Tim, good to see you, man.
Dude, glad we're doing this. Yeah. So fun to hang.
Back in LA for a little bit. And it is a nice corner of the world.
You know, until the failed state implodes, it's going to be lovely.
Yeah, we'll enjoy it while we can.
Yeah. So, you have lots that we can talk about.
I've got some things jotted down. Where should we start? Let's start with probably the most talked about thing these days, which is AI.
And I, you know, I know people are tired of hearing about all this AI stuff, but I think there's been an inflection point in the last, I'd call it three weeks, that I am just really blown away by. Like AI has turned into something that I kind of saw it coming, but I didn't think it would come this rapidly, which is it is replacing. So when I first thought of AI, I thought, okay, we have this chatbot. We can launch it. We can ask like questions like of whatever, you know, I got to repair this light switch. How do I do it? Like that's typical AI use case over the last, call it, you know, two years. In the last call it month, there has been a release of a handful of AI assistants that are not your typical like ChatGPT. They're different. So have you played with Instinct at all?
I haven't, but I know people are. Yeah. So you should provide some context for folks who don't. Let's start off.
So let me first put these are the people in the ring that are entering this new kind of era of personal assistant AI, which is I would say Instinct, Muse, which is a Meta product, and then you have Grokbot, which is essentially Grok, which is Elon's project. So when Instinct dropped, someone sent me a text invite was like, hey, you just got to sign up for this. I'm like, "Ah man, I don't want another AI thing." Like, you know, I already do this all day long. I'm using for coding, all that stuff. Like, whatever. So, the first thing that you notice is it's not another app to download.
It actually is iMessage. So, they have reverse engineered and they actually give you just a phone number to chat with.
It's closer to WeChat in China.
So, I have this phone number. I texted it was like, "Hey, off your Google account." I know this is your nightmare from a privacy standpoint but it's like, you know, give us your Gmail, give us your Google Drive, here's a link, you just click here.
Yeah, exactly. It's like a Russian site or something.
But I click through, I authorize, I'm like whatever. There's some hype, I hear it happening, people are doing this. Like I don't have any like nudes, but you probably do. Like I don't know, I don't know how much you keep all that stuff online.
Was this your nudes? Do you keep it in Google Drive?
I just post those to my Tumblr account.
All in all seriousness though, do you lock down like do you have a separate offline storage for like sensitive stuff?
Yeah, you should. We should talk about this off camera.
Okay. Like there's just certain things that like in my mind I'm always like, "Okay, what's the blast radius of if something gets hacked? What is Kevin Rose gives me to worry about?"
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. All right.
So, okay. So, you authorize everything and the first thing I notice is that this bot texts me back and it's like, "Hey, you missed this DocuSign from a couple days ago." And I was like, "Oh, well, that was like kind of helpful, you know?" So, I went in there and like did it and then it's proactively just watching everything and it learns by my responses everything I've done prior and it really understands what I care about and what I should pay attention to.
And who manufactures Instinct? It's just a startup. It's a self-named startup.
Yeah, it's a startup. It went from like zero to 10 billion in valuation in like four months. It's crazy.
Sounds like a sign of the times.
Now, why would you trust a smaller company from a privacy and access perspective versus like Muse from Meta or something? I trust Muse certainly more because it's just going to be battle tested.
Listen, scrutiny. I mean, not that they're always the best actors, but at the same time, right?
Well, they also have more checks and balances.
Yeah. And they came out and they actually did a whole briefing on their security model around their private instance of Meta with Muse. Yeah. So, Muse is a very similar product. It actually has an app. I think they're adding a phone number and whatnot. And so, it is just it's wild. It's wild in that this is something where I never thought it would connect the dots in the way that it does. Like I'll give you an example. I was doing an international flight and I was like, "Okay, I want to have like a prescription for gabapentin so I can get some sleep on the flight, right? Be careful with that." I knew you have to be careful with it. Like whatever. So I had a prescription coming in. It got called in and to get filled and Instinct was like, "Hey, just so you know, your prescription's ready. You should go pick it up. Leave by this time because your flight's on time and if you want to grab it, go over here now. Grab it then and then head to your airport."
Can I tell you something crazy? Yeah. Just in terms of synchronicity. So 3 months ago, I drafted a preface to the new book, this book on that I'm writing because there are many examples in the book around assistants and some of the very early reader feedback because I tested it with 100 plus people was some of these seem like 1% problems.
And so I wrote a preface which was a letter from it was called a letter from the future and it basically talked about how what's called 78 I was using a gen one Dexcom which was like sticking barbecue tines under your.
I was with you. You got me on to remember that. The plunger, it was a plunger for people who don't know this is a continuous glucose monitor and now you push a button it's like woo tingly and you get it in you. You used to have to stick a plunger into your body.
You basically had to stick two very long prongs under your abdominal skin.
Now it's like a little peck on the cheek. It's so much better. But at the time I was like, "Nobody's going to use this." And I was like, "Well, I don't agree with that because the tech's going to improve very quickly, right?" And particularly once it went from this weird beeper device to smartphone, it was pretty clear that the adoption was going to be rapid and then get outside of type 1 diabetics, certainly type two, but then get to kind of healthy normies and worried well.
And on the assistant side, I was also pointing out like back in the day, yes, it was a 1% problem just like inbox overwhelm and everybody has six inboxes now. But in the case of assistants, it's like sure. It went from like full-time in person to virtual assistant to digitally enhanced virtual assistant. And I was like, by the time you read this, we will have AI assistants.
That can do 99% of what I'm describing. And it's already happened. So, I've had it change flights for me.
