Episode 355 - Tim Ferriss
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck billies what the fuckaholics what the fuckadelics what the fuckanistas how is everybody i am mark maron this is wtf this is my show you're listening to it hope everybody's doing okay
Marc:I got Tim Ferriss on the show today, the four-hour body guy, whose diet I sort of hacked and tried to do without reading the books.
Marc:And he's got a new book out called The Four-Hour Chef, which is another obsessive, compulsive Bible of process and procedure and exciting.
Marc:There's so much shit in all his books.
Marc:And I just ripped off the diet because some guy told me what to eat and gave me a website of places to check.
Marc:So I figured I'd go to the source
Marc:And ask him some questions.
Marc:See who that guy is.
Marc:And he came over.
Marc:And you're going to hear that in a minute.
Marc:If I could just take a couple minutes of your time to do some other business.
Marc:I will be in Albany at the Egg Friday, February 1st.
Marc:Get some tickets to that.
Marc:It's going to be cold up there.
Marc:I'm going to need you there just to keep me warm.
Marc:I need a crowd as a human heater.
Marc:Also, I'll be in Washington, D.C.
Marc:at the 6th and I Synagogue Saturday, February 2nd.
Marc:That thing's almost sold out.
Marc:So if you want to get in on that, get in on that now.
Marc:So that's the current tour schedule.
Marc:There's more dates coming up.
Marc:Cincinnati, Columbus, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Eugene, Boston, February 8th at the Wilbur Live WTF.
Marc:with Sue Costello, Rick Jenkins, DJ Hazard, DJ Hazard with no DJ Hazard, you don't get Louis CK, Joe Wong, Gary Goleman, and Dan Crone, that's it.
Marc:Yep, that's a pretty full roster of Boston talent.
Marc:Looking forward to going back there.
Marc:So those are the shows.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com and check the schedule to get ticket links and whatnot.
Marc:And what else?
Marc:I've got things to say.
Marc:I was just in Sundance at the film festival.
Marc:I skied and I saw a fucking amazing concert.
Marc:Right now, I don't feel so good.
Marc:Somebody gave me a thing that went into my nose or my mouth or in my ear, maybe from my finger, from the air in the plane or from a handshake or from a piece of bacon that is now just taking effect inside of me.
Marc:Some sort of bacterial or viral explosion is I'm fighting it down right now with my mind, with oregano pills, with massive doses of alcohol.
Marc:vitamin c and with gargling salt water in my throat and doing neti pot in my nose i can't i don't want it i don't want it but i guess everybody thinks that when they're getting sick they can fight it however possible and sometimes the only thing to do is sleep can't sleep there is no sleep until i whatever the poem is let's talk about my eating disorder
Marc:It's no mystery to all of us that I have body dysmorphia and an eating disorder.
Marc:It is my genetic legacy, having the mother that I had.
Marc:So when I got the opportunity to have Tim Ferriss on, I don't usually do interviews like this, but I needed to understand him, and I needed to understand this diet, because you should see these books.
Marc:I didn't even have the books.
Marc:Quite honestly, I ripped it offline because Matt...
Marc:Matt Myra sent me his copy of the book from online and Jonah, Jonah Ray was on the diet and they were like, yeah, it's working.
Marc:You can't eat this.
Marc:You can't eat that.
Marc:You should take this supplement.
Marc:I'm like, all right, that's all I need to know.
Marc:I don't need the history of the guy.
Marc:But then I started looking into Ferris a little bit and he's kind of a whack job, sort of an obsessive, you know, meticulous scientific whack job.
Marc:that will do anything to experiment on himself in order to find how to make his body more functional, how to transcend the genetic destiny or normal thinking around what we can and can't do with our bodies.
Marc:And I'm like, well, look, really, I just want to lose a few pounds, if that's possible.
Marc:And then I look at the four-hour body, and there's a chapter on sex.
Marc:And in this new book, The Four-Hour Chef, there's sort of a whole chunk on survivalism and hunting and eating pigeons and cooking in a can.
Marc:So I just had to get a sense.
Marc:I just had to talk to this guy to figure out what the hell makes him tick.
Marc:And also, quite frankly, just to give me some straight up diet advice, which he does.
Marc:And I hope you enjoy this.
Marc:And I can get behind.
Marc:These books are sort of they're weighty.
Marc:There's a lot in them.
Marc:And it seems like this guy, his life is putting his life on the line so you can feel better about yours.
Marc:Yeah, that's something, isn't it?
Marc:Hell yeah, it is.
Marc:Look, I got to be honest with you, man.
Marc:I'm pretty lucky when it comes to weather because I live in Southern California, but I know a lot of you have to deal with winter elements every day.
Marc:I know I'm going to be flying into some on my tour dates.
Marc:All right, let's talk to Tim Ferriss.
Marc:Tim Ferriss is here, man.
Marc:The myth, the legend.
Marc:In my mind, you are a myth because here's what happens.
Marc:Look, I grew up with an anorexic mother.
Marc:So dieting was, you know, the first book I think I had was some sort of calorie counting book.
Marc:Like she was literally that.
Marc:Her entire job in life is to maintain a weight of 116 pounds.
Marc:So I have an eating disorder is what I'm trying to tell you.
Marc:I believe you do, too.
Marc:I have many, many disorders.
Marc:But but so somebody, you know, I I'm I'm usually on not really a diet, but I've done Weight Watchers and shit.
Marc:And I'm not a fat guy.
Marc:And but I in my mind, I'm a fat guy.
Marc:So someone tells me about your your the four hour body.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it's my buddy, Jonah.
Marc:And then for a while, there were a lot of people on it.
Marc:Like people were talking about this four-hour body shit.
Marc:And I don't even know what the four hours in relation to.
Marc:But I asked, and you'll tell me, I asked Jonah, I said, so what is it?
Marc:He's like, and he tells me what you can eat.
Marc:And then he gives me a website of things you just look up, whether it's on the fucking thing or not.
Marc:He says, you can eat whatever, you eat like this for six days.
Marc:Then on the seventh day, you just fucking shove shit in your face.
Marc:But I think you underestimated the amount of shit I can eat on that seventh day.
Marc:But my question is,
Marc:Is that so then so someone I ripped off your book right now.
Marc:And now you gave me one.
Marc:I see it's all hardback and nice.
Marc:And I didn't have any idea.
Marc:I thought it was a paperback.
Marc:I didn't know anything about it.
Marc:So when I got it, when I got the book and before someone gave to me, the guy gave it to me, says, yeah, just check out the dieting stuff.
Marc:But it gets fucking weird, man.
Marc:He's got a chapter in there on fucking, and there's a lot of science.
Marc:It's fucking crazy.
Marc:He did surgery on himself.
Marc:I'm like, who the fuck is this guy?
Marc:What are you talking about?
Marc:Where do you come from, man?
Marc:Where were you brought up?
Guest:I grew up on the east end of Long Island.
Guest:The rat tail and the whole nine yards.
Guest:I was a townie growing up in the Hamptons of all places.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you're a Long Island ocean townie.
Guest:You got it.
Guest:And my mom threw me into kiddie wrestling at age six or seven because I was hyperactive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Some of the village mothers said that was a great way to exhaust your kid before they came home.
Guest:So you're genuine.
Guest:You were diagnosed hyperactive.
Guest:I think that they lacked a lot of the acronyms, which I was thankful for.
Guest:But absolutely, I was labeled hyperactive.
Guest:I mean, I had a lot of timeouts, ate a lot of soap in kindergarten, if you can believe that.
Guest:And what did your old man do?
Guest:Real estate broker.
Marc:So are you Jewish?
Marc:No.
Marc:So you're a Long Island non-Jew.
Marc:Long Island non-Jew, which is a rare breed.
Guest:But no, further down, I think, on the island, there's fewer Jews.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:No, there's more?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah, in the Hamptons.
Guest:I mean, it's the vast majority.
Guest:I mean, because you look at the local population doesn't have a lot of Jews.
Guest:I mean, I had Jewish friends growing up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The population increases four or five-fold with Manhattanites.
Guest:It's a summer destination.
Marc:Right, sure.
Marc:We all know about the Hamptons.
Marc:So you were like the locals who used to sort of look down your nose at these fucking rich people that would show up.
Guest:Yeah, rip the hood ornaments off of cars and just do general pains in the ass.
Guest:You got some hood ornaments.
Guest:Because we had to work in the rest.
Guest:Well, we had to.
Guest:I mean, it's making it sound dramatic, but most people work in the restaurants or landscaping or whatever.
Guest:And so you get to see the best and the worst of humanity at the restaurants.
Guest:So you develop an aversion.
Guest:So it was, yeah, the city people.
Marc:But it wasn't like sort of like, all right, the Manhattan chicks are coming this summer.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, that was fair game.
Guest:That wasn't bad.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But like every few months, there'd be like this influx of fucking little rich Jewish girls that you'd be like, ah, there they are.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's...
Guest:i couldn't go to the town beach though the village beach because the locals can't or either can't get or can't afford the the beach permits so we had we went to a different beach so we didn't we didn't get to see the hot man that night oh girls on uh at indian wells which is where i went but that's changed because now it's kind of an all-year thing but
Marc:I just pictured you and your friends sort of like holding onto the fence, like that scene in Apocalypse Now with just the local Vietnamese people around the scene where the helicopter brings in the Playboy bunnies.
Marc:They're just kind of clinging to the fence watching the excitement.
Guest:There's a lot of idle time.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So you were a wrestler?
Guest:Yeah, so that's where all the self-experimentation started because once I got into- What year are we looking at?
Guest:This would be- So like high school?
Guest:High school is when I really got into the science of performance enhancement just because- So that's where it started.
Guest:That's where it started.
Guest:It was athletics.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's where it started because I was born premature and my left lung has a lot of issues.
Guest:I overheat very easily.
Guest:So to lose weight for wrestling, and I was cutting from 175 to 152, actually 178.
Guest:I'm not a sports guy, so everything is going to have to be fully explained.
Guest:Absolutely, that's fine.
Guest:So what that meant was twice a week, I had to lose 25 plus pounds of water to weigh in and then rehydrate and compete.
Guest:And to do that without having organ failure, you have to figure out
Guest:certain aspects of the body, like sodium, potassium, et cetera.
Guest:So that's where it started, was tracking all that stuff.
Marc:Okay, so you're in high school, but other kids, they're drinking, they're smoking pot, they're jerking off every other day, and you're that obsessed that you're like, I have to figure out the science of how to maximize my athletic output?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I want to make it sound like I was a saint.
Guest:I mean, I have nothing against jerking off.
