#886: The Random Show — AI Super Assistants, Boner Pills, Dream Engineering, Wizards, Supplements, Books, and More

optimal minimal at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking can i ask you a personal question now would you see an appropriate time i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton kev kev tim tim good to see you man dude glad we're doing this yeah so fun to hang back in la back in la for a little bit and it is a nice corner of the world it's not bad you know until the failed state implodes it's going to be lovely yeah it's uh we'll enjoy it while we can yeah so you have lots that we can talk about i've got some things jotted down where should we start let's start with probably the most talked about thing these days which is ai and i you know i know people are tired of hearing about all this ai stuff but i think there's been an inflection point in the last i'd call it three weeks that i am just really blown away by like ai has turned into something i kind of saw it coming but i didn't think it would come this rapidly so when i first thought of ai i thought okay we have this chat bot we can launch it we can ask like questions like of whatever you know i got to repair this light switch how do i do it like that's typical ai use case over the last call it you know two years last call it month there has been a release of a handful of ai assistants that are not your typical like chat gpt claude they're different so have you played with instinct at all i haven't but i know i know people are yeah so you should you should provide some context for folks who don't recognize it well so let's let's start off so let me first put the these are the people in the ring that are entering this new kind of era of personal assistant ai which is i would say and then you have grok bot which is essentially grok which is elon's project so when instinct dropped someone sent me a text invite was like hey you just got to sign up for this i was like oh man i don't want another ai thing like you know i already do this all day long i'm using for coding and all that stuff like whatever so the first thing that you notice is it's not another app to download it actually is i message so they have reverse engineered and they actually give you just a phone number to chat with it's closer to wechat in china yeah exactly so i have this phone number i texted it was like hey off your google account and like i know this is your nightmare from a privacy standpoint but it's like you know give us your gmail give us your google drive here's a link dot ru just click here yeah exactly it's like russian side or something but i i click through i auth it i'm like whatever there's some hype i hear it happening people are doing this like i don't have any like news but you probably do like i don't know i don't know how much you keep all that stuff online probably done what was this your nudes you keep it in google drive i just post those to my tumblr account no it's just your private tumblr yeah in all seriousness though do you lock down like do you have a separate offline storage for like sensitive shit i probably should yeah you should we should talk about this off camera okay like there's just certain things that like in my mind i'm always like okay what's the blast radius of if something gets hacked something what is one more thing kevin gives me to worry about yeah exactly yeah all right so okay so you often every day you're like oh my god i'm like oh my god everything and the first thing i notice is that this bot texts me back and it's like hey you missed this docu sign from a couple days ago and i was like oh shit well that was like kind of helpful you know so i went in there like did it and then it's proactively just watching everything and it learns by my responses everything i've done prior and it really understands what i care about and what i should pay attention to and who manufactures instinct it's just a startup it's a self-named instinct startup it's the startup it went from like zero to 10 billion in valuation in like four months it's great sounds sounds like a sign of the times yeah now why would you trust a smaller company from a privacy and access perspective versus like muse from meta exactly i trust muse certainly more because it's just going to be battle tested they're used to regulatory scrutiny i mean not that they're always the best actors but same time right well they also more maybe more you know yeah and they came out and they they actually did a whole briefing on their security model around their private instance of they meta meta with muse yeah so muse is a very similar product it actually has an app i think they're adding a phone number and whatnot it is just it's wild it's wild in that this is something where i never thought it would connect the dots in the way that it does like i'll give you an example i was doing international flight i was like okay i want to have like a prescription for gabapentin so i can get some sleep on the flight right careful that okay i know you have to be careful with it like whatever so it's i had a prescription coming in it got called in to get filled and instinct was like hey just so you know your prescription's ready you should go pick it up leave by this time because your flight's on time that's very and if you want to grab it go over here now grab it then and then head to your airport can i tell you something crazy yeah just in terms of synchronicity so three months ago i drafted a preface to the new book this book on no that i'm writing because there are many examples in the book around assistance and some of the very early reader feedback because i tested it with 100 plus people was some of these seem like one percenter problems and so i wrote a preface which was a letter from it's called a letter from the future and it basically talked about how in 2000 let's call it seven eight i was using a gen one dexcom which was like sticking barbecue tines under your skin i was with you so you got me on you remember that the plunger it was a plunger for people who don't know this is a continuous glucose monitor and now you push a button it's like oh tingly yeah and you get it and you stick a plunger into your body you basically yeah you basically had to stick two very long prongs under your abdominal skin now it's like a little peck on the cheek yeah it's so much better but at the time it was like nobody's going to use this and i was like well i don't agree with that because the tech's going to improve very quickly right and particularly once it went from this weird beeper device to smartphone it was pretty clear that the adoption was going to be rapid and then get outside of type 1 diabetics certainly type 2 but then get to kind of healthy normies and worried well yeah and on the assistant side i was also pointing out like back in the day yes it was a one percent problem just like inbox overwhelm and everybody has six inboxes now but in the case of assistants it's like sure it went from like full-time in person to virtual assistant to digitally enhanced virtual assistant and i was like by the time you read this we will have ai assistants yes that can do 99 of what i'm describing and it's already happened yeah so i've had it change flights for me i've told that there's a restaurant that's a hard reservation to get into this is all instinct yeah and i've told it hey there's a hard reservation to get into and it's like hey i can't log in with your open table but it drops at this time every two weeks but i'll if you give me a link and it's a secure like vault and i gave it my open table login and then it snagged the reservation for me perfectly and like add to my calendar and then the cool thing is if you have multiple friends with instinct you can friend your instincts together so i said to a couple of my friends there was one person i wanted to take to dinner and our instincts became friends and so i said share the calendar invite and all the details and the instincts just talk to each other and figure out the schedule it's magic this is how skynet auto populates for all the illuminati by the way they are people but they put them all in the same calendar invite to get them into one spot so the drone swarm can strike them at once yeah yeah it's going to be awesome i'm definitely going to use this everyone is going to be using right i mean chat gpt just announced dots that's their version of it now so that's come out how do you think about your history memory context if you've predominantly used something let's just say this may or may not be true but if you've predominantly used chat gpt would you be inclined to use dots or would you be inclined to use something else it's i don't know if they've made it harder or impossible to export your you can export memories and some of that but they are i mean this is the wedge they're looking for they want to have something that is uniquely theirs that isn't just like what's happening right now with the ai enthusiasts is that if there's a new model that comes out there's no there's zero loyalty right it's like oh claude's better i'll go use claude oh chat gpt is better and like people are jumping all over the place this is a finally becoming this global storage of your life and your story and your history and all the things that you're into and that is going to be i think something where they're going to lock that down the agentic ai's like once you authorize all that shit you don't want to do that every time a new model drops somewhere else yeah so question for you i saw a little news around this somebody a friend of mine who's keen on startups and investing texted me about contrast in styles and business models between amazon and shopify and this may have developed a lot of people have developed a lot of i'm sure it has developed very rapidly but i think that amazon blocked meta's agent in part because amazon's business model i think it's i don't want to hazard a number it was texted to me but they have sponsored placement they have advertising i mean there's there are a lot of drivers that get circumvented revenue drivers that get circumvented by agentic commerce right right so they blocked it and then like 24 hours later shopify and they're like shopify is like we are open for business right agents welcome how do you think that plays out you're hitting on a very fascinating trend which is this idea where applications, destination websites, all those things go away. So in a world where you say, Hey, you know, I just need some new towels for my house, right? Rather than going on Amazon and searching for new towels or whatever it may be, or Shopify or whatever independent shop, you just ask ChatGPT. Now what Amazon is worried about is if they are top of funnel, if ChatGPT is the entry point, they can just be swapped out. So it's like, Oh, you know what? Walmart has the same thing for $10 less. And they just push that right into the feed. And so for them, they're like, Oh shit, this was our moat because we were the destination. Everyone comes to amazon.com. They shop there. And now the AI is deciding and buying on their behalf. So brilliant by Shopify, but this is happening everywhere. So I'll give another example. I just shot a podcast with Henry Shookman, our Zen master friend. And I was like, you know, I don't want to send this over to an editor. I'm just going to like do it myself. And so Blackmagic is a maker of cameras and editing software. They have a great stuff. They have an editing package called DaVinci Resolve. And it's like Premiere, Final Cut, any of these editing software suites that are out there. Well, what they did is they launched an MCP server, which essentially means that with one click, you can tie it to your AI. So I drop in three camera shots, two pieces of audio. And I said, go make the podcast. I told that to ChatGPT. It connected directly. I'm watching on the screen. It's rearranging everything, editing it, doing all that stuff. Same thing happens with Photoshop now. Same thing happens with CAD software. You don't need the software anymore. You just tell the AI. And essentially this can be headless. Like I would never need to see Photoshop ever again. I'm like, hey, just go bill me this book or whatever I want to do or remove the stain or whatever it is. And it's just done. It's wild because you don't need these destination sites like an Amazon anymore. You just talk to your clients. So in some sense, all of these apps are up for grabs. Like all of these, it's whoever's going to play nicely with that point of entry. And that was always Google. But the thing about Google, it was always pushing you to the final destination. They weren't doing the commerce themselves. And so now it's like going to be all in the one suite. So you'll never need to leave Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. It just does it for you. It's so crazy. What do you think Amazon does? Because Amazon, I mean, does have huge advantages in terms of economies of scale, pricing, distribution, like physical distribution of product, speed of delivery, etc. They still crush. Last I checked, I mean, in most cases, they crush everybody else. But they don't want to take whatever the hit is for all of these sponsored placements and everything else. They're going to have to. So do you think they launched their own agent? If so, are they able to compete? I don't think so. Because you have on device. So Apple intelligence, those models will get better. Don't count Apple out. Give them three years, right? And probably not even that, a year and a half. That will be that domain. You have Gemini on Android, which is going to power all of Android. And then you have ChatGPT and Anthropic and probably a couple others that will probably just be like, oh, I don't prefer Coke to Pepsi. Like you want your own AI. It's better at certain things. And that will be the entry point for all of the internet, all the applications, all of everything. Sponsor ad revenue on Amazon goes away largely because it's going to funnel. We saw this back in the 2000s. So in the 2000s, it was like, okay, online versus offline commerce, right? It was like, of course, everyone goes to Sears to buy their tools, right? And then all of a sudden, oh, guess what? 10% of tools are being sold on Amazon now or online now. And all of a sudden, a decade goes by and you're seeing the vast majority of stuff that is just being purchased online, right? And that's why Sears and JCPenney and all these big retailers just go out