#398: Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More

Peter Attia, M. D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More | Brought to you by HumanN's BeetElite http://livehuman.com/Tim and Peloton http://onepeloton.com. Dr. Peter Attia (peterattiamd.com http://peterattiamd.com/, TW: @PeterAttiaMD https://twitter.com/peterattiamd, IG: @peterattiamd https://www.instagram.com/peterattiamd/, FB: @peterattiamd https://www.facebook.com/peterattiamd/) is a former ultra-endurance athlete (e.g., swimming races of 25 miles), a compulsive self-experimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is one of my go-to doctors for anything performance or longevity-related. He is also easily the best quarterback and sherpa for the US medical system I've ever met. But here is his official bio to do him justice: Peter is the founder of Attia Medical, PC, a medical practice with offices in San Diego and New York City, focusing on the applied science of longevity. The practice applies nutritional biochemistry, exercise physiology, sleep physiology, techniques to increase distress tolerance, lipidology, pharmacology, and four-system endocrinology to increase lifespan (delaying the onset of chronic disease), while simultaneously improving healthspan (quality of life). Peter trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including resident of the year, and the author of a comprehensive review of general surgery. He also spent two years at NIH as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute where his research focused on immune-based therapies for melanoma. He has since been mentored by some of the most experienced and innovative lipidologists, endocrinologists, gynecologists, sleep physiologists, and longevity scientists in the United States and Canada. Peter earned his M. D. from Stanford University and holds a B. Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. Peter also hosts The Drive https://peterattiamd.com/Podcast/, a weekly, ultra-deep-dive podcast focusing on maximizing health, longevity, critical thinking and a few other things. Topics include fasting, ketosis, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, mental health, and much more. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/63AWQmsSnFNFHUqnRAOFtD, Overcast https://overcast.fm/itunes1400828889/the-peter-attia-drive, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Please enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by HumanN's BeetElite http://LiveHuman.com/Tim, the endurance superfood and nitric oxide activator. HumanN's BeetElite can help extend endurance, improve energy and stamina, and increase oxygen delivery throughout the body. It provides the nitric oxide equivalent of six whole beets, and BeetElite http://livehuman.com/Tim is trusted by hundreds of elite teams, athletes, and organizations all over the world, so you know you're getting a top-notch performance product. BeetElite http://LiveHuman.com/Tim is Informed-Sport Certified, and the team at HumanN is making an offer exclusive to my listeners: Take your performance to the next level with BeetElite by going to LiveHuman.com/Tim http://LiveHuman.com/Tim to get 20% off your first purchase! This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/ is offering listeners to this show a special offer: Enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. That’s onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. 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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.

• 0:06Peter Attia?

  Can I ask you a personal question? Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Peter Attia?

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

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Humans Beat Elite. The product is Beat Elite, not meat elite, not beet, B E A T, but beet, B E E T, elite, which you might consider an endurance superfood, or what they would call a nitric oxide activator. Really, all I care about is this product. Beat Elite was introduced to me several years ago by a multiple-time world champion, and has since been recommended to me by multiple world-class athletes. And I use it pre-workout for endurance training. That could be cycling, that could be swimming, it is very rarely running.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  But my subjective experience supports what some of the research would seem to indicate, and that is that you can work out, say, up to 15 to 18% longer if you're looking at high-intensity interval training, HIIT, for instance, and at recovery times. So the, let's call it the refractory period for getting back to peak power output, for instance. So I use Beat Elite, just used it this morning before a 30-minute, somewhat intense swim workout. And I have found that particularly for someone like myself,

• 1:48Tim Ferriss?

  who has really terrible endurance genetically speaking, my presets are horrible, that it really does allow a 10 to 20% boost in shorter workout performance, especially. Although I do know people who've used it for 20-mile runs, 30-mile runs, much longer endurance events.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  And they've got all sorts of different points about the mechanisms of action and so on, but suffice to say that it is a lot easier to consume Beetle Elite than to eat the nitric oxide equivalent of six whole beets, for instance, much more rapidly assimilated. And it tastes great. It will also stain your pet polar bear, or your white cotton, or your down pillows, so don't spill it on anything. But it does taste delicious. I tend to mix this into a shake that I have pre-workout in the mornings. So, there you have it. I've used Beetle Elite for a number of years now. It is trusted by hundreds of elite teams,

• 2:53Tim Ferriss?

  athletes, and organizations all over the world. And it is also informed sport certified, which means that it is certified to not contain any banned substances. So if you're a competitive athlete, that is one fewer thing that you need to worry about. So, take your performance to the next level with Beetle Elite. Try it out. Go to livehuman.com/tim to get 20% off your first purchase. The team at HUMAN, that's the company, is making this offer exclusive to you, my dear listeners. So check it out. Go to livehuman.com/tim. Super simple. Livehuman.com/tim. Give it a shot.

• 3:40Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton. I love Peloton. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule, making it to the studio, or dealing with some commute to the gym. I have a Peloton bike in my master bedroom at home, and it is one of the first things that I do in the morning. I wake up, meditate for 20 minutes, and then I knock out a short 20-minute ride, usually high-intensity interval training or HIIT. Then I take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's beautifully convenient and has become something that I actually look forward to. And I was skeptical in the beginning. I didn't think I would dig it, and I really do. So, you have a lot of options. For one, if you like ...ride live with thousands of other Peloton riders from across the country on

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  the interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. I tend to use a lot of the classes on demand and have four to six of them that I've bookmarked and use over and over again. There are up to 14 new classes every day with thousands of classes on demand and there are a variety of workouts to choose from. 45 minute classes, 20 minute burns, hip hop, rock and roll, low impact or high intensity. Pick the class structure and style that works for you. Peloton has an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City. They really do have great instructors of every possible personality and style and you can find one that you love, no matter what you're in the mood for. Personally, I use Matt Wilpers a lot, but I use a bunch of them. I'm promiscuous and enjoy classes from a lot of their instructors. With real time

• 5:07Tim Ferriss?

  metrics, you can track your performance over time and continue to beat your personal best. I did not think the gamification would work for me and they really hit the nail on the head. It does work, at least for me, tremendously well to keep me pushing consistently. So, discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's spelled O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com, enter the code TIMPODCAST, all one word, at checkout and get $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great workout at home anytime you want. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIMPODCAST to get started.

• 5:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am here with some, I might mistake him as Borat, sample.

• 6:06Peter Attia?

  A man is like a horse. We say in Kazakhstan, if a man is happy, happy, you know, happy, is like if a horse is happy.

• 6:22Tim Ferriss?

  But on the internet and in his clinical duties, he's known as Peter Attia. Dr. Peter Attia, welcome back to the show.

• 6:33Peter Attia?

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 6:34Tim Ferriss?

  And Peter, for those who do not know anything about your background, we'll cover just the basics, but what would be a kind of speaker bio, short version of Peter Attia, just to get people up to speed who have not heard previous episodes?

• 6:50Peter Attia?

  Part-time shepherd, part-time race car driver, part-time archer, part-time doctor.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  And that pie chart has most of the pie on doctor. What else do we have here?

• 7:05Peter Attia?

  Doctor interested in longevity. I guess I have to do all the serious stuff now. Podcast host, courtesy of you. Podcast is called The Drive and it focuses on things beyond driving, mostly, I guess, things related to longevity. And dad, I guess that's another thing on the bio.

• 7:29Tim Ferriss?

  Another responsibility. And for those who have not heard our prior conversations, Peter is my go-to resource for anything related to extension of lifespan, or more accurately, health span. So threading the needle of combining both longevity and performance. And that's across many different dimensions. We're probably not going to spend all of our time on that today, but Peter is one of the most methodical and oftentimes obsessive people I've ever met, and that's coming from me, keep in mind. So I think it was in episode

• 8:11Tim Ferriss?

  one that we talked about, so we're not going to spend time on it now, but Peter's very, very, very particular etiquette for stapling, which has measurements in the metric system and so on. So we're not going to get into that, but Peter is my de facto expert when it comes to many different things, including longevity. And one of our episodes, which was a group episode with two other very, very accomplished scientists, was actually recorded on Easter Island.

• 8:42Tim Ferriss?

  As a teaser for people who might want to explore, which is known as rapa newy and is the namesake from which rapamycin is named, which we may talk about. And there you have it for preface to our conversation, but we're going to try something today, which is a first. And I think we're going to call it temporarily five things with Peter Tia. It might end up being more than five, but I know Peter pretty well and Peter knows certainly me quite well. I said, what do you think of doing an episode where we talk about, say, five things that you're excited about currently?

• 9:23Tim Ferriss?

  Five things you've changed your mind on in the last, whatever it is, a year, two years, three years, whatever. And then five absurd or stupid things that you do or still do. And we're going to give that a shot. And I think we'll maybe cycle through. Do you think we should do the five excited, five change, five stupid in that grouping? Or should we do one, one, one and kind of cycle through?

• 9:47Peter Attia?

  Oh, that's a, that's a good question. I don't know. I, I was all mentally prepared to go from one category to the next. So I would suggest do the opposite of what I was prepared for.

• 9:58Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. Let's cycle through. So what is the first, the first thing you'd like to confess or describe that you're excited about?

• 10:07Peter Attia?

  So the first thing, and I guess for the listener, you were very kind enough to give me a heads up that this is what you wanted to talk about. So I actually did have some time to think about this, which fortunately allows me to not sound like an idiot, which is what I would have sounded like if you had just asked me this cold. So the first thing I have on my list about excited stuff is the centenarian Olympics, which is my favorite sport. It's the sport that I am exclusively training for. And it has become one of the highest priorities within my medical practice in the past probably two years. So the idea is the following, I had this, I think I can call it an epiphany, actually. Maybe 18 months ago to two years ago, I was at the funeral of a close friend, the parent

• 10:52Peter Attia?

  of a close friend. And

• 10:55Peter Attia?

  You know, like all funerals, there's a somber nature to them, but on some level, people are also generally rejoicing in the fact that a person hasn't suffered too much. And in the case of my friend's parent, who'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the time from diagnosis to death was like six months. And everyone was like, oh, that's great. You know, there wasn't much suffering there. But I knew that parent for many years. And what I realized in spending more time talking with everybody was that the last 10 years of their life, even though their brain was still intact, shy of the last six months of that 10 years, the body had broken down.

• 11:35Peter Attia?

  And the two things that gave that person the pleasure, you know, beyond spending time with their grandkids and things like that, which was golf and gardening, like landscaping, really some killer landscaping, were basically off the table. You know, courtesy of nip in, like hip injuries, shoulder injuries, back injuries, all those other things. And so I sort of reflected on this for a while and realized that's pretty much the standard path that people go on, which is before they actually die, their physical death, you know, the sort of what I call death certificate death, they tend to die some combination of a cognitive and physical as an exoskeleton death. And so we're sitting there at the funeral and I'm, I don't know, I'm just thinking,

• 12:18Peter Attia?

  there's got to be a way to stop this because nobody's really thinking about this. We do all this amazing training for athletes who are, you know, trying to go to the Olympics or even being weekend warriors or doing whatever they're going to do. But why aren't we training to be kick ass 90 year olds? So my hypothesis was, well, it's just a lack of specificity. I mean, what separates, you know, a professional athlete from a weekend warrior is generally the specificity and the intensity with which they pursue this thing. So I said, well, what if we came up? With an event that actually defined what one would want to be able to do when they're a hundred, using that just as a benchmark. Again, you may never live to a hundred, but to train to achieve this thing when you're a hundred, you'll obviously be in great shape

• 13:01Peter Attia?

  when you're eighty. And so I sort of came up with this idea of the centenarian Olympics. And the first thing you gotta know about the centenarian Olympics is it's very personal. It's individual. Everyone will have a different set of events. So you and I might have a different looking centenarian Olympics, though I think there are some common things to all. So the first thing I did to figure this out was I, for myself, which is, you know, the person I'm solving for in the first iteration is sort of mapped out how old everyone in my life would be when I'm a hundred. So how old would my kids be? How old would their kids' kids be? And all the way down. And that gave me kind of a mental model of what the world looks like when I'm in my 10th decade. And what I realized is the things

• 13:46Peter Attia?

  that are probably going to give me the greatest joy at that stage will involve interacting with those littler people. And my kids won't be that little. They'll be in their 60s or whatever. But their kids will be, you know, in their 20s and 30s. And their kids' kids will be basically the age of my youngest kids now. And so I just started paying more attention to what I do with them. And it's stuff that, you know, Tim, you and I would take for granted. In fact, I'm guessing anybody listening to this is going to take it for granted. But kids, you've seen my kids a million times, they play on the floor. So step one, can you get up off the floor? Can you lay on the floor? Can you do something on the floor? And can you get up under your own support? Again, you could do that blindfolded

• 14:28Peter Attia?

  today. But watch how many people, even in their 60s, let alone 70s and 80s, can't do that. And then you start to deconstruct why. What are the structural misgivings that prevent someone from doing that? Another thing I noticed is how often toddlers come running at you headfirst. And they don't actually stop when they get to you. So there's an implicit assumption that as they're running to you, you're going to be able to pick them up and stop that momentum. And if you can't, you're going to get a headbutt to the groin. So that's, that's a very essential part of the equation here. So I started saying, well, how many times has my son, my youngest son, come running at me? And how often, how often do I have to, you know, drop down into a goblet squat, grab him and pick him up?

• 15:11Peter Attia?

  And so basically, I listed out eighteen things that I can do today that I want to be able to do when I'm ninety, for example, and those events constitute my centenarian Olympics. And so I'll rattle off a couple of them, but you know, a thirty-pound goblet squat. Again, could you do that today, Tim? Yeah, you could do a hundred of those today. But how many ninety-year-olds can do that? Very few. Walking up three flights of stairs with ten pounds of groceries in each hand and walking down under the same load. Again, biomechanically, that's not, that's not a trivial task. The walking down has its own challenges. The walking up has its own challenges. Being able to pull myself out of a pool where

• 15:55Peter Attia?

  the gap between the water and the surface, the lip of the, you know, the, the ground is six inches away. So being able to actually like pull myself up. As I said, getting up off the floor with a single point of support, being able to put a thirty-pound suitcase over my head. All these sorts of things. Which would simulate putting your luggage into the overhead. Exactly. Like, again, I would not want to, I don't want to get to the day when I can't put my luggage above myself in the airplane. And once I sort of mapped out all these things, I kind of broke down what the movement patterns that were necessary to do this. So this requires the ability to hip hinge. This requires a certain amount of aerobic efficiency. This requires a certain amount of anaerobic efficiency. This requires

• 16:39Peter Attia?

  a certain amount of scapular stability, et cetera, et cetera. And they basically condense into four elements of health, which is stability. So the ability to control, you know, using the muscles of the body, control the exoskeleton such that load is transferred safely through muscles as opposed to unsafely out joints. Strength, aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance.

• 17:07Peter Attia?

  And then you back out of that and say, well, if you want to be able to do all of those things by the time you're 100, or say in your 10th decade, so between 90 and 100, what do you need to be doing when you're 70? Because there is going to be an inevitable decline from 70 to 100. And if you can do this metric at 70, what do you need to be able to do at 60? And what do you be able to do at 50? And, you know, since that's the decade I'm closest to, you know, I'll be 50 soon, that becomes my benchmark is, okay, so that's what I'm training for. And so this idea, we've sort of translated to our patients, which is, you know, unless you really have a strong desire to do an Ironman or run a marathon, most people are exercising without a real sense of purpose.

• 17:49Peter Attia?

  And so the question is, could you create a true sense of purpose around this and then work backwards to build towards it? And obviously, we're not going to know the answer to that question until people start getting there. But my, my strong belief is you can and you should. And if you, if you, if you don't do this, if you just assume by chance you're going to get there, I think the likelihood of that is low.

• 18:12Tim Ferriss?

  And if we look at one of those exercises, and you can pick any one, let's just take the goblet squat. Yeah, goblet squat to simulate picking up a toddler. How do you back out from doing that at 90 or 100 with 30 pounds? Do you assume a certain amount of sarcopenia? Is that the right word? Muscle loss per year from 70 to 100, and then somehow calibrate a much higher weight for a certain number of repetitions as a result? How do you, how do you think through that calculus?

• 18:44Peter Attia?

  It's exactly that. So it's not rocket science to figure out a 30-pound goblet squat at 90 equals how many pounds at 50. The bigger question is to understand how you have to do it biomechanically at 50 to ensure you can still even do it safely at 90. So let's just say the number's 90 pounds at 50. It's not that hard to goblet squat 90 pounds for a fit guy like you. But it's actually kind of hard at our age to, or anybody's age frankly, to do it perfectly, especially with complete scapular protraction, which is another thing you want to be able to do.

• 19:24Peter Attia?

  Because remember, you're holding a toddler here. So you need to be completely stabilized through the upper and lower body. And the thing that's nice about a goblet squat, just as one example.

• 19:35Tim Ferriss?

  Do you want to just describe a goblet squat to people for those who don't know? I mean, there's, we could use kettlebell as an example or something else.

• 19:41Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah. So if you're picturing holding a dumbbell or a kettlebell and you have both hands on it and it's in front of you, and you're going into a squat position that way. So as opposed to like a barbell squat where the bar is on your back and you're holding it back. The nice thing about this goblet squat is it's a little bit more representative of real world movement because you now have your scapula that have to move forward. That's called protraction. And you have to be able to stabilize that position, which is, you know, going to be holding the kettlebell or the dumbbell or the child.

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you're our friend Kevin Rose, you want to be able to throw a raccoon at 90. Also helpful. For those who haven't seen, we don't have to get into it. There's a great video of Kevin Rose throwing a raccoon. You can look it up. Back to the children and the goblet squat.