Guest:I didn't smoke much pot.
Guest:Number one, because it doesn't really do anything to me.
Guest:Brownies are a different story.
Guest:Edibles are okay with you.
Guest:Edibles are okay.
Guest:And I didn't drink because there just wasn't much around.
Guest:I mean, I might have under other circumstances.
Marc:But you have to admit you're an obsessive dude.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, definitely.
Marc:No doubt about it.
Marc:And some part of this has got to sort of reveal like it started consuming your life in high school.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because like when I look at your books, dude, I'm like, this guy is fucking consumed with this shit.
Marc:He's completely obsessive compulsive and it seems to be working for him.
Guest:Well, the whole thing was an accidental career, this whole writing stuff.
Guest:And I was able, by sort of falling into this karmic accident, to turn what I'd viewed as a weakness of mine, this kind of OCD, bouncing around, only having six months of attention for any given thing, into...
Marc:writing style which is hysterical in a way but yeah and it's all over the place but you seem to wrangle it in you create a context yeah and as long as I provide a map in the beginning for people so it's more like a chooser and adventure book and not the ravings of a madman then it's okay so let's track this so okay so you're you're you're figuring out the science of what you need to do to accommodate your weak lung and your weight in high school as a wrestler and so how does that how does that evolve so what'd you figure out
Guest:Well, I figured out that you can use, that's when I started learning about diuretics and fluid and whatnot.
Guest:So I would use stuff like dandelion root, which is a potassium sparing diuretic.
Guest:All that means is you're less likely to have severe problems and cramping.
Guest:When I got to college, I took the same interest in science and started looking at smart drugs and stuff like that.
Marc:Well, where'd you find the dandelion root?
Marc:Was that, did you have like the Kloss's book of, did you have that giant, something of Eden?
Marc:Oh, all the herbs and everything.
Guest:I had that.
Guest:I had a whole shelf.
Guest:In fact, I went to an Episcopal boarding school after transferring from public school on Long Island.
Marc:Why'd you have to go to boarding school?
Marc:What'd you do?
Guest:I didn't have to.
Guest:I was actually, it was my choice.
Guest:I had, well, a friend of mine got stabbed in the leg in school, which is ridiculous because it's,
Guest:East Hampton.
Guest:Uh, but there were, kids were really bored.
Guest:So there's a lot of drugs and stupid shit like that.
Guest:Some guy just got stabbed in the leg.
Guest:There's a fight.
Guest:And this guy pulled, this kid pulled the knife and stabbed my friend in the leg.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And, uh, I had had one friend who had gone to boarding school and he said, you got to get the fuck out of here.
Guest:And actually, so you don't get stabbed in the leg.
Guest:Well, no, just like, you're not going to, even if you're the best at this school in whatever, it doesn't make a difference.
Guest:Like, right.
Guest:So you need to move on.
Guest:And you might end up never leaving the island and dying in a car of some kind.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Precisely.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Got it.
Guest:Actually, there are a lot of overdoses there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:A lot.
Guest:But anyway, the point being, I had this entire shelf full of herbology and stuff, which was hard to get without having witchcraft somewhere in the title.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I had this reverend come into my dorm room at one point and have a heart attack just about.
Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:He was like, oh, God, you're giving me heartburn already.
Guest:It's the first time I'd met the guy.
Marc:So he was pretty sure he had a Satanist to convert?
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So most of them were sort of hippie witch books, you mean?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:But you could get Dandelion Root over the counter at GNC or whatever.
Guest:And this is something that works?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And it's a note.
Marc:See, I don't know anything about this.
Marc:I mean, I know I've taken some...
Marc:vitamins that i i think are bullshit you know my dad's become a real proponent for uh coconut oil and and all kinds of other shit that he's sure like all this stuff is going to make a big difference and i tell you he had me on some sort of fucking vitamin concoction with a bunch of other shit and i took it and i started to think like well wow this is really making a difference and i started not taking them just because i spaced it and then a few months went by and like you know what tim i don't feel a fucking difference in anything and
Guest:Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of bullshit out there.
Guest:And what I would say, though, is that I treat supplements, food, vitamins, drugs, prescription, illicit or otherwise all as drugs.
Guest:Like if you put it in your body through your mouth, through your skin, through a needle and it has some biochemical effect, it's a drug.
Guest:So I treat the supplements with needles.
Guest:uh i have i don't recommend it i mean i've done you know in b12 i've done uh all sorts of crazy stuff for injury reversal yeah like taking out whole blood uh and then having it spun in a centrifuge to
Guest:remove the growth factors or put them into the plasma and then re-injecting it locally for injury.
Guest:Well, you did this yourself at home?
Guest:No.
Guest:You went to a place that does that?
Guest:You went to the blood centrifuge place?
Guest:Went to Wikipedia with some latex gloves.
Guest:No, I found some sports doctors.
Guest:So typically I'll look at the athletes that have miraculous recoveries, which is exactly what they are because they're chemically enhanced.
Guest:And then I'll track down their doctors and...
Guest:have them work but you weren't a professional athlete no i wasn't but the people who work on professional athletes get the most money to figure out how to solve really severe problems like i've seen guys what was your severe problem though i mean if you're not an athlete well i was i was an athlete for a long time so i was all american in wrestling in high school and then uh was uh
Guest:national Chinese kickboxing champion in 99 so I just I've accumulated a lot of injuries yeah and not that I'm very old but at 35 you start to feel the cumulative trauma of all the stuff you've done to your body so I had I've had 20 plus fractures and I'm just starting to get pain in my upper back and things like that that I wanted to fix
Guest:And I'm impatient and very curious.
Guest:So I went to these sort of black market doctors to do various things.
Guest:And that was one of them.
Marc:So what's the vision?
Marc:I mean, what?
Marc:I mean, you obviously have some there seems to be a manifesto or an ideology forming around what you're doing.
Marc:I mean, these books are obviously I got it off the Internet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now you bring these two hardback copies of the four hour body and then the four hour chef.
Marc:And I'm like, don't you have a paperback?
Marc:You're like, they never came out in paperback.
Marc:And I just sort of got them because I heard about you.
Marc:But when you started doing this stuff, it was primarily to not self-medicate, but to self-treat, to maintain the machine.
Guest:Yeah, to not only maintain the machine, but to take an imperfect or mediocre machine and look at what kind of fuel you can put into it, what type of training you can use to take someone, let's just say...
Guest:to take someone without the attributes to be really good at something and make them really good at it so michael phelps like he's a mutant right he's built right some people are gifted he is built to be in water right and uh but you take someone else like there's a guy named shinji takeuchi japanese guy clearly who learned to swim in his 30s and he at the time i wrote the four hour body had the second most viewed swimming video on youtube and uh
Guest:He's trained himself to swim completely effortlessly.
Guest:You barely see the water move.
Guest:And I try to take people like that and determine what are the 20% of activities that they're using that produce 80% or more of the results.
Guest:So for the first book, the four-hour work week was for business stuff.
Guest:And then the second one was for physical performance.
Guest:And the third one was for learning.
Guest:But it's all...
Guest:More or less that 80-20 analysis.
Guest:I think that's the theme across it all.
Marc:So you just do a bunch of research and you apply it to yourself and then you share that process.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And typically, especially with the physical stuff, because readers...
Guest:If something can go wrong and you unleash it into the wild before you've vetted it, people will mess themselves up.
Guest:They will not follow directions.
Marc:Sure, yeah.
Marc:If people are desperate enough and they hate themselves enough, they'll jump off a fucking building if they think it'll help.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Which is the saddest, weirdest metaphor for suicide I've ever come up with.
Guest:that you're just saying that they might hurt themselves if you if your procedure is is dubious or not well researched and i yeah and i use that and i just realized yeah people who kill themselves do think it will help yeah and but the it's it's astonishing to me though and it shouldn't be because if you take like you know random thousand people or a million people of course you're going to get a handful who are batshit crazy but i had a chapter are you not batshit crazy
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, of course, that's what I'm sure every batshit crazy person says.
Guest:No, no, you're very constructive.
Marc:I mean, you're proactive and it seems you've gotten a lot of shit done, but I'm not convinced you're not batshit crazy.
Guest:We'll come back to that.
Guest:But I had a chapter that was removed from the four-hour body, which was how to hold your breath like Houdini.
Guest:And David Blaine, the illusionist, trained me in 15 minutes to go from 45 seconds max breath hold to three minutes and 33 seconds.
Guest:And I taught people how to do it with a ton of caveats and a ton of warnings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And of course, first thing that happens a week out of the gate, get a blog post.
Guest:This guy's like, yeah, I was trying this at my local public pool and passed out.
Guest:And then the lifeguard had to yank me out of the water and resuscitate me.
Guest:But he dislocated my shoulder.
Guest:I was wondering if you have any advice for how to fix my shoulder.
Guest:And I'm just like, fuck.
Guest:it doesn't matter if you put in all the warnings.
Guest:You really have to make it.
Guest:Why'd you pull it out of the book?
Guest:You thought you would be liable somehow?
Guest:Well, not only- I mean, isn't that free will on some level?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, there is, well, yeah, Darwinism.
Guest:There's the free will.
Guest:You're actually trying to thin the hurt.
Guest:There's the liability piece, and maybe, whether I was liable or not, I just didn't want readers killing themselves on my clock.
Guest:By accident.
Guest:By accident, right.
Guest:So, I mean, or on purpose, but that's a separate, that's harder to pull off.
Marc:But let's say in your mind,
Marc:When you had that chapter in there, so this was an idea you said, like, you know, how do you hold your breath like Houdini?
Marc:What was the point of that in your mind?
Guest:The point of it was to demonstrate how many things that we assume to be fixed genetically or otherwise are completely malleable.
Guest:Like IQ, total horseshit, you can change that.
Guest:Like maximal strength, flexibility, longevity, all these things can be really tweaked extremely easily.
Guest:So the breath holding...
Guest:It was a very personal example because I was phobic about holding my breath given my lung issues.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wanted to draw attention to that as an extreme example.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But on a practical level, I just decided that the risk benefit ratio wasn't there.
Guest:Like best case scenario, what?
Guest:Some people learn how to hold their breath longer.
Guest:Great.
Guest:Worst case scenario, a bunch of dumb asses killed themselves in public pools.
Guest:So I yanked it.
Marc:So a lot of this stuff came out of your own personal insecurity about your physical makeup when you were younger.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That like, you know, you were put in a situation to wrestle and you couldn't compete at a certain level because of, you know, you were a certain size or a certain weight and you had this lung issue.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So out of spite and persistence, you said, fuck you.
