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Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls. Oh, Doogie Howser. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. Deep baritone welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. This one is a random show with my good buddy Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, partner at True Ventures, venture capitalist prior to that, incredibly successful angel investor, also serial Entrepreneur, founder of Digg.com, digg.com they are rebooting that. Keep an eye on it. He's doing it with Alexis Ohanian, co founder of Reddit and other folks. So something to watch. We cover a lot in this random show but before we get to some topics, I must say gotta do it right now I am launching my first and ever card game called Coyote. CoyoteGame.com youm can find it everywhere. Amazon, Target, Walmart. It's in 8,000 retail locations. I did this with the geniuses at Exploding Kittens and it's been a labor of love. Such a fun project for the last two years. Tested it with 100 plus fam, thousands of people now and it's working. It's going nuts. So you need some fun, you need some analog, you need some social interaction. You definitely need more laughs in this crazy chaotic world of ours. So check out coyotegame.com it has 300 million plus views on social of gameplay and if inventory is low, stuff is selling out in a lot of places. Just stick around. There is more and more and more stock flowing into all the channels including Amazon. So please check it out coyotegame.com and you can watch some videos right there. You'll see one on social that did 40 million plus by itself. So if you want to see what that recipe looks like, check it out. And topic wise we cover a ton in this episode. We cover Kevin hitting the 100 days with no drinks and how he did it. We talk about microdosing, GLP1s home defense, home self defense. We talk about the changing landscape of tech and vibe coding and what you can do if you have no engineering background, no programming experience. Just what you can do now with new tools is mind blowing and how that's going to disrupt a lot of venture capital and how startups are built. And then on my side, let me get my trusty composition notebook. I talk about a lot of health experiments that have paid off, different things that I have played with and tracked with various types of blood tests and biomarkers and there's a lot, there's a lot I am feeling and certainly has reflected in my blood work looking better than I have in more than a decade and I was starting I think from a pretty good baseline. So there's a lot in this episode with Mr. Kevin Rose. So without further ado and maybe a few words from the sponsors who make this program possible, enjoy this wide ranging, I think pretty hilarious conversation with the fast tap dancing Kevin Rose Creatine isn't just for muscle. It turns out it's essential daily fuel for your brain, your body and long term performance. 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This is something I look for on a a lot of products I use, which means it's independently tested for safety, label accuracy and banned substances. So if you've been curious about creatine, this is your moment to get back on track. Or try it for the first time with a formula you'll actually enjoy that will make you feel great thanks to superior quality and quality assurance. So just go to livemomentous.com that's live m o m e n t like livemoment o u s livemomentous.com Tim for 35% off your first subscription or simply use code Tim at checkout livemomentous.com I am always on the hunt for protein sources that don't require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. I don't want to eat sawdust. I also don't want a candy bar that's disguised as a protein bar. And that's why I love the protein bars from today's sponsor David. They are my go to protein source on the run. I throw them in my bag whenever I am in doubt that I might be able to get a good source of protein. 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What does that mean? It means that protein out of carbohydrates, fat and protein inhibits your appetite while also feeding all the things you want to feed, which helps you consume fewer calories throughout the day. You're less inclined to eat garbage. All of that contributes to fat loss and reducing the risk of various diseases. And now you guys. Listeners of the Tim Ferriss show who buy four boxes, get a fifth box for free. You can check it out. You can also buy one box at a time. Try them for yourself at davidprotein.com Tim learn all about it. That's davidprotein.com Tim to get a free box with a four box purchase or simply learn more, check it out. Davidprotein.com Tim at this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Kevin Rose
Can I answer your personal question now? It is in the perfect time.
Tim Ferriss
What if I get the album? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
Kevin Rose
Ferris show.
Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. Kevkev. Welcome to the show. Here we are again. Nice to see you.
Kevin Rose
Here we are Good to see you as well.
Tim Ferriss
Crazy listeners and viewers out there. We have a lot to talk about. This is going to be an action packed episode. Features all sorts of new biological hacks, psycho emotional hacks. Even includes some homeless people hiding in a closet. And that is not a metaphor. We'll get to that eventually. But let's kick off with a huge congrats man. 100 days. Why is 100 days significant? What is the milestone?
Kevin Rose
The milestone is no alcohol for 100 days.
Tim Ferriss
Fucking A, man. Congratulations. That is huge. Thank you. That is huge.
Kevin Rose
Especially given how much of an alcoholic I was.
Tim Ferriss
Well, let's dive into it because I have over the decades, I guess at this point, right. Seen you take a stab at sobriety many different times, and the success is varied, but Nothing has approached 100 days. Nothing. Yeah, right. Nothing.
Kevin Rose
Well, I mean, don't make it seem like it's that bad.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, when you were laying under those overpasses, just, hey, listen, you've all.
Kevin Rose
Hit a stab at non sobriety with me many times. I know, I know.
Tim Ferriss
Well, I was going to say 100 days sober, even for someone who does not consider themselves a drinker. But let's just say for someone who drinks occasionally socially, that's a meaningful period of time. That's a quarter of the year, more than a quarter of the year. So I'm sure we've talked about this, we've tracked it a little bit over time. But what made the difference this time around? Let's reiterate that for folks and maybe your answer's changed.
Kevin Rose
I think that initially it was fear of death, which was largely driven by my doctor calling me up and saying, your liver enzymes are like, you know, whatever. It was 5x7x what they should be.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose
Okay, so that was number one. But just to give people a benchmark of kind of where I was at drinking wise, my journey with alcohol has been one of. It's been one of a love affair. I've definitely enjoyed the drinks, but for me it's never been about drinking to blackout or drinking to even like any type of illness or sickness. It's just kind of consistency. Meaning that when Covid happened, I was like sober as could be for the first three weeks. And then I'm like, eh, you know, what do we have to do? We should just drink a little bit. Like I think everybody's gonna be okay. At first I was like, gotta get my immune system like on point, you know. And then I just kind of gave that up. And there was a lot of loneliness. And I was out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in Oregon and had some young kids. I was like, ah, let's just crack a bottle of wine. So it was a very common, very normal thing for us as a house. Yeah, for a lot of people, just crack a bottle and just finish the whole bottle between two people. And that became the norm for me. I was always asking myself, can I take a day or two off per week? Which I think would Be a good, healthy thing. But then if you just add up the amount of drinks, even with taking a day or two off, if you're doing three drinks a night, that's a lot of drinks every month, right?
Tim Ferriss
That's a lot. And just to put that also in a broader context, part of the reason I've never lived full time in New York City and part of the reason some of my friends have moved out of New York City is not because New York City is a bad place, but at least in the social circles, by and large, that I know. Finishing a bottle of wine between two people, let's call that two and a half drinks a piece, would be a light night in New York City. And to do that, minimum three nights, but three, four, five, six nights per week in a lot of the groups I know, at least that is just par for the course, right? Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. The issue is that when you get into your 40s and you have all that cumulative damage of decades, you realize like, well, things start to shut down, like your liver. So I think that's. That was the first sign. But only have one liver.
Tim Ferriss
So you want to take care of that baby.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. The nice thing, obviously, about the liver is that until you're at that point of no return, it's pretty damn good at healing itself. And my liver enzymes snap back to normal ranges within four weeks, which is great to see. But when I think about, when have I truly given it a break, when have I truly taken more? And I've taken a month off here or there, there's those dry Januarys, and I would have a dampish January where you have a drink or two, but still kind of dry January. And so that was the norm. And then I just said, if I can't go three months. And actually, my therapist told me this. She said, kevin, it's kind of a golf clap at one month. Three months is where the magic happens in terms of how you feel, your energy, your mo, Weight loss, glucose control, all of the things that you've said you want to have, but can you do it? And it is really challenging to go three months for someone like myself, that it is a crutch around social situations. It is a crutch around, if I'm being honest, when you have a partner where you're dealing with a couple little kids, and it can be challenging with the kiddos and with the logistics of a household, and all of a sudden you're just like, ah, I had a hard, long day at work and I had a long day at home. And I have some good wine sitting right there. It's very easy to tap into that.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. What would you say made the difference this time around? You had the health scare or at least the doctor saying like, hey, hot chat.
Kevin Rose
It was surrounding myself with people that had done this before.
Tim Ferriss
How did you find them?
Kevin Rose
Well, I think we're at the age that I'm sure you probably can check this box as well where I know right now three people that have successfully done 12 step programs.
Tim Ferriss
Sure. Easily three.
Kevin Rose
We have a couple of friends in common that are now sober and have done these programs and yeah, that's exactly it. And you just, you reach out to them and say, hey, what did you do? What about these 12 steps has worked for you? I was always kind of put off by the religious aspect of some of the 12 step stuff. It just seemed to me like a little. I don't know, I didn't really think I had it that bad, but I knew that there were people that, and I had seen this, that stuck to it with the help and support of these people. And they gather around you and really give you kind of a toolkit to lean into. And for me, that has been really understanding that it's not about the three months, it's just about winning today. And so if you can reframe it as like, just not today. Yeah, I can have a drink tomorrow, but just not today.
Tim Ferriss
Not today, Satan. Not today, Satan.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. And it sounds so silly, but it doesn't do little tiny things.
Tim Ferriss
Eternity. Well, I guess we're not going to live for all eternity unless you believe some people on the Internet. But until you die is a long time. Or at least you hope it's a long time. But today or tomorrow, today, it's very digestible.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, 100%. And so that was a big thing. And having those friends and the first thing they did being some of them are one still in AA and two are ex. AA is said. What we do here is we could just give you our numbers and you call anytime you're having a craving or you think you're getting close to not pulling this off because we want to see you succeed. And I think that's a powerful thing to be able to have a hotline to someone that is like, I've been here. It sucks. Yes, yes, you can get to two weeks, but do you want to white knuckle this the entire way by yourself or do you want someone that's going to go have a tea with you and sit with you for an evening on a day that's particularly hard. And so I think after you get to kind of six. Well, I'm just speaking for myself, but when I got to six or ish weeks, the kind of headachy kind of desire of it all faded away a little bit. And then I found a bunch of shit that I really enjoyed doing that was not drinking. And I think that's the other big thing you have to do is you have to really figure out what is going to fill that space. Because if it's just sitting there thinking.
Tim Ferriss
About drinks of weed. No.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I mean, I started cocaine and I just did a bunch of weed, but other than that, no. I wish I liked weed. I do not like weed. For some reason, I think Sigmund Freud.
Tim Ferriss
For a while was viewing cocaine as the solution to heroin. And I'm not making that up. It's like a very famous psychoanalyst. Anyway, but that's not that you didn't go for snow blindness.
Kevin Rose
No, but I did go for this.
Tim Ferriss
Look at this. Oh, okay. Now this looks like a Japanese Lego ish. Those are nanoblocks.
Kevin Rose
Yes. So this is called nanoblocks and it's one of the things I wanted to talk about today. All right, so nanoblocks are from Japan, and I did a little research and essentially they were able to find a way around a lot of the Lego patents and they created. Look at how small this block is.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, he's holding it up.
Kevin Rose
If you listen to audio.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. It's about the size of a baby aspirin. I mean, it's tiny, Right?
Kevin Rose
Exactly. And so they literally sell Nanoblock branded tweezers to put these things together.
Tim Ferriss
That's the most Japanese thing I can imagine at this moment.
Kevin Rose
Exactly. And so the instructions are horrific, which actually makes it more fun. Look at this. Look at this bad boy.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, wow. Okay. So he's holding up a cherry blossom tree. It's actually awesome. It's kind of mesmerizing in that lo fi kind of way. And it probably has, I'm just going to guess here, 857 pieces.
Kevin Rose
No, this was 2,500, I think, pieces.
Tim Ferriss
God, yes.
Kevin Rose
So this will take you a good solid week.
Tim Ferriss
It'll keep your hands idle hands in the devil's workshop. But not if you have nanoblocks.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. So I will say that little hobbies like this, especially ones that you can do with your kids. Do I have my. Yeah. So this one back here is also a Lego.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that's. I guess I'm blanking on the exact name. The Great wave, Hokusai. Almost everyone will have seen this in some form or fashion. That's cool. That's very cool.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So that actually is legit Lego. This is not Nanoblocks, but this one is really cool. We talked about that one once before. But I think these things are great to have. These little hobbies are great to have. And nanoblocks, I will say, if you go on Amazon, they sell them on there, they have horrible reviews. And the reason why the reviews are so bad is because the instructions, like I said, are horrific. But once you understand the way that the Japanese want you to do it, there is a method to their madness. And they all work the same way. So it takes you like an hour and a half to be like, why are they telling me to put it? What does that arrow mean? And then you understand the arrow systems. Because there's a lot of Japanese, a little bit of sprinkled English throughout the.
Tim Ferriss
Instructions probably doesn't help very much.
Kevin Rose
Right. But look at this kit here.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, right.
Kevin Rose
So they have these cute little kids.
