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

- Should we have Peter do it? - Whoa!

- Peter's never listened to our show,

so we just didn't know the format. - I do, I do, I sort of. It's like, yeah. (laughing) (laughing)

- Wait, what's your tagline format? I've heard it a hundred times and now I came and I'm just confusing it with hours in my head. We could do a little Peter, what do you know about the more our body?

- Mm. (laughing) - Peter's head, like a dance. - Yeah. - And climb!

(laughing) - It's your podcast.

“If you want to degrade it by using our lazy format.”

- Well, do one then, Peter. - You're kind of like, figure out a way

where it's my responsibility to come up with a tagline.

- 100%, my guess. It turnily drank two weeks all this way out of doing the tagline. - What if we made you a part of this? Peter, what if Peter?

- Peter, I want you to feel like you have some real ownership here. (laughing) Okay, just probably doesn't work. Welcome to Matean's phase.

The podcast that has 36 hours left every week for face. 'Cause it's the four-hour body. And you have like 36 hours left in the work. - Yeah, no, sick. (laughing)

Thank you. (laughing) - I'm Aubrey Gordon. - I'm Michael Hubs. - I'm Peter Shemsheri.

- If you would like to support the show,

“you can do that at patreon.com/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. - Peter is joining us today for a sort of, like a very delayed follow-up to your Tim Ferriss four-hour work week episode. - Yes.

- Incredible cross promo.

The only podcast I could appear on where there's absolutely no new fans being brought up by us. - So today, we are talking about Tim Ferriss's follow-up to the four-hour work week. It's called the four-hour 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 work week? - 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, 'cause you can't hire people in India

to do sit-ups for you.

“- Right, also four-hour work week is like,”

oh great, I'm losing 36 hours of my work week. Four-hour body is like, yes, a good amount of working out. - Yeah, that's actually, it's like a normal amount of work out. - Yeah, well, come for you both to learn that there is no mention of four hours anywhere in this.

There's no justification for four hours. - It's all branding. - It's pure clickbait. - So for folks who are unfamiliar, Tim Ferris' primary sort of claims to fame

are his long-running podcast and this previous book, The Four-hour Work Week. He's like a life hack guy and an optimization guy. He's also sort of by trade, a tech guy and an investor and like many tech guys and investors,

he is rich and that has given him the brain disease of I am rich, Ergo, I must be right about everything. - And also I must be a wellness influencer. I feel like all these fucking guys want to be like gurus before the Four-hour Work Week,

he sold a supplement called Brain Quicken. (laughing) - Yeah, the Four-hour Brain. - I looked into the active ingredients and it feels like very like trademarked Tim Ferris

that he is listing out a bunch of like, very scientific names for things. He's doing the thing of saying a scoreback acid instead of just saying vitamin C. He's saying niacinamide instead of vitamin B.

So it sort of obscures that what this pill is is like there's some adaptogenic mushrooms in it. There's some B vitamins, there's some amino acids, there's some ginko, there's some ginseng and there's a fucking of caffeine.

- Oh. - So like it was largely a caffeine pill. 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. - Starbucks. - You can find it at Starbucks. - Yeah, you can find it in the panero lemonade.

He's enjoying it 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, he has two poll quotes that are blown up. One is from Wired Magazine, calling him

And another one is from the New York Times, calling him quote, "A cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk." (laughs) - You just want everyone to just think through, like, what would that even be?

- Also, he's never accomplished anything.

- Yes, he's just a scam artist. He just wrote a stupid fucking book. - And the core message of the book of I recall correctly is how to scam other people, like how to start getting 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 your book. - So, you all have provided me with the perfect segue. - Oh, he did publish the four hour work we could 2007. It is on its face like a life hack manual

to just work less. It's a rebrand of work smarter, not harder. Among other things, he advises readers to hire people to outsource large parts of your job, as you mentioned, so that you can do less.

But he also advises things like, hey, you could become an expert in something. Go buy the top two or three most popular books on the subject. Schedule a free seminar invite people to the free seminar and give them like a talk about what you learned

from the books, basically.

And then book a bunch of paid speaking gigs off of that free seminar. - Yeah, I'm almost nostalgic to this 'cause now it would be like, we'll just get chat GPT to read the two most popular books. And you 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. (laughing) - And these consist of it.