I've told it there's a restaurant that's a hard reservation to get into. This is all Instinct.
Yeah. I've told it, hey, there's a hard reservation to get into. And it's like, hey, I can't log in with your OpenTable but it drops at this time every two weeks. It gave me a link and it's a secure vault and I gave it my OpenTable login and then it nailed it, snagged the reservation for me perfectly and like added to my calendar. And then the cool thing is if you have multiple friends with Instinct you can friend your Instincts together. So I said to a couple of my friends there was one person I wanted to take to dinner and our Instincts became friends and so I said share the calendar invite and all the details and the Instincts talk to each other and figure out the schedule, pick up. It's magic.
This is how Skynet autopopulates for all the Illuminati. By the way, they don't exist, people. But they put them all in the same calendar invite to get them into one spot so the drone swarm can strike them at once. Yeah, it's going to be awesome.
I'm definitely going to use this. Everyone is going to be using this, right? I mean, ChatGPT just announced Dots. That's their version of it now. So that's come out. How do you think about your history, memory, context, right? If you've predominantly used something, let's just say this may or may not be true, but if you've predominantly used ChatGPT, would you be inclined to use Dots or would you be inclined to use something else? I don't know if they've made it harder or impossible to export your.
You can export memories and some of that, but they are I mean, this is the wedge that they're looking for. They want to have something that is uniquely theirs. That isn't just like what's happening right now with the AI enthusiasts is that if there's a new model that comes out, there's zero loyalty, right? It's like, "Oh, Claude's better. I'll go use Claude." Oh, ChatGPT is better. And like people are jumping all over the place. This is finally becoming this durable storage of your life and your story and your history and all the things that you're into. And that is going to be, I think, something where they're going to kind of lock that down. The agentic AIs like once you authorize all that, you don't want to do that every time a new model drops somewhere else.
So, question for you. I saw a little news around this. Somebody, a friend of mine who's keen on startups and investing, texted me about decisions contrast in styles and business models between Amazon and Shopify. And this may have developed very I'm sure it has developed very rapidly. But I think that Amazon blocked Meta's agent.
Right. In part because Amazon's business model, I think it's I don't want to hazard a number. It was texted to me, but they have sponsored placement, they have advertising. I mean, there are a lot of drivers that get circumvented, revenue drivers that get circumvented by agentic commerce, right? So, they blocked it. And then like 24 hours later, Shopify is like we are open for business, agents welcome. How do you think that plays out?
So this is actually you're hitting on a very fascinating trend which is this idea where applications, destination websites, all those things go away. So in a world where you say, "Hey, you know, I just need some new towels for my house, right?" Rather than going on Amazon and searching for new towels or whatever it may be or Shopify or whatever independent shop, you just ask ChatGPT. Now, what Amazon is worried about is if they are top of funnel, if ChatGPT is the entry point, they can just be swapped out. Right. So it's like, "Oh, you know what? Walmart has the same thing for $10 less." And they just push that right into the feed. And so for them, they're like, "Oh, this was our moat cuz we were the destination. Everyone comes to amazon.com, they shop there, and now the AI is deciding and buying on their behalf." So brilliant by Shopify. But this is happening everywhere. So I'll give you an example. I just shot a podcast with Henry Shoukman, our Zen master friend, and I was like, you know, I don't want to send this over to an editor. I'm just going to like do it myself.
And so Blackmagic, who's a maker of cameras and editing software, they have great stuff. They have an editing package called DaVinci Resolve and it's like Premiere, Final Cut, any of these editing software suites that are out there. Well, what they did is they launched an MCP server which essentially means that with one click you can tie it to your AI. So, I drop in three camera shots, two pieces of audio, and I said, "Go make the podcast." And I just said that I told that to ChatGPT. It connected directly. I'm watching on the screen and it's rearranging everything, editing it, doing all that stuff. Same thing happens with Photoshop now. Same thing happens with CAD software. You don't need the software anymore. You just tell the AI. And essentially, this could be headless. Like, I would never need to see Photoshop ever again. I'm like, "Hey, just go build me this book or whatever I want to do or remove this stain or whatever it is, and it's just done." It's wild because you don't need these destination sites like an Amazon anymore. You just talk to your client. So, in some sense, all these apps are up for grabs. It's whoever's going to play nicely with that point of entry, and that was always Google, right?
But the thing about Google, it was always pushing you to the final destination.
They weren't doing the e-commerce themselves. And so, now it's like going to be all in the one suite. So, you'll never need to leave Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. It just does it for you. It's so crazy.
What do you think Amazon does? Because Amazon I mean does have huge advantages in terms of economies of scale, pricing, distribution like physical distribution of product, speed of delivery, etc. Right. They still crush as last I checked. I mean in most cases they crush everybody else.
But they don't want to take whatever the hit is for all of these sponsored placements and everything else.
They're going to have to.
They're going to have to. So do you think they launch their own agent if they already have their own AI? Are they able to compete?