Tim Ferriss
Cup a noodle, basically, that little ramen. Yeah. 140 pieces, ages 12 plus.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So this ramen is going to be about the size of like a little teacup, like. Yeah. Shot glass. Exactly. But it's super tiny and it'll take you like eight hours to put that together. But they're so fun. They're so fun. And they have a massive Godzilla. That's cool.
Tim Ferriss
So two things. Number one, if video on YouTube doesn't exist already, you should just create a video which is like, let me explain how to use these fucking things. I think that would be a great service to humanity.
Kevin Rose
You know what's funny is I'm actually doing that. I'm going to do a live. There's this whole movement right now where people go out. Actually, Craig Mod is quite good at this, where he'll go out. You had him on your podcast. Fantastic. All Things Japan. Craig Mott's the best. He has gone out and he's done these ambient recordings where he just goes to these rural parts of Japan and he just sets up his mic. And you'd listen to the street traffic. You listen to the people doing various tasks. And there's something to be said about. They call this slow tv, this movement. There's this whole thing where people watch people groom and shear sheep using this.
Tim Ferriss
No, but I saw this guy who has a podcast that is sort of, I guess, interviewing thought leaders. And he didn't disclose this in the tweet, but the tweet was like, there's an account of a Norwegian truck driver. This is on YouTube, just driving through different parts of the countryside in Norway and it has 5 million subscribers or something. And he said, meanwhile, there are other podcasts that do this on YouTube and they only have 9,000 subscribers. Link. He didn't disclose that it was actually his account. But, yeah, the slow, I suppose. What's the right word? Sort of living vicariously as a fly on the wall with things that seem very day to day. Craig Maud has a super relaxing. It's hard for me to explain exactly what it is. Maybe it's just a mild antidote to digital loneliness. Maybe that's part of it. But he went to a Japanese jazz listening bar where people. Or jazz listening cafe, where it's full of vinyl. People sit there in true Japanese fashion, like practically dead silent just listening to the owner, who's effectively the dj, put on different vinyl and he got all. I've been to this bar, okay, all the ambient sounds. And Craig Mod, what a gem. Definitely look him up. Yes, the name is Mod, as you heard. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And I will say that I've talked to Craig about. I asked him, I said, hey, how do you get this? Why does it sound so amazing? What's your secret here? And he uses these binaural microphones, essentially, they go into his ears. And so he plugs them into his ears and then into a solid state recording device. And so you're listening as though you're sitting in his ears because there's a mic on each side and so that's left and right audio channels and it creates this illusion of like a depth of audio as you're listening, which is just brilliant. And it's so much fun. There is a massive movement and I get it, Tim. Like, we are so addicted to our devices that. I don't know, maybe it's because I'm getting in my late 40s, but I desperately crave more analog in my life.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, more analog.
Kevin Rose
More so than I ever have for sure. Do you find that to be the case with yourself?
Tim Ferriss
Oh, 100%. I mean, next week I'm going on this wilderness trek in Montana and Idaho that is going to be off grid and with a couple of close friends. And sure, you could bring, say, a solar charger and try to use your phone, but I'm just going to leave mine behind. I don't need it. What am I going to do?
Kevin Rose
You just bring in your printed Playboys. Yeah, you're going all analog.
Tim Ferriss
Bring in the stash from the late 80s. I kept those with my D and D from childhood when I packed them up. And analog, more and more analog. We are just evolved to thrive and feel at ease in analog environments. Which isn't to say all digital is bad, but is certainly past a point. The self soothing becomes a poison. And I don't think we need to convince anyone of that. You see it everywhere. So it makes sense that even in a digital sphere, this type of slow viewing. I was going to say cat on the wall. I'm not even sure what that would be. Maybe it sounds like a Japanese T shirt, but fly on the wall experience allows people to put something in the background. I used to do this when I was writing my books. So four hour work week. I don't even know if you know this. A four hour work week, four hour body for a chef. I would do most of my writing late at night. And a lot of authors I know who are productive. Not saying I'm one of the most productive at all, but either. Write very early when everyone's asleep. Write very late when everyone is asleep. The upside is you can focus. The downside is it can feel very, very isolating. So I would sit in my TV room and I would put on music, but I would always put on movies to watch. So I had people around on the screen and these were movies that I would just watch on repeat. So I've seen for the first set of movies for the four Hour Workweek, it was Shaun of the Dead and the first Jason Bourne. And then for the four Hard Body, it was Snatch. And it was the first movie I chose that popped up on Amazon prime, which is Babe, masterpiece of a movie. I watched snatch and babe 5,000 times each. I mean absolutely high hundreds each. But it's just to have something in the background that is comforting while I'm isolated and I'm listening to music and writing. So it makes sense to me.
Kevin Rose
You know the Naked Gun is coming back.
Tim Ferriss
Yes, I do. I saw the reviews and I'm like, God, I hope it's true because the Naked Gun was so good. Yes, Liam Neeson is actually a fantastic actor, despite the fact that he's made some version of taken like 789 times. But the guy has chops. But in the same way, Johnny Deppes chops. But when they did a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I was like, oh, don't do it. Gene Wilder's going to be really hard to top. That's going to be really tough. So I'm optimistic In a way, I suppose, with movies that I haven't been in a long time. So I'm excited to check out the Naked Gun.
Kevin Rose
I'm just curious to see if they're going to keep up with the. Because the Naked Gun you could not make today. Well, maybe you could again now as it was.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, there'd have to be some script doctoring for sure. Before we get to the Naked Gun, I want to make an observation, which is you and I text a lot and we're in one ridiculous small friend group thread. And since you cut alcohol out, the tone of your communication is completely different in the sense that you basically don't complain anymore. Effectively gone as far as complaining. But I think that's just related to the ups and downs that are maybe more noticeable when you're drinking and all the effects on metabolism and insulin sensitivity and so on. But it's like your general tone and existence and demeanor is so much more stable in its positivity since you stopped drinking. So I just wanted to mention that because it's very noticeable.
Kevin Rose
That's interesting.
Tim Ferriss
Not that you were bitching and moaning all the time before, but the change is very noticeable.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. Because I feel like your bitching has gone up.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. You know, something's not right here. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. No, I appreciate you saying that. I. I feel as though. Well, I will say you never know how much you should share on podcasts and whatnot, but I'm going to go out here. I know my wife's gonna listen to this, but I might as well say anyway. You argue less when you're both not drinking, it turns out, for sure. And you and I are always. We've been known to text each other various grievances with our partners and people we've been seeing.
Tim Ferriss
So, yeah, you need to do it. Yeah, you need to do it.
Kevin Rose
You need an outlet. With especially, you need an outlet.
Tim Ferriss
It's like you need somebody to vent to. Yeah. But I would say holistically, so if you even took the partner piece out of it, just in general, you're much more upbeat and it's noticeable. And I want to mention something that I'm pretty sure we haven't. I didn't want to repeat myself. So I used AI to summarize our last few random shows and a few things that I've done I'm pretty sure, since our last conversation were interventions for health also. And the primary drivers behind that were not any type of medical emergency. But I'm now caring for two family members who have rapidly deteriorating cognitive Health. And this is very common in my family. Lots of Parkinson's, lots of Alzheimer's in particular. And what I've noticed is that some of these people who seem hardest hit by Alzheimer's are, say, APOE3.3. They shouldn't have a high predisposition to Alzheimer's. And I'm APOE3.4. So I'm like, fuck if I'm, as we understand it now, something like 2.5 times more likely than the kind of population average to be predisposed to Alzheimer's. This is something I want to look at very, very closely because there are some interventions out there and you and I have invested in, hopefully, some new interventions to come in the forthcoming years. But that's going to take some time. By the time the symptoms are really obvious, it's very, very hard to treat something like Alzheimer's. Which doesn't mean that the interventions don't work. It just means they might not work at that stage. So I'm really. And I've already been taking a lot of mental health and cognitive kind of neuronal health things seriously. So I started wondering, and this is just a hypothesis, but if it's possible that I have inherited some mitochondrial dysfunction and looked at ways to improve mitochondrial health, which would include increased Zone two training, for instance. Right. I hate Zone two. But, yeah, it's so boring, it's annoying. It's like flossing. It's just like, worst. It's not fun, but it's mild enough that you can throw on something on Netflix or listen to a podcast. So Zone two, it's boring, but you got to do it. And I've been finding more interesting ways to do that. But in addition to that, looking at some old friends that I thought were worth dusting off and revisiting, like ketosis and the ketogenic diet. So I'll give you the punchline and then I'll back up. So did my blood draw and also an oral glucose tolerance test, which we should really talk about because that's just such an important tool in the toolkit to see how sensitive you are with respect to insulin sensitivity or insensitive glucose disposal, et cetera. Getting fasting glucose isn't enough. You can get false good news if that's timed luckily or well. So I've had my best lab results and I get three or four tests a year. Probably my best lab results in the last decade, most recently. And I would attribute that to a few things. I used ketogenic diet. Very straightforward. You have to figure out A few meals that work for you? For me, it was a big salad with ribeye cut on top with some cheese. You have to figure out something that doesn't make you feel like a human cheesecloth every day because you really want to keep your protein moderate. You can't have too much protein on the ketogenic diet if you want to sustain high levels of high millimolar concentration of ketones. And I test all this with a finger prick. I shifted naturally like ketosis first to initiate some adaptations. And for everything I read, it takes about. I knew I didn't want to do it super long term. It's just too boring and too disgusting. And plus, I really need to watch my lipid profile.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, that's my problem.
Tim Ferriss
But based on the reading that I was doing, it seemed like three to four weeks of serious ketosis was enough to initiate some durable changes. And then maybe if you do that, at least, and this is speculation, but once every six months, once every year, that you can keep the metabolic machinery where you want it. And so I did four weeks and I was like, enough. But I started leaning into intermittent fasting towards the end of that and experimenting with 16:8. So what that means is 16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating, 8 hours, could be noon to 8 o', clock, could be 2:00pm to 10, and then continued with the ketogenic diet, but just two meals a day, typically one at 2:00 clock and then one at, say 8 or 9, and then shifted back to a non ketogenic diet. And this is going somewhere, folks, because the ketogenic diet may have nothing to do with it, but the combination of doing three to four weeks of ketosis and then doing intermittent fasting for the last two months, but at the time of my blood test, it was only about four weeks in my insulin sensitivity, which my family, just as a team, sucks at. Right? Like genetically, I am not predisposed to having great glucose disposal or insulin sensitivity. And that's a huge driver for accelerated neurodegenerative disease. If you have high blood pressure, if you have chronically elevated glucose or insulin and. Or insulin. All of these things drive degeneration cognitively. And people can learn all sorts of stuff about 168 intermittent fasting from Rhonda Patrick, and she's had a number of scientists on her podcast. There's also a guy I recommend with some reservation, but Martin Birkin, who really popularized to his credit 168 and worked with a lot of clients and his audience. So he had very interesting data, but his editorial Tone is not for everybody. He will not die from confidence deficiency, I'll put it that way. Nonetheless, his recommendations around intermittent fasting plus resistance training are very compelling. So I would suggest people check that out. A byproduct of this. And this was very unexpected. My mood is so elevated and stable now, it's kind of hard for me to believe that I didn't figure this out sooner. And I think part of that was as a competitive athlete, especially growing up. When we grew up, it was like, okay, small meals every four hours, something like that was the dogma. And I think that was just enough smokescreen that I was able to cover up insulin insensitivity, because if I didn't eat frequently, I would start to crash and then get grumpy and then I would boost it back up with, granted, a healthy meal. But I was still eating very, very consistently. And in doing this, my mood on average has just been so much higher, so much more stable for, I would say, the last eight weeks. I don't have any intention of changing.
Kevin Rose
That's amazing.
Tim Ferriss
I think I could do the intermittent fasting indefinitely. And on top of that, I'll say, what are my concerns? And part of the reason I didn't try this sooner is that if you don't incorporate resistance training and if you don't get enough protein, I was just.
Kevin Rose
Going to ask you that.
Tim Ferriss
You can lose a lot of muscle mass. And I remember doing DEXA scans way back in the day. I started doing dexa before the four hour body in 2010. And the owners of these DEXA facilities would tell me the vast majority of people who try intermittent fasting think they're losing fat, but they're losing muscle mass and their body composition goes upside down effectively. And I judged it harshly and I judged it prematurely so in animal models. And also certainly if you look at what Martin and some of his clients have done, that need not be the case. And you're not necessarily going to pack on tons of muscle, but you can lose fat while preserving or moderately gaining muscle. So I'm still getting stronger in my workouts. It's interesting how fat loss works too. And Martin's observed this. A lot of people have observed this, but it's not caloric deficit and you lose a predictable amount every week. Sure, if you were a closed system, blah, blah, blah, law of thermodynamics. Yeah, it should just be pure math. But what seems to happen, at least with me, is that it's like not really seeing anything. Not really seeing anything. Not really seeing anything. And then all of a sudden in week four or five, you just seem to drop a lot of body fat. I don't have a great explanation for that, but I'm sure there is a good explanation.
