#239: How to Reverse Aging with Art De Vany

Dr. Arthur De Vany is nearly eighty years old and ripped. Better known as Art De Vany https://www.facebook.com/art.devany, he was signed as a professional baseball player in his youth and later earned his Ph. D. in Economics at UCLA. He is most famous for his "evolutionary fitness" approach to training and diet, and our conversation focuses on that. During his time at UCLA, Art did many things, including creating mathematical and statistical models to precisely describe the motion picture market. Art is Professor Emeritus of Economics of the University of California, Irvine, and is a member of its acclaimed Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a Paleo athlete for more than thirty years and is considered a "patriarch" of the Paleo movement. He believes there is no such thing as "healthy" aging and that we can intervene to protect against the aging process. In this episode, we talk about his daily schedule, workout routines, why he never gets sick, ice ages, economics, philosophies of intermittent everything, and really dig into the details of a fascinating man. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now -- this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This podcast is also brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, this isn't appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish folks, young entrepreneurs, very talented, after a acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which is mushroom coffee. The specific one includes chaga and lion's mane. And it knocked my socks off. I highly recommend if you try it, you start with half a packet. It's very strong and lights you up like a Christmas tree in the best way possible. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement, and for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect,

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water and oddly enough, only includes 40mg of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard

• 1:53Tim Ferriss?

  full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something, you can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's four Sigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim, and use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out.

• 2:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for many, many years. I absolutely love audiobooks and they are one of my favorite ways to pass the time when I travel. I'm on the road all the time and Audible allows me to consume many more books than I possibly could otherwise. I have two audiobooks to recommend right off the bat. The first is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time and it's the only audiobook I've wanted to listen to twice in a row. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's amazing and you will thank me. There are a few different versions. I like the version that Neil narrates himself. One of the most soothing voices of all time. The second book is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, P-O-T-T-S, which had a huge impact on my

• 3:08Tim Ferriss?

  life and formed the basis for a lot of what would later become The 4-Hour Work Week. So, go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of these two books or any of many, many other options. That could be books, magazines, and much more. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can also access a free 30-day trial. Just go to audible.com/tim. You can't make more time, but you can make the most of it. So, turn your travel or your commute into something more with a free trial at Audible. Go to audible.com/tim to start now and get your free 30-day trial.

• 3:46Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm sitting in a cabin surrounded by snow and it is still my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, from entertainment to military, chess to jujitsu, you name it. I have tried to interview the best of the best in that world. And in this particular episode, we are going to talk about anti-aging. What does that mean? Well, there's a lot of hogwash, a lot of nonsense out there, but there are a few people who really stand out as particularly interesting because they walk the talk. Dr. Arthur Devaney is nearly 80 years old and totally ripped. I just spent a bunch of time with him, better known as Art Devaney, and you should check

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  him out on Facebook, facebook.com/art.devaney, D-E-V-A-N-Y. He was signed as a professional baseball player in his youth and later earned his PhD in economics at UCLA. He is most famous for his evolutionary fitness, that's the term you would use, approach to training and diet, and our conversation focuses a lot on the subtleties and details of that. During his time at UCLA, Art did many things, including creating mathematical and statistical models to precisely describe the motion picture market. Art is now Professor Emeritus of Economics of the University of California at Irvine and is a member of their acclaimed Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. So this guy's very analytical, he's very mathematical, and very, very logical.

• 5:14Tim Ferriss?

  And that is the water on the kettle, but I'm gonna power through it because I'm gonna have tea, but it's gonna be after this intro is recorded. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a paleo-athlete for more than 30 years and is considered a patriarch of the paleo movement, right up there with Lauren Cordain. He believes there's no such thing as healthy aging and that we can intervene to protect against the aging process. And in this episode, we talk about his daily schedule, workout routines, Nassim Taleb, why he never gets sick, that is why Art never gets sick, and really dig into the details of a fascinating man. There's also one point where I doubt myself, which happens fairly often, and I mention myotatic reflex, and then I re-nag and say, "I don't know what I'm talking about."

• 5:59Tim Ferriss?

  So just to explain what I meant by that, here's the definition. "The stretch reflex, also known as myotatic reflex," this is from Wikipedia, "is a muscle contraction in response to stretching within the muscle. It is a monosynaptic reflex which provides automatic regulation of skeletal muscle length. When a muscle lengthens, the muscle spindle is stretched and its nerve activity increases." That sounds like gobbledygook to a lot of you, but that is why I said myotatic reflex. It's related to doing negative-only or negative-dominant workouts, which Art subscribes to. All right, so there you have it. There's a lot of dense stuff in here. We get into the weeds, which you guys love, but if you're having trouble grasping something

• 6:41Tim Ferriss?

  and it's getting very dense, just hold on and listen for a few more minutes and we'll get back into more familiar territory. We talk about everything from Ice Ages to economics to the philosophies of intermittent everything. We talk about the extreme events and the economics thereof. It's a fascinating conversation, at least it was for me. So without further ado, as I always say, I'm gonna go get my tea now. Please enjoy this conversation with Art Devaney.

• 7:12Tim Ferriss?

  Art, welcome to the show.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Happy to be here, Tim.

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  I am thrilled to meet you. I've heard so much about you from many people, including our mutual friend Naval Ravikant. And we're sitting here, for those people listening, at my undisclosed mountain location.

• 7:27Tim Ferriss?

  And Art was kind enough to meet me here. And here we are at the kitchen table. And I thought we would just start with how you connected with Naval, because I don't know the story.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  It started with my blog. He got in touch with me. And I decided to give a seminar in Las Vegas covering sort of the elements of my approach. And he and his brother Kamal attended, along with John Durant.

• 7:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  And Richard Nicolay, and then a whole bunch of other people who've gone on to pay me the fortune in the paleo world.

• 8:05Tim Ferriss?

  And you've kept in contact with Naval, or at least he is certainly very familiar with the blog. If we rewind the clock a little bit, how did you go... Well, actually, I'll take a step back. I was going to ask you how you went from economics to the evolutionary approach to everything. But before I go there, how did you get to economics?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I loved economics. It's a study of decentralized mechanisms and organizations in spontaneous order. I got into it because I took an undergraduate class in comparative economic systems at UCLA. And I had a professor who was just profoundly inspiring in that class, George Murphy, and give him credit. He may disclaim my credit, but he was so eloquent in talking about Hayek and, oh, and Rikard Baroni and a whole bunch of other people who wrestled with central planning. It's a time when central planning was sweeping Europe

• 9:14Speaker 03

  and was being promoted even in the United States, the progressive movement at that time. They felt this centralized control, scientific management, top-down hierarchical control would be the sensible way to do it. In fact, I wrote a book about the inland waterways that... Criticized that approach and talked about how they actually messed up the flood plains. And they thought there was a hundred year flood plain, but floods don't have mean statistics. They don't converge, they diverge. So the variance keeps growing with every new flood.

• 9:54Tim Ferriss?

  What is that for people who don't have any familiar with familiarity with economics? What does that, what does that mean? If you could maybe elaborate on that?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Well, the variance, of course, is a measure of the variation in the series of the series. If it has a mean, you know, most people think in terms of normal distributions. It has central tendencies and that the mean and variation are well described by those two parameters. Not true. The damage that's done by the worst rainstorm in a decade does forty percent of all the damage that rainstorms do in that decade. This is, it's, it's a, it's an extreme event dominated series, just like the movies and just like your life.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  People fail to realize, you know, you don't get anywhere from the drip, drip, drip of the incremental. You get there from some big event that changes your life, like your book probably changed your life.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  I don't know what changed my life, lots of things have.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  But those are the moments that are the power moments in your life. And in fact, the whole notion of normal doesn't apply to a person's life.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  You don't, you don't get anywhere by incrementing in small increments. It's the extreme event and you seize it and you're poised. If you remain poised, you can respond to that kind of significant event. For example, there's this notion of algorithmic compressibility, which is a computer science term that, that applies to the ability to reduce your life to an algorithm. Can't do it, can't do it. The novelty in your life is constantly progressing and you should welcome the variance, seize the opportunities.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  That was, that's the way I, I, I think of life and it's the Zen of evolutionary fitness. That's how, that's how life works out.

• 11:56Tim Ferriss?

  So we're, we're gonna spend the majority, I think, of our conversation on evolutionary fitness and I have so many questions for you, but I want to start with an area I know even less about, which is Hollywood. So what are some of the erroneous beliefs or that you, that you've found in Hollywood or insights that, that you've written about and, and studied?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's an industry that nobody understands. Nobody's really written anything very sensible about the industry. The Supreme Court, for example, divorced the studios from the theaters and Justice Douglas was the guy who wrote the decision. The famous Paramount antitrust agrees. It treated the industry as a monopoly because they looked at market shares, which if you measure at a particular point in time, Paramount will have so many dollars of the total revenue of the industry. Universal will have so many and on down the line. Problem is that changes every week. So if you use something like

• 13:06Speaker 03

  a Herfindall index or a measure of concentration, it's constantly varying. In fact, it has no mean. It's the second moment of, excuse me, but it's the second, it's the variance of the distribution of market shares, the Herfindall index is, and it's infinite, doesn't exist. Marlon Boe wrote about this, so did, oh, who's the other guy who did, did fractals? Anyway, it doesn't matter who the.

• 13:36Tim Ferriss?

  Was it Mandelbrot?

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, Mandelbrot. He, he coined the word fractal because it, it's a situation where the, the variation is so extreme that the distribution itself doesn't have the normal kinds of, of limits. It's a so-called wild distribution, as Nassim Taleb calls them. And these wild distributions don't have finite moments necessarily. The mean in variance may not exist, such as in the flood example. And that's true also in the movies. Turned out that the movies has such a wild distribution that even the mean doesn't exist. So if you talk about the average gross, you're talking about no movie that ever made that.

• 14:24Tim Ferriss?

  It reminds me of, there was some type of joke that was meant to illustrate the flaw in how people misapply arithmetically mean. And so, you know, Bill Gates walks into a bar and suddenly the, the average net worth is $50 million or something like that.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Bill Gates walks into a bar and everybody's a millionaire on average.

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right, yeah, exactly.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:48Tim Ferriss?

  So does this make movies impossible to predict or plan for? How would you build that? And if you ran a studio, how would that inform what, what you've learned? How would that inform decisions that you make?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Well, you've got to have a story and characters the audience will love. As remember, Callie Currie, she invited me to come speak to this screen actor, the, the screenwriters killed. And she said, you make a movie by, you make the audience love the characters and then you torture them.

