Pod Insights The Tim Ferriss Show #822: The Random Show — Ketones for Cognition, Tim’s Best Lab Results in 10+ Years, How Kevin Hit 100 Days Sober, Home Defense, Vibe Coding Unleashed, and More About this episode Welcome to another wide-ranging "Random Show" episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose https://www.kevinrose.com/ (digg.com https://digg.com/)! We cover Kevin's sobriety journey and marking 100 days without alcohol, my results with the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, GLP-1 agonists, home security, the future of Venture Capital, AI, authenticating yourself online in a world of deepfakes and anonymity, the cultural shift toward human-to-human connection, Roblox, and more. Enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
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Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Start.
[00:06:54] Kevin celebrates 100 days sober! Why and how?
[00:15:16] Nanoblocks: Kevin's new Japanese micro-building hobby.
[00:18:16] The Slow TV movement and Craig Mod's ambient recordings.
[00:20:58] Craving analog experiences and wilderness trekking.
[00:22:24] Writing with background movies.
[00:23:42] High hopes for The Naked Gun reboot.
[00:24:35] Kevin's improved communication since quitting alcohol.
[00:26:28] My health interventions for cognitive protection.
[00:29:00] How ketogenic diet and 16/8 intermittent fasting led to my best lab results in 10+ years.
[00:33:35] Weight control regimens we don't recommend.
[00:39:51] Exogenous ketones: Qitone vs. premium options.
[00:50:32] How glucose tolerance tests work.
[00:51:58] Microdosing GLP-1 (tirzepatide) for glucose control.
[00:54:12] DORA sleep medications and neuroprotective effects.
[00:56:55] Belsomra trial and cost considerations.
[00:57:52] Sauna temperature optimization based on Rhonda Patrick's research.
[01:00:28] There are no biological free lunches.
[01:03:27] The time Kevin found a homeless person in his closet.
[01:06:11] Modern home security and privacy measures.
[01:19:42] Pondering how we survived childhood.
[01:24:23] AI-driven venture capital landscape changes.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 23,641 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tim Ferriss? Hello, boys and girls. Oh, Dookie 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, D-I-G-G.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 ever card game called Coyote, coyotegame.com.
0:44 Tim Ferriss? You 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 families, 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.
1:25 Tim Ferriss? 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 GLP-1s, 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
2:07 Tim Ferriss? 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 is 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
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6:36 Speaker 01 Can I ask you a personal question?
6:37 Speaker 02 No, it would seem inappropriate, Tim.
6:40 Speaker 01 What if I give the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
6:54 Tim Ferriss? Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Kev Kev. Tim Tim. Brand new show. Here we are again. Nice to see you. Here we are. Good to see you as well. Crazy listeners and viewers out there, we have a lot to talk about. This is gonna be an action-packed episode. Features all sorts of new biological hacks, psychoemotional 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? The milestone is no alcohol for 100 days. Fucking A, man. Congratulations. Thank you.
7:40 Tim Ferriss? That is huge. Especially given how much of an alcoholic I was. Yes. 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 successes varied, but nothing has approached 100 days. Nothing. Yeah. Nothing. Well, I mean, don't make it seem like it's that bad. I mean, when you were laying under those overpasses, just... Hey, listen, you've also taken a stab at non-sobriety with me many times. I know, I know. Well, I was gonna say, 100 days sober, even for someone who does not consider themselves a drinker, but let's just say for someone who drinks occasionally,
8:22 Tim Ferriss? socially, like, 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, maybe your answer's changed. 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, 5X, 7X, what they should be. Oh, wow. Okay. So that was number one.
8:54 Speaker 02 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 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, you know, 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.
9:39 Speaker 02 So it was a very common, very normal thing for us as a household.
9:43 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, for a lot of people.
9:44 Speaker 02 To just crack a bottle and just finish the whole bottle between two people, you know? 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?
10:06 Tim Ferriss? It's a lot. And just, 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 to 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 it two and a half drinks apiece, would be a light night in New York City. And to do that, minimum three nights, but three, four, five, six nights per week. And a lot of the groups I know at least, that is just par for the course.
10:40 Speaker 02 Right.
10:41 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
10:41 Speaker 02 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.
10:55 Tim Ferriss? Only have one liver, so you want to take care of that baby.
10:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. The nice thing obviously about the liver is that if, 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, you know, 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. You know, there's like those dry Januaries and I would have a dampish January where like you have like 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, you know, Kevin, it's kind of a golf clap at one month.
11:39 Speaker 02 Three months is where the magic happens in terms of how you feel, your energy, your mood, weight loss, glucose control, all of the things that you've said you want to have. You know, 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, you know, if I'm being honest, like when you have a partner where you're dealing with a couple of 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, you know?
12:23 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 shot.
12:29 Speaker 02 It was surrounding myself with, with people that had done this before.
12:32 Tim Ferriss? How did you find them?
12:34 Speaker 02 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.
12:43 Tim Ferriss? Sure. Easily three.
12:45 Speaker 02 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'd seen this, that had 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.
13:25 Speaker 02 It's not about the three months. It's just about winning today.
13:28 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
13:29 Speaker 02 And so if you can reframe it as like, just not today. Yeah, I can have a drink tomorrow, but just not today.
13:34 Tim Ferriss? Not today, Satan. Not today, Satan.
13:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. And it sounds so silly, but there's these little tiny things.
13:41 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, right? But like today or tomorrow, today, it's very digestible.
13:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, a hundred percent. And so that was a big thing in having those friends. And the first thing they did being, you know, some of them are, one's still in AA and two are ex AA. It 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, 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? You know? And so I think after you get to kind of six, well, I'm just speaking for myself.
14:36 Speaker 02 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 you're just sitting there thinking about drinks.
14:56 Tim Ferriss? Of weed. No kidding.
14:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, I started cocaine and I just did a bunch of weed, but other than that, no, I don't, I don't, I wish I liked weed. I do not like weed for some reason.
15:05 Tim Ferriss? I think Sigmund Freud, for a while, was viewing cocaine as the solution to heroin. I'm not making that up. It's like a very famous psychoanalyst. Anyway, but that's not that. You didn't go for, uh, snow blindness.
15:19 Speaker 02 No, but I did go for this. Look at this.
15:22 Tim Ferriss? Oh, okay. Now, this looks like a Japanese Lego-ish. Those are NanoBlocks?
15:30 Speaker 02 Yes. So this is called NanoBlocks, and it's one of the things I wanted to talk about today.
15:34 Tim Ferriss? All right.
15:34 Speaker 02 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've created, look at how small this block is.
15:49 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, he's holding it up.
15:50 Speaker 02 If you listen to audio.
15:51 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, it's about the size of a baby aspirin. I mean, it's tiny.
15:54 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. And so they literally sell NanoBlock branded tweezers to put these things together.
16:01 Tim Ferriss? That's the most Japanese thing I can imagine at this moment.
16:04 Speaker 02 Exactly. And so the instructions are horrific, which actually makes it more fun. Look at this. Look at this bad boy.
16:12 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 gonna guess here, one, uh, 857 pieces.
16:29 Speaker 02 No, this was, this was 20, 2,500, I think, pieces.
