athletic training review book

>>joel constable: hi everyone. my name isjoel constable and i work in leadership development as part of google edu and i'm thrilled todayto introduce our newest authors@google speaker, tim ferriss. tim was nominated as one of fastcompany'smost innovative business people of 2007 and is the author or the number one new york times,wall street journal, and business week best seller, the four hour workweek, which hasbeen translated into 35 different languages. wired magazine has called tim the supermanof silicon valley for his manipulation of the human body. a few interesting things about tim: he isactually a tango world record holder and a

former national kickboxing champion, whichi guess means that he could sweep you off your feet in multiple different ways. [laughter] tim is also a guest lecturer at princetonuniversity and a faculty member at singularity university based at nasa ames research center. today tim is going to be talking about hisnew book, the four hour body: an uncommon guide to rapid fat loss, incredible sex, andbecoming superhuman, which is perhaps why all of you are here. as a big fan of both tim and becoming superhumani'm really excited to hear what he has to

say. so please join me in welcoming tim ferris. [applause] >>tim ferriss: alright, thank you for beinghere everyone. i'm excited to be back at the googleplex yet again. [pause] it's all downhill from here after that introductionso. [laughs] this is delicious peppermint water. you don'tseem to have anything other than flavored water.

so the four hour body is the topic of a verybrief presentation today. i'm gonna keep it exceptionally short. i wanna get to q anda as quickly as possible. and i put masochism first in the subtitlebecause that will be reflected in the video that i'm going to show you. and then i'lladd commentary after that. so i'll explain why i do such things to myself. [video playing] male #1: this is a biopsy needle. [sound of clapping] >>tim ferriss: this is for comparative purposes.

>>male #1: yes. it's about the thick ? just a little bit thinner than a pencil. >>tim ferriss: yes. this might seem a little bit strange. >>tim ferriss live: this is in cape town,south africa where you don't have to sign a hundred thousand waivers to have such thingsdone to you. [chuckles] that is in the vastus lateralis on the rightthigh. i have a nice scar for that. >>male #1: [inaudible] >>tim ferriss: so that's ?

>>male #1: that the depth that we've createdto [uintelligible]. >>tim ferriss: [sighs] >>male #1: i'm going to get a sample. [two people speaking afrikaans] >>tim ferriss live: that is afrikaans forthose of you who speak afrikaans here. >>male #1: i'll say, i'll say "suction" andyou pull back a bit if you feel resistance you just [inaudible]. and then i'll say "release."then i'll say "suction." and then i'll say "release." >>tim ferriss live: this is a hollow biopsytube and they use the suction to pull muscle

tissue, which doesn't have any pain receptorsas far as i could tell into the tube so they can then sever it and use it for analysis. >>male #1: relax the leg for me as far aspossible. there we go. and just [inaudible]. and suction. and release. >>tim ferriss: did we get it? >>tim ferriss live: [laughs] alright, whowants to sign up? >>male #1: [inaudible] just take it off. >>tim ferriss live: that wasn't my musclesamples.

>>tim ferriss: yeah, there we go. thank youa little carpaccio, steak tar tare, tim tar tare. [laughs] okay so these will be used for the anti-[inaudible],the fiber type ? >>male #1: yes. >>tim ferriss: and the comparisons that wetalked about with the graphs. >>tim ferriss: and then that one over therewill hopefully be used for the ? >>male #1: yeah. >>tim ferriss: contractility and all thatgood stuff. >>male #1: this is exactly ?

>>tim ferriss live: okay, so there you haveit. so i spent three years doing that type ofthing to myself. now why would you do such a thing? well, as it turns out that what you wouldexpect to happen based on tests like 23 amino avigenics doesn't always pan out in the realworld when you actually look at, for example, muscle fibers under the microscope so. according to a number of genetic tests thati had to look at my genotype i lack, or i should say, i have a nonsense allele for actin3 and that codes for fast twitch muscle fiber. so i wanted to see what my potential was forgaining muscle quickly or becoming an olympic

sprinter. the results came back, "sorry, you're gonnabe really, really piss poor at both. but good luck. you have a genetic predisposition." alright, so i had my muscle fibers removedto look at my genetic potential for endurance and this is what we turn out with. so we're looking ? [laughs] you can see right from the outset, not lookinggood. and dr. cohen who was one of the two doctorsperforming the biopsy came in with the results and before he described them he said, "i'mgoing to speak simply because i'm a doctor

and i like to speak simply." i was like, "alright." he says, "you would have trouble finishinga 10k. no you would have trouble finishing a 5k." i was like, "alright." [laughs] so here are a number of enzymes that limitendurance potential in aerobic capacity among other things. so you have citrate synthaseon the left which has been studied quite a lot, [3h]ad, and so forth and so on. and you have south african antelope in thered, so i'm not gonna be beating them in 40 yard dash or 100 mile races anytime soon.

then you have endurance athletes. and then you have tim ferriss below the line;below zero. [laughs] i don't know how that's even possible; turnsout that the y axis here is the enzyme activity percentage of untrained humans. so if thatzero is homer simpson, then the green is me. is basically what that means. so there's another graph that i didn't includein this presentation which is equally instructive and that was muscle fiber type. turns out i have very little slow twitch musclefiber, but i have a lot of what's called type iia fast twitch muscle fiber; purely throughtraining.

alright, so the genotype what you would expectbased on my genetic predisposition and what i've been able to produce through trainingare two very, very different realities. and the four hour body, the three hour body'snext. damn i already told you guys. the four hour body was a three year processof testing all of this, whether it was fat loss, endurance, sleep related, maximal strengthrelated, to see if the lab results or lab expectations held up under field testing. and it turns out that a lot of it does nothold up and that i believe you can reach your genetic potential in almost any one of thesephysical performance areas in about six months. and we can talk about some of those examples.

