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

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

We're joined by Mike's If Books Could Kill co-host to revisit a biohacking diet book for the boys.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!The 4-Hour BodyDoes Glycemic Index Matter for Weight Loss? An Examination of the Evidence New! Improved! Shape Up Your Life! The 4-Hour Body: The Real App You Are Working On Is An App Called YourselfThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Uh, should we have Peter do it? Peter's never listened to our show, so he doesn't know the format. I do. I do. Sort of. It's like, uh... Wait, what's your tagline format? I've heard it 100 times, and now I'm just confusing it with hours in my head.

We could do a little. Peter, what do you know about the four-hour body? Peter's health I'm convinced. Decline. It's your podcast. If you want to degrade it by using our lazy format. We'll do one then, Peter. You're trying to figure out a way where it's my responsibility to come up with a tagline.

100%. Mike is eternally trying to weasel his way out of doing the tagline. What if we made you a part of this, Peter? What if we... Peter, I want you to feel like you have some real... ownership here. Okay, this probably doesn't work. Welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast that has 36 hours left every week for

face. Because it's a four-hour body. You have like 36 hours left in the work week. Yeah, no, sick. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hobbs.

I'm Peter Shamsherie. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can subscribe on Apple Podcast. podcast. It's the same audio content. Michael. Peter. Aubrey. So for those of you who are unfamiliar, Peter is Michael's co-host on If Books Could Kill. Other podcasts. Peter is joining us today for a sort of, like a very delayed follow-up to your Tim Ferriss for Our Workweek episode. Yes. Incredible cross promo. The only podcast I could appear on where there's absolutely no new fans being brought on. So today we are talking about Tim Ferriss's follow-up to the four-hour work week.

It's called the four-hour body. Body by Tim. Peter, do you recall, it has been a minute. Do you recall any of the sort of high points from the four-hour work week? Broadly speaking, Tim had this idea where if you, like, create passive streams of income and then automate all of your work, you can bring your work week down to four hours and basically do nothing. This doesn't work as well with body because you can't like hire people in India to do sit-ups for you. Right. Also, four-hour work week is like, oh, great.

I'm losing 36 hours in my work week. Four-hour body is like, yeah, that's a good amount of working out. Yeah, that's like a normal amount of working out. Well, it will comfort you both to learn that there is no mention of four hours anywhere in this. There's no like justification for four hours. It's all branding. It's pure clickbait. So for folks who are unfamiliar,

you're Tim Ferriss's primary sort of claims to fame are his long-running podcast and this previous book, The Four Hour Workweek. He's like a life hack guy and an optimization guy. He's also sort of by trade, a tech guy and an investor. And like many tech guys and investors, he is rich. And that has given him the brain disease of I am rich, ergo, I must be right about everything. And also, I must be a wellness. influencer. I feel like all these fucking guys want to be like gurus. Before the four hour work week, he sold a supplement called Brain Quicken. Yeah, the four hour brain.

I looked into the active ingredients and it feels like very like trademark Tim Ferriss that he is listing out a bunch of like very scientific names for things. He's doing the thing of saying ascorbic acid instead of just saying vitamin. C. Okay. He's saying niacinamide instead of vitamin B. So it sort of obscures that what this pill is is like there's some adaptogenic mushrooms in it. There's some B vitamins. There's some amino acids.

There's some ginkgo. There's some ginseng. And there's a fuck ton of caffeine. Oh. So like it was largely a caffeine pill. People are like, I feel amazing on this. Absolutely. That's like all of the comments on all of the Reddits are like, does anybody know where to find

this? nothing worked this well. And it was like 200 milligrams of caffeine. Starbucks. You can find it at Starbucks. Yeah, you can find it in the Panera Lemonade. Please enjoy. Since selling Brain Quicken, Tim Ferriss has mostly been an investor for tech companies like Task Rabbit and a bunch of others. He's a Forbes 40 under 40 guy. He's a Princeton graduate. And he has quite an ego. On his own website, he has two poll quotes that are blown up. One is from Wired magazine calling him the Superman of Silicon Valley. And another one is from the New York Times calling him, quote,

a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk. What the fuck? I just want everyone to just think through. Like, what would that even be? Also, he's never accomplished anything in this case. He's just a scam artist. He just wrote a stupid fucking book. And the core message of the book, if I recall correctly, is like how to scam other people,

like how to start doing seminars and stuff. Yeah, he was like the best way to create passive income is to do a scam like the one I'm doing on you right now by writing his book. So you all have provided me with the perfect segue. He did publish the four hour work week in 2007. It is on its face like a life hack manual to just work less. It's a rebrand of work smarter, not harder. Among other things, he advises readers to hire people to outsource large parts of your job,

as you mentioned, so that you can do less. But he also advises things like, hey, you could become an expert in something. Go buy the top two or three most popular books on the subject. Schedule a free seminar. Invite people to the free seminar and give them like a talk about what you learned from the books, basically. and then book a bunch of paid speaking gigs off of that free seminar. I'm almost nostalgic for this because now it would be like, well, just get chat GPT to read the two most popular books.

And like, you wouldn't even have to absorb the information. If you're like, hey, did his next book include or use any of those tips? Yes, it did. Three years later in 2010, Tim Ferriss follows up with the four-hour body. The diet part of his book, which is a pretty commanding majority of it, it is fully just reheating the nachos of the zone and the South Beach diet? At least he's consistent. He's like, I told you what I was going to do.

And then I did it. They are two diets from the mid-90s that at this point had already achieved like really major popularity. These were books that were being sold in airports, had like massive uptake. I remember seeing them at the Costco book table. It's like basically low-carbid not like as extreme as Atkins. Isn't that what the zone and South Beach are? It's not quite low carb.

It's something that they call slow carb. Oh, it's like a glycemic index thing. Yes, totally. And we'll get into the glycemic index of it all. Yeah, okay. Just checking in, I understand all of this. Yeah. So the core idea behind the four-hour body is that you can lose weight and get shredded

with what he refers to as the quote-unquote minimum effective dose. So that means he's big on like high-intensity interval training where you do. like really intense workouts for short periods of time. He's big on like creating little formulas for meals. And like he has a whole section where he's like, I love Diet Coke. And I've found that as long as I keep my consumption to under 16 ounces a day, it doesn't interrupt my fat loss.