16:33 Tim Ferriss? God.
16:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:35 Tim Ferriss? So this'll take you a good, solid week.
16:41 Tim Ferriss? It'll keep your hands, idle hands in the devil's workshop, but not if you have NanoBlocks.
16:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. So I will say that little hobbies like this, especially ones that you can do with your kids. Yeah, so this one back here is also a Lego.
16:55 Tim Ferriss? Oh, that's, I guess, I'm blanking on the exact name, The Great Wave, Hokkaido. Almost everyone will have seen this in some form or fashion. That's, that's cool. That's very cool.
17:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, so that actually is legit Lego. This is not NanoBlocks, but this one is, 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 like, 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 instructions.
17:47 Tim Ferriss? Probably doesn't help very much.
17:49 Speaker 02 Right, but, but look at this, look at this kit here.
17:51 Tim Ferriss? Oh, right.
17:52 Speaker 02 So they have these cute little kits.
17:53 Tim Ferriss? Cup of noodle, basically.
17:55 Speaker 02 That's little ramen.
17:56 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, 140 pieces, ages 12 plus.
17:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, so this ramen is going to be about the size of like, like a little teacup, like a 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.
18:16 Tim Ferriss? So two things, number one, if a 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.
18:26 Speaker 02 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 like, actually Craig Mod is quite good at this, where he'll go out, you had him on your podcast, fantastic, all things Japan, Craig Mod's the best. He has gone out and he's done these ambient recordings where he just goes to these like rural parts of Japan.
18:44 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
18:44 Speaker 02 And he just sets up his mic and he just, 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. Like there's this whole thing where people watch people groom and shear sheep.
18:58 Tim Ferriss? Have you seen this? 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 is an account of a Norwegian truck driver, this is on YouTube, just driving through different parts of the countryside in Norway. And it has like five 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.
19:42 Tim Ferriss? Like Craig Mod 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 the
20:13 Speaker 02 I've been to this bar.
20:14 Tim Ferriss? Okay, all the ambient sounds and Craig Mod, what a gem, definitely look him up. Yes. The name is MOD, as you heard.
20:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, 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? Like, 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 the left and right audio channels. And it creates this illusion of like a depth of audio as you're listening, which is just brilliant.
20:53 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
20:54 Speaker 02 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.
21:10 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, more analog.
21:11 Speaker 02 More so than I ever have.
21:11 Tim Ferriss? For sure.
21:12 Speaker 02 Do you find that to be the case with yourself?
21:14 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 gonna leave mine behind. I don't need it. What am I gonna do?
21:33 Speaker 02 You just bring in your, your printed Playboys?
21:36 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, yeah.
21:37 Speaker 02 You're going all analog?
21:38 Tim Ferriss? I'm bringing 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 it's, 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 gonna say cat on the wall. Not even sure what that would be. Maybe it's, it sounds like a Japanese T-shirt, but fly on the wall experience allows people to put something in the background.
22:23 Tim Ferriss? 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, the four hour work week, four hour body, four hour 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 or they 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 work week,
23:08 Tim Ferriss? it was Shaun of the Dead and the first Jason Bourne. And then for the four hour 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. So I watched Snatch and Babe like 5,000 times each. It's, I mean, absolutely high hundreds each, but it's just to have something in the background that is comforting.
23:36 Speaker 02 Right.
23:37 Tim Ferriss? While I'm isolated and I'm listening to music and writing. So it makes sense to me.
23:41 Speaker 02 You know, The Naked Gun is coming back.
23:43 Tim Ferriss? Yes, I do. I saw the reviews and I'm like, God, I hope it's true. Cause The Naked Gun was so good.
23:49 Speaker 02 Yes.
23:50 Tim Ferriss? 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, you know, Johnny Depp has chops. But when they did a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I was like, oh, I don't do it. Gene Wilder is gonna be really hard to top. That's gonna 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. I'm just curious to see if they're gonna keep up with that because The Naked Gun, you could not make today. Well, maybe you could again now. As it was. I mean, yeah. Yeah, there'd have to be some script doctoring for sure. Let me, before we get to The Naked Gun, I just want to. Yes.
24:35 Tim Ferriss? I want to make an observation, which is, you know, you and I text a lot and we're in, you know, 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
25:15 Tim Ferriss? 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. That's interesting. Not that you were like bitching and moaning all the time before, but the change is very noticeable. Yeah, because I feel like your bitching has gone up. Yeah, you know. You get older. Something's not right here. Yeah. No, I appreciate you saying that. 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 just go out here. I know my wife's gonna listen to this, but I might as well say it anyway. You argue less when you're both not drinking. Yeah, for sure.
26:00 Tim Ferriss? And you and I are always, you know, we've, we've been known to text each other various grievances with our partners and people we've been seeing. So. Yeah, you need to do it. Yeah, you need to do it. You need an outlet, especially. You need an outlet. 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, you know, 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.
26:40 Tim Ferriss? 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, APOE 3.3. They shouldn't have a high
27:20 Tim Ferriss? predisposition to Alzheimer's. And I'm APOE 3.4. 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 trying to, and
28:01 Tim Ferriss? 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. Just 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 gotta do it. And I've been
28:45 Tim Ferriss? 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. Right.
29:27 Tim Ferriss? 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 like ribeye cut on top with some cheese. Like, 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
30:10 Tim Ferriss? 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. Yeah, that's my problem. 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, eight
30:52 Tim Ferriss? hours of eating. Eight hours could be noon to eight o'clock, could be 2:00 PM to 10:00. And then continued with the ketogenic diet, but just two meals a day, typically like one at 2:00 and then one at, say, you know, 8:00 or 9:00. 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.
31:35 Tim Ferriss? 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 16-8 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 his credit 16-8 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.
32:20 Tim Ferriss? 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 like four hours, right? Something like that was the dogma.
32:56 Tim Ferriss? And I think that was a 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.
33:34 Speaker 02 That's amazing.
33:34 Tim Ferriss? I think I could do the intermittent fasting indefinitely. And on top of that, I'll say, one of 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.
33:47 Speaker 02 I was just gonna ask you that.
33:48 Tim Ferriss? You can lose a lot of muscle mass.
33:50 Speaker 02 Right.
33:51 Tim Ferriss? 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 gonna 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.
34:36 Tim Ferriss? 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.
34:53 Speaker 02 Right.
34:54 Tim Ferriss? 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.
35:12 Speaker 02 Is that MCT oil that you're taking with the... You're running to the bathroom.
35:17 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 like 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.
35:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, and lack of sleep.
35:41 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.
35:57 Speaker 02 Let me guess, NOXplored?
35:59 Tim Ferriss? It was, so NOXplored, Little Red's. Yeah, NOXplored 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.
36:11 Speaker 02 Finfin and shit?
36:12 Tim Ferriss? No, not Finfin, 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. Like you are really hammering yourself and your system.
36:27 Speaker 02 Did you ever hit Broncade?
36:28 Tim Ferriss? Broncade is probably Ephedrine, I would guess.
36:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know, but did you ever hit it when you were younger?
36:33 Tim Ferriss? Actually, an inhaler? Or what do you mean?
36:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, cuz that, cuz that's what people would do. Like the bodybuilders would hit Broncade and they would put on sweatshirts and go like on the treadmill?
36:42 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, no, no.
36:43 Speaker 02 And just sweat their faces off and just get six-pack abs.
36:46 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 Primatene mist tablets, now you have to show your driver's license because I believe you can, 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, like you can spot them from a mile away.
37:29 Tim Ferriss? And like 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 do that. Any other thing else like joint pain? Some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet have, people say they, joint pain goes away, they get some of these other things. So another reason in addition to mitochondrial health that I want to do ketosis is because
38:13 Tim Ferriss? 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.
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39:50 Tim Ferriss? 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, did you, maybe you introduced me to her, and she was like podcast number 12 for me out of 800 and something, which I didn't realize, it was so early. She's 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
40:34 Tim Ferriss? 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, you know, this kind of cellular self-eating slash cleanup? And she sent me a case study of an Alzheimer's patient, pretty progressed Alzheimer's, like very impaired function, who was given a ketone monoester. So this is a liquid that you, basically just a shot, two or three times a day. And the, I recognize this is
41:13 Tim Ferriss? N of 1, so take it with a huge grain of salt, but still a 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.
41:51 Speaker 02 Wait, can we ask you one question too, 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 in at the time. And this was recently. So are these the ones?
42:07 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 gonna 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 like 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.
42:46 Speaker 02 Okay. Is this one palatable?
42:48 Tim Ferriss? This one is palatable.
42:50 Speaker 02 Cause you should tell people like the hardcore stuff is no joke, right? Like it's almost cruel to be giving it to someone with dementia and that you're asking them to chug gasoline.
42:58 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, I thought it was gonna 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 mean, I was having, dating a lovely girl right now and I made some salad and she tried to eat it and she's 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 like, 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. Cause literally, I think he's been public about this. Peter Attia, famous doc, trained at Hopkins, Stanford,
43:43 Tim Ferriss? et cetera. A lot of people will know him. He told me about the first time he tried the OG ketone mono esters and he took a shot and he basically had to run to the sink and like white knuckle the sides of the sink as he's dry heaving for like 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 GI distress may vary. So you might be fine.
44:16 Tim Ferriss? You might not be fine.
44:17 Speaker 02 Chase it with an Imodium, you'll be fine.
44:19 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, so, and, and of particular danger is caffeine, ketones, and creatine, which is also great to take.
44:27 Speaker 02 And the ACT.
44:28 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 a 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, 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.
45:01 Speaker 02 Wow.
45:02 Tim Ferriss? 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.
45:21 Speaker 02 So Tim, for people that are listening and they, they're hearing you talk about two different ketones here, it begs the question, like if you are pricking yourself, doing a 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, you know, and a half hour later, for five minutes later, you see that your ketone bodies are elevated and you're like, okay, it's in my system, it's working.
45:48 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, and, and I don't know about you, but I can feel it. It's like a light switch goes on. Cognitively, your brain, also cardiac tissue, loves ketones.
45:57 Speaker 02 Yes, brain juice, it's just like.
45:59 Tim Ferriss? It's brain juice and finish what you're saying and then I'll add something else.
46:02 Speaker 02 My question for you is, why would you even consider the more expensive $20 to $30 when there are so many other readily available, you know, call it the $5 to $7 kind of range ketones that are out there on market? Like what are the advantages of that $30 model?
46:19 Tim Ferriss? It's hard for me not to dox the supplier by giving too much detail, but I, what I will say is this. Subjectively, and I've checked with a few people who've tested it, nothing feels like these ketones. Really? Nothing, not even close. It's the Bugatti of exogenous ketones. Like 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.
47:04 Tim Ferriss? 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 you're, 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
47:46 Tim Ferriss? a taste test for whether or 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 it 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, I did for many years, I did a seven day water
48:30 Tim Ferriss? 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 eight 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
49:14 Tim Ferriss? 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. 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
49:58 Tim Ferriss? 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.
50:18 Speaker 02 Hmm.
50:19 Tim Ferriss? And just from the perspective of trying to grease the wheels for behavioral change, and people who are resistant, who are, who have failed a lot before, this is very interesting.
50:31 Speaker 02 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
50:50 Tim Ferriss? You want to explain what that is?
50:51 Speaker 02 I stayed elevated 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, You could 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. Yeah. 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? Yeah, every 30 minutes for two hours. Right. 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 Recovery.
51:36 Speaker 02 Return to a normal baseline, right? And mine just stays elevated for like five X 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.
52:06 Speaker 02 Phone a friend. Poor Rhonda. Yeah, exactly. Poor Rhonda. So she told me not too long ago, maybe this was like six months ago. She was like, there are people, and this is not an endorsement of this, but there are people that are microdosing GLP-1s now. Yeah. So I want to hear more about this. Yeah. So I started microdosing basically about two months ago, Terzepatide. Zepbound. Right. It goes by Zepbound or on the glucose side, Monjaro 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 two and a half milligrams, but they sell it in vials now.
52:47 Speaker 02 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. IU, yeah, international unit. 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 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, you know, like
53:32 Speaker 02 there's, so there are other benefits of GLP-1s other than just can I look good, right? So obviously, I'm not doing it for the weight loss. I need more for weight loss. But, you know, if I could see one ab, I'm not gonna be pissed.
53:46 Tim Ferriss? I'll take a two pack at this point. No, but try the 16-8, man. It's been, it's been wild to watch.
53:54 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, you're talking to the guy that created Zero, the intermittent fasting yeah, like I've definitely done my fair share of 16-8.
54:00 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, like it really took a few weeks and then there was a step function in terms of change. A few more things about GLP-1 agonists. So I have some of my relatives with the neurodegenerative disease on trisepotide, low dose trisepotide. And by the way, folks, talk to your doctors. We are fucking not doctors. We're clowns on the internet. So just like.
54:28 Speaker 02 This is pro-science at best.
54:30 Tim Ferriss? At best. Yeah. Pro-science B minus. So they're on trisepotide, 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 GLP-1s 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.
55:05 Speaker 02 What was the name of the one? I can't remember the name of it.
55:08 Tim Ferriss? The sleep medication. It's a class, so let me get this right.
55:13 Speaker 02 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.
55:26 Tim Ferriss? Well, let me just finish my thought for a second here.
55:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:28 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, 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 probably still use occasional or continuous trazodone for help with sleep.
55:51 Speaker 02 I don't use trazodone anymore.
55:52 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, 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?
56:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have one. I'm trying to find the name of it. I'll have to go into my pharmacy and look.
56:31 Tim Ferriss? You know.
56:32 Speaker 02 Into your pharmacy? Well, I have half an online pharmacy. No, but it's legit. It's Amazon Pharmacy. I'll just say it.
56:40 Tim Ferriss? All right.
56:40 Speaker 02 Amazon Pharmacy.
56:41 Tim Ferriss? Like a dedicated, next to your red room, you have a dedicated pharmacy.
56:45 Speaker 02 You're the one with the.
56:47 Tim Ferriss? Well, yeah, that's true. That's true.
56:49 Speaker 02 Cut that out.
56:50 Tim Ferriss? Tomato, tomato.
56:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
56:53 Tim Ferriss? Whatever floats your boat.
56:55 Speaker 02 So I tried Alsomra.
56:57 Tim Ferriss? No idea. Sounds like a Japanimation character.
57:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. So Belsomera is the one that I tried and it was, I want to say about $600 off prescription, which was just insane.
57:12 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, that's pricey.
57:13 Speaker 02 But, you know, I just wanted to see what it would do. Yeah, it was $600. So, so far, I only tried it one time and it was, it was great, but I don't know. I've also been sleeping a lot better now that I have not quit alcohol, you know? 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. When you get your doctor to say that you're allowed to have.
57:37 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, yeah, we're great. Black market, bro trades. What could, what could go wrong?
57:45 Speaker 02 Give me some of your ketones, your ketones.
57:47 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 like the Rhonda show, but I want to give her two more nods. Two other changes I've made.
57:58 Speaker 02 10 grams of creatine.
58:00 Tim Ferriss? No, I've been doing that for a long, long time, but I have upped the quantity. Yeah. And actually, if I'm feeling deprived of sleep, like my HRV, my heart rate variability was really low this morning. So 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 like 175, 180. Yeah. And that's based on some literature and studies that Rhonda cited out of Finland.
58:44 Tim Ferriss? 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, ah, good Lord, okay.
59:11 Speaker 02 Well, she found a study that too hot is not good for you. Like there actually was a study that showed you get the inverse at too hot. And that 174-ish, five-ish is kind of the sweet spot for 20 minutes. Are you wearing a felt hat?
59:25 Tim Ferriss? I'm not wearing a felt hat. I probably should because I don't really. Yeah, cuz I'll get hot enough wearing the, I guess it's a wool hat. Yeah, the, the, the pros. That's what I mean. Yeah, if you go to like 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? No. Yeah, there are these like, they look like oven mitts. There are these wool mittens that the super hardcore will wear and they'll just. Damn, I gotta get that. Sit in there forever. And people might think, wait, doesn't wool keep you warm? It's like, well, actually wool can do both cuz it's an insulator. So it can keep the cold out, but can also keep the hot out from what it's covering.
1:00:09 Tim Ferriss? 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 don't, 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, 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,
1:00:52 Tim Ferriss? 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 like, 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, uh, I don't love that. So I'll probably cycle on and off. But I have shifted to.
1:01:34 Tim Ferriss? Thornbrand, and I have no dog in that fight, nothing to gain from saying that. Kirk human 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, oh, where should we start? We've already started.
1:01:51 Speaker 02 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 Tia 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.
1:02:19 Tim Ferriss? Abort, abort.
1:02:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, abort. So if you're gonna do the ketogenic diet, definitely get your blood work done, check your ApoB, make sure you're working with your doc. Like, it's not a free lunch for everyone.
1:02:29 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, I mean, the number of people who got really into, back in the day, bulletproof coffee.
1:03:10 Speaker 02 Oh, my God. I had so many of those.
1:03:12 Tim Ferriss? And then realized, oh, shit, my labs are so bad that I, 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.
1:03:26 Speaker 02 Yeah. All right. Let's talk about people in your house.
1:03:30 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:03:32 Speaker 02 One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how one approaches modern day home security in terms of like how you protect yourself. So it was one of the things I wanted to ask you, you know, what you're doing at home because one of the things that I had recently was a homeless person in my closet.
1:03:55 Tim Ferriss? I thought you were screwing with me, but this is actually a real thing.
1:03:59 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, 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, um, 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
1:04:41 Speaker 02 down in the corner and he puts his finger up to his lips and goes, shh, like, don't tell anybody. Like 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, I just, you know, I just live in here. And he ended up being like 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,
1:05:23 Speaker 02 in homes that are under construction and are like newly built homes. And he was, 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, and so he leaves and then he won't leave, like he's standing in the driveway, like just standing out there. And we're like, hey buddy, like you kind of have to go, you know? And then he just stands there and we were like, shut the door. We're like, okay, clearly he's not a 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 like all this stuff. And I was just like, ah, this poor guy. So we ended up sending him some, he has a cell phone. So we, the guy, the realtor was nice enough
1:06:07 Speaker 02 to send him some, some cash to like help him, you know, 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, like
1:06:20 Tim Ferriss? It's a different story.
1:06:21 Speaker 02 It's a different story, right?
1:06:23 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
1:06:23 Speaker 02 And so I immediately started thinking like, what, 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.
1:06:36 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:06:37 Speaker 02 And so I'm basically starting from scratch. And so I bought two pepper sprays and a taser. And I'm just, just wondering, what does Tim Ferriss do for home protection? I know what you do. You got AR 15s and shit.
1:06:49 Tim Ferriss? Well, all right. So this is not, let me, let's see. There are
1:06:56 Speaker 02 It's not weapon advice.
1:06:58 Tim Ferriss? No, yeah, this is not professional weapons. Talk to your professional armorer.
1:07:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
1:07:05 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 like, why are people falling in the river in the first place? And it's actually, it does mean to to 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 slash unpredictable randomness. And then there's like premeditated trying to find you. So I would say that for me, step number one is
1:07:49 Tim Ferriss? Choosing very carefully where you live, if you can. And secondly, 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 microfamous 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. Yeah, all it takes is one crazy one. All it takes is one crazy 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
1:08:32 Tim Ferriss? 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. Not to, this is not a real example. I'm just making that up. But they, they send you flowers. And those businesses rent and trade and maybe even sell mailing lists as part of their business. Or they get hacked. Or they get hacked. Like, before you know it, you're doxed. Your home address is everywhere. So I would say that thinking about privacy
1:09:16 Tim Ferriss? and honestly, trying to red-team yourself, that's just to say, we won't get into what that actually means. But it's, the basics are have one of your friends who's smart, pretend to be a stalker and try to find you, right? 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 unstable, smart people out there. So that's step number one for me. Since taking all of that stuff seriously, I very rarely had to deal with any type of stalker issues. People in your closet? People in my, I haven't, yeah, the people in the closet are a thing of the past. And- College years. Yeah.
1:10:00 Tim Ferriss? 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 a 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. Right. 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.
1:10:43 Tim Ferriss? 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 Taran Tactical.
1:11:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:11:04 Tim Ferriss? Way back, way back in the day before he was everywhere.
1:11:06 Speaker 02 Tim Ferriss experiment.
1:11:07 Tim Ferriss? Yeah. Yeah, good for him. Yeah, we did a lot with Taran over the span of a few days, like a bunch of training before he did the John Wick movies and everything else. Right. 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 like biometric safes and this, that and the other thing. But you know, Jim Jefferies does sort of a hilarious and tragically realistic reenactment of gun stuff in the US. 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.
1:11:50 Tim Ferriss? 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.
1:12:08 Tim Ferriss? Fail safe in their
1:12:10 Speaker 02 Right.
1:12:10 Tim Ferriss? Protection, right? So you're just sort of moving in 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.
1:12:56 Speaker 02 Oh.
1:12:56 Tim Ferriss? Like recognized his kid, not him.
1:12:59 Speaker 02 Right.
1:12:59 Tim Ferriss? That's spooky as fuck.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, people have done that with my dog.
