Tim Ferriss’s "The 4-Hour Body" (feat. Peter Shamshiri)

uh should we have peter do it whoa peter's never listened to our show so he doesn't know the format i do i do i sort of it's like wait what's your what's your tagline what's your tagline format i know i've i've heard it a hundred times and now i can't remember the format because i'm just confusing it with hours in my head we could do a little peter what do you know about the four-hour body decline it's your podcast you can if you want to degrade it by using our our lazy format we'll do one then peter you're trying to like figure out a way where it's my responsibility to come up with a tagline 100 mike is eternally trying to weasel his way out of doing the tagline what if we made you a part of this peter what if we peter i want you to feel like you're a part of this you have some real ownership here okay does this this probably doesn't work welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that has 36 hours left every week for face because it's a four-hour body maybe you have like 36 hours left in the work yeah no sick thank you thank you i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs i'm peter shamsheri if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can subscribe on apple podcast it's the same audio content michael peter aubrey so for those of you who are unfamiliar peter is michael's co-host on if books could kill other peter is joining us today for a sort of uh like a very delayed follow-up to your tim ferris four-hour workweek episode yes incredible cross promo the only podcast i could you 're on where there's absolutely no new fans being brought on so today we are talking about tim ferris's follow-up to the four-hour workweek it's called the four-hour body body by tim peter do you recall it has been a minute do you recall any of the sort of high points from the four-hour workweek broadly speaking tim had this idea where if you like create passive streams of income and then automate all of your work you can bring your work week down to four hours and basically do nothing this doesn't work as well with body because you can't like hire people in india to do sit-ups for you right also four-hour workweek is like oh great i'm losing 36 hours of my workweek four-hour body is like yeah that's a good amount of working out yeah that's actually that's like a normal amount of working out well yeah it will comfort you both to learn that there is no mention of four hours anywhere in this there's no like justification for four hours it's all branding it's pure clickbait yeah so for folks who are unfamiliar tim ferris's primary sort of claims to fame are his long-running podcast and this previous book the four-hour workweek he's like a life hack guy and an optimization guy he's also sort of by trade a tech guy and an investor and like many tech guys and investors he is rich and that has given him the brain disease of i am rich ergo i must be right about everything and also i must be a wellness influencer i feel like all these fucking guys want to be like gurus before the four-hour workweek he sold a supplement called brain quicken yeah the four-hour brain i looked into the active ingredients and it feels like very like trademark tim ferris that he is listing out a bunch of like very scientific names for things he's doing the right thing he's like okay let's do this okay i'm gonna do this okay let's do this okay let's do this okay let's do this okay let's do this okay let's do this okay let's do this okay let's do this okay so it sort of obscures that what this pill is is like there's some adaptogenic mushrooms in it there's some b vitamins there's some amino acids there's some ginkgo there's some ginseng and there's a fuck ton of caffeine oh so like it was largely a caffeine pill people like i feel amazing on this absolutely that's like all of the comments on all of the reddits are like does anybody know where to find this nothing worked this well and it was like 200 milligrams of caffeine starbucks you can find it at starbucks yeah you can find it in the panera lemonade please enjoy since selling brain quicken tim ferris has mostly been an investor for tech companies like task rabbit and a bunch of others he's a forbes 40 under 40 guy he's a princeton graduate and he has quite an ego on his own website uh he has two poll quotes that are uh blown up one is from wired magazine calling him the superman of silicon valley and another one is from the new york times calling him quote a cross between jack welch and a buddhist monk what the fuck i just want everyone to just think through like what would that even be also he's never accomplished anything in this he's just a scam artist he just wrote a stupid fucking book and the core message of the book if i recall correctly is like how to scam other people like how to start doing seminars and stuff yeah he was like the best way to create passive income is to do a scam like the one i'm doing on you right now by writing this book so you all have provided me with the perfect segue he did publish the four-hour workweek in 2007 it is on its face like a life hack manual to just work less uh it's a rebrand of work smarter not harder among other things he advises readers to hire people to outsource large parts of your job as you mentioned so that you can do less but he also advises things like hey you could become an expert in something go buy the top two or three most popular books on the subject schedule a free seminar invite people to the free seminar and give them like a talk about what you learned from the books basically and then you can do a lot of stuff like that and then you can do a lot of stuff like that and then you can do a lot of stuff like that and then you can do a lot of stuff like that and then you can do a lot of stuff like that and then book a bunch of paid speaking gigs off of that free seminar i'm almost nostalgic for this because now it would be like we'll just get chat gpt to read the two most popular books and like you wouldn't even have to absorb the information if you're like hey did his next book include or use any of those tips yes it did three years later in 2010 tim ferris follows up with the four-hour body the diet part of his book which is a pretty commanding majority of it is fully just reheating the nachos of the zone and the south beach diet at least he's consistent he's like i told you what i was gonna do and then i did it they are two diets from the mid 90s that at this point had already achieved like really major popularity these were books that were being sold in airports had like massive uptake i remember seeing them at the costco book table it's like basically low carb but not like as extreme as atkins isn't that what the zone and south beach are it's not quite low carb but it's like basically low carb but not like it's something that they call slow carb oh it's like a glycemic index thing yes totally and we'll get into the glycemic index of it all yeah okay just checking in i understand all of this but so the core idea behind the four-hour body is that you can lose weight and get shredded with what he refers to as the quote-unquote minimum effective dose so that means he's big on like high intensity interval training where you do like really intense interval training intense workouts for short periods of time he's big on like creating little formulas for for meals and like he has a whole section where he's like i love diet coke and i've found that as long as i keep my consumption to under 16 ounces a day it doesn't interrupt my fat loss also it sort of just assumes that like eating healthy and exercising are just chores that nobody would want to do deliberately right it's like what's the least amount of tennis that i can play to like be shredded but like surely the actual advantage is that you can lose weight and you can lose weight and you can lose weight and you can lose weight and you can lose weight and you can lose something you like doing no