The Tim Ferriss Show - #239: How to Reverse Aging with Art De Vany

Episode Date: May 12, 2017

Dr. Arthur De Vany is nearly eighty years old and ripped. Better known as Art De Vany, he was signed as a professional baseball player in his youth and later earned his Ph.D. in Economics at UCLA. He is most famous for his "evolutionary fitness" approach to training and diet, and our conversation focuses on that. During his time at UCLA, Art did many things, including creating mathematical and statistical models to precisely describe the motion picture market. Art is Professor Emeritus of Economics of the University of California, Irvine, and is a member of its acclaimed Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a Paleo athlete for more than thirty years and is considered a "patriarch" of the Paleo movement. He believes there is no such thing as "healthy" aging and that we can intervene to protect against the aging process. In this episode, we talk about his daily schedule, workout routines, why he never gets sick, ice ages, economics, philosophies of intermittent everything, and really dig into the details of a fascinating man. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now -- this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This podcast is also brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm sitting in a cabin surrounded by snow, and it is still my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, from entertainment to military, chess to jujitsu, you name it. I have tried to interview the best of the best in that world. And in this particular episode, we are tried to interview the best of the best in that world. And in this particular episode, we are going to talk about anti-aging. What does that mean? Well, there's a lot of hogwash, a lot of nonsense out there, but there are a few people who really stand out as

particularly interesting because they walk the talk. Dr. Arthur Devaney is nearly 80 years old and totally ripped. I just spent a bunch of time with him, better known as Art DeVaney, and you should check him out on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash art.devaney, D-E-V-A-N-Y. He was signed as a professional baseball player in his youth and later earned his PhD in economics at UCLA. He is most famous for his evolutionary fitness, that's the term you would use, approach to training and diet. And our conversation focuses a lot on the subtleties and details of that. During his time at UCLA, Art did many things, including creating mathematical and statistical models to precisely describe the motion picture market.

Art is now a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California at Irvine and is a member of their acclaimed Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. So this guy's very analytical, he's very mathematical, and very, very logical. And that is the water on the kettle, but I'm going to power through it because I'm going to have tea, but it's going to be after this intro is recorded. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a paleo athlete for more than 30 years and is considered a patriarch of the paleo movement right up there with Lauren Cordain. He believes there's no such thing as healthy aging and that we can intervene to protect against the aging process. And in this episode, we talk about his daily schedule, workout routines, Nassim Taleb, why he never gets sick. That is why Art never gets sick

and really dig into the details of a fascinating man. There's also one point where I doubt myself, which happens fairly often, and I mentioned myotatic reflex, and then I renege and say, I don't know what I'm talking about. So just to explain what I meant by that, here's the definition. The stretch reflex, also known as myotatic reflex, this is from Wikipedia, is a muscle contraction in response to stretching within the muscle. It is a monosynaptic reflex, which provides automatic regulation of skeletal muscle length. When a muscle lengthens, the muscle spindle is stretched and its nerve activity increases. That sounds like gobbledygook to a lot of you, but that is why I said myotatic reflex. It's related to doing negative only or negative dominant workouts,

which ARC subscribes to. All right, so there you have it. There's a lot of dense stuff in here. We get into the weeds, which you guys love, but if you're having trouble grasping something and it's getting very dense, just hold on and listen for a few more minutes and we'll get back into more familiar territory. We talk about everything from ice ages to economics to the philosophies of intermittent everything. We talk about the extreme events and the economics thereof. It's a fascinating conversation, at least it was for me. So without further ado, as I always say, I'm going to go get my tea now. Please enjoy this conversation with Art Devaney. Art, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here, Tim. I am thrilled to meet you. I've heard so much about you from many people, including our mutual friend, Naval Ravikant. And we're sitting here for those people listening at my undisclosed mountain location. And Art was kind enough to meet me here. And here we are at the kitchen table. And I thought we would just start with how you connected with Naval, because I don't know the story. Oh, it started with my blog. He got in touch with me and I decided to give a seminar in Las Vegas covering sort of the elements of my approach. And he and his brother Kamal attended, along with John Durant and Richard Nicolet,

and then a whole bunch of other people who've gone on to fame and fortune in the paleo world. And you've kept in contact with Naval, or at least he is certainly very familiar with the blog. If we rewind the clock a little bit, how did you go? Well, actually, I'll take a step back. I was going to ask you how you went from economics to the evolutionary approach to everything. But before I go there, how did you get to economics? Oh, yeah. Well, I loved economics. It's a study of decentralized mechanisms and organizations in spontaneous order. I got into it because I took an undergraduate class in comparative economic systems at UCLA. And I had a professor who was just profoundly inspiring in that class, George Murphy.

I give him credit. He may disclaim my credit, but he was so eloquent in talking about Hayek and Enrico Barone and a whole bunch of other people who wrestled with central planning. There was a time when central planning was sweeping Europe and was being promoted even inical control would be the sensible way to do it. In fact, I wrote a book about the inland waterways that criticized that approach and talked about how they actually messed up the floodplains. They thought there was a 100-year floodplain, but floods don't have mean statistics. They don't converge. They diverge. So the variance keeps growing with every new flood. What does that, for people who don't have any familiarity with economics, what does that mean? If you could maybe elaborate on that. Well, the variance, of course, is a measure of the variation in the series. The series, if it has a mean, you know, most people think in terms of normal distributions, it has central tendencies and that the mean and variation are well described by those two parameters.

Not true. The damage that's done by the worst rainstorm in a decade does 40% of all the damage that rainstorms do in that decade. It's an extreme event-dominated series, just like the movies and just like your life. People fail to realize, you know, you don't get anywhere from the drip, drip, drip of the incremental. You get there from some big event that changes your life, like your book probably changed your life. I don't know what changed my life. Lots of things have.

But those are the moments that are the power moments in your life. And in fact, the whole notion of normal doesn't apply to a person's life. You don't get anywhere by incrementing in small increments. It's the extreme event, and you seize it, and you're poised. If you remain poised, you can respond to that kind of significant event. For example, there's this notion of algorithmic compressibility, which is a computer science term that applies to the ability to reduce your life to an algorithm. Can't do it. Can't do it.

The novelty in your life is constantly progressing and you should welcome the variance, seize the opportunities. That's the way I think of life, and it's the zen of evolutionary fitness. That's how life works out. So we're going to spend the majority, I think, of our conversation on evolutionary fitness, and I have so many questions for you. But I want to start with an area I know even less about, which is Hollywood. Yeah. So what are some of the erroneous beliefs, uh, or, uh, that you, that you found in Hollywood or insights that, that, uh, you've written about and, uh, and studied? Well, you know, it's an industry that nobody understands. Nobody's really written anything very sensible about the industry. The Supreme Court, for example,

divorced the studios from the theaters. And Justice Douglas was the guy who wrote the decision, the famous Paramount antitrust decrees. They treated the industry as a monopoly because they looked at market shares, which if you measure at a particular point in time, Paramount will have so many dollars of the total revenue of the industry. Universal will have so many. And on down the line. Problem is that changes every week. So if you use something like a Herfindahl index or a measure of concentration, it's constantly varying.

In fact, it has no mean. It's the second moment of, excuse me, but it's the second, it's the variance of the distribution of market shares, the Herfindahl index is, and it's infinite. It doesn't exist. Malin Voh wrote about this and so did oh, who's the other guy who did fractals? Anyway, it doesn't matter who the...

Oh, was it Mandelbrot? Yeah, yeah, Mandelbrot. He coined the word fractal because it's a situation where the variation is so extreme that the distribution itself doesn't have the normal kinds of limits. It's a so-called wild distribution, as Nassim Taleb calls them. And these wild distributions don't have finite moments necessarily.

The mean invariance may not exist, such as in the flood example, and that's true also in the movies. It turned out that the movies has such a wild distribution that even the mean doesn't exist. So if you talk about the average gross, you're talking about no movie that ever made that. What reminds me of, there's some type of joke that was meant to illustrate the flaw in how people misapply arithmetic mean. And it was, you know, Bill Gates walks into a bar and suddenly the average net worth is $50 million or something like that. Bill Gates walks into a bar and everybody's a millionaire on average. Yeah, exactly. So does this make movies impossible to predict or plan for?

How would you build that? And if you ran a studio, how would that inform what you've learned? How would that inform decisions that you make? Well, you've got to have a story and characters the audience will love. As, remember, Callie Curry. She invited me to come speak to the screenwriter's guild. And she said, you make a movie by, you make the audience love the characters, and then you torture them.

Torture the characters. Yeah, torture. I guess, and vis-a-vis the characters, the audience. Torture the characters, right. So guess, and vis-a-vis the characters, the audience. Torture the characters, right. So the idea is that a great script, a great story, memorable characters, then the rest is up to the audience. It may or may not work. An actor has the same kind of variance in his career grosses as does the industry in general. So an actor will make one movie, and that movie will earn 40% of the actor's career revenues.