• 15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Torture the characters.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:23Tim Ferriss?

  I guess, and, and vis a vis the characters, the audience.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Torture the characters, right. So the idea is that you, a great script, a great story, memorable characters, then the rest is up to the, to the audience. It may or may not work. An actor has the same kind of variance in his career grosses as does the industry in general. So the, an actor will make one movie and that movie will earn 40% of the actor's career revenues. Same thing with directors. If you, if you did all the regressions in the world, this statistical technique for trying to predict what a movie's going to make, you would find out that a handful of actors have any significance

• 16:10Speaker 03

  and they're sort of flukes anyway. Like Val Kilmer, Kilmer came up in the, in the regression equations. He's gone now. I mean, it's, it's not that. The past doesn't predict the future is really the way to look at it. And there's no algorithm to determine how a movie's going to gross. Genre is somewhat helpful, but only because people look at genre. Genre is not a category, it's something that people put, it's a box people put, put movies in. If you really want to know how much a movie's going to make, you have to look at how many theaters they open it on. It's the cereal box effect.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  If you go into a grocery store and Wheaties gets all the shelf space except for a few inches, it's going to have the highest gross. It might disappear very quickly though, because a big opening is a dangerous strategy. It tends to give you dominant revenues in the early weeks and if people follow the revenues as a means of making a decision how to go, which movie to go to, that would tend to propel a dynamic where you would have an expansive gross. Problem is, you also have word of mouth and reviews. So it's a mixture of public and private information.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Private information being what your friends tell you about it. Public information being reading the box office scores. You put those two together and you just have an enormously complicated dynamics. You can't tell how it's going to do. As a matter of fact, if you don't get the grosses and you get 4,000 theaters committed their screens to your movie, you may have to allow them to double bill in the second week. That is add another feature to it. Oh, I see. If you see a movie that's double billing by the third week, it's a stinker.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  So.

• 18:12Tim Ferriss?

  And yeah, I would imagine it's similar to books too. I mean, I suppose in any hits driven business, there are some people who try to front load with distribution. So they have this huge initial upfront cost in the hopes that it will make the list somewhere at the top and then become a self fulfilling cycle of sorts where people use it as a shopping list.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  It's the same kind of thing. And actually, a lot of authors will go out and buy lots of copies of their book.

• 18:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, I know. I know of people who've bought, you know, I remember I visited, I shall not name names, but I went to the, the office, the headquarters of a CEO who had recently published his own book, or I should say, had his book published, which he did not write. And there were tens of thousands of copies lining the walls. It was just outrageous. He could have built an entire structure out of these books.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Well, the public has to, they're smart. They've learned that if you just look at the sales itself, that's what a lot of other people are doing. But it could be that they're manipulating the sales as a way of signaling to you that it's a, it's a great book. So you look at reviews and you see what the author's done before. It might work if you're Tom Hanks in a movie, but then again, it could be, he's had, he has huge variance in his grosses also. He's not a sure thing. What a star will do is it will raise the least revenue a film might earn.

• 19:42Tim Ferriss?

  I see. It raises the, the,

• 19:45Speaker 03

  The minimum revenue. Cause it gets it out on a fair number of screens and some people will come. But then word of mouth starts to take over and it can, it can tank in no time.

• 19:55Tim Ferriss?

  So you developed these, these mental models, this analytical, these analytical frameworks. How did fitness and diet enter the scene for you? And or how, how did that, how did you start focusing on that?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  It really began, began the other way around. I always wanted to be fit and strong and have a beautiful body and healthy looking skin and so forth. I just like people liking me and looking at me. So ego helps a lot in this game. But I also was interested in, in fitness and eating well, most of my life.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  However, that blended with that plus my interest in athletics and I wanted to be a pro baseball player. Ice site let me down. So that mixture led me to appreciate the hunter-gatherer kind of lifestyle. That is, if you view uncertainty in the world the way I do, and you realize that we came through a narrow bottleneck, only 2,500 or so humans made it through the Toba, the post-Toba volcanic eruption, volcanic winter, that was the lowest temperature in

• 21:19Speaker 03

  the last 20,000 years was post-Toba. And so, we came through a bottleneck like that, you realize that we have to be extremely hardy, very robust, you had to be poised, the brain is there in order to adapt to the climate variations that humans went through. There were 20,000 years of extreme climate variation, and a good brain is a good way to get through that sort of thing. You can imagine God's designers, human designers, saying, "Well, we've got a new kind of, we've got a new model now. It's different from the archaic model in the sense it has a very

• 22:01Speaker 03

  large brain. It's smart as hell, but it's kind of fat and slow." And God just says, "Well, let's see if it gets through the Ice Ages. I have 20,000 years of Ice Ages plans ahead of it." And that's what happened. The archaic form didn't last, and all the other closely related forms of human beings disappeared at this time. The Neanderthal, the Homo heidelbergis, and a host of other, even Homo erectus was still around early on in this period, 200,000 years ago. So they all disappeared, and they all disappeared because you didn't have the adaptive behavior

• 22:44Speaker 03

  that modern humans have. That brain was the survival instrument. That means that we're here, we have a great brain, simply because it's a way of adapting to the challenges that the world presents to us. And you couldn't have the brain that we have unless you had a body as well. The brain-body, the brain muscle signaling dominates most of my thinking. So, an approach to fitness, well, think of the sea squirt.

• 23:17Tim Ferriss?

  I'll admit, I don't know much about sea squirts.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  And the sea squirt's a little polyp that lives in the sea. And it floats around, finds a location, latches on to that barkalonger and eats its brain.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Eats its own brain?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Eats its own brain. Because it's found its place, it no longer needs to navigate the world. And the brain is dispensable. And every bit of protein and substrate that an animal can get a hold of, of course, it's gonna eat. So, at that point, the sea squirt consumes its brain. A lot of people do that too, don't they?

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I think a lot of that's happening right now.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Settling into a couch, you lose your muscle. Your brain begins to degenerate because it's not getting the signals at the muscles. Muscles release all kinds of so-called myokines now that have been discovered. And it also, a remote signal from the muscle can cause your brain to improve its cell quality, to maintain neurons. One thing you can do is to contract muscles and you'll find you improve what's called proteostasis in the neurons. Proteostasis is maintaining the cellular quality. Not having misfolded proteins, misshapen proteins, wrong kind of proteins in your...

• 24:40Tim Ferriss?

  Is that related to, like, a brain drive neurotrophic factor or things like that? Or is it a different mechanism?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  It also does that. But, see, neurotropic factors are typically growth-type factors that rescue a stressed cell. And that does happen. But the other part of it is that you need to alter insulin signaling so that you're actually...

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Bring on the defensive pathways in that neuron as opposed to the growth

• 25:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  The growth factors and signal, uh, growth signaling. So that would bring on the foxo and sirtuins and other factors in the, in the neuron. So that kind of signaling, and if you, if you affect proteostasis in the brain, the brain then can send neural signals to affect proteostasis in remote tissues. Now we're into this notion of remote signaling or signaling at a distance, which is systemic signaling. Economists love that kind of, uh, you know, the kind of model that adaptive kind of decentralized behavior.

• 25:49Tim Ferriss?

  And what, uh, what types of, if, if we're looking at, so for instance, I was listening to one of your presentations and one of the, on one of the slides, I just wrote down two lines and it was, it reads, aging is not programmed, it is the result of the failure of a renewal program.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I would love to hear you A elaborate on that maybe a little bit. And then B, uh, follow that through with the, the implications in terms of behaviors that might help or diet, anything that might help to, uh, bolster that renewal system.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you know, aging is really a puzzle. I only started studying it a few years ago. And I figured, well, I'm an expert because I'm experienced.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  I was about seventy eight years old when I started looking at, at aging. And then I thought it really is a lot simpler than people are making it out to be. It is not programmed. There are, there's no, no aging genes have been discovered. The only just genes that have been discovered to have any bearing on aging are defensive pathways. Foxo, sirtuins, proteostasis, a host of other defensive immunity, stem cell proliferation. There are four or five pathways that are involved in aging. And in the main, they are regenerative or defensive pathways. Like, like immunity, the, the immune pathways cross over with your, uh,

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Cell maintenance, defensive pathways. For example, autophagy is used in both processes. Autophagy being the consumption of self-tissues, of own tissues. Phagey being eating and auto being you, your own tissues. So autophagy is both an element of the immune system. It's also an element of keeping the stem cells alive and healthy because they're living on autophagy. And when they need to proliferate and come out and heal wounded tissues, they go through a burst of autophagy and then they transition into oxidative phosphol.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  They use oxidative pathways after that. They're in there being defended by autophagy so that the mitochondria don't damage the stem cells. They have to live in a low oxygen niche. In fact, they're very similar to a very primitive form of cell. They live on, basically, glycolysis. And that was how all life lived at one time. And your fast-switch muscle fibers also use the most primitive kind of energy sources for movement. So the defensive pathways are really the key to it all. And the poets know this.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  The legend of Thithonus is a legend of the Greek god. Aurora was, he was Aurora's boyfriend and Zeus didn't like it. So Aurora pleaded with him, with Zeus, not to kill him. So Zeus, in his clever way, said, "Well, okay, you're gonna live forever." But he didn't. He forgot to say, "I'm not going to let you age." So, Tithonus wastes away for eternity. It's a cruel punishment, but it's a correct description of what the aging process is. It's a loss of cell function, loss of cell integrity, a loss of the ability of stem cells to renew tissues. So aging basically is simply damage.

• 29:46Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the interventions that you find most interesting at this point?

• 29:51Speaker 03

  I eat only twice a day, so I want long intervals between meals. I want low insulin signaling so that I bring on the defensive and repair pathways. I want to be conscious of maintaining my stem cells. Now, how do you maintain your stem cells? Well, first of all, you don't have too much mitochondrial density down in your stem cells.

• 30:11Tim Ferriss?

  So, yeah, I really want to talk about this. Okay.

• 30:16Tim Ferriss?

  Mitochondrial density is all the rage. All right, I mean, it seems like...

• 30:19Speaker 03

  It seems to be all the rage, isn't it? Like, they're innocent little batteries that just sacrifice and produce energy for you. Remember, they have their own DNA.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  So mitochondrial density has to be very low in the stem cell niches. Moreover, the mitochondrial activity level, for example, humans, people don't know this, humans have the lowest mitochondrial density of any mammal.