Marc:I can do anything.
Guest:Or I'll try to do anything and I'll see what works.
Guest:And I mean, my life is just a series of wacky ass two week experiments.
Guest:Basically, I'll try almost if I don't think it'll kill me and I think the potential damage is reversible.
Guest:I'll try almost anything for two weeks.
Marc:But these aren't things to get you high.
Marc:They're things like most people do that with drugs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But these are things to test your endurance or your ability to withstand something in order to sort of get to another level with it.
Guest:In most cases, not all cases, I mean, I've experimented a lot with drugs.
Guest:I mean, big Terrence McKenna fan.
Guest:I've...
Guest:i've uh when i was so initially in school i mean other worlds other levels you know yeah it's all it's it's our perception is limited yeah let's take a ride and what would you come out what'd you come up with well i uh okay i'll give you one example i think that lsd therapy and rem sleep have a lot of similarities so you can rem sleep in the same way can it's
Guest:thought to consolidate memories.
Guest:The more REM you get, generally the faster you'll learn sports, remember foreign vocabulary or whatever.
Guest:I think that LSD could potentially be utilized similarly to accelerate learning.
Guest:So I was playing around with it for that purpose.
Guest:Good acid?
Guest:Good acid.
Guest:And I mean, really, you have to stand, and I'm not, again, I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, so I'm not recommending people, or I'm not a lawyer either, so I recommend people haphazardly screw around with this stuff.
Guest:But if you can control your variables and do it in a controlled environment with proper supervision, I think that there are certain compounds, I mean, I think psilocybin is another, that have really tremendous therapeutic applications, potentially.
Guest:For what?
Guest:For what?
Guest:Well, I mean, ego disassociation, which can be a dangerous thing, but I feel like the.
Marc:So these are psychological speculations that you're coming up.
Marc:That ego just like, yeah, to get rid of the ego in order to find the true self or find some sort of freedom from it.
Guest:Or to be able to analyze problems that you have more objectively.
Guest:So I'm not saying that... Oh, I get it.
Guest:And this is... Where I formulate these types of hypotheses is not... I mean, sometimes it's just out of thin air and I want to try it myself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's a good excuse to try drugs.
Guest:Well, there's that.
Guest:And it makes it sound like a real intellectual endeavor.
Guest:But the second place is I go to PubMed.
Guest:So PubMed is where you can find the...
Guest:scientific literature that's been published recently or 20 years ago and searched by keywords and things like that so a lot of my wild goose chases start with searches there i'll just search something like uh i'm trying to think of a recent example adiponectin is this hormone i got really interested in uh because it seemed like you could use cold exposure just taking like a cold bath or putting ice packs on the back of your neck yeah to accelerate fat loss and it had to do with this thing called adiponectin so i was like okay i'm gonna look for adiponectin fat loss adiponectin obesity
Guest:and then she read everything yeah and what'd you come up with it works works really well and when the four hour body came out man i got such a firestorm of shit it's so much criticism uh left and right this and that the other thing is impossible it's impossible to lose two more than two pounds of fat awake it's impossible to listen you can do that on fucking weight watchers dude
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That's why, I mean, there's so many old wives tales that have been repeated so many times that they're just assumed to kind of be true.
Marc:I mean, if you exercise even two or three times a week and eat, what, 2,400 calories a day, 2,000 or under 2,000, you'll lose.
Marc:You will lose weight, but here's the issue.
Marc:It's all coming around to putting a program together for me.
Marc:That's what we're doing.
Marc:Yeah, well, let's talk about it.
Marc:But I also want to talk about this thing that you stuck in your stomach.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, the continuous glucose monitor.
Guest:Oh, that was a great experiment.
Guest:So there's a device called the Dexcom 7.
Guest:These things are super cool, which is used by type 1 diabetics.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But they're expensive, and at the time were kind of experimental, so race car drivers who had diabetes would mount it on the dashboard.
Guest:And you put two probes inside your abdomen under the skin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it sends, it allows you to watch your blood sugar in real time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so if it's falling too quickly or rising too quickly.
Guest:Why would race car drivers put that?
Guest:If they're a type one diabetic, they have to make sure that they're not about to go into, they're not about to pass out, for instance.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so they might need to actually, if they're racing for, let's say 10 hours, they'll actually give themselves insulin.
Guest:If they're type one diabetic, there are many, but because there is one, of course they use him as their spokesperson.
Guest:It's like, you know, if you're eating Cheetos and watching golden girls, well, we've got the solution.
Guest:Cause look at this bad-ass who uses our product.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's on a moving couch.
Guest:Yeah, he's on a really fast moving couch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I wore this implant for, I'd have to look for the exact duration.
Guest:It was about two weeks.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And recorded everything I ate, everything I drank, measured it, weighed it to identify when my body digested things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What caused weird spikes so that I could fine tune it and spot check things.
Guest:What's your educational background?
Guest:Did you go to college?
Guest:I did, but I was on the five-year plan.
Guest:I did that plan, too.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I took a year off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I went to undergrad Princeton, and in the beginning was wanted to major in neuroscience, and I did initially declare a major in neuroscience, but...
Guest:But I couldn't do the animal testing.
Guest:I wanted to be in a lab that was run by a guy named Barry Jacobs who actually did a lot of LSD research and worked with cats because they sleep all the time so they're easy to study for REM.
Guest:But I couldn't do the animal testing necessarily.
Guest:I don't object to it necessarily, but I couldn't personally do it.
Guest:So I shifted to- It hurt your heart?
Guest:Yeah, it did, man.
Guest:I remember going in for orientation for the lab at one point.
Guest:And there was this, I think it was a graduate student, this woman from either Ukraine or Russian.
Guest:She showed me what perfusing a rat looks like.
Guest:And that's a fancy term for bleeding a rat to death.
Guest:Because if you inject a retrovirus or something, then have to slice the brain up.
Guest:You can't have bruising.
Guest:So you need to get rid of the blood before they die.
Guest:I don't think it's a particularly painful thing, but I said, oh God, you know, like I kind of flinched and looked away and she said, yeah, you know, I used to feel that way, but now I can perfuse 15 rats and go to lunch.
Guest:And I just remember thinking to myself, I'm not sure I want to get to that point.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, like I'm not sure I want to dull myself that much.
Guest:And, uh...
Guest:I transferred.
Guest:I moved over to- Because you couldn't perfuse rats.
Guest:I couldn't perfuse rats, yeah.
Marc:Coming back around, the reason I asked you that was that you seem not like, I look at the book, and I'm looking at your studies, and my eyes just glaze over.
Marc:Basically, the guy who turned me on to you, he said, this is what you eat, and then he can eat all this on the one day a week.
Marc:And you can look at all the science.
Marc:I just couldn't get through it.
Marc:It's like reading a textbook.
Marc:I'm like, oh, fuck.
Marc:And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's a chapter on fucking and on fitness things.
Marc:Reeled you back in with the fucking?
Guest:Well, a little bit.
Marc:I mean, I didn't quite get into it, but I knew that you were some sort of force to be reckoned with in terms of the way you put things together.
Marc:But my thing with the four-hour body was that every time I did it, and I did it a few times, I would lose about 12 pounds.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:that was it then i'd level off like well maybe not that much well i think like the weight i think i'm good at but i wasn't exercising i wasn't doing anything that you said yeah other than eating the way you said okay and i would just it would seem that like i think the biggest jump i took was from 186 to 179 178 which is about where i want to be yep and then i couldn't get beneath it i couldn't get beneath those two whereas if i starved myself i could
Guest:You could, but the problem with starving yourself is your body composition tends to shift to more of like a skinny fat model, if you follow what I mean.
Guest:You end up losing a lot of muscle mass.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then your potential for regaining fat is even higher than it was before.
Guest:We could talk about spot checking.
Guest:I mean, there's a guy...
Guest:So there are the outliers on the positive side, right?
Guest:So there's a guy named Ricardo Arias who just sent me an email.
Guest:He's going to cross the 200 pounds lost point probably this week or next.
Marc:How much exercise is he doing?
Guest:I would have to check.
Guest:I know someone who lost 120 without any exercise.
Marc:Yeah, I've heard a lot of people that are really losing weight on that.
Guest:So with the tracking of 3,500 people, they had an 82% compliance rate.
Guest:People who followed it and lost weight successfully, 82%.
Guest:A few of the common issues are, some are, and this isn't obviously an issue that you have, but alcohol-related, some are sweetener-related, any kind of artificial sweeteners.
Guest:stevia stevia i have here's my opinion on stevia i get asked about this a lot uh it's better than a lot of the others but my my my theory is that anything the brain perceives as sweet causes an insulin reaction so it's not it's not a chemical thing it's a it's a it's it's well it's a chemical thing but it's got nothing to do with the actual glucose it's got to do with the reaction that your tongue sends to your brain yeah
Marc:saying like, he's eating sweet shit now.
Marc:Let's pick it up or slow it down or whatever.
Guest:Just like if you know you're going to eat, your body starts to respond hormonally even before you take the first bite.
Guest:So I try to avoid all sweeteners, especially agave nectar.
Guest:That's just sugar, man.
Guest:Well, it's even worse.
Guest:It's fructose, which wreaks havoc on your body.
Guest:But
Guest:Point being, you have the artificial sweeteners.
Guest:Other people, even like a tiny amount of lactose, can stall fat loss.
Guest:So, for instance, if you have a little bit of coffee in, I'm sorry, a little bit of milk in your coffee, and people think skim milk is the way to go, which it isn't, you replace that with cream, which is pure fat.
Guest:And I've seen people lose an additional two to four pounds of fat a week.
Guest:It's amazing.
Guest:Just because lactose is really insulinogenic.
Guest:It doesn't have a high GI like the glycemic index, which people talk about a lot, but it's high on the insulinogenic index.
Guest:So there are these tiny things.
Guest:Not drinking enough water is a huge one.
Guest:So if you're drinking diuretics like coffee, and I love coffee, but if you've placed a burden on your liver by not drinking enough water, it's really easy to stall out.
Guest:Stall out fat loss?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:And there are a handful of things like that.
Guest:But be happy to the the other thing that when people if people really want to get serious about it, you have to do blood work like you have to look at blood work.
Guest:If you want to be serious about your diet, you have to do blood work, what, weekly?
Guest:No, no, no, no way.
Guest:You can, I mean, I'm crazy, so I do blood work all the time, but I would recommend doing blood work every two or three months.
Guest:I think that- What do we learn from blood work?
Marc:See, this is not the diet for middle America.
Marc:If you're like, no, I'm not knocking it.