• 20:28Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So, and then of course, you get into the real minutia of what does it really mean to be able to squat safely? And again, for most people, myself included, before I was really putting a lot of thought into this, to do a heavy hip hinge activity like a squat or a deadlift, you will naturally tend to fall into a place of lumbar compression. You will compress the spine when you do these things. That's not that sustainable. What you really want to be able to do is get to a point where you can do those things under spinal traction, which sounds very counterintuitive. Most people think of traction as something you can only achieve when you hang, which is elongating the spine.

• 21:07Peter Attia?

  But it turns out if you generate concentric intra-abdominal pressure from diaphragm to pelvis, you can actually stretch out the spine while you're under load. And once you start doing it biomechanically correctly at the age of 40 or 50 or whatever, and you start to carry that forward, then you're sort of winning on two fronts. With the more important of those being, by the time you get to 90, you actually have the ability to even move in that direction and stabilize your trunk, which is the rate limiting step for a squat.

• 21:39Tim Ferriss?

  It seems, it seems like with

• 21:43Tim Ferriss?

  Many of these movements, and I suppose in many things in life, if you want to play the long game, you kind of have to check your ego at the door, right? Because you would probably be making some trade offs in terms of the amount of weight you can lift, et cetera. If you're going to be training technically to be able to perform these movements at 90, right? You might have, if you're not going to be doing a wide powerlifter squat with a limited range of motion compared to say, an Olympic ass to heel squat, very different in terms of biomechanics and what you can do.

• 22:19Peter Attia?

  I mean, I work with three people. A woman named Beth Lewis, a guy named Michael Stromsnes, and another guy named Michael Rintala. And all of them have a training in something called dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, or DNS. And then they all, of course, bring in their own expertise outside of that from powerlifting and other athletic disciplines. And Beth, who's sort of the one that kind of defaults into my deadlift program. So I deadlift twice a week, and we started from scratch. So we have basically, you know, imagined I've never deadlifted, even though I started deadlifting at the age of 15 and powerlifted all the way through high school. Her view is, no, we're starting from scratch. It's as though you've never done this before. And one day a week, I'm doing straight bar, you know, very traditional closed leg, straight

• 23:03Peter Attia?

  bar, deadlift. And, I mean, she had me starting at 105 pounds. And I was not allowed to progress from that for a couple of months. And I was like, Beth, at least let me just get to 135 so I can use the goddamn 45s on the side of this thing. I mean, it's getting ridiculous here. And she's like, no, you're not ready yet. And, you know, so...

• 23:25Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just imagining a row of like, five or 10 pound plates with the bar, your knuckles scraping the floor.

• 23:33Peter Attia?

  So, well, luckily, we had 10 pound bumpers.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just kidding, I'm kidding.

• 23:37Peter Attia?

  So, so, so we were juxtaposing the straight bar deadlift with very lightweight. And, you know, she was letting me use more weight on the hex bar. But we had to fix a whole bunch of movement defects.

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, hex bar, for those who don't know, also known as a trap bar, so called in the former case because it is a hexagon that you step inside of so that effectively the bar path is traveling through the centerline of your body.

• 24:04Peter Attia?

  And so the hex bar is much easier to deadlift because you are in a more advantaged position, but it's also easier to do incorrectly. And the reason for that is you don't have a bar in front of your shins. And so if you're like me, you tend to default into a very quad dominant deadlift. And what Beth realized was we had to break that cycle. And the only way we were going to get you to use your hamstrings, Peter, is if we changed your position. And I, you know, the, the idea was the best way to change your position was put a bar in front of your shins that you can't go through. So anyway, that's one example. But yeah, it, to your point about checking ego, so much of what I do these days in the

• 24:47Peter Attia?

  weight room looks really silly, and it's not using nearly that much weight. I mean, today you should have seen me, like what I was doing in the gym today was sort of comical to watch. You know, a lot of single arm pressing in, you know, positions that are really forcing me to generate the right amount of concentric force inside my trunk.

• 25:07Tim Ferriss?

  And when you say concentric force in the trunk, what do you mean? Because I'm familiar with concentric, eccentric, as thought of, say, in a bicep crawl with lifting the weight, in this case, contracting, concentric movement versus eccentric lowering.

• 25:23Peter Attia?

  So picture like someone putting a, yeah, yeah. Picture somebody putting a balloon inside your belly. Let's pretend for a moment they could strip all your guts and liver and everything out. And you could put a cylindrical shaped, but round top and round bottom balloon inside your abdomen. So at the top, it's mimicking sort of the shape of your diaphragm. And at the bottom, it's sort of like the shape of your, your pelvis. And then the idea is you sort of start to blow that up and you generate this pressure that comes out. So all of the muscles are sort of getting longer and under more tension. And the, the force is sort of uniform all the way throughout. And that, that's called intra-abdominal pressure,

• 26:07Peter Attia?

  or IAP. And what I've realized over the past, you know, little over a year now, is most of us have lost the ability to put air into our pelvis, or put pressure really is the right way to think about it. You're not literally putting air in your pelvis. The air doesn't go below the diaphragm. But we don't know how to generate that pressure in the abdomen. And by being able to do that, That's what enables you to actually stabilize your spine. So people who say, you know, people say to me all the time, I can't believe you would deadlift. Like, that seems so crazy. Aren't there better ways to get the same activation of the muscles in your glutes or hamstrings or quads? And the answer is yes and no.

• 26:50Peter Attia?

  I mean, you can certainly do those things without having to go under that load. But a deadlift is an amazing audit, as is a squat for that matter. And I do, I think of those things as audits. Because if you're doing them correctly, and once you learn the proprioceptive cues that you're supposed to feel, you know when you're having a good day and a bad day.

• 27:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Peter Attia?

  And if you're having a good day, that's the feeling you want to replicate.

• 27:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, audits. There are quite a few movements that act as good audits. Turkish get up also a nice little audit for another day perhaps. So let's, I'm kind of doing the math here. I'm like, all right, if we have 15 or 17, it's going to be a long podcast. But let's put a bookmark in the centenarian Olympics, which we might come back to, you never know, something you've changed your mind on.

• 27:38Peter Attia?

  So the, in no particular order, other than the order that I listed these things out, the use of metformin in very healthy individuals is something I've changed my mind on. So I don't think we talked about this on any of our other podcasts.

• 27:52Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think so. So yeah, what was the previous, the previous position or conclusion? And then?

• 27:58Peter Attia?

  So my 2010 view, which sharpened and became more and more bullish from, say, 2010 through 2015, 16, was that metformin was a very, very low-risk, cancer-mitigating drug in anybody. Now, I believed that it was more so in patients who had diabetes or conditions that approximated diabetes, like hyperinsulinemia. But the data were, I think, quite convincing to me. And my extrapolation was, well, even in people who don't have diabetes, this is still a great longevity agent.

• 28:43Tim Ferriss?

  And for those, those who don't know, what does metformin do?

• 28:47Peter Attia?

  Well, you know, that's a That is a big question. Yeah, and that's part of the rub is metformin does a lot of things. It's a mild mitochondrial toxin. And this becomes relevant to the story. So it sort of inhibits the first complex of the mitochondria, what's called complex one. And by doing so, and it seems to do so almost, I mean, preferentially in the liver. It leads to a cascade of events that activates an enzyme called AMP kinase. And when you do that, the body basically starts acting like it's in a fasted state. So it's sort of like a junior fast in a pill.

• 29:28Peter Attia?

  And for people with diabetes, what's beneficial about it is it lowers the amount of glucose that the liver puts into circulation. So there's plenty of benefit to that. And that's, there's no disputing its efficacy there. And in the last five years, frankly, it's become a very popular topic. There's, I've interviewed a guy named Nir Barzagli on my podcast, and we've talked exclusively about this, and he was one of the world's experts on metformin. And he's leading the charge to do a very large clinical trial to test the question of whether metformin is a longevity drug in non-diabetics. Anyway, the point is, my baseline view was that this is the case, and I had been taking metformin since 2010.

• 30:12Peter Attia?

  What changed a year ago was I began doing a very focused type of exercise that was geared towards mitochondrial performance and efficiency, something called zone two training, where you basically push the boundaries of how much work you can do while keeping lactate below two millimolar. So lactate is a byproduct of metabolism under conditions in which you're asking the body to make ATP, which is the energy currency, at a rate faster than can be sustained aerobically using oxygen only. So by pushing the boundaries of how much work you can do, and I mean work in the very technical sense, so how fast you could run, how many watts you could push on a bike.

• 30:57Peter Attia?

  And and ratcheting up that level while still keeping lactate below two, you're training your mitochondria to become more and more efficient. And what I started noticing when I was mucking around with different drugs was whenever you have metformin in your system, that that output goes down. So and again, that I was when you thought about it for a minute, that shouldn't be surprising. It's a mitochondrial toxin.

• 31:21Tim Ferriss?

  Could you just don't lose your train of thought, but what are mitochondria? So fucking fascinating, but mitochondria, I think, really, really interesting. We don't want to take us off the rails.

• 31:31Peter Attia?

  Yeah, they do a lot of things, but for the purpose of this discussion, what they do is they do the most efficient form of energy transfer, which is transferring energy that comes in the chemical form of energy, like food energy. Right? So when you eat something like glucose or fat, or your body breaks down and gives you glucose and fat, how do you turn the energy that is stored within those chemical bonds, the carbon, carbon bond, the carbon, hydrogen bond, et cetera? How do you turn that into ATP? And you do that by first breaking those things down and getting electrons into these electron donors and people who might remember from a high school class, something called the

• 32:11Peter Attia?

  electron transport chain that runs through the mitochondria and those electron donors eventually donate back, make an energy gradient that makes ATP. And in the end, all they spit out is oxygen, carbon dioxide and water. So that's why we breathe out carbon dioxide and water vapor in exchange for taking food and making energy. So they play an essential role, obviously, in in energy production. And if you lose the ability to make energy with the mitochondria, that's effectively what happens to a cancer cell. So this idea of zone two efficiency is so important for metabolic health that I started

• 32:53Peter Attia?

  questioning, well, why the hell would metformin be a good thing if it's impairing that?

• 33:01Peter Attia?

  And basically, after doing a lot of experimenting with and without metformin, metformin under different clearance pathways, et cetera, et cetera, it became unambiguous to me that metformin was impairing this and there was no two ways about it. And then I began to question, well, you know, how would you reconcile that with the fact that metformin is helpful? And then you realize, well, metformin's only really ever been shown to be helpful in people who have diabetes. And when you look at the sort of mitochondrial performance of people with diabetes, it's abysmal. In fact, even though that's not a hallmark that the medical system would typically pay much attention to, but if you do that type of zone two testing in people with diabetes, it's such a contrast between them and someone without diabetes.

• 33:45Peter Attia?

  So I realized, well, maybe when you are all, when your mitochondria are that sick, a little bit more toxicity doesn't matter that much. But if you're playing a different game, it might. Now, since that time, a number of other studies have come out. I've written about one of them, maybe actually two of them, that look at the effect of mitochondria, pardon me, metformin and mitochondrial inhibition on the difficulty of growing muscle mass, which again, is not as interesting to me, but that appears to be a totally different issue, which is the blocking of sort of the stress response. I think the jury's still out on all this.

• 34:21Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning that it appear, that metformin appears to inhibit versus not administration of metformin.

• 34:27Peter Attia?

  Correct. Metformin, that's right. Metformin seems to impair the sort of, the inflammatory response that would be pro-growth to muscle, pro-adaptation, for lack of a better word. I think it's still too soon to say how this story shakes out, but I was, basically in the past year, I've seen enough data to suggest that for me personally, the benefits of just focusing and doubling down on my exercise are probably going to yield better results than the use of metformin. And of course, then the question is, how do you translate that into patients? And where do you draw that line? Which patients are sufficiently on the healthy enough side? And I don't know the answer.

• 35:12Peter Attia?

  I think my thinking on that is the more you exercise and the healthier you are, the less benefit and potentially the more detriment you could experience from metformin.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I suppose this is, this is not Tim playing a doctor on the internet, but just thinking about that, that even if someone were, say, pre-diabetic or presenting the symptoms of or biomarkers of someone who's pre-diabetic, it might, it might make sense to try other interventions before metformin, right? Because you might slap on 10 pounds of muscle mass and low and behold, they're much better at disposing of glucose or any number of things could change.

• 35:56Peter Attia?

  I think no matter what, like if you take somebody who's got diabetes, I don't think people appreciate how potent a tool fasting, exercise and sleep are. You know, when you rob someone of sleep, when their sleep sucks, when they're not exercising and when they have full stores of glycogen in liver and muscles, which is basically the state you're in when you're constantly fed, the ability to reverse those three things is more powerful than all drugs combined. I mean, so, so I agree. If there's a way that you can treat patients without using medication, one should always do it. Sometimes metformin does offer a great step forward.

• 36:40Peter Attia?

  And again, it comes down to every patient's ability to sort of adhere to exercise and all these other things.

• 36:45Tim Ferriss?

  Would you ever consider using metformin? Maybe this is more a job for Acrobos, is that?

• 36:55Peter Attia?

  Yeah, you remember that.

• 36:56Tim Ferriss?

  But using, say, metformin selectively when you're going through a period of overfeeding for some period, for some purpose?

• 37:04Peter Attia?

  I mean, I think those are exactly the kind of questions I'm still struggling with, which is, does it make sense to cycle metformin? Does it make sense to only use metformin in the evening, but not use it in the morning? So you, let's say in the morning, you know, you exercise, but in the evening, when most people are fed, like for one of the things I did notice when I stopped taking metformin. Is definitely my nighttime glucose levels are just a little bit higher because nighttime glucose is controlled by the liver. It's not really a function of what you just ate. It's, you know, you're so far outside of that last meal that it's, it's generally the response of the liver putting glucose in circulation and titrating that. So, yeah, I think there are probably different, like, you know, five different ways that you could sort of slice this thing up and decide on how to do it. And I don't know the answer, and I guess

• 37:48Peter Attia?

  I reserve the right to change my mind again. But for now, that's been, that's been a pretty big change for me.

• 37:54Tim Ferriss?

  Absurdity, stupidity. I know we have a, a wealth of options because you and I are sort of connoisseurs of the absurd.

• 38:07Peter Attia?

  So one of them, which is, is the one that you already know about, and I know you're a big fan of, is egg boxing. I just cannot get enough of egg boxing.

• 38:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so, oh, God, where do we even go with this? Because this could be a podcast in and of itself. So, but I don't think we have time to tell the story. If people look it up, or we can link to a video of the, the ramenusion of egg boxing.

• 38:32Peter Attia?

  That's right.

• 38:33Tim Ferriss?

  But that is maybe a story for another time, which really does put into concrete terms just how ridiculously obsessive Peter can be. But what is egg boxing?

• 38:45Peter Attia?

  So it's a sport slash game where whenever you're making something with eggs, you, you hold an egg, you hold another egg, you bang them off each other, the one that cracks, you obviously break, and the one that didn't crack, that considered, that's considered one win. So that, like, let's say these are two eggs you've never touched before, you smash them, that, that guy is now one and O. And then you pick up another egg. Let's say you want to make five eggs, and you smash, and let's say that guy wins again. So he's now two and O. And then you smash again. And let's say he loses. Well, then he retires with a record of two and one, and the other guy is now one and O. And you keep going. And at the end, like, when you break your last egg that day, you write down how many

• 39:28Peter Attia?

  wins the last guy has, because by definition, the last one standing is always the winner. And then the next time you come to make eggs, you just play again. And so I don't know when I started playing this game, but it was somewhere in high school, and I've never stopped. And I take it very seriously, and I guard the champion very closely.

• 39:48Peter Attia?

  And as you're alluding to, we did, we did, there was, there was one very, very special egg in my life in 2007 and 2008, who I nicknamed Ramenusion after the great mathematician, not a great boxer, but he was such a prodigy amongst eggs.

• 40:04Tim Ferriss?

  Probably a terrible boxer.

• 40:05Peter Attia?

  Yeah. But he's the only egg I've ever had where his winning record was so great that we, I lost track of his actual record.

• 40:14Tim Ferriss?

  Was it in the hundreds, thousands?

• 40:16Peter Attia?

  Oh, I mean, put it this way, he was the champion for more than a year.

• 40:22Tim Ferriss?

  Now, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna continue on to future bullets, but I will say, if my memory serves me correctly, that at one point you were like, I want to know what type of strange, like abscess or like structural abnormality exists in this egg, but you couldn't get someone to agree to X-ray the egg for you, so you like snuck it into your pocket?

• 40:44Peter Attia?

  Well, no, the plan was I was gonna go to the ER and pretend I had a groin injury and have them do a CT scan of my pelvis with Ramenusion in my pocket. Cause I wanted to see what was really going on inside of him.

• 41:02Tim Ferriss?

  And alas, we shall never know. Died a tragic death.

• 41:05Peter Attia?

  He died an awful tragic death that I might explain in the video.

• 41:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we'll link in the show notes to the video, uh, which includes a demonstration of the proper technique for egg boxing.

• 41:18Peter Attia?

  And I don't know if you know this, but Nick Stenson, who works for me, uh, and then the podcast, actually built championship belts for the eggs.

• 41:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I saw them because I remember voting on what the championship belts should look like.

• 41:31Peter Attia?

  That's right. So now we have championship belts for my eggs. And it's one of those things, people always say, Peter, when are you going to start making swag for your podcast? The first piece of swag I would ever make would be championship eggs, like, or like the championship belts for the eggs.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, I, I should give you credit where credit is due. You have introduced me to a number of people who've been on this podcast, including Jaco Willink, who is a master of merch. No big surprise, graded execution. And I'm thinking that you might even be able to sort of create the equivalent of the celebrity bobblehead dashboard for your dashboard craze by having particular personalities represented in the world of egg boxing. You could have a Jaco egg boxing iteration of some type. You'd have to clear it with the big man himself, obviously, but.