because he specifically says about both the diet and the exercise you should not enjoy it he has a whole section where he's like don't confuse recreation with exercise hell yeah you don't like exercise you do like recreation and the sort of implication is like if you're enjoying it then it's not exercise which is man pretty directly counter to all of the research that we have that is like if people like it then they do it regularly and doing it regularly is the thing that matters the most i love the idea that he's innovating by just talking about high intensity workouts for shorter periods of time he's just like where he's just like i have an idea fucking run faster just haul ass on that trend my understanding is that high intensity interval training is fine but also it was kind of a fad at the time a lot of these guys just fall for fads basically exercise fads and they repackage them as if they're some sort of like deep insight like i can't get over you know brian johnson this guy like the reverse aging millionaire guy who just does intermittent fasting right which is again just like a trend that everybody's hopped onto well doesn't he also transfer his child's blood into himself or something that's less trendy but that's because not everybody has a son yeah and your son has to be cool your son has to be like all right yeah sure dad one of the things that sort of shows up in the four-hour body is that tim ferris is like we've got so much science to prove so many things but overwhelmingly the science that he refers to is either quote-unquote research that he's just done on himself oh yeah or firsthand accounts from people who read his blog or rat studies oh yeah so i am going to send a quote make peter do it make peter do it are you kidding me i'm i'm just like a event for you to do less work i'm outsourcing my work to peter mike is four hour work week right now he's like playing video games and you ask him a question he's like peter so i am sending this to michael to fucking read okay fine i'll read it i've recorded almost every workout i've done since age 18 i've had more than a thousand blood tests performed since 2004 sometimes as often as every two weeks tracking everything from complete lipid panels insulin and hemoglobin a1c to igf1 and free testosterone i've had stem cell growth factors imported from israel to reverse quote permanent injury and i've flown to rural tea farmers in china to discuss pu-erh tea's effects on fat loss all said and done i've spent more than 250 000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade i am a huge fucking sucker i just announced that right off the bat yep yep yep just as some people have avant-garde furniture or artwork to decorate their homes i have pulse oximeters ultrasound machines and medical devices for measuring everything from galvanic skin response to rem sleep the kitchen and bathroom look like an er if you think that's craziness you're right fortunately you don't need to be a guinea pig to benefit from one let's get it out there off the bat i am mentally ill yeah okay also there's just like not really any compelling medical reason to have that many blood tests yeah he thinks he's finding out a ton of things right i don't trust having read this entire book that he knows enough to know what is going on and i don't trust him to know what is sort of worth measuring here and i think that he is like there is like a real core of confirmation bias happening in this book where the stuff that he prioritizes is the stuff that sort of upends expectations right right but also a bunch of it really is just sort of a wealth flex i feel like a lot of these guys get to a point where they're so rich that they're like it's bullshit that i have to die yeah it's like my life rules in all of these ways my life is better than the average person yeah but like there is this one great unifying element and that's that i'm going to die and i think that is nonsense and i'm gonna try to i'm gonna try to get out ahead of it two hundred fifty thousand dollars is so embarrassing it's really stunning because it feels like the end of the day it's gonna be like yeah do exercise and like try to eat a balanced diet of like fruits and vegetables but it's like these guys want this sort of one weird trick kind of thing or some sort of shortcut but it's not clear to me that like all of this data about yourself really offers that much i mean i will also say like a bunch of these sorts of devices end up like i recently had a family member who had lung cancer and was using a pulse oximeter like all the time that became sort of a source of like fixation and anxiety right and the health care providers that i talked to sort of in the process of all of this were like that's actually like really common particularly for men to get especially hung up on like what is this measurably doing not as a way of like discerning information about themselves but as a way of like discharging anxiety that they're having about their health he feels like he's taking back control because he's measuring something because like yeah why are you getting an ultrasound not only why are you getting an ultrasound why do you own an ultrasound machine so he has sort of a little thesis for the book and sort of like a little bit of a rallying cry for like what he thinks this is all about i am sending another quote to the chat peter okay you guys can trade off how about that i just want to i'm this is unpaid work i'm doing i view 4hb as a manifesto a call to arms for a new mental model of living the experimental lifestyle it's up to you not your doctor not the newspaper to learn what you best respond to if you understand politics well enough to vote for a president or if you have ever filed taxes you can learn the few most important scientific rules for redesigning your body will become your friends 100 reliable and trusted this changes everything there is no high priesthood there is cause and effect welcome to the director's chair this annoys the shit out of me shut up why are there so many metaphors going on it's like we're talking about like diet and exercise you're not redesigning your body dude if you can vote for president has not aged well if you're if your dumb ass has ever clicked next 20 times on turbo tax then you can vote for the president you can do this part of what i find interesting about this is that it's sort of like a prototype of what has become a real sort of core ethos of the uh maha movement right which is just like fuck experts nobody gets to decide but you what's good for you it's not your doctor it's not the newspaper but it is an airport book he's like don't trust them but like you're also just some random person trust the guy who sells brain quicken i feel like but he's saying trust yourself and yourself is reading tim ferris right i'm telling you that you are smart and then in return you just do what i tell you right but it's sort of listening to yourself in a way we're in this together rejecting the experts yeah that's right and i think like specifically saying it's not up to your doctor is the part where i'm like that's a wild approach to take right who's your who's your doctor to tell you what your blood pressure is so on top of his sort of n of one stuff he says that he has quote tracked the progress of hundreds of readers of his blog and touts that quote many of them lost 20 pounds in the first few weeks and sort of makes those kinds of claims most of his claims about weight loss throughout the book are about what happened in the first two to four weeks so it's like tell me you've never read a diet book before without telling me you've never read a diet book before right like every diet under the sun follows the same pattern which is like right and then you're like oh my god i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry rapid weight loss for the first like one to maybe six months three to six months and then a long plateau and then a weight regain like that is how