Marc:I think it is, but like-
Marc:That's extra credit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Your obsession is like, do you ever get any relief from it?
Marc:I mean, I know you're very level headed right now, but if I look at these books and I listen to the way you're talking, is there any joy outside of honoring your obsessive pattern?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:I need that or I'll, I'll flame out.
Guest:Uh, I, I do need built in breaks and, uh, absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm not this way about everything.
Guest:I mean, it's like the, uh, people have asked me for like the four hour relationship and I'm like, look, man, you know, there's some things you really want to try to optimize, but there are other things you want to savor and take your time with or can't optimize.
Guest:Or can optimist.
Guest:Some things are out of your control, aren't they, Tim?
Guest:Oh, a lot of things are outside of your control.
Guest:Most things are outside of your control.
Guest:I mean, the universe will kick you in the nuts if you think otherwise.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, maybe we're getting off topic, but I read...
Guest:I read a lot of Stoicism, actually, like Seneca is my favorite literature from Stoic because it teaches you to value only the things that can't be taken away.
Guest:And the things that can be taken away are usually the things that I obsess about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So like your life.
Guest:Like your life, yeah.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:What else is on that list?
Guest:What do you see as things that can be taken away?
Guest:That can be taken away?
Guest:Anything material, right?
Guest:So if you're trying to optimize for business, there are so many factors outside of your control that can... But outside of business, just for you.
Marc:Like if you're reading Stoicism.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, the comfort you get from that at the end of the day is what?
Guest:The comfort I get is knowing that no matter what the worst case scenario, whether that's in relationships with who knows what, some reader trying to drown himself in a public pool, or- Or your chick leaves.
Guest:Or a chick leaves, or like a frivolous lawsuit, or like some horrible piece in the New York Times or whatever, that I have the emotional feeling
Guest:objectivity to not overreact to it and and then dwell on it and also you can buy the new book you can also kill a pigeon or eat yeah in a can you could yeah the hobo can uh the the pigeons i thought their heads would be hard to rip off me it sounds kind of strange to open that way but um they're kind of like those candy necklaces do you know those things they're like there's it's it's hard not to pull their head off if they're dead okay anyway all right can you track
Marc:Like, was there some event in your life where you thought you were going to be without everything?
Marc:I mean, can you track your brain to an event, or do you think that your mental state is genetic?
Marc:No, no, no, no.
Marc:Well, I mean, I suppose a lot of things are genetic, although...
Marc:But was there some point where your heart got broken, your old man left, or some point where you were just falling?
Guest:Yeah, oh yeah.
Guest:The year I took away from school was that.
Guest:I left Princeton in the middle of my senior year.
Guest:That's an unusual move.
Guest:So you had a breakdown?
Guest:Yeah, oh yeah, definitely.
Guest:How did that unfold?
Guest:That unfolded...
Guest:from a few things at once um a really damaging relationship that i was in was so the the environment for all these other things to really uh so you hung your heart on someone yes and and uh it was a very bad relationship secondly was how did it play out what happened
Guest:And it was, you know, I wanted to be the fixer.
Guest:And so it was this girl I'd met, seemed pretty unhinged from the outset, was a chain smoker.
Guest:And I'm not, I'm just, I have a tough time dealing with smoking.
Guest:But you loved her, right?
Guest:I was, yeah, I did.
Guest:You were like, that girl is like.
Guest:I did.
Guest:And I was like, you know what?
Guest:She's smart.
Guest:At her core, despite all these horrible, like, molting layers of the onion that I'll choose to ignore.
Guest:She's good at her core.
Guest:We can work through this.
Guest:And so I was like, all right, I'll try to, you know, I can fix this.
Marc:We'll fix this.
Marc:But that's how you went into it?
Guest:That, like, you know, she... I mean, that's not how I, like, that wasn't my self-talk every morning.
Marc:But that was a retrospect.
Marc:That's in retrospect.
Marc:But for something like, did it play out like you met her and you were like, oh, my God, this chick's awesome.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:In the beginning.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And then you're like, oh, she's not doing what I want her to do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or she's like, what are you going to do?
Guest:Tough guy.
Guest:Like, fuck you make me or whatever.
Guest:I'm like, Oh really?
Guest:Never had this conversation before.
Guest:So she challenged you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:In some really unhealthy ways.
Guest:I mean, because like, you know, I'd, I'd be like, she'd start smoking in the car.
Guest:I'd be like, do you mind not smoking in the car?
Guest:And she'd like, you know,
Guest:flick it across the car and be like what are you my father like you know parents were really abusive and translated into all this behavior I hadn't had to contend with before but on top of that I my senior thesis was killing me which is funny for a guy who's a writer now but I I
Guest:I thought I wasn't going to be able to finish my thesis.
Guest:What was it on?
Guest:It was on the acquisition of Chinese characters by native English speakers.
Guest:So looking at the phonetic and semantic pathways by which native English speakers can learn Chinese characters really quickly.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:And I got about, I don't know, half the way through it.
Guest:And keep in mind, I'm coming up on graduation, this thing is due.
Guest:And my thesis advisor decided that he wanted me to do a bunch of his research for him.
Guest:And he said, I want you to incorporate this into the thesis.
Guest:And it was a total...
Guest:His, you know, 90 degree turn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he wanted me to do kind of the grunt work.
Guest:And I told him, I was like, well, I'm going to have to rewrite everything I've done, basically.
Guest:And he said, well, you better get started then, I suppose.
Guest:And it turned into this really fucked up thing where he was on tenure.
Guest:So no one wanted to mess with him in the department.
Guest:And I went to the student affairs committee or whatever the hell it's called to talk about it.
Guest:And they're like, oh, no, he would never do that.
Guest:Like, I don't believe that happened, basically.
Guest:And I'm like, I'm telling you this happened.
Guest:Like, I can't do what he's asking me to do.
Guest:I won't finish this in time.
Guest:And it's worth like...
Marc:whatever it was a quarter a third of my four-year right average right and uh do you think he was threatened by you and he was like pushing you to a limit i don't i don't think so i don't i honestly can't so you got a crazy girl flicking cigarettes at you and you got a teacher that's like here do some work for me
Guest:Yeah, well, do this thing that will almost guarantee that you will not be able to complete your thesis, which will fuck up every good grade you've had in this department since day one.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And what, were you getting good grades?
Guest:Yeah, I was getting good grades.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I just said, you know what, time out.
Guest:I can't deal with this.
Guest:I'm burned.
Guest:Were you doing athletics, too?
Guest:I was not doing athletics.
Guest:I was training, though.
Guest:Okay, so you're burned.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I was burned.
Guest:So I took a year off and I sort of gave my notice.
Guest:And my thesis advisor said to me when I told him, he goes, oh, you're quitting.
Guest:Well, when you come back, I hope this is the best thesis I've ever seen in my life.
Guest:And I was like, all right, here we go.
Guest:And like into the vortex, man.
Guest:So I ended up living in Jersey, like in Lawrenceville.
Guest:And then I was like going to Trenton for boxing classes.
Guest:With a chick?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I went by myself.
Guest:I was the only person not on work release at the boxing gym.
Marc:But I mean, were you still with the girl?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, I was still with the girl.
Guest:And what was fucked up about it, like the worst part was that as this was going along, I never looked at the relationship as the problem.
Guest:What was the problem?
Guest:Well, like this thesis and not knowing what I want to do with my life.
Guest:Were you panicking?
Guest:Like were you having panic attacks?
Guest:I was panicking.
Guest:I mean, I would get this thing.
Guest:Well, let me add one more thing to the mix because this is what would cause like the vision to close in.
Guest:I don't know if you've ever had that, but I'm very competitive by nature and I didn't know what I wanted to do professionally after college.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so all of these kids in my class were competing for like Goldman Sachs or McKinsey.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was just what you competed for.
Guest:So I started going to all these job fairs and meetings.
Guest:The demon factories.
Guest:The demon factories.
Guest:I started going to the demon factories and I was on their blueprint.
Guest:And at one point I was like, I don't fucking want to do this stuff and I don't know what else is out there.
Guest:It was the bleeding the rat moment.
Guest:It was the bleeding the rat.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So I saw the thesis and all these other things as the problem.
Guest:So ostensibly, my reason for taking the year off was I want to try a couple of jobs in different industries so that I don't get forced into management consulting or investment banking.
Guest:It was also to give me breathing room for this thesis.
Guest:But when anything went wrong, I was having an existential crisis related to those two issues.
Guest:I saw the relationship as the safety net.
Guest:Right.
Guest:See where I'm going.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So then I'm like, well, this is the only thing that I think is keeping me sane.
Guest:Therefore, I can't end it.
Guest:Whereas all fucking along, it was what I needed to get rid of.
Guest:But it wasn't clear until like a year later.
Guest:You were addicted to the drama.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, man, what a mess.
Guest:But it was the only constant that I had at that point.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Marc:And did it keep getting worse?
Marc:Were you fighting with her?
Guest:It didn't get much better, and then it got really, really, really bad.
Guest:Yelling, screaming in the street?
Guest:Yeah, not so much in the street, but definitely some horrible, horrible instances.
Guest:How did it ultimately end?
Guest:It ended pretty, I'm not going to say nonchalantly, but she'd never been broken up with.
Guest:She just had that hot girl, bitchy, controlling, psychologically, very manipulative, but in a highly intelligent way.
Guest:So she was really good at Jedi mind tricking me into thinking things were in my best interest.
Marc:Do you think she did that on purpose, though?
Marc:Because I have an issue.
Marc:I wonder about these things.
Marc:You've thought about this stuff a lot.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, do you think that the relationship dynamics between people, that sometimes it's not some big plan, that it's innate, that the way that they're operating, what I would see as manipulation, it's not their plan to do that.
Guest:Oh, no, no, no.
Marc:They're just getting their needs met.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:She had no grand...
Marc:Because if you ever tried to argue with that reasoning, it's like you're going to lose.
Guest:There's no winning.
Guest:No, there was no big plan.
Guest:It was she, I don't think she knew how to survive without the drama.
Guest:So she liked to manufacture it.
Guest:And I mean, man, she got it.
Guest:it was what i what i saw was i mean her her father had been very abusive to her mother physically and uh so she's trying to relive that and she might not have known that well it seemed that way to me i mean at one point she's like oh big fighter guy blah blah what are you gonna do you can hit me like hit me hit me hit me and i was like what is happening i didn't you know and i didn't hit her
Guest:Good for you.
Guest:That's frowned upon and not good behavior.
Guest:But that happened in the middle of a fight, right?
Guest:That happened in the middle of a fight.
Guest:And she saw it escalating.
