#232: The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour: Controlling Stress, Nutrition Upgrades, and Improved Health

Welcome to the second installment of The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. After more than 200 conversations with the world's top performers, you start to spot certain patterns. These are the shared habits, hacks, philosophies, and tools that are the common threads of success, happiness, health, and wealth. These commonalities were the premise of my most recent book, The New York Times #1 bestseller Tools of Titans http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1328683788/offsitoftimfe-20 -- a compilation of my favorite lessons, routines, and tips of many of my guests. In this particular episode, I've gathered some of the best advice from past guests about fitness, nutrition, and wellness. This includes conversations with: General Stanley McChrystal about thriving on one meal per day. Tony Robbins about morning discipline and routines. Wim Hof about consciously controlling his autonomic immune system. Dominic D'Agostino about nutritional strategies for peak performers. Without further ado, let's get started. I hope you enjoy this episode of The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim, the world's most popular meditation app (with more than four million users). It's used in more than 150 countries, and many of my closest friends swear by it. Try Headspace's free Take10 program https://www.headspace.com/tim -- 10 minutes of guided meditation a day for 10 days. It's like a warm bath for your mind. Meditation doesn't need to be complicated or expensive, and it's had a huge impact on my life. Try Headspace for free https://www.headspace.com/tim for a few days and see what I mean.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I have used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. The only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Headspace. More than 80% of the people I have interviewed, world-class performers across the military, entertainment, sports, and beyond, all have some type of meditative practice. I tried for years and years and failed miserably. The key is making it simple, and you can dramatically improve your life in just 10 minutes a day, and technology can help you. This change comes through guided meditation, and Headspace is by far the most popular app for this purpose. More than 4 million users. It's meditation made simple. So what I recommend is that you take this practice, meditation, which is rooted in thousands of years of tradition, supported by thousands of scientific studies,

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  and try it for 10 minutes a day for 10 ...days. That's all you need to do. You could also check out the founder, Andy Puddicombe's TED Talk, which has more than 5.5 million views. His last name is P U D D I C O M B E, if you want to look that up. But otherwise, download the free Headspace app, I have it on my phone, and begin their Take 10 program. For 10 days of guided meditation, completely free, 10 minutes a day, that's all it takes. You should give it a shot. Headspace.com/Tim. Just go to Headspace.com/Tim.

• 2:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. Tim Ferriss here. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a Tim Ferriss Radio Hour, which is a special edition. I will come back to that in a second. As always, it's my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the habits, routines, breakfasts, or lack thereof, favorite books, etc., that you can test and apply in your own life. They come from many different worlds: entrepreneurship, athletics, entertainment, special operations, and so on. And the goal is tactical practical. It's very specific advice and suggested purchases or otherwise that you can immediately apply. Now, after more than 200 of these conversations, you

• 3:27Tim Ferriss?

  can start to spot certain patterns. These are the shared habits, hacks, philosophies, tools, and so on, that are the common threads. This is very interesting to me and a very common question from you all, for instance. And this ranges from meditation to fitness to many different domains. You start to spot the common threads of excellence, even across many different disciplines. So, these commonalities were the premise of my most recent book, and number one New York Times bestseller, Tools of Titans. So, thank you guys so much for making that possible, which is a compilation of many of my favorite lessons, routines, tips, and so on, from 100-plus different folks. These episodes in the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour are a concentrated dose of the patterns organized around themes that you guys have

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  requested. So, in this particular episode, I've gathered some of the best advice from past guests about fitness, nutrition, and, for lack of a better... Better term, wellness, although that term bugs me, but it's a good catch-all. In this episode, I talk to, for instance, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal to hear how he explains how he not only survived, but thrived on one meal per day for years.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  And I do find that there are certain days your body just says, eat and eat right now. And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan, and I'd grab a handful of those.

• 4:44Tim Ferriss?

  I also talked to world-famous performance coach Tony Robbins, one of my favorites. Of course, I got started reading a lot of his stuff, even as far back as college. And I asked him to explain his morning discipline and routines.

• 4:55Tony Robbins?

  Because your brain's going, you're going to freeze to death. It sounds horrific. It really isn't. You'll find out it's not that painful. Going in my cold plunge at 57 degrees feels more jolting than this does, even though it's colder.

• 5:06Tim Ferriss?

  Then we dig into the habits of Dutch world record holder, adventurer, daredevil, and all-around crazy guy, Wim Hof, and discuss his ability to control, or at least affect, this is consciously, affect his supposed autonomous immune system, which is fascinating.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  You are the Iceman. You do exceptional features, but nobody is able to do that without that proper training of so many years. And I told them, no, I can train them within 10 days.

• 5:38Tim Ferriss?

  And we end the episode by getting down and dirty into the science of ketosis with Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, also known as Dom, as we discuss nutritional strategies for peak performers. And Dom, just in case you don't know, he can do a week-long fast and then deadlift 500 pounds for something like 10 repetitions in front of his class that he teaches. So he's not only Bruce Banner, but the Incredible Hulk. So, without further ado, let's get started. I hope you enjoy this episode of the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described Stanley McChrystal as, quote, "Perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I have ever met," end quote. That is high praise, certainly, and for good reason.

• 6:23Tim Ferriss?

  McChrystal served as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, shorthand is JSOC. You may have heard of it. That where he was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. His last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Now, we talked about a lot. We had, I want to say about a two-hour conversation. One of the things that stood out was how Stan rewards himself with a large dinner at night because he doesn't handle smaller meals throughout the day very well. While this might seem odd, it's actually become a more and more popular approach to diet with the rise of intermittent fasting. And there are many different varieties of intermittent fasting. There's five-two, where you eat normally for five days of the week, and then for two

• 7:07Tim Ferriss?

  days, you might eat subcalorically, or even go down to, say, 500 calories, or fast completely. So that would be intermittent fasting on a weekly schedule, which I've tested. Then you have, for instance, say, 16 hours of fasting and eight hours of eating, or the opposite, you could do 18 and 6. There are many different ways to approach this. A lot of the male peak performers over the age of 40 that I've interviewed skip breakfast, a very high percentage. This includes Wim Hof, for instance, who's coming up later, and many, many others. There are exceptions, though, who do things slightly differently. Art Devaney, who's worth checking out, he's older than 80 years of age and shredded, still

• 7:49Tim Ferriss?

  an athlete, an economist, and if you haven't heard his episode, you also should hear that one. But he does a reasonably-sized breakfast, trains a few hours later, and then fasts until dinner. So he does breakfast, no lunch, and then dinner. I have at least recently found this to be more effective for me personally, and particularly on training days, if I can time it such that I train earlier in the day, I find it particularly effective. When I skip breakfast, I would say 20% of the time or so, I find myself fatigued in the afternoon because I postpone lunch too long. So if I'm gonna skip breakfast, it's important, A, that I wake up on the earlier side, and

• 8:30Tim Ferriss?

