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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 seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Kev Kev, nice to see you.
tim tim happy holidays brother happy holidays another random show ladies and gentlemen boys and girls brought to you by kev kevin tim tim happy holidays time of the year it is and can i say where you are because you're not in a holiday place and why right i'm not in a in a place with great seasonal variety yeah i am in a place with wonderful sun and warmth which is it good why it's amazing of course it's amazing
You seem very chill right now. I am chill right now. I'm feeling very good. And there are a bunch of reasons for that that I could talk about. We'll get to that. But there are some contributing... elements that you're actually very familiar with so we'll come back to that but i've had more comments in the last week or two from close friends of mine people who know me were like you seem really chill yeah very grounded right now and i'm like yeah
I feel very chill and very grounded right now. And there's still a lot going on. It's not for absence of things going on. It's actually somewhat amazing that given how many projects are... in process right now i'm getting those comments which makes me feel like i must be doing something right or i'm just lucky because who knows i'm sleeping well in hawaii could be that set the ac to like
negative 500 degrees which i had to override every system in the hotel to do yeah they have those things on lockdown and then if you open the door it shuts the ac off it's like chill a whole thing yeah 70 degrees would be dangerously cold so it's sometimes hard to get the ac low but let's hop into it man we have a lot to talk about where should we begin oh man let's start off with when i think about these urine specials we've done a few of these and we typically do a little bit of like
What are you doing in the new year? You know, like, what are you going to change this year? And it's the same list every year for me. Drink less exercise more. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But we'll talk about that. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff. I thought some predictions would be fun because I have some good ones for next year. Yeah. You're the right guy for that. I might have some predictions, but you have a better track record than I do. I don't know. You've got a few, right?
I mean, I occasionally get one, right? It's not that my track record is bad. I think you have such a 30,000-foot view on so many different sectors. And also, just as a general partner, a true and as more active. investor than yours truly, you get to see a lot that is coming down the pike, right? You really get to observe patterns on a weekly basis that most humans do not.
including me. But I do see things occasionally. So we'll see if I can riff off of some of your predictions. So where would you like to start? Let's start off with something that I just thought was a fun one to just... Really get your take on this because I think we're screwing up society. So every year Apple does these. It's like, hey, you're the 15 apps that we love. This is the best gaming app. This is the best productivity app. All this stuff, right?
And I tend to go in there and poke around and I'm always checking out what the new hot thing is, especially on the gaming side or stuff where I really just don't pay attention. I'm like, just tell me the best thing. Go check it out, right? Yep. And I noticed one thing that I keep seeing this over and over and it's driving me nuts because.
It dovetails into some of the videos that we send each other on a side thread. But like, okay, so we've sent a couple of these videos back and forth. You mean the mutually assured destruction threads? We can say Sokka. These are more civilized. Okay, got it. Yeah, so you mean Sokka will be like sending text.
This is one of those threads. I don't know if this one's that bad, but we've been on some threads where there's a lot of pics going around. Nothing horrible, but definitely I'll move on from there. So there's basically these new AI videos. of like mma fighters and they'll get like knocked out and when they fall to the ground they like get in go-karts and shit and start driving around have you seen this where they like blend ai yeah i've seen them
And it's like, it's messing with my head. Like I look at that stuff and I'm like, this is like really bending reality. I don't know if it's because like, there's a psychedelics kind of component there where you're like, why am I seeing? Something that I would typically see in a different realm, like in this realm, like weird stuff's happening in the brain. But one of the things I noticed in the app store, as I said, the best app of the year was.
a adobe app which you know they make great stuff and they had adobe lightroom on there as winning the apple app store 2024 winner mac app of the year and why they were so stoked on lightroom when you think about lightroom you're like oh this is like software's been around for like you know couple decades like why is this anything new and they had a video there that showed these kids running around in their backyard and you've seen this thing where like you can like
erase shit. You can drag your finger across it. Google does all these ads where they're like, hey, is there someone weird standing in your photo? Erase them. Dude, this video, we've gone too far. They're like, these kids playing in the backyard.
There was like hedges and then they erased their like yard door to get out of their backyard. And like it made more hedges. And I was just like, can you imagine when these kids are like 35 or 40? And they're like looking back at their photos and they're like. Do we have like a backyard? And they took the dog out and shit. I'm like, why are you taking the dog out?
Like the dog's like part of the family. Sowing the seeds for gaslighting yourself later. Do you know what I mean? Like what is going on? They're erasing all of our real memories and replacing them with almost imperceivable at this point, digital alternatives. And it's really worrisome to me. I don't know. Do you do any of this shit? Do you erase anybody out of your photos? I don't erase people out of my photos. I also feel like a lot of that editing is for...
Sharing outside of your immediate circle. Like social media stuff. Social media or effectively applying digital plastic surgery to your life so you can share highlights that look better than they actually. do in real life and i am very cautious to play with that because i feel like it's similar to getting your first little dabble with eye tucks or facelift and then there's this creeping tendency to add more and more and more and more and similarly i don't want to become
delusionally dissatisfied with my life because there are little things that in my mind I aren't perfect for broadcast, like a door in the hedges, right? Right. Because then what happens when you're doing that constantly and then you sit in your backyard and you're looking at that door, does it drive you insane? Right. When it really shouldn't. And then also, but think of the downstream effects too, where your friends are like, okay, you just take something.
that is a mild visual nuisance out of the equation and it's like oh they had that perfect beat shot they are so lucky if only i could have that thing and then you go and you're like oh it was crowded like we didn't have the same thing they did but in reality they just like
magic eraser at all their friends or all the people behind them out of it. I'm just like, it's creating a fake everything. I don't know. I just, something about it. I love AI. I think there's a lot of fun. There's so much I use it for every single day. But this is one of those things where I'm just like, I don't want my kids to grow up thinking they need perfection. And that's what this is doing. It's creating a better, perfect scene.
Oh, yeah. I mean, people are already using that, of course. I mean, it's like Zoom filters on steroids, right? Totally. And I think, I'll just throw this in there. I'm not sure exactly what form this is going to take. But I do think there will be a pendulum swing away from certain digital environments when people realize just how contorted Constant exposure will make your perception, your satisfaction.
your dopamine reward system, I really feel like the impact is going to be felt in a way that people could perhaps rationalize away or brush aside in years past. We're like, well, I know that. Twitter's a cesspool on X, Y, and Z levels, but I get A, B, and C. But once people are put into environments where what's up is down, what's left is right, what's fake is real, and what's real is fake.
this psychological toll the emotional toll i think will become much harder to dismiss and people are going to look for things offline i think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for that you see that in i think you see early indications of that with, for instance, running clubs and various in-real-life activities that have become very popular in place of or as supplements to online dating and dating apps.
As an example, like those things are exploding in New York City and a lot of major cities. You see that in potentially, certainly this is a trend, at least in a few. countries outside of the U S I'd have to look at the data. I think it's mildly true. We see some improving numbers in print book sales that could be attributed.
to a number of other factors outside of people moving from digital formats to print. But at least as a thought exercise, I think we can explore different ways in which people are going to seek out. something tangible they can hold and know is real, look at in person and know is real. So that's certainly extrapolating from just what I see in a sort of small circle of people who are hyper exposed.
to a lot of this. I feel like people like you who are perhaps way, it's called like prematurely saturated with exposure to these things are canaries in the coal mine. You're like, oof, holy shit. We need an exit. We need a way to step off the stage so we're not looking at this manufactured reality. It's funny you say that. I was talking to another friend of mine that's deep in this stuff. You know Chris Hutchins. I was talking to him about...
raising daughters and the kids are getting older. And he's like, dude, he's like, you know, what's funny is like when we got bullied as kids. somebody would be like, you know, I hooked up with your mom or whatever. Right. And it would just be like, there's like the schoolyard slams or whatever. Right. Yeah. And like now in like three years, like I hooked up with your mom, look at this video and it'd be like the mom hooking up with a kid. Cause AI and shit.
Damn, you're hooking up on my mom. But it won't be real, but it'll be like the slams. It's going to look real enough. The bullying's going to get hardcore. Yeah, of course it will. Or just sharing videos of... the person you want to bully doing things they didn't do. Right, exactly. It's going to get bad. Yeah. And there are plenty of upsides. I mean, look, I've used ChatGPT and Claude.
like 10 to 15 times today with my team i'm doing a company off-site here in maui that's why i'm in maui and there are reasons for the location we can get into but it's very useful But the dose makes the poison. The application also makes the poison. And it pays to just be cognizant of how you are using these things. Yeah. So that's one. All right, what else you got? Are there any personal...
New Year's resolutions that come to mind or specific ones where you're like, okay, some of these might rhyme with things in the past, but here's how I'm going to approach them differently. Yeah. Oh, man. Okay. So the exasperated exhale is always a good place to start. Well, I mean, the hard thing for me is that I get into this really bad situation where come November...
I just like let myself go. It happens every single year. I just go ham on shit. Thanksgiving comes around and I hate too much nutmeg. It's like, or not nutmeg, eggnog. Nutmeg too. You know what I can't stand? Cloves. Let's talk about cloves for a minute. No, but I do like a little eggnog with a little of that brandy in there. You put in a little tonic in your eggnog. Yeah, yeah.
And so like, but that goes straight to your gut, you know? Of course it does. And so I hate this because this is like the freaking seventh year of random shows or whatever, where it's like every December it's like, I want to be less fat and drink less. And like, it's like. You know, I get a good running start on the new year though. So I am going to go into this. Maybe we'll put together like a compilation. Oh yeah. All the time. 10 years. Yeah, exactly. So.
I think I'm just going to lean into it and do the exact opposite. Just keep eating and just keep drinking. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. That's horrible. No, but I think one of the things that you and I were trading links on a couple of days ago, which I'd really curious to get your take on this is like.
there's like this movement well not movement it's called it's movement but it's old people movement of like you know you and i when we first met the name of the game is bro as this might sound is like we wanted to put muscle mass on like we were like you know sure meathead central yeah yeah like i wouldn't say full meathead but there was a good amount of meat there it was pretty meathead so to transition from meathead to like
somebody that actually just wants to feel the stretch and do functional stuff. We were talking about functional patterns because it was an account that I had followed for a while and they had some kind of... more non-traditional ways of approaching your gait and your movement and really setting you hopefully up for years of good, solid longevity in terms of joint health, back health, all these things. And I sent you another one.
that you were checking out as well. What's been your take here? Because I'm starting to make this move into like, okay, I want a lot of movement and a lot of core plus plus strength. I'd love to be lean. I don't need to be ripped. Although did you see the new Hugh Jackman Wolverine with Deadpool? He's a beast. Yeah. Do you think that was freaking animated or was that really Hugh Jackman's body at this stage? I think it's really him. That's insane.