1:13:03 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:13:04 Speaker 02 They actually see toaster and they're like, oh, there's toaster and I'm not even there.
1:13:07 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:13:07 Speaker 02 And they like, they see toaster and they can recognize him, which is crazy.
1:13:10 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. I mean, and that's not to insult police officers. It's very, very hard, which is why people use the 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.
1:13:45 Speaker 02 It's like 10 feet. Yeah. But it is the highest concentration. Like this is like the, the heat test. You know, they have those ratings on them.
1:13:52 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:13:52 Speaker 02 This is the highest legal concentration you can get, which I think is like 2.4.
1:13:56 Tim Ferriss? If you can just get a bear spray that you can hit him at 25 feet.
1:13:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:14:00 Tim Ferriss? And I mean, if you get to that point, right? And with a taser, I've played around 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, right? 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 until my 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.
1:14:44 Tim Ferriss? But when I've talked to my military friends, I know this is like uncorking a lot here, but sure, they're very good with handguns and they're very good certainly with kind of 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 jujitsu 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. Like, you never want to get to that point. Sure, you want to know enough that you can cover the base, but like, if it ever got to
1:15:28 Tim Ferriss? the point where you're tasing someone, or your wife's having to use pepper spray, a lot of things proceeding and preventing that would have had to have gone wrong, right? Right. So I don't know if that's a satisfying answer. I do think, and I'm saying this as 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 like American Sniper, we're not, trust me.
1:16:13 Tim Ferriss? So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure for sure. I mean, how are you thinking about it? Because I mean, you're living in LA where it's not exactly marauders in Mad Max, but like you, there are some issues, right?
1:16:29 Speaker 02 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.
1:16:41 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:16:41 Speaker 02 Because you just hear the zombies in the street that are strung out, screaming their brains out, like just going crazy.
1:16:48 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:16:49 Speaker 02 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 know, you get those on Amazon. I got those. 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 know, you 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?
1:17:24 Tim Ferriss? No, you don't want to engage.
1:17:25 Speaker 02 You don't want to engage.
1:17:27 Tim Ferriss? You don't want to engage. I mean, nobody, 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.
1:17:33 Speaker 02 Right.
1:17:33 Tim Ferriss? There's, 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. And I think Krav Maga has a lot to offer, but it sometimes instills a false sense of competence in people. If you think you can disarm someone with a knife, to have somebody take a nice big highlighter, hold on to it and be like, I'll give you 10 bucks for every mark you can leave on me and see what happens. You're going to get covered in highlighter.
1:18:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:02 Tim Ferriss? 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.
1:18:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, spray is the way to go.
1:18:16 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.
1:18:26 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, fun time though. People in your closet.
1:18:32 Speaker 02 That was the weirdest house showing I've ever been to.
1:18:35 Tim Ferriss? I could also totally see your wife just going, um, there's a person in the closet.
1:18:42 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. Like, it didn't freak her out at all.
1:18:45 Tim Ferriss? Very calmly.
1:18:48 Speaker 02 It was, it was very strange. I had to, I'm glad I kept my cool because I was just like, I get very protective of, especially when my kids are there, you know? And so it just, yeah, he ended up being a very nice guy.
1:19:03 Tim Ferriss? Yeah. And you know, when I was younger, you know, 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. Like, 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.
1:19:42 Speaker 02 It's funny, I was walking through a grocery store the other day and here in LA and it's so strange because I had this flashback as when I was a kid. And my dad would essentially say like, okay, go have fun in the grocery store. So I'd just run around and go to the toy aisle and see what they had and just like, you know, try and like grab some Twinkies and sneak them into the cart when he wasn't seeing and, you know, stuff like that. That was like my childhood. And I looked around and I was like, I don't want my kids out of my sight. Like, it was just filled with, I mean, there was a lot of people there that were clearly had, either were on drugs or had just taken a step too far in that direction.
1:20:27 Speaker 02 And we just didn't have that. It wasn't like, I was standard, kind of lower middle class growing up. It just what 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, right? 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?
1:20:52 Tim Ferriss? Yeah. So throwing stars and sharks with lasers, folks. I think that's where we live.
1:20:57 Speaker 02 I had throwing stars as a kid.
1:20:59 Tim Ferriss? So dangerous.
1:21:01 Speaker 02 Another thing that I was allowed to do.
1:21:03 Tim Ferriss? 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 like throw a throwing star at a tree, it just bounces back and shoots right back at you. Like that's-
1:21:22 Speaker 02 No, no, no, no. Here's what we did. So this was the hack. A hundred percent they would just bounce back at you. So my dad, for some unknown reason, let me go into the garage and use his like metal grinder polisher to like-
1:21:36 Tim Ferriss? To make them sharper.
1:21:37 Speaker 02 I made them sharp. And so mine would stick in the tree. And so you would go to our front yard and there were like all these holes in our tree from me just throwing throwing stars. And like, I think he like kind of looked at it and was like, oh, that's cool. You know, the kids are throwing stars at the tree.
1:21:52 Tim Ferriss? Different world. I'm just-
1:21:54 Speaker 02 Different world.
1:21:55 Tim Ferriss? Amazed that I'm alive, honestly.
1:21:56 Speaker 02 Well, that was the same 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.
1:22:09 Tim Ferriss? So you're protected.
1:22:10 Speaker 02 Yes, you're protected. Exactly.
1:22:12 Tim Ferriss? The brace position in an airplane in case of impact. You're like-
1:22:15 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:22:16 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, that's gonna do a whole lot. I mean, I remember, sorry, I'll shut up on the reminiscing, but it is kind of wild. So I was into skateboarding. I was never, you were too. I was never terribly good at it, but I had like 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, like the angles aren't quite right.
1:22:46 Speaker 02 And yeah.
1:22:47 Tim Ferriss? And the way that we would use this, cause it's like, there's just like grass and gravel around is drag it out. And like, cars would go by and then you drag that quarter pipe out into the street.
1:23:00 Speaker 02 Yes, we did the same thing.
1:23:01 Tim Ferriss? Skateboarding and then try not to get hit by traffic and then pull it back over.
1:23:06 Speaker 02 We would just leave a quarter pipe sitting in the street and just like, and then they'd be like, drag it back to the sidewalk. And we'd like drag it back. And then I used to, I had a trampoline in my backyard. I was lucky enough. My, my dad eventually bought us a trampoline at Costco and I used 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 kinda it. And then he'd just like watch me jump off the roof onto my back on the trampoline.
1:23:34 Tim Ferriss? Yeah. Well, by a consequence of many miracles, we are still here today.
1:23:39 Speaker 02 Exactly. Exactly. Explains the back pain.
1:23:42 Tim Ferriss? Yeah. Explain, yeah. No shit. Jesus. The number, yeah, it's not, 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, let's hear about it. We got books, book recommendations coming. We got all sorts of stuff coming, so don't skip out. Also shameless plug, coyotigame.com, just in case it doesn't come up later. It's gone fucking bananas right now, which we should talk about, but it's awesome. Why is, you texted me in.
1:24:10 Speaker 02 Let's go gentle here on what I said exactly.