  B, that I have lunch, say, four to five hours after waking. Otherwise, I tend to have a slump in energy in the afternoon, and then to self-medicate with Caffeine, exogenous ketones, and all sorts of other things. So at the moment, I find that I function best if I am on, say, a weight training and athletic schedule, meaning I have multiple sessions of movement throughout the week, either breakfast and dinner, skipping lunch, or three meals a day. And I will do my intermittent fasting in a slightly different way, and I do think the term intermittent fasting is used so often to have almost become meaningless, but I like to do a contiguous three-day fast each month, generally Thursday dinner to Sunday

• 9:15Tim Ferriss?

  dinner, and that should be medically supervised, and this is largely at the recommendation or based on my conversations with Dom D'Agostino, which comes up later. Now, before I get too ahead of myself, let's listen to McChrystal's specific approach. I have a slew of questions, but the one that I have been asked to ask you, Stan, more than perhaps any other, is why one meal a day? Do you actually eat one meal a day?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  I do. And people ask me, why? Is it some zen connection with something? And no, what happened was when I was a lieutenant in special forces many, many years ago, I thought I was getting fat, and I started running, and I started running distance, which I enjoyed. But I also found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating three or four small-discipline meals. I'm better to defer gratification and then eat one meal. And for me, that's dinner, and so what I do is I sort of push myself hard all day, try to get everything done, and then, and sort of reward myself with dinner at night.

• 10:25Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you usually eat dinner?

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Well, whenever I'm finished work, and it would be like 8:00 or 8:30. There's a challenge when you work really long hours, because suddenly you start to eat very late, and then you go directly to bed, and that, that you feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach.

• 10:41Tim Ferriss?

  And do you drink coffee earlier in the day? I'm just thinking with the workout in that many hours, a lot of people would fade. How do you prevent yourself from fading?

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have a tendency, I'll drink coffee, I'll drink other beverages too, water and different things. And I do find that there are certain days, your body just says, eat and eat right now. And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan, and I'd grab a handful of those. And other times I might be out doing something physical in the military, like road marching, and suddenly your body communicates, eat pretty quickly, or you won't keep road marching. And I'll do that. But otherwise, I like to stick to the idea of one a night.

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. You know, this is a constant topic of conversation in the intermittent fasting worlds, and everyone has, Ori Hoff Meckler has his thing, the Paleo guys have their thoughts, obviously. Are you, Chris, are you a one meal a day kind of guy?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Well, when I was working for then General McChrystal as his aide de camp, his last year running the Joint Special Operations Command, it was sort of a by directive. There was no other choice. That was just what we call the battle rhythm of the organization. And when, you know, the old man got up to eat, that's, you did it then, or you didn't do it at all. So, yeah, I've lived on that train. But I would be the first to tell others, because as Dan alluded to, it sort of became the driver in the organization, but this is what we do. And I would tell people as his aide, he won't judge you if you eat breakfast. This is the way his metabolism works. He doesn't do this as a demonstration of personal strength. This is just what works. So, don't think you're impressing him by not eating lunch or whatever.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  But there was a, the classic story around this, when I first joined the inner circle staff, we had this Command Sergeant Major, well, called Jody, a legend in the community. He had been with Stan for about three and a half years at that point. And so, I was asking him about the one meal a day thing. And he said, when he showed up for the first year, he's, you know, two feet from Stan for the entire five years they worked together. And he said, well, this is what the boss does, this is what I'll do. So, he did a meal a day, and he does not have a metabolism that drives toward it. And we lived in these little crummy sort of Quonset huts next to where the headquarters was.

• 12:55Tim Ferriss?

  Did you say Quonset huts?

• 12:56Speaker 00

  You know, just sort of wooden huts. Pretty Spartan living. About 50 yards from where the headquarters was in Iraq. And Jody said about a year into the tour, that General McChrystal calls him and says, "Jody." Get in here. So he runs over to it. What's up, sir? And he goes, and he said, I hadn't really looked through his hooch before. And he said, General McChrystal's pointing at these, this little tin of pretzels he has. And he goes, I think there's mice eating my pretzels. And Jody said, I almost whipped up my gun and shot him. And I said, you've been eating pretzels?

• 13:28Tim Ferriss?

  Dark secrets.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  For a year? And you had pretzels in your room? He goes, it was the most unprofessional I've ever been with a good officer. I just stormed out of the room.

• 13:39Tim Ferriss?

  You know, low blood sugar will do that. That was so funny. Makes cowards of men. Long distance running and low blood sugar. Working out. Do you work out every day?

• 13:47Speaker 04

  I do.

• 13:48Tim Ferriss?

  What type of exercise and why?

• 13:51Speaker 04

  When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant and I, as I mentioned, I started, started getting fat. And I had a first sergeant in my parachute infantry company that liked to run. So we would do loosening up exercises and then we'd run. And so I started running. And so for the first 20 or so years, I ran. I had a one period when I was a captain, when I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week, didn't vary, didn't take days off, wore lousy running shoes. It was sort of stereotypically all the mistakes you can make. As I got older and I started to have a series of shoulder surgeries and back surgeries predictably, what I learned to do was to alternate. So I will run one day, I'll lift weight the next day, I'll bike when, a bike

• 14:36Speaker 04

  when I'm home and have that capable so I can round out. But for me, it's very important to do something literally every day. I'll only take a day off when I'm forced to because I've got some weird schedule thing that makes it impossible.

• 14:48Tim Ferriss?

  And when you, what does your weight training, your resistance training workout look like?

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I will start at my home, if, if we're at home and I, I go down to my basic basement, I do four sets of pushups, as many as I can do for four sets. And I alternate that with a series of abs exercises. So I'll do, starting with a set of situps and I'll do 100 situps and I'll flip over and I'll do three minutes of a plank. And then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes. Then I'll do another set of pushups. And then I go to my next abs thing, which is a crunch-like crossover. Then I'll do a two and a half minute plank. And then I'll do more yoga, slightly different. Then I'll do another set of pushups. And then I'll do my third set, which is crossover situps.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  And I'll then do a third plank of two minutes. I'm decreasing each time. Then I'll do some more yoga. And then I'll do my fourth set of pushups. And then I'll do my fourth, which is a flutter kick. Sixty flutter kicks followed by static. Then I'll do my fourth plank, which is now a minute and a half. And then I'll come back. I only do four sets of pushups. So the last time I don't do pushups, I then do one more set of the crunch-like. And I'll flip over, do my last plank, which is one minute. And then I'll do some final yoga. And that'll take me about forty-five to fifty minutes. Then I'll leave my house and go to the gym. Because my gym opens at five thirty. It's three blocks from my house.

• 16:19Tim Ferriss?

  I assume you mean AM?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I can do all this from four thirty. If I get up at four, I can do all that from four thirty to about five twenty, five twenty-five. Go down to my gym. And then when I get to the gym, I do four sets of pullups. Alternated with incline bench press. Alternated with standing curls. And then in that, I'll also do these one-legged things, balance exercises as the break between them. I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot. And I'll do a few other things in that. And I can do all that in thirty, thirty-five minutes. So by six fifteen, six twenty, I can be done at the gym. Head back home, get cleaned up, and then be starting work.

• 17:00Tim Ferriss?

  Ready to rock and roll.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:02Tim Ferriss?

  And what is the... Why is exercise important to you? Both when you were overseas and at home? Maybe the reasons differ. But why is that... Routine, ritual important?

• 17:15Speaker 04

  I think it's several things. There's a certain self-image, you know? I think that if I was struggling with my weight, or if I was not as fit as I wanted people to perceive me, and I couldn't perceive myself that way, I think my own self-esteem would suffer. And particularly over life now, whenever I'm injured and I have even a slight period, it bothers me a lot. So I think that's part of it. Second is the military. There's an expectation. If you are not a physical leader in the kind of organizations that Chris and I were in, if you can't do those things physically, you don't have to do it better than everybody else, but you have to do it credibly and they can look up to, then I think your status in the organization is going to go down.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  When I was left Ranger Battalion Command in 1996, and I went off to spend a year at Harvard, and I remember one of my non-commissioned officers said, "Sir, what are you going to do at Harvard?" I said, "I'm going to study." He says, "You're going to work out?" And I said, "Yeah, presumably I will." And he goes, "You know, you come back here with a PhD, but you're out of shape. We're going to have a word for you, and it ain't going to be doctor."