How could he freaking be that age? I have a pretty good authority that that is him. Yeah. Dude, how does he get cut like that? It was insane. He takes it seriously. Follows the basics. Follows the rules. Doesn't waver. He's very dedicated. And he is a real athlete. I mean, you watch him move. He moves like a dancer. He can lift like a powerlifter.
his endurance on sick on a rower like a concept too is unbelievable like the wattage that he can sustain over periods of time would boggle the mind of even some people who have been former competitive rowers he is a he is a true athlete okay so yes legitimate yeah so anyway my point being is that like there's this little micro trend i see occurring where
A lot of people are making this move to a more functional, holistic kind of movement based health and strength and training that is non-traditional as we define it. Where do you see that playing into your own routine? Is that something that you're looking into? Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. So our texts were well-timed. And I want to give credit where credit is due. First to you for introducing me to this account.
I ended up doing a bunch of research on this account that I did not tell you about. So I will probably pronounce the name incorrectly. And for that, I apologize. But I believe his name is Nseema Inyang. Now, the spelling on that. will be more accurate than my pronunciation, but N-S-I-M-A, that's probably all you need to find him on YouTube, Inyang, I-N-Y-A-N-G. So Nsima has this video which you sent to me.
called the live traditional strength training now yes that is youtube clickbait on one hand but he actually does deliver on that his production value is incredible his delivery is impeccable I was very, very impressed. I went back and watched certain sections of this. His agility too, just insane. His agility is incredible. In terms of power, he's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor as well at a very, very high level. I think he won.
worlds or masters worlds at brown belt most recently is now black belt which is no joke and i reached out to a friend of mine mark bell who is Very well known in the powerlifting community. He also has a number of products that have done very, very well. And I met, I realized, in SEMA at Super Training Gym in Sacramento. decade ago. Oh, crazy. When he was still really focused on powerlifting. Met him very, very briefly. I'm almost 100% confident. I remember he was doing...
deadlift band pulls while I was there checking out the gym for the first time. This was a long time ago. So I chatted with Mark about Encima, who... Mark. reinforced is the real deal on every possible level. The piece that I took from that video specifically was paying attention to what he calls and others have called the spinal engine. And there's a book actually by that title, The Spinal Engine. The name, again, tough one.
I think it's Serge Grakovetsky, S-E-R-G-E, and we'll put a link in the show notes. But in effect, I'll actually pull this up because I think it's worth reading. so the spinal engine and you can watch the video and see me does a great job with video of explaining this
But the book has in its Amazon description, and there's no digital version, you have to buy paperback for like $115. So I'm not saying you should. I haven't read it. But this book deals with the human spine with particular emphasis on the lumbar spine. Human gait is traditionally believed to be
be the exclusive function of the legs or say the swinging of the arms and the legs, which play a part. But going back to the description, the book presents arguments and data that challenge that belief. It proposes that the spine is the primary engine that makes us move. And it goes on and on.
What I think Insima does such a nice job of is showing that, demonstrating the implications of that theory through video, and also using... tools like rope swings and other things to demonstrate how you can develop mobility through different planes of motion. So you have various things, lateral flexion, you have flexion extension in terms of this type of forward-backward plane. And it really got me thinking. I started experimenting with some of the motions in that video.
Primarily because his counter example, which is effectively the live traditional strength training, is how if you're constantly bracing, you're constantly, say, holding your breath in certain portions of a lift to increase intra-abdominal pressure. that ultimately, as a side effect, you can produce a lot of rigidity in the spine.
I really have never had an interest in being a powerlifter or even an Olympic weightlifter, although I think they should more accurately be called powerlifters. I've always been focused on weight training in service of athleticism.
and have loved playing sports, have traditionally competed a lot, and I may actually compete in 2025 in some form of sport. I would like to have something on the calendar for that. A number of... cautionary notes and then I'll come back to how I'm thinking about maybe framing exercise for myself.
The first is that you should not go from all fucked up and broken and stiff to I'm going to do the most exaggerated rotational movements possible. Yeah. Or pulling a sled backwards in this compromised rounded back position. break yourself if you do that so i think the name of the game is micro progressions and progressive resistance but being very very smart about it because as you have experienced certainly as i have experienced as you get older and you accumulate
injuries, it takes a lot longer to heal. And sometimes those things do not heal completely, no matter what you do. I got one of those splits machines where you can like put your legs in there. Oh, the Chuck Norris special. Yeah. Yeah. I had like the check Norris thing on the outside. I was doing it and I was getting further and further and further each week. And my Pilates instructor was like, what the hell are you doing? And I'm like, I'm going to do the splits in like a couple months.
And she's like, you have no supporting muscles at all for any of this. She's like, when you get done, you'll go down once and then you will only even be able to like, everything else will rip, you know? And I was like, oh shit, that's a good call. I'm glad I didn't take it that far. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. So for me, I am focused on a few things and I've actually made a lot of progress with this over the last handful of months. And in 2025.
I will be very focused on this for the first two months of the year. I'll be focused on skiing. So I'll be in the mountains for two months. And that is a great motivator to develop say different types of stability and strength. single leg lifts and so on.
And having that context in which to test myself, right? So if I'm carving in one direction and then in the other, say the inside leg is very unstable for some reason, it's chattering a lot. Well, that's something to fix. And the skiing serves as. a fun, assuming you don't overdo it and blow yourself apart, diagnostic tool for bringing to awareness some of these things you need to work on. And I'd say...
Priorities, these aren't necessarily in ranked order, but number one, as you get older, you lose muscle mass. You just do. And that's age-related muscle loss. Sarcopenia is directly correlated to any number of issues, I'm sure. including all-cause mortality. So weight training, resistance training, building muscle mass is an undeniable priority for functional healthspan as you get older.
For me, that means compound movements once or twice a week. You really don't need to overdo it or do it five days a week. A lot of people use five days a week or every day as an excuse to not get started. You can make a lot of progress, especially if you haven't done much weight training with one day.
one session per week. If you're using say a high intensity training, one set to failure type protocol, I recognize it's very simple. I recognize there are some very experienced athletes who will say, well, now you want to do. five sets of three or five sets of five or whatever it might be with three to five minute rest intervals in between to replenish the creatine phosphate. But complexity can be the enemy of execution, as Tony Robbins and others say a lot. And it's like...
Just scale down to what you can do. If you're starting an exercise habit, if that means you go to the gym every day and you do five minutes on a treadmill, make the bar low enough that you can clear it and you are not tempted to make excuses.
Let me ask you a question. If you're like, okay, I don't want to be a meathead, but I want a little muscle mass. So I want like some tones and definition, a little bit of muscle mass, you know, and I've seen the pros and cons of one set to failure and the data around it. It seems to be that
It's good, but not as good as multiple sets of failure for a single muscle group. Would you say that you believe that to be true? Or are you doing one set to failure with, if you're doing bicep, let's just take bicep, for example. If you're doing one set to failure. Are you doing several exercises on the bicep one set to failure? Or are you just talking about you're just doing hammer curls until you fail and that's it for biceps a day? Let's just take skiing as an example.
So my priority is going to be skiing and there are actually a few other sports I'll be training for at the same time. So I will be a busy, busy boy for the first two months of the year, which is great. So I'll need to lose all this fat that I accumulated over Thanksgiving and Christmas because I know those Danish butter cookies that my mom bought at Costco are just waiting for me. I know it. I know they're sitting there. So the one set to failure.
or multiple sets to failure. Training to failure can inhibit your ability to train something sport-specific like skiing if you overdo it. For instance, even though you could pack on tons of muscle doing 20 rep set to failure for squats, if you do that and then you try to go skiing the next two or three days, you're going to be garbage from a sort of fine motor control perspective. But to answer your question directly,
I have not looked at the most recent data on any of this. I'm not sure there exists data comparing these in meaningful ways that do not bias towards one method or another because I have volunteered to be a participant, a subject in certain weightlifting trials. I'm not going to mention the university because I don't want to throw them under the bus. But when I went in there, the protocol required us to do...
10 reps of bench press for X number of sets. And I went in there and you'd see one guy get on the bench because there was a circuit, right? They're trying to make use of basically an open class period for volunteers. You'd see one person who's basically dropping the weight onto his chest at a risk of breaking every one of his ribs and bouncing it off. Using terrible form. Terrible form.
very, very little time under tension. And then you'd see someone else who's doing like two seconds up, four seconds down, pause at the chest. Those are not the same 10 repetitions, right? So I do think- Time under tension is completely different. yeah so i think garbage in garbage out for a lot of studies so i don't weigh them too heavily but what i will say is if you are reasonably novice even intermediate for training and by the way
If you've been training for a bunch of years and you haven't made a lot of progress, I would consider you novice. If you do a single set to concentric failure per exercise, and I'll come back and then answer the what type of exercise and so on that you asked. you will see excellent results. And there may be some incremental gain from doing multiple sets, but it's going to dig into your recovery ability.
So you're saying one set. Yep. And now let me tell you what the one set means. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. What the one set means. And I've gone back to all of my books kind of function this way. Like all of my books are sort of reference books for myself. I go around. I gather these best practices that I've tested, and then I refer back to them. So in the case of, say, the four-hour body, the Occam's protocol and a handful of compound movements still does the trick.
for the vast majority of the population i'm sure people are going to take issue with this but i have now like hundreds of thousands millions of people who have tried these things and i've seen the success studies like it does work yes it's simple Yes, it could be more sophisticated. It is idiot proof for a reason that if I go into lift, I'm not going to be doing direct bicep work. I'm going to be doing something like a seated row.
and then a pull down and if i'm hitting the back from a few different angles that's it i might honestly just do one of those like i might do one compound pulling movement one compound pressing movement and then one or two Leg movements, that's the whole workout. The whole workout should take less than 20 minutes. People say, what about warm-up sets? Well, if you're tracking your progress well, you're using the same equipment, and you're lifting at a slow cadence, this is key.