1:24:13 Tim Ferriss? Okay. All right. You know what? I'm not even gonna say it cause I don't want to misstep and then put more work on my post-production. All right. What did you say to me?
1:24:23 Speaker 02 Well, we were talking about venture capital funds.
1:24:25 Tim Ferriss? We were talking about venture capital and what did you say?
1:24:27 Speaker 02 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.
1:24:43 Tim Ferriss? Footing?
1:24:43 Speaker 02 Footing right now?
1:24:45 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, this is like the most doctored Kevin I've ever seen.
1:24:48 Speaker 02 I know, I know, I know. Well, I work in venture capital, so that's probably part of the reason why. So I have to be careful what I say here.
1:24:54 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?
1:25:01 Speaker 02 I believe it's going to be a lot harder for early-stage funds.
1:25:05 Tim Ferriss? Let's first start with the problem and what's changed.
1:25:08 Speaker 02 So essentially, what we've seen in 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, you're doing venture on the tech side. And, you know, if you get into the next Uber or OpenAI or whatever, you know, pick your unicorn. The returns are just insane and they outpace that of pretty much all public, the 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 certainly, 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.
1:25:51 Tim Ferriss? It's also how the GPs make a lot of their management fees. Yum, yum, yum.
1:25:54 Speaker 02 That's right. Yes.
1:25:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, so, so partners at firms both get management fees and they also get upside in the return on those funds.
1:26:04 Tim Ferriss? And also for people who have not enough context, and I would have said this in the intro somewhere, but like 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, like 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 just, 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.
1:26:37 Speaker 02 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. You know, there was a couple decades of what Marc Andreessen famously kind of coined is software eating the world. And now we've kind of transitioned into this world of AI
1:27:17 Speaker 02 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'd 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.
1:27:43 Tim Ferriss? And eventually is like, I mean, next 12 months. I mean, it's gotta be, I mean, I would imagine law firms are already reading the writing on the wall for
1:27:52 Speaker 02 Right.
1:27:52 Tim Ferriss? 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 spearheading huge AI initiative within the firm for cost cutting and efficiency.
1:28:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. I have 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 to be the AI.
1:28:20 Tim Ferriss? Five years is generous.
1:28:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, five years is very generous. And so the tea leaves that I'm reading right now, where I think that venture is going to 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 side, what's happened in the last, I call it 18
1:29:03 Speaker 02 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.
1:29:30 Tim Ferriss? Like what you can produce.
1:29:31 Speaker 02 Deploy. Yes.
1:29:32 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:29:33 Speaker 02 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, you know, insert the four or five most popular AI coding tools right now. I would bet without a doubt, within four days, you could dream up any app that you could imagine in terms of, you know, the Tim Tim Ketone dosing regimen app, whatever it may be.
1:29:59 Tim Ferriss? And Ketone suppositories.ai.
1:30:02 Speaker 02 Exactly. The Bugatti suppository.
1:30:06 Tim Ferriss? Gets sued immediately.
1:30:09 Speaker 02 That'd be awesome. 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 had gone out, you'd have hired a designer. You'd have gone out, you would have found an engineer. You probably would have maybe needed a backend engineer, probably mostly front end. You know, you picked your language. It would have been a whole, call it 250K project.
1:30:35 Tim Ferriss? Side end, PowerTop, all those.
1:30:38 Speaker 02 Right. You know, the angles that you need to hit. So you're already speaking code. Look at you. But imagine that's 250K traditionally, right?
1:30:47 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:30:47 Speaker 02 That's $50 now.
1:30:49 Tim Ferriss? That's so nuts.
1:30:50 Speaker 02 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.
1:30:58 Tim Ferriss? I don't even know what Vercel is, but I want your, 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 like in a few hours at night for a couple of weeks, one of my part-time employees created like an app, a website, everything he wanted, had to pay a little bit for a Getty image to like use Canva Pro to make some graphics. But all in, I think $240 is what he said.
1:31:41 Tim Ferriss? And he was using, he was using Base44, which six-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for 80 million in cash. That was June of this year. And then lovable, right? There's a post, 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 startup, I gotta love the Swedes, right? I mean, they've got some good stuff.
1:32:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:32:09 Tim Ferriss? 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.
1:32:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:32:27 Tim Ferriss? Eight months. Oh my God.
1:32:30 Speaker 02 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, as 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.
1:32:50 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, okay.
1:32:50 Speaker 02 So the point being is that venture capitalists, what they do at the seed stage and the early stages, it's their job to go out, find entrepreneurs that are building exciting new products, write that first, call it, you know, one, two, three million dollar check.
1:33:06 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:33:06 Speaker 02 Get their ownership.
1:33:07 Tim Ferriss? I don't need to get on bended knee for $240.
1:33:11 Speaker 02 Exactly. So what's going to happen is you're going to have 10x the amount of ideas hitting the market, because anyone can 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 like to their first million users, might be a couple, a 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.
1:33:45 Tim Ferriss? That's going to get fixed.
1:33:46 Speaker 02 It won't be in six months.
1:33:47 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:33:48 Speaker 02 Exactly. And in a year, it's going to be just, if it's second year of 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?
1:34:00 Tim Ferriss? Why would you?
1:34:01 Speaker 02 Why?
1:34:02 Tim Ferriss? Yeah. And also, how would venture capitalists even begin to filter and sort the winners from the losers?
1:34:09 Speaker 02 There's going to be so many.
1:34:10 Tim Ferriss? With that volume.
1:34:11 Speaker 02 Right.
1:34:12 Tim Ferriss? You can't have coffee dates with even one, one hundredth of those founders, nor would they necessarily take the coffee to begin with.
1:34:19 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:34:20 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?
1:34:37 Speaker 02 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 side of things.
1:35:10 Tim Ferriss? So you're saying I should buy a lot of Etsy?
1:35:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, I just could say, but then you just turn into an Etsy wool hat maker for saunas.
1:35:18 Tim Ferriss? I mean, mitts, sauna mitts. I'm all about the sauna mitts.
1:35:23 Speaker 02 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 and 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? Ah, I don't think I would say yes. But I don't know where to point people because everything is kinda F'd, you know?
1:35:50 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, I mean, there is, there is, and this isn't like schadenfreude on my side, like wanting to celebrate the misery of others, but there is kind of this like poetic justice to techies creating tools.
1:36:05 Speaker 02 That are killing themselves.
1:36:06 Tim Ferriss? That people thought would 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 gonna get smashed. I mean, so many of those jobs that are basically occupied by people who have helped create these tools are gonna get obliterated.
1:36:28 Speaker 02 You know what's really interesting about that? It's a 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 gonna be the one that manually writes that code because ego, ego, ego, you know, 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.
1:37:13 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, that's exciting.
1:37:15 Speaker 02 It's interesting because Andreessen Horowitz, I actually did a post about this. There was, 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? Like, that's been the, 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 out of the park, you need to grow from two to 200 people for a variety of different
1:38:00 Speaker 02 things that you need, you know, it turns out you need a lot of stuff as a startup, not just more engineers.
1:38:05 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:38:06 Speaker 02 You're going to need some working capital and VCs, that's what VCs will step in.
1:38:10 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 inevitable, right? It's like if you're creating an Andoril, you need cash, right? If you're producing something that has a hardware component.
