Pod Insights Maintenance Phase Tim Ferriss’s "The 4-Hour Body" (feat. Peter Shamshiri) About this episode We're joined by Mike's If Books Could Kill co-host to revisit a biohacking diet book for the boys. Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! The 4-Hour BodyDoes Glycemic Index Matter for Weight Loss? An Examination of the Evidence New! Improved! Shape Up Your Life! The 4-Hour Body: The Real App You Are Working On Is An App Called YourselfThanks to Doctor ...
Transcript 11,662 words · 3 speakers
0:11 Speaker 00 Should we have Peter do it?
0:12 Speaker 01 Whoa!
0:14 Speaker 00 Peter's never listened to our show, so he doesn't know the format.
0:16 Speaker 02 I do, I do, sort of. It's like, uh...
0:22 Speaker 02 Wait, what's your tagline format? I've heard it 100 times, and now I can't remember the format, because I'm just confusing it with hours in my head.
0:29 Speaker 01 We could do a little, "Peter, what do you know about the four-hour body?"
0:32 Speaker 02 Hmm.
0:34 Speaker 00 Peter sounds unconvinced.
0:36 Speaker 01 Decline!
0:38 Speaker 02 It's your podcast. If you wanted to grade it by using our lazy format...
0:44 Speaker 00 We'll do one then, Peter.
0:45 Speaker 02 You're trying to figure out a way where it's my responsibility to come up with a tagline.
0:49 Speaker 00 100%.
0:50 Speaker 01 Mike is eternally trying to weasel his way out of doing the tagline.
0:54 Speaker 02 What if we made you a part of this, Peter?
0:58 Speaker 01 Peter, I want you to feel like you have some real ownership here.
1:03 Speaker 00 Okay, this probably doesn't work. "Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that has 36 hours left every week for face." Because it's the four-hour body, and you have like 36 hours left in the work week.
1:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, sick.
1:16 Speaker 00 Thank you, thank you.
1:20 Speaker 01 I'm Aubrey Gordon.
1:21 Speaker 00 I'm Michael Hobbs.
1:22 Speaker 02 I'm Peter Shemshere.
1:24 Speaker 01 If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael!
1:34 Speaker 00 Peter.
1:35 Speaker 02 Aubrey?
1:35 Speaker 01 So, for those of you who are unfamiliar, Peter is Michael's co-host on If Books Could Kill.
1:41 Speaker 00 Other podcasts...
1:42 Speaker 01 Peter is joining us today for a sort of, like, a very delayed follow-up to your Tim Ferriss Four Hour Work Week episode.
1:51 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:51 Speaker 02 Incredible cross-promo, the only podcast I could appear on where there's absolutely no new fans being brought on.
1:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:59 Speaker 01 So today, we are talking about Tim Ferriss's follow-up to the Four Hour Work Week. It's called "The Four Hour Body."
2:07 Speaker 00 Body by Tim.
2:08 Speaker 01 Peter, do you recall, it has... Been a minute. Do you recall any of the sort of high points from the four hour work week?
2:14 Speaker 02 Broadly speaking, Tim had this idea where if you like, create passive streams of income, and then automate all of your work, you can bring your work week down to four hours and basically do nothing.
2:28 Speaker 00 This doesn't work as well with body, because you can't like, hire people in India to do sit-ups for you.
2:34 Speaker 02 Right. Also, four hour work week is like, oh, great, I'm losing 36 hours of my work week. Four hour body is like, yeah, that's a good amount of working out.
2:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's actually, that's like a normal amount of working out in a week.
2:45 Speaker 01 It will comfort you both to learn that there is no mention of four hours anywhere in this. There's no like justification for four hours.
2:53 Speaker 02 It's all branding.
2:54 Speaker 00 It's pure clickbait, yeah.
2:55 Speaker 01 So, for folks who are unfamiliar, Tim Ferriss's primary sort of claims to fame are his long-running podcast, and this previous book, The Four Hour Work Week. He's like a life hack guy and an optimization guy. He's also sort of, by trade, a tech guy and an investor. And like many tech guys and investors, he is rich, and that has given him the brain disease of, I am rich, ergo, I must be right about everything.
3:25 Speaker 00 And also, I must be a wellness influencer. I feel like all these fucking guys wanna be like gurus.
3:31 Speaker 01 Before the four hour work week, he sold a supplement called Brainquicken.
3:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, the four hour brain.
3:39 Speaker 01 I looked into the active ingredients, and it feels like very like trademark Tim Ferriss, that he is listing out a bunch of like, very scientific names for things. He's doing the thing of saying ascorbic acid instead of just saying vitamin C.
3:57 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:58 Speaker 01 He's saying niacinamide instead of vitamin B. So it sort of obscures that what this pill is, is like, there's some adaptogenic mushrooms in it. There's some B vitamins, there's some amino acids, there's some ginkgo, there's some ginseng, and there's a fuck-ton of caffeine.
4:15 Speaker 00 Oh.
4:16 Speaker 01 So like, it was largely a caffeine pill.
4:19 Speaker 00 People are like, I feel amazing on this.
4:21 Speaker 01 Absolutely. That's like, all of the comments on all of the reddits are like, does anybody know where to find this? Nothing worked this well. And it was like, 200mg of caffeine.
4:30 Speaker 00 Starbucks. You can find it at Starbucks.
4:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can find it in the Panera lemonade. Please enjoy.
4:38 Speaker 01 Since selling Brainquicken, Tim Ferriss has mostly been an investor for tech companies like TaskRabbit and a bunch of others. He's a Forbes 40 Under 40 guy. He's a Princeton graduate, and he has quite an ego. On his own website, he has two poll quotes that are blown up. One is from Wired Magazine, calling him "the Superman of Silicon Valley." And another one is from the New York Times, calling him, quote, "a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk."
5:11 Speaker 02 What the fuck?
5:15 Speaker 01 And I just want everyone to just think through, like, what would that even be?
5:20 Speaker 02 Also, he's never accomplished anything in this. He's just a scam artist. He just wrote a stupid fucking book.
5:26 Speaker 00 And the core message of the book, if I recall correctly, is like, how to scam other people, like, how to start doing seminars and stuff.
5:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was like, "The best way to create passive income is to do a scam like the one I'm doing on you right now," by writing this book.
5:39 Speaker 01 So, you all have provided me with the perfect segue. He did publish The Four Hour Workweek in 2007. It is, on its face, like a life hack manual to just work less. It's a rebrand of Work Smarter, Not Harder, among other things. He advises readers to hire people to outsource large parts of your job, as you mentioned, so that you can do less. But he also advises things like, "Hey, you could become an expert in something. Go buy the top two or three most popular books on the subject. Schedule a free seminar. Invite people to the free seminar and give them, like, a talk about what you learned from
6:22 Speaker 01 the books, basically. And then book a bunch of paid speaking gigs off of that free seminar."
6:30 Speaker 00 I'm almost nostalgic for this, because now it would be like, well, just get ChatGPT to read the two most popular books. And like, you wouldn't even have to absorb the information.
6:38 Speaker 01 If you're like, "Hey, did his next book include or use any of those tips?" Yes, it did. Three years later, in 2010, Tim Ferriss follows up with The Four Hour Body. The diet part of his book, which is a pretty commanding majority of it, is fully just reheating the nachos of the Zone and the South Beach Diet.
7:01 Speaker 00 At least he's consistent. He's like, I told you what I was gonna do, and then I did it.
7:04 Speaker 01 They are two diets from the mid 90s that at this point had already achieved like really major popularity. These were books that were being sold in airports, had like massive uptake. I remember seeing them at the Costco book table.
7:18 Speaker 00 It's like basically low carb, but not like as extreme as Atkins. Isn't that what The Zone and South Beach are?
7:23 Speaker 01 It's not quite low carb. It's something that they call slow carb.
7:26 Speaker 00 Oh, it's like a glycemic index thing?
7:27 Speaker 01 Yes, totally. And we'll get into the glycemic index of it all.
7:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay.
7:31 Speaker 02 Just checking in, I understand all of this, by the way.
7:36 Speaker 01 So, the core idea behind The Four Hour Body is that you can lose weight and get shredded with what he refers to as the quote unquote "minimum effective dose." So that means he's big on like high intensity interval training, where you do like really intense workouts for short periods of time. He's big on like creating little formulas for for meals. And like he has a whole section where he's like, "I love Diet Coke, and I've found that as long as I keep my consumption to under 16 ounces a day, it doesn't interrupt my fat loss."
8:11 Speaker 00 Also, it sort of just assumes that like eating healthy and exercising are just chores that nobody would want to do deliberately, right? It's like, what's the least amount of tennis that I can play to like be shredded? But like surely the actual advice would be like, find something you like doing.
