Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose (digg.com)! We cover Kevin’s sobriety journey and marking 100 days without alcohol, my results with the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, GLP-1 agonists, home defense and security, the future of Venture Capital, authenticating yourself online, AI, the cultural shift […] The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 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 (#822) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose (digg.com)!
We cover Kevin’s sobriety journey and marking 100 days without alcohol, my results with the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, GLP-1 agonists, home defense and security, the future of Venture Capital, authenticating yourself online, AI, the cultural shift toward human-to-human connection, Roblox, and more.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the conversation on YouTube.
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Tim Ferriss: Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. KevKev. Random Show.
Kevin Rose: TimTim.
Tim Ferriss: Here we are again. Nice to see you here.
Kevin Rose: Here we are. Good to see you as well.
Tim Ferriss: And you crazy listeners and viewers out there, we have a lot to talk about. This is going to be an action-packed episode. Features all sorts of new biological hacks, psycho-emotional hacks, even includes some homeless people hiding in a closet. And that is not a metaphor. We’ll get to that eventually, but let’s kick off with a huge congrats, man. 100 days. Why is 100 days significant? What is the milestone?
Kevin Rose: The milestone is no alcohol for 100 days.
Tim Ferriss: Fucking A, man. Congratulations. That is huge.
Kevin Rose: Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: That is huge.
Kevin Rose: It is huge, especially given how much of an alcoholic I was.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s dive into it. Because I have, over the decades, I guess, at this point, right, seen you take a stab at sobriety many different times, and the success has varied, but nothing has approached 100 days. Nothing. Nothing.
Kevin Rose: Well, don’t make it seem like it’s that bad.
Tim Ferriss: When you were laying under those overpasses just taking hit after hit.
Kevin Rose: Hey, listen, you’ve also taken a stab at non-sobriety with me many times.
Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. Well, I was going to say 100 days sober, even for someone who does not consider themselves a drinker, but let’s just say for someone who drinks occasionally, socially, that’s a meaningful period of time. That’s a quarter of the year, more than a quarter of the year. So I’m sure we’ve talked about this, we’ve tracked it a little bit over time, but what made the difference this time around? Let’s reiterate that for folks and maybe your answer’s changed.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. I think that initially it was fear of death, which was largely driven by my doctor calling me up and saying, “Your liver enzymes are like,” whatever it was, “5X, 7X what they should be.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. Okay.
Kevin Rose: So that was number one. But just to give people a benchmark of where I was at drinking-wise. My journey with alcohol, it’s been one of a love affair. I’ve definitely enjoyed the drinks, but for me, it’s never been about drinking to blackout or drinking to even any type of illness or sickness. It’s just kind of consistency, meaning that when COVID happened, I was sober as could be for the first three weeks. And then I’m like, “Eh, what do we have to do? We should just drink a little bit. I think everybody’s going to be okay.” At first, I was like, “Got to get my immune system on point,” and then I just gave that up and there was a lot of loneliness. And I was out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, and had some young kids, and was like, “Ah, let’s just crack a bottle of wine.” So it was a very common, very normal thing for us as a household —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for a lot of people.
Kevin Rose: — to just crack a bottle and just finish the whole bottle between two people, and that became the norm. And then I just remembered that there — for me, I was always asking myself, “Can I take a day or two off per week?” Which I think would be a good, healthy thing. But then if you just add up the amount of drinks, even with taking a day or two off, if you’re doing three drinks a night, that’s a lot of drinks every month.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot. And just to put that also in a broader context, part of the reason I’ve never lived full-time in New York City, and part of the reason some of my friends have moved out of New York City is not because New York City is a bad place, but at least in the social circles by and large that I know, finishing a bottle of wine between two people, let’s call that two and a half drinks apiece, that would be a light night in New York City. And to do that minimum three nights, but three, four, five, six nights per week — and a lot of the groups I know at least, that is just par for the course.
Kevin Rose: Right. The issue is that when you get into your 40s and you have all that cumulative damage of decades, you realize, “Well, things start to shut down like your liver.” So I think that was the first sign, but then I just realized —
Tim Ferriss: Only have one liver, so you want to take care of that baby.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, the nice thing obviously about the liver is that until you’re at that point of no return, it’s pretty damn good at healing itself. And my liver enzymes snapped back to normal ranges within four weeks, which was great to see. But when I think about: when have I truly given it a break? When have I truly taken more? And I’ve taken a month off here or there, there’s those dry Januaries, and I would have a dampish January where you have a drink or two, but it’s still kind of dry January. And so that was the norm, and then I just said, “If I can’t go three months, then —” And actually my therapist told me this, she said, “Kevin, it’s kind of a golf clap at one month, three months is where the magic happens in terms of how you feel, your energy, your mood, weight loss, glucose control, all of the things that you’ve said you want to have.”