Kevin Rose
It's that MCT oil that you're taking with the. You're running into the bathroom.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Just letting everything pass through. But what I will say is that I have used just about every diet imaginable. And I would say one criticism I would have of some of what Martin recommends is he advises people to consume somewhere along the lines if they can tolerate it, like 400 to 800 milligrams of caffeine a day to aid in fat loss. And yes, that will aid in fat loss. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And lack of sleep.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I don't want the sleep architecture disruption. And also, it's like you can get away with a lot if you're taking stimulants. And this is said as someone who for a long time. I was first introduced to pre workout stimulants by an older student when I was wrestling in high school.
Kevin Rose
Let me guess, no explode.
Tim Ferriss
So no explode. Little reds. Yeah, no explode is like a later iteration. But at that point this guy was giving me the cobbled together. You can't really do this anymore and I don't recommend it.
Kevin Rose
Fen phen and shit.
Tim Ferriss
No, not fen phen. Ephedrine, caffeine, aspirin, the ECA stack. And that will rip body fat off of your body. But you are not getting a biological free lunch. You are really hammering yourself and your system.
Kevin Rose
Did you ever hit bronchade?
Tim Ferriss
Broncade is probably ephedrine.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I know, but did you ever hit it when you were younger?
Tim Ferriss
Actually an inhaler or. What do you mean?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, because that's what people would do. The bodybuilders would hit broncade and then they would put on sweatshirts and go like on the treadmill. Yeah, just sweat their faces off. Six pack abs.
Tim Ferriss
No, you would buy Primatene mist tablets and don't do this, folks, it's not good for you. Also, if you try to buy private TMS tablets now you have to show your driver's license because I believe there are labs or probably trailers is more accurate description. People will use that as a precursor to produce methamphetamine, is my understanding, which is why it's very tightly controlled. So suffice to say, don't do that. And I've been very wary of any regimen that requires a lot of stimulants is, I guess what I'm trying to say and the only time that I have reliably. If you look at every single male in my family, it's kind of comical. You can spot them from a mile away. And abdominal fat. I know this isn't unique to my family but it's like nobody in the history of my family on either side has ever had six pack abs except for me when I was taking disgusting quantities of stimulants. But this time around, doing the resistance training plus intermittent fasting and yes, some of it could be explained by reduced caloric intake, but I think there's more to it. The abdominal fat's finally coming off and this is at 48, I'm no spring chicken so I've been very impressed that I'm able to eat anything else like joint pain.
Kevin Rose
Some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet, people say joint pain goes away, they get some of these other things.
Tim Ferriss
So another reason in addition to mitochondrial health that I want to do ketosis is because of the potent anti inflammatory effects and some of the chronic back pain that long term listeners will be sick of hearing about. So that was another reason why I did the ketosis. I felt the anti inflammatory effects of that much more so than just the intermittent fasting with a quote unquote regular diet that's higher in carbohydrates. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 Next Gen, the same single scoop once a day product that I use myself, but now with more vitamins, more minerals and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport, one of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry. So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 welcome Kit and five of the upgraded AG1 Travel Packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com Tim that's drinkag1.com Tim I have also been adding in with my, let's just call it normal diet, intermittent Fasting, exogenous ketones. So supplemental ketones in the morning. Because I also, I want to give credit where credit is due. Rhonda Patrick and I have had a lot of texts back and forth. Rhonda Patrick, for people who don't know, I think, God, maybe you introduced me to her age. She was like podcast number 12 for me, out of 800 and something, which I didn't realize it was so early. Early. She's a PhD. She is a scientist and researcher. She has published in very credible journals and it's just a great resource for separating fact from fiction in so many different domains. And her dad, I believe it was, was diagnosed with Parkinson's and she's been public about this. And so we were trading notes on all different things and we were talking about ketosis. And if you're in ketosis, what about intermittent fasting? If you have a tablespoon of heavy cream in your coffee in the beginning, are you sacrificing autophagy, this kind of. Of cellular self eating cleanup? And she sent me a case study of an Alzheimer's patient, pretty progressed Alzheimer's, very impaired function, who was given a ketone monoester. So this is a liquid that basically just a shot two or three times a day. And I recognize this as n of 1, so take it with a huge grain of salt. But still huge regain in function, I mean, astonishing recovery of function and mood and personality. So I figured, well, let me experiment with this because I might want to suggest it to people in my family, but I'm not going to do that until I understand exactly what I'm dealing with from a first person perspective. And adding in, for instance, one option, a mutual friend of ours, I'm not going to dox him, but recommended ketone, Q I, T O N E. And it's a powder that you can add into your coffee and mix up as a creamer, which is what I do.
Kevin Rose
Wait, can we ask you one question, Tim, before you go on with this one? You and I were on a call, not a public call, but a phone call. And you mentioned that you found the best basically ketones on the market that you believed at that time. And this was recently. So are these the ones?
Tim Ferriss
These are not those ones, in part because this is going to make you sound like a dick. I will share that one soon. They're very expensive. I'll tell you offline the reason. And people are going to hate me for saying this, but it's like, I want this stuff for my family. And this producer has very Very limited inventory. So I want to make sure that I can get this stuff. And furthermore, I think it's really premature to start just dosing your elderly parents or aunts and uncles with this. I still have some open questions about concerns and long term health, et cetera, so I want to do some more digging. This is not that one. Okay.
Kevin Rose
Is this one palatable?
Tim Ferriss
This one is palatable because you should.
Kevin Rose
Tell people the hardcore stuff is no joke. Right. It's almost cruel to be giving it to someone with dementia and that you're asking them to chug gasoline.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I thought it was going to be worse than it is, but I also have a stomach of iron and have choked down so much disgusting shit over my life that I think I was dating a lovely girl right now. And I made some salad and she tried to eat it and she's like, like, this is inedible. This is so disgusting. Why did you put so much vinegar on it? And I did put way too much vinegar on it and she almost puked at the table and I was like, what are you talking about? I'm just shoving it down my maw. So I don't know if I'm the best reference for palatable, but they've improved a lot. They used to taste like jet fuel based on reports. And I wasn't even willing to do it because literally, I think he's been public about this. Peter Attia, famous doc, trained at Hopkins, Stanford, et cetera. A lot of people will know him. He told me about the first time he tried the OG ketone monoesters. And he took a shot and he basically had to run to the sink and white knuckle the sides of the sink as he's dry heaving for 10 minutes. And I was like, no thanks, no thanks. But this ketone, the Q, I, T, O, N E, it is very palatable. You just mix it in with your coffee. What I will say to folks is just public service announcement. Your. Your GI distress may vary. So you might be fine, you might.
Kevin Rose
Not just chase it with an Imodium, you'll be fine. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And of particular danger is caffeine ketones and creatine, which is also great.
Kevin Rose
Well, and act.
Tim Ferriss
But yeah, if you take any two of those four, you're in the danger zone. If you take three or four out of the four, there's coin toss, disaster pants. So just stay close to the bathroom. You do get used to it. But I just used this ketone this morning, morning, for instance, because the stuff at some point that I hope to share when they get their production ramped up. Number one, it does taste pretty awful. It's pretty God awful. And then second, it's very expensive. I mean, it's like 20 to $30 a dose. Wow. It's very, very expensive. So if you're going to be giving someone this particular exogenous ketone two or three times a day on an ongoing basis, we have to figure out a more economical solution, because outside of the 1% of 1%, no one's going to be able to afford that.
Kevin Rose
So, Tim, for people that are listening and they're hearing you talk about two different ketones here, it begs the question. If you are pricking yourself, doing blood work afterwards and finding out what your ketone levels are, or peeing on a strip or however you're doing it, obviously you can tell that these things work. And I've done it myself, because you take them and then you literally go do the test. And a half hour later, 45 minutes later, you see that your ketone bodies are elevated and you're like, okay, it's in my system. It's working.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. And I don't know about you, but I can feel it. It's like a light switch. You can absolutely feel it cognitively. Your brain, also cardiac tissue, loves ketones.
Kevin Rose
Yes, Brain juice. It's just like it's off juice.
Tim Ferriss
And finish what you're saying. And then I'll add something else.
Kevin Rose
My question for you is, why would you even consider the more expensive $20 to $30 when there are so many other readily available? Call it in the five to seven dollars range. Ketones that are out there on market. What are the advantages of that $30 model?
Tim Ferriss
It's hard for me not to dox a supplier by giving too much detail. But what I will say is this subjectively, and I've checked with a few people who have tested it, nothing feels like these ketones. Really nothing? Not even close. It's the Bugatti of exogenous ketones. You flip on the switch and for instance, I'm doing a lot of media interviews and stuff right now because of this coyote game. And we could talk about that at some point. I mean, that's very analog, as analog as it gets. I'm doing a lot of media, and historically, what would I have done Because I want to be sharp, even in the afternoon? I would have tea or coffee, but then that fucks up your sleep so badly and it turns into this vicious cycle. So now I just take the exogenous ketones in the afternoons. And if anything, it's going to help you sleep, which is something you observe with the ketogenic diet. That's really wild. Is that your at least personally, and this is true for a lot of people. Your sleep requirements go down and when you wake up, I'm not a morning person. Historically it doesn't take me an hour to get up to speed when I'm in ketosis. I wake up and I am ready to go nine or 10 out of 10. So I would say for a lot of folks though, at least based on the reviews and reports that I've read, the diester this ketone Q I T O N E it's more than enough to get a taste test for whether or not not you're going to get any response. It's hard for me to imagine anyone not getting a response because we're evolved to produce and consume ketones. And I'll just say also that I have found it very helpful to think of Alzheimer's and this is simplifying things. And I'm not the first person to say this as type 3 diabetes, brain diabetes. And that is part of the reason why this is so interesting to me. Not only is a possible treatment or something that could reduce symptoms, maybe restore function, but also for preventative purposes. If I can do as I did for a long time, for many years I did a seven day water only fast per year and then I would do a three day water only fast once a quarter. I still think that's a good idea. But for whatever reason in the last few years I became less tolerant of that. I would do a seven day fast and I would get really dizzy. If I stood up, I would have memory problems. And I think it was increasing insulin insensitivity in part that caused that. And now that I'm doing this 16,8 intermittent fasting and I'll occasionally just switch it up and ketosis takes a little while to get into so there's a bit of an on ramp. But now that I'm doing this and also feeding my system with exogenous ketones, my working hypothesis is that I'm keeping that ketone machinery busy so that it doesn't atrophy. And my expectation is, and I'm going to test this again soon is the next time I do three days is pretty easy for me at this point. But a seven day, let's just say water only fast, by the way, you don't need to lose much if any muscle mass doing that either. But that's a whole separate conversation. But it's kind of counterintuitive. I will be able to test this hypothesis. Did all this stuff help? Does doing. I think doing 16, eight by itself probably helps you with an extended fast. So we'll see. But my feeling is that I'm late to the party in a sense. But that intermittent fasting is very interesting and it's compelling from a compliance perspective, because, for instance. Well, I just think of my parents or anybody. It's like I can get so many people to change their behavior on the planet and my parents will not listen to a thing I say. So it's very hard to get people to change what they eat. I think it's easier to change when people eat. And just from the perspective of trying to grease the wheels for behavioral change in people who are resistant, who have failed a lot before, this is very interesting.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. People really underestimate what snacking does to keep their glucose levels elevated. Because when you have that full eight hours plus of downtime of no eating, and you really give your body a chance to like. For me, I'm just like you where I did a glucose tolerance test and you want to explain the elevator for way too long. Yeah. So for people that don't know when you go to a fancy doc like Peter Attia or some of these other concierge doctors, and you can ask your normal GP to do this, and some of them will if you have a cool one and they're on top of it, but they'll essentially sit down with you and they will give you a straight glucose drink. So it's think of like Gatorade syrup. Like if it were just pure syrup. Right. And you drink that and then they're going to one draw your blood at baseline and then they'll pick intervals. I can't remember what it is. Tim, do you know off the top of your head.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Every 30 minutes for two hours. Right.
Kevin Rose
And then they're testing for insulin's response. And also where is your glucose over time? And ideally, you want to see a spike up, not too high, and then a rapid kind of return to a normal baseline. Right. And mine just stays elevated for like 5x too long. You know, it just hovers around that, like 135 forever. And it just, you know. So that could be. My muscles aren't sensitized. They're not taking up enough glucose. There's. I have metabolic dysfunction. It could be a handful of different things. And so I'm actually taking a different approach than you in that. I also have been talking to RHONDA a lot.
Tim Ferriss
Phone a friend. Poor Rhonda.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly, Poor Rhonda. So she told me not too long ago, maybe this was six months ago, she was like, there are people. And this is not an endorsement of this, but there are people that are microdosing GLP1s now.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. So I want to hear more about this.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So I started microdosing basically about two months ago. Tirzepatide.
Tim Ferriss
Zepbound. Right.