Same thing with directors. If you did all the regressions in the world, a statistical technique for trying to predict what a movie is going to make, you would find out that a handful of actors have any significance, and they're sort of flukes anyway. Like Val Kilmer came up in the regression equations. He's gone now. I mean, it's not that the past doesn't predict the future is really the way to look at it. And there's no algorithm to determine how a movie is going to gross. Genre is somewhat helpful, but only because people look at genre. Genre is not a category.

It's something that people put, it's a box people put movies in. If you really want to know how much a movie is going to make, you have to look at how many theaters they open it on. It's the cereal box effect. If you go into a grocery store and Wheaties gets all the shelf space except for a few inches, it's going to have the highest gross. It might disappear very quickly, though, because a big opening is a dangerous strategy.

It tends to give you dominant revenues in the early weeks. And if people follow the revenues as a means of making a decision, how to go, which movie to go to, that would tend to propel a dynamic where you would have an expansive gross. Problem is you also have word of mouth and reviews. So it's a, it's a mixture of public and private information, private information being what your friends tell you about it. Public information being reading the box office scores.

You put those two together and you just have an enormously complicated dynamics. You can't tell how it you just have an enormously complicated dynamics. You can't tell how it's going to do. As a matter of fact, if you don't get the grosses and you've got 4,000 theaters committed their screens to your movie, you may have to allow

them to double bill in the second week. That is add another feature to it. If you see a movie that's double billing by the third week, it's a stinker. So. And yeah, I would imagine it's similar to books too. I mean, I suppose in any hits driven business,

there are some people who try to front load with distribution. So they have this huge initial upfront cost in the hopes that it will make the list somewhere at the top and then become a self-fulfilling cycle of sorts where people use it as a shopping list. It's the same kind of thing. And actually, a lot of authors will go out and buy lots of copies of their book. Oh, yeah. I know. I know if people have bought, you know, I remember I visited, I shall not name names, but I went to the office, the headquarters of a CEO who had recently published his own book, or I should say had his book published, which he did not write. And there were tens of thousands

of copies lining the walls. It was just outrageous. He could have built an entire structure out of these books. Well, the public has to... They're smart. They've learned that. If you just look at the sales itself, that's what a lot of other people are doing. But it could be that they're manipulating the sales as a way of signaling to you that it's a great book. So you look at reviews and you see what the author's done before. It might work if you're Tom Hanks in a movie, but then again, it could be,

he said he has huge variance in his grosses. Also. He's not a sure thing. Yeah. What a star will do is it will raise the least revenue a film might earn. I see. It raises the, the,

the minimum revenue because it gets it out on a fair number of screens and some people will come but then word of mouth starts to take over and it can tank in no time. So you developed these mental models, these analytical frameworks. How did fitness and diet enter the scene for you? How, or how, how did that, how did you start focusing on that? It really began the other way around. I always wanted to be fit and strong and have a beautiful body and healthy looking skin and so forth. And just

like people liking me and looking at me. So ego helps a lot in this game. But I also was interested in fitness and eating well most of my life. However, that blended with that plus my interest in athletics and I wanted to be a pro baseball player. Eyesight let me down. So that mixture led me to appreciate the hunter-gatherer kind of lifestyle. That is, if you view uncertainty in the world the way I do, and you realize that we came through a narrow bottleneck, only 2,500 or so humans made it through the Toba, the post-Toba volcanic eruption, volcanic winter, that was the lowest temperature in the last 20,000 years was post-Toba. And so we came through a bottleneck like that. You realize that we have to be

extremely hardy, very robust. You had to be poised. The brain is there in order to adapt to the climate variations that humans went through. There were 20,000 years of extreme climate variation, and a good brain is a good way to get through that sort of thing. You can imagine God's designers, human designers, saying, well, we've got a new kind of, we've got a new model now. It's different from the archaic model in the sense it has a very large brain. It's smart as hell, but it's kind of fat and slow. And God just says, well, let's see if it gets through the ice ages.

I have 20,000 years of ice ages planned ahead of it. And that's what happened. The archaic form didn't last. And all the other closely related forms of human beings disappeared at this time. The Neanderthal, the Homo heidelbergis, and a host of other. Even Homo erectus was still around early on in this period, 200,000 years ago. So they all disappeared, and they all disappeared because you didn't have the adaptive behavior that modern humans have. That brain was the survival instrument.

That means that we're here, we have a great brain, simply because it's a way of adapting to the challenges that the world presents to us. And you couldn't have the brain that we have unless you had a body as well. The brain muscle signaling dominates most of my thinking. So an approach to fitness, well, think of the sea squirt. I'll admit, I don't know much about sea squirts. The sea squirt's a little polyp that lives in the sea, and it floats around, finds a location, latches onto that bark of longer, and eats its brain. Eats its own brain.

Eats its own brain. Because it's found its place, it no longer needs to navigate the world, and the brain is dispensable. And every bit of protein and substrate that an animal can get a hold of, of course, it's going to eat. So at that point, the sea squirt consumes its brain. A lot of people do that too, don't they? Yeah, I was going to say, I think a lot of that's happening right now.

Yeah, yeah. Settling into a couch, you lose your muscle. Your brain begins to degenerate because it's not getting the signals that the muscles, muscles release all kinds of so-called myokines now that have been discovered. And it also, a remote signal from the muscle can cause your brain to improve its cell quality, to maintain neurons. One thing you can do is to contract muscles, and you'll find you improve what's called proteostasis in the neurons.

Proteostasis is maintaining the cellular quality, not having misfolded proteins, misshapen proteins, wrong kind of proteins in your... Is that related to like a brain drive neurotrophic factor or things like that? Or is it a different mechanism? It also does that. But see, neurotrophic factors are typically growth-type factors that rescue a stressed cell, and that does happen. But the other part of it is that you need to alter insulin signaling so that you actually bring on the defensive pathways in that neuron,

as opposed to the growth factors and growth signaling. So that would bring on the falxel and sirtuins and other factors in the neuron. So that kind of signaling, and if you affect proteostasis in the brain, the brain then can send neural signals to affect proteostasis in remote tissues. Now we're into this notion of remote signaling, or signaling at a distance, which is systemic signaling. Economists love that kind of model, that adaptive kind of decentralized behavior. And what types of, if we're looking at, for instance, I was listening to one of your presentations, and on one of the slides, I just wrote down

two lines, and it reads, aging is not programmed, it is aging is not programmed. It is the result of the failure of a renewal program. Right. And so I would love to hear you a elaborate on that maybe a little bit and then be, uh, follow that through with the,

the implications in terms of behaviors that might help or diet, anything that might help to, uh to bolster that renewal system. Well, you know, aging is really a puzzle. I only started studying it a few years ago, and I figured, well, I'm an expert because I'm experienced. I was about 78 years old when I started looking at aging. And I thought, it really is a lot simpler than people are making it out to be. It is not programmed.

There's no aging genes have been discovered. The only genes that have been discovered to have any bearing on aging are defensive pathways. Foxo, sirtuins, proteostasis, a host of other defensive immunity, stem cell proliferation. There are four or five pathways that are involved in aging. In the main, they are regenerative or defensive pathways. Like immunity, the immune pathways cross over with your cell maintenance, defensive pathways. For example, autophagy is used in both processes. Autophagy being the consumption of self-tissues, of own tissues,

phagy being eating and auto being you, your own tissues. So autophagy is both an element of the immune system. It's also an element of keeping the stem cells alive and healthy because they're living on autophagy. And when they need to proliferate and come out and heal wounded tissues, they go through a burst of autophagy and then they transition into oxidative phospholipid. They use oxidative pathways after that. They're in there being defended by autophagy so that the mitochondria don't damage the stem cells. They have to live in a low oxygen niche.

In fact, they're very similar to a very primitive form of cell. They live on basically glycolysis. And that was how all life lived at one time. And your fast-twitch muscle fibers also used the most primitive kind of energy sources for movement. So the defensive pathways are really the key to it all. And the poets know this. The legend of Tithonus is a legend of the Greek god. Aurora was, he was Aurora's boyfriend, and Zeus didn't like it. So Aurora pleaded with him, with Zeus, not to kill him.

So Zeus, in his clever way, said, well, okay, you're going to live forever. But he didn't. He forgot to say, I'm not going to let you age. So Tithonus wastes away for eternity. It's a cruel punishment, but it's a correct description of what the aging process is. It's a loss of cell function, loss of cell integrity, a loss of the ability of stem cells to renew tissues. So aging basically is simply damage. What are some of the interventions

that you find most interesting at this point? I eat only twice a day, so I want long intervals between meals. I want low insulin signaling so that I bring on the defensive and repair pathways. I want to be conscious of maintaining my stem cells. Now, how do you maintain your stem cells? Well, first of all, you don't have too much mitochondrial density down in your stem cells. How do you maintain your stem cells? First of all, you don't have too much mitochondrial density down in your stem cells. I really want to talk about this. Mitochondrial density is all the rage.

It seems to be all the rage, isn't it? They're innocent little batteries that just sacrifice and produce energy for you. Remember, they have their own DNA. So mitochondrial density has to be very low in the stem cell niches. Moreover, the mitochondrial activity level, for example, humans, people don't know this, humans have the lowest mitochondrial density of any mammal.