The first handful of reps effectively function as your warmup. Now, what I'll often do is take like 30% of the target working weight that I'm going to use for my one set to failure, and I'll do three, four, five reps. just to make sure my joints aren't flared up, that I'm not feeling any pain. And then I would have, say, an A workout and a B workout. So let's just say, hypothetically, I'm making this up, but you might have something like a
Close grip incline bench press to just avoid issues with your shoulders, let's just say. Then you have pull-downs, like close grip supinated, so palm facing you, pull-downs. And then a leg press or split squats holding dumbbells on either side. So you're also hitting your traps on that one, right? That's your whole workout.
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So sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Tim, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash Tim to start selling today with Shopify. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim. One thing we didn't cover that I think is really important is you say one step to failure, but what's your target reps here? Some people say lift heavy and do eight to 10.
Some people say go a little bit lighter, get to 20 to where you fail at 20. What are you aiming for here? For safety purposes, and again, everybody's got a fucking opinion with this stuff, but use something akin to a super slow protocol, which is like five seconds up, five seconds down.
And then you can do six to 10 reps, but I wouldn't increase the weight until you get to like an eight to 10 rep range. You can increase that for the legs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I wouldn't make it complicated.
I would say five seconds up, five seconds down. That's one 1,000, two 1,000 slow. And let's call it six to 10 reps to failure. Positive or concentric failure means you're on... the in the case of the pull down the pulling motion this is when the muscle is overlapping and shortening in the case of the leg press let's just say or the squats it would be when you're pushing out not when you're lowering in the case of the
close grip bench press, it would be when you're lifting the weight up. That's the positive portion. Then you get to the point where you stick, you can't move it. All right, push for another 10 seconds as hard as you can. Try to move it a millimeter at a time. And then lower for 10 seconds, you're done. And then you have to... log the entire workout.
It's not hard to do. You need to take notes. If you don't take notes, you're not going to make the progress you want to make. And then the second workout, just to, again, hypothetical, it doesn't really matter that much. As long as it's safe and it's a compound movement, you're doing it to failure, you're going to make progress. So let's just say...
that your shoulders are healthy enough to do this. It could be like overhead press or a military press. And I'm equipment agnostic. People can argue about free weights versus machines. My position now is whatever is safest. Yeah. and whatever you can do consistently. So if you're traveling a lot, then hire a personal trainer or a powerlifter or someone with very good technique to coach you on how to use free weights because those are going to be uniform.
around the country or around the world instead of equipment which is going to be highly variable so on the next one might be like overhead press or seated overhead press Then we already did the pulldown. So maybe it's a seated row or a bent row with a barbell. Then for legs, we already did, I think I was talking about split squats with. dumbbells so maybe at this time it's leg press i have for instance my right leg is 1.1 centimeters i had full leg x-rays done a year ago
because a number of doctors thought I was full of shit with this. And I was like, I really think one leg is longer than the other. I've looked at it a number of different ways. My right leg is about like femur length. is like 0.8 centimeters to 1.1 centimeters. I did two takes of x-rays. So what happens if I'm doing, say, a back squat is it introduces a rotational force.
That is how I initially turned my mildly bad back pain into really acute, horrifying back pain that has persisted now for two years or so. I've made a lot of progress, and I can talk about what's contributed to that. actually an experiment recently with stem cells seem to be delivering some very interesting results. I'm not ready to recommend any.
laboratories related to the production or harvesting of the stem cells nor any clinics because i want to wait until i see more longitudinal results for myself but the early indications are very positive and the tldr on that is that I did not want to inject anything intradiscal. I didn't want to puncture any discs. And there are many reasons for that. I've spoken to a lot of spine mechanic experts and so on. It seems that...
the long-term risk of having some type of issue with your disc or a rupture is higher if you ever puncture the disc. So I didn't want to do that. Rather than do that, because my pain is localized to the SI joint and L4, L5, where I do have a bunch of structural issues, we did something. maybe a little unorthodox in a sense, and there's something called the iliolumbar ligament, and you have two of them, and people can look this up. But I used to think...
And I do still think this, like you're effectively as old as your joints feel, right? I really think there's something to that. Especially when you throw your back out and you're like, walk. You've never felt older in your life. And when you have to crawl to your bed on your hands and knees because your back is thrown out. Yeah, or lay on your bed, or you have to constantly fidget because your back is bothering you. Yes. Where I've started to think there may be, for me, some interesting...
interventions. Because what we did is we did an injection. I mean, the needle's huge. It's like five to eight inches long. But an injection in the SI joint... but then also bathing the... I didn't want an injection directly into the ligament just because I couldn't take the recovery time for that, but to bathe around the ligament with these stem cells, MSCs, and... Literally within a day, I felt relief in that area. So it raises questions for me around how you diagnose
back pain or look at structural issues and what's visible versus less visible. So in other words, when you look at back pain, oftentimes you do imaging, you look at the spine. and you fixate on the set joints and the vertebral bodies, the segments, and so on. And if you're over the age of 40, your back's going to look...
fucked in some way. That's not going to look great. As you get older, just like you get wrinkles on your face, your back is going to show degenerative changes almost 100%, especially if you've done any lifting or athletic anything. And what is less obvious, though, is the health or inflammation associated with some of these ligaments. So I've become super interested based on my recent experience.
and i know friends from friction massage who have seen tremendous back pain relief what is friction massage you could use like a gua sha tool there are different ways like cupping and like where they break the fascia up it's like a rapid pressure movement back and forth. So you could use a gua sha tool. It's probably going to be too big for this particular area. You might use probably using manual therapy, but I have friends who've seen incredible relief in.
What appears to be the case is that if I address those ligaments, a lot of my low back pain goes away. Now the contrast between my right side, which was treated, and my left side, which was untreated. But my left side, I considered the healthy side, I now realize it's actually in a lot of pain. So what I may do, I'm part of a clinical trial and you have to take a six-month break between stem cells for a host of reasons. I may actually do PRP.
platelet-rich plasma on that left side. We'll see. Get the vampire facial while you're at it. I'll get a two-for-one vampire facial while I'm there. Get the package deal. So hopefully that helps. And we only talked about one aspect of how I'm thinking about.
health, which is the muscle mass. For me, since I am doing the skiing training and other things, I will probably not do extended sets to failure because it'll inhibit my training. I will probably do something in the order of more like the three to five.
rep range still doing it slowly enough that i feel like it is very under control nothing ballistic i'm going to get plenty of ballistic and dynamic movements from the skiing itself one question on the recovery side you know is back in the day it was like one gram of protein per pound of body weight to get you know any type of like muscle growth what's your current regimen look like for something like this because i mean you're not going for massive gains here so it's not like it'd be perfect
Are you still getting adequate protein? Are you putting a lot of protein in there when you're doing these training days? Yeah, I will. I mean, especially because I'll be training. I'll basically be training at the gym at night before dinner and I will be... skiing and taking very serious technical lessons and trying some pretty gnarly stuff for me in terms of reasonably intense training shit or no no no no not that intense no you're doing a half pipe
No, not half pipe. I'm just talking about like bumps and backcountry stuff. Oh, backcountry stuff, yeah. Also like ski touring. I'll be skinning. Basically, you work your way up the mountain and then you ski down and stuff. So it's going to be physically...
intensive. I'll also be eating quite a lot of carbs, but probably I will almost certainly get at least one gram of protein per pound body weight. I don't think that's overkill. All right. Yeah. And I'll show you one more thing that's kind of fun. yeah and i've been looking very closely at this i don't feel comfortable promoting any brands yet because i have some technical questions but i have been experimenting with something called The acronym is LICUS, L-I-C-U-S, which is...
So I've got this. And then another one over here. If you're not seeing the video, it looks like he's part cyborg now. I've got these patches with electrodes and cables coming off. And then you set how many hours you want on this thing. And it is low-intensity continuous ultrasound. Is this why you're so chill right now? What's going on? What is this thing doing? No, no. This is not why I'm so chill. I mean, who knows? I don't think so. This is...
a device that safely administers low-intensity ultrasound over a period of one to four hours per site of treatment. So I currently have two of these coupling patches. one on the front of my shoulder, one at the rear of the shoulder. I have a bunch of tendonitis around the insertion points. Oh, so this has nothing to do with your Hawaii trip. It's not like... No, no, no. This is swimming or talking to dolphins. No, no.
This is for recovery, but also the low-intensity continuous ultrasound, so Lycus, L-I-C-U-S. You can find a lot of interesting studies on this. And I'll mention a site. I don't know if I mentioned it before, but consensus.app.
which uses AI to assess published literature from reputable journals to determine if something is a thumbs up thumbs down or inconclusive so you could put something in like is there any evidence that low intensity continuous ultrasound helps with tissue remodeling or sports recovery you'll get an answer it's not perfect but it's actually very helpful to get an initial indication
Part of what I find interesting about this is unlike some other types of, say for instance, electrical stimulation, like there are tens units that you can use that will effectively reduce pain by, and this is not scientific. description, but they're effectively overriding your nerves or overstimulating your nerves with certain frequencies to turn off or mute the pain signaling. That's not what this is doing.
This technology seems to actually help with tissue remodeling and proliferation of different growth factors. And I really remember the first time I used this, within an hour, this acute pain in my shoulder just vanished. Crazy. Now, could that be placebo? Like, it could be placebo. What's the cost on this? It's not cheap. Yeah. Which is why most people go into a clinic to use something like this.
but they get you with the razor blades approach. So the device itself, who knows, but these coupling patches are very expensive. So to get, if I'm using it once a day or twice a day, I've been using it a lot. It's like 10 grand for two months. It's expensive. How much are the patches? Like a grand a pop? Like one box of four.