Kevin Rose
It goes by Zepbound or on the glucose side, Mounjaro, for people that have glucose and diabetes issues. So there's two brands for it. Zepbound is if you want the fat loss. It's the same drug. So essentially the lowest dose you can get that in is 2 1/2 milligrams, but they sell it in vials now. So if you grab yourself an insulin syringe, you can give yourself a little under. What is it that insulin syringe is? Little under one unit, basically.
Tim Ferriss
Iu. Yeah. Internationally. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So a little under one unit of that compound. And I notice immediately, not immediately, but over the course of a week because that's how long you microdose it for. I have lower, just standard resting glucose, and then also my spikes don't get near as high. I probably trim 30% off the spikes and my return to baseline is so much better. And so I'm kind of repairing that through a little bit of a hack. And so there's a bunch of people now that are starting to think of this as more of a longevity drug. And we've known this, that people that take these drugs, they have fewer cardiovascular events. So there are other benefits of GLP1s other than just, can I look good?
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Kevin Rose
So obviously I'm not doing it for the weight loss. I need more for weight loss. But if I can see one ab, I'm not gonna be pissed.
Tim Ferriss
I'll take a two pack at this point. No, yeah, exactly. But try the 16 8, man. It's been been. It's been wild to watch.
Kevin Rose
Well, I mean, you're talking to the guy that created zero, the intermittent fasting. Yeah, I've definitely done my Fair share of 16 8.
Tim Ferriss
It's just like, it takes some time. Just like the long term, durable changes. And I don't mean indefinite changes, but with the ketogenic diet, it really took a few weeks. And then there was a step function in terms of change. A few more things about GLP1 agonists. So I have some of my relatives with the neurodegenerative disease On Tirzepatide. Low dose Tirzepatide. And by the way, folks, talk to your doctors. We are fucking not doctors. We're clowns on the Internet.
Kevin Rose
So just like this is bro science at best. At best.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, bro science, B minus. So they're on Tirzepatide. That's with supervision of very competent doctors for the metabolic dysfunction, primarily. So glucose control, et cetera. Some of these, and I'm not sure which in particular have been studied, but some of these GLP1s appear to have neuroprotective effects also. So that is very interesting to me. There's actually, I think they're called Doras, as sleep medication. Also appear to have some neuroprotective effects, primarily or at least relevant to me, related to Alzheimer's.
Kevin Rose
What was the name of the one? I can't remember the name of it. The sleep medication.
Tim Ferriss
It's a class. So let me get this right.
Kevin Rose
There's a name for that. I just got a prescription to one of these and I had to pay out of pocket for it because I didn't qualify, obviously, for insurance. And it was insane.
Tim Ferriss
Well, hold on, let me just finish my thought for a second here. So I want to hear about this. So I said Nora or Dora. I think I'm thinking of mixing up my words here, but I'm pretty sure, and do your homework, folks, that DORA is dual orexin receptor antagonist. And I've been thinking, because you and I have. I probably still use occasional or continuous trazodone for help with sleep.
Kevin Rose
I don't use Trazodone anymore.
Tim Ferriss
You don't? Okay. I've been thinking of replacing that with a Dora, obviously with medical supervision. Because now that I'm an adult and I can see what's going on, because as a kid, I had a grandmother who kind of disintegrated under the weight of Alzheimer's, but I was too young to really know what was going on. Now that I'm an adult and I can see the personality changes, the anxiety, the depression, everything that comes with it, it, I am looking for a full stack of capped downside, ideally well studied, low risk, but potential upside interventions. So you tried some of these? What happened?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I have one. I'm trying to find the name of it. I'll have to go into my pharmacy.
Tim Ferriss
And look into your pharmacy.
Kevin Rose
Well, I have half an online pharmacy. No, but it's legit.
Tim Ferriss
It's Amazon Pharmacy.
Kevin Rose
I'll just say Amazon Pharmacy.
Tim Ferriss
They just had a dedicated next to your red room. You Have a dedicated pharmacy.
Kevin Rose
You're the one with the red room, bitch.
Tim Ferriss
Well, yeah, that's true. That's true.
Kevin Rose
Cut that out.
Tim Ferriss
Tomato, tomato.
Kevin Rose
Yes, exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Whatever floats your boat.
Kevin Rose
So I tried balsamra.
Tim Ferriss
No idea. Sounds like a Japanimation character.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. So Balsamra is the one that I tried. And it was, I want to say, about $600 off prescription, which was just insane.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's pricey.
Kevin Rose
But I just wanted to see what it would do. Yeah, it's $600. So so far, I only tried it one time and it was great. But I don't know, I've also been sleeping a lot better now that I have not quit alcohol. And so I would say that I need to try it again. So it's on my to do list. It's sitting in the cabinet. I'll give you some next time you come. Once you get your doctor to say that you're allowed to have it.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Black market bro trades. What could go wrong?
Kevin Rose
Give me some of your ketones. Your high quality ketones.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My. Off the back of a truck Bugatti ketones. All right, so I want to give. Not to make this the Rhonda show, but I want to give her two more nods. Two other changes.
Kevin Rose
I've made 10 grams of creatine.
Tim Ferriss
No, I've been doing that for a long, long time, But I have upped the quantity. And actually, if I'm feeling deprived of sleep, my hrv, my heart rate variability was really low. This. I took 20 grams today to try to compensate for some of the effects of sleep deprivation. But the most important, maybe most important one is that I reduced the temperature of my sauna based on some conversations with Rhonda. So I'm no longer doing 194 plus. Throwing lots of water on the rocks, which is what I've been doing for many, many years. Yeah, it's high, but I reduced it to 175. 180. Yeah. And that's based on some literature and studies that Rhonda cited out of Finland. Now, I don't know how well designed these are. I haven't read them myself, but I'm like, you know what? It kind of makes sense to me. I mean, I feel like I am cooking a steak and my head happens to be the steak at 194 plus. Whereas at 180, it's less microwave in my head and more of a full body thermic effect, because too hot could be actually something that accelerates dementia. So it's like, oh, good Lord. Okay.
Kevin Rose
Well, she found a study that too hot is not good for you. There actually was a study that showed you get the inverse at too hot. And that 174ish 5ish is kind of the sweet spot for 20 minutes. Are you wearing a felt hat?
Tim Ferriss
I'm not wearing a felt hat. I probably should because. Yeah, because I'll get hot enough wearing the. I guess it's a wool hat. Yeah, the pros. That's what I meant. Yeah. If you go to Coney island or some of these Russian bathhouses with people with lots of tattoos you shouldn't fuck around with, then not only will they have the hat. Have you ever seen them wearing the oven mitts? The wool mitts?
Kevin Rose
No.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, they look like oven mitts. They're these wool mittens that the super hardcore will wear.
Kevin Rose
Oh, damn, I got to get that.
Tim Ferriss
Sit in there forever and people might think, wait, doesn't wool keep you warm? It's like, well, actually, wool can do both because it's an insulator, so it can keep the cold out, but it can also keep the hot out from what it's covering. So that's a good point. I should start wearing my little Keebler elf hat again. I do have one here. The other one that I'll mention just because I'm sure there are people listening who have, if not chronic pain, then occasional pain. I mean, particularly as you just accumulate life, you get bumps and bruises along the way. I have begun to, and I really try not to take oral anti inflammatories much at all. There was about a year and a half when I was on prescription anti inflammatories and all this stuff, which is just systemically not great for you, but I needed it at the time for back pain. Curcumin, phytosome from Thorne. So really switching from NSAIDs like ibuprofen aka Advil or naproxen sodium, aka Aleve, just shifting away from that stuff to curcumin. Everybody should read the blog post I wrote called no biological free lunch, but there is some trade off. And part of the reason I stopped using curcumin on a regular basis, which also seems to have some potential effects on slowing the onset of neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's. So it seems to have a lot of applications, but if I used it daily for say, a week or two and then I stopped, I would be incredibly sore for a few days afterwards. And I was like, I don't love that. So I'LL probably cycle on and off, but I have shifted to Thornbrand and I have no dog in that fight. Nothing to gain from saying that. Curcumin, phytosome. Those are a few. Now. You've got a lot on your list. I haven't gone too far into the Google Doc. But where should we start? We've covered. Well, where should we start? We've already started.
Kevin Rose
Before we move on from this topic though, I think it's important to mention is that when I first started doing the ketogenic diet with Peter Attia as my physician, he was running my blood work. And I am one of the unique individuals that because heart disease runs in my family, I have that genetic marker that essentially hates saturated fat. And so my apob shot up through the roof. So much so that he goes, he freaked out and he was like, okay, you can never do the ketogenic diet again.
Tim Ferriss
Abort. Abort.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, abortion. So if you're going to do the ketogenic diet, definitely get your blood work done, check your apob, make sure you're working with your doc. It's not a free lunch for everyone.
Tim Ferriss
No, it's not. And also, I'll say so. I'm a cholesterol hyper absorber, so I also have to be very careful with saturated fat intake. So if I'm not in ketosis, I really do watch any type of saturated fat intake. Also have to be careful around MCT oil to a certain extent. But since I am on medication already for controlling some of that, my body was actually able to tolerate the ketogenic quite well. But the point of all of this is you need a professional tracking this and helping you to understand what you're working with. Because the number of people who got really into back in the day, bulletproof.
Kevin Rose
Coffee, oh my God, I had so.
Tim Ferriss
Many of those and then realized, oh shit, that my labs are so bad that it looks like I could have a heart attack tomorrow. You just have to know thyself and that begins with measurement and professional guidance. So, yeah, thanks for saying that.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. All right, let's talk about people in your house. So one of the things I've been thinking about lately is how one approaches modern day home security in terms of how you protect yourself. So it was one of the things I wanted to ask you what you're doing at home, because one of the things that I had recently was a homeless person in my closet.
Tim Ferriss
I thought you were screwing with me, but this is actually a real thing.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So basically what happened is I only say My closet. Because we ended up getting the place so real quick. For people that aren't aware, I was part of those crazy fires that happened out in California. We lost our house. Everybody was safe and sound, which is great. And we moved into an apartment. And recently I found a new place to move into. We were touring the house, and my wife is upstairs. She walks out of the room, and she looks at the person that's showing us the house and goes, there's somebody in the closet. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's an empty house. Like a brand new empty house. Like, what are you talking about? And she goes, yeah, I opened the closet door. He was crunched down in the corner. And he puts his finger up to his lips and goes, shh. Like, don't tell anybody. Nothing more creepy than that. And he walks out and he's like, hey. And we're like, who are you? And he's like, yeah, just living here. And he ended up being a really nice guy. I was actually kind of impressed because he goes, you know, I make the bed every day. I wash my clothes here, because there's a washer and dryer here. And I just. I'm keeping the place nice. But he goes, this is what I do. I felt really bad for him because he said he worked at a car wash. He makes $500 a month. He can't afford a place to live. And this is what he does. He just crashes in homes that are under construction, and they're like newly built homes. And then he started bragging. He's like, you won't believe some of the mansions I've lived in. I've lived in crazy places. And I was like, this is crazy. And so he leaves, and then he won't leave. He's standing in the driveway, just standing out there, and we're like, hey, buddy, you kind of have to go. And then he just stands there and we shut the door. We're like, okay. Clearly he's not complete of sound mind, but he's a nice enough guy. And eventually he knocks on the door again and he's like, I left all my stuff in the cupboards there. And he had all this stuff in the cupboards, Peanut butter and all this stuff. And I was just like, ah, this poor guy. So. So we ended up sending him some. He had a cell phone. So the guy at the realtor was nice enough to send him some cash, help him get a meal that night and whatnot. But it makes you think, especially, I mean, when I was Younger. Listen, I lived in some really shitty alleys and bad places in San Francisco, so I'm fine with that. But when you have kids, it's a different story. It's a different story. So I immediately started thinking, what do you do? And so I went and did some research online and this is one of the pepper sprays that I found, all of the home defense stuff that I had before burned in the fire. And so I'm basically starting from scratch. And so I bought two pepper sprays and a Taser. And I'm just wondering, what does Tim Ferriss do for home protection? I know what you do. You got AR15s and shit.
Tim Ferriss
Well, all right, so this is not, let's see, it's not weapon advice.
Kevin Rose
No.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. This is not professional weapons. Talk to your professional armorer.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss
All right, so I would say a few things. For me, step number one, there are a few things we can say, how do we get really good at pulling people out of the river? But then there's why are people falling in the river in the first place? And it's actually Desmond Tutu paraphrase. But the point of that is that there's what do I do when someone's in my house or who comes to my house? And then there's how do we just prevent that from happening in the first place? There's serendipitous, accidental, unpredictable randomness, and then there's premeditated trying to find you. So I would say that for me, step number one is choosing very carefully where you live if you can, and secondly, just paying a lot of attention to privacy. So if you might have people who are going to seek you out, and this is going to become an increasingly relevant problem for anyone who even becomes micro famous for a second, you think it might not happen. You have, who knows you're doing something funny. You end up with 3,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok or wherever. 3,000 People is a lot of people.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. All it takes is one crazy one.