• 42:22Peter Attia?

  I'm literally gonna call Jaco Tim and actually, this guy loved the idea.

• 42:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we're back. I like this cyclone through. I think we should go back to excited about.

• 42:34Peter Attia?

  Okay, the next thing I have on my excited list is just overall the space of fasting and the potency of fasting. But it's sort of taking a page out of your playbook, right? So the work that you've done recently with Johns Hopkins is basically, and I was talking about this with a bunch of people today at the race, and they were like, what is Tim really excited about these days? And I said, well, you know, and I kind of walked them through your thesis.

• 42:59Tim Ferriss?

  And context, by race, we mean F1.

• 43:02Peter Attia?

  Yes.

• 43:02Tim Ferriss?

  Here in Austin. And if you don't know anything about F1, just consider this. Top cars have, what is it, 500 million behind them, put into them, teams of hundreds? I mean, it's.

• 43:14Peter Attia?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. $500 million a year budget, easily.

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's just incredible.

• 43:18Peter Attia?

  Team of 1,000.

• 43:18Tim Ferriss?

  So, all right, so continue, didn't mean to interrupt, but.

• 43:23Peter Attia?

  So, so what I've realized is, and I've vented about this many a time, in fact, I have an entire Sunday email devoted just to my vent on this, which is, it really bothers me that we don't, like, if fasting is such a potent tool, and I don't think anybody who's studied nutrition or biochemistry would disagree with that, it's sort of odd we don't know how to dose the tool. And so, as you know, Tim, I fast for about seven days a quarter.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, and this is how it ties into the Hopkins, is the question of dosing?

• 43:56Peter Attia?

  Is the question of studying something, is basically taking, yeah, so it's basically saying, okay, I fast seven days a quarter, and people ask me, rightfully so, but Peter, how do you know to do that? Like, you know, I, you know, someone will say, well, I fast three days a month, and that's a comparable number of days, total days fasted, but what's producing the ideal physiologic response that would lead to life extension or the minimum reduction of, you know, disease risk? And again, it bothers me greatly that I don't know that. So it sort of occurred to me that what we need to do is form a little coalition. And a number of my patients have already said, oh, sign me up, I'm in. And we'll basically put a pot of money together and find the best people

• 44:40Peter Attia?

  who understand and can help us pick the right animal model. Because we're not going to be able to study this in humans. Like, you have to accept that you that we're in the option B territory. There is no option A. There's no, let's do this experiment in humans and study them for

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  Is it because it wouldn't get cleared by the IRB?

• 44:55Peter Attia?

  It would take too long.

• 44:56Tim Ferriss?

  Just takes too long.

• 44:57Peter Attia?

  Yeah. If you want a hard outcome, which is actual mortality, you have to do this in an animal model.

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  Agreed. Okay. I missed that last part.

• 45:05Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So, so should it be mice? Well, you know, mice have the advantage of being really easy to study, and you could probably know the answer in a year. And that might be the answer, but it will require people really smart to understand what the equivalents are for mice in fasting. And it's not going to be a linear extrapolation from our humans. Like, for example, you know, a mouse that fasts for two days dies and loses 25% of its body weight directionally. So that's not going to be that helpful.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  I'm thinking ostriches. I'm kidding. Sorry, just being an idiot.

• 45:37Peter Attia?

  Yeah. And I mean, I have no idea what it is, like ferrets. I mean, I just, I don't know. But what I really want to do is, in the next couple of years, come up with the next best answer. And until that time, unfortunately, I'm going to continue to flail, which means I'm going to continue to fast, but do so without much real insight about what the quote unquote best way to do it is, or if regimen A is better than regimen B. But I think this idea of just saying, you know what, look, NIH is probably not going to fund this. Because I don't think there's a question they're that interested in. Industry is not going to fund this because you can't sell a fast. You know, VCs aren't going to fund it. Like, when you look at all

• 46:20Peter Attia?

  of the traditional funding vehicles that would go into exploration of question, this one really has to come down to philanthropy. And I have no interest in like, creating an organization to do this. So why not just, you know, bring a coalition of people together, find the right people, and just directly fund them?

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  What would the study design look like?

• 46:41Peter Attia?

  So let's just say, and again, I don't know if you would do this, but let's just say it was agreed upon that mice would be an appropriate model. And let's just say that You know, you agree that there would be three arms, right? One arm would be mice that were on regular mouse chow. And it would be important that it would be proper chow, not nonsense chow. Like, a lot of these studies are done with pure sugar, high-fat nonsense chow. The goal isn't to do that. The goal is to take, like, healthy mice, and then picking the right strain is in itself a huge decision that would have to go into this. So you have the ad lib feed. So these are the mice that are allowed to eat normally. Yeah, ad libitum? Yes. Then you'd have probably- Which means they can eat as much as they want. That's right. And you have to be very careful about what that looks like, by the way, in animals in

• 47:26Peter Attia?

  captivity. So you still, you might have to actually put them on a confined number of calories, and maybe it's not ad lib. And then you'd have different fasting regimens. So you'd have the equivalent of three days a month. What does that look like? Maybe that's, I don't know, that probably works out to be something like eight to, maybe eight hours of fasting, sixteen hours of food exposure. I have no idea. And then there's the, well, what is seven days a quarter look like? Or nine days per quarter? And those are contiguous days. Yes. Yeah. And then maybe you've got the whopper, which is like, once a year, they just do a mega fast, which for a mouse would probably be 24 hours. And then the idea would be, you know, follow them over the course of their lives.

• 48:10Peter Attia?

  And if you pick mouse, you know, pick, if you pick a mouse that's like 12 months old at the outset, you'd probably know your answer in about a year and a half. What would you be, what are the outcome measures? Or what would you be tracking? The most important one would actually be death. I see. Would be lifespan. But, you know, if we could gather other indirect measures, disease-specific measures, if, you know, depending on the budget for such a study, if we could also kind of shotgun and look at some metabolomic, proteomic signals as well, that would be especially interesting because the only way we would ever triangulate on this in humans would be to look at biomarkers

• 48:52Peter Attia?

  in humans that are surrogates of good things happening. So things like autophagy, the inhibition of senescent cells, reduction of inflammation in, you know, areas that we don't really want it to be in. So- Those would be kind of the two prongs of this thing, which is get the hard outcome of mortality in the animal model, try to get some biomarker data. And again, it just, like I said, it really, when you think about how potent fasting is as a tool, that we don't know what the dose is. It's like, I've got this thing, it's called Tylenol, and I know it reduces fevers and prevents muscle soreness. How much do I take? I have no idea. Like, think of how frustrating a problem that is.

• 49:36Tim Ferriss?

  Well, especially with that example, very dangerous problem to have. What does your current fasting look like in the sense of timing? Is there a particular day of the week that you tend to start on? And how do you lead from whatever your current normal is into the fast?

• 50:00Peter Attia?

  So for the past couple of years, I've done the same thing, once a quarter, called the, I think it's, I think Bob calls it the KFK Nothing Burger. So it's a week of keto that leads into a week of water-only fasting that is sandwiched on the other end or bookended by another week of keto.

• 50:17Tim Ferriss?

  Is the keto hypocaloric? Is it isocaloric?

• 50:20Peter Attia?

  It's a, it's a eucaloric ad libitum keto diet. So the purpose of it on the way in is generating ketones so that when you enter the fast, you suffer a little bit less. The rationale on the way out is to prevent me from eating like an idiot.

• 50:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry.

• 50:39Peter Attia?

  Can you relate to that?

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  I can relate to that. And we've done a lot of damage together. Just harkening back to our fantastic trip to Easter Island with

• 50:49Peter Attia?

  I don't think we said no to a dessert.

• 50:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, David and Nav, two incredible, incredible scientists. And they were just appalled and disgusted because we were so be, so well behaved until we had two or three glasses of wine and decided, you know what? Tonight's going to be cheat night. And the entire table was just piled with plates of dessert. And I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed. But

• 51:16Peter Attia?

  So I am thinking next year of changing it to three days a month, just as a way to mix things up. Um, it's, it'll be a little less socially intrusive. The, the week of fasting becomes a little bit of a grind. I only do it when I'm away from my family and I always go Saturday to Saturday. Uh, or sorry, I always go Sunday to Saturday. So I, I do like Saturday and last meal is always a Saturday and first meal is a Saturday. Um, whereas I was thinking, yeah, what if I just did like a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the first Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of every month or something like that. You know, that would be an alternative way to do it.

• 51:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've done more of the, I've done seven day and 10 day, but I've done more of the three day. I've always started on Thursday, early dinner. That was all, or that was the last meal because I could kind of gut through. I wasn't doing the.

• 52:01Peter Attia?

  So you prefer to be, see, I like to be fasted during the week more than the weekend.

• 52:04Tim Ferriss?

  I get, I can get grumpy depending on the transition because I'm not doing, generally I'm not doing the ketosis first. I'm not coming into it producing much in terms of ketones. So I'm going cold turkey, water only. Let's call it 7:00 PM on a Thursday. And then I can kind of gut through Friday, especially if I schedule things such that I'm having mostly admin like phone calls and so on. Uh, nothing that requires any degree of delicacy or diplomacy. Uh, so I don't leave scorched earth in my inbox that I need to unfuck for days afterwards.

• 52:44Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so usually it's early and then I go water only and I'll walk a lot on Friday. Uh, basically just do a walk and talk with lots of water and a handful of electrolytes and so on. Are you supplementing when you go water only or are you going directly from ketosis, ketogenic diet into water only and not supplementing?

• 53:07Peter Attia?

  No, I'm supplementing with sodium, magnesium, uh, being the two main things.

• 53:11Tim Ferriss?

  Are you supplementing with different types of magnesium or just a single type?

• 53:14Peter Attia?

  Yeah, two different types. Um, during the fast I use slow mag and, um, I use L3 and 8 in the evening. So slow mag, I take two slow mag in the morning, two slow mag before bed, along with two magnesium L3 and 8 before bed.

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's the mag team.

• 53:30Peter Attia?

  Yes.

• 53:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. That's good stuff.

• 53:33Peter Attia?

  The, the, it's really a fantastic product.

• 53:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 53:39Peter Attia?

  I'm glad I passed 10 different times on investing in the company.

• 53:44Tim Ferriss?

  Those are the best investments.

• 53:46Peter Attia?

  Well, I mean, my feeling, I mean, it sounds stupid.

• 53:48Tim Ferriss?

  When you're like, you're like this, this like record-setting trout just kept throwing itself into the boat and I just tossed it out.

• 53:59Tim Ferriss?

  And then I was like, oh yeah, I'm on a fishing trip. Oh, that's dumb.

• 54:05Tim Ferriss?

  Shouldn't have done that. Uh, what's, what's something else you've changed your mind on?

• 54:10Peter Attia?

  Okay, this one's a little heavier. Um, I, I think that the fate of one's personality may not actually be set. I, I think I have historically believed that we are born with hardwired motherboards and our personalities are set in stone and there's no changing them. And in particular, I think for me, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot. I've never known a time of not being angry. I've just, I don't, I mean, I think I was probably just a pissed off fetus is sort of my, I don't think that's actually true, but that's been my belief template. And I don't know, I think just a few years ago, I just, maybe more than that, maybe 10 years ago, even 15 years ago, I remember kind of having this discussion with my dad once.

• 54:52Peter Attia?

  It was really sort of a sad day because my wife and I, who had been barely married, we might've been married for like a couple of years and my parents were over and it was just, I mean, I'm too, even, I'm even too embarrassed to tell the story, but my wife and I had a fight, which was basically just me being a total piece of shit. In other words, it's not even like there was any symmetry in this. It was just, I was a hundred percent wrong and I dug my heels in and I was such a jerk. And you could sort of tell my parents were just so sad for us. And I think sad for me at my sort of miserable existence. And I sort of remember my dad not saying anything, but sort of his body language being like, dude.

• 55:33Peter Attia?

  What? I mean, what are you doing? Like, why are you such an asshole?

• 55:39Peter Attia?

  And so I preemptively struck at him, which was, look, I don't even want to hear about it, man. Just like, I'm not meant to be around other people. You know, I just, I just remember going like launching into this tirade about how I am not really designed to be around other people. Like, there was just no two ways about it. Like, I'm way too volatile. I'm way too angry. I'm way too, you know, all these other things.

• 55:59Peter Attia?

  And I think I've carried that belief system with me up until about a year ago, up until probably, yeah, up until about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And I now realize that that entire narrative is simply incorrect. It's no more correct than saying, you know, I have two copies of an APO E4 gene, which is, you know, which would be a genetic template that would make you much more likely to get Alzheimer's disease. But arguing that it's a given that you're going to get Alzheimer's disease. That's not the case. These are not deterministic genes. And similarly, I don't think that these flaws in our personality are deterministic.

• 56:34Peter Attia?

  And while there may be people who are more or less predisposed to be one way or the other, and then of course, events in life can reinforce that and push you more into that. And then the response to that can reinforce that. So all of those three factors can drive you in a given way.

• 56:55Peter Attia?

  I know this sounds like a very glib example, but I, I really think that with enough work, you can start to overcome these deficits. And I think that for me, I think I'm only 50%, you know, as angry as I was during my, you know, sort of anger heyday. And so I don't know, to me, that's amazing, like that, that, because I now, I now have this confidence that I've never had before, which is two years from now, I might only be 50% of what I am today, and that would be 25% of what I was at the outset.

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  So the tracking of the fury half-life.

• 57:34Peter Attia?

  Yes, exactly. So, so I just, I just think that that's, that's my personal example, but for someone who says, you know, I'm just not fill in the blank enough, or I'm too fill in the blank. I, I do think a lot of us start to buy our narrative and we just start to believe the story. And for me, that is.

• 57:57Peter Attia?

  That is by far the most hardwired story I've ever believed about myself. And there are lots of stories I believe about myself, right? I mean, we all have our insecurities and I'm to this, or I'm to that, or I'm not this enough, or I'm not good enough, or blah, blah, blah. But this, this one was like, no, no, that one you don't get to change. Like, that's eye color. And there's not even a contact lens you can put on it. Like, it just is what it is.

• 58:22Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen certainly, and I mean, we talk about a lot of this in the first episode of your podcast, where you and I had a long, long conversation about many of these things. The Drive, we'll link to it. But I don't, I don't know if I'm, if, if we talked about this particular perspective on what we might view as deficits or weaknesses, and that is finding a way to inspect them as coping mechanisms and protective mechanisms that served an incredibly important function at some point, right?

• 58:56Peter Attia?

  That's exactly right.

• 58:57Tim Ferriss?

  So instead of refusing and rejecting those pieces of you, maybe feeling anger towards them, certainly, which I've done plenty of, instead, looking at how you might thank them for mitigating or preventing, even if it ended up being now counterproductive, when overused, but at some point, these were responses that protected you, right? Like, if that, if that were the assumption, how would, how might you look at them differently? Could that possibly be true? And that's been incredibly important for me in reconciling all,

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  all different types of facets of myself that I've long held kind of resentment and anger towards.

• 59:46Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I mean, and we could, if we were to really double click on this topic, that, that's exactly the direction we'd, we'd go, which is, it starts with a little bit of self empathy and introspection and realization of, well, let's examine the why. This, this must have served some purpose at some point. This was an adaptation to something. Let's acknowledge that. And, you know, in the words of Terrence Reel, who I just recently interviewed for my podcast, you know, it's, it's, it's taking that adaptive child in you and thanking them, but just moving them to the backseat, like making sure their hands aren't actually on the, on the steering wheel.

• 1:00:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Peter Attia?

  And saying, hey, like, thank you. Thank you for, for the help you gave me during this period, but I, I need you to just sit back there now and just, just chill out, man. Just look out the window. We're just gonna go on a drive, but, but the adult has to drive now.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. This is a hard segue into stupid and absurd things, but let's fucking force it.

• 1:00:49Peter Attia?

  What's funny is looking at the stupid thing, you would, you would, I'll just tell you what it is and you'll see why it's really fun.

• 1:00:56Tim Ferriss?

  Cheating.

• 1:00:57Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So the, the next stupid thing on my list is tearing phone books. But I will say it's not out of rage.

• 1:01:03Tim Ferriss?

  This is like a wine pairing. It works perfectly.

• 1:01:06Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So when I was in college, a good friend of mine named Todd Remington, uh, one, I never forget this. I was at, so, so it was his wife and my then girlfriend were like best friends. So we were all, all four of us were at their place. And he came home with a phone book, like a standard two, two and a half inch phone book. And he goes, do you think you can tear this? And I, in college, I was like really strong, right? I was like, uh, probably not, but let me try. And I like, you know, just wailed on this thing and of course could not tear this phone book. And then he shredded it, like just, just ripped it in half. And I was like, oh my God, how did you do that? And he's like, you know, he immediately just told me, he's like, look, it's a technique.

• 1:01:48Peter Attia?

  And he explained the technique and I was like, all right, well, do you have another phone book? He's like, no, that was our only one. And I was like, all right, we gotta go get more. And this was back in the day when like you had phone books. So we, I remember this, we got into his, uh, Land Rover or whatever. No, he had like a, it was like, I don't know, some Toyota, like

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  Forerunner.

• 1:02:06Peter Attia?

  Forerunner. That was it. Yeah. And I still remember we, in a silver Ford, and we drove to the mall, which was like 20 minutes away. And we went into the phone store because they had phone stores inside of malls. This is like pre-cell phone. And they had a wall of phone books, like hundreds of them. And I just, I don't know why, like it was just such an obnoxious thing of me to do. I just started grabbing all the phone books. And the woman comes up and she goes.

