Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging Random Show episode, recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose! We cover our recent Zen meditation retreat with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, the fascinating science of vagus nerve stimulation, my recent back pain breakthrough, balance-training tools, tendon-strengthening protocols from Swedish rock climber Emil Abrahamsson, the emerging research on photobiomodulation, urolithin A supplementation, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol for cognitive longevity, podcast recommendations, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird feeder obsession, and much more.
Kevin’s full bio
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip Strength Tools, and More
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Kevin Rose: Okay, ready?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wait, wait. So we’re rolling?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, we’re rolling.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Kevin Rose: Three, two, one.
[CHIME]
It feels, actually, really good.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like my bowl is a little smaller than yours.
Kevin Rose: That’s always been the case.
Tim Ferriss: You want to kick it off?
Kevin Rose: Hello, friends and family, colleagues. That was amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Very prominent ejaculation projection show.
Kevin Rose: Welcome to The Random Show.
Tim Ferriss: Welcome, folks, to another episode of The Random Show.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Couch audition edition.
Kevin Rose: That’s right. ADU back-of-my-place edition.
Tim Ferriss: Why do we have these fancy bowls?
Kevin Rose: So this is —
Tim Ferriss: For people not looking, these are meditation bowls.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Got a bunch of script. Presumably that’s Tibetan or Sanskrit or something.
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: And you have a little corner, but that’s not the bad corner. That’s the Zen corner.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is Zen corner. Would you say bad corner?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you don’t need to put kids in the bad corner.
Kevin Rose: Did you used to have to do that as a kid?
Tim Ferriss: In school, I got sent to the bad table all the time.
Kevin Rose: Oh, there was a table.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. And then the teacher in kindergarten sent me to the bad table with a bunch of other kids who were really bad, and then forgot that she had decided it was the bad table and just left us at the bad table for the entire year.
Kevin Rose: And so she —
Tim Ferriss: It might explain a lot of psychological issues —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: — that I’ve carried with me.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So this is not the bad table. This is the meditation area. And I have bowls over here that I just use. I just like the sound of a good — I mean, you heard that. Hopefully, it came through and didn’t distort the mic, but a well-rung bowl — it sets the tone for the beginning of the meditation and then also at the very end.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also just perfect for a podcast in Southern California.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Nice to be in person.
Kevin Rose: It plays well in the whole, yes, SoCal environment. There’s bowls per capita out here and crystal shops are very high.
Tim Ferriss: High density. High density, man.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Another beautiful day in SoCal.
Kevin Rose: Beautiful day.
Tim Ferriss: Been doing a lot of walking. Where should we start off with? We’ve got tons.
Kevin Rose: We just came back from our retreat.
Tim Ferriss: We did. We did. You want to describe the format?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we’ve done a couple of these retreats. This is the second one where it’s just a small group of people that are interested in meditation and that want to go a little bit deeper in the world of Zen. You and I both talked about The Way and Henry Shukman a ton. The Way being his app. And Henry’s just a great leader, great Zen master. And it was accompanied by Valerie, another Zen master.
Tim Ferriss: This is in Mountain Cloud.
Kevin Rose: Mountain Cloud Zen Center.
Tim Ferriss: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we flew out there, small group, got together. And it’s kind of like if a proper Zen retreat is like 5:30 cushion in the morning and then you’re off at 7:00 p.m. and it’s hardcore, like no talking, shitty food. This was not that. We had a good chef that was there and we were allowed to ask questions in between sits. The sits were purposely time bound to call it maximum of 25 minutes and then a walking meditation, then another 25 minutes that was like the max.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me interject just so we don’t get into hyper bougie territory too fast. So the chef was not our chef. He’s actually, as I remember, this is a former, I think, James Beard award winner who decided to forego the accolades and the attention.
Kevin Rose: How is that less bougie than what I was going to say?
Tim Ferriss: Well, you said we had a nice chef and people might assume that we’re bringing in a chef. This is a chef who actually —
Kevin Rose: He lives there locally.
Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s the point I’m making. He lives at the Zen Center and has chosen a life of simplicity working with local ingredients and so on. And he is also normally there. It’s not like we had our own dedicated —
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — chef.
Kevin Rose: That’s right. That’s one of the things.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not in my house. I ate venison jerky sticks most of the time. Lentils out of a can still stick.
Kevin Rose: And you chugged my freaking ketones about five minutes ago. Tim just goes to my fridge and he’s like, “Okay, what are you up to?”
Tim Ferriss: I want to see what Kevin’s up to. I want to see the evidence.
Kevin Rose: Okay, we’ve got a little something gluten here. We got some Repatha.
Tim Ferriss: A little Repatha, what else do you have?
Kevin Rose: He’s like, “Oh, ketones.” And he starts chucking my ketone esters.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I unwrapped it and I was like, “I probably should ask if I can drink this, but I’m guessing this has been in there for weeks.”
Kevin Rose: Dude, that stuff that you drank is like — so they make several versions of that. That’s like the full on — F16 isn’t the latest fighter jet. Whatever the Gen 5 fighter jet is, F22.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the highest intensity. This is the deltaG brand ketone monoester, which is BHB, which is kind of what you want, bound with something called 1,3-butanediol, which I will say if you see that on the ingredient list of your supplement for exogenous ketones, treat it like a shot of tequila. You really want to use it in moderation. There’s mounting evidence that it’s pretty unhealthy for your liver. So just use in moderation in terms of ketone supplementation. But hey, right before a podcast —
Kevin Rose: By the way, I’m —
Tim Ferriss: — it’s a great time for me to take like 15 grams. I will not do 30 because, and I talked to you, she’ll probably come up again, our mutual friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick about this. I don’t think I’m talking out of school here, but when you take, when I take, and this is true for her as well, and I suspect other people, the full 30, the entire shot, rather than decreasing anxiety, it actually, for me, spikes it. And I think that could be related to a very rapid rise and then trough afterwards. But who knows? The point is, keep it moderate.
Kevin Rose: You’re the first person to tell me that it impacts liver function. And I have more often than not had elevated liver enzymes, surprise surprise on the whole drinking front typically, but it’s something I watch. And when did you hear about that? Because I’d never heard that could be the case with ketones.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I, fortunately, by virtue of doing the podcast and also being incredibly interested in science, interact with a lot of researchers, so I get to have chats with them once I get to know them better about pre-publication data. Studies that are underway, and they never want to talk about them publicly because you have to check all the boxes, and science is also very much about not fooling yourself when you make a certain hypothesis. But the first whispers of this were from, and still are, from animal models, where you can basically dose mice with 1,3-butanediol and give them the equivalent of fatty liver disease.
Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not good. And I’m sure I’m oversimplifying that.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: The point is treat it like ethanol. Treat it like not even tequila, moonshine, like you’re drinking moonshine and you wouldn’t want to do that every day.
Kevin Rose: It tastes like moonshine.
Tim Ferriss: Or cough syrup. Cough syrup moonshine.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that is just to say, I think they still think there’s a time and a place for it. I’ve been experimenting with other versions like ketone salts, Dominic D’Agostino. He’s also the co-author in some of the papers that are describing this.
Kevin Rose: He tried bath salts for a while too. That was a very odd version of Tim that came out.
Tim Ferriss: If it’s good for McAfee.
Kevin Rose: Just eating the flesh off of us.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Eating people and eating —
Kevin Rose: Wasn’t that a thing that happens?
Tim Ferriss: — in the median in Florida. It’s always a Florida man.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So Florida man, duh-duh-duh. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Eats another person. Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Shooting someone’s face off after bath salts. Stay away from bath salts, kids. So yeah, I came in nice and fully loaded today.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Awesome. Well, I am glad that you’re feeling better because you also might not have made today.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a sidebar. I may have had a glancing blow of eggplant to which I’m deathly allergic and woke up in the middle of the night, incredibly sick last night. So I’m glad I’m here.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I brought my EpiPen for dinner later.
Kevin Rose: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Learned my lesson. Bring your backup.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the retreat, let’s finish that off real quick.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: So we got together. What did you learn this time around? Because we’ve done this twice. You’ve dabbled in the world of Zen. You’ve always said, correct me if I’m wrong, but meditation’s been a hard thing for you typically. Where are you now with your practice?
Tim Ferriss: Well, what I would say is, first thing, speaking as a very much still a novice on any level, I would say that meditation is like sports or exercise. “Do you like exercise?” Well, what kind of exercise? Meditation, there’s so many different ways to meditate or explore mindfulness. There’s the Vipassana approach. There’s Transcendental Meditation. There’s Zen, which is very much its own thing, and you know more about that than I do.
But what I do find helpful about the retreats is you can describe what is going on when you’re sitting still with your eyes closed, trying to focus on something, in the case of, say, the breath, or trying to just observe whatever that comes up. And the feedback that you get from someone like Henry or Valerie, where you can do a 25-minute sit and then take a short break, talk about it, and they can say, “Well, given that you experienced this, this, maybe you had restlessness. Maybe you had, in my case, this sort of planning compulsion.” So rather than memories or fantasies about who knows what, not necessarily people can run wild with that, but I default to plans, like things I need to do.
And it’s like, okay, well, if that’s coming up, then Henry might say, “Why don’t you try in the next sit, which we’re going to do in 10 minutes or five minutes, A, B, or C?” And then you do it and you provide feedback. And so you’re able to really polish the stone moving forward. And similar, I suppose, to a lot of what we might call transcendental experiences, which sounds fancy, but it’s really just perhaps not fixating on the self or interrogating what this thing is that we call the self, which you can do through meditation. You can also do it with, or maybe you’re forced to do it in some cases with psychedelic experiences or other things, breath work.
When I was there at the retreat, you might remember this, I was getting very frustrated and I was like, “Where’s all this frustration coming from?” And while I was there, I was like, “I don’t know how much I’m getting out of this right now.” But when I got back to “real life” in Austin, I had like three to five days of this just kind of blissful, calm attention where I was able to get everything done. I need to get it done. There was no rushing, there was no looping in any kind of future tripping. And I was like, “Well, that’s very interesting.”
And it also holds true for, say, breath work, psychedelics. There are many different things that you could look at. And interestingly, maybe this is one way to think of it. I mean, in a sense, there are a lot of parallels between different methods for entering what people might consider a trance state. And I don’t think meditation is exempt from that, depending on what it is. But if it’s a concentration practice, it’s like for sure, you’re using a mantra or you’re using something you’re repeating in the case of TM in the same way that you might use rhythmic drumming and you can go some pretty weird places and then you come out of it, you’re like, “I don’t know what to make of that. “
And sometimes the payoff is what you notice in the next unfolding week or two or three or whatever the duration might be.