one of my inspirations was this girl righthere. so barry ross, who trained one of his athletesto break all of marion jones' records in high school, and his athlete allyson felix endedup becoming the first professional track athlete right out of high school. looks somethinglike this; this is another one of his trainees. and i worked with him for maximal strengthdevelopment because he's very good at it with sprinters. so he sent me this photograph to illustratea movement called "the torture twist" which is a horrible, horrible movement. i'm happyto show you how to do it after the presentation. this girl is a high school runner. she is132 pounds; looks pretty normal from all indications;

and she deadlifts 405 pounds for repetitions. and that alone was severely emasculating forme. [laughs] and inspired me to train, not harder, butmuch more intelligently and i was able to go from being able to pull roughly 300, 315pounds off the floor to doing rack pulls with about 650 with a double overhand grip, that'snot a hook grip. so i'll let you guys google that later, butit's a hell of a lot harder than doing an alternating grip using wraps. and it was from training using less than fiveminutes of tension per week in the deadlift. the volume was exceptionally, exceptionallylow.

alright, and that would be one example ofthe minimum effective dose, which we will come back to. so the guiding tenet for this entire explorationwhich started actually coincided with beginning to invest in startup companies and advisestartup companies; so i'm in twitter and evernote and stumbleupon and others. i wanted to see if you could apply split testing,multi-variant testing, that type of data crunching to the physical body, but in general the tenetcame from mark twain. "so whenever i found myself on the side of the majority it wastime to pause and reflect." not just pause and reflect, but to test the opposite approach.

so if everyone's doing 20 to 30 hours of trainingfor ironman, let's say, well could you do 4 or 5 hours of training and get better results?are there any outliers who have been able to achieve that? it turns out there are. so i'm gonna keep the presentation based ona number of what i would call, "first principles" that are organizing principles for all ofthe tactics. so these are more strategies than anything else. okay, [laughs] so the means inform the mean,i think i read that incorrectly. the extremes inform the mean, not vice versa. how many people here have seen the movie objectified?anyone? wow, i'm amazed only three people.

objectified also done by the director of helvetica;fantastic movie; and there's a moment, an anecdote interview in that movie that involvesgarden shears. and frog design is being interviewed or they'reexplaining how one of their clients came in to ask them to develop a new type of gardenshears and they said, "our average user is a 45 year old woman, she is in this type ofjob, she behaves this way." and they said, "we don't care about your average. we wannaknow the extremes." so on either side in each pole we wanna knowabout let's say the 400 pound body builder who can't brush his own teeth, and we wannaknow about the paraplegic and their limitations. and if you handle the extremes then you coverthe means.

it just so happens it doesn't work in theopposite direction. so you've probably heard the joke about billgates walking into a bar and the average net worth jumps to $150 million each. the mean and the average oftentimes mean nothing,from a practical standpoint. so on the right hand side you have me posingwith a number of syringes that have three inch needles. and they contain a number ofdifferent things. and this is experimenting with the mean, with the extremes rather, toinform the mean. and that particular cocktail is very simple;it's effectively sugar water; its dextrose, saline, a few other things, perhaps some glucosaminewhich i have mixed feelings about, b12 for

injury repair. some of the others are a bit more aggressive.they contain things like stem cell growth factors that i flew in from israel, igf-1,and some of my growth factor one. so some pretty, pretty powerful stuff. but what you realize is that when you lookat, let's say, how someone who is 400 pounds lost their first 150 pounds of fat, then youlook at how the professional body builder gets from 6 to 4% body fat, you learn a lotmore than if you're looking at anything in between those two ranges. so that's the first principle. look for theoutliers and study the outliers.

alright, tracking plus loss aversion is moreimportant than how-to. so the emphasis in exercise and diet in particulartends to focus on the latest and greatest. and the business model seems to be complicateto profit. so you can't publish a magazine every month without new material. unfortunatelythat leads to a lot of confusion. and what i realized very early on was thatthe how-to does not matter as much as the motivation for the behavioral change; andspent time with people like bj fogg at stanford university in the persuasion lab, among otherpeople, to really drill down into the specifics of this. and this is a photograph of chad fowler beforeand after who runs the railsconf conference,

among others. and chad knew what to do on some level, buthe didn't make the change until the pain was painful enough. and i think that for manypeople the tracking was the second piece that he used to provide the feedback necessaryto compel him to continue. so self-discipline, willpower all very overrated.if you just use tracking you can oftentimes catalyze a behavior change that you want tomake. and a good example of that would be the flashdiet. the so-called flash diet. all that entails is taking an iphone or a camera phone of sometype and taking a picture of every meal before you eat it.

it's a pattern interrupt that makes you awareof your decisions that were previously subconscious or habitual and leads to dramatically morefat loss than even written food journals. and if you were to take that as one optionand then personal trainers and a sophisticated strict zone diet on the other, i would actuallybet on the people with the iphones, based on all the data that i've seen. loss aversion also is very, very important.let's see we have, where's trevor? trevor? trevor? trevor, there he is. so trevor claiborne here makes a guest appearancein the book as well, and i think accentuates i think one principle behavioral change that'svery undervalued.

in the u.s. in particular we tend to focuson rewards and patting everybody on the back. in fact fear of loss if you look at let'ssay, bidding behavior at auctions. people will overbid dramatically more to preventlosing, let's say, $10 as opposed to gaining $10. no big surprise. but you can use that to your advantage. sotrevor, in particular, bet a co-worker, was it one dollar a workout? so one dollar a workout;if one of them missed their workout they had to pay the other a dollar. so in lifestyle impact one dollar does verylittle, but from a psychological standpoint it has a tremendous impact.

