FoundMyFitness - #007 Tim Ferriss on Biomarkers, Ketosis, Microbiome, and Lyme Disease

Episode Date: July 20, 2015

Tim Ferriss Tim Ferris is a notorious self-experimenter, three-time New York Times bestselling author, angel investor, startup advisor, and much, much, much more.  In this episode, we discuss...  (00:00) Introduction (02:29) Oxytocin, vasopressin, and the neuroendocrine basis of pair bond formation (05:54) Tim's self-experimentation with the ketogenic diet and the biomarkers he measures daily (14:55) Can a ketogenic diet reduce Alzheimer's disease risk? (22:14) Inflammation accelerates aging, but is necessary for tissue repair (26:17) Vitamin C reduces inflammation, but may also inhibit muscle growth (35:22) Tim describes his experience with Lyme disease (45:43) Rhonda talks about her experience with MRSA and antibiotics (48:55) Tim's personal experience with ketosis (55:06)The 4-Hour Body talks about improving your body's performance while doing less (01:02:56) How to reduce social stress by exposing yourself to similar stresses (01:09:52) Meditation can help you stay focused and improve production (01:12:40) Tim Ferriss' future plans in Hollywood If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here. Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information  straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor

Hello guys and gals. Today's podcast is a special one because it is a full hour and 13 minutes of world-renowned self-experimenter Tim Ferriss. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it's also loaded with a multitude of great information, including topics like what Tim's leading blood biomarkers are that he focuses on optimizing. The importance of tracking glucose along with ketones to make sure you do not confuse non-nutritional ketosis with the real deal. Tim's personal experience beating Lyme disease and his insights on recovery, the origin and cause of Lyme hysteria, and how some of the symptoms of what is described as chronic Lyme disease may actually be caused by a disrupted gut microbiome from uninterrupted long-term use of antibiotics. What the minimum effective dose is when it comes to working out

and a little bit about Tim's workout routine. And much, much, much. much more. For your convenience, you can also download a full transcript of the podcast at FoundMyFitness.com forward slash Tim Transcript. If you absolutely love this podcast, please also consider letting me know. One of the best ways you can do that is to leave a review on iTunes, possibly with comments or even suggestions for my next guest. All of that said, today's sponsor is, well, people like you. You can check out my ongoing crowdfunding campaign at Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com, forward slash found-my fitness, where I continue to inch, thanks to many of you, inexorably to my next major milestone.

For the insignificant price of a latte, you too can feel the satisfaction of having helped me make Found My Fitness happen. Without further ado, the podcast. Dr. Montepatrick here. Today I'm very excited to be sitting here with my friend Tim Ferriss, a notorious self-experiment, a three-time New York Times best-selling author, an angel investor, startup advisor, and much, much, much, much more. So before we start, I really just want to say that I really enjoyed the last time you and I had a conversation.

It was about a year ago, I think, on your podcast. Micronutrients, aging, epigenetics, stem cells, all that stuff, super fun. So I'm very excited to have the opportunity to interview you on my podcast. Yeah, I'm intimidated. But I'm looking forward to it. Great. So we were, I kind of want to start off with the self-expermentation. Sure.

And we were actually just having this interesting conversation that we stopped so that we could continue it, you know, live. And that has to do with a little bit about the night you just had and what you're doing to recover from that night. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. Sure. So I had, like, a lot of people on Saturday nights, a little more booze than intended or anticipated. And we were talking about.

mineral excretion. Right. And I was talking about some of my pregame tactics, whether that's consuming carbohydrates, I tend to drink the most booze on cheat day for that reason, because I'm retaining whatever it is. I guess four grams of water per gram of carbohydrate, something like that. So it helps to counteract the effects of inhibition of vasopressin. That's how we got on to vasopressin.

Because vasopressin is an antidioretic hormone, which means it prevents you from peeing or minimizes peeing. So it's used in children who bedwet past a certain age. I think they use Desma Pressin. And I became jumping around a little bit, but I became interested in Vassopressin first because when I was in college, I was reading up on the smart drug literature at the time.

And it was purported to be very effective for boosting short-term memory. So you would take hits in each nostril, study whenever you have to study, and then quickly scurry off to the test before it sort of evaporated. Right. And the, but then you have,

some very interesting comments on Vaspreson. So I did use Vaspreson for a period of time, found the headaches and side effects ultimately just not worth it for me the way that I was using it. But it is something that has kind of stuck with me when someone says, oh my God, I was at the bar and then all of a sudden I time travel and I was at Denny's. I'm like, aha, might have something to do with vasopressin because you just gave yourself sort of a reverse smart drug. Very interesting. Yeah. I'm familiar with vasopressin because it's also a, it's a hormone. It's a social hormone. And it's particularly important.

It's kind of like the counter to, or not the counter, it's the male version of oxytocin. So in females, oxytocin is this, you know, notorious love hormone. I mean, when you produce oxytocin, you feel good, you bond, social bonding, things like that. Well, in males, vasopressin serves a similar role to oxytocin in females, and vasopressins associated with pair bonding and specifically with monogamy. So they've done studies in prairie voles where they actually genetically engineer them to not be able to respond to vasopressin. So they like engineer their vasopressin receptor to be non-responsive.

And these prairie voles which are monogamous become polygamous, like that. So it's very interesting. Also they've done human studies where they've looked at gene polymorphisms, which are just variations in the sequence of DNA of a gene that changes the function, we all have various polymorphisms. You're familiar with that. And so there's a particular variety of this polymorphism in the vasopressin receptors that males have that make them less responsive to vasopressin. And these males are more likely to be either divorced or never been married.

Whereas males that don't have this polymorphism are more likely to be happily married. Suppressed, surprise. So, yeah, so alcohol may actually, you know, there may be actually a mechanism through basopressin that leads to polygamy or being more promiscuous, I guess. So on the self-experimentation topic, I, you know, you've been self-experimenting for many years. And I was wondering if throughout your years of experimentation, if there's three or four biomarkers, so you typically measure, you know, blood biomarkers routinely.

If there's three or four really important ones that you think are important and that you routinely measure, and if they have anything to do with performance or mental acuity or perhaps aging. Yeah, there are a few that, well, there are many blood markers that I look at. And I had a fun conversation with Pita Tia on the podcast not too long ago about this. but my markers, the markers that I'm following right now are, number one, my millimolar concentration of ketones. So I have a device just on the counter over there, precision extra device by Abbott Labs,

that allows me to use both glucose strips and ketone strips. So I can look at my, say, fasting or waking fasting, glucose level, and then ketone level, and monitor that after certain types of, say, exercise where the ketone level can drop and so on and so forth. Because I've identified for myself, part of the reason I have fat in my tea, is I operate best mentally at around 1.1 to 1.7 millimolars. And I only figured that out by tracking. Very interesting. And some people, for instance, perform much better the higher the concentration. The higher the concentration of ketones, the better they feel.

I don't fall in that camp. And I was having a conversation with a scientist a few days ago about this. And he said, well, really, and this is not a new observation, but your blood level of ketones can be gamed or increased in many different ways. So you could just eat a meal that's full of medium chain triglycerides or eat a meal that's just full of fat in general. And you could spike your ketone level. And that's not necessarily indicative of sort of an endogenous production of ketones.

or you could be fasting, for instance, in like deep fasting after five or six or seven days. In my particular case, I think you also want to look at, and this is true, a lot of very smart people like Pete, you know, Tia, Dom Degasino, very, very smart guy, Dominic, would say likely that it also could be people, some people utilize ketones better than others. Yes. So just because you have a high level of ketones doesn't mean you're necessarily doing a lot with it. And in my case, a high level of ketones, my hypothesis is, well, maybe past a certain point my kind of machinery gets very inefficient or gets damaged. So between 1.1 and 1.7, my brain functions at a level reminiscent of pre-lime. And that's a whole separate thing.

