← Solutions with Henry Blodget
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- [00:01]
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- [00:38]
Henry Blodgett
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- [01:06]
Kevin Rose
Back when we started Digg, we had hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of people kind of doing this for free. And now that I look back on it and you have a double digit billions of dollars market cap company and $0 go to the users. But every other major platform, whether it be Onlyfans or Patreon or you name it, that has launched in the last decade is now rewarding those creators. It's wild to me that we aren't giving back to them for the value that they're creating.
- [01:40]
Henry Blodgett
I am old enough to remember a time before social networks. I'm even old enough to remember a time before the Internet. But we won't go there. And I remember when Facebook, Reddit, Digg and other social networks were just crazy ideas that were never going to succeed. But then some of them did succeed. Facebook for example, and Digg, which in those days was much bigger and more successful than Reddit. Then Digg went away for a while. It is now back and the original founder and current founder Kevin Rose is here to tell us about the new Digg and the vision for that is to finally have somebody build a social network that brings out the good in humanity as opposed to what all the other social networks bring out. In addition to being a founder of Digg and many other companies, Kevin is a venture capitalist at True Ventures. He's been in Silicon Valley for a long time, very familiar with the political situation. Other big questions AI. What's going on at the cutting edge of AI? AI's impact on jobs. And like others in the Silicon Valley community, he is a life optimizer and he thinks a lot about what he should do to live his best life and longest possible health span and be as smart and productive as long as he can. Something that I have tried to do and follow. And so we were going to talk about that as well. Kevin, so great to have you. Let me start off, and we want to hear about the new dig and everything else you're doing and writing about. But let me just start off by saying, when I started the company that became Business Insider, we were a few guys spending all day in a loading dock writing blog posts as fast as we could. And one of the things that was just the best thing that could happen in the world was you would suddenly get on Dig and it suddenly seemed like the entire Internet would show up and start reading what you had written and so we'd start high fiving and everything else. So the old dig was very big in my world for a while and it's great to see you come back to it. So tell us, what are you doing? Why did you come back to it?
- [03:44]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. I do remember those days fondly when we would see your articles on the front page. And it was a great platform for people that didn't know about up and coming sites to kind of, you know, put a lot of attention and eyeballs on that great content that was being produced. So it was fun to give exposure to the up and comers. And now you're a household name. So a lot has changed, but yeah. So why come back? I think Alexis and I just saw the state of social media and the state of these platforms that are getting overrun with bots and agents, and we just thought there has to be a better way. And Alexis and I had been competitors for a long time. He's of course, is the co founder of Reddit and you know, he had his own issues with the platform that he had created and kind of where it is today. And then, you know, we started comparing notes on what if we could rebuild some of the stuff from the ground up. And is there anything here that's worthwhile in, in kind of tackling? And honestly, it's early days. It's early days for us to put together this, this new platform. I would say by the end of this year, we'll actually have it all fully st up. And more importantly, it'll be just differentiated in a way that you'll be able to look to it and say, okay, this isn't just a clone of Reddit. These aren't guys aren't just creating another, you know, glorified forum or whatever. It may be, but there is something new and exciting here that is going to look very different than what we have today. And so for us, that's the exciting part. It's, it's not. Neither of us need to go build another platform at this point in our careers. And so for us, we hired a great CEO, Justin Bazell, to go run this very creative designer and CEO. And you know, we get to kind of lean in and talk about some of the features that we always hoped would exist by this point in time, but just don't today.
- [05:26]
Henry Blodgett
And so let's talk about some of the features in a second. Just more broadly, Reddit is doing very well. Where do sites like Reddit and like the new dig and then we can talk about how it's different. Where do they fit in the total landscape of content these days?
- [05:43]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, well, I think that there's, it is a challenging question. I think it's the right question too, because there is something new that has happened the last couple of years which previously it was. I have a question I want to ask of the Internet. I search it and Google points me in the right direction. I always end up on some third party website for said answer. Right. It could be Wikipedia, could be great blog content, could be a traditional publication, it could be all over the place. Or more recently it was Reddit where you would type in, you know, what is the best, whatever vegan protein that I want to find space Reddit into Google. And that's why you'd oftentimes see that autocomplete on Google with the Reddit it being appended to the end. And that was largely because the most important trusted piece of content out there is authentic human connection and conversation, long form that is hopefully, you know, not being propped up by any type of bias or, or commercial relationship, but is really just someone's take on what they believe to be valuable in the world. And that could be for product recommendations, it could be for a whole slew of different things. And the Reddit was great in that they captured the entire long tail of that. So if you had everything from, you know, some type of chronic condition to, you name it, the next type of electric vehicle you want to purchase, it was they had an answer for you. And so, you know, the, the issue that what we're seeing today is essentially the, the crawling of that ingesting of it in a way that produces the answers directly in line with these LLMs so that you know, you're getting the responses directly there and you're not being pushed off to third rights, we believe, and we've seen this more recently in that a lot of these social networks are being infiltrated by bad actors. And those are typically, they used to call them bots back in the day, but they've gotten a lot more sophisticated where now they're, they're agentic agents that just kind of hang out and are infinitely patient and will slowly do something different than they had in the past. In the past they had posted something that said, hey, this is the supplement you need to try out or whatever it may be. And it was written decently and you know, they would try and convince you to go do and take action on, on that statement. Now it's different because what we're seeing is, we're seeing agents that are actually befriending people in their DMs becoming more persuasive in the sense that they're trying to encourage other people to kind of raise their pitchforks and join forces with them to promote different types of agendas that are out there. And so it's a very different type of bot. It's a smart, I wouldn't call it a bot anymore. It's not like it's a programmed, you know, before it was just had a very one mission, programmed to go out there and do said mission. And now it's a living breathing entity. Not breathing, but you know what I mean. It's a living entity that kind of works with individuals to change their point of view, which is much more powerful in the way that it can do damage. So the first and foremost thing that we want to do, even before we get into some of the crazier features we want to build, is just ensure that there's actually a heartbeat at the other end of the keyboard and protect what we see as kind of a sacred space that will eventually be overrun by agents. And that's the danger here, is that trust just completely erodes across the entire ecosystem of the web.
- [09:07]
Henry Blodgett
And how do you do that? How do you figure out that there's a heartbeat there?