• 30:47Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Yes. And they also have low reactive type of mitochondria, the L3. We all came out of the L3 mitochondrial haplotype that left Africa. Remember, mitochondrial eve occurred about 160,000, 138,000 years ago. By that time, humans were huddled on the seashore of South Africa trying to survive. The temperature was so cold and so much ice was locked up moisture that the Sahara expanded in scope and became very arid. So, after Toba, a volcanic eruption, the largest volcanic eruption in the last two million years,

• 31:29Speaker 03

  humans were basically settled along the southern and eastern shore of Africa.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Huddled there to survive and Curtis Marion thinks that the seashore saved humanity. The accessibility of seafood along the shore. Vegetables were wiped out for about a thousand years or not. There was a thousand year volcanic winter and vegetables were difficult to come by and the inland sources of animals were sparse as well. It turns out we may have survived on corms. They're a starchy plant that is in the biome of South, Southern Africa. Corbs? Corbs. C O R M S? Ah, yes, I've seen this written, yes.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Corbs. It's a carbohydrate containing, I hate to tell the paleo guys this, but between the mussels and the washed up seals and an occasional beached whale and the seabirds and occasional inland hunting, that's basically how we survive. Mussels, mussels are your friend and both, both kinds of mussels. So, so there's the survival aspect. The DHA, of course, in the seafood became a substrate for the, for the brain. And you can see there are remarkable photos that show the difference between a hundred thousand years difference in the, in the human skull.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  It's a profound difference. You can see that the human skull, the modern human skull that emerged is kind of a juvenileized version of the earlier skull. And the hyprophonal area, the cortex and what have you. So, brain expansion clearly occurred in response to two things. The availability of nutrition to help propel brain growth.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  The need to have high brain cognitive power to survive the Ice Ages, plus the growing settlement size on the seashore because we now had a stable source of food. We, I'm thinking of us, you know, coming from that period. And that spurred technology. And remember, language developed at this time, too. So it was an enormous change in human behavior during this time period.

• 34:00Tim Ferriss?

  And so we were talking about the interventions. You mentioned eating two times a day. And we'll come back to this, I think. But is that generally breakfast, dinner, lunch, dinner? What's the, what does your split look like?

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Well, whatever suits you. But I do lunch, I do breakfast, dinner because I want a long interval between meals to promote proteostasis. I want, I want to clear the enzymes. I want to, remember, you've got, there are about a billion proteins in a cell, according to Dylan's group up at Berkeley. Oh, Berkeley. And it's very critical to the degradation of the proteins is sort of a continuous process. But the transcription and making new proteins is an interval based kind of thing.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  It depends on when the nutrient signals are there, when MTOR begins to say, okay, don't consume proteins, make new ones, transcribe and translate. Although when you transcribe and translate, you find that that moves up a diagonal, that the atrophy process follows it because you've got to keep some kind of balance there. If you over, my theory is this, that we, we had to overeat in order to survive. We don't live on energy balance. And if you look at this as a random world, you can't survive unless you overeat during periods when food is available, so as to store nutrients for the times of scarcity. We also overproliferate.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  That is, when nutrients are available, the transcription and translation process turns on in a sort of a burst. Has to be, because otherwise you won't make enough proteins to survive. Your cells won't be durable. That is what's killing us today, because we're over-transcribing, we're overeating. We're making too many proteins, they get misfolded, they get damaged, they don't, there's no room for them. The architecture of the cell is stretched, the actin filaments are stretched out, and there's stress signaling going on. And you don't transcribe accurately, you don't make good proteins when you're under stress.

• 36:16Tim Ferriss?

  We also talked then about the low mitochondrial density near stem cell niches, I guess you said?

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Yes, they reside in a low oxygen niche.

• 36:25Tim Ferriss?

  So how do you proactively encourage low mitochondrial density in those areas?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  You do weightlifting. You stay off the treadmill. Actually, if you sprint, you can use up, you can consume mitochondria, because you improve mitochondrial quality.

• 36:49Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So they become more sort of effective and efficient, so they don't need, you don't need the density?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. And they're not, they don't rely as much on oxidation either. You're using the glycolytic pathway, which goes through the mitochondria anyway, but in the Krebs cycle and so forth, but it's not, it's not producing lots of free radicals.

• 37:11Tim Ferriss?

  So are you responsible for getting Nassim Taleb deadlifting? Is that?

• 37:18Speaker 03

  My fault. Well, you remember the story about Nassim, if you've, if you read the back section of, the little section he wrote for my book, because he... Here he was, a Kurtosis trader, that is, he used distributions with wild characteristics. He was buying out of the money calls and puts and living on the variance.

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right, he was a, were living in the options world.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. And so here he was doing just steady-state exercise. And I said, "What are you doing? This is the wrong approach."

• 37:57Tim Ferriss?

  Just so I know, and how did you first, how did the two of you connect?

• 38:02Speaker 03

  I used his book in a class I taught, Fool by Randomness, I used in a class I taught on the economics of uncertainty. I told him, I communicated with him, I said, "I'm using your book," I don't know why I wrote him, "because I hate textbooks." And that really connected with him. He said he hates textbooks too.

• 38:26Tim Ferriss?

  You really, you really hit a sore spot. You get him started on academia. So you connected with him and then he was doing steady-state exercise?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  He was doing his, you know, three sets of 12 and so many hours on the treadmill or the cycling or whatever. And he figured out that in cycling to and from his office, that's when his office was some distance from his gym, he said he figured out that the maximum expenditure of energy in that ride was what did him the most good. And that's your approach too, that's four hours. For example, in an organization, the half the work is done by the square root of n workers. So you've got 100 people in there, 10 workers produce half the output.

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, this is, we're on the same page with this in terms of Pareto distributions.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Right. And this is just all of Price's work and Lofka and others have looked at scientific publishing, publishing, what have you. The Pope has his own version of this, by the way. Pope John Paul, before he passed away, he was asked, "How many people work at the Vatican?" He said, "About half of them."

• 39:53Speaker 03

  And of course Robert Evans says the same thing about Hollywood. Hollywood's a place where half the people are not working. And it's true, they're between films and they're hoping for the next one. So even Dustin Hoffman is great. He said, I have to be grateful to be working. This goes with the business. In the industry, there are these power law distributed networks and a few people are at the central hubs. And so the same rule really holds for the movie industry. Probably half the people do about, 10% of the people do about half the, half the movies or something like that.

• 40:28Tim Ferriss?

  And so Nassim thought that the, the calorie expenditure during his bike ride was what was giving him the most bang for the buck.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Can you imagine that people were that dumb back in those days? And there's still people around who think that it's an energy balance model. I don't know how, well, let's face it, they all studied steady state exercise because you have to put someone on the treadmill and you measure the oxygen expenditure. Nobody had any idea. Non-steady state exercise is very difficult to quantify and to measure. Now they're getting better at it. Much better at it. The power law holds again because the most intense exercise, the most intense expenditures to the bulk. You put accelerometers on children.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  The leanest are the ones who engage in the most intense verse. Little, little children don't steady state exercise.

• 41:25Tim Ferriss?

  So what does your exercise regimen look like or what you would prescribe to someone like a Nassim or anyone really?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Well, I told Nassim to start doing negative deadlifts if he wants to improve his deadlifts. Have, have somebody help you put the bar up, lower it, pick, pick a height. And then put it up again, and lower it again, and put it up again, and lower it again. I do, I do almost all negatives now.

• 41:53Tim Ferriss?

  Why Zach, you talk about, why, why, why are eccentrics so important?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Well, I'm doing eccentrics for really three reasons. The main one being that they double your stem cell counts in them, in the satellite cells in the muzzle. Now, they double them, but they don't exhaust them. A lot of people, if you double the, the, the stem cells that flood out, you may exhaust them because you may simply exhaust the ones in the niche. What you want to do is you want to double them and have one go back into the niche and one go out and, and heal tissues. Asymmetric differentiation is what you want. If they symmetrically differentiate, they both become new possible progenitors to cells. You're now exhausting. Put one, take one out, put one in.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  It is the best way to do it and eccentric exercise does that. Downhill running does too.

• 42:48Tim Ferriss?

  Downhill running.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Downhill running.

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  How do you in, so I'd love to hear what a, a, a negative focused workout of yours might look like? And if you could also just talk about mitigating injury risk.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:04Tim Ferriss?

  Because there are a lot of people who get in, for instance, there are a lot of sprinters who in their training will only do the positive on deadlifts and drop them for fear of hamstring injuries. So, so not to say it can't be done safely because I, I've done a lot of negatives, but I'd love to hear what a workout of yours looks like.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  It's so mild you wouldn't believe it. I work out almost every day.

• 43:25Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Maybe 10, 15 minutes. And sometimes it's hard to do a negative if you don't have a training partner, but I use equipment. And I'll use, like, for example, leg extensions. Push up with two, lower with one. Yeah, typical. Leg press, push up with two, lower with one.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Shoulder presses, push up with two. Actually, I, I use, I use a machine and in this case they're like the power hammer and stuff. I'll push it up with two hands and then lower it with one. And deltoids are all fast switch, mostly fast switch fibers. So they really respond well, well to that.

• 44:08Tim Ferriss?

  What body, just since you mentioned it, which muscle groups respond best to this type of training?

• 44:15Speaker 03

  All of them, all of them. But postural muscles, they're slow twist fibers. You need to, they need to have endurance. Keep your posture locked in. And every workout, standing against the wall. Now, this was the thing that Naval liked most about my seminar. Stand against the wall. You know, get a little slot in the small of your back. Put your heels and butt against the wall, your shoulders back, your head back.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Walk off and look over your cheekbones. Don't drop your head and start looking down. Your whole spine collapses.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  So look straight ahead.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Well, if you need to look down, just look down over your cheekbones. Don't drop, don't drop your head. You descend your head and the rest is.

• 44:59Tim Ferriss?

  So this is to establish proper posture?

• 45:02Speaker 03

  It is to establish proper posture, but also to maintain it and to have a sort of nobility of having good posture. It really makes a difference in your mental attitude.

• 45:13Tim Ferriss?

  Are you working your entire body every, your entire body every day?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  No, I'm not because I may want to, I might do legs and shoulders one day. And I might do, I almost never do curls because they're just ego muscles anyway.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  But I would just go around and do a variety of exercises. I make sure to hit every body group a couple of times a week. And I'm cycling through and I do a lot of lat and lower back and leg work and shoulder work.