Really? Yes. And they also have low reactive type of mitochondria. The L3. We all came out of the L3 mitochondrial haplotype that left Africa. Remember, mitochondria eve occurred about 160,000, 138,000 years ago. By that time, humans were huddled on the seashore of South Africa trying to survive. The temperature was so cold and so much ice was locked up moisture that the Sahara expanded

in scope and became very arid. So after Toba volcanic eruption, the largest volcanic eruption in the last two million years, humans were basically settled along the southern and eastern shore of Africa The accessibility of seafood along the shore. Vegetables were wiped out for about a thousand years. There was a thousand year volcanic winter and vegetables were difficult to come by and the inland sources of animals were sparse as well. It turns out we may have survived on corms. They're a starchy plant that is in the biome of South, Southern Africa. Corbs?

Corms. C-O-R-M-S. Ah, yes. I've seen this written. Corms. It's a carbohydrate containing, I hate to tell the paleo guys this, but between the mussels and the washed up seals and an occasional beached whale and the seabirds and occasional inland hunting,

that's basically how we survive. Mussels are your friend and both kinds of muscles. So there's the survival aspect. The DHA, of course, in the seafood became a substrate for the brain. And you can see the remarkable photos that show the difference between, it's 100,000 years difference in the human skull. It's a profound difference. You can see that the human skull, the modern human skull that emerged, is kind of a juvenileized version of the earlier skull.

And the high prefrontal area of the cortex and what have you. So brain expansion clearly occurred in response to two things, the availability of nutrition to help propel brain growth, the need to have high brain cognitive power to survive the ice ages, plus the growing settlement size on the seashore because we now had a stable source of food. I'm thinking of us coming from that period. And that spurred technology.

And remember, language developed at this time, too. So it was an enormous change in human behavior during this time period. And so we were talking about the interventions. You mentioned eating two times a day. And we'll come back to this, I think. But is that generally breakfast, dinner, lunch, dinner? What does your split look like? Well, whatever suits you.

But I do breakfast, dinner because I want a long interval between meals to promote proteostasis. I want to clear the enzymes. I want to... Remember, you've got... There are about a billion proteins in a cell, according to Dylan's group up at Berkeley. Oh, Berkeley. And it's very critical to...

The degradation of the proteins is sort of a continuous process. But the transcription in making new proteins is an interval-based kind of thing. It depends on when the nutrient signals are there, when mTOR begins to say, okay, don't consume proteins, make new ones, transcribe and translate. Although when you transcribe and translate, you find that that moves up a diagonal, that the atrophy process follows it because you've got to keep some kind of balance there. My theory is this, that we had to overeat in order to survive. We don't live on energy balance. And if you look at this as a random world, you can't survive unless you overeat during periods when food is available,

so as to store nutrients for the times of scarcity. We also over-proliferate. That is, when nutrients are available, the transcription and translation process turns on in sort of a burst. It has to be because otherwise you won't make enough proteins to survive. Your cells won't be durable. That is what's killing us today because we're over transcribing or overeating. We're making too many proteins. They get misfolded. They get damaged. There's no room for them. The architecture of the cell is stretched. The actin filaments are stretched out and there's stress signaling going on. And you don't transcribe accurately. You don't make good proteins when you're under stress. We also talked then about the low mitochondrial density near stem cell niches, I guess you said.

Yes, they reside in a low oxygen niche. So how do you proactively encourage low mitochondrial density in those areas? You do weightlifting. You stay off the treadmill. Actually, if you sprint, you can use up, you can consume mitochondria because you improve mitochondrial quality. I got it.

So they become more sort of effective and efficient so they don't need, you don't need the density. That's right. That's right. And they don't rely as much on oxidation either. You're using the glycolytic pathway, which goes through the mitochondria anyway, but in the cryptocycle and so forth, but it's not, it's not producing lots of free radicals. So are you responsible for getting Nassim Taleb deadlifting? Is that my fault?

Well, you remember the story about Nassim. If you've, if you read the back section of the little section he wrote for my book, because here he was a kurtosis trader. That is, he used distributions with wild characteristics. He was buying out-of-the-money calls and puts and living on the variance. Right. He was living in the options world. Yes, that's right. And so here he was doing just steady state exercise.

And I said, what are you doing? This is the wrong approach. Just so I know. And how did the two of you connect? I used his book in a class I taught, Fool by Randomness, I used in a class I taught on the economics of uncertainty. I told him, I communicated with him,

I said, I'm using your book. I don't know why I wrote him, but because I hate textbooks. And that really connected with him. He said he hates textbooks too. You really hit a sore spot. You get him started on academia. So you connected with him, and then he was doing steady state exercise.

He was doing his three sets of 12 and so many hours on the treadmill or the cycling or whatever. And he figured out that in cycling to and from his office, that's when his office was some distance from his gym. He said he figured out the maximum expenditure of energy and that ride was what did him the most good. And that's your approach too. That's four hours.

For example, in an organization, half the work is done by the square root of N workers. So you've got 100 people in there, 10 workers produce half the output. Sure. I mean, we're on the same page with this in terms of Pareto distributions. Right. And this is just all of Price's work, and Lotka and others have looked at scientific publishing and what have you. The Pope is his own version of this, by the way.

Pope John Paul, before he passed away, he was asked how many people work at the Vatican. He said about half of them. Of course, Robert Evans says the same thing about Hollywood. Hollywood's a place where half the people are not working. And it's true. They're between films and they're hoping for the next one.

Even Dustin Hoffman is great. He said I have to be grateful to be working. This goes with the business. In the industry, there are these power law distributed networks, and a few people are at the central hubs. And so the same rule really holds for the movie industry. Probably half the people do about... 10% people do about half the half the movies or something like that and so nasim thought that the the the calorie expenditure during his bike ride was what was giving him the most bang for the buck can you imagine that people were that dumb back in those days and there's still people around who think that uh it's an energy balance

model i don't know how well let's face it they all studied steady state exercise because you have to put someone on the treadmill and you measure his oxygen expenditure. Nobody had any idea. Non-steady state exercise is very difficult to quantify and to measure. Now they're getting better at it.

Much better at it. The power law holds again because the most intense exercise the most intense expenditures to the bulk of the... You put accelerometers on children. The leanest are the ones who engage in the most intense bursts. Little children don't steady state exercise. So what does your exercise regimen look like or what you would prescribe to someone like Nassim or anyone really?

Well, I told Nassim to start doing negative deadlifts if he wants to improve his deadlifts. Have somebody help you put the bar up, lower it, pick a height, and then put it up again and lower it again and put it up again and lower it again. I do almost all negatives now. Why, Zach? You talk about, why are eccentrics so important? Well, I'm doing eccentrics for

really three reasons. The main one being that they double your stem cell counts in the satellite cells in the muscle. Now, they double them, but they don't exhaust them. A lot of people, if you double the stem cells that flood out, you may exhaust them because you may simply exhaust the ones in the niche. What you want to do is you want to double them and have one go back into the niche and one go out and heal tissues. Asymmetric differentiation is what you want.

If they symmetrically differentiate, they both become new possible progenitors to cells. You're now exhausting. Take one out, put one in. It is the best way to do it. And eccentric exercise does that. Downhill running does too. Downhill running does too. Downhill running. Downhill running.

How do you in, so I'd love to hear what a negative focused workout of yours might look like. And if you could also just talk about mitigating injury risk. Yeah. Because there are a lot of people who get in, for instance, there are a lot of sprinters who in their training will only do the positive on deadlifts and drop them for fear of

hamstring injuries. So, so not to say it can't be done safely because I I've done a lot of negatives, but I'd love to hear what a workout of yours looks like. It's so mild. You wouldn't believe it. I work out almost every day, maybe 10, 15 minutes. And sometimes it's hard to do a negative if you don't have a training partner, but I use equipment and I'll use, like, for example, leg extensions. Push up with two, lower with one. Typical. Leg press.

Push up with two, lower with one. Shoulder presses. push up with two. Actually, I use a machine, and in this case, like the power hammer and stuff. I push it up with two hands and then lower it with one. And deltoids are all fast twitch, mostly fast twitch fibers, so they really respond well to that. What body, just since you mentioned it, which muscle groups respond best to this type of training?

All of them. All of them, okay. Postural muscles, they're slow-twitch fibers. They need to have endurance. Keep your posture locked in. I had every workout standing against the wall this was the thing that Naval liked most about my seminar

stand against the wall get a little slot in the small of your back put your heels and butt against the wall your shoulders back your head back walk off and look over your cheekbones don't drop your head and start looking down.

Your whole spine collapses. So look straight ahead. Well, if you need to look down, just look down over your cheekbones. Don't drop your head. Just send your head and the rest of your... So this is to establish proper posture? It is to establish proper posture, but also to maintain it and to have the nobility of having good posture. It really makes a difference in your mental attitude.