so focusing on tracking, using data to youradvantage, and that type of feedback to your advantage, and then loss aversion beat themethod. to give you a very clear example of how methodcan fail. i had a number of ceo's here in silicon valleyask me for an index card. they said, "i don't want the story. i don't want the details.give me an index card with the bullet points for losing abdominal fat and i'll do it." and so i gave each of them the index cardwith the bullet points; success rate 0%. alright, so the reasons for change and thefeedback mechanisms are more important in many cases than the actual how-to.

then we have the minimum effective dose. sothe minimum effective dose is a way of looking at exercise and diet, among other things,as you would look at medicine or drugs. so what is the minimum effective dose to achievea very precise, quantifiable outcome? anything above that produces side effects and the sideeffects could be from over training, they could certainly be from supplementation, theycould be from simply trying to maintain a low calorie diet of 1200 calories that's unsustainable. alright, so in this particular case you havetwo pictures. on the right hand side this is a fairly typical meal of mine. i followa diet called the slow carb diet and i could go into great detail about that if you wantin the q and a.

if people ask me the first step that theyshould take i'm not gonna give them a list of five things to change. so if you talk to bj fogg, he'll tell youif you ask, let's say people over 50, if you try to teach them to learn to text in orderto lose weight or to quit smoking it won't work because it's two behaviors. so i say change your breakfast: 30 grams ofprotein within 30 minutes of waking up. my dad who ended up losing a total of morethan 90 pounds of fat and gaining 20 to 30 pounds of muscle at age 65, began with changinghis breakfast and he went from approximately 5 pounds of fat loss per month to 18.75 poundsin the first month after changing his protein

intake within 30 minutes of waking up. that's where i would have people change. another case study; a female who was runningfive hours per week, five, six hours per week and could not lose the last 10 to 15 poundschanged her breakfast and lost 3% body fat between four and five weeks; very small changewith a disproportionately large outcome; so looking for that minimum effective dose asthe starting point. on the left hand side you have tracy. tracy lost 117 pounds with two or three 10to 20 minute kettlebell workouts per week, focusing on the two-handed swing which yousee here. that's the down swing. mother of

two and it started with that minimum effectdose of very short duration: kettlebell workouts and then she also adopted the same diet. so, last but not least, [laughs] you wanna keep improvement relative. so ido not have the actin 3 to do that, nor do i have perhaps the liver drug tolerance todo that -- [laughs] but the goal is not to be the best in theworld, necessarily. the goal is to use numbers to be the bestyou, the best version of yourself you can possibly in these various domains; these variousareas of physical performance or appearance. and that's it.

those are the overarching principles thatyou'll see in every single chapter of the four hour body. all of the various self-destructive experimentsthat i perform on myself so other people don't have to, i'm happy to talk about anythingrelated to self-experimentation in the book or otherwise, but that's the end of the presentation. so thank you for listening. sorry. oh, yes. we have a microphone. so you cango to the microphone over here or you can yell it out and i'll repeat your question.

>>charles: hi tim, i'm charles. >>tim ferriss: hi charles. >>charles: i lead design for our mobile productsand social products here at google. big fan of what you do; it looks like theleast paritofied, if that's a word? >>tim ferriss: um-hum. >>charles: chapter of your book might be aboutthe endurance? >>charles: stuff; i don't know if that's afair statement. seems like based on the analog graph? >>charles: your endurance is something you'rekind of?

>>charles: slow to love, maybe. >>tim ferriss: yeah, yeah. i'm definitelyslow to love endurance. >>charles: and so i was just wondering, there'slike a little bit of a cliff hanger in the book? >>tim ferriss: yeah, yeah. >>charles: how did it come out? >>tim ferriss: okay. >>charles: and are you gonna continue? >>tim ferris: um-hum.

>>charles: tryin' to? >>tim ferriss: uh-hum. >>charles: run long distances? that's my question? >>tim ferriss: yeah. good question. >>charles: thanks. >>tim ferriss: so there is a cliff hangerin the book with the endurance training. so there are a few things i'd say. the first is that the greatest progress thati've made has been technically related; so biomechanics related as far as running; reallya combination of pose method and a few other

methods. for those people who are really into runningpose method does have its risks. there is a sidebar in the book that discusses how theforces get transferred from the knee to the ankle; side note. in my particular case i hate running. i haterunning. i really, really, really hate running, so i knew that the best way to ensure thati completed an ultramarathon which will be my first goal; so i've never run a 10k buti'm try to run a 50k minimum; is to do it in front of the entire world while they'rewatching. so i'm actually gonna start that beginningof next month. and i've been making sure that

my body is as symmetrically capable as possiblebefore beginning the training to avoid injury. so the pre-hab chapter is what i've been focusingon thus far. but i'm gonna start in earnest next month and maybe do, i'm not sure if it'llbe the quad dipsea; a little too much vertical [laughs] in the quad dipsea, but i will bestarting that in february and i'm expecting, aiming within six months to complete; hopefullysooner. i think it could be done in 12 if i really focused on it and didn't have totravel. >>charles: um-hum. >>tim ferriss: that's the goal. thanks.

other questions? um-hum. >>male #1: i was curious that i'm generallycomfortable with like a liquid diet a lot of times. i can find that i can supplementreally almost anything in liquid form and it's convenient and fast for me. >>male #1: have you seen any kind of likepsychological reports or analyses that follow that? because a lot times obviously i'm notnearly as satisfied >>male #1: when it comes to liquid diets comparative >>male #1: to finding the same supplements