Yes. I got kind of knocked out of normal cognitive function for nine months due to severe Lyme disease. But when I am focused on at least a nominal amount of ketones, I feel like my ultimate. itself. And so that's one. Other things that I focus on or look at, there are some esoteric things that I play with every once in a while, but if you're looking at the routine levels, I'm going to look at, obviously the sex hormones, but look at free testosterone. I'll look at free testosterone as relative to sex hormone binding globulin, for instance. Not convinced that higher sex hormone binding globulin is always a bad thing. That's a whole separate because my testosterone

in experimenting with high fat, total testosterone has gone from like 650 to 950 in the span of like two months. It's a non-trivial increase. Now, sex hormone, you know, sex hormone binding globulin has also increased over that period of time, but I've gained so much mat, like lean muscle tissue, that I have other ideas. And I was talking to Stephen, I think Stephen Finney about this, scientist, very well known for looking at the ketogenic diet. And what he was saying is independent of insulin levels, insulin being very anabolic.

Sorry, we're getting into the weeds here with that, is it's possible that my lean mass gains can be accounted for by decreased degradation of branched chain amino acids. And I was like, that's really interesting because then that maybe that explains why fasting plus chemotherapy is very, very effective. For instance, people can recover faster from chemotherapy. So you have the ketones, you have the sex hormones. Hymoglobin A1C, sort of like you're running three-month average of glucose levels, just as an insurance policy to ensure that I'm not skewing towards prediabetic in any way. And then a laundry list of like five or six different pages. So your biomarkers tend to be a lot of performance-related biomarkers.

Yeah. And I've done the genetic stuff. So I know, let's just say that I'm a poor methylator. Right. The motherfucker gene, as they said. Yes, M-T-H-F-R. Yeah. Is not, yeah, I'm not in an ideal spot.

So in taking, say, L-Methylate could be a good option for me, and I've experimented with that in the past, looking at how that could lower, say, homocysteine or other things like that. Have you noticed any differences after supplementing with 5 methylfolate, L-5 methylfolate, Methyl-Folate, methyl-Methylate? Yeah, I haven't noticed many changes in blood markers. and I haven't noticed subjective changes in, say, performance or clarity or anything like that. Yeah.

Doesn't mean it isn't doing things. Yeah, I have an anecdotal story. Actually, my, so I'm very into looking at different gene polymorphisms. 23 me is a great service that can do that. So, you know, my friends, family, et cetera, I'm telling everyone to do it. And so my mother-in-law got genotyped and we found out that she is homeless, I guess, for MTHFR, meaning that she, her MTHFR enzyme only produces about 10. is working at about 10 to 20% efficiency. And she's always had really high blood pressure, like to the point where, you know, doctors

were like wanting to get her on medicine for it. She's always refused. Nothing she did. She's done various diets, lots of, you know, exercise, lots of things she's tried. Nothing has gotten her into a normal range. Until we identified she had MTHFR, got her supplementing with five methylfolate and Ethical Balman, but, you know, she's been taking pretty high doses of it. But now her blood pressure for the first time isn't like a normal.

range. So I was kind of curious if you had ever... I have, I've had, I very consistently what you would consider excellent blood pressure, so I haven't looked closely at that. The question that comes to mind for me always, because I've noticed, so I'm a big fan of Richard Feynman. And, so Richard Feynman, and I'm not saying this is the case with your, you said, mother-in-law? Yes. But the importance of not tricking yourself because you're the easiest person to a fool, basically is what he would say. And I know that it's what I have initially thought were sort of causal relationships with high correlative value. Sometimes, like, for instance, I've talked to people who've gone on fill in the blank diet.

And they're like, oh my God, like, this thing changed. And I'm so glad I found this diet. And I'm like, so you haven't changed anything else. And they're like, oh, no, no, no. Like I started running in the morning. Right. I started doing this. I started doing that.

I'm like, oh, yeah. Because like, one, it's so hard. That's where the observational data gets so challenging. When you look at, say, anything, whether it's the China study or whatever. I mean, we don't need to get into that, that one. But that's a sensitive one. But any sort of observational, self-reporting and so on, it's so, it's, the data is almost always so flawed because it's huge.

Humans almost never changed just one thing. Yeah, I think that's why it's so important when you're looking, when you're doing these, when you're looking at epistodies that are associative, that are not, you know, a clinical randomized clinical trial sort of, you know, thing that coupling that data with, you know, mechanistic data done in animal models or lower organisms. I think coupling the two is very important because you go, oh, okay, we've noticed this observational data and here we've done X, Y, or Z to manipulate it in a worm or in a fly. So you have a plausible mechanism.

Right. So you have like a mechanism and that's where I think looking comprehensively at the whole like scientific, yeah, is very important. Totally. But it's interesting. You mentioned, you know, the ketone thing, I just want to briefly give you my story. So I've never been very response, like I've never noticed really any extreme like mental benefits or mental acuity changing when I, you know, consume large amounts of MCT, you know,

on empty stomach, on whatever. And I found out that I have one APOE4 allele. And of course, at that point, I became terrified of Alzheimer's and because it increases the risk for Alzheimer's by twofold. And I'm writing an academic paper on this right now and getting into all the mechanisms and diet lifestyle and things like that. But what I found very interesting is that the studies that have been done where they give, for example, people that have dementia or are in the early stage of Alzheimer's, they give

them beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is a lot of the studies. just a ketone body. And there's improvements. I have some synthetic jet fuel in the freezer if you want to try it. We'll probably both vomit on my couch, so let's do it. Yeah, I've heard it's disgusting. But so people that were APOE3, APOE3 responded very well. So they had improvements in learning in memory.

With supplemental MCT. With beta hydroxybutifate. Yeah, Bedi, they gave them beta hydroxybidrate. But what was interesting to me and also very discouraging was that people with the APOE4 allel did not have those benefits. And, you know, that's, if you look at Alzheimer's, people with Alzheimer's, between 65 and 80% of all people who have Alzheimer's have one allele of April 4. Oh.

So. Well, I bet I have that on both sides of my family then, because I have Alzheimer's on both sides. Yeah, I wanted to ask you. So you mentioned that you have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's on both sides of your family. So I'm curious, has this changed your diet, your lifestyle? Oh, definitely, definitely. How so? Well, the Parkinson's maybe a bit less so, but on the Alzheimer's side, I have just looked at it like some scientists look at it, which is as brain diabetes.

And I think that's a helpful, simplified way of looking at it. And you, I'm sure, know much more about this than I do. But, I mean, there's always kind of the prevalent theory of why, say, Alzheimer's has the effects it has. on cognitive performance or in this case degradation or otherwise. And for a long time it's like, it's the plaques, it's amyloid plaques, it's this, it's that. And it turns out to be more complicated than that, right? Because you have people who have massive tangles of plaques, but they seem asymptomatic. You know, they're 100x years old and they still play the piano every day or whatever it might be.

A great movie called The Lady in Number Six as a side note, 109-year-old piano player doesn't get into Alzheimer's. But where it has led me is just to be more cognizant of insulin. Things that are related to and or affect insulin. To look at not only ketosis, but fasting, to look at cyclical ketogenic diets and so on. Targeted ketogenic diets where your timing, carbohydrate intake, near workouts, which a lot of endurance athletes do. so they could consume like 3, 400 grams of carbohydrates in a day and still stay in ketosis.

Pretty wild stuff. But what I start wondering, for instance, in the case, because if I take supplemental MCDs or even beta-hydroctubuterate, and there are tasty ways to do it now, I think it's Patrick Arnold and prototype nutrition. They have, well, people say keto cana, Ketocana, C-A-N-A, but it tastes like Gatorade, basically, and it's beta-hydroxybuterate. If I take that when I'm not, say, above 0.6 millimolars ketones, I don't feel much. But when my body has shifted into that fat-adapted state, I do feel it.