I think it's four, four, four, four. So it'd be like 16 patches, something like 900 bucks. It's very expensive. But there are some people out there for whom this will be out of reach, but you may be able to find a clinic where you could do this on sort of an as needed basis.
who knows, once a week, there may be some minimum cadence necessary to see the results that you would want. But there are also people out there for whom this may make sense. And hopefully, as this technology, and you've seen this happen a million times, so have I, as it becomes.
more popular, as the technology gets more developed, as there's more competition, the price drops tremendously. You know what's funny is I've seen in podcasts, you know, you and I have been... part of this word like you'll mention something that's like three grand or whatever or something crazy and there's like well that tim rich guy can like afford all these things blah blah but honestly what happens that i think is so beautiful about this stuff is like
If you can get the higher end folks that want to go and experiment at the edges here that have the disposable income, they're doing nothing but dropping the prices for the masses because they have to ramp up production over time. And it's like, it's funny. I've seen this happen so many times, even in drugs stuff as well. Like when I first started taking Repatha as an alternative to cholesterol meds and it wasn't covered out of pocket, it was like $2,500 a month. It was like ridiculous.
and now amazon has it for 500 that's no insurance you know and it's like it just it takes time for these things to come down and hit the masses and and with those vo2 max machines too that you can get at home now i don't know if you messed around with those i just got one of those it's insane
It's insane. But it's great because you don't have to go to the clinic, and you can save the time, and then eventually these will be less expensive for everyone. Yeah. I mean, we've seen it with Uber, right? Uber Black in the beginning was definitely kind of a one-percenter thing, but it subsidized the development of…
I mean, that was jet travel though as well. UberX, Tesla, same thing. I mean, there are many, many examples. I would say I'll give people some recommendations that are not expensive at all. which I'm equally focused on, actually more focused on. This is a nice bonus, and I'm still experimenting with it. Jury's out. It seems to be very helpful, but I want to see longer term. There is a...
chapter in, and I'll see if I can share some of this. I'll put a link in the show notes for people. I'll share at least some of this. There's a chapter in The 4-Hour Body called Reversing Permanent Injuries. I will link to it for folks, but the exercises in that still deliver so much, like the bang for the buck.
in doing some of the Grey Cook exercises, the chop and lift with cable machines, the Turkish getup, even if you're just doing the first portion of that on the ground for shoulder health. I mean, there's so many. benefits to a handful of exercises in terms of injury prevention. And you have to invest in that stuff as you get older, if you want to be active, if you want to be athletic.
Your body just does not have the elasticity and the regenerative ability that it used to. And that, for instance, part of the reason I went back to that chapter is that the... chop and lift exercise have a slow under control rotational component that I felt was not dynamically, but still compatible with getting me closer to.
developing or redeveloping the spinal engine that Nsima and Yang talks about. I was like, okay, look, let me take small safe steps towards incorporating some very mild rotational exercises and that's where i'm starting it feels good feels great and i'm doing it first thing in the morning wake up cold brew coffee right now and then hawaiian coffee is incredible so yeah this is this has been my re-entry we can
after my 30, 40 days of abstinence. Wake up, immediately have a cold brew, and then go to the gym. That's a big shot. Like Hawaiian coffee is no joke. That's like some strong stuff. It's so good. It's delicious. So my favorite coffee on the planet. There's something about...
how does dark and dense and it feels very nutrient rich, like antioxidant rich to me, you know, it's good stuff. Kona coffee is good. All right. So we get a few other predictions and fun things. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. So. we got tons i just gave several ted talks so you should yeah so i'll just do i'll do some rapid fire fun stuff here so
Damn January, I'm going to drink six or less drinks per month. Moving on to investments. I like how you ran through that one. Listen, the drinking thing, well, I actually am cutting back a ton. You just notice I'm not drinking tonight. Look at that. Look at that.
Hey, baby steps. Baby steps. One of the things I've realized, especially as you get older, is that as life gets more complex, there has to be this kind of continual, especially as you have kids and other things, because continual reevaluating of... your processes like every year how can you turn down the knob and automate more things than you had the previous year just for my own sanity or eliminate more things too yes yes and so in that theme
I've gotten really simple on the investing front. The vast majority of my exposure is at True Ventures, where we take on a lot of risks. That's what we do for our day jobs. I'm going to try a new app called Monarch. It's not new, but it's been around for a while to track my finances and finally get...
a budget under control starting January. You've been using it, right? For a bit. Yeah, but he's in it. It's great. What do you like about it? So there's a couple of amount that I really like. I like for like holistic net worth, just where am I in the world? There's a bunch of tools out there. Projection Lab is good. Where am I in the world? Meaning like big picture, what does my whole thing look like? Yeah, exactly. And so I would say that, you know.
Projection Lab is good at looking where you're spending in terms of how soon can I retire and what does my retirement look like in planning for different scenarios. I think that's probably the best app out there. What was it called? Projection Lab.
Copilot has always been my favorite on mobile, but Monarch is now just, it ties together all my accounts in a view that I think is more data rich, especially on the budgeting side than Copilot. So I've kind of started to... move over to monarch more full-time which is great those two and then uh gosh i'm drawing a blank of the the last one um for the kind of like overview of everything you're gonna kill me because it's a fantastic premium what's that
Pornhub premium? Exactly. So there's Tim. He's back. He's back, everybody. Now I can't even blame it on the booze. Yeah, exactly. Before you were like, I'm hammered. Do you actually buy their premium? No. No, no, no. You would answer. Yeah, I'm sure my public favorites. Yeah, exactly. Pornhub.com slash Tim Tim. 20% off. Kubera.
Kubera is my overview app that I think is the best for tracking off your larger investments. What was the name? No wonder you forgot it. Kubera. K-U-B-E-R-A. I love Kubera. I think it's really high quality software. Anyway, that's that. So let me just go quickly down the investment front. VTI, because it gives you global exposure. I love that. I get the total stock market index there. It's Vanguard. It's low cost. It's like I want to have.
the majority of my stuff in there. I have moved my crypto allocation to 10% of overall net worth from about 4% to 5%. Oh, you increased your holdings. I increased. Now, okay. Did you increase it or is that just reflective of an increase in value? No, I increased it. You bought more. Yes, I've been buying more the last few months. I had this feeling that Trump was going to win.
And I started buying more crypto when I had that gut feeling. Just because I think that he's going to push a massive crypto agenda. And I believe that if this is probably in the more prediction side. I think in the next couple of years, we're going to see for the very first time, the US government is going to start adding crypto to our reserves. We'll treat it as a currency that we hold in our reserves. And when that happens, it's going to be nuts. I think we're going to hit my...
gut says 250 250 000 or more a coin in the next couple of years so we'll see where that goes now if somebody listens like kevin's just shilling his bags what would you say to that i would say a lot of people said this i don't know like I was talking about. I'm not saying that. No, no, I get it. But like, listen, here's the deal about shilling your bags. I'm giving you the PTSD. No, no, no, no, but this is, this is the real truth. Okay.
Let's go and take a look at how much Bitcoin traded today in terms of volume. Okay. So I love our podcast that we're both going to syndicate this episode on our respective feeds.
But we're not moving trillions of dollars of Bitcoin because I say it's going to 250 Bitcoin. I could go right now on Coinbase, right now, and say, sell 20 million in Bitcoin, press a button at market, and it would hardly even... like a little tiny tick because there's so much volume no amount of shilling could move it in any meaningful way it just can't happen now 10 years ago
You and I go on here talk about Bitcoin and we just made ourselves like, you know, 5 million bucks. But you know what I mean? Like, that's not the case anymore. It's just too massive. So anyway, there's no such thing as shilling anymore. at least when it comes to Bitcoin. Now, if we're talking about shit coins, which are happening a lot right now, that's the stuff that's just so stupid I don't even get involved in. So anyway, I hold Bitcoin. I purposely hold it in an account that I can't touch.
So I like this because like Coinbase has a feature called custody where you can't withdraw it for like three days. Enterprise level self-control. Yeah, exactly. It's like a forced hold. I like doing it and I've now stopped trading it. So I don't even look at the price. I'm like, it's just part of my overall holdings. I'm going to hold it for the next 50 plus years. Like I want to hand my kids Bitcoin. It's gone from like, when do I sell it?
Like, Ooh, is it too high? Should I sell right now? Like those days are over now. It's just like part of the portfolio. So it goes, it's digital assets. It's not going away. You can't put digital assets back in the box, like back in the tube or wherever, wherever the genie comes out of. in the tube yeah can't put the genie back in the toothpaste tube yeah exactly so last thing i will say now i do like to play you know do little one-off stock buys every now and then
I got really lucky because we called NVIDIA pretty early on your podcast before, which was good. But I have enough friends that are large executives at major companies in the tech arena. that they are all talking about nuclear power. And I don't know how to play it, but my gut tells me over the next decade, there's going to be, I'm pretty bullish on the return of nuclear to the United States.
out of our sheer capacity for power that we need for data centers on the AI side, we need alternative forms of energy. Especially if coal plants are shut down. Well, I mean, I don't think that's going to happen. I'm not saying all. I'm not saying all. If you want to play the broad basket and you're thinking about this over the long term, and I was speaking for myself, this is not investment advice, but I did find there's a fund that holds like...
uranium manufacturers and some like nuclear plants and some of the companies that are thinking about doing these new smaller plants. And so it's like a basket of public nuclear stocks right now. And they will add to it as other nuclear companies go public.
And so I'm not in the game of going and saying, hey, this is the nuclear future. It's just one company, right? Because that to me would be like, it seems too much like angel investing or something else. So anyway, the one I look at is the only one I could really find was NLR.
which is the Venec ETF trust uranium and nuclear basket of stocks. It's got a pretty high expense ratio, but I'm doing a really small piece into it just because I think over the next decade, it's going to outperform the S&P. That's all.
That's what's for fun on the kind of investment going into the new year. And then I got a bunch of predictions. Yeah, throw some of the predictions up. Okay, so prediction number one, Bitcoin hits 250, U.S. government starts adding it to the reserves. You think that's in 2025? I think that is...
in the next two years. So I'll kick that out, say, within the next two years. I think several AI companies next year struggle to raise capital and go under. And I'm talking some of the bigs that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, because I think what's going to happen is that...
I shouldn't say the bigs, the big players that are in the startup space now. I think the quote unquote bigs, like the alphabet companies are just going to run the table when it comes to most AI related things. And if that's the case. I kind of just want to hold those stocks. OpenAI, I'm still like, you know, they're so intertwined with Microsoft. I think that they'll be fine. Plus, they're working on other devices as well.
Speaking of which, one of my predictions will be that OpenAI launches some type of mobile device, maybe some type of smart headphones this coming year, because they have to be at the metal level, meaning like they have to be at the device level that we all carry around.
And when you have press and hold Apple intelligence, just by holding on the side of your phone now, and you have press and hold, like, you know how you used to query like Siri or whatever. And now you have that same going on with Gemini with Google. Now you've got AI. at the phone level already carried by the big providers to get someone to think like oh i got to go download chat gpt so i can go and switch it out as my assistant shortcuts and all that and it's like if it's like 90 is good
people won't care. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't care if I'm streaming Lord of the Rings off of freaking Hulu or Prime or Apple TV. I just want to watch the movie, right?