8:25 Speaker 01 No, because he specifically says about both the diet and the exercise, "You should not enjoy it." He has a whole section where he's like, "Don't confuse recreation with exercise."
8:37 Speaker 00 Hell, yeah.
8:37 Speaker 01 "You don't like exercise. You do like recreation." And the sort of implication is like, if you're enjoying it, then it's not exercise, which is
8:47 Speaker 00 Man.
8:47 Speaker 01 pretty directly counter to all of the research that we have. That is like, if people like it, then they do it regularly. And doing it regularly is the thing that matters the most.
8:55 Speaker 02 I love the idea that he's innovating by just talking about high intensity workouts for shorter periods of time. He's like, where he's just like, "I have an idea. Fucking run faster."
9:05 Speaker 02 Just haul ass on that treadmill.
9:07 Speaker 00 My understanding is that high intensity interval training is fine, but also it was kind of a fad at the time. A lot of these guys just fall for fads, basically, exercise fads, and they repackage them as if they're some sort of like, deep insight. Like, I can't get over, you know, Brian Johnson, this guy, like, the reverse aging millionaire guy, who just does intermittent fasting. Which is, again, just like, a trend that everybody's hopped on to.
9:27 Speaker 02 Well, doesn't he also transfer his child's blood into himself or something?
9:30 Speaker 00 That's less trendy. But that's because not everybody has a son.
9:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, and your son has to be cool. Your son has to be like, alright, sure dad.
9:37 Speaker 01 One of the things that sort of shows up in The Four Hour Body is that Tim Ferriss is like, we've got so much science to prove so many things, but overwhelmingly, the science that he refers to is either, quote unquote, research that he's just done on himself?
9:54 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
9:55 Speaker 01 Or firsthand accounts from people who read his blog, or rat studies.
10:00 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
10:01 Speaker 01 So I am going to send a quote.
10:06 Speaker 00 Make Peter do it, make Peter do it.
10:07 Speaker 02 Are you kidding me?
10:08 Speaker 00 Do it.
10:09 Speaker 02 I'm just like a vent for you to...
10:12 Speaker 00 To do less work. I'm outsourcing my work to Peter.
10:15 Speaker 01 Mike is four hour work weeking right now.
10:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know. He's like, playing video games, and you ask him a question, he's like, Peter?
10:23 Speaker 01 So, I am sending this to Michael to fucking read.
10:27 Speaker 00 Okay, fine, I'll read it, I'll read it. I've recorded almost every workout I've done since age 18. I've had more than 1,000 blood tests performed since 2004, sometimes as often as every two weeks, tracking everything from complete lipid panels, insulin, and hemoglobin A1C, to IGF-1 and free testosterone. I've had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse, quote, "permanent injuries," and I've flown to rural tea farmers in China to discuss Pu'er teas' effects on fat loss. All said and done, I've spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade. I am a huge fucking sucker. I just announced that right off the bat.
11:09 Speaker 01 Yep, yep, yep.
11:10 Speaker 00 Just as some people have avant-garde furniture or artwork to decorate their homes, I have pulse... Oximeters, ultrasound machines and medical devices for measuring everything from galvanic skin response to REM sleep. The kitchen and bathroom look like an ER. If you think that's craziness, you're right. Fortunately, you don't need to be a guinea pig to benefit from one.
11:31 Speaker 02 Let's get it out there off the bat. I am mentally ill.
11:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:35 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:35 Speaker 01 Also, there's just like not really any compelling medical reason to have that many blood tests.
11:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
11:41 Speaker 01 He thinks he's finding out a ton of things.
11:44 Speaker 02 Right.
11:45 Speaker 01 I don't trust, having read this entire book, that he knows enough to know what is sort of worth measuring here.
11:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:54 Speaker 01 And I think that he is like, there is like a real core of confirmation bias happening in this book where the stuff that he prioritizes is the stuff that sort of upends expectations, right?
12:06 Speaker 00 Right.
12:06 Speaker 01 But also, a bunch of it really is just sort of a wealth flex.
12:10 Speaker 02 I feel like a lot of these guys get to a point where they're so rich that they're like, it's bullshit that I have to die.
12:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:18 Speaker 02 My life rules in all of these ways. My life is better than the average person.
12:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:21 Speaker 02 But like, there is this one great unifying element, and that's that I'm going to die. And I think that is nonsense, and I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna try to get out ahead of it.
12:30 Speaker 00 $250,000 is so embarrassing.
12:33 Speaker 01 It's really stunning.
12:35 Speaker 00 Because it feels like the end of the day, it's gonna be like, yeah, do exercise and like, try to eat a balanced diet of like, fruits and vegetables. But it's like, these guys want this sort of one weird trick kind of thing, or some sort of shortcut. But it's not clear to me that like, all of this data about yourself really offers that much to your health.
12:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I will also say like, a bunch of these sorts of devices end up, like, I recently had a family member who had lung cancer and was using a pulse oximeter like, all the time. That became sort of a source of like, fixation and anxiety.
13:07 Speaker 00 Right.
13:07 Speaker 01 And the healthcare providers that I talked to, sort of in the process of all of this, were like, that's actually like, really common, particularly for men, to get especially hung up on like, what is this measurably doing? Not as a way of like, discerning information about them. But as a way of like discharging anxiety that they're having about their health.
13:28 Speaker 00 He feels like he's taking back control because he's measuring something. Because like, yeah, why are you getting an ultrasound?
13:33 Speaker 01 Not only why are you getting an ultrasound, why do you own an ultrasound machine? So he has sort of a little thesis for the book and sort of like a little bit of a rallying cry for like what he thinks this is all about. I am sending another quote to the chat.
13:53 Speaker 00 Peter.
13:53 Speaker 01 Okay, you guys can trade off. How about that?
13:55 Speaker 02 I just want to, this is unpaid work I'm doing. I view 4HB as a manifesto, a call to arms for a new mental model of living, the experimental lifestyle. It's up to you, not your doctor, not the newspaper, to learn what you best respond to. If you understand politics well enough to vote for a president, or if you have ever filed taxes, you can learn the few most important scientific rules for redesigning your body. These rules will become your friends, 100% reliable and trusted. This changes everything. There is no high priesthood. There is cause and effect. Welcome to the director's chair.
14:30 Speaker 00 This annoys the shit out of me. Shut up.
14:33 Speaker 02 Why are there so many metaphors going on?
14:36 Speaker 00 It's like, we're talking about like diet and exercise. You're not redesigning your body, dude.
14:42 Speaker 01 If you can vote for president has not aged well.
14:45 Speaker 02 If your dumb ass has ever clicked next 20 times on TurboTax, then you can do this.
14:51 Speaker 01 Part of what I find interesting about this is that it's sort of like a prototype of what has become a real sort of core ethos of the Maha movement, right? Which is just like, fuck experts, nobody gets to decide but you what's good for you.
15:07 Speaker 00 It's not your doctor, it's not the newspaper, but it is an airport book? He's like, don't trust them, but like, you're also just some random person.
15:15 Speaker 01 Trust the guy who sells Brain Quicken.
15:18 Speaker 02 I feel like, but he's saying, trust yourself and yourself is reading Tim Ferriss, right? I'm telling you that you are smart and then in return, you just do what I tell you, right? But it's sort of listening to yourself in a way. We're in this together, rejecting the experts.
15:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. And I think like specifically saying it's not up to your doctor is the part where I'm like, that's a wild approach to take, right?
15:45 Speaker 02 Who's your, who's your doctor to tell you what your blood pressure is?
15:51 Speaker 01 So on top of his sort of N of one stuff, he says that he has quote, "tracked the progress of hundreds of readers of his blog," and touts that quote, "many of them lost 20 pounds in the first few weeks," and sort of makes those kinds of claims. Most of his claims about weight loss throughout the book are about what happened in the first two to four weeks.
16:11 Speaker 00 So it's like, tell me you've never read a diet book before without telling me you've never read a diet book before.
16:15 Speaker 01 Right. Like every diet under the sun follows the same pattern, which is like rapid weight loss for the first like one to maybe six months, three to six months, and then a long plateau, and then a weight regain. Like that is how it goes. So when folks are sort of cherry picking, like, "we're just gonna talk about the first month," like, "yeah, dude, you're picking your best numbers. Absolutely. I'm only gonna talk about my sales at Christmas time."
16:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. You can go to almost any diet and lose weight in the first month.
16:45 Speaker 01 Yes, absolutely. The interesting thing is, he is presenting like a series of these kind of N of one findings, quote unquote findings, right? It is very far from any kind of like randomized controlled trial. It's very far from any kind of scientific method. There is massive confirmation bias if he's hearing from fans of his blog who want to tell him why his shit works and why they like him.