• 1:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  Not a word.

• 1:02:30Peter Attia?

  Yeah, nothing like just totally, you know, and the woman comes up and goes, what are you doing? And I was like, oh, um, I work at a camp for kids and we do a lot of paper mache. And the phone books are the best for paper mache. And she was like almost apologetic. She's like, oh, oh, okay. Um, uh, I think I mumbled like it was a camp for kids that had like less than a week to live or some stupid thing. Yeah, it's awful. So, so we leave the store with as many phone books as two guys can carry, go back to his house and I practiced that night until my hands bled and I could tear phone books.

• 1:03:10Peter Attia?

  And by the end of that night, I was very good at it. And then it became fully pathologic as an addiction. So I could not see a phone book and not tear it.

• 1:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  You're like the Cookie Monster of phone books?

• 1:03:25Peter Attia?

  That is exactly. Right. It is. It was like Cookie Monster. So I remember in college, I rode my bike everywhere. And there, this was back in the era of phone booths and phone books. And so anytime I rode past, even if I was late for class, if I saw a phone booth, I stopped, laid my bike down, went into the phone booth, grabbed the phone book, tore it, got back on my bike, rode to class. So I just left in my wake, torn phone books everywhere. So fast forward a couple of years, I'm applying to medical school. I put together a spreadsheet of all the factors that go into the, into the decision of where do you want to go? What kind of research opportunities? What's their ranking in the US News and World Report? What's their success in getting you into the residency of your choice? What type of this? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What is the size of the phone book in that city?

• 1:04:10Peter Attia?

  Was one of the columns in the spreadsheet. It was absolutely a criteria.

• 1:04:15Tim Ferriss?

  So what was the sweet spot? Was it the bigger, the better? Was it, it's not the size, it's how you use it? I mean, what are we talking about?

• 1:04:22Peter Attia?

  At some point, once you're, if your technique is impeccable and you're strong enough, and it really just comes down to grip strength. It's not like the strength of your biceps or something like that. It's basically how strong are your hands and how well do you know the technique? You become limited by hand size. So for example, I could never tear the Toronto phone book. It was simply too big. I couldn't get my hands around it. Now, at some point enough strength will overcome it. I'm sure if you, if I were stronger, I could have done it. So the sweet spot for me was about three inches. And so I wanted to move, I wanted to go someplace where the phone book was sort of two and a half to three inches, all things equal. Or you could get in some good working sets. Yes, exactly.

• 1:05:04Peter Attia?

  And so, so now I'm going, I go through medical school, tearing every phone book in sight. I just can't stop. And I'll conclude this stupid story by saying like how it has sort of a funny ending, or not ending, but a funny point in the middle. So for, I don't, I don't actually remember this. I only remember this because she reminded me of it, but on the very, very, very first date with my wife, which was in Baltimore, which we met at Hopkins, we're downtown Baltimore and not in like the part where you get killed, but in like kind of a nicer part of Baltimore. And it was that time of the month or year or whatever, when the phone books were being distributed. And so we went to this dinner called the Sobo Cafe, I still remember.

• 1:05:44Peter Attia?

  And as we walked out, there was a stack of like five phone books on the doorstep of an apartment building. And I said to her, like, like a little child, I was like, do you want to see me tear a phone book? And she was like, no. And I was like, let me show you. And then of course. Undeterred. So I was like, here, try to tear it. Like my hundred pound wife is going to tear a phone book. And she's like, I can't tear it. And I was like, watch. I tore it. She's like, why did you tear that phone book? And I was like, do you want to see me do another one? She's like, definitely not. I was like, I'll show you. Let me show you the technique. So then I pick up the second one. I tear it. She's like, okay, definitely don't do that again. Of course I tore all five of them.

• 1:06:30Peter Attia?

  And it's such a dick move. Like that's five people that didn't get their phone book. And, and I always left the halves there. Just in case they want to reassemble them. It's not like you can't find the number in it, but now it's just a bigger mess. And yeah, she just reminded me of that, like, I don't know, five years ago, she's like, do you remember that night? Like you tore all those phone books. So I don't know, I don't know what it was about it. I will say this, I'm nowhere near as good at it as I used to be, like. I remember trying to do a couple of phone books like a few months ago and it's definitely a technique you have to stay up to speed on like it the first one I fumbled on a little bit and the second one I got after it but you know.

• 1:07:11Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, I would imagine you might want to do a preemptive funeral for phone books. At some point, like you will have no more phone books. I mean, there's a possibility you'll have to go to like a museum of phone books to even get a hold of something that you might desecrate with ripping.

• 1:07:27Peter Attia?

  Yeah, it's it's um, I mean, I think that's I think that's probably why I'm not as good at it anymore. I just don't get the wraps.

• 1:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  All right. It sounds like you're still pretty excited about phone books, but we'll have to we'll keep that in the absurd bucket.

• 1:07:42Peter Attia?

  Yes, I I I took this section to be stupid things I do, not stupid things I did.

• 1:07:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, nice. That's even better. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I like present tense. Excited about what's next up on excited about.

• 1:07:55Peter Attia?

  So this is something that you deserve quite a bit of credit for, but just sort of archery, hunting and the consumption of wild game. And again, this it started out totally benign as, oh, maybe I'll just get a bow, you know, Tim has told me about why he enjoys this and I've got a bit of a sense of, you know, and just for the listeners, I guess the story is it would have been the summer of 2016. You were getting ready to go out on a hunting trip. The irony of it, of course, was it was with a guy named Jonathan Hart, who at the I would get to know years later.

• 1:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, founder of a great brand called Sitka.

• 1:08:34Peter Attia?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent, excellent gear.

• 1:08:36Peter Attia?

  Yep, unbelievable gear. And after watching you go through that journey of training for and going on the hunt, I was like, you know, I'm gonna get a bow. It just might be one of those things you I want to do every, you know, couple of times a month. And

• 1:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just to pause for a second. So I also have come to, I think, better understand the perfect or more perfect than I used to understand cocktail of characteristics that make something more likely to be your crack cocaine of activities.

• 1:09:13Peter Attia?

  Tell me what you think.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, in the in the preparation for that, it was, I mean, it's very methodical, very.

• 1:09:22Tim Ferriss?

  Uh meticulous. You have gear to tinker with, right? And it takes, it brings in some degree of mathematics and physics, which you have background in. Uh, so there's more to it, but continue.

• 1:09:38Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So, so in early 2017, I call up the local bow shop, Performance Archery in San Diego. Just get real lucky and the guy that happens to answer the phone, JR, turns out to be a complete obsessive. I mean, it turns out everyone that works there was totally obsessive, but JR might even take it to another level, just in terms of his technique obsession. And the rest is history, as they say. And it's, it's now at the point where in some ways my life revolves around this thing. Um, if you come to our house, I mean, you have, you haven't been in a while. You need to see what it looks like now.

• 1:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I haven't seen the new range.

• 1:10:16Peter Attia?

  It is out of control. I mean, we, we, it's like, you know, those life, those huge block targets now, you know, like the five feet by five feet block targets. I mean, I've got like eight of those, every animal you can imagine throughout the range. And yeah, I mean, every single day, my morning routine involves at least one round of 300. So 300 is the scoring system you use on the paper target when you either shoot at the three spot or the five spot. Um, so I get, you know, I'll, I'd like to get 90 shots out of the way first part of the day at the target and then do the longer range shooting, the 3D target shooting. Um, and, and I will say this, it, a big part of this

• 1:11:01Peter Attia?

  is this has been an amazing tool, tying it back to part of the training, a new set of emotional skills, right? So there was a day when if I didn't shoot well, that was the end of the day. Everything went off the rails. Uh, and I've talked about this, I think once even on a post, an Instagram post, I was, you know, kind of opening up about this, which was like, even as recently as a year ago, I remember there was a day when...

• 1:11:30Peter Attia?

  There was something wrong with my bow that I didn't realize at the time, but I ended up lodging three straight arrows into the fence. So I'm taking long range shots, but I missed something in my bow. And one, two, three arrows into the fence and you can't recover an arrow once it's in the fence. So that's like three arrows. I just flushed down the toilet. And I was so pissed that when I took each of them out of the fence, because you have to snap them to pull them out of the fence. I then proceeded to snap each one over my thigh. Now, these are, you know, 450 to 500 grain carbon fiber arrows. I was welted for a week. Which, you know, if you like- You basically gave yourself like a Thai kickboxing leg kick with each one of those. Yeah.

• 1:12:12Peter Attia?

  And, you know, so you, when you think about the complete and utter stupidity of that type of behavior. I've now realized archery is always going to be an amazing teacher because either you go up there and you just have this amazing day where you're in this flow state and everything goes well and it feels amazing. Or it's some variation of not going that way, but you get to practice this skill of distancing yourself from the narrative that is, dude, you suck, you suck. How can you be so bad at this, you know? And all of these awful, stupid thoughts that sort of spiral you out of control. So, so that's the part of it. And then of course, the other thing is, you know, then once I finally took these skills into the field

• 1:12:53Peter Attia?

  and began to hunt and began to experience this cycle of, you know, what is it like to go into an area where you have an animal that is a pest that needs some population control in the area that we hunt? It's so much the case that that's, that the government is basically killing these animals and just leaving them for dead or burying them. And you instead get to go and try to use your skill to do this and then harvest the animal. And then feed your family and feed yourself. I mean, it, the whole thing is just, it's such an incredible experience that has changed many things about the way I look at food. Like it's made it, it certainly reduced my appetite for consuming food

• 1:13:36Peter Attia?

  that I haven't had some relationship with. And I think my aspiration is by next year, meaning by 2021, to only eat food that I've, I've killed. Which I think I'll be able to get there by next year.

• 1:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot to discuss there. It's A, making me want to get back into archery. I do have my gear and only recently reconnected, or I should say connected with two guys who train here in Austin, which I'm excited about. Not for hunts here, but at higher elevation and don't hunt very often, in part because it's been mostly larger games. So you've got a lot of meat afterwards to keep you busy. Oh, and I remember you were on Joe Rogan's show.

• 1:14:26Tim Ferriss?

  The name of the bird that I shot, just for clarity, was grouse.

• 1:14:31Peter Attia?

  Yes.

• 1:14:31Tim Ferriss?

  Mountain chicken. It's like the chewiest, fastest running mountain chicken you can imagine. So that's what that was.

• 1:14:38Peter Attia?

  It was an amazing shot.

• 1:14:39Tim Ferriss?

  I was happy with that. I was very happy with that. It was a grouse at like 30 yards with with a bow. I was very happy with that. But the bow, or I should say archery practice also is a really good audit in my experience. Like if your nervous system, if you feel recovered, but your nervous system is not where it should be, your body really tells you with archery, at least in my case, like it's, it's a, it's a very effective and very fast assessment tool.

• 1:15:11Peter Attia?

  I agree. I think it's an emotional audit as well. I think the, you know, John Dudley, who is, is, you know, probably one of the greatest influences on archery for me. If people, if people are interested in archery and don't know who John Dudley is, you just need to hit pause on this one podcast now and go over to John Dudley's podcast called Knock On. And, you know, this is a guy who's a world-class archer who has, who also has the skill of being an amazing teacher. So a lot of people can be world-class, but they don't know how to explain to schmucks like us, like how they actually are doing what they're doing. But John is that really rare intersection of someone who is exceptional, but really knows how to break

• 1:15:55Peter Attia?

  archery down. And, you know, his, his teaching is, I mean, one of the greatest lessons I learned from him, which is obvious, but it's, it's really good to hear it from someone so good is. You can't, you have no influence over the arrows that are not in your quiver.

• 1:16:17Peter Attia?

  So every time you take that shot, it doesn't matter how bad it is, you can't do anything about it. And simply worrying about it increases the probability that that arrow that's still in your quiver is going to be a bad shot.

• 1:16:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good metaphor.

• 1:16:32Tim Ferriss?

  What type of gear do you use currently?

• 1:16:34Peter Attia?

  So currently I'm using-

• 1:16:35Tim Ferriss?

  And why?

• 1:16:36Peter Attia?

  Yeah, so currently I'm using the Hoyt RX3 bow, which I absolutely love. You know, it's, it's, it sounds so stupid and my wife laughs at me when I say this and I'm sort of joking, but not really. Like, I love it so much. It's the only inanimate object I've ever wanted to sleep with in my bed. Like, I, I just, like, I love everything about it. I just love, I love the way it looks and the way it feels and all, like, I mean, compound bows, as you know, are just ridiculous pieces of engineering.

• 1:17:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Peter Attia?

  It's, it's sort of, it feels, it's just hard to believe that they've figured out a way to make something so efficient.

• 1:17:13Peter Attia?

  I only shoot with a back tension release.

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  What, what type is that?

• 1:17:17Peter Attia?

  I, I use John Dudley's release called the, the Knock To It and the Silverback. So he has, he has a pure back tension release called the Silverback. And then the Knock To It is a, it's a, it has a thumb trigger on it, but you still do it with back tension. So when your thumb is on it and the rhomboid contracts, that's what actually pulls the thing back. But technically you could cheat with the Knock To It. You can't with the Silverback. The Silverback is a pure back tension release.

• 1:17:44Tim Ferriss?

  Could you just explain the significance of back tension? And then what, what that is, if you could just kind of paint a picture for people who are imagining archery?

• 1:17:53Peter Attia?

  So if you picture your, your, let's say your right eye dominant, that would mean your left arm is holding the bow out and your right arm is pulling the string back. Now, these compound bows are very hard to pull back. In the olden days, you used to actually pull compound bows with your fingers and you would release off your finger. Today, we have a release that clips onto a little loop on the string called the D-loop and you're pulling on that release. But whether you're doing that or just pulling on a string, you still need the release to be a surprise. So a surprise release or a surprise shot is an essential part of archery because it combats the sort of need of the motor system, of your CNS and motor system to sort of have this trigger anxiety

• 1:18:38Peter Attia?

  or trigger panic while looking at the target. So if you're looking at the target and you pull the trigger, you're going to have a less accurate shot than if you're following the perfect biomechanics and the shot releases without your knowledge. And so the way to do that is-

• 1:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  And don't you need to get to a certain equilibrium with your focus before said surprise?

• 1:19:02Peter Attia?

  Absolutely. Yes, you have to. Yeah, so when you think about looking out, so what are you doing with a compound bow? You have two holes. You have the sight, which is one hole, and you have the peep, which is another hole. So those have to be aligned.

• 1:19:16Tim Ferriss?

  And just for those who haven't used compound bow, so the sight is going to be, if you imagine your left arm straightened out in front of you, the sight is going to be not that dissimilar from, say, the top, the iron sights on a handgun or something like that. You have a sight down by your hand and then you have another hole that is actually on the string itself and you're lining those two up.

• 1:19:36Peter Attia?

  That's right. So you have to get those two things lined up. In the sight, there's a level, like, you know, the thing you'd hang a picture with or something with a little bubble. So the first thing you're doing is you're getting rear sight, front sight acquisition. Then you have to get the bubble level and then you have to get the pin where you want it to be. Now, I use a pin that comes in the side because I have multiple pins in the bow. But if you have a pin at the bottom or the single pin, it's the same idea. So you've now got rear sight, front sight acquisition, bubble level, pin on target, and then the target is still going to be moving. That's okay. You have to trust the process. If all those other things are fine and that sight, that pin is sort of moving gently around your target, that's okay. What you don't want to do is try to time that

• 1:20:21Peter Attia?

  and punch the trigger while it's there. So instead, that's where you're contracting the rhomboid and being surprised by when the tension is actually achieved in the trigger.

• 1:20:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, true with a lot of, as far as I can tell, firearm instruction also. So that

• 1:20:40Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I've never fired a gun in my life. It's sounds odd, I suppose, but anyone I've talked to who's like a marksman, they'll say the same thing like the there's still a surprise release on the trigger.

• 1:20:50Tim Ferriss?

  Huh, so much to talk about.

• 1:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  All right, archery. I have seen your playground once, but it sounds like it's expanded that the the hamster cage has more toys in it now. It sounds like.

• 1:21:03Peter Attia?

  Yeah, and I'm about to order like the monster elk.

• 1:21:10Tim Ferriss?

  Peter's menagerie. Animals of death. The animated pet cemetery in the back of your house changed your mind on. What else have you changed your mind on?

• 1:21:22Peter Attia?

  Well, this, you know, in some ways sorts of sort of builds off the last one a little bit, but it's it's basically this idea that that that childhood experiences can matter in ways that after the fact seem sort of irrelevant. So.

• 1:21:38Tim Ferriss?

  So that's not the belief that you have reversed. That's the current.

• 1:21:45Peter Attia?

  Yes, that's correct. The current belief is, yeah, so I'll rephrase it. I used to believe that

• 1:21:54Peter Attia?

  that, you know, traumatic events in your childhood probably weren't that relevant or could be net positives. If they, you know, and it's this effectively like a parallel to the first thing.

• 1:22:10Peter Attia?

  To the previous one we talked about about personality stuff. I think what I've come to realize through, you know, extensive interaction with experts in this space, my own experience, the experience now of many people that I know is if a child perceives helplessness, even as an adult, if you look back and think, that wasn't so helpless.

• 1:22:33Peter Attia?

  You have to be thoughtful about what the implications and ramifications of that are going forward. Right? So.

• 1:22:41Peter Attia?