And so it's like, I think AI is going to be kind of like that, where we'll just like, oh, I have an Apple phone, so I use Apple intelligence. Like that's kind of where it's at. That's interesting. Yeah. So you think of like, where could they get the wedge in the door? Right. I think the headset's interesting, right? Because if they made a really good set of...
basically airpod clones of some type but intelligent with ai built in yeah had that built in but basically they're not going to replace the iphone right they're not going to replace good android phones for people who already use those but they could replace wireless AirPods. The only way I think they would have a chance at replacing, not replacing the iPhone, but being a top seller would be that they do something so first principles oriented where it's like a type of
UI UX that we just haven't even imagined yet. I heard they were working with Johnny Ive on some of this stuff. And so, you know, you got the former like industrial designer, head of design for Apple. coming to the table with OpenAI saying, hey, let's go back to the drawing board and say, if we had to build a phone today, would it be with a series of app icons on here? Or might there be a different interface that makes this way more sexy, more fun?
Cause like the future is not going to be, Hey, I'm going to go launch hotels.com app and say, get me a room in Japan in two weeks, negotiate all the things, put in my credit card credentials. It's going to be literally. You open your AI and you say, hey, can you get me a room for Japan at this hotel in two weeks? And they'll be like, which room do you want? These three things, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, this room. And it's like, boom, it's already got my information.
It's all APIs behind the scenes. It hands all that data over. The exchange is done. The payment is done. And it's just like, it's finalized within 30 seconds versus the 15 minute thing. I mean, I guess what someone like OpenAI could do is... something along the lines of a fantasy I've had for a long time, which is like a very dumb phone that I remember last, this is almost a year ago, I was telling my friends, it'd be great to have a one button phone.
And the one button phone at that time would have basically sent voice or routed a phone call to a virtual assistant or someone who handles everything for me. outside of Google Maps. It's like, all right, I have Maps, and then I have one request button for everything. And that's it. just to avoid the metastasized mess of having a thousand apps and thousand notifications and all that bullshit. And I know some very...
accomplished professionals who have stopped taking their iPhone into their office. Like they leave it in some type of locker or maybe they leave it someplace safe at like the reception and they take their dumb phone. into say the office where they're doing their real work and their family has that number right ringer is on for emergencies it has maps and that's it yeah there's nothing else so you could envision
something that is effectively the one-button phone, but it's using an AI assistant through OpenAI. 100%. Yeah, I think you're exactly right in that like there's probably the two or three things that you still need and it's not Instagram. It's not. a full suite of things it's like okay i maybe i still need to call or hail an uber at this corner and see when it's pulling up right like maps maybe uber and then music probably
Yeah, music and credit cards. That's it. Right. You don't need anything else. And AI could serve up music. I mean, I don't know exactly how they would do it, but there'd be a way to do it. They'll have APIs with all that stuff. They'll have APIs for everything. Yeah. Coming back to what we were saying earlier, too, it's like, okay, well, most people are not going to replace their phone with that, but could they get 100,000, 200,000 techies to overpay?
for that to do the basically field testing for them? Sure they could. 100%. Almost certainly. As the technology kind of matures behind the scenes, I mean, this is the playbook that I think is finally starting to work for Meta. where they had these Ray-Ban glasses, that it's the first time I've seen a meta product where I've said, okay, I mean, we've been talking about VR and AR for so long and how stupid it is, as long as this show has been around.
I know. Adam Gazzali still owes me a bottle of whiskey because he thought it was going to win out, but that's in your book. Yeah. So Ray-Bans finally is really starting to hit for meta in that you can walk up to people now. in japan and like get real-time translations right like and you don't even look like you're wearing anything real-time doxing too you see the harvard student who figured out how to use the ray-ban glasses to immediately
dox everyone. You can be like, oh, hey, are you so-and-so who researches so-and-so? They're like, oh my god, how'd you know? And it's like, because they're getting a Terminator readout. Yeah, you're getting the Terminator readout, totally. A little higher fidelity than those graphics back then. But yeah, so a couple of things, though, real quick on the prediction front, and then I'm done. But I think Microsoft releases an Android phone largely because they have the suite there. They have Word.
They have Excel, they have PowerPoint, they have Drive, they have all the stuff, Outlook, you name it. I think it'll be Android-based, and they have ChatGPT. So I think on the open AI side, that will probably be integrated into the Microsoft phone. My gut tells me there's a no-brainer for them. So Microsoft would subsidize the development and all that of this hardware as opposed to... But it'd also be Android-based.
Okay. It's almost like getting a Google phone. You know when you get a Google phone, you open it up and it's got Gmail and Chrome and everything baked in? If it is Android-based, this is such a Luddite question, I should know the answer. Does Gemini automatically come along for the ride, in which case that would be built-in competition for OpenAI if they used an Android phone? It's a great question because I know that Google had...
some funky things back in the day. If you wanted to use Android, you had to include certain types of Google services behind the scenes, even though it's open source. I don't know to what extent and what you have to bundle, but I believe...
because if i look at samsung phones and they have their own browsers and they have their own email and everything else and they're based on android that they could do the swap here because samsung already does it on the ai side and everything else lastly i think we'll get some type of confirmation of aliens and then
one last thing which i think is we'll see is we're gonna see a very massive unlock and creativity around music creation happening in the next couple of years so the same way that we're able to prompt and type in like show me a fox swimming underwater grabbing an apple and now you can't even tell it wasn't shot you know and it's like just being generated these little 4k snippets i think there's going to be a way to prompt
music creation in a very fun and exciting explosion of creativity that will make an average consumer sound that they can be a real producer for the first time. Just because I've seen some of these early betas and they're a lot of fun. I think that's the next 12 months, maybe 18 max. Yeah, I think 18 sounds about right. So you skipped over damp January, which is fine. We'll let that sit. Yeah, yeah. Aliens. So tell me more about the aliens.
And what the hell is going on in New Jersey? Honestly, I just have been ignoring the news kind of too. There's been this, I feel in the last three years, and I got a really awesome chance to sit down with that Navy fighter pilot that saw some of these things.
There has been so much inquiry now. And then there also is a new change in government, obviously, that's pushing for so much more transparency. And I think that when you have someone... and we don't have to get in the politics whether you love them or hate them or anything else, but when you have someone like Elon Musk in there being Elon, I can see this shaking free or at least the uncovering of whatever we know in this.
domain being kind of declassified and that to me is just horribly scary slash exciting at the same time yeah who knows crazy yeah i mean what are the odds that you would place honestly i in my head it's like 90% there's like aliens out there and that we know about it as a government. I guess we haven't talked about this because I don't want to sound like a fucking crazy person, but there was a point where this conversation was in the air enough. I was like, okay.
Let me do a deep dive to see what we can say with any degree of certainty and what we can't say with any degree of certainty. And looking at government reports, looking at... various first-person testimony about the tic-tac and so on that are very widely cited and trying to account for the possibility that
Some of these people, not all of them, and not necessarily people involved with TikTok, may see some benefit or appeal, like every human being on social media, to getting attention. So you have to add that in as a possible contributing factor. What can we conclude based on the available data? And what seems to be the case if you're looking at UAPs, right?
this is what unidentified aerial phenomena now the rebrand from ufo so you don't sound like someone wearing a tinfoil hat And part of the reason that it's aerial phenomena as opposed to flying object is because the vast majority of these can be explained by... high-altitude weather balloons or meteorological phenomena that cause a strange visual effect in the sky that is noticeable by humans from the ground.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are like 95 plus percent can be accounted for by that or 90 plus percent. Then you have also a long government history of covering up test craft. flights and so on with reports of UFOs, right? So there's a crash of some prototype of some type of weaponized technology or surveillance technology.
especially many, many decades ago. They're worried about that news getting to our enemies slash competitors overseas. So they drum up a misinformation campaign around it being a UFO. Okay, so there's also a bunch of that. Taking all of that into account, if you look at congressional testimony and a bunch of other things, there do seem to be quite a few examples of documented phenomena often recorded from multiple video.
sources that defy explanation. They seem to defy explanation. And the descriptions of the behavior of these things seem to defy any explanation using technology that is currently available to us. But I would say that the idea that there are little green men in these ships strikes me as... kind of ridiculous unless they're tourists who just like are on safari seeing what humans are doing yeah because if they're sufficiently advanced to do what some people report these craft doing
Why on earth would they have, like we're already using drones for warfare and all sorts of things. Why would they risk life and injury? That's why I don't think it's that. I think it is tourism, dude.
You're right. It could be tourism. And the ones that wreck are like the ones that you hear about in Africa when people go to safaris and they have too many drinks and they just like fucking crash into a rhinoceros and then like get eaten or whatever. It's like some of these aliens are coming down here and it has to be something like that.
They've had a few bevs, and they just fucking wrecked their shit. It's like teenage alien DUIs. Yeah, exactly. Where'd Glob Glob go? Oh, fuck. Yeah, he's gone to earth again. Did he drink? Yeah, he took a few. Yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe, right? I do think there are many more questions than answers, of course, but actually, you know, I'll give a shout out. There is an app called Enigma, which...
runs machine learning on UAP sightings. So if people want to check that out, it's pretty interesting. Of course, we've seen a huge spike in New Jersey over the last period of time, but that's worth checking out. And I'm actually just going to double. Check. Did you see moment of contact, by the way? Nope. Oh, you got to see this. Yeah, so Enigma is enigmalabs.io. Make a note of this. Moment of contact.
It's a Netflix documentary about this 1996 crash in Brazil. And it's like these citizens, dozens of them, saw not only the crash. But the freaking aliens wandering around the neighborhood and shit after the crash. And then all these military things came in. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's like E.T., but in Brazil. I put on an alien documentary like once a year. Netflix knows me not.
yeah yeah it's like it's like hey you might like this i'm like jj abram's production company bad robot they made some ufo miniseries i watched that on an airplane did they That's when you watch that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I watched this one and I was like, wow, holy shit, like it's pretty compelling. Let me throw out a couple of alternate explanations or like supplemental explanations. So one.
