#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

27:49By 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 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.

28:29It'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 got to do it. And I've been finding more interesting ways to do that. But in addition to that, looking at some old friends that I thought were worth dusting off and revisiting like ketosis and the ketogenic diet. So I'll give you the punchline and then I'll back up. So did my blood draw and also an oral glucose tolerance test, which we should really talk about because that's just such an important tool in the toolkit to see how sensitive you are with respect to insulin sensitivity or insensitive glucose disposal, et cetera.

29:18Getting fasting glucose isn't enough. You can get false good news if that's timed luckily or well. So I've had my best lab results and I get three or four tests a year, probably my best lab results in the last decade, most recently. And I would attribute that to a few things. I used ketogenic diet, very straightforward. You have to figure out a few meals that work for you. For me, it was a big salad with 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.

29:55You can't have too much protein on the ketogenic diet if you want to sustain high levels of high millimolar concentration of ketones. And I test all this with a finger prick. I shifted naturally, like ketosis first, to initiate some adaptations. And for everything I read, it takes about... I knew I didn't want to do it super long-term. It's just too boring and too disgusting. And plus, I really need to watch my lipid profile. 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.

30:40And 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 hours of eating, eight hours could be noon to eight o 'clock, could be 2 p.m. to 10. And then continued with the ketogenic diet, but just two meals a day, typically like one at two o 'clock and then one at say, you know, eight or nine. 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.

31:20but at the time of my blood test, it was only about four weeks in, my insulin sensitivity, which my family just as a team sucks at, right? Like genetically, I am not predisposed to having great glucose disposal or insulin sensitivity. And that's a huge driver for accelerated neurodegenerative disease. If you have high blood pressure, if you have chronically elevated glucose or insulin and or insulin. All of these things drive degeneration cognitively. And people can learn all sorts of stuff about 16-8 intermittent fasting from Rhonda Patrick. And she's had a number of scientists on her podcast.

32:01There'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. 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.

32:45And 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. And I think that was just enough smokescreen that I was able to cover up insulin insensitivity. because if I didn't eat frequently, I would start to crash and then get grumpy. And then I would boost it back up with granted a healthy meal, but I was still eating very, very consistently. And in doing this, my mood on average has just been so much higher, so much more stable for, I would say the last eight weeks.

33:31I don't have any intention of changing. That's amazing. 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... I was just going to ask you that. You can lose a lot of muscle mass. Right. And I remember doing DEXA scans way back in the day. I started doing DEXA before the 4-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.

34:11And I judged it harshly and I judged it prematurely. So in animal models, and also certainly if you look at what Martin and some of his clients have done, that need not be the case. And you're not necessarily going to pack on tons of muscle, but you can lose fat while preserving or moderately gaining muscle. So I'm still getting stronger in my workouts. It's interesting how fat loss works too. And Martin's observed this. A lot of people have observed this, but it's not caloric deficit and you lose a predictable amount every week. Sure. If you were a closed system, blah, blah, blah, law of thermodynamics.

34:53Yeah. 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. It's that MCT oil that you're taking with the, you're running to the bathroom. Yeah. Just letting everything pass through. But what I will say is that I have used just about every diet imaginable. And I would say one criticism I would have of some of what Martin recommends is he advises people to consume somewhere along the lines, if they can tolerate it, like 400 to 800 milligrams of caffeine a day to aid in fat loss.

35:37And yes, that will aid in fat loss. Yeah. And lack of sleep. 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. Let me guess. Inno Explode. It was. So Inno Explode, little reds. Yeah. Inno Explode is like a later iteration. But at that point, this guy was giving me the cobbled together, you can't really do this anymore. And I don't recommend it. Fin-fin and shit?

36:12No, not Fin-fin. 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. Did you ever hit bronchade? Bronchade is probably ephedrine. Yeah, I know, but did you ever hit it when you were younger? Actually an inhaler or what do you mean? Yeah, because that's what people would do. Like the bodybuilders would hit bronchade and then they would put on sweatshirts and go like on the treadmill and just sweat their faces off. No, I didn't do that. Six-pack abs. No, you would buy primatine mist tablets.

36:48And don't do this, folks. It's not good for you. Also, if you try to buy primatine mist tablets, now you have to show your driver's license because I believe there are labs or probably trailers is more accurate description. People will use that as a precursor to produce methamphetamine is my understanding, which is why it's very tightly controlled. So suffice to say, don't do that. and I've been very wary of any regimen that requires a lot of stimulants is I guess what I'm trying to say. And the only time that I have reliably, if you look at every single male in my family, it's kind of comical.

37:26Like you can spot them from a mile away. 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, you know, I'm no spring chicken. So I've been very impressed that I'm able to do that. Some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet have people say they joint pain goes away.

38:06They get some of these other things. So another reason, in addition to mitochondrial health, that I want to do ketosis is because of the potent anti-inflammatory effects and some of the chronic back pain that long-term listeners will be sick of hearing about. So that was another reason why I did the ketosis. I felt the anti-inflammatory effects of that much more so than just the intermittent fasting with a quote-unquote regular diet that's higher in carbohydrates.

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39:50I 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 age. She was like podcast number 12 for me out of 800 and something, which I didn't realize it was so early. She's a PhD. She is a scientist and researcher. She has published in very credible journals and it's just a great resource for separating fact from fiction in so many different domains.

40:31And her dad, I believe it was, was diagnosed with Parkinson's and she's been public about this. And so we were trading notes on all different things. And we were talking about ketosis. And if you're in ketosis, what about intermittent fasting? If you have a tablespoon of heavy cream in your coffee in the beginning, are you sacrificing autophagy? 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 shot two or three times a day.