And offhand, I don't know what my status is. Yeah. But from the genetic standpoint. But what's been very interesting, say, for me, when I'm thinking about it from the standpoint of brain diabetes, right? is it's not just enough. And this comes back to kind of how people, if they focus solely on the millimolar concentration,

they can fool themselves because you could be in non-nutritional ketosis, but consuming a lot of supplemental beta-hydroxybutyrate and be like, oh, I'm killing it. I'm at, you know, two millimolar's concentration. Whereas I'm also taking my glucometer readings precisely because I don't want to be, say, running at 120 glucose and dismiss that. If I wake up and I'm fasting 120 glucose each morning,

like something funny is going on that I need to pay attention to. Whereas if I drop into nutritional ketosis, and let's just say I'm at like 74, 80, even lower, and I have high millimolar. My response to, at that point, supplemental beta-hydroxybutyrate is totally different. Anyway, I'm still kind of a novice in this space, but it's interesting stuff.

So the cyclical ketogenic diet is something that you do now practice, and that's, you think, as a concept, of thinking of Alzheimer's like type 2 diabetes. I mean, it's really interesting the connection between, you know, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. I don't know if you measure any blood biomarkers or if you're aware of this, but there is a biomarker that is present in blood that's called insulin-like receptor 1 and it's IRS 1. And it's recently, very, very recently been shown to be a diagnostic for Alzheimer's 10

years in advance with 100% accuracy. So I don't know, I don't think it's like something that, well, you can modulate. So 10 years in advance is a long time to change. You're like, just by the way. Yeah, by the way. You are fucked. But it's, good luck with that. It's inactive.

Yeah. So what's really, it's interesting to me. Yes. Yes. Yes. Is that I typically think of the connection between type two diabetes and insulin resistance and Alzheimer's as the connection between inflammation. and neurogenital disease because inflammation, we've now recently found that the lymphatic system

connects directly to the brain. The lymphatic system is what carries blood cells, cytokines, inflammatory molecules, and inflammation is a major, major downstream consequence of being insulin resistance. And inflammation then causes, you know, reactive auction species, things that, you know, damage all sorts of cells. But the inflammatory molecules get into the brain and they do start causing all sorts of immune type of reactions and aggregation of more amylade beta plaques and taut tangles and all that stuff starts to happen more quickly. So I think that the inflammation, because if you look at people, type 2 diabetics, being type 2 diabetic, you have a two-fold or so roughly increased chance of getting Alzheimer's.

But if you look at people with Alzheimer's, a small percentage of them actually have type 2 diabetes. So I think that there's, it's not just the insulin resistance. I think there's the consequence. the byproducts, the indirect things that are associated with type 2 diabetes that needs Alzheimer's. And it's, it's rarely if never, just one thing, right? And I think humans strive for simplicity and in a sort of a sea of noise, especially if you're not a trained scientist. It's just like, God, thank goodness, somebody gave me a definitive answer. Like now I know A causes B. It's like, yeah. Okay, maybe as a temporary kind of a, a, a temporary, kind of a, a,

temporary holding bay, like we can use that answer, but it's probably not right. But on the inflammation side, I've been thinking a lot about this recently because, number one, and this is not that uncommon, but I've noticed, for instance, if I'm consuming carbohydrates, cycling carbohydrates, and I'll do, say, cheat day like yesterday, we're eating like, you know, an entire pound cake by myself, you know, this kind of thing. And then I get, even several hours later, get acupuncture. And that's a whole separate conversation. But I will bleed more.

So, like, I will have, I will bleed much more than if I am, say, in a catotic state. But then I have all these questions that come to mind. For instance, I mean, I'm consuming, like, turmeric with, like, ground pepper or, like, I guess I always read it. I never say it, piperine. Yeah, pipering. There we go. So to increase the bioavailability and absorption. Right.

So that's pretty old school, right? You've got, like, turmeric, curcumin pills or what. whatever. I mean, there are million ways to go about it. But I've, I've tried to whenever possible. So you have like L. Methylpholio, let's say. Very interesting to me. But unless I'm mistaken, like pretty new kit on the block. It's relatively, uh, relatively new addition to the kind of supplement arsenal. Whereas like, turmeric tea, it's like, okay, Ayurvedic medicine. They've been doing that for thousands of years. Like, I'm like, I feel, I feel pretty comfortable, like bringing in turmeric with like some ginger and black pepper to counteract unnecessary inflammation.

Yes. At the same time, I'm like, but inflammation, this is where maybe you can help me gain some clarity. I'm like, but inflammation also serves some really important purposes, right? So if, for instance, you have people go do a weight training workout and there's a fair amount of empirical data, I don't know if there's research data to support this, where athletes are like, oh my God, I don't want to be so sore after my workout, I'll take NSAIDs, right? and I'll take abil ibuprofen, whatever, to facilitate recovery.

In fact, then they have less hypertrophy and they have less muscle growth as a result. So it's like, what is the inflammation that we want to not interfere with versus the inflammation that we should try to prevent? Yes. I think that it's something I've been thinking about in a similar way with inflammation and also antioxidants. Because I think that the type that you want to interfere with is the chronic inflammation, the kind that's coming. from your gut that's leaking endotoxin, which is released from like dead bacteria when they get, you know, and it causes all sorts of damage because it binds to cholesterol. And anyways, I can get into this whole conversation, but it's the bad stuff. And, you know, the inflammation

that's causing that chronic reactive auction species, which damages DNA, proteins, lipids, in your cells, which gets into the brain and stops serotonin from being released, so it causes depression, things like that. So... Sounds like a bad cycle? Yes. Very vicious cycle. cycle too because then you start to activate more inflammatory molecules. I think the good type of inflammation, the good type of damage, the good type of stress is when you exercise.

It is when you're doing that type of exercise or heat stress or cold stress or that type of transient stress on the body that induces all these, you know, the expression of genes that deal with stress. So you're increasing the expression of all these good genes that deal with inflammation express. And having that inflammation, having that stress is critical to do that. I mean, that's how chimeric works in procurement. One of the ways it works is it's actually slightly toxic to us.

And because it's slightly toxic to us, our body goes, oh, wait a minute, I need to increase the expression of all these genes so that they make more of the gene to do all this good stuff, to fight inflammation, to fight, you know, reactive oxygen species, all that bad stuff. So I think it's sort of like a difference. It's like what Dredd Pirate Roberts did in the Princess Bride with Iocaine powder. Yes. A little bit every day. Yes.

But I mean, it's like the chronic versus acute, good type of stress, right? So I think that's something, you know, that's what I think about. And I also have been thinking about it in regards to like supplemental antioxidants. Because, you know, I used to take a lot of vitamin C, supplemental vitamin C. And then, and you know, there's studies that we're showing, you know, taking two grams of supplemental vitamin C a day with lower two. We have protein and, you know, there's all these reasons why I was taking it. But then studies started to come out where, you know, if you take the supplemental vitamin C

like after a workout, you know, the half life is like an hour and a half in plasma or something. Yeah. But then all the, you know, when you work out, you create oxidative stress and that you want that. That's what induces mitochondrial biogenesis. Like that stress is what signals to mitochondria to make more mitochondria. But if you dampen that by like sequestering that stress with an antioxidant, that's, you know, You're not going to get those benefits. So now, and there's studies now showing this, both in humans and also in mouse animals.

So now I'm kind of a little more cautious about supplemental antioxidants specifically because they can sequester some of that good stress that you want from things like exercise or intermittent fasting, for example, things like that. So I think it's... Interesting. So you think antioxidants could negate some of the benefits of say intermittent fasting? Yes, they can, and it's been shown that that can. That's good to know.