But can you do it? And it is really challenging to go three months for someone like myself that it is a crutch around social situations. It is a crutch around, if I’m being honest, when you have a partner where you’re dealing with a couple little kids and it can be challenging with the kiddos and with the logistics of a household, and all of a sudden you’re just like, “Ah, I had a hard long day at work and I had a long day at home, and I have some good wine sitting right there.” It’s very easy to tap into that.
Tim Ferriss: So what would you say made the difference this time around? You had the health scare or at least the doctor saying, “Hey, hot shot —”
Kevin Rose: It was surrounding myself with people that had done this before.
Tim Ferriss: How did you find them?
Kevin Rose: Well, I think we’re at the age that if you — I’m sure you probably can check this box as well, where I know right now three people that have successfully done 12-step programs.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Yeah. Easily three.
Kevin Rose: In fact, we have a couple of friends in common that are now sober and have done these programs. And yeah, that’s exactly it. And you reach out to them and say, “Hey, what did you do? What about these 12 steps has worked for you?” I was always kind of put off by the religious aspect of —
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Kevin Rose: — some of the 12-step stuff. It just seemed to me like a little — I don’t know. I didn’t really think I had it that bad, but I knew that there were people that, and I had seen this, that had stuck to it with the help and support of these people. And they gather around you and really give you a kind of tool kit to lean into. And for me that has been really understanding that it’s not about the three months, it’s just about winning today. And so if you can reframe it as just not today. Yeah, I can have a drink tomorrow, but just not today.
Tim Ferriss: Not today, Satan. Not today, Satan.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. And it sounds so silly, but —
Tim Ferriss: No, it doesn’t though.
Kevin Rose: — do these little tiny things
Tim Ferriss: Eternity — well, I guess we’re not going to live for all eternity unless you believe some people on the internet, but until you die is a long time, or at least you hope it’s a long time. But today or tomorrow, today, it’s very digestible, right?
Kevin Rose: Yes. Yeah, 100 percent. And so that was a big thing. And having those friends, and the first thing they did being — some of them are — one’s still in AA and two or ex-AA. They said that, “What we do here is we can just give you our numbers and you call anytime you’re having a craving or you think you’re getting close to not pulling this off because we want to see you succeed.” And I think that’s a powerful thing to be able to have a hotline to someone that is like, “I’ve been here. It sucks.” Yes, yes, you can get to two weeks, but do you want to white knuckle this all the entire way by yourself or do you want someone that’s going to go have a tea with you and sit with you for an evening on a day that’s particularly hard?
And so I think after you get to kind of six — well, I’m just speaking for myself, but when I got to six or ish weeks, the kind of the headache-y kind of desire of it all faded away a little bit. And then I found a bunch of shit that I really enjoyed doing that was not drinking. And I think that’s the other big thing you have to do, is you have to really figure out what is going to fill that space. Because if it’s just sitting there thinking about drinks —
Tim Ferriss: Smoking. Copious amounts of weed. No, I’m kidding.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I started cocaine and I just did a bunch of weed, but other than that — no. I wish I liked weed. I do not like weed for some reason. It just doesn’t — I like the way it —
Tim Ferriss: I think Sigmund Freud for a while was viewing cocaine as the solution to heroin. I’m not making that up. He’s a very famous psychoanalyst, but that’s not that. So, you didn’t go for snow blindness, you went for —
Kevin Rose: No, but I did go for this. Look at this.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay. Now this looks like a Japanese LEGO-ish — those are Nanoblocks?
Kevin Rose: Yes. So this is called Nanoblocks, and it’s one of the things I wanted to talk about today. So, Nanoblocks are from Japan. And I did a little research and essentially they were able to find a way around a lot of the LEGO patents. And they created — look at how small this block is.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s holding it up.
Kevin Rose: If you listen to audio —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s about the size of a baby aspirin. It’s tiny.
Kevin Rose: Right, exactly. And so they literally sell Nanoblock branded tweezers to put these things together.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the most Japanese thing I can imagine at this moment.