it goes so when folks are sort of cherry picking like we're just gonna talk about the first month like yeah dude you're picking your best numbers absolutely i'm only gonna talk about my sales at christmas time yeah you can go to almost any diet and lose weight in the first month yes absolutely the interesting thing is he is presenting like a series of these kind of n of one findings quote-unquote findings right it is very far from any kind of like randomized controlled trial it's very far from any kind of scientific method there is massive confirmation bias if he's hearing from fans of his blog who want to tell him why his shit works and why they like him because you're obviously not going to be hearing from people that it didn't work for because they would probably just like not be on the blog anymore they find something else absolutely he has like a whole segment where he's like if you want to know how to lose 20 pounds in two weeks just ask the founder of wordpress who lost a bunch of weight from just chewing every mouthful of food 20 times where you're like okay come on man that's literally like an 1800s diet that's like one of the first diets that's what happens when you make wordpress money you're like what's next now to turn my thoughts inward i will triple the amount of bites that i'm taking of every sandwich the four hour body has a couple of good points i do want to do like a little bit of credit where credit is due so he cautions readers against falling for like marketing terms so he's like if someone's telling you about toning cellulite firming shaping like these are all marketing words he just said redesigning your body though that's also a fucking marketing term that's not reshaping that's not reshaping 4hb is different than a marketing term it's a protocol is what he keeps saying it's a protocol protocol itself not a marketing term don't get confused he also cautions readers he's like look you're going to be doing a bunch of self-experimentation that means that you're going to have to challenge your own ideas about correlation and causation right and he gives them some like actually quite good questions to challenge like is this causal relationship moving the way you think it is one is like is it possible that what he calls the arrow of causality is reversed okay like is it possible not that this person ran and therefore got a quote-unquote runner's build but rather that they kind of looked like someone who could do well at running so they did i'm eating brussels sprouts because i'm farting it's actually if you think about it he asks if uh you're mixing up absence and presence so for example like is a vegetarian diet healthier or perceived to be healthier because of the lack of meat or because of the increased presence of vegetables okay right like it's just like basic good probing kinds of questions at one point he does say quote is it possible that you tested a specific demographic that other variables are responsible for the difference for example if the claim is that yoga improves cardiac health and the experimental group comprises upper class folk is it possible that they are therefore more likely than a control group to eat better food you bet your downward dog posing ass oh god a little spice in the sentence nice so this is like straightforwardly good advice that he then proceeds to ignore for the rest of the world like you're reading a book by a rich guy who got blood tests a thousand times right he's like don't confuse what's happening with rich people with what's happening with you confuse what's happening with me with a single rich guy the diet itself is pretty straightforward there are five core rules one is avoid quote-unquote white carbohydrates so that's like bread pasta rice potatoes that kind of stuff two is quote eat the same few meals over and over again especially for breakfast and lunch you already do this you're just picking out new default meals this is where he gets into like you should not enjoy it and also he does talk about he's like here are some good meals to have on the diet one of my favorites is canned tuna packed in water mixed with lentils and chopped onion what just like in a bowl yep dude no mayo no lemon juice nothing you gotta get that mercury up you want you want you want to be able to see it through your skin like a thermometer rule number three is don't drink calories that's a pretty common one rule number four is don't eat fruit what it's part of the like slow carb thing right of just like it there's not a ton of fiber there is a lot of sugar that's not true but whatever whatever rule number five is take one day off per week and quote go nuts i recommend saturday often nicknamed fatter day by followers but this is also like he's just telling you to like do something you hate all the time and then one day a week you get to do something you like like surely you can find a happy medium right yeah throw a little bit of mustard in the tuna and maybe take take it easy on saturdays it's also funny because like none of these guys have kind of been steeped in like fad diet world the way i think a lot of women have they're like a lot of women by their 30s are like oh i've heard this advice a million fucking times it's not going to work for me but these guys are like basically discovering like fad diet stuff this it's like look maxing stuff for men uh where like we we've gone a little too far and like 19 year olds are like wearing shoulder pads and microdosing meth yeah i will say on the cheat day stuff he comes up with sort of a scientific rationale for the cheat day where he's like no it's actually like good and important like psychologically important no like no like physically metabolically important okay quote paradoxically dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate doesn't downshift from extended caloric restriction not true that's not true that's totally not true i know he's like oh don't trust your your doctor the science but like you should trust the science bro that's not true at all you want to get your body right on the verge of starvation mode and then boom an entire pizza yeah remember like the p90x muscle confusion thing you're doing that but for your metabolism you can't let it get too comfortable the formula for meals uh for this is pretty straightforward very standard diet advice uh he says for every meal you should pick one item from each of his sort of prioritized food groups that's lean protein vegetables that are either low carb and or high fiber and the third group is legumes is a bean diet baby beans at every meal so you're gonna fully endorse this book now i love it i'm blurbing it it's gonna be great the only diet that works yeah he's honing in here on this idea of whole grains and quote-unquote slow carbs that was popular at the time the underlying idea here is that so-called fast carbs so things with like white flour white sugar whatever else are big drivers of people's weight loss and they're not going to be able to eat a whole grain diet because people getting fat and that so-called quote-unquote slow carbs like whole grains and fiber-rich vegetables would be less likely to lead to weight gain and would like help with weight management this is based on the glycemic index which we've talked about before on the show the glycemic index is a way of uh it's sort of presented as a way of measuring the impact of various foods on like humans blood sugar but the way that they determined it is in groups of between five and fifteen people since then in the in the years since the development of the glycemic index um we have found that it is like almost useless for individual guidance because different people's bodies have like such wildly different responses to the same foods going in them right that for some folks white rice might be like a major issue for their blood sugar and for other folks it like doesn't really do much right but what if a rich guy who wrote an airport book already did all the research and