I don't think so because you have on device. So Apple, Apple Intelligence, those models will get better. Don't count Apple out. Give them three years, right? And probably not even that. A year and a half. That will be that domain. You have Gemini on Android, which is going to power all of Android. And then you have ChatGPT and Anthropic and probably a couple others that will probably just be like, "Oh, I prefer Coke to Pepsi." Like you want your own AI. It's better at certain things. And that will be the entry point for all of the internet, all of applications, all of everything. Sponsor ad revenue on Amazon goes away largely because it's going to be sales. Most commerce will start to funnel. Like we saw this back in the 2000s. So in the 2000s it was like okay online versus offline commerce, right? It was like of course everyone goes to Sears to buy their tools, right? And then all of a sudden oh guess what? 10% of tools are being sold on Amazon now or online now. And all of a sudden, you know, a decade goes by and you're seeing the vast majority of stuff that is just being purchased online, right? Versus that's why Sears and J.C. Penney and all these big retailers just go out of business, right? So, I think what's going to happen is we're going to see that transition happen once again, but it's going to be through the front ends of AI interfaces. So, you'll just be talking to your AI like, "Hey, you know, I just need a refill of this. Like, can you have it here?" "Yeah, we got you covered with Walmart. They give it to you in two hours." Or, "Do you want to go with Amazon? It's $2 cheaper, but it'll be here tomorrow." You know, it'll be those types of real life conversations that you'll just be having with your AI agent. It's a wild transition time.
Yeah, I've been watching this, but I've actually been waiting to have this conversation. I mean, we'll continue obviously chatting offline to figure out like where to start, right? Well, maybe you can just tell everybody. So, it's like if people are using, let's just say they're using if they're already using Claude and ChatGPT.
Claude doesn't have theirs out yet, though.
And they're like, "Well, look, if there's an advantage to using Meta, what is it called again?"
Muse. If there's an advantage to using Muse, let me know. Maybe. If there's an advantage to using Instinct, let me know. Maybe." How would you experiment? How would you suggest somebody who is non-technical experiment with these things?
Well, if you have the ChatGPT app on your phone and you're paying for it, it's going to be there right now, I believe, for everyone. Instinct still invite only, so they're slowly rolling that out. So you'd have to know somebody and you can poke around online on Twitter or whatever and you'll find somebody. And then Muse has been number one in the app store for like the last couple of weeks. So that one's pretty easy to get and you can just sign up for it. So I would say probably Muse and Grok is still behind. Their models aren't the best. That one I would just like sit on for a bit. It's a little bit more technical, but yeah, you can just start right away and then just play with it because you'll launch your little bot and then it gives you a phone number so you can actually call your bot. And so like listen to this. This is actually I'm calling my agent right now on the phone. This is ChatGPT.
Hey, good to hear from you. I wanted a sexy voice. I wanted a sexy voice. Sorry. Can you tell me about the podcast that I'm shooting today?
Sure. Let me pull up what I've got on that. You're recording with Tim Ferriss today. It's 12:30 to 3:30.
Probably bleed some of that out.
Your social security number is.
Yeah, exactly. So, but I mean, I can just call this at any time. It doesn't cost against your AI credits. So, you can be in the car and just be like, "Hey, can you move this for me or you know, can you follow up with this email or whatever it may be?" And everything I need to mess with that it's time for me to actually.
Yeah. Step into the arena.
Amazing. All right. Call to action. I'm in. Should we talk about some other items?
Yes. On our non-agenda, I wanted to bring back an oldie but goody. I don't know if you've ever tried this.
So, this is a bottle of tablets. And this is something that I've played with for at least a decade, probably more.
Few tablets of this. This is interesting.
It's called beta-alanine. And the reason I started playing with this again, this is a dietary supplement, is I have I think you know been getting back into climbing.
Rock climbing. And have been training really seriously for about two months. So not very long. But I have coaches or I had coaches when I was on the East Coast and in Austin, but now I'm still traveling, so that'll get figured out. But I wanted to see what I could do to improve endurance because I think like many people, when you get on the wall, you're going to use your arms too much. You're going to end up in these locked off positions, meaning your arms are bent and you're going to flame out your forearms or other parts of your upper body. So, yes, you need to learn how to use your feet, and I'm doing all of that, but I wanted to see if I could address some of the physical constraints. And I didn't want to use some of my normal standards like creatine because creatine leads to water retention and weight gain. And the last thing I need at 180 lbs with these tiny little squirrel paws, with another limiter being finger strength, obviously, to add weight. I didn't want to add weight. It really adds an additional hurdle to progress. So beta-alanine was something that I surfaced again and I wanted to see if it had ever been applied to climbing. And it turns out that there have been studies done specifically with elite climbers and there's not a lot but randomized and double blinded 15 elite climbers taking four grams a day for four weeks or placebo. And somewhat like creatine depending on which protocol you use. They are large pills.
This will be fun to watch.
Why? Cuz Kevin just had two. What's wrong with? I'll explain this not beta-alanine.
I'll explain some of the side effects in a moment.
But let me give you the data first.
I mean, look, you're I mean, I just thought it was what you said it was.
When you're with Tim, rule number one is you should never just swallow a bunch of pills from a bottle that he puts on the table. But here's the upshot of it. So, with longer traverse, that means getting on a wall, moving sideways, right? There was in the intervention group with beta-alanine after they had kind of saturated. It takes about two to three weeks to start seeing results if you're going to see results. But 57% longer before falling versus 19% improvement with placebo and an additional 21 seconds of improvement beyond placebo. That is a ton. Like it is highly highly statistically significant. And then looking at longer traverse and by longer this means like one to two minutes. So the duration's really important one to two minutes which on a say top roping when you have a rope attached doing like a 35 ft wall like maybe that's the duration right which I was doing. I wasn't doing huge walls like 70 or something like that for indoor but I was also doing top roping and also bouldering which is a different thing. So it doesn't really help super short bouldering that's without ropes but doing let's just say 5 to 10 moves to get to the top campus board like didn't really help any of that stuff. I won't bother with defining that but say longer traverse moves completed right there's basically like a four move improvement in the placebo group just from training effect and then in the beta-alanine group it was 10 moves. And I have noticed a difference it took a while and you can't really separate out all of the elements that go into it because I am training I'm doing isometrics doing collagen plus vitamin C before training. So, collagen peptides from Momentous plus vitamin C, you don't need very much. 500 milligrams or 1,000 milligrams. I think it was as low as 50 in the research. Boosts collagen production in the fingers.