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  When you, it's usually 10 to 15 minutes. How do you choose? Let's just take an example in the shoulder press. How are you determining what weight to use? Is it a percentage of, say, one rep concentric? And then what is the tempo, number of repetitions? If you could just give us an idea of the programming of that.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  I'm such an instinctive trainer, like Arnold is.

• 46:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  I might, I just don't have a regular way. I just do it.

• 46:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Do you go to the point where you start to lose the ability to control the descent? Or when do you terminate?

• 46:22Speaker 03

  I do. I have some sense of fatigue, but what I do is I push it up really fast and quickly, in a very precise form, but very, lots of acceleration and then coming down really slow. And to a full, good stretch, you have to, you remember you have this giant protein in your muscles, this titan protein. It's the stress sensor. And stress, by the way, will stimulate mTOR and protein synthesis.

• 46:53Tim Ferriss?

  The stretch?

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 46:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's the, is that, I might be getting this wrong, myotatic reflex? Am I getting there on something? I don't know what I'm talking about. Please continue.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a signaling domain down in the, and the titan protein passes, it sets the architecture of the whole muscle, really, and that and the actin. There's a cytoskeleton, a skeleton in the muscle itself, these actin fibers. And if there's stress and they sense stretching, you, the dystrophin protein that senses the distortion of the enclosure of the muscle, and then the titan senses the extension of the muscle. That means you want to really go to a full stretch.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  If you actually, if you did curls and never fully stretched, you would, you'd have a little tiny muscle. You've got to stretch the muscle out and Goldberg's work and all, all kinds of work on muscle shows that full extension, you lengthen the muscle too. A lengthened muscle is stronger and fuller when it's contracted and it's faster.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  So I go, I want my muscles to be not too big, lean, long and quick.

• 48:12Tim Ferriss?

  What, from a distant evolutionary standpoint, what would have mimicked the eccentrics aside from downhill running?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Well, actually, any kind of running does it, as you know, because every impact is eccentric.

• 48:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Stress, any kind of lowering, of course, you had a lift and lower things.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  I suppose carry, even carrying is a certain degree of eccentric exercise. But I only, see, this is, this is Stone Age plus high tech.

• 48:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  And the high tech part of it is, I looked at Macalusi's work on stem cell activation. And there's other work on it as well. I wanted efficient, time, time efficient exercise, keep me injury free. And injury free is really very important. I've had almost no injuries in the gym. Over 60 years of using, using gyms, I can think of one, one, one injury. So you're efficient, injury free, the fast switch type of fibers are the ones you're hitting when you do descending. When you get older, your motor neurons aren't as effective.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  So you want to have the kind of heavy stimulation of the fast switch fibers. They're the ones that have the biggest motor neurons. And the way to do that is negatives. That's very safe, very effective. Of course, you can't do negatives on everything because, you know, it's awkward and

• 49:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  what have you. So you can, you can at least concentrate on accelerating smoothly and rapidly up and then descending slowly. I mean, Doug McGuff likes this sort of stuff and probably the best thing about his exercise is the slow descent.

• 50:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I would never work out hard enough where I have to rest a whole week. I do something every day.

• 50:08Tim Ferriss?

  What's the, what's the rationale behind, behind that as opposed to having longer rest intervals?

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Okay, well, I want a renewal signal every day. The renewal signal is, one, it's fasting before exercise.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Then the fasted.

• 50:25Tim Ferriss?

  When do you work out typically? When do you do this 15 minutes?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  I probably work out at 11 o'clock in the morning typically.

• 50:31Tim Ferriss?

  So got it.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get up at like seven or six and I'll have a mild breakfast at like eight.

• 50:39Tim Ferriss?

  What would be would be some of your default breakfasts?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Well, my favorite default breakfast is a giant smoked turkey leg.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  With a bit of melon.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  They're very inexpensive and they're fun to eat.

• 51:00Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds fantastic. I wish I had some of that here. Unfortunately, I do not.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  You've got two, two big turkey legs in a package at Walmart even and I eat one, one turkey leg and maybe half, a third of a melon.

• 51:14Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  And then I will work out at 11. I'll have a 15, 20 minute workout because I like to go around and see if there are any girls there to look at too. While I'm there and I won't eat until four hours after. I'll eat like at five o'clock.

• 51:33Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So that's your, that's your evening meal and then you don't eat between five and when do you typically go to sleep?

• 51:39Speaker 03

  I might go to bed at 11.

• 51:40Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. All right. No, but so you'd, you'd finish your last meal by say six o'clock and have four or five hours of fasting before bed.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 51:48Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  I won't eat till, you know, maybe even lunch the next day. It just depends.

• 51:54Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  I, I never have three meals a day. I sometimes have

• 52:00Speaker 03

  one, sometimes none, most times two. But you don't have to cut calories. It's just the timing. It's the intervals between meals where you have low insulin sense signaling. Hyotophagy and proteostasis mechanism, like the proteosome is eating up enzymes and you're clearing the damage. Your, your autophagy peaks at about four hours after, four to six hours after exercise.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  All these guys who guzzle right after their workout, they're killing. They're killing their adaptive process. You can't have, without a proper autophagy, your muscles degenerate. You have to clear the old damaged proteins, and that's how you do it. The proteasome is that little core-shaped, barrel-shaped object in the cell. That consumes mostly enzymes that have done their job. Clears enzymes. If you have enzymes that stay there too long, or neural factors of some kind, like stress hormones, you have to eat those up. The whole thing is dynamic protein generation and clearance.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  So what I'm doing is I'm working out. I'm stimulating the autophagy process and the proteasasis. Proteasasis is protein quality maintenance process. So by four hours later, that's peaked. It's over, and I'm good and hungry. I have a nice big meal.

• 53:36Tim Ferriss?

  What does dinner look like? Would be an example of a dinner that you enjoy?

• 53:42Speaker 03

  My wife hands me something. Usually it's, I used to do all my own cooking when, after my first wife passed away. But now she's such a great cook. I have a big mound of spinach with lots of garlic in it. And there may be, she makes a lot of pot roast. Her own way, though, is more an Italian way. Of course, a fair amount of steak. I'll have an occasional prime rib. But I always cut the excess fat off. I don't like fatty meats.

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Is that just a personal preference? Or is there a, is there a scientific reason behind it? Or is it just palate?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  It's both personal. I trust my taste. And if something is just like, oh, this is too much of this, I back off it. The other part of it is if you want to have a fatty liver, you eat a lot of fat. There's no way around it.

• 54:38Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, you oxidize energy sources according to how easy they are to actually oxidize. So first carbohydrate goes, then maybe protein or fat, but fat's the last to go. So it has to go somewhere. And excess adipose tissue is one of the worst things you can do. My body composition is so crucial. And if you get, if your liver starts filling up with fat, this is fat where it shouldn't be. This is ectopic fat. Then it's also building up in your bone marrow, in your muscle, in your thymus, you know, in your brain. So fatty degeneration is a source of stem cell differentiation.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Stem cell will come wandering out and say, I'm going to fix this muscle. But it encounters a lot of fat in the muscle. So it differentiates into an adipocyte instead of a muscle cell. Remember, these stem cells are very plastic. They can take on a fate depending on the tissue they arrive to and what signals they receive. They're local. It's local as well as the global signals that are causing that. See, bodybuilders always knew it was volume that built mass. I think this is really generally true. Lots and lots of volume, even two workouts a day. I was around a lot of these guys. Sure. I get the volume in a different way. I work out every day, but maybe 20 minutes at the most.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Right? I do take one day. I don't work out at all.

• 56:10Tim Ferriss?

  What do some people in the paleo movement get wrong? What do you think are the most common errors or logical fallacies or damaging fads or trends that you observe in people who self identify as paleo?

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Very interesting. Because there are, there are a lot of little tribes inside.

• 56:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure. A lot of factions.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  And I don't, frankly, I don't keep track of these guys. There's just too many people trying to say too many things. They eat too much fat.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely true. They, a lot of them went off wildly into the, into fat consumption. So they probably have fatty livers by now. Really, I mean, you cannot eat large amounts of fat and not have a fatty liver. You can't, who needs all the energy? They're trying to, they're worried about energy balance. I don't get worried about energy balance, do you? They, they, they think there are particular kinds of foods they have to eat. But really, variety and flavor, texture, color, that's, that's how you choose your meals.

• 57:24Tim Ferriss?

  What are your thoughts on, I, I love your Facebook page, by the way. I do have questions about why you got rid of your blog, but I, your Facebook has more sort of information density than I've seen on almost any other Facebook page. And what are your thoughts on coconut oil and coconut products?

• 57:44Speaker 03

  I wouldn't do it.

• 57:45Tim Ferriss?

  You wouldn't do it? Now, does that come back to the fatty liver and just a percentage of your total intake is, is fat?

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, it's, it's an evolutionary non sequitur. It doesn't follow. You would not be seeing large amounts of coconut consumption in the Paleolithic. So it, that, it's just odd. First of all, and it's kind of a fad, second of all, and they're, who knows of the manufacturers of these things. There are all kinds of impurities that are involved. It doesn't taste good either.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  I'll confess, I'm pretty sick of coconut.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Modern meat has got so much fat in it already. Why would you ever need to have any additional source of fat? And even the olive oil, I'm sparing with.

• 58:38Tim Ferriss?

  Do you cook eggs or do you consume eggs?

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 58:40Tim Ferriss?

  You do. How do you prepare your eggs?

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Fried, boiled, scrambled.

• 58:46Tim Ferriss?

  So if you, if you fry them, what are you using to fry in? Or scrambled? What, are you using a small amount of olive oil, using butter, or using?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Small amount of olive oil and at a moderate temperature. And I don't know, actually haven't seen my wife cooking the eggs lately. I don't know how she does.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Oil-free would be perfectly fine with me if you had a pan that, you know, one of these ceramic pans that where things slide off. She never burns an egg either. They're always wonderfully done. I used to throw a yolk away when I'd eat four boiled eggs, you know.

• 59:20Tim Ferriss?

  Would you, would you still do that if you were consuming eggs?

• 59:24Speaker 03

  I find the yolk a bit odd in taste and I don't like too much yolk, but I, but I don't throw, but I get tired of eggs, very tired, very quickly.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Yeah, I found, I love eggs, but I only recently discovered a few years ago, and it's so simple that how to make proper soft boiled eggs. So you have a nice delicious yolk as opposed to the, the yellow golf ball of the hard boiled, which is just so chalky and unpleasant.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 59:55Tim Ferriss?