Kevin Rose: Exactly. And so the instructions are horrific, which actually makes it more fun. Look at this. Look at this bad boy.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. Okay. So, he’s holding up a cherry blossom tree. It’s actually awesome. It’s kind of mesmerizing in that lo-fi kind of way. And it probably has, I’m just going to guess here, 857 pieces, something —
Kevin Rose: No, this was 2,500, I think, pieces.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. Here we go.
Kevin Rose: So, this’ll take you a good solid week.
Tim Ferriss: It’ll keep your hands — idle hands of the devil’s workshop, but not if you have Nanoblocks.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. So, I will say that little hobbies like this, especially ones that you can do with your kids — do I have my — yeah, so this one back here is also LEGO.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s — I guess I’m blanking on the exact name. The Great Wave, Hokusai. Almost everyone will have seen this in some form or fashion. That’s cool. That’s very cool.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so that actually is legit LEGO. This is not Nanoblocks, but this one is really cool. We talked about that one once before, but I think these things are great to have. These little hobbies are great to have. And Nanoblocks, I will say, if you go on Amazon, they sell them on there, they have horrible reviews. And the reason why the reviews are so bad is because the instructions, like I said, are horrific. But once you understand the way that the Japanese want you to do it, there is a method to their madness, and they all work the same way. So, it takes you an hour and a half to be like, “Why are they telling me to put it like — what does that arrow mean?” And then you understand the arrow systems because there’s a lot of Japanese, a little bit of sprinkled English throughout the instructions.
Tim Ferriss: Probably doesn’t help very much.
Kevin Rose: Right, but look at this kit here. So they have these cute little kits.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, ramen. Yeah. Cup O’ Noodle, basically.
Kevin Rose: That little ramen.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 140 pieces, ages 12 plus. That’s fun.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So, this ramen is going to be about the size of —
Tim Ferriss: A shot glass.
Kevin Rose: — a little teacup. Like a shot glass. Exactly. But it’s super tiny, and it’ll take you eight hours to put that together. But they’re so fun. They’re so fun. And I have a massive Godzilla that’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: So, two things. Number one, if a video on YouTube doesn’t exist already, you should just create a video, which is like, “Let me explain how to use these fucking things.” That would be a great service to humanity.
Kevin Rose: You know what’s funny is I’m actually doing that. I’m going to do a live — there’s this whole movement right now where people go out — actually Craig Mod is quite good at this, where he’ll go out — you had him on your podcast, fantastic. All things Japan, Craig Mod is the best. He has gone out and he’s done these ambient recordings where he just goes to these rural parts of Japan.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, they’re so cool.
Kevin Rose: And he just sets up his mic and you listen to the street traffic, you listen to the people doing various tasks, and there’s something to be said about — they call this slow TV, this movement. There’s this whole thing where people watch people grooming and shearing sheep. Have you seen this.
Tim Ferriss: No, but I saw this guy who has a podcast that is sort of, I guess, interviewing thought leaders, and he didn’t disclose this in the tweet, but the tweet was like — there is an account of a Norwegian truck driver, this is on YouTube, just driving through different parts of the countryside in Norway, and it has 5,000,000 subscribers or something. And he said, “Meanwhile, there are other podcasts that do this on YouTube, and they only have 9,000 subscribers,” link. He didn’t disclose that it was actually his account. But yeah, the slow, I suppose, what’s the right word, sort of living vicariously as a fly on the wall with things that seem very day to day.
Craig Mod has actually a super relaxing — it’s hard for me to explain exactly what it is. Maybe it’s just a mild antidote to digital loneliness. Maybe that’s part of it. But he went to a Japanese jazz listening bar where people — or a jazz listening cafe, where it’s full of vinyl. People sit there in true Japanese fashion, practically dead silent, just listening to the owner who’s effectively the DJ, put on different vinyl. And he got all the —
Kevin Rose: I’ve been to this bar.
Tim Ferriss: — all the ambient sounds. And Craig Mod, what a gem. Definitely look him up.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: The name is M-O-D, as you heard.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. And I will say that I’ve talked to Craig about — I asked him, I said, “Hey, how do you get this? Why does it sound so amazing? What’s your secret here?” And he uses these binaural microphones that, essentially, they go into his ears. And so he plugs them into his ears and then into a solid state recording device. And so you’re listening as though you’re sitting in his ears because there’s a mic on each side. And so that’s the left and right audio channels, and it creates this illusion of a depth of audio as you’re listening, which is just brilliant, and it’s so much fun. But yeah, there is a massive movement, and I get it.
Tim, we are so addicted to our devices that, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m getting in my late 40s, but I desperately crave more analog in my life.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, more analog.