What's one scoop from them, by the way, cuz I take the same stuff. What's a full scoop? Do you know?
I don't recall what's on the label, but it's like a scoop of that.
Plus some vitamin C. And the type of collagen does matter. You kind of want hide if you can get it as opposed to bone just to avoid heavy metal and other contaminant issues. But the point being I think this stuff has really helped to the extent that my coaches like it was almost by the clock like when I got to 2 and 1/2 weeks of taking this not before they were like whoa what happened there seemed to be like a phase shift where if I'm working on and it did for me seem to translate to bouldering which makes me wonder how much of it is the beta-alanine but suffice to say I've been very impressed and this is something where I've done testing before and after to try to track some of the improvements. So, it is a heavy lift though because if I'm taking in my case not 4 g but 6.4 gram a day roughly, right? I'm taking eight of these pills a day, it's a lot. And I would suggest and this gets to the side effects. This is Thorne beta-alanine SR that means sustained release to minimize and I might be getting the pronunciation wrong on this one side effect which is called paresthesia. It just means body tingling basically it feels like it feels like a niacin flush or like many parts of your body fell asleep like you had crossed your legs for too long and sat down.
What do they attribute this to? Is this a cognitive thing? Is it ATP enhancement like what was underlying mechanism?
I'm actually not sure of it's carnosine it's I believe it's carnosine saturation muscular saturation but I am getting over my skis so people can look it up but beta-alanine has quite a bit of published literature on it. I was just very surprised that there was actually a study that got funded for 15 elite climbers. Like who even pays for that? I have no idea. Probably some supplement manufacturer probably. So that is one on the supplements and since I brought it up in terms of I had mentioned with the collagen and contaminants just a quick public service announcement if you're taking say psyllium husks right fiber very helpful for a lot of reasons you don't just need to be boomers like us with aging colons and rectums it's also very helpful for glycemic control like you can take it for meals and stuff like that. If you take any kind of fiber, you do want to add water. But the point is there are a lot of heavy metals and contaminants in most common brands of psyllium husks. So Yerba Prima Y-E-R-B-A or Organic India are two that I have looked at testing results for and those are good. But one doctor joked to me, he's like, "Yeah, you could go to fill in the blank major pharmacy chain and grab something off the shelf, but it's going to be 2% fiber and 98% arsenic." It was a joke. It's not quite that bad, but the contamination actually is worth paying a lot of attention to, particularly if it's something like this that you'd be taking on a daily basis.
Yeah. I read another study recently that just was like, shy, like just killed me. And that is, you know, those seaweed chips that you can get at like the grocery stores, like the little flat papers. So much microplastics in those cuz they're pulling all that seaweed out of the ocean and they're just like filled with microplastics.
You can't win. You can't win.
Okay, speaking of supplements, you hate creatine.
No, I don't hate creatine. I love creatine. I just don't find it to be the most helpful for climbing specifically.
So, yeah, because it puts a few pounds of muscle on or whatever. Muscle water or whatever.
It helps me lift more weight though.
So, creatine, we've talked about this, I'm sure, at least on I mean, we've done what, like a couple hundred random shows. I think we've talked about this at least 10 of them, which is creatine can be your friend and sometimes not so much.
If you overdo creatine, it is a problem with the GI.
It can be. Yeah. Also, if you're in airport.
Oh, god. Yeah. You don't do what Tim does or Well, I don't do it anymore because I do learn. I'm slow. But yeah, if you're like, "Let me have a double espresso, some creatine, and MCT oil on your way to the airport." Don't do that because disaster pass potential is high.
I would say also because of some of the research, you know, Rhonda Patrick has highlighted on the cognitive benefits.
I was taking 10 grams a day, but I started getting really wicked muscle cramps in my hands, my feet, and then I dialed it back to five.
Yeah. I think that for my system at least and I think Rhonda's also observed this I might not be getting that right but I think she's talked about it publicly also experienced cramping at 10 10 grams plus per day so I've had all kinds my stomach is horrible with creatine like I have historically.
You're a delicate flower with the stomach anyway.
Sometimes yeah it depends on the thing but like sometimes I'm actually really good it's very confusing but anyway long story short I was doing some research and I don't know this brand at all so take this with a grain of salt, but the technology is legit. I looked up the study that the technology they're using to create a delayed release creatine. So, this is the only one on the market. So, if you look at these pills, they look wild. They have all these little tiny beads inside of them.
And they looks like I think it was Dexatrim back in the day.
Yeah, totally. Yeah. But I will tell you like this is the first one I've been able to take because of the delayed release and it does not mess up my stomach at all. It's amazing.
Well, yeah, you're burying the lead here. BodyTech Elite delayed beadlet.
Oh, okay. Here's the I think critical piece with NovaSpheres trademark.
Yeah. So, I did the research on what NovaSpheres are and they're legit.
Yeah. So, I mean, if it's just one of those things where like, listen, I have also when I travel, I'll use I kind of flip brands all over the place, but lately I like the stuff from Momentous because of the quality checks they do. And I have their little travel satchels that I take with me and just mix them with some stuff. As long as I slow drink it over like 3 hours, I'm fine, you know? But this is the first time I've been like, "Okay, on the go, I can just like chug five pills at once and no issues." So, anyway, that one's fun.