It's supplemental antioxidants because when you're intermittent fasting, there are a lot of things are going on, but it is a type of stress. And when you're stressing yourselves, you know, things are, you're creating reactive oxygen species. That's what happens. And part of that, there's a hormetic effect. So when you create these reactive oxygen species, and this is the good type of stress, like Reactive Oxygen species because you're chronically inflamed because you're eating processed

carbohydrates and you're poking holes in your gut and leading to inflammation and blah, blah, blah, that's not the good type. You don't want that constant reactive oxygen species being made every day. But when you're intermittent fasting or when you're exercising, that burst of it, which is much more powerful, so it's not like a little bit each day. It's like, boom, here I am. It's enough to signal to your genes, to other cells. Make more of this gene that deals with inflammation.

Make more of this gene that deals with stress. Make more mitochondria. It's just enough to do that. You want. That's some of the benefits of intermittent fasting and exercise or rely on that. You know, I was just as another random side note, and this could be the alcohol that I was fed by Polish people yesterday talking. But so you said reactive oxygen species ROS sounds a lot like ROUS's, rodents of unusual size,

also from Princess Bride. I'm wondering how much biochemistry you could teach using metaphors from the Princess Bride, but that's a whole separate conversation, probably not worth having. The one thing that I've been pondering, and I'm not an expert in this area, but vitamin C, if you look at protocols being used at, say, the University of Kansas for antiviral purposes or anti-cancer purposes, the vitamin C is thought of when it's delivered intravenously as a pro-oxidant. So then I'm wondering, huh, so could you use vitamin C in sort of a proximate? capacity or I guess it's being converted into like hydrogen peroxide, to not, not mitigate,

but exaggerate the benefits you want of say intermittent fasting. Like is there... That's interesting. So like, is there a place if you were doing not even necessarily intermittent? Let's say you did a seven-day water fast. Could you do like 50 to 75 grams of vitamin C each day? Would that end up making nullifying a lot of the effects or dramatically enhancing the effects? So here's my thoughts.

Purely spectating here. I think because, so, you know, intravenous vitamin C, you get much higher, you know, up to million molar concentrations of vitamin C in your blood. And as you mentioned, so vitamin C is constantly going through this cycle of being reduced and oxidized, reduced and oxidized. When it's oxidized, it can act as a pro-oxidant. And that's part of the way it kills cancer cells. Because cancer cells are, they're ready to die, but they've found a way around death by

increasing all these genes that stop them from dying. But all they need is a little push. And that little push is, you know, like reactive oxygen species or, you know, a pro-oxident like vitamin C. And it just pops them, pushes them to death. So intermittent fasting, for example, one of the benefits of intermittent fasting is that your autophagy occurs. Your body is clearing out all these damaged cells.

So that would, in theory, if you've got damaged cells, they're ready. So the problem is with damaged cells, if they don't die, they become senescent. Yeah. And when they're senescent, they sit around and they secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines. So then they damage nearby cells because the inflammatory cytokines, there's like this vicious cycle, and it's why you need to get them out. The cellular Zamboni to clear that stuff. That's a funny analogy. I used to be an ice skater.

I used to be an ice skater. Oh, really? Yeah, like for many, many years, I was competitive ice skater, both freestyle and drill steam. Anyways, so you want to clear them out. And I would think that if you have this senescent cell, that would help, you know, get rid of it. So very, very interesting observation. I've been thinking about it also because cancer generally cancer, I mean, by the time you're 40, let's say, we all have sort of pre-cancerous little cells. But the question is, you know, do they grow, do they then sort of metastasize or become a problem or do they just remain these little mutations that don't cause any particular?

harm, among other things, obviously. And for me, I've become also interested. I'd love to get your opinion on metformin. Because there are people who'd say, well, if you want to try to dodge that cancer bullet, we know that cancer cells are, they love kind of sustaining themselves anaerobically. Or let me rephrase that with glucose. Yes.

They love glucose. So if we can really, if we can really, if we can. dramatically lower, say, your, whether it's storage of glycogen, plasma, glucose, whatever might be, then in theory, we should be able to lower the risk of cancer and limit cancer cell growth. What are your thoughts on that form? Why are you taking it or not taking it? I'm not taking it. And the reason I'm not taking it, I think, you know, it has been shown, Like you said, it can possibly prophylactically prevent cancer so far. And I think the studies that have shown that have been pretty short term.

My concern with metformin is the feedback mechanisms that happen when you're taking this drug. How is that going to affect other cells and how they respond to glucose and things like that over the long term, like 15 years down the line? I think that limiting your sugar intake is probably, if you haven't damaged yourself so much by eating a bunch of crap, a bunch of processed sugars and carbohydrates and things like that, then, you know, I think limiting your sugar intake is probably good, good enough. And there's to a certain component, there's a certain component of cancer that's, you know, there's

there is a genetic component that, that what I know, what I know. mean by that is not that you're born with it, but that, you know, so downstream of, you know, a cell that's glycolytic that's only using glucose to make ATP through this glycolysis pathway is inflammation again. I come back to it because it's just downstream of everything. And inflammation damages DNA and eventually you get it in the right gene that's saying, oh, this gene usually protects whenever there's any damage, it kills a cell. It's called a tumor suppressor gene.

You get it in that tumor suppressor gene, you're screwed. Now you're, anytime you get damage, that pathway isn't like activated to go, whoa, wait a minute, this is not good. I'm going to die. And it just keeps living. If you look at, like, for example, our lymphocytes, our lymphocytes are glycolytic and they're not cancer. Yeah, yeah. So it's not as simple as, you know, a glycolytic cell is going to give you cancer. No, no.

But definitely, you know, starving. I think before you get to the point where you're starving a cancer cell, you can kill the damaged cell. before it becomes to that point where it's shifted its metabolism. So cells- What do the lymphocytes do in like a catotic state? Do they like derive- I don't know. Do they derive glucose from lactate or something?

Yes, they do get it from lactate. Lactate is something that they do use. Yeah. And that's, it's interesting because lactate also is much like ketone bodies, energetic, thermodynamically favorable. So it takes less energy to make energy. Yeah, yeah. you're consuming less oxygen because you don't need as many ATP molecules to make ATP.

But back on the ketone, since we're back on the ketone, I do want to get to the Lyme disease because it's a topic that I avoid. I've never, actually, I've never talked about it. It's one I avoid too. Yeah. So I always have this like knee-jerk reaction because I'm like, the signal to noise ratio is so small and I feel like there's just a lot of confusion. So much nonsense.

But I'd be really interested because you're not, you're a very analytical person. So what your experience with, well, obviously it's a real disease. People suffer from it. You can observe spirokates under a microscope. So it's definitely real. There's just a lot of craziness that seems to be associated with it. But maybe you can talk a little bit about, because you mentioned going on the ketogenic diet to treat your Lyme disease, can you talk a little bit about what you found in terms of. of like your experience with Lyme disease?

Yeah. How you got to treating it with ketogenesis and... Yeah, yeah, I can talk about it. And the, all right, so we're gonna begin with this. First of all, I'd just like to agree with you and sort of emphasize for everybody that the amount of nonsense and charlatanism out there surrounding Lyme is just beyond belief. I mean, it's just, there are so many fraudulent companies. and practitioners who are just printing money by either misdiagnosing people with lime,

or treating lime in the quacket, most, the quackiest of quackery. Why, why? Like, why did they? Here's, so here's my thinking, is that, so I contracted Lyme on eastern Long Island, which if you look at the CDC map, right, the Center for Disease Control, heat map for Lyme disease, like that is ground zero. Like, that's where the bomb went off. And Lyme is named after Lyme, Connecticut. So it's really has historically focused on that sort of northeastern area,

Pennsylvania, also upstate New York, Cousin Valley. And I think Lyme has become this popular topic of conversation for a few reasons. Number one, it's poorly understood on a lot of levels.