Tim Ferriss
All it takes is one crazy one one. And for that reason there are lots of basics and none of these are foolproof. But it's like buying your home through an entity of some type, which doesn't need to cost a lot of money, but simply to cut down on how easy it is for casual kind of fair weather stalkers to find you. Never having anything shipped to your home address, always having a UPS store or some type of mailbox where everything is sent. Because if someone, for instance, sends anything to your house, maybe they're trying to be really nice. It's a friend of yours and they send you 1-800-Flowers. This is not a real example. I'm just making that up. But they send you flowers and those businesses rent and trade and maybe even sell mailing lists as part of their business.
Kevin Rose
Or they get hacked.
Tim Ferriss
Or they get hacked. Before you know it, you're doxxed. Your home address is everywhere. So I would say that thinking about privacy and honestly trying to red team yourself, that's just to say we won't get into what that actually means. But the basics are have one of your friends who's smart pretend to be a stalker and try to find you. Preferably somebody who has some technical chops or is at least tech savvy. Because just because someone's crazy does not mean they're stupid. There are actually a lot of of unstable smart people out there. So that's step number one for me. Since taking all of that stuff seriously, I've very rarely had to deal with any type of stalker.
Kevin Rose
People in your closet?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, the people in the closet are a thing of the past college years. Yeah. Then I would say I never thought that high rises condos would be of any interest to me. But there are added layers of security. So my place in Austin is way the hell off of ground floor. There are multiple, I don't want to say security points, but you need a key and a fob to get through the elevators and to get past the front desk and to do these various things. So I would also consider that as a viable option if you currently have or expect to have any type of real public exposure. And again this seems like a problem for the 1% of the 1% of the top creators. That's not going to be the case. And increasingly this is a problem even for people who are micro famous to a few thousand people. So that's step number one. But you're very savvy with a lot of that kind of stuff on a home security level. And you mentioned the kids. You and I have shot firearms together. We did three gun shooting training with Terran Tactical. Terran Tactical way back in the day, before he was ever Tim Ferriss experiment.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Good for him. Yeah. We did a lot with Terran over the span of a few days. Like a bunch of training before he did the John Wick movies and everything else. That's where Keanu Reeves trains. That's an amazing spot. So we both know how to shoot guns and I have firearms and so on. I'm not recommending that for everybody. If I had kids, I would rethink that really, really strongly, because kids are smart. And yes, you can have biometric safes and this, that, and the other thing. But Jim Jefferies does sort of a hilarious and tragically realistic reenactment of gun stuff in the U.S. he's from Australia. He's hilarious and very politically incorrect, if you want to check out his comedy. He's been on the podcast, too. But basically, it's like, if you want your guns ready to go, you need to be able to get them quickly, okay? But if you want them secure enough that your kids are insured against some type of horrible accident, which is sadly pretty common, then you need them really, really fail safe in their protection. So they're sort of moving the right direction with Taser and so on. Some people obviously have physical security. I think physical security is often overrated compared to digital security, frankly. So, for instance, it's like if you have physical security for a portion of the day or at your home, and then you're constantly posting where you are on social media in real time, or you're putting your family on actually publicly accessible social media. It's like, I remember this friend of mine wasn't really thinking about it, right? Because he doesn't have a lot of exposure to crazy people, but has become better known in his niche sphere. And he was at the grocery store with his kids, and somebody recognized his kid and was like, oh, that's so and so. So recognized his kid, not him.
Kevin Rose
Right?
Tim Ferriss
That's spooky as fuck.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, people have done that with my dog. They actually see Toaster and they're like, oh, there's Toaster, and I'm not even there. And they see Toaster and they can recognize him, which is crazy.
Tim Ferriss
So I would say, if you're intending on having people familiar with how to use a taser or pepper spray or any of that stuff, first of all, even with firearms, most police officers in a pinch will not be able to hit someone under dark conditions at any decent distance. And that's not to insult police officers. It's very, very hard, which is why people use bear spray instead of firearms. Oftentimes with bears, it's just easier to get the job done. So you might consider, because that little pepper spray that you just showed me, the effective range of that is probably going to be pretty low.
Kevin Rose
It's like 10ft.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
But it is the highest concentration. This is the heat test. They have those ratings on them. This is the highest legal concentration. You can get, which I think is 2.4.
Tim Ferriss
You get a bear spray that you can hit them at 25ft.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And I mean, if you get to that point and with a taser. I've played around with tasers before, amazing tool. But just like anything else, it takes a good amount of practice to be able to hit anything with that, particularly under duress. So what I'm training for, say bow hunting, which I've done for 10 plus years now. The way that I'll train a lot of the time, as I'm getting closer to the season is I'll do a bunch of kettlebell swings outside, heart rate is peaking, my hands are kind of shaking. And then I will grab the bow. I have the ability to shoot one arrow. That's it. That's a pass fail. And practicing under those heightened conditions I think is important if you're going to take it seriously. But when I've talked to my military friends, I know this is uncorking a lot here, but sure, they're very good with handguns and they're very good certainly with their primary weapon system. And I'll talk to some of them about say hand to hand combat stuff. And yes, they're fundamentally, if they get to tier one operator, they're kind of mutants and they're physically very, very, very impressive. And all of them can fight hand to hand. But the point they'll make, because they're not trying to become a black belt in jiu jitsu necessarily, although some of them are, they'll say, if it gets to the point where I am having hand to hand combat, 17 things have gone wrong. You never want to get to that point. Sure, you want that, you can cover the base, but if it ever got to the point where you're tasing someone or your wife is having to use pepper spray, a lot of things preceding and preventing that would have had to have gone wrong. So I don't know if that's a satisfying answer. I do think, and I'm saying this is someone who takes certain precautions for natural disaster, et cetera, but a lot of the prepper stuff misses the plot, I think past a certain point. And as much as we would all like to think that we're Steven Seagal in the movies, not in real life, plus Jason Bourne, plus American Sniper, we're not, trust me. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure for sure. I mean, how are you thinking about it? Because you're living in la, where it's not exactly marauders in Mad Max. But there are some issues, right?
Kevin Rose
It is certainly depending on the block. You're on a roll of the dice on who's going to confront you. And that becomes very clear at about 3am every night because you just hear the zombies in the street that are strung out screaming their brains out, just. Just going crazy. And so it's less about someone's going to rob me. It's more who's going to stumble into the yard or hop the fence or whatever it may be. So I've already put up those little spikies that will cut you wide open if you try and hop the fence. So those are. You get those on Amazon.
Tim Ferriss
I got those.
Kevin Rose
I put those all around the perimeter. So that's been good. I think about the pepper spray is more like, I'm taking my kids out to the park or out to some place where you could. Could bounce into someone. And for me, it's just like, I don't want to engage. Like, could I take out a crazy person?
Tim Ferriss
No, you don't want.
Kevin Rose
You don't want to engage.
Tim Ferriss
You don't want to engage. I mean, nobody's going to win. Everybody's going to get hurt. And if they have a knife, you're going to get stabbed or cut. Right. There's no way around it. You're not going to pull. I mean, look, I'm sure there are some people out there who are master ninja disarmers, but here's what you can do, do. And I think Krav Maga has a lot to offer, but it sometimes instills a false sense of confidence in people. If you think you can disarm someone with a knife, to have somebody take a nice big highlighter, hold onto it and be like, I'll give you ten bucks for every mark you can leave on me and see what happens, you're going to get covered in highlighter. Those are all cuts. So it's not worth engaging. So I think if I had to bet, I'm sure other folks are going to have good ideas here, but I think spray is probably the way to go.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, spray is the way to go.
Tim Ferriss
It's going to have the most margin for error, and you'll have more rounds per se than a taser if you miss fire or you miss the target.
Kevin Rose
Yeah. Fun times, though, people in your closet. That was the weirdest house showing I've ever been to.
Tim Ferriss
I could also also totally see your wife just going, there's a person in the closet.
Kevin Rose
Right, Exactly. It didn't freak out at all.
Tim Ferriss
Very calmly.
Kevin Rose
It was very strange. I'm glad I kept my cool because I was just like, I get very protective of, especially when my kids are there. And so he ended up being a very nice guy.
Tim Ferriss
Guy, yeah. And when I was younger, growing up as a townie with a rat tail, working in the restaurants on eastern Long island where there are a lot of wealthy people, I would look at them with the hedges and all the protection and I would just think to myself, what a bunch of assholes. They think they're so important, blah, blah, blah. And now I'm like, yeah, okay, I get it. You don't want some weirdo just like digesting everything you're doing in the house. Like someone watching tv. There are a lot of unstable people out there. I hate to say it, and it's not like they're the majority of the population, but it just takes one.
Kevin Rose
It's funny, I was walking through a grocery store the other day here in la and it's so strange because I had this flashback when I was a kid and my dad would essentially say, okay, go have fun in the grocery store. So I just run around and go to the toy aisle and see what they had and just try and grab some Twinkies and sneak them into the cart when he wasn't seeing and stuff like that. That was my childhood. And I looked around and I was like, I don't want my kids out of my sight. It was just filled with. I mean, there was a lot of people there that were clearly either were on drugs or had just taken a step too far in that direction. And we just didn't have that. And it wasn't like. Like I was standard kind of lower middle class growing up. It just. The drugs weren't as hardcore. You know, we would have alcoholics. Like, that was like kind of it. Like if you saw somebody down on their luck, they were like an alcoholic.
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Kevin Rose
And now you see people that are sadly just don't have the care and they're talking to themselves and, you know, it's brutal. It's really brutal. And it's tough because there's no easy fix, you know?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. So throwing stars and sharks with lasers, folks. I think that's where we live.
Kevin Rose
I had throwing stars as a kid.
Tim Ferriss
So dangerous. Another thing that I was allowed to do, another thing, literally, I just threw out my throwing stars that I got from Asian World of Martial Arts magazine, like, catalog. I think they shipped it from Philadelphia. And I'm just like, I cannot believe I was allowed to play with these. Because what happens you throw a throwing star at a tree, it just bounces back and shoots right back at you.
Kevin Rose
No, no, no, no. Here's what we did. So this was the hack 100%. They would just bounce back at you. So my dad, for some unknown reason, let me go into the garage and use his metal grinder polisher to make him sharper. I made him sharp, and so mine would stick in the tree. And so you would go to our front yard and there were all these holes in our tree from me just throwing. Throwing stars. And I think he kind of looked down, was like, oh, that's cool. The kids are throwing stars at the tree.
Tim Ferriss
Different world. I'm just different world. Amazed that I'm alive.
Kevin Rose
Honestly, when I was back era where he would just be like, we're going to this grocery store. Jump in the back of the pickup and put your arms over the side. And yeah, the word of advice was like, lean up against the back so your backs are touching the back of the pickup.
Tim Ferriss
So you're protected.
Kevin Rose
Yes, you're protected.
Tim Ferriss
It's like the brace position in an airplane in case of impact. You're like, exactly. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
That's going to do a whole lot.
Tim Ferriss
I mean, I remember. Sorry. I'll shut up on the reminiscing. But it is kind of wild. So I was into skateboarding. You were too. I was never terribly good at it it. But I had confidence way and enthusiasm way beyond my capabilities. And my parents, to their credit, were cool. They made a homemade quarter pipe. Right now that sounds cool. And I loved it. But homemade quarter pipe, the angles aren't quite right. And the way that we would use this because there's just grass and gravel around is drag it out. And cars would go by. And then you drag the quarter pipe out into the street.
Kevin Rose
Yes.
Tim Ferriss
We didn't start skateboarding and then try not to get hit by traffic and then pull it back. Oh, for sure.
Kevin Rose
We would just leave a quarter pipe sitting in the street, and then they'd be like, drag it back to the sidewalk. And we'd drag it back. And then I had a trampoline in my backyard. I was lucky enough, my dad eventually bought us a trampoline at Costco. And I used to to climb on my roof and jump off the roof onto the trampoline. And he would hear me climbing on the roof and he'd come out and be like, get off the damn roof. And that was kind of it. And then he just watched me jump off the roof onto my back on the trampoline.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Well, by a consequence of many miracles, we are still here today.
Kevin Rose
Exactly. Exactly. Explains the back pain.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, explain. Yeah, no shit. Jesus. Yeah, it's not exactly a total mystery. So I want to hear about something that you texted me and people might be. Who knows. I think it's interesting. Let's hear about it. We got book recommendations coming. We got all sorts of stuff coming, so don't skip out. Also, shameless plug CoyoteGame.com, just in case doesn't come up later. It's going fucking bananas right now, which we should talk about.
Kevin Rose
But it's awesome.
Tim Ferriss
Why is you texted me in.
Kevin Rose
Let's go gentle here on what I said exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Okay. All right. You know what? I'm not even going to say it because I don't want to misstep in this. Then put more work on my post production. All right. What did you say to me?