Should we talk about sperm quality?
Oh, that's where I wanted to go next. How did you know? God, we.
Kevin tried to anonymize it through random YouTube live stream and I was like, please talk about sperm quality. I was like, all right, I know it's you, Kev.
Kev, was this a question somebody wrote in?
So, I have long been fascinated with nuts. Not in the testicle sense, although that's probably true. Also, just some of the benefits of consuming different types of nuts like Brazil nuts.
I literally thought you were talking about a ball sack the entire time you were saying that.
There is a double entendre here.
So, I talked about for instance Brazil nuts and selenium way back in the day. And of course, you have to look at the funding sources and so on, but there's a brand of nut butters. I'm sure they do other things called Artisana. And I don't know why their raw almond butter is just better than every other brand in terms of consistency. They somehow homogenize that might not be the right word, the oil so that you're not dealing with like the oil slick on the top and like getting it all over your countertops and stuff, but I ended up just for shits and giggles buying their walnut butter cuz I had never had walnut butter and it has some cashews in it. And you know, I'd like to have a family, ideally a couple of kids. So, it's good as I age into my soon 50s, I'm like, you know, I should keep the twins as healthy as possible. And I tend to think that if you optimize for fertility, you get a lot of other things right as downstream effects. And the two ingredients are raw walnuts and raw cashews. I'm bringing this up because there are actually walnut specific studies. There was a 2012 randomized control trial in 117 healthy men aged 21 to 35. And they were randomized to either continue their normal diet or add 75 grams a day of walnuts. And it's not impossible. Like 75 grams just to turn that into something people might recognize. It's like 6 cups of chopped walnuts. Like two and a half handfuls. It's not that crazy.
And the improvements in sperm vitality, motility, and morphology all were statistically significant.
We just want Are there other health?
That's the question. That's the question. So, generally speaking, nuts seem to be supportive of fertility. So, in 2024, there was a meta analysis that showed that at least 60 grams per day, so that's less than the 75 we talked about. Let's call that two handfuls of nuts as an estimate. Improved sperm motility, vitality, and morphology. Although it did not significantly improve sperm concentration. So, of course, be aware of the caloric density, right? If you're just housing nuts all day, you'll have 6,000 calories of nuts, it's going to have other side effects. But I thought this was super fascinating and it only came about because I ended up loving this walnut butter and I was like I have read or actually not read. I had been told that consuming walnuts could improve testosterone and free testosterone and I was like let me fact check that. And I did not get back confirmation on that but I got back these research results related to sperm quality. I was like fantastic. Okay.
Yeah, with Brazil nuts and the selenium side of things, it was a reduction in prostate cancer, right? There was some study that I don't recall. For me, the reason that I was looking at that with for our body and man, it's crazy to think about how hard fact checking and research was back then compared to now.
Oh my god, it's like you kids have it good now with ChatGPT and Claude and so on. It's so much easier. You need to know how to interrogate the system. But the reason I was looking at that and this is still relevant today that looking at your micronutrient consumption and absorption matters right so if you have a copper deficiency or a selenium deficiency that can be reflected in all sorts of issues with say sex hormones right and I have friends there's one actually multiple friends who had testosterone issues is they ended up and I don't know who the latest and greatest I think it was SpectraCell back in the day but I don't know who the latest and greatest would be for options for testing but they ended up just having like three Brazil nuts a day and they're like I feel like I'm on cocaine like their lived experience changed so dramatically and sure this isn't randomized controlled I don't know if that was placebo or not but I saw it enough times where I'm like look this seems to be low hanging fruit.
Topsoil is depleted everywhere. You can be sure as that most vegetable matter you're consuming is not as nutrient-dense as you would like probably. So, it's just something to keep an eye on.
Yeah. And so, people should also know that Brazil nuts, like that nut, it receives its selenium from the soil itself. So, it's the uptake from the soil. I've seen this now at grocery stores. There's Brazil nuts that aren't even made in Brazil.
Yeah. So you have to make sure like it has to say product of Brazil on the back of the nuts. Is there a certain brand that you like when it comes to that or are you just checking for that on the label?
I'm looking at not really. I mean I haven't done the due diligence there. I've just been looking for organic cuz man oh man like I really want to minimize pesticide consumption. I understand there are issues with the designation of organic to begin with. But I mean this is just a general kind of meta principle that or it underscores a meta principle that I think about a lot which is like you're there's the expression you are what you eat but that's not sufficient like you are what you eat ate right so if you're eating salmon like not all salmon is created equal like what is the salmon consuming right similarly this applies to vegetables It applies to salad greens like where was this grown? How was it grown? What were the nutrients that were absorbed or not absorbed that were present or absent?
And with tools that you have now, I mean it's a lot easier to try to do this type of due diligence.
Most people don't know that non wild salmon like they add dyes to like make them look more pink, which is just insane.
Yeah. There's a lot of this kind of stuff. And look, I mean, you don't have to get every detail right, but there are little things here and there to pay attention to. And there are also like lots of weasel words out there when people say all natural, right? I mean, there are many terms that are just not defined in any meaningful way. So, they can be used to confuse consumers. But look, point of the story is walnuts perhaps good for your nuts.
I'm going to do it. So, and Artisana products are delicious. So, why not try them out? Should we just keep going on the food?
The food kit. I have so many supplements and today. This supplement day. So, this actually I've been doing more gym time, which has been great. Been trying to like, you know, get a little lean, try to lift a little bit more weight. I've been trying to find like a good source I brought you this one.
A good source of protein.