  So, so let's talk a little bit about, you mentioned the, the consumption of, say, post-workout carbohydrates and amino acids or whatever it might be. Love to chat a little bit about mTOR. So this is, this is a big subject and a lot of people are trying to minimize mTOR activation in the, in the hope of extending lifespan and health span. And so I'd love in general to hear your thoughts on, on that where people are, say, doing everything they can to minimize activation of mTOR. They're trying to remove L-16, they're trying

• 1:00:36Tim Ferriss?

  to get their IGF-1 as low as possible. So thoughts in general on mTOR and then also on the use of, say, rapamycin or metformin?

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Well, look, when, overproliferation or hyperproliferation is considered to be one of the evils of modern world, but it was a necessary adaptation in, in the past. You couldn't have survived if you didn't proliferate rapidly in the presence of food because you wouldn't have another chance later on. You had to be very effective at doing that. But there would have been, in the evolutionary times, there would have been a protein quality control process following that because you've had, had a fairly long interval without food. So overdriving mTOR was never a problem.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  They're talking in the modern world about people who never shut mTOR off. Basically, you don't have these intervals between meals and you're overdriving mTOR. So you're creating lots of misfolded proteins, proteostasis is collapsing. The first thing a celegans does when it starts to die is its proteostasis collapses.

• 1:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  Celegans, this is our favorite worm.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:51Tim Ferriss?

  For a lab study.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Uh huh. So you don't want your proteostasis to collapse. It's not going to collapse if you have these intervals between meals. If you don't turn on mTOR, your immunity is not going to function properly because you proliferate your thymocytes and your T cells, your whole immune system. Rapamycin is an immune suppressant.

• 1:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  Immune suppressant, right.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because you're shutting down mTOR. All toxins shut down mTOR. Because you can't transcribe in the presence of a toxin, or you're going to proliferate that toxin is going to invade all the new tissues you're making. So proliferation in mTOR, and mTOR isn't the whole thing, by the way. You stimulate mTOR through mechanical stress. When you're consuming damaged proteins inside your cell, mTOR is being signaled. Why is that the case? Well, because those amino acids are now available. And you have to have that because if you don't, you don't, the innate stress response can't

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  be activated. Gene transcription changes when you're under a stress. First of all, because you don't want to make proteins in a stressful situation. Second of all, you have to encode other genes to mount the stress response. And mTOR is doing that because it's getting the amino acids that are coming from the proteostasis process. So if they want to chronically turn down mTOR, they're going to waste away. You need IGF-1 in the, to rescue neurons that are struggling and stressed. You make IGF-1 locally, not, they're confusing systemic IGF that is in the serum, in the

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  blood.

• 1:03:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  From the local. There's local signaling and there's...

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  Global cycling in some sense. And in the circulation, you're getting your global signals, but in the muscle or in the brain, when you activate, when you exercise your muscles, you actually create local IGF-1 that doesn't necessarily go out into the bloodstream. I have very low serum IGF-1, but I have lots of muscle in it because I make it locally. I had an Olympic doctor looked at me and said, "You can't have that kind of muscle and have such low IGF-1." And I said, "Well, I make it locally." Well, he's used to seeing professional wrestlers and so forth, they were stoking up on insulin

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  and other such things, right?

• 1:04:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's kind of like all the hipsters in San Francisco where they say, "Think globally, buy locally." Well, so you're thinking globally and making your IGF locally.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  I make it locally. But you know what? A muscle contraction will turn on AKT and so you're not coming through the insulin pathway, but the second half of it, you're rescuing. AKT is a survival hormone, survival protein. They're thinking about the insulin pathway exclusively, but you've got other factors down there. There's some wonderful work done by Japanese Izumura, Akasake and others, who show that if you can overexpress AKT in the muscle, that's protein kinase B also, or whatever it is, it'll heal your liver. So, exercise your muscles and heal your liver. And how do you do that?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  You express AKT in the fast twitch muscle fibers.

• 1:05:37Tim Ferriss?

  So, in those studies, were these researchers using a high-intensity weightlifting protocol?

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  No, they were merely engineering the genes in the mouse to overexpress AKT in the fast twitch fibers. Profoundly effective, profoundly effective. You can't read that, our study, and a series of studies by this group, Azumura. And you can't read that without saying, I want all the fast switch fibers I can have. They're not only disposing glucose, they're taking the glucose disposal burden off the liver.

• 1:06:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  And off the brain. So these insulin-like peptides that are signaling in the brain too often, you're turning that down because you're taking the glucose disposal burden off the other cells. And therefore, you're reducing insulin signaling in those cells. And it turns out that when you contract muscle, you make this 4B E P E, or something like that, which interrupts transcription. What you want to do is you want to have, you don't want to be transcribing new proteins in your brain when it's not time to do so. You want to be improving the quality of the neurons.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  So if you exercise, you reduce transcription in other cells. Because this particular protein, it binds to mTOR and keeps it from initiating transcription, the things that mTOR does. mTOR is overrated, anyway. It's a ribosome that really matters.

• 1:07:16Tim Ferriss?

  Please say more. Tell us more about the ribosome.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  Well, the ribosome is...

• 1:07:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you could make it as, start at the basics.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, well...

• 1:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  And I could blame that on my audience and say, for those who don't know, but I would actually like to educate myself.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  Well, when you're going to make a new protein, the messenger RNA comes out. It's a string. The ribosome is this little bead-like structure that runs across the string, and it's charged with amino acids. It reads the signals on the messenger RNA, and it transcribes these long strings of proteins. Then they go off, and then they're folded and what have you. It's actually like a universal Turing machine, remember? Alan Turing. So you can make any computer if you just have a read-write head and a tape.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  That's what the ribosome is. It's the read right head that runs along the tape and makes proteins. My neighbor at UCI was the world's leading expert on ribosomes. God, it's so complicated. It gives you a headache every time I've talked to him. So I finally came up with this idea. Well, it's a universal Turing machine. It's going across the the read tape is the messenger RNA. The write tape is the protein that is made is by the by the ribosome. Well, the ribosome, kind of being very complicated, is very adaptive in how what it transcribes. So Foxo will change the transcription factors, so therefore

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  change the messenger RNA. And the ribosome will run across there. And between those two, they're like any universal computer is inheriting what they can do. So you change the transcription factor, you wrinkle up the DNA a little bit and expose other areas for transcription. And the ribosome is what is the coding factor that handles the integrated stress response. Protein transcription changes toward instead of making new proteins, you're making these stress responsive factors. And that's integral to the to the survival process.

• 1:09:42Tim Ferriss?

  That happens in as in response to resistance training?

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:47Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. You'll make Foxo, you alter the transcription of your DNA, you'll make new messenger RNA. And the ribosome, if it senses stress in a cell, it'll begin transcribing these protective factors. Instead of like making all new proteins, it'll it'll switch. Andrew Dillon has a wonderful paper on this.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  His group has taken the

• 1:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  Where is he based? Where is his team?

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  Berkeley.

• 1:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's Berkeley, man. My backyard.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  He's right up there in the Bay Area. He may be at UC San Francisco. He has, he has a quantitative biology group there.

• 1:10:30Tim Ferriss?

  And so in doing that, then, in shifting the transcription to what you were just describing to the survival?

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:40Tim Ferriss?

  Or stress response?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Stress response factors.

• 1:10:43Tim Ferriss?

  Factors. We're bolstering that renewal program.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:47Tim Ferriss?

  The failure of which is implicated for what we call aging. That's

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Precisely. Right.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Your immunity is brought up also during this. Everybody, everybody who does anything in aging these days is finally

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  it's a stress response. That, that's what keeps you young. That, that maintains the cells, protects them, and hormesis is like they want to leave it on all the time.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  But they would exhaust you.

• 1:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  You can't, you can't be poised for every possible kind of damage. Remember, the world's full of maybe trillions of different kinds of damage that can happen to you. And you can't have a precisely tuned damage response to each threat. They have to be generalized. And they're generalized through certain transcription factors and through the way their ribosome makes proteins. So these generalized stress responses, they run across the immune system. They run across the stem cell system. They run across the protein synthesis, across the ribosome. All these pathways intersect and every one of them encodes some kind of

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  stress response, cell protective pathway that's responding to atoxin, rapamycin, to a bacteria.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  And the thing you don't want to have happen is when a bacteria is in there, you don't want to be transcribing proteins of the bacteria will get into that. You'd be making proteins for the bacteria. So you've got to be able to shut down transcription at the right time. But if you can't shut down transcription or mTOR completely, because then you can't make the defensive factors that are required. And this is where these microRNAs seem to come in.

• 1:12:44Tim Ferriss?

  Are you interested or not interested in say intermittent use of something like rapamycin? Do you find that is that just trying to make a deal with the devil? Is that are there too many unknowns? Or is something like that interesting to you?

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  To me, I don't it's a deal with the devil.

• 1:13:00Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  I haven't even had a cold in 40 years. So I'm not going to mess with my immune system.

• 1:13:06Tim Ferriss?

  So aside from the, the, let's say, the, the way that you eat and the spacing of your meals that we discussed and the resistance training, what other factors or behaviors interventions do you think have contributed to not being sick for decades?

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Stay away from people.

• 1:13:24Tim Ferriss?

  Stay away from people.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  But I couldn't. When I was teaching at the university, I had a class with 400 people in it. And half of them had just gotten back from China and were coughing and sneezing and so forth. I was sort of the universal substitute teacher because everyone else got sick and they knew Art wouldn't be sick. They'd call me up to go teach their classes. It's spooky in a way.

• 1:13:51Tim Ferriss?

  So do you is it just picking your picking your parents wisely? Or is it is there is there more or there other factors?

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  There are other factors like you expose yourself to some cold. You stress your muscle. You you get plenty of good sleep.

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  Very important. You've got to, and you've got to have these foxo mtor windows during your sleep. You've got to, you've got to live in one window or the other. There's a growth, repair window, insulin window, and there's the foxo window. Insulin tor versus foxo. That's how I see my, my life. And I'm going from one window to the other because I can't spell.

• 1:14:37Tim Ferriss?

  Foxo.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  F O X O. It's a four-hit box.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  Proteins, they're four human versions of it.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  Foxxo is probably most important. It's so important in your cognitive function. When starving, foxo makes you want to move.

• 1:14:59Tim Ferriss?