41:11And I recognize this is N of one. 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.

41:51Wait, can we ask you one question, Tim, before you go on with this one? you and I were on a call, not a public call, but a phone call. And you mentioned that you found the best basically ketones on the market that you believed in at the time. And this was recently. So are these the ones? These are not those ones in part because this is going to make you sound like a dick. I will share that one soon. They're very expensive. I'll tell you offline the reason, and people are going to hate me for saying this, but it's like, I want this stuff for my family. and this producer has very, very limited inventory.

42:26So 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. Okay, is this one palatable? This one is palatable. Because 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. Yeah. I thought it was going to be worse than it is, but I also have a stomach of iron and have choked down so much disgusting shit over my life that I think, I 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.

43:13This 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. I was like, what are you talking about? I'm just shoving it down my maw. So I don't know if I'm the best reference for palatable, but they've improved a lot. They used to taste like jet fuel based on reports. And I wasn't even willing to do it because literally, I think he's been public about this. Peter Atiyah, famous doc, trained at Hopkins, Stanford, et cetera. A lot of people will know him. he told me about the first time he tried the OG ketone monoesters and he took a shot and he basically had to run to the sink and like white knuckle the sides of the sink as he's dry heaving for like 10 minutes.

43:59And 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. You might not be fine. Just chase it with an Imodium. You'll be fine. Yeah. And of particular danger is caffeine, ketones, and creatine, which is also great to take. But yeah, if you take any two of those four, you're in the danger zone. If you take three or four out of the four, there's coin toss disaster pants. So just stay close to the bathroom. You do get used to it.

44:40But 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. Wow. It's very, very expensive. So if you're going to be giving someone this particular exogenous ketone two or three times a day on an ongoing basis, we have to figure out a more economical solution because outside of the 1 % of 1%, no one's going to be able to afford that. So Tim, for people that are listening and they're hearing you talk about two different ketones here, it begs the question, if you are pricking yourself, doing blood work afterwards and finding out what your ketone levels are or peeing on a strip or however you're doing it, obviously you can tell that these things work and i've done it myself because you take them and then you literally go do the test and 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 yeah and and i don't know about you but i can feel it it's like yeah you can absolutely feel cognitively your brain also cardiac tissue loves ketones yes brain juice it's just like it's brain juice and finish what you're saying and then i'll add something else 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?

46:16Like, what are the advantages of that$30 model? It's hard for me not to dox the supplier by giving too much detail, but 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. 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?

46:54Because I want to be sharp, even in the afternoon, I would have tea or coffee. But then that fucks up your sleep so badly and it turns into this vicious cycle. So now I just take the exogenous ketones in the afternoons. And if anything, it's going to help you sleep, which is something you observe with the ketogenic diet. That's really wild is that 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, 9 or 10 out of 10.

47:34So I would say for a lot of folks though, at least based on the reviews and reports that I've read, the diester, this ketone, Q-I-T-O-N-E, it's more than enough to get a taste test for whether or not 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.

48:16Not 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-only fast per year. And then I would do a three-day water-only fast once a quarter. I still think that's a good idea. But for whatever reason, in the last few years, I became less tolerant of that. I would do a seven-day fast and I would get really dizzy if I stood up. I would have memory problems. And I think it was increasing insulin insensitivity in part that caused that. And now that I'm doing this 16-8 intermittent fasting and I'll occasionally just switch it up and ketosis takes a little while to get into.

49:03So there's a bit of an on-ramp. But now that I'm doing this and also feeding my system with exogenous ketones, my working hypothesis is that I'm keeping that ketone machinery busy so that it doesn't atrophy. And my expectation is, and I'm going to test this again soon, is the next time I do three days is pretty easy for me at this point, but a seven day, let's just say, water only fast. By the way, you don't need to lose much, if any, muscle mass doing that either. But that's a whole separate conversation. It's kind of counterintuitive. I will be able to test this hypothesis. Did all this stuff help?

49:38Does doing, I think doing 16-8 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 compliance perspective. Because for instance, well, I just think of my parents or anybody. It's like, I can get so many people to change their behavior on the planet. And my parents will not listen to a thing I say. So it's very hard to get people to change what they eat. I think it's easier to change when people eat. And just from the perspective of trying to grease the wheels for behavioral change in people who are resistant, who have failed a lot before, this is very interesting.

50:31Yeah. 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 I stayed elevated for way too long. Yeah. So for people that don't know, when you go to a fancy doc like Peter Tia or some of these other concierge doctors, and you can ask your normal GP to do this. And some of them will, if you have a cool one and they're on top of it, but they'll essentially sit down with you and they will give you a straight glucose drink.

51:10So it's think of like Gatorade syrup, like if it were just pure syrup, right? And you drink that and then they're going to one, draw your blood at baseline. And then they'll pick intervals. I can't remember what it is. Tim, do you know at the top of your head? Yeah. Every 30 minutes for two hours. Right. And And then they're testing for insulin response and also where is your glucose over time. And ideally you want to see a spike up, not too high, and then a rapid kind of return to a normal baseline. Right. And mine just stays elevated for like five X too long. You know, it just hovers around that like one 35 forever.

51:48And 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. 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.

52:29Zepbound. Right. It goes by Zepbound or on the glucose side, Monjuro 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. So if you grab yourself an insulin syringe, you can give yourself a little under, what is it that insulin syringe is? A 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 microdose it for, I have lower just standard resting glucose.