of business, right? So I think what's going to happen is we're going to see that transition happen once again, but it's going to be through the front ends of AI interfaces. So you'll just be talking to your AI. Like, hey, you know, I just need a refill of this. Like, can you have it here? Yeah, we got you covered with Walmart. They get to you in two hours. Or do you want to go with Amazon? It's two hours cheaper, but it'll be here tomorrow. You know, it'll be those types of real life conversations that you'll just be having with your AI agent. It's a wild transition time. Yeah. I've been watching this, but I've actually been waiting to have this conversation. I mean, we'll continue, obviously, chatting offline to figure out where to start. Well, maybe you can just tell everybody. So it's like if people are using, let's just say they're using, if they're already using Clod and ChatGPT. All right. And they're like, well, look, if there's an advantage to using metas, what is it called again? Muse. Muse. If there's an advantage to using Muse, let me know. Maybe if there's an advantage to using Instinct, let me know. Maybe. How would you suggest somebody who is non-technical experiment with these things? Well, if you have the App on your phone and you're paying for it, it's going to be there right now, I believe for everyone. Instinct's still invite only. So they're slowly rolling that out. So you'd have to know somebody and you can poke around online on Twitter or whatever, and you'll find somebody. And then Muse has been number one in the App Store for like the last couple of weeks. So that one's pretty easy to get. You can just sign up for it. So I would say probably Muse and Grok is still behind. Their models aren't the best. That one I would just like sit on for a bit. It's a little bit more technical. But yeah, you can just start right away and then just play with it because you'll get a little bot and then it gives you a phone number so you can actually call your bot. And so like, listen to this. This is actually, I'm calling my agent right now on the phone. This is ChatGPT. Hi, I'm Sabrina. Hey there. Good to hear from you. I wanted a sexy voice. Sorry. Can you tell me about the podcast that I'm shooting today? Sure. Let me pull up what I've got. Hold on that. You're recording with Tim Ferriss today. It's 1230 to 330. Probably bleep some of that out. Your social security number is. Yeah, exactly. So, but I mean, I can just call this at any time. It doesn't cost against your AI credits. So you can be in the car and just be like, Hey, can you move this for me? Or, you know, can you follow up with this email or whatever it may be? And it's just everything. All right. I need to mess with that. It's fun. It's time for me to actually step in. Yeah. Yeah. Step into the arena. Amazing. All right. Call to action. I'm in. Okay, guys, I'm recording this at an airport. I am on the go. And this ties into urolithin A. What the hell is that? Some of you have heard me talk about this on a Q and A episode I did this summer. It was in response to a question around what I'm doing for cognitive performance, or at least possibly mitigating cognitive decline. I take on very few new supplements. This is one that I'm taking for a lot of good reasons. I'm taking a lot of new supplements. I'm taking a lot of new medicines. And there are some very credible peer-reviewed publications in humans, not just mice on this stuff. Let me give you a little bit of background. Your cells have these built-in maintenance crew. Every day, they clear out worn out mitochondria, the power plants in your cells, to put it simply, and replace them with healthier ones. The technical term is mitophagy, and it gets less efficient as we age. Urolithin A supports that renewal process. By the way, it seems highly plausible that it helps with decreasing neuroinflammation and a number of other things. So it's deeply, deeply interesting. But getting back to the renewal process, your gut bacteria can make urolithin A from compounds in foods like pomegranates, but many people make very little of this or none at all. In one study of 100 adults, only 12 had detectable levels of urolithin A. So I just take 1,000 milligrams per day. That is what's supported by some of the research. And that's what I'm doing. I'm taking a lot of The version I take is MitoPure, M-I-T-O-P-U-R-E, from Timeline, a highly pure form of urolithin A, backed by 15 years, 15 plus years, actually, of research and multiple human clinical trials. And for a limited time, Timeline is offering you 30% off. I've been using it for, God, I don't know, a year now, year and a half. And it's always fun when I come across sponsors related to products I'm already using and have been using for a long time. So check it out. Get 30% off. Go to Timeline.com. Tim, that's Timeline, as you would spell it, Timeline, T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E, Timeline.com slash Tim. Check it out. As some of you might recall, I launched my own limited edition coffee a few years back. It was delicious. It was a blast. But that's a story for another time. Here's why I'm bringing it up. I needed and wanted an online store that would be beautiful, fast, and reliable, plus a checkout that wouldn't scare people off at the finish line. So I used this episode. Sponsor, Shopify. I've known the team since 2009 when they had something like 10 employees and I was using it back then. Many of the most successful startups I advise today also use Shopify. From fast-growing new companies to some massive juggernauts, they all use Shopify. I started my first online business back in 2001. Back then, it meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails, and headache. After headaches, after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours, ran 24-7 without drama, and ShopPay, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add to cart to paid in seconds. ShopPay lifts conversions by up to 50% relative to guest checkout. So it really smooths the way I use it all the time when I'm buying stuff. So if you're ready to make your first sale, check it out. Go to Shopify.com, slash Tim, and start your free trial today. One more time, that's Shopify.com, slash Tim. should we talk about some other items yes on our random non-agenda i wanted to bring back an oldie but goodie i don't know if you've ever tried this i've not so this is a bottle of tablets and this is something that i've played with for at least a decade probably more this is this is interesting it's called beta alanine and the reason i started playing with this again this is a dietary supplement is i have i think you know been getting back into climbing rock climbing and have been training really seriously for about two months it's not very long but i have coaches or i had coaches when i was on the east coast and in austin but now i'm still traveling so that'll get figured out but i wanted to see what i could do to improve endurance because i think like many people when you get on the wall you're gonna use your arms too much you're gonna end up in these locked off positions meaning your arms are bent and you're gonna flame out your forearms or other parts of your upper body so yes you need to learn how to use your feet and i'm doing all that but i wanted to see if i could address some of the physical constraints and i didn't want to use some of my normal standards like creatine because creatine leads to water retention and weight gain and the last thing i need at 180 pounds with these tiny little squirrel paws with another limiter being finger strength obviously to add weight i didn't want to add weight it really adds an additional hurdle to progress so beta alanine was something that i surfaced again and i wanted to see if it had ever been applied to climbing and it turns out that there have been studies done specifically with elite climbers and there's not a lot but randomized and double-blinded 15 elite climbers taking four grams a day for four weeks or placebo and somewhat like creatine depending on which protocol you use they are large pills this will be fun to watch why kevin just had to what's wrong i'll explain this is not beta no it is i'll explain some of the some of the side effects in a moment that's hilarious but let me give you the the data first and when you're with tim rule number one is you should never just swallow a bunch of pills from a bottle that he puts on the table but here's the upshot of it so with longer traverse that means getting on a wall moving sideways right there was in the intervention group with beta alanine after they had kind of saturated it takes about two to three weeks to start seeing results if you're going to see results and then you're going to see results and then you're going to see results but 57 longer before falling versus 19 improvement with placebo and an additional 21 seconds of improvement beyond placebo that is a ton it is highly highly statistically significant and then looking at longer traverse and by longer this means like one to two minutes so the duration is really important one to two minutes which on a say top roping when you have a rope attached doing like a 30 35 foot wall like maybe that's the duration right which i was doing i wasn't doing huge walls like 70 or something like that for indoor but i was also doing top roping and also bouldering which is a different thing so it doesn't really help super short bouldering that's without ropes but doing let's just say five to ten moves to get to the top campus board like didn't really help any of that stuff i won't bother with defining that but say longer traverse moves completed there's basically like a four move improvement in the placebo group just from training effect and then in the beta alanine group it was 10 moves and i have noticed a difference it took a while and you can't really separate out all of the elements that go into it because i am training i'm doing isometrics i'm doing collagen plus vitamin c before training so collagen peptides from momentous plus vitamin c you don't need very much 500 milligrams or a thousand milligrams five i think it was as low as 50 in the research boosts collagen production in the fingers what's one scoop from them by the way because i take the same stuff what's what's a full scoop you know i don't recall what's on the label but it's like a scoop of that it's a few grams plus some yeah okay plus some vitamin c and the type of collagen does matter you kind of want hide if you can get it as opposed to bone just to avoid heavy metal and other contaminant issues so i'm going to go ahead and choose but the point being i think this stuff has really helped to the extent that my coaches like it was almost by the clock like when i got to two and a half weeks of taking this not before they were like whoa what happened there seemed to be like a phase shift where if i'm working on and it did for me seem to translate to bouldering which makes me wonder how much of it is the beta alanine but suffice to say i've been very impressed and this is something where i've done testing before and after to try to track yeah some of the improvements so it is a heavy lift though because if i'm taking in my case not four grams but 6.4 grams a day roughly right i'm taking eight of these pills a day it's a lot yeah and i would suggest and this gets to the side effects this is thorn beta alanine sr that means sustained release to minimize and i might be getting the pronunciation wrong on this one side effect which is called parasthesia it just means body tinkling basically it feels like like nice it feels like a niacin flush or like many parts of your body fell asleep like you had crossed your legs for too long and sat down what do they attribute this to is this a kind of thing is the atp enhancement like this is underlying mechanism i'm actually not sure it's carnosine i believe it's carnosine saturation muscular carnosine saturation but i am getting over my skis so people can look it up but beta alanine has quite a bit of published literature on it i was just very surprised that there was actually a study that got funded for 15 elite climbers like who even pays for that i have no idea probably some supplement manufacturer probably that is one on and since i brought it up in terms of i had mentioned with the collagen and contaminants just a quick public service announcement if you're taking say psyllium husks for fiber very helpful for a lot of reasons you don't just need to be boomers like us with aging colons and rectums it's also very helpful for glycemic control like you can take it before meals and stuff like that if you take any kind of fiber you do want to add water but the point is there are a lot of heavy metals and contaminants in most common brands of psyllium husks so yerba prima y-e-r-b-a or organic india or two that i have looked at testing results for and those are good but one doctor joked to me he's like yeah you could go to fill in the blank major pharmacy chain and grab something off the shelf but it's going to be two percent fiber and 98 arsenic it was a joke it's not quite that bad yeah but the contamination actually is worth paying a lot of attention to particularly if it's something like this that you'd be taking on a daily basis yeah i read another study recently that just was like oh shitty like this killed me and that is you know those seaweed chips that you can get at like like the grocery stores like the little flat papers so much microplastics in those because they're pulling all that seaweed out of the ocean and they're just like filled with microplastics you just can't win you can't win you can't okay speaking of supplements oh look at this you hate creatine no i don't hate creatine i love creatine i just don't find it to be the most helpful for climbing specifically so uh yeah because it puts a few pounds of muscle water whatever it helps me lift more weight though oh for sure yeah so creating we've talked about this i'm sure at least on i mean we've done what like a couple hundred random shows i think we've talked about at least 10 of them which is creating can be your friend and sometimes not so much yeah if you overdo creatine it is a problem with the gi it can be yeah also you're in an airport uh oh god yeah you don't don't do it tim uh does or well i don't do it anymore because i i do learn i'm slow but yeah if you're like let me have a double espresso some creatine and mct oil on your way to the airport don't do that yeah i don't do it