  You know, for example, let's take an extreme example. If a child loses a parent when they're young,

• 1:22:49Peter Attia?

  you might say, well, look, they have another parent. That other parent is a loving parent. Everything is going to be fine. But there's an enormous amount of chaos that's inserted into that person's life. And if a child perceives that as like helplessness, that can really shape the subsequent years of their life. That can shape aspects of their personality that I don't think I ever, I just don't think I really understood and appreciated before. And I've seen this now with a number of my patients, for example, using that example, patients who lost parents when they were very young, seven years old, eight years old, 12 years old, suddenly and or tragically, or not suddenly or tragically. I mean, you could have someone who's suffering for three years with cancer,

• 1:23:34Peter Attia?

  and it's not sudden, but it's still to a child, they perceive things differently. An extension of that, which comes back to this whole thing around anger, and this was part of my motivation to sort of begin to make sure I wasn't so angry was, I almost never got angry at my kids, right? But my kids saw me angry. So, you know, the last time I got really, really pissed in front of my kids was a year ago. And I remember this very well. We were actually driving to a funeral of the mother of one of my daughter's best friends. So this is a young woman, a woman who's in her 40s, who dies of cancer. And we're going to the funeral. It was exactly a year ago. So it's not a happy day. And so it's me, my wife and my daughter going to the funeral. And I'm driving.

• 1:24:20Peter Attia?

  And, you know, traffic is sort of moving along at a sort of slow pace. And there's a merging lane that's coming on. And there's this woman who's not paying even a modicum of attention to what's going on. Like she's on her phone or something. And then at the last minute, she just goes, like accelerates, jumps in front of us. I almost hit her. And

• 1:24:46Peter Attia?

  I mean, normally that would be annoying, but on that day I went ballistic. Now, she didn't even hear me, right? She's in another car. But the torrent of just, you know, profanities and like what I wanted to do to her and say to her and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah was unbelievable. Heightened presumably by the fact that I was just in this awful mood about all this other stuff, whatever.

• 1:25:13Peter Attia?

  I never for a moment would have realized like that could have an effect on my daughter. It's like, I'm not yelling at her, I'm not yelling at my wife, I'm not like, you know, I'm yelling at some random stranger in front of us. But I realized that kids internalize that stuff different. Kids and, you know, my daughter's not a baby, but she's still a child. They internalize that type of stuff as it's still like, it's still hitting them, right? So it's, I don't know, I don't know how to think about it. There's still shrapnel that is hitting them in a way it wouldn't hit an adult. And so you take an extreme that's very minor, you take an example that's very minor like that one versus something that's very major like the funeral we were going to, which is

• 1:25:56Peter Attia?

  for her friend's mom. I, I, I don't think we are paying enough attention to how these things that kids experience can shape their personality. And so, and to be clear, like, these are two edged swords. There are some good things that can come from hard experiences. I'm not suggesting everything is negative, but you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? You can accept some of the positives that come from these things without ignoring the things that need to be mended or repaired. So I think that, that broad topic is something that I have really been much more attentive to both in myself and in my patients and in understanding their, their lives and their

• 1:26:40Peter Attia?

  emotional health as it pertains to the events of their, of their childhood.

• 1:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking from my firsthand interactions with you, you are, and we talk quite a bit, or just text stupid jokes to each other, at least that with fair frequency. And you are much less anger ridden than you have been historically, which is really nice to see. And I mean, it's something that I've battled with a lot myself also, quite possibly for similar reasons, or some similar reasons. But what resources or tools, if any, I don't know if there are any books or anything

• 1:27:25Tim Ferriss?

  else that you would recommend, or simply mention as having been valuable for diffusing the default anger response, or helping you to revisit the story of that being an inalterable aspect of your personality?

• 1:27:44Peter Attia?

  I think there have been a lot of things. There's no one thing, which isn't to say that for others, one thing couldn't do the trick. I think the good news is if somebody's listening to this, and they're also thinking to themselves, man, like, I just wish I was a little less angry too. I think the good news is the probability that you are walking around with as much anger as me is hopefully low. You're probably starting from a better place, and therefore maybe your anger is less recalcitrant to change. There were many things. So I'll start with one. Meditation has made a big difference, not by itself. Meditation simply gives a gap. That's, that's the only thing meditation does, is it creates

• 1:28:28Peter Attia?

  a pause between the stimulus and the response. And that gap used to never exist. That gap, I didn't even know it was a gap. So it was, it was, it was a potential space that I didn't realize had the potential to be a space. Which meant stimulus, you know, woman cuts you off while you're on the way to worst funeral you could be imagining going to, um, blowing up. That's happening in microseconds, not milliseconds. Well, the difference is today, cause that's just, I mean, that still happens every day, like some stupid thing will happen that would have normally fired me off. The difference is now I have seconds to inspect that and look at the template of beliefs that are feeding into

• 1:29:12Peter Attia?

  that and examine the why, which is what like, what is anger, right? I mean, so, so that's, that's, if the first thing is using a practice of Vipassana meditation to create a tool in the mind to slow time down, then the second one is.

• 1:29:28Tim Ferriss?

  And is that, sorry to, uh, to jump in, but just for specifics, I know that you and I've both used Sam's waking up app. Uh, do you now meditate, uh, without that? What does the practice look like?

• 1:29:41Peter Attia?

  No, I, I, I use either Sam's or Dan Harris's. I go back and forth between them. And yeah, so sometimes I'll do like a month on one and not see the other one and vice versa. I, I sort of go back and forth with no, with no rhyme or reason.

• 1:29:54Tim Ferriss?

  The Harris twins, unrelated.

• 1:29:56Peter Attia?

  Yes, exactly. The, the brothers Harris, no relation. Um, so, so yes, just having, just, just, again, I can think of a million analogies. It's like, imagine, you know, being a race car driver and you get to see time travel half as fast as the other drivers. Well, you're going to be a much better driver. Like you see the road coming at you at half the speed. Um, the second thing is just work through, through really helpful therapy has been actually examining what is, what, what anger stems from. So I think, you know, the first time I was ever, you know, I want to say forced to or suggested to play the game of emotional check-in. I didn't

• 1:30:39Peter Attia?

  have a vocabulary. So the question was, how do you feel right now? Pissed off? Okay. Say more. How do you feel? Fucking pissed off. How do you feel? So fucking pissed off that if you fucking ask me again, I'm going to fucking kill you. Like that was the only response I had. Right? What I didn't have at the time was I didn't even have a vocabulary to understand I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel helpless. I don't feel in control. So, so I had to learn a new vocabulary and start to learn what those other things looked like so that I could, in that gap of

• 1:31:17Peter Attia?

  time, start to say, oh, you're feeling X, but you're, you have such a, you have such a beautiful default wide lane highway that turns X into anger. And oh, by the way, yours turns Y into anger and yours turns Z into anger too. Like, that's Peter's thing. Other people might have, you know, depression or sadness or anxiety as these other well-worn paths that come out of these various converging stimuli. So, so learning how to recognize what was understanding that has made a big difference. Another thing has just been, you

• 1:31:55Peter Attia?

  know, traditional insight-related therapy. You know, I mean, so Esther Perel, who actually met through you many years ago, who is, you know, an incredibly important part of my life today. I'm trying to think. Oh, I know.

• 1:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  For every Jaco, you get one Esther Perel.

• 1:32:14Peter Attia?

  I'll take it. So, so I'll give you another, I'll tell you the last time I actually lost my shit. I thought, it wasn't a year ago. It was a year ago was with that, that funeral. It was more recently than that. It was when one of our chickens got killed. And so I'm up actually shooting, doing my archery, and I hear my daughter like, kind of scream, like, something's wrong. And I kind of run down and she's crying and I see one of our chickens is mangled into like a million pieces. And of course, I immediately figure out what's going on. And, you know, we had just lost one, like, I don't know, a month earlier. I thought I had reinforced the coop as much as possible, but clearly I hadn't

• 1:32:56Peter Attia?

  done a good enough job. And I just went off on a tirade. I mean, and again, I'm embarrassed to even say all the things I said because it's so stupid. I'm basically yelling at whatever animal that is no longer there that killed our chicken about what I'm going to do to it.

• 1:33:15Peter Attia?

  I mean, again, we can laugh at it. It's so ridiculous, though, right?

• 1:33:20Peter Attia?

  What Esther was able to point out was, um, was let's deconstruct that whole situation. So first of all, why are you angry? Well, if I'm going to be brutally honest about it, I'm angry because I feel inadequate. I failed. Like, I'm, my job is to protect my family and my chickens are now a part of my family. Like, I failed at protecting these chickens. Like, it can't be that I'm actually angry at the bobcat for being a bobcat.

• 1:33:45Peter Attia?

  Like, you know, Marcus Aurelius once said something along the lines of, you know, to be, you know, it's like being angry at a fig for making fig juice or something like that. You know, like a fig tree for growing figs or something, I think he said. So, so no, there's no way I'm pissed at the actual bobcat who killed the chicken. That's called the site, that's, that's like the carbon cycle. Like, that's the way it works. I'm pissed at myself. I have failed to protect my family.

• 1:34:10Peter Attia?

  I feel helpless, blah, blah, all those other things. But the point is, in that moment, I'm, I missed an opportunity to console my daughter. I was so consumed with my own rage and my own, like, and rage, as you can probably relate to, and many people who get angry can relate to, is a very, it's a very numbing, transiently numbing thing. Lots of dopamine gets secreted in that outburst that actually makes you feel a bit better. Now, that doesn't last long. It's a very hollow, uh, I think there's a saying about the, it's like a honey with a poisoned tip or something like that, you know? It's, it's a very short-lived, transient, um, benefit that comes with a long tail of misery.

• 1:34:54Peter Attia?

  But I lost an opportunity, which was, my daughter's actually very upset about this. I mean, like, you know, not only do our chickens give us eggs, but like, the kids love them. They play with them every day. They all have names. They all have, like, we know everything about every one of those chickens and their personalities. So it's no, it's no different than her losing her cat or her dog. And instead of consoling her, like, I'm wrapped up in my own nonsense. So sometimes you just actually have to be confronted with that type of brutal truth. And again, if you go back to the first thing, which is you now have a gap. The next time, a couple of months later, something came up, it wasn't related to the chicken, but it was something where I think the peter of old would have gone right down the default pathway of just raging.

• 1:35:39Peter Attia?

  I had a little, I had that breathing room to notice. The feelings of another person and realize, wait a minute. The much more important thing to do here is make sure that person is okay. And not, you know, go down your own stupid rabbit hole.

• 1:35:55Peter Attia?

  Another tool that I think has been very important here, you know, Ryan Holiday recently put out, and I'm sure it's still available, a whole work, like a whole sort of 10 day or 11 day course on anger. Ryan writes about anger a lot. And I've talked with him about this, actually, on, in my interview of him very recently, which probably by the time this is out, will not even be out yet. But those types of exercises are helpful. Again, it comes down to this idea that once you accept that this is not something you are hardwired to, like your height or your shoe size, and you can start to change it, you just have to start working at it. So there are a number of other tools as well.

• 1:36:35Peter Attia?

  I think a lot of this sort of David Foster Wallace relational reframing stuff also has been just incredibly helpful.

• 1:36:43Tim Ferriss?

  So there is an audio recording of his commencement speech. This is water that you listen to on a regular basis.

• 1:36:51Peter Attia?

  Yeah, to this day, I still listen to it at least once a month. Usually more than that.

• 1:36:55Tim Ferriss?

  So people can can find that in the show notes. I'll put that in the show notes as well. For you, at this point in time, what do you think? What are the characteristics of a therapist who is good for Peter? I'm curious because I have historically, and I've largely gotten over this, but had a skeptical view of most therapists. And you come from a math background. You come from a hard science background and also the experience of a surgeon,

• 1:37:33Tim Ferriss?

  where a pass fail or an A plus versus a C minus is, I would imagine, pretty tangible and easy to assess. Right? It's like if you if you're doing reconstructive surgery and the person's nose is on the side of their head, well, you don't fucking pass, go. You do not collect the money. And with therapy, it is a softer, in some respects. Or I wouldn't even say softer. It's a harder field to assess, at least I have viewed it that way.

• 1:38:06Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you, how do you wrap your head around that? How do you think about?

• 1:38:13Peter Attia?

  I mean, that's a, that's a great question, and I don't have an answer. I mean, I have my answer, but I don't know that that's the answer.

• 1:38:19Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm interested in your answer.

• 1:38:20Peter Attia?

  It almost assuredly is not. In the end, two things have to be firing, right? There has to be the connection and chemistry between you and the therapist or between like, I'll just talk about me. I have to be able to connect with that person, which is, and, and, and for me, that means that their insights have to be such that I exit almost every session thinking, wow, like I see something I didn't see before.

• 1:38:47Peter Attia?

  I love that. So, and then, so that's the sort of short term tangible, like that insight is, that's, that's, that's surprising. That's the point where, first of all, I journal in the sessions a lot, and I sometimes even record the sessions. That's how powerful I find some of these insights to be where I can't even capture them all if I'm there without those tools. The, but the, but the second thing that matters to me is the results. You know, in the end, none of this stuff matters if it's not reducing your suffering. And that's sort of, I mean, I use that term very deliberately instead of if you're not happier, because I don't exactly know what happiness means, but I do know what suffering

• 1:39:30Peter Attia?

  means, and I do know what it's like to suffer less. And anything that helps me suffer less, which is quite easy for me to assess, is a good thing. And so if I feel that there's this connection, chemistry and constellation of insights that are constantly, you know, evolving from the discussions, and it's translating to a phenotypic benefit that's resulting in-

• 1:39:53Tim Ferriss?

  That is the most fucking Peter Attia way to describe this ever. Phenotypic benefit. Don't worry, folks. I don't get it either.

• 1:40:04Tim Ferriss?

  Jesus. All right.

• 1:40:06Peter Attia?

  I'm gonna have to let you edit my book before I catch any of those things in there.

• 1:40:12Peter Attia?

  Then those are those are the two things that matter. So in other words, like, you know, there's other little things like, I think for me, the therapists that are really valuable are also the ones that, you know, frankly, just don't have a hard time telling you when you're wrong. You know, they just don't have a hard time telling you, you're totally full of shit and deluded, or that you're being a dick. I mean, you know, I mean, I've had, you know, so I have three main therapists, which sounds, I know, ridiculous, but I think when you're trying to solve some of my issues, but, you know, Esther.

• 1:40:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a pit crew.

• 1:40:44Peter Attia?

  Yeah, exactly. Esther and Terry and Lori. And, I mean, I have had some really brutal sessions with Lori. And I don't know why it's worked out that way. Like, each, I had, they all know each other, by the way, very well. So that's another thing. There's no, it's not a counterproductive experience, because the three of them know each other, and they all know they're chipping away at different pieces of things. But, I mean, I've had some very difficult, you know, interactions with, with her, where, you know, she has just said to me, like, you are being a spoiled little baby. You know, like, do you, do you see what you're, do you see what you're, how you're behaving right now? And

• 1:41:25Peter Attia?

  I just, I think the fact that she can do that matters a lot. I think there are a lot of people that would give me a pass on stuff, because it's, it's easier to. It's hard to stand up to someone.

• 1:41:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think you need, or needs is a strong word, but I certainly, when interacting with specialists of almost any type, I prefer people who can fire me very easily. Do you know what I mean? Because then, it makes it a lot easier for them, if they're in demand, or are completely utterly concerned with how many billable hours they're racking up, that they can be like, you know, Peter, you're making this really fucking difficult for both of us. I just wanted to like, pause for a second, to allow you to like, wallow in how fucking unnecessarily difficult you're making this. And it's like, oh, okay. Oh,

• 1:42:17Tim Ferriss?

  yeah. Which, yeah, I think, I think I'm probably also the problem child, oftentimes. So we were on.

• 1:42:30Peter Attia?

  So I think we're now into stupid things again. All right, let's do it. Stupid things. So to this day, I still play a game called forks and knives. Forks and knives. Forks and knives is the name of the game. So I like, so, so I have an awesome system with my wife, which is she likes to put stuff in the dishwasher and hates to take it out. I hate putting stuff in the dishwasher and I love taking it out. I just, I don't like touching dirty stuff. I really like clean stuff. And I don't know why she doesn't like taking it out because that seems more enjoyable. But anyway, and as a kid, this game started when I was a kid. My mom says, like, I was the best at chores. Like, my brother and sister apparently didn't like doing chores as much as I did, but I loved chores.

• 1:43:15Peter Attia?

  I was like her little helper. So whatever she said to do, I couldn't wait to do. And one of my chores was doing the dishwasher and I loved it. So this started when I was probably like about eight. And I remember she used to always say, Peter, can you put away the forks and the knives? And it really kind of got to me because I was like, why don't you also include the spoons in that discussion? It's not just forks and knives. It's forks and knives and spoons. And she would be like, acknowledge that I said that, but you know, the next day she'd forget. And she'd be like, can you please put away the forks and the knives? So I was like, I'm gonna just start keeping track. And so I played this game where I would count the forks and the knives and the spoons.

• 1:43:56Peter Attia?

  And the game is the spoons would win anytime there were more spoons than forks and knives. Now, if anyone who's played this game, and I'm guessing the answer is nobody. Wait a second, the number in the dishwasher? Yes. That you're removing? Yes. Okay. So basically, every time I got to do this, it turned into a game of who's gonna win? The forks and the knives or the spoons? Which was a counting. That's just a counting game. But I was always rooting for the spoons because they're the underdog. Because the probability of the spoons winning is very low. You generally have way more forks and knives combined than spoons. So over the years, the game evolved and I started to allow other things to be proxies for spoons. So if there was like a spatula or a carrot peeler, that would get to go in the spoon category, just to sort of level the playing field a little bit.

• 1:44:39Tim Ferriss?

  The handicap.

• 1:44:39Peter Attia?