• 18:22Speaker 04

  And I just thought that was so good. It also puts a discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out, at the end of the day, I'd go, "Well, I had a good workout." Almost no matter what happens, when the Rolling Stone article came out, it came out about 1:30 in the morning. I found out about it. I made a couple of calls. I knew we had a big problem, and I went, put my clothes on, and I ran for an hour. Clear my head, stress myself. Didn't make it go away, but that was something that I do in those situations.

• 18:59Tim Ferriss?

  Not long ago, I flew to Florida to interview peak performance coach Tony Robbins, who has long been someone I've looked up to and learned a lot from. He's very good at getting people to not only hear advice, but take action on that advice. Now, aside from asking him to palm my face with his massive hands, that was actually the very first Instagram photo I ever put up, which you can check out on Instagram, Tim Ferriss with two R's and two S's. If you want to see a picture of his ginormous hands covering my entire head. But besides that, he allowed me to dive really deep into the various routines and frameworks that he applies almost every day, if not every day. For instance, Tony believes that in a lowered emotional state, we tend to only see the problems and not solutions. Let's say you wake up feeling tired and overwhelmed, or anxious for whatever reason.

• 19:44Tim Ferriss?

  You might sit down to brainstorm strategies to solve your issues, but it comes to naught and you feel even worse afterward. Why? Because you started in a negative state. You went from state to then strategy. And in this particular case, you attempted strategy, but you didn't succeed due to the tunnel vision on the problems, and then you likely told yourself self-defeating stories. Alright, so you went state, strategy, stories. For instance, I always do this. Why am I so wound up that I can't even think straight? To get the first piece of this chain set up properly, the state, Tony encourages you to prime your state. So he calls this state priming. And priming, my state personally, is often as simple as doing five to 10 pushups, ideally

• 20:28Tim Ferriss?

  with ring turnout on rings, or on paralets, or getting, say, 20 minutes of sun exposure first thing, which is what legendary music producer Rick Rubin did to completely jumpstart and resurrect his own health. Ended up losing more than 100 pounds after that. Even though I do my most intense exercise at night typically, where I have a higher pain tolerance, say four to six or seven before dinner, I've started doing one to two minutes at, in some cases at a very most, of calisthenics or kettlebell swings in the morning to set my state for the day. You can also use cold exposure and so on. So here's more on Tony's specific morning routine and his priming approach. What are your, some of your daily routines?

• 21:12Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, what do you typically eat for breakfast, if it's up to you?

• 21:16Tony Robbins?

  I'm boring as hell. Because I just know it's fuel. Now, before I met my wife, we've been together for more than 15 years, I was completely anal. I was like, I hadn't had chocolate, I hadn't had ice cream in like 15 years. I was just, just crazy. And then she came into my life, and I'll never forget, I thought, God, this woman's incredible. She's a phlebotomist, and she does the blood, she's an acupuncturist, she's a nutritionist. We're having these green drinks, and we had this lunch, and afterwards, she ordered a hot fudge sundae, and I thought, what in the hell are you doing? She goes, living, you bastard.

• 21:49Tony Robbins?

  So she loosened my ass up just a bit, which is great because I loved her. So I, you know, she calls it zigging and zagging. We zig zig zig and then she zags or we zag. And when I was first with her, I was like, you're zagging. We were traveling through Europe, you know, Rome and Italy and, and, you know, various parts of, of France, south of France. And I was like, you know, you seem to be zagging every day. And she goes, well, I'm on vacation. And then later on, we were traveling. I said, you know, the problem is we're always traveling, so you're always on vacation. But she's in this hell of a great shape, but I'm a, you know, high greens, you know, protein type of guy, very low carbs. And my, but my regimen is I start with something to strengthen and jolt my nervous system every frickin' day. I will sometimes ease into it.

• 22:32Tony Robbins?

  I'll go in the hot pools and I'm fortunate enough to have multiple homes. My home in Sun Valley have natural hot pools that come out of the ground just steaming hot. And I go in the hot pools and then I go there in the river. Here, I go in a 57 degree, you know, plunge pool that I have. And I have it every home I have. And this will be immediately upon waking up? Waking up. It's just like boom, every cell in the body wakes up. And it's also just like training my nervous system to rock that there is no, I don't give a shit how you feel, this is how you perform. That's what you do. Even when I'm taking vacation, I do it. It's just, I don't know. Now I like it. It's a, I like that, that simple discipline that reminds me the level of strength and intensity that's available any moment, even if I'm relaxing, I can bring that up at will. It's my one. And I also have a cryotherapy unit in all my homes. Do you have you tried cryotherapy?

• 23:17Tony Robbins?

  I haven't. You know what it is? Uh, maybe you could elaborate a minute. I can, I can put the two words together and probably guess. Oh my God, with all that you do, you're gonna love this. I'm surprised. I'm glad I'm teaching Tim Ferriss something for the show. I've done ice baths, not the first time. Ice baths suck, ice baths suck, trust me. I'm on stage in a weekend. I do my unleash power than program, three days, 50 hours. You know, I've been to that. You gotta come to my guest on an event sometime. I would love to. The, but I'm gonna give you an idea. People won't sit for a three hour movie that somebody spent 300 million dollars on and I got like Usher or Oprah going, you know, Tony, I love you, but two hours most I could do it and 12 hours later, you know, Oprah's standing on a chair going, this is the most incredible experience of my life on camera. And Usher's like, dude, I'm in for all.

• 23:58Tony Robbins?

  Three days, but for me, one of those days alone, I'm I, you know, I wear odometer and I'm Fitbit and it's twenty six and a half miles on average. Wow. We start at eight thirty in the morning, I finish at one thirty or two, there's one, one hour break. People can vote with their feet, no one leaves, you know, there's on average twenty minutes of just crazy ass standing ovations, music, stuff that happens at the end, because people are just, it's like a rock concert, it's so much fun. But this wear and tear of doing, you know, basically marathon after marathon after marathon on the weekend, back to back. It's pretty intense. And so over the years, like the inflammation in my body, the demands I've had, do everything I can to reduce it. Nothing has come close to cryotherapy. Cryotherapy was developed in Poland and eastern Germany

• 24:40Tony Robbins?

  and the Eastern Bloc countries. And what it does is it uses nitrogen, so there's no water. And unlike an ice bath, what you're doing, you know, you get spasms and you've got to do them still, right? If you're a boxer, you're a runner, you're an athlete, which is what I would do before, hated them. There's no, none of that process, but it reduces your body temperature to minus two twenty Fahrenheit. And you do it three minutes and it's mind boggling. In fact, I have one here and I'll throw you in at the end if you want. I would love to, that'd be great. I have a unit here, I'll do it for you. But what it does is, and I do it about three times a week usually. And when I, when I come back from an event, I do it, you know, a couple of days in a row. And what it does is it takes all the inflammation out of your body and you know what inflammation does to every aspect of the body and the breakdown.

• 25:21Tony Robbins?