>>male #1: on a plate. >>tim ferriss: so the question of solid versusliquid food. it's easier to over consume with liquid and that's part of the reason thatif people are trying to gain mass; most controversial topic in the book by far is the mass gain;that's where like the meathead brigade has come down upon me in force on the internet. but i gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days.so i was supervised by a ph.d. as san jose state university and to do that you have toconsume a pretty atrocious number of calories. and the easiest way to do that is throughliquid. but, as an example, so this morning i wasrunning out and didn't have much time to prepare

so i had unflavored whey protein with somecinnamon and vanilla extract. and then i had brazil nuts and a handful of different seedsand that was it. and that will keep me sated because of the protein content for a numberof hours. so as long as it has high protein percentage,i don't see any problem with it. i know people who've lost a tremendous amountof weight doing using primarily liquid meals and one or two whole meals per day. but if you have the control to keep an eyeon the actual macronutrient and caloric intake then i don't see a problem with it. if people don't wanna get up and walk overthat's fine too.

>>peter: hi, my name's peter. >>tim ferriss: hi peter. >>peter: so you showed the woman who lost117 pounds of fat through changing her breakfast and doing kettlebell swings. so i understandthe concept of minimum effect dose to accomplish that goal of fat loss. did you evaluate whether those same techniquesactually were resulting in holistic, overall health for her? i understand she lost a lot of fat, but likehormone markers, all kinds of other measures of health, were those improved as well? andis there like a minimum effective dose for

holistic, overall health? so the question is, is there a minimum effectivedose for minimum, i'm sorry, for overall, holistic health? >>peter: expansion of life span, that sortof thing. >>tim ferris: yeah. >>peter: like is she gonna live longer 'causeof that? so the health is like success in the sensethat it's defined differently by different people. so we would have to sit down and actuallylook at the actual markers. what i would say is that in her particularcase, certainly by improving insulin sensitivity

and so forth i would wager that her life spanwould be extended. if you take anything to an extreme with physicalperformance like power lifting; i mean i know, a friend of mine is 145 pounds and he canbench press 600 pounds, as an example. or running 100 mile races; he's done that incompetition too. i doubt any of that's terribly good for the body long term. but i think that many of the, if we're talkingabout longevity specifically, there are a few takeaways that i'd suggest looking closelyat. one would be protein cycling and minimizingcomplete amino acid profile intake for at least 16 hours a week which isn't that hard;things like wheat lack lysine, as an example.

donating blood; many of the managers of centenarianstudies; i think boston university most notably. this is a male; donates blood because lasti checked men don't menstruate. that's one of the hypotheses as to why women in generallive longer than men is the reduction of toxic iron accumulation, things of that type. but it would really come down to looking atthe markers individually i would say. but if you're looking at, let's just say,the general health markers of, let's say, total cholesterol to hdl, triglyceride, fasting,glucose, hemoglobin a1c, things of that type. in these particular instances i would wagerthey've all been improved. for most of the case studies, certainly formyself, i've done thousands of line item blood

tests over the last few years; most of thosehave been improved longitudinally overtime. but if i'm doing an experiment like i eatnothing but meat and mixed nuts for 21 days to see what effect it would have on thosemarkers. if you remove some of those more extreme experiments, then i would say, forthe most part, they're being improved at the same time. >>peter: thanks. >>tim ferris: yeah. welcome. if you wanna talk about anything specificmarkers afterwards, i'll hang out for a bit. any other questions?

>>male #2: what happened when you ate nothingbut meat and nuts for 21 days? >>tim ferriss: [laughs] so i was in nicaragua for this particulartest. i was doing some experimentation with medical tourism. i ate grass fed beef, fewpounds a day, and almonds primarily; pretty boring diet. [laughs] my conventionally assessed cholesterol valuesimproved. so my hdl to total cholesterol ratio improved. there were a few things, let me think offhand,it was an improvement on average over my baseline beforehand.

and i think that underscores a point thatis neglected oftentimes which is, you are what you eat, yes that's true. but you arewhat you eat ate also. in the sense that i would rather eat grass fed beef than grainfed salmon, as an example. so that was to try to highlight the importanceof understanding your sources. >>female #1: hello. >>tim ferriss: hi. nice shirt. >>female #1: thank you. >>female #1: i wondering what advice or warningyou would give to women who reading your book as far as things that might need to be modifiedor --

>>female #1: additional consideration. >>tim ferriss: so good question. so thingsin the book that might be modified for women or emphasized for women; there are a few. the first is that it is extremely importanton the slow carb diet to ensure that you're getting enough calories. so many women who have tried low carb dietsin the past will default to eating, let's say, a chicken breast and leafy salad forlunch. and what you'll find, this is true on anylow calorie or sub maintenance diet, that you could stop menstruating. it's very, verycommon among athletes as well. and that's

generally not a good thing. so i would say if you eat for fertility asa woman you'll generally also get optimal athletic performance and fat loss. a few things related to fertility very quickly. i've seen, this is dozens, i'm not talkingabout one or two case studies of women who have just gone from miscarriage, miscarriage,miscarriage to pregnant. and the two most common changes were removinggluten from the diet. for a host of reasons that affects hormone regulation; so removinggrains effectively. number two would be adding in increasing saturatedfat intake, oddly enough. so i don't know

if that's due to long chain fatty acids. idon't know if it's due to replacing the gluten and therefore increasing protein and fat intakeas a side effect. but those were the two most common changes. otherwise, from a training standpoint, froma dietary standpoint, men and women more or less respond the same way. there is a lotof variability between people but not as much as we would sometimes like to think. there's been some speculation that becausewomen have a higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers they should train with a higherrepetition range in resistance training or weight training.