Kevin Rose: More so than I ever have.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Kevin Rose: Do you find that to be the case with yourself?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, 100 percent. Next week I’m going on this wilderness trek in Montana and Idaho that is going to be off grid and with a couple of close friends. And sure, you could bring, say, a solar charger and try to use your phone, but I’m just going to leave mine behind. I don’t need it. What am I going to do?
Kevin Rose: You just bring in your printed Playboys. You’re going all analog.
Tim Ferriss: I’m bringing the stash from the late ’80s. I kept those with my D&D from childhood when I packed them up. And analog, more and more analog. We are just evolved to thrive and feel at ease in analog environments, which isn’t to say all digital is bad, but certainly past a point, the self-soothing becomes a poison. And I don’t think we need to convince anyone of that. You see it everywhere. So, it makes sense that even in a digital sphere, this type of slow viewing cat — I was going to say cat-on-the-wall, not even sure what that would be. Maybe it — it sounds like a Japanese t-shirt, but fly-on-the-wall experience, it allows people to put something in the background. I used to do this when I was writing my books.
So 4-Hour Workweek — I don’t even know if you know this, so 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef, I would do most of my writing late at night. And a lot of authors I know who are productive, not saying I’m one of the most productive at all, but either write very early when everyone’s asleep or they write very late when everyone is asleep. The upside is you can focus, the downside is it can feel very, very isolating. So I would sit in my TV room and I would put on music, but I would always put on movies to watch, so I had people around on the screen.
And these were movies that I would just watch on repeat. So I’ve seen, for the first movie — or first set of movies for The 4-Hour Workweek. It was Shaun of the Dead and the first Jason Bourne. And then for The 4-Hour Body, it was Snatch, and it was the first movie I chose that popped up on Amazon Prime, which is Babe. Masterpiece of a movie. So, I watched Snatch and Babe like 5,000 times each. Absolutely high hundreds each. But it’s just to have something in the background that is comforting while I’m isolated and I’m listening to music and writing, so it makes sense to me.
Kevin Rose: You know The Naked Gun is coming back.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I do. I saw the reviews and I’m like, “God, I hope it’s true,” because The Naked Gun was so good.
Kevin Rose: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Liam Neeson is actually a fantastic actor, despite the fact that he’s made some version of Taken like 789 times, but the guy has chops. But in the same way Johnny Depp has chops, but when they did a remake of Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, I was like, “Oh, I don’t do it. Gene Wilder is going to be really hard to top. That’s going to be really tough.” So I’m optimistic in a way I suppose with movies that I haven’t been in a long time. So, I’m excited to check out The Naked Gun.
Kevin Rose: I’m just curious to see if they’re going to keep up with the — because The Naked Gun you could not make today. Well, maybe you could.
Tim Ferriss: As it was.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There’d have to be some script doctoring for sure. Let me — before we get to The Naked Gun, I want to make an observation, which is you and I text a lot, and we’re in one ridiculous small friend group thread. And since you cut alcohol out, the tone of your communication is completely different, in the sense that you basically don’t complain anymore, effectively gone as far as complaining. But I think that’s just related to the ups and downs that are maybe more noticeable when you’re drinking and all the effects on metabolism and insulin sensitivity and so on. But it’s like your general tone and existence and demeanor is so much more stable in its positivity since you stopped drinking. So I just wanted to mention that because it’s very noticeable.
Kevin Rose: That’s interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Not that you were bitching and moaning all the time before, but the change is very noticeable.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, because I feel like your bitching has gone up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: As you get older, something’s happened.
Tim Ferriss: Something’s not right here.
Kevin Rose: No, I appreciate you saying that. I feel as though — well, I will say this — you never know how much you should share on podcasts and whatnot, but I’m going to just go out here. I know my wife’s going to listen to this, but I might as well say it anyway. You argue less when you’re both not drinking, it turns out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. For sure.
Kevin Rose: And you and I are always — we’ve been known to text each other various grievances with our partners and people we’ve been seeing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you need to do it. Yeah, you need to do it.
Kevin Rose: You need an outlet, especially with your buddy.
Tim Ferriss: You need an outlet. It’s like you just need somebody to vent to. But I would say holistically, so if you even took the partner piece out of it, just in general, you’re much more upbeat and it’s noticeable.