  But it also, it's, it sends emergency signals to your brain, it's like resetting your neurological system. Because your brain going, you're going to freeze to death. It sounds horrific, it really isn't. You'll find out it's not that painful. Going in my cold plunge at fifty seven degrees feels more jolting than this does, even though it's colder. Because, you know, the fluid of water versus the nitrogen around is different. Right, the connectivity. The connectivity, exactly right. And so, but what happens is your nervous system gets a signal, so it's like everything in your body connects, because it's like emergency. Every part is a reset of your nervous system. You get an explosion of endorphins in your body, which is really cool. So you get this natural high, you feel this physiological transformation and you get the reduction of inflammation. What it was used for originally is for people with arthritis.

• 26:03Tony Robbins?

  And I found my first one, because my mother in law would be calling up and she was just crying in pain and no medication was enough for her. And I hate somebody medicated anyway. And so I started doing this research and it just started coming to the US and now daily Lakers, most football teams, it's spreading like wildfire amongst the sports teams. And so that's where it took off. So I went and got her one and I mean, it took her, I think, three sessions and she's out of pain. And now, there's not a day she's in pain. Now, most people can't afford to go buy a unit, but there are local places now that are popping up all over the United States where athletes go, where people go, where people go for rejuvenation. It's amazing for the skin. But it's one of the great things. I got it for her, so I got it for me. And then now I'm addicted. So I've got one every three minutes.

• 26:43Tim Ferriss?

  What type of unit? Do you know the actual model and the brand that you use?

• 26:47Tony Robbins?

  Uh, yeah, there's two of them, the best out there. It's, uh, what was it? Java? Junka, J U N K A, I think it is. I'll get it for you when we go downstairs.

• 26:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll put it in the show notes for those of you who...

• 26:57Tony Robbins?

  Yeah, if anybody wants to do it. But also, like, if you're in LA, there's a place there on, um, I'll give it to you and put it in your notes. A couple of the locations there. There's some great guys. I'm getting another unit. This is a brand new home. So, um, and I'm building a, you know, additional guest house and additional size gym and so forth. I'm getting a unit, though, that's better. This one, it just goes up to your neck. And, but I'm getting one that encloses you a full room. And the reason is, about 70% of your nerve receptors are from the neck up. So when you step into one of those, it's even more powerful. But other than that, I don't do much unique or different with my life.

• 27:28Tim Ferriss?

  I don't believe that entirely. I'll keep digging. But, uh, the, so you have the, either the sort of contrast therapy that you mentioned, the hot cold, the cryotherapy.

• 27:39Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 27:40Tim Ferriss?

  You have salad and fish.

• 27:42Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  How far after, so what is, if you were to kind of spec out the first hour of your day?

• 27:48Tony Robbins?

  Well, the first, the first, every day, um, I do the water, I take in the environment, and then the first thing I do before I do anything else in my day is I do what I call priming. And priming, to me, is, uh, different than meditating. I'm never really a meditator per se. I know the value of it. But the idea for me of sitting still and having no thoughts just didn't really work out for me. It was just a pain in the ass. And I just thought it's not natural, right? It's like, that's what works. But when I'm in nature, I feel that form of meditation. When I stand on stage and someone stands up and my brain, it's done. I don't even know what it is, but person suicidal. I've never lost a suicide, for example, in, you know, 37 years. Knock on wood. Doesn't mean I won't someday, but I never have it a thousand. So we followed up with them. So it's like, there's something that comes through me and it's, and it's quite meditative. It's like I experience it

• 28:32Tony Robbins?

  as a witness, you know, afterwards. It's one of the most beautiful gifts in my life. Um, so I know that meditation. But for me, what priming is, if you wanna be, have a prime life, you gotta be in a prime state. And, uh, you know, weeds grow automatically. I don't give a damn what it is. My teacher Jim Rohn used to say that. And so what I do is I get up and I do a very simple process. I do an explosive change in my physiology. I've done the water already, right? Cold, hot. Then I do it with breath. Because I know you know, all forms of eastern meditation all understand that that the mind is the kite and breath is the string. So if I wanna move that kite, I move the breath. So I have a specific pattern of breathing that I do. I do thirty of these breaths, um, and I do them at three sets of thirty.

• 29:13Tony Robbins?

  And that creates a profound physiological difference in my body. And from that altered state, I usually listen to some music and, um, and I go for, I promise myself ten minutes and I usually go thirty. And you do that in this room that we're sitting in? I know, I do it all of this one room is where I do it. This has got a great vibe. I'll do this one. I do it at night. I usually will go outside because I love the wind on my face and I love taking the elements and so forth. But I do it multiple places. I'm on the road. I do it. It doesn't matter what day. I always, I do not miss priming. The reason is, I'm not, you know, you don't get fit by getting lucky. You don't get fit by working out for a weekend. You know, you live your life that way. Fitness is because it's, becomes just part of who you are. So what I do during that time is I do three simple things and I do it minimum ten minutes. Three minutes of it is just me feeling,

• 29:57Tony Robbins?

  getting back inside my body and outside of my head, feeling the earth in my body and experience, and then feeling totally grateful for three things. And I make sure one of them is something very, very simple. The wind on my face, you know, the reflection of the clouds that I just saw there. But I don't just think gratitude, like I let gratitude fill my soul. Um, because when you're grateful, as we all know, there's no anger. It's possibly angry and grateful simultaneously. When you're grateful, there is no fear. You can't be fearful and grateful simultaneously. So it's, it's a, I think it is one of the most important power emotions of life. And also, to me, there's nothing worse than an angry rich man or woman, you know, somebody's got everything and they're pissed off. I wanna slap them. Surprisingly high number of those. Yeah, it is. Because they, they develop a life that's based on expectation instead of appreciation. Agreed.

• 30:42Tony Robbins?

  And I, I tell people, you wanna change your life fast, then trade your expectation for appreciation and you have a whole new life. So every day I anchor that in and I do it very deeply emotionally. Then the second three minutes I do is a total focus on Feeling presence of God, if you will, however you want to language that for yourself. But this inner presence coming in and feeling that heals everything in my body, my mind, my emotions, my relationships, my finances, I see it as solving anything that needs to be solved. I experience the strengthening of my gratitude, of my joy, of my strength, of my conviction, of my passion, and I just let those things happen spontaneously. And then I focus on celebration and then service, because my whole life is about service. That's what makes me feel alive. So I flood myself with that with a breathing pattern that I take that does the opposite,

• 31:27Tony Robbins?

  takes the breath down through my body and back up again. And then the last three minutes are me focusing on three things I'm going to make happen, my three to thrive. And I have some big things that I'll do, and sometimes I'll do things that are smaller, but I see them, feel them, experience them. So it's a really simplistic process, 10 minutes, but I come out of it in my power. It doesn't matter if I had two hours sleep, I'm now ready. You know, it doesn't, and I do this even when I have no sleep. That's how committed I am. As I say, I've always said, there's no excuse not to do 10 minutes. If you don't have 10 minutes, you don't have a life.

• 31:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 31:59Tony Robbins?

  And that's how I got myself to do it. And now that I've done it, you know, 20 to 30 minutes is almost always what it is, because it actually feels extraordinary.

• 32:05Tim Ferriss?

  And where can people learn more about the breathing pattern, or could you describe it?

• 32:09Tony Robbins?

  I'm putting a link online, because I just started to share this just recently, and I'll get it for you. I don't know what it's off the top of my head, but it'll be up shortly, I think, this week.

• 32:16Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, awesome. And I will also put that in the show notes, guys, so that's just fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, and you'll be able to find this episode. On the, I have to ask, what type of music do you usually listen to during?

• 32:28Tony Robbins?