- [09:12]
Kevin Rose
It's very tricky. Trust is not a binary thing. It's kind of a gradient and it changes over time. So just because we can detect that there's a heartbeat on the other side of it, doesn't mean that that person is going to be well intention and isn't going to have any number of things happen where they're either persuaded themselves or they could have credential stuffing attacks, or their accounts are taken over or you know, people are being paid X number of pennies or dollars to go and create these fake accounts. Like they're gonna, you can verify a heartbeat but not still have bad actors on the other end. So there's a slew of different things. I think that trust has to be both. Okay, we know there's a human, but also just what they're saying they're attesting to, is it true? And so, you know, examples, I'm wearing an aura ring on my finger right now. I've had an aura ring for, I don't know, maybe seven or so years now, since the early days. In a future version of the web, I should be able to create a, what they were called, these complex little pieces of math called ZK proofs, where I can attest, improve with a piece of math that I've actually held and own this Oura ring and been a subscriber for X number of years. And when I go out, when I decide to show that and go out there and maybe make this statement, I can back it up with data in a way that isn't tied to my credentials. So it's not, you know, potentially compromising who I am, but in a way that is trusted within the network. So, you know, we think of these communities as being places that when you pop into these different communities, you should have these gradients of trust based on how you show up at the community level, your contributions to that community over time. And then also if you're making, you know, or attesting towards owning something almost like an Amazon Verified purchase, in some sense, you should be able to say with safet, like, this is my experience with said product. And that will lead to just, you know, better reviews, better outcomes, more, more trust in the entire ecosystem. But it's a tough thing to build because this sounds insanely complex and it is. And you have to make it simple to the average consumer so they can quickly grock it when they walk into a new system like this. And it's not some, you know, fancy, you know, math type term that they just don't understand what they're even there for.
- [11:32]
Henry Blodgett
And is this something that Reddit is not doing?
- [11:36]
Kevin Rose
We haven't seen it to date. I mean, what Reddit has rolled out so far is they've done some of the. Well, they've made a statement that they do want to verify that there actually are humans on the platform. That's a very tricky thing when you have tens of millions of accounts that have been created and you have to imagine a lot of them are just kind of sleeper accounts waiting to be deployed. They have talked about using Sam Altman's orb for retinal verification. We think that's pretty heavy handed. There are a lot of other ways that you could prove that you're an actual human without actually having to scan someone's eyeball. Not that those folks couldn't come in and verify because they've already done it and they prefer that as a way of authentication. They could do that, but they haven't done it at the product level. Meaning that if you go into, you know, slash oura ring on Reddit, you can't see who actually is a verified purchaser there, who's been a member and actually an owner of that product for, for a while.
- [12:32]
Henry Blodgett
And I don't want to go too far down this road, but you're an observer of what's going on and the just incredibly rapid advance of the capabilities of the LLMs and their intelligence and so forth. And I was just reading an exchange between a couple of people, one a writer and one a technologist and the writer was saying no art could ever be created by a machine that is not breathing, that can communicate to a breathing entity with a heartbeat like a human and so forth. Response on the other side was, look, if we found a great short story that was written by GPT or anybody else, wouldn't it be fair to actually observe it and use it and so forth? So the question to you is, especially given the state of a lot of human social media users, which you alluded to a second ago, is if you had a really smart machine that was very fast and fair and wasn't trying to sell something and didn't really had an agenda, would that be helpful at all to have them on the platform?
- [13:31]
Kevin Rose
I think if it's called out as such. I think you just have to know we are not against agents being in the workflow and in the mix On a social platform. There is a lot of things that they're quite good at. You could say that I want an agent to review all of the incoming news story submissions and look for spam. You could say that someone has had, you know, X number of reports against their account. Can you go in and validate those reports and see if what they're saying is true and highlight and kind of condense that time to present it to a system moderator so they're not spending their entire life, you know, working in the trenches and dealing with all the garbage of the Internet. You know, that's one of the things that we see as a shame is a lot of you know, community moderators are just essentially unpaid employees that are doing a lot, so much of the heavy lifting to have these communities function. We've talked to some of these larger communities that have, you know, tens of millions of users, and they have. Have over a dozen moderators kind of working around the clock to keep everything on the rails. And we would like to automate as much of that as we possibly can in a very transparent way. So if someone says, hey, I was unfairly banned here, rather than there being some kind of shadow banning going on behind the scenes, you can actually see an audit trail of what happened and when. When humans were involved, when machines were involved. And some of that is, is. Is fairly. It's quite good. Already today, Google has an API that you can hit right now in Google Cloud that I can give it any string of text and it can come with, I think it's around 20 different, basically 20 different types of tags that are applied to that text saying, is this political? Is this hate speech, Is this threatening? You know, all these different scores that come back. And you can instantly, as you can imagine, you can dial up those parameters up or down as a moderator and say, this is what I want it to flag. And so the way that we think about it is in the future, you know, at the end of this year, beginning of next year, when you can create custom communities on demand and Diggs, we very much want it to be in the moderator's power to where they can dial those knobs up or down. So, you know, if you're running a slash Zen meditation community, you might want to have, you know, a certain type of speech dialed way down versus something that's, say, a political chatter where you're okay with it getting a little bit of spicy as long as it doesn't go off the rails. And so every community will have those tools at their disposal so that, you know, they're more kind of a director and champion of the community and director of vibes than they are, you know, unpaid janitor, basically.
- [16:01]
Henry Blodgett
But all AI tools on the back end to help human moderators, moderate humans. You don't want AI personalities contributing on the front end.
- [16:11]
Kevin Rose
Not ne. Well, that I would say we're open to that as long as it's called out as such. So the way that we think about it is, you can imagine, you know, these are going to be very thoughtful partners to have as part of the mix and as part of the conversation to expand upon and flesh out. Conversation. Think of it more like if you're in a story and there's some fact checking that you want done in real time about the article. You could summon the agent and say, hey, I was curious about, you know, this point about Intel's Q4 earnings. Is this true? It would then go out, crawl on your behalf and come back to you with bullet point statements as linked to those references so you can validate them and push those directly into the article. So now as a human, rather than pushing AI on you, you're summoning, summon, summoning that AI to go out, do work on your behalf. We flag it as such. We show the query that the human actually put out there and we show the response back and we'll push that off to the side and if people like it, they can vote it up and decide that's a relevant piece of that particular document. But we see, when I say document, we see these kind of stories as living, breathing entities that should have information that comes in in real time based on a variety of different sources. And if there's a way to make that easier for humans to pull into the conversation and actually further the conversation, that's just a win for the entire community as long as they actually know it is the AI that is doing that and it's not disguised as some fake user with an actual human Persona or an account where it wouldn't be truthful.
- [17:46]
Henry Blodgett
One of the things I've heard either you or Alexis say, and I apologize, I can't remember exactly which one of you is that it's social's not a winner take all game. You don't have to kill Reddit, you don't have to kill Facebook. You can just introduce a really cool platform to the world and it grows and build a soda and so forth. But stepping back again to what I asked just a few minutes ago in the full range of, hey, I have a question, I have a whole bunch of different places I can start. And one of the things I know you've said on your substack is that you have really moved from Google to Perplexity as your start in a lot of issues or instances. So what kinds of questions is it that you would start at day? And what kinds of, you know, what, what niche is this filling? Is it a different kind of searcher who wants it to be more game or feel like more of a game? Is it, you know, I want a lot of different perspectives on it. What, what is it? Where is it fitting versus an LLM or a search engine or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal?