Are you working your entire body every day? No, I'm not, because I might do lakes and showers one day, and I almost never never do curls because they're just ego muscles anyway. But I would just go around and do a variety of exercises. I make sure to hit every body group a couple of times a week and I'm cycling through and I do a lot of lat and lower back and leg work and shoulder work. When you, excuse me, 10 to 15 minutes, how do you choose? Let's just take an example in the shoulder press. How are you determining what weight to use? Is it a percentage of, say, one rep concentric?

And then what is the tempo number of repetitions? If you could just give us an idea of the programming of that. I'm such an instinctive trainer, like Arnold is. I might just don't have a regular way. I just do it. Okay. Do you go to the point where you start to lose the ability to control the descent, or when do you terminate it?

Yes, I do. I have some sense of fatigue, but what I do is I push it up really fast and quickly in very precise form, lots of acceleration and then coming down really slow. And to a full good stretch, you have to, remember you have this giant protein in your muscles, this Titan protein. It's the stress sensor. And stress, by the way, will stimulate mTOR and protein synthesis. The stretch. Yes. That's the, is that, I might be getting this wrong, myotatic reflex?

Am I getting that wrong? I don't know what I'm talking about. Please continue. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a signaling domain down in the, and the tit protein passes, it sets the architecture of the whole muscle, really, and the actin. There's a cytoskeleton of the enclosure of the muscle, and then the titan senses the extension of the muscle.

That means you want to really go to a full stretch. If you did curls and never fully stretched, you'd have a little tiny muscle. You've got to stretch the muscle out. Goldberg's work and all kinds of work on muscle shows that full extension, you lengthen the muscle too. A lengthened muscle is stronger and fuller when it's contracted. And it's faster. So I go, I want my muscles to be not too big, lean, long, and quick. What, from just an evolutionary standpoint, what would have mimicked the eccentrics aside from downhill running?

Well, actually, any kind of running does it, as you know, because every impact is eccentric. Right. Stress. Any kind of running does it, as you know, because every impact is eccentric stress. Any kind of lowering, of course. You had to lift and lower things. I suppose even carrying is a certain degree of eccentric exercise. But I only see this is Stone Age plus high tech. Right. And the high tech part of it is I looked at Macalusa's work on stem cell activation.

There's other work on it as well. I wanted efficient, time-efficient exercise to keep me injury-free. And injury-free is really very important. I've had almost no injuries in the gym over 60 years of using, using gyms. I can think of one, one, one injury. So you're efficient, injury free, the fast twitch type of fibers are the ones you're hitting when you do descending. And when you get older, your motor neurons aren't as effective, so you want to have the kind of heavy stimulation of the fast-switch fibers.

They're the ones that have the biggest motor neurons. The way to do that is negatives. They're very safe, very effective. Of course, you can't do negatives on everything because it's awkward and what have you. You can at least concentrate on accelerating smoothly and rapidly up

and then descending slowly. I mean, Doug McGuff likes this sort of stuff, and probably the best thing about his exercise is the slow descent. Yeah. Yeah. But I would never work out hard enough where I have to rest a whole week. I do something every day. What's the rationale behind that as opposed to having longer rest intervals?

Okay. Well, I want a renewal signal every day. The renewal signal is, one, it's fasting before exercise. Then the fasted... When do you work out typically? When do you do this 15 minutes? I probably work out at 11 o'clock in the morning typically. So if you... Got it. Yeah, I'll get up at like 7 or 6 and I'll have a mild breakfast at

like 8. What would be some of your default breakfasts? Well, my favorite default breakfast is a giant smoked turkey leg with a bit of melon. They're very inexpensive and they're fun to eat. Sounds fantastic. I wish I had

some of that here. Unfortunately, I do not. You've got two big turkey legs in a package at Walmart even. And I eat one turkey leg and maybe a third of a melon. Got it. And then I will work out at 11. I'll have a 15, 20-minute workout because I like to go around and see if there are any girls there to look at too while I'm there. And I won't eat until four hours after.

I'll eat like at five o'clock. Got it. So that's your evening meal, and then you don't eat between five, and when do you typically go to sleep? I might go to bed at 11. Okay. All right.

No, but so you'd finish your last meal by, say, six o'clock and have four or five hours of fasting before bed. That's correct. Got it. I won't eat until, you know, maybe even lunch the next day. It just depends. Got it. I never have three meals a day. I sometimes have one, sometimes none, most times two.

But you don't have to cut calories. It's just the timing. It's the intervals between meals where you have low insulin signaling, high autophagy and proteostasis mechanisms like the proteasome is eating up enzymes and you're clearing the damage. Your autophagy

peaks at about four hours after four to six hours after exercise. All these guys who guzzle right after their workout, they're killing. They're killing their adaptive process. You can't have, without a proper autophagy, your muscles degenerate. You have to clear the old damaged proteins, And that's how you do it. The proteasome is that little core-shaped barrel-shaped object in the cell. That consumes mostly enzymes that have done their job, clears enzymes.

If you have enzymes that stay there too long or neural factors of some kind, like stress hormones. You have to eat those up. The whole thing is dynamic protein generation and clearance. So what I'm doing is I'm working out, I'm stimulating the autophagy process and the proteostasis, protein quality maintenance process. So by four hours later, that's peaked. It's over.

And I'm good and hungry. I have a nice big meal. What does dinner look like? What would be an example of a dinner that you enjoy? I have my wife hands me something. I used to do all my own cooking after my first wife passed away, but now she's such a great cook. I have a big mound of spinach with lots of garlic in it.

And there may be, she makes a lot of pot roast. Her own way, though, is more an Italian way. Of course, a fair amount of steak. I'll have an occasional prime rib. But I always cut the excess fat off. I don't like fatty meats. Is that just a personal preference, or is there a

scientific reason behind it, or just palate? It's both personal. I trust my taste. And if something is just like, oh, this is too much of this, I back off it. The other part of it is if you want to

have a fatty liver, you eat a lot of fat. There's no way around it. Got it. Yeah. You know, you oxidize energy sources according to how easy they are to actually oxidize. So first carbohydrate goes, then maybe protein or fat, but fat still has to go.

So it has to go somewhere. And excess adipose tissue is one of the worst things you can do. Our body composition is so crucial. And if you get, if your liver starts filling up with fat, this is fat where it shouldn't be. This is ectopic fat.

Then it's also building up in your bone marrow, in your muscle, in your thymus, in your brain. So fatty degeneration is a source of stem cell dis-differentiation. A stem cell will come wandering out and say, I'm going to fix this muscle. But it encounters a whole lot of fat in the muscle. So it differentiates into an adipocyte instead of a muscle cell. Remember, these stem cells are very plastic. They can take on a fate depending on the tissue they arrive to and what signals they receive. They're local.

It's local as well as the global signals that are causing that. See, bodybuilders always knew it was volume that built mass. I think this is really generally true. Lots and lots of volume, even two workouts a day. I was around a lot of these guys. I get the volume

in a different way. I work out every day, but maybe 20 minutes at the most. I do take one day. I don't work out every day, but maybe 20 minutes at the most. I do take one day. I don't work out at all. What do some people in the paleo movement get wrong? What do you think are the most common errors or logical fallacies or damaging fads or trends that you observe in people who self-identify as paleo? Very interesting.

Because there are a lot of little tribes inside. Oh, sure. A lot of factions. And frankly, I don't keep track of these guys. There's just too many people trying to say too many things. They eat too much fat. Absolutely true. A lot of them went off wildly into fat consumption.

So they probably have fatty livers by now. Really, I mean, you cannot eat large amounts of fat and not have a fatty liver. You can't. Who needs all the energy? They're worried about energy balance. I don't get worried about energy balance. Do you? They think there are particular kinds of foods they have to eat.

But really, variety and flavor, texture, color. That's how you choose your meals. What are your thoughts on... I love your Facebook page, by the way. I do have questions about why you got rid of your blog, but your Facebook has more sort of information density than I've seen on almost any other Facebook page. And what are your thoughts on coconut oil and coconut products?

I wouldn't do it. You wouldn't do it. Now, does that come back to the fatty liver and just a percentage of your total intake is is fat well first of all it's it's an evolutionary non-sequitur doesn't follow you you would not be seeing large amounts of coconut consumption in the Paleolithic. So it's just odd, first of all. And it's kind of a fad, second of all. And who knows the manufacturers of these things? There are all kinds of impurities that are involved. It doesn't taste good either.

I don't think you get... I'll confess, I'm pretty sick of coconut. Modern meat has got so much fat in it already. Why would you ever need to have any additional source of fat? And even the olive oil I'm sparing with. Do you cook eggs or do you consume eggs? Sure. You do.

How do you prepare your eggs? Fried, boiled, scrambled. So if you fry them, what are you using to fry in or scrambled what are you using a small amount of olive oil using butter are using small amount of olive oil in at a moderate temperature and i don't know actually haven't seen my wife cooking the eggs lately i don't know how she does oil-free would be perfectly fine with me if you had a pan, one of these ceramic pans where things slide off.