Guest:She's like, okay.
Guest:Look me right in the face.
Guest:She's like, what are you going to do?
Guest:You're going to hit me?
Guest:Like, hit me.
Guest:Go for it.
Guest:Like, come on, big guy.
Guest:Tough guy.
Guest:Fighter, huh?
Guest:Yeah, I've never seen you fight.
Guest:Like, what are you going to do?
Guest:And it was just like, wow.
Guest:I couldn't believe it.
Guest:You know, like if I had written a novel like that, I would have been like, this is totally unbelievable.
Guest:But by doing that, she won.
Guest:well i mean i didn't i guess i didn't do anything and then you had no what there was nothing you could do i'll tell you what what ended it though was a one of my closest friends i hadn't seen in a very long time had dinner with me and my girlfriend and uh after dinner sauce fighting about something or other like off in the distance because i didn't want to make a scene
Guest:and overheard some of it, and we were hanging out later that night going for a walk, and he said, that girl is going to bring all of the demons out of you.
Guest:He's like, you need to end that relationship.
Guest:And this is a guy who dealt with his own demons in a major, major way.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:What were those demons?
Guest:What were your biggest fears?
Guest:That you would hit her?
Guest:Something like that.
Guest:Something really...
Guest:Just, yeah, like a fundamental negative game changer like that.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:So that was it.
Guest:I was just like, we're done.
Guest:So that's out of the way.
Guest:I had tried to do it before, but I wasn't able to do it until the thesis was in.
Okay.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then once it was in, it was like, all right, weight off the shoulders, like beast of burden can actually lift his head now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We're done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was that.
Guest:So you went back and finished it and graduated.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I did.
Guest:Hardest thing I've ever done.
Guest:Hardest year I've ever had.
Guest:With the exception, I shouldn't say with the exception, close second place, the last year of my life.
Guest:Up to this point, the last year has been extremely, extremely trying, but nothing compared to that year.
Marc:Well, that's interesting that, you know, you kept that relationship going, you know, throughout this process because it, you obviously was grounded in, you're grounded by it somehow.
Guest:Well, exactly.
Guest:So it's like, in retrospect, I can say, oh God, that was the big negative thing.
Guest:But I'm like, would I have made it through that relationship?
Guest:those dark days without it as fucked up as it was.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Like maybe as, as horrible and awful as it was, it was the, it was as a constant, what I needed at the time, a constant obsessive struggle, something that is, uh,
Guest:predictable that's what i had you know what i mean okay yeah yeah yeah and um you knew what you were getting it wasn't support it wasn't good you know it was kind of the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know right right right and uh god i'm glad i ended that one though disaster what happened to her you know
Guest:I do know and I'm obviously not going to mention her by name but I heard from her like a year ago and I got a Facebook message check this out Facebook message was oh hi Tim I was thinking about you today
Guest:i have two new kids now look aren't they pretty you know see my photos and i'm breastfeeding now and i had a couple of questions and oh by the way this was the the the kicker she goes by the way i had a dream last night that you and your dad were drowning your mom in a bathtub i don't know what that means hope all's well bye oh my god i'm just like wow am i glad that those kids are not with me did she know your family
Guest:she'd met them absolutely the only time my mom like my mom's usually very nice with uh and and likes my girlfriends yeah this is the one case where she was just like you could see it clear as day and we talked about it too she was just like i do not think this is a good idea right uh so so now you're on this this this path you're on you know where you're you're you know this diet thing
Marc:It's interesting to me because I see that when you look at your books, man, it's sort of like you're driven by this fucking... It seems like a demon to me.
Marc:But I mean, ultimately... Perhaps in a way, it's...
Marc:Outside of the business that you seem to be building around the four-hour brand, I mean, what has it done for your life in terms of, like, it would seem to me that after, if you think like this all the time, you would be constantly exhausted.
Marc:I mean, what are you looking to get out of all this?
Guest:If I don't think this way, I get exhausted.
Guest:That's the weird thing.
Guest:Like, my relaxation...
Guest:I think you'll get this though.
Guest:My relaxation is having one singular thing to focus on and obsess about while ignoring everything else.
Guest:I find that really relaxing.
Guest:Like to turn off, ignore email for a week, ignore phone calls for a week, not calendar anything new, not commit to anything new and just be like, sorry, like I'm doing this weird medical adventure in Nicaragua.
Guest:Like you'll have to wait.
Guest:Right, so everything, so your whole being goes into whatever it is.
Marc:Yeah, blocking everything else out, I find really relaxing.
Marc:But not staying in that, like you shift it, and that's sort of the nature of your creativity, is that you lock in for two weeks and you go all in, because it seems to me that, not so much with the four hour body, but with the four hour chef, that
Marc:Well, maybe with both of them, that maybe the competitive nature of you is sort of like everything you know is bullshit and most of it is posturing.
Marc:That if anybody who has the capability to focus thoroughly on just about anything can get the same results.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's true.
Guest:But I think I'm in the unique position of having a career that allows me to exclusively do that.
Guest:Whereas most people have other jobs.
Guest:They don't have the time.
Guest:So I take it upon myself to be the human guinea pig for all this stuff.
Marc:But that's sort of an inspirational message on some.
Marc:Oh, yeah, definitely.
Marc:Because I've known for myself that, you know, I'm real good at a lot of things, you know, for about, you know, the first hour that like because there's almost sort of like this horrible fear of failure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And a lot of people have that, and I'm not tooting my own horn, I'm saying I'm talented, but the focus doesn't hold.
Marc:But the need not to fail will hold for a little bit.
Marc:But I'm not that disciplined around it.
Marc:And it seems to me that some of your drive is sort of that as well.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Guest:I think that and I don't think as depressing as it might seem to realize that most people are driven by loss aversion or fear of failure.
Guest:It can be really useful.
Guest:So you're going to fail.
Guest:Well, I mean, you're going to fail at stuff, certainly, but meaning like all this sort of positive psychology and like offering rewards and things like that doesn't work as well as having a stick.
Guest:And that's not to say you have to be a tyrant, but if it's being a tyrant with yourself, for instance, a friend of mine named AJ Jacobs is a writer.
Guest:I know AJ Jacobs.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right, so AJ, to lose weight, wrote a check to the KKK for $1,000 as a Jewish guy and gave it to a friend of his and said, if I don't lose X amount by X point, Y point in time, I want you to mail this to the KKK.
Guest:Seems ridiculous, right?
Marc:But what, was there a specific, I mean, writing a check to a general KKK, you just put KKK?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:KKK North Pole, right?
Guest:No, but the point being that if you take, if you look at research, even auction behavior, overbidding, stuff like that, there's a site called, and I don't have any affiliation with it, stick.com, S-D-I-C-K-K.com, where you can put money in escrow.
Guest:and choose an anti-charity that you'd rather nuke than give money to, you can then be refereed by people on the site or friends as to whether you do what you commit to doing, like going to the gym two times a week or practicing the guitar three times a week, whatever.
Guest:So it's like some weird enforcement of resolution.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And it was initially hatched by a Yale professor.
Guest:It was the commitment store.
Guest:But it works incredibly well.
Guest:I've looked at the numbers, and you take someone...
Guest:Or you take, let's say, losing weight, typically maybe 15% to 20% temporary success rate.
Guest:And you can get that up to 80% just by adding in the stakes, some type of consequence.
Marc:So I think that's- As if heart disease, diabetes, cancer is not enough.
Marc:They're not enough.
Marc:Because they're still sort of like... They're too far away and they're too abstract for people.
Guest:Yeah, no one wants to... They all think they're going to beat it somehow.
Guest:Right, which is why if I want to get someone to cut their insulin in half or reverse heart disease, I don't sell them any of that shit because clearly other people have talked to them about it and it's not working.
Guest:I'll sell them 15 minute orgasms, six pack abs and all that.
Guest:I'll be like, look, if you don't stop doing X, your dick's going to stop working and Y point in time.
Guest:And they're like, oh, stop the presses.
Guest:Let's talk.
Guest:And then I can Trojan horse all the stuff that I think they need by giving them that sort of sizzle.
Marc:The dream of six packs abs and the 15 minute orgasm.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So what is a 15 minute orgasm?
Guest:This is female.
Guest:Obviously, a 15-minute male orgasm would be pretty painful.
Guest:15-minute orgasm is repeated female orgasms over a 15-minute period of time.
Marc:Yeah, that's doable.
Guest:Yeah, it's doable, and it's coachable.
Guest:So I spent time with a couple of groups.
Guest:Some people have called them sex cults.
Guest:Not necessarily the case, but not too far off.
Guest:in some cases, but one taste was one in San Francisco.
Guest:I mean, San Francisco of all places has a lot of options.
Guest:You can do a lot of things sexually in San Francisco.
Guest:Yeah, and in SF, well, specifically in some of these other Morehouse University back in the day, all they did was focus on
Guest:manually stimulating women.
Guest:It was like an orgasm training school.
Guest:That's all they did to a large extent.
Guest:So I figured, well, even as fringe as these people might be, they've probably figured some stuff out if all they're doing is sexually related.
Marc:I just saw a cute documentary on HBO that was hosted by a naked woman.
Marc:about the evolution of the dildo and the vibrator that I didn't realize that during repressed times, Victorian times, that these women were losing their mind with, and they had a name for it.
Marc:I can't remember the name of the,
Marc:of the syndrome but it was specifically because they weren't having orgasms and weren't well maybe it was but the treatment was literally this vibrator that they were actually designed to it distemper i can't remember what but like the that apparently doctors were i'm just imagining dildos being handed over the counter at the prescription lane at kind of walgreens but they would go to doctors who would jerk them off to relieve them of this distemper
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, the female orgasm and everything around it, you know, is essential.
Marc:You need to learn how to do that.
Marc:Oh, it's important.
Marc:It solves a lot of problems.
Marc:They need to learn how to do it.
Marc:You should probably know how to do it.
Marc:It solves a lot of problems.
Marc:Or facilitate.
Guest:So that was that research.
Guest:That was the sex part of the four-hour body.
Guest:Well, it was the female orgasm part.
Guest:I mean, I also looked at increasing sperm count and testosterone in males, which is really fascinating stuff.
Guest:Quite easy to do, in fact.
Guest:But you can you can find some really unusual needles in the haystack.
Guest:Like one thing I noticed because I had low testosterone at one point was that I had a selenium deficiency and I used a company called SpectraCell.
Guest:And you can get this done anywhere to do just do a mineral and nutrient analysis.
Marc:What were the symptoms of this that made you concerned outside of you just poking around your blood work?
