gods. These episodes cover a lot of fascinating ground. So let's get to the bios. Who is Mark? If you don't know Mark on Twitter at

Doc. DOC Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon conservation team, which has partnered with roughly eighty tribes to map and improve management and protection of roughly one hundred million acres of ancestral rainforests. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books ever written about the Rainforest. His most recent book is The Amazon What Everyone Needs to Know. You can find my interview with Mark at Tim.blog slash Mark Plotkin. That's M-A-R-K-P-L-O-T-K-I-N. And the guest His guest today is Hamilton Morris. Love Hamilton. Hamilton on Twitter at Hamilton Morris, M O R R I S, is a chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist. Graduate of the new school, he conducts chemistry research at Saint Joseph's University. Hamilton is the writer and director of the documentary series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, or Pharmacopeia, depending on how you like to say it, in which he explores the chemistry and traditions surrounding psychoactive drugs, very often subjecting himself to personal intake. You can find my most recent interview with him at Tim.blog slash

Hamilton. And what you're about to hear is a tightly packed 60 minute interview. Mark and Hamilton cover the history of different psychoactive substances, Timothy Leary's legacy, the drunken monkey hypothesis, conservation, microdosing, the differences between five MEO, DMT, that's five methoxy, dimethyltryptamine, and DMT, a disease that afflicts people who smoke enormous quantities of cannabis. Yes, really. The impact of the placebo effect. Synthetic versus natural options. in this psychoactive spectrum of things, the role of ritual, and much, much more. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. Albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmas, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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