She never burns an egg either. They're always wonderfully done. I used to throw a yolk away when I'd eat four boiled eggs. Would you still do that if you were consuming eggs? I find the yolk a bit odd in taste, and I don't like too much yolk. But I don't throw, but I get tired of eggs, very tired, very quickly. Got it. Yeah, I found, I love eggs, but I only recently discovered a few years ago,

and it's so simple, how to make proper soft-boiled eggs so you have a nice, delicious yolk, as opposed to the yellow golf ball of the hard boiled, which is just so chalky and unpleasant. Yes. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about, you mentioned the consumption of say post workout carbohydrates and amino

acids or whatever it might be. Love to chat a little bit about m tor so this is this is a big subject and a lot of people are trying to minimize m tor activation in the in the hope of extending lifespan and healthspan yeah and uh so i'd love in general to hear your thoughts on on that where people are say doing everything they can to minimize activation of mTOR they're trying to remove l-leucine they're trying to get their igf1 as low as possible so thoughts in general on mTOR and then also on the use of, say, rapamycin or metformin. Well, look, overproliferation or hyperproliferation is considered to be one of the evils of modern world, but it was a necessary adaptation in the past.

You couldn't have survived if you didn't proliferate rapidly in the presence of food because you wouldn't have another chance later on. You had to be very effective at doing that. But there would have been, in the evolutionary times, there would have been a protein quality control process following that because you've had a fairly long interval without food. So overdriving mTOR was never a problem. They're talking in the modern world about people who never shut mTOR off. Basically,

you don't have these intervals between meals and you're overdriving mTOR. So you're creating lots of misfolded proteins. Proteostasis is collapsing. The first thing a C. elegans does when it starts to die is its proteostasis collapses. C. elegans. This is our favorite worm. Yes. For a lab studies guy. Uh-huh.

So you don't want your proteostasis to collapse. It's not going to collapse if you have these intervals between meals. If you don't turn on mTOR, your immunity is not going to function properly because you proliferate your thymocytes and your T cells, your whole immune system. Rapamycin is an immune suppressant. Immune suppressant, right. Yeah, because you're shutting down mTOR. All toxins shut down mTOR. Because you can't transcribe in the presence of a toxin,

or you're going to proliferate that, and that toxin is going to invade all the new tissues you're making. So proliferation in mTOR, and mTOR isn't the whole thing, by the way. You stimulate mTOR through mechanical stress. When you're consuming damaged proteins inside your cell, mTOR is being signaled. Why is that the case? Well, because those amino acids are now available,

and you have to have that because if you don't, the innate stress response can't be activated. Gene transcription changes when you're under stress, first of all, because you don't want to make proteins in a stressful situation. Second of all, you have to encode other genes to mount the stress response. And mTOR is doing that because it's getting the amino acids that are coming from the proteostasis process. So if they want to chronically turn down the mTOR, they're going to waste away.

You need IGF-1 to rescue neurons that are struggling and stressed. You make IGF-1 locally. They're confusing systemic IGF that is in the serum, in the blood, from the local. There's local signaling and there's global signaling in some sense. And in the circulation, you're getting your global signals, but in the muscle or in the brain, when you activate, when you exercise your muscles, you actually create local IGF-1 that doesn't necessarily go out

into the bloodstream. I have very low serum IGF-1, but I have lots of muscle in it because I make it locally. I had an Olympic doctor looked at me and said, you can't have that kind of muscle and have such low IGF-1. And I said, well, I make it locally. Well, he's used to seeing professional wrestlers and so forth who are stoking up on insulin and other such things, right? Well, it's kind of like all the hipsters in San Francisco where they say think globally, buy locally.

Well, so you're thinking globally and making your IGF locally. I make it locally. But you know what? A muscle contraction will turn on AKT. And so you're not coming through the insulin pathway, but the second half of it, you're rescuing. AKT is a survival hormone, survival protein. They're thinking about the insulin pathway exclusively, but you've got other factors down there. There's some wonderful work done by Japanese Isomura and Akasaki and others who show that if you can overexpress AKT in the muscle, that's protein kinase B also or whatever it is,

it'll heal your liver. So exercise your muscles and heal your liver. And how do you do that? You express AKT in the fast-twitch muscle fibers. So in those studies, were these researchers using a high-intensity weightlifting protocol? No, they were merely engineering the genes in a mouse to overexpress KT and the fast-twitch fibers. Profoundly effective. Profoundly effective.

You can't read that or study, and there's a series of studies by this group, Azumara, and you can't read that without saying, I want all the fast-twitch fibers I can have. They're not only disposing glucose, they're taking the glucose disposal burden off the liver. Right. And off the brain. So these insulin-like peptides that are signaling in the brain too often, you're turning that down because you're taking the glucose disposal burden off the other cells.

And therefore, you're reducing insulin signaling in those cells. And it turns out that when you contract muscle, you make this 4-B-E-P-E or something like that, which interrupts transcription. What you want to do is you want to have, you don't want to be transcribing new proteins in your brain when it's not time to do so. You want to be improving the quality of the neurons. So if you exercise, you reduce transcription in other cells because this particular protein, it binds to mTOR

and keeps it from initiating transcription. The things that mTOR does. mTOR is overrated anyway. It's, it's the, it's the ribosome that really matters. Please say more. Tell us more about the ribosome.

Well, the ribosome is, let's, yeah, if you could make it as a start, start at the basics. Yeah. Okay. Well, and I could blame is... Yeah, if you could make it as... Start at the basics. Yeah, okay, well... And I could blame that on my audience and say,

for those who don't know, but I would actually like to educate myself. Well, when you're going to make a new protein, the messenger RNA comes out. It's a string. The ribosome is this little bead-like structure that runs across the string, and it's charged with amino acids. It reads the signals on the messenger RNA,

and it transcribes these long strings of proteins. Then they go off, and then they're folded and what have you. It's actually like a universal Turing machine, remember? Alan Turing said you can make any computer if you just have a read-write head and a tape. That's what the ribosome is. It's the read-write head that runs along the tape and makes proteins. My neighbor at UCI was the world's leading expert on ribosomes. God, it's so complicated.

It gives you a headache every time I've talked to him. So I finally came up with this idea. Well, it's a universal Turing machine. It's going across the re-tape is the messenger RNA. The right tape is the protein that is made by the ribosome. Well, the ribosome, not only being very complicated, it's very adaptive in what it transcribes. So FOXA will change the transcription factors,

so therefore change the messenger RNA, and the ribosome will run across there. And between those two, they're like any universal computer is is inheriting what they can do so you change the transcription factor you wrinkle up the dna a little bit and and expose other areas for transcription and the ribosome is what is the the coding factor that handles the integrated stress response. Protein transcription changes toward, instead of making new proteins, you're making these stress responsive factors.

And that's integral to the survival process. That happens in response to resistance training? Yes. Got it. Yes, it does. You'll make FOXO. You'll alter the transcription of your DNA. You'll make new messenger RNA.

And the ribosome, if it senses stress in the cell, it'll begin transcribing these protective factors. Instead of making all new proteins, it'll begin transcribing these protective factors instead of making all new proteins. Andrew Dillon has a wonderful paper on this. His group has taken the... Where is he based?

Berkeley. Oh, that's Berkeley, man. My backyard. He's right up there in the Bay Area. He may be at UC San Francisco. He has a quantitative biology group there. And so in doing that, then, in shifting the transcription to

what you were just describing, to the survival or stress response factors, we're bolstering that renewal program. Yes. The failure of which is implicated for what we call aging. Precisely. Right.

Your immunity is brought up also during this. Everybody who does anything in aging these days is finally agreed that basically it's a stress response. That's what keeps you young. That maintains the cells, protects them. And hormesis is like they want to leave it on all the time, but it would exhaust you. You can't be poised for every possible kind of damage. Remember, the world's full of maybe trillions of different kinds of damage that can happen to you. And you can't have a precisely tuned damage response to each threat.

They have to be generalized. And they're generalized through certain transcription factors and through the way the ribosome makes proteins. So these generalized stress responses, they run across the immune system. They run across the stem cell system. They run across the protein synthesis across the ribosome. All these pathways intersect, and every one of them encodes some kind of stress response, cell protective pathway that's responding to a toxin, rapamycin, to a bacteria. And the thing you don't want to have happen is when a bacteria is in there, you don't want to be transcribing proteins or the bacteria will get into that and you'll be making proteins for the bacteria will get into that you'll be making proteins for the bacteria so you've got to be able to shut down transcription at the right time but

if you can't shut down transcription or mTOR completely because then you can't make the defensive factors that are required and this is where these micro rnas seem to come in are you interested or not interested in say intermittent use of something like rapamycin? Do you find that? Is that just trying to make a deal with the devil? Are there too many unknowns? Or is something like that interesting to you? To me, it's a deal with the devil.