Also, it sort of just assumes that like eating healthy and exercising are just chores that nobody would want to do deliberately, right? It's like, what's the least amount of tennis that I can play to like be shredded? But like surely the actual advice would be like find something you like doing. No, because he specifically says about both the diet and the exercise, you should not enjoy it. He has a whole section where he's like, don't confuse recreation with exercise. Hell yeah. You don't like exercise.

You do like recreation. And the sort of implication is like if you're enjoying it, then it's not exercise, which is pretty directly counter to all of the research that we have that is like if people like it, then they do it regularly and doing it regularly is the thing that matters the most. I love the idea that he's innovating by just talking about high intensity workouts for shorter periods of time. He's just like, I have an idea. Fucking run faster.

This haul ass on that trend. My understanding is that high intensity interval training is fine. But also, it was kind of a fad at the time. A lot of these guys just fall for fads, basically. Exercise fads and they repackage them as if there's some sort of like deep insight. Like I can't get over, you know, Brian Johnson, this guy like the river. reverse aging millionaire guy who just does intermittent fasting, which is again, just like a trend that everybody's hopped on to. Well, doesn't he also transfer his child's blood into himself or

something? That's less trendy. But that's because not everybody has a son. Yeah. And your son has to be cool. Your son has to be like, all right. Yeah. Sure, dad. One of the things that sort of shows up in the four-hour body is that Tim Ferriss is like, we've got so much science to prove so many things. but overwhelmingly the science that he refers to is either quote unquote research that he's just done on himself. Oh, yeah. Or firsthand accounts from people who read his blog or rat studies. Oh, yeah. So I am going to send a quote.

Make Peter do it. Make Peter do it. Are you kidding me? Do it. I'm just like a vent for you to do less work. I'm outsourcing my work to Peter. Mike is four-hour workweeking right now. Yeah, I know.

He's like playing video games and you ask him a question. He's like, Peter. So I am sending this to Michael to fucking read. Okay, fine, I'll read it. I've recorded almost every workout I've done since age 18. I've had more than a thousand blood test performed since 2004, sometimes as often as every two weeks, tracking everything from complete lipid panels,

insulin and hemoglobin A1C to IGF1 and 4. free testosterone. I've had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse, quote, permanent injuries, and I've flown to rural tea farmers in China to discuss Pua' tea's effects on fat loss. All said and done, I've spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade. I am a huge fucking sucker. I just don't announce that right off the bat. Just as some people have avant-garde furniture or artwork to decorate their homes, I have pulse oxymeters ultrasound machines and medical devices for measuring everything from galvanic skin response

to REM sleep. The kitchen and bathroom look like an ER. If you think that's craziness, you're right. Fortunately, you don't need to be a guinea pig to benefit from one. Let's get it out there off the bat. I am mentally ill. Yeah.

Okay. Also, there's just like not really any compelling medical reason to have that many blood tests. Yeah, yeah. He thinks he's finding out a ton of things. Right. I don't trust having read this entire book that he knows enough to know what is sort of worth measuring here.

And I think that he is like there is like a real core of confirmation bias happening in this book where the stuff that he prioritizes is the stuff that sort of upends expectations, right? Right. But also a bunch of it really is just sort of a wealth flex. I feel like a lot of these guys get to a point where they're so rich that they're like, it's bullshit that I have to die. Yeah.

It's like my life rules in all of these ways. My life is better than the average person. Yeah. But like there is this one great unifying element. And that's that I'm going to die. And I think that is nonsense. And I'm going to try to get out ahead of it. $250,000 is so embarrassing.

It's really stunning. Because it feels like at the end of the day, it's going to be like, yeah, do exercise and like try to eat a balanced diet of like fruits and vegetables. But it's like these guys want this sort of one weird trick kind of. thing or some sort of shortcut. But it's not clear to me that all of this data about yourself really offers that much to your health. Yeah, I mean, I will also say like a bunch of these sorts of devices end up like I recently had a family member who had lung cancer and was using a pulse oxymeter like all the time. That became sort of a source of like fixation and anxiety. Right. And the health care providers that I talked to sort of in the process of all of this were like,

that's actually like really common particularly for men to get especially hung up on like what is this measurably doing not as a way of like discerning information about themselves but as a way of like discharging anxiety that they're having about their health he feels like he's taking back control because he's measuring something because like yeah why are you getting an ultrasound not only why are you getting an ultrasound why do you own an ultrasound machine so he has sort of a little thesis for the book and sort of like a little bit of a rallying cry for like what he thinks this is all about. I am sending another quote to the chat. Peter.

Okay, you guys can trade off. How about that? I just want to, this is unpaid work I'm doing. I view 4HB as a manifesto, a call to arms for a new mental model of living, the experimental lifestyle. It's up to you, not your doctor, not the newspaper, to learn what you best respond to. If you understand politics well enough to vote for a president, or if you have ever filed taxes, you can learn the few most important scientific rules for redesigning your body. These rules will become your friends, 100% reliable and trusted.

This changes everything. There is no high priesthood. There is cause and effect. Welcome to the director's chair. This annoys the shit out of me. Shut up. Why are there so many metaphors going on? It's like we're talking about like diet and exercise.

You're not redesigning your body, dude. If you can vote for president has not aged well. If your dumb ass has ever clicked next 20 times on turbotax, then you can do this. Part of what I find interesting about this is that it's sort of like a prototype of what has become a real sort of core ethos of the Maha movement, right? Which is just like, fuck experts, nobody gets to decide but you, what's good for you. It's not your doctor. It's not the newspaper, but it is an airport book. He's like, don't trust them, but like you're also just some random person. Trust the guy who sells brain quicken. I feel like, but he's saying trust yourself and yourself is reading Tim Ferriss, right? I'm telling you

that you are smart. And then in return, you just do what I tell you, right? But it's sort of listening to yourself in a way. We're in this together rejecting the experts. Yeah, that's right. And I think like, specifically saying it's not up to your doctor is the part where I'm like, that's a wild approach to take. Yeah. Who's your doctor to tell you what your blood pressure is? So on top of his sort of N of one stuff, he says that he has, quote, tracked the progress of hundreds of readers of his blog and touts that, quote, many of them lost 20 pounds in the first few weeks and sort of makes those kinds of claims. most of his claims about weight loss throughout the book are about what happened in the first two to four weeks. So it's like,

tell me you've never read a diet book before without telling me you've never read a diet book before. Right. Like every diet under the sun follows the same pattern, which is like rapid weight loss for the first like one to maybe six months, three to six months. And then a long plateau and then a weight regain. Like that is how it goes.