Kevin Rose
Well, we were talking about venture capital funds.
Tim Ferriss
We were talking about venture capital. And what did you say?
Kevin Rose
The way that I put it is that you had asked me about investing in certain funds and I said I would be careful because I believe that venture is in a very. They're not necessarily on sound footing right now.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, this is the most doctored Kevin I've ever seen.
Kevin Rose
I know, I know. Well, I work in venture capital, so that's probably part of the reason why I have to be careful on what I say here.
Tim Ferriss
So is it fair to say that the gist of what you're saying is VC is going to get. Venture capital is going to get a lot harder.
Kevin Rose
I believe it's going to be a lot harder for early stage funds. Let's first start with the problem and what's changed. So essentially what we've seen historically with venture capital is that venture capital can be a fantastic return for investors if done right because you get into early stage predominantly technology startups who are doing venture on the tech side. And if you get into the Next Uber or OpenAI or whatever, pick your unicorn, the returns are just insane and they outpace that of pretty much all public S and P or whatever it may be. It's just a good asset class to be invested in. Not to have all of your eggs in that basket. But you certain a lot of professional investors would want some exposure to venture endowments. Want exposure universities. That's where a lot of the LPs, the limited partners that invest in these funds come from.
Tim Ferriss
It's also how the GPS make a lot of their management fees. Yum, yum, yum.
Kevin Rose
That's right. Yes, Yum yum. Partners at firms both get management fees and they also get upside in the return on those funds.
Tim Ferriss
And also for people who have not enough context, and I would have said this in the intro somewhere, but you have a ridiculous track record with not just creating companies, but investing in super early stage companies. And I've said this to a lot of people. You're a rare breed because you are good, very good at investing in a whole lot of different asset classes at different stages of size and growth. And it's very hard to do that. So I just want to understand that Kevin is speaking from a place of being a very good practitioner of this craft. Continue.
Kevin Rose
I appreciate you saying that. No, thank you. It's kind of you to say. I've certainly enjoyed the journey. It's a crazy journey when you get to see these things at a very early stage and watch them grow and have eventual outcomes. But the craziness that's happening right now, it should come as no surprise for people listening, is that AI is the absolute darling of Silicon Valley right now. So everyone is talking about AI. All the funds are geared towards AI. I'm a partner over at True Ventures. I would say nine out of 10 deals that we do these days are all AI focused in some regard. There was a couple decades of what Marc Andreessen famously coined as software eating the world. And now we've kind of transitioned into this world of AI eating the software. So AI is doing a lot of both retooling of the software to make it more, I would say AI dominant in that you need less employees and AI does a lot more of the heavy shouldering of the burden and work. And so it's causing a lot of disruption all across multiple industries and multiple verticals, starting with customer service, eventually getting into coding and beyond drug discovery. I mean, basically everything.
Tim Ferriss
And eventually is like, I mean, next 12 months. I mean, it's got to be. I mean, I would imagine law firms are already reading the writing on the wall for hiring of associates for rote tasks that can be done in 30 seconds by AI. I know. Actually a senior partner at a law firm, he is in charge of Spearhead, heading huge AI initiative within the firm for cost cutting and efficiency.
Kevin Rose
Absolutely. I've seen it on the legal side as well. Our mutual friend Josh Cook has talked to his junior associates and said, look to your left, look to your right. One of you is not going to be here in the next five years. And it's most likely you're just going.
Tim Ferriss
To be the AI five Years is generous.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, five years is very generous. The tea leaves that I'm reading right now where I think that Venture is going to have, have a hard time is that I would say on non capital intensive businesses. Meaning that if you're building something that is hardware based, you're building the next robotics company or whatever it may be, you need a lot of capital to kind of get that off the ground. There's no doubt that that's still the case. And so Venture makes a lot of sense and I feel very fortunate that we were quite good at that particular area in that we've done the pelotons and the rings and the Fitbits and all those companies that kind of go off and build on the hardware side on the software. What's happened in the last, I call it 18 months is that the barrier to entry for a new engineer? You don't even have to be an engineer. They call it vibe coding now. And so if you have an idea, you can spend the next 48 hours, maybe let's just say double that, watch YouTube videos and be, I would call it a second year computer science student. In terms of your kind of efficiency.
Tim Ferriss
Like what you can produce.
Kevin Rose
Yes. So Tim, even today, like if we started today and we said, okay listen, we're going to make you watch these 10 videos on cursor and AI and use Claude code and insert the four or five most popular AI coding tools right now. I would bet without a doubt within four days you could dream of up any app that you can imagine in terms of the Tim, Tim, Ketone dosing regimen app, whatever it may be and ketonesuppositories AI. Yeah, exactly. The Bugatti suppository, Ketone Suppositories gets sued immediately.
Tim Ferriss
That'd be awesome.
Kevin Rose
There's a co branding deal there somewhere you're missing out on, but I'm not even kidding. You could actually ship that to the app Store and have a fully functioning. And how much is it going to cost you? It's going to cost you. Traditionally you would have gone out, you would have hired a designer, you would have gone out, you would have found an engineer, you probably would have maybe needed a backend engineer. Probably mostly front end. You'd have picked your language, it would have been a whole, call it 250k.
Tim Ferriss
Project, side end, power top, all those, right.
Kevin Rose
You know all the angles that you need to hit so you already speaking code. Look at you. But imagine that's 250k traditionally, right?
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
That's $50 now it's so nuts because your Cursor account is going to be $50 a month and you can go and you can deploy that on Vercel for an extra 20 bucks a month.
Tim Ferriss
I don't even know what Vercel is, but I want your help doing this because this is something I want to do. And just to interrupt for a second and then I want you to tell me what those names correspond to because I haven't been tracking this very closely. I've been meaning and meaning and meaning to dig into Vibe Coding and then in a team thread with my employees, just in a hours at night for a couple of weeks, one of my part time employees created an app, a website, everything he wanted. Had to pay a little bit for a Getty image to use Canva Pro to make some graphics, but all in, I think $240 is what he said. And he was using base 44, which six month old solo owned vibe coder. Base 44 sells to Wix for 80 million in cash. That was June of this year. And then Lovable, this was in the same thread, which is why it's right here, top of mind for me. Vibe coding platform Lovable becomes fastest growing software startup ever Swedish AI. Gotta love the Swedes, right? I mean they've got some good stuff. Swedish AI startup Lovable says it has surpassed 100 million in annual recurring revenue ARR just eight months after launch. This makes it the fastest ever software company to reach the milestone, eclipsing the historically rapid growth rates of companies such as Cursor and Wiz. That's bananas.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Eight months. Oh my God.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, yeah. Lovable I think is probably my favorite hosted Vibe coding platform that's out there. If you're really taking Vibe coding seriously, is seriously as you want to take that statement because it's still not coding. You're kind of vibing your way through code. You would be using Cursor, not Lovable. But Lovable is. It's great. It's a great place to start actually.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Okay.
Kevin Rose
So the point being is that venture capitalists, what they do at the seed stage and the early stage is it's their job to go out, find entrepreneurs that are building exciting new products, write that first, call it 1, 2, $3 million check, get their ownership.
Tim Ferriss
I don't need to get on bended knee for $240.
Kevin Rose
Exactly. So what's going to happen is you're going to have 10x the amount of ideas hitting the market because anyone can come code and probably even greater than that. Call it 50X. So we're going to try and fail a lot faster, which is great. And then you're going to have. And I've already seen this startups that are one or two people, full investment, call it to their first million users, might be a couple few thousand dollars and they're already profitable and on their way to great things. And yes, they're going to have. It's going to be buggy right now because the code is a little bit janky and a little bit half broken. Broken that's going to get fixed. It won't be in six months. Exactly. And in a year it's going to be just if it's second year CS student right now, in a year to be full on college grad and you're off to the races and you don't need to raise venture capital. Why would you?
Tim Ferriss
Why would you? Why? And also how would venture capitalists even begin to filter and sort the winners from the losers?
Kevin Rose
There's going to be so many with that volume.
Tim Ferriss
You can't have coffee dates with even than 1/100th of those founders. Nor would they necessarily take the coffee to begin with.
Kevin Rose
Exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Maybe if they just want to meet you. Sure. And maybe at later stages if they're going to be really fueling massive growth. But here's a question for you. You've got kids? I don't have any that I know of. I hope to change that at some point soon. But how are you thinking about educating your girls?
Kevin Rose
I would say I don't believe there's a profession that is really kind of immune to the AI wave. I believe it's going to touch anything and everything that's out there. And so at the end of the day this is really tough because I think the answer is the lamest one, which is you should be doing what you're most passionate about and where you can find your life's work and artisan crafts, handmade goods, things of that nature that will stand out and still be desirable because of the human touch touch side of things.
Tim Ferriss
So you're saying I should buy a lot of Etsy?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I was just gonna say. But then you just turn into an Etsy wool hat maker for saunas. It's kind of your gig.
Tim Ferriss
Mitts. Sauna mitts. I'm all about the sauna mitts.
Kevin Rose
It's wild because for the last two decades of my career I would have said computer science. Computer science, like it's all about, you know, these tech jobs in the tech industry. That's the future. And I think if someone was just going into college and they said, hey, should I study cs? I don't think I would say yes. But I don't know where to point people because everything is kind of effed.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. I mean, there is. And this isn't like Schadenfreude on my side wanting to celebrate the misery of others, but there is kind of this poetic justice to techies creating tools that.
Kevin Rose
Are killing themselves that people thought would.
Tim Ferriss
Take away kind of working class blue collar jobs. And nope, surprise, bitch, we're taking all the coding jobs, we're taking all of the white collar jobs. Those are going to get smashed. I mean, so many of those jobs that are basically occupied by people who have helped create these tools are going to get obliterated.
Kevin Rose
Well, you know what's really interesting about that, it's a great, great insight. And one of the things that I have found, which is pretty exciting actually, is that a lot of technical people that I know that are very senior computer science, like hardcore, they're like, screw AI. Yes, it can look at my code base and tell me where to look for something, but I am going to be the one that manually writes that code because ego, ego, ego, that plays out. And then you have the scrappy designer, that's the creative that says, I have never coded in my life, but I have a lot of ideas. And all of a sudden that person is empowered. That creative mind is empowered in a way that they have never been empowered.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's exciting.
Kevin Rose
It's interesting because Andreessen Horowitz actually did a post about this. It was this LinkedIn post or something where they said, we're looking for designers to be the next CEOs, where they were really brilliant in saying, actually the next wave forever. We've always said technical co founders. Who's your technical team? What's the technical shops? That's been the kind of lens at which we've evaluated the quality of a startup. I think that really shifts to more of the creative side. I don't think VC is dead. I think what happens is that valuations go up, which is great. It means entrepreneurs give away less of their company and you fund them at a later stage. Because ultimately if you're going and you've really hit the ball to the park and you need to grow from 2 to 200 people for a variety of different things that you need. It turns out you need a lot of stuff as a startup, not just more engineers. You're going to need some working capital. And VCs that's where VCs will step in.
Tim Ferriss
And also, to be clear and correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but there are many sectors and many categories where venture capital or some source of financing is still, still inevitable. Right? It's like if you're creating an anduril, you need cash, right? If you're producing something that has a hardware component, you're going to need some cash.
Kevin Rose
Exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I've thought, and I don't know if this is just a simplistic, primitive way to think about it, but I'm really wondering, with everybody focusing on the hottest girl at the dance, which is AI and everything that has AI slapped on it, what are the neglected, unsexy, really fast growing sectors? And it makes me think of, I remember somebody showed me a chart, somebody could look this up, we'll put it in the show notes. But if you just invested in Domino's Pizza at the right time, it would have smashed every tech company. The growth rate was just shocking to behold. It's like what's the equivalent of Domino's Pizza that has nothing to do, at least at its core, AI, Right? So in some sense, maybe it's outside of the overbearing influence of that. So maybe there's less likelihood of it getting completely disrupted. Although, like you said, nothing is immune. But Coca Cola is going to be Coca Cola. I don't want to invest in poison, so I'm not going to, no offense, Coke, invest in that. But there are certain things that may be fast growing and maybe more predictable, and I'm just wondering what those things are.
Kevin Rose
So I have two that I think I've identified and I have no crystal ball. I have crystal balls, but I use them for myself.
Tim Ferriss
That didn't sound right.
Kevin Rose
Yep.
Tim Ferriss
Got to be careful, you could end.
Kevin Rose
Up in the er. It can be painful at times. Let's rephrase that. This is my best guess at where I see the puck going on a couple of different fronts. One is that I believe that. Well, I know this to be certain. Actually it's kind of the same bet in just two slightly different ways, which is that the lifeblood of AI should come as no surprise.
Tim Ferriss
It's human data.
Kevin Rose
It is human generated, actual human created data. In order for it to learn, to evolve, to understand where humanity is going, it has to drink from the blood of us humans to survive us.
Tim Ferriss
Such a nice vampire man servant. So polite.