He's like, I told you what I was gonna do and then I did it. There are two diets from the mid 90s 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

and not like his extremist atkins. Isn't that what the zone and South Beach are? - It's not quite low carb. It's something that they call slow carb. - Oh, it's like a glycemic index thing.

- Yes, totally. - And we'll get into the next book. - We'll get into the next book. - Yeah, okay. - Just checking in, I understand all of this.

(laughing) So the core idea behind the four-hour body is that you can lose weight and get shredded with what he refers to as the quote-unquote minimum effective dose. So that means he's big on like high intensity interval training

where you do like really intense workouts for short periods of time. He's big on like creating little formulas for 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. - So it sort of just assumes that like eating healthy

“and exercising are just chores that nobody would want to do”

deliberately, right? It's like what's the least amount of tennis that I can play to like be shredded? But like surely the actual advice would be like, find something you like to do with.

- 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 okay. - Don't confuse recreation with exercise.

- Hell yeah. - You don't like exercise, you do like recreation. And those 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 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 like, he's just like, I have an idea to talk in the run faster. (laughing) - It's a whole ass of training. - Why does that he's like high intensity interval training

is fine, but also it was kind of a fad at the time. - Yes. - A lot of these guys fall for fads basically exercise fast and they repackage them as if they're some sort of like deep insight.

- Like I can't get over, you'll Brian Johnson this guy, like the reverse aging millionaire guy who just does intermittent fasting, which is again just like a trend that everybody's hopped onto. - Well, doesn't he also transfer his child's blood

into himself or something? - That's the less trendy. - 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 that. - One of the things that sort of shows up in the four-hour body is that Tim Ferriss is like, we've got so much science to prove so many things, but overwhelmingly the science that he refers to

is either quote unquote research that he's just done on himself or firsthand accounts from people who read his blog or rat studies. - Oh yeah, so I am going to send a quote,

- Are you kidding me? - Do it.

“- I'm just like a vent for you to do this work.”

I'm out thourcing my work to Peter.

- Mike is four-hour work, we can't write it. - Yeah, I know he's like playing video games and you ask him a question, he's like Peter. - So, okay, I'm sending this to Michael to fucking reason. - Okay, fine, I'll read it later.

I 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 test Osterone.

I've had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse quote permanent injuries and I flown to rural T- farmers in China to discuss Puehr T'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 have that right off the bat. - Yep, yep, yep.

- Just as some people have avant-garde furniture

or artwork to decorate their homes, I have pulseximiters, 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. - Also, there's just like not really any compelling medical reason to have that many blood tests? - Yeah. - And 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 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.”

But 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 get out ahead of it. - $250,000 is so embarrassing.

(laughing) It's really stunning. Because if you're like the end of the day, it's gonna be like, yeah, do exercise. And try to eat a balanced diet of 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 all of this data about yourself really offers that much to your health. - Yeah, I mean, I will also say like a bunch of these

sorts of devices end up like I recently had a family member who had lung cancer and was using a pulse oximeter like all the time. That became sort of a source of like fixation and anxiety. And the healthcare providers that I talked to

sort of in the process of all of this were like, that's actually like really common, particularly for men to get especially hung up on like what is this measureably doing, not as a way of like discerning information about themselves

but as a way of like discharging anxiety that they're right about their health. - He feels like he's making back control 'cause he's measuring something. - Yeah.

“- 'Cause like, yeah, why are you getting an ultrasound?”

- Not only why are you getting an ultrasound? Why do you own an ultrasound machine? - Yeah, I know. 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, to go, okay, you guys can trade off. How about that? - I just wanna, this is unpaid work I'm doing.

I do for HB as a manifesto, a call to arms for a new mental model of living, the experimental lifestyle. It's up to you, not your doctor, not the newspaper, to learn what you best respond to.

If you understand politics well enough to vote for a president or if you have ever filed taxes,

you can learn the few most important scientific rules

for redesigning your body. These rules will become your friends, 100% reliable and trusted. This changes everything. There is no high priesthood.