  Yeah, you had to handicap this thing somewhat. But the game started, you know, almost 40 years ago. And to this day, I mean, just two days ago, I played forks and knives versus spoons. And I love it. I love it. And it's at the point now where I don't want anybody else to put that stuff away. So let's say like Jill is putting stuff away. I'm like, no, no, no, I want to get the forks and knives. I gotta get those guys. And let me tell you, spoons don't win much.

• 1:45:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04Peter Attia?

  It's a sad state of affairs if you're a spoons fan. But if they win once every three months, like, it is freaking awesome. It just feels so good when the spoons win.

• 1:45:15Tim Ferriss?

  What is the furthest you've stretched the label of spoon? Like, what, can you think of anything that we're?

• 1:45:24Peter Attia?

  There was, there was a big inquiry came into the rule committee about 20 years ago, where I thought if I could start including cups as spoons, because they, you could, you could see how you could create sort of a post hoc analysis that would suggest that, well, a cup sort of holds things like a spoon holds things. You could drink soup out of a cup, just as you could use a spoon. But I decided that was a very slippery slope. And I didn't, I didn't want to take the game down that road. I thought that was going to really tarnish the sport that I loved so much. So I decided I would rather lose 90 times out of 91 times, but know that that one time I won, it was the sweetest victory.

• 1:46:04Tim Ferriss?

  This is seem, gonna seem like a complete non sequitur, but that, as you were saying this on the rules committee, I'm thinking about doping in sports. And then I started thinking about this conversation we had long ago about xenon gas. I don't know if you remember this. Did you end up ever looking more closely at xenon gas?

• 1:46:22Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I, it's so funny you remember that.

• 1:46:26Peter Attia?

  I actually called, um, what's the name of the company? Airgas and I think it's called Praxair.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Praxair.

• 1:46:33Peter Attia?

  Yeah. And basically the deal died when I just couldn't get a reasonable supply of xenon gas. Reasonable meaning like enough for me to use. I basically had to buy enough to, you know, provide xenon gas for the entire universe.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  And this, and the speculation was that, or maybe it wasn't speculation, maybe it'd been confirmed. I can't remember because I don't know how you track such a thing, but, or maybe you just have to catch them inhaling, but it was being used by endurance athletes at the, at the Sochi Olympics.

• 1:47:01Peter Attia?

  Yes. It was basically a legal PED. And this was probably six years ago. And at the time I was still, you know, competing in cycling and I was like, well, like, you know, I was comfortable with the safety profile. It was legal and it was enhancing performance. I was like, I want xenon gas. I want to, I want to take a big bong of xenon gas every day before I go and work out.

• 1:47:23Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other, uh, currently legal performance enhancing drugs that you think the cat and mouse game of dopers and anti doping committees, uh, have not yet, or I should say the, I'm not sure which is the cat and which is the mouse. I guess the cat is the, the IOC and so on, has not caught up to. Or things that are simply difficult to test for.

• 1:47:51Peter Attia?

  Well, the latter definitely growth hormone fits into that category. So growth hormone is, is clearly banned by WADA, USADA and every, um, entity out there, but it's very difficult to, to, to, to check for, uh, because it's a human recombinant equivalent. And unlike something like testosterone, where you can give somebody testosterone, but you can, even though it's bioequivalent, you can, if you're getting it from the outside of your body, other things change inside your body that become a signature of it. Whereas that's not quite as easy to do with growth hormone.

• 1:48:24Tim Ferriss?

  Now this, I see, would a signature in this case be, would it be looking at a ratio of, what is it?

• 1:48:30Peter Attia?

  It's testosterone.

• 1:48:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Peter Attia?

  Yeah. And if you take enough of it, obviously you'd see inhibition of luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, things like that. So no, I'm not close enough to it at all. I don't, I just don't, you know, it's, it's been, it's been a long time. I mean, one thing that I did notice just through some sort of personal interactions I've had with professional athletes who are also interested in sort of mind altering drugs is psilocybin is not banned by WADA and MDMA is. And I sort of find that hilarious because I don't think either of those things have a performance enhancing, like, I mean MDMA would be a performance.

• 1:49:13Tim Ferriss?

  Great for, great for Greco-Roman wrestling.

• 1:49:15Peter Attia?

  Yeah, it's like, I can't think of one sport that gets better with MDMA. So I was sort of amazed to see that on the WADA list.

• 1:49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe if you went very high dose, what is it? Methylene dioxy?

• 1:49:27Peter Attia?

  I mean, yeah, I mean, technically it's a methamphetamine, but I, I don't know.

• 1:49:33Tim Ferriss?

  What is the term for the eye movements that are so often characteristic of higher dose MDMA use? It's like astigmia? I can't remember the term, but it would definitely not be good for something like archery where the eyes effectively do this back and forth kind of ratcheting movement. I can't remember the term. Somebody I'm sure pointed out when they hear this. Yeah, psilocybin's an inch to one. That, that's, that we could certainly delve into just from a, it's like many things, better get the dose right. If you're thinking of using it as a performance enhancing or.

• 1:50:08Peter Attia?

  And in truth, you know, I, I have talked to people who have said at very low doses, psilocybin has actually enhanced their physical performance. So, so who knows? Maybe there is something to that.

• 1:50:23Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard the same from endurance athletes using relatively, or I know not relatively, low doses of LSD, like 10 or 15 micrograms, or maybe even tend to like 25.

• 1:50:33Peter Attia?

  Wow.

• 1:50:34Tim Ferriss?

  But.

• 1:50:35Peter Attia?

  It's hard to believe, like, it seems so imperceptible. Like, that seems like such a small dose.

• 1:50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Does indeed. Yeah. I mean, this, this upcoming weekend, by the time this comes out, it will have passed, but there's the psychedelic science event here in Austin with MAPS and one of the sessions is specifically focused on microdosing, which this would fall under the umbrella of at 10 to 15 micrograms.

• 1:51:02Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Where aren't we excited?

• 1:51:03Peter Attia?

  We're back to excited, yeah.

• 1:51:04Tim Ferriss?

  All right, yeah, we'll do one, we'll do one or two more. Let's, let's, let's go with excited.

• 1:51:08Peter Attia?

  Uh, next thing I'm pretty excited about is just driving, you know, just sort of getting deeper and deeper into the craft of learning how to drive a race car. And, um, and sort of just, you know, training both in the simulator and actually on a racetrack with a, with a race car. Um, and again, I think part of it is I just, I love, you know, I, I, I love mechanical things. I love cars. I love driving them fast. And there's no better place to do that than on a racetrack. But also part of it is it's another one of these audits, you know? Like archery, it is not a sport that gets better the more pissed you are. It is not a sport that gets better the harder you squeeze. So, and it's also a sport where, let's say you miss an apex on a turn.

• 1:51:52Peter Attia?

  If you think about that or dwell on it anymore, it only increases the likelihood you're going to miss the apex on the next turn, or miss your breakpoint, or miss your turn in point, or do something wrong. So it, it's one of these things that teaches you a skill that I just think is good for life, which is you don't want to not know that you made a mistake, because then you run the risk of making that mistake again, but you can't beat yourself up for making the mistake. So you have to have a relatively short half-life for torturing yourself. Otherwise, you will spiral out of control and it's really amazing. I just happen to be very lucky to have a great coach, a guy by the name of Thomas Merrill in driving. And I don't know, he's just, he's so good at spotting when my mistakes start.

• 1:52:36Peter Attia?

  And it's never really the case that when I screw something up at, you know, turn seven, where I went off track.

• 1:52:42Tim Ferriss?

  That was the first screw up.

• 1:52:43Peter Attia?

  Yeah, not even close. He's like, actually, look at what you did at turn five. And then look at how that fed into turn six. By the time you got to seven, it was, uh, he, he said, look, the only way you were not going to crash at seven is if you had slowed down enough to a speed much slower than you would normally go there because of the mistake you made in five and six.

• 1:53:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:04Peter Attia?

  So I, I think for a lot of people, again, it's easy to look at what people are doing in a race car and not think there's much to it. But of course, like many things, the further you are from the shore, the deeper the ocean, as Bob Kaplan says. And so the more I do it, the more I appreciate the gap between me and Sebastian Vettel.

• 1:53:26Tim Ferriss?

  And you're wearing an Ayrton Senna shirt as we speak. And for those people who don't know who that is, you should absolutely watch a documentary called Senna, which was just incredible, uh, which, which I think helped me at least as someone who's completely naive to race car driving, to develop a high level of appreciation for just how hard it is to perform at a high level in those circumstances. I mean, it's, uh, and, and how incredibly dangerous it was at that point in time. Things have changed quite a bit, but when he was racing, certainly, uh, far more dangerous.

• 1:54:09Peter Attia?

  Yeah, in the, in the sixties, I, you know, I'd say sort of mid, early to mid sixties into mid nineties. It was a staggeringly dangerous sport, unacceptably so.

• 1:54:24Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, something occurred to me that, uh, I don't think I've ever asked you before. And that is, have you considered, maybe you already have something that fits this bill, but picking a hobby or something to obsess about that is a group activity or a partner activity, because it seems like most of the things I find you, uh, gravitate towards and become very obsessed about are, uh, even though there might be other humans around, they're mostly solitary experiences.

• 1:55:03Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I, I, you're not the first person to ask me this, and I, I think it's a great point.

• 1:55:10Peter Attia?

  I, I suspect the problem is I love these things I do so much. I barely feel like I have as much time as I want to do them, but it might be the case that as my kids get older and I can do more of these things with them or, or do different things with them, that that would sort of scratch that itch. But there's definitely something to be said for it. I mean, I think ever since I was 13, I've been so, that was sort of a turning point, I think, in my personality or something where I just remember really gravitating towards individual things.

• 1:55:43Peter Attia?

  For a whole bunch of reasons I could probably unpack.

• 1:55:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think that could be an entirely separate podcast.

• 1:55:52Tim Ferriss?

  So racing. Changing your mind.

• 1:55:56Peter Attia?

  Um, I would say the next one here on this list would be, and this is going to sound almost silly, but on the, I, I've changed my mind on the benefits of exercise being much greater than I ever envisioned. So, you know, I would probably classify as a borderline exercise addict. So for me to say, I now actually think exercise is incredible and has all these benefits is sort of a funny statement, um, which is not to say that I didn't think it had benefits before, but I, I don't think I understood or appreciated metabolically. So if you just take one example, um, probably like four years ago, three years ago, um, I had

• 1:56:36Peter Attia?

  one of our analysts do this exercise that took him about a year, which was with some direction around where to start, comb through all the literature on Alzheimer's disease and get a sense of what tools in the toolkit would be most beneficial to prevent it or reduce the risk of it and or delay it.

• 1:56:58Peter Attia?

  And, you know, I mean, it was, anything was in, or anything was on the table. What drug, what supplement, what this, what that? And he came back and said, and we had a framework that was a very mechanistic framework. He came back and said, um, it's definitely exercise. And I was like, dude, that, I mean, that sounds like such a politically correct thing to say, come back with like a real answer, please. Like that's just sounds dumb. Exercise, like, how could it be exercise? And of course, it, you know, he came back and made the case. And in the end, I believe that case, which is when you look at what exercise does from a vascular standpoint, from a growth factor standpoint, you know, the creation of B D N F, brain derived neurotropic factor.

• 1:57:41Peter Attia?

  I really believe that, and again, you shouldn't take the view that you should only do one thing, but if you're, if you're really committed to brain health, um, you, you want to be exercising every day.

• 1:57:56Tim Ferriss?

  Parameters are there on that exercise? When you say exercise, for instance, there are people that view running as cardio, but then you, in the case of resistance training, are obviously utilizing the vascular system in your heart. But how do you think about type and dose?

• 1:58:14Peter Attia?

  So the literature is not crystal clear on that. But if you loosely take three types of exercise, which is modest or low intensity quote unquote cardio, high intensity cardio and strength training, if you took those as the three legs of the exercise stool. The good news is they all appear to increase BDNF. They all appear to have benefits, though to different degrees, on vascular tone, circulation, et cetera. What I basically decided a couple of years ago, or maybe a year ago, was in the absence of better information, just having a portfolio approach to those in the context of the training for the centenarian Olympics was the best of both worlds.

• 1:58:57Peter Attia?

  So in other words, my training is programmed through the centenarian Olympics, which requires that you have training, a very specific type of training in all three of those legs, coupled with the tabletop, which is stability. So you have these four pieces of training, stability, strength, aerobic and anaerobic. And by doing these every day, or some combination of them every day, you also know that to at least to a first order approximation, you are getting the benefits of brain health. And then, of course, I mean, well, we're just on that topic. I think sleep and, you know, periods of nutrient cycling and obviously the appropriate steps on nutrition.

• 1:59:35Tim Ferriss?

  Nutrient cycling, meaning fast and famine?

• 1:59:38Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I think some period.

• 1:59:39Tim Ferriss?

  Or I guess it's probably the same.

• 1:59:41Peter Attia?

  Feast and famine, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:42Tim Ferriss?

  That'd be a great name for a podcast about fasting. Faster famine. Right, feast or famine.

• 1:59:50Peter Attia?

  But it's funny, like, you know, if you think about Silicon Valley right now, right? Like, everybody's so obsessed with this nootropic and that nootropic. But, but I don't think people understand is, correct nutrition, exercise and sleep are far better nootropics than modafinil. I mean, modafinil, modafinil might be one of the most potent no tropics out there, but it's actually not that strong a no tropic. It's actually kind of a weak no tropic, actually, by the literature.

• 2:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  It is pretty amazing how many narcoleptics are Olympic level sprinters, though.

• 2:00:20Tim Ferriss?

  They could prescribe modafinil. Anyway, pro-vigil, anti-narcolepsy drug, true story. Wow, eight of the 10 top 10, eight of the top 10 are narcoleptics. Who would have thought?

• 2:00:31Peter Attia?

  That's just, that's how they get so much time to train.

• 2:00:33Tim Ferriss?

  Back in the good old days. What are things, and I know you're a fan, correct me if I'm wrong, but of Matt Walker and a lot of his thinking on sleep, and I shouldn't say thinking, I mean, is research related to sleep. How have you changed or better yet improved sleep protocol, things that you prescribe, not necessarily chemicals, to patients to improve sleep quality?

• 2:01:02Peter Attia?

  I mean, this, sleep is a hard thing because it's sort of like exercise in the sense that you can't just give somebody a pill that makes sleep better. It really comes down to changing, it's, you have to sort of accept you're going to make behavior change. You have to prioritize this thing. And it's not just the eight hours you want to spend in bed, it's the buildup to it. So my sort of simplest toolkit, which is what I basically employ, I mean, most nights I don't require a supplement to sleep. It's not like I'm taking, you know, melatonin or even using Kirk parsley supplement. I mean, those things I'm basically reserving for jet lag situations and things like that. But if I'm, if I'm doing everything correctly, or fasting, you know, that's another time when you need a

• 2:01:46Peter Attia?

  little bit of a boost. But if I'm doing everything correctly, you know, using the right amount of blue light blocking glasses, and I've recently switched to a new brand that, that I am fricking super jazzed about. It's, I mean, I find, first of all, they actually have published research that, you know, documents, actually, I shouldn't.

• 2:02:05Peter Attia?

  Um, I don't know if it's been published yet, but anyway, they, they have data that I've actually seen that demonstrate, you know, how much they're able to block blue light. And at least according to my, my, um, sort of sleep tracking metrics, they're, they're definitely contributing to much more deep sleep than I've seen historically. Can you name? Yes, yes. It's called Felix Gray. F E L I X? Yes. Uh, Felix and then Gray. Actually, you can see the box, right? Sitting over there. So those glasses sitting right over there are my Felix Grays. And they're, they're just redonculous. G R, while people can find it. A Y or E Y. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's A Y. Um, and, um, so, so, you know, I'm very religious about using those things.

• 2:02:50Peter Attia?

  Felix Gray, is that a real person or is it like Ashley Madison? I have, I have no idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might be in the latter. Yeah. So, um, so I use those things religiously. I'm very attentive to how much light is around me as the sun is going down. I'm also very attentive of not doing stupid things in the evening. And we've talked a lot about this, not looking at email, not looking at social media, not looking at things that are gonna potentially activate or phosphorylate me in any way. It's another Peter, Peterism. Don't fucking phosphorylate me. Um, also just being very consistent in bedtime and wake up time, you know?

• 2:03:32Peter Attia?

  And, and when, when I'm really in the zone, it's, it's early to bed, early to rise. So understanding your own chronotype, are you an early or late chronotype? Well, you and I've talked about this a lot. Um, incredible darkness in the actual room at night or using, I, I use this thing called the Alaska Bear Eye Shade. It's like you can buy it on Amazon. It's eight bucks. It's like this little silky Alaska Bear Mask. It's the stupidest name ever. I don't know why. I love it though. I have, I have 20 Alaska Bears because I have them everywhere. So there, I'm never without one. Um, and, um, I use, I, I just upgraded in the last six months from the Chili Pad to the Ooler. That's O O L E R. Yeah, Kevin. Our buddy Kevin uses that as well.

• 2:04:16Peter Attia?

  Yeah. I have no affiliations with any of these companies, by the way, so I feel totally happy to just plug them shamelessly, um, for no personal gain. Um, and the Ooler is a big step in the right, it's, it's, it's really taken the Chili Pad to another level. First ones on me, Ooler. I do take sponsorship money.

• 2:04:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but this has come up with Kevin, uh, that to joke people in case you can't take it for fuck's sake.

• 2:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this has come up a couple of times recently.

• 2:04:46Peter Attia?