Kevin Rose
This is why Reddit is getting $50 million plus a year to train on their data is why the Tim Ferriss blog should be charging AI to train on all of the original content that you've written. So what I really liked was a move that Cloudflare did here just a few weeks ago where they said, okay, everyone in the world uses Cloudflare, that is their DNS more or less, because they have anti DDoS protection and all that good stuff. Which is a fancy way of saying, saying that your servers stay up and they're really good.
Tim Ferriss
Keep your side up.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, they keep your sight up. So what they have done is they said if you own original content like a Tim Ferriss, we can block the AI bots. So we won't let them train on your data, but we're also going to create a marketplace.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that's fucking brilliant.
Kevin Rose
Want to sell to the AI companies, they can bid to actually license your data. Yeah, isn't that brilliant?
Tim Ferriss
That is brilliant. And the first thing that comes to mind is, I mean there are a lot of smart people working in these AI companies because they just use Wayback Machine to scrape all your stuff anyway. But I imagine Cloudflare is thinking about it.
Kevin Rose
But yeah, well, I mean that's also. It's always going to be the most recent stuff as well, right? Like there's no doubt they could go get a copy of Wikipedia and train on that. And they have, but they're going to need what does Tim Ferriss think about the latest GLP1s? And that's going to come out next month, right. So they always need to be training on the latest stuff. So that's one. And part of the reason why, and I swear this isn't a self plug, but part of the reason why we're Alexis Ohane Ian, the co founder of Reddit and myself are rebooting dig.com is that we believe that human authenticated original content is going to be so important to safeguard. Because if all of these social sites are just flooded with bot content, man.
Tim Ferriss
Just looking at the comments on some of these platforms, I'm like 90 plus percent of this is all bot. It's all bot.
Kevin Rose
Here's the crazy thing is like you can still tell a little bit that it's bottom, but in a few years, or not even that in a few months, six months, you won't even know it's bots. You'll just be sitting there being like, wow, that was a really thoughtful review that person wrote about X headphones. And then you'll buy them off Amazon. You'll be like, why the hell these Headphones suck so bad. It's because there were 37 bots and they're all championing these headphones about how they're so amazing and it's all bs, everything, nothing is to be trusted. So there's this whole theory called the Dead Internet theory, which is that eventually the Internet is just going to be completely overrun by agents, AI agents that are infinitely patient, that will write perfectly screwed up copy enough for you to believe it. Right. Because it can't be perfect.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
And so this is just all going to come. And so for us, what we're focused on is really creating a safe haven for humans to have real conversation. And that's exciting. So those are the two kind of things that I believe original content creators, as long as you can prove that you're an actual human, are going to be be rewarded ultimately, hopefully by the AIs that crawl you.
Tim Ferriss
How do you think that authentication is going to work? Because doing private and public keys and stuff, there's too much of an education hurdle to make that work, I would think. I think maybe Sam Altman has yet another company that is focused on human authentication. But what do you think is going to actually make the cut and become the standard of the driver's license for proving this is me? There's so much AI deepfake stuff out there right now. I can speak personally and it's so good. And within six months, like you said, it's going to be indistinguishable or close to indistinguishable.
Kevin Rose
This is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking pretty deeply about. And I traded a couple notes with Sam and I met with the CEO of the retinal scanner company, Tools for Humanity. They're making that orb that scans your eyeball and went and met with them and I actually got my retina scan and did that whole process. It is not for everyone. I think a lot of people will kind of freak out by that. It is anonymous. Like they've done it in a way that shards your data. They can't link it back to you, all that good stuff. But that's too much explaining. Consumers are not just going to believe that they'll use it for their TSA precheck or whatever it may be to skip the line. But I don't think for everyday purchases or general Internet trust, it is going to hit scale.
Tim Ferriss
Scale.
Kevin Rose
They're paying people to do it right now, which I think is probably a signal that you don't quite have the right product. If you have to pay people to use it. So I don't know, it'll certainly be an authentication method that a lot of sites will use and support. And I could see us doing that as well.
Tim Ferriss
I can see users of the Internet, let's just say, broadly speaking, not wanting to use it for. Well, if they had to for a checkout purpose to pay for things, then they would. But having a lot of resistance for, say, just logging into Facebook or Instagram. But as a creator, if I want to give my fans a way to confirm that something is mine, then I think you're heavily incentivized to use something like that.
Kevin Rose
Right. And I think there's two sides of the.
Tim Ferriss
But the education part is so hard just to teach people what to look for. It's got to become as common in the vernacular as driver's license for people to just know what to look for. If I have to be like, okay, guys, I'm gonna teach you the exact watermark and this and that. And watch out for these fakes though, because they're very similar. But it's never gonna work. Right.
Kevin Rose
And that's where I think there's gonna be a couple things. We're talking about a handful of different things here, right? Because we're talking about consumers. How do I trust another consumer? That when they say these headphones are the best headphones, I can really believe that. And then you're talking about how do I know that Tim Ferriss is Tim Ferriss. Right. Those are two different things. Different, I think on the. I'm actually writing an article for Wired right now about this, where the trust is moving from a binary thing, where we had binary trust before, meaning that back in the day, and I don't think this is any longer the case, but more or less, you could go onto Twitter, when it was called Twitter, and you would see a blue check box next to someone and say, oh, that person's been verified or validated in some way. So it's a very binary. I, Yes, I trust this person because of said box and graphic trust is moving to a gradient. And I think it's very much going to be a score or a level based trust system where trust will be defined by a collection of actions that you take online and a collection of proofs that you do online. So a hardcore proof would be, I got my retina scanned. I'm showing you that I got my retina scanned and here's my proof of that. A gradient would be be. I've been a paying customer for this service for X number of months I can prove it, or I have purchased these headphones. That's what the Amazon verified purchase does. Right. And so there are going to be open standards for that and it's going to be messy, but it will work. And that if you come on the future version of Digg, for example, if you come on there and you say, hey, I own an OURA ring and I love it, anyone can say that. And so how do I trust that? And so one way to trust that is to there's these fancy technologies, I won't get into it here, but they're called ZK proofs, where you can go in and I can authenticate basically with my Aura account and prove to you without exposing who I am, but I can do cryptographic proof that I have owned an Oura ring for five years and I have used it daily. And so those types of proofs almost like the way that we see secure certificates when we check out now on an e commerce site, and we trust them because they are cryptographically secure, we will have those types of proofs for almost anything and everything that exists online. And so when you engage with another user, you'll be able to say, okay, I'm clicking on Tim. How do I know that these are the ketones that he trusts or whatever it may be? And there will be multiple ways to cryptographically prove in a non geeky way. That's the key here. It can't be something that my mom won't understand.
Tim Ferriss
Read this white paper. Exactly, exactly.
Kevin Rose
It can't be that. So it's going to be a little rough for the next couple of years while we hammer this stuff out, we come up with standards, we figure out with very easy consumer ways to show this. But ultimately, at the end of the day, there needs to be this. And also the other thing I was going to tell you is I believe deeply that human connection matters and that we need to really encourage more of that to happen. So one of the things, or without trying to, to spill the beans too early, and what we're building at Digg is a lot of proof around.
Tim Ferriss
I was still thinking about the crystal balls. Go ahead.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, we're not going to crack the crystal balls on this yet, but I will say that in person means a lot. And so when you actually gather in a location with other people, proving with technology that you've actually met in person and have add broken bread in person is going to create a trust network that is unlike anything that can be done online. And so that's on us to build and figure out as well. Which is going to be pretty exciting.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I have this might seem like I'm shilling my bags, but I've thought this for a long time. Just launching a card game literally as we record this. But I am so long analog and the reason that I'm long analog is that at least one of the silver linings I think of this post truth Internet experience, at least for a while. While it's going to be messy AF for a while.
Kevin Rose
Yes.
Tim Ferriss
And it's also a cat and mouse game. Right. It's not like you create these authentication there's no response. It's a cat and mouse kind of cloak and dagger situation. There's so many incentives, financial and otherwise to scam people that trust me, the scammers have great some of them are really sophisticated and it's an arms race. And I think speaking as someone who's not an engineer, I'm not a computer scientist but I would like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy. I've social media apps off my phone for the last handful of years and I have systems for trying to sort fact from fiction. But it has become so exhausting and it's going to become 100x exhausting. I'm done with it. I don't want to walk into this house of funhouse mirrors and watch things that are fake, read things that are fake, have to decipher what's true and what isn't and get misled. There's so much downside that I really am optimistic, at least I hope that people are going to actually do what we're evolved to do, which is spend more time interacting with humans irl. And we're seeing that with running clubs and board game nights and these various offline activities that are exploding in popularity. Who knows if that'll sustain. But you're seeing it in every major city in the United States at least. And, and that gives me some hope because if there were nothing to offset the opiate addiction of short form video and perfectly tune algorithmic feeds, we're entertained to death. We're done.
Kevin Rose
This is exactly why I think a big portion of this social site that we're building is going to be about in person connection. It really has to be. And actually Tim, you were a big inspiration for this. This one of the things that we talk about. Remember when you had your. You did those global meetups where people gathered in.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose
That was so cool. Do you remember the name of the service that you used?
Tim Ferriss
It was Let Me get it right. It's River. I think it's River IO and let me just make sure I'm getting that right. It's getriver IO in person event and social platform for communities. So I used this service to run the podcast 10th anniversary global meetups around the planet. We had 157 cities, thousands of people meeting up in person who have already a bunch of common interests or at least lived experience. They've listened to the podcast so they have something automatically they can talk about. We're meeting in person and it was so much better than I could have ever hoped for. It was so much fun. Some of these meetups had hundreds, hundreds of people. Some had four or five. And what I hoped would happen and what did happen is a lot of these people have stayed in touch and they're meeting up afterwards. It wasn't just a one and done.
Kevin Rose
Right. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Great experience. And the team over there was awesome.
Kevin Rose
Yes. So I met with her because of you and then she was amazing. And we're going to use them for our Digg launch. In fact, we're doing a meetup tonight. Close to 100 people in LA just randomly threw it out there last week.
Tim Ferriss
I love it.
Kevin Rose
It's exactly this where if we can build part of that functionality into the product itself and encourage people with these interests that when you figure out that your weird is not so weird. If you're into Japanese woodworking or the Tim Red rooms that you love, whatever you're into.
Tim Ferriss
Kevin's crystal balls.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. You can find 10 other people that are and you can go to break bread with them and hang out. But I think that is the future because don't get me wrong, I still want to launch that app and learn about those funky weird things that I would only find online. And you and I trade so many ridiculous videos. I wouldn't want that to go away.
Tim Ferriss
No.
Kevin Rose
But I also need to go and get outside and actually breathe some fresh air and meet people. Right. So I think that has to be a big part of what we do at Digg. And it was a lot of it was inspired by that. Your success there.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know that. And since we're so on topic, I gotta just flash this guy right here. So as you know, I've been so nervous about this and excited. But so Coyote, this card game, it's fast, casual, a couple minutes to learn, 10 minutes to play. Kids love it. Turns out people have had a few drinks or smoked a little weed. Also love it. Does not help performance, but does make it pretty hilarious to watch. We'll have to see if that's okay to keep in.
Kevin Rose
But we just call that a friend of ours that likes to play games.
Tim Ferriss
And it's finally launching everywhere. Walmart's had the exclusive for a few months and they've been actually awesome and it's been a bestseller and it's started to go kind of bananas. And gameplay videos, videos we've texted about this a little bit, but gameplay videos online have more than 300 million views now, dude, which is so amazing.
Kevin Rose
So crazy. Congratulations, man. After the NFTs, I'm glad to see you actually doing something that works. Yeah, thanks.
Tim Ferriss
Got to practice my art in a different way. And you know, we're not going to get into a blood wrestling match or nft. I am still going to do a bunch with that Cockpunch Legends of Varlata universe, you wait and see. I am actually going to do a bunch with it. But yeah, it's been going nuts. If people go to Amazon or wherever Target, it's all over the place. And it's 8,000 plus retail locations as of this week. It's feeding into all the locations. That's amazing. And it's actually giving me both flashbacks that are really pleasant and also a little bit PTSD with my first book because the inventory is not getting to the warehouses fast enough. So it's actually. It can be a little challenging to buy this thing.
Kevin Rose
But hey, soak it all in, man. Enjoy that moment though, right? Because you're in a great place to even have that issue. It's so awesome.
Tim Ferriss
And you know what's also been super fun is I've played with friends. I've seen all the play testing with families because we tested it with like 100 plus families. We tested the hell out of this. I mean, so many iterations and it's ready, it's going. But I had a chance to play with a group of strangers, two different groups of strangers at a game shop in Brooklyn last weekend. And we were recording it for an instructional video. And they're not actors, they're people who love games, but people I'd never met before. And the amount of fun that we had, that was the real test for me, right? Because it's like if I have a bunch of my dumb friends and we've had two drinks each and we have so much fun. Anyway, together. Together, it's a warm audience. The game still has to work, and it did. But with a group of strangers where it's A little uncomfortable in the beginning and everyone's a little stiff. And then by the end, we're like, slapping shoulders and high fiving, laughing our asses off. I was like, okay, I can finally exhale a bit with this thing. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Okay, okay, okay.