And again, I want to mention something that I’m pretty sure we haven’t. I didn’t want to repeat myself, so I used AI to summarize our last few Random Shows. And a few things that I’ve done I’m pretty sure since our last conversation were interventions for health also. And the primary drivers behind that were not any type of medical emergency, but I’m now caring for two family members who have rapidly deteriorating cognitive health. And this is very common in my family. Lots of Parkinson’s, lots of Alzheimer’s in particular.
And what I’ve noticed is that some of these people who seem hardest hit by Alzheimer’s are, say, APOE 3/3. They shouldn’t have a high predisposition to Alzheimer’s. And I’m APOE 3/4, so I’m like, “Fuck, if I am, as we understand it now, something like 2.5 times more likely than the population average to be predisposed to Alzheimer’s, this is something I want to look at very, very closely.” Because there are some interventions out there, and you and I have invested in hopefully some new interventions to come in the four coming years, but that’s going to take some time. By the time the symptoms are really obvious, it’s very, very hard to treat something like Alzheimer’s, which doesn’t mean that the interventions don’t work, it just means they might not work at that stage. So, I’m really trying to — and I’ve already been taking a lot of mental health and cognitive neuronal health thing 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 2 training, for instance.
Kevin Rose: I hate Zone 2, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so boring.
Kevin Rose: Just annoying.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like flossing. It’s just like the 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 2, it’s boring, but you’ve 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 or insensitive glucose disposal, et cetera. Getting fasting glucose isn’t enough. You can get false good news if that’s timed luckily or well.
So I’ve had my best lab results, and I get three or four tests a year, probably my best lab results in the last decade, most recently. And I would attribute that to a few things. I used ketogenic diet, very straightforward. You have to figure out a few meals that work for you. For me, it was a big salad with ribeye cut on top with some cheese. You have to figure out something that doesn’t make you feel like a human cheesecloth every day because you really want to keep your protein moderate. You can’t have too much protein on the ketogenic diet if you want to stay in 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. It’s just too boring and too disgusting, and plus, I really need to watch my lipid profile.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s my problem.
Tim Ferriss: But based on the reading that I was doing, it seemed like three to four weeks of serious ketosis was enough to initiate some durable changes. And then maybe if you do that at least, and this is speculation, but once every six months, once every year, that you can keep the metabolic machinery where you want it. And so I did four weeks and I was like, “Enough,” but I started leaning into intermittent fasting towards the end of that, and experimenting with 16/8. So, what that means is 16 hours of fasting, eight hours of eating. Eight hours could be noon to eight o’clock, could be 2:00 p.m. to 10:00. 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, 8:00 or 9:00.
And then shifted back to a non-ketogenic diet, and this is going somewhere, folks, because the ketogenic diet may have nothing to do with it, but the combination of doing three to four weeks of ketosis and then doing intermittent fasting for the last two months, but at the time of my blood test, it was only about four weeks in, my insulin sensitivity — which my family just as a team sucks at. 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. There’s also a guy I recommend with some reservation, but Martin Berkhan, who really popularized, to 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 is that, and this was very unexpected, my mood is so elevated and stable now, it’s kind of hard for me to believe that I didn’t figure this out sooner.
And I think part of that was, as a competitive athlete, especially growing up when we grew up, it was like, “Okay, small meals every four hours,” something like that was the dogma. And I think that was a just enough smoke screen that I was able to cover up insulin insensitivity because if I didn’t eat frequently, I would start to crash and then get grumpy, and then I would boost it back up with granted a healthy meal, but I was still eating very, very consistently. And in doing this, my mood on average has just been so much higher, so much more stable for, I would say, the last eight weeks. I don’t have any intention of changing.
Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: I think I could do the intermittent fasting indefinitely. And on top of that, I’ll say 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 —
Kevin Rose: I was just going to ask you that.
Tim Ferriss: — you can lose a lot of muscle mass. And I remember doing DEXA scans way back in the day. I started doing DEXA before The 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. And I judged it harshly and I judged it prematurely. So, in animal models, and also certainly if you look at what Martin and some of his clients have done, that need not be the case. And you’re not necessarily going to pack on tons of muscle, but you can lose fat while preserving or moderately gaining muscle. So, I’m still getting stronger in my workouts, and it’s interesting how fat loss works too. And Martin’s observed this. A lot of people have observed this, but it’s not caloric deficit, and you lose a predictable amount every week. Sure, if you were a closed system, blah, blah, blah, law of thermodynamics, yeah, it should just be pure math. But what seems to happen, at least with me, is that it’s 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. And I don’t have a great explanation for that, but I’m sure there is a good explanation.