Kevin Rose: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: So that was very invigorating for me. And also Henry at one point used a prompt in response to, I’ll give a great — this is a real world example of something that happened to me, something I experienced in a sit and then Henry’s response, right? So I use The Way all the time, full disclosure, we’re both involved with it. I mean, it’s really because —
Kevin Rose: Henry’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: — more than anything else, it’s just I think it’s good for humanity and people to learn from somebody who is really deliberate about layering on progressive skills that you can take outside of the meditation. But one of the practices is labeling. So if, and there are a million different ways to do this, but let’s just say talk comes up in the mind and you label it radio or talking. And then if some kind of video comes up in the mind, images, you’re imagining something or planning something or remembering something, “okay, that’s video” and so on and so forth.
But for me, as someone with very well-established OCD, I can just end up being like, radio, radio, radio, video, radio, radio, radio. And it turns into, instead of a helpful thing, a very interruptive, stressful thing. And at that point in the retreat, clear — it was three to four days, something like that. It was very short. Henry said, “Okay,” well, he moved into the next sit and he said, “Just be still. Just be still. That’s it. That is the focus. Just sit still.” Did that for two consecutive sits. I just focused on that and it was remarkable how much everything calmed down. I was like, “Okay.”
Well, just like exercise, some people, sure, can go to the gym and do full sprinting workouts on an incline treadmill. Not everybody can do that. And other folks are well-suited to yoga. Some people are well-suited to different types of lifting, et cetera. And everybody should probably spend a little bit of time in each of those compartments if they can, but it’s not like everyone is equally suited, for instance, in my case, to the open monitoring stuff, like, well, just sit there and notice all the things that come up.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I came out of the retreat thinking, you know what? Something along the lines of Transcendental Meditation, not necessarily with that branding, but using a koan, using “Just be still” as a concentration practice that I repeat really gives me a lot of payoff. If I just sit still for 10 to 20 minutes, twice a day — did I tell you my theory on this?
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: So one of my theories, because I’ve been going super deep on bioelectric medicine and different ways of using electricity in place of pills, basically, and medications, which I think is really the next frontier in a million different ways. People check out Michael Levin at Tufts and some of the crazy stuff he’s able to do. But related to meditation, I did this deep dive with someone named Kevin Tracey, who’s a very credible scientist, very widely cited, helped discover and explore a lot related to TNF alpha and all sorts of things.
And he is incredibly knowledgeable of vagus nerve stimulation, not the bogus bullshit kind, which is 99.9 percent of what you see on the internet, but using, say, implants the size of an omega-3 capsule in the neck, which is where the vagus nerves run. It’s really like two transcontinental cables running down either side of the neck. Each one has about 100,000 fibers. And if you put an implant in that’s giving continuous stimulation on and off, on and off, it’s not 24/7, it’s incredibly effective for things like rheumatoid arthritis. And actually it was FDA approved. It was on the cover of The New York Times —
Kevin Rose: Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: — the day that I interviewed him. And that raises the question, how? Why? What’s going on? And it just so happens when you stimulate the vagus nerve, you activate something called the inflammatory reflex and you can in effect prevent damaging cytokine storms, decrease systemic inflammation of all different types. That word inflammation is kind of an umbrella term for a million different things.
And I remember chatting with one of my friends who’s a professor, he was using the 10% Happier app by Dan Harris, and he was meditating twice a day. And then after like one or two weeks, he’s like all of his aches, which were debilitating. He had a lot of musculoskeletal issues. They just went away. And one way people might try to explain that as like, “Well, you’re becoming more present to your feelings and maybe it was psychosomatic.” But I think it might actually be when you sit still and you inherently end up breathing rhythmically, because you can also stimulate your vagus nerve with say box breathing and other things, that you do that twice a day. If you were to use an implant or let’s just say either ear-based or neck-based stimulation of the vagus nerve, guess how long it lasts? Roughly 12 hours. So you do it twice a day, you’re getting full coverage.
Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.
Tim Ferriss: And so if you’re getting full coverage, and there’s a lot more to it, I won’t dig too deep right now. If you’re getting twice a day, vagus nerve stimulation from sitting and focusing on breathing, even if you don’t realize that you’re entraining your breathing, I think that might have explanatory power for some of the benefits people see from meditation.
Kevin Rose: That’s fascinating. So I bought one of the vagus nerve stimulators that hooks onto my ear. Have you seen that one? And you feel that this little tiny pulse of current that’s happening.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So people who are not watching this may have trouble envisioning this, but I’m actually in communication with a couple of scientists in Scandinavia. I don’t want to dox this guy because I don’t think he’s public with it yet, but there are two ways currently, non-invasively, to stimulate the vagus nerve that are commonly known. One is the neck where you really press some type of device. There are a number of them out there, mostly used for migraines or cluster headaches, and it’s pretty unpleasant. You stimulate the neck and it actuates superficial muscles in your face and it pulls your face down. And I used one of those for probably four to six weeks. Didn’t see any systemic benefits.
A friend of mine doubled his HRV using one of those devices. He had some, I’m not going to call it PTSD, but he had some overactive sympathetic drive and the vagus nerve stimulation is associated with the rest and digest parasympathetic.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Which is also why right now I stimulate it before bed, five minutes twice a day.
Kevin Rose: I know you do.
Tim Ferriss: For the ear — Jesus Christ.
Kevin Rose: No, I’m talking about the device.
Tim Ferriss: For the ear, there’s something called the cymba concha. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And people can see most of the research —
Kevin Rose: This little bit right here?
Tim Ferriss: Most right here.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And you can look this up online. You kind of want the portion of the cymba concha that is closer to your sideburns, let’s say.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And then you need another piece that is grounding and/or completing the circuit, and that’s got to be touching your skin. The contact point is incredibly important.
Kevin Rose: Are there any of these that you like that are consumer available? Because a lot of this stuff you mentioned —
Tim Ferriss: You can DIY it with components off of Amazon and maybe I’ll make that available to folks. The reason I hesitate to do that is that it’s easy to get wrong and you can — I just don’t want to be responsible for people trying to put current through their heads. There are a lot of people who DIY trying to do TMS and stuff.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is the one I —
Tim Ferriss: Or TDCS and they reverse polarity. And you can fry your brain, not with the vagus nerve stuff necessarily, but you got to be really careful with stimulation.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of this one, Nuropod?
Tim Ferriss: Uh-uh. I haven’t seen it.
Kevin Rose: I mean, it’s basically, if you look at who’s involved on the scientist level, it’s crazy. The number of —
Tim Ferriss: N-U-R-O-P-O-D. Let me see the world’s-most studied wearable vagus nerve stimulation.
Kevin Rose: A hundred plus international, UCLA did a study there, Penn —
Tim Ferriss: Okay. That’s interesting. I’d have to check it out.
Kevin Rose: It’s interesting, but I will say, just to be honest with people —
Tim Ferriss: Have you noticed anything?
Kevin Rose: I’ve owned this thing for about a year and a half. I did it for about two weeks for 30 minutes a day and I didn’t notice anything.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m looking at — it’s hard for me to see the placement on the earpiece. The placement is very, very, very specific.
Kevin Rose: It clips right here to this lobe right here.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I don’t think that’s in the right place.
Kevin Rose: But you feel a little ticky, ticky, tick, like shock, almost.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t think you’re — look, this is my first time seeing it, but I don’t think you’re going to be necessarily hitting as many fibers as you would want if that’s the placement.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But who knows? Look, a lot of fancy names on the website, maybe I’ll take a look at it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s worth it. You can borrow mine, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Because I want something I can recommend to people.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I can’t recommend this because it’s not done anything for me. But when I was doing the research for the most — this one, they’ve clearly paid for studies to be done. Obviously, that’s a huge grain of salt because who’s doing the studies and what are their biases and whatnot. But I’ll let you borrow mine and see if it does anything for you. It is a $900 device, which is like, “Shit. That’s a lot of money to spend.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m using a prototype of one from Scandinavia right now. On Amazon, look, I’m sure people can find some instructions for this. You can DIY something for like 20 to $25 worth of components on Amazon. It is not hard.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just a small tense unit.
Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s do that.
Tim Ferriss: Cables, the placement is very challenging to get right. And I did not see much in terms of results from me, even with a lot of professional guidance using that.
Kevin Rose: I want to tell you about something related.
Tim Ferriss: But can I stop for a second?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, please.
Tim Ferriss: Try breathing.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Do box breathing.
Kevin Rose: So that’s what this is?
Tim Ferriss: Or something like that. Do that twice a day.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: This is why also in The Great Nerve, which is a book written by Kevin Tracey, it’s a great book. There’s an extended chapter about Wim Hof. And Wim Hof is a very controversial figure, but well-known for breath work. And you see some of the same effects in terms of controlling immune response so that it is not excessive with respect to various types of cytokines and so on. You can do it with breath work. So what are we looking at?
Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of HeartMath?
Tim Ferriss: I have heard of HeartMath. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Okay. I went to a little mini retreat where they were doing a bunch of different modalities in terms of different therapies and things to just really let you be the best version of yourself. And one of the things that they did was they gave you a HeartMath device and they had a whole class on it. And I was like, “Yeah, I heard of that thing before. I never tried it.”
And so I hooked it up to my ear and it measures your HRV, but what blew my mind was that the app, once you launch it, it’s like, “Follow this box breathing and we’re going to watch…” You get to watch your HRV in real time. And dude, when I followed it, just as it was telling me what to do, the HRV just shut up. And then I would try and trick it and I’d be like, I’d follow up, but I’d think of something really stressful and my HRV would go down.
So I’m telling you, this is the coolest device I have owned in a while and you lock into this coherence mode as you do this breathing and it’s pretty awesome. It’s 250 bucks. I’m not an investor or anything, but heartmath.com.
Tim Ferriss: Heartmath.com. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And 60-day money back guarantee. Well, I want to say that because I hate recommending stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Affiliate code Kevin 40 percent.
Kevin Rose: Exactly. TimTim, 20 percent off. I hate recommending stuff when people spend their money, but I will say this with the one thing that I was really-
Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard good things about HeartMath. I don’t know who’s involved. I did, maybe you didn’t know this, for a period of time, maybe it was about three months I did training for this specifically, I think it was before any retail options were available, with a doctor named Leah Lagos, who has a book about this. And we actually in real time would do a video call and identify what type of breathing specifically would have, in real time, the biggest impact on HRV.