Marc:I mean, were you like- Yeah, lower sex drive, fatigue, just- But doesn't that happen here and again?
Guest:It happens here and again, but it was persistent.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so I started to supplement with, let's say, Brazil nuts, which have very high selenium.
Guest:And also fixed a few other things, specifically increased my saturated fat intake and was able to double or triple my free testosterone.
Guest:And I doubled my sperm count and my motility and all of that.
Guest:Every guy who's thinking of having kids should do that right now.
Guest:I'm not kidding.
Guest:I thought I was.
Guest:Selenium boost?
Guest:Well, test your swimmies.
Guest:Figure out if your swimmers are healthy or not.
Guest:Because I assumed everything was okay.
Guest:And realized when I did.
Guest:Because I was thinking to myself, well, who knows?
Guest:I had a friend who got testicular cancer and had to have one of his testicles removed, which scared the shit out of me.
Guest:me.
Guest:So I was like, you know what, I need to start storing my material in case something happens and I still want to have kids.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And I went to a clinic to do that.
Guest:Results come back.
Guest:They're like, yeah, these things are looking kind of wonky.
Guest:We're not sure what's going on.
Guest:Swimming in circles?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:It's like the Special Olympics.
Guest:So we need to fix this.
Guest:And the other thing I did, very simple, anybody can do this, is I took my cell phone out of my pocket.
Guest:There's a lot of research to suggest that- They're sperm killers?
Guest:Yeah, you're microwaving your balls, basically.
Guest:And there are a lot of animal studies and animal models that have looked at this.
Guest:I don't know who funds roasting rat testicles, but- Do you think you're a very productive hypochondriac?
Marc:I just had this moment where it's like with your free time, you just sort of like, I don't think my toe is working.
Marc:Like, I mean, are you sitting around going like, how come my nails aren't growing?
Guest:Yeah, I kind of am like that.
Guest:What I don't do, I don't.
Guest:I don't go online and look up random symptoms because then you'll think you have 15 diseases.
Guest:What I will do is blood test.
Guest:It's just like maintaining a car.
Guest:Like if you're going to pay money and go to the trouble of doing the 60,000 mile checkup and all this shit.
Guest:Do the same thing with your body, for God's sake.
Guest:It's like 150 bucks.
Guest:Yeah, I just got a blood test.
Guest:My cholesterol is a little high.
Guest:I feel all right.
Guest:Yeah, well, honestly, if you feel good and there's no huge red flag in blood work, then don't worry about it.
Guest:Can I still get six-pack abs?
Guest:I'm 49 years old.
Marc:You can get six-pack abs, for sure.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:But let's talk about- You can't do it by the starvation sub-maintenance calorie stuff.
Guest:No, I'm not.
Marc:I haven't been starving.
Marc:I got a sugar issue.
Marc:I like sugar.
Marc:And I get strung out on sugar.
Marc:And I'm not unusual.
Marc:That's the world in a nutshell.
Marc:That's a big problem with your diet is that one fucking cheat day, I will go to town and then it's hit or miss.
Marc:Once I get a taste of that shit and I have that milkshake or whatever- You can go nuts though.
Marc:No, I know, but like two days after I go nuts, I'm like, ah, that fucking felt good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, yeah.
Guest:It can be very seductive.
Guest:There are ways to kind of hedge a little bit with that stuff.
Marc:but yeah you get six-pack abs you have to have muscle underneath it so you need you need both the diet is going to be 99 right i don't know if i need six-pack abs obviously i need to go back to the gym but let's get back real quick and i want to i want to we don't even have to be real quick but so the idea of this of i like the idea of like you know donating money or having consequences if you don't do what you say you're going to do for yourself yeah that's interesting to me
Marc:Because it seems to me that what happens with me is I go through cycles and there's just a slow cycle back to my regular habits.
Marc:And obviously I'm not obese and I'm not doing anything that's horribly dangerous.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Though I could probably my coffee intake is high.
Marc:But eventually I don't have a pattern of living that would just remain constant in terms of health.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what do you suggest for that?
Guest:What I would suggest, just a quick note on the coffee.
Guest:So way too much caffeine can cause a decrease in active thyroid, which could relate to the fat loss.
Guest:But that's usually if you're like more than 600 milligrams of coffee a day.
Guest:What are the other consequences of that?
Guest:Coffee?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The verdict's out.
Guest:I mean, I like coffee.
Guest:You read research one week and it says it helps stave off Parkinson's.
Guest:You read it the next week, it says it looks like it's moving the opposite direction.
Guest:But I think that I love coffee.
Guest:I just try to temper it with other sources of caffeine, like green tea and things like that.
Guest:But
Guest:Coming back to your question, if you want to have a sort of a maintenance default schedule or some type of thing that keeps you fit and whatnot, do as little as possible.
Guest:I think the biggest mistake people make is they're like, okay, New Year's resolution, I'm going to go to the gym four times a week, hour minimum.
Guest:I'm going to change everything about my diet.
Guest:And it doesn't work.
Guest:You have to change one habit at a time, which is why when I'm, let's say, interacting with readers who are severely obese, like 400 pounds, 500 pounds,
Guest:I don't have them exercise at all for the first few months.
Guest:I have them just focus on the diet.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:And specifically, I have them focus on breakfast.
Marc:Let's talk about the diet then.
Marc:Let's be one of those shows.
Marc:I don't do these kind of shows very often, but let's do it.
Guest:Yeah, so the first thing is 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.
Guest:That's the first thing I would have people do.
Guest:Eggs, meat.
Guest:Yep, three eggs.
Guest:Have a burger.
Guest:With some lentils, say.
Guest:You can have a burger.
Marc:Three eggs with some lentils, with yolks.
Marc:Yeah, with yolks.
Marc:So it's important that you get it from a good... That's what I was doing.
Marc:I was doing turkey meat and beans.
Marc:How do you tell people to maintain their lives when they're farting constantly with your fucking diet?
Marc:Well, you could use... You don't have to do the beans.
Marc:What are you going to eat though?
Marc:It's like, all right, go ahead.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Guest:No, you're fine.
Guest:You're fine.
Guest:So, okay.
Guest:Lentils and three eggs within 30 minutes of waking up.
Guest:You could also put something called epazote, which you can definitely get around here.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Onto the beans, which, you know.
Guest:It's a Mexican green, right?
Guest:It's a Mexican spice slash herb effectively, but it decreases gas also.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:uh if you want to do the beans yeah the you could also do protein shake so you keep it super simple that's what my dad did and he went from five pounds of monthly fat loss on average to 17.85 in the first four weeks the point being he didn't actively change any of his diet other than adding in 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up uh but he still ate milk and everything else did whatever the hell he wanted
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And only later, once he'd made that his default routine and no longer had to think about it, then I added in changes to his other meals.
Guest:Then once that was done, let's say four to eight weeks later, then I added in the exercise.
Guest:And I think that layered approach is really important.
Guest:But for exercise, people are like, oh, how much do you exercise?
Guest:I'm like, honestly, my default is kettlebell swings twice a week.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Like no matter what, come hell or high water, I'm going to do something resembling kettlebell swings twice a week for 50 to 100 repetitions.
Guest:It takes five minutes.
Guest:It's a full body workout.
Guest:Yeah, it works everything except for your sort of your pecs, which I don't use for anything.
Guest:Just do push-ups.
Guest:Just do push-ups.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:All right, so let's go over the diet.
Marc:The diet is basically nothing white.
Marc:No sugar, no milk, no cheese, no ice cream, no flour, no... Yeah, avoid things that are white.
Guest:Avoid things that are white.
Guest:Don't drink calories.
Guest:No sugar.
Guest:Yeah, avoid sugar, avoid fruit juice, avoid milk, et cetera.
Guest:You're allowed one or two glasses of wine a night, preferably dry red, if people want that.
Guest:And then you're going to 30 grams within 30 minutes of waking up.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:I didn't do that.
Guest:Yeah, it's super helpful.
Guest:It makes a big difference.
Guest:Just in metabolizing?
Guest:It improves.
Guest:It does a few things.
Guest:The first thing it does is it sets you up hormonally for the rest of the day in a very favorable condition for fat loss and also sustained energy so you don't get dips at like 2 to 3 p.m.
Guest:That relates to thyroid, different things like ghrelin, for instance.
Guest:But you don't need to understand any of that shit.
Guest:You just have to know 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes waking up.
Guest:It's also very good for adding muscle mass.
Guest:Most people do not consume enough protein.
Guest:The other point I would make about it is that protein has what's called a very high thermal effect of food.
Guest:It causes you to burn more calories off as heat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you just burn more fat.
Guest:And it also has a very positive effect on appetite.
Guest:So you end up not, you end up typically, let's just say with eggs in particular, eggs have some pretty cool properties.
Guest:Consuming 20, in some studies, 20% fewer calories over the entire day just by having eggs in the morning.
Guest:Whole eggs though.
Guest:with choline and all that good stuff right um and then you'd be typically the meals that you're that you're that you're building i have some combination of protein i'm fine with fatty protein i don't care at all uh veggies of some type like steamed veggies or whatever and then beans or lentils or what have you so what can you eat compulsively i'm a compulsive eater this is the problem is that like chipotle
Guest:okay yeah with sour bowls and what yeah yeah absolutely chipotle you could do thai food all you have to do is sub out the rice or whatever so you can just eat beans all day long doesn't fucking matter you could do beans all day long that could definitely get you pretty unhappy yes happy girlfriend right exactly need wide open spaces yeah yeah
Guest:What is four-hour relate?
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:Okay, so the four-hour thing came from the four-hour workweek.
Guest:The book was turned down by 27.
Guest:I've been saying 26.
Guest:My agent was like, 27.
Guest:The four-hour workweek.
Guest:Was turned down by 27 publishers.
Guest:That was the amount of time I spent in 2005 running my business.
Guest:Four hours for the whole year?
Guest:Per week.
Guest:No, no, per week.
Guest:And...
Guest:Then the four-hour body was, I mean, I was using the brand that I'd already established, but the four hours was also the amount of time that my dad spent working out per month to lose 90, ultimately 90 pounds.
Guest:Yeah, so that's that.
Guest:So ultimately it was a brand thing.