told me what works and what doesn't and what doesn't and what doesn't and what doesn't work for him what if a wealthy man said it with confidence what if a guy wearing an aura ring told me that i should eat sweet potato a 2021 meta-analysis in the journal advances in nutrition looked at 43 studies with samples totaling just under 2 million adults and they were looking at like uh when we're advising people to have a low glycemic index diet what are the actual results of that what they found was quote results of 30 meta-analyses of rcts from eight publications demonstrated that low gi diets were generally no better than high gi diets for reducing body weight or body fat while carbohydrate quality including glycemic index impacts many health outcomes gi as a measure of carbohydrate quality appears to be relatively unimportant as a determinant of bmi or diet induced weight loss that makes right so like have your slow carbs they're good for you for a lot of reasons they're good for you for a lot of reasons they're not going to make you thin also this is just like yet another diet basically being like you should eat brown rice and broccoli and chicken breast but those diets are marketed to ladies not yeah nerds who want to be wealthy yeah well i wonder what he kind of would have come up with if it wasn't for his research with the ultrasound machines i spent 250 000 and here's what i've come up with it's like brown rice eat some beans i'm also now just imagining tim ferris with like a pulse oximeter clipped to every finger yeah just eating tuna out of a bowl like a dog just with his face so his main chapter or sort of section about weight loss is called subtracting fat he has subtracting fat he has adding muscle and he has improving sex don't listen to gimmicky little taglines folks people are going to tell you that you can quote lose weight you can't you can subtract fat however also like don't listen to marketing language but the first header in the first chapter about weight loss is quote how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise hey no one's ever said this before no one's ever promised that this is how like tech guys talk where they try to like throw in what feels a little more like computer language into like everyday shit right so they they talked they talk about optimizing all the time and it's just it's so tedious and annoying here's how to pivot to being a skinny person the other thing did you guys see this article that they're they're now recommending you know this whole thing of like a stack you have a stack of like the caffeine that you do and like we're gonna talk so fucking much about stacks tech bros are recommending that you add nicotine patches yeah to your stack oh hell yeah dude no they're talking about nicotine and caffeine both as being nootropics which is a wild way to read those things because that's also a made-up term so like yeah they're nootropics like lucky charms nootropics why not like whatever it does feel like we're gonna circle back to just like you can smoke and they're gonna rebrand it as like drag maxing right like burn smack smashing and then you're all gonna be fucking smoking again you know like the the famous madman ad campaign where they're like uh they're toasted all right they're gonna start doing that shit yeah um so he does use this header of like how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise and then his example for himself is that he lost 15 pounds in six weeks oh nice okay so do more than i did he also has some before and after pictures that are fascinating they are almost a complete recreation of like a very popular style of like 2010s body positivity instagram post hell yeah where like a thin woman would take a picture of herself slouching so that she would like have some rolls and then take another picture of herself standing up straight and the caption would be like it's the same body he like has like a quote-unquote before picture that is him leaning forward and weighing i don't know maybe 10 or 15 pounds and then he's like oh my god i'm 15 pounds more and then the next picture is him shirtless and ripped and standing off to the side it's like the the alex jones picture uh where where he's just slightly more red in the after photo the initial diet that we talked through sounds pretty straightforward like focus on protein and fiber eat from certain food groups get some exercise that kind of thing but then he gets to a section where he talks about like common mistakes okay and now it's getting real complicated mistake number one not eating within one hour of waking preferably within 30 minutes it's all metabolism confusion at the end of the day his argument is that you should he's like i eat one tablespoon of almond butter and four brazil nuts upon waking oh yeah i keep it next to my bed just a spoon right before my first cigarette of the day absolutely he says that uh mistake number two is not getting enough protein per meal mistake number three is not drinking enough protein per meal mistake number three is not drinking enough water but he doesn't really define enough mistake number four he says is believing that you'll cook if you're a bachelor what the fuck is that what's wrong what what throughout this book he is assuming that the reader is him and he's like i don't cook so they don't cook yeah i feel like learn to cook would also be like reasonable advice for a book like this he has a whole mistake just about um mistiming weighings with your menstrual cycle and then in parentheses he writes not a problem for bachelors nice for married men however tell him he talks about how cheat day is like a really important part of the diet not just for adherence to the diet but for its actual effectiveness he says that um the big issue that cheat day helps with is uh to minimize your release of insulin which triggers your body to store phlegm fat metabolism spoofing absolutely yes so he has a whole thing where he's like uh you have to increase the speed of gastric emptying or how quickly food exits the stomach oh he's doing like a poop speed run like you want to get from food to poop in like 35 minutes your body should not be absorbing the nutrients from the food it should be blasting through you at full speed actual food should be coming out of you just a full a full slice of pizza coming out your ass but can people even do anything about that could you manipulate how fast you're pooping and like processing food there are ways that you can line your pipes to like in your house i imagine if you implement the same method so that you can sort of create a slide where the food cannot actually enter your stomach in any meaningful way you're just drinking a bottle of lube almond butter and astroglide we're gonna read what tim says you can do i consume one hundred to two hundred milligrams of caffeine or 16 ounces of cooled yerba mate at the most crap laden meals my favorite green supplement athletic greens mentioned in the schedule doesn't contain caffeine but will also help does this really work taking the goodies from taste buds to toilet without much storage in between more than a few people have told me it's pure science fiction too much information warning i disagree and for good reason rather than debate meta studies i simply weighed my poo yeah yeah yeah i don't think that's true i don't think that's true i don't think that's true yeah that's absolutely absolutely hell yeah i'm mad at study dude on a scale identical volumes of food on and off the protocol on protocol equals much more poo mass equals less absorption equals fewer chocolate croissants that take up residence on my abs simple but effective perhaps good to leave out of a first date conversation definitely he's doing the work you know this is what before we had meta analyses right before we had these studies to analyze guys were just shitting on scales right this is what isaac newton would have done i love that he's like i'm not gonna get into these meta studies