  I have a variety, but for that meditation, I have one in particular, which is a oneness meditation that a friend of mine made, it was from India, that I find really profound. It has no singing in it or anything like that, it's just the sound of a vibration that's going on, and I just love it. But that's what I'm doing currently. In the past, over the years, I've used all kinds of different pieces of music, but I don't use modern music, or pop music, or rock music. I do that to work out, you know, rap. I don't know, it just feels weird to be doing rap while you're meditating. But again, what's different is I don't look at meditation, because I look at it as it's priming courage, love, joy, it's priming gratitude, it's priming strength, it's priming accomplishment, it's priming, you know, when I'm doing my gratitude piece, I'm doing the circle of who's closest to me, and, you know, circling that out to everybody I love, and sending that energy and healing out to them as well.

• 33:12Tony Robbins?

  So to me, that's, if you want prime time life, you got to prime daily.

• 33:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I like the term priming also because I think that most people who struggle with meditation or even attempt to use meditation are utilizing it for that purpose. They're doing it first in the morning. And when he said, "If you don't have 10 minutes, you don't have a life," it reminded me of something that Russell Simmons said to me, which was, "If you don't have 30 minutes to meditate, you need three hours." And I don't always do 30 minutes, but I do meditate in the morning. And it's been a very consistent pattern through, among all of the people that I've interviewed so far on the podcast.

• 33:42Tony Robbins?

  Really?

• 33:43Tim Ferriss?

  Practically 100%.

• 33:44Tony Robbins?

  Wow, that's wonderful.

• 33:45Tim Ferriss?

  And of course, we'll get to Ray Dalio, but also a very avid meditator.

• 33:50Tony Robbins?

  He's coming with me to India in a couple of weeks.

• 33:52Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that'll be an amazing trip, I'm sure.

• 33:54Tony Robbins?

  For a week of this experience.

• 33:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wim Hof, let's talk about Wim Hof. He's a Dutch world record holder who is commonly referred to as the "ice man" for his ability to withstand extreme cold. For instance, in 2007, Wim climbed past the death zone altitude on Everest wearing nothing but shorts. He's a bit of a madman. In 2009, he completed a full marathon above the polar circle in Finland in temperatures close to minus 20 degrees Celsius. That's minus 4 Fahrenheit. He holds the Guinness World Record for the longest ice bath, now set at 1 hour and 53 minutes and 12 seconds. Before I continue, I need to state a very clear warning. You should never, ever, ever do breathing exercises in the water or before training in water. Shallow water blackouts are common after these types of breathing exercises and can be fatal and often are fatal.

• 34:43Tim Ferriss?

  So do not do any of what Wim recommends, close to water or in water. Now, with that disclaimer stated very clearly, some of his methods can produce amazing before and after effects. After one in-person training session with Wim, I went from my normal 45-second breath hold or so to 4 minutes and 45 seconds with no perceptible side effects. This was a first for me, and this was in Malibu, in fact, at Laird Hamilton's house, who's also been interviewed. He's one of the kings of big wave surfing. Several months later, while in very deep ketosis, about 6 mm or higher after 8 days of fasting, again, never to be done without medical supervision, I did the same exercises in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at 2.4 atmospheres. What was the result?

• 35:28Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there was a clock outside of the chamber and I held my breath for, and I know a lot of people aren't going to believe this, 7 minutes and 30 seconds before I stopped because I was afraid my brain was going to melt. The power of breathing exercises is amazing to behold, which is why, in part, his methods have become very, very popular. Again, they are, or can be, as dangerous as they are powerful. Never do this stuff when you are not going to hurt yourself if you pass out. So do it in a chair or something like that, laying down possibly. Don't do it while you're going up an escalator. Don't do it while you are preparing to go into water or anything like that. So, here we go with more from my conversation with Wim Hof.

• 36:13Tim Ferriss?

  You have such a fascinating story and you have a lot of accolades, a lot of records, I think more than 20 world records at this point, it seems. What was the first world record that you set?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  The first was in Paris, just staying half hour, immersed in ice. And 12 days later, I repeated the record time and made it an hour in Hollywood, actually. Yes.

• 36:46Tim Ferriss?

  And I saw one also, I mean, you've been, you've spent a lot of time in ice baths and I've largely influenced by you and a handful of other people, Tim Nokes, Ray, and a huge fan of ice baths and my fans always complain about it, but I've seen you in so many containers full of ice. I saw one where it looks like there was a lot of Chinese or Japanese in the background. What has been the most challenging cold exposure experience that you've had, whether it's for records or anything else?

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Maybe...

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Losing my sight while I was swimming underneath a ice deck of almost one meter. I had no goggles on. So I lost sight at thirty-five meters, something like forty yards. And I lost the hole. And yeah, things like that. Shit, shit happens. It happened over there, right there. The meter ice deck above me. So yeah, that was some great experience. Another one was losing my way on Mount Everest in shorts.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  And at like eighteen thousand feet in a blizzard, in like a wide out. So things like that happen, yeah. And they are challenging. But then it throws me back to, you know, the depth of myself, which is trust and confidence. And I got it.

• 38:20Tim Ferriss?

  What do you say to yourself in one of those moments? So I guess physiologically, did your, did your retinas just freeze? Or when you were swimming under the ice deck, in a moment like that, when many people would panic? I mean, did you panic? If so, what was the mental self-talk when you realized that was happening?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Very interesting. It is the stress level at that moment is absent, is not there. I'm just dealing with the situation. And it has been shown in the university that our stress levels, the stress hormone levels are able to be raised lying in bed more than somebody in fear for the first time going into a bungee jump.

• 39:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, going into a, doing a bungee jump for the first time?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but not me, but because of bungee jump, you are attached. But very unexpected situations in nature, like a blizzard or swimming beneath ice and losing the hole because your eyesight is gone. Things like that, or climbing without gear, steep mountains and having cramps. And what do you do at that moment? And that's exactly what I learned, how to raise consciously the stress hormone level, purely controlled, and I'm able to deal with the situation at that moment without panicking.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  And I think that's one of the crucial findings, which could benefit for human mankind, as it is, you know, very subjected to stress all the time, panicking, having fear and all that. And I learned in nature how to deal with that. And the cult brought me, brought me that science, brought me that knowledge, wisdom, actually.

• 40:21Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the raising of stress hormones, so, so controlling something that has long been thought to be part of the autonomous nervous system, something that you have no control over, right? And we'll get to the breathing, because breathing is very interesting, since it's both autonomous, but you can, you can consciously control it and practice different methods. I think it was, it was certainly in the Vice documentary that recently came out, which I recommend to everyone, and I'll link to in the show notes. But was it in 2011 that you were injected with some type of virus or bacteria to see if you could control the immune response? That was at the Dutch, I'm gonna mispronounce this, the Radboud University?