  So the foxo window for you then would be part of good sleep, which is why you're not going to eat within four or five hours of going to bed.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  You're going to, you're going to spend the first window of sleep sort of rebuilding tissues. Second window of sleep, you're into the star, star foxo mode and you're also altering your synapses. There's an interesting new gene is called Homer.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  It comes, it floods into your brain, yet when your excitatory fact, signaling is depressed. Not much glutamate in the neuron. So Homer comes in and it shrinks your synapses.

• 1:15:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's very appropriately named. That's hilarious.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  It is hilarious. It's proportional

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  shrinking. In other words, you're going to say 10%, each synapse is going to shrink by 10%. The biggest synapses are the most active ones. That's where post-traumatic stress lives.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  So if you can shrink those, they have to be stable. But if you keep rehearsing that same synapse constantly, it's going to grow in strength. And people who reverberate thoughts in their mind or ruminate a lot, they get depressed because of those circuits, according to J. L. Edelman, that's neural Darwinism.

• 1:16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Neural Darwinism.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  Neural Darwinism. Darwin, there's Darwinian competition going on inside your cells everywhere.

• 1:16:33Tim Ferriss?

  So for those people listening who do ruminate and perseverate, that's another good word, constantly and get depressed, what advice might you give them?

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  Starve and exercise.

• 1:16:47Tim Ferriss?

  Starve and exercise. Now, you seem like you have more to say, so I'll, please continue.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Well, starve and exercise, but do something that's totally different so that you you set up neural circuits that compete with the ones that are ruminating and building and strengthening your brain. The starvation part of it is to eat up some of these dysfunctional synapses. My saying is for every damaged molecule, there's a damaged thought. And you're a depressed brain or a brain that is, you know, has post-traumatic stress, those are injured neurons inside the brain and you just need to get rid of the dysfunctional molecules that are causing those neurons to malfunction.

• 1:17:39Tim Ferriss?

  So I guess, yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, it seems self-evident, but for those people, it goes, it goes both ways, right? I mean, for every damaged thought, there's a damaged molecule. So if you're thinking about, rather than trying to think your way out of that problem.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Heal the brain. First heal, first heal the brain and you heal it with neurotropic factors, be outside, new thoughts, new, new patterns of behavior.

• 1:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  How would you feed, I know this sounds silly to ask, but how would you feed those new thoughts?

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Tim Ferriss?

  If a loved one of yours was, was getting depressed and exhibiting these symptoms, what would you prescribe to them?

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  Well, you know, when my first wife was in, was declining.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  From a host of other things. I take her walking as much as I could. I would tell her bad jokes.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  Changed her surroundings. You know, the typical things that people have to do. Being outside is enormously effective. There's stimuli you can't even relate to, but you perceive them. And your unconscious brain is what's going to heal you first. And the unconscious brain is more healthy when it's exposed to nature and happy people and children and dogs.

• 1:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  Well, our friend of all, I think I'm getting this attribution right, but he said the first rule of conflict resolution or minimizing conflict is to not spend a lot of time around people who are constantly in conflict. Thought that was a good rule.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Well, our politics is exposed to that, so turn off the news. If you don't like the news.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned in passing cold exposure. So this is something that I've found to be tremendously effective in mood elevation, among other things. But how do you expose yourself to cold?

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Well, I walk the dogs early in the morning with almost no jacket or anything. Just go out and get nice and chilly with them. Cold showers, a cool pool.

• 1:19:46Tim Ferriss?

  And just to be clear, where do you live now?

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Oh, southern Utah, so it's not as cold.

• 1:19:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's no longer. You see, I lay around campus.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  No, no, it's not. But even if you live in a desert-like climate, it's cool in the morning.

• 1:19:59Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  Quite cool in the morning. I keep the pool cold. I don't hate the pool much. And I take cool showers. I don't try to shock myself.

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  What, so you, I know this may seem like a non sequitur, which is most of my brain, but we were talking about what you taught Nassim as it related to exercise. Are there anything, any particular things that you've learned from him? Or, and that could be what you used his book to illustrate in your class, or anything else?

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. I mean, first of all, he's a marvelous writer. He tells stories in a way I could never tell.

• 1:20:39Tim Ferriss?

  Fat Tony.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, Fat Tony, right. He creates marvelous characters that embody the kind of thing he wants to ridicule or...

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Our point out is, you know, savvy. He likes street smarts like I do. We both like math smarts too. I mean, actually, he went to the Karan Institute, you know, he's a very well-trained mathematician, far better than I. I guess we all need a black swan hunting device is some, in some sense. I tried to create a financial device. I had a crook for a partner who was too dumb to be able to take this anywhere, but I've figured out ways of using kurtosis to finance pharmaceuticals.

• 1:21:24Tim Ferriss?

  Could you define kurtosis, please? And spell that?

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  It's a measure of the odd shape of the distribution. It's highly peaked and skewed off to the right or something. It looks very non-normal.

• 1:21:36Tim Ferriss?

  Does not resemble a bell curve?

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  No, but it's a thing of beauty. Cause it's where life lives. That's where life is in that kind of, they're fractal type distributions. It's like a parrot distribution and then they drop down at the minimum.

• 1:21:54Tim Ferriss?

  So you developed that for pharmaceutical development, you said?

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I had, because the last talk I gave at Harvard was between what compared the movies to pharmaceuticals. And it turned out that they were the same kind of statistical distributions. Lepto-kratonic. It sounds like something you should gargle for, but it's actually a thing of beauty. It's skewed and biased to the right and with a very long heavy tail. Heavy tail being, because every tail is long in a sense, but they become very thin. It has a lot of probability out there. That's, that's true. Power law distribution,

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  parrot distribution and so forth. So it turns out pharmaceuticals that way because a few pharmaceuticals sell billions and billions and billions of dollars, or like 12 billion dollars a year. Most pharmaceuticals sell about half a million or a billion maybe at most. It's the big outliers that dominate the industry in revenues. So.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Using that skew, you can design a swab-like instrument that uses the upper tail to pay the lower tail. And if you divide it correctly, you have a very favorable kind of gamble.

• 1:23:20Tim Ferriss?

  So his blackwood, would Taleb's black swan hunting device then be derivatives training? Would that be how, or would it be something in addition to that?

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  Well, actually, you're the one to talk about that because you're the guy who's who's found all the black swans.

• 1:23:37Tim Ferriss?

  With the startups, yeah. I mean, that's, that's certainly, well, I mean, the way of, we're going to maybe get off the reservation here for a second, but the way I've thought about that is because I do not have the mathematical or modeling background of you, nor Nassim or anybody else. I, it's not a funny story. It's kind of a tragic story. But 10th grade, my brother and I had two different math teachers. I had a math teacher who was very caustic, really had a chip on her shoulder and berated students.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  Sounds like Nassim.

• 1:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, he had a different response. I think Nassim is more pugnacious than I am. So he, so, so he showed his teacher. I decided to choose my college based on lack of math requirement. My brother had a fantastic teacher. He now has a PhD in statistics.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  Oh, isn't that something?

• 1:24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  There's, there's an extreme event right there.

• 1:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  A little small event, but it really changed the course.

• 1:24:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It, it completely changed the course of my life. And therefore, in my case, when I remember having a conversation with a hedge fund manager, and there, there are plenty of bad hedge fund managers out there, and I don't think they go by that name anymore. But there are some very, very brilliant people in the game. And I spoke with one, and I'm not going to get this totally right and, and do it justice, but he said, you can have, there are a number of different advantages you can have, and you need to have at least one. And he said, you can have an informational advantage.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  You could have an analytical advantage. You could have a, say,

• 1:25:13Tim Ferriss?

  Behavioral advantage, meaning if you're someone like a, there are plenty of people who try to imitate, say Buffett, but they emotionally react to the market differently than a Buffett or a Munger.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  And so on and so forth, and there are many of these. And what I realized was, given my sets of strengths and weaknesses where I could capitalize was in the informational advantage by placing myself in the center of the switch box in Silicon Valley. So that became my way of hunting for black swans.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Fantastic. If you can handle the information load that's coming through there.

• 1:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know what was so odd about it, in a sense, or counterintuitive for a lot of people I described this to, and Nassim actually informed my thinking a lot on this because, and I'm, again, not going to do his description justice, but thinking in a barbell fashion, where I have the vast majority of my assets and investments are cash or cash-like equivalents, and then I have this smaller portion that is speculative, but very asymmetrical returns, if I can think through basic portfolio management properly. And what I realized for myself is that I have an emotional disadvantage when it comes to publicly traded anything.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Tim Ferriss?

  I respond very poorly to compulsively, despite knowing it's not in my best interest, looking at, watching people freak out and the sky is falling, and then I become Chicken Little and I sell at the worst time. So what's fantastic about startups for me, and I do not recommend this to anyone who does not have a significant advantage, as I did, that I would do all of my homework, make a decision, invest, and then I couldn't sell. It was a liquid, and that turned out to be a very good thing. I was locked in.

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  How about that?

• 1:27:01Tim Ferriss?

  So I had to do all of my homework on the front end.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:04Tim Ferriss?

  And then there was no ticker tape for me to watch, no charts for me to watch, really, and it's just worked out fantastically.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  I had a professor who was long in sugar when the Castro revolution hit. He finally said, I can't take it anymore. I gotta, I gotta clear my position.

• 1:27:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man, it's.

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  Couldn't get any work done.

• 1:27:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, I'm really, really, really bad at anything that I can watch moving up and down. So I need to address that in my own life in a lot of ways. But so we were talking about, well, for instance, I mean, talking about the, the sugar position. And I remember asking a friend of mine who's a very good investor about liquidating certain positions or not. And he said, well, I think you should just look at, as I was asking him for certain dollar ranges, how he runs the math. And he said, I just sell down to sleep, uh, sleep at night levels.

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  That's exactly it.

• 1:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  So selling to sleep at night levels. And you mentioned getting good sleep. What are, what are things that you do or don't do to help ensure good sleep for yourself?

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  Well, I, here's probably the only supplement I take. I do take some melatonin.

• 1:28:14Tim Ferriss?

  Melatonin. And do you take that on a daily basis?

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  Sometimes, uh, but every, it's like I didn't bring any with me on the trip or.