So when folks are sort of cherry picking, like we're just going to talk about the first. month like yeah dude you're picking your best numbers absolutely i'm only going to talk about my sales at christmas time yeah you can go to almost any diet and lose weight in the first month yes absolutely the interesting thing is he is presenting like a series of these kind of n-of-one findings quote-unquote findings right it is very far from any kind of like randomized controlled trial it's very far from any kind of scientific method there is massive confirmation bias is if he's hearing from fans of his blog who want to tell him why his shit works and why they like him?

Because you're obviously not going to be hearing from people that it didn't work for because they would probably just like not be on the blog anymore. They'd find something else. Absolutely. He has like a whole segment where he's like, if you want to know how to lose 20 pounds in two weeks, just ask the founder of WordPress who lost a bunch of weight from just chewing every mouthful of food 20 times. Where you're like, come on, man. That's literally like an 1800s diet. That's like one of the first diets. That's what happens when you make WordPress money.

You're like, what's next? Now to turn my thoughts inward, I will triple the amount of bites that I'm taking of every sandwich. The four hour body has a couple of good points. I do want to do like a little bit of credit where credit is due. Ooh. So he cautions readers against falling for like marketing terms. So he's like, if someone's telling you about toning, cellulite, firming, shaping, like these are all marketing words. He just said redesigning your body, though.

That's also a fucking marketing term. That's not reshaping. That's not reshaping. 4HB is different than a marketing term. It's a protocol, is what he keeps saying. It's a protocol. Protocol, itself not a marketing term. Don't get confused.

He also cautions readers. He's like, look, you're going to be doing a bunch of self-experimentation. That means that you're going to have to challenge your own ideas about correlation and causation, right? and he gives them some like actually quite good questions to challenge. Like is this causal relationship moving the way you think it is? One is like, is it possible that what he calls the arrow of causality is reversed? So like is it possible not that this person ran and therefore got a quote unquote

runners build, but rather that they kind of looked like someone who could do well at running so they did. I'm eating Brussels sprouts because I'm farting. Actually, if you think about it. He asks if you're mixing up absence and presence. So, for example, like, is a vegetarian diet healthier or perceived to be healthier because of the lack of meat or because of the increased presence of vegetables? Okay.

Right? Like, it's just like basic good probing kinds of questions. At one point, he does say, quote, is it possible that you tested a specific demographic that other variables are responsible for the difference. For example, if the claim is that yoga improves cardiac health and the experimental group comprises upper class folk, is it possible that they are therefore more likely than a control group to eat better food? You bet your downward dog posing ass.

Oh, got a little spice in the sentence. Nice. So this is like straightforwardly good advice that he then proceeds to ignore for the rest of the You're reading a book by a rich guy who got blood tests a thousand times. Right. He's like, don't confuse what's happening with rich people with what's happening with you. Confuse what's happening with me. With a single rich guy.

The diet itself is pretty straightforward. There are five core rules. One is avoid quote unquote white carbohydrates. So that's like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, that kind of stuff. two is quote eat the same few meals over and over again especially for breakfast and lunch you already do this you're just picking out new default meals this is where he gets into like you should not enjoy it and also he does talk about he's like here are some good meals to have on the diet one of my favorites is canned tuna packed in water mixed with lentils and chopped onion what just like in a bowl yep dude no man Mayo, no lemon juice? Nothing. You got to get that mercury up.

You want to be able to see it through your skin like a thermometer. Rule number three is don't drink calories. That's a pretty common one. Rule number four is don't eat fruit. What? It's part of the like slow carb thing, right? Of just like, there's not a ton of fiber. There is a lot of sugar.

That's not true, but whatever. Whatever. Rule number five is take. one day off per week and quote, go nuts. I recommend Saturday, often nicknamed Fatterday by followers. But this is also like, he's just telling you to like do something you hate all the time. And then one day a week you get to do something you like. Like surely you can find a happy medium, right?

Yeah. Throw a little bit of mustard in the tuna and maybe take easy on Saturdays. It's also funny because like none of these guys have kind of been steeped in like fad diet world way I think a lot of women have. They're like, oh, women by their 30s are like, oh, I've heard this advice. million fucking times. It's not going to work for me. But these guys are like basically discovering like fad diet stuff. It's like look maxing stuff for men where like we we've gone a little too far and like

19 year olds are like wearing shoulder pads and shit. Microdosing meth. Yeah. I will say on the cheat day stuff, he comes up with sort of a scientific rationale for the cheat day where he's like, no, it's actually like good and important. Like psychologically important? No. Like physically, metabolically important.

Okay. Quote, paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week, increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate doesn't downshift from extended caloric restriction. That's not true. That's not true. That's totally not true. I know he's like, ooh, don't trust your doctor or the science, but like you should trust

the science, bro. That's not true at all. You want to get your body right on the verge of starvation mode and then boom, an entire pizza. Remember like the P90X muscle confusion thing? You're doing that but for your metabolism. You can't let it get too comfortable. The formula for meals for this is pretty straightforward. Very standard diet advice.

He says for every meal you should pick one item from each of his sort of prioritized food groups. That's lean protein, vegetables that are either low carb and or high fiber. and the third group is legumes is a bean diet baby beans at every meal so you're going to fully endorse this book now i love it i'm blurbing it it's going to be great the only diet that works he's honing in here on this idea of whole grains and quote unquote slow carbs that was popular at the time the underlying idea here is that so-called fast carbs so things with like white-flats flour, white sugar, whatever else, are big drivers of people getting fat and that so-called quote-unquote slow carbs like whole grains and fiber-rich vegetables would be less likely to

lead to weight gain and would like help with weight management. This is based on the glycemic index, which we've talked about before on the show. The glycemic index is a way of, it's sort presented as a way of measuring the impact of various foods on like humans' blood sugar. But the way that they determined it is in groups of between five and 15 people since then in the in the years since the development of the glycemic index um we've found that it is like almost useless for individual guidance because different people's bodies have like such wildly different responses to the same foods going in them right that for some folks white rice might be like a major issue for their blood sugar and for other folks it like doesn't really do much right But what if a rich guy who wrote an airport book already did all the research and told me what works for him? What if a wealthy man said it with confidence? What if a guy wearing an aura ring told me that I should eat sweet potato? A 2021 meta-analysis in the journal advances in nutrition looked at 43 studies with samples totaling just under 2 million adults.