There is cause and effect. Welcome to the director's chair. - This annoys the shit of me shut up. - Why are there so many metaphors going on? (laughing)

- It's like we're talking about like diet and exercise. - Right. - You're not redesigning your body, dude. If you can vote for president, has not aged well. - If your dumb ass has ever

cause next 20 times on turbo tax, then 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 Maham movement, right?

Which is just like, fuck experts, nobody gets to decide

It's not your doctor, it's not the newspaper

but it is an airport book, he's like don't trust them but you're also just some random person. - Trust the guy who sells brain quick and (laughing) - I feel like but he's saying trust yourself and yourself is reading Tim Ferriss, right?

I'm telling you that you are smart

“and then in return you just do what I tell you, right?”

But it's sort of listening to yourself in a way. You'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 Tim. - Yeah. - Who's your doctor to tell you what your blood pressure is? (laughing) - So on top of his sort of end 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 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 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 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. - 'Cause you're obviously not gonna be hearing from people that it didn't work work 'cause they would probably just like not be on the blog anymore.

They'd find something else. - Absolutely. He has like a whole segment where he's like, if you wanna know how to lose 20 pounds in two weeks, just ask the founder of WordPress

who lost a bunch of weight from just chewing every mouthful of food 20 times, which is like, okay, come on man. - That's literally like an 1,800 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 prove 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 wanna do like a little bit of credit where credit is due. - Ooh. - So he caution's readers against falling for like marketing terms.

So he's like, if someone's telling you about toning, cellulate, 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 really shaping. (laughing) - 4-H-B is different than a marketing term. - It's a protocol is what he keeps saying.

- It's a protocol. - It's a protocol. It's self not a marketing term. - Yeah. (laughing) - He also caution's readers.

He's like, look, you're gonna be doing a bunch of self-experimentation. That means that you're gonna have to challenge

“your own ideas about correlation and causation, right?”

And he gives them some like actually quite good questions to challenge like, is this causal relationship moving the way you think it is? One is like, is it possible that what he calls the arrow of causality is reversed?

- Right. - So like, is it possible not that this person ran and therefore got a quote-unquote runner's build, but rather that they kind of looked like someone who could do well at running, so they did.

I'm eating Brussels sprouts because I'm farting. (laughing) It's actually he think about it. - He asks if you're mixing up absence and presence. So for example, like, is a vegetarian diet healthier

or perceived to be healthier because of the lack of meat or because of the increased presence of vegetables? - Okay. - It's just like basic good probing kinds of questions. - Yeah.

- 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 result. (laughing) You're reading a book by a rich guy who got blood test a thousand times.

- Right. He's like, don't confuse what's happening

Confuse what's happening with me with a single rich guy.

- The diet itself is pretty straightforward. There are five core rules. One is a void 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's 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's just like in a bowl?

- Yep. - Dude, no mayo, no lemon juice. - Nothing. - You gotta get that mercury up. (laughing)

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 is part of the slow carb thing, right? Of just like, if there's not a ton of fiber, there is a lot of sugar. - That's not true, that whatever. - Whatever.

Rule number five is take one day off per week and quote, go nuts. I recommend Saturday, often nicknamed, "Faturday" by followers.

“But this is also like, he's just telling you to 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. It's a little bit of mustard in the tuna

and maybe take easy on Saturdays. - It's also funny 'cause none of these guys have kind of been steeped in like fat diet world. I think a lot of women have, they're like, "Oh, women by their 30s are like,

"Oh, I've heard this advice a million fucking times.

"It's not gonna work for me." But these guys are basically discovering like fat diet stuff. - Right. - It's like look maxing stuff for men, where like we've gone a little too far

and like 19 year olds are like wearing shoulder pads and dried. - Right. - I wasn't 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 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. - That's not true.

- That's not true. - That's true. - I know he's like, "Oh, don't trust your doctor,

“"or 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 and tire 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 for this is pretty straightforward. Very standard diet advice. The easiest 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 boon diet baby means at every meal. You're in a fully endorses book now. - I love it. - I'm blurbing it, and it's gonna be great. - The only diet that works.