- [18:46]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, that's a great Question. Well, one of the things that Alexis and I talk about in Justin is we think that human connection is ultimately going to be very important over the long term. And if we interfacing with bots and we don't have authentic deep human connection, that is going to be a pretty damaging thing for society. And when we think about some of the beautiful things that do happen on, on Reddit is, is you have these niche communities that come together and in, in certain circumstances they're very powerful and a very connecting experience. So, you know, if you go to Japanese woodworking on Reddit, that's a, is beautiful things, right? You get to partake and learn and advance your knowledge and connect with other individuals that share a similar passion. And so one of the things that we think deeply about is, you know, how can we make sure to protect that over the long term, enhance it with AI in a way that is, is more, gives them more control over their destiny, gives more ownership back to the actual community, the people that are creating these communities. One of the things that we see is a huge problem today is when some of these communities get too large, these corporations go out and trademark those community names. And so, you know, I had a great chat with the, one of the co founders of WallStreetBets and that person tried to create a, sell a book called Wall Street Bets and Reddit sued him because they own the trademark for that name. And that's a huge miss in our opinion in that, you know, we almost see ourselves a lot more like a substack or patreon where we want to give the power and ownership back to the individuals. And if we don't provide the best platform, let them take their audience elsewhere and also let them figure out ways to monetize the great value that they've created on platform as well. So we think that's going to be a huge differentiator for us. And then also just the ability to define the platform much further than what you see today. Right now we think of platforms as kind of like almost old forum software where we can style it with CSS and we can add badges and whatnot, but we really can't define it to be a living, breathing thing for what we want to see. So one of the nice things that we have seen recently is, you know, know companies like Replit and Bolt and others, they've created these coding LLMs where you can type in pretty much anything you want and have these small micro apps deployed, you know, in a matter of minutes. And we think if we put the guardrails on a social backbone there and say, hey, you have a community. If it's about, you know, stocks, then with by typing to your LLM, I want a stock ticker at the top of my screen and to show these 10 stocks deploy that should automatically go up on your site within a matter of minutes and be ready to go. And so you can think of it as like, we want to wake up one morning a couple years from now and be completely blown away by what some community has done and built that was way outside of what we ever could have thought was, was, was possible. And it's largely because they were having a conversation with our builder agent to actually build a very custom experience that is, is tailored to that audience. So we think that's a very powerful thing. But the on the back, on the human connection part, we also see offline experiences as equally as important. One of the things we've been doing a lot in person meetups around the country, here domestically first, and then eventually internationally. But, you know, we think of trust and that gradient of trust I spoke about earlier is happening in person as well. So eventually on the Digg app, you know, when you go to meetups, you'll be able to geofence your way into a location, show that you were actually in person and at a meetup. And as you make friendships and follow people by bumping phones with them at those meetups, you'll actually see that those connections were made in person. So when you talk about validating a heartbeat, what better way to show that actually someone exists than actually going to a meetup and showing that they made connections at those meetups? And that's unlike anything we have today. So if you clicked on someone's user profile and you can see like, oh, they've been to three dig meetups and made 27 friends. And I see that there's actual human, you know, connection that's happened in real life. That's just another signal in the, in the kind of positive camp of this is a real heartbeat behind this, behind the screen here and the way you.
- [22:53]
Henry Blodgett
Describe it there and some of the other things that you've said about it, it really sounds like a big focus is, is creating better tools for the moderators. And the way, the way you just described it almost sounds like a, like, like a substack or I'm, I'm creating a website and I'm going to build a community around it. Is that the way to think about it?
- [23:10]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I think that it's, that is the way to think about it, it is, it is a kind of a more of a living, breathing social substack that is a little bit more customizable. I, I, my main website, kevinnotes.com is on substack right now. So I'm deeply familiar with the tools that they use and they're great and they, they have a newsletter and I love everything that they've done but they have yet to integrate like a really, truly, deeply customizable environment. You know, and like one of the pain points that I have on my existing substack is I can't use any of my users that have subscribed to my newsletter for authentication. I can't let them log in anywhere else on any other platform because they are locked into that ecosystem and substack doesn't expose those APIs. And so for us, we are trying to, to really embrace is, you know, and be as open as we possibly can because I, I just believe that only good things will, will follow if we can give users and who ultimately are our most important customers. So because they're creating all the value here, we have to give them as many tools so that they say, gosh, I would never dream of leaving Digg because it's the best platform out there and if they do, they have a quick off board and a, in a way to, to get out and off to the platform that they prefer because I don't know, it's like I just can't imagine a world where you create so much value and you're just trying desperately to lock them in because you don't have the best service.
- [24:37]
Henry Blodgett
And you mentioned folks working around the clock in some of these big subreddits. So why do people do that? Why do they spend so much of their time on a computer?
- [24:47]
Kevin Rose
Well, I mean, back when we started Digg, we were the kind of pioneers in the space and we had hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of people kind of doing this for free. And there was a lot of prestige in getting your name on the front page and being like, hey, I'm one of the top diggers and top submitters for this. And that was great, but there was really, we didn't understand how much value was going to accrue to all this. And now that I look back on it and you have a double digit billions of dollars market cap company and $0 go to the users. But every other major platform, you know, whether it be OnlyFans or Patreon or you name it, that has launched in the last, you know, decade is now rewarding those creators. It just, it's wild to me that we, we aren't giving back to them for the value that they're creating. So I, I guess that's, that's the main push here.
- [25:43]
Henry Blodgett
So will that be part of it?
- [25:44]
Kevin Rose
100%.
- [25:45]
Henry Blodgett
So if I, if I'm a moderator, I'll be part of paid.