17:12 Speaker 00 Cause you're obviously not gonna be hearing from people that it didn't work for, cause they would probably just like not be on the blog anymore. They find something else.
17:17 Speaker 01 Absolutely. He has like a whole segment where he's like, "if you wanna know how to lose 20 pounds in two weeks, just ask the founder of WordPress who lost a bunch of weight from just chewing every mouthful of food 20 times," where you're like, "come on, man."
17:32 Speaker 00 That's literally like an 1800s diet. That's like one of the first diets.
17:36 Speaker 02 That's what happens when you make WordPress money. You're like, "what's next? Now to turn my thoughts inward, I will triple the amount of bites that I'm taking of every sandwich."
17:46 Speaker 01 The Four Hour Body has a couple of good points. I do wanna do like a little bit of credit where credit is due. So he cautions readers against falling for like marketing terms. So he's like, "if someone's telling you about toning, cellulite, firming, shaping, like, these are all marketing words."
18:05 Speaker 00 He just said redesigning your body, though. That's also a fucking marketing term.
18:08 Speaker 01 That's not reshaping. That's not reshaping.
18:12 Speaker 02 4HB is different than a marketing term.
18:14 Speaker 01 It's a protocol, is what he keeps saying. It's a protocol.
18:18 Speaker 02 Protocol itself not a marketing term. Don't get confused.
18:24 Speaker 01 He also cautions readers, he's like, "Look, you're gonna be doing a bunch of self experimentation. That means that you're gonna have to challenge your own ideas about correlation and causation." Right? And he gives them some like, actually quite good questions to challenge. Like, is this causal relationship moving the way you think it is? One is like, is it possible that what he calls the arrow of causality is reversed? So like, is it possible not that this person ran and therefore got a quote unquote runner's build? But rather that they kind of looked like someone who could do well at running, so they did.
18:59 Speaker 00 I'm eating Brussels sprouts because I'm farting.
19:05 Speaker 00 Actually, if you think about it.
19:06 Speaker 01 He asks if you're mixing up absence and presence. So for example, like, is a vegetarian diet healthier or perceived to be healthier because of the lack of meat or because of the increased presence of vegetables?
19:21 Speaker 00 Okay.
19:21 Speaker 01 Right? Like, it's just like basic good probing kinds of questions. At one point, he does say, quote, "Is it possible that you tested a specific demographic that other variables are responsible for the difference? For example, if the claim is that yoga improves cardiac health and the experimental group comprises upper-class folk, is it possible that they are therefore more likely than a control group to eat better food? You bet your downward dog posing ass."
19:50 Speaker 00 Oh, got a little spice in the sentence.
19:53 Speaker 02 Nice.
19:53 Speaker 01 So, this is like straightforwardly good advice that he then proceeds to ignore for the rest of the book.
19:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was gonna say, like, you're reading a book by a rich guy who got blood tests a thousand times.
20:04 Speaker 01 Right. He's like, "Don't confuse what's happening with rich people with what's happening with you. Confuse what's happening with me."
20:12 Speaker 00 With a single rich guy.
20:14 Speaker 01 The diet itself is pretty straightforward. There are five core rules. One is avoid quote unquote white carbohydrates. So that's like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, that kind of stuff.
20:28 Speaker 01 Two is, quote, "Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch. You already do this, you're just picking out new default meals." This is where he gets into, like, you should not enjoy it. And also, he does talk about, he's like, "Here are some good meals to have on the diet. One of my favorites is canned tuna packed in water, mixed with lentils and chopped onion."
20:54 Speaker 00 What, just like in a bowl?
20:55 Speaker 01 Yep.
20:56 Speaker 00 Dude, no mayo, no lemon juice?
20:58 Speaker 01 Nothing.
20:58 Speaker 02 You gotta get that mercury up. You want, you want, you want to be able to see it through your skin like a thermometer.
21:07 Speaker 01 Rule number three is, don't drink calories, that's a pretty common one. Rule number four is, don't eat fruit.
21:15 Speaker 00 What?
21:15 Speaker 01 It's part of the, like, slow carb thing, right? Of just like, if there's not a ton of fiber, there is a lot of sugar.
21:21 Speaker 00 That's not, that's not true, but whatever.
21:23 Speaker 01 Whatever. Rule number five is, take one day off per week and, quote, "Go nuts." I recommend Saturday, often nicknamed Fatter Day by followers.
21:34 Speaker 00 But this is also, like, he's just telling you to, like, do something you hate all the time? And then, one day a week, you get to do something you like?
21:40 Speaker 02 Like, surely, you can find a happy medium, right?
21:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:43 Speaker 02 Throw, throw a little bit of mustard in the tuna and maybe take, take it easy on Saturdays.
21:47 Speaker 00 It's also funny, because like, none of these guys have kind of been steeped in, like, fad diet world the way I think a lot of women have. They're like, a lot of women by their 30s are like, "Oh, I've heard this advice a million fucking times, it's not gonna work for me." But these guys are, like, basically discovering, like, fad diet stuff.
22:01 Speaker 02 This, it's like look-maxing stuff for men, uh, where, like, we, we've gone a little too far and, like, 19-year-olds are, like, wearing shoulder pads and shit.
22:11 Speaker 01 Microdosing meth, yeah. I will say, on the cheat day stuff, he comes up with sort of a scientific rationale for the cheat day, where he's like, "No, it's actually, like, good and important."
22:23 Speaker 02 Like psychologically important?
22:24 Speaker 01 No, like, like physically, metabolically important.
22:28 Speaker 02 Okay.
22:29 Speaker 01 Quote, "Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way, once per week, increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate doesn't downshift from extended caloric restriction."
22:41 Speaker 00 That's not true, that's not true. I know he's like, ooh, don't trust your, your doctor, the science, but like you should trust the science, bro. That's not true at all.
22:49 Speaker 02 You want to get your body right on the verge of starvation mode and then boom, an entire pizza.
22:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:56 Speaker 02 Remember like the P90X muscle confusion thing? You're doing that, but for your metabolism.
23:01 Speaker 00 You can't let it get too comfortable.
23:02 Speaker 01 The formula for meals for this is pretty straightforward. Very standard diet advice. He says for every meal, you should pick one item from each of his sort of prioritized food groups. That's lean protein, vegetables that are either low carb and/or high fiber. And the third group is legumes. Is a bean diet, baby. Beans at every meal.
23:30 Speaker 00 So you're going to fully endorse this book now?
23:32 Speaker 01 I love it. I'm blurbing it. It's gonna be great.
23:36 Speaker 02 The only diet that works.
23:39 Speaker 01 He's honing in here on this idea of whole grains and quote unquote, slow carbs that was popular at the time. The underlying idea here is that so-called fast carbs, so things with like white flour, white sugar, whatever else, are big drivers of people getting fat and that so-called quote unquote, slow carbs, like whole grains and fiber-rich vegetables, would be less likely to lead to weight gain and would like help with weight management. This is based on the glycemic index, which we've talked about before on the show. The glycemic index is a way of, it's sort of presented as a way of measuring the impact of various foods on like humans' blood sugar. But the way that they determined it is in
24:22 Speaker 01 groups of between five and 15 people. Since then, in the, in the years since the development of the glycemic index, we have found that it is like almost useless for individual guidance because different people's bodies have like such wildly different responses to the same foods going in them, right? That for some folks, white rice might be like a major issue for their blood sugar and for other folks, it like doesn't really do much, right?
24:51 Speaker 00 But what if a rich guy who wrote an airport book already did all the research and told me what works for him?
24:55 Speaker 01 What if a wealthy man said it with confidence?
24:58 Speaker 00 What if a guy wearing an Oura ring told me that I should eat sweet potatoes?
25:02 Speaker 01 A 2021 meta-analysis in the journal Advances in Nutrition looked at 43 studies with samples totaling just under 2 million adults, and they were looking at like, when we're advising people to have a low glycemic index diet, what are the actual results of that? What they found was, quote, "Results of 30 meta-analyses of RCTs from eight publications demonstrated that low GI diets were generally no better than high GI diets for reducing body weight or body fat. While carbohydrate quality, including glycemic index, impacts many health outcomes, GI as a measure of carbohydrate quality appears to be relatively
25:45 Speaker 01 unimportant as a determinant of BMI or diet-induced weight loss."
25:50 Speaker 00 That makes sense.
25:50 Speaker 01 Right, so like, have your slow carbs, they're good for you for a lot of reasons, they're not going to make you thin.
25:56 Speaker 00 Also, this is just like yet another diet basically being like, you should eat brown rice and broccoli and chicken breast.
26:01 Speaker 01 But those diets are marketed to ladies, not nerds who want to be wealthy.
26:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:06 Speaker 02 Well, I wonder what he kind of would have come up with if it wasn't for his research with the ultrasound machines. I spent $250,000 and here's what I've come up with.