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Exactly, Radboud University in Holland, and intensive care nuclear science. I underwent an experiment, and they injected me with a endotoxin, with a toxin, actually, which is a part of a bacteria. And that creates a very dramatic immune response. And as we have no control over the immune response in our body, they thought I was not able to do it as well as expected, because nobody showed to be able to suppress the immune

• 41:40Speaker 02

  response, because it is part of the autonomic nervous system. And nobody is able to do that until now. I showed.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Eh, that I was very able, within a quarter of an hour, instead of hours, uh, suffering from uncontrolled chivering, fever, headaches and all, all that. Uh, I showed, within a quarter of an hour, uh, to have, uh, control. Complete over the symptoms and, uh, also the cytokines, which is, uh, which are the inflammatory beings in the blood, created by the immune response. And I showed in the blood and by blood results to suppress them dramatically, uh, within a quarter. And then they told me, okay, but you are an exception that confirms the rule.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Because you, uh, yeah, you, you have been training so many years. You are the Iceman, you do exceptional, uh, features, but nobody is able to do that without that proper training of so many years. And I told them, no, I can train them within ten days. And then the professor was really challenged, because if this group would show to be able, within ten days, uh, to, uh, uh, be able to influence deeply into the autonomic nervous system, related to the immune system, then that's for the first time in the scientific history.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  So, but he, he saw the indication of the possibility. Uh, but still thought, those guys are not gonna be able to do that within ten days. And you know what? It, it wasn't within ten days, it was in with four days of training, that I made them able to undergo the same experiment, that, uh, that means, uh, the, the injection of the endotoxin, and have them, within a quarter of an hour, completely control over their immune system, related to the autonomic nervous system. So, they showed a hundred percent score of everybody, to be able, within a couple of

• 44:01Speaker 02

  days, to go, eh, to tap into the autonomic nervous system, related to the immune system.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  And yeah, and the training about the training be prior to it. Uh, we had our beers, you know, in the evening and uh a a a lot of music and uh uh very relaxed and uh their mindset, I said, hey guys, uh probably you uh you guys are the new gladiators. Uh, well, we are going to win the the worst war ever. Which uh produced uh uh uh uh uh the much uh the uh the most casualties, agony, pain and all that. And that's the bacteria, that's the bacilli, that's the virus, and we're gonna win this war.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Are you with me? I I that's the way I talked to them and so they had a mindset. So in the evening, we had a relaxed, it was like a hippie movement, but this is a new revolution. And in four days' time, they were able at the fourth day, without prior experience in the cold, they were able to go in shorts at by by minus ten, that's about, I don't know, in uh in per uh Fahrenheit Celsius. This is Celsius, that means freezing cold.

• 45:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it's probably in the twenties, probably in the

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Yes, in the twenties.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  Below freezing, yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  And then uh uh for hours and hours, we were uh going uphill and up the mountain and we arrived at the summit after hours and it was minus twenty seven. Minus twenty seven Celsius, that uh that is uh more than uh minus uh than uh than twenties. It's uh probably ten, so something like that. And we danced the Harlem Shake up uh up there. Then I knew, these guys, these guys are ready.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  In four days' time, when they will be internalized in the hospital and injected with the endotuxine, they will be able, because I feel when somebody is back into its natural state of his or her's physiology. And I know how to do that. The cold trained me. The cold is my teacher.

• 46:31Tim Ferriss?

  And with these subjects, I'm so curious to ask because the, I mean, I am certainly not as proficient as you are in any of these techniques, but I've enjoyed experimenting over the last 10 years and writing about these short experiments, whether it's related to breath-holding with David Blaine or other aspects. Obviously, you're a professional and I am not. But I'd be very curious to hear you perhaps elaborate, for instance, on the first day of training with these subjects in preparation to be injected four days later.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 47:07Tim Ferriss?

  What did the first day of training look like for them?

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Just in the morning, at eight o'clock, without food intake, we do breathing and they lie on the ground all because that's the most relaxed pose. And if you are relaxed, you are able to store up a lot more oxygen than when in tension or in posture. So I say to them, "Just lay down. Relax." Now we are going to begin. Just breathe in deeply and let go. Breathe in deeply, let go. Make it a rhythm. Breathe in deeply, let go.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Not fully out, but fully in. And let go. And repeat that about 30, 40 times until these indications or symptoms come about. And that means lightheadedness.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Loose in the body, feeling loose in the body, tingling, contractions. That's because carbon dioxide goes out. Oxygen is roaming freely throughout the body. And the pH levels rise. They are optimized. So they get to their best condition. And uh that's proven, that's proven. And they saw, eh eh when we do this. Eh they saw, they saw all these results chemically. Then, once you feel positively charged. With all these symptoms of lightheadedness, feeling loose, contractions and tingling in the body.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Ask them, just breathe in deeply, let go. And now the last time, breathe in deeply. Eh let go. And after letting go, after exhalation, stop. Reframe from breathing, there is no need. We get a whole lot of oxygen. And eh eh measurement devices are not able to detect how much. It's more than hundred percent, that's my opinion, but devices still are not able to detect that. They only can go up till eh hundred percent, as they say. But the hundred percent, the body is able to store up more oxygen than measurement devices of now.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Are able to eh measure. So then, after one and a half minutes. Eh eh then you see that the measurement device shows hundred percent. And then it goes dramatically down afterwards.

• 50:01Tim Ferriss?

  And you're using a pulse oximeter, like something that you clip on your finger?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Yes, pulse exam. So eh so you need a heartbeat, you have a heartbeat. And you have the saturation of the oxygen in, inside the blood. So the amount of oxygen. So after one and a half minutes, you see with everybody. That the eh saturation of the blood is going down. Hey, you know, people with COPD, that that's lung diseases and all that, they they suffer from real severe COPD when they have eighty-five. We go to ninety, to eighty, seventy, sixty, fifty. People die at fifty and forty, eh eh forty percent saturation in the blood. We go past.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  We go even to thirty and then the device, measurement device, the archimeter shuts down. It is not measuring anymore, but we even go past that one.

• 51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Now, why don't you, why don't the subjects pass out at this point?

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Eh, they don't pass out eh because they are alkaline.

• 51:09Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  They're eh the pH degrees eh eh are really perfect at that moment. And eh in instead of a a person who is dying eh is very acidic. So that's the difference. So eh because we are so alkaline, people ma- maybe sometimes are able to pass out, but just two seconds or three seconds because they get eh eh they are out of their conditioned control. Eh eh but eh in a in a, you know, after exercising, they have a re- a regain not only control in those moments and and those situations. They eh they win a new part in the brain.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  They get eh very deep in the brain and it's all new terrain. It's like a baby, a baby has no problem with eh with her legs, but there are no motoric, motorical neurons to the legs yet.

• 52:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  So eh eh we are going into different parts of the brain, where there is, where the the guy or the eh the eh the eh the girl never has been.

• 52:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  So it's logic that the eh people are able to pass out, but nothing happens because they are alkaline. So they just wake up and mostly eh eh or mostly, almost always, they wake up very happy.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  And it's like a drug experience.

• 52:42Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  So, but that's besides of the real effect I'm trying to not not try, which we showed scientifically is to be able to tap into the immune system in all the layers. Those are three layers and normally we are not able to get into the second and the third layer. And I say now we have found a key to the second and the and the third layer. That means the nonspecific immune system and the specific adaptive immune system. And that makes us looking to disease completely different because our ability is so much more.

• 53:30Tim Ferriss?

  Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, Dom is one of my most popular guests I've had on the podcast. You guys ask for more and more and more. You just love him. He's appeared on the podcast a total of three times, although I recommend people start with the first. Dom is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at the University of South Florida Mursani College of Medicine. That's a mouthful. Much of his work is related to nutritional strategies for peak performers and resilience in extreme environments. For instance, he does a lot of work for the special operations communities in developing esters and exogenous ketones that can do things like prevent or mitigate brain damage in hypoxic environments, meaning lack of oxygen, or even extend breath hold times

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  and oxygen utilization and so on. He's a very impressive guy. He is a highly legitimate athlete in his own right and built like the Incredible Hulk. In this last segment that we're going to sample, we get a little into the weeds scientifically, but I know that you can get some great tips from it, so bear with it, and a real understanding of the power of ketosis, or at least the ketogenic diet. Most important, his information might save your life. There are certain Circumstances within which that the ketogenic diet or ketosis can be used as a medical adjunct to say improve, in the case of fasting, the resilience of normal cells in prior to treatments for cancer, including chemotherapy and so on. It is not

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  intended to be a standalone treatment for cancer, so do not spread that nonsense. But as an adjunct, many people I know who have been diagnosed with cancer have used it so that instead of being laid out the next day after, say, radiation or chemo, they are able to run five, 10 miles in the morning. And his approach to ketosis has certainly changed my life and helped me to recover from very severe symptoms of Lyme disease. There's a lot of diet talk, but the supplements and fasting can be treated as separate tools. So you don't necessarily need to consume a lot of bacon and heavy cream to get into a katic state. Now, for those of you not familiar with his work, here's a very quick primer. The ketogenic diet is often nicknamed keto. This is a

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  high-fat diet that mimics fasting physiology. In other words, what you do when you starve or you get lost in the woods, you start to break down body fat for fuel. Your brain and body begin to use ketones, which are derived from stored or ingested fat, for energy instead of blood sugar, glucose. And that is the state of ketosis. The diet was originally developed for treating epileptic children, believe it or not, but there are many variations, including the Atkins diet, which became very, very popular. You can achieve ketosis through fasting, diet, exogenous ketones, that means supplemental ketones, which can come in powder or liquid form, or some combination of all of those. One of the most common questions I get is, how do you know when you're in ketosis? I don't think the urinalysis strips, the keto strips are very reliable, because as you become

• 56:25Tim Ferriss?

  fat-adapted, you excrete fewer of these ketone bodies. And the most reliable way at this point in time is using a device called the Precision XTRA, XTRA by Abbott, A-B-B-O-T-T. You can buy it on Amazon and other places. This can both measure glucose and blood levels of ketone bodies, specifically beta-hydroxybutyrate. So you prick your finger and you feed it into this device, and once you get a readout of 0.5 millimolars, mmol, that is a concentration in your blood, you can consider yourself lightly in ketosis. I tend to feel the most increased mental clarity and so on at 1 millimolar or higher.

• 57:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now, here we go with more of Dom's wisdom. Please enjoy.

• 57:16Tim Ferriss?

  Let's define ketosis. What is ketosis? Let's, I guess we could talk about nutritional and sort of fasting ketosis, but what is ketosis exactly? And what are ketones?

• 57:28Speaker 06

  Okay, I kind of like to start out with fasting, right?

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, perfect.

• 57:32Speaker 06

  So if we're on a normal diet and we stop eating all of a sudden, we will mobilize and use up our stored glycogen, mostly in the liver, right? And our central nervous system more or less demands that we have a steady fuel supply to our brain. And in the absence of glucose availability, we'll be depleting our liver glycogen. The insulin levels will be suppressed and we'll start mobilizing fatty acids for fuel. The fatty acids, long chain fatty acids, don't cross the blood-brain barrier very efficiently. The liver, while you're suppressing the hormone insulin, you'll upregulate beta oxidation of fatty acids in the liver. And

• 58:12Speaker 06

  an accumulation of products from fatty acid oxidation will start forming ketone bodies. And these ketone bodies are, they're more or less like water soluble fat molecules. And they're small molecules that can readily cross the blood-brain barrier and get inside cells into the mitochondria. And as we fast, within about 24 to 48 hours, we'll start registering ketones to the level that clinically is defined as being in ketosis.

• 58:43Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna ask you about that.

• 58:44Speaker 06

  Which is above 0.5 millimolar typically. Yeah, so a person on a high carb diet would probably take about 24 to 48 hours to start even getting into mild ketosis. But fasting is the fastest way to get into ketosis. And that's why if you have a child with drug resistant seizures and they're administered, or they're admitted into a place like Johns Hopkins, the old protocol was to fast them. They're not exactly sure if that's absolutely necessary with things like more with ketogenic diets. Have MCTs and stuff, but you can fasting has classically been the fastest way to get into ketosis.

• 59:24Speaker 06

  So the ketogenic diet has a macronutrient ratio that's high in fat typically.

• 59:31Tim Ferriss?

  And by macronutrients, we're referring to protein, fat, carbohydrates.

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And maybe ketones could be the fourth macronutrient, maybe if you talk about exogenous ketones.

• 59:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 59:42Speaker 06

  So a ketogenic diet has a macronutrient ratio that that mimics the metabolic physiology that you have when you're fasting. So if you were to take the blood out of someone, you know, do a blood sample of someone on a strict ketogenic diet, it would look like they're fasting, like they've been fasting a few days. That changes your physiology incredibly, like your metabolic physiology changes acutely. And then there's, there's long-term changes that occur with that. Epigenetic changes, you know, we know that that beta hydroxybutyrate, which is a ketone body can have a, you know, interesting effects on gene expression.

• 1:00:20Tim Ferriss?

  What types of effects?

• 1:00:21Speaker 06

  Uh, well, there was a science paper showing that beta hydroxybutyrate is an HDAC, class one and class two inhibitor and can activate genes that play a role in enhancing endogenous antioxidant mechanisms, specifically superoxide dismutase and catalase. So these, these mechanisms, when they're upregulated, it confers protection against the environment. It, it sort of enhances our cellular defense mechanisms. It enhances the robust kind of protective mechanisms that the cell has that can preserve

• 1:01:02Speaker 06

  the genome stability. So maybe being in a state of ketosis and maintaining that can protect your DNA from damage. So that's the implications. Also anti-inflammatory. So we, we published a, a paper. Uh, our colleagues actually did it at Yale. Uh, I developed the diet for them and sent it up to them. It was exogenous ketone, but the paper demonstrated that it activated.

• 1:01:27Speaker 06

  Or prevented the activation of a particular inflammasome that's that's linked to age-related chronic diseases. So it inhibited inhibited a specific inflammatory pathway that is really associated with all chronic age-related diseases. And it was independent of the ketones effect on metabolism. They did a lot of studies to tease out the mechanism and and demonstrated that that the effect of it, you know, suppressing inflammatory pathway was completely independent of its metabolic effect. So we understand that, you know, when I got into this, I just knew that ketones were

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  an energy metabolite. So now we know it's much more than a metabolite, you know, it's an it's an HDAC inhibitor. And the

• 1:02:15Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that? I apologize. HDAC?

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Histone deacetylenase inhibitor. So HDAC would be H D A C.

• 1:02:24Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:02:24Speaker 06

  And then there's class one, two, three, I think, four. So class one and two, HDAC inhibitors are a big, big are of big interest to the pharmaceutical industry. So there are many, for example, we do a lot of cancer research, there's a lot of pharmaceutical companies focusing on histone deacetylenase inhibitors for as targeting specific pathways to for cancer therapy. So so you have an endogenous HDAC inhibitor, you know, with beta

• 1:02:56Tim Ferriss?

  Not not to interrupt, but just for people who want to keep endogenous and exogenous straight, I've always found thinking of exoskeleton as sort of outside as an indicator of outside. So if you're taking exog- please correct me if I'm getting this, if I screw this up in any way, Dom, but if you're taking exogenous ketones, that means you are you are consuming ketones from outside of your body. And endogenous is something you're producing yourself.

• 1:03:21Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  What was the study that you did on advanced lifters as it related to ketosis? And what's what's kind of the abstract on that?