When you see these reports, right, like the vast majority of alien abduction reports are like rednecks getting pulled up by a tractor beam and then having like anal probes put in them. And I'm just like, why is it that all these rednecks are getting anal probed? Is it always anal probes? There is a lot of probing typically involved, but it is weird. What's going on there? Why do they return them? Like take them? I don't know. I don't know where I was going to go is like the reports also of the.
appearance of these aliens right so what you often see is like the upside down teardrop shaped head with the big eyes and it's like well look cross-culturally you see these reports everywhere therefore they must be real those types of entities often are cited in say certain types of psychedelic drug experiences also so what does that mean right are people having sort of spontaneous
drug-like experiences that are producing these visions? Is it actually not that these particular alien creatures exist, but that there is some fundamental production of this hallucination based on...
endogenous DMT release or something. Who the fuck knows? But I'm saying there could be a component of that. The other one is, my thought is, if we take as a possibility that there are aliens from God knows where who are somehow getting to Earth by bending the time-space continuum to get here from gazillions of light years away somehow in these craft. then wouldn't it be equally plausible that these craft are sent by time traveling?
basically like descendants of us that are like, wow, we really fucked that up. Let's try to send back like an intervention team. It sounds crazy. I don't think it's any crazier than aliens figuring out how to get here from a gajillion years away to go on safari.
handle pro rednecks. It doesn't strike me as any stranger. You've heard that a lot of these sightings are around some of these nuclear facilities as well, like the missile silos and stuff like that. I have, yes. What I'm doing right now is what I always try to do. This is especially true with things that I feel strongly about. I'm like, what else could explain this? Like, what are some possible alternate explanations? Particularly when I'm delving into some of the very weird.
edges of things that I've done over the last 15, 20 years with respect to psychedelic assist therapies and so on. Like some very, very strange reports come back. So how do you cross examine those? One tool in the toolkit is simply to say, let me try to strongman against whatever my current explanation is. So in the case of the nuclear sites, it seems like there's a disproportionate...
number of reports and videos and so on associated with these military sites. However, you could also look at, say, the data for brain tumor diagnoses. And if you were to look at the graph, of something like that, and I'm making up this example, but I think it's probably true, it would look like there's an explosion of brain cancer, that among the human populace, brain cancer is just on this crazy parabolic rise.
It's probably just because our diagnostic tools have become better, right? Our imaging tools are catching things earlier. They're more sophisticated. Similarly, at these nuclear sites, or especially military sites with nuclear components, what do they have?
a million times the surveillance of any other place, right? So it's possible these things are flying around in the Alaskan tundra, but there's nothing there to capture them. So I think it's certainly possible those are areas of interest. To me, that would seem to... lend weight to explanations of, I don't know why aliens would be interested in that. Time traveling humans, maybe. State actors, like China.
Oh, for sure. They'd be very interested. Soviet Union, for sure. But some of the propulsion and aeronautic behaviors of these craft do not seem to reflect technology that's available to any. current state actor, including the United States, which raises all sorts of questions. But there's some very strange stuff out there. It is a very, very, very small single digit percentage of the total reported.
or documented phenomena. But yeah, it's strange. That was my conclusion. If we can ever find a hotspot and we get a chance to go out there, that would be fun. I just get a group of people go out there and just do like a little UFO. What do you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a place where there's a lot of UFOs showing up, you know?
There is some of those places that are supposed to be better for viewing UFOs. Yeah. That would be fun. Just get Airbnb for like a week. When I was a kid, I remember driving. My mom, babesitter at the time. I think my brother was a baby. and we were driving i remember exactly where we were i'm not going to name it but i remember the exact road and this kind of like cigar shaped things went and then just shot off we all saw it and i was just like what the was that no idea
But we all saw the same thing. Yeah, so who knows? There was a fair amount of military testing out there, so maybe. Who knows? That's crazy. Go figure. That's awesome. So that's the aliens. That's all I got. Or pseudo-aliens. All right, that's all you got. So I'll talk about a couple of things which are not related to predictions. Maybe I have some predictions. Maybe they'll come out organically. So you're talking about protein. I'll mention a few things that might be of interest to folks.
while i've been here i've been on the go i'll also talk about why i seem so chill which i think i can nail pretty easily to one thing so the first and this is a company i'm super heavily involved with but I mean, I'm involved with it because I believe in it a lot. So these, so you've seen these venison sticks, these axis deer venison sticks, Maui Nui venison. It's the most nutrient.
dense red meat that you can get and the most ethically harvested, in my opinion, red meat that you can get. What's interesting about this one, this is a brand new product. I've been consuming two or three of these a day. It's basically a multivitamin in a meat product because it has, this is called Peppered 10. And it's got 10% liver and heart in addition to the muscle. And it is incredible how much nutrient density.
you get from that. And then the other one, which I don't actually have any official relationship with whatsoever, but shout out to also Peter Tia, who we both know, who's the chief science officer. but this is David. So these David bars have incredible protein per calorie ratios, 28 grams of protein, 150 calories. So when I am traveling, especially when I'm traveling, this is basically the kit.
Yeah, I do the David bars too. They're good. One of them was a little too sweet for me, but the blueberry one's really good. Yeah, some of them are a little too sweet for my palate, but also there is a point where I'm like, I cannot eat another. venison stick because i eat so many of those per week and we're in maui meaning my team and i are in maui right now because we wanted to visit maui nui oh that's awesome jake muse is one of the most impressive
company leaders and operators I've ever seen, including all of my startups in tech and otherwise. He's so good at talent development. He's so good at culture. It's a great example of doing good through a for-profit. And I just think that type of model is important to highlight because... There is a lot of good you can do through sort of market-driven solutions. And in this case, what Maui Nui Venison does, people don't know. Axis Deer were introduced, they're originally from India, to Hawaii.
by king kamehameha the third or fifth i can't recall exactly they have no natural predators and now there are like tens of thousands of these deer ravaging the landscape and so they're destroying the ecology And that has all sorts of downstream effects, literally and metaphorically, including destroying coral reefs because they produce a lot of erosion and it's really alarming it looks like wildfire effectively so what maui nui does is they harvest these deer meaning they
shoot them in the field at night for lowest stress levels for the animals and it's incredibly well run their sort of efficiency ratio is as good as say slaughterhouses for cattle which are very stressful for the animals right they're factory farmed then they're put into chutes they're literally held in place and then boom like bolt in the head this
for my money is infinitely more ethical. I mean, the animal is wild and free, living its life until the very instant that it instantaneously expires. Then they package that and they sell it. But what they also do, best way to go. Yeah. Let's just go at a Maui Nui field when we're like old. Like they'll just put us up at some point when we can no longer harness our spinal engine.
It's like, oh, it's time to put Kevin out to pasture. Just give him a donut and a couple of beer. Have him sitting at a table. Yeah, exactly. At Maui Nui, it's all green. I'm like, Tim, why did you bring me to Maui Nui? It's so nice here. Yeah, no, Maui Nui retirement home. You're going to love it.
you're gonna love it so what i did here this trip which i'd always wanted to do but i've never done is i went on a hollow eye and a hollow eye harvest is for the community here in maui so The HoloEye food sharing program that was created in April 2020 as a response to food insecurity in Hawaii, which had a lot of food security issues, emergency level caused by the COVID lockdowns.
What the Maui Nui team did is they completely sort of revamped everything so they could first just drive venison by the ton straight to the food bank to donate it for communities. And then after the devastating wildfires last year, they completely restructured their operations and this i mean i got the email sent to all investors and they're like hey look guys we are like shifting our focus completely to helping our communities which need food like this is a disaster level
crisis and changed their business model and they have shared more than 120 000 pounds of venison meaning donated since the 2023 fires it's amazing so There are a lot of partners and other people who have helped them along the way. But what I did is, and my team had the option of participating and they all opted in, was to go on a night harvest. So their operation is like a special operation, Vampire Hour.
I mean, you go out, they have FLIR infrared cameras and scopes. They have display monitors. They're capturing information, which is like a current stop, no shot, current stop, shot. And they have... like laser identifications for the rovers who are the people who then go and like retrieve the deer. And I went through the butchering process. I wanted to get better at butchering. So it's like, I actually.
butchered, I don't know, six or seven deer on this trip. That's amazing. And did you take some meat with you or no? Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, the vast majority of that's going to be donated, but some of it I'm going to keep. for myself and sent to family members and so on but it can be very visually arresting it can be confronting for someone who's used to getting food from a conveniently wrapped
plastic packaging from Whole Foods. But I find it so grounding in the sense that it makes you fully aware of what is involved to put food on your table if you choose to eat meat. And I feel very unconflicted about it. I know there's some people who feel conflicted. I don't. It's funny you mentioned that because it's like...
I get if you're a vegetarian or vegan out there and you're like, I don't see eye to eye with anything that is being said right now. That totally makes sense to me. But if you're going and having a burger and like, I don't know for me, if I'm eating a burger and I can't.
put down the animal that i ate it from like that there's a big disconnect there like it wasn't just a couple generations ago we were doing that you know what i mean and like now it's been completely stripped out of our culture and you know i don't have the same amount of hunting experience that you did i went hunting with my dad once but
you know, when I was, I've certainly done a shit ton of fishing and, you know, it's not the easiest thing to put down a big ass salmon either, but like, you know, you think it's for its life and you make use of everything you can, you know, and it's, and it's amazing. Totally. And they use everything, which is also deeply inspiring. I mean, they use everything from these animals. And they're effectively restoring an ecosystem, right? They are feeding.
the local community and they're providing the most nutrient dense. Yes. You can purchase. And they're bringing back traditions of things that like this idea that there's a lot of chefs that are doing this now where they call it like nose to tail, which is like.
It's not about just getting the prime cuts and throwing everything else away and being wasteful. It's like cooking all of the different aspects and using all the different aspects of the animal for either consumption or for product use or whatever it may be. There's no waste there or very little, you know? And part of the reason they can do this is because they are harvesting these deer from private land. So to be clear, the reason that you buy farmed animals...
for food in the United States because that's what you have to do. You cannot buy game meat. That's illegal because you don't want people poaching on public land and then selling meat, which can lead to overkilling and all sorts of issues with wildlife management.
cause imbalancing so the operation is incredibly unique in that respect and there are actually i don't think it matters to out them here like there are a lot of say vegans or vegetarians there are i know vegans this is going to sound like a contradiction in terms but who object to a lot of the
animal husbandry practices especially factory farming and so on in the us so they don't eat meat based on those ethical grounds and they make an exception for maui nui it's the only meat that they consume so anyway that was this trip so my team got to ride around in these atvs and see the displays and really see the whole process how does that not surprise me that every single one on your team like if you work for tim ferris and and you're like you're like hey we're going on a hunt tonight like
Is there one person that's going to be like, oh, no. You're like, you're fucking fired. No, no. I wouldn't fire them. I wouldn't fire them. I mean, it's. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I know. You know, it's quite a bit to take in.