because disaster pants potential is high i would say also because of some of the research you know ronda patrick has highlighted on the cognitive benefits yeah 10 grams a day i was taking 10 grams a day but i started getting really wicked muscle cramps in my hands my feet and then i i dialed it back to five no cramps yeah so i'm at five right now yeah yeah i think that for my system at least i think ronda's also observed this i might not be getting that right but i think she talked about publicly also experienced cramping at 10 grams plus per day so i've had all kinds of my stomach is horrible with creatine like i have just historically you're a delicate flower with the stomach sometimes yeah it depends on the thing but like sometimes i'm actually really good it's very confusing but anyway long story short i was doing some research and i don't know this brand at all so take this with a grain of salt but the technology is legit i looked up the study the technology that they're using to create a delayed release creatine okay this is the only one on the market and i'm not sure if it's going to work or not but i'm not sure if it's going to work or not but i'm not sure if it's going to work or not but i'm not sure if it's going to work or not but i'm not sure if it's going to work or not but i'm not sure if it's going to work or not but i'm not sure if it's going to work or not so if you look at these pills they look wild they have all these little tiny beads and they looks like i think it was exit trim back in the day yeah totally yeah but i will tell you like this is the first one i've been able to take because of the delayed release and does not mess up my stomach at all it's amazing well yeah you're bearing the lead here body tech elite creatine beadlet oh okay here's the i think critical piece with nova spheres registered trademark yeah so i did the research on what nova spheres are and their legit time release spheres technology yeah all right look at that yeah so i mean if it's just one of those things we're like listen i have also when i travel i'll use flip brands all over the place but lately i like the stuff from momentous because of the quality checks they do and i have their little travel satchels that i take with me and just mix them with some stuff as long as i slow drink it over like three hours i'm fine you know but this is the first time i've been like okay on the go i can just like chug five pills at once and no issues so anyway that one's fun should we talk about sperm quality let's do it oh that's where i wanted to go next how did you know god i got the request yeah kevin tried to anonymize it through yeah through the random youtube live stream and i was like please talk about sperm quality i was like all right i know it's you kev kev was this a question somebody wrote in no i'm kidding for yourself so i have long been fascinated with nuts not in the testicle sense although that's probably true also just the some of the benefits of consuming different types of nuts like brazil nuts you're talking about a ball sack the entire time well saying that there there is a double entendre here so i talked about for instance brazil nuts and selenium yeah way back in the day and of course you have to look at the funding sources and so on but there's a brand of nut butters i'm sure they do other things called artesana and i don't know why their raw almond butter is just better than every other brand in terms of consistency they somehow homogenize the nuts and they homogenize that might not be the right word the oil so that you're not dealing with like the oil slick on the top and like getting it all over your countertops and stuff but i ended up just for shits and giggles buying their walnut butter because i had never had walnut butter and it has some cashews in it and you know i'd like to have a family ideally a couple of kids so it's good as i age into my soon 50s i'm like you know i should keep the twins yeah as healthy as possible and i get a lot of other things right as downstream effects and the two ingredients are raw walnuts and raw cashews i'm bringing this up because there are actually walnut specific studies there was a 2012 randomized control trial and 117 healthy men aged 21 to 35 and they were randomized either continue their normal diet or add 75 grams a day of walnuts and it's not impossible like 75 grams just to turn that into something people might recognize it's like 0.7 cups of chopped walnuts like two and a half handfuls it's not that crazy yeah and the improvements in sperm vitality motility and morphology all were statistically significant wow yeah just so just walnuts i mean could it be are there other healthy that's the question that's the question so generally speaking nuts seem to be supportive of fertility so in 2024 there was a meta-analysis that showed that at least 60 grams per day so that's less than the 75 we talked about so let's call that two handfuls of nuts as an estimate improves sperm motility vitality and morphology although it did not significantly improve sperm concentration so of course be aware of the caloric density right if you're just housing nuts all day you'll have 6 000 calories of nuts is going to have other side effects but i thought this was super fascinating and it only came about because i ended up loving this walnut butter and i was like huh i have read or actually not read i had been told that consuming walnuts could improve testosterone and free testosterone and i was like let me fact check that and i did not get back confirmation on that but i got back these research results related to sperm quality i was like fantastic okay with brazil nuts in the selenium side of things there was it was a reduction in prostate cancer right there was some study i don't i don't recall for me the reason that i was looking at that with for our body and man it's crazy to think about how fucking hard fact checking and research was back then compared to now yeah oh my god it's like you kids having good now chat gpt and claude and so on it's so much easier you need to know how to interrogate the system but the reason i was looking at that and this is still relevant today that looking at your micronutrient consumption and absorption matters right so if you have a copper deficiency or a selenium deficiency that can be reflected in all sorts of issues with say sex hormones right and i have friends there's one actually multiple friends who had testosterone issues they ended up and i don't know who the latest and greatest i think it was spectra cell back in the day but i don't know who the latest and greatest would be for options for testing but they ended up just having like three brazil nuts a day and they're like i feel like i'm on cocaine like their lived experience changed so dramatically and sure this isn't randomized controlled i don't know if that was placebo or not but i saw it enough times where i'm like look this seems to be low-hanging fruit yeah topsoil is depleted everywhere you can be sure as shit that most vegetable matter you're consuming is not as nutrient dense as you would like probably so it's just something to keep an eye on yeah and so people should also know that brazil nuts like that nut it receives its selenium from the soil itself so it's the uptake from the soil i've seen this now at grocery stores the there's brazil nuts that aren't even made in brazil so you have to make sure like it has say product of brazil on the back of the nuts is there a certain brand that you like when it comes to that or are you just checking for that on the label i'm looking at not really i mean i haven't done the due diligence there i've just been looking for organic because man oh man you like i really want to minimize pesticide consumption i understand there are issues with the designation of organic to begin with but i mean this is uh just a general kind of meta principle that or it underscores a meta principle that i think about a lot which is like you're there's the expression you are what you eat but that's not sufficient like you are what you eat ate right so if you're eating salmon like not all salmon is created equal like what is the salmon consuming right similarly this applies to vegetables it applies to salad greens like where was this grown how was it grown what were the nutrients that were absorbed or not absorbed that were present or absent and with tools that you have now i mean it's a lot easier to try to do this type of due diligence in any case don't know that non-wild salmon like they add dyes to like make them look more pink which is just insane yeah there's a lot of this kind of stuff and look i mean you don't have to get every detail right but there are little things here and there to pay attention to and you know there are also like lots of weasel words out there when people say all natural right i mean there are many terms that are just not defined in any meaningful way so they can be used to confuse consumers but look point of the story is walnuts perhaps good for your nuts i'm gonna do it so and artisana products are delicious so why not try them out i've easily worked with 100 plus founders and entrepreneurs over the last 20 years and i've seen some massive wins some huge companies built and some failures and zombies among other things repeatedly i've seen how customer service can make or break a company this is where finn comes in finn finn is an ai agent and people throw that around a lot in this context think of it as a digital employee and finn your digital employee delivers high quality answers and helps resolve complex questions that your customers may have and a lot of name brand companies use finn rapidly growing companies like asana and anthropic company behind claude and past podcast sponsors like gamma and vanta rely on finn to deliver accurate and thoughtful customer support to millions of customers and users finn is also built using custom models trained on thousands of actual customer interactions and it understands the complexity and nuance of customer service like no other agent this is what it does you feed finn your internal knowledge and policies it learns your rules and it can start supporting your overstretched support team it's an extension it's in a way infinitely extensible of your support team and because every business runs things differently finn is fully self-manageable so check it out see the difference finn can make in your business check it out and learn more at finn.ai slash tim that's finn.ai slash tim i literally speak with founders and entrepreneurs every single week and they're so excited about a lot of things the product team the latest fundraise their next big bet payroll not so much but you really have to get it right you really really have to get it right and today's sponsor gusto makes that part easy and boy oh boy i polled millions of you guys you love gusto gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses it's all-in-one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay hire onboard and support your team from anywhere starting with offer letters going to everything gusto automatically files federal state and local payroll taxes handles w-2s and 1099s and offers straightforward health benefits and 401k options for nearly any budget And switching to Gusto is quick, straightforward, and painless. And don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. If you need help, their certified HR experts are standing by. They are ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and trusted by more than 500,000 small businesses. So check them out. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash Tim. That's G-U-S-T-O dot com slash Tim. And get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash Tim. Should we just keep going on the food kick? Yeah, I mean, I have so many supplements and shit today. This is supplement day. So this actually, I've been doing more gym time, which has been great. I've been trying to get a little lean, try to lift a little bit more weight. I've been trying to find a good source. I brought you this one. Oh, thanks. A good source of protein. Can I try it? Yeah. By the way, none of the stuff we've talked about today. No, we have not. No affiliation with any of this stuff. So this was one that I found largely because A2 protein. Are you familiar with A2 at all? I am. I have not done my own homework on this, but I can tell you how I came across this. Just so people understand what we're talking about. You want to read the label here because you sent me a hilarious video of your refrigerator where you're like, yeah, I've got a little bit of this, a little bit of this. And then it's like all protein. Then we have some protein and there were like 40 of these in your refrigerator. Well, I mean, Pioneer Pastures. Yeah. So this is Pioneer Pastures. You can. I mean, they literally sell it at Target and whatnot. A2 protein, though, was the only protein that cows would produce about a thousand or so years ago. They said 500,000 years ago, somewhere around there until this variant took over and it was became non A2 and it became a combination of A1 and A2. And it's a type of protein that comes from the casein, which is the slower digestion version of protein. Bodybuilders used to take casein at night before they would go to bed because it's like cottage cheese. Yeah, exactly. So, but the thing about A2 and what's so cool about it. Is that way less stomach discomfort, like it is the natural, clean form of protein and it's really hard to find. So I found this one drink, 160 calories, 30 grams of protein. It doesn't need to be refrigerated until you open it. Lactose free. Lactose free. Um, and it tastes really good. Yeah, it's pretty good. Um, it was two grams of sugar. I mean, I enjoy it. So for me, this is like a great, I just want something first thing in the morning to kind of like, especially if I train hard the day before. Like to just get some protein in the body, take this with some coffee. It's fantastic. You know, the first time I saw this, this is the first time I've tried it actually. But first time I saw this was in the offices of Chris Williamson, the podcast. Oh, no way. He's jacked AF. I mean, the guy is basically a bodybuilder. I mean, he's very strong, very lean and much like your refrigerator. There were like 30 of these sitting in a fridge at the offices. And that was the first time that I had someone described to me be. The difference, I suppose, the differentiator with a two protein. It doesn't taste bad. Right? No, it's no, it's totally fine. Yeah. There's a lot of shitty tasting protein out there. So I was pleasantly pleased. There's also a lot of, there are a lot of protein products that are basically candy bars or junk food masquerading as health food. So looking for kind of the minimum effective dose of ingredients. Yeah. I mean, this has monk fruit in it, but it doesn't have any of the other like fake sweeteners or anything. And it's very, very few ingredients. Yeah. Relative to like, if you were to compare it, not to throw them under the bus, cause I will occasionally have them when I'm caught in a pinch, but like if you were to compare the number of ingredients on this pioneer pastures with say muscle milk, it's like seven ingredients versus 40. Do muscle milk was like the like gym shake during like the nineties, right? Like everybody wanted muscle milk. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, Hey. Desperate times. What was that? A pre-workout that everyone took that just got you cranked to shit. You know, explode. Oh God. That's stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That was a bodybuilder crack. It was so strong, you know, on the muscle milk. Yeah. I mean, you might find this interesting. Like when I was training to compete, this is probably two years ago in archery. So I had my period of intense training and the reason I'm not doing as much of it anymore is because it's just very isolating. It is a solo practice and you're repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again. I do still love it, but I wanted to do something more social. Yeah. Yeah. And just a little more physically engaging like rock climbing. Right. Which I just love to no end to every aspect of it. So fun. The reason that muscle milk is relevant to the story is that I wanted training nutrition that could not be broken by inconvenience on the road. So basically when I was doing my training sessions, which would be like three to four hours, and this is going to sound gross, but basically I would only consume stuff that I knew I could get it almost any gas station because I knew my competition was going to be in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And Lancaster is actually a beautiful town, but I didn't know where the competition would be. And I suspected it would be in the middle of nowhere and I would only have access to gas stations or some type of quick convenience store, like a seven 11. And that turned out to be the case, but I was comfortable with muscle milk, almonds, like roasted almonds of some type. Yeah. Every guest. And then zero calorie monster energy. I know, I know with some Taurine, right? But I got comfortable using the most commonly available stuff so that I felt like I had, and even if it's only psychological, like a competitive advantage, um, oh, and unsweetened iced tea. That's it. And, uh, in any case, that was my sidebar note on muscle milk. You look at the ingredients now. I don't know if it's changed, but back in the day it was not healthy stuff. Yeah. And it's like, look, I mean, great name though. Great name. Also as I continue to do intermittent fasting a few times a week, I don't do it a ton because I'm actually trying to, I want to add some like muscle mass and connective tissue strength. And you just need nutrition for that. Did you get that gripper by the way? Look, I have grippers. Did you get the one that our buddy sent us? No, I got a different adjustable gripper because my right arm is still recovering. Okay. Starting from the elbow surgery I had a year ago. We should link that up in the show notes that gripper that that's a really good one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll, we'll link to a couple of different grippers. If people are interested, I'm going pretty likes, I'm still strengthening the extensors in the right elbow that was repaired, but you want to hear about something crazy that I've been getting really into, this is going to get into crazy town, but you know, we like getting into crazy town a little bit. So dream engineering and anesthesia dreams. Yeah. So I've been going down this rabbit hole related to dream engineering. So can you modify dream content? Can you, for instance, facilitate two-way communication between scientists and dreamers while they are dreaming? This is a long standing interest of mine. I first read exploring the world of lucid dreaming by someone named Steven LaBerge, the very, very beginning of high school and became very interested in the lucid dreaming, which is just a divine terms where you train yourself. And there is a process for this to induce lucidity while you're dreaming. That just means you become conscious of the fact that you are dreaming and with exercises, you can get to the point where you're able to modify your own dream content. And I used to, for instance, in high school, when I was competing in wrestling, I would do additional training sessions at night in my dreams. I'm not making this up. And I felt like there was a direct translation to improve performance. Okay. But flash forward, I connected, I ended up getting introduced to Dr. Adam Horowitz, who took research out of MIT and Harvard to make dream engineering a reality. So he has a startup called Dust, D-U-S-T, and I'm in full disclosure, I am an investor in that. What does it do? But they're going to be helping people to modify dream content. They're going to address things like PTSD. Now, that's where the conversation started. And he knows that I have longstanding interest in psychedelic-related therapies. But psychedelics have taken a backseat for me in the last handful of years because most people, I shouldn't say most, many people will not be able to take psychedelics for whether it's health reasons, contraindications, they have psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, and their family. That means it would be ill-advised to take them. So I've been really focused, as you know, on neuromodulation, brain stimulation. And I still am. Super, super bullish. How often are you doing that now? I'm going to be doing it again probably in the next month. I would say every three to four months. The update there, I did get involved with one company and I thought very heavily about it called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A Health. They have the smallest, most modular option on the market. Very easy to use. And I think they are the company, if I had to bet on one, that's going to get to the point where you can actually power something off of an iPhone. They're doing some really, really interesting work. Just to touch on that, they're doing one-day protocols now. So instead of five days off of work, it costs 30 grand or something, you're doing one day of treatment accelerated with this very small dose of antibiotic called d-cycloserine, which induces plasticity in the brain, much like certain psychedelics. Mm-hmm. You basically let that dissolve in your mouth beforehand and from, let's say, a one to 10 let's say my OCD, a generalized anxiety, it's at like an eight or nine, it has taken it to like a zero or a one, one day. Now it gets crazier though, because you can also use it. People can check out Ampa Health. Do they do it in LA as well or no? They're all over the country. I mean, what I'm hoping is that people who are already administering things like ketamine or who are offering CBT or whatever, we'll just offer this as an add-on. Because most of the devices that are available now are like the size of a refrigerator. You have to sign like a quarter million dollar lease. The Ampa Health product for providers is like three grand a month. You can cancel any time. I think that's still accurate and it can fit in like the trunk of a car. It's much easier to use. But what's also amazing, and I did this recently when I was traveling, met a technician and did like two, two hours of, I think it was stims every 30 minutes, just for a handful of minutes each. When you say stims, I would go with stimulations. Yeah. Just for sleep. Different target area of the brain then? Same. In this case, it was the same target. It's a target that they're not talking about super publicly yet, but very easy for a therapist, like technicians to find. How do they find it? Are they just like measuring your head and shit and looking like? It's all based on really, really good science. They're looking at overlapping networks that are identified by looking at data from deep brain stimulation, data from lesion research. You know what I mean? When they sit down with you, like if you're going to go into this place and they're like, "Hey, I got to find this region in your brain." Part of what makes how they do it interesting is they're finding targets that are more uniform person to person. Certain places like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, certain areas on the front of the skull. Or front of the brain, front of the head, right? Are a little more variable. You have to be very precise. So they're finding ways to make it very effective, very fast, and less likely to suffer from like clinch and error, right? Because if you really have to thread the needle, sometimes you get no effect. That happened to me when I was using earlier targets with other hardware. If they were off by like a half a centimeter. Wow. Nothing. And you just wasted a week, right? And like 30 grand. And no downside? Like, are you not getting headaches afterwards or anything weird? Mild headache. Mild headache for like a day. Does that not freak you out though? I mean, that's the only reason I haven't tried in this stuff. I'm like, I don't know. Like, it's like, they're just putting magnets in your brain and shit. I mean, just to bust your balls, before we started recording, you're talking about some drugs you're experimenting with. Yeah, but that's just a good old time. It's like, yeah, let's try it true. You've done it too. Oh, I mean, look, I'm no stranger to pharmacology. I'm just saying, in this particular case, I personally found the, I think the risk benefit ratio is much more attractive for the general population than psychedelics, which is why I'm spending so much time looking at it. I think it is much, much, much more attractive. It's faster. And frankly, let me come back to these crazy stories of dream engineering and anesthesia dreams. So from, you know, the startup Dust, people can check out the AMPA Health. I encourage them to check it out, but they're all over the country now. Is that the publicly traded company one? No, it's private. So Dust does the dream engineering. And then he introduced me to some research out of Stanford. Here's some of the headlines of pieces published by Stanford Medicine. Could anesthesia induced dreams wipe away trauma? Another one, could anesthesia dreams be a more palatable psychedelic therapy? All right. So what does this actually mean? Let me read some of this stuff. All right. Here's the dream protocol. Yeah. That's what I want to know. What's the protocol? I tried to convince, I was getting an endoscopy recently just to look at my throat. You know, you got to do that stuff. The endoscopy is colonoscopy and so on. And I was trying to convince this doctor I'd never met to do this for me. And he was like, yeah, I don't think so. But the dreaming protocol has five steps. Number one, tell the patient they've might dream under anesthesia. Number two, use propofol, right? Oh, this is great. Yeah. It's very common. That's what Michael Jackson did. Michael Jackson used that plus like six other things. Yeah. I have a great story about that, by the way. You should not DIY propofol, but using propofol as an anesthetic, as the patient is emerging from anesthesia. So here's the thing. If someone has surgery, they're not changing the anesthesia delivered for the surgery. They're basically using propofol to taper them out and tune them to a very particular dose and let's call it radio station. So they have pleasant dreams. Okay. But step number three is monitor brain activity, et cetera, with EEG. Ensure at least 10 minutes of quiet undisturbed emergence. This is really important. If you don't do that, then dream recall is shot. And then you have to ask them about dream recall. But the point of this is that what they're seeing, and this is not really super speculative. I mean, it is at the edges now, but they are seeing people with long standing, complex PTSD. They have one of these dreams where they taper out on propofol and they rehearse beforehand to basically imagine their traumatic event ending in a better way with some kind of resolution. And some of these people, 10 months later, still zero symptoms of complex PTSD. Wow. They go from severe to zero. The reason I find this so interesting and other people find it interesting is that it underscores the possibility that, and I've thought this for a very long time, but the trip matters. Because in the world of psychedelic medicine and business right now, the name of the game, if you want to ramp up your market cap and have an exit for $2 billion or whatever, or launch something with an IPO and make tons of money is you say, okay, psychedelics, broadly speaking, a whole lot of them hit these serotonin type 2A receptors. Let's create a drug that hits the same receptors, but that doesn't cause the trip because the trip doesn't matter. The trip is a side effect. Well, what's interesting is that I think it's both, but just to be clear, like you can hit the serotonin type 2A receptor with no trip, like an LSD variant, and it can be very effective for things like cluster headaches. Sure. It does something. Yeah. But I'm talking about the emotional release that comes from that. Sure. But, but, but, but so I would say like also some of these psychedelics and not all of them are primarily hitting the type 2A receptor, but have potent anti-inflammatory effects, right? At sub-perceptual doses. So also I think that could lead to anti-depression and stuff. Right. However, if dream engineering, like a la dust, right? If they can dream engineer people to have fewer nightmares, which they can, and that has psychedelic like outcomes, like is it possible that even though there are millions of people for whom psychedelics will never be appropriate, like tripping balls for four to six hours, and there are shorter acting psychedelics and so on, methadone and so on, I get it. But there are plenty of people who will never be able to take psychedelics. Is it possible that every night you have an opportunity to