53:10And then also my spikes don't get near as high. I probably trim 30 % off the spikes and my return to baseline is so much better. And so I'm kind of repairing that through a little bit of a hack. And so there's a bunch of people now that are starting to think of this as more of a longevity drug. And we've known this, that people that take these drugs, they have fewer cardiovascular events. So there are other benefits to GLP-1s other than just, can I look good? So obviously I'm not doing it for the weight loss. I need more for weight loss. But if I can see one ab, I'm not going to be pissed. I'll take a two-pack at this point.

53:48Yeah, exactly. But try the 16-8, man. It's been wild to watch. Well, I mean, you're talking to the guy that created zero, the intermittent fasting. Yeah, yeah. Like, I've definitely done my fair share of 16-8s. 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 trisepatide, low-dose trisepatide. And by the way, folks, talk to your doctors.

54:24We are fucking not doctors. We're clowns on the internet. So just like... This is bro science at best. At best. Yeah. Bro science B -. So they're on trisepatide. 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.

55:05What was the name of the one, I can't remember the name of it, the sleep medication. It's a class. So let me get this right. 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. Well, let me just finish my thought for a second here. So I want to hear about this. So I said Nora or Dora. I think I'm thinking of mixing up my words here, but I'm pretty sure, and do your homework, folks, that Dora is dual orexin receptor antagonist. And I've been thinking, because you and I probably still use occasional or continuous trazodone for help with sleep.

55:50I don't use trazodone anymore. 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?

56:24What happened? Yeah, I have one. I'm trying to find the name of it. I'll have to go into my pharmacy and look. Into your pharmacy? Well, I have an online pharmacy. No, but it's legit. It's Amazon Pharmacy. I'll just say it. Amazon Pharmacy. I thought you just had it. Yeah, like a dedicated, next to your red room, you have a dedicated pharmacy. You're the one with the red fruit bitch. Well, I know. That's true. That's true. Cut that out. Tomato, tomato. Yeah, exactly. Whatever floats your boat. So I tried Belsamra. No idea. Sounds like a Japanimation character. Yeah, exactly. So Belsamra is the one that I tried.

57:04And it was, I want to say, about$600 off prescription, which was just insane. Yeah, that's pricey. 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 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. Once you get your doctor to say that you're allowed to have. Yeah. Great. Fucking black market bro trades. What could, what could go wrong?

57:45Give me some of your ketones. Your quality ketones. 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. 10 grams of creatine. No, I've been doing that for a long, long time, but I have up to 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.

58:24So 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. 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.

59:09So it's like, oh, good Lord. Okay. Well, she found a study that too hot is not good for you. There actually was a study that showed You get to the inverse at too hot. And that 174-ish, 5-ish is kind of the sweet spot for 20 minutes. Are you wearing a felt hat? I'm not wearing a felt hat. I probably should because I don't really, yeah. Cause I'll get hot enough wearing the, uh, I guess it's a wool hat. Yeah. The, the, the pros, yeah. If you go to like Coney Island or some of these Russian bath houses 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?

59:46The wool mitts? No. Yeah. They're these like, they look like oven mitts. They're these wool mittens that the super hardcore wool wear. Oh, damn, I got to 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 because it's an insulator. So it can keep the cold out, but it can also keep the hot out from what it's covering. So that's a good point. I should start wearing my little Keebler elf hat. Again, I do have one here. The other one that I'll mention just because I'm sure there are people listening who have, if not chronic pain, then occasional pain.

1:00:21I mean, particularly as you just accumulate life, you get bumps and bruises along the way. I have begun to, and I really try not to take oral anti-inflammatories much at all. There was about a year and a half when I was on prescription anti-inflammatories and all this stuff, which is just systemically not great for you, but I needed it at the time for back pain. curcumin phytosome from thorn. So really switching from NSAIDs like ibuprofen, aka Advil, or naproxen sodium, aka Aleve, just shifting away from that stuff to curcumin. Everybody should read the blog post I wrote called No Biological Free Lunch, but there is some trade-off.

1:01:04And part of the reason I stopped using curcumin on a regular basis, which also seems to have some potential effects on slowing the onset of neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's. So it seems to have a lot of applications. But if I used it daily for, say, a week or two, and then I stopped, I would be incredibly sore for a few days afterwards. And I was like, I don't love that. So I'll probably cycle on and off. But I have shifted to Thornbrand, and I have no dog in that fight, nothing to gain from saying that, curcumin phytosome. Those are a few. Now, you've got a lot on your list. I haven't gone too far into the Google Doc, but where should we start?

1:01:48We've covered a lot. Where should we start? We've already started. 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 Atiyah 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. Abort, abort. Yeah, abort. So if you're going to do the ketogenic diet, definitely get your blood work done.

1:02:25Check your ApoB, make sure you're working with your doc. It's not a free lunch for everyone. 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.

1:03:03Because I mean, the number of people who got really into back in the day, bulletproof coffee. Oh my God. I had so many of those. And then realized, oh shit, my labs are so bad that it looks like I could have a heart attack tomorrow. You just have to know thyself. And that begins with measurement and professional guidance. So yeah, thanks for saying that. Yeah. All right, let's talk about people in your house. Yeah. So 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.

1:03:46Because one of the things that I had recently was a homeless person in my closet. I thought you were screwing with me, but this is actually a real thing. Yeah, so basically what happened is, I only say my closet because we ended up getting the place. So real quick for people that aren't aware, I was part of those crazy fires that happened out in California. We lost our house. Everybody was safe and sound, which is great. And we moved into an apartment. And recently I found a new place to move into. We were touring the house. and my wife is upstairs. She walks out of the room and she looks at the person that's showing us the house and goes, um, there's somebody in the closet.