And they were looking at like when we're advising people to have a low glycemic index diet, what are the actual results of that? what they found was, quote, results of 30 meta-analyses of RCTs from eight publications demonstrated that low GI diets were generally no better than high GI diets for reducing body weight or body fat. While carbohydrate quality, including glycemic index, impacts many health outcomes. GI as a measure of carbohydrate quality appears to be relatively unimportant

as a determinant of BMI or diet-induced weight loss. That makes sense. So like, have your slow carbs. They're good for you for a lot of reasons. They're not going to make you thin. Also, this is just like yet another diet basically being like, you should eat brown rice and broccoli and chicken breast. But those diets are marketed to ladies, not nerds who want to be wealthy.

Yeah. Well, I wonder what he kind of would have come up with if it wasn't for his research with the ultrasound machines. I spent $250,000 and here's what I have come up with. It's like brown rice. Eat some beans. I'm also now just imagining Tim. Ferris with like a pulse oxymeter clip to every finger. Yeah. Just eating tuna out of a bowl like a dog just with his face. So his main chapter or sort of section about weight loss is called

subtracting fat. He has subtracting fat. He has adding muscle and he has improving sex. Don't listen to gimmicky little taglines folks. People are going to tell you that you can quote lose weight. You can't. You can subtract fat, however. Also like don't listen to marketing language, But the first header in the first chapter about weight loss is, quote, how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise. Hey. No one's ever said this for. No one's ever promised that.

This is how, like, tech guys talk where they try to, like, throw in what feels a little more like computer language into, like, everyday shit, right? So they talk about optimizing all the time. And it's just, it's so tedious and annoying. Here's how to pivot to being a skinny person. The other thing, did you guys see this article that they're now recommending, you know, this whole thing of like a stack? You have a stack of like the caffeine that you do.

Oh, we're going to talk so fucking much about stacks. Tech bros are recommending that you add nicotine patches. Yeah. To your stack. Oh, hell yeah, dude. No, they're talking about nicotine and caffeine both as being neutropics, which is a wild way to read those things. Because that's also a made up term.

So like, yeah, they're new troves. Like, lucky charms, new tropics. Why not? Like, whatever. It does feel like we're going to circle back to just like, you can spend. And they're going to rebrand it as like drag maxing. Right. Like burn smashing and then you're all going to be fucking smoking again.

You know like the famous madman ad campaign where they're like they're toasted. Right. They're going to start doing that shit. Yeah. So he does use this header of like how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise. And then his example for himself is that he lost 15 pounds in six weeks. Oh, nice. Okay.

So do more than I did. He also has some before and after pictures that are fascinating. They are almost a complete recreation of like a very popular style of like 2010's body positivity Instagram post. Hell yeah. Where like a thin woman would take a picture of herself slouching so that she would like have some rolls. And then we'd take another picture of herself standing up straight. And the caption would be like, it's the same body. Yeah.

He, like, has, like, a quote unquote before picture that is him leaning forward and weighing, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 pounds more. And then the next picture is him shirtless and ripped and standing off to the side. It's like the Alex Jones picture, uh, where he's just slightly more red in the after photo. The initial diet that we talked through sounds pretty straightforward, like focus on protein and fiber, eat from certain food groups, get some extra. exercise, that kind of thing. But then he gets to a section where he talks about like common mistakes. Okay. And now it's getting real complicated.

Mistake number one, not eating within one hour of waking, preferably within 30 minutes. It's all metabolism confusion at the end of the day. His argument is that you should, he's like, I eat one tablespoon of almond butter and four Brazil nuts upon waking. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I keep it next to my bed, just a spoon. Right before my first cigarette in the day. Absolutely. he says that mistake number two is not getting enough protein per meal mistake number three is not drinking enough water but he doesn't really define enough mistake number four he says is believing that you'll cook especially if you're a bachelor what the fuck is that what throughout this book he is assuming that the reader is him and he's like i don't cook so they don't cook yeah i feel like learn to cook would also be like reasonable advice for a book like this he has a whole mistake just about mistiming weighings with your

menstrual cycle. And then in parentheses, he writes, not a problem for bachelors. Nice. For married men, however. Tell him. He talks about how cheat day is like a really important part of the diet, not just for adherence to the diet, but for its actual effectiveness. He says that the big issue that cheat day helps with is to minimize, uh, to minimize your release of insulin, which triggers your body to store fat.

Metabolism spoofing. Absolutely. Yes. So he has a whole thing where he's like, you have to increase the speed of gastric emptying or how quickly food exits the stomach. Oh, he's doing like a poop speed run? Like you want to get from food to poop in like 35 minutes? Your body should not be absorbing the nutrients from the food.

It should be blasting through you at full speed. Actual food should be coming out of you at the end. Just a full slice of pizza coming out your ass. But can people even do anything about that? Could you manipulate how fast you're pooping and processing food? There are ways that you can line your pipes to, like, in your house. I imagine if you implement the same method so that you can sort of create a slide where the food cannot actually enter your stomach in any meaningful way. You're just drinking a bottle of lube and eating something to slide through, like a slip and slide.

almond butter and astroglyde. We're going to read what Tim says you can do. I consume 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine, or 16 ounces of cooled Yerba Matae at the most crap-laden meals. My favorite green supplement, athletic greens, mentioned in the schedule, doesn't contain caffeine, but will also help. Does this really work? Taking the goodies from taste buds to toilet without much storage in between? More than a few people have told me it's pure science fiction. Too much information warning.

I disagree, and for good reason. Rather than debate meta studies, I simply weighed my poo. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Hell yeah. Fuck a meta study, dude. Shit on a scale.

Identical volumes of food on and off the protocol. On protocol equals much more poo mass, equals less absorption, equals fewer chocolate croissants that take up residence on my abs. Simple but effective, perhaps. Good to leave out of a first date conference. conversation, definitely. He's doing the work. You know, this is what, before we had meta-analysis, right, before we had the studies to analyze,

guys were just shitting on scales, right? This is what Isaac Newton would have done. I love that he's like, I'm not going to get into these meta studies. Instead, I weighed my shit. What are you a fucking nerd? We weigh your poop. I'm like squatting over a bathroom scale. It's so absurd.

And it really feels like, like he presents this in a way that is very much, like, like, Like, guys, I cracked the code. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the meantime, you are, I guess, fishing poop out of your toilet. Yeah. And weighing it? Like, what are we doing here? Was there, is there any basis to this at all?

Michael, I like, I like how you're at. You're like, so, Aubrey, did you look into this? Yeah, I want. What the matter is. This guy is shitting on a scale, Michael, all right? No, I fact-checked a lot of things for this episode. I did not fact-check the poop weighing. Also, it's like, good to leave out of a first date conversation.