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: And there is something to this. There’s definitely something to this. I can’t speak to HeartMath, but I’ve heard of it before. So don’t worry about the device for stimulation, the point being try meditating twice a day for 10 to 20 minutes. And if you’re like, “Ugh, meditating, God, I’m allergic to that word because it gets used so much,” Try breathing. Use HeartMath or something else. There’s not a whole lot you need to worry about. Andy Weil has some very good breathing exercises.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, 4-7-8. Yeah. So I have box breathing and 4-7-8 on my app Oak that’s still in the App Store and it’s 100 percent free. There’s no way you have to pay for anything on the app. So if you just Google Oak, you can find it. And it has like six different breathing techniques on there you can do.
Tim Ferriss: I think here’s a hypothesis-slash-bet. I think that if it hasn’t been demonstrated already, I haven’t done a full lit search for this, I think there are breathing patterns, if you repeat them in the morning and at night, twice a day, roughly 12 hours apart for like 10 to 20 minutes, that you will see a lot of benefits for things like chronic pain.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I think it is — I really feel very confidently. So it’s exciting.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Sweet.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what else you’ve got.
Kevin Rose I’ve got crazy things. I mean, I just had my birthday a few weeks ago, which is crazy because I’m marching towards 50 really quick.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Kevin Rose: And so are you.
Tim Ferriss: Getting dragged through the —
Kevin Rose: I know.
Tim Ferriss: — doorway. With your fingernails leaving lines on the linoleum.
Kevin Rose: It’s really scary. Well, what’s crazy is, dude — okay, so when Tim and I first started hanging out, whatever, 15 years ago, 17 years ago, maybe 20, I don’t even know how long it’s been.
Tim Ferriss: It must be close to 20 years ago.
Kevin Rose: Close to 20 years ago, every time you walk into Tim’s house, he tackles you with some kind of new jiu-jitsu move to take you down. And in the last three years, he’s been carrying a ball for his lower back where he’s like, “I can’t move.” And it’s like old man Tim has appeared and that old Tim that would tackle you with the jiu-jitsu move is gone.
Tim Ferriss: The gentle art, not so gentle it turns out.
Kevin Rose: But I know one of the things that I want to really focus on for this next decade is balance. Balance obviously is such a key thing and it’s the number one way that people as they get older in their 60s, 70s, and beyond are actually permanently injured is by falling and breaking a hip and things like that. So two things to show off.
Tim Ferriss: Incredible increase in risk, all-cause mortality if you’re older and you break a hip.
Kevin Rose: Yes. It turns out breaking hips are not good. So check this out. This one right here I’ve had for a while.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t fall on your ringing bowl.
Kevin Rose: So can you imagine? I smashed my face on the ringing bowl. So I’m going to show you how this works.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, geez.
Kevin Rose: Have you used this before?
Tim Ferriss: I have. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And so are you good at these or no?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, I feel like a parent watching after you.
Kevin Rose: Move this. All right, how well can you do the balance boards?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t done it in a long time. There’s one called the Indo Board, which I have and I’ve fucked around with it. I don’t think today is the day.
Kevin Rose: Well, so let’s check this out. So five minutes a day, there was some research that was done around people with ADHD and it dramatically improved their symptoms, which I have a ton of.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can’t really —
Kevin Rose: But I want to know if you can do this. I want to see if you can do these squats.
Tim Ferriss: You have to pay attention if you’re on this thing.
Kevin Rose: Could you do these?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. Never tried it.
Kevin Rose: And then the tippy-toes. So I do 50 squats like this.
Tim Ferriss: I should also point out he has some history as a skateboarder.
Kevin Rose: I do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which helps.
Kevin Rose: Let’s see, let’s see, Tim —
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I’m going to —
Kevin Rose: You’ll be okay. I’ll hold your hand when you go up. Come on, just give it a shot for a second.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you some Depends. I’ll give you some Depends and give you a walker so you can get up there.
Fuck, man.
Kevin Rose: Okay. So one foot there.
Tim Ferriss: Yep. I got it.
Kevin Rose: Jesus. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, fuck. Hold on.
Kevin Rose: There you go. It’s got blockers, so you won’t slide off the end.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: Lean hard right, harder on the right foot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like —
Kevin Rose: It’s hard, isn’t it?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m nervous about falling over.
Kevin Rose: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: There we go.
Kevin Rose: Now the squats.
Tim Ferriss: This is kind of like slackboarding where you need a couple of days to get your nervous system in order.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing how your nervous system adapts to it?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: It’s really —
Tim Ferriss: There’s a crazy video people should check out. I think maybe it’s not online. There’s a guy named Jerzy Gregorek, had on the podcast, he’s got to be 70 something right now, but he was 67. He could stand on one of these at 67 with a fully loaded barbell with like 150, 200 pounds. He weighs probably 130 and he could do a perfect form Olympic snatch —
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: — landing with ass to heels and then stand back up and do repetitions.
Kevin Rose: So dude, when I was just in Japan last week —
Tim Ferriss: All right, there we go. That’s enough.
Kevin Rose: When I was just in Japan last week, I was out there and I was at this event. Whoops. I was at this friend’s birthday party that Tony Hawk’s also friends with. So I was hanging with Tony and he’s like — last time I saw Tony, I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” Because —
Tim Ferriss: Tony Hawk, one of the most legendary skateboarders of all time, for people who don’t know.
Kevin Rose: People definitely know who Tony Hawk is, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You might be surprised.
Kevin Rose: I mean, a lot of people definitely know.
Tim Ferriss: A lot of people know who Tony Hawk is.
Kevin Rose: So Tony —
Tim Ferriss: For the youngsters.
Kevin Rose: Last time I saw him, he had a cane and I was like, this was probably like eight months ago or whatever. And I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” And he’s like, “I just got a couple screws put into my hip.” And he had this injury and I was like, “Holy shit, man.” In my head, I’m like, “Oh, the fucking legend.” Pushing himself in his 50s to do — he’s still doing whatever, 720s on the half pipe in his mid 50s. Fucking crazy.
And I saw him up at Hokkaido and we’re going snowboarding, he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going boarding today.” He has no cane, no nothing. And I’m like, “Do you have pain? Do you have pain? Do you feel pain? What are you doing in your mid 50s doing vert snowboarding?” You know what I mean? And he’s just like, “Yeah, my wife jokes that I should have a shirt that says ‘Always in pain’ or something like that.” And I was just like, that is a — some people are built like that though. Have you ever seen his shins?
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he looks like a Thai kickboxer.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. He has been hit so many times by the board, it’s insane.
You and your birthday, when I was at your birthday in New York probably about, I don’t know, maybe seven, 10 years ago, you had a slackline in your backyard.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And I couldn’t do it at all at not even one step because it is very much a nervous system practice.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a nervous system practice.
Kevin Rose: So I found this online. It’s like a little home one. Do you have one like this?
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. I have played around with these. These are pretty sweet. So I have not used the smaller ones. I had one between trees, same company, Gibbon. And just for people who’ve never played with this, if you’re going to try it, don’t do an hour thinking that you’re going to figure it out in one day. Actually, my belief is you need sleep cycles for your nervous system to try to integrate it. So you’re better off doing a few minutes every day and gradually you’ll figure it out. But that’s cool. Very portable. So obviously a lot easier to set up and take down a gigantic thing between two trees with ratchets and everything.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to get one because again, on the balance front, they’ll have a little QR code there at the end that you scan and they give you about 20 or 30 different exercises that you can do with it. Like the toe taps where one foot is on and you need to tap of toe on each side of the bar.
And you’re right. And there’s this weird thing and I noticed this in my kids where they got those little hoverboards for Christmas so they can just kind of zoom around and they’re seven and eight. And day one, like eating shit, helmets, full gear. And day two, my youngest is just like whoosh-shoom, just flying over the place.
Tim Ferriss: Totally figured it out.
Kevin Rose: But it took a couple of days of that kind of adaption and that muscle memory to kind of kick in, which I think all these things do. But yeah, this has been awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for people who might want to try slacklining, don’t get on a slackline really far off the ground, number one, but a lot of rock climbing gyms have slacklines set up. So you can potentially get someone to show you the basic ropes, pun intended, of walking on a slackline over there. And it’s called Gibbon. Pretty sure this is why it’s called Gibbon because if you see really good slackliners, they do this with their arms as they’re walking across. And what does that look like? It looks like a gibbon, this monkey.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And you can see footage of Gibbons walking across rope on small suspension bridges. Pretty fascinating stuff. So try it out.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw something out there.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: Because it’s related to rock climbing. Well, a couple of things, since you brought it up. So for the last two days, we’ve been hanging out a little bit and you have not seen my little blow up Pilates ball that I usually put behind my low back.
Kevin Rose: Well, I just mentioned it a few minutes ago. I do see it. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but you haven’t seen it.
Kevin Rose: I know. So what’s going on?
Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems like, and this is not going to apply to most people, and this is a work in progress, so it’s not definitive, but I ended up meeting with a neurologist and surgeon in Austin.
Kevin Rose: And you’ve injected baby seal stem cells into your spine.
Tim Ferriss: No, no.
Kevin Rose: It’s going to be some shit like that.
Tim Ferriss: No. It might apply to a very, very small fraction of the people who are actually listening to this. He did imaging. He used to be in a clinic where they ran trials and studies related to something called Bertolotti’s Syndrome. And Bertolloti’s Syndrome is incredibly uncommon, most specialists in his profession might see one or two cases in their entire careers, but he’s seen hundreds. And he looked at my imaging and he said, “You may actually have Bertolotti’s Syndrome.” And he pointed out, they had very advanced imaging, the first time it came up, it corresponds perfectly to where I point to when people ask me where I have pain.
And it’s, in effect, where you have a transitional segment. So it’s like a lumbar vertebra that’s behaving like a sacral vertebra or vice versa. And let’s just say it’s L5 and the transverse processes, I think it’s transverse processes on both, try to form a pseudo joint. So they basically lay on bone and other material to try to create what is then called a pseudo joint. And if you look at textbook cases of Bertolotti’s, you’re like, “Yeah, of course that’s going to hurt your lower back.”
And as a way of testing the hypothesis, he said, “Well, before we even consider any interventions, let’s try to hone in on whether that is accurate or not as a diagnosis. The way we’ll do that is there are some nerves that affect that area specifically, there’s no radiating effect or anything down the leg, let’s put in effectively a nerve block and then see what happens. We’ll put in a nerve block…”
Kevin Rose: What is a nerve block?
Tim Ferriss: Basically stops the area from transmitting pain signals.
Kevin Rose: But what does it mean though when you put in a nerve block?