He's honing in here on this idea of whole grains and quote unquote slow carbs that was popular at the time. The underlying idea here is that so-called fast carbs, so things with like white flour, white sugar, whatever else are big drivers of people getting fat

and that so-called quote unquote slow carbs, like whole grains and fiber-rich vegetables, would be less likely to lead to weight gain and would like help with weight management. This is based on the glycemic index,

which we've talked about before on the show. The glycemic index is a way of, it's sort of presented as a way of measuring the impact of various foods on like humans, blood sugar, but the way that they determine it is in groups

of between five and 15 people. Since then, in the years since the development of the glycemic index, we've 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 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 for him? - What if a wealthy man set it with confidence? - What if a guy wearing an aura ring,

told me what I should eat sweet potato for him? A 2021 meta-analysis in the journal advances in nutrition,

totaling just under two million adults,

and they were looking at like,

“when we're advising people to have a low glycemic index diet,”

what are the actual results of that? What they found was, quote, results of 30 meta-analyses of RCTs from eight publications demonstrated that low GI diets are 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 sense. - Right, so like, have your slow carbs, they're good for you for a lot of reasons, they're not going to make you think.

- Also, this is just like yet another diet basically being like, you shouldn't brown rice and broccoli and chicken breast. - But those diets are marketed to ladies. - Yeah, 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 in here's what I have come up with.

- It's like brown rice. - Eat some beans?

“- I'm also now just imagining Tim Ferriss”

with like Paul Soximeter clip to every finger. - Yeah, just eating tuna out of a bowl like a dollar with 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 tag lines, folks. People are gonna 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, whatever's at this board. I've ever promised that.

- This is how tech guys talk where they try to throw in what feels a little more like computer language into like every day, shit, right? 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 now recommending, you know this whole thing of like a stack, you have a stack of like the caffeine that you do.

“- We're gonna talk so fucking much about stacks.”

- Techbro's are recommending that you add nicotine patches. - Yeah, do your stack. - Oh, hell yeah, dude. - No, they're talking about nicotine and caffeine both as being neutropics, which is a wild way term.

- Yeah, yeah. - Because that's also made up terms. They're like, yeah, they're neutropics. Lucky charms, neutropics, 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 smashing.

And then you're all gonna be fucking smoking again. - You know, like the famous madman ad campaign where they're like, they're toasted, all right. They're gonna start doing that shit. - Yeah.

- 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 20 tens body positivity Instagram post.

- Hell yeah. - We're like a thin woman would take a picture of herself slouching so that she would like have some roles. And then we take another picture of herself standing up straight and the caption would be like, it's the same body.

- Yeah, he like has like a quote unquote before picture that is him leaning forward and weighing, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 pounds more and then the next picture is him shirtless and ripped and standing off to the side.

- It's like the Alex Jones picture where he's just slightly more red to the actor photo. - The initial diet that we talk 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 up. - Yeah, I keep it next to my bed just a string.

- Right before I first cigarette in bed, absolutely.

- He says that Mistake number two is not getting enough protein per meal. Mistake number three is not drinking enough water, but he doesn't really define enough. Mistake number four, he says is believing

that you'll cook, especially if you're a bachelor. - What the fuck is that? What's wrong with 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

- He has a whole mistake just about mistiming wings

with your menstrual cycle, and then it prevents the seas, he writes, not a problem for bachelors. (laughing) - Nice.

- For Mary? - No, however. - So, he talks about how cheat day is like a really important part of the diet, not just for adherence to the diet,

but for its actual effectiveness. He says that the big issue that cheat day helps with is to minimize your release of insulin, which triggers your body to store fat.

“- Metabolism spoofing, that's what I'm saying.”

- Absolutely, yes. - So, he has a whole thing where he's like, 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?

Do 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 your full speed. - Actual foods, you'll be coming out of you. - Just a full slice of pizza coming out your ass.

- Booking 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.

(laughing) - It's a slide through like a slipper slide. - Almond butter and asteroid slide. (laughing) - We're gonna read what Tim says you can do.

- I can assume 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine or 16 ounces of cooled year-by-mante 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 poop. - Yeah, yeah.

(laughing) - So literally. (laughing) - Hell yeah. - Fuck a meta study dude.

- Shit on the scale. (laughing) - Identical volumes of food on and off the protocol. On protocol equals much more poomass equals less absorption equals fewer chocolate croissants

that take up residents on my apps. 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 do you a fucking nerd weigh your food?

- 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 correct the code. - 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? - Is there any basis to this at all?