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

He says that there's a third principle, which is engaging in brief muscular contractions throughout your binge. Cagels? Like butt cagels? Like, intestinal cagels? No, he's doing, like, wall squats. Like, he does, like, a wall sit.

He does, uh, he says, wall tricep extensions. and 60 to 120 seconds of total air squats immediately prior to eating main courses on his binge day. Oh my God, dude. So he's like going to fucking pizza hut. We're just like squatting down next to the booth.

Yeah. And then like getting up to do fucking calisthenics for two minutes before he like eats a whole pizza. Like it's extremely odd. So not only is like, like the food miserable to eat six days a week because he refuses to allow for seasoning or whatever, but you have to do wall squats. Yeah, in public on your binge day.

Because you might enjoy it, right? Don't get caught enjoying your food. I'm at the Buffalo Wild Wings, holding a wall squat for three minutes. So he has a whole argument here about how doing these sort of brief exercises and muscle contractions brings glucose transporters to the surface of muscle cells, opening more gates for the calories to flow into. Where is he getting this shit? He's just making, he's using big words to make it sound real,

but like, what is he talking about? Michael, he's not making it up. It's based on one Japanese rat study. Oh, great. Okay, cool. Just because someone reads his blog does not make them a Japanese rat. So earlier, Mike, you mentioned stacks. Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss experiments on himself, on which ones he thinks are most effective for weight loss. He talks about one of his most effective stacks being the quote unquote classic ECA stack. And I was like, what the fuck is an ECA stack? Ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin. Oh, what? He talks about having done this ECA stack, Ephedron, caffeine, and aspirin. EFedrin now banned because so many people died from using it and also because you can use it to make meth. My stack of chlorine and bleach. So his current preferred stack is now

the P-A-G-G-G stack. It consists of... P-C-P-P-C-P. Garlic extract. Bath salt. Greedy. And an antioxidant that naturally exists in meat and some vegetables. Like I googled it. It's alpha-lipoic acid. And I was like, what the fuck is this? And they're like, it's in broccoli and steak. And I was like, oh, well, have some broccoli at a steak. Sounds less cool when you're like, I eat some broccoli and drink tea. These guys are constantly bragging about how easy they are to do. Right. Because they're like, oh, this supplement changes everything.

But like they're just falling for like marketing claims ultimately. Take a fucking one a day. Like, please. Part of what makes it complicated is the supplements themselves. Part of it is the schedule. I am sending the schedule. This one has a bunch of sciencey names. So apologies.

in advance to whoever? Yeah, Peter. All right, I'll do it. How did I do it? I followed a simple supplement regimen. Morning, no explode 11, two scoops. That sounds like an anti-diarrhea medication. Yeah, no explode.

No explode. If you mix that with the diureoles that he takes. And just let him fight it out inside of you. That's intestinal confusion. May the best man win. All right. No explode 11, two scoops. Slow niacin or timed release.

niacinamide, 500 milligrams. Each meal, chromate, pre-workout, body-quick, post-workout, meselion, prior to bed, polychocosinol, polychosinol. Sure, chromate, again, alpha-lapoic acid, and slow niacin. This is like a lot of steps to take each day, and he's using these names like, no explode, and slow niacin, and chromate, and that, kind of stuff. Most of these are pretty common things.

No Explode 11 is just a pre-workout. So he's taking a pre-workout fresh out of bed? That's not right. Yeah, my workout is the entire day, so I take a pre-workout right when I wake up. Like, it's just caffeine and creatine. This man is caffeinated to the fucking max. Yeah, dude. By the way, slow niacin is niacinamide.

It's just a B-vite. Timed release. B vitamin. Right. And all of this is just like you could all get all of these as like nature made supplements at Target or whatever.

Right. Like these are not like hard things to find. But when he lists the like, ah yes, I'm using 23 milligrams of polycosanol. It gives the whole thing sort of a mystique of being much more like stem oriented than it is. Right. He's giving his readers this vener.

veneer of science for things that are totally just like take your vitamins also i'm trying to like count up how many pills he's taking it's a lot right so he's doing this in the morning at each meal before workout after workout and prior to bed you're just like pumping your body with like these weird powders when like you don't need even like the pre-workout post workout stuff is like fake you don't need this shit like have a banana he also is careful to note that you only follow the schedule six days a week and you take one day off each week from your stacks. Wait, what? And then you also take one week off every two months and quote, this week off is critical.

Yes. You got to keep your metabolism guessing. Don't let your metabolism fucking rest on the florals. Yeah, you want to be constantly switching between constipation and diarrhea at a rate that baffles the intestines. Unsurprisingly, he's also a cold plunge guy. Oh, yeah. Unsurprisingly, he's also like generally a health gadget guy. So he advocates using a glucometer, which is a monitor that you install on your body to continually monitor your blood sugar levels.

Does he have the poop camera? Not to my knowledge, but this book was written before the existence of poop cam. Peter, this is an actual thing that exists. You can get something that attaches to the side of your toilet. The Kohler Decoda. That films your toilet bowl. and like there's an app that gives you like quote unquote insights but the insights are like how many times did you poop yesterday like it's not actually well hydrated or not well hydrated no I like that why should I have to look you know I just I want an app to just every time I take a shit I don't look I mean I just stand right up and then it it sends me a notification that says gross he uses a continuous glucose monitor a thing that is straightforwardly unnecessary for people who are not diabetic, I looked up the glucose

monitor that he recommends. It's the Dexcom 7. It lasts for two weeks on your body, and it costs $120 per monitor. And it's more just him being a rube. It's like this is not meaningful data that you really need. Yeah, he has this belief that if you keep your blood sugar under a hundred, that you will sustain fat loss for longer. He also writes, quote, don't want to become diabetic. want to curb things like eating sweets, which can lead to adult onset diabetes, try using a glucometer for 24 hours. Oh, he like recommends this? Yes.

Oh, my God. Essentially, the argument that he's making is like, do you not want to become diabetic? Start living like you have diabetes. Yeah, yeah. Watch everything you eat, exercise in really specific ways, wear a glucometer, and, you know, maybe take some diabetes meds, right? as a bunch of biohackers suggest taking like metformin and stuff like that, right? Like, so it is this really odd thing where I'm like, I just try mapping that on to other illnesses.