26:17 Speaker 00 It's like brown rice.
26:18 Speaker 02 Eat some beans.
26:19 Speaker 01 I'm also now just imagining Tim Ferriss with like a pulse oximeter clipped to every finger.
26:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:24 Speaker 02 Just eating tuna out of a bowl like a dog, just with his face.
26:28 Speaker 01 So, his main chapter or sort of section about weight loss is called "subtracting fat." He has subtracting fat, he has adding muscle, and he has improving sex.
26:39 Speaker 02 Don't listen to gimmicky little taglines, folks. People are gonna tell you that you can, quote, "lose weight." You can't. You can subtract fat, however.
26:48 Speaker 01 Also, like, don't listen to marketing language, but the first header in the first chapter about weight loss is, quote, "How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise."
26:59 Speaker 00 Ayy. No one's ever said this before. No one's ever promised that.
27:02 Speaker 02 This is how like tech guys talk, where they try to like throw in what feels a little more like computer language into like everyday shit, right?
27:11 Speaker 00 Yes.
27:12 Speaker 02 Talk about optimizing all the time and it's just, it's so tedious and annoying.
27:18 Speaker 00 Here's how to pivot to being a skinny person. The other thing, did you guys see this article that they're, they're now recommending, you know, this whole thing of like a stack? You have a stack of like the caffeine that you do.
27:28 Speaker 01 Oh, we're gonna talk so fucking much about stacks.
27:30 Speaker 00 Tech bros are recommending that you add nicotine patches.
27:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:34 Speaker 00 To your stack.
27:35 Speaker 02 Oh, hell yeah, dude.
27:36 Speaker 01 No, they're talking about nicotine and caffeine both as being nootropics, which is a wild way to rebrand those things.
27:42 Speaker 00 Cause that's also a made up term. So like, yeah, they're nootropics, like Lucky Charms, nootropics, why not? Like whatever.
27:47 Speaker 02 It does feel like we're gonna circle back to just like, you can smoke.
27:50 Speaker 00 And they're gonna rebrand it as like drag maxing.
27:53 Speaker 02 Right.
27:53 Speaker 00 Like burn smashing and then you're all gonna be fucking smoking again.
27:56 Speaker 02 You know, like the, the famous Mad Men ad campaign where they're like, uh, they're toasted, uh, right? They're gonna start doing that shit.
28:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:05 Speaker 01 Um, so he does use this header of like, how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise. And then his example for himself is that he lost 15 pounds in six weeks.
28:17 Speaker 00 Oh, nice. Okay. So do more than I did.
28:19 Speaker 01 He also has some before and after pictures that are fascinating. They are almost a complete recreation of like a very popular style of like 2010's body positivity Instagram post.
28:33 Speaker 00 Hell yeah.
28:34 Speaker 01 Where like a thin woman would take a picture of herself slouching so that she would like have some rolls.
28:41 Speaker 00 Uh, yeah.
28:41 Speaker 01 And then would take another picture of herself standing up straight and the caption would be like, it's the same body. He like, has like a quote unquote before picture that is him leaning forward and weighing, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 pounds more. And then the next picture is him shirtless and ripped and standing off to the side.
28:59 Speaker 02 It's like the, the Alex Jones picture, uh, where, where he's just slightly more red in the after photo.
29:09 Speaker 01 The initial diet that we talked through sounds pretty straightforward, like focus on protein and fiber, eat from certain food groups, get some exercise, that kind of thing. But then he gets to a section where he talks about like common mistakes.
29:24 Speaker 00 Okay.
29:24 Speaker 01 And now it's getting real complicated. Mistake number one, not eating within one hour of waking, preferably within 30 minutes.
29:32 Speaker 02 It's all metabolism confusion at the end of the day.
29:35 Speaker 01 His argument is that you should, he's like, I eat one tablespoon of almond butter and four Brazil nuts upon waking.
29:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, I keep it next to my bed, just to
29:44 Speaker 00 Right before my first cigarette of the day, absolutely.
29:47 Speaker 01 He says that mistake number two is not getting enough protein per meal. Mistake number three is not drinking enough water, but he doesn't really define enough. Mistake number four, he says, is believing that you'll cook, especially if you're a bachelor.
30:01 Speaker 00 What the fuck is that? What's wrong with what?
30:03 Speaker 01 Throughout this book, he is assuming that the reader is him. And he's like, I don't cook, so they don't cook.
30:07 Speaker 00 I feel like learn to cook would also be like reasonable advice for a book like this.
30:11 Speaker 01 He has a whole mistake just about mistiming weighings with your menstrual cycle. And then in parentheses, he writes, not a problem for bachelors.
30:22 Speaker 00 Nice. For married men, however.
30:24 Speaker 02 Tell them.
30:25 Speaker 01 He talks about how cheat day is like a really important part of the diet, not just for adherence to the diet, but for its actual effectiveness. He says that the big issue that cheat day helps with is to minimize your release of insulin, which triggers your body to store fat.
30:51 Speaker 00 Metabolism spoofing, that's what it's doing.
30:53 Speaker 01 Yes. So he has a whole thing where he's like, you have to increase the speed of gastric emptying.
31:01 Speaker 01 Or how quickly food exits the stomach.
31:04 Speaker 00 Oh, he's doing like a poop speed run? Like, you want to get from food to poop in like 35 minutes?
31:09 Speaker 02 Your body should not be absorbing the nutrients from the food. It should be blasting through you at full speed.
31:14 Speaker 00 Actual food should be coming out of you.
31:16 Speaker 02 Just a full, a full slice of pizza coming out your ass.
31:19 Speaker 00 But can people even do anything about that? Could you manipulate how fast you're pooping and like processing food?
31:25 Speaker 02 There are ways that you can line your pipes to like in your house. I imagine if you implement the same method so that you can sort of create a slide where the food cannot actually enter your stomach in any meaningful way.
31:37 Speaker 00 You're just drinking a bottle of lube.
31:41 Speaker 00 Slide through, like a slip and slide.
31:44 Speaker 02 Almond butter and Astroglide.
31:47 Speaker 01 We're gonna read what Tim says you can do.
31:49 Speaker 00 I consume 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine or 16 ounces of cooled yerba mate at the most crap-laden meals. My favorite green supplement, Athletic Greens, mentioned in the schedule, doesn't contain caffeine, but will also help. Does this really work? Taking the goodies from taste buds to toilet without much storage in between? More than a few people have told me it's pure science fiction. Too much information, warning. I disagree, and for good reason. Rather than debate meta-studies, I simply weighed my poo.
32:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.
32:24 Speaker 00 Hell, yeah.
32:25 Speaker 02 Fuck a meta-study, dude. Shit on a scale.
32:29 Speaker 00 Identical volumes of food on and off the protocol. On-protocol equals much more poo mass, equals less absorption, equals fewer chocolate croissants that take up residence on my apps. Simple but effective? Perhaps. Good to leave out of a first date conversation? Definitely.
32:47 Speaker 02 He's doing the work, you know? This is what, before we had meta-analyses, right? Before we had the studies to analyze, guys were just shitting on scales, right? This is what Isaac Newton would have done.
32:57 Speaker 01 I love that he's like, "I'm not gonna get into these meta-studies. Instead, I weighed my shit."
33:03 Speaker 02 What, are you a fucking nerd? Weigh your poo.
33:05 Speaker 00 I'm like squatting over a bathroom scale.
33:08 Speaker 01 It's so absurd, and it really- Really feels like, like he presents this in a way that is very much like, guys, I cracked the code.
33:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:18 Speaker 01 In the meantime, you are, I guess, fishing poop out of your toilet.
33:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:22 Speaker 01 And weighing it. Like, what are we doing here?
33:24 Speaker 00 Was there, is there any basis to this at all?
33:26 Speaker 02 Michael, I like, I like how you're at, you're like, so Aubrey, did you look into this?
33:30 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:32 Speaker 02 This guy, this guy is shitting on a scale, Michael. All right.
33:36 Speaker 01 No, I fact-checked a lot of things for this episode. I did not fact-check the poop weighing.
33:41 Speaker 02 Also, it's like, good to leave out of a first date conversation. Dude, good to leave out of your book. No one wants to hear about this. I would rather, I would rather you like fraudulently create a peer-reviewed study than tell me about this.
33:53 Speaker 01 He says that there's a third principle, which is engaging in brief muscular contractions throughout your binge.
34:02 Speaker 00 Cagles? Like butt cagles?
34:05 Speaker 02 Like intestinal cagles?
34:06 Speaker 01 No, he's doing like wall squats. Like he does like a wall sit. He does, uh, he says wall tricep extensions. And 60 to 120 seconds of total air squats. Immediately prior to eating main courses on his binge day.