Kevin Rose: It’s that MCT oil that you’re taking with the — you’re running into the bathroom.
Tim Ferriss: Just letting everything pass through.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: And yes, that will aid in fat loss, but —
Kevin Rose: Yeah, and lack of sleep.
Tim Ferriss: — yeah, I don’t want the sleep architecture disruption. And also it’s like you can get away with a lot if you’re taking stimulants. And this is said as someone who for a long time — I was first introduced to pre-workout stimulants by an older student when I was wrestling in high school.
Kevin Rose: Let me guess, N.O.-Xplode.
Tim Ferriss: So, N.O.-Xplode, little reds, yeah. N.O.-Xplode is like a later iteration, but at that point, this guy was giving me the cobbled together, you can’t really do this anymore and I don’t recommend it.
Kevin Rose: Fen-Phen and shit?
Tim Ferriss: No, not Fen-Phen. Ephedrine caffeine aspirin, the ECA stack, and that will rip body fat off of your body, but you are not getting a biological free lunch. You are really hammering yourself and your system. So I’ve —
Kevin Rose: Did you ever hit Bronkaid?
Tim Ferriss: Bronkaid is probably ephedrine, I would guess.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know, but did you ever hit it when you were younger?
Tim Ferriss: Actually an inhaler, or what do you mean?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, because that’s what people would do.
Tim Ferriss: No.
Kevin Rose: The bodybuilders would hit Bronkaid and they would put on sweatshirts and go on the treadmill, just sweat their faces off —
Tim Ferriss: No, no. No, I didn’t do that.
Kevin Rose: And just get six-pack abs.
Tim Ferriss: No. You would buy Primatene Mist tablets. And don’t do this, folks, it’s not good for you. Also, if you try to buy Primatene Mist tablets now, you have to show your driver’s license because I believe there are labs or probably trailers is a more accurate description. People will use that as a precursor to produce methamphetamine is my understanding, which is why it’s very tightly controlled. So suffice to say don’t do that and I’ve been very wary of any regimen that requires a lot of stimulants is, I guess, what I’m trying to say. And the only time that I have reliably — if you look at every single male in my family, it’s kind of comical. You can spot them from a mile away.
And abdominal fat, I know this isn’t unique to my family, but nobody in the history of my family on either side has ever had six-pack abs except for me when I was taking disgusting quantities of stimulants. But this time around doing the resistance training plus intermittent fasting and yes, some of it could be explained by reduced caloric intake, but I think there’s more to it, the abdominal fat’s finally coming off. And this is at 48. I’m no spring chicken. So I’ve been very impressed that I’m able to do that.
Kevin Rose: Anything else like joint pain? Some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet, people say joint pain goes away. They get some of these other things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So another reason in addition to mitochondrial health that I want to 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 “regular diet” that’s higher in carbohydrates.
I have also been adding in with my, let’s just call it normal diet, intermittent fasting, exogenous ketones. So supplemental ketones in the morning because I also — I want to give credit where credit is due. Rhonda Patrick and I have had a lot of texts back and forth. Rhonda Patrick, for people who don’t know, I think — God, maybe you introduced me to her. 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. And her dad, I believe it was, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and she’s been public about this. And so we were trading notes on all different things and we were talking about ketosis and if you’re in ketosis, what about intermittent fasting? If you have a tablespoon of heavy cream in your coffee in the beginning, are you sacrificing autophagy, this kind of cellular self-eating/cleanup? And she sent me a case study of an Alzheimer’s patient. Pretty progressed Alzheimer’s, very impaired function, who was given a ketone monoester, so this is a liquid that is basically just a shot, two or three times a day.
And 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, 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 Qitone, Q-I-T-O-N-E. And it’s a powder that you can add into your coffee and mix up as a creamer, which is what I do.
Kevin Rose: Wait, can we ask you one question, Tim, before you go on with this one? You and I were on a call, not a public call, but a phone call and you had mentioned that you found the best basically ketones on the market that you believed at the time and this was recently. So are these the ones?
Tim Ferriss: These are not those ones in part because, this is going to make me 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 I want this stuff for my family and this producer has very, very limited inventory. So I want to make sure that I can get this stuff. And Furthermore, I think it’s really premature to start just dosing your elderly parents or aunts and uncles with this. I still have some open questions about concerns and long-term health, etc. So I want to do some more digging. This is not that one.
Kevin Rose: Is this one palatable?
Tim Ferriss: This one is palatable.