So there's, there are ample opportunities for non-scientists and quacks to sort of invent stories around it. That makes sense. Number one. So there's a, number two,

it's scary, it involves a bug biting you and you catch this disease, so the media loves it. The media loves it, the media writes about it. Then the media sometimes correctly, often incorrectly, lists the symptoms of Lyme disease. Joint pain, depression, fatigue. It's like, well, that's one out of every two people in the United States. At some point, every year.

So then people go, oh my God, I've had a lot. I've had my elbow. I got an email from a friend of mine. He said, you know, my shoulders have been bothering me for a couple of weeks. And two of my friends said it might be Lyme. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's not. I would bet $1,000 to not license. And given where you live, given the likelihood of having contracted it,

it's just so unlikely for most people. Now, all of that having been said, Lyme is a real thing. Like you said, you can observe these spirochet's under microscope. I think another reason it's popular to talk about is people love saying the word spirokee. I'm not kidding. They love saying spirokee because they imagine this like screwdriver, like this, this, this, this, this, this horribly, you know, evil, like, molyficent, like spiral bug that, like, digs into your body. And, like, the antibiotics come in and they're like, oh, no, we're going to hide from the antibiotics.

And it's like, no, it's not that sentient. Like, it's not. My husband's grandmother says spirokates probably like at least every conversation I have with her. People love saying spirokates. Yeah, so you get it. Yes. So for all these reasons, it's popular to talk about. I think primarily because the symptoms overlap with a million other conditions.

What I came to realize for myself is like, yes, it's a real thing. It's almost certain after Western Blot tests, a Lisa test, and looking at all of the diagnostics, which are really primitive, it's very likely that I already had Lyme disease at some point because I've been bitten my ticks hundreds of times I mean almost everyone in my immediate family has had Lyme disease and on Long Island's just kind of like suck it up like takes some antibiotics you're fine like doxycycline move on with life it's not this big it's not viewed as like a huge crisis by everyone who gets it on Eastern Long Island because it's so common

so I shrugged it off I did not get when I was I took three or four deer ticks that were embedded off of me in the span of two or three weeks and you know historically hadn't been a big deal. So I was like, well, that sucks. Well, you know, pick it off, make sure the head's not in there, move on. And I did not develop what's thought of as the kind of trademark, the trademark bull's-eye rash. And so I ignored progressively worsening symptoms for eight weeks where, like, my joints started getting very sore, swollen, had trouble like getting out of bed in the morning, started getting

slow cognitively and had trouble recalling friends' names and just really common words. And eventually got to a point where my system was like, I've seen you sick, I've seen you tired, I've seen you, like burning the candle at both ends, this is none of those things. Like you need to go see a doctor. Like, it sounds like dementia. Like not remembering friends names. Things are really funny. And if you look at the advanced symptoms of severe Lyme, I mean, it takes on dementia-like qualities

and even cerebral palsy in some cases, really scary stuff. So, long story short, then I get diagnosed with Lyme, and when I walk into the clinic in, you know, on Long Island, to give you an idea of how common it is, so this walk-in kind of emergency clinic,

open on the weekend, they had a poster up, which was like, hey, allow us to send your blood sample to such-and-such lab, upstate New York, to do research on Lyme, and there's a picture of a tick,

and we'll give you a free $50 Amazon gift card. And it's like, it's that comment. But then the question was, okay, I have Lyme, I'm taking Doxycline, I do that for eight weeks or 12 weeks, whatever it was, I still feel really shitty. Now what, right? And that's when... Longed out about it, of course.

Yeah. Well, some people do. Like, they take Ami for years, which I think is not the right thing to do. But the... What, this is where I am, and I'll try to sum it up because this can be a very long conversation. I think that there are very, very, very credible scientists and, you know, and, you know, And infectious disease specialists who do not believe that chronic Lyme exists. And their position would be there's no evidence that, you know, the, whatever it is, the Borrelis, blah, blah, blah, you know, Spirokeet cannot be eradicated with broad spectrum antibiotics, like a doxycycline or something else.

There's no evidence to suggest that they like burrow away and hide and come back, you know, hide in biofilm or whatever. Yeah, right. Right. then you have people and there aren't that many but a handful of people who are like well it is possible that this lime could behave something like herpes simplex where you have it's like a recurring infection essentially and it maybe it takes root in like the nervous system somehow and only comes back out in times of stress right there are people credible doctors who have been like, it's not completely beyond the realm of possibility that it has some recurring nature.

Okay. Still kind of descriptive, not prescriptive. Like, what do we do? Right. And then the theory that I kind of came up with, and I'm sure other people have come up with it, but I hadn't read it. I was like, well, let's look at the symptoms of Lyme. You know, like depression, fatigue. What are other potential causes after a long course of antibiotics?

Well, maybe you just completely scorched earth your microbiome, among other things. So one of my kind of theories is that what people perceive as chronic Lyme is, in fact, a collection of similar symptoms caused by the long-course antibiotic antibiotics. So that you should focus on prebiotics, probiotics. I have had a tremendous amount of difficulty, at least as measured in common, say, stool testing and so on, in repopulating my gut diversity. It's been extremely hard. And I have consumed just about, you know, every type of pre-probiotic imaginable.

And I've also tweaked my diet to try to be more favorable for certain types of gut repopulation. It's been really tough. I mean, I did like a three-month intense protocol. All sorts of stuff. So I'd love your thoughts. Yes. Did a follow-up stool sample analysis. And it was still just like, no, you're fucked.

And it's like, wow. So, depressing. You're talking about measuring your fecal bacteria. Yeah. Population using like U-biome. Yeah, U-biom or, you know, there are other like Rocky Mountain blah-bla-bla-d Doctors Data, whatever. Okay, so there's other ones.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean U-biom has a slightly different approach, but along those lines. So what's, I agree with you for one, it's very, first of all, I heard a podcast you did with Jessica Richmond from Ubiome and I think you had talked about this and that's how I became first aware that you talked, the link between when you mentioned, you mentioned having this hypothesis that you thought possibly some of these symptoms of Lyme disease were a consequence of just complete gut dysbiosis where you're taking several rounds

of antibiotics and you are obliterating your gut bacteria, a lot of the good ones are going away. And if you don't take a very strong probiotic immediately after antibiotics, it repopulates with all the bad stuff and it's really hard to get because they take up the occupy space and You're sitting in what's called the mucin in the gut. And they have to stick in the mucin to stay. Otherwise, anything you take will just flow through. It's kind of like the flow through. And so it's really hard to repopulate.

I've been doing a lot of self-expermentation with you. I've been using Ubiom to track my gut, bacteria, genotypes. But have you tried VSL number three? I haven't in my fridge right now. Do you? Yeah. Okay. So the sashits are what I recommend because-

Yeah, I have the capsules. The satchets have 450. billion, which is more than what the capsules have. 450 billion is like 10 times more than what most probiotics have. The thing about VSL number three, very interesting, so it's the probiotic that I take. I'm taking it because I've had some gut issues that started in graduate school because I got MRSA. Yeah, that's not fun.

Antibiotics were the prescription, and I had several courses of strong ones. And finally, it kept coming back. back and I was like fed up. How do you get Mercer? I don't really know how I got. I worked in a hospital. Yes. Staph aureopacus.

Oh, damn. Staff. Staff. Staff Aras. Yeah. So I worked in a children's hospital. Oh, that's a good place to do. They're everywhere in hospitals.