34:23 Speaker 02 Oh my god, dude.
34:24 Speaker 01 So he's like going to fucking Pizza Hut.
34:31 Speaker 00 Just like squatting down next to the booth?
34:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then like getting up to do fucking calisthenics for two minutes before he like eats a whole pizza. Like it's, it's extremely odd.
34:42 Speaker 02 So not only is like the food miserable to eat six days a week, cause he refuses to allow for seasoning or whatever. But you have to do wall squats.
34:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, in public on your binge day.
34:54 Speaker 02 Cause, because you might enjoy it, right?
34:57 Speaker 01 Don't get caught enjoying your food.
34:59 Speaker 02 I'm at the Buffalo Wild Wings, dude, holding, holding a wall squat for three minutes.
35:05 Speaker 01 So he has a whole argument here about how doing these sort of brief exercises and muscle contractions. Brings glucose transporters to the surface of muscle cells, opening more gates for the calories to flow into.
35:22 Speaker 00 Where is he getting this shit? He's just making, he's using big words to make it sound real, but like, what is he talking about?
35:27 Speaker 01 Michael, he's not making it up. It's based on one Japanese rat study.
35:31 Speaker 00 Oh, great. Okay.
35:32 Speaker 02 Aubrey, just because someone reads his blog does not make them a Japanese rat.
35:38 Speaker 01 So earlier, Mike, you mentioned stacks.
35:41 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
35:42 Speaker 01 Tim Ferriss experiments on himself on which ones he thinks are most effective for weight loss. He talks about one of his most effective stacks being the quote unquote "classic ECA stack." And I was like, what the fuck is an ECA stack? Ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin.
36:01 Speaker 00 Oh, what?
36:02 Speaker 01 He talks about having done this ECA stack, Ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin. Ephedrine, now banned.
36:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
36:08 Speaker 01 Because so many people died from using it, and also because you can use it to make meth.
36:13 Speaker 02 My stack of chlorine and bleach.
36:16 Speaker 01 So his current preferred stack is now the P A G G stack. It consists of-
36:24 Speaker 00 PCP.
36:24 Speaker 01 Garlic extract-
36:26 Speaker 00 Bath salts.
36:26 Speaker 01 Green tea. And an antioxidant that naturally exists in meat and some vegetables. Like, I Googled it. It's alpha lipoic acid. And I was like, what the fuck is this? And they're like, it's in broccoli and steak. And I was like, oh, well, have some broccoli and steak. I don't know.
36:43 Speaker 02 Sounds less cool when you're like, I eat some broccoli and drink tea.
36:46 Speaker 00 These guys are constantly bragging about how easy they are to dupe, right? Because they're like, ooh, this supplement changes everything. But like, they're just falling for like, marketing claims, ultimately.
36:53 Speaker 02 Take a fucking one a day. Like, please.
36:58 Speaker 01 Part of what makes it complicated is the supplements themselves. Part of it is the schedule. I am sending the schedule. This one has a bunch of sciency names, so apologies in advance to whoever.
37:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, Peter.
37:13 Speaker 02 All right, I'll do it. How did I do it? I followed a simple supplement regimen. Morning, no explode 11, two scoops.
37:22 Speaker 00 That's like an anti-diarrhea medication.
37:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, no explode.
37:25 Speaker 00 No explode.
37:26 Speaker 02 If you mix that with the diureals that he takes.
37:29 Speaker 00 And just let him fight it out inside of you.
37:31 Speaker 02 That's intestinal confusion. May the best man win. All right. No Explode 11, two scoops. Slow niacin or timed release niacinamide, 500 milligrams each meal. Chromate, pre-workout, Bodyquick. Post-workout, Mycelium. Prior to bed, polycosinol, polycosinol.
37:55 Speaker 00 Sure, sure.
37:55 Speaker 02 Chromate, again, alpha lipoic acid and slow niacin.
38:00 Speaker 01 This is like a lot of steps to take each day and he's using these names like no explode and slow niacin and chromate and that kind of stuff. Most of these are pretty common things. No Explode 11 is just a pre-workout.
38:20 Speaker 02 So he's taking a pre-workout fresh out of bed?
38:23 Speaker 01 Yes, that's right.
38:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, my workout is the entire day, so I take a pre-workout right when I wake up.
38:29 Speaker 01 Like, it's just caffeine and creatine? This man is caffeinated to the fucking max.
38:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, dude.
38:35 Speaker 01 By the way, slow niacin is niacinamide, it's just a B vitamin.
38:40 Speaker 02 Timed release of B vitamin.
38:42 Speaker 01 Right, and like, all of this is just like, you could all, get all of these as like, nature-made supplements at Target or whatever, right? Like, these are not like, hard things to find, but when he lists the like, ah, yes, I'm using 23 milligrams of polycosinol. It gives the whole thing sort of a mystique of being much more like STEM oriented than it is, right? He's giving his readers this veneer of science for things that are totally just like, take your vitamins.
39:15 Speaker 00 Also, I'm trying to like, count up how many pills he's taking.
39:20 Speaker 01 It's a lot.
39:20 Speaker 00 Right, so if he's doing this in the morning, at each meal, before workout, after workout, and prior to bed, so you're just like pumping your body with like these weird powders, when like, you don't need, even like the pre-workout, post-workout stuff is like fake, you don't need this shit, like have a banana.
39:37 Speaker 01 He also is careful to note that you only follow the schedule six days a week and you take one day off each week from your stacks.
39:45 Speaker 00 Wait, what?
39:45 Speaker 01 And then you also take one week off every two months and quote, "This week off is critical."
39:51 Speaker 00 Yes. You gotta keep your metabolism guessing. Don't let your metabolism fucking rest on its laurels.
39:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, you want to be constantly switching between constipation and diarrhea at a rate that baffles the intestines.
40:04 Speaker 01 Unsurprisingly, he's also a cold plunge guy.
40:07 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
40:08 Speaker 01 Unsurprisingly, he's also like generally a health gadget guy, so he advocates using a glucometer, which is a monitor that you install on your body to continually monitor your blood sugar levels.
40:22 Speaker 00 Does he have the poop camera?
40:25 Speaker 01 Not to my knowledge, but this book was written before the existence of poop cam.
40:30 Speaker 00 Peter, this is an actual thing that exists. You can get something that attaches to the side of your toilet.
40:34 Speaker 01 The Kohler decoda.
40:36 Speaker 00 That films your toilet bowl and like, there's an app that gives you like quote unquote insights, but the insights are like, how many times did you poop yesterday?
40:44 Speaker 01 And like, was your poop well hydrated or not well hydrated?
40:48 Speaker 02 No, I like that. Why should I have to look? You know? I just, I want an app to just, every time I take a shit, I don't look, I immediately I just stand right up and then it, it sends me a notification that says gross.
41:03 Speaker 01 He uses a continuous glucose monitor, a thing that is straightforwardly unnecessary for people who are not diabetic. I looked up the glucose monitor that he recommends. It's the Dexcom seven. It lasts for two weeks on your body and it costs $120 per monitor.
41:23 Speaker 00 It's more just him being a rube. It's like, this is not meaningful data that you really need.
41:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, he has this belief that if you keep your blood sugar under 100, that you will sustain fat loss for longer. He also writes, quote, "Don't want to become diabetic? Want to curb things like eating sweets, which can lead to adult onset diabetes? Try using a glucometer for 24 hours."
41:47 Speaker 00 He like recommends this?
41:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
41:48 Speaker 00 Oh, my God.
41:49 Speaker 01 Essentially, the argument that he's making is like, do you not want to become diabetic? Start living like you have diabetes.
41:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
41:57 Speaker 01 Watch everything you eat, exercise in really specific ways, wear a glucometer, and, you know, maybe take some diabetes meds, right? As a bunch of biohackers suggest, taking like Metformin and stuff like that, right? Like, so it is this really odd thing where I'm like, I just try mapping that on to other illnesses. Like, it would be really weird if someone was like, I don't want to get cancer, so I'm gonna do preemptive chemo.
42:23 Speaker 00 Or like, if you want to avoid chlamydia, just wear a condom at all times. No matter what you're doing.
42:28 Speaker 02 Wake up, almond butter, Z-Pak.
42:31 Speaker 01 Before we dig in on the last chapter that we're really gonna focus in on, we have a little interval that I have just titled in my notes, "Tim Ferriss is Weird About Women." There's one section that he calls "The Math of Beauty."
42:44 Speaker 00 Oh, no.
42:45 Speaker 02 Are we, are we doing like symmetry, symmetry stuff?
42:48 Speaker 01 We're not leaning away from phrenology, I will say that. Michael, you are up.