Kevin Rose: Because you should tell people, the hardcore stuff is no joke, right? It’s cruel to be giving it to someone with dementia and that you’re asking them to chug gasoline.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I thought it was going to be worse than it is, but I also have a stomach of iron and have choked down so much disgusting shit over my life that I think — I’m dating a lovely girl right now and I made some salad and she tried to eat it and she’s like, “This is inedible. This is so disgusting. Why did you put so much vinegar on it?” And I did put way too much vinegar on it and she almost puked at the table and I was like, “What are you talking about?” I’m just shoving it down my maw. So I don’t know if I’m the best reference for palatable, but they’ve improved a lot.
They used to taste like jet fuel, I mean based on reports. I wasn’t even willing to do it. Because literally, I think he’s been public about this, Peter Attia, famous doc, trained at Hopkins, Stanford, etc, a lot of people will know him, he told me about the first time he tried the OG ketone monoesters and he took a shot and he basically had to run to the sink and white-knuckle the sides of the sink as he’s dry heaving for like 10 minutes. And I was like, no thanks, no thanks. But this Qitone, 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.
Kevin Rose: Just chase it with an Imodium, you’ll be fine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And of particular danger is caffeine ketones and creatine, which is also great to take.
Kevin Rose: Well, and MCT.
Tim Ferriss: But yeah, if you take any two of those four, you’re in the danger zone. If you take three or four out of the four, there’s coin toss disaster pants. So just stay close to the bathroom. You do get used to it. But I just used this ketone this morning 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.
Kevin Rose: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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 one percent of one percent, no one’s going to be able to afford that.
Kevin Rose: So Tim, for people that are listening and they’re hearing you talk about two different ketones here, it begs the question, if you are pricking yourself, doing blood work afterwards and finding out what your ketone levels are or peeing on a strip or however you’re doing it, obviously you can tell that these things work and I’ve done it myself because you take them and then you literally go do the test and a half hour later or five minutes later you see that your ketone bodies are elevated and you’re like, okay, it’s in my system, it’s working. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And I don’t know about you, but I can feel it. It’s like a light switch goes off.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can absolutely feel it.
Kevin Rose: Cognitively your brain, also cardiac tissue, loves ketones.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, brain juice. It’s brain juice and — finish what you’re saying and then I’ll add something else.
Kevin Rose: My question for you is why would you even consider the more expensive 20 to $30 when there are so many other readily available, call it the five to $7 range ketones that are out there on market? What are the advantages of that $30 model?
Tim Ferriss: It’s hard for me not to dox a supplier by giving too much detail, but what I will say is this. Subjectively, and I’ve checked with a few people who have tested it, nothing feels like these ketones.
Kevin Rose: Really?
Tim Ferriss: Nothing. Not even close. It’s the Bugatti of exogenous ketones. You flip on the switch and for instance, I’m doing a lot of media interviews and stuff right now because of this Coyote game and we could talk about that at some point, I mean that’s very analog, as analog as it gets. I’m doing a lot of media and historically what would I have done? Because I want to be sharp, even in the afternoon I would have tea or coffee, but then that fucks up your sleep so badly and it turns into this vicious cycle. So now I just take the exogenous ketones in the afternoons and if anything, it’s going to help you sleep, which is something you observe with the ketogenic diet that’s really wild is that you are, at least personally, and this is true for a lot of people, your sleep requirements go down and when you wake up, I’m not a morning person historically, it doesn’t take me an hour to get up to speed. When I’m in ketosis, I wake up and I am ready to go nine or 10 out of 10.
So I would say for a lot of folks though, at least based on the reviews and reports that I’ve read, the diester, this Qitone, 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 three diabetes. Brain diabetes. And that is part of the reason why this is so interesting to me. Not only is it possible treatment or something that could reduce symptoms, maybe restore function, but also for preventative purposes.
If I can do, as I did for a long time, for many years I did a seven-day water only fast per year and then I would do a three-day water only fast once a quarter, I still think that’s a good idea, but for whatever reason in the last few years I became less tolerant of that. I would do a seven-day fast and I would get really dizzy if I stood up. I would have memory problems and I think it was increasing insulin insensitivity in part that caused that. And now that I’m doing this 16/8 intermittent fasting and I’ll occasionally just switch it up and — ketosis takes a little while to get into, so there’s a bit of an on-ramp. But now that I’m doing this, I’m 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? 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. I can get so many people to change their behavior on the planet and my parents will not listen to a thing I say. And 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, particularly —
Kevin Rose: 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 — for me, I’m just like you where I did a glucose tolerance test and I stayed elevated for way too long.