my position on that is that you should trainfor your desired outcome, not for your current state. because if i train for my current state basedon my genetics testing it wouldn't go anywhere. [laughs] like i would be well suited to i don't knowwhat sports; sliding down slides or monopoly. so those would be the highlights. but i would say that women are fortunate onone hand because they have very clear indications of their hormonal state through menstruationand other things.

whereas men are just kind of wandering aroundnot knowing what the hell's going on. and then they're like, "oh no my sperm count'sfour times lower than it should be. uh-oh; didn't realize that until i wanted to havekids." side note: the starting point for all of thisis comprehensive blood testing. so i would highly, highly recommend once every threeor six months you get comprehensive blood testing done. certainly everyone here canafford it. and additional testing that i would recommendis spectracell. s-p-e-c-t-r-a-c-e-l-l dot com, allegedly used by lance armstrong andothers which wouldn't mean anything incriminating; it's for nutrient deficiency.

i identified that i had a selenium deficiency.how many people here track their selenium? probably not many. and selenium's very importantfor spermatogenesis. so i actually did a number of things: fixedmy selenium deficiency; used cold exposures; and stopped carrying my cell phone in my pocket,side note. and doubled my sperm count in three months. for those of you who are interested in suchthings. >>male #2: so as far as i can tell from thequick look through the book, it pretty much concentrates on what we would normally considerphysical attributes. do you have any research or anything interestingon minimum effective dose either for balance

and coordination? >>male #2: 'cause i didn't see much there. >>male #2: and also mentally; nootropics or >>tim ferriss: yeah. >>male #2: or diet as sort of >>male #2: opposed to mental >>tim ferriss: yeah, yeah. good question. so the, have i found anything for the minimumeffective dose for balance, agility, or mental performance like nootropics?

so i was as an undergrad first a neurosciencemajor primarily because i wanted to focus on smart drugs. [laughs] i've seen a lot. there are many differentapproaches you can take. as far as balance goes, there's quite a lotof debate in the pt and athletic training community about whether balance is a generalskill you can train, just like if there exists a general intelligence. usually people wouldsegment it out into, for example, [pause] muscular symmetry. so one of the fastest ways to improve generalagility and balance, i would say, is by doing an assessment called the fms, the functionalmovement screen.

and i'm sure there are people at sf who cando that. and that'll assess imbalances from left to right or contra laterally. and whenyou fix those it's pretty astounding. it's in the pre-hab chapter. but if you identify using, for example, there'sa movement called, or there are two movements called the "chop and lift" where you're using,generally speaking, a cable and you're doing this type chopping diagonal movement and thenyou're reversing it and going up. and so you test your four quadrants and you'llgenerally find that one quadrant is extremely weak, relatively speaking. and when you fixthat it's incredible how many aches and pains, how many problems, how many injuries justdisappear.

so i would say that from a functional standpointthat would be one. if we're talking about equilibrium i haven'tfound anything to be particularly effective for general balance. for mental performance, this is somethingthat i really debated quite a lot because i'm a huge fan of cognitive enhancement. andi didn't include any chapter specifically on that because i found looking at the literaturethat improving physical performance, what most people would divorce from their mindor brain, is actually the best way to improve cognitive performance. and there's a great book called spark whichis written by a harvard m.d. that looks at

physical education in some very sophisticatedprograms from improving academic performance specifically by making students perform ata certain heart rate immediately prior to their worst subjects; really fascinating stuff. but if we're talking about drugs. [laughs]i'm sure there a few people in this audience who probably tried modafinil, among others.so provigil which is an anti-narcolepsy drug. there are a lot of drugs that will improveshort term memory, working memory, reaction speed. vasopressin which is an anti-diuretic hormonethat's used in, let's say, bedwetting in children in some cases, also can improve short termmemory.

the reason that i have ended up staying awayfrom any of these drugs is that i've realized in the course of doing all this research andall this testing, that the brain is a very sensitive instrument. and the brain, well the body, likes homeostasis.so if you interrupt any of the feedback loops you can cause some really significant longterm problems. that's certainly true if you look at, let'ssay, anabolics' use. if you're using super-physiological high dose, let's just say, testosterone cypionate,then you can screw up your hpta axis. and if you screw up your hypothalamus, boy you'regonna have a lot of issues. so i've ended up staying away from the smartdrugs most recently.

the exceptions would be yerba mate tea. ilove yerba mate. and it contains a handful of stimulants that all have different pharmacokineticsso you end up getting this nice extended, like three to four hour buzz, which is greatfor writing, among other things. and the other, i would say, for mental performancewould be hunger. so when you are in a fasted state whetherthat's through intermittent fasting or otherwise, you will experience a heightened level ofcognitive function and i think that does reflect back to evolution. from an evolutionary standpointif you're hunting and gathering it's a good idea to have better visual acuity if you'rereally hungry [laughs] and you need to find food, among other things. but that's somewhatspeculation.