Yeah. So, I have no By the way, none of the stuff we talked about today. No, we have no affiliation with this stuff. So, this was one that I found largely because A2 protein, are you familiar with A2 at all?
So, I am I have not done my own homework on this, but I can tell you how I came across this just so people understand what we're talking about. You want to read the label here because you sent me a hilarious video of your refrigerator where you're like, I got a little bit of this, a little bit of this, and then we have some protein. And there were like 40 of these in your refrigerator.
Well, I mean, Pioneer Pastures.
Yeah. So this is Pioneer Pastures. I mean they literally sell it at Target and whatnot. A2 protein though was the only protein that cows would produce about a thousand or so years ago. They.
said 500,000 years ago somewhere around there until this variant took over and it became non-A2 and it became a combination of A1 and A2. And it's a type of protein that comes from the casein, which is the slower digestion version of protein.
Bodybuilders used to take casein at night before they would go to bed because of the cottage cheese.
Yeah, exactly. So, but the thing about A2 and what's so cool about it is that way less stomach discomfort. Like, it is the natural clean form of protein and it's really hard to find. So, I found this one drink, 160 calories, 30 grams of protein. It doesn't need to be refrigerated until you lactose
And it tastes really good.
Um, it was two grams of sugar. I mean, I enjoy it. So, for me, this is like a great — I just want something first thing in the morning to kind of like, especially if I train hard the day before, like to just get some protein in the body, take this with some coffee. It's fantastic.
You know, the first time I saw this — this is the first time I've tried it, actually — but the first time I saw this was in the offices of Chris Williamson, the podcaster.
He is jacked AF. I mean, the guy is basically a bodybuilder. I mean, he's very strong, very lean. And much like your refrigerator, there were like 30 of these sitting in a fridge at the offices.
And that was the first time that I had someone describe to me the difference, I suppose, or the differentiator with A2 protein.
It doesn't taste bad, right? I mean,
There's a lot of shitty tasting protein out there, so I was pleasantly pleased.
There's also a lot of protein products that are basically candy bars or junk food masquerading as health food. So, looking for kind of the minimum effective dose of ingredients.
Yeah. I mean, this has monk fruit in it, but it doesn't have any of the other like fake sweeteners or anything. And it's very, very few ingredients relative to like if you were to compare — not to throw them under the bus, because I will occasionally have them when I'm caught in a pinch — but like if you were to compare the number of ingredients on this Pioneer Pastures with say Muscle Milk.
It's like seven ingredients versus 40.
Dude, Muscle Milk was like the gym shake during like the 90s, right? Like everybody wanted Muscle Milk.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, hey, desperate times. What was that pre-workout that everyone took that just got you cranked as [__] and explode?
Oh god, that stuff. Yeah. I mean, basically just bodybuilder crack. It was so strong.
So I, you know, on the Muscle Milk, you might find this interesting. Like when I was training to compete — this is probably two years ago in archery. So I had like my period of intense training, and the reason I'm not doing as much of it anymore is because it's just very isolating, right? Like it is a solo practice and you're repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again. I do still love it, but I wanted to do something more social.
And just a little more physically engaging, like rock climbing, right?
Which I just love to no end, every aspect of it.
The reason that Muscle Milk is relevant to this story is that I wanted training nutrition that could not be broken by inconvenience on the road. So basically, when I was doing my training sessions, which would be like three to four hours — and this is going to sound gross — but basically I would only consume stuff that I knew I could get at almost any gas station because I knew my competition was going to be in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And Lancaster is actually a beautiful town, but I didn't know where the competition would be. And I suspected it would be in the middle of nowhere, and I would only have access to gas stations or some type of quick convenience store like a 7-Eleven. And that turned out to be the case. But I was comfortable with Muscle Milk, almonds, like roasted almonds of some type, and then zero-calorie Monster Energy.
I know. I know. With some taurine, right? But I got comfortable using the most commonly available stuff so that I felt like I had — and even if it's only psychological — a competitive advantage. Oh, and unsweetened iced tea. That's it. And in any case, that was my sidebar note on Muscle Milk.
You look at the ingredients now. I don't know if it's changed, but back in the day, it was not healthy stuff.
Yeah. And it's like, look, I mean,
Great name. Also, as I continue to do intermittent fasting a few times a week — I don't do it a ton because I'm actually trying to, I want to add some like muscle mass and connective tissue strength, and you just need nutrition for that. Did you get that gripper, by the way?
Yeah. Look, I have grippers.
Did you get the one that our buddy sent us?
No, I got a different adjustable gripper because my right arm is still recovering from the elbow surgery I had a year ago.
We should link that up in the show notes. That gripper, that's a really good one.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll link to a couple of different grippers if people are interested. I'm going pretty light because I'm still strengthening the extensors and the right elbow that was repaired.
But you want to hear about something crazy?
That I've been getting really into. And this is going to get into crazy town, but you know, we like getting into crazy town a little bit. So, dream engineering and anesthesia dreams. So I've been going down this rabbit hole related to dream engineering. So can you modify dream content? Can you, for instance, facilitate two-way communication between scientists and dreamers while they are dreaming?
And this is a longstanding interest of mine. And I first read "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by someone named Stephen LaBerge at the very, very beginning of high school and became very interested in lucid dreaming, which is — just to define terms — where you train yourself, and there is a process for this, to induce lucidity while you're dreaming. That just means you become conscious of the fact that you are dreaming. And with exercises, you can get to the point where you're able to modify your own dream content.