Tim Ferriss: You want to explain what that is?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, so for people that don’t know, when you go to a fancy doc like Peter Attia or some of these other concierge doctors, and you can ask your normal GP to do this and some of them will if you have a cool one and they’re on top of it, but they’ll essentially sit down with you and they will give you a straight glucose drink. So think of a 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 remember off the top of your head?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, every 30 minutes for two hours.
Kevin Rose: Right. 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Recovery.
Kevin Rose: Return to a normal baseline, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kevin Rose: And mine just stays elevated for 5X too long. It just hovers around that 135 forever. So that could be my muscles aren’t sensitized, they’re not taking up enough glucose, I have metabolic dysfunction. It could be a handful of different things.
And so I’m actually taking a different approach than you in that I also have been talking to Rhonda a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Phone a friend. Poor Rhonda.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Poor Rhonda. So she told me not too long ago, maybe this was 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-1 now.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I want to hear more about this.
Kevin Rose: So I started microdosing, basically about two months ago, tirzepatide.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Zepbound also.
Kevin Rose: Right, it goes by Zepbound or on the glucose side it’s Mounjaro for people who 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 one milliliter of it and — not milliliter. What am I thinking of?
Tim Ferriss: Milligram?
Kevin Rose: What is it the insulin syringe is? A little under one unit basically.
Tim Ferriss: IU, yeah, international unit.
Kevin Rose: Yeah. So a little under one unit of that compound. And I notice over the course of a week, because that’s how long you microdose it for, I have lower just standard resting glucose, and then also my spikes don’t get near as high. I probably trim 30 percent 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. There are other benefits of GLP-1 other than just can I look good? Right? So obviously I’m not doing it for the weight loss, I need more for weight loss, but if I could see one ab, I’m not going to be pissed.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll take a two pack at this point.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: No, but try the 16/8, man. It’s been wild to watch.
Kevin Rose: Well, I mean, you’re talking to the guy that created zero, the intermittent fasting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Rose: I’ve definitely done my fair share of 16/8.
Tim Ferriss: It takes some time, just the long-term durable changes. And I don’t mean indefinite changes, but with the ketogenic diet it really took a few weeks and then there was a step function in terms of change.
Kevin Rose: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: A few more things about GLP-1 agonists. So I have some of my relatives with neurodegenerative disease on tirzepatide, low-dose tirzepatide. And by the way, folks, talk to your doctors. We are fucking not doctors, we’re clowns on the internet.
Kevin Rose: This is bro science at best.
Tim Ferriss: At best. Yeah. Bro science B minus. But they’re on tirzepatide, that’s with supervision of very competent doctors, for the metabolic dysfunction primarily. So glucose control, etc. 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. And there’s actually, I think they’re called DORAs, a sleep medication, also appear to have some neuroprotective effects primarily or at least relevant to me related to Alzheimer’s. So I’ve also thought —
Kevin Rose: What was the name of the one that — I can’t remember the name of it. The sleep medication.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a class, so let me get this —
Kevin Rose: But there’s a name for that. I just got a prescription to one of these and I had to pay out of pocket for it because I didn’t qualify obviously for insurance and it was insane.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me just finish my thought for a second here.
Kevin Rose: Yeah, go ahead.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to hear about this. So I said NORA or DORA, I’m 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 for —
Kevin Rose: I don’t use trazodone anymore.
Tim Ferriss: You don’t? Okay. I’ve been thinking of replacing that with a DORA, obviously with medical supervision, because now that I’m an adult and I can see what’s going on — because as a kid I had a grandmother who kind of disintegrated under the weight of Alzheimer’s, but I was too young to really know what was going on. Now that I’m an adult and I can see the personality changes, the anxiety, the depression, everything that comes with it, I am looking for a full stack of capped downside, ideally well-studied low risk, but potential upside interventions. So you tried some of these? What happened?
Kevin Rose: Yeah, I have one. I’m trying to find the name of it. I’ll have to go into my pharmacy and look.
Tim Ferriss: Into your pharmacy.
Kevin Rose: Well I have an online pharmacy. But it’s legit. It’s Amazon Pharmacy. I’ll just say it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, all right. All right.
Kevin Rose: Amazon Pharmacy.
Tim Ferriss: I thought you just had next to your red room, you have a dedicated pharmacy.
Kevin Rose: You’re the one with the [Inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: Well yeah, that’s true. That’s tr