harness something similar? And if so, like who are the scientists who are going to figure out how to mold that and shape it and do the prep work? So what is, do the prep work? I think it's all touching the same stuff. Let me ask you a question. What does dust do? Is it a coaching service? Like, because I have this app that I, by the way, I have no affiliation with this, but I, you should check this out too, Tim. I think you'd really like it before I go to bed. There's an app I use called Claria C L A R I A. And it is the best hypnosis app that I've found out there for a variety. It's it's makes clarity. I may have, I may have tried you to recognize the scientists and the team behind it, that it's, it's amazing. It's expensive. It's 150 a year. Yeah. So it's not cheap, but it is, I found it to be a beautiful way to drift off to sleep. And I swear, I feel better than the next day. And there's a variety of different topics. It can be anxiety. It can be whatever. But anyway, my point is my question about dust is okay. What is the thing? Is it, is it, could you sit there in this propofol kind of state coming out? So just to be clear, dust isn't doing anything with propofol. That's totally okay. Okay. So could you do this with hypnotherapy? That's a great question. I don't know the answer. I also, just to be on the safe side, I don't know what they're disclosing publicly. So people can check out the website and whatever it says it says, but it's something I'm keeping an eye on. But broadly speaking, that ended up being the wedge in the door for me to get back into doing a deep dive on basically dream shaping, which is 100% possible. And it's already been demonstrated that you can have dreamers who achieve lucidity communicate with researchers while they are provably in an REM state by memorizing eye movement patterns in advance, like Morse code, basically like right, right, left, left, right, left, something like that to indicate like, I know that I'm dreaming and I'm telling you I'm dreaming. It's crazy. Yeah. Have you talked to Matt Walker about this? I haven't, I haven't had a chance to talk to Matt about this stuff yet. Yeah. So Matt used to run the, for people that don't know, he's run the, you wrote the why we sleep book and also used to run the Berkeley sleep lab for a long time. So yeah, yeah. He's still very active. He's in Dallas now has a huge lab. Yeah. He's doing lots of good work. He and I on the sleep front have mostly talked about the Dora class, drugs. Yes. And just with the mice. I still have a ton of that, by the way. Oh yeah. I'm using something called Q-Vivic instead of Balsamara now. Yeah. And talk to your doctor, guys. This is not stuff to- Well, they can't get it without the doctor anyway. Yeah. I mean, who knows though, if they're buying stuff online from Mexico or whatever. Just don't screw around with any of this stuff without talking to your doctor. But the point of that, for people who maybe haven't heard anything about this, Matt Walker has a good podcast episode on this. It's probably six to nine months old at this point about the DORA, like DORA the Explorer, D-O-R-A class of drugs. That's dual orexin receptor antagonist drugs. There's some evidence to suggest it might be helpful for people with family histories of Alzheimer's and things like that for- Didn't they do a spinal tap and saw that- For beta amyloid clearance and so on. Amyloid clearance or healthy amyloid clearance. Yeah. Not just in animals, but they've looked at human data. So for me, honestly, even though it might be speculative at this point, because no one's proven that it prevents Alzheimer's, I'm like, you know what? That shit is so scary. And I've seen relatives just disintegrate. I'm like, eh, since I'm ApoE3-4, I'm genetically predisposed. Let me just be on the safe side. Yeah. I bring it with me. I'm actually going to Japan soon and that's when I use it. I'm like, I'd rather do that than some type of like these other class of sleep drugs that have been shown to do all kinds of horrible things, including cancers and you name it. So these seem to be, they look like on paper so far to be the safer class of sleep drugs. They're pretty interesting. Drugs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some other drugs that seem not to affect sleep architecture horribly. Like, you know, the ambience of the world, like Trazodone might be a decent choice, but for a host of reasons, I wanted to, it just seemed to make sense to me to look at the Dora's. All right. What else you got? Okay. I'm going to do rapid fire. I got a few things. First of all, have you ever seen these before? Plum flower curing pills? Yes. Plum flower curing pills, my friends. No. Economy size. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Oh, this gets better and better. I had a buddy that was like, he's like, Kevin, you don't understand. I was actually in Paris and I had like a little bit of like a stomach, like, oh man, my stomach's a little bit off, like blah, blah. And he goes, I was about to get food poisoning. I felt it coming on. I had had, I think it was oyster or something. And he had, he was like, I took two of these. It's from a Chinese practitioner. And he goes, I dodged a bullet every time. And this is called like once every eight weeks where you're like, Ooh, my stomach's a little sideways. You know, I take one of these little packets and it freaking works. And I do, I'm telling you, I know it sounds crazy. And so before the podcast. Is it just laced with tons of antibiotics? Yeah, exactly. No, I, before the podcast, I was like, I wanted to look it up because it's a traditional Chinese medicine and I can't pronounce any of the shit in it. It's a bunch of wild, it's like 15 different Chinese herbs. Yeah. This is unlike the A2 protein. This has like 27 different ingredients in size two font. I'm telling you, these little packets are like 50 cents a piece. Yeah. You can buy them on Amazon. You can buy them in a smaller thing. I just love that. They're called curing pills. They work too. If you at all, like, you know what they work with really? It's like, if you had too much to eat and you're like, oh, I'm bloated. Like, I just feel bloated. Like just take one little packet. Take a couple with you to go. I'm 10% owner of the company. I'm like what executive chairman, Kevin Rose. What is this? I have pictures on the outside of the box. How did you get to Shanghai? Um, this thing, a rapid fire, Aerofit. Oh, I've got one of those in my bag. Are you in your bag? What the fuck? Like on you right now? Well, I don't have it right now, but it's in my backpack, but the, I was not able to get the app to work for a while. I got working. You did. Was it a pain in the balls? It was a little bit of pain. So you can get the one without the smart technology in it, but this will also work if you just don't even use the app. Yeah. Okay. So for people that don't know this device right here, I should just use it without the app because it's been basically I downloaded the app and then they're like, oh, you want any utility out of this app at all? Pay $79 a month or whatever. And I was like, ah, not gonna do that. So you can just ask chat to be for a training protocol. So there's two knobs on here on each side of this thing that adjust the resistance on inhale and exhale. So you put this thing in your mouth like this. This is to train your respiratory muscles. So that's difficult for me to do. They showed after eight weeks of 30% increase in lung capacity when you train with this thing, which is just insane. Yeah. Those, those, uh, the respiratory muscle training devices are really cool. Cool. I had boss written this UFC, but also prior to that, like in Japan, MMA legend on, and he's done this stuff basically daily for multiple years. There's good data to suggest reductions in lower back pain, all of these different issues. If you improve the strengthening of the muscles that aid in respiration, do you have the same model? Like the same type? I have a white one that's got like Bluetooth and all this fancy technology that I think I do not need. When did you buy it? I bought it probably a year ago. I think I bought it about a year ago. Okay. I don't know why this had the latest firmware on it and it works fine. I haven't had any issues with the connectivity, but I did have one before my house burned down and it was always having issues connecting. So I don't know if maybe I needed a new one, but air fit, please improve your app if you haven't in the last year. Cause I found it to be incredibly difficult. Plus your baseline of programming for somebody who's bought a device should be decent. Yeah, but I do have, I do have one in my bag at home, so I will, I will just use chat GPT or cloud to help me figure out a. Yeah. Bluetooth free option for training. You can also, um, what I've been doing with it is rock backpack, 6% incline on the treadmill. That sounds comfortable with this in my mouth and it's really helped. Like I'm guessing the people on the treadmills next to you just clear out, huh? No, I'm my, is that my house? I'm not doing this in public. It's ridiculous. Um, okay. I, the last one I have is about man makeup, but, uh, we can get to that. Come back to man makeup. Yeah. I'll give another. This is a bit of science that I think is pretty fascinating to watch. This was sent to me by an oncologist who specializes in on one level cancers around the eye. So I had a scare. I might've told you about this. I'm not sure. It's still a little bit of a scare, but there was a nevus found at the back of my eye, which is like a large freckle and that can develop into cancer. Good news is they can get rid of it. The bad news is you lose your eye. So this is something I've tracked. First. Every three months, then every six months, it hasn't changed in size, but really came to admire this by the way, I get eye exam, but with retinal scanning with like very, with advanced imaging. And certainly I was happy to find it, but I mean, very scary to find because, because you don't know if it's been there for 20 years or if it's been there for a month. This is my brain aneurysm. I had a little tiny brain aneurysm that was like, you know, one millimeter or whatever. So you found that with like a biographer pre-nuvo or something? Yeah. Pre-nuvo. Yeah. Pre-nuvo. I did. And they're like, okay, well we have to watch this and it could explode if it gets too big. And then after two years, they're like, oh, you probably just have this since you were born. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So she is, you know, occasionally will send me science that she finds interesting. And this one, I mean, this is probably not the description of the study itself. I think I went to the lay person's interpretation of it, but the headline here, which I put in my newsletter, five bullet Friday, check it out. Timed up blog slash Friday, but brain stimulating. Contact lenses match Prozac and depression study. All right. So this isn't an animal model, but let me read the synopsis. Material scientists have developed a wearable drug-free contact lens capable of treating depression by delivering mild electrical signals through the retina. The study demonstrates that these specialized lenses are as effective as fluoxetine. That's the active ingredient Prozac at reducing behavioral, neural, and physiological signs of depression in mice. Okay. So mice are not just little furry humans. So just keep that in mind. This Averages the eye's anatomical connection to the brain to stimulate mood-regulating circuits non-invasively. So that is pretty fascinating, right? Imagine if, now I don't know mechanistically what it's actually doing with the stimulation. Is it affecting vagal tone? Is it affecting something else? Who knows? I haven't done the deep dive on it yet. But imagine this is where bioelectric medicine, whether it's different types of stimulation for increasing vagal tone, there are a lot of bullshit devices out there, folks, so just be aware. I'm not aware of any one commercially available that is not prescription that is credible. But you talked to Michael Levin of Tufts. Will we more and more be able to use electricity instead of pills to treat conditions? And I think that that will be the case. And in fact, you look at, say, anesthesia. Anesthesia is one of those things where we're like, yeah, it's just anesthesia. Anesthesia, when you start scratching. Scratching the surface is so incredibly strange. They really don't know how it works, right? There are many anesthetics people have no idea how they work. And I mean, a few things, right? If you look at like Michael Pollan's new book, he talks about how anesthesia is effective on plants, even though they have obviously completely different nervous systems slash, I should say, more anatomy. But it would seem, how should I get into this without making a mess of things? There are some hints of quantum effects. Of anesthesia. But putting that aside, because I'm not credible enough to talk about that at length, some of these anesthetics are inert. Like they shouldn't do anything. So what is happening? And it would seem that it might be physics and not chemistry. So it's not within the realm of chemists say, oh, it's binding to this receptor and doing A, B, or C, even though they might observe effects that mimic those things, that it's somehow affecting bioelectrical fields. And. That's the limit of the extent of my cursory understanding. but it's just fascinating. There's so many things like this that we take for granted that we think are understood by the quote unquote experts. Right. And we have no idea what the mechanism of action is. There are many examples like that. Isn't that crazy? Like it's something we just take for granted. We're like, yeah, let's pop two of those. Like we have no idea how it works. Yeah. There are, there are a lot of those, right? Like I think for a while that was true of modafinil. There are many, many, many, many drugs. Do you take Tadalafil? Tadalafil? Tadalafil. Tadalafil. Tadalafil. Whatever that is. Cialis. Boner pills. Do you take it? No, I don't. You don't? I don't because I know there's supposed to be maybe plausible cognitive benefits and so on. Low dose. I just do a little halfer. Yeah. I get, and this is not actually that uncommon. I get horrible. Blushing. Back pain. Oh, back pain. Weird. Yeah. It's not super common, but in like a percentage of people, it's reported in the literature. How about the other ones? Horrible back pain. What about the other ones? Like Viagra. Like what? Viagra. Viagra is similar. Back pain. Wow. Yeah. What's the deal? Do people know why the back pain? They don't know. Oh, they do. Yeah. I mean, they're like, there are different types of phosphodiesterase PDE inhibitors. I think I'm getting this right. I'm going to have to fact check this before this gets published. But basically I want to say it's like PDE5 or something like that. Yeah. So Huberman was talking about there's a potential benefit, both on the cognitive side and also obviously the blood pressure side as well. So it brings down your blood pressure a little bit. And you don't have to take much of this stuff. You can just take a little half. A little nibs. Yeah. I'm just on so many things. I'm trying to. But they work for you. Like even though it hurts your lower back, like you're like a Superman. Sure. I mean, I'll have a huge boner. It looked like a UFC fight around roundhouse kicked me in the kidney. Yeah. Oh, because your kidneys, like it pops out like your back. No, it doesn't pop out, but like the low back hurts so much that I'm like, I can't like, I can't sit. I can't stand. I thought you're like back muscles got hard or something. And you got like bulges on your. No, no. I'm just saying it's like, it's hard to enjoy the boner. If right. If you're like crippled with low back pain, that's fair. That's fair. It is. I got to tell for people that have never tried these, like I don't, I don't need these, but no, but hold on. This is the random show. We're supposed to be the time about this. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. When you try them for the first time, it is the weirdest shit. Well, I mean, look, you reach down and it's not you. Well, this, this is like, you're like, Whoa, this is, this is where you have to be careful with augmentation. Right. Because it's like, for instance, if your eyes are like going a little bit and then you wear glasses and you're just like, Holy shit, this is a different world. Yeah. How do you go back to black and white? Right. It's like, this is another reason why sure. Like technically people might be able to use all of these peptides and testosterone and GH and all these things. And then just get off because, you have post-psychotherapy or whatever, but psychologically people can get so addicted to the results because they are obvious if these things are used correctly. And so it's kind of like similarly with this extends back to the AI conversation. It's like, man, the siren song, the temptation to use AI for almost everything is so strong, but I'm working on this new book right now. And it's like, I am not using it to write for you. I'm not using it to write for me because if I do that, I'm done. Oh yeah. It's good. It's too good. Well, there's even, I'm using it for version control. If somebody provides edits, I'm like, compare this to this and give me a graphic overview so I can print it out and look at it in color. Like it can do some tremendous things, but if you want to retain a function, a cognitive ability and be very careful about what you outsource. Cause let me throw this out there for people that, that aren't aware of it because most people won't be in the world of AI. What they do. Sometimes they put these elegant pieces of code that kind of sit on top of the AI that makes it turbocharges kind of the AI to do special things. Right. And they're called harnesses. And there is a new harness that came out recently just for writers. Oh God. So if you thought Claude or chat, if he was really good at helping you write, wait till you throw this harness on top of it. So there's a company called every out there and they'd released a, a package for coders called compound engineering. They now have one. You can just type in every compound engineering writer, harness, and it'll show you the right one. You just install it into your chat GPT or Claude and it will write the book for you. Like it's, it's going to be insane. Oh yeah. You're done. Yo, I don't know if I'm done. I mean, I don't think so because I mean, you've talked about this online and I think we've texted a little bit about it, but it's like, what's the moat reputation. It is reputation. Right. So I don't think I'm dead. I think books are harder and harder to sell as a, a viable format of the media. Well, it's funny, like back in the day. So when I knew when Tim was writing these books back in the early days, cause I first met you when the day your first book came out, the work we came out at the party and then, you know, you would tell me, Hey, I'm working on this book and you would like, you would want to keep everything hush hush. You wouldn't want to tell anybody because you were like, okay, someone can front run me with this idea, with the ideas that I have in here. If any of this leaks out, right. And you were super guarded. That is more of the reality. These days. I mean, it's somewhere to find out the next book you're writing on it. Like I got a leaked copy of it. They can rewrite the entire thing and have it out in like 48 hours published and printed. Yeah. I mean, the defense is no, I know, I know there's the moat of you. Yeah. Well, I'm just saying like, that is why if you are writing about the realm of ideas, that is going to be a hard game to play. If you are writing about lived experience, like I did X, Y, and Z. Right. Then I think you have more defensibility, but you know, I, I think, I'm not sure we talked about this, but I've, I've just kind of come down to deciding that I I'd rather right now, I'm also half pregnant with this book is, is like 80% of the way there. Yeah. You've been working on this one for a long time. Yeah, I have. I mean, it's taken in a way, honestly, I've been waiting for the technology to catch up. Yeah. So that I could make the point that I wanted to make, which is look, guys, this is not a 1% problem. This is a 99% problem. And the tools are also available to 99%. So I was like, if I published this five years ago, people would be like, Oh, cry me a river. Tim, Tim Ferriss has too much inbound. Right. But now I'm like, how many I'm like, okay, you've got what I message. What's up to email addresses, DMS, everybody's fucking drowning, right? Everybody's drowning. But I couldn't have made that argument as well, six years ago. And it's, as you know, like with robots are so good at imitating humans. Yeah. Although I do, I do test my team will test things. If I'm like, if this is a hundred percent AI, I written like it's automatic X it's automatic archive, but coming back to, I would just rather write a book for 10,000 people than do short form videos for 10 million who forget it 10 seconds later, you know, but I want to share one piece of long form for people who can still digest it, which is hopefully many of you there is, this is a speech and I read the transcript. It is exceptional. It's called personal renewal. It's by John Gardner. G a R D N E R. I don't have no idea how I found this thing. It's delivered to McKinsey and company in November, 1990. How did I find this? I have no idea, but it is full of gems. You can find an audio version, just search personal renewal, John Gardner. That's G a R D N E R. It's really about personal renewal, continual learning throughout life. It's really, really good, but it does require a little bit of foreplay to get to the gems, but here's a really good one. And I'll quote, I'm quoting from the piece here. Remember I mentioned earlier, the myth that learning is for young people. I want to give you some examples and a piece I wrote for readers digest. Not long ago, I gave what seemed to me particularly interesting, true example of renewal. The man in question was 53 years old. Most of his adult life had been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune in military service. He received a battlefield injury that denied him the use of his left arm. And he was seized and held in captivity for five years. Later, he held two government jobs succeeding at neither at 53. He was in prison, and not for the first time there in prison. He decided to write a book driven by heaven knows what motive boredom, the hope of gain, emotional release, creative impulse, who can say, and the book turned out to be one of the greatest ever written a book that has enthralled the world for over 350 years. The prisoner was Cervantes, the book, Don Quixote. What a fucking crazy story shit. And there are many examples like this. So personal renewal by John Gardner, like just maybe printed out single task, get away from notifications, I've read this one a few times now and I just get something from it every time. That's amazing. Man, makeup, man, makeup, do you wear makeup? I don't wear makeup. Never, never on your TV show. My TV show. You mean like when I was on actual TV? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, they've got makeup people who want to like de-gloss my head. Yeah. Yeah. They'll use like oil patches and stuff. Do any like little touch-ups? I don't, I probably should, but I don't. Okay. Yeah. No, no touch-ups. So I was on a podcast. I was on a podcast. Like, like a month ago. And I, I looked like hell, like I had just flown into the city. You're like Al Pacino after a bender. No, it was sick. Seriously. I just went into the city and I slept like shit for some reason. So it was at altitude where I was at. And I went on the screen. I was like, I get like rosacea sometimes in my cheeks and stuff. And I just looked like shit. I was like, I need to do something like it in case you can bleep that I need to do something in case, like, I just like go, wait, why don't we just bleep the F word? Come on. So we had, you had 30 of those last episode. So I went in to the store, okay, I'm gonna say, the sephora fucking sephora i've never been in that shit before ever in my life and it was all ladies and i was just like i went in there i didn't want makeup i was just like hey do you have something for like when your cheeks get extra red like rosacea and stuff like that like is there anything you can get and they're like what i'm putting on my little black dress and my high heels exactly i was i was decked out to the nines like i'm gonna get gussied up this is a horrible name for probably but it's dr jart it has something called cica pear which is so get this it's green okay and i'm like why is it green it's color when mixed with red okay well even out the tone complementary color and it's spf so christmas neutralized yeah so watch this like i can do i don't know we can't get a zoom here but like so there's little dots right here now watch the difference now hold on i don't it's a lot or something is it a lot i mean you you okay watch let me just rub it in all right how you doing you're doing this is like an infomercial you're doing this the one side i love it okay so if we look now do you notice how much like less red it is than the other side and it's spf too i don't but it looks very well moisturized it is very well moisturized it's got an spf anyway my only point is that cica pear c-i-c-a-p-a-i-r the soothing color connecting treatment the reason why i bring this up is because i know a lot of people have rosacea and it's a shitty thing like it's like for me it's like spicy foods or something and like you get like extra red cheeks and all that so i'm just telling the truth i wanted something this is like matte so like if you're on camera or whatever you don't look like you took a bath in olive oil right i just i just i feel for people that have problems that they don't know how to fix and i was like okay rosacea a lot of people have i might as well talk about you look like you have fewer crow's feet than i recall have you been doing vampire i yeah i do vampire facials and i do one vampire facials is prp yeah prp where they draw your blood still haven't tried it how often do you do it yeah i do vampire facials and i do one skin oh dude i do it like twice a year yeah so they draw your blood it's the only reason i i mean i still have wrinkles if i scrunch up you can still see them on the side but it's way better so they draw your blood they spin it they take out the platelet-rich plasma first they they micro needle your face and this is gonna sound like a lot but like it was like there was a discount package they micro needle your face and then they rub it in and then i swear after like two weeks like the wrinkles just go away do you look like you got in a street fight for a couple days uh you're a little red and it works wonders and then one skin with the peptides is awesome and i didn't again i did i did put a small angel check into into one skin because it worked so well for me but that's it and makeup i want to mention two other things that i have really been enjoying finding thought provoking it at least one is a mini series i'm curious if you've seen it it's a four-part mini series called the dark wizard have you seen this oh okay so the dark wizard is a series of four-part miniseries called the dark wizard have you seen this okay so the dark wizard which was first recommended to me by andrew huberman and then a couple of other folks recommended it it's about this wild brilliant but totally tormented artist and athlete named dean potter so dean potter way back in the day i'm gonna get the timing wrong but i want to say like early 90s sometime in the 90s he was on the cover of outside magazine and this guy's story was so captivating to me that i kept that issue of outside magazine with this black and white photo of him like very handsome looking guy super athletic and he pioneered all these new approaches to climbing rock climbing he also was one of the main i would say proselytizers of slacklining and then highlining which is doing like a slackline over a canyon just the scariest stuff with the big long poles and shit right no poles no poles just hands and and then he ended up wanting to push the boundaries of free soloing but the problem is as he roughly stated it was well when you're free soloing you'll always have to climb well within your limits and he's like i want to push my limits so he started doing something called free basing where he was combining free soloing with base jumping yeah i've heard and this four-part series is insane and it's incredibly well produced all of this archival footage drawings and notes from dean's personal journals all woven together and there's a lot of darkness like he struggled with a lot many inner demons and depression and on the flip side he was just this absolute genius on