Tim Ferriss
It's actually awesome.
Kevin Rose
Dude, that is so awesome.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
You caused a micro fight in our house last night because the game.
Tim Ferriss
Was it over whether somebody messed up or not?
Kevin Rose
No. So here's what happened. I was playing Roblox with my kids, and then Dari had her headphones in and so she couldn't hear me. And the kids were asking questions, and I was like, she's listening to her podcast. And I'm like, can you take them out so you can engage with the kids? And she's like, well, if we weren't playing this and we could play something like Coyote, then we wouldn't have this issue because we could all play as a family.
Tim Ferriss
And I'm like, oh, fuck. Oh, man. Quick, funny note on Roblox. I actually want to interview the founders of Roblox Bucks. It's such an incredible. Just such a wonder they've created. And they've also. Actually, I'm sure you did not know this. Maybe you did. They have funded a ton of research related to dietary interventions for various psychiatric conditions, like the ketogenic interventions. So they've actually funded a lot of science related to that. So on a whole bunch of levels. But the reason I brought up Roblox. Roblox is because you sent me and Saga this video, this screen capture of playing Roblox, which is honestly really relaxing. It's so relaxing. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
The garden that I grew.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, the garden grew with the cherry blossoms. Very relaxing to watch. But there was this classical music playing, and I was like, wait a fucking second. You stopped drinking and now Kevin's listening to classical music. What is happening here?
Kevin Rose
It's built into the game. Grow a Garden has millions of users now. I have the beautiful cherry blossom bushes if anyone wants to come check out my garden. And I built little forts for my kids to play in there. I've got some great bamboo, and I just got a rare little red Zen dragon today, which is cool.
Tim Ferriss
Congratulations. Thank you.
Kevin Rose
It was 1% chance to get it on a roll. 20 bucks per 10 rolls.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, wow.
Kevin Rose
What a bunch of geniuses. Yeah. And I won't even tell you what I've. I'm not proud.
Tim Ferriss
This is like, when they're doing their internal presentations, they're like, okay, so Q2 has been great. They're like really, it all hinges on the 1% of overspenders. Here's an avatar. We call it Kevin Rose. Exactly.
Kevin Rose
We don't know who this user is, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss
Oh, my God. Awesome, man. So nice you to see. See you always. Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Good to see you as well.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. We got to hang. This is also all this talking about in person. I'm like, man, we got to hang in person. I'm sorry. You got family and lots of stuff. I didn't give you a ton of heads up either on the wilderness trip, but we got to do something. Got to do something in person.
Kevin Rose
100%. Japan trip or something.
Tim Ferriss
Japan trip or. I will be in LA actually next month. So I'll let you know. Either next month or the following. So I'll let you know. I'll be in la.
Kevin Rose
Awesome. Let's do a little meetup.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
Kevin Rose
Speaking of in person stuff.
Tim Ferriss
Kev.
Kevin Rose
Kev.
Tim Ferriss
All right. Sweet, man. Well, I think you got anything to add for folks? Anything.
Kevin Rose
Tell people if. Yeah. So we. That crazy site that I was telling folks about, dig.com with two G's is rebooting dot com. Yeah. From the old Internets, if you remember it, from way back in the day. It's rebooting. Alexis and I and my CEO Justin are working hard at work on it. We want to give people an early invite. It's in beta right now. If you want to check out a next gen, crazy fun social network that is all about news and craziness around the web, email and we will put you on the early invite list. Tim. Tim. It's two Tim's igig.com digg.com and we will let you skip that list and get you on one of the early invite lists.
Tim Ferriss
Tim. Tim. And just FYI, I'm not going to disclose because I don't know if it's public, but that's a long, long. There's a long list.
Kevin Rose
Several hundred thousand people.
Tim Ferriss
The bouncer will be letting you skip and come through the velvet ropes.
Kevin Rose
We've only let 25,000 in so far and we have a couple hundred thousand people waiting on the wait list. And so far people are loving it. And we're just getting started, so we've got a lot to build.
Tim Ferriss
So fun. So fun. Well, you look great, man. You sound great. Congratulations on the 100 days. That's a big, big, big deal.
Kevin Rose
It sucks that you feel so much better. I hate it because I feel better. I'm slimming up a little bit.
Tim Ferriss
I assume you're being sarcastic.
Kevin Rose
No, everything Seems better. I want to have a couple drinks.
Tim Ferriss
But you're getting to spend money on Roblox instead. Instead of the vice that kills your liver, you got a vice that kills your bank account. You got to trade.
Kevin Rose
I will say I've definitely just shifted that funnel of cash over straight to Roblox in a grow garden. That little freaking dragon guy cost me like, two.
Tim Ferriss
That's the Kevin I know and love.
Kevin Rose
There you go. He's back.
Tim Ferriss
He's back.
Kevin Rose
Let's do some nanoblocks together.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I'm down for some nanoblocks. I think I need one. That is sub 500 pieces to start with.
Kevin Rose
I'll save this little ramen for you and we'll do it live on video. That'd be fun. 140 pieces.
Tim Ferriss
Have Craig Mott set up the audio for us.
Kevin Rose
Yeah, exactly. All right, cool.
Tim Ferriss
Cool, man. Awesome to see you, buddy.
Kevin Rose
All right, brother, talk soon.
Tim Ferriss
And everybody listening. I guess we'll probably have some show notes for this. So Tim blog, podcast, random show, and just look for the newest ones. All right, everybody, be well, be kind, and thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizzard, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about.
Kevin Rose
If you'd like to try it out.
Tim Ferriss
Just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser. Browser Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I am always on the hunt for protein sources that don't require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. I don't want to eat sawdust. I also don't want a candy bar that's disguised as a Protein bar and that's why I love the protein bars from today's sponsor David. They are my go to protein source on the run. I throw them in my bag whenever I am in doubt that I might be able to get a good source of protein. And with David protein bars you get the fewest calories for the most protein ever. David has 28 grams of protein, 150 calories and 0 grams of sugar. I was actually first introduced to them by my friend Peter Attia, MD, who is their chief science officer. Many of you know of Peter and he really does his due diligence on everything. And on top of that Dave David tastes great. Their bars come in six delicious flavors. They are all worth trying and as I mentioned before, I will grab a few of those from running out the door if I think I might end up in a situation where I can't get sufficient protein. And why is that important? Well, adequate protein intake is critical for building and preserving muscle mass, especially as we age. And one of the biggest things that you want to pay attention to is counteracting sarcopenia age age related muscle loss. And for that you need enough protein. When in doubt, up your protein. Protein is also the most satiating macronutrient. What does that mean? It means that protein out of carbohydrates, fat and protein inhibits your appetite while also feeding all the things you want to feed which helps you consume fewer calories throughout the day. You're less inclined to eat garbage. All of that contributes to fat loss and reducing the risk of various diseases. And now you can. Guys. Listeners of the Tim Ferriss show who buy four boxes, get a fifth box for free. You can check it out. You could also buy one box at a time. Try them for yourself at davidprotein.com Tim learn all about it. That's David. Protein.com Tim to get a free box with four box purchase or simply learn more, check it out. Davidprotein.com Tim creatine isn't just for muscle. It turns out it's essential daily fuel for your brain, your body and long term performance. For me I have Alzheimer's and dementia risk. In my family the cognitive benefits are the reason I take creatine every single day. And it also seems there's some evidence to support if you don't get enough sleep that you can use creatine to compensate to recover from that. I also use it for that purpose and today's episode sponsor Momentous is the gold standard in creatine. There's a lot of BS floating around a lot of questionable creatine but I choose them. Why? Because they source creapure Creatine, the purest, most effective creatine monohydrate available single sourced from Germany and not cut with fillers or junk which is hard to avoid otherwise. Their new lemon travel packs make consistency easy, naturally flavored perfectly portioned single serve packets that you can take with you on the road or at any time to make sure with water and you're set. Every batch is NSF certified for sport. This is something I look for on a lot of products I use, which means it's independently tested for safety, label accuracy and banned substances. So if you've been curious about creatine, this is your moment to get back on track or try it for the first time with a formula you'll actually enjoy that will make you feel great thanks to superior quality and quality assurance. So just go to livemomentous.com that's live m o m e n t like livemoment o u s livemomentous.com Tim for 35% off your first subscription or simply use code Tim at checkout livemomentous.com.
Episode Summary: The Tim Ferriss Show – The Random Show with Kevin Rose
In this dynamic and wide-ranging episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim Ferriss engages in a candid and insightful conversation with his long-time friend and esteemed venture capitalist, Kevin Rose. The episode delves into personal growth, health optimization, the future of technology and venture capital, and the importance of real-world connections in an increasingly digital age.
The episode kicks off with an enthusiastic celebration of Kevin Rose’s significant milestone: 100 days without alcohol. Tim expresses heartfelt congratulations, highlighting the personal and health-related triumph this represents for Kevin.
Notable Quote:
Kevin Rose [08:03]: "The milestone is no alcohol for 100 days... especially given how much of an alcoholic I was."
Kevin shares the underlying factors that contributed to his sustained sobriety. He emphasizes the importance of surrounding oneself with supportive individuals who have successfully navigated similar challenges. Additionally, Kevin discusses the mental shift from viewing sobriety as a long-term goal to focusing on daily victories.
Notable Quote:
Kevin Rose [12:32]: "It's about winning today. And so if you can reframe it as like, just not today."
Tim opens up about his personal health journey, detailing his experiments with the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. He explains how these dietary changes have led to his best lab results in over a decade, including improved insulin sensitivity and overall metabolic health.
Notable Quote:
Tim Ferriss [30:18]: "I have my best lab results and I get three or four tests a year. Probably my best lab results in the last decade."
Exploring further into his health regimen, Tim discusses the use of exogenous ketones to maintain ketosis without strict dietary adherence. He compares different ketone supplements, addressing their palatability, cost, and cognitive benefits.
Notable Quote:
Tim Ferriss [45:57]: "You can absolutely feel it. Your brain, also cardiac tissue, loves ketones."
Kevin introduces the concept of microdosing GLP1 agonists, such as Tirzepatide (Mounjaro), as a method to enhance insulin sensitivity and regulate glucose levels. He shares his personal experience with reduced glucose spikes and improved metabolic function.
Notable Quote:
Kevin Rose [52:20]: "I have lower, just standard resting glucose, and then also my spikes don't get near as high."
The conversation shifts to personal safety when Kevin recounts an unsettling experience of finding a homeless individual in his closet during a house showing. This leads to a broader discussion on effective home defense strategies, including the use of pepper spray, tasers, and the importance of maintaining privacy to prevent unwanted intrusions.
Notable Quote:
Tim Ferriss [66:58]: "This is not weapon advice. Talk to your professional armorer."
Kevin provides a deep dive into the shifting landscape of venture capital, particularly the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) in startup ecosystems. He predicts that AI tools are lowering the barriers to entry for developing applications, leading to a surge in new startups and challenging traditional investment models.
Notable Quote:
Kevin Rose [87:43]: "AI is doing a lot of both retooling of the software to make it more, I would say AI dominant... causing a lot of disruption."
Expanding on the AI discussion, Kevin introduces the concept of "vibe coding"—a method where individuals without formal engineering backgrounds can rapidly develop applications using AI-powered tools. He highlights the implications for venture capital and the startup world, suggesting a shift towards more creative and less technically intensive ventures.
Notable Quote:
Kevin Rose [90:02]: "You can spend the next 48 hours... and be, I would call it a second year computer science student in terms of your efficiency."
Tim proudly announces the launch of his first-ever card game, "Coyote," celebrating its widespread success across 8,000 retail locations. He shares anecdotes from playtesting sessions with families and strangers, emphasizing the game's accessibility and fun factor.
Notable Quote:
Tim Ferriss [115:22]: "It is actually giving me both flashbacks that are really pleasant and also a little bit PTSD with my first book because the inventory is not getting to the warehouses fast enough."
Concluding the episode, both Tim and Kevin reflect on the critical need for fostering genuine in-person relationships amidst the rise of digital interactions. They express optimism for platforms like Digg, which aim to facilitate authentic human connections and community building.
Notable Quote:
Tim Ferriss [110:03]: "I am so long analog and the reason that I'm long analog is that at least one of the silver linings I think of this post truth Internet experience, at least for a while."
This episode serves as a compelling exploration of personal resilience, health optimization, technological innovation, and the evolving paradigms of venture capital and social interaction. Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose provide a blend of personal anecdotes, expert insights, and forward-thinking perspectives, making it a valuable listen for enthusiasts across various domains.
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Disclaimer: The discussions on health supplements, diets, and medical interventions are based on personal experiences and should not be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making significant changes to your health regimen.