- Michael, I like, I like how you're at. You're like, so, Aubrey, do you look into this or? - Yeah, I want that. - What the meta study. - This guy is shitting on his scale, Michael.

All right. - So, I fact checked a lot of things for this episode, I did not fact check the poop wing. - Also, it's like, pretty good to leave out

of a first date conversation.

Dude, good to leave out of your book. - No one wants to hear about this. (laughing) - I would rather you, I would rather you like, fraudulently create a peer reviewed study

than tell me about this. - He says that there's a third principle which is engaging in brief muscular contractions throughout your binge. - Cagels?

(laughing) - Like butt cagels? - Like intestinal cagels? - No, he's doing like wall squats. Like he does like a wall sit.

He does, he says wall tricep extensions. And 62, 120 seconds of total air squats. Immediately prior to eating main courses on his binge day. - Oh my god dude.

- So, he's like going to fucking pizza hut. (laughing) - Oh my god. - He's like squatting down at the limit. - Yeah, and then like getting up to do fucking

calisthenics for two minutes before he eats a whole pizza. Like it's extremely awesome. - So not only is like the food miserable to eat six days a week 'cause he refuses to allow for seasoning or whatever, but you have to do wall squats.

- Yeah, in public on your binge day. - Because you might enjoy it, right? (laughing) - Yeah, don't get caught enjoying your food. - I'm at the Buffalo Wild Wings

do holding a wall squat for three minutes. (laughing) So he has a whole argument here about how

brings glucose transporters to the surface of muscle cells,

“opening more gates for the calories to flow into.”

- Where is he getting this shit? He's just making, he's using big words to make it sound real, but like what is he talking about? - Michael, he's not making it up. It's based on one Japanese rat study.

- Oh great, okay. Oh, just because someone reads his blog does not make them a Japanese rat. (laughing) - So earlier my human shits stacks.

- Oh yeah. - Tim Ferriss experiments on himself on which ones he thinks are most effective for weight loss. He talks about one of his most effective stacks being the quote unquote classic ECA stack.

And I was like, what the fuck is an ECA stack? - Mm-hmm. - A Fedron caffeine and aspirin. - Yeah. - What?

- He talks about having done this ECA stack

a Fedron caffeine and aspirin. A Fedron now banned because so many people died from using it and also because you can use it to make math. - My stack of chlorine and bleach. - So his current preferred stack is now the P-A-G-G stack

it consists of P-C-P. - Garlic extract. - That's all. (laughing)

“And anti-oxidin that naturally exists in meat”

and some vegetables. Like I googled it, it's alpha lipoic acid and I was like, what the fuck is this? And they're like, it's in broccoli and steak. - Classic.

- Oh, well, have some broccoli and steak. - I don't know. - 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 dop, right? 'Cause they're like, ooh, this supplement changes everything. Like they're just falling for marketing claims. - Right. - Take a fucking one today.

Like, yes. (laughing) 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. So apologies in advance to whoever. - Yeah, Peter. All right, I'll do it. How did I do it?

I followed a simple supplement retumen. Morning. No explode 11 to scoop.

“- That's like an anti-diarrhea medication.”

- Yeah, no explode. - No, it's not. (laughing) - You mix that with the diea reels that he takes. - I just let him fight it outside of you.

- That's intestinal confusion. (laughing) Made a best man when. (laughing) - All right, no explode 11 to scoop.

- Slow nious in or time release nious in a mind. 500 milligrams. Each meal, chromate, pre-workout, body quick, post-workout, macellion, prior to bed, polycosinol, polycosinol.

- Sure. - No mate. Again, alpha-lepoic acid and slow nious in. - This is like a lot of steps to take each day and he's using these names like,

no explode and slow nious in and chrome-mate and that kind of stuff. Most of these are pretty common things. No explode 11 is just a pre-workout. (laughing)

- It's easy, it's easy and a pre-workout, fresh out of bed. (laughing) - That's right. - My workout is the entire day,

so I get every workout right when I wake up. - Like, it's just caffeine and creatine. This man is caffeinated to the fucking max. - Yeah, dude. - By the way, slow nious in is nious in a mind.