Marc:it mostly a brand thing uh but i feel the need to like literally justify it in somewhere in each book but some dude emailed me even when i'm talking about your diet and he said you know you can go crazy on the cheat day but depending on how much how well you know yourself and what that's you know from your past what that means is it going to open the floodgate you know because like ultimately what happens with somebody like me because i think that a lot of this stuff is about control and i think
Marc:a lot about you know the way you work is about control and it's a feeling of control most eating disorders are about control yeah so with me what happens is like if i get into it then your whole 90 of your brain is around this fucking you know what am i gonna eat how am i gonna eat how am i gonna eat at that place you know did i eat this today did i not eat this today i didn't i'm a fucking genius i'm great
Marc:and then like and then the other part of that the only thing that's that's really keeping you going is like well saturday is the fucking damn i'm gonna have a milkshake french fries i'm gonna fucking have ice cream you know and if you're not careful you're like here was the one thing i fell into is like the day of my cheat day i'm like when does it start well you tweeted me you're like is cheat day midnight to midnight right that's right
Guest:That's where... When I was first experimenting with all this stuff, my brother said to me, he goes, you have the longest fucking Saturdays I've ever seen in my life.
Guest:It's like a 48-hour Saturday.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the... So let me mention a few things.
Guest:So the first is that the...
Guest:I think it was 70, I'd have to look at it, but it was something like 70% of the people that we tracked, like the 3,500 people, had no problem with cheat day.
Guest:It had zero negative impact on fat gain or fat loss.
Guest:Where people get into trouble with cheat days is splitting it across two days.
Guest:So if you do it, let's say, before you go to bed, like you stay up really late.
Guest:Right, noon to noon or something?
Guest:Exactly, where you eat it before.
Marc:If you're gorging between two bedtimes...
Marc:You got to start in the morning with the diet.
Guest:You can't, right.
Guest:The second, I would say the other primary problem that folks have is, and this happens less than you might think, but if they have the cheat day and they've been told for so long,
Guest:that that is going to negatively affect what they're trying to accomplish.
Guest:And they go, you know what?
Guest:I had one cheat day.
Guest:Like, fuck it.
Guest:I'm already into it.
Guest:I might as well just have like a croissant the next morning.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'll start again Monday.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's when people then immediately go back into their old behavior.
Guest:What typically happens is people will say, keep, and this is what a lot of readers have recommended, just keep a list of like their targets for Saturday.
Guest:Like every time they have an urge to eat something, they'll just be like, I'll put that on my to eat list for Saturday.
Guest:They'll so overdo it that first Saturday, they'll make themselves feel pretty sick.
Guest:You get a fucking, you get exhausted.
Guest:Yeah, you get like an insulin hangover.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they'll go right back to the diet.
Guest:Next Saturday, they'll do the same thing.
Guest:They'll feel fucking horrible.
Guest:Go back to the diet.
Guest:That's what happened to me.
Guest:But then they start toning it down.
Guest:and they'll they'll tone down the cheat day just so they don't feel shitty just so they don't feel shitty and so what i recommend to those people and again it's i try to layer in like one simple behavior at a time i'll be like all right try this first meal of the day have a couple eggs and some spinach like some fiber get that in your body it doesn't have to be big it could be like 300 calories and then you can have your cheat day and what they find is like wow i don't feel like total shit
Marc:fantastic so but now they're only having like two or three cheat meals instead of 17 right so you put a fiber bed down yeah exactly morning yeah yeah exactly no that's exactly what you're doing so well here's here's the other thing i think people do is what i do it's like you have your cheat day and then the next day it's like oh we got to meet those people for brunch yeah fuck yeah well i'm not gonna eat the pancakes i mean yeah you have to you have to you have to commit you just have to commit
Marc:All right.
Marc:So let's get into this four hour chef because this is what, you know, ultimately, you know, I got this book and I'm like, this guy's really fucking nuts.
Marc:And I got to talk to him.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It takes a lifetime to read either of your books, I think.
Guest:Well, no, no, no.
Guest:I mean, they're big books, obviously, but they're written like chooser and adventure books.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Guest:People kind of dip in and out with the stuff that they want to read.
Marc:But it seems to me because I love food and I like watching cooking shows and I like cooking.
Marc:It seems to me that you're like, fuck it.
Marc:I can be a gourmet cook.
Marc:Fuck school.
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:You know, I if I just apply myself, I can do this.
Marc:And it's broken into you talk about your the learning thing, the metal learning.
Marc:Yeah, which is just that basically if you apply yourself and focus.
Guest:If you study the world's fastest learners, whether it's chess, languages, basketball, whatever, you can decipher a process that you can apply to anything, including cooking.
Guest:So meta-learning is basically this blueprint for acquiring any skill faster.
Guest:And that's what I'm teaching in the four hour chef.
Guest:I mean, the subtitles is grandiose sounding as any of my, any of my others, but you know, the simple path to cooking like a pro learning anything and living the good life, very narrow scope.
Guest:But the, this is the book on learning that my readers have been asking me for, but it's fucking boring to write about like phonetic acquisition of Chinese characters by native English.
Guest:Nobody's going to buy that.
Guest:So I want to integrate that into the cook.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like Zen.
Guest:It's like Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance in that sense.
Marc:So then you do domestic cooking, and then you do the wild, and then you do like sort of gastro, what do you call it?
Marc:Molecular gastronomy, yeah, the scientist.
Marc:Right, and then you talk about professional chefs and whatnot.
Marc:But it was interesting to me.
Marc:So you're basically using this as an example to sort of put in place or applying your concept of meta learning.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So you're going to start with cooking.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's what this book is.
Marc:That's exactly what it is.
Marc:Now are you trying to become a leader of men?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you want people?
Marc:Are you going to go out there and wear a headset and do the big talks?
Marc:I don't do much public speaking.
Marc:I don't enjoy it.
Guest:So it's really about book sales with you and the internet presence.
Guest:No, it's not.
Guest:See, the thing is with book sales.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, just to address that.
Guest:If I wanted to, if money, and I'm not saying finance isn't a component of evaluating all these decisions, but it's not the best way to make money, selling books.
Guest:It just isn't.
Guest:The economics aren't good.
Guest:But I enjoy teaching.
Guest:I always thought I was going to be like a 9th or 10th grade teacher.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I really did.
Guest:And maybe a wrestling coach.
Guest:You know, maybe.
Guest:I enjoy that.
Guest:And it just turned out that the books were a vehicle and the blog.
Guest:I spent a lot of time on the blog for teaching.
Guest:So you asked me, you mentioned drivers earlier.
Guest:My driver is to interview all these experts and
Guest:as sort of this explorer, do all these fucking ridiculous experiments, like the New York City Food Marathon and all that stuff, then to put it out there into the world and see the readers who come back with even better tips, even better stories, all that stuff.
Guest:So you create a community.
Guest:Yeah, it's fun to learn from people who then come to me.
Guest:Like, for instance, one of the guys who ended up being in the professional section, Grant Ackett's, who's at a linear restaurant in Chicago, which was at the time the number one ranked restaurant in the U.S., his partner, Nick Konis,
Guest:He was a fascinating guy used to be a derivatives trader, but he reached out to me because he was a he was He had read the previous books and the only reason he was able to reach me is through the blog So it's like those kind of incoming random.
Marc:I found you on Twitter.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:I didn't know anything.
Marc:I just had a diet problem I just needed a fucking basic question asked.
Guest:Yeah Well, I think you know I think it's how did it's how did that all start?
Guest:I'm actually really curious because someone pointed out your interview with with Jimmy Kimmel and
Guest:Where they were like, Steve Ferris?
Guest:I think you mean Tim Ferris.
Guest:But then there was a separate thing where it was you, Patton Oswalt, and Lou C.K.
Guest:talking about weight stuff.
Guest:And then the four-hour body came up.
Guest:What was your very first... Oh, it was your friend.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Jonah Ray, who's also a comic.
Marc:Like, you know, I'm getting it.
Marc:I'm getting it.
Marc:You know, it's a great book.
Marc:I gave it away as one of the free ones I got.
Marc:I gave it as a gift.
Marc:Isn't that nice of me?
Marc:Very nice of that.
Marc:But there's a lot in here.
Marc:It's a very compelling book because you just open it and there's a page full of knives.
Marc:And then, you know, you're gutting a fish and a squirrel and killing pigeons.
Marc:And you're all full of blood.
Marc:There's traps.
Marc:There's a survivalist thing.
Marc:uh sort of feel to the wild chapter where it's sort of like there's part of you that like right the survive top survival gear tarps traps and tactical knives that is there a party that's sort of like preparing for something ah or you just want to be prepared no i do you know i went a little off the rails with that section um why because he got off and you're a guy that couldn't bleed a fucking rat and now you're out there killing pigeons and squirrels and a fish and you kill i know you killed that what'd you shoot a deer shot a deer
Guest:Recently shot a caribou.
Guest:But I eat it all.
Guest:I use it all.
Guest:No, that's good.
Guest:And I make stuff out of the skin, like Ed Gein style.
Marc:Well, I hope you're not doing that.
Guest:You used to make lampshades.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:I'm not doing that.
Guest:But I had to cut 250 pages from that book, if you can believe that.
Guest:And part of it was because I'm in San Francisco, and I took a class called NERT, which was taught by the fire department, the police department.
Guest:Right.
Guest:and it's for disaster response training right and they basically said what what do you guys think the population of san francisco is okay whatever it is 800 000 okay how many fire engines do you think we have and people are like 50 100 500 and he's like 19 okay what that means is just to set the tone you're on your fucking own it's like lord of the flies for seven to ten days if we have an earthquake like we did if we have another earthquake like loma prieta in 1989
Guest:lord of the flies all over again so you need to know what's going on so you became obsessed with that i did because it wasn't coming from some like you know crackpot it was i was in a police department having this said to me uh-huh uh so i did the basics you know i got the like generator gasoline right water etc yeah then i uh i randomly well it wasn't random i met this guy hedge fund guy
Guest:who you know richer than god who wanted me to turn him into the the main character from limitless you know that movie like nzt take a pill like see the world in 15 dimensions right he wanted me to turn him into that and he's like unlimited budget make me that guy i was like all right well if you're gonna try all this stuff fantastic
Guest:And he had a pot.
Guest:He had built an apocalypse proof billionaire compound like mini city in Texas, in rural Texas.
Guest:And so I I had it specked out.
Guest:I got like the blueprints, the shopping lists.
Guest:The guy had had bought a Saracen tank like the ones they used in Northern Ireland.
Guest:It was amazing.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:It's a six-wheeled tank that they use in urban environments as tanks.
Guest:So what I thought would be really fun would be to have like a blueprint of this thing.
Guest:Just to be like, if you had an unlimited budget and thought the world were going to end, what would you actually do?
Guest:If you were really smart, what would it look like?
Guest:And so I had this fantasy about specking this whole thing out, and it turned into this just crazy rabbit hole.
Guest:where I ended up meeting all these preppers and all these survivalists and getting a million and one tips and it just exploded into like 100 pages of content.