• 1:28:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  So forth. I don't do anything regularly. But, um, melatonin is much more than just a sleep aid. It's, uh, it's found in plants. It's a resistance, uh, stress resistant, uh, protein. It does have powerful antioxidant properties, but you need oxidants to oxid, oxidative molecules or signaling molecules as well. But you need a proper balance of signaling versus chronically signaling oxidative molecules. But there's some other direct, it's, uh, I think it stimulates autophagy in the brain or some of these more fundamental processes. That, uh, maybe it brings out Homer.

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  Out of his cave. I know you, are you, how, how do you think about dosing? Is this like a one milligram, a three milligram? Do you have an idea?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Five.

• 1:29:20Tim Ferriss?

  Five.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Sometimes 10.

• 1:29:22Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Okay. So that's a dose that I would use if I flew to Hong Kong to correct my sleep cycle.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  Sure you would. Yeah, you would. And it would work, but I don't do it for sleep. I do it for the other things it does.

• 1:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And do you worry at all? And this, this has been, there are certain things you, you are not terribly interested in, like rapamycin. Do you worry at all? And this is the question that came to mind. I haven't asked him directly, but Dom, who we know, Dominic D'Agostino, also uses melatonin on a very, very regular basis. Do you worry about any type of negative feedback loop or tolerance development or side effects from chronic use of melatonin?

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  A lot of people do, and I, maybe I did it one time when I didn't know enough about it, but actually it's not, you're not going to, you know, shut down the pineal gland from making melatonin because you're, because you're not really stimulating it to make it in the first place. You're not, you're, you're thinking in terms of a homeostatic balance of melatonin. I'm not. I'm thinking about it as a surge that's bringing up protective pathways. I think of it in a completely different way. And I don't even take it to sleep. I take it to.

• 1:30:34Tim Ferriss?

  Roll the other.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. Keep, keep my brain.

• 1:30:37Tim Ferriss?

  To summon Homer.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  So it's, actually, everything I think of, I think in terms of those protective pathways, immunity, restoration pathways. The whole, the whole knowledge that I thought I had before is sort of out the window. You think in terms of these molecular pathways.

• 1:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, I'd like to explore that a little bit. And this is gonna, I'm sure, uncover a fairly deep level of ignorance on my part. But if, if we're thinking about, I know very little about melatonin, but I have taken it in the past. If, if we're looking at, say, the, how, how does production, well, I'm trying to frame this. If I think of the, the HPTA.

• 1:31:25Tim Ferriss?

  Like the hypothalamus pituitary testosterone axis and the ways that that can be disrupted if you supplement with say testosterone or luteinizing hormone, which I guess would be HCG when you're injecting it or taking it some other form, even if say testosterone or growth hormone for that matter are released in surges, it's not continual, much like melatonin. Why wouldn't regular consumption of melatonin cause some type of malfunction? I just don't know if it's one thing in a large stream of other elements that I don't know about.

• 1:32:00Speaker 03

  I don't have the answer to that either. It's a, first of all, you're positing that there's a feedback.

• 1:32:05Tim Ferriss?

  No, I am and I don't. That's, you know, I'm just, I'm not even positing, I'm just asking.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I wouldn't necessarily posit that feedback pathway to begin with because I don't think it's a homeostatic balance there. I don't think it's that the body attempts to maintain pulses or a balance of melatonin. I think it's, you actually make it during the day too. It's not, it's not the sleep hormone, it's a defensive hormone. I mean, it's in plants, plants don't have to get their rest or sleep, they're not moving around all that much. It's, it's an ancient, ancient hormone, it's evolutionarily conserved across almost all species. And I used to know a lot about it, I haven't thought about it in a while, so you caught

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  me short of knowledge.

• 1:32:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, maybe this is a good place to talk about the limits of human knowledge.

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Tim Ferriss?

  And for instance, in reading The Black Swan, nothing talks about epistemological arrogance fair about. And I think, just to give people an example of that, just to bring it down to a more easily understood level, a very good friend of mine, well, a lot of doctors, any good doctor will generally say, 50% of what we know is wrong, we just don't know which 50%.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so very true.

• 1:33:37Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you think about? Human knowledge, what we can know versus what we can't know. And this very broad question, but that was one of the topics that Naval recommended bouncing around in this conversation. So, and this is something that has caused me to go from taking a lot of supplements to taking fewer supplements, for instance, because there's so many historical case studies of carrots are good for us. We think they improve, I say, we attribute it to beta carotene. Then we start taking mega doses of beta carotene. Oops. Turns out, there's a lot more to the story now. We've created all of these unanticipated side effects.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think even if you look at a static diagram of something like the M4 pathway, like, gosh, it's so complicated. And then you realize, they all have to be in the right sequence, too, these molecules. You have to move at the right speed and have the right doses and so forth. You'll never be able to figure that out. So what you have to do is you have to be an experimentalist, maybe on yourself, like you and I do, maybe on your child or on your dog.

• 1:34:51Tim Ferriss?

  On Bali.

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  I actually had to experiment on my child. I didn't like to, but I had to because the doctors were killing him. So, I don't want to get into that too much, but you have to be willing to test hypotheses. Why not just admit that nature knows a lot more than we do? And try to live a simple, clean, decent life and eat good food and go hungry now and then, mimic those patterns. There's an air correction mechanism inside each one of us. If you err in terms of, for example, you make some bad cells, some bad proteins, or

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  some of your stem cells go bad, nature's down there cleaning it up because the other stem cells will kill it. It'll consume it or it'll shove it out of the niche, just like eagles get shoved out of, you know, nestlings get shoved out of the niche. There's competition going on inside your body constantly. And if you use competition to weed out the weak and the faulty and let the strong survive. So, you really, your ideas are competing also. Everything is a question of...

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  Variety, pruning, competition, pruning things. Like I said, God said, "I got these different species. I'll send out, let's see which one is best. Which one gets through the Ice Age." That's how you do it. And your body is constantly pruning. Your thoughts, your motivations, your rewards. And sleep is the way you clean all that up.

• 1:36:40Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to shift gears a little bit. I'll just ask some of what my audience knows as rapid-fire questions. Your answers don't need to be rapid. But just as we come to sort of the tail end of our chat, what books have you gifted most to other people? Or recommended most to other people? Are there any particular that come to mind?

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I gave all my library books to the local college library, and they were full of books. Not philosophy, I've thrown my philosophy books away.

• 1:37:21Tim Ferriss?

  Why's that?

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  The pointless, empty questions, for the most part. They're not testable hypotheses.

• 1:37:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. I've been generous with my thoughts, more than I have with my books, in the sense I've gifted the bulk of my knowledge that I developed on my webpage and my first essay on evolutionary fitness. And the knowledge I put out there about the paleo lifestyle, I think, was a real gift I gave to a lot of people who've carried on and developed further. And I wasn't the originator, but Lauren and I were both sort of thinking about, Lauren Corning and I were thinking about these things simultaneously. I kept telling him, "Don't jog, Lauren."

• 1:38:07Tim Ferriss?

  Don't jog?

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think he probably still does. I'm sure he's quite healthy, still. So that's the primary gift. And I gifted many dissertation topics to graduate students. I ran more graduate students at the universities where I work than anyone else in the department. The students were drawn to me, but my ideas were kind of complicated. And there was not necessarily a good dissertation there in the usual sense.

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  Good news, you have me as an advisor. Bad news?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  It's a hard topic.

• 1:38:47Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular books that have very heavily influenced you? Or books that, what are books that you've reread, if any, come to mind?

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  I actually read the journal literature. I don't read very many books anymore.

• 1:39:00Tim Ferriss?

  Scientific literature. Where do you go hunting for literature and how do you decide what to read?

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  I choose a topic and I, I look very broadly at the topic from a mathematical point of view, from a biological point of view, which is all my reading now. I must have, my bibliography is getting close to 8,000 entries in, in this aging literature. And what a goofy literature some of it is. You know, I mean, it's, there's some fantastic articles there and then there's just a lot of fluff and redoing and reviews. And, and sometimes the article will, the abstract of the article won't be as long as a listing of authors.

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  It's, it's really a weird field.

• 1:39:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a party, party review.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. They, they've figured out how to get citations.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Economists never, we, we don't call author that much. Yeah. Maybe one or two co-authors at the most.

• 1:40:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, if, humans respond to incentives, right?

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  Is that mostly PubMed? What sources do you like to, to use? Are you subscribing to particular journals themselves?

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  I'm still a professor emeritus, so I have access to just about all the world's publications. Yeah, yeah. PubMed, don't get into reading about diets. It's an endless literature and it's pretty lousy.

• 1:40:34Tim Ferriss?

  What are in the, in the fields or field of aging longevity? Although I feel like that word's kind of tainted, but yeah, life extension, that one too. I don't even know what to, what to call it. But what are the current?

• 1:40:51Tim Ferriss?

  Wild goose chases, in your opinion, or areas that are

• 1:40:56Tim Ferriss?

  potential dead ends, or things that are just getting way overblown in your mind?

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  I do think these attempts to manipulate mTOR are

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  are kind of pointless. If you chronically shut down mTOR, you're going to shrink to nothing. You're not going to make new proteins.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  It's windows. You gotta have, you gotta have these switches. The most fruitful papers that I read talk about a pathway that crosses another one, and they have switches. You turn them on and off. You age in this window, you don't age in that window. It's one way to look at it.

• 1:41:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a helpful way to look at it. So you just want to have the not aging.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, you want to be defending or renewing, but most people in today's life are renewing on a continuous basis, and so they're misfolding proteins, and they're damaging their cells and building fat in tissues where it doesn't belong and so forth. So I think all these attempts to stall mTOR are really kind of weird. You want to stall it. You don't want to overproliferate, but you actually want to be capable of proliferating when it's essential. Because when you want to renew a cell or rebuild, rebuild tissues, you have to be able to do that. Bodybuilding and the whole, the whole notion of regularity and chronic are totally wrong.

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  You gotta have switches, windows, and you go back and forth. You alternate. You gotta be, alternating states is the way to think about things. The problem is, some of the people have looked at, for example, Cynthia Kenyon's work on the worms and so forth, the foxo pathway. There are lots of residual pathways from, that are, that are Fox, four-kid box genes that, that were part of the development process. That are now resident in the cells and can respond and defend and repair a cell. For example, if you work out, you, you, you trigger Fox P and Fox M proteins in your, in your brain. Well, they would-

• 1:43:01Tim Ferriss?

  And by workout, you mean sprint or resistance training?