so many different levels so i found it to be a really really thought-provoking watch i actually binged i i started one at like i think each is an hour long roughly an hour long and i started one at like 11 p.m and my lady fell asleep in like 20 minutes wasn't really her jam and it was bedtime anyway and i stayed up i binged the entire series i stayed up until like three in the morning watching this stuff i just couldn't stop watching it that's a strong recommendation i'm gonna check that out yeah it's it ties into a lot of current interests and also old demons of my own so it was you know brought up it brought up a lot for me and many people have enjoyed it so the dark wizard that was his nickname and then there's a book that people might not expect i would bring up this is not a new book this is a book by studs turkle talk about a good name t-e-r-k-e-l studs turkle you won the peel surprise at one point i think for working you might be getting the title wrong but the book that i was introduced to is called hard times an illustrated oral history of the great depression and it was introduced to me by a brit of all things a great guy named ed cook who i'm not sure if you know it yeah yeah yeah total total lunatic yeah yeah awesome guy one of the best and most famous memory competitors formerly like world champion of memory has super good person yeah and he's very good at coaching people to get incredibly good at memory competition there was an entire book written about this called moonwalking with einstein he has a startup called mind max which is a learning app if people want to check it out but this book hard times an illustrated oral history of the great depression by studs turkle contains many dozens of vignettes and profiles of people who went through the depression from the most destitute to the rich who lost everything to the jingle writers who actually had the most incredible explosion of creativity during that period and i think it's a great book and i think it's a great book and i think it's a great book and i the stories are told both in their own words and in the words of studs who's trying to convey different perspectives on everything from these different vantage points and it is a page turner it's so well written and it fleshes out the depression into something very real and complex right it's not just like one mom with her hungry kids sitting on a doorstep looking forlorn right there's so many different angles to it and i just feel like it's one of the better and most unique depictions of history that i've ever come across that's awesome is there audible on that or no i wouldn't be surprised if there is hard times it's very very well written and ed told me he's like hard times is good but But if you like that, working is incredible. And working, as I understand it, is kind of like dirty jobs before dirty jobs with micro. But looking at all these different professions across the United States. But hard times is the one that I've been cracking. So if I have 15 minutes and I'm just killing time waiting for something, I'll pull it up on my Kindle and I'll read that. Because you'll get through like one or two profiles. So I've been doing this in the sauna where I put on an audio book. And it's like my way to kind of just crank through something. And I did something very similar, speaking of new books. And I've been trying to push myself in new directions of things I would normally never listen to. Like what is something that would never be on my radar? And just give me a whole new perspective on what people are consuming media-wise. And so my friend Britt, she was like, hey, I've got a recommendation for you. There's this whole genre of books that are big. And apparently women in their mid-30s into their 40s love this genre. Have you heard of fairy tales? No, I don't know what fairy porn is. Is this like what it's called, the fourth wing? This is called A Court of Thorn and Roses. Have you heard of that book? No. Okay. So I'm like, okay, I'll buy it, right? And I download it on Audible. It's damn good. Is it like dime store romance novels? No, no, no, no. It's more sophisticated than that. That's what they all say. Yeah. I never thought I would be listening. This shit. And I'm how many times does the word throbbing come up so far? I'm like, maybe twice manhood, but it's, it is for, it's actually no, but what's different than like the old, like, you know, when you go to the grocery store, you see like the dudes with the chiseled abs and everything is they actually are taking these very sophisticated kind of like it's fantasy. It's like well-written fantasy. And then there's a little bit of like, like thrown in there that like everyone's like, Ooh, like he like did that. Like, you know, I would never listen to this shit ever, but I will say it's interesting because they had like, it was something like 30,000 five-star reviews. And I'm like, how is this a genre I've just never heard of? So I'm trying to force myself to say, okay, you know, once or twice a year, pick a genre that's just completely different than you would ever expose yourself to and go deep. I don't know if you've ever done that with any, I do this all the time just to find things that I would never read. Like hard times is a good example where I was just like. Ed, give me a book that I would never find. Yes. Yes. And he was like, I got one for you. I did bring up the fourth wing because this. This is one that was everywhere. I'm sure it has like a hundred thousand picture of it. I'm sure it has a hundred thousand reviews. It's like that. Okay. And basically I saw again, like early to mid, maybe like 30 to 40 year old women all over the place reading this book. And they seem to be like business women. And I was like, what is going on? Yeah. The person that recommended, why are they, why are they, why are they reading fantasy? Like something doesn't add up. Right. And then not to diminish it. I'm sure they're great books, but it there, it's kind of like dragon porn. It's like, there is a porn aspect to the whole thing. It has to be. And what some people may not know, and I think I'm getting this right. It's not like porn. It's not porn. It's a romance. Yeah. There's sex, but porn is very different. Like that's not, I mean, it depends on what we're talking about, but yeah, it's not like right. Gang bangs every five pages, right. But there's still some pretty explicit, what people may not realize. I am almost a hundred percent sure I'm getting this right, but I'm not going to fact check it now on my phone. Do you know how 50 shades of gray started? No, it was fan fiction. It was twilight series fan fiction. So somebody was writing like an extension of like within the twilight world, her own fiction, super sexualized. And that turned into 50 shades of gray. Wild. Isn't that crazy? That is insane. It is. Something like that. It may not be twilight specifically, but it was fan fiction fantasy that then got converted into its own franchise. Have you ever read that book? I couldn't do it. I couldn't do the writing. I tried. And I just, and I'll do respect to the author. It just was not, I could not digest the prose, but what it demonstrated to me, it was like the power of a simple premise, right? It's just like you have people can probably familiar with the series, but it's like you have this, whatever it is like the name, Christian gray, like this like billionaire rich guy with a sex dungeon. And then like, yeah. And super explicit. And you know, I remember a number of different pieces of coverage described it as mommy porn for what that's worth. But it impressed me. I tried to get through the pros. I couldn't do it, but the power of a simple premise, how visceral and simple is your premise and can see it. And honestly, that's where, for instance, my third book for our chef, that's where it failed. It tried to do too much. It was like three books in one. It was not a simple premise. It was very complicated. I felt like it was well received. It was well received. I mean, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It sold like 120,000 copies the first week, but that was a function of my diehard audience who would take me at my word that it's worth reading. But if you went blind, unfamiliar with me at all to the, say, Amazon page, it tried to do too much. And I think this is true with presentations. Like if I'm talking to someone who's going, for instance, I was just coaching someone who's going on 60 minutes and they wanted to talk about messaging. Or if I'm talking to somebody who's got a Ted talk coming up and they're, they're asking for advice, you know, my advice is always the same. I didn't come up with this. Somebody else gave it to me, which is like presentations fail from too much information, not too little information. And I think, that's true with books too. It's like, does this conjure a simple image in someone's head like immediately? Right. And that is not easy to do while being differentiated, right? So 50 shades of gray nailed it, completely nailed it. And that has turned this thing into a global phenomenon. Yeah. Right. Whereas this third book, which I'm still very proud of, I think it's a great book, but it's really three or four books combined into one. And to try to convey that to anyone in a paragraph is, is next to impossible. Yeah. I mean, the same applies to so much in life though. I mean, even on the product side of all the products that I've built over the years, it is, you know, and I watch entrepreneurs going to launch new consumer products or whatever it may be the ones that boil the ocean and throw in every single feature. And they're like, Oh, but wouldn't it be great to add this? And I'm like, yeah, maybe someday. Yeah. But can you really distill down this idea to that one concept? So that when you're in that, I used to call it the crowded bar conversation, not the elevator pitch, but the, the crowded bar. Like if you want to say in two sentences, what your thing does, can you get it out to there to where they say, Oh yeah, I'll go check that out. Oftentimes you can't do it. So the battle is cutting features out. This is what Steve jobs was so good at. It's like, he could have added app store on day one for the iPhone, but it was like, he didn't, he was like, it's going to do these 10 things really well. And then slowly build on, on that base, you know? Yeah. I mean, if the V one iPhone could get away with no copy paste, remember that? Oh yeah, that's right. Bro talk about minimalist. Yeah. So true. And this is also part of the reason why, frankly, the book that I'm working on right now is, has taken so long. Cause I'm like, it's not ready just yet because the way that I try to explain it and like the crowded bar test, aren't there ways I could probably do market analysis to get more comfortable or to confirm or disconfirm this concern maybe. But if I talk to say some of our friends who are super busy and I tell them it's a book on saying no and focusing in a world of noise, right? How do you create systems for that? They're like, fuck, I need that right now. I would please send me the draft today. I don't care if it's right. But for nine out of 10 people who are not like one of our friends or one of the podcast guests who've been on, when I tell them that I do not see like the slight eye opening and lean in, I don't see it. They're like, Oh, interesting. And I'm like, Hmm, is it because most people are looking at it? You can for more things to say yes to because they don't have the opportunity. This is what I'm working on deducing. Like, is it the title? Maybe it's the title, right? So I was just playing around with that yesterday. Is it the description where the promise is unclear? Is it the fact that it sounds perhaps negative instead of affirming saying no versus something else? Because a third of the book actually is like how to pick the one or two things. That change everything to say yes to. So it's like, Hmm, maybe the book positioning should be more focused on that. It would require a very heavy lift on like revamping a bunch of the positioning in the book or explanatory stuff in the book. But I am trying to learn from past mistakes. I don't think this book tries to do too much. I don't think that's a problem. And everybody who actually reads it, a test reader, they're like, I was never bored. Like I would gift this book to my friends more than any of your other books. So it's like, it's working. But if people go to the Amazon page and the title and the description don't work, it doesn't matter. You're dead, right? So that like 50 shades of gray genius, I want to get that right. Which is part of the reason why I'm like, I don't need to publish a book. I didn't take an advance, which I mean, it has its own drawbacks. I don't have a gun to the head. I don't have accountability to a publisher, which is actually can be a bad thing because like we have 20 different things we're doing at any given time. It's very easy to be like, eh, I'll just push it off another six months. It's fine. And that's actually not a great thing when it comes to writing books. So TBD, but that'll get figured out. I feel pretty confident in that. I'm you know, the, my aim is to have the book done in the next eight weeks. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so when you go from that to no publisher, like how do you think about printing? How do you think about distribution? Are you going to do like author's equity or yeah, I'm leaning, I'm leaning towards author's equity. I'm a small investor in that company. I mean, not enough to people should know that it's James Claire's like, one of the largest investors. I mean, talk about a phenomenon, man. Holy shit. What is it? 25, 30 million copies sold. Nobody does that in prescriptive nonfiction. Nobody does that. I mean, James is a non-recurring phenomenon. Very nice guy. Very smart guy. He's one of the largest investors in author's equity, great team at author's equity. So I'm leaning towards doing something with them. I don't know what the exact formal take, right? Do I do? All formats? Do I do some formats? I'm not overly worried about that. I was just chatting with them the other day just to figure out like, what are the actual lead times? If we're going to do the dead tree format in addition to other things, I've thought about only doing Kindle and audible, but I feel like this book, here's a hot take. It's like a giftable. Well, it's a giftable book. But here's the other hot take is like the more this becomes, though I'm holding up my iPhone, the more these become a digital leash that is feeding you 24, seven, distraction. The more I want to have a format that forces people to single task. And the only option for that right now, I suppose you could do it on a Kindle. If people are using an actual Kindle device that is not internet connected for distraction, but print is a great way to single task. And this is also, this is a workbook. This is not a passive spectator book. If you put in the work, if you put four, five, four hours of work into this book, it should save you four. Yeah. If you put four, let's call it five. If you put five hours of work inflation, if you put five hours of work into this book, it's like, it should save you a hundred hours in the next year. If you're a busy person, like without question. And it just goes up from there. So, so we'll see, but the goal is to be done in the next eight weeks. What is the lead time? Just out of curiosity for someone looking to make an actual physical book, like, is it three months, five months? Like, it depends a lot on who you're talking to. you're talking to some publishers the first run is right yeah and Well, yeah, the size doesn't matter as much as you might think. If it's a simple page layout, black and white or two color, I would say it's still pretty slow, but there's a lot that goes into it, right? Like if you're going to get a polished book and you're not just self-pubbing whatever comes off your laptop, if you're going to have copy editors and professional layout and so on, like there are things that make that easier. I'm sure AI could do a lot of page layout at this point. I'm sure people are developing harnesses that'll come with that specifically. But if you're looking to have, and I'm not sure how relevant this is to me at this point, honestly, in terms of like retail distribution, I don't know how much it matters in terms of market share at this point. Things are changing so quickly and have been changing so quickly. But if you really want like the full traditional experience, I would say from what you consider finished book. But there's still people who are going to do copy editing and everything else, probably a year. Wow. Yeah, maybe more. That's slow. Now, there are cases where you can do a crash book where it's like, okay, let's just say, I mean, this is maybe not a lovely example, but it's like Princess Diana dies. Publisher wants to be first out of the gate. Can they get a book printed and out the door in three months? Yeah, they can. If they make it the top priority and everything else goes to the back of the line. Yeah. If their primary distribution is in the US. And they have printers in the US. A lot of publishers print overseas. Those are all factors that go into it. And like part of me is like, man, once I'm done with this, I want to out ASAP. I don't want to like wait for a year. It's like, what does that mean? Do I not do print? Right. Right. Do I do some small print run? It might be interesting to just do one print run ever. Yeah. Do I do publish on demand? Right. Like that, you can get out the door quickly with POD and the quality has gone up a lot. But the collectability of a single. Yeah. A run of like 10,000 could be really interesting. Yeah. I could do that. Who knows? Maybe I do that. And then I'm like, hey, if you want the book, like you can either get a hard copy now and there are 10,000 copies. Right. Or you can get it in a year. Or you can get it in a different format. Yeah. Right. I mean. That's cool. I get excited about it. It's a strong book. Like I feel very, very good about it. I wouldn't put it out otherwise. I cut it from, I think it was 870 pages down to like 350. That is a lot of cutting. Holy shit. Yeah. So everything that is in the book right now has been rated by test readers and proofreaders, multiple test readers as an eight, nine or 10 out of 10 in quality. Everything that remains is kind of cream of the crop. So. That's awesome. Yeah. It should be strong. I'm excited to check it out. Yeah. We'll see. Anything else we should talk about? No, I think I'm good. I think I covered everything I wanted to cover. You know what? I'll send out some of those invites. I can get more of those instinct invites. KevinRose.com newsletter over there. Sign up. And I will send a bunch out when this goes live. Sweet. And then just to add to the dueling email newsletters. You already mentioned yours earlier, bitch. I know. I'm going to do it. Tim.blog. Slash Friday. I don't even know if I'm pointing to the right camera. No, it's a great, your newsletter is great. Five bullet Friday. Yeah. There's five bullets. The KevinRose.com newsletter is slightly longer, a little bit more information dense, probably more takeaways there. So just KevinRose.com. Also includes a free nude. Yeah. I could include one foot picture. Yeah. Subscriber. Please join my OnlyFans. I'm going to make one more recommendation, which is, I'm not going to say anti-AI, but it's nice counterbalance. I don't know if he wants credit. So I'm not going to mention our friend who sent this to us, but there is a short article called Please Use AI by someone called Sean Smucker. S-M-U-C-K-E-R. Please Use AI. And it's a beautiful piece about preserving the beauty and integrity. Of human interaction and why you should not always strive for optimizing efficiency with LLMs and computers. So check it out. Please Use AI by Sean. It's S-H-A-W-N, Smucker. It's really, really good. I've been sending that to different friends of mine. And what I put that because I put it in the newsletter not too long ago, maybe two months ago. And I mentioned that the Please Use AI piece. It reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers passage that is about telling his wife, he's going out to buy an envelope. So this is, this is Kurt Vonnegut, wrote Breakfast of Champions and tons of other classics. So this is Kurt. She says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her and go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I'm going to meet a lot of people and see some great looking babes and a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And. Ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And I don't know, the moral of the story is we're here on earth to fart around and don't let anybody tell you different. And of course the computers will do us out of that with the computer. People don't realize, or they don't care is we're dancing animals. So check out, Please Use AI by Sean Smucker. It's a good one. I'm actually very, very, very bullish on this idea that AI will make almost everything that we need to do in terms of the tactical day-to-day stuff kind of just almost handled to the extent to where we can get together in person, in real life, hang out, hopefully have more leisure time, like with everything. I mean, we've seen, we've seen there was alcohol in the last decade, like alcohol consumption is like at all time low right now, right? There's a, there's always a pendulum that swings back the other way. You got the ketamine going the other direction, but yeah, no doubt. But like my, we see this like social media, like, oh, now it's bad for us. Less people are wanting less of that. Here's something I didn't think of could the decline in alcohol consumption actually be reflective of people sitting at home and not socializing outside? I don't know. I love, do you know what I mean though? I have no idea, but, but you know what I'm talking about, right? Like it could actually correlate to people spending more time at home on their computers and their phones. Yeah. What I would say is with the AI stuff, I hope it results in people having more in-person interactions. I do think that people are going to feel the poison, right? Like the dose makes the poison. I think they'll feel that it's not good for them in a, in a very visceral, deep way that has not perhaps been as obvious in the last five years minus AI. But, and I'm not the first person to observe this. It's like if interacting with a digital companion is easier than interacting with your actual partner, if they're always supportive and saying the right things and they're not getting dysregulated and freaking out like all humans do, right? If kids find their customized LLM a better parent, easier to deal with because it eliminates some of the messiness of unpredictable human interactions, you know, what are the consequences of that? The leisure time. I hope that's true. There've been so many technologies with that promise industrial revolution. We can go through a long list and I have not yet seen it. I don't know anyone who's like, I used AI to free up a bunch of free time that I'm now using for kite boarding and knitting. Well, they're like, I was doing two projects, but, you know, I don't know anyone who's like, I used AI to free up a bunch of free time that I'm now using for kite boarding and knitting. Well, they're like, I was doing two projects, but now I can do 10 projects. Something always fills the gap, right? Something's always going to fill the gap. And you have to be very selective about what's going to fill that gap. But I will say for me, the daily grind of email and a lot of those other things, now that I have these and it's going to be like, Hey, Kevin, you need to pay attention to this. I don't have to check all the other spam and all the other crap that's coming in there. It has freed up time. Now, am I using it to AI code then? Yes, I am right back in. But in theory, I could be doing woodworking or some other things. The woodworking comes up every, every nine months. You know, Japanese joinery is amazing. I know your Japanese woodworking is like my Jean-Claude Van Damme splits. It's like, I'm like, you know, someday I'm going to get there. Oh, no doubt. Someday between two chairs, I'm going to be doing splits. It's like, yeah, we'll see what those hips do. Not getting any competition for which one you can do the splits first. I thought it was going to be, if you can get to Japanese woodworking, no, no, no, I'm down. I want to, I've been going to stretch lab and having people stretch me out. I'm going to get, I'll be able to do the splits and then Van Damme split within six months. Within six months. Oh, a hundred percent. How much you want to bet? You want to do $500 of charity? Okay. So if you're doing my choice, well, hold on. First of all, this is just a bet about whether Kevin does something in six months. The splits. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm out of the picture. Why are you getting the picture? Well, I'm just saying you, you're. Oh, you don't want to do the splits. I don't care that much about it, frankly, but if you're saying you're going to get to Jean-Claude Van Damme splits in six months, I'm like, I will take the other side of that bet. Okay. 500 bucks of charity. Charity. Charity of your choice or mine. So either brain stem or Zen meditation is where it's going. Okay. Yeah. Something apolitical, not bullshit. So you're just for clarity, you're saying you're going to be able to do Jean-Claude Van Damme splits between two chairs in six months. Okay. So just as a reminder, just so I have this correct one leg on one chair, the other on the other chair, hovering in the air. Yeah. Do I have to be like straight line? Like, I mean, you can have like, like an inch and a half. Sure. Inch and a half. Okay. You're going to do that. Do I have to hold myself up? Like, is that hard to do? I don't know. Yeah. You have to be stupidly strong and you're like adductors. Otherwise it just tears your legs out. Like, like chicken legs. Yeah. We're going to do this live on the podcast. I'm going to rip my groin and I'll be in a wheelchair for six months for 500 bucks. Yeah, sure. On that note, folks, another random show. Kev Kev, great to see you. Yeah. And we'll put stuff in the show notes. God knows, sorry to my post-production team for all the things you're going to need to put in. But Tim.blog slash podcast for people who want to check it out. TimRose.com, it's a great newsletter. There you go. All right. Thanks for tuning in, guys. See you. See you. 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, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of people. I have 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.com slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday. Drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. It was delicious. It was a blast. So I used this episode's sponsor, Shopify. I've known the team since 2009 when they had something like 10 employees, and I was using it back then. Back then, it meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails, and headaches after headaches after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop, orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours. I ran 24/7 without drama, and Shopify, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add-to-cart to paid in seconds. Shopify lifts conversions by up to 50% relative to guest checkout, so it really smooths the way I use it all the time when I'm buying stuff. Go to shopify.com/tim and start your free trial today. One more time, that's shopify.com/tim. I am on the go, and this ties into urolithin-A. Some of you have heard me talk about this on a Q&A episode I did this summer. This is one that I'm taking for a lot of good reasons, and there are some very credible, peer-reviewed publications in humans, not just mice, on this stuff. Every day, they clear out worn-out mitochondria, the power plants in your cells, to put it simply, and replace them with healthier ones. Urolithin-A supports that renewal process. By the way, it also seems highly plausible that it helps with decreasing neuroinflammation and a number of other things. But getting back to the renewal process. Your gut bacteria can make urolithin-A from compounds in foods like pomegranates, but many people make very little of this, or none at all. In one study of 100 adults, only 12 had detectable levels of urolithin-A, so I just take 1,000 milligrams per day. That is what's supported by some of the research, and the version I take is mito-pure, M-I-T-O-P-U-R-E, from Timeline, a highly pure form of urolithin-A, backed by 15 years. It's a lot of research, actually, of research and multiple human clinical trials. So check it out. Get 30% off. Go to Timeline.com/Tim. That's Timeline, as you would spell it, Timeline, T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E, Timeline.com/Tim. Check it out. ♪ ♪