hopefully that helps. >>female #2: i was wondering if you couldtalk a little bit about fruit and why you don't recommend it and also beans and whyyou recommend it [inaudible] ? >>tim ferriss: beans. um-hum. are you paleo? >>female #2: uh ? >>tim ferriss: paleo person? >>female #2: [inaudible] >>tim ferriss: semi. so the question was why do i recommend againstconsuming fruit, for the most part, and why

do i allow beans on the slow carb diet? so the first fruit. fruit as it existed 100,200 years ago is very different from fruit as it exists today. it's selectively bredand modified to have the highest level of fructose or fruit sugar possible. and fructose is problematic for fat loss specifically.so if you're not trying to lose fat, i have no particular problem with consuming fruit.but if you wanna get the best results possible from a fat loss program, fructose is convertedto glycerol phosphate which is then converted to body fat very, very efficiently. it's likethere's no more efficient pathway you could find just about; the same reason that highfructose corn syrup will make you really,

really fat. another note: same reason agave nectar willmake you very, very fat. it's 90 percent concentrated fructose. so looking at, again from an evolutionarystandpoint, the nutrient necessity of fruit; if you get it once a week; i have the oneday off, the cheat day or the binge day once per week on the slow carb diet. that's morethan enough to satisfy any sweet tooth requirement as it relates to fruit. if you absolutely have to have fruit; andi'm experimenting with fruit again in very moderate doses using primarily berries becauseit does have a fascinating effect on blood

glucose. it flat lines your blood glucose. so i do recommend fruit on your off day; havingit in the beginning of the day, such as grapefruit, which also includes neurogenin which is interestingfor extending the half life of caffeine. i implanted a dexcom seven device in my side.it's a continuous glucose monitor used by type i diabetics. and i implanted it in myside to track my blood glucose 24/7 for about three weeks. and what i noticed is when you have this smallamount of fruit in the morning it allows you to keep your blood sugar below, i think its100 nanograms per deciliter, milligrams per deciliter. it allows you to keep it belowthis critical threshold for fat loss which

is pretty fascinating. but, in general, i would say just stay awayfrom fruit, from what i've seen. and i haven't seen any deleterious health effects from thatat all. beans; so beans if anyone here is a strictpaleo eater, beans and legumes are a big no-no. for that same reason, peanuts are a big no-no;and cashews; i love cashews. but if you prepare beans properly; so if you'resoaking them let's say overnight, i simply haven't seen the digestive issues that onewould expect based on how strongly they are avoided on the paleo diet. i just haven'tseen the problem. so i do recommend lentils and other legumesand beans for the simple reason, among others,

that if people are only consuming leafy vegetablesor steamed vegetables and protein, they're almost always hypocaloric. and then they getirritable, they get headaches, and they quit. so that would be the main reason. and i'm convinced someday i'll either be provenright or wrong, as i suppose is the case with everything. lentils, there's some property in lentilsthat is just, it's a force multiplier for fat loss. i cannot figure out, i don't knowwhat it is. i have my speculations, but lentils are amazing; taste pretty good too. no problem.

>>male #3: so did you put lots of sort ofdistillation of successful experiments, do you have any stories about things that wentwrong, maybe in a spectacular nature? oh yeah. somebody asked me recently, "you seem to alwaysland on your feet." and i was like, "really?" and two of my doctors were in the audience.i was like, "you should ask [laughs] them how often i land on my head. it's pretty bad." spectacular or dangerous fashion? yeah, so i had a prp injection. so prp isfascinating; there's some really good researchers here in the bay area. allan mishra in particularis fantastic; he's at stanford.

prp stands for platelet rich plasma and thisis a way of getting around the illegality of anabolics, as a side note. what many athletes will do is they'll havetheir blood taken out; they'll have a blood draw performed; they'll put that whole bloodinto a special centrifuge and spin it so it separates out the plasma and white blood cellsand growth factors that are associated. and then they re-inject or they inject that locallyinto the site of injury. and it works spectacularly well. there are a number of cases of super bowlathletes; eight weeks out; one of them tears an achilles tendon; now what? prp. and thenthey compete.

i've seen world class sprinters win gold medalsat the world championships something like 12 weeks after hamstring or achilles tendontears; prp. i'm sure there are other things being usedas well. but i had a number of prp injections and mostof them worked very well and then there was on botched injection. when i say botched injection it should havebeen injected laterally on the elbow and it was injected really right at the point ofthe elbow where the skin is the thickest. now the bad part about thick skin is there'sa lot of bacteria, there's always bacteria in skin, but the thicker it is, the more bacteriathere is.

and they pushed through the bacteria and gaveme a mrsa infection which is a antibiotic resistant staph infection. and within 48 hoursmy elbow was the size of a football. and i was talking to a friend of mine who'sa harvard trained doctor; i was eating lunch. and she goes, "put down you lunch. get ina taxi. go to the emergency room." and she said go to this particular emergency 'causeshe's based around here. and i had to have emergency surgery. i wasput on intravenous antibiotics and had to have emergency surgery. because that can notonly eat your joint it can kill you dead. so i would say that was probably one of mymore "don't try this at home. not recommended tomy readers," mistake. and i did put that in

the book because i don't people to get triggerhappy with injections and things like that. they can be really serious. >>female #3: tell us a little bit about yourfeelings around the amount of sleep >>tim ferris: um. >>female #3: that you get. i thought i heardsome comment around like two hours of sleep? >>female #3: [inaudible] >>tim ferriss: so sleep; my opinions on sleep. my opinions on sleep depend on how many sessionsof sleep you get per day. so most people in this room will be familiarwith what's called "monophasic sleep;" that's

just go to bed, wake up. you get one sessionof sleep. if you're doing that or speaking from a personalbasis, if i'm doing that, i like to get 9 to 10 hours of sleep. i sleep a lot. if, on the other hand, you're doing what'scalled polyphasic sleep, where you break it up into multiple segments per day. and thatcan be taken to an extreme in something called uberman, which is i believe two and a halfhours of total sleep per day which is comprised of 20 minute naps. [laughs] not terribly socialas you can imagine. that can be sustained. and there's a lot ofdebate about this; there are long articles online about why it's impossible.

i can't divulge it yet, but i can say rightnow i'm using along with a few other groups some pretty sophisticated equipment to demonstratethat it is possible. we're tracking people using eeg's while they sleep on uberman. so it can be done. should you do it? that'sa separate question. for most people it's gonna be completely untenableand unsustainable. but there are people like matt mullenweg, usually called the lead developeror one of the lead developers of wordpress. and while he was working on wordpress he hadhis most productive year of coding; probably produced, i'm just speculating here, but 60%of the wordpress code in one year and he was following uberman.