I haven't even had a cold in 40 years. So I'm not going to mess with my immune system. So aside from the, the, let's say the, the way that you eat and the spacing of your meals that we discussed and the resistance training, what other factors or behaviors, interventions do you think have contributed to not being sick for decades? Stay away from people. Stay away from people. But I couldn't. When I was teaching at the university, I had a class with 400 people in it, and half of them had just gotten back from China and were

coughing and sneezing and so forth. I was sort of the universal substitute teacher because everyone else got sick and they knew art wouldn't be sick. They'd call me up to go teach their classes it's it's spooky in a way so do you is it just picking your picking your parents wisely or is it uh is there is there more are there other factors there are there are other factors like you expose yourself to some cold you stress your muscle, you get plenty of good sleep. Very important.

And you've got to have these FOXO mTOR windows during your sleep. You've got to live in one window or the other. There's a growth repair window, insulin window, and there's the FOXO window. Insulin tore versus FOXO. That's how I see my life. And I'm going from one window to the other. Because I can't spell FOXO. F-O-X-O.

It's a forkhead box. Proteins, there are four human versions of it. FOXO is probably the most important. It's so important in your cognitive function. When you're starving, foxo makes you want to move. So the foxo window for you then would be part of good sleep, which is why you're not going to eat within four or five hours of going to bed. You're going to spend the first window of sleep sort of rebuilding tissues.

Second window of sleep, you're into the star foxhole mode, and you're also altering your synapses. There's an interesting new gene that's called Homer. gene is called homer it comes it floods into your brain yet when your excitatory fact signaling is depressed not much glutamate in the neuron so homer comes in and it shrinks your synapses it's very appropriately named that's's hilarious. It is hilarious. And it's proportional shrinking. In other words, you're going to say 10%. Each synapse is going to shrink by 10%. The biggest synapses are the most active ones. That's where post-traumatic stress lives.

So if you can shrink those, they have to be stable but if you keep rehearsing that same synapse constantly it's going to grow in in strength and people who reverberate thoughts in their mind or ruminate a lot they get they get depressed because of those circuits according to jay ladleman that's neural darwinism. Neural Darwinism. Neural Darwinism. Darwin, there's Darwinian competition going on inside your cells everywhere. So for those people listening who do ruminate and perseverate, that's another good word, constantly and get depressed, what advice might you give them? Starve and exercise. Starve and exercise. Starve and exercise.

Now, you seem like you have more to say, so I'll leave. Please continue. Well, starve and exercise, but do something that's totally different so that you set up neural circuits that compete with the ones that are ruminating and building in strength in your brain. The starvation part of it is to eat up some of these dysfunctional synapses. My saying is for every damaged molecule, there's a damaged thought. And you're a depressed brain or a brain that has post-traumatic stress, those are injured neurons inside the brain and you just need to get rid of the

dysfunctional molecules that are causing those neurons to malfunction. So I guess, yeah, I mean, of course, it seems self-evident, but for those people, it goes both ways, right? I mean, for every damaged thought, there's a damaged molecule. So if you're thinking about, rather than trying to think your way out of that problem. Heal the brain. First heal the brain. And you heal it with neurotropic factors, be outside, new thoughts, new patterns of behavior.

How would you feed, and this sounds silly to ask, but how would you feed those new thoughts? Yeah. If a loved one of yours was getting depressed and exhibiting these symptoms, what would you prescribe to them? Well, you know, when my first wife was declining from a host of other things, I'd take her walking as much as I could. I would tell her bad jokes. Change their surroundings. You know, the typical things that people have to do. Being outside is enormously effective.

There's stimuli you can't even relate to, but you perceive them. And your unconscious brain is what's going to heal you first. And the unconscious brain is more healthy when it's exposed to nature and happy people and children and dogs. Well, our friend Naval, I think I'm getting this attribution right, but he said the first rule of uh conflict resolution or minimizing conflict is to not spend a lot of time around people who are constantly in conflict i thought that was i thought that was a good rule well our politics is exposed to that so turn off the news the news you you mentioned in passing cold exposure. So this is something that I've found to be tremendously effective in mood elevation, among other things.

How do you expose yourself to cold? Well, I walk the dogs early in the morning with almost no jacket or anything. Just go out and get nice and chilly with them. Cold showers. Just to be clear, where do you live now? Southern Utah, so it's not as cold. It's no longer UCLA around campus. No, it's not.

But even if you live in a desert-like climate, it's cool in the morning. Sure. Quite cool in the morning. I keep the pool cold. I don't heat the pool much. And I take cool showers. I don't try to shock myself. So you, I know this may seem like a non sequitur, which is most of my brain, but we were talking about what you taught Nassim as it related to exercise. Are there any particular things that you've learned from him? And that could be what you used his book to illustrate in your class or anything else?

Oh, sure. I mean, he, first of all, he's a marvelous writer. He tells stories in a way I could never tell. Fat Tony. Yeah, Fat Tony, right? He creates marvelous characters that embody the kind of thing he wants to ridicule or point out as savvy. He likes street smarts like I do. We both like math smarts, too. I mean, actually, he went to the Courant Institute.

He's a very well-trained mathematician, far better than I. I guess we all need a black swan hunting device in some sense. I tried to create a financial device. I had a crook for a partner who was too dumb to be able to take this anywhere, but I've figured out ways of

using kurtosis to finance pharmaceuticals. Could you define kurtosis, please? And spell that. It's a measure of the odd shape of the distribution. It's highly peaked and skewed off to the right or something. It looks very non-normal.

It does not resemble a bell curve. No, but it's a thing of beauty. Because it's where life lives. That's where life is. They're fractal type distributions. It's like life is in that kind of fractal-type distribution. So it's like a Pareto distribution, and then they drop down at the minimum. So you developed that for pharmaceutical development, you said?

Yes. Yes, I had. Because the last talk I gave at Harvard was between what's compared in the movies to pharmaceuticals. And it turned out that they were the same kind of statistical distributions. Leptokurtani. It sounds like something you should gargle for, but it's actually a thing of beauty. It's skewed and biased to the right and with a very long, heavy tail. Heavy tail being, because every tail is long in a sense, but they become very thin. It has a lot of probability out there.

That's true of power line distribution, operator distribution, and so forth. So it turns out pharmaceuticals that way because a few pharmaceuticals sell billions and billions and billions of dollars or like $12 billion a year. Most pharmaceuticals sell about half a million or a billion maybe at most. It's the big outliers that dominate

the industry in revenues. So using that skew, you can design a swamp-like instrument that uses the upper tail to pay the lower tail. And if you divide it correctly, you have a very favorable kind of gamble. So would Taleb's black swan hunting device

then be derivatives training? Would that be how, or would it be something in addition to that? Well, actually, you're the one who talked about that because you're the guy who's found all the black swans. With the startups, yeah. I mean, that's certainly, well, I mean, the way we're going to maybe get off the reservation here for a second, but the way I've thought about that is because I do not have the mathematical or modeling background of you nor Nassim or anybody else.

It's not a funny story. It's kind of a tragic story. But 10th grade, my brother and I had two different math teachers. I had a math teacher who was very caustic, really had a chip on her shoulder, and berated students. Sounds like Nassim. Well, he had a different response. I think Nassim is more pugnacious than I am.

So he showed his teacher. I decided to choose my college based on lack of math requirement. My brother had a fantastic teacher. He now has a PhD in statistics. Oh, isn't that something? Yeah. There's an extreme event right there. It's a little small event, but it really changed the course. Yeah. It completely changed the course of my life. And therefore, in my case, when I remember having a conversation with a hedge fund manager, and there are plenty of bad hedge fund managers out there, and I don't think they go by that name anymore,

but there are some very, very brilliant people in the game. And I spoke with one, and I'm not going to get this totally right and do it justice, but he said, there are a number of different advantages you can have and you need to have at least one. And he said, you can have an informational advantage. You could have an analytical advantage. You could have a, uh, say, uh, behavioral advantage. Uh, meaning if you're someone like a, there are plenty of people who try to imitate say Buffett, but they emotionally react to the market differently than a Buffett or a Munger and so on and so forth. And there are many of these.

And what I realized was, given my sets of strengths and weaknesses where I could capitalize was in the informational advantage, by placing myself in the center of the switch box in Silicon Valley. So that became my way of hunting for black swans. Fantastic. If you can handle the information load, it's coming through there. Well, you know what was so odd about it in a sense or counterintuitive for a lot of people I described this to and Nassim actually informed my thinking a lot on this because, and I'm again, not going to do his description justice, but thinking in a barbell fashion where I have the vast majority of my assets and investments are cash or cash

like equivalents. And then I have this smaller portion that is speculative, but very asymmetrical returns. If I can think through basic portfolio management properly. And what I realized for myself is that I have an emotional disadvantage when it comes to publicly traded anything. I respond very poorly to compulsively, despite knowing it's not in my best interest, looking at watching people freak out and the sky is falling. And then I become chicken little and I sell at the worst time. So what's fantastic about startups for me, and I do not recommend this to anyone who does not have a significant advantage as I did, that I would do all of my homework, make a decision, invest, and then I couldn't sell. It was a liquid. And that turned out to be a very

good thing. I was locked in. So I had to do all of my homework on the front end. Yeah. And then there was no ticker tape for me to watch, no charts for me to watch, really. And it's just worked out fantastically. I had a professor who was long and sugar when the Castro revolution hit. He finally said, I can't take it anymore. I gotta clear my position. Oh, man. It's... Couldn't get any work done. Yeah. No, I'm really, really, really bad at anything that I can watch moving up and down. So I need to address that in my own life in a lot of ways. But so we're talking about, well, for instance, talking about the sugar position.