- [25:49]
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I think what it's going to come down to is it's not necessarily about just. Well, there's a bunch of different ways that we, in avenues that we have to go down to explore on the monetization side. But I can tell you that ads, to me, feel very stale and old, and I would much rather figure out almost I like what Patreon's done. I like what Substack has done. I like what Netflix has done. Netflix, I think, is brilliant and that, that it's not death by a thousand subscriptions. We're not paying like 9.99 for each of the individual channels. You pay one flat fee. And then essentially, even though they don't call this out this way, but the way it works is where attention goes, money flows. Like, the more popular the show, the more dollars flow to that show. And so when we think about, you know, what eventually a Dig Pro account would look like or something that you would pay for on Diggs. Dig. It's not about making Dig wealthy. Yes, we want to break even and be a great business, but on the backside of that, what we'd like to do is, you know, really watch where attention is flowing. And so if attention is flowing to Japanese woodworking and they have 30,000 people that are over there, then a lot of that money should flow there. And so, you know, if I'm spending 80, 80% of my, you know, time on Japanese woodworking and 20% on, you know, vibe coding, it should be divided up like that. That stipend that I kind of have every month to give to a community should dynamically go and spread in those different directions. And so that's the beautiful thing about smaller micro payments and the ability to, you know, with. Without getting down the bad sides of crypto, which are a lot of the speculation side, the good side, and the stablecoin side. And what's beautiful is even, even Bitcoin's divisible by what I think eight decimal places. Like, you can cut this stuff up into fractions of a penny. And so you can really do these really efficient micro payments to communities based on attention. And for us, that's just. It's worth experimenting In I think Alexis and I, we don't claim to have the answers here. And when we work with Justin on this stuff, we're all just like, huh, wouldn't it be cool if we tried this? And let's see what happens. And so that's what the next couple of years is going to be. It's less about us just trying to bring the sword to Reddit and take them down and more about us trying to really improve the Internet. And if we can do that, what will happen ultimately is Reddit will change their ways and they'll be forced to do some of these things that really, hopefully help their community and makes the whole web a better place.
- [28:22]
Henry Blodgett
Yeah, and it seems like ultimately Substack will try to do the same thing that you just described with Netflix, which is, hey, it's one price, you get everything. And then we'll apportion the value internally as we see fit. And I would say, having run an organization that is powered by advertising and certain articles are much more popular than other articles and so forth, it is hard for that Japanese woodworking community to compete with the political outrage of the day.
- [28:49]
Kevin Rose
Right.
- [28:49]
Henry Blodgett
And so, to me, that's the big challenge. And if you guys can figure that out, that's terrific. You're going to have a huge customer base of people saying, well, I think.
- [28:57]
Kevin Rose
Also the one thing that was really fascinating, and I'd love to get your take on this as well, is when we've interviewed, as you can imagine, with Alexis's Rolodex, we've talked to a lot of Reddit moderators, and it was funny. This one conversation stuck in my head. This person was running like a subreddit that I won't mention, but they want to make the move over to dig when the time is right. And it's got a couple million users on it. And we asked him, you know, we were kind of picking around the compensation side, like, you know, how do you. How would you like us to work? Should it be like, this should be like. And we floated, like, a few different ideas, and one of the things that the person said back to me was like, it would just be nice if I got bought a cup of coffee every now and then. So the expectations were really low because, well, what's beautiful about it is if you're running Japanese woodworking, you're not necessarily thinking like, this is my career. Like, this is. I'm going to make a fortune off of this community. It's more like, yeah, if it covered some meetups and some expenses and Covered the bar tab or a dinner out with some other fellow. Awesome. You know, and I think there's a lot of communities that are out there like that. And yes, if you get to insane scale and you've got ten plus million users, maybe there are a few full time people that are able to, you know, pay their salaries and they create even better communities and, and more extravagant meetups and all these wonderful things that'll happen by money flowing in their direction. But I think a large bulk of them, their expectations are so low these days because they're not getting paid anything. They'll take that cup of coffee, which is a, you know, which is, is a sweet thing that these people are putting out that much effort for, for no return.
- [30:24]
Henry Blodgett
And you mentioned politics or will there be politics on the platform?
- [30:29]
Kevin Rose
Oh, that's a tough one. You know, we have it out there today on the beta and it is the hardest. Just it is such a hot button as you know, right now. It's really tough because, you know, Alexis and I were one of the things that we bonded over when we realized we weren't enemies. And same with Justin the CEO is we all kind of sat around and said, gosh, we just missed the times of like just a more peaceful Internet, you know, and there's so many places to go and talk politics and get that outrage and get all those different things. One of the things that we figured out out is that when you have an administration out there today that is commenting on pretty much everything, meaning like you know, Crackle Barrel logo or whatever it may be like, it, it's everything is being commented on that. When we looked at the data in the submissions to currently to dig, we thought like, wow, everyone's gonna be submitting political content to Slash Politics. And if we just give people, we thought initially like, okay, let's make politics like almost like an NSFW topic where you have to opt in to go into it and we're like, okay, that'll work. But then we looked at the data and politics were in every category because it was applicable to everything that's going on in the world today. And so, you know, getting back to that Google model that can detect all different types of speech, one of the things it can do is detect political speech as well. And we figured out that we can eventually, in the next couple of months give users a way to say, hey, I don't want to say anything political on Digg. And they could just say that as a global thing and then just all those stories will disappear at the end comments will disappear at the global level if they they choose to do that. If it was up to me and we have a CEO, we have a board and all that I probably wouldn't do. I would just say, hey, Dig isn't the place for politics. But I also like the challenge because there is a challenge here where you say one of the when we talk about these bots that can be deployed, you know we talked about earlier and what they can do, one of the things that I would love to see is in politics, if there's a story that comes out out, you automatically drop in left, right and center points of view as spoken by three different LLMs and they kind of drop in their take. So it gives you a broader exposure of really what's going on. Because I think one of the things that we suffer from that it's tough for me is that we there's a lack of communication. It's all about who can dunk on who these days. And there's just a breakdown in communication there and that that leads to nowhere. But it's, it's a path to nowhere. It's a path of just hate and rage and and know it's not my DNA to want to see that type of world.
- [33:10]
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- [33:48]
Henry Blodgett
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- [34:59]
Henry Blodgett
All right, well, to finish up on Digg, so I, I noticed that you. It's a by invitation only in beta. Why have it closed at this point or limited?
- [35:09]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty big herculean effort to stand up a new social site at scale. Especially with the, the kind of, of framework that we want to build on the back end for the real time moderation. We just want to make sure it's battle tested and we've, you know, been able to detect it, to detect as many types of bots and edge cases and attack vectors before we really open up the floodgates and say, okay, there's the sign up button, you know, great.
- [35:35]
Henry Blodgett
Well, the mission sounds terrific. Speaking on behalf of all moderators, if you can bring some more value to them, that sounds great. And if we can have it be a more respectful public square, that would be terrific. So I wish you the best of luck and given that we have, you would love to just talk about some broader things. You've been in the Silicon Valley community for decades now. We are in the middle of what many, many people are describing as an AI bubble. It's just like dot coms, except it's all over again. It's going to crash, going to be terrible. There seems to be a remarkably consistent sort of consensus about where we are, which is we're in the building phase. Going back to the dot coms, it's like 97 or 98 a few years before the peak. The spending, absolutely unsustainable, the revenue isn't behind it. At some point there's going to be a big crash and lots of people are going to lose their shirts and so forth. You're a venture capitalist at True Ventures, seeing a lot of companies. How does it feel to you? What's your view on that?