Tim Ferriss: Well, you lay down, in my case, on your face. I hate when anyone is messing with my spine, man. I’ve had so many things done to me and I’m usually cool as a cucumber, but when needles are in or around my spine, I really get the fear sweats. I don’t like it at all. But in this case, that was required. So you get a — in this case, it was, I think it was lidocaine, small amount of lidocaine to numb the surface.
Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.
Tim Ferriss: Then they’re going through quite a bit of deep musculature. So they go in and then they’re putting, in this case, and obviously you need specialists for this —
Kevin Rose: It was a baby seal.
Tim Ferriss: Prilocaine, baby seal semen. No, it was Prilocaine and something called Kenalog. But none of those specifics are the punchline. The punchline is, after he did the injection, he said, “Okay, this particular portion of the cocktail is going to last 18 hours, and then you’re going to get probably two weeks of effect from the Kenalog, something like that, which is a cortisone shot basically.”
And he said, “I want you to do all of the things that you think will most piss off your back. All the things you’ve been avoiding,” which for me are sitting on hard surfaces, sitting with a slightly flexed back, like if you’re sitting on a bar stool and you’re kind of like this, any of those, stretching in that position, sitting on the floor with the dogs, certainly things like heavy deadlifts, squats. So I did all of that stuff for three days straight, zero pain.
And I’m like, “Holy shit.” After having so many specialists from different disciplines say like, “Yeah, I know you point to that, but that’s not the spot. It’s actually because there’s referral pain from this, this, or this.” And just having so many people dismiss how precisely I could point to where I felt the most pain, which was consistent over years. And for the first time, he’s like, “If we look at the imaging right here, it is exactly where you are pointing with your finger.”
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m cautiously optimistic.
Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: This is the first time in six years. Also, there are different tools that work for different people. Sometimes it requires multiple tools. A lot of people have benefited from the work of John Sarno, but that school, for instance, in effect, says none of the imaging really maps to symptoms well, it’s all in your head. So do cognitive training and reconditioning to solve it because —
Kevin Rose: That’s the guy that Howard Stern got his back problems fixed through, right?
Tim Ferriss: It might be. A lot of people benefit from that stuff, but it’s also infuriating to be told every type of back pain is in your head. I’m like, “Really? If I took a ball peen hammer and smashed one of your vertebrae, that would be in your head?” I guess technically since the brain is governing pain, fine, but this is the first time with a relatively simple but precise intervention, I guess it’s been about five days, it’s like I can do everything with no pain.
Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So what does that mean?
Kevin Rose: Well it could be the cortisol shot. That’s the one thing that’s like, hmm?
Tim Ferriss: Well, that is —
Kevin Rose: You probably had that before, right? Or no?
Tim Ferriss: No, I haven’t, but here’s the thing. So that’s going to have —
Kevin Rose: Anti-inflammatory.
Tim Ferriss: — yeah, anti-inflammatory, it’s also going to basically kind of, for lack of a better term, like puff up the pseudo joint in a way that sort of reverses the chronological age or development of that in some ways from a symptom perspective. But this is where I’ll offer people something they can potentially look into, obviously with the help of really, really, really good doctors. If that shot continues to deliver benefits, and I can do all these things pain-free, which is the case right now, then there’s something called radiofrequency ablation, RFA, which is used to, in this case, temporarily, completely incapacitate those nerves.
So they go in, they apply radiofrequency ablation, and that should last for like a year to a year and a half, hopefully. And the hope in that case is, okay, with a year, year and a half, and I’ve spoken to multiple people and they’re like, “Even if you resume a lot of your activities and stare step into it that previously caused pain, you shouldn’t structurally make that worse.” Because that was a concern.
And I think that’s enough of a period of time where you could effectively reprogram your pain patterning, right? Because for years now, it’s like if I sit on a hard surface, my brain is like code red, DEFCON 5, you are about to not be able to sleep for six to seven days.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re going to have trouble walking and sitting and standing. So super exciting.
Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you mind if I continue my TED Talk for a second?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So I also had long overdue surgery, I think I might have talked about this last time, but on my extensors, right? So the forearm extensors. So this would be considered like tennis elbow, like 20 plus years overdue, from a sports injury. And I’m back to rock climbing. I’m not great at rock climbing, but I love it. I just love rock climbing, feeling really good.
And if people have never seen something called Abrahangs, so like Abraham, but Abrahangs, go on YouTube, find this Swedish rock climber named Emil Abrahamsson, so Abrahamsson, S-S-O-N, he is a monster, very competent rock climber, does like V13 problems and probably much more, incredible explainer of things and dives into a lot of training. And he, along with the help of this scientist named Keith Barr, B-A-A-R, who I’ve actually had on the podcast, developed or tested this protocol for improving tendon strength.
And it is the simplest, lowest impact thing you can imagine. It’s basically 10 minutes, twice a day, and he does a bunch on a hangboard, but let’s keep it simple. Let’s say you’re hanging on, could be a pull-up bar, could be a door jamb, could be the underside of some stairs, whatever, and he’s hanging with like 30 to 85 percent of his weight, so his feet are still on the floor, does that for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, and you do it 10 times, that’s 10 minutes, and then you do it again later in the day, and his before and after strength in endurance tests are mind-blowing.
This is already a guy who we could say is a high level climber, and to see the before and after is crazy. So you don’t always have to kill yourself to adapt in really, really interesting ways. And that’s something I’ve really, really benefited from. But the low back has been a limiter for the last few months, because hanging from a bar, if I don’t engage the abs, it could cause some issues with the low back and spasming.
So I bought this thing recommended by a friend of mine, Nick Norris, who’s also been on the podcast, former Navy SEAL, called the NUG. And the NUG is, it’s about the size of a gigantic bar of soap, it’s a piece of wood, and it has different depths of grips on it, like 25 millimeters, 20 millimeters, and you can move it around really easily. And basically you could keep it in a jacket pocket. And as long as you have a carabiner, like one of those things that kind of clicks on, you can do all sorts of exercises while you’re traveling. And at home I have basically a plate loading pin that you can load plates on.
Kevin Rose: Like this?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So that you can basically do like a single-handed deadlift with different weights.
Kevin Rose: And so this is the same as essentially doing the hanging board?
Tim Ferriss: It’s similar, right? You’re going to be, I’m looking for the same kind of loading, but what you can also do is take this thing that you can fit in your pocket and attach it to like a low cable machine. That’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, actually.
Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: And just like get the weight off the ground, the stack off of the resting position and then I was doing 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off.
Kevin Rose: And you only have one of these?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because I’ll do one hand and then I’ll do the other.
Kevin Rose: Oh, amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ll be like, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 second rest, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds rest.
Kevin Rose: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And I think a lot — yeah, the website is Frictitious Climbing, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but like friction, Frictitious Climbing. They have the NUG, they have a bunch of other items that you can use while traveling for this, which are really, really interesting. So that’s another one that I’ve been traveling with. I’ll let you go and then —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just a fun little tool to play with. Do not overdo finger training. You do not want to tear a pulley or something in your fingers. So less is more, less is more, less is more. This is, I guess, something like 30 to 85 percent of body weight. And obviously, or maybe it’s not obvious, that’s with two hands, so if you’re doing it with one hand, it’s going to be 15 to 40 percent.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing. Oh, this is cool. Thanks. I already just ordered it by the time you’re done talking about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s fun to play with.
Kevin Rose: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: What you got?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of things. One, I was hanging with Craig Mod in Japan and you’ve had Craig on the show before.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Craig.
Kevin Rose: Craig is —
Tim Ferriss: Amazing, amazing guy.
Kevin Rose: I don’t think there’s anybody that understands Japan the way that Craig does, in terms of the back country and just like the little artisans and all the stuff that he’s into.
Tim Ferriss: Craig has walked probably fair to say like thousands of miles of different trails and pilgrimage paths in Japan. It’s very likely he has walked more of Japan on foot than any other person.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So he was out here visiting, he actually stayed in this house for a week when he was out here in L.A. And I walked in and he’s got all his little toiletries sitting out. It’s sitting out, he puts it all in Japanese order where it’s got a little nice little cloth and it’s got all this shit —
Tim Ferriss: He even dresses like a Japanese person now.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know. So I mean he’s lived there for 25 years, so that makes sense. But I saw his toothbrush and I was like, “That is a dope looking toothbrush.” And I got you one.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow, look at this.
Kevin Rose: So you can get these on Amazon. It’s got a really wide head. He said it’s his favorite Japanese toothbrush.
Tim Ferriss: So for people who can’t see it’s like the toothbrush bristles are almost in a square. I mean, it’s very square-like as opposed to being more elongated.
Kevin Rose: And so you get three of these for $11.50 on Amazon. And what does it say in Japanese?
Tim Ferriss: Premium care. Premium care.
Kevin Rose: Premium care. Oh, Toaster’s here.
Tim Ferriss: Premium care.
Kevin Rose: Hey, buddy.
Tim Ferriss: Hi, buddy.
Kevin Rose: Look at old man Toast.
Tim Ferriss: I was just saying hi to him earlier. Toaster is now 15. I was just saying to Darya that the last time we did a podcast sitting on a couch was at your place in San Francisco back when Toaster was a puppy and he chewed through the XLR cables on the Zoom.
Kevin Rose: Yes, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Hey, buddy.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, he can’t hear anything anymore. And sadly, his back legs are falling out from underneath them now. But look at that. He’s still a good dude. Look at that.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like he recognized me because I’ve seen him so many times.
Kevin Rose: Oh, for sure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What a sweetheart.
Kevin Rose: He’s such a good boy.
Tim Ferriss: So yes, premium care.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I got you one of those and there’s a three pack for $11.50. I think it’s great. It’s a fantastic toothbrush.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. [Tim says something in Japanese]. Yeah, okay. Cool. I dig it. Thank you.
Kevin Rose: Speaking of all things Japanese, so I am hesitant to give this up. So if you want to get a —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, low in stock, only one left.
Kevin Rose: Well, hold on, let me tell you why. So first of all, check this out. Check out this jacket.
Tim Ferriss: Cool. All right. Oh, nice.
Kevin Rose: You feel how heavy that is?
Tim Ferriss: Feels almost like a — I know what this is. I know what this is.
Kevin Rose: So this is a fireman’s jacket in Japan.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And this is a heavy, dope fireman’s jacket. It’s vintage from like —
Tim Ferriss: This would be hard to rip. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: — the 1970s.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose: And so I found a store on Etsy.
Tim Ferriss: How did you even think to look for this?
Kevin Rose: Because I love this style of jacket.
Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese fire jacket.
Kevin Rose: I didn’t type in, fireman jacket. I typed in, Japanese jacket on Etsy. And so this importer, they import the coolest vintage Japanese.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just wear this.