1:04:30And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's an empty house, like a brand new empty house. Like, what are you talking about? And she goes, yeah, I opened the closet door. He was crunched down in the corner and he puts his finger up to his lips and goes, shh, like, don't tell anybody. 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.

1:05:09And I just, I'm keeping the place nice. But he goes, this is what I do. I felt really bad for him because he said he worked at a car wash. He makes$500 a month. He can't afford a place to live. And this is what he does. He just crashes in homes that are under construction and they're like newly built homes. And 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 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?

1:05:44And 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 had a cell phone. So we, The guy, the realtor was nice enough to send him some cash to help him get a meal that night and whatnot. But it makes you think, especially, I mean, when I was younger, listen, I lived in some really shitty alleys and bad places in San Francisco.

1:06:17So I'm fine with that. But when you have kids, it's a different story. It's a different story, right? And so I immediately started thinking, what do you do? And so I went and did some research online. And this is one of the pepper sprays that I found. all of the home defense stuff that I had before burned in the fire. Yeah. And so I'm basically starting from scratch. And so I bought two pepper sprays and a taser. And I'm just wondering, what does Tim Ferriss do for home protection? I know you do. You got AR-15s and shit. Well, all right. So this is not, let's see. It's not weapon advice. No, yeah, this is not professional weapons.

1:07:00talk to your professional armorer. Yeah, exactly. 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, um, it's actually a dozen and two 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.

1:07:42So I would say that for me, step number one is choosing very carefully where you live, if you can. And secondly, just paying a lot of attention to privacy. So if you might have people who are going to seek you out, and this is going to become an increasingly relevant problem for anyone who even becomes micro famous for a second. You think it might not happen. You have, who knows, you're doing something funny. You end up with 3000 followers on Instagram or TikTok or wherever. 3000 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 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.

1:08:44Because if someone, for instance, sends anything to your house, maybe they're trying to be really nice. It's a friend of yours and they send you 1-800-Flowers. This is not a real example, I'm just making that up, but they, 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 doxxed your home addresses everywhere. So I would say that thinking about privacy and honestly trying to red team yourself, that's just to say, we won't get into what that actually means, but it's the basics are have one of your friends who's smart pretend to be a stalker and try to find you, right?

1:09:30Preferably 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... Yeah, the people in the closet are a thing of the past. College years. Yeah. Then I would say, I never thought that high-rises condos would be of any interest to me, but there are added layers of security. So my place in Austin is way the hell off a ground floor.

1:10:15There are multiple, I don't want to say security points, but you 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. 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.

1:10:54On a home security level, and you mentioned the kids, you and I have shot firearms together. We did three-gun shooting training with Taron Tactical. Yeah, Taron Tactical. Way back in the day, before he was everywhere. Tim Ferriss experiment. Yeah. Yeah, good for him. Yeah, we did a lot with Taron 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.

1:11:30And yes, you can have like biometric safes and this, that, and the other thing. But Jim Jeffries 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. But basically it's like, if you want your guns ready to go, you need to be able to get them quickly. Okay. But if you want them secure enough that your kids are insured against some type of horrible accident, which is sadly pretty common, then you need them really, really fail safe in their protection, right?

1:12:11So they're 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.

1:12:49And he was at the grocery store with his kids and somebody recognized his kid and was like, oh, that's so-and-so. Oh, shit. Like, recognized his kid, not him. Right. That's spooky as fuck. Yeah, people have done that with my dog. Yeah. They actually see Toaster and they're like, oh, there's Toaster and I'm not even there. Yeah. And they see Toaster and they can recognize him, which is crazy. 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.

1:13:27I 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 it's like 10 feet yeah but it is the highest concentration like this is like the the heat tested you know they have those ratings on them yeah this is the highest legal concentration you can get which i I think it's like 2.4. You can just get a bear spray that you can hit him at 25 feet.

1:13:59Yeah. And I mean, if you get to that point, right? And with a taser, I've played around with tasers before. Amazing tool, but just like anything else, it takes a good amount of practice to be able to hit anything with that, particularly under duress, 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.

1:14:37That's a pass-fail. And practicing under those heightened conditions, I think is important if you're going to take it seriously. But when I've talked to my military friends, I know this is 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.

1:15:23You never want to get to that point. Sure, you want to know enough that you can cover the base. But if it ever got to the point where you're tasing someone or your wife is having to use pepper spray, a lot of things preceding and preventing that would have had to have gone wrong, 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.

1:16:10it's like 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 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. Yeah. Because you just hear the zombies in the street that are strung out, screaming their brains out, like just going crazy. Yeah. 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.

1:16:58So 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 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? No, you don't want to engage. You don't want to engage. You don't want to engage. I mean, nobody nobody's going to win. Everybody's going to get hurt.

1:17:31And if they have a knife, you're going to get stabbed or cut. 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 confidence in people. If you think you can disarm someone with a knife, to have somebody take a nice big highlighter, hold onto it and be like, I'll give you 10 bucks for every mark you can leave on me and see what happens. You're going to get covered in highlighter. Yeah. Those are all cuts.

1:18:04So 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. Yeah. Spray is the way to go. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Fun time. So people in your closet, that was the weirdest house showing I've ever been to. I could also totally see your wife just going, um, there's a person in the closet, right? Exactly. Like it Very calmly. It was very strange. I'm glad I kept my cool because I was just like, I get very protective of, especially when my kids are there.

1:18:59And so it just, yeah, he ended up being a very nice guy. Yeah. And when I was younger, growing up as a townie with a rat tail, working in the restaurants on Eastern Long Island, where there are a lot of wealthy people, I would look at them with the hedges and all the protection. And I would just think to myself, what a bunch of assholes. 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.