It's just a b-vite. - Time to release b-vite in a minute. - Right and like all of this is just like, you could all get all of these as like nature-made supplements - Yeah.

- Target or whatever, right? Like these are not like hard things to find, but when he lists the like, "I, yes, I'm using 23 milligrams of polycosin all." - Yeah.

- He gives the whole thing sort of a mystique of being much more like stem-oriented than he is. 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, so if he's doing this in the morning at each meal, before work out after work out and prior to bed,

so you're 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. - Like what? - And then you also take one week off every two months

and quote, "This week off is critical."

- Yes. - You gotta keep your metabolism guessing. Don't let your metabolism fucking rest on the floor. - Yeah, you wanna be constantly switching between constipation and diarrhea and a rate

that baffles the intestines. - Oh, surprisingly, he's also a cold plunge guy. Unsurprisingly, he's also generally a health gadget guy,

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 to attach this to the side of your toilet. The color decoda that films your toilet bowl and like there's an app that gives you like corticot insights, but the insights are like, how many times did you poop yesterday?

- Yeah. - And like, just like you poop well hydrated or not well hydrated. - No, I like that.

“I think, what, why should I have to look?”

You know, I just, I want an app to just, every time I take a shit, I don't look. I mean, I just stand right up and then it, it sends me a notification that says gross. - He uses a continuous glucos monitor.

A thing that is straightforwardly unnecessary

for people who are not diabetic, I looked up the glucos monitor that he recommends. It's the Dexcom 7 at last for two weeks on your body and it costs $120 per monitor. - And it's more just him big of roof.

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 a hundred 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 like you have diabetes. - Yeah, yeah.

“- Watch everything you eat, exercise in really specific ways”

where a glucometer and you know,

maybe take some diabetes meds, right? - It's a bunch of biohacker 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, if you want to avoid climdia, just wear a condom at all times.

I'm like, what are you 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, Tim Ferriss is weird about women. - There's one section that he calls the math of beauty. - Oh no. - Are we doing like symmetry stuff? - We're not leaning away from chronology.

I was saying that. Michael, you are up. - What do Marilyn Monroe, Cecilia Ren and El 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 waist are seven tenths of the size of their hips. That makes their waist a hip ratio, WHR, 0.7. In this ratio in females,

appears to be hard-wired into the male brain as a sign of fertility and therefore attractiveness. The wider your waist is, the higher this ratio goes toward the apple-shaped 1.0, which correlates in scientific studies with decreased estrogen levels,

increased disease risk, increased birth complications and lower fertility rates. Working toward a more slender waist has been shown to have a greater effect on attractiveness than reducing hip size.

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. Peter, go ahead. I know you think about this all the time.

This is how you talk to your boys when you're like, you're not a mean obberate. - Look, I don't get bogged down by the numbers. I know it when I see it. You know, if you think about this often enough,

it 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, people can 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, I guess this is hardwired

into the male brain. He's sort of a reverse engineering. This is what I am attracted to. And this is like a contemporary beauty standard, here go, 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 for sure, the need to sort of make these things quantifiable is so fucking bizarre.

- Yeah, why can't you just be like, they're hot. It's so fucking weird. - We're too Marilyn Monroe, so Fieleran and Alan McPherson have in common. They're fucking hot, dude.

- They're doing it. - 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, like dick to chin ratio? - Yeah, exactly. - Okay, so the ratio is shoulder to waist.

- Oh wait, is it actually in there?

- He doesn't include that. - Wait, what is it?

“- I think it's 0.8 shoulder to waist to shoulder ratios”

or your waist to be. - I saw that on, like, masculineman.tumbler. (laughs) - Teddy made the same fucking joke. I recently heard of a podcast

or he was included on a tumbler that has exactly the 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. (laughs) What's the dick to heart ratio? (laughs) 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 explicit discussion of sex in genitals. - You're an hour into the podcast episode about shit

and you know what, no, this isn't okay. You're about to hear about intercourse. - The chapter title is the 15-minute female orgasm. How long it lasts? - How long it takes?

- What happened to four? - He gets a very sort of granular 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. (laughs) (laughs)

- To his credit, the quote unquote experts that he fights 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, you gotta weigh it.

“He doesn't say anything about what does that mean, right?”