- [36:34]
Kevin Rose
There's certainly a lot of consensus capital out there, meaning that there's three to five deputized winners at this point. In which cases, if you're in that camp, it's very easy to raise capital right now to the tune of, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Every time another round gets announced at outrageous valuations, you Know, like you said, you and I have been around for a long time. So remembering the Web one days, a lot of companies went under and I think that's going to be the same here. It's just, there's no, there's no. The only difference is that Web1 had a lot of public market exposure so individual investors got really harmed and so far we don't see that. And so the only one that's going to harmed our, you know, high net worth LPs via funds. And you know, that's the game they play. So that's, that's, we expect 90 plus percent of our investments to go to zero. And, and that's totally fine. That's, that's how that, that whole, the whole ecosystem is set up to function. And so that's there, there will be though, you know, several trillion dollar winners here in terms of outcomes and I think that's what everyone's looking for. You know, at the end of the day you, I'm sure you remember this. It was, you know, what, 15 years where everyone was saying Amazon's never going to turn a profit. And it was just like over and over that message over and over again like they're never going to be, they're going to go out of business, they're never going. And eventually, you know, they became who they are today. And I have a feeling that we're on the same path here. We're just going to see AI companies for the next decade that, you know, oh, GPUs are too expensive, compute's too expensive, da da da, da. And then just eventually there will be two or three big winners here. And I don't think it'll be a winner take all. I think it'll be a lot more, more along the lines of what happened in the cloud kind of race. But, and then we'll forget about all the ones that, that didn't make it and they'll just be an afterthought and we'll just recognize the household names that are with us going forward and that'll, that'll be it. So I do see a bubble, but I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. Like I don't see where anyone gets harmed here. Any exciting new frontier markets like this require a lot of capital, especially ones that are very hardware intensive here like, like the compute, computing energy that's required for LLMs. And, and that's the nature of building these types of businesses.
- [38:51]
Henry Blodgett
That's right. And particularly in hindsight it is often there's a moral view taken of it, that it was somehow terrible and everybody was so stupid. And having lived through a few of these now, including the housing bubble and others, I don't think there's any way that it happens otherwise. I mean, we're in an R and D lab now.
- [39:09]
Kevin Rose
Exactly.
- [39:09]
Henry Blodgett
R and D lab is happening at different startups and you have to figure out what works. And they need capital and people are making different bets. I do. One of the things is, I thought about the Internet bubble and you just said it, which was while it was going up in the 90s, I was saying exactly the same thing, like, yeah, most of these companies are going to die, but a few of them are going to go on, they're going to create all this value. What surprised me in hindsight at least, out of the 1990s vintage of public companies, it was really only one. It was Amazon. The other guys. Like eBay.
- [39:40]
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- [39:40]
Henry Blodgett
EBay did well for a while, then kind of stumbled and now it's sort of clawed black to where it was at the peak or you know, it did. EBay's done well. Cisco is now back, just not very many, right?
- [39:50]
Kevin Rose
Oh yeah. I mean, we had hundreds. Yeah, it's probably two or maybe three.
- [39:55]
Henry Blodgett
Yeah, you're right. And it is true that if you owned Amazon, it took care of every other thing. It created so much value. But I'm just, I was surprised when I look back at some of the ones that I thought were really confident like these guys will make it through the storm, like Yahoo. And they made it, they survived, but not, not that long. So anyway, so it'd be very interesting to see for me whether OpenAI becomes the Amazon or whether it's AOL.
- [40:20]
Kevin Rose
Yeah. And some of these will be reinvented probably a second time. I mean, I, I remember the days when it was just too logistically complicated to pull off something like a webvan with the current stack that was out there. That was the first kind of big delivery service for people that don't know and you know, and now we've got delivery services on the back of the Uber API and things just work out so totally. It's crazy.
- [40:43]
Henry Blodgett
My favorite is everyone's like, oh, how stupid it was was pets.com and meanwhile, what is Chewy's valuation now? 20 billion or what have you. It's like, hey, order, order pet stuff on the Internet. Not such a dumb idea. They were just a little bit ahead of time.
- [40:58]
Kevin Rose
I was buying massive, you know, 45 pound bags of dog food for free shipping and I was Like I don't know how long this is going to last but I'll take take advantage of it.
- [41:07]
Henry Blodgett
All right, so you mentioned also in, in some of your own writing that you are using a lot of the AI tools and it's changing how you're doing things. Like what, what do you use? What's help you?
- [41:18]
Kevin Rose
I'm just looking at my desktop right now. I mean I have, I think right now on my desktop is cursor. I use you know, whisper flow for real time kind of voice translation using comp playing around with the Comet browser a bit. You know I have a crazy GPU off here to the right where I test local models. A bun there's you know some interesting new smaller condensed models even today announced from Samsung that are, they're quite interesting. I'm always kind of kicking the tires on a little bit of everything. Like our job as VCs is to play, to play, break things, deploy things. And I'm, I'm always have at least a handful of different, you know, kind of either launched or not launched test flight builds and, and but the, but the daily drivers are just the ones that you would, you would most guess that everyone else is using. I, I feel like what, what has happened is you have a, a slew of different startups. You have the, the foundational kind of LLMs which are you know the big three or four providers that are out there and they're scrambling to figure out, you know, outside of just general lookup for everyday questions work, where else can we play? And so you see, see you know folks like Perplexity doing you know email integration where they automatically read your email and apply labels to it and help sort it and filter it for you. You know you see these kind of context cards and deeper conversations that are happening with you know, some of the new additions that you've seen to OpenAI or Notebook. Lm creating podcasts out of content in real time. It's kind of all over the place. And I don't know that we have true product market fit outside of two main pillars which are general deep research, you know, Q and A with LLMs and then I would say coding tools as well. I think those are the two biggest kind of like there's no doubt these are going to be well I would say some of the other deployed like customer service agents and tighter bound focus driven agentic workflows to enterprise customers make a lot of sense as well. There's this like low hanging fruit jobs that are going to be picked off pretty quickly on that end of things and on jobs.
- [43:37]
Henry Blodgett
Where are you on this debate in terms of what impact this is going to have on the economy?
- [43:43]
Kevin Rose
It's going to destroy it completely.
- [43:45]
Henry Blodgett
You think so really?