So who knows where I got it, right? I mean, but the point is I got it and it sucked. And so I finally after like, I don't know, three or four rounds of antibiotics, I would take it and then go away and then like a month later would come back. And then again and again, and I was like, I can't do this. So I read in the literature that, with the help of my husband, Dan, that garlic and grapefruit seed extract, just a concoction of things. I applied both topically.

I made a cream that I orally took. And within 24 hours, I got this thing to come to a head, puss out, and never came back. Interesting. So, but as a consequence of all the antibiotic use, I had serious gut issues, led to IVD. And I've been, you know, finally been able to recover. And I'm... I'm still... Imbiator bowel disorder.

Yeah, inflammatory bowel disorder. So, but it's been really, really a long journey in tweaking my diet. And doctors, of course, I went to see doctors and they were just like, here, take an SSRI. It helps with the pain. And I'm like, I'm not going to take an SSRI. Yeah, no thanks. Yeah, and I walked out of that doctor. I'm like, I'm not, you're insane.

You know, this was like a pelvic pain specialist doctor. So I've just had terrible experiences with doctors. And finally, I'm like, why aren't you asking me about my diet? fiber, you know, things like that. And so I tweaked my diet and did lots of things, but VSL number three. So you've seen, have you, with the Ubiom testing, have you seen an, I haven't done a follow-up test in a few months, but I have been taking VSL number three. So I'm optimistic. Yes. Hopefully. So, so I did a 30-day VSL number three course with the satchets, which are $450 billion and did a stool test, and I'm still waiting for those results.

I've had, my husband and I both, Dan, he's done a recent course of antibiotics and so I had him do his baseline and then after, right after, literally like the day he stopped taking antibiotics did a sample from the biome. I got that data back so I've been looking at that. So I'm going to talk about all the, it's really complicated and things in the literature are confusing and some people think some things and they're actually not true. So I've been looking at other people's eubium. Anyways, I'm going to be doing a series of talks on this.

I'm pretty excited. Yeah, I'll check them out. Now, add just a little bit of color on the ketosis. Yes. And the color there is I began looking at fasting as a tool for very many, many different reasons. And whether that be related to, say, longevity or kind of, the reason I was excited about as I was looking at it as basically a reboot for the immune system, even shorter fasts like three days.

So I began playing around with fasting. And then, of course, you fast long enough and you go into pretty deep ketosis. Right. And so it was almost an accidental discovery for me whereby I had not been in nutritional ketosis for 10 years, 15 years. I did a lot of experimentation with the cyclical ketogenic diet when I was in college and competing as an athlete. And then I said, stop.

Because it was kind of a pain in the ass. It's really boring. But then I did this fasting to reboot, help reboot my immune system for just keep it simple. So rebooting my immune system kicked over into deep ketosis and suddenly felt amazing. And my cognitive function just went through the roof compared to how I had felt up to that point after Lyme disease. And I was like, well, this is very interesting, isn't it? And I said, well, I don't have to fast to be a nutritional ketosis. So let me now play around with ketosis and see what I can discover just by tracking.

and logging a lot of data. And so I have my, it's kind of the pet hypothesis about the gut biome. And the antibiotics leading to symptoms that appear to be Lyme when in fact they're caused by something else. Another hypothesis, and the reason I'd like to dig into this, but I haven't come up with a great plausible explanation for this, is that Lyme or the antibiotics or both somehow interfere with carbohydrate metabolism. And that's just a starting point.

But I've had, because I've been public about the Lyme stuff, because I was incapacitated, I had to tell people, I was like, sorry, I'm not going to reply to your email. Like, I'm archiving 2,000 emails. Sorry. Why, Lyme? And then people started coming out of the woodwork to be like, hey, my wife has lime. She's been debilitated. What should we do? What have you learned?

And the only advice that I gave a few people is like, look, there's a lot of BS out there. So number one is like put your thinking cap on and be a good scientist to the extent possible. Number two is try a carb restricted diet. Try it. And ideally go into ketosis. All of the people who have gone into ketosis have had the same experience I have. Now it's a handful of people. Like so the N, the sample size is really small.

But these are people who are like cannot function, had to quit my job type serious cases. Go into ketosis. Wow, I feel like my old self. Have you measured any changes in? gut bacteria after going into ketosis or after doing the ketogenic diet? I haven't. That is also, yeah, a very interesting topic of discussion, right? So what effect does ketosis have on the gut biome or the repopulation, the rate or the

diversity of repopulation? Short answer is, I don't know. And part of it is, and this is where maybe I'm just not being a thorough scientist, but I felt it works so well for me. I'm kind of like doing it. I'm so excited to get back to building things and creating things and being my old self that I haven't taken the time to dissect it to the extent I probably should. But I'm not sure.

Your carbohydrate, I have this interesting sort of hypothesis that sort of is related. You know, people that have a severe imbalance of gut bacteria, let's say they have a lot less of the commensal bacteria, which is making good, you know, short-chain fatty acids and metabolites like lactate that are feeding other good bacteria, they're feeding your gut cells. So you have less of those and you have more of the bacteria that are, say, you know, methane or hydrogen sulfate producing, so you get bloated, more of the, you know, more pathogenic type of bacteria. So you have this overgrowth of bad bacteria.

But the thing is, is that let's say, you know, you eat something that's typically supposed to, you know, be good, like you eat something like that has a lot of fiber and or like vegetables. And so you're getting this, this fiber that's supposed to be, you know, you know, you know, you're not digested, but the bacteria can digest it and make it into this good stuff. Well, bad bacteria can digest that as well. So you're feeding this bacteria substrates to keep going and to make more of the bad bacteria. Now the interesting thing that I don't know is what, there are certain species of bacteria species.

There's phyla, class species. It's like so incredibly complicated, but certain species only metabolize fat. And I don't know which ones those are and if they're good or bad. It sounds like you've had a positive experience, but that would be really interesting to measure in general. But I'm glad you're feeling better. And, you know, the ketogenic diet is something that I'm interested in diving into and understanding more about. I'd like to talk to Peter. Peter's a good guy.

I listen to the podcast, I guess, I don't know, he's done more than one podcast, but I listen to one he's been on. Yeah, he did one with me, which was our conversation, and then he did a follow up with me, which was answering the 10. most popular questions. Okay, so I listened to the conversation. And I heard him and I was like, I want to talk to this guy. He's a scientist. He thinks like a scientist. I respect what he's saying.

And I think that him and I have a lot of interesting overlap that. He's also compulsively performance driven. So, and he's, I mean, he walks the talk, right? I mean, what I like about Peter is that he's not an academic who like takes his breaks at the hospital like going outside and smoking cigarettes. and it's like a punch, like, no, he's a competitive athlete. And I say that because I literally saw a bunch of people standing outside of a hospital yesterday in their scrubs, like smoking cigarettes on break.

I can't believe people smoke. Oh, my God. So, but Peter, on the other hand, is still a very competitive-driven athlete. So he just has a unique perspective on all this stuff. So on the athletic side, I have a question for you. In the four-hour body, you talk about the minimal effective dose. Yeah. And you mentioned high intensity interval training and how, you know, you can get long-lasting

effects with, you know, just more, less effort, basically. And at first I was like, hmm, and then you went on to talk about biomarkers, like, you know, studies that have shown high intensity and neural training, you know, increases mitochondrial biogenesis as much, if not more than, let's say, like, an hour and a half or something of cardio. Yeah. Then you went on to the brain, which I, that was my real concern. I was like, well, fine, if you're going to get the same amount of muscle mass or more from

doing this, that's great, but what about the brain benefits? Because I'm interested in saving off Alzheimer's, like I mentioned, I've got an increased risk. So exercise has been shown to people with APOE4-Ail are much, much less likely to get Alzheimer's if they exercise more intensely the better. So part of that is because you're BDNF, you're increasing neurotrophic factors that are growing new neurons because you need to repair a lot of that damage that's going on in the brain. So I'm interested in whether or not you are still engaging in, you know, high intensity interval

training and what, you know, if anything, you measure to know that the minimal effective dose is working. Yeah, that's a big question. So I am coming off of and rehabbing some very serious leg knee and ankle injuries that I inflicted on myself doing the crazy parkour episode for my TV show. So I'm not doing a lot of interval training that would be recognizable as say, let's just call it like Tabata training or some type of sprint training or something like that because it's too high impact. So I have concluded, yes, I'm still practicing the minimal or minimum effective dose in a lot of facets of exercise.