  The other thing is almost elimination of alcohol. So I'll probably have a drink tonight, right? We're going out to dinner, like a bunch of friends getting together in Austin tonight. I mean, I'll have a drink tonight, probably.

• 2:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you were the one who really put it on my, I, I certainly academically or intellectually understood that alcohol, even though it in some cases seems to make it easier to sleep, really disrupts quality of sleep or degrades quality of sleep. But I really didn't have an appreciation of that until, uh, and this is one where I guess I don't have any disclosure, but the, where the aura ring really highlighted that for me, just how fucked my sleep was in terms of quality after, say, two and a half, three drinks.

• 2:05:31Peter Attia?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm down to probably three or four drinks a month. Uh, that's, that's basically it. And, and, and there, I've, I've gone two months without a single drink. It's like, it has to be worth it because even at one drink, I'm going to experience some degradation of sleep. And

• 2:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  Could, could you, what, what type of degradation?

• 2:05:52Peter Attia?

  It's generally a reduction in REM, uh, for sure. Uh, a slight reduction in deep and an increase in fragmentation. So you're in a, you're just, you're moved into that stage one, stage two, uh, space a bit more.

• 2:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do you see a spike in, for lack of a specificity, the middle of the night in resting heart rate after you drink two or three drinks?

• 2:06:19Peter Attia?

  Well, I see a higher resting heart rate period and a lower heart rate variability for sure, and a higher body temperature. Um, and I don't know the last time I had two drinks in a night, but, but definitely it's one to two is also a really big step up. So, you know, look, it's, everyone's got to decide what they're going to do and what their priorities are. And I'm not here to say, don't drink at all, but I just, I just, I do, I would just say like, don't be mindless in your drinking is sort of my point. Like if you're going to drink, like make it really freaking worthwhile. Like do it for a reason. Don't just do it because the alcohol's there.

• 2:06:52Tim Ferriss?

  Is it, uh, I don't know if you've Seen anything anecdotally or experienced this personally, but is it, is it just the ethanol? Or is there, is there variability across vehicles for the alcohol itself, right? Is it, is a sipping tequila going to do less damage than for sort of the, the equivalent blood alcohol content achieved through red wine or something like that? I don't know if you've, if you've looked at any of this yourself.

• 2:07:23Peter Attia?

  I mean, anecdotally, it's hard to know because you know, your mind is also sort of feeding into a narrative around this stuff, but certainly drinking my classe azul reposado seems to be less toxic or, you know, than having, well, I'll tell you, I mean, I've given up certain things like I don't drink a Moscow Mule anymore. Like I make a mean ass Moscow Mule. I love that drink so much. I love the ginger beer, the lime, the whole ritual. But what I really decided was it's just not worth combining sugar and alcohol together. You know, the, you know, once in a while you can have sugar, once in a while you'd have alcohol, putting the two together is like, I mean, you might as well just kick yourself in the nuts at that point. So I just don't want to do that.

• 2:08:05Peter Attia?

  So, so certainly mixed drinks are things that I think just don't have a place in civil society. If, if you care about your liver, if you don't care about your liver, by all means, drink all the mixed drinks in the world. Certain, I, I don't experience this personally. I don't seem to have any issue with red wine. I don't get hangovers. I don't get headaches, even if I have a couple glasses of red wine. But I, I've certainly seen patients who see a real difference in red wine consumption. And it really seems to sit poorly with them. Similarly, if I drink like my sort of dark favorite super duper Belgian beer, I don't seem to get any bloating or anything from it, but I've seen people who, who can't really handle that stuff either.

• 2:08:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now that would, although it's not a mixed drink, I mean, you're getting plenty of maltose in that, right? So I mean, you're getting a nice little.

• 2:08:51Peter Attia?

  It's the fructose that I'm most worried about. It's the fructose and the ethanol combined I never want.

• 2:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 2:08:56Peter Attia?

  Because they both go through this similar metabolic pathway. And when they're delivered in liquid form, that when the fructose is in a liquid form and the ethanol, which of course is in a liquid form.

• 2:09:06Peter Attia?

  Now you've combined the velocity problem, the kinetic problem is working against you.

• 2:09:12Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by that?

• 2:09:14Peter Attia?

  So sugar as a liquid versus sugar as a solid behave differently. And also the dose matters, but if you take a bolus of liquid sugar, it's going to make it further down the GI tract than the solid. And certainly in animals, the evidence, Lou Cantley actually published this study in Science about four months ago. You could basically take a mouse model that is primed to get colon cancer. And if you, you had three groups, so one group is getting just a bolus of glucose. The other group is just getting a bolus of fructose liquid. And the other is getting a bolus of sugar, glucose and fructose together. You could make that animal explode in colon cancer with the sugar, the glucose fructose.

• 2:10:00Peter Attia?

  And too much of a tangent to get into the why. But it turned out that that effect is probably not present with solid sugar, which does not mean solid sugar doesn't come with its own problems.

• 2:10:12Peter Attia?

  But it's, it's the ability of the, the transit time to get there quickly before, you know, and not get absorbed because it's not being held up in the upper part of the GI tract with fiber and other solid things that you'd have, say, if you were eating it in the form of fruit or even just in, you know, like a piece of cake, for example. So again, I'm not suggesting, oh, it's good to eat cake. But the single worst thing you can do is drink your sugar.

• 2:10:37Tim Ferriss?

  So many questions that I'm going to table for now. On, on this list, on these three lists, I should say, is there anything that you think I would find particularly thought provoking or hilarious that you'd like to share?

• 2:10:54Peter Attia?

  My next thing on this stupid list is the what if game. Have we talked about the what if game?

• 2:11:01Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think so.

• 2:11:02Peter Attia?

  So I don't know when this started.

• 2:11:06Peter Attia?

  It was definitely before I got married. But I just, I thought it was really funny to play this game of would you still like me if? And then I would make up something really stupid. And even the game itself bugs my wife. But I make her do it. I make her go through the explanation of why it's yes or no. So I still remember the very first one I did.

• 2:11:32Tim Ferriss?

  Would you still like me if?

• 2:11:33Peter Attia?

  If, yes. And so the very first one I ever did, this is probably we'd been dating for like a few months. And she came over to my place and I made my, one of my favorite meals is like a curry stir fry, which is a very labor intensive meal. You're carving up a million different vegetables and all this other thing. And so we're sitting there, we're eating this thing. She's like, oh, this is great. And I was like, would you still like me if I was the exact same guy? It always gets prefaced by that. Would you still like me if I was the exact same guy? But instead of using a knife to cut these, I was like this really flexible guy with long toenails and I used my toenails to cut them. So I sat cross legged on the floor and I sliced and diced all the vegetables using my toenails.

• 2:12:19Peter Attia?

  But I was, everything else about me is the same.

• 2:12:21Tim Ferriss?

  And she's like, ah.

• 2:12:23Peter Attia?

  She's like, what? And I was like, I want you to like literally picture this. I'm the same guy. Everything about me is the same, except for this one little thing, which is I just like to use my toenails to cut the vegetables instead of a knife and a, you know, chopping block. Then, you know, she sort of humored me with that. And I just went over and over and over again. And to this day, I still play this game constantly. And I actually asked her before I came over, I was like, do you remember some of the ones that really like annoyed you when I would ask these? And so she reminded me of a few. So one of them, we were in Italy this summer and we, we walk into a department store and they have this big, bright red Speedo with a gold belt. And I was like.

• 2:13:04Peter Attia?

  Would you like me if I was the exact same guy, but I only wore this as my shorts? So like, I would still wear shoes and a shirt, but instead of wearing like the shorts that I'm wearing now, like I would only wear this bright red Speedo with the big gold belt.

• 2:13:19Tim Ferriss?

  The European, this, this American hero.

• 2:13:21Peter Attia?

  Yes.

• 2:13:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:22Peter Attia?

  And she's like, ah, probably not. And I'm like, and then of course, whenever she says that, I'm always like, how can you be so superficial? Like, how can that one thing be such a deal breaker? Another one that she remembered was car dancing. I was like, what if I was the exact same guy, but I was, I would dance like crazy while I was driving. And then I would mock, do you remember in 16 Candles when Anthony Michael Hall is dancing around Molly Ringwald at the dance?

• 2:13:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 2:13:46Peter Attia?

  I would do that dance, but I always did that while driving. And I was like, what if I was the exact same guy, but I did that?

• 2:13:56Peter Attia?

  What if I wanted to watch the Smurfs for two hours every single day? I loved the Smurfs.

• 2:14:01Tim Ferriss?

  Like the Smurfs.

• 2:14:02Peter Attia?

  The TV show.

• 2:14:03Tim Ferriss?

  The TV show, not, not movie.

• 2:14:05Peter Attia?

  That's right, right, right, right. So like, I loved Hefty Smurf and I was totally obsessed with him.

• 2:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  Hefty.

• 2:14:10Peter Attia?

  Remember Hefty Smurf was like the really muscular dude?

• 2:14:13Tim Ferriss?

  I don't remember.

• 2:14:14Peter Attia?

  Yeah. And, um, so anyway, I just had like a long list of these. I just always do it. I always play the, I love playing the what if game. And I'm, I'm, I'm actually kind of amazed at the amount of times she would just veto me based on the stupid thing I say.

• 2:14:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I would imagine at some point she's like, how can I, he's not gonna let me out of this. So like, how do I cut this short or make it interesting for myself?

• 2:14:39Peter Attia?

  But if anybody else is listening to this and you're trying to just insert a little spice in your life, I can't suggest the what if game highly enough.

• 2:14:50Peter Attia?

  It's really where you'll find out, like where the rubber hits the road.

• 2:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. How much would it take? How much would I have to pay you to? That's another good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  That one, that one devolves quickly in my experience. If, if more than two guys are involved, generally speaking. Especially if one of them's Kevin Rose. Awful, very quickly. Hashtag Kev Kev.

• 2:15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry. I remember one time, I just have to give Kevin some shit since we know him so well. Uh, I don't know if I've ever talked about this publicly, but Kevin was sort of famous. I don't think he does this as much anymore. But he was famous among the friend group I had in the Bay area for bedding people to do things. Right? I'll give you the, I'll give you whatever amount if you do this. Right? And he would, he would do this all the time to try to get people in trouble or not in a malevolent way. Mind you, just to like create mischief and be like, I'll give you X if you do this. And we were out at a steakhouse in San Francisco and there was this bottle of Tabasco or something like that.

• 2:16:06Tim Ferriss?

  And we're like 80% done with the meal. And I had ordered surf and turf and people had ordered various things. And Kevin goes, if you drink that whole bottle of hot sauce, I'll give you $20. And I was like, okay, timeout. Kevin, you're not fucking poor and you're offering me $20. To basically destroy my GI tract. Destroy my GI tract, maybe have to like tap out for two days or like go to the hospital. How fucking cheap are you? Like, that's embarrassing. You should be ashamed of yourself. And I had just finished the lobster tails or no, there's more to it. There's like a full lobster or half shell or whatever.

• 2:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I was working on my steak and I said, you know what? $20? That's bullshit. I'll give you $10,000 if you can eat this lobster shell.

• 2:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  This is in front of an entire table. And to his credit, he actually took a crack at it and he he ate like an inch and a half of one of the antenna and was like, I can't do this.

• 2:17:15Tim Ferriss?

  But he did give it a shot, so.

• 2:17:17Peter Attia?

  So here's another question. How many times in the history of? Let's just limit it to Homo sapiens. Do you think that game has been played by females?

• 2:17:26Tim Ferriss?

  You know, if we're talking just because this is getting waiting into dangerous territory. But if we're talking

• 2:17:33Tim Ferriss?

  just knee jerk response. When it gets to like dangerous levels of stupidity. I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd definitely put that on the low side. Very few.

• 2:17:45Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I just, I don't know what it is about guys that make us so dumb when it comes to this stuff.

• 2:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, just to, to, to maybe give, give people a showcase.

• 2:17:56Peter Attia?

  By the way, for context, in high school, for $2, I drank an entire bottle, one liter or 750 ml of lemon juice.

• 2:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, oh.

• 2:18:06Peter Attia?

  You know that real lemon, lemon juice stuff?

• 2:18:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 2:18:08Peter Attia?

  750 ml for $2. I drank it in high school.

• 2:18:12Tim Ferriss?

  Terrible.

• 2:18:12Peter Attia?

  Oh, I, I, I pretty much perforated my stomach.

• 2:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  Terrible.

• 2:18:17Peter Attia?

  But it was like, oh, well, you're, you're, you're egging me on to do this? Oh, yeah, I'll do that.

• 2:18:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a, there are many Instagram accounts that I sort of

• 2:18:27Tim Ferriss?

  rubberneck at watching and I, I, this probably came via one of my friends who shall remain nameless. But it's pretty sure it's just called

• 2:18:38Tim Ferriss?

  doing things wrong. And it's basically people fucking up like everything you can imagine possible. BMX bike riding, parkour, whatever. And the ratio, like the male female ratio is

• 2:18:52Tim Ferriss?

  Is astonishing, right? It's astonishing and also completely unsurprising at the same time. It's just like all guys, you're like, you see it coming from a mile away. You're like, terrible, terrible, terrible idea. And then boom, payoff. Yep. Turns out that was a bad idea.

• 2:19:04Peter Attia?

  It's just sort of funny to think like, it's possible our species couldn't have got here. Like, it's possible, like, there's at least another parallel universe that didn't quite make it, because the male reproductive end of the bargain could not be lived up to due to just constant stupidity.

• 2:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  I don't, I think it's a fine line, right? I mean, I don't, I don't think we're that far away from that already, right? It's just.

• 2:19:30Peter Attia?

  Well, now it's different because evolution isn't the thing. It's like, it's not going to be natural selection that kills us now. We'll just kill ourselves directly. But like, natural selection could have basically weeded us out just based on male stupidity.

• 2:19:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm, I don't have kids yet, and I'm astonished that I haven't won the Darwin Award yet, right? At this point. All right, let's do one more excited or changed mind on that you think might be a good closer.

• 2:19:57Peter Attia?

  Um, well, the other one I had on excited was, was, um, which I really owe a lot of credit to you is, is this whole sort of podcasting thing and, and learning, learning might even be too strong a word, practicing this art of interviewing. It is, so, you know, this whole thing started as sort of an experiment a year and a half ago. And I just didn't, I couldn't have imagined how enjoyable it is. I mean, I think what you're doing today is way more fun than what I'm doing. I don't actually like being asked questions that much anymore, but I love asking questions.

• 2:20:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:30Peter Attia?

  And I find myself listening to podcasts much more than I ever did before. And listening to now two things. One is what's the content, you know, but also, and perhaps as importantly, if not more importantly, is how is this interview extracting that? How is this interviewer? What are they thinking? What would I have thought at that moment? Did they think of, oh, they went down a path I wouldn't have thought of? Okay, how can, what can I take away from that? So the good side of that is I think it allows me to try to, you know, become better at this craft. The downside honestly is I feel much more pressure now. I feel, and not to the point where it's taking away or detracting from the experience,

• 2:21:13Peter Attia?

  but I, I, I've had to now go back and listen to some of my own podcasts because that's one way you learn is you, you sort of have to go back and listen to it. And that's just, as you probably know, that's a very painful thing to do. Like, do you ever listen to your own podcast?

• 2:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:27Peter Attia?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:27Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely.

• 2:21:28Peter Attia?

  I think you have to if you want to get better at it.

• 2:21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you have to. I mean, it's like reviewing footage of a, of a training session or something. It's, it's a requirement, I think, if you want to do post-game analysis and improve what you're doing, but it can be really painful.

• 2:21:44Peter Attia?

  It's super tough. So it is, again, yet another thing like archery, like race car driving, where, you know, there's this opportunity to be somewhat critical in the spirit of trying to get better. But it's also opened me up to a new world I never really paid attention to before, which is journalism, like, you know, sort of TV journalism or radio journalism,

• 2:22:05Peter Attia?

  where, you know, you gotta be able to think on your feet. You've got to be able to multitask. And for me, I don't know if you feel this way, but I think the hardest thing is to somehow parallel process being engaged in the discussion that you're having, but allowing a part of your brain to be thinking about where you are on a path and where you want to go. And those are, that is, that's like next level ninja moves.

• 2:22:28Tim Ferriss?

  It is, uh, what's, what surprised me maybe the most about the podcast interviewing game or the format of, of one-on-one, one-hour-plus interviews is that, is how

• 2:22:47Tim Ferriss?

  Coachable and improvable, many of the component skills are. I've really been astonished by that. And one example of that would be the ability to bookmark, even when not taking notes. Right now, I took notes throughout this conversation in case I wanted to come back to something. But even in the case of not taking notes, the ability to bookmark departure points where your interviewee goes off in a different direction. And the capacity to then return to those bookmarks as if you had flagged them. That, that is an ability that, let's throw an arbitrary number on it, like 10x to my ability to do that in any conversation vis a vis the podcast.

• 2:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  And it makes you wonder like, what are the cognitive? Like, what's the mechanism behind that? And like, does that transfer to anything else? Like, am I unbeknownst, to me, developing other cognitive functions that correlate to that? Right? And certainly, listening, listening to your own audio really showcases any tics that you have, or any pet phrases, or any words that you tend to start too many sentences with. I used to go, Sue, Sue, Sue, Sue. And I listened to this audio and it was agonizing. And then there was one interview in particular. I'd love to hear, I know that intros drove you completely insane for a period of time. They still do.

• 2:24:16Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So we can come back to that. I don't think people fully appreciate how torturous that process can be. But I interviewed Ed Catmull, who I think he's still the president of Pixar, but at the time was president of Pixar. And he was coming out with a book that, great book, actually. It's Creativity, Inc. And he was the first guest ever on the podcast who I'd never had a prior conversation with, or I never had a prior, I'd never had a conversation with him prior to the recording. And there was a mix up in communication. And he thought the podcast was a lot shorter than my intended time. Right? He's a busy guy. And he wasn't angry. He wasn't.