And I remember asking a friend of mine who's a very good investor about liquidating certain positions or not. And he said, well, I think you should just look at, I was asking him for certain dollar ranges, how he runs the math. And he said, I just sell down to sleep at night levels. That's exactly it. So selling to sleep at night levels. And you mentioned getting good sleep. What are things that you do or don't do to help ensure good sleep for yourself? Well, here's probably the only supplement I take.

I do take some melatonin. Melatonin. And do you take that on a daily basis? Sometimes, but it's like I didn't bring any with me on the trip or so forth. I don't do anything regularly, but melatonin is much more than just a sleep aid. It's found in plants. It's a stress-resistant protein. It does have powerful antioxidant

properties, but you need oxidants too. Oxidative molecules or signaling molecules as well. But you need a proper balance of signaling versus chronically signaling oxidative molecules. But there's some other direct, I think it stimulates autophagy in the brain or some of these more fundamental processes that maybe it brings out Homer. Out of his cave. And how do you think about dosing? Is this like a one milligram, a three milligram? Do you have any idea? Five.

Five. Sometimes 10. Wow. Okay. So that's a dose that I would use if I flew to Hong Kong kong to correct my sleep cycle sure you would yeah you would and it would work but i don't do it for sleep i do it for the other things it does got it and do you worry at all and this this has been uh so there's certain things you you are not terribly interested in like rapamycin do you worry at all and this is the question that came to mind i haven't asked him directly but dom uh who we know dominic d'agostino also uses melatonin on a

very very regular basis do you worry about any type of negative feedback loop or tolerance development or side effects from chronic use of melatonin a lot of people do and i maybe i did it one time when i didn't know enough about it, but actually you're not going to shut down the pineal gland from making melatonin because you're not really stimulating it to make it in the first place. You're thinking in terms of the homeostatic balance of melatonin. I'm not. I'm thinking about it as a surge that's bringing on protective pathways. I think of it in a completely different way. And I don't even take it to sleep.

I take it to keep my brain. To summon Homer. Yeah, to summon Homer. Actually, everything I think of, I think in terms of those protective pathways, immunity, restoration pathways, the whole knowledge that I thought I had before is sort, I'm sure, uncover a fairly deep level of ignorance on my part. But if we're thinking about, I know very little about melatonin, but I have taken it in the past. If we're looking at, say, the, how does production, well, I'm trying to frame this. If I think of the HPTA, the hypothalamus pituitary testosterone axis, and the ways that that can be disrupted

if you supplement with, say, testosterone or luteinizing hormone, which I guess would be HCG, when you're injecting it or taking it some other form, even if, say, testosterone or growth hormone, for that matter, are released in surges, it's not continual, much like melatonin. Why wouldn't regular consumption of melatonin cause some type of malfunction? I just don't know if it's one thing in a large stream of other elements that I don't know about. I don't have the answer to that either. First of

all, you're positing that there's a feedback. No, I am. And I don't, that's, you know, I'm just, I'm not even positing. I'm just asking. Yeah. So I would, I wouldn't necessarily posit that feedback pathway to begin with, because I don't think it's a homeostatic balance there. I don't think it's that the body attempts to maintain pulses or, or a balance of melatonin. I think you actually make it during the day, too.

It's not the sleep hormone. It's a defensive hormone. I mean, it's in plants. Plants don't have to get their rest or sleep. They're not moving around all that much. It's an ancient, ancient hormone. It's evolutionarily conserved across almost all species. And I used to know a lot about it.

I haven't thought about it in a while. So you caught me short of knowledge. Well, maybe this is a good place to talk about the limits of human knowledge yeah and for instance in reading the black swan nothing talks about epistemological arrogance fair about and and I think just to give people an example of that just to bring it down and to eat more easily interested level I very good friend of mine, well, a lot of doctors say this. Any good doctor will generally say, 50% of what we know is wrong, we just don't know which 50%.

Yeah, it's so very true. How do you think about human knowledge, what we can know versus what we can't know? And this very broad question, but that was one of the topics that Naval recommended bouncing around in this conversation. So this is something that has caused me to go from taking a lot of supplements

to taking fewer supplements, for instance, because there's so many historical case studies of carrots are good for us. We think they improve eyesight. We attribute it to beta carotene. Then we start taking mega doses of beta carotene. Oops. Turns out there's a lot more to the story now.

We've created all of these unanticipated side effects. Yeah, I think even if you look at a static diagram of something like the M4 pathway, my gosh, it's so complicated and then you realize at all they all have to be in the right sequence to these molecules have to move at the right speed and have the right doses and so forth you'll never be able to figure that out so what you have to do is you have to be an experimentalist, maybe on yourself like you and I do, maybe on your child or on your dog. On Molly.

I actually had to experiment on my child. I didn't like to, but I had to because the doctors were killing him. So I don't want to get into that too much, but you have to be willing to test hypotheses. Why not just admit that nature knows a lot more than we do and try to live a simple, clean, decent life and eat good food and go hungry now and then, mimic those patterns. There's an error correction mechanism inside each one of us. If you err in terms of, for example, you make some bad cells, some bad proteins, or some of your stem cells go bad, nature's down there cleaning it up because the other stem cells will kill it.

It'll consume it or it'll shove it out of the niche, just like eagles get shoved out of, you know, nestlings get shoved out of the niche just like eagles get shoved out of, you know, nestlings get shoved out of the niche. There's competition going on inside your body constantly. And if you use competition to weed out the weak and the faulty and let the strong survive. So you really, your ideas are competing also. Everything is a question of variety, pruning, competition, pruning things. Like I said, God said, I got these different species. I'll send out. Let's see which one is best, which one gets through the ice age.

That's how you do it. And your body is constantly pruning your thoughts, your motivations, your rewards. And sleep is the way you clean all that up. So I want to shift gears a little bit. I'll just ask some of what my audience knows is rapid fire questions your answers don't need to be rapid but this is we come to sort of the the tail end of our chat what books have you gifted most to other people or recommended most to other people are there any particular that come to mind well I mean I gave all my library books to the local college library and they were full of books. Not philosophy. I've thrown my philosophy books away. Why is that? The pointless empty questions

for the most part. They're not testable hypotheses. Got it. Yeah. I've been generous with my thoughts more than I have with my books in the sense I've gifted the bulk the paleo lifestyle, I think, was a real gift I gave to a lot of people who've carried on and developed further. And I wasn't the originator, but Lauren and I were both sort of thinking about, Lauren Cordain and I were thinking about these things simultaneously. I kept telling him, don't jog, Lauren.

Don't jog. Yeah. I think he probably still does. And I'm sure he's quite healthy still. So that's the primary gift. And I gifted many dissertation topics to graduate students. I ran more graduate students at the universities where I work than anyone else in the department. The students were drawn to me, but my ideas were kind of complicated.

So there was not necessarily a good dissertation there in the usual sense. Good news, you have me as an advisor. Bad news? It's a hard topic. Are there any particular books that have very heavily influenced you? What are books that you've re-read, if any, come to mind? I actually read the journal literature. I don't read very many books anymore. Scientific literature.

Where do you go hunting for literature and how do you decide what to read um i choose a topic and i i look very broadly at the topic from a mathematical point of view from biological point of view which is what all my reading now i must have the my bibliography is getting close to 8 000 entries in in this aging literature and what a goofy literature some of it is. You know, I mean, there's some fantastic articles there, and there's just a lot of fluff and redoing and reviews. And sometimes the article will, the abstract of the article won't be as long as a listing of authors.

It's really a weird feel. It's really a weird feel. It's just a party review. Yeah. They figured out how to get citations. Economists never... We don't call through that much. Yeah.

Maybe one or two co-authors at the most. Well, I mean, if humans respond to incentives, right? Indeed. Well, I mean, if humans respond to incentives, right? Indeed. Is that mostly PubMed?

What sources do you like to use? Are you subscribing to particular journals themselves? I'm still a professor emeritus, so I have access to all the publications yeah yeah but man don't get into reading about diets it's an endless literature and it's pretty lousy what are in the in the fields or field of aging longevity although i feel like that word's kind of tainted but uh it is yeah life extension out of that one too i don't even know what to call it. But what are the current wild goose chases, in your opinion, or areas that are potential dead ends or things that are just getting way overblown in your mind?

I do think these attempts to manipulate mTOR are kind of pointless. If you chronically shut down mTOR, you're going to shrink to nothing. You're not going to make new proteins. It's windows. You've got to have these switches. The most fruitful papers that I read talk

about a pathway that crosses another one and they have switches. You turn them on and off. You age in this window. You don't age in that window is one way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a helpful way to look at it. Yeah.