I think that most people do as much as possible, not as little as is needed. And you can You can land somewhere in the middle. But the higher the level of athletics, generally speaking, the more coaches work on holding their athletes back and not pushing their athletes. I think this is a very poorly understood idea. But at the highest level, pushing the athletes is not the problem. With some team sports is different, like even in the NFL. But if we're talking about, let's say, track and field, the coaches spend more time

holding their athletes back. And so in my case, if you do, for instance, for most people who go, you go to the NFL, but And for most people who go to the gym one hour a day, five days a week, if they're trying to change body composition, would get better results by doing two or three sets of swings per week, kettlebell swings. And I've just, I've seen this hundreds and thousands of times in readers already. For me, with, with mental performance and, you know, there's the book Spark that talks about a lot of this stuff and like, like you said, the brain drive neurotrophic factors and so on. from a subjective standpoint, I've seen as good results, if not better results, in terms of cognitive performance from resistance training of almost any type, when compared to, say, steady state or even higher intensity interval training

that could be thought of as cardio, say like sprinting or cycling or whatnot. And sort of mechanistically, I don't have some sort of, specific sort of before and after biomarkers that I'm tracking. But I am looking at, say, you know, pages per day output, quality of writing, which can get very subjective. But I think that as these studies hopefully get funded, we will see that resistance training, if you think about it, weight training is very effective cardio, right? Yes.

You need to push it. Yeah, either way. Like if you're using, and Doug McGuff has talked about this quite a bit, but if you're utilizing musculature to move your body through space, particularly with resistance, your heart has to work really hard generally to supply all the necessary nutrients and so on to get that job done. So I think that on top of that,

if you're looking to prevent age-related cognitive and physical decline, And one of the key correlates with all the bad stuff is sarcopenia, right? It's a loss of muscle mass. To which I would say targeted resistance training, much more effective bang for the buck in not only preventing lean muscle tissue loss, but increasing muscle gain, then say, most types of interval training, even if you're temporarily spiking certain hormones. So my, but that's also because I hate doing endurance work. Yeah.

So I really hate doing metabolic conditioning. I find it miserable. So I usually avoid it. But I do think that if you were to just do two, three sets, I really focus these days personally in my exercise regimen on sort of high intensity, very brief duration or very, very, very long duration, typically walks, like two to four hour walks. And I have a barbell approach. So it's kind of like my investing approach, too. But my physical training approach is very barbell oriented. So it's either like these sprint-like demands, which could be, say, overhead squats,

I think are really fantastic for a whole host of reasons for preventing a lot of the physical maladies that plague people as they get older. And then long two to four-hour walks. Awesome. Like humans have made a lot of evolutionary tradeoffs to be able to walk long distances. So I feel like, you know, maybe that's something we need to do more. If we've made so many compromises to be able to walk long distances, I don't know, I find quality of life subjectively assessed a lot higher when you're doing regular kind of long,

steady stay walking. And it's just also like the meditative aspect of it. I mean, that's something that you get from walking long distances. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Especially if you're in a calm and peaceful environment. Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of parks out there. Get outside. I'm interested, I'm interested to know you do talk about meditation a lot and being mindful.

and how that's important for, you know, a lot of things. And it's been shown to improve learning, memory, things like that. Have you ever tried Flotation Tank? I have. You have? Yeah. Okay. I have.

I've tried Flotation Tanks. I like Flotation Tanks. There's a new, there is a new location, actually, in the city that I have not been to. I'm blank. Reboot Spa or something, I think, is it. Yeah, or it might be, yeah, reboot spa, maybe Float Lab. I'm not sure exactly what the name is, but I think it's reboot. Yeah.

But the only location that I had available to me beforehand was a real pain to get to from where I am kind of in the Noi Valley area. And as a result, I went a handful of times, but could never make it a regular track or didn't want to make it a regular track. But I could see using Flotation Tank for all sorts of different experiments. Yeah. Including potentially incorporating microdosing of various types. But do you use Flotation? I'm actually going to try it for the first time next week. So they actually, this new flotation tank place reached out to me.

I think it's a reboot or something. Reach out to me and gave me some free passes and I'm like, you know what? I'll do it. Let's give it a go. So I'm going to go next week actually. Cool. Don't shave the day before. Try it.

Oh, okay. Yeah. You're basically in the Dead Sea. I mean, it's all salt. So you will be really unhappy. No, I'm excited. So I'm all talking about. I wouldn't shave for a couple days beforehand.

So just a couple of things. non, you know, not particularly health-related questions. I just want to ask you before we close. One is, so in your books and also in your TV show, the Tim Ferriss experiment, you talk about doing some silly things that help people push past anxiety, like laying on the floor of a crowded place or going and ordering a cup of coffee and asking for a discount arbitrarily. Right.

So what do you think some of the positive benefits that can be reaped for? from that are, and have you, are there any specific, you know, fear-inducing things that you've engaged in that have given you benefits in your life? So I think the benefit of practicing discomfort is realizing repeatedly that the worst case just isn't that bad. So becoming comfortable with increasing levels of discomfort, especially something that's like ridiculous and has no real tangible downside other than embarrassment. I think it's very, you know, to be, and this comes back to kind of my obsession with stoic philosophy,

but if you were to look at like, for instance, Cato, who was considered kind of the perfect stoic for a period of time, he would wear a tunic that was an unusual color to train himself, because he would get ridiculed for it, to train himself to be embarrassed about only those things which are truly worth being embarrassed about, clothing not being one of them. Right. Right. So going into, say, Starbucks or whatever, and just kind of. kind of calmly sitting down and then like laying down the floor for 10 seconds.

Super awkward. People are going to think it's weird. Some people might like take five steps back and kind of freak out. And then you just get back up and be like, oh, fine. And it's a small way of inoculating yourself against succumbing to pure pressure about stupid things. Or holding off and making important decisions or having uncomfortable conversations because of this irrational fear of this massive downservable. that you've never actually thought about. So something like laying down, asking for a free coffee or asking for a discount, is really

just rehearsal for the things that happen outside of your control or the more important conversations so that you have a certain level of calmness and have repeatedly had the realization that the worst case scenario you're imagining is almost never that bad. And so those are just training mechanisms. Yeah. So you're basically dealing, you're dealing with high pressure or stress. You know, you're inducing stress to deal with it better for the next time when there actually is a stressful situation. You're more calm.

Right. It's like if you want to negotiate a raise with your boss, probably not the, it's probably not best to practice you're negotiating in that first conversation. Like you should go to a state fair and like learn how to haggle and take 100 bucks. And that's like your tuition, that's your MBA and haggling. Like, don't be a jerk and negotiate with everybody and not buy anything. But it's like, all right, you have 100 bucks to spend. Your job is to get $300 worth of stuff for $100. I like a state fair.

And it's like, go practice. It's a great suggestion. I've actually overcome. I had a lot of fear of public speaking. And I would go into the mall and tell jokes to random people. And I am not a comedian. So I'm a scientist. I've been in a lab most of my life reading books.