He just says, "Oh yes, my friend Talula, a specialist in female ejaculation, 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, it would be at about one o'clock." - What, it's off center?

- I mean, I'm a gay man and Peter's never given a woman

at orgasms. - No, no, no, no, no, no. - You're gonna make your claims very slowly. - I just do the alphabet, like a gentleman. (laughs)

- 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. (laughs) - It's like, it's just off the clitoris.

It's like, (laughs) - He's next to it. (laughs) - It's just so weird. You're just like, slightly missing the clitoris.

(laughs) - You know work. - If you use the one o'clock trick, we'll take a full 15 minutes. - In addition to his sort of 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 and do it up frantically as you make it in the bedroom. - Slaping on my nicotine patch.

24 to 48 hours before you want to have incredible sex.

- Why? - Why? - 48 hours. - When you get a genome 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 guy ever goes nuts at the one o'clock on here of a giant nut, the night before, he was looting up on cholesterol. - Right, his defense, he's had seven eggs in the rest of the minutes.

- He's like scarfing hard, boiled. - Just eating half a pound of shrimp. - He 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 as 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 a swage 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 text you, she's like, I'm so horny, let's just do it tonight and you're like five eggs deep. - 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

I can't, I haven't had a 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 describes as quote, a 25-year-old female yoga instructor fresh from Midwest, where you're just like fresh. 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 were off. - Give me a dozen eggs and 24 hours hunting. (laughing)

- He writes, quote, "My quest for the elusive female O had begun." The outcome four weeks later was better than I ever could have imagined. - Before we could have some-- - I was able to facilitate orgasms.

The word "facilitate" will be explained later. In every woman who acted as a test subject. - Oh, my God, what 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%.

- Dude, whenever I write a self-help book,

like any non-fiction book, I'm including a chapter about how good it's XAM. That woman then introduces him to an organization, YouTube may or may not have a herd of it called One Taste, to have either viewer 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 fuck and dark one taste is. And that is where he goes to learn this quote unquote 15-minute orgasm business, right? - That's kind of the kind of shit

that a cult leader would tell you. - There's a secret clip. (laughing) It's just to the right of the regular one. - What is this organization though, officially?

- They essentially are having people come in to get coached on their sex technique. So they come in with a partner. There's a coach who watches you sometimes a group of people who watches you

and then you get notes and direction. It's like a sex coupon 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 were participating in orgasmic meditation. - Yeah, I've been telling women that for years. (laughing)

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 to where I'll click. (laughing)

- You come like a spiritual thing. - He also consults another expert named Nina Hartley or either of you familiar with Nina Hartley? Is it porn? - Yep.

So Nina Hartley is sort of in the like Ron Jeremy Jenna Jamison vein of like a porn actor

“who sort of crossed over into more pop culture notoriety, right?”

- Okay. The book, Tim Ferriss writes that other porn actors have said that Nina Hartley was quote the best sex of their life and he says, "Soda's my friend, Silvester." - Oh, would that be still alone?

- No, he just says he has a friend named Silvester. - Oh, what? - Okay. - Who had sex with Nina Hartley? - Cool.

- You know Nina Hartley? My friend hooked up with her. (laughing) This is the most for the fucking boy's anecdote that we will read in this entire--

- I Peter's doing it. - All right. Silvester'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 Silvester, guess who I was at dinner with, famous porn star, Nina Hartley. Have you ever heard of her?

“Silvester 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.

Silvester's mom raised a hand and picked up the phone.

Hi Nina, it's Mrs. Norwood.

“I had such a wonderful time meeting you at the party.”

Listen, I have a question for you. Do you ever make love to younger men? - Oh, come on. - 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 get too far. This is like too much sex positivity in the family.

- No, that's the only, this is fake. - Fine. - The best case scenario here is Silvester made this up - Yeah. - Do you press this for Tim? - Imagine you make up this crazy bullshit story

about fucking a porn star and then 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.

- Did you guys remember there was an ad for like, it was like, "Cours" or something in the '90s. It was like, "I like beer with my friends, "watchin' football with my friends and twins." - Yeah, of course.

“- Of course. - Remember that. - And twins.”

- That coolest mom ever feels like in the straight out of the Antwoom era of like just like, we're just being so fucking horny in public all the time. - This is like very, for some shit like that. - It's not.