Like, it would be really weird if someone was like, I don't want to get cancer, so I'm going to do preemptive chemo. Or like if you want to avoid chlamydia, just wear a condom at all times, no matter what you're doing. Wake up, almond butter, Z-pack. Before we dig in on the last chapter that we're really going to focus in on, we have a little interval that I, I have just titled in my notes, Tim Ferriss is weird about women. There's one section that he calls the math of beauty.

Oh, no. Are we doing like symmetry, symmetry stuff? We're not leaning away from phrenology. I won't say that. Michael, you are up. What do Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Ren, and L. McPherson have in common? The number 0.7

and the letters W.H.R. If you measured the waist and hip circumference of these three women, you'd find that their waists are 7 tenths the size of their hips. That makes their waist a hip ratio, WHR, 0.7. In this ratio in females appears to be hardwired into the male brain as a sign of fertility and therefore attractiveness. The wider your waist is, the higher this ratio goes toward the apple-shaped 1.0,

which correlates in scientific studies with decreased estrogen levels, increased disease risk, increased birth complications, and lower fertility rates. working toward a more slender waist has been shown to have a greater effect on attractiveness than reducing hip size. If your waist to hip ratio is high, dropping it even a little bit will increase your power, health and hotness, to attract a male partner. Nice. Wait, Peter, go ahead. I know you think about this all the time. This is how you talk to your boys when you're like, you're not or mean, Aubrey. Look, I don't get bogged down by the numbers. I know it when I see it.

No, like, if you think about this often enough, you won't need to view the measurements. you'll be able to just shout them out as a woman passes. The advisor seems to be you should work toward a more slender waist rather than working toward smaller hips. But like women, like people cannot do this. You can't really control the build of your body. And also he's doing this bizarre sort of scientific laundering of like, ah, yes, this is hardwired into the male brain.

Right. He's sort of reverse engineering like, this is what I am attracted to. And this is like a contemporary. beauty standard, ergo. It's like a biological imperative. The women that I'm attracted to are like super healthy and like super fertile. It's big no fatty's energy for sure. It's not weird.

The need to sort of make these things quantifiable is so fucking bizarre. Yeah, why can't you just feel like they're hot? It's so fucking weird. What do Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Ella McPherson have in common? They're fucking hot, dude. Just hot babes. And there's also no point that involves like asking. women what they like. Because I want to know what ratio they like in men. What's the healthiest

like dick to chin ratio? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so the ratio is shoulder to waist. How dare you? Oh, wait, is it actually in there? He does include that. Wait, what is it? I think it's 0.8 shoulder to waist to shoulder ratios. Yeah, I saw that on like masculine men.tumbler.com. Yeah, you made the same fucking joke. I recently heard of a podcaster who was included on a tumbler that has exactly that ratio. It's interesting to me. Notably, those ratios both come from studies of men. They're asking men what they think is the right ratio for men to have. They're not asking women.

Yeah, because if you ask men, they'll talk about how big his shoulder should be. But if you ask women, they'll talk about how big his heart should be. What's the dick to heart ratio? That's what they want to know. So that was sort of the beginnings of him getting weird about women. He does have a whole chapter called Improving Sex. I'm going to let Peter take it from here, Peter. And that is where shit gets the weirdest.

If you are listening to this podcast as some people do with your kids and you would rather not have like a more explicit discussion of sex and genitals. You're an hour into the podcast episode about shit. And you're like, you know what? No, this isn't okay. You're about to hear about intercourse. The chapter title is the 15-minute female orgasm. How long it lasts?

how long it takes what happened to four he gets very sort of granular uh in his advice here and as a certified gay lady his advice in this chapter is fucking nutso okay at one point he just tosses out that he's like i talked to a number of experts about this yeah it's my my buddy jimmy to his credit the quote unquote experts that he cites are all women okay okay so at one he just tosses out that he had this conversation with a quote-unquote specialist in female ejaculation. Yeah. You got to weigh it. You got to weigh it.

He doesn't say anything about like what does that mean, right? He just says, ah, yes, my friend Tallulah, a specialist in female ejaculation. Okay. What Tallulah tells him is that for most women, there is a most sensitive part of the clitoris. and she's like, if you're imagining a clock face and you are facing a woman's vagina and her clitoris, it would be at about one o'clock. It's off center?

I'm a gay man and Peter's never given a woman in orgasm. So you're going to have to slow, you're going to have to explain this very slowly. I just do the alphabet, like a gentleman. I like called a bunch of other gay lady friends being like, hey, am I fucking high or is this nothing? One o'clock in a vagina is crazy. That's nuts.

It's like just off the clue. He's next to it. You're just like slightly missing the clitoris. That's how you know it works. If you use the one o'clock trip, it will take a full 15 minutes. In addition to his sort of fat loss stacks that he takes, he also has a pre-sex protocol. What? Vitamins?

He's like, stop, honey. I mean, he's like scooping powder into a cup frantically. She's like naked in the bedroom. Slapping on my nicotine patch. 24 to 48 hours before you want to have incredible sex, as he puts it. 48 hours. When you get the Gmail calendar invite for sex. You should quote,

eat at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol within three hours of bedtime the night before you want to have incredible sex. Oh my God, it's bottoming advice. Why before bed? Testosterone is derived from cholesterol, which is primarily pretty, at night during sleep. What? Ladies, if a guy ever goes nuts at the one o'clock on your vagina, the night before he was, he was loading up on cholesterol.

In his defense, he's had seven eggs in the last 15 minutes. He's just like scarfing hard-boiled eggs. Just eating half a pound of shrimp. I mean, like, one o'clock, one o'clock, one o'clock. So that's 24 hours before. He also has a protocol for four hours. prior to sex? Sex should not be a spontaneous thing. Sex is all about protocols. This part of it does feel very Brian Johnson in that I'm like, oh, you're not comfortable with like human relationships and like

feeling shit out with people. So like you got to come up with a whole song and dance to like make it okay and to sort of like assuage your nervousness about like having sex with someone. What if you're gonna hook up the next day and then she like calls you or she like text you. She's like, I'm so horny. Let's just do it tonight. And you're like five eggs deep. Well, if you have four hours of notice, then you eat four Brazil nuts, 20 raw almonds, and two capsules of fermented cod liver oil and butter. This is like an avoidance strategy when you're like so afraid of women. You're like, I can't.

I haven't had my Brazil nuts. He really seems like a dude who is uncomfortable with women, telling a bunch of stories with a bunch of bravado. Yeah. Tim uses this sort of quote unquote information. to set himself on a quest to, quote, facilitate female orgasms with as many partners as he could. Again, why is this in your, like, diet and exercise book? Because he wants to tell the boys how good he is with the ladies.