instead i weighed my shit what are you a nerd weigh your poop i'm like squatting over a bathroom scale it's so absurd and it really feels like like he presents this in a way that is very much like guys i cracked the code yeah yeah yeah in the meantime you are i guess fishing poop out of your toilet yeah and weighing it like what are we doing here was there is there any basis to this at all michael i like i like how you're at you're like so aubrey did you look into this or yeah this guy this guy is shitting on a scale michael all right no i fact checked a lot of things for this episode i did not fact check the poop weighing also it's like good to leave out of a first date conversation dude good to leave out of your book no one wants to hear about this i would rather i would rather have to leave out of a first date conversation rather you like fraudulently create a peer-reviewed study then tell me about this he says that there's a third principle which is engaging in brief muscular contractions throughout your binge kegels like butt kegels like intestinal kegels no he's doing like wall squats like he does like a wall sit he does uh he says wall tricep extensions and 60 to 120 seconds of total air squats okay immediately prior to eating main courses on his binge day oh my god dude so he's like going to pizza hut just like squatting down next to the food yeah and then like getting up to do calisthenics for two minutes before he like eats a whole pizza like it's it's extremely odd so not only is like the food miserable to eat six days a week because he refuses to allow for seasoning or whatever but you have to do wall squats yeah in public on your binge day because you might enjoy it right yeah don't get caught enjoying your food i'm at the buffalo wild wings dude holding holding a wall squat for three minutes um so he has a whole argument here about how doing these sort of brief exercises and muscle contractions brings glucose transporters to the surface of muscle cells and i think that's a good way to put it and i think that's a very good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it michael he's not making it up it's based on one japanese rat study oh great okay just because someone reads his blog does not make them a japanese rat so earlier mike you mentioned stacks oh yeah tim ferris experiments on himself on which ones he thinks are most effective for weight loss he talks about one of his most effective stacks being the quote-unquote classic eca stack and i was like what the is an eca stack ephedrine caffeine and aspirin yeah oh what he talks about having done this eca stack ephedrine caffeine and aspirin ephedrine now banned yeah because so many people died from using it and also so many people died from using it and also because you can use it to make meth my because you can use it to make meth my stack of uh chlorine and bleach so his stack of uh chlorine and bleach so his current preferred stack is now the p-a-g-g current preferred stack is now the p-a-g-g stack it consists of pcp garlic extract bath salt stack it consists of pcp garlic extract bath salt green tea green tea green tea and an antioxidant that naturally exists and an antioxidant that naturally exists and an antioxidant that naturally exists in meat and some vegetables like i in meat and some vegetables like i in meat and some vegetables like i googled it googled it googled it uh it's alpha lipoic acid and i was like uh it's alpha lipoic acid and i was like was like what the fuck is this and they're like it's in broccoli and steak and i was like oh well have some broccoli and steak sounds less cool when you're like i eat some broccoli and drink tea these guys are constantly bragging about how easy they are to dupe right because they're like oh this supplement changes everything but like they're just falling for like marketing claims ultimately take a fucking one a day like yeah part of what makes it complicated is the supplements themselves part of it is the schedule i am sending the schedule this one has a bunch of sciencey names uh so apologies in advance to whoever yeah peter all right i'll do it how did i do it i followed a simple supplement regimen morning no explode 11 to scoop that's like an anti-diarrhea medication yeah no explode no if you mix that with the diarrheals that he takes and just let him fight it out inside that's intestinal confusion may the best man win all right no explode 11 slow niacin or timed release niacinamide 500 milligrams each meal chromate pre-workout body quick post-workout meselian prior to bed polycosin all polycosin all sure chromate again alpha lipoic acid and slow niacin is like a lot of steps to take each day and he's using these names like no explode and slow niacin and chromate and that kind of stuff most of these are pretty common things no explode 11 is just a pre-workout so he's taking a pre-workout fresh out of bed that's right yeah my workout is the entire day so i take a pre-workout right when i wake up like it's just caffeine and caffeine and caffeine and caffeine and caffeine and caffeine and caffeine and creatine this man is caffeinated to the fucking max yeah by the way slow niacin is niacinamide it's just a b-vitamin timed release yeah b-vitamin right and okay all of this is just like you could all get all of these as like nature-made supplements at target or whatever right like these are not like hard things to find but when he lists the like ah yes i'm using 23 milligrams of polycosin i'm using 23 milligrams of polycosin i'm using 23 milligrams of polycosin all yeah it gives the whole thing sort of a mystique of being much more like stem oriented than yeah yeah right he's giving his readers this veneer of science for things that are totally just like take your vitamins also i'm trying to like count up how many pills he's taking it's a lot right if he's doing this in the morning at each meal before workout after workout and prior to bed so you're just like pumping your body with like these weird powders when like you don't need even like the pre-workout post-workout stuff is like fake you don't need this shit like have a banana he also is careful to note that you only follow the schedule six days a week and you take one day off each week from your stacks wait what and then you also take one week off every two months and quote this week off is critical yes yeah you gotta keep your metabolism guessing don't let your metabolism fucking rest on its laurels yeah you want to be constantly switching between constipation and constipation and constipation and constipation and constipation and diarrhea at uh at a rate that baffles the intestines unsurprisingly he's also a cold plunge guy oh yeah unsurprisingly he's also like generally a health gadget guy so he advocates using a glucometer which is a monitor that you install on your body to continually monitor your blood sugar levels does he have the poop camera not to my knowledge but this book was written before the existence of poop cam peter this is an actual thing that exists you can get something that attaches to the side of your toilet the kohler decoder that films your toilet bowl and like there's an app that gives you like quote unquote insights but the insights are like how many times did you poop yesterday like it's not actually well hydrated or not well hydrated no i like that why should i have to look you know i just i want an app to just uh every time i take a shit i don't look i uh i mean i just stand right up and then it it sends me a notification that says gross he uses a continuous glucose monitor a thing that is straightforwardly unnecessary for people who are not diabetic i looked up the glucose monitor that he recommends it's the dexcom 7 it lasts for two weeks on your body and it costs 120 dollars per monitor it's more just him being a rube it's like this is not meaningful data that you really need yeah he has this belief that if you keep your blood sugar under 100 that you will sustain fat loss for