And I used to, for instance, in high school when I was competing in wrestling, I would do additional training sessions at night in my dreams. I'm not making this up. And I felt like there was a direct translation to improved performance. Okay. But flash forward, I connected — I ended up getting introduced to Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz, who took research out of MIT and Harvard to make dream engineering a reality. So he has a startup called Dust. And in full disclosure, I am an investor in that. But
They're going to be helping people to modify dream content to address things like PTSD.
Now, that's where the conversation started. And he knows that I have long-standing interest in psychedelic-related therapies. But psychedelics have taken a backseat for me in the last handful of years because most people — I shouldn't say most, many people will not be able to take psychedelics for whether it's health reasons, contraindications, they have psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia in their family that mean it would be ill-advised to take them.
So I've been really focused, as you know, on neuromodulation, brain stimulation, and I still am super, super bullish.
How often are you doing that now?
Uh, I'm going to be doing it again probably in the next month. I would say every three to four months.
The update there, I did get involved with one company, and I thought very heavily about it, called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A Health. They have the smallest, most modular option on the market. Very easy to use, and I think they are the company, if I had to bet on one, that's going to get to the point where you can actually power something off of an iPhone. And they're doing some really, really interesting work. Just to touch on that, they're doing one-day protocols now. So instead of five days off of work,
costs 30 grand or something, you're doing one day of treatment accelerated with this very small dose of a compound called dextromethorphan, which induces plasticity in the brain, much like certain psychedelics. So you basically let that dissolve in your mouth beforehand. And from let's say a one to ten in severity, let's say my OCD, generalized anxiety, it's at like an eight or a nine. It has taken it to like a zero or a one.
One day. Now it gets crazier though because you can also use it. People can check out Ampa Health.
Do they do it in LA as well or no?
They're all over the country. I mean, what I'm hoping is that people who are already administering things like ketamine or who are offering CBT or whatever will just offer this as an add-on because most of the devices that are available now are like the size of a refrigerator. You have to sign like a four-million-dollar lease. The Ampa Health product for providers is like three grand a month. You can cancel any time. I think that's still accurate, and it can fit in like the trunk of a car. It's much easier to use.
But what's also amazing, and I did this recently when I was traveling, met a technician and did like two hours of, I think it was tDCS, every 30 minutes just for a handful of minutes each simulation.
Different target area of the brain?
In this case, it was the same target that they're not talking about super publicly yet, but very easy for therapists like technicians to find.
How do they find it? Are they just like measuring your head and [__] and looking like it's all based on really, really good science.
They're looking at overlapping networks that are identified by looking at data from deep brain stimulation, data from lesion research.
No, but I mean when they sit down with you, like if you're going to go into this place and they're like, 'Hey, I got to find this region in your brain.'
Part of what makes how they do it interesting is they're finding targets that are more uniform person to person.
So certain places like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, certain areas on the front of the skull or front of the brain, front of the head, right, are a little more variable. You have to be very precise. So they're finding ways to make it very effective, very fast, and less likely to suffer from like clinician error, right? Because if you really have to thread the needle, sometimes you get no effect. That happened to me when I was using like earlier targets with other hardware.
If they were off by like a half a centimeter,
Nothing. And you just wasted a week, right? And like 30 grand.
No downside. Like, are you not getting headaches afterwards or anything weird?
Mild headache. Mild headache for like a day.
Does that not freak you out, though? I mean, that's the only reason I haven't tried any of this stuff. I'm like, I don't know. Like, it's like they're just put magnets in your brain and [__].
I mean, just to bust your balls. Before we started recording, you were talking about some drugs you were experimenting with.
Yeah, but it's like just that's a good old time.
You've done it, too. I mean, look. Okay. I'm no stranger to pharm—
I love that. You're going to say it online.
No, I'm no stranger to pharmacology.
I'm just saying in this particular case, I personally found the — I think the risk-benefit ratio is much more attractive for the general population than psychedelics, which is why I'm spending so much time looking at it.
I think it is much, much, much more attractive.
Well, let me come back to these crazy stories of dream engineering and anesthesia dreams. So from, you know, the startup Dust, right, and people can check out the Ampa Health, I encourage them to check it out, but they're all over the country now and
Is that the publicly traded company or
So Dust does the dream engineering and then he introduced me to some research out of Stanford. Here are some of the headlines of pieces published by Stanford Medicine: 'Could anesthesia-induced dreams wipe away trauma?' Another one: 'Could anesthesia dreams be a more palatable psychedelic therapy?' All right. So, what does this actually mean? Let me read some of this stuff. All right. What dreams? Here's the dream protocol.
Yeah, that's what I want to know. What's the protocol?
I tried to convince — I was getting an endoscopy recently just to look at my throat. You know, you got to do that stuff, the endoscopies, colonoscopies and so on. And I was trying to convince this doctor I'd never met to do this for me. And he was like, 'Yeah, I don't think so.' But the dreaming protocol has five steps. Number one, tell the patient they might dream under anesthesia. Number two, use propofol. Right.
What Michael Jackson did.
Michael Jackson used that plus like six other things.
I have a great story about that.
You should not DIY propofol, but using propofol as an anesthetic as the patient is emerging from anesthesia. So, here's the thing. If someone has surgery, they're not changing the anesthesia delivered for the surgery. They're basically using propofol to taper them out and tune them to a very particular dose and let's call it radio station so they have pleasant dreams. Okay. But step number three is monitor brain activity etc. with EEG.
Ensure at least 10 minutes of quiet, undisturbed emergence. This is really important. If you don't do that, then dream recall is shot. And then you have to ask them about dream recall. But the point of this is that what they're seeing — and this is not really super speculative. I mean, it is at the edges now, but they are seeing people with longstanding complex PTSD. They have one of these dreams where they taper out on propofol and they rehearse beforehand to basically imagine their traumatic event ending in a better way with some kind of resolution.