1:19:36And it's not like they're the majority of the population, but it just takes one. It's funny. I was walking through a grocery store the other day here in LA, and it's so strange because I had this flashback when I was a kid. And my dad would essentially say like, okay, go have fun in the grocery store. So I just run around and go to the toy aisle and see what they had. And just like, you know, try and like grab some Twinkies and sneak them into the cart when he wasn't seeing and 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.

1:20:15It 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. And we just didn't have that. It wasn't like... I was standard kind of lower middle class growing up. It just, the drugs weren't as hardcore. You know, we would have alcoholics. Like that was like kind of it. Like if you saw somebody down on their luck, they were like an alcoholic, 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?

1:20:53Yeah. So throwing stars and sharks with lasers, folks. I think that's where we live. I have throwing stars as a kid. So dangerous. Another thing that I was allowed to do. Another thing, literally, I just threw out my throwing stars that I got from Asian World of Martial Arts magazine, like catalog. I think they shipped it from Philadelphia. And I'm just like, I cannot believe I was allowed to play with these. Because what happens? You like throw a throwing star at a tree. It just bounces back and shoots right back at you. No, no, no, no. Here's what we did. So this was the hack a hundred percent.

1:21:26They 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 make him sharper. I made him sharp. And so mine would stick in the tree. And so you would go to our front yard and there were like all these holes in our tree from me just throwing, throwing stars. And like, I think he like kind of looked at it was like, Oh, that's cool. You know, Now the kids are throwing stars at the tree. Different world. I'm just amazed that I'm alive, honestly. Well, that was the same era where he would just be like, we're going to the grocery store, jump in the back of the pickup and put your arms over the side.

1:22:03And yeah, the word of advice was like, lean up against the back. So your backs are touching the back of the pickup. So you're protected. Yes, you're protected. That's like the brace position in an airplane in case of impact. You're like, yeah, that's going to 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 confidence way and enthusiasm way beyond my capabilities. And my parents, to their credit, were cool. They made a homemade quarter pipe, right?

1:22:39Now, that sounds cool and I loved it, but homemade quarter pipe, the angles aren't quite right. Yeah. And the way that we would use this, because 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 the quarter pipe out into the street and start skateboarding and then try not to get hit by traffic and then pull it back. Oh, for sure. 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.

1:23:15I was lucky enough, 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 kind of it. And then he just watched me jump off the roof onto my back on the trampoline. Yeah. Well, by a consequence of many miracles, we are still here today. Exactly. Exactly. Explains the back pain. Yeah. Explain. Yeah. No shit. Jesus. The number. Yeah. it's not exactly a total mystery. So I want to hear about something that you texted me and people might be, who knows?

1:23:52I 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 coyote game.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 let's go gentle here on what I said exactly. Okay. All right. You know what? I'm not even going to say it because I don't want to misstep and then put more work on my post-production. All right. What did you say to me? Well, we were talking about venture capital funds.

1:24:25We were talking about venture capital. And what did you say? The way that I put it is that you had asked me about investing in certain funds. And I said I would be careful because I believe that venture is in a very... they're not necessarily on sound footing right now. Yeah. This is like the most doctored Kevin I've ever seen. 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. 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. I believe it's going to be a lot harder for early stage funds.

1:25:05Let's first start with the problem and what's changed. So essentially what we've seen historically with venture capital is that venture capital can be a fantastic return for investors if done right. Because you get into early stage, predominantly technology startups, you're doing venture on the tech side. And if you get into the next Uber or OpenAI or whatever, pick your unicorn, the returns are just insane. And they outpace that of pretty much all public S &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.

1:25:45Endowments want exposure, universities. That's where a lot of the LPs, the limited partners that invest in these funds come from. It's also how the GPs make a lot of their management fees. Yum, yum, yum. That's right. Yeah, so, yum, yum. Yeah, so partners at firms both get management fees and they also get upside in the return on those funds. And also for people who have not enough context, and I would have said this in the intro somewhere, but you have a ridiculous track record with not just creating companies, but investing in super early stage companies. And I've said this to a lot of people, you're a rare breed because you are good, very good at investing in a whole lot of different asset classes at different stages of size and growth.

1:26:29And 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. 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.

1:27:01I'm a partner over at True Ventures. I would say nine out of 10 deals that we do these days are all AI focused in some regard. There was a couple of decades of what Mark Andreessen famously coined as software eating the world. And now we've transitioned into this world of AI eating the software. So AI is doing a lot of both retooling of the software to make it more, I would say, AI dominant and that you need less employees and AI does a lot more of the heavy shouldering of the burden and work. And so it's causing a lot of disruption all across multiple industries and multiple verticals, starting with customer service, eventually getting into coding and beyond.

1:27:41Drug discovery, I mean, it basically... And eventually is like, I mean, next 12 months. I mean, it's got to be... I mean, I would imagine law firms are already reading the writing on the wall for hiring of associates for rote tasks that can be done in 30 seconds by AI. I know actually a senior partner at a law firm, he is in charge of spearheading a huge AI initiative within the firm for cost cutting and efficiency. 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.

1:28:18and it's most likely you're just going to be the AI. Five years is generous. 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 and 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.

1:28:59On the software side, what's happened in the last, I call it 18 months, is that the barrier to entry for a new engineer, you don't even have to be an engineer. They call it vibe coding now. And so if you have an idea, you can spend the next 48 hours, maybe let's just say double that, watch YouTube videos and be, I would call it a second year computer science student in terms of your kind of efficiency and your ability to deploy. Yes. So Tim, even today, like if we started today and we said, okay, listen, we're going to make you watch these 10 videos on cursor and AI and use cloud code and, you know, insert the four or five most popular AI coding tools right now.