1:38:33 Speaker 02 Right.
1:38:33 Tim Ferriss? You're going to need some cash.
1:38:35 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:38:36 Tim Ferriss? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, 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.
1:38:52 Tim Ferriss? What are the neglected, unsexy, really fast growing sectors, right? 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, like it would have smashed every tech company.
1:39:11 Speaker 02 Right.
1:39:11 Tim Ferriss? The growth rate was just shocking to behold, right? And 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 like 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, like invest in that. But there are certain things that may be
1:39:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:39:44 Tim Ferriss? fast growing and maybe more predictable and
1:39:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:39:49 Tim Ferriss? I'm just wondering what those things are.
1:39:51 Speaker 02 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. That didn't sound right.
1:40:01 Tim Ferriss? Yep. Got to be careful. You could end up in the ER.
1:40:06 Speaker 02 It can be painful at times. Let's rephrase that. This is my best guess at kind of 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. It's human data. 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 serve us.
1:40:38 Tim Ferriss? Such a nice vampire manservant.
1:40:40 Speaker 02 So polite. This is why Reddit is getting $50 million or 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 that your servers stay up and they're really good.
1:41:09 Tim Ferriss? Keep your site up.
1:41:10 Speaker 02 Yep. Yeah, keep your site 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.
1:41:23 Tim Ferriss? Oh, that's fucking brilliant.
1:41:25 Speaker 02 So that if you want to sell to the AI companies, they can bid to actually license your data.
1:41:31 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:41:31 Speaker 02 Isn't that brilliant?
1:41:32 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. But yeah.
1:41:43 Speaker 02 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, and train on that. And they have, but they're going to need, what does Tim Ferriss think about, you know, the latest GLP-1s? And that's going to come out next month, right? So they always need to be training on, on the latest stuff. So that's one. And, and part of the reason why, and I swear this isn't a self-plug, but the part of the reason why we're, Alexis Ohanian, 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.
1:42:23 Tim Ferriss? Oh, man, 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.
1:42:31 Speaker 02 Well, here's the crazy thing is like you can still tell a little bit that it's bots.
1:42:35 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:42:35 Speaker 02 But in a few years, or not even that, in a few months.
1:42:38 Tim Ferriss? Six months.
1:42:39 Speaker 02 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'd be like, why the hell do these headphones suck so bad? It's because there were 37 bots and they're all championing these headphones.
1:42:53 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:42:54 Speaker 02 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 gonna 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.
1:43:13 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:43:14 Speaker 02 And so this is just all gonna 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 kinds of things that I, I believe that original content creators, as long as you can prove that you're an actual human, are gonna be rewarded ultimately, hopefully, by the, the AIs that crawl you.
1:43:34 Tim Ferriss? How do you think that authentication's gonna work? Because doing like 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 gonna actually make the cut and become the, the standard of the driver's license for proving like, this is me. There's so much AI deep fake stuff out there right now with just, I can speak personally. And it's so good. And it's within six months, like you said, it's gonna be indistinguishable or close to indistinguishable.
1:44:13 Speaker 02 This is something that I've kind of spent a lot of time thinking pretty deeply about. And I traded a couple of 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 met with them and I actually got my retina scanned 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. So, but that's too much explaining. Consumers are not just gonna believe that. You know, they'll use it for their TSA pre-check 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.
1:44:56 Speaker 02 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.
1:45:11 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.
1:45:36 Speaker 02 Right. Yeah, and I think that there's, so there's two sides of the coin, right?
1:45:40 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." It's never gonna work.
1:45:59 Speaker 02 Right. And that's where I think there's gonna be a couple of 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.
1:46:17 Tim Ferriss? They're different.
1:46:18 Speaker 02 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 on to Twitter, when it was called Twitter, and you would see a blue checkbox next to someone and say, "Oh, that person's been verified or validated in some way, right?" So it's very binary, like, I guess 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.
1:47:01 Speaker 02 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 I've been a paying customer for this service for X number of months. I can prove it or I have purchased these headphones. You know, 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 in that if you come on the future version of DIG, for example, if you come on there and you say, hey, I own an Aura 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 are these fancy technologies. I won't get into it here, but they're called ZK proofs where you can go in
1:47:46 Speaker 02 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 Aura 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 a 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.
1:48:30 Speaker 02 It can't be something that my mom won't understand.
1:48:33 Tim Ferriss? Read this white paper.
1:48:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. 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 Spill the beans too early and what we're building at Dig is a lot of proof around.
1:49:08 Tim Ferriss? I was still thinking about the crystal balls.
1:49:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. We're not gonna spill the, 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 had 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 gonna be pretty exciting.
1:49:39 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, I have, this might seem like I'm shilling my bags, but I've thought this for a long time, just some, you know, 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, it's gonna be messy AF for a while. Yes, and it's also a cat and mouse game, right? It's not like you create the use 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.
1:50:23 Tim Ferriss? And I think, speaking of 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 taken 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 wanna 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.
1:51:02 Tim Ferriss? 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 I R L. 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 that gives me some hope because if there were nothing to offset the opiate addiction of short form video and perfectly tuned algorithmic feeds, we're entertained to death. We're done.
1:51:44 Speaker 02 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 you actually, Tim, you were a big inspiration for this. One of the things that we talk about, remember when you had your, you did those global meetups?
1:51:58 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:51:59 Speaker 02 Where people gathered and?
1:51:59 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, yeah, that was so fun.
1:52:01 Speaker 02 Do you remember the name of the service that you used?
1:52:03 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, like they've listened to the podcast. So they have something automatically they can talk about, who are meeting in person.
1:52:47 Tim Ferriss? And it was so much better than I could have ever hoped for. It was so much fun. Some of these meetups had 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.
1:53:06 Speaker 02 Right, exactly.
1:53:07 Tim Ferriss? Great experience and the team over there was awesome.
1:53:10 Speaker 02 Yes, so I met with her because of you. And then she was amazing and we're gonna use them for our DIG launch. In fact, we're doing a meetup tonight, close to 100 people in LA. Just randomly threw it out there last week.
1:53:23 Tim Ferriss? I love it.
1:53:24 Speaker 02 And 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 just, you figure out that you're weird is not so weird. If you're into Japanese woodworking or the Tim Red Rooms that you love, like whatever you're into.
1:53:43 Tim Ferriss? Kevin's crystal balls.
1:53:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. You can find 10 other people that are and you can go break bread with them and hang out. But I think that is the future because, don't get me wrong, I still wanna 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.
1:54:04 Tim Ferriss? No.
1:54:04 Speaker 02 But I also need to go and get outside and actually breathe some fresh air and meet people, right?
1:54:11 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
1:54:11 Speaker 02 And so I think that has to be a big part of what we do at DIG. And it was, a lot of it was inspired by that, your success there.
1:54:19 Tim Ferriss? Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know that. And I gotta, since we're so on topic, I gotta just flash this guy right here.
1:54:27 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:54:27 Tim Ferriss? So as you know, I've been so nervous about this and excited, but so coyote of this card game. It's fast casual, couple of minutes to learn, 10 minutes to play. Kids love it. Turns out, people who've had a few drinks or smoked a little weed also love it. Does not help performance, but does make it pretty hilarious to watch.