And some of these people 10 months later still zero symptoms of complex PTSD. They go from severe to zero. The reason I find this so interesting and other people find it interesting is that it underscores the possibility that — and I've thought this for a very long time — but like the trip matters, right? Because in the world of psychedelic medicine and business right now, the name of the game, if you want to ramp up your market cap and have an exit for two billion dollars or whatever, or launch something with an IPO and make tons of money, is you say, 'Okay, psychedelics, broadly speaking, a whole lot of them hit these serotonin type 2A receptors. Let's create a drug that hits the same receptors, but that doesn't cause the trip because the trip doesn't matter. The trip is a side effect, right?'
Well, what's interesting is that I think it's both. But just to be clear, like you can hit the serotonin type 2A receptor with no trip, like an LSD variant, and it can be very effective for things like cluster headaches.
Yeah. But I'm talking about the emotional release that comes from—
Sure. But so I would say like also some of these psychedelics, and not all of them are primarily hitting the type 2A receptor, but have potent anti-inflammatory effects right at subperceptual doses. So also I think that could lead to antidepressant effects and stuff, right.
However, if dream engineering, like a la Dust, right, if they can dream engineer people to have fewer nightmares, which they can, and that has psychedelic-like outcomes. It's like, is it possible that even though there are millions of people for whom psychedelics will never be appropriate, like tripping balls for four to six hours, and there are shorter-acting psychedelics and so on, methylone and so on, I get it. But there are plenty of people who will never be able to take psychedelics. Is it possible that every night you have an opportunity to harness something similar? And if so, like who are the scientists who are going to figure out how to mold that and shape it? And so what is the prep work? I think it's all touching the same stuff.
Let me ask you a question. What does Dust do? Is it a coaching service? Like because I have this app that, by the way, I have no affiliation with this, but you should check this out too, Tim. I think you'd really like it.
Before I go to bed, there's an app I use called Claria. C-L-A-R-I-A. And it is the best hypnosis app that I found out there for a variety.
Who makes Claria? I may have tried.
You would recognize the scientists and the team behind it. It's amazing. It's expensive. It's 150 a year, so it's not cheap, but I found it to be a beautiful way to drift off to sleep, and I swear I feel better the next day. And there's a variety of different topics. It can be anxiety. It can be whatever. But anyway, my point is, my question about Dust is, okay, what is the thing? Could you sit there in this propofol kind of state coming out?
So, just to be clear, Dust isn't doing anything with propofol.
That's totally okay. So, could you do this with hypnotherapy?
That's a great question. I don't know the answer. I also, just to be on the safe side, I don't know what they're disclosing publicly, so people can check out the website and whatever it says, it says.
But it's something I'm keeping an eye on. But broadly speaking, that ended up being the wedge in the door for me to get back into doing a deep dive on basically dream shaping, right, which is 100% possible.
And it's already been demonstrated that you can have dreamers who achieve lucidity communicate with researchers while they are provably in an REM state by memorizing eye movement patterns in advance, like Morse code basically, like right, left, right, left, something like that, to indicate like, 'I know that I'm dreaming and I'm telling you I'm dreaming.' It's [__] crazy.
And have you talked to Matt Walker about this?
I haven't had a chance to talk to Matt about this stuff yet.
Yeah. So, Matt used to run the — for people who don't know, you wrote the 'Why We Sleep' book and also used to run the Berkeley Sleep Lab for a long time. So,
Yeah. Yeah. He's still very active.
He's in Dallas now. Has a huge lab, is doing lots of good work.
He and I on the sleep front have mostly talked about the DORA class of drugs.
You still have a ton of that, by the way.
Oh yeah. I'm using something called Quviviq instead of Belsomra now. Yeah. But, and talk to your doctors, guys. This is not stuff—
You can't get it without the doctor anyway.
Yeah. I mean, who knows, though, if they're buying stuff online from Mexico or whatever. Just don't screw around with any of this stuff without talking to your doctor. But the point of that, for people who maybe haven't heard anything about this, Matt Walker has a good podcast episode on this. It's probably six to nine months old at this point about the DORA, like Dora the Explorer, D-O-R-A class of drugs. That's dual orexin receptor antagonist drugs. There's some evidence to suggest it might be helpful for people with family histories of Alzheimer's and things like that for—
They do a spinal tap and saw that—
Beta-amyloid clearance or health, amyloid clearance.
Yeah. Yeah. They, not just in animals, but they've looked at human data.
Well, for me, honestly, even though it might be speculative at this point, because no one's proven that it prevents Alzheimer's, I'm like, you know what, that [__] is so scary and I've seen relatives just disintegrate. I'm like, eh, since I'm APOE34, I'm genetically predisposed. Let me just be on the safe side.
Yeah, I bring it with me. I'm actually going to Japan soon. And that's when I use it. I'm like, I'd rather do that than some type of like, you know, these other class of sleep drugs have been shown to do all kinds of horrible things, including cancers and you name it. So, these are the—
They look like on paper so far to be the safer class of drugs.
Yeah. I mean, there's some other drugs that seem not to affect sleep architecture horribly, like, you know, the ambien of the world, like trazodone might be a decent choice, but for a host of reasons, I wanted to just — it just seemed to make sense to me to look at the DORAs. All right. What else you got? Okay, I'm going to do rapid fire. I got to get a few things. First of all, have you ever seen these before?
Plum Flower Curing Pills.
Yes. Plum Flower Curing Pills, my friends.