1:29:47I 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. And ketonesuppositories.ai. Yeah, exactly. The Bugatti suppository, keytube suppositories. Gets sued immediately. 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 would have gone out. You would have hired a designer.

1:30:25You would have gone out. You would have found an engineer. You probably would have maybe needed a back-end engineer, probably mostly front-end. And, you know, you picked your language. It would have been a whole, call it 250K project. Side end, power top, all those. Right. You know all the angles that you need to hit. So you already speak in code. Look at you. But imagine that's 250K traditionally, right? Yeah. That's$50 now. It's so nuts. Because your cursor account is going to be$50 a month. And you can go and you can deploy that on Vercel for an extra 20 bucks a month. I don't even know what Vercel is.

1:30:59But 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 an app, a website, everything he wanted. Had to pay a little bit for a Getty image to use Canva Pro to make some graphics. But all in, I think, $240 is what he said. And he was using Base44, which six-month-old solo-owned VibeCoder Base44 sells to Wix for$80 million in cash.

1:31:50That 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, gotta love the Swedes, right? I mean, they've got some good stuff. Swedish AI startup Lovable says it has surpassed$100 million in annual recurring revenue, ARR, just eight months after launch. This makes it the fastest ever software company to reach the milestone, eclipsing the historically rapid growth rates of companies such as Cursor and Wiz. That's bananas.

1:32:26Yeah. Eight months. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Lovable, I think, is probably my favorite hosted VibeCoding platform that's out there. If you're really taking VibeCoding 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. Yeah. Okay. So the point being is that venture capitalists, what they do at the seed stage and the early stage is it's their job to go out, find entrepreneurs that are building exciting new products, write that first, call it, you know, one, two,$3 million check, get their ownership.

1:33:07I don't need to get on bended knee for$240. dollars. 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. I'd 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, it's going to be buggy right now because the code is a little bit janky and a little bit half broken.

1:33:45That's going to get fixed real fast. It won't be in six months. Exactly. And in a year, it's going to be just, if it's a second year CS student right now, in a year it'll be full on college grad and you're off to the races and you don't need to raise venture capital. Why would you? Why would you? Why? Yeah. And also, how would venture capitalists even begin to filter and sort the winners from the losers. There's going to be so many. With that volume. Right. You can't have coffee dates with even one one hundredth of those founders, nor would they necessarily take the coffee to begin with. Exactly.

1:34:20Maybe 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? 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 artists and crafts, handmade goods, things of that nature that will stand out and still be desirable because of the human touch side of things.

1:35:10So you're saying I should buy a lot of Etsy. Yeah, I just could say, but then you just turn into an Etsy wool hat maker for saunas. It's kind of your gig. Mitts, sauna mitts. I'm all about the sauna mitts. 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? I don't think I would say yes, but I don't know where to point people because everything is kind of effed, you know?

1:35:50I mean, 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 that are killing themselves. 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 going to get smashed. I mean, so many of those jobs that are basically occupied by people who have helped create these tools are going to get obliterated. You know what's really interesting about that?

1:36:30It'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 going to 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 is empowered in a way that they have never been in power.

1:37:13Yeah, that's exciting. It's interesting because Andreessen Horwitz, I actually did a post about this. It was just the LinkedIn post or something where they said, we're looking for designers to be the next CEOs where they were really brilliant in saying, actually, the next wave forever, we've always said technical co-founders, who's your technical team? What's the technical shops? That's been the kind of lens at which we've evaluated the quality of a startup, I think that really shifts to more of the creative side. I don't think VC is dead. I think what happens is that valuations go up, which is great.

1:37:47It 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 200 to 200 people for a variety of different things that you need. It turns out you need a lot of stuff as a startup, not just more engineers. you're going to need some working capital. And VCs, that's where VCs will step in. 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.

1:38:24It's like if you're creating an anduril, you need cash. If you're producing something that has a hardware component, you're going to need some cash. Exactly. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I've thought, and I don't know if this is just a simplistic, primitive way to think about it, but I'm really wondering with everybody focusing on the hottest girl at the dance, which is AI and everything that has AI slapped on it, what are the neglected, unsexy, really fast growing sectors? And it makes me think of, I remember somebody showed me a chart. Somebody could look this up. We'll put it in the show notes.

1:39:05But if you just invested in Domino's pizza at the right time, it would have smashed every tech company. The growth rate was just shocking to behold. And it's like, what's the equivalent of Domino's pizza that has nothing to do, at least at its core, AI? 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 fast growing and maybe more predictable.

1:39:48And I'm just wondering what those things are. 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. Yep. Got to be careful. You could end up in the ER. 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.

1:40:30In 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. Such a nice vampire man servant. So polite. This is why Reddit is getting$50 million plus a year to train on their data, is why the Tim Ferriss blog should be charging AI to train on all of the original content that you've written. So what I really liked was a move that Cloudflare did here just a few weeks ago, where they said, okay, everyone in the world uses Cloudflare as 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.

1:41:09Keep your side up. Yep. Yeah, keep your side 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. Oh, that's fucking brilliant. So that if you want to sell to the AI companies, they can bid to actually license your data. Yeah. Isn't that brilliant? 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.