1:54:50 Tim Ferriss? We'll have to see if that's okay to keep in, but. Who's calling out a friend of ours that likes to play games?
1:54:59 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 best seller and it's started to go kind of bananas. And gameplay videos, we've texted about this a little bit, but gameplay videos online have more than 300 million views now.
1:55:20 Speaker 02 Dude, that's so amazing.
1:55:22 Tim Ferriss? It's so crazy.
1:55:23 Speaker 02 Congratulations, man.
1:55:24 Tim Ferriss? After the NFTs, I'm glad to see you actually doing something that works.
1:55:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, thanks.
1:55:31 Tim Ferriss? Got to practice my art in a different way. And you know, we're not going to get into a mud wrestling match or NFTs. I am still going to do a bunch with that cock punch legends of our lot of universe. You wait and see. I'm actually going to do a bunch of 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.
1:55:56 Speaker 02 That's amazing.
1:55:56 Tim Ferriss? And it's, it's actually giving me both like flashbacks of, 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.
1:56:16 Speaker 02 But hey, soak it all in, man. Enjoy that moment though, right? Cause you're like, you're in a great place to even have that issue. Like it's so awesome.
1:56:23 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 a hundred plus families. We tested the hell out of this. I mean, so many iterations and it's ready, like 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? Cause it's like, if I have a bunch of my dumb friends and we've had two drinks each
1:57:08 Tim Ferriss? and we have so much fun anyway 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. Okay, okay, okay.
1:57:32 Speaker 02 It's actually on its way.
1:57:33 Tim Ferriss? Dude, that is so awesome.
1:57:33 Speaker 02 Yeah. You caused a micro fight in our house last night because of the game.
1:57:38 Tim Ferriss? Was it over whether somebody messed up or not?
1:57:41 Speaker 02 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 like you can engage with the kids? And she's like, well, if we weren't playing this and we could play something like Coyote, like then we wouldn't have this issue because we could all play as a family. And I'm like, oh, fuck.
1:58:03 Tim Ferriss? Oh, man. Quick funny note on Roblox. I actually want to interview the founders of Roblox. 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, 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 is because you sent me and Saga this video, this like screen capture of playing Roblox, which is honestly really relaxing. It's so relaxing to watch.
1:58:44 Speaker 02 The garden that I grew.
1:58:45 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, the garden that you grew with the, with the cherry blossoms. Very relaxing to watch. But there is this classical music playing and I was like, wait a fucking second. You've stopped drinking and now Kevin's listening to classical music? What is happening here?
1:58:59 Speaker 02 It's built into the game.
1:59:03 Speaker 02 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.
1:59:19 Tim Ferriss? Congratulations.
1:59:20 Speaker 02 Thank you. There's 1%, chance to get it on a roll. And so it's 20 bucks per 10 rolls.
1:59:27 Tim Ferriss? Oh, wow. What a bunch of chilices.
1:59:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I won't even tell you what I've done there. I'm not proud.
1:59:36 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.
1:59:48 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:59:52 Tim Ferriss? We don't know who this user is.
1:59:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:59:56 Tim Ferriss? Oh, my God. Awesome, man. So nice to see you. Always.
2:00:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, good to see you as well.
2:00:01 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, we gotta hang. This is also all this talking about in person. I'm like, man, we gotta hang in person. I'm sorry, the you got family and lots of stuff. I didn't give you a ton of heads up either on the wilderness trip, but we gotta do something. Gotta do something in person.
2:00:14 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. Japan trip or something?
2:00:16 Tim Ferriss? Japan trip, or I will be in LA actually next month. So I'll let you know.
2:00:24 Speaker 02 Either next month or the following. So I'll let you know. I'll be in LA.
2:00:27 Tim Ferriss? Awesome. Let's do a little meetup.
2:00:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:00:29 Tim Ferriss? All right, I'm taking a note.
2:00:29 Speaker 02 Speaking of in person stuff.
2:00:30 Tim Ferriss? Kev, Kev. All right.
2:00:32 Speaker 02 Sweet, man. Well, I think you got anything to add for folks?
2:00:35 Tim Ferriss? Anything to mention?
2:00:35 Speaker 02 Oh, I can tell people if, yeah, so we that crazy site that I was telling folks about. Dig.com with two G's is rebooting.
2:00:43 Tim Ferriss? D I G G dot com.
2:00:45 Speaker 02 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 kind of 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 Tims, at dig.com, D I G G dot com, and we will let you skip that list and get you on one of the early invite lists.
2:01:16 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, and just FYI, I'm not going to disclose because I don't know if it's public, but that's a long, like, there's a long list.
2:01:23 Speaker 02 Several hundred thousand people.
2:01:24 Tim Ferriss? The bouncer will be letting you skip and come through the velvet ropes.
2:01:28 Speaker 02 We've only let 25,000 in so far, and we have a couple hundred thousand people waiting on the waitlist. And so far, people are loving it, and we're just getting started. So we've got a lot to build.
2:01:37 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.
2:01:44 Speaker 02 It sucks that you feel so much better. I hate it because I feel better. I'm like slimming up a little bit, you know, and it's like.
2:01:51 Tim Ferriss? I assume you're being sarcastic.
2:01:53 Speaker 02 No, it does suck because I want to, I want to have a couple of drinks, you know, but.
2:01:58 Tim Ferriss? Well, you're you're getting to spend money on Roblox instead, you know, in terms of instead of the vice that kills your liver, you got a vice that kills your bank account. You know, you got to trade.
2:02:07 Speaker 02 I will say I've definitely kind of just shifted that funnel of cash over straight to Roblox and the grow garden. That little freaking dragon guy cost me like two grand.
2:02:20 Tim Ferriss? That's the Kevin I know and love.
2:02:22 Speaker 02 There you go. There you go. He's back.
2:02:25 Tim Ferriss? He's back.
2:02:26 Speaker 02 Let's do some NanoBlocks together.
2:02:27 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, I'm down for some NanoBlocks. I think I need one that is sub 500 pieces to start with.
2:02:34 Speaker 02 I'll save this little ramen for you and we'll do it live on on video. That'd be fun.
2:02:39 Speaker 02 140 pieces.
2:02:40 Tim Ferriss? Have Craig Mod set up the audio for us.
2:02:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
2:02:44 Tim Ferriss? All right, cool, man. Awesome to see you, buddy.
2:02:47 Speaker 02 All right, brother. Talk soon.
2:02:48 Tim Ferriss? All right. And everybody listening, I guess we'll have probably have some show notes for this. So tim.blog/podcastrandomshow 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 one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:03:30 Tim Ferriss? It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, 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. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your 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
2:04:14 Tim Ferriss? 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 zero 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, David tastes great. Their bars come in six delicious flavors. They are all we're trying. And as I mentioned
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Previous #821: My Two-Year Secret Project, COYOTE — The Strategies and Tactics for Building a Bestseller from Nothing with Elan Lee of Exploding Kittens Next #823: Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg — Creating Supranormal Vision, Cutting-Edge Science for Eye Health, Supplements, Red Light Therapy, and The Future of Eyesight Restoration Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