longer he also writes quote don't want to become diabetic want to curb things like eating sweets which can lead to adult onset diabetes try using a glucometer for 24 hours oh he like recommends this yes oh my god essentially the argument that he's making is like do you not want to become diabetic start living with a glucose monitor like you have diabetes yeah yeah watch everything you eat exercise in really specific ways wear a glucometer and you know maybe take some diabetes meds right as a bunch of biohackers suggest taking like metformin and stuff like that right like so it is this really odd thing where i'm like i just try mapping that on to other illnesses like it would be really weird if someone was like i don't want to get cancer so i'm going to do preemptive chemo or like uh if you want to avoid chlamydia just wear a condom at all times no matter what you're doing wake up almond butter z-pack before we dig in on the last chapter that we're really going to focus in on we have a little interval that i have just titled in my notes uh tim ferris is weird about women there's one section that he calls the math of beauty oh no are we are we doing like symmetry symmetry stuff we're not leaning away from phrenology i will say that uh michael you are up what do marilyn monroe sophia loren and l mcpherson have in common the number 0.7 and the letters whr if you measured the waist and hip circumference of these three women you'd find that their waists are seven tenths the size of their hips that makes their waist to hip ratio whr 0.7 and this ratio in females appears to be hardwired into the male brain as a sign of fertility and therefore attractiveness the wider your waist is the higher this ratio goes toward the apple-shaped which correlates in scientific studies with decreased estrogen levels increased disease risk increased birth complications and lower fertility rates working toward a more slender waist has been shown to have a greater effect on attractiveness than reducing hip size if your waist to hip ratio is high dropping it even a little bit will increase your power health and hotness to attract a male partner nice wait peter go ahead i know you think about this all the time this is how you talk to your boys when you're like you're not our mean aubrey look i don't get bogged down by the numbers i know it when i see it no like if you think about this often enough you won't need to do the measurements you'll be able to just shout them out as a woman passes the advisor seems to be you should work toward a more slender waist rather than working toward smaller hips but like women like people cannot do this you can't really control the build of your body and also he's doing this bizarre sort of scientific laundering of like ah yeah this is hardwired into the male brain right he's sort of reverse engineering like this is what i am attracted to and this is like a contemporary beauty standard ergo right it's like a biological imperative the women that i'm attracted to are like super healthy and like super fertile it's big no fatties energy for sure it's weird like the need to sort of make these things quantifiable it's so fucking bizarre yeah why can't you just be like they're hot it's so fucking weird what do marilyn monroe so sophia lorraine and ellen mcpherson have in common they're fucking hot dude just hot babes and there's also no point that involves like asking women what they like because i want to know what ratio they like in men what's the healthiest uh like dick to chin ratio yeah exactly okay so the ratio is shoulder to waist how dare you oh wait is it actually in there he does include that wait what is it uh i think it's 0.8 uh shoulder to uh waist to shoulder so your waist should be i saw that on like masculine men.tumblr.com yeah you made the same fucking joke i recently heard of a podcaster who was included on a tumblr that has exactly that ratio it's interesting to me notably those ratios both come from studies of men they're asking men what they think is the right ratio for men to have they're not asking women yeah because if you ask men they'll talk about how big his shoulder should be but if you ask women they'll talk about how big his heart should be what's the dick to heart ratio okay so that was sort of the beginnings of him getting weird about women he does have a whole chapter called improving sex i'm gonna let peter take it from here peter and that is where shit gets the weirdest if you are listening to this podcast as some people do with your kids and you would rather not have like a more uh explicit discussion of sex and genitals you're an hour into the podcast episode about shit and you're like you know what no this isn't okay you're about to hear about intercourse the chapter title is the 15 minute female orgasm oh that's how long it lasts how long it takes what happened to four he gets very sort of granular uh in his advice here and as a certified gay lady his advice in this chapter is fucking nutso okay at one point he just tosses out that he's like i talked to a number of experts about this yeah it's my buddy jimmy yeah that's right to his credit the quote-unquote experts that he cites are all women okay so at one point he just tosses out that he had this conversation with a quote-unquote specialist in female ejaculation yeah you gotta weigh it you gotta weigh it he doesn't say anything about like what does that mean right um he just says oh yes my friend talula a specialist in female ejaculation okay what talula tells him is that for most women there is a most sensitive part of the clitoris and she's like if you're imagining a clock face and you are facing a woman's vagina and her clitoris uh it would be at about one o'clock why it's off center i'm a gay man and peter's never given a woman an orgasm so you're gonna have to slow you're gonna explain this very slowly i just do the alphabet like a gentleman i like called a bunch of other gay lady friends being like hey am i fucking high or is this nothing one o'clock in a vagina is crazy it's like it's like just off the clitoris he's next to it you're just like slightly missing the clitoris you know it works if you use the one o'clock trick it will take a full 15 minutes in addition to his his sort of uh fat loss stacks that he takes he also has a pre-sex protocol what vitamins he's like stop honey i mean he's like scooping powder into a cup frantically and she's like naked in the bedroom slapping on my nicotine patch 24 to 48 hours before you want to have incredible sex as he puts it 48 hours when you get the gmail calendar invite for sex you should quote eat at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol within three hours of bedtime the night before you want to have incredible sex oh my god it's bottoming advice why before bed testosterone is derived from cholesterol which is primarily produced at night during sleep what ladies if a if a guy ever goes nuts at the one o'clock on your vagina the night before he was he was loading up on cholesterol right in his defense he's had seven eggs in the last 15 minutes he's like scarfing hard-boiled just eating just eating half a pound of shrimp i mean like one o'clock one o'clock one o'clock so that's 24 hours before he also has a protocol for four hours prior to sex sex should not be a spontaneous thing sex is all about protocols this part of it does feel very brian johnson in that i'm like oh you're not comfortable with like human relationships and like feeling shit out with people so like you gotta come up with a whole song and dance to like make it okay and to sort of like assuage your nervousness about like having sex with someone what if you're gonna hook up the next day and then she like calls you she like texts you she's like i'm so horny let's just do it tonight and you're you're like five eggs deep uh um well if you have four hours of notice then you eat four brazil nuts 20 raw almonds and two capsules of fermented cod liver oil and butter this is