• 2:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hypercritical, but it's, it got off to a tense start because I was like, how do I reconcile this? Can we go longer? And it was just an unexpected variable to deal with. And I was, I was very nervous going into it to begin with. And did the interview. I was quite happy with it, all things considered. And then I'm looking at feedback on Twitter. And I see three tweets in a row that are, that are MMM, dot, dot, dot, MMM, dot, dot, dot. And I see a few of these. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? And I go back and I listen to the audio. And every

• 2:25:35Tim Ferriss?

  time he said anything, I went, hmm, hmm, hmm, for a fucking hour, an hour and a half, whatever it was. And I just could not believe how fucking oblivious I was to the fact that I was doing that every 15 seconds. And I could think of 15 of those, right? And, or at one point, I don't know what it was. It was another nervous tick in one of my interviews. And I was going, sound like I had a fucking chipmunk on my shoulder chewing acorns for the whole interview. Oh, torture.

• 2:26:18Peter Attia?

  I mean, those things stress me out, but not nearly as much as the bigger picture of missing the exit. Or like, if, if, if, if an interview is a discussion where you're driving down a road, it's like missing a side road. Yeah. You know, missing a, missing a side road and getting lost. And I don't know. I mean, I, I, I think I am better than I was at the outset. But I think this is definitely like the steepest learning curve. And there's so, I mean, I have an aspiration for what it can be. And I do love listening to great interviewers. Now, in the podcast space, it's a bit misleading. So if you listen to somebody like Steve Dubner, who I think is fantastic, that type of a podcast is produced.

• 2:26:59Tim Ferriss?

  Freakonomics.

• 2:27:00Peter Attia?

  Yes. Yeah. And so that's a little bit different. But, you know, I, I mean, I love listening to Katie Couric. I love listening to people do long form interviews. And, you know, I've asked, I've actually asked Katie for some, for some advice, which has been great. And I, I, I, I, any chance I get to ask somebody who does this for a living.

• 2:27:21Tim Ferriss?

  Do you recall what you asked her and what she responded with, or, or anything that you've picked up from good, which is not always-

• 2:27:28Peter Attia?

  I'm trying to think what the best piece of advice I've been given so far.

• 2:27:33Tim Ferriss?

  Or any good advice?

• 2:27:34Peter Attia?

  Well, well, I'll, I'll, I'll definitely tell you, at the outset, the hardest part I had was, I, and it's embarrassing because you feel like such an idiot when you're doing it, and you realize it as it happens, is you're talking over the person, you know, and I just think, like, in your excitement, you sometimes just, like, okay, but I have another question now. And it's like, I don't want to forget these other, I don't want to forget all these questions. So, so that's something where it's a lot easier in person, because body language makes that easier to avoid. I do most of my interviews in person, so that that's a bit easier. I think in the end, I've, I've learned, it comes down to prep, you know, you, you really, the better interviews are ones where I feel like I'm more prepared.

• 2:28:16Peter Attia?

  And the interviews that I come out of where I think, man, like, I can't believe I didn't know all of these other things that would have allowed me to take this discussion in another direction.

• 2:28:30Tim Ferriss?

  There are also many different styles of interviewing, right? I remember early on, I was very lucky, I don't know how this happened, to be introduced to one of the head researchers, if not the head researcher for Inside the Actor Studio. And I asked him if he'd be willing to look at transcripts of some of my interviews to offer pointers or observations. And it was very, very valuable. And the point that he made as a preface to feedback was exactly what I said, and that is there are many different ways to skin the cat. And James

• 2:29:09Tim Ferriss?

  Lipton, who is fantastic in his role as the interviewer slash host of Inside the Actor Studio, almost never changes the order of questions. Once he has a stack of questions on blue cards, he will not deviate. He almost without exception knows the answers to every question he's going to ask. And that's, say, one end of the spectrum. Then you have-

• 2:29:36Tim Ferriss?

  A Larry King and there are others of sort of Larry King's school of interviewing who go in, I'm not going to say blind, but intentionally with beginner mind, not knowing much about the the interviewee unless they've met them before, so that they can ask questions kind of from first principles, right, mimicking the listener's experience. And then you have a lot in between, you have a ton in between. And as as you noted, the produced shows like This American Life or Freakonomics are spectacularly good, but they're very different from a minimally edited, long form interview of, say, two hours or

• 2:30:20Tim Ferriss?

  where we are, two, almost two and a half hours. And the ability to compartmentalize, like you, like you said, to parallel process is also something that I could not do in the beginning. And I'm not saying I'm the epitome of of skill or ability with it now, but it does seem to be a faculty that you can cultivate. Who are other interviewers you've paid a lot of attention to? I mean, I certainly, when I was getting started, I listened to and still do listen to quite a bit of Rogan, you know, Joe Rogan, Mark Maron, very different styles, right? Both very skilled, but very different styles. I think Steve Rinella actually is a fantastic interviewer. He's he's such a subject matter

• 2:31:02Tim Ferriss?

  expert with a lot of what he does. And there are many, many other people who are just outstanding. But does there any, is there anyone who's who?

• 2:31:11Peter Attia?

  I think part of the problem is I'm still trying to figure out where I am on that spectrum, you know? So so I think one of the goals I have for next year is to hone this craft even more and and actually sort of figure out what my voice is and then sort of start to double down on the learning around that. Now, of course, again, you could argue that being malleable would be the best outcome, being able to do one extreme or the other. I don't go into interviews with questions, but I go in with a lot of prep. I have a team that helps with that. So so I go in with, you know, four, five, sometimes I did a podcast a week ago with 28 pages of notes going in, but none of them were questions. It was just content.

• 2:31:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do you refer to those pages in the midst of the interview?

• 2:31:58Peter Attia?

  Yeah. So what I usually do is I'll say to the person I'm interviewing, and sometimes I don't.

• 2:32:02Tim Ferriss?

  And actually, if you don't mind me interrupting. And talking on top of you for a second. What does, what do the prep instructions look like? When your team helps you prep? What are their marching orders? What do they do?

• 2:32:15Peter Attia?

  It varies totally by the podcast and subject matter.

• 2:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  Give me an example.

• 2:32:18Peter Attia?

  For this one, for the 28 page one, this was a podcast, which was very difficult because I was interviewing two people. So that's, I've only done that three times or maybe even twice. And it's much harder to interview two people. And like you, these are people, like the example you gave, I'd never spoken with them before. So I identified them as subject matter experts. The subject was THC, CBD, all things related to cannabis. So I identified them as exactly the two smartest people I wanted to talk to in the room, but had never, it was all through email. No communication otherwise. And I said to my team, look, these are things I want to understand that I don't know. I believe these are things the public wants to know. I need a dossier that is the best available knowledge

• 2:33:02Peter Attia?

  you have on all of these topics. And then I'm going to basically look where the gaps are and I'm going to sort of run the sled between the gaps in the snow.

• 2:33:09Tim Ferriss?

  Did you send five to 10 bullets per silo? In terms of what Peter wants to know, what the public might want to know? I mean, how much are you sending to your team as a starting point?

• 2:33:20Peter Attia?

  Um, so in that case, I'm trying to think, I think Jess took the lead on that analysis. No, I think actually Jess took the first cut. So she came back with kind of like 10 pages of stuff. And then I was like, okay, let me digest this for.

• 2:33:36Tim Ferriss?

  But what did you provide her first?

• 2:33:38Peter Attia?

  Like literally nothing, blank space.

• 2:33:40Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it was blank space?

• 2:33:40Peter Attia?

  Yeah, total blank space. And then she came back and then I reshaped it and said, okay, well, I also need to know more about this, more about this, more about this. This is good here. Thank you. This one is good, but can you give me a little bit more insight? So that's like one extreme end of the spectrum. And then other podcasts that, I mean, I have podcasts where I literally go in with nothing except blank paper to take notes on well word speaking, kind of like what you and I are doing right now for you where you're, you know, there's nothing you need to prep for this type of an interview. But, uh, and then there's very technical ones.

• 2:34:12Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, I do have 28 pages to my right on egg boxing, but we didn't manage to fully. Unpack that next time.

• 2:34:21Peter Attia?

  I mean, it's just, it's such a nascent space. You know, the bottom line is it's, I'm a little embarrassed sometimes when I listen to my self-interview, you know, I, when you hear it the second time, you think, how did you, how did you miss that thing that they said? Like, they said something so important. They were opening a door here and you didn't even go in that door. And that's another, I think, part of what, what the people who are good at this can do is they can release their own agenda and sometimes go where the story is more interesting. And I've definitely seen many examples of how I've missed that opportunity.

• 2:34:56Tim Ferriss?

  I had a lot of trouble with that also. And fixation on remembering questions, which is actually part of the reason why I still often recommend to novice podcasters that they pre-record a number of episodes via phone first, meaning via Skype and eCamp Call Recorder or ZenCaster, because it, it allows the ability to look at notes so that you're not as preoccupied. What I've found very helpful for myself is more of a structural prep than a content prep in the sense that I will decide as a placeholder, and it's not something that I fixate on, but to

• 2:35:34Tim Ferriss?

  have, say, a post-it note to my side, which says, first 30, this type of stuff, next 30, this type of stuff, next 30, this type of stuff, but no specific questions.

• 2:35:46Peter Attia?

  Yep.

• 2:35:47Tim Ferriss?

  And then I will look at the recording time and segue roughly at those two pivot points. And the other thing that I've found really, really helpful, and this mirrors how I've done a lot of my best writing, which I haven't done in quite a while, and I'm going to be getting back into writing, that is knowing which handful of questions I'm going to start with, and I might only get through two, and then where I want to bookend it. Questions, I think, could lead to a, a grand finale or a nice way to wrap up. And then in between, it's just looking for the side streets like the entire time.

• 2:36:21Peter Attia?

  It's a fun craft. I mean, again, this is sort of like archery, sort of like driving a race car. Anybody can do it. It's hard to do really, really well.

• 2:36:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like, I think it's Bushnell's law. This was in the gaming world, it was in the context of Atari at the time, but I want to say that the quote is roughly, "A great game is easy to learn, hard to master."

• 2:36:47Peter Attia?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:36:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that'll keep you moving for a long time.

• 2:36:51Peter Attia?

  Yep, absolutely. Well said.

• 2:36:54Tim Ferriss?

  So Peter, tell people where they can find you if they want to listen to the most meticulous dissection of subjects like THC, CBD, MRI, longevity. You've got all manner of subjects. I mean, you also introduced me to Ryan Flaherty, the savant of speed when it comes to physical training. You cover a lot. The podcast is?

• 2:37:21Peter Attia?

  The Drive.

• 2:37:22Tim Ferriss?

  The Drive.

• 2:37:23Peter Attia?

  And I exist on any sort of whatever, my website, Twitter, Instagram is all peteratia MD.

• 2:37:31Tim Ferriss?

  peteratia MD.com.

• 2:37:33Peter Attia?

  And that's only because Peter was taken. I hate having MD. I can't say it without thinking about, "Meet the Parents."

• 2:37:44Peter Attia?

  Dr. Bob, Bob MD.

• 2:37:50Peter Attia?

  My wife still makes fun of me for that. Peteratia MD.

• 2:37:56Tim Ferriss?

  If you had a blog post or a series of blog posts that you would suggest people start with if they want to explore your thinking in the written medium, where would you suggest people start? Is there anywhere you would suggest they start?

• 2:38:11Peter Attia?

  We have a five-part series on science, understanding science, called Studying Studies.

• 2:38:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so good.

• 2:38:18Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I think that's a helpful one if you consume news about health, you know.

• 2:38:24Tim Ferriss?

  Which you do, right?

• 2:38:25Peter Attia?

  It's hard not to.

• 2:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you read, if you are exposed to media that contain any health claims whatsoever, then chances are you're coming across.

• 2:38:35Peter Attia?

  Yeah, so that's.

• 2:38:36Tim Ferriss?

  Studies show bananas increase risk of colorectal cancer 47%.

• 2:38:41Peter Attia?

  Right, right.

• 2:38:41Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a second.

• 2:38:42Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you want to get through the fine print, so Studying Studies, which Bob Kaplan and I wrote in 2017, I believe, I think that's a great place to start for folks.

• 2:38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Great, and I'll link to that at timferrissmd.com.

• 2:38:58Peter Attia?

  And I'll shamelessly plug for our Sunday newsletter, which I know you like.

• 2:39:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you should.

• 2:39:03Peter Attia?

  If you can sign up for what I describe as a non-lame weekly email.

• 2:39:09Tim Ferriss?

  I get your emails, and there aren't that many emails that I subscribe to, because I have enough in my inbox, but yours is one I get, one of the few. And I will link to the newsletter, your newsletter, and everything else that we've talked about at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Attia, A-T-T-I-A, and it'll pop right up. Anything else you'd like to say? Closing comments, limericks? Anything else?

• 2:39:36Peter Attia?

  I don't think so. I think I could certainly offer about 20 more dumb things I do, but we could save that for another day.

• 2:39:43Tim Ferriss?

  We could save that for a follow-up. If you guys enjoyed the format, please let me know in the blog comments that accompany this podcast, or on Twitter at T Ferris, two R's, two S's. Just let me know if you liked or hated this format, or anything in between. The kind of five things with person X. Might do three things with, five things with, whatever, but you get the idea. Kind of excited about, changed mind about, and then stupid absurd things. Thinking about doing more of these because it's a damn easy plug-and-play format, for one thing. And Peter, we have a dinner date, and we will get to that at some time in the very, very near future. So I guess autophagy be damned.

• 2:40:28Tim Ferriss?

  Here comes the calories. And thanks for making the time, man.

• 2:40:31Peter Attia?

  Thank you.

• 2:40:33Tim 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 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.

• 2:41:15Tim 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 Peloton. I love Peloton. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule, making it to the studio, or dealing with some commute to the gym. I have a Peloton bike in my master bedroom at home and it is one of the first things that I do in the morning. I wake up, meditate for 20 minutes, and then I knock out a short 20-minute ride. Usually, high-intensity interval training or HIIT.

• 2:42:00Tim Ferriss?

  Then I take a shower and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's beautifully convenient and has become something that I actually look forward to. And I was skeptical in the beginning. I didn't think I would dig it. And I really do. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other Peloton riders from across the country on the interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. I tend to use a lot of the classes on demand and have four to six of them that I've bookmarked and use over and over again. There are up to 14 new classes every day with thousands of classes on demand, and there are a variety of workouts to choose from. 45-minute classes, 20-minute burns, hip hop, rock and roll, low-impact, or high-intensity. Pick the class structure and style that works for you.

• 2:42:42Tim Ferriss?

  Peloton has an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City. They really do have great instructors of every possible personality and style. And you can find one that you love, no matter what you're in the mood for. Personally, I use Matt Wilpers a lot, but I use a bunch of them. I'm promiscuous and enjoy classes from a lot of their instructors. With real-time metrics, you can track your performance over time and continue to be your personal best. I did not think the gamification would work for me, and they really hit the nail on the head. It does work, at least for me, tremendously well to keep me pushing consistently. So, discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited-time offer.

• 2:43:24Tim Ferriss?

  Go to onepeloton.com, that's spelled O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com. Enter the code TIMPODCAST, all one word, at checkout and get $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great workout at home anytime you want. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIMPODCAST to get started. This episode is brought to you by Humans Beat Elite. The product is Beat Elite, not meat-elite, not beat, B-E-A-T, but beat, B-E-E-T, elite, which you might consider an endurance superfood, or what they would call a nitric oxide activator. Really, all I care about is this product.

• 2:44:08Tim Ferriss?

  Beat Elite was introduced to me several years ago by a multiple-time world champion and has since been recommended to me by multiple world-class athletes. And I use it pre-workout for endurance training. That could be cycling, that could be swimming, it is very rarely running. But my subjective experience supports what some of the research would seem to be.

• 2:44:37Tim Ferriss?

  And that is that you can work out, say, up to 15 to 18% longer if you're looking at high intensity interval training, HIIT, for instance, and at recovery times. So the, let's call it the refractory period for getting back to peak power output, for instance. So I use Beadley, just used it this morning before a 30-minute, somewhat intense swim workout. And I have found that particularly for someone like myself who has really terrible endurance, genetically speaking, my presets are horrible, that it really does allow a 10 to 20% boost

• 2:45:22Tim Ferriss?

  in shorter workout performance, especially, although I do know people who've used it for 20-mile runs, 30-mile runs, much longer endurance events. And they've got all sorts of different points about the mechanisms of action and so on. But suffice to say that it is a lot easier to consume Beadley than to eat the nitric oxide equivalent of six whole beets, for instance, much more rapidly assimilated. And it tastes great. It will also stain your pet polar bear, or your white cotton, or your down pillows. So don't spill it on anything, but it does taste delicious.

• 2:46:03Tim Ferriss?

  I tend to mix this into a shake that I have pre-workout in the mornings. So there you have it. I've used Beadley for a number of years now. It is trusted by hundreds of elite teams, athletes, and organizations all over the world. And it is also informed sports certified, which means that it is certified to not contain any banned substances. So if you're a competitive athlete, that is one fewer thing that you need to worry about. So take your performance to the next level with Beadley. Try it out. Go to livehuman.com/tim to get 20% off your first purchase. The team at Human, that's the company, is making this offer exclusive to you, my dear

• 2:46:48Tim Ferriss?

  listeners. So check it out. Go to livehuman.com/tim. Super simple. Livehuman.com/tim. Give it a shot.