Kevin Rose: Everything from jackets to — you know how they used to do that patch mill work where they take stuff? They would patch quilts out of old material?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So everything from little tiny shrines to wicker baskets. Dude, check out the store. Let me just show you this store real quick. And the only reason I’m plugging it is —
Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese Indigo dyed Kendo jacket.
Kevin Rose: So they’ve got all the little dolls. Look at these different types of indigo dyed blankets.
Tim Ferriss: So what’s the seller?
Kevin Rose: The seller is just an importer from Japan. Or exporter.
Tim Ferriss: You don’t want to give the name?
Kevin Rose: No, I will. Well, here’s the deal. It’s so inexpensive. In the States, if you were to buy this jacket from a designer called Visvim, which is like a well-known Japanese designer, this style of jacket would be — oh, gosh, it’d probably be $2,500 for that jacket.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. It’s more expensive than my car.
Kevin Rose: No, it’s not. They sell these jackets on there for — here’s one for $92. Look at this. Vintage 1960s jacket, $92.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s cool. Watch out, buddy.
Kevin Rose: You okay, bud? He needs a little help.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think you’re ready for the slackboard, my friend.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There you go. Okay. I know, I know.
Kevin Rose: That jacket’s dope. But I just wanted to get this out there because I think if you’re looking to buy vintage fun things in, you can’t scroll.
Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. I know. I’m being an idiot.
Kevin Rose: If you’re looking for just various objects around your house that are vintage from Japan, this place is insanely inexpensive for all different types of things.
Tim Ferriss: Blue Heritage Japan?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Etsy name is Blue Heritage Japan.
Tim Ferriss: 4.9 stars, thousands of reviews.
Kevin Rose: But look at some of this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s cool. These hanging tapestries for stores and stuff, those are fun.
Kevin Rose: So anyway, I just thought it was a fun shop that — and you know it’s legit because when you get the package, it’s actually shipped directly from Japan. Oftentimes you’ll find some of these places that make a Japanese style jacket and then you find a little tag that says made in China on the inside of it or something. So anyway, look at this farmer’s washy paper basket. But wouldn’t that be cool to have in your house sitting around somewhere? That’s just awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I guess these guys are based in Canada, looks like. CA.
Kevin Rose: Oh, no, that’s just because I’m logged in the Canadian store. They’re based in Japan.
Tim Ferriss: Why the hell are you logged into the Canadian store?
Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I was on VPN.
Tim Ferriss: You better close those porn browsers.
Kevin Rose: No, I was in Japan and they were firewalling me off of some stuff, and so I had to use a VPN.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: I’m being dead serious, I’m being dead serious. It wasn’t porn, dude.
Tim Ferriss: Thou doth protest too much. All right. Should I hop in?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, go ahead.
Tim Ferriss: All right, cool. So I want to recommend some podcasts for people. And these are two that I continue to revisit. One is a miniseries by 99% Invisible, one of the OGs, Roman Mars, and he’s got some co-hosts. It is a series on The Power Broker. So The Power Broker by Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It’s a biography of Robert Moses, who basically shaped modern New York. And this book is considered the quintessential book to read if you want to understand state and local politics, especially power wielding in New York.
And it’s a legendary book. It’s 1200 pages. I’ve never made it through. I’ve never even really put a dent in it. And then what 99% Invisible does, they walk you through the whole book and give you their highlights. They interview Robert Caro himself who got to meet Robert Moses multiple times and they have guest appearances by people like Conan O’Brien, who’s a huge Robert Caro and Power Broker fan. It’s a wonderful series.
Kevin Rose: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: And I think there are 12 parts. I had listened to it ages ago, but they only had three episodes out and then I just petered out because I didn’t want to wait months for the next one to come out. Now they have the full 12. So that’s one. And then the other one is a podcast called STEM-Talk. And if I want to find interesting scientists doing things that I think I might be able to apply to my life or the lives of loved ones, and certainly there’s a lot of stuff that’s out on the edges that is not yet ready for any clinical applications. STEM-Talk is just incredible. And my latest discovery there is a really fascinating scientist named Dr. Francisco Gonzalez-Lima, who’s at UT Austin.
One of the many reasons I’m interested in his research is that he has a very different view on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and thinks, as I do, that people underweight and researchers underweight, how you might think of Alzheimer’s as a vascular disease and including mitochondrial dysfunction. And the more I dig into this, the less compelling I find amyloid beta plaque, amyloid beta plaque for a whole host of reasons.
Kevin Rose: It’s pretty widely accepted now that that is a byproduct of something gone wrong and not the cause of it, right?
Tim Ferriss: But still, I do think a lot of doctors and scientists would view it as a byproduct. Nonetheless, a lot of the treatment options like Donanemab infusions or otherwise are focused on removing plaque. But you can remove a lot of plaque —
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t do shit.
Tim Ferriss: — assuming it doesn’t kill people because there are —
Kevin Rose: The side effects are huge.
Tim Ferriss: — risks of RA and stuff. And you may not see any change in cognition whatsoever.
Kevin Rose: What do you think of the Bredesen protocol?
Tim Ferriss: Look, Dale Bredesen, I don’t know much about Dale, so you should illuminate me. Let’s get to that in a second.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Tim Ferriss: But what I have seen, let’s just say in the case of some of my relatives, I’ve got three relatives with Alzheimer’s right now, one who’s disintegrating very quickly, one who’s in hospice, and another who’s in the early but rapidly advancing stages. I gave one of them actually the exact same ketone that I had before we sat down, only 10 grams because I didn’t want to risk them getting dizzy, which can be a byproduct and falling, but I gave them 10 or 15 grams and within 20 minutes, longer sentences, faster speech, this is someone who’s giving like one word, two word responses, and that lasted for about an hour, hour and a half. So if plaques, even if we’re talking about tau and so on, if those were solely responsible, that shouldn’t work. But I don’t want to be dosing my family with ketones constantly for a lot of reasons. It’s like, “Okay, well, what else can we do?”
And this Dr. Gonzalez-Lima has looked at low dose methylene blue and also photobiomodulation using lasers or LEDs right on, in most cases, the right prefrontal cortex.
Kevin Rose: By the way, do you know that they’re selling methylene blue on freaking Amazon now?
Tim Ferriss: That’s scary.
Kevin Rose: I know. They didn’t used to because they were scared to do it. Now there are supplement companies that are selling straight up methylene blue on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss: That’s scary. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Although the safety profile, it’s been used for a very long time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s got like 120 years of research, but if you overshoot the therapeutic window, you can fuck yourself up.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. 100 percent. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So in this case, it’s low dose, ideally plus photobiomodulation, and you’re hitting two aspects of the electron transport chain that should be synergistic for mitochondrial function and also glucose metabolism. And so that’s really got my attention right now.
Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this on Amazon. Look at this guy drinking a big pitcher of it.
Tim Ferriss: Guy’s drinking a shaker bottle full of methylene blue.
Kevin Rose: With the goldfish.
Tim Ferriss: Dude.
Kevin Rose: Methylene blue is what they use for fish tanks, right? To color the water blue.
Tim Ferriss: Is it?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, they were using it in fish tanks.
Tim Ferriss: Well, if it’s good enough for the fish tanks, I guess. Be careful.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, look at it. Here it is. General disease prevention for fish.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, disease prevention. Oh, you know, hey.
Kevin Rose: If it works for fish.
Tim Ferriss: Those pet stores figured it out.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Be very careful, folks.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: If you overdo, this is true for a lot of things. You basically have a response curve where a hormetic dose, like a very small amount is good for you, like iocaine powder in the Princess Bride, or it helps with immune function and so on.
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: If you take too much, it has the opposite effect. So you could, I believe, I don’t think I’m getting this wrong, handicap your mitochondrial function by taking too much.
Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this. 15 milligrams of methylene blue with 75 milligrams of vitamin C NeuroPro. I’m not recommending this. This is just one on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss: It’s All over Amazon. God, that’s terrifying.
Kevin Rose: What would be considered a microdose in your opinion?
Tim Ferriss: I’d have to go back and look at his actual research. People should listen to the STEM-Talk episode with Francisco Gonzalez-Lima.
Kevin Rose: There’s a picture of someone putting it in her purse.
Tim Ferriss: Like an EpiPen.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’ll just take this to go.
Tim Ferriss: Take this to the spa.
Kevin Rose: By the way, the comments — it’s so funny you’re on this because literally two days ago, I was in here reading the comments and they’re like, “I’m peeing blue now.” You pee blue.
Tim Ferriss: You do pee blue. And that’s actually a way individually that you can begin to identify your customized dose.
Kevin Rose: Oh, you shouldn’t be peeing blue.
Tim Ferriss: No, at what point you go from blue to clear. You can figure out basically what the half — I’m probably using not exactly the correct terms, but figure out what the half life is in your body so that you’re dosing at the right interval.
Kevin Rose: They call this bro science, by the way, when two guys that don’t have —
Tim Ferriss: Well, I am pretty closely echoing. Yes, it is broscience, but it’s bro science with citations, meaning don’t trust exactly what I’m saying, but go listen to the episode and read his research.
Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this.
Tim Ferriss: Methylene blue gummies. Fuck.
Kevin Rose: They’re selling gummies now of methane blue.
Tim Ferriss: Terrifying.
Kevin Rose: Anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Just because it’s a supplement doesn’t make it safe, folks.
Kevin Rose: Amen. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Hemlock, all natural. Turns out, shouldn’t have too much of it.
Kevin Rose: Hemlock?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, killed Socrates.
Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just like arsenic, all natural. Don’t go take a shaker bottle full of arsenic. So yeah, be careful out there, kids. But that definitely has my attention right now because I think about say parental risk, my mom’s cognition is slipping, but she’s APOE e3/e3. Her APOE allele profile is 3/3. I’m 3/4, my brother’s 3/4, which means we got the four from my dad. He’s sharp as a tack. He’s incredibly sharp and he’s older than my mom. So it’s like, all right, they both have metabolic dysfunction. So that’s equalized. The fasting glucose and all that’s terrible. It’s like, what’s going on? Well, you do inherit mitochondria from your mom and mitochondria are a very big deal. So looking at different levers that I might experiment with in my mom that could also potentially be applied preventatively in me and my brother.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Dale Bredesen protocol is pretty awesome. He wrote a book about six or seven years ago, maybe it’s closer to 10 now.
Tim Ferriss: Nicotine enemas, am I right?
Kevin Rose: Exactly. That’s all it is. Which you tried for the first time today.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t exactly that, but yeah.
Kevin Rose: So the one thing I like about, it’s called The End of Alzheimer’s, is the name of his book, is that he’s —
Tim Ferriss: Understated.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Won’t sell any copies with that title. But what he came up with is he said, “Okay, listen, what we’re seeing in the brain is the byproduct of something going haywire. It’s either blood-brain barrier breaking down, allowing bad shit in. It could be bacteria. It could be a whole slew of different things.” It could be, like you said, an issue with blood flow and it could be, what did you call it? A vascular type issue.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And he thinks it’s like three or four. He thinks it’s either vascular, which sauna, other things like that help with. CocoaVia, like other ways to make sure that you have vascular health. Obviously the mitochondria thing is another one that he’s huge on. And then he also thinks it could be toxin-related as well.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: And talking about how to get those toxins out of your body, but his protocol is very common sense.
Tim Ferriss: What is it?
Kevin Rose: It is essentially a handful of supplements, which are all the ones that you’ve basically talked about along with, it’s like a lightweight keto. So just making sure you go into lightweight ketosis like five days a week. And then obviously no sugar, no refined carbohydrate, it’s eliminating all that shit. Turns out exercise, like intense exercise, is very important. And he’s shown now over the course of a decade that he’s taken people. Actually, you know Kelly Boys who we were on the —
Tim Ferriss: Retreat with.
Kevin Rose: — retreat with. She’s an awesome meditation — she teaches something, this form of relaxing yoga.
Tim Ferriss: Yoga Nidra.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. As an aside, her father, I think she’d be okay for me to share this, we’ll double check, but her father had mild cognitive impairment 10 years ago and they were, of course, really worried. They put them on the Dale Bredesen protocol and he’s scoring better now than he was when he first took the test. 10 years later.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And she’s like, “Yeah, he still has issues here and there.” But he’s I guess in his 80s now or something, but that’s what you want.
Tim Ferriss: Makes a difference. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Even if we can say, okay, mild cognitive impairment, it’s progressing. My mom is in this situation. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but thankfully she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She has some form of dementia. She remembers me, kids’ names, stuff like that, the important things. She would have a hard time telling you what the name of my dog is. There’s little things that slide through the cracks. She’s sadly really overweight, didn’t really want to do that. But the point is, if we could see this stuff early enough where you still have enough of your wits about you to take action, because compliance is huge, as you know. How hard is it to get your family members to go do high intensity exercise?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Can I pause for a second?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of the reason why the methylene blue and the photobiomodulation are so interesting because for instance, there’s a device that is actually worth investigating on some levels called the Cognito device. It’s a headset and it was developed by scientists out of MIT and it’s 40 hertz, I believe, both visual and auditory stimulation, and in Rhesus monkeys, pretty recently in the last year, they showed a lot of plaque clearance enhanced by this, right? But that’s still, if I’m understanding correctly, people fact check this, but that’s still predicated on the theory of disease for Alzheimer’s that by removing plaque, you get clinical outcomes, right?
Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: The photobiomodulation — well, before I get to that, as I understand it, this is an hour a day of wearing this device on your head. My mom’s not going to do that. There’s no fucking way, right? Nor any of my relatives. However, the photobiomodulation, it’s like eight to 10 minutes, right? Laser or LED. LED is a little harder to make —
Kevin Rose: And do you have to go in to do that or can you get a device that does it at all?
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to buy a device and I’m not recommending people do that. You can really damage your eyes with lasers and so on, but right now, it’s not like you can go to a clinic and be like, “Hey, I’d like to have this treatment.” Just doesn’t exist. So let me be the guinea pig before anybody does anything, but you get this device and I’m sure it’s going to be very expensive. Some of these lasers, they’re like $30,000. But eight to 10 minutes, and you can see, even after a single session, you can see multiple weeks of effect. It’s crazy.
Kevin Rose: And so it just sits right on top of — into the eye or on top of the —
Tim Ferriss: No. Well, there are devices that go through the eyes, but this one, what makes it so mystifying in a way for me is that it’s actually pointed at the forehead as an infrared laser. It’s so fascinating. And there are peer reviewed published studies on this, which you can find. Anybody who looks up Gonzalez-Lima will find it. So it’s exciting. It’s super exciting because there’s certain things. I know that my mitochondria are funky. And I know that through different types of endurance testing, different types of, obviously all sorts of stuff done through doctors and tests and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s something funky with the mitochondria. And I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s try to get ahead of that.”
And actually related to that, to invoke, I said she would come back. Rhonda Patrick, also, I was texting with her at one point because I was listening to STEM-Talk, that podcast I mentioned, and I came across a scientist discussing something called urolithin A.
Kevin Rose: Of course, Mitopure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Mitopure. And two years ago, maybe it was two years ago, she was pretty bearish on it, but there’s a lot of new research, or I shouldn’t say a lot. There’s new research that’s come out and also met with a couple of biotech people in Boston who are very respected. I’m not going to dox them because I don’t want to, but they basically did this comprehensive analysis and landed on three or four things and one of them was urolithin A.
Kevin Rose: Right. I take 300 milligrams a day.
Tim Ferriss: 300. How did you choose 300 milligrams?
Kevin Rose: Because that’s what all the studies are done on — or no, sorry, so 500 to 1,000. I take 500 milligrams a day.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Clear then you’ve been taking a higher dose.
Tim Ferriss: I was like 300?
Kevin Rose: I’ve only been doing these things for three months to see some results. So bear with me people, I was close. it was 200 milligrams off.
Tim Ferriss: What’s a little strange is that if you buy the bag, you can get this on Amazon. I’m not recommending you do that. Jury’s still out, but I’m like, “Hey, I want to hit mitochondria from as many reasonably plausible mechanisms or angles as possible.” You can get Mitopure. It’s expensive AF. It is very expensive.
Kevin Rose: I was going to tell people that the one that people talk about the most in this world that has done a lot of clinical studies around it, your Urolithin A is this company called Timeline, who doesn’t say — they trademarked the name of it, which is Mitopure. The problem is it’s freaking expensive.
Tim Ferriss: It’s very, very expensive.
Kevin Rose: And I don’t know, is there another company that’s out there that has high quality? Because I’m not going to put shit into my body, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: But I would like to know, is there any company that has —
Tim Ferriss: When you say expensive, it’s like 60 count is $125, right?
Kevin Rose: Right. And you’re taking two a day.
Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So that’s 30 days.
Tim Ferriss: And most of the studies actually have people taking a thousand a day. So if you’re taking a thousand a day, the prices are going to add up. But again —
Kevin Rose: I would trust Pure Encapsulations if they offered some of it. I haven’t seen anybody — there’s no other brands that I’ve seen that — you know the household names like the Thorns, the Pures, the ones that —
Tim Ferriss: And this is a single SKU, well, not a single SKU, but a single compound company. They have a lot vested in IP protection and so on.
Kevin Rose: But it can’t be synthesized. They don’t own urolithin A. Obviously that’s something that anyone can produce.
Tim Ferriss: Well, urolithin A is also —
Kevin Rose: urolithin A, I mean.
Tim Ferriss: — what’s called a postbiotic. If you were eating tons of pomegranates and walnuts and so on, there’s certain things that in your gut, biomicrobes will be converted into, in part, urolithin A. The problem is that there’s a high degree of variability. So if Kevin eats two handfuls of walnuts and I ate two handfuls of walnuts, we’re not going to get the same amount of urolithin A out. Fortunately, urolithin A is very orally bioavailable, which is why the supplementation potentially makes sense.
Kevin Rose: What’s interesting is actually Pure Encapsulations does make one, and when you go and look at the label, they actually buy Mitopure for theirs.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, There you go.
Kevin Rose: So they use Mitopure in theirs.
Tim Ferriss: Well, Mitopure in this case is almost like an industrial grade supplier in so much as Creapure. If you’re buying Creatine, I use Momentus Creatine, they’re a sponsor of the podcast, but I like their stuff and everything is NSF certified and third party analyzed. Creapure is this supplier, just like maybe Mitopure is, that’s providing something that is very pure and properly assayed and so on and so forth. Okay. So Pure Encapsulations, it’s not cheap either. That one’s 80 bucks.
Kevin Rose: 80 bucks, but so that’ll get you — hold on. Let’s just do the math here. So $80 of 60 pills. And, again, it is 250 mgs per two pills, so that’s half the dose.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so if you wanted — well, per two pills, so if you wanted a thousand a day, that’s eight per day.
Kevin Rose: It’s 160. Oh, thousand a day, yeah, eight a day.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s eight a day, 60 capsules.
Kevin Rose: But it has other shit in there, too. I don’t want all this other stuff, the resveratrol and whatever.
Tim Ferriss: So, yeah, it’s expensive. That 80 bucks is going to last you like 12 days, something like that. In any case, guys, the jury is out.
Kevin Rose: The jury is out.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s interesting enough that I added it into the rotation. And I routinely take things out of the rotation also.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.
Tim Ferriss: This one I’ve been taking for probably six to eight weeks.
Kevin Rose: What’s the number one thing that you’ve kept in rotation for the longest time? I have two, vitamin D, obviously, because my levels are chronically low without it. And I think, at this point, it’s a no-brainer to get your levels where they should be. And then I would say curl-ups is another one that I have had in for a long time —
Tim Ferriss: CocoaVia is interesting, yeah.
Kevin Rose: — just because it looks really interesting in terms of vascular health, and then I think, well, obviously, your high-quality omega-3. Outside of that, I don’t know what else I’ve had. What’s been in your rotation forever?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, a lot of them are dictated by genetic analysis and blood biomarkers in some way. Right? So, outside of prescription stuff, because I am taking things to not die of cardiovascular disease, because everybody in my family gets smoked by some kind of cardiovascular disease, and I’m, like, “Yeah. I’m no spring chicken.”
Kevin Rose: Are you taking Repatha, too?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m taking Repatha.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Where do you inject it?
Tim Ferriss: In the thigh. I hate it. It’s so painful.
Kevin Rose: Oh, really?
Tim Ferriss: I find it so painful.
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God, dude, I can tell you a secret.
Tim Ferriss: What’s the secret?
Kevin Rose: How often are you — how long do you let the alcohol dry for?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it’s the alcohol.
Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve done thousands of injections in myself.
Kevin Rose: You got to let it because, if you would just like swipe, swipe, swipe and then go pop, it hurts because it’s pushing the alcohol down into the cuts.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe I’m not waiting long enough because I’m impatient. It’s possible because —
Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, oh, are you letting it come to room temperature, too?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did let it come to room temperature. Yeah.
Kevin Rose: Okay, because you know it takes five times as long to inject it if you don’t.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, there’s the prescription stuff. It’s not going to apply to too broad a number of people, and I don’t want anyone aping it and getting themselves into trouble, but there are like a few prescription meds for lipid profile specifically, in my case, cholesterol absorption, hyperabsorption. But I would say supplement-wise, omega-3, I honestly try to get that from fish when I can. I eat a lot of canned sardines and mackerel and stuff, which ties into the keto and Fasting Mimicking Diet diet stuff. Vitamin D, yes, although I’m pretty skeptical of like the entire planet having vitamin D deficiency frankly. I do take it though. And then there’s some B vitamin complex stuff.
Kevin Rose: I do that, too.
Tim Ferriss: I’m a shitty methylator, so that’s a good idea.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.
Tim Ferriss: And creatine, although I end up looking kind of like a puffy fat baby if I eat too much of that stuff.
Kevin Rose: Wait. Are you doing five grams?
Tim Ferriss: It depends on the day, right? So like I took five grams today. If I’m training, I’m going to use at least 10. I’m doing weight training. And then, if I have a crazy travel schedule ahead of me where I’m going to be in like London for one day and Sweden for one day, I’ll be taking probably 20 to 30 grams a day —
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: — because my sleep’s going to be so screwed —
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — just to compensate for the sleep deprivation.
Kevin Rose: Holy shit. Good luck.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Kevin Rose: Good luck making it to the toilet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Don’t —
Kevin Rose: Creatine jacks your stomach up, right?
Tim Ferriss: Don’t combine. Actually, I’m fine with creatine. If I get —
Kevin Rose: You told me at one point it was messing you up though.
Tim Ferriss: Well, there was the story of me — what did I have? I was in San Francisco. This is probably TMI, but whatever. We’re all friends here, right? So I was in San Francisco. I had my Volkswagen Golf. It got broken into like three times for change. I was so annoyed. San Francisco for the win. And, in any case, I had to run to an international flight, and I was stressed out because I was running behind. And I was, like, well, just before I go, I’m going to have double espresso, 10 grams of creatine, and then I had MCT oil.
Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, my God, dude.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m driving on my way to the airport like in a massive rush. I don’t have time for anything. And I leaned to do a little squeaker, and just —
Kevin Rose: Oh, no.
Tim Ferriss: — full disaster pants.
Kevin Rose: In an Uber?
Tim Ferriss: No. In my own car.
Kevin Rose: Oh.
Tim Ferriss: I park in long-term parking and —
Kevin Rose: Did you grab a new pair out of your thing, just wipe and go?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, all right, I can’t believe I’m talking about this to millions of people. But I basically took the underwear and like some rags that I had, like did what I had to do for like emergency field triage —
Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: — tossed it under my car, put on my pants —
Kevin Rose: Throw it in the trash.
Tim Ferriss: — put on my pants. No, I literally was about to miss my flight. I put my pants on commando style and then ran on and got on the flight.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: And I was just, like, “I’m sorry, everybody.” I know this can’t be too much of a wonderful cologne for anyone near me.
Kevin Rose: Oh, God.
Tim Ferriss: We might need to edit some of that. So, yeah, don’t do those three at once. If you’re getting Creapure creatine, I don’t find it to mess up my stomach at all. Totally fine. If you combine it with caffeine and MCT oil —
Kevin Rose: MCT oil is the devil, dude.
Tim Ferriss: All bets are off. All bets are off.
Kevin Rose: That stuff just goes straight through you. I don’t know a single person that can do high-dose MCT and has been, like, “Oh, my stomach’s fine.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. You’re going to — high risk. You should just pre-order the subscription of Depends.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Let me mention one other thing. So, related to all the mental health stuff, it sounds like we’re doing like tons of stuff, millions of things. It’s actually not that complicated for me. Right? There are a few supplements that I’m taking consistently, the creatine, the Urolithin A, et cetera. There are a few things I’m considering like methylene blue. If photobiomodulation with the lasers or LEDs is something that you can experiment with once a week or once every few weeks and track changes over time, let’s do that, and before and after cognitive testing. Intermittent ketosis, which I find easiest to do through intermittent fasting, frankly, which I’ll be doing when I travel also. I find it to help with jet lag.
And then there’s the exercise, right? And so what kind of exercise? I did a podcast with Dr. Tommy Wood recently. Fascinating guy. People should listen to that episode. But 4×4 Norwegian, high-intensity training, which is like you’re basically doing — I guess it would be considered zone four. You’re really maxing out your heart rate. And you’re doing four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on. You’re repeating that four times. And it is very much puke inducing. It’s a lot of lactic acid.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: The problem has always been, or one of the problems has always been that, if I’m traveling, stationary bikes in hotels are just terrible.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: They will destroy my knees. They’re just too inconsistent in terms of settings and stuff. So I was texting with Tommy. I don’t think he’d mind me saying. I’ll have to double check with him. But I asked him, I said if — in the conversation we had, I was, like, “Well, what are the drivers here? Is it VO2 max, because talk about VO2 max, VO2 max, VO2 max?” And he said, “Well, lactate actually seems to be a big driver, like lactic acid, right?”
Kevin Rose: Driver of what?
Tim Ferriss: Driver of the cognitive changes, like the neuroanatomical and vascular changes. And he’s, like, “Okay.” “Well, hold on a second.” I was, like, “If that’s the case, there are certain ways of weight training. Like if you do 20 rep squats in slow cadence or any number of different things, like you are going to be brimming with lactic acid. Could that possibly achieve the same effect?”
Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?
Tim Ferriss: What’s that?
Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?
Tim Ferriss: Klotho is another part of it.
Kevin Rose: Because klotho has been shown — like HIIT is what creates klotho in humans.
Tim Ferriss: Well, klotho is another piece. I don’t think it’s the only piece. I mean, look, I can’t wait for us to have proper injectable klotho or that lever to pull. But, in the meantime, I guess, right now, today, what I’m saying is like high intensity interval training when you’re traveling is not always the easiest thing to do.
Kevin Rose: Right. Right. Right.
Tim Ferriss: But, like for instance, when I go back to my hotel tonight, can I do like a couple of sets of very high repetition leg presses and just basically have lactic acid pouring out my eyeballs? Yeah, I can do that.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I can do it in like five minutes. Right? And there are many open questions about it, but that’s the approach I’m taking. And what’s really cool about the Norwegian 4×4 that Tommy describes, and I think I’m remembering this correctly, is that, if you do it, I think it’s three times a week for six months, you can observe the effects, the beneficial effects for like five years afterwards.
Kevin Rose: Wow. Holy shit.
Tim Ferriss: Isn’t that fucking crazy?
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: The durability of the effects are just nuts.
Kevin Rose: Okay, this is what I get to — I’ll start by like 1×1 or something. And you could go in 4×4?
Tim Ferriss: There ain’t no way in hell I’m doing 4×4.
Kevin Rose: 4×4, if you’re doing it properly. I use a Morpheus chest strap. But you’re assuming a certain level of like baseline cardiovascular fitness to do 4×4.
Tim Ferriss: Not really because, I mean, look, you don’t —
Kevin Rose: It’s subjective.
Tim Ferriss: You don’t blow yourself apart, but it’s heart-rate based, right?
Kevin Rose: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So, if you get winded and your heart gets gone walking up a flight of stairs, like you’re not going to need very much to get into the proper zone. I will say, for me, and this comes back to the mitochondrial discussion, and I’ve had doctors who are, like, “That’s nonsense. It’s all mediated by the lungs.” It’s actually not mediated by the lungs. It’s all like heart stroke volume. I’m, like, “My legs crap out first before my heart rate gets to where it needs to be.” My legs are the weak link.
Kevin Rose: Oh, dude.
Tim Ferriss: I feel that fatigue in my legs.
Kevin Rose: I’ve got boots for you tonight. Can I put the boots on while you have dinner?
Tim Ferriss: Are these the —
Kevin Rose: The ones that go all the way up the leg.
Tim Ferriss: — Normatec?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, Normatec.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll try them. Yeah, I’ll try them.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever tried them?
Tim Ferriss: I have. I love those.
Kevin Rose: Oh, they’re so good, man. For people who don’t know, real quick, just a quick aside, they just squeeze and then move the blood around in your legs. They’re great for recovery.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like if you want to feel like a Kobe cow —
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: — just throw on some Normatec boots, have a cold beer while you’re doing it.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. And we could do both of those things tonight.
Tim Ferriss: I mean that’s —
Kevin Rose: That’s it from my side.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot —
Kevin Rose: I can do the doom-and-gloom AI shit, but I don’t want to talk about that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. Let’s save the doom-and-gloom for next time. I think you’re getting contagions from one of our other friends. I left out something that’s kind of important.
Kevin Rose: I’ve just got to make sure what you’re talking about. We have a buddy that just like we text with. And we love you if you’re listening. But he’s, like, “The world is ending.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot of — I lean dystopian anyway. It’s like I don’t need any feeding that hypervigilant. Like I need to become John Connor. Like I don’t. Plus, it’s like, can I do anything? What am I going to do? What’s Tim going to do?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly. Meditating.
Tim Ferriss: The fuck, the genie is out of the bottle, folks, so we’ll save the doom-and-gloom for next time. But, in terms of an actionable thing, like something I just did before coming here, let’s say you want to experiment with this lactate as lever for cognitive longevity, right? That’s interesting. Okay, and let’s just say, furthermore, to your point, right, everybody’s getting older. And, believe me, maybe you’re like a 20-year-old dude and feeling immortal. Those like popped-up joints and broken bones will add up, and they will come back to haunt you like the ghost of Christmas past. So, if you’re trying to minimize injury risk, right, there are a couple of different ways you can do it. One that I’ve been a proponent of for a long time is slow down, right? Five seconds up, five seconds down, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down.
Kevin Rose: Time under 10 is just huge, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so it’s like, look, if you’re not a competitive powerlifter, consider moving slowly. What that requires you to do is lower the weight. You’re also not going to be using momentum. The second thing you can —
Kevin Rose: Testosterone?
Tim Ferriss: Not for lactate, but, yeah, I mean, sure, when in doubt, yeah, testosterone.
Kevin Rose: When in doubt.
Tim Ferriss: When in doubt.
Kevin Rose: 200 milligrams once a week.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a joke, people.
Kevin Rose: Well, first of all, if you have it — well, anyway, don’t do that.
Tim Ferriss: So the second thing you can do, which I’ve been experimenting with, which Tommy would use this all the time, especially when traveling, is blood flow restriction cuffs.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And so —
Kevin Rose: I used to have some of those before my fire happened.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so —
Kevin Rose: I would blood flow. I got the automatic ones that would automatically keep the pressure, too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to use, like, a hand pump. I’m using the KAATSU —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, mine are digital KAATSU. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — K-A-A-T-S-U, C4. I’m using the C4 because I’m, like, I don’t want another app on my phone.
Kevin Rose: Did you get the app? Oh, I got the app.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t want —
Kevin Rose: That’s nice.
Tim Ferriss: No. Like, look, if people want apps, they can. I’m kind of along the Bill Burr lines of, like, “I need to install a fucking app to use my toaster now? Like, please, shoot me.”
Kevin Rose: What about having a hummingbird feeder?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, we’ll talk about that.
Kevin Rose: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Let me finish the blood flow restriction. We’re all over the place. All right. So the blood flow restriction, all it is is a cuff. It inflates and it causes a partial occlusion. Right? It’s cutting off circulation to your arms or your legs. And there’s a lot of really good science on this. You can check it out. But what you can do when traveling — and I’m trying this right now. Tommy Wood, by the way, is a phenomenal athlete, endurance and strongman in addition to being an incredible researcher. I don’t know where they breed these people like Dominic D’Agostino, same thing, like 500-pound deadlift for 10 reps after a seven-day fast. Like who are these people? Anyway, Tommy is a beast. When he’s traveling, and he doesn’t lose muscle when he’s doing this, he’ll use blood flow restriction. And he’ll bring bands.
Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.
Tim Ferriss: He’ll just bring a bunch of bands. And I got to tell you.
Kevin Rose: It doesn’t take much. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I like to think of myself as reasonably strong. I’m not a world-class powerlifter, but I think, like generally, pretty strong guy. I put on those cuffs today. And I was, like, “I think I’ll just bump it from light up to medium.”
Kevin Rose: Like 20 pounds?
Tim Ferriss: Ah, well, it has a different metric. It has a different —
Kevin Rose: The band strength?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in terms of like there’s —
Kevin Rose: Extra large or extra strong or whatever?
Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember. Yeah, I mean, if you use the KAATSU bands. There are many other brands. Tommy uses a different brand. You can find it in the podcast. We can put it in the show notes. But, suffice it to say, it’s like you’re using very, very light weights. And it’s like I can probably do hammer curls with like 40-pound dumbbells, let’s just say.
Kevin Rose: With those on?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: That’s what I was going to say. That’s way too much weight.
Tim Ferriss: I’m saying, normally, with reasonable cadence, not swinging around, I can probably do hammer curls with 40 pounds without too much trouble with the blood flow restriction bands on.
Kevin Rose: Like, literally, 20 pounds is all you need.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, 10 pounds.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I was doing like 30 reps and then take a 15-second rest, then 20 reps, 15-second rest, like 10 to 50 reps.
Kevin Rose: So you have the C4s, these bad boys?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got the C4s, yeah. And, look, KAATSU is expensive. These are, what, yeah, $1,259. Like that is expensive. There are other options that are not that expensive. But then the one that really was humbling is I was, like, “Okay, I’ll just do pushups for like triceps,” just because I only brought the armbands. I didn’t bring the leg bands and everything this time around. I can just do like walking and lunges. Trust me, you can smoke yourself doing those. But I was doing pushups, and I was, like, “Well, let me start moderate. I’ll just start on like a bench that’s about 18 inches off the ground. I’ll do some pushups.” And I did like 25, and I’m, like, “Wow, that’s a lot harder than I would expect,” right, because like, on the ground, I could probably do, I don’t know, 40, good form, 50 pushups. And I did 25. I was, like, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable.”
And then I went to do the next set, got like five, and I was, like, “Oh, I can’t do it.” And so then I increased my — basically elevated myself to make it easier. Right? And I’m doing it on, like, the seat of a hamstring curl machine. Did like 12. Couldn’t do any more. And then I got to the point where I was literally doing pushups. It’s so humbling on like the railing of the stairs. I was basically standing up straight, and I did 30 reps, and I was, like, “This really…”
Kevin Rose: Okay, real quick —
Tim Ferriss: “…keeps your ego in check.”
Kevin Rose: 20-second version, why is it working? Why is restricting blood flow working? Why is it building more muscle?
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s doing a few different things. It’s also increasing capillary density and vasculature. It’s having a whole host of effects. I, to be honest, don’t —
Kevin Rose: But doesn’t it increase HGH as well, localized?
Tim Ferriss: It might. It makes you sweat your balls off, too.
Kevin Rose: And then had another question.
Tim Ferriss: Not to get too technical, but
Kevin Rose: Could it work? Could that work?
Tim Ferriss: Kevin’s asking me if you could use blood flow restriction on your —
Kevin Rose: I didn’t want to bring it up unless it was with —
Tim Ferriss: — on your Schwantz.
Kevin Rose: So, listen, I think —
Tim Ferriss: I think it sounds like a terrible idea.
Kevin Rose: No. Listen, they have rings that you can put around your schwonks and — but, listen, hear me out.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I know those exist.
Kevin Rose: I just literally Googled that there is smooth muscle tissue in there. If you’re telling me that you’re putting bands on your arms doing lifts, if you —
Tim Ferriss: How are you going to do lifts with your Schwanz?
Kevin Rose: You have to have a schlonks erection.
Tim Ferriss: And then you do some shaolin monk — like —
Kevin Rose: Well, if you have the band —
Tim Ferriss: — like curl-ups?
Kevin Rose: I’m just saying this is a theory.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I guess you could like do manual resistance. You could push it down and then bring it back up.
Keving Rose: Push it down, five seconds up. Do you know what’s crazy? Obviously, everyone knows this is a joke, but it might not be, you know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Do not —
Kevin Rose: Like this could be real.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, do not wrap duct tape or anything —
Kevin Rose: Well, they have rings that they sell at stores.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think you can try that and then report back in the next show.
Kevin Rose: Have you ever used one of the rings?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think so.
Kevin Rose: You have to.
Tim Ferriss: No. I mean, I would. Why not? Yeah, I mean, why not? As long as you’re not going to completely — I mean, it’s not going to just fall off.
Kevin Rose: Apparently, it locks the blood in.
Tim Ferriss: Well, obviously, yeah. What else would it be for?
Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously, for people that don’t know, pre-Viagra era.
Tim Ferriss: We’re talking about cock rings. We’re speaking in fucking riddles here. It’s like that’s what they’re called.
Kevin Rose: We’re speaking in Zen koans here. What is the sound of one —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. This really fucking went in the gutter, yeah, quickly.
Kevin Rose: Well, we’re almost at the end of the episode, so —
Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds.
Kevin Rose: Hummingbirds. Okay. So, before we started the show, Tim was, like, “You’ve got to mention the hummingbirds,” and I’m like —
Tim Ferriss: Well, I looked at your draft, and I was, like, “You’ve got to talk about your hummingbird thing.” You’ve sent me a bunch of these videos.
Kevin Rose: Dude, they’re so cool. Okay. So, essentially, for Christmas, I got my kids a hummingbird feeder with a digital camera built in. And the cool thing about it is it charges from the sunlight and then also — so the camera just always stays on. And then also it detects what — in this case, it’s the hummingbird, but they have for normal birds as well. But it’ll tell you the variety of hummingbird that landed and then uses AI. And then you could name them. And so we have one named —
Tim Ferriss: Tony is back.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly, and we have one named Sunset. Our girl’s named it Sunset because it has this beautiful red neck, and we’re like — I’ll get a text notification. “Sunset is drinking…”
Tim Ferriss: Is this the one?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s the one, Birdbuddy. It’s the Birdbuddy Smart Solar Pro Hummingbird Feeder. And it’s fun, people, because these things are so beautiful and —
Tim Ferriss: The videos are amazing.
Kevin Rose: The videos are amazing. And then they play with each other. And you watch them hovering. And you get full audio. You see the little — their tiny tongues like sticking out. It’s just amazing. It’s really cool.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the videos were quite cool.
Kevin Rose: And then I got the one that is for just standard birds which has bird feed that comes down, and the motherfucking squirrels are taking it over.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, they’re just mercenaries.
Kevin Rose: They are ruthless. Dude, they jump. Like there’s nothing you could do to keep them out of it. They will spring onto it. And then you see they’re like — sadly, they look out because they don’t want to get attacked, and so all I have is squirrel ass on my freaking camera. I’m, like, “Goddammit, how do I get rid of the squirrels?”
Tim Ferriss: Have you heard of Mark Rober? Does his name mean anything to you?
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: He created like the ultimate squirrel ninja warrior course in his backyard.
Kevin Rose: No.
Tim Ferriss: He put it on YouTube. Let me — yeah, there we go. All right. Mark Rober, squirrels, I think he had the same problem. Here we go. Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 Ninja Warriors.
Kevin Rose: It’s supposed to keep them out?
Tim Ferriss: People have to check this out. Oh, hold up, no ads, no free ads.
Kevin Rose: I got to pay for my pro.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re not paying the $5 a month.
Kevin Rose: I’m not logged in. I’m not logged in to the pro.
Tim Ferriss: You’re buying $7,000 Japanese vintage jackets but you won’t pay $5 to get rid of these goddam ads.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, just click “skip.”
Tim Ferriss: All right. So, here, hold on a sec.
Kevin Rose: Whoa.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, look at this setup.
Kevin Rose: This is like MrBeast for squirrels.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, look, these guys just get —
Kevin Rose: My God, it’s totally MrBeast for squirrels. Like he’s having them go through all these obstacle courses.
Tim Ferriss: They stick their heads through and then they get a photo taken. All right, we’ll link to that.
Kevin Rose: People, you have to watch this video.
Tim Ferriss: Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 by Mark Rober.
Kevin Rose: Dude, this is —
Tim Ferriss: R-O-B-E-R.
Kevin Rose: — 144 million views.
Tim Ferriss: See, this is the kind of shit where I’m, like, “I should have come up with this idea.” Like this is too good. All right. Solid.
Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds and cock rings.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. We covered it all this time, people.
Tim Ferriss: Brought to you courtesy the Random Show.
Kevin Rose: Brother, good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good to see you, too, man.
Kevin Rose: Glad you’re —
Tim Ferriss: Good to see you, too.
Kevin Rose: Glad you’re feeling better. And, yeah —
Tim Ferriss: To be continued.
Kevin Rose: To be continued.
Tim Ferriss: All right, folks, we’ll put everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Random Show. It’s going to be one of those. Search for cock rings. It’ll be the only result on tim.blog. And, until next time, take care of —
Kevin Rose: For now.
Tim Ferriss: — yourselves. Be nice. Be a little kinder than is necessary to yourselves and to others.
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