Because he had 120 pages and they were like, we need 60 more. He talks about, like, he tells little stories about several of the women that he includes in this quest. The first one he describes as, quote, 25-year-old female yoga instructor fresh from the Midwest, where you're just like, fresh. And in his telling of the story, she unprompted volunteers to him that she has never had an orgasm. And he's like, well, I'm the guy.

All right. Just had my Brazil nuts. We got 15 minutes before they wear off. Give me a dozen eggs in 24 hours, honey. He writes, quote, my quest for the elusive female O had begun. The outcome four weeks later was better than I ever could have imagined. The four week orgasm. I was able to facilitate orgasms.

The word facilitate will be explained later in every woman who acted as a test subject. Oh, God. What the fuck is going on? The results? Those who'd never experienced manual-only orgasm were able to do so. And those who'd never experienced penetration-only orgasm were also able to do so. The success rate was 100%. Dude, whenever I write a self-help book, like any nonfiction book, I'm including a chapter about how good at sex I am.

That woman then introduces him to an organization. You two may or may not have heard of it called One Taste. Have either of you heard of one taste? No. It's a Bay Area organization that has been accused of being a cult. It has paid a lot of former employee settlements for labor law violations, sexual abuse. They have a Netflix. documentary about how fucking dark one taste is. And that is where he goes to learn this quote unquote 15 minute orgasm business, right? That's the kind of shit that a cult leader would tell you. There's a secret clit. It's just to the right of the regular one. What is this organization though?

Officially? They essentially are having people come in to get coached on their sex technique. So they come in. With a partner, there is a coach who watches you, sometimes a group of people who watches you, and then you get like notes and direction. It's like a sex Kuman Learning Center. They do have this sort of framework that they use where they talk about, quote unquote, orgasmic meditation.

Uh-huh. They sort of have this sort of construction built in that is like whether you have an orgasm or not is immaterial because you are participating in orgasmic meditation. Yeah. I've been telling women that for years. We are like sort of spiritually participating in a cosmic orgasm, so whether or not you are coming in the real world is irrelevant. And I am coming, just so we're all clear.

But for you, it's like a spiritual thing. He also consults another expert named Nina Hartley. Are either of you familiar with Nina Hartley? Is it porn? Yep. So Nina Hartley is sort of a. in the like Ron Jeremy Jenna Jameson vein of like a porn actor who sort of crossed over

into more pop culture notoriety, right? In the book, Tim Ferriss writes that other porn actors have said that Nina Hartley was quote the best sex of their life. And he says, so does my friend Sylvester. Oh, would that be St. Stallone? No.

He just says he has a friend named Sylvester. Oh, what? Okay. Who had sex with Nina Hartley. Cool. You know Nina Hartley? My friend hooked up with her. This is the most for the fucking boys anecdote that we will read in this entire.

All right. Peter's doing it. Peter's doing it. All right. Sylvester's mom attended a group dinner in Berkeley, California that Nina also happened to be attending. And the two ended up seated next to each other. Mrs. Norwood came home and said to then, 22-year-old Sylvester, guess who I was at?

dinner with, a famous porn star, Nina Hartley. Have you ever heard of her? Sylvester nearly choked. In his secret double life, he had a huge collection of videos featuring Nina, his personal snow leopard. What? I don't know. Mom, I have to meet her. If I never do anything again in this life, I must meet Nina Hartley. Three days of insistent begging and nagging later, Sylvester's mom raised a hand and picked up the phone. Hi, Nina. It's Mrs. Norwood. I had I had such a wonderful time meeting you at the party. Listen, I have a question for you. Do you ever make love to younger men?

What? Yep. Nina's answer, why yes, I love breaking in younger men, but only once. And so it happened. Summary, coolest mom ever. Dude, there's like progressive parents, and then there's like when progressive parents go too far. This is like too much sex positivity in the family.

Thankfully, this is fake, but... The best case scenario here is that Sylvester made this up to impress his friend Tim. Imagine you make up this crazy bullshit story about fucking a porn star. And then, like, your friend puts it in a best-selling book. Yeah. I didn't realize the stakes were so high when I was lying to you about having sex with Nina Hartley. Do you guys remember there was an ad for, like, it was like Coors or something in the 90s. It was like, I like beer with my friends watching football with me.

my friends, and twins. Yeah. Of course. I do remember that. And twins. That coolest mom ever feels like it comes straight out of the Ant twins era of like just like we're just being so fucking horny in public all the time.

This is like very presumptuous. It's nuts. But to be like, hey, you're you're kind of professionally, you have professional sex. Will you? Doesn't this make you kind of a slut? Will you just fuck my son? You have no standards. So do you want to fuck my son?

She's not even like, yeah. Like, is he cute? Is he nice? When I was in high school, all my friends were straight dudes. And so as people turned 18 on their 18th birthday, we would all go to the local strip club, which was like right next to my high school. And so I went to like strip clubs a decent amount, like my final year of high school, because I turned 18 first.

And one of the things you saw fairly regularly at strip clubs was like, a dad and a son would like go there together. And I remember very vividly to like a man and a son getting like lap dances next to each other. And then the dad just goes up for a high five and like high fives his son. What on earth. And I think all of us were like, oh, what are we doing? Upsetting stuff.

Also, this is not like it's not a cool story. No, it's really not. If my friend told me this story about themselves. I'd be weirded out, right? But the fact that he's telling it to us about his friend thinking that it's cool, it's almost, it's so weird. Like, nothing about it is cool. The mom doesn't seem cool. No.

And now you're telling me the story as if it's cool. It's weird. The whole thing's bizarre. This all exists in this how to section on the 15 minute orgasm. He does have some steps to follow. Step one, quote, explain to your partner that it is a, goalless practice. This is 100% critical. There is no objective. Just focus on a single point of contact. The phrasing should emphasize this and remove all expectations and pressure.

Quote, I'm going to touch you for 15 minutes. You don't need to do anything and you don't need, you don't have to do anything afterward. There's nowhere to get to. Nothing to make happen. Just focus on the single point of contact. It's an exercise. This is you just like poking the one o'clock mark. But also like this strikes me as like he's not saying this to her. He's saying this to himself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a goalless practice, guys. We didn't say we were going to get anywhere.

We didn't say anything was going to get accomplished. Eat an egg, take a deep breath and get in there. He goes really hard on how much focus this will take from the dude. He writes, quote, this technique requires 15 minutes of 100% concentration on approximately three square millimeters. of contact, nothing more. Oh, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke. That's too slow, Michael. It should be like a hummingbird.