But what I wanted to do, and this is actually not my idea, this is the suggestion of one of my employees, they wanted firsthand experience with one of the companies or nonprofits that I support. And initially, we'd thought about doing something with Amazon Conservation Team.
because i've done a lot of work with them in columbia and suriname and other places but that would have involved two weeks off the grid and would have been very complicated from a logistics perspective maybe they're talking about your psychedelic donations that you've been doing wait what was this
Maybe when they're talking about your psychedelic research, you've been doing that. I don't think I feel comfortable sending my employees to the 17th dimension just yet. But who knows? So that's what I've been up to. And then on the calming side, on the grounding side. Yeah, you're like a two. You're typically like a nice toasty seven or eight. Simmering seven. You seem very chill. Yeah. So I'd say chill, certainly Hawaii helps. Certainly good sleep helps. Exercise helps.
What? Valium. I feel like I did three Valium before I started the show. I've got the Lycus on this shoulder. I've got my morphine drip on the other. Yeah, exactly. Your morphine patch. No, it's not morphine. It's not morphine. It's meditating twice a day. amazing yeah and i've been doing it for probably a month now and i started it in part as a response to a
disappointing result from a booster of accelerated TMS. So we spoke several shows ago about accelerated TMS and how my five-day bout, let's just call it, or treatment with accelerated TMS... Had the greatest durable impact on.
my generalized anxiety that I've ever experienced. This includes psychedelic assist therapies. The accelerated TMS, which is a non-invasive treatment using transcranial magnetic stimulation over a five-day period in this case, where you're getting treated basically eight minutes.
every hour on the hour for 10 hours a day. It's very involved. Like when you're doing it, that's all you're doing for effectively a week. And it was phenomenal. And I will almost certainly do it again, but five days is a lot. I wanted to see if I could do it with less. So first I tried a two day booster. It might've been a single day booster and it was not enough. It did nothing. Then I went back and this is going to California and I did a three day.
booster also not enough so i just wasted a lot of time a lot of money trying to round down and it didn't do anything and i found that very disheartening it just means i need to go back and do the five days and figure out the right cadence, but it's very expensive to do this, and it's very time consuming. So I then was looking at different meditation options, and this has since become a company that I'm...
very heavily involved with. But The Way, Henry Shookman, your man, who you initially introduced me to. And I've introduced my employees to The Way, which is an app. And the sessions, you can make them longer or shorter. I set them at 10 minutes. And I was very skeptical because I did TM, you know, transcendental meditation back in the day, which is 20 minutes twice a day.
And I assumed that 10 minutes, like, yeah, it'll be kind of relaxing, but it's really not going to have much of a cumulative effect. And I was completely wrong doing 10 minutes in the morning.
10 minutes either before dinner or before bed but making it like brushing your teeth it's a non-negotiable right it's just a non-negotiable you just do it like you would do anything else that is non-negotiable and doing those 10 minutes twice a day has been incredible because it has effectively gotten me to, I think, a similar level of lower generalized anxiety.
that I got from spending 30 to 50 grand to do this experimental TMS therapy, which that is all inclusive, right? So that's like the treatment, the hotels, the flights. so on and so forth it adds up and you can do it for less
That was with a MagVentures device, which I think is quite interesting. BrainSway is another one that's very interesting and works well for a lot of other people. It doesn't have to be that expensive. But for me, I was like, look, let me pay for the white glove ultra high touch best option. And if that doesn't work for me, I'm going to conclude that I cannot recommend this therapeutic intervention because this is as good as it gets. And the idea that you can meditate 10 minutes a day.
with an app and people can check it out thewayapp.com is the app henry shookman has the most relaxing voice you'll ever hear in your life and i think the app gives you 30 sessions for free so you can get a real flavor for it it's not like oh you get two chances and at least when i used it the first time i didn't have to use my credit card and by the way even though i'm an investor because i
product test everything and love giving feedback. As Kevin has seen, I've sent like a million looms to co-founders as product feedback. We're like, no, I want to pay for it because if there's a glitch in the system, I want to know what the glitch is. And I want to report it. So I paid for it. And you get 30. So that's either if you're doing 10 minutes a day, that's 30 days. If you're doing two a day, that's two weeks. It's plenty of time.
to either notice or not notice in effect. But what else would you say about Henry? I will say that what is a challenging thing to always navigate on the investment stuff, although I love my new as well, I just ordered the sticks, the 10 sticks. Those are going to be good. They're so good. I'm not an investor there, but I do love their product.
is like the one thing that you won't see that i'll tell you the behind the scenes is like tim i was hitting you up and i was like oh dude you know you invested but you hadn't really given it a full deep dive run right And you were like, oh, man, I don't know. Like, I really have to like to your defense and your credit. And this shows you kind of like the behind the scenes of why, Tim, I respect you so much is like you didn't want to ever really kind of.
talk about this or really like overly endorse it until you would really put it through your own personal rigor deep dive yeah and then the first thing is i get on the phone call with the team because we do investor updates with them or i do investor updates with them because i let their round every month and they're like
yeah tim sent us like another 10 looms like he's he's got all this feedback he's got all this feedback and he's like and they were quick to implement that stuff they have been one of the fastest teams to update product which is not to say they have to take all my feedback or suggestions they certainly don't it's their product but they have been so fast at fine-tuning the product i've been really
impressed. Yeah. Well, they've loved the feedback. It's all been super valid stuff. So that's, that's awesome. But anyway, what I would say about it is like, you know, I started studying with Henry during, before he had an app during the pandemic and.
you know, this is what really got me into Zen. And I think one of the things that meditation struggles from is this race towards the bottom in that there's been a commercialization of meditation that says, Hey, do the two minute meditation. No, the one minute meditation of the like.
How can I just like productize meditation and sell meditation? And like, this is like a real Zen master teaching course that it's for people that really, you may have tried calmer headspace, but you want to go deep, deep.
and really go for something much bigger here that to me is the exciting promise of this app because it's not just a hired pretty voice on the thing it's like an actual zen master teaching you and that comes through in the the knowledge transfer it's just you can feel it you know and it's also it's skill development right it's not
pleasant story du jour where you're just jumping around listening to different things, which could be soothing. Maybe it worked for some people. It's never really worked for me particularly well if I approach it that way. This is skill development in a logical progression, which you notice.
recognize it. You will recognize as you go through and maybe you're going through a particular retreat that is themed on hindrances, for instance, and then you're doing a sit where you're focusing on aversion and you can label it. And then for instance, I went out to a dinner two nights later. This was a table of ladies who'd had a few too many drinks and they were cackling like fucking crazy. And normally I would just, I would sit there just.
seething, right? And I'm not proud of saying this, but I would just be like, God damn it. you know, I'd want to exact some vigilante justice. I'd be like, well, if nobody's going to talk to her, like, how are they going to learn? And like, nobody else is going to go over there. So I have a moral obligation to like, be like, Hey ladies.
Then if they're like, hey, pal, fuck yourself, then I'm going to be all spun out and dysregulated, sitting down to eat my cheesecake, trembling in fury. So I was like, oh, and it popped up. And as soon as it popped up, I was like, aversion. You're experiencing aversion. And I used exactly the skill that I had practiced two days before in the meditation. I was like, boom. And it defused the whole thing.
that's what you want. Like you're not meditating in an app just to feel good while you're using the app. How can you bring into everyday life? And what I also like about it is it doesn't let you skip. You have to follow the program. for good reason. You don't get to skip around indulging your whim and impatience. You have to follow through. So if you try to skip ahead, it's like, hey, buddy. Yeah, glad you're excited.
Sorry, you're not allowed to skip around because this program does X, Y, and Z. So enjoy. It's good stuff. It's perfect time to use New Year's, like get a New Year's resolution. This is like going to be. This is going to be a big one for me. You know, it's funny because I'm looking at the number of retreats because I've done quite a few now and I'm like, oh God, I don't want this to end. Like, what am I going to do?
When I'm like through the entire program, I'm like going to run out of Henry, but I have so much left. It's great. Also, you're going to come with me to a seven-day retreat. We got to make that happen this year, like an in-person one. Yeah, I'm game. We'll do a five-day one. Look, I'm open to it.
As long as you don't eat a lot of mushrooms before you go. Yeah, fast for six days and eat microdose while I'm doing it from probably overkill. You probably have some PTSD from that one. Oh, it was not a wise.
set of decisions there were there were bad decisions were made on my part i'd be game to talk about that so let's talk about actually new year's resolutions for a second yeah this ties in i literally just did my past year review which i do every year i go through my calendar kind of week by week i did that today i also looked forward to the next year and
What I've already been doing over the last month or two, and I'd encourage people to think about this, instead of thinking about New Year's resolutions, think about New Year's reservations. New Year's reservations, what does that mean? It means what are you putting in your calendar? If it's not in your calendar, it's not real. It's like, okay, so if you want to exercise this and this and this, hire a trainer or book a program or buy a membership.
get time in your calendar. So what are your New Year's reservations? And for me, the core of that is extended periods of time with close friends. Those people who I know are going to give me energy or going to leave me feeling better about my life and the world and optimistic. Those are the relationships I want to invest in.
So I go through the year and for instance, January, February, it's like I've rented a house and it's stupidly expensive for me, but I put together a Google spreadsheet and I'm inviting friends to come join. I'll see you late January. I don't know if you saw that on our list. I'm going to buy some skis too. I'm going to do some skiing. It's going to be fantastic. I'll give you another example.
you're invited i haven't actually talked to anybody about this i did it on the slide but next august i booked a week in the rockies for alpine survivalist training with this amazing outdoorsman. And I'm going to invite five to seven guys. Dude, that sounds amazing. Yeah. So if you're interested, I can tell you more about that. It's going to be incredible.
Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I pay a lot of attention to the details for this type of thing. I've always loved that shit, you know, like with the Eagle Scout and being a Boy Scout. Like I want to dig little tunnels that I can like sleep in and shit and the fucking ice and shit. Like I'm totally down. So we'll have adventures like that. And it doesn't have to be a week long. It could be a long weekend, right? It could be. Yeah.