42:54 Speaker 00 What do Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Ren, and Elle McPherson have in common? The number 0.7 and the letters WHR. If you measured the waist and hip circumference of these three women, you'd find that their waists are 7/10ths the size of their hips. That makes their waist-to-hip ratio, WHR, 0.7. And this ratio in females appears to be hardwired into the male brain as a sign of fertility and therefore attractiveness. The wider your waist is, the higher this ratio goes toward the apple-shaped 1.0, which correlates in scientific studies with decreased estrogen levels, increased disease risk, increased birth complications, and lower fertility rates. Working toward a more slender waist has been shown to have a greater effect on attractiveness than reducing hip size.
43:39 Speaker 00 If your waist-to-hip ratio is high, dropping it even a little bit will increase your power, health, and hotness to attract a male partner.
43:47 Speaker 02 Nice.
43:48 Speaker 00 Wait, Peter, go ahead. I know you think about this all the time. This is how you talk to your boys when you're like, you're not a mean Aubrey.
43:53 Speaker 02 Look, I don't get bogged down by the numbers. I know it when I see it. No, like if you think about this often enough, you won't need to do the measurements. You'll be able to just shout them out as a woman passes.
44:06 Speaker 00 The advisor seems to be you should work toward a more slender waist rather than working toward smaller hips. But like women, like people cannot do this.
44:16 Speaker 01 You can't really control the build of your body. And also, he's doing this bizarre sort of scientific laundering of like, ah, yes, this is hardwired into the male brain.
44:26 Speaker 02 Right.
44:27 Speaker 01 He's sort of reverse engineering, like, this is what I am attracted to. And this is like a contemporary beauty standard, ergo.
44:35 Speaker 00 Right.
44:35 Speaker 01 It's like a biological imperative.
44:37 Speaker 00 The women that I'm attracted to are like, super healthy and like, super fertile.
44:41 Speaker 01 It's big no fatties energy, for sure.
44:44 Speaker 00 It's so weird, like, the need to sort of make these things quantifiable is so fucking bizarre.
44:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, why can't you just be like, they're hot?
44:51 Speaker 00 It's so fucking weird.
44:52 Speaker 02 What do Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and Ella McPherson have in common? They're fucking hot, dude. All right.
44:59 Speaker 02 Just hot babes.
44:59 Speaker 01 And there's also no point that involves like, asking women what they like.
45:04 Speaker 00 Because I want to know what ratio they like in men.
45:06 Speaker 02 What's the healthiest, like, dick to chin ratio?
45:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly.
45:10 Speaker 01 Okay, so the ratio is shoulder to waist. How dare you?
45:14 Speaker 00 Oh, wait, is it actually in there?
45:15 Speaker 01 He does include that.
45:16 Speaker 00 Wait, what is it?
45:17 Speaker 01 Uh, I think it's 0.8, uh, shoulder to, uh, waist to shoulder ratio. So your waist should be...
45:23 Speaker 02 I saw that on like masculinemen.tumblr.com.
45:26 Speaker 00 Have you made the same fucking joke? I recently heard of a podcaster who was included on a Tumblr that has exactly that ratio. It's interesting to me.
45:32 Speaker 01 Notably, those ratios both come from studies of men. They're asking men what they think is the right ratio for men to have. They're not asking women.
45:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, because if you ask men, they'll talk about how big his shoulder should be. But if you ask women, they'll talk about how big his heart should be. What's the dick to heart ratio? They want to know.
45:52 Speaker 01 So that was sort of the beginnings of him getting weird about women. He does have a whole chapter called "Improving Sex."
46:01 Speaker 00 I'm gonna let Peter take it from here. Peter?
46:03 Speaker 01 And that is where shit gets the weirdest. If you are listening to this podcast, as some people do, with your kids, and you would rather not have like a more explicit discussion of sex and genitals.
46:15 Speaker 02 You're an hour into the podcast episode about shit. And you're like, you know what? No, this isn't okay. You're about to hear about intercourse.
46:24 Speaker 01 The chapter title is "The 15-Minute Female Orgasm."
46:29 Speaker 02 Oh. It's how long it lasts?
46:30 Speaker 01 How long it takes.
46:31 Speaker 02 What happened to four?
46:33 Speaker 01 He gets very sort of granular in his advice here. And as a certified gay lady, his advice in this chapter is fucking nutso.
46:43 Speaker 02 Okay.
46:44 Speaker 01 At one point, he just tosses out that he's like, I talked to a number of experts about this.
46:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's my buddy Jimmy.
46:54 Speaker 01 To his credit, the quote-unquote "experts" that he cites are all women.
46:58 Speaker 00 Okay.
46:59 Speaker 01 So at one point, he just tosses out that he had this conversation with a quote-unquote "specialist in female ejaculation."
47:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:07 Speaker 00 You gotta weigh it. You gotta weigh it.
47:09 Speaker 01 He doesn't say anything about like, what does that mean, right? He just says, "Oh, yes, my friend Tallulah, a specialist in female ejaculation."
47:19 Speaker 02 Okay.
47:20 Speaker 01 What Tallulah tells him is that for most women, there is a most sensitive part of the clitoris. And she's like, if you're imagining a clock face, and you are facing a woman's vagina and her clitoris, it would be at about 1 o'clock.
47:36 Speaker 02 What, it's off-center?
47:37 Speaker 00 Aubrey, I'm a gay man, and Peter's never given a woman an orgasm. So you're gonna have to slow. You're gonna have to explain this very slowly.
47:42 Speaker 02 I just do the alphabet, like a gentleman.
47:45 Speaker 01 I like called a bunch of other gay lady friends, being like, "Hey, am I fucking high, or is this nothing?"
47:52 Speaker 02 1 o'clock in a vagina is crazy.
47:54 Speaker 01 That's nuts.
47:55 Speaker 02 It's like, it's like just off the clitoris.
48:00 Speaker 00 He's next to it.
48:01 Speaker 02 It's just so lit. You're just like slightly missing the clitoris.
48:06 Speaker 00 You know it works.
48:07 Speaker 02 If you use the one o'clock trick, it will take a full 15 minutes.
48:10 Speaker 01 In addition to his, his sort of fat loss stacks that he takes, he also has a pre-sex protocol.
48:21 Speaker 00 What, vitamins? He's like, stop, honey. I got, I mean, he's like scooping powder into a cup frantically. And she's like naked in the bedroom.
48:28 Speaker 02 Slapping on my nicotine patch.
48:30 Speaker 01 24 to 48 hours before you want to have incredible sex, as he puts it.
48:36 Speaker 00 48 hours? When you get a Gmail calendar invite for sex.
48:40 Speaker 01 You should quote, eat at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol within three hours of bedtime, the night before you want to have incredible sex.
48:50 Speaker 00 Oh my God, it's bottoming advice.
48:52 Speaker 01 Why before bed? Testosterone is derived from cholesterol, which is primarily produced at night during sleep.
48:59 Speaker 00 What?
48:59 Speaker 02 Ladies, if a, if a guy ever goes nuts at the one o'clock on your vagina, the night before he was, he was loading up on cholesterol.
49:08 Speaker 00 In his defense, he's had seven eggs in the last 15 minutes. He's just like scarfing hard boiled eggs.
49:16 Speaker 02 Just eating, just eating half a pound of shrimp. I mean, like one o'clock, one o'clock, one o'clock.
49:21 Speaker 01 So that's 24 hours before. He also has a protocol for four hours prior to sex.
49:28 Speaker 00 Sex should not be a spontaneous thing.
49:30 Speaker 02 Sex is all about protocols.
49:31 Speaker 01 This part of it does feel very Brian Johnson in that I'm like, oh, you're not comfortable with like human relationships and like feeling shit out with people. So like, you gotta come up with a whole song and dance to like, make it okay. And to sort of like assuage your nervousness about like having sex with someone.
49:49 Speaker 02 What if you're gonna hook up the next day and then she like calls you or she like texts you, she's like, I'm so horny, let's just do it tonight. And you're, you're like five eggs deep. Uh, you're like, um.
49:58 Speaker 01 Well, if you have four hours of notice, then you eat four Brazil nuts, 20 raw almonds and two capsules of fermented cod liver oil and butter.
50:12 Speaker 00 This is like an avoidance strategy where you're like so afraid of women. You're like, I can't, I haven't had my Brazil nuts.
50:17 Speaker 01 He really seems like a dude who is uncomfortable with women, telling a bunch of stories with a bunch of bravado.
50:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:24 Speaker 01 Tim uses this sort of quote unquote information to set himself on a quest. To quote, "facilitate female orgasms with as many partners as he could."
50:36 Speaker 00 Again, why is this in your like diet and exercise book?
50:40 Speaker 01 Because he wants to tell the boys how good he is with the ladies.