You shouldn't even, you know. Woodpecker? Yeah. I love that he's like, this will be incredibly difficult. There is no goal. Like, he's doing this like, like the Kung Fu Master montage from Kill Bill. He does tell you to get a kitchen timer and set it for 15 minutes to take the pressure off.

Yeah. No, that'll take the pressure. That ticking sound. Yeah. We're in this calculus is like, what is this? woman thinking. It's really strange to me the kinds of gymnastics that he goes through to avoid like just being vulnerable with a partner. Right. Right. And being like, here's what I want. What do you want? Right. And like actually just fucking negotiating it on some level or like talking

it through. He talks us through this whole how to. And then he gives us an example of like, guys, here's how fucking well this shit works. Get ready. The next. The next. chapter is called sex machine one. Adventures in Tripling testosterone. Oh no. And he opens with an anecdote about a CEO that he sometimes hooks up with named Vesper. Uh-huh. What? Okay. It's really amazing to me how many anecdotes he includes of people that he knows and includes their first and last name, Sylvester Norwood. Right. Fuck Nina Hartley at his mom's arranging. Oh, yeah. I didn't realize that you could just piece together Sylvester's full name from this. Oh, yeah.

Also, it's hilarious that his mom, according to this transcript, said, Hi, Nina, it's Mrs. Norwood. Also, like, how many CEOs named Vesper are? I'm going to say, I will read this passage, Peter, you Google Vesper CEO. All right. Mike, I believe you're up. Okay. The last time we met, I had just taken my total testosterone from 244.8 to 650,000.

3.3 nanograms per decilator while cutting my estrogen in half. I just returned from Nicaragua, where I ate grass-fed beef three times a day for 21 days. I had protein loaded for the last three days, eating two to three pounds of fatty, organic, grass-fed beef per day, including at least 400 grams just before bed. Dude, this guy smells like a fucking barn. The result? 15 minutes after we sat down, Vesper was in a sexually aggressive stupor. The bread hadn't arrived, and she was already claiming on top of me.

This is not a boast. This is not penthouse forum. It's a statement of pure confusion. She's a CEO. And this is not typical public CEO behavior. Oh, so it's a public company, too? He's just, like, giving us breadcrumb fare. The whole spectacle was surreal.

She was literally intoxicated on fairmoans. Oh, he's saying the beef, like, made her smell him. Yeah. And then she, like, went bananas. This is like if Jordan Peterson was horny. Yeah, no, he's saying that he has been like cholesterol maxing to allow him to increase testosterone production, right? This is his previous sort of thinking about this, like eat a bunch of cholesterol so your body can convert it into testosterone. And he's saying, not only did it work, it worked so much that it was like invasion of the fucking body snatchers for this lady.

Right. When she saw the beef tallow coming out of my pores, she couldn't resist. She can smell a clogged artery. Absolutely. I was like, man, he has been eating beef three times a day for 21 days. And he's also saying, yes, I have all this medical equipment at my house and I get blood work done all the fucking time. And I go, uh-da-da-da-da-three weeks of beef for every meal is going to show up in your blood work in ways other than testosterone. This is, why is every rich guy the same kind of weird?

At some point they all start beef maxing. Yeah, it's crazy. Although this was also, like, 2010 is early to beef maxing, but it's also closer to the generation of men who did literally just only eat beef as a matter as a matter of practice and principle. The whole thing is kind of fucking nuts. I think it also makes more sense when you consider, like, how close in time this is to the premiere of, like, VH1's The Pickup Artist. Yeah.

And, like, the rules and that kind of stuff. Right? That you're like, he's trying to do like a sciencey version of like a shitty misogynist sort of dating book. Right. You're doing card tricks. I'm eating beef. Yeah. Yeah. Eating more beef. And doing things from like a third party instructor rather than asking your partner what she likes, right? Hummingbird speed karate chops on the one o'clock. One of the last things that I find really fascinating about this diet book is how it is received in. different sort of corners of media. Book reviews are straightforwardly like,

this is bullshit. The New York Times book review writes, quote, The Four Hour Body reads as if the New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the Sky Mall catalog. Oh, nice. Some of this junk might actually work, but you're going to be embarrassed doing it

or admitting to your friends that you're trying it. This is a man who, after all, weighs his own feces, likes bloodletting as a life extension strategy, and aims a Phillips go light at his body in place of ingesting caffeine. I love that you skipped the bloodletting. I do. You're like, there's too much in the episode. I did.

Another one is medical reviews, like actual doctors reviewing the book. And what did they say about the bloodleting? One of them comes from psychology today. The title of the review is, quote, how to not become superhuman. Psychology today. Yeah, it's not great. Should have on the outskirts of what I would consider reputable.

Yeah, yeah. Are like, hmm. Psychology today in their review from this MD, right, quote, so why does this good guy industry insider and potent scientific self-experimenter right immediately after the title page, please don't be stupid and kill yourself. It would make both of us quite unhappy. And then says,

you should, quote, consult a doctor before doing anything in this book. Why is the publisher writing that they and the author, quote, expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may resolve from the user application of the information contained in this book? There's a full, like, legal liability release at the end of the book. To buy it, you have to, like, sign a waiver. So, like, book reviews, no. Ostensibly scientific sources, no.

Tech Crunch. Yes. Tech Crunch likes it. They wrote a review in 2011 called The Four Hour Body, Colon. The real app you are working on is the app called Yourself. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in.

I'm listening. And that's just a clean, succinct headline. So I just sent a little quote from the TechCrunch review for whoever. When I boarded the four-hour train, our fancy schmancy scale reported that I weighed 197.6 pounds. 10 days later, after morning coffee and protein, 187. For calibration, I'm 6-1. I assume most of the difference is water weight, but still, that part actually seems to work as advertised. But still!

Yeah. He says, I expected no less, given the data that drove it. I know, I know. Why are you writing about your lunch on TechCrunch? Because my lunch is a data-driven iteration from the previous state of the art. In other words, a technical innovation. Oh, my God. Look beyond the valley, and you'll find that approach can and will pay dividends almost anywhere.

He's like, you may think this is silly, but it's a science-based approach. You're literally just listening to some guy. Why are you writing about your lunch in a technology website? Because there's data involved, dude. And like the data, such as it is, is Tim Ferriss tried some stuff on Tim Ferriss, and then some people had his blog and emailed him about the stuff that they tried. The scale that you weigh your poop on is technology.

Smart guy.