And so, you know, social interaction, you know, it's a little anxiety-inducing. for me. And so I would do this and most of the time people would laugh at my bad jokes and you know, less look at me like I'm insane. I'd still get that. But, you know, I did get over that anxiety of having people think I'm, you know, crazy or just like that awkwardness of like talking to someone. And now I'm, you know, communicating science to people. So it really, it worked for me. Yeah. And so I thought that was. And the baby steps that seem so ridiculous, like the telling of the joke or asking for a free coffee.

It's hard for some people to realize how much those experiences transfer because they're like, well, when am I ever going to have to ask for free coffee? It's like, no, you're missing the point. The point is to subject yourself to the same types of fear and discomfort that you will experience in a million other circumstances and to overcome that in a very sort of rehearsed way. And so, for instance, I mean, for me, in the dating episode, the dating game episode of the TV show.

I mean, like Neil Strauss, who wrote the game, forced me to do cold approaches at the ferry building here in San Francisco, which is like my ultimate nightmare. I mean, it brought back like every stressful, sweaty palm, miserable situation from like eighth and ninth grade. Give me sweaty palms thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, it's just so bad. And, but I enjoy trying to, like, every week.

It's like plan something out that is going to force you to do something, potentially funny, right, that, is going to be stress-inducing. And just figure out what that is and then go do it. It's like maybe that's, you know, getting a milk crate and like a hat

and going out and trying to busk without getting arrested, obviously. But like trying to bust and like be a shitty dancer and make five bucks. That's your goal. Like you have an hour

to make $5 being a shitty dancer. Like see what we're being a terrible mime, right? Or whatever it is. Right. And the more you practice that type of thing, you know, I have, here I'll,

I'm going to disappear from camera for a second, but, you know, I have this. And I'm not sure. I don't even know how to, pronounce this name, which I'm embarrassed. But, you know, this quote is,

the life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. If you can pronounce that, you got me to be an A-N-A-I-S with an oomlaught over the I, N-I-N-S second. So this is something that I have reminders like this in front of me constantly, so that I realize very rarely are the things we're afraid of, worth being afraid of. Right. And to overcome that, you just have to practice. Most of the time they're not.

Yeah. And it's rather than, it's very hard to think your way out of something you didn't think your way into. So if you're afraid of like asking for a discount on coffee, that's not really a rational fear. Like it's just not. So the way you overcome that is not by sitting down and like drawing out a decision tree, although that stuff can help and like fear setting this exercise I do a lot can be very helpful. You go out and you just try it. And that's how you overcome these sort of irrational. reptilian fears. Absolutely. And it helps you to deal with, I mean, like you said, it helps you to, next time you have that fear, you're more calm, you're thinking more clearly, you're, I'm sure if they were to do like MRIs like of people before they do this sort of, you know, sort of microdosing themselves to this type of fear. And then, you know, after when they're actually dealing in a difficult situation, they

may see that they're, you know, amygdala as hyperactive or something like that where you're really training your brain. Yeah. And the meditation, you mentioned that, the meditation helps a lot. The meditation helps you to not overreact. So I find the meditation too. And I'm a very like aggressive bull in a China shop kind of guy. So the meditation is particularly helpful for me when let's say you ask for discount for coffee.

And the guy's like, who the fuck do you think you are? Like my instinct would be like, who the fuck do you are? And instead to just be like, hmm, that's a good question. Give me a second. And then like to calmly respond, get a laugh and then the guy gives you the discount. Like having that composure to have a delay. between the immediate, like, that impulse is really, really helpful in almost every circumstance. So, yeah, and if people are looking to get started with meditation, it can be a super nebulous,

like people can get very sanctimonious about their meditating stuff. Like, just think about it as bringing your attention back to one thing. Get distracted, you bring it back. You get distracted, you bring it back to one thing. And it can be any number of things. That translates a lot to productivity and being effective throughout the day. So you're not like, oh my God, I just spent two hours on Facebook. What the hell will happen?

to avoid that kind of experience, just get an app like calm or headspace and start doing like 10 minutes a day. I'm going to try it. I'd like to get more into the meditation. It's super, super helpful. It just trains you to be able to calm and they kind of come back to what you're supposed to be doing or what you want to be doing. You do that 10 minutes a day and it's especially once you get like five or seven days straight,

it's amazing how something that neurologically or cognitively just clicks. After like five or seven days of doing it consistently, I do it first thing in the morning. You do headspace? I do Transcendental meditation. So I just kind of sit there and focus on my breathing. Like I did that before you guys got here. How long? But I do that.

If you do that every morning for five to seven days, it's really profound how much more calmly effective you are. And I've never been a big woo woo-woo meditation guy. I was like, eh, I'll also have a cup of coffee. It'll do me twice as good. Not true. Like 10 minutes in the morning will make you sort of calmly efficient. You'll get 50% more done if you do that every, you'll do that every, you'll do it.

day for a week. Ten minutes is not a long time. It's not a lot. My kind of magic number for me is 20 minutes, but don't start there because it's too much to start with. Start with whatever you're going to do, right? The baby steps. Start with whatever you're going to actually do. If that's three minutes, then do three minutes. If it's 30 seconds, then make it 30 seconds. But using up, I think like headspace with guided meditation makes it a lot easier. Just commit to doing it for a week or two. And then it becomes self-perpetuating because you'll see the positive effect. But yeah, I think meditation, some type of mindfulness practice, plus practicing humiliation.

Yes. Super potent, valuable combination. And quite frankly, the practicing humiliation, and nine times out of ten, you don't end up being humiliated, is just fun. It's actually a good way. It's a good way to get laughs, and you can do it with your friends. Exactly.

Exactly. Well, Tim, this has been great. I've got one last question. I'm kind of dying to ask you, and then we'll close. And that is, so I did read on, I think it was your Reddit Ask Me Anything. You talked about how you were interested in recruiting Hollywood talent, whether it's directors or actors or etc. Coupled with your interest in fiction writing,

it sort of leads me to think that you're possibly writing like the next matrix or something cool. I'm totally hoping to blow your cover here. But are you writing a cool? Is this? I am working on some screenplay stuff. Awesome. So, you know, whether it'll be. I hope it's science fiction.

Yeah. Whether it will be cool or not is to be determined. But one of the. main reasons I'm spending more time in Hollywood and spending more time with people who are very good at whether it's screenwriting, directing, fill in the blank, is because I want to start to absorb sort of the gestalt understanding of how that whole machine and ecosystem functions. But I also just want to get to know people who are like the good guys and the good gals. You know, like the people who are not only really good at what they do, but like the cool people I could be friends with

for 10, 15 years. So I'm spending more time down there. And I'm not in a rush. I'd rather do it right than do it quickly. So that doesn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah. So I'm taking time. And honestly, for screenwriting, for books, for blogs, for podcasting for whatever, I mean, the power for those people who have a direct audience is just, it's growing by the day. So making a movie the way I would like to make a movie, I think will just get easier. You know, six months from now, it'll be easier than it is today. A year from now, it'll be much easier than it is today. Two years from now, it'll be even easier. than it is today. And that's very exciting. Very exciting, Tim. Just like science. I really enjoy

talking to you, as always. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Most people know where to find you. You're pretty famous. But for those that don't, where can they find you? They can find me at 4hourworkweek.com, well, spelled out. And there are a million ways to misspell that, which is like in retrospect, oops on me. But yeah, 4 is in the number 4 hour, H-hour. not OUR, 4hourworkweek.com, on Twitter at T. Ferris with 2Rs and 2S's and 2S's. And then Facebook, I put up a lot of videos like Q&As and stuff on Facebook. That's just Facebook.com forward slash Tim Ferriss, 2Rs and 2SS. Awesome, Tim.

Thanks a lot for doing this. My pleasure. I look forward to talking to you again. Yeah, until next time.