1:41:40But I imagine Cloudflare is thinking about it. But yeah. Well, I mean, that's also, it's always going to be the most recent stuff as well, right? Like there's no doubt they could go get a copy of Wikipedia and train on that, and they have. stuff but they're going to need what does tim ferris think about you know the latest glp ones 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 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 these social sites are just flooded with bot content 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 well here's the crazy thing is like you can still tell a little bit that it's bots yeah but in a few years or not even that a few months six months you won't even know it's bots you'll just be sitting there being like wow that was a really thoughtful review that person wrote about x headphones and And then you'll buy them off Amazon.

1:42:46You'd be like, why the hell these headphones suck so bad? It's because there were 37 bots and they're all championing these headphones about how they're so amazing. And it's all BS. Everything. Nothing is to be trusted. So there's this whole theory called the dead internet theory, which is that eventually the internet is just going to be completely overrun by agents, AI agents that are infinitely patient that will write perfectly screwed up copy enough for you to believe it, right? Because it can't be perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is just all going to come. And so for us, what we're focused on is really creating a safe haven for humans to have real conversation.

1:43:21And that's exciting. So those are the two kind of things that I believe original content creators, as long as you can prove that you're an actual human, are going to be rewarded ultimately, hopefully, by the AIs that crawl you. How do you think that authentication is going to 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 going to actually make the cut and become the standard of the driver's license for proving like this is me?

1:43:58There's so much AI deepfake 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 going to be indistinguishable or close to indistinguishable. This is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking pretty deeply about. And I traded a couple notes with Sam and I met with the CEO of the retinal scanner company, Tools for Humanity. They're making that orb that scans your eyeball and went and met with them. And I actually got my retina scanned and did that whole process. It is not for everyone. I think a lot of people will kind of freak out by that.

1:44:36It is anonymous. They've done it in a way that shards your data. They can't link it back to you, all that good stuff. But that's too much explaining. Consumers are not just going to believe that. They'll use it for their TSA 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. 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.

1:45:08And I could see us doing that as well. 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. Right. Yeah, and I think there's two sides of the correct coin. 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.

1:45:51If I have to be like, okay, guys, I'm going to teach you the exact watermark and this and that. And watch out for these fakes, though, because they're very similar. But it's never going to work. Right. And that's where I think there's going to be a couple things. We're talking about a handful of different things here, right? Because we're talking about consumers. How do I trust another consumer that when they say these headphones are the best headphones, I can really believe that? And then you're talking about how do I know that Tim Ferriss is Tim Ferriss, right? Those are two different things.

1:46:18They're different. I think on the – I'm actually writing an article for Wired right now about this, where the trust is moving from a binary thing where we had binary trust before, meaning that back in the day, and I don't think this is any longer the case, but more or less, you could go on to Twitter when it was called Twitter. and you would see a blue check box next to someone and say, oh, that person has been verified or validated in some way, right? So it's a 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.

1:47:00So 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. That's what the Amazon verified purchase does, right? And so there are going to be open standards for that. And it's going to be messy, but it will work. And that if you come on, the future version of 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?

1:47:38And 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 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 an e-commerce site and we trust them because they are cryptographically secure, we will have those types of proofs for almost anything and everything that exists online.

1:48:15And so when you engage with another user, you'll be able to say, okay, I'm clicking on Tim. How do I know that these are the ketones that he trusts or whatever it may be? And there will be multiple ways to cryptographically prove in a non-geeky way. That's the key here. It can't be something that my mom won't understand. Read this white paper. 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.

1:48:50And 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 that we're, without trying to spill the beans too early and what we're building at Dig, is a lot of proof around... I was still thinking about the crystal balls. Go ahead. Yeah, we're not going to crack the crystal balls on this yet. But I will say that in-person means a lot. And so when you actually gather in a location with other people, proving with technology that you've actually met in person and had broken bread in person is going to create a trust network that is unlike anything that can be done online.

1:49:35And so that's on us to build and figure out as well, which is going to be pretty exciting. Yeah, I have, this might seem like I'm shilling my bags, but I've thought this for a long time, just launching a card game literally as we record this. But I am so long analog. And the reason that I'm long analog is that at least one of the silver linings, I think, of this post-truth internet experience, at least for a while, it's going to be messy AF for a while. Yes. And it's also a cat and mouse game, right? It's not like you create these authentication, there's no response. It's a cat and mouse kind of cloak and dagger situation.

1:50:11There's so many incentives, financial and otherwise, to scam people that, trust me, the scammers have great, some of them are really sophisticated. And it's an arms race. And I think, speaking as someone who's not an engineer, I'm not a computer scientist, but I would like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy. I've 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 want to walk into this house of funhouse mirrors and watch things that are fake, read things that are fake, have to decipher what's true and what isn't and get misled.

1:50:59There's so much downside that I really am optimistic, at least I hope, that people are going to actually do what we're evolved to do, which is spend more time interacting with humans, IRL. And we're seeing that with running clubs and board game nights and these various offline activities that are exploding in popularity. Who knows if that'll sustain, but you're seeing it in every major city in the United States at least. And 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.

1:51:43We're done. 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 where people gathered in? Yeah. Yeah. That was so fun. Do you remember the name of the service that you used? 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 get river.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.

1:52:41Like they've listened to the podcast. So they have something automatically they can talk about. We're meeting in person. And it was so much better than I could have ever hoped for. It was so much fun. Some of these meetups had hundreds 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. Right, exactly. Great experience. And the team over there was awesome. Yes. So I met with her because of you. And then she was amazing. And we're going to use them for our dig launch.

1:53:18In fact, we're doing a meetup tonight, close to 100 people in LA, just randomly threw it out there last week. 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. Kevin's crystal balls. 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.