to most people if you feel like you have tosleep two hours a day to get more done, i would say let's look at the time management[laughs] first before we start cutting you back to two hours. but those would be my feelings. >>female #4: i'm a runner and i like run inthe morning >>female #4: but i don't want to eat breakfastbefore running. >>female #4: what do you recommend that ieat protein right after [inaudible] ? >>female #4: but [inaudible]. >>tim ferriss: so if you're going to; thequestion was i'm a runner, i don't like to

eat before i run. what's the distance? >>female #4: like six miles a day. >>tim ferriss: six miles; alright. what i would suggest, if possible, it dependson why you're running. if you're training from competition it's one answer; if you'redoing it for, let's say, general fitness and fat loss it'd be another answer. but i would say that if you're consuming avery quickly digested protein like whey protein, whey protein isolate, it shouldn't cause toomuch stomach upset. if you don't want to eat prior to your workoutthen, and you're doing it for training, i

would suggest consuming either during therun or after a carbohydrate supplement like vitargo s2, which is a waxy maize starch whichwill help you to replenish your glycogen, particularly if you're following a diet that'spaleo or slow carb or something like that. otherwise, if you wanna get extra fat lossout of it you could just have a double espresso before you go running. but the cold water will also help quite alot. so if you're doing it for fat loss or bodycomposition or recomposition purposes, 500 milliliters of ice water will do wonders.i kid you not. it's pretty astounding the difference that it makes.

>>male #3: so fat loss [inaudible] nice becauseyou can have dietary [unintellgible] intervention as a result of [inaudible]. so i was wondering what your research turnedout regarding hdl, ldl [inaudible]. >>male #3: [inaudible] >>tim ferriss: whew! this is a big question.[laughs] very important question. the question, correct me if i get this incorrect. with dietary interventions, or i should saywith body fat loss or muscular gain, it's very easy to see the short term consequencesor outcomes.

with something like cardiovascular healthor disease it's quite a bit harder because you can look at the short term effects whichcould be quite divergent from the long term effects. and what's my opinion or what are my theorieson cardiovascular health? so the first i would say is that cardiovascularis a good word to use. aerobic is usually co-opted by people trying to sell you something. so like aerobics versus aerobic are very different. you actually get a fantastic aerobic if we'relooking at the pathways workout after resistance training when you're body's trying to clearlactate and so forth; it's actually a fantastic

[laughs] aerobic workout usually called "afterburn" so post-workout oxygen consumption things like that. as far as cardiovascular health goes, there'sno consensus. that's part of the problem. and my position, at the moment, is that itis important to look at the sub-fractions of, let's say, ldl or hdl. berkeley heartlabs, i believe, does a very comprehensive fractionated analysis. but as with any type of data gathering theproblem is, "okay. well that's fine, but now what do i do." and my suggestion to most people is if you'regetting your fat from good sources, meaning

if it's an animal product the animals areeating the feed they were intended to eat. or coconut milk, let's say; but not all coconutmilk is good for you and you have to look at your ingredient list. if you're consuming high quality fats as longas you're not spiking your insulin levels at the same time by consuming lots of carbohydrates,i think it has a minimal effect; minimal negative effect, if any, on cardiovascular, meaningarterial health or blood vessel health. that's my position at the moment. so i've been following this diet for the lastseven years. not to say that because as of an end of one it works for me, it'll workfor everybody.

but looking at the blood tests, again i'mnot a doctor, i don't play one on the internet, but having looked at a lot of blood testslongitudinally, i think as long as you separate the carbohydrates from the protein and fats,for the most part, then you're fine. that's been my experience thus far, but i'mnot a cardiologist. >>male #4: this is kind of a follow up tothat question which is: are you aware of the published research on successfully reversingheart disease, reversing diabetes, and slowing down the growth of prostate cancer? and i ask because the dietary recommendationsare precisely the opposite of what you have in your book which is the recommendation thatyou increase whole grains and starches; increase

fruit and vegetable consumption; and probablyyou both would agree on fats so. >>tim ferriss: so i would say, i appreciatethat. the first thing is you should be skepticalabout everything that i say. i don't want anyone to take my word for anything. and iwould say look at the data. so while we're talking about published research,i would also say that not all published research equal. and in many of the, i'm not gonna namenames 'cause there's no purpose to it, but in many of the multi-variable tests that showreversal of heart disease, they're also doing yoga, they're also doing therapy, they'realso doing exercise, and then they have a diet with grains. and they say, "well, toldya. it was the diet with grains."

and i think that's bad science. so they're not controlling their variablesufficiently in most of the tests. what i would say is if anyone's interestedin looking at this topic in depth, read what gary taubes has written; meticulously researched;good calories, bad calories or why we get fat: and what to do about it, which is hismost recent book. if you want to look at the role of carbohydrates in endocrine healthand also as it relates to disease states. if you have the patience and concentrationfor it, good calories, bad calories has probably 100 pages just on the role of carbohydratesin cardiovascular disease and diabetes. i have seen people, i know a mother in particularwho reversed type i diabetes in two of her

children. and she did it by eliminating carbohydrates.in every other attempt up to that point using what most people label as complex carbohydrates,it had precisely the opposite effect. and most recently, i know another woman; oneof her children is in ketosis or potentially ketoacidosis. i'm waiting to hear what thedoctor's verdict is. and complex carbs; [snaps finger] diabetic coma, like that. so i think that based on the data i've seenat least, the safest bet is removing any type of refined carbohydrates or carbohydratesthat have been introduced into industrial agriculture in the last 10,000 years. it's just my experience.