50:43 Speaker 02 Because he had 120 pages and they were like, "We need 60 more."
50:47 Speaker 01 He talks about, like, he tells little stories about several of the women that he includes in this quest. The first one, he describes as, quote, "A 25-year-old female yoga instructor fresh from the Midwest."
51:01 Speaker 02 Ugh, fresh.
51:05 Speaker 01 And in his telling of the story, she unprompted volunteers to him that she has never had an orgasm. And he's like, "Well, I'm the guy."
51:13 Speaker 00 Alright, just had my Brazil nuts. We got 15 minutes before they wear off.
51:17 Speaker 02 Gimme a dozen eggs in 24 hours, honey.
51:23 Speaker 01 He writes, quote, "My quest for the elusive female O had begun. The outcome, four weeks later, was better than I ever could have imagined."
51:32 Speaker 02 The four-week orgasm.
51:33 Speaker 01 "I was able to facilitate orgasms," the word facilitate will be explained later, "in every woman who acted as a test subject."
51:41 Speaker 02 Oh, God, what the fuck is going on?
51:43 Speaker 01 The results? Those who'd never experienced manual-only orgasm were able to do so. And those who'd never experienced penetration-only orgasm were also able to do so. The success rate was 100%.
51:58 Speaker 00 Dude, whenever I write a self-help book, like any nonfiction book, I'm including a chapter about how good at sex I am.
52:03 Speaker 01 That woman then introduces him to an organization, you two may or may not have heard of it, called One Taste. Have either of you heard of One Taste?
52:12 Speaker 02 No.
52:13 Speaker 01 It's a Bay Area organization that has been accused of being a cult. It has paid a lot of former employee settlements for labor law violations, sexual abuse. They have a Netflix documentary about how fucking dark One Taste is. And that is where he goes to learn this quote-unquote 15-minute orgasm business, right?
52:39 Speaker 02 That's the kind of shit that a cult leader would tell you. There's a secret clit.
52:45 Speaker 00 It's just to the right of the regular one. What is this organization, though, officially?
52:50 Speaker 01 They essentially are having people come in to get coached on their sex technique. So they come in with a partner. There is a coach who watches you, sometimes a group of people who watches you. And then you get like notes and direction.
53:05 Speaker 00 It's like a sex Kumon learning center?
53:07 Speaker 01 They do have this sort of framework that they use where they talk about, quote unquote, orgasmic meditation. They sort of have this sort of construction built in that is like, whether you have an orgasm or not is immaterial because you are participating in orgasmic meditation.
53:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've been telling women that for years.
53:29 Speaker 02 We are, yeah, we're like sort of spiritually participating in a cosmic orgasm. So whether or not you are coming in the real world is irrelevant.
53:39 Speaker 00 And I am coming, just so we're all clear. For you, it's more like a spiritual thing.
53:44 Speaker 01 He also consults another expert named Nina Hartley. Are either of you familiar with Nina Hartley?
53:53 Speaker 02 Is it porn?
53:54 Speaker 01 Yep. So Nina Hartley is sort of in the like Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson vein of like, a porn actor who sort of crossed over into more pop culture notoriety, right? In the book, Tim Ferriss writes that other porn actors have said that Nina Hartley was, quote, "the best sex of their life." And he says, "So does my friend Sylvester."
54:17 Speaker 00 Oh, would that be Stallone?
54:19 Speaker 01 No, he just says he has a friend named Sylvester.
54:23 Speaker 00 Oh, what? Okay.
54:24 Speaker 01 Who had sex with Nina Hartley.
54:27 Speaker 00 Cool.
54:27 Speaker 02 Yo, you know Nina Hartley? My friend hooked up with her.
54:33 Speaker 01 This is the most for the fucking boys anecdote that we will read in this entire.
54:39 Speaker 00 All right, Peter's doing it. Peter's doing it.
54:41 Speaker 02 All right. Sylvester's mom attended a group dinner in Berkeley, California, that Nina also happened to be attending. And the two ended up seated next to each other. Mrs. Norwood came home and said to then 22-year-old Sylvester, "Guess who I was at dinner with? A famous porn star, Nina Hartley. Have you ever heard of her?" Sylvester nearly choked. In his secret double life, he had a huge collection of videos featuring Nina, his personal snow leopard.
55:07 Speaker 00 What? What? I don't know.
55:09 Speaker 02 Mom, I have to meet her. If I never do anything again in this life, I must meet Nina Hartley. Three days of insistent begging and nagging later, Sylvester's mom raised a hand and picked up the phone. Hi Nina, it's Mrs. Norwood. I had such a wonderful time meeting you at the party. Listen, I have a question for you. Do you ever make love to younger men?
55:35 Speaker 00 What?
55:35 Speaker 02 Oh, gosh.
55:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
55:37 Speaker 02 Nina's answer: Why, yes, I love breaking in younger men, but only once. And so it happened. Summary: coolest mom ever.
55:47 Speaker 00 Dude, there's like progressive parents, and then there's like when progressive parents go too far. This is like too much sex positivity in the family.
55:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, thankfully, this is fake, but uh...
55:57 Speaker 01 The best-case scenario here is that Sylvester made this up to impress his friend Tim.
56:02 Speaker 02 Imagine you make up this crazy bullshit story about fucking a porn star, and then, uh, like, your friend puts it in a bestselling book.
56:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:12 Speaker 02 I didn't realize the stakes were so high when I was lying to you about having sex with Nina Hartley.
56:15 Speaker 01 Do you guys remember, there was an ad for like, it was like Coors or something in the 90s that was like, "I like beer with my friends, watching football with my friends, and twins."
56:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:27 Speaker 01 Do you guys remember that?
56:28 Speaker 00 I do remember that.
56:29 Speaker 01 And twins.
56:32 Speaker 01 That coolest mom ever feels like it comes straight out of the "and twins" era. Of like, just like, we're just being so fucking horny in public all the time.
56:44 Speaker 02 This is like very presumptuous. Like the...
56:46 Speaker 01 It's nuts.
56:47 Speaker 02 But to be like, hey, you're, you're kind of professionally, uh, you have professional sex. Will you, doesn't this make you kind of a slut? Will you just fuck my son?
56:56 Speaker 00 You have no standards. So, do you want to fuck my son?
57:00 Speaker 02 She's not even like, yeah, like, is he cute? Is he nice?
57:04 Speaker 00 Dude, when, uh, when I was in high school, all my friends were straight dudes, and so as people turned 18 on their 18th birthday... We would all go to the like, the local strip club, which was like, right next to my high school. And so I went to like, strip clubs a decent amount, like my final year of high school, because I turned 18 first. And one of the things you saw fairly regularly at strip clubs was like, a dad and a son would like, go there together. And I remember very vividly, two, like, a man and a son getting like, lap dances next to each other. And then the dad just goes up for a high five and like, high fives his son.
57:40 Speaker 02 What on earth?
57:41 Speaker 00 And I think all of us were like, oh, what are we doing?
57:44 Speaker 02 Upsetting stuff. Also, this is not, like, it's not a cool story.
57:48 Speaker 01 No, it's really not.
57:50 Speaker 02 If my friend told me this story about themselves, I'd be weirded out, right? But the fact that he's telling it to us about his friend thinking that it's cool, it's almost, it's so weird. Like, nothing about it is cool. The mom doesn't seem cool.
58:05 Speaker 00 No.
58:06 Speaker 02 And now you're telling me this story as if it's cool? It's weird. The whole thing's bizarre.
58:09 Speaker 01 This all exists in this how-to section on the 15-minute orgasm. He does have some steps to follow. Uh huh. Step one, quote, "Explain to your partner that it is a goalless practice. This is 100% critical. There is no objective. Just focus on a single point of contact. The phrasing should emphasize this and remove all expectations and pressure." Quote, "I'm going to touch you for 15 minutes. You don't need to do anything and you don't need, you don't have to do anything afterward. There's nowhere to get to, nothing to make happen. Just focus on the single point of contact. It's an exercise."
58:49 Speaker 00 This is you just like poking the 1 o'clock mark.
58:54 Speaker 01 But also, like, this strikes me as like, he's not saying this to her, he's saying this to himself.
58:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
59:00 Speaker 01 This is a goalless practice, guys. We didn't say we were gonna get anywhere. We didn't say anything was gonna get accomplished.
59:05 Speaker 02 Eat an egg, take a deep breath, and get in there.
59:08 Speaker 01 He goes really hard on how much focus this will take from the dude. He writes, quote, "This technique requires 15 minutes of 100% concentration on approximately 3 square millimeters of contact. Nothing more."
59:24 Speaker 00 Oh, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke.
59:26 Speaker 02 That's too slow, Michael. It should be like a hummingbird. You shouldn't even, you know.