1:53:54I still want to launch that app and learn about those funky, weird things that I would only find online. And you and I trade so many ridiculous videos. I wouldn't want that to go away. No, but I also need to go and get outside and actually breathe some fresh air and meet people. Right. 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. Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know that. And I got it since we're so on topic, I got to just flash this guy right here. So as you know, I've been so nervous about this and excited, but so Coyote, this card game, it's fast, casual, a couple of minutes to learn, 10 minutes to play.

1:54:38Kids love it. Turns out people have had a few drinks or smoked a little weed. Also love it. Does not help performance, but does make it pretty hilarious to watch.

1:54:50We'll have to see if that's okay to keep in, but we just called out a friend of ours that likes to play games. And it's finally launching everywhere. Walmart's had the exclusive for a few months and they've been actually awesome. And it's been a bestseller and it's started to go kind of bananas and gameplay videos. We've texted about this a little bit, but gameplay videos online have more than 300 million views now, which is so amazing. It's so So congratulations, man. After the NFTs, I'm glad to see you actually doing something that works. Yeah, thanks. Got to practice my art in a different way.

1:55:34And, 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 cockpunch Legends of Verlata Universe. You wait and see. I'm actually going to do a bunch with it. But, yeah, it's been going nuts. If people go to Amazon or wherever, Target, it's all over the place. It's in 8 ,000 plus retail locations as of this week. It's feeding into all the locations. And it's actually giving me both flashbacks that are really pleasant and also a little bit PTSD with my first book because the inventory is not getting to the warehouses fast enough. So it's actually, it can be a little challenging to buy this thing.

1:56:16But hey, soak it all in, man. Enjoy that moment though, right? Because you're in a great place to even have that issue. Like, it's so awesome. And you know what's also been super fun is I've played with friends. I've seen all the playtesting with families because we tested it with like 100 plus families. We tested the hell out of this. I mean, so many iterations. And it's ready. 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.

1:56:57They're people who love games, but people I'd never met before. And the amount of fun that we had, that was the real test for me, right? Because it's like, if I have a bunch of my dumb friends and we've had two drinks each and we have so much fun anyway together, 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 it's actually on dude that is so awesome yeah you caused a micro fight in our house last night because the game was it over whether somebody messed up or not no so here's what happened i was playing roblox with my kids and then daria had her headphones in and so i she couldn't hear me and the kids were asking questions.

1:57:49And I was like, she's listening to her podcast. And I'm like, can you take them out so you can engage with the kids? And she's like, well, if we weren't playing this and we could play something like Coyote, then we wouldn't have this issue because we could all play as a family. And I'm like, oh, fuck. 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.

1:58:28So they've actually funded a lot of science related to that on a whole bunch of levels. But the reason I brought up Roblox is because you sent me and Saga this video, this screen capture of playing Roblox, which is honestly really relaxing. It's so relaxing to watch. Yeah, the garden that I grew. Yeah, the garden that you grew with the cherry blossoms. Very relaxing to watch. But there was this classical music playing, and I was like, wait a fucking second. You stopped drinking, and now Kevin's listening to classical music? What is happening here? It's built into the game. It's built into the game.

1:59:02Grow 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 congratulations. Thank you. It was one, 1 % chance to get it on a roll. And so I, it's 20 bucks per 10 rolls. Oh wow. What a bunch of geniuses. Yeah. And I won't even tell you what I've done there. I'm not proud. This is like when they're doing their internal presentations, they're like, okay, so Q2 has been great. They're like, really?

1:59:42It all hinges on the 1 % of overspenders. Here's an avatar. We call it Kevin Rose. Exactly. We don't know who this user is. Oh my God. Awesome, man. So nice to see you. Always. Yeah, good to see you as well. Yeah, we got to hang. This is also all this talking about in person. I'm like, man, we got to hang in person. I'm sorry, you got family and lots of stuff. I didn't give you a ton of heads up either on the wilderness trip, but we got to do something got to do something in person 100 japan trip or something japan trip or i will be in la actually

2:00:50next month. 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. TimTim, two Tims, at dig.com, D-I-G-G.com. And we will let you skip that list and get you one of the early invite lists. Tim Tim. And just FYI, I'm not going to disclose because I don't know if it's public, but that's a long, like there's a long list. Several hundred thousand people. The bouncer will be letting you skip and come through the velvet ropes.

2:01:28We've only let 25 ,000 in so far and we have a couple hundred thousand people waiting on the wait list. And so far people are loving it and we're just getting started. So we've got a lot to build. So fun, so fun. Well, you look great, man. You sound great. Congratulations on the hundred days. That's a big, big, big deal. 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, I assume you're being sarcastic. No, I want to, I want to have a couple of drinks, you know, but 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.

2:02:06You know, you got to try. I will say I've definitely kind of just shifted that funnel of cash over straight to Roblox in the grow garden. That little freaking dragon guy cost me like two grand. That's the Kevin I know and love. There you go. He's back. He's back. Let's do some nanoblocks together. Yeah, I'm down for some nanoblocks. I think I need one that is sub 500 pieces to start with. I'll save this little ramen for you and we'll do it live on video. That'd be fun. 140 pieces. Have Craig Mott set up the audio for us. Yeah, exactly. All right. Cool, man. Awesome to see you, buddy. All right, brother.

2:02:48Talk soon. All right. And everybody listening, I guess we'll probably have some show notes for this. So tim.blog slash podcast random show and just look for the newest ones. All right, everybody. Be well, be kind, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between 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.

2:03:19It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, 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.

2:03:57If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I am always on the hunt for protein sources that don't require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. I don't want to eat sawdust. I also don't want a candy bar that's disguised as a protein bar. And that's why I love the protein bars from today's sponsor, David. They're 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.

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