So you just want to have the not aging. Yeah. You want to be defending or renewing. But most people in today's life are renewing on a continuous basis. And so they're misfolding proteins and they're damaging their cells and building fat in tissues where it doesn't belong and so forth. So I think all these attempts to stall mTOR are really kind of weird.

You want to stall it, you don't want to over proliferate, but you actually want to be capable of proliferating when it's essential because when you want to renew a cell or rebuild tissues, you have to be able to do that. Bodybuilding and the whole notion of regularity and chronic are totally wrong. You've got to have switches, windows, and you go back and forth.

You alternate. Alternating states is the way to think about things. The problem is some of the people have looked at, for example, Cynthia Kenyon's work on the worms and so forth, the foxhole pathway. There are lots of residual pathways that are fox, four-kid box genes that were part of the development process that are now resident in the cells and can respond and defend and repair a cell. For example, if you work out, you trigger FOXP and FOXM proteins in your brain. And by workout, you mean sprint or resistance training? Yeah, you can jog if you want to, if you want to kill some of your stem cells.

No, you got to have variety. You got to do all of these things. So I think the idea of switches and windows is going to come in. Systemic signaling is the hottest new thing in aging research, which makes a lot of sense. That is signaling at a distance. I think the stem cell pathways are going to turn out to be just crucial and very, very important. And again, mTOR is sort of misplaced because we got so many sick people in the world. It's bad to be average now in today's world.

It's really bad. I've never had average looking tests in my blood work or anything else. And average is dangerous these days. You mentioned, so dangerous reminded me of one thing that you said in passing, and I wanted to just unpack it. It may not be a long story, but you said, I've never been injured in all these decades of weight training, except for one instance that I can remember. What was the one instance? What happened? Oh man, there was just this weird guy in the gym. There are a lot of those.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, yeah. He was an say. He was a fireman and he worked out at the gym and he used to do these behind the neck presses. Oh, right, with a barbell. Yeah, with a barbell. So he's using some weight and I said, well, that's nothing. I wasn't warmed up or anything. I hopped on and I said, well, that's easy. And I did it and I pulled a muscle in my neck and it hurt for three months. What are things that you do to help minimize the likelihood of injury, whether it's some type of warmup before you go into your negative work or otherwise? Well, first thing, I don't warm up.

You don't warm up? No. Like Mike Men warm up? No. Like Mike Mencer used to do. Got it. He just go in and start working out. So you go straight to your first work set, whatever that might be. Yeah. But it's usually sort of mild. And I may start with my so-called famous hierarchical sets.

A lightweight 15 reps, a heavier weight 8 reps, A heavier weight, 8 reps. A heavier weight, yet 4 reps. You're going right up the fiber hierarchy. Slow, intermediate, fast switch. Now you're warm. You warm up more rapidly if you do something that's reasonably intense. And then the rest of the workout, you're warm. I work out early in the morning when it's cold. I used to. And now that I don't have a job workout, you're warm. I work out early in the morning when it's cold. I used to.

And now that I don't have a job anymore, I'm retired. I work out at 11. And every time I go there, I see the same guy. He's an ex-bodybuilder, you can tell. He looks good. He's there for hours. And I'm in and out. I don't know who looks better.

I think I do. But I'm leaner. He's a more bodybuilding looking guy and they don't look good. When they're not flexed, they don't look good. Let's face it. You mean you don't like the second trimester abdominal one? No.

Just for all the bodybuilders in the audience, it's not all of you, but let's be honest. If we look at some of the competitors, when they're not flexed, oh boy, how long, you know, is it a boy or a girl? That's right. That's exactly right. So I'm really, I'm there for a little adventure, for a little bit of intensity, not to get hurt. So if you have long muscles, you do a full range of motion, you're not going to get hurt. And you're also generally, at least on the negatives, following a slow cadence, right?

I mean, you might be raising it quickly, but you're lowering it entirely under control. Entirely under control, but down to a full stretch. Right. I'm thinking tightened spring. Right. There's a spring down there. And so even if I'm doing positive exercises, I will lower and I'll come and I do a little, not, not a bounce because full stop bounces are destructive, but the little stretch bounce. Right.

If you were to go back to teaching and you were to teach a freshman undergrad, actually it could be a freshman or a senior seminar. So it's just a, say 15 to 40 students, something like that. Uh, and you only have them once a week. Let's say,

let's say you have them once a week for three hours, one semester. What would you, what would you teach them? The economics of uncertainty. Economics of uncertainty. That's the last class I developed there at UCI, and I taught. They loved the class. Economics of extreme events is really what it was.

Not uncertainty the way it's taught by utility theory and all this nice utility maximization and expected this and expected that. It's all nonsense. It would be the economics of extreme events. If someone wanted to, since you're probably not going to teach that class anytime soon, if somebody wanted to explore that for themselves, how would they self-educate?

Any starting points that you would recommend? My class notes are somewhere. We should definitely somehow crowdfund getting those. Well, I would start with my movie book. What was the title of that? Hollywood Economics.

It covers extreme events fairly thoroughly. In fact, a lot of students looked at that. I had other readings as well. Or you could look at climate science and look at the extremes of climate variation. And what happens, you could look at the economics of storms and floods, floodplain analysis. So I would look at nature. If you were to pick one of Nassim's books to start with,

would you choose Fooled by Randomness or would it be one of the others? I think students learn more from Fooled by Randomness. The Black Swan is marvelous as well. Skin in the Game is probably going to be a terrific book too because you've got to have skin in the game. Everybody knows that, but they always ignore it. If you want to do a Chinese fun, you got to put skin in with him. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. 30%. Oh, they want incentives a lot. They won't just cut your knuckles off. There's more at stake. So the economics of extreme events. If you could put anything on a billboard, you have a gigantic billboard,

and you can put a short message, a word, a couple of words, a sentence, whatever, to get out to millions of people, what would that message be? Or whatever you would put on the billboard could be anything. Well, I used to, in my principles of economics, teaching the importance of freedom and arbitrage. Arbitrage keeps you from being stupid because you compare the price of this relative to other equivalents or close substitutes and so forth.

If you talk mathematically about pricing, you lose the anchoring from the arbitrage principle. So I always taught arbitrage. Arbitrage. Could you explain that maybe through an example? I would just love to hear it. Well, buy low and sell high, but you trade, you have to trade different alternatives. For example, nature abhors a vacuum and economics abhors an arbitrage opportunity. Arbitrage opportunities get eliminated.

Is that, okay, got it. Is that just efficient, not efficient market theory? It's a sensible way of looking at efficient markets. The best predictor of tomorrow's price of something is today's price because that leaves no arbitrage opportunity. Right. If you knew the price was going up tomorrow, it would go up today. You know, that kind of thinking. You think about opportunities, but you think in terms of the arbitrage limits that are there. So I taught

general equilibrium theory as arbitrage also. It wasn't too successful. It wasn't appreciated, but this is how Malinvold taught general equilibrium theory also. It's the presence of arbitrage.

So would you just put understand arbitrage? Would that be the message? Oh, the billboard? Yeah. Um, no, that it would be a freedom counts. Freedom counts. Yeah.

Freedom matters. And is that mostly in reference to markets or is, is it. Freedom of contract, freedom of arbitrage, freedom of entry, freedom of exit. People don't have to be forced to do things. They can exit. They can participate. Freedom counts. Yeah.

I like that. And your workouts, too. Lift heavy things. Yeah, lift heavy things. Freedom counts. Well, Art, we could talk for hours and hours and hours, and I know we're going to go probably grab a bite to eat at some point after this, but is there anything, and I'm going to ask you after this,

where people can learn more about you, what you would like them to check out, and certainly that will all go in the show notes. But is there any parting words or suggestions or asks of my audience? Something they should test, something they should consider, anything that you'd like people to... Well, get ready for my book when it comes out on aging. It's a field that's full of a lot of charlatans. There's some good science and there's no such thing as successful aging because aging is damage. So you can't be

successful if you're being damaged. And do you have a set timeline for that or a title people should look out for or should we just say, prime yourselves, it's coming and we will let you know when it comes out? Yeah, just check my Facebook page. I've given up my blog.

It wasn't worth the time and effort. I did help a lot of people, but I'm past that now. I've taken up this really as a scientific quest because, one, like I said, I'm experienced. Coming up on aging, on 80 is you start thinking about, you know, when you approach middle age, you start thinking about these things. So you're planning your next 80? The possibility, the technology is coming and it is there right now inside each person. And it's the protein quality control,

cell quality control, don't lose cells, maintain them, starve them, and within a while, that's good for them. So the technology, I am applying the technology,

and I think I'm doing pretty well at it so far. I do plan to live another 40, 60 years. I think you're doing pretty well, and your arms are bulging out of your shirt, which is long sleeved. So I think things are going well. Uh, well, Art, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. And, uh, this is, this has been a lot of fun and, uh, for everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything that we've discussed to Art's Facebook page and more at Facebook, not Facebook.

Let's try that again at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast or at tim.blog forward slash podcast. They both go to the same place and you will find show notes for this episode and every other episode. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include

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