59:30 Speaker 00 Woodpecker?
59:31 Speaker 02 Yeah. I love that he's like, this will be incredibly difficult. There is no goal. Like, he's doing this like, like the Kung-Fu Master montage from Kill Bill.
59:40 Speaker 01 Yes. He does tell you to get a kitchen timer and set it for 15 minutes to take the pressure off.
59:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. No, that'll take the pressure. That ticking sound.
59:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:49 Speaker 02 Where in this calculus is like, what is this woman thinking?
59:53 Speaker 01 It's really strange to me, the kinds of gymnastics that he goes through to avoid like, just being vulnerable with a partner.
1:00:01 Speaker 00 Right.
1:00:02 Speaker 02 Right.
1:00:02 Speaker 01 And being like, here's what I want. What do you want? Right? And like, actually just fucking negotiating it on some level, or like, talking it through. He talks us through this whole how-to. And then he gives us an example of, like, guys, here's how fucking well this shit works. Get ready. The next chapter is called Sex Machine One: Adventures in Tripling Testosterone.
1:00:29 Speaker 00 Oh, no.
1:00:30 Speaker 01 And he opens with an anecdote about a CEO that he sometimes hooks up with named Vesper.
1:00:38 Speaker 00 A what?
1:00:39 Speaker 01 It's really amazing to me how many anecdotes he includes of people that he knows and includes their first and last names. Sylvester Norwood.
1:00:48 Speaker 00 Right.
1:00:48 Speaker 01 Who fucked Nina Hartley at his mom's arranging.
1:00:51 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. I didn't realize that you could just piece together Sylvester's full name from this.
1:00:56 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:00:57 Speaker 02 Also, it's hilarious that his mom, according to this transcript, said, "Hi Nina, it's Mrs. Norwood." Also, like, how many CEOs named Vesper are there?
1:01:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was gonna say, I will read this passage. Peter, you Google Vesper CEO.
1:01:12 Speaker 01 All right. Mike, I believe you're up.
1:01:16 Speaker 00 Okay. "The last time we met, I had just taken my total testosterone from 244.8 to 653.3 nanograms per deciliter while cutting my estrogen in half. I'd just returned from Nicaragua, where I ate grass-fed beef three times a day for 21 days. I had protein loaded for the last three days, eating two to three pounds of fatty, organic, grass-fed beef per day, including at least- 400 grams just before bed. Dude, this guy smells like a fucking barn. The result, 15 minutes after we sat down, Vesper was in a sexually aggressive stupor. The bread hadn't arrived and she was already climbing on top of me. This is not a boast. This is not Penthouse Forum. It's a statement of pure confusion.
1:01:59 Speaker 00 She's a CEO and this is not typical public CEO behavior.
1:02:03 Speaker 02 Oh, so it's a public company too? He's just like giving us breadcrumbs?
1:02:10 Speaker 00 The whole spectacle was surreal. She was literally intoxicated on pheromones. Oh, he's saying the beef like made her smell him?
1:02:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:02:19 Speaker 00 And then she like went bananas?
1:02:20 Speaker 02 This is like if Jordan Peterson was horny.
1:02:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, he's saying that he has been like cholesterol maxing to allow him to increase testosterone production. Right? This is his previous sort of thinking about this, like eat a bunch of cholesterol so your body can convert it into testosterone. And he's saying, not only did it work, it worked so much that it was like Invasion of the Fucking Body Snatchers for this lady.
1:02:44 Speaker 02 Right, right.
1:02:45 Speaker 00 When she saw the beef tallow coming out of my pores, she couldn't resist.
1:02:49 Speaker 02 She can smell a clogged artery.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I was like, man, he has been eating beef three times a day?
1:02:58 Speaker 00 Dude.
1:02:58 Speaker 01 For 21 days. And he's also saying, ah, yes, I have all this medical equipment at my house and I get blood work done all the fucking time. And I blah, blah, blah, blah. Three weeks of beef for every meal is gonna show up in your blood work in ways other than testosterone.
1:03:14 Speaker 00 This is, why is every rich guy the same kind of weird?
1:03:18 Speaker 02 At some point, they all start beef maxing.
1:03:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's crazy.
1:03:22 Speaker 02 Although this was also like 2010 is early to beef maxing, but it's also closer to the generation of men who did literally just only eat beef. As a matter of practice and principle.
1:03:34 Speaker 01 The whole thing is kind of fucking nuts. I think it also makes more sense when you consider like how close in time this is to the premiere of like VH1's The Pickup Artist?
1:03:45 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 And like the rules and that kind of stuff, right? That you're like, he's trying. To do like a sciency version of like a shitty misogynist sort of dating book.
1:03:56 Speaker 02 Right. You're doing card tricks. I'm eating beef.
1:03:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:03:59 Speaker 01 Eating more beef and doing things from like a third party instructor rather than asking your partner what she likes, right?
1:04:07 Speaker 02 Hummingbird speed karate chops on the one o'clock.
1:04:15 Speaker 01 One of the last things that I find really fascinating about this diet book is how it is received in different sort of corners of media. Book reviews are straightforwardly like, this is bullshit. The New York Times Book Review writes, quote, "The Four Hour Body reads as if the New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the Sky Mall catalog."
1:04:42 Speaker 00 Ooh, nice.
1:04:43 Speaker 01 Some of this junk might actually work, but you're going to be embarrassed doing it or admitting to your friends that you're trying it. This is a man who, after all, weighs his own feces, likes bloodletting as a life extension strategy, and aims a Philips Go Light at his body in place of ingesting caffeine.
1:05:01 Speaker 00 I love that you skipped the bloodletting.
1:05:03 Speaker 01 I did.
1:05:04 Speaker 00 You're like, there's too much in the episode.
1:05:06 Speaker 01 I did. Another one is medical reviews, like actual doctors reviewing the book.
1:05:11 Speaker 02 And what did they say about the bloodletting?
1:05:13 Speaker 01 One of them comes from Psychology Today. The title of the review is, quote, "How to Not Become Superhuman."
1:05:21 Speaker 02 Psychology Today on
1:05:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not great.
1:05:23 Speaker 02 Sort of on the outskirts of what I would consider reputable.
1:05:27 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:05:27 Speaker 02 But even they are like, hmm.
1:05:29 Speaker 01 Psychology Today, in their review from this M D, write, quote, "So why does this good guy, industry insider, and potent scientific self-experimenter write immediately after the title page? Please don't be stupid and kill yourself. It would make both of us quite unhappy." And then says, you should, quote, "Consult a doctor before doing anything in this book." Why is the publisher writing that they and the author, quote, "expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the user application of the information contained in this book"?
1:06:03 Speaker 02 There's a full, like, legal liability release at the end of the book.
1:06:06 Speaker 00 To buy it, you have to, like, sign a waiver?
1:06:08 Speaker 01 So, like, book reviews, no. Ostensibly scientific sources, no. TechCrunch...
1:06:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:06:16 Speaker 01 TechCrunch likes it.
1:06:18 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:06:18 Speaker 00 Mmm.
1:06:18 Speaker 01 They wrote a review in 2011 called "The 4-Hour Body: The real app you are working on is the app called Yourself."
1:06:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
1:06:30 Speaker 00 I'm in. I'm listening.
1:06:31 Speaker 02 And that's just a clean, succinct headline.
1:06:34 Speaker 01 So, I just sent a little quote from the TechCrunch
1:06:37 Speaker 00 Peter.
1:06:37 Speaker 01 review for whoever.
1:06:38 Speaker 00 Peter.
1:06:39 Speaker 02 "When I boarded the 4-hour train, our fancy schmancy scale reported that I weighed 197.6 pounds. 10 days later, after morning coffee and protein, 187. For calibration, I'm 6'1". I assume most of the difference is water weight, but still, that part actually seems to work as advertised."
1:06:59 Speaker 00 But still!
1:07:00 Speaker 02 Yeah. He says, "I expected no less, given the data that drove it. I know, I know. Why are you writing about your lunch on TechCrunch? Because my lunch is a data-driven iteration from the previous state of the art. In other words, a technical innovation."
1:07:15 Speaker 00 Oh my god.
1:07:16 Speaker 02 "Look beyond the valley, and you'll find that approach can and will pay dividends almost anywhere."
1:07:22 Speaker 00 He's like, "You may think this is silly, but it's a science-based approach. You're literally just listening to some guy."
1:07:28 Speaker 02 Why are you writing about your lunch in a technology website? Because there's data involved, dude.
1:07:35 Speaker 01 And, like, the data such as it is, is Tim Ferriss tried some stuff on Tim Ferriss, and then some people read his blog and emailed him about the stuff that they tried.
1:07:44 Speaker 02 Uh, "The scale that you weigh your poop on is technology, smart guy."
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