like an avoidance strategy when you're like so afraid of women you're like i can't i haven't had my brazil nuts he really seems like a dude who is uncomfortable with women telling a bunch of stories with a bunch of bravado yeah tim uses this sort of quote-unquote information to set himself on a quest to quote facilitate female orgasms with as many partners as he could again why is this in your like diet and exercise book because he wants to tell the boys how good he is with the ladies because he had 120 pages and they were like we need 60 more he talks about like he tells little stories about several of the women that he includes in this quest the first one he described as quote a 25 year old female yoga instructor fresh from the midwest where you're just like and in his telling of the story she unprompted volunteers to him that she has never had an orgasm and he's like well i'm the guy all right i just had my brazil nuts we got 15 minutes before they wear off give me a dozen eggs in 24 hours honey he writes quote my quest for the elusive male oh had begun the outcome four weeks later was better than i ever could have imagined the four-week orgasm i was able to facilitate orgasms the word facilitate will be explained later in every woman who acted as a test subject oh god what the fuck is going on the results those who'd never experienced manual only orgasm were able to do so and those who'd never experienced penetration only orgasm were also able to do so the success rate was 100 percent dude whenever i write a self-help book like any non-fiction book i'm including a chapter about how good at sex i am that woman then introduces him to an organization youtube may or may not have heard of it called one taste have either of you heard of one taste no it's a bay area organization that has been accused of being a cult it has paid a lot of former employee settlements for labor law violations sexual abuse they have a netflix documentary about how fucking dark one taste is and that is where he goes to learn this quote-unquote 15-minute orgasm business right that's that's kind of the kind of shit that a cult leader would tell you there's a secret clit it's just to the right of the regular one what is this organization though like officially they essentially are having people come in to get coached on their sex technique so they come in with a partner there is a coach who watches you sometimes a group of people who watches you and then you get like notes and direction it's like a sex kuman learning center they do have this sort of framework that they use where they talk about quote-unquote orgasmic meditation they sort of have this sort of construction built in that is like whether you have an orgasm or not is immaterial because you are participating in orgasmic meditation yeah i don't know if you've heard of orgasmic meditation i've been telling women that for years yeah we are yeah we're like sort of spiritually participating in a cosmic orgasm so whether or not you are coming in the real world is irrelevant and i am coming just so we're all clear but for you it's more like a spiritual thing he also consults another expert named nina hartley are either of you familiar with nina hartley is it porn yep so nina hartley is sort of in the like ron jeremy jenna jameson vein of like a porn actor who sort of crossed over into more pop culture notoriety right okay in the book tim ferris writes that other porn actors have said that nina hartley was quote the best sex of their life and he says so does my friend sylvester oh would that be still alone no he just says he has a friend named sylvester oh what okay who had sex with nina hartley nina hartley cool yo you know nina hartley my friend hooked up with this is the most for the fucking boys anecdote that we will read in this entire all right peter's doing it peter's doing it all right sylvester's mom attended a group dinner in berkeley california that nina also happened to be attending and the two ended up seated next to each other mrs norwood came home and said to then 22 year old sylvester guess who i was at dinner with a famous porn star nina hartley have you ever heard of her sylvester nearly choked in his secret double life he had a huge collection of videos featuring nina his personal snow leopard what i don't know mom i have to meet her if i never do anything again in this life i must meet nina hartley three days of insistent begging and nagging later sylvester's mom raised a hand and picked up the phone hi nina it's mrs norwood i had such a one i had such a wonderful time meeting you at the party listen i have a question for you do you ever make love to younger men what yep nina's answer why yes i love breaking in younger men but only once and so it happened summary coolest mom ever dude there's like progressive parents and then there's like when progressive parents go too far this is like too much sex positivity in the family no thankfully this is fake but the best case scenario here is that sylvester made this up to impress his friend tim imagine you make up this crazy bullshit story about uh fucking a porn star and then uh like your friend puts it in a best-selling book yeah i didn't realize the stakes were so high when i was lying to you about having sex with nina hartley do you guys remember there was an ad for like it was like cores or something in the 90s it was like i like beer with my friends watching football with my friends and twins yeah do you guys remember that of course remember that and twins that coolest mom ever feels like it comes straight out of the ad twins era of like just like we're just being so fucking horny in public all the time this is like very presumptuous like the it's not but to be like hey you're you're kind of professionally uh you have professional sex will you yeah doesn't this make you kind of a slut will you just fuck my son like you have like no standards so do you want to fuck my son she's not even like yeah like is he cute is he nice when uh when i was in high school all my friends were straight dudes and so as people turned 18 on their 18th birthday we would all go to the like the local strip club which was like right next to my high school and so i went to like strip clubs a decent amount like my final year of high school because i turned 18 first and one of the things you saw fairly regularly at strip clubs was like a dad and a son would like go there together and i remember very vividly to like a man and a son getting like lap dances next to each other and then the dad just goes up for a high five and like high fives his son what on earth and i think all of us were like oh what are we doing upsetting stuff also this is not like it's not a cool story no it's really not if my friend told me this story about themselves i'd be weirded out right but the fact that he's telling it to us about his friend thinking that it's cool it's almost it's so weird like nothing about it is cool the mom doesn't seem cool no and now you're telling me the story as if it's cool it's weird the whole thing's bizarre this all exists in this how-to section on the 15-minute orgasm he does have some steps to follow step one quote explain to your partner that it is a goalless practice this is a goal-less practice this is a goal-less practice this is 100 critical there is no objective just focus on a single point of contact the phrasing should emphasize this and remove all expectations and pressure quote i'm going to touch you for 15 minutes you don't need to do anything and you don't need you don't have to do anything afterward there's nowhere to get to nothing to make happen just focus on the single point of contact it's an exercise this is you just like poking the one o'clock mark but also like this strikes me as like he's not saying this to her he's saying this to himself yeah yeah this is a goalless practice guys we didn't say we're gonna get anywhere we didn't say anything was gonna get accomplished eat an egg take a deep breath and