- But to be like, "Hey, you're kind of professionally, "you have professional sex. "Well, you've done this make you kind of a slut. "Well, you just fuck my son like this." - You have no standards, so if you wanna fuck my son.

- She's not even like, "Yeah, like, is he cute? "Is he nice like that too?" - 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 local strip club,

which was like right next to my high school. And so I went to strip clubs a decent amount, like my final year of high school

'cause 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, "I fives his son." - What on earth?

“And I think all of us were like, "Oh, what are we doing?"”

- I'm setting stuff. Also, this is not like, it's not a cool story. - No, it's not. - No, it's really not. If my friends told me the story about themselves, I'd be weirded out, right?

- Yes, 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 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 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-aclock mark. (laughing) - 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 going to get anywhere. We didn't say anything was going to 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 "3 square millimeters of contact, nothing more."

- Oh, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke. - That's too slow, Michael, it should be like a hummingbird. You shouldn't even let me know if you would be better. - Yeah. - I love that he's like, this would be incredibly difficult.

There is no goal. He's doing this like the kung fu master of montage from Kill Bill. - He does tell you to get a kitchen timer and set it for 15 minutes to take a pressure off. - Yeah, no, that'll take the pressure, that ticking sound.

- 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 just being vulnerable

with a partner and being like, here's what I want.

What do you want, and actually just fucking negotiating it on some level, or talking it through? He talks us through this whole how-to, and then he gives us an example of guys,

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. - I want that.

- It's really amazing to me how many anecdotes

he includes of people that he knows and includes their first and last name, Silvester Norwood. - Right. - Fuck me and hardly at his mom's arranging. - Oh yeah, I didn't realize that you could just

be together Silvester's full name from this. - Oh yeah. - Also, it's hilarious that his mom, according to this transcript, said, "Hi Nina, it's Mrs. Norwood."

Also, like, how many CEOs need the Vesper already? - I will be this passage Peter, you Google Vesper CEO. (laughing) - 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 decilator”

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.

Do 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

claiming on top of me. This is not a boast. This is not penthouse form. 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 getting us breadcrumbs. (laughing) - The whole spectacle was so real. She was literally intoxicated on fair mounds.

Oh, he's saying the beef like made her smell him, and then she like went bananas. - This is like if Jordan Peterson was horny. - Yeah, no, he's saying that he has been like cholesterol maxing to allow him to increase testosterone production.

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. - Which 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 three times a day for 21 days. And he's also saying, yes, I have all this medical equipment at my house and I get blood worked on all the fucking time. But 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, but it's also closer to the generation of men who did literally just only eat beef,

just 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 VH1s the pickup artist.

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, but you're doing card trick tricks on eating beef. - Yeah, eating more beef.

And doing things from like a third party instructor

rather than asking your partner what she likes, right? - Homing bird speed karate chops on the one a clock. (laughing) - 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." (laughing) 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, 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 psychology today. The title of the review is, quote,

- Psychology today on that.

- Yeah, it's not great. - Should have on the outskirts of what I would consider for a beautiful idea, or like, hmm. - Psychology today in their review from this MD, right? Quote, so why does this good guy industry insider

and potent scientific self-experimenter right immediately after the title page? Please don't be stupid and kill yourself. It would make both of us quite unhappy.

“And then says you should quote, consult a doctor”

before doing anything in this book.

Why is the publisher writing that they and the author quote expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result in the user application of the information contained in this book? - There's a full legal liability release at the end of the book.

- To buy it, you have to like sign a waiver. So like book reviews? - No. - A 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 - Dear 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, a hundred and eighty-seven. 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. - Let's do. - Yeah. He says, "I expected no less given the data that drove it."

I know, I know.

“Why are you writing about your lunch on Tech crunch?”

Because my lunch is a data-driven iteration from the previous state of the art. In other words, a technical innovation. - My God. - 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." - You're literally just listening to some guy.

- Why are you writing about your lunch in a technology website? Because there's data involved, dude. - And like, the data, such as it is, is Tim Ferriss tried some stuff on Tim Ferriss,

and then some people had his blog and emailed him about the stuff that they tried. - The scale that you weigh your poop on is technology. - It's my God. (laughing)