- [43:46]
Kevin Rose
100%. Yeah, I mean I, well and I say that because I've been using these coding tools for the last year or so and, and when I first started, you know, I'm a CS dropout so I took a couple years of CS and then I just realized I had too much ADHD and I couldn't quite stay focused enough to finish out my degree and I just went into product building which allows me to jump between, you know, that back then Photoshop designs, but now Figma, which is a lot more in line with someone whose brain jumps around. But on the coding side, you know, a year ago I was like, ah, this is pretty crappy but you know, it's auto completing my sentences and it's kind of like helped me get back into coding. This is fun. And then about six months ago I was like, wow, I can build basic websites with this and tie up a database and that's cool. And now we have Supabase and we have, you know, one, we have MCP servers that are helping me deploy this stuff without even actually having to talk to the database or define the tables or think about indices or anything else that would be more complicated. And then, you know, in the last couple of weeks I have come up with some pretty sophisticated workflows and applications that would require what I call probably a third or fourth year CS student to actually pull off. And I know this is not slowing down. And so because coding is a definable problem that can be solved so there is an end in sight. It's not like an open ended question like get creative and create the next movie for me. Which is very subjective, right? Coding is not subjective. The code either runs as, you know, defined in the spec or it does, doesn't. And so we know we can march towards non subjective outcomes with LLMs. And I know within the next couple of years the vast majority of CS jobs are just going to be gone. And if that's the case, you know, for the first time I, you know, over my career over the last decade, people have come to me and said, you know, Kevin, I'm thinking about getting into school, what should I do? Where should I go to? You know, what, what type of degree should I go for? I would not recommend CS right right now. I just wouldn't. Unless it's like your life's work where you're like, hey, I love algorithms and I want to go into more the quantum side of things, like kind of more the edges, the emerging markets. There's still going to be another five, seven, ten years until AI comes for them. But you know, it's just we're going to lose the engineers. What's going to happen is people like myself and others that are meaning like multi kind of discipline, like design/PM coding, people will, they'll almost be an orchestrator of LLMs where they'll kind of, you know, conduct the, the symphony versus having to go and hire the folks. And it's just, it's I, I can't think. There's very little, there's very few jobs out there where I don't see a path for AI to somehow cause a reduction in workforce.
- [46:44]
Henry Blodgett
I'm going to be more optimistic. And it's not just me. I mean, I've talked to folks who have studied technology, job transitions in the past and so forth, and just say that it seems like there is going to be a lot of disruption, but at least historically there are many more jobs created somewhere else, like we don't know what they are, jobs change and so forth. And so, But I'll give you, having said that, on the optimistic side, what about the arguments that the modern CS engineer is just going to be great at using LLMs and that that's the key skill, so you're the orchestrator, write it from an early stage rather than writing it line by line.
- [47:23]
Kevin Rose
Well, that's not really an engineer then. I guess for existing trained engineers it is. But then you won't need to be an engineer. Right? Anyone can be. And I think that will unlock a lot more creativity in that you will have someone that just has an idea and can deploy it, iterate on top of it and get it to scale without having to have that formal training on the engineering side. And so yes, engineers will be able to do that, but so will everyone else. And so which is, which is great because this means that you'll largely be judged on your creativity and not so much your just book knowledge of how something should be coded, which I actually, actually can appreciate because it turns designers into entrepreneurs and engineers, it turns everyone into an engineer. So yeah, I, I'm with you in that There certainly will be whole categories of jobs that are created and, but, but I think where that falls down is that when you think about, you know, the invention of, well, it doesn't always hold true. Right. Like I'll give an example. I, I, I had I was talking to a friend of mine that spends a lot of time in China, kind of boots on the ground and on the manufacturing side creating, you know, devices like mobile phones. And one of the things that he said, which I thought was fascinating, is he goes, hey, there's this big push by the current administration to bring more jobs back to the United States. And he's, he's like, that's never going to happen. He goes, it's not because you couldn't build factories and you couldn't. You can't pull that off the United States. It's because when he visits, you know, Foxconn and goes into. He told me a story how they kind of give you this tour of the facilities when you're looking to, to build a new device there. And they walk you through a bit of the different factories. And Apple has a huge lockdown on. They. They don't let people in to see, you know, what they're creating, obviously, because that's all NDA protected and there's proprietary ingredients to that process. But one of the areas he was allowed into was where they produced the keyboards for Mac. Keyboards like this kind of like the little place where they create them. And he said there were two people there producing about a hundred thousand keyboards a day because everything is automated, everything. And so even if you wanted the quote unquote jobs to come back to the United States, they're not even there because it's all automated. So you could bring that plant over and then you're going to hire two people. So this is where we're going. Where is like the thinking side of it has never been replaced before. We have automated and smoothed down the rough edges on a ton of different things, but this is the first time we're removing the most essential piece that humans have always had a kind of wholesale monopoly on, which is liquid wet compute, which is the brain. And so now we don't need a trained, trained, you know, technician to look at X rays of cancer slides, because an AI can do it in a fraction of a second and detect cancer a lot better than the naked eye can. And it's just the thinking is being replaced. And so I want to believe that there will be job security elsewhere, and I'm sure there will be. But this is the first time we've had our thinking under assault by machines.
- [50:47]
Henry Blodgett
I think it's a big challenge. Challenge. But looking at so many different job transitions over time, I'm still going to be optimistic that jobs will change. It's going to be a big Impact, but generations who can learn new things going back to things like the telephone switching and everything else will be optimistic. But your point about the manufacturing, you are so right on. That's a different story. I don't want to talk about that because it's depressing to me what we're doing to our position in the globalization world. Well, let me.
- [51:15]
Kevin Rose
One thing I will say real quick, just to put a point on what you said, because I think, think it's, it's, it's, it's really important. I, my hope, my dream is that we have a flight back to kind of artisan goods, craftsmanship, human value around the passion that they have around putting it into creation of physical things that people will demand and want to stamp on something and say, wow, there was a lot of care and thoughtfulness that went into this and I value that. And that's what we see in Japan, still has that. When you go around and, and you, you look at these great. I visited a national treasure Japanese woodworker in his, you know, early 80s. And just the fact that they really put a lot of emphasis and value on human creation and what happens there. My hope is that, you know, Etsy becomes one of the largest sites in the world because of that focus.
- [52:11]
Henry Blodgett
And I, by the way, I think that will happen. And I think it sounds like that's what you're thinking with Dig too is it's not, let's not have all the commenters be AI because they're smarter than a lot of people. Let's have them be people. And I don't know, I confessed to a friend of mine who's very plugged in to the Valley that I was writing a novel and he said, dude, that is like learning to Horseshoe in 1901 or whatever. Like, what are you doing? Just go to Claude, tell Claude what you want. The novel will be done in 10 minutes. To which my reactions. Yeah, but I actually like writing it and there's a lot to be learned from that and so forth. And our phones have been able to kick our asses in chess for 40 years and we're still. Chess clubs are bigger than ever. So I'm going to be optimistic, but let's move on. Let me ask you just a couple things you mentioned that you don't talk about politics. Incredibly smart. Let me just ask you though, in Silicon Valley, in my experience, people never talked about politics. Why would you do that? It's fine. Why bring it up? Why antagonize people? People in the last cycle in particular, it seems like there are a lot of people that are crusading in Silicon Valley. Like it's a big thing, very upfront, very pugnacious about it. First of all, why, why do you think that happened?