get in there he goes really hard on how much focus this will take from the dude he writes quote this technique requires 15 minutes of 100 concentration on approximately three square millimeters of contact nothing more oh poke poke poke poke poke that's too slow michael it should be like a hummingbird you shouldn't even you know woodpecker yeah i love that he's like this will be incredibly difficult there is no goal like he's doing this like like the kung fu master montage from kill bill he does tell you to get a kitchen timer and set it for 15 minutes to take the pressure off yeah no that'll take the pressure that ticking sound yeah yeah we're in this calculus is like what is this woman thinking it's really strange to me the kinds of gymnastics that he goes through to avoid like just being vulnerable with a partner right right and being like here's what i want what do you want right and like actually just fucking negotiating it on some level or like talking it through he talks us through this whole how-to and then he gives us an example of like guys here's how fucking well this shit works get ready the next chapter is called sex machine one adventures in tripling testosterone oh no and he opens with an anecdote about a ceo that he sometimes hooks up with named vesper what okay it's really amazing to me how many anecdotes he includes of people that he knows and includes their first and last name sylvester norwood right fuck nina hartley at his mom's arranging oh yeah i didn't realize that you could just piece together sylvester's full name from this oh yeah you also it's hilarious that his mom according to this transcript said hi nina it's mrs norwood also like how many ceos named vesper are you gonna say i will read this passage peter you google vesper ceo all right mike i believe you're up okay the last time we met i had just taken my total testosterone from 244.8 to 653.3 nanograms per deciliter while cutting my estrogen in half i just returned from nicaragua where i ate grass-fed beef three times a day for 21 days i had protein loaded for the last three days eating two to three pounds of fatty organic grass-fed beef per day including at least 400 grams just before bed dude this guy smells like a fucking barn the result 15 minutes after we sat down vesper was in a sexually aggressive stupor the bread hadn't arrived and she was already climbing on top of me this is not a boast this is not penthouse for him it's a statement of pure confusion she's a ceo and this is not typical public ceo behavior oh so it's a public company too he's just like giving us bread crumbs the whole spectacle was surreal she was literally intoxicated on pheromones oh he's saying the beef like made her smell him yeah and then she like went bananas this is like if jordan peterson was horny yeah no he's saying that he has been uh like cholesterol maxing to allow him to increase testosterone production right this is his previous sort of thinking about this like eat a bunch of cholesterol so your body can convert it into testosterone and he's saying not only did it work it worked so much that it was like invasion of the fucking body snatchers for this lady right when she saw the beef tallow coming out of my pores she couldn't resist she can smell a clogged artery absolutely i was like man he has been eating beef for a long time he's been eating beef for a long time he's been eating beef for a long time he's been eating beef three times a day dude for 21 days and he's also saying uh yes i have all this medical equipment at my house and i get blood work done all the fucking time and i three weeks of beef for every meal is gonna show up in your blood work in ways other than testosterone this is why is every rich guy the same kind of weird at some point they all start beef maxing yeah it's crazy although this was also like 2010 is early to beef maxing yeah it's crazy although this was also like 2010 is early to beef maxing yeah it's crazy but it's also closer to the generation of men who did literally just only eat beef as a matter of practice and principle the whole thing is kind of fucking nuts i think it also makes more sense when you consider like how close in time this is to the premiere of like vh1's the pickup artist yeah and like the rules and that kind of stuff right that you're like he's trying to do like a sciencey version of like a shitty misogynist sort of dating book right you're doing card trick tricks i'm eating beef yeah yeah eating more beef and doing things from like a third party instructor rather than asking your partner what she likes right hummingbird speed karate chops on the one o'clock one of the last things that i find really fascinating about this diet book is how it is received in different sort of corners of media book reviews are straightforwardly like this is bullshit the new york times book review writes quote the four-hour body reads as if the new england journal of medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the sky mall catalog some of this junk might actually work but you're going to be embarrassed doing it or admitting to your friends that you're trying it this is a man who after all weighs his own feces likes bloodletting as a life extension strategy and aims a phillips go light at his body in place of ingesting caffeine i love that you skipped the bloodletting i do like we there's too much in the episode i did another one is medical reviews like actual doctors reviewing the book and what did they say about the bloodletting one of them comes from uh psychology today the title of the review is quote how to not become superhuman psychology today on yeah it's not great sort of on the outskirt the outskirts of what i'm i would consider reputable but even they are like psychology today in their review from this md write quote so why does this good guy industry insider and potent scientific self-experimenter write immediately after the title page please don't be stupid and kill yourself it would make both of us quite unhappy and then says you should quote consult a doctor before doing anything in this book why is the publisher writing that they and the author quote you should consult a doctor before doing anything in this book expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may resolve from the user application of the information contained in this book there's a full like legal liability release at the end of the book to buy it you have to like sign a waiver so like book reviews no ostensibly scientific sources no tech crunch yes tech crunch likes it yes they wrote a review in 2011 called the four hour body colon the real app you are working on is the app called yourself yeah yeah i'm in i'm listening and that's just a clean succinct headline so i just sent a little quote from the tech crunch review for whoever when i boarded the four hour train our fancy schmancy scale reported that i weighed 197.6 pounds 10 days later after morning coffee and protein 187 for calibration i'm six one i assume most of the difference is water weight but still that part actually seems to work as advertised but still yeah he's he says i expected no less given the data that drove it i know i know why are you writing about your lunch on tech crunch because my lunch is a data-driven iteration from the previous state of the art in other words a technical innovation oh my god look beyond the valley and you'll find that approach can and will pay dividends almost anywhere he's like you may think this is silly but it's a science-based approach and i'm not sure if it's a science-based approach but it's a science-based approach and you're literally just listening to some guy why are you why are you writing about your lunch uh in a technology website uh because there's data involved dude and like the data such as it is is tim ferris tried some stuff on tim ferris and then some people read his blog and emailed him about the stuff that they tried uh the scale that you weigh your poop on is technology Bye.