• 1:03:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's under review right now.

• 1:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, got it.

• 1:03:32Speaker 06

  And yeah, I'll give you kind of like the synopsis of it. So we had 12 subjects and these were advanced resistance trained individuals, meaning that they could squat and deadlift and bench a certain percentage, you know, their body weight, which is kind of puts them in the range of, you know, the top 10% of lifters out there.

• 1:03:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just out of curiosity.

• 1:03:55Speaker 06

  I gotta go back. It was, it was some funky number, not like, it was like, you know, 185% or 75% of their body weight squatting for, you know, seven reps or eight reps or something like that. So it was pretty, it would be, it would be like me, let me see, squatting, you know, 425 or something for a set of six or something like that.

• 1:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, these are very.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  It's pretty significant.

• 1:04:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, significantly advanced trainees.

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, uh, yeah, the gist of that is that we did a, a parallel. The control group was on a Western diet and, which is pretty similar to kind of, you know, moderate protein, higher in carbohydrates and moderate fat. And the ketogenic diet had roughly 75 to 80% fat, restricted carbohydrates to about 20 to 25 grams per day. And, um, and the fat was also supplemented to some extent with MCT oil and coconut oil. And all the subjects, it was two weeks, they had to be on the diet and had to confirm ketone levels by blood and urine.

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  And once they did, we only did a two week adaptation, which is kind of another subject we could talk about. But they adapted for two weeks and then kind of trained the heck out of them. And every workout was done in the lab, in a human performance laboratory.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  And every, everything was recorded, the volume was controlled, all the parameters were controlled, uh, blood work was done. And, uh, the, the take home on it was that strength, you know, body composite, or I would say strength and performance were maintained and increased. And there was muscle hypertrophy was seen with a ketogenic diet. And, uh, there was similar increases, yeah, in power, in hypertrophy. And the big, the big difference was kind of the overall body composition was more favorable in the ketogenic diet group, meaning they had similar increases in lean body mass, but they lost proportionally more fat. And, uh, that's the study that we completed. It's under review right now.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  Uh, the first journal kicked it back. So we went in for another journal and did some follow-up work with it.

• 1:06:10Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what is your, uh, what is your hypothesis, or maybe you already know, but how would you explain the maintenance or even development of hypertrophy and power in the ketogenic group when a lot of people associate, say, insulin, uh, with different growth factors and whatnot? And I, I had a conversation, I want to say it was with, uh, Stephen Finney, very short conversation. And I asked him this because I'd been in a ketotic state for two or three weeks and had experienced, uh, a non-trivial amount of muscle growth. And I was really surprised by it. And, uh, he explained in terms that I, I can't recall,

• 1:06:52Tim Ferriss?

  but how the ketogenic might, diet might have a, I guess, like a branched chain amino acid sparing effect of some type. But is it possible to get very big and, uh, powerful on a ketogenic diet? And if so, what's the mechanism in the sort of absence of higher spiking insulin levels?

• 1:07:14Tim Ferriss?

  If that is the parent anabolic hormone, and I'm not saying it is, but a lot of people view it that way.

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, you know, there's insulin and insulin signaling, right? Certain diet, like when you calorie restrict a rodent, or even, you know, humans or any mammal, you will enhance insulin sensitivity, right? So you will be more, more sensitive to a given amount of insulin. And I think we're seeing some of that in the athletes. I mean, exercise itself enhances insulin sensitivity. So, and guys that are advanced lifters who've been at it for like 10 years may have a different response to a ketogenic diet than, say, a 15-year-old kid, you know, who's trying to bulk up for football. You know, he would probably not be a good candidate for, for the ketogenic diet.

• 1:08:03Speaker 06

  You know, your sensitivity to things like IGF-1 and insulin are much higher when you're younger, in your teenage years especially. So you could compromise a lot of your potential development and strength if you're younger in doing that. But if, you know, say, guys, the older we get, the less carbohydrate tolerant we get. So we lose, you know, our ability to kind of process carbs as we get older, and our insulin sensitivity declines. You know, just going back to your question, as it relates to being on a ketogenic diet, we know that ketones are anti-catabolic. You know, that's why we can fast for 40 days. And the ketones have an anti-catabolic protein-sparing effect. And if our, our blood is flooded with ketones, we're less likely to liberate gluconeogenic

• 1:08:48Speaker 06

  amino acids from our skeletal muscle for fuel, because the ketones can more or less replace glucose as the primary energy, energy substrate to maintain your central nervous system, which is, you know, like 3% of our body by weight, but sucks up like 20 or 25% of the energy. It's a big metabolic engine. So the ketones kind of drive a lot of that substrate, you know, energy need. So in a situation where you're at a, at a caloric deficit, I think that's where ketones can shine. You know, if you're trying to make weight, if you're trying to preserve, or even increase

• 1:09:29Speaker 06

  your performance and strength, you know, and alter your body composition. So if, I don't think the ketogenic diet is... Ideal if your goal is maximum a purely ketogenic diet. I think, you know, there's different, we have to kind of figure out what ketogenic diet we're talking about. But I don't think a purely ketogenic diet, as it's kind of described in the literature, right, a 90 or 85% fat diet is an ideal diet for growth and repair. The diet that we use in our study is actually a little higher in protein, like 25% protein, which is like really almost double that used by the, you know, by the Johns Hopkins group that developed the classical ketogenic diet.

• 1:10:14Speaker 06

  And it's really that, that protein level is important. So, growing on a classic ketogenic diet would be pretty hard. I mean, kids do it. Their growth rates are a little bit less, you know, with these kids that have drug resistant seizures when they're put on the diet. But if you simply just do what's called a modified Atkins, and there's a lot of literature coming out now on the modified Atkins, Eric Kossoff at Johns Hopkins, he's a colleague of mine and more in the clinical realm, and he's done a lot of work showing that a modified Atkins, which is about 70% fat and like 20 or 30% protein, is, has the same sort of ability to metabolically manage seizures.

• 1:10:59Speaker 06

  And I think that sort of diet can be used pretty successfully in the performance world, and specifically for bodybuilding. But I think with that amount of protein, you'd be able to grow muscle, for sure. And it's calories too, right? I mean, calories are the driver, your caloric intake. If you have a surplus amount of calories, you're more likely to push insulin up and drive anabolic processes. But a lot of times, people, when they follow ketogenic diet, because ketones have a really good appetite suppressing effect, that they will inadvertently restrict calories and may not even know it after a while, and, and maybe losing weight without even trying.

• 1:11:43Speaker 06

  And that's, I mean, that's one of the benefits, I guess you could say, of the ketogenic diet. You can lose weight and you can alter your body composition without necessarily even trying, just through the appetite suppressing effect.

• 1:11:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there you have it, folks. That is the latest Tim Ferriss Radio Hour, featuring some of the experts I've spoken to in and across more than 200 episodes - what - of this podcast? That's crazy. The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour is an experiment, and it takes a good amount of work. So, it's now over to you. I want you to tell me, do you like it? Do you not like it? What should we do more of? What should we do less of? Please tell me how we can improve it, what topics you would like us to explore. In other words, I just want your feedback. Let me know what you think, please. So, ping me, send me a note on Twitter, @TFerriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, or on Facebook, or on the blog, tim.blog/podcast. That's where you can find every episode of the podcast, tim.blog/podcast.

• 1:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  And, as always, and until next time, thank you so much for listening.

• 1:12:50Tim 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.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:13:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:14:36Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:15:12Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:15:56Tim Ferriss?

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