Guest:And that's gone.
Guest:I have it.
Guest:I'll use it for something.
Guest:It's a little weird.
Guest:Why?
Guest:It's not weird, but I don't want to give people... What I don't want to do is have people throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Guest:If I put in the really crazy stuff, then they don't take the more conservative recommendations seriously.
Guest:Well, what's like a really crazy thing?
Guest:Well, buying a tank is pretty crazy.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:I would say- A lot of people fighting for that, right, as we speak.
Guest:Yeah, this, indeed.
Guest:I mean, the amount of weaponry that one might have.
Guest:Okay, right.
Guest:Having electromagnetic pulse weaponry.
Guest:I don't know if you've ever heard of this kind of stuff.
Guest:Yeah, the kind that makes people grab their head and go, no!
Guest:it destroys electronics so one potential terrorist threat which is actually quite real is that you could have uh electromagnetic pulse bomb detonated over the great lakes let's say yeah and so this guy had backup chips in electromagnetic pulse proof boxes buried at strategic location on his property uh backup chips with what for like for electronics for generators and all this type of stuff okay
Guest:And that would be another example.
Guest:But I didn't want people to say, oh, you know what?
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:So I'm not going to spend an afternoon at Costco getting water and canned goods.
Guest:Because I think it is a good idea if you're living on a fault line to do that kind of stuff.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So you're just being practical.
Marc:I think so.
Marc:Emergency response survival.
Marc:which encapsulates hunting for your own food, being prepared for basic emergencies like water, electricity, maybe some looting and pillaging.
Marc:You might better make sure you're the guy with superior firepower.
Guest:Which is a slippery slope.
Guest:Which is a very slippery slope.
Guest:There was some other fun stuff that I took out.
Guest:One of the things I thought was kind of cool was I spoke with some military guys about how they would escape New York City or L.A., for instance, a couple of major cities, in the case of a red alert catastrophe, like 9-11 or a dirty bomb or something like that.
Guest:So they had some really fascinating recommendations.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:uh buying something akin to a u-haul truck and having a zodiac inflatable boat with like a couple of canisters of gasoline basically buying a place or a part a permanent parking spot or even having a outside of the city right close to a waterway so that you could go from let's say manhattan to new jersey as opposed to trying to go over bridges
Guest:Something like that, which actually would only cost, I mean, only, obviously relative, but 15, 20 grand if you're extremely wealthy, but you don't have a helicopter.
Guest:Even if you had a helicopter, you could very easily get grounded.
Guest:But with something like that, it'd be really easy to get out of a city.
Guest:You didn't put that in the book.
Guest:I did not.
Guest:Didn't seem to fit in with the cooking motif.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, that's what happened is my, well, first of all, the book was supposed to be 250 pages, ended up whatever it is, 692.
Guest:And my editor got the first draft.
Guest:And I just remember the meeting where I was like, okay, guys, we have some news.
Guest:Everything's going great.
Guest:That 250 page book is now at the time is like 950.
Guest:And like,
Marc:But I think people should know that, you know, you have parts of this book where it's like how to properly cook an egg, and then there's, you know, a couple hundred pages later, you know, it's how to kill something with a bow and arrow.
Marc:Because people hate cooking.
Guest:They hate cooking.
Guest:And I hated cooking.
Guest:Well, a lot of people hate cooking.
Guest:I hated cooking for so long because I found it time consuming.
Guest:And every time I tried it, I didn't know where shit was in the grocery store.
Guest:And like, there's so many reasons I didn't like cooking, which is why I wanted to use it to showcase learning.
Guest:I was like, this is the thing that I've quit the most before.
Guest:So let me try.
Marc:So you just went to town.
Marc:Not only did you learn how to cook gourmet style food and also cook to accommodate your dietary needs that are in your other book.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you're also sort of like, well, I've never I've never hunted my own food and you used everything in the animal.
Marc:I don't know anything about knives or bows or guns.
Marc:I need to learn about that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, if I you know, I need to learn how to cook in a can if necessary.
Right.
Marc:yeah exactly it's funny you walk into my house you never roasted your own fucking coffee I got a whirly pop in there that was cool I'm really into it I'm gonna get one I found the fucking blind side of your entire being Tim I'm like you never roasted your own coffee caught me unaware you're eating squirrels I know and you haven't roasted your own fucking coffee I know worlds to explore man that's what keeps me excited I'm like so excited to roast my own coffee I've never tried it I gotta find that I can't wait I gotta find the instructions and I'll email it to you did you piss off any chefs
Marc:You know, this is... Because you're basically saying, look, you guys, it all looks fancy on television, but I can wear a T-shirt and I don't need a chef's hat and I don't need to go to culinary school and I can fucking do this.
Guest:Well, what I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be complicated.
Guest:I'm definitely not saying I can waltz in and outcook Thomas Keller or anything like that.
Guest:And I do always view myself, not to become even more narcissistic than I suppose I am already,
Guest:that I'm the guide, I'm the explorer, I'm never the expert, but I do gather all these experiments and I think come out with some pretty cool stuff.
Guest:The chefs I've interacted with have been awesome.
Guest:Like they haven't, I'll put it this way, the chefs who are like really good, but not top 1%, don't like me.
Guest:Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Guest:And there's a bunch of ego and they just, they view me as a pain in the ass.
Guest:The guys at the very top,
Guest:love to talk about fundamentals and how they make things simple and there's so little ego in my experience i mean like totally because you're not a threat to them no exactly it's like it's a competitive thing it's sort of like if they're if you get you're talking to guys who are still gunning to be the big chefs yeah and you come along go oh i can do that easy they're like well fuck you but guys who are like and also you're not saying that like you know i can do your job no not at all and it's like i wouldn't and i didn't walk in and say i could do that what i would walk in and say is like
Guest:I would just say, do you have 30 minutes for me to ask a couple questions?
Guest:And I would try to dissect these inflection points that they had.
Guest:Like, well, there are a million and one chefs out there.
Guest:I think there's something like 23,000 restaurants in New York City.
Guest:So it's like, why is your rest?
Guest:Like, what are the things that allowed your restaurant and you to land at this point?
Guest:And to try to deconstruct it and make a recipe out of it for people.
Guest:Talk about, I mean, a very charged atmosphere where I could be looked at absolutely as the enemy.
Guest:I mean, geez, I mean, hunting and outdoorsmen, sports and things like that would definitely be one.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Well, I live in San Francisco.
Guest:I'm coming from a pretty liberal location, number one, and have never hunted before, had a very low opinion of hunting and hunters before getting into the book.
Marc:Well, did it hurt your feelings when you killed something?
Guest:Weirdly enough, no, it didn't.
Guest:And I didn't want to injure any animals.
Guest:My biggest fear was maiming an animal and having it suffer.
Guest:But all of my shots to date have been straight through the heart.
Guest:And it's just been a couple of seconds and it's all over.
Guest:The reason I didn't feel badly about it, and I thought that I would feel really badly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was very respectful.
Guest:I don't enjoy the act of killing animals.
Guest:But when I hunt and I know that I'm going to make use of every single piece of the animal that I can make use of, I don't have guilt associated with that.
Guest:Because I feel like life and death is part of everything.
Guest:And it is a cycle, whether we want it to be or not.
Guest:And that's just how it works.
Guest:I mean, we will all be ashes in the ground.
Marc:You weren't doing it for sport.
Marc:You were doing it.
Marc:And you don't find yourself wanting to go out and do it.
Marc:It's not going to be a thing you do now, or is it?
Guest:No, I'm not.
Guest:I mean, it's not something I think about.
Guest:But you know you can.
Guest:I know I can.
Guest:It was about reconnecting with ingredients that I would usually just buy wrapped in a package on a shelf.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I wanted to feel more responsible for it.
Guest:what I ate.
Guest:So I also did foraging and all these other things, but obviously, I mean, the hunting's oftentimes a more exciting story, but I did foraging and I did, you know, like we were talking about before we came out here, like pickling and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:Except for coffee roasting.
Yeah.
Guest:I don't have the roasting.
Guest:I have the brewing.
Marc:I have the brewing in there, but I don't have the roasting.
Marc:Well, here's the deal.
Marc:The two books are 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef.
Marc:That's the one we were talking about today.
Marc:And so what I got to do is get some kettlebells.
Marc:How many do I need?
Marc:Just need one.
Marc:It's just one thing?
Marc:You can get two if you want.
Marc:35-pounder and a 52, 53-pounder.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:I need to do that, and I need to eat protein for 30 minutes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's plenty to start with.
Marc:And then I'm good.
Marc:And then in terms of the 4-Hour Chef...
Marc:I have to get into it just in terms of resources because I do cook and it seems like everything's covered there.
Guest:I really think it is.
Guest:I mean, I worked with a lot of good chefs and we took, for instance, we did an experiment where we tried to cram six months of culinary school into 48 hours into a weekend.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And even if you retain 40% of that, or let's just say 50% of that, you're still getting three months of culinary school on weekends.
Marc:Well, ultimately, I think what it comes down to is that most people will stay in the habits they're in if they're effective enough for probably their whole life.
Marc:So I think that any of this stuff just becomes relative to what you can use.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:That's the weird thing about all of this.
Guest:It's a buffet.
Marc:You pick what you want and you ignore the rest.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, shit, man.
Marc:Let's go now and I'll find that stuff on the coffee roasting.
Marc:And you don't have a kettlebell you can give me, right?
Marc:I don't have one with me.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:I can definitely find one for you, though.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Thanks, Tim.
Guest:Thank you.
Thank you.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:I hope you dug it.
Marc:I hope you got some info.
Marc:I hope you're ready to take the challenge.
Marc:Some of that stuff sounded crazy, but I'm in for some of it.
Marc:I need to get a kettlebell.
Marc:Is that what they're called?
Marc:Kettlebell?
Marc:Anyways, thank you for listening.
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Marc:Soon we'll have a new Mark and Tom show.
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Marc:You can, what?
Marc:You can check out the Lipson deal.
Marc:Also, we just reissued the first 100 episodes on MP3 files on a two DVD set.
Marc:Also available at WTFPod.com.
Marc:And for God's sakes, for God's sakes, could you please, please check my tour schedule and come see me where you can.
Marc:I'm talking to you, Cincinnati.
Marc:I'm talking to you, Columbus.
Marc:Hey, I found my buddy Guy Pick.
Marc:I wonder if this guitar is in tune.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oops.
Marc:Shit.
Marc:Out.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:Maybe I should practice a little before I start doing that stuff.
Marc:Boomer lives!