>>male #5: yeah, i think we agree on refinedcarbohydrates being bad. but good calories, bad calories has a lotof omission of key science. for example, it doesn't address the fact that the entire nationof china lives on primarily carbohydrates and they have a much lower rate of heart diseaseand diabetes than we have here. he just doesn't deal with that in his book. so if you omit key data? >>tim ferriss: i don't think, i would saythat we should invite gary and you can take him up on it. gary would be happy to debate. but what i would say is that gluten and riceare very different, number one.

number two, if you look at the disease statesas recorded in china and the data gathering is not very good in china. i'm very familiarwith the china study, the monograph, the original monograph not the book, which i think is largelypropaganda. i think that we'll see a lot of changes inchina if they're not occurring already. but, needless to say, i think it's an areaworth a lot of additional research, but just based on everything that i've seen, that i'vemeasured directly and watched, omitting carbohydrates is, and not all carbohydrates, but omittinggrains, starches; i have yet to see any negative impact from that. >>male #5: yeah, thanks for the response.

>>tim ferriss: yeah, my pleasure. thanks forthe question. >>female #4: so the event description hada bullet point that said something about 15 minute female orgasm? >>tim ferris: [laughs] >>female #4: [inaudible] >>tim ferriss: i'll give you your $50 billlater. thank you for bringing that up. i thought we might miss it. right. so, [laughs] 15 minute female orgasm.[sighs] where to begin with this? so this chapter, it's actually two chapters,were included at the request of female friends

and female readers. the book was originally gonna be titled, becomingsuperhuman and it was gonna focus on muscular gain and fat loss and that was it. and what happened was looking at limitersof muscular hypertrophy pretty quickly you have to look at testosterone. so i was looking at testosterone; did a numberof experiments; tripled my testosterone; that has a number of interesting positive sexualside effects. and so i was talking about this with a numberof my friends over dinner; two of them were female and they're like, "what is this, adude's club? [laughs] why aren't you gonna

write about anything that has to do with femalesexuality." okay. so i looked into it and i was amazed at howproblematic sex is for a very high percentage of women in terms of, how explicit can i gethere, pretty explicit? in terms of let's say, let's just say what most peoplewould consider the involuntary contractions that characterize vaginal orgasm through intercourse. >>female in audience: how's it? >>tim ferriss: everybody okay?

very problematic. it has a lot to do withthe distance, well i'm not gonna even get into it. but anyway. i guess i lost my composure there for a second.[laughs; clears throat] so let me give one, but where i'm going withthis is, sex is a very sensitive topic in the u.s. i was told by a number of morning shows inthe u.s., very popular morning shows that have had me on as a guest before and werevery happy, "we'd love to have you on, but

we can't because you have sex in the subtitle." and that, i think, has led to a lot of brokenrelationships. sex makes or breaks relationships; makes or breaks marriages. therefore, makesor breaks families. i think it's a very important topic. your choices, if you want to self-educate,are usually i'm gonna go to some fairly strange cult-like environment where it's like worshippingthe goddess noonie, which most people don't want to do. or i can deal with this very nebulous sexualadvice that's based on a book, that's based on a book, that's based on a book. there'sno testing.

so the 15 minute orgasm i set out to sacrificemyself for science. to identify what best practices, what techniquescould be used that would have the highest success rate. i'm not gonna go too far into this, but forthose interested, how can i do this? let's say this is a clock face. alright, sothis is a clock face. and that clock face represents the clitoris if you're lookingat it from between the legs. on, i would say, 95 plus percent of womenthe most sensitive part is gonna be between 1:00 and 1:30. okay? look on twitter if you don't think this works.[laughs]

it sounds like some hocus pocus nonsense andi'll just leave you with that so. very important topic and i think that formany people the sex and the sleep will have the greatest impact on quality of life. i'll answer follow up questions, but unpromptedi don't wanna go into all the [laughs] particulars. >>female in audience: [inaudible] >>tim ferriss: yep. oh, one more question? okay. >>female #5: so i'm trying to just look fromdiet so do you have any advice for people who are vegan versus [inaudible]

>>tim ferriss: no, i, okay. so the question was can you follow the slowcarb diet if you're a vegan. the answer is yes. so there are two appendices in the book calledthe meatless machine i and ii and i do profile mark who, mark bozeman, who is a vegan andfollowed the slow carb diet. and you can move that direction; you willmost likely have to supplement with different types of protein. it's challenging and the reason it's challengingis that you will very often end up including things that i would prefer be avoided likesoy.

i think soy, soy milk, isolated soy is extremelyrisky as an endocrine disrupter. and if you look at reproductive specialists at differentcenters, there's one in edinborough who's name escapes me at the moment, but he said,"until i see data that refutes everything i have seen i will not feed soy to my children,specifically because of the effect on reproductive health." it can be done; it can be done. and i do havereaders who have done it successfully. what i would say is take another look at themeatless machine chapters in the appendices and then also go to the blog post that catalyzedthis entire thing, which is just how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise [chuckles]on my blog.

there are 4,000 comments or 5,000 commentsso just search "vegan" and i think you'll probably find a number of suggestions thereas well. >>female #5: thank you. >>tim ferriss: you're welcome. it's made a lot easier if you do make theallowance to have let's say whey protein or cottage cheese or eggs, let's just say, withyokes. it makes a big different; it's a lot easier. but if you if you're not willing to do that,which is a personal decision, i would just say to look at the comments as well.

okay, i think that's it guys. i'll hang outfor a little bit longer if people have questions. thank you for coming.