Every year, some of my closest friends come, and it depends on the cast of characters. It's not always the same people every year, but for an annual reunion in the summer of old friends. And in this case, because I do get questions about this sometimes, it's like, well, why isn't it?
a mixed group. It's not a mixed gender group because unfortunately in modern society, especially on the coasts where people tend to get highfalutin and fancy and brainwash themselves into all sorts of unproductive things. that there are very few socially acceptable male-only activities or groups. There are just not many options outside of perhaps certain sports environments. So since that is a rarity...
People are by default going to be in mixed groups. And I think women generally do a very good job and it's socially acceptable to have female only activities and groups and so on. But a lot of men don't have that. Most of my friends don't have that. And that type of experience becomes less and less common as they get married and have kids and so on. For me, I feel like the gift I can give is blocking out a few options for people over the year. Take them away from their wives for a week.
Yeah. It's a gift you're given. Yeah, where they get some time. And the kids and a little break. Yeah, yeah. And also, I think a lot of men, in my experience, it's like they don't... bond necessarily and i know i'm painting with a broad brush and there are always exceptions and so on but it's like they don't bond in the same way that women do in the sense that a lot of guys just want to not talk and do shit together right and there just aren't many options for doing that
And the beauty of saying, setting this up and having reservations, and this doesn't only apply to men, it applies to women too. Like if you don't cultivate and nourish those friendships, they will atrophy, they will go away.
It's interesting. I have to convince my wife, Daria, to do these social things with women because it's not in her DNA to do that. And so tonight I was like, I'm going to record a podcast. She's like, okay, I'm going out with my girlfriend. I'm like, awesome. Go do that. Take some time. have a moment go get a massage like whatever you got to do like to prep for the holidays like you deserve it and it's so important to have those breaks it's important to have the breaks and i mean this idea that
I can't remember where I read this recently, but I was reading a piece. This idea that you're going to spend 24-7 together with your partner is a very new idea, relatively speaking. and get everything and anything from your partner unreasonable that's not gonna work yeah they're everything the other being your therapist your partner your business person you're like and it's like that doesn't work yeah so i have a number of these blocked out for the year i try to have
probably like four or five and they're not all a week long and they're not all dedicated time. For instance, like with the skiing, it's like people are bringing their wives, people are bringing their kids. It's like, that's a family. or a couple adventure. And then there are a few that are boys only. So the New Year's reservations is something I've done this now for at least five years, maybe longer, where it's like I'm blocking these things out.
They're in the calendar. They will not get crowded out by other things. So that's a big one for me. That's great. And then other news. Finished my NABNAM, which is no booze, no masturbating.
30-day challenge, which a lot of my readers and fans joined me on. I also did no coffee. So I was allowed to have tea, but I didn't do coffee. And it was a fantastic reset. And in the last... weak not to get too tmi but it's like okay all of those things have been reintroduced and i'm like yeah you just went to town i really liked the cleansing of the dopamine palette and
These can be addictive behaviors, right? All of them. So I think there's a very good chance that I'm going to be, I have to think about it a little bit just because so many people will be visiting, but very, very either completely dry for January. You're like, so many people are going to visit me. I just going to have to like masturbate in the living room. I've got so many friends coming up.
What kind of party is this? I didn't get the memo. Tim's back on. Just give him a few minutes. You don't understand. He's been depriving himself. Is Tim ever not in his bathroom? What's going on here? No, that's the alcohol side. Yeah, all that stuff, I think I might continue all of that for January. We'll see. But it really was a fantastic reset. And I think it contributed to the lowered anxiety and kind of how chill I am right now, frankly.
And there was an interview I think Peter Tia did with a psychiatrist, female psychiatrist, who was saying when somebody comes in and say they're a heavy cannabis user and they use it for reducing anxiety. chronic pain or whatever. Actually, in this case, it wouldn't be chronic pain. They're using it for what they believe to be reducing anxiety. But they've developed this hedonic adaptation to the cannabis consumption.
that before she'll prescribe other medications, before she'll work on the talk therapy, she'll try to get them to abstain from, say, cannabis use for two to four weeks. And lo and behold, in many cases, anxiety drops to the floor just by that intervention. That was partially what inspired me to do the 30 days of abstinence from these things is to see, okay, what does it look like to reset the system? And it's great. Nothing against those things in moderation, but like, I think.
for instance with me and coffee it's like if i'm allowed to unrestrained consume as much coffee as i want i will consume a lot of coffee yeah and it's easy for me to over consume so I do occasionally. I mean, look, I've been loving my cold brew. So maybe I'll just limit it to one cup of coffee in the morning, which I can actually do if I'm getting out of the house and getting on the mountain for a few hours rather than sitting in a coffee shop.
where it's like there's a fixation with beverages and it's like, or if you're in a restaurant, they just like a diner, they keep pouring coffee. You're like, and before you know it, you've had five cups. So anyway, some of the things on my mind, what else you got, Kevin? Anything else you'd like to add?
I'm on the same boat as you with the alcohol stuff. It's so funny how the last few years, if you go back, it's been like, oh, I'm going to do X number of days. And there's been like this hard and fast rule. And it was like, don't break it. Just force yourself through it.
It's like one of the things I realized in the last few weeks, especially with all the holiday parties and things that I've had, I'm like, I just have to understand there are going to be moments when you go out and you have a couple of drinks with friends, but it has to be. an occasion, not just a night at home where you're like, oh, let's pop a bottle of wine and have some alcohol. I would much rather it be about a special moment with a friend enjoying a good meal than have it be.
just this constant thing that just kind of makes you not hung over, but just not your best version of yourself. You know, like you said about the anxiety stuff, like a lot of that. You don't even realize it because you think that substance is actually reducing anxiety. But in reality, if it's too many times in a month, it's like depleting all kinds of nutrients and B vitamins and like it adds to actually more anxiety.
by just partaking in it so it's like this horrible thing it also fucks up your sleep right so i mean the big one is like yeah it's going to reduce your anxiety for two to three hours and then you're going to feel like dog shit for 12. so and some people handle it better than others but What I've found also is that by doubling down on exercise, like exercise is the lead domino that tips over all of these other habits more easily. What I mean by that is...
If I know I have a half-day ski lesson that starts at 8.30 or 8 a.m., depends on the snowfall, and then I have more training later that night, if I have had two or three drinks the night before, I'm going to be punished. There are consequences. And maybe it's not feeling terrible, but my performance is terrible. And I hate losing. I hate not improving. I love improving. And it's a corrective mechanism, right? If I don't have that in place.
I'm just sitting in front of a laptop and maybe the performance drop isn't as noticeable. It's not as obvious. Then it's harder for me to hold myself to that line, perhaps. But yeah, you know, the more movement. more exercise, the more everything else falls in line, in my experience. Agreed. Yeah. All right, man. Well, I'm excited for 2025. I got all sorts of great shit coming.
i'm super stoked we're gonna hang i'm presuming at south by well we'll see you in january but of course yeah no we're gonna see each other in jan and then got a lot of fun stuff coming for south by Yeah. We'll have to let people in on that at a later date in terms of when to come hang with us. But yeah, we're going to do a little, we'll do something. We'll do something on stage and something fun around that time. So keep your eyes and ears.
peeled for news at some point in the near future which should be very exciting sounds good good to see you buddy yeah happy new year and happy holidays give your fam the best yeah same to you man same to you and yours and For everybody listening, we'll put links to stuff we mentioned in the show notes, tim.blog slash podcast, and we'll put everything in there. And I'll give one more rec, which is, I'm totally unaffiliated with this.
But in addition to the way I've been listening to a recording, which was actually sent to me by a friend who took the audio tapes and converted it into MP3, but there's an easier option because I found it on Audible. It's called The Present Moment. a retreat on the practice of mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. So Thich Nhat Hanh, I've been a fan of forever and his books had a huge impact on me, but I'd never heard his voice. I had never heard his voice. And this is a recorded.
retreat with guided meditations and so on from Thich Nhat Hanh and it is quite mesmerizing. And I mean, he's got the accent, which gives it the necessary level of exotic gravitas, which always helps. But I will say that the way sort of greased the groove for me to be more open to this and...
When I've just been laying in the bath after doing a bunch of activities after my night harvest or whatever, and I'm really sore, I will listen to these chapters from the present moment. Let me give one book recommendation as well I'm not affiliated with. Fire away. By Bruce Grayson, MD. It's called After. Have you heard of After? I have excited Bruce Grayson on the podcast. No way. Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. I got to go listen to that. Was it good?
It was outstanding. Yeah, he was really good. From University of Virginia. Yeah, so essentially this book, the subtitle is A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. I'm like halfway through it and I just like, I can't put it down. Like, it's so good. Professor slash Dr. Grayson is a very credible researcher. This guy is not like hand-wavy woo-woo guy in beads. No offense to beads, but you get the idea. He's not like the archetype of some guy who's...
got a heavy dose of conspirituality and can't really sort fact from fiction. This is a very credible researcher, and he is fascinating. I debated having him on the podcast or not for quite a long time. And then I realized, what am I so afraid of? I actually feel quite good about his documentation, the research he's put out. his observations don't ring as wildly speculative.
And these are documented phenomena. People have these experiences. So let's take a closer look at near-death experiences. And I'm really glad I did it. Really glad I did it. But I was hemming and hawing for probably a year or two.
I was worried that it would open the door to criticism of not being sufficiently skeptical or critically minded with guests, but he delivered what I hoped he would deliver, which is a very... sober, fascinating account of a well-reported phenomena that is poorly understood that he has researched for several decades now at this point.
Yeah. Which he became interested in quite accidentally and reluctantly. Oh my God. The story about how he became interested in it and what happened to him is just wild. It's bananas. I won't ruin it, but people check out the book or check it when the podcast came out a couple of years ago.
No, podcast came out like a few months ago. Oh, geez. I gotta go check it. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. Yeah, it's fun. I'll link to the Dr. Grayson episode as well for folks after. Didn't Daria also read that? yeah that's how i had it was in my audible library she's like you got to read this and that when you share an audible library you just see what your partner's buying yeah cool and so like i just downloaded it and yeah it's been awesome i dig it
Awesome, brother. Well, lovely to see you. As always, give a hug to Dardar and the kiddos and Toasty for me. Will do. Please pet Molly for me and tell your parents I said hello. I will. Happy holidays, brother. I love you. I'll see you in Jan. Yeah. Love you too, buddy. I'll see you in January. Happy holidays. Happy holidays.
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.
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