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can jog if you want to, if you want to, you know, kill some of your stem cells, but-

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  No, you gotta have variety. You gotta do all of these things. So I think the idea of switches in windows is going to come in systemic signaling is the hottest new thing in aging research, which makes a lot of sense, that is signaling at a distance. I think the stem cell pathways are going to turn out to be just crucial and very, very important. And again, mTOR is sort of misplaced because we got so many sick people in the world. It's bad to be average now in today's world. It's really bad. I've never had average looking tests in my blood work or anything else. And average is...

• 1:43:55Tim Ferriss?

  Average is dangerous these days. You mentioned, so dangerous reminded me of one thing that you said in passing and I wanted to just unpack it. It may not be a long story, but you said, "I've never been injured in all these decades of weight training, except for one instance that I can remember." What was the one instance? What happened?

• 1:44:17Speaker 03

  Oh, man, it was just this weird guy in the gym.

• 1:44:21Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of those.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah. He was a fireman and he worked out at the gym and he used to do these behind the neck presses.

• 1:44:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, right, with a barbell.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, with a barbell. So he's using some weight and I said, "Well, that's nothing. I wasn't warmed up or anything." I hopped on, I said, "Well, that's easy." And I did it and I pulled a muscle in my neck and it hurt for three months.

• 1:44:48Tim Ferriss?

  What are things that you do to help minimize the likelihood of injury? Whether it's some type of warm-up before you go into your negative work or otherwise?

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  Well, first thing, I don't warm up.

• 1:45:05Tim Ferriss?

  You don't warm up?

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  No. Like Mike Mensah used to do.

• 1:45:08Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, sure.

• 1:45:09Speaker 03

  You just go in and start working out. Now, when I was...

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

  So you go straight to your first work set, whatever that might be?

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it's usually sort of mild. And I may start with my so-called famous hierarchical sets. A lightweight, 15 reps. A heavier weight, eight reps. A heavier weight, yet four reps. You're going right up the fiber hierarchy. Slow, intermediate, fast switch. Now you're warm. You warm up more rapidly if you do something that's reasonably intense and then the rest of the workout, you're warm. I work out early in the morning when it's cold or I used to and now, now that I don't have a job anymore, I'm retired, I work out at 11. And every, every time I go there,

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  I see the same guy. He's an ex-bodybuilder, you can tell. He looks good. He's still, he's there for hours and I'm in and out. I don't know who looks better. I think I do, but that's, I'm leaner. He's a more bodybuilding looking, looking guy. And they don't, they don't look good. When they're not flexed, they don't look good. Let's face it.

• 1:46:16Tim Ferriss?

  You mean you don't like, like the second trimester abdominal?

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  And just for all the bodybuilders in the audience, it's not all of you, but let's be honest, if we look at some of the competitors, when they're not flexed.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:46:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, boy. How long, you know, is it a boy or a girl?

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  That's right. That's exactly right. So I really, I'm there for a little adventure, for a little bit of intensity, not to get hurt. So if you have long muscles, you do a full range of motion, you're not going to get hurt.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  And you're also generally, at least on the, on the negatives, following a slow cadence. I mean, you're, you're, you might be raising it quickly, but you're lowering it entirely under control.

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  Control, entirely under control, but down to a full stretch.

• 1:47:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  I'm thinking, I'm thinking Titan Spring.

• 1:47:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:47:05Speaker 03

  There's a spring down there. And so even if I'm doing positive exercises, I will lower and I'll come, and I do a little, not, not a bounce, because full stop bounces are destructive, but the little stretch bounce.

• 1:47:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right. If you were to go back to teaching and you were to teach a freshman undergrad, actually, it could be a freshman or a senior seminar. So it's just, say, 15 to 40 students, something like that. And you only have them once a week. Let's say, let's say you have them once a week for three hours, one semester. What would you, what would you teach them?

• 1:47:45Speaker 03

  The economics of uncertainty.

• 1:47:47Tim Ferriss?

  Economics.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  That's the last class I developed there at UCI and I taught. They loved the class. Economics of extreme events is really what it was. Not uncertainty the way it's taught by utility theory and all this nice utility maximization and expected this and expected that. It's all nonsense. It would be the economics of extreme events.

• 1:48:10Tim Ferriss?

  If someone wanted to, since you're probably not going to teach that class anytime soon, if somebody wanted to explore that for themselves, how would they self-educate? Any starting points that you would recommend?

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  My class notes are somewhere.

• 1:48:26Tim Ferriss?

  We should definitely somehow crowdfund getting those.

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  I would start with my movie book.

• 1:48:34Tim Ferriss?

  What was the title of that?

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  Hollywood Economics. It covers extreme events fairly thoroughly. In fact, a lot of students looked at that. I had other readings as well. Or you could look at climate science and look at the extreme climate, extremes of climate variation. And what happens? You could look at the economics of storms and floods, floodplain analysis. So I would look at nature.

• 1:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to pick one of Nassim's books to start with, would you choose Fooled by Randomness or would it be one of the others?

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  I think students learn more from Fooled by Randomness. The Black Swan is marvelous as well. Skin in the Game is probably going to be a terrific book too, because you've got to have skin in the game. Everybody knows that, but they always ignore it. If you want to do a Chinese fun, you've got to put skin in with him.

• 1:49:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thirty percent.

• 1:49:38Tim Ferriss?

  They want incentives a lot.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  They won't just cut your knuckles off.

• 1:49:43Tim Ferriss?

  There's more at stake. So the economics of extreme events.

• 1:49:52Tim Ferriss?

  If you could put anything on a billboard, you have a gigantic billboard and you can put a short message, a word, a couple of words, sentence, whatever, to get out to millions of people, what would that message be? Or whatever you would put on the billboard, it could be anything.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  Well, I used to, in my, my Principles of Economics, teaching the importance of freedom and arbitrage. Arbitrage keeps you from being stupid because you compare the price of this relative to other equivalents or close substitutes and so forth. If you do, if you talk mathematically about pricing, you lose the anchoring from the arbitrage principle. So I always taught arbitrage.

• 1:50:39Tim Ferriss?

  Arbitrage. Could you, could you explain that maybe through an example? I would just love to hear.

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we'll buy low and, and sell high, but you trade, you have to trade different alternatives. For example, nature abhors a vacuum and economics abhors an arbitrage opportunity. Arbitrage opportunities get eliminated.

• 1:51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Is that, okay, got it. Is that just efficient, not efficient market theory?

• 1:51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, it's a sensible way of looking at efficient markets. The best predictor of tomorrow's price of something is today's price because that leaves no arbitrage opportunity.

• 1:51:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  If you knew the price is going up tomorrow, it would go up today. You know, that, that kind of thinking. You think about opportunities, but you think in terms of the arbitrage limits that are there. So I taught, I taught general equilibrium theory as arbitrage also. It wasn't too successful. It wasn't, it wasn't appreciated, but this is how Maldonado taught general equilibrium theory also, was the presence of arbitrage.

• 1:51:45Tim Ferriss?

  So would you just put?

• 1:51:48Tim Ferriss?

  Understand arbitrage, would that be the message?

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Oh, the billboard?

• 1:51:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  No, it would be Freedom Counts.

• 1:51:57Tim Ferriss?

  Freedom Counts?

• 1:51:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Freedom matters.

• 1:51:59Tim Ferriss?

  And is that mostly in reference to markets? Or is it?

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  Freedom of contract, freedom of arbitrage, freedom of entry, freedom of exit. People don't have to be forced to do things. They can exit. They can participate.

• 1:52:15Tim Ferriss?

  Freedom Counts.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Tim Ferriss?

  I like that.

• 1:52:19Speaker 03

  And your workouts, too.

• 1:52:22Tim Ferriss?

  Lift heavy things.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, lift heavy things, Freedom Counts.

• 1:52:28Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we could talk for hours and hours and hours. And I know we're gonna go probably grab a bite to eat at some point after this. But is there, is there anything, and I'm gonna ask you after this, where people can learn more about you, what you would like them to check out? And certainly that'll all go in the show notes. But is there any, are any parting words or suggestions or asks of my audience? Something they should test, something they should consider, anything? That you'd like people to?

• 1:52:57Speaker 03

  Well, get ready for my, for my book when it comes out on aging. It's a field that's full of a lot of charlatans. There's some good science. And there's some, there is no such thing as successful aging, because aging is damage.

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  So you can't be successful if you're being damaged.

• 1:53:15Tim Ferriss?

  And do you have, do you have a set timeline for that? Or a title people should look out for? Or should we just say, "Prime yourselves, it's coming," and we will let you know when it comes out?

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, just check my Facebook page. That's, that's my, I've given up my blog. It wasn't worth the time and effort. I did help a lot of people, but I'm past that now.

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  I, I've taken up this as a really, as a scientific quest, because, one, like I said, I'm experienced. Coming, coming up on aging, on 80 is, you start thinking about, you know, when you approach middle age, you start thinking about these things.

• 1:53:54Tim Ferriss?

  When you, wait, so you're planning your, planning your next 80?

• 1:53:57Speaker 03

  The possibility, the technology is, is coming. And it is there right now, and inside each person. And it's the protein quality control, cell quality control. Don't lose cells. Maintain them, starve them, then within a while, that's good for them. So the technology, I am applying the technology and I think I'm, I'm doing pretty well at it so far. I do plan to live another forty, sixty years.

• 1:54:25Tim Ferriss?

  I think you're doing pretty well and your arms are bulging out of your shirt, which is long sleeved. So I think things are going well. Well, Art, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. And this is, this has been a lot of fun. And for everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything that we've discussed, to Art's Facebook page and more at Facebook, not Facebook, let's try that again, at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast or at tim.blog/podcast. They both go to the same place and you will find show notes for this episode and every other episode. And until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:55:07Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance, and it's very short.

• 1:55:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for many, many years. I absolutely love audiobooks and they are one of my favorite ways to pass the time when I travel. I'm on the road all the time and Audible allows me to consume many more books than I possibly could otherwise. I have two audiobooks to recommend right off the bat. The first is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time and it's the only audiobook I've wanted to listen to twice in a row. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

• 1:56:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's amazing and you will thank me. There are a few different versions. I like the version that Neil narrates himself. One of the most soothing voices of all time. The second book is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, P-O-T-T-S, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what would later become The 4-Hour Work Week. So, go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of these two books or any of many, many other options. That could be books, magazines and much more. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can also access a free 30-day trial. Just go to audible.com/tim. You can't make more time, but you can make the most of it.

• 1:57:18Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:58:01Tim Ferriss?

  I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product... And Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product's sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool.

• 1:58:45Tim Ferriss?

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