- [53:28]
Kevin Rose
Well, I think they've been crusading for a long time, just largely. I'm just going to kind of generalize here, but it seems to me that more or less a lot of tech was left leaning for a long time. And I think it just really is, is kind of a show of ultimately, at the end of the day, I don't want to say anything too controversial, but people tend to flock and, and they want power, power, wants more power. And so in some sense, if you believe the regime is changing and it's going a different direction than where you stand and you want to continue to remain in power and grow your power power, you will just quickly adapt and, and go along with whatever that is that it's changing in front of you. I think that's largely what we're seeing here. It doesn't surprise me. I think if it flip back the other way, we'd probably see a reversal on a lot of these things. And all of a sudden, oh, guess what? I, you know, I took it a little bit too far, maybe a little bit more left now. And it's just the nature of, of, you know, I, my wife asked me this oftentimes where she's like, well, why do you, you know, she goes, you're, you're, you seem that you're not, you know, at times I hadn't gotten, and she would be really into them and she'd be like, I didn't. You see what's going on? This is crazy. And my answer is always, I just see this as a race to clawing and wanting more. And it oftentimes is, is just, you know, how can I get paid more? How can I accumulate more things? How can I, you know, and that, that has never really attracted me. And so it's, that's largely why I've kind of stayed out of it personally.
- [55:04]
Henry Blodgett
So self interest, you think it's self interest? 100% swim with the current.
- [55:08]
Kevin Rose
100%. Like, you see these people up here, like when Zuckerberg was leaned over to Trump and he's like, I didn't know what number to say. It's like they're just saying whatever is going to get them in, in good favor with the current administration. And you know, they have massive companies and, and, and they're just, it is what it is. It's the game that they all have to play. And I'm just, I feel very fortunate that I don't have have to even think about playing that game right. It's a tough one because they want to see their company survive and thrive. And if you are in a place where whoever kisses the ring is going to get favors and more consideration and there's a chance that your company could be damaged if you don't do that, and that has to be a very difficult thing to sleep with, I would imagine.
- [56:01]
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- [56:38]
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- [58:32]
Henry Blodgett
All right, let's close by talking about some of what you're talking about as a human. Human and how to live a great life and so forth. And I just have to say that I, you know, I'm, I'm so grateful to you and Tim Ferriss and Mr. Huberman and, and many other folks who you are. You have taught me so much about how to get more out of life and be healthier and so forth. I, I do have to actually regulate how much I listen to you because there are so many different details. Now apparently Andrew Huberman is telling me I can't have coffee when I get up. I've got to go out and walk around and look at the sun. And then I come back and I have it and I only have it on a few days, I can't always and so forth. You begin to feel like you're not living up to your potential very quickly. But let me just talk about a couple of things that you've highlighted recently that I found fascinating. One, you wrote about how you have a method for changing habits fast and you make a distinction between that and something like atomic habits, which is changing them over time very gradually. Tell us about that. And first of all, let me start off. You mentioned that you, you are, you were, you started this thinking because you lost your house in la, which just sounds terrible and very sorry to hear that.
- [59:42]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I mean some people really prefer, you know, these kind of like longer habit formation cycles where they, they take the time to make small little changes that in, in aggregate, you know, lead to meaningful impact. There's nothing wrong with that. For me personally, I, I feel that it's just a little bit too slow. I'm probably largely because a little bit of, you know, my ADHD brain kind of plays a, a little bit into this as well. But you know, I, I'm kind of of the belief that we just jump in with both feet and burn the boats and so you force yourself to a time bound based change. So you say, you know, I'm not going to do X for X number of weeks or, or more months and then just see, you know, where that takes you. So you know, I did this once with, where I got rid of my iPhone for several months and just went all in on Android. And it's very easy to make that jump back if you're like, ah, this doesn't work for me. But if you have Burned your bridges, got rid of your devices, that I'm only going to stick with this. You're forced to learn new routines. And if that was a, there's no way to kind of do that in a, in a gradual fashion. I also did this with alcohol as well. So you know, as of two weeks from now, it'll be six months of no alcohol. And you know, I had to really go all in and say like I'm not going to do this through some like incremental cutting back, but just you know, jump in with both feet. And it's been, it's been a great kind of forcing function to get me to do things that I wouldn't normally do.
- [61:15]
Henry Blodgett
And I, I was also struck in reading your, your writing about this that you say like you, as you age you have to make uncomfortable changes to increase your brain plasticity. Really?
- [61:27]
Kevin Rose
Really?
- [61:28]
Henry Blodgett
Do I have to do that? I like my habits. I don't want to change. Am I going to get stupid?
- [61:32]
Kevin Rose
Well, I think that's the whole thing. It's one of the things that I'm sure you've noticed, and certainly I have, is that as you get older we tend to take the path of least resistance. Like it is. Like I, like when I was younger, every time a new Mac OS version came out, I used to format my computer and start from scratch and just like make it really clean. And I was faster and it just felt. And now I'm like, I just want it to work. I don't even know if want to do the upgrade because it might screw something up. You know, there's just like this, this sense of, of if it's not, you know, it's not broken, don't fix it. And, and, and that is age creeping in and saying, get comfortable, get complacent, it's okay, relax, kick your feet up. Versus if there's a new technology or something new that you haven't tried to, if you want to stay relevant and on the bleeding edge for as long as possible, you can't just write it off as too complicated. I don't have time. You just kind of have to jump in and go with it. I see this a lot on the investing side. I've had friends that you know, are now kind of in the closer to retirement or retiring actively, actively retiring on the venture side. And you know, this side of this, this kind of AI change came in and they're like, ah, this one isn't for me, it's just too complicated. I don't want to take the time to learn it. And, you know, I believe maybe it's just kind of in my DNA. But for me, when I. I get a lot of thrill and excitement out of trying new things, and it has gotten harder as I've gotten older. I've wanted to stay with the things that I love, but I. I've realized now that when I force myself to learn something new, you're going to stay sharper and more relevant for a longer period of time. And it's not comfortable and it does suck and. But it's. You don't know. For those that want to. To. I think it's just important to call it out and recognize it as a kind of feature or bug of aging. And there is a way to combat it quite easily, but you just have to be willing to make those. Those calls.
- [63:33]
Henry Blodgett
And does it work outside of work as well? How's it gone with alcohol?
- [63:37]
Kevin Rose
Alcohol? It's been. It's been tough, but, you know, I. It was very strange because with alcohol, you know, you listen to Huberman and you talk to him about this stuff, and they all make it sound so easy. They're just like, oh, you just need to get. You just don't drink. And it's like, well, for those of us have been making careers out of this, like, we tend to, like, have a glass of wine with dinner or whatever it may be. It's not as easy as just shutting it off. But one of the things that it's challenging is when you stop drinking alcohol, one thing becomes very apparent, and that is the reason why you were drinking alcohol to begin with, because those feelings come up, which is like, I need something to relax. It's been a long day. I need to take the stress out. There's all these internal questions and anxieties that just kind of rise to the surface. And then there's one of two things. You can either have a drink or you can start journaling and sit down and write and understand where are these coming from? What is the root source of this anxiety? Why didn't I have this when I was 16 or 18 or whatever it may be? Why did these, you know, creep in later in life and what has gone unresolved and what haven't I kind of worked through so that I can naturally, naturally remove these anxieties? And, you know, some people say, oh, after a month, I was able to kind of like, you know, either in. In conjunction with a therapist or some type of program work through these anxieties and be good for me. It wasn't until about the four month mark where I was like, wow, I actually was very odd. I woke up and I had sweat quite a bit that night randomly. And I was like, oh, my shirt's wet, it's weird. But my cravings had completely disappeared. My body just kind of kicked it at some point at the four month mark and everybody's a little bit different, but it just real. I realized how dependent I was. Not in a kind of over consumption way, like I would just more and more a consistency kind of way where I was having, you know, a drink or two almost most nights of the week. And that's not good. You know, it turns out if you think, take a look at where you are today, you know, I'm in my late 40s. Do I want the next 20 years to look like that? Like, and then who will I be and what will I look like when I'm 70? And so those are the hard questions you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself.
- [65:43]
Henry Blodgett
It is startling and the transition is difficult. And I remember the moment that sealed it for me and I'd experimented with it before was actually listening to Andrew Huberman saying, saying listen, I have your wine, but there is no amount and no formulation that is good for you.
- [66:00]
Kevin Rose
The Huberman's the worst at that. I mean, I kind of wish you would just say one like, come on or give us like a half a glass or something.
- [66:05]
Henry Blodgett
Exactly. And so, I mean, for me, off and on, the challenge is it's a social lubricant. I, I just went from feeling, oh, very comfortable to party and maybe I can entertain people and so forth to being feeling like the most boring guy.
- [66:18]
Kevin Rose
Me both.
- [66:19]
Henry Blodgett
You gotta go home.
- [66:20]
Kevin Rose
But it's a muscle you can build though, right? Like if you force yourself. I've been to enough meetups and events and things like that now. And the first 10 were just like horrible because you're like, oh, I would normally lean on a drink right now to kind of loosen up and get in the vibe a little bit. But after you slowly start to build that muscle, then you're like, oh, actually I'm good. I can just actually communicate with people, have fun. And then you watch people get hammered and you're like, whoa, I used to act like that. You know, when they've had like two or three drinks, you're like, wow, you're getting a little crazy. See, it's. It's hilarious.
- [66:50]
Henry Blodgett
All right, couple more topics. Very quickly. You had a post that you wrote and sent out. The title is my supplement stack. And I didn't even know what it was referring to. Okay, I think I know what he's talking about. I listened to Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia and others have these 12 hour marathons where they talk about the perfect supplements and eating and, and everything else. Just a very general question like, like when did you get sucked into or when did you buy into, into this sort of health optimization routine and, and do you think they make a difference and we won't even need to go through them. Anybody who wants to go can go read your very detailed article about what you have. Yeah, but I'm just curious, like.
- [67:31]
Kevin Rose
Well, I, you know, it's when I first started I, I started working with Peter Tia probably 12 or so years ago and he was kind of my non general practitioner physician, more focused on kind of longevity and, and health, overarching health and what my passed away from heart disease and I just realized, hey, I need to start, you know, taking my health seriously. And when you do your blood work at such a deep level and you run your genetic profile and you figure out what all your snips are and you see where the, the numbers are off. And if the numbers are off, they don't lie. They're just not completely optimized and there are things that you can take to address some of those deficiencies. And so for me it was really figuring out how can I use supplementation where it makes sense to go in and have measurable impact on my longevity. I don't, I'm not one of the Brian Johnson types that wants to live forever. I really don't. I just want to have health span that hopefully lasts me into my 80s, maybe my 90s, who knows and then you know, pass quickly in a, in a way that is, is just keeps my brain intact, keeps me functional and mobile for the majority of my life and that means, you know, a certain, certain type of exercise regimen. I don't think supplements are a replacement for proper diet or exercise. And so those are just the things that I add in that I've noticed personal benefit from. And I've also done a bunch of research in terms of the brands that are out there largely because I think there's just so much garbage out there. You really have to be careful on what you buy and do you feel better.
- [69:14]
Henry Blodgett
Is it a noticeable change?
- [69:16]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I would say say that there are a few things that they're going to sound like the, the kind of boring stuff, but you know, a certain type of magnesium that works well and crosses the blood brain barrier is great. For kind of relaxation and pre sleep. I think that's a solid choice on the nights where you are feeling a little bit anxious or can't get sleep. I think a microdose of melatonin is really interesting a la Matt Walker and his research. Research I would say that There is the Omega 3s high quality and a decent amount more than the average consumer takes is it definitely helped with mood. That's another one that I think is quite good. Creatine on the strength training and cognitive side at around 5 to 10 grams a day has been great for me. Then there are a few protective type things that I take like some blueberry concentrate. There are a handful of things like taurine and glutamine and others that you can do and take that are well, I just think also high quality ketones have been great for certain days around cognitive function. Cocoa flavonoids are vasodilators which are great for sauna usage and brain health. There's a lot of stuff out there, but it's a it's playing and saying do I feel the impact here? And if you don't, throwing it away and saying I don't, I don't need to do this. And so I like to dabble and play with a variety of different things.
- [70:50]
Henry Blodgett
It sounds like I have a lot to experiment with. Kevin, let's leave it there. This is terrific. Thank you so much for your time. Best of luck with Digg and everything else and look forward to talking to you again soon.
- [70:59]
Kevin Rose
Well, thank you for all your contributions to the Internet as well. I love the stuff that you've created and I appreciate you being an early Dig user and hopefully we drove some decent traffic to your site back in the day.
- [71:10]
Henry Blodgett
You sure did. Solutions is produced by Meghan Cunane. Jim Mackle is our video editor. Our theme music is by Trackademics. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's Executive producer of podcasts. Thanks for listening to Solutions from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm your host